How a mercurial figure, cast in bronze with a black veneer, surrounded by gold and platinum, summons empathy, and its opposite; posits self-perception as intertwined with identification; and relates to icons, idols and other forms of objectification.

In the summer of 2016, Rick Baker, a famous Hollywood makeup artist—or rather, his studio—held an auction of ephemera and objects, strewn fragments of commissions were up for valuation weighed by a large public. It was that day that artist Nicole Miller acquired a set of molds of Michael Jackson’s body circa 1986. Captured still and kneeling, Michael must have held the pose for dozens of minutes as the cold material hardened and heated up against his skin, encasing him. The plaster, I imagine, was carefully applied to a body-suit, a thin layer separating mud from flesh, strips of wet, white material covering his features. 

Miller was not, at that time or prior, a Michael Jackson fan, so this acquisition was in some regard forensic for her. For years, her work had been oriented around performers and performances, impersonations and embodiments. This mold, and its potential, felt fated, a culmination of hard-earned concepts she had been nurturing. Over the next few years—and with frustrating interruptions—she sat in her studio alongside the dismembered carcass of Jackson’s famous body. She moved the pieces around, she cradled his head, she explored the cavities of his limbs, and even slipped her own arms through the space once filled by his chest. Ultimately Miller cast the mold in bronze. At the foundry, large vats of molten metal engulfed the negative space of the relic. Once reassembled into a body—with bent arms, folded legs, chest and head now re-sutured—she selected a classical black patina and dubbed him Michael in Black. 

A patina can be developed or adorned. It is a second skin added to the weighty substance of bronze. It can cure over time, precipitated by outside forces (natural and otherwise) or be manufactured through chemistry to counterfeit age and value, depending upon trends, tastes and biases. It can be authentic, be a forgery––or even be both. Michael’s black patina references Hepatizon, or black Corinthian bronze, a precious metal in classical antiquity (favored for sculptures), which, as a choice by a contemporary artist, re-positions the pop musician’s body against the backdrop of distant eras and their relics. In short, this sculpture appears as if from antiquity, as that which has already entered the canon of historical forms. This patina choice also lends its name to the sculpture, Michael in Black; a title that appropriately carries Miller’s material consideration, and a loaded strand of significances from a performer’s formal black costumes to the black cloths of grieving, to black skin. Jackson is of course notorious for the slow and very public lightening of his skin over years—untethering himself from what exactly, arguably not from his Blackness though perhaps the expectation set on him to be black. In a panel held a year after Jackson’s death at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (June 5, 2010) in Harlem, Arthur Jafa describes Blackness as nonnative to the body. He argues that Michael Jackson’s choices, bodily and professional, which seemingly reject the black tradition are in themselves profoundly Black: that they allow for a reconfiguration of the world as raw material, that this strategy is survival, and that the act of surviving is innately Black. A lighter skin color, a softer voice, acquiring the Beatles repertoire, these were moves that gave Michael mobility in a white dominant world. However, these choices, made in the name of survival and mobility, paradoxically also reinforce a status quo. The colonial weapon of infusing self-perception into epidermis, is an argument Frantz Fanon makes in Black Skin, White Masks where he litigates, among other things, the role of wide-spread cultural production (politics, entertainment, really all public life) in connecting “wrongness” and “Blackness.” In this same text Fanon articulates the black person as phobic object for his white colonizer: the catalyst for irrational, unjustified and embodied terror; an object rather than a subject.  

The mold was originally produced for a scene in Moonwalker (1988)—a feature-length anthology of music videos conceived by Michael Jackson. Moonwalker is a strange cultural product, a precursor to myriad contemporary albums-turned-films,  comprised of a collection of vignettes. It was crafted by Jackson himself, interspersing musical and dance performances of his hit songs with a series of semi-narrative shorts (uncomfortably reminiscent of the narrative structure of pornography where story plays a secondary role to performative climaxes) in which genres collide: some instances are science fictional, detective Thriller-esque, coming-of-age-ish.

Across the board, Jackson plays an augmented version of himself, ultimately navigating his lived reality (performances, fans, backstage relationships, Neverland, and the children who surrounded him, who, even then, raised questions, and from whom, later, would emerge testimonies of horrific abuse) albeit Disneyfied. The mold was produced for a scene in which Jackson morphs into a mechanical, weaponized form, his body becoming metal, his armored skin outfitted with force field devices that deflect a shower of cascading bullets as his enemies open fire. At the start of the sequence, prior to building his shell, Jackson is attempting to escape from a doctor-like villain but is trapped. As he flees, he hits walls and keeps getting caught by dramatic search lights (more like spotlights) that ceaselessly follow him.

