Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.arunadsouza.com/about/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Toba Khedoori, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA), 2016, and We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85, New Perspectives, Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY), 2018. Contributor of articles to publications and websites, including 4Columns.org, Bookforum, Art News, Art in America, Art Practical, Garage, Momus, and the Wall Street Journal.
SIDELIGHTS
Aruna D’Souza is a writer, whose work is focused on art, politics, and feminism, and how they interact. She has written articles that have appeared in publications and on websites, including 4Columns.org, Bookforum, Art News, Art in America, Art Practical, Garage, Momus, and the Wall Street Journal. D’Souza has written and edited books, such as Self and History: A Tribute to Linda Nochlin, The Invisible Flâneuse? Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris, Cézanne’s Bathers: Biography and the Erotics of Paint, Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn, and Metaphor into Form: The Rebecca and Jack Benaroya Collection.
In 2018, D’Souza released Whitewalling: Art, Race, & Protest in Three Acts. In this volume, she examines three controversial events in art history involving race. D’Souza begins by discussing the 2017 Whitney Biennial, which present a painting of Emmett Till by a white artist, Dana Schutz. She goes on to comment on the uproar over a series of drawings by Donald Newman displayed at the Artists Space in 1979. The final incident in the book is the Met’s “Harlem on My Mind” show in 1969.
D’Souza told Shiv Kotecha, contributor to the Art in America website: “The conception of the book was a kind of meeting of minds between me and Paul Chan. … In July, Paul asked me to come to the Badlands [publisher’s] office for a chat. Over the course of the conversation he realized that I had been in the weeds in a lot of the Facebook debates around the Dana Schutz painting. The book was conceived at that meeting, and we signed the contract a week later.” D’Souza continued: “I started researching over the summer, began writing in October or so, and delivered the first draft of the manuscript in December. The speed of writing was very new to me, and uncomfortable at times, but I think there was a usefulness in being timely about it.” In an interview with Andy Battaglia, writer on the Art News website, D’Souza discussed her inspiration for the book: “I’m fascinated by the idea of how ‘public’ museums see themselves to be. One of the things that became clear to me over the course of writing this book was that museums have always struggled with understanding their public and how they relate to it—and how to be honest about who they see their public to be. What fascinated me around each of these moments of controversy is that a lot of times, controversy started because museums were saying ‘our public is everyone!’ when it was clear by their actions that their public was a much smaller swath of people.” D’Souza discussed her personal connection of the Schutz controversy in the same interview with Battaglia, stating: “I happened to be involved in an eight-month project with the education department at the Whitney Museum, which was doing a monthly reading seminar around questions of structural and institutional bias, critical race theory, and how they could expand notions of audiences. When everything blew up around the Dana Schutz Open Casket painting, one of the really interesting things was that it was clear that different parts of the museum were reacting in different ways, based on how they related to an imagined audience.” D’Souza also commented on the book’s structure, stating: “I organized the book in reverse chronological order and there were reasons for that. We live in a very present-ist moment, so I wanted to start where people are and take them back in history rather than make them slog through chapters they might not understand or find immediately relevant to what they’re interested in now. What I didn’t want to do, and think that the narrative wouldn’t have sustained, is suggest the idea that we’ve gotten anywhere good in the past fifty years.”
“Though navigating this work is demanding, this book could become an essential primer in discussions about exclusion [and] free speech,” suggested a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Seph Rodney, critic on the Hyperallergic website, commented: “D’Souza gets a good deal right in her analysis. … Unfortunately, a few times when she is clearly and forcefully direct, D’Souza gets it wrong.” Rodney added: “For this clear and well-researched rendering of the history of New York City art protests of the last generation, ultimately, Whitewalliing is an important book. It provides historical context to our current and recent controversies, letting them be seen in less glaring incandescence. The book would have been a stronger effort if the author had initially, in very clear terms, set out her political positions and declared her concerns. They bleed through nevertheless, but in ways that make this reader feel that D’Souza has not done all her due diligence.” Writing on the Art Review website, Harry Burke remarked: “Whitewalling sets a generative precedent. Yet, though progressive, and knifelike in its critical revisionism, the book is about the failure of effective solidarity. … A more prefigurative politics is clamoured for, one that disassembles the stage while reappraising the acts.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, April 9, 2018, review of Whitewalling: Art, Race, & Protest in Three Acts, p. 70.
ONLINE
Art in America Online, https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/ (May 2, 2018), Shiv Kotecha, author interview.
Art News, http://www.artnews.com/ (May 14, 2018), Andy Battaglia, interview with author and Laura Raicovich.
Art Review, https://artreview.com/ (September 17, 2018), Harry Burke, review of Whitewalling.
Aruna D’Souza website, https://www.arunadsouza.com/ (September 10, 2018).
Garage, https://garage.vice.com/ (May 7, 2018), review of Whitewalling.
Hyperallergic, https://hyperallergic.com/ (June 26, 2018), Seph Rodney, review of Whitewalling.
ABOUT
Aruna D'Souza writes about modern and contemporary art; intersectional feminisms and other forms of politics; and how museums shape our views of each other and the world. Her work appears regularly in 4Columns.org, where she is a member of the editorial advisory board, and has been published as well in The Wall Street Journal, Art News, Garage, Bookforum, Momus, Art in America, and Art Practical, among other places. Her book, Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts was published by Badlands Unlimited in May 2018. She is editor of the forthcoming volume Making It Modern: A Linda Nochlin Reader, which will be published by Thames & Hudson.
QUOTED: "The conception of the book was a kind of meeting of minds between me and Paul Chan. ... In July, Paul asked me to come to the Badlands office for a chat. Over the course of the conversation he realized that I had been in the weeds in a lot of the Facebook debates around the Dana Schutz painting. The book was conceived at that meeting, and we signed the contract a week later."
"I started researching over the summer, began writing in October or so, and delivered the first draft of the manuscript in December. The speed of writing was very new to me, and uncomfortable at times, but I think there was a usefulness in being timely about it."
INTERVIEWS May 2, 2018
Who Has the Power: A Conversation with Aruna D’Souza
by Shiv Kotecha
Parker Bright: Confronting My Own Possible Death, 2018, mixed media on paper, 19 by 24 inches. Courtesy the artist
Aruna D’Souza’s new book Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts (Badlands Unlimited) presents, in reverse chronology, three events that sparked protest against racism at New York art institutions: the inclusion of Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the white artist Donald Newman’s solo show titled “The Nigger Drawings” at Artists Space in 1979, and “Harlem On My Mind,” an exhibition of all-white artists at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969.
