A full rant: there is no objective art or writing.

Privilege, universalism and ignorance

Shihōin Yoruichi, Bleach, #662.

I did a little rant-note, but my head kept on spiralling even more, so I had to make an actual post.

Personal context:

I have had a hard time writing all my life. I am dyslexic; at some point, words turn into lines, everything starts to vibrate, and my vision becomes dizzy. I grew up learning three languages simultaneously (Armenian, Farsi, and German)¹, and I have synesthesia². I have a tiny window during the day when I can focus my concentration on writing, but it is very random and cannot be planned or anticipated. I usually have to write in one sitting or over a maximum of 3-4 successive days. If I encounter an interruption, I forget what I was doing and move on to something else.

When I was writing my thesis, which was originally planned to be written over the course of five months, I ended up writing 50 pages in 10 days. I have never cried so much. It was extremely painful to be forced to write with a deadline looming, knowing I would be evaluated and my thesis graded. I have always needed pressure to finish whatever I have started. If the future isn’t immediate, I cannot feel it. Whenever something dreadful like that happens, I need to dive deep, reflect, and figure out what the hell is going on.

Installation view, Bad Timing by Hannah Black, Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, DK (2023), courtesy of Arcadia Missa.

The first memory that comes to mind is from when I was in the 7th grade. My school had a parent-teacher conference day, which meant that your parents had appointments with the teachers who thought you had issues studying at school. Since I had to write in every subject, I had appointments with all my teachers. The problem was always the same: I wouldn’t finish sentences, and my interpretations or derivations always seemed far-fetched. The teachers couldn’t make sense of what I was writing. Any oral contributions during class were not a problem at all, but in writing, something was always off. In Germany, we also receive oral grades. My oral grades were always between 1 and 2 (like A or B), but my written grades, no matter the subject, were always between 4 and 5 (like D or E). One teacher asked my mom to take me to a speech pathologist who could understand what was going on, while the other teachers said my parents needed to speak German with me at home. Since my mother’s German wasn’t good, I had to translate what the teachers had said to both of us. She took it as “Your son is mentally ill and he needs help”. She smiled, said goodbye and we went home. She said I had to study harder and just force myself to concentrate better, because there was nothing wrong with me. That is true, and at the same time I would have needed that speech pathologist. As a result of not knowing I was dyslexic, I faced more dreadful years of studying, reading, and writing. Learning by heart was also the worst thing, I would cry in my room and feel a constant prickle in my stomach, not being able to focus and my mind jumping elsewhere. School in general was very hard for me, not because I have had a hard time with subjects, but because I thought I was slow, lazy and dumb. I only found out about five years ago that I am dyslexic, which has completely changed how I understand the mental state of writing and reading for me personally, but that is only one part of the puzzle.

The diagram I made for my thesis.

Another, more recent memory (about three years ago) involves my finals at university. We had weekly colloquiums with my philosophy professor and all my fellow students. It was my turn to present the overall theme of my thesis, so I prepared a diagram with how I envisioned my thesis, incorporating quotes, videos, and a chapter from Fred Moten’s and Stefano Harvey’s “THE UNDERCOMMONS”. I was extremely nervous because I knew I wasn’t going to write according to academic standards and also because I question its disciplinary, linear, and objective-oriented form. For me, simultaneity, the subject-object relationship, and form are the most important aspects of writing.

Simultaneity in writing, for me, means that I am aware of the fact that whatever I say, assert, and state is not universally and infinitely true. There is always another simultaneous space of someone else’s reality when I state something, which has its own right and freedom to exist as well; it might even counter my space. For me, form means that I am aware of the fact that the way I write, the way I choose words, the way I change semantics, and the way I repeat an argument to further strengthen my perspective—the way I use verbs, adjectives, and nouns, whether I am more detail-oriented so I describe more or focused on the bigger picture so I use nouns to shorten—is extremely subjective to the ways I have been exposed to in this world. I write not only because I want to be understood, but because the way I write will tell you how I have been listened to; the way I see fit to write in order for you to understand me is shaped by my past experiences.

So very typical of me, I had about seven themes that I wanted to connect because I saw one thread that bound them all together. My professor laughed—I remember it clearly—and she said, "These are way too many themes; you have to concentrate on one. If you choose all of them, you’ll be too general." I tried to contest this by saying, "I see a correlation between all of these artists and researchers; they have something in common, but it’s not necessarily the topics." I knew that because of my synesthesia, I was seeing something that made sense to me—a difficulty I’ve had all my life, seeing something before I am able to put it into words. It was a visual feeling, but I just could not create a framework for my professor. I had to start writing and find my way through it, otherwise, I wouldn’t have gotten my degree.

