2017 Whitney Biennial Curators Lew & Lockshave Stand Firm On 'Open Casket' Controversy

Christopher Lew, 2017 Whitney Biennial co-curator

2017 Whitney Biennial Co-Curator Responds To 'Open Casket' Controversy

Not in recent memory has a single painting caused such controversy and furor in the contemporary art world as Dana Schutz's 'Open Casket' (2016), part of New York's current Whitney Biennial. The portrait focuses on the disfigured corpse of Emmett Till, murdered in 1955 at age 14 by a Mississippi lynch mob after conflicting stories about whistling -- or 'worse' according to suggestive innuendos in court testimony -- at a white woman. 

AOC previously covered the protests around Schutz and her painting; her right to paint it in the first place as a white woman; artist Parker Bright's standing guard over the painting wearing a t-shirt and a scrawled message 'Black Death Spectacle'; the demands of British artist Hannah Black that 'Open Casket' be stripped from the show and destroyed; and a false apology letter and request for removal by Schutz that was widely circulated with no verification of the author's identity. 

The two Biennial creators  Christopher Lew and Mia Lockshave also become the target of criticism, and Artnet New's editor-in-chief Andrew Goldstein spoke to Lew about the controversy.

It's easy to forget that there are 62 other artists in the Whitney Biennial with all the controversy around 'Open Casket'. Referencing the dynamic playing out in the summer of 2016, when final curatorial decisions were being made for the Biennial, Goldstein summarizes America's mindset:

I think it’s useful to remember back to this time, in the summer of 2016, because the furious churn of the news cycle has propelled the national psyche to a different place since then. The country was in a state of extreme trauma. Terrorist attacks in Europe and at home had everyone on edge, police were brutally killing black men in the streets, protests were blazing across America, and specters of the gruesome 20th century were reappearing in headlines in the form of Nazi rallies, white supremacists, and the Ku Klux Klan. Add to this the yawning economic polarization between the classes and it truly felt like society was falling apart—a climate that Donald Trump exploited with his call to a ferocious, nativist populism. Your show seems to specifically address this horrific moment, for instance with another Dana Schutz painting that greets visitors as they reach the fifth floor: a painting of people crammed in an elevator, literally tearing each other limb from limb, evidently out of rage born by pure proximity. Why did you commission that painting specially for the show?

Dana Schutz Elevator (2017). Photo by Henri Neuendorf.

It speaks to the heatedness in the US and the world at large over the last year or two—those issues you point out that are not new to the country but have become recently more visible. Dana had already been working on a series of elevator paintings, so we weren’t asking her to create something completely new, only to think of an elevator painting in the context of the Whitney—to think about the size of our art elevator and to use that as a launching point.

Reality is that most of the people - including AOC -- are talking about the Emmett Till painting without having seen it. We are looking at 'Open Casket' and talking about it based on Internet images -- and not within its context of a large number of painting devoted to America's current social eruptions. Within the Whitney, the painting exists within a larger social dialogue.

Lew explains his real experience of viewing the painting: "For me, whenever I’m standing in front of the painting, it brings about a real sense of loss. It really evokes the feeling of mourning for a real person who has died. It was that feeling, when I saw it for the first time in Dana’s studio, that allowed me to think about the painting in a way that would fit into the Biennial, within a constellation of artworks that could speak to these issues in a deeply meaningful and deeply sad and empathetic way . . . "

Hannah Black Letter & Petition

Addressing Hannah Black's petition (and letter to the museum, which we published in its entirety calling for the destruction of  'Open Casket', Lew is unyielding in his defense of not responding. "As a museum with a collection, with the role of being custodians for art, we can never condone the destruction of a work. It’s such an extreme demand that it brings things to the point where one can’t have a real conversation."

Marilyn Minter, a leading liberal and feminist voice on the New York arts scene,  a person we have followed for years and is now a leading Trump critic, posted on Facebook: “The art world thinks Dana Schutz is the enemy? The left is eating its young again. Censorship from the left really sucks!”

If we do not see the humanity in one another, that’s when we end up with divisions and barriers. In many ways, it goes back to when we could only see 3/5 of a person. That’s what has led us down this path to where we can no longer empathize or even speak to each other. To police these barriers takes us down a dangerous path, moving us away from the very ideals of what this country can be.

Artist Hannah Black. Courtesy of the artist and MOMA PSI

In an equally sober reflection, Lew addresses an issue that we find to be relevant within the controversy:

The other thing about the work—the history that Dana is tapping into with the work, the lynching and murder of Emmett Till—is that this is a history that is an American history. Certainly people of different races have different experiences, but this historic and contemporary violence is something that we all have to grapple with and confront. It is deeply painful and traumatic—more so for some than others, in unequal terms—but it is something that we all have to deal with, and I think if we don’t confront it, if we don’t have these kind of conversations, then we’re not getting anywhere.

