So much hinges on the question of audience. Who is presumed to engage with artwork, and on what terms? In the museum, people of color so often feel that we are not the intended audience. The hurt that we experience on realizing that disconnect—that we are here for art but art is not necessarily here for us—has now been made starkly evident by a clumsy gesture that instigated so much debate that it seems to overpower any other conversation. This is a feeling we expect to get at the Whitney Biennial on a regular basis, and it is why so many people were negatively affected simply by the image of the painting as it circulated around the internet. It’s all the more frustrating when one stands before the painting, feeling the weakness of its impact and the pull of the other artists’ works around it.

Installation view of Cauleen Smith, In the Wake, 2017. Whitney Biennial 2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 17-June 11, 2017. Collection of the artist; courtesy Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, and Kate Werble Gallery, New York. Photo by the author.

Perhaps what surprises most about seeing the painting in person is how small it is. Henry Taylor’s Ancestors of Genghis Khan with Black Man on Horse (2015–2017), on the sixth-floor landing, is many times its size. Nearly obscured in a back corner of a fifth-floor gallery, the now-infamous painting of Emmett Till does not scream for attention the way Dana Schutz’s other paintings on the fifth floor do. If anything, it is not sensational enough—not visceral enough, not cruel enough to do justice to its subject. On a large and busy floor, featuring a dizzying vortex by Samara Golden, Pope L.’s oozing bologna slices, a 3D film by Anicka Yi, and works using the institution to illustrate the operations of capital, from Occupy Museums and Cameron Rowland, the painting seems an ancillary work in the curatorial argument. This is perhaps the biggest indictment, this and its utter lack of resolution. Above these galleries hang several luxurious handmade banners by Cauleen Smith. “Rage blooms within me,” they proclaim. “I am holding my breath.” “We were never meant to survive.” Maya Stovall’s four videos of public performances in the streets of Detroit hang adjacent to the painting. In them, people of color talk about their experiences and their dreams. It is possible to hear their voices while looking directly at the painting of Emmett Till.

Looking at the painting is difficult. The obvious challenge is the subject matter, and how it clashes unnervingly with the candy-like color scheme. Neo-Expressionism’s blend of grotesque and provocative subject matter, combined with the media-saturated palette of Pop Art, makes a style particularly ill-suited for rendering an image of raw horror. Certainly the effect seems facile—if not exactly glib, then more ambivalent and anxious than the subject warrants. Critics of the painting have charged that it violates an innate truth carried in the original photograph. What is that truth, and is it inviolable? Or does it shift based on its framing, what is seen and what is unseen? What does a painting of Emmett Till in his casket need to show us?

Installation view of Pope.L aka William Pope.L, Claim (Whitney Version), 2017. Whitney Biennial 2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 17-June 11, 2017. Collection of the artist; courtesy Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York. Photo: Matthew Carasella.

Historian Martin Berger has written in Seeing Through Race of how White media of the 1960s suppressed the circulation of the image of Till in his casket. “Given the importance of the Till murder to the history of civil rights, and the absence of visual representations of the boy’s suffering in the white press,” writes Berger, “analysis of the coverage of his death provides insights into the complex symbolic work that black children performed in the white imagination.” For Berger, “the modern civil rights movement was grounded on the unrepresented body of a black child,” namely Till, whose absence from the covers of mainstream newspapers indicated that “the idea of suffering black children was of greater interest to whites than visual evidence of their plight.” [emphasis his] Berger argues that White progressives’ inability to see Till as both a child and a visual manifestation of the everyday horror of White supremacy has hobbled efforts to improve social conditions for African Americans since the civil-rights era. His point is underscored by the similar rhetoric employed around the 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, nearly sixty years later. In both cases, Black youths were described as “men,” their physical and sexual maturity greatly exaggerated, as a means of engendering public sympathy for the White men who committed the acts of killing.

Installation view of Henry Taylor, The 4th, 2012-2017 and THE TIMES THAY AINT A CHANGING, FAST ENOUGH!, 2017, with Deana Lawson, Ring Bearer, 2016. [Taylor] Collection of the artist; courtesy Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo. [Lawson] Collection of the artist; courtesy Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York. Whitney Biennial 2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 17-June 11, 2017. Photo: Matthew Carasella.

