1 00:00:00,090 --> 00:00:10,050 So I want to start by, um, by first welcoming everyone to the second lecture in the terror lectures in American Art this year, 2 00:00:10,050 --> 00:00:17,850 the lecture series is focussed on the topic, a contest of images, American art as culture war. 3 00:00:17,850 --> 00:00:26,010 And my name is John Blake Jr. I'm the 2018 2019 Terror Visiting Professor of American Art here at Oxford. 4 00:00:26,010 --> 00:00:33,420 And before I begin today's particular lecture, I want to give a bit of a disclaimer. 5 00:00:33,420 --> 00:00:38,340 I'm going to show some imagery that may be disturbing, some violent imagery. 6 00:00:38,340 --> 00:00:42,810 So if it is upsetting for any reason, please feel free to get up and leave the room. 7 00:00:42,810 --> 00:00:57,750 Not a problem at all, but I just want to give warning to everyone in advance that the topic today does focus on images and issues of violence. 8 00:00:57,750 --> 00:01:03,150 The most significant work of art at the twenty seventeen Whitney Biennial, 9 00:01:03,150 --> 00:01:13,350 the exhibition of contemporary American art held every two years at the Whitney Museum in New York City, was not supposed to be part of the show. 10 00:01:13,350 --> 00:01:20,010 It was a performative gesture, perhaps a work of activism more than art by Pirker Bright, 11 00:01:20,010 --> 00:01:26,580 who walked through the Whitney's galleries with a grey t shirt bearing an inscription in Sharpie marker. 12 00:01:26,580 --> 00:01:33,330 The back of his shirt was emblazoned with a highly charged phrase Black Death spectacle. 13 00:01:33,330 --> 00:01:40,110 He stood in front of another work, an official work, one sanctioned and selected by the biennial curators, 14 00:01:40,110 --> 00:01:45,120 and started recording on his iPhone while streaming on Facebook Live. 15 00:01:45,120 --> 00:01:51,210 He captured conversations with museum visitors about the painting behind him. 16 00:01:51,210 --> 00:01:57,300 He described that canvas as, quote, a scheme for the Whitney to create controversy and, 17 00:01:57,300 --> 00:02:03,890 quote, to generate media attention through spectacle, through shock and awe. 18 00:02:03,890 --> 00:02:14,710 Bright's action, effectively reframed and re signified that painting created by the artist Donna Schutz in 2016 and titled Open Casket. 19 00:02:14,710 --> 00:02:17,710 The painting depicts the body of Emmett Till, 20 00:02:17,710 --> 00:02:27,340 an African-American boy killed by two white men in 1955 when one of the most shocking lynching murders in American history. 21 00:02:27,340 --> 00:02:33,820 Photographs of Till's open casket funeral appeared throughout the mass media, 22 00:02:33,820 --> 00:02:44,500 and the painting shows his painting attempts to remediate these images, which linger in American national memory through pigment on canvas. 23 00:02:44,500 --> 00:02:50,910 But the painting incited an intense backlash. Critics angrily condemned it as cultural appropriation. 24 00:02:50,910 --> 00:02:57,580 It's a white woman had painted a subject, a black boy that was not hers to paint. 25 00:02:57,580 --> 00:03:08,060 She had appropriated a historical example of violent imagery in order to create black death spectacle to shock and awe. 26 00:03:08,060 --> 00:03:14,120 By blocking our view of Donna Schwarz's painting, by standing directly in front of it, 27 00:03:14,120 --> 00:03:19,970 blocking our gaze and labelling the work with an aggressive textual description, 28 00:03:19,970 --> 00:03:26,690 Bright's action, effectively reappropriate, fits his own appropriation of Till's body. 29 00:03:26,690 --> 00:03:35,330 A photograph posted to social media captured his action. The image and images of the painting soon appeared everywhere. 30 00:03:35,330 --> 00:03:41,150 Artnet, Artforum, The Guardian, The New York Times, hyper allergic. 31 00:03:41,150 --> 00:03:46,100 The Washington Post right then appropriated this photograph. 32 00:03:46,100 --> 00:03:52,520 Yet again, turning it into a drawing titled Confronting My Own Possible Death, 33 00:03:52,520 --> 00:03:58,490 further appropriating his own action and the media spectacle it had created. 34 00:03:58,490 --> 00:04:08,150 These interventions effectively reframe and re signify as painting, yet again forcing her work under his gaze, 35 00:04:08,150 --> 00:04:17,000 forcing her use of an image into his representational terms, thus claiming ownership and possession. 36 00:04:17,000 --> 00:04:22,760 Who can see and who is seen? What are the ethics of representation? 37 00:04:22,760 --> 00:04:26,930 Bright's response was actually only one of many artists pastiche. 38 00:04:26,930 --> 00:04:32,240 Lumumba, for example, hung a banner outside the Whitney Museum that read, quote, 39 00:04:32,240 --> 00:04:37,850 The white woman whose lies got Emmett Till lynched is still alive in twenty. 40 00:04:37,850 --> 00:04:50,330 Feel old yet, end quote. And he he's referring there to Carolyn Bryant, who is now age 85 and whose interaction with TILL had prompted Till's murder. 41 00:04:50,330 --> 00:04:58,370 The controversy, however, did not explode until the artist Hannah Black posted a provocative letter online on Facebook. 42 00:04:58,370 --> 00:05:05,480 It is worth reading her letter closely to the curators and staff of the Whitney Biennial. 43 00:05:05,480 --> 00:05:10,130 I am writing to ask you to remove Donna Schwarz's painting open casket with the urgent 44 00:05:10,130 --> 00:05:16,730 recommendation to the painting be destroyed and not entered into any market or museum. 