As a twenty-seven-year-old, thin white female from the United States who is close to finishing graduate school, I am expected to have a functioning, productive body and mind in order to be a “good” citizen in this capitalistic society. Especially in the public sphere, where my body and mind appear to function “normally,” it is assumed that I am able to move quickly, work long hours, and maybe even have an active social life a few nights per week. A career and a little fun are the expected goals.
I am an emerging artist and an arts writer. And I have invisible disability. I was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at the age of six when my younger brother died of the same illness. Twenty-one years later, the amount of time spent on self-care and dependent-care just to move my body and mind is upwards of five hours a day. This time increases to twenty-four hours on those (not infrequent) occasions when I have to be hospitalized for two weeks at a time.
This essay expands on Tilt West’s roundtable discussion on disability, “Every/body: Art, Representation, and Accessibility,”elaborating on three concepts very crucial to the politics of disability: care, dependency, and crip time. These ideas have tremendously impacted my life but are rarely considered in disability studies and conversations.
These three terms speak not only to my personal experience with disability but to the various body and mind experiences of three important artists making headway in today’s contemporary art world. Carolyn Lazard, a Philadelphia-based artist, and Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos, who work in New York, have begun exhibiting at such venues as the New Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the Modern Museum of Art. They have also won numerous awards for their artistic commentary on the medical industrial complex, debt, care, dependency, and crip time. While these artists mainly produce artworks, they also spend a significant part of their time writing and publishing about their personal experiences with disability, which is a crucial aspect of their practice as social activists working to expand society’s awareness of disability.
Care Collective (2011-present) is an ongoing performance project that comprises a network of people, including Zavitsanos and occasionally Lazard, who assist McArthur with her nightly routine, such as taking a bath, cooking dinner, and getting into pajamas. The collective makes evident both the significance of care and dependency and how care and dependency are rarely seen in public. Dependency is portrayed as unwilling reliance on another body, mind, institution, source of nutrition, medication, etc. It goes hand in hand with care because disabled bodies and minds often depend on continuous care from the self and others.
In “Sort of Like a Hug: Notes on Collectivity, Conviviality, and Care,” McArthur defines care as “a spectrum of dependency and labor different than childcare, different than elder care, and different than the heteropatriarchal configurations of an unwaged laborer reproducing a waged laborer for tomorrow’s workday.”[1] In other words, care is about caring for a body and mind that is not functioning, producing, or generating in terms of the capitalistic body and mind. However, as all these artists’ performances show, care and dependency do not exist within a system of binaries, but as part of a spectrum.
In their 2016 performance Support System: for Tina, Park, and Bob, Lazard exposes how care and dependency are interchanged not only between performer and participant, but between the person who is understood as receiving care and the person who is understood as giving care. From 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., during their residency at Room & Board in New York City, Lazard welcomed guests one at a time for thirty-minute intervals into their bedroom, a space dedicated to the private realm. Each guest was asked to either sit with Lazard, talk with them, or help them with chores.
According to Room & Board’s founder Julia Pelta Feldman, “part of the idea was to create a performance work that would allow [Lazard] to rest: a marathon of comfort instead of the extreme asceticism fetishized by the art world.”[2] This being said, however, Lazard ended up caring for their visitors by talking with them, conducting tarot readings, and providing them with emotional support. As one participant noted, it was a marathon of ‘affective labor,’ the kind that is least valued in our society, and that is (perhaps not coincidentally) most often performed by women.”[3] In the end, Lazard’s twelve-hour performance revealed how we are all dependent on one another and in need of care, whether we identify as disabled or not.
Support System, then, exposes how care and dependency are not experiences confined to people who identify as disabled. It shows how disability is not limited to one type of experience but actually a multitude of experiences tied to various complex embodiments. In other words, rather than revealing a simple binary of disabled and abled, i.e. Lazard and visitor, the artist explores how care and dependency (and in turn disability) are a spectrum: both Lazard and their visitor are within the spectrum because both are in need of care.
In addition, as Care Collective and McArthur’s nightly routine shows, McArthur is constantly dependent on her friends and loved ones to help her take a shower, get dressed, and get in bed. However, even though the artist receives care from and is dependent on her loved ones, partners, and friends who expect nothing in exchange, she still returns care to those who take care of her. In fact, a few months after Zavitsanos and McArthur began using letters, text messages, and text-based art to explore ideas of care and intimacy, McArthur began a routine of brushing Zavitsanos’ teeth.[4] Also, McArthur undoubtedly provides care to her friends and loved ones via emotional support, conversation, and company.
In my 2018 performance you need to gain weight to stay healthy, I wanted to reveal a type of care that causes pain but is needed in order to stay healthy long-term. On a mid-May day, I nervously handed out little tasters of weight gain shake to everyone sitting in the audience. I then waited for five minutes to pass and proceeded to take off my clothes down to my nude-colored underwear. I was shaking uncontrollably. Once I mixed the four weight gain powder packets with four glasses of milk, which added up to a total of three thousand calories, I drank all four glasses as my belly swelled with pain. Then I got up, started putting my clothes back on, and sat on the ground. As I was putting on my shoes, I quickly grabbed the nearest garbage can to puke what I had just imbibed.
This form of self-care via performance is an exhibition of dependency where I expose my dependence on weight gain shakes for “nutrition,” my dependence on doctors, my feeding tube scar, which itself displays my former dependence on a feeding tube, and the “nutrition” it provided me for three years.
Crip time, a term defined by Alison Kafer, is the temporality of non-normative embodiments, from the day-to-day negotiations of moving from one space to the other, to the long view of historical time that has historically written disabled people out of the future.[5] Namely, crip time is shaped by the experiences of disabled bodies and minds who remain largely invisible in political, social, economic, and historical spheres. While crip time can be experienced by all bodies and minds, disabled bodies and minds are hyperaware of crip time since they usually experience it on a daily basis, whereas others may only experience it during temporary bouts of illness, sickness, or disability.
Once I drank all four glasses of weight gain shake and started to put my clothes back on to show that we were now moving back into the public, the sphere where I do not look sick, where I have invisible disability, I grabbed for the nearest garbage can. While I did not plan this, it was the perfect moment to vomit because, since I threw up in what signified the public sphere, my movements and actions showed that I was still sick, always sick, no matter which sphere I was in, and demonstrated that crip time occurs in both spheres and thus blurs the boundaries between them. As a result, when the dividing lines between public and private are no longer there, issues of care and dependency are no longer an individual problem but a collective problem.
Ultimately, as determined by my personal experiences living in and through crip time and performing you need to gain weight to stay healthy (2018), I have come to understand crip time as my way of living. For me, crip time is when I do my breathing treatment at 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. Crip time is when I eat and take my oral medications. Crip time is when I take care of myself, when my partner takes care of me, when my mother takes care of me. Crip time is when I go to school or work and still have nausea and/or a headache. Crip time is when I rest and sleep. Crip time is when I feel well enough to ride my bike down to the park. Crip time is when I have to be hospitalized. Crip time, for me and my disabled body and mind, is all of the time. Crip time is embodied time.
Through our efforts of making the invisible visible, Lazard, Zavitsanos, McArthur, and I write and perform about our disabled bodies and minds to offer what scholar Sophie Anne Oliver explains as “an ontological and structural model through which the concept of embodied ethical spectatorship might begin to be imagined.”[6] Our work, sharing the experiences we live within our disabled bodies and minds and within the social constructions and institutions that choose to render disability invisible, along with the work by several other scholars and artists with disability, are only tiny steps toward a collective goal of changing the Western perspective that wants to write people with disability out of the past, present, and future.
Disability representation and accessibility in the arts are absolutely necessary to make the voices of the invisible shared, heard, and understood. However, it is crucial to remember and take notice of the components happening often times in the private sphere (i.e. personal experiences) of disability politics that must occur before entering the public sphere. Without acknowledging care, dependency, and crip time, it is almost impossible to completely address issues surrounding disability representation and accessibility in the arts.
I lived in South Africa and worked there as a journalist from 1993 to 1996. I had the privilege of covering that country’s first all-race ballot in 1994. In 1995, while visiting the United States for the first time in two years, I found that many relatives and friends were curious about the historic, apartheid-ending election. A cousin had a question on which I still think back often. Particularly these days.
My cousin wanted to know: “How do black South Africans vote? On what do they base their decisions?”
Black South Africans had been denied citizenship and cheated out of education for generations. I suppose my cousin’s question was fair. But I bristled. I’d heard too many dismissive suggestions from white South Africans that their black countrymen and women “weren’t ready for democracy.” White South Africans, whose prejudices and privileges had been fed and coddled for generations, had much to prove when it came to readiness for democracy, but no one was giving them a poll test.