Some critics of the painting have faulted the biennial’s curators, Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks, for racial insensitivity in including this work. It is an ironic charge for two Asian American curators who for the first time lead the biennial team without a White colleague. Is it a tone-deaf choice? Possibly. Is it intended to foreclose dialogue around race, or to provoke it? Speaking to artnet, Lew described his intention to address questions of race head-on in the exhibition: “We spend our everyday lives skirting around these issues, but they’re really built into the show—we’re not running away from these discussions.” Asian Americans, though hardly a homogenous group or evenly represented in the art world, frequently find themselves awash in racial nuance when debates turn black-and-white.

Installation view of Frances Stark, Ian F. Svenonius’s “Censorship Now” for the 2017 Whitney Biennial, Spread 1 of 8 (Sincerely), 2017. Collection of the artist; courtesy Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York. Whitney Biennial 2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 17-June 11, 2017. Photo: Matthew Carasella.

Even the controversial call to destroy Schutz’s painting, issued by artist Hannah Black in an open letter, is anticipated in the biennial. The presentation of Frances Stark’s paintings, which employ text appropriated from the writings of musician Ian Svenonius, constitutes a vigorous defense of censorship on grounds of its necessity in equalizing political representation in cultural spaces, much as Black suggests. One wonders whether Black, a Berlin-based artist of Black and Jewish heritage, saw Open Casket in its 2016 debut at CFA in Berlin, as Lew did, and whether the work could have been read differently there given Schutz’s own Jewish background. What role Schutz’s painting was intended to play in the biennial’s racial dialogue is unclear, although it represents the lone instance of a White artist attempting to wrestle directly with questions of race. If the curators thought they would balance the scales by including Open Casket, thereby showing that White artists were open to engagement with racial issues, they blundered by neglecting to recognize that a White artist’s engagement must be with the racial imaginary of Whiteness in order to matter. That complicated and ugly construct is one that few Americans of any race are well equipped to dismantle.

Installation view of Dana Schutz, Open Casket, 2016, with Maya Stovall, Liquor Store Theatre, 2014-2016, and Julian Nguyen, Executive Function and Executive Solutions, 2017. [Schutz] Collection of the artist. [Stovall] Courtesy of the artist, Eric Johnston, and Todd Stovall. [Nguyen] Collection of the artist; courtesy Neue Alte Brucke, Frankfurt, and Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London. Photo by the author.

The 2017 Whitney Biennial is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through June 11, 2017.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

Sheila Pree Bright. 1960Now, 2015; installation view, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia. Courtesy of the Artist.

Neither scattered nor arranged, spontaneous nor precise, oversized black-and-white photographs lie on the floor, inches away from the gallery’s outer perimeters. The powerful presence of voices, faces, and traces of the bodies captured within these images are immediately striking. Brightly lit faces sit square within the repetitive rectangular form—awake, alive, and uncompromising. The installation refuses the normal conditions of visual engagement in two-dimensional art—an engagement that normally demands an equal confrontation and leveling of space between the viewer and the viewed. Through this gesture, Bright demands that we turn our heads down to look at and regard individuals who command and reclaim our gaze. The experience is as profound and poignant as it is uncomfortable. Illuminated in front of a stark white background, Bright’s work collapses the conditions of the studio portrait and the uniformity found within institutional photography (passport photos, mug shots, photo IDs, driver’s licenses) to create images that carry the weight of the shared history and contingent experiences of these individuals. Size and scale play an important role as well in the filmic element of the exhibition that gives voice to the unique experiences and perspectives of these social agitators, thus animating the photographs that lie powerful in their silence around the room.

Sheila Pree Bright. BringIt, 2015; chalkboard; installation view, 1960Now, The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia. Courtesy of the Artist.

BringIt is an interactive project consisting of blackboards that stretch across the open wall space. Interrupting the floor space of the photographs, the ever-evolving piece is scrawled with chalk-written notes, which electrify the room with a visual language that embodies contemporary activism today. Filled with hashtags, slogans, mantras, and graffiti written by the people for the people, BringIt opens up the static portraits to a world constantly in the process of being written and connects the struggles of bodies across the nation and throughout the world. Undertaken and activated by the community, the project creates paths of inclusiveness within the gallery, turning text into indexical affirmations of the spaces and sites outside of the context of the museum.

