This is America

Museums

Question: why do we have museums? According to this TED-Ed video, museums evolved as a means to achieve the following:

• To keep watch over academics; the arts and sciences
• The preservation of the uncommon, rare, and exotic
• To showcase a physical encyclopedia of artifacts
• To serve as a center of scholarship and artistic and scientific discovery

Yet, this is what museums do. This doesn't answer why we have museums. 

Museums tell us what things are. They're collections of artifacts, images, sounds—evidence of something that exists or existed. 

Art museums, specifically, are a records of our humanity. We preserve visual art because each piece represents a particular moment in the human experience. When Pablo Picasso introduced cubism, he didn't just create something visually, he inspired a multi-dimensional approach to perceiving the world.

 

Museums preserve the development of human intellect, the journey from the shadows to the light. They remind us of how we arrived here, in this moment in time. Museums tell us who we are.

So, who are we?

The Greatest Country in the World

Shall I compare thee to a summers day?

My dear America the beautiful.

Or, perhaps, list all the virtues I may

Of how thine kingdom is so dutiful.

Thine appetites are most legendary,

In all things of both luxury and need.

The world praises thee exemplary

In the arts of hedonism and greed.

Thine armies the mightiest in the land,

In trade of arms thou art second to none.

Thou rule thy citizens with iron hand, 

None more than thine in incarceration.

In all that thee are one true majesty,

America, what could compare to thee?

The American Museum

The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum, The Smithsonian Institute, The National Gallery of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art; monolithic structures, veined with velvet ropes and flowing with picture-snapping tourists. The modern museum experience seems to be less about academic enlightenment and more about proclaiming "I was here" with a selfie. We exit through the gift shop to pick up an artifact of our own, something to add to our personal exhibits of cultural participation.

And why not? In the age of the Internet, we curate our own identities. Our museums exist in digital spaces. How many times has American Gothic been viewed by the public? "WAP"—Wet Ass Pussy—has been viewed 287 million:

In case it's not obvious, this is a four minute and twelve second ode to female arousal. And it's graphic. Extremely graphic. This is actually the clean version. 

I'm not passing judgement on Cardi B's artistic expression. One could argue that females have been unable to celebrate their sexuality with such freedom for nearly all of human history. In that respect, I applaud the unbridled fury with which Cardi B proclaims her identity as a sexually confident woman. 

The point, however, is that anything viewed 287 million times is surely as canonical to the American identity as any work of art in a museum. 

The modern American museum, the institution that tells us who we are, exists now in the palm of our hands. The artifacts that fill its halls are images, videos, songs, half-baked memes, and witty remarks of 280 characters or less.

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An American* Exhibit

Jon Henry, Untitled #25, Montgomery, AL from the series Stranger Fruit, 2016, gelatin silver print.

This image is on display at The UK Art Museum in an exhibit called This is America*. It's one of four photographs taken by Jon Henry depicting black mothers with their (pretending to be) dead sons. Noticeably absent from these photos are the boys' fathers, perhaps suggesting that none of these young men live long enough to have children of their own. Another consistent factor is the expression on the faces of the bereaved. There's no pain, no anger. Instead, their faces convey a cold impatience, like the punchline of a terrible joke they're waiting for you to pick up on.

The UK Art Museum originally planned an exhibit focused on "aspects of history, citizenry, race, dignity, power, and struggle." However, the museum decided to incorporate commentary on social justice and police brutality after the death of George Floyd last May.

One artifact in the exhibit is a simple stone—it looks like a sidewalk paver—that reads: "There were 353 documented lynchings that occurred in Kentucky." Lynchings. Men and women were overtaken by angry mobs in the streets, or perhaps in their homes, and then brutally murdered. 353 of them were actually accounted for, recorded somewhere for posterity. How many were not? During one of my visits, I wrote in my notes about the stone: "It looks like a rejected paver from Lexington's 'Walk of Fame,' something city officials thought might threaten tourism revenues, so they replaced it with 'Home of Earnest P. Worrell.'"

Paul Stephen Benjamin, God Bless the Martyrs, 2017, black ceramic and black cotton.

The most interesting piece in the exhibit for me was Paul Stephen Benjamin's God Bless the Martyrs, a pyramid of pitch black hands clutching black American flags. Each of the flags is woven from a unique pattern of lace. It felt ironically patriotic, like a star-spangled mountain of death. 

Benjamin's piece, like the rest of the art in the exhibit, is an attempt to bring America inside and confine it in a space where various artistic visions can coalesce into a singular expression of what America is. They're parts of a whole. And the exhibit is tragically beautiful; it's moving.

Yet, I think the exhibit fails for the same reason that most other modern museums fail. The real art is outside, in the streets.

American Pastoral

Choke

I was a combatives instructor in the military. Our program incorporated several elements of modern jujitsu, to include a plethora of chokes. One might be surprised to discover just how many ways you can choke a person. Chokes can be broadly organized into two main categories: blood chokes and air chokes. A blood choke compresses the veins and arteries in the neck to deprive the brain of oxygen. As a result, the body shuts down. It just gives up. A well executed blood choke will render a person unconscious in less than ten seconds.

In order to effectively train others to perform various blood chokes, it was deemed necessary that every instructor experience the business end of things. There's a bit of excitement just before your partner puts his arm around your throat, like you're Alice standing on the precipice of a rabbit hole. When the pressure collapses on your throat, however, there is a startling sense of terror. It's a fear like nothing else I've ever experienced; violent, crushing, hopeless.

An air choke works similarly to a blood choke, but it takes a lot longer—it can take minutes for the body to shut down in response to an air choke. That's because air chokes compress the airway. They deprive the respiratory system of oxygen, although blood continues to flow to the brain. The result is the same, but the suffering is prolonged.

My children may one day visit museums to study and admire art history, but there will be no more true museums of modern art. Their modern art will look like this:

Art is supposed to move us. It speaks to us. It makes us feel. 

And thus, in all those ways, this video is art. It makes me feel. I feel fear and pain and anger. It hurts every time I hear George's voice, or when I see the officer with his hands in his pockets, like he's out for a stroll, shift his weight onto George's neck. I want to curse; goddamn it all. This is a video of a man dying, and it's been viewed millions of times.

A police officer killed a man in broad daylight on the side of a busy road. He kept his hands in his pockets while he did it.

This is America.

Conclusion