Whitewalling is both a book about protest and about the ways in which art institutions have had to address who they are and which public they are meant to serve. Each of these three moments sparked rage and contention among black artists, writers, and their allies, and Whitewalling meticulously charts both the protests and the ensuing debates about exclusion and censorship. D’Souza reminds her readers that the ideology of white supremacy is not always overt, but often appears masked by arguments for the right to free speech and artistic expression.
Whitewalling builds on D’Souza’s previous writing on intersectional, tactical, and coalitional politics. She was trained as an art historian; her academic writing focused on early twentieth-century French painting and her first book was on the erotics of Cezanne’s bathers. Over the past several years, D’Souza told me, she has shifted her practice to more active sites of conversation, like blogs and magazines, where she writes about culture, food, art, and politics. D’Souza is as thoughtful of a conversationalist as she is a writer. I spoke to her over Skype ahead of the launch on Whitewalling at the Brooklyn Museum on May 3.
SHIV KOTECHA How did Whitewalling come about?
ARUNA D’SOUZA The conception of the book was a kind of meeting of minds between me and Paul Chan. Last April, I saw his show “Rhi Anima” at Greene Naftali on a day when he happened to be talking to public high school students about the themes of the work, specifically about how it engaged murders of black youth by police. I had never met him before, and I just watched from afar; I was impressed by how he talked to these young kids. Then, in July, Paul asked me to come to the Badlands office for a chat. Over the course of the conversation he realized that I had been in the weeds in a lot of the Facebook debates around the Dana Schutz painting. The book was conceived at that meeting, and we signed the contract a week later. I started researching over the summer, began writing in October or so, and delivered the first draft of the manuscript in December. The speed of writing was very new to me, and uncomfortable at times, but I think there was a usefulness in being timely about it.
KOTECHA And it’s set up in reverse order…
D’SOUZA It was very much a gut instinct that the chapters, or “acts,” should go back in time. I thought it was good to start with people’s most urgent interest, and that the reverse order would give the book a hopeful trajectory. It moves in a very utopian direction: from an institution being challenged about a single painting to a narrative about the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition asking the Met to become an activist institution by dispersing its collection, embracing a radical transparency about its curatorial decisions, and taking an active part in the fight against racism.
The Black Emergency Coalition’s demands of the museum were kind of extraordinary. The group was started in 1969 by African-American artists Benny Andrews and Clifford R. Joseph in response to curatorial decisions at the Met and at the Whitney. They were influenced by the Black Panthers and other black nationalist thinking and strategy. They were very savvy about leveraging media attention. They were motivated by a very pragmatic concern—wanting to be a part of these institutions—but at the same time they wanted to change these institutions in radical ways. The sequence of the chapters recovers that legacy of black protest, and sets it up as a jumping-off point for whatever happens next. It’s a call to action, or at least reminder of what activism around museums could aim to achieve.
KOTECHA Your book thinks about protest in a very expansive way. Not only in public spaces as picketing, or in the circulation of leaflets, but also as conversation, whether that be by way of Facebook debates, Twitter feuds, and open letters. Can you speak to social media as a site of protest?
D’SOUZA To put it in the most anodyne way, the space of social media brings up both possibilities and dangers. It’s dangerous because everything can get subsumed into one battle cry: because Hannah Black’s letter included an “urgent recommendation” to the Biennial’s curators that the painting be destroyed, a lot of those unsympathetic to the protesters ended up believing “Everyone who protests wants to burn all paintings.” All nuance got subsumed into that one battle cry. But social media spaces also open up opportunities. Black’s letter was not the first articulation of protest. It came after a lot of thoughtful and really fraught discussion on social media, among mostly younger black artists, critics, curators, and writers who were responding to their initial knowledge of what this painting was and how it came to be in the show, and discussing what the proper responses to it should be.
KOTECHA Donald Newman’s 1979 exhibition at Artists Space was particularly difficult to read about. It’s hard to believe that an independently run alternative venue would host this show: a rather formalist set of triptychs made by a twenty-three year old white man, who used his material, charcoal, as a euphemism for blackness. It’s even harder to believe that critics I have so much respect for, namely Douglas Crimp and Craig Owens, defended the work.
D’SOUZA I think Crimp and Owens saw themselves as not working in favor of the institution because they did not see Artists Space as part of the establishment. They saw it as a place that defended culture against the power of art institutions, including the art market. But in this case, I would argue that they forgot who actually held the power. It’s not unusual for that to happen. I remember writing on Facebook last year, “God help me if I forget who has the power and who doesn’t.” That’s what was happening in the Schutz debates. Established people with massive amounts of power imagined that these primarily twentysomething black artists had the power to censor.
That’s also what happened in the late ’70s. Crimp and Owens both later stepped back from their hardline positions against identity politics, especially when they got involved in AIDS activism. In his 1983 essay “The Discourse of Others: Feminism and Postmodernism,” Owens admitted to “gross critical negligence” in failing to acknowledge the role of sexual difference in his postmodern analysis, but he never wrote about having regrets in relation to race, as far as I know. It’s one of the very tragic points in the book for me. I know a lot of the people I discuss in the first two chapters: they are friends, acquaintances, and former teachers. It became very hard for me to forget that context and really see what was happening. That’s why I decided to rely entirely on the archival record for the second chapter. It seemed important to just quote peoples’ words and not report revisionist recollections.
KOTECHA What do you think it means to be an ally in the struggle against anti-black racism?
D’SOUZA I am a South Asian who has written a book about black protest. I spent a lot of time thinking about what that means. At one level, this book is about good allies, bad allies, or not-at-all allies—but for me, the process of writing the book itself was an exercise in being an ally, and what that looks like in practice. The responses to the book will be the measure of my success. And if I got it wrong, I am sure people won’t hesitate to tell me.
KOTECHA How do you, as a writer of color, experience systemic racism in your own work?
D’SOUZA There’s no doubt that almost any person of color working in the art world encounters microaggressions, overt racism, or exclusion on a daily basis. There are now people of color in the art world who are in charge of the decision-making mechanisms, who can distribute power and grant resources—and even despite that, institutions are getting into trouble, often rightly so. No matter how much effort toward diversity is made at art institutions, the structures that protect whiteness remain more or less intact. The 2017 Whitney Biennial, for instance, was the first curated by a team completely composed of people of color, and was the most diverse biennial the Whitney has ever had! But it was also the most controversial, if you measure that by how deeply the conversation penetrated pop culture. I mean, Whoopi Goldberg was talking about it on The View.
