Review: Sanford Biggers’s Blossom: On the Advantage and Disadvantage of Art for Life
July 22, 2021
By Simon Cohen
A life-size tree juts through a grand piano. Its back leg hovering above the ground, the instrument seems perpetually on the verge of capsizing. The weathered bench seems to have been knocked to the ground just a moment ago, the lid hanging agape atop a mound of soil. The tree’s trunk ruptures the piano’s innards, and the intricate instrument lurches forward, useless for playing but still beautifully ornate. Sanford Biggers’s Blossom (2007) is therefore alluring but deeply unsettling. It restages the haunting image of lynching, the mob killings of Black Americans that often served as visual spectacles for crowds and photographers. But the installation resolutely refuses to show us the horrific violence it invokes: rather, Biggers provocatively transforms a site of horror into one of regeneration and growth, an experience mediated by art.
Photo: Author’s own
Every thirty minutes, the seemingly impossible happens: the piano’s keys begin to move, and music fills the room. The piano seems to be played by a ghost, and the instrument speaks despite the evisceration of its internal mechanism. From the piano emanates Biggers’s own arrangement of “Strange Fruit,” the anti-lynching song made popular by Billie Holiday. The music is alternately halting and florid, unfolding as a series of improvised elaborations bearing little resemblance to their source material. In its current place on the fourth floor of the Brooklyn Museum, Blossom occupies a point of transition between retrospectives of work by African American artists Lorraine O’Grady and John Edmonds. In this context, the installation provides a broader meditation on how the violence committed against Black Americans might be reckoned with in museums today. As Biggers himself explains, “when you see the piano and the tree, it’s not like you see a body hanging from the tree, you see a piano. But we relate to the piano very bodily.”[i]
Photo: Author’s own
James Baldwin explores the relationship between the piano and the human body in the short story “Sonny’s Blues”(1957). In it, the narrator struggles to accept his brother’s ambitions to work as a jazz musician. After seeing Sonny perform, the narrator comes to understand how the piano serves as a vehicle for Sonny’s self-expression. He observes that a musician “has to fill…this instrument with the breath of life, his own.”[ii] Without someone to play it, the piano “just a piano. It’s made out of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory.”[iii] Swept up in the performance, the narrator “seemed to hear with what burning [Sonny] had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting.”[iv] Activated by the human touch, the piano becomes a means of salvation.
When Biggers’s piano begins to play “Strange Fruit,” there is no musician breathing life into the instrument. Instead, the keyboard appears haunted by a ghost, one whose voice can’t quite be heard. For Baldwin, Sonny’s musical expression is tied up with experience: not only his own, but that of the collective. Similarly, audiences have often understood Holiday’s unique voice as a product of her life circumstances, which were characterized by sexual assault, arrests, and drug addiction. It has become commonplace to describe Holiday’s “haunting” voice as a natural outcome of this suffering.[v]However, as musicologist Nina Sun Eidsheim points out, such autobiographically determined listening has constrained understandings of Holiday’s music, reducing her experiences to a generic paradigm of Black female suffering, and denying her agency over her own artistic expression.[vi]
“Portrait of Billie Holiday, Downbeat, New York, N.Y., ca. Feb. 1947,” Music Division, Library of Congress
By transcribing “Strange Fruit” for the piano, Biggers circumvents what Eidsheim calls the “acousmatic question,” the question “who is this? Who is speaking?”[vii] Nobody in particular is speaking (or singing), so we are free to experience the installation without searching for a persona behind it. The tree brings us back to the site of the violence that “Strange Fruit” describes, while also directing us away from the particularity of Holiday’s voice, so often synonymous with the song. Holiday’s rendition of “Strange Fruit” brings us unflinchingly close to a grotesque scene of lynching, whereas Biggers places distance between us and the act, forcing us to confront the artistic mediations we use to make sense of history. Sometimes, Biggers’s piece suggests, “unspeakable” horrors are truly unspeakable. Neither celebrating nor condemning the aestheticization of violence, Blossom captures the persistent power of the instruments we use to make sense of it.
[i] Sanford Biggers, “Sanford Biggers - To the Tune Of,” The Bholdr, YouTube video, 2:48, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zhj1rZBKnY.
[ii] Ibid., 46.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Ibid., 47.
[v] Farah Jasmine Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (New York: Free Press, 2001), 31, quoted in Nina Sun Eidsheim, The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre & Vocality in African American Music (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019), 158.
[vi] Eidsheim, 156 ff.
[vii] Ibid.