It’s been more than 100 days since most of America learned about a small town outside of St. Louis, MO called Ferguson, and many more since a cell phone video went viral of a man dying from having his throat and chest crushed while being restrained by police on Staten Island. While Michael Brown and Eric Garner’s names have received the most attention in the popular press, there were many more Black people killed by law enforcement officials this year, a phenomenon that is not new or that unusual. It wasn’t just that “the block was hot” this summer, but it seemed like the entire nation suddenly felt the heat. Each time another racial injustice was revealed this year, it became more difficult to claim with sincerity that we are living in a post-racial America, or that race doesn’t have as much impact in daily life as it once did.

I know in the art world, it can feel like we aren’t really supposed to talk about this race stuff, but in 2014, it’s been really difficult to avoid the topic. There was the YAMS Collective controversy during the Whitney Biennial, discussions of how to critique the new Latin American wunderkind without bringing up Basquiat, a questionable exhibition in London, and an art dealer defending the exploitative work of an artist by saying there are worse things to be upset over… like global warming. Was it easier to report on and critique those and similar incidents because they were such blatant examples of racism? Why has finding words to discuss the aftermath and recent “non-indictment indictments” in the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown been more difficult?

I’ve struggled with writing something that said everything I wanted to say about the images the media used to tell the story of Michael Brown’s death and its aftermath too. How do art critics talk about the framing of all Ferguson protesters as rioters and looters, the visual absence of Officer Wilson, the ghost of the deceased Brown, and the use of racially coded language like “thug”? Why do we even need to speak up? In art, we critics — unless our last names are Davis, Cotter, or Saltz — don’t always have the freedom to talk about race in concrete terms for fear of accusations that we lack objectivity or may be employing our “race card” — whatever that is — or worse. None of us want to be dismissed as crazy or hysterical, people who have nothing better to do than stir up the pot and keep sleeping dogs from lying down. Besides, isn’t art free from all of those social constructs like race and gender or economic limitations…?

Lived experience tells me that we have a lot of work to do, and that there is much at stake. Responses to the media treatment of Brown like #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, where social media users paired photographs of flattering images like a yearbook portrait with something fault-finding, such as an impulsively misguided selfie to highlight the news media’s polarizing and oversimplified portrayal of black youths, is devastatingly real. If one of the roles of criticism is to reflect on the contemporary cultural moment and spark thoughtful conversations about how we experience the world, examining the visual culture associated with current events matters. Imagine how the language of critique might shift or how the range of voices and topics heard might expand if more art critics didn’t consider their primary role as that of quality control for good taste. Art objects and images have value in the world beyond their aesthetics. Objects and images help us interpret the world and give it meaning. The things we make reflect the way we see. What if we spoke of the visual language of respectability politics in these officer-involved shootings? What if we critiqued that?

There is a long and sordid history of tension between police and Black communities, a history that stretches back to the plantation overseer. So much of law enforcement practice in the U.S. has been about managing the autonomy, self-determination, and individual freedoms in a society; so much about Black community life in the U.S. has been about fighting to reclaim those same rights from those who would like to take them.

The most morally repressed and vile among us maintain the belief that people are generally hard-wired to do good. Police are supposed to protect and help the citizenry, and each time one of their number does something to shatter that assumption, most of us are still taken aback. Overgrown bullies and would-be sociopaths do not become police officers, right? Is that why CNN looped that video of Mike Brown at the corner store allegedly stealing even though the video had not yet been authenticated? It is sadly ironic that 2014 is the 50th anniversary of the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, during which the police and local Klu Klux Klan members colluded to cover up the murder of three Civil Rights workers, two of whom were White northerners.

Art critics are preoccupied with the connections between words and images and their connotations. We study, research, posit, analyze, reflect, and conjure, all in search of meaning. We know that while images are visual, they are emotive. We also understand that the way we see is different depending on how we feel or what’s happening around us. The events that seemed to culminate around Ferguson appeared so ripe for our critical eyes, but it’s been hard to fix our gaze there. Some of us may think it doesn’t concern us — that this isn’t about art — but we’re wrong.

Something about this cultural moment jolted our collective “we” to action. Americans are talking with strangers about the way they live their lives and we’re struggling to understand how others might experience the world. Art is a powerful tool for increasing understanding and bridging seemingly “un-bridgeable” gaps. As protests across the country continue, I’m hoping the art world isn’t caught sleeping again, but instead, makes room for more of its practitioners and participants to add critical perspective to the tidal change the entire world seeks. If art is who we are when no one else is looking, perhaps criticism can help reveal even more of what’s been hidden in the dark.

