Michael Jackson: On the Wall review

Neither hagiography nor reliquary – no pots of skin-whitener, no Swarovski-encrusted glove, no shades, nothing about the nose: this is not the Michael Jackson Story. A refracted portrait of Jackson through the eyes of 48 artists, On the Wall feels an entirely justified exhibition. It is not the last word. As Zadie Smith wrote in her novel Swing Time: “A great dancer has no time, no generation, he moves eternally through the world, so that any dancer in any age may recognise him. Picasso would be incomprehensible to Rembrandt, but Nijinsky would understand Michael Jackson.” The novel’s narrator also recalls a story that Fred Astaire begged Jackson to teach him the moonwalk. Fred, like Jackson’s nose, isn’t here. Instead we have Klara Lidén, moonwalking the streets of Manhattan at night, in a grainy video, and Spartacus (or do I mean Marvin Gaye, or is it now Monster) Chetwynd and her chums dancing to Thriller, with bawdy squirts of artificial smoke, in a strangely ritualised performance titled (according to the on-screen credits) Thiller. It looks like a covert recording of a bizarre ritual as much as a Jackson homage. Perhaps it is just that.

Everywhere in the show, Jackson’s voice and Quincy Jones’s arrangements leak from tinny headphones and drift from videos. When Jackson’s Dangerous world tour hit Bucharest in 1992, two years after the communist regime fell, the audience went utterly berserk. Jackson stood alone and static. Removing his glasses drew a roar. A single hand movement caused an outpouring of screams Ceausescu could never have engineered. Footage of the concert, focusing almost as much on the audience as the performer, is shown in a room alongside the Michael Jackson masks the tour’s promoters distributed, interspersed with newspaper images of the faces of Romanians, taken at the time of the concert. Faces and masks alike are illuminated, glowing from the gallery wall. Everyone, it seems, was illuminated by Jackson’s presence.

Full review here