45 00:05:16,730 --> 00:05:23,060 As you know, this painting depicts the dead body of 14 year old and the till in the open casket that his mother chose, 46 00:05:23,060 --> 00:05:26,640 saying, let the people see what I've seen. 47 00:05:26,640 --> 00:05:35,160 That even the disfigured corpse of a child was not sufficient to move the white gaze from its habitual cold calculation is evident daily. 48 00:05:35,160 --> 00:05:41,010 And in a myriad of ways, not least the fact that this painting exists at all. 49 00:05:41,010 --> 00:05:48,060 In brief, the painting should not be acceptable to anyone who cares or pretends to care about black people 50 00:05:48,060 --> 00:05:54,180 because it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute black suffering into profit and fun. 51 00:05:54,180 --> 00:06:01,830 Though the practise has been normalised for a long time. Although Schwartz's attention may be to present white shame, 52 00:06:01,830 --> 00:06:07,080 this chain is not correctly represented as a painting of a dead black boy by white artist. 53 00:06:07,080 --> 00:06:12,780 Those nonblack artists who sincerely wish to highlight the shameful nature of white violence should, 54 00:06:12,780 --> 00:06:18,870 first of all, stop treating black pain as raw material. The subject matter is not Shultz's white. 55 00:06:18,870 --> 00:06:24,480 Free speech in white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others and are not natural rights. 56 00:06:24,480 --> 00:06:33,210 The painting must go. Ongoing debates on the appropriation of black culture by non black artists have highlighted the relation 57 00:06:33,210 --> 00:06:38,400 of these appropriations to the systemic oppression of black communities in the US and worldwide. 58 00:06:38,400 --> 00:06:47,580 And in a wider historical view to the capitalist appropriation of the lives and bodies of black people with which our present era began. 59 00:06:47,580 --> 00:06:54,070 Meanwhile, a similarly high stakes conversation has been going on about the willingness of a largely 60 00:06:54,070 --> 00:06:59,580 non black media to share images and footage of black people in torment and distress, 61 00:06:59,580 --> 00:07:06,390 or even at the moment of death, evoking deeply shameful white American traditions such as the public lynching. 62 00:07:06,390 --> 00:07:11,460 Although derided by many white and white affiliated critics as trivial and naive, 63 00:07:11,460 --> 00:07:21,390 discussions of appropriation and representation go to the heart of the question of how we might seek to live in a reparative mode with humility, 64 00:07:21,390 --> 00:07:29,280 clarity, humour and hope. Given the barbaric realities of racial and gender violence on which our lives are founded, 65 00:07:29,280 --> 00:07:33,720 I see no more important foundational consideration for art that this question, 66 00:07:33,720 --> 00:07:41,090 which otherwise dissolves into empty formalism or irony into a pastime or a therapy. 67 00:07:41,090 --> 00:07:49,860 The curators of the Whitney Biennial surely agree because they have staged a show in which black life and antiblack violence feature as themes. 68 00:07:49,860 --> 00:07:58,590 And Ben and Ben approvingly reviewed it happen approvingly, reviewed in major publications for doing so, 69 00:07:58,590 --> 00:08:03,060 although it is possible that this inclusion means no more than that. 70 00:08:03,060 --> 00:08:11,220 Blackness is hot right now, driven into nonblack consciousness by prominent black uprisings and struggles across the U.S. and elsewhere. 71 00:08:11,220 --> 00:08:20,730 I choose to assume as much capacity, capacity for insight and sincerity in the biennial curators as I do in myself. 72 00:08:20,730 --> 00:08:25,050 Which is to say, we all make terrible mistakes sometimes, but through effort, 73 00:08:25,050 --> 00:08:31,380 the more important thing could be how we move to make amends for them and what we learn in the process. 74 00:08:31,380 --> 00:08:45,450 The painting must go. Thank you for reading. Needless to say, the painting was not destroyed. 75 00:08:45,450 --> 00:08:52,260 It did not go. The museum did not remove it. The Whitney did revise its wall label. 76 00:08:52,260 --> 00:08:59,250 More explanation that the museum, quote, as a Museum of American Art must engage this enduring history. 77 00:08:59,250 --> 00:09:04,110 And quote, Schultz also added an explanation of her intentions. 78 00:09:04,110 --> 00:09:07,560 She related the painting to the summer of twenty sixteen, 79 00:09:07,560 --> 00:09:13,890 the summer before the election of Donald Trump, quote, a long, violent summer of mass shootings, 80 00:09:13,890 --> 00:09:17,940 rallies filled with hate speech and an ever escalating number of black men being 81 00:09:17,940 --> 00:09:24,870 shot execution style by police recorded with camera phones as witnesses and quote. 82 00:09:24,870 --> 00:09:31,230 She claimed that photographs of Tyll quote felt analogous to the tragic events of the summer. 83 00:09:31,230 --> 00:09:37,420 What had been hidden was now in plain view, end quote. 84 00:09:37,420 --> 00:09:44,470 The debate over Donna Schwartz's painting of Amatil and the incendiary responses it generated raise profound questions. 85 00:09:44,470 --> 00:09:49,270 Is history universal? Is the past available to all? 86 00:09:49,270 --> 00:09:54,220 Is American history available to all Americans? To anyone? 87 00:09:54,220 --> 00:10:00,580 Or alternatively, to a particular historical episodes only belong to certain people. 88 00:10:00,580 --> 00:10:06,880 To those who claim ownership over the past based on identity and shared experience. 