At the High Museum, What Is Left Unspoken, Love Lacks . . . Love

The show sows division, resentment, and PC lies. The High flopped on this one.

E arlier this week I wrote about my visit to the lively, welcoming, and entirely awesome High Museum in Atlanta. There’s so much to say about it, all of it positive except for the certifiably insane What Is Left Unspoken, Love exhibition. It was the anchor exhibition during the summer. Like so much today, it’s the opposite of what it purports to be. It’s an exhibition about love, but it celebrates resentment and lies.

“It’s hard to wrap one’s head around love because of its enormity,” the first page of the exhibit catalogue reads. That’s the best reason not to do a show about love, but the curator didn’t listen to his own advice. It’s an ugly mess, too.

In his forward, Randall Suffolk, the director, calls it a “truth procedure” addressing “the culmination of racialized hate crimes and white supremacist terrorism.” He and the curator, Michael Rooks, think there’s a pandemic of both, which there isn’t, and none of the art is about either, visually or intellectually. These are big problems in that, theoretically, we’re dealing with scholarship. The show is absolutely the bluntest case of curatorial hijacking. Rooks, as well as Suffolk, who had to green-light the thing, decided what they wanted to say and then shopped around for art to illustrate it.

This isn’t art history, but we’re dealing with contemporary art, so the standards are different. Most writing and exhibitions about the work of living artists are cultural criticism, not scholarship and definitely not art history. Even as cultural criticism, or even journalism, What Is Left Unspoken, Love is a sham.

The exhibition starts well. Two large sculptures from 2000–2002, a bronze of a male nude and a marble female nude, dominate the first gallery. I saw “Farrah Fawcett” on the label as the artist, along with Keith Edmier, of Recasting Pygmalion, and thought, “Could it be?” Yes, I was looking at a nude sculpture depicting one of Charlie’s Angels.

About 30 years ago, I met Fawcett in a restaurant in Malibu, gushed, and kept calling her “Suzanne” because I mistook her for Suzanne Somers. I didn’t realize my blunder until that night. I actually did know who Fawcett was. She was nice about it. “Who let him out of the cave?” she probably wondered. At least I didn’t think she was June Allyson.

Neither sculpture is particularly good, but it’s the concept that counts. Edmier had a teen crush on Fawcett. Years later, when he was an established artist, their paths crossed. He asked her to collaborate with him on a project. He’d make a sculpture of her, and she, with his considerable help, would make a plaster modello of him — nude — and off to a foundry it would go for casting. “This is going to be one kinky show,” I thought.

Kinky, yes, but boring kink. Edmier’s project was about narcissism and the faux love between fan and celebrity. What Is Left Unspoken, Love, it turns out, is about curatorial narcissism. “You’re So Vain,” Carly Simon’s tune, popped into my head. On the wall next to the sculptures is Dara Friedman’s 2001 video Romance, showing a lengthy succession of couples kissing in a park. It’s a voyeur’s idea of sexy for about 30 seconds, then banal, and, finally, just too much saliva. All of this aside, kissing is romantic communication, and love’s romantic, and it seemed that this exhibition about love was going to be, well, about love.

In the next gallery, Kahlil Robert Irving’s My Grandmother’s Cupboard points to the kitchen as the center of family and home, where we learn the building blocks of home. Warm and fuzzy. Fine. Then there’s Wangechi Mutu’s Sisters, about “Black kinship as a source of power and knowledge.” Where did this come from? Felicita Felli Maynard, genderqueer and Afro-Latinx, “uses the antique wet plate collodion process to stage an imagined history of queer and trans-Black people.”

Mutu’s not that good an artist, though much acclaimed. Looking at Maynard’s work, however, I was still, sensing doom, along for the ride. People shunned by their families over sexuality often create alternative families. And her photographs are very good.

Then came Black Lives Matter, via, of all people, Aristotle.

“Aristotle posits that all kinds of love exist in community,” I read in a wall panel introducing one of the galleries. That’s “kindred and comradely” love. I thought, “Now, this must explain what Pol Pot, Lenin, and Mao had in mind, hardy-har.” Next, I read, “When Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi co-founded Black Lives Matter . . . it became the last influential and far reaching movement in generations, fueled by love, a love for Black life, Black joy, and a vision of the world in which we collectively love Black communities.”

