The insistent resolve of Steve McQueen’s camera is well known. Whether circling the charred remains of Grenfell Tower or the dirty verdigris on the Statue of Liberty; whether locking onto a submerged bicycle or a dead horse, McQueen is literal and specific about history’s traumas. Which makes his return to a coincidental, permissive mode of observation in tandem exhibitions at Dia Chelsea and Dia Beacon enlivening, if not always incisive.
We begin in Chelsea with “Bounty” (2024), a set of 47 photographs of flowers growing on the island of Grenada. Each saturated inflorescence is isolated in shallow focus, as if offering its beauty urgently. Lining three sides of the gallery, the work is met by “Exodus” (1992–97) on the fourth, a short film of twin coconut palms bobbing through London’s Brick Lane Market, carried by two West Indian men in fedoras. You can feel the rush of discovery as McQueen, then a student at Goldsmiths College, first notices the men and struggles to keep up with his camera.
At the core of the Chelsea exhibition is “Sunshine State” (2022), a two-channel video installation overlaying excerpts from the minstrel talkie The Jazz Singer (1927) with a disquieting account of racial violence McQueen’s father survived in Florida in the 1950s, narrated by the artist himself. By contrast, 70 miles upstate, we find a notably imageless McQueen in “Bass” (2024). In the emptied factory basement of Dia Beacon, lightboxes and subwoofers slowly generate an immersive abstraction, weaving a cycle of ambient lighting with a low soundtrack of various instruments (Malian ngoni, electric bass).
Critics often draw a line between McQueen’s art and filmmaking, much to the artist’s chagrin. The distinction is moot, I agree. I propose that film’s centering of narrative, its allowance for mood and imagination, permeates his video and photographic work alike. That subjectivity allows him to recast the mundane premises of “Exodus” and “Bounty” into works of wonder, precluding the longeurs often found in durational video art.
Two structural edits both define and unsettle “Sunshine State.” First, scenes from The Jazz Singer, shown in negative, play on the left, while scenes on the right are shown in positive, but run backward. Second, the spoken narrative of the film fragments further with each retelling, leaving us in longer and longer bouts of silence.
The voiceover begins by introducing McQueen’s father, Philbert — “a very Victorian name,” he emphasizes, peculiarly — who goes to Florida as a migrant worker to pick oranges. One day after work, he goes to a bar with two fellow farmhands. The bartender — using the most violent slur in our language — refuses to serve them. One of them smashes a bottle over the bartender’s head and they all run out, until — Bang. Bang. McQueen’s father hides in a ditch until morning, then proceeds to repress the story for decades, telling his son only right before his death.
Meanwhile, in the lefthand channel, actor Al Jolson dons blackface in negative, erasing himself. As he performs, headless, his open arms cast fugitive, abstract shadows. Then, his image doubles, and both channels start to toggle between positive and negative. Is he donning blackface or furiously scrubbing his face off? Whichever it is, he does so faster and faster until — cut to an image of the sun. It swirls closer than we could ever get, accompanied by a low hum that builds into a roar. You feel it in your stomach, the sensation so intense it empties you. “Shine on me, Sunshine State,” McQueen rasps, breathlessly, unto oblivion. “Shine on me” — is he asking for the burn or the bask? For the pain or the relief? I am reminded of Dave McKenzie’s “Wilfred and Me” (2012), in which the artist repeats the single line “Magic Johnson has AIDS,” a fact that apparently moved his stolid father to tears, in a similarly cathartic if damaging attempt at understanding a father after death.
“Father / Philbert / Victorian / Florida,” McQueen begins; “holding me tight,” he concludes. The broken narrative becomes a concrete poem, suspended in sound. But this is not the traumatic stutter of “Shine on me”; it is scripted, with pauses, an aural compartmentalization of trauma, perhaps. Sometimes, my mother says cryptically about her own immigration story, it is just easier to move on. “Sunshine State” sees McQueen wrestle with his father’s repression, one of the many ways we try to sympathize with our parents’ struggles. It is effective because it is candid: He does not so much recount narrative, presuming to understand it, but seems rather to process it in real-time.
Much like B-roll in a film, “Bounty” enhances the nature and context of his father’s Grenada. The images recall Eliot Porter’s startlingly clear photographic plea of In Wildness is the Preservation of the World (1962), though McQueen’s beauty is of a darker variety. In a conversation with Dia curator Donna De Salvo, McQueen spoke of the flowers’ perverseness, alluding to all they have witnessed. “Bounty,” as in the generosity of nature — but also “bounty” as in a reward paid to slave catchers for capture or kill. The entire series is one work, the order decided upon installation, and McQueen neither specifies individual flowers’ taxonomy, nor suggests any symbolism. But several are arresting. When facing “Exodus,” third from the right on the left-hand wall is a splayed bromeliad, its spattered red leaves stunted by rot. Water pools in its center and the plant appears radioactive, even threatening. Directly opposite, third from the left on the right-hand wall, a single duranta hovers so close it appears stuck on the surface, every detail of its papery petals palpable as the sun shines through its violet bloom. Rendered in inkjet printed on sheets of aluminum composite that fill the frame, the flowers appear flattened, within reach and yet not entirely of this world.
And yet, these are just flowers — a familiar genre, often sentimental and easily overdone. McQueen is aware of the cliché, I’m sure, but risks it to look deeper. Filmmakers, it seems to me, have the privilege above all other practitioners of pure discovery, of being able to show us the specificities of the world without having to explain them.
“Bass,” however, lacks those specificities. Overhead, lightboxes cast the basement in a red, then orange, lime green, and purple glow. The last is calming, reminiscent of walking at dawn. Several plucked strings thrum and gather into a trancelike echo. Orienting myself, I looked for details — were those columns painted? The towers of speakers hulk like the Minimalist sculpture upstairs. The work encourages wandering, open interpretation; it feels like an abstraction, but it isn’t clear of what, as if it lacks a heuristic center. Reading the pamphlet, we understand that the soundtrack is an improvisation, hybridizing the instruments and rhythms of enslaved people and their descendants to evoke the forced diaspora of the Middle Passage. As with any conceptual work, learning the premise is fortifying; but without it, “Bass” feels vague. There is a tragic grandeur to the work that is too ambitious to be filled, and the lighting begins to feel artificial in its effort to guide the mood.
The most striking element of “Exodus” is the coincidence of those two men on a busy London street. Yes, the palms were a symbol of the West Indies — but where were those physical fronds, and the men who carried them, going? It’s the mystery of their living that McQueen desired, and though he never finds out, his efforts are acknowledged: One of the pair waves at him from the bus. In a world of unreal, competing tragedies, McQueen looks for the fantasies in real life. In this obsession, sometimes we find the plain truth of a butterfly jasmine or a forget-me-not. Its significance, if it’s there, hasn’t shown itself to us yet, but still, we look on.
Steve McQueen continues at Dia Beacon (3 Beekman Street, Beacon) through May 26, 2025 and Dia Chelsea (537 West 22nd Street) through summer 2025. The exhibition was co-commissioned by Dia Art Foundation and Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager, and organized by Donna De Salvo, Emily Markert, and Randy Gibson.
