Skin in the game: the artist’s new exhibition makes manifest the ghosts of racial trauma and colonial violence.
Steve McQueen, installation view. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Don Stahl. © Steve McQueen.
Steve McQueen, curated by Donna De Salvo with Emily Markert,
Dia Chelsea, 537 West Twenty-Second Street, New York City,
through July 13, 2025
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Steve McQueen’s films are mostly, though not entirely, matters of history: the Troubles, slavery, World War II twice over; aside from that, there is corruption in the form of sex and theft. A malformed past is the domain of ghost stories, and everywhere you look in the artist’s work—on-screen and off—the dead seem to hover just beyond reach. He collects their belongings and bids them to rise. His show at Dia Chelsea is like that, too. Here are two rooms where the doors ought to creak and windows bang shut.
Steve McQueen, installation view. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Don Stahl. © Steve McQueen. Pictured: Bounty, 2024 (detail).
In the first, the early Super 8 film Exodus (1992–97) is paired with Bounty (2024), a line of photographs of mostly red-hued Grenadian flowers. The name darkens these blooms. Where there has been bounty there has been plunder, and where plunder, eradication and enslavement. Seeking beauty in a place haunted by colonial violence is not new for McQueen. He has done so even as he has faced the common claim of “aestheticizing” that violence—as he sometimes was with 12 Years a Slave—though presumably the scholars and critics who have levied this charge write about these same outrages without the adornment, rhythm, or precision in their language that one might find beautiful.
Steve McQueen, installation view. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Don Stahl. © Steve McQueen. Pictured, left, against back wall: Bounty, 2024 (detail). Far right: Exodus, 1992–97.
McQueen is an artist of force: a body wrestles, the frame of a house slams into the earth, a man’s toes strain toward the ground to keep a noose from killing him. Here, the room falters precisely because of its attempt to look away from force. The evasion of the “traumatic” image, the search for the precious morsel of beauty whereupon to rest one’s eyes, has become as familiar an artistic strategy as the plain (or gratuitous) display of violence. Neither offers a consistently morally or intellectually superior way out of the conundrum of how to make a picture in a world soaked in blood. To pretend that they do is to traffic in slogans. At best, that’s politics; most commonly, it’s advertising.
Steve McQueen, installation view. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Don Stahl. © Steve McQueen. Pictured: Sunshine State, 2022.
In the second gallery, Sunshine State (2022) never once looks away—only more closely, and more provocatively for it. On two screens, which can be viewed from both sides, an image of the sun gives way to a few moments from The Jazz Singer. The projections are reversed: one positive, one negative, one running backward, the other forward. Instead of intertitles and odes to mammies, McQueen narrates a story told by his father, Philbert, as he lay dying. When Philbert was younger, he harvested oranges as a migrant worker in Florida. The pickers were not meant to leave the camp, but one evening, he and two others snuck out to get a drink at a bar in town. They were told, with vicious slurs appended, that they would not be served. One of the men responded by breaking a bottle over the bartender’s head. You know what followed: flight into darkness, separation, McQueen intones, “and then the dogs.” It can hang, because even before he describes the two shots, any brush with history tells you this is what follows hounds. The narrative repeats again and again, but words drop out, syntax leaks away, plot dissipates into incantation. McQueen tells us he always thought his father was holding him back, but really he was holding him tight, and that also recurs until “hold me tight” sounds like a plea.
Steve McQueen, installation view. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Don Stahl. © Steve McQueen. Pictured: Sunshine State, 2022.
The story is told over some of cinema’s most notorious footage. In the movie, a Jewish man named Jakie answers the call of show business and flees to the theater, to minstrelsy. It is a classic immigrant’s tale: the first generation clings to tradition, the second assimilates. For this, too, is a story of fathers and sons. The father, a cantor, casts his child out of his home (“you jazz singer!” is spat out like “nigger lover” might be), but when he is near death, sends his wife to call his son home to sing Kol Nidre one last time. To produce merely harrowing work is satisfactory for many artists, particularly in motion pictures. But this amalgamation feels like a blade pointed at your gut, your eyes stuck to it not just for its threat, but for the enticing way the light might dance upon it, as though the metal were unstilled water.
Sunshine State uses the scene where Jakie’s mother and a local busybody have arrived backstage to beg him to come home before it is too late. McQueen does more than invert color. He has manipulated the footage to erase Jakie’s body until the crucial moment when he applies black paint. It is now as if he is scrubbing it away, and in so doing, becomes visible. Al Jolson is a ghost. He appears, he disappears, like any good performer; or like the way the lingering dead are made sensible to us. Their invisibility proves their otherworldliness. Their apparition is what distinguishes them from the wind.
Steve McQueen, installation view. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation. Photo: Don Stahl. © Steve McQueen. Pictured: Sunshine State, 2022.
On one hand, the gesture underlines the movie’s own principle: Jakie only feels like somebody when he’s in blackface singing jazz. The effect of the original is sharp, but McQueen’s variant confirms its usurpation when Jakie, still torn by “the cry of [his] race,” looks in the mirror. In the artist’s version, there’s nothing there but the collar of Jakie’s shirt instead of black makeup and a wig. In an old cinematic trick, the mirror becomes memory’s screen, the reflection fading into an image of his father singing in the temple. Without a blackfaced Jakie, the orthodox ritual appears opposite blank space. There is another kind of assimilation at work now, not just into secularism or the gaudy world of performance. Peer too closely at your reflection in this new land, beneath these new lights and with these new ways, and you might tumble into the American abyss, leaving nothing behind when the glassy surface settles. You might flee persecution only to find succor in a nation of executioners. “He talks like Jakie—but he looks like his shadow,” the busybody says in the original. But a shadow is itself a look-alike, an outline of some primary object made faithful or corrupted by the angle of the sun or some other body interceding in its path.
Blackface, perhaps by virtue of its publicness, has been over-indexed, like colored water fountains, becoming a stock emblem of a murderously racist regime. McQueen’s doubling and distortion of a canonical instance bends the problem posed by the performer away from simple humiliation and back toward violence. It is not only domination or extermination the colonizer wants, but possession. They want to walk like you, talk like you, but then the gunshots ring out. Although elsewhere it is a different game, here, they play at blackness, sometimes drawing as near as the skin. We, or our fathers or mothers or theirs, hear the padded paws, the barks and howls. Even now, there, at the border, in Ohio, in the White House, you can hear it—the dogs straining to be loosed.
Blair McClendon is an editor, filmmaker, and writer. His film work has screened at Sundance, Cannes, Tribeca, TIFF, and other festivals around the world. His writing has been published in n+1, the New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in New York.