KOTECHA How would you say that museums should respond to these issues?
D’SOUZA I think that museums need to be more transparent in addressing their mistakes. Simply vowing to do better without explicitly taking responsibility for what happened in the past is not going to satisfy a public who expect more of their institutions.
In an ideal world, art institutions would make space for actual conversation. In each of the cases in the book, the institutions themselves rarely enter the conversations in ways that are satisfying and meaningful for the protestors. Can you imagine if the Whitney genuinely thought about the history of race protest against itself? I want to know what that would look like. And I don’t mean mounting an exhibition on the history of art-world protests, or even holding a panel about the Schutz controversy—both of which the museum did in the past year. I mean addressing the question of race and institutions in a way that lays bare the practices of decision-making, resource allocation, and hiring—something that looks less like museum programming and more like a truth and reconciliation commission. Even if the Whitney protests were triggered by a single painting, the stakes of the protest were much greater, and spoke to a whole set of institutional and societal issues that are urgent and complex. Until museums figure out how to process their mistakes as part of an ongoing practice, I think these protests will continue to erupt. And thank goodness for that—it’s how real change will happen.
QUOTED: "I’m fascinated by the idea of how 'public' museums see themselves to be. One of the things that became clear to me over the course of writing this book was that museums have always struggled with understanding their public and how they relate to it—and how to be honest about who they see their public to be. What fascinated me around each of these moments of controversy is that a lot of times, controversy started because museums were saying 'our public is everyone!' when it was clear by their actions that their public was a much smaller swath of people."
"I happened to be involved in an eight-month project with the education department at the Whitney Museum, which was doing a monthly reading seminar around questions of structural and institutional bias, critical race theory, and how they could expand notions of audiences. When everything blew up around the Dana Schutz Open Casket painting, one of the really interesting things was that it was clear that different parts of the museum were reacting in different ways, based on how they related to an imagined audience."
"I organized the book in reverse chronological order and there were reasons for that. We live in a very present-ist moment, so I wanted to start where people are and take them back in history rather than make them slog through chapters they might not understand or find immediately relevant to what they’re interested in now. What I didn’t want to do, and think that the narrative wouldn’t have sustained, is suggest the idea that we’ve gotten anywhere good in the past fifty years."
THE ARTNEWS ACCORD SPRING 2018
The ARTnews Accord: Aruna D’Souza and Laura Raicovich in Conversation
BY Andy Battaglia POSTED 05/14/18 4:18 PM
212 46 2 263
Laura Raicovich and Aruna D’Souza at Dumpling Galaxy in Flushing, New York.
©KATHERINE MCMAHON
Aruna D’Souza is the author of Whitewalling: Art, Race, & Protest in 3 Acts, a new book from Badlands Unlimited, the publishing house helmed by the artist Paul Chan. The book begins with protests at the 2017 Whitney Biennial against Open Casket, a painting by the white artist Dana Schutz of the murdered black teenager Emmett Till, whose mutilated body figured in a 1955 photograph that helped galvanize the civil rights movement. The history then moves backward in time to survey similar episodes in relation to two exhibitions in New York: in 1979, “The Nigger Drawings,” a show of abstract works at Artists Space by the white artist Donald Newman that many deemed racist in its presentation, and, in 1969, “Harlem on My Mind,” an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that was taken to task for including no black artists in a show associated with the most prominent African-American neighborhood in America. D’Souza, who lives in Williamstown in western Massachusetts, is also the author of Cézanne’s Bathers: Biography and the Erotics of Paint and a contributor to numerous publications including 4Columns and ARTnews.
Laura Raicovich is a politically engaged arts administrator and author who, until late January, served as director of the Queens Museum in New York. (Her departure was announced two days after the following conversation transpired.) After three years at its helm, she resigned in the wake of differences of opinion with the institution’s board. Prior to her tenure there, Raicovich worked as director of global initiatives for the public arts organization Creative Time and as deputy director for the Dia Art Foundation. She is the author of At the Lightning Field (Coffee House Press, 2017), a book of ruminations inspired by Walter De Maria’s Land Art work in New Mexico. She is also a co-editor of Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production (OR Books, 2017).
ARTnews convened with D’Souza and Raicovich at Dumpling Galaxy, an esteemed Chinese restaurant in the Arcadia Mall in the ethnically diverse neighborhood of Flushing, Queens. The table was arranged with assorted dumplings—filled with pork, crab, scallops, chives, and other sundries—for all to share. — Andy Battaglia
ARTnews: You two have corresponded some in the past . . .
Aruna D’Souza: We became Facebook friends and have some unexpected mutual acquaintances. One of them is one of the handful of South Asians in Williamstown.
Laura Raicovich: She is from a sprawling Pakistani-American family who are like an extended family to me. We also have some mutual friends from the art world . . .
D’Souza: But part of it was realizing we both love food—we’re both cooks. Also, both of us have a sense of what writing can do. Laura’s book At the Lightning Field is very much in line with what I think writing can and should do around art, and that is more expansive than [what] art criticism or art history normally does.
COFFEE HOUSE PRESS
Raicovich: Reading your writing, I also identified a desire to go beyond what is traditionally thought of as art-historical or critical writing in a way that brings in elements of a personal experience, a relationship to something I call “the realm of the real.” The Lightning Field can seem hermetic for people because it’s this minimal installation in a faraway place, but Walter’s desire was profound in his wanting people to have their own experience with it and bring their own experiences of the world to it.
ARTnews: How much can museums truly engage with the realm of the real?
D’Souza: I’m fascinated by the idea of how “public” museums see themselves to be. One of the things that became clear to me over the course of writing this book was that museums have always struggled with understanding their public and how they relate to it—and how to be honest about who they see their public to be. What fascinated me around each of these moments of controversy is that a lot of times, controversy started because museums were saying “our public is everyone!” when it was clear by their actions that their public was a much smaller swath of people.
ARTnews: Is that more or less the case now in contrast to prior points in history?
Raicovich: To talk about that, we need to go back to why museums exist, particularly in the United States. Most museums have started because wealthy patrons thought to make their personal collection public. And curators, the source of the word in Latin is curare, “to care for”—so what are we caring for and who are we protecting it from? The stance of the museum was often to make precious works of art public but, at the same time, to protect them from the public. In that dual existence, I think the balance remains heavier on the protection side—or the education side. I see the function of museums as needing to be committed to an exchange of ideas and information rather than a broadcast.
