2 artworks that made me cry this month

October 2018. 

A couple weeks ago, I took a class of UCLA students to see the Adrian Piper exhibition at the Hammer Museum. Of course Adrian Piper is great, and it was super interesting to walk through a seeming evolution of ideas from (apparently) race and gender neutral “conceptual art” into very specifically feminist and race-conscious artworks. My favorite works were mostly ones I was already familiar with until I got to the last room of the exhibition where there was a small square room with four photographs hung in each corner. I wonder if people very predictably start left and look at things in a clockwise direction, because that’s what I did here. The images are large, but not monumental and one was forced to stand fairly close to them since the room is small. The first one shows a group photo from probably the 80s. It’s sort of anodyne, like a stock photo or a publicity image from the Cosby Show:

We are among you

I had snowsuits a lot like these when I was a kid going skiing 1-3 times a year in the '80s. The other thought that crossed my mind is that skiing is a 'white' sport (y'know, if it's a sport and not a hobby at all. If it's a hobby it's a 'white' hobby.)  They're so happy!

There's a low, somewhat discordant but not unpleasant heavy music playing over a small directional speaker there in that room; I turned to the next image. Same deal:

We are around you

Again, happy people doing "normal" things. I study a lot of critical race theory type stuff and am now familiar with certain patterns of persuasive representations. These were falling into a pattern I recognize: the We are like You trope. The images to me did not look neutral: they are heavily coded with a certain Rockwell-esque white Americana-ness. To swap the standard white faces with Black faces to subtly enlarge the status quo is a familiar tactic these days, for example in commercials where a large number of nice nuclear families eating cereal are attractive people of color with adorable children. I don't actually know when this piece was created, so it could be that it was put together as early as the 80s when I think those tactics were not as common as they are today. 

On to the third image:

We are within you

This image changes the tactic a bit. A stereotypical image of, if you will, separate but equal positivity rather than a sameness claim to equality. Obviously a rhetorical claim with at least as long a history amongst activists, primitivist enthusiasts, Return-to-Africa abolitionists, and so on. The claim made--We are within you--complicates that separation a bit; it's more of a difference within the heart of sameness declaration. Who is 'you' anyway? As a mostly white/Asian person in a contemporary art museum, I had unconsciously assumed an imagined White Museum-goer stance for the you, due perhaps to my own subject positionality, but probably as much or more due to the stereotypes and expectations around the "average" Hammer Museum-goer. Since this was about the third room of race-conscious art of Adrian Piper's, I was also deep on the journey with Piper and this little room was familiar in conjunction with what I'd already seen. 

Then:

You are safe

And this is the one that caused my hand to fly up to my face, and a sort of tearful traffic jam inside my head and throat. Why exactly? I mean, it's still an anodyne image-- this is the most Cosby Show of all the images, like a JC Penney catalogue or something, but something about the phrase, and especially the progression--so simple, but in my case it worked like a perfectly sprung trap-- that led me to believe this is not about you, this is about them and their fight for acceptance, equality, dignity, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness... this is not about you, this is about them... and then with the last image, instantly, the realization, THIS IS ABOUT YOU. That wasn't the sole thing that made my cry--the real thing that did it, I think, is the compassion I read in that statement. I received it as a moment of radical care-taking in the midst of a long gallery journey of witnessing difficult, tragic, and exhausting subjects.

Now, the way I received this piece isn't the only way it could be interpreted: that last sentence could as easily be delivered with an eye roll, acknowledging the ways in which the myths of black criminal incursions on white life have always been first and foremost fevered white paranoias (the black male attackers conjured up by white spouse and child murderers like Susan Smith and Charles Stuart to cover their crimes, the mostly imaginary rapes of white women that gave cover to lynching, through to contemporary police violence rates). 

Further, it's important to note (as is currently standard in anti-racist work) that I certainly didn't expect a moment of radical compassion from Adrian Piper, I don't think that I/the museumgoer deserved that or had earned it from the artist, I don't think it's a prerequisite for progress in anti-racist work. Rather, it was precisely because it was undeserved, unexpected, and different from the other work surrounding it that it hit me so hard. We should always feel like anti-racist work is our work because getting more justice for a group that isn't us is more justice for all, but in the midst of that to be suddenly hit with a moment of caretaking that did feel like it was for me-- it was like a sudden Jesus or bodhisattva like visitation, a forceful, loving reinsertion into the matter at hand. 

THEN
The Marciano Collection


First, a potentially but probably not inflammatory opinion: Marciano Collection is much more exciting than the Broad. Oh yeah, also a very Los Angeles opinion. Anyway. The Marciano Collection is, I believe, purchased with blue jean money (Guess? !!) and took over the old Masonic Temple on Wilshire Boulevard which is awesome and genius, and now that I got to enter, is also Art-Deco-shading-into-Midcentury beautiful! Plus there are still Masonic compasses on the elevator doors. Ai WeiWei was great to see. I am sad they don't sell porcelain sunflower seeds in the shop. I mean, I know, commercialization, but seriously-- at least let the Chinese-American Kansans have the porcelain sunflower seeds!!

There's a big room of Yayoi Kusama, other interesting contemporary pieces by people I've never heard of-- including the one that made me cry, that stood out--in some ways literally, since it's made of stacked and pressed corrugated cardboard:

Andrea Bowers, after a Walter Crane illustration. I do think this piece is first of all unabashedly beautiful, a sort of unapologetic Art Nouveau sort of sinuous line fest. The colors are rich and saturated, the lines beautiful, the cardboard beautifully merging the humble, the trashy, the street, with the simultaneously bourgeois and camp of Art Nouveau illustration. But, of course, that epigraph. First I laughed out loud and then my eyes filled with tears. It's like a profane koan, exhausted from the struggle even as it affirms the gloriousness of living and life. Since lately I just feel exhausted, it was exhilarating to feel simultaneously recognized and encouraged, at once, with a host of gorgeous brown angels, detourning and reclaiming Walter Crane.

Next to "Magic Every Damn Day" was one of several pieces by the same artist (frustratingly I didn't record her name and my searches are not turning her up). These creepy little dolls echo the intimation of magic, but sort of ominously. But they're also invoking mere child's play in the same gallery room with a full size swingset that has a brick perched almost unnoticeably directly above the swing, and several chains (of the kind like swings are often made of) whose links slowly end up composed of Kanekalon fake hair.