This is a new world order. . . . This is a brand new day.
It is also a run of clichés, in the Great Hall of the Met, but Jacolby Satterwhite means them seriously. He takes almost every bit of wall space for four huge projections—including above the cloakroom, itself closed since the start of the pandemic. Maybe museums after Covid-19 will never return to normal, but Satterwhite does not believe one bit in normalcy. As the soundtrack and subtitles continue, you will all be changed.
The whole production risks cliché, through January 7, while demanding change. A landscape basks in sunlight or fire. A stately city lies in ruins while refusing to go away. Its glittering highlights accord with its upbeat message, as do sleek bodies, still sleeker outfits, and constant motion. They include dancers and what might be paramilitary on the move. They look like nothing so much as a perpetual commercial, without an ad blocker in sight.
For all that, do not dismiss them out of hand, and many do, without so much as looking. This is a tough space for art. Two years ago, Kent Monkman used two equally large murals for the first encounters of Europeans and Native Americans, and visitors pretty much tuned them out, too. They are on their way somewhere else, in a crowded, confusing entrance hall. Not even the 2019 MoMA renovation could altogether redeem its entrance from Yoshio Taniguchi in 2004 and museum traffic. No wonder the new Whitney reserves its lobby for sales, and the Morgan Library reserves its atrium for coffee and pastry.
The Met makes things harder still. It now requires timed tickets—and puts them all but out of reach. Those willing to pay in full can do so online, and it is not cheap. Locals out to “pay what you will,” and that includes young people who might form a life-long interest in the arts, must join a line that twists and turns forever. It may seem odd that those coming in from New Jersey must pay a lot, while upstaters do not, but I can hear the Met thinking. No, we cannot eliminate the break for New Yorkers without losing state funding, but we can make your life miserable in return.
If visitors ignore two carvings in the lobby, a pharaoh in the round and Mayan rulers in relief (both from the collection), they can ignore anything. Satterwhite, though, is not giving up. Online he promises a personal introduction to a global museum—just as Refik Anadol promises an AI tour of the Modern in that museum’s lobby. If both are a bit bland, so be it. In practice, though, Satterwhite has his own creation, about transformation of the self and the given. Still in his thirties, he has been mixing media and identities for years.
He let loose on video in 2001 for a created environment with a wild and crazy cast—a lecture hall with clay models for lecturers, monitors for students, and a pulsating soundtrack. Here hell is not other people, but the people telling you so. He appeared in 2013 with black performance art at NYU’s Grey Gallery and emerging black artists at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Just months later, he returned to Harlem for the projects in “Shift.” Born in South Carolina and based in New York, he was also ripe for a show of the Great Migration north. He was to spotlight the male body in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and just this summer in a confluence of art and dance, as well as in the confluence of art and music at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall.
The extravagance continues, and so does the collision of media, minds, and bodies. The music goes live on weekends. The title, A Metta Prayer, reads like a typo for “A Meta Prayer,” a prayer reflecting on prayer. It refers instead to Buddhism and, says the artist, a queer black take on Buddhist art. The soundtrack does insist that all this can change you and cut through your disbelief—much as Samuel Taylor Coleridge spoke of a reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief.” Now if only I were a believer.