History tells us no one is ready for democracy. Not the American colonialists who believed so little in their own declarations of the equality — on which democracy depends — that they held slaves and denied the vote to women and the landless. Not the descendants of those slaves who marched and died demanding to be enfranchised. Not the East Germans whose wall fell in 1991 — few questioned their readiness to vote despite the fact that dictatorship and suspicion were all many knew, and I suspect that was because they were white.
White or black. European, American, African or African-American, democracy isn’t given to you when you’re ready. You take it when you can, then you make it work.
On what do we base our votes? Sure, sometimes on a sober assessment of the facts, a determination of what is true. Sometimes on fear. Sometimes because we believe it’s good for our tribe, whether that’s our neighbors in Crown Heights or our fellow Xhosa.
As I mentioned, I’ve been thinking about my cousin’s question a lot lately. Americans readied for democracy by more than two centuries of trying it out have proven as likely as any rank novices to make their decisions based on impulse, insularity or ignorance.
But we do get to keep trying. We make mistakes, correct, repeat. And repeat. Democracy is not an end. It’s the best means we have of working out our differences. Then we encounter new differences and return to the work of perfecting our union. We’ve been doing it so long in America we have perhaps forgotten what the alternative to democracy — to continually making democracy — will cost us.
I sense a lot of the angst we’re feeling now over the state of our democracy and its susceptibility to untruths does not come out of an actual inability to determine the facts.
People say figuring out what’s true is difficult. Often, what they mean is that they’re finding it difficult to let go of what they want to believe, or finding it uncomfortable to consider how their cherished lies affect others.
Yes, we have to contend with misinformation. But we are capable of recognizing the lies. It’s just that we sometimes don’t want to. We sometimes would rather undermine democracy than face the truth.
Luckily, we have art — fiction — to help us. To inspire us when our energies and commitment lag. Our truest myths endure because they order the facts into stories that can sustain us and help us remember where we set out to go.
Perhaps democracy is the fiction we need the most. It demands faith in cooperation and selflessness — without which a diverse society won’t long endure.
Masturbation Painting, Fuck Grid, Cunt Painting…
When I was asked to write a companion piece to Tilt West’s roundtable discussion on The Problematic Nude,[1] prompted by artist Laura Shill [2], these titles and the associated works by Betty Tompkins [3] first came to mind.
Tompkins started making these photorealist paintings and drawings between 1969–1974 and came under immediate fire from many feminists for making such frank work about pleasure.
On first view, Masturbation Painting #2, Cunt Painting #12, Fuck Grid #34 are close-ups of a woman touching herself, a woman’s cunt, and heterosexual penetration — images similar to what is typically seen in porn magazines and videos.
But, here, under Tompkins rendering, they are hushed, soft, and calm. Using heightened cropping, the artist slightly abstracts her subjects; the woman’s labia is organically florid or softened to peach-like skin. The effect is different from a photo in a men’s magazine. The images center a woman’s pleasure.
At the beginning of the roundtable, Laura Shill posed questions about the role of the nude, describing “female bodies as political battlegrounds where fights over agency, autonomy, and access are waged both publicly and privately.” More specifically, Shill alluded to the “disproportionate…. (privilege given to)…. images of nude women made by men.” Shill invited us to consider focusing our attention on women as subjects and authors, yet the conversation soon returned to the male gaze and centered on the problems that arise therein.
I’ve been struggling to write this article. I’d prefer to talk about female desire, which has only recently been acknowledged. Gasp! Women experience, need, and desire sexual pleasure. Not just whores — ALL (or most) WOMEN. Sexuality is complex and doesn’t fit into a neat either/or.
There are so many things I have to say — both from experience and years of research. Having personally dealt with sexual objectification, political and economic inequality, and domestic and sexual/violence, I am convinced that the traditional female nude — a cis white male visualization of female sexuality — plays a huge part in cementing inequality. There is a daily onslaught of media portraying women as flat objects with very little to no agency, or as fragile beings who are incapable of making their own informed decisions.
That being said, there is nothing inherently wrong with a man’s desire to look at a woman; rather, the problem arises in how this look is played out to reinforce the objectification and subjugation of others. These images are fabricated to serve a specific need. There is no denying that many of us use images to enhance pleasure. I enjoy porn, looking at both women and men. The female nude is not the problem; the problem lies in the dynamic portrayed in the images — between power and powerlessness — and the privileging of one gaze and one type of pleasure over another.
Even though I understand that this is an important component to the conversation, I don’t want to talk about the male gaze anymore. I’m tired of this old binary, this conversation that centers the cis white male experience and excludes LGBTQIA+ narratives and “othered” stories. If you’re involved in making (or buying) images that portray women as flat sexual objects, or simplified one-note narratives like the dangerous vamp, dumb blonde, exotic dancer, childlike waif, girl next door, harpy wife, mammy, sexless mother, or sexy secretary, don’t be mad or petulant when I don’t give a shit about your work. I would never argue for censorship. But there’s nothing new in it. Boring.
Simplified one-note narratives are not fully lies; I think of them as lies of omission.
The problem of the female nude rests in the lies it tells: of denying female desire and complexity. Women are reduced — in stature, earning power, relationships — by this falsity.
Here we are. Each of us is culpable and responsible for talking about and formulating strategies both as creatives and consumers that challenge inequality. We can band together with allies, work to gain understanding about intersectional feminism, and break structures that hold us down from earning an equitable living — or be subjected to violence in our lives.
Laura Shill”s quote by Hélène Cixous [4]from, The Laugh of the Medusa, seems a fitting end note:
The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipation is imperative.
Have you ever had a transformative experience with a work of art?
If you have, maybe you were standing in front of an object in a museum. Perhaps you were on an educator-led tour, or listening to an audio guide. Maybe you were reading a brochure produced by the museum. Or maybe there was no “stuff” involved — just you and the object.
Museum educators love to talk about what it means to slow down, creating space to have something John Dewey called an Aesthetic Experience. In the galleries, when visitors take time to really drink in a work of art, magic can happen. Museum scholar David Carr calls this “becoming” — in other words, we can use objects as powerful teachers of something new; they transport us, add depth and dimension to our lives, and stir our emotions.
But does it matter how we use those objects, how we connect with them? And who gets to decide?
Curators might say that you need an in-real-life (IRL) experience along with some type of scholarly information to access an aesthetic experience. Educators might tell you that you need a participatory tour (or two) and a lot of open-ended questions. An artist might just ask you to quietly contemplate their work of art. But a social media manager, like me? We’ll probably want you to do whatever you want, however you want (as long as you post it).
During Tilt West’s recent roundtable Proud to be Flesh: Cultural Spaces After the Internet, prompter Marty Spellerberg framed our conversation with this question: As much of the world moves online, what’s next for engaging, enriching, in-real-life experiences of art and culture?
I would add to Marty’s question: With both digital and physical experiences blended in a museum setting, can we even distinguish one from the other? Are they even separate?
Here are my thoughts regarding online versus IRL experiences:
1. Deeply engaging experiences can look different for each museum visitor.
Sometimes I enjoy reading wall labels when I wander through a museum exhibition. There are other days when I simply like to look around. Generally speaking, I like to take “fancy photos” — especially when I’ve dragged a friend along with me. I force that person to stand in front of works of art, gazing contemplatively into the distance. Or I’ll ask my friend to do a casual #strideby, which isn’t casual at all, since they wouldn’t have walked in front of my camera unless I had asked them. Are any of these activities the “wrong” way to experience a museum?
No one way is right or wrong. Who are we, as museum professionals, to decide how another person should make meaning during their museum experience? In his 2009 book, Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience, John Falk evaluates motivations behind a visitor’s experience. He outlines a series of specific reasons given by visitors for choosing to attend a museum, based on their needs and values. These five types of visitors are: Experience Seekers; Explorers; Facilitators; Rechargers; and Professionals. No one type of visitor motivation has greater value over any other. Nor does a visitor own only one identity type — -in fact, your motivations might change, based on the day or your mood.
2. Engaging through your phone is not less valid than engaging through your eyes, no matter how many critics tell us we are wrong to do so.
Mediated experiences look different for every visitor. Some folks enjoy reading wall text, some enjoy wandering aimlessly. Some like to travel in packs of friends and talk the entire time. Others like to use the museum as a contemplative space. And yes, using your phone mediates your experience in a museum — and that’s okay, too. If you facilitate your experience with your device, it is not a superficial experience.
A 2017 report noted that museum-goers preferred to be “entertained” rather than “educated” and wanted more “social interactions” as opposed to “quiet reflection” when they visited exhibitions. But, sometimes, we want everything — because we’re cultural omnivores. And 81% of those study participants also wanted digital experiences in museums. What better application to address all these desires — entertainment, social interaction, digital experience — than Instagram?
