Fear
On fireworks in Paris and confederate statues in Los Angeles.
No one talks about “fear” in the art world, but it’s pervasive, both the feeling and the concept. In any gathering, one can hear it in the chatter. Abstract things are abstractly precarious. Ends are not being met. Every opening is a harbinger of closure; every launch an intimation of the crash to come. Everyone’s afraid. It’s why the settings and the fashions are so infinitely refined, the spectacles so extravagant. It’s why the art looks the way it does. Two sets of images that came to dominate my digital feeds recently may offer suitable evidence:
In Paris, the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang mounted a now-signature fireworks show on the facade of the Centre Pompidou, one which shrouded the museum in flames and sparks and smoke. Titled The Last Carnival, the display marked the Pompidou’s closure for a five-year renovation project (the museum closed to the public officially on September 22), and it could not be lost on the spectacle’s many observers, both those who witnessed it in person and those watching clips on their screens, that what the artist wanted one to imagine was the museum’s very demolition — less a necessary moment in the institution’s, or the culture’s, renewal, than its final passing: the demolishing, and so the death, of culture itself.
Such spectacular offerings come with a hint of danger, and so the smell of fear. When the artist inaugurated the The Getty’s most recent Pacific Standard Time initiative with a similarly architecture-bound display (this one at LA’s Memorial Coliseum), the volume of the blasts so disturbed some spectators that the artist noted (wryly, one imagines) that perhaps he should have warned the audience that the fireworks would be loud. When Cai lit off another display on the Tibetan plateau (sponsored by a Canadian-founded but now Chinese-owned luxury performance-apparel company), activists charged the artist with harming the land’s environmental and spiritual resources (the Chinese government, long an ardent defender of human rights and the environment, was called in to investigate). Those same activists were on hand to challenge the Pompidou’s display, where the scene was overdetermined by the threat of further insults, and injury.
Like a good modernist, perhaps Cai’s fireworks have become legible as art in the moment of their obsolescence. In 2008, when the artist designed a fireworks show to open the Beijing Olympic Games, nearly everyone commenting on the spectacle at the time thought of it as nothing more than service provision, here a parallel to Ai Wei Wei’s collaboration with Herzog and de Meuron on the design of the “bird’s nest” stadium itself. No “art” here, just creative “consulting.”
By the 2022 Winter Olympics, again in China, the fireworks were gone, and the drone show was firmly in place, in the skies above Shenzhen, yes, but also above eastern Ukraine. Fireworks, once benign tools for the reenactment of battles long past, would now be replaced by illuminated AI-driven drone swarms — specters not just of battles to come but ones currently underway. So outmoded, fireworks now pass into the precincts of art, but not without the intimation of the threats they once posed.
Unmanned Drone (2023-2025) is the name of Kara Walker’s reconfiguration of a confederate-era statue originally titled Thomas Joshua Jackson (as in “Stonewall”) which was crafted by Charles Keck and installed at the Courthouse Historic District in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1921. The statue was slated for removal by a 3-2 vote of the Charlottesville City Council in 2017, which, with the ensuing “mostly peaceful” Unite the Right rally and its chants of “Jews will not replace us,” contributed to “Charlottesville” becoming a synecdoche of a startlingly self-confident and resurgent White nationalism.
With the courts involved, Thomas Joshua Jackson would only be removed in 2021, at which point it was acquired by The Brick in Los Angeles and given to Walker as raw material for her work. The sculpture is part of the show Monuments, jointly presented by The Brick and The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, which opened to the public on October 23, though many people first saw Walker’s work when it was widely disseminated across Instagram and other social media feeds on the occasion of The Brick’s 20th Anniversary Gala (on October 15), at which Walker was honored alongside noted LA collectors and patrons Jarl and Pamela Mohn.1 There the work was situated amongst long wooden tables set and dressed in simple finery to celebrate the artist’s achievements and the Mohns’ charity. And it was in that setting, of community celebration and self-regard, that Unmanned Drone oddly found itself first widely pictured, and posted.
Hamza Walker, one of the curators of Monuments and the director of The Brick, is on record as calling Unmanned Drone an expression of “horror,” a confrontation with the legacies of U.S. racism both past and present. The artist herself has suggested however that there was a “healing aspect” about her contribution, even as Hamza (I’m using first names here for clarity’s sake) has likened Walker’s sculpture to a “butchering.”
Perhaps it’s useful then to regard Walker’s work as a kind of exorcism. If Hollywood has taught us anything, it’s that exorcisms, those rituals that entail horrors and healing (not in equal measure, of course) are indeed frightening affairs.
At least one review of Monuments notes the presence of “heightened security,” (though it’s unclear if that usage is being deployed figuratively), as the show brings together works of contemporary art with 10 recently removed monuments to various “heroes” of the Confederacy, most of which were commissioned in the first decades of the 20th century as a service to the “Lost Cause” mythology that attended the rise of Jim Crow and its regime of racial terrorism (though one statue was commissioned as recently as 1985). The statues are presented as found, which means that many bear the defacements that came with protests over their persistence in public space. Thomas Joshua Jackson was one such statue, but Walker’s intervention is unique. Less an act of protest than what some won’t fail to see as righteous vengeance against that regime.
One question Monuments appears to ask then is this: What’s the weather going to be? Before the show even opened to the public, a critic for The New York Times was calling it the year’s “most contentious,” as if sensing in advance — before any such conflict had materialized, indeed before a public could even begin to register whether there is anything like ozone in the air — that what makes this show consequential is the feeling of inevitable consequence, of conflict, that attends it. Such are the pyrotechnics of Monuments.
But wether it’s vengeance or exorcism, a “butchering” that is a “healing” too, whatever Walker’s Unmanned Drone is taken to mean, there is no question that threat, and fear, subtend the work. Like Cai’s fireworks, fear is part of its intended atmospherics.2
Some will say this is just the weather we live with now — the weather of creeping authoritarianism, social reaction, and martial dreams. Our best artists cannot but serve as barometers for its various fronts, its high and low pressure zones. But perhaps one of the reasons these images find such purchase is that they do more than just meet and measure the weather pattern. It would be trite to suggest that they face this fear, as if one could face off with such weather. But it doesn’t seem wrong to suggest that they open up a space to sit with the fear, to tarry with it — a “tarrying with the negative,” which is tantamount, at least on one account, to what it is to be free.3
Walker has a knack for making work that makes one want to take pictures of it, and makes the taking pictures of it part of what makes the work what it is. See Siona Wilson’s “Troubled Sleep, Sugar High,” here for an early assessment of this condition.
Whatever the atmospherics, I think it makes sense to say that Walker has “taken the life” of Thomas Joshua Jackson, that she has somehow “killed” that work by her transformation of it. And the question then is what kind of “killing” this is. Is it an act of vengeance as I have suggested? Could it be an act of mercy? A psychopathic butchering? A tragic accident? But then, the questions themselves are the point it seems. The goal is not to settle on which one is correct, but to see and acknowledge and to recognize that whatever the answer, the agency of the artist, Walker’s agency, which is also a responsibility, is the point. Unlike the other statues presented in Monuments, for which responsibility would seem to be the whole question (i.e. Who is and has been responsible for these monuments and how do we assess that responsibility?), Unmanned Drone, even in its title, raises the question of responsibility, and so of agency, and answers it with, “I am.”
“Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being.” (§32), G. F. W. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller.