Should art embroiled in controversy be removed?
Widespread backlash to Emmett Till piece
We all encounter art we don’t like, that upsets and infuriates us. This doesn’t deserve to be exhibited, our brains yell; it should not be allowed to exist. Still, does such aversion mean that an artwork must be removed from view — or, worse, destroyed?
This question has been at the heart of the controversy that has split the art world since the Whitney Biennial, an exhibition of American art in New York, opened nearly two weeks ago. The turmoil centres on “Open Casket,” a painting in the exhibition by Dana Schutz. The work is based partly on photographs of the horrifically mutilated face of Emmett Till lying in his coffin in 1955, about 10 days after that African- American 14- yearold was brutally killed by two white men in Mississippi for supposedly flirting with a white store clerk. The artist, Schutz, is white, and her use of the images has struck many in the art world as an inappropriate appropriation that, they argue, should be removed.
Objections to the painting went viral with an open letter from Hannah Black, a British-born writer and artist who lives in Berlin, co-signed by others, charging that the Till image was “black subject matter,” off limits to a white artist.
Black belittled the Schutz painting as exploiting black suffering “for profit and fun” and demanded that it be not only removed from the exhibition but also destroyed.
Schutz’s painting is not the only work of art i nspired by the lynching of Till: There’s a ballad that Bob Dylan wrote, and performed in 1962, titled The Death of Emmett Till, released belatedly in 2010.
Some artists who have crossed ethnic lines in their depiction of social trauma have been met with historic hostility. Among the most intense was the condemnation of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner 50 years ago by African- American writers. In “William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond,” the contributors charged that Styron furthered numerous racial myths, stereotypes and clichés. Since then, Styron’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel and the debate it unleashed have come to be seen as an important turning point for writers of black history, and the confrontation, as The New York Times Book Review wrote in 2008, “helped shatter the idea that there can or should be one version of ‘ how slavery was.’”
Over time, artists have periodically depicted or evoked lynchings, but the injured black body is a subject or image that black artists and writers have increasingly sought to protect from misuse, especially by those who are not black. This debate flared up in 2015 when, in a reading at Brown University, the poet and performance artist Kenneth Goldsmith — most of whose work is based on appropriation, sometimes of violent deaths — read as a poem a slightly rearranged version of the autopsy report of Michael Brown, the black 18- year- old shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo. Goldsmith was reviled on Twitter, accused of exploiting this material.
For a moment, Black’s letter about the Schutz painting created the impression that African-American opinion on this issue was monolithic. It is not. Antwaun Sargent posted a balanced editorial on artsy. com that linked to a short, blunt Facebook statement by the artist Clifford Owens. It read in part: “I don’t know anything about Hannah Black, or the artists who’ve co- signed her breezy and bitter letter, but I’m not down with artists who censor artists.”
Schutz has said she painted Open Casket out of sympathy for the pain endured by Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, and the label at the Whitney has been adjusted to take this into account. In an email on Monday, Schutz wrote: “The photograph of him in his casket is almost impossible to look at. In making the painting, I relied more on listening to Mamie Till’s verbal account of seeing her son, which oscillates between memory and observation.”
But Schutz has always focused her art on physical suffering expressed by traumatized bodies and skin. Occasionally, the body has been black — as in her painting of Michael Jackson on an autopsy table — but it is usually white. Her subjects include Terri Schiavo on life support; George Washington as a kind of monster with overgrown wooden teeth; and a portrait of Ukraine’s former president Viktor A. Yushchenko, his face disfigured by poison.
Themes of race and violence figure in art throughout this Biennial, including a painting by the black artist Henry Taylor, The Times Thay Aint a Changing Fast Enough! It depicts the fatal police shooting of Philando Castile.
Open Casket will not be destroyed but by now it is also beyond destruction.