During our roundtable, one participant asked: But ARE people connecting with a work of art through a photo or a selfie? My colleague Jim Fishwick’s response: “I say yes. This is the social function of photography rather than an exercise in vanity.” And I tend to agree. By extending the museum experience to your device, you’re creating an external hard drive of your memory. Experiences are captured, saved, preserved.
3. The Museum of Ice Cream might be just as valid as any other museum.
Our roundtable also discussed the ever-controversial, always-trendy spaces that call themselves “museums,” like the Color Factory in New York or the Museum of Ice Cream in San Francisco. This probably isn’t going to be a popular opinion, but I’m wondering if experiencing something like the installations in the Color Factory might entice visitors to eventually stop by another institution in New York, or at least consider how museums might contribute to the equation of future experiences they might have.
Call me crazy, but museums should be both fun and thought-provoking. Looking at @colorfactoryco or @museumoficecream’s Instagram feeds, I see both fun and thought in how visitors have staged, designed, and creatively constructed their Instagram images. These visitors are constructing their own experiences, not following expectations of what a traditional museum experience should be. And isn’t this what we want?
On site or online, museums must be open to experiences of all kinds. Not every experience with an object will be transformative. And not every object-based experience will be in front of that object. I used to think that in order to connect with a work of art, I had to slow down, think carefully, and quietly ponder the object’s existence. I’m no longer sure that’s the only way. Actually, online is not sub-par to IRL. Think about all the ways people use the Google Art Project, or other image viewers. At the end of the day, is the physical object essential for every type of aesthetic experience? Maybe. I don’t have all the answers, and neither do museums. But we must be open to letting our visitors discover meaning on their own terms, and through their own points of view (and lenses).
“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter — and getting smarter faster than most companies.”
That’s from The Cluetrain Manifesto, a business text published in 2000 by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger, as an expanded version of the “95 theses” the authors had released a year earlier on the web. The book was a huge bestseller, and it ended up being very influential in the tech boom of post-bubble Silicon Valley. It’s riddled with quotable tidbits like the one above. One of my favorites is this, “[The Internet] undermines unthinking respect for centralized authority, whether that ‘authority’ is the neatly homogenized voice of broadcast advertising or the smarmy rhetoric of the corporate annual report.” That is what many of us genuinely believed almost twenty years ago.
I’ve been thinking about Cluetrain a lot lately. The book, like much of the popular thinking of the time, is filled to the brim with unrealistic technocratic optimism and happy predictions that have failed to come true. One of the core premises of the text is that networked technology will fundamentally alter human culture, and that these changes will liberate, educate and unite people into “markets” engaged in “conversations”. We’ll all form affinity groups online and self organize into humanist-oriented communities of mutual support, keeping each other safe from the manipulative misinformation of the elitist broadcast era that came before the birth of the populist network.
Nearly twenty years later, it’s a little hard to take Cluetrain and its many contemporaries seriously. Markets certainly do not seem to be getting smarter faster than the companies which exploit them. Social media companies promote extreme, polarizing content to increase vaguely defined engagement metrics. Search engines tailor query results to match our profile, narrowing rather than expanding our worldview. Political campaigns have begun using online advertising and social media promotion to knowingly spread disinformation to audiences believed to be vulnerable to such tactics in advance of increasingly contentious elections.
And it is important to remember that all of this was built on the twin premises that:
A. Advertisers will pay more for ads if they think the audience is more receptive to their message.
B. Regular people want ads that are more relevant to their interests rather than, say, fewer ads in their lives or no ads at all.
Neither of these two premises seems to be true, or at least true to any meaningful degree. Online advertising is still quite cheap compared to broadcast advertising in spite of its targeted nature. And I don’t know anyone who deeply appreciates the deluge of ads they find in their social media feeds, email inboxes, search engine results, freemium apps, news websites, and almost anywhere else you care to look online. Nor is there particularly convincing evidence to indicate that targeted online advertising actually works any better than old-fashioned broadcast advertising.
And yet, we have built the most massive surveillance network in human history to support targeted advertising as a business model. This network of surveillance is entirely owned by private companies with little to no obligation to protect public safety or promote public benefit, and there is no reason to believe that anyone other than them benefits from its existence.
And that’s just one issue we find ourselves worrying about now. We also worry about addiction to new media. We worry about the effects of constant distraction on our mental and civic health. We worry about the constant drive toward greater efficiency that has altered and often dehumanized many of our jobs. We worry about the automation of those jobs as robotics and A.I. continue to advance. The tools for liberation, education and unity that were promised to us in the late 90s have turned into sources of anxiety, confusion and division in the present day.
How do cultural organizations like museums participate in online culture without becoming victims to its perils? Perhaps more importantly, how do we utilize the tools of the network without participating in the systems that victimize our visitors? Why do we use Facebook tracking codes and Google Analytics on our websites? Have we ever asked ourselves, or do we just go along with “industry best practices” that were defined for the for-profit sector? Do we have any idea how useful these tools actually are to us, or do we assume their utility based on general consensus? Do we even know if alternatives exist?
In all of the talk of museums learning from the for-profit sector, do we ever stop to ask if the behaviors of the companies we imitate align with the principles of the organizations we serve? Is it normal for us to just adopt tools and behaviors from the for-profit sector without such analysis, or is this unique to the complicated and often confusing world of technology?
Who in the average museum has the time to analyze and examine these practices? Whose role is it to be responsible for questioning these practices? Who decides whether it violates the spirit of our mission to participate in a vast private surveillance network in order to count “clicks”? And again, this is just one issue of many related to technology. How much technology should be deployed in our spaces? What purpose should it serve? Should museums offer a refuge from the encroachment of digital technology in our lives? Or should they engage in the conversation around these issues, providing a space for people to learn, think and talk about the role of technology in their lives? Should we serve an education role? Do people need to be told about individual companies’ power over their lives? We think we know what principles are represented in the mission statements of our organizations, but what principles are represented in our behaviors?
Honestly, our roundtable discussion raised more of these questions than it answered. What seems clear is that it falls to individuals within our institutions to examine and adapt their practices and to drive the necessary conversations forward. There is no institutional force driving toward ethics. There is no role in our organizations responsible for finding the answers to difficult questions. We have to do this ourselves.
And that makes sense. After all, it’s the same answer we face to our larger questions as a society. Everything we’re afraid of now is the result of something we welcomed into our lives. The society that enthusiastically read The Cluetrain Manifesto also enthusiastically adopted social networks, free website analytics, free email services and customized search results. We deferred to best practice and accepted the wisdom of the crowd. We let the companies selling us their products tell us how amazing the world would be if we let them alter it.
We can’t wait for someone else to answer the difficult questions for us because that’s what is happening now. The companies that seek to exploit us as a market are answering these questions in a way that serves their ends, not ours. But these technologies didn’t come to dominate our economy and culture on their own. We adopted them. It’s time for us — as individuals and as communities — to interrogate them, understand them and adapt our use of them to serve our needs. If we don’t, then it’s reasonable to expect more anxiety, confusion and division in our future.
A conceptualist walks into a bar. The bartender says, “What’ll it be?” The conceptualist points to a person drinking at the other end of the bar and says, “I’ll have what he’s having, but over here in this context.”
I like that joke because it gets at something I intuited about language long before I’d read Derrida — that language, which almost all of us have, is always about what’s absent (differánce oui?), that it points to what’s missing as its way of meaning, and that context is perhaps all we can ever have at any given moment. Bottoms up!
When I think about art and language, I think about who was missing from the context of art in the mid-20th Century — mainly women, people of color, and queers. What better way to point to absence itself than in the material of what’s missing? Critic and conceptual art theorist, Lucy Lippard, understood this. The abstract expressionists had reached the apotheosis of absolute materiality of painting, but they conveniently ignored the context: their white maleness. Lippard was simply pointing it out via dematerialization, i.e., the emperor’s new clothes.
