In and Out of View: Art and the Dynamics of Circulation, Suppression, and Censorship 9781501358715, 9781501358685, 9781501358708

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In and Out of View

ii

In and Out of View Art and the Dynamics of Circulation, Suppression, and Censorship Edited by Catha Paquette, Karen Kleinfelder, and Christopher Miles

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2022 Paperback edition published 2023 Selection and editorial matter © Catha Paquette, Karen Kleinfelder, and Christopher Miles, 2023 Individual chapters © their authors, 2023 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. xv–xvii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Ben Anslow Cover image: Morehshin Allahyari, Lamassu, 2015. Series: Material Speculation: ISIS (2015-6). 3D printed resin and electronic components. Courtesy of artist and Upfor Gallery, Portland, OR. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Paquette, Catha, editor. | Kleinfelder, Karen L., editor. | Miles, Christopher (Writer on art), editor. Title: In and out of view : art and the dynamics of circulation, suppression, and censorship / edited by Catha Paquette, Karen Kleinfelder, and Christopher Miles. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020046689 (print) | LCCN 2020046690 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501358715 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501358708 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501358692 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Art–Censorship. | Art–Political aspects. Classification: LCC N8740 .I5 2021 (print) | LCC N8740 (ebook) | DDC 701/.03–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046689 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046690 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-5871-5 PB: 978-1-5013-7746-4 ePDF: 978-1-5013-5870-8 eBook: 978-1-5013-5869-2 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

We dedicate this anthology to our students, with whom we always learn; artists, scholars, and teachers, who expand their fields and take risks; and friends and loved ones, who support our endeavors.

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Contents

List of Illustrations  x Acknowledgments  xv

Introduction  1 Catha Paquette, Karen Kleinfelder, and Christopher Miles PART I  Deadly Serious 1

Subjugated Knowledges, Revisionist Histories, and the Problem of Visibility: Carrie Mae Weems and Ken Gonzales-Day  27 Nizan Shaked

2

Damage Control: Teresa Margolles, the Mexican Government, and the 2009 Venice Biennale Mexican Pavilion  37 Ana Garduño

3

Death Matters  Kerstin Mey

51

PART II  The Sexual (In)Sight 4

Art/Obscenity/Underground Cinema in West Germany, 1968–72: Circulating through the Debates  67 Megan Hoetger

5

Impossible to Image: Art and Sexual Violence, 1975–79  Angelique Szymanek

6

De-Shaming Shame: A Conversation  John Fleck and Kevin Duffy

7

Only the Stupid Are Overt: Covert Censorship in the American Museum  109 Jonathan D. Katz

81

95

PART III  Under Deliberation: Artful Activism 8

Tucumán Arde and the Changing Face of Censorship  Fabián Cereijido

119

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9

CONTENTS

The Discursive Roots of Censorship: Neoliberalism’s Rendering of Chican@ Art  137 Karen Mary Davalos

10 Tools and Obstacles: A Conversation  155 Daniel Joseph Martínez, Carol A. Wells, and Nizan Shaked 11 Remaining in Sight: Andrea Bowers’s Art Lessons from Activists  Peter R. Kalb PART IV  Framed: Institutional and Governmental Constraints 12 In and Out of Sites: Disability and Access in the Work of Park McArthur and Carmen Papalia  191 Elizabeth Guffey 13 Culture, State, and Revolution: Arts Wars between Religious and Secular Autocracies in Post-Revolution Egypt  199 Sonali Pahwa and Jessica Winegar 14 Knowing/Caring: A Conversation  Ai Weiwei and Alexandra Munroe

209

PART V  Contested Objects: (Re)Presenting Cultural Heritage 15 Re-Indigenizing Native Space in a University Context  Craig Stone

223

16 African Cultural Heritage: Erasure, Restitution, and Digital Image Regimes  235 Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie 17 Censorship and Creative (Re)Production: A Conversation  Morehshin Allahyari and Brittany Ransom

247

PART VI  Matters of Race: Campus (Un)Learning 18 Our Compliance: Provocation and Valuation  Ashley Powell and Kara Walker

257

19 Presenting/Canceling N*W*C*: Creative Expression, Speech Rights, and Pedagogy  265 Jane Conoley, Maulana Karenga, Karen Kleinfelder, Cyrus Parker-Jeannette, Michele Roberge, Elena Roznovan and Cintia Segovia, Griselda Suarez-Barajas, Andrew Vaca, Jaye Austin Williams, and Teri Shaffer Yamada

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CONTENTS

20 American Monument 25/2018: Students Respond  293 Andrea A. Guerrero and CSULB School of Art Concerned Students of Color and Allies Afterwords  305 Svetlana Mintcheva and Laura Raicovich Contributors  317 Index  328

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Illustrations

Plates 1 

Carrie Mae Weems, Restless after the Longest Winter You Marched & Marched & Marched from the series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, 1995–6

2 

Ken Gonzales-Day, Disguised Bandit, Erased Lynching Series #1, 2006

3 

 eresa Margolles, ¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? Bordado T (What Else Could We Talk About? Embroidery), 2009

4 

 eresa Margolles, ¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? Embajada T (What Else Could We Talk About? Embassy), 2009

5 

 lastinated body of a pregnant woman viewed by a museum visitor P at the Body Worlds exhibition by Gunther von Hagen at the Museo Miraflores in Guatemala City, July 6, 2012

6 

Sue Fox, Mother, 1997

7 

Still from Kurt Kren, 23/69 Underground Explosion, 1969

8 

Joy Poe, A Matter of Degree, 1979

9 

John Fleck in Blessed Are All the Little Fishes, 1989

10 Kevin Duffy, video still from John Fleck Is Who You Want Him to Be, 2019 11  David Wojnarowicz, A Fire in My Belly, 1986–7 12 Exhibition catalog, Los Four: Almaraz/de la Rocha/Lujan/Romero, 1973 13 Exhibition catalog, ¡Murales Rebeldes! L.A. Chicana/o Murals under Siege, 2017 14 Daniel Joseph Martínez, Museum Tags: Second Movement (Overture) or Overture con claque—Overture with Hired Audience Members, 1993

ILLUSTRATIONS

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15 Irving Petlin, Jon Hendricks, and Frazer Dougherty, Q. And Babies? A. And Babies., 1970 16 Andrea Bowers and Olga Koumoundouros, TRANSFORMer: Platform for Community Education, Activism and Fundraising, 2013 17 Park McArthur, Ramps, 2014 18 Carmen Papalia, Guiding String, 2015 19 Ai Weiwei, film still from Human Flow © 2017 Human Flow, UG 20  Ai Weiwei, China Log, 2005 21 Tribal flags of California State University Long Beach (CSULB) Native Alumni, 49th Annual CSULB Pow Wow at Puvungna, 2019 22  California State University Long Beach American Indian Student Council, Genocide Flags, 2015 23 Royal statues of the Kingdom of Dahomey, attributed to Sossa Dede, Benin, Abomey (1858–89) 24 Morehshin Allahyari, Lamassu, 2015, from the Material Speculation: ISIS series 25 Ashley Powell, Our Compliance, 2015 26 Kara Walker, A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, 2014 27 Promotional poster in California State University Long Beach bookstore for N*W*C* performance on September 24, 2015 28 lauren woods, American Monument 25/2018, 2018

Figures 2.1 Teresa Margolles, ¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? Limpieza (What Else Could We Talk About? Cleaning), 2009  38 2.2 Teresa Margolles, ¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? Tarjetas para picar cocaína (What Else Could We Talk About? Cards to Cut Up Cocaine), 2009  39

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ILLUSTRATIONS

4.1 

 hotographer unknown, “Anti-festival” organizers at the Hamburger P Filmschau. Bild, March 8, 1969  71

4.2 

 enno Josef Wiersch (Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger staff photographer), B Protesters at the “Underground Explosion” anti-censorship demonstration, Cologne Police Station. Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, October 21, 1968  77

5.1 

Joy Poe, Holy Family/Perversion Fan, 1975  83

5.2 

Joy Poe, Rape Performance, 1979  87

6.1 

John Fleck in Blacktop Highway, 2015  97

6.2 

 evin Duffy, video still from John Fleck Is Who You Want Him to Be, K 2019  97

7.1 

 xhibition catalog, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American E Portraiture, 2010  111

7.2 

Museum of Censored Art, January 13–February 13, 2011  112

8.1 

Meeting in Rosario of Grupo de Arte de Vanguardia, 1968  121

8.2 

Publicity sticker designed by Juan Pablo Renzi for the 1968 Tucumán Arde exhibition  122

8.3 

 ucumán Arde exhibit at the headquarters of the General T Confederation of Labor of the Argentines, Rosario, 1968  123

8.4 

 uz y Fuerza union workers marching during the 1969 “Cordobazo” L in Córdoba  123

9.1 

Exhibition catalog, Hispanic Art in the United States, 1987  142

9.2 

 xhibition catalog, The Road to Aztlan: Art from a Mythic E Homeland, 2001  143

9.3 

Exhibition catalog, Phantom Sightings, 2008  144

9.4 

Exhibition catalog, Asco: Elite of the Obscure, 2011  148

10.1 Detail of 1979 mural by Róger Pérez de la Rocha and others  157 10.2 Lieutenant Orville Pennington holding the head of Silvino Herrera with boy looking on  158 10.3 Daniel Joseph Martínez, Museum Tags: Second Movement (Overture) or Overture con claque—Overture with Hired Audience Members, 1993  162

ILLUSTRATIONS

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10.4 Daniel Joseph Martínez, Call Me Ishmael: The Fully Enlightened Earth Radiates Disaster Triumphant, 2006  163 10.5 Daniel Joseph Martínez, Call Me Ishmael: The Fully Enlightened Earth Radiates Disaster Triumphant, 2006  164 10.6 Forkscrew Graphics, iRaq [Abu Ghraib prisoner], 2004  168 11.1 Andrea Bowers, video still from Vieja Gloria, 2003  178 11.2 Suzanne Lacy and Andrea Bowers, Your Donations Do Our Work, 2009  179 11.3 Andrea Bowers, Courtroom Drawings (Steubenville Rape Case, Text Messages Entered as Evidence), 2013  182 14.1 Exhibition catalog, Fuck Off, 2000  211 14.2  Ai Weiwei, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995  212 a–c  14.3 Ai Weiwei, film still from Human Flow © 2017 Human Flow, UG  213 15.1 PowerPoint slide by Craig Stone featuring beading loom and overlaid “Cultural Arts Questions”  225 15.2 Poster for conference of American Indian Leaders of Today and Tomorrow, 1979  228 15.3 Craig Stone’s unsigned installation Blind to History, 2015  229 15.4 Poster commemorating 2016 NAGPRA reburial of ancestors at Puvungna  231 16.1 Royal ancestor heads (Uhunmwun Elao), from the former Benin Kingdom, eighteenth century and nineteenth century, displayed at Quai Branly Museum, Paris, November 23, 2018  239 17.1 Morehshin Allahyari, South Ivan Human Heads: Bearded River God, 2017, from the Material Speculation: Isis series  252 17.2 Morehshin Allahyari, detail of Huma and Talismans, 2016, from the She Who Sees the Unknown series  253 18.1 Ashley Powell, Our Compliance, 2015  258 18.2 Ashley Powell, Our Compliance, 2015  264 19.1  Letter from FIRE, NCAC, and DLDF to President Jane Close a–d   Conoley, September 23, 2016  267–270

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ILLUSTRATIONS

20.1 lauren woods pausing American Monument 25/2018, September 16, 2018  294 20.2 lauren woods, American Monument 25/2018, 2018  299 20.3 lauren woods, American Monument 25/2018, 2018  300

Acknowledgments

The site on which California State University Long Beach (CSULB) was constructed and the space in which we created this anthology is Puvungna—a sacred homeland for indigenous peoples past and present. “Puvungna” is often translated as “The Gathering Place.” We are thankful for the time we gather here teaching and learning. We know where we stand. In and Out of View: Art and the Dynamics of Circulation, Suppression, and Censorship originated with the 2011–12 campus-wide project titled “Banned, Blacklisted & Boycotted: Censorship and the Response to It.” The B-Word Project launched by Michele Roberge, then the director of the Richard and Karen Carpenter Performing Arts Center (CPAC), and Christopher Scoates, then the director of the University Art Museum (UAM), was conceptualized by CPAC in 2010, the twenty-year anniversary of the National Endowment for the Arts’ (NEA) withdrawal of grants awarded to performance artists Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller. Roberge and Scoates, who secured Creative Campus Innovations Grants awarded by the Association of Performing Arts Presenters and funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, engaged the NEA Four, other artists, and individuals from a variety of professions and disciplines for visiting-artist programs, performances, panel discussions, and student seminars. We thank all who supported and participated in this interdisciplinary project, which facilitated our investigations of a variety of culture wars in and beyond the United States. In participating in the B-Word Project, we recognized the need for an anthology addressing the continuing pressures, global dimensions, and discursive complexities of censorship. Over time our focus extended to other kinds of suppression and also the means by which art is recreated and recirculated. Our enterprise became all the more compelling as we worked through unexpected campus circumstances related to the anthology’s concerns. First was the university’s cancellation of a September 2016 performance at CPAC titled N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk, which resulted in Roberge’s resignation in protest of the cancellation. Second, in 2018, the university dismissed Scoates’s successor, UAM director Kimberli Meyer, who upon arriving at CSULB in 2016 had made clear her intention of focusing on museum programming that was decidedly anti-racist—invoking a term that has become broadly familiar amidst recent protests against and discussions about systemic racism, police brutality, the over-policing of Black individuals, and the devaluation of Black lives. Meyer’s dismissal came just days before the opening of the first major UAM exhibition she organized: artist lauren woods’s American Monument 25/18, which investigated police violence against Black people. The firing led woods to “pause” the project and curtail further activity at CSULB. During these crises, we thought, felt, and learned much—not only about the complexities of processes of circulation, suppression, and censorship but also about the many ways through which individuals know, see, hear, speak, (en)act, affirm, and challenge. We have tremendous respect for and are grateful to the students, staff, and faculty impacted by these events who over time had the courage to speak about their experiences. We are grateful some of these individuals agreed to contribute to our text and at the same time regret we were

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

unable to give voice to all. Importantly, however, we know that we and many others grew from illuminating, at times difficult, and ongoing exchanges. Now in 2020, as this book goes to press, we are horrified and anguished by the tragedies and disproportionate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the brutal murders of Armaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, George Floyd Jr., David McAtee, Breonna Taylor, Byron Lee Williams, and others. At the same time we are heartened by the constructive responses of protesters, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the growing number of people the world over who are listening to voices that have for far too long been ignored, misrepresented, and suppressed. We sense the possibility for unprecedented change, though committed discussion and much hard work must be undertaken. We are hopeful collective efforts will bring about change that truly matters. We express our deep appreciation to the contributors to this volume for their enduring commitment and collaborative spirit. They devoted considerable resources as well as passion to their research and carefully deliberated pressing issues. We are indebted to many individuals in the CSULB School of Art who assisted us in profound ways; their titles don’t begin to describe the many things they do: directors Jay Kvapil, David Hadlock, and Aubry Mintz; administrative coordinator Karen Warner; visual resources coordinator Jeffrey Ryan; advising coordinator Michael Nannery; and fiscal coordinator Ardel Deltgen. We also thank CSULB College of the Arts administration and staff: deans Cyrus Parker-Jeannette, Margaret Black, and Robin Bargar, administrative services manager Chanel Acker and her staff, and assistant to the dean Corinne Garthoff. Michele Roberge and Megan Kline-Crockett, successive directors of the CSULB Carpenter Performing Arts Center, and former CSULB University Art Museum director Kimberli Meyer were also immensely helpful. We likewise appreciate the efforts made by hardworking CSULB Library staff to secure valuable research material: Mark Moffatt, Vicky Munda, Leslie Anderson, Sandy Raquel, Gilbert Parra, Yesica Parra, Kirstie Genzel, Thanthony Cooper, and Chloe Pascual. Images, copyright permissions, and other publication expenses were funded by Scholarly and Creative Activity Awards and Faculty Small Grants from CSULB’s School of Art and College of the Arts. The following individuals and organizations helped us secure images and copyright permissions: all contributing authors; Ai Weiwei Studio, Amazon Studios, Lisson Gallery, London, Participant, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Morehshin Allahyari, Sapar Contemporary, New York, and UPFOR, Portland, Oregon; Andrea Bowers, UC Riverside Sweeney Art Gallery, Vielmetter Los Angeles, Olga Koumoundouros, and Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College; Archivo Graciela Carnevale; Mike Blasenstein and Michael Dax Iacovone; Center for the Study of Political Graphics; CSULB Carpenter Performing Arts Center; John Fleck; Forkscrew Graphics, Los Angeles; Sue Fox; Bibiana Fulchieri; Ken Gonzales-Day and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles; Jon Hendricks; Teresa Margolles, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, and James Cohan, New York; Daniel Joseph Martínez; Park McArthur and ESSEX STREET, New York; National Coalition Against Censorship; Carmen Papalia and Model Contemporary Art Center, Sligo, IE; Joy Poe and Ryerson and Burnham Archives, Art Institute of Chicago; Ashley Powell, Kara Walker, and Sikkema Jenkins & Co; Reuters; Jeffrey Ryan; Michael J. Schroeder; sixpackfilm; Craig Stone, Art Neri, CSULB American Indian Studies, and CSULB Daily49er; Carrie Mae Weems and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Estate of David Wojnarowicz, P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York, and Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University; and lauren woods and Nicola Goode.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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Elizabeth Pulsinelli was diligent and thoughtful in editing the chapters at various stages and reviewing the complete manuscript. Anonymous readers of our initial proposal made astute observations and offered incisive recommendations. For their attentive and insightful work with the manuscript, we are indebted to Bloomsbury Press commissioning editors Margaret Michniewicz, Frances Arnold, James Thompson, April Peake, and Alex Highfield, Bloomsbury production editor Barbara Cohen Bastos, and Bloomsbury editorial assistants Erin Duffy, Anita Iannacchione, Yvonne Thouroude, and Ross Fraser-Smith, as well as Shanmathi Priya Sampath and Viswasirasini Govindarajan of Integra Software Services and copyeditor Ami Naramor. Together they enabled this anthology to come to fruition. Family and friends were also crucial to the completion of this anthology. Special thanks to you for your continuing love and support. Last, we thank all the individuals—contributors, editors, peer reviewers, our students and colleagues, friends, and the many other people we consulted along the way—who in brief exchanges or extended conversations gave us things to think about, challenged us, and expanded our vision.

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Introduction Catha Paquette, Karen Kleinfelder, and Christopher Miles

For many, the words “art censorship” suggest a simple binary transaction: one person creates a work of art, and another prevents it from being viewed. Censorship, however, is generally one aspect of complex processes involving creation, erasure, and reemergence. Morehshin Allahyari’s Lamassu (2015–16) invites contemplation of the dynamics of such processes (Plate 24). The work, part of the artist’s series Material Speculation: ISIS, is a 3D-printed plastic six-inch-high miniature of a ninth-century BCE Assyrian stone sculpture in Iraq.1 Depicted as bearded deities with wings and bodies of bulls or lions, Lamassu functioned as protectors of royalty in Assyrian times, continued to serve religious and sociopolitical purposes in later Mesopotamian cultures, are valued today as integral to regional memory and identity, and are globally important given Mesopotamia’s role in the development of civic art and architecture and Iraq’s rich history and heritage. While the Lamassu and eleven other ancient artifacts Allahyari replicates in Material Speculation: ISIS were destroyed in 2015 by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), other cultural objects have been suppressed through various processes: damage and destruction due to ancient efforts to stifle perceived power; demise of Mesopotamian texts; inadequate nineteenth- and twentieth-century academic historical narration; discontinuous archaeological excavation; and neglect, ruination, looting, and foreign displacement following invasions, sanctions, civil wars, and sectarian violence.2 Material Speculation counters suppression through a digital 3D modeled/reconstructed/fabricated form with embedded storage media safeguarding specifications, maps, provenance data, and still and moving images. The object’s compelling details, portable size, and implanted information attest to Allahyari’s strategy to ensure visibility and indispensability. The forces Allahyari calls attention to are clearly not binary. They are exemplary of complex, ongoing processes. In and Out of View: Art and the Dynamics of Circulation, Suppression, and Censorship, a collection of writings on artistic propositions and individual/institutional reception from the mid-twentieth century to the present, invites us to consider the dynamics inherent in such cycles. Contributors illustrate that artwork deemed insignificant, divergent, disruptive, offensive, obscene, sacrilegious, or threatening can be subject to varying levels

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IN AND OUT OF VIEW

of accessibility and (mis)understanding. They make evident the range of factors effecting visibility, invisibility, and problematic visibility: varied actions of artists, museums, critics, historians, educational institutions, governments, and nongovernmental entities, as well as the alternatingly additive and subtractive nature of interpretative processes.

Lingering Issues Individuals in many professions and academic disciplines have previously investigated processes of circulation and suppression. Their subjects of focus are remarkably varied, and, importantly, many of the questions they pose remain at issue.

The Question of Culture War(s) Much US literature on art censorship focuses on 1980s and 1990s controversies over contemporary art dealing with gender, sexuality, eroticism, homophobia, sexism, race/ racism, religion, and the AIDS crisis. Prominent examples include debates over Robert Mapplethorpe’s X and Z Portfolios (1978 and 1981), Andre Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987), and the 1990 rescinding of National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) grants to Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller.3 James Davison Hunter argues that the “historically pivotal” conflicts underlying the culture wars were divergent views regarding moral values stemming from “polarizing impulses” toward “orthodoxy” and “progressivism.” While conservatives and progressives advocated differing conventions and standards, each urged governmental restrictions—the former to crack down on obscenity and the latter to preempt demeaning speech against racial minorities, gays, and women. “Both sides,” he surmises, “make a big mistake when they confuse censuring (the legitimate mobilization of moral opprobrium) with censoring (the use of the state and other legal or official means to restrict speech).” Hunter locates the “problem” of “moral pluralism and its expansion” in “competing interest groups” with diverse notions of the “public good,” “public justice,” and “national identity and purpose” struggling for power. Such competition threatens the nation’s commitment to the dual values of diversity and unity and, by extension, democracy.4 Michael Kammen, who suggests increasing “democratization” of culture and “politicization of art” led to individual and institutional “imperatives” to “shock,” emphatically asserts that changing views concerning aesthetics and “American” values will “invariably meet with resistance.”5 Richard Bolton, who views the NEA controversy as a “battle for power” between “cultural” and “conservative” elites who “spoke for” but had little “connection to” the “larger public,” proposes that solutions lie with the NEA: funding for “new educational approaches to controversial subjects,” strengthening of community relationships, and support for work addressing changing social conditions.6 Dustin Kidd underscores the impact of period debates, including reductions in NEA funding and defunding of programs addressing “issues of power,” as well as the stakes: the “notion of the sacred”; the “sacredness of art”; ideas about national, racial, class, gender, and sexual identities; and “life itself,” given the AIDS crisis.7 But he challenges the very notion of a “culture war,” particularly the idea that controversies stem from “deeply held ideological or moral attachments.” Kidd suggests conflict is a matter of public discourse, which can effect changes in “attachments” and “shared language.”8 Jennifer Doyle contends “the culture wars … produced an ocean of hard feelings in their wake (artists who feel abandoned, curators who feel betrayed, museum directors who fear

INTRODUCTION

3

their own patrons, journalists who know no other story about art than scandal).”9 Feelings, she explains, are an integral aspect of “difficult” art; they can be “unpleasant or painful,” “very complicated,” and “impossible to stabilize.” But much prevents us from working through emotions that “difficult” art provokes: “art controversy invariably simplifies its object,” and “mainstream art criticism … tends to reject work once it detects the presence of an identity and discernable politics.” Doyle insists profound difficulties that “difficult” art asks of us “are productive and important kinds of difficulty … because they speak to quite fundamental aspects of being a social subject.”10 She advocates “expanded conversation” that acknowledges difficulty on three levels: the institutional, the historical, and the affective.11 Ruy Teixeira wrote in 2009 of “The Coming End of the [US] Culture Wars,” citing the rise of the Millennial generation and the nation’s eventual transition to a majority-minority nation,12 and Kidd proposed in 2010 that “the culture wars period is over in terms of highly publicized large-scale cultural conflict.”13 But cultural confrontations persist—in the United States and across the globe. Artwork relating to gender, sexuality, religion, race, ethnicity, nationalism/national identity, immigration, international politics, institutional power/ practices, and many other topics remains “difficult.” Controversies continue to rage.

Problematics of Knowledge With knowledge practices an increasingly important area of focus, a broad range of phenomena has been designated as censorship. Sue Curry Jansen argues that censorship in post-Enlightenment liberal societies includes “all socially structured proscriptions or prescriptions” that “inhibit or prohibit dissemination of ideas, information, images, and other messages”—whether “overt” or “covert” in nature or “secured by political, economic, religious, or other systems of authority.”14 Regulatory censorship is enacted through governmental laws and regulations, and constituent censorship is inherent in knowledge systems, epistemologies, and social standards. Jansen, who highlights the workings of market censorship, notes that with “information-capitalism,” knowledge is a commodity and profitable knowledge circulates. “Esoteric” speech acts of “vanguards” and the “elite” are another suppressive force; in implying professional competence is necessary to process complex issues, they “systematically deny the legitimacy of the voices of the people.”15 Yet, Jansen maintains, knowledge can be an instrument of subversion, as “knowledge of power” is not restricted to the powerful.16 Elizabeth C. Childs underscores the benefits of contrasting regulatory and constitutive censorship in varied historical periods and democratic, fascist, and communist societies. Much is made evident: the “heterogeneous” nature of historical circumstances; the “constantly changing relations” between those authorizing and dissenting from suppression; and the variations in constraints, penalties, acts of resistance, and consequences.17 As Jansen and Childs indicate, theoretical propositions by Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu are instrumental to broadening definitions of censorship. In delineating the relationship between power and knowledge, Foucault argues that censorship is as much the product of discursive and disciplinary practices as legal and judicial action. Bourdieu maintains censorship is constituted within any discursive structure that “delimits the universe of possible discourse.”18 Robert C. Post emphasizes the significance of Foucault and Bourdieu in late 1990s perspectives favoring regulation as a means of countering oppression, such as those concerning pornography, hate speech, public protest, campaign financing, and broadcast media. Post, who notes writing on censorship “tends to veer between the concrete mechanisms of silencing and the abstraction of struggle,” suggests “distinctions among kinds of power,” such as legal, market, discursive, and institutional pressures, are thereby “flatten[ed]”—deemed

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IN AND OUT OF VIEW

equivalent.19 Robert Atkins and Svetlana Mintcheva argue that investigations of institutional and individual forces through which material relating to sexuality, physical violence, and hate speech are suppressed, including market factors, legal action, copyright law, and selfcensorship, make clear that such forces are systemic—“part of a complex system of economic, political, cultural, and/or social arrangements.”20

Museums and Their (Im)Possibilities Significant attention has been focused on silencing and erasure in display spaces, as well as problematic exposure given to so-called ethnic art, US native art, and non-US/European cultural patrimony. James Clifford emphasizes that supposed “truths” of ethnographic observations are “inherently partial”—i.e., “incomplete” and “committed” to a particular way of interpreting and evaluating.21 The same is said of museums; as Svetlana Alpers writes, in “isolat[ing]” an object and “transform[ing] it into art,” they “put” it “under the pressure” of a particular “way of seeing.”22 This “museum effect” is a source of opportunities and problems, enabling transmission of cultural information but rendering complex, dynamic processes as reductive and fixed via problematic categorizations and characterizations. Steven D. Lavine and Ivan Karp speak of the “inherent contestability” of exhibitions. Object selections, display methods, language, content, decision-making structures, and impacts are all called into question. Museum professionals striving to be responsive to groups whose cultures they display and serve must develop effective means to “accommodate alternative perspectives” and “admit” their “highly contingent nature.”23 As Raymond A. Silverman writes, museums, cultural institutions, and archives have increasingly sought to join forces with constituencies “represented in and by” them. Museum work is now considered a matter of process; strategies of engagement among “intellectual, professional, and cultural communities” involve experimentation and “reflexive critique,” which have the potential to yield “new ways of thinking” and “living.” Complications, confusion, and failure are closely analyzed, as are efforts to better understand the “dynamics” of collaboration and translation—“how knowledges are apprehended, translated, negotiated and shared.” Knowledge is regarded as concrete and dynamic, “reshaped” in its movement across geographical/cultural spaces and historical/generational time frames.24 Displacement resulting from (post)colonial plunder and theft is challenged by calls for repatriation of human remains, objects, digital material, and copyrights; actions in the United States resulting from the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and demands in France for return of African cultural objects are but two examples. At issue in institutional actions are questions concerning ownership, control of access, shifting purposes, commodification, and relationships between objects and digital surrogates. Museum professionals have long conceded their policies and practices are impacted by the global processes of (neo)colonialism, (neo)liberal commerce, industrial development, emigration, and tourism, and have acknowledged the problematic role of museums in identity construction.25 In addition, as Silverman writes, many among them increasingly see museum work as “social work,” as museums “can play a significant role in improving the lives of individuals in the communities … they represent and serve.” Activities are moving from museum space into community space, and knowledge is “flow[ing] in multiple directions.”26 Hence, Karp and Corinne A. Kratz’s advocacy of “interrogative” as opposed to “declarative, indicative, or even imperative” practices—those that acknowledge the contestability of institutional contents, operations, and structures and “the agency and knowledgeability of audiences.”27 The need for interrogative practices and ethical adjudication is ever more pressing.

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Artists’ Propositions Artists whose work emerges from, intersects with, and often transcends categories of conceptual art, feminist and anti-racist practice, postcolonial inquiry, and critique of institutions and representation have been instrumental in foregrounding issues relating to art circulation and suppression. Art historian and critic Douglas Crimp, who from the late 1970s to the early 1990s focused on a critical mass of postmodernist artists engaging in societal, cultural, and institutional critique, interrogated the entanglements of artistic production and representation, museum and market machinations, capitalism and conservatism, and powerful and disempowered groups. These concerns informed his later assessments of the ways in which art institutions, the market, and the press addressed the AIDS crisis.28 The impulse toward critique Crimp identified in the 1980s is manifest in work emerging in the 1960s and 1970s. The Art Workers Coalition and Guerilla Art Action Group in the late 1960s transformed museums (particularly the Museum of Modern Art) into sites of performance, protest, and dialogue regarding diversity, inclusion, transparency, and institutional complicity with US foreign policy and the military-industrial complex. David Hammons used body prints to assert and literally imprint African American presence and identity on and among metaphorical and emblematic barriers maintaining institutionalized exclusion and racism. In Spray Paint LACMA (1972), the collective Asco painted three of their four artists’ names on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art façade, while the fourth artist posed with the graffiti for a photograph; the artists simultaneously took control of the stereotype of Chicanxs as vandals, registered critique and protest, and exhibited at and staked a claim to a museum that programmatically excluded Chicanx artists. Lynda Benglis, echoing Judy Chicago’s subversive 1970 Artforum ads, used exhibition postcards and centerfold and advertisement formats in Artforum in 1973 and 1974 for both promotion and critique—questioning the interplay between representations of gender/sexuality and artistic promotion/reception. Chicago’s Dinner Party project (1974–9) served as process, forum, and vehicle for exposing and reversing erasure of influential women from history and reclaiming representation of the female body. Throughout this period, Hans Haacke made visible institutional problematics, including provenance of postwar museum acquisitions, political and financial ties of institutions and their overseers, and corporate event sponsorship and backing of collections; he also mined the implications of activist intervention in art acquisition, exhibition, and viewership—display in art venues of patrons’ socioeconomic information, engaging of viewers in political discourse, and gathering of data on the politics and demographics of participants. Michael Asher’s site-specific installations and interventions during this period examined the obscured underpinnings, decisions, operations, histories, idiosyncrasies, and impacts of gallery and museum patronage, administration, curating, and exhibition design. Artists since the 1980s have expanded upon strategies and issues to address problems of representation and transparency. The anonymous artist-activist group Guerilla Girls, operating via posters and other promotional media, videos, actions, interventions, and exhibitions, continues to illuminate racism, sexism, and exclusion in the art world. Artist collectives, including General Idea, Gran Fury, and the SILENCE=DEATH Project, promoted awareness of realities and complexities of the AIDS crisis, challenged misconceptions and misinformation about AIDS, countered homophobia, and asserted public visibility for marginalized groups via artworks, exhibitions, and agitprop strategies. James Luna utilized photography, installation, and performance to critique representations of Native Americans in museum exhibitions and other public/cultural settings. Both Amalia Mesa-Bains and Fred

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Wilson merge museological inquiry, archival work, curating, exhibition design, installation strategies, and image- and object-centered artwork to intervene in histories of race, culture, gender, and sexuality and to expose the roles of art and art institutions in perpetuating oppressive narratives and representations. Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta), whose oeuvre spans production of art objects, documentary film, work in digital and web-based media, research projects, critical and scholarly publications, curatorial activity, and organization of panels and talks, examines the interrelation and intersection of the private, public, social, and economic in urban and institutional spaces within local and global contexts. In their collaborative work, artist Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck and art historian/curator Media Farzin examined suppressed narratives about the use, positioning, and entanglement of art in cultural diplomacy and propaganda. Patty Chang engages performance, video, and installation to challenge constructs and representations of identity with regard to gender, sexuality, and ethnicity—particularly as they pertain to Asians and Asian Americans—and to examine how cultural myths are performed and perpetuated at personal, societal, and global levels. Andrea Fraser employs text-based work and performance to interrogate the underlying value structures, hierarchies, politics, and economics of art institutions, markets, and participants. In this ever-broadening field of critical inquiry, which includes the work of artists discussed in and contributing to this anthology, virtually all mechanisms through which art and artists are given exposure are called into question.

Art History’s Global Respons/Abilities David Joselit proposes that 1980s processes of globalization, which emerged with neoliberal deregulation of financial markets and subsequent efforts to exploit international labor and consumer markets, resulted in both “growing infrastructural homogeneity” and “expanded consciousness of cultural diversity” given “increased and accelerated contact between geographically distant regions.” Art historians have become increasingly aware that there is “a wide range of distinct visual dialects, each with its own local histories and semantics,” which “may be mutually intelligible, but … nonetheless remain significantly different—and often even contradictory.” Likewise, there is not one “global art world” but many, each assembling “heterogeneous mixture[s] of cultures, infrastructures, and aesthetics.” With the research and expertise of “a more diverse profession of art historians,” the discipline can develop “a broader range of local histories,” as well as valuation methods acknowledging “transitivity” of meaning—“how meaning[s]” are “produced through movement.”29 Joselit, in addition, emphasizes the importance of self-authorization, as opposed to professional or otherwise elite authorization, in global contemporary art practices. He highlights the potential inherent in the civil intentions and acts of agency of artists and citizen spectators who broadly engage cultural heritages for the purposes of cognitive justice—the acknowledgment and the revaluation of diverse ways of knowing.30 Globalization, Joselit argues, yields aggregative art practices that “select and configure relatively autonomous elements.” He relates his notion of aggregate to Paolo Virno, Antonio Negri, and Michael Hardt’s notion of multitude—a “resistant social force indigenous to globalization” bound by neither national nor class identity; “multitudes,” Joselit explains, “constitute themselves from independent individuals drawn from a variety of communities and locations in response to shared conditions or provocations.” While much contemporary art is aggregative in nature, so too are contemporary art platforms, such as online content generators, biennials, and art fairs that provide “common space” for the “productive, often

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contradictory association” of “singular” entities. “Their contradictions,” Joselit writes, “are not resolved, but rather put on display … to provoke honest and open-ended dialogue.”31 At a 2011 international conference at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute—a clearly aggregative platform—co-convener Aruna D’Souza addressed the pressing need for reforming art history “in the wake of the global turn.” Art historians desiring to expand the discipline have been developing non-Western coursework and faculty positions, adopting “diasporic, transnational, or transcultural models of inquiry,” eschewing “a presumptive European or Anglo-American center,” attempting to shift away from singularly linear sequential narratives, “reimagin[ing] the canon,” and rethinking disciplinary boundaries. While most agree more needs to be done, solutions are contested. Some seek analytical tools to “create a more or less complete picture,” while others are leery of substituting “one master narrative with another.” Those conscious of the degree to which “power relations are produced and re-produced in language, discourse, and disciplinarity” view the problematic binaries of West/non-West and center/periphery as “inescapable.” Many have concluded the ostensibly inclusive lenses of multiculturalism and hybridization perpetuate inequity. Definitions and periodization are disputed: what/when/how is “global”?32 “Practicing art history today,” D’Souza writes, “requires us to engage with sometimes irresolvable friction, disunity, and incommensurability.”33 But, as she makes clear, the diverse views of conference participants are promising. Raqs Media Collective emphasizes the benefit of visualizing the global in terms of scattered fragments—as “different places … speak[ing] to different people at different times.”34 Co-convener Jill Casid likewise sees the challenge inherent in the “exploded global” positively—we confront “our fear, our precarity, and the fragility of the incompassable” but retain “hope in the decentered and multicentered and ultimately unbounded, fractured and yet perhaps still sustainable globe.” Casid maintains that in renouncing mastery in scholarship and pedagogy and accepting our inadequate listening/translating skills, we are able to focus on emerging voices.35 Talinn Grigor argues that in attending to “local agency” and “relations of power,” we make evident the “normalcy” of cultures and histories previously exoticized, tokenized, fetishized, and marginalized.36 Esra Akcan emphasizes the importance of investigating the “different types, modes, items, channels, agents, ideologies, and qualities of cultural encounters” that yield disparate processes of “translatability and untranslatability.”37 D’Souza observes that Akcan’s “approach … thrives on the misunderstandings, the incommensurabilities, the misprisions of our conversations across geographies and times.” She concedes: [We academics] do not fully understand the language that we think we speak with native ease. We encounter it … with a mixture of familiarity and fluency and confusion and grasping for meaning.38 Accepting both the centrality of disciplinary language—“analytic, visual, conceptual, rhetorical, and disciplinary”—and its seemingly insurmountable problems, D’Souza is optimistic. She suggests that in “reimagining” the discipline, “we must be willing to attend to the ways in which art history is spoken differently.” “Moments of incommensurate, untranslatable, irreconcilable difference,” she intimates, are inevitable and beneficial given their productive potential.39 D’Souza’s assertions concerning cultural workers in public universities compelled by neoliberal economics and reduced state funding to engage in transnational programs and collaborations are likewise cogent. She insists we must “make visible” and “negotiate” the “theoretical, ethical, and political effects on our practices.” We need to both concede

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our position in the global “network” of “cultural capital” and acknowledge “the ways … neoliberalism is experienced by many in the world as a form of neocolonialism.” In “the frictions that arise,” D’Souza suggests, we have the opportunity “to distinguish” our “work from the economic structures in which” we “operate.”40 As information networks and knowledge economies expand, so do possibilities for oppression. Given the “friction, disunity, and incommensurability” that characterize disciplinary endeavors, how might an aggregate be mobilized across the globe to respond to attacks on art and artists? The stakes are high. Acts of suppression run the gamut from exclusions from exhibition to state-supported incarceration, torture, and murder. After the deadly 2015 attacks on political cartoonists at the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and subsequent shootings at a free speech event in Copenhagen, a global confederation of museums and art institutions named L’Internationale Online called for a global response.41 Anej Korsika, who notes that “ruling voices still enjoy an immensely predominant representation” and that liberal democracies exercise “entirely new and much more disturbing patterns of control,” advocates critiquing “the deeper historical rootedness and ideological substance of so-called ‘freedom of speech’”; he calls for “people” themselves to “produce people’s media” to “breach the everyday consensus and representations … imposed by mass media.”42 André Lepecki, on the other hand, warns of a form of “multitudinal fascism” in which “highly policed zones of corporate- and governmentally encouraged selfexpression (YouTube, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Twitter, whatever)” corrode human rights and result in “individualization of maximal violence.”43 Banu Karaca views the attack on Charlie Hebdo not as iconoclasm (“it did not aim to destroy specific images”) or a strike against “free speech as an intrinsically European value” but as an indication of how the “question of power shapes the conditions of the production and circulation of images”; any debate about “freedom of expression” requires ”discussion” about “power, place and history.”44 For Yassin Al-Haj Saleh, Syria is a case in point given the underrepresentation of its people including cultural workers, their brutally suppressed political participation, and their inability to challenge the narrative sanctioned by the regime. Al-Haj Saleh insists “the first step towards reconstructing an alternative field of representation is recognizing that the responsibility is global.”45 The aggregative entity L’Internationale Online has recognized and accepted this responsibility; it is documenting limits on artistic freedom via the collections, archives, and protocols of individual and institutional members.

Speech/Silence in Academia Speech issues on college and university campuses have been the focus of an increasing stream of commentary. At issue are basic questions concerning what constitutes academic freedom and why it is necessary. For Joan Wallach Scott, academic freedom in public universities entails freedom from state intervention in research and teaching, freedom from public and private influences and constraints, the ability to self-regulate, and rights to due process and peer review. She argues such freedoms enhance the “public good” because they facilitate production of knowledge and expertise that yield advancements in physical and social sciences, technology, and the humanities.46 Keith E. Whittington views such benefits as “subsidiary.”47 He sees universities as “committed to the advancement of human understanding for its own sake,” and freedom of speech as “essential” to this “mission.”48 Sigal R. Ben-Porath, for whom “controversial speech” is crucial to teaching and learning,49 proposes that an “inclusive, open-minded, and broad search for truth … prepares students to participate in democratic politics beyond the bounds of the university as conscious and committed members of their

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local communities and the wider world.”50 Timothy C. Shiell argues that while many presume “public education should be subject to strict moral and legal constraints” and others support restrictions on any speech impeding “equal teaching and learning opportunities” (such as hate speech),51 some rightfully maintain that “academics [must] be insulated from nonacademic interference” because “an environment of free inquiry” is necessary for the advancement and dissemination of knowledge.52 Stanley Eugene Fish contends that colleges and universities are obligated to guarantee not free speech but free inquiry regulated through professional protocols—“exercise of judgment by persons and bodies authorized to decide which voices are worthy of being heard and which are not.”53 “Students,” he asserts, “are not authorized to exercise that judgment”; they are “apprentices” with “no right to a voice in the content or structure of their education.”54 To secure “truth” in scholarly disputes in the humanities or social and physical sciences,55 “accuracy,” “completeness,” and “relevance” of speech are necessary,56 as is assessment of all arguments in a given field per the “tried-and-true standards of deliberative inquiry.”57 Such inquiries, at the same time, must not be “distorted by external pressures … from churches, politicians, parents, donors, or corporate interests.”58 The academic “way of life,” he insists, must be one of “disinterested contemplation.”59 Fish at the same time writes that hate speech cannot and should not be regulated because it is an “unstable category” contingent upon viewpoint60 and that academics should not be sanctioned for “extra-academic stances.”61 The usefulness of constraints for moral or egalitarian purposes continues to be debated. Ben-Porath notes many individuals and groups, such as “women, racial and sexual minorities, [and] first-generation students … remain outside the conversation.” Hate speech and offensive language “silence” individuals; over time the “effect” can be “accumulating and insidious.” “Epistemic injustice” can also occur when the knowledge and views of certain individuals and groups are not deemed valid or useful. Ben-Porath points out that some scholars advocate regulation of speech that assaults the dignity of an individual or group.62 Jeremy Waldron, for instance, views hate speech as “group libel” or “group defamation” that should be regulated, just as personal libel and defamation are regulated.63 Ben-Porath maintains harm to dignity does not justify speech restrictions; he suggests cancellations of speech events based on content risk restrictions on “anyone who threatens the status quo.” Focus should be placed not on “silencing offensive speech” but on securing dignitary safety via access and participation: college eligibility, full admittance into the curriculum, opportunities to contribute, and safety from physical harm. “Those with greater power”—i.e., “campus administrators, faculty, [and] larger student groups”64—must “properly recognize” all social groups “as equal members” and assure their contributions.65 Scott agrees—emotional injury should not justify speech suppression.66 Whittington takes issue with the “rhetoric of discursive violence.” He argues that “once words are taken to be equivalent to violence, then the call for censorship quickly follows.” Asserting that “hate speech is neither harmless nor valuable,” he cautions against its restriction: “Once an official has been empowered to suppress speech, it is inevitable that good speech will be suppressed along with the bad, that the tools forged to punish worthless speech will be used to silence valuable speech as well.” Whittington, who insists “university officials cannot be selective” regarding speakers and speech content, laments protestors’ efforts to disrupt and obstruct ideational exchange. He nevertheless maintains campus officials should give voice to “thoughtful representatives of serious ideas”— not “extreme provocateurs.”67 While he concedes demands for civil discourse “can become tools to censor and suppress,” he affirms the value of civility and social order: “Civility breeds dialogue, mutual respect, and ultimately the productive exchange of ideas.” Universities, Whittington asserts, “must be places where new, unorthodox, controversial, and disturbing ideas can be raised and

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scrutinized,” and students “must learn to grapple with and critically examine ideas they find difficult and offensive.”68 Ben-Porath contends that demands for individuals to “behave in a civil way” or adapt to “civil norms of conversation” inhibit speech; he indicates that emphasis on civility “can … and has been used to limit speech based on viewpoint.”69 He concludes, “Campus communities should not … aspire for a civil discussion on tough issues.”70 Lamenting the “presumed opposition” between free speech and respectful treatment of “vulnerable” individuals and groups, Ben-Porath advocates “inclusive freedom”—protections for speech and diversity.71 “To protect inclusive free speech,” he proposes, “much more room should be made for messy, inappropriate, challenging, and sometimes uncivil expression.”72 While students’ “well-being” and “sense of belonging and safety” are important, “intellectual safety” is not conducive to “truthful and productive discussion”: “intellectual safety should be rejected to allow openminded research and teaching to take place, and intellectual harm, such as the harm caused by inaccurate and misleading speech, should be regulated.”73 Scott views academic freedom not as “unfettered” speech but as an ethical practice based on critical thinking: “thoughtful, critical articulation of ideas; the demonstration of proof based on rigorous examination of evidence; the distinction between true and false, between careful and sloppy work; the exercise of reasoned judgment.”74 Critical thinking, she concludes, is an appropriate means to “investigate and challenge the deep material and psychic investments that allow injustices to persist, that justify unequal treatment in the name of immutable social norms, and that take (social, racial, ethnic, sexual, religious) differences to provide a natural explanation for hierarchy.”75 A number of scholars focus on global challenges to academic freedom in the new millennium. Evan Gerstmann and Matthew J. Streb highlight the degree to which the 9/11/01 attacks and the “war on terror” refueled debates around the world on academic freedom. Contributors to their anthology spotlight attacks on unpatriotic speech and scientific inquiry in the United States; violence against academics in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia; conflicting perspectives and weak commitments in Western Europe regarding the need for academic freedom; dangers posed in Latin America by authoritarian governments and nongovernmental entities such as guerrilla groups; and the pervasive threat of self-censorship.76 Streb, who emphasizes that intellectual development occurs in “environments where [students] are free to learn about and debate complex and controversial issues,” calls attention to mounting pressures in the United States against academic freedom: heightened nationalist sentiment, denouncements of challenges to government policies, tensions between conservatives and liberals, charges of indoctrination, increased government surveillance, threats of dismissal, and challenges to curricula.77 Gerstmann in turn warns against corporate ties that impact research, publications, and tenure; loyalty oaths; reductions in tenured faculty; undue pressure from institutional review boards; restricted access to information; and governmental constraints on faculty and student travel.78 Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira underscore the pressures that come to bear on US faculty and students from “the logics of racism, warfare, and nationalism,” which undergird US imperialism and the “architecture” of US academic institutions—the “systemic structure of repression of academic knowledge that counters the imperial, nation-building project.” They argue that US imperialist “strategies of control … include proxy wars, secret interventions, and client regimes aimed at maintaining its political, economic, and military dominance around the globe, as well as cultural interventions and ‘soft power’”; foreign intervention deemed “humanitarian” is defended via “liberal ideologies of gender, sexuality, religion, pluralism, and democracy.” Universities in the United States, they suggest, are integral to the operations of empire as they “legitimiz[e] notions of Manifest Destiny and foundation mythologies of settler colonialism and exceptional democracy.” In addition, “pedagogies of nationhood, race,

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gender, sexuality, class, and culture” are “intertwined with the interests of neoliberal capital and the possibilities of economic dominance.” Faculty and students, Chatterjee and Maira note, are attempting “to challenge and subvert them,” and “the university” is therefore “a key battleground in these culture wars”—“producing as well as contesting knowledges about the state of the nation.” Chatterjee and Maira importantly also highlight the “politics of value, legitimacy, and marginality at play” in debates over ethnic and women/gender studies—their “precarious positions” made more so by the “increasing professionalization and policing of these interdisciplinary fields” and efforts to dismantle them.79 In 1998 Simi Linton noted that disability was commonly omitted from “diversity and multicultural curriculum,” which tended to focus on ethnicity and gender. Critical disability studies and studies of disability across curricula were intended to make visible and address the social suppression of disability and also to transform academic and societal discourse concerning the varied meanings and functions of disability. In the physical and social sciences, “the voice of the disabled subject and the study of disability as idea, as abstract concept,” was “absent,” and the “liberal arts, particularly the humanities,” she wrote, had “barely noticed disability.” A crucial finding in critical disability studies was that disability is less a medical category and more a “social, political, and cultural phenomenon” deserving of inquiry in specialized applied fields and liberal arts. Linton, who emphasized the importance of “foreground[ing] the mechanisms by which disability is covered over, layered with meaning and rendered invisible,” called for empiricist studies, “qualitative, interpretive, historical analyses,” and consideration of contextual variables—“social, political, and intellectual contingencies that shape meaning and behavior.” Questions she posed remain pressing: “What … representations, dominant narratives, metaphors, and themes” in academic discourse “contribute to ableist perspectives?” What comprises “meaning-making … in metaphoric and symbolic uses of disability”?80 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson emphasizes today that disability is a relatively complex phenomenon: “a civil and human rights issue, a minority identity, a sociological formation, a historic community, a diversity group, and a category of critical analysis in culture and the arts.”81 Mike Kent, Rachel Robertson, Katie Ellis, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson agree there is tremendous diversity in “directions and perspective” regarding the “future of critical disability studies.”82

This Text Issues raised in these varied investigations resurface throughout In and Out of View: Art and the Dynamics of Circulation, Suppression, and Censorship. University administrators and students, studio and performance artists, art historians, and specialists in cultural studies, ethnic studies, queer history, sociocultural anthropology, and museum practices interrogate the means by which controversial art—works relating to gender, sexuality, violence, death, disability, race, ethnicity, cultural heritage, religion, national and international politics, institutional practices, and many other topics—moves into and out of view. What local, national, binational, and transnational processes render such art (in)visible? Is (in)visibility productive or counterproductive? What might we conclude regarding the relative impact of regulatory and constituent censorship? What ethical obligations do past and present dynamics of circulation and suppression in the “global” world necessitate? The array of phenomena discussed by contributors is fittingly global in scope; their attention is focused on dynamics of circulation and suppression in the United States, other parts of the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Several contributors set their sights on events and circumstances in Southern California. Perspectives, which are

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productively diverse, are nevertheless both locally and globally relevant. They resonate with ongoing debates concerning racial injustice, speech rights, repatriation/restitution, the impacts of language, and calls for change in the missions, policies, and practices of public and private institutions. Because professional discourse has the capacity to conceal and silence, this anthology gives voice to speakers from varied speech platforms, as well as formal and informal forms of commentary—essays, interviews, panel-type discussions, one-on-one dialogue, and personal statements. Discursive methods vary. While some individuals historicize suppression, others personalize or perform its effects. All components are issue oriented. Together they illustrate an array of attitudes and perspectives—from nuanced expressions of understanding and acceptance, to open and hard-hitting rebuke, to critical self-reflection. A few authors are not reticent to “shock”; their provocative commentary highlights the stakes—objective and subjective aspects of lived experiences. The anthology illustrates the complexity of a variety of art issues, the diverse means by which they are analyzed and negotiated, and the broad and varied fields of effects and impacts. It also makes evident the range of agents prepared to assert interpretive rights, authorize particular meanings and valuations, and critically assess stakes and consequences in terms of social and cognitive justice. The components are grouped not chronologically or geographically but by a loosely thematic flow: mortality, sexuality, activist politics, institutional/governmental constraints, cultural heritage, and race. The chapters, which have varied points of overlap, can be compared/contrasted in alternate ways—overt/covert pressures, physical/emotional/ discursive violence, intercultural conflicts, governmental/academic/museum environments, personal/organizational concerns, and consensual/nonconsensual circumstances. Conflicting priorities, perceptions, sensibilities, sensitivities, terms, and interpretations challenge assumptions, provoke new questions, and invite reflection. In Part I, Deadly Serious, contributors assess the challenges and risks involved in artists’ efforts to give visceral form to experiences with tragic violence. Nizan Shaked charts the theoretical origins of revisionist history and analyzes the creative means by which Carrie Mae Weems and Ken Gonzales-Day make visible disturbing aspects of suppressed minority history. In From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–6) Weems modifies photo-based prints featuring nineteenth- and twentieth-century Black men and women with supplemental visual and textual elements; she thereby contrasts strategies of omission, distortion, objectification, and appropriation in the past and present and identifies problematic processes of reception as an aspect of historical construction. In the Erased Lynching series (2001–13) Gonzales-Day digitally erases Latino victims from late nineteenthand early twentieth-century photographs of lynchings to both foreground violence and disallow spectacle. Shaked argues that Weems, through an additive process, and GonzalesDay, through a subtractive process, address a challenge inherent in revisionist art practices: mitigation of trauma involved in (re)presenting tragic events. Ana Garduño investigates a 2009 international exhibition funded by the Mexican government: Teresa Margolles’s ¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? (What Else Could We Talk About?) curated by Cuauhtemoc Medina for the Mexican Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. Margolles manipulated residue from narco-violence in metaphoric, graphic, and material form. She surreptitiously transported mixtures of mud and blood from sites of violence on the Mexico/US border and employed them for varied artistic actions and objects in and outside the Mexican Pavilion, on the US Pavilion façade, and on Venice beaches. Margolles thereby publicized the escalation in and transnational dynamics of narcotrafficking homicides. Garduño, who argues earlier administrations would have prevented the project, assesses officials’ attempts to minimize the exhibition’s impact (firing of officials,

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withdrawal of funding, discursive silence, and media complicity) and efforts by the artist and curator to codify pressing demands for speech and suppression. Kerstin Mey calls attention to the “pornography of death”—the degree to which bodily decay and demise have been removed from public and private view in Western society. Focusing on the “anatomy art” of German physician Gunther von Hagens, she examines how his Body Worlds exhibitions of preserved bodies resulted in calls for censorship and regulatory interventions. His exhibits and televised broadcasts of human dissections incite “a publicly executed act of pausing, looking attentively, and inspecting.” She extends her inquiry to artists engaging with morgues and curation of dead bodies: English artist Sue Fox’s photographic post mortems of bodily incineration (Plate 6), Russian art group AES+F’s choreography of corpses in haute couture, and US photographer Joel-Peter Witkin’s macabre vanitas imagery. Mey proposes that these artists, by merging scientific and artistic strategies, expose death and bodily degeneration, provoke diverse reactions, and mitigate moral dissent and suppression. Part II, The Sexual (In)Sight, addresses controversies concerning sexuality in various media, display venues, geographic locales, and eras. Megan Hoetger focuses on underground cinema in 1960s West Germany that transgressed social norms and decency laws. Debates between and within the Right and the Left over representations of nudity and sex, which were entangled in postwar efforts to rebuild national identity, were fraught with tension. Filmmakers associated with the XSCREEN project in Cologne and the Progressive Art Production Agency in Munich formed alternative distribution channels that went beyond those established by art and film institutions. Underground screenings exploring sexual and racial otherness and eschewing fascist, state socialist, leftist, liberal democratic, and commercial aims were scrutinized by censor boards and police, who arrested organizers and confiscated films. Despite such scrutiny, however, the state funded showings of experimental films from underground cinema venues at international forums—the same work censored elsewhere. Hoetger proposes that tension between censorship and support is a legacy of Cold War soft power tactics and a crucial factor in performing cultural openness. Angelique Szymanek revisits Joy Poe’s 1979 Rape Performance, arguing that Poe’s enactment with a male friend of a dramatized sexual assault was a vital contribution to the rise of feminist art in the United States addressing sexual violence. The marginalization of the artist and the performance in art historical narratives, however, foregrounds the limits of what was and remains image-able when it comes to sexual violence: the challenges involved in displaying but not fetishizing the female body and presenting but not spectacularizing sexual trauma, questions concerning which aspects of female bodily experience may or may not be made visible, and the issue of viewer consent. Expanding the limited discourse on this divisive work, Szymanek analyzes and contextualizes conditions of visibility, or rather invisibility, as such conditions were articulated in concurrent debates regarding representations of the female body and sexual violence in art, pornographic film, and mass media. Artist John Fleck and filmmaker Kevin Duffy engage in a strikingly personal exchange about a number of issues. They revisit the ferocity, absurdity, and trauma of the NEA’s vetoing of grants awarded to Fleck and three other artists, the artists’ out-of-court settlement with the NEA, and the eventual ambiguous US Supreme Court ruling concerning NEA grant review criteria and artistic speech. In this discussion Fleck and Duffy also reflect on the impacts of the AIDS crisis, attacks by the religious right on the gay community, and criticism of Fleck’s performance work—all the while noting the significance of period debates over struggles for LGBTQ rights. While they acknowledge recent contradictory shifts in social mores and continuing pressures to self-censor, Fleck and Duffy choose not to avoid controversy; instead, they readily affirm the “de-shaming” power and pathos of provocative performance art.

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Jonathan D. Katz examines controversies surrounding the 1989 exhibition Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, the 2010 removal of David Wojnarowicz’s film A Fire in My Belly from the 2010–11 National Portrait Gallery exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, and other recent instances of censorship impacting queer studies. Katz, who cocurated Hide/Seek, contrasts overt acts of censorship, which imperil museums, with what he considers a more prevalent danger: quietly handled covert actions within institutions ranging from killing an exhibition in committee to not giving a proposal a hearing. Noting museums increasingly reflect the perspectives of the moneyed class that funds them to the detriment of free inquiry or public service, he suggests we have given US museums a free pass. He concludes that of all centers of power in US culture, museums are the least “politicized”—except if they are “stupid” enough to overtly censor their exhibitions. Authors contributing to PART III, Under Deliberation: Artful Activism, focus on the variety of pressures that come to bear in production and reception of political activist art. Fabián Cereijido investigates reactions past and present to the multidisciplinary action Tucumán Arde. In 1968 Argentine art collective Grupo de Arte de Vanguardia, which had abandoned the prominent Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires and joined forces with a radical labor union to implement Tucumán Arde, was dramatically censored by the Argentine military. Cereijido recounts the political circumstances surrounding this overt act of censorship and then calls attention to a different kind of suppression—the absences and problematic presence of Tucumán Arde in national and international accounts of contemporary art since the 1970s. Cereijido illustrates the means by which hegemonic art world discourse—methods of critical interpretations involving deconstruction, decontextualization, and naturalization of “cultural production in terms of regional constraints”—suppress evidence of artistic agency and erase or neutralize “potentially transformational ideas and actions.” Karen Mary Davalos investigates the degree to which critics, curators, and funding institutions have rendered Chican@ art and artists problematically “visible” or utterly “invisible” in Southern California exhibitions foundational to the discourse. Four occurred between 1974 and 2008: Los Four: Almaraz, de la Rocha, Lujan, Romero (1974); Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Painters and Sculptors (1987); The Road to Aztlan: Art of the Mythic Homeland (2001); and Phantom Sightings: Chicano Art after the Movement (2008). Others were part of Getty Pacific Standard Time initiatives—Art in Los Angeles, 1945–1980 (2011) and Los Angeles/Latin America (2017). Davalos argues that the conditions of both visibility and invisibility for Chican@ art have followed from the “dysfunctional operations” of neoliberalism, including contradictions inherent in neoliberal conceptions of cultural diversity, individualism, and social identity. She concludes by highlighting institutional actions and analytical shifts necessary for intervention. Daniel Joseph Martínez and Carol A. Wells, in a conversation led by Nizan Shaked, contemplate the possibilities and limits of political art. Wells, who as founder, director, and curator of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics has circulated activist political imagery, recounts her experiences with blatant and veiled instances of censorship in a variety of contexts—university, high school, and cable television environments and a federal arts agency. Martínez, who produces texts, images, sculptures, videos, performances, installations, and interventions that have resulted in controversy, offers observations regarding broader discursive mechanisms through which information is controlled. In considering possibilities for resistance and the problem of acquiescence, Wells and Martínez offer diverse perspectives regarding the potential for meaningful social change—actions and circumstances necessary to capture public interest, challenge apathy, and move people to action. Peter R. Kalb discusses how artist Andrea Bowers, in the wake of 1990s art controversies and subsequent censorship mechanisms (control of funding, pay-to-play exhibition practices,

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blurring of “boundaries between the state, the market, and the museum,” and depoliticization of art), learned from activist practices and relocated/reworked the activist component of her art. He proposes that Bowers models a distinctive post–culture wars approach to art activism—converting host institutions and venues into collaborators, engaging them directly in oppositional action, and linking representational practice, pedagogy, and political activism. In considering controversy over Open Secrets I & II at the 2019 Art Basel international art fair, Kalb weighs the complexities—potentialities and challenges—of employing the art marketplace as a forum for political activism, highlights questions relating to context and consent, and considers implications for activist voice and visibility. In PART IV, Framed: Institutional and Governmental Constraints, contributors reflect on the mechanisms by which institutions and governments suppress or control, as well as means by which artists evade or challenge them. Elizabeth Guffey introduces two artists who with varied materials exploit the fact that things “in place” functioning properly are not noticed, while those “out of place” disrupting the environment command attention. In Park McArthur’s Ramps (2014) and Carmen Palalia’s Guiding String (2014), installation elements impede access. They thereby remind us that many things out of sight to the non-disabled are uncomfortably visible to the disabled— obstacles necessitating attention and negotiation. McArthur, who uses a wheelchair, and Palalia, who is visually impaired, alter gallery space to bring the problematics of attention and negotiation into view. This “new form of institutional critique” invites consideration of the degree to which art displays are inaccessible to disabled audiences, as well as marginalization of disability in artwork, the art world, and broader society. The artists advocate change far beyond modifications to built environments. They call for disruption of power structures working against visibility and inclusiveness. Sonali Pahwa and Jessica Winegar describe the volatile nature of the Egyptian cultural scene in the wake of the Arab Spring. In assessing the benefits of and problems with governmental patronage, they challenge prevailing views about Islamic threats to speech. Tracking artists’ experiences in the Nasser and Mubarak eras, as well as following the 2011 Cairo protests, Mubarak’s resignation, Muhammad Morsy’s presidency, and the military coup toppling him, they effectively illustrate the dynamic relationship between state, culture, and religion. Pahwa and Winegar view Egypt after the Arab Spring as a “moment of opening” when artists and politicians alike posed “foundational questions about the role of government in the field of culture and vice versa.” In a postscript covering the period since Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi removed Morsy from office and re-established military rule, they attest to how “fervently” secular-oriented artists reverted to the “devil’s bargain” of the Mubarak era—”that an authoritarian non-Islamist president” is “necessary to protect the arts from Islamism.” However, they also point to “significant generational cracks in the dominant narrative” as younger artists who grew up during the hopefulness of the revolution “in a globally media-saturated world” now “question these black-andwhite choices.” In a 2018 thought-provoking conversation at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, curatorial scholar Alexandra Munroe and artist Ai Weiwei discuss Ai’s practice, which spans photography, video, sculpture, installation, writings, actions, and documentary film. Munroe and Ai reflect on the Chinese government’s persistently repressive treatment of the artist, as well as suppression and violence more generally, which Ai has made the context and focus for much of his work. Munroe and Ai note the timely and pressing issues of immigration, refugees, borders, and speech rights, and consider the ways governments “eradicate” evidence of artists and their actions. Together they delineate components of his practice: continually discerning what he is working against (regional and state power versus the global impact of capitalism and authoritarianism), questioning art categories and definitions, critiquing motivations for

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and notions of success, selecting effective media for expression and communication, testing speech limits, giving voice to others, and “caring” more than “knowing.” Contributors to Part V, Contested Objects and Meanings: (Re)Presenting Cultural Heritage, reflect on consequences of art theft, displacement, and destruction, as well as benefits of reparative, remunerative, and creative actions. Craig Stone explains that as an academic he has two stories to tell, one as a professor in an art department, the other as a professor in American Indian Studies. In telling the latter story, he brings into view the sizeable native community in Southern California, the continuing significance of the sacredness of Puvungna land on which California State University Long Beach was constructed, and acts of creative expression through which natives sustain their cultures. Stone, who speaks of the devastating impact of state genocide in the past and cultural genocide in the present, emphasizes the importance of American Indian Studies and, more generally, ethnic studies. He argues that it is crucial to analyze how and why institutions display native culture and whose power they reinforce, eliminate problematic signifiers such as mascots, acknowledge the significance of native lands and culture, and counter the pervasive nature of oppressive knowledge frameworks. Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie draws attention to confrontations between African publics and Western museums housing African art and artifacts and controlling digital images and copyrights. He highlights the censoring effects of geographic displacement: European universal museums prevent artists in Africa from “engaging their ancestral heritage,” present African culture via Western structural orders and norms, and force African artists to conform. Given their ordering of non-Western cultures, canonical museums represent less the art of Africa than European ideas about it. However, as repositories of imperialist global plunder, they now face questions about their roles and possessions. African nations increasingly demand repatriation and restitution. Ogbechie, who maintains that repatriation and restitution counteract distortion and erasure of cultural history and heritage, contemplates the implications of French president Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 endorsement of repatriation, the 2018 Sarr-Savoy report, and completion of the Museum of Black Civilizations in Dakar, Senegal. Artist Brittany Ransom engages in conversation with artist/activist Morehshin Allahyari, who through video, digital fabrication, 3D modeling/printing, and data sharing challenges censorship. Topics include how and why censorship became important to Allahyari, as well as the forms censorship takes. Allahyari, who notes that suppression occurs in both her native Iran and the United States, where she currently resides, sees censorship and self-censorship as pervasive dilemmas. She highlights the potentially radical role of 3D technology, which extends the visibility of destroyed artifacts. Ransom and Allahyari consider the oppositional potential of #Additivism, an additivist/activist movement initiated by Allahyari and Daniel Rourke that exploits processes of “destruction and construction, interruption and rebuilding.” Additivism, Allahyari suggests, provides the means to counter “the very powers” of those “that oppress” by way of their “strategies and languages and aesthetics.” In Part VI, Matters of Race: Campus (Un)Learning, multiple voices speak to issues at stake regarding artistic expression and suppression. Concerns parallel those of diverse constituencies within educational and scholarly institutions striving to adapt in appropriate ways to shifting contexts and uphold varied—and often conflicting—ideals and values. In September 2015 Ashley Powell, an MFA student at the University of Buffalo, placed “WHITE ONLY” and “BLACK ONLY” signs in various campus locations, sparking controversy. In a statement published in the campus newspaper, Powell explains the context in which she acted—a class on artistic interventions in urban space—and her motivations. Her art practice is a “remnant” of and an “antidote” for the “self-hate, trauma, pain, and indignation” she experiences as a nonwhite person, which are “exacerbate[d]” by “white privilege and compliance.” Powell highlights other artists’ efforts to deal with difficult experiences, including

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those of Kara Walker: “Subtlety hurt us, but that hurt was necessary to call us to action.” In an April 2016 letter Kara Walker responds to Powell in supportive yet sobering terms. Powell, reflecting in 2019 on her experience and Walker’s observations, defends activist provocation as necessary in a world rife with passive compliance and reactionary censorship. “Presenting/Canceling N*gger Wetb*ack Ch*nk: Creative Expression, Speech Rights, and Pedagogy” features diverse perspectives on the 2016 cancellation of a performance by Speak Theatre Arts titled N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk (asterisks inserted by the creators) at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center (CPAC) at California State University Long Beach (CSULB). The show, which incorporates provocative language and references to stereotypes, had run at CPAC a year earlier with the endorsement of the university president, some academic participation, and utilization of campus promotional channels. As the scheduled and advertised 2016 performance neared, however, the dynamics shifted. Amid circumstances that remain contested, “cancellation of this return performance was determined” and resignation of the CPAC executive director followed. In published statements and comments solicited by the editors, participants and observers on and off campus individually revisit facts and effects, collectively revealing but not resolving the complexity of the situation. They offer varied views concerning harmful speech, freedom of artistic expression, student needs, academic freedom, and administrative oversight of programming. “American Monument 25/2018: Students Respond” focuses on circumstances surrounding CSULB’s 2018 dismissal of University Art Museum director Kimberli Meyer and artist lauren woods’s subsequent pausing of American Monument, a project investigating police violence against African Americans. While the Bibliography points readers to various individual and organizational declarations, two pronouncements by students are published in full. Arguably the most important of campus constituencies, students are rarely given voice in academic texts addressing issues impacting them. In a document written during the crisis by CSULB School of Art Concerned Students of Color and Allies, students express dismay and anger over the director’s untimely firing, calling it a “direct affront to the work and the content” and an “act” of “institutional violence.” In an essay written several months later, art history graduate student Andrea A. Guerrero describes the controversy’s mixed consequences and raises pressing questions: What will result from this crucial work? Who will make change happen? The anthology concludes with Afterwords, a conversation between Svetlana Mintcheva and Laura Raicovich about shifts in discourse on censorship. Mintcheva notes that while concerns during the 1980s and 1990s culture wars focused largely on reductions in government funding, and she herself viewed censorship as “systemic,” she fears the term today is applied too liberally. Raicovich laments the structural inequities and complex dynamics continually at play in governmental institutions, museums, and universities. Mintcheva and Raicovich go on to exchange views on institutional gatekeeping, means of achieving diversity and inclusion, productive programming strategies, and the benefits and risks of boycotts. While they agree protests are valuable and necessary, they disagree on institutional neutrality—should museums openly express their positions on current issues or simply enable others to do so? Noting free speech and social justice are often construed in “false opposition,” they call for “productive disagreements.” Controversies, they maintain, present opportunities to hold “difficult conversations.”

Transitioning Thoughts Investigations since the 1960s of issues relating to speech rights and visibility—culture wars, knowledge practices, museum acquisition and display, entanglements of artistic production/

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representation in sociopolitico-economic systems and structures, the global turn in art historical narration, and protected expression in academia—have generally been undertaken in full awareness of, direct response to, and solidarity with civil rights movements, including those of Asian American, Black American, Chicanx/Latinx, disability, feminist, LGBTQ, and Native American activists. As this book goes into production—a time of political divisiveness, global pandemic, insurrections, pervasive economic crises, heightened attacks on democracy, increasingly visible police/military/paramilitary violence, awareness of racial inequity and oppression, as well as globally articulated demands for social justice—the need for close analysis and substantive deliberation is especially pressing. Given these unrelenting pressures, investigations of complex frictions and potentially productive discord seem all the more imperative. A major premise behind this anthology has been that close assessment of the relative impact of suppressive phenomena is necessary—the consequences of censure, overt censorship by public and private institutions, and invisibility and problematic visibility effected by knowledge practices. Contributors have offered varied views on how and why such pressures are impactful: what their determinants, ramifications, and broader implications are, and, ultimately, what is at stake. They bring to light variations in historical circumstances, representational strategies, and mechanisms of visibility, distortion, and erasure. Parallels and differences among kinds of power—regulatory and constituent censorship—are not flattened here, but fleshed out for nuanced consideration. In adopting then-versus-now frameworks and considering the interrelation between past and present, contributors have generally concluded that “then” is by no means over “now.” The past, they propose, continues to be used to shape present understandings. Also, they make clear that controversial forms of creative expression are caught up in multiple instances of contextualization, interpretation, and evaluation. Arenas of debate are complex matrices in which discursive issues ebb and flow, intersect and disconnect. Processes through which works of art move into and out of view are kept in play by diverse constituencies—individuals, social groups, and institutions with distinct needs, motivations, and interests. Along the way, social needs, moral imperatives, political priorities, economic interests, individual aims, and institutional missions cohere and conflict. Art is rendered visible and invisible in productive and counterproductive ways. Authors confirm that the dynamics of dissemination, distraction, displacement, restriction, intervention, and resistance are fluid and complex. With this unavoidably incomplete collection of concerns, and our contributors’ diverse analytical priorities and approaches, much comes into view: many art worlds, practitioners, conflicts, coalitions, contexts, and narratives, as well as the undeniable and indispensable benefits of creative production, critical thinking, and debate.

Notes 1 For information concerning Material Speculation: ISIS, see Alexis Anais Avedisian and Anna Khachiyan, “On Material Speculation,” Morehshin Allahyari: Material Speculation (Toronto: Trinity Square Video, 2016), www.morehshin.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/morehshin_ allahyari-material_speculation_isis_brochure-1.pdf. 2 The significance of both regional cultural heritage and the looting and destruction following the 2003 invasion of Iraq by a US-led coalition is addressed by Zainab Bahrani, Harriett Crawford, Robin Greeley, and John Malcolm Russell in Art Journal 62, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 6–29. 3 In 1990, after Congress authorized NEA funding with the stipulation that the NEA uphold “general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American people,” the NEA revoked the four artists’ awards, which had been recommended by an NEA review panel. The artists filed a lawsuit against the NEA for violating their First Amendment

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rights. While they secured a 2003 out-of-court settlement that paid their grants and legal fees, their case eventually reached the US Supreme Court, which issued an arguably ambiguous 1998 ruling: the NEA “decency” standard was upheld but declared “advisory.” 4 James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America: Making Sense of the Battles over the Family, Art, Education, Law, and Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 34, 43, 246, 307–8, 316–17. 5 Michael Kammen, Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Cultures (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 382–3. 6 Richard Bolton, “Introduction,” in Culture Wars: Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts, ed. Richard Bolton (New York: New Press, 1992), 23–4. For analyses of shifts in the practices of socially conscious artists from the 1970s to the 1990s and related controversies over institutional operations, public policy, and NEA funding, see Philip Yenawine, Marianne Weems, and Brian Wallis, eds., Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America (New York: New York University Press, 1999). 7 Dustin Kidd, Legislating Creativity: The Intersections of Art and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2010), 135, 151–3. 8 Kidd, Legislating Creativity, 144–5. 9 Jennifer Doyle, Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 9. 10 Doyle, Hold It Against Me, 4, 20–1. 11 Doyle, Hold It Against Me, xvii, 23. 12 Ruy Teixeira, “The Coming End of the Culture Wars,” Center for American Progress, July 15, 2009, www.americanprogress.org/issues/democracy/reports/2009/07/15/6454/the-coming-end-ofthe-culture-wars/. 13 Kidd, Legislating Creativity, 144. 14 Sue Curry Jansen, Censorship: The Knot That Binds Power and Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 221. 15 Jansen, Censorship, 168–70, 204. 16 Jansen, Censorship, 7. 17 Elizabeth C. Childs, “Introduction,” in Suspended License: Censorship and the Visual Arts, ed. Elizabeth C. Childs (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 3–4. 18 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 169–70, quoted in Childs, “Introduction,” 5. 19 Robert C. Post, “Censorship and Silencing,” in Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation, ed. Robert C. Post (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1998), 4. 20 Svetlana Mintcheva and Robert Atkins, “Introduction: Censorship in Camouflage,” in Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression, ed. Robert Atkins and Svetlana Mintcheva (New York: New Press, 2006), xvii. 21 James Clifford, “Introduction: Partial Truths,” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 7; Clifford’s italics. 22 Svetlana Alpers, “The Museum as a Way of Seeing,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 26–7, 29. 23 Steven D. Lavine and Ivan Karp, “Introduction: Museums and Multiculturalism,” in Exhibiting Cultures, 1, 4, 7. Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, ed. Karp, Lavine, and Christine Mullen Kreamer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), is also indicative of the increasing emphasis on community engagement.

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24 Raymond A. Silverman, “Introduction: Museum as Process,” in Museum as Process: Translating Local and Global Knowledges, ed. Raymond A. Silverman (London: Routledge, 2015), 1–3. 25 See, for instance, Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, ed. Ivan Karp, Corinne Kratz, Lynne Szwaja, and Tomas Ybarra-Frausto (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), which calls attention to complexities inherent in museums’ global processes. 26 Silverman, “Introduction,” 9. 27 Ivan Karp and Corinne A. Kratz, “The Interrogative Museum,” in Silverman, Museum as Process, 281. 28 See Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). 29 David Joselit, “Globalization, Networks, and the Aggregate as Form,” in Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, ed. Hal Foster et al., 3rd ed. (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2016), 51, 54–5, 57. 30 David Joselit, Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (Boston: MIT Press, 2020). 31 Joselit, “Globalization,” 57–8. 32 Aruna D’Souza, “Introduction,” in Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn, ed. Jill H. Casid and Aruna D’Souza (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, 2014), vii–xi. 33 D’Souza, “Introduction,” vii. 34 Raqs Media Collective (Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi), “An Ephemeris, Corrected for the Longitudes of Tomorrow,” in Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn, 9; quoted in D’Souza, “Introduction,” xii. 35 Jill H. Casid, “Turning the ‘Fearful Sphere’: Prepositional Tactics in and for the Global,” in Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn, 216; cited in D’Souza, “Introduction,” xii. 36 Talinn Grigor, “What Art Does,” in Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn, 140. 37 Esra Akcan, “Channels and Items of Translation,” in Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn, 158. 38 D’Souza, “Introduction,” xviii. 39 D’Souza, “Introduction,” xvi, xviii. 40 D’Souza, “Introduction,” xix–xx. 41 Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ was removed from the online archives of the Associate Press in the wake of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris. 42 Anej Korsika, “Bourgeois Censorship: No Representation without Taxation!” in Representation under Attack, ed. L’Internationale Online, (2015 ebook), 16, 17, 19, 21, https://d2tv32fgpo1xal. cloudfront.net/files/01-representationunderattack-1.pdf. 43 André Lepecki, “Under Attack (or Expression in the Age of Selfie-Control),” in Representation under Attack, 9–10. 44 Banu Karaca, “The Myth of Unfamiliarity,” in Representation under Attack, 30, 33, 34. 45 Yassin Al-Haj Saleh, “Syria as a Global Metaphor,” in Representation under Attack, 26. 46 Joan Wallach Scott, Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 6–7. Scott adds that academic freedom includes faculty’s right “to express political views outside the classroom.” 47 Keith E. Whittington, Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 19. 48 Whittington, Speak Freely, 14. 49 Sigal R. Ben-Porath, Free Speech on Campus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 23. 50 Ben-Porath, Free Speech on Campus, 4.

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51 Timothy C. Shiell, “Three Conceptions of Academic Freedom,” in Academic Freedom at the Dawn of a New Century, ed. Evan Gerstmann and Matthew J. Streb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 25, 31. 52 Shiell, “Three Conceptions of Academic Freedom,” 20. 53 Stanley Eugene Fish, The First: How to Think about Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-truth, and Donald Trump (New York: Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2019), 63, 67, Kindle. 54 Fish, The First, 65. 55 Fish, The First, 68. 56 Fish, The First, 67. 57 Fish, The First, 74. 58 Fish, The First, 65. 59 Fish, The First, 77. 60 Fish, The First, 50–1. 61 Fish, The First, 75. 62 Ben-Porath, Free Speech on Campus, 43, 57–60. 63 Jeremy Waldron, The Harm in Hate Speech (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), cited in Ben-Porath, Free Speech on Campus, 60. 64 Ben-Porath, Free Speech on Campus, 43, 63, 74. 65 Ben-Porath, Free Speech on Campus, 61. 66 Scott, Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom, 78–9. 67 Whittington, Speak Freely, 84, 86–7, 129, 133. 68 Whittington, Speak Freely, 97–8. 69 Ben-Porath, Free Speech on Campus, 71–2. 70 Ben-Porath, Free Speech on Campus, 69. 71 Ben-Porath, Free Speech on Campus, 13, 106. 72 Ben-Porath, Free Speech on Campus, 71. 73 Ben-Porath, Free Speech on Campus, 4, 77, 86. 74 Scott, Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom, 5, 35, 115. 75 Scott, Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom, 92. 76 Evan Gerstmann and Matthew J. Streb, eds., Academic Freedom at the Dawn of a New Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). 77 Matthew J. Streb, “The Reemergence of the Academic Freedom Debate,” in Academic Freedom at the Dawn of a New Century, 7. 78 See Evan Gerstmann, “The Century Ahead,” in Academic Freedom at the Dawn of a New Century, 175–86. 79 Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira, “The Imperial University: Race, War, and the Nation-State,” in The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, ed. Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 6–7, 9. Ana Clarissa Rojas Durazo writes of her experience of exclusion in a CSULB tenure-track position in Chicano and Latino Studies in “Decolonizing Chicano Studies in the Shadows of the University’s ‘Heteropatriracial’ Order,” in The Imperial University, 187–207. 80 Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 2, 6–7, 77, 87–8, 93, 125, 147.

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81 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Critical Disability Studies: A Knowledge Manifesto,” in Manifestos for the Future of Critical Disability Studies, Volume 1, ed. Katie Ellis, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Mike Kent, and Rachel Robertson (London: Routledge, 2019), 12. 82 Mike Kent, Rachel Robertson, Katie Ellis, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Looking to the Future for Critical Disability Studies: Disciplines, Perspectives and Manifestos,” in Interdisciplinary Approaches to Disability: Looking towards the Future, Volume 2, ed. Katie Ellis, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Mike Kent, and Rachel Robertson (London: Routledge, 2019), 6.

Bibliography Atkins, Robert, and Svetlana Mintcheva, eds. Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression. New York: New Press, 2006. Ben-Porath, Sigal R. Free Speech on Campus. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Bolton, Richard, ed. Culture Wars: Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts. New York: New Press, 1992. Casid, Jill H., and Aruna D’Souza, eds. Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn. Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, 2014. Chatterjee, Piya, and Sunaina Maira, eds. The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Childs, Elizabeth C., ed. Suspended License: Censorship and the Visual Arts. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997. Clifford, James. “Introduction: Partial Truths.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 1–26. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Doyle, Jennifer. Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Ellis, Katie, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Mike Kent, and Rachel Robertson, eds. Interdisciplinary Approaches to Disability: Looking towards the Future, Volume 2. London: Routledge, 2019. Ellis, Katie, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Mike Kent, and Rachel Robertson, eds. Manifestos for the Future of Critical Disability Studies, Volume 1. London: Routledge, 2019. Fish, Stanley Eugene. The First: How to Think about Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump. New York: Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2019. Kindle. Gerstmann, Evan, and Matthew J. Streb, eds. Academic Freedom at the Dawn of a New Century. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Hunter, James Davison. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America: Making Sense of the Battles over the Family, Art, Education, Law, and Politics. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Jansen, Sue Curry. Censorship: The Knot That Binds Power and Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Joselit, David. “Globalization, Networks, and the Aggregate as Form.” In Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, edited by Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and David Joselit, 51–60. 3rd ed. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2016. Joselit, David. Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization. Boston: MIT Press, 2020. Karp, Ivan, and Steven D. Lavine, eds. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. Kidd, Dustin. Legislating Creativity: The Intersections of Art and Politics. New York: Routledge, 2010.

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L’Internationale Online, ed. Representation under Attack. 2015. eBook. https://d2tv32fgpo1xal. cloudfront.net/files/01-representationunderattack-1.pdf. Linton, Simi. Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Post, Robert, C. “Censorship and Silencing.” In Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation, edited by Robert C. Post, 1–12. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1998. Scott, Joan Wallach. Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Silverman, Raymond A., ed. Museum as Process: Translating Local and Global Knowledges. London: Routledge, 2015. Whittington, Keith E. Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.

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PART I

Deadly Serious

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1 Subjugated Knowledges, Revisionist Histories, and the Problem of Visibility: Carrie Mae Weems and Ken Gonzales-Day Nizan Shaked

In the past, mainstream academia and museums saw the historical materials of marginalized groups as trivial or banal, and active suppression allowed entire histories to go unnoticed or be misinterpreted. Revisionist histories started to appear in academic and display institutions with the turn to multiculturalism, which commenced around the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s and spread gradually until it became more prevalent in the 1980s. The question of how to deal with primary historical materials considered disturbing, sensationalist, or upsetting is taken up in revisionist histories in visual culture. Although their strategies differ greatly, Carrie Mae Weems and Ken Gonzales-Day both work with the problem of historical narrative concealment. Each of these artists has made visible the historical data neglected in mainstream historical accounts and exposed the very processes of erasure inherent in institutional narratives. Acknowledging that historical materials are themselves mediated cultural objects, their works point not only to painful histories of exploitation and injustice but also to the ways in which those conditions have been framed by history or ignored by it. This essay shows the different modes by which the two artists relocated history in the present day, confronting the master narrative of history as constructed and/or censored yet having a concrete effect on living bodies.1 To reveal history’s Janus-headed operation, these artists take on the role of historian, their work a form of revisionist history.

Subjugated Knowledge Instances of institutions using omission and suppression to manipulate historical narratives are well documented. Controversies involving history textbooks have often been the focus

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of the media and public concern. For example, in 1974 the Mississippi Textbook Purchasing Board banned Mississippi: Conflict and Change for use in state schools. The book, which discusses racial tensions and highlights the contributions of several Black Americans and other subjugated groups in the development of the state, had been rejected by several publishing houses before it was accepted in 1974 for publication by Pantheon Press. The following year, the book won an award for best Southern nonfiction. After the authors (which included students and teachers from Tougaloo and Millsaps Colleges) filed a lawsuit against the state, school authorities allowed the book to be placed on the approved list for a term of six years, though reports surfaced that teachers who used the book in their classrooms faced threats and harassment.2 Following the political dynamics of the civil rights movement, Black power, and feminist and gay activism of the 1960s and 1970s, a gradual change came about in the academy and the museum, where subjects and methods of scholarship and display began transforming, and, to a degree, the demographic of their practitioners and their audiences changed. With the emergence of poststructuralism and postcolonial theory came the understanding that systems of evaluation, classification, and interpretation are ideological and formed by discriminatory social hierarchies. The theories of key figures, such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, and especially Michel Foucault, would later be taught to subsequent generations, reshaping the disciplines of art making, art history, and museum practice. In his 1976 lectures at the Collège de France Foucault discussed the emergence in the 1960s of minority and localized discourses. He named these discourses “subjugated knowledges” and explained that they supported new ways of understanding history as a genealogy based in repressed or minor knowledge or the knowledge of marginalized groups and politically suppressed communities: Subjugated knowledges are, then, blocks of historical knowledges that were present in the functional and systematic ensembles, but which were masked, and the critique was able to reveal their existence by using, obviously enough, the tools of scholarship … [W]hen I say “subjugated knowledges” I am also referring to a whole series of knowledges that have been disqualified as nonconceptual knowledges, as insufficiently elaborated knowledges: naive knowledges, hierarchically inferior knowledges, knowledges that are below the required level of erudition or scientificity.3 Undoing the subjugation of knowledges requires a double move that both clears the way for them to emerge and examines how and why they have been suppressed, so as to not sustain a harmful form of ignorance. Paul Ricoeur suggests a critical outlook in evaluating written histories in his post–World War II analysis of historical manipulation: First, it is necessary for the philosophy of history to look upon itself as a search for a unity of meanings. This does not hold true for all philosophies of history. Secondly, as soon as the philosopher of history puts into perspective all the levels of truth, all cultural activities in relation to a guiding motive of history, he begins to exercise a virtual violence upon the diverging tendencies of history, even if his intention is only to understand and not transform history. He says: “a single truth is in process and shall be: all contradictions will culminate in a higher synthesis.” And indeed, he no longer tries to understand what does not come under his law of construction; he strikes it off and mentally destroys it.4 By the 1980s critics and artists took on the task of decentering the Western-centric hegemony of mainstream culture and academia.5 Author and artist Rasheed Araeen demonstrates how terms such as “ethnic arts” and “primitivism” are used not as an equalizing measure but

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rather as a function of colonialism and imperialist discourse, serving to solidify dominant cultural identity and control a marginalized “other” as subject to definition or inquiry. As he states: “The ‘primitive’ can now be put on a pedestal of history (Modernism) and admired for what is missing in Western culture, as long as the ‘primitive’ does not attempt to become an active subject to define or change the course of (modern) history.”6 Mark Godfrey has examined the role of the artist in destabilizing standard notions of historical narrative. In a 2007 October article titled “The Artist as Historian,” Godfrey describes the crossover of revisionist history into the realm and practices of visual artists. He focuses on the works of Matthew Buckingham to explore the ways in which contemporary artists use established methods to discuss historical representation: There are an increasing number of artists whose practice starts with research in archives, and others who deploy what has been termed an archival form of research (with one object of inquiry leading to another). These varied research processes lead to works that invite viewers to think about the past; to make connections between events, characters, and objects; to join together in memory; and to reconsider the ways in which the past is represented in the wider culture.7 Godfrey asserts that although Buckingham’s work drew lessons from artistic methods foregrounded between 1965 and 1975 and several preceding artists, such as Renée Green and Fred Wilson, his practice differs in methods of display and distribution. Rejecting objectbased practice, the artist’s films and installations use slide projection and photo–text pairings to “break up and reconfigure narrative, and to force viewers into an awareness of their role in the reconfiguration.”8 Analyzing Buckingham’s Muhheakantuck—Everything Has a Name (2005), Godfrey shows how the artist uses a wide range of media to challenge the master narrative. The footage, shot on 16 mm film over the course of a helicopter ride, was utilized to explore the history of the Hudson River in the early seventeenth century, focusing on the exploitation of the indigenous Lenape people by Henry Hudson and the Dutch East India Company. Seen in the gallery, the footage was rendered pink through a filter and dissected into river, land, horizon, and sky. Voiceover, used in different registers with different streams of content, helped distance the viewer: This is accomplished most obviously by the fragmentation of the narrative, which contrasts powerfully with the free-flowing river in the image. Different stories are woven together, one breaking up the flow of the other; different voices interrupt one another. Neither able to settle into the film, nor to trust the narrator’s authority, the viewer is encouraged to subject all conveyed information to questioning. Indeed, in many places the narrator insists on the contingency of knowledge, reminding the viewer that none of the stories told is objective or factual—that each is learned via other representations, that each is told for a reason, that each is told through language with its attendant histories and imprecision. If the contemporary moment necessitates the work of memory, at the same time it requires us to question all received knowledge.9 In his approach Buckingham follows earlier examples of revising visual histories that revealed omission as a form of censorship and challenging not only the histories we have accepted as truth but also the ideas and methods that established them as such. Buckingham has pointed to the theories of Walter Benjamin as being key to his works: There’s a notion that can be found in Walter Benjamin’s writing that is central to what I try to work with. Benjamin describes the vanishing point of history as always being

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the present moment. This formulation of history—thinking about the present moment as the point where history vanishes—is a way of reversing the received notion of history as vanishing somewhere behind us, vanishing into a nonexistent time, a time that no longer exists. [Benjamin’s notion] forces us to confront history as a construction. It implies that when we reconsider past events, we’re not so much returning to another time and retrieving material or events. We are restaging those events here and now in order to think about what’s happening here and now, to think about the present.10 Buckingham exemplifies how the role of the revisionist historian, primarily occupied through written text, has recently been taken up by practicing artists.

Carrie Mae Weems: The Strategy of Visual Performativity The photographic practice of Carrie Mae Weems has included series such as Family Pictures and Stories (1978–84) and the Kitchen Table series (1990), in which she explores gender bias, racism, and their relation to or appearance in class structures and familial relationships.11 She uses storytelling in its various forms and contexts to both question historical truths and offer perspectives previously disallowed to speak. In From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–6), Weems edits and responds to an archive of African American visual history, overlaying a narrative onto a selection of images spanning daguerreotypes from the slavery-controlled South, which reach as far back as 1850, all the way up to and including various forms of portraiture and contemporary artworks (Plate 1). The chronological progression of the series reveals a revisionist historiography that combines both stories of violence and discrimination, and those of survival, dignity, and pride. From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried arose out of a commission from the J. Paul Getty Museum, which solicited from Weems an artistic response to its upcoming exhibition Hidden Witness: African Americans in Early Photography (1995).12 The materials for the latter were culled from both the Getty’s holdings and the private collection of Jackie Napoleon Wilson, whose grandfather was born a slave in South Carolina. A Detroit attorney, Wilson developed a passion that drove him to amass a collection of nineteenth-century daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and tintypes of African Americans throughout the antebellum South.13 He collected over the span of two decades, and quickly became aware of both the weighty significance and lack of visibility of African American imagery. Prior to Wilson’s visit to the Getty in the early 1990s, the museum was unaware that it had only sixteen photographic images of African Americans in its holdings. Sometimes not asking a question is itself a form of erasure. Alongside depictions of African Americans as slaves, several images included in the exhibition showed a side of African American life seldom seen: men and women portrayed as family members, political leaders, and musicians. Wilson states: Photography was most certainly used to portray this period and to justify, explain, and record this conflict [the Civil War] that changed the world. But if one were to make a visual photographic assessment of America at that time, one might ponder where the subjects of this great conflict were. Visually, African-Americans are seldom depicted in

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history books. The historical record has been lost in many instances but there can be extracted an interpretation of the actors when viewing these photographs.14 Displayed in a gallery adjacent to Hidden Witness, Weems’s From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried directly engaged Wilson’s exhibition. Her installation included thirty-three toned, rephotographed prints of Black men and women, mostly enlarged to a consistent size, which the artist drew from several sources, including the adjacent exhibition, photographic documents of the civil rights movement, and contemporary works of art. Portraits comprised the majority of the works. The gaze of an African tribeswoman shown in profile bookends the photo-essay; she looks inward at all of the images and their ongoing narrative of racism and objectification, but also of overcoming and salvation. Over each chromatic photograph Weems superimposed a text sandblasted into the glass of the frame “to distance the original photograph and make clear that this was something that was taken from something else— this was lifted.”15 Weems applied the critical perspective of photo-conceptualism as a means to contextualize the exhibition of documents next door. If Wilson’s collection aimed to remedy an absent history, Weems’s intervention points to the methods and strategies of visual knowledge in the present, begging comparison with those of the past. In effect she compels contemporary viewers to test their attitudes—to the image, to its history, and to what and how it makes meaning for the viewer. Weems’s work responds to a broad set of historical distortion and omission by “speaking” directly to and about the images. Her chromatic and textual filters unify the disparate subjects, creating a spatial experience akin to leafing through a book layout. Rather than simply mitigate the materials at hand, the text directly engages viewers, asking them to consider the act of reception as a moment of history’s continued construction. As Jennifer Doyle explains: Each of the photographs appear in this series as reclaimed spoils deployed against history’s grain. Where the J. Paul Getty museum exhibits nineteenth-century images of African Americans to give its audience a reparative encounter with a repressed photographic archive, Weems takes as her focus the story of how photography is deployed within what W.E.B. Du Bois called “the propaganda of history.” Weems’s installation is overtly committed to making the politics of Art and History visible, as disciplines engaged in ideological work, and she locates that work in affect and economies of perspective.16 The pairing of photograph and text serves several purposes. For example, “AND I CRIED” on the image of the African tribeswoman invites lament; “YOU BECAME MAMMIE, MAMA, MOTHER, AND THEN YES, CONFIDANT—HA” placed on the image of a nanny and the infant she is charged with is accusatory and defiant. The words “HA” and “YOU BECAME” are repeated on multiple panels, creating a refrain throughout the entire work. The “individual units,” as the artist describes them, include people known only by their first names—Delia, Renty, Jack, and Drana—and daguerreotypes of unnamed enslaved Black Americans. Accompanying lines of text read: “YOU BECAME A SCIENTIFIC PROFILE,” “A NEGROID TYPE,” “AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL DEBATE,” or “A PHOTOGRAPHIC DEBATE.” An image from contemporary sources includes a widely exhibited and hotly debated work by Robert Mapplethorpe, Man in a Polyester Suit (1980). The photograph shows a man’s body cropped from the upper thighs to his abdomen in a three-quarter profile. The trousers of his cheap suit are unzipped to reveal his uncircumcised penis, the focal point of the image. The overlaid text, “ANYTHING BUT WHAT YOU WERE—HA,” points to both objectification of the Black figure through fetishization and to perceived stereotypes

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of Black male anatomy. In a 2013 talk at Pitzer College Weems explained the role of viewer perception in the work: It’s not just about the issue of race, the black subject as a stand-in for human subjectivity. Reading [the work] the way the skin is read is a limited kind of way—it is like reading the work only through race. It is about projection—what had been projected onto the daguerreotypes, rather than what they actually were.17 Weems’s emphasis on the viewer physically interacting with the work in space is facilitated by her methods of display. The bright red and blue transparencies distance the image from its status as a mere historical document or as an object for (voyeuristic) visual pleasure, thereby promoting active viewing. The use of the personal pronouns (I, YOU), in their grammatical status as shifters (their lack of direct referent), pushes the viewer to question who is being referenced and why. The inclusion of several perspectives in the superimposed text forces a consideration of a larger, shared history. Weems thus situates viewers in a space to consider not only the perceptions and interpretations of the materials in their own time but also the continued projections they are subject to in society today.