After nearly a year of procrastinating, changing and rearranging every single thought I had created for my thesis, I finally decided to write about cultural appropriation, othering and violence in museums. I also shortened my time to write, I only had bout 2 weeks left.

I tried to give a very thorough, clear, and crisp analysis of cultural appropriation and ownership, then used the arguments for three very recent art world scandals: “Der Ziegeln****”³, “Scaffold”⁴ and “Open Casket”⁵. All of these artworks were made by white artists. They were centering a violent racist crime on the bodies of non-white people as their subject.⁶ The main focus of my thesis was: how is it possible, that before you make the Other as your material and object, you have not figured out a way to address your own as your material and object and its relations (especially concerning social, political and systemic matters)?⁷ One’s own—as a sort of counter-concept to whiteness instead of othering—basically means owning one’s self, owning one’s historical inclinations and ascriptions, owning one's position, and understanding where “one’s own of oneself” is. I know it’s a bit of a weird phrasing, but that’s the only way I can word it right now.

Installation view, Bad Timing by Hannah Black, Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, DK (2023), courtesy of Arcadia Missa.

When you are like Dana Schutz, who paints an abstract painting of a black boy's open casket photo (from a time when black people weren’t even legally declared as human beings), how can you not think about your positionality in this relationship? The open casket newspaper photo of Emmett Till from 1955 shows his face, which was already abstracted through physical violence. Dana Schutz then further abstracts it with her brush strokes and has the audacity to say she wanted to empathize with the pain of Emmett's mother because Dana Schutz herself is a mother, too.⁸ Her market value has risen since and she is with a high caliber gallery now.⁹

Artist Hannah Black countered with an open letter called “The painting must go” (which was signed by tons of artists who were part of the biennale):

OPEN LETTER

To the curators and staff of the Whitney biennial:

I am writing to ask you to remove Dana Schutz’s painting “Open Casket” and 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 the 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, humour 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

She is an absolute icon and I have learned immensely from her practice. The mere act of saying that the painting must go is so very important. The main critic after this letter came from Coco Fusco, also a scholar, who said artistic freedom should not be touched and we should never ask for the burning of an artwork. I think that is exactly the point of Hannah Black's open letter; without it, we would have never had this discussion a few years ago. We also know that demanding never really works politically; a command, on the other hand, is more effective.

The same goes for writing as well. If you constantly write about things, release opinion pieces especially about political, social and cultural subjects, make universal points, you seem untouched, you objectify, intellectualise, rationalise everything around you and you are not able to relate it back to you, your history and position, or you don’t even want to because you think your writing will lack of rationale, it won’t be academically or theoretically relevant, its not discursive enough … I don’t know, I think I am done.

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If you were able to follow me until here, I actually can’t believe it, thank you. This is a messy post, I just needed to get this out and I am okay with its shortcomings. Type away and let me know how you feel ~

1. My parents are Armenian, so that is my first language. My parents were born in Tehran, so they are fluent in farsi, which I picked up because they would watch only Iranian tv, listen to Iranian music and use Farsi for everything they didn’t want us to understand. I was born in Germany so I learned German in school. At home, we did not speak one word German.

2. Stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leading to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway (a neurological mental state that is on all the time). When I read I see objects and forms in a room, the symmetry of the constellation tells me if it makes sense for me or not; I see colors for weekdays; Time is divided into 2 levels with one giant staircase coloured with a white/black/orange gradient; I see voices as objects, structures and forms.

3. A painting by Georg Herold, 1981. Please google the painting yourself, because I cannot find a censored version of its title. The Painting resurfaced in an exhibition 2020 in the Städelmuseum, Frankfurt, Germany.

4. An installation by Sam Durant, 2017. The artist made an exact replica of a scaffold, where 38 indigenous Dakota men were executed (in Minnesota after the United States-Dakota war).

5. A painting by Dana Schutz, 2016. The artist made an abstract painting of Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old boy who was lynched by two White men in Mississippi in 1955.

6. If you are interested in reading my thesis, I can translate it into English for a future post.

7. Not necessarily autobiographical work, it can be. In the case of othering, if you are making an universalist argument in your artwork for example one that depicts racism and you are a white person, where is you own part within the imagery?

8. c. f. https://www.vulture.com/2022/01/dana-schutz-open-casket-emmett-till-painting.html

9. c. f. https://news.artnet.com/market/dana-schutz-market-rebuild-1985790