This was my first visit to the Met Breuer, and I was very excited to see the space. Mika Rottenberg’s No Nose Knows (2016) was visually and sonically stimulating, simply satisfying to see on screen. Her work is always impactful for me, poignantly and eloquently expressing the theme of the exploitative global economy. Steven McQueen’s Five Easy Pieces (1995), while visually attractive, felt the hardest to connect with and also felt the most dated. In the context of the exhibit it felt appropriately considered, not out of place, just a little less accessible to my contemporary point of view. Arthur Jafa’s Love Is The Message, the Message Is Death (2016) was an interesting and important piece in the exhibit for me. It had a contemporary message and mood, and could have been made in no other time period than now. The exhibit theme was most directly carried out in Jafa’s piece. The news reels, vintage clips, youtube videos, and stock footage were edited in a beautiful and thrilling pace. It is tragic and heartbreaking seeing the events sequenced how they were. Celebration and anguish went side by side, cut from children playing directly to harsh violence. The video is an honest comment on the lives of people of color in America today. However, the song choice took me out of it a bit and created distance between the experience and I. David Hammon’s Phat Free (1995) felt surprisingly contemporary to me. Tragically, perceptions of black men in America have hardly changed since it was created.