Ken Gonzales-Day: Archival Revisions The work of photographer, artist, and scholar Ken Gonzales-Day is a direct contribution to the underrepresented histories of racialized mob violence, vigilantism, and the lynching of marginalized groups in the West. Gonzales-Day undertook rigorous archival research in several collections on the West Coast. He developed his expansive body of research, amassed over ten years, into two series of photographs: Searching for California Hang Trees (2002– 6) and Erased Lynchings (2000–15). In Searching for Hang Trees Gonzales-Day set out to visit and photograph more than three hundred documented lynching sites in California, photographing those he was able to find (or assumed he had found). In Erased Lynchings the artist digitally manipulated archival photographs of lynchings that had originally circulated as postcards, newspaper images, or mementos. This research also culminated in a Pulitzer Prize–nominated book, Lynching in the West: 1850–1935, in which Gonzales-Day uncovers new findings about the lynching of Latin Americans in general, and Mexicans or Mexican Americans in particular, throughout the West and California. As opposed to the Southeastern United States, where lynchings of African Americans have been recorded by the hundreds, the West saw much smaller numbers. A peculiar fact is that lynching cases of other people of color (including Native Americans, Chinese, Mexican, and Latin Americans) were recorded as that of whites, and, as further research showed, Latino victims outnumbered all other ethnicities in documented lynching cases. His goal, he stated, was twofold: “first, to provide a broader understanding of the transracial nature of lynching in the US, and second, to consider those factors which may have contributed to the nearly complete erasure of this history from national consciousness.”18 In his book Gonzales-Day uses one of the earliest examples of lynching photographs, Hanged at the Water Street Bridge (1877), to illustrate the spectacle and injustice of people of color lynchings in early American history.19 The photo shows the deceased figures of Francisco Arias and José Chamales, who were hanged under the accusation of murdering and robbing a man as a means to attend the town circus the day prior. Though they were originally apprehended and detained at the town jail, at two o’clock in the morning, by the force of either an angry mob or vigilantes, legal officials were overpowered and both men were apprehended. After admitting guilt during a brief questioning, the two were hanged on the

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beams of the town’s Water Street Bridge. As was routine, their bodies remained there through the night so town residents and journalists could view the aftermath the following day. In the photograph the two deceased men are surrounded by a crowd of individuals, including barefooted children, standing in four rows inches away from the bodies. Disturbingly, the gaze of every witness is focused not on the bodies but on the camera; the spectators jostle, grin, and pose, entranced by the novelty of the camera, apparently hoping that their presence will be immortalized in the documentation of the event. Until 1908, when the US Postal Service prohibited the mailing of lynching images such as the one just described, commemorative postcards of these events publicly circulated alongside images of bucolic scenery and world exhibitions. As photographers considered lynchings lucrative events, newspapers would often announce them several days beforehand, allowing sufficient time for photographers to prepare their equipment. Photographers sold their pictures for as much as fifty cents apiece, and images of the heinous crime served as mementos.20 To remember the events witnesses often took items from the scene, including fabric torn from the deceased’s clothing, and in some cases branches stripped off the tree in question. Today Gonzales-Day manipulates this type of archival imagery not to sensationalize the events but rather to highlight the ways in which certain histories, particularly of those on the margins of society, are often suppressed or omitted. In his Disguised Bandit (2006), for example, several uniformed men gaze into the camera, some faces set in a frown, others grinning. The converging point of their physical orientation is beneath one of the branches of a gnarled, leafless tree. As the eye travels downward to the shadow of the branch, it moves to the left to a rifle leaning casually against the base of the tree, and then inevitably settles on a disturbing sight: two individuals to the left of the frame are caught in a macabre pantomime: they appear to hold the rope from which the victim hangs, but both the figure and the rope are digitally erased. In the Erased Lynching series, digital erasure both eliminates the spectacle and foregrounds erasing as a literal action. The artist explains: “The main idea, of course, is to make the erasure visible and to let that speak for itself.”21 Disallowing the spectacle re-presents the image as a document, bringing to light its status as a form of evidence and not an act of exploitation. Gonzales-Day’s methods of erasure and framing deny a passive experience. In Disguised Bandit (Plate 2) the viewer—confronted by the erased victim—meets the eyes of several individuals, who are positioned in a way as to allow consideration of various participatory roles: cameraman, spectator, uniformed lynchers, or the hanged. Juli Carson outlines three photographic typologies that coexist in Gonzales-Day’s image: popular culture, documentary photography, and landscape photography. Facing the simultaneity of all three, the viewer is put in the discomforting position of both the lynched victim and a member of the lynch mob: And yet, because the viewer is put squarely in the position of erasure—there is no body for us to see and control with our gaze—we are at once, phenomenologically, put into the place of the subject of the work, both as the lynched (it could be me up on that empty tree) and the lyncher (it could be me in that lynch crowd). This operation, the aiming at the event through the very negation of the event, underscores and activates our jouissance or psychic ambivalence towards the representation of lynching (I want to see that which I don’t want to see).22 According to Parveen Adams, rather than enforcing aspects of spectacle and therefore reinstancing the event, the artist’s strategies force the viewer out of a state of passivity into engagement: You already disapprove, not noticing the undercurrent of enjoyment. But in the GonzalesDay images, the erasure of the victims in one old photograph after another, the absence of

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the victims from the new photographs of the same old trees, build a space that puts you right in the picture. Where were you then? Where are you now? You are no longer in your comfortable body. You lose yourself momentarily, transported out of a world organised by past/present/future. Now in this second moment after the first, the scene of the crime that you did not witness, you can touch something of the reality of what was done. You can now be a witness because, confronted with the event, you go beyond the shared narrative of the original event.23 By taking away the object of the spectacle, Gonzales-Day highlights an interlocking set of problems embedded in the spectacle itself, situating the viewer and making them aware of a larger, shared cultural experience and history. In what Jason Hill calls Gonzales-Day’s method of “structuring absence,” it is not only the audience and the victims of the lynching in the photograph that are erased but also the whole of the photographic apparatus as a system that makes meaning: “The photographer in the photographic image, and particularly in the traumatic photographic image, has long supported the double myth that photography has not in some way produced the object of its capture, and that the photographic image is not intrinsically a politically motivated instrument.”24 In his erasures Gonzales-Day imbues the medium of photography with a political agency that brings into question the very act of capturing traumatic acts of violence. The artist gives visual form to the story of this spectacle that historians have long ignored. In this way Gonzales-Day effectively takes on the role of revisionist historian; his work is an act of scholarship that responds to institutional neglect and the racist attitudes that dictate a lack of interest in a more detailed and comprehensive study of the various aspects and specificities of lynchings. The series addresses the horrific history of vigilante “justice,” the social structures that made it permissible, and the photographic genre that recorded the event and exploited it for profit while perpetuating its justification. As a photographer, Gonzales-Day not only comments on the history of his discipline but also uses photography’s status as both an art form and a historical document to highlight the ethical issues involved in constructing a visual record and historical knowledge. In From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried and Erased Lynchings, respectively, Weems and Gonzales-Day use different techniques to distance viewers from the spectacle of violence depicted in the historical images with which they work: Weems uses color transparencies and text, and Gonzales-Day erases the spectacular part of the image. Instead of producing an affective image of an injured or dead body, the artists utilize barriers that mitigate a painful history: a presence or addition in Weems’s case, absence as a strategy in Gonzales-Day’s work. The two artists’ gestures similarly foreground a critical apparatus, a means for the viewer to reflect upon the media, the context of presentation, and the historical document as a mediated outcome of this system of interpretation and display.

Notes 1 See Ken Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West: 1850–1935 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). The understanding that history is not a given truth but narrativized is part of a broad shift that recognized methods of study influence the outcome. An example in the discipline of history is Stephen Greenblatt’s chapter titled “Fiction and Friction” in his book Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 66–93. In philosophy, the work of Jacques Rancière emphasizes how the act of writing history inevitably takes a poetic form and as such is just as close to fiction as it is

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to the presumed facts. See Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), and Jean-Philippe Deranty, ed., Jacques Rancière: Key Concepts (Durham, UK: Acumen, 2010), 25–37. 2 See Antoon de Baets, “History: School Curricula and Textbooks,” in Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, ed. Derek Jones (New York: Routledge, 2015), 1071. 3 Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 7. 4 Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 183. 5 See Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven Levine, eds., Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992). This anthology examines the ways in which artists and historians during the late 1980s and early 1990s reevaluated the role of the museum as bearer of historical consciousness, responsible for shaping the identity of its community. Additional examples include Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (New York: Routledge Classics, 2010), Lucy Lippard, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), and Bridget R. Cooks, Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011). 6 Araeen Rasheed, “From Primitivism to Ethnic Arts,” Third Text 1, no. 1 (1987): 8. Italics in original. 7 Mark Godfrey, “The Artist as Historian,” October 120 (Spring 2007): 142–3. 8 Godfrey, “The Artist as Historian,” 149. Godfrey expands on Buckingham’s methods, stating: “Each of these three devices (division of the work into two parts, internal division of each part, installation), which Buckingham has described as ‘tactics of defamiliarization,’ serves a double function regarding the way a subject or story is presented” (151). 9 The Godfrey, “The Artist as Historian,” 166–7. 10 Matthew Buckingham, quoted in Godfrey, “The Artist as Historian,” 147. 11 See “Carrie Me Weems: Biography,” Carriemaeweems.net, http://carriemaeweems.net/bio.html. 12 Suzanne Muchnic, “Going for a Gut Reaction: Outspoken African American Artist Carrie Mae Weems Could Be Expected to Provide a Hot Response to Historical Images of Blacks. The Getty Only Had to Ask. Many Times,” Los Angeles Times, February 26, 1995. 13 Jackie Napoleon Wilson, Hidden Witness: African American Images from the Dawn of Photography to the Civil War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). 14 Wilson, Hidden Witness, ix. 15 Carrie Mae Weems, Voice-over narration, “Carrie Mae Weems on Her Series ‘From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,’” J. Paul Getty Museum, November 4, 2011, https://youtu.be/ l2VrAsu0KeE. 16 Jennifer Doyle, Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 123. In her book Doyle also addresses the role of artist as historian, taking, for example, the installation-based works of Native American artist James Luna: “When Luna performs alcoholic masculine depression as The History of the Luiseño People (La Jolla Reservation 1990) it is to mark history as a problem—not only as the lingering trauma of settler colonialism but, more significantly (for Luna’s practice), as the question of how one engages that past, how one narrates it, how one knows it, and how one feels it” (100). 17 Carrie Mae Weems, “Standing in the Shadows,” The Murray Pepper and Vicki Reynolds Pepper Distinguished Visiting Artist Lecture, Pitzer College, September 19, 2013. 18 Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West, 3. 19 Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West, plate 4. The credit line for the photo reads: “Unidentified photographer, ‘Hanged at the Water Street Bridge,’ courtesy of Covello and Covello, Santa Cruz, California.”

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20 Linda Kim, “A Law of Unintended Consequences: United States Postal Censorship of Lynching Photographs,” Visual Resources 28 (2012): 171–93. 21 Gonzalez-Day in “Ken Gonzales-Day & Edgar Arcenaux,” NDP #4 (Brooklyn, NY: North Drive Press, 2007), 1, www.northdrivepress.com/interviews/NDP4/NDP4_GONZALES-DAY_ ARCENAUX.pdf. 22 Juli Carson, “Ken Gonzales-Day’s Lynching in the West,” Lynching in the West (New York: Cue Art Foundation, 2006), n.p., https://kengonzalesday.com/ken-gonzales-days-lynching-in-the-west/. 23 Parveen Adams, “The Art of Repetition: Exploitation or Ethics?” Art Monitor 3 (2008): 92. 24 Jason Hill, “The Camera and the ‘Physiognomic Auto-da-fe’: Photography, History, and Race in Two Recent Works by Ken Gonzales-Day,’” X-TRA 11, no. 3 (Spring 2009), http://x-traonline. org/article/the-camera-and-the-physiognomic-auto-da-fe-photography-history-and-race-in-tworecent-works-by-ken-gonzales-day/.

Bibliography Adams, Parveen. “The Art of Repetition: Exploitation or Ethics?” Art Monitor 3 (2008): 83–101. Araeen, Rasheed. “From Primitivism to Ethnic Arts,” Third Text 1, no. 1 (1987): 6–25. Carson, Juli. “Ken Gonzales-Day’s Lynching in the West.” In Ken Gonzales-Day. New York: Cue Art Foundation, 2006. https://kengonzalesday.com/ken-gonzales-days-lynching-in-the-west/. Deranty, Jean-Philippe, ed. Jacques Rancière: Key Concepts. Durham, UK: Acumen, 2010. Foucault, Michel. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. Edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003. Godfrey, Mark. “The Artist as Historian.” October 120 (Spring 2007): 140–72. Gonzales-Day, Ken. Lynching in the West: 1850–1935. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Gonzales-Day, Ken, and Edgar Arcenaux. “Ken Gonzales-Day and Edgar Arcenaux.” NDP #4 (Brooklyn, NY: North Drive Press, 2007), 1–9. www.northdrivepress.com/interviews/NDP4/ NDP4_GONZALES-DAY_ARCENAUX.pdf. Hill, Jason. “The Camera and the ‘Physiognomic Auto-da-fe’: Photography, History, and Race in Two Recent Works by Ken Gonzales-Day.’” X-TRA 11, no. 3 (Spring 2009). http://x-traonline.org/ article/the-camera-and-the-physiognomic-auto-da-fe-photography-history-and-race-in-two-recentworks-by-ken-gonzales-day/. Karp, Ivan, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven Levine, eds. Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992. Kim, Linda. “A Law of Unintended Consequences: United States Postal Censorship of Lynching Photographs.” Visual Resources 28, no. 2 (2012): 171–93. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. Edited and translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Ricoeur, Paul. History and Truth. Translated by Charles A. Kelbley. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965. Weems, Carrie Mae. “Carrie Mae Weems: Biography.” Carriemaeweems.net. http://carriemaeweems. net/bio.html. Weems, Carrie Mae., Voice-over narration. “Carrie Mae Weems on Her Series ‘From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried.’” J. Paul Getty Museum, November 4, 2011. https://youtu.be/l2VrAsu0KeE. Weems, Carrie Mae. “Standing in the Shadows.” Murray Pepper & Vicki Reynolds Pepper Distinguished Visiting Artist Lecture, Pitzer College, September 19, 2013. Wilson, Jackie Napoleon. Hidden Witness: African American Images from the Dawn of Photography to the Civil War. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

2 Damage Control: Teresa Margolles, the Mexican Government, and the 2009 Venice Biennale Mexican Pavilion Ana Garduño

An Inevitable Conflict The Mexican Pavilion of the 53rd Venice Biennale, which was open to the public between June and November 2009, featured Teresa Margolles. In this solo exhibition curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina and titled ¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? (What Else Could We Talk About?), Margolles spotlighted the escalation in narco-violence plaguing Mexico.1 Her media and materials were shocking in their expressive force and evocative power. The artist indelibly marked the sprawling rooms of the sixteenth-century Rota Ivancich Palace and other spaces in and around Venice with physical vestiges of brutal acts of violence committed by drug traffickers in northern Mexico. Margolles employed diluted mixtures of blood and mud from crime scenes for a variety of artistic actions and objects. Cloth used to clean streets where killings occurred was mounted on palace walls where Renaissance-period paintings and tapestries would have been displayed. Drops of bloody liquid from the dampened, muddy fabric were allowed to collect in channels at the base of gallery walls. Collaborators used the liquid to mop/taint floors and clean/contaminate windowpanes (Figure 2.1). During the exhibition Margolles’s team used gold and silver thread to embroider narcomensajes on large fragments of bloodand-mud-soaked cloth (Plate 3)—messages traffickers left on lifeless bodies or in streets to intimidate citizens and justify acts of violence.2 A red banner made from soiled cloth was mounted at the entrance to the pavilion between the flags of Mexico, Venice, and/or the European Community and displayed in one of the galleries.3 Margolles also employed cloth fragments for other purposes: temporarily closing off the entryway and front windows of the US exhibition space at the Giardini Palace (Plate 4), and floating them in the waters of one of the most famous beaches in the Venice area.

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FIGURE 2.1  Teresa Margolles, ¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? Limpieza (What Else Could We Talk About? Cleaning), 2009, installation and repeating performance by one to three people mopping floors of the exhibition space with a water mixture obtained from humidifying fabrics that previously absorbed fluids and other residue from crime scenes in cities of northern Mexico. Courtesy of artist, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, and James Cohan, New York.

Margolles invoked the horrific nature of narco-violence in other ways. Remnants of car windshields shattered in shoot-outs were mounted in gold and incorporated in ostentatious necklaces, bracelets, and rosary beads; individuals wearing them walked the palace environs. Sound was piped into the palace corridors: oral testimonies of witnesses and noises one might hear at sites where violence occurred. Ten thousand ID-sized cards were handed to visitors. One side featured a photographic image of a charred human corpse (Figure 2.2). The other, which presented the exhibition title and the artist’s name, read: “Person murdered because of links to organized crime. Card to cut cocaine.” With these interventions, Margolles gave glaring exposure to the horrific increase in the number of killings associated with the so-called drug war—a problem the Mexican state was either denying or downplaying in public statements at home and abroad. The content of Margolles’s transgressive work is reminiscent of that of Colombian artist Doris Salcedo, who uses art to draw attention to the devastating impact of the war the Colombian government has waged since the mid-1980s against powerful cartels monopolizing cocaine production and trafficking, and to defy the state’s efforts to impose silence about it. In her 2010 monograph Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo’s Political Art, Mieke Bal revisits philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s questioning of the epistemological usefulness of logic and language in challenging religious and artistic questions. He asserts, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” As Bal writes, Salcedo “breaks through the silence.”4 The artist’s protests activate memory and encourage speech, including

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FIGURE 2.2  Teresa Margolles, ¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? Tarjetas para picar cocaína (What Else Could We Talk About? Cards to Cut Up Cocaine), 2009, one of ten thousand cards distributed during the opening days of the Venice Biennial in summer 2009. Courtesy of artist, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, and James Cohan, New York.

acknowledgment by governmental entities of their roles in perpetuating violence. In her trademark installations, which feature victims’ furnishings and other belongings, she chooses not to present the perspectives of victims/mourners in testimonial-narrative-descriptive terms and instead conceptually approaches absence, loss, and suffering. Salcedo proposes: “One of the functions of art is to produce powerful and meaningful images that counteract the excess of raw, brutal images that conflict and violence yield and that often circulate in the media.”5 Like Salcedo, Margolles takes a stand against public silence, effecting memory and speech, but she does so in a more strident manner. Unlike Salcedo’s interventions, Margolles’s work is raw and brutal; it emblematizes violence. The artist engages in—and arguably eclipses— the aesthetics of blood pervading TV newsmagazines and lurid crime pages in the tabloid press. Her manipulation of blood, while often metaphoric and only occasionally graphic, is consistently and compellingly material in form. Margolles thereby directly confronts the neocolonial perception of third world countries as empires of crime and impunity where social structures are invariably dysfunctional and human rights are habitually violated, while also making clear to viewers from the global north—those in Europe and the United States who presume drug-trafficking violence is a matter of minor consequence confined to the global south—that narco-terrorism has broad origins and impacts. 6 Margolles and Medina make manifest the tension between conflicting imperatives: the urgent need to talk about the crisis and the mounting pressure not to do so. As Medina states, “to the horror of local officials, by 2008 the global news agencies had begun to report on [Mexico’s] uncontrollable violence.” He notes that ¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar?

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“codifie[d]” the “artistic situation,” which clearly followed from the political situation: “On the one hand there [wa]s the impossibility of limiting this talk, but at the same time one ha[d] to confess the load it implie[d] to make this talk crucial.” Medina continues, “The inevitable political conflict then arises with the assumption that the nation’s economic viability depends on silencing that which we must, without any doubt, take responsibility for: the violence that has become an inevitable object of speech and representation.”7 The artist and curator put into service, indeed systematized, the incompatibility of the pressing demands for speech and silence, visibility and invisibility. Margolles’s materials were transported into Venice surreptitiously, in an act that defied international customs laws and policing efforts of Mexican and European border officials; they were essentially contraband, similar in category to illegal drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, Ecstasy, LSD, and heroin. Margolles also mined the contrast between the exhibitionist behavior of traffickers and the secretive nature of drug production, trafficking, and profit laundering; when not used as bodily decoration, the ostentatious jewelry and prayer beads were concealed in a wall safe.8 Margolles ensured that her intervention at the US Pavilion, which was staged in April, was not directly witnessed by US officials, and that her washing of bloodied cloth on Venice beaches also occurred prior to the Biennale opening. The artist nevertheless froze her symbolic gestures in photographic form and made them known after the fact, publishing them in the official catalog for the Mexican Pavilion. The horrific color image of the corpse printed on the card given to exhibition visitors was reproduced in a larger format on the catalog cover, but veiled by way of translucent parchment paper. Medina concedes that people entering the pavilion speaking loudly or joking, as is oftentimes the case at the Biennale, were asked to remain silent: “Our only intervention was a sort of censorship; it was to impose a certain restriction on emotions and noise.”9 The artist and curator nevertheless clearly aimed to instill unease. The review by Mexico City art critic and curator José Manuel Springer testifies to the efficacy of their efforts. Springer declares that upon leaving the Rota Ivancich Palace he was “filled with despair”: “I wasn’t thinking about Teresa Margolles’s art[;] that wasn’t what bothered me at that moment[;] it was more the impotence and the chill that this place in Venice, which had been converted into an open tomb, produced in me.” He explains that unlike repetitive press accounts of narcoviolence, which blunt one’s sensibility, the “testimony” of blood itself “creates a presence.” It serves as powerful “evidence of the crime.” Without “resorting to the visible”—images of actual scenes of violence—Margolles “situate[d]” viewers “in a situation of certitude.” With this strategy, “concealing the drama [and] volatizing it,” the “aura of death” was essentially “in the air.”10 Springer acknowledges that many view narco-violence as the “principal problem” affecting the Mexican nation.11 In a June 2009 interview published in La Jornada three days after the exhibition opened, Medina suggested these developments—societal disgust with this new period of “necropolitics” and uncontrollable violence—had to be publicly acknowledged, and he declared display space for “national representation,” like that of the Venice Biennale, should be used for purposeful “tension” rather than “disguise.”12 Those who selected Margolles and Medina for the Mexican Pavilion clearly concurred. The process of selection-definition-production began in January 2008, when the cultural affairs office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE), led by diplomat Alberto Fierro Garza, circulated the 2009 Venice Biennale’s call for proposals to the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (Conaculta), the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA), the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and private groups that had participated in contemporary art events in the past, such as the Patronato de Arte Contemporáneo (PAC) and the Fundación Jumex.13 From these organizations a jury was created, which consisted

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of three individuals: Itala Schmelz, director of INBA’s Carrillo Gil Museum of Art; Ramiro Martínez, director of INBA’s Rufino Tamayo Museum of Contemporary Art; and Guillermo Santamarina, curator at UNAM’s University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC). The jurors then invited eight curators to propose artists and themes for the Mexican Pavilion. Among the proposals submitted was that of Medina and Margolles, and in January 2009 the jurors selected their proposal, a project that in their estimation had “the greatest historical power and production viability to activate the Mexican Pavilion.”14 When the names of the winners were leaked to the press on January 26, 2009, the Margolles-Medina selection proved controversial.15 Fierro was reportedly forced to resign from his position at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the ministry withdrew its support for the project, and the Jumex Foundation decided not to sponsor the pavilion.16 Medina indicates that as curator he felt pressure from the Office of the Presidency of the Republic, and although federal authorities did not cancel the project, they restricted funding.17 Conaculta and INBA then had to invest more funds than anticipated. After the Biennale Medina thought about mounting the exhibition in Mexico, but soon abandoned the effort as he suspected it would be censored. In 2011, when Margolles was invited to participate in curator Gerardo Mosquera’s group exhibition Crisisss: Latin America, Art and Confrontation 1919–2010 at the Palace of Fine Arts Museum and Ex-Teresa Arte Actual in Mexico City, she proposed recreating one of the pieces from the Mexican Pavilion but was blocked from doing so. Cultural authorities recognized that a governmental order made it impossible to reproduce the most controversial installations presented in Venice.18

Transnational Problem: Shared Responsibility The full significance of both the exhibition’s critical success and its controversy and censorship in Mexico cannot be understood without considering the broader socioeconomic, political, and cultural context. Of utmost relevance were Mexico’s drug policies. While violence arose from the illegality of growing, producing, distributing, possessing, and consuming drugs, the decades-long, highly militarized antidrug policy in Mexico had focused less on local distribution and consumption and more on transnational production and supply.19 Furthermore, with the defeat of the deeply corrupt Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in the 2000 presidential election, the gradual dissolution of unofficial pacts between criminal groups and government entities, the incompetence of members of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), and the gradual erosion of the power of the Mexican state, public institutions were increasingly incapable of protecting citizens from organized crime. Also, in 2006 newly elected president Felipe Calderón (2006–12) made the drug war his primary focus and launched an arguably haphazard and irresponsible assault on traffickers. Criminal groups then strengthened their paramilitary capabilities and intensified their acts of terror against the general populace. The acceleration in violence—the killing of not only criminals but also federal soldiers, regional police, and, above all, innocent civilians—made clear the strategy was a debacle. By 2009 federal authority was virtually nonexistent in many areas in northern Mexico.20 The accelerated violence resulted from not only the misguided policies of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the Mexican government but also the actions and inaction of the United States, the principal end point of illicit drug routes and the world’s leading drug consumer.21 Key problems included US opposition to drug decriminalization, counterproductive gun policies (ineffectual regulation of possession, sale, and transfer), and systematic efforts by the United States to shape political and economic policies in Mexico.22

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Margolles’s project invited consideration of the following issues: the disastrous consequences of Mexico’s drug-war strategy, the inability of Mexican state agencies to contain criminal groups, the high proportion of brutal deaths along the US-Mexican border, and the interrelation between drug prohibition and the traffickers’ profits, luxurious lifestyles, and violent actions. In extending her intervention to the US Pavilion, Margolles made evident that the problem was indeed transnational and needed to be addressed from the standpoint of shared responsibility.23 Justo Pastor Mellado, an art critic and curator from Chile, proposed that the “most significant piece” in Margolles’s project was the use of “blood-soaked fabrics” for “curtains” at the US Pavilion—a “closure” that called to mind US “closure” of relevant “political representation.” While the United States tended not to circulate any “image” of “bodies murdered on the northern border,” Margolles in large part honored this tendency (with the exception of the photo card), but ensured a “deferred corporal presence” by means of bodily “traces.”24

Political Transgression Margolles’s signaling of the failure of the transnational war against narcotics was arguably not the primary source of controversy. It was the fact that she dealt with such a complex and disturbing subject under the auspices of the Mexican state, despite presidential warnings not to deal with it in diplomatic contexts.25 The artist and curator approached the problem of transnational drug trafficking—and the Mexican state’s ineffectiveness in dealing with it— not in a private or otherwise independent cultural space, but in a pavilion sponsored by and representing the government in a globally influential biennale.26 Since the early 1920s—the start of the Mexican postrevolutionary period—administrative and budgetary considerations associated with official culture have been linked to the interests and needs of the political elite. Government officials have employed the discourse of cultural institutions, including museum exhibitions and historical narratives, for nation building. This cultural production, which has enjoyed both domestic and global circulation, has tended to meet both the national need for self-representation and the international need for distinction and differentiation. State culture has been a vehicle for transnational dialogue, negotiation, and influence, and as such, it has been integral to efforts to maintain politically and economically productive relations with the United States and other nations. Regimes governing Mexico through the early twenty-first century, which have instrumentalized public museums and exhibitions in systematic propaganda campaigns, have favored cultural practices that positively affirm Mexican national identity. Any international encounter, negotiation, or treaty, whether of a commercial, financial, political, or diplomatic nature, generally serves as a framework to deploy select narratives of national art, culture, and history. The goal of traveling exhibitions and world fair pavilions has been to establish a place for Mexico in the hierarchy of great world civilizations, above all through archetypal representations that emphasize the authenticity, distinctiveness, insularity, and generative power of Mexican art, from ancient Mesoamerican artifacts to twentieth-century Mexican murals. Similarly, maintaining Mexico’s global appeal as a destination for travel and investment has been of primary importance.27 As is often the case when nations participate in international exhibitions, the official cultural sector in Mexico has generated optimistic, nationalistic, triumphal curatorial projects, narratives in which internal crises, political discord, and socioeconomic issues are suppressed. The fundamental diplomatic objective has been to maintain Mexico’s image as a nation whose ancient and modern traditions occupy a worthy place in global history and culture.

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Hence the grievous nature of the discrepancy between ¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? and Mexico’s other incursions in international exhibitions: the Pavilion’s transgression of politically acceptable cultural practices.

Buffering the Public Echo The dynamics of circulation and suppression associated with the Mexican Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale were relatively complex. The processes of both production and reception of ¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? were characterized throughout by tension and contradiction. The artist/curator team and the state that both sponsored and censored it each resorted to varied forms of articulation: direct and indirect speech, covert provocation, self-censorship, and meta-censorship. The state as sponsor/censor was hardly a monolithic entity. Government employees and their representatives were instrumental in bringing the project to fruition. Members of the selection committee, who were well aware of the provocative nature of prior work by both the artist and the curator, deemed their proposal both powerful and viable. Once their decision was leaked to the cultural press in January 2009 and pressure began to mount, they and other officials involved refused to recant.28 Medina stated that early commitment to the project by Santiago Espinosa de los Monteros, who until January 2009 was head of the office coordinating fine arts projects at INBA, was fundamental, and that cultural consultant and architect Alejandra Peña Gutiérrez, the INBA undersecretary general of artistic patrimony, played an important role in ensuring the pavilion opened. The support of individuals at other institutions, such as the UNAM and PAC, in particular Aimee Servitje and María Bostock, was also essential, although financial contributions by these agencies did not exceed 10 percent of the overall cost.29 Authorities questioning the project were evidently tempted to abort the process, cancel the pavilion, or arbitrarily designate another project, but they chose not to do so. While it is difficult to prove by way of government documents or interviews with high-level officials (no one interviewed would likely respond honestly), the state’s ineffectiveness in controlling its public image at an influential international exhibition undoubtedly sparked indignation among other functionaries and prominent conservatives. But they did not become aware of the content of the exhibition until it was well underway, when canceling it would have incurred too high a political cost.30 Government officials ultimately chose not to curtail the project and made no effort to supervise the exhibition’s installation or remove inappropriate works.31 Nevertheless, while the government avoided an open and direct act of censorship—what Kant would define as “criticism imposed by force”—it did not hesitate to deploy less overt forms of suppression.32 As mentioned, the state apparatus quietly punished members of the cultural bureaucracy and imposed severe budgetary restrictions. As Springer notes, the artist and curator put the dilapidated condition of the existing structure—its dusty surfaces, torn and stained tapestries, and naked light bulbs—to effective use. “The characteristics of the building, its physical deterioration, and its ample spaces” (left largely empty) “served Teresa Margolles’s proposal.”33 By contaminating that space with material vestiges of violence, Margolles and Medina provided viewers with what was essentially a whole-body experience, one involving sight, smell, sound, and touch. In addition, they ensured that their aesthetic approach, including their art materials and actions, were described and analyzed in detail by essay contributors to the Mexican Pavilion exhibition catalog. Nonetheless, the artist and curator to a degree modulated their speech. Their intentionally ambiguous curatorial statements served as camouflage of sorts; they had the potential to

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diffuse attention. The official press release written by Medina and his team, which was posted on the presidential office’s web page, omitted explicit reference to narco-terrorism: ¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? is a narrative based on tactics of contamination and material acts that seek to emotionally and intellectually engage visitors on how violence and the global economy proclaim to an entire generation of individuals and social classes that they are disposable, trapped between the logic of delinquency, capitalism, and prohibition … The works presented in the Mexican pavilion are a subtle chronicle of the effects of a diabolical global economy: the vicious cycle of prohibition, addiction, accumulation, poverty, hatred and repression that taints transgressive and puritanically obsessive pleasures from north to south.34 Their decision to “codify” conflicting pressures—to speak of what needed to be said but not speak conventionally—was arguably a means of evading further suppression. The inexplicit nature of publicity, surreptitious transport of physical materials, paucity of graphic images, and enactment of various art actions prior to the opening of the Biennale (those staged at the US Pavilion and local beaches) ensured the project’s visibility. That said, once the exhibition was underway, the Mexican government and the media restricted the project’s visibility through discreet means. As Jacques Derrida has written, “Censorship does not consist in reducing something to absolute silence. It suffices to limit the field of addressees, or of exchanges generally. There is censorship as soon as certain forces … simply limit the scope of a field of work, the resonance or propagation of a discourse.”35 This was the case with What Else Could We Talk About? Although they had failed to honor the presidential order to limit discussion in international contexts about narco-violence, the artist and curator were neither prosecuted nor persecuted. The regime (ever concerned with maintaining its democratic image) responded not with open and extreme prohibition but quiet maneuvering—efforts to stifle the work’s resonance. While members of the political establishment and media could not prevent the small sector of individuals in Mexico involved in contemporary art from knowing about and discussing the Mexican Pavilion, they were able to employ the tactic of ninguneo (ignoring): “ni los veo ni los oigo” (“I don’t see them, I don’t hear them”).36 The pro-state mass media, with few exceptions, opted to remain silent about the exhibition and the official response to it, either not reviewing the exhibition or restricting coverage to the press release, which, as mentioned, offered limited information regarding artistic content.37 Silence was a corrective measure—a form of damage control. The dearth of information had the potential to minimize the exhibition’s impact. Neither the government nor the mass media demonized—i.e., publicly condemned—the project. The possibility of the exhibition or the controversy becoming a significant incident in the global communications arena was minimal. A high-profile international scandal was averted. The artist and curator in turn chose not to publicly acknowledge pressure they felt in government circles. Medina reports they believed “to exploit … political sanction” would be counterproductive, as their “denunciation” of such criticism would signify “failure”: “the effects of the work and its very complexity would have been immediately reduced, subsumed, and distorted by the effect of that public complaint.” Medina continues: “We thought resistance against presidential policy and the [government’s] moment of criticism was in the works [themselves] … we didn’t have the right to sabotage [the works] in favor of making something public that—since [political sanction] was ineffective—we were ultimately able to nullify.”38 The Mexican government, nevertheless, became more vigilant. As mentioned, re-creation and re-presentation in Mexico of 2009 Biennale material were prohibited. Also, the officials assumed a proactive stance—exerting greater control—in administering state-sponsored

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cultural projects. It ensured the rupture that took place at the 2009 Venice Biennale was not repeated. The Mexican Pavilion in the 2009 Venice Biennale might be said to represent a temporary departure from standard protocol. Curators and artists involved in Venice Biennale exhibitions that followed did not question state policies or practices by engaging in confrontational content. The controversy associated with the 2009 Mexican Pavilion makes clear that diverse pressures come to bear in Mexican institutionalized culture. Federal authorities can remove funds, directors, and work teams at their discretion, frame their decisions and activities in favorable ways, and influence to a degree the information that circulates via the media. It likewise suggests, however, that artists have latitude for action. That leeway is evident in the fact that the exhibition was not shut down. One might argue this was due to the inexperience, disinformation, or indolence of the political party in power. Unlike the PRI, which had governed the country for more than half a century, PAN officials in the Vicente Fox administration (2000–6) and the early years of the Calderón administration (2006–12) relaxed their oversight of cultural ministries. For many working in the arts, it seemed as though the suppression and censorship of the decades-long PRI era was a thing of the past. When the Calderón administration in 2009 recognized the importance of the contemporary art exhibition in the Mexican Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which had the potential to broadcast its incapacities in and beyond national borders, it was too late. The Medina/Margolles project slipped through the gaps of the inadequate regulatory framework. The controversy also indicates that representational practices are not entirely controlled by the political elite. As Pastor Mellado writes: “Even though President Calderón [had] stepped up his efforts to have Mexican diplomacy change foreign perceptions of his country, he [was] asking them for something that [was] impossible to carry out, because what Teresa Margolles implicitly convey[ed] in response [was] that the country’s image [did] not depend on a communications policy.” He proposes that “the complex reality imposes the terms of its representability, in inverse proportion to the efforts of its diplomatic apparatus.”39 As Medina states, “violence” had “become an inevitable object of speech and representation.”40 According to the curator, the exhibition was indicative of the “triumph of the notion of artistic autonomy”: a professional decision had been made concerning how Mexico should be artistically represented, and that decision was authorized and respected. In short, INBA had “done what it needed to.”41 The relative autonomy that characterized the Mexican institutional art world at this point in time enabled it to challenge the conservative sector of Mexican society, which expected an affirmative image of national identity. At the same time, the sociopolitical and economic context was conducive to the emergence of and the artist’s experimentation with alternative “terms of representability,” those that operated by way of raw exposure and tactical concealment. Margolles and Medina took a calculated risk in giving exposure to the failed narco policies of Mexico and the United States, and their pertinent gesture was ultimately painful—¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? hit a raw nerve. However, the exhibition forced further consideration of a political-military crisis, one that has proven irrepressible in the Mexican and international media. Art historiography has demonstrated that projects of a provocative or divisive nature, regardless of their aesthetic quality or level of innovation, generally receive greater media attention, especially if there are threats of censure or censorship. Also, the status of artwork as “censurable” influences perception; it gives the artwork and the artist heroic auras. While the government successfully limited the “field of addressees,” Medina’s stature in the world of contemporary art as a politicized, dissident, and intentionally controversial curator, his

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capacity to draw global media attention, and his negotiating skills, along with Margolles’s reputation as an “irrepressible artist,” worked in the project’s favor.42 The Margolles-Medina ticket worked so well that it enhanced their respective positions, even as a Latin American minority within the transnational mainstream art world. While the Mexican Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale marked a clear rupture, a brief interruption in a long flow of official exhibitions positively affirming national identity (and not questioning, criticizing, or directly confronting institutional power), the silencing imposed on it via subtle censorship was, is, and will continue to be a failed strategy. The political efficacy of art—its capacity to engage in discourse that the state attempts to monopolize—was made patently clear. And the exhibition will continue to activate speech. Evidence of its success will lie in the work’s future reception. In addition, Margolles and Medina’s potent intervention has attained an almost mythical aura in the field of Mexican art, one with which artists and curators, in an ironic twist, have to compete. It is a milestone to which many contemporary artists and curators aspire. Given their pivotal artistic/curatorial actions, ¿de qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? What else could one talk about? Importantly, not only the transnational dynamics of narco-violence but also the innovative nature of their creative intervention.

Notes I am grateful to the editors, especially Catha Paquette, and to Peter Krieger and Cristóbal Jácome for their comments on this text, and to Debra Nagao for translating it. All translations are by Nagao unless otherwise specified. 1 Teresa Margolles’s installation at the 53rd Venice Biennale was her first collaboration with Cuauhtémoc Medina. 2 Narcomensajes are oftentimes painted on fabric (narcomantas). The messages Margolles deployed were: para que aprendan a respetar (so you learn to respect), ver, oír y callar (watch, listen, and say nothing), así terminan las ratas (this is what happens to rats [traitors]), and hasta que caigan todos tus hijos (until all your children die). 3 The red banner changed several times. Springer indicates that at one point in time a bloody red banner was hung above the pavilion entrance between the flags of Mexico and the city of Venice. A catalog photo of the entrance dated May 2009 (before the biennale opening) shows a bloodsoaked banner between the flags of the European Community and the city of Venice. Two other photos show that a similar red banner was mounted on a flagpole in a gallery inside the pavilion. See Cuauhtémoc Medina, ed., Teresa Margolles: ¿De qué otra cosa podemos hablar? (Mexico City: Conaculta, INBA, UNAM, PAC, 2009), plate VII; and José Manuel Springer, “¿De qué otra forma podríamos hablar? El pabellón de México en la 53 Bienal de Venecia,” Réplica21 (July 12, 2009), www.replica21.com/archivo/articulos/s_t/566_springer_margolles.htm. 4 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (1921; New York: Routledge, 1974), cited in Mieke Bal, Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo’s Political Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 27. The title of Margolles’s installation at the 2009 Venice exhibition may refer to Jacques Derrida’s “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” in Languages of the Unsayable, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 3–70. But that is a subject for another essay. 5 Doris Salcedo, quoted in Gina Beltrán Valencia, “Doris Salcedo: creadora de memoria,” Nómadas 42 (April 2015): 189. 6 See Peter Krieger, “¿Incomprensibilidad paradigmática? La megalópolis latinoamericana en la óptica de la vieja Europa,” in Nombrar y explicar (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas-Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2012), 355–73.

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7 Cuauhtémoc Medina, “Viendo Rojo,” Plétora 3 (December 2014), http://pletora.es/ViendoRojo#article_82. 8 Photographs of this activity were included in the exhibition catalog. 9 Cuauhtémoc Medina, interviewed by author, Mexico City, December 4, 2014. 10 Springer, “¿De qué otra forma podríamos hablar?” 11 Springer, “¿De qué otra forma podríamos hablar?” 12 Jandra Ortiz Castañares, “Por la violencia, México es un país que llora: Teresa Margolles,” La Jornada (Mexico City), June 11, 2009, 3. 13 The office directed by Garza was Dirección General de Asuntos Culturales, today Dirección General de Cooperación Educativa y Cultural. 14 Minutes of the January 26, 2009, jurors’ meeting at INBA’s Coordinación Nacional de Artes Plásticas. 15 Santiago Espinosa de los Monteros, interviewed by author, Mexico City, February 4, 2015. 16 As a career diplomat, Fierro could not be fired by the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE); instead he was sent into consular exile—transferred to Orlando, Florida. In 2013 he was appointed consul in Minneapolis, Minnesota. 17 Medina, interviewed by author. Medina has publicly noted that at the time he and Margolles were planning the project, President Calderón was instructing Mexican diplomats to circulate information regarding the “democratic governability” of the nation and to counter reports that the nation was in chaos. Medina cites Claudia Herrera Beltrán, “Diplomáticos deben señalar que no hay caos: Calderón,” La Jornada, January 8, 2009; see Medina, “Viendo Rojo.” President José López Portillo (1976–82) had already formulated this policy. “I don’t pay to be beaten up,” he explained of his decision to not sponsor state advertising in media that questioned his authority. The restriction of state financing put the survival of the media at risk. 18 Medina, interviewed by author. 19 Juan José González Figueroa relates an “anecdote involving presidents Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and Lyndon B. Johnson … verified during one of the meetings between the leaders of Mexico and the US … President Johnson reproached the Mexican leader in an irritated tone for what he considered the ineffective fight on the part of the nation’s authorities against drug traffickers. The phrase was memorable: Mexico is the springboard of drugs to the United States … Díaz Ordaz … said: Close your swimming pool and the springboard will be no more.” See Juan José González Figueroa, “México: el capítulo negro del narcotráfico,” El Sol de México, July 20, 2009, 14A. 20 “In 2012, according to the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI, National Institute of Statistics and Geography), during the Calderón administration there were 121,683 violent deaths.” Braulio Fausto, “Guerra contra el narcotráfico: la guerra que los mexicanos no queremos pelear,” SDP Noticias, May 14, 2014, www.sdpnoticias.com/columnas/2014/05/14/guerra-contrael-narcotrafico-la-guerra-que-los-mexicanos-no-queremos-pelear, no longer accessible. 21 On a visit to Mexico in 2015 former US president Bill Clinton recognized the worsening violence that was largely the result of the transportation of drugs through Mexico. He stated: “I wish you had no drug trafficking, but it is not your responsibility. We targeted drug transportation by air and by sea and then it all ended up by land, and I apologize for that.” “Acepta Clinton responsabilidad de Estados Unidos en el problema del narco,” La Jornada (Mexico City), February 7, 2015, 21. 22 In Mexico since 2015 there has been heightened awareness of the advantages of legalizing drugs such as cannabis, increasing acceptance of the inevitability of drug consumption, and discussions concerning legal frameworks for the regulation of drug production, circulation, and consumption. Many supporters of legalization believe it would help eradicate drug-related violence. See Juan Gabriel Tokatlian, ed., Drogas y prohibición: Una vieja guerra, un nuevo debate (Buenos Aires: Libros del Zorzal, 2010).

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23 “Conversación entre Tayana Pimentel, Teresa Margolles y Cuauhtémoc Medina,” in Teresa Margolles: ¿De qué otra cosa podemos hablar? 96. 24 Justo Pastor Mellado, “Teresa Margolles y las fronteras de la institución artística,” Art Nexus no. 77 (June–August 2010). 25 “President Felipe Calderón, in the meeting that presidents hold annually with the ambassadors who return to Mexico to receive instructions, lays out the guidelines that their first main task will be … to prevent the dissemination of this image … of what was happening in terms of the violence in Mexico … It was very surprising to see that something so dreadful was published,” Medina, interview by author. See also Medina, “Viendo Rojo.” 26 Teresa Margolles was fully aware that her work in the Mexican Pavilion would be perceived as representative of Mexico as a nation. She explains: “I’ve been exhibiting outside of Mexico since 1999 and each time I do so I am inevitably a representation of the nation. Whether I want to or not, I am anyway.” “Conversación entre Tayana Pimentel, Teresa Margolles and Cuauhtémoc Medina,” 84. 27 For several decades Mexico was one of the ten most visited tourist destinations in the world. Paradoxically, however, the drug wars impacted its status. In 2012 Mexico dropped from the top ten to thirteenth for the number of tourists. Alejandro de la Rosa, “México cae tres lugares en el ranking turístico,” El economista (Mexico City), May 17, 2013, 25. Statistics indicate that since 1960, 88 percent of foreign tourists have come from the United States. Jorge Olivera Toro, Legislación y organización turística mexicana (Mexico City: Porrúa, 1988), 58. 28 Espinosa de los Monteros, interviewed by author. 29 Medina, interviewed by author. Espinosa de los Monteros led the entity known as Coordinación Nacional de Artes Plásticas. 30 Espinosa de los Monteros, interviewed by author. 31 Medina, interviewed by author. 32 Immanuel Kant, La Religión dentro de los límites de la mera Razón (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2001), 26. 33 Springer explains: “She needed something that was not a white cube, but rather a place with character and an aura of abandonment.” Springer, “¿De qué otra forma podríamos hablar?” 34 “Por segundo año consecutivo México irá a la Bienal de Venecia,” May 25, 2009, El Informador, www.informador.mx/Cultura/Por-segundo-ano-consecutivo-Mexico-ira-a-la-Bienal-deVenecia-20090525-0021.html. 35 Jacques Derrida, El lenguaje y las instituciones filosóficas (Santiago, Chile: Escuela de Filosofía de la Universidad de Arte y Ciencias Sociales, 1995), 47. English cited in Ernesto Menéndez-Conde, “Toward a Cuban October,” in Caviar with Rum, ed. J. Loss and J. M. Prieto, trans. Elizabeth Bell (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012), 87. 36 President Carlos Salinas de Gortari uttered this response in 1994, when asked what he thought of the protests of members of the opposition parties in the Chamber of Deputies. 37 There are two exceptions. Sandra Licona published her interview with Medina and juror Guillermo Santamarina of the MUAC prior to the opening in El Universal: “Su arte denuncia un mundo de violencia,” El Universal (Mexico City), culture section, March 5, 2009, F4. Jandra Ortiz Castañares documented her interview with Medina for La Jornada shortly after the opening: “Por la violencia, México es un país que llora: Teresa Margolles,” La Jornada (Mexico City), culture section, June 11, 2009, 3. 38 Medina, interviewed by author. 39 Justo Pastor Mellado, “Teoría y acontecimiento,” June 19, 2009, www.justopastormellado.cl/ niued/?p=484. 40 Medina, “Viendo Rojo.”

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41 Medina, quoted in Ortiz Castañares, “Por la violencia, México es un país que llora: Teresa Margolles,” 3. 42 Sealtiel Alatriste, “Foreword,” ¿De qué otra cosa podemos hablar? 10. Medina, as a full-time, tenured researcher at the UNAM, is irrepressible as well.

Bibliography Bal, Mieke. El lenguaje y las instituciones filosóficas. Santiago de Chile: Escuela de Filosofía de la Universidad de Arte y Ciencias Sociales, 1995. Bal, Mieke. Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo’s Political Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Derrida, Jacques. “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.” In Languages of the Unsayable, edited by Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, 3–70. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Medina, Cuauhtémoc. “Viendo Rojo.” Plétora 3 (December 2014). http://pletora.es/ViendoRojo#article_82. Medina, Cuauhtémoc, ed. Teresa Margolles: ¿De qué otra cosa podemos hablar? Mexico City: National Council for Culture and the Arts (Conaculta), Institute for Fine Arts (INBA), National University of Mexico (UNAM), and Patronato del Arte Contemporaneo (PAC), 2009. Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name at the fifty-third International Biennale di Venezia, June 7–November 22, 2009. Mellado, Justo Pastor. “Teresa Margolles y las fronteras de la institución artística.” Art Nexus no. 77 (June–August 2010). [English translation available at www.artnexus.com/en/magazines/articlemagazine-artnexus/5d63f6c190cc21cf7c0a2637/77/teresa-margolles] Springer, José Manuel. “¿De qué otra forma podríamos hablar? El pabellón de México en la 53 Bienal de Venecia.” Réplica21 (July 12, 2009). http://www.replica21.com/archivo/articulos/s_t/566_ springer_margolles.htm.

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3 Death Matters Kerstin Mey

Death is part of life. Yet more than sixty years ago, Geoffrey Gorer observed that natural death had gradually disappeared from public life in Anglo-Saxon society since the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Gorer proposed: “If we dislike the modern pornography of death, then we must give back to death—natural death—its parade and publicity, re-admit grief and mourning. If we make death unmentionable in polite society—‘not before the children’— we almost ensure the continuation of the ‘horror comic.’ No censorship has ever been really effective.”1 Following Gorer’s position, it could be argued that the vanishing of human biological expiry from communal life is a larger phenomenon of Western society. Amongst other factors, this phenomenon is connected to the industrialization, urbanization, and atomization of society, and the idea of living in the moment, in the here and now. These interrelated developments have fueled the fading away of collective rituals and observances that mediate the transitoriness of life. In their residual persistence, for instance in rurally marked regions of present-day Ireland or in Scotland, the departed ones are laid out in their home or in the funeral parlor to enable not only those closest to them but the wider community to bid farewell. In Ireland this is called the wake. Yet in many other contemporary cultures, the deceased are kept out of an extended private sight and do not meet the public eye. When someone passes away, the doctor visits discreetly to ascertain and officially certify the cause of death before a funeral service can collect the body and transport it to the next “stop” on its journey toward the final resting place. The aftermath of one’s departure is carefully choreographed by a flourishing funeral industry and bureaucratic apparatus that takes care of all aspects of the final farewell. Looking back, a richness of collective practices existed to support grieving and to foster commemoration in the past. The way that the Incas are said to have kept alive their relationship to the departed members of their communities more than five hundred years ago resides perhaps on the extreme end of the spectrum of such rituals. Once a year they removed the dead from their tombs and paraded them through the town or village. Inca nobleman Felipe Huamán Poma de Ayala, who in the early sixteenth century chronicled for King Phillip II life under both Inca and Spanish rule, noted the solemnity of Aya Marcay Quilla, “the month in which reverence was paid to the dead”: It was custom to take corpses out of their tomb and put them on show in the open air. Food and drink were placed beside them, they were dressed in their best clothes and feathers were stuck in their heads. The people danced and sang in their company.

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Afterwards the dead bodies were put in litters and carried from house to house by way of the streets and squares. Then, when the procession was over, they were put back in their tombs. Quantities of food were provided in gold and silver dishes for the noble corpses, in earthenware dishes for the remains of the poor. Also, domestic animals and a variety of clothing had to be provided for the use of the dead, so that this ceremony was liable to be extremely costly.2 The Inca thereby remembered and celebrated the deceased as part of their community before they were returned to their graves, and they provided them with sustenance for the continued journey through the afterlife. It is remarkable that there seems to have been no social taboo to handle the decaying corpses and that their social status remained intact after death. In the twentieth century the growing sanitation of everyday life, the advances of preventative medicine, and the implementation of high standards of hygiene helped reduce deathbed scenes from the collective experiential horizon. In Gorer’s argument, such end-of-life moments formed one of the few commonly shared experiences writers of the Edwardian and Victorian ages could draw upon to build relevance and an emotive bond between their readership and their story narrative.3 Largely confined to the professional space of the hospital, the care home, or the hospice, the transition from life to death is now efficiently managed and controlled through its complete medicalization and accompanying legal frameworks. It is aided (or obstructed, depending on the point of view) by complex life support systems, expanded palliative care, and sophisticated drug regimes. The “industrial management” of dying has impacted profoundly how we mourn and grieve, and how we are (en)able(d) to deal with our own demise and dissolution. It uncomfortably occupies the gap that the decline of religious beliefs, spiritual guidance, and empathetic companionship has opened up, and fosters an emotional and rational estrangement from dying and death. In his 1955 essay, Gorer speaks of a “pornography of death” and describes the concomitant collective disaffection as social “prudery.”4 In a culture that has become wholly extroverted and aestheticized, and that worships high performance in every aspect of one’s existence catalyzed by (self-)control and (self-)perfection, physical and mental deterioration and death have become anathemas. A mediated world that focuses on youthful, fit, and beautiful people drowns out those private and public spaces where natural demise and death can be encountered with dignity, and where we can come to terms with our mortality. At the same time, violent death plays an ever-growing part in the fantasies offered to mass audiences following the atrocities of two world wars, revolutions, gas chambers, and genocides. Since the beginning of the new millennium the encounter with violent death has not only been brought incessantly into people’s lives via print and broadcast journalism but increasingly and, more importantly, ever more immediately, through online platforms and social networks. More and more, the media as well as citizen journalists report in real time on accidents, homicides, and terrorist attacks, on natural catastrophes, conflict, and war. The more sensational and shocking the better. Bad news is still good news. Killing people has become child’s play with the multiplication of violent video and computer games and horror and slasher movies. Yet it also marks many mainstream films, animations, and cartoons. Public TV broadcast in Germany, for instance, is littered with fictional crime stories that ensue from real-life killing incidents, some more violent and explicitly staged than others. The proliferation of 24/7 content on demand has rendered the so-called watershed for the public transmission of particularly violent programs meaningless and shifted regulation toward parental control of online access. Remnants of official censorship govern the cinema

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release of films with only age certifications for all publicly screened films and respective control of access in most Western countries. Gorer argues that “we must give back to death—natural death—its parade and publicity, [and] readmit grief and mourning.”5 As society is surrounded by an explosion of artefactions and arte-fictions alike that thematize violent death, his stance has been adopted in a range of cultural explorations of death over the past five decades: in “anatomy art” by German physician Dr. Gunther von Hagens, in photographic work by English artist Sue Fox, in multimedia interventions by Russian art group AES+F, and in images by American photographer Joel-Peter Witkin.6 All four have reinstated the “public parade and publicity” of death. Their created “rendering” of corpses shares an intended transcendence and transgression of the symbolic order and systems of meaning (making). Yet their individual approaches are motivated by different re/presentational and formal-aesthetic strategies that impact viewers distinctly—emotionally and intellectually. These re/presentations have more often than not been met with controversy and calls for censorship and, in some instances, its actual implementation. The relationship between the re/presentation of dead bodies and censorship provides the main lens for the following exploration.

The Art of Anatomy Since the late 1970s Gunther von Hagens has perfected the art of preserving human and animal bodies and body parts. In a complex process water and fat are removed from the corpse or a corporeal fragment and replaced by polymers such as silicone, epoxy, or polyester resin. The end result is permanently conserved, stabilized, and odor free.7 The impregnation technique was refined in the 1990s to deal with whole corpses and intricate physical detail, leaving surfaces and structures largely intact and exposed, as required for demonstration purposes. The prepared specimen could be easily mistaken for anatomical wax models from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, not least because the perfectly rendered models carry “lively hues and fresh sheen” owed to the insertion of color during the preparation process. This makes them “truer to the colorful vitality that we expect to find within ourselves than the dull grey brown confusion that dominates the appearance of an actual dissection of a corpse.”8 In other words, von Hagens’s corpora conform to the collective imagination of our body interior, shaped by the long history of medical illustration and modeling and more recently by the conventions of digital (medical) imaging technologies. Von Hagens has built a profitable enterprise with a global reach for his “anatomy art”: establishing the Institute for Plastination (IFP) in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1993, opening a plastination factory in China in 1999, and inaugurating a Plastinarium in 2006 that offers an inside look at the laboratories in his institute’s new headquarters in Guben, a town located near the border with Poland in what was formerly East Germany. Since 1995 he has developed and curated the Body Worlds exhibition. Initially it was conceived as a traveling show with venues in Japan, Europe, the Americas, South Korea, and Oceania. Since the early 2000s the anatomy entrepreneur has launched five permanent displays to date, including the Menschen Museum (Museum of Humans) at Berlin Alexanderplatz, which opened its doors in 2015. Like the monumental Body Worlds touring exposition (Plate 5), these collections showcase a sizeable number of plastinations to explore a broad range of physical aspects of human existence. The skillfully prepared specimens examine the function of individual organs and body parts, demonstrate human reproduction, and explore common diseases. Conserved corpses and organs have also found their way into universities’ anatomical collections for

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educational purposes; other exemplars could be purchased through the official Body Worlds website.9 Von Hagens’s “parade of death” is performed as both a spec(ta)cularization and a spectacle and, arguably, is driven by a quest for “knowing thyself.” It is motivated by education through intellectual enlightenment and by creating informed decision-making through insights. Yet the endeavor has become engrained in the collective conscience by its provocation of established moral beliefs and ethical conventions. Wherever the Body Worlds exhibition is staged, whether as a traveling or a permanent show, it is surrounded by controversy, calls for censorship, or actual regulatory interventions. The key issues that generate voices of dissent and protest are aptly summarized in the 2004–5 ethical review carried out by the California Science Center in Los Angeles for the inaugural Body Worlds show in the United States. The Center sought to “evaluate the ethical issues relating to Body Worlds, principally to ascertain sufficient donor informed consent, educational value of the exhibit, and the respectful treatment for human remains.”10 This inquiry was sparked by an awareness of the range of disagreements caused by the show when touring in Asia and Europe between 1995 and 2004, where more than fifteen million people viewed the Body Worlds exhibit. For the 2004–5 Los Angeles exhibit at the California Science Center, a special local ethics advisory committee was convened consisting of a diversity of medical, community, and religious representatives. Based on the principal recognition of the educational value of the exhibits and rigorous ethical scrutiny, it set out a number of recommendations, which informed the exhibition design at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. In response to identified community standards, religious sensitivities, and the local opinion climate, text panels for each body display were provided. Using a clinically inflected language, these explained “the educational reason why the body is posed the way it is—to illustrate a particular anatomical or physiological feature.”11 The reproductive section was placed in a “separate, clearly marked area.” Particular efforts were directed at managing the expectations and reactions of the audience and to protect children in particular. A special parent-and-child guide was developed “to assist parents in deciding whether or not to bring their child to the exhibit.” While an age limit was not set, it was made a requirement that children under thirteen had to be accompanied by a responsible adult. Expectation management also guided the special design of the entrance area to the show to “communicate how the exhibit is organized,” to convey the scientific, medical, and health purposes of the show, to draw attention to the ethical review, and to foster a “reverential and respectful mood” before the actual encounter of the body specimen.12 Entry spaces to the exposition were designed to ease viewers into the encounter with the corpses by using historical anatomy drawings and quotations. Various references to the history of anatomical explorations and models served to contextualize and frame Body Worlds as a legitimate scientific endeavor for explicit educational and enlightening purposes. It was followed by skeletons based on the assumption that “people may be more accustomed to seeing” these rather than full dead bodies.13 In recognition of socially constructed norms of acceptability, the California Science Center applied a form of censorship by excluding “non-viable fetuses” from public display.14 These controversial specimens had formed part of von Hagens’s international “body tour” to describe the whole cycle of embryonic and fetal development. In other cultural contexts, for instance when von Hagens’s Körperwelten (German for Body Worlds) extravaganza was held in Berlin’s Ostbahnhof in 2001, these demonstration objects (including a number of developmental abnormalities) were shown in an enclosed exhibition space. The entrance door to this section featured a warning sign pointing out the potentially “harmful” nature of the exhibits. Access was restricted to adults only—i.e., visitors of eighteen years and above. When the show toured Berlin again in 2009, under the thematic focus of the “Cycle of Life,”

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similar exhibits featured in the first room of the exposition were accessible and clearly visible to all visitors.15 It could be speculated whether the curatorial shift toward unrestricted access to this section was due to a change in the local context—i.e., the disappearance of moral concerns under the influence of advanced mediatization of social life and a related openness toward images of bodily realities. Such developments may in turn have fostered an increased collective threshold for feelings of shame and embarrassment vis-à-vis sexually explicit re/presentation. Perhaps the 2009 exhibition hosts were prepared to take a bigger risk in presenting those specimens to the public, or the relaxation on restrictions merely reflects an altered power constellation in Berlin’s local government. The example illustrates how divisive a role the local situatedness and the governing value framework play in determining what is socially acceptable and how this inflects the scope for public display and performance. The issue of informed body donor consent featured extensively in the considerations of the ethical review instigated by the California Science Center and required further independent scrutiny from an internationally reputed bioethicist. The host’s nervousness concerned the process of: a) obtaining and documenting consent from the body donors during their lifetime; b) matching the consent forms with the actual death certificates before the bodies are prepared; c) confirming whether donors had agreed to specific “everyday” poses and that their physical remains be choreographed by von Hagens and his team of anatomical “preparers,” particularly where those poses proved contentious; and d) verifying the accuracy of the detailed documentation of the whole process. The reviewer attested that all 206 donations were made in accordance with the law.16 However, the fact that an additional expert reviewer was appointed demonstrates the severity of raised ethical and judicial concerns regarding the origins of the corpses, the supposed exploitation of human remains, and the dignity of human life (and death). Various claims for exploitation were made on the grounds of allegations that corpses had been illegally acquired from Siberia and that bodies of executed prisoners from China were purchased.17 The international media publicized such speculations whenever Body Worlds exhibitions—temporary or permanent—were launched. They were especially traced to von Hagens’s establishment of his “body factory” in Dailan, China, in 1999. Following controversies and court cases in Germany, he had his specimens mass-produced there, as well as in a laboratory in Kyrgyzstan. Respective claims intensified when von Hagens was forced to return seven bodies to China in 2004 as he could not prove they were acquired legally.18 This incident was exploited to put into question the credibility of the entire display and its underlying anatomical procedures. To counteract persistent allegations, all expositions of von Hagens’s plastinations, as well as the Body Worlds official website, now contain statements pertaining to the lawful process and certification of body donations. However, in a recent incident local authorities ordered the Menschen Museum in Berlin to veil ten complete body presentations because the donor certification was regarded as ambiguous—i.e., informed consent could not be proven beyond doubt because the exhibits were anonymized early on. Von Hagen was forced to rework the exhibition to conform with legal requirements and save the museum from permanent closure.19 For the California hosts back in 2004, the issue of consent proved of particular concern with regard to the display of a Reclining Pregnant Woman shown in a provocative pose of sexual lure that points to precedents of both eroticizing historical paintings and “soft” pornographic images. In this instantiation of the body the gravid uterus is partially opened up to give sight to the eight-month-old fetus. This symbiotic moment when new life is developing inside the body is forever frozen in time. Thus this specific plastination serves as a particularly stark reminder of the proximity of life and death. In its various international exhibition locations it could be expected to attract protests from representatives of faith groups who regard the work as a violation of the sanctity of life and a human being’s dignity.

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The Los Angeles exhibition organizers sought to counteract anticipated visitor responses by training their staff to explain “how the pregnant woman died and why the fetus was not saved.”20 Viewers were also interested to learn how informed consent was secured from the deceased woman. The informed consent issue was further crystallized when the full “Cycle of Life” premiered in the Berlin Body Worlds show in 2009. The “Thanatos and Eros” display caused particular outrage. This exhibit shows the deceased bodies of a man and a woman having sex. The female sits on the reclining male facing away, and the mechanics of sex and reproduction are demonstrated. The morbid sex scene, displayed in a separate space, stands in stark contrast to its surround of mirrored walls and opulent chandelier that hold strong connotations of a luxurious brothel rather than an “anatomy cabinet,” as the room was called. Access to the space was restricted to viewers over sixteen years old, and photography was prohibited.21 While this rather surreal performance of the biology of human sex suffocates any sense of titillation, the responses to it illustrate current contradictory attitudes to public or publicly available representations of sex. On one hand, explicit sexual encounters—both as gainful venture and amateur pursuit—have taken center stage in the digital ether and generated one of the key nonmilitary drivers for the development of the Internet. The growing appearance of the overt presentation of sex in Western European public broadcast environments signals a respective liberalization of social attitudes. On the other hand, the protocols of major social network providers include rather prudish censorship rules that do not permit the display of female breasts, nipples, or the areola. Therefore, it is perhaps not surprising that this morbid parade of copulation still has the power to upset dominant norms of “taste” and “morality.” Such feelings of shame and embarrassment are bound up with the continued traction of divisions between the public and the private. These resonate in a differentiation between mediated and firsthand encounters of human intercourse.22 The unease and disturbance expressed in audience responses to “Thanatos and Eros” are thus aggravated by a perceived— posthumous—violation of human dignity and decency.23 Eager to share their learning from their ethical review and the evaluated visitor responses, the Los Angeles organizers made three key recommendations for the “Future Public Exhibition of Plastinated Human Bodies.” These were: a) a local ethical review prior to staging the exhibition and attuned to the specific ethical and cultural sensibilities; b) a verification that the “bodies and organs were donated with full and informed consent of the donors”; and, finally, c) a guarantee of “compliance with laws and regulations in particular when cultural, ethical, or religious controversies can be expected.”24 The differences between national or even regional cultural tolerances and judicial frameworks are evident in whether local authorities granted permission to promote the Body Worlds exhibition through a public poster campaign. When the show toured Offenbach in Germany in 2010, for example, the local authorities allegedly prohibited its public advertisement. Government officials cited local regulations to argue that only communal events could be promoted on municipal poster boards. In addition, religious representatives there accused von Hagens’s project of blasphemy, a powerful headline employed by the press in other places as well to heat up controversial debates about the exposition of prepared corpses.25 At the turn of the millennium von Hagens took his passion for the exploration of the human body—along the lines of physiology, biological development, impact of lifestyle, disease, and disfigurement—out of the dissecting room, the medical textbook, specialized journal, and the museum, and on to the public stage of the exhibition hall and the TV screen. He initiated a series of public dissections of actual deceased bodies in the United Kingdom in 2004 and organized their broadcast. The initial performance was situated in a gallery space

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and executed in front of an invited audience. The multi-camera setup combined a central vanishing point with a close-up zoom of the dissection process. The interweaving of a central perspective surveillance position and its inscribed denotation of rationality and mastery, with the detailed inspection, observation, and explanation of the pathological investigation process, underpinned the authoritative character of the event. From its inception this autopsy had been under threat of censorship in the form of both the prohibition of its life staging and the embargo of its arranged public broadcast by Channel 4. The pressure of censorship was linked to the threat of prosecution of its main proponent: Gunther von Hagens. In the end both the event and its TV transmission went ahead without official interventions or consequences for its presenter. On the contrary, this landmark event led to a series of specially commissioned television programs over the next three years. In 2005 UK private broadcaster Channel 4 commissioned a complement of four screenings titled Anatomy for Beginners featuring von Hagens and pathology professor John Lee dissecting a number of cadavers. In those four programs, sub-themed “Movement,” “Circulation,” “Digestion,” and “Reproduction,” they discussed key bodily functions and respective physiological features. Von Hagens utilized preserved cadavers to execute the autopsy and life models to explain anatomical facts through surface markings. A four-part follow-up series titled Autopsy and Death aired on Channel 4 in 2006 in which von Hagens and Lee discussed common fatal diseases (circulatory issues, cancer, poisoning from organ failure, and aging) with the aid of performed dissections. In November 2007 another series of three programs titled Autopsy: Emergency Room, which featured presentations by the British Red Cross, illustrated what happens when the body is injured. In all these TV programs dissections were performed with showmanship and the intention to create a palpable effect on the audience. Governed by the requirements of effective “infotainment,” the procedure—in contrast to the length it takes students and professionals to open up, disaggregate, and investigate a corpse—was greatly speeded up and supported by the use of plastinated specimens for demonstration. In 2009 the History Channel transmitted a series called Strange Rituals with eleven episodes. The first episode, titled “Last Rites,” featured von Hagens and his patented method to preserve bodies. On Easter Sunday 2012 the United Kingdom’s Channel 4 broadcast a program titled “Crucifixion,” in which von Hagens created his interpretation of the martyrdom of Jesus Christ. The documentary examined the enduring iconic image of the crucifix from theological and art historical perspectives. A number of donated bodies were used for the plastination of bones and blood vessels to create the main corporeal structure that was mounted on a wooden cross.26 It is evident that in the space of less than a decade the envelope of public opinions and legal framings in Britain was pushed by the production of such programs. Whether one describes the Body Worlds exhibits and anatomy broadcasts as science, art, or sheer spectacle, they have brought the human corpse into view like no other contemporary display or performance. Millions of exhibition visitors and TV program spectators have had the chance to encounter the skillfully prepared specimens without the intermediation of embarrassment, shame, or fear. The selected “milieus” for display—multipurpose exhibition halls and science museums—serve to legitimize and validate their exhibits and foreground their informative, educational, and scientific purpose and defend against judicial determinations of the obscene. Von Hagens’s spectacular/ized choreography of the dead stays well away from ugly and revolting corporeal realities: the discoloration of the skin, disintegration of the flesh, and the stench of its decay that would immediately trigger revulsion and disgust. The intricately assembled specimens aim at the sublimation of death as abjection and the cadaver as the abject. To support the “lure” of the object and its public acceptance von Hagens has

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drawn on the privileged symbolic practice of art and visual culture. Sublimation is reinforced by the cured and grotesquely enlivened bodies through the adoption of postures and gestures that emulate established cultural symbols of power and authority. These corporal references are deeply anchored in the canon of art history from Greek antiquity via the Renaissance and classicism to modernism and the influence it has asserted on contemporary popular images of the human body through exposure and citation. The fusion with references to images of contemporary commodity culture, particularly from the area of sports, seeks to strengthen the relevance of the displays and their acceptance by viewers. Such allusions mitigate against public moral concerns and ethical dissent. In von Hagens’s conceptualizations of the body different knowledge systems wrestle with each other. The application of the concept of art as expressed in the term “anatomy art” and the employed references to established motifs in art history and concomitant stimuli for aesthetic appreciation converge with the public engagement function of the sciences and accompanying expectations regarding the popularization of knowledge. Often the arts are employed in rather instrumentalized ways to serve the latter. For the viewer, the pageant of plastinations generates a complex and complicated force field between rational insights and affective responses, fascination and marvel, curiosity and illumination, mortification and disgust. It can be argued that the exhibits as well as the performative qualities of the choreographed autopsies excite a Schaulust—i.e., a publicly executed act of pausing, looking attentively, and inspecting, as opposed to the voyeuristic intent of clandestine observation.

The Art World Taking in the intricacies and beauty of the vascular system accentuates the wonder of life but also its fragility. Catching a pathologist’s hand at the moment when they pry open the rib cage and gut the corpse shows the vulnerability of the human body, the materiality and messiness of the flesh. It fixates our gaze and arrests our attention. Manchester-based artist Sue Fox has thought to capture those moments in a series of photographs set in the city’s morgue in the early 1990s. With her camera she takes on the role of dispassionate observer, documenting the procedures by which the dead are prepared for their inhumation. Her photographic Post Mortem series (Plate 6) shifts what happens to the body when life expires off scene by exposing the corpse to the public gaze: the excretions that occur at the point of total muscle relaxation, the awkwardness of handling a body in rigor mortis, and the sensation of touching lifeless, cold flesh––all of which are part of the cycle of life. These photographic revelations provoke the imagination of the lingering stench that emanates from open wounds and putrefying flesh. Some of Fox’s photographs in this series deal with deconstruction and decomposition of the cadaver. The gaze is focused on the corpus and on the hands of the investigator. Details pertaining to the individuality of both the deceased and the professional are kept out of sight to concentrate on the human essential. Her images capture the incineration of the body: how the flames devour the skin first, then destroy the soft tissue, muscles, and organs until the skeletal structure lays bare and collapses into a pile of hot ashes. This pictorial journey, mapped through carefully edited images, takes the viewer from the meaning/full that builds on the recognizable presence of a carcass to the formless, where signification is invoked through “situated” absence. The detached, matterof-fact image taking proffers the spirit of an anthropological investigation rather than pandering to an aestheticizing choreography. Yet the poignant close-up documentation

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of the mortuary scenes condenses meaning into a moving existential statement. Her chosen imaging strategy elevates the representations into “arte-factions”—i.e., skillfully constructed close-ups and condensed abstractions—and this reduces their potential of becoming literally a “bone of contention” and thus liable to censorship measures. The mediation of the scenes through the use of color photography and adherence to a standard gallery-viewing format support the latter points. It is telling that of the more than fifteen hundred photographs Sue Fox took in her local mortuary, only a small number of selected images were initially shown in public. Following adverse audience responses and personal verbal abuse when the work was first displayed, the artist decided not to show the series more widely—i.e., she applied self-censorship. It was through the Channel 4 TV series Vile Bodies (1998) and the accompanying book27 that public attention for this area of her photographic work grew.28 The morgue also offered the material for works by AES+F and Joel-Peter Witkin. They used anonymous dead individuals to develop different kinds of photographic tableaux. Whereas AES+F’s series titled Défilé (2000–7) converges traditions of photographing the dead with the stylistic repertoire of the contemporary fashion shoot, Witkin’s capture of bodies and body parts—skulls, corpus, and skeletons—from the 1970s onward revitalizes the vanitas motif that featured prominently in seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painting.29 AES+F’s Défilé consists of seven light boxes. Each carries the translucent photographic image of a corpse dressed up in an exuberant haute couture garment. The pictures of the bodies are taken from an arrested bird’s-eye vantage point to bind the images together into a coherent series. Bringing to bear the postproduction editing toolkit available to digital photography, all traces of their clinical surround are erased. The shrouded “stiffs” are cut out and superimposed onto a white neutral background and tilted into the vertical. In contrast to the lifeless bodies, their costumes flow in an animate manner that disturbs. To achieve this effect the fashion props were carefully draped and invisibly supported or fixed. In their swaying, carnivalesque attires and with their toes pointed, the dead bodies appear weightless. Like dancers they float in space, which some may read as having entered heaven. Associations with the “divine hovering” of spiritual figures in religiously motivated paintings may have been intended to stimulate respective connotations and culturally anchor this imagery in historical precedents. The exquisiteness of the extravagant clothes and their overly graceful arrangements create an alluring beauty that aims to sublimate the brutal finality of death. The aesthetic semblance is disturbingly ruptured by indicators of the harsh life experiences those individuals endured. Their decimated physiques, premature signs of aging, and visible traces of disease and/or violence speak of considerable degrees of deprivation. The juxtaposition between beauty and unseemliness invokes the abject in a complex intersection of the physical and biological and the social and ethical. The ethical is particularly problematized by the artists’ choreography of the anonymous dead who during their lifetime did not give informed consent. Their dressing up, public exposure, and potential ridicule through externally enforced “impersonation” carry undercurrents of impropriety and exploitation. The ambiguity of the intellectual and emotional responses that human morbidity and sexuality elicit lies at the center of Witkin’s photographic oeuvre. His black-and-white image Autoerotic Death (1984) shows the torso and part of the lower body of an athletic man in his prime.30 Head bent back and eyes covered by a mask, his corpus is covered in a translucent black vest and adorned by paraphernalia for sexual stimulation, including a metal chain, each end wrapped round his scrotum and neck, respectively. Closer inspection brings to the fore a number of ambiguous elements, such as a large insect feasting on the corpse’s chest, a bold earring featuring a Roman-style miniature portrait, and bulging flesh

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and nipples under the vest that look like female breasts. The curation of the dead body in tandem with the imaging technique employed move it from the portrait of an individual to a complex object composition, thereby further complicating a reading indicated by the suggestive title. Witkin’s macabre imagery draws on both the thanatotic culture of (New) Mexico and the Baroque still life. Still Life, Marseille (1992), for instance, consists of a partially opened up and emptied out head of a male.31 The tumid skull—eyes closed—rests on a tabletop and provides a container for a bouquet of white lilies and roses. Vegetables and fruits, some of them contained in a large tilted bowl, complement the arrangement. This still life exudes an erotic charge and points to the dynamic nexus of human drives. In contrast, Corpus medius (2000) showcases the lower body of a young(er) man laid out on a clothed table.32 Literally a nature morte, its staging draws the gaze to the gaping wound where the torso was removed from the lower body and extremities. This visual orchestration juxtaposes the body exterior with its interior: its firm and smooth outer with the soft and squelchy mess of the flesh and bowel. In “playing” with human cadavers, Witkin studies the influential tropes and stylistic principles that have been associated with the iconography of Western art since the seventeenth century. Of particular interest is the operation of sublimating devices in relation to the representation of the abject. These symbolic visual references are “manufactured” by employing outmoded photographic technologies, particularly the wet plate collodion process and the later daguerreotype, and by distressing the black-and-white negatives. Thus the screen of semblance and beauty of the signifying objects are willfully shattered. Witkin’s approach resonates with what Roland Barthes calls the punctum—i.e., the piercing of the screen of the mediated images through which a momentary glimpse of the real is provoked.33 His formal repertoire and aesthetic registers do not conform to the zeitgeist of the later twentieth century and its focus on the shiny surfaces of capitalist aesthetization of society. In his theatrical stagings since the 1970s Witkin articulates an Other situated in proximity to notions of the obscene and the prohibited. The intentional slippage into the ugly and monstrous constitute a fragile liminality in the formation of contemporary aesthetic sensibilities and social norms of acceptability. His overtly libertarian artistic approach not only sits in tension with religious, moral, ethical, and political assertions of human dignity and propriety. Witkin’s often disquieting and disturbing representations of human desire and mortality also brush against the anti-pornography legislation put forward by feminist activists such as Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin in the late 1980s, in which they proposed treating pornography as sexual discrimination and censoring representations of exploitative sex.34 Controversies were also sparked in the 1980s when the US National Endowment for the Arts allocated funding and support to artists such as Witkin. These debates erupted in the battle of polarizing views around divisive issues such as censorship in the United States of the 1990s, during the so-called culture wars.35 To this day some online accounts of works by von Hagens and Witkin are accompanied by what is called “trigger” warnings in regard to their explicitness. Cultural expressions by the German anatomist, Fox, AES+F, and Witkin inflect public discourse and impact the negotiation of collective values, social standards, and professional norms. The body works by von Hagens and the photographs by Fox provoke through an emphasis on the factual matters of human existence, while the mediated and bizarre stagings of AES+F and Witkin elicit ambivalent responses by indulging in the “horror comic.” These images share a focus on the human, on the all-too-human. They produce irritations, but also create openings through which an acceptance of human demise and thus collective grief and mourning might be re/admitted into social life. As rapid and radical advances in the

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sciences and the information and communication technologies raise profound questions with regard to what makes us human and how we preserve our humanity, their public in/ter/ventions contribute to much-needed cultural elucidation on value models and social conventions.

Notes 1 Geoffrey Gorer first made these statements in “The Pornography of Death” published in Encounter 5, no. 25 (October 1955): 49–52. He republished the essay as an appendix in Death, Grief, and Mourning (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 192–9; statements appear on p. 199. 2 Felipe Huamán Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva crónica y buen gobierno (1612–15), quoted in Elias Canetti, Das Buch gegen den Tod (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2014), 341 and 183ff. (author’s translation). 3 Gorer, Death, Grief, and Mourning, 196. 4 Gorer, Death, Grief, and Mourning, 196–7. 5 Gorer, Death, Grief, and Mourning, 197. 6 In using the terms arte-faction (arte/fact/ion) and arte-fiction I seek to highlight that any kind of document already includes an author position from which the recording is undertaken, one that determines the way the document is constructed and situated and how it relates and communicates factual occurrences or persons/characters. One could go further to bring into play the materiality of the chosen recording media, the devices used, and the cultural technologies employed, all of which contribute to the making of a document and its (perceived) authenticity and relation to truth. 7 Gunther von Hagens and Angelina Whalley, Anatomy Art: Fascination beneath the Surface (Heidelberg, Germany: Institute for Plastination, 2000). 8 Martin Kemp and Martina Wallace, Spectacular Bodies: The Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo to Now (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 59. 9 See the website of the Plastinarium in Guben, Germany, www.plastinarium.com/en/store/shop_ eng.html. 10 Jeffrey N. Rudolf, Diane Perlov, and Hans-Martin Sass, Body Worlds: An Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies, Summary of Ethical Review (Los Angeles: California Science Center, 2004–5), 1, www.ntnu.no/documents/10476/1272942827/PressKit_EthicReview_XL_E. pdf/9e7e7d64-6531-434d-b294-332cd291dc67. 11 Rudolf, Perlov, and Sass, Body Worlds, 1. 12 Rudolf, Perlov, and Sass, Body Worlds, 1. 13 Rudolf, Perlov, and Sass, Body Worlds, 8. 14 Rudolf, Perlov, and Sass, Body Worlds, 1. 15 “‘Der schwebende Akt’—Skandal um Gunther von Hagen,” Fokus Online, May 6, 2009, www. focus.de/panorama/vermischtes/koerperwelten-der-schwebende-akt-skandal-um-gunther-vonhagen_aid_396664.html. 16 Rudolf, Perlov, and Sass, Body Worlds, 5. 17 David Barboza, “China Turns Out Mummified Bodies for Displays,” New York Times, August 8, 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/08/08/business/worldbusiness/china-turns-out-mummified-bodiesfor-displays.html. 18 Luke Harding, “Von Hagens Forced to Return Controversial Corpses to China,” The Guardian, January 23, 2004, www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jan/23/arts.china.

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19 Berliner Tagesspiegel, October 9, 2017, www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/umstrittene-ausstellungoeffnet-wieder-menschen-museum-verhuellt-plastinate/20434406.html. 20 Rudolf, Perlov, and Sass, Body Worlds, 7. 21 “‘Der schwebende Akt’—Skandal um Gunther von Hagen,” Fokus Online, May 6, 2009, www. focus.de/panorama/vermischtes/koerperwelten-der-schwebende-akt-skandal-um-gunther-vonhagen_aid_396664.html. 22 See “Annals of Necrophilia: Body Worlds Strikes Again,” Spiegel Online, May 5, 2009, www.spiegel. de/international/germany/annals-of-necrophilia-body-worlds-strikes-again-a-623025-druck.html. 23 “Annals of Necrophilia.” 24 Rudolf, Perlov, and Sass, Body Worlds, 1–2. 25 “Zensur und Blasphemie: Streit um von Hagens ‘Körperwelten,’” Main-Echo, September 4, 2009, www.main-echo.de/regional/rhein-main-hessen/art25224,1159347. 26 See “C4 Doc Reveals Crucifixion Artwork by Anatomist Gunther von Hagens,” Channel 4, March 25, 2012, www.channel4.com/press/news/c4-doc-reveals-crucifixion-artwork-anatomist-gunthervon-hagens. 27 Chris Townsend, Vile Bodies (Munich, Germany: Prestel, 1998). 28 Ann Treneman, “Sick Sensationalism or Life as Art?” Independent, March 24, 1998, www. independent.co.uk/life-style/visual-arts-vile-bodies-1152137.html. 29 See “AES+F: Défilé,” https://aesf.art/projects/defile/. 30 See “L’oeuvre Autoerotic Death,” Centre Pompidou, www.centrepompidou.fr/cpv/ressource. action?param.id=FR_R-cebf52d58e1aad1b51c1fcf369ed99b7¶m.idSource=FR_O-b4661de1 3f6f42283f799ff0c6eb8e27. 31 See “Joel-Peter Witkin: 1 Apr 1993–15 May 1993,” Fraenkel Gallery, https://fraenkelgallery.com/ exhibitions/joel-peter-witkin-2. 32 See “Joel-Peter Witkin,” Catherine Edelman Gallery, www.edelmangallery.com/artists/artists/o-z/ joel-peter-witkin.html. 33 See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). 34 See particularly Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); also Angela Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (London: Women’s Press, 1981); and Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon, Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women’s Equality (Minneapolis: Organizing Against Pornography, 1988), 138–9. 35 See Connie Samaras, “Feminism, Photography, Censorship, and Sexually Transgressive Imagery: The Work of Robert Mapplethorpe, Joel-Peter Witkin, Jacqueline Livingston, Sally Mann, and Catherine Opie,” New York Law School Review 38, nos. 1–4 (1993): 75–82.

Bibliography AES+F. Défilé. 2000–7. https://aesf.art/projects/defile/ Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. Canetti, Elias. Das Buch gegen den Tod. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2014. Fox, Sue. Post Mortem. Salford, UK: Viewpoint Photographic Gallery, 1997. Gorer, Geoffrey. Death, Grief, and Mourning. New York: Doubleday, 1965. Kemp, Martin, and Martina Wallace. Spectacular Bodies: The Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo to Now. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000.

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MacKinnon, Catherine A. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Mey, Kerstin. Art and Obscenity. London: I.B.Tauris, 2007. Rudolf, Jeffrey N., Diane Perlov, and Hans-Martin Sass. Body Worlds: An Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies, Summary of Ethical Review. Los Angeles: California Science Center, 2004–5. Tepper, Stephen J. Not Here, Not Now, Not That! Protest over Art and Culture in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Townsend, Chris. Vile Bodies. Munich: Prestel, 1998. Urban, Otto M. Joel Peter Witkin––Vanitas. Prague: Nakladatelstvi Arbor vitae, 2012. Von Hagens, Gunther, and Angelina Whalley. Anatomy Art: Fascination beneath the Surface. Heidelberg, Germany: Institute for Plastination, 2000.

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PART II

The Sexual (In)Sight

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4 Art/Obscenity/Underground Cinema in West Germany, 1968–72: Circulating through the Debates Megan Hoetger

In 1969 West German film programmer Karlheinz Hein, together with Austrian artistfilmmakers VALIE EXPORT and Peter Weibel, organized a multimedia, multisensory “altered state” event that toured West Germany (FRG) and German-speaking Switzerland. Reminiscent of Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground’s The Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–7), “Underground Explosion” featured experimentation across theater, music, film, and visual art performance. It moved to at least five different sites—Essen, Cologne, Munich, Stuttgart, and Zürich—where it took over local stadiums and circus halls, bringing together thousands of youths who had gathered in revolt. This inclination toward rebellion among West German youth was multipronged. It was a student revolt against an educational infrastructure in which former members of the National Socialist Party held many of the most influential positions. It was a sexual revolt against the repressive norms of a state anxious to distance itself from the lasciviousness of the Nazi period. It was a philosophical revolt taken up under the influence of Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1966) and his students in Frankfurt. It was a revolt in music by way of an embrace of US traditions of jazz and rock ‘n’ roll, and a nascent German experimental sound scene—“from [Jimi] Hendrix to [Karlheinz] Stockhausen.” Finally, it was an “inter-technological” revolt against the separation of media communication systems.1 For Peter Weibel, “Underground Explosion” was a moment to look directly in the face (or faces) of a failed culture and speak—or scream—back to it. To document these “revolts,” Hein invited Austrian experimental filmmaker Kurt Kren to join the tour and film the activities. Of the more than eight hours of footage Kren collected, what remains is a five-and-a-half-minute, out-of-focus film called 23/69 Underground Explosion. It is a mescaline-induced haze of motion, an action in itself. Kren’s off-kilter camera work is intensified by the discordant soundscape of experimental jazz phrases, vocal tracks from Motown classics, rock guitar riffs, and electronic feedback noise. These audio elements drift in and out, sometimes syncing with the movement of bodies, but more often not.

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In 23/69 we see a stage filled with a discordant scape of Happening-like actions ranging from theater warm-up trust falls to bodies climbing over one another (à la Simone Forti’s 1961 Huddle) and writhing on the floor (à la Carolee Schneemann’s 1964 Meat Joy). In the flash of film projector light, traditional stage spotlighting is replaced by a radiating red and blue glow, and the scant visual information that is initially recognizable blurs out as the jazz phrasing performed on stage picks up speed (Plate 7). Figures and instruments begin to dissolve into streaks of red, blue, and yellow light traversing a smoky black ground like acid shadows. They pulsate with halos, afterimages, and visual snow—like the effects brought on by 3,4,5-trimethoxyphenethylamin (mescaline) and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)—hovering in the perceptual field. And then the film sequence breaks. Things go silent and dark. The intensity of the “Underground Explosion” environment holds in it both the exhilaration of discovery and the panic of overstimulation involved in the hallucinogenic experience. One could perhaps dismiss the event as “trippy” but for the ways that Kren’s camera jarringly jerks us around. Dizzying in-camera edits make clear that the generative potential of psychedelia is also the stuff of which bad trips are made. In this drug-induced, sexualized, and theretofore forbidden space, our view continuously shifts from the stadium seating through which the camera point of view weaves, to the stage and its activities—projection screens, clusters of sound equipment, and chaotically moving bodies—to the reflective surfaces and flashing bulbs of the media photographers’ cameras, which flicker as the gathered journalists attempt to capture what is going on. Roving between these sites, Kren’s “document” triangulates spaces––the audience arena, the stage/screen, and the photographers’ press box. The outof-focus perspective through which he visually and sonically represents these constitutive elements of cinema (spectator, screen, discursive circulation) mimics the blurred and blurry ideological effects of the part political, part psychedelic performance media concert—an event that distorts and distends the lines between elements of the cinematic apparatus, and pushes up against the decency standards that organized and ordered life in the FRG. It is this configuration of spaces, as well as the vertiginous way in which Kren configured them, that suggest the organizing principles for this essay. Thinking through this model of formation—of realignment and nonalignment—of image, viewer, and context, the following pages examine what I call the “critical-political” project of underground cinema screening events like “Underground Explosion” during the final years of the FRG’s porn panic. The entanglements discussed here—of the art market, New Left activist causes, and obscenity debates—prompt a set of questions on “good politics.” Operating through a set of negations that began with the “not fascist” and building a complex, praxis-based negative critique from there, “Underground Explosions” forcefully posed the question: “What is left?” (as in “What remains?” and “What is Left?”).

The West German Porn Panic and the Film Screening Event In the 1960s political turbulence and social upheaval manifested in West Germany and elsewhere through debates around pornography and obscenity laws. In US-Western European contexts the sexual revolution coincided with student and workers’ movements and anticolonial solidarity struggles. This so-called revolution loosely constituted a social movement that challenged traditional Judeo-Christian codes of behavior related to sexuality and libidinal expression and that influenced a generation of youths eager to shed the repressive

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mores of their parents’ wartime generation and establish their own autonomous identities. Images abounded of men and women piled into beds together, topless women, and women burning their bras. Such activity prompted anxiety and debate at the individual-familial and state levels, crisscrossing electoral and activist positions associated with the Left, as well as the moral decency standards held by those on both the left and the right. This porn panic spanned party platforms, taking different guises as it crossed policy positions.2 The situation was particularly fraught in the FRG, where issues relating to sex, sexuality, and the consumption of their representations were entangled with the country’s efforts to re-form its national identity after the multiple wreckages of its past—from the rapid industrialization of the Wilhelmian period and the traumas of World War I to the experimentation and failure of the interwar Weimar Republic and the horrors of the Nazizeit. This “new” national identity was, moreover, negotiated in direct relation to its other, East Germany (GDR)— another point of anxiety. From the Reconstruction period through the early Cold War years (the 1950s to the mid-1960s), both Germanys were actively building and rebuilding their identities through double negations: in the FRG identity was being figured against the ground of “not fascism” and “not communism” and in the GDR of “not fascism” and “not capitalism.”3 The new West German state system propagated itself on a freedom of “choice” that was carefully linked to the ability of the liberal democratic nation-state to provide the best (or, at least, better than state socialism) for its citizens. Numerous aspects of society, from sexual relations and familial structures to communication technologies, media access, and urban planning, were carefully reorganized around a rhetoric of democratic choice that consumerism was to offer. The threat of the “obscene” in this context exceeded the formal boundaries of what was described as hardcore pornography, which depends on the making visible of the penetrative sex act and the dénouement of orgasm.4 Instead obscenity—those activities prohibited by the vague language of §184 in the FRG’s Basic Law (Grundgesetz)—encompassed a range of actions and behaviors. The “indecency” of the pornographic read as obscenity stretched from explicit explorations of sexuality (especially homosexual pleasure) to overt representations of race and racial otherness.5 Such material, which populated screen and stage in 23/69 Underground Explosion, threatened to both feminize (or “soften”) and radicalize (or “harden”) youth cultures. On one hand, the refusal of the state’s normative body politic— from the organization of theater seating that kept bodies separate (not touching) to the prohibition against depictions of bodily erotics on screen—was a feminization of bodies. Both on- and off-screen there were risks of sensuousness and permeability. Sometimes it was druginduced, as had been the case in Kren’s mescaline-induced 23/69, and sometimes not. This feminization led, on the other hand, to a radicalization of bodies involved in this sensuous experience. Exposure to that way of being, it was feared, would harden anti-institutional resolve and refusal to willingly perform subjecthood within the boundaries of normative national identity. The danger seemed clear: with so many people packed into a space with no recognizable organization or order, anything could happen. Events like “Underground Explosion” posed a significant threat, not only because of the sounds and movements imaged on screen and activated in spaces—though this was the impetus for police raids and legal battles. It was also a result of the underground and ad hoc means by which such screening events came together—often temporary alliances with both the public (state) and private (commercial) spheres—and circumvented the predetermined field of choice mapped out by the state’s liberal consumerist program. In the midst of broader Cold War debates regarding cultural policy in the FRG, experimental filmmakers and programmers like Hein, Weibel, and EXPORT formed alternative distribution structures for the circulation of their films, many of which had little in the way of art-institutional or

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film-industrial support. This tactic of circumvention was bolstered by the emergence of a sprawling filmmaker cooperative network that bypassed the nation-state as framework for distribution, including its rhetoric of democratic, consumerist choice. The push for expanding infrastructural supports beyond commercial circuits for art and film was also, in West Germany and elsewhere, a fight for the legality of events that included noncommercial materials and actions, which rubbed against morality codes and decency laws. The history of this battle’s unfolding, however, has thus far largely been described through aesthetic choices. At stake has been a claiming of the “proper” aesthetic strategy for film’s political intervention. Should it be narrative? Should it not? What is the function of entertainment in political intervention? What is the function of pleasure? This “right to claim” a correct politic was being contested in US and British film circles on a battleground broadly exemplified in the division between New York-based film theorist Annette Michelson and Californiabased film critic Gene Youngblood. The question of medium specificity surfaced—what made film “Film” for Michelson was its capacity to tell stories, and, potentially, to tell stories differently. Youngblood, conversely, hedged his bets on another dimension of the moving image’s entertainment value: its potential status as spectacular event. Film events offered a fundamentally different ideological vision of what “radical” change even meant. In West Germany this situation extended into state funding structures. Following the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto and new industry standards, which codified the feature-length art house narrative form, a third opposition party began to develop that was neither commercial nor art house.6 It was art film. What was that? Where did you show it? How had the spectatorial experience become so rigidified that a four-minute film was mostly inconceivable? Underneath and alongside battles over narrativity, a larger war was being waged in the FRG over funding structures, the organization of film’s economies and market motions, and, most fundamentally, the modes of social relation that “cinema” could and should foster. Accordingly, the central focus across experimental film and performance events was finding viable market structures. The cooperative model thus emerged. Following a landmark 1967 International Experimental Film Festival in Knokke-Le-Zoute, Belgium, known as EXPRMNTL, the cooperative movement, which had until then only been active in the United States and Britain, took hold across continental Europe. EXPRMNTL brought together an international group of filmmakers interested in establishing a circulation network for their work and that of other filmmakers in their regions. Cooperatives that began to crop up were invested not in building national identity but in creating collective group identity. Attempts to form a European Filmmakers Cooperative followed the 1967 convening. Though this never came to fruition, it precipitated the establishment of robust networks of communication among local settings from Amsterdam to Rome. Each cooperative took on particular characteristics in response to specificities of context. While the Hamburg Co-op in the northern West German port city primarily consisted of filmmakers connected to the commercial scene, the Austria Filmmakers Co-op (AFMC) in Vienna invested its efforts in demonstrations against what co-op members saw as fascist elements in state arts institutions and the market capitulations of a liberal “democratizing” order (Figure 4.1). In early 1969 such differences led to a protest of the Hamburger Filmschau, a festival co-organized by the co-op there, by members of the AFMC, as well as those of the Cologne-based XSCREEN project.7 Unwieldy as these systems and events were—consider the triangulation of audience arena, stage/screen, and press apparatus Kren’s film had dizzyingly captured—they were crucial to creating alternative distribution conditions and providing different conduits for movement alongside and in between the rigidified mechanisms of prevailing state-promoted market structures and dominant activist circuits.

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FIGURE 4.1  Photographer unknown, “Anti-festival” organizers at the Hamburger Filmschau. Bild, March 8, 1969. Reprinted in W+B Hein: Dokumente 1967–1985: Fotos, Briefe, Texte, 1985.

“Programs and Not Programmatic Agendas” Cooperatives may have established new and different industry standards for distribution, but shifts in exhibition and access were shared between the cooperatives proper and other projects, like the “Underground Explosion.” The traveling multimedia event documented in Kren’s 23/69 was the second underground explosion to take place in German-speaking Western Europe at the end of the 1960s. The other was a screening program organized in Cologne one year earlier, in 1968. The traveling event captured in 23/69 was named and conceived in homage to this earlier program. Though they both had the title Underground Explosion and dramatically shifted audience and screen/stage relations, the 1968 event had a much more complicated relationship to publicity. It was not an independently staged spectacle selling sex and leftist identification as the concert in 1969 would be. Instead, it was a satellite program to the annual Art Cologne (Köln Kunstmarkt) organized by the XSCREEN Cologne Studio for Independent Film (XSCREEN Kölner Studio für unabhängigen Film), a cultural association established in Cologne in 1968 by a group of thirteen critics, artists, and filmmakers with the mission of creating more opportunity and access to noncommercial and independent (unabhängigen) film.8 Like the co-op movement, XSCREEN was an outgrowth of the momentum amassed in Knokke.

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Through collaborative effort, the group sought to open up a space that was something like the communal cinema (kommunales Kino)—a movement that would gain traction in the FRG slightly later, in the mid-1970s.9 Situating themselves as a “studio” afforded room to maneuver between the space of a formal institution and a communally shared movie house. In that situated space XSCREEN could foreground a complex agenda based around democratization of communication technologies, including media visibility and exploration of the aesthetic and filmic possibilities within the unmarketability of the underground. As the founding manifesto stated, “a fixed system of production, distribution and screening of commercial films, sanctioned by state institutions, has patronized and manipulated the public for years. … [T]he possibilities of the film medium and the horizon of the audience are narrowed by the industrial apparatus in a catastrophic manner.”10 That the studio was neither a cooperative nor a communal cinema, though adjacent to both, is crucial to understanding the situatedness of its critical lens, specifically oriented as it was around the organization of “programs and not programmatic agendas.”11 Regular screening programs were at the center of the studio’s efforts; the group became known for them throughout the international experimental film scene, as well as across underground youth cultures in West Germany. In the beginning XSCREEN Studio rented theaters for monthly midnight screenings because they were the most affordable option, but by late 1968—following their “Underground Explosion”—the demand for more would lead to weekly midnight screenings. This weekly schedule continued for the next three years and eventually moved into a regular theater space, which was rented with support from the city for a secured, low-cost lease. In its first three years XSCREEN organized midnight showings of mixed programs that included everything from educational and industrial film to avantgarde shorts, animated film, and documentary film footage of the Vietnam War and Weimarperiod Berlin leftist films that were exemplary of Germany’s political film tradition.12 A mixture of genres was characteristic of XSCREEN programming. It transformed the theater into a mixed-use space, drawing people together from different sectors within and outside the arts. Sexually explicit works like Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947), Jean Genet’s banned Chant d’Amour (1950), or Kurt Kren’s 6/64 Mama und Papa (1964) were thus routinely screened (Kren’s film was included in the inaugural screening) as part of a much larger project. Scientists might show up for screenings of educational and industrial films and stay for the experimental abstract shorts; youths seeking exposure to sexually explicit materials could be exposed to anti-war documentary reels. Near the end of 1971 Saturday midnight showings of hardcore pornography were also added to the studio’s lineup, but these were kept separate from the mixed programs—a financial supplement to the studio’s small income, but never a central focus.13 The notion of underground that XSCREEN followed was not thus about hardcore pornography, and not even only about sexually explicit materials, though the latter was certainly a part of it that led to police intervention on multiple occasions (interestingly no Saturday night screening was ever raided). By the end of 1972 once pornography was fully legalized in the FRG, state censorship shifted to private lawsuits brought by porn theater owners wanting sole rights for the distribution of the genre’s films. As representations of sex and sexuality (both the “pornographic” and “obscene”) often associated with an “underground” acquired a legal status under the purview of the state and sexually explicit experimental film began to be absorbed into visual art industries, the slippages between genres held together by their shared economic conditions began to disappear. Before the 1972 legalization of pornography, though, the underground— for XCSREEN anyway—included any kind of film shut out of the commercial mainstream system; it was a site for the formation of different, perhaps new kinds of social relations.

