“If only I could….” must be one of the most frequently uttered sentence fragments of this constraint- and fear-ruled year. If only I could see my children, if only I could travel, if only I could go to museums and fill my heart with art. Those wishes pale, of course, in comparison to the “if only I still had a job, if only I could feed the kids, if only I could pay the rent, if only I could say Good Bye to the loved one dying alone in the ICU,” that are existential worries most of us are spared. Or so I pray.

My frivolous wishes pale in particular when things like travel and museum visits can be replaced by virtual experience, looking at art and places through the caleidoscope of the internet. That said, there is nothing wrong with a bit of vicarious joy and so parts of this week will be devoted to joyful or uplifting or thought-provoking art I wish I’d had had the fortune to see in the flesh.

I missed Nari Ward‘s first retrospective exhibition, We The People, at the New Museum in New York City last year by only a couple of months. I was too late, as is so often the case…. and bummed about it. The exhibition surveyed 25 years of the artist’s work: sculptures, large-scale installations, paintings, and videos created between 1992 and 2019. I had never seen any of the work of this Jamaican-born, Harlem-based artist and was made curious when I read that his visual art accomplishes what Walter Benjamin’s Arcade Project did for writing: “echoing the features of a cityscape (Paris) with textual passages resembling it in pace and structure – the passages of urban exhibition halls, arcades, and train stations cloned in immaterial fashion.” How do you echo the pace and structure of Harlem visually?

What are we looking at? I’ll pick a central piece, Amazing Grace (1993), because it speaks across time and place, a brilliant combination of locating something within a specific history and a specific place – and not.

Ward has worked for most of his career by using discarded objects he found on the streets of NYC. He collected, combined and choreographed these items into political meaningful assemblages that speak to issues that concern us all with historical references that might be understood only by some. Amazing Grace was an installation in direct reaction to the crack epidemic and devastation from AIDS in the 1990s, a memorial to a community in crisis.

Some 300 dilapidated, broken and bent strollers are arranged in a circular fashion around a central piece that also contains many of them, intersected by firehoses on the floor, producing an uneven surface that affects balance when you walk. My first thought when I looked at the photographs was that it resembled a church congregation of mourners surrounding the central coffin.

The artist found all of these strollers discarded across Harlem, abandoned by either the families who no longer needed them or the unhoused who use them to transport their remaining worldly goods. Mahalia Jackson’s voice carries Amazing Grace like a beacon of hope across the scene of devastation.

What happens to the children, once snug in these strollers, growing up into communities ravaged by disease, poverty and resulting addiction? What happens to the people who lose their housing when illness or addiction take over and carry their belongings in shopping carts or strollers? When your entire already precarious universe becomes unstable? How is it related to the original sin of this nation (note the shape the fire hoses hinting at the hull of a slave ship?) How is it related as the artist noted in an interview here, to community narratives that saw the epidemic as an intended tool for the forces of gentrification?

“The one material that was so ubiquitous and so dangerous that I did not touch because it was so charged was the crack vial. It was everywhere, almost like pebbles. Because it was such a devastating epidemic, I did not feel I could address it at the time. But I do think about those vials and what having collected them would mean today, as they were so much about what they represented in terms of loss, but also in terms of greed. There’s a whole narrative that considers that this was a kind of expulsion to clear out the inner cities for what’s happening now with gentrification, because immediately after this happened the government stepped in and created empowerment zones where they dictated who was going to develop these neighbourhoods. It was almost like dropping a bomb on these poor neighbourhoods and then going back in and reforming it, all within 20 years. It really makes you think about the other narrative that is not in the mainstream, and it still seems to somehow resonate today.”

Loss. Greed. A racist history. And now think how this installation might fit the 2020 mold. Empty strollers could represent all that’s left behind when children are separated from their asylum-seeking parents, many of whom will never be reunited again. Firehoses might be echoing the water canons used against protesters who demand respect for Black lives, or the futile attempts to douse the fires incited by ever progressing drought and winds from climate catastrophe, destroying homes and all that’s in them, strollers included.

This is what I find essential in truly successful art – it is anchored in its own time as a reaction to the answers needed, but it is also reaching back into a past that paved destructive paths and a future that contains variations on a theme – in our case the devaluing of human life in the interest of preserving established economic and power structures. The music, of course, is about redemption and hope. That is what art does as well: it can lift our spirits into a realm where we still see the possibility for change. If we look hard enough and not away, if we act on what we see. Which is why I chose this vicarious visit today!

Photographs are from Harlem last year.

As an aside: I have always thought that people’s claim that music is the truest, highest form of art relates to the fact that it elicits emotion, pure subjective reactivity, and is protecting us from the worry that we might not “understand” the message communicated by a piece of art. I mean, how often have I stood in front of something visual and rolled my eyes, sometimes frustrated, sometimes embarrassed, that I simply did not “get it.” (Well, of course I also often roll my eyes when I do get it….)

So much work needs to be done to read up on what people more educated or more insightful than I have said about that art. Sometimes the reading elicits a lightbulb moment, sometimes you just feel like a dumb outsider. No deeper understanding will change the crucial emotional tone of your experience when you listen to music, this one in particular, on the other hand.