The emergence of women artists like Martha Rosler, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Yoko Ono wasn’t an accident. The dematerialization of art was a decidedly feminist move, and an ingenious one. Abstract expressionism hadn’t just taken art to its purest form of materiality, its presence as product in the total obliteration of meaning was hewn from the metaphor provided by the A-bomb’s obliteration of everything. Though there have been several excellent revisionist reconsiderations of the abstract moment’s gender problems (the Denver Art Museum’s 2016–2017 Women of Abstract Expressionism to name one), the heroes at that moment were all white men. That was the context to which Lippard and Co. pointed in the language of absence — white male supremacy as embodied by the new hegemony of the ultimate exportable conceptual product: American capitalism. (Is it any surprise that the abstract expressionists’ works were used by the CIA as Trojan Horse ideological exports deployed to undermine Soviet propaganda? The genius of capitalism is its ideological triumph over the state, i.e., who needs state propaganda when you already own everyone’s minds?) Bydematerializing art and its practice, Lippard and Co. managed to point all of this out in a new language: language — the most democratic, if least marketable, medium this side of dust. It leveled (for some) the art landscape, if not the art market, and centered those at the margins. As Lippard writes in Escape Attempts, her memoir of the times:
The inexpensive, ephemeral, un-intimidating character of the Conceptual mediums themselves (video, performance, photography, narrative, text, actions) encouraged women to participate, to move through this crack in the art world’s walls. With the public introduction of younger women artists into Conceptual art, a number of new subjects and approaches appeared: narrative, role-playing, guise and disguise, body and beauty issues; a focus on fragmentation, interrelationships, autobiography, performance, daily life, and, of course, on feminist politics. The role of women artists and critics in the Conceptual art flurry of the mid-sixties was (unbeknownst to us at the time) similar to that of women on the Left. We were slowly emerging from the kitchens and bedrooms, off the easels, out of the woodwork, whether the men were ready or not — and for the most part they weren’t.
I saw the exhibition, “Materializing ‘Six Years’: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art,” at the Brooklyn Museum many years ago, and it wasn’t hard to imagine how un-ready men were for it. It was still strikingly mundane in its anti-aesthetic — like some museum of fetishized Stasi bureaucracy: index cards full of instructions, documents documenting performances of boredom, labor, domestic rituals, etc. — all still so vital and exciting in their middle-fingers to the preciousness and apartness of the male art that preceded it.
(Brief aside: dematerialization is, of course, native to language, which makes it surprising to think that conceptual writing [see: Vanessa Place’s Gone With the Wind Twitter project; and, speaking of context, Kenneth Goldsmith’s deeply fucked up reading of Michael Brown’s autopsy report] didn’t really come along until the early 2000s, more than a quarter century after Conceptual art. Aside from the fact that the movement was, and is [conceptually], redundant, it was also almost a century late to the game. Argentine writers, Macedonio Fernandez and Jorge Luis Borges, had already popped the balloon of “authorship” as the ultimate expression of capitalist context in the early 20th Century [but hey, what’s new?]. And what, after all, could belong to anyone less than language? [See: Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”.] Unless, of course, we’re talking about computer languages — Python, etc. — in the context of the techno-priesthood Latin of Silicon Valley, the manufactured scarcity of codes.)
And yet: there it was in the Brooklyn Museum. In other words, capital C Conceptual art was as much Python as it was vernacular, as much abstract expressionism as abstract expressionism once the velvet ropes had been moved to let the women, people of color, and queers in. To paraphrase Žižek: just because the avant-garde pointed out the structures of capitalism doesn’t mean it wasn’t recreating the structures of capitalism. The paradox (and perhaps the problem) is, and always will be, that you can’t let everyone in without letting in everyone you don’t want as well. The context is, was, and always will be, power. Once you remove the ropes altogether, the context that is power looks a lot like what may be the ultimate conceptual art project of all time: Twitter. Is it any surprise that Twitter is Donald Trump’s context, that he learned the lessons of the avant-garde and took them all the way the end of the fence, or the velvet ropes, or the wall he’s always pointing toward in hopes he might keep the next group out with the greatest re-materialization since Tara Donovan? It might just make him the greatest artist of our time.
Here’s to him, over here in this context, where I’m still (and always will be) waiting for my drink to arrive.
“Life is deeply steeped in suffering, and cannot escape from it; our entrance into it takes place amid tears, at bottom its course is always tragic, and its end is even more so.” –Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
“I can give you reports that are fabulous and I can give you reports that aren’t so good…” –President Donald Trump on recent Climate Change studies.
The tone of the recent Tilt West roundtable conversation on Environmental Ethics & the Arts echoed a feeling that has been growing within me for quite some time now. When I think of the future, especially in light of global climate change, I’m filled with neither hope nor despair — but an anxious numbness, a twitchy morbid wondering and wanting. A wanting to want to be hopeful. Yet I find that my resources (like so many others in our world today) feel overdrawn, exhausted. I am, perhaps, too eagerly looking for the excuse or validation to fall deeply and thoroughly into a cold and complete hopelessness. I’m having an illicit affair with pessimism. During the conversation, when someone asked, “is it already too late?,” another participant unhesitatingly and forcefully (but without judgement) said, “YES!,” and there was a cathartic round of laughter. We had all been waiting for this; to have someone tell us what we already feared and knew — that we’re past the point of no return, that there is nothing to be done. It’s all over now, and we can just hang up our hats and wait it out. Death comes for us all, and today that reality is certain in a more global and concrete way.
I might be projecting.
I’ve been soaking up a lot of pessimism these days (much in the way that an oyster mushroom can soak up petroleum hydrocarbons and heavy metals).[1] A certain tone of theoretical pessimism has become popular recently, largely thanks to Eugene Thacker and his “Cosmic Pessimism,” which is derived from the patriarch of all pessimist philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer. It’s a masculine, navel-gazing pessimism that implies that we’d all be better off if we’d never been born, but without the conviction of wanting to actually commit to death. I have trouble buying into this particular style of pessimism; its end point is a tragedy of the commons in which no one has to do anything, and we can wait for inevitable mass extinction, nuclear winter, or whatever it may be that brings us all to the death we should have had already. Sounds dire, but so do today’s headlines: “We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe,”[2]“Earth Will Survive. We May Not,”[3]and “We’re Doomed.”[4] As if the news wasn’t enough to fuel my fast-growing pessimism along, after leaving the Tilt West discussion, I walked past a church billboard that reprimanded me with, “PESSIMISTS NEED A KICK IN THE CAN’TS.”
Well, do we?
The question of “what can we do” was raised repeatedly during the roundtable conversation, but never answered. This is part of the problem. Things begin to look too big, minutia piles up, and a cycle of neoliberal guilt and release kicks in (characterized by personal exculpations like, “I’m vegan,” “I have a reusable straw,” “I take public transport,” or “I don’t fly anymore”). But as Donna Haraway explains throughout her book, Staying with the Trouble, this individualism cannot be maintained in light of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene. As we know, and as Haraway explains, we live in troubled and troubling times, and these “mixed-up,” “cloudy” moments are filled with both pain and joy (“vastly unjust patterns of pain and joy”).[5]Our task is to simply become capable within these times. But how? We need to recognize that no god-like technology will save us (no Deus-ex-Musk taking us all to Mars), but neither will our problems go away if we just ignore them. Our relationship with time has to change. “In urgent times,” Haraway observes, “many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future…”[6] Instead, we have to live in the present, and most of all, according to Haraway, we must “stay with the trouble” no matter how uncomfortable it may be. We must also become less human-centric; we must “make kin” with all kinds of non-human “critters.” “The task” as Harraway explains it, “is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present.”[7]
Trouble is coming no matter what, whether we like it or not, and we have to stay with it. Humans will transform perhaps beyond recognition (if they survive). Our job is to figure out not only how to live but how to die well. Now.
To be honest, I don’t think Haraway is pessimistic enough.
My favorite iteration of the, “What can we do,” question was brought to the roundtable by prompter Jessica Langley, who asked, very concretely and in the face of our high-waisted cant’s, “What can artists, specifically, do — and what can this group of artists here today, collectively, do?” This question was posed in a way that would do Haraway proud — it wasn’t a consideration “for the future” or an effort to “stop all this,” but a genuine reflection on what we can do here, today, together. The question was posed not in the spirit of determining what we can produce or solve necessarily, but in how to make kin and live better. Although her question was left disappointingly unanswered, I was inspired by the response posed in lessons from mycology that Langley provided. She shared stories of the diverse benefits mushrooms can deliver, many of which are only now coming to be understood, from breaking down e-waste to helping cancer patients.[8]
I find it odd that Haraway doesn’t discuss mushrooms more, as they may be the exemplary subject for what she calls “Chthonic ones.” She elaborates: “Chthonic ones are beings of the earth, both ancient and up-to-the minute…Chthonic ones romp in multicritter humus but have no truck with sky-gazing Homo. Chthonic ones are monsters in the best sense; they demonstrate and perform the material meaningfulness of earth processes and critters. They also demonstrate and perform consequences. Chthonic ones are not safe; they have no truck with ideologues; they belong to no one; they writhe and luxuriate in manifold forms and manifold names in all the airs, waters, and places of earth. They make and unmake; they are made and unmade. They are who are.”[9]
Mycologist Paul Stamets might agree with categorizing mushrooms as “Chthonic” since, as he explains (devoid of Haraway’s sometimes jargoned “critter speak”), “Our bodies and our environs are habitats with immune systems…and fungi are a common bridge between the two…mycelium are the neurological network of nature…with a sentient membrane” that has “the long-term health of the host environment in mind.”[10]Mushrooms are already making kin with us and the world, let’s make kin back.
