Let the People See (Reflections on the Open Casket Controversy)

Dana Schutz: Open Casket (2016) 

Oil on canvas (99 x 135 cm)

I.

There are of course several famous portraits of black boys painted by white artists. One might think, for example, of the mid-19th century picture of a youngster who, having crossed the Atlantic as a stowaway, found himself in Liverpool and an object of aesthetic interest to the Pre-Raphaelite William Windus.  

But perhaps none have been as controversial or caused as much fuss around issues concerning race and representation, as the recent portrait by Dana Schutz of Emmett Till - a black teenager who was brutally murdered by two white men in Mississippi in 1955 ...


II.

Entitled Open Casket, the work was displayed at the 2017 Whitney Biennial in New York. Campaigners, led by the British conceptual artist and author Hannah Black, called for the removal - and, indeed, destruction - of the picture on the grounds that it transmuted black suffering into profit and pleasure (which, in a sense, I suppose it does).

There was also a small-scale protest at the museum, organised by African-American artist and activist Parker Bright, who described the exhibiting of the work as a black death spectacle (which, in  a sense, I suppose it is).  

Ironically, however, Schutz was attempting to signal her own bleeding-heart liberalism. For the work - based in part on a famous photograph of Till's disfigured and mutilated corpse lying in an open casket (this at the request of his mother, so that everyone might view the violent reality of American racism) - was created in response to the media coverage of recent shootings involving young black men and white police officers.  

Schutz responded to the criticisms of her picture by pointing out that whilst she may not know what it's like to be black in America, she does know what it's like to be a mother and to experience pain; that the importance of art, for her, lay in its power to open up a space of empathy and bring people together. Acknowledging otherness and the pathos of distance that exists between individuals, Schutz nevertheless - perhaps naively - insists that we still share a common humanity.

Some of those coming to her defence tried to frame this issue in terms not of racial identity and the imperial white gaze, but freedom of expression. But Hannah Black doesn't have much time for this line of argument: not when, in her view, white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded upon the silencing and constraint of others and the contemporary art scene remains a fundamentally white supremacist institution, despite all the nice people working within it.

Again, this may or may not be true - and I don't really care one way or the other to be honest - but Black's last line, dripping with contempt, is one that made me smile. As Nietzsche said, it's merely Christian to forgive one's enemies; you must also learn how to hate your friends (even when these people are your dealers, curators, or publishers).