Dana Schutz's painting in the Whitney Museum Biennial, is based on a 1955 photo of 14-year-old Emmett Till's mutilated body, published in Jet Magazine and credited with inspiring support for the civil rights movement. Till, an African-American from Chicago, was killed in Mississippi by two white men who were acquitted, although later admitted to the crime. In 2008, at age 82, the woman who had accused him of making advances recanted her story.
What
the current art world controversy around Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till tells me, is that a preponderance of white artists, who think
of themselves as liberal, have no awareness of their (overused term alert!) privilege
and unconscious racism. Exclaiming in droves on Facebook and elsewhere that
they know better how black people should respond, their righteous arrogance is
mind-boggling—perhaps not a surprise to blacks, but to me, because these are
people I know.
This
also happened a couple of years ago when issues about Kara Walker came up on my blog, with comments on Facebook. Walker, a black
artist whose work is collected primarily by whites, often features blacks being
abused by whites, as well as Jim Crow imagery, which many blacks find
degrading. But when black artists and academics expressed this on my FB page,
white artists had no qualms about telling them they were “ignorant” and
“anti-art.” One even said that Michele Wallace, who had written a negative essay about Walker,
“didn’t understand art”— obviously unaware that Wallace is the daughter of
venerable black artist Faith Ringgold.
Now
the black activists protesting the Schutz painting are being called “poseurs”
and “panic merchants,” “a niche group” whose responses are “ridiculous” “nit-wit
shit,” and “about some people assuming they have the exclusive right to certain
aspects of American history.”
The
most frequent cry from whites is that of “censorship”— a term I associate with attempts
of authoritarian governments to control the masses, rather than the struggle of
the downtrodden to keep their experience from being co-opted and
mischaracterized by their oppressors. One art editor on FB called it a “whiff of the
Cultural Revolution,” while a socialist columnist, addressing the “foul
attempt to censor and suppress” the painting, wrote, “The arguments being used are worthy of the Nazi
officials who banned Jewish artists from playing or conducting classical music
on the grounds of their ‘un-German’ spirit” – to which a commenter replied, “Bringing up Nazis in this issue is like a Nazi painting a
picture of the camps and blaming the Jews for being too sensitive.”
I think of a friend who once worked in a dentist’s office that
was decorated with pastoral prints. One showed a group of good ol' boys sitting
under a tree, and hanging from one of the branches, barely perceptible, was a
noose. The white patients who crowded the office never noticed it, nor did the white
dentist who chose it, but it gave my black friend chills. At her request, the
dentist took it down. Censorship? Political correctness? No, simply consideration
for his employee. And a reminder that not only may we not see things as others
do, we might not see them at all.
I once asked a white collector why he bought a Kara Walker work
on paper. “I liked the way it was drawn,” he said. And the imagery? “Oh, I
didn’t care about that.”
Another white artist friend calls the controversy “trivial”
because, he says, it has nothing to do with the day-to-day struggle of poor blacks.
In fact, a number of white artists were maintaining that art is unimportant in
the scheme of life, or in the face of our current political miasma—a curious
stance for those who have devoted their lives to it. But when the protestors
call for the destruction of the painting, they turn around and argue for its
intrinsic value as if it were a sacred object.
While it’s true that many economically disadvantaged blacks, survival
on their minds, may never know about this issue and, if they did, might not
care what happens at the Whitney, the arts are important in shaping the culture
and the perceptions of those who make decisions about our lives. Do we hold our
judgment and listen? Or continue to send the message that the white
establishment couldn't care less?
Beyond the question of the subject matter, a big problem
with Open Casket, as Aruna D’Souza and Ann Landi have also pointed out, is that it’s not a great painting, and
one wonders if the result would have been different if it were. Instead Open Casket is a Dana Schutz before
anything else, with the result that it trivializes and makes a decorative
cartoon of a horrific event. As one commenter said, “I'm not sure that 'rubber
stamping' a style on a loaded subject is a good strategy for a successful
painting”.
Adding insult to injury is Schutz’s statement that she was
empathizing as a mother, if not a black mother, which indicates she must have
missed the conversation around the distinction between “Black Lives Matter” and
“All Lives Matter,” at the top of the news the last several years.
If I were King of the Whitney, I’d leave the painting up and
make the dialogue around it part of the exhibition, posting the dissenting
remarks and holding symposia with an eye to giving black voices a
platform—because, in the end, the conversation is much more consequential than
the painting.
