1 00:00:03,620 --> 00:00:11,090 I want to start by welcoming everyone to the third lecture in the terror lectures in American Art, 2 00:00:11,090 --> 00:00:19,550 which is the series is focussed this year on the theme, a contest of images, American art as culture war. 3 00:00:19,550 --> 00:00:31,010 And first, I want to also introduce myself. My name is John Blake and Jr. I'm the 2018 2019 Terror Visiting Professor of American Art here at Oxford. 4 00:00:31,010 --> 00:00:34,640 And before proceeding, I want to make an announcement. 5 00:00:34,640 --> 00:00:38,930 There'll be drinks next week after the final lecture in the series. 6 00:00:38,930 --> 00:00:41,840 So I hope to see all of you there. 7 00:00:41,840 --> 00:00:51,830 And I also want to offer again this week a disclaimer that I'm also going to be showing images that are related to death and that are violent. 8 00:00:51,830 --> 00:00:56,330 So if you need to step out of the room, obviously that's not a problem. 9 00:00:56,330 --> 00:01:06,820 OK. On January 1st, 1863, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, 10 00:01:06,820 --> 00:01:13,930 an executive order that granted freedom to more than three point five million enslaved African-Americans. 11 00:01:13,930 --> 00:01:21,100 The proclamation, signed in the myths of the American Civil War as a war measure meant that slaves who escaped the Confederacy, 12 00:01:21,100 --> 00:01:30,190 the southern states that had seceded from the Union, would now have federal legal status as free and as union troops advanced across the South. 13 00:01:30,190 --> 00:01:35,140 The order eventually applied to 10 states in rebellion. 14 00:01:35,140 --> 00:01:42,640 The Emancipation Proclamation was followed after the war by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, 15 00:01:42,640 --> 00:01:48,760 which finally abolished slavery in the United States in 1865. 16 00:01:48,760 --> 00:01:56,620 But the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation occurred the same week as another very different presidential action. 17 00:01:56,620 --> 00:01:59,800 On December 26, 1862. 18 00:01:59,800 --> 00:02:09,670 The day after Christmas, the largest mass execution ever on American soil took place in the small frontier city of Mankato, Minnesota. 19 00:02:09,670 --> 00:02:18,280 At 10 a.m., just a few weeks before, on December 6th, President Lincoln sent a directive to the frontier, 20 00:02:18,280 --> 00:02:22,750 ordering the execution of thirty nine Native Americans. 21 00:02:22,750 --> 00:02:30,520 Members of the Dakota part of the Sioux nation, they were condemned to death by hanging. 22 00:02:30,520 --> 00:02:38,320 The men had all been part of an uprising that came to be known as a U.S. dakotah war in which the Dakota desperate for food, 23 00:02:38,320 --> 00:02:46,750 in part because the US government failed to provide annuity payments and supplies as mandated in legally binding treaties, 24 00:02:46,750 --> 00:02:54,070 instigated attacks on white settlers who subsequently repressed them with violence. 25 00:02:54,070 --> 00:03:05,590 Lincoln was under enormous pressure from these settlers to punish the Dakota and not doing so risked encouraging vigilante violence on the frontier. 26 00:03:05,590 --> 00:03:10,980 In fact, Lincoln could have ordered many more Native Americans to death by hanging. 27 00:03:10,980 --> 00:03:17,830 Three hundred and three Dakota men were originally sentenced to death in Mankato by a military commission. 28 00:03:17,830 --> 00:03:23,890 Three hundred and ninety two Dakota men were first tried in the commissions legal proceedings. 29 00:03:23,890 --> 00:03:31,750 President Lincoln, despite the pressures of a civil war. We examined these case records and commuted individual sentences. 30 00:03:31,750 --> 00:03:35,740 Reducing the number of men condemned to death to thirty nine. 31 00:03:35,740 --> 00:03:42,390 Another man was later reprieved. Lincoln reported to the U.S. Senate, quote. 32 00:03:42,390 --> 00:03:47,280 Anxious to not act with so much clemency as to encourage another outbreak. 33 00:03:47,280 --> 00:03:53,460 On the one hand, nor with so much severity as to be real cruelty on the other. 34 00:03:53,460 --> 00:03:59,750 I caused a careful examination of the records of trials to be made and quote. 35 00:03:59,750 --> 00:04:08,780 But despite this careful examination, Lincoln's orders still resulted in the largest mass execution in U.S. history. 36 00:04:08,780 --> 00:04:17,600 How do we reconcile these two diametrically opposed events, events that took place at essentially the same time in American history? 37 00:04:17,600 --> 00:04:22,490 But point you very different mythologies of the American nation. 38 00:04:22,490 --> 00:04:32,060 On the one hand, the Emancipation Proclamation represents redemption for the original sin in American history, the institution of chattel slavery, 39 00:04:32,060 --> 00:04:36,590 which was legal across the 13 original colonies when the Declaration of Independence 40 00:04:36,590 --> 00:04:43,370 was signed in 1776 and which subsequently persisted south of the Mason-Dixon Line. 41 00:04:43,370 --> 00:04:53,960 The Emancipation Proclamation is rightly celebrated as one of Lincoln's most powerful actions in office, both in real terms and symbolically. 42 00:04:53,960 --> 00:05:04,010 It filtered through visual culture in the period as an act of national liberation as seen, for example, in this image, which is from Harper's Weekly. 