89 00:10:06,880 --> 00:10:11,670 Who can speak and for whom? Who can see and what is seen. 90 00:10:11,670 --> 00:10:21,160 How is the right to representation determined and who decides? And finally, how do current events, the violence that saturates our visual culture, 91 00:10:21,160 --> 00:10:25,660 the images of police brutality that we all see in newspapers and online? 92 00:10:25,660 --> 00:10:32,880 How do these events and images shape and reshape the debate over Schwarz's painting? 93 00:10:32,880 --> 00:10:41,680 You might talk. Today, I explore these questions not so much to answer them, but to reveal the layers of complexity in this controversy. 94 00:10:41,680 --> 00:10:46,630 The layers of complexity that extend back into history. 95 00:10:46,630 --> 00:10:52,120 Before proceeding, I want to make clear that I can only offer my own perspective. 96 00:10:52,120 --> 00:10:59,560 I make no claim over how others perceive these images, and I'm not interested in arguing for or against Shultz's painting. 97 00:10:59,560 --> 00:11:02,560 And the responses are generated as I see it. 98 00:11:02,560 --> 00:11:10,320 The controversy is in part about the need to validate the full range of responses charged images generate. 99 00:11:10,320 --> 00:11:17,590 I mean, I am inspired by the hope in Black's letter that we all might live in a reparative mode. 100 00:11:17,590 --> 00:11:23,560 We can only do that by taking part in these high stakes conversations. 101 00:11:23,560 --> 00:11:29,500 This talk is the second in a series of four lectures that attempts to do precisely that. 102 00:11:29,500 --> 00:11:33,710 That examines the resurgence of the culture wars in the United States. 103 00:11:33,710 --> 00:11:39,700 Two recent controversies and high stakes conversations last week in a discussion of 104 00:11:39,700 --> 00:11:44,260 ongoing protests at the Whitney against the museum board member Warren Kanter's, 105 00:11:44,260 --> 00:11:47,560 whose company, Safari Land Manufacturers, teargassed. 106 00:11:47,560 --> 00:11:56,540 I presented a few of my hypotheses about recent culture wars, ideas I want to carry across the floor talks and repeat here. 107 00:11:56,540 --> 00:12:03,110 I suggested that, first of all, one, these controversies are both analogue and digital. 108 00:12:03,110 --> 00:12:10,460 To the debates are framed by a set of diametrically opposed, dialectically inverted positions. 109 00:12:10,460 --> 00:12:15,630 Three, the controversies are political but also aesthetic. 110 00:12:15,630 --> 00:12:20,480 For they are about the present, but also the past. 111 00:12:20,480 --> 00:12:25,390 And five, they seem new but are actually old. 112 00:12:25,390 --> 00:12:33,010 These claims are consistent with the controversy over open casket, which perfectly illustrates these tensions. 113 00:12:33,010 --> 00:12:39,130 It is about a painting in the present. It seems new, but it also engaged questions about the past. 114 00:12:39,130 --> 00:12:43,960 It is about a physical thing, but the debate happens in the digital sphere. 115 00:12:43,960 --> 00:12:50,500 The most revealing aspect of Parker Bright's protest is the way it indexes these contradictions. 116 00:12:50,500 --> 00:13:00,640 It shows him in situ at the museum. But his action is captured as a digital image, one that also depicts a woman's iPhone reflecting the scene. 117 00:13:00,640 --> 00:13:06,580 This meson, a beam of references, clarifies one of the main arguments of this lecture series. 118 00:13:06,580 --> 00:13:14,020 These cultural wars reflect how contemporary digital technologies are disrupting older historical arguments. 119 00:13:14,020 --> 00:13:23,370 Arguments about the past, animating them and also animating American art and visual culture in new ways. 120 00:13:23,370 --> 00:13:29,610 We live in an age of image overload, of constant visual bombardment, of too many images, 121 00:13:29,610 --> 00:13:38,000 a blur on thin glass screens on our computers and iPhones, all of history is disturbingly visible. 122 00:13:38,000 --> 00:13:46,190 I want to argue that this contemporary condition is a key feature linking all of these culture wars. 123 00:13:46,190 --> 00:13:55,490 This debate is also representative of many other recent controversies in the U.S. involving identity politics and claims of cultural appropriation. 124 00:13:55,490 --> 00:14:03,350 Specifically, the appropriation of black culture by white cultural producers, artists, novelists, musicians and so forth. 125 00:14:03,350 --> 00:14:13,160 Today, I examine that debate, but also situated historically relating it to the visual dynamics that remain unseen and unacknowledged, 126 00:14:13,160 --> 00:14:18,320 but which nonetheless structure these historical images of violence. 127 00:14:18,320 --> 00:14:24,260 Vision and the gaze are both reactionary and progressive weapons. 128 00:14:24,260 --> 00:14:31,660 The painting is contested now, but its image was contested long ago. 129 00:14:31,660 --> 00:14:36,700 Lynching is vigilante violence. It is murder committed by a mob. 130 00:14:36,700 --> 00:14:43,420 Typically, though, not exclusively by whites against blacks as racialized and racist terrorism. 131 00:14:43,420 --> 00:14:48,430 The majority of lynchings occurred in the United States between 1880 and 1930, 132 00:14:48,430 --> 00:14:53,230 when there were four thousand six hundred and ninety six documented murders. 133 00:14:53,230 --> 00:14:59,680 Many more were never recorded. The vast majority of these murders occurred in the Jim Crow South. 134 00:14:59,680 --> 00:15:03,040 Their perpetrators were rarely brought to justice. 135 00:15:03,040 --> 00:15:13,420 These crimes were intended to defy the legal system altogether and there and they were often even tacitly condoned by police and the legal system. 