ANYTHING TO DECLARE? VOL. 08
The first thing I saw when entering the exhibition was a gigantic photo of some two hundred or so Black children giving the nazi salute to the American flag. The wall label said the piece, entitled Pledge of Allegiance, was a photograph taken in 1899 in Virginia and the children were giving the “Bellamy Salute.” I took a deep breath, grateful I was alone to experience whatever I was about to experience, and proceeded forward.
I had heard it was Arthur Jafa’s most expansive solo exhibition to date. I had heard it was incredibly resonant. Jafa, an artist who has called himself an “undertaker,” focuses on stark truths of the Black American experience. He’s known for his visual means of storytelling and the power of collage, rearranged contexts. I was surprised that his first retrospective would be in super white and quaint Humlebæk, Denmark; but there it was.
I spent three hours in Jafa’s Magnumb, the most powerful art exhibition I think I’ve ever witnessed. It was entirely about being Black in America, and it had a depth of nuance, of coherently shifting from the reverent to the vile, that I had never encountered before. I cried about 80% of the time—sometimes with silent, graceful, appreciative tears and sometimes with my shoulders shaking and thick saliva caught in my throat. I hadn’t considered that, surrounded by only non-Black faces, I would become part of the exhibition.
In every room, sets of pale blue eyes ping-ponged from the walls to me, my reaction to the work becoming their experience of it. I went late morning on a weekday: prime time for the student, unemployed and retired crowd. A dear, dear friend of mine once told me that meeting me was possibly the first time his parents had ever touched a Black person. They were from the deep Danish countryside. I’ve never quite known if he was kidding, but I do know it’s plausible. How many of those parents were there that day? Their first personal interaction with a Black person framed by the simultaneous questioning and affirmation of Black humanity. Would they recount their museum visit and proudly mention that the Black woman next to them was shook to her core, that the work is really something to behold and they knew that to be true simply because of their proximity to my affected state? Would they use the word “authentic?” Or would they rather I wasn’t there at all?
An older couple—in their mid-70s, I’d say—entered the exhibit at the same time I did. We kept pace with each other throughout the works, and I started calling them ‘Jeppe’ and ‘Lærke’ in my head. Jeppe and Laerke are looking at me again I’d think. There was a video work in the show called “The White Album” (2018). It’s a representation of Black America, but through visuals of mostly white people — and it earned Jafa ‘best artist’ at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Slow, moving portraits of some of Jafa’s white friends are peppered in among recontextualized surveillance footage, social media rants and pop culture tidbits. Jeppe and Lærke sat through all of it, all 40 minutes of film. I am 99% positive they wouldn’t have if I hadn’t been there. At one point, Jeppe got up to leave and I looked at him, simply because my eye was drawn to the movement. But I had been crying, and so it was with crying eyes that I looked at him. He immediately sat down again, his eyes fixated on the screen while Lærke began to gasp and huff at the sentiments coming from the projector, indignant that people who look like her would say such things, be such a way.
It’s a film that makes white people want to defend themselves. Audibly. In addition to Lærke’s huffing, other viewers cleared their throats and nervously shuffled their feet. The work is visceral and uncomfortable and unnervingly unhurried in its unfolding. It shows white people from a Black man’s perspective: wary until proven safe; sure some of the faces are friendly but all the friendly ones are silent.
Weaving through the rooms dotted with real-life friendly white faces, I couldn’t help but be both in awe of Jafa and upset with him for making me feel so incredibly lonely. For knowing that the few Black folks able to make the journey here would be, too. I became very self conscious, like I was a glass through which others were viewing the work. Another elaborate construction placed by Jafa to thin the barrier between the abstract and the real. A truly interactive, recontextualized work.
Perhaps that is what made the exhibition so impactful for me. I, like one of Jafa’s found video and audio snippets, was pulled out of the origins of my creation and plopped in another. I had remixed myself. Though I was still the same person, the new environment sometimes changed my meaning. But here, in this carved out Jafa-curated realm, the new environs morphed into the old. I was here but there. It made me feel wobbly.
Jafa’s work so painfully represented two things that I thought about constantly after having left America. On the one hand there was relief from the relentless presence of violence, hate and racism. On the other, there was the absence of the beauty of Black America, the awesome ease with which Black people spark communion, fluidity and serenity. His work juxtaposed my deepest fears and most elated joys with a dizzyingly potent precision. The art enthusiast in me was slack-jawed by his deft elegance at boring through the poles of the human condition. But the me in me, the sum and overlap of all my identities and experiences, was confused by so much of my psyche appearing in a place it was supposed to be rare. The weight of my former identity became heavy — and I suddenly realized I was still carrying it.
Even now, after months of ruminating on the experience, I find it difficult to explain. I guess the simplest way to say it is that there was a sense of loneliness that I saw as mine and only mine to carry, driven by memories of my home and my place in it. Jafa stole that from me, that solitary weight of a former life. The full constellation of my past. It was all there, no longer secret and, because of the public display from a stranger, clearly not solitary. Yet no one was there who could actually carry the weight with me. Not a single pair of eyes in the museum met me with a sense of I know, but it was this museum that gave Jafa’s subject matter the respect of that much space. And so for those three hours, I was living in a vortex of limbo. A beacon of light in exactly the place I thought I’d disappear.
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Here is a bootleg version of one of Jafa’s most famous works “Love is The Message, The Message is Death,” also featured in Magnumb.
This version doesn’t do it justice.
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This is the eighth of a 12-part mini-series exploring my experience with immigration. It is edited by Ann Friedman. Read the previous installments or sign up to get the rest of the volumes delivered directly to your inbox here.