We can make kin, but what about art?
The discussion turned, at various points, to what it means to make art in this moment — is it possible for art not to be complicit with environmental trouble? The approach of artist-as-beacon was mentioned in the discussion; some felt that a creative approach to life and living — to be a beacon who doesn’t own a car, or fly in a plane, or use plastic bags, or on and on and on — can be a useful directive. This concept extends, of course, to artistic practice. But how can we make art about the state of the environment when the art comes wrapped in plastics, or when we put up and tear down the equivalent of a house in building materials to install an exhibition? What does it matter if we make work about the impact of climate change if we ship and fly works across the world?[11]A participant asked: can one really call oneself an environmental artist and use harmful materials? A resounding “NO” seemed to be the response, but others felt that education trumps materiality and practice.
It goes back and forth; individual and collective acts are powerful, but structural, governmental, corporate change is always needed. How to untwist these questions beyond the intricacies of who is contributing to what problems in the art world? And really, what are the stakes in that fight when 70% of all greenhouse emissions are caused by only 100 companies?[12]Then again, BP (number eleven on the list of 100) has been the target of protests due to of their massive sponsorship of the arts and ExxonMobil Corp (number five) was once called “a Medici” in reference to their large patronage.[13]Does art help or hurt? Where is the balance?
But back to my pessimism.
I’ve been worrying about time (it’s on my mind, if not my side). There are the aforementioned daily news articles putting a clock on our world, and then there are men putting clocks into mountains — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, to be specific. He’s invested over 42 million dollars into constructing, “The Clock of the Long Now,” (originally conceived by Danny Hillis) within a mountain he owns in Texas. It will tick once a year for at least 10,000 years, with a cuckoo coming out every millennium. That’s one way to slow time down, although its purpose, according to a founding board member (we’re living in the Capitalocene, folks, of course our conception of slow time has a corporate board) will be to “embody deep time for people” and “be charismatic to visit” as well as “be famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse.”[14]
The Tilt West discussion hit upon the topic of time in discussing the need to slow down and to take things in, whether it be mushrooms on a walk, Iceland before tourism subsumes its natural wonders, or your own life and artistic practice in a deliberate manner. One discussion participant pulled at my pessimistic heartstrings, sharing that, after a trip to Iceland, they felt the need to stop making work, not to slow down but to stop. The notion of stopping altogether seemed troubling to participants, but perhaps we could all be more like a contemporary Bartleby, preferring not to — not to keep replicating, reproducing, and adding to the pile and speed.
Slowing down is especially important, I feel, in the face of the overwhelmingly popular and effective right-wing accelerationism movement. Accelerationism is the concept that capitalism, and/or its attending technologies, can (and should) be used against itself. If we lean into the structure of capitalism, speed it up, exaggerate it and its libidinous growth and contradictions, it can be provoked to a breaking point. Over the years, accelerationism has split into left and right alignments, the right currently seeming to be the most effective. As Isaac Camacho writes in his article “Nick Land and Accelerationism,” “The right alignment consists of NRx, Vulgar Libertarianism, and the Alt-Right. The Trump administration is both a symptom and a catalyst for right accelerationism.”[15]Long story short, while left accelerationists feel that the only way out of capitalism is through it, and then we’ll be left with a “Marxism for the 21stCentury,”[16]the right accelerationists are exploiting the ways in which capitalism turns people into human garbage. They don’t have to worry about how to fix climate change, because they choose to buy their way out of it. Camacho argues, “The wealthiest people in the world are throwing fortunes at a gated world after climate change as opposed to fixing it for everyone.”[17] For a select few, the god of technology will save them, but the rest of us are only getting in their way.
So again, what can we, as artists and thinkers and potential non-1%ers who are about to be made into expendable human waste, do?
I don’t have the answers, but, in conclusion, I want to return to Haraway’s conception of time. Haraway’s antidote to the Capitalocene and Anthropocene is what she dubs the “Chthulucene” (and no, it has nothing to do with the unimaginably horrific being…except perhaps for sharing tentacles). The term “Chthulucene” comes from the Greek “kainos” meaning “now.” It’s “a timeplace for learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying response-ability on a damaged earth…”[18] I think it’s fine to be a pessimist, to not feel hopeful for the future. I don’t need a kick. We can acknowledge that there is no hope, no future, but still not give up or be inactive. We can live (and die) well –not in spite of, but because of, the trouble that we have. Action is still needed, and we can take it without a fantasy of a perfect future filled with perfect solutions (while still acknowledging that some solutions are better than others). We can wait for something better to come along, or we can put out our tentacles to other critters while we’re all still here, whatever that looks like, fixing the problems as they come, and just live until we die — not for the future, because there very well may be none, but for each other and ourselves.
We can accept the construct and all that it insists upon, or we can decide where it is false, re-write or invent a more suitable setting, put (part of) ourselves in it, and then begin being free.
Part One: Re-Introduction
Writing on The Art and Politics of Afrofuturism is to write about a continuous, evolutionary event — something moving, something blurry and uncertain. Certainly, something in the movement we call ‘Afrofuturism’ is complementary to other freedom movements of our times. But I want to draw attention to the possibility that so-called militant Black Power groups such as The Nation of Islam and The Black Panthers are in direct opposition, not to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and other nonviolent groups as first thought, but to Afrofuturism. With wildly imaginative products and ideas, Afrofuturism has the specific potential to diversify what is often perceived as a binary identification of political Black persons in the American psyche.
Part Two: The First Laws of Afrofuturism
I have discovered four useful concepts for engaging the Afrofuturistic frame. I will attempt to make these concepts useful to all of us as we explore. Thank you for your indulgence.
Law 1. All time and space occur simultaneously.
That is to say that there have been a lot of suggestions of which direction the future is, some are up, out, on, in, around, and through all of time and space. Some suggestions exist in the past, present, and in various speculative futures. All must be equally valid.
Law 2. Afrofuturism does not distinguish among works which are based in experience and reality, works which are based in the imagination, or works which are speculative.
It has not proved useful to say whether a creative project or idea has or has not been realized. What is important is that (Black) minds are conjuring and resolving challenges in their present or that they imagine a future where such a challenge requires their attention. It is also important to say that if access and opportunity to the various means of creative production and self-sufficiency have been historically denied to the Black person in America, then the imagination of that same person will have to suffice.
Law 3. Afrofuturism is a Human movement.
It does not serve Black people (or any other people) to create futures which still contain the germ of racism and the effects of historic bigotries. While Afrofuturism does not concern itself with the futures of White persons specifically (except where it does), it also does not aim to enslave or promote systems which lack equity or inclusion of all persons. Consequently, the Afrofuturist may be a person of any gender or race.
Law 4. Free your mind…and your ass will follow[2].
Any questions? I didn’t think so.
Part Three: An Exposition on Space and Time
Our understanding of Time is a construct with much history. Where our pre-history relationship to time is one of planetary shadows and magic — our early observation of the lights which move in the sky — our historic bodily association with time is one of labor in the delegated and often negotiated realms of impulse, purpose, work, slavery, devotion, and punishment.
Time is also Space (or more specifically, distance and light). The author’s reasonable extrapolation of our scientific understanding could say, “All Travel Is Time Travel,” especially travel to that which we will eventually call “outer space.”
This is relevant because when Sun Ra [3] offers us Space is the Place [4], we are energetically invited toward three things: 1. To travel. 2. To escape the gravitational force of this planet. 3. To look upwards and see the light that has traveled to make itself known to us and to imagine meeting who and what is in the stars.
All three of these invitations seem critical to the Negro in America who seeks an Afrofuturist identity. We need not critique Ra’s other-worldliness, but if we embrace his construct [5], we may find ourselves shot at unimaginable speeds toward the other planets in our solar system (perhaps Saturn or Pluto) with experiences and tools that bring lightness to (or lighten the burden of) the Negro and Human experience.
To Travel
The invitation to move freely and to travel is crucial because the United States first began to criminalize the movement of free people when slavery was abolished. The Black Codes of 1865 and 1866 [6], were put into effect to quell the free movement of Black people of “The South” as a way to continue to exploit the labor of freed Negroes.
