What to Do With Infuriating Art?
When art upsets us, must it be removed from view or even destroyed?
At the Whitney Biennial that opened last month in New York, controversy has been raging around “Open Casket,” a painting by Dana Schutz based partly on photographs of the mutilated face of Emmett Till lying in his coffin in 1955, about 10 days after that African-American 14-year- old was brutally killed by two white men in Mississippi for supposedly flirting with a white store clerk. Ms. Schutz is white, and her painting has struck many as an ill-advised appropriation that should be removed.
The day the exhibition opened an African-American artist, Parker Bright, stood in front of it wearing a T-shirt with “Black Death Spectacle” handwritten on its back, sometimes partly blocking the view, sometimes engaging others in conversation.
Objections to the painting went viral with an open letter from Hannah Black, a British-born writer and artist who lives in Berlin, cosigned by others, charging that the Till image was “black subject matter,” off limits to a white artist. Ms. Black belittled the painting as exploiting black suffering “for profit and fun” and demanded that it be destroyed.
The discussion was upsetting, bracing, ultimately beneficial. Is the censorship of art abhorrent? Yes. Should people offended or outraged by an artwork or an exhibition mount protests? Absolutely.
Many people found themselves in the messy middle ground, seeing both sides, grasping for precedents.
What came to my mind are earlier works of art by those who crossed ethnic lines. “The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti” (1931-32), a series by Ben Shahn, a white Jewish artist, was a stinging commentary on the trial of the immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in Massachusetts during the 1920s — a politically charged case that mirrored issues of ethnicity, class and corruption in the justice system.
And it was a white Jewish schoolteacher and songwriter, Abel Meeropol, who wrote “Strange Fruit,” an anti-lynching ballad made famous by Billie Holiday that in 1939 “tackled racial hatred head on,” as David Margolick wrote in “Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights.”
Ms. Schutz’s painting is not the only work of art inspired 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 crossovers 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.’ ”
For a moment, Ms. 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.net 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 cosigned her breezy and bitter letter, but I’m not down with artists who censor artists.”
Kara Walker, an African-American artist who was herself once the target of a protest over her portrayals of black life on antebellum plantations, posted a message on Instagram. “The history of painting is full of graphic violence and narratives that don’t necessarily belong to the artists own life,” Ms. Walker wrote. She concluded that art can be generative regardless of how it offends or falls short, giving “rise to deeper inquiries and better art. It can only do this when it is seen.”
Ms. Schutz has said she painted “Open Casket” out of sympathy for the pain of Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, and the label at the Whitney has been adjusted to take this into account. In an email, Ms. 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.”
Themes of race and violence figure in art throughout this Biennial. Perhaps most important, Ms. Schutz’s painting has an all-too-American subject, that of hateful, corrosive white racism.
Who owns that?