D’Souza: There are conflicts at the heart of the museum, which often have different notions of audience or how to conceive of the people who come into the museum as a public. At one point while I was writing the book I was also consulting, and I happened to be involved in an eight-month project with the education department at the Whitney Museum, which was doing a monthly reading seminar around questions of structural and institutional bias, critical race theory, and how they could expand notions of audiences. When everything blew up around the Dana Schutz Open Casket painting, one of the really interesting things was that it was clear that different parts of the museum were reacting in different ways, based on how they related to an imagined audience. The guards and the front-of-house staff have their own understanding of who the audience is, how they’re reacting, and what they need, and that is very different from how the education department imagines it. And then that is different from how curatorial imagines it, and the director, the board of trustees. All these institutions are operating with people who have entirely different understandings of what their public is.
Raicovich: And what that public wants from their interactions with a museum. In what language do people want to interact with the museum? Do they want to make stuff? What does museum interpretation mean, and how can we reimagine it? I’ve spent years trying to untangle these knots. You know, if you have a curatorial text, no matter how sensitive you are to not being jargon-y and inaccessible, you still have a problem in that it’s appealing in a certain register—and that register just isn’t interesting to a lot of people. How do we operationalize our values and decolonialize the structure of museums to actually operate along the value system that can be challenging when the structures themselves contain bias?
Artist Parker Bright protesting the Dana Schutz painting Open Casket at the Whitney Biennial in 2017.
MICHAEL BILSBOROUGH
ARTnews: What were your reactions to the way the Whitney handled the controversy over the Dana Schutz painting in its biennial?
D’Souza: Most museums, including the Whitney, are imagining a universal audience and understand viewership as a neutral, passive experience. There are exceptions: I think the education department at the Whitney is doing extraordinary things to try to nuance that. But for the most part, almost every museum, when they think of audience, they’re thinking of a generic person. And any time you start thinking of generics, in my view, it always devolves to whiteness. That became clear at the Whitney when, to me, their response was really about, How do we get our audience to understand what these protests are about? That confused me, because I was like, Well, your audience knows what these protests are about because your audience is protesting! Your audience knows—but does the Whitney know?
Raicovich: Public space is under attack. You know, very little truly public space still exists in our urban space, especially in New York. Can the museum be a place that we hold in common, in the truest sense of the commons, where we go into a collective mode for the making of ideas and culture at large? A museum is a place for the production of culture, and I think all kinds of publics need to participate in that. But you can’t get all kinds of publics if they feel like the place is not for them.
D’Souza: For the controversies in my book, all three of the heads of those institutions wanted to imagine that their spaces could be a platform for debate. That is different than what Laura’s talking about when she talks about the commons, because the idea of true public space means that it can sustain conflict—that it doesn’t need to manage conflict but can allow conflict as a positive and public good. The people I know best at the Whitney are in the education department, which is the most diverse group in the museum, and I think they did the best they could do to contextualize the conversation. But the problem is that they needed to contextualize it in a way so that the institution came out unscathed, as one would expect from any institution.
Raicovich: They needed to contextualize it for a primary imagined audience, which was white and not native to issues being brought up by the protest. We need a way of conceiving of museum audiences as truly multiple. I love Jeff Chang’s book Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post-Civil Rights America (2014). He picks up the multicultural project and brings it into today. I’ve always felt there was a multiculturalism in the early to mid-’90s that was trampled on. There were a lot of babies thrown out with that bathwater. Aruna and I are about the same age and grew up, you know, reading Edward Said. That multiculturalism has to come out again, and there’s a generation of people that, hopefully, understands multiplicity in a way that is not “diversity.” That’s an important distinction.
ARTnews: Aruna, were there any surprises for you in the historical episodes you covered? Sentiments that you might not have expected? Has there been a trajectory toward progress?
D’Souza: I organized the book in reverse chronological order and there were reasons for that. We live in a very present-ist moment, so I wanted to start where people are and take them back in history rather than make them slog through chapters they might not understand or find immediately relevant to what they’re interested in now. What I didn’t want to do, and think that the narrative wouldn’t have sustained, is suggest the idea that we’ve gotten anywhere good in the past 50 years.
Raicovich: In fact we might have devolved!
D’Souza: When you go back in time, the stakes of protest were actually much higher. What protesters wanted in 1969 was bigger than what the protesters wanted in 2017. The protesters of “Harlem on My Mind”—black artists, critics, and writers who were associated with black nationalism and the Black Arts Movement—wanted a share of the resources. They didn’t just want to be let into the museum—they wanted the Met to decentralize. They wanted the Met to fund museums in the outer boroughs. They wanted the Met to put resources all over the city. They wanted museums to be cultural actors, to be actively fighting for racial justice. In a sense, the stakes have gotten smaller and smaller. I think Hannah Black’s letter [protesting the Dana Schutz painting at the Whitney and calling for its removal] was asking for something quite a bit larger, but that wasn’t recognized.
ARTnews: How does the nature of protest-minded thinking need to change?
D’Souza: The 1979 protests at Artists Space were about institutional critique, but, in 2017, Paul Chan and I started talking about “infrastructural critique,” which is different. We have to examine how, over the long duration of history, resources have been unequally distributed.
Raicovich: The idea that museums are neutral is an absurdity, because all “neutral” means is that the museum is reinforcing the values of the dominant culture. Connoisseurship is only neutral because of its position in a larger society. Neutrality is a myth. The museum has never been neutral. It was designed to convey a lot, like colonial prowess by nations. Collect enough stuff and you look really powerful. When you start thinking in those terms, you have to contend with that. You have to ask yourself: do we dump it or do we deal with it?
Mierle Ukeles Laderman, Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Inside, July 23, 1973.
COURTESY RONALD FELDMAN FINE ARTS
ARTnews: Going back to what we were talking about earlier, the need to find different kinds of language to engage different audiences, what types of register might be most effective?
D’Souza: As a writer, I come at engagement from a different point of view. A register I think is really effective and probably underused is storytelling. We don’t tell enough stories about art. We tell people about art, but that’s not the same as telling people stories about art. Every culture has a storytelling tradition, and storytelling is very much part of how we learn. Somehow in grad school we are talked out of the idea of storytelling being a kind of language that art is supposed to produce.
Raicovich: Storytelling makes connections between the unusual stuff of art—the weirdness in it—and more regular things in life make sense. I would love, when people put out their trash after seeing a Mierle Laderman Ukeles show, to say, “That’s actually a portrait of me.” At the end of the day, I would love for people to walk away saying, “Huh, I never would have thought of that,” or, “Huh, I wonder. . .”
D’Souza: My ideal is if people go to a museum and come away thinking, “OK, smash the patriarchy!”
Raicovich: That, too!
