Opening June 20 at The Met Breuer, The Body Politic: Video from The Met Collection will present four videos created between 1995 and 2015. Ranging from the provocative to the poignant to the absurd, the videos are David Hammons's Phat Free (1995/1999); Arthur Jafa's Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2016); Steve McQueen's Five Easy Pieces (1995); and Mika Rottenberg's NoNoseKnows (2015).

 

The exhibition will consider the body in relationship to race, ethnicity, class, and gender. The videos—all from The Met collection—explore the connection between power, performance, and the moving image. In each, the role of the camera is paramount, as is that of the actors and the activity it records. The camera, in addition to functioning as a mediating agent and framing device, serves as witness to acts of injustice as well as moments of rebellion. Historically, the term body politic has been used to describe a community comprised of disparate individuals, and in this usage responsibility for the overall health of the body politic is shared equally among citizens, just as the fate of any one "part" has ramifications for the whole. Today, the term is expanded to connote more generally the politics of the body—the way bodies both suffer political violence and wield political authority.

 

Single-channel digital video, transferred from video tape, color, sound, 5 min.4 sec.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2003

 

For the first half of David Hammons's Phat Free, viewers are plunged into darkness, hearing only the sound of what is later identified as a metal bucket being kicked down New York streets and sidewalks by the artist. In this video, Hammons aims to confront directly the conundrum faced by black men as they traverse public space in American society—their mobility restricted and their presence coded as either menacing, suspicious, or aggravating. Hammons responds by playing to these very stereotypes. In the process, through his repetitive, rhythmic swipes at the bucket, he also conjures the intensity and affectivity of music and dance.

Video, color, sound, 7 min. 25 sec.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Gift of Continental Group, by exchange, 2017

 

Arthur Jafa's Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death, is a seven-minute, single-channel video montage comprised almost entirely of found footage sampled from films, newscasts, sporting events, and citizen videos. The clips have been woven together and joined with Kanye West's song "Ultralight Beam" (2016), a conflation of hip-hop and gospel. Together the images and music form a visceral, poignant inquiry into African American life. By necessity, Jafa's video narrates the history not only of black agency, sociability, and creativity, but also of black trauma. Scenes of children, parents, dancers, musicians, reverends, athletes, and Civil Rights activists are mixed with images of police violence and systemic racism. Much of the video's affective power derives from Jafa's use of what he calls black visual intonation, a technique derived from African American music that involves the editing, pacing, and syncopation of images and their inconsistent synchronization with sound.

Single-channel digital video, transferred from 16-mm film, black-and-white, silent, 7 min.4 sec.

Jointly owned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, purchased with the Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 2016, and the Art Gallery of Ontario, purchased with the assistance of Peter Ross and the David Yuile and Mary Elizabeth Hodgson Fund, 2016

 

Five Easy Pieces is a silent seven-minute 16mm film transferred to video that plays on a continuous loop. Contrary to the title's implication, the work is not divided into five distinct, sequential segments, though it is possible to identify five vignettes, or "pieces," each featuring a person or a group of people of African descent, one of them Steve McQueen, the artist, performing confidently and self-consciously for the camera. The camera's gaze is curious, persistent, and voyeuristic; it scrutinizes the actors' bodies, rendering them abstract through the use of close-ups and oblique points of view. McQueen treats the act of spectatorship explicitly, forcing viewers to admit their particular erotic, psychic, racial, and political investment in the black bodies on display.

Digital video, color, sound, 22 min.

Commercial woven polypropylene bag and 50 kilos cultured pearls

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 2016

 

NoNoseKnows is a both an absurdist fantasy and an incisive polemic. Its subject is the global economy, which Rottenberg frames as an exploitative system that extracts wealth from natural resources and regulates belaboring bodies—in this case, the bodies of Chinese women. The video unfolds across two sites: a pearl-making facility in Zhuji, China, and a set in New York. Through assiduous editing, these far-flung locations are knit together, forming the backdrop to a story at once factual and fanciful. Rottenberg intersperses scenes staged inside the factory with those performed on her improvised stage. All of the actors, from the Chinese workers to the New York-based performer Bunny Glamazon, are both protagonists and catalysts in the artist's narrative. Each does strange things that make other strange things happen, resulting in an assembly line of cause and effect, reaction and response.