To Escape Gravity
I can think of no greater metaphor than gravity to describe the burden of the American Negro at this time. Even though Black people in America continue to endure so many policies whose purpose is to burden them with constraints that impede their opportunities for self-reliance and dignity, Ra’s construct employs a transcendent quality where there are oppressors, no victims, and no spoils. Instead he sees the negative condition of the Negro (and perhaps all people) as an invisible force — which is not attributed to one person or single action, but is necessarily heavy — and is a principal, defining characteristic of this planet and of this particular place. In this regard, Ra’s Afrofuturism is engaging the psyche of the American people through Jazz, suggesting that all things are possible and that our true orientation (and origin) may be elsewhere and may be attempting to (re)make contact with us.
Consider contemporary works such as the 1999 film The Matrix [7], in which Morpheus (a Black leader)[8] invites the dissident, Neo, to ‘re-write’ the construct. He transforms and reshapes the Matrix into a place for ‘freed’ persons to imagine themselves to have the identical powers as those who created the construct. In this place, imagination is critical to survival. Incidentally, the last human city on Earth, ‘Zion,’ appears to be neo-primitive (steampunked) and filled with predominantly non-White, freed persons.
Part Four: Imagination, Experience, Speculation and Action
For Ra and others, the engagement of the imagination is essential to the construct. Jazz is where Ra expressed himself; over 66 years he recruited more than 30 musicians to engage in improvisation and collaboration in his Arkestra. This is profound because the organizing of labor and the improvisation of Negros in the ‘Jim Crow’ South was not just uncommon, but virtually illegal. This particular aspirational identity towards self-reliance and the belief that there is so much of our birthright that we have not explored yet is certainly one narrative which we find echoed and expressed throughout the freedom movement — the so-called ‘civil rights’ movement. The imaginative transformation of this construct to suit our historic and future needs is a principal characteristic which was not, however, present in the works of ‘Black Militants’ of the time.
Speculation (as in: speculative fiction and design) is an appropriate tool for this movement. One noteworthy example is the inconvenient speculative architecture of Bodys Isek Kingelez as shown in his recent exhibit at MoMA, City Dreams (pictured above). This self-described artist, engineer, and architect has produced hundreds of maquette designs for architectural projects that would contribute to the urban renewal of the capital city of Kinshasa in his country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire, formerly the Belgian Congo). Bodys’ work is ‘inconvenient’ because while the work is absolutely future-focused, his motivation comes from his experience and identity as a product of an invading colonial force. His powerfully expressed disdain for his countrymen and nostalgia for Belgian colonialism bring an intellectual diversity to the products which are included in this movement of Afrofuturism.
At present, it is the mediums of film and television which dominate commentary on the status of the Negro in America, with many Black directors, writers, producers and actors contributing to the various roles and archetypes. Their contribution largely consists of representations of daily life — in sitcoms, dramas, and thrillers. In the genre of science fiction, the inclusion of Black narratives like those of Nyota Uhura [9], Thomas Dodge [10] or David Kano [11] have helped frame the Black astronaut experience, even to the point of making space travel for Black people conceivable in real life.
In the 2018 film Sorry to Bother You, Boots Riley has created a ‘present day’ dystopian Oakland, CA where, on one level, Riley’s setting is familiar and consistent — though being simultaneously both hyperbolic and hyper-normal, and on another, the modest and immodest human transformations create access to new spaces and wildly creative narratives within the film. In some ways Riley’s imaginative work is similar to the Michel Gondry film of 2008, Be Kind, Rewind, in which the characters are responsible for a re-writing of history, a re-making of contemporary media, and even an opportunity to re-think the mechanics of creativity itself.
Part Five: Human
In all these futures, we imagine places without exclusively White places or exclusively Black places. Even in Wakanda (Black Panther, Marvel, 2017), the imagined Central African country, the principal argument among the citizens is how to share the bounty of ‘the gift’ (vibranium) with the rest of the world. Afrofuturism often envisions spaces where the historic effects of race have either evaporated, reversed, or — in the most fantastic speculation — never existed at all, and the index of the transatlantic slave trade is similarly nonexistent. Perhaps this imaginative construct exists — in part — for the purpose of disrupting typical image-making of the last several hundred years, giving elders and young persons alike an opportunity to evade the psychic damage created by images that present the histories of human abuse of Black persons all over the world. This ‘type’ of future (as with all futures) has an infinite number of permutations.
In the filmic science fiction works of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, Gene Roddenberry, Ridley Scott, and others who were given the opportunity to envision worlds and futures where race was no longer conditioned by the racial aspects of slavery, we see that it is not only the imaginations of Black people who bring images to light for Afrofuturism, but all people with access to the means of production who have been remaking and re-framing all of the histories, both past and present, for all of us.
It occurs to me that the first wave of Afrofuturism was largely literary and musical. It is probably due in large part to the costs of production and distribution that much of the first wave was oriented toward the intellectual devotees of Black music experience, literature, and some science fiction. This new (second) wave shows great contributions in music, but its reach extends more broadly to film and fashion and all of the design fields.
The second wave has a different driver, one nested in late-stage capitalism, that is completely in step with recent significant changes in the mechanics of cinema. The tools for making cinema are now available to a broader creative class, which is bringing new voices and players onto the scene. The resulting films also have a significantly wider audience of White and Black consumers alike. Thus this second wave of Afrofuturism is significant because it reimagines an artistic medium previously available only to elites and dramatically broadens its reach.
A Cautionary Caveat in Conclusion
Afrofuturism is in the atmosphere again at a time when inclusivity is part of the conversation; that’s a good thing. But I fear the market forces at work in its newest incarnation. The natural enemy of multiculturalism, of true inclusivity, is acculturation. The danger in wider commercial acceptance is that we will endorse only the possibilities expressed in the popular mediums of film and television, thereby restricting our potential afro-futures to the limitations and demands of our contemporary capitalist culture. And where’s the beauty in that? But I also have hope. If I have learned anything from my research on this topic, it is that Afrofuturism is free to be in the mainstream and in the underground. It is, after all, a subversive movement, a ripple, and — as such — an important continuous disruption in time-space.
Let’s be honest, censorship can be discussed, argued, and evaluated ad nauseum. Like any social or political issue, everyone has an opinion, and the opinions are varied. We value the notion of neutrality in such discussions, the idea that a free or open exchange of ideas yields “truth.” But what happens when voices are not given equal weight, when the historical and cultural context that informs some voices is suppressed before the conversation even begins?
I am a person of color, as they say. More specifically, I am an Indigenous person, as well as being an artist. I live in a society in which the image, likeness, and existence of Indigenous people is scripted by popular culture — a culture that is not ours. In my career, censorship has been weaponized to maintain these popular tropes and to escape the discomfort of a truth that is different from that of the popular (mis)understanding.
For those of us who are “other,” there is aggression, even evisceration, in censorship. The term “other” refers to the social status of people who are inherently different than those of the dominant culture. “Othering” emerged out of European Colonialism, where defining who is “good” or “normal” was an important part of conquering the world. “Othering,” by extension, became part of the history and vernacular of the United States, where the role played by people of color was either forced labor or straight-up genocide.
Embedded in this history of “othering” is the authority to define and inform who Indigenous people are across generations. What is latent in this definition is the positioning of the worth of one people, culture, and story over that of another. To define a people as savage is to make them less than — less smart, less desirable in appearance, less worthy than anything in Western culture — even to the people themselves.
So, how does this relate to permission and censorship in art? Growing up in the United States taught me that, for someone like me, submission is rewarded over seeking permission. Censorship becomes a means of quieting the voices of those who seek permission to define their own sense of existence and identity.
Some context is necessary. Just about everything indigenous, from sports mascots to films to literature to art — yes, even art — is defined by a limited set of images: the man in the headdress, or the submissive maiden. Being defined by headdresses and buckskin maidens is to be beholden to an image of Plains Indians, who represent a fraction of the indigenous tribes and traditions. There are 577 federally-recognized tribes in the U.S., and several hundred more that are not. There are over 300 different languages and multiple dialects within each language, and at least as many different traditions, origin stories, and cultures. And yet our “Indian-ness” is judged in relation to the dress and even the facial features of about a dozen tribes. Whether one is Navajo or — like me — Paiute, we must present as a Plains Indian to give you, the non-Indian, context.
This carefully-scripted context quite literally will inform what is permitted in art by Indigenous people. There is a silent, insidious censorship at work, in which curators and collectors decide whether an Indigenous artist’s work looks Indian enough to be authentic. Anything outside the canon of Western understanding of Indigenous identity is cast aside as too complicated, too uncomfortable, even offensive. Often, we don’t even get to the point of entering the conversation.
In 2016, I was invited to participate in an exhibition of more than 40 artists representing diverse nations, religions, races, sexual orientations and genders at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. — a career milestone for any artist.