136 00:15:13,420 --> 00:15:17,440 The lynching of Emmett Till was one of the most widely covered cases, 137 00:15:17,440 --> 00:15:29,030 and the brutal images from that event effectively helped and lynching as a common extra juridical practise in the US. 138 00:15:29,030 --> 00:15:34,290 This specific story of Amatil needs to be told. 139 00:15:34,290 --> 00:15:40,530 Emmett Till grew up in Chicago, where his grandmother had moved as part of the Great Migration out of the Deep South, 140 00:15:40,530 --> 00:15:45,840 to the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast in the early 20th century. 141 00:15:45,840 --> 00:15:53,820 A migration prompted by the racism of the Jim Crow South, but also the promise of opportunities elsewhere. 142 00:15:53,820 --> 00:16:03,600 In the summer of 1955, when Till was 14 years old, he asked his mother to allow him to visit his cousins in Mississippi for a few weeks. 143 00:16:03,600 --> 00:16:08,130 And despite her reservations about a boy of 14 travelling on his own, 144 00:16:08,130 --> 00:16:16,470 she sent him down by train to the small town of Money, Mississippi, where he would stay with his great uncle Moses Wright, 145 00:16:16,470 --> 00:16:18,840 on a Wednesday evening, August 24th, 146 00:16:18,840 --> 00:16:28,030 till with his cousins and some friends drove to Bryant's grocery and meat market at nearby general store for candy and sodas. 147 00:16:28,030 --> 00:16:36,230 Carolyn Bryant, a white. 21 year old woman, was working the cash register till wanted bubble gum. 148 00:16:36,230 --> 00:16:38,540 It is not clear what happened at Bryant's grocery, 149 00:16:38,540 --> 00:16:47,810 but whatever occurred violated the rigid social codes to dictating behaviour between whites and blacks and between men and women, 150 00:16:47,810 --> 00:16:57,230 boys and girls in the Jim Crow South. Bryant later told her attorney that Till's hand touched hers when he gave her money. 151 00:16:57,230 --> 00:17:03,440 This alone would violate taboos against physical contact across racial lines. 152 00:17:03,440 --> 00:17:08,210 Tilden put his candy money on the counter, as was common custom. 153 00:17:08,210 --> 00:17:15,830 Actually, I cite alone just making eye contact. Just looking was enough to violate taboos. 154 00:17:15,830 --> 00:17:23,300 Local news reports at the time also described what similarly seemed like innocuous transgressions till may have failed to say. 155 00:17:23,300 --> 00:17:34,290 Yes, ma'am. He may have whistled at Bryant. In response, Till was kidnapped from his uncle Moses Wright's house by Carolyn Bryan's husband, Rob. 156 00:17:34,290 --> 00:17:39,180 Excuse me, Roy Bryant and her brother in law, J.W. Milam. 157 00:17:39,180 --> 00:17:48,810 The two men beat till shot him and dumped his body, weighed down by a giant metal fan from a cotton gin tied to his neck in the Tallahatchie River. 158 00:17:48,810 --> 00:17:55,530 The body was discovered three days later. He was sent by train back to his mother, Mamie Till Bradley, 159 00:17:55,530 --> 00:18:05,220 who famously insisted against the demands of authorities in Mississippi and her own funeral director in Chicago and holding an open casket funeral. 160 00:18:05,220 --> 00:18:11,190 The coffin lid was propped open, only a thin sheet of glass covering her son's body. 161 00:18:11,190 --> 00:18:22,120 She famously declared that it was this body, a visible body that would create social change in the United States that might change the body politic. 162 00:18:22,120 --> 00:18:26,040 And the Till's body was visible to all who attended. 163 00:18:26,040 --> 00:18:34,050 Tens of thousands of mourners who went up around the block. There were also many photographs. 164 00:18:34,050 --> 00:18:38,760 Newspapers reproduced images of the funeral. These were seen by millions. 165 00:18:38,760 --> 00:18:47,050 One in particular is striking. It's a PIC's Till's mother in shock at the side of the casket. 166 00:18:47,050 --> 00:18:50,650 Her face is anguished. It is riveting and awful. 167 00:18:50,650 --> 00:18:56,950 But I am drawn to the coffins silk lining, which serves as a backdrop for the display of still more photographs. 168 00:18:56,950 --> 00:19:05,260 This is a photograph of photographs. An image of images. These pictures displayed on the coffin lining TTYL as a boy. 169 00:19:05,260 --> 00:19:08,440 In one he poses with his mother. 170 00:19:08,440 --> 00:19:17,050 This particular image of Mamie Till Bradley Index is the way photographic images have framed this event since it occurred. 171 00:19:17,050 --> 00:19:26,990 I find it so striking simply because it anticipates the image overload that defined and continues to define Till's murder. 172 00:19:26,990 --> 00:19:31,520 Many of the other photographs taken at the time were more gruesome focus less on 173 00:19:31,520 --> 00:19:36,950 the funeral and the public task of mourning and instead on the image of brutality. 174 00:19:36,950 --> 00:19:43,640 The most shocking brand in Jet magazine, the major news magazine targeting African-Americans. 175 00:19:43,640 --> 00:19:51,140 Shot by the photographer David Jackson. This one particular photo showed physical trauma in close detail. 176 00:19:51,140 --> 00:19:58,760 And it is also worth mentioning that many of these images were actually artists representations, 177 00:19:58,760 --> 00:20:11,770 which raises a question of how aesthetic cessation of this image occurs in different contexts from different artists for different purposes. 