Schutz herself speaks to this reality, saying the painting is "not a rendering of the photograph but is more an engagement with the loss." Note that the actual open-casket photographs of Emmett Till are horrific beyond our understanding of human's capacity for torturous violence.

NBC writes that Schutz made the painting in August of 2016 during a time which she calls "a state of emergency" that came about as a result of fatal officer involved shootings of unarmed Blacks. She believes the violence Till experienced coincides with violence and brutality innocent Black men face today.

Why Not Paint Emmett Till From A White Woman's POV?

Art professor Dr. Lisa Whittington, a Black artist who has created two paintings of Emmett Till, takes no issue with a white artist taking on the difficult subject matter, but questions Schutz's perspective in making the painting. This seems like a valid question to us and one worth exploring.

"I would ask her, why she did not paint the Emmett Till Story from a white woman's point of view? Is there nothing that as a white woman that she would want to say? Especially in recently knowing that the woman who accused Emmett Till has admitted that she lied. Where is the artwork that represents her lies?" Whittington said. "The two men who lynched Emmett? Where is the artwork about them? Does she have nothing to say there?"

Whittington continued, "As artists—responsible artists—we are to speak and to document history. We are to tell about life from our point of view from where we stand."

Dana Schutz Painting Of Emmett Till Creates Controversy At Whitney Biennial 2017

Dana Schutz, Open Casket (2016). Oil on canvas. Collection of the artist; courtesy Petzel, New York.

The 2017 Whitney Biennial -- the first to take place at the museum's new headquarters in Manhattan's meatpacking district -- has received considerable praise as being uplifting and well-balanced. It's generally agreed that the Biennial has learned lessons from bitter past controversies over race and representation. 

As always, some pundits consider the Biennial too tame. Writing for The New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl observes:

The result, which is earnestly attentive to political moods and themes, already feels nostalgic. Most of the works were chosen before last year’s Presidential election. Remember back then? Worry, but not yet alarm, permeated the cosmopolitan archipelago of new art’s creators, functionaries, and fans. Now there’s a storm. The Age of Trump erodes assumptions about art’s role as a barometer—and sometime engine—of social change. Radicalism has lurched to the right, and populist nationalism, though it has had little creative influence so far, challenges sophisticated art’s presumption to the crown of American culture. The crisis makes any concerted will to “resist” awkward for those whose careers depend on rich collectors and élite institutions, sitting ducks for plain-folk resentment. Of course, artists are alert to ironies. The near future promises surprising reactions and adaptations to the new world disorder. But, for now, all former bets are off. The ones placed by the Biennial’s curators, Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks, preface an unfolding saga in which, willy-nilly, all of us are characters.

Hannah Black Raises Her Fist For Emmett Till

UK-born, Berlin-based artist Hannah Black has registered a particularly strong dissent against one painting included in the Whitney Biennial, launching a campaign demanding that Biennial curators Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks remove Dana Schutz’s painting 'Open Casket' from the show, and calling for its destruction. (In a bit of irony, another painting by Schutz 'Elevator' is the featured photo in the New Yorker review.)

A small-scale protest of five or six people took place last Friday—when the Biennial first opened to the public— blocking the view of the painting from anyone who wanted to view it.

The painting is inspired by a photograph of the funeral of Emmett Till, an African-American boy who was viciously murdered at age 14 by two white men JW Milam and his half-brother Roy Bryant in Mississippi in 1955.

The Emmett Till Story

Left, a young Emmett Till; right, Carolyn Bryant with her two sons Roy Jr. and Lamar at Till's murder trial at the Tallahatchie County courthouse in Mississippi, September 1955.

ArtNet writes that Till had been falsely accused of flirting with a white woman, a charge that is disputed presently by Till's cousin who says that Till did whistle at the woman Carolyn Bryant -- and nothing more. The Root explains:

In the Deep South, where racism was still violent as well as pervasive, Bryant and Milam took it upon themselves to abduct the young teen. They later admitted to killing Emmett, beating and mutilating him, shooting him to death and then sinking him in a local river. Emmett’s mother insisted on having an open-casket funeral for her disfigured son so that the world could witness the brutality of white supremacy.

Author of 'Blood Done Sign My Name' and 'The Blood of Emmett Till', historian, and one of the leaders of the Moral Monday movement, Timothy B. Tyson.

The details of the Emmett Till case are front and center in America, with the 2017 publication of a new book 'The Blood of Emmett Till', authored by Timothy Tyson, a Duke University senior research scholar, who determined that in 2007, the white woman 'victim', now Carolyn Bryant Donham admitted that she had made up the majority -- and the most damning passages -- of her testimony in the murder trial.  

Vanity Fair covers the story, previously published on AOC. Donham herself approached Tyson having admired Tyson’s earlier book, 'Blood Does Sign My Name', about another racism-inspired murder committed by someone known to Tyson’s family.