Just as things were ramping up, the Office of Public Affairs at the Smithsonian approached the head curator of the exhibition with concerns; the Office wanted to perform an extra layer of vetting of each artist. The curator was tasked with presenting the artists and their proposed work to a committee, which happened to be entirely Caucasian. Two artists were singled out for extra scrutiny, and I was one of those artists.
In my performance work, I deliberately engage tropes and cultural stereotypes in order to disarm them. When the curator showed the committee a photograph from my performance entitled, “The Last American Indian On Earth,” which shows me clad in a faux Indigenous outfit and a fake (albeit decently made) headdress, the response was an audible gasp. The idea of my proposed performance was to embody the Indigenous stereotype and document public reactions to it. I certainly got a reaction.
The committee presented me with a list of requirements that went something like this:
1. You can NOT talk about the Washington Redskins. You cannot use the Redskin logo or insignia, and you are not allowed to use the word “Redskin” at any point of the weekend and performance.
2. Your work needs to be submitted to and checked by the director of the National Museum of American Indians.
3. Validation of your right to create such works needs to be presented to the National Museum of American Indians director. This can be in the form of proof of tribal enrollment, certificate of Indian blood, or other documentation proving your lineal right to be listed as an Indigenous artist.
4. Failure to adhere to these items will remove you from the exhibition and be considered a breach in contract.
I was blind-sided. Never in my years as an artist had I been required to “prove” either my own Indigeneity — by tribal registration or blood quotient — or the “Indian-ness” of my ideas. Can you imagine them requiring participating black artists to check their work with the newly-erected National Museum of African American History and Culture, or Asian artists to go to the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (also on the National Mall under the Smithsonian umbrella), or — heaven forbid — the few White artists in this show to go to… I don’t know… the National Museum of American History? The football team mandate was gratuitous, as I never proposed anything having to do with the mascot. “Redskin” is a dictionary-defined racial slur. And yet, standing on the National Mall in one of the pre-eminent art museums in the nation, I was pre-emptively told not mention it, so that I would not offend the non-Indigenous football franchise.
Because I wanted to exhibit at the Smithsonian, I went through their vetting process with regard to each aspect of my work, but I kept a few tricks up my sleeve. I changed the name of my piece to “The Indian Voice Removal Act of 1879–2016.” 1879 was the year the first government-owned Indian boarding school had opened, something I consider to be an early official government action to eradicate the cultural voices of Indigenous people. For this show, I had proposed to erect a giant tipi as a backdrop to a performance piece. I told the committee that the tipi would be filled with images of Indigenous people. What I didn’t tell them is that I would deface each painting, which were all black and white, with a big red “X” over the subjects’ mouths. And for my performance piece, I would place a large, white handprint over my own mouth. When people directed questions to me, a white man dressed as an anthropologist with a name tag that read “Cornelius Smith, Cultural Interpreter” would respond instead.
My artwork became a protest — a response to censorship and an echo of the silencing of Indigenous voices by Western powers for centuries. Censorship remains a core aspect of my work. I have been required to jump through hoops that other artists — even other artists of color — would never be asked to tolerate because of the profound discomfort that arises when I challenge the narrative imposed on my “otherness.” The Smithsonian was concerned by my use of appropriation (appropriation is bad, right?) without ever considering that the images I embodied had themselves been appropriated by the dominant culture.
In a conversation about censorship and permission, all voices are not equally situated because of the weight of history. For indigenous artists like me, that history is so endemic as to be rendered invisible, even as compared with that of other people of color. Times are changing, but censorship remains in play as an arsenal to maintain dominant narratives even in the most celebrated art institutions.
Do people have the right to be wrong? This question anchors arguments about censorship, mooring interlocutors in stormy waters.
When the censor answers, “No,” that response comes from the conviction that ████████ is too harmful to be heard. At its best, censorship can be a loving gesture, a protective hand pressing against vulnerable ears. At its worst, censorship is a selfish maneuver, a shield around the censor that deflects criticism.
When the heretic answers, “Yes,” that rejoinder comes from the conviction that nothing is too harmful to be heard. At its best, heresy can be a rejection of patronizing attempts to shelter, an insistence that treating people as fragile is both an insult and a self-fulfilling prophecy. At its worst, heresy is a shallow excuse for bad behavior, a justification for malice.
Of course, heretics don’t believe that they’re wrong, and sometimes they’re right about that. “The truth hurts,” they might say. Other times, they really are wrong. But the right to be wrong does not hinge upon an objective analysis of the truth. In those stormy waters, there’s too much salt stinging peoples’ eyes to find the truth; the compass was washed overboard; dark, gray clouds cover the stars.
When people evaluate the right to be wrong, what they care about is how much pain the heresy causes, not how true the heresy is. And so, in navigating between the censors’ “no” and the heretics’ “yes,” we must ask a follow-up question: What results in more harm — the risk of being wrong or the elimination of that possibility? It is instructive to consider real-world examples when mulling over complicated questions like this, because the devil is always in the details. Exhibit A is Andres Serrano’s 1987 photograph, “Immersion (Piss Christ).”
Serrano submerged a wood and plastic crucifix in a vat full of his own urine and then photographed Christ on the cross through the bubbling, amber fluid. Of his motivations, Serrano said, “I’m a Christian artist making a religious work of art based on my relationship with Christ and The Church. The crucifix is a symbol that has lost its true meaning; the horror of what occurred. It represents the crucifixion of a man who was tortured, humiliated and left to die on a cross for several hours. In that time, Christ not only bled to death, he probably saw all his bodily functions and fluids come out of him. So if ‘Piss Christ’ upsets people, maybe this is so because it is bringing the symbol closer to its original meaning. There was a time prior to the 17th century when the only important art, the only art that mattered, was religious art. After that, there were very few contemporary art pieces that were considered both art and religious, and ‘Piss Christ’ is one of them.”
Serrano’s detractors attributed other motives to him, and they accused him of blasphemy that hurt believers. A 16-year-old boy bludgeoned “Piss Christ” with a hammer at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne because his mother wept after the Gallery decided to display it. That Australian retrospective of Serrano’s work was promptly closed, so that violence would not spread to the simultaneous Rembrandt exhibition. A few years later, in Avignon, France, another Serrano retrospective closed after “Piss Christ” was hammered again. Eight hundred protesters besieged the Lambert Gallery, and museum staff received death threats. (Serrano has also received death threats.) Perhaps most infamously, U.S. Senator Alfonse D’Amato (R-NY) tore up a copy of the photograph while arguing for the need to review how the National Endowment of the Arts selects artists to support with tax dollars.
Senator D’Amato alleged, “In naming it, [Serrano] was taunting the American people. He was seeking to create indignation. That is all right for him to be a jerk, but let him be a jerk on his own time and with his own resources. Do not dishonor our Lord. I resent it, and I think the vast majority of the American people do. And I also resent the National Endowment for the Arts spending the taxpayers’ money to honor this guy.” But the artist insisted, “I am not a heretic. I like to believe that rather than destroy icons, I make new ones.” Serrano also clarified that, “To set the record straight, I received not a whole grant from the NEA, but a partial grant. I received $15,000 from an organization that had received $5,000 from the NEA. At the time that I received that money, I was a poor artist. I made no income, I paid very little taxes. Since then, because of the fact that my name became so prominent and I sold so much work, I’ve paid millions of dollars back in taxes. You know, so you have to figure, it was a great investment for the government and for the United States.”
And not every Christian opposed Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” Standing in contrast to Dr. George Pell, the bishop who tried to invoke dusty blasphemy laws last used in 1871 to censor the photograph, is Sister Wendy Beckett, the British nun and art critic who became a beloved interpreter of culture in the 1990s. When asked if “Piss Christ” offended her, Sister Wendy explained, “Well actually no, because I thought he was saying, in a rather simplistic, magaziney-type of way, that this is what we are doing to Christ. We’re not treating him with reverence. His great sacrifice is not used. We live very vulgar lives. We put Christ in a bottle of urine — in practice! It was a very admonitory work. Not a great work, one wouldn’t want to go on looking at it, once one had seen it once. But I think to call it blasphemous is rather begging the question. It could be, it could not be. It’s what you make of it, and I could make something that made me feel a deep desire to reverence the death of Christ more by this suggestion that this is what, in practice, the world is doing.”
Her interviewer pressed her on this point, asking if there are objective standards for great art, and Sister Wendy went on to say, “If, continually, people look and look and always come away enriched, then it’s a great work. But it takes time, you see, to discover this, so it’s not just flavor of the month or flavor of the year. That’s why it’s very hard to make judgments on works of art — we have to wait.” In other words, if judging art requires innumerable viewings for decades or centuries, then blocking the view hides the truth. But remember, denying the right to be wrong is more about preventing pain than accessing truth.