43 00:05:04,010 --> 00:05:05,660 On the other hand, 44 00:05:05,660 --> 00:05:17,160 the Mankato execution represents the failure of attaining redemption for another original sin in American history settler colonialism. 45 00:05:17,160 --> 00:05:25,400 The executions remain a shadow on Lincoln's legacy, one typically overlooked in popular accounts and in common collective memory. 46 00:05:25,400 --> 00:05:34,200 The Mikoto, 38, have faded from view. They are, for many of us, forgotten. 47 00:05:34,200 --> 00:05:39,020 These events now distant and as I've said, forgotten, 48 00:05:39,020 --> 00:05:48,000 were forced back into memory by the artist Sam Durand through a sculpture he created in 2012 titled Scaffold. 49 00:05:48,000 --> 00:05:52,500 The work was first exhibited without controversy outside of the United States. 50 00:05:52,500 --> 00:06:01,530 It appeared in The Hague, Netherlands, in Edinburgh, Scotland, and at the contemporary art exhibition at Documenter 13 in Castle, Germany. 51 00:06:01,530 --> 00:06:09,870 The sculpture was made up of wooden planks and beams, a massive platform, metal steps and stairs. 52 00:06:09,870 --> 00:06:16,680 But the sculpture triggered an uproar when it appeared in a renovated sculpture garden at the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis. 53 00:06:16,680 --> 00:06:27,630 In the summer of twenty seventeen, the structures form was, according to Durand, a composite of seven infamous Gallow's from American history. 54 00:06:27,630 --> 00:06:34,200 I will list them. It re-created one. The scaffold used to execute them and Kado 38. 55 00:06:34,200 --> 00:06:38,640 In 1862. So execution, I've already explained. 56 00:06:38,640 --> 00:06:42,810 But also number two, the scaffold used to execute John Brown. 57 00:06:42,810 --> 00:06:47,880 The abolition is to let a raid on a federal armoury at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. 58 00:06:47,880 --> 00:06:54,090 In an attempt to initiate a slave rebellion across the South in 1859. 59 00:06:54,090 --> 00:06:58,170 Three The gallows used to execute the Lincoln conspirators. 60 00:06:58,170 --> 00:07:05,730 The three men and one woman who were convicted for assisting John Wilkes Booth in his assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, 61 00:07:05,730 --> 00:07:11,220 an attempted assassination of other U.S. government officials in 1865. 62 00:07:11,220 --> 00:07:18,780 And this event was also the first execution in U.S. history of a woman and then for the gallows used to 63 00:07:18,780 --> 00:07:30,410 execute the Haymarket martyrs who led a labour revolt and bombing in Chicago in eighteen eighty six. 64 00:07:30,410 --> 00:07:33,800 Five, the scaffold used to execute Reynie Bethia, 65 00:07:33,800 --> 00:07:43,190 convicted for rape and killed by the state in the last legally conducted public execution in U.S. history in 1936 and six. 66 00:07:43,190 --> 00:07:46,010 The scaffold used to execute Billy Bailey, 67 00:07:46,010 --> 00:07:55,190 who was convicted of two counts of murder and who elected death by hanging and the last hanging in U.S. history, which was not a public execution. 68 00:07:55,190 --> 00:08:02,130 And then finally, the gallows used in the execution of Saddam Hussein. 69 00:08:02,130 --> 00:08:10,380 This litany of references, this history of capital punishment in the United States probably seemed very distant in The Hague, 70 00:08:10,380 --> 00:08:17,580 in Edinburgh, in Castle, Germany, but it meant something more specific in Minnesota. 71 00:08:17,580 --> 00:08:21,690 The Walker Art Centre, after all, is located in Minneapolis. 72 00:08:21,690 --> 00:08:28,740 Only some 80 miles from Mankato, where the execution of the 38 Dakota man took place in 1862. 73 00:08:28,740 --> 00:08:34,610 The museum's sculpture garden is on land that once belonged to the Dakota. 74 00:08:34,610 --> 00:08:39,960 Durand's sculpture had previously been cited a great physical distance from its references, 75 00:08:39,960 --> 00:08:49,770 but also in completely different national contexts where capital punishment would have been understood as a completely American phenomena, 76 00:08:49,770 --> 00:08:57,990 as something that happened over there far away. After all, capital punishment was abolished in the Netherlands in 1870, 77 00:08:57,990 --> 00:09:04,620 in the United Kingdom in nineteen sixty five, and in Germany after the Second World War. 78 00:09:04,620 --> 00:09:08,910 Now located in close proximity to the works primary, 79 00:09:08,910 --> 00:09:17,400 historical sources in the country where all of these executions occurred, the illusions are not so abstract. 80 00:09:17,400 --> 00:09:23,820 The abstract collapses into this specific, the local into living memory. 81 00:09:23,820 --> 00:09:30,090 The way the sculpture forces the past back into mind is a more violent artistic gesture. 82 00:09:30,090 --> 00:09:38,910 When that path persists for communities that could visit and see and experience the sculpture. 83 00:09:38,910 --> 00:09:42,750 Memories of the execution of Don Carto 38 are traumatic. 84 00:09:42,750 --> 00:09:49,320 Not simply because execution as artistic subject matter is disturbing and inherently uncomfortable, 85 00:09:49,320 --> 00:09:56,580 but because these memories are entangled with the experience of settler colonialism. 86 00:09:56,580 --> 00:10:03,360 The history of settler colonialism in Minnesota requires some elaboration. 