In many ways, Moonwalker is about celebrity. In other memorable scenes, Jackson similarly attempts to escape his fame and his fans—the latter distorted, monstrous animations of faceless crowds and stateless armies. In Moonwalker, his body transcends worldly physics; he is simultaneously a god of his own universe and the victim of it, summoning the violence of his fans’ desire that is, in retrospect, a foil for his own.  

Here Jackson is highlighted as spectacle through the meticulous work of special effects. He becomes technology, image, monument, and light all at once.

The ekphrasis of a sunken double

Kneeling—prostrate, praying, begging, mutating—the sculpture feels like a shrunken version of the real body, a sunken double. Head tilted forward, expressionless lips and eyes, those who have written about it note its missing hands—a psychoanalytic goldmine of interpretation, be it artistic castration, the missing evidence of a crime, or the haunting limbs of a criminal. The object is a mausoleum cast nine years after the body’s death; the sculpture and its reflective patina elicit empathy and lack thereof—projection and catharsis. The affective experience of this multivalent object is complicated: the story of a demigod’s rise and fall, of a child turning into a monster, is one read, certainly. But what confounds logic in this object—entangling ethics, values, and emotion—is the somatic impact that Jackson—his image, his movement and music, his story—possesses. He embodies the treacherous relationship the American (and potentially worldwide) public had to this figure, as well as the demands we make on those in the public spotlight, Black entertainers in America in particular. How do you have empathy for a figure fallen so far from grace and yet whose impact is so profoundly valuable? How do you sustain grief for a loss which is ongoing? (And empathy, for that matter—is that what this work contains?) Can an artwork be a “third space” between the maker’s intent and the public’s reception? Are the best works morally complicated and able to contain both something morally good, and morally bankrupt? Much like its viewers? If Michael Jackson can be a lauded public figure, an entertainer, a child star, a child molester, a victim, a perpetrator; his cast body is perpetually raw material in a constant state of transformation, a liquid substance leaking uncomfortably, mutating. Miller’s work therefore serves, not as a fixed image of the star, but something like a lenticular image, which catches light and shifts shape. 

A long list of attributes

Within Miller’s work, the sculpture symbolizes myriad considerations of celebrity and image: her interest in the malleability of oneself and of public perception, the ‘objecthood’ of the (Black American) performer, the potency and perversity of objects, the dehumanizing qualities of the mass gaze, and, of course, the celebrity as a host object for projections. In fact, in broader strokes, the sculpture easily summons a mix of both perennial and prescient conversations around race, capitalism, subjectivity, and class. Therefore, the sculpture is both a loaded object, and an unfixed one. Its subject, “Michael,” is not unique in his ability to continue to mutate even posthumously, but he nevertheless constructs the model of this contemporary condition, one predicated upon the inevitable excavation of truths ready to be recast. It’s the raw materiality of a personal substance, the unfixed nature of the celebrity-tale as perfectly embodied by Michael Jackson. How do you grieve a story that is still unfolding, resisting the finitude of death?

The sculpture, once cast, travels to New York where it sits on a pedestal lit with a single spotlight. Above it is another work by Miller, a loud laser tracing words on the wall. The laser screeches and further emphasizes the mute stillness of the kneeling figure. It’s on view in New York for a few months, then later in Los Angeles. People come and go. No words are publicly written about the object. While working on this essay, Jeffrey Stuker asks me how the sculpture is perceived when it is installed, some scavenging research I have yet to do. He asks me if it is seen as an “iconographic work rather than an ekphrastic one,” and whether it would be a misunderstanding. By the time the sculpture is installed in LA, the HBO documentary about Michael Jackson’s abusive crimes has been released and he is a radioactive subject. If he is an icon, he has just come to signify, yet again, something else. Meanwhile, Nicole and I are months into editing a book about the sculpture. The book acts as a monograph for Nicole and yet compiles contributions by other artists and writers responding to this context; Michael, Michael, etc… Among the contributors is artist and musician Jasper Marsalis.

“Fuck Michael Jackson,” Jasper says in his studio-garage surrounded by mic stands and cords, open books, and small paintings in progress. His work depicts details of live performance scenes. He and I on two folding chairs, Nicole’s upper half on an iPhone screen rigged to a tripod. “But also, it could only be his body.” Only his body could elicit as much fascination and repulsion, as much arc.