178 00:20:11,770 --> 00:20:16,660 How? Excuse me. How were these images looked at in the 1950s? 179 00:20:16,660 --> 00:20:22,600 And how do we look? Look. Excuse me? And how do we look at them now? 180 00:20:22,600 --> 00:20:34,340 How does Donna Shutz look at them? Are they gratuitous, fulfilling, a disturbing, voyeuristic desire to indulge in spectacular violence, 181 00:20:34,340 --> 00:20:41,000 to witness Black Death spectacle, as Parker Bright so provocatively puts it in her memoir? 182 00:20:41,000 --> 00:20:50,480 Mamie Till Bradley argued the opposite. She claimed that seeing the body of her son was urgent, that the body needed to be visible. 183 00:20:50,480 --> 00:21:00,310 That vision could be a powerful agent of social change, rendering the violence enacted by whites visible to all quote. 184 00:21:00,310 --> 00:21:04,210 I knew that I could talk for the rest of my life about what happened to my baby. 185 00:21:04,210 --> 00:21:12,490 I could explain it in great detail. I could describe what I saw laid out there, one piece, one inch, one body part at a time. 186 00:21:12,490 --> 00:21:17,050 I could do all that and people would still not get the full impact. 187 00:21:17,050 --> 00:21:22,930 They had to see what I had seen. The whole nation had to bear witness to this. 188 00:21:22,930 --> 00:21:31,510 I knew that if they walked by the casket, if people opened the pages of Jet magazine or The Chicago Defender, another African-American newspaper, 189 00:21:31,510 --> 00:21:41,250 if other people could see it with their own eyes, then together we could find a way to express what we had seen. 190 00:21:41,250 --> 00:21:49,630 The art historian Martin Berger knows that the most graphic images of Till's body only appeared in African-American publications. 191 00:21:49,630 --> 00:22:00,850 The black press used them tactically, strategically as a means of generating outrage that could propel civil rights activism. 192 00:22:00,850 --> 00:22:05,650 The white press avoided these images altogether. They censored them. 193 00:22:05,650 --> 00:22:10,150 Photographs of violence were, of course, featured in mainstream white newspapers. 194 00:22:10,150 --> 00:22:19,120 So the lack of images documenting Till's murder was not the result of an editorial ban on disturbing visual culture of fear of upsetting readers. 195 00:22:19,120 --> 00:22:28,150 Graphic depictions of dead soldiers, for example, frequently filled the pages of Life magazine during the Second World War censoring 196 00:22:28,150 --> 00:22:33,790 and the Till's body instead reflected a fear that the images power was too strong, 197 00:22:33,790 --> 00:22:38,380 that they might destabilise liberal narratives around race. 198 00:22:38,380 --> 00:22:40,750 Or, as Berger puts it, quote, 199 00:22:40,750 --> 00:22:49,450 The singularly unified white resistance to publication offers evidence that dissemination of the till photographs would have produced 200 00:22:49,450 --> 00:22:59,320 more unambiguously progressive results than the circulation of any other period photograph of white on black violence and quote. 201 00:22:59,320 --> 00:23:06,970 Significant accounts from the likes of Black Panther, Eldridge Cleaver and boxer Muhammad Ali attest to this power, 202 00:23:06,970 --> 00:23:17,050 a traumatic but compelling power that instil fear, anger, rage and sadness in those who viewed the images. 203 00:23:17,050 --> 00:23:22,120 Many who saw them later became leaders of the civil rights movement. 204 00:23:22,120 --> 00:23:31,540 The Emmett Till generation. They were called in this sense, the use of the images was helpful to African-American poet Langston Hughes, 205 00:23:31,540 --> 00:23:38,710 for example, embraced the spread of such images via mass media, quote, showing just one lynched body on TV. 206 00:23:38,710 --> 00:23:47,890 Seems to me long overdue, end quote. Or as Mamie Till Bradley announced on the station platform, according to press reports, 207 00:23:47,890 --> 00:23:57,120 when her son's body arrived in Chicago by train from Money, Mississippi, quote, The death of my only son might bring an end to lynching. 208 00:23:57,120 --> 00:24:00,300 End quote. In other words, 209 00:24:00,300 --> 00:24:10,590 the failure of mainstream white publications to publish these images the way they remained invisible is actually a reactionary political gesture. 210 00:24:10,590 --> 00:24:14,130 The graphic depiction of violence is here progressive, 211 00:24:14,130 --> 00:24:24,240 revealing through vision a truth about American society which might force other Americans to change the way that society functioned. 212 00:24:24,240 --> 00:24:30,690 Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, however, were soon acquitted by an all male, all white jury. 213 00:24:30,690 --> 00:24:39,780 They would later confess in the pages of Look magazine, a publication whose title is so appropriate for our discussion of what is visible 214 00:24:39,780 --> 00:24:47,900 and what is invisible to the acts that committed the murder they got away with. 215 00:24:47,900 --> 00:24:54,560 On its own, without the title, without the wall text, without the critical reappropriation, 216 00:24:54,560 --> 00:24:59,360 the reframing and re signifying provided by Pirker Bright and Hannah Black. 217 00:24:59,360 --> 00:25:05,030 The painting does not seem to convey much of this history, at least to me. 218 00:25:05,030 --> 00:25:13,760 My I. It's wrong to the lining of the casket with a silk fabric falls in painterly patterns purples, 219 00:25:13,760 --> 00:25:22,230 pinks, blues, yellows, oranges, a rich texture, a seductive layer of carefully worked pigment. 