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Promoting the underground was a matter of both bringing more visibility to all forms of cultural production that were unmarketable for the film industry proper and bringing together different kinds of communities that formed around those scenes. It was in the precarious position of XSCREEN—poised as it was in the cracks between commercial markets, cooperative routes, communal efforts, and state support, as well as between genres of film—that the tensions between censorship, the legal apparatus, and performing cultural openness became most pronounced. XSCREEN had not fully “dropped out,” but neither was it fully embedded in any one programmatic agenda. In the introduction to her 1971 Film im Underground XSCREEN cofounder Birgit Hein described the situation: Underground film is the latest, least well-established art form in our time. Since it cannot be easily exploited commercially, it still has no market behind it (like, for instance, the book market or art market), which could secure a place for it in the official business of culture. … But this also means that it is not yet dependent on the official business of culture, at least for the time being, since scandals such as confiscation, police actions, and resignations from festivals have given it the necessary publicity over the last few years to get enough spectators for regular screenings of films. … This economic outsider position justifies the term [underground] derived from the political situation.14 Skirting the consumerist circulation mechanisms of the state’s political economy was a powerful way to undermine the West German state, precisely because it evaded the capitalist consumer markets for “art” without taking an explicitly communist political position. Refusing to turn the film programming into a politically programmatic agenda, XSCREEN worked against any kind of a state political or commercial market economy. Experimental film refused, in other words, to enact the ways in which the West German state was a “free” and “equal” nation in order to affirm its global position and thus its democratic identity. Hein continued: “Experimental films cannot be easily incorporated into the existing social order as can political films that move entirely within familiar convention.”15 This inability for a smooth assimilation of experimental film—and the underground more generally—into either the state’s performances of openness or activist agendas of militancy added more sets of negations to the process of citizen-subject formation: aligned with the co-op framework, XSCREEN had increasingly less to do with solidifying identity along national lines, yet it remained unaligned with any Western Marxist international solidarity programs. Given the proliferation of negations through which XSCREEN was formulated—not fascist, not state socialist, not quite liberal democratic, not commercial film, not political film—the question of the studio’s political orientation had no straightforward answer. This intensified the threat of its underground ad hoc events. The lack of a clear answer drew suspicions from the Left as well as from the Right. During a protest against the 1970 Underground Film Festival in London, which included an XSCREEN program, constituents from both sides of the political spectrum picketed. As one news article described it, the theater “foyer was enlivened by a violent argument between three Maoists and two National Front regulars who turned up to watch the ‘corrupt, decadent movies.’ Despite their full agreement that the movies should be stopped, they disagreed on ideologies of why.”16 On one side, representing such “lewd” material went against the sense of moral decency supported by the conservative nationalist, and, on the other, such material was seen as counterrevolutionary to the leftist anti-nationalist. Implicit to the critical task of XSCREEN and the “Underground Explosion” was the political task of anti-censorship. At its foundation the studio was built upon a paradoxical situation: programs were understood by the organizers to be non-adherent to any singular

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ideological platform, yet competing ideologies ran side by side through most events they organized. Setting up mixed-genre programs, working tentatively with the state but against its rules of “appropriate” engagement, rejecting a “proper” aesthetic approach to leftist politics, but working in radical ways, XSCREEN laid bare the ideological platforms upon which political economies of the moving image moved. The “public” space of the screening and the public space of politics were intertwined with the “private” space of the family and the community. The critical-political task of anti-censorship was precisely about such entanglements, thwarting yet again the model of social relations upon which the FRG’s consumer-based democratic state identity was based. The reconfiguration of audience arena, stage/screen, and media visibility thus was something happening in the films (as in the case of Kren’s 23/69 Underground Explosion), the screening events (as in the XCSREEN Studio mixed programming), and the activities of those involved. It was a total, though certainly not totalizing, reimagining of how individuals could share leisure and labor time. One thing is clear: for the generation living on the cusp of the 1972 “porn revolution” (when pornography was fully legalized in the FRG), access to different imaginings and imagings of sex and sexuality was as sure to sell out small ad hoc theater spaces as to attract protestors from across the political spectrum. As Birgit Hein has stressed repeatedly, the politics of XSCREEN was oriented around a conception of film and programming that was against censorship in any form. This commitment to anti-censorship was a political act without any particular party affiliations; as the scene in London illuminated, this gained few advocates in a party-based state system. It also did not attract many advocates in the commercial sphere. The foregrounding of cultural materials invisible in mainstream commercial markets that followed from the commitment to anti-censorship was also a threat to a consumer-based market system. It challenged the dominant systems of valuation, setting capital’s motions a-spin in ways different from those of documentary-based political film. To work in the film underground, as Birgit Hein has since suggested, was “already a political act.”17

Explosion at the Kunstmarkt Exhibitionary event cultures like the one that supported XSCREEN’s “Underground Explosion” in October 1968 played a crucial role in the rebuilding of West German cultural life. The first of these events was documenta, the quinquennial one-hundred-day exhibition founded in Kassel in 1955 amidst the wreckage of the war, which was intended to serve as a foil to the German art exhibitions being staged in the FRG’s counterpart, the GDR. Documenta became a place-making model for other cities in the FRG looking to raise their visibility on the national and international stages. One such outgrowth of this model was Art Cologne (Köln Kunstmarkt), which began in 1967. At the time Cologne was a site of heavy industry in the West German state, and money was flowing into the city domestically as well as from US postwar aid. This economic situation was coupled with a progressive cultural atmosphere, which in those critical years at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s allowed for—even invited—critical-political projects like XSCREEN to develop. Such projects happened with relatively stable acceptance from the Social Democrats (SPD) who dominated the municipal government, as opposed to the centrist-conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) who controlled the federal administration. In this context the fair was envisaged by the group of gallerists who came together to form an association (Vereinigung) as a way to draw critical attention and financial interest to the North Rhine-Westphalia urban center. The gallerists negotiated with SPD members of the Cologne Department of Cultural Affairs to host the fair in the city. They were successful, drawing more than fifteen thousand

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visitors in 1967, the event’s first year.18 The expansion into “alternative programming” in the second year was prompted by the shared desire of the gallerists and the city to compete with Düsseldorf as the cultural destination in the region.19 It was in this context, as parallel programming to the art fair, that XSCREEN’s “Underground Explosion” was scheduled to happen October 15–19, 1968, in a newly renovated—and still not open to the public—subway station, the Neumarkt U-Bahnhof. Just as the city recognized the advantages of including this kind of “alternative” programming in its commercial collaborations, the studio knew well the benefits of using resources provided by the city and the city’s sponsoring of the spectacular commercial event—from support for installation to publicity. It also meant, though, that the studio had to strategically succumb to other limitations that came along with such proximity to the art market, including its uptake of experimentation as a marketing tactic. In the process of raising interest in a lackluster art market, the West German gallery scene constructed a self-image as protector and promoter of “cutting edge” artistic activity. It proved, however, to be an unreliable advocate.20 Nonetheless, the studio’s choice to take municipal support and provisionally join the galleries allowed them to literally move into the city’s infrastructural cracks vis-à-vis its underground transit network. The subway station, as any city-dweller knows, is a critical site in urban space—a kind of artery in the lifeline of the city— that allows inhabitants to move around. Like an artery, its constant operation below the surface makes everything possible. The integration of these levels of “mobility” by “Underground Explosion” emphasized the overlaps between state and commercial mechanisms of distribution, and between physical and cultural movement. Such overlaps and the resulting frictions became increasingly visible as the nights of the XSCREEN program wore on. On the fourth night of “Underground Explosion,” shortly before 10:00 p.m., and as Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967) should have been playing, around seventy police officers gathered outside the subway station’s two entrances, blocking them and trapping the attendees underground. It was a raid. Twenty-six films were confiscated, all bags were searched, and everyone inside was rounded up as police “searched for films, young people who had missed their curfew for the nightly homecoming, and criminals.”21 Attendees without identification were detained and those with identification were cross-checked for criminal warrants. The organizers of the event from XSCREEN, as well as other “suspects,” were photographed. Cofounder of XSCREEN Rolf Wiest was taken to the station. As a newspaper report on the raid described it, the event and the views of the filmmakers involved had “ruptured the rules of the game of sexual repression.”22 Wiest’s arrest was based on suspicion of offense against §184. The police report stated that the activities imaged on screen were “capable of injuring the modesty and morality of an impartial third party by aversion and disgust” and “must therefore be regarded as unkind in the sense of §184.”23 There are conflicting accounts of what brought law enforcement to the event that night— no complaints remain in the official police file on the raid. Newspaper coverage at the time made mention of a gas station attendant out for a walk with a friend, a detective at the Cologne police department who saw people entering a closed subway station. Upon further investigation, they found a screening underway of “shitting and pissing” (the films of Austrian artist Otto Mühl). As a result the police descended on the event. According to later historical descriptions, however, it was concerned parents who had called into the station, worried that their fifteen-year-old son had gone missing from an event at the nearby Volkshochschule. Upon looking for him the couple came upon this event screening illicit materials in the subway station where, though they did not locate their son, they purportedly saw minors.24 It has also been suggested that the police intervention was actually initiated by “one of the most influential art dealers in Cologne as an assault against city councilman [Kurt] Hackenberg …

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aimed at damaging his reputation because the Kunstmarkt [Art Cologne] was seen as a competitor to the established craft-based art market of Cologne.”25 XSCREEN was targeted as a means to this end, mobilizing the “porn panic” across the FRG to cast suspicion onto what might be happening at those underground nightly screenings and the art fair sponsoring them. The prevailing panic could have made such a claim not only believable but urgent. Regardless of what precipitated the raid, the spatial literalization of the underground in the subway station and its spilling over into the streets during a police raid must have been quite a jarring scene: hundreds of bodies pouring onto the street from a closed subway station during the night. The triangulation of audience arena, stage/screen, and press box was massively realigned. Those gathered had physically moved down under the city, electing to participate in order to get away from the FRG’s veneer of civil society. In so doing they openly acted in opposition to normative West German culture, which went to great pains to distance the state from the lascivious preceding decades and to appear reconciled with its Nazi past. The threat of opposition to these official tactics of distancing was too risky, and “Underground Explosion” attendees were hastily shuttled back up to the surface— reconfined to the veneer—by police order. The effects of this immersion and subsequent overflow were felt well beyond the subway station, exposing rifts in both the state’s and the commercial market’s support of experimental film. Though no one was found to be either underage or criminal, tickets were issued and charges were filed (which were abruptly dropped a year later). For undisclosed reasons, the next morning the subway station was closed. “Underground Explosion” came to an apparent end. Despite the venue closure, convening continued outside of the XSCREEN’s programming. The next night at least fifty people showed up at the subway station entrance in a spontaneously generated protest action that drew together different segments from the city’s leftist political groups.26 The demonstration resulted in physical confrontations between protestors and police. This in turn drew the attention of the Association of Progressive German Art Dealers, which denounced the repressive actions of the city’s law enforcement.27 As events unfolded with police and protestors, the gallerists joined in intermittently. On day five, Friday, the fair opened in the morning, but booths were closed by the afternoon because, as gallerist Otto van de Loo (head of the progressive art gallerist’s association) stated, “This police action was not directed exclusively against XSCREEN, but against the progressive art in general and the art fair in particular as a forum for this progressive art.”28 Despite calls to shut down the art fair in solidarity and even to move the event to another city, the gallery booths by Saturday morning were opened again; record attendance at the fair persuaded the gallerists to stay. Likewise the support of the state—or at least the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs—was also fleeting. In the wake of the protests SPD city council member Kurt Hackenberg defended the police censorship. Hackenberg had initially supported the studio and sponsored its invitation to the fair (and would continue to support XSCREEN’s work after 1968), but with his political career possibly at risk, he now denounced the indecency of the films that had been screened: The action of the police is absolutely okay! The permanent cultural revolution adamantly demands to be productive creativity. Efficient productive creativity [in the service of] progress [however] is only in: science, medicine, and engineering. Legitimate also is sociology, if it brings with it realizable proposals for the permanent improvement of the form of human society. Man distinguishes himself from mammals only through his creative ability to reason, not through sexual organs. We do not want to be animals, therefore we do not conduct ourselves in carnal respects. … In all states on earth, like the Soviet Union, the USA, China, India, and so forth, individuals who behave as foul animals would be treated as such.29

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Hackenberg’s public statement reveals the prevailing conservative sexual politics of the state and much more. The specter of Nazi ideology in his words (e.g., the language of human improvement) is palpable. Respectability—and humanity itself—were tied to scientific knowledge and rationality, progress connected to concrete propositions for change. Scientific research and possibly some work in the social sciences could support this, but art and aesthetics had no place in such matters. This approach to knowledge and progress, he concluded, was a guiding force in the FRG as in other important states on the international stage (to which, one could infer, the FRG should be compared), including both the United States and the Soviet Union. Gesturing at a supposed morality that transcended even the ideological and organizational divides of Cold War politics, the West German politician made clear that the city’s support of experimental art had little to do with political commitments. The city’s attempt to brand itself as a center of art and experimentation backfired. Fliers were distributed, lines were drawn, and political watchdog groups of state censorship quickly got involved. Hundreds, if not thousands, showed up outside Cologne’s main police station with signs demanding the resignation of the SPD political officials who supported police terror (Figure 4.2). Some demonstrators even stormed the city’s opera house, taking the stage in protest. Where XSCREEN had just a few months earlier been met by disapproval from activists concerned with the political complicity of experimental filmmaking, here they became

FIGURE 4.2 Benno Josef Wiersch (Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger staff photographer), Protesters at the “Underground Explosion” anti-censorship demonstration, Cologne Police Station. Kölner StadtAnzeiger, October 21, 1968. Reprinted in XSCREEN: Materialien über den Underground-Film, 1971.

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what film historian Randall Halle has called “a Lefitist cause cèlèbre.”30 The convening found itself at the center of political battles happening in the streets, which ranged from imperial wars abroad to representations of sex and sexuality domestically. After the projection booth at “Underground Explosion” was dismantled and the film canisters confiscated, images associated with the event continued to show crowds of people crammed together in spaces like the police station plaza or the theater stage—spaces of dissent that were resolutely outside of official forums like those being created during the lunch sessions within the art fair following its reopening. The confrontational situation stretched the boundaries of audience, screen/stage, and media relationships, as it also tested the limits of state and commercial institutional provision. Sometimes XSCREEN accepted the support of the state and/or the commercial art market, and other times, like this one, they relied on the backing of New Left student groups and leftist organizations. They formed contradictory and explosive sets of alliances, indeed. Such a convening—in the subway station and later in the streets—was possible because of XSCREEN’s by-any-means-necessary approach, and its willingness to engage simultaneously in contradictory alliances—with the state, the art market, and the radical Left. XSCREEN gained support from one arm of the state, the city council, which afforded it the material means by which to produce the Underground Explosion convening and provided legibility for the studio within the art fair context. It was through another arm of the state, law enforcement, and its counterpoint of activism that XSCREEN gained public visibility for programs of experimental art. The state’s international vision for itself as a culturally open democratic nation ran headlong into its highly contested national interests in regulating access to sex and sexuality. Maneuvering in the narrow openings between these interests, the studio maintained its commitment to an anti-censorship position. Such an orientation to the underground also hit limits though. At the same time the XSCREEN program faced censorship by the state, it was the state that enlisted participation of the studio in the art fair to raise the cultural prestige of the event. This contradictory situation seemed to pit legibility—interpolation into a sustainable economic structure—against visibility—representation within a media landscape. In such a situation the call for visibility was disaggregated from legibility. Yes, the studio’s programming strategy represented, or made visible, its complex sets of negations— not fascist, not state socialist, not quite liberal democratic, not commercial film, not political film, and now not visual art project. It remained, however, illegible within the fair’s market structure, which was organized around an interest in sales, not solidarity struggles. As Hein has since recounted, XSCREEN was caught in a paradox: in the interest of visibility, it was unable to totally join the protestors’ demands to shut down the fair; it was also unable to totally join the gallerists in their request for the fair to go on.31

Conclusions It was the commitment to anti-censorship that formed the core of the XSCREEN Studio’s critical-political project, leading them to a non-nation-state-based economic vision of circulation. The legal situations that erupted at events like “Underground Explosion” exemplify the complicated and convoluted ways in which accusations of “obscenity” were instrumentally mobilized in the service of the state’s political and commercial “democratic” interests. The tensions between state censorship of underground cinema, which accompanied reconstruction of the terms of national identity, and global presentations of support, which were aimed at strengthening West Germany’s international face and its relations with other nations (from Poland to the United States), are the deep legacies of the Cold War’s soft

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power tactics in the European art circuit. Such tensions remain at the center of what it means today to perform cultural openness. It was in the cracks opened up by these tensions—cracks occupied by events like “Underground Explosion”—that different means of distribution and, by extension, configurations of social relations were imagined and, even if only momentarily, brought into practice. The story of XSCREEN and its negotiations of “art” and “obscenity” should serve today as a timely reminder that sometimes both imagining and practicing critique and politics differently—in the alongsides and the in betweens—are possible.

Notes 1 Peter Weibel, interviewed by author, June 15, 2017. 2 Elizabeth Heineman, Before Porn Was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 27–60. 3 Uta Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 31–70. 4 Linda Williams, Hardcore: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 93–119. 5 Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels, 106–36. 6 For more on the Oberhausen Manifesto and its effects, see Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989). 7 Box 101, folder 3–6, Otto Mühl Papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2011.M.38). 8 “Kölner Studio für den unabhängigen Film.” Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Archiv der Avantgarden, C 1/Film Archiv Birgit und Wilhelm Hein 20. 9 “Cologne Studio for Independent Film.” 10 “Cologne Studio for Independent Film.” 11 Phrase taken from Birgit Hein’s description of XSCREEN’s political position as stated in conversation with author, April 17, 2017. 12 Hein, conversation with author, January 16, 2017. 13 Hein, conversation with author, July 21, 2019. 14 Birgit Hein, “Film in Underground,” reprinted and translated in Film als Idee: Birgit Hein’s Texts on Art and Film, ed. and trans. Nanna Heidenreich (Berlin: Vorwerk Verlag, 2016), 236; italics added. 15 Hein, “Film in Underground,” 259. 16 “Foyer Fürore: Fascists Taunt Reds” in OzNews: International Film Festival Supplement, October 30, 1970. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Archiv der Avantgarden, C 1/Film Archiv Birgit und Wilhelm Hein 14. 17 Hein, conversation with author, January 16, 2017. 18 See “Kunstmarkt Köln 1967,” Artblog Cologne, April 7, 2016, https://www.artblogcologne.com/ en/from-zadik-kunstmarkt-koeln-67/; and Günter Herzog, “A History of the First Modern Art Fair: 1967–1969.” https://www.artcologne.com/fair/art-cologne/geschichte_der_art/. 19 Enno Stahl, “‘Kulturkampf’ in Köln. Die XSCREEN-Affäre 1968,” Geschichte im Westen 22 (2007): 177–200. http://www.brauweiler-kreis.de/wp-content/uploads/GiW/GiW2007/ GiW_2007_STAHL_KULTURKAMPF.pdf 20 See the XSCREEN’s post-event report in XSCREEN: Materialen über den Underground-film, ed. Wilhelm Hein, Birgit Hein, Christian Michelis, and Rolf Wiest (Köln: Phaidon, 1971), 116.

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21 Stahl, “‘Kulturkampf’ in Köln.” 22 Stahl, “‘Kulturkampf’ in Köln.” 23 Police report reproduced in XSCREEN: Materialen über den Underground-film, 117; translated by author. 24 Stahl, “‘Kulturkampf’ in Köln.” 25 Gabriele Jutz and Birgit Hein, “Interview: Gabriele Jutz with Birgit Hein,” in X-Screen: Film Installations and Actions in the 1960s and 1970s, ed. Matthias Michalka and Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (Köln: Walther König, 2004), 121. 26 Wilfried Reichart, “Neue Wege des Films: XSCREEN,” in Köln 68! Protest, Pop, Provokation, ed. Michaela Keim and Stefan Lewejohann (Mainz am Rhein, Germany: Nünnerich-Asmus Verlag & Media GmbH, 2018), 352–9. 27 Stahl, “‘Kulturkampf’ in Köln,” translated by author. 28 Otto van de Loo, “Protokoll einer Polizeiaktion gegen die progressive Kunst,” in XSCREEN: Materialen über den Underground-film, 116. 29 Transcription of Kurt Hackenberg’s public statement in XSCREEN: Materialen über den Underground-film, 115. 30 Randall Halle, “Xscreen1968: Material Film Aesthetics and Radical Cinema Politics,” A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 10, no. 1 (2017): 11. 31 Birgit Hein, conversation with author, July 16, 2019.

Bibliography Elsaesser, Thomas. New German Cinema: A History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Halle, Randall. “Xscreen1968: Material Film Aesthetics and Radical Cinema Politics,” A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 10, no. 1 (2017): 10–25. Hein, Birgit. Film als Idee: Birgit Heins Texte zu Film/Kunst. Edited and translated by Nanna Heidenreich, Heike Klippel, and Florian Krautkrämer. Berlin: VorwerkVerlag, 2016. Hein, Wilhelm, Birgit Hein, Christian Michelis, and Rolf Wiest, eds. XSCREEN: Materialien über den Underground-film. Köln: Phaidon, 1971. Heineman, Elizabeth. Before Porn Was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Hoffmann, Hilmar, and Walter Schobert, eds. W + B Hein: Dokumente, 1967–1985 Fotos, Briefe, Texte. Frankfurt am Main: Deutsches Filmmuseum, 1985. Michalka, Matthias, and Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, eds. X-Screen: Film Installations and Actions in the 1960s and 1970s. Köln: Walther König, 2004. Poiger, Uta. Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

5 Impossible to Image: Art and Sexual Violence, 1975–79 Angelique Szymanek

In an article published in a 1983 issue of The New Art Examiner titled “Chicago and Feminism: An Uneasy Alliance,” Joyce Fernandes interviewed arts professionals with various perspectives on the rise of feminism in the city throughout the 1970s. A common point of orientation for each of them was the establishment of two cooperative galleries in 1973, A.R.C. and Artemisia. These spaces were centers for growing dialogues concerning the role of women in the arts and hosts to various feminist exhibitions and events including the controversial Rape Performance (1979). In her contribution to Fernandes’s article Nancy Forest-Brown noted what she believed to be the failure of that performance: “I don’t feel the piece was successful. It wasn’t positive and just showed another instance of a woman being victimized. The woman should have ‘won.’”1 Many shared Brown’s sentiment, and the discourse the performance opened up serves as a productive metric by which to gauge the expectations of feminist art at that time. Rape Performance by Artemisia cofounder Joy Poe was staged at the opening of her exhibition Ring True Taboo on May 4, 1979. The performance commenced when a man approached Poe while she was mingling with guests at the event, proceeded to throw her to the floor, then sexually assaulted her while attendees looked on. Despite its brevity and its housing within the context of a women’s cooperative gallery that frequently highlighted issues such as domestic violence, pornography, and reproductive rights, the work shocked many. The effects of the piece on the feminist art community and the artist were profound and lasting. Rape Performance was a vital contribution to the rise of feminist art addressing sexual violence in the United States throughout the 1970s, a history that includes numerous individual and collaborative works by Suzanne Lacy, Leslie Labowitz, and Ana Mendieta, among others. The performance, however, is significant not just for its content but also for the ways its critical reception boldly traced the parameters of what was possible for artists when engaging the subject of sexual violence. Despite her role as a pioneering figure within the 1970s feminist art world in Chicago, Poe’s life’s work has been distilled to those few minutes at the close of the decade, which, when addressed, rarely garner more than a passing and often dismissive mention. Rape Performance has stood as an exemplar of feminist art gone wrong.

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The marginalization of the performance and the artist from art historical narratives, which foregrounds the limits of what was and remains image-able when it comes to sexual violence, is a more productive line of inquiry than debates about whether the approach taken was “good” or “bad.” This essay aims to expand and shift the limited discourse on this contentious work through a contextualizing of its conditions of visibility or, as is the case, invisibility. The conditions that defined an artist’s ability to address issues regarding the female body were undergoing particularly volatile articulation in the United States during the period with which this essay is concerned, 1975–9. The feminist movement at large had generated debates among artists regarding the merits and limitations of depicting the body, an often divisive issue that had a corollary by the close of the decade in the so-called pornography wars. At the heart of these debates lay questions regarding what sorts of images are feminist and which are not. How does an artwork about sexual violence both capture the trauma of that event while avoiding the risk of making spectacle or fetish of the violated body? In this essay censorship is taken up less as it appears in the form of discrete acts of removal, suppression, or redaction, but rather as a mode of producing boundaries and conditions of possibility for the visibility of a particular experience as valid or truthful. In this instance the rather public criticism of Poe also foregrounded questions concerning what kinds of acts fall within the realm of art and which, perhaps, are always already outside of it. In her effort to engage with rape Poe’s unapologetically blunt presentation violated the terms under which sexual violence could be represented even as they were being contested within the realms of art, media culture, and pornography.

“Not the Kind of Work People Censor” Artemisia Gallery was one of numerous woman-owned and operated cooperative art spaces to open in the United States in the 1970s, including the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles (1973), Hera Gallery in Rhode Island (1974), and WARM Gallery in Minnesota (1976). Having recently visited the newly founded A.I.R. Gallery in New York City, then School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) student Joy Poe began an initiative to open a similar space in downtown Chicago. After procuring support and interest from Barbara Grad, Phyllis MacDonald, Emily Pinkowski, and Margaret Wharton, the process of generating a membership base commenced through interviews and studio visits with more than one hundred women. By September 1973 Artemisia opened its doors on East Ontario Street in what Joanna Gardner-Huggett has described as an important bid for placing women at the center of the contemporary art world in Chicago.2 Poe had entered graduate school at SAIC in 1972, pursuing her arts education after a divorce and while raising her two young daughters.3 Completing her MFA in 1974, Poe was still a student while serving as president of Artemisia Gallery and the Artemisia Fund. The responsibilities for Poe and fellow members were great and many were learning the fundamentals of gallery labor for the first time, including painting walls, installing art, drafting press releases, and fundraising. By 1978 the gallery had relocated to a more accommodating space, instituted a speaker’s program, and held workshops led by pioneering women critics, historians, curators, and artists from around the country, including Judy Chicago, Ruth Iskin, Lucy Lippard, and Arlene Raven. Poe’s own workshops were inspired by her attendance at one of the Feminist Educator’s Workshops held at the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles. The relationships forged between women in Chicago and those working in New York City and Southern California illustrate an exchange of ideas that, as Gardner-Huggett has foregrounded in her scholarship on Artemisia, disrupts the East Coast versus West Coast

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relationship that has subtended most histories addressing the production of feminist art in the United States during the 1970s.4 Poe and other members were no strangers to censorship since the gallery often exhibited work that would have likely not been shown elsewhere due to its perceived feminist or political agenda. This was most evident when they managed to display their work outside of Artemisia. In 1976, for example, when Poe’s Holy Family Fan (1975) was exhibited in the AHR Civic Center and Public Museum in Wisconsin, then director Joseph Hutchinson refused to make particular images within that piece visible to the public. Holy Family Fan, alternatively titled Perversion Fan, consists of ten foam-board panels, each with a Catholic prayer card affixed to one side. The reverse sides of the panels, however, feature overtly erotic images sourced from popular magazines, making material the duality of the sacred and the profane (Figure 5.1). Holy Family/Perversion Fan is one among a series of similar objects wherein the artist plays with the multiple meanings of the word “fan” as it refers both to the object and the identity of one who admires or adores another. The would-be holder of Poe’s fan is implicated in the relation this suggests between the more socially acceptable forms of worship associated with the Christian faith and those perceived as socially transgressive, amoral, or pornographic. Holy Family/Perversion Fan foregrounds the mutually constitutive relation between the meanings associated with the images on each side, a binary that serves to produce and reinforce that which is deemed taboo, including rape. In 1977, at an Artemisia Gallery exhibition hosted at the John Hancock Center in downtown Chicago, work by Jane Wenger was also subject to censorship. A series of eight

FIGURE 5.1  Joy Poe, Holy Family/Perversion Fan, 1975, wood panels. Courtesy of Artemisia Gallery Records, Ryerson and Burnham Archives, Art Institute of Chicago.

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black-and-white photographs of the artist’s nude body were deemed offensive, “particularly,” as the center’s public relations director explained, “to children who are residents in the center or visitors in the observatory and to other tenant areas.”5 Although the center offered to allow Wenger to replace the offending photographs with alternative images, the artist refused, describing the censorship as “ridiculous” and her photographs as “not the kind of work people censor.”6 Artemisia Gallery agreed and the entire show was removed upon the center’s refusal to allow the photographs to remain. In defense of the work, Artemisia Gallery coordinator Elaine King pointed to the hypocrisy of the center’s “prudish” response to the images given the establishment’s sale of magazines such as Playboy. “If they can accept that,” she lamented, “why can’t they accept a higher level of art experience?”7 The defense of Wenger’s photographs of her nude body was predicated upon a shared sociocultural understanding of the “kinds of work” worth censoring as well as the distinction between “high” and “low” culture. Given that popular magazines trafficking in soft-core pornography and the art under debate share the same subject––the female nude––the legibility of one as objectionable and the other as worthy of admiration becomes a matter of considering form, authorship, context, and presumptions of agency or intent, the latter of which are precarious grounds upon which to debate censorship. Perhaps most telling, however, is Artemisia Gallery’s defense of its exhibition and the artists on precisely these terms. When considered in relation to the response Poe would receive for her Rape Performance just three years later, it becomes clear precisely what “kinds” of work the gallery did, in fact, deem censorable. In May 1979 an exhibition of artwork by Poe and Barbara Housekeeper opened at Artemisia Gallery. Poe explained that Ring True Taboo represented “the culmination of two years of thought and re-evaluation of goals” resulting in “works that reflect my continuing interest in social concerns.”8 Among those social concerns were substance abuse, vegetarianism, and pacifism as well as those that might be more readily associated with the exhibition title, including abortion, pornography, domestic abuse, and rape. The variety in content was met by a range of mediums, including collage, photographs, drawings, and sculpture. Although several of the pieces exhibited in Ring True Taboo have since been destroyed, the large installation piece, A Matter of Degree, exists in its documentation. The fifteen-byten-foot mixed-media collage included magazine and newspaper clippings, in many cases full pages that appear to have been torn or cut from their sources and then pinned to the gallery wall (Plate 8). In a critical review of the exhibition Joanna Frueh noted that the artist “stabbed the piece with butcher knives,” amplifying the violence of the piece.9 In this case the choice of an object used both as a weapon and as a tool for butchering animals for human consumption points to the ideological collapse of animal and female flesh that undergirds the abuse, rape, and murder of women described in the images and texts that populate the collage. The installation appears like a bulletin board of announcements or advertisements of the kind one might see in a café or wrapped around a telephone pole on a well-traversed city street. The collage aesthetic of A Matter of Degree takes up that which can be readily associated with public space, a gesture reinforced by the materials themselves as well as the handwritten text at the top and bottom of the wall. The title of the piece is placed prominently above the collaged elements, its letters larger than the others, but like the rest rendered in capitals in an uneven free-handed gesture reminiscent of graffiti, a further reference to the aesthetics of public space. Reading left to right, the phrases “wolf whistles,” “beating,” “assault,” “rape,” and “torture” appear beneath the title. The words narrate, in a series of progressions, some of the various “degrees” of sexual violation illustrated in the images and text collaged between this partial textual frame. As though to explicate the verbal

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modes through which these degrees of physical violence are frequently mediated, “threats,” “coercion,” and “intimidation” are found just above where the wall meets the floor with the word “murder,” the implied last stop in this progression, standing alone at the bottom right. The urgency and agitation expressed through the hand-painted words stand in contrast to much of the commercially printed text and images, which include female bodies in various stages of undress and distress. The references to media culture in A Matter of Degree pull together two visual regimes often held apart: popular culture and the art world. Furthermore, the presence of commercial images of gendered violence alongside newspaper clippings documenting rape, abuse, and murder of “real” women challenges the perception of these as distinct experiences, weaving them into a kind of cause-and-effect narrative that makes distancing oneself from the subject difficult. Whether or not viewers have experienced the forms of violence spelled out by Poe’s hand, as consumers of imagery that so often normalizes or sensationalizes female sexual trauma, all are implicated in the hetero-misogyny of what Nicola Gavey aptly calls the “cultural scaffolding” of rape. This scaffolding, Gavey describes, is constructed of the “discourses of sex and gender that produce forms of heterosex that set up the preconditions for rape—women’s passive acquiescing (a)sexuality and men’s forthright, urgent pursuit of ‘sexual’ release.”10 Central to her theorization is the premise that these discourses obscure the distinction between “what is rape and what is just sex,” an ambiguity that is particularly provocative when considered in relation to feminist artists’ attempts to engage with rape’s image.11 Critically examining the role of media culture in the eroticizing of sexual violence was central to the work of a number of feminist artists in the 1970s, including the collaborative practices of Leslie Labowitz and Suzanne Lacy. In Record Companies Drag Their Feet (1977) Labowitz organized a performance in conjunction with the organization Women Against Violence Against Women that took place under a billboard on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Through a parody of record company executives, the performance drew explicit connections between the kind of images exemplified by the promotional Kiss billboard under which they stood and statistics enumerating a 48 percent increase in the number of reported rapes between 1970 and 1975. The critique of media representations of women and their corollaries in lived experience is similarly at work in A Matter of Degree. What remains unique to Labowitz’s approach is her use of media as the site through which her artistic interventions are made visible. Earlier in the same year Labowitz and Lacy’s In Mourning and in Rage responded to media coverage of a series of rape-murders occurring in Los Angeles. The sensationalizing of the killings was often amplified by the exploitation of the victims whose brutalized corpses were imaged in magazines, newspapers, and television broadcasts worldwide. The coverage, as the artists recall, struck fear in the women of Los Angeles, who were inundated with warnings against walking alone at night, leaving doors or windows unlocked, and wearing “provocative” clothing. As is often the case in highly publicized incidents of sexual murder, the annunciation of rape mythology was acute. The performance was designed to emulate the format of a press conference, part of a strategy Labowitz later laid out in the essay “Feminist Artists: Developing a Media Strategy for the Movement.”12 The strategic use of media conventions subverted the ways in which these modes of communication normatively produce and reproduce rather than challenge rape culture. Record Companies Drag Their Feet, In Mourning and in Rage, and a third collaborative project organized by Lacy and Labowitz in 1977, Three Weeks in May, constitute a body of feminist performance that is distinct not only in terms of its content but also in the ways the performances simultaneously critique and infiltrate media culture. In the various components of each, members of the public were offered information regarding the

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prevalence of rape, where to find support, self-defense workshops, and other resources. The relative success of Lacy and Labowitz’s projects, particularly within feminist communities, was not, of course, shared among all artists who engaged with the subject of rape. The activist community-engaged imperatives of their work from this period were and continue to be held up as exemplars of feminist art practices that address the issue. It bears noting, however, that, despite the conceptual and formal innovations of the projects, attention has focused disproportionately on the content of the work. Lacy and Labowitz are thereby made exceptional, singled out as artists who were among the first to address rape in their art rather than as formative figures within the development of performance and/or public art. Poe was certainly well aware of Record Companies Drag Their Feet, In Mourning and in Rage, and Three Weeks in May, all of which appeared in the exhibition Both Sides Now, guest curated by Lucy Lippard at Artemisia Gallery just three months prior to the opening of Ring True Taboo. A series of photographs documented the events that constituted each performance as well as other collaborative works by Lacy and Labowitz that addressed sexual violence, such as From Reverence to Rape to Respect (1978, with Kathy Kauffman and Claudine King) and Take Back the Night (1978). What was absent from the many photographs on exhibit, however, was an image of rape. In Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography the author includes a chapter titled “Has Anyone Ever Seen a Photograph of Rape?” Anti-rape discourse in the seventies, she claims, had “extraordinary conditions of visibility.”13 Pointing to the lack of imagery in the vast majority if not all of the publications on rape from the period, Azoulay asserts, “Everybody’s talking about it, talking about its images as if they were here in front of us— present before the gaze—but the images are absent. … This systematic absence is indicative of a policy that can best be characterized by the dictum ‘Do not Show.’”14 In making visible that which was otherwise largely absent––that rape is a violent crime rather than a heroic act or a titillating fantasy––Rape Performance violated the “Do not Show” mandate, a transgression for which Poe has paid greatly both personally and professionally.

Rape Performance In a text published in High Performance months after the event, Poe describes her desire to create a performance that she believed would extend the critiques and challenges posed by A Matter of Degree and other works in Ring True Taboo. “I decided,” she wrote, “that the strongest way to dramatize the horror of rape and create an awareness in the public would be to present a performance of an actual rape.”15 Rape Performance was planned in collaboration with the artist’s friend Peter Panek, who agreed to play the part of the “rapist,” as well as fellowartist and friend Nancy Forest-Brown, who documented the event on video. Dennis Shapiro also captured moments of the two-minute and seventeen-second performance in a series of black-and-white photographs (Figure 5.2). Panek was the only participant who was aware of precisely when the performance would commence, having agreed to Poe’s request that he enter Artemisia Gallery during the opening reception and proceed to “rape” her in front of the attendees. She didn’t want to know the exact timing so as to maintain an element of fear and shock or, as she explained, to “present it like it would happen on the street.”16 The uneasiness Poe recalled feeling in anticipation of the “attack” was a type of paranoia that she likened to the persisting sense of fear many women experience when simply being alone in public. Poe had arranged for security to be present in case viewers attempted to intervene. She stated in an interview conducted shortly after the event that “the protection wasn’t for me; it was for him.”17 Poe notes that one woman did, in fact, attempt to intervene and managed

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FIGURE 5.2  Joy Poe, Rape Performance, 1979, Artemisia Gallery, Chicago, IL. Courtesy of Artemisia Gallery Records, Ryerson and Burnham Archives, Art Institute of Chicago.

to pull Panek’s hair before being quickly stopped by one of the men planted by the artist for just such a purpose. For the most part, however, the audience remained passive and Poe even describes the semicircle of spectators that formed around the two as they struggled on the gallery floor. Whether the approximately one hundred people who witnessed the performance that night were aware that what they were witnessing was “real” is of course nearly impossible to answer definitively. While Poe recalls hearing a man shout, “I think it’s real,” other attendees suggest that many were operating on the assumption that it was staged. At the conclusion of the performance, Panek exited the gallery, and a piece of paper was distributed stating “You have just witnessed an art performance about rape.” This curt explanation was accompanied by the oft-cited quotation from artist Honoré Daumier: “One must be in one’s time.” Rape Performance was both in and out of step with its time. In making a work of art about rape, Poe was among the growing pool of American feminist artists who were taking on the subject. The violent and confrontational nature of the event, moreover, was of a type of performance that had been flourishing in the United States since the start of the decade. The approach, which frequently involved artists inflicting harm upon their bodies, is a tactic that Kathy O’Dell named “masochistic performance.”18 The use of violence was intended to disrupt the passivity of the viewer and, particularly when wielded by women, to engage with the subjectivity and objectivity of the body. While male performance artists such as Chris Burden and Vito Acconci have been canonized within the history of art, women engaged with similar modes of violent performance were frequently dismissed as narcissists and have remained either marginalized or positioned as reactionary in relation to their male counterparts.

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In what has become an emblem of this moment in North American performance art history, Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971) consisted of the artist instructing a friend to shoot him with a.22 rifle in front of an audience of ten people who were invited to F Space Gallery in Santa Ana, California. The premise, much like that of Rape Performance, was that the artist authorized an act of violence to be perpetrated against himself by someone else within the space of an art gallery. As Frazer Ward describes, Burden’s performance generated a community of viewers forged through their shared role as witnesses. In their inaction in the face of violence, however, Ward argues that the fragile if not unattainable ideal notions of community were made visible.19 The ways members of a public fail to intervene is as much a part of many masochistic performance works as is the act of violence itself, an approach to positioning viewers as collaborators within a performance that is distinct from what art historians such as Vivien Green Fryd, Sharon Irish, and Meiling Chen have described as the “transformative” empathetic modalities that operate in Lacy and Labowitz’s projects from the period.20 The ways feminist art addressing sexual violence calls upon the viewer to witness, to empathize, to remember, and/or to be receptive to the pedagogical imperatives of the art are crucial and undeniable effects of these collaborative works. Focusing on these notions alone, however, risks reducing if not eradicating the feminist potential in art that points to the moments when such calls to empathetic activist spectatorship fail. To this end Ana Mendieta’s Untitled (Rape Scene) (1973), described by the artist as a violent tableau, shares far more in common with Poe’s approach to the subject than Lacy and Labowitz’s. Mendieta staged the aftermath of a rape in her apartment in Iowa City, Iowa, where she was a student at the time. The artist used the description of the rape-murder of a fellow Iowa University student as it was detailed in local newspapers to recreate the crime scene inside her apartment, complete with scattered dish shards, a discarded wire hanger, and blood in the toilet bowl. Posed as the victim, Mendieta’s body was bent over a table to which her wrists were tied with rope. Pools of blood accumulated on the table at her head, streamed down her bare backside and legs, smeared across the exposed underwear twisted around her ankles, then collected at her feet. The viewers of the work had been invited to the artist’s apartment that night where, upon arrival, they found the door to the apartment ajar and encountered the horrific tableau just beyond its threshold. Whether the invitees were aware of what Mendieta had staged before arriving has become subject to much speculation. Like Poe’s Rape Performance, however, one can assert with some level of certainty that they were likely not accustomed to encountering the subject of rape in this manner. The proximity to the brutalized body in both performances shatters the distance necessary to maintain the conditions of voyeuristic pleasure.21 Interestingly, however, Untitled (Rape Scene) did not spark the outrage Poe’s work did. Rather, Mendieta’s subsequent work has been comparatively well received, although the violent tableaux remain largely in the shadow of her Silueta Series (1973–8) and Rupestrian Sculptures (1981–3). The potential reasons for this disparity include, no doubt, the fact that one was staged within the confines of the artist’s apartment with limited viewership, while Rape Performance occurred during a dual-artist opening in a public space with far less certainty in terms of who may have been in attendance. In both cases, however, accusations of having traumatized their viewers placed each of these artists seemingly in opposition to their contemporaries. At issue in both Mendieta and Poe’s performances is the question of consent. Many of the objections to both were grounded in lack of consent on the part of the viewers to participate in the piece. This of course was intended to parallel the actual event of rape, defined as it is by absence of consent. Member of Artemisia and fellow artist Gail Simpson called Poe’s

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piece “back-ward and anti-feminist,” accusing Poe of “violating the rights” of those with whom she shared the space that night.22 Consent, as a contractual relationship between two parties, is predicated on the assumption that those entering into an agreement or exchange are doing so of their free will as subjects under the law. Much scholarship has been devoted to interrogating the mythology of consent under liberal democracy. In her eponymous 1980 essay, “Women and Consent,” Carole Pateman critiqued the ways that social contract theory had failed to acknowledge gender inequities that always already foreclosed the possibility for consensual transactions, founded as they are on presumptions of agency. She notes the paradoxical position of women who are simultaneously unable to consent, as freedom and equality are the necessary preconditions for full citizenship under liberal democracy, while also presented as “always consenting.” “Their explicit non-consent,” she continues, “has been treated as irrelevant or has been reinterpreted as ‘consent.’”23 Reading Pateman’s decadesold essay today, the degree to which her analysis of legal consent in regard to rape remains relevant is alarming. Tracing the history of consent in Western legal traditions as inextricable from that of the transatlantic slave trade, Saidiya Hartman articulates its acutely racialized production.24 Bodies, through their continued status as subhuman or nonhuman under the neoliberal democratic state, are paradoxically unable to consent and always already consenting. If consent remains visually illegible, then rape, as defined by the ability to locate consent, is an event that can’t be imaged. As historian Pamela Haag has noted, “We don’t know what consent would look like because ‘it’ hasn’t existed in ideal form and therefore hasn’t existed at all.”25 Considering the centrality of consent in the legal definition of rape and, by extension, broader sociocultural understandings of sexual violence, the role consent has played in structuring the conditions of visibility for perpetrators and victims provides another avenue through which one might better understand the persistence of rape culture as well as the conundrum of attempting to image it from a feminist perspective. Whether or not one believes that this piece was an effective feminist critique, Rape Performance raises many of the most controversial ethical questions surrounding images of rape.

“Do Not Show” In a formative essay, “What Is Female Imagery?” Lucy Lippard provoked a series of responses to the question its title posed in 1975. Lippard stated the risk involved in women artists taking up their own bodies as subject and/or material: “A woman using her own face and body has a right to do what she will with them, but it is a subtle abyss that separates men’s use of women for sexual titillation from women’s use of women to expose that insult.”26 Naming performance artist Carolee Schneemann as an example, Lippard’s fear of co-optation was shared by a number of other feminist scholars. Art historians Griselda Pollock and Jill Dolan, for example, went so far as to condemn the use of the female nude. “The female body is not reducible to a sign free of connotation,” Dolan wrote. “Women always bear the mark and meaning of their sex that inscribes them within a cultural hierarchy.”27 In an interview conducted in 1982 Mary Kelly, a frequently cited artist within the debate, stated: [W]hen an image of a woman is used in a work of art, that is, when her body or person are given as signifier, it becomes extremely problematic. Most women artists who have presented themselves in some way, visibly, in the work have been unable to find the kind of distancing devices which would cut across the predominant representations of woman as object of the look, or question the notion of femininity as pre-given entity.28

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The resistance to imaging the body exemplified in Kelly’s work responds to the comparatively obsessive referencing of it that typified much of the art associated with the feminist art programs in Southern California throughout the 1970s. In their 1973 essay “Female Imagery” Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro laid out a defense for what was quickly dubbed cunt art or core imagery: “To be a woman is to be an object of contempt, and the vagina, stamp of femaleness, is devalued.” “The woman artist, seeing herself as loathed,” they continued, “takes that very mark of her otherness and by asserting it as the hallmark of her iconography, establishes a vehicle by which to state the truth and beauty of her identity.”29 The conundrum for art practitioners was and continues to be navigating the paradoxical conditions under which using the body often provoked critique of essentialism or narcissism. One of the most telling paradoxes of the historic moment within which Rape Performance was created was that it also marks the apex of what is often referred to as the “golden age of pornography,” an industry that has long been founded on heterosexist narratives of violence.30 Just as the anti-rape campaigns spurred on by the feminist movement had gained much ground in regard to generating awareness around the subject, the mainstreaming of heteronormative pornography and its echoes in popular cinema, television, and advertising culture were aggressively rearticulating rape as fantasy, commodity, and even as fashionable, realities addressed in Poe’s A Matter of Degree and Labowitz’s Record Companies Drag Their Feet. Rosemary Betterton has frequently written about feminist artists’ interest in anti-porn activism precisely because, as she writes, many women believed pornography to be “the paradigm for all male representations of the female body.”31 The obvious objection to the industry was and remains for many its reduction of women to “purely sexual objects.” Some critics have even compared the hallmark isolation of female genitalia found in hard-core pornography to the core imagery produced by many feminist artists at the same moment.32 Betterton describes the “anger” of the pornography debates as having created an environment that made it difficult for women to engage in issues of the body and sexuality in their art. “Making images of the female body,” she notes, “was risky business.”33 Members of the feminist community who were spearheading the anti-porn movement, such as Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, did so more or less under the banner of Robin Morgan’s phrase, “Porn is the theory, rape is the practice.”34 Dworkin went so far as to claim that “pornography is used in rape—to plan it, to execute it, to choreograph it, to engender the excitement to commit the act.”35 In 1978 activist group Women Against Pornography (WAP) formed in New York City and its activities, including an antipornography march of more than five thousand people held in Times Square in 1979, were met with widespread support. Some members of the group had been active in Women Against Violence Against Women, the group that collaborated with Lacy and Labowitz on a number of performances.36 By the start of the 1980s WAP was one of the most powerful lobbyists in support of MacKinnon and Dworkin’s Anti-Pornography Civil Rights Ordinance, legislation that proposed that pornography be treated as a legal violation of women’s civil rights. The highly publicized legal proceedings following that campaign furthered the rift between feminists in support of the ordinance and those, such as Lisa Duggan, Kate Ellis, and Carol Vance, who vocalized opposition to what they perceived as a conservative politics of censorship. In the anthology The Feminist Porn Book (2013) the editors summarize some of the prevailing objections to anti-pornography activism as concerns over “WAP’s ill-conceived collusion with a sexually conservative Reagan administration and Christian Right, and their warping of feminist activism into moral hygiene or public decency movement.”37 In the collection of essays titled Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography and Censorship, edited

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by FACT (Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force) (1986), various feminist scholars challenge the collapsing of the categories of rape and pornography and the foreclosing of conversations about women’s desires that it enacts. In her conceptualizing of Rape Performance Poe was operating on an assumption that upon seeing rape viewers would somehow “get it.” In an interview conducted with the artist in 1988 Poe describes the idea for the performance as “one of those illuminating lightbulbs in the head … what I have to do is show them a rape and then they will understand, everyone will know then.”38 This premise failed, of course, but not necessarily because it was bad, immoral, or insensitive art, but because it presupposes that vision is some higher plane of knowledge. Furthermore, it presupposes a visible distinction between violent sex and rape and, in this case, between art or representation and reality. In a discussion about a recent work by Emma Sulkowicz, Ceci N’est Pas un Viol (2015), Emily Apter commented, “In art, there’s some claim to a higher angle of vision, of a multiplicity of angles of vision, that might bring you to the aporia, to the unknowable, but they may also bring you to the critical parameters.”39 Ceci N’est Pas un Viol is a web-based video wherein Sulkowicz and a male collaborator enact what appears to be a restaging of the artist’s rape by a fellow Columbia University student as she recounted it to university officials. Like Poe, Sulkowicz presents sexual violence in a form unmediated by interventionist or activist gestures. The lack of conventional or recognizable feminist framing, however, raised a distinct set of questions about rape culture for both works. Rather than viewing as a form of witness or as empathic, looking at Poe’s Rape Performance or Sulkowicz’s video of a violent sexual encounter in a dorm room engenders an implication of the viewer as a voyeur or inactive spectator to a crime. In both cases the aggressive critiques launched at the artists were founded on their having violated an expectation regarding the way art should engage with the subject of rape and the role of the artist in negotiating the viewer’s relationship to it. Those in support of Poe’s action, Lucy Lippard and Pat Rathje among them, concurred that the piece was successful precisely because it so deeply disturbed its audience. In a letter to the editor of New Art Examiner Rathje wrote: “People are outraged because they had no control over what happened in the performance and their involvement in it. I think this is the point. Poe did not want people to watch a woman being raped; she wanted them to experience the act of rape.”40 Gardner-Huggett notes that these events “raised the question of whether a community could withstand and tolerate complete and open experimentation in art.”41 More acutely, Poe’s work indicated the particular difficulty when it came to addressing sexual violence, especially when the approach asserts some level of accountability or culpability toward the spectator. Prohibiting work on rape on the grounds of its inevitable traumatizing effects, moreover, denies the ubiquity of its image elsewhere. The implication that feminist representations of rape can and must engage with the viewer outside of the practices of looking that shape all other manner of visual culture sets any attempt to do so up for egregious failure. The question of what rape looks like within the context of a culture wherein violence is fundamental to the very construction of heteronormative sex relations is another productive mode of inquiry opened by Poe’s controversial performance. As is made evident by the thousands of hateful comments launched at Sulkowicz on the website where Ceci N’est Pas un Viol is available, the expectation that, as Nancy Forest-Brown lamented of Poe’s work almost thirty years ago, “the woman should have won” remains one of the metrics through which art about rape is deemed sufficiently feminist or even viable as art. What this expectation also reveals of course is the reality of its inverse as it continues to be experienced by feminized subjects living within the persistent logic of rape culture.

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Notes 1 Nancy-Forest Brown, quoted in Joyce Fernandes, “Chicago and Feminism: An Uneasy Alliance,” The New Art Examiner 11 (1983): 14. 2 Joanna Gardner-Huggett, “Artemisia Challenges the Elders: How a Women Artists’ Cooperative Gallery Created a Community for Feminism and Art Made by Women,” in “Feminist Art and Social Movements: Beyond NY/LA,” special issue, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 33, no. 2 (2012): 55. 3 Joy Poe, handwritten note dated May 7, 2014, in Ryerson & Burnham Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago. 4 See Joanna Gardner-Huggett, “The Women Artists’ Cooperative Space as a Site for Social Change: Artemisia Gallery, Chicago (1973–1979),” in “Art, Identity and Social Justice,” special issue, Social Justice 34, no. 1 (107) (2007): 28–43. 5 William Braden, “Show Stripped of Nude Photos,” Chicago Sun-Times, June 4, 1977, 1. 6 Braden, “Show Stripped of Nude Photos,” 1. 7 Braden, “Show Stripped of Nude Photos,” 8. 8 Joy Poe, “Ring True Taboo—a one-person exhibition by Joy Poe,” undated text in Ryerson & Burnham Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago. 9 Joanna Frueh, “Joy Poe,” New Art Examiner 7 (June 1979), 8. 10 Nicola Gavey, Just Sex? The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape (New York: Routledge, 2005), 3. 11 Gavey, Just Sex?, 2. 12 Leslie Labowitz-Starus, “Feminist Artists: Developing a Media Strategy for the Movement,” (1981) in Leaving Art: Writing on Performance, Politics, and Publics, 1974–2007, ed. Suzanne Lacy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 83–91. For more on Lacy and Labowitz’s collaborations, see Angelique Szymanek, “Performing a Public for Rape: The Collaborative Performances of Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz-Starus,” Women’s Art Journal 39, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2018): 32–42. 13 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008), 220. 14 Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 245. 15 Joy Poe, “May 4, 1979, Ring True Taboo,” High Performance: The Performance Art Quarterly #8, vol. 2, no. 4 (Winter 1979–80): 42. 16 “Interview with Joy Poe,” The New Art Examiner 7 (June 1979), 8. 17 “Interview with Joy Poe,” 8. 18 Kathy O’Dell, Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 3–30. 19 Frazer Ward, No Innocent Bystanders: Performance Art and Audience (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 2012), 81–107. 20 See Meiling Cheng, In Other Los Angeleses: Multicentric Performance Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Vivien Green Fryd, “Suzanne Lacy’s Three Weeks in May: Feminist Activist Performance Art as ‘Expanded Public Pedagogy,’” in “Feminist Activist Art,” special issue, NWSA Journal 19, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 23–38; and Sharon Irish, Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 21 For an analysis of Ana Mendieta’s violent tableaux, see Angelique Szymanek, “Bloody Pleasures: Ana Mendieta’s Violent Tableaux,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, no. 4 (Summer 2016): 895–925. 22 Gail Simpson, quoted in Jenni Sorkin, “The Feminist Nomad: The All-Women Group Show,” in WACK! Art and Feminist Revolution, ed. Cornelia Butler and Lisa Gabrielle Mark (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 470.

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23 Carole Pateman, “Women and Consent,” Political Theory 8, no. 2 (1980): 150. 24 See Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 25 Pamela Haag, Consent: Sexual Rights and the Transformation of American Liberalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), xv. 26 Lucy Lippard, “What Is Female Imagery?” (1975), in Lucy Lippard, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (New York: Dutton, 1976), 125. 27 Jill Dolan, “The Dynamics of Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Pornography and Performance,” Theatre Journal 39, no. 2 (May 1987): 160. 28 Mary Kelly and Paul Smith, “No Essential Femininity: A Conversation between Mary Kelly and Paul Smith,” Camera Obscura 5 (March 1985): 152. 29 Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, “Female Imagery,” Womanspace Journal 1 (Summer 1973): 11. 30 For a history of the pornography industry in the United States, see Susanna Paasonen, Kaarina Nikunen, and Laura Saarenmaa, eds., Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2007). 31 Rosemary Betterton, An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body (New York: Routledge, 1996), 10. 32 The plates of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974–9), for example, were frequently described as pornographic. In 1990 charges of obscenity led to a public debate of the project on the floor of the US Senate. For a detailed account, see Jane F. Gerhard, The Dinner Party: Judy Chicago and the Power of Popular Feminism, 1970–2007 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013). 33 Gerhard, The Dinner Party. 34 Gerhard, The Dinner Party. 35 Andrea Dworkin, testimony before the New York Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography in 1986. 36 For more on the formation of WAP and anti-pornography activism in the United States, see Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, eds., In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 37 Tristan Taormino, Constance Penley, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, and Mireille Miller-Young, Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (New York: Feminist Press, 2013), 10. 38 Joy Poe, interview transcribed by Melissa Campos, July 23, 1988, Ryerson & Burnham Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago. 39 Silvia Kolbowski, “What’s Art Got to Do with It? A Conversation about Art and Rape with Emily Apter, Emily Liebert, and Sonia Wilson,” Silvia Kolbowski: Writings on Art, Culture, Politics (blog), October 22, 2015, http://silviakolbowskiblog.com/2015/10/22/whats-art-got-to-do-with-ita-conversation-about-art-and-rape-with-emily-apter-emily-liebert-and-siona-wilson/. 40 Pat Rathje, “Letter to the Editor,” New Art Examiner 7 (June 1979), 9. 41 Gardner-Huggett, “Artemesia Challenges the Elders,” 65.

Bibliography Gardner-Huggett, Joanna. “Artemisia Challenges the Elders: How a Women Artists’ Cooperative Gallery Created a Community for Feminism and Art Made by Women.” In “Feminist Art and Social Movements: Beyond NY/LA.” Special issue, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 33, no. 2 (2012): 55–75. Haag, Pamela. Consent: Sexual Rights and the Transformation of American Liberalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999.

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Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. O’Dell, Kathy. Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Pateman, Carole. “Women and Consent.” Political Theory 8, no. 2 (1980): 149–68. Szymanek, Angelique. “Bloody Pleasures: Ana Mendieta’s Violent Tableaux.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, no. 4 (Summer 2016): 895–925.

6 De-Shaming Shame: A Conversation John Fleck and Kevin Duffy

Introduction The NEA 4 controversy of the 1990s, which included attacks on John Fleck’s performance work, was a critical incident in the struggle for LGBTQ rights. In the 1980s and early 1990s, AIDS, a devastating illness that first struck the gay community, was effectively 100 percent fatal. At the time, I, Kevin Duffy, lived in Chelsea in New York City, one of the hardest hit areas in the country, and I saw its effects firsthand. For years the government’s response to the epidemic was nonexistent, a fact that undoubtedly worsened its spread.1 On October 15, 1982, President Reagan’s press secretary laughed in response to a question about AIDS.2 Reagan himself did not mention AIDS until late in 1985, years into the epidemic, and only in response to a reporter’s question.3 Compounding the crisis were attacks on the gay community from the religious right, often blaming the victims for the disease and opposing the use of condoms and needle exchange programs that could have saved lives. This led to a provocative counterattack from the AIDS protest group ACT UP.4 As part of the era’s “culture wars,” many artists, faced with a rapidly mounting death toll, produced increasingly confrontational and provocative work. Those artists included Andres Serrano, David Wojnarowicz, and Robert Mapplethorpe. These works were and in some cases continue to be the subject of legal and bureaucratic counterattacks. As recently as 2010 Wojnarowicz’s work was effectively censored and removed from display at the National Portrait Gallery, part of the Smithsonian Institution.5 In 1990 the United States had already seen at least one hundred thousand AIDS deaths. Four artists—Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller—were among eighteen individual artists unanimously recommended for National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants by a peer review committee. Three of the four artists were queer. In June 1990, after Congress drafted a “decency clause” stating that NEA funding “must respect the diverse beliefs of the American public,” John Frohnmayer, the head of the NEA, made the decision to defund the four controversial artists. Leading the attack on the NEA was Jesse Helms, a conservative Republican senator from North Carolina. The NEA 4 fought back by filing a suit against Frohnmayer and the NEA, charging that their grants were denied for political

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reasons. While the artists subsequently received their funds and court fees in an out-of-court settlement, they pursued their challenge to the “decency clause.” After an eight-year legal struggle—and as an exhausted community finally saw the death toll lessen thanks to the combination of AIDS treatments known as “the cocktail”—the US Supreme Court upheld the decency clause, despite the First Amendment to the Constitution’s mandate that “Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion.” In the case of John Fleck, archival footage clearly shows that the “beliefs” named in the decency clause are religious beliefs. In a performance that partly provoked the crisis, Fleck juxtaposed excerpts from a sermon by evangelist Jimmy Swaggart against disturbing and transformative uses of religious imagery. The fact that queer artists were attacked by the government during the AIDS crisis is clear evidence of homophobia. The footage of John Fleck’s performance has not been seen in twenty-five years, but I have included it in a documentary I made about the artist, John Fleck Is Who You Want Him to Be (2016), which is, on one level, a conversation between Fleck and me. As late as March 2021 the film had yet to find distribution, likely due to its content. What follows is a conversation recorded for this publication on May 14, 2015, and edited for clarity, with additional information included in brackets. Fleck: Should we get to censorship? Duffy: Yes, let’s talk about the difference between censorship and criticism. That’s interesting. Fleck: Who’s criticizing? Somebody can criticize you, but then the decision is do you censor yourself to make them not criticize you. Duffy: With criticism, the idea is that you’re putting the work out there, while censorship is about stopping the work. Fleck: It’s for critical comment: yes or no? Do you like it? It’s a very vulnerable position to put yourself in. It’s not for everyone but the sadistic or masochistic at heart. Duffy: How do you deal with it? Fleck: What other people think of me is none of my business, Mr. Duffy. Don’t read your reviews. That’s why I got into performance, because I was the perfect little people-pleasing, ass-kissing kid and then BRRR! Get it out and not worry about it! Of course you’re always going to be criticized. But I don’t read reviews, and it was kind of fun for people to walk out every now and then. Yeah! Because I had never dared offend anybody in my life. Duffy: But then you sure made up for lost time (Plate 9, Figure 6.1). Fleck: How many people walked out versus how many people stayed and liked it? Duffy: I thought it was interesting, when we screened the documentary (Plate 10, Figure 6.2) at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), that an audience member asked if your work was antagonistic. You seemed surprised because I think there’s more a sense of play and involvement. I think you want people to come along for the ride, but some people are going to be pissed off. Fleck: Part of the fun is seeing how far you can go up to the point of falling off a cliff. It’s like a scary ride. If you go off the tracks, you’re dead, but it’s fun just to see how you can fuck around with people. That’s where you risk offending some people. If you want to make an argument for funding, well, yeah, in the free market, you can offend whomever you want. But when a source is funding you, do they have any say over whom you can’t offend? Duffy: Buñuel’s Viridiana was filmed in fascist Spain in 1960, but could not be shown there under Franco’s dictatorship. In that case, it wasn’t illegal to do the work. It was illegal to show it. That’s a really interesting distinction.

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FIGURE 6.1  John Fleck in Blacktop Highway, 2015. Photograph by Greg Cloud. Courtesy of John Fleck.

FIGURE 6.2  Kevin Duffy, video still from John Fleck Is Who You Want Him to Be, 2019, showing John Fleck in Madwomen performance rehearsal. Courtesy of Kevin Duffy and John Fleck.

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Fleck: If you don’t show the work, what happens to the work? It’s just for you? You can’t do that as a performance. Duffy: It doesn’t exist. Fleck: Unless you look in the mirror and just say, “This is a performance for me. Fuck you Jesse Helms!” [Laughter] But if there’s one other person present— Duffy: So it is all about your relationship to the other. I thought about this a lot with the movie, because you have mirrors in your work. You’re always reflecting things back to the audience. That is the nature of performance. There has to be a performer and there has to be an audience. There has to be that relationship, or the work doesn’t exist. So censorship is chopping that; it’s breaking it down. Fleck: And telling you what objects of desire you can discuss. I like to deal with shame, growing up Catholic, gay, and suppressed all those years. So a lot of my work does have to do with de-shaming shame. I take it to the extremes, and for me sex was often involved. Duffy: This all happened during the height of the AIDS crisis. Fleck: The 1980s is when it all took off. Duffy: A sexually transmitted plague basically devastating lots of communities. It’s almost like we were shamed massively through this kind of Holocaust. Fleck: Yeah, because they thought we were all licking each other’s assholes that we had it coming to us from our perverse, disgusting, dirty ways, which were anti-hetero, anti-good, anti-clean, anti-natural. And so, yeah, AIDS was a punishment. You heard that from a lot of people. Maybe there’s a part of me that, since I am a mirror, will take on the shame that you’ve thrown my way. Then I’ll try to process it as an artist, and this is how it comes out. It’s kind of like a two-way street. Yeah, you’re shaming me, and I take the shame, and then shame on YOU! [Laughter] Duffy: I remember at an AIDS march in New York on Fifth Avenue, walking past St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and everybody spontaneously started pointing their fingers at the church and chanting “Shame, shame, shame!” because the cardinal at that time was fighting the use of condoms, the distribution of condoms. Fleck: And he was shaming us. Duffy: Then the disease was this kind of censorship, about stopping, cutting the connection: silencing. “Silence equals death” was one of the mottos at the time. It’s almost like the AIDS crisis was this enormous act of censorship. Gay culture was really happening before. Boy, did that shut things down. Fleck: But I’m sure there was, in some parts, glee that so many gay people were dying. Duffy: How much as a culture are we still dealing with that trauma of surviving? Personally I do feel that was a trauma I survived. I can’t fucking believe that here we are now. Given the conservatism of gay culture right now and the mainstreaming of it, this is an unpopular position. But there used to be radical politics and radical sexual politics. It’s almost like “family values” won. Back then there was the opposition. You even have a performance piece— Fleck: About family values— Duffy: Yes, where you give birth. Fleck: Right, Interview with a Degenerate at Skirball Cultural Center in 1997. “I’m a procreator. I love creativity. I love babies. I love families, and I love the theater.” Duffy: You say to the performers who were working with you, including the audience, “We’re family, and they’re not going to keep us apart.” You were doing it as a parody: you’re in drag, and you’re pretending to give birth. Now that’s supposed to be the new norm. Has a heterosexual normative structure been imposed on gay culture?

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Fleck: I don’t know if it has been imposed, but assimilation has taken place, hasn’t it? So there aren’t many radical differences anymore. If you go to Russia today, and to other countries around the world, you’ll find that homosexuality is still a crime in over seventy countries. But I kind of reveled in being a sexual outlaw because, boy, what a family we were and what a great bonding experience it was. I wonder if I’ve lost part of that bonding experience with what was once us against them. So now we are all them. We are them. Duffy: I was just looking at a video of the Cockettes. Gay liberation came out of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. [The Cockettes were a gender-bending performance troupe from San Francisco founded in 1969. They gave their last performance in 1972.] Fleck: How revolutionary it was. Duffy: It was all very radical and very extreme and very oppositional. Fleck: We need another revolution. Duffy: Maybe so. Let’s start one. Fleck: What’s it gonna be? Duffy: There’s this new technology. There’s decentralization and that’s different. In the 1980s there were three television networks. The media was tightly controlled and we were fighting that. Now they’re facilitating all these voices, so there’s this seeming democratization and maybe some of it is really good. I think that’s why there’s so much awareness of police violence. That’s a really positive thing. Fleck: As soon as it happens, we’re aware of it. Duffy: Certainly a problem in the 1980s, with the AIDS crisis, was that people were not aware. Fleck: So that’s why they had to get out on the streets and “Hello! Hello! HELLO!” Now you just hit a button on your computer and more people see it than did then. Duffy: But back then that act of censorship or defunding—whatever you want to call it— they didn’t stop you from performing. Fleck: No. Duffy: The police didn’t come and lock you up. Fleck: That was always their point. You’re free to do whatever, you know stick a finger in your butt, but just in the free market. Then it’s cool. But if you want funding, then we have a say. Duffy: Isn’t that interesting? We’re such a hyper-capitalistic society. So if you’re doing it and you’re selling tickets or whatever, it’s fine. Fleck: Yeah, if you make a profit then fine, but don’t come looking for us to support you with public funding. Duffy: So is the problem that the public funding just has to support the main discourse? You can’t rock the boat and expect support? Fleck: Where is the line? The main line is right down the middle, and it’s for the greatest good, the greatest profit. It appeals to that center. Duffy: That was the argument at the time: we’re not censoring you. You’re free to do what you want, but we’re not going to give you a nickel to do it. Let’s look at that. Are they right? Is it okay? Then it wasn’t censorship, or was it censorship? Fleck: President Kennedy got the NEA going, and along the course of all those years, a lot of controversial artists were funded. But somehow we got into the sights of Jesse Helms and these conservatives, like Dana Rohrabacher, the US congressman from Orange County who introduced a bill to defund the NEA in 1989.

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Their reaction to Piss Christ, the descriptively titled and controversial 1987 photograph by Andres Serrano, and Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs got the ball rolling, and we— the NEA 4—were the little cherry on top. Duffy: Wasn’t it in Cincinnati where the curator was arrested? Fleck: For showing Mapplethorpes. [On April 7, 1990, Dennis Barrie, director of the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, was indicted on charges of obscenity for exhibiting Robert Mapplethorpe’s sexually explicit photographs; he was acquitted on October 5, 1990.] Duffy: Something I learned recently—and this is really shocking—people are not aware of it; it happened in the 1960s, in the last World’s Fair— Fleck: Andy Warhol’s pictures about all the outlaws or wanted posters, were— Duffy: —they were destroyed. They were painted over— Fleck: —silver, all silver. You can see in the pictures. Duffy: Yes, Andy Warhol’s 13 Most Wanted Men, which had been installed at the New York World’s Fair on April 15, 1964, were painted over in silver by officials a few days later. Again, that had to do with criminality, illegality, sexuality. He was a gay artist. Fleck: But they knew he was a gay artist before they invited him. It was okay to be gay just as long as you didn’t flaunt it or do any gay-themed art. Duffy: On the side of an international pavilion. Fleck: That was when Warhol was doing the dark car crash pieces. He was going more for the dark side, and they just didn’t want it. There again, public spaces. The lights have almost been turned off on me. Grand Performances in downtown Los Angeles tried to turn the lights off during my performance of Dirt, which I wrote during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. At an improv-comedy event at the Natural History Museum, they couldn’t find the switch, so I kept going. It went fine, but they fired the guy who put it together, Peter Bergman. [According to the Los Angeles Times, an official from the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum indicated Bergman’s firing “was not about specific content—political or otherwise.” George Lynell, “Home Edition: Comic says political jokes cost job; Peter Bergman says museum ousted him as event producer because of anti-Bush humor; An official denies it,” Los Angeles Times, October 15, 2004.] Duffy: They are okay now? Fleck: Well, Peter Bergman is dead. Duffy: I’m sorry. Fleck: It killed him. No, it didn’t. He died of natural causes. Well, I don’t know what “natural” means. But Tony Abatemarco, who produced the show with Peter, is doing fine. Me, on the other hand, I’m not doing so fine. [Laughter] Duffy: If you look at the history of art in the Western world, there always were patrons. Fleck: The Medicis. Duffy: It was either the church or rich, noble families. Fleck: And they had a say over what was made. Although Michelangelo’s statue of David is pretty homoerotic, if you ask me. Duffy: When David was shown on Chinese television, they blurred out the genitals. Recently Fox TV had an image of a Picasso that just sold, and they blurred out the nipples. So it’s still happening. [CCTV initially blurred out the image of Michelangelo’s David (1501–4), on July 10, 2012. New York Fox 5 blurred out Pablo Picasso’s Women of Algiers (1955) on May 14, 2015.] Fleck: Are you kidding me? How ridiculous. Duffy: Is that about shame?

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Fleck: Obviously, it seems like that would be shame, fear that it’s going to arouse prurient interest. Duffy: Is it the shame of the censoring body that’s being projected? Fleck: Haven’t we always had shame here, we being of the Puritan ilk? Shame of sex? It seems that the NEA 4 were all about sex. Three gays dealing with sexual politics and Karen Finley dealing with feminist sexual politics. Using our bodies—nakedness—to express ourselves. That was a big taboo. Duffy: I don’t think you would’ve been censored in the 1970s. You were censored in 1990. Was there a reaction when this arc of the sexual revolution, which had started in the 1960s, went to this extreme? There was a plague happening at the time, and there was a reaction. Fleck: But also look at the politics of Ronald Reagan—what he set in motion. That was a big conservative movement. It was about cutting public funding. People who should have been getting psychiatric help ended up on the streets; there was no funding. No funding for AIDS. Thusly for avant-garde performance art: it was the perfect target to cut funding. Duffy: But a lot of that was symbolic. It was such a minuscule amount of money in the scheme of things. Fleck: Well, they were fighting for morality. To them it was a moral cause as well. Duffy: How much of it was a moral cause and how much of it was a moral façade? Fleck: A political cause? Well, look who the constituents were. Most of the people who were opposed to our funding were from Bible Belt communities, don’t you think? Duffy: Yeah. Fleck: A lot of hypocrisy going on there. Duffy: The way religious images are coopted or controlled. Fleck: It makes you think maybe art is more powerful then we give it credit for. If you can censor the art, maybe you can censor dissent. Look at what Putin’s doing with Pussy Riot. If you keep it invisible, then it doesn’t make people think. Because I think provocative art provokes in a healthy way. Duffy: In the 1980s media was really centralized. We always say the media is not state controlled: it’s a private business, which is sacred. Well, that is the state in this country. You guys were going up against that. Performance in general has always been antithetical to media control because it’s not mediated. It’s very direct; it’s live. Fleck: And it’s not about making money. That’s why funding is necessary to keep it going. Their thought was if it’s worth anything, you can make money doing it. If it’s not worth anything, you don’t make money; therefore, we don’t sponsor it. Duffy: So you’re not worth anything. Fleck: Does the media dictate public morality, or is the media just a mirror? Duffy: That’s a really big question, isn’t it? Fleck: Or is it all about selling products, since the media is controlled by General Electric and all these big billion-dollar conglomerates? Duffy: It’s all a big cluster fuck, for lack of a better word. Fleck: And having gays get married, it’s great for divorce attorneys. It’s a big business. It’s all about making money. [Laughter] Duffy: Wedding cakes, the whole thing. Now, in your encounter with Ms. Winfrey on her show, you were just sort of— Fleck: The bogey man. They all need a bogey man. Duffy: I don’t think anybody involved with that show remotely thought about your work. They just threw you to the wolves and everybody was going “Blah blah blah blah” so they

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could be heard. So they could run their ads and have viewers and keep the whole corporate machine going. You were just sort of thrown in there and chewed up. [Fleck appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show on July 27, 1990, in the wake of the NEA 4 controversy.] Fleck: What’s wrong with the decadence of the Left? Extreme, liberal, left-wing agenda. They’re baby killers. They have no morality in their hearts: the devil— Duffy: By shaming the outsider, is that a way of— Fleck: Shaming the outsider unites us as a group? Duffy: The mainstream of society wants to shame gays, lesbians, minorities. Fleck: There’s always that. They’re always blaming and killing. The Bosnians against the Croats, and look at the Sunnis and Shiites. There’s always the enemy: the Jews, the gays, the artists. A lot of shit was going down in the late 1980s. When did Clinton get into office? Duffy: He was elected in 1992. Fleck: It’s funny, we, the NEA 4, won the case at a Los Angeles federal district court in June of 1992, when the decency clause was declared unconstitutional. The decision was upheld at the Court of Appeals. Then Clinton’s administration appealed the decision to the Supreme Court in 1998. So they knew that it had a little blood on the bone. Duffy: Clinton also started the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in the military. Fleck: He was kind of working both sides. I’d rather have him working it than the other option at the time. Duffy: Bush, he beat Bush. Fleck: He beat Bush? Duffy: The first Bush. Fleck: Oh, Daddy Bush. Duffy: Bush the first. Fleck: Supposedly, Hillary has a big bush. Duffy: We’re gonna have to censor that! [Laughter] So what the hell, what the fuck happened? Here we are, and we’re older and we’re alive. Fleck: Speak for yourself. Duffy: I guess that’s an act of defiance in and of itself. Fleck: The question is: what can you say and what can’t you say? Now look at the Internet. You go on YouTube, and you can do, say practically anything. Duffy: Well, they do monitor. And they do control content, but it is much more diffused. I think the power of performance is that it’s live. It’s direct and you’re there. I’m sure there are going to be new art forms that evolve with this technology, but performance, theater, that’s the most ancient art form. Fleck: Is it? Duffy: Theater. Maybe you call it performance art: some kind of ritual where one person is getting up and acting out in front of another group that is watching. I’m sure the cavemen did that. Fleck: Now are you talking about theater or performance art? Duffy: What’s the difference? Fleck: What is the difference between performance art and entertainment? That’s a very complex question, because I find performance art entertaining myself. I was recently asked, “Why is the audience so small for performance art?” Because it needs to be. Because it’s an alternative art form. In a way it’s this rich silt on the bottom, and the big fish and the big media feed on us. It’s like the ecosystem. We’re a needed part of the ecosystem. Duffy: Is it about realness? Is it that, in theater, the convention is that you’re playing a role?

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Fleck: You’re interpreting somebody else’s words, whereas performance is your own words. Duffy: Something that we talk about in the documentary is: when are we not performing? When are we not playing a role? Fleck: Today my intention is to be honest. To be honest. Duffy: And how do we censor ourselves? When are we doing that, and when are we not doing that? Fleck: When our gut’s telling us. When I’m not being true to myself, to what my gut wants me to do, and I’m doing it for some other reason—to make you happier or thinking that I’m supposed to do that at my age—then I certainly stop myself from being true to myself. Do you censor yourself? Duffy: Yeah. I’m thinking, when you talked about shame, that shame is basically imposing censorship. The contagion is the self-censorship by way of shame, which comes from society. It comes from our culture. Fleck: So shame: I must not show this. I must suppress it. I must cut it out. I must change it. I must not acknowledge it. Duffy: And I must not show it. That again: the AIDS crisis. It was a disease that infected gay people. It was sexually transmitted. There were all these issues around shame, and when you’re ashamed, you’re silent. Fleck: But then the anger builds up and you explode. Duffy: Then you become a performance artist. Fleck: Exactly. Interesting. Part of the evolution of it all. Duffy: Do we have to be proud and joyful that we have survived? Fleck: There is something to be said for that, today, on this beautiful day, sitting here watching the clouds roll by. Duffy: Again, all the gay men who died of AIDS: that’s the ultimate censorship. Because the culture refused for so long to deal with the problem or the crisis and delayed it, aggravated it, and made it worse. I think that’s what happened. Fleck: So you think as a community we were almost acting out the ultimate censorship, this death knell? Duffy: I think it’s more something that the mainstream culture allowed to happen. Fleck: That’s why I didn’t think they’d think it was a bad thing. It was just that we had it coming to us. It certainly reinforced their views: Don’t let gays teach your kids. Don’t let gays touch you. Cut gays out of your life because they’re diseased. Duffy: Another thing that’s in the documentary: that 1988 performance you did, about Lyndon LaRouche’s proposition in California. Fleck: Yeah, No on 69. Duffy: So what was that performance all about? People don’t even remember that stuff. Fleck: Well, they wanted to eliminate 69 you know, auto-fellatio for us both, and I said, “No!” Duffy: I’m censoring that! [Laughter] Fleck: So we said, “Unh-unh, Lyndon, not so quick, Daddy-o.” Duffy: There was a lot of homophobia. Fleck: Right. [Prop 69 could have led to a quarantine for people with AIDS, but it was defeated. A similar proposition had been defeated two years earlier.] Duffy: There was a period, the early 1990s, when maybe the treatments were a little better or people were living longer. AZT was around, but AIDS was still a death sentence. It was just a slower death.

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Fleck: Right. Duffy: And I felt like there was a kind of homophobia that said: “Well, you’re really probably not going to be around that long.” Did you ever get the feeling? Fleck: Personally? No. I just automatically assumed that I was going to be around. Duffy: So maybe that’s me and my projection of my own personal history. But I always felt like, if you were gay in Hollywood, like in film school: “Yeah, that’s great, but you’re probably not going to be here in ten years.” Fleck: Well, in Hollywood you’re never gonna be a big star if you’re gay. Don’t ask, don’t tell: it was the whole decade of that, wasn’t it? Duffy: Right, it’s all about imposed silence. Fleck: I hated being labeled as a gay artist in a way. I never was labeled as a gay artist until the NEA thing happened: Karen Finley and the three gay performance artists. I always wanted to be bigger— Duffy: Yeah. Fleck: I dealt with sexual ambiguity and extremes, but I never felt I was gay: just questioning the sexual boundaries that we are all so rigidly thrust into from childhood. So, you know, I’m a try-sexual artist. I just try. And as I get older, I try so much more desperately to be sexual. [Laughter] Duffy: That’s a good one—have you done it before? Fleck: Probably. I used to be “buy-sexual,” I had to buy sex. But now I don’t even buy it. I just try, try to get it up. C’mon, I dare ya! How much time have you got? Time is the great censor. Duffy: Censorship: shame. I guess these things are important to me because, as you know, when we were in New York and you were doing the show at the New Museum, I was doing all this personal history. I saw my foster family and I went to the island in New York where my father is buried. Fleck: He was a prisoner? Duffy: No! That’s the thing. You would think he was a prisoner. In New York they have a potter’s field, and people who die and their bodies aren’t claimed are buried in these unmarked graves. Fleck: And your father was one of them? Duffy: Yeah. Fleck: Why wasn’t your father claimed? Duffy: Because his family was in Ireland. He was an immigrant. He was born in New York, but his family went back. Fleck: And your mother wasn’t in his life at the time that he died? Duffy: Yeah. My mother was mentally ill, so there was incredible drama. Fleck: What a background you’ve got! Duffy: Talk about survival. Fleck: You turned out fairly normal for growing up like that. Duffy: In terms of survival. Jesus Christ! Fleck: Yeah. Duffy: Look who’s talking! [Laughter] But I think about that as sort of the ultimate—I knew my father was buried there, and then I finally went there because an artist sued the city and forced them to open this place, Hart Island. So when you go there, this graveyard is run by the department of prisons. The people are buried by prisoners, and it’s something that was set up in the nineteenth century, like a lot of stuff back East. It’s just completely Dickensian and punitive. You go over on a boat—a prison boat—and you walk down a path and then there’s a book under a tree. They check your ID and you sign the book.

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Then you go to a viewing platform, they call it a gazebo, and you’re able to look out at the island. But you’re not able to visit the graves. Why? Because a truck drives by full of guys in stripes who are the prison gravediggers. [Artist Melinda Hunt founded the Hart Island Project in 1991. On December 3, 2014, the New York Civil Liberties Union filed suit to open the island.] Fleck: Oh, really? So you saw that while you were there? Duffy: I saw that. Fleck: Oh, my God. Duffy: And they say, “This over here is field one, the oldest part of the cemetery.” Fleck: Do you know if your relatives are buried in field one or two or three? Duffy: Yes, anyone who died previous to 1982 is in field one. They explain that. “And then, in the 1980s, we opened our newer facility.” Fleck: It’s like a mass burial ground, huh? Duffy: Yes. They just say, “And then, in 1982—” Well, why did it happen in 1982? Because of the rate of death of young gay men who were rejected by their families. [Since 1980, the year the first cases of AIDS were reported in New York City, 63,483 people have been buried on Hart Island.] Fleck: Right, they were buried there. Duffy: They were buried there. Fleck: Wow, so there was an influx of many burials that year, in 1982. Duffy: I don’t know if that was the exact year, whether it was 1982 or 1983. But it is interesting that it was an artist who made this whole Hart Island Project. Fleck: And what is the Hart Island Project? Duffy: They’re pressuring the city to turn Hart Island into a park, to open up the access. Fleck: Wow. Duffy: They’ve gotten them to go this far, allowing the boats, and the signing of the book and the gazebo. Fleck: But you don’t know exactly where your father was buried, just in group one, or whatever. Duffy: Yeah, you just sort of know it’s in that field. Fleck: How big are the fields? Duffy: I guess they’re pretty big. You can’t really see. You just see the island and you see trees and things. You can’t go to the spot and say, “That’s where so and so is.” It’s about erasing somebody’s voice, their memory. That’s the ultimate form of censorship. That’s what it leads to, like Charlie Hebdo, where they killed the cartoonists in Paris, that’s the ultimate extreme. The Nazis did that. Fleck: Ethnic cleansing. Duffy: Degenerate art. So the extreme of it is like destroying the other person. You want to destroy the artist. Fleck: Fascism seems to need censorship. Duffy: In that period, the culture wars, there was this strange combination of forces. Fleck: Because politics and religion are separate in this country. We call it a democracy, but, man, the church is still fighting over that. Didn’t that have to do with how good, biblefearing people don’t fund art like that? I’m going back to that idea. Duffy: But we do have separation of church and state in this country, and the First Amendment. But what is censorship nowadays? Facebook hires people in the Philippines to monitor posts. If you post something that’s too extreme, it will be censored. Fleck: So, yeah, Facebook self-censors. Duffy: Is it self-censoring? It is the corporation.

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Fleck: Well, yeah, corporate censoring. Duffy: All these Internet corporations have this façade that they’re just us. Fleck: So someone—a power greater than ourselves—is saying that this is acceptable for mass consumption and this is not. Therefore, we have to set limits: “We can’t allow that.” Duffy: Who gets to say? Fleck: Well, Facebook gets to say. Duffy: Right. But is that what we want? Fleck: Well, that’s what you agree to by agreeing to the terms and conditions every time. Duffy: Right, but back in the 1980s there was, on the one hand, big media, and on the other people got together in clubs, Lhasa Club and all those places, in small spaces. In cities there was a sense of an underground and a counterculture. And that was the way to avoid the big media. But now there isn’t big media. There’s diffused media, decentralized. [Lhasa Club, founded by Jean-Pierre Boccara, was an incubator for performance in Los Angeles from 1982 to 1988.] Fleck: Right. There’s a million channels. Duffy: But how do you break that control—Facebook’s control, YouTube’s control. Fleck: Go to another channel, I guess. Duffy: Do you go to another channel, or do you go back to face to face? Fleck: I don’t know. It seems like, if anything, people want to put theater on YouTube instead of doing theater. Is theater still a powerful force? Duffy: Do people go to events? Can you use this technology to generate “traffic,” as they would call it now, to events? Fleck: Well, you can always get a hundred people there, or two hundred. Duffy: And get those ideas across and hopefully spread it directly? Fleck: It might not go into the mass culture, but there will always be people who want that alternative of live performance. Duffy: Yeah, it’s like ideas. Getting an idea out is like the ultimate virus that spreads. Fleck: Right. Duffy: Any closing words? Fleck: Well, Jesus is in all of us, and the gateway is through your ASSHOLE! Duffy: I don’t know if they’re gonna print that. Fleck: CENSORSHIP! [Laughter] It’s funny you can say “asshole” on TV now. Duffy: Oh, yeah? Fleck: You can’t use it as an anatomical reference, but you can say, “Boy, he’s an asshole.” You can’t say, “Oh, my asshole’s sore today.” You can’t do that. [Laughter] “Piss,” you can do the same thing with “piss.” Duffy: You can say, “I’m pissed off”? Fleck: Yeah, I’m pissed off. But not, “Oh, I’m gonna go take a piss.” “Crap” is the same. Duffy: Why does it always go back to the body? Fleck: I think because we’re shame-based. I think it’s that the body is disgusting: fear, fear, body, sex, homosex, any kind of sex. But then you go and have your illicit sex in the bathroom stalls. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Duffy: So the body is the threat to control. Fleck: Maybe that’s why live theater and live performance is so dangerous to so many. Because it is live and it is kind of sexual, just by the nature of you being there, in the body. Duffy: Again, it’s not mediated, and it’s not like anybody is controlling it. Fleck: That’s right, you can’t edit out the bad in a performance.

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Notes 1 Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 23. Schulman explores connections between the AIDS crisis, gentrification, and the conservative drift in culture. 2 Dan Amira, “AIDS Was Hilarious to Reagan White House, Press Corps,” New York Magazine, December 2, 2013, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/12/aids-white-house-larry-speakesjoke-press-briefing-1982.html. 3 Jerry Gerstenzang and Marlene Cimmons, “Reagan Asks Abstinence in Remarks about AIDS,” Los Angeles Times, April 2, 1987. 4 Jason De Parle, “111 Held in St. Patrick’s Protest,” New York Times, December 11, 1989, http:// www.nytimes.com/1989/12/11/nyregion/111-held-in-st-patrick-s-aids-protest.html. 5 See Jonathan Katz, “Only the Stupid Are Overt: Covert Censorship in the American Museum,” in this volume.

Bibliography Bolton, Richard, ed. Culture Wars: Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts. New York: New Press, 1992. Kidd, Dustin. Legislating Creativity: The Intersections of Art and Politics. New York: Routledge, 2010. Schulman, Sarah. The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

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7 Only the Stupid Are Overt: Covert Censorship in the American Museum Jonathan D. Katz

Acts of overt censorship are the most effective inoculations against the recognition of how policed our museum world really is. Every time museum officials are imprudent enough to censor something, the rest of the museum world breathes a collective sigh of relief. The censorious museum, almost universally reviled, serves a purpose not lost on other museums: it’s the negative pole, the bad example against which other museums can now stand bathed in the light, ennobled in contrast to their compromised brethren. Notably, these newly virtuous museums generally position themselves in principled solidarity with the censored, not the institutions doing the censoring, all amidst high-flying rhetoric about artistic freedom and respecting artistic choices. Dutifully, we, the art world public, routinely swallow this rancid bait, vowing to protest, to resist, to hold that lonely, outlaw, offending museum accountable for its actions. Once again, in short order, the image of the museum as an open market for dangerous ideas and dissident artwork is burnished to a high sheen, its social and political progressiveness reified. And we return to the world of fiction we prefer to inhabit, blithely unaware of how badly we’ve been used. The fact is that only reckless museums censor overtly. Savvy ones, and they are in the vast majority, censor art vastly more often, but they do so long before that art ever gets mounted onto walls, made into shows, given an institutional life. In fact, this covert censorship is the lifeblood of the museum world, the immune system that works to keep its entire body politic free of difference—which is itself the disease. But because this covert censorship occurs in boardrooms, director’s offices, and other sites shielded from public view, we never hear about it and can pretend it simply doesn’t exist. In what follows I plead that we shift our attention from overt censorship, which we’ve almost exclusively taken to be the defining political issue, to covert censorship. Covert censorship—namely, the restrictive palette through which nearly every large museum in the United States adjudicates artwork and interpretive texts and ideas—is the real enemy. In saying this, I am mostly referencing the large, well-funded museums, the ones so famous, so grand, so well-endowed that they can weather any sudden conflict. And yet it is precisely these large museums that are often the most covertly censorious, leaving it to small and/or university museums to take the risks they eschew.

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Change has come so very slowly to the large American museum that it generally feels as if it hasn’t changed at all—especially regarding a frank discussion of queer art and artists. I’m attending to queerness in particular here because the artwork in question is already in the museums. Unlike the politics of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and ability, wherein active diversification must be premised on aggressive acquisitions, fixing the queer problem is fast, easy, and cheap. All you need to do is change a wall label. And yet that’s apparently an insurmountable problem. When was the last time the National Gallery of Art or the Metropolitan Museum of Art even mentioned sexuality, much less allowed it to do active art historical work?1 You’re much more likely to see a discussion or representation of sexual difference in popular commercial mediums such as TV or film than in any of the large, partially taxpayer-funded, nonprofit educational institutions we call art museums. So clearly this pervasive silencing isn’t what audiences are demanding. On the contrary, queer shows are almost always popular with all audiences regardless of their self-identification. So why are they so rare? When Republicans in Congress attacked my cocurated, queer-themed 2010 Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery exhibition, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture (Figure 7.1), I got to witness the relative weight of overt and covert censorship firsthand. The Republicans were of course simply looking for a wedge issue in the hopes of reigniting the culture war and with it the lavish ideological and fiscal payoffs that have historically followed in its wake. In turn we knew that the exhibition was going to be attacked—it was, after all, the first ever queer show at a national museum in the United States—and we prepared for it. Expecting that the assault would replicate previous attempts to censor, my cocurator, David Ward, and I deliberately crafted a relatively restrained exhibition, one not out of keeping with the Smithsonian’s usual fare. We made sure that, with one exception, all the nudes were by straight artists so we could undercut any criticism of homoeroticism with the satisfyingly sharp retort that the artists were in fact straight. The Smithsonian even videotaped training interviews in which they asked me offensive and homophobic questions. We then reviewed the tapes together so I could learn how to respond on that cool medium, TV, and avoid such traps as repeating the question.2 In concert with the director of the National Portrait Gallery, we thought we were being as deliberate and thoughtful as we could be, anticipating various kinds of responses to what we suspected would be the inevitable backlash against exhibiting queer art at a national museum. Unfortunately, we didn’t realize that our enemies on the right were quite politically savvy and capable of a certain kind of basic political evolution. Unlike, say, the brouhaha over the Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective The Perfect Moment, censored at the Corcoran museum in 1989—where all they had to do was label the artist a promiscuous homosexual, as if that alone sufficed as an argument—our enemies had come to understand that naked homophobia was by 2010 a politics of diminishing returns. So they camouflaged their oldschool homophobia in the guise of religious offense and improbably claimed that in fact our exhibition was an attack on them, on the Catholic Church and on Christianity in general. The vehicle for that attack was the Right’s favorite whipping boy, David Wojnarowicz, who even eighteen years after his death could still rile our culture police into a mad lather. Ripping a page from our own playbook and using it against us, they made themselves over into a discriminated against and endangered minority, leveraging the fact that we had finally, for the first time, secured queer representation in the Smithsonian to cast themselves as the underdogs. A work of art that was arguably the most traditionally Catholic in the exhibition, Wojnarowicz’s unfinished film A Fire in My Belly, was their evidence. In that film Wojnarowicz, shooting at a Day of the Dead celebration in Mexico, saw and quickly seized upon the metaphor of ants crawling on a crucifix to allegorize our  generalized  human  indifference

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FIGURE 7.1 Exhibition catalog, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, 2010. Photo by Jeffrey Ryan.

to suffering (Plate 11). Deliberately misreading the work’s intent, professional provocateurs on the right such as the Catholic League then claimed that the inclusion of the film was a deliberate insult to Christianity, as if the tortured figure of Christ as an allegory for human suffering wasn’t a Catholic trope dating back nearly two millennia. They even argued that the exhibition was part of a larger attack on Christmas, though the exhibition opened in October. When the Catholic League, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has categorized as a right-wing hate group, published all my personal contact information—including my home address—I received a truly shocking wave of anti-Semitic hate mail, including one note saying that “we had our chance to rid ourselves of Jews at Auschwitz—and we won’t make the same mistake again.” The secretary of the Smithsonian Institution caved in to this homophobic critique as rapidly as he did thoughtlessly. Without consulting us and our contingency plans, and ignoring his own museum’s director, he ordered the Wojnarowicz removed from the exhibition and an immediate dustup ensued. In one of the Hide/Seek exhibition galleries artists Michael Blasenstein and Michael Dax Iacovone attempted to show the censored film on continuous loop on iPads hanging around their necks, but were expelled from the museum. Undaunted, they raised funds to secure a large trailer and, with the city’s permission, parked it in front of the National Portrait Gallery. They called this the Museum of Censored Art and screened the film during the hours the Smithsonian was open (Figure 7.2). In solidarity with the censored art, a number of institutions bought and screened the Wojnarowicz film––thereby publicly allying themselves with an artist they never showed, hosted, or screened when he

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FIGURE 7.2  Museum of Censored Art, January 13–February 13, 2011, Washington, DC. Courtesy of Michael Blasenstein and Michael Dax Iacovone.

was alive. Many of the museums so quick to attack the Smithsonian were privately endowed behemoths, unlike the publicly funded Smithsonian, and thus insulated from some of the more egregious forms of fiscal blackmail the Right threatened. But, even more galling, I knew that many of these protesting large museums had utterly refused to cooperate with Hide/ Seek before the censorship battle, denying all loan requests, not to mention the prospect of hosting the exhibition on tour—and even, in some instances, attacking the queer premise of the exhibition itself. Although the exhibition was called Hide/Seek after a celebrated eponymous 1948 painting by Pavel Tchelitchew held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), MoMA refused to lend the titular painting, and, indeed, refused all loan requests. Nonetheless, it bought and screened the film, and earned positive press for so doing. I am in no way excusing the Smithsonian’s cravenness and cupidity in censoring its own exhibition, but I am at the same time interested in calling attention to the way a censorship crisis can serve other museums so well, turning complicity into resistance despite the lack of any genuine institutional social or political commitment. Lost in the brouhaha was that it was the Smithsonian Institution, the museum perhaps more directly in national political crosshairs than any other in the United States, that agreed to present this queer exhibition despite its almost guaranteed controversy. Many of the museums that attacked the Smithsonian could have hosted the exhibition with much less severe political consequences—and yet they did not. The unfortunate result of the Smithsonian censorship controversy was not only that yet again queer art provoked scandal and pushback. It was also that museums that wouldn’t be caught dead doing a queer show could now “protest” the Smithsonian’s censorship and win on both counts—underscoring their progressive credentials even as they continued to justify engaging in covert censorship to ensure that such a scandal would never rock their own institutions. And since covert censorship is by definition invisible, there is never a public relations problem to work out. But while we can almost never point to covert censorship

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and directly call it out, the narrow range of acceptable exhibition frames underscores its nefarious workings. On the few occasions when I have had a chance to sit at the table and watch covert censorship in action, rarely do I hear anything approaching the actual rationale for turning down an exhibition. Instead of copping to the political complexities, directors and curators tend to make off-the-cuff claims about what audiences want and express their fear that a queer-themed exhibition will appeal only to a small, invested queer audience. History tells a different story, however, and, as but one example, Hide/Seek was one of the most popular exhibitions ever mounted at the National Portrait Gallery.3 To argue that only queer people would be interested in a queer show is of course yet another variant of homophobic essentializing, one that phantasmatically projects a clear and knowable divide between queer and straight culture when in fact what queer exhibitions do is precisely blur that boundary. In any case, as anyone who has worked in a large museum can testify, attendance fees are a fraction of a museum’s operating budget. Trustees provide the lion’s share of the support, and directors are therefore loath to do anything that might displease the 1 percent that is their true fiscal base. Covert censorship is therefore generally a preemptive move to eschew any difference of opinion that might threaten a trustee’s largesse. Whether the board of trustees is actually politically conservative (and of course, composed of people who sit at the very top of the social hierarchy, many of whom are invested in conserving that hierarchy as it now stands) or museum staff simply treat them as such as a precaution, the net effect is the same: most large museums will go out of their way to avoid anything that smacks of the now-infamous Corcoran ruckus of 1989, in which Robert Mapplethorpe’s retrospective exhibition The Perfect Moment was preemptively pulled from the schedule so as to “protect” the museum from the threat of censorship, apparently by doing the censoring themselves. Needless to add, that act of overt censorship didn’t work, constituting an object lesson for museum directors in the United States that openly censoring your own shows won’t protect your museum from controversy. The answer was to censor them covertly, out of the public spotlight. Of course covert censorship is never understood or framed as censorship, even in private. As one famous museum curator told me in acknowledgment of her covert censorship of Robert Rauschenberg’s long-term and significant relationships with his former partners Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns—while at the same time including a label that Rauschenberg was married (and not noting that he quickly divorced)—“we just prefer to let the art speak for itself.” Among more sophisticated museum staff, acts of covert censorship are instead couched in a language of scholarly disagreement and dismissal. As Susan Davidson writes in her essay on the early Rauschenberg painting Mother of God for the SFMOMA website, Other art historians may read the “traveling” theme as a coded homosexual trope for “coming out.” While it is true that Rauschenberg’s personal life was undergoing significant and life-altering changes at the time Mother of God was created (i.e., meeting and partnering with Cy Twombly (1928–2011); the birth of Rauschenberg’s son Christopher; and the subsequent dissolution of his marriage to Weil), this author cautions against a queer studies interpretation. More likely, the artist was of a mind to celebrate birth and rebirth—thus the centrality of a circular form alluding to pregnancy.4 This blatant attempt to reinscribe Rauschenberg in line with dominant heteronormative ideology is of course a familiar form of policing. Note that she simply throws out a different reading, without either arguing for her interpretation or against the careful massing of evidence by those with whom she disagrees. Furthermore, the attempt to disallow certain

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kinds of readings, “to caution against,” as opposed to allowing a plurality of significations to flourish, smacks of the censorial. I disagree with Susan Davidson, but I would never seek to indict her entire methodology without argument. Another recent development that only seems more progressive is to frankly address an artist’s sexuality as a biographical fact but allow it no purchase on the meaning of the resulting work. In this way sexuality becomes the functional equivalent of being born in Poughkeepsie, a fact that while true, lacks any substantive interpretive merit. Because the museum seems so comfortable acknowledging LGBTQ identity, these kinds of statements distract the audience from recognizing the reality of covert censorship. But to substitute declarative biography for art historical argument is a kind of sleight of hand, serving to carefully sever high-value commodities from the taint of sexual politics. That an artist’s sexuality can now be addressed as a matter of biographical fact does not translate into any necessary revision of what the artworks themselves may mean. And there’s the rub, for a queer art history isn’t interested in the sexual lives of artists per se, but rather in how a socially sanctioned selfhood inflects artworks’ communicative means and purposes. A new tactic is on the rise that is perhaps even more effective in misleading public opinion. We are beginning to see museums actively cultivate niche audiences, and I have been struck recently by how often the LGBTQ community is now finding itself targeted. But only very rarely does this cultivation of a queer audience translate into an account of the art on display. Rather, most often it’s done in the form of ancillary programming and events, as audience development and a fundraising tool. The Metropolitan Museum in New York, for example, hosts receptions cultivating a queer public in its Great Hall, even as it studiously avoids any mention of sexuality in its Classical Halls, where homosexuality is plainly on display. The Art Institute of Chicago has announced the advent of drag queen tours, and other museums hold queer nights. But all this ancillary programming, while cultivating the appearance of a progressive and queer-friendly endeavor, actually serves the interests of overt censorship in keeping questions of sexual difference as far as possible from the works of art on display. When sexual difference is now an acceptable category of audience development, it takes the pressure off the curatorial, and we witness a strange reality wherein art audiences may be queer, but not works of art. But perhaps the newest—and, I would argue, the most insidious—means of naturalizing covert censorship in museums is to allow that very rare, carefully vetted exhibition of one or more contemporary artists whose work is unavoidably engaged with queerness. This permits the museum to point to its progressive programming, but in truth, such discursively queer exhibitions are not only extremely infrequent, they are deceptive in that they serve as a stand-in for an active engagement with queer studies scholarship across the vast bulk of art history on display. These isolated queer exhibitions, always of contemporary artists whose work is by our contemporary standards self-evidently queer, challenge and thus change no dominant account. On the contrary, these artists, because they are of our own time, merely naturalize our reigning binary narrative of sexuality as inherently divided between a heterosexual majority and a queer minority. But a truly queer art history doesn’t construct sexuality in terms of a settled binary, but instead allows for a much more complicated account of slippages, eruptions, and repressions that restores to sexuality the force of the psychological. Sexuality is a powerful motive force precisely because it so often resists legibility and transparency according to our accepted definitions. And if that is the case today, it is ever more powerfully true for the art of different historical eras with different sexual schema and self-understandings. We cannot allow an occasional LGBTQ exhibition to license avoiding any of the more fraught or complicated but far richer questions the field of queer studies in art history has struggled to understand over the past few decades. These

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questions not only turn on the masking or elision of queerness in the historical record, addressing the sexuality of artists who, either because of personal preference or the context of their times, were not open about their sexuality, but equally about what a nonbinary account of sexuality—a queer sexuality, in short—would look like and how we might know it when we see it. At the same time, we should not leave hanging questions of audience and interpretation, patronage, and a host of other art historical questions that, in this relentless focus on the contemporary, are left on the table, questions that point to the problem of how we might reinterpret historical images alive to frames of reference regarding sexuality that are distinctly not our own. This means that a truly queer art history may surprise us with its active dissent from our assumptions and naturalized meanings, that it may assume forms and modes of representation we as yet don’t understand. So I want to be very clear that in seeking more queer exhibitions, I am not asking that they take a form I can recognize. On the contrary, I would hope to have my definitions and naturalized understandings challenged and redirected. Because acts of overt censorship necessarily catalyze an opposition, the act of protesting that censorship, while politically necessary, is at the same time a reification of the very definitional boundaries a queer art history is struggling to erase. Still, the most pernicious aspect of covert censorship is that it also leaves unchallenged our exceedingly familiar binary models of sexual definition. Ironically, it is only in actively addressing sexuality that we might be able to move beyond or through it, toward a new horizon that understands our sexuality, as with so many other human differences, neutrally, not dissimilar from the way we confess to adoring a favorite food or color. After all, the fact that I like red need not entail disliking blue, and people who like broccoli are not deemed fundamentally distinct from those who hate it. On the field of taste, differences can happily cohabitate. And the more we can now forthrightly address our differences, the less these differences will come to signify and the less we will need to address them. Censorship, overt and covert, thus only catalyzes and reinforces what it would prefer to erase. Paradoxically, censors would be wiser to throw open a conversation that will in the end perish of its own irrelevance.