Bright’s work refuses all notions of the passive subject—a difficult outcome to achieve, given the rocky historical relationship between the media and social movements across the span of the last century, from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York City in 1911 to Ferguson, Missouri. The gap between what is represented as “documentary” evidence by the media and the reality of the experience on the ground is a problem that continues to inform the history of civil dissent, particularly when it involves media coverage of institutionally marginalized and oppressed groups. Bright’s photographs weigh in on the loaded politics of the African American objector in representation by recoding the inherent nostalgia of black-and-white photography and film. By using genres that call up powerful emotions of past struggles that continue to shape our understanding, Bright ambiguously provides the affinities and ruptures between past and present race struggles.

Sheila Pree Bright. 1960Now, 2015; installation view, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia. Courtesy of the Artist.

In his groundbreaking text on the photographic documentation of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, Maurice Berger highlights the determined efforts of the white press to frame any acts of black resistance as nonthreatening, thereby casting blacks in roles of limited power, and minimizing the bravery and accomplishments of those who were risking their lives on a daily basis.[1] Even within the photographs that captured the physical violence of white supremacists, blacks were cast as passive victims within a black-and-white image world, with the effect of “focusing white attention on acts of violence and away from historically rooted inequalities.”[2] Projected across the upper ridge of the gallery wall, Bright’s films refuse the media’s emptying of meaning and objective in acts of resistance, and reverberate with the experiences of those who witnessed and participated in the trajectory of protests, old and new. The videos allow actors and agents of protest movements to speak for themselves, with testimony and footage unbound by the biases, perspectives, and edits of the 24-hour televised news cycle.

Bright’s careful mediation of and attention to contemporary eruptions of African American action—bodies in the streets, moving forward, united in rage and care for the other—asks us to break our notions of difference between past and present, passivity and progress, in order to see that the cause of Martin, Malcolm, and Rosa is both continuous and discontinuous, aligned while moving forward toward its own unique position.

[1] See Maurice Berger’s Seeing Through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

[2] Ibid., pg. 34–35.

Sheila Pree Bright: 1960Now is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia in Atlanta through November 28, 2015.

“Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.”—Hannah Arendt

“They were forced […] to condemn us without believing in our existence.”—Claude Cahun

The horrific images emerging from Gaza in the past weeks have displaced any other visual reference in my mind, artistic or otherwise. While artists have historically played a substantial role in reporting on and responding to the tragedy of war, that immediate responsibility has shifted, since the advent of photography, to photojournalists. The question of whether overt political content is well served by art and vice versa is presently an open one that I will leave to others for the time being. Even so, art has an undeniable importance in times of conflict, in that it has the capacity to humanize those whom political and military interests are better served by dehumanizing. Here are a few such projects, presented as a corrective to the systematic denial of Palestinian humanity currently being waged in American media.

Aissa Deebi. The Trial, 2013; video.

In Aissa Deebi’s film The Trial (2013), the artist deliberately invokes Kafka’s tale of bureaucratic torment while commemorating the trial of Palestinian writer and activist Daoud Turki, a leader of the nondenominational Israeli Left who was imprisoned from 1973 to 1985 on charges of treason against Israel. Deebi casts three actors to reenact Turki’s interrogation and defense in what amounts to an absurdist play committed to film. Absurdity is inevitable in a circumstance where the defendant on trial—an Israeli Arab Muslim—is himself an oxymoron according to the prosecution, a state that legally denies the possibility of his existence. Similarly, absurdity is a fact of daily life in occupied Palestine, and humor a necessity for survival but still a characteristic rarely permitted to Palestinians by the international community that tends to objectify the whole lot as either victims or terrorists.

Khaled Hourani. Picasso in Palestine, 2009-2011. Photo by Sander Buyck.

If Khaled Hourani’s Picasso in Palestine (2009–11) seems similarly absurd, this in itself demonstrates how the media portrayal of Palestinians tends to excise their humanity, in the eyes of the world and of Palestinians themselves. Hourani, an artist and director of the International Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah, was on a visit to the van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, when he had what seemed a crazy thought. Listening to his guide extol the many distant lands to which works in the museum’s collection had travelled, he wondered if it were even imaginable to bring a masterwork from the collection to Ramallah. Charged with selecting a work to request, Hourani’s Palestinian art students were incredulous, but ultimately selected Picasso’s Buste de Femme (1943). Even with the van Abbemuseum on board, insurance coverage was nearly impossible to obtain given that Palestine is defined extralegally, by exclusions and by Acts of God. The trajectory of the work transported across contested border zones and the paper trail created by a stifling bureaucracy that thwarts his countrymen daily became elements of Hourani’s final work, as did a drawing of the Picasso made by an imprisoned man whose isolation did not prevent him from sharing in the historic event. Despite the intimidating figures of two armed guards who frame the painting in Hourani’s video, visitors to the display were euphoric at the realization that culture and a life of the mind were concepts that could actually be available to them and relevant to their lives. Now permanently ensconced in the historical provenance of this work, Palestinians gain another small acknowledgement of their existence and their history.