220 00:25:22,230 --> 00:25:30,210 The painter's marks are at once informal and spontaneous, but also controlled and articulated here. 221 00:25:30,210 --> 00:25:33,940 The fabric. Excuse me here. 222 00:25:33,940 --> 00:25:38,380 The fabric does not evoke anything about the episode at all. 223 00:25:38,380 --> 00:25:46,510 It doesn't index the mediation of the event through images. It is all surface decoration. 224 00:25:46,510 --> 00:25:50,950 We could probably perform the same type of analysis on the decorative, 225 00:25:50,950 --> 00:25:58,090 painterly patterns that comprise and the tails face the stumbled and worked pigment. 226 00:25:58,090 --> 00:26:02,770 Indeed, what is most disturbing about the painting is not the fact that it depicts the body of Emmett Till. 227 00:26:02,770 --> 00:26:08,050 But the tension of that fact against the visual play of the painting surface. 228 00:26:08,050 --> 00:26:13,210 The painting abstracts charged content into mere form. 229 00:26:13,210 --> 00:26:19,340 It creates a transformation of history into something literally superficial. 230 00:26:19,340 --> 00:26:25,520 Hannah Black called this transformation a transmutation of the reality embedded in the image. 231 00:26:25,520 --> 00:26:34,390 Its reference to an actual person, the real Emmett Till, into, quote, profit and funds, unquote. 232 00:26:34,390 --> 00:26:38,170 Last week, we discussed the phenomena of earth washing, 233 00:26:38,170 --> 00:26:44,230 the idea that the investment of capital into the arts turns that capital into cultural capital, 234 00:26:44,230 --> 00:26:49,390 into a mask, a positive value that can disguise negative ones. 235 00:26:49,390 --> 00:26:55,090 At the Twenty Seventeen Biennial, a version of this dynamic was also at play. 236 00:26:55,090 --> 00:26:59,470 The issue is not that Schultz's painting attains monetary value. 237 00:26:59,470 --> 00:27:01,660 Schwartz has confirmed that it will never be sold, 238 00:27:01,660 --> 00:27:10,030 but that it tienes cultural capital of value resulting from a sense of intellectual engagement with the politics of race. 239 00:27:10,030 --> 00:27:16,390 Even though that engagement might might be no more than a spectacle of racial 240 00:27:16,390 --> 00:27:23,930 reconciliation intended to entertain a largely white audience at the museum. 241 00:27:23,930 --> 00:27:35,900 In viewing this painting, we, of course, become complicit with the aesthetic experience it creates with the contradictions between form and content. 242 00:27:35,900 --> 00:27:40,340 We cannot escape the seduction of pigment on canvas. 243 00:27:40,340 --> 00:27:48,080 This is part of what makes the painting uncomfortable to view. 244 00:27:48,080 --> 00:27:55,520 Lynching is vigilante violence, but it is also visual violence specifically connected to the image, 245 00:27:55,520 --> 00:28:06,680 to photography and the politics of seeing the crime of looking often incited murder to begin with looking across boundaries of race and sex. 246 00:28:06,680 --> 00:28:15,440 Carolyn Bryant, in her own memoir, recalls how the social codes in Indianola, Mississippi, where she grew up, were conditioned by vision. 247 00:28:15,440 --> 00:28:23,200 The prevailing rule was that blacks, quote, better not look any white person in the eye and quote. 248 00:28:23,200 --> 00:28:31,420 Lynching was also visual in the sense of public spectacle. The murders were often viewed by the lynch mob in a common space. 249 00:28:31,420 --> 00:28:38,830 Though this is not the case with the lynching Minitel, but making images of lynchings was also central to the ritual. 250 00:28:38,830 --> 00:28:48,810 And these photographs frequently circulated as souvenirs or keepsakes mounted on cardstock or sent as postcards. 251 00:28:48,810 --> 00:28:55,980 They not only increased the circle of participants who took part by proxy through the consumption of the image, 252 00:28:55,980 --> 00:29:05,700 they also served as a warning, a threat to black Americans enacting a type of panoptic power in which the image looks back. 253 00:29:05,700 --> 00:29:18,680 It instils fear in those who see it. And yet these images were highly complex representations and could also be reappropriated, reframed, 254 00:29:18,680 --> 00:29:27,770 re signified and inverted for a time alternative uses an image weaponized in white visual culture used as 255 00:29:27,770 --> 00:29:34,730 an instrument to police consensus amongst whites and intimidate blacks could also serve inverse purposes, 256 00:29:34,730 --> 00:29:44,660 especially in the hands of anti lynching activists. In the 1920s, these activists purposely used such images in their campaigns, 257 00:29:44,660 --> 00:29:48,890 and I want to offer a brief warning that the next image is particularly disturbing. 258 00:29:48,890 --> 00:29:58,640 But I think it's worth and valuable to discuss one famous example, a 1935 leaflet circulated by the NAACP. 259 00:29:58,640 --> 00:30:04,100 The most significant civil rights organisation shows the body of Rubins Stacy. 260 00:30:04,100 --> 00:30:09,350 The leaflet uses text to modify the way we consume the image. 261 00:30:09,350 --> 00:30:14,600 Quote, Do not look at the Negro. His earthly problems are ended. 262 00:30:14,600 --> 00:30:23,410 Instead, look at the seven white children who gaze at this gruesome spectacle and quote. 263 00:30:23,410 --> 00:30:28,060 The leaflet takes the gaze directed at the lynched man. 264 00:30:28,060 --> 00:30:32,770 An object of visual focus as indicated by the sight lines provided by the mob of white 265 00:30:32,770 --> 00:30:40,060 spectators surrounding the body and redirects it toward the white girl at right. 