Art, Censorship, and the Death of Emmett Till

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WELL, it’s really come to this, hasn’t it? Having to defend the very existence of a piece of visual art not against Puritans or Nazis or Southern Fundamentalists or the Taliban but against…. other artists.

The story of how the New York art world has been divided between people who think artist Dana Schutz should be able to paint (and exhibit) a picture of Emmett Till in his coffin, on one hand, and those who don’t just dislike the piece or consider it in poor taste but think it should be removed from the Whitney Biennial and destroyed, locked away, etc, on the other, has already been told. (The argument is that Schutz, a Brooklyn-based painter of about 40 — and a Caucasian — is exploiting a black tragedy.)

This story in Hyperallergic gets into the madness of the whole thing — including the charges led by Hannah Black, a British-born, Berlin-dwelling black artist — better than I can. Of course I get the general argument — that white people have been tourists in and out of black pain for centuries now, often earning money and fame from their exploitation of the blues and various sorts of merchandizing of African-American tragedy.

But to argue that Till, whose mother wanted the world to see his state after he was killed by Mississippi racists, should only be rendered by black artists, and that the offense is so grave that Open Casket should be destroyed, is just nuts. And it’s not the sole incidence of a censorious and intolerant side of the cultural left — a place where I dwell most of the time — which is manna from the heavens for the Fox New crowd.

One angle on this I’d not considered was that this was also a kind of war on abstraction. As Coco Fusco’s Hyperallergic piece argues:

“The most perplexing criticism that’s been bandied about regarding Schutz’s painting, both on social media and in discussions I’ve had, is that some great harm has been inflicted by the act of abstraction, as if the only ‘responsible’ treatment of racial trauma is mimetic realism …

There’s a fundamental misunderstanding at work in damning abstraction by associating it with erasure and irresponsibility. Abstraction, like mimeticism, is an aesthetic language that can be interpreted and used politically in a range of ways. It doesn’t necessarily mean erasure, but it does complicate the connection between perception and intellection—something that deeply thoughtful painters like Gerhard Richter have taken advantage of in order to make us reflect on how photographic images represent history and structure memory. Jacob Lawrence ‘abstracted’ his black figures, not to obscure their humanity but to explore new ways of evoking ethnic identity and communal purpose through color and dynamism.”

Tip of the pen to the Paris Review online for noticing this wrinkle.

And sheesh — how the hell did we get here?