Youmna Chlala and Jeanno Gaussi. Home Sweet Home–Jerusalem, 2010.

Youmna Chlala and Jeanno Gaussi’s Home Sweet Home—Jerusalem (2010) is a video, artist book, and installation created in an apartment in Jerusalem that is an archive of displacement and denial. This home is maintained by a Palestinian woman who must keep her address to preserve her right to work in Israel, while her husband is restricted to the West Bank. The site becomes a facsimile of a home in which an ongoing performance of living takes place—a necessary charade, given Palestinians’ economic dependency on Israel and the constant policing of their movements. Unwilling to suffer without either her job or her partner, this woman is a constant presence despite her absence within the home. The artist book is a record of each object within the home, while the video captures rituals of domesticity performed as a spiritual intervention that shifts the pragmatic context of the apartment to a dream space of potential reconciliation.

Sama Alshaibi. Birthright Series, 2004.

Sama Alshaibi has made numerous works about her experiences as a Palestinian born into exile. In Birthright (2004), In This Garden (2006), and My Apartheid Vacation (2005), she speaks to her privilege as one who can return to the land that her grandparents were forced to flee, and to the pain of her family’s further displacement from Iraq to the United States, an uprooting that ironically enabled her return as an American, immune to Israeli sanction. Birthright addresses the dehumanization of Palestinian mothers whose loss is determined to be less real and in which they are deemed more culpable than Israeli mothers who have also lost children in the war. My Apartheid Vacation chronicles Alshaibi’s return to Palestine, in which the class anxiety of the expatriate is magnified tenfold against the recognition of her countrymen’s suffering. In This Garden documents the incongruity of Alshaibi’s American lifestyle with her Palestinian roots. She writes, “I don’t want to be nationalistic. I don’t want to be loud. I just want to go there, and for things to be better than they are.” Even these modest hopes convey her disillusionment.

Phil Collins. They Shoot Horses, 2004. Video, 2 projections, color and sound. Courtesy of Tate Gallery, London.

As another round of brutality passes between two communities, each heavily invested in a narrative of their own victimization, it can seem impossible that the disaffection of war could ever abate and make room for joy. Phil Collins’ instant classic They Shoot Horses (2004) masterfully demonstrates that people will seek pleasure even in the worst circumstances. Collins’ film, shot using journalistic conventions, documents a dance marathon in which young Palestinians dance for eight consecutive hours. This grueling ordeal is nonetheless understood as “fun” by both participants and viewers. The emotional trajectory of the dancers from euphoria to fatigue is remarkable because it represents one of the few times when western media has depicted Palestinians as capable of a range of experiences and emotions. The exploitative nature of the project is tangible, with Collins dancing along a fine line between commenting on abuse and reinscribing it. The work is not really addressing Palestinians directly so much as the media circus that feeds on their collective trauma, a trauma that must be reenacted in order for the artist to critique its representation.

Each of these artists speaks only obliquely about the present-day crisis in Israel/Palestine. To address this specific and temporal political condition directly would be to risk preempting insight in favor of ideology. By focusing on the everyday experiences of Palestinians, these artists question the nature of normalcy itself as defined under occupation. Their intention is not to attack the state of Israel or even to question its right to exist. Rather, these works are intended to balance the inequity between the two sides in whatever small ways they can. If wars are won by dehumanization, casting opponents as the enemy, they are ended only by humanization, recognizing that your adversary is also your neighbor.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

The upcoming 2014 Winter Olympics and Paraolympics in Sochi, Russia, have shined a light on a host of environmental, migrant, labor, and civil rights concerns in Russia. International observers and Russian organizations indicate that the situation for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in Russia has recently deteriorated. An emergent “traditional values” ideology propagated by the state and church—that falsely posits homosexuality as being anti-Russian, a Western import, and dangerous to children—is leading to increased violence against LGBT people, penalty and fines for “homosexual propaganda,” hate speech in the media, and intimidation of LGBT activists by extremist organizations, soccer hooligans, and neo-Nazis.