D’Souza: One of the things that’s interesting to me about historical moments of protest is that they’re actually producing exactly what you want art to do. If you say you want art to promote passion and engagement, this is that exactly. It’s mind-blowing to consider the sheer volume of opinions that were expressed around Dana Schutz’s Open Casket, and I’m not just talking about art-world opinions. I wrote a piece for CNN.com and there were hundreds of comments, mostly people who I’m sure have never bothered thinking about art for one moment in their lives. The fact that they thought even for a moment that art was worth thinking about—and that there were stakes to the conversation—was amazing. The protesters did that. This is what we hope that art does, but then sometimes it does so in a way that is challenging institutions and not wider society. Toppling the Trump administration also means toppling some of the assumptions that subtend a place like the Whitney. Those two things are connected, and people weren’t making that connection. I don’t think the Met was making the connection in 1969 between their position and what black power was trying to fight. But guess what: the Met is exactly what black power was trying to fight.
ARTnews: Whitewalling stemmed in part from conversations you were having with Paul Chan, whose Badlands Unlimited is publishing it. What was the tenor of those conversations?
D’Souza: I live in western Massachusetts, and when MASS MoCA’s Building 6 opened last summer, I was appalled that they had renovated 150,000 square feet of new space, doubling the size of the museum, and that the space was devoted to installations by white artists but, then, the opening was filled with black performers. That laid out for me, structurally, what’s wrong with how museums deal with race. I wrote a piece called “White Space, Black Spectacle” about the ways in which museums are happy to invest temporarily in artists of color but not when it comes down to their real resources, meaning space in the permanent collection, long-term installations, and things like that. Paul came across the article and invited me to come to his office for a chat.
ARTnews: Was it useful to get input from an artist?
D’Souza: We had never met and I got a little nervous. I asked a friend of mine why he would want to talk to me, and my friend said, “Maybe he wants you to write an erotic novel for his feminist erotica series.” [Laughs.] But he said he had come across my article and also my book Cézanne’s Bathers: Biography and the Erotics of Paint when he had been working on his “Air Dancers” series. When I had gone to see that show at Greene Naftali, I happened to go on a day when he was in the gallery talking with a group of high school students about the work and the issues around race that it was meant to invoke, along with references to dancers in Cézanne and Matisse.
Paul’s publishing operation is very much part of his larger practice as an artist, and I think it’s important for him to try to engage an audience who will themselves go on to change the world. It’s a question of how do you get to them? How do you put things in their heads that plant certain ideas? How do we use this as a lever to engage all sorts of people who should be having conversations that they have either been deferring or otherwise having only halfway?
Raicovich: It reminds me of this Mierle Laderman Ukeles work called Birthing Tikkun Olam: Your Idea to Repair the World, which refers to a concept in Judaism to leave the world a better place. I think there’s a common thread among artists particularly committed to and interested in how they address the world. Mierle hands out mirrors in order for people to look at themselves and pledge to repair the world. It’s the artist as instigator, as provocateur—not as a self-aggrandizing act of “look at me” but more like “we need to do this collectively.” A museum can offer those moments of collectivity.
BADLANDS UNLIMITED
ARTnews: How has the changing makeup of museum boards affected the ways in which museums can do that?
Raicovich: You can’t do this work without the board being a central part of it. It’s a very complex question, not easy to untangle. There are people whom you need to find as fellow travelers, and it’s not easy work.
D’Souza: The only act of protest that led to an immediate result in my book was around “Harlem on My Mind.” It was not acceding to any of the black protesters’ demands but to the pulling of the show’s catalogue on the basis of separate complaints by the Jewish Defense League and the Anti-Defamation League that it
contained anti-Semitic comments. The reason that happened was because Jewish protesters lobbied New York City Mayor John Lindsay, who then threatened to withdraw $3.5 million dollars of city funding when the museum was trying to get the means to expand to house the Temple of Dendur and create a wing for the Robert Lehman Collection.
There were different strains of protest happening all at once, and that’s in fact the only one that succeeded in the short term, when the museum conceded and pulled the catalogue from sale. There were other successes in the long-term, but in that immediate moment it was only because there was a public leverage on the institution. Now, there is very little public leverage, because institutions are privately funded and so much power is placed in the board of trustees. Museums are essentially privately funded at this point, but they imagine themselves as public institutions. There’s a contradiction and a conflict there that needs to be acknowledged
and made transparent.
ARTnews: Looking toward the future, are you hopeful about arts institutions’ abilities to engage publicly in meaningful ways?
Raicovich: I am always a glass-half-full kind of gal, but I think that the urgency of our times demands it. Culture’s role is enormous and necessary. For cultural producers and artists there is a major responsibility to step into the fray and contend with what’s before us. Artists and institutions are vehicles for that.
D’Souza: I’m a fan of agonism—the idea of conflict as a productive kind of energy. There’s a strong case to be made that how we conceive of art institutions now is in large part thanks to people like the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and groups that were promoting a radical idea of what institutions should be and how they could be relevant to the communities they serve. But as much as that has happened and affected how museums understand their role, what hasn’t happened is museums understanding their communities in a sufficiently broad sense to include and deal with the kinds of larger cultural issues that people expect museums to engage in.
ARTnews: What could make for sufficient change in those terms?
D’Souza: Going back to what surprised me as I was writing my book, the “Harlem on My Mind” show was organized according to what could be called best practices in terms of diversity. They specifically put black staff on the planning committee, they had three separate advisory boards made up of black experts to advise on the exhibition—and it was still a disaster. The reason was [that] no one wanted to cede authority at the very top of the food chain. As long as all these strategies are enacted simply to provide cover for where the real power is in institutions, we’re going to continue having protests. But that’s lucky for us—it would be infinitely worse if we didn’t. It would be infinitely worse if we didn’t have the conversations we had around Open Casket and Sam Durant’s Scaffold at the Walker Art Center. The question is: will we ever hear what we should be hearing from those protests?
ARTnews: What should we hear?
D’Souza: I think what a lot of people heard was noise, and what a lot of people found hard to hear were some important potent truths about the ways in which what we understand as universal liberal values are really doled out unequally. Another thing I wanted to point out is that a lot of the Whitney controversy erupted because museums have glommed on to the idea of diversity as a way of achieving equity. But, in fact, the protests weren’t around diversity. The protests were around anti-blackness, and that is the other thing that the institutional world is going to have to grapple with: the difference between diversity and institutional anti-blackness. I say this especially as a South Asian. I am the kind of person often brought in to provide diversity, but asking a South Asian woman to come in to deal with the question of diversity doesn’t mean that I have any ability to grapple with the larger question of anti-blackness.