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The room smelled like rain-softened wool and leather at Issue Project Room on Saturday September 13th. The tightly packed audience, half of them sitting and half standing — the chairs normally occupying the back of the space were cleared to allow for the performers’ mobility — waited in humming excitement for experimental composer Yoshi Wada, his son Tashi Wada, and their accompanying musicians, David Watson and Jim Pugliese. Yoshi, born in 1943 in Kyoto, Japan, studied sculpture at the Kyoto University of Fine Arts before moving to New York in the late 1960s where he joined the Fluxus art movement and studied with its founder, George Maciunas. Though Maciunas acted as a catalyst to Yoshi’s early experiments in music, Yoshi maintains that he did not carry the movement’s influence into his later career. In a 2008 interview with The Wire, Yoshi commented that Fluxus appealed to him at the time, however his independent interests in sound and music directed him elsewhere. His departure from Fluxus led him to study music composition with La Monte Young, and by extension North Indian signing with Prandit Pran Nath, and Scottish bagpipe with James McIntosh.[i] In Yoshi’s most recent work, Fluxus’ democratic consideration of the artistic potential in objects and actions, the tonal precision of North Indian singing, and the emotive qualities of Scottish bagpipes all merge into a sensory environment thickening with the sense of urgency and approaching danger.

The unnamed performance began with the sound of an alarm. Yoshi churned a low whine from a worn, metal hand siren, which grew to an anxious, undulating howl, then stopped abruptly. He then focused his concentration on a small switchboard. With each definitive press of a button he rang one of the alarm bells installed in various unidentifiable locations throughout the performance space. The warning sounds compounded further as Pugliese’s bass drum and Tashi’s organ drone joined in. Pugliese’s mallet attacked the drum in sporadic intervals while Yoshi watched avidly, waiting to ring the alarm bells precisely in or out of synch with the echoing percussion. Like the slow, elongated footsteps of a giant or an army marching in unison, the drumbeat spread ominously into the air as the shrill bells quivered erratically in sonic contrast. The hum of Tashi’s organ crept into audibility, seeming to emanate from beneath my feet. Watson exhaled a mournful note from his bloated bagpipe, which hung heavily in the air. Later in the performance, Watson and Yoshi — who began playing his own bagpipe — circled the perimeter of the space. As elongated tones followed them around the space like half-deflated balloons attached to their instruments, the growing amalgam of sounds created a formless narrative specific to the evening and location.

In addition to its inextricable link to duration — unlike static two- or three-dimensional objects that can be experienced at various points in time, we only hear sound while the sound waves vibrate — the performance of sound also greatly involves the space in which it is presented. At Issue Project Room, sounds bounced around the cavernous ceiling, and from where I sat, the reverberations created a spinning sonic halo above my head. Further amplifying the sensory experience, the room, crowded with radiating bodies, became gradually hotter and more humid as the performance went on. At the point of swampy discomfort, the climate heightened the effect of the instruments and I became acutely aware of my corporeal sensations: everything blended into a bath of perception. The bagpipe, siren, and organ combined into a polyphonic discord while the drum rumbled on the side. The tones resonated so deeply it became hard to distinguish whether they were being heard or felt.

Yoshi’s composition filled both the walls of the architecture and the bodies of the attendants as it wove periods of intensity with ones of meditative restraint. The interludes allowed my mind to calm and wander, but never for too long as Yoshi continually reintroduced the siren and the corresponding crescendo of the other instruments. The utilization of sound’s ability to resonate within the body, through both high and low frequencies, combined with sounds that connote impending danger, created a foreboding psychological event. The lack of contextualization further disconnected the audience from an opportunity to interpret the elements. The only specific information Issue Project Room gave about the nameless composition is in Yoshi’s words: “I search for deep and ringing sound that travels deep into my cells. Where does this sound exist?” The question posed by Yoshi requires a heightened awareness, not just of what we hear but how it feels to hear. By blurring the lines that distinguish individual senses, Yoshi created an open space for unadulterated sensory perception.

[i]Haynes, Jim. “Piper’s Lament.” The Wire June 2008: 20-22.

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