The Harvard Art Museums have acquired Wardell Milan’s Bill T. Jones (2018), a photographic collage of the American dancer, choreographer, director, and author, made from a page in Robert Mapplethorpe’s The Black Book (1986).
Curator Makeda Best recently had a conversation with the New York–based artist—about his collage, the origins of his work with paper, and his artistic process.
Makeda Best: There is a wonderful story you tell about your parents setting up a studio area when you were a child to make your work. I’m curious about what you were making at that time.
Wardell Milan: I am basically making now what I was making when I was seven or eight. My parents set up the spare bedroom as a studio. I was making these cardboard cities for my cars and figurines to exist in and to populate. I was also making small drawings of action figures and creatures that I imagined. Making these small drawings and constructing cities has grown into my studio practice today. I’m still creating cardboard spaces and dioramas for paper figurines to live in; I’m still making large drawings of imagined spaces and individuals.
I always feel like how I approach things and my practice can be linked back to that little studio. [My parents] recognized my interest, and I started taking art classes in third grade in school. I also took classes on Saturday mornings. And after that class, my mother would take me to the art store to buy supplies. [My parents] weren’t artists themselves, but they supported whatever I was interested in.
MB: It is interesting that you still have this interdisciplinary practice and that you found your voice through combinations.
WM: Everything returns to drawing, to mark making, to wanting to consider how to express an idea through the mark, but [also] through collage, moving image, and sculpture. The practice continues to develop through my desire to move something, to translate something beyond the 2D.
MB: Is it about a dialogue with the medium, or is it about the story you’re trying to tell or the thing that you are trying to express?
WM: It is all of that. Sometimes it’s just boredom! I am always thinking about the medium and the process. I say to myself, “We’ve done this. Either you need to push the medium or the idea or use a different medium.” Sometimes the story or narrative can be told through drawing or a photograph. Or maybe a sculpture—maybe the viewer needs to walk around the object and have a different kind of experience.
MB: So you are focusing on how this is going to be seen?
WM: More so, [I am considering] what the conversation with the viewer [will be]. With everything I make, there is a point when I understand it is not going to live with me; hopefully, it has a life that exceeds my time here on earth. So, with that understanding, I want to make sure the work is as intelligent and as useful as it can be. I think: how is the viewer going to experience this? What do I want to say? Is the conversation relevant, and are these conflicts and questions ones that will continue to be asked? And in that asking, will they ever be answered? These are the things that cycle through my mind in the process of making.
MB: I love that you’re talking about play and boredom, because that’s not something one would necessarily think when looking at your work. But I’m also interested in what you said about your work leaving you, moving out into the world. With collage, the works seem so intimate. You imagine that the collaged elements have lived with you, touched you. And then there is the act of cutting or destroying something you owned, which is also intimate.
WM: Absolutely. I like the intimacy and size of the works, particularly with the small [ones], like Bill T. Jones. When I am making these, I see myself as a descendant of these queer black gay men. Considering how to reimagine the pages of The Black Book and to reimagine, not so much Mapplethorpe and his relationship to these models, but the men [in the photographs] and their lives in New York City—before the AIDS pandemic and at the height of it—I wanted to think about what they would look like if they had survived. They would look like me. But could I imagine and draw their portrait? Could the pages also stay small and intimate? I wanted it to feel like we are looking at a family portrait, an Olan Mills [a company that offered photographic portrait services in department stores and malls] photograph.
“I’ve been thinking more about how the black and brown body is seen as inconsequential. I just want to honor those men.”
MB: How did you choose which portraits from the book to collage?
WM: It began with pages that really lent themselves to collage. But once I got to [the photograph of] Bill T., I had exhausted that approach and it was like, okay, how can you use the body? How can you use these pages in a more interesting way? That became the challenge. The next challenge for me became how to use the discarded pieces. Certain communities, communities of color, are also discarded, they are inconsequential, so I thought: how do I use these to create new portraits? The process, then, was to first take the page out and do something traditional, and then challenge myself to use the pages and the discards.
MB: I love the interconnectedness in that statement between the formal, conceptual, and political. In the other Bill T. images in Mapplethorpe’s book, his arms are outstretched and there is an amazing sense of line. I also see this throughout your body of work, in your awareness of how the cut line appears. This awareness is very different from the photographic, and perhaps that comes from your drawing practice. In your Bill T. work, there is a way in which all the lines are condensed and compounded. You folded this person back into himself.
WM: Right, with that work I was thinking about the relationship between photographer and model. In much of the book, you can understand the hierarchy, but Bill T. is different. I get the sense that he is in full control—from how he holds himself to how he presents his body to the camera.
MB: Speaking of the relationship between photographer and subject, are these your subjects? What is your subject?
WM: The men in the photographs are my collaborators.
MB: The men as photographed by Mapplethorpe?
WM: I’m not even considering Mapplethorpe. I think of the individuals as my collaborators. I am not interested in Mapplethorpe.
MB: That’s fascinating, because at one point he was the center of the conversation. You are saying, I’m not giving that any more airtime, and I’m coming back to these subjects and asking what it means to be represented and pictured and in control.
WM: I definitely had that conversation with the Mapplethorpe work at one time. I think it is valid and necessary, but for me, at the point I was making these collages, and considering what has happened in recent years—the past year specifically—I’ve been thinking more about how the black and brown body is seen as inconsequential. I just want to honor those men.
MB: When you reflect on your work now, and on the past year, what do you want to do, or what’s important to reengage with?
WM: I want to make the visual equivalent to what Hilton Als and Joan Didion do in their writing. I love their work. Didion goes back and forth from writing personal anecdotes to this journalistic/documentarian voice. There is the personal reflection, and then she is at a protest. Like Hilton. I’m thinking of his book The Women.
MB: I love their writing, too. Their works start out very simply, and by the end you have been wrapped up in so many profound observations about contemporary life and history that you are in awe. It is interesting that you see that as an aspiration for your work, because what I see in it are these gestures and details that are very specific to a moment and then become part of a broader perspective.
WM: Absolutely. I like the shifting.
MB: You have said that you think of your work as storytelling.
WM: Yes, the work is often very heavy with narrative.
MB: I read that at one point you had begun to “reconsider” your relationship to photography. What was that reconsideration?
WM: When I was in grad school [at Yale University], I felt like I was just trying to push the idea of what the medium was as a “documentary” form. My uncle gave me my first camera when I was seven or eight. In undergrad, I’d concentrated in photography and painting. But I always felt like I was on the outside of photography because of how I use the medium. I use it as a means to an end. I don’t use the camera to speak about the world through the lens of the camera. It is [merely] another step in getting toward the [final] piece.
Milan’s work was recently featured in the 2021 exhibition Wardell Milan: Amerika. God Bless You If It’s Good To You, at the Bronx Museum.
This conversation between photographer Wardell Milan and Makeda Best, the Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at the Harvard Art Museums, took place on June 1, 2021, via Zoom. It has been slightly shortened and edited for style and clarity.
