"30 Americans," A Response

I recently went to the Milwaukee Art Museum ("MAM") and viewed, among other things, the current exhibit, 30 Americans.  The Art Museum describes the exhibit thus:

30 Americans is a dynamic exploration of contemporary American art. Paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs, video, and more made by African American artists since 1970 raise questions of what it means to be a contemporary artist and an African American today. Whether addressing issues of race, gender, sexuality, politics, or history—or seemingly remaining silent about them—these works offer powerful interpretations of cultural identity and artistic legacy.

 A number of things struck me during and after the exhibit.  I found myself able to access the pathos, frustration, disgust, rage, powerlessness, pride, confidence, bravado, sorrow, joy, ebullience, and other feelings that the works inspired.  For example, there is a take on the Mastercard "Priceless" advertising campaign showing a scene at a funeral of a young black man who was shot and killed for jewelry he was wearing.  The final line of parody, "Picking the perfect casket for your son.  Priceless" stirred powerful emotions in me.  The elegaic quality brought tears to my eyes; the senselessness angered me, etc.

Despite the tendency of most pieces to stir a response in me, I found myself sensing something inaccessible in the pieces.  After thinking about the matter, I have concluded that the inaccessible place is a parodic or ironic aspect to the work that derives from a presence to which I will always remain outside because the parodic or ironic aspect is rooted in lived experience.  Even though the art is expressed in shared 'rhetorical' or artistic forms that allow me comprehend aspects of the pieces, I can only sense the deepest or profoundest presence from which they arise, feeling the reverberations of what the pieces mean without having the experiential capacity to understand and articulate what the pieces mean at the felt level.  The Mastercard piece moved me, but I have never lost a friend or a relative to gun violence, particularly of the type of gun violence that often besets impoverished, urban minority communities.  The way this experience resonates with the piece of art is something I can only access through assumption and inference, which has a slightly disconcerting and bewildering effect, a shade of which can almost be described as sadness.

What does it mean that a significant part of the art I viewed is inaccessible to me?  First, that the artist can bring to my attention, in a public space, awareness of the arrest or gap in my experiential capacity to understand is significant.  Communication enables the creation of experiences otherwise not possible.  Through dialog, whether visual or audible, written or unwritten, new presences arise.  The artists creating the pieces exhibited at MAM function as hero-translators (in the mythic or epic sense), bringing news of different worlds to their audience.  Marco Polo brought news of a new culture to Europe, enriching and expanding the experiential capacities of Europeans in the process.  Think of the rich history of culinary delight to which Italians have access simply because Marco Polo brought noodles back with him.  Surely Italians have been enriched in this exchange.

The artists whose works are being exhibited do the same thing.  I may not be able to access the felt reality of urban gun violence, but the poignancy of the Mastercard piece gives me a sense of what it must do to persons and communities that experience urban gun violence.  In giving me (and anyone lacking experiential capacity) this sense, the artist creates a new presence, a new statement that is the acknowledgement f the inaccessible experiential aspect of the work.  When persons like me who have not experienced urban gun violence directly (who are surely the majority of the viewers) respond to the piece, we bring the previously unexpressed or poorly expressed experience into the public sphere and give it voice.  The responses, even when incomplete or inchoate, acknowledge the felt experience of the artist and so gives it space in the broader cultural exchange of ideas.  Once the art is exhibited publicly, it is an utterance of sorts that cannot be taken back, silenced, or otherwise erased.

Giving voice to a a real experience, even one experienced by a minority of persons, is important to recognize the breadth of experiences that persons in our culture have and to legitimize those experiences as valid and public parts of the greater culture.  In bringing a new or poorly disseminated experience to the public sphere, the artist brings us closer as people to acknowledging our common humanity and individual differences, creating a communicative space for respect and learning.  From this platform we become a more integrated but less homogeneous culture, a culture that craves contact with difference rather than suppressing it, running from it, or fearing it.  And so, despite my ability to only glimpse the profound parodic and ironic elements of the many of the pieces, I am better for having seen them and remaining open to the aspects I cannot fully understand.