Notes 1 In the case of the National Gallery of Art on the Mall, the answer is not once, never in all of its exhibitions, a scandal that is curiously invisible precisely because it also has never actively censored an exhibition once it was up in public. 2 As they explained, if they ask you about “the homosexual agenda,” and you use that phrase even mockingly, the lead on Fox News could have you confessing your “homosexual agenda” in your own voice. 3 The Smithsonian worked to gather extensive demographic audience data for Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture; by and large, non-queer audiences were equally enthusiastic about the exhibition. 4 Susan Davidson, “Mother of God,” Rauschenberg Research Project, July 2013, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, www.sfmoma.org/essay/mother-of-god/. The note following Davidson’s first sentence reads: “Rauschenberg steadfastly maintained that his sexual orientation was not the cornerstone upon which his art was made. Nevertheless, numerous scholars have approached his work from this angle. See, for example, Jonathan D. Katz, ‘The Art of Code: Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg,’ in Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership, ed. Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 189–207; Kenneth E. Silver, ‘Modes of Disclosure: The Construction of Gay Identity and the Rise of Pop Art,’ in

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Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955–61 (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1993), 179–203; Lisa Wainwright, ‘Reading Junk: Thematic Imagery in the Art of Robert Rauschenberg from 1952 to 1964’ (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1993); Laura Auricchio, ‘Lifting the Veil: Robert Rauschenberg’s Thirty-four Drawings for Dante’s Inferno and the Commercial Homoerotic Imagery of 1950s America,’ in The Gay ’90s: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Formation in Queer Studies, ed. Thomas Foster, Carol Siegel, and Ellen E. Berry, special issue, Genders 26 (New York: New York University Press, 1997): 119–54; and Tom Folland, ‘Robert Rauschenberg’s Queer Modernism: The Early Combines and Decoration,’ Art Bulletin 92, no. 4 (December 2010): 348–65.”

Bibliography Davidson, Susan. “Mother of God.” Rauschenberg Research Project. July 2013. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. www.sfmoma.org/essay/mother-of-god/. Kardon, Janet, ed. Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment. Philadelphia, PA: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1988. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name at University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art, December 9, 1988–January 29, 1989. Katz, Jonathan D., and David C. Ward, eds. Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2010. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, October 30–February 13, 2011.

PART III

Under Deliberation: Artful Activism

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8 Tucumán Arde and the Changing Face of Censorship Fabián Cereijido

Tucumán Arde (Tucumán Is Burning) was a 1968 multidisciplinary project by the Argentine collective Grupo de Arte de Vanguardia (Vanguard Art Group) (GAV), a group of artists, social scientists, and journalists from Buenos Aires and Rosario seeking to denounce the dire social conditions resulting from the policies of General Juan Carlos Onganía’s military dictatorship (1966–70) in the Argentine province of Tucumán. Because of political differences, the artists leading GAV had abandoned the Instituto di Tella—a privately funded cultural center complying with restrictions imposed by the regime. In implementing Tucumán Arde, they collaborated with the Confederación General del Trabajo de los Argentinos (General Confederation of Labor of the Argentines) (CGTA), a radicalized labor union vehemently opposed to Onganía that worked with other oppositional groups in and outside Argentina. With Tucumán Arde, a seminal work that imagined, created, and operated within a space in which art and politics were undifferentiated, GAV challenged the Argentine art world and the power structures behind it. I propose that while the group’s alliances and actions provoked overt censorship—the army’s forceful closing of GAV’s First Biennial of Avant-Garde Art at the CGTA’s headquarters in Rosario—they were subject in ensuing decades to less overt forms of silencing that depended not on abject force but on cultural hegemony. In investigating the effects of naturalized discourses that purport to be neutral and self-evident but inhibit the agency and historical selfinscription of transformational emancipatory movements and thereby serve the interests of established power structures, I adopt Jacques Derrida’s definition: “Censorship exists as soon as certain forces (linked to powers of evaluation and to symbolic structures) simply limit the extent of a field of study, the resonance or the propagation of a discourse.”1 The interpretive practices in academia and museums that I highlight should not be equated with the actions of the murderous military regime that reduced many individuals and groups to absolute silence. They do, however, warrant critical analysis, as they blunted, diminished, modified, or rendered unthinkable crucial aspects of Tucumán Arde. Even now, when Tucumán Arde is celebrated as a groundbreaking manifestation of socially engaged conceptual art, much art-

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historical and curatorial practice serves to suppress its most productive aspects. It neutralizes or conceals its potentially transformational ideas and actions.

1968 to Early 1970s: Unprecedented Oppositional Articulations, Violent Censorship, and Short-Lived Critical Celebration In ousting democratically elected President Arturo Illía in 1966, Onganía’s administration aimed to expand the market economy and eradicate leftist and communist threats. Early on Onganía announced a three-phased plan for economic, social, and political change designed to appease the opposition and gradually replace physical force with consensus: industrialization and technological modernization, improvement of social conditions, and reinstatement of democratic rule. The government, however, created a de facto legal framework through which judges and officials constrained questionable educational, cultural, and artistic activities, and it increasingly relied on force; the police and the army crushed activity deemed subversive or immoral. Post-Marxist Argentine theorist Ernesto Laclau considers this regime “the most inefficient and stupid the country ever had.”2 Onganía alienated the majority of the population, and an unprecedented oppositional front formed. Sectors traditionally at odds, such as working-class Peronists and left-leaning middle-class students, began to converge, and small business owners, Catholic activists in the Liberation Theology movement, and even nationalistic industrialists aligned. Publicly articulating this unlikely alliance was the CGTA, led by Raimundo Ongaro and Rodolfo Walsh, both tied to Peronism and the Cuban Revolution. The CGTA founding document titled “Plan del Primero de Mayo” called on every sector of society to recognize the oppositional front as “El Pueblo” (“The People”) and join in “la Revolución”—a signifier broad enough to interpellate a variety of constituencies to rebellion and evoke the sense that emancipation and plenitude (a state of affairs fulfilling all desires) were on the horizon. The creators of GAV were outraged by the military regime and inspired by the traction of the CGTA, the Cuban revolution, and the surge of the Left across the continent. The conceptual artists at the core of GAV had previously been associated with the Instituto Di Tella, a private institution in an affluent area of Buenos Aires that maintained contact with the international art world and provided funds, studios, and exhibition space to young Argentine artists dedicated to avant-garde practices, such as happenings, performance, and conceptual art.3 Months before GAV’s inception these radicalized artists returned grants, vacated studios, and withdrew from exhibitions in reaction to the institution’s corporate funding and its acceptance of the military regime’s restrictions on artistic content. Artists disrupted activities inside the Instituto, destroyed their own work out in the streets, and were jailed after clashing with police. The CGTA legal team’s intervention to free them was a momentous occasion, culminating in an alliance based on shared opposition to the government, recognition of the opportunity in the shifting relations of power, and commitment to the revolution. Members of GAV embraced the workers’ operational plans, set to work within the CGTA’s institutional framework, and helped create the union’s Comisión de Agitación y Propaganda (Figure 8.1). The province of Tucumán was emblematic of the negative effects of the government’s economic policies. “Operativo Tucumán” was supposed to modernize and grow the economy but resulted in poverty and malnutrition. The government exploited its grip over the mass media and Tucumán’s remoteness (800 miles from the capital) and launched a deceptive newspaper, television, and radio campaign proclaiming it a successful model for change.

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FIGURE 8.1  Meeting in Rosario of Grupo de Arte de Vanguardia, 1968. Photo by Carlos Militello. Courtesy of Archivo Graciela Carnevale, Rosario, Argentina.

In October 1968 GAV members undertook a fifteen-day field trip to Tucumán to experience circumstances firsthand and interviewed unemployed sugar mill workers and their families, refinery owners, local officials, labor organizers, and artists. They produced testimonial film and photographic and audio material countering the government’s narrative. Their actions caught the attention of military authorities; however, they avoided censorship thanks to the presumed neutrality and prestige of the art world. In a press conference they claimed the interviews were part of a “collective experience” of “art and mass communication.” The GAV members then presented a two-week exhibition of the material at CGTA’s Rosario headquarters. While the term “Tucumán Arde” was vague, use of the present tense conveyed the urgency of the situation in Tucumán.4 The publicity campaign was designed to create suspense, with white posters bearing the word “Tucumán” printed in red, formal signs announcing the upcoming “First Avant-Garde Biennial” at the CGTA headquarters, and spray-painted graffiti reading Tucumán Arde. Small stickers featuring a psychedelic dark stellar logo with the words Tucumán Arde in a groovy typeface were pasted on walls (Figure 8.2). The GAV members dramatized the imminent exhibit: “In three days, Tucumán Arde.” “In two days, Tucumán Arde.” “Tomorrow, Tucumán Arde.” A banner greeting visitors read, “Welcome to Tucumán, Garden of Misery.” Visual and acoustic material saturated the space (Figure 8.3). Large black-and-white photographs displayed destitution and violent struggle, loudspeakers broadcasted oral testimonies, and flickering Super 8 film footage featured tumultuous demonstrations and sugarcane workers

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FIGURE 8.2  Publicity sticker designed by Juan Pablo Renzi for the 1968 Tucumán Arde exhibition, which became the Tucumán Arde logo. Courtesy of Archivo Graciela Carnevale, Rosario, Argentina.

clashing with police. Emphasizing the sugar shortage, sugarless coffee was served. Posters with names of refinery owners were glued to the floor so people walked on them. The lights were turned off and on at calculated intervals to denote the death rate from hunger. Corridors were plastered with newspaper clippings and signs repeating “Tucumán Arde.” The innovative combination of avant-garde practice, radical politics, media manipulation, enticing language, playfulness, and broad cultural appeal bore the marks of Oscar Masotta. This philosopher, artist, happenista, psychoanalyst, and frequent Di Tella lecturer had introduced the Spanish-speaking world to the writings of Jacques Lacan and pioneered the use of structural linguistics in the study of the avant-garde. Masotta notably defined happenings and conceptual art not as “archival materials for the bourgeoisie” but “building blocks of post-revolutionary consciousness.”5 As in Rosario, the inauguration of the Buenos Aires exhibit was well attended. A banner was hung, perhaps precipitously, advocating the release of a group of guerrillas from the newly formed Fuerzas Armadas Peronistas who had been imprisoned.6 A day later police threatened to rescind CGTA’s legal status if the union did not close the exhibit. CGTA complied. In May 1969, shortly after the closing, the union coordinated a multi-class insurrection that culminated in “El Cordobazo”—the seizing of Córdoba for a three-day period (Figure 8.4).7

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FIGURE 8.3  Tucumán Arde exhibit at the headquarters of the General Confederation of Labor of the Argentines, Rosario, 1968. Photo by Carlos Militello. Courtesy of Archivo Graciela Carnevale, Rosario, Argentina.

FIGURE 8.4 Luz y Fuerza union workers marching during the 1969 “Cordobazo” in Córdoba. Printed in El Cordobazo de las Mujeres: Memorias (2019) by Bibiana Fulchieri. Courtesy of Bibiana Fulchieri.

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The army retook the city and incarcerated Ongaro, Walsh, and other leaders of the revolt. The army’s increasingly virulent acts of repression made any resistance not clandestine impossible. Censorship was now enforced through both intimidation and physical violence. The oppositional coalition that produced Tucumán Arde ceased in 1969, and CGTA folded in 1972. The regime all but cancelled public cultural life. Grupo Argentino de Vanguardia disbanded, and the artists stopped making art and joined the intensified armed struggle, left the country, or went into hiding. Graciela Carnevale, the collective’s press contact and record keeper, buried GAV’s documentation behind her home to hide and preserve it. Carnevale’s brave and poetic act greatly contributed to Tucumán Arde’s later allure. The government’s act of censorship—its forcing of CGTA’s act of self-censorship—is relatively easy to understand. In late 1968, at the time of CGTA’s inception, the government condoned its legal status to keep its actions visible and contained. In turn CGTA expressed sympathy for nascent armed guerrilla groups but pledged neither official allegiance nor armed action. By late 1968 CGTA and GAV were aligned and coordinating opposition to the government. The Taco Ralo banner was arguably less of a threat than the exhibition, which foregrounded the squalor and violence wrought by the regime, dramatized the urgency of the situation, advocated resistance, and invoked the notion of a pending revolution without defining it in restrictive ways. In making a radically different future conceivable, the GAV/ CGTA collective entered into active and symbolic consonance with an unprecedented oppositional front consisting of the working class, liberal-minded middle-class students, small and large business owners, and Liberation Theology adherents. It established an important precedent for the art world and movement politics, situating artistic production and political action in an undifferentiated and immensely productive space. Several art world experts at this time acknowledged in national and international journals the significance of Tucumán Arde. In a daring and out-of-character laudatory 1969 review in the short-lived Artiempo magazine, Argentine Jorge Glusberg praised GAV’s tactical use of structural linguistics and informational theory, applauded its political agency, determination, and visionary sensibility, and identified it as “la verdadera vanguardia” (“the real avantgarde”).8 In 1971 the French magazine Robho identified Tucumán Arde as a meaningful confluence of artistic modernism and historical Marxism.9 In her 1973 account of the early years of conceptual art, US conceptual artist and critic Lucy Lippard declared that her contact with the Tucumán Arde organizers was central to her political radicalization.10 In 1974 Spanish critic Simón Marchán Fiz characterized Tucumán Arde as “conceptualismo ideológico” in Del arte objetual al arte de concepto. However, Tucumán Arde soon faded from the critical eye.

1970s to Late 1990s: The Long Night In spite of the government’s recovery of Córdoba, widespread opposition in 1969 brought down Onganía’s administration. A succession of brief military and democratic administrations continued until 1976. During this period censorship was less incisive. From the 1970s to the late 1990s Glusberg was the president of the Argentine chapter of the International Association of Art Critics and the editorial director and the sole funder of the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAyC), an institution for art and architectural research and exhibitions. He also served as editorial director and critic for several national newspapers and authored countless exhibition catalogs published by CAyC, which promoted a structuralist discourse intertwined with leftist rhetoric. Glusberg, who chronicled the political dimensions,

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desire to change history, and use of communication theory and linguistics of the Argentine avant-garde, normalized important shifts in hegemonic art historical narratives. From 1976 to 1983 the military wielded power under a new plan, El Proceso de Reorganización Nacional, which focused on national security and market expansion. With Plan Cóndor, they cooperated with other US-backed dictatorships in the southern cone, and repression intensified.11 The military “disappeared” and murdered people without due process and in a systematic manner stole babies born in captivity. Military and paramilitary forces hunted down not only left-wing guerrillas but anyone believed to be associated with the political Left. Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano writes that at the time there were four types of Argentines: “enterrados, desterrados, encerrados y aterrados” (“buried, exiled, imprisoned, and terrified”).12 There was an upsurge in intellectual and artistic circles of a formalist, politically disengaged register of structuralism and structural linguistics. As Laclau and Chantal Mouffe state regarding the expansion of structuralist theory: “[W]hen the linguistic model was imported to the general field of the human sciences, it was the effect of systematicity that predominated, and thereby constituted structuralism as a new form of essentialism: as the search for underlying structures that constitute the immanent law of any possible variation.”13 The neutrality and systematicity of this essentialized structuralism can function to hide, naturalize, and preserve power structures and subject positions. Circumspection and complex theoretical jargon also shielded many intellectuals who, forcibly or not, reduced their political involvement. University courses, publications, and conferences on the intricacies of linguistic structures did not attract the police. Glusberg now stopped discussing GAV’s revolutionary politics and tactical use of theory and emancipatory discourses. He backpedaled on the geopolitical significance of Tucumán Arde.14 In La Semiótica de las Artes Visuales and later in Del Pop a la Nueva Imagen, he obfuscated political content from Althusser’s theory of interpellation and painted the Argentine avant-garde as a derivative movement that gave “local” color and circumstance to the avant-garde of the “centers.” He proposed that international art centers interpellated the periphery, hailing local avant-gardes into subjecthood and calling on them to join the international symbolic order. Well-traveled and enlightened local critics facilitated the process by explaining the conceptual intricacies of artistic production in the centers in local terms.15 Argentine artists were considered manifestations, not tactical users, of linguistic structures. While he proposed this process made possible el libre ejercicio de la creación (the free exercise of creativity) by avant-gardes throughout the world, he obscured the transformative aspects of the Argentine avant-garde. From 1984 to the late 1990s Glusberg continued to dominate the local art scene. Under Argentina’s first post-dictatorship elected president, Raúl Alfonsín (1984–9), the neoliberal model so violently imposed by the military became hegemonic. Revolutionary politics and political art lost traction. Argentina was now an impoverished and indebted country deeply scarred by state terrorism. Alfonsín accepted the burden of international debt incurred by the regime, courted foreign investment, and prosecuted only a handful of individuals for human rights violations. In his 1985 account of contemporary Argentine art, titled Del Pop a la Nueva Imagen, Glusberg declared that Argentine national character and artistic tradition were back on course. He promoted La Nueva Imagen, a group of young Argentine painters who deployed recognizable imagery and romantically affirming notions of national identity and who paired abstract forms with expressive painterly gestures. He depoliticized clear references to military regime violence. In explaining allusions to political violence, Glusberg was tentative: “[M]aybe the fact that our young artists have embraced this sort of expressive painting … at an unconscious level … might be related to … genocide, massacres.” He then

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equivocated: “To point out a historical coincidence is by no means the same as to offer an explanation. In our opinion, we are just stating that since this fact recurs, it must be significant.”16 Glusberg described Nueva Imagen artists as iconoclasts without exacting the established order, artistic or political, they were rebelling against. He made no assessment of artistic intention without a naturalizing reference to objectified conditions of possibility, such as “historical coincidence” or the involuntary “unconscious.” And he identified regional/ national identity as the most important condition of possibility, thereby presenting artworks and artists as examples of regional behavior. In 1969 Glusberg characterized GAV as an historical agent with concrete intentions and a command of communicative theory and structural linguistics. He championed its artistic and activist virtues. During military regimes between 1976 and 1983, he recast Tucumán Arde and the Argentine avant-garde as manifestations of essentialized linguistic structures and products of international trends. During neoliberal democracies between 1984 and 2000, he de-emphasized them and focused on other artistic developments, which he characterized as a regional spasmodic reflex. Argentine art was ready to travel, and travel it did. Glusberg became an important broker of Argentine art in the 1980s and early to mid-1990s boom of Latin American art in Europe and the United States—contributing to the first wave of blockbuster exhibitions in prestigious museums. Some exhibitions, such as Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century (New York’s Museum of Modern Art, 1993), ignored Tucumán Arde.17 Others advanced stereotypes of national and regional identity and ignored or misrepresented conceptual art from Latin America, such as Art of the Fantastic: Latin America, 1920–1987 (Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1987). A bias was also clear in the exclusion of Latin America from conceptual art surveys, such as 1965–1975: Reconsidering the Object of Art (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1995).18

Late 1990s to 2004: Contrasting Returns—Social Movements at Home, Survey Exhibitions Abroad Tucumán Arde reappeared in Argentina in the late 1990s, when Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman published Del Di Tella a “Tucumán Arde”: Vanguardia artística y política en el `68 argentino, and activist art groups identified Tucumán Arde as an important precedent that affirmed the relevance of art groups in movement politics. Del Di Tella a “Tucumán Arde” is a comprehensive archival study of the 1960s Argentine avant-garde that includes a detailed historical account, contextual information, facsimile documents, and testimonies of artists, union leaders, students, theorists, and journalists. Longoni and Mestman acknowledged that they aimed to “reactivate Tucumán Arde’s utopian substratum and its tremendous inaugural impetus”—in other words, recuperate GAV’s critical agency and Tucumán Arde’s subversive potential.19 To them, historical context was not a condition of possibility but the scenery in which Tucumán Arde’s artistic and political actions and potential could best be understood. Longoni and Mestman’s text was doubly significant because after years of military rule and subsequent neoliberal democratic governments, there was little knowledge of or regard for the role of movement politics in the late 1960s and the dislocation of power structures that GAV and CGTA helped bring about. Longoni and Mestman moved beyond mainstream historical narratives to highlight period political shifts not widely acknowledged in Argentina or other Latin American centers.

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Just as GAV used research material collected in Tucumán for its exhibitions, Longoni, Mestman, and art activist groups leveraged the publication’s archival information for movement politics. A younger generation was energizing a popular uprising against the Argentine government and neoliberal policies aligned with the Washington Consensus and diversifying the local human rights movement.20 With a keen sense of historical opportunity, they used the text to initiate discussions about art and politics and helped art collectives process ideas, genealogies, and strategies. The expansion and diversification of socially engaged art practices originated in or were inspired by Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio (Children for Identity and Justice against Forgetting and Silence) (HIJOS), an organization consisting of children of the desaparecidos (disappeared). At this time mothers and grandmothers of los desaparecidos, known as Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Abuelas, were relatively isolated. Democratically elected presidents had passed impunity laws protecting the masterminds and executors of state terrorism. The Madres’ decades-old demands for restitution and legal prosecution had lost traction. However, the sons and daughters of the desaparecidos were now old enough to transform the human rights movement. Members of HIJOS formed two art collectives. Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC) and Etcétera staged escraches, carnival-like public shamings of repressors who had been prosecuted, found guilty, and exonerated by immunity laws.21 HIJOS attempted to compensate for legal and institutional deficiencies by aligning with other human rights groups. One of the Madres, Nora Cortiñas, described the transformation in these terms: We picked up the battle banners of our children and we learned that we had to defend all human rights. … What unified the Madres, who were from different social classes and had different levels of education, was that the ideals of their children were the same. Today I understand that human rights include economic, social and cultural rights, the civil and political rights of women, the rights of the indigenous, the rights of the homosexuals and the disabled.22 The human rights movement was becoming a united front in which, as Laclau would say, equality functioned as a “surface of inscription” for different social demands.23 During this period the socioeconomic situation worsened, and the opposition movement organized around not political parties but neighborhood associations, popular assemblies, associations of unemployed citizens, and other impromptu coalitions. Activist artists and art groups produced and circulated banners, posters, graffiti, and flyers, created slogans and chants, and stenciled slogans and logos on clothing. These visually and acoustically compelling creations dramatized the expanding presence and diversified nature of the human rights movement. Longoni and Mestman introduced members of GAC and Etcétera to Del Di Tella a “Tucumán Arde” at the IMPA factory, one of the first factories taken over by the Recovered Factory Movement, which ultimately converted as many as two hundred liquidated and abandoned factories into profitable cooperatives. The circumstances were much like those of the late 1960s, when CGTA and GAV joined forces. Members of HIJOS aligned with workers and met in a location that, like CGTA’s headquarters, was an operational hub for the oppositional movement.24 Longoni later described the occasion in these terms: Tucumán Arde had not yet been canonized. It wasn’t yet seen as an inevitable referent of international conceptualism. Political art had not been institutionally legitimated either. … The artistic avant-garde and political radicalization of the 60s had made

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[the new collectives] feel they were part of a powerful history of unknown practices. Practices that undid pre-established boundaries between art and militancy and set out to work on a context they do not want to be and could not be estranged from. It is at that juncture that this critical legacy was reactivated as a public repository of resources and experiences to turn protests into creative acts.25 Tucumán Arde became a recurring reference for many activist art collectives: Etcétera, Taller Popular de Serigrafía, and Ala Plástica, among others. Naming collectives after Tucumán Arde became a trend: Argentina Arde, Arde Arte, and Arde Arde. Longoni and Mestman seemingly found the answer to the question they had asked in Del Di Tella a “Tucumán Arde”: What would be the best way to “reactivate [the] tremendous inaugural impetus” of Tucumán Arde?26 While Longoni and Mestman did not address the constructed nature of Tucumán Arde, historical context, or their own account and treated this “impetus” as a truth that could be universally understood and accepted, their observations concerning Tucumán Arde’s active relationship with context disrupted conventional narratives about a derivative periphery. Tucumán Arde’s international reappearance sharply contrasted with its introduction into sites of local popular political action. A second wave of exhibitions in major museums in socalled centers featuring Latin American modern and contemporary art defined Tucumán Arde as the manifestation not of national culture but of a movement of idea-based art occurring around the world. For example, in Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s at the Queens Museum, New York (1999), and Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts (2004), Tucumán Arde was a prominent feature in a revisionist art canon acknowledging conceptual art in the so-called periphery. Global Conceptualism was a pioneering gesture of inclusion. Curated by critics from each of the regions represented and coordinated by Jane Farver, Luis Camnitzer, and Rachel Weiss, it surveyed the historical development of idea-based art around the world. As Camnitzer has noted, this irruptive enterprise fostered debate and generated a critical space in which global avant-gardes could be explored.27 Mari Carmen Ramírez, the curator of the Latin American section, represented Tucumán Arde with video footage from the 1968 Rosario exhibit and in her catalog essay argued that conceptualism in Latin America had a distinctive quality.28 Ramírez reiterated her argument and also explored Tucumán Arde in greater detail in her 2004 exhibition Inverted Utopias, which was dedicated exclusively to the Latin American avant-garde. Curators Ramírez and Héctor Olea wanted to account for the rich and varied art production of Latin America, contest stereotypical definitions, and reject reductive curatorial practices. They adopted an anti-totalizing model of “constellations” that clustered works according to diverse criteria and included Tucumán Arde in the constellation termed Cryptic and Committed. The catalog featured photographs of the Rosario exhibit, the street campaign, and related period art. In her introductory essay titled “A Highly Topical Utopia: Some Outstanding Features of the Avant-Garde in Latin America,” Ramírez stated that works in this constellation, which had been created “in societies characterized by repression, censorship, and de facto authoritarianism,” exemplified “production of meaning at any cost” and “deep-seated questioning of the ‘function of art.’” She singled out Tucumán Arde as the apex of Latin American conceptualism: “[A]ll of [the] conceptual manifestations [in the Cryptic and Committed constellation] symbolically came to a climax” in Tucumán Arde, “the great collective” that brought together “a broad front of artists and workers” to denounce “the lies broadcast by the national media concerning the wretched labor conditions of sugar cane mills in northern Argentina.”29 Such historical narration and curatorial work raised the global visibility and status of Tucumán Arde. The notion that there was such a thing as relevant Latin American conceptualism was landmark thinking. However, in Ramírez’s second catalog essay “Tactics

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for Thriving on Adversity,” she reiterated a point she had made in her Global Conceptualism essay, characterizing and framing Latin American Art in a problematic way. She differentiated between American and British “tautological” conceptualism and Latin American “ideological” conceptualism.30 In describing North American and British conceptualism, she implied that the constitution of art objects lay in analytical artistic practice and tautologies that were not ideological—that did not operate within a larger socioeconomic context. In characterizing Latin American conceptualism, she intimated that artists were more ethical, humane, and socially conscious but disregarded their capacity to nominally determine their context and inscribe themselves within it. In her conclusion Ramírez reduced the historical context of Latin American conceptualism to three historical developments: desarrollismo, World War II, and authoritarianism.31 These certainly were influential, but they hardly approximate the contextual specificities that GAV engaged with, which included an oppositional front of unprecedented scope. Ramírez also declared: “With a few exceptions, Latin American Conceptualism remained in the long run marginal activities largely appreciated and supported by intellectual elites within their own countries.”32 She overlooked the relevance of popular movements and institutions with which Tucumán Arde articulated its actions: the Cuban Revolution, Peronism, and the Cordobazo. And she did not acknowledge the afterlife of Tucumán Arde—its 2001 rescue and redeployment in Argentine movement politics and the proliferation of radical Tucumán Arde-inspired art collectives engaged with political institutions. It was an ironic time for her to minimize Tucumán Arde’s impact. Social movements were finding elective expression all across the continent. Argentina and many other Latin American nations had opted for leftist forms of political governance. But the very title of Ramírez’s essay—“Tactics for Thriving on Adversity”—emphasized not instrumentalization of social change and plenitude but reactive coping and survival. Ramírez pondered “the relationship between Conceptualism and authoritarianism”: While early Conceptual practices were largely spurred by repressive governments in the Southern Cone, the latter can also be credited with the eventual dissolution of these practices. This was particularly evident in Argentina. Thus, perhaps the greatest contradiction confronted by Conceptualism in Latin America is embodied in a painful irony: the advent of democracy brought about its demise. … [I]n Latin America the passage of authoritarianism to democracy imprinted a particular fate on these practices, significantly curtailing the radical investigations they had opened.33 Ramírez thereby suggested that GAV’s practice was contextually determined, that it followed from historical circumstances. The army brought about Tucumán Arde with its repressive actions and took it away; democracy brought about the “demise” of conceptualism. Ramírez did not consider the social struggles and hegemonic shifts that made the change from authoritarian rule to democracy possible—movement politics and institutional power that GAV effected and subsequent changes in the balance of power. Any discussion of context as an objective condition of possibility detracts from agency, particularly when one gives context enormous relevance and at the same time overlooks its constructed nature. Derrida has noted that the exacting of a limit between text and context, as between cultural production and historical circumstances, is never neutral.34 It is difficult—in fact impossible—to trace a clear dividing line between them. The very attempt is tendentious. In regards to contextual determinations, the account of Ramírez and that of Longoni and Mestman differed remarkably. Longoni and Mestman presented context as the mise-enscène in which Tucumán Arde’s agency could be appreciated. They affirmed not only GAV’s agency but also Tucumán Arde’s “tremendous inaugural impetus.”35 Ramírez inverted the

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equation, presenting Tucumán Arde and its trajectory as the scenery that made the historical agency of authoritarian rule evident. Her explanation was tied to a less deliberate rhetorical gesture: an ostensibly observable paradox in which authoritarianism engenders radicality. Her puzzling observation combined with her troubling ideological/tautological dichotomy neutralized the radical political character of GAV’s practices. Although she described Latin American conceptualism as a “brilliant chapter” in “the history of twentieth-century art,” her designation of objectified contexts as conditions of possibility diminished it. The tendency to naturalize avant-garde cultural production in terms of regional determinants has long been a feature of art historical narratives. Regionalization of subjectivity disavows authorship and agency, and this constitutes epistemic violence, particularly when it is perpetrated from a position of influence and institutional power. With Tucumán Arde’s revival in Argentina in the early 2000s, greater emphasis was placed on GAV’s transformative vocation; activist groups associated Tucumán Arde with historical opportunity and movement politics. In international historical narratives and curatorial practice, Tucumán Arde became an icon of Latin American conceptualism and an apex of political art and ethics, but GAV’s authorial determinations, historical sense, agency, and political relevance were compromised under the weight of problematic interpretive frameworks. The group’s self-definition, political predilections and gambles, projections of future emancipation, and capacity to articulate its actions with a front of counter-hegemonic operations were obscured.

2004 to the Present: A Canonic Tucumán Arde and the Case of Inventario By 2004 the political situation in Argentina had changed. Popular movements had grown in size and influence. After thirty years of weekly marches by the Madres and Abuelas, cases against repressors had been reopened and the human rights movement had morphed into a coalition, a broad surface of inscription. Legalization of same-sex marriage, with support from the Madres, was imminent.36 Throughout Latin America there was an upsurge in the power of the electoral Left. This unprecedented upsurge was not like the isolated cases of the Cuban Revolution (1959), the miraculous victory of Salvador Allende (1970) in Chile, or the Sandinista victory (1979) in Nicaragua. A majority of the Latin American population, from Chavez’s Venezuela to Kirshner’s Argentina, Evo Morales’s Bolivia, Lula da Silva’s Brazil, José Mujica’s Uruguay, and Rafael Correa’s Ecuador, elected leftist governments. Tucumán Arde, which now had universal art canonical status, and Carnevale’s archive had become a regular feature in the national and international exhibition circuit. Tucumán Arde was (in the words of Longoni and Mestman) “an unavoidable referent of international conceptualism.”37 The concurrent rise of Latin American leftist politics and Tucumán Arde in art institutions had complex overtones. This was evident at documenta 12 (2007) in Kassel, Germany, and Inventario (2008) in Rosario. The inclusion of Tucumán Arde in documenta, which takes place every five years and is one of the world’s most prestigious art events, was significant.38 However, what was presented was the archive in nonchronological order and without explanatory texts. The decision to minimize information, which was intended to enable every possible reception, was based on the assumption that this interpretative context would be by default a tabula rasa. For Carnevale, who made the archive available, it was important to liberate viewers from a

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potentially oppressive master discourse, transform them from passive to active receivers, and reset the normative Tucumán Arde narrative in polysemic flux.39 While gaps in information were meant to tease the viewer’s projective imagination, the display may have evoked, in general terms, social destitution in rural Latin America, student revolts in urban Latin America and, possibly, early performance art and cultural effervescence. It arguably condemned to oblivion important aspects of the work: GAV’s articulation of social critiques and its calls for revolutionary emancipatory action within a broad-based political oppositional front, which gained a place in the political imaginary of art activist groups in the early 2000s engaged with movement politics in Argentina—a development in which, as previously stated, Longoni was deeply invested. Inventario 1965–1975: Archivo Graciela Carnevale, which was presented at the Centro Cultural Parque de España in 2008 in Rosario, was curated by Longoni, Carnevale, historian Fernando Davis, and Rosario-based artist Ana Wandzik and coordinated with the collective Red Conceptualismos del Sur. Its purpose was the “political reactivation of Tucumán Arde.”40 Carnevale made clear that the exhibit was designed to “show these words and images so that they don’t crystallize, so that they are not stripped of the jolting energy they originally had.”41 The strategy for the political reactivation of Tucumán Arde involved dismantling its iconic status, which the curators saw as a stifling myth, and providing the public with a participatory environment in which it might actively re-signify Tucumán Arde. In Davis’s words, it was necessary to “fracture the stability of Tucumán Arde’s legacy to keep its contours problematic and fertile.”42 Instead of resorting to scarcity, like the exhibit at documenta, the curators of Inventario embraced saturation. They displayed primary and secondary documentation, presented multiple points of view in a purposely suffuse manner, and allowed visitors to manipulate the material. Their intent was to convey the idea that the work was still in flux and immersed in a rich maze of possibilities. Inventario deployed a multimedia avalanche that included not only the original documents of the Carnevale archive but also testimonies of other GAV members who at times opposed Carnevale’s views, images of Tucumán Arde’s presentations, every text, review, and editorial ever written about Tucumán Arde at home and abroad, and a detailed historical account of the original exhibit and all exhibitions since. The archive, which by then included reactions to its countless presentations, was more visible than ever before. Those attending the exhibit could handle the original documents, make copies at a Xerox station, and email digitized versions to whomever they wanted. Images of catalog items and of people looking at these items in past exhibits were projected on the walls. Consider again the political effects of essentialized registers of structuralism and deconstruction adopted by the social sciences. Laclau and Mouffe argue that once academics accepted that “objects had a necessarily discursive character” and “it was impossible for any given discourse to implement a final suture”—in other words, that everything was open to multiple, shifting meanings—scholars assumed their mission was to reveal the constructed nature of every apparently natural social phenomenon.43 Laclau and Mouffe propose that such deconstruction, if not accompanied by a political articulation calling attention to hegemonic configurations, naturalizes existing power structures and prevailing subject positions. Declaring the death of the author, for example, does not do away with authorial privileges; it allows hegemonic agents to cash the checks of departed authors. The ostensibly neutral position from which myths and constructs are exposed and demoted is itself a social construct that should not be considered neutral. It is important to remember that Tucumán Arde and the CGTA shared a belief in and a commitment to the revolution, which was both a social construct and a myth in which they were deeply invested. It is also essential to recognize the omnipresence of constructions and myths in cultural production and the hegemonic political

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operation involved in “revealing” them. Judith Butler proposes that “construction is not opposed to agency; it is the necessary scene of agency.”44 Could the saturation of Inventario conjure up the historical sense, social dislocations, and political mobilizations of 1968 and 2000? Could the discursive openness of Inventario approach the cohesion generated in 1968 by a shared aspirational mythic construction— the revolution? Could chaotic pluralities replace the sense of opportunity, receptiveness, and volatility that brought Longoni and Mestman to hold their momentous meeting with artists and laborers at the IMPA factory in 2000, present their book on Tucumán Arde, and invigorate the movement politics of the time? If the intentions of the curators of documenta 12 and Inventario were to turn Tucumán Arde into a placeholder for new emancipatory meanings and actions, why would their mythic and iconic status be considered obstacles? Why not regard them as capital? It is difficult, almost sacrilegious, to declare Inventario an act of censorship. The effort to demystify Tucumán Arde was carried out with the belief that a fertile transformational ground could be established by denouncing construction, myth, and fixed meaning. Also, the curators seem to have believed that Tucumán Arde could somehow withstand its own demystification and that a more emancipatory Tucumán Arde could be generated by the public’s encounter with their installation. Yet their positive intentions, established from a position of power, occluded the inscriptive determinations, projections, and political gamble of Tucumán Arde, as well as the triumphal return in 2001 to which they had so profoundly contributed. For the sake of open and fertile resignification, they put in doubt the subjective, constructed, and invested aspects of Tucumán Arde. In opposing construction, they tacitly yielded to naturalized power structures and agents that transcended subjectivity and mythology.

Conclusions In the past forty-five years, emblematic instances of what I am calling censorship have suppressed, diminished, misrepresented, or rendered unthinkable one or more aspects of Tucumán Arde. The saga started with a direct intervention by the Argentine military government: the banning of an exhibition that was an urgent multimedia exposé of its ruinous policies and a call to revolution. Despite a flurry of national and international acclaim, Tucumán Arde soon faded from view. During military governments of the 1970s and neoliberal democracies of the 1980s and 1990s, GAV and its seminal work were shrouded in critical silence. The shroud slipped away in the late 1990s, in the midst of a popular revolt against the government. In the 2000s Tucumán Arde gained canonical status in hegemonic historical narratives about the international avant-garde and became a regular feature in national and international museum exhibitions. However, critical narratives and curatorial frameworks suppressed key aspects of the work. Unlike the 1968 forceful closing of the exhibit, subsequent censorial actions were indirect, not enforced by a clear chain of command, and carried out within hegemonic discourses. Some were blatant and deliberate; others were subtle and performed without malice. None should be equated with the military violence of an oppressive regime. They were all, however, constraints imposed from a position of power. It was not only the brutal and instrumental actions of state, police, and military agencies but also the coalescing of hegemonic narratives and decisions of cultural agents in positions of power that (at times unwittingly) effected censorship on Tucumán Arde. The most regrettable consequence was the eradication of many groundbreaking aspects. These aspects were acknowledged and re-instantiated by Longoni and Mestman in the midst of the 2001 antineoliberal revolt, but they were absent from critical discourse before and after—discourse in

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which the essentialized registers of structuralism and disaffected versions of deconstruction that Laclau and Mouffe had analyzed and deplored had traction. While pioneering scholars provided Tucumán Arde with significant visibility and currency, the pull of oppressive hegemonic methods of historical narration endured. What should remain in view is GAV’s capacity to recognize and help build a new horizon, inscribe itself within it, operate and establish alliances based on this radical investment and projection, articulate its actions with both traditional political institutions and innovative movement politics, and give presence and urgency to a much needed and desired future.

Notes I thank Gabriela Simón-Cereijido for her help and support; Graciela Carnevale for our lengthy 2008 conversation in Rosario, Argentina; and Catha Paquette, whose contribution to this text has been essential. Translations, unless otherwise specified, are mine. I engaged with matters discussed in this essay in Fabián Cereijido, “Assured Pasts or Gambled Futures” (PhD Diss., University of California, San Diego, 2011), ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. 1 Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 46. 2 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2007), 219. 3 Instituto Di Tella, a cultural center founded in 1958 by the Di Tella Company, a family-owned industrial consortium, developed around the family’s Western art collection, had financial backing from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and supported artists such as León Ferrari, Marta Minujín, and Liliana Porter. 4 GAV member Margarita Paksa adapted the term from the 1966 film Is Paris Burning? which was playing in Argentina at the time. Ana Florencia Frontini, “Tucumán Arde: Campaña publicitaria de la 1ra Bienal de Arte de Vanguardia,” in La Trama de la Comunicación, vol. 10, Anuario del Departamento de Ciencias de la Comunicación: Facultad de Ciencia Política y Relaciones Internacionales (Rosario, Argentina: UNR Editora, 2005), 2. 5 Oscar Masotta, Happenings (Buenos Aires: Jorge Alvarez, 1967), 42. 6 Fuerzas Armadas Peronistas emerged in the Taco Ralo area of Tucumán. In September 1968 the army ambushed and arrested guerrillas from the group. See Ana Longoni and Mariano Mestman, Del Di Tella a “Tucumán Arde”: Vanguardia artística y política en el ‘68 argentino (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2008), 83. 7 For information concerning women’s involvement in El Cordobazo, see Bibiana Fulchieri, El Cordobazo de las mujeres: Memorias de Bibiana Fulchieri (Córdoba, Argentina: Editorial Las Nuestras, 2019). 8 Jorge Glusberg, “17 Artistas Detrás de la Dialéctica de lo Simple,” Artiempo 4 (January–February 1969): 12. 9 “Dossier Argentine: Les Fils de Marx et Mondrian,” Robho (Paris), nos. 5–6 (1971): 16–22, https://icaadocs.mfah.org/icaadocs/THEARCHIVE/FullRecord/tabid/88/doc/761610/language/enUS/Default.aspx. 10 Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (New York: Praeger, 1973), 32. 11 Collaborating regimes included those of Hugo Banzer, Bolivia; Ernesto Geisel, Brazil; Alfredo Stroessner, Paraguay; Juan María Bordaberry, Uruguay; and Augusto Pinochet, Chile.

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12 Eduardo Galeano, Días y Noches de Amor y de Guerra (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1983), 38. 13 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), 113. 14 Jorge Glusberg, Del Pop Art a la Nueva Imagen (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de Arte Gaglianone, 1985). In this publication Glusberg barely mentioned Tucumán Arde. 15 Glusberg, Del Pop Art a la Nueva Imagen, 52. 16 Glusberg, Del Pop Art a la Nueva Imagen, 516. 17 See Waldo Rasmussen, ed., Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1993), including Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Blueprint Circuits: Conceptual Art and Politics in Latin America,” 156–67. 18 The exhibition featured one Argentine artist—David Lamelas. 19 Longoni and Mestman, Del Di Tella a “Tucumán Arde,” 454. 20 Coined in 1989, the term “Washington Consensus” refers to economic measures recommended to developing countries by financial institutions based in Washington, DC, including the US Treasury Department, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank: market-determined pricing, avoidance of inflation, free trade, financial deregulation, an enhanced private sector, and minimal role of government. 21 For these events outside repressors’ residences, Etcétera made farcical puppets and costumes and staged operatic representations of torture, cozy rapport between the church and the military, and the selling of babies. Grupo de Arte Callejero created false street signs using official city graphics, with inscriptions such as “torturer on the next corner” and “house of a repressor 500 meters.” 22 Nora Cortiñas, quoted in Elizabeth Borland, “Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo en la era neoliberal: ampliando objetivos para unir el pasado, el presente y el futuro,”  colomb.int., n.63 (January/ June 2006), 128–47. http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S012156122006000100007&lng=en&nrm=iso. 23 Laclau, On Populist Reason, 98. 24 Mouffe advocated this type of collaboration: “It would be a serious mistake to believe that artistic activism could, on its own, bring about the end of neo-liberal hegemony.” Chantal Mouffe, “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces,” Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 1 (Summer 2007): 5. 25 Ana Longoni, “(Con)Texto(s) para el GAC,” in Pensamientos, Prácticas y Acciones, ed. Grupo de Arte Callejero (Buenos Aires: Tina Limón, 2009), 10. 26 Longoni and Mestman, Del Di Tella a “Tucumán Arde,” 454. 27 Fernando Davis, “Entrevista a Luis Camnitzer,” Ramona 86 (November 2008), Ramonaweb, http://70.32.114.117/gsdl/collect/revista/index/assoc/HASH5e10/f797a393.dir/r86_24nota.pdf. 28 Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity: Conceptualism in Latin America, 1960–1980,” in Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, ed. Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, and Rachel Weiss (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), 53–71. 29 Mari Carmen Ramírez, “A Highly Topical Utopia: Some Outstanding Features of the AvantGarde in Latin America,” in Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, ed. Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 13, 14. Marchán Fiz coined the term “ideological conceptualism” in 1974 in Del arte objetual al arte del concepto (Madrid: Akal, 1986), 269. Jacqueline Barnitz reintroduced it in “Conceptual Art in Latin America: A Natural Alliance,” in Encounters/Displacements: Luis Camnitzer, Alfredo Jaar and Cildo Meireles, ed. Mari Carmen Ramírez and Beverly Adams (Austin: Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, 1992). Ramírez used it in Global Conceptualism and Heterotopías: Medio siglo sin-lugar 1918–1968 (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2000).

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30 Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity: Conceptualism in Latin America, 1960–80,” in Inverted Utopias, 436. The essay in Inverted Utopias is an abridged version of Ramírez’s earlier Global Conceptualism essay. 31 Desarrollismo was a current of economic thought that favored consolidation of local democratic institutions and development of local industry through state support of science and technology and taxing of foreign imports. While neither revolutionary nor leftist, desarrollismo was a frequent target of interventionism, as it conflicted with the interests of transnational corporations operating in Latin America and imposed “unnatural” barriers on the flow of capital. 32 Ramírez, “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity,” in Inverted Utopias, 435. 33 Ramírez, “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity,” in Inverted Utopias, 436. 34 Jacques Derrida, quoted in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 90. 35 Longoni and Mestman, Del Di Tella a “Tucumán Arde,” 454. 36 Argentina legalized same-sex marriage in 2010. 37 Longoni, “(Con)Texto(s) para el GAC,” 10. 38 See Roger M. Buergel and Ruth Noack, eds., Documenta Kassel 12, 16/06-23/09: 2007 (Cologne: Taschen, 2007). 39 Carnevale said of the archive installation: “[T]he curators stated that this kind of event does not lend itself to stopping and reading lengthy texts. On the other hand, they felt that the works should speak for themselves and that the public should view the exhibition as a direct aesthetic experience rather than through a manipulated version of the work. … [The display of the archive without clear explanatory texts] can also be read as a criticism of the entire system of manipulation that has been established around the work, in which an elitist group (i.e., critics, curators, etc.) provides the lone opinion and presents the truth. This places the public in a position of being mere consumers of that imposed uncritical point of view. Rescuing or vindicating the role of a public, that acts as such, with a thoughtful, critical attitude would give it back its leading role and approach the aesthetic experience as a subjective process.” “Interview Transcript,” Graciela Carnevale interview by Ana Longoni, LatinArt Online, August 1, 2007, http://www.latinart.com/transcript.cfm?id=91. 40 Graciela Carnevale, “Algunas interrogaciones sobre el archivo,” in Inventario 1965–1975: Archivo Graciela Carnevale, ed. Graciela Carnevale et al. (Rosario, Argentina: Centro Cultural Parque de España/AECID, 2008), n.p. 41 Carnevale, “Algunas interrogaciones sobre el archivo,” n.p. 42 Fernando Davis, “El Conceptualismo Como Categoría Táctica,” Ramonaweb, January 3, 2013, http://www.ramona.org.ar/node/21556. 43 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 111. 44 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), 147.

Bibliography Buergel, Roger M., and Ruth Noack, eds. Documenta Kassel 12, 16/06–23/09: 2007. Cologne: Taschen, 2007. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name at Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany, June 16–September 23, 2007. Exhibition catalog. Carnevale, Graciela, Ana Longoni, Fernando Davis, and Ana Wandzik. Inventario 1965–1975: Archivo Graciela Carnevale. Rosario: Centro Cultural Parque de España/AECID, 2008. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name at Centro Cultural Parque de España, Rosario, Argentina, October 3–November 9, 2008.

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Derrida, Jacques. Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2. Translated by Jan Plug. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Glusberg, Jorge. Del Pop Art a la Nueva Imagen. Buenos Aires: Ediciones de Arte Gaglianone, 1985. Glusberg, Jorge. Semiótica de la Artes Visuales. Buenos Aires: CAyC, 1980. Grupo de Arte Callejero. GAC: Pensamientos, Prácticas y Acciones. Buenos Aires: Tina Limón, 2009. Laclau, Ernesto. On Populist Reason. London: Verso, 2007. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso, 1985. Longoni, Ana, and Mariano Mestman. Del Di Tella a “Tucumán Arde”: Vanguardia artística y política en el ‘68 argentino Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2008. Masotta, Oscar. Happenings. Buenos Aires: Jorge Alvarez, 1967. Ramírez, Mari Carmen, and Héctor Olea. Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name at Houston Museum of Fine Arts, June 20–September 12, 2004.

9 The Discursive Roots of Censorship: Neoliberalism’s Rendering of Chican@ Art Karen Mary Davalos

Chican@ artists have a palpable sense of the discursive effect of censorship. This essay explores the widely felt institutional practices, methodological conventions, and canonical processes that have made Chican@ art visible and invisible within mainstream museums since the 1970s.1 Through an analysis of select art exhibitions, largely produced in Southern California, I investigate the dynamics that suppress and distort Chican@ artists and their work. I classify as censorship those instances in which Chican@ art is visible in problematic ways and trace censorship to classic liberal thought and its “late twentieth-century incarnation,” neoliberalism.2 Neoliberalism produces invisibility and contingent visibility, and the art exhibitions I examine betray explicit promotion of neoliberalism or inadvertent slippage into liberal tenets, such as individualism vs. collectivity. The varied manifestations of neoliberalism are loaded with contradictions, but the effects remain the same: narrowed misrepresentation of Chican@ art. Because neoliberalism is dynamic and complex, I limit my attention to the enhancement of individual liberty. My focus is the underlying presumption of classic liberal political theory and its conceptualization of “an abstract individual without, or prior to, group allegiance.”3 Drawing on Arlene Dávila, Lisa Duggan, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, and Linda Martín Alcoff, I explore the manifestations of neoliberalism, its “instrumentalized” view of culture and identity, and its contradictions, which sustain the invisibility and problematic visibility of Chican@ art.4 Dávila finds that Latino culture is praised in one context but not in another and is frequently dismissed as an anachronism, the reason for its exclusion. Duggan notes that calls for diversity have significantly influenced education, politics, and even corporate America since the 1980s, but diversity remains a banner under which institutions distance themselves from social justice movements and political organizations advocating downward redistribution of resources.5 In multiple contexts diversity is celebrated because it can produce heightened self-esteem and individual empowerment, as well as increased profits, when a diverse workforce enhances innovation. Yet neoliberal politics does not advocate material redistribution and public intervention for equity.

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Duggan cogently demonstrates how such contradictions thrive under neoliberalism. While it “organizes material and political life in terms of race, gender, and sexuality as well as economic class and nationality, or ethnicity and religion,” neoliberalism, as an ideology, “actively obscures” the relationships among politics, economics, and social position.6 Bonilla-Silva argues that the abstraction of liberalism not only obscures racist logic but also allows whites to construct a “moral” rhetoric opposing restitution.7 According to Duggan, it does so by separating and naturalizing private and public life, morally appealing to individual choice, and identifying the state as “the ‘proper’ location of publicness,” or collective life, “while the most private site is the family.”8 Collective claims to identity, such as Chican@, are suspect, fitting into neither public nor private realms because they are affective, political, and extrafamilial. This lack of fit allows neoliberals to pathologize identity, as Alcoff remarks.9 They frequently call on individuals to forgo their cultural, racial, gender, sexual, or ethnic affiliation, which they view as constraining and unproductive. Alcoff astutely observes how neoliberal thought aligns with Enlightenment notions of reason, obtained by separating oneself from “imposed” and “constraining” social identities.10 The critics of identity presume that a collective solidarity or subjectivity leads to intolerance of difference and thus curtails agency, creativity, and “individual freedom.”11 The individual must gain distance from her historical location and transcend local, familial, and cultural identities because these are seen as “producers of conflicting loyalties” within the nation-state and producers of conformity.12 Yet, as Maureen Burns states, neoliberals say nothing about the unmarked categories of whiteness, masculinity, and heterosexuality, which are disguised as normative or universal. No one is expected to transcend unmarked, normative social identities.13 Indeed, artists of color and women are expected to embrace the unmarked categories, and doing so is viewed as a sign of transcendence. In general, the neoliberal paradigm sanctions an inability to see Chican@ art. More than an obedient enforcement of the boundaries between politics and culture, the neoliberal disavowal of identity, as Alcoff notes, illogically assumes that identity creates the reification problem. This essentialist view of ethnic artists presumes that ethnic affiliation creates an obligatory style or perspective. Following these critics of neoliberalism, I observe how identity is put to work—to borrow Dávila’s term—in the arts and how multiculturalism and post-identity politics require a decontextualized notion of identity. I demonstrate that curatorial and critical discourse in and around Chican@ art exhibitions allows museums to appear inclusive even as these cultural institutions censor Chican@ art. Neoliberalism asserts essentializing notions of culture, difference, and nonwhite identity by valuing an ostensibly universal citizen subject and its aesthetic. Under liberal political thought, multiculturalism is premised on political and cultural neutrality, even as it acknowledges difference. This is the type of neoliberal contradiction that supports limited visibility of Chican@ art. Although the exhibitions under investigation largely originated in Southern California, their discursive weight ripples across the nation. I examine four exhibitions and two exhibition seasons in chronological order. In each historical moment either critical reception or museum practices in and of themselves crystalized particular canonical orientations, although each show emerged for different reasons and audiences. My analysis begins with Los Four: Almaraz, de la Rocha, Lujan, Romero (1974), tracing expectations and essentialist notions about Chicana and Chicano artists. I then explore the assumption in Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Painters and Sculptors (1987) that artists need to transcend cultural identity to achieve visibility. I argue that two early twenty-first-century exhibitions—The Road to Aztlan: Art of the Mythic Homeland (2001) and Phantom Sightings: Chicano Art after the Movement (2008)—affirm an obligatory transcendence aligned with modernist art, particularly abstract expressionism and its “dedica[tion] to transcendence, progress, and to

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the repression of anything that threatened the autonomy of art.”14 Both exhibitions originated at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and traveled to Mexico. Productive and counterproductive curatorial and methodological practices of two editions of Pacific Standard Time (PST), major collaborative initiatives funded by the Getty Foundation over two separate seasons, also resulted in limited visibility and misrecognition or erasure of Chican@ art. The practices and rhetoric of PST offer a special example because of their focus, economic impact, and volume—approximately seventy exhibitions in 2011 and another eighty-six in 2017—as well as their historical moments: after the multiculturalism of the 1980s and the post-identity art of the 1990s. My objective is to intervene against the ideological apparatus that supports/ extends the limited visibility and invisibility of Chican@ art into the twenty-first century.

Authenticity and the Folkloric Other In 1974, one year after it debuted at the University of California, Irvine, Los Four: Almaraz/de la Rocha/Lujan/Romero opened at LACMA (Plate 12). Hal Glicksman and Gilbert “Magu” Sanchez Luján, the team that brought Los Four from Irvine and to LACMA’s attention, have not received sufficient acknowledgment, and their collaboration is consistently overshadowed by the triumphant declaration that LACMA premiered Chicano art. Although inaccurate, the artists in the acclaimed collective Los Four—Magu, Carlos Almaraz, Roberto “Beto” de la Rocha, Frank Romero, and the unacknowledged fifth member, Judithe Hernandez, who participated in the LACMA exhibition—were identified as the first Chicano artists to exhibit in a major museum.15 Trained at local arts institutions and universities, the collective worked collaboratively in its experimentation with spray paint, found objects, and assemblage and its self-conscious efforts to present Chicano iconography. Los Angeles Times art critic William Wilson took considerable space in his review to contrast so-called authentic folk artists and assimilated Chicano artists. Wilson complained that the show gave him a “headache,” and before discussing the art and the artists in the three-column review, he focused his critical energy on criteria of an unacknowledged canon, thereby implying his displeasure with restitution and affirmative action. The review of the exhibition begins with the following: What ever happened … to the museum as a bastion of cultural excellence? … “Los Four” is housed in an art museum. Nobody pretends that every item in every museum is a bona fide masterpiece. One hopes, however, that everything is striving to be a clear, quintessential example of its genre. “Los Four” is far from clear. That is partly because museums’ standards are no longer clear. Museums recently developed an anxiety to be “responsible to the needs of the community.” That is a legitimate desire although it might be argued they were previously responsive to the needs of the community which decided it needed something else worse than it needed aesthetics. It needed a platform to air the point of view of special interest groups. That made museums subject to political influence.16 Wilson was clever not to explicitly attack affirmative action or the social movements in Los Angeles calling for democratic representation, equitable redistribution of resources, and institutional change. He rhetorically undermined any claim to cultural restitution as excessive because “something else”—education, housing, full employment, perhaps—was a greater need for “the community.” At the same time, he lamented that Los Four did not achieve the aesthetic standards of LACMA, now made confused in efforts to affirm and respond to “the community,” a code word for working-class people of color, including Chican@s.

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If the county museum, he tacitly reasoned, was concerned about redistribution of cultural resources, then it should have given the public “the real article, unfiltered by the interposition of four college trained artists who by the very act of leaving the barrio, ceased to be authentic folk artists.”17 In this way, Wilson conveyed the cause of his headache: the rupture of the binary model that requires Chican@s to either remain authentically exotic, primitive, naïve, and distinct from high art or become fully integrated Americans of Mexican descent living as undifferentiated citizen-subjects. Both visions of the artists directly enact neoliberalism and its expectation of transcendence. The temporal and spatial premise of Wilson’s assertion substantiates my point. “Leaving the barrio” and completing college results in assimilation and thus allows artists to transcend their identity. Without a cultural anchor the artists are inauthentic and not folkloric, since a folkloric artist is deeply embedded within her/his culture and history. It is this “unfiltered” self—the nonautonomous individual—that is authentic to Wilson. In this direct application of liberal political thought, Wilson demanded that Chican@ art only become visible as folk art, existing in a comparatively unrefined state. It should not become visible when the work is politically inspired. In addition, LACMA should not exhibit work to fulfill a “social obligation,” an undisguised critique of claims for redistribution and recognition that, as Bonilla-Silva observes, depends upon a moral argument against so-called preferential treatment. Wilson’s concluding remarks further indicate his moral outrage: “Meantime the museum ought not be surprised to receive complaints from many artists, equally talented as ‘Los Four,’ that they are disadvantaged by having no special circumstances [such as social inequality] to promote their talents.” Wilson warned the museum about so-called reverse racism, since “equally talented” artists would have little access to the public institution.18 Wilson’s expectation about Chican@ artists—either authentic natives or integrated Americans—reveals a very narrow view of culture and identity, although this expectation does not appear to apply to the unmarked European and European American artist. As integrated Americans, the artists have no need for the identifier “Chicano”; the end of identity, as liberal political theory promises, thus allows for visibility and access to the museum, granted that the work meets artistic standards. As Ellen Fernandez-Sacco notes, however, assumptions about whiteness underlie these standards, but they are largely unexplored.19 Following neoliberal notions of identity, Wilson’s logic anticipates that Chican@s either shed their cultural heritage and become integrated Americans, or remain distinct from Americans and thus “authentic.” Chican@s cannot exist in a hybrid cultural space that is both American and Mexican. Visibility depends upon essential cultural difference; the aesthetic distinction of folk art depends upon its ability to remain outside of the European visual tradition. Viewed as culturally distinct, Chican@ art could not engage an American aesthetic tradition and retain the identifier “Chicano.” Moreover, the institution should not assert the need for reconciliation as justification for display. Wilson’s claim for the authentic and his assumption about integration depend upon classic liberal thought and the call for the end of identity. In this view Chican@ artists must forgo cultural identity to achieve individual autonomy and artistic excellence.

Multiculturalism: Transcendent Expectations A decade later curators temporarily embraced the identities of nonwhite artists, celebrating diversity and promoting inclusion. However, in the popular vision of multiculturalism that characterized neoliberal thinking, the emphasis on cultural, racial, gender, sexual, or ethnic identities displaced political articulations about injustice and inequity, as well as social disfigurement and misrepresentation of nonwhite people. In the 1980s and 1990s

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multiculturalism employed the rhetoric of egalitarianism even as it reduced culture and identity to narrow and essentialist constructions. Multiculturalism in museum contexts divorced itself from the social movements and political mobilizations from which the art emerged. It did so to reinforce the liberal presumption that art should be separate from politics to ensure quality and objectivity, an idea that resonates with notions of modernist art. In many ways Wilson had articulated the essentialist assumption upon which multiculturalism was founded, particularly its limited view of culture, race, and identity. This limitation distorts how Chican@ artists acquire visibility. As Arlene Dávila observes, since the “Hispanic art boom” of the 1980s, “when museums and galleries discovered the marketability of exhibiting Latino and Latin American artists under a pan-Latino category, Latino artists have had to maneuver through established boundaries of artistic and identity categorization.”20 Co-opting the language of social justice movements, critics of multiculturalism claimed it was artists of color who employed narrow views of art. Latino artists therefore had to negotiate the expectation that they were transitioning from their specific “ethnic milieu,” to use Jane Livingston’s term, to a universal visual idiom.21 Furthermore, under this logic of neoliberal transcendence, failure to leave behind one’s difference was a sign of social and aesthetic deficiency. This perspective was perhaps most clearly articulated in Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Painters and Sculptors (Figure 9.1). Produced in 1987 by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and curated by John Beardsley and Jane Livingston, the exhibition was composed of 150 works by thirty artists from the United States, Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Central and South America. It traveled two years later to Los Angeles. In this major survey exhibition murals and posters and their political orientation were abandoned to achieve visibility within the mainstream art world. Universal forms of aesthetic expression were defined as apolitical. This investment in universalism and the disavowal of politics affirmed the neoliberal premise of individual autonomy.22 Opening the catalog preface with the statement “Hispanic-American visual art is at once too familiar and utterly unknown,” Beardsley and Livingston announced a paradox regarding the hypervisibility and invisibility of Latino art.23 The paradox was clarified by the claim that “Chicano art … has lately become something of a stereotype in the perception of Hispanic artist expression.”24 Here we learn that Chican@ art is the one subgroup of Latino arts that is “too familiar” and even “a stereotype,” implying an obligatory or predictable aesthetic.25 This tacit association of Chican@ art with an anticipated style echoes the neoliberal assertion that identity leads to the policing of boundaries, the insistence on conformity, and intolerance for difference. Although it is unlikely that Chican@ art had by 1987 reached such national recognition as Beardsley and Livingston declared, the claim allowed the curators to establish an expectation around Chican@ art. Livingston explained, “the book and exhibition do not include murals.”26 According to Livingston, Chican@ murals “tended to depict scenes inspired by current or recent political issues.”27 Viewers were left to deduce that the political aspect comprised the “stereotype.” This methodology that differentiates one style or body of work from another without fully describing or even documenting the foil has served to reinforce the invisibility of much Chican@ art.28 Moreover, since Beardsley and Livingston concentrated on aesthetic values—“not sociological” ones—viewers likely understood that colorful, figurative, fanciful, folkloric, neo-expressionist, and abstract painting and sculpture were worthy of visibility because of their aesthetic qualities.29 The work in Hispanic Art was not simply represented as less political; it was the lack of political content or intent—explicitly labeled as “refined” by Livingston—that justified its visibility.30 She explained, “the works featured do embody the spirit begun in the Chicano murals and carried on, refined and transformed in the drawings, paintings and sculptures of a few artists who participated in the mural movement.”31 Work

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FIGURE 9.1  Exhibition catalog, Hispanic Art in the United States, 1987, Houston Museum of Fine Arts. Photo by Jeffrey Ryan.

exhibited remained truthful to its ethnic-specific “spirit” but successfully surpassed the political orientation of Chican@ art, especially muralism, and this transcendence, a tenet of neoliberal individualism, made the work viable and aesthetically valuable. Livingston’s discussion of Los Angeles-based artist Gronk further conveys the application of neoliberal thought. She argued that “Gronk employs imagery reminiscent of a more recent ‘urban punk’ aesthetic; his extremely flat, decorative painting style and the repeated use of certain mythic figures—primarily La Tormenta—in different settings suggest that the artist is less concerned with Chicano politics than with broader satire.”32 This depiction of Gronk exemplified the temporal and spatial expectation for ethnic-identified artists, as noted in Wilson’s review of Los Four. Gronk was consistently praised for moving away from imagined parochial politics of the Chican@ barrio and toward universal visual images, myths, and allegories. Indeed, Chican@ artists were encouraged to “transcend specific cultural references to become virtually universal.”33 A mutually exclusive reading of “political” and “aesthetic” qualities reinforced dominant neoliberal presumptions about universality and apolitical forms and thereby rendered political art as a limited and insignificant development in the history of art in America. It also formalized the multicultural distancing from political mobilization and identity politics. The curators were unwilling to address politics and, as a result, their decontextualized view of the art perpetuated a truncated view of identity. Identity is put into focus—a Hispanic one—but it does not generate discussion about political misrepresentation or injustice. Their multicultural maneuver—inclusive and celebratory of difference—refuses the realities that brought the identity into national focus in the first place, thus obfuscating racism and other

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inequities. By the end of the 1990s the emphasis on the historical, political, and cultural context of Chican@ art became the fulcrum for assessing it as a parochial aesthetic or as an anachronism.

Transcending Aztlan: The Disavowal of Identity At the start of the new millennium the neoliberal appropriation of diversity made its way into the museum, where artwork could be different but not simultaneously cosmopolitan or universal. Through LACMA’s massive survey The Road to Aztlan: Art of the Mythic Homeland (2001, Figure 9.2), curators Virginia M. Fields and Victor Zamudio-Taylor argued for a “unified cultural area” in the geographic borderlands joining Mexico and the United States, metaphorically referred to as Aztlan, the mythic homeland of Mexica and Chicano nationalism.34 However, the show’s 250 works of pre-Columbian, colonial, and contemporary art from Mexico and the United States privileged artists who transcended an ethnic-specific visual vocabulary. Although the curators intended to bridge the gap between Mexican and Chican@ artists, Fields and Zamudio-Taylor unabashedly praised Mexican artists over Chican@s. They found Mexican artists “more ironic and less direct than their Chicano/a contemporaries,” and able to have “a more complex relationship to pre-Columbian canons,” which allows them “a more philosophical investigation of the construction of identity over time and its deployment in national narratives.”35 This Aristotelian elevation of tragedy over history for its so-called universal message effectively praised Mexican artists for irony but ignored how Chican@ artists enact a tremendous philosophical maneuver when they claim a pre-Columbian past against two nationalist agendas that erase indigeneity. Furthermore, Fields and Zamudio-Taylor could not account for the considerable feat of creating an oppositional consciousness and subjectivity without the benefit of a national or patriarchal narrative and in the wake of colonialism.

FIGURE 9.2  Exhibition catalog, The Road to Aztlan: Art from a Mythic Homeland, 2001, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo by Jeffrey Ryan.

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More critically, the curators’ valuation of Mexican artists reifies what Theresa Delgadillo identifies as the neoliberal vision of the exceptional or ideal immigrant.36 Those praised were the Mexican artists—the college-educated elites whose work has been exhibited, catalogued, and collected by museums throughout North America. Conversely, Chican@ artists lack presence in the political, economic, cultural, and historical landscapes of the United States and Mexico. What accounts for this invisibility? The calculus of more against less validates an imaginary conceptual refinement over a fictitious group of low-brow, representational artists who produce political realism. Implied in the curators’ calculus was the idea that Chican@ artists could achieve the aesthetic valuation of their Mexican peers if they transcended their locality and investment in Aztlan. As Zamudio-Taylor clarifies, the search for Aztlan and a viable Chican@ past was valuable during the Chicano Movement, but, “Today [it is] cliché and restrictive.”37 His dismissal duplicates the neoliberal disavowal of identity, which finds it “obsolete” because it is oldfashioned, parochial, and an obstacle to social achievement.38 In effect, a Chican@ perspective is an “essentializing discourse” and thus inappropriate for artists seeking international recognition.39 Effectively duplicating neoliberal thought, Zamudio-Taylor indicates that the Chican@ perspective limits the choices of artists and must be abandoned.

Post-Ethnic Expectation Another show at LACMA reproduced the neoliberal appropriation of diversity, which permitted difference but valued something implicitly more advanced than its predecessors. Although not the first attempt to visualize another aesthetic for Chican@ art, Phantom Sightings: Chicano Art after the Movement (2008, Figure 9.3) was the first major exhibition in the Southwest to travel internationally and grapple with a post-Chicano rhetoric. Phantom Sightings focused on conceptual art by artists who began working after the Chicano Movement, those who may or may not identify as Chicana or Chicano. The

FIGURE 9.3  Exhibition catalog, Phantom Sightings, 2008, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo by Jeffrey Ryan.

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work of Asco, the performance and conceptual arts collective initially comprised of Gronk, Harry Gamboa Jr., Patssi Valdez, and Willie Herrón, was a curatorial starting point. This methodological launch was intended to challenge conventional expectations of Chican@ art, although the apparently conventional arts were unaddressed. The diversely trained curators, Rita Gonzalez, Howard Fox, and Chon A. Noriega, argued that the temporal curatorial model indicated in the subtitle—art after the Chicano Movement—allowed them “the freedom to follow an idea, rather than represent a constituency,” and as such conceptual art could come into focus.40 Yet this curatorial argument tacitly associated an obligatory aesthetic with the work before Phantom Sightings. Furthermore, “the constituency” apparently mandated a particular representation of that group. More directly, the curators agreed to focus on “the distinctive features of recent Chicano art: that which privileges conceptual over representative approaches, and articulates social absence rather than cultural essence.”41 Not only did this temporal premise assume that conceptual art was lacking in the past, except in the case of Asco, it also reinforced the neoliberal expectations of “cultural essence.” The curators were acutely aware of the narrow presentation of Chican@ art, particularly its exclusion from major exhibitions that focused on styles or aesthetic trends. However, their curatorial tactic unfortunately implied that ethnic-based art was merely representational and essentialist—qualities disavowed by neoliberalism. In appearing to denounce identitybased art, Phantom Sightings soothed the public art museum and corroborated dominant discursive practices in American art history that had dismissed and co-opted identity politics since the 1990s. The exhibition ambiguously addressed and also avoided the idea of Chican@ art, both negating it with the phrase “rather than” and obliging it with its reference to art “after” the Chicano Movement. Indeed, the phrase “rather than” and other bifurcating frames similar to those circulating in The Road to Aztlan reinforced neoliberal transcendence. Noriega’s catalog essay states, “Phantom Sightings presents itself as a fundamental break, considering new genres, … conceptual rather than realist approaches, and an aesthetic project that takes a more ambiguous and fluid approach to identity.”42 At the end of the essay he writes, “In Phantom Sightings, the word Chicano signals an absence rather than an essence, dissension rather than origin,” as if to imply the curators and not the earlier artists made the shift.43 Gonzalez’s catalog essay also repeatedly invokes the contrast. She asserts that artists selected for Phantom Sightings are “more ludic” than previous Chican@ artists.44 In addition to tacitly characterizing Chican@ art as rigid and predictable, she writes that artists in the exhibition “depart from a form of religiosity and paternalism found in much of Chicano iconography and themes” and “from a call to claim or reclaim a homeland.”45 The show’s differentiation of the one type of art from the other constitutes slippage into neoliberal multiculturalism, which tacitly supports erasure of the political contexts that inspired particular themes and the range of art produced during the Chicano Movement. That is, the unintentional neoliberal message of Phantom Sightings emerges from its emphasis on the contrast: conceptual art “rather than” “culturally affirmative symbols.”46 The bifurcating methodology clearly distinguishes between art of and after the Chicano Movement. Even when Noriega demonstrates the ways in which Chican@ artists of the earlier period expressed the types of complexities illustrated by Phantom Sightings, his message slips into neoliberalism. Noriega examines the work of Yolanda M. López, Malaquias Montoya, Mel Casas, and César Martínez, artists who came of age during the Chicano Movement. He notes that local and global events influenced their art, that they engaged in “dialog with art history and artistic influences,” and that they made use of multiple styles, including “didactic realism.”47 However, embedded within the essay’s positive endorsement of Chican@ identification is an

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overt distinction between this previous generation and the younger one: “In contrast, the generation born in the 1960s and 1970s and who are represented in Phantom Sighting often start with a modernist attention to medium, rather than formal and thematic concerns within a representational field.”48 Unfortunately this distinction duplicates neoliberal anxiety over identity and its apparent obligatory attention to “formal and thematic concerns.” As such, the essay reproduces neoliberal expectations that ethnicity or the representation of ethnicity is a constraint on aesthetic freedom or on freedom more generally. The temporal distinction between art during and after the Chicano Movement and the binary methodology reignited a long-simmering tension over the dismissal of identity-based art and veneration of post-identity art that flourished in the 1990s. For example, the nowinfamous 1993 Whitney Biennial was widely panned by white male critics, such as Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times, for its “political sloganeering and self-indulgent selfexpression” by artists of color, women, and queer artists.49 While others praised the curators for challenging the status quo, by the end of the decade identity-based art was dismissed as unimportant and restrictive. Given the poor record of institutional exhibition and acquisition of Chican@ art between the 1960s and the 2000s, Phantom Sightings could be seen as participating in the abrogation of identity-based art. The major problem was not what was said about the art after the movement; it was the unstated assumptions about Chican@ art of the movement. Neoliberalism and the hegemonic narrative of art history presume that Chican@ art is unmediated, ascribed, transparent, and coherent. It is as Gonzalez recognizes: “[t]hat which became identified with (and perhaps too easily conscribed as) multicultural art.”50 The exhibition had the effect of supporting the charge that Chican@ art of the movement was parochial, inevitable, and now anachronistic because it was not illustrated otherwise. Most of the catalog is “unwilling,” observes Nizan Shaked, to “engage the term [identity politics] anew.”51 Moreover, Shaked points out that the catalog’s “apologetic tone,” which I suggest is located in the tacit comparison between art of the movement and art after the movement, indirectly signals that one type of art is somehow inherently advanced, an analysis not unlike the one made by the curators of The Road to Aztlan.52 It is as if the art of the movement did not transcend its location and historical context, which abstract expressionism and conceptual art, the two most valued styles of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, were presumed to have done. As a result, Phantom Sightings did not support a newfound freedom, as the curators propose, but rather reinforced a restrictive art historical discourse. It fueled the neoliberal paradigm that identity is conformist and restrictive by inadvertently reinforcing the misperception that Chicano art of the 1960s and 1970s lacks complexity, negotiation, multiplicity, irony, and ambiguity. Thus, while Phantom Sightings was a record of what is possible inside the museum structure, it served as evidence that the neoliberal paradigm, which understands identity as restrictive and conformist, must be shifted. New epistemologies, infrastructures, and theories are required to make Chican@ art visible on multiple terms that account for problematic social, political, and economic effects on Chican@s’ lives, art making, and community formation, as well as the curatorial biases and hegemonic categories of art.

The Conditions of Visibility in the Twenty-First Century: Ambivalence and Erasure Since neoliberalism discredited all forms of restitution, and the 2008 presidential election of Barack Obama, the first African American in the office, legitimated claims for a post-

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racial society, it was no surprise that the Getty Foundation’s major initiative Pacific Standard Time (PST) included Chican@ artists but in restrictive ways. The first edition, titled Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art, 1945–1980 (2011), aimed to exhibit, document, and reinterpret Los Angeles art and place Los Angeles on an equal footing with New York. This goal produced a paradox: it celebrated diversity and gave limited exposure to Chican@ artists by truncating or ignoring the political contexts that mobilized them. Pacific Standard Time missed the opportunity to engage the complexities of Chican@ art. While Chicana and Chicano scholars, curators, and artists organized several PST exhibitions, Chican@ art was largely invisible in others. This invisibility implied that Chican@ artists did not participate in or contribute to the aesthetic trends that are normalized as fundamental to the history of art in Los Angeles and American art, and it indicated that their works are best understood through the lens of ethnic identity. The same invisibility tragically occurred with a subsequent edition of PST—the exhibitions, catalogs, and programs of LA/LA (2017) meant to showcase the art of Los Angeles and Latin America.53 Yet even this edition of PST, which could have showcased Mexican-heritage artists given the history and demography of the city, region, and hemisphere, reproduced the limited visibility and misrecognition of Chican@ art. The 2011 and 2017 PST initiatives made possible two historic exhibition seasons for Chican@ art. No other region’s mainstream arts and cultural institutions had ever devoted as much exhibition space and funding at one time to the interpretation of art by Mexicanheritage artists. The first edition acknowledged the connection between identity, politics, and culture with the thematic category of “cultural identity and politics,” which included exhibitions of feminist, African American, Chinese American, Japanese American, queer, and politically radical, dissident, and innovative art. Moreover, Getty financing supported six groundbreaking exhibitions of Chican@ art, including Asco: Elite of the Obscure presented by LACMA and the Museum of Art of Williams College (Figure 9.4, Rita Gonzalez and C. Ondine Chavoya, curators); Mex/LA: Mexican Modernisms in Los Angeles at the Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach (curated by Rubén Ortiz-Torres with Jesse Lerner); and four exhibitions produced by Chon A. Noriega, Terezita Romo, and Pilar Tompkins Rivas from the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, which were grouped under the title L.A. Xicano. The UCLA team, the only non–arts institution PST collaborator, undertook Art along the Hyphen: The Mexican-American Generation at the Autry National Center (Romo, lead curator); Mural Remix: Sandra de la Loza at LACMA, an installation conceived and designed by the artist; and Mapping Another L.A.: The Chicano Art Movement and Icons of the Invisible: Oscar Castillo at the UCLA Fowler Museum (Noriega and Rivas, lead curators). Each exhibition challenged recent discursive conventions within Chican@ and American art history by reinserting the term “Chicano” and dropping “post-Chicano.” Yet PST paradoxically performed the erasure of Chican@ art. It signaled how “identity” is put to work under neoliberalism: cultural diversity is celebrated even as it is narrowly represented. For instance, the survey exhibitions that “follow[ed] an idea”—conceptualism, photography, assemblage, printmaking, ceramics, artist collectives and collaborative spaces, space and light movements, or craftsmanship—rarely included work by Chican@ artists. When Chican@ artists were included, the same works or artists were presented or artworks were exhibited anonymously. For example, Asco received curatorial attention from multiple arts institutions; as a result, Harry Gamboa, the collective’s principal photographer, was the most recognized Chican@ artist of the PST season. The work of this collective was featured in Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974–1981 at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA); State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970 at the Orange County Museum of Art; and Los Angeles Goes Live: Performance Art in Southern California, 1970–1983 at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). However, museum visitors were likely left with the impression that

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FIGURE 9.4  Exhibition catalog, Asco: Elite of the Obscure, 2011, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Photo by Jeffrey Ryan.

Gamboa produced only four photographs. First Supper (After a Major Riot) (1974), Walking Mural (1972), Instant Mural (1974), and Decoy Gang War Victim (1974) were the only Asco works exhibited outside the LACMA retrospective. It is as if curators across the region were unable to grasp the research that produced the “fat catalog (435 pages)” for Asco: Elite of the Obscure.54 Systemic misrecognition plagued exhibition design. Artists of color were relegated to the back corner, next to the emergency exits, bathroom, or janitor’s closet. Some were not named. Hailed as a successful representation of California’s pluralism and wide-ranging diversity, Under the Big Black Sun featured seventeen Chican@ artists. But only eight were identified in the exhibition checklist, leaving the works of Linda Lucero, Louie “The Foot” Gonzalez, Rudy Cuellar, Ricardo Favela, Mark Vallen, Rachel Romero, Yolanda M. López, Juan Cervantes, and Herbert Sigüenza unattributed. The rhetoric of diversity in the face of misrepresentation and lack of acknowledgment smacks of hollow 1980s multiculturalism. In addition to erasing nine artists, this exhibition did not provide adequate space for Chican@ artists, although it presented a significant display of Judy Baca’s studies for The Great Wall of Los Angeles, the mural she produced with at-risk youth and other artists over five summers (1974–83; restored 2011). Prints by Malaquias Montoya and Rupert Garcia, two internationally recognized artists, were exhibited salon style, stacked one atop the other in crowded rows near the emergency exit doors at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary. By contrast, non-Chican@ artists enjoyed an abundance of expansive, uncluttered wall space.

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Following instrumental neoliberal strategies around culture and identity, PST acknowledged the presence of Chican@ artists, but in a limited way. In cases where artists could not be identified, there was no discussion of the political context in which anonymity was valued. The Chicano art movement was not hailed for its challenging of the notions of the individual artistic genius and art for art’s sake. The exposure given to Chican@ art was sufficient to register PST as inclusive. But its sloppy and insufficient inclusion reproduced neoliberal views of ethnic culture. While Chican@ art functioned to legitimate the Getty initiative, the initiative maintained the artists’ invisibility, problematic visibility, and lack of access to mainstream institutions. The 2017 edition of PST further legitimized the Getty’s approach to diversity while obscuring the visibility of Chican@ art.55 For a program devoted to linkages across the Americas, it is curious that only eight (13 percent) of the fifty-five Getty-funded exhibitions were exclusively Chican@ shows, and this included presentations joining Chican@ with other Latin@ artists. As advocate and collector Armando Durón argues, Chican@ artists only appeared in thirteen (24 percent) of the funded exhibitions organized around themes relating to Latin America, craft, the border, and critiques of globalization. The initial checklist (2014) for the most recognized exhibition, Radical Women in Latin American Art, 1960–1985 at the Hammer Museum (Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, curator), did not include Chicanas; however, Cecilia Alvarez Muñoz, Judith F. Baca, Barbara Carrasco, Isabel Castro, Yolanda M. López, Patssi Valdez, and Linda Vallejo were eventually added. History and demography ironically failed to justify a larger number of Chican@ art exhibitions, yet PST advertising gave the impression Chican@ artists were embraced and celebrated.56 Indeed, hollow multiculturalism seemed to guide PST. Three of the eight exhibitions of Chican@ art had to mobilize for Getty support after initial rejections by the funder: the solo exhibition The Great Wall of Los Angeles: Judy Baca’s Experimentations in Collaboration and Concrete at the Art Galleries of California State University, Northridge (Mario Ontiveros, curator); ¡Murales Rebeldes! L.A. Chicana/o Murals Under Siege at La Plaza de Cultura y Arte (Plate 13; Erin M. Curtis, Jessica Hough, and Guisela Latorre, curators), the timely show that reminded viewers of both Los Angeles’s earlier status as the mural capital of the world and the state’s participation in the erasure of public art; and Self Help Graphics & Art’s intervention titled Día de los Muertos: A Cultural Legacy, Past, Present and Future (Linda Vallejo and Betty Ann Brown, curators), which situated this political, cultural, and spiritual form within modernist and postmodernist traditions. Without them, PST would have produced only five exhibitions exclusively for Chican@ artists. Eventual funding allowed the Getty to appear to be a supporter of diversity even as the institution limited its funding to these and other non-mainstream arts institutions presenting Chican@ art.

Containing Chican@ Art Mainstream terms of visibility obligated a particular path through which Chican@ art was allowed presence within authorizing arts institutions. Largely classified in terms of cultural style when presented in exhibitions celebrating America’s multiculturalism, Chican@ art satisfied an ideological notion of partial assimilation. Nonwhite and women artists were welcomed into public space with the expectation that they were becoming so-called American artists. Indeed, their visibility as “Hispanics” or “Chicanos” was read as transitory movement into America’s mainstream. Abandonment of this process was interpreted as foolhardy, even

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after the inclusion of difference in the twenty-first century. Alternatively, those who insisted on difference had to maintain an essential distinction from the normative aesthetic: Chican@ artists could not convey international or cosmopolitan sophistication or influence; to do so would render the work inauthentic, as Wilson declared of Los Four, or unimportant, as several LACMA curators implied of representational or identity-based art. Under neoliberalism Chican@ artists are expected to relinquish the descriptor “Chicano,” particularly if the work is read as “message,” a code word for the political or propaganda art one must disavow to achieve distinction.57 The rubric of multiculturalism temporarily permits visibility, but only if Chican@ artists forgo their difference or claims to restitution for past exclusions or injustices. This expectation of Chican@ art under multiculturalism also suits and aligns with modernist terms of visibility. As Hamza Walker aptly states, the authority of modernist and contemporary art emerges from its claim to “transcend national, regional, and biographical specificity.”58 Any art that announces its location, in this case its politicized and historicized position, is not modernist or contemporary and thus is not welcomed within mainstream arts institutions, art historical canons, or curatorial practices because it is viewed as parochial. Hegemonic methodologies in art history presume that the timelessness of a work of art is what makes it grand. Political or identity-based art by necessity of its immediacy and urgency is not timeless and thus becomes invisible, since it can never escape its parochialism. This presumption was the premise of Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Painters and Sculptors, which tacitly argued that Chican@ art creates its own absence. In contrast, the transcendent expectation fosters the desire for “curatorial freedom” (Phantom Sightings) from consideration of a political constituency and the value of irony over history (The Road to Aztlan). A distinction between art of and after the Chicano Movement does not depend upon a separation of culture and politics, but rather affirms the neoliberal ruse that art after the Chicano Movement could be separate from politics without challenging the mythos of the binary. In short, being “Chican@” is a liability in Hispanic Art in the United States, The Road to Aztlan, and Phantom Sightings. Although it occurred in an ostensibly post-racial environment, Pacific Standard Time paradoxically permitted the lexicon of identity politics while simultaneously reinscribing the terms of (in)visibility established under multiculturalism. However, no longer viewed as token representation, the inclusion of Chican@ art is read as simply sufficient, comprehensive curatorial vision—even when it is misrecognized or underrepresented. As a result of neoliberalism, Chican@ art has not escaped the injuries of distortion and censorship, even when it achieves presence through institutional celebrations of inclusion, as the PST seasons demonstrated. Chican@ art has suffered from erasure and misrepresentation. Since the 1980s American art criticism has viewed identity-based art as an anachronism, except in exhibitions celebrating multiculturalism, and critics continue to call for its dismissal. Neoliberalism and modernist methodologies presume that a marked identity (read nonwhite, non-male, non-Christian, nonheterosexual) inhibits rationality and reason. Alcoff observes that these assumptions do not “correspond” to lived experience.59 There is nothing within the “real epistemic and political implications” of identity that creates the problems of reification, essentialism, or irrationality.60 However, by focusing on identity as the problem, as the source that prohibits aesthetic transcendence or relevance, the art world can dismiss its own culpability in the omission of Chican@ artists and other artists outside the canon. Given these terms we should not be surprised to find artists who deny their ethnic, racial, national, or gender identities and reconfigure themselves to fit into dominant and visible space. The infrastructure of the American art world—museums, curators, academic departments,

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publication venues, and critics—may not have been a signatory of the racial contract, to borrow the term Charles W. Mill used to conceptualize racial stratification in the United States, but it is a beneficiary of it.61 The most effective means of intervention would be the creation of a robust infrastructure for Chican@ art production, education, exhibition, valuation, market circulation, and interpretation that remains connected to the multiple communities and institutions from which the art emerges, one that supports and critically examines the political implications of redistribution of resources. Scholars and artists must continue to interrogate the dominant methods, conventions, and discursive practices in art history and criticism. Arts institutions and libraries must collect and preserve documents and visual art. Universities must create doctoral and master of fine arts programs that engage the histories, experiences, and aesthetics of Chican@ artists. Museums and arts organizations must hire these experts and transform how they collect, preserve, exhibit, and interpret Chican@ art, not simply folding it into existing categories but generating systemic changes. Paradigmatic boundaries, categories, methods, and concepts in American art history that facilitate misinterpretation and erasure must shift. Only then will Chican@ art be made visible.

Notes 1 I employ the term “Chican@” to describe women, men, transgender, and gender nonconforming artists of Mexican heritage in the United States. When relevant, I use gender-specific terms. I have elected not to use the gender-blind term “Chicanx.” 2 Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 3. 3 Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 21. 4 Arlene Dávila, Culture Works: Space, Value, and Mobility across the Neoliberal Americas (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 190. 5 Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?, 44. 6 Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?, 3; italics in original. 7 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 76. 8 Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?, 3. 9 Alcoff, Visible Identities, 22. 10 Alcoff, Visible Identities, 44. 11 Alcoff, Visible Identities, 37. 12 Alcoff, Visible Identities, 36. 13 Maureen Burns, “White,” in Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing through the Discipline, ed. James Elkins and Kristi McGuire, with Maureen Burns, Alicia Chester, and Joel Kuennen (New York: Routledge, 2012), 284. 14 Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), xxiii. 15 Eduardo Carrillo received a solo exhibition at La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art in 1965. Museo Eduardo Carrillo, biography, curriculum vitae, https://museoeduardocarrillo.org/on-view/ page/7/.

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16 William Wilson, “‘Los Four’ a Statement of Chicano Spirit,” Los Angeles Times, March 10, 1974. 17 Wilson, “‘Los Four.’” 18 Wilson, “‘Los Four.’” 19 Ellen Fernandez-Sacco, “Check Your Baggage: Resisting Whiteness in Art History,” Art Journal 60, no. 4 (2001): 59–61. 20 Dávila, Culture Works, 112. 21 Jane Livingston, “Recent Hispanic Art: Style and Influence,” in Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors, ed. John Beardsley and Jane Livingston (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987), 101. 22 In 1990, a year after Hispanic Art opened at LACMA, the Wight Art Gallery at University of California, Los Angeles, premiered the extensive traveling retrospective exhibition Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965–1985. The exhibits offered divergent methodological approaches: Hispanic Art emphasized the formalist method of art history; Chicano Art documented Chican@ art’s emergence within the social and civil rights movement of Mexicanheritage people in the United States, who had adopted the name “Chicano” to signify their awareness of a history of conquest and resistance to American myths of assimilation. 23 Beardsley and Livingston, “Preface and Acknowledgment,” in Hispanic Art, 7. 24 Beardsley and Livingston, “Preface and Acknowledgment,” 7. 25 Beardsley and Livingston, “Preface and Acknowledgment,” 7. 26 Livingston, “Recent Hispanic Art,” 99. 27 Livingston, “Recent Hispanic Art,” 99. Sandra de la Loza’s 2011 installation Mural Remix demonstrates that art history discourse has masked the range of Chican@ styles and approaches to muralism in the 1970s. She documents geometric and psychedelic motifs, nature, futurist, and landscape themes, and text-image and surrealist styles. 28 I describe how the leaders of the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) produced Errata: Not Included to dispute the historiography of Hispanic Art in Karen Mary Davalos, Chicana/o Remix: Art and Errata since the Sixties (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 19–21. 29 Beardsley and Livingston, “Preface and Acknowledgment,” 10. 30 Livingston, “Recent Hispanic Art,” 99. 31 Livingston, “Recent Hispanic Art,” 99; italics added. 32 Livingston, “Recent Hispanic Art,” 101; italics added. 33 Livingston, “Recent Hispanic Art,” 118. 34 Virginia M. Fields and Victor Zamudio-Taylor, “Aztlan: Destination and Point of Departure,” in The Road to Aztlan: Art from a Mythic Homeland, ed. Virginia M. Fields and Victor ZamudioTaylor (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2001), 40. 35 Fields and Zamudio-Taylor, “Aztlan,” 68–9; italics added. See also Davalos, Chicana/o Remix, 40–1. 36 Theresa Delgadillo, “The Ideal Immigrant,” Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies 63, no. 1 (2011): 37–67. 37 Victor Zamudio-Taylor, “Inventing Tradition, Negotiating Modernism,” in The Road to Aztlan, 355; italics in original. 38 Zamudio-Taylor, “Inventing Tradition, Negotiating Modernism,” 355. 39 Zamudio-Taylor, “Inventing Tradition, Negotiating Modernism,” 355. 40 Rita Gonzalez, Howard N. Fox, and Chon A. Noriega, “Introduction,” in Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement, ed. Rita Gonzalez, Howard N. Fox, and Chon A. Noriega (Los Angeles and Berkeley: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and University of California Press, 2008), 13.

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41 Gonzalez, Fox, and Noriega, “Introduction,” 13; italics added. 42 Chon A. Noriega, “The Orphans of Modernism,” in Phantom Sightings, 20; italics added. 43 Noriega, “Orphans of Modernism,” 41; italics added. 44 Rita Gonzalez, “Phantom Sites: The Official, the Unofficial, and the Orificial,” in Phantom Sightings, 48. 45 Gonzalez, “Phantom Sites,” 54, 48. 46 Gonzalez, “Phantom Sites,” 48. 47 Noriega, “Orphans of Modernism,” 30, 24. 48 Noriega, “Orphans of Modernism,” 33, 35. 49 Michael Kimmelman, “Art View: At the Whitney, Sound, Fury, and Little Else,” New York Times, April 25, 1993. 50 Gonzalez, “Phantom Sites,” 60. 51 Nizan Shaked, “Event Review: Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement,” American Quarterly 60, no. 4 (2008): 1068. 52 Shaked, “Event Review,” 1068. 53 Between 2014 and the official opening of PST: LA/LA in 2017 the Getty continuously revised the description of the program. The final version states: “Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA is a far-reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles.” Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, http://www.pacificstandardtime.org/lala/index. html. 54 Christopher Knight, “Art Review: ‘Asco: Elite of the Obscure, 1972–1987’ at LACMA,” Los Angeles Times, September 9, 2011, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2011/09/artreview-asco-elite-of-the-obscure-a-retrospective-1972-1987-at-the-los-angeles-county-museumof-a.html. 55 This section acknowledges the influence of Armando Durón’s “Parallax Views: Analyzing PST: LA/LA without Pom Poms,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the College Art Association, Los Angeles, February 22, 2018. 56 In one promotional video Chican@ artists represented 33 percent of the total, but three artists did not initially receive Getty funds. Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, http://www.pacificstandardtime. org/lala/index.html. 57 See, for example, John Dorsey, “While the Whitney Biennial Focuses on Messages, They Don’t Always Get Through,” Baltimore Sun, March 29, 1993, http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1993-0329/features/1993088159_1_whitney-biennial-work-of-art-today-art. 58 Hamza Walker, “Double Consciousness, Squared,” Newsletter of The Renaissance Society, April 28–June 23, 2013, https://renaissancesociety.org/publishing/12/double-consciousness-squared/. 59 Alcoff, Visible Identities, 38. 60 Alcoff, Visible Identities, 44. 61 Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).

Bibliography Almarez, Carlos David, Roberto de la Rocha, Gilbert Sanchez Luján, and Frank Edward Romero. Los Four: Almaraz/de la Rocha/Lujan/Romero. Irvine: University of California, Irvine, 1973. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name at University Art Gallery, University of California, Irvine, November 10–December 9, 1973, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, February 26–March 31, 1974.

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Beardsley, John, and Jane Livingston, eds. Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Contemporary Painters and Sculptors. New York: Abbeville Press, 1987. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, May–September 1987, and other museums in the United States and Mexico. Chavoya, C. Ondine, and Rita Gonzalez, eds. Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972– 1987. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, September 4–December 4, 2011, and Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA, February 4–July 29, 2012. Curtis, Erin M., Jessica Hough, and Guisela Latorre, eds. ¡Murales Rebeldes! L.A. Chicana/Chicano Murals under Seige. Los Angeles: Angel City Press, 2017. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name at La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, Los Angeles, September 23, 2017– March 12, 2018, and other venues in the United States. Davalos, Karen Mary. Chicana/o Art Remix: Art and Errata since the Sixties. New York: New York University Press, 2017. Dávila, Arlene. Culture Works: Space, Value, and Mobility across the Neoliberal Americas. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Duggan, Lisa. The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. Fields, Virginia M., and Victor Zamudio-Taylor. The Road to Aztlan: Art from a Mythic Homeland. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2001. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, May 13–August 6, 2001. Gonzalez, Rita. An Undocumented History: A Survey of Index Citations for Latino and Latina Artists. CSRC Research Report 2. Los Angeles: UCLA CSRC Press, 2003. Gonzalez, Rita, Howard Fox, and Chon A. Noriega, eds. Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2008. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, April 6–September 1, 2008, and other museums in the United States and Mexico.

