To Describe A Life

To Describe A Life: Notes from the Intersection of Art and Race Terror

In 2014, following the fatal police shooting of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in broad daylight on a street in Ferguson, Missouri, Darby English recalled his overwhelming urge to respond to this murderous act from a “seemingly inapposite location,” namely the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where he worked as a part-time curator (7). Aided by colleagues, English’s response involved installing Benny Andrews’s collage painting No More Games (1970; Museum of Modern Art) in a high-traffic area of the museum in order “to recognize, outwardly, that a museum should offer no ‘escape’ from the predicaments that such events rouse” (7). Although “an expressively abundant statement about race relations,” the work also “honors the instability of its topics rather than elides it in the name of easy summary” (9). Deploying a singular work as part curatorial intervention and part catharsis served as a placeholder for To Describe A Life: Notes from the Intersection of Art and Race Terror. In an eloquent and oftentimes poignant introduction, English sets out the rationale for this approach. Notwithstanding the incalculable loss, pain, and anger produced by routinely catastrophic violent incursions into Black American daily life, he also notes how contemporary America remains beholden to a culture of division and indifference. From former President Obama’s racial inertia (under whose watch Ferguson erupted after Brown’s murder) to former President Trump’s amplification of white supremacy, embodied by murderous events in Charlottesville, Virginia, English contends that beyond anger and despair, certain artwork offers an alternative means by which to understand America’s perpetual crisis. Although the era of Black Lives Matter is certainly a catalyst for this book, it is by no means its main focus.

English declares his project as one of “critical reflection on culture” which challenges conventions in race-based thinking on art (xiii). Flipping convention on its head, he sets out to illustrate how art “complicates discussions of difference” (x). The introduction and subsequent three chapters in this richly illustrated volume each focus primarily on a contemporary work of art: a sculpture, a painting, an ongoing series of drawings, and a miniature architectural model, all produced between 1997 and 2016. Law enforcement, racialized nomenclature, and the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., are, broadly speaking, subjects that scaffold each of the three chapters. But, similar to Andrews’s work No More Games, each artist English addresses approaches the “urgent affair obliquely” (6).

This approach is evident in the introduction, where English considers Zoe Leonard’s Tipping Point (2016). Comprising a carefully arranged stack of fifty-three first-edition copies of James Baldwin’s nonfiction book, The Fire Next Time (1963), Tipping Point was Leonard’s response to “ongoing hypervisible destruction of black life by unchecked police power” (12). But for English, it beckons contingencies that far exceed his first impression that the work evokes “stacked bodies of shooting victims” or a “memorial” to the dead (15). On the one hand, Tipping Point summons reflection, reappraisal, or even a first encounter with Baldwin’s masterful exposé of America’s dependency on racism. On the other hand, Leonard’s sculpture performs physical and allegorical precariousness. A “hygroscopic” object prone to physical change, the sculpture is, as its title suggests, susceptible to collapse. English’s analysis has an ebb and flow; it undulates, and it is thoughtful, probing, and descriptively immersive.

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