87 00:10:03,360 --> 00:10:07,660 The conflict between the Dakota and white settlers that came to be known as the 88 00:10:07,660 --> 00:10:12,660 U.S. Dakotah war can be traced to eighteen fifty one when the Dakota leader, 89 00:10:12,660 --> 00:10:13,740 Little Crow, 90 00:10:13,740 --> 00:10:23,700 signed two major treaties with the US government that ceded massive tracts of native land and what settlers called the Minnesota territory. 91 00:10:23,700 --> 00:10:29,970 In exchange, the Dakota would receive regular monetary payments and goods. 92 00:10:29,970 --> 00:10:35,640 These treaties forced the Dakota onto a reservation, just a thin strip of land. 93 00:10:35,640 --> 00:10:43,620 But the encroachment of white settlement, which occurred in part because the US Senate had surreptitiously removed articles from 94 00:10:43,620 --> 00:10:48,570 the treaties that specified the boundaries of the land granted to the Dakota cause. 95 00:10:48,570 --> 00:10:54,120 Destruction of Minnesota's natural habitat. The levelling of forests. 96 00:10:54,120 --> 00:11:03,730 The ploughing of prairies. This destruction disrupted the ability of the Dakota to hunt, fish farm and gather. 97 00:11:03,730 --> 00:11:09,090 Soon, the U.S. government began withholding annual payments. 98 00:11:09,090 --> 00:11:16,860 The Dakota leader, Little Crow visited Washington, D.C., dressed in Western clothes to renegotiate the treaties. 99 00:11:16,860 --> 00:11:25,950 He was rebuffed. Withheld payments, broken treaties and environmental destruction led to food shortages and famine. 100 00:11:25,950 --> 00:11:34,860 The Dakota became desperate. A white trader named Andrew Jackson Muridke, who frequently sold goods to the Dakota, 101 00:11:34,860 --> 00:11:39,750 is famously remembered for his complete indifference to this desperation. 102 00:11:39,750 --> 00:11:48,120 Quote, So far as I am concerned, let them eat grass or their own dung and quote, 103 00:11:48,120 --> 00:11:59,250 These tensions exploded into violence in August 1862 when a band of Dakota killed five settlers, including Meric, whose mouth was stuffed with grass. 104 00:11:59,250 --> 00:12:06,540 A series of raids and skirmishes followed the war, such as it was only lasted months. 105 00:12:06,540 --> 00:12:13,230 U.S. soldiers took thousands of Dakota captive and forced them into internment camps. 106 00:12:13,230 --> 00:12:21,030 Many were then tried and condemned to death by hanging. After the Mankato execution, the Dakota lost everything. 107 00:12:21,030 --> 00:12:25,920 All treaties were expunged. All Dakota expelled from Minnesota. 108 00:12:25,920 --> 00:12:33,360 A bounty of twenty five U.S. dollars per skalp was offered for any dakotah found in the state. 109 00:12:33,360 --> 00:12:40,890 The case of the Mercado's thirty eight and the larger U.S. Dakotah war represent the trauma of colonisation. 110 00:12:40,890 --> 00:12:43,320 And in invoking this episode, 111 00:12:43,320 --> 00:12:53,750 I believe Sam Durand may have thought he was expressing empathy with indigenous people and unmasking the ideology of Manifest Destiny. 112 00:12:53,750 --> 00:13:00,440 But it is important to emphasise that Durans sculpture is not about just a single historical episode. 113 00:13:00,440 --> 00:13:09,050 It references seven in total. And not all of these episodes can be read as examples of colonisation or miscarriage of justice. 114 00:13:09,050 --> 00:13:17,740 The men and women hanged in his seven case studies were not a unanimously sympathetic group. 115 00:13:17,740 --> 00:13:20,740 This is a fact missing from many accounts of Durant's sculpture, 116 00:13:20,740 --> 00:13:25,870 which tend to assume that the artist's only selected instances that reflect the abuse of power. 117 00:13:25,870 --> 00:13:32,450 To me, this sculpture is actually very unclear, evoking episodes of execution that are contradictory, 118 00:13:32,450 --> 00:13:36,740 their social and political resonances inconsistent. 119 00:13:36,740 --> 00:13:43,880 For example, the Mikoto execution is now understood by most historians as legally and morally reprehensible. 120 00:13:43,880 --> 00:13:48,140 The trials were rapidly processed by a military commission. 121 00:13:48,140 --> 00:13:55,310 On the last day of trials, the commission heard 40 cases, some results with guilty verdicts in just a matter of minutes. 122 00:13:55,310 --> 00:14:05,690 There was no due process. The Dakota was also tried as common criminals, not as legitimate belligerents of a sovereign power fighting in a war. 123 00:14:05,690 --> 00:14:10,970 And the trials did not take place in actual courtrooms or with standard court procedures. 124 00:14:10,970 --> 00:14:19,980 Perhaps worst of all, the proceedings were in English, a foreign language that the Dakota did not all speak or understand. 125 00:14:19,980 --> 00:14:30,550 But Durant's other cases are ambiguous, Rainey Bethia, for example, was convicted of raping a US excuse me, a 70 year old woman. 126 00:14:30,550 --> 00:14:39,280 He also killed this woman. Bethia was not charged with murder, only rape, so that he could be executed by public hanging. 127 00:14:39,280 --> 00:14:48,070 Otherwise, he would have received a conviction of death by electrocution, which would not have enabled a public spectacle hanging. 128 00:14:48,070 --> 00:14:55,240 By contrast, ensured an audience. The case attracted national media attention. 129 00:14:55,240 --> 00:15:01,780 Some 20000 spectators attended. This photograph is shocking in its depiction of the mob. 130 00:15:01,780 --> 00:15:05,980 The thieves executioner was also drunk at the time of execution. 