10 Tools and Obstacles: A Conversation Daniel Joseph Martínez, Carol A. Wells, and Nizan Shaked

This 2011 conversation between Daniel Joseph Martínez and Carol A. Wells, with art historian Nizan Shaked, is about the potentialities and limits of political art. It was adapted by the editors from a panel discussion for undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty members at California State University Long Beach (CSULB), which was held on September 14, 2011— a decade after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the thwarted attempt on the US Capitol, and a decade before the 1/6/21 insurrection at the US Capitol.1 The discussion transcript, which was edited for length and re-sequenced in a few areas for clarity, brings to bear the experience and expertise of Wells, creator and director of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG) in Los Angeles, and Martínez, an artist who makes creative use of images, text, 3D forms, installation, robotics, performance, and public intervention. In this conversation, Wells and Martínez move back and forth between specific instances of censorship and theoretical deliberations concerning art activism. In the process they offer varied views on strategies necessary to induce critical thinking, effect political engagement, and secure meaningful social change. Shaked: Carol, your decision to create CSPG—which has about ninety thousand prints from around the world relating to protest and human rights movements—followed from your desire in the 1980s to publicize and protest US intervention in Central America. Wells: Yes, my primary focus was the US government’s illegal war against the Nicaraguan Revolution—the Sandinista’s 1979 overthrow of a US-backed dictatorship in power since the 1930s. In 1981 I visited Nicaragua for the first time, collected my first poster, curated my first exhibition, and gave my first talk on art and revolution. The Center grew out of posters I collected around the Nicaraguan struggle for self-determination. Between 1982 and 1989 I received invitations from solidarity activists across the US to show Art and Revolution of Nicaragua, which I curated with UCLA’s David Kunzle. Someone saw our exhibition at the Social and Public Art Resource Center in Venice and said, “We have a cultural center in San Diego, will you bring it down?” My husband and I drove it down. Then in San Diego, “My sister does Nicaraguan solidarity work

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in Colorado. If we fly you out there, will you—?” It was a grassroots effort that spread through word of mouth. Shaked: As director, you’ve had firsthand experience with censorship. What impressions do you have about how it operates? Wells: Censorship happens in many ways, and most of the time we’re not even aware of it. We don’t get a grant. We don’t get to exhibit in certain venues. We’re never told, “Oh, it’s because of the politics.” Instead we hear: “It’s a budget-cut issue.” Many times it’s not censorship, or there’s no clear way of knowing, but there are times when the issues are clear and censorship is undisputable. Shaked: When we think about censorship, we might not imagine it occurring in a law school, but you’ve found otherwise. Wells: In 1985 Loyola Law School students invited me to display the Nicaraguan poster exhibition. Apparently people complained right away. When I came to do the talk, I saw a disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this exhibit do not express the opinions of the school, the faculty, the Board of Trustees, etc. That’s how I learned there was a fight over this exhibition. Some people were very offended. But because defending free speech is one of the main points of a law school, they couldn’t take the exhibition down. Instead, they put up the disclaimer. They eventually went farther. Before that it was a student space where students could do whatever they wanted. After the Nicaragua exhibition every exhibition had to have faculty approval. That’s a form of censorship. Two years later students requested a women’s rights poster exhibition. In this case the faculty member who had to approve the posters was a nun. Some students were nervous about the pro-choice posters. I told them they didn’t need to include every abortion rights poster in the collection, but they couldn’t have the exhibition with zero. That was my bottom line. I suggested one with a child’s drawing that said, “My mom had an illegal abortion. I don’t miss the baby, I miss my mom.” I said the nun might accept it since it dealt with a side of the issue not usually discussed. And I was right. She accepted it. But after that, from what I was told, no exhibits were allowed in the space. That was Loyola Law School. Shaked: You’ve found that secondary school environments pose similar challenges in terms of content restrictions. Wells: Yes, in 1986 I was invited to give the Nicaraguan art talk at Mission Viejo High School in Orange County. I’d been giving it all over the country—high schools, colleges, community centers. The talk was to be given to the entire school so I was to present three times over two days. I was thrilled but also nervous because usually I gave the high school talk to the class of a teacher who had prepared the students. Mission Viejo High School was a different story, and I was right to be worried. After my first talk the administration wanted me to remove a couple of slides they considered offensive. So I thought, “What’s better: take the slides out and let myself be censored, or put up a fight and have them not see the other 95 percent of the presentation?” I decided to take the slides out. After my second presentation they wanted me to remove a couple of other slides. I agreed. I realized then that since I was probably not going to make it to day two, I should make the most of day one. I left empty spaces where the slides had been, so when I was going through the talk, there was a white space. Each time a white space came up, I described what was missing. I figured my time was limited, so I might as well go for broke. After the talk some of the students wanted to see the missing slides. Unlike deleted PowerPoint images, you can hold removed slides up to the light and see them. One slide was a Sandinista mural painting showing a US Marine holding the decapitated head of a Nicaraguan (Figure 10.1).

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FIGURE 10.1  Detail of 1979 mural by Róger Pérez de la Rocha and others, perimeter wall of “El Chipote,” former military base and secretariat of the national directorate of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), Managua, Nicaragua. Photo taken by Carol A. Wells in 1981. Mural painted over circa 1983 due to deterioration. Courtesy of Carol A. Wells.

I admit that in 1981 when I first saw that mural in Nicaragua, I thought, “Oh, this is over the top.” I assumed it hadn’t happened, and I didn’t include it in my talks. Then in 1984 Rolling Stone magazine printed a series of photographs from the National Archives.2 One showed a US Marine holding the head of a Nicaraguan who had been decapitated during a patrol by La Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua (Figure 10.2).3

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FIGURE 10.2  Lieutenant Orville Pennington holding the head of Silvino Herrera with boy looking on. Original 1930 photo attributed to Lieutenant White, Guardia Nacional. Records of the United States Marine Corps, Record Group 127, Entry 38, Box 29, US National Archives, Washington DC. Copy photograph by and courtesy of Michael J. Schroeder.

La Guardia was a militia created during the US occupation of Nicaragua (1909–33) that was closely intertwined with the US military. From 1926 to 1933 Augusto Cesar Sandino and his supporters waged a successful guerrilla war against thousands of US Marines occupying Nicaragua. Beheading captured Sandinistas and placing their heads outside their villages were tactics used to create fear and intimidation. Historical records and scholarly accounts offer different views about Herrera’s affiliation with the Sandinistas and those who killed him, but

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the photo inscription translates clearly: “Head of a bandit leader Silvino Herrera—killed by the Guard in August 1930—Matagalpa.”4 The terms “Sandinista” and “bandolero” (bandit) were both interchanged and conflated; US policy makers defined Sandinistas as bandits, and the Marines and La Guardia tended to see many Nicaraguans as bandits.5 A 1932 memo from the head of La Guardia to the US minister to Nicaragua, which alludes to the use of the photo in “anti-American propaganda,” seeks to absolve both the Marines and La Guardia. The author of the memo says that the Marine picked up the head after a local farmer murdered Silvino to avenge the abduction and rape of the farmer’s wife. He notes efforts by La Guardia to keep the image under wraps, indicating that the photographer made only three prints and destroyed the film.6 Censorship on a government level. As soon as I saw that photograph in Rolling Stone, I put it and the mural into the slide show. The second set of images that Mission Viejo High School asked me to remove was even more horrific because it was recent. In 1985 a US college student decided to travel with the Contras, a mercenary counterrevolutionary army created illegally under President Ronald Reagan. Congress had prohibited using US money to support the Contras, but Reagan was determined to overthrow the Sandinistas. So he supported the Contras illegally. The student photographed a Sandinista militiaman captured by the Contras who was forced to dig his own grave and lie in it. He continued to photograph while one of the Contras slit the man’s throat. The student took color pictures of the whole thing. In April 1985 Newsweek magazine published them, and I made slides from them.7 When you think of the violence kids see in movies and television—it blew my mind that real violence done in the name of Ronald Reagan was “too much” for them to take, but with fantasy violence, it was “why not?” Shaked: Often the US media doesn’t adequately cover instances of US participation or complicity in such violence. Yet in these two examples media coverage confirming acts of atrocity prompted your decision to show difficult images. It’s ironic that in situations like these, news accounts have the potential to spark public debate while decisions about what’s suitable in the classroom can preempt it. Wells: Yes, after the third talk the teacher who had invited me to speak called me into the office. He was very apologetic. I knew what was happening. The school administration told him that I was not to come back the next day. But it didn’t end there. The high school had many students whose parents worked in the El Toro marine base, Camp Pendleton, the Seal Beach naval weapons station, and the Miramar naval station. Some kids had organized when they heard I was coming to talk about the Nicaraguan Revolution, calling their parents, who then called the local newspaper to complain there was a communist speaking on the campus. I received a phone call from the Orange County Register, which is not a bastion for liberal perspectives, but it’s a newspaper, and free speech is an issue with most newspapers. The reporter was the first to tell me I was being called a communist and wanted to know my opinion. The protesting students ultimately did me a favor because far more people read about this issue in the newspaper than the few hundred people that would have seen me at the school. That backfired on them. Shaked: Yes, censorship can yield its opposite—the airing of opposing views via the media. That said, one of the more difficult situations you’ve dealt with involved television. Wells: In 2001 I was booked for a late September talk on Bill Rosendahl’s cable television show. After the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington they asked to postpone it for a couple of months. When they rescheduled, I said, “Instead of doing a generic presentation on CSPG, I want to deal with September 11 and show how the US flag has been used to express both patriotism and dissent. I want to show posters made in

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the forty years since the Vietnam War that have used flags to protest US foreign policy.” They agreed to my proposal. I was motivated by the fact that displays of the US flag started out as signs of grief and solidarity, but quickly became jingoistic: “Bomb ‘em to hell,” or “Smash ‘em.” They were very aggressive and said things like “These colors don’t run.” I wanted to show posters that used the flag in an anti-war way. The cable station asked me to deliver the posters ahead of time so they could photograph them for the show. I brought an assortment of fifteen posters. There were really mild ones, like Earth First’s green and white ecology version of the US flag. Others were strong, like the famous Fluxus poster by George Maciunas that says, “U.S.A. Surpasses all the Genocide Records!” It gives statistics on other genocides and mass murders including those carried out by Kublai Khan, the Nazis, Stalin, and concludes with how many Native Americans and South Vietnamese were killed by the US. On the day of the show they called to say, “You have a choice. You can either come on today without graphics, or you can reschedule for another time with different posters.” After my initial shock I asked a few questions, and the program’s producer told me which two posters would be acceptable for that day’s show. I asked permission to use just one more, featuring a Shirley Chisholm quote: “Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies in our own country, poverty and racism, and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed in the eyes of the world as hypocrites when we talk about making people free.” The producer said, “That sounds reasonable. I’ll get back to you.” Ten minutes later she called and said, “You’re off the show. We’re cancelling the segment.” I agreed to go on without the Chisholm poster, but she said, “No. It’s off.” I was stunned. CSPG had sent out a promotional email saying, “Watch for Carol on the Bill Rosendahl show.” When it was cancelled, we sent another that said I wasn’t going to be on, but we gave no reason. We started getting emails saying, “What happened?” One of the calls came from a journalist. I told him the story. He asked if he could make it public. I said, “Fine with me.” So he did, and then I got more calls from the press. Bill Rosendahl got calls, but he rewrote the facts. He told the press, “Oh no, no, no, we’re just postponing it. She wasn’t cancelled. She was just postponed.” Which was not what I was told. He was publicly embarrassed into inviting me back. This time the show’s producers told me to send twenty posters. They said they would choose which posters I could use. So I thought, “Fine. Two can play this game.” I sent twenty of the strongest posters we had. Let them pick any of them! The green ecology flag wasn’t included. Every poster was about a US act of atrocity or genocide, from Native Americans to the present. The hour-long Rosendahl show generally featured four guests, each having fifteen minutes. In my segment Rosendahl used five minutes to give his definitions of patriotism, all of which were great. After I had spoken five minutes, he said, “Okay, thank you very much.” Although I refused to leave until I finished my point, I left before my time was up. It made me angry. I felt powerless because I was fighting people who could pull the plug. But if it hadn’t been for the press embarrassing Bill into rescheduling, I wouldn’t have been on his show. Shaked: Censorship and self-censorship were fairly common after the September 11 attacks, persisting well after the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. And while there were efforts to resist, censorship was oftentimes defended. But as you noted earlier, censorship is often masked. Wells: We receive city, county, and state grants, and grants from private foundations, but after applying numerous times over two decades to a particular federal agency and receiving

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strong peer reviews but no grants, I called the agency and said, “We make it all the way to the final cut, but we’ve never been awarded a grant, in spite of high ratings. These applications are labor intensive. I want to know if we’re wasting our time.” I asked, “Is it the politics of the posters?” Of course he had to say no. It’s against the law for them to discriminate based on politics. So I said, “I know you can’t admit it. But can you tell us if it’s worth applying? It takes a lot of time and money for a small organization to prepare a federal grant application.” He explained it’s not just based on peer reviews. For the final selection, officials like senators and congressional representatives have veto power. Then he said, “When you’re writing your grant, ask yourself this question, ‘If Fox News found out that the federal government was giving you a grant for this project, how would it fly?’” And I basically asked, “Are you saying that Fox News is the litmus test? If that’s the case, we might as well forget it.” This was during the Bush years, but it demonstrates how self-censorship works. Most politicians were then and still are terrified of being mocked, dragged through Fox News slander. It’s not a ripple effect. It’s a tidal wave. People don’t want to put themselves in a position where they have to justify their actions. Shaked: In your opinion, has anything changed? Wells: I think censorship has escalated since September 11. People are terrified. There’s a lot of self-censorship. Many artists today are dealing with it. If they say what they would have said before September 11, they might not get a commission. Or worse—some artists have had Homeland Security knock on their door. Shaked: It’s important in discussing censorship to also consider reactions by art world professionals. I’m thinking about the critical response to Daniel’s Museum Tags: Second Movement (Overture) at the 1993 Whitney Biennial. He replaced admission buttons that read “WMAA” [Whitney Museum of American Art] with buttons that had one or two words or the entire sentence I CAN’T/IMAGINE/EVER WANTING/TO BE/WHITE (Plate 14, Figure 10.3). The work speaks to the issue of not only signification—instability of meaning—but also discrimination, which is a form of censorship. Daniel was highlighting racial and ethnic discrimination at a time when museums were adamantly asserting they were no longer discriminating in terms of exhibitions, acquisitions, or targeted audiences. People got really upset with this work. Many misinterpreted it. It became infamous. Reception of Daniel’s work was overdetermined for a long time by the tags. That said, it made the cover of Artforum and in a way came to stand for the entire decade of the 1990s.8 Let’s also consider Daniel’s piece at the 2006 Biennale of Cairo—Call Me Ishmael: The Fully Enlightened Earth Radiates Disaster Triumphant (Figure 10.4). He placed a mechanized figure in white clothing, with facial features resembling his, on the floor of an empty gallery. At times the figure was still, but periodically it gestured violently (Figure 10.5). It was up to the viewer to determine the imaginary cause of the figure’s seizures, whether they came from within, such as a mental disorder, or from without—pressures of neglect, isolation, or constraint. The work was later vandalized. Daniel, the belt originally identified the figure as “Ishmael.” You changed the name to “nobody,” presumably for the sake of cross-cultural sensitivity. Martínez: I was asked to change it. Shaked: You were asked to change it? Martínez: Right. By the US government. Shaked: As an artist, what do you do when you’ve been asked to change your work? When do you say, “No, I’m not changing anything,” and when do you make a concession?

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FIGURE 10.3  Daniel Joseph Martínez. Museum Tags: Second Movement (Overture) or Overture con claque—Overture with Hired Audience Members, 1993, visitor with paint-and-enamel-on-metal tag, 1993 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Courtesy of artist.

Martínez: We can go back to what Carol has been talking about. Her example with the slide presentation. Perhaps the blank space says more than the actual image in the context of its absence. She made a decision to allow something, a certain type of discourse, to move forward and circumvent a gate, a rule, a rationale for what is appropriate or inappropriate in what we refer to as civil society. In the context of civil society, especially academic environments, where we take for granted the ideas of freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom of thought—it’s a bit confusing.

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FIGURE 10.4 Daniel Joseph Martínez. Call Me Ishmael: The Fully Enlightened Earth Radiates Disaster Triumphant, 2006, installation view of animatronic sculpture with audience, United States Pavilion, Tenth International Biennale of Cairo, Museum of Modern Art, Cairo. Courtesy of artist.

A characterization I’ve made—a lot of people disagree with me—is that it’s possible we still live intellectually in the eighteenth or nineteenth century in terms of the rules and regulations by which we govern ourselves. We have laws that keep society cohesive so there isn’t anarchy. Nobody wants anarchy. But no one wants to be told what to do either. We want a democracy, don’t want dictatorship. It gets complicated. If you’re still thinking intellectually in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, it affects what happens to you in the twentieth century. The Reagan example is perfect. It’s not what we know that’s dangerous. It’s what we don’t know. Carol and I agree. We’re essentially coming from the same point of view. We might split hairs on things. We might have a minor disagreement, even an argument, which would be fun, about our slant on what censorship is and how it functions—but it’s difficult for us to create a debate. What I’d like to do, rather than focus on the specificities, is consider your question— how do you decide what’s the best means by which to communicate what you need to communicate in any given context? It will be a decision of whether to include or somehow remove information that’s vital to the given subject. In the case of Ishmael the belt buckle name is irrelevant to the assertion of the work’s overall proposition.9 But let’s move the discussion to where and how censorship functions. It has to do with information flow. Censorship is about control of information. It’s about people who have information and people who do not have information. It’s dissemination of information in various manners that allow people to be indoctrinated to a particular set of values. Your

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FIGURE 10.5  Daniel Joseph Martínez. Call Me Ishmael: The Fully Enlightened Earth Radiates Disaster Triumphant, 2006, installation view of animatronic sculpture in motion. United States Pavilion, Tenth International Biennale of Cairo, Museum of Modern Art, Cairo. Courtesy of artist.

ethics, your morals, the qualities and principles you believe in as an individual—how are those formed? They’re formed through a socialization based on the country you were born in, based on the hierarchy within the socioeconomic-political environment that suggests someone can dictate to other individuals how, when, and why something will happen. So the illegal war—there have been thousands of illegal wars run by the US in more countries than one can count. But the US didn’t invent this; this is age-old. In terms of flow of information, let’s consider what the difference is between understanding a thing and believing a thing. When can you make the distinction between information that’s been given to you and the motivation behind its dissemination? My favorite example is Galileo, a man probably smarter than your average individual at this time, who makes an argument for heliocentrism by suggesting the earth is not the center of the universe and the cosmology of the world you live in is not what you think it is—is not what you were told it was. If one person steps up and says, “No, the cosmology, the orientation of the planets in relation to the universe and solar system, functions like this.” And it’s contrary to everything else you’ve been told, but you haven’t been told why you’ve been told this information—which is clearly to control you, to manipulate you. It has to do with monotheism. It has to do with politics. It has to do with finances. It has to do with everything every war has ever been started over, which is wealth, power, and control of individuals. So if you’re told the earth is the center of our solar system and you believe that, then all of a sudden someone else says that something’s different, the information immediately is stopped. There’s no way to refute the central core of information that

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disseminators deliver to you. In Carol’s case, you know the earth is not the center, but you feel completely helpless. If I told you the world was flat today, you’d laugh at me. What if I made an argument that seemed rock solid scientifically that proved the world was flat? You’d walk out of here laughing because you know the world isn’t flat. But how do you know the world isn’t flat? How do you know? What’s the basis of the information you use to evaluate what you’re told, by your faculty members, teachers, parents, politicians, priests, rabbis, society? What is the motivation behind the dissemination of that information they want you to believe? Why do they want you to believe this information over that information? Shaked: Didn’t Galileo essentially start the process that led to Enlightenment thinking, culminating with our ability to employ critical thinking and say, “Wait—let me look at my belief system”? Martínez: That’s right. But when do you enable information to be challenged, at every moment, at every level? So if the opportunity to critically examine information can be weighed fairly amongst a group of individuals, who are the regulators of society? Right now I don’t have much to say about the individuals who regulate our society or supposedly manage the country. I’m just trying to make the point that censorship did not begin with us in the twentieth or even the nineteenth century—censorship, controls for the flow of information, and social mores for how and why we tell each other what we want to believe. Wells: I think the Galileo paradigm is brilliant because today people feel superior, thinking how we know so much more now. Of course we all know the sun is the center. We’re familiar with the term “Eurocentrism.” It’s not only Eurocentricity. It’s “twenty-first-century centricity,” the idea that we today are smarter. But the Galileo paradigm is happening right now with global warming. Martínez: That’s right. Wells: The US is probably the only country in the world where politicians are still debating whether climate change is real. But the argument against the reality of global warming is obviously for ideological and political reasons, and to protect economic interests. Martínez: But consider the results of Galileo’s inquisition for heresy. For defending an opinion contrary to Holy Scripture, they sentenced him to house arrest, which he remained under for the rest of his life, and forbade publication and discussion of his offending book, Dialogue. This is how you control information and people’s thinking. Do what Carol suggests. Take that model and apply it to Fox—and they’re the least of our problems. Shaked: When Carol was telling us what the government official said—about Fox News—I was shocked by it. If that’s the litmus test, we’re stuck with landscape painting. Wells: Also, look how the schools are being cut back, how education is being cut back. Art is the most powerful weapon we have. A gun can make you change your behavior, but art can affect your heart and mind. That’s why art is the first thing that gets cut out of the budget. Critical thinking gets cut—they don’t want critical thinkers because an educated, critically thinking populous is hard to control. Shaked: We’re in agreement on these issues, but what about the more difficult questions that go beyond that? What about images that are horrible, maybe documentation of actual violence and by extension pornography—is there such a thing as positive censorship? Can we just freely open everything up? An issue under debate in the news now concerns state secrecy. What shouldn’t be secret and what should? Some make the argument that certain things must be secret. Is that a form of censorship? Or are there grey areas? Wells: You’re asking if censorship is ever justifiable. What’s flashed through my mind is that after World War II the Jewish community didn’t let children under ten or twelve years old see photos of the Holocaust because they were so horrific. But think of all the children in

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Iran, Iraq, Central America, Vietnam, who saw all of that firsthand, not just photographs, but actual genocide. Children around the world are not protected. Martínez: By not delivering the photograph—the information that’s necessary to fully comprehend what’s taken place—doesn’t that somehow, inevitably, do more damage than having a really critical, intellectual, deep understanding of what’s transpired during a particular time? And there’s more violence anywhere than what’s censored in the movies. Whom are we protecting, from what? Wells: I don’t disagree with you, but I want to tell you what’s happening now in the early twenty-first century. Whenever I can, I show the My Lai Massacre poster Q: And Babies? A: And Babies featuring the March 1968 photo that journalist Seymour Hersh made public in November 1969 (Plate 15). The US government sends out documentary photographers all the time. Think about all those World War II movies with spliced documentary footage. There were cameras on the planes and jeeps, and even if nobody survived, the cameras were still going. They did the same thing in Vietnam. Ron L. Haeberle, a photographer accompanying Charlie Company on a search-and-destroy mission, turned in the army-issued film daily, but no one asked him to turn in his own camera and film. In the My Lai Massacre, somewhere between 343 and 567 unarmed civilians were massacred, primarily women and children, some elderly men. Many of the women and girls were raped and tortured before they were killed. There was a ditch filled with bodies and a baby crawling out of the ditch. Lieutenant [William] Calley, head of Charlie Company, ordered a soldier to kill the baby. When the soldier refused, Calley shot the baby himself. A year and a half later Hersh published the story with photographs. Mike Wallace then interviewed one of the soldiers, asking, “And babies?” And the soldier answered, “And babies.” The next day the New York Times printed the interview. Before computers and Photoshop, the Art Workers’ Coalition in New York photographed the New York Times interview, blew it up, superimposed it on the photograph, and made fifty thousand posters, which they disseminated all over the US and Europe. I show that poster a lot because it still has the ability to shock. If you’re under forty or fifty years old, you don’t know about it. When some graduate students studying design visited my office, I pulled out the poster, and they collectively said, “Whoa.” I thought they were responding to the horror of the image. They asked, “Those babies look real. How did they get them in there?” They thought it was fake. They thought it was doctored. They thought it was Photoshopped. You know those Holocaust photos are real, but there’s going to come a time when all the survivors are gone and someone’s going to say, “Oh, that’s Photoshopped.” We’re back to Galileo. Shaked: Theodor Adorno made a statement—which I think was about images of the Holocaust—that the image of violence has the potential to elicit pleasure, and once you have a very strong image, you’re open to manipulation. That’s how Nazi propaganda functioned. Martínez: Two different points: first, regarding the Nazi’s overt governmental use of censorship with “degenerate” art. It suggested this form of art making not only had no validity but didn’t fit within the more powerful, dogmatic, political ideology deemed necessary to purify and run the world in a more orderly manner. There’s a good example of how not just one artist but the largest swathe of individuals gets put into one category. But, second, one of the most extraordinary technological inventions—and I’m a huge advocate of it—is search engines. In something like 00.000000001 of a second you can have more data on anything that has taken place in human history than has ever been possible.

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Shaked: But that data is highly censored. Martínez: Yes. But the fact that the data is accessible in some shape or form, and then the next step is to decipher it—never before could you punch in anything you want and know something that would have taken you years to research before. Shaked: Not if you’re in China. Martínez: Well, okay. But what changed the Vietnam War—by the way, there are a few more Vietnam War images. One is the Buddhist priest who set himself on fire. The other is the little girl running down the street after being napalmed. The next is the man being shot in the head— Wells: —the handcuffed North Vietnamese prisoner executed by South Vietnam’s chief of the national police, right in front of a photographer and a filmmaker. Martínez: Right. These images took a long time, as Carol suggested, to get disseminated in the US. And this is what I mean about the Internet and dissemination, the speed of information flow, because it took so long for those images to come into view, to the level of deep comprehension, from the most humanistic point of view, from one human being to another—very, very slow, because the US government understood these images would slow down what had been taking place in Vietnam. And sure enough, as soon as those images saw the light of day, it changed public opinion in this country. Wells: The power of the image changed public opinion. Martínez: That’s right. Very important. In this sense, I agree with Carol that the possibility of the power of what she referred to as art or art as image, the representation of art as image, however one wants to categorize or contain or make reference to what it means to have a nonverbal communication—a fascinating thing that happened was Abu Ghraib did absolutely nothing, in my opinion. Wells: I disagree. Martínez: What did it change? Wells: They changed public opinion, but the US government doesn’t give a damn about public opinion. Martínez: Understood, but I use those images in my lectures all the time, though I might as well be showing roses. The severity of those images, just like the violence you were referring to, has become anesthetized. Wells: True. Martínez: It has become neutralized. My students said, “Look, that’s what cheerleaders do, right? They all stack themselves up. One gets on top and they cheer.” Imagery, art making, the content about which we’re interested in forming multiple, simultaneous points of view, has to be updated in a way that we haven’t yet considered. Vehicles for the exchange of information and the dissemination of imagery have to be more powerful than Abu Ghraib, because if something like that doesn’t affect people’s worldview, what is it going to take for someone to be concerned about the way in which the world is currently functioning? Wells: I agree with you up to a point. Talk about the power of the image—the majority of the US population supported the Vietnam War until the My Lai Massacre was made public. Martínez: That’s right. Wells: After the Abu Ghraib images were made public more people started questioning the war, what the US was doing in the war, and what the war was doing to our own kids. But the additional problem is what Gore Vidal calls historical amnesia. I had about thirty-five UCLA freshmen come to my office for a presentation in 2007, three years after the Abu Ghraib photos were publicized. These kids were fourteen in 2004, and how many

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fourteen-year-olds watch the news? It wasn’t in their frame of reference. There used to be only three TV stations, and everybody watched the news because news was on all three stations at the same time. Now you can watch television 24/7 and never watch the news, or Fox News, which isn’t news. Martínez: Fox News is news. Wells: We have a poster that’s a take-off of the 2004 iPod ad. It combines the highly stylized iPod ads featuring dancing silhouettes with white wire attached to their ears, with the Abu Ghraib hooded man with wires attached to his fingers (Figure 10.6). Artists in New York and Los Angeles had the same idea and did similar posters at the same time.

FIGURE 10.6  Forkscrew Graphics, iRaq [Abu Ghraib prisoner], 2004, silkscreen poster. Courtesy of Forkscrew Graphics, Los Angeles, California.

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Martínez: Right, I have them. Wells: We only have the LA poster. You have the New York one? Martínez: Yeah. Wells: Oh, can I get one? Let’s talk later. Martínez: We’ll have to make a deal. Wells: The artists made the protest poster look like the iPod ad. They used the same bright colors of the iPod ad but replaced the dancers with the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner with wires dangling from his fingers. It’s the ultimate visual subversion. Martínez: Ten thousand volts. Wells: You can never see the real iPod ad again without doing a double take. Is this a real one, or is this the political one, the image of torture? It’s brilliant culture jamming, how the political statement hooks into your head. Back to 2007, when I showed the thirty-five students the iPod/Iraq poster. The iPod ad had gone through some changes in three years, yet every student recognized it. Not one student recognized or could identify Abu Ghraib. Martínez: Of course not. Wells: It’s still shocking to me because it was only three years later. Martínez: That’s precisely the gap I’m talking about. Wells: Yes. Martínez: There was a moment when it would be very easy to be upset. Even if you’re disseminating information in your classes to offer more than one point of view on any given subject—it doesn’t really matter what it is, I don’t think it’s a question of left, right, or center anymore—it seems like an obsolete means by which to look at who we are as individuals and the world that we function in. If someone didn’t know about something as horrific as—for our age group—the Vietnam War and what took place there, you go, “How could you possibly not know what just took place a couple decades ago, much less three years ago?” That seems somewhat upsetting. Why are we not teaching our children about their own history? I got over being upset about that because I realized it wasn’t that the students were at fault or weren’t interested. It wasn’t that we didn’t have the politics by which to deliver the information. It’s that the paradigm shift is so great. It’s the gap. I’m not talking about the generational gap. I’m talking about the technological gap that’s been created. The globalization of sets of information that are taken for granted as being fact are at this point unchallengeable. In order to challenge them, in order to disrupt that flow of information, you have to make that new information as accessible and digestible as the language of texting. It might as well be a new language. Wells: I still need interpretation for a lot of it. Martínez: But we can’t deny its existence. A lot of people say, “I can’t understand this.” Well, in some instances you can’t understand because you’re not paying attention to information being disseminated. It seems to me that we’re in the same dilemma. I know that people here are supposed to be using their computers to take notes and do other things, but I was just watching somebody looking up recipes for some kind of gardening. My point is you cannot make assumptions about what information will be important. We can no longer assume that what was important to us, what was seminal to our formation, of our intellect, our being, our politics, our ability to interact in the world—we can no longer assume that this set of information or values has anything to do with the set of today’s values, and that is not a left, right, center issue. Wells: Right, but there’s also the fact that at the time of the Vietnam War we would eat dinner with the war on television. The war was brought into everyone’s home. That didn’t

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happen under George W. Bush because the government learned from Vietnam. Since the Bush administration, photographers and journalists have been embedded with the troops, which means they’re not independent. If the government doesn’t like what they print, they’re thrown out, not given access. The government won’t allow photographs of body bags coming home. That’s censorship. Martínez: There’s something else. The white elephant in the room we’ve not yet described. When is there too much freedom? Perhaps we experience too much freedom here in the US. Wells: I’ll let you know. I’ve never experienced it. Martínez: Well, I don’t know. Perhaps we do experience it here in the US. Perhaps there’s a sense of entitlement to freedom due to a complete misunderstanding of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The fact is that we use a body of language that constitutional scholars argue over in the twenty-first century. I’m not sure we should be using the same rules and regulations we were using at the time of the formation of this country. I’m not saying get rid of them. I’m not saying they need to be amended in such a way that they change the very nature of constitutional government, but if you have an Apple computer from five years ago and you have a 2008 operating system, it isn’t going to work with your software today. They’re incompatible. You have a system of governance trying to organize the population under a rubric of completely antiquated ideas. Wells: You’ve said we have too much freedom in the US. I really disagree with that. I think the concept of freedom in this country has been trivialized. You can get a Coke or a Pepsi. You can get a super-size or an extra super-size. Freedom of choice has been redefined as what you can buy in the supermarket. And that’s not freedom of choice. Martínez: Choice is an illusion. My favorite example is the cereal aisle. You take someone from another country to any store, and there are hundreds of choices of cereal. Wheaties. Cap’n Crunch. Cheerios. And there isn’t one bit of difference between them. It’s all the same cereal, all made the same way, all owned by the same company, all disguised as choice. Wells: That’s the point I was trying to make. Martínez: Then we agree again. Wells: And that’s not democracy. Martínez: It’s not freedom. Wells: Right. Martínez: If you want to save the economy, take your credit cards and max them out. Spend money as much as humanly possible. Get into debt. Get your parents into debt. Your brothers and sisters into debt. Get married, get them into debt. Get your partners into debt. Get into debt, debt, debt, and you’ll be like the perfect patriotic American citizen. You might save this economy. At least California. Audience Member [artist and professor Todd Gray]: I was curious about how we can penetrate the psyche of people with images, because we’ve been anesthetized by the accumulation of violent images over decades and decades and decades. And then the first example you brought up where the pin pricked was the mix of the iPod and Abu Ghraib, which made me think of Robert Heinecken’s political gesture, his agitational propaganda gesture, where he put atrocities of the Vietnam War into porn magazines in various Hollywood newsstands—in porn magazines and fashion magazines. So people would be looking for porn, and then they would get an atrocity. It was by shifting context. And so it seems since global corporate has shifted or defined the groundwork, the definition, of freedom, then maybe it’s how does one use that to turn it on itself. So maybe this wouldn’t require a more violent ramping up of spectacle, but just a greater shift in context.

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Wells: Well, there are new media that inspire me now—political flash mobs. A couple years ago, when the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco was trying to break its employee union, a group of union musicians dressed in suits were pretending to sign in at the hotel when all of a sudden somebody yelled, “Stop! You can’t stay here. It’s a bad hotel!” They broke into Lady Gaga’s “Don’t Get Stuck in a Bad Romance,” but sang “Don’t Get Stuck in a Bad Hotel.” They did this choreographed thing with huge instruments and somebody videotaped it. It was over and done within a minute, maybe two minutes, and they were gone before anyone could call security. That was seen by I don’t know how many hundreds or thousands of people on YouTube. We were missing humor, one of the most subversive tools we have. This was funny. It was clever. It was unexpected. And I can’t hear Lady Gaga’s song now without thinking of that demo. Those things are happening all over the country, all over the world. Martínez: Yes, one borrows from the other, right? It’s constantly happening. Art does something. Advertising bites it. Advertising does it a little bit better, because they have a little more money. Then art bites that. It goes back and forth. The same thing happens in the political spectrum, the tug of war over a particular set of ideas. But I’m going to go back to the flash mob. I think anything electronically flashy is fabulous, but it’s pointless. It’s necessary, but pointless. During the Second Gulf War there were more protests in more cities in the world— Wells: —forty million protestors in one day. Martínez: That’s right. More than had ever happened in the history of this planet, and it did zilch. Nobody cared. Nobody noticed. In order for someone to pay attention, you need to cut off their electricity. Wells: Or you sit in on a freeway. But then you go to jail. It may be worth it. Martínez: No. It’s really simple. You cut off the electricity for California for one week. I guarantee people are going to have a very different opinion about the way things work. You cut off gasoline for one week. You shut down every grocery store in this country so there’s no access to any food at all. You will change. Something out of the ordinary has to happen before anyone in this country is going to care. You know why? Because I can go to the student center here and eat all I want. I can get into my Prius and drive home for $3. I lack nothing. What’s the problem here? There’s no problem for me right now. Everything’s good. Wells: Okay. I have a major disagreement with you. Martínez: Good. That’s what I was trying—I was hoping— Wells: —you were trying to be outrageous, and I took the bait. Okay. I’ve spent the majority of my life trying to make the world a better place than when I found it. And I absolutely believe that unless everyone—anybody who’s awake and concerned—if all of us don’t try to make the world a better place than when we found it—it’s going to get a whole lot worse a whole lot faster. Martínez: There is a way to penetrate the veneer of twenty-first-century technology that’ll do what you just said. I don’t believe and I still am hopeful—this is not a pessimistic statement—I’m still extremely hopeful because I’ve spent my life, as you have, as people in this room have, trying to, in the smallest way, improve the condition of the world that we live in, whether it’s our block or our city. The question is, though, how do we contemporize the way we think and move within contemporary society without doing what you and I just did? We’re good for a history lesson, but we’re not at the point of looking at a future, which is where the students here are. How do we enable them to both comprehend the necessity of understanding history and also reorganize that history in such a manner that technologically there is something that can be done?

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I think that until something cataclysmic happens in this country, there’s going to be a very small amount of people that care. Wells: Well, it’s starting to happen. Martínez: What is? Wells: The job situation for this generation isn’t what it was when I graduated. Martínez: But who cares? Wells: They care. Come on. Martínez: You think they care? Really? Come on. Wells: You think they want to live at home the rest of their lives? Martínez: How many graduate students would you like me to name who are in their thirties living at home? Wells: Because they had no choice. Because there are no jobs. Martínez: They have to have a purpose. Wells: But, see, that’s the purpose for having this kind of discussion and a history lesson, because it gives a perspective— Martínez: —absolutely. Wells: Who would have thought that the Egyptians would have overthrown that dictatorship? Shaked: But they knew what they wanted. Wells: Yes. Audience Member [artist and professor Todd Gray]: Who thought that the military would be able to move in and take over? Shaked: The historical problem with revolution is that you replace one dictatorship with another. Martínez: Yes, re-vo-lu-tion. All it does is revolve. It doesn’t change. I’m not aware of a single moment when the idea of political, leftist revolution has succeeded. Wells: Well, I’ll give you, again, the Nicaraguan example. I was there in 1981, 1983, and 1984. In 1983, when the Sandinistas took over, they had a 56 percent illiteracy rate. They brought it down to 15 percent. Illiteracy in the United States is higher. The Sandinistas made healthcare available. They built schools. They started promoting women’s rights. And then the US government came in with their Contras, attacking healthcare centers, schools, and agricultural cooperatives. The US provided spy planes to tell the Contras the location of the Sandinista army, which agrarian storage only has three people, three militias protecting it—attack that one. This government makes sure that revolutions do not succeed. Martínez: I understand. Audience Member [unidentified student]: Considering that we have desensitized society, and because of the amount of information that bombards us every day, and all the technology, the—the amount of drunkenness— Martínez: —drunk did you say? Audience Member [unidentified student]: Yes. When confronting that wall of silence—this wall can be put up by a single individual or a group of people and dialogue is no longer possible. What’s the next option to reach a resolution based on a common enemy? And, I mean, not agreement just for the sake of agreeing. Martínez: Do you mean consensus? Audience Member [unidentified student]: Yes.

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Martínez: Amongst whom? Audience Member [unidentified student]: To find a solution for the common problems we have. And so art is not being censored. Wells: Well, there’s a couple of ways of approaching your question, and one is with what Daniel just said. Freedom of speech exists in this country unless you use it to challenge the power. Martínez: Thank you. Wells: The Black Panthers got killed because they were speaking truth to power. The American Indian movement was set up and framed. Angela Davis was set up and framed. If you use your freedom of speech, but you’re saying stuff that the powers that be don’t want to hear, they’ll do whatever they can to neutralize you. Martínez: Right. Wells: When you start being Galileos, they have no compunction about killing you or putting you in jail, or neutralizing, or discrediting— Martínez: —or disappearing you. Wells: —disappearing or discrediting you. It’s the same. Martínez: It’s mandatory that a dissenting voice is always present. You do not have to agree with it, but you need to be honest enough with yourself to at least listen to what another person has to say about the subject you adamantly believe is one-dimensional, because it’s not one-dimensional. You have to have a dissenting voice. Wells: One last comment. The level of discourse has gotten so disrespectful. With the role models we’re getting in Washington, all the talking heads in the news. The ones with the biggest ratings are the rudest, interrupt the most. Martínez: Because it’s entertainment. Wells: They want to be provocative through entertainment. We have to be able to say no, turn it off, switch the channel. And let them know we want to hear real stuff, real people, and not disgusting insult after insult with no content. Martínez: In a fully immersive, capitalist, global society you have to be able to, if possible, know the difference between genuine critical dialogue and profit-making entertainment. Wells: I want to mention art censorship that just happened this week. The Oakland Museum of Children’s Art was scheduled to have an exhibit of Palestinian children’s art, children from, I don’t know, ages seven through eleven. Martínez: Yeah, I heard about that. Wells: And their funders complained and said no. So they cancelled. Martínez: We just brought the discussion full circle. Therein lies the obstacle we face. There’s always someone deciding what’s appropriate or inappropriate to share in any given context. There’s always going to be someone who’ll censor information. It happens that we can speak freely. Half this audience might want to shoot us, but at least the information is being heard. Again, I’m still looking. There’s got to be a mechanism to counter the anesthetization, the absolute apathy, the grocery store full of food— Wells: Art. Look at what you did with your museum tags. And these are the future artists. Martínez: And there’s the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, which is a fabulous organization. You’ve done more to let people know about politics in the world than anybody I know.

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Notes 1 The panel discussion, originally titled “Mural Art, Street Art, Public Art: Observations/ Discussion,” was part of CSULB’s initiative “Banned, Blacklisted & Boycotted: Censorship and the Response to It.” See “Introduction.” 2 “From Here to Eternity,” introduction by Christopher Dickey, research by Eddie Becker, Rolling Stone, May 24, 1984, 26–9. 3 The photo is featured in a webpage produced by historian Michael J. Schroeder. “Photo USNA14.11. Lt. Orville Pennington with head of Silvino Herrera, August 1930,” in Michael J. Schroeder, “The Sandino Rebellion: Nicaragua 1927–1934: A Documentary History,” May 20, 2020, http:// www.sandinorebellion.com/PhotoPgs/1USNA1/PGS/photos4.html. 4 See Neill MacCaulay, The Sandino Affair (Micanopy, FL: Wacahoota Press, 1998), 228–9; Richard Grossman, “‘The Blood of the People’: The Guardia Nacional’s Fifty-Year War against the People of Nicaragua, 1927–1979,” in When States Kill: Latin America, the U.S., and Technologies of Terror, ed. Cecilia Menjívar and Néstor Rodríguez (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 70; and “Photo USNA1-4.11. Lt. Orville Pennington with head of Silvino Herrera, August 1930.” 5 Grossman, “‘The Blood of the People,’” 69–70. 6 C. B. Matthews to Matthew E. Hanna, June 4, 1932, memorandum accompanying Photo USNA1-4.11 in the National Archives, Washington, DC, reproduced in Schroeder, “The Sandino Rebellion.”http://www.sandinorebellion.com/PhotoPgs/1USNA1/PIX-NARA1/NA69.jpg. 7 “Execution in the Jungle,” Newsweek, April 29, 1985, 43. 8 See Hilton Als et al., “Whitney Biennial 1993: Eleven Article Special Section,” Artforum International 31, no. 9 (May 1993): 7–17; and Nizan Shaked, “The 1993 Whitney Biennial: Artwork, Framework, Reception,” Journal of Curatorial Studies 2, no. 2 (June 2013): 142–68. For analysis of 1990s debates regarding identity politics, see Shaked, The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2017). 9 Daniel Joseph Martínez and Gilbert Vicario, The Fully Enlightened Earth Radiates Disaster Triumphant: Daniel Joseph Martinez: United States Pavilion: 10th International 2006 Cairo Bienniale (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2007), and “Daniel Joseph Martínez: Belief Theory” [Gilbert Vicario interview and video], accessed April 1, 2019, https://herbalpertawards.org/artist/ belief-theory.

Bibliography “CSPG: Center for the Study of Political Graphics.” http://www.politicalgraphics.org. Martínez, Daniel Joseph, Hakim Bey, Michael Brenson, David Levi Strauss, and Gilbert Vicario. Daniel Joseph Martinez: A Life of Disobedience. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2009. “Visiting Artist Lecture Series: Daniel Martinez and Carol Wells.” BWordProject, October 17, 2011. Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWjBlJKJY5A. Part 2: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=NLXRtkl6hos. Part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B-HCaP-FSs. Part 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9hjlRGycME. Part 5: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Z2chlhInGy0. Part 6: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihYx4PvFRns. Part 7: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXqeBaR70xo.

11 Remaining in Sight: Andrea Bowers’s Art Lessons from Activists Peter R. Kalb

Censorship controversies of the late 1980s and 1990s in the United States drew attention to the fragility of political speech in the contemporary art world. With funding agencies beholden to partisan ideologues, issues raised by artists were quickly muffled by manufactured controversies or simply shuttered away from view. Artists such as Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, Sally Mann, and the NEA 4 became polarizing signposts of the political limits of free speech. A second and perhaps more pervasive censoring mechanism become evident in 1999 in Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Though Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s boisterous objection to the contents of the show and his threats to cut city support of the museum appeared to rehash earlier rhetoric, the unique significance of the exhibition lay in the role corporate wealth played in its curation. Charles Saatchi contributed $160,000 and his artists’ dealers offered up additional sums to produce the show, thus securing center stage at the expense of those without such extravagant backing. These two forces—ideologically determined control of funding sources and pay-toplay curatorial practices—confirmed the degree to which the boundaries between the state, the market, and the museum had eroded by the turn of the millennium. While the persistent shadow of censorship has contributed to a depoliticizing of art, it has also demonstrated the tenacity of a rather traditional understanding of political art. Since nineteenth-century realism, politically active artists have chosen to either test the resolve of censors with explicit imagery or elude them by coding their art to be legible only to fellow dissidents. The political image in these latter cases sounds one message to the initiates and another to censors and critics. Gustave Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans (1850), as famously discussed by T. J. Clark, or his summa, The Painter’s Studio (1855), as detailed by Linda Nochlin, exemplify such representational duplicity, inspiring the artist’s hometown friends and fellow travelers while confounding and infuriating conservative Parisian viewers.1 Such art of infiltration, and the eventual backlash it incites, repeats the same dramas, whether in the Salon of 1850 in Paris, China Avant-Garde (1989) in Beijing, or Hide/Seek (2010) in Washington, DC.

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Conservative politicians are not the only ones with a distrust of representation. Critics and historians, as well as appropriation, identity, and body artists, have deconstructed the political and psychological power of conventional representational practices. The dissection of issues of identity, community, and representation by intellectuals as diverse as Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Linda Nochlin, Lucy Lippard, Craig Owens, Laura Mulvey, and Judith Butler have radicalized art and art history programs across the country, arming those seeking to intervene in the politics of representation. The histories of these critical traditions—one stemming from art studios, the other from theoretical writings—have been well rehearsed; each has shaped how we understand the political character of the art world and taught artists and an increasingly large portion of the public to expect political issues to be considered, challenged, and debated on the walls of studios and museums. I would like to examine political activism itself as a third source, one outside academia and the art world, for lessons on how to make political art and keep it in view. To do this, I consider the work and practice of Los Angeles-based artist Andrea Bowers, whose combination of representation, performance, and pedagogy addresses activism and is activist itself. On one hand, she has crafted a refined photorealist drawing practice to display a visual archive of feminist, antinuclear, civil rights, and environmental activism. Bowers uses representation as her Trojan horse, offering viewers legible scenes of participatory political protest and seducing them with trompe l’oeil precision. Critical to her activism, however, is her commitment to the legacy of political dissent and her desire to integrate its strategies into her studio practice. Appreciating her own need for tools for the political tasks of instigation and organization, Bowers adopted tactics of protest movements, from their organizational philosophies and methods of individual and collective action to posters, pamphlets, storytelling, classrooms, and methods of fundraising. She also enlists the skills of her dealers and the resources of collectors to support political organizations, turning her exhibitions over to activist groups in the tradition of teach-ins and Occupy Movement protests, and negotiating sales agreements so money is transmitted from the art world, including herself, her gallery and her collectors, to activist organizations. She has learned art making from activists.

Becoming Activist Bowers’s artistic path led her early on to the apparently inevitable choice to make art about activism.2 In 1987 Bowers completed her BFA at Bowling Green State University and left Ohio, where she was born, for New York City. The political terrain in the United States was shaken by the AIDS epidemic, the deregulation and privatization of Reaganomics, and the Iran-Contra debacle of the mid-1980s turning into the first Gulf War of 1990. Activists at the time, especially those based in New York, were responding to the crises with great creativity. Bowers joined the incipient Women’s Action Committee and began participating in the media savvy, highly theatrical actions of the AIDS activist organization ACT UP.3 The New York activist world also was being fronted by the design- and brand-conscious work of Gran Fury and by the institution building and advocacy of groups such as GMHC, Queer Nation, and more established feminist organizations such as NARAL and Planned Parenthood. Though not her first experience with activism, Bowers’s time in New York provided her with an education in inventive, hands-on civil disobedience, one that would impact her artwork. After arriving in California in the 1990s and attending California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, Bowers practiced an aggressive brand of feminist performance that crossed boundaries of art and life, challenged stereotypes of femininity, and overturned what she felt

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was an emphasis on theory over practice in academic feminism. Her reinvention of political art in the early 2000s came in the form of finely controlled mimesis. Over the course of a few years Bowers established a practice rooted in photorealist representations of democracy in action. Work such as Diabloblockade, Diablo Nuclear Power Plant, Abalone Alliance, 1981 (2003), a highly illusionistic drawing of an early 1980s newspaper photograph of antinuclear protestors, is most startling for the obsessive rigor of its craft. The repetitive and physical labor of this process connected to her childhood: when studying, she would rewrite anything she was asked to learn.4 Applying this imitative form of learning to the history of protest, she not only generated a large body of political imagery but also refined her strategies regarding content and form. In drawings, installations, sculptures, videos, and events that explore many chapters in the history of resistance—suffragettes rallying, antinuclear protestors linking arms, activists scaling fences, groups and single figures marching, and so on—Bowers harnesses the immediacy of craft and performance while also combining education and direct action. “I’m always trying to prove that art and activism are inseparable,” Bowers has commented. “I’m always trying to bleed those dividing lines and simultaneously do activist work through my artwork.”5 The nature of her activism differs from that of her subjects, however, as it is always joined to art making. “What I have to offer is my practice; any way that it can be used, I offer my services. And then I get amazing artwork out of it. The lines have been so blurred that it’s really beautiful for me.”6 This relationship between the actions of her subjects, the subject of their actions, and Bowers’s desire and ability to examine the first and contribute to the second has been integral to her practice. In the early 2000s, while honing her drafting skills and becoming involved with Los Angeles activists, she came across a news report about residents of Valencia, CA, led by Barbara Wampole, Lynne Plambeck, and Gabrielle Benton, protesting to prevent developers from removing a four-hundred-year-old oak tree. They secured John Quigley, an experienced tree sitter, to take up residence in the oak for what became a seventy-one-day occupation and vigil. Deciding that single-channel video had the widest reach, Bowers produced the forty-seven-minute Vieja Gloria (2003, Figure 11.1). It was her “big jump to be overtly political,” a move Bowers feared would end her art career.7 The following year the video was featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, confirming the relevance of her combined artistic and activist path. The Valencia activists emphasized the importance of collaborating with a cross-section of constituencies, both local advocacy groups and others from farther afield, including Quigley, Bowers, and an active Latino community that traveled hundreds of miles to support the demonstrators. Bowers would orient her career around working with different communities and encouraging and converting “conviviality” into “action.”8 As her video conveys, she also recognized in the Valencia protest the importance of crafting relationships between individual and collective action. This is central to her depiction of Quigley, an outsider and longtime activist who self-consciously stood apart from the Valencia community. In the video Quigley describes being inspired by how local activists took control over each stage of their encounter with authorities, noting that shortly after he took his position in the tree, protestors transformed the fencing police used to surround it into an ad hoc exhibition space covered with signs and letters of support. Instead of containing the action, the fence increased the visibility of the protest, both at the site and on TV news. In addressing issues such as AIDS activism, immigration reform, environmental policy, and trans rights—all of which have well-established concerns, practices, and constituencies—Bowers orients her practice to invested parties, rather than specific positions. Like the Valencia activists taking over the fence, Bowers exerts control over form and content by way of organic, impromptu, and direct engagement.9

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FIGURE 11.1  Andrea Bowers, video still from Vieja Gloria, 2003, single-channel video, color, sound, 47:16, edition of 3 + 1 AP. Courtesy of artist.

Bowers returned to film Quigley in 2009, this time depicting him as an educator. In Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Training—Tree Sitting Forest Defense he is shown teaching the artist and by extension the viewers how to ascend and occupy a tree. Rather than document a protest in action, this work is about becoming an activist. Again exploring the body in political action, this work suggests pedagogy is a medium for contemporary political art.10 In an almost literal way Bowers mined the activist practice that kept the four-hundredyear-old California oak alive to make art that expands discussions of urban development, deforestation, and social responsibility. In retrospect it is evident that Vieja Gloria initiated a transition in Bowers’s identity from a concerned artist to participant observer, a shift confirmed clearly on January 12, 2011, when she organized and participated in a tree-sitting action in Arcadia, California, a protest that served as the basis for a new video, I Plan to Stay a Believer—The Arcadia 4 Tree-Sit (2013).11

Radical Pedagogy In 2008 Bowers joined the faculty of the Graduate Public Practice Program at Otis College of Art and Design and with its founder, visionary feminist performance artist Suzanne Lacy, and others developed a fine arts curriculum rooted in advocacy and activism. The Otis experience crystallized in two intertwined events in 2008–9: Laton Lives!, an eight-month engagement of Otis faculty, students, and guest artists with the Joaquim Valley town of Laton, California; and Your Donations Do Our Work, a two-person show by Lacy and Bowers at the Sweeney

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Art Gallery, University of California, Riverside (Figure 11.2). Laton Lives! exemplified public practice at its best—students and artists collaborated with residents to find ways politically, aesthetically, and practically to express and address the aspirations and frustrations of the community. The outcomes included films in and about Laton, a public celebration called Laton Lives! Reunion Reunión, a “Free Store” where one could barter labor for goods, and literally painting the town. Your Donations Do Our Work originated as a museum exhibition and maintained its institutional and museological foundation as Bowers and Lacy turned the university gallery into both an exhibition space and a collection and processing center for the “Free Store” in Laton. Visitors watched the artists and their students manage dayto-day operations, including sorting, cleaning, and repairing donated clothing, as well as negotiating with the university, the gallery, the Laton site, and partner organizations. Bowers has discussed how the Laton experience was transformative almost to the point of crisis, leaving her unsure as to what constituted teaching, learning, or art making.12 As with Vieja Gloria, until she was clear that activism was part of her artistic practice, it felt like activism threatened to replace it. Bowers soon expanded this pedagogical turn into TRANSFORMer (2010–13, Plate 16), a series of site-specific sculptures created in collaboration with sculptor Olga Koumoundouros that serve as stations for training activists in agitprop protest, public relations, product design, resource distribution, and fundraising. The work emerged out of a “visual arts laboratory” at the 18th Street Arts Center, Los Angeles, designed by Bowers and arts administrator Robert Sain to host conversations, classes, workshops, exhibitions, and actions interrogating the

FIGURE 11.2  Suzanne Lacy and Andrea Bowers, Your Donations Do Our Work, 2009, Sweeney Art Gallery at the University of California, Riverside. Photograph by Shane Shukis.Courtesy of UC Riverside Sweeney Art Gallery.

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role of art organizations in society.13 The following year it was featured at Art Basel Miami, where it facilitated an odd meeting between curious well-heeled fair attendees and a group of diverse Florida activists trying to change the world. Two years later, at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Bowers and Koumoundouros again treated their host as an active, not simply permissive, partner. Titled TRANSFORMer: Platform for Community Education, Activism and Fundraising, the Tang iteration included stations for food donations and information on sexual health and safety, an exhibition space, a library, and a silkscreen studio where artists, students, and local activists produced and sold tee shirts and prints. The museum was responsible for distributing donated food items and managing the financial contributions, as well as exhibiting art. The relationships Bowers and Koumoundouros initiated with community organizations continued after the exhibition.14 Over its life span, TRANSFORMer was a relational and portable model of art activism based not on adversarial acts of infiltration and disruption but on engagement and exchange.

Repoliticizing the Art Object One of the lessons of 1980s art world spectacles was that insiders as much as conservative outsiders acted against politically engaged art. As early as 1984, Douglas Crimp railed against the blockbuster exhibitions that dominated the art world, asking rhetorically: “Where can we learn of the political critique that has been a major force in recent art?”15 The answer, of course, was nowhere. Crimp located the problem in the conjunction of the conservative ahistorical vision of Reagan-era cultural politics and current museological trends. “Whatever disruptions of art … there have been, current, postmodern museology will not register them as such.”16 In her 1991 essay, “Suitable for Framing,” Abigail Solomon-Godeau examined the art world’s reaction to Cindy Sherman’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art and found a similar, but specifically anti-feminist, erasure of politics from the art historical record.17 Ten years later Andrea Fraser took a broad historical view of the Brooklyn Sensation debacle that sheds light on the perceptions of art objects and institutions as Bowers’s career was beginning.18 In light of the economic and political dependency of the New York museum world on real-world power brokers, Fraser asserted, the modernist valuation of aesthetic, social, and political autonomy could only be seen as a means to isolate and neutralize art. In fact, she argued, by clinging to outdated and suspect claims of autonomy, art institutions had reduced the role of culture itself to only a means of jockeying for power: between politicians seeking reelection, museums asserting municipal bragging rights, and board members and donors increasing their wealth. Crimp, Solomon-Godeau, and Fraser presented art objects as inescapably intertwined with the institutions in and beyond the art world that supported their production, exhibition, and sale.19 The challenge facing political artists at the end of the twentieth century was not being kept out but being invited in. Bowers, who did not give up on the art object, is not alone in exploring its political, aesthetic, and psychological power. Within the framework of post-Fordist theory elaborated by writers such as Paolo Virno, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri, which is concerned with the nature of labor and value in the current information and service economy, Dutch sociologist Pascal Gielen describes the work of art as a “quasi-subject” or “semi-social actor” able to assert agency from within the “heterogeneous arena as a product of capitalism.”20 In the 1980s and 1990s suggesting a necessary association between art’s efficacy and its participation in dominant culture would have smacked of complicity, and it clearly flew in the face of the modernist aspirations toward autonomy discussed by Fraser. However, with the turn-of-the-millennium appreciation that criticality is not based on an external

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objective view, a perspective either ideologically indefensible or simply no longer imaginable, locating agency within capital is arguably a form of pragmatic idealism. Essential, in Gielen’s proposition, is that as the work of art circulates it is claimed by many different viewers, thereby accruing “political and economic and legal and pedagogical––and of course artistic” power.21 Such a position embraces the practices of dematerialized labor––processing data, collating information, providing services, and generating creative capital––and suggests an embedded approach to making political art that depends on “network[ing] heterogeneously” along a “meshwork of many networks and sub-networks,” including the flows of capital as well as the cultural, political, educational, and personal circuits upon which taste, values, passions, interests, and investments travel.22 The power of the economic network of course is strong, as is the risk that the tools of global capitalism will resist being employed for countercultural means. Gielen, however, writes with optimism, and he is not alone. Such harnessing of the master’s tools is encouraged by Virno’s explanation that “the linguistic production line” that creates value for the robber barons of the global economy can become the “foundation of a new politics” and a “pivot of a political, non-state constitution.”23 Artists as innovators of communicative, conceptual, and representational tools play a leading role in such societal transformation. Fraser’s analysis of Sensation ends with a similar conviction regarding the porous boundaries containing the so-called art world: “The best-intentioned explanations [of the reach and limitations of culture] will ring false so long as they fail to recognize the ways in which the dynamics of struggle within the field articulate with the distributions of different forms of power, whether economic or cultural, political or professional.”24 Artists, curators, and intellectuals are tasked here to understand that all statements––curatorial, editorial, and intellectual––operate with, not in opposition to or independent from, the networks of powers they aim to resist. In the decade and a half since Sensation, artists such as Bowers have integrated the histories of institutional critique, post-Fordist globalization, and the art object to enlist the intimate relationship between artistic production, art world reception and distribution, and the many forms of power that interact with each.25

Visible in the Virtual and the Real In 2014 Bowers debuted a project that began with the evidence of a crime: texts and images produced during and after the assault of a sixteen-year-old West Virginia girl by members of the Steubenville, Ohio, high school football team, including records of the activist response that followed, notably by the group Anonymous. The Steubenville case was significant for the shocking indifference shown by the perpetrators and for having occurred both in the houses and streets of this small Ohio town and in cyberspace. Exhibited under the title Andrea Bowers: #sweetjane, at the Pomona College Museum of Art and Pitzer College Art Galleries, the Steubenville works, like those who rallied in support of the unnamed survivor Jane Doe, established a dialogue between criminal, aesthetic, and activist actions in virtual and analog space. The display was anchored by Courtroom Drawings (Steubenville Rape Case, Text Messages Entered as Evidence) (2013, Figure 11.3), a monumental multipage drawing of words: the tweets and texts written by the assailants, the survivor, and her friend that Bowers and two reporters had transcribed as they were read in court. The words rising up around the viewers are formed of negative space, the empty white paper surrounded by fields of blue marker alluding to the color of cell phone screens.26 Courtroom Drawings conveys through its narrative and marks the increasingly dissociated double life of violence in American society: at one moment enacted physically on a young woman’s body in repeated acts of rape, and simultaneously becoming viral in the abbreviated and immaterial forms of

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FIGURE 11.3  Andrea Bowers, Courtroom Drawings (Steubenville Rape Case, Text Messages Entered as Evidence), 2013. Photograph by Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy of Vielmetter Los Angeles.

social media. This frightening dichotomy can be read in Courtroom Drawings as the texts jump from callous physical descriptions to texting shorthand: “She looks dead. LMAO,” … “Shoulda moved her around and got a better angle.” Reflecting on the increasing use of social media for communication, Bowers asks, “Does this obsession with social media and digital space affect the morality of a whole generation? … Are we losing our sense of ethics?”27 Connecting actions in spaces we cannot touch to our ethical, emotional, and political lives in the physical world is central to activists’ demands for justice and the work of psychological healing, but also to Bowers’s formal strategies in this body of work. Bowers’s single-channel video about the case, #sweetjane (2014), clarifies the power of the digital in the realms of both violence and resistance. It steps back from the immediacy of Courtroom Drawings to recount the entry of the story into the public sphere.28 Throughout the thirty-three-minute video Bowers presents videos, texts, tweets, Instagram pages, and photos as they were encountered by the public: unmediated messages exchanged online, edited for local and national news, and displayed as evidence in court. As harrowing as it is, #sweetjane is about resistance and social change. Statements of violence are not left unanswered by those of protest in both the virtual and physical realms. Bowers frankly shows digital media to be part of the cruelty and evidence of the crime, but also presents online activism as a form of nonviolent civil disobedience able to challenge the censorial practices of the corporately controlled news media. Social media posts by the rapists are countered by hacked messages of Anonymous; news reports of the football team are framed by footage of protestors. Of critical importance are numerous scenes with masked Anonymous protestors on the ground in Ohio emphasizing that in the realm of civic action and not just sexual violence, that which occurs in virtual reality makes itself felt in real life. The reception of the Pomona/Pitzer show emphasized the urgency and radicality of the work even as the project itself accrued a counterintuitive exhibition history.29 #sweetjane was subsequently shown at Art Basel Miami (2015), FIAC Paris (2016), and Fair Miami Beach (2017). This was not the first time Bowers’s work injected politics into art fairs. After TRANSFORMer appeared at Art Basel Miami 2011, her tree-sitting platforms were hung at

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the 2013 edition, the same year she introduced her work at Frieze New York with a letter objecting to the organizers’ anti-union hiring practice.30 At Frieze New York in 2019, her neon text work Empowered Women Empower Women (2019) was one of the most popular sites for selfies. One might object that these are instances of resistance being consumed by capital and institutional critique being institutionalized. However, such critique rests on limiting the politics of art to the terms that began this conversation, as outbursts of truth in a space reserved for silence. The fact that many political artists have found ways to function in the spaces of global capital leaves us to reckon with the fact that the radicalism of art today lies not in illuminating particular topics, but in reorienting relationships between individuals, communities, ideologies, and resources. Museums, galleries, and even art fairs are full of representations of what is wrong with the world; the challenge is to turn such illuminations into actions. In the past few decades, with cultural power relocating from museums and critics to collectors and dealers, it is logical that artists would turn to the spaces of capital and culture to educate its antagonists, redistribute its assets, and undermine its authority. Bowers’s practice suggests looking to others within the spaces of capitalism to glean ways of making change. Artists active in AWC (Art Workers Coalition) and BECC (Black Emergency Cultural Coalition) in the 1970s, the Day without Art in the 1980s and 1990s, and PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) and Gulf Labor Coalition in the 2000s took such lessons from activists and stepped outside their studios to put them into action. Bowers’s work experiments with enacting lessons learned from activists within the art itself. The relocation of the Anonymous hactivists and Steubenville activists and apologists to the economic centers of the art world set the stage for a two-year process in which Bowers and several collaborators culled outpourings of accusations, investigations, denials, apologies, and retaliations of the #MeToo movement for the creation of Open Secrets Parts 1 & 2 (2018, 2019). With this monumental installation, more than one thousand square feet, Bowers sought to historicize the #MeToo movement and give material form to its largely virtual records. When it was shown in 2019, the work drew attention to the practice of reclaiming and broadcasting narratives online, but also the degree to which social media, as a largely untested site of activism, might impact the balance Bowers had struck between the worlds of civil disobedience and art.

Where Things Stand Open Secrets Parts I & II (2018, 2019) as presented at Art Basel: Unlimited, a curated section of the premier Swiss art fair, consisted of banners hanging high on a wall and spilling onto the gallery floor with 167 accounts of instances of sexual violence exposed in the #MeToo movement and the responses by those accused. Office chairs provided viewers some comfort as they read the texts, tweets, posts, and articles detailing the charges. Though most entries include a photograph of the accused, some have supplementary photographs. Advance press and opening day reporting described VIP visitors, particularly men, uncomfortably studying the work. Art news website Artnet listed it as one of the “Six Best—And Riskiest” works of the fair, noting that in response to the balancing act between “spectacle and substance … Bowers’s physical manifestation of the Me Too movement, which had its watershed moment largely in the virtual world, remind us of the importance of making it tangible.”31 Newswire Agence France-Presse writer Nina Larsen cited it as evidence of the fair becoming a “#MeToo reckoning … expressing disgust and exasperation [at] persisting gender inequalities and culturally condoned abuse and harassment of women.”32 Larsen’s article, which included Bowers’s observation that opening night attracted “some of the richest people in the world,

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and they actually know many of the people on the walls,” conveyed to readers in Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia that the art world was a site of radical discourse.33 The piece also set off alarms due to the inclusion in one panel of photographs of a survivor who, upon learning of the piece, objected strenuously. The images, which the woman originally posted online, show bruises on her neck and shoulders.34 In the artwork, as on social media, these images connect narratives of violence to a real person and the visceral actuality of assault. They further help fit the singular act into larger patterns: the survivor’s story about serial assault and the artist’s description of a system perpetuating violence against women. Bowers did not ask for permission to use the photographs. The survivor found that her posts were on view from posts of the work online. She responded passionately, publicly, and online. Within hours images of the offending section of Open Secret and accusations by the survivor and others of exploitation were circulating on social media. Bowers responded with a public statement: “I, Andrea Bowers, would like to apologize to the survivor whose image was included in my piece. I should have asked for her consent.”35 The statement further noted that the woman depicted “asked that the panel including her photo be removed and I have honored the request. I have reached out privately and am very much looking forward to listening.”36 At this point Bowers’s galleries announced that the piece would not be for sale at the fair. When asked about the controversy by a New York Times reporter, feminist art historian Griselda Pollock responded: “This is a whole new set of questions. Artists have a right to quote from the world, and they have authorization to present it as their art. But if you use materials that come from one context of use, with its own inherent ethics and politics, into another one, then we find that there are people who are challenging it.”37 Pollock identifies the challenge at the heart of Bowers’s practice of migrating images, actions, histories, and texts from sites of political action into art objects and onto various stages of the art world for the purpose of broadcasting the issues, actions, and histories of civil action and social change. The stakes are heightened in the case of a professional artist like Bowers whose work is not only an expression of her politics but also the source of her livelihood. Issues of consent, largely resolved in earlier work through Bowers’s collaborative practice, became urgent in the more research-oriented Open Secret. To Pollock’s point, manipulating “materials,” narratives as well as images and words, is complicated when the content is as traumatic as sexual violence and the context of its revelation is as unresolved as social media. This new work, and the varied experiences resulting from its exhibition, expose the politically charged and psychically fragile territories in which we live, act, assert ourselves, and hurt each other— spaces in and between the virtual and the physical. If Open Secret was not as clearly collaborative as earlier work, it was also not as clearly historical at the fair as it had been the year before, when Part 1 debuted at Capitain Petzel Gallery, Berlin, with paintings sourced from suffragette and antiwar posters and a video based on DisruptJ20 protests at the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump. Such framing made evident the artist’s intentions to locate #MeToo in a history of civic struggles against patriarchy and oppression. Alone, the work relied heavily on viewers’ acceptance that the art world was allied with the survivors and that the work furthered rather than coopted the original intent of the photographs. Bearing in mind the fraught history of efforts to address sexual violence and the legacy of exploitation concerning images of women’s bodies, the survivor and her supporters had little reason to assume the goodwill of the artist and the Art Basel community. To a degree, this follows from common perceptions of the art world as a place of wealthy artists and wealthier collectors, as well as from debates among art professionals themselves about how artworks function within the art market. Explaining that the artist won’t make money on a work priced at $300,000 doesn’t change this attitude.38 In

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addition to the loss of historical context at the art fair, the controversy rests on the changing condition of the images themselves. The original post, by its nature immaterial and ultimately viral, was created to circulate with the unspoken understanding that each re-presentation would remain virtual; the good faith of those retweeting the images was likewise assumed.39 One imagines this might create the sense that even without determining how and where the image would be used on the Internet, the person posting still would retain a degree of control. Thus demands for permissions, charges of exploitation, and concerns over privacy, which did not arise while the images remained online, became urgent when the image appeared in analog space. A second survivor named in the panel noted the impact of seeing the posts change from immaterial expression to material object: “It was strange to see the story stand in real life, not on a computer screen.”40 The challenges raised by the survivors and the subsequent protest on Twitter on their behalf highlight the situation in which justice for brutal crimes of sexual assault is pursued and often realized in the virtual space of social media, while calls for emotional and political reckoning still appear in the physical spaces we occupy. The presentation of Open Secrets at Unlimited was an imperfect attempt to illuminate the place of gendered violence in both arenas. Bowers’s work drew attention to how acutely issues she raised with regards to #sweetjane about the “ethical moral effect” of our use of “social media and digital space” continue to matter as artists and activists participate in the intertwined histories and politics of gender, violence, and representation.41 Like earlier work, Open Secret Parts 1 & 2 was created to both represent civil disobedience and contribute to social change. Just as Bowers’s works about ecological justice became actions themselves, and TRANSFORMer extended the activities of local groups, Open Secret was designed to represent and continue the #MeToo movement’s confrontations with power via shared voices. The distance between the original gestures in cyberspace and Bowers’s representation of them in art, however, added an element not present in her earlier work. Activism has always relied on text-based immateriality—Bowers’s oeuvre represents many such examples ranging from pedagogical charts to manuals and letters—but such documents circulated in order to facilitate action by physical bodies in specific locations: student activists learned about protest to be enacted on the streets; women read manuals to facilitate organizing or self-care; letters were written to secure medical help or express love. Today the path from virtual to actual is not as certain, expected, or necessary as it once was. Viral communication online can be effective on its own. Understanding the character of the virtual, #MeToo is harnessing the power of the placelessness and spatial diffusion of social media. Thus learning from activists now means grappling with both the ethics and tactics of collaboration, organizing, protest, messaging, nonviolence, and direct action, as well as the nuts and bolts and the risks of transmitting representations—stories and images—across the boundaries of the virtual and the real. Discussing the #sweetjane works, Bowers described the difference between how artists and activists think about art and politics: “The funny thing is the art world seems always concerned whether politics and activism fit in, but activists see artists as integral parts of their movements.”42 I have argued that Bowers not only made art about activism, but also integrated activist practices into her artistic practice. The aim is not just to make art as one would design and enact civil disobedience but also to think about art and artists the way activists do. Integrating art and activism at the levels of goals, means, and identity permits an artist to “simultaneously do activist work through … artwork.”43 The survivors who sought justice and created communities online, like activists teaching nonviolent civil disobedience, community organizers raising awareness and resources, and environmentalists occupying forests, have started conversations that artists can learn from, not only to become educated and politically motivated but also to create forms of art that are responsive, realist, collaborative, and activist.

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Notes 1 T. J. Clark, Image of the People (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 80–3; Linda Nochlin, “Courbet’s Real Allegory: Rereading ‘The Painter’s Studio’,” in Courbet Reconsidered, ed. Sarah Faunce and Linda Nochlin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 17–43. 2 Sam Durant and Monica Bonvicini, “Andrea Bowers,” Neue Review (December 2003): 5. 3 Andrea Bowers in conversation with the author, August 12, 2014. 4 Andrea Bowers and Catherine Opie, Between Artists: Andrea Bowers and Catherine Opie (New York: Art Resources Transfer 2008), 33. 5 Andrea Bowers in Patricia Maloney, “Interview with Andrea Bowers,” Bad at Sports, March 26, 2014, http://www.artpractical.com/column/bad-at-sports-interview-with-andrea-bowers/. 6 Bowers in Maloney, “Interview with Andrea Bowers.” 7 Bowers in Maloney, “Interview with Andrea Bowers.” 8 Bowers in conversation with the author, May 12, 2019. 9 For a list of organizations with which Bowers has collaborated, see Rebecca McGrew and Claire Ennis, eds., Andrea Bowers (Claremont, CA: Pomona College, 2014), 175. 10 Other pedagogy-based projects include Ground Floor (2012) at University of Utah in Salt Lake City; Drawing Lessons (2014) at the Drawing Center, New York, in which Bowers taught Suzanne Lacy how to draw; and Performance Lessons (2016) at the Main Museum, Los Angeles, for which Lacy returned the favor. 11 Jeff Edwards, “Never Forgotten. The Art and Activism of Andrea Bowers,” ArtPulse, April 19, 2012, http://artpulsemagazine.com/never-forgotten-the-art-and-activism-of-andrea-bowers. 12 Bowers in conversation with the author, May 12, 2019. 13 18th Street Arts Center, Love in a Cemetery press release, January 2010, https://18thstreet.org/ love-in-a-cemetery/. 14 Rachel Seligman, assistant director for curatorial affairs and Malloy curator, Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, in conversation with the author, August 15, 2014. 15 Douglas Crimp, “Art of Exhibition” (1984), On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 256. 16 Douglas Crimp, “Postmodern Museum” (1987), On the Museum’s Ruins, 307. 17 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Suitable for Framing: The Critical Recasting of Cindy Sherman,” Parkett 29 (1991): 112–21. 18 Andrea Fraser, “A ‘Sensation’ Chronicle,” Social Text 67 (Summer 2001): 127–56. 19 This critical tradition relies heavily on writings of Craig Owens, Martha Rosler, Griselda Pollock, Rosalyn Deutsche, and Lucy Lippard, among many. 20 Pascal Gielen, The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude: Global Art, Memory and Post-Fordism (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2010), 140–1. 21 Gielen, Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude, 140. 22 Gielen, Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude, 140–1. 23 Sonja Lavaert and Pascal Gielen, “The Dismeasure of Art: An Interview with Paolo Virno,” in Being an Artist in Post-Fordist Times, ed. Pascal Gielen and Paul de Bruyne (Rotterdam, Netherlands: NAi Publishers, 2009), 32. 24 Fraser, “‘Sensation’ Chronicle,” 154. 25 Any list of writers addressing the intimacy of power in and out of the art world is encouragingly long and inevitably incomplete. In addition to those cited, recent studies include Jaimey Hamilton

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Faris, Uncommon Goods (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), and Martha Buskirk, Creative Enterprise: Contemporary Art between Museum and Marketplace (London: Bloomsbury, 2012); see conversations on e-flux.com around the writings of Martha Rosler and Hito Steyerl. 26 See Bowers in Ashton Cooper, “Art and Activism: Talking Steubenville, Andrea Bowers in Conversation with Ashton Cooper,” Brooklyn Rail, November 2014, https://brooklynrail. org/2014/11/art/art-and-activism-talking-steubenville-andrea-bowers-in-conversation-withashton-cooper. 27 Bowers in Cooper, “Art and Activism.” 28 Bowers also included footage from her childhood in an Ohio town not unlike Steubenville. 29 See Christopher Knight, “‘#sweetjane’ Fuses Art, a Horrific Crime to Powerful Effect,” Los Angeles Times, February 18, 2014, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cmknight-bowers-sweetjane-review-20140218-story.html#page=1; Annie Buckley, “Investigating Steubenville: Andrea Bowers’ #sweetjane,” KCET Artbound, February 6, 2014, http://www.kcet. org/arts/artbound/counties/los-angeles/andrea-bowers-sweet-jane-pomona-college-museum-of-art. html; and Patricia Maloney, “All You Protest Kids, You Can Hear Jack Say, Sweet Jane,” Brooklyn Rail, September 2014, http://www.brooklynrail.org/2014/09/criticspage/all-you-protest-kids-youcan-hear-jack-say-sweet-jane; and Cooper, “Art and Activism.” 30 Frieze employed union labor the next year; see “Solidarity Wins! Frieze New York Goes Union,” Arts & Labor, April 9, 2014, http://artsandlabor.org/solidarity-wins-frieze-new-york-goes-union/, and Mostafa Heddaya, “The Story behind Frieze New York’s Decision to Hire Union Labor,” Hyperallergic, May 7, 2014, https://hyperallergic.com/124066/the-story-behind-frieze-new-yorksdecision-to-hire-union-labor/. 31 Tim Schneider and Kate Brown, “The 6 Best—and Riskiest—Artworks at Art Basel Unlimited, Where the Fair’s Supersized Artwork Shines,” artnet news, June 11, 2019, https://news.artnet.com/ market/art-basel-unlimited–2019–1568539. 32 Nina Larsen, “Women Bring #MeToo Reckoning to Art Basel,” Gulf Times, June 14, 2019, https:// www.gulf-times.com/story/634060/Women-bring-MeToo-re. 33 Larsen, “Women Bring #MeToo Reckoning to Art Basel.” 34 The original post appeared on Twitter and was documented in an online article for Jezebel that included responses to the original tweet from two women describing assaults by the same man; a fourth woman also reported being raped by the accused. See Hazel Cills, “Former ‘Male Feminist’ Columnist Faces Multiple Allegations of Assault,” Jezebel, November 3, 2017, https://jezebel.com/ former-male-feminist-columnist-faces-multiple-allegatio–1819266286. 35 Andrea Bowers, quoted in Sarah Cascone, “After an Outcry, Andrea Bowers Removes an Abuse Survivor’s Photos from a Monumental Artwork about the #MeToo Movement,” artnet news, June 12, 2019, https://news.artnet.com/market/metoo-victim-demands-andrea-bowers–1571290. 36 Bowers, quoted in Cascone, “After an Outcry, Andrea Bowers Removes an Abuse Survivor’s Photos.” 37 Griselda Pollock, quoted in Nina Siegal, “#MeToo Work at Art Basel Offers Cautionary Tale about Political Art,” New York Times, July 16, 2019. 38 The work was presented by Bowers’s three galleries, so benefits from a sale were to be divided four ways. The artist’s earnings would cover the salaries of two assistants working for the previous two years, materials, and other expenses incurred in making the work. The arrangement was not public, but galleries typically cover the booth fee, which, for special feature exhibitions, runs from $50,000 to $100,000, plus shipping, travel, insurance, and salaries. A work such as this, targeted for a museum collection, would likely be discounted; the discount would come out of the galleries’ percentages. 39 Survivor Dilara O’Neil notes the image was reposted thousands of times before Bowers used it; see Dilara O’Neil, “Who Profits When Pain Becomes Art?” Garage, June 19, 2019, https://garage. vice.com/en_us/article/zmp85j/who-profits.

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40 O’Neil, “Who Profits When Pain Becomes Art?” 41 Bowers in Cooper, “Arts and Activism.” 42 Bowers in Cooper, “Arts and Activism.” 43 Bowers in Cooper, “Arts and Activism.”

Bibliography Cooper, Ashton. “Art and Activism: Talking Steubenville, Andrea Bowers in Conversation with Ashton Cooper.” Brooklyn Rail, November 2014. https://brooklynrail.org/2014/11/art/art-and-activismtalking-steubenville-andrea-bowers-in-conversation-with-ashton-cooper. Gielen, Pascal. The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude: Global Art, Memory and Post-Fordism. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2010. Maloney, Patricia. “Interview with Andrea Bowers.” Bad at Sports, March 26, 2014, podcast. https:// www.artpractical.com/column/bad-at-sports-interview-with-andrea-bowers/. McGrew, Rebecca, and Ciari Ennis, eds. Andrea Bowers. Claremont, CA: Pomona College, 2014. Published in conjunction with the exhibition Andrea Bowers: #sweetjane at the Pomona College Museum of Art and the Pitzer College Art Galleries, January 21–April 13, 2014.

PART IV

Framed: Institutional and Governmental Constraints

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12 In and Out of Sites: Disability and Access in the Work of Park McArthur and Carmen Papalia Elizabeth Guffey

When Park MacArthur’s show Ramps opened in 2014 (Plate 17), it was greeted with critical praise but also with slight confusion. At a distance the assemblage of nearly two dozen gently inclined planes made from a variety of materials and carefully presented in a compact grid resembled the minimalist floor sculptures of the mid-1960s. At least one critic found the grouping impressive, even admitting that it “at first seemed to be a riff on floorbased minimalist sculpture by the likes of Donald Judd.”1 On closer inspection the tiny, tightly packed Essex Street gallery space on New York’s Lower East Side was filled with a surprisingly varied assortment of slivers, wedges, and blocks. While some of the objects were carefully constructed, many more had a makeshift appearance; made of odds and ends, some were even hacked out of fiberboard, cast-off plywood, and corrugated cardboard. At least one, a pink cabinet door, was clearly recycled from a building project. Almost all these constructions were scratched, smudged, and otherwise scuffed from use. In fact, McArthur’s sculptures were little more than temporary access ramps. All had been requested by the artist, who also uses a power wheelchair, so she could enter and exit art spaces across New York and New England. Arriving at the crowded downtown gallery that evening in early January 2014, visitors wishing to move about the tiny gallery space found the tightly placed grid of bulky wheelchair ramps impeded their movement at every turn. A state of mild confusion reigned. Writing shortly after the show’s opening, a dismayed critic at Frieze magazine observed that “McArthur’s ramps were more and less cautiously trodden on, tripped over and stumbled across due to the overflow of by-standers in the gallery.”2 Reflecting on the event later, another observer recalled a “slightly hostile environment … Even though there were people circling the room and asking everyone not to stand on the works, there were a lot of people at the opening … basically making the split-second decision to briefly walk across the installation to get to a different part of the room.”3 These choices were not arbitrarily made. Outside the

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gallery space, these things served a purpose. They were intended to be walked on or rolled over. But placed here, they put gallery goers at a disadvantage. Even so, Freize’s reviewer suggested, these behaviors proved a larger point, performing a “perhaps unintended yet fitting upset of able-bodied balance.”4 The manner in which McArthur puts things out of place echoes Carmen Papalia’s work Guiding String (Plate 18), assembled several months later and an ocean away. Installed during a residency at the Model Contemporary Art Center in Sligo, Ireland, Papalia’s Guiding String consisted of a series of cords tied to museum fixtures like café tables and handrails. The string-like web helped Papalia, an artist involved in social practice and who is also visually impaired, feel and find his way to the restroom, the museum café, and the second-floor gallery where he was developing a project. In practical terms Papalia used the distinctive red cord as a kind of wayfinding device. The string also functioned like a three-dimensional “drawing,” tracing a lasting line of his movements in and out of the site of his installation, literally as he traveled from room to room. Much like McArthur’s ramps, the intention was not to trip or injure visitors. But the string, like the wheelchair ramps, was a thing out of place. Furthermore, while the installation improved Papalia’s own ability to access the museum, it disrupted some of the most commonly used routes on the art center’s first and second floors. Written more than fifteen years ago, Bill Brown’s Thing Theory did not examine the display or reception of art, but his account of things provides a useful framework to consider the things on display in the art of McArthur and Papalia. Brown argues that when things are used properly, we scarcely notice them. Things often come to our attention only when they get in the way or stop working.5 Even as McArthur and Papalia use very different materials in their art, they bring a shared perspective to the marginalization of disability in Western art and its institutions. The string—rather like McArthur’s ramps—arguably produced an environment of inaccessibility for nondisabled visitors. That is, it was difficult for visitors to get to different parts of each room. They also drew attention to people’s access in and out of the gallery space or site. By bringing McArthur’s work into dialogue with that of Papalia, I argue that a younger, post-ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) group of artists is engaging in a new form of institutional critique. Using the gallery space to raise larger questions, both McArthur and Papalia use everyday things in new ways. As the opening of MacArthur’s Ramps exhibition demonstrated, sometimes we need to stumble over ordinary things in order to really think about them.

Overlooking Things Virtually anyone, Bill Brown insists, has been confronted by “the suddenness with which things seem to assert their presence and power.” In his 2001 introduction to thing theory Brown tends to consign such situations to the realm of accident: “You cut your finger on a sheet of paper, you trip over some toy, you get popped on the head by a falling nut.” Suddenly a thing that would ordinarily pass unobserved asserts its presence in our lives. Brown continues, “We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy.”6 One might argue that we all see through everyday things, at least up to a point. They are both in and out of sight. But for most disabled people, an awareness of things is not the product of an accident. In a world not designed with disabled bodies in mind, things are constantly getting in the way.

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Finding things seemingly both in and out of sight is a common experience for disabled people who have long lived with a built environment not configured with their bodies in mind; even the most ordinary, everyday things that might be obviously helpful to nondisabled people can become impediments. Steps and doors, books and newspapers, and signs on walls are all things that pass almost unconsidered by most people. Depending on the nature of a disability, virtually anything can become a thing that requires careful consideration and negotiation. A thing that enhances access for nondisabled persons can become a barrier or impediment to access for people with disabilities. While a revolving door benefits large numbers of nondisabled people entering a building quickly, it becomes an obstacle for a wheelchair user. Similarly, a written sign can be an impediment for a vision-impaired person. McArthur and Papalia not only use things to express this condition but also question access in museums and other art institutions. More than forty years ago artist Brian O’Doherty asked museum and gallery visitors to reflect on the meaning and function of the “White Cube,” that is, the spotless, sanitized spaces in which modern art has been often shown since the mid-twentieth century.7 For O’Doherty, the ways in which fine art is shown, as well as the written and unwritten rules that shape art exhibition behaviors and protocol, rigidly control our behavior and reveal unexpressed power structures behind art institutions. Paintings hang obediently at standing eye level and gallery visitors are expected to walk slowly, stopping for a few moments of silent contemplation. These sparse, pristine interiors, O’Doherty observed, function as a kind of liminal space designed to facilitate a state of disinterested contemplation. As curator and critic Katherine Kuh suggests, the museum offers us “islands of relief where we can study, enjoy, contemplate and experience emotional rapport with man’s finest manmade products.”8 And yet, as much as our concentration is meant to be directed toward the art on display, these exhibition strategies suppress a variety of other things, disability among them. While some, like literary scholar and disability theorist Tobin Siebers, conceive “disability aesthetics” as largely a question of bodily difference and its representation in art, in traditional arts institutions it can take a very material form.9 Steep vertiginous steps, for example, often front nineteenth-century museum facades, while art installations inside are usually meant to be viewed from standing eye level. Spare and empty galleries can discourage visitors from stopping, let alone sitting to rest. These spaces privilege viewers able to stand in contemplation.10 Disability, which has traditionally been suppressed within the supposedly neutral spaces in which modern art is displayed, motivates aspects of both McArthur and Papalia’s work. In fact, not only in museums but more generally nondisabled people rarely consider the things that surround them. As Bill Brown observes, through much of our lives “we look through objects (to see what they disclose about history, society, nature, or culture—above all, what they disclose about us).” Their sheer ordinariness causes us to look through most objects. Brown specifically points to the window, something we have a “habit of looking through,” not at. In most contexts people who do not use wheelchairs scarcely consider the presence of wheelchair ramps. So too string used for tying, wrapping, and bundling is so commonplace that we scarcely note it at all. Only when either thing appears unexpectedly in an art gallery do we face the challenge of deciding whether to look through or at it. For Brown, the crowded and somewhat obstructive ramps at McArthur’s exhibition and the red string wending its ways through the art museum’s space become part of something more. Used strategically, they become part of a broader condition of “objects asserting themselves as things.”11

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Exploring the Things of Disability Papalia and McArthur have taken their exploration of art and disability into a more concrete direction, opening their art to the possibility of suppression and critique. As an artist with vision impairment, Papalia has long interrogated museums and galleries by conducting what he calls “accessibility audits.” Early in 2015 he was invited to serve as artist-in-residence at the Model Contemporary Art Center in Sligo, Ireland, a position that allowed him to work from within the museum creating several site-specific works of art. One work, For Erik Ferguson, involved rehanging a museum gallery; under Papalia’s direction, all the pictures on display were positioned at floor level. Papalia’s reference to Ferguson, a Portland-based wheelchair dancer and performance artist, highlights the latter’s artistic practice. Performing in and out of his wheelchair, Ferguson sometimes sits and at other times leaves the chair to perform directly on the floor. Placing the pictures just above the floorboards, almost on the ground itself, Papalia considered the new hanging a tribute to his friend, a way of evoking Ferguson’s “joy” when he left his wheelchair and performed on the floor.12 Whether kneeling, lying down, or just crouching, Papalia’s installation required visitors to contort themselves or simply lie on the floor, adjusting their art-viewing experiences in new—and perhaps joyful— ways. At the same time as he was working on For Eric Ferguson, Papalia developed Guiding String. Running the string throughout some of the art center’s most used spaces, the work demanded that visitors decide how to deal with the obstruction. In this way Guiding String might seem to echo earlier twine, ribbon, and string art installations in gallery and exhibition spaces. Marcel Duchamp, for example, famously deployed a “mile of string” at First Papers of Surrealism, the first major Surrealist exhibition in the United States in 1942. The resulting weblike construction obstructed visitors’ progress through the gallery space and almost covered many of the works on display, helping secure Duchamp’s reputation as an artistic provocateur. Almost a generation later minimalist sculptor Fred Sandback stretched elastic cord or acrylic yarn in direct lines across or up and down gallery spaces. In so doing, his strings seemed to carve out volumetric spaces within otherwise empty rooms. Rather than serve as background, Sandback’s work made exhibition spaces a focal point. Papalia’s installation of course differs from Sandback’s string in at least one significant way. He uses a simple thing— in this case a cord of red string––to make visible not space itself, but the kind of easy access through space that sighted people take for granted. While the string never entirely impeded others’ movements in the gallery spaces, Papalia effectively turns the tables on nondisabled people. In this manner Papalia cites his Guiding String as “destabilizing.”13 It disrupts in the way that Bill Brown’s falling nut destabilizes, suddenly making a thing we scarcely ever consider visible. In this case, however, the thing is the rather invisible act of wayfinding. The very material thingness of access plays a slightly different role in McArthur’s work. The ramps on display at the Essex Street Gallery are remarkable for their sheer variety. While some are commercially procured and carefully constructed from aluminum and sport nonskid treads, others are rickety and unsound. At least two are fashioned from rotting plywood, their thin painted veneers so decomposed that they are little more than splintered strips of decaying wood. Others are simple two-by-four planks. They would seem to impede—rather than allow—easy access to anyone, let alone a power wheelchair and its user. The exhibition checklist reveals that another ramp, in this case little more than a piece of white laminated chipboard provided by the Essex Street Gallery itself, still bears the swerving tire imprints of the wheelchair’s wheels as they crossed over its surface. In their sheer variety we learn much about the conditional nature of McArthur’s access. In fact, the exhibition’s press release reveals that nearly all these ramps were bought or created specifically for the artist. While

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the efforts made on McArthur’s behalf might seem laudable, the fact that she had to ask for them to be installed at all suggests just how provisional disabled people’s access to various buildings and institutions remains. McArthur’s Ramps was not the first exhibition to highlight the inclined plane (and the role it plays in providing access). Almost inevitably, as a geometric object placed on the floor, the form begs comparisons with minimalism. Conceptual artist Stephen Lapthisophon, for example, displayed a type of ramp in the 2002 gallery exhibition With Reasonable Accommodation, in which the pared-down shape was placed against a wall. At least one reviewer emphasized its resemblance to “a Robert Morris Minimal sculpture.”14 The issue was sidestepped some ten years later when designer and theorist Sara Hendren engaged the ramp form in her project Slope: Intercept. Built of plywood and mounted on wheels, this ramp was reintroduced not as art but rather as a critical design project. Hendren’s ramps multitask as a portable wheelchair access or a makeshift skateboard ramp. The project was conceived as an investigative proposition. The designer was aiming for unexpected results, “deploying estrangement and de-familiarity for productive, formative, propositional ends.”15 McArthur’s project, however, was different from both; it drew attention to the suppression of disability in art spaces lacking ramps as much as it demonstrated how ordinary things can provide—or resist—access. As she explains, the ramps on display at the Essex Street Gallery were really only “temporary fixes to structures that are ultimately inaccessible and will remain inaccessible, either because these places don’t have the funds to do an overhaul, or because there are architectural incentives to not change their entryways.”16 On one hand, they are a testimony to the institutions’ desire to accommodate the artist. Furthermore, the gallery’s own press release pointedly observed that they document what was, in her words, a “basically one-to-one relationship with me. Maybe other people aren’t using them because they don’t know that these ramps exist.”17 If both artists use everyday things to critique art institutions’ lack of inclusiveness in their acquisitions and displays, they also force us to reconsider much broader questions of suppression and access. Just as Papalia’s work, in the words of Alice Wexler, provides a “method of de-orientating the sightedness of art institutions,” both artists make a claim for disabled bodies that have long been ignored or suppressed in the museum world.18 And both also see their work as a form of broader social critique.

Addressing Suppression: Beyond Ramps As visitors to McArthur’s exhibition opening focused primarily on the ramps on the floor, some missed the text written on one of the facing walls. In large black vinyl lettering, the artist displayed a link to a Wikipedia page dedicated to social theorist and filmmaker Marta Russell. Russell died only a couple of months prior to the exhibition’s launch, but her principal text, Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract (1998), had a deep influence on McArthur. In a room stuffed full of wheelchair ramps, Russell’s urgent appeal for all Americans to look “beyond ramps” is particularly significant. In Beyond Ramps Russell critiques what’s been called the “crown jewel” of the disability rights movement,19 the ADA, as well as its legacy.20 While many nondisabled people take wheelchair ramps for granted, they are a recent invention; they became a standard part of the built environment only when the ADA came into existence in 1990. Before this law was passed (and like other legislation soon appearing internationally, including the UK’s 1992 Disability Discrimination Act), the United States had a patchwork of laws that applied to disabled people on the local level. But Russell saw the ADA as a marker of “the age of public

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relations politics” rather than a deep and substantive change.21 Its emphasis on buildings and urban planning, she argues, suggests that Americans fetishize material access, while neglecting true social justice. Wheelchair ramps are not enough; in a world that does not have their best interest in mind, Russell asserts, disabled people must remain vigilant, embrace their difference, and become activists who advocate for a far-reaching economic and social agenda. While Russell was part of an older generation of disability activists, McArthur and Papalia scarcely knew a world without the ADA (or its equivalents in Canada and elsewhere). Instead, they dealt with its more recent legacy. For McArthur, the inclined planes on show at Ramps are only part of a bigger picture. As it is, McArthur argues, “I don’t want to reinforce thinking about ramps as the be-all and end-all of what access looks like.”22 Instead, she argues for more theoretical thinking; disability can, as she puts it, be “a set of architectural, political and economic situations that might disable someone more than another person, and is often mapped on to impairment.”23 Papalia is even more direct regarding disability. He states, it is “not a quality inherent within me as an individual but is something cast upon me and defined by the choices of people in positions of power.”24 Citing his own “poor visitor experience” as a non-sighted person in a museum, Papalia is quick to apply questions of access and power to museums. In this case, he argues, “the institution, in its failure to accommodate me as a non-visual learner … disables me as a museum visitor.”25 While McArthur refers viewers to Russell’s theory, Papalia has authored his own “Open Access Manifesto,” a treatise that has been excerpted and published.26 In it the artist takes aim at an exhibition culture that is knowingly exclusive. Regarding the time when he began his artistic practice, Papalia notes, I knew there weren’t many like me practicing as artists. In fact, I learned that many of my non-visual friends had never set foot in a museum; they didn’t think there would be anything for them to do. And even when there was—usually in the form of a specially programmed touch or descriptive tour—it was a poor consolation for the privileged visual art experience.27 Intended as nothing less than a new paradigm for access, the Manifesto claims open access as an alternative to suppression and neglect. In it Papalia argues for a more humanizing approach to museum practice. Above all, he insists, museums must rethink shared notions of community, and especially how best to express ideas of care, mutual support, and the respectful coexistence of individuals and groups.28 The question of access has haunted museums and other art institutions at least since the passing of the ADA in 1990 and remains a key metaphor in both artists’ work. As McArthur puts it, the goal moves beyond making art to proving “that institutional critique in an art economy or an art world can begin to ask what other institutions require questioning. I think that there is a place for these other forms of critique within galleries.”29 In a similar vein Papalia turns to larger institutional critique. Just as he saw Guiding String as part of a body of work that “destabilizes visual primacy,” we might see McArthur’s Ramps as similarly disorienting.30 Papalia ultimately echoes McArthur’s ideas, not limiting the discussion to art and instead asking, “How do we destabilize that power?”31 To do this, both artists effectively use things to demonstrate how disability itself can be made more visible. But they also question society’s degree of commitment to inclusiveness. The urgency behind their art rests on this sweeping social critique. And yet it is hard to overlook the legacy of material things. Viewers at McArthur’s show saw twenty ramps on display inside the gallery. But twenty-one were actually present. The last one—missing from the gallery floor—was specially made of poured concrete for the Essex

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Street Gallery’s own entrance. Before McArthur’s show the space had no access ramp at all. Since the 2014 exhibition of McArthur’s work, the Gallery has moved to a newer and larger space. That twenty-first ramp, poured as it was out of sturdy, long-lasting concrete, remains behind. And there it continues to fill a very real function. Most simply put, it continues to be walked on every day. But it also remains a curious marker, commemorating in a way McArthur’s 2014 show. As McArthur and Papalia demonstrate, the things associated with disability often linger around us, existing both in and out of sight.

Notes 1 Jason Farago, “Sucked Up, Squeezed Out: The Super-Absorbent Art of Park McArthur,” The Guardian, January 26, 2016, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jan/26/park-mcarthurpoly-chisenhale-gallery-london-sculpture-art. 2 Kari Rittenbach, “Park McArthur,” Frieze 163 (2014): 215. 3 Jennifer Burris, “Park McArthur,” BOMB, February 19, 2014, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/ park-mcarthur/. 4 Rittenbach “Park McArthur,” 215. 5 Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22. 6 Brown, “Thing Theory,” 3–4. 7 Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Santa Monica, CA: Lapis Press, 2001). 8 Katherine Kuh, “What’s an Art Museum For?” Saturday Review 52, no. 8 (1969): 58. 9 Tobin Siebers, “Disability Aesthetics,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 7, no. 2 (2006): 64. 10 Elizabeth Guffey, “The Disabling Art Museum,” Journal of Visual Culture 14, no. 1 (2015): 61–73. 11 Brown, “Thing Theory,” 4. 12 Carmen Papalia, phone interview by author, February 25, 2019. 13 Papalia, phone interview. 14 Kathryn Hixson, “With Reasonable Accommodation,” Frieze 74 (April 2003): 89. 15 Sara Hendren, “Slope: Intercept: Notes on an Inclined Plane,” in Disability, Place, Architecture: A Reader, ed. Jos Boys (London: Routledge, 2017), 286. 16 Burris, “Park McArthur.” 17 Burris, “Park McArthur.” 18 Alice Wexler, “#Blacklivesmatter: Access and Equity in the Arts and Education,” Art Education 71, no. 1 (January 2018): 22–3. 19 See Samuel R. Bagenstos, “Foreword: Thoughts on Responding to the Left Critique of Disability Rights Law,” in Disability Politics in a Global Economy: Essays in Honour of Marta Russell, ed. Ravi Malhotra (New York: Routledge, 2017), vii. 20 Marta Russell, Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract: A Warning from an Uppity Crip (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1998). 21 Russell, Beyond Ramps, 10. 22 McArther in Burris, “Park McArthur.” 23 Park McArthur in Katie Guggenheim, “Chisenhale Interviews: Park McArthur,” January 29–April 3, 2016, https://chisenhale.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Chisenhale_Interview_Park_McArthur-1.pdf.

