Musical Thinking: New Video Art and Sonic Strategies

Simone Leigh’s Cupboard VIII (2018) beckons from the far end of the corridor leading into Musical Thinking at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). The work is immediately recognizable and yet, in the context of its location in Washington, DC, suddenly suggestive of the Capitol Building only a few blocks away. The round, dried raffia leaf skirt and stoneware upper body with a tilted jug instead of a head pours out a vision of communal politics quite different than the persistent antagonism spewed from that power center of representative government.

This thoughtful curatorial gesture by Saisha Grayson layers museum and locale, merging aesthetics and politics in a manner that resonates while moving through the exhibition and then returning to the street. To “resonate” is precisely the kind of sonic language frequently used within visual art that Grayson implicates in Musical Thinking, with works by ten interdisciplinary artists whose practices adopt scores and notation, sound and song, alongside drawings, photographs, sculpture, and installation to reflect on the complex valences of American life.

Scenic photographs from Shaker Village in Pleasant Hill, Kentucky surround audiences in the first room to the left of the entrance, where When the Spirits Moved Them, They Moved (2019), Mariam Ghani and Erin Ellen Kelly’s three-channel video work plays. Ghani documented Kelly’s 12-hour choreographic interpretation of Shaker worship meetings, editing the footage into a succinct 23-minute film that presents a panoply of affects from collected to euphoric. The thud and spring of steps amidst occasional hymns or chants offers a gentle introduction to Shaker philosophy, described in the wall text as “rooted in principles of simplicity, shared resources, and racial and gender equality.”

The Protestant sect was founded in 1774 by a woman, Mother Ann Lee, who aspired to a pacifist, communalist arrangement of intentional participants. Rebecca Cox Jackson, a free Black Shaker eldress of the nineteenth century appears in Cauleen Smith’s moving film Sojourner (2018), an exploration of Black feminist voices in the last gallery of the exhibition. Grayson positions this largely forgotten Christian politic of equity and inclusion as a more generous cultural aesthetic than the nation’s frequent bouts of fundamentalism that refuse to hear some citizen’s cries for recognition.

Renowned mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran vocalizes an astonishing array of sounds in Simone Leigh and Liz Magic Laser’s film Breakdown (2011), a work that troubles the stereotypes of female emotional crises and hysteria. Moran performs a libretto composed of lines of dialogue extracted from theatrical plays, movies, and television shows while her postures pull from photographs of nineteenth-century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot’s patients and descriptions taken from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The musical layers recall blues, spirituals, jazz scat, show tunes in a sonic mélange of high notes, shrill cries, and tremors. Disorienting and distressing, the work is a bombardment not for the faint of heart but it effectively presents the drama of a culture that largely dismisses expressions of pain by women and Black populations until they reach a fevered pitch.

Nearby, a lit catwalk invites audiences to dance in front of Martine Gutierrez’s video Clubbing (2012), a celebration of the personal liberation that club life offers, particularly within queer culture. Beyond presenting an opportunity for audiences’ social media postings, the work’s central position in the exhibition encourages a different affective register by permitting the personal to appear in a context that often produces a pedagogical hierarchy that stultifies appreciation and connection to an artwork’s multiple through lines.

The complex acoustics of contemporary politics appears in Raven Chacon’s Report (2001/2015), a video work that shows an open blue sky, dusty ground with low-lying foliage indicative of a dry rural terrain, and eight music stands. Behind each stand Chacon situated a person holding a rifle, handgun, or shotgun fired according to his score written as a music student in 2001 at the University of New Mexico. The composition is placed squarely in the middle of the room for audiences to read as they listen.

Chacon states in the exhibition catalog that the work acts as “a proposition, rather than a position on the morality of firearms,” since these objects of violence present a distinct soundscape familiar to military personnel and other weapon owners, who recognize that the meaning of “report” is context dependent: the sonic discharge of a weapon and the massing of statistics on gun violence. Audiences hear the shots of Chacon’s score before entering the room, presenting firearms as background noise to the American landscape.

Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, The Message is Death (LMMD) (2016) presents a heartening and heartbreaking compilation of a century’s worth of filmed footage related to the ongoing march towards racial equity in this country, set to Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam,” with synced audio interspersed throughout the video work. The SAAM first presented LMMD in tandem with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2020, showing a 48-hour looping livestream in the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd—an important, even model, chorus of solidarity by two institutions dedicated to our national cultural heritage. The museum worked with Motion Light Lab and Lloyd May, a Stanford PhD researcher, to develop specific vibro-tactile technologies for many artworks in the exhibition, exemplifying the curator’s meaningful attention to accessibility. The enclosed room showing LMMD provides benches for viewers to sit and process the seven-minute work; one was outfitted with a vibrating haptic to convey the song’s rhythmic power for the deaf and hard of hearing but that enhances the experience for all.

Jafa’s Apex Grid (2018) presents the collection of photographs originally shown in his video work Apex (2013), images of Blackness that percolate across popular culture. Sensitive viewers are invited to move around the bench placed before the images, guiding them towards Christine Sun Kim’s audio work One Week of Lullabies for Roux (2018), a proximity that stretches West’s line “You can feel the lyrics, the spirit coming like braille” from Jafa’s video work to Kim’s personal politics of access.

Kim, a Deaf artist, popularly known for providing the American Sign Language translation of the “Star Spangled Banner” at the 2020 Super Bowl, used charcoal on paper for The Star-Spangled Banner (Third Verse) (2020), which presents her notations for that performance. The lyrics charted across the page reveals their violence, which led Kim to write an accompanying artist statement addressing underlying racism in other verses as well as the disproportionate police violence directed at people with disabilities. “More than half of Black people with disabilities will have been arrested at least once by the time they reach their late twenties,” she notes.

Multiple registers of lived reality are thoughtfully presented throughout. ADÁL’s West Side Story Upside Down, Backwards, Sideways and Out of Focus (La Maleta de Futriaco Martínez) (2002) offers a clever riposte to the staggeringly uninformed popular film by remixing it with documentary clips of Nuyorican culture shown on a screen inserted into the side of an old leather suitcase. In 1917, Puerto Ricans gained citizenship status but over a century later still have no representation in the federal government. Three passports from the series “El Puerto Rican Passport, El Spirit Republic de Puerto Rico” (2005/2012) come from pop-ups that ADÁL hosted with collaborators, providing passports for a land that is neither nation nor united with the other states of the USA. As citizens of Washington, DC, the nation’s capital, in which SAAM is situated, also do not have full voting rights (a delegate in the House, no Senate representation, three electoral votes for President and Vice-President), the work’s presence in the exhibition draws a notable parallel.

Musical Thinking doesn’t simply beat the drum of aesthetics as politics, but provides a context in which to remember that politics are aesthetic and, as will shortly be evident with another election cycle, provide many a song and dance. Grayson’s curatorial sensibility tunes difficult content into a poignant show representing the diversity of this nation that some of its representatives insist on denying. And, though the works are independently bold and rich, they call and respond to each other in much the manner we might wish to see and hear within these United States. In Musical Thinking, audiences get a sound vision.