On The Whitney Biennial Controversy

Many in the “art world” are thinking a lot about the controversy at the Whitney Biennial surrounding Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket. Bear with me while I take my turn at it. (See below for links to other readings).

Does she have the right to make that painting and to show it? Yes. If we ever seriously start saying who does and does not own certain subjects we will be sliding down a step slope.

Should it be taken down? I don’t think so. Should it have been included to begin with? I don’t know –
I feel conflicted.
I feel my whiteness in this and I don’t want to lie to myself about what this is or how it works …

I am tempted to be silent rather than prove myself naïve or ignorant … but that seems contrary to my deepest ideals. I don’t want to be a coward.

For me, in strange ways, the controversy reinforces the mechanisms of privilege and power. The attention to Open Casket drowns out and distracts from the work of lesser-known artists who are also in the Biennial. Their biennial moment is being occluded, washed away. It grabs the media – the public eye – and moves it away from what else might be thoughtful, meaningful, or potent in the show …

It is an unfortunate side effect of people caring about things that matter.

But maybe this moment could be used as a magnifying glass to turn attention to the full roster of the show’s artists? Maybe it could be used as a megaphone so that conversations that don’t usually happen – happen? –
How do we talk about things that really matter?

Whitney Biennial 2017

This is an art show – an art show – an art show – it mediates and objectifies. Sometimes this gives us the distance or the emotional armor to approach real things – and sometimes it numbs and aestheticizes –

The original photograph gives us neither armor nor beauty.

Emmett Till’s murder is an example of the horror that grows from one person’s ability to dehumanize another person. It was a murder committed from an assumption that one human, because of the circumstances into which they are born, inherently deserves hate, violence and contempt. It is a piercing example of a kind of depravity that is unable to consider the value of human life that is somehow other than its own.

It is a symptom of a kind of social psychopathy that is still with us.

His mother’s grief and rage held up a mirror to those who would dismiss and diminish his suffering and her gapping loss.

However this moment came again to our attention, it is a reminder of something that is radically prescient. We can pray that we steel ourselves against those thoughts and feelings that tempt us away from a commitment to shared humanity but any ideology that reduces human beings to something “other” only propagates a living nightmare. Such ideologies assure future horrors.

I think a lot about the “they” some speak of – the confidence that those speaking have that “they” are evil. This capacity to believe that there is a “they” is terrifying.

It’s important to know where our empathy goes first.
Maybe the painting does us a favor of reminding us of its source – maybe.
And maybe Till’s murder still has some power to awaken in our social consciousness an understanding that more recent events have somehow failed to do - maybe. We can use all the help we can get.


Other Readings on this subject:

"On Dana Schutz's Open Casket: A Masterful Yet Imperfect Painting" by Paddy Johnson, Artfcity

"The Violence of the 2017 Whitney Biennial" by Hrag Vartanian, Hyperallergic

"Black Artists Are Calling For An Emmett Till Painting To Be Destroyed" by Jordan Danville, Fader

"Dana Schutz’s Painting of Emmett Till at Whitney Biennial Sparks Protest" by Lorena Muñoz-Alonso, Artnet

Added on March 29, 2017

"Censorship, not the Painting, Must Go" by Coco Fusco, Hyperallergic

From many - One.

The difficulty in talking about racism is that racism is predicated on gross generalizations, sweeping statements and a dehumanizing set of biases. It’s difficult to talk about racism – particularly as a white southerner - because one runs the risk of becoming an apologist or a naïve denialist or even worse, slipping into gross generalizations that, even when well-intentioned, turn to an “us vs. them” point of view.

The public space where this conversation should happen, our political sphere, has become a shit show.

The rhetoric of hate, the politics of exclusion and fear mongering have dominated our public discourse.

Money, and we are obsessed with money, Money is speech. Every conversation we have of the public good is underwritten, undercut, by money. As a people we seem so fearful that someone might take something away from us.

Many of us claim to be people of faith. Many of us say we are Christians, Muslims, religious Jews or any number of other religions, and many more say we are committed to the ideals set forth by our founders, and yet, many of us practice an intellectual laziness that undermines everything we say we believe in. Many of us do not question whether or not the positions we take are in keeping with the principles we say we hold. For many of us our biases are so deeply rooted that we cannot muster compassion for our fellow human beings.

What is our responsibility as guardians of the principles we hold? – There is so much cynicism around the things we “say” we believe in. Too often it’s enough to say it or use it as a position from which to condemn others – but to actually practice what we say we believe … This is the hard work that we’re called to do – to put aside our selfish concerns, to look past fear, to hold our nation to the highest examples of those principles.

I get so frustrated when people who claim to hold to these ideals, who claim for instance to be Christian, can justify in their own minds the selfish and meanness that produces the very atmosphere of fear and hate that contributes to the violence we’re seeing now. The great leaders of history were philosophers, they thought deeply about ethics, about how the world should be and if we are to follow any one of them we must do the same.

How to we comfort one another? How to we take care for one another? How do we fulfill our responsibility to the ideals of our nation: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? that we are all created equal? How do we ensure that we are worthy of our inheritance, of those that we say we come after? Love one another - and part of that work is to dwell on what loving means.