“Aboveness”

Alfredo Jaar’s controversial entry in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, 06.01.2020 18.39, installed in its own black box gallery, consisted of a black and white video projection on one wall showing Black Lives Matter protesters assembled in Washington, D.C. on June 1^st, 2020, as they attempt to remain upright despite the terrific wind created by a military helicopter suspended only a few feet above their heads. As the viewer is absorbed in the video of this infamous incident in which then-President Donald Trump ordered the dispersal of protesters by the National Guard so that he could stage a photo op in front of St. John’s Church holding up a Bible, powerful fans, suspended from the ceiling of the gallery, switch on, turning the room into the site of a minor tornado. Strongly criticized for what a few reviewers believed was its appropriation of Black suffering and others described as its “fun house special effect[s]” and its similarity to an IMAX movie, the work was maligned as overly theatrical. It was, in a word, untrue. This paper reexamines Jaar’s work from the perspective of post-rational visuality to argue that it creates a kind of knowledge that we might call “aboveness,” a word that attempts to capture the prevailing sense of fear and panic produced by the calamities that occur increasingly from overhead—drones, planes, helicopters, satellites, the digital cloud, and the sky itself in which an overheated sun bears witness to increasingly devastating climate catastrophes.