THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Monday, August 19, 2019 |A
noirish video installation of as-
pects of modern American black
life, ruminates on what might very
well have been lost.
Ms. Corral’s contribution, “Me-
mento” (2013-present), is a decep-
tively simple horizontal wall draw-
ing done with ash, containing—
semi-illegibly, which is the point—
the names of all those women who
vanished and are presumed killed
around Juarez, Mexico (a city infa-
mous for its prostitution and drug
trades), over the past quarter-cen-
tury. The work’s aesthetic distance
only intensifies its subject’s sad-
ness. Mr. Wilson’s video, “Black
Mask” (2012), is probably the best
work in the show. It’s brief but, for
some strange reason, invites multi-
ple viewings. In the video, the art-
ist gradually covers his face with
black Post-it Notes and then re-
moves all but one of them. The art
makes clear as a full moon the si-
multaneous conspicuousness and
invisibility of African-Americans in
our society.
The exhibition’s roster of world-
famous artists is short but substan-
tial—the South African draftsman-
filmmaker William Kentridge (b.
1955), the Iranian-born photogra-
pher Shirin Neshat (b. 1957), and
the Chinese conceptual artist
Zhang Huan (b. 1965). In fact, their
fairly familiar pieces (respectively,
a 2002 film with erased drawingand animated collage shadow fig-
ures, a 1999 photograph of Muslim
women dressed in black with Ara-
bic writing on their upraised palms,
and a photographed 2000 perfor-
mance piece with the artist’s face
gradually covered solid with Chi-
nese writing) lend the show its art-
historical anchor.
Other than such untestable
claims in the museum’s press mate-
rials as Mr. Kentridge’s work re-
flecting “on the ongoing transfor-
mation of history, politics and
memory in the contemporary
world,” the only problem with
“Bodies of Knowledge” is that un-
less a visitor is a local and can eas-
ily return to the museum, the musi-
cal performances by Mahmoud
Chouki and the dance presentations
by Edward Spots may not be acces-
sible. What’s astonishing, though, is
how adroitly the New Orleans Mu-
seum of Art has mounted an exhi-
bition about social knowledge that
manages to dodge both the Scylla
of today’s artistic didacticism and
the Charybdis of today’s aesthetic
preciousness, and to present a case
for diversity that you feel.Bodies of Knowledge
New Orleans Museum of Art, through
Oct. 13Mr. Plagens is an artist and writer
in New York.ART REVIEW
Balancing the Aesthetic
And the Political
A group exhibition that’s both socially trenchant and visually arresting
Clockwise from below: a photo of Edward Spots by Louis Greenfield; Shirin
Neshat’s ‘Rapture Series (Women With Writing on Hands)’ (1999); still from
Garrett Bradley’s film ‘America’ (2019); Wafaa Bilal’s ‘168:01’ (2016-present);
Manon Bellet’s ‘Brèves braises’ (2010-present); still from Wilmer Wilson IV’s
film ‘Black Mask’ (2012)New Orleans
PERHAPSthe biggest challenge
for major museums showing con-
temporary art today is finding a
balance between aesthetics and di-
dactics. Since that quite fungible
concept we call social justice has
become so prevalent in museum
exhibitions of contemporary art,
those favoring aesthetics first have
reason to feel hopelessly passé. On
the other hand, if a museum show
leans too far toward sociopolitical
content, much of the audience
feels lectured, if not hectored. In a
time when museums are trying to
better represent racial and sexual
diversity, putting together a group
exhibition that’s both socially tren-
chant and visually arresting is a
tall order. With “Bodies of Knowl-
edge” (on view through Oct. 13),
however, the New Orleans Museum
of Art succeeds admirably.
Consisting of work by 10 artists
(two of them, however, perfor-
mance artists whose work can be
experienced only on specific days
and times), “Bodies of Knowledge”
is clean and elegant without being
merely pretty, and it offers a kind
of position paper on the value of
diversity and inclusion without be-
ing either preachy or mawkish.
The show is smartly installed
throughout several contiguous gal-
leries, providing sufficient
amounts of space among media
that range from books, silent film,
ink, ashes and musical scores to
video and photography.
In a continuing series called
“Brèves braises,” Manon Bellet (a
French artist, b. 1979, who recently
moved to New Orleans) attached
hundreds of fragments of charred
paper to a wall and then invited
musicians to perform periodically
in front of them. The breezes gen-
erated by their playing slowly dis-
integrates the paper, which falls in
powder to the floor. The work’s
general meaning in this iteration is
about the ephemerality of physical
material in the face of human ac-
tivity—a fairly obvious and even
hackneyed idea, but moving never-
theless. “168:01” (2016-present) by
the Iraqi-born Wafaa Bilal is, on
the other hand, installation art
with a concrete message. During
the 2003 American invasion of
Iraq, “looters” (a benign bit of no-
menclature used in the museum’s
press materials) burned Baghdad’s
libraries and destroyed thousands
of books. In response to this cul-
tural atrocity, Mr. Bilal has placed
a large white bookshelf on the mu-
seum floor and filled it with white
dummy volumes—an effect that’s
deliberately ghostlike. Viewers are
encouraged to purchase art books
from the museum shop and then
use them to replace, from left to
right, the phantom tomes. The
hope is that gradually the ener-
getic color of real books will over-
take the funereal white; when the
show is over, the new, real books
will be shipped to Iraq.
Many of the artists in “Bodies
of Knowledge”—e.g., Garrett Brad-
ley (b. 1986), Adriana Corral (b.
1983) and Wilmer Wilson IV (b.
1989)—while not household names
in the art world, are, like Ms. Bel-
let and Mr. Bilal, established pro-
fessionals whose work packs an
emotional punch. Mr. Bradley’s
logic is somewhat speculative: He
posits that because the Library of
Congress states that 70% of silent
films made between 1910 and the
advent of sound in 1929 were de-
stroyed or are missing, this must
include a whole body of them
made by and for black people.
“America” (2019), his visually film-BYPETERPLAGENSCLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: WAFAA BILAL; MANON BELLET; NEW ORLEANS MUSEUM OF ART; LOIS GREENFIELD; SHIRIN NESHAT/GALERIE JÉRÔME DE NOIRMONT, PARIS; GAR
RETT BRADLEY
LIFE & ARTS