“Am I still in an art show?” I thought. Putting aside that BLM is a kleptocracy and riddled with antisemitism, I questioned its role in a community of love. Its manifesto, which I’ve read in many versions as its leaders have sanitized it, calls for “Black villages collectively caring for each other” in place of families with two parents raising their own kids. And BLM is against prisons and police departments, exposing poor neighborhoods to a unique brand of terrorism.

On and on it goes, about incarceration, social justice, the dreadful, sexless Stacey Abrams, queer theory, and late-stage capitalism. How did we get from Farrah Fawcett and Granny’s kitchen to the 1965 Voting Rights Act?

“What’s love got to do with it,” Tina Turner sang. Where’s Fred and Ginger, dancing cheek to cheek, or Westley and his Buttercup? Or Scarlett and Rhett? Or Shakespeare? Twelfth Night and Viola, Orsino, Olivia, Sebastian, and Antonio, if we must do genderqueer. Hell, I’ll take Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. But love and Black Lives Matter?

At that moment, I lost that lovin’ feeling. The exhibition is an intellectual disaster. It’s not about intimacy or couples or family. It’s about groups, whether tribes or classes or races. Dinah Washington sang “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” as did Billie Holliday and, I think, everyone else. This dumb exhibition doesn’t know what love is, either. I thought the High Museum was named after Mrs. High, not a state of curatorial intoxication.

I always work to accentuate the positive. What Is Left Unspoken, Love isn’t an aesthetic disaster. Some of the art is good, some compelling. Kerry James Marshall’s Souvenir I is there, depicting a black angel and a commemorative banner with portraits of Martin Luther King Jr., JFK, and RFK.

It’s famous and a great picture at the top of which Marshall painted small, angelic portraits in pastel blue and pink of Medgar Evers, the four children killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963, and, guess who . . . Malcolm X.

In my Thursday piece, I wrote about the terrible 1962 plane crash, then the worst in aviation history, that killed 120 Atlanta cultural titans at Orly airport in Paris. They were returning to Atlanta after a three-week art trip to Europe. The disaster destabilized Atlanta’s cultural development for years. Malcolm X, preaching that day in Los Angeles, called the crash “God’s work.” Referring to the 106 dead people, all white, he said, “He gets rid of over 120 of them in one whop.” Let’s pray, he said, “that every day another plane falls from the sky.”

Satan’s a fallen angel. Like Malcolm X, What Is Left Unspoken, Love professes to come from a place of love, but it’s so twisted by its own smug sense of what’s right that it divides people into the saved and the damned. “Agree with me,” it says, “or you’re a beacon light of hate.”

Rina Banerjee’s Take me, take me, take me . . . to the Palace of Love, from 2005, is a vast tent of red cellophane under which found objects are arranged. Together they evoke the Taj Mahal, a temple to love and death. It flanks the panel on BLM, and this makes no sense. Jana Vander Lee is a very good fiber artist whose tapestries are on view. Her works are “reflections on varieties of love from the sacrificial to the altruistic to the nurturing and devotional.” They’re gorgeous, but why are they in the exhibition? The gallery interpretation tells me, in effect, that they’re about everything, which means they’re about nothing.

I read the catalogue. It’s an impressionist thing, a dab here, a dot there. Curator Michael Rooks wrote an essay that drops dozens of names, from Kierkegaard to Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, Lorca and Cormac McCarthy, the Book of Solomon and John Lennon. And bell hooks, whom Rooks quotes at the end of his essay. “Condoning lying is an essential part of patriarchal thinking,” she says about justifying “White supremacy terrorism,” the boogeyman in the show. All of this probably makes sense to Rooks but doesn’t make sense to anyone else.

