“America”

With seminal, historic works by Joseph Beuys, William Eggleston, and Martha Rosler alongside more recent efforts by Ziad Antar, Mounir Fatmi, and the duo of Julia Meltzer and David Thorne, the latest exhibition at the Beirut Art Center is eclectic almost to the point of incoherence. The title, “America,” is also totally misleading. This is neither a survey nor a statement about the art, history, or politics of the United States. The accompanying curatorial text may ape the attitude of Jean Baudrillard’s America (1989), but it articulates little in terms of tangible themes. In fact, the show seems to have come together more through a process of vague intuition and loose association than as a result of any desire to construct a clear argument or explore a singular idea. But somehow, it works—on the one hand because the sixteen selected pieces are so resonant in this particular context (sharing concerns with many artists in Beirut while diverging productively on the level of form), on the other because the show is bolstered by a truly stellar eleven-part program of related events, including an artist’s talk by Kara Walker (whose video Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions, 2004, is one of the exhibition’s standouts) and a workshop on political graphics led by the former Black Panther Party member Emory Douglas.

Instead of addressing an amorphous territory, “America” could have easily been staged under a title evoking agitated or excised histories, episodes of injustice and repression, or strategies of artistic subversion and creative interference. For example, Fatmi’s terrific video installation Out of History, 2005–2009, features interview footage with David Hilliard, another former Black Panther, layered under still images of declassified government documents, many of them heavily redacted. (Photocopies of those same documents are papered over the walls enclosing the room in which the video is being projected.) Coaxing Hilliard to speak on everything from dialectical materialism to the commonalities between the Black Panthers in America in the 1960s and Palestinians in Gaza today, the work sidesteps nostalgia and the romance of long-lost revolutionary moments and explores more pointedly what can be resurrected from the past and still have meaning and purpose in the present.