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Malaga Island, tragic and mysterious, lies just off the coast of Maine in the US. It was once home to the mixed-race descendants of a freed slave named Benjamin Darling. But in 1912, they were all forcibly removed from their homes, with the state’s connivance, in little more than a week.
Some were dumped in mainland communities, which persecuted this so-called “maroon society” to the point of hunger and poverty. Others were arrested and illegally committed to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded, where they died with suspicious rapidity. Even the corpses were removed from the ancestral graves, to cleanse Malaga of its supposed taint.
This harrowing tale has preoccupied American artist Theaster Gates for many years and in many different ways – which is only what you might expect from this famous polymath. For Gates (born 1973) is equally renowned as an urban planner, gospel singer, potter, sculptor, community organiser and university professor. By purchasing condemned buildings with the sales of his art, and transforming them into low-cost housing, he has invented better futures for African Americans in his native Chicago.
All of these diverse gifts have clearly gone into the making of Amalgam, formerly in the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, now filling the entire top floor of Tate Liverpool. This is nothing less than a multi-part monument to Malaga and its lost inhabitants. Here was a community that lived outside the laws of the state, and even the nation, from the mid-19th century onwards, ignoring the prohibiting of interracial marriage and “miscegenation”.
The show opens with a massive rooftop, covered in slates, which appears to be sliding into the ground. It is a half-buried house, presumably, a home that can no longer be entered. More slates form a circle beneath a revolving sign that spells out Malaga in lime-green neon. This is an obvious nod to the tourist instincts of the developers who hoped to turn Malaga into a resort. So far, so disappointing.
A gallery full of handmade vitrines sets forth the iconography Gates has created for his island – a kind of faux-ethnographic museum of horned masks and curious casts, half-human and half-beast, with overtones of voodoo spirits and Benin heads. Some are white, some black, some manage to be both, with the use of clay glazes poured over the surfaces like fluid icing sugar.
If you were not already thinking of the slave trade, its evil history is immediately invoked with what appear to be branding irons. Elsewhere, there are screws and vices and rusty instruments that might relate to ships or sugar or barbaric transportation. Some are attached to bollards very like those seen through the window on the Liverpool docks, with their own desperate connection to black history.
A wall of blackboards covered in chalk writing presents a rough timeline of the Malaga disaster, and the history of Maine, along with the names of mixed-race stars such as Alicia Keys and Halle Berry. The phrases seem to belong to many voices, as if overheard, some speaking of the state’s appalling dishonesty in relation to Malaga. For the island never became a resort. Its 40 acres lacked not only the mule famously promised to American families by General Sherman, but the projected hotel. For all the horrific evictions, Malaga Island remains deserted to this day.
Gates has constructed something approximate to an island twice over in this show. A wooden stage bears a sequence of sculpted rock formations, sprouting seashells and sinister callipers. Empty glass-fronted cabinets conjure both the missing hotel and the ethnographic museum. Elsewhere, a forest of carved wooden trunks, on an island of white pine, bear many more of Gates’s effigies and masks. This isle is full of voices, too, with a soundtrack of waves and songs.
But all of this feels conventional, obvious. Artists have been doing these island/forest installations for years. And the made-up masks go right back to Picasso. My sense is that visitors will take more from the photographs, documents and black magazines – such as Jet and Ebony, from Gates’s vast personal archive – in the central gallery. After all, this show is partly about consciousness-raising and historical knowledge.
But how it might have felt to be so isolated, and at the same time liberated on Malaga; what it was like to lose your home and family in such barbaric circumstances, to be disposed of with such contempt, or declared mentally infirm simply by virtue of marrying someone with a different skin colour – this is only touched upon in a single work. It is the show’s centrepiece, though, and also its high point.
Gates’s film, Dance of Malaga, is beautiful, affecting and deeply eloquent. It has no dialogue, but a haunting score composed by his gospel band, the Black Monks. Black and white dancers perform a pas de deux against the island’s undergrowth that is by turns loving and sorrowful, its choreography subtly intercut with film clips, news reportage, period photographs and devastating historical quotes. It is a complex meditation on a viciously particular form of racism, at a certain time and place, but also on the never-ending tragedy of forbidden love.
• Theaster Gates: Amalgam is at Tate Liverpool until 3 May 2020
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