Rooks describes what’s in the exhibition, object by object, and I enjoyed his take, though there’s no coherent intellectual entirety, and some things he gets very wrong. Akram Zaatari’s Tomorrow Everything Will Be Alright is a video displaying an exchange between a man and a woman transcribed in real time, using an old Royal typewriter, as the video unfolds. The artist is using the creepy, cryptic, very now language of chat rooms. Rooks says that it “employs the usual tropes of intimacy and romance,” but this ain’t Keats writing to Fanny Brawne. The man’s language is a stalker’s, the woman’s is uncertain, wary at first but, later, up for a fling. It’s riveting, but it has nothing to do with the exhibition. I watched it feeling relieved that I haven’t gone on a date in 20 years.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Pulse Room is a big, darkened space at the end of the exhibition with ceiling lights that flicker to the rhythm of the heartbeats of visitors who’ve registered them on a sensor device at the gallery’s entrance. It’s very pretty and meant to suggest community, but it’s unserious, too. It’s a gimmick, unless it hints that we’ll all be using candles if the climate crackpots have their way.

Sonia David’s short essay, possibly a short story, is about menopause and sex. Noel Quiñones’s essay is a young man’s gay coming-of-age using the color orange as a metaphor. I liked them both and hate to be the iceberg that ruins Rose and Jack’s fling on the Titanic, but, in the context of the exhibition, they make no sense.

I left humming “I Will Survive.” Never underestimate the inspiration of Gloria Gaynor. There were too many good things to see in the permanent collection. The best thing about What Is Left Unspoken, Love is that it’s temporary, and now it’s gone.

It’s a case of a curator hijacking the museum for his own rants. Suffolk, the director, whom I don’t know, described our era in the catalogue introduction as “a time of social and political discord when diplomacy, reason, common sense, decency, and truth itself seem inoperable.” This is cocktail-party clucking. He said the exhibition comes at a moment when “the culmination of racialized hate crimes and White supremacist terrorism has demonstrated the depths of lovelessness.” This is 1619 Project porn.

I’m certain none of this is true and certain the project comes from a hysterical, self-aggrandizing, self-righteous milieu at the museum. To persuade me otherwise, the High needed to make a case, an intellectual foundation, and select art that springs from it. I think some focus would have helped. Examining love, the key ministers involved in the civil-rights movement, and art about Christian love is one theme. I would have done something clever with the folk-art collection and the High’s civil-rights photography.

The black/trans/Latinx angle clutters the storyline, as does AIDS. And “Latinx” is a white bourgeois socialist word. Everyone with Latin-American heritage hates it, unless they’re on the white bourgeois socialist dime. As an alternative approach, I’d suggest using contemporary art and historical art together to explore love and individual responsibility for social justice. I’m afraid I can’t get beyond the foundation of Christianity, which is indeed love, but the last thing a big civic museum is going to do is an exhibition touting Christian values.

The High wanted an extravaganza, though, with everything tossed in the mix, including the Taj Mahal. Rooks at least dropped climate loony tunes, denying me fun with “Too Darn Hot.”

What Is Left Unspoken, Love is a cold, discordant, depressing thing. It’s a boon to monastic recruitment. The catalogue says the exhibition has been fermenting in Rooks’s mind for 20 years. The director might have told him to finish it or stop talking about it, when the director should have killed it.

I looked at the High’s past exhibitions. I saw some of them when they ran in other museums. Calder/Picasso was a lousy, dumb show, and the Julie Mehretu retrospective shoehorned this essentially abstract artist into ugly PC crocs. The High also did the Kusama Infinity Mirrors show, which is schlock art. The High’s had great exhibitions, too. It suffers from a case of uneven judgment.

There’s a Bob Thompson retrospective on view now. I saw it at the Colby College Museum. It’s very good. The High is taking the Clark Art Institute’s exhibition on Rodin in America. The exhibition itself is a fine idea made too anemic by the Clark, so I’m wondering what the High will do with it. I suggested when I reviewed the exhibition at the Clark that the key American collectors were cardboard figures when, in reality, they were very large personalities. It’s doing a Joseph Stella exhibition, too, focusing on his nature-based works. Stella is a gift that keeps giving. People need to know more about him, and the High owns Purissima, from 1927, a gorgeous painting and a great High acquisition.

I visited on a Sunday when admission was free. I’ve never seen so many black people in a museum, and I was thrilled. Museum goers skew pasty bourgeois, suburban, and old lady. What a change. I saw a success story for Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of a post-race society. What Is Left Unspoken, Love undercuts this spirit.