Quiet as it's Kept: White Space at the Whitney

Rebecca Belmore, "ishkode (fire)" 

 -- By Tom Phillips

Two middle-aged white male art critics were coming down in the elevator after previewing the Whitney Museum of American Art's 80th Biennial.  With an air of befuddled irritation, one said to the other, "Quiet as it's Kept?  What does that mean?"  He was referring to the show's cryptic subtitle, which came from African-American co-curator Adrienne Edwards.  His friend had no clue.  

A third, older white male critic was standing nearby, and recalled for them the explanation Ms. Edwards had given in her pre-show remarks.  Her mother and her aunties used to say it all the time, she said--- to preface something widely known to be true, but not discussed in public. 

Gaga at Breezy Point

9/11 Memorial --Breezy Point 

This summer, amid the national uproar over the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and a long list of others, I spent a Saturday visiting a friend in the beach resort of Breezy Point, Queens. Wrapped around the western tip of the Rockaway peninsula, this is an enclave of middle-class homes on sandy pedestrian paths, festooned with American flags and sprinkled with Trump signs -- a summer haven for New York City police and firefighters, heavily Irish, overwhelmingly Catholic, 100 percent white.  It was organized as a co-op in the 1960s, with rules that keep it a closed society, a gated community.  

I took a walk by the bay, watching children play in the sand and trading wary nods and glances with the adults.  It was a perfect beach day, a time to relax, but the atmosphere felt subdued and tense.  Some residents had recently been involved in a confrontation with protesting Black surfers in nearby Rockaway Beach.  Others had faced off with demonstrators in the streets. As a stranger with a beard, I was regarded with caution. The last time I visited, in 2017, one guy told me I looked like his dog.  This time there was no conversation.   

It reminded me of South Africa in 1990, in the last days of apartheid, just before Nelson Mandela was released from prison. All those white faces grimly trying to milk their white privilege to the last drop, knowing that the outside world was turning away from them.    

These feelings came back at me this week, watching Lady Gaga's new video, "911." 

Viral Spring #19: Dreams and Visions

                           And afterward. 

                       I will pour out my spirit on all flesh;
               your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
                       your old men shall dream dreams,
                       and your young men shall see visions.  
                                      Joel 2:28

I dreamed that I was fighting for a new America, a better America, in a rebellion that had just been named the "Green Patriotic Uprising" or something like that.  I was in a school gymnasium, waking up at dawn next to a young woman who was my wife or girlfriend.  She told me the name of the uprising; and I said -- OK that's what they call it, now let's go fight it!  I was gung-ho, as they say.   
 

We were to move out at dawn.  My assignment was to run to the front lines pushing my upstairs neighbor, a fellow septuagenarian and a long-time activist, in a wheelbarrow.  She wanted to fight, but had a bad leg and couldn't run.  I grabbed the wheelbarrow with Myra lying down in it and began to run, full tilt along a narrow wooden track, with the rest of the force close behind.  But the wheel got caught in a crack and stuck.  I was holding up the charge, so I worked frantically to free the wheel.  Then  it occurred to me that neither Myra nor I had any kind of weapon.  How did we expect to fight?  

Then I woke up.                    

Viral Spring #17: White Bodies Up Front!

Brooklyn,  6/4/2020

-- By Tom Phillips

Something turned in me over the span of a day last week, maybe because something is turning for America.  

On Thursday morning I opened the New York Times to the most gut-wrenching piece of arts criticism I've ever read. Wesley Morris, a young black man who is the paper's critic-at-large, wrote of  a song that came up on the radio and left him weeping at his kitchen sink. The 1985 song by Patti Labelle is about the end of a long, bad relationship.  If you don't know me by now, she wails, you'll never know me.

Morris's composure broke not over a failed romance but the police murder of George Floyd, and Morris's own feeling that another relationship is ending -- that if we whites still don't get it, after all these years, we never will.  

Here's what he heard in Patti Labelle's lament:    

I heard a woman declaring her value. George Floyd was suspected of having used a counterfeit bill at a corner store, which means his life was worth less than money. I heard her thinking through an ultimatum now being laid down in the streets of this country. You still think we’re monkeys, monsters, beasts, thugs, the living dead, minorities? If you don’t know that a black man, calling for his mother, his dead mother, is so desperate for somebody to hear him that he’s screaming for ghosts — or fears he’s in the process of becoming one; if you don’t know that we, too, can run for leisure and sleep for rest; if you don’t know that this skin is neither your emergency nor an excuse to invent one, that the emergency has tended to be you — by now? — you will never, never, never …

I finished the article shaken.  If black people give up on us -- who were raised to think of them in just these ways, who struggle daily to beat back our pre-conscious ideas, whose very perceptions are still twisted by a racist culture -- what is next?  Is there any hope?

A Funny Valentine: Bonobo on Love

"Tu Amaras"
Bonobo
Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York
February 14, 2020
-- By Tom Phillips

"Tu Amaras" – Thou Shalt Love -- begins with an excruciating dialogue, set in 16^th Century Latin  America, between two Spanish missionaries and a lone Indian who has fallen in love with a cow -- a species brought to America by the Spanish. These inquisitors don’t like to call their friend an Indian, because they’re afraid it will make him uncomfortable – but what really makes him uncomfortable is their discomfort with calling him anything. They want to banish him for his carnal relationship with the cow. But they still want him to be comfortable.

This Chilean theater troupe calls itself Bonobo, after a human-like species of ape, and their ongoing concern is with human perceptions of the "other."  For the cast of "Tu Amaras," this comes to include animals, extraterrestrials, immigrants, homosexuals, criminals, and each other.  The last category is the most difficult.