131 00:15:05,980 --> 00:15:09,880 It is no wonder that this was the last public hanging in the US. 132 00:15:09,880 --> 00:15:15,300 The episode led to reforms in the application of the death penalty. 133 00:15:15,300 --> 00:15:22,220 The discussions of Durant's scaffold often reduced the sculpture to a sympathetic, if ill conceived, gesture towards the Dakota. 134 00:15:22,220 --> 00:15:32,180 But I'm not sure what commentary Durand is making on these other cases, like Pythias, whose execution became a disturbing public spectacle. 135 00:15:32,180 --> 00:15:37,220 But who is not a particularly sympathetic figure in this way. 136 00:15:37,220 --> 00:15:44,060 I see Durand doing two opposite and contradictory, contradictory things with Scaffold. 137 00:15:44,060 --> 00:15:50,120 He is drawn to historical episodes that reveal the failure of American justice 138 00:15:50,120 --> 00:15:56,900 and the powerful fault lines that pool American history and society apart. 139 00:15:56,900 --> 00:16:05,030 Sorry, went ahead there. But he has also drawn to the spectacle of it all. 140 00:16:05,030 --> 00:16:11,210 He sees the gallows as another site of public fascination, of voyeuristic pleasure. 141 00:16:11,210 --> 00:16:19,400 He wants to fix the gaze of those 20000 spectators viewing Pythias execution back on to his own work. 142 00:16:19,400 --> 00:16:23,810 Scaffold contains political content, possibly critical content. 143 00:16:23,810 --> 00:16:30,580 Perhaps I'm not even sure, but it is also an indulgence in this spectacle. 144 00:16:30,580 --> 00:16:36,850 Something and we talked about this at great length last week. 145 00:16:36,850 --> 00:16:43,590 These two intertwined themes are present in historical accounts of the Mankato 38. 146 00:16:43,590 --> 00:16:50,110 The execution in Mercado took place on a large Gallow structure that was purpose built for 147 00:16:50,110 --> 00:16:57,430 the occasion designed to allow the execution of all 38 condemned men in a single instance. 148 00:16:57,430 --> 00:17:02,170 The trap or trap flaw dropped and everyone fell. 149 00:17:02,170 --> 00:17:08,080 I explored last week how murder became public spectacle and how vision is often part of these events, 150 00:17:08,080 --> 00:17:18,700 rituals which take place for people to see, to watch, and then to image and continually reimagine through keepsakes and postcards. 151 00:17:18,700 --> 00:17:26,440 The drama of mass death in a single instant at Mankato was similarly intended to increase the visual spectacle. 152 00:17:26,440 --> 00:17:34,550 It is interesting, given this fascination with visualising death in America that we have seen in previous case studies, which is also this. 153 00:17:34,550 --> 00:17:40,000 This named Death in America is also the title of World Series of disaster paintings 154 00:17:40,000 --> 00:17:46,960 that we considered that there are actually no photographs of the Mankato execution. 155 00:17:46,960 --> 00:17:57,760 There were, however, prints that appeared in Frank Leslie's illustrated newspaper and Harper's Weekly engravings of the scene circulated widely. 156 00:17:57,760 --> 00:18:08,740 They appeared on commemorative trays. This is for Standard Brewing Company and also commemorative spoons. 157 00:18:08,740 --> 00:18:16,330 These images are all triumphant, containing and reducing the violence of a mass execution to the gallows at centre, 158 00:18:16,330 --> 00:18:27,040 a perfect square feet in the distance and emphasising instead the perfect lines of troops, information and the many spectators. 159 00:18:27,040 --> 00:18:35,710 The news coverage at the time similarly presented the scene in visual terms, even when only describing it with text, 160 00:18:35,710 --> 00:18:41,170 newspapers often manipulated readers responses by setting up a visual tension, 161 00:18:41,170 --> 00:18:49,750 one that is important for Durant's later work between the beauty of the surroundings in Mankato and the reality of what happened. 162 00:18:49,750 --> 00:18:56,470 The New York Times focussed attention on the scaffold structure and the spectacle of it all in this way. 163 00:18:56,470 --> 00:19:07,710 Quote. The instrument upon which the extreme sentence of the law was to be performed was constructed in a very simple yet most ingenious manner. 164 00:19:07,710 --> 00:19:12,510 It was erected upon the main street, directly opposite the jail and between it and the river. 165 00:19:12,510 --> 00:19:17,560 The shape of this structure was a perfect square. 166 00:19:17,560 --> 00:19:25,780 Precisely at the time announced 10:00 a.m., a company without arms entered the prisoner's quarters to escort them to their doom. 167 00:19:25,780 --> 00:19:30,160 The signal to cut the rope was three taps of the drum. 168 00:19:30,160 --> 00:19:31,450 All things being ready. 169 00:19:31,450 --> 00:19:40,360 The first tap was given when the poor wretches made such frantic efforts to grasp each other's hands that it was agony to behold them. 170 00:19:40,360 --> 00:19:49,300 The second tap resounded on the air. The vast multitude were breathless with the awful surroundings of this solemn occasion. 171 00:19:49,300 --> 00:19:53,980 Again, the doleful tap brakes on the stillness of the scene. 172 00:19:53,980 --> 00:20:03,210 Click goes. The sharp axe and the descending platform leaves the bodies of 38 human beings dangling in the air. 173 00:20:03,210 --> 00:20:13,080 It was an awful sight to behold. Thirty eight human beings suspended in the air of the Bank of the beautiful Minnesota above the smiling, 174 00:20:13,080 --> 00:20:28,970 clear blue sky beneath and around the silent, thousands hushed to a deathly silence by the chilling scene before them. 175 00:20:28,970 --> 00:20:35,750 Durant's sculpture repeats this bizarre collapse of positive and negative. 