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24 Carmen Papalia, “A New Model for Access in the Museum,” Disability Studies Quarterly 33, no. 3 (2013), http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3757/3280. 25 Papalia, “New Model for Access in the Museum.” 26 Carmen Papalia, “Access Revived,” Canadian Art 34, no. 4 (2018): 55–7. 27 Carmen Papalia in Whitney Mashburn and Carmen Papalia, “Meaningful Inclusion,” cmagazine 140 (Winter 2019), 22. 28 Papalia, “Access Revived,” 55–7. 29 McArthur in Burris, “Park McArthur.” 30 Carmen Papalia, “You Can Do It with Your Eyes Closed,” Art21 Magazine (October 7, 2014), http://magazine.art21.org/2014/10/07/you-can-do-it-with-your-eyes-closed/#.XPGzEC2ZPGI. 31 Jacqueline Bell, “Practicing Accessibility: An Interview with Carmen Papalia,” Field: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism 5 (Fall 2016), http://field-journal.com/issue-5/an-interview-withcarmen-papalia.

Bibliography Bell, Jacqueline. “Practicing Accessibility: An Interview with Carmen Papalia.” Field: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism 5 (Fall 2016). http://field-journal.com/issue-5/an-interview-withcarmen-papalia. Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22. Burris, Jennifer. “Park McArthur.” BOMB, February 19, 2014. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/ park-mcarthur/. Farago, Jason. “Sucked Up, Squeezed Out: The Super-Absorbent Art of Park McArthur.” Guardian, January 26, 2016. www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jan/26/park-mcarthur-polychisenhale-gallery-london-sculpture-art. Guffey, Elizabeth “The Disabling Art Museum.” Journal of Visual Culture 14, no. 1 (2015): 61–73. Guggenheim, Katie. “Chisenhale Interviews: Park McArthur.” Chisenhale Gallery, January 2016. https://chisenhale.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Chisenhale_Interview_Park_McArthur-1.pdf. Hendren, Sara. “Slope: Intercept: Notes on an Inclined Plane.” In Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader, edited by Jos Boys, 278–86. London: Routledge, 2017. Mashburn, Whitney, and Carmen Papalia. “Meaningful Inclusion.” cmagazine 140 (Winter 2019): 20–7. Papalia, Carmen. “A New Model for Access in the Museum.” Disability Studies Quarterly 33, no. 3 (2013). http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3757/3280. Papalia, Carmen. “Access Revived.” Canadian Art 34, no. 4 (2018): 55–7. Papalia, Carmen. “You Can Do It with Your Eyes Closed.” Art21 Magazine. October 7, 2014. http:// magazine.art21.org/2014/10/07/you-can-do-it-with-your-eyes-closed/#.XPGzEC2ZPGI. Rittenbach, Kari. “Park McArthur.” Frieze 163 (May 2014): 215–16. Russell, Marta. Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract: A Warning from an Uppity Crip. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1998. Siebers, Tobin. “Disability Aesthetics.” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 7, no. 2 (Spring/ Summer 2006): 63–73. Wexler, Alice. “#Blacklivesmatter: Access and Equity in the Arts and Education.” Art Education 71, no. 1 (January 2018): 20–3.

13 Culture, State, and Revolution: Arts Wars between Religious and Secular Autocracies in Post-Revolution Egypt Sonali Pahwa and Jessica Winegar

The Middle East uprisings have brought major challenges as well as unprecedented opportunities to the culture industries. According to a flurry of celebratory news articles from the spring of 2011 onward, protest art is proliferating in the region, from graffiti in Egypt to hip-hop in Morocco to massive photographic displays and political cartoons gone viral in Tunisia. The articles then adopt a predictably ominous tone to express the concern that resurgent Islamist forces represent a danger to arts and culture writ large. Two fundamental aspects of this emerging cultural politics are frequently overlooked: the support for culture industries in mainstream Islamist circles and the underlying structural transformation of the relationship between arts and the state. The story is not simply one of liberation from authoritarian states, new desires to criticize such states, or Islamist threats to freedom of expression. It is also not simply about the re-entrenchment of authoritarianism in the wake of the first years of protests. Rather, there are complex shifts in the overlapping cultural and political fields. Changes in the cultural scene have not simply been a barometer of broader political and economic change, but part and parcel of it, particularly in countries with strong, centralized ministries of culture, such as Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia. In these places the dominant state ideology posed culture as a path to progress and enlightenment. In moments of revolutionary opening, cultural producers, intellectuals, and politicians asked foundational questions about the role of government in the field of culture and vice versa. Egypt is a case in point and a bellwether of sorts because it is the most populous Middle Eastern country and because it has, since the outbreak of the uprisings, experienced both an Islamist presidency and a new military ruler. Editors’ Note: The authors first published this essay in Middle East Report in summer 2012, produced the “Postscript” at the request of the editors in summer 2019, and approved minor revisions during the subsequent copyediting process.

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State Involvement in Culture Nasser founded the Egyptian Ministry of Culture in 1958 largely on the French model but also shaped by the experiments of various Eastern Bloc socialist countries to centralize and support cultural production and dissemination. The major goals at the time remain central to its mission today: to define the nation and national identity through the arts, to protect cultural patrimony, and to uplift the so-called masses by exposing them to the arts. To this end the Egyptian Ministry of Culture expanded the ranks of its employed artists and literati who often did works in line with many of the nationalist goals of the ruling regime. For example, many were sent to document the building of the High Dam. Furthermore, the Ministry built or renovated many museums and arts centers throughout the country. Similar to what was done in France, the government built dozens of “culture palaces” in small towns and villages to both disseminate and centralize cultural production and social uplift projects, and many of Egypt’s artists of today got their start in these culture palaces. They include visual artists, writers, musicians, and dramatists. Yet what seemed to many in the cultural field to be a promising beginning soon devolved into decades of disappointment. Although the Mubarak regime pulled the Ministry back from the brink of dissolution, which Sadat threatened with funding cuts, artists and literati increasingly felt that the massive cultural bureaucracy, corruption, and not-so-subtle demands that art conform to dominant nationalism were killing any chance of attaining the cultural vibrancy and widespread interest in arts and culture initially promised by the Ministry in its early years. In the months following the downfall of Husni Mubarak intense debate ensued among artists in all fields over the question of dissolving the Egyptian Ministry of Culture completely. Some argued that, given its wretched performance in key areas, it should be dismantled and abandoned. This view has held little traction, however. The majority of those in the cultural scene, and perhaps more important, the majority of those who partake of state cultural offerings, would be distressed to see the Ministry of Culture disappear. The issue for these people has been instead how to fix a broken institution. The commitment to state support for culture has remained strong, even amidst the opportunities for government reorganization that the ongoing revolutionary process has afforded. What are ministries of culture good for, according to those who continue to support them? From one of the most prominent leftist perspectives, they are good for fostering the creation of artistic offerings, plain and simple, and regardless of the market appeal of those works. Some say that state support leads to greater artistic freedom, particularly in less commercial arts, because it shields artists from market pressures and allows audiences to see works they might not see if venues operated according to pure consumerist logic. Others counter that the state has an interest in supporting art that fits a political agenda or that state employees direct funds to their own art and that of friends and relatives. The solution that some Egyptian intellectuals have raised to these problems seems promising: Ministry selection committees would include a majority of members from outside the state apparatus and members would regularly rotate on and off. Members would hail from different generations. Corruption must be weeded out, a tall order indeed. In the decades when state cultural institutions administered large budgets without oversight, public money was regularly misappropriated or channeled into the projects of the cronies of powerful administrators. But the waves of revolution tipped the scales against toleration of corruption and opened channels for protesting it. Whether the extensive protests will result in effective change depends in part on the still-shifting relationships between the executive, legislative, and

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judiciary branches. Anti-corruption initiatives in the cultural sector have shown signs of growing through partnerships with campaigns in other sectors of the government. Many cultural producers contend as well that ministries of culture play an important role in protecting national patrimony. They say that this role should not be left to corporations, lest access to patrimony be subject to high admission fees or treasures sold outside the country. The Egyptian government has indeed performed abysmally in this realm. Paintings were left to rot in the basement of the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art; original reels of cinematic classics molded in cardboard boxes or were sold to foreign buyers; and Pharaonic antiquities were stolen. And then there was the authoritarian cult of Zahi Hawass, the former minister of antiquities who claimed to discover archaeological artifacts personally in his one-man shows on the Discovery and History Channels, and who was reputed to jealously guard access to archaeological sites. But Egyptian cultural producers also look to Europe, where there is relatively easy public access to the arts, for models of patrimony management. They argue that if the Ministry of Culture had more resources and managed them better, then Egypt’s cultural endowments would remain intact, in Egypt, for all Egyptians to enjoy. Discussions about how to make Ministry operations more transparent, and how to forge more collaboration between the government and private foundations, may well bring such strong protections of patrimony to fruition. Finally, culture ministries’ proponents point to how they reach underserved audiences, especially outside major cities. In Egyptian towns and villages today, there are 550 governmentrun “culture palaces,” as well as a multitude of creativity centers and libraries. Visitors are often struck by three things: no private cultural institution is to be found in these places, the people who partake of the state’s offerings are often quite enthusiastic about them, and the institutions are grossly underfunded and, in many cases, mismanaged. It is not a stretch to say that many practicing artists and writers from lower-class or provincial backgrounds were first exposed to “culture” through these state institutions. Many frequenters of these institutions are women and youth eager to learn new things and keen to build communities outside of the home. On nights when there is a theater performance, visiting dance troupe, or exhibition by local visual artists or schoolchildren, for example, the places are abuzz with families on what they clearly consider a major outing. Other state culture palaces, of course, are not as active; the employees, faced with extremely low budgets, have often lost passion for their work. But the moribund institutions are normally in far-flung locales, and the Ministry has an apparatus for traveling programs. Again, the circulating suggestions for increased funding, more transparency in allocation and use of funds, and better training of arts administrators could make the existing system much more active and professional. There could be higher standards for incoming cultural sector employees to ensure that they have sufficient background in their chosen field. There are numerous counterarguments to these defenses of the Ministry of Culture, some of which are voiced by the Ministry’s supporters as well. The issue is not black and white. But one need only look at the United States to gain understanding of why many Egyptians want to keep state support for culture even as they recognize the challenges. Public funding for the arts in the United States is anemic compared to European countries, in part because of the influence of neoliberal economic ideology. An artwork or artistic medium must be popular or marketable in order to survive. Most artists in the United States struggle in multiple lowpaying jobs in order to keep doing their art, and studies show that many give up. This cultural policy has dampened creativity as well as wide interest in the arts in the United States. In a country like Egypt, which has equal if not greater levels of class and geographic inequality hindering artistic production and consumption, the extreme market model of culture makes little sense. That is why the post-revolutionary period has seen—in the hundreds of Ministry

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of Culture institutions, as well as coffee shops, living rooms, and other intellectual meeting points—vibrant conversation about how to build a new cultural policy that succumbs neither to the market nor to state corruption, propaganda, and inertia. There have been new initiatives, new discussions about public-private partnerships, and attempts to change the relationship between independent artists and the state, all of which launched the beginnings of a structural transformation in the field of culture, despite setbacks accompanying the return of security-state authoritarianism.

Independent Arts and the Public-Private Relationship At the turn of the twenty-first century independent Egyptian dramatists petitioned for their right as taxpaying citizens to apply for public funding that previously had been reserved for state troupes. These dramatists had come of age at a time when state theaters were overstaffed and had few jobs to offer. Working outside of state institutions was a necessity, but it turned out to have many virtues. The independent troupes occasionally won small production grants and access to performance space from the state, but stayed free of the bureaucracy at state theaters. Intriguingly, despite their lack of reliable rehearsal space and smaller budgets, independent troupes went on to produce lauded plays that frequently represented Egypt at the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theater and traveled to theater festivals abroad. Their model of artistic independence with occasional state support offers a possible program for the post-revolution Ministry of Culture. Freedom from censorship and bureaucratic control was not enough to produce true artistic independence, the most successful theater troupes found. They also needed financial support in order to create imaginative work with more than formulaic market value. Their quest to produce popular culture, outside the definitions of that term in state cultural ideology, is an instructive example of how independent cultural production can draw upon state support to represent and engage with popular concerns. Theater troupes formed by university students or graduates of amateur troupes at the cultural palaces reached varied audiences with fresh, topical plays staged in accessible venues. The state theaters, in sharp contrast, put on European and Egyptian literary classics in buildings designed as temples of high culture. Independent dramatists wrote about ironies of contemporary life and social tensions, aiming to entertain audiences while provoking thought. Their popular aesthetic styles were closely linked to a perception of themselves as citizenartists rather than as high priests of theater or professionals demonstrating sophisticated dramatic techniques. These organic intellectuals won far more popularity for theater than mandarin administrators of state theaters, with their elitist and somewhat outdated vision of the arts. Were the state theaters to fund and host these independent troupes, they could capitalize on the revival of theater as a popular art. A state theater and arts complex has already experimented with this model. The Hanager, a complex housing a theater, an art gallery, and a coffee shop, was established in Cairo on the state’s opera house grounds in 1988 to accommodate a wave of youth theater and visual arts. It soon acquired a stellar reputation. In its early days the art gallery featured independent and innovative art, such as the first exhibition of video art in Egypt. It was a striking exception to the Ministry of Culture’s rules: headed by a university professor rather than a state bureaucrat, Hanager was intended as an extension of campus theater. With a single manager and a minimal staff, the playhouse and gallery together constituted a friendly, non-bureaucratic institution where independent artists felt welcome. Theater aficionados especially considered it a second home. Its patronage was also somewhat feudal, as decision-

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making rested with one person, the manager. In the spirit of the post-revolution era, however, a committee could govern Hanager, one allowing for participatory programming and including younger artists and critics. Dramatists, musicians, visual artists, poets, and craftspeople have also embarked on a major initiative in light of the ongoing revolution that tries to democratize the arts even more, as well as to establish new models of public-private partnership. Al-Fann Midan (Art Is a Public Square) is a monthly festival held in various urban centers around Egypt. It is part of a set of revolutionary artistic activities that attempt to rework the relationship between art and the state such that the state offers funding but avoids subsuming cultural production under any particular government’s economic and political agenda. Al-Fann Midan was initiated by the Independent Culture Coalition of artists and arts professionals, some of whom have experience in government institutions, and others who had been part of earlier attempts to reshape cultural policy in Egypt, for example al-Mawrid al-Thaqafi (Cultural Resource). Al-Fann Midan has brought new audiences to the arts and new artists to public visibility. It enjoyed significant support in 2011 from the Ministry of Culture when Emad Abu Ghazi was head of that body. Abu Ghazi subsequently resigned in protest of state violence, and the new Ministry has reduced funding. But the organizers want this successful event to be Egyptian funded, from both public and private sources, and remain immune to the dictates of either. A new Ministry of Culture could continue the diversified model of state support for art— providing funds without an attached agenda—that Abu Ghazi sanctioned. Can independent artists thrive without a ministry of culture? The question is worth considering after decades when these enterprising citizens learned to make do without state support. Egyptian visual artists built grassroots artists’ collectives, galleries, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to support their own innovative art, as well as collaborations with local communities. Yet some of these rely on foreign funding, which has spurred episodes of state surveillance and censorship, albeit less frequently and dramatically as in the fields of literature, cinema, and theater. Egyptian playwrights Ahmad al-‘Attar and Hasan al-Giritli were also badly burned by censorship or capricious funding from the Ministry of Culture. They were subsequently successful in funding their performances through private sources, as they had worked in Europe and were able to tap resources there. Most Egyptian artists, however, could not think of applying for grants from foreign festivals or foreign cultural centers based in Egypt because they were not avant-gardist in a way that these organizations recognized. Indeed, their commitment to the role of citizen-artists made their art so contextual that it was difficult to translate for foreign audiences. National funding was the logical source of support for small-scale, local theater made by independent artists. In the post-revolution era a more representative parliament must revisit received definitions of the artist who merits state support to include younger and less formally trained citizens, if it is to aid cultural production that has a popular audience. The question, then, is not just whether independent artists or arts initiatives such as al-Fann Midan can do without the Ministry, but also whether the Ministry can maintain its stature without endorsing independent artists.

Revolution’s Challenges The paramount concern for most Arab cultural producers is the relationship between religion, state, and culture. For those who are secular oriented, a crucial function of ministries of culture is to combat what they view as misguided (read, conservative) interpretations of Islam. When Egypt’s first democratically elected parliament in decades held its first session in

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January 2012, the arriving Islamist majority was met by a large group of protesting artists fearful that the Islamists would outlaw freedom of expression in Egypt, rendering it a cultural backwater. This anxiety ironically was redolent of the Mubarak era. But the emergence of religiously oriented cultural producers and advocates on the scene signals a potentially major transformation of the relationship between state, culture, and public in Egypt. Democracy was not a hallmark of Egypt’s Ministry of Culture under Mubarak, though it cultivated an image of liberalism. The former culture minister, visual artist Farouq Husni, saw European-style avant-garde arts festivals as a way of integrating Egypt with international arts trends. He inaugurated international theater, dance, and fine arts festivals and biennials. Husni’s policies opened up the market in artistic production. Yet creative freedom in the Mubarak era was closely guarded, supporting what were viewed as Westernized genres of creativity, which the culture minister deemed appropriate for a globalizing nation building its international trade and fighting what was viewed as a backward Islamist front at home. This cultural policy, begun in earnest in the 1990s, was markedly different from what came before. Meanwhile, the Ministry never loosened its controls over local artistic production, particularly in the fields of literature, film, and cinema. Independent theater troupes grabbed the opportunity to perform at the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theater, but could not sell tickets to their shows outside the festival grounds or solicit funding without paying to register as corporations. Censors shut down several plays on opening night if they criticized the political or religious establishment or spoke openly about sex. The censor’s scissors clipped many a film, and a few works of fine art were removed from display. The Ministry also walked a fine line between seeking to challenge social mores and appeasing Islamist commentators, who were reaching a growing audience through independent media. In regular cases since the 1990s, the Ministry caved in to pressure from religious authorities to ban a book or film that Islamists had brought to public attention for elements they considered blasphemous (most famously in 2000 with the controversy over a state publishing house reissuing Haydar Haydar’s novel A Banquet for Seaweed). Cairo’s thriving community of independent artists nevertheless saw the Ministry of Culture as a resource and even as a savior. Its enlightenment discourse gave educated, urban intellectuals such as these a place at the vanguard of social reform. Many of them believed, moreover, that culture should reach the masses and that the wide network of state institutions was far better equipped for outreach than private circuits. Artists working after the heyday of state cultural institutions often experimented with ways of reaching the people without all the bureaucracy and ideology. In roundtable discussions and newspaper articles they cast “the people” whom they wished to enlighten as tradition bound, obsessed with morals, and in need of progressive ideas. Meanwhile, Islamist youth groups gaining popularity on university campuses competed with the secular-oriented artists in teaching progressive thought in an Islamic vein and supporting arts that further Islam. In the context of a powerful statesupported ideology (mainly in the cultural sector) of conflict between Islam and secularism, in which the Ministry of Culture played the roles of mediator and guardian of peace, religious and secular-oriented intellectuals tended to see each other as enemies. With the post-revolution rise of the Muslim Brothers as a force inside and outside the parliament, the antagonism in the cultural field only intensified. The Supreme Council of Culture was reconstituted after the revolution without a single Islamist member. In protest the Muslim Brothers formed Hawiyya, a body of Islamist literati meant to serve as a parallel Supreme Council. The Brothers argued that their cultural body was more representative of popular tastes. “The standard Muslim Brother argument is that if a book or article offends religion, the people themselves will not want it published,” asserts literary critic Muhammad Shu‘ayr. Established secular-oriented literati have been skeptical about cultural programs

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that they perceive as pandering to popular conservatism. There is considerable evidence of Muslim Brother support for arts and culture, such as the fact that one of the six chapters in the 2007 Muslim Brothers party platform advocates a “cultural renaissance” through arts, literature, and literacy.1 Certain young Brothers oppose censorship and many are artists and writers in their own right. The standard secular-oriented responses to these facts are to claim that they are a ruse or that the desire to make art in line with dominant religious values is aesthetically backward. But in the revolutionary era Hawiyya’s self-proclaimed role as defender of popular cultural values (which it imperiously claims authority to define) is generating a broader debate about cultural elitism, which provides an opening to imagine a new Ministry of Culture that is indeed representative of a range of cultural values in Egypt. Such a reimagined Ministry of Culture must account for the fact that Egyptians draw cultural references from religious texts, Muslim and Christian, no less than from European artistic traditions. Just as censoring art in response to (some) opposition from religious leaders is foolish, so is censoring art that is in explicit engagement with religious values and traditions. Indeed, devout Egyptians have mixed religious and secular cultural forms for years. In the early years of the Muslim Brothers their magazine Al-Da’wa (The Call) often published scripts of original one-act plays with an Islamic theme. In the contemporary era the Brothers have supported theater troupes that called themselves Islamic in Egypt’s governorates, just as several Coptic churches host popular theater troupes. Past decades have witnessed poets and novelists working to create a modern category of “Islamic literature.” Today the largest student club at the Cairo College of Fine Arts (counting around twelve hundred members) explicitly promotes Islamic values through making art. Cultural production with religious values already exists; it remains only to be recognized by state cultural authorities. Secular-oriented intellectuals, however, continue to hold positions of power in state institutions for art, theater, and publishing. Their arguments that art and literature are alternatives to rigid religious belief, and that all Islamists are enemies of creativity, have only gained fervor after the rise of Islamists in elections. A spring 2012 lawsuit by a salafi lawyer against veteran comedian ‘Adil Imam, for his negative portrayals of Islamists in classic films, confirmed many in their fears of growing artistic unfreedom. But while many are rightly concerned that the existing variety of artistic expression will be quashed if certain interpretations of religion become dominant, the post-revolutionary moment invites a revisiting of the relationship between religion, art, and public that might create more openings than closures. Indeed, the anti-Islamist ideology evident in Imam’s films and propagated casually by the likes of media tycoon Naguib Sawiris (charged with blasphemy for posting online a picture of Minnie Mouse in a face veil) is a remnant of the culture wars of the Mubarak era, when secular-oriented intellectuals freely denigrated the devout and Islamists fought their political and cultural marginalization through legal channels. A new Ministry of Culture can give cultural producers who wish to foreground Islam more equal representation in state institutions, thereby creating opportunities for debate “across the aisle,” so to speak, rather than kneejerk silencing. Islamists are certainly not uniform in their views of art and culture. Reforming national cultural ideology through the Ministry of Culture is the best bet for mending the secular-religious divide fostered by state institutions under Mubarak. Younger generations of secular-oriented artists, writers, and dramatists continue to have their own grievances with the Ministry of Culture, arising from exclusion from positions of power in state cultural institutions. But these artists have not made common cause with the Islamist literati, which is ironic since young activists reached across religious divides to oust Mubarak. The Mubarak-era cultural policy—to promote arts that sidelined religion and were palatable to Western curators and critics as a defense against Islamism—gave these

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junior intellectuals more cultural authority than their religious peers, and they were keen to maintain that distinction. With the post-revolution rise of Islamist parties, a secular-oriented group organized the Egyptian Creativity Front to protest religiously motivated policies against artistic freedom and highlight instances of censorship by Islamists. Writers and artists with secular beliefs voiced their individual fears of Islamist takeover through social media. They were apprehensive that the new Ministry of Culture would impose a narrow ideology, much like the old, but this time with an Islamist program. They had never known a nonauthoritarian Ministry of Culture, and it was difficult, in their view, to conceive of how such a ministry would propagate culture with high aesthetic value. Yet the struggles of independent artists and groups to form more democratic cultural institutions have already thrown up more promising alternatives for the future of the Ministry and the overall relationship between culture and politics.

Postscript as of June 2019 Since this essay was first published in summer 2012 in Middle East Report, Egypt has experienced the election of an Islamist president, Muhammad Morsy (who took office in June 2012), and a popularly backed military coup that toppled him in July 2013 and that eventually put in place (through highly controlled elections) a military strongman: Abd alFattah al-Sisi. It could be argued that Egypt’s secular-oriented artists played a significant role in Morsy’s downfall and Sisi’s rise. Almost as soon as Morsy was elected, most of them trotted out the as-yet-unproven though not completely illegitimate claim that an Islamist president would censor and suppress the arts. Under the Morsy government, as under the previous post-Mubarak rule of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces, graffiti arts in particular proliferated and were frequently painted over by government forces. A new Islamist Minister of Culture tried to replace several leading artist-bureaucrats on the grounds that they were corrupt, and artists responded with claims that he was embarking on a Brotherhoodization of the Ministry that would lead to attacks on artistic freedom. In the early summer of 2013 they began a lively sit-in at the Ministry, filled with anti-Brotherhood music and poetry, to protest these changes. Notably there was little discussion of corruption at the core of the new minister’s claims regarding the dismissals. Large groups of artists participated in the massive June 30 demonstrations in 2013 that culminated in Sisi’s removal of Morsy and reinstatement of military rule. Leftist painter Muhammad Abla agreed to serve on the committee that rewrote Egypt’s constitution in ways that took out the more restrictive religiously conservative aspects of Morsy’s constitution but left in place massive protections for the military. Many artists, particularly those of the older generations and those most embedded in state institutions, then joined the massive patriotic pro-Sisi movement that led to his election and, shockingly, to the massacre of one thousand Morsy supporters at an encampment in August 2013. It was indeed striking to see artists who had participated so fervently in the removal of Mubarak in 2011 then, a mere three years later, cheer for the return of military rule—with some producing artworks and writings in support of the new leader. Many of them also, at least at the time of this writing, support the broader censorship of political protest and free speech that Sisi’s government has institutionalized and enforced with brutal torture and long prison sentences. However, subsequent infractions of artistic freedom have produced some dissent. When state security refused to grant permission for al-Fann Midan to use Abdin Square in July 2014, outrage in the arts community impelled Minister of Culture Gaber Asfour to intercede with the Ministry of Interior and have the security decision reversed in just a few days.

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It seems the devil’s bargain many artists accepted during the Mubarak era—that an authoritarian non-Islamist president was better than an Islamist one and that such a president was indeed necessary to protect the arts from Islamism—is not only still present but even more fervently adhered to after the experience with Morsy.2 Fortunately younger generations of artists, particularly those under age thirty-five, are starting to question this black-and-white choice. As we conclude this postscript, we are witnessing significant generational cracks in the dominant narrative, along with a groundswell of important and critical art in the fields of music, comedy, graffiti, poetry, and memoirs of the revolution. For these artists who came of age in a globally media-saturated world, full censorship not only makes no sense but is also impossible to truly execute. Neither does authoritarianism nor complete state direction of culture make sense to younger artists: the revolution has unfolded during their formative years, and as such they are less likely to abandon its principles. At least, not yet.

Notes 1 See the 2007 Muslim Brothers Party Platform, Ikhwanwiki.com, https://www.ikhwanwiki.com/ index.php?title=%D8%A8%D8%B1%D9%86%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%AC_%D8%AD%D8 %B2%D8%A8_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A5%D8%AE%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%86_%D8 %A7%D9%84%D9%85%D8%B3%D9%84%D9%85%D9%8A%D9%86. 2 Muhammad Morsy, who was accused by the military regime of espionage and terrorism, died during trial proceedings in Cairo on June 17, 2019.

Bibliography Armbrust, Walter. “Trickster Defeats the Revolution: Egypt as the Vanguard of the New Authoritarianism.” Middle East Critique 26, no. 3 (2017): 221–39. Moll, Yasmin. “Television Is Not Radio: Theologies of Mediation in the Egyptian Islamic Revival.” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 2 (2018): 233–65. Schielke, Samuli. Egypt in the Future Tense. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. Van Nieuwkerk, Karin, ed. Muslim Rap, Halal Soaps, and Revolutionary Theater. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. Winegar, Jessica. “Civilizing Muslim Youth: Egyptian State Culture Programmes and Islamic Television Preachers.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20 (2014): 445–65.

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14 Knowing/Caring: A Conversation Ai Weiwei and Alexandra Munroe

On July 19, 2018, in Snowmass, Colorado, Ai Weiwei accepted the Anderson Ranch Arts Center International Artist Award, given to “globally recognized artists who demonstrate the highest level of artistic achievement and whose careers have fundamentally influenced contemporary art.” On the preceding day Ai engaged in a public conversation on the Anderson Ranch campus with Alexandra Munroe, Samsung Senior Curator of Asian Art and senior advisor for global arts at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation and lead curator of the Guggenheim’s Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World exhibition. The conversation was followed by a screening of Ai’s documentary film Human Flow (Plate 19). The interview is provided here, with the exception of some introductory remarks and the audience question-and-answer period. The transcript was edited primarily for clarity, with every effort to retain the original words and tone of the participants. Munroe, who at the time of Ai’s arrest by Chinese authorities in 2011 initiated the international museum petition that called for his release and garnered 145,000 signatures, engages Ai on a number of topics—his journey as a “refugee” filmmaker, his evolving understanding of authoritarianism and liberal democracies, the ways in which the Chinese government suppresses information about him and his work, and also the limits of censoring effects. In the process Ai charts an activist artistic practice characterized by self-examination, the questioning of “success,” direct involvement, giving voice to others, and acceptance of difference. Munroe: Welcome to Aspen, Weiwei. Ai: Thank you. Munroe: A month ago, when I visited Ai Weiwei in his Berlin studio, I said, “Do you even know where Aspen is?” And he said, “I think it’s in remote Gansu Province.” Ai: Which is true. Munroe: So here we are in wilderness, Weiwei, but you make it the center wherever you are. We were laughing because Weiwei and I have been working together for a long time. And while I talk about you a lot and with you a lot, we have never actually been on stage before for a public conversation.

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Ai: It’s true. This is the first time. Munroe: How’s it going to go? Ai: Well, I’m very nervous, you know. When I see the audience here, it’s a very special audience, and I’m just shaking here. Munroe: Weiwei, you of all teach us that fear is just an occasion to overcome fear, to battle fear, to fight fear, to work through it. So I’m the one who’s scared. We have a certain history. I consider Ai Weiwei my greatest love, and also my fiercest critic. I really am not sure how the next hour will unfold. But let’s start with a question that someone asked me last night. They said, “What are you going to talk to Ai Weiwei about? Are you going to talk to him about his art? Are you going to talk to him about his activism? Are you going to talk politics? Or are you going to talk about his social media?” And without thinking, I said, “We’re going to talk about all of it, because for Weiwei, it’s one and the same.” You do not distinguish between media. Art, life, action, politics, and change are what you wake up to do. It’s all you do. Would you agree with that? And how is it that you can move so fluidly, Weiwei, between Instagram posts, installation, exhibition (Figure 14.1), smashing Han Dynasty urns (Figure 14.2.a–c), performance, music videos, protest, activism? How do you move between all these media and yet infuse each one with a distinct desire and message for freedom? Ai: First, it’s so nice to be here, and the weather is very dry, a lot of sunshine here. It’s the kind of weather I really like. I grew up in a province, Xinjiang, which is very dry and has this kind of sunshine. So I feel quite comfortable here. And the question about my activities. Yes, firstly, you’ll have to recognize me as a whole cow, rather than recognize different cuts of the meat, you know. So I’m a cow here, and I kind of, you know, I smile as a cow, moo as a cow. People look at me very differently. But I’ve never been very conscious about it. In modern society people give or need categories or names for each kind of activity. For me, it’s one, as you just described. And it’s about human expression. It’s about communication. So we all have expressions, but artists or activists are dealing more with expressions, because you want your so-called idea to be presented in the right language, or to find the language. But at the same time, with communication you need somebody to hear it or to share that kind of sensitivity—sometimes successful, sometimes not successful, and a lot of times, even misunderstood. So that’s the situation. Munroe: I’ve never heard you use the word “successful.” How would you measure success? It wouldn’t occur to me to think of you in terms of “success” and yet you are, in fact, the most successful artist in the world. As someone said this morning, “You are the most famous artist and dissident artist in the world.” I guess that’s success. So how do you measure success? Ai: I think success is alarm. It only tells you that you may have to rethink your condition, or you may have to take a different kind of approach. So for me, success is really alarm. Munroe: Alarm? Ai: It’s a warning. Life is like you take a journey. If you’re on this road, you miss the other road. And then you miss a lot of other possibilities. You know, what everybody thinks of as success only means we—we made a choice just to get that little. But we miss a lot. We always miss a lot in the journey. Munroe: I think your journey has encompassed more than most lives and has also touched more lives than most ever touch, and that brings me to the film Human Flow, which I think I’ve seen probably eleven times. I learn something new each time, and I learn something new about you as well. When you first moved from Beijing to Berlin, when  the

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FIGURE 14.1  Cover of the exhibition catalog Fuck Off, 2000, Eastlink Gallery, Shanghai. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

government finally gave your passport back and basically said—what did they say to you, Weiwei? Ai: They said, “You’re free.” After five years of detentions, self-detention, they said, “Weiwei, you’re free.” So what do you mean I’m free? I’m always free. Even in detention I think I’m free, because I don’t think anybody can stop your thinking or your understanding of

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FIGURE 14.2a–c  Ai Weiwei, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio.

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the world. Even when put in the most difficult situation, it’s not a possibility for you to understand something you never would understand before. But that means I’m free to travel. They gave back my passport. So I took the opportunity to go to Germany where my son is. By then he was five. Now he’s nine. For me it was most difficult when I was in detention. They told me I would not see my son for the next thirteen years. You know, they could sentence me easily for the crime called subversion of state power, which means I just freely talk about my opinions on every matter. That time made me really feel very heavy, to have a son, but not to be with him. So I’m very happy to have my passport back and travel to Berlin. I have my studio established there. And since then, I started to make this film about the global refugee situation. So we traveled to about twenty-three countries, visited about forty camps, interviewed over six hundred people relating to refugee conditions: government officials, experts, UNHCR, activists, refugees, smugglers, gravediggers, you know, whoever is related to this issue. And we came up with this film (Figure 14.3). And why do I have to make films like that? It’s maybe because so much relates to my childhood. My father was exiled when I was born, so we’re all, have always been, pushed out. We never have a sense of home. Because we don’t have furniture belonging to us. We don’t have even a glass or a cup belonging to us. We never know where we will go on the next trip or where we will settle in—in which town. So that kind of feeling has been with me all along until today. You know, I stay in Germany, but I don’t speak a single word of German. It’s not easy to learn German. And so I still don’t have a sense of home. So that’s why I made this film. [Ai Weiwei moved from Berlin to Cambridge, UK, in 2019.] Munroe: Well, you’ve talked before about your own status as a refugee and the experience of being with your father when he was in exile. But a couple of things strike me about your choice of this subject matter. First, when you left China you also left the object of your controversy, the object of your protest: the Chinese state. Not just the temporal thing of a

FIGURE 14.3 Ai Weiwei, Human Flow © 2017 Human Flow, UG. An Amazon Studios release. Film still featuring refugees walking near Idomeni Camp, Greece. Courtesy of Amazon Studios and Participant.

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Chinese state, but the culture of authoritarianism that you’ve so often said runs so deeply, is so deeply embedded. It’s not just Mao. It’s not just the Cultural Revolution. It’s not just the Communist ideology. It runs deep in thousands of years of Chinese culture—authoritarianism, and then modern state ideologies of totalitarianism that you’ve experienced in the forms of dictatorship, censorship, suppression of freedom of expression. That must have been scary as an artist and as an activist. What did it feel like to lose that object that defined you? You were in opposition to this thing that you hated but you also loved and that was the content of your days, of your work, and of your activism (Plate 20). Ai: During the detention I realized the state is not my enemy, but rather the authoritarianism—you know, this kind of dictatorship, this kind of inhuman treatment we see in culture and politics. And so human rights are really on topic, and also freedom of speech. But once you’re pushed out of that subject, of course, today you have the Internet. You still can comment or be active in that kind of field concerning China or problems relating to China. But leaving China offers me a new opportunity to look at the West, to see human rights or the human condition, or freedom of speech, in Europe or in the US or globally, you know, global politics. And I’m liking that kind of study. So I want to get involved, to know more about world history, about problems relating to the Middle East, Asia, Bangladesh, Myanmar, or Africa. What is the situation in Africa? In China we always think if you want to be knowledgeable, you have to travel a thousand miles. You know, in the old times you would say that. You’re not only reading books. Confucius always said, “You travel 10,000 miles, read 10,000 books. Now you are a scholar.” I think that’s very important to put your knowledge in the reality, to reflect. So that is a journey—for me to examine my previous struggle with China. What’s the true problem with Chinese authority? But now you see these kinds of problems in the US, in today’s political situation. It’s a democratic society, but still you see so much uncertainty about our future here. So I think more than ever after globalization and the Internet, the whole universe has become more as one, as so much related. The borders and our understanding of politics are not really the same borders that have been marked on the map, but are rather much more complicated—the economic order or political orders. Today’s global political play is always quite surprising. Munroe: I think what you’ve just described is really profound for those of us who try to understand how to link the different urgencies and different periods of urgency in your work. I have never felt very comfortable with the description of you as a dissident artist because it’s very limiting. It’s limiting because it confines you to this thing called China and this thing called “Chinese artist,” which my work has tried to explode and complicate and expand and see in different ways, to understand the art that Chinese artists are making on its own terms, not in terms of some descriptive. And I feel like “dissident” is a descriptive that actually limits you to a specific period of the Chinese avant-garde or Chinese contemporary art, which as we all know is also a complete fiction and construct of the art market. What you’re saying that’s so important is that what your real subject is, what your real drive is, is humanism, is human rights, is insistence on truth, this urge to document. I mean, all of your work going back to film school, I guess, and the thousands of photographs you took in New York, your documentary films—some of them are a minute long, some of them are twenty-four hours long—and now your new dedication to feature films. It’s all documentary. It’s recording truth. And I think that’s what you were doing in China when you said “fuck you” to Beijing’s national stadium. You were recording truth. You said it’s a “false smile” of the Chinese state, this whole Olympics thing, a false smile when so much

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suffering was going on, including the Sichuan earthquake that occurred just months prior to the opening ceremony. But what’s also so moving about your work with refugees and the film Human Flow is that the state, the Chinese state, has tried to erase you. You know, when I go to China I have to go through about sixteen different VPNs to even get on the Internet, and when I finally go to look for Ai Weiwei—nothing. Zero. You have been eradicated, eliminated, scrubbed from the Chinese Internet. And yet you’re going after these children, these mothers, these hordes of men who have come across borders of economic disaster, war disaster, famine, ecological disaster, to give them a voice. Where does that come from? Has your own experience of having been erased, does that drive you to not have these faces erased? Ai: It’s very hard to analyze yourself, actually. I have to really also study my—my part in action. I think first I have curiosity. I really want to know people, whether it’s people like me or in very different locations or different religions, backgrounds, different languages. But there are similarities, you know. If you think of children who are in refugee camps, now you realize they might stay a refugee for twenty-five years. Now there’s 68.5 million people who have been forced out of their homes. So then you feel there’s no single one who would want to leave their home. You know, every refugee just wants to go back to their home. You know, in the poorer parts of Africa, the indoor/outdoor has no difference. There’s nothing indoor you can see as human-made objects. It’s just one stove, and they can cook something. I don’t know what they’re cooking because there’s almost nothing you can grow in those very harsh environments. Not just one village, a nation, a few nations. And you see those people and children everywhere, and they have no education, nor any kind of security. Women have no security of any kind, none. It becomes some kind of a trial about yourself. You think, okay, I’m so privileged. Being seen as an artist, my voice can be heard. Then you think, can I share some voice? You know? It challenges my practice. If I can be called by any means successful—and I cannot do anything to help with this kind of condition? So, now you feel—feel ashamed. You feel you basically live a double life. You know, you have two sets of a moral system. So that is a challenge, a self-challenge. It’s nothing else. It’s just to see, okay, maybe I can do something about it, but not necessarily the language, not necessarily being acceptable or understood. Basically, the world is so divided—too many different levels or too many layers, and some media, and the political situation, trying to divide people that way to make it feel safe or stable, but sometimes, I think it’s a totally wrong illusion about humanity to think something can be separated. You know, people are not created equal. They should have equal opportunity, you know, to shine the life and to take their only opportunity to live once, to give them some equal chance. But this is far from the reality. So that’s how I somehow, I sometimes get involved. You know, I’m not—I don’t even think I’m fully equipped for dealing with this kind of situation. But I do get involved. Munroe: You certainly do. You just came back from Bangladesh and from Myanmar, and you visited the largest refugee camp in the world, right before the mud season and the typhoon season. Can you just tell us one story? We followed you on Instagram. It’s all extraordinary. And also, what are you going to do with this new material? Ai: Well, Bangladesh is one of the refugee camps we featured in our film Human Flow. But before we finished our film, like a year before, the camp developed another seven hundred thousand refugees from Myanmar. So the camp has now become nine hundred thousand refugees, which is almost unthinkable. I just wanted to see the camp, how this nine hundred thousand will just stay in one camp. So I brought my son and my girlfriend there. I told them, you know, it’s part of the school vacation. I always try to bring my son with

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me. And, well, if I have to use a single sentence to talk about that camp, it’s very unique. It’s very different from all the other camps, the other forty camps all over the world. Those people are very much like—they don’t even know why I’m there. They don’t—they don’t expect anybody to help them, and they aren’t asking for that kind of help. And you know, not a single person refused to be filmed, but if you interview them, they don’t know what to say. They were never educated to give a clear talk about their situation. So they’re very, very innocent. I never met a group of people so pure, and you know, they desire, I mean, they really, really need help, but they don’t even ask for that. Of course today basically they’re being forgotten. You know, nine hundred thousand people in Asia. It’s—it’s just a number. It’s not an individual. So there’s a lot of stories. You know, these refugee camps are for Muslims. Can you believe it? They are Muslims being pushed out by Buddhists. Munroe: Yes. Ai: You know, Myanmar is a Buddhist society. It’s very kind people, but how could these conflicts so brutally push out those Muslims? There they are, Muslim refugees settling in Bangladesh. And it’s raining all the time. It’s pouring. But you know, it seems they are very used to it, because before they were pushed out, even in Myanmar, they were stateless people. They have never been recognized as Myanmar people. Munroe: Yes, I was thinking they—they don’t ask for help because they’ve never had help. Ai: Yes, they never had help, and they never had—a human condition. Munroe: No, they’ve never had it. Ai: Or state identity. Munroe: You’re speaking about one of the greatest crises possibly the world has ever seen, and the refugee crisis is one of the many factors that is defining the first decades of the twenty-first century. There’s been a lot of talk. We read about it in the papers every day. It’s what all the talk shows on the news programs are carrying on about, this collapse of the postwar world order and the collapse of a liberal democratic value system. There’s a lot of discussion about America’s decline. There’s also a lot of discussion about the rise of China. You travel all around the world. You come from a radically different background. You were denied education for twenty years of your coming of age, as you were yourself a refugee in the wilderness of Xinjiang, watching your father clean toilets seven days a week. You’ve described your father as so good at cleaning toilets that they looked like Donald Judd sculptures after he was finished. Ai: Exactly. Munroe: But is this panic that is sweeping the intelligentsia of America, Europe, and to some extent Japan, is it—should we take it seriously? From your perspective, is it a problem that America is in decline? Are we really in the midst of a collapse of the liberal world order? Ai: I think you give a very good analysis of the situation. We are living on a stage really. We have to carefully examine our human future—you know, globally, the situation, especially after globalization, after today’s Internet. On one hand, we are—we feel so powerful. We are so equipped with scientific development. But at the same time, all those heightened problems come from globalization, from the vast development of capitalism, you know, not only the money or property but rather moral conditions of the society. You know, how do we look at ourselves or development in relation to the human future? There’s no such thing as an American future or a Chinese future. There’s only our global future.

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So we should understand it, you know, because after the Cold War, still the world is very, very divided due to the past twenty years of globalization. And we have become so complex in the political situation, the economic situation. But the problems we’re facing today are not being clearly dealt with by liberals or the intellectuals, and the so-called liberals or intellectuals in the West are on the same boat as the so-called populists or rightists at this moment. And still I think it’s a moment to really think, to reexamine, the whole situation, and the only way we can still agree upon, besides all those arguments, is humanity. You know, where our human world goes. Because this is not only a problem of original political problems. We have environmental problems that can be much bigger than we imagine, and there’s many ways in which we’ve reached a point, many think, a point of no return, you know? So it’s really calling out for our human judgment, in the individual and in society or state, to come up with possible solutions, and today politics are trying to avoid it. They try to push these issues away, try to say, “That’s their problem.” That’s the original problem. You know, they still categorize problems with the superpowers like US, Russia, or China. And it takes some better intelligence or intellectual understanding to see how to solve the problem. We’re quite capable if only we could be very conscious about what is the reality. It’s just the reality has been painted very differently, so we don’t see the truth—so-called truth. So human rights, and freedom of speech, and human dignity, and also this questioning of the power: those are very central values we have to protect, and it takes each generation to protect them. There’s no such thing as to say, “Okay, we’re in the US or Europe. We are privileged not to defend those rights.” Those rights have been badly violated in the US and Europe, as well as in China or Russia. It just takes different ways. Some are hidden or some the media doesn’t really report. Munroe: And yet, you know, one of the regrets, one of the laments that we read about in this discussion about America’s decline is America’s decline as a force of good, as a force of the sort of postwar Cold War liberal values of individualism, democracy, and freedom. This is your first trip to Aspen. You may be interested to know this town’s big role in the history of twentieth-century humanism. Aspen was founded by a family who’s here in our audience—Ann Nitze’s family, Bill Nitze’s family, the Paepcke family—in the late 1940s, three years after World War II, which actually compared to the disasters that you’re recording in your films. Those were also pretty horrific circumstances, including the atomic bomb, the Holocaust. It involved, you know, over sixty countries, World War II. The entire world was swept up in that war, and there were also massive refugee crises, of course, right after that war as well. This family, Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke, came to this tiny Colorado mining town and had a vision to create a center for the resurrection, preservation, and reinvention of panEuropean humanism. They founded the Aspen Institute. They founded the Aspen Music School and Festival. And from these institutions, the Anderson Ranch Art Center evolved and the Physics Center evolved. It’s pretty extraordinary. Further, it was all designed by Bauhaus artists and architects who were themselves political refugees with no place to go and who were also being patronized by this same family. If you had to reinvent Aspen today at the cusp of all these crises that your work has been recording, what humanism would you invent? I mean, this was about classical music. It was about pottery studios. It was about physics. What would your institute look like? What would you teach?

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Ai: Well, I think today we are very—we are very different. We are really living in this socalled Internet age, so all the information flow seems so very easy. You just use your finger. You can Google things, you know, and we are seeing such fast shifting from the past to an unknown future. But the speed is so fast, we almost cannot really cope with the situation because we simply know too much, but we care very little because, you know, it—it’s not in proportion. We’re knowing so much but we care so little. So that’s—I think that’s today’s problem. And we call it a problem because it changes the quality of our life. It shuts off so many sensitivities or ways to understand who we are and what different possibilities can be. So if we don’t have that kind of sensitivity, then the solution or the ways we’re dealing with things are very limited. The means of dealing with the situation can be quite narrow, be quite narrow-minded. So I think the institutions should really challenge themselves by accepting difference, because if we all speak the same language, then it becomes too easy. You know? So the real challenge is to accept difference. Munroe: You once wrote, “If a nation cannot accept its past, or know its past, it has no future.” And I think you’re saying that if a nation or if the world does not care, it has no future, which is a beautiful thought for us all to take away today. I just want one last— one last beat on Anderson Ranch Art Center, which is where we are today. As you know from walking around, this is a center that sponsors artist residencies, studios, all about the handmade. Even the photography studio is still very much about the developing room. It reminds me of your own work, Weiwei, when you came back from New York to Beijing in 1993, and for a decade or more, you were at the center of bringing a community together of artists that had been decimated after Tiananmen. You published books showing their art side by side with interviews with Tehching Hsieh. You introduced them on a new level to the art and thought of Duchamp. You introduced them to the work of Jeff Koons side by side with the radical, crazy work that was being done by artists who were penniless and virtually stateless living in Beijing’s East Village. You had an art center, The Warehouse. You were a curator. You did so much to create a community at a time when that community had no self-identity, and you created that self-identity for those artists as citizens of the world, not just citizens of this troubled period of transition in China. Maybe Anderson Ranch in a small way is doing some of that. But what about the handmade? Can you tell us as an artist and someone who has made ceramics and crashed ceramics and broken ceramics and had ceramics made for you, what’s the value of that handmade in today’s world? Ai: I think—I still think handmade is so important because when I met all of those craftsmen I realized they’re the smartest people in the world because they are dealing with problems that they touch. They’re sensitive, and they know the material. They know the form, the shape. It takes so long. It becomes part of them. They move very gracefully. Then you realize the so-called intelligence is the way of making. You know? If we think something is meaningful only because it’s functional, where does the meaning come from? So the functional means how you make the functional. More than 90 percent of our intelligence is related to our hands, our way of sensitivity to carry out language, to extend feelings to another person. So all those things are so much related to craftsmanship, and that we are, as humans, pleased by a fine language. A fine carrying out of expressions makes us feel sometimes satisfied; sometimes makes us even feel dangerous because it’s leading to new experience, new possibilities. So I think this is always wonderful or fortunate to have people working with their hands.

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Bibliography Ai Weiwei, director. Human Flow. Amazon Studios, 2017. 140 min. https://www.amazon.com/ Human-Flow-Ai-Weiwei/dp/B075VJNKZC. Ai Weiwei and Alexandra Munroe. “Ai Weiwei in Conversation at Anderson Ranch.” Filmed July 18, 2018. YouTube video. Duration: 1:18. Posted August 2, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Y1CPWebi9sE. Alexandra Munroe with Philip Tinari and Hou Hanru. Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2017. Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. “Call for the Release of Ai Weiwei.” Change.org. Last modified July 22, 2011. https://www.change.org/p/call-for-the-release-of-ai-weiwei.

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PART V

Contested Objects: (Re)Presenting Cultural Heritage

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15 Re-Indigenizing Native Space in a University Context Craig Stone

Which story shall I tell? As a professor for almost forty years in two academic cultures, I have two to tell. This is the less familiar story.

Two Worlds on One Campus At California State University Long Beach (CSULB) I am a “joint appointment,” a faculty member hired into more than one academic unit, two in my case. I was tenured and promoted in both units. I am a professor of art in the School of Art in the College of the Arts (COTA). I have been teaching and producing studio art for exhibition and public artworks for more than forty years. I am also the director of American Indian Studies (AIS) in the College of Liberal Arts—the oldest AIS program west of the Mississippi, which began in 1968 and expanded during the 1970s when the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (1973) and the Indian SelfDetermination and Education Assistance Act (1975) funded training, employment, and other forms of support for American Indian college students. The difference between these academic cultures is illustrated in how I was first hired in 1981 as a part-time lecturer. To become a part-time lecturer in the art department, it was necessary to meet the university’s minimum hiring requirements, secure a recommendation from the head of a discipline-specific program, and obtain the department chair’s approval. In AIS, director Richard Band’s decision-making was based on that of Squamish elders. To become a part-time lecturer, one had to meet CSULB’s minimum teaching requirements, be a contributing member of the Southern California American Indian community or a member of a federally recognized tribe, teach a subject for which you had academic training and lived experience, and present a representative lecture to fifty to eighty members of the American Indian community, including not only the AIS faculty and director but also staff, students, the Community Advisory Board, and American Indian community members. This group recommended who would teach.

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Both academic units valued academic training and experience in a specialized area. In the art department’s vertical decision-making process one was approved by and indebted to one individual: a program head. In AIS’s horizontal decision-making process one was indebted to many: the director, staff, faculty, the Community Advisory Board, and the broader American Indian community.

Two Kinds of Artists and Venues Everyone is familiar with the activities required of academic artists in the international art world. The AIS standards are less well known. In writing the 1968 handbook for the Native American Studies Department (NAS) at University of California, Davis, Jack Forbes recommended three types of faculty: those with PhDs in subjects related to Native American culture and history, practicing artists and musicians trained in a traditional Native American context, and, most important, faculty with “broad practical experience in Indian Affairs, Tribal Management, Indian legal practice, [and] Indian community development.” The NAS artists were not to exhibit their work in the mainstream art world but in indigenous venues. This was and still is crucial in urban areas without reservations, where ancient ceremonial sites often lie beneath urban developments. Cultural events, including pow wows, gatherings, conferences, and ceremonies, are especially important to maintain and reinvigorate expressive culture in Southern California, which is home to the nation’s largest urban native population. About one hundred fifty thousand Native Americans reside in the counties of Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside. As I explain in what follows, CSULB’s Native American community has a long history of creating, claiming, protecting, and maintaining native cultural activities.

Cultural Sustainability In AIS we often ask how individual and institutional actions help sustain language, song, story, dance, culture, and ways of knowing of indigenous communities. I invite students to consider how and why visual culture by Native Americans and other groups comes into view and is contextualized and interpreted. Does the institution’s way of making culture visible effect long-term change? Whose power does it support? I have started a beading project featuring such questions (Figure 15.1). I show students an image of my loom and these questions in order to stimulate them to consider how their actions and the actions of others impact the survival of cultures, including their own.

Place and Responsibility The CSULB campus is located on Puvungna, the place of emergence for the Gabrielino/ Tongva and Acjachemen/Juaneño people and the birthplace of the Chingichngish spiritual philosophy, which reaches south to northern Mexico and east to Arizona. Puvungna was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the “Puvungna Indian Village Sites” in 1974. Often translated as “The Gathering Place” or “The Place of Emergence,” the name refers to both a large district at and beyond CSULB and the twenty-two-acre parcel of

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FIGURE 15.1  PowerPoint slide by Craig Stone featuring beading loom and overlaid “Cultural Arts Questions.” Courtesy of Craig Stone.

campus, where California Indians hold private tribal/intertribal gatherings and ceremonies, as well as public events like California Indian Awareness Day. In 1978 I and other members of the Native American Student Council (NASC) met with university president Steven Horn to request the return and reburial of a Gabrielino/ Tongva ancestor who had been unearthed on campus and kept in the archeology lab. President Horn agreed to fund the 1979 reburial and erect a sign acknowledging the significance of Puvungna, and he suggested planting indigenous plants on the site. In 1990 the US Congress enacted the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). Twenty-six years later, in summer 2016, the remains of almost one hundred ancestors that were previously housed in the department of anthropology were reburied at Puvungna. Led by our NAGPRA committee and supported by the administration, this reburial of indigenous ancestral remains was the first and only one on a university campus under NAGPRA. We are currently preparing the remaining ancestors in the NAGPRA collection for reburial. In order to develop a landscape design to honor these ancestors and heal and protect Puvungna for future generations, we developed a conceptual plan with Tongva and Acjachemen families, elders, and indigenous architect Johnpaul Jones to restore the land in ways that culturally sustain the Tongva and Acjachemen people and expand the university’s sustainability efforts.

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Whose Consensus? Whose Authority? On Thursday, September 19, 2019, before we were able to present the conceptual design approach for the site to the community and without the university’s knowledge, an unauthorized and unsupervised contractor entered the sacred site of Puvungna with heavy machinery and began to smooth out piles of earth that had recently been placed at Puvungna. When this occurred, I and the California Indian members of the Committee on Native American Burial Remains and Cultural Patrimony issued an open letter to the CSULB community to request that all movement of earth at Puvungna be halted until the California American Indian community was consulted. We began meeting with California Indians with a direct connection to Puvungna who are Tongva, Gabrielino, Acjachemen, Juaneño, and Chumash people active with their tribal councils, cultural groups, clans, and families. Many of these individuals and their family members also were litigants in the 1990s lawsuit to protect Puvungna from a proposed housing and commercial development. Thirty of these California Indians with ties to Puvungna became the founding members of the United Descendants of Puvungna Council (UDPC) and issued the “Declaration of the Rights of United Descendants of Puvungna Council”1 in alignment with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, which in 2007 affirmed the right of indigenous peoples to “maintain, protect and develop the past, present and future manifestations of their cultures,” including historical lands, artifacts, and other resources.2 In its declaration, which it shared with CSULB leadership and state agencies, the UDPC avowed its right of stewardship and affirmed its right to define through member consensus the protocols for honoring, protecting, and preserving the sacred site of Puvungna and invited the university to develop a memorandum of agreement with the UDPC. While negotiations have not yet begun with the university administration, the UDPC recommendations in the declaration have motivated the College of Liberal Arts to assist in increasing the knowledge about Puvungna on campus. Led by AIS and Anthropology, and in consultation with the UDPC, six departments are funding and producing a film and website to educate the campus community about the meaning and significance of Puvungna. We hope to expand training collaborations across the university. In AIS, our long-term collective goal has been to assist in developing a best-practices model for universities operating on lands of indigenous peoples. In our case, campus land is a sacred site. The practices we advocate include protocols for honoring indigenous peoples and sacred spaces, methods for re-indigenizing, restoring, and protecting lands that support and sustain indigenous cultural practices, and ways of educating the public concerning local Indigenous culture. A critical aspect of relations between universities and Native Americans concerns voice and representation, beginning with acknowledgment that local indigenous native consensus and authority matter. While allies are always welcome, people who wish to be beneficial allies should always defer to the leadership of the actual indigenous peoples of the areas where they are located. Local indigenous peoples are the rightful caretakers and stewards of native lands, resources, artifacts, and culture.

Expressive Culture and Self-Representation While awareness of Puvungna is increasing, there are many who are already familiar with our Native American Pow Wow every March (Plate 21). This venue for regalia, drums,

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dance, storytelling, and song production, which attracts more than six thousand people, is one of the largest public events on campus. Respected members of the American Indian community speak to and represent indigenous culture and values to the campus community while expressing support for American Indian students and campus employees. Some pow wow participants are the great-great grandchildren of those who started the pow wow in 1969. My first CSULB pow wow was fifty years ago, six years before I became a student here. I have participated as a singer, dancer, sound man, and, for the past thirty years, as the faculty advisor. The pow wow provides a public arena for families and individuals in the urban American Indian community to represent their families and traditions. Selected by active participants in the urban Indian pow wow community, these are voices not often heard in academic settings or art venues.

Mortar Boards and Eagle Feathers The AIS program logo is a beaded mortarboard and eagle feather. In 1978 the NASC asked, “What would the headdress for tomorrow’s Indian leaders look like?” Someone said, “A beaded buckskin mortarboard with an eagle feather.” All agreed and this became the design for our third annual American Indian Leaders of Today and Tomorrow (AILOTT) conference poster. I created the beaded buckskin mortarboard, Richard Sears photographed it, and Irving Jumping Eagle came up with the slogan (Figure 15.2). The poster, which promoted university education, was later exhibited in the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum as an image of American Indian self-determination. Over time we received phone calls from families asking if they could make a similar mortarboard for their graduating relatives, and we were honored that families wanted to do this. Today families in the United States and Canada make their own mortarboards from traditional materials or bead standard mortarboards and attach eagle feathers to them for student graduation ceremonies. Many schools in the United States currently forbid wearing a beaded mortarboard and eagle feather at graduation ceremonies. With the 2018 passage of California state law AB–1248, K–12 students gained the right to wear culturally significant adornment in their graduation ceremonies. The conceptualization and writing of this law began as a class assignment in an American Indian studies course at California State University San Marcos.

Master Narratives, Unconscious Censorship, and Speaking for Others One master narrative ingrained in “American” culture is the slogan that originated with Manifest Destiny, which is now frequently employed by social justice “allies.” The slogan “We are all immigrants” is emblazoned on signs well-meaning protesters display, and it also serves as a chant. These acts of symbolic annihilation of Native Americans often go unnoticed. I recently received an email from an academic with instructions on how to “decolonize” my syllabus. Ironically, indigenous peoples were not included in the list of people to include in “decolonizing.” Concepts appropriated by socially conscious settler-colonialists from a broad range of ethnic backgrounds reinforce their agency and power, and the symbolic annihilation continues.

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FIGURE 15.2 Poster for conference of American Indian Leaders of Today and Tomorrow, 1979. Courtesy of California State University Long Beach American Indian Studies.

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Acknowledging Wrongs Two years ago CSULB retired a university mascot associated with the genocide of California Indians. After the founding of CSULB in 1949, the idea of students and alumni continuing in the footsteps of the university’s founders, known as “49ers,” became conflated with the 1849 California Gold Rush. The university seal still bears the emblem of a crossed pick and shovel, added to the seal in 1965 to reinforce the 49er theme. The first campus mascot was a mule named Nugget, who was later replaced with Prospector Pete. This new mascot performed at sports events, and a bronze statue of Prospector Pete was erected on campus. The Native American community expressed concern for fifty years, yet the genocide of California Indians was rarely acknowledged. Educating people took many decades. Avoiding 1960s-style protests, we produced temporary public artworks. I placed a blindfold on the prospector statue and added a temporary plaque with the words “Blind to History,” along with the dates of the California Gold Rush (Figure 15.3). When students searched for these dates on the Internet, they found information about the California Indian genocide/holocaust. The American Indian Student Council (AISC) placed hundreds of yellow flags to form three shapes of California in front of the Department of History (Plate 22). The decreasing numbers of flags illustrated the decline in the California Indian population from one hundred fifty thousand at the beginning of the Gold Rush in 1846, to thirty-five thousand in 1873, and to twenty thousand in 1900. In the Tongva language each flag said, “Count what you

FIGURE 15.3  Craig Stone’s unsigned installation Blind to History, 2015, California State University Long Beach  (CSULB) at Puvungna,  featured in  Daily49er,  CSULB student newspaper, October 29, 2015. Courtesy of Daily49er.

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value.” We held public events and panel discussions and invited professors from American Indian studies, history, American studies, and Jewish studies to discuss when and how they first learned about California Indian genocide. No one had learned about it in school. We composed round dance songs in the Tongva and Chumash languages and held flash mob round dances around the prospector statue. Once aware, CSULB students passed a resolution supported by all levels of campus leadership to change the mascot and disassociate the university from the Gold Rush and the genocide of California Indians. Eight thousand students voted to select a new mascot that is older than humans, lives in the ocean, and is indigenous—a shark. The prospector statue in June 2020 was removed from the LA-5 Plaza and stored on campus for possible relocation to the Alumni Center, where the history of this earlier mascot can be discussed. Student design teams began working on proposals to redesign the plaza. In support of the mascot issue, the statewide California Faculty Association (CFA), working with the CFA Indigenous Peoples Caucus, passed a resolution to eliminate human mascots from the CSU system. In July 2019 Governor Gavin Newsom issued an apology to California Indians for the state’s participation in the genocide of California Indians and advocated teaching this history in California schools.

Do You Know Where You Stand? One antidote to symbolic annihilation is acknowledging indigenous people of the land at campus events, gatherings, and class meetings. Our academic senate, president, provost, and some deans, chairs, faculty, and staff do this now, and many campuses in the CSU have adopted land acknowledgment statements. A CFA resolution requiring land acknowledgment on all campuses will be considered by the new CSU chancellor, Joseph I. Castro, this year. With 109 federally recognized tribes in California and seventy-eight entities petitioning for recognition, land acknowledgment is important to create awareness of whose land we stand upon. At CSULB we stand upon a very special place, which CSU Chancellor Timothy P. White acknowledged at the 2016 reburial of ancestors at Puvungna (Figure 15.4).

Fifty Years of AIS The history of education is different for indigenous people than for others. Forced assimilation in the United States and Canada was a tool for cultural genocide, and this educational legacy continues to impact indigenous people in North America. In the CSU system ethnic studies has existed for only fifty years, and prior to ethnic studies everything taught in universities about American Indians was taught through a Judeo-Christian Western European lens. When I was a student, American Indian art in COTA was presented using a universalist aesthetics framework employing Jungian and/or Freudian theories. It was, as they say today, a “White Supremacist” approach. What were missing were Native American perspectives. The history of education for others about indigenous peoples has likewise been fraught with problems, most notably the lack of Native American voice and representation. It was not until the late 1960s that ethnic studies were established. CSULB at that time became the first to create an autonomous American Indian Studies Program and San Francisco State University—a CSU entity—created the first College of Ethnic Studies, which consisted of American Indian Studies, Asian American Studies, Black Studies, and La Raza Studies.

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FIGURE 15.4  Poster commemorating 2016 NAGPRA reburial of ancestors at Puvungna. Courtesy of California State University Long Beach American Indian Studies.

The CSULB AIS program grew during the 1970s and early 1980s, eventually offering interdisciplinary bachelor of arts and master of arts degrees in American Indian Studies, which increased the presence of ethnic studies at CSULB. While many of the CSUs in the 1980s maintained ethnic studies programs or departments, there was a continual decline in support for ethnic studies. At CSULB this decline was tied to

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a required course on human diversity that was originally taught primarily by ethnic studies units but over time was taught by departments across the university with fewer and fewer courses taught by ethnic studies units. In the weekend after the 1992 LA uprisings against the acquittal of four police officers charged with the brutal beating of Rodney King, CSU ethnic studies leaders gathered at Cal State San Jose and formed the CSU Ethnic Studies Council, with leadership comprised of a representative from each of the four ethnic studies caucuses. I was chosen to represent the American Indian Studies Caucus and have been reelected to this post over the past twentyfive years. During this period there was once again a continuing decline in the support for ethnic studies in the CSU, with the possible exception of San Francisco State, which had the only College of Ethnic Studies in the nation. In 2014 anticipation of a budget crisis in the CSU stimulated a response at CSULB that would have decimated ethnic studies. The first phase of the plan was to downgrade Africana Studies from a department to a program, eliminate the master’s degree in Asian and Asian American studies, and change the status of the American Indian Studies Program so that it would become just another offering in the College of Liberal Art’s history department. Dr. Maulana Karenga spearheaded a movement to inform California citizens and legislators about these developments. When they made their concerns about these negative actions known, proposed changes at CSULB and other CSU campuses came to a halt; CSU Chancellor White issued a two-year moratorium on alteration of ethnic studies programs until a report by the CSU Task Force on the Advancement of Ethnic Studies could be completed. This task force included representation from the CSU Ethnic Studies Council, and I became one of the authors of the report. The task force recommended that students be required to take an ethnic studies course in order to graduate from the CSU. In the years that followed, the CSU Ethnic Studies Council in partnership with the CFA and a group of legislators led by Assemblywoman Dr. Shirley Weber advocated that this coursework be taught by ethnic studies departments and programs—an effort not embraced by the CSU leadership. In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of 2020, Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB–1460 into law, which requires CSU students, in order to graduate, to take a course in ethnic studies taught by ethnic studies units and implemented in consultation with the CSU Ethnic Studies Council Steering Committee. This is a major achievement that will have a profound impact—broadening the exposure of California citizens and others enrolled in the CSU to a multicultural education. In the CSULB AIS program the number of courses and tenure-track faculty will ultimately double. The first courses to be offered meeting the new requirement, which will be taught in fall 2021, will signal the reemergence of ethnic studies in the CSU. And with the State Board of Education’s unanimous approval in March 2021 of the nation’s first statewide model for K–12 ethnic studies instruction, many more students in California will have the opportunity to develop an awareness and understanding of the epistemologies, histories, views, contributions, and expressive forms of Asian, Black, Latinx, and Native American peoples—from an ethnic studies perspective.

Unexamined Censorship and Meaningful Collaborations As I prepared my contribution to this anthology, several questions came to mind. Are the most insidious forms of censorship—unconscious and unnoticed—the by-product of neglect and erasure of cultural expressions that do not sustain the Western/international art world, except as topics or subjects? How can universities and art institutions that have consciously and unconsciously extended the project of Manifest Destiny acknowledge the roles they have

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played in—and the benefits they have accrued from—the erasure of indigenous peoples? How can they use their power to support American Indians today? What meaningful strategies can universities and art institutions employ to ensure local indigenous peoples are collaborators in making decisions that impact their communities? How can they make visible the stories that so often go untold? To acknowledge the indigenous people of the land we often ask, “Do you know where you stand?” Where do you stand?

Notes 1 The UDPC submitted the “Declaration of the Rights of United Descendants of Puvungna Council” on January 14, 2021, to CSULB President Jane Close Conoley and other university officials, City of Long Beach officials, officers of the California Native American Heritage Commission, the State Historic Preservation Officer and Deputy Officer, Los Angeles City/County Native American Indian Commission officials, and Governor Gavin Newsom. 2 “United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People,” September 13, 2017, https:// www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2018/11/ UNDRIP_E_web.pdf

Bibliography “American Indian Studies.” CSULB American Indian Studies website. www.cla.csulb.edu/departments/ americanindianstudies/ CSULB American Indian Studies. “CSULB Land and Territorial Acknowledgment.” Summer 2020. www.csulb.edu/sites/default/files/u69781/csulb_land_and_territorial_acknowledgments_faq_002. pdf. Deloria Jr., Vine, and Daniel R. Wildcat. Power and Place: Indian Education in America. Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2001. Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the US: Revisioning American History. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2014. Forbes, Jack. Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008. Johnson, Troy R. The Occupation of Alcatraz Island: Indian Self-Determination and the Rise of Indian Activism. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Johnson, Troy, Joane Nagel, and Duane Champagne, eds. American Indian Activism: Alcatraz to the Longest Walk. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Kidwell, Clara Sue, and Alan Velie, eds. Native American Studies. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2013. LaDuke, Winona. All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1999. LaDuke, Winona. Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming. Boston, MA: South End Press, 2005.

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Madly, Benjamin. An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873. The Lamar Series in Western History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Theisz, R. D., and Severt Young Bear. Standing in the Light: A Lakota Way of Seeing. Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 1996. Treuer, Anton. Everything You Wanted to Know about American Indians but Were Afraid to Ask. Saint Paul: Minnesota Historical Press and Borealis Books, 2012. Tuhiwai-Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books, 2012. “United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.” September 13, 2017. www.un.org/ development/desa/indigenouspeoples/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2018/11/UNDRIP_E_web.pdf Wilson, Daryl Babe. The Morning the Sun Went Down: A Memoir. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Press, 1998. Wilson, Daryl Babe. The Sound of Rattles and Clappers: A Collection of New California Indian Writing. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1994.

16 African Cultural Heritage: Erasure, Restitution, and Digital Image Regimes Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie

In this essay I analyze the intersection of museum discourse, contemporary art, and global relational politics by reviewing how ongoing debates about restitution impact claims of Western museums to ownership and display of African cultural heritage. The canonical museum (aka “universal” museum) is inheritor of and repository for the plunder of the globe by Western imperialists, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the Berlin Conference of 1884–5, European countries (with the United States as a signatory) partitioned Africa among themselves. King Leopold II of Belgium, who was a principal organizer of the conference, secured control over the Congo. There he executed a brutal policy of resource extraction that killed an estimated ten million Congolese and resulted in the wholesale removal of cultural treasures from the Congo to the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren. Similar ruinous colonial incursions such as the British invasion of the Ashanti Empire (1895) and the Benin Kingdom (1897), and France’s consolidation of its African colonies, especially in West Africa, allowed Western museums to accumulate massive amounts of African cultural patrimony, including bronze sculptures from the kingdoms of Dahomey and Benin and spoils from France’s Dakar-Djibouti Ethnographic and Linguistic Mission in the early 1930s.1 Zoë Strother notes that European colonization of Africa engendered iconoclasm—active destruction of indigenous cultural objects, institutions, and religious practices. These in turn made vast amounts of African artworks (discarded, seized by colonizing powers as loot, turned over to Christian missionaries by Africans newly converted to Christianity, or collected by colonial officials) available to the Western market.2 The competition to collect these artworks by European institutions led to the establishment of major ethnographic museums in various European cities, including London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Rome, Stockholm, and Germany. However, in the contemporary era these museums now face major questions about their role in abetting colonization and plunder of cultural resources, especially as indigenous peoples worldwide demand repatriation of important cultural artifacts and restitution for how their removal affected these societies. Mass relocation of African cultural patrimony, which constitutes erasure of vital forms of cultural heritage, prevents young Africans from engaging their ancestral heritage and redirects

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their attention to the foreign locations where these artworks are held. If the definition of the term censorship includes the control of information and ideas circulated within a society, I propose, the relocation of African cultural patrimony to the West is a form of censorship as it circumscribes and regulates information about African cultural history and undermines how this history might be used to support modern African subjectivities. Here censorship is not only about being prevented from speaking of or engaging with absent cultural patrimony. It is about how erasure of cultural and historical knowledge renders them invisible within contemporary cultural formations. I propose also that marginalization of African cultural registers impacts the reception of contemporary African art in the global context. An unspoken but very real art world requirement is that indigenous and contemporary African arts conform to Western norms— one through the structural order of museum collections and display, the other through marginalization of efforts by African artists to express their historical and cultural realities. Conformity to these restrictive standards engenders a form of self-censorship among contemporary African artists and a denigration of artworks that reference aspects of African culture. Thus, while we find a plethora of references to African cultural forms and imagery in modern African art of the colonial and postcolonial periods, many contemporary African artists (at least those most visible in Western sites of exhibition and display) avoid references to African cultural registers in order to make their works acceptable to Western curators.3 This is a form of self-censorship that erases Africa from the site of its own creativity by rendering its cultural forms and symbols irrelevant to the contemporary reality of its artists. The Eurocentric nature of how African art is ordered and displayed in Western museums often means that they represent less the art of Africa and more the European ideas about what art in Africa is or should be. The history of European collecting and display of African art thus displaces analysis of cultural transformations in the African locales where these artworks originate. In this regard, recent events crystalize the debate over African cultural patrimony in Western museums. In November 2017 French president Emmanuel Macron gave a speech at the University of Ouagadougou in which he endorsed the repatriation of African artworks and artifacts from French museums to their respective countries of origin. Macron was responding to the growing debate in France over the fate of artworks and artifacts taken from several African countries during French colonial rule. Highlighting the importance of African heritage being accessible to Africans in their own countries and not only in the capitals of Europe, Macron called for “conditions be[ing] met” within the next five years for their temporary or permanent restitution. More recently, in December 2018, the long-gestating Museum of Black Civilizations (Musée des Civilizations Noir) (MCN) in Dakar, Senegal, finally was completed and opened. Leopold Sedar Senghor, a pan-Africanist philosopher and the first president of Senegal, crafted the original vision for the museum, which he saw as a vital aspect of the reclamation of African cultural identity in the postcolonial era. Taken together, the MCN’s opening and Macron’s stance on repatriation signal a new phase in postcolonial Africa’s struggle for equality and equity in the global sphere of culture. Macron’s speech received global attention and caused museums and African countries alike to revisit the vexed issue of restitution of objects looted during Western colonization and, importantly, recognition of colonialist acts of violence against Africans. In March 2018 Macron commissioned a report from academic researchers Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy on how to best implement the return of thousands of African artworks held in French museums. Published on November 21, 2018, the Sarr-Savoy report, titled The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Towards a New Relational Ethics, is a 252-page proposal for a bilateral agreement between France and certain African countries that outlines a road map for the repatriation of African cultural patrimony. The report argues for restitution based

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on France’s history of colonial collecting and indicts European museums for becoming the public archives of a colonial system of appropriation and alienation. It calls for French museums to produce thorough inventories of all sub-Saharan African cultural patrimony and related documentation in their collections and to share them with all affected African countries that could then make claims for the return of specific artworks. The report further recommends that France return all claimed artworks to these countries.4 Days after the Sarr-Savoy report’s release, Macron displayed his resolve to follow through on its recommendations by agreeing to the Republic of Benin’s demand for the return of twenty-six artworks (Plate 23), including nineteenth-century iron figures of King Glele on display at the Louvre that French troops had looted during their 1892 invasion of the Kingdom of Dahomey. These artworks are examples of a key point of the Sarr-Savoy report: the sheer volume of African artifacts in French and other European-style universal museum collections reveals a rationalized system of exploitation through which colonial authorities systematically plundered African societies. As with the exploitation of Africans in the era of transatlantic slavery and African natural resources during and after the colonial period, Western countries have never acknowledged that Africans have a right to their own bodies and resources. Macron’s support of restitution represents a major step forward in the debate over African ownership and stewardship of its cultural patrimony. However, I argue that returning the artworks is only part of a bigger issue. Discussions about restitution need to officially acknowledge African ownership of the intellectual property rights of African cultural patrimony and define mechanisms by which the continent can benefit from the value such cultural patrimony generates. More importantly, there needs to be robust discussion about the ramifications of emerging digital regimes and who should own the digital rights to images of African artworks. As Yaniv Benhamou writes: Digital museums disseminated over technology platforms and social networks are fast becoming the norm. But they raise a number of legal issues ranging from copyright to image rights and data protection to contract law. Copyright, in particular, plays a key role in that it governs whether and how content can be used.5 The development of new image reproduction protocols would allow for the manipulation of images of cultural artifacts within digital space. This would include current forms of digital reproduction and emergent forms of virtualization, such as interactive virtual reality platforms, holographic imagery, and new media forms yet to be invented. This particular aspect needs to be central to the discourse of cultural patrimony. Of what significance are these digital image regimes that monetize cultural production? What are their implications for debates over repatriation and restitution? How can African countries benefit from these recent technological developments? A definition of terms is in order: repatriation speaks to the restoration of stolen African artworks to their countries of origin while restitution combines that process with recompense for injury arising from how these artworks were removed from Africa in the first place. Restitution also returns to the original owners all intellectual property rights of the artworks in question. We can use the corpus of artworks looted from the Kingdom of Benin by the British in 1897 to illustrate how these terms are entangled. The invasion of Benin was initiated by the British government, acting upon requests from the Royal Niger Company to remove the Benin king, who was seen as an obstacle to trade. (This highlights the fact that private companies paved the way for colonization of Africans through their trading activities. Most often, they served as a vanguard for European

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colonization.) Subsequently, in February 1897, a British force of about twelve hundred men supported by several hundred African auxiliaries besieged Benin City. The British Punitive Expedition, as the colonial force was called, bombarded the city for three days from the Benin port of Ughoton, torched the capital, Benin City, and looted five hundred years’ worth of bronze, brass, and ivory sculptures—a national treasure that constituted the royal archive of Benin’s history. The Benin kingdom was incorporated into the colonial nation of Nigeria, and the Benin king, Ovonramwen, who acceded to the throne in 1888, was deposed and exiled. He remained in exile until his death in 1914. As the Sarr-Savoy report notes, similar invasions of African kingdoms occurred under British, French, German, and Italian colonial occupations from 1890 to 1930. The corpus of Benin art in Western art museums dates from those removed from Benin in 1897 and is one of the most studied archives of art from Africa. The expedition directors, along with the researchers and anthropologists who accompanied them, conducted an exacting documentation of all items taken from the king’s palace as a precursor to sharing the works among the invaders and selling them to various European museum collections. We thus have a good record of their locations worldwide. The Benin artworks were the private property of a succession of kings who spent vast amounts of national funds to import brass, initially from the Mediterranean, and then directly from Europe. Their royal patronage also sustained the Iguneromwon (bronze caster) and Igbesamwan (ivory sculptor) guilds that produced these works for Benin kings over the centuries. Some objects, such as the famous ivory pendant mask of Iyoba Idia, were taken from the body of the deposed Oba (king) Ovonramwen. All in all, these artworks are therefore the private property of the Benin kings, looted in the course of an illegal war waged on an independent kingdom. Since this unfortunate event occurred, their heirs have repeatedly requested the return of these artifacts (Figure 16.1). It is important to note that as early as the fifteenth century, trade in ivory saltcellars brought Benin art to the attention of European Renaissance collectors such as the Medicis. Art from later periods of Benin history showed significant change from these earlier examples. In fact, evidence of internal developments in Benin art is one reason why it was rapturously received in European museum collections after the invasion.6 The damage done to Benin cultural heritage by the invasion continues to impact the reception of Benin art today. The location of African cultural patrimony, such as Benin artworks in Western museums and private collections, prevents the emergence of objects of equal value in Benin or other parts of Africa. European dealers, museums, and collectors deride newer Benin bronze artworks as “fakes,” which helps sustain and increase the value of those Benin bronzes that can be traced back to the 1897 plunder of Benin. Ironically the initial acts of theft and vandalism are now used as the primary framework for validating the originality of Benin bronze arts in auction houses and museums. By contrast, Benin-produced works that build upon tradition to establish new precedents furthering the evolution of established genres (qualities that are understood as legitimizing contemporary European and American art) are derided as inauthentic, foreign to what is deemed the legitimate corpus of Benin art. Bronze artworks produced in Benin since the invasion are thereby prevented from gaining value as they are considered to be outside the corpus of Benin art. Benin artworks had particular functions and protocols of display within the cultural matrix of the kingdom and its history. For example, most of the artworks were clustered in groups on royal altars and were combined in specific ways: a bronze head would usually have an ivory tusk implanted in it, carved with symbolic imagery referring to the reign of a particular king. In the European museums where most of these artworks are exhibited today, they have been subjected to different display protocols that separate clustered objects into

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FIGURE 16.1 Royal ancestor heads (Uhunmwun Elao), from the former Benin Kingdom, part of modern-day Nigeria, eighteenth century (R) and nineteenth century (L). Displayed at Quai Branly Museum, Paris, November 23, 2018. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer.

single individual objects. Paired objects, such as bronze heads with their ivory tusks, have been separated and often reside in different museums. This transformation of their basic form significantly changes their meaning. Finally, the plunder of Benin bronzes affects how scholars produce knowledge about the kingdom. There were more than thirty-six guilds charged with various functions within the Benin royal palace; of these, only the bronze casters and ivory sculptors have been subjects of sustained research. This has undermined study of other forms of Benin cultural expression, as well as the impact of Benin hegemony on the arts and visual cultures of its neighbors in the upper Niger Delta. Restitution will redirect attention to these overlooked aspects of cultural production and greatly expand our understanding of the shifts and changes that took place in this region from the fifteenth century to date. Macron’s speech and the report he commissioned establish an important foundation for furthering the debate on restitution of African cultural patrimony. The Sarr-Savoy report examines France’s role in colonial conquest and the disposition of artworks gained through colonial plunder that are housed in French museums. This brings us to the notion of the European-style universal/encyclopedic museum where artworks looted from Africa are currently displayed. The art museum, whose mission is to collect and display art, categorizes its collections in specific ways, and this in turn imposes meaning upon the objects. Emma Barker defines this as the structural order of museum collecting. Artworks are culture specific but also circulate widely through cultural exchanges, trade, and conquest. However, encyclopedic museums aspire to collect and display representative art from all cultures. African art collections in such museums derive from this ideal of totalizing representation.

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However, as Tom Flynn suggests, “the revival of the universal museum exposes a widening gulf between a backward-glancing museology with its roots in nineteenth-century imperialism and an accelerating trend towards greater cross-cultural awareness in a pluralist society.”7 The British Museum is an encyclopedic museum that encodes a history of global British imperialism. France’s Musée du Quai Branly and Germany’s ethnology museums (such as Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, whose collections are being consolidated in the newly built Humboldt Forum) are also examples of these kinds of institutions. Colonial adventures by Britain, France, and Germany aided expansion of their museum collections in the early twentieth century. For example, the Sarr-Savoy report notes that “before 1885, the African collections housed at the Musée du quai Branly were comprised of roughly less than a thousand objects. Between 1885 and 1960, the number of cultural heritage items skyrocketed to an increase of more than 45,000 pieces.”8 Today the Quai Branly contains more than eighty thousand African artworks, most secured in conditions of colonial control. The SarrSavoy report concludes that “[F]ar from being a mere fortuitous addition of cultural items gathered from repeated missions, this large sum of items reveals the existence of a veritable rationalized system of exploitation, in some ways comparable to the exploitation of natural resources.”9 American museums, while not directly involved in colonization of Africa, have also profited massively from donations of looted artworks, accessioning objects whose identity as colonial plunder implicates them in the restitution debate. Encyclopedic museums therefore face increasing criticism about the assumptions underlying their stewardship of cultural artifacts that were mostly looted from indigenous peoples during the colonial period. The kind of aggregation of art in such museums is no longer possible in the contemporary era. Furthermore, their Eurocentric ordering often means that these artworks reflect European ideas of what art should be. In this age of increasing awareness of how such museums are implicated in issues of hegemonic dominance through cultural patrimony aggregations, the demand for restitution argues it is important for these museums to rethink their impact and how they represent the art of other cultures. Whether or not French museums accept Macron’s exhortation to return African cultural patrimony to their countries of origin, the Sarr-Savoy report and Macron’s initial act of restitution has forever changed the debate over African cultural patrimony in Western museums. Many African countries immediately reiterated claims for the return of their cultural patrimony. However, many European individuals and governments unsurprisingly reacted to the Sarr-Savoy report with indignation and suggested that Macron’s actions threatened to empty their museums of important holdings. They argued against returning artworks, although some conceded that periodic circulation of African cultural patrimony to Africa might be a solution to the current problem. Some museum officials suggested loaning African artworks to their countries of origin instead of wholesale repatriation. In fact, the Benin Dialogue Group (BGD), reflecting on the disposition of the Benin bronzes, outlined an agreement for the British Museum to “loan” these artworks to Nigeria upon completion of a new museum in Benin City. The BDG conceded that such “loans” do not constitute an agreement by African countries to waive their demand for repatriation of looted cultural objects. The BDG’s suggestion that Western museums loan African artworks from their collections to their original producers nevertheless constitutes a tacit acknowledgment that Western museums have some intrinsic rights to the contested artworks. By offering loans rather than actual restitution, emboldened Western museum officials set conditions for how such works should be repatriated. In this manner, they assert authority over the discourse and reinforce colonial mindsets that deny Africans agency over their own cultural heritage. The Benin Dialogue Group’s conclusions highlight the principal argument against restitution, which is that African countries do not have the necessary infrastructure to securely

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safeguard and exhibit these artworks. This overlooks the fact that various African societies carefully secured important artworks through cultural rituals and injunctions, sometimes for many centuries, as in the case of Benin bronzes. Their carefully constructed safeguards were destabilized by the European colonial invasions described earlier, which specifically targeted important institutions responsible for maintaining these artworks. The idea that Africans cannot be trusted to safeguard their own cultural heritage has therefore been a fundamental argument of a Western museum oligarchy that essentially controls a global system of cultural valuation bolstered by its horde of artifacts plundered mainly from African and other indigenous peoples across the world. The infernal logic of this counter-narrative is a favorite ploy of apologists for the existing museum power structure, and its arrogant defense of the right of Western museums to keep the loot of their imperial plunder amounts in many ways to crass racism. The Museum of Black Civilizations (Musée des Civilizations Noir) (MCN) rebuts in the most spectacular fashion the argument that Africans cannot be trusted to safeguard their own cultural heritage. The sprawling edifice is a world-class institution in both its architecture and operational protocols. It is one of several similar museums under construction in many parts of Africa that are designed to house, among other treasures, artworks restituted from Western museums. The museum directs attention to the fact that African cultural patrimony consists of more than the figurative sculptures and ritual objects that constitute most of the current African holdings in Western museums. It argues that preservation of intangible cultural heritage (songs, dance, performance, geospatial constructs, and varied aspects of culture) is also important in the project to recover Africa’s cultural memory in the postcolonial era. The museum thus represents an important step toward the realization of an Africa with a strong cultural identity, complex heritage, shared values, and ethics. Hamady Bocoum, director of the new museum, stated that the MCN is focused on collaborating with other institutions in Africa, cultivating international partnerships, and highlighting the works of living African artists.10 The MCN’s desire to recover and safeguard African cultural patrimony contrasts with the intransigence of the Humboldt Forum museum, whose collection includes a significant amount of looted African artifacts. The Humboldt Forum Museum complex in Berlin is a part of the German’s government’s plans to restore the architectural and cultural history of the city in the post-unification period. Arguably the largest and most ambitious cultural project in Germany, the museum’s architecture echoes that of the famous Berlin Palace, and it was designed to serve as a central depository for artworks from Berlin’s Ethnological Museum (formerly located at Dahlem) and the Museum of Asian Art. The disposition of large numbers of looted African artworks in its collection has brought negative global attention to the Humboldt Forum Museum, whose leader has been accused of marginalizing the issue of restitution.11 Germany has long been accused of a lack of transparency toward its colonial history in Africa, which was one of the bloodiest despite its short duration. The genocide German colonialists perpetrated against the Herero and Namaqua peoples of Namibia (numbers vary, but combined deaths total more than one hundred and fifty thousand people) was a clear precursor to Nazi atrocities, but it has not yet been properly accounted for in a similar manner. Given the institution’s silence on the issue of German colonialism, critics of the Humboldt Forum Museum accuse it of celebrating militarism and effacing German culpability in dispossessing Africans of their cultural patrimony. The museum claims that the history of colonialism will be one of the main subjects of the museum complex, but lack of adequate funding for provenance research of African cultural patrimony in German collections suggests the Humboldt Forum Museum is not prioritizing this issue. There are,

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however, ongoing efforts in Germany to attend to the disposition of artifacts acquired during the colonial era. Sections of the Guide to Handling of Collectibles from Colonial Contexts, which was published in 2018 by the German Museums Association, highlight the issue of restitution, but the Guide mostly emphasizes as solutions loans and international cooperation with source countries rather than outright repatriation of artworks. The Sarr-Savoy report notes that the return of African cultural objects bears the promise of a new relational history through which a new economy of exchange might emerge that no longer sees the African continent merely as a site of predatory extraction. In a similar manner to Macron’s speech, it generated a new global momentum for restitution. Due to the SarrSavoy report, we have already seen a reiteration of earlier demands for return of valuable cultural objects (for example, the demand by Nigeria for the return of the Benin bronzes), as well as new demands by other West African countries for restitution. Furthermore, the Museum of Black Civilizations’ plans to collaborate with other African institutions and highlight different forms of tangible and intangible African cultural patrimony speak to a new movement among scholars and culture workers to redefine the continent’s cultural histories on its own terms through flagship institutions. These are all good developments, but we also need an international discourse that recognizes African ownership of the intellectual property rights of its cultural patrimony and allows the continent to benefit from the value such cultural patrimony generates worldwide. The issue at stake is therefore not only whether and how to restitute/repatriate African cultural patrimony. There is an equally important question concerning ownership of the image and intellectual property rights of African artworks and heritage in the digital age. The future of wealth lies in the control of intellectual property rights of specific cultural properties; we need a discourse that acknowledges the importance of safeguarding the intellectual property rights of African cultural patrimony so that African countries can benefit from the ancillary values they produce. These include image rights, reproduction rights, licensing of artworks for various purposes, and of course publication and educational protocols that disseminate important information about returned artworks. Of what use is the return by Western museums of African artworks in their collections if the museums retain the ability to deploy virtual images of these artworks and the right to authorize digital reproductions that are indistinguishable from the original? Control of these functions by Western museums renders the actual African artworks valueless by co-opting their value within online/virtual interactive contexts. The circulation and consumption of images increasingly engender important questions about who owns the images encoded in photographic and digital representations of African art. As image banks become more prevalent and influential, it is necessary to question why the endless appropriation of African art never benefits its original cultural producers and owners. Africans have been subject to ever-compounding losses, from the looting of the continent’s artworks during the colonial period to their display and monetization within the museum and gallery spaces of the global art market, and now to the monetization of images of these artworks in the context of contemporary global media. This continuous process of dispossession and loss of equity has implications for decisions about ownership, restitution, and repatriation of African cultural patrimony. Macron’s speech and the resultant Sarr-Savoy report identify restitution as a major issue of our time. However, their calls for restitution confront basic questions of protocols: what would a restitution of African artworks/heritage from France and other European countries look like? The Sarr-Savoy report provides guidelines. Restitution of African heritage from France would begin by returning every single item of human remains (e.g., bones) held in Western museums to countries of their origin (or as proximate as possible) so they can

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be properly interred, as is their due as ancestors. This will provide the sacred foundation necessary for building trust between Western museums who hold human remains as ghastly mementos and various African countries and peoples. Along with the return of ancestral remains, France, per the Sarr-Savoy report, would open negotiations to return various African heritage/artworks with clearly defined ownership histories, such as bronze sculptures from the Benin Kingdom, Ashanti gold artifacts, Kenyan Vivango grave memorials, Kongo and Kuba artifacts, and royal sculpture looted from the Republic of Benin’s Dahomean peoples. The return destinations for these items have already established important safeguards for protecting their varied forms of African heritage. Note in this regard that negotiations should be with Benin, Ashanti, or Dahomean royal houses for the direct return of artifacts of importance. The Benin bronzes belong to the kings of Benin, not to the Nigerian government. Ashanti gold belongs equally to Ashanti kings, not to the modern nation of Ghana. It will be left to the modern African nations to negotiate the terms through which primary owners of heritage items will lend them to national museums and cultural institutions. In the case of communities that do not have the centralized authority of indigenous rulers, France and other European holders of African cultural heritage would, per the report, negotiate with the specific countries in which these forms of cultural heritage were acquired. Heritage items whose origins cannot be easily determined should ideally go to modern nations proximate to those countries. Finally, all Western countries that have held African heritage would be required to provide monetary compensation to account for the benefits derived from holding African heritage items over the past one hundred thirty-five years (roughly, from the 1885–6 Berlin Conference’s partition of Africa). As to the practicalities of these suggestions, we can use Britain’s restitution to British slave owners as a model. The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership at the University College London documents payments made to slave owners to compensate them for the abolition of slavery.12 These payments, the project notes, provided the foundational capital that jump-started the Industrial Revolution in England. The fact that no payments were made to the slaves themselves highlights the ongoing injustice that Western predation on Africa has produced over the centuries. Calls for African countries to buy back or borrow African artworks in Western collections are comparable to this egregious attitude that allows Western countries that oppressed Africans to profit many times over from their wrongful deeds. A common view that has emerged in the contemporary discussion of restitution is that African countries must build museums that meet French (or European) standards before African artworks can be returned. It is neocolonial to insist on such terms. The primary damage to African protocols of managing its own art came from the colonial process that legitimized mass looting of African cultural heritage. The Benin bronzes were perfectly safeguarded in the king’s palace for more than five hundred years before the British looted them. Obviously many of the African peoples to whom important cultural heritage are returned will need to develop viable security protocols for safeguarding these works. It will take time to do so, but it is completely and arrogantly wrong to imagine that France or other European colonizers should have the last word on what constitutes safe conditions for managing these artifacts.13 In the meantime, France seems to be making good on its desire to move the discussion along. Nine months after the Sarr-Savoy report was issued, the French government, through the French Development Agency, has approved loans of €20 million to the Republic of Benin to create a new museum at the Royal Palaces of Abomey.14 One does not doubt that well-secured museums are necessary to safeguard cultural objects, but it is even more necessary to hold accountable those Western museums that buy looted African artworks, even when they know such works have been obtained by illegal means. No

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Western museum will knowingly buy looted Holocaust artworks, and this has contributed to reducing incidences of theft of such artworks. Obviously, art theft is a major international problem but it persists because unscrupulous museums and individuals are willing to buy such artworks and credible journals are willing to publish them. It is a chain of culpability that stretches widely. Prestigious auction houses such as Sotheby’s that sell looted African artworks are obviously selling stolen goods. A Getty curator was tried for trafficking in stolen art.15 Why shouldn’t Sotheby’s or Christie’s be prosecuted for selling stolen African artworks? In conclusion, I can only hope that Macron’s efforts will start a wider trend of restitution of African heritage from the rest of Europe. Macron’s statement and the resulting Sarr-Savoy report have shifted the discourse of cultural patrimony restitution and repatriation, if only by Macron’s willingness to take a firm position on Africa’s ownership of its cultural heritage. Challenges to the Sarr-Savoy report, as well as the intransigence of French, British, and German museums, suggest this shift may encounter strong resistance, even within Macron’s own administration.16 In fact, suggestions from the Sarr-Savoy report were all but buried at a conference held at the French Academy in Paris on July 4, 2019.17 Instead of advocating for rapid actualization of the recommendations of the Sarr-Savoy report, the conference pushed for wider cultural cooperation with Africa. Sarr and Savoy refused to speak at the conference, perhaps in anticipation of the conference’s regressive position. The lack of legal authority behind the Sarr-Savoy report means that ultimate outcomes depend on the goodwill of European countries whose museums hold contested African artworks and cultural patrimony. I certainly don’t see the rest of Europe abiding by the recommendations of the report, especially given the revival of revanchist and racist ideologies gaining ground in Western cultures. Poland recently passed a law criminalizing claims of its complicity in the Holocaust. If they are bold enough to do so, given the well-organized Holocaust discourse that has scored several important victories in the past decades, then I can see other European countries absolving themselves of blame for looting African artworks. The British government, for example, will not countenance discussion of British Museum’s horde of looted artifacts. A prominent trustee of the museum recently resigned, citing the museum’s intransigence on the matter.18 Despite these setbacks, it is important that African countries continue to press their demands for a visible sign from the West that its dastardly treatment of black peoples over the past five centuries—including looting of African bodies, natural resources, and cultural artifacts—warrants an admission of guilt on their part. As Martin Luther King, invoking nineteenth-century abolitionist preacher Theodore Parker, observed, “the arc of the moral universe, although long, is bending towards justice.”19

Notes 1 On the wars fought to bring African countries under colonial control after the partition, see Bruce Vandervort, Wars of Imperial Conquest in Africa 1830–1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). 2 Zoë S. Strother, “‘Breaking Juju,’ Breaking Trade: Museums and the Culture of Iconoclasm in Southern Nigeria,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 67–68 (January 2017): 21–41. 3 For analysis of this issue, see Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, “Where Is Africa in Global Contemporary Art? (‘Wo ist Afrika in der Global Zeitgenossischen Kunst?’)” Savvy 1 (2011): 24–40. 4 Felwin Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Towards a New Relational Ethics, trans. Drew S. Burk (Paris: Ministry of Culture, 2018), http:// restitutionreport2018.com/sarr_savoy_en.pdf.