Raicovich: That brings us to self-awareness and the commitment to actually be willing to give up the power that has been given, to enact the white work that needs to be done—to contend with it within myself and the power I hold just because I was born in a certain body. A lot of this sounds like mushy rhetoric, but when you are in a position of power and you feel it, you know exactly what you need to give up in order to share it. When you begin to pay attention to the things that are done to shut down conversations and to shut down people who don’t have white skin or aren’t normatively gendered, you end up realizing how inequitable the construction of that power is. But you’ve got to tune in to it—it requires an effort, and the luxury that most white people have is that they’re never forced to contend with that. It’s not easy. It’s oftentimes very uncomfortable and we all mess up—but it’s a personal responsibility.
D’Souza: Writing my book was about coming to terms with my own past ways of thinking, or not thinking—and atoning for my past blindness by now paying attention. That is something we all have to do in this moment. Anyone who is not black, even if brown like I am, we’ve all benefited from systems and values associated with anti-blackness. We all have to do it, and institutions have to do it in a way that’s honest and public. It’s never a matter of a single institution messing up. I think everyone has acted with what they believed were the best possible intentions with the best possible goals in mind.
Raicovich: But that’s often what reveals the anti-black structures that are underlying. . . .
D’Souza: . . . in the case of the Dana Schutz painting, underlying the idea that things we think of as categorically good, like empathy, are enough to overcome historical inequalities. They aren’t, and we have to think about why.
Raicovich: People are trained to be right and to be leaders, and that’s hard to overcome on the institutional side. You don’t always have to be right. Failure is OK. If you’re not failing now and again, you’re not pushing hard enough. We’re not all-knowing monoliths. There’s a weird way in which the institution always speaks with one voice, but what would happen if people saw the arguments within institutions?
A version of this story originally appeared in the Spring 2018 issue of ARTnews on page 20 under the title “Aruna D’Souza & Laura Raicovich.”
QUOTED: "Though navigating this work is demanding, this book could become an essential primer in discussions about exclusion [and] free speech."
Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts
Publishers Weekly. 265.15 (Apr. 9, 2018): p70+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts
Aruna D'Souza. Badlands Unlimited, $19.99
trade paper (144p) ISBN 978-1-943263-14-1
Art critic D'Souza (Cezanne's Bathers) provides an impressively nuanced exploration of the relationship between art and race in America in this account of three controversies from the New York City art world. In 2017, the curators of the Whitney Biennial exhibited white artist Dana Schutz's Open Casket, a painting of Emmett Till's disfigured body, precipitating a debate about censorship and the responsibilities of artists and institutions. In 1979, Artists Space, an independent art space in SoHo, displayed white artist Donald Newman's Nigger Drawings series, sparking an emotional back-and-forth between black artists, the gallery, and the wider art world about the meaning of open dialogue. And in 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Harlem on My Mind exhibit provoked protests and dialogue about inclusion and museums' power to police their boundaries. In examining these three events side by side, D'Souza lays bare the "contradiction at the heart of our idea of open dialogue: while it seems to depend on the idea of leaving open space for ambiguity, uncertainty, and the contingent, it is grounded in ... de facto limits of who can speak and what can be said." Though navigating this work is demanding, this book could become an essential primer in discussions about exclusion, free speech, and the power of institutions in the art world and outside it. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts." Publishers Weekly, 9 Apr. 2018, p. 70+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A535100008/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a0724fd1. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A535100008
QUOTED: "D'Souza gets a good deal right in her analysis. ... Unfortunately, a few times when she is clearly and forcefully direct, D’Souza gets it wrong."
"For this clear and well-researched rendering of the history of New York City art protests of the last generation, ultimately, Whitewalliing is an important book. It provides historical context to our current and recent controversies, letting them be seen in less glaring incandescence. The book would have been a stronger effort if the author had initially, in very clear terms, set out her political positions and declared her concerns. They bleed through nevertheless, but in ways that make this reader feel that D’Souza has not done all her due diligence."
A Book on Art Protests Falters in the First Act But Deepens the Conversation
Whitewalling is an important book that provides historical context for our current and recent controversies around protest; however, it would have been a stronger effort if the author had adopted a more consistent analytical and rhetorical approach.
Seph RodneyJune 26, 2018
Cover of Aruna D’Souza’s Whitewalling (2018) (image courtesy Badlands Unlimited)
The subtitle to Aruna D’Souza’s new book indicates that it consists of three distinct parts brought together by an overarching and compelling question that pulls the author through rigorous research and discerning analysis. The reader will feel the fervency of D’Souza’s desire to answer her research query, but will need to be patient as the author stumbles a bit out of gate and then finds better footing in the latter two-thirds of the book.
There are many astute conclusions arrived at by Aruna D’Souza in her book Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts — conclusions that come by way of what seems like careful and considered scholarship and a feel for the connective tissue that links distinct controversies around displays of art. The wishy-washy construction of the previous sentence is intentional: it mirrors D’Souza’s own rhetorical approach to framing her analyses and reporting her findings. Take for example her read on how the contention over the placement of Dana Schutz’s infamous painting in the 2017 Whitney Biennial; she writes on page 38: “The controversy did not play out as a starkly black versus white issue; in fact, on the contrary, at times it seemed that the divide was more generational than racial.” In her specific analysis of the work itself, she offers (p. 47), “While Schutz may have imagined that she was channeling black pain in her work … her artistic gesture was inevitably read through another lens: that of white lies.”
Reading that first argument, I’m reminded of admonitions from my PhD supervisor that I needed to resist being mealy-mouthed and passive-aggressive. I want to ask D’Souza whether the divide was more generational than racial or not. Hedging her bets by using “seemed” doesn’t help me develop trust in her assessments. (For the record, I think it indeed was.) She goes from direct to wishy-washy in the span of a sentence. In the second quotation, D’Souza absolves herself of responsibility for the critique by using the passive construction “was … read,” as though others were responsible for that reading and she merely means to report their feelings and arguments.
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with taking the approach of letting others make their claims and mount their critiques, while acting as a kind of critical bundler who then shows the reader how certain contentions repeat and resonate among those who were deeply emotionally and intellectually invested in the controversy, those who felt like their own bodies were being callously displayed and used for entertainment and misplaced pity. However, one problem that occurs is precisely the one that my supervisor had warned me of: at times it’s very difficult to tell who is speaking, D’Souza or someone else. This issue recurred several times in the text and made sussing out her conclusions unnecessarily difficult.
