Tschabalala Self is relentlessly positive and unstoppably optimistic. The US artist is waiting for the unveiling of Lady in Blue, her new sculpture for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London, a towering, colourful painted bronze of a black woman striding (positively, optimistically) into the future. Self seems resolutely hopeful about the work, which is pretty impressive considering what happened to her last public sculpture in the UK.
Like Lady in Blue, it was a vast, brightly painted bronze depiction of a black woman, this time seated demurely on a chair. After being shown at Coal Drops Yard without incident, it was moved to the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, where the reception wasn’t quite as warm. That someone had enacted violence on an object I had imbued with love and affection.” The Pavilion wanted to organise a protest in response to the vandalism, but Self pushed for a community cleanup day instead.
Her work is in MoMA, the Guggenheim and the Whitney in New York and the Albertina Museum in Vienna. She has had exhibitions at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the ICA Boston and is represented by some of the world’s chicest commercial galleries. Her work is a lurid, vivid, super-colourful, mega-joyful celebration of everyday bodies.
She’s like a politically engaged, millennial New York version of the French pop modernist Niki de Saint Phalle, famed for her appealingly exuberant “Nanas”. I think that’s a human right. My work is really about allowing people to understand that their physical experience is something they should relish, and to enjoy the physicality of a lived experience.” Self talks like this a lot – positively, optimistically, almost politically, about the idea of bodies and “vessels” and confidence.
It’s courageous to be a human being. That is an act worth valuing.” This empowering, direct, hopeful message sets Self a little at odds with the hyper-critical, seriously conceptual and often lofty artworks that have sat on the fourth plinth in recent years. How does Lady in Blue sit with Teresa Margolles’s wall of life-masks taken from hundreds of transgender and non-binary people, which it’s replacing, or Samson Kambalu’s defiantly anti-colonialist portrait of Pan-African preacher John Chilembwe in 2022?
Self’s work looks almost shockingly simple and joyful in comparison. Where’s the invective, the anger, the criticality, the radicalism we’ve come to expect from contemporary art? It turns out that joy twinned with simplicity is the radical thing.
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