176 00:20:35,750 --> 00:20:44,570 He translates the rhetorical device used in The New York Times into aesthetic terms, into experiential terms. 177 00:20:44,570 --> 00:20:50,060 Scaffold is deadly serious, but it looks to me like a jungle gym or a playground. 178 00:20:50,060 --> 00:20:55,730 The type of structure on which children run, play Klein and laugh. 179 00:20:55,730 --> 00:21:03,320 A postcard shows one such structure in Minnesota, just an hour and a half from both Mankato and the Walker Art Centre. 180 00:21:03,320 --> 00:21:12,260 The image is unsettling. It now evokes the gallows scuttled, creates an ironic tension between the spectacle, 181 00:21:12,260 --> 00:21:18,440 the historical events and a more contemporary resonance and common shared childhood experience. 182 00:21:18,440 --> 00:21:23,840 Images of the work as installed abroad show visitors responding to it in this way, 183 00:21:23,840 --> 00:21:34,020 clambering up its steps, playing in its shadows, circling on Bicycle's scaffold was fun. 184 00:21:34,020 --> 00:21:40,230 This tension is further reiterated by the works, citing in the Minnesota sculpture Guarded, 185 00:21:40,230 --> 00:21:49,530 where it was positioned in ironic dialogue with a giant sugary cherry balanced precariously on an enormous boon. 186 00:21:49,530 --> 00:22:00,070 That work by class Oldenburg and Coscia van Brugmann is also a fountain and sprays a spritz of water from the tip of its cherry stem. 187 00:22:00,070 --> 00:22:07,290 It conveys pop pleasure and humour, a sensuality in shiny red metal. 188 00:22:07,290 --> 00:22:14,200 Scuffled was also cited not far from a giant bright blue rooster by Catarina Fritsche. 189 00:22:14,200 --> 00:22:19,510 Scaffold looks plainly ridiculous between these works, 190 00:22:19,510 --> 00:22:26,770 and it's also intriguing to think about the spoon sort of recurring surreptitiously in this sighting. 191 00:22:26,770 --> 00:22:32,410 Durand's might have imagined that such irony strengthens the charge of the work scaffold, 192 00:22:32,410 --> 00:22:39,580 creates associations with the ludic, with playful, fun, with the big red cherry and the blue rooster. 193 00:22:39,580 --> 00:22:48,530 But then subsequently punctures these playful associations as one suddenly becomes aware of the reference to mass execution. 194 00:22:48,530 --> 00:22:54,390 Three taps of the drum click goes the sharp axe. 195 00:22:54,390 --> 00:23:03,070 The work placates viewers as a first approach and then forces them into a state of discomfort. 196 00:23:03,070 --> 00:23:09,070 Scuffle, therefore, reflects a problem that we have encountered while examining Donna Shutz painting Open Casket, 197 00:23:09,070 --> 00:23:17,900 which rendered the body of Emmett Till in a seductive sheen of oil pigment on canvas. 198 00:23:17,900 --> 00:23:28,960 And here's the detail. It gave that awful image a decorative appeal through paint that effectively transformed and transmuted historical reality into, 199 00:23:28,960 --> 00:23:34,060 as Parko Bright called it, Black Death spectacle in scaffold. 200 00:23:34,060 --> 00:23:42,160 The work does something similar, but different. The look of the work is really not all that seductive or appealing. 201 00:23:42,160 --> 00:23:43,990 It doesn't look like much, 202 00:23:43,990 --> 00:23:53,440 but the playfulness of its associations and its siting in a sculpture garden are completely at odds with historical realities it represents. 203 00:23:53,440 --> 00:24:01,080 What does the category of art as a philosophical construct do to memories of trauma and tragedy? 204 00:24:01,080 --> 00:24:07,150 To how those memories are experienced now? Many viewers believe that the works. 205 00:24:07,150 --> 00:24:13,240 Historical references actually served a valuable educational purpose. 206 00:24:13,240 --> 00:24:21,310 The National Coalition Against Censorship and Anti Censorship Organisation, which I'll speak more about, momentarily, argued that the work quote, 207 00:24:21,310 --> 00:24:28,210 intended to create awareness about capital punishment and its historically disproportionate effect on people of colour. 208 00:24:28,210 --> 00:24:33,690 And Pope. Others found similar meetings in Scaffold. 209 00:24:33,690 --> 00:24:39,450 A curator at the Walker Art Centre recalls seeing the work for the first time in 2012. 210 00:24:39,450 --> 00:24:43,410 Quote, I thought it was an incredibly powerful piece, 211 00:24:43,410 --> 00:24:49,770 which I read as a comment on the history of capital punishment and mass incarceration in the United States. 212 00:24:49,770 --> 00:24:55,420 And quote. But how does creating awareness even work? 213 00:24:55,420 --> 00:25:00,910 What is the comment? The sculpture actually makes about Kopit capital punishment? 214 00:25:00,910 --> 00:25:03,340 I don't see one at all. I'm not sure. 215 00:25:03,340 --> 00:25:12,040 Visitors are made aware of history in their encounter with the sculpture, which does very little to reframe and re signify history. 216 00:25:12,040 --> 00:25:22,950 It only inserts historical associations into an aesthetic experience, which does not seem to me to resolve those histories in any way. 217 00:25:22,950 --> 00:25:27,630 The explanation of the purported content that the sculpture references seven infamous 218 00:25:27,630 --> 00:25:33,960 Gallow's cannot be learnt from the sculpture alone without text explaining it. 219 00:25:33,960 --> 00:25:51,290 Nothing about the works form expresses the reality of the works content. 