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5 Yaniv Benhamou, “Copyright and Museums in the Digital Age,” WIPO Magazine 3 (June 2016), 25, https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2016/03/article_0005.html. 6 For a comprehensive evaluation of the specifics of the trade in and collection of Afro-Portuguese ivories, see Ezio Bassani and William Fagg, Africa and the Renaissance: Art in Ivory (New York: Center for African Art, 1988). 7 Tom Flynn, The Universal Museum: A Valid Model for the 21st Century? (London: Tom Flynn, 2012), 32, https://www.academia.edu/20053839/The_Universal_Museum_A_Valid_Model_for_ the_21st_Century. 8 Sarr and Savoy, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage, 47–8. 9 Sarr and Savoy, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage, 57. 10 Hamady Bocoum, cited in Roxana Azimi, “A Dakar, un Musée des Civilisations pour rendre les Africains ‘fiers de leurs racines,’”Le Monde, February 13, 2016. 11 Gero Schließ, “Is Berlin’s Humboldt Forum Shying Away from Colonial History?” Deutsche Welle, August 14, 2017, https://www.dw.com/en/is-berlins-humboldt-forum-shying-away-fromcolonial-history/a–40082234. 12 “Legacies of British Slave-ownership,” Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slaveownership, University College London Department of History, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/. 13 Legal scholar Kwame Opoku has written extensively to rebut common excuses given by European museums opposed to repatriating African cultural patrimony. See Kwame Opoku, “You Cannot Go Very Wrong with Benin Artifacts: Made in Benin, They Belong to the Oba,” Museum Security Network, June 30, 2019, https://www.toncremers.nl/kwame-opoku-youcannot-go-very-wrongwith-benin-artefacts-made-in-benin-they-belong-to-the-oba. 14 Zachary Small, “Benin Receives $22.5 Million Loan from France for New Museum,” Hyperallergic, July 17, 2019, https://hyperallergic.com/509718/benin-receives-22-5-million-loanfrom-france-for-new-museum/. 15 Peter Popham, “Getty Museum Curator Stands Trial for Art Trafficking,” Independent (London), November 17, 2005, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/getty-museum-curatorstands-trial-for-art-trafficking-515645.html. 16 Mathilde Pavis and Andrea Wallace, “Response to the 2018 Sarr-Savoy Report: Statement on Intellectual Property Rights and Open Access Relevant to the Digitization and Restitution of African Cultural Heritage and Associated Materials,” Social Science Research Network, March 25, 2019, posted May 23, 2019, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3378200. 17 See Vincent Noce, “France Retreats from Report Recommending Automatic Restitutions of Looted African Artefacts,” The Art Newspaper, July 5, 2019, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/ news/france-buries-restitution-report. 18 Hakim Bishara, “British Museum Trustee Resigns, Citing Oil Funding and Restitution Inaction,” Hyperallergic, July 15, 2019, https://hyperallergic.com/509404/british-museum-trustee-resigns/. 19 Martin Luther King, “Statement on Ending the Bus Boycott,” December 20, 1956, Holt Street and First Baptist Churches, Montgomery, Alabama, quoted in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Volume III: Birth of a New Age: December 1955–December 1956, ed. Clayborne Carson, Peter Holloran, Dana Powell, Susan Carson, and Stewart Burns (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 486.

Bibliography Barker, Emma, ed. Contemporary Cultures of Display. New Haven: Yale University Press, in association with The Open University, 1999. Benhamou, Yaniv. “Copyright and Museums in the Digital Age.” WIPO Magazine 3 (June 2016): 25–28. https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2016/03/article_0005.html.

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Flynn, Tom. The Universal Museum: A Valid Model for the 21st Century? London: Tom Flynn, 2012. https://www.academia.edu/20053839/The_Universal_Museum_A_Valid_Model_for_the_21st_Century. Ogbechie, Sylvester Okwunodu. “Where Is Africa in Global Contemporary Art? (‘Wo ist Afrika in der Global Zeitgenossischen Kunst?’)” Savvy 1 (2011): 24–40. Pavis, Mathilde, and Andrea Wallace. “Response to the 2018 Sarr-Savoy Report: Statement on Intellectual Property Rights and Open Access Relevant to the Digitization and Restitution of African Cultural Heritage and Associated Materials.” March 25, 2019. SSRN, May 23, 2019. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3378200. Sarr, Felwine, and Bénédicte Savoy. The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Towards a New Relational Ethics. Translated by Drew S. Burk. Paris: Ministry of Culture, 2018. http:// restitutionreport2018.com/sarr_savoy_en.pdf. Strother, Zoë. “‘Breaking Juju,’ Breaking Trade: Museums and the Culture of Iconoclasm in Southern Nigeria.” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 67–68 (January 2017): 21–41. Vandervort, Bruce. Wars of Imperial Conquest in Africa 1830–1914. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

17 Censorship and Creative (Re)Production: A Conversation Morehshin Allahyari and Brittany Ransom

The following discussion between Brooklyn-based Iranian media artist, activist, and educator Morehshin Allahyari and Brittany Ransom, an associate professor of sculpture and new genres and the associate director of the School of Art at California State University Long Beach, took place as an email exchange between November 2017 and February 2018. Questions that arise in this discussion concern how and why censorship became important to Allahyari, censorship’s many forms and proliferation, and the means by which she has rematerialized ancient Middle Eastern artifacts via digital technologies. Ransom and Allahyari call attention to the oppositional potential inherent in #Additivism, an additivist/activist movement that exploits the processes of destruction and reconstruction to not only pose difficult questions but also to counter “the very powers” of those “that oppress” by way of their “strategies and languages and aesthetics.” Ransom: Your work addresses the dynamics through which visual culture moves in and out of site, functioning in the real world and the virtual, with information shifting between the physically tangible and the digitally manipulatable, and with the concepts and resulting works (objects/publications) of your practice addressing various types of circulation and suppression. Your work exploits issues of both erasure and re-creation. Why is that important to you as an artist/activist? Allahyari: This is a very beautiful way to describe the binaries and gray areas my work exists in. I think it’s also exactly why I have been interested in technology as a tool set that allows for moving between and in and out of these spaces. I’ve been looking for ways my work as an artist can be both practical and conceptual, and exist back and forth in the virtual and digital. For example, so much of my fascination with 3D printing in some of my earlier work was its potential as a technology to bring an object existing in digital 3D space into a physical 3D object—layer by layer, in real life. Watching the process of the 3D printer for the first time was magical and also allowed for the opening of new trajectories in my work. The same thing is true in terms of how I imagine concepts of art, poetics, activism, and my practice coming together.

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A number of my recent projects created in the last decade focus on these ideas in ways that are not dry or direct. I have been considering how to make politically related work that is not cheesy or boring. Numerous times I have said that being born and raised in a country like Iran, as artists, we never felt like we had the privilege of making work that is not political and critical. I always have felt a very strong connection as an artist to the world beyond the artwork and its problems—to the political, social, and cultural conditional struggles we have. How can I live in the America of Trump as a woman of color and an immigrant from Iran and not constantly have my head occupied by everything that this current political climate means and how it affects me and my people? I want to take this opportunity to share some of Nina Simone’s statements about art activism, which are among my favorites on the subject: An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times. I think that is true of painters, sculptors, poets, and musicians. As far as I’m concerned, it’s their choice, but I choose to reflect the times and situations in which I find myself. To me, that is my duty. This is a crucial time in our lives, when everything is so desperate, when every day is a matter of survival, I don’t think you can help but be involved.1 This is my motto. Stand up and use work as a platform. Ransom: Themes of censorship seem to be at the root of many of your projects. Can you discuss your work Video Instructions: Tips on Censorship (2010)?2 Why did you find censorship to be a particularly important issue at that moment in time, and in what context did you choose to focus on this issue? Who was your primary audience for this work? Allahyari: The first two to three years of living in the US, after moving from Iran in 2007, came with a lot of confusion and complications. I think I now embrace this feeling of being split after living in the US for ten years. I was trying to make sense of this shift, not just in a literal geographical sense of being in between, but also in practical, cultural, and emotional ways. Censorship was one topic that I continuously thought about. Trying to figure out how to approach and bring censorship into my work was important, as it was a very personal issue. As an Iranian artist living in the US, I had the opportunity of not censoring my work and myself, and realized that this change came with a huge amount of compromising. If I were going to make the kind of work I wanted to make without censoring myself, it would make it very difficult as an artist to go back to Iran without risking being harassed by the government. This meant I had to make many choices. It meant that the less I censored myself, the more I exiled myself from my home country, and I was fascinated by those connections and ideas. I was also on a one-entry student visa for the first four years of living in the US and that also came with its own immeasurable amount of stress, paperwork, and an unclear future in terms of immigration. Upon this shift, I did not have a comfortable, clear space to stay in the US that aided in making these choices any easier. Censorship and its consequences were rooted both in my personal work and my studio practice from the beginning. Tips on Censorship was an ironically humorous series of performances I did online and in gallery spaces where I had made my own ministry of culture and censorship bureau. I made my own rules. I would perform these acts of marking/blacking out things, measuring, and cutting things, while giving instructions on how to censor. This mostly came from a scenario in Iran where a whole team of people sit around and go through magazines, imported books, and visual material, and they literally cut things out of or black out images, one by one, before these materials come to stores, libraries, and are accessible to the public.

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I was playing with the idea that someone has a 9-to-5 job of being in charge of this type of censorship, and I found it ridiculous and bizarre. I wanted to see how it felt to practice that and also to bring out visual elements of censorship. When you censor something using a black marker, it is a very different gesture than if you just cut it out. The black censorship bar is very specific when it’s on someone’s body versus if you just take out that scene in a movie and manipulate the story to be something else. It reads as “hey, we know that you know that we are censoring this because there is this black bar on it” vs. “hey, we censored this and you might never know it was censored because we did such a masterful job of taking it out of this movie without you even noticing that there is a scene where these people have sex or kiss each other.” These are very different gestures and positions, especially in Iran where censorship has had many different layers and its visual appearance has changed through the years. Ransom: In your Open Letter to the Audience (2013) relating to the same project, you state, “We live in a repressive global censorship culture.” The work is culturally specific to Iran, where you were born and raised, but also the US, where you have lived. You state that in the US censorship is more “subversive and clever.” The video and instructions emphasize that censorship is universally relevant, and at the same time you make clear that we’re all implicated in it: governments censor and individuals self-censor. Allahyari: In the years following the making of the Tips on Censorship series, I made different variations of this work––sometimes inviting other artists to be a part of my bureau, sometimes only doing panels and discussions about the work. My approach in expanding the issue of censorship beyond Iran came after living in the US for a number of years and learning about how censorship worked here. The way information was selected, manipulated, presented, censored, and controlled was done in a more clever way. Once I started to experience and learn more about US methods of censorship, I wrote the letter as part of a performance I did at CentralTrak in Dallas in collaboration with MAP (Make Art with Purpose). I lived in Texas from 2010 to 2014. I think it was then that I learned how when I talk about censorship in only Iran, the conservative and xenophobic people in the West abuse that space to talk about how oppressive Iran is and how America is this free country that I should obviously feel lucky to live in. This attitude was immediate in so many cases. Like: “Wow, we feel so bad for what you and your people experience in Iran. Glad you have freedom of expression here to talk about this.” I felt uncomfortable with that attitude, and I felt it necessary to remind those very people that the government and constitution they believe in, vote for, and support has been censoring and manipulating information for them and the world for decades. The letter was a direct response to these double standards. Ransom: You have since collaborated with Daniel Rourke on The 3D Additivist Manifesto (2015) and The 3D Additivist Cookbook (2016) and a number of related curatorial projects and events. The Cookbook has also resulted in collaboration with numerous activists, artists, writers, and curators. How did your previous work exploring censorship lead you to this collaboration with Rourke and the creation of the Manifesto and Cookbook, and what exactly were you responding to by creating these linked projects? Allahyari: In 2013, Daniel interviewed me for Rhizome’s artist profile series about the project I was working on at the time called Dark Matter, which was a series of combined, sculptural 3D-printed objects brought together to form humorous juxtapositions. The objects I worked with were all chosen because they are forbidden or taboo to have or use in Iran. I was interested in 3D printers as machines that have a kind of radical political potential embedded in them. What if we could 3D print these objects in-house and use them as an act of guerilla DIY resistance? How would that change our relationship to the forbidden and the censored? This project was the beginning of a multiyear collaboration with Daniel. We both felt like there was no critical dialogue around additive technologies like 3D printers.

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These technologies were being used in fablabs and maker spaces by designers, students, and architects but with very little criticality around the machines and acts of object making. It took us one year to write the manifesto and make the video between three time zones (London, Dallas, Oakland). The process of writing it was a very important part of how things got developed and shaped; it was instrumental to what then became a manifesto and a book two years later. The manifesto was a call to artists, activists, writers, designers, and others to respond to our utopian and dystopian ideas on plastic, oil, the 3D printer, and the future. A call to arms; a call to action. Ransom: In 2016 you released The 3D Additivist Cookbook, a “free compendium of imaginative, provocative works from over 100 world-leading artists, activists, and theorists” that contained text but also included replicable files for 3D printers, templates, recipes and “(im)practical designs and methodologies for living in this most contradictory of times.”3 Can you discuss your conviction to share more than simply text, and say what you hope users of the cookbook might generate in terms of tangible objects and possible activism? Can you elaborate on the statements you made in the Manifesto: “Additivism can emancipate us. Additivism will eradicate us.”4 And explain how that relates to The 3D Additivist Cookbook?5 Allahyari: Additivism is the combination of the two words Additive and Activism, a term Daniel and I coined as a point of departure in building a movement and a school of thought. We thought about it as a way of being and making that could bring together some kind of horror sci-fi thinking with a more positive-action-oriented-political-doing. We were inspired by previous manifestos but also were standing on the shoulders of thinkers and writers like Donna Hathaway and Reza Negarestani, among many others. The emancipating and eradicating is a statement, perhaps an exaggerated promise and position for #Additivism as a movement of destruction and construction, interruption and rebuilding. #Additivism is about asking difficult, and often unpalatable, questions. At its heart, it questions the very powers that oppress you, and uses these strategies, languages, and aesthetics against them. Embrace the apocalypse, but use its darkness to create light. It was also important for us to remember not to take ourselves too seriously; so I would like to mention that this statement is also ironic and self-reflective in a way. It’s a promise that suggests a potential rather than an absolute truth. We always thought of The 3D Additivist Cookbook as a toolkit rather than a textbook. So much of what we wanted to build was accessibility, education, and activation (daily small actions). The cookbook’s most radical feature––we hope––is its accessibility and openness (download it for free now and see).6 But we are far more excited about the projects that are not contained in it, those that still have to be imagined. A lot of actionbased projects in the cookbook can be realized by anyone with any kind of background. In addition to the pdf, we also have released a folder of selected.obj and.stl files from the cookbook, which means anyone with access to a cheap 3D printer or a fablab can 3D-print the objects if they wish. We hope the cookbook encourages people to play, experiment, and not be afraid to make mistakes. That’s the best way to learn, and it’s fundamental to the practices of art and design. We all start as amateurs and some of us try really hard to stay that way. Ransom: You and Rourke describe #Additivism in relation to 3D printing as “a technology for channeling creative endeavor, through digital processes, into the layering of raw matter excavated from ancient geological eras … #Additivism … aims to disrupt material, social, computational, and metaphysical realities through provocation, collaboration, and ‘weird’/science fictional thinking.”7 Allahyari: 3D printing is a process that I have used in a number of works (Material Speculation, 2015–16; Dark Matter, 2014–15; and She Who Sees the Unknown

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2017–18). In these series, I make use of this technology to both regenerate structures and explore/modify them; ancient artifacts are kept visible and also maintained in creative production. Ransom: Can you discuss your primary aims for these recent works and your thoughts on the interrelation between artifacts and historical memory? Are these pieces potentially about cultural “repair”? If so, what sort of repair? Short-term or long-term, or both? Allahyari: Material Speculation: ISIS (Plate 24) has been about preservation of historical memory as well as cultural repair, both short-term and long-term. There is here a very practical approach to 3D printing, as well as a completely conceptual, poetic, and nonfunctional approach, where plastic, 3D printing, oil, technocapitalism, and Jihad converge to create dialogue about systems and realities around us that are nonbinary and complex. I find thinking and working around technology like 3D printing really important and exciting. Using 3D printing has been about its functionality (how) and criticality (why). This process is about not only resistance but also inclusion. The objects themselves are 3D-printed sculptures in a clear resin material with a flash drive embedded inside of them. I think of all these twelve sculptures as time capsules. The information inside the flash drives contains all the material that I had gathered during the research process about the artifacts, their history, the process of research, images, and the obj/stl 3D-printing files. I also wanted to find a way to share this information and material with people in an open format. I recently worked on three heads as part of the Material Speculation: Isis series that allowed me to bridge the physical and digital gaps within this project in a more practical way. These three dead drops (2017) are 3D-printed reproductions of stone reliefs that were originally located at the ruins of the ancient city of Hatra in Iraq where they survived for thousands of years in the open air. Gertrude Bell photographed them in April 1911, before major excavations took place. But ISIS destroyed them in 2015. Each dead drop contains a USB drive that viewers can use to download research material (images, maps, pdf files, videos, and a 3D-printable object file of the piece King Uthal) to their laptop or hard drive (Figure 17.1). Ransom: Your work explores the lines between the vast ways in which Internet and digital technologies circulate, share, and generate content, as well as the ways in which the same information can be suppressed through censorship via technology. Can you discuss how these ideas relate to your most recent work, which is titled She Who Sees the Unknown? With this work, are you taking a position of resistance against digital colonialism? Allahyari: In She Who Sees the Unknown I will also be using 3D printers and 3D scanners–– two contemporary tools of western digital colonialism of Middle Eastern cultural heritage––to create sculptures of these figures, along with a series of talismans. Each of the figures will have specific powers and spells attached to them, aimed at re-equilibrating contemporary imbalances of power. The figures I will feature are from a mix of eras and traditions, both pre- and post-Islamic. I’m taking them out of their context in order to create the space to build new stories around them. Collaging texts and reappropriating material, I want to create a counter-reality that is critical of claims over heritage by both Western technology industries and Islamic iconoclasts. It is a new feminist collection that focuses on dark goddesses, feminine monsters, and djinn female figures of Middle Eastern origin (Figure 17.2). This research project, which builds on my previous work, explores the symbolic meanings behind traditions and myths to speculate on the effects of colonialism and other forms of contemporary oppression. I want to devise a narrative through the practices of magic, poetic-speculative storytelling, re-appropriation of traditional mythologies, collaging, meshing, 3D scanning/3D printing, and archiving. In addition, an important part of this

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FIGURE 17.1  Morehshin Allahyari, South Ivan Human Heads: Bearded River God, 2017, from the Material Speculation: Isis series, 3D-printed sculpture (polymer powder) and electronic components. Photo by Mario Gallucci. Courtesy of artist and Sapar Contemporary, NYC.

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FIGURE 17.2  Morehshin Allahyari, detail of Huma and Talismans, 2016, from the She Who Sees the Unknown series, 3D-printed black resin sculpture. Photo by Mario Gallucci. Courtesy of artist and Sapar Contemporary, NYC.

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project is to build a library/reading room and gather and organize an image and textbased archive of under-represented and misrepresented female mythological figures. These will come from online resources and physical books from Iran, ultimately constituting a digital encyclopedia. There is a serious digital divide in terms of the availability of Middle Eastern material online. This practice is an important part of my efforts to make visible undocumented and forgotten histories and thereby counter both increasing censorship and new forms of censorship in our times. I want to explore issues of digital colonialism and re-figuring by means of a feminist and activist practice using new technologies as tools of investigation.

Notes 1 Nina Simone in What Happened, Miss Simone?, directed by Liz Garbus (Moxie Firecracker Films, Netflix, Radical Media, 2015). 2 See “Video Instructions: Tips on Censorship (2010),” www.morehshin.com/video-instructionstips-on-censorship/. 3 Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke, The 3D Additivist Cookbook, January 2017, http:// additivism.org/cookbook. 4 Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke, The 3D Additivist Manifesto, 2015, https://additivism. org/manifesto. 5 For information about the relationship between the manifesto and the cookbook, see Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke, The 3D Additivist Manifesto & Cookbook, https://additivism.org/ about; Morehshin Allahyari, The 3D Additivist Cookbook (2016), www.morehshin.com/3d_ additivist_cookbook/; and Morehshin Allahyari, The 3D Additivist Manifesto (2015), www. morehshin.com/3d-additivist-manifesto/. 6 Allahyari and Rourke, The 3D Additivist Cookbook, http://additivism.org/cookbook. 7 Morehshin Allahyari, The 3D Additivist Manifesto [text accompanying video], 2015, https:// vimeo.com/122642166.

Bibliography Allahyari, Morehshin. “Morehshin Allahyari,” 2020. www.morehshin.com. Allahyari, Morehshin, and Daniel Rourke. “The 3D Additivist Manifesto & Cookbook.” https:// additivism.org/about.

PART VI

Matters of Race: Campus (Un)Learning

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18 Our Compliance: Provocation and Valuation Ashley Powell and Kara Walker

Introduction On September 16, 2015, while pursuing a master of fine arts degree at University at Buffalo, State University of New York (UB), I, Ashley Powell, carried out an art action titled Our Compliance (2015) that involved producing segregationist signs reminiscent of those of the Jim Crow era and posting them in public areas on campus (Plate 25, Figure 18.1). My action provoked controversy. In my September 17 letter to UB’s newspaper, The Spectrum (published September 18), I explained my motivations and tactics, the backlash against the work, and subsequent campus discussions. I also called attention to others who have used art to deal with difficult experiences, including Kara Walker, one of the most successful and controversial artists of our time. In April 2016, just prior to completing my degree, I received a sobering letter of wisdom from Walker, which she titled “Black Judge Takes the Stand.” After contemplating the results of Our Compliance and Walker’s observations about the power and risks of art dealing with oppression, I developed new understandings about art, activism, and censorship, which I offer here.

Letter to The Spectrum Ashley Powell, 2015 My name is Ashley Powell, and I am a graduate student here at UB in the Department of Art. In my class “Installation: Urban Space” we integrate our specific studio practices with theory, discuss them, and exchange ideas. We realize interdisciplinary and collaborative projects. The prompt for this project was to create an installation within five minutes’ walking distance from the CFA [Center for the Fine Arts], which addresses “time.” We were welcomed to address time in whichever way we interpret it and however we see fit. In this class, we are learning to finesse our articulation as artists, strengthen our voices, and unapologetically pursue our practice.

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FIGURE 18.1 Ashley Powell, Our Compliance, 2015, urban installation. “BLACK ONLY” bench. Courtesy of artist.

I am in pain. My art practice is a remnant of my suffering, but also an antidote that brings about healing. The afflictions I suffer from are self-hate, trauma, pain, and an unbearable and deafening indignation. White privilege and compliance only exacerbate my symptoms. Nonwhite suffering is the greatest psychological detriment that I have ever faced, and one that many individuals undoubtedly face as well. It manifests as a blatant or furtive acknowledgment of inferiority to the dominant group. It results in a trauma that is perhaps more destructive and damaging than any physical, legislative, or societal oppression an individual may ever face. I understand that the ambiguity of the “black only” and “white only” signs are problematic in light of recent events on other campuses where actual acts of hatred, misogyny, and racism occurred. However, my work is something else—an artistic intervention. This was not a social experiment. I do not need to experiment with non-white people’s trauma, nor pain, to know that it exists. This was not a joke. I do not need to, and will never joke about my own reality, or anyone else’s, because our reality is grave, it is frightening, and it is one of constant endurance, resilience, and burden. This project, specifically, was a piece created to expose white privilege. Our society still actively maintains racist structures that benefit one group of people and oppress another. Forty to fifty years ago, these structures were visibly apparent and physically graspable through the existence of signs that looked exactly like the signs I put up. Today these signs may no longer exist, but the system that they once reinforced still does. Any white person who would walk past these signs without ripping them down shows a disturbing compliance with this system. These signs do not allow a white person to give the age-old excuse of “I didn’t create this system” or “I never asked for this white privilege.” They attempt to give those people the individual agency to rebut the very system

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that puts them in a place of supremacy. These signs illustrate that white people do not have to be active aggressors, like the KKK, to be responsible for this system of racism and white privilege that threatens, traumatizes, brutalizes, stunts, and literally kills non-white people every day in the US. I recognize that this piece had extremely negative and traumatic effects on some of the non-white people in the student body. With the support of my professor and my colleagues from the class, I was able to confront many of those issues in person at a BSU meeting on Wednesday evening. The BSU attendees, the majority of whom were non-white people, spoke freely about the signs without knowing who created them, or why. Eventually I stood to take full responsibility and to clarify the nature and purpose of the project. I will address here many of the criticisms I received for my actions, the implications of those criticisms, and the implications of this project as a whole. I will restate what I stated to the BSU that evening. I understand the extreme trauma, fear, and actual hurt and pain that these signs brought about. I understand if you were hurt, but I do not apologize for what I did. Once again, this is my art practice. My work directly involves black trauma and non-white suffering. I do not believe that there can be social healing without first coming to terms with and expressing our own pain, rage, and trauma. For anyone who is questioning my actions on the basis of the pain they were caused, I will say this is the nature of my art and this is the nature of social change. Perhaps, sharing some of my own experiences may elucidate the question of trauma and pain. I attended Southeast Missouri State University in the course of my undergraduate career. I was called a “nigger-monkey” on that campus, I was called a “nigger-bitch.” I was born and raised on the southeast side of Chicago, where my siblings and friends and I have experienced police intimidation first-hand. My father is seventy-five years old, and he was born in 1940 in a slave home on a plantation in Greenwood, Mississippi. I have generational struggle and trauma in my family like many non-white people currently living in America. And for those who would reproach me for invoking our pain: it is my belief that silent acknowledgment and endurance of our shared trauma will in no way lessen its effects. My art practice is not an act of self-policing meant to hide my rage. Instead, it uses pain, narrative, and trauma as a medium of expression and as grounds for arguing a need for change in the first place. I understand that I forced people to feel pain that they otherwise would not have had to deal with in this magnitude. But I ask, should non-white people not express or confront their trauma? Should we be content with not having to confront that pain? We know it exists, and it often causes many of us immediate discomfort. Should we not be in a state of crushing discomfort? Should we be content with being comfortable? Do we not have to come to terms with our trauma in order to articulate the necessity and urgency of social change? Many expressed to me that they left the “hood” to avoid dealing with things like this. Is that not problematic? Just because you are not there, are these issues irrelevant? These signs made you feel discomfort. They are tangible objects that forced you to revisit your past, to confront your present, and to recognize here and now the underlying social structures that are directly responsible for your pain and suffering. This project makes forceful what has been easy for you to ignore. People expressed to me that they feared for their lives on Wednesday. That the signs negatively affected the rest of their day, and will probably affect the rest of their semester, or even their entire life. The question that I pose is why did it take these paper on cardboard signs to elicit such strong reactions? Do non-white people not already fear for their lives every day? Along with and beyond the fact that they stirred racial trauma, if they aren’t already

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an underlying issue, why has there been such a strong reaction? If they weren’t needed, and if they are irrelevant, then, why are so many people upset? As it has been firmly expressed, this is our lives. For that very reason, I ask do we not need to attack the social structures responsible for the burdens on our lives, and expose what it means to be non-white in the US? Are we not complicit in our own oppression when we turn away from our shared pain? My art is not silent, it does not spare our feelings, and it does not spare the feelings of the privileged. These signs are the reality of our lives, and I need our lives to change. I did not ask for permission. My practice does not need permission to speak honestly, because structural racism is in fact my life, your life, and it is our lives that are at stake. If I had asked for permission, and it had been denied, then I believe, people would have been outraged at the fact of not allowing me to speak about racism. This art is not made for the gallery. The art gallery is already ingrained with present and historical structures of institutional racism; otherwise it would have stunted, if not completely eliminated, the productive conversations we should have at this moment. My art practice will never ask for, nor will it ever need, institutional authority to regulate my voice. Should my art be censored? Should it be censored because it is too honest or too painful for some people? My practice does not need permission when our lives are at stake, and I will not ask for permission to help change your life. My work gives agency to my trauma, and I ask that you do the same. I question, should you not take your rage, your pain, and your hurt and convert it into agency? For all the energy being used to eliminate me, can it be used instead to hold accountable the actual system of oppression? Furthermore, are the white people who stayed unaffected by this art project responsible for complying with a system that causes injustice, pain, and anguish for non-white people? Are they not implicated when they allowed these signs to stay up, in the same manner that they continue to allow and comply with our racist system that benefits white skin? An individual does not have to be an active aggressor to be partially responsible for the system that unjustly empowers one and oppresses another—all they need to be is silent. These signs, which made plain and tangible the dynamics of our society, gave passive people in power the chance to individually take steps toward equality, and away from privilege. In the history of art, there have been many art pieces and interventions that have addressed this pain. Francis Bacon famously stated, art for him meant “to remake the violence of reality itself.” This is what his art was, and this is what my art is. Kara Walker’s Subtlety hurt us, but that hurt was necessary to call us to action (Plate 26). Adrian Piper’s Calling Cards hurt us, but once again that hurt was necessary to generate more discussion. I will not allow our society to continue to beat us to death and claim that we condone it, due to our silence. I will be vocal, we will be vocal, and I will not allow the weight of our trauma to stunt our voices. We will use our trauma, we will remake our reality. My practice wants to call you to action and force you to make a choice. I ask, why have these signs caused more outrage than the fact that over 800 people have been unjustly murdered by the police since the death of Michael Brown? Why does it take signs, and not the public and unlawful police gang rape of Charnesia Corley to cause one of, if not the biggest turnout of the BSU ever? Why does it take these signs for students of different nonwhite organizations to finally and passionately verbalize a need for non-white solidarity? Art is not an object. It isn’t only a painting or sculpture, and it does not only belong in a gallery. Art finds a way to say what could not be said before. It has the agency to say what would not have been said before. I am an artist, this is my practice, and this is how I speak. This art project is what it took to force people to have a conversation that should have already taken place at this magnitude. Take for example the testimonies invoked and expressed in that

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BSU meeting alone. University at Buffalo is one of the most diverse schools in the country, ironically situated in one of its most segregated and racist cities. We are the intellectuals that can transform our frustrations into constructive social actions. We, university students, have always been the ones to confront social issues. I refuse to believe that the student body will rest on the fact that it was hurt and end the discussion there. University at Buffalo has a rich history of critical social engagement. However, my art project in no way was meant to reflect the opinions of our university. Instead, it was meant to critique the issues that we as an intellectual community have fallen short of addressing. I understand my art project has exhumed our shared pain. However, our society cannot heal or change until non-white people are able to confront and gain agency through our burdens, and white people are able to confront and become accountable for their privilege. It is a delusion to believe that we can change society without first changing ourselves. From the response to this art project, my practice and goals are affirmed, and I stand steadfast in knowing that the change direly needs to occur.

Black Judge Takes the Stand Kara Walker, 2016 Congratulations! You have just taken your first steps toward developing a strategic, political art practice using the tactics of intervention and subversion to challenge the status quo of the school, business, state, political structure and/or nation of your concern! I trust that you have attained the desired result, for a well-reasoned “conversation” around your timely topic/sanctions against a disreputable policy/transformative legislation toward a better world for all? Or perhaps you sought only to sound an alarm, poetically, to alert all-comers to the presence of some long standing injustice, and did not care for an outcome, just that your voice be heard. I trust that you have taken the arrows and slights against you with a measure of good humor and a solid look at your long history. For, your work is not unprecedented. The parties of your address; school, business, state, political system, and/or nation are nearly without fail, blind to the nature of art, metaphorically obtuse (I mean they are obtuse, when it comes to metaphor) and likely to shout down the lone artist, to perform an inquisition that will only leave the artist dancing on hot coals, or dangling from a noose, perhaps one of his or her own design. Students will call for executions; Presidents will ban all forms of art not laudatory to the State (or school). Careers in the arts are not made of such stuff, but interventionist art does not lend itself to the dream of success in the art world. I trust, that as you laugh your way out of the gates of the institution, which taught, and then betrayed your education with expulsion, that you will hone your knowledge of the history of intervention, performance and activist art and promise never to make such easy work again! Calling attention to oppression must do more than “trick the eye”; it must reach beyond the one-liner, the sucker punch. The work must also reach challengingly into the annals of an art history that may or may not have included you and your immediate concern. And most importantly, you better work out just who it is you think you are, and why you think this work is yours to do. Ask yourself, just what do you bring to the table? Being talented is not enough. Being a member of your gender or minority group is not enough. First you must wrestle out the demons from within. You had better ask yourself this first, because your detractors will be asking that of you later.

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As for your detractors … scaredy cats, frightened by a painting? You, the artist, are right to feel incredulous. They’ll extract a pound of flesh demanding answers, don’t give them more than you’ve got. States, institutions, student bodies and other mobs have become alert to the expedient, Internet era judgment. They are quick to respond, even quicker to forget, and before you know it another four years will go by and another student, artist, activist will sound the selfsame bell as before, as you once did, before you were banished, and their work will be misunderstood, and the same accusations will be leveled, and not one person will be the wiser. I have often wondered, in my dealing with the public, why it is so much easier to wound the artist, and I have come to this conclusion. The general public sees the art object as nothing short of witchcraft. A magical thing that has no history, that succeeds on burrowing into the parts of the brain not used on average by most … not as a calculated result of much thinking and making. Suddenly there it is, and should the artist be dumb enough, or vain enough to sign her name to the work, then she ought to expect the fire. In my experience I have seen women not unlike myself resort to the worst sorts of name calling and calls for banishment because of some art object, image, or idea that was deemed too dangerous, but I believe them. I think art IS dangerous and always has been and to think otherwise is foolhardy. Artwork does not come with disclaimers; artists dream up crazy shit all the time and some of it is good, and some sophomoric and some of it brave and topical. Some is just schoolwork, and the life lesson here, the useful lesson for the exercise you lately proposed, enacted, and faced challenges for, is that the institutions you challenge will always feel they have a more important say in your artistic process, and as long as you propose that this audience is a part of the problem you are wrestling with, because they were not there in the making. Your detractors (and mine) cannot be with you in your studio, sketchbook, or your mind, and so—the greater their feeling of exclusion will be—the greater their rancor directed at you, the artist. The more likely the work will face censorship, vandalism, or worse. Moreover, depending on what country or state government you are living in you the artist might face imprisonment or exile or death, so count your blessings. *Sighed* Judge Kara E. Walker

Reflections Ashley Powell, 2019 The initial motive for my art action was to implicate compliant white privilege and urge active defiance despite the absence of active aggression. The Black Lives Matter movement was then in full swing. But this movement began to behave on a reactionary basis. After police brutality took place or after a person faced institutional discrimination, Black lives would matter. Unfortunately, reactionary activism has the potential to become infertile as it waits for oppressive acts of aggression to occur. Is waiting for an atrocity to occur necessary for oppositional action? It is my firm belief that a society with a deeply ingrained and historically severe precedent of white supremacy, racial discrimination, and other forms of oppression

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doesn’t need to be actively aggressing to be deserving of firm, persistent, and consistent antiracism, anti-oppression, and activism. Our Compliance was intended to shock viewers back into a temporal space where racial aggression was realized as a constant threat. It was not a reaction to any specific case of racial aggression. Instead, it beckoned individuals to recognize, take responsibility for, and address white supremacy and oppression before the next aggression occurred. It was therefore shockingly unexpected and emotionally intolerable to most, and this intolerance resulted in an attempt at censorship, one of the most dangerous and toxic practices for intellectual discourse, artistic practice, activism, and constructive social change. Censorship is a direct aggression against activism. It often attacks the atypical artistic, intellectual, institutional, and political activist interventions that don’t adhere to mainstream social mores. Atypical voices often sow the most fertile grounds for constructive societal change, and censoring them results in a movement’s malnourishment. Such malnutrition becomes dangerous, as it deflates the potential for the movement’s contributions and growth. History and hindsight eventually congeal into shallow, commodifiable, and palatable anecdotes. Justice becomes a superficial husk for vengeance, and the activist core, which once ordained the taking of fierce personal risk, becomes confused with self-gratification, passive participation, and agreement. What was once an organic collective flourishing from plurality and shared goals now becomes a self-masticating machine awaiting the next lash of its oppressor. This vicious cycle, which results from activism censoring its own atypical voices, fertilizes a societal climate opposite to what it desires. This became apparent in 2016 when the newly elected president waged an all-out war against intellect, agency, critique, and liberty. White supremacy, anti-queerness, and xenophobia enjoyed robust reinvigoration, and a toxic landscape overtly infested our nation with a thick vitriolic blanket of active hatred. This harsh landscape didn’t creep up. It has been incubating in the resting periods between acts of aggression, with the passive compliance of white privilege. Censorship nourishes it. Might discussing issues stirred by interventions such as Our Compliance enrich mainstream activism with diversity, tolerance, solidarity, and growth and help us garner hindsight and foresight for the navigation of harshly oppressive political and social landscapes? We cannot change the past, or precisely predict the future, but we can utilize both to understand that censorship, like racism, is a self-destructive action that empowers the aggressor. With Kara Walker’s observations and my own recent reflections, I’ve come to understand crucial aspects and consequences of activism, art, and censorship. To make constructive movements, activism must be grounded in an understanding of desires, goals, and oppressors. Art is dangerous, alarming, provocative, unpalatable, and difficult to tolerate, but this bolsters its usefulness for change. Censorship is the grave side effect of a reactionary mainstream current that interprets atypical voices as exclusionary to its tactics and jarring to its sensibilities. The mainstream current that censors atypical voices ironically and reflexively censors itself. A world rife with censorship is a dangerous, self-muting, and agency-deflating world. When an activist movement resorts to censoring its own atypical voices, it is crucial to remember, reconsider, rejuvenate, and graft that movement’s earlier tactics and goals. In a society where oppressive aggressors harmonize, evolve, and gain solidarity organically, they do not need our help to oppress us. It is dire that we acknowledge this problem and stop oppressing ourselves (Figure 18.2).

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FIGURE 18.2  Ashley Powell, Our Compliance, 2015, urban installation. Two students defy the signs. Courtesy of artist.

Bibliography “Kara Walker.” Art21. https://art21.org/artist/kara-walker/. Powell, Ashley. “Letter to the Editor: UB Student Sends Statement to The Spectrum about ‘White Only’ and ‘Black Only’ Signs.” The Spectrum, September 18, 2015. http://www.ubspectrum.com/ article/2015/09/white-only-and-black-only-letter-to-editor.

19 Presenting/Canceling N*W*C*: Creative Expression, Speech Rights, and Pedagogy

Editors’ Introduction From the mid- to late 2010s public discourse in the United States concerning a variety of social issues was marked by heightened tension. Government action and inaction regarding immigration fueled dissension, and instances of police violence against Blacks, as well as failures to prosecute and acquittals, sparked nationwide protests and occasionally reciprocal violence. Political campaigns were laden with polarizing, inflammatory rhetoric, and belligerent, antagonistic language proliferated across social, news, and entertainment media. Racial hostility, including white supremacist sentiment, manifested in emboldened ways, and hate speech and hate crimes escalated. On university campuses, debates raged over who could or should speak, and pressure mounted against ethnic studies curricula and programs. Publicly and privately across the nation, individuals and organizations engaged in vehement discussion concerning the legality and ethics of perceived liberties and limits of speech, expression, action, and representation. Not immune to these contentious issues was California State University Long Beach (CSULB), a relatively diverse, publicly funded state university of more than thirty-five thousand students located on the boundary between Los Angeles and Orange Counties, home to a cluster of some of the longest-standing ethnic studies programs in the United States, and site of the 2011–12 B-Word Project—a campus-wide interdisciplinary initiative titled “Banned, Blacklisted & Boycotted: Censorship and the Response to It.”1 Against this backdrop, Michele Roberge, the director of CSULB’s Carpenter Performing Arts Center (CPAC) and one of the organizers of the B-Word Project, booked a performance for September 24, 2015, by Speak Theatre Arts performers Rafael Agustín, Jackson McQueen, and Dionysio Basco titled N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk (see Plate 27). In a May 2015 promotional video featuring interviews with the artists and excerpts from a previous performance, Basco suggested that there was “a difference between calling people these words” and “starting a healthy dialogue” about “where they came from” and “how to depower” them.2 In a September 4 press release Roberge was quoted as saying that the three performers aimed “to confront racist stereotypes they had experienced” and to “do so through humor.” She stated: “Particularly now, given

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the ongoing discussion regarding race, we as a performing arts theater have a responsibility to bring shows like ‘N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk’ to students and the Greater Long Beach community.”3 President Jane Conoley supported the event despite protests from members of the local chapter of the NAACP and other individuals. In a July 27 letter to the NAACP she wrote: I concur that our university is a perfect setting for this discussion and presentation of controversial themes and issues. As the largest public university arts college in the Western states, we believe the arts are the perfect venue for this kind of inquiry and discussion. … As President, it is my goal to push the envelope on matters of race and prejudice to ensure The Beach remains a safe haven for freedom of expression on this vitally important topic.4 In March 2016 Roberge booked the artists for a return performance. In promoting the September 29 event, CPAC announced: “This compelling and comedic play—written by three men who were tired of being typecast and discriminated against because of the color of their skin—returns once more to directly confront racial slurs and stereotypes while stimulating cultural awareness and acceptance!”5 In early September, however, the event was canceled, and Roberge resigned in protest. As discussions on and off campus made clear, perspectives on these events varied. On September 7 OC Weekly published Speak Theatre Arts’ official response, written by Agustín, who expressed the group’s disappointment over the cancellation of the show and Roberge’s departure. Agustín stated that this turn of events was “a critical juncture in the path of free speech on the campus of a public educational institution.” Acknowledging “the undeniably challenging nature of the show title,” he drew a distinction between using words “to express hatred” and using such words to encourage community dialogue, concluding that the group intended “to keep the conversation going.” (See “Speak Theatre Arts Official Statement.”) On September 23 the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), and the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund (DLDF) decried the university’s action. In a letter to President Conoley, organization officials declared that the cancellation was “wholly at odds with First Amendment principles and betray[ed] the university’s role as the ‘marketplace of ideas,’” demanded the decision be reversed, made known that their request for disclosure of related records had been denied, and cited relevant Supreme Court decisions concerning the silencing of offensive speech. They wrote: Students are free not to attend N*W*C*, whether because they believe the play to be offensive or for any other reason. Likewise, faculty are free to coordinate academic programming with the Carpenter Center if they think it may enhance their students’ academic experiences, and they are free to decline to do so. But instead of recognizing the freedom community members enjoy to reach their own determinations about the play—a freedom protected by the First Amendment—CSULB’s cancellation has unilaterally foreclosed any further engagement. Within days FIRE and NCAC had posted the letter to their websites (see Figure 19.1.a–d).6 The declaration by the artists and the joint response of FIRE, NCAC, and DLDF—national organizations committed to defending speech rights in education, the performing arts, and the visual arts—are important contextual documents, as they make evident the range of concerns provoked by the university’s actions. However, the ten statements produced between April 2017 and January 2018 at the invitation of the editors of this anthology illustrate that any investigation

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FIGURE 19.1a–d  Letter from FIRE, NCAC, and DLDF to President Jane Close Conoley, September 23, 2016.

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of an incident characterized as censorship necessitates consideration of a broader spectrum of issues. Administrators, faculty, and students at CSULB highlight aspects of the controversy they deem worthy of consideration. Their reflections, which vary in tone, length, and expressive style, considerably enrich the debate. They demonstrate the strong desire in academia for both respectful discourse and meaningful civic action, acknowledge the ongoing importance of a range of civil rights, and affirm the crucial need for universities to facilitate productive communication.

Official Statement Speak Theatre Arts We’re deeply disappointed in the recent turn of events associated with the planned presentation of our show, N*GGER WETB*CK CH*NK, at the Carpenter Center in Long Beach. While we acknowledge the undeniably challenging nature of the show title, there is a long history of broad support for this project dating back to its origin at a student show at UCLA. Our travels nationally include performances at the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity and over 150 venues in more than forty states. It has long been the position of our company that there is a vast difference between using these words to express hatred and having a mature conversation about their use. We encourage important dialogue within diverse communities like Long Beach, and believe that the artists of our show deserved an opportunity to share stories borne from the real-life experiences of its authors. We know that giving a platform to strong voices is what drove Executive Director Michele Roberge to book us for a return engagement at the Carpenter Center, and were devastated to hear of her decision to leave the position following our show cancellation. She has been staggeringly professional, thoughtful, and tenacious in her support of our show and company and we are so grateful to her. Please let it be known that we believe deeply in the need for change as advocated by the Black Lives Matter movement and stand in solidarity with their commitment to achieving freedom and justice for all black lives. We cannot ignore, however, that this occurrence also stands as [a] critical juncture in the path of free speech on the campus of a public educational institution in perhaps our most liberal state. The same act of censorship that today may seem to protect a community may be used next time as justification to silence a community in desperate need of a voice. We intend to keep the conversation going even though the Carpenter Center stage will remain empty on September 29th.7

Campus Perspectives Communication and Collaboration: A President’s View Jane Close Conoley, CSULB President As a university president, I am clear that I have an obligation to promote freedom of expression on campus in keeping with our Constitutional mandates and our goal to develop well-informed citizens. One way of exploring ideas surrounding this important subject is through the arts. Although I do not have a role in choosing artistic events for our venues and rarely am involved in promoting them personally, I supported Carpenter Performing Arts Center

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Director Michele Roberge’s 2015 request to show N*W*C*, both financially and with positional influence. My office bought tickets, urged others to do so, and I directed our Division of Student Affairs to offer their expertise to help students use the performance as a platform for the difficult dialogues around race that are so necessary on a university campus. During several post-performance meetings with Ms. Roberge, faculty members and students indicated disappointment in the 2015 performance. Their audience perspective was that the piece reinforced stereotypes instead of provoking new insights about race and ethnicity. Given this feedback, Ms. Roberge was invited to work with our faculty—scholars of race, gender, and class—to find an alternative piece that would generate deep discussions about ethnicity and class; my impression was she agreed to do so. Though surprised when N*W*C* was rescheduled for the subsequent performance season, I offered what I hoped would be a consensus direction. Ms. Roberge was free to host the N*W*C* show, but I would not provide exceptional financial and public relations support or direct the campus to develop educational activities around the show. This was based on additional feedback from faculty and staff indicating an unwillingness to develop such collateral educational experiences. I was disappointed when Ms. Roberge’s resignation was fashioned as a pro–First Amendment rights action. In an ideal situation Carpenter Performing Arts Center and the university would have collaborated to offer our students superior learning experiences.

Toward an Expansive Concept of Freedom of Speech: Defending the Principle, Practice, and People Maulana Karenga, CSULB Professor and Chair of Africana Studies The intense struggles now being waged across university and college campuses of this country can be perceived from one vantage point as simply for or against the principle of freedom of speech. But in a larger sense, they can also be understood as part of an ongoing historical struggle about how this vital freedom is practiced and who are its real beneficiaries. Indeed, these critical struggles offer an important opportunity for expanding the concept of freedom of speech and expression so that it involves not only the defense of the principle, but also the enhancement of the practice and due respect for the people, a freedom which includes the conditions and capacity conducive to freedom of speech in real life forms. It will be a freedom of speech born of constant negotiation and struggle, not mere announcements of ideals which do not deal with living difference and diversity and ever-changing concepts of how rights are conceived, practiced and defended. As members of the academy we all know and concede the essentiality of freedom of speech to our pursuit, production, and sharing of knowledge. This is, of course, especially true for those of us who are activist scholars and see as part of our work what Maatian philosophy calls nedjnedj ken, constant and courageous questioning of the established order of things in the interest of human good and the well-being of the world. And thus, most of us would and do oppose acts of shouting down, shutting down, disinviting, and disruptive interventions in general. But even if we stop or discontinue these actions, real free speech would still not exist on campus, as it did not exist before the beginning of these acts of resistance to how it is practiced. If we are to restrain ourselves from self-righteous conceptions of institutional practices and idealist visions of the university community, we know that free speech was/is more of a practice for some and an aspiration for others, and that these acts of resistance demand and

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compel a reconsideration of things. Even our curricula still silence and sideline whole peoples, and before the struggles of the 1960s, they were essentially one long self-congratulatory narrative about European (i.e., White) people as if the majority peoples of color in the world were not part of the whole truth they claim to teach. Thus, free speech, like other values, is subject to ongoing contestation not to intentionally destroy or deny it, but as in this case, to expand the arc of its inclusiveness. In a word, it’s to make the principle and practice more beneficial for all the people, not simply for a privileged and powerful few who create spaces of freedom of expression for themselves and are shocked when the excluded, marginalized, mistreated, and misrepresented challenge their creations and instructions. Much of the discourse on free speech calls on the listener to be respectful and attentive, but no such requirement or strong request is made of the speaker or presenter. But speech as a communicative practice is relational and the most productive relations, at a minimum, are and must be mutually respectful and reciprocal. Indeed, persons have no obligation to listen to those that degrade them, condemn their identities, and deny their humanity, insult them and ask them to be silent and compliant during the assault. Moreover, trying to answer or erase these concerns by labeling the attacks simply “disagreements” and “differing views” that make the assaulted uncomfortable and which they must get used to, seems intellectually dishonest and ethically questionable. For it seeks to intellectualize injury and insult in selfserving defense of an abstract principle at the expense of real people. It is also argued by those who choose and determine what students should listen to, view, read, and discuss under the banner of academic freedom, that there is some educative value in assaults that degrade, insult, mock suffering, and deny people’s humanity. But there is no reliable study to demonstrate that listening to a lecture, watching a play, or reading a book which questions and denies a person’s or people’s humanity and human worth is the best or even advisable way to enhance or even pursue learning and expose or end misconceptions. In fact, it could tend to normalize the assaultive presentations and practices rather than correct them. This is mainly a pablum of peace without justice for the vulnerable. Indeed, the early Nation of Islam Yakubian narrative about the diabolic origin and nature of Whites is not widely recommended reading as a promising pedagogical approach to ending misconceptions about Whites and their oppressive practices in the world. There is at least a slight odor and appearance of hypocrisy and contradiction in the reasoning of those who urge students to be civil, have respect, and build campus community, and then, tell them that when it comes to speech, they should accept what people impose on them as long as it is within law or policy. Clearly, history shows that law and policy can be and has been oppressive, out of step with the times, or inadequate. And the university is one of the best places to challenge, question, and demand change, especially given its august claims of constantly seeking truth of the world in all its diversity. Actually, there is no unencumbered public discourse and thus people bring to discursive exchanges their culture and experiences of daily life and their aspirations for a context of freedom, justice, equity, mutual respect, and civility, touted by the university as its aspirations also. And, therefore, Native Americans, Africans, Latinas/os, Asians, women, Muslims, Hindus, and others considered religiously different, LGBT people, the disabled, the aged, and all the other vulnerable, devalued, and artificially-made invisible peoples have a rightful expectation to realize these goods in the university and a self-defined democratic society. Thus, a new population of students are raising their voices about issues important to them and resisting degrading speech and behavior, conditions that, they reason, should not be a part of the community the university says it stands and works for in its best documents.

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They have a right to resist, to question and confront. And the university is the best place for them to engage in this transformative action, expand their knowledge, hone their skills, and develop values for their work and social engagement in society and the world. Clearly, it should not coddle them or indulge them in all their sensitivities. Rather, it should engage and challenge them, hear their concerns, and work with them in cooperatively creating a balance between the right of free speech and the right to security and freedom from environments negative to both learning and a good life. And this will, of necessity, be achieved through an expansive concept of freedom of speech, created through principled and productive struggle for reciprocal relationships of mutual respect and civility between speakers, presenters, listeners, and respondents, directed toward a rigorous defense of the principle, practice, and people in the interest of human good and the well-being of the world.

Making the Case for Nuance and Diversity Karen Kleinfelder, CSULB Professor Emerita and Former Director of the School of Art I always knew what side I was on when it came to the question of censorship. It was one of the few contested issues that seemed clear-cut for anyone in the arts. The events surrounding the Carpenter Center controversy have made me rethink my entrenched standpoint in more nuanced ways. Attending a panel discussion of diverse speakers covering the issue from multiple standpoints, and meeting with the chairs of Africana Studies and American Indian Studies, made me start to see things differently. What would it feel like to walk the campus as a person of color and repeatedly see signage advertising the play’s title, N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk? Though loaded, they are just words, asterisked at that, and in college we all learn how linguistically distanced any chain of signifiers is from the real, right? What if your lived experience is all too chained to these slurs, and not just on the basis of content, of what can be inferred by such language and its deep-level connections to race, but also in terms of what these signifiers actually do? Such slurs have the power to harm, to make the outsider within—those who are not part of the “dominant” group—experience in a heightened way differential power relations and marginalization.8 Communication is not just linguistics in the abstract; it is lived and constructed through socially embedded practices, especially on a campus where we expect open debate and diverse opinions will be heard. But what is the true status of free speech on campuses? How often do faculty and students in art departments dialogue with those in ethnic studies? How regulated, homogenous, and even oppressive is the official language of the academy, measured by what is considered “ideal” English and prescriptive norms, which are then reproduced in speech deemed suitable for publication? Do we not often fail to practice what we preach when conformity to certain language practices rules out other ways of being knowledgeable, speaking subjects? What the Carpenter Center controversy brought into view for me was how removed from sight my own privilege as a member of the “dominant” group was. I had heard the title of the play spoken out loud—with the asterisks omitted—at a fall convocation promoting events to come. Though the title was not without shock value, it also seemed instantly condoned merely by being spoken in that academic context by well-meaning members of my group, and thus I felt no offense. In fact all I felt was guilt. I had missed the show the year before when it was first performed at the Carpenter Center, and though a little surprised to see it back again—such repetition is not standard booking practice—I made a note to myself that this time I should be sure to attend. Curiously, the use of the prohibited terms in the title had an

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inverse effect: instead of offending, their very use seemed to dictate that something important about race was at stake and being a liberal white woman, I needed to align myself with that cause. I never got there, of course, because the show was canceled. I can’t argue the merits or shortcomings of a performance I didn’t see, which is one of the key problems I have always had with censorship: it foregoes any debate if what is controversial is never seen or experienced firsthand. Being prohibited from seeing this performance, however, did something surprising; it helped me see other things. I attended the panel discussion put on the night the performance was originally scheduled to occur. Some speakers had seen the event the year before; others had not. The discussion never really focused on the content of the performance. What seemed more at stake was a broader problem with communication on campus: how are such loaded words heard by different groups, and who has the right to speak them? All the panelists were careful in their speech not to take those asterisks off; the title was not spoken outright until a member of the audience stood up and projected it loudly at the outset of the question-and-answer period. This time I heard the title differently. I was no longer tone deaf. And what was at stake, I realized, cut more deeply than simply a matter of tone. Regardless of the speaker’s intent, the slurs caused real offense. Having gone through this controversy in the midst of coediting this anthology, I now critically question when the right of free speech and expression runs up against the moral right to condemn racially oppressive speech. Such tensions have recently proved extremely challenging on campuses where extremist groups from the outside are met with voices that talk back, at times aggressively trying to shout/shut down what they say. Negotiating such competing and even irreconcilable values necessitates ongoing debate, which is why I know who I will stand and shout with whenever hate speech is spoken, but why I also know I will continue the fight to preserve First Amendment rights so meaningful debates can go on. But there is one thing more I will fight for in terms of free speech, and that is for the inclusion of all voices, most importantly for the standpoints of those who have been historically muted or subordinated since their situated knowledge throws the entire system and its power differentials into the kind of visibility needed to effect change. After the first showing of the performance at the Carpenter Center, that is what happened. Faculty from ethnic studies, some of whom had sent students to the event, met with President Conoley. Their response was mixed, but a recommendation was made to follow up the event by inviting other speakers from a list faculty in ethnic studies had compiled to keep the dialogue going in the year to come. Whether this move was construed as overstepping the Carpenter Center director’s freedom to set programming or as a direct challenge to her firm belief in N*W*C*, the recommendation went unheeded and the event was rescheduled for the second year in a row. The decision to cancel the event after it had been scheduled and publicized does constitute an act of censorship, but it does not seem a targeted act of prohibition from where I stand now. It seems more that the president chose to stand with faculty in ethnic studies after she heard what they had to say. The danger, however, of such a decision is what happens the next time controversy arises––who will be allowed to speak and who will not? There is good intent behind efforts to provide safe places on campuses, but is censoring ever an effective way to play it safe? The real danger when voices aren’t heard is that discussion breaks down and underlying tensions are left unpacked. Why are we here on a college campus if not to debate hard issues, voice/hear/consider multiple points of view, and critically think our way through controversies? Consensus may never be reached, but disagreements can prove illuminating. It is my hope we counter the act of censorship that occurred on this campus by bringing in and hiring more diverse voices so our students are in a better position to determine their own standpoints going forward.

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Deciphering the Nuances Cyrus Parker-Jeannette, Former CSULB Dean of the College of the Arts Censorship, education, art, race, racism, anger, conflict, nuance, freedom of expression, listening, ethics, compassion, inquiry, multifacets, contradictions, decisions, no win. These are the words swirling through my musings and reflections on a conflict of one-year plus regarding the booking and subsequent cancellation of a controversial satirical theater piece. As dean of the College of the Arts at CSULB and as an artist, educator, and arts advocate, I provide in what follows an account of what happened on our campus. In September 2015 the show, N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk, hereby referred to as N*W*C* for the purposes of brevity and sensitivity, was presented on the CSULB campus. Michele Roberge, then the executive director of the Carpenter Performing Arts Center, and I met with university president Dr. Jane Close Conoley prior to booking the show the first time in 2015, and asked for and received her full support. As posters, banners, and the electronic marquee went up advertising the show, there was a public outcry. The local chapter of the NAACP wrote a formal letter of protest against the production’s title and numerous campus and community members outwardly expressed their dismay, citing hate speech and historically hurtful words. There were calls for its cancellation. Instead, we upheld the performance as a vehicle for dialogue about race and racism, stereotypes, and other contemporary cultural issues. Dialogue was heated, discourse was rich, and the performance occurred to a near sold-out audience. After the performance, in the midst of heated controversy, I organized two meetings with several members of the campus community. The group included the president and provost, the chairs of our ethnic studies programs, the president and vice president of the Associated Students, leaders of our multicultural center, Michele and a staff member of the Carpenter Performing Arts Center, and an invited group of diverse student representatives. The touchstones of the discourse were censorship, art and race, and N*W*C*. There was dissonance in the expressed viewpoints. Some who had seen the show felt that it was superficial, sexist, sophomoric, and hurtful. Others found it wonderful, salient, and satirically funny. Those who had not seen the show, several who are campus leaders of color, were vexed by its title and stood adamantly against booking the performance again. As a resolute anticensorship advocate, Michele defiantly asserted at both of these meetings, “I am going to book this show every year until we don’t need it anymore.” To add context to the conversations and decisions that were subsequently made, I should note that several racially charged incidents occurred on the CSULB campus during 2015 and 2016. Racial demonstrations occurred, Black Lives Matter came on campus to rally the supporters of its agenda, alt-right groups posted propaganda, and students organized large open forums that became angry, heated, and racially divisive in their discourse. The campus, like the nation, was intensely feeling the conflicts and controversies of this epoch when the achievement of social justice seems distant. It was in response to these larger issues and in the context of extensive conversations with the members of our campus community that the request by the CSULB administration to cancel the return performance was made in May 2016. I was charged with canceling. As canceling a scheduled and advertised performance for reasons of controversy goes against the grain of my core values on freedom of expression and censorship of the arts, I began the consultation process once again. I sought advice, expertise, and recommendations on how or whether to proceed. I strangely and clearly understood each side of the varying and passionate perspectives that I heard. Meetings resumed with each of the ethnic studies chairs, with student representatives, and with community members of color with a range of

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cultural perspectives. I spoke with a variety of university administrators and counsel, and with Michele and other trusted colleagues. Reasonable and intelligent people were on all sides and the discussions were nuanced and messy. I was convinced that canceling the show would cause greater damage and backlash than not canceling it, but a call for cancellation persisted. Another contradiction within this described situation is that I had worked closely a few years prior with Michele on a large, campus-wide educational effort titled “The B-Word Project: Banned, Blacklisted and Boycotted: Censorship and the Response to It.” It was funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and a Creative Campus Innovations Grant from the Association of Performing Arts Presenters. The B-Word Project was an eighteenmonth series of lectures, screenings, performances, and exhibits, most by controversial artists such as the NEA 4, Judy Chicago, Bill T. Jones, and Azar Nafizi, among many others.9 It was a profound series for our campus. The contradictions and irony of the N*W*C* situation at CSULB were visible and unsettling. The programming decisions for the Carpenter Performing Arts Center have always been relatively autonomous, left to the trust of the executive director and the dean of the College of the Arts (who oversees the Center). From May to August Michele and I continued to try to find a positive proactive context in which the presentation of the show could go on—perhaps as part of a larger academic effort to focus campus attention and resources on these issues. We considered it within a greater slate of events on racial topics such as films, panel presentations, exhibits, and performances. President Conoley entertained some of these compromises, and also asked me to have conversations with the partners on and off campus who would need to engage with us to create this greater slate of events. As mentioned previously, I spoke with community donors and arts leaders, the CSULB ethnic studies chairs, the executive director of the Arts Council of Long Beach, friends, and acquaintances. I spoke with people who had seen the show and people who had not. Most of those I sought out are people of color, and all advised me that in this particular case canceling the show was the right thing to do. When I shared with the president the input I had received, President Conoley offered a choice of the performance with little or no advertisement, no financial or marketing support from the campus, and no congruent activities. Ms. Roberge was not interested in presenting with no support or advertising and cancellation of this return performance was determined. Michele Roberge was angry; she submitted her resignation and went public with her account of the story. There have been symbolic, political, and human missteps throughout this process. There was also great passion, intelligence, and conviction on all sides, as well as fallibility. The cancellation of N*W*C* was and still is a complex and nuanced issue. Deciphering it all is daunting. Censorship is an ugly word with frightening connotations, and no artist or academic in my experience wants to be accused of it. As I reflect on the lessons learned, it is evident that our good intentions are often misread and misplaced when our cultural perspectives differ. It is clear we at CSULB and beyond have a lot of work ahead of us as we pursue equity, social justice, and inclusion on our campuses and in our communities.

Statement Michele Roberge, Former Director of the CSULB Carpenter Performing Arts Center

Why have a performing arts center on a state university campus? 1) To present shows for the greater community so they see how their taxes are spent?

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2) To introduce the arts to elementary students in hopes they’ll consider becoming a student there someday? 3) To showcase university performers, impressing their families and big donors? 4) To provide an alternative perspective to what students encounter in their college classrooms? Yes, of course, to the first three reasons. Yes, ideally, to the last. A university performing arts presenter can select from a worldwide variety of artists, genres, and disciplines that offer ideas in person right there in front of an audience. Classical music, Chinese acrobats, all kinds of dance, smooth jazz, storytellers, comedians, rock-nroll bands, country music legends, puppet shows, even controversial speakers. A university performing arts center can bring the entire spectrum of what humans do with their voices, bodies, and imaginations to convey their thoughts via their artistry. But you can get that in any nonprofit theatre. What makes a theatre on a university campus different? To me, it was the opportunity to contribute to the often messy experience of LEARNING going on all over the campus. In bringing artists—those visionary, crackpot, edgy, brilliant genius outsiders—we offered students a different perspective. Sometimes those perspectives correlate and confirm what’s being taught in a classroom, and sometimes they challenge it. The interplay, whether discrepancy or confirmation, between what students learn in a classroom and what they experience on a stage causes something interesting to happen in students’ brains. They learn to compare, contrast, and extrapolate. They learn to think for themselves. A good university presenter creates/curates a varied menu of professional artists to engage, entertain, inspire, and, yes, challenge students, faculty, and community audiences. A state university presenter, supported by taxpayers as well as private donors, has an especially important function in ensuring a place for artists and art, no matter how provocative or controversial, to be explored, discussed, and considered by both students and general citizens. Is it arrogance, territory protection, or just parochial shortsightedness when faculty members dissuade students from experiencing all they can conveniently on their campus? Are faculty not prepared to be challenged by the ideas of artists? Are administrators frightened of controversy, frightened that “violence would break out” as I was warned would happen if our presentation of N*W*C* went on? And, most importantly, is the university afraid of damaging the tender sensibilities of its students by words said on stage that they experience in every other aspect of life? Those of us in the arts know the dangers of performing on stage. Audiences can be thrilled, bored, disappointed, angered, and delighted, many times at the same performance. Any shared experience, from watching a car crash to hearing a concert, will resonate differently in each person who experiences it. But after every performance, whether one likes it or not, the inescapable fact is that each audience member learned something from the experience. It was my understanding that the cultivation of eagerness to learn something, even if the learning is difficult, is the goal of a university, nurturing students and ultimately citizens capable of critical thinking. The university president and the dean of the College of the Arts deprived students and community members of the chance to experience the artistry and voices of the artists of N*W*C* after it had been publicly announced, an act of censorship. Their decision negated all I tried to do in fourteen years as a university presenter. It silenced the artists and it silenced me.

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Policies and Freedom of Expression Elena Roznovan and Cintia Segovia, Artists and Former CSULB MFA Students and Officers of the Fine Arts Roundtable Public universities historically have promoted dialogue on difficult issues. They are catalysts of change and a safe space to discuss social concerns, serving as incubators of critical and argumentative thinking. When it comes to safe space, most people interpret it as a space with inoffensive language and images. To us, it means the ability to show any work even if it might be deemed offensive, to charge visual elements with new meaning, to challenge any and all concepts, and to generate discussion. We, as MFA candidates in sculpture and photography, agree on this. I, Cintia, produce work that deals with politics, including issues relating to immigration and identity. I, Elena, don’t address political issues directly in my work, but I believe that all art is inherently political. Thus we hold the opinion that any form of artistic expression should be welcomed in order to encourage a robust and healthy critical thinking environment. Cancellation of NWC was an issue for us as artists because we very much value freedom of speech. In our opinion, NWC, a well-known and much-circulated play and a form of political expression in its own right, was censored. Part of what we have learned at CSULB’s School of Art is that oftentimes the gestures that artists make have the role of creating conversations around difficult topics, answering questions that arise from conflicts, and facilitating reconciliation in contradictory situations. If controversial topics cannot be raised due to censorship, the artist’s role becomes futile. That is why we cannot condone censorship. In the time leading up to the presidential election, when the political climate was divisive and racial tensions ran high, we witnessed a demarcation of responsibilities regarding exhibitions scheduled in the School of Art galleries. SOA exhibition spaces are available to any graduate or undergraduate student who wishes to test different display methods, an otherwise impossible task to achieve within one’s studio space. The application process involves submitting a gallery proposal with a description of the show, display techniques, and materials to be used. It invites the students to plan for and implement any unconventional art practice or exhibition method, such as the use of blood and foul language. SOA then decides what exhibitions will be accepted. Also there is a one-hour mandatory meeting at the beginning of the semester to train the exhibitors on gallery installation, good practices, and safety. We were struck by the course of events during the two-week period following the cancellation of NWC. A permanent sign was posted in every gallery. The first version of the sign was removed within a week and an excerpt of the second version was posted sometime around September 9, which read: “The artworks, exhibitions, and accompanying statements or texts presented in these galleries are the unique expressions and creative intellectual products of their creators, and do not represent the views of the School or University.” The signs were posted by the entrance of every SOA gallery. At this juncture the SOA student body had not received any formal communication about the decision to change the gallery policies or make them explicit. The wording of this sentence made us feel that the university would not defend our right to free speech. However, due to SOA faculty who are passionate within their fields and are supportive of students, the sign posted in the galleries was reworded. An excerpt of the current sign reads: “Freedom of speech is a constitutional right. We defend both the artists’ right to create such work and the School of Art’s right to display it. At the same time, works on display do not represent the views of the School of Art or CSULB.”

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While we are very thankful for this change, we also understand that professional gallery and museum spaces, which we visit often, commonly do not exhibit such signs. Ultimately we are of the opinion that these display policies do not facilitate discussion among scholars, but rather cloud the academic environment. To conclude, while the signage posted in the galleries does not exactly censor our points of view as exhibiting artists, it suggests the university is not supportive of students and is willing to leave them legally unprotected. With this in mind, we would like to address your attention once again to the importance of safe space for artists, and note that within university facilities with such signs, a controversial gesture becomes the sole responsibility of the student. Critical thinking and dialogue are ultimately at risk.

An Account: N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk at Carpenter Performing Arts Center Griselda Suarez Barajas, Executive Director of the Long Beach Arts Council and CSULB Chicano and Latino Studies Lecturer It all started with an email thread that was forwarded to me on September 14, 2015, with the subject line: Carpenter Center Performance on Culture and Race—September 24. I had not yet heard about the local NAACP chapter’s concerns regarding the title and the play’s content.10 But even if I had known, I would have still replied to the invitation. I am always open to participating in a discussion about race and culture for various reasons. Ultimately, as an artist and a cultural worker, I felt it was my responsibility to take advantage of an opportunity for Chicano and Latino Studies (CHLS) students to engage with artists and participate as audience members. Moreover, I do not have a budget to provide cultural experiences for students in my CHLS 100 course and the invitation included a free class visit and students could obtain free tickets from Associated Students Incorporated (ASI). In opening up my classroom, I became responsible for preparing students to engage critically and creatively. This responsibility to prepare CSULB students for the 2015 performance, in my opinion, was not taken as seriously throughout our university until pressure after the performance from students, ethnic studies, and faculty challenged the quality and academic integrity of the performance.

Class Visit

It is my understanding that I am the only faculty who opened up the classroom for the performers. N*gger Wetb*ack Ch*nk (NWC), as performed by Rafael Agustín, Dionysio Basco, and Jackson McQueen, became a lesson plan in CHLS 100, an arts exposure unit in the classroom and an arts experience at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center (CPAC). From the long email thread—College of the Arts to College of Liberal Arts to department to faculty—the correspondence demonstrated that university administration believed the play, although inflammatory and provocative, had the “potential to generate conversations across our disciplines.” Furthermore, in participating in the larger vision of academic engagement, I accepted the marketing of the play: “with curricular content in the humanities, sociology, psychology, anthropology and ethnic studies, it seems that the subject [of the play] may be relevant to the content of many of your courses”; also, the university administration communicated that the “performance is meant certainly to entertain (the show has gotten great reviews) AND to enable and provoke discussions about discrimination, stereotyping, and racism.” I was in. My CHLS 100 course was scheduled at 8:00 a.m., so my request that

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they meet with my class was not easy. The actors first stated that they would not be able to present. The troupe found it difficult to arrive on time with Los Angeles traffic, and they would be working late the previous night. Michele Roberge, director of CPAC at the time and conversation facilitator, made it possible. She was able to secure hotel rooms for the troupe so that they could present. I had ten days to prepare my class for the performance, and it was an absolute coincidence that the unit we were discussing in class was identity construction within political, social, and cultural contexts. I added a presentation on creative inquiry in relation to artistic expression. We reviewed the Luis Valdez short film on the poem “I am Joaquin” by Corky Gonzalez. My educational approach is very much influenced by writers like bell hooks and in particular her essay “Art on My Mind.” This essay inspired me to engage students with the following questions: Who has the power to create? What does a colonized visual or performative art look like? How has colonization restricted creative expression? Which colonized images and expressions are still present in our lives? Where do you place yourself within an artistic lineage? Where do you see creative expression in your lives? In addition to the poem on film, we had already reviewed casta paintings, marketing campaigns that target Latinx consumers, and US Census data. On September 23 Michele arrived with the performers of NWC and we quickly moved into the presentation. The actors did three excerpts of the play so that students could get an overall understanding of the play. I immediately recognized the utilization of humor as a tool to connect with its audiences. The students were interested and laughed at all the right places, a sign of knowing how to deliver a punch line. However, it was also apparent the play was dated because I reacted to some cultural references and my students didn’t. A discussion followed and the students were very engaged. Questions about the title, the topics, and even the purpose of such performance arose and the actors were very honest. We learned that Jackson McQueen’s family found it difficult to support a play that used “Nigger,” even if censored in the title, as an inciting device for participation in discussion. I also recognized rehearsed answers that seemed to come off marketing material, such as “they find ways to throw words right back,” when talking about why the title is what it is. Last, students were ready to engage in larger philosophical dialogues of how art perpetuates, breaks down, and reimagines identity. One of the students asked the actors how their performance ultimately dealt with identity. I distinctly remember actor Rafael Agustín responding with, “Is this an honors class? That is a really hard question. This is not like other Chicano studies classes.” This comment made several heads turn, as students looked to me for direction. All I could say was that students were really interested in the subject matter, and I tried to restate the question. I think that the troupe was there to entertain and get students to CPAC. All in all, the presentation ended on a high note and I even promoted it on social media. I thanked Michele for the exposure provided to the class.

Performance

The night of September 24 was full of energy. Because of the free tickets, most of my class, several CHLS majors, and a few CHLS faculty attended the performance. When I walked into the theater I saw that it was at capacity. NWC had sold out the venue and I learned during the introduction by Michele that Long Beach High School students were present alongside community college students from surrounding areas. I can imagine that on many levels this was seen as successful. I had only seen this kind of evening one other time while at CSULB and it was for a free screening of Blowout, a movie about the Chicano Youth Movement

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in East Los Angeles. After more announcements the lights went down and the performance began with an a capella song reminding the audience of the words they expected to hear: Chink … Chink … Chink. Chink … Chink … Chink. [enter Asian American actor] Wetback … Wetback … Wetback … Wetback … Wetback … Wetback. [enter Latinx actor] Nigger, nigger, nigger. Nigger, nigger, nigger. Nigger, nigger, nigger. [enter Black actor] [all on stage] Chink … Chink … Chink. Chink … Chink … Chink. Wetback … Wetback … Wetback … Wetback … Wetback … Wetback. Nigger, nigger, nigger. Nigger, nigger, nigger. Nigger, nigger, nigger. Chink … Chink … Chink. Chink … Chink … Chink. Wetback … Wetback … Wetback … Wetback … Wetback … Wetback. Nigger, nigger, nigger. Nigger, nigger, nigger. Nigger, nigger, nigger. The song rang in my ear like a house techno song reminding me again that it was a dated play stuck in a time when as a country we struggled with government-sanctioned racial profiling and saying these epithets was an act of calling out society. It also served as a light dance moment of the play that settled us into a night of “comedy.” Throughout the evening I heard and saw many people laugh at the comical representations of stereotypes and, at times, the struggles of the original cast members presented via monologue. The play was two acts, the struggle versus the elation, and most of my discomfort was with the second half. After toying with audience emotions and triggering all of us who have experienced racism and homophobia in the first half, NWC offered a superficial answer to engage with systematic forms of oppression. The Black actor extolled Latinx communities for providing Latina women to the world as voluptuous and oversexualized. The Asian American actor displayed in a very physical monologue laundered with “Asian”-inspired movement just how fabulous Asian cuisine is amidst the American food landscape. I find these examples inappropriate at a time when people of color are being harassed, deported, and shot by authorities. The play ends on an inspirational note that leaves the audience members feeling like they too can overcome struggles, but the questions-and-answer period immediately following once again showed that our students were looking for deeper engagement. One CHLS student specifically asked why the play perpetuates the stereotype of the oversexualized Latina, and the Black actor responded, “I just like them.” This ended the night for me on a very low note, and I knew that, come Monday, I was going to have to answer questions about my support of the play. The NWC play left campus with its costumes, set, and actors. But it left behind a restless body of students, faculty, and administration. It was supposed to help bring us together to talk about race; actually, it divided us even more. I think the play failed on many levels. It was not the appropriate tool to aid or heal what was going on in our lives. When I saw my class again on Monday, I learned that some students felt entertained but many felt offended by the entire process. I know that one of the functions of art is to offer a point of conversation. I go back to my training and think about bell hooks once more. How do I aid in shifting conventional ways of approaching the function of art? How do I facilitate student empowerment? How do I revolutionize how students see and look at art? How do we, as an institution, collectively supply inclusive educational programs of critical inquiry in order to motivate innovative public art sharing and thereby make possible essential elements for the exercise of liberation?

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I thought about the play constantly and talked about it with anyone who would listen. In my opinion, it did not fulfill my artistic expectation, yet the play served as a catalyst for me to be more involved in the arts and culture of my community. I thanked Michele for the class presentation and booking of the play because at an entry level, it gave us a starting point. I also expressed my appreciation to the College of the Arts and College of Liberal Arts for providing me with such an opportunity, but I knew I needed to insert myself into the program-planning process. I inquired how I could give my suggestions for other performers at CPAC. To my surprise, Michele asked if I would be interested in serving on a faculty advisory board for the center. Of course I replied in the affirmative. Second, I sent a list of performers that even included a CSULB graduate. I know that various ethnic studies colleagues and students had expressed their frustrations with President Conoley and Dean Parker-Jeannette about how the campus engages in discussions of race and about how race impacts graduation rates, participation, and cultural representation. I did not hear back from Michele until June 2016, when she shared with me via email that she had invited NWC back to campus for fall 2016 and asked for my input on future educational programs. Somehow what my colleagues, students, and I had shared earlier did not hold weight compared to the sensational energy the play had created.

Reflection

Many things had changed for me personally and professionally by the summer of 2016, but I made every effort to meet with Michele to discuss her booking of NWC. I never got the opportunity—schedules did not coincide. The academic year, in terms of current events, had been full of tension, fear, and anger. In 2015, 431 people of color were shot dead by police in the United States; in total police killed 995 people across the country. It is important for me to also include the fact that twenty-one transgender people—nineteen of them people of color—were murdered in the same year. So after the show, the laughs, and the critical questions, I as an arts advocate would like our university community to better consider the kinds of creative expressions we bring to campus. Between the moment I learned about the second booking in June and the decision by President Conoley in September to not financially support the second play, there was a fatal shooting of a person of color every month and the murders of transgender people, mostly of color, were rising to an all-time high. There was an onrush of mobilization for student activists, and many of our students at CSULB were getting involved. I saw it as my responsibility to express my point of view on the NWC matter when asked. As a CHLS faculty member and an arts administrator, I could not support any production that was not strong in craft, presentation, and academic rigor. It also did not address the issues of our time. It would not have been right to send students to the ASI office asking for the “Nigger, Wetback, Chink” tickets during a time when organizers and supporters of one presidential campaign were attacking communities of color on a daily basis. NWC presents itself as a play that helps audiences confront racism, hence presenting itself as consciousness-raising social practice art. In doing so it is charged with the task of engaging in the process of eliminating racism, rather than resisting consideration of how their content and language complicates or defers actual social change. I am completely against censorship and equally an advocate for quality. If CPAC had proposed a performance with better writing and a more developed message, even if it was inflammatory, I would have supported it. I also did not want to support NWC again just to be able to say that we had secured a packed house and academic engagement. Our students of color deserve better from CPAC—the same attention to craft that CPAC pays when booking mainstream or dominant arts and culture for general audiences.

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Art can be a transcendent experience and as such it transforms people. I want CPAC and CSULB to continue to have performances that engage everyone on campus on difficult topics. Concurrently, discussions on race will continue to be presented in ethnic studies classrooms and beyond; these discussions do not need to be sanctioned by a university program. A campus-wide effort to engage in dialogue is just one of many actions that can be taken to address systemic oppression, and I believe that utilizing the arts is imperative in the process. So how do we move forward? The university must not make the same mistakes the next time, and should take the advice that has been given. A planning process for a more successful arts engagement experience would include more people at the decision table (students, faculty, staff, and community members), a thorough evaluation of quality, and an advisory board that is charged to look at bookings that can be integrated into classrooms. The way we move forward is to not only look at the number of artists and performers of color represented but also to encourage creative expressions that confront racism with innovation, ultimately enabling students to find agency and liberation.

Statement Andrew Vaca, CSULB Professor and Former Chair of Dance Writing about something that occurred more than a year ago is difficult. I certainly remember sitting with other CSULB faculty and staff on September 23, 2016, listening to President Conoley and Provost [Brian] Jersky defend the course of action the university took to keep NWC from being performed, but my notes are sparse. Found recently in a small spiral-top notebook, they remind me of the notes I take when I am making dance combinations for class or rehearsal: they make a lot of sense a few hours later, make a little less sense the next day, and they are cryptic and practically meaningless a month later. I was angry that day in 2016 about a lot of things: a trusted colleague quitting her job; college leadership taking part in the public judgment of a theater piece with a group of individuals that didn’t include any faculty member of the College of the Arts; a lack of transparency regarding the chain of events that led to the cancellation of NWC; a presupposition that it was better to get rid of something than allow students upset by it to respond in whatever manner students would respond; a seeming lack of ability of our campus to handle public relations; the thought that at an institution of higher learning an opportunity for dialogue and discussion was largely turned into an opportunity for some to lecture others … A year later I feel as though I better understand how some of that which disappointed me occurred. As I mentioned in an email to colleagues back in September 2016, the truth of a situation often lies between the stories of opposing parties, and the NWC/CPAC saga serves as a crystal-clear example. Many people were doing their best for those they represent and for some they do not represent. Today I am not so angry, yet I am still trying to discover what I can do differently when these sorts of situations happen again, as I am sure they will in either my career or life. I am disappointed in myself for not following through on the emails I sent to the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond about setting up an Undoing Racism workshop for the College of the Arts. A semester later I discovered firsthand in Academic Senate meetings, when the charge of our campus’s LGBTIQ+ campus climate committee was being debated, that when it comes to “otherness” on the CSULB campus there are still a lot of privileged individuals thinking they know what is best for others. A year and a semester later I am heartened by the comments my freshman dance majors wrote on their final exams for Orientation to Dance regarding how

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much studying dance the past fifteen weeks at CSULB had improved their communication skills—a new and purposeful course outcome in the wake of what has occurred here and elsewhere that will prove useful for my students in these types of situations. Nevertheless, a year and a semester later I am saddened that the campus’s follow-through to this situation is much like the sparse notes in my small spiral-top notebook: cryptic and practically meaningless.

On the Trap(pings) of “Censorship” Discourse and the “Civil” Circumvention of Rupture Jaye Austin Williams, Former CSULB Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts, Currently Assistant Professor and C. Graydon and Mary E. Rogers Faculty Fellow in Africana Studies at Bucknell University It is usually about settling everyone down so that class can begin. Not this time. They were anticipating my entrance, the question locked and loaded on the pursed lips of the student elected to hurl it at me like a torpedo as I crossed the threshold: “Did you hear about the censorship at the Carpenter Center?” That is how I learned of the cancellation of the performance piece titled N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk (hereafter, NWC) scheduled to be performed at the Carpenter Center on the California State Long Beach campus on September 29, 2016, while I was serving on the theater arts faculty. The issue was so deeply layered I barely knew where to begin. The truth seemed a good start. No, I hadn’t, I told them. Neither had I seen the earlier iteration performed on campus the year before—a fact I regretted instantly, sensing there was more to come. I heard, loud and clear, the allegation of “censorship” now clamoring against the walls of our tiny, windowless classroom, and set aside the lesson plan for that day’s meditation on “Theatre Today,” its replacement having brazenly announced itself. The meaning of the term “censorship” as defined by the American Civil Liberties Union is straightforward: it is “the suppression of words, images, or ideas that are ‘offensive,’ [which] happen[s] whenever some people succeed in imposing their personal political or moral values on others. [It] can be carried out by the government [and by] private pressure groups. Censorship by the government is unconstitutional.”11 I inferred from the performance piece’s title, however, that the issues attendant to both its content and its cancellation ran far deeper than censorship alone. This is not to suggest that censorship is benign, but the fervent outcry on behalf of freedom of expression can be shortsighted in its presumption that the enjoyment of such freedom is universal, simply by dint of its constitutional girding. In the flurry of concern around NWC’s termination, a deeper set of concerns around how and why the work itself had piqued such a complex of responses was not only being overlooked, but funneled into a one-word declaration: “Censorship!” The more intricate, racial(ized) contours of the piece, and the turbulence surrounding its annulment, are not singular, but myriad. In viewing the clips available on YouTube, I observed repetitions of the epithets, noting my discomfort, and I strained to parse its complexity. Was I uncomfortable because of the ways in which these rehearsals tweaked slavery’s indelible, traumatic marking of my own heritage? Was my unconscious shot through with the Aristotelian mandate that a linear narrative emerge, thus imbuing the “story” with a liberal (pun intended) dose of redemptive catharsis? The answer: likely both. Saidiya Hartman’s incisive analyses of violence and its repetitions are crucial to this contemplation, particularly as they pertain to both the Africans who were terrorized, violated, drowned, and otherwise disposed of in the Atlantic and to the Black

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beings who survived, yet were subjected to unthinkable corporeal and libidinal violence(s) at the behest of slavers and slaveholders, pitching their human being into an unthinkable aporia. Hartman examines the perpetual tension between the import of invoking the slaves’ “lost archive” and the ethical dilemmas that arise from the gestures toward documenting the unthought and undocumentable.12 The discourse around NWC revealed concern about the material’s offensiveness to some people of Color (mostly faculty members, as I came to understand it) who had seen the earlier iteration and (purportedly) found its framing of the three monikers offensive in both its oversimplification and repetition of them. This had apparently led to a consensus amongst these (multidisciplinary) faculty members that the work was merely incendiary and thus insufficient to elicit a comprehensive broaching of the subject at hand: the violence of racially inflected language, its repetition(s), and effects. These concerns prompted the university president, Jane Close Conoley, to order the performance’s cancellation, a reflex that is concerning as it does not appear to consider the complexity of academics of Color passing judgment on work conceived outside the academy. The president’s parry aimed, in my view, to avoid being perceived as racist for not hearing or responding to the concerns expressed by that cadre of academics of Color. It is not my intent to dismiss the concerns of those faculty members or to single out President Conoley, who was managing an extremely sensitive situation exacerbated in no small part by a long history of institutional avoidance of culpability in racial oppression. Rather, I am suggesting that her reflex signifies a pervasive, entrenched soci(et)al anxiety constituted by and retrenched in that avoidance/ nonconfrontation. The clamor that in turn incited students to speak out in support of the performers’ voices being heard was formidable. Such earnest support of freedom of expression is, in itself, certainly not a “bad” thing. But that clamor in effect crowded out the space within which the extremely troubled discourses between people of Color—around issues of respectability, acceptability, upward mobility, and the various projects of striving (not least, the attainment of higher learning) that likely influenced the decision to call off the event—might be elaborated. Academics’ prerogative to determine what constitutes “analytical” or “comprehensive” discourse can be problematic. These were young performers who, although utilizing developmental support from an academic institution (University of California, Los Angeles), were forging a largely grassroots, communitybased artistic exploration of racial(ized) violence(s). A flurry of questions comes to mind: Do we cathedralize academic authority to such an extent that we relegate these performers’ right to theorize (never mind the right to speak, period) about the ways in which their lived experiences stand as evidence of such violence, to the very lost archive to which Hartman refers? What are the underlying fears and anxieties that fuel the invocation of such authority, and how might we expose them in ways that rupture “civil,” “respectable” spaces that, in their avoidance of such confrontations, quash these analyses altogether? Further, why couldn’t the productive tension between academic notions of “acceptable” articulations around race, and grassroots modes of doing so, be unpacked in a postperformance discussion? Why wasn’t that productive tension allowed to boil over during the panel discussion that stood in lieu of the performance on September 29, 2016, in which I was invited to participate as a panelist? As I have inferred, the reflex to preempt rupture is both fear driven and deeply conditioned. In my view, several factors circumvented such a rupture in the panel discussion. First, several of us on the panel had neither seen the earlier iteration of the show nor had any extensive access to it (other than a couple of clips on YouTube), which put us at a

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critical disadvantage in addressing specifics about the show’s content.13 Second, there was a moderator who did her job quite ably, which is to say, she “successfully” preempted what I believe needed to explode in the space—namely, the clash between the hallowed halls and the quotidian (i.e., the commonplace, the streets, the everyday folk) around language, where racism and its attendant issues are concerned.14 This is not a new simmer, after all. The CSULB students, faculty, and the surrounding communities had come to hear why these men of Color had gotten shut down. What many fail to realize, however, is that the resounding query is not simply about free speech and First Amendment rights, but about the ghosts in the very law(s) that produced such legislation: in effect, the structural (and in this case, institutional) silencing of people of Color embarking on their own analyses of their respective predicaments—with or without benefit of hallowed language—to say nothing of the fact that these predicaments neither are uniform nor stem from the same histories.15 This was the rupture I hoped for in agreeing to sit on the panel—a direct confrontation with those ghosts—because it might also have exposed the often colonizing effects imposed by the (so-called) progressive who gestures toward matters of equality for all, while obfuscating their own deeply inlaid fear of appearing racist—and certainly of being so accused. It is that voice that often brays the loudest in these scenes of ideological protest. Such outcry can in turn obscure the harder, even more urgent question: Why have those rights, for far too many, never been experienced universally—legislative precedents notwithstanding?16 During the panel event there was an insistence upon respect and civility. This concern is in many respects at the crux of why communication at its most effective does not occur. Civility and ethical action(s) are not always analogous; and conversely, disruption (of civility and order) and respect are not always antithetical.17 In conclusion, the students whose urgent query greeted me at the threshold of our classroom door had become armed with a singularized agenda—censorship—when in fact the issues surrounding the canceled performance are far more intricate. As Joy James suggests, “[t]he semi-illiteracy of conventional rhetoric shaping the dominant discourse on ‘race’ [continues our conceptual] severing [of] racism from its logical culmination in genocide.”18 Such funneling of the issue circumvents our collective (societal) cognition of the genocidal dimensions and historical implications of silencing. The outcry of “censorship” tends to map the infraction through a cohered (civil/social) presumption that such rights apply to all human beings, rather than expose the systematic refusal of those rights, via blatant and nuanced means, to human beings whose human being is historically marked by enslavement and its myriad violences.19 Whether or not one views the performance as having articulated with rhetorical “sophistication,” mightn’t its intuitive knowledge(s) been signifying by way of the asterisks that the show’s creators knew to include them? In guiding students through the ever-expanding sociopolitical web in this complicated world, it behooves us as educators to ensure they are not armed with inflamed, one-dimensional rhetoric that they are ill equipped to analyze. Rather, it is incumbent upon us to foster their ability to critically discern the myriad subtler issues that likely permeate any one, overarching issue. Certainly it behooves us all to read the First Amendment to the Constitution and to bear in mind the troubling questions about who its framers likely had in mind, and who they did not, in designing “our” right to free expression, among other (supposedly) “inalienable” rights. Our students are not brigades we are leading around by the nose in support of our agendas; they are people with burgeoning intellectual, artistic, scientific, and/or technical capabilities that must be tooled toward their own framings of this ever-complicating world so that they can think through and articulate them clearly, thoughtfully, and perhaps, most importantly, ethically.

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In Praise of Laughter Teri Shaffer Yamada, CSULB Professor Emerita and Former Chair of Asian and Asian-American Studies Comedy is all about poking fun at righteous pretensions. Its cultural power lies in making us laugh at others and indirectly at ourselves, opening an opportunity to perceive and accept our own narrow-mindedness, pretensions, and prejudices. There is no social change without recognition. Laughter can create a cultural opening for new insights into taboo subjects, including racial hatred. That hatred percolates deeply in the collective unconscious of American culture and irrationally explodes in gratuitous violence against people identified as “different”: young women wearing hijabs on a commuter train, young black men sitting in automobiles or wearing hoodies. The September 2015 performance of N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk played to a packed audience, including many high school students, at the Carpenter Center of CSU Long Beach. The performance was preceded by days of on-campus discussion led by members of the ensemble, all young men of color, about the purpose of this comedic play: to call out or deconstruct racial stereotypes through comedy. In a post-performance discussion with the audience, the actors explained how over the past few years they found college crowds increasingly reactive to their performance. Our current age of extreme political correctness has taken its toll on academic free speech and creative expression. People now lose jobs over poorly worded tweets. It is an age in which vituperative accusers of bigotry fail to recognize their own positionality as oppressors of free speech. The possibility of dialogue over difference fades in a righteous standoff between the accusers and the accused. What was most remarkable to me about the post-performance reaction to N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk was the response by several academics on campus who had not seen the performance. It was a response I have heard before in other contexts: using ethnic stereotypes to inform others about emotionally painful ethnic issues is a “bad idea.” There is a point here. By using ethnic stereotypes, even in a comedic fashion, those very stereotypes inadvertently become reinforced in the cultural unconscious. The cancellation of the subsequent performance of N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk at CSU Long Beach the following year was based on a communication breakdown among various stakeholders on campus. It becomes a trope for a larger cultural breakdown: our inability to identify and work toward common social goals in spite of divergent belief systems and ideologies. We are unable to talk to each other. Another power of comedy is its ability to produce compassion and empathy through laughter that acknowledges our similarities in contrast to our differences. It is only through shared purpose that social change takes place. Thus, in praise of laughter: mutual laughter and creativity, not mockery or censorship, facilitates the awareness that forms the basis of equitable change.

Notes 1 For information concerning CSULB’s ethnic studies programs, see Chapter 15. The B-Word Project, which was undertaken by Michele Roberge, then the director of the Richard and Karen Carpenter Performing Arts Center (CPAC), and Christopher Scoates, then the director of the University Art Museum (UAM), was conceptualized by CPAC in 2010, the twenty-year anniversary of the National Endowment for the Arts’ (NEA) cancellation of grants awarded to performance artists Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller. Roberge and Scoates

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secured Creative Campus Innovations Grants from the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, which were funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. The NEA Four, other artists, and individuals from a variety of professions and disciplines were engaged for visiting-artist programs, panel discussions, performances, and student seminars across the campus 2 Dionysio Basco in “Carpenter Center CSULB: N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk,” May 12, 2015, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClKOa2jxAds. 3 Michele Roberge, quoted in “Actors Use Humor, Candor to Address Racism in ‘N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk,’” Richard and Karen Carpenter Performing Arts Center, September 4, 2015, http:// carpenterarts.org/documents/N.W.C.forpublication.pdf. 4 Jane Conoley, quoted by Michele Roberge in a Facebook post, as cited in David Kelsen, “Long Beach St. Pulls Plug on N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk Show: Cancellation, or Censorship?” OC Weekly, September 7, 2016, https://ocweekly.com/long-beach-st-pulls-plug-on-n-gger-wetb-ck-ch-nk-showcancellation-or-censorship–7491571/. 5 Richard and Karen Carpenter Performing Arts Center, “N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk,” http:// carpenterarts.org/2016-2017/ngger-wetbck-chnk.html. 6 “FIRE, NCAC, and DLDF Demand Cal State Long Beach Reverse Censorship of Play,” September 28, 2016, https://www.thefire.org/fire-ncac-and-dramatists-legal-defense-fund-demand-cal-statelong-beach-reverse-censorship-of-play/; and Joy Garnett, “NCAC, FIRE & DLDF Letter to Cal State University Long Beach: Re-instate Play about Race,” September 28, 2016, https://ncac.org/ news/blog/ncac-fire-dldf-letter-to-cal-state-university-long-beach-re-instate-play-about-race. 7 Kelsen, “Long Beach St. Pulls Plug.” 8 I use this term in the sociological sense by which the “dominant group” refers to a social group that controls or is privileged by those who control the value system and rewards in a particular society or culture. I put the term “dominant” in quotation marks to acknowledge the inadequacy of such a term that connotes a sense of superiority or mastery over others who are thereby relegated to the position of “subordinates.” 9 The NEA 4 was comprised of Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller, performance artists whose approved grants from the US government’s National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) were vetoed in June 1990 by NEA chairperson John Frohnmayer due to the controversial nature of their work. 10 Howard Sherman, “How ‘N*W*C*’ Became Drama non grata on a California State Campus,” Arts Integrity Initiative, September 9, 2016, http://www.artsintegrity.org/how-nwc-became-dramanon-grata-on-a-california-state-campus/. 11 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), https://www.aclu.org/other/what-censorship. 12 See, for example, Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), in which the author reframes the institution of racial(ized) slavery as means of bringing to bear the making of human selfhood and societal construction through the violent unmaking of the African; Hartman’s essay “Venus in Two Acts” in Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 1–14, in which she deeply contemplates the lost archive of the slave and the myriad monikers with which (s)he is marked; and the interview between Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Position of the Unthought,” Qui Parle 13, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2003): 183–201, in which they posit Blackness as a realm that is largely unthought by the main. These in turn call to mind Christina Sharpe’s latest book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), in which she references a young Black girl “rescued” in the wake of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, whose forehead paradoxically bears a sticker marked “SHIP.” 13 I requested a video and/or script to adequately prepare for the discussion, and when I found out neither would be available, I made clear I would focus on the issues attendant to the ensuing controversy (which I am addressing in brief with this writing) rather than the content of the performance.

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14 Khanisha Foster, who identifies as a mixed-race performer, activist, and professional moderator, served in this capacity. 15 The performers presented, as the piece’s title implies, perspectives from Black, Latin-x (in particular, Mexicano/a), and Asian perspectives. 16 See, for example, Guyora Binder’s examination of the contradictions that haunt notions of emancipation and manumission and the distinction he draws between the two, in and around the Thirteenth Amendment, in his article “The Slavery of Emancipation,” Cardozo Law Review 17 (May 1996): 2063–102. Various projects of the prison abolition movement, including the 2016 documentary film 13th directed by Ava DuVernay (Kandoo Films and Forward Movement), along with other emergent Black radical and trans* analytical formations, are recent exemplars. 17 Cyrus Parker-Jeannette, COTA dean, was deeply concerned about the campus uproar and, upon inviting me to take part in the panel discussion, explained that she wanted to facilitate a space in which people could share their varied perspectives around the controversy in a civil and respectful fashion. I believe her concern was well intentioned. However, I also believe notions around where and how “civility” and “respectability” are comported are deeply complicated—an issue deserving of its own forum. 18 Joy James, Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender and Race in U.S. Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 46. 19 See Jared Sexton’s formulation around Blackness and (human) being, in which he asks, “What is the nature of a human being whose human being is put into question radically and by definition, a human being whose being human raises the question of being human at all?” Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism,” InTensions 5.0 (Fall/Winter 2011): 6–7.

Bibliography “Actors Use Humor, Candor to Address Racism in ‘N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk.’” Richard and Karen Carpenter Performing Arts Center. September 4, 2015. http://carpenterarts.org/documents/ N.W.C.forpublication.pdf. “Cal State Long Beach Carpenter Center Closes Curtains on NWC.” Daily 49er. Last modified September 8, 2016. http://daily49er.com/news/2016/09/07/cal-state-long-beach-carpenter-centercloses-curtains-on-nwc/. “Carpenter Center CSULB: N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk.” May 12, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ClKOa2jxAds. Conoley, Jane. “Freedom of Speech at the Beach.” September 30, 2016. https://www.csulb.edu/officeof-the-president/article/freedom-of-speech-at-the-beach. “FIRE, NCAC, and DLDF Demand Cal State Long Beach Reverse Censorship of Play.” FIRE. September 28, 2016. https://www.thefire.org/fire-ncac-and-dramatists-legal-defense-fund-demandcal-state-long-beach-reverse-censorship-of-play/. Garnett, Joy. “NCAC, FIRE & DLDF Letter to Cal State University Long Beach: Re-instate Play about Race.” National Coalition Against Censorship. September 28, 2016. https://ncac.org/news/ blog/ncac-fire-dldf-letter-to-cal-state-university-long-beach-re-instate-play-about-race. Kelsen, David. “Long Beach St. Pulls Plug on N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk Show: Cancellation, or Censorship?” OC Weekly. September 7, 2016. https://ocweekly.com/long-beach-st-pulls-plug-on-ngger-wetb-ck-ch-nk-show-cancellation-or-censorship–7491571/.

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“N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk.” Richard and Karen Carpenter Performing Arts Center. http:// carpenterarts.org/2016-2017/ngger-wetbck-chnk.html. Smith, Keeley. “Carpenter Center Director Resigns after CSULB Cancels N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk Show; Cites Censorship.” Long Beach Post. September 8, 2016. https://lbpost.com/news/education/ carpenter-center-director-resigns-after-university-cancels-n-gger-wetb-ck-ch-nk-show-citingcensorship/.

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20 American Monument 25/2018: Students Respond

Editors’ Introduction On September 5, 2018, the University Art Museum (UAM) (now the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum) of California State University Long Beach (CSULB) announced the September 16 launch of the first iteration of American Monument, a nomadic project by lauren woods (the artist prefers lowercase l and w). The central space of American Monument at the UAM comprised twenty-five pedestals, each with a record player and an LP containing audio (live recordings and readings of related documentation) chronicling police killings of Black persons (Plate 28). The “interactive sound installation,” the UAM stated, “actively transforms the museum into a monument which examines the cultural conditions under which African-Americans have lost their lives to police violence” and “analyzes the complex relationship between the social construction of race, police violence, and systemic power” (see “American MONUMENT Launch,” in bibliography). On September 11 university officials dismissed Kimberli Meyer, who was instrumental in initiating and developing the project with woods, from her position as UAM director. At the scheduled launch woods expressed her dismay over Meyer’s dismissal and announced her decision to “pause” American MONUMENT (Figure 20.1) (see woods, “Statement on Decision to Pause,” in bibliography). Amidst the controversy that followed, many individuals and organizations weighed in on what transpired. The breadth of these points of view is sampled in the Select Bibliography. Among those responding were students from the School of Art (SOA). The two student documents that follow capture the gravity of the situation. The first, written during the crisis by CSULB SOA Concerned Students of Color and Allies, urgently and insistently appeals for constructive remedial action. The second, published in Artillery magazine in the aftermath by art history graduate student Andrea A. Guerrero, offers expansive reflections concerning the consequences.

