MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

In many of Marshall’s paintings, the space is construed as a stage. In his twelve-part woodcut, *Untitled*, it becomes cinematic. The work is 50-feet long, too large to take-in at a single glance. Here Marshall introduces a cinematic approach to a static medium. The work reads from left to right, as a story and a filmed image. Our eyes glide over its length like a camera on a dolly. We are the camera. The scene is set in the first panel: the architecture of a high-rising urban landscape, the corner of a building, a window with flowers. We enter from over an outside wall, where six men are deep in conversation in a tidy living room. He uses this filmic intermezzo as proof of the objectivity of his panorama. He deliberately draws our attention from the action in the living room to the intermediary space and the open door of the bedroom. It is a simple pictorial work, in contrast to some of the artist's large history paintings. The apartment and the men are intentionally anonymous and generic. *Untitled* is a powerful image, owing not only to its scale but to its subdued naturalism as well.