A selfie in front of the titular work of an enthralling exhibit at the New Museum may be a bit on the nose, but you really ought to see Pepón Osorio's "My Beating Heart."
Video helps you appreciate the intensity of colorful and densely conceived installations that examine sociology, culture and politics from a Puerto Rican perspective.
"reForm" (2014-17)
After funding cuts shuttered a school in Philadelphia, Osorio created this lacerating indictment of public education from objects abandoned in classrooms and interviews with the students who still identify as "Bobcats" despite their loss.
"No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop" (1994)
Conversations with Puerto Rican residents--a staple of Osorio's creative process--in Hartford, CT, where this installation was originally exhibited, suggested that machismo gestates in barber shops. Osorio created one full of mixed messages, including Saint Lazarus, the patron saint of the poor and sick who looks lost.
"Badge of Honor" (1995)
Machismo also figures in this work, my favorite. Having a father in jail was seen by many young men in Newark--where this work was installed in a storefront with support from the community--as a "badge of honor." It creates a cautionary dialog between an incarcerated father, who has been stripped symbolically, and his teenage son, imprisoned by the cliched tokens of his inchoate masculinity.
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| "Reparación" (2022) |
"Lonely Soul" (2008)
Today's equivalent of this poor woman being consumed by the flames of Hell probably would be the Latinas who sell freshly cut fruit in the subways and parks, but Osorio based his off-kilter scenario on another hard worker, beset by both the patriarchy--which limits her job opportunities--and job-related injury. She sold him flavored ice in north Philadelphia.
"Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?)" (1993)
Hollywood's negative depiction of Puerto Ricans is the target of Osorio's critical eye here in a deliberately cluttered work created for the Whitney Biennial with the assistance of a former NYPD detective. Note the murder weapon sticking out of the yellow couch.
"Convalescence" (2023)
It should be obvious by this point that Osorio doesn't shy away from big topics. Here, in the first installation of an ongoing work about the American healthcare system, he incorporates its medical, pharmaceutical and spiritual components in a carnival-like tableau.
Other Exhibits @ the New Museum
When I visited Viet Nam in 2018, it amazed me that the American War (that's what the natives call it) seemed so forgotten due in part to the youth of the population. Not so for Tuan Andrew Nguyen, who was born in Saigon three years after the communists finally prevailed. "Radiant Remembrance," his first U.S. museum exhibit, investigates the war's legacy through sculpture, film and other media. Spent artillery shells and a B-52 bomb were used to fashion and reconfigure the meaning of these objects.
Viet Nam had a long colonial history before the Americans invaded which Nguyen also examines through archival family photos and more video using actors. France recruited soldiers from its African colonies to suppress the Viet Minh (the forerunners to the Viet Cong) during their occupation of Viet Nam in the late 19th century. As a result, there are small communities of Vietnamese in places like Senegal where mixed marriages occurred.
"The Spector of Ancestors Becoming" (2022) imagines a dialog between a father who has concealed the Vietnamese ethnicity of his son's mother, thus throwing the younger man's own identity into confusion.
Nguyen reproduces the fliers that the Viet Minh distributed to north African soldiers encouraging them to defect from the French army word for word as cotton banners.
A daughter--left behind in Viet Nam by her Moroccan father--examines her feeling of statelessness in another video.
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