220 00:25:51,290 --> 00:26:01,490 In a statement from May 2017, draughted, in response to the complaints from a native community, Durans explained the purpose of the work as not to, 221 00:26:01,490 --> 00:26:12,030 quote, cause pain or suffering, but to speak against the continued marginalisation of these stories and people and quote, to create that awareness. 222 00:26:12,030 --> 00:26:21,490 His comments revealed his own blind spots, which he openly admits to having about the work and his perception. 223 00:26:21,490 --> 00:26:25,450 I made scaffold as a learning space for people like me, 224 00:26:25,450 --> 00:26:34,930 white people who have not suffered the effects of a white supremacist society and who may not consciously know that it exists. 225 00:26:34,930 --> 00:26:42,250 It has been my belief that white artists need to address issues of white supremacy and its institutional manifestations. 226 00:26:42,250 --> 00:26:46,300 Whites created the concept of race and have used it to maintain dominance. 227 00:26:46,300 --> 00:26:52,870 For centuries, whites must be involved in its dismantling. 228 00:26:52,870 --> 00:27:03,790 However, your protests have shown me that I made a grave miscalculation in how my work can be received by those in a particular community. 229 00:27:03,790 --> 00:27:09,060 In focussing on my position as a white artist making work for that audience, 230 00:27:09,060 --> 00:27:16,800 I fail to understand what the inclusion of the Dakota 38 in the sculpture could mean for Dakota people. 231 00:27:16,800 --> 00:27:22,410 I offer my deepest apologies for my thoughtlessness. I should have reached out to the Dakota community. 232 00:27:22,410 --> 00:27:31,180 The moment I do that, the sculpture will be exhibited at the Walker Art Centre in proximity to Mankato. 233 00:27:31,180 --> 00:27:38,590 My work was created with the idea of creating a zone of discomfort for whites. 234 00:27:38,590 --> 00:27:44,770 Your protests have now created a zone of discomfort for me. 235 00:27:44,770 --> 00:27:52,450 In my attempt to raise awareness, I have learnt something profound, and I thank you for that end quote. 236 00:27:52,450 --> 00:28:00,730 That discomfort is evident in the signs posted by protesters on the chain link fence that surrounded the sculpture garden. 237 00:28:00,730 --> 00:28:06,460 In the photos that circulated online, these signs serve as textual labels that, 238 00:28:06,460 --> 00:28:15,800 as we saw with Parker Bright's response to open casket last week, effectively re signify and reframe the work. 239 00:28:15,800 --> 00:28:24,950 Cultural genocide opportunist. This hurts native people, respect Dakota people, not your story. 240 00:28:24,950 --> 00:28:28,970 Feels like 1862 execution is not art, Dakotah. 241 00:28:28,970 --> 00:28:38,380 Genocide is not art. Take it down. One sign offered a 200 dollar reward for Skalp of artist, 242 00:28:38,380 --> 00:28:45,850 updating the old reward offered by the state of Minnesota for Dakota Scouts and inverting the irony of Duran's work. 243 00:28:45,850 --> 00:28:51,580 Back at the work itself, Durans also became the target of social media attacks. 244 00:28:51,580 --> 00:29:01,290 The type of Twitter abuse and Internet outrage that is again a prevailing feature of the contemporary culture war. 245 00:29:01,290 --> 00:29:08,780 But these protests had a very different effect in the case of scaffold in comparison to the case of open casket. 246 00:29:08,780 --> 00:29:12,610 While claims of cultural appropriation recur in both instances, 247 00:29:12,610 --> 00:29:18,830 there is also the suggestion from activists who protested Scaffold that the work triggered a powerful negative 248 00:29:18,830 --> 00:29:25,790 reaction not because it reflected cultural appropriation that was self-serving to the artist and institution, 249 00:29:25,790 --> 00:29:30,920 but because it enacted the forced confrontation with a painful past. 250 00:29:30,920 --> 00:29:39,050 In other words, it forced people to remember. That was Durant's goal, education awareness. 251 00:29:39,050 --> 00:29:44,180 But why should Native American communities be forced to remember in public spaces 252 00:29:44,180 --> 00:29:50,120 in the museum at the Walker Art Centre so near to where these events occurred? 253 00:29:50,120 --> 00:29:55,790 Why should they bear that burden when those memories had never even been forgotten? 254 00:29:55,790 --> 00:30:04,700 Well, the act of remembering is powerful. The uproar aimed at the rant and against Scaffold indicates that not everyone is in a position 255 00:30:04,700 --> 00:30:11,390 of privilege that allows remembering to happen in a purely intellectual or aesthetic manner. 256 00:30:11,390 --> 00:30:18,730 For some, it is too deeply intertwined with actual experience with real life. 257 00:30:18,730 --> 00:30:24,760 Moreover, the protests also prompted different resolutions in these two cases. 258 00:30:24,760 --> 00:30:33,430 Donna Shutz defy protesters claiming her work was motivated by empathy but expressing no regret, shame or embarrassment. 259 00:30:33,430 --> 00:30:44,920 By contrast, Durant actually listened. He met with protesters and he's seen here with director of the Walker Art Centre at the time, Ohga Visa. 260 00:30:44,920 --> 00:30:49,510 Duran came to appreciate the perspective of the protesters. 