![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/CR-8-Img1-IM_Aloi_Gallagher_Dew-Breaker_RGB-1024x957.jpg\")
Dew Breaker<\/em>, 2015.
Photo : courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
The title of the exhibition encapsulates the essence of the curatorial proposition: grief is about loss and grievance speaks of retribution. In Enwezor\u2019s words, the exhibition explores \u201cthe crystallization of black grief in the face of a politically orchestrated white grievance.\u201d Together, grief and grievance imply the condition that has defined Black lives as mourning in the context of the law, its tragic shortcomings, and the perpetual state of emergency it perpetrates. It seems therefore particularly cunning that the exhibition should begin with Arthur Jafa\u2019s Love is the Message, the Message is Death<\/em>, a meticulously edited seven-minute collage of found footage set to Kanye West\u2019s \u201cUltralight Beam.\u201d Reclaiming media\u2019s representational tropes, strategies, and clich\u00e9s, the video at once embodies and represents the alienation, fragmentation, and collective multitude making up Blackness in the United States today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n On the second floor, the exhibition takes on an intentionally monochromatic aura. Nari Ward\u2019s\u202fPeace Keeper<\/em>, (1995) comprises a rusted, burnt-out hearse covered with peacock feathers. Trapped in a metal cage-like structure, the hearse is stuck. Unable to move forward, it symbolizes the state of unfinished mourning the Black community is condemned to as a hostage of history. Nearby, the black-and-white photographic series by LaToya Ruby Frazier and Dawoud Bey ground the exhibition in specific sociohistorical milieus in which trauma is either rooted in the extractive exploitation of capitalist systems (Frazier) or the outright racist violence of groups like the KKK (Bey). Both series, in their own distinct ways, explore different conceptions of loss, and personal and collective devastation as defined by an overwhelmingly relentless sense of powerlessness. In front of these images, it is hard not to sense that photographic realism can take on a new political agency that by far exceeds the dialectics of indexicality. These clearly are \u201cBlack and white\u201d images in the sense that they visually embolden Black grief and grievance in the context of a white-defined world. The context in which contemporary Black artists think and work realism takes on a powerful new role, as further confirmed by Kerry James Marshall\u2019s painting Untitled (Policeman)<\/em> from 2015. Through his distinctive synthetic realism, Marshall summons the culturally ambivalent figure of a Black cop. Sitting on his cruiser, his eyes point outside the frame, to something we will never see. This deceptively simple image is charged with hope and sorrow. Victim or perpetrator; plausible hero or villain? The race\/power relations inscribed in this historical moment, as this painting suggests, are never clean-cut and easy to grasp. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Unstraightforward narratives in which Black and white prescriptive roles appear problematized are also central to Lorna Simpson\u2019s painting Night Light<\/em> (2019). The painting is part of a recent series informed by the work of Matthew Alexander Henson, an often-overlooked African-American Arctic explorer. While researching Henson, Simpson came across a poem by Robin Coste Lewis titled \u201cUsing Black to Paint: Walking\u202fThrough\u202fa Matisse Exhibit Thinking about the Arctic and Matthew Henson\u201d in which a passage reads: \u201cThe unanticipated shock: so much believed to be white is actually\u2014strikingly\u2014\/blue. Endless blueness. White is blue. An ocean wave freezes in place. Blue.\/Whole glaciers, large as Ohio, floating masses of static water. All of them pale\/frosted azuls. It makes me wonder\u2014yet again\u2014was there ever such a thing\/as whiteness? I am beginning to grow suspicious. An open window.\u201d Simpson\u2019s work taps into multiple registers of sublimity and purity while questioning the construction of whiteness, its implied naturalness, and the subjectivity of colour. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The aesthetic strategies deployed by some of the artists in the exhibition also explore the edges of the unrepresentable\u2014they prod the boundaries of grief at the point at which words begin to crumble. More than others, the large canvases of neo-abstract expressionist artists Julie Mehretu and Mark Bradford\u202fseem to emotively map territories of unspeakable grief. Here too, as was the case for realism, abstraction seems to take on a dimensional depth that exceeds the concerns of previous abstract expressionist artists. In the context of Black art, this contingency powerfully shifts abstraction and the spiritual connotations it has inherited from its modernist roots into a politically charged field. However, the result is not one filled with anger, rage, or resignation, as one might expect. Ellen Gallagher\u2019s abstract paintings explore conceptions of communication and isolation through the idea of the archipelago. The artist\u2019s mythology of regeneration envisions a pan-African borderless interdependency born from the bones of drowned African slaves. Personal mythologies and searches for alternative, not-white defined, identities are also central to Rashid Johnson’s monumental, plant-filled, structure titled Antoine\u2019s Organ <\/em>(2016). In this work Johnson uses plants and African plant-based products, like shea butter and black soap, to reflect on his African-American identity, registers of individual and collective vulnerability, and capitalist exploitation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Grief and Grievance <\/em>could not be more timely. It is undeniably powerful, well curated, and impactfully staged. Social media have time and time again proved detrimental to the discussion of topics as serious and urgent as these. The speed and limitation they impose denies the time, care, and thinking-depth they deserve. Political art of the kind seen here <\/em>can give us the opportunity to slow down, pause, truly reflect, and sincerely empathize as a step towards a fairer future. <\/p>\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/CR-8-Img2-IM_Aloi_Marshall_Untitled-policeman_RGB-1024x1021.jpg\")
Untitled<\/em> (policeman), 2015.
Photo : courtesy of the artist & Jack Shainman Gallery, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n