The “Piss Christ” censors believed that Serrano’s photograph hurt both believers and God because Serrano literally pissed on their religion. And yet, their censorship became a media sensation. “Piss Christ” was reprinted in news articles, and Serrano was interviewed for a documentary about him and his work. His photographs began to sell for so much money that he has paid millions in taxes to the U.S. government. How many more people saw “Piss Christ” because some tried to censor it?
To return to our follow-up question, did this example of censorship reduce harm? By the censors’ own standards, more Christians were harmed because of the proliferation of “Piss Christ.” Nobody could un-see the image.
A similar event unfolded thirty years later.
Exhibit B is Dana Schutz’s 2016 painting “Open Casket.” Schutz based her painting on a photograph of Emmett Till’s body, lying in an open casket after he was mutilated and shot by racist white men during the Jim Crow era in Mississippi in 1955. Of her motivations, Schutz said, “I made this painting in August of 2016 after a summer that felt like a state of emergency — there were constant mass shootings, racist rallies filled with hate speech, and an escalating number of camera-phone videos of innocent black men being shot by police. The photograph of Emmett Till felt analogous to the time: what was hidden was now revealed. The painting is very different from the photograph. I could never render the photograph ethically or emotionally. I always had issues with making this painting, everything about it. And it is still uncertain for me.”
Schutz’s detractors attributed other motives to her, and they accused her of exploitation that hurt black Americans. “Open Casket” debuted at CFA Gallery in Berlin in 2016 without incident, in a solo show titled Waiting For The Barbarians, which included paintings that the gallery press release described as “terrifying events where time seems stopped.” But when Schutz displayed it again in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, an artist named Parker Bright stood in front of “Open Casket” with other protestors, wearing a t-shirt that read “Black Death Spectacle,” and argued that the piece was an injustice to the black community. Soon after, British-born, Berlin-based artist Hannah Black wrote a letter to the curators, co-signed by over 30 other artists, arguing for the removal — and hopefully also the destruction — of “Open Casket.” The Whitney Biennial curators, Mia Locks and Christopher Lew, declined.
In the letter, Black wrote, “with the urgent recommendation that the painting be destroyed and not entered into any market or museum…. In brief: the painting should not be acceptable to anyone who cares or pretends to care about Black people because it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun, though the practice has been normalized for a long time…. Although Schutz’s intention may be to present white shame, this shame is not correctly represented… The subject matter is not Schutz’s; white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights…. Even if Schutz has not been gifted with any real sensitivity to history, if Black people are telling her that the painting has caused unnecessary hurt, she and you must accept the truth of this. The painting must go.” But Schutz insisted that the painting had never been for sale, and, “I don’t know what it is like to be black in America but I do know what it is like to be a mother…. In her sorrow and rage [Mamie Till] wanted her son’s death not just to be her pain but America’s pain. The thought of anything happening to your child is beyond comprehension. Their pain is your pain. My engagement with this image was through empathy with his mother…. I don’t believe that people can ever really know what it is like to be someone else (I will never know the fear that black parents may have), but neither are we all completely unknowable.”
And not every black artist opposed Schutz’s “Open Casket.” Standing in contrast to Dr. Lisa Whittington, who also painted Emmett Till and thinks that Schutz should have painted the white actors in his story instead, is Coco Fusco, whose mother never allowed her to visit the Deep South. (Fusco’s mother escaped the Cuban revolution and immigrated to New York just before Till’s murder, so that his death was her introduction to the U.S.) In an essay she penned for Hyperallergic, Fusco explained, “I find it alarming and entirely wrongheaded to call for the censorship and destruction of an artwork, no matter what its content is or who made it. As artists and as human beings, we may encounter works we do not like and find offensive. We may understand artworks to be indicators of racial, gender, and class privilege — I do, often. But presuming that calls for censorship and destruction constitute a legitimate response to perceived injustice leads us down a very dark path. Hannah Black and company are placing themselves on the wrong side of history, together with Phalangists who burned books, authoritarian regimes that censor culture and imprison artists, and religious fundamentalists who ban artworks in the name of their god.”
Fusco went on to write, “The authority to speak for or about black culture is not guaranteed by skin color or lineage, and it can be undermined by untruths…. [Hannah Black] claims that Mamie Till wanted her son’s body to be visible to black people as an inspiration and a warning; however, according to Emmett Till’s cousin Simeon Wright, who was with him the night of his capture and attended his funeral, Mamie Till said ‘she wanted the world to see what those men had done to her son’ (my emphasis). There was no exclusion of non-black people implied, nor was it a deviation from the custom of having an open casket. That casket was donated to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture by Till’s family to be on view for all, not just black, people…. Those photographs galvanized the Civil Rights Movement: activist leaders strategically and adeptly circulated them to encourage blacks and whites in the North to join the struggle, and in order to shame politicians by casting doubts on America’s adherence to its democratic ideals.”
The “Open Casket” censors believed that Schutz’s painting hurt black Americans because Schutz behaved with presumptuous entitlement. And yet, their attempts at censorship became a media sensation. “Open Casket” was reprinted in news articles, and Schutz is still showing her paintings despite attempts to de-platform her. It is too soon to tell how her career will be impacted in the long-term, but we can still wonder: How many more people saw “Open Casket” because some tried to censor it?
To return to our follow-up question, did this example of censorship reduce harm? By the censors’ own standards, more black people were harmed because of the proliferation of “Open Casket”. Nobody could un-see the image.
In both the Serrano and Schutz scenarios, an artist appropriated an image of a mutilated, murdered man that is sacred to a particular population. The lynching of Emmett Till became a sacrifice for black Americans; like Christ, his parent tried to help heal the world through his suffering. Of course, there are also obvious discrepancies, namely that Mamie Till did not choose to sacrifice her only son. Herein lies another layer of harm in these particular arguments over the right to be wrong: what kind of reverence do we owe to the dearly departed? Perhaps the censors in both scenarios sensed that these artists were breaking the millennia-old taboo of “speaking ill of the dead” when they gave themselves permission to use these sacred images.
While Serrano’s provocative title seemed like an undeniable insult to his Christian critics, Schutz did not obviously speak ill of the dead. Instead, her critics protested against her speaking about the dead, about their dead. Censorship is inherently tribal, so that when it is a loving gesture, its protective hand only extends toward members of the in-group; at the same time, the other hand strikes the heretic. In the recent history of tribal conflict, if Serrano was a major figure in the culture wars of the ’90s, then Schutz may be remembered similarly within this decade’ debate over identity politics.
The similarities between these scenarios are striking, as are their differences. Serrano’s critics largely came from outside of the art world, while Schutz’s largely came from within. As a result, Schutz’s career is threatened by the disapproval of her peers in a way that Serrano’s never was, and it is unlikely that Schutz will make millions more dollars because of her controversy. There was also collateral damage, because black artists who painted about black pain in the 2017 Whitney Biennial were overlooked in favor of scrutinizing and punishing Schutz. How many people remember the names of those artists?
A crucial difference between the “Piss Christ” and “Open Casket” controversies is that in Schutz’s case, no death threats were issued, no exhibitions were cancelled, and no artworks were destroyed. This is to the credit of Schutz’s detractors and to the shame of Serrano’s. There are only two ways to resolve conflict — words or blows — and only one of those can literally end in murder. It’s not exactly true that, “sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me,” because people hurl plenty of heartbreaking words, even at those they love most; but it is true that stoning is a form of execution, so that playground retort is on to something. If the only alternative to words is blows, is it wise to curtail the use of words?
Censorship may seem ineffective in these examples, although the practice has sharper teeth in societies that do not protect freedom of speech and expression. However, even in the U.S. where free speech is protected more than anywhere else in the world, attempts at censorship can have lasting consequences. Heretics are always punished in public to remind other people to hold their tongues, and it is impossible to measure how much has been left unsaid. The media sensation does not merely propagate the offensive image. It also propagates a threat: You better not say or paint the wrong thing.
The best way to avoid saying or painting the wrong thing is to just not think about it. If it’s not in your head, then it can’t slip out of your mouth. Put another way, censorship says “no” to the right to think… whether that’s thinking critically about the shortcomings of one’s own religion; thinking mournfully about the racism of one’s own country; or thinking about any number of other things. Censors help people not think by passing out scripts that tell them what to say. How much harm can come from forbidding the right to think?
One such harm is bad art. Creativity is unscripted. Without the right to think and be wrong, artists cannot try anything new. Discoveries tend to be more or less stumbled upon, after a great many mistakes. But in lieu of exploring the human condition, censorship replaces art with propaganda.
What is the value of art, without the right to be wrong?