266 00:30:40,060 --> 00:30:45,280 In other words, vision itself, as coded through the logic of the gaze, 267 00:30:45,280 --> 00:30:56,740 is directed in a way that diverts attention from the act of murder and focuses it on the act of looking at murder. 268 00:30:56,740 --> 00:31:04,420 The gaze is a form of violence, one that turns its centre of attention into an object, 269 00:31:04,420 --> 00:31:10,750 one that objectifies its subject, that dehumanises controls and polices. 270 00:31:10,750 --> 00:31:18,130 Here, however, we are asked to shift that weapon from a victim of violence to a perpetrator of violence, 271 00:31:18,130 --> 00:31:24,370 or if not a perpetrator of actual violence, then a perpetrator of visual violence. 272 00:31:24,370 --> 00:31:33,810 The leaflet demonstrates how an intervention in spectatorship can transform the way these images function. 273 00:31:33,810 --> 00:31:39,240 This is precisely what Mamie Till Bradley did with the photographs of her son's funeral and of his body. 274 00:31:39,240 --> 00:31:53,000 She also reappropriated, reframed, re signified she turned what could have been exploitative into a form of activism, constructing new meanings. 275 00:31:53,000 --> 00:32:03,260 I do not discuss these images eagerly looking at lynching photographs is awful, but now looking at lynching photographs is also awful. 276 00:32:03,260 --> 00:32:09,860 Avoiding them, averting the gaze entirely, pretending they do not exist is an act of repression, 277 00:32:09,860 --> 00:32:15,110 a suppression of history of the past, but also of the present. 278 00:32:15,110 --> 00:32:21,740 I am showing them because understanding how these images worked is actually crucial for understanding how they work. 279 00:32:21,740 --> 00:32:27,710 Now how the controversy in twenty seventeen repeats the history of lynching photography and 280 00:32:27,710 --> 00:32:33,710 the way that vision became implicated with power structures first in the Jim Crow South, 281 00:32:33,710 --> 00:32:45,800 but also again in the mass media environment of the 1950s, an age of newspapers, of inky photographs printed in black and white on grey newsprint. 282 00:32:45,800 --> 00:32:52,760 And, of course, the way that vision. Again, becomes implicated with power structures. 283 00:32:52,760 --> 00:33:01,880 Today, in the new media environment of digital culture, we have a responsibility to look at these awful images, 284 00:33:01,880 --> 00:33:11,420 not to normalise them, not to legitimate them or glorify them, but to understand how they operated and continue to operate. 285 00:33:11,420 --> 00:33:18,130 In viewing these images, we, of course, also become participants in the violent spectacle. 286 00:33:18,130 --> 00:33:25,150 It does not matter whether we are viewing Schulz's painting, Bright's intervention or the image as weapon that Mamie Till Mobley. 287 00:33:25,150 --> 00:33:31,420 Excuse me, Mamie Till Bradley embraced. We are forced into a relationship with what we see. 288 00:33:31,420 --> 00:33:37,390 We cannot escape entrapment. And this is part of the paradox. 289 00:33:37,390 --> 00:33:45,460 This dynamic plays out constantly. It's worth mentioning that the front of Parker Bright's t shirt declared no lynching mob. 290 00:33:45,460 --> 00:33:51,300 It announces our complicity. We are that mob. 291 00:33:51,300 --> 00:34:00,870 And yes, this dynamic recurs right now in this lecture where a discussion of one of the most significant controversies in the arts in recent years. 292 00:34:00,870 --> 00:34:08,970 A topic I believe is important to publicly discuss, a topic that already has been publicly discussed in every major news outlets. 293 00:34:08,970 --> 00:34:17,360 Inevitably, unavoidably also restaged is the visual dynamics that caused the uproar in the first place. 294 00:34:17,360 --> 00:34:25,940 Again, I don't believe in avoiding these discussions or images, but I am very aware that any discussion about violent imagery cannot help but 295 00:34:25,940 --> 00:34:34,480 perpetuate a history of violence and the racial politics that produced the images. 296 00:34:34,480 --> 00:34:41,110 In this way, the politics circa 2017 are also the politics circa 1955. 297 00:34:41,110 --> 00:34:47,240 And this is for me, the point of historic sizing, this controversy. 298 00:34:47,240 --> 00:34:50,510 A point that is largely missing from the discussion, 299 00:34:50,510 --> 00:35:00,540 which tends to be completely a historical operating on the instantaneous timescale of Twitter and Instagram and Internet outrage. 300 00:35:00,540 --> 00:35:04,850 The supposed transgression of Till's murder was an interaction with Carolyn Bryant. 301 00:35:04,850 --> 00:35:10,050 Perhaps nothing more than a glance, a gaze then looking. 302 00:35:10,050 --> 00:35:18,010 Mamie Till Bradley, Donna Schultz and Parker Bright all intervene in this looking and relooking. 303 00:35:18,010 --> 00:35:25,300 Images of violence can be dehumanising and damaging, but can also assert through a negative statement. 304 00:35:25,300 --> 00:35:29,080 The value of human life, they can be constructive. 305 00:35:29,080 --> 00:35:35,980 Susan Sontag famously claimed that, quote, photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. 306 00:35:35,980 --> 00:35:46,470 And quote, This simple statement encapsulates the paradox of viewing the body of Emmett Till. 307 00:35:46,470 --> 00:35:54,090 Hannah Black's letter, her attack against ownership's is painting generated an equally intense counter attack. 308 00:35:54,090 --> 00:36:05,450 Another backlash. This is, after all, one of the key features of a culture war, a polarised, dialectically inverted response. 