Art and politics exhibit in New York

The tone is still very politicized at the start of 2018 in art museums in New York. Should this be seen as a reaction to our contemporary world? No doubt, even if all exhibitions do not have the same impact. The Whitney Museum Biennial last year raised many questions, especially racial ones. This year, the famous New Museum Triennial of Contemporary Art is a major failure. Placed under the sign of commitment, it resembles a living room revolution with almost touristic works, more decorative than mobilizing. However, the curators of this fourth Triennale had traveled the world to find creations dealing, among other things, with colonialism and institutional racism.

They didn’t have to go that far… Right across from this museum, at the International Center of Photography (ICP), without fanfare, an exhibit on the shameful incarceration and dispossession of 120,000 Japanese-Americans during the Second World War troubles much more. Photos taken at this time by Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams and Toyo Miyatake — who himself was placed in a detention camp — will create a much stronger sense of revolt and reflection.

At the ICP, the journey continues with the work of Edmund Clark, who for ten years has worked on the United States government’s response to terrorism. With images from the Guantánamo prison and documents from secret CIA prisons. This questioning of the links between art and politics is also developed at the Neue Galerie, where Before the Fall : German and Austrian Art of the 1930s. A presentation that shows the intelligence and greatness of artists, such as Max Beckmann, Otto Dix or Max Ernst, on this eve of the apocalypse of the interwar period. An exhibition that confronts us with the limits of art, the impotence of creation and even of reason in the face of the madness of the world. Because let’s face it, art can’t do much when man’s stupidity is unleashed. He can just embody a last cry of dignity.

Danh Vo and the memory of the world

But it is undoubtedly the retrospective at the Guggenheim of the Danish artist Danh Vo, originally from Vietnam, which is to be remembered in this endless winter (and I am not only talking about the climatic conditions). His art makes it possible to get out of the literalness of artistic commitment that is too transparent.

Vo probes the symbolic links that exist between the actions taken in this world and the objects that surrounded or permitted them. Do these objects retain traces and lessons from the events they “witnessed”? Vo has an approach similar to that of Quebecer Raphaëlle de Groot, who, for her project The weight of objects (2009-2016), had asked individuals to give him — to free himself — from objects that embodied a form of burden.

The Danish artist shows how certain objects perpetuate values. He underlines how European imperialism was able to implant in foreign cultures objects that were unknown to it. This is the case, for example, with the pottery from Tavalera placed by Vo throughout the route of the Guggenheim, pottery which was imported by the Spaniards into Mexico. Vo had these earthenware decorated with motifs drawn up by the Belgian engraver Théodore de Bry (1528-1598) depicting the “conquistadors brutally treating the natives as well as the acts of mutilation and cannibalism practiced on the colonists”.

Vo also works by collages of fragments of statues in order to point out how more modern cultures appropriate and divert older cultures. Here, a Roman sarcophagus continues into the body of a 14th-century Virgin Mary. This artist also tells us how historical artifacts are an illusion of memory and commitment to the subjects they embody. This is the sad fact that this approach raises. Humanity is without a deep memory, incapable of not repeating its mistakes which have nevertheless left traces.

To see in video

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