261 00:30:49,510 --> 00:30:54,940 He ultimately agreed with them and supported the removal of his sculpture. 262 00:30:54,940 --> 00:31:02,230 The original plan had been to ritually burn the work, but community leaders decided that burning was inappropriate. 263 00:31:02,230 --> 00:31:10,140 As fire into code, a myth represents a constructive life force and should not be used to destroy Durant's 264 00:31:10,140 --> 00:31:15,590 signed intellectual excuse me intellectual property rights over to the Dakota. 265 00:31:15,590 --> 00:31:21,590 And they instead decided to bury the wood in an undisclosed location. 266 00:31:21,590 --> 00:31:27,630 And Okah Visa would later write about this experience. She stepped down from her position following this incident, 267 00:31:27,630 --> 00:31:33,430 and she writes here in an editorial in The New York Times about how the museum's reaction 268 00:31:33,430 --> 00:31:40,980 might be a more progressive reaction than the case of Donna showed that the Whitney. 269 00:31:40,980 --> 00:31:47,410 Colonisation of the West operated through the mythology of Manifest Destiny and the frontier. 270 00:31:47,410 --> 00:31:51,640 Under those ideological imaginings, the West was just empty. 271 00:31:51,640 --> 00:31:56,170 Ready for colonial conquest. Ready to be colonised. 272 00:31:56,170 --> 00:32:04,330 The problem with the mythology of Manifest Destiny and the frontier was that they were structured upon an imagined erasure of indigenous presence, 273 00:32:04,330 --> 00:32:09,480 which thus justified the forced removal of indigenous people. 274 00:32:09,480 --> 00:32:14,400 Durand, in his embrace of remembering, regardless of his intentions, 275 00:32:14,400 --> 00:32:21,860 seems to forget that there are people there who already remember and may not want to be forced to publicly remember. 276 00:32:21,860 --> 00:32:25,620 Again. From one protester, quote, 277 00:32:25,620 --> 00:32:34,080 It's really traumatising for our people to look at that and have it just appear without any warning or idea that they were doing this. 278 00:32:34,080 --> 00:32:41,780 And it's not art and quote. An editorial in a local paper further explained the problem. 279 00:32:41,780 --> 00:32:46,730 Quote, Minnesota has so successfully wiped clean. It's awful treatment. 280 00:32:46,730 --> 00:32:57,210 That's a quote of people that no one, no Walker, curator, board member or patron raised the issue of what actual Dakota might think. 281 00:32:57,210 --> 00:33:07,410 The history of art and in fact, all history is founded on the assumption that the past is worth remembering, reconstructing, reanimating. 282 00:33:07,410 --> 00:33:11,730 It's our job as historians to give life to the past. 283 00:33:11,730 --> 00:33:20,220 This episode suggests to me, however, the value of precisely, precisely the opposite procedure forgetting, 284 00:33:20,220 --> 00:33:27,630 deconstructing, dismantling, dismantling the gallows means finding a way to acknowledge what happened. 285 00:33:27,630 --> 00:33:38,880 Sure. But also a way to move beyond it. The need for this procedure might be more acute today, in part because of the disruptions of digital culture. 286 00:33:38,880 --> 00:33:45,330 Last week I alluded to the way that all history is now rendered invisible, easily accessible. 287 00:33:45,330 --> 00:34:01,000 The past is always present on our computers and iPhones. Perhaps this is part of what makes the notion of dismantling, of forgetting appealing to me. 288 00:34:01,000 --> 00:34:07,480 The debate over scaffold was cheap, which seemed to shock everyone in the art world. 289 00:34:07,480 --> 00:34:14,740 Actually repeated and reiterated an ongoing series of culture war debates over the representation of the US dakotah war. 290 00:34:14,740 --> 00:34:18,480 And this is a debate that really the Welker's should have been aware of. 291 00:34:18,480 --> 00:34:25,530 Since 1923, a painting by artist Anton Gag has hung in the Minnesota Capitol Building. 292 00:34:25,530 --> 00:34:35,370 It depicts an attack on a frontier city of new home. The work became controversial on account of its depiction of the Dakota as violent. 293 00:34:35,370 --> 00:34:40,980 The painting does not fully represent the complexities of the U.S. dakotah war or its causes. 294 00:34:40,980 --> 00:34:46,920 And critics argued that displaying this particular view of history in the Capitol building bestows 295 00:34:46,920 --> 00:34:54,900 that narrative the narrative of the white settler with complete historical authenticity and validity. 296 00:34:54,900 --> 00:35:01,530 It conveys Gex impression as the official, state sanctioned view of the war. 297 00:35:01,530 --> 00:35:06,240 After the painting was then sent to the Minnesota Historical Society for Conservation, 298 00:35:06,240 --> 00:35:12,510 it was not returned, effectively removing it from the capitals walls. 299 00:35:12,510 --> 00:35:22,020 Many attacked what they saw as censorship. The Centre for the American Experiment, a conservative think tank based in Minnesota, took on the issue, 300 00:35:22,020 --> 00:35:30,270 calling the painting superb and historically accurate and the decision to remove it, remove it as incomprehensible. 301 00:35:30,270 --> 00:35:36,820 An editorial on their Web site elaborates, quote, The Tota did, in fact, attack the town of New Arm. 302 00:35:36,820 --> 00:35:43,470 And the painting could just as easily be seen as depicting the battle from the Native American perspective. 