Aruna D’Souza (photo by Dana Hoey, courtesy Badlands Unlimited)
More, this rhetorical posture of hanging back away from the dispute feels mistaken because its deployment is so wobbly. This strategy would have been earned if the book were written as a truly birds-eye evaluation of the ways and means of arts protest convened around issues of race and power. Instead D’Souza sometimes slips into reproof that is just shy of condemnation. Again speaking about Schutz she declares (p. 48), “Schutz made Open Casket from an aesthetic and social vantage point that left a glaring blind spot: the complicity of whiteness, and of white womanhood, in those events.” Here — before she introduces Pastiche Lumumba who makes the most forceful indictment of Schutz’s deployment of white privilege in the book — she begins to make an argument that sounds very much like there is an unspoken “should” lurking in the background. Lumumba brings it to the forefront by describing Schutz’s work as (p. 49), “lazy, shallow, and uncritical [and] ontologically linked to the tradition of white people reveling in Black death,” apparently because she used the painting to depict Emmet Till’s death instead of white complicity.
This is an argument worth making, but to do so properly, one should respond to the obvious queries begged by this denunciation: what would a painting showing white complicity look like? How does one go about finding out how to properly express this? Once white art makers have dealt honestly and comprehensively with white complicity in the killing and dehumanizing of Black people what else might they turn to? How will they meaningfully engage in the issues that affect us all if this sector of culture is cordoned off? She doesn’t deal with these questions, which makes her analysis rather one-sided.
Also helping to make her arguments slanted is that, particularly with the case of Schutz, D’Souza cites, but ultimately ignores one of the most trenchant insights into the meaning of the controversy given by Coco Fusco in Hyperallergic. According to D’Souza, Fusco analyzes Hannah Black’s contentions given in her open letter, finding (p. 40) “problematic notions of cultural property,” “the imput[ation of] malicious intent in a totalizing manner to cultural producers and consumers on the basis of race,” and a kind of “cultural nationalism,” that “presumes an ability to speak for all black people.” Additionally, Fusco imagines that protesters such as Black who called for the destruction of the painting are ruling out the possibility of interracial collaboration or the development of an anti-racist consciousness that is not tied to one’s race. These are all heavy contentions that require serious and strenuous engagement, but D’Souza reduces all those key points to the dismissal of Fusco by writing that (p. 41) “her argument did hinge on the idea of emphathetic allyship.” D’Souza’s own previous summation of Fusco’s main points shows this simply to not be true.
D’Souza gets a good deal right in her analysis. I particularly appreciated her finding that the Schutz painting became a flashpoint at least partly because people of color felt fed up with the glaring failures of white liberalism and especially white liberal feminism because as the last presidential election showed, many people who were supposed to act as allies failed to do so. Unfortunately, a few times when she is clearly and forcefully direct, D’Souza gets it wrong. When she claims that “liberal culture seems consistently to value things over people,” [emphasis mine] she is mistaken, at least if she means the liberal culture that exists in the domestic art scene. This culture clearly values the agency of the artist over people, which is starkly revealed in the second and third acts of her book.
Parker Bright, “Confronting My Own Possible Death” (2018) mixed media on paper, 19 x 24 in (courtesy of the artist)
What comes out of those acts is the most useful reportage and analysis in the work, for me. Here, the historian is on much more solid ground in showing how as she writes (p. 67):
There is a contradiction at the heart of our idea of open dialogue: while it seems to depend on the idea of leaving open space for ambiguity, uncertainty, and the contingent, it is grounded in — and perhaps even depends upon — de facto limits of who can speak and what can be said.”
This point is clearly and rigorously made in her examination of the “Nigger Drawings” exhibited at Artists Space in 1979. D’Souza shows how tools for understanding the use and import of language, such as semiotics, and the notions of artist’s almost limitless agency fueled a backlash to the protests of what is now obviously a reprehensibly racist gesture pursued in the name of being provocative. It’s instructive how what passes as erudition can fly in the face of felt harm — and this is one of the key threads that runs through all the stories. Another crucial observation is how those who I tend to think of as sensitive, politically aware writers and researchers can so easily succumb to protecting white supremacy. Those who signed an open letter that claimed that (p. 89) “the protesters had … cynically used the nonissue of racism to further their underlying nefarious agenda — to shut down Artists Space entirely” include: Douglas Crimp, Laurie Anderson, Rosalind Krauss, Roberta Smith, and Craig Owens. I wonder what answer any of them have ever had to the question (if it was indeed posed to them): what were you thinking?
For this clear and well-researched rendering of the history of New York City art protests of the last generation, ultimately, Whitewalliing is an important book. It provides historical context to our current and recent controversies, letting them be seen in less glaring incandescence. The book would have been a stronger effort if the author had initially, in very clear terms, set out her political positions and declared her concerns. They bleed through nevertheless, but in ways that make this reader feel that D’Souza has not done all her due diligence.
Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts has been published in May of this year by Badlands Unlimited Press.
“Whitewalling” Is the New Term Describing Exclusion In the Art World
Aruna D'Souza's “Whitewalling : Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts” addresses spectacle, appropriation, and exclusion in the white cube.
SHARE
TWEET
Parker Bright, Confronting My Own Possible Death, 2018. A mixed media work on paper depicting the artist's own protest in front of Dana Schutz's painting at the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Last March the Brooklyn Museum announced the appointment of a white consulting curator for its African art collection, and a chorus of objection soon echoed across social media, even inspiring an organized response from the collective Decolonize This Place. Many, quite simply, were not having it. As I’ve listened to far too much Alanis Morissette in my lifetime, “ironic” was the first if not best word that came to mind when I heard that there would be a release event for Aruna D’Souza’s book, Whitewalling : Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts on Thursday, May 3rd at the museum, featuring a conversation between the author and artists Lorraine O’Grady and Devin Kenny.
Ironic or not, there I was on Eastern Parkway, involved in a “conversation” to which I hadn’t exactly consented. Whatever museum professionals mean by this word, their definition doesn’t depend on intimate or common exchange—people in last night’s audience were required to phrase their questions in thirty seconds or less. In the posh-looking third-floor auditorium, amongst a mostly non-black crowd, I felt out of place. The Brooklyn Museum’s own website spells out the institution’s vision: “Where great art and courageous conversations are catalysts for a more connected, civic, and empathetic world.” Emphasis mine. A conversation assumes, or at least dreams of, an exchange of equal parties. Controversy, no neutral term either, is like a scab that art-world devotees keep picking in order to show off blood. But institutions are not people, even if they have historically delimited humanity by way of a Euro-American universalism, and the material wounds of exclusion and violence are old, open secrets. As O’Grady said at the launch, the “substratum” of the events analyzed in Whitewalling was “the placement of a museum within a white supremacist structure. You can’t get away from that.”