309 00:36:05,450 --> 00:36:11,420 Most figures in the arts completely disagreed with her argumentation, Coco Fusco, 310 00:36:11,420 --> 00:36:16,730 for example, denounced the call for the destruction of Schwarz's painting on The View. 311 00:36:16,730 --> 00:36:25,850 The day to. Daytime talk show. Whoopi Goldberg compared blacks call for destruction to actual fascism, 312 00:36:25,850 --> 00:36:33,500 to the way Nazis burned books and targeted modern art with the epithet degenerate. 313 00:36:33,500 --> 00:36:41,480 This controversy has departed from the positions on censorship characteristic of an early generation of culture wars. 314 00:36:41,480 --> 00:36:49,490 In those controversies in the 1990s, right wing critics deemed works of art morally offensive and demanded their removal. 315 00:36:49,490 --> 00:36:55,820 Here we have calls for image destruction from a progressive left, not the right. 316 00:36:55,820 --> 00:37:04,220 The controversy does not fit familiar positions on debates over freedom of expression versus censorship. 317 00:37:04,220 --> 00:37:13,880 These demands not only contradict familiar positions from other controversies, they also relate in complex ways to the historical events of the 1950s. 318 00:37:13,880 --> 00:37:17,990 As I already mentioned, and as art historian Myron Berger compellingly argues, 319 00:37:17,990 --> 00:37:27,740 the weight the white mainstream media censored images of Till's body from its pages because they feared the power of these images as weapons, 320 00:37:27,740 --> 00:37:40,900 destabilising the status quo. But the actual sites where these historical actions occurred in the 1950s have also been targeted, have been censored. 321 00:37:40,900 --> 00:37:47,110 Bryant's grocery and meat store, where TTYL bought bubble gum is now a ruin. 322 00:37:47,110 --> 00:37:53,860 Long abandoned, overgrown, dilapidated, falling into the past. 323 00:37:53,860 --> 00:38:00,030 In the summer of twenty seventeen. At the same time, the news media ran editorials denouncing Hannah Black. 324 00:38:00,030 --> 00:38:09,700 The historical markers at sites like Bryant's grocery were vandalised, defaced, their images destroyed. 325 00:38:09,700 --> 00:38:11,290 These acts of iconoclasm, 326 00:38:11,290 --> 00:38:21,520 this destruction of images was presumably intended as a protest against the progressive politics to which the Till's story is now associated. 327 00:38:21,520 --> 00:38:24,950 The way it propelled the civil rights movement, 328 00:38:24,950 --> 00:38:35,330 school students visiting on a class trip attempted to repair the signs to make new images telling the story of TTYL. 329 00:38:35,330 --> 00:38:41,240 Other historical markers in Money, Mississippi, on the Mississippi Freedom Trail were routinely attacked, 330 00:38:41,240 --> 00:38:50,370 are routinely attacked, riddled with bullet holes, used for target practise sites for actual gun violence. 331 00:38:50,370 --> 00:38:54,750 These signs have all been replaced multiple times. 332 00:38:54,750 --> 00:39:04,110 These acts of image destruction are the inverse of Hannah Black's call for image destruction with the historical markers, vandalism and defacement. 333 00:39:04,110 --> 00:39:07,710 Censorship is used to silence history, 334 00:39:07,710 --> 00:39:18,530 whereas Black hopes to silence shots in what she sees as as opportunistic and self-serving association with his history. 335 00:39:18,530 --> 00:39:26,600 The politics of censorship around this episode in 2017 compared to 1955 are highly conflicted. 336 00:39:26,600 --> 00:39:34,670 The positions are not consistent. They do not align. We experience the culture war as a set of dialectically inverted positions. 337 00:39:34,670 --> 00:39:45,390 But this polarisation ignores the complexity of positions around these images in different contexts and moments in time. 338 00:39:45,390 --> 00:39:56,680 Ultimately. Ultimately, I appreciate the radicality of black statement and Bright's gesture. 339 00:39:56,680 --> 00:40:06,160 I spoke last week about radical thinking, about how activists have embraced a set of positions that are radical because they are perhaps untenable 340 00:40:06,160 --> 00:40:13,120 and that these positions therefore allow us to think about what a more humane art world might be. 341 00:40:13,120 --> 00:40:18,520 Hannah Black makes a radical argument, and it worked as media strategy. 342 00:40:18,520 --> 00:40:25,720 Donna Schultz, on the other hand, seems to have encountered this controversy unintentionally without realising what she was doing. 343 00:40:25,720 --> 00:40:33,420 She was, I think it is fair to say, naive, unprepared for backlash and for. 344 00:40:33,420 --> 00:40:39,330 American visual culture is a contest of images, and we are all entangled in it. 345 00:40:39,330 --> 00:40:41,310 I can't resolve this contest. 346 00:40:41,310 --> 00:40:52,140 Can't answer all the questions, but perhaps thinking this contest historically reveals it as in part, a clash between the present and the past. 347 00:40:52,140 --> 00:41:02,640 A contemporary culture of rapid image circulation and digital networks creates constant confrontations with history. 348 00:41:02,640 --> 00:41:09,260 History is framed and really framed. It signifies and we signifies. 349 00:41:09,260 --> 00:41:13,580 I want to repeat something I said at the conclusion of my talk last week. 350 00:41:13,580 --> 00:41:23,000 Given the pervasiveness of these digital networks, the constant bombardment of images, it is certain there will be many more culture wars to come. 351 00:41:23,000 --> 00:41:38,304 We will look at another one. One related to the story of them until next week.