The art show “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” which begins next week in Manhattan, is the legacy of a remarkable man. The world-famous curator Okwui Enwezor died in Germany in March 2019. In the months before his death, he worked on the concept of this exhibition, which is about grief, but also about sadness and anger about an unfair country. Because with her, with this last project, he wanted to make it clear how deeply racism has engraved itself in the history and present of the USA. After his death, others continued to work on his bitter inventory.
–
Enwezor was born in Nigeria and lived in New York for a long time. At the same time, he had a lot in common with Germany, in 2002 he was responsible for the legendary Documenta, and in 2011 he came back to head the Haus der Kunst in Munich. He was celebrated, at least initially. A few years later he felt downright dumped. The world citizen suddenly had to justify himself for not speaking German.
He officially resigned in Munich in 2018 because of his illness; In a SPIEGEL interview, he made it clear that he was no longer wanted there either. His employer, the Bavarian State Government, gave him this to understand. But he stayed in Germany because he did not want to discontinue medical treatment. And then the request came from New York, he also gave the direction of the exhibition, named possible artists and works.
–
Strange normality
The objects in the show go back to the time when racial segregation was abolished in the USA, but nothing fundamental changed in the “normality of white nationalism,” as Enwezor emphasized in the preface to the exhibition catalog
–
. The tarred canvas from the 1960s is reminiscent of this strange normality, on which a seemingly lost button with the inscription »Freedom Now« is attached. The work of the US artist Daniel LaRue Johnson is a tribute to the peaceful civil rights movement, which has felt the immense brutality of the police, the executive power of the state.
–
A key message of the show and the accompanying publication reads: Non-white victims of violence or natural disasters are mourned differently in the country. white
Victims of violence are publicly deplored, the grief is staged politically. Dead people from other population groups, however, would be more likely to be accepted.
–
A film by Arthur Jafa, which will also be shown, fits in with this. “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death” was created a few years ago, in a kind of collage the violence of the police against defenseless black people emerges in fragments – flickering so naturally, as if it simply could not be removed from the image of today’s America . The artist Kerry James Marshall reacted differently to the assaults, which were already seemingly obligatory; In 2015 he painted a black cop, sitting on the hood of the company car, in front of a night sky. Today the picture belongs to the New York Museum of Modern Art, where one finds that the sitter is a “challenging” counterpart to the cliché, “he is both a black man and a police officer” and thus “apparently trapped in two contradicting identities”.
Lack of compassion
But the clichés are not only annoying, they are also murderous. The poet Claudia Rankine writes in the accompanying volume that black people are basically born in the USA as dying, in the eyes of white people they are never really alive. Liberal whites also lack empathy because they cannot understand how dangerous it is to let a non-white child play with a toy gun outdoors.
–
The exhibition is also a suggestion of how one could deal with this intolerable situation: American grief work should replace the American dream. Not only in the form of lamenting the dead, but also by the fact that reflection and reappraisal replace outdated hero stories.
In the catalog texts it is said that – so far – progress has almost always been followed by a step backwards. The civil rights movement, for example, won a victory, but to this day non-white people are disproportionately more arrested and convicted in the United States.
Enwezor no longer felt safe in Germany
Shortly before his death, Enwezor had spoken about the fact that he no longer felt safe in Germany. The sight of the Pegida supporters, who also demonstrated in Munich, near his apartment, had shocked him.
Basically, he doesn’t see himself as a victim, he said at the time. Nevertheless, through such protests from the right, he becomes aware of how part of his environment might perceive him: “As an African in a predominantly monocultural city, I am someone who is left out.” happens? ”It just crosses your mind.
For him, art was a way of making visible what drives a society apart, but also drifts apart. Until the end he held fast to the belief that it could also broaden consciousness and sharpen thinking.
The show lives from this belief. * Okwui Enwezor: »Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America«.
-Icon: The mirror