Artists Lorraine O'Grady and Devin Kenny with Aruna D'Souza at the Brooklyn Museum on May 3, 2018. Photo courtesy of Badlands Unlimited.
D’Souza’s book examines three exhibitions in New York, with the earliest dating back to 1969, that spurred, as she writes, “black protest within the art world.” Her most recent example is the 2017 Whitney Biennial, which included white artist Dana Schutz’s painting of a photograph of Emmett Till’s open casket; a series of charcoal and photographic triptychs called The Nigger Drawings (by a white artist simply credited as “Donald”) shown at the so-called “alternative” art institution Artists Space in 1979; and the formation of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition in 1969 after the Metropolitan Museum of Art excluded black artists from an exhibition called Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968, the museum’s first attempt to include black America as both subject and object. For D’Souza, these breaking points circle around the concept of “whitewalling,” which she defines in her introduction as “a neologism that expands in many directions: the literal site of contention, i.e., the white walls of the gallery; the idea of ‘blackballing’ or excluding someone; the notion of ‘whitewashing,’ or covering over that which we prefer to ignore or suppress; the idea of putting a wall around whiteness, of fencing it off, of defending it against incursion.”
In the opening remarks to the event, a staff member urged us to remember that central Brooklyn is at the heart of the museum’s work. But another kind of incursion looms in the borough. Decolonize This Place, which currently shares an address with Artists Space, has emphasized the Brooklyn institution’s role in gentrification, and just a few days ago organized an action in its lobby where people recited via call and response a list of demands they had for the museum and its staff. Their pamphlets were also offered for free on the same table where D’Souza’s book was being sold. If resistance can be welcomed at all, this writer is clearly striving to do so, while the museum itself attempts to manage it. As the author pointed out at the launch, she is a non-black person writing about black art and protest, making this book, to borrow her language, an “experiment” about what it means to be a “good ally.” To do good though, critical examination and restructuring of both the self and the system one works in are needed. In contemporary discussions of allyship, we rarely note the militaristic tenor of “ally”: a formal union that acknowledges complicity, the way we are folded together—whether we like it or not.
Aruna D’Souza’s Whitewalling: Art, Race, & Protest in 3 Acts will be released by Badlands Unlimited on May 22.
QUOTED: "Whitewalling sets a generative precedent. Yet, though progressive, and knifelike in its critical revisionism, the book is about the failure of effective solidarity. ... A more prefigurative politics is clamoured for, one that disassembles the stage while reappraising the acts."
Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts
by Aruna D’Souza, Badlands Unlimited, $19.99 (hardcover)
By Harry Burke
Despite the general reflexivity of many popular styles of critique, the implications and intonations of whiteness remain too rarely confronted in contemporary art, not least by white people. Puzzlement and indignation met the assertions, made by many black artists, that the painting Open Casket (2016) – by white artist Dana Schutz, depicting the body of murdered black teenager Emmett Till – was racist, and should be removed from the 2017 Whitney Biennial, let alone, as Hannah Black’s widely circulated letter recommended, that it should be destroyed. Free speech, a universal human right, was affirmed in defence of the painting’s existence, yet artistic freedom was troublingly equated with the inviolability of the museumised commodity, and the voices protesting at the Whitney and on social media, who questioned the capitalist erotics of cultural relativism and appropriation, and underlined the ‘conceptual impossibility’, in Aria Dean’s words, of nonblack identification with the work’s subject matter, were refuted. In short, antagonism was blanketed by a ‘white victim’ response, forestalling conversations about institutionalised antiblackness, the carceral continuum, whiteness’s foundations as a legal fiction and technology of settler colonialism or other social issues framing the painting’s production.
Aruna D’Souza’s new book contextualises this controversy and its response, examining the ways in which the artworld’s liberal racism is not just repetitive, but cyclical. In reverse chronology it recalls two earlier New York exhibitions that were protested for antiblackness: white artist Donald Newman’s 1979 presentation at Artists Space, shamelessly titled The N***** Drawings, and the Metropolitan Museum’s 1969 Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968, which included no black artists. Notably, as per the Schutz storm, white commentators shirked complicity: Douglas Crimp, Craig Owens and Roberta Smith, among others, defended an ethos of ‘artistic freedom above all’ at Artists Space. Allon Schoener, curator of Harlem on My Mind, alleged to understand the importance of black artists exhibiting at the Met, but shrugged that ‘I didn’t see that as my responsibility’. The book’s neologistic title refers not simply to the racialised access barriers that define participation in contemporary art but, crucially, to the white-washing of discussions on race in the artworld, whereby actors gymnastically redefine the terms of the debate, conveniently disentangling themselves. The horizon of transformative change is rendered crudely fluid, while art history repeats itself.
Whitewalling breaks from this, constituting a study of allyship – the difficult process of unlearning, reevaluating and forfeiting privilege in order to challenge structural oppression – through annotation and archival fidelity. The book emerged from its author’s participation in the social-media discussions that generated much analysis of Schutz’s painting. Dispersed, and quickly buried by the accumulative logic of the medium, these remain the property of the platforms on which they were published, yet are critical groundwork for any dissenting student of aesthetics. Social media dramatically outpaces, and outpunches, older formats thanks to its deviance from editorial and grammatical conventions, yet is vulnerable to genealogical link rot. Through compendial citation, and with her polyphonic analysis bolstered by artworks by Parker Bright and Pastiche Lumumba, two important participants in the protests, D’Souza has gathered kindling for future fires.
As D’Souza affirms, there is no neutrality regarding racism. Yet too little writing on art takes up, and complicates, antiracist work – Badlands Unlimited’s Paul Chan claims Whitewalling is the sole book on art and race published this trade season in the US. Demanding historical accountability while celebrating the pathbreaking direct action of groups like the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and artists including Benny Andrews, Janet Henry and Howardena Pindell, Whitewalling sets a generative precedent. Yet, though progressive, and knifelike in its critical revisionism, the book is about the failure of effective solidarity. The Whitney protests didn’t just demand the removal of a painting from a museum, but the suspension of conditions that precede the painting – and, by extension, the book, this review and my writing of it. Criticism and allyship are finite modes. A more prefigurative politics is clamoured for, one that disassembles the stage while reappraising the acts.
From the Summer 2018 issue of ArtReview Asia