wandering empire’s capital

Mother’s Day in NYC, Book of Mormon the night before: Like South Park, the show is like brilliant. But after living in Utah and meeting so many people harmed by the church, and after learning how colonialism thrives in programs to “educate” (westernize) non-westerners by the likes of the UN, peace corps, and religious missions(!), I wince in hopes we’re laughing with, not laughing at—because this fucking shit actually happens.

Now we’re at the MOMA, once a sacred space to me. Art, the cornerstone of my life—so meaningful, I’d study art history. I loved how the works told big stories about the worlds they came from; how particular styles mark periods of time, a movement: how it all kind of runs together until it doesn’t as part of some now-apparent socio-technical juncture.

And, modern art: how contentious! I’m bemused until it gets weird. Then I remember that chapter in Azoulay’s book about Unlearning Imperialism, and her thesis along with it: “Imperial violence is not secondary to art but constitutive of it.” [In another section: “Modern art is not a historical category but an imperial condition in which imperial violence is congealed.”]

She’s deconstructing “art” as an area of “expertise” that aids the colonial enterprise in mastering time and space. “Art” manifests (mid 1700s) alongside the once-celebrated “conservation effort” to collect (take*) objects from (non-western) cultures and place them on a linear timeline—as if time could be captured, divided, and distributed. This process separates objects from their people and purpose, from their material and political worlds, while those taken-from are solidified as disempowered. And with their *accumulated* objects, the colonizers impose a unified idea of “art” that can be practiced and appreciated only through the lens of its institutions, museums, and “experts.” Then, as we walk the works of historical progress, we normalize its world-destroying violence.

Wandering empire’s capital, I’m entertained by the crass comparison—wondering if this is how ex-mormons feel when they find their gods have abused them. Still, my art world falls apart to reveal real lives and communities ruined in its making.