Claude Cahun. Self Portrait, c. 1928. Gelatin silver print. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes. Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Against the backdrop of increasing, institutionalized homophobia in Russia, I looked for positive and realistic images of LGBT Russians. As a photography historian and film curator, I am aware of the potency of visual representation—the affirming power of self-representation in particular. My PhD dissertation on queer surrealist photographer and activist Claude Cahun argued for the power of photographic self-representation in both affirming and crafting identity in the face of rising fascism. The images I was seeing of LGBT Russians were either of frontline activists fighting for their right to public assembly or misrepresentations, painted in words, by the virulently homophobic invective of politicians, neo-Nazis, and Russian Orthodox Church leaders. American and British LGBT civil rights movements have been represented, documented, and dramatized in film (Milk), photographs (Catherine Opie), Conceptual art (Gilbert & George), political art and design (Gran Fury), and public assembly and protest (as documented in the exhibition AIDS in New York: The First Five Years). As LGBT Russians are fighting for the basic right to declare their very existence, as well as for the rights to assemble as a community and to raise children, this battle is playing out on the turf of visual imagery.

Anastasia Korosteleva. Girls, 2013. 18 x 13 cm. Courtesy the artist

Russian photographer Anastasia Korosteleva protects the identity of her subjects in the series Girls (2013) by literally burning their faces in the photographs. The burned-out faces of women embracing literally and metaphorically show the scars of homophobia.

Film festivals are being organized to bring the experience of LGBT people and filmmakers to new audiences in Russia. The LGBT Film Festival “Bok O Bok” (“Side By Side”) was the first international LGBT film festival in Russia. After experiencing censorship in its first year (2008), it has operated for the past five years at various sites in Russia. The festival was most recently found guilty and fined for violating the new “foreign agents” law.

Annica Karlsson Rixon and Anna Viola Hallberg. State of Mind (Installation view), 2008.
Gallery K1, Kulturhuset, Stockholm, Sweden. Projection hd, 7 monitors sd, sound. Courtesy the artists

The Swedish photographer duo Annica Karlsson Rixon and Anna Viola Hallberg’s “State of Mind” (2006–8) consists of personal stories and group video portraits of Russian lesbian and bisexual women and their friends and family discussing issues of LGBT identity and East/West dynamics. The subjects, casually posed in places of significance to them in the city, such as along the banks of the Neva River in St. Petersburg, project a mix of emotions—joy, exuberance, hope, pride, comfort. The video portion presents filmed conversations with the subjects, viewed simultaneously to create an approximation of the community as a congregation of voices. The installation has been shown in St. Petersburg, as well as in Ukraine, Sweden, and the United States at UC Berkeley’s Worth Ryder Art Gallery [1].

A June 2013 Russian federal law banning “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations,” broad in its implications, is now being used to censor film. Russia’s federal oversight organization recently issued a warning to a popular movie channel for airing a French musical, Les Chansons d’Amour (2007), for its alleged “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations.” Local and federal laws banning “homosexual propaganda” have been enacted from 2006 to 2013, sparking fears that they could be used against visiting Olympic athletes and tourists. For foreign citizens found guilty of “homosexual propaganda,” there is a penalty of fifteen days in prison followed by an entry ban. Transgender Russians and LGBT teens are particularly vulnerable. For example, one Russian neo-Nazi group hunts for gay teens to abuse and humiliate, disseminating video of the attacks through social networks on the Internet.

President Obama’s meeting with LGBT activists during his trip to St. Petersburg, Russia, for the G20 summit this month, was a step toward acknowledging the problem of discrimination and furthering international debate (although Russian President Putin denies that discrimination against LGBT people exists). Obama said he is “very proud” of the activists’ work, pointing to Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement in the United States as precedents. The controversy over free speech in Russia has already gained attention via the internationally publicized plight of the all-female punk band Pussy Riot, two of whose members remain in prison after a brutal crackdown. Significantly, activists point out that the rise of discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, as well as feminists and atheists, is tied to xenophobia and violence against ethnic minorities. In all cases, “others” are set up as foils to advance the state’s ideology of purity.

[1] Disclosure: “State of Mind” was included in In Mind and Memory, an exhibition curated by #Hashtags editor Anuradha Vikram.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.