Arts District: Oscar winner Steve McQueen on ‘Truth’ in Art

  More than the sum of his film work – most notably the critically acclaimed Hunger, Shame, and 12 Years A Slave – the British-born Steve McQueen is also a distinguished visual artist. His works include sculpture, photography and video art.  McQueen’s approach shuns simplicity, challenging people to think deeply about race, ethnicity, and the nature of human conflict.

 

Unlike his more recent feature films, many of McQueen’s short video works are black-and-white and projected in highly controlled environments. In Bear, part of Tate permanent collection in London, two naked men, one of whom is McQueen, spar in silence. Illumineer shows McQueen lying on a hotel bed, lit only by images of war flickering on a television screen, his dark black skin a sharp contrast to the stark white bed sheets.

 

Although he is featured in the short films, the Tate Museum asserts McQueen, who’s received Britain’s highest honor in the arts, is not the point of the films.

 

“In underemphasizing the importance to his films of his own presence,” the Tates’ website reads, “McQueen avoids questions of identity and racial politics that are often imposed on his work, reinforcing a characteristically open approach to meaning.”

 

Steve McQueen was in Snowmass, Colorado for a symposium at the Anderson Ranch focusing on artists whose work confronts social injustice. He dismissed the idea of his being an artist “Making The Change They Want To See” – the title of the symposium – as “presumptuous.” McQueen discussed his art, feelings on the conference and a 2003 project that still resonates today in an interview that aired on Morning Edition.