It would be a mistake to call St. Louis-based artist Kahlil Robert Irving merely a ceramist. Nowhere is this more evident than in Irving’s current solo exhibition in the ongoing series “Projects” at the Museum of Modern Art, where his signature tabletop sculptures are almost overshadowed by his busy, even chaotic, installation environment of wallpaper collages. They draw on what the artist describes as “an eternal feedback loop of my experience,” especially online.
Images, as if projected from Irving’s browsing history, stretch the length of the gallery walls, rising two stories high on one wall. This recreates for the viewer a distilled experience – seemingly adapted from Irving’s – of being young, intellectually voracious and black online – post Mike Brown and George Floyd.
In his fluency with contemporary digital life and one of the oldest forms of art, Irving performs a sort of code swap over millennia, going from memes to fired earth and back seemingly with ease. He presents a clay vision of life as a modern day Pompeii buried under an explosion of too much information.
If Irving’s sculptures resemble archaeological specimens pulled from ash and pumice and set in deep geological time, a closer look reveals that these works document the near-present. With their glistening patina of glaze and shine, they compress and grind the history of clay-based art — bricks, barrels, and other functional and decorative objects such as teapots and vases — alongside urban street trash, including soda bottles, takeout containers, rolled newspaper, and the small tree-shaped air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirrors of taxicabs, all in facsimile ceramics.
They also include approaches to architectural forms in miniature, ranging from cylindrical brick chimneys to a chrome arch that mimics St. Louis’ famous Gateway Arch, a monument to western expansion designed by Eero Saarinen. Headlines and Irving’s own self-portrait in the form of a social media avatar can be seen and partially read amid the solidified forms of his table sculptures displayed on pedestals beneath showcases. Floor-mounted tiling reproduces the tarmac street itself, while also evoking the starry sky through speckles of white everywhere.
On my most recent visit to Irving’s MoMA exhibit, I spent an hour in the ground floor gallery, which is open to the public without a ticket. Presented in collaboration with the Studio Museum in Harlem, the exhibit is curated by its director, Thelma Golden, along with Legacy Russell, the former associate curator (and now executive director and chief curator of the kitchen). Watching visitors enter was no different than seeing a crowd waiting somewhere, with most people staring at their phones, but here the phone and its scroll become a collective composite experience, with days or months of content reproduced on the walls. Visitors laughed at memes (it is convincingly argued that more statues should be dedicated to Outkast than to the Confederacy because the Atlanta hip-hop duo lasts longer and won more Grammys), recognized clickbait ads (“Top Heart Surgeon: It’s Like a Magic Eraser for Fatigue”), and recorded a playlist of track and video references through screenshots (including a post by artist Glenn Ligon of a video interview with James Baldwin). Scannable QR codes have been incorporated everywhere.
Right through his nods to art history and popular culture, to the many facets of the black joy and spectacle of the black death, to the organization of protest and the undulating news streams alongside wreckage of streaming, posting, shopping and reading.
At the time of his MoMA debut, Irving’s work was prominently displayed in two other New York museums, including the Whitney Museum in “Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950-2019” and at the New Museum’s 2021 Triennial, “Soft Water, Hard Stone .” His work has also recently been featured in the Gagosian Gallery’s “Social Works II”, the follow-up London presentation to last year’s blockbuster New York counterpart, both curated by Antwaun Sargent, and brought Irving’s work into an Atlantic dialogue with an older generation of artists such as David Adjaye, Theaster Gates and Carrie Mae Weems.
With the exception of Simone Leigh, there is currently no other artist creating more relevant and compelling clay-based work. As a multimedia artist, Irving adeptly grapples with the excesses of the contemporary experience—of injustice, violence, inequality, and insatiable capitalism—creating new constellations for representing the information in a library that would otherwise not be captured. Clay-based works remain the focus of his practice, although the sculptures are much more difficult to read: they gesture across a vast swath of history – the clay tablets of Mesopotamia through porcelain from the Ming dynasty to the predominance of brick in St. louis .
In the MoMA installation, the backdrops and wall-mounted images of stars and skies simultaneously suggest the immensity of the natural world beyond and, conversely, that the windows we see through its increasingly mediated and digital.
However, it would be a mistake to link Irving’s work to Afrofuturism. Rather than looking at an idealized future, his work captures the present and places it in context with the past. As I stood in the gallery, wondering how Irving’s sculpture related to the digital galaxies that surrounded them, I thought of the philosopher Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” and his famous reading of Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus.” Benjamin sees Klee’s angel tossed by the winds of “the storm we call progress” into the future as the angel looks back at history and the wreckage of the piles of the past at his feet.
In Klee’s monoprint, we get an image of the angel, but I’ve always wondered what the piles of disaster might look like. Irving’s sculptures could provide a picture of this, bringing together the trash of everyday life, product packaging and glimpses of newspaper headlines, compiled and compressed into clay, much like a photographed image is compressed into a jpeg file.
Projects: Kahlil Robert Irving
Until May 1 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan; 212-708-9400; moma.org.