Steve McQueen's 'Bass' Strips Down Cinema and Lays Its Bones Bare

Summary

• Award-winning director and artist Steve McQueen has opened Bass (2024) at Schaulager Basel, which is now on view through November 16.
• Originally presented at Dia Beacon, the piece expands on McQueen’s well-known cinematic oeuvre, using light and sound to create an immersive sensory field.

When Steve McQueen unveiled Bass last year, more than a few were thrown for a loop – unlike Deadpan (1997) which earned him a Turner Prizer or his Academy Award-winning 12 Years a Slave (2013), this work was image-less altogether. Rather, the artist opted for something more pared down, using only light and sound, cinema’s building blocks.

McQueen brings Bass to Schaulager Basel, marking his return to the Swiss institution twelve years after his landmark eponymous exhibition. Originally co-commissioned by the Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager Basel and Dia Art Foundation, the work debuted at Dia Beacon last year, where it transformed the museum’s cavernous, post-industrial underground into an enveloping sensory field. The piece has since been adapted to complement Schaulager’s own architectural character, flooding the space with a 40-minute, immersive presentation of low-frequency tones and spears of shifting hues.

“What I love about light and sound is that they are both created through movement and fluidity.” McQueen wrote in a recent statement. “They can be molded into any shape, like vapor or a scent; they can sneak into any nook and cranny.”

In-hand with this exploration of light – exquisite in its luminosity and imperceptible ebbs and flows – the piece also wrestles with familiar questions for McQueen: those of identity, absence and the trauma of the Black diaspora. Through the temporal-sensorial limbo that is Bass, the artist hones in on the “beginning points” of the “all-encompassing” – psychological states, layered history, personal memory and the invisible forces that move us.

Here, McQueen not only expands our limits of perception, but what we know his canon to be. In doing so, Bass further enhances and elaborates on his decades-long interrogation of the moving image, opening up new dimensions to his cinematic universe.

The piece is now on view in Basel through November 16.

Schaulager Basel
Ruchfeldstrasse 19,
4142 Münchenstein,
Switzerland