303 00:35:43,470 --> 00:35:50,630 I don't know how Gex painting could reasonably give rise to an inference that it is a white interpretation. 304 00:35:50,630 --> 00:35:58,160 Thus, do the organs that control our cultural life steadily impose their vision of how American history should be viewed? 305 00:35:58,160 --> 00:36:04,490 And quote. Comments from readers attacked cultural cleansing. 306 00:36:04,490 --> 00:36:13,460 Quote, The P.S. politically correct crowd has learnt much from the Stalinist Nazis and Taliban, end quote. 307 00:36:13,460 --> 00:36:23,420 That debate closely resembles any number of recent culture war episodes in which any alteration to an object or image is seen as a profane, 308 00:36:23,420 --> 00:36:30,880 profane destruction of history. As fascism. 309 00:36:30,880 --> 00:36:37,750 Indeed, this conservative right wing response was bizarrely mirrored in the left wing response to scaffold, 310 00:36:37,750 --> 00:36:44,590 as put forth by the National Coalition Against Censorship, which typically defends things like flag burning. 311 00:36:44,590 --> 00:36:49,600 People thought, photos, etc. They put out a press release. 312 00:36:49,600 --> 00:36:57,010 Quote, The Walker's decision to destroy scaffold as a way to respond to protests sets an ominous precedent. 313 00:36:57,010 --> 00:37:01,180 Not only does it weaken the institution's position and future programming, 314 00:37:01,180 --> 00:37:08,830 but it sends a chill over artists and other cultural institutions commitment to creating and exhibiting political, 315 00:37:08,830 --> 00:37:15,610 socially relevant work, even ostensibly voluntary decisions to destroy artwork have ominous implications for 316 00:37:15,610 --> 00:37:20,830 creative expression and the need for public debate over contentious social issues. 317 00:37:20,830 --> 00:37:25,600 And quote. As the coalition saw it, 318 00:37:25,600 --> 00:37:34,600 the decision to dismantle the gallows was a concession to the frightening forces that aim to limit Americans First Amendment right to free speech. 319 00:37:34,600 --> 00:37:43,840 Even if Durant willingly approved of the action and even if the museum agreed to allow it to happen in consultation with the artist, 320 00:37:43,840 --> 00:37:53,530 the act of destruction negates the power of the artist and the museum to argue for free speech and against censorship in all future instances. 321 00:37:53,530 --> 00:37:59,170 I appreciate the thinking here and I also want to condemn acts of censorship. 322 00:37:59,170 --> 00:38:08,030 But I don't think this argument applies to scaffold. The work was dismantled, destroyed, but it was not censored. 323 00:38:08,030 --> 00:38:17,540 The artist's intervention was a deliberate choice to remove the work, and I consider that action to have been a performative part of the work itself. 324 00:38:17,540 --> 00:38:24,830 As I see it, dismantling is an aesthetic gesture. The art is in the destruction. 325 00:38:24,830 --> 00:38:35,700 Duran's position illuminates a counterintuitive approach to the work of art and to history and overcoming it. 326 00:38:35,700 --> 00:38:43,260 The sight of the gallows in Mercado's struggling downtown is now thoroughly unremarkable. 327 00:38:43,260 --> 00:38:53,190 A public library in concrete and sandstone occupies what had once been the open square where the scaffold was constructed in 1862. 328 00:38:53,190 --> 00:39:00,900 There is a small park named Reconciliation Park along the Bank of the Minnesota River near the site. 329 00:39:00,900 --> 00:39:09,120 It contains numerous memorials intended to mark the significance of the location and the gravity of the events that occurred there. 330 00:39:09,120 --> 00:39:17,780 A historical plaque and one bearing a prayer. But Dakota Warrior dedicated in nineteen eighty seven. 331 00:39:17,780 --> 00:39:30,120 A sculpted bison. From 1997 and so on, these memorials all replaced a more offensive monument, a Carstone that read here were hanged. 332 00:39:30,120 --> 00:39:37,630 38 Sioux Indians, December 26, 1863. 1862, sorry. 333 00:39:37,630 --> 00:39:42,860 This monument, this older monument has been dismantled. 334 00:39:42,860 --> 00:39:52,310 But these other memorials seem to me unable to match the terror of public hanging or the realities of the U.S. dakotah war and its legacies. 335 00:39:52,310 --> 00:40:00,530 But the forced removal of the Dakota people from Minnesota. Are these memorials and monuments successful at helping us remember? 336 00:40:00,530 --> 00:40:08,370 They seem profoundly inadequate. Sam Durante points to a different approach, one based not on remembering, 337 00:40:08,370 --> 00:40:14,880 but on finding ways to forget, to dismantle, to escape the past and its shackles over us. 338 00:40:14,880 --> 00:40:18,450 I don't mean this in the sense of letting history disappear, 339 00:40:18,450 --> 00:40:23,760 but this sense of forgetting the weight and burden of the past in all of our public spaces, 340 00:40:23,760 --> 00:40:29,020 especially when it impacts some people so forcefully and immediately. 341 00:40:29,020 --> 00:40:32,710 Who benefits from that imposition of power over them? 342 00:40:32,710 --> 00:40:39,970 Does that action, rhetorically coded as awareness and education, celebrated as aesthetic experience? 343 00:40:39,970 --> 00:40:46,700 Not reiterate and repeat the imposition of power that occurred in settler colonialism? 344 00:40:46,700 --> 00:40:54,020 Dismantling is a more compelling gesture, maybe letting people forget is a better form of reconciliation. 345 00:40:54,020 --> 00:40:54,744 Thank you.