Schutz’s painting is a medium-sized canvas depicting Till’s face and chest, as he lies in his coffin. artnet News’ Christian Viveros-Fauné was impressed with the work, calling it a “powerful painterly reaction to the infamous 1955 funeral photograph of a disfigured Emmett Till,” adding that “the canvas makes material the deep cuts and lacerations portrayed in the original photo by means of cardboard relief.”

Hannah Black is having none of it!

Black wants the painting destroyed, considering it to be so exploitative that it should never be displayed in other institutions or sold in the art market.

"It's not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun," Black argues. 

Like ArtNet, we publish her open letter to the Biennial curators in full: 

To the curators and staff of the Whitney Biennial:

I am writing to ask you to remove Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket with the urgent recommendation that the painting be destroyed and not entered into any market or museum.

As you know, this painting depicts the dead body of 14-year-old Emmett Till in the open casket that his mother chose, saying, “Let the people see what I’ve seen.” That even the disfigured corpse of a child was not sufficient to move the white gaze from its habitual cold calculation is evident daily and in a myriad of ways, not least the fact that this painting exists at all. In brief: The painting should not be acceptable to anyone who cares or pretends to care about Black people because it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun, though the practice has been normalized for a long time.

Although Schutz’s intention may be to present white shame, this shame is not correctly represented as a painting of a dead Black boy by a white artist—those non-Black artists who sincerely wish to highlight the shameful nature of white violence should first of all stop treating Black pain as raw material. The subject matter is not Schutz’s; white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights. The painting must go.

Emmett Till’s name has circulated widely since his death. It has come to stand not only for Till himself but also for the mournability (to each other, if not to everyone) of people marked as disposable, for the weight so often given to a white woman’s word above a Black child’s comfort or survival, and for the injustice of anti-Black legal systems. Through his mother’s courage, Till was made available to Black people as an inspiration and warning. Non-Black people must accept that they will never embody and cannot understand this gesture: The evidence of their collective lack of understanding is that Black people go on dying at the hands of white supremacists, that Black communities go on living in desperate poverty not far from the museum where this valuable painting hangs, that Black children are still denied childhood. Even if Schutz has not been gifted with any real sensitivity to history, if Black people are telling her that the painting has caused unnecessary hurt, she and you must accept the truth of this. The painting must go.

Ongoing debates on the appropriation of Black culture by non-Black artists have highlighted the relation of these appropriations to the systematic oppression of Black communities in the US and worldwide, and, in a wider historical view, to the capitalist appropriation of the lives and bodies of Black people with which our present era began. Meanwhile, a similarly high-stakes conversation has been going on about the willingness of a largely non-Black media to share images and footage of Black people in torment and distress or even at the moment of death, evoking deeply shameful white American traditions such as public lynching. Although derided by many white and white-affiliated critics as trivial and naive, discussions of appropriation and representation go to the heart of the question of how we might seek to live in a reparative mode, with humility, clarity, humor, and hope, given the barbaric realities of racial and gendered violence on which our lives are founded. I see no more important foundational consideration for art than this question, which otherwise dissolves into empty formalism or irony, into a pastime or a therapy.

The curators of the Whitney Biennial surely agree, because they have staged a show in which Black life and anti-Black violence feature as themes, and been approvingly reviewed in major publications for doing so. Although it is possible that this inclusion means no more than that blackness is hot right now, driven into non-Black consciousness by prominent Black uprisings and struggles across the US and elsewhere, I choose to assume as much capacity for insight and sincerity in the biennial curators as I do in myself. Which is to say—we all make terrible mistakes sometimes, but through effort the more important thing could be how we move to make amends for them and what we learn in the process. The painting must go.

Thank you for reading,

Hannah Black

Artist/writer

Whitney Independent Studies Program 2013–14

Hannah Black has posted the letter on Facebook, modified to allow Black co-signs only, while encouraging non-Blacks to help get the painting destroyed in other ways. The Whitney as issued an update:

UPDATE

Statement from the Whitney Biennial curators, Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks, sent to artnet News:

“The 2017 Whitney Biennial brings to light many facets of the human experience, including conditions that are painful or difficult to confront such as violence, racism, and death. Many artists in the exhibition push in on these issues, seeking empathetic connections in an especially divisive time. Dana Schutz’s painting, Open Casket (2016), is an unsettling image that speaks to the long-standing violence that has been inflicted upon African Americans. For many African Americans in particular, this image has tremendous emotional resonance. By exhibiting the painting we wanted to acknowledge the importance of this extremely consequential and solemn image in American and African American history and the history of race relations in this country. As curators of this exhibition we believe in providing a museum platform for artists to explore these critical issues.”

W Magazine interviews curators  Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks in Whitney Biennial 2017: How the Riskiest, Most Political Survey in Decades Came Together. 

We will update this article as new views are expressed on this critical subject of 'cultural appropriation' in the creative disciplines.