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FIGURE 20.1  lauren woods pausing American Monument 25/2018, September 16, 2018, University Art Museum, California State University Long Beach. Photo by and courtesy of Nicola Goode.

CSULB SOA Student Response to Dismissal of Kimberli Meyer CSULB School of Art Concerned Students of Color and Allies October 21, 2018 Dear CSULB Administrators, In response to the communication from admin informing us of the context surrounding the firing of Kimberli Meyer, issues raised regarding lauren woods and her artistic project American MONUMENT at the UAM, and UAM staff behavior and reaction to race-related issues, a group of concerned students of color and allies at the School of Art have written a public statement. This statement is a reflection of the conversations had by SOA undergraduate and graduate students, many of whom feel intensely impacted by these events. It is important that we communicate this with you all and keep this dialogue active and direct. Attached is our statement.

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October 20, 2018 A Response to the College of the Arts (COTA) Dean Cyrus Parker-Jeannette; California State University Long Beach (CSULB) Spokesperson Terri Carbaugh; California State University Employees Union (CSUEU) Chapter 315 President Jennifer Moran; and whom[ever] else it may concern: Since the firing of the University Art Museum (UAM) director Kimberli Meyer on September 11, 2018 there have been growing concerns among CSULB students regarding the handling of race-relations and inclusivity within the UAM, the College of the Arts, and the School of Art. The following is our response and reaction to the communication from leadership. It is our hope that all those in positions of leadership listen, internalize our questions and concerns, and act accordingly.

Cyrus Parker-Jeannette, COTA Dean, statement released September 17, 2018 “The installation is designed to provoke open and free discussion. Our campus is a place for civil discourse and artistic expression” [see Parker-Jeannette, “Dean of the College of the Arts’ Statement,” in bibliography].

Response

The installation is designed to enable change. Free discussion means nothing to the people in the line of fire if there is no direct action taken by people like you in positions of leadership and power. Are we meant to civically (politely) discuss the mass murdering of Black people by police and law enforcement agencies in the US and feel content with only being permitted to speak but not be heard, affirmed, or helped? What is the point of free discussion if you, Dean Parker-Jeanette, are not free to address certain issues and concerns? Furthermore, what good is discussion if there is no action? We want to see demonstrated interest in implementing long-term solutions to the problem at hand. Current leadership and museum staff have been inadequate at handling issues regarding race. If you will not hire people who look like us or share our experiences as people of color then at the very least administration, faculty, and staff must be trained to recognize unconscious bias.

Terri Carbaugh, CSULB Spokesperson, statement released to Hyperallergic September 19, 2018

“It is important to understand that the departure of Kimberli Meyer is unrelated to the exhibit’s content.” “Campus officials sought [exhibition] transcripts not to curtail free speech or artistic expression, but to gain a clearer understanding if the campus would need to invest in counseling staff who could assist any student who might experience an emotional trigger as a result of the intensity of the exhibit” [see Carbaugh, “Associate Vice President of the Office of Public Affairs,” in bibliography].

Response

Meyer was lauren woods’s main collaborator in this project, this is a stated and known fact. Her removal from her position as director had a significant impact to the work and there is no conceivable way that that fact would have been unknown to UAM staff or anyone handling whatever personnel dramatics were in place. Removing a major collaborator from the project was a direct affront to the work and the content. This was an act of utter disrespect and

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institutional violence. It may be unrelated to the content of the monument as you understand the content to be but the fact is that the content was altered because of this action. The content suffered. If you still believe the content to be unrelated, you must at least admit that it became collateral damage. Take time to consider how the community and students of color feel about content that reflects them and their experiences casually becoming collateral damage. To your second point regarding an interest in investing in counseling staff we ask this: if the university is truly concerned with the emotional well-being of students who may be triggered, why not invest in long-term solutions? Why has museum staff not received unconscious or implicit bias training? More importantly, why is Catherine Scott (Scoti) the only self-identifying person of color on staff at the UAM? (Incidentally, Scoti has been the only UAM staff member to personally reach out to students, ask about our concerns, and attempt to organize events to facilitate our healing.) Despite the intensity of the events and discourse that followed Meyer’s firing, we as students have not heard a single concern from UAM or COTA admin and staff specifically about our emotional well-being. We do not feel comfortable or safe going into the UAM. Somehow, this is apparently of no concern.

Jennifer Moran, CSUEU Chapter 315 President, statement released to the LB Post October 1, 2018

“[Meyer’s] conceptual legacy is honored with continued conversation about systemic oppression and exhibits that uphold social justice issues.” “I wanted to have a discussion [with University Police] about protecting the safety of UAM staff, and by extension, the students and public.” “This project is an opportunity to come together and have meaningful dialogue around systemic oppression. The fact that a personnel matter may overshadow the importance of understanding and exploring the bias in police violence is unfortunate” [see Moran’s full statement quoted in Morris, “Fired CSULB Museum Director,” in bibliography].

Response

Meyer’s work is being co-opted by a staff that is inadequate for “continuing conversations about systemic oppression.” How can the UAM claim to uphold social justice issues when the most actively committed person to radical change was fired? What does “upholding social justice issues” mean to you? We want to sincerely ask you, Ms. Moran, do you think communities of color feel safe around police or law enforcement agencies? According to your statement you were most concerned with the safety of the staff. The mostly white and white-adjacent staff. American MONUMENT is about police brutality against Black people. So, vehemently wanting to involve agents of an institution historically linked to systemic violence and racism is not only a severely tone-deaf approach but it also represents complete disregard for the safety of the community and students of color. Lastly, this project is about more than dialogue. It is about action. Violent actions from police, action taken by the community to claim ownership of public documents, and potential institutional actions to keep our brothers and sisters of color safe and alive. This personnel matter is not “overshadowing the importance of understanding and exploring the bias in police violence” because it is our lived truth every single day. Nothing will overshadow this reality for us. What is a shame, rather, is that this personnel matter, in which you are so invested, has impeded this public institution from implementing and achieving any kind of institutional change enabled by Kimberli Meyer’s leadership and lauren woods’s monument. [In summary,] Kimberli’s firing and the consequent pause are a tremendous loss, not just for us but for the university whose ethnic/racial demographic is primarily made-up of

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students of color (Undergraduate ethnic/race demographic according to CSULB’s Common Data Set 2016–17; 2017–18 data not provided on the CSULB website: Hispanic–12,994; Black or African American–1,274; Asian–7,239; American Indian or Alaska Native–57; Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander–74; White, non-Hispanic–5,759). American MONUMENT was the first artistic project facilitated by the UAM that many of us at the School of Art felt truly reflected those practices in a way that was relevant to us. Learning about Kimberli’s anti-racist initiatives enhanced our excitement for it. We were starting to feel included. With that said, we ask for a response from COTA Dean Cyrus Parker-Jeannette, CSULB Spokesperson Terri Carbaugh, and CSUEU Chapter 315 President Jennifer Moran. You were all quick to defend the institution, the UAM staff, and champion free and open dialogue. Consider this an open invitation to dialogue with us, School of Art students of color. We welcome any and all additional responses from CSULB administration, COTA admin, faculty and staff, and UAM staff. Please understand that we would not engage in dialogue with you if we did not deeply care for this institution. We have invested so much of our time, money, and energy into CSULB. We love this university, we cherish our community, and we are supportive of the university’s interest in implementing inclusionary practices. However, we refuse to give up our seat at this table. All exhibitions, present or future, that do not involve anti-racist staff like Kimberli Meyer and the initiatives she spearheaded are but superficial in nature regarding their claims of student engagement and racial justice. We demand a reworking of institutional practices linked not only to American MONUMENT but all future artistic presentations at the UAM. We cannot sit back in silence and accept that our school will simply dismiss our concerns. By now you have all read Melissa Raybon’s open letter [see Raybon, “Melissa Raybon x CSULB,” in bibliography; in this statement Raybon discusses her personal experience as an intern helping to prepare the UAM project]. CSULB failed her. The right thing to do is to recognize how the institution has hurt her, apologize, and begin to implement measures to ensure that no other student like her has to endure that kind of treatment and disrespect again. You can begin by responding to our concerns with an articulation of actions that will be taken to address the issues we have raised. We stand in full support of Melissa Raybon (CSULB alumnx 2018), lauren woods, and Kimberli Meyer. Signed, CSULB School of Art Concerned Students of Color and Allies

American Monument: Remembering as a Form of Resistance Andrea A. Guerrero The University Art Museum (UAM) at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) recently hosted artist lauren woods’s (lower case intentional, per the artist) project, American Monument 25/2018, an ongoing intermedia monument to Black lives taken by police brutality. Through most of the Fall 2018 semester controversy surrounding the work disrupted the campus, but you wouldn’t know it walking into the museum the following Spring. During a tour of the exhibition Call and Response, When We Say … You Say— curated by Los Angeles-based Slanguage Studios—I asked a senior staff member about any connections between Slanguage’s institutional critiques and what happened last Fall. Her

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response: “What happened?”As I share this story with woods, we break into laughter. “It’s institutional amnesia!” she responds. I continue to tell her that the tour guide, while dodging my question, intentionally noted that the inclusion of a work by Lorna Simpson, a wellknown African American artist, was a curatorial decision made by the museum and not Slanguage. “It just exposes their need to mediate through art,” woods sighs. What she refers to is the supposed neutral position art spaces, particularly large-scale publicly funded fine-arts institutions, take regarding social and political issues. As LaTanya S. Autry and Aruna D’Souza have brilliantly articulated [see Autry, #museumsarenotneutral, and D’Souza, Whitewalling, in bibliography], museums choose to embrace their function as a space to foster challenging and difficult dialogues rather than make institutional decisions that enable radical change. They “mediate” and “consider” both sides of a confrontation— and then they move on. But by choosing neutrality they choose not to challenge an oppressive structure and thus maintain it. As a visual artist, woods engages this contradiction. Currently based in Dallas, woods explores in her projects the impact public spaces have on social change. Her work questions the role monuments play in shaping historical narratives and social consciousness related to Black identities and experiences in the US. One of her first intermedia monuments, Drinking Fountain #1 (2013), took shape after a metal plate fell off the wall above a drinking fountain in the Dallas County Records Building, revealing a trace of the words “white only” from a previous sign. Woods recontextualized the fountain as an object with historical resonance. When a thirsty viewer activates the fountain it now plays a forty-five-second video, archival footage of Birmingham police violently using water cannons on Black civil rights activists in the 1963 desegregation campaign. Local politicians and the Dallas public were a bit baffled. Why make people wait fortyfive seconds for a drink of water? Are Jim Crow laws being memorialized? Why isn’t this in a museum? We tend to correlate public monuments with memorialized historic events or people; hardly do we think of monuments as condemnations of government-sanctioned violence. Woods believes collective authorship and ownership of public monuments plays a key role in facilitating social change rooted in equity and justice. Single works develop into largescale collaborative projects. The Dallas Historical Parks Project (2014), for example, began as a municipal commission to reframe the history of segregated parks in Dallas. Woods and her collaborator Cynthia Mulcahy were invited to provide research and text detailing the history of those parks. However, their work—a product of intense archival research and gathered oral histories—was contested by the project’s funders. According to the funders, the artists’ texts were too much about race and complicated US segregation’s traditional narrative. This led to conceptual clashes about the content, resulting in the dismissal of the artists. This public institution intended to recognize and right a disturbing history through a public-private partnership, but only on the terms set by the private parties funding the work. When those terms weren’t met, the organization tried to tell their own sanitized narrative by co-opting the artists’ labor. So, woods and Mulcahy went public. They spoke at city hall meetings and managed to pressure the funders into backing out of the project. They took action, ensuring the public had the right to access, reconstruct and tell a more complex history. Similarly, American Monument is an exercise in collaborative art making and collective ownership of public documents. American Monument 25/2018 transformed the museum into a monument to Black lives, people like Sandra Bland, Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile and as-of-now countless more, all taken by police violence. Twenty-five LPs on individual record players atop white pedestals memorialized the deaths of twenty-five Black women, children, and men (Figure 20.2). This sound sculpture at the center of the monument held

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FIGURE 20.2  lauren woods, American Monument 25/2018, 2018, detail of record player in Archive I room, University Art Museum, California State University Long Beach. Photo by Jason Meintjes. Courtesy of artist.

audio of their last moments taken from testimonials, witness accounts and documents, all pressed into circular acetate. Visitors could activate the work by simply dropping a needle, potentially filling the space with an overwhelming sound of violence, injustice and death. At its core, the monument holds official state documents related to these cases (Figure 20.3), painstakingly accessed through Freedom of Information Act requests by woods

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FIGURE 20.3  lauren woods, American Monument 25/2018, 2018, enlarged autopsy diagram in Autopsia room, University Art Museum, California State University Long Beach. Photo by Jason Meintjes. Courtesy of artist.

and collaborator and museum director Kimberli Meyer, along with a team of students. The documents provide the government’s narrative—a story of death, not as a result of institutionalized racism and state violence, but of highly circumstantial and isolated events. That narrative reveals a connection between culture and law. Patterns arise: police violence is repeatedly justified and rationalized, and the victims, who can no longer speak for themselves, are projected as irrational and dangerous. For example, take the official statements made

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by George Zimmerman, who murdered Trayvon Martin under the guise of neighborhoodwatch vigilantism, and disgraced Ferguson, Missouri cop Darren Wilson, who shot and killed Michael Brown while his hands were above his head. Both murderers use African-American vernacular English when describing their victims’ supposed taunts and threats. These killers’ enlarged statements, with aforementioned “slang” highlighted, hang on opposing gallery walls, bookending a space with similar documents organized on three separate tables. Museum visitors could actively participate in the monument’s ongoing construction by examining and challenging the narratives—reclaiming ownership of public documents. Unfortunately, the monument’s participatory evolution never manifested at the UAM, at least not in the way woods envisioned. Woods paused production of the work at its opening reception in response to the abrupt firing of Meyer just days earlier. The records were removed, research ceased and programming stopped. At the opening, woods read a statement aloud, crediting Meyer as her collaborator, and critiquing the UAM and CSULB administration for failing to recognize Meyer’s presence as important to the continuation of the work. The UAM and the university’s administration never officially stated why Meyer was fired, but professed ad nauseum that her dismissal had nothing to do with the monument’s content. Yet, as time went by, inquiries exposed questionable administrative and staff practices: the institution had demanded transcripts of the monument’s audio; CSULB wanted to involve campus police in the exhibition; Meyer was accused of not following proper administrative protocols, and admonished for attempts to ask staff to consider their race, privilege and lack of knowledge about the potential social and political concerns held by people of color regarding the monument. Some staff felt they were being asked to do things that impeded their jobs, as if these considerations made their institutional tasks harder. In the end, the optics seemed to indicate that it was easier to oust Meyer than to reflect on the problematic institutional practices that led to these tensions and act to combat them by changing policy and practice. As the monument turned into a mausoleum, critical dialogues and movements emerged within CSULB’s School of Art (SoA). Concerned students, staff and faculty interpreted Meyer’s ouster as an act of institutional violence intended to impede American Monument’s progress. Alumni, students, and the SoA directors wrote public statements and press coverage followed. Students like Nicola Lee, Chris Velez, and Ashley Galvan, along with alumnus Melissa Raybon created site-specific works in response to the monument’s pausing. In Raybon’s performance, What’s goin’ on?: HOW I FEEL, the artist returned to the location where she experienced racism as a Getty intern in 2017, meditating in front of the UAM entrance for almost an hour. Faculty dedicated class time to discuss the pause. Students of color formed a strong community as they gravitated toward each other in search of a space to air grievances and organize demonstrations in solidarity with woods and Meyer. Even in its idle state, the monument propelled the public to take ownership of the narrative, stand against institutional violence and combat systemic erasure. American Monument, like Drinking Fountain #1 and the Dallas Historical Parks Project, is an extraordinary aesthetic proposition, demanding more commitment, empathy and selfreflection than most people and institutions are used to giving to works of art and public monuments. The monument’s iteration at the UAM made abundantly clear the work and its content are not, and cannot, be isolated and contained within an art space like a traditional art object. The work lives and grows through interactions with the public—art audience or otherwise—even if it encounters resistance. All of the tensions between the parties involved fundamentally arose because an artist and cultural workers tried to address the issue of police brutality and violence against Black bodies without privileging whiteness. Marketable aesthetics, claims of reverse racism by white museum staff, the police and hypothetically from

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white supremacists are not primary concerns because they are not what the monument seeks to address. The second iteration of the monument will take place this year at the Beall Center for Art and Technology at University of California, Irvine (UCI). Through correspondence, Meyer shares why she and woods are continuing the work at a university art space: Because of the rich pedagogical and research opportunities with American Monument, woods and I always felt strongly that the first iteration should be on a university campus. With the Beall and UCI as the new host, the work is benefitting from an interdisciplinary group of scholars from the School of Law and the departments of African American Studies, Social Ecology and Art. With this high level of academic collaboration, we are able to bolster the research component of the monument and build a substantial basis for it to iterate forward. With the eyes of the public on American Monument at UCI in the near future, the relevant question will not be what happened, but rather, what will happen, and who will make it happen? [This article was published in Artillery 13, no. 5 (May–June 2019), https://artillerymag.com/ american-monument/ (April 30, 2019).]

Bibliography “American MONUMENT Launch.” California State University, Long Beach. University Art Museum. www.csulb.edu/university-art-museum/event/american-monument-launch. Autry, LaTanya S. Twitter. #museumsarenotneutral. Carbaugh, Terri. “Associate Vice President of the Office of Public Affairs, Terri Carbaugh Issues the Following Statement on University Art Museum.” For the Media, CSULB News, September 19, 2018. www.csulb.edu/for-the-media/article/associate-vice-president-of-the-office-of-public-affairsterri-carbaugh-issues. D’Souza, Aruna. Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts. New York: Badlands Unlimited, 2018. Meyer, Kimberli. “Letter [by] Kimberli Meyer to the CSU Chancellor and Trustees.” December 19, 2018. American Monument 25/2018: Paused [blog of lauren woods]. https://americanmonument. blog/letter-to-the-csu-chancellor-and-trustees/. Mintz, Aubry, Karen Kleinfelder, and Chris Miles. “Statement from the Director and Associate Directors of the CSULB School of Art regarding American Monument and the Dismissal of University Art Museum Director Kimberli Meyer.” October 16, 2018. http://art.csulb.edu/CSULB_ SOA_Statement_re_UAM_and_AmerMonument.pdf. Morris, Asia. “Fired CSULB Museum Director Told Staff to Answer Questions about Police Brutality Exhibit according to Race, Union Chief Says.” LB Post, October 1, 2018. https://lbpost.com/ news/fired-csulb-museum-director-told-staff-to-answer-questions-about-police-brutality-exhibitaccording-to-race-union-chief-says. Parker-Jeannette, Cyrus. “Dean of the College of the Arts’ Statement on the University Art Museum.” For the Media, CSULB News, September 17, 2018. www.csulb.edu/for-the-media/article/dean-ofthe-college-of-the-arts%E2%80%99-statement-the-university-art-museum. Raybon, Melissa. “Melissa Raybon x CSULB—Open Letter.” Google Document, October 8, 2018. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GCbLsXBQ3QlI64nnMsqOur7haGbrk4rvD7RrWxLrobk/edit.

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Raybon, Melissa. “What’s Goin’ On?: HOW I FEEL.” YouTube, December 16, 2018. www.youtube. com/watch?v=hFDwwbfnHEI&app=desktop. Shaked, Nizan. “After a Director Is Fired and a Work of Art Paused, We Must Demand Social Justice.” Hyperallergic, October 26, 2018. https://hyperallergic.com/467456/after-a-director-is-fired-and-awork-of-art-paused-we-must-demand-social-justice/. SOA SOC and Allies. “Student Response to CSULB Leadership, CSUEU, and UAM Staff.” Google Document, October 20, 2018. https://docs.google.com/document/ d/1L4Md3L7apv0bHKv91NST81-eHUpObRC4hDI5JWXOOlA/edit. Stromberg, Matt. “After Museum Director Is Fired, Artist Shuts Down Her Exhibition on Police Brutality.” Hyperallergic, September 18, 2018. https://hyperallergic.com/461150/americanmonument-lauren-woods-kimberli-meyer-california-state-university-long-beach/. Stromberg, Matt. “Forum at Cal State Long Beach Provides Few Answers on Museum Director’s Firing.” Hyperallergic, September 18, 2018. https://hyperallergic.com/462840/forum-at-cal-statelong-beach-provides-few-answers-on-museum-directors-firing/. woods, lauren. “lauren woods Opening Remarks UAM” [statement on decision to pause American MONUMENT 25/2018 at the UAM, September 16, 2018]. “Documents of the Pause.” https:// americanmonument.blog/lauren-woods-opening-remarks-uam/.

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Afterwords Svetlana Mintcheva and Laura Raicovich

On the invitation of the editors, Svetlana Mintcheva, director of programs at the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) and founding director of NCAC’s Arts Advocacy Program, and Laura Raicovich, codirector of the seminar series “Freedom of Speech: A Curriculum for Studies into Darkness” for the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics, met in New York City on March 13, 2019, to discuss their thoughts on the range of suppressive actions and pressures at issue today in museum and university environments. What follows is an adaptation of their discussion, edited for length and clarity. Mintcheva: Let’s first consider how to define “censorship.” In 2000, when I joined the NCAC, at the end of the 1990s culture wars, censorship was perceived as primarily a matter of government action that involved not direct suppression, not putting people in jail or banning speech, but taking away funds. Even then, there was a contest over the definition of censorship: culture warrior politicians on the right claimed, “This is not censorship. This is about sponsorship––and taxpayer money.” But, whether it was accomplished through the purse strings or direct suppression, censorship was understood firmly as government action. As the culture wars over arts funding subsided, attention shifted to the role of the free market in determining what voices could be heard. Various actors, public and private, played a role in suppressing speech. As I argued with Robert Atkins in Censoring Culture, we needed to understand censorship more broadly as a systemic issue.1 Now this notion of systemic censorship—of what is selected, what the gatekeepers allow—has come to a point where the notion of censorship is becoming diluted and thus increasingly vague. Everything becomes censorship. Where do we draw the line? What is censorship, and what is not? Is the fact that institutions are exhibiting certain artists and not others already censorship? Or do we call it something else? Is censorship a useful concept? If so, how is it useful? While acknowledging that there are systemic restrictions on speech, NCAC’s advocacy work with visual art focuses on countering attempts to remove artwork from display or cancel planned exhibitions, and helping curators and art institutions negotiate pressures to self-censor by preparing them to confront potential controversy and turn it into productive

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programming. We also work with social media companies to pressure them to become more art friendly. However, all of our work is viewpoint-neutral; we protect all voices, not just the ones we may consider underrepresented. Raicovich: I think the word “censorship” has seen a lot of use that’s broader than we would have defined it in the 1990s and the aughts. Part of the problem is that we’ve not yet addressed structural inequities and biases that are so embedded in institutions, whether in government, the academy, or museums. Museums in the United States may claim to be neutral, but they come out of a history that is not at all neutral. Most were founded out of the collections, either gifted or created, of wealthy white men. Their taste defined what was good art, and then these collections were preserved and studied. It’s not to say the collections weren’t good. But what did these persons, given their personal taste, choose not to collect? Mintcheva: Would you define that as censorship? Raicovich: That structure has created an exclusion to the point that some people do now call this censorship. But exclusion and censorship are different things. Mintcheva: Right. I agree. And I like to look at the political roles those terms play. How does it serve you to call something censorship versus exclusion? I guess it does serve you to call it censorship, because while censorship’s actual denotative meaning is fluid, its emotive meaning is clear. Raicovich: It’s very clear. Mintcheva: When the term “censorship” is used to refer to exclusion and argue that museums already are censoring (i.e., excluding voices), it also justifies pressure on them to censor in a “good” way. Justifying censorship as a good thing can very easily backfire. What is “good” is always politically contested. So I find the use of the term clearer—thus potentially more useful—if we speak of censorship when there is an actual suppression of speech, whether it’s a private entity that has the power to suppress or a government entity. Raicovich: My feeling about censorship is that it’s always related to government. Mintcheva: In the legal sense censorship is always related to government. In the broader sense, as in the dictionary sense, it’s also related to any institution in power, and that could be the government or a private museum, a gallery, a publisher, an Internet platform, or another entity. You can identify censorship in a very straightforward fashion. It’s the cancellation of a show. It’s the removal of an artwork. It’s the cancellation of a book publication. It’s not allowing a voice to be there for the simple reason that someone with economic or political power does not like the viewpoint expressed. Raicovich: So it’s more about how it relates to programmatic elements within the institution rather than its structural/operational elements? Mintcheva: Right—which are different. Structural elements pose problems, of course, but calling these problems “censorship” does not help us address them. Fighting censorship in the sense of suppression and addressing structural inequities require very different types of action. Fighting censorship simply means supporting the vision of the curator and artist in the face of challenges. Addressing structural inequities is a matter of broader economic and political activism, which goes beyond the art institution. Raicovich: Something I find interesting is how often mission or value statements of cultural institutions speak of accessibility. Public access is a common core value amongst cultural institutions. And the ways diversity and inclusion are most visibly manifested are programmatic initiatives, where artists of color are being included in exhibitions, performances, and talks.

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However, the governance and staffing structures that undergird all of this have stayed pretty much the same, with some notable exceptions. While I recognize these things often take some time to evolve, if diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are to have a real impact, these other parts of the museum have to be taken into account. Mintcheva: There’s a new four-million-dollar initiative to diversify boards. Curators are being diversified.2 There is awareness across the field—and efforts to be more inclusive. This isn’t going to happen overnight, because you need to train a generation of curators and museum leadership to do that. But there is much progress already. In terms of productively addressing the protests around diversity and inclusion, this is the way to do it—changing the constitution of a museum. Not by removing an artwork, because this is not going to help anything. There is no absolute right to free speech in any legal system. The US legal framework around the First Amendment offers the most radical free speech protections. Yet not all speech is protected, even under US law. There is always a balancing test—the balancing of speech against other governmental interests. That’s why libel and incitement to violence are not protected, as well as several other categories of speech. There’s a range of speech that doesn’t have constitutional protection. Private institutions, however, have no First Amendment responsibility to protect free speech. A private entity that curates, such as a museum, is not an open forum. I remember you saying in a discussion a long time ago that a free speech defense doesn’t cut it anymore as an argument. Museums are about editing. A museum isn’t a public park where you can go and say what you like. A museum selects. Here regulation of speech—I won’t call it censorship, because censorship refers to suppression of something already selected—is the norm, not the exception. I think the efforts now are to change the terms (or hierarchies) of selection and push some speech forward, some speech back. Raicovich: One of the elements that’s being problematized by people questioning the ways in which speech is regulated within museums is the commitment to bothsidesism. If you have someone from one side of an argument on stage, you have to have someone from the other side. This is being heavily questioned. Mintcheva: Yes, the idea of balance is also interesting in the university context. It’s frequently evoked when addressing issues around the Middle East. The demand is that every time you have a speaker critical of Israel you balance them out with a pro-Israeli speaker. Often, if the latter cannot be scheduled at that time, a talk is cancelled with balance used as a justification for what is de facto censorship. But, aside from the creation of a misleading binary (there are more than two distinct sides to the issue), this course of action disregards the cultural context. When you’re looking at a specific event at an individual institution and demanding balance, you need to look at the cultural context as a whole. And in that context, one can argue, the Palestinian position does not get much coverage. Raicovich: It’s interesting how censorship plays out in museums and curatorial spaces—the topics one doesn’t bring up in certain circles. A curatorial committee or a director might accept or reject a show based on its content. Those kinds of no-go places still exist. Certainly Palestine/Israel is one of them. It’s still a profoundly problematic issue to address in any way whatsoever. Mintcheva: And has been for a while. But today universities and museums are facing situations they haven’t quite witnessed before because of active protests, not only in the street but also on social media. Social media has made protests very easy. Sometimes people assume NCAC is against protests when it calls for censorship. Absolutely not. There is a fundamental difference between arguing for censorship and

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censoring. I think protests not only are protected speech, they are highly valuable speech, and that’s true even when they call for censorship. In a way, they expand museum exhibitions into the real world and create conversations that are necessary. Where I draw the line is this—you can have a protest, talk to the protesters, but don’t remove artwork. Protesters really enrich the conversation and make you see a work in its contextual— social—complexity. Raicovich: Here’s where it gets interesting, because protesters are aware now that their actions within museums become part of the museum landscape, that their performances can be and sometimes are claimed by the museums themselves in some way, because of protests’ inclusion in things like the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Occupy Museums was actually one of the artists’ groups represented in the show. Mintcheva: And these were artists who were protesting in most of those cases, which makes inclusion easier. At the Brooklyn Museum, there was a show on— Raicovich: Agitprop art.3 Mintcheva: And there were, the month before, protests opposing a real estate forum at the museum. The protesting artists were then invited to be part of Agitprop!4 Raicovich: Decolonize This Place (DTP) was organizing the protests, attempting to link gentrification issues in Brooklyn with land conflicts in Israel/Palestine. Simultaneous to Agitprop!, the museum had an exhibition featuring photography dealing with Israel and the West Bank.5 Decolonize This Place very carefully wove the protest between exhibition spaces so that it could continue without getting shut down. They started in the agitprop show to blur the boundaries between what was part of the show’s content and what was protest. But what’s interesting is that security in museums now has a more sophisticated approach. They know if they have the protesters arrested, it creates a bigger stir and negative publicity. Mintcheva: That’s what universities are learning too. Right-wing student organizations are going to keep inviting right-wing speakers. They’re going to do that as a provocation. I have mixed feelings about the Left responding to these provocations by giving them more publicity. In any case, universities need to provide a space for protests to happen. But the protests should not result in cancellations. Because what if it were the reverse? Say a conservative student group wants to invite an alt-right speaker and is blocked from doing so by the university. The same thing could happen to a speaker on the left. And so you allow the other side its speakers. I think the best way to counter noxious speakers is to deprive them of an audience and free publicity. Let their few fans go to the event and leave it at that. The alt-right is feeding off the attention given to them by the antifa groups that are protesting and doing the violence, because that makes the news. A small event with a fringe speaker is not news. A major protest is news. So that’s my problem with the Left. What to me is important is that universities let protesters protest the way museums are learning to. Institutions have to learn how to have all these conflicting voices rather than suppress them. Raicovich: My inclination is also to have more structured ways—or just maybe more intelligent ways—of responding to these kinds of protests, because oftentimes there’s so much defensiveness on the part of the institution, whether it’s a museum or a university. In the case of Long Beach, the firing of the director of the museum, that doesn’t create space for actual discourse because it gets clamped down. After the Dana Schutz controversy at the Whitney, they invited Claudia Rankine and The Racial Imaginary Institute to moderate a discussion.6 While this seemed to be productive in some ways, I kept thinking about what would happen if the thoughts and reflections of the

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brilliant people on staff at the Whitney were voiced in a democratic forum. I would love to hear that kind of conversation. It would disrupt the idea that museums are monolithic institutions, and create a space to actually have the difficult conversations art museums often claim to provide space for. This certainly wouldn’t be easy, but it might be a step toward opening the conversation beyond the usual participants. I say this knowing what it’s like to be a museum director. Directors want everyone to be pulling in the same direction. But at the same time, these moments provide opportunities for us to unpack the tension points within institutions. And whether that’s done in a totally public, semipublic, semiprivate, or totally private forum, these moments are not often enough seized as opportunities. The default position is, “Let’s just get it to go away.” There’s a clamping down on issues that bubble up. I guess for me this reflects a certain type of censorship that is ultimately about where one stands in the power structure. Mintcheva: Right. There should be a lot more discussion with staff in the preparation for a show. Staff should be heard. Raicovich: And not just the curatorial staff. Mintcheva: Not just the curatorial staff. Especially because museum directors and curators are kind of airdropped into their positions. They go from one country to another, one state to another. Very different contexts. Among staff there is local expertise. Directors and curators should be talking to the whole staff, including the guards. Not only talking and preparing them to respond to the public but also listening to them because they live there. They know what the situation is, and they represent the museum to the public. They have to defend the museum’s decisions. There also needs to be reaching out to the wider community before an exhibition. After an exhibition happens, the lines of conflict are drawn. It’s harder. There used to be a time when it was okay to say, “The work speaks for itself.” Now you can’t do that. You have to plan educational programming with the views of different, conflicting interest groups in your community in mind, talk to museum staff, and be prepared well in advance of the opening. Raicovich: Often the thing people in museums think is going to cause controversy is not the thing that draws attention. They get surprised all the time. Mintcheva: They get surprised all the time, and they think they can predict. Raicovich: For example, when the Walker Art Center was planning its Kara Walker show, they did staff training and an enormous amount of preparation, and while certainly there were strong responses to the show, it didn’t result in controversy. And maybe that is due to the work they put in in advance.7 There was a very interesting dynamic when Walker presented A Subtlety (Plate 26) at the Domino Sugar Factory with Creative Time.8 While installing a giant, sugar-coated sphynx in the shape of a nude Black woman in the middle of a former sugar refinery is clearly provocative, some of the ways in which society’s relationship with Blackness, Black bodies, and Black women’s bodies in particular, which came up via the Instagram insanity that accompanied the show, were really intense. And the tension here between what was mediated by the presenting organization and what just happened as the artwork lived its life in public became a space that mashed up joy, misogyny, exploitation, pride, celebration, history, presentness, racism, and so many other conflicting yet very genuine realities. Because of the sophistication of so many artists working in not only physical space but also this other kind of conceptual space, or even public space, the response of viewership can become a key component of the work itself. Mintcheva: Museums used to know who their audiences were. Now you have a viewership that is beyond the “initiated” audience they’re used to. That creates the need to test in advance

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how a more diverse audience is going to respond. But you also have to draw the line at what point you’re going to censor your show. You need to have community groups respond, but not curate by committee. And maybe you want to adjust your educational program. You want to do your labeling in a way to respond to the concerns of who’s coming in. Raicovich: Interestingly, a recent MuseumNext survey noted that visitors under thirty years of age were more likely to think that museums should comment on social issues, with 38 percent of respondents saying that museums should do so and 40 percent responding maybe.9 Protestors and artists are showing the way on this. The 2017 Whitney Biennial controversy opened up the idea of the museum, and the Whitney specifically, as a site of scrutiny, protest, and expectations that institutions take positions. Now, two years later, one artist pulled out of the Biennial before it opened and more artists withdrew their work later because of museum vice chairman Warren Kanders’s engagement with munitions manufacturing.10 It had an impact. In late July the vice chairman resigned from the museum’s board of directors. Mintcheva: Is there a difference between issues being directly addressed and the museum itself becoming an active political actor? Outside of ethical positioning, is it the role of the museum to take a position on political issues? Raicovich: They’re already taking positions. They’ve been taking positions since they were established. It’s just that it has become invisible to many people, because it largely supports the status quo, also known as white, heteronormative, ableist patriarchy. And yet there are artists fully aware of museum power structures who wish to expose the views of individuals in power and take action against them. It’s been interesting to see artists turn to boycott when they feel they’re not being heard in any other way. Plus it is a way to use the power they do have––that of withdrawal or nonparticipation to make change or initiate dialogue. Mintcheva: Indeed. But one needs to note the difference between an artist’s withdrawal of work or refusal to participate and the more frequent occurrence of cultural boycotts intended to silence other voices. Boycotts—both cultural and economic—are of course a constitutionally protected and powerful way to express an opinion and put economic power behind it. Economic boycotts were very effective in achieving political and social change during the battles against apartheid in South Africa and segregation in the United States. When human rights are violated and no international body has the power or will to stop the abuse, or when criticism is disregarded and world leaders are more interested in geopolitical dominance than preserving rights, what recourse remains? Cultural boycotts, however, offer uncertain gains and come at a high cost. Inevitably, they restrict the circulation of ideas by discouraging performances, films, or exhibitions. Cultural boycotts may not be intended as censorship, but this is their effect. Even institutions that are not directly targeted often self-censor to avoid controversy. Raicovich: While boycotting can be viewed as a preemption of discussion, public boycotts are a discourse in their own right. They often initiate conversations that otherwise would not occur. In abdicating one form of public speech, artists exercise another, which can be powerful. In the art world even the threat of withdrawal has been used in effective ways. But boycott certainly isn’t an easy answer for artists themselves. It’s a hard answer, often a tactic of last resort. To ask anybody to boycott something is really difficult. And to boycott something yourself can be challenging. It can be life-threatening. And boycotts have had unintended consequences. Look at the situation in 2014 in Australia, during the 19th Biennale of Sydney—the conditional withdrawal of several artists due to the actions of its sponsor, Transfield, the company that owns the migrant asylum prisons on Manus Island. The controversy was damaging to Transfield’s chairman, who

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resigned as the founding underwriter of the Biennale and withdrew Transfield’s significant funding. In that moment the leverage the artists exerted was considered a success. While it diminished the financial capacity of the institution, it divorced the Biennale from this problematic political debate. It also escalated the debate nationally about how Australia treats asylum seekers. But in the political backlash that ensued, government funding for the arts was dramatically chopped. Government officials said, “If you can’t handle private money, why should we make up for it?” And in the aftermath, a number of small to midsized arts organizations were defunded right out of existence. This highlights the complexity of being an actor in a globalized world. In our best attempts at understanding corporate and government power and social conditions in a different place, even a place like Australia where we speak the same language, we find it’s an unfamiliar landscape with complex interrelationships and dynamics. Mintcheva: The Boycott, Divestments, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, currently the most prominent instance of cultural boycott, is a double-edged sword that needs critical examination. Are the uncertain gains worth limiting the circulation of voices and ideas and alienating potential allies? Could the energy spent in BDS campaigns be better directed toward ensuring mobility and funding of more Palestinian—as well as Israeli—artists and collectives? I agree with you, in any case. Arts organizations aren’t neutral. They’re embroiled in a particular political power system. They have their histories. They’re not blank spaces. Institutional critique has made that quite visible. Raicovich: They’re not pure. Mintcheva: But is there a difference between not being pure as a structural condition and an active abrogation of the current role of the art museum, which is providing a space for discussion without taking an active side? Raicovich: The space might be more productive if discussion could be more nuanced and the bothsidesism that’s endemic could be minimized. It should be okay to highlight the side of the conversation you feel needs the most exposure, the most light shown on it. I think you could have a more subtle, nuanced conversation about particularities of a given subject if you didn’t have to defend it against the most radical position on the other side of the spectrum. But, unfortunately, right now you’re mostly getting mealy-mouthed dialogue. It’s too constructed to feel authentic. Mintcheva: The situation now is there’s an impression that people are extremely polarized. Someone is for free speech, and somebody else is for social justice. That’s a false opposition. I can strongly believe in both, though I may have points of disagreement with both free speech advocates and social justice activists. There is a forced splitting into categories of consensus. I believe in what Chantal Mouffe has called dissensus—allowance for disagreement and dissent.11 You don’t need to reach consensus. Raicovich: You don’t need to agree. Mintcheva: Productive disagreements are what we need more of, not discussions in which extreme positions are rehashed. But the museum, the institution, should it be an actor in this? Should it be a speaker with a position, or should it only be a holding space for discussion? Raicovich: I think it can be both. And it has to be both because it chooses the people to speak. If the museum is performing the “choosing” role, then it’s already taking a position, so it may as well be clear that this is the case. The idea that one can maintain neutrality or be unbiased when selecting seems completely counterintuitive. Why not focus the discussion on why the ideas in the work need to be unpacked rather than stifling opposition to it by saying we have to represent this view because we believe in artistic freedom of expression? The former might engender a deeper discourse than the silence that follows the latter.

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Mintcheva: I agree. Saying this is a free speech issue doesn’t close the deal. You have to explain why it’s important to have this conversation. Raicovich: It can be important to have this conversation because the view in question is important to highlight. Mintcheva: Or to be debated. Raicovich: Yes, exactly. The museum should be able to say that. The museum is endorsing that view simply by showing that work in one way or the other. Mintcheva: But is it? I think that’s a dangerous thing to say. By having a speaker or showing an artwork, are museums—or universities—endorsing, or are they simply asking questions, opening a space for diverse voices? Raicovich: It depends how you frame it. I don’t think any museum is going to spend thousands of dollars to bring in an artist and install and promote a show if they don’t believe in the work. Mintcheva: Let me tell you why I think museums should say, “We do not endorse the ideas of our artists.” Take the recent case of the Museo del Barrio cancelling the Alejandro Jodorowsky show.12 Everything was known about Jodorowsky and his controversial statements as the show was being planned. Then two months before the opening, the museum decided to cancel it because of protests in the community. People were upset because of Jodorowsky’s 1973 statement, which he later recanted, that he had raped an actress during the filming of El Topo. The fact of the matter was never confirmed and the actress was nowhere to be found. He said he made the statement to shock. It’s kind of believable. Yet his films are undeniably violent and arguably misogynist. Raicovich: That’s true. Mintcheva: The museum’s director said something along the lines of, “I know these are important issues to talk about, but not now and not here.” What does that mean? Raicovich: Why not now and not here? Mintcheva: Because now is the time. Now is the #MeToo movement. Now we’re talking about violence of men against women. Now we’re thinking about how artists make their work, and the role violence plays in the work. So why not now? By saying, “We’re not endorsing the artist,” a museum is allowing that the artist may be someone whose moral character may be questionable, but, at the same time, worth featuring in an exhibition as the work is important and issues he’s bringing up are important to talk about. Raicovich: Why not just talk about a different artist? There are so many amazing artists who need a show, especially at El Museo. If you’re in that position of deciding— Mintcheva: But they had already decided, and then they canceled the exhibition— Raicovich: But they had three directors in three years. Who started that process? Who ended it? “I don’t want to deal with this, and somebody else initiated it.” You know? This is where choosing happens, right? They made a choice. I don’t think that’s censorship. The Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts had a Chuck Close show up when the news about him broke, and instead of taking it down, they developed a serious, active program to address allegations against him. This was an amazing way of dealing with it. Mintcheva: The National Gallery canceled its Chuck Close show. Raicovich: But it wasn’t up. If it were up, I would want to deal with it. If it were not already up, my question would be, why commit all these resources toward it because it’s so expensive to put on an exhibition? Mintcheva: The Jodorowsky was a traveling show, already put together, slated to go— Raicovich: But even just to install it. The budget and the amount of labor are enough to make you question spending this kind of money on someone who is in violation of whatever the community principles are.

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Mintcheva: My fear is that faced with all the activism and organized protests going on in and beyond the art world, especially around the very relevant but also sensitive, controversial, and difficult-to-address issues of race and gender violence, museums will become even more timid and fearful than they are today and say, “No, why even deal with race? However we decide to deal with race, somebody’s going to be unhappy.” Do we need to deal with race? We need to deal with race. Do we need to deal with violence toward women? We need to deal with that. These are the issues artists are dealing with. But you have a show about that, and somebody’s going to be unhappy. Raicovich: I think dealing with protest is different from dealing with the issues in the work. Generally speaking, museums need to understand who their audiences are and are not. And this process would be so much easier if their staffs were diverse enough to begin with. The answer to all the hand-wringing about “not knowing” what will set something off is to have different kinds of people on your team. Talk about what’s in development. Mintcheva: But this thinking about the possibility of protest, the possibility of the museum not looking good, and consequently the possibility of deciding to not do the program is what leads to self-censorship. Raicovich: So much of the structural piece of the museum has for so long been set up to exclude certain people that we need a wave of recalibration. This will require changes in the composition of the staff and the structures, possibly even governance structures. These changes are going to make it easier to address issues like race, misogyny, and violence because different people will be doing it. It’s not going to be all white faces making these decisions. Mintcheva: I don’t know; having a person of color as curator doesn’t necessarily offer immunity from controversy over racial representation. And does diversity itself offer fundamental structural change? Will that change the economics behind the art institution? Will the economics of the art market change? You can train those diverse curators in the same kinds of structures and finances and dealer pressures and whatever— Raicovich: Profound structural changes, which need to take place, are not going to eliminate claims of censorship. That’s always going to be part of the discourse. We’re at a reparative moment. We have to repair some of the damage that has been done. There’s certainly a generation of art people looking for ways to create circumstances that could be reparative without being exoticizing or tokenizing, which is very important because otherwise reparation becomes another box ticked or there’s bland acknowledgment without any research or action behind it. That’s where you prove your mettle. Mintcheva: There’s a lot of pressure on cultural institutions to do the work of social change. Cultural institutions are in a peculiar position: they … work in the sphere of the symbolic, and at the same time they’re part of the current socioeconomic structure. The symbolic is important, yet the question remains as to what extent you can change society by working on the symbolic, by pressuring art institutions to shift their programming or expel bad actors from their boards. Focusing on art institutions gives you publicity, for sure. Beyond that? Warren Kanders stepped off the board of the Whitney. Victory is declared. Yet Kanders’s company is still producing tear gas and the US government is still pursuing its atrocious border policies. Art institutions are opening their collections and curatorial staffing to new, previously underrepresented groups, but that’s in large part because this harmonizes with neoliberal priorities: it opens new markets. It’s in their financial interest, and in the interest of neoliberal capitalism, to open up the market more in terms of diversity and find all the people who haven’t been in museums and make them new, lucrative, marketable commodities. What kind of social change would that bring about? There’s so much political energy that goes into putting pressure on museums that it’s necessary to examine the impact that’s hoped for, especially when we’re talking about institutions that

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are part and parcel of the general social-economic configuration, albeit somewhat at the margins politically. Raicovich: The statistics around the influence of museums and the number of people who go to museums is off the charts. Museums have enormous audiences. They also reflect in the most profound ways the gross wealth and power inequities of society. If one could somehow make change in the actual structures of museums, could this not find a way outside the museum? It could be a model in a sense. Mintcheva: I am all for that, but I don’t see it happening. What I see are people saying let’s get more people of color and women on the boards of museums and let’s get more artists of color in museums. But I don’t see that changing the underlying economic structures or hierarchies. It’s just confirming them. Raicovich: Both issues need to be highlighted, and many constituencies need to be involved in discussion. It’s poignant to think we spend nearly all of our lives trying to communicate with one another. And we’re almost always failing. We know that even if we’re looking at one another and nodding and thinking we know where the other person is coming from, there’s a gulf in understanding. Mintcheva: And when you change cultural context, it— Raicovich: —it’s even more challenging. But we still can find common ground. As Aruna D’Souza points out, Amitav Ghosh’s book Sea of Poppies features many different characters speaking in a diversity of languages.13 They can’t understand each other literally, but they make themselves understood. The comedy that emerges, and the embodied experience of being with somebody and trying to communicate with them as best you can, and this pleasure perhaps in misapprehension—maybe we all just need to be a little bit more accepting of that state we’re constantly in. Mintcheva: This speaks to a lot of censorship controversies around art. When we talk, we want to be understood in a precise way. Art doesn’t provide this clarity. Art opens space for interpretation, multiple interpretations. One of these interpretations could well be, “This is really hurting me.” Art can resonate, touch you in a painful way. So how do you talk about that? How do you negotiate that? Raicovich: Right. We want art to be able to provide a different register, to try out those forms of communication. It’s important to honor the different registers that art or poetry might contribute. Mintcheva: There’s a general malaise today: the lack of nuance in discussions, which tend to very quickly go into extremes without lingering in the space of indeterminacy. There’s discomfort with indeterminacy. We need to spend more time there and not just quickly align with rehearsed positions. We need to disagree more interestingly. Raicovich: And with more compassion. Mintcheva: Yes, and we need to listen to each other. Individuals but also museums and other institutions can be so defensive that the opportunity for dwelling in a space of indeterminacy and exploration gets lost. And exploration’s really what we need. Experiment more and not be afraid. Raicovich: Yeah, let’s not be afraid.

Notes 1 Svetlana Mintcheva, “Introduction: Censorship in Camouflage,” in Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression, ed. Robert Atkins and Svetlana Mintcheva (New York: New Press, 2006), xv–xxiv.

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2 In November 2017 the Ford Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation launched the $6 million Diversity in Museum Leadership Initiative (DMLI), which will support programs at twenty museums with the goal of diversifying staffing for creative, educational, and leadership functions. The DMLI is a response to the 2015 report of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that noted the failure of museums to adequately represent and serve racially and ethnically diverse constituencies. In January 2019 the American Alliance of Museums announced that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Alice L. Walton Foundation, and the Ford Foundation had committed $4 million to support Facing Change: Advancing Museum Board Diversity & Inclusion. 3 Brooklyn Museum presented Agitprop! from December 11, 2015, to August 7, 2016. 4 On November 17, 2015, Brooklyn Museum rented space for the Sixth Annual Brooklyn Real Estate Summit. The Artist Studio Affordability Project, along with individual local artists, launched an online petition objecting to the museum’s action, and on the day of the event artists and other activists associated with multiple community groups organized a protest at the museum. 5 Brooklyn Museum presented This Place from February 12 to June 5, 2016. 6 Controversy erupted after the Whitney Museum of American Art included Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2016), which depicted the torso and mutilated face of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, who was kidnapped, tortured, and lynched by two white men in 1955 in Mississippi. At issue were questions concerning the white artist’s appropriation of Black history and trauma, the Whitney’s display of the work, and the museum’s response to protests against the work and calls for its removal. Poet Claudia Rankine is a member of the curatorial team of The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII), which is “committed to the activation of interdisciplinary work and a democratized exploration of race.” See “About TRII: An Interdisciplinary Cultural Laboratory,” in “The Whiteness Issue,” The Racial Imaginary Institute, September 2017, https:// theracialimaginary.org/about/. 7 Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, which was curated by Philippe Vergne and Yasmil Raymond, was exhibited at the Walker Art Center from February 17 to May 13, 2007. 8 Creative Time presented A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant from May 10 to July 6, 2014. 9 Jim Richardson, “Should Museums Be Activists?” MuseumNext: Social Impact, April 24, 2017, www.museumnext.com/2017/04/should-museums-be-activists/. 10 The controversy resulting in artists withdrawing from the 2019 Whitney Biennial (May 17– September 22) surrounded Warren Kanders’s connection to Safariland, which manufactures tear gas canisters and other enforcement equipment used against asylum seekers along the US-Mexico border. 11 Chantal Mouffe, “Pluralism, Dissensus and Democratic Citizenship,” in Education and the Good Society, ed. F. Inglis (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 42–53. 12 Jodorowsky was scheduled to open at Museo del Barrio on February 8, 2019. 13 See Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies (New York: Picador, 2009).

Bibliography “Art, Freedom, and the Politics of Social Justice.” National Coalition Against Censorship. June 1, 2018. ArtsEverywhere: Musagetes. https://artseverywhere.ca/roundtables/politics-of-social-justice/. Atkins, Robert, and Svetlana Mintcheva, eds. Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression. New York: New Press, 2006.

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D’Souza, Aruna. Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts. New York: Badlands Unlimited, 2018. Estefan, Kareem, Carin Kuoni, and Laura Raicovich, eds. Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production. New York: OR Books, 2017. Kuoni, Carin, and Laura Raicovich. “Freedom of Speech: A Curriculum for Studies into Darkness.” Vera List Center for Art and Politics. The New School. www.veralistcenter.org/engage/event/2123/ freedom-of-speech-a-curriculum-for-studies-into-darkness/. Mintcheva, Svetlana, moderator. “Mapping the Territory.” Seminar 1 of “Freedom of Speech: A Curriculum for Studies into Darkness.” Vera List Center for Art and Politics. The New School. www.veralistcenter.org/engage/events/2115/mapping-the-territory/. Mintcheva, Svetlana, moderator. “Structures of Power and the Ethical Limits of Speech.” In Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production, edited by Kareem Estefan, Carin Kuoni, and Laura Raicovich, 163–72. New York: OR Books, 2017. “Museum Best Practices for Managing Controversy.” National Coalition Against Censorship.” http:// ncac.org/resource/museum-best-practices-for-managing-controversy/. Reilly, Maura. Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating. London: Thames & Hudson, 2018.

Contributors

Ai Weiwei is an internationally acclaimed artist and activist whose creative output includes sculptural installations, architectural projects, photographs, performances, videos, documentary films, and writings. His art’s subversive dimension has led to various forms of suppression by Chinese authorities, including house arrest, demolition of his Beijing studio, and eradication of his Internet presence in China. Remembering (2009), the result of a citizen investigation he initiated following the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and Sunflower Seeds (2010), an homage to the oppressed, testify to Ai’s steadfast commitment to human rights. After leaving China in 2015 he focused on the global refugee crisis. Ai’s 2017 film Human Flow features intimate exchanges with refugees from among millions of displaced persons spanning twenty-three countries. In 2019 he had solo exhibitions in Belo Horizonte, Toronto, Mexico City, Curitiba, Düsseldorf, Rio de Janeiro, St. Louis, and Monterrey. In 2020 Ai Weiwei and curator Alexandra Munroe launched Ai Weiwei MASK with eBay for Charity, selling hand-printed face masks with Ai’s iconic human rights imagery, benefiting COVID-19 efforts by Doctors without Borders, Human Rights Watch, and Refugees International. Morehshin Allahyari (Persian: ‫)موره شین اللهیاری‬, an Iranian-Kurdish media artist, activist, and writer based in Brooklyn, NY, produces 3D-printed sculptures, videos, and publications challenging societal norms. Engaging the philosophical and poetic possibilities of technology, collective archiving, and cultural contradiction, she explores issues relating to (self-) censorship, colonialism, exile, and gender. Allahyari has been an artist in residence at BANFF Centre (2013), Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry (2015), Autodesk Pier9 Workshop (2015), the Transmediale/Vilém Flusser Residency Program for Artistic Research (2016), Eyebeam (2016–17), Pioneer Works (2018), and Harvest Works (2018). Foreign Policy in 2016 designated her one of the world’s leading global thinkers. In 2019 she was honored with a Sundance Institute New Frontier International Fellowship and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. Her work has been featured in numerous venues, including the Biennale di Venezia di Archittetura, New Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Pompidou Center, Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal, Tate Modern, Queens Museum, Pori Art Museum, Powerhouse Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, and Museum für Angewandte Kunst. Fabián Cereijido is an artist, educator, and independent scholar. In 2011 he obtained his doctorate in art history, theory, and criticism from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). His video installations, drawings, and sculptures, which have been exhibited at museums and galleries in the United States and Argentina, deal with fictional trips in milk and everyday rituals. Cereijido has taught graduate and undergraduate courses at UCSD, California State University Long Beach, and University of Redlands. He has also taught at Art Division and the Antioch University Bridge Program, both dedicated to underserved populations in Los Angeles. His writings in journals and exhibition catalogs in the United States address the politics of context in Latin American art, current forms of censorship in

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art, the points of contact between Goya and Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and art produced during the recent anti-neoliberal revolt in Latin America. Jane Close Conoley—the author, coauthor, and editor of more than 130 publications—is the seventh president of California State University Long Beach and the first woman to hold the post. Conoley, who earned her PhD in school psychology from University of Texas, Austin, previously served as the interim chancellor of University of California, Riverside, and held leadership positions at University of California, Santa Barbara, Texas A&M University, and University of Nebraska, Lincoln. She is coauthor with Collie Wyatt Conoley of Positive Psychology and Family Therapy (2009). Conoley’s four-decade career is marked by leadership in high-impact educational experiences for diverse student communities. In her efforts at CSULB to create environments that enable students, staff, and faculty to succeed, she has facilitated basic needs programs for students, high-performance computing options for faculty, and an increase in award programs and advancement pathways for faculty and staff. Deeply engaged with local and regional communities, Conoley has been named among the most influential leaders in Los Angeles by the Los Angeles Business Journal. Karen Mary Davalos, professor and chair of Chicano and Latino studies at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, is the author of Exhibiting Mestizaje: Mexican (American) Museums in the Diaspora (2001) and The Mexican Museum of San Francisco Papers, 1971–2006 (2010), as well as  the award-winning  Yolanda M. López  (2008) and  Chicana/o Remix: Art and Errata since the Sixties (2017). She was lead coeditor of Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (2003–09) and received the 2012 President’s Award for Art and Activism from the Women’s Caucus for Art. As a UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center advisory committee member for L.A. Xicano, Davalos helped conceptualize five exhibitions on Mexican-descent artists for Getty Pacific Standard Time:  Art in L.A. 1945–1980 (2011–12) and produced research for three. She contributed to three Getty Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA exhibitions (2017–18), including Aztlán to Magulandia: The Journey of Chicano Artist Gilbert “Magu” Luján. Davalos is the codirector of Rhizomes of Mexican American Art since 1848, a digital portal to library, archive, and museum documentation. Kevin Duffy, filmmaker, actor, and writer, directed the documentary feature John Fleck Is Who You Want Him to Be (2019), which has been screened by the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles, Los Feliz 3 Cinema, Siegal Theatre Center at City University of New York, California Institute of the Arts, New York’s New Museum, and Highway’s Film Maudit 2.0 Virtual Festival. Duffy’s short film cheap flight (1996) was featured on the Sundance Channel, at the Hamptons International Film Festival, and by the American Cinematheque. His first independent feature, Becoming Blond (2010), which is distributed by Ariztical Entertainment, has been shown on Here TV and VOD. A graduate of New York University, Duffy holds an MFA from the American Film Institute. John Fleck is an actor and performance artist whose work since the 1980s has spanned performance spaces, museums, theater, television, and film. He became renowned as one of the NEA 4, artists whose National Endowment for the Arts grants were awarded, rescinded, and later reinstated amidst the 1990s culture wars and debates concerning obscenity. Performance art venues presenting Fleck’s work include the ICA London, ICA Boston, Andy Warhol Museum, New Museum, Public Theater, Guggenheim Museum, PS-122, Second Stage, La Mama, Dixon Place & Joe’s Pub, Broad Stage, REDCAT, Getty Museum, Cal Plaza, MOCA, Taper 2, Bootleg Theater, and Skylight Theater. He has participated in theater productions

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at Getty Villa, Odyssey Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, Geffen Theater, UCLA’s Reprise, Kirk Douglas Theatre, Cape Playhouse, Evidence Room, South Coast Repertory, Tiffany Theater, Old Globe, and Los Angeles Theatre Center. Television and film work include guest star/ recurring/series-regular roles in Orville, Criminal Minds, True Blood, Weeds, Carnivale, Tales of the City, Murder One, Seinfeld, and Waterworld, all of which enable him financial fluidity to create his, not necessarily for profit, performance art. Ana Garduño, who holds a PhD in art history from Universidad Nacional Autonóma de México (UNAM), is a researcher at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA). She is also a professor in the art history graduate program at UNAM and teaches museology at the Escuela Nacional de Conservación, Restauración y Museografía of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH). Garduño, who received the National Research Prize from INBA in 2010 and 2015, is the author of El poder del coleccionismo de arte: Alvar Carrillo Gil (2009), Evocaciones: Museo Nacional de San Carlos: 50 aniversario (2018), and Alfredo Guati Rojo y el Museo Nacional de la Acuarela (2016), which earned the Premio Antonio García Cubas from INAH for best art book of 2016. She has published essays in Argentina, Colombia, Germany, Mexico, Spain, and the United States on museums, institutional practices, art collecting, and cultural politics of the twentieth century. Andrea A. Guerrero earned her MA in art history at California State University Long Beach (CSULB) in 2020. Her research interests include the art of contemporary Latin Americans and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) activist movements with an emphasis on aesthetic strategies developed to question, queer, and redefine marginalized subjectivities. In her MA thesis, “The Being/Becoming Object: Strategies in Unfolding, Disrupting, and Becoming in Contemporary Latin American and Latinx Art,” Guerrero analyzes the relevance of Latin American conceptualism to the practices of contemporary Latin American and Latinx women artists engaged in the queering of social and political discourse. Guerrero was the recipient of the 2020 Best Thesis Award for the College of the Arts at CSULB. Elizabeth Guffey is the coordinator of the MA program in modern and contemporary art, criticism, and theory at State University of New York at Purchase. Her research lies at the intersection of art and design, visual culture, museology, and disability studies. In Designing Disability: Symbols, Spaces and Society (2017) Guffey argues that designs such as the International Symbol of Access and the “wheelchair symbol” can alter the environment, making people more disabled or less, depending on the design’s planning and use. Her most recent book, which she coedited with Bess Williamson, is Making Disability Modern: Design Histories (2020). In this collection of essays leading scholars discuss the impact designed objects and spaces have on how meanings of ability and disability are produced and negotiated. Guffey is the founding editor of Design and Culture: The Journal of the Design Studies Forum. Megan Hoetger holds a PhD in performance studies with emphases in film and critical theory from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2018–19 Hoetger was a visiting scholar at Ghent University’s Centre for Cinema and Media Studies and in 2019 a research fellow at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden. Since 2019 she has served as a curator at the arts organization If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, an Amsterdambased entity devoted to exploring expanded conceptions of performance and performativity. She is currently completing her first book, Rude and Playful Shadows: Spaces, Screens and Social Reproduction in Cold War Europe’s Underground Cinema, which examines

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CONTRIBUTORS

underground cinema and shifting social relations in German-speaking Western Europe during some of the “hottest” years of the Cold War. Across her academic and curatorial practices, Hoetger examines politics of distribution and histories of underground performance and media circulation in Europe (West and East) through the Cold War period and into the era of the European Union. Peter R. Kalb is the Cynthia L. and Theodore S. Berenson Chair of Contemporary Art and chair of the Department of Fine Arts at Brandeis University, where he also serves as a member of core faculty in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. His research focuses on questions of representation and globalism in contemporary art. Kalb’s publications include High Drama: The New York Cityscapes of Georgia O’Keeffe and Margaret Bourke-White (2003) and Art since 1980: Charting the Contemporary (2013). He has written extensively on Andrea Bowers, including the essays “When We’re Screwed We Multiply: Andrea Bowers and Representation for Democracy” in Andrea Bowers (2014) and “A Photorealism Fit for Politics: The Transformative Drawing of Andrea Bowers” in Contemporaneity: Papers on Drawing in the 21st Century (2015). Maulana Karenga is professor and chair of the Department of Africana Studies, California State University Long Beach, the executive director of the African American Cultural Center (LA) and the Kawaida Institute of Pan-African Studies, and the creator of the pan-African holiday Kwanzaa, a celebration of family, community, and culture, and of the Nguzo Saba, the Seven Principles around which the holiday is centered. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles and books, including Odu Ifa: The Ethical Teachings (1999), Maat: The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt (2004), Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community and Culture (2006), Essays on Struggle: Position and Analysis (2016), and The Liberation Ethics of Malcolm X: Critical Consciousness, Moral Grounding and Transformative Struggle (forthcoming). His fields of teaching and research are Africana (continental and diasporan) philosophy, ancient Egyptian (Maatian) ethics, ancient Yoruba (Ifa) ethics, African American intellectual history, ethnic studies, and multiculturalism. Jonathan D. Katz—art historian, curator, and queer activist—is interim director of the Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies Program/Alice Paul Center and associate professor of practice and history of art at the University of Pennsylvania. He was chair of the Department of Lesbian and Gay Studies at City College of San Francisco (1989–2000), associate professor and founder of the LGBTQ program at Yale University (2002–7), and founding director of the visual studies doctoral program at the University at Buffalo from 2010 to 2018. A leading figure in queer art history, he is the author of and a contributor to books, catalogs, and monographs. Katz, who cofounded the Queer Caucus for Art (1997), has curated groundbreaking exhibitions: Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture (2010) at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, which was the first major museum queer arts exhibition in the United States, Art AIDS America (2016), and About Face: Stonewall, Revolt and New Queer Art (2019). His forthcoming book is titled The Silent Camp: The Queer Postwar Avant-Garde. Karen Kleinfelder is professor emerita of art history at California State University Long Beach, and former director of the School of Art (2014–18). She continues to teach modern and contemporary art and critical theory, as well as writing and methodology. Her research interests range from gender, hysteria, and psychoanalysis to censorship, cyborgs, and complexity theory. Kleinfelder has written and lectured extensively on Picasso, including

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in her monograph titled The Artist, His Model, Her Image, His Gaze: Picasso’s Pursuit of the Model (1993) and essays in Picasso: Inside the Image (1995) and Picasso and the Mediterranean (1996). She is also the author of “Ingres as a Blasted Allegory” in Fingering Ingres: Essays in the Historiography of a Nineteenth Century Artist, coedited by Susan Siegfried and Adrian Rifkin (2000). Her next book project is titled Picasso becoming-woman: The Gender Debates. Daniel Joseph Martínez interrogates sociopolitical and cultural mores through “nonlinear, asymmetrical, multidimensional propositions.” Kerstin Mey is the first woman president of the University of Limerick, Ireland, where she previously served as professor of visual culture and vice president of academic affairs and student engagement. Born in Germany, she obtained her PhD in art and aesthetics at Humboldt University and held academic positions in Germany and the UK—most recently pro-vice chancellor and dean of the Westminster School of Media, Arts, and Design. In various capacities Mey has served the Austrian Science Board, the European Foundation for Press and Media Freedom, the Council for Higher Education in Art and Design, and the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning. In her research she explores crossdisciplinary connectivities and socially engaged creative practices. Publications include Art in the Making: Aesthetics, Historicity and Practice (2005), “On-Site/In-Sight,” a special issue of Journal of Visual Art Practice (2005), Art and Obscenity (2007), Art as Research: Acoustic Space #9 (2011, coedited with Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits), and “Corpus Delicti” in Abject Visions: Powers of Horror in Art and Visual Culture (2016). Christopher Miles is a Los Angeles-based artist, writer, and educator. Since 2016 he has served as head of the ceramic arts program at California State University Long Beach (CSULB), and he is cofounder and director of the CSULB Center for Contemporary Ceramics. Miles received the 2004 Penny McCall Award for his work as a writer and curator, and the 2005 award for “Best Thematic Exhibition Nationally” from International Association of Art Critics—USA for the Hammer Museum exhibition THING: New Sculpture from Los Angeles, which he cocurated with James Elaine and Aimee Chang. Miles worked with cocurator Kris Kuramitsu to organize Los Angeles participation in the 2010 ARCOmadrid International Contemporary Art Fair, and the concurrent exhibition L.A. Invisible City at the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid. Miles has publications in numerous journals, including American Ceramics, Art & Auction, Artforum International, Art in America, Flash Art, Flaunt, Frieze, LA Weekly, Los Angeles Times, Tate Etc., Tema Celeste, and X-TRA. Svetlana Mintcheva is director of programs at the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), an alliance of US national nonprofits. She is founding director of NCAC’s Arts Advocacy Program, the only US national initiative devoted to the arts and free expression today. A prolific writer on controversial art and issues of censorship, Mintcheva is coeditor of Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression (2006) and Curating under Pressure: International Perspectives on Negotiating Conflict and Upholding Integrity (2020). She curated Filth, Treason, Blasphemy? Museums and Censorship, a 2007 exhibition at Chicago’s McCormick Tribute Museum, and conceived Exposing the Censor Within, a traveling interactive public art installation launched in 2007. Mintcheva has taught literature, art, and critical theory at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria, at Duke University, NC, where she received her PhD in critical theory in 1999, and at New York University.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Alexandra Munroe, Ph.D., is an award-winning curator, Asia scholar, and author focusing on art, culture, and institutional global strategy. She is the Senior Curator of Asian Art and Senior Advisor, Global Arts, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum where she has led the Guggenheim’s Asian Art Initiative since its founding in 2006. Since 2018, she is Director, Curatorial Affairs, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, where she leads the collections, exhibitions, and programming development of the future museum. She has worked on over forty exhibitions and is recognized for her pioneering scholarship on artists Cai Guo-Qiang, Daido Moriyama, Yayoi Kusama, Lee Ufan, Mu Xin, and Yoko Ono, among others, and for bringing such historic avant-garde movements as Gutai, Mono-ha, Japanese otaku culture, and Chinese conceptual art to international attention. Her project Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky (1994) is recognized for initiating the field of postwar Japanese art history in North America. Recently, Munroe was lead curator of the Guggenheim’s exhibition Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World, which The New York Times named as Top 10 exhibitions of 2017 and Artnews named as Top 25 most influential shows of the decade. She received the 2017 Japan Foundation Award and the 2018 Commissioner for Cultural Affairs Award, both bestowed by the government of Japan. Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie is professor of arts and visual cultures of global Africa in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist (2008), and Making History: African Collectors and the Canon of African Art Collection (2011). Founder and editor of Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture, Ogbechie also was consortium professor of the Getty Research Institute, a Daimler fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, a senior fellow of the Smithsonian Institution, and a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation and Institute for International Education. His research focuses on modern and contemporary African art, cultural informatics, and the arts and cultural patrimony of Africa in the age of globalization. Sonali Pahwa, associate professor in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota, is an ethnographer of stage, street, and digital performance in Arab youth culture. Her expertise spans many areas of study—the UAE, Egypt, theater, and digital gender and race. She has published essays in Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, African Theatre, Women & Performance, and Text & Performance Quarterly, and contributed to the Duke University Press anthology Freedom without Permission: Bodies and Space in the Arab Revolutions (2016). In Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt (2020), Pahwa focuses on Egyptians’ stagings of cultural politics in underground theater before and after the 2011 revolution, specifically how performances and workshops addressed issues concerning gender, new media, refugee status, and self-help citizenship. She is currently investigating performances of gender and race on social media platforms in the UAE. Catha Paquette is professor emerita of Latin American art at California State University Long Beach. In essays published in the United States, Mexico, and Europe, she has analyzed the work of Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rubén Ortiz-Torres, and Argentine artist David Lamelas. Paquette, who is a recipient of a 2007–8 Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Arts and Humanities and a 2015 Millard Meiss/ College Art Association Publication Grant, has investigated collectors, public agencies, and private institutions that have acquired or promoted Latin American art in the United States, including the Rockefellers, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and the 1940s Office of Inter-American

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Affairs. In At the Crossroads: Diego Rivera and His Patrons at MoMA, Rockefeller Center, and the Palace of Fine Arts (2017) Paquette explores controversies surrounding Rivera’s 1930 MoMA retrospective, the creation and destruction of his 1933 Rockefeller Center mural, and the Mexican government’s commissioning of his 1934 Palace of Fine Arts mural. Cyrus Parker-Jeannette served as dean of the College of the Arts at California State University Long Beach (CSULB) from 2014 to 2019 and previously chaired the dance departments at CSULB and Chapman University. She is a professional dancer and choreographer whose versatility ranges from concert dance and theater works to improvisation and site-specific performances. Parker-Jeannette has been an artist-in-residence and master teacher at educational institutions in Taiwan, Mexico, the Philippines, and the United States, as well as an entrepreneur who directed her own professional company. She is a recipient of multiple leadership and teaching awards. Her research is as diverse as her dance practice: she has published on early twentieth-century dancer/choreographer Adolf Bolm, given numerous lectures on dance and dance history, and presented on censorship in the arts in Washington, DC. Parker-Jeannette remains active as a dance and arts activist with interest in the arts as aesthetic endeavors and vehicles for social and cultural justice. Ashley Powell, who completed her MFA at University of Buffalo in 2016, is an artist activist from Chicago. In past artworks and interventions she was primarily concerned with experiences of self-hatred, continual reminders of white privilege, the direct and indirect impact of race relations, and America’s disproportionate inequities of social justice. Before the 2020 televised death of George Floyd in Minneapolis put police brutality so prominently in the national spotlight, Powell’s work was already focused on exposing institutional racism and increasing awareness of the mental strains and daily  shocks  that diminish the agency and inhibit the empowerment of individuals. Her current art practice centers on dismantling white supremacy and untangling the links and tensions between dynamics of race, diasporic dispersion, oppression, agency, empowerment, identity, and trauma. Laura Raicovich is a New York-based writer and curator. Earlier in her career she worked at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Public Art Fund in various capacities and was Dia Art Foundation deputy director. In 2012 she launched Creative Time’s Global Initiatives. While director of Queens Museum (2015–18) she cocurated Mel Chin: All over the Place (2018), a survey of the artist's work. With Kareem Estefan and Carin Kuoni, Raicovich coedited Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production  (2017), an anthology on the politics and culture of withdrawal, and  she cocurated the seminar  series  Freedom of Speech: A Curriculum for Studies into Darkness (2018–19) at the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics. In 2019 she was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the Bellagio Center and received the inaugural Emily H. Tremaine Journalism Fellowship for Curators from Hyperallergic. Raicovich in 2020 served as interim director for Leslie Lohman Museum of Art. Her book Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, which focuses on museums, cultural institutions, and the myth of neutrality, was published in 2021. Brittany Ransom, a half Black queer artist and educator based in Long Beach and New Orleans, received her BFA in art and technology from Ohio State University (2008) and her MFA from University of Illinois at Chicago (2011). She is associate director of the School of Art at California State University Long Beach, where she also serves as associate professor of sculpture/4D, teaching digital fabrication technologies and micro-controller electronics.

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In her explorations with emergent digital fabrication technologies, Ransom probes human, animal, and environmental relations, specifically correspondences between insect pest-based systems and human societal structures. Ransom, whose work has been exhibited at national and international venues, is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Arctic Circle Research Residency, the ZERO1 American Arts Incubator Fellowship, the Los Angeles Clean Tech Incubator Residency, and the CAA Professional Development Fellowship. Her essays have appeared in Leonardo, The 3D Additivist Cookbook, Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture, and other publications. Ransom has worked extensively with SIGGRAPH, serving as studio chair (2017) and art gallery chair (2019). Michele Roberge served many distinguished years as executive director of the Carpenter Performing Arts Center at California State University Long Beach (CSULB) before resigning in 2015 to protest the cancellation of a group she had booked for the Carpenter Center. After notice of her resignation was announced in local news media and the New York Times, Roberge was honored as 2016 Presenter of the Year by the North American Performing Arts Managers and Agents association. She received several invitations to interview for similar positions around the country, but instead chose to suspend her career so she could assist her partner of more than twenty-five years as he progresses through Alzheimer’s disease. Roberge continues to teach a popular class on Shakespeare for the CSULB Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, as she has for more than fourteen years. Elena Roznovan is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles and Amsterdam.  She received her BFA in 2012 from Maryland Institute College of Art and her MFA in sculpture/4D in 2018 from California State University Long Beach, where she cocurated Video Art from Long Beach Museum of Art: The 1970s and 1980s (2017) in the Merlino Gallery and was an organizer and cocurator of the 2017 and 2018 Greater LA MFA exhibition programs. The recipient of multiple awards, including a 2016 Djerassi Workshop/Residency and a 2017 and 2018 Werby Endowed Scholarship, Roznovan has exhibited her work in museums, private art galleries, and nonprofit art spaces, including Brea Art Gallery (2016), Kopeikin Gallery (2017), CSULB University Art Museum (2017), Torrance Art Museum (2017), Eastside International/ESXLA (2018), and  SCOTTY-Berlin (2019), an artist-run project space for contemporary art and experimental media. School of Art Concerned Students of Color and Allies (SoA SoC & Allies) is an unofficial student group composed of anonymous members at California State University Long Beach (CSULB). The group organizes and takes actions to engage university administrators in issues that pertain to and directly impact students of color at the School of Art. SoA SoC & Allies formed during the fall of 2018 in response to the abrupt firing of Kimberli Meyer, the director of the CSULB University Art Museum (UAM), now the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, and artist lauren woods’s subsequent decision to pause her work American Monument 25/2018 on the day of its opening at the UAM. Cintia Segovia is a photographer who uses humor and wit to delve into issues of immigration, identity, and bilingualism. Born and raised in Mexico City, she received her BS in communication sciences from Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (2006), her MA in visual arts from California State University Northridge (2013), and her MFA from California State University Long Beach (2017), where she cocurated the 2017 and 2018 Greater LA MFA exhibitions. Segovia’s work has been exhibited in museums, private galleries, university galleries, and community venues in California, Missouri, Oregon,  Texas,  and Vermont,

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including the Mexican Consulate and the National Immigration Law Center in Los Angeles, Museum of Latin American Art (MoLAA), Torrance Art Museum, Whittier Museum, Spartanburg Art Museum, Glass Box Gallery at UC Santa Barbara, and Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion at Orange Coast College. Her work has been acquired by MoLAA, National Immigration Law Center, and University of Dayton. In 2019 the Radial Gallery at University of Dayton featured her solo exhibition Repeat after Me/Repitan después de mí. Nizan Shaked is professor of contemporary art history and museum studies at California State University Long Beach. For The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art (2017), Shaked was honored with a 2012 DAAD grant for research at the Adrian Piper Foundation, a 2015 CAA/Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Award, and the 2019 Smithsonian American Art Museum Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art. Recent essays include   “Is Identity a Method? A Study of Queer Feminist Praxis” in Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (2015), “Propositions to Politics” in Adrian Piper: A Reader (2018), “Getting to a Baseline on Identity Politics: The Marxist Debate” in Routledge Companion to African American Art History (2019), and “Animating a Still History” in Terry Adkins: Infinity is Always Less Than One (2019). Other articles have appeared in American Quarterly: The Journal of American Studies, Journal of Curatorial Studies, Historical Materialism, Third Text, Afterall, and XTRA Contemporary Art Quarterly. Her most recent book, Museums and Wealth: The Politics of Contemporary Art Collections, was published in 2022. Craig Stone is professor emeritus at California State University Long Beach (CSULB), where he is tenured in two colleges. For thirty-nine years, Stone has taught for the School of Art in the College of the Arts and the American Indian Studies Program (AIS) in the College of Liberal Arts. He is currently the director of AIS. For more than three decades Stone has served as the advisor to the Annual CSULB Pow Wow at Puvungna, which attracts more than six thousand people during its two-day celebration. He has sung at hundreds of pow wows in North America over the past half century. Stone is a long-term member of the CSU Ethnic Studies Council and the CSULB Committee on Native American Burial Remains and Cultural Patrimony and  played a significant role in the 2016 reburial of more than one hundred Tongva ancestors on the land where CSULB is sited. His four-decade-plus art practices span studio work in diverse media and genres and large-scale public artworks in Southern California. Griselda Suarez Barajas is executive director of the Arts Council for Long Beach and a lecturer in Chicano and Latino studies at California State University Long Beach. She received her MFA in writing and consciousness in 2004 from New College of California. One of the founders of Las Guayabas Salon, her poetry and short stories have appeared in publications of Aunt Lute Press, Seal Press, and NCOC Press, and in Acentos Literary Review and Sinister Wisdom Journal. Finishing Line Press published her first poetry collection as part of its tenth Anniversary Chapbook Series. Her collection has been nominated for the California Book Prize. Suarez currently serves on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors Advisory Committee on Cultural Equity and Inclusion. Angelique Szymanek is assistant professor of art history in the Department of Art + Architecture at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. Her writings, which focus on feminist art with a particular interest in histories of sexual violence, have been published in Signs: A Journal of Feminist Scholarship, Women’s Art Journal, Art Journal,

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and The Journal of Feminist Scholarship, for which she served as coeditor of the special issue “A Gun for Every Girl” (Spring/Fall 2017). Szymanek was a Helena Rubenstein fellow at the Whitney Museum for American Art Independent Study Program in 2012–13 and has twice been named a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute Scholar (2016 and 2017). She was the recipient of a 2019–20 Fulbright US Scholar Award to conduct research on production of feminist art in Scotland and is coeditor of the forthcoming Routledge anthology Transnational Perspectives on Feminism and Art, 1960–1985. Andrew Vaca is professor of dance at California State University Long Beach (CSULB), where he served for seven years as chair of the Department of Dance. He teaches various courses in jazz dance, modern dance, and dance pedagogy, and has debuted twenty-four original pieces of concert jazz dance choreography since joining the CSULB faculty in 1991. Known worldwide as an authority in competitive and professional sports dance teams, he has worked in sports entertainment for more than thirty years with multiple teams in the NBA and NFL. Vaca has judged numerous national and international competitions, including Dance Worlds and International Cheer Union championships. Vaca served for two years as vice president of the Council of Dance Administrators. Since 2011 he has served on the board of the American College Dance Association (ACDA), the largest higher education dance organization in the United States, and he currently serves as the ACDA board president. Kara Walker is an artist known for her candid investigations of race, gender, sexuality, and violence. Her silhouetted figures have appeared in exhibitions and are included in museum and public collections around the world. Her 2007 survey exhibition Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love at the Walker Art Center traveled to ARC/Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hammer Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth. For the 2015 Venice Biennale, she was director plus set and costume designer for Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma at Teatro La Fenice. Walker, who has received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award and the United States Artists Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Carol A. Wells, an activist, art historian, curator, lecturer, and writer, is the director of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG). She has been collecting posters and producing political poster art exhibitions since 1981. Trained as a medievalist at University of California, Los Angeles, she taught the history of art and architecture for thirteen years at California State University Fullerton. In 1988 Wells founded CSPG, an educational and research archive that collects, documents, preserves, and exhibits posters and prints relating to diverse movements for social change. The Center currently holds more than ninety thousand posters and has the largest collection of post–World War II human rights and protest posters in the United States. Wells has produced or cocurated more than one hundred exhibitions for more than four hundred venues worldwide. Recent exhibitions include To Protect & Serve? Five Decades of Posters Protesting Police Violence (2018) and Health Care Not Wealth Care: Posters on Health Activism & Social Justice (2019), and Activists, Artists & Sisters: Posters on Women Fighting for Justice (2020). Jaye Austin Williams is assistant professor of Africana studies and a C. Graydon and Mary E. Rogers Faculty Fellow at Bucknell University. From 2015 to 2017 she served as assistant professor of theater arts at California State University Long Beach. Williams’s work of thirty years as director, playwright, actor, teacher, writer, and consultant—regionally and on and off

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Broadway—is situated at the nexus of critical Black studies, drama theory, and performance. She teaches drama and cinematic theory and directs works that ground students’ discovery of Black radical analysis and praxis in not merely the psychological underpinnings of Black playwrights’ stories but also the systemic, ongoing violence (spectacular and mundane) that impacts Black existence on a global scale. Williams is currently working on Staging (within) Violence: Slavery, the “Post-”colony and (Anti-) Black Modernity, an analysis of several of her university productions, and Kia Corthron in Concert: Selected Plays and Critical Engagements, an anthology pairing the dramatist-novelist’s plays with an interdisciplinary array of political and structural analyses by Black scholars. Jessica Winegar, professor of anthropology at Northwestern University, has published numerous articles on arts and culture in the Middle East, including a number of recent writings on Egypt’s uprising. Her book Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt (2006) won the Albert Hourani award for best book in Middle East studies and the Arnold Rubin award for best book on African arts. She is coauthor with Lara Deeb of Anthropology’s Politics: Discipline and Region through the Lens of the Middle East (2015). Winegar’s areas of research include cultural politics and the culture industries, material and visual culture, aesthetics, nationalism, religion, social class, youth, gender, and the politics of anthropology. She has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, Social Science Research Council, Fulbright, the Howard Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Teri Shaffer Yamada is professor emerita of Asian studies and former chair of the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at California State University Long Beach. She has studied seven Asian languages and holds a master’s degree in Southeast Asian languages and literatures and a doctorate in Buddhist studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include modernity and Southeast Asian literature, development and sustainability in Cambodia, and casino capitalism in Asia. In 2002 she organized the Nou Hach Literary Association, a nongovernmental organization in Phnom Penh, to support emerging Cambodian writers. Her book publications include Virtual Lotus: Modern Fiction of Southeast Asia (2002), Modern Short Fiction of Southeast Asia: A Literary History (2009), and “Just a Human Being” and Other Tales from Contemporary Cambodia (2013). Recent articles include “Violent Traces: Writing Cambodia” (2017), “Phnom Penh’s Diamond Island: City of Spectacle” (2018), and “Cambodia’s Changing Landscape: Rhetoric and Reality” (2019).

Index

Abla, Muhammad 206 ability, politics of 110 ableism 11, 310 abstract expressionism 138, 146 Abu Ghazi, Emad 203 Abu Ghraib prison 167–70 academic cultures 223 academic freedom. See freedom, academic/ campus Acconci, Vito 87 Acjachemen/Juaneño peoples 224–6 ACT UP organization 95, 176 activism/activist(s) additivist 247, 249–50 anti-oppression 263 anti-porn 60, 90, 93 n.36 anti-racism 5, 263 anti-sexism 5, 60 anti-sexual assault/violence 84, 181–2 antinuclear 176 in art marketplace 15 AIDS 176, 177 Asian American 18 African/Black American 18, 28, 298 American Indian/Native American 18 Catholic (Liberation Theology) 120 Chicanx/Latinx 18 disability 196 Egyptian 205–6 environmental 176, 177 feminist 18, 28, 60, 86, 88, 90, 176, 254 in fine arts curriculum 178 immigration reform/global refugee conditions 177, 213 Left/New Left 68–70, 77–8 LGBTQ/gay 18, 28, 176 against museum practices 5, 315 n.4 Nina Simone on 248 online/virtual 181–3, 185, 247–8, 254 reactionary 262 scholarly 272 social justice 311 student 185, 261, 283

training 178, 179 trans rights 177 underground 73, 78 activism, art 5, 14–7, 126–8, 130–1, 134 n.24, 155, 176–9, 183, 185, 209–10, 214, 247–50, 261–3, 313 activism, political 12, 14, 15, 68, 73, 155, 176–83, 185, 249–50, 257, 261, 263, 298, 308, 310–1, 313. See also Argentina, movement politics ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) 192, 195–6 post-ADA artists 192 Adams, Parveen 33–4 #Additivism movement 16, 247, 250 Adorno, Theodor 166 Negative Dialectics 67 AES+F art group 13, 53, 59–60 Défilé series 59 Africa/African. See also Benin Kingdom; Benin, Republic of; Dahomey, Kingdom of art/artworks (looting/destruction of) 235–44, 239, Plate 23 and European/American art 238 European invasion/colonization of 235–41 marginalization of contemporary African art/ artists 236 ownership of images/copyrights/intellectual property 237, 242 reclamation of cultural identity 236, 241 repatriation 4, 16, 235–7, 240, 242, 244 restitution 16, 235–7, 239–44 and Sarr-Savoy report 16, 236–40, 242–4 and Western/encyclopedic/universal museums 16, 235, 237, 239–40 African/Black Americans 5, 17–8, 28, 30–2, 146, 147, 293, 297, 298, 299, 301, 302 aggregate, aggregative art/practices 6, 7, 8, 240 Agustín, Rafael 265–6, 280–1 AHR Civic Center and Public Museum, Wisconsin 83 Ai Weiwei 15. Contributing author 209–19 China Log Plate 20

INDEX

Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn 210, 212 Fuck Off exhibition 210, 211 Human Flow 209–10, 213, 215, Plate 19 A.I.R. Gallery, New York City 82 Akcan, Esra 7 Ala Plástica collective 128 Alcoff, Linda Martín 137–8, 150 Alfonsín, Raúl 125 Alice L. Walton Foundation 315 n.2 Allahyari, Morehshin 16. Contributing author 247–54 on additivism 250 on censorship 247–9, 251, 254 Dark Matter 249–50 Huma and Talismans, detail of 253 Lamassu, from Material Speculation: ISIS series 1, 250–1, cover image, Plate 24 Open Letter to the Audience 249 and Rourke, The 3D Additivist Cookbook 249–50 and Rourke The 3D Additivist Manifesto 249–50 She Who Sees the Unknown series 250–1, 253 South Ivan Human Heads: Bearded River God 252 3D printing technology 1, 16, 247, 249–53 Video Instructions: Tips on Censorship 248–9 Allende, Salvador 130 Almaraz, Carlos 139–40 Alpers, Svetlana 4 American Alliance of Museums 315 n.2 American Civil Liberties Union 285, 289 n.11 American Indian art 230 American Indians 16, 223–4, 226–7, 230, 233. See also California State University Long Beach (CSULB) Acjachemen/Juaneño peoples 224–6 California population of 229 Chumash people/language 226, 230 college students 223, 226–30, 228, 297 cultural sustainability 224 Gabrielino/Tongva peoples 224–6, 229–30 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), 1990 4, 225, 231 political movement 173 Southern California population 224 and Manifest Destiny/“We are all immigrants” slogan 227 American Monument 25/2018 (woods) 17, 293–4, 294, 296–302, 299, 300, Plate 28

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American studies 230 anatomy art. See von Hagens, Gunther Anderson Ranch Arts Center 15, 209, 217–8 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation 315 n.2 Anger, Kenneth, Fireworks 72 Anti-Pornography Civil Rights Ordinance 90 anti-pornography legislation 60, 90, 93 n.36 anti-rape campaigns 90 anti-Semiticism 111 Apter, Emily 91 Araeen, Rasheed 28–9 A.R.C. gallery 81 Argentina 119, 125–6, 128–31 art/artists 14, 119–20, 125–6, 134 n.18, 134 n.21 (see also Grupo de Arte de Vanguardia (GAV, Vanguard Art Group), Tucumán Arde) Confederación General del Trabajo de los Argentinos (CGTA, General Confederation of Labor of the Argentines) 119–22, 124, 126–7, 131 movement politics 124, 126–7, 129–33 Onganía military dictatorship 119–20 “Operativo Tucumán” 120 Arias, Francisco 32 Art along the Hyphen: The Mexican-American Generation exhibition 147 Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World exhibition 209 Art and Revolution of Nicaragua exhibition 155 Art Basel Miami 15, 180, 182 Art Basel: Unlimited 183–4 art collectives. See specific collectives Art Cologne (Köln Kunstmarkt) 71, 74–8 art history 6–8, 28, 58, 87–8, 100, 113–5, 125, 130, 142, 145–7, 150–1, 152 n.27, 176, 260, 261 The Art Institute of Chicago 114 Art of the Fantastic: Latin America, 1920–1987 exhibition 126 art making 28, 146, 166–7, 176–7, 179, 196, 205, 214, 218, 248, 250, 262, 298 Art Workers’ Coalition, New York 5, 166, 183 arte-faction 53, 59, 61 n.6 arte-fiction 53, 61 n.6 Artemisia Gallery 81–4, 86–7 artistic freedom. See freedom, artistic/aesthetic/ creative Artnet website 183 Asco (art collective) 145, 147–8 Decoy Gang War Victim 148 First Supper (After a Major Riot) 148 Instant Mural 148

330

INDEX

Spray Paint LACMA 5 Walking Mural 148 Asco: Elite of the Obscure exhibition 147–8, 148 Asfour, Gaber 206 Asher, Michael 5 Asian Americans 6, 18, 232, 282 Aspen Institute 217 Aspen Music School and Festival 217 Associated Students Incorporated (ASI) 280, 283 Association of Performing Arts Presenters 277 Association of Progressive German Art Dealers 76 Atkins, Robert, and Mintcheva, Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression 4, 305 al-‘Attar, Ahmad 203 Austria Filmmakers Co-op (AFMC) 70 authoritarianism/authoritarian rule 15, 128–30, 199, 202, 207, 209, 214 Autoerotic Death (Witkin) 59 Autry, LaTanya S., #museumsarenotneutral 298 Autry National Center 147 avant-garde 101, 120, 122, 125–8, 130, 132, 204, 214 Azoulay, Ariella, The Civil Contract of Photography 86 Aztlan 143–4 Baca, Judith F./Judy The Great Wall of Los Angeles 148 in The Great Wall of Los Angeles: Judy Baca’s Experimentations in Collaboration and Concrete exhibition 149 Bacon, Francis 260 Bagchi, Jeebesh 6 Bal, Mieke 38 Band, Richard 223 Barker, Emma 239 Barnitz, Jacqueline 134 n.29 Barthes, Roland 28, 176 punctum 60 Basco, Dionysio 265, 280 Beall Center for Art and Technology, UCI 302 Beardsley, John, and Livingston, Hispanic Art of the United States: Thirty Painters and Sculptors exhibition 14, 138, 141–3, 142, 150, 152 n.28 Bell, Gertrude 251 Benglis, Lynda 5 Benhamou, Yaniv 238 Benin Dialogue Group (BGD) 240 Benin Kingdom. See also Africa/African

artworks of 235, 237–41, 237 bronze sculptures 235, 237, 238–43 hegemony in upper Niger Delta arts 239 invasion (damage to cultural heritage) of 238–9, 241 and Nigeria 238, 242–3 Ovonramwen, Oba (King) 237–8 Benin, Republic of Dahomean peoples 243 demand for return of artwork 237 French Development Agency loans to 243 Benjamin, Walter 29–30, 176 Ben-Porath, Sigal R. 8–10 Benton, Gabrielle 177 Berlin Conference 235, 243 Betterton, Rosemary 90 Biennale of Sydney 310 Binder, Guyora, “The Slavery of Emancipation” 290 n.16 Black/African Americans 5, 17–8, 28, 30–2, 146, 147, 293, 297, 298, 299, 301, 302 Black Lives Matter movement 232, 262, 271, 276 Black power movement 28 Blacktop Highway (Fleck) 97 Bland, Sandra 298 Blasenstein, Michael 111 and Iacovone, Museum of Censored Art 111, 112 Blessed Are All the Little Fishes (Fleck) Plate 9 Blowout movie 281 Body Worlds exhibitions (von Hagens) 13, 53–8, Plate 5 Bolton, Richard 2 Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo 137–8, 140 Bostock, María 43 Both Sides Now exhibition 86 Bourdieu, Pierre 3, 35 n.5 Bowers, Andrea 15, 175–88 Art Basel Miami/Art Basel: Unlimited 180, 182–4 Courtroom Drawings (Steubenville Rape Case, Text Messages Entered as Evidence) 181–2, 182 Diabloblockade, Diablo Nuclear Power Plant, Abalone Alliance, 1981 177 Drawing Lessons 186 n.10 earnings 187 n.38 Empowered Women Empower Women 183 Ground Floor 186 n.10 I Plan to Stay a Believer—The Arcadia 4 Tree-Sit 178 and issue of consent 184–5

INDEX

and Koumoundouros, TRANSFORMer: Platform for Community Education, Activism and Fundraising 179–80, 182, 185, Plate 16 and Laton Lives! 178–9 and Laton Lives! Reunion Reunión 179 Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Training— Tree Sitting Forest Defense 178 Open Secrets Parts 1 & 2  183–5 Performance Lessons 186 n.10 post–culture wars approach 15 #sweetjane 181–2, 185 Vieja Gloria 177–9, 178 and Lacy, Your Donations Do Our Work 178–9, 179 Boycott, Divestments, and Sanctions (BDS) movement 311 boycott, economic/cultural 310–1 British Museum 240, 244 British Punitive Expedition 238 Brooklyn Museum of Art 175 Agitprop! exhibition 308 Artist Studio Affordability Project 315 n.4 This Place exhibition 315 n.5 Brown, Betty Ann 149 Brown, Bill 192–4 Brown, Michael 260, 301 Buckingham, Matthew 29–30 Godfrey on methods of 35 n.8 Muhheakantuck—Everything Has a Name 29 Burden, Chris 87 Shoot 88 A Burial at Ornans (Gustave Courbet) 175 Burns, Maureen 138 Bush, George H.W. 100, 102 Bush, George W. 170 Butler, Judith 132, 176 Cairo College of Fine Arts 205 Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theater 202, 204 Calderón, Felipe 41, 45, 47 n.17, 47 n.20, 48 n.25 California Assembly Bill 1248 (AB–1248) 227 California Assembly Bill 1460 (AB–1460) 232 California Faculty Association (CFA) 230, 232 CFA Indigenous Peoples Caucus 230 California Institute of the Arts 176 California Native American Heritage Commission 233 n.1 California Science Center, Los Angeles 54–6 “Future Public Exhibition of Plastinated Human Bodies” 56

331

California State University (CSU) American Indian Studies Caucus 232 and California Assembly Bill AB–1248 227 and California Assembly Bill AB–1460 232 ethnic studies 230–2 Ethnic Studies Council 232 Task Force on the Advancement of Ethnic Studies 232 California State University Long Beach (CSULB) 16, 17, 96, 155, 223, 265 and Acjachemen/Juaneño peoples 224–6 Africana Studies 232, 274 and American Indian community 16, 223–33 American Indian Community Advisory Board 223–4 American Indian Leaders of Today and Tomorrow (AILOTT) conference, poster 227, 228 American Indian Student Council (AISC) 229 American Indian Student Council (AISC), Genocide Flags 229–30, Plate 22 American Indian Studies (AIS) 16, 223–4, 226–7, 230–2, 274 and American Monument 25/2018 17, 293–4, 294, 295–302, 299, 300, Plate 28 Annual Pow Wow at Puvungna 226–7, Plate 21 The B-Word Project: “Banned, Blacklisted & Boycotted: Censorship and the Response to It” 265, 277, 288–9 n.1 and California Gold Rush 229–30 and California Indian Awareness Day 225 Carpenter Performing Arts Center (CPAC) 17, 265–6, 271–2, 274–7, 280–5, 288, 288 n.1 Chicano and Latino Studies (CHLS) 21 n.79, 280–3 College of Liberal Arts 223, 226, 280, 283 College of the Arts (COTA) 223, 230, 276–7, 278, 280, 283, 284, 295–7 Committee on Native American Burial Remains and Cultural Patrimony 226 ethnic studies 230–2, 265, 274–5, 276–7, 280, 283–4 49ers 229 and Gabrielino/Tongva peoples 224–6, 229–30 mascots (Prospector Pete, shark) 16, 229–230 and National Register of Historic Places 224 and Native American community (see CSULB, and American Indian community) Native American Student Council (NASC) 225, 227

332

INDEX

and N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk/N*W*C*/ NWC (Agustín, McQueen, and Basco) 17, 265–88, 289 n.13, 290 n.14, 290 n.15, 290 n.17, Plate 27 and Puvungna 16, 224–6, 229 reburial of indigenous ancestral remains 225, 230, 231 School of Art (SoA) 279, 293, 301 School of Art Concerned Students of Color and Allies 17, 293, 301. Contributing author 294–7 undergraduate demographics (2016–17) 296–7 and United Descendants of Puvungna Council (UDPC) 226, 233 n.1 University Art Museum (UAM, now Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum) 17, 288 n.1, 293–7, 301 California State University Northridge Art Galleries 149 California State University San Marcos 227 Call and Response, When We Say … You Say exhibition 297 Call Me Ishmael: The Fully Enlightened Earth Radiates Disaster Triumphant (Martínez) 161, 163, 163, 164 Calley, William 166 Calling Cards (Piper) 260 Camnitzer, Luis 128 canons and art 7, 58, 87, 127–8, 130, 132, 137–9, 143, 150 and museums 16, 138, 235 Capitain Petzel Gallery 184 Carbaugh, Terri 295–7 Carnevale, Graciela 124, 130–1, 133, 135 n.39 and Davis, Longoni, and Wandzik, Inventario 1965–1975: Archivo Graciela Carnevale exhibition 130–2 Carrasco, Barbara 149 Carrillo, Eduardo 151 n.15 Carson, Juli 33 Casas, Mel 145 Casid, Jill 7 Castile, Philando 298 Castro, Isabel 149 Castro, Joseph I. 230 Catholic League 111 Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography and Censorship (FACT) 90–1 Ceci N’est Pas un Viol (Sulkowicz) 91 censorship/censoring 1–2, 9, 14–18, 41, 43,

45–6, 51, 52–4, 60, 78, 83–4, 90, 99, 101–6, 119, 121, 124, 132, 137, 155, 159–60, 163, 175, 205–7, 209, 232–3, 235, 263, 271, 274–5, 277, 279, 285–7, 307–10, 313–14 academia 9, 275 activism 263 anti-censorship 73–4, 77, 77–8 Bourdieu on 3 and boycotts 310 bureaucratic 248–9 censuring vs. censoring 2 corporate 106 covert 3, 14, 18, 109–10, 112–5 definition by American Civil Liberties Union 285, 289 n.11 Derrida on 44 and film 13, 52–3, 72–8, 96, 110–2, 159, 205, 312 Foucault on 3 Jansen on 3 market 3–4, 73–4, 78, 96, 99, 175, 277, 305, 313 meta-censorship 43 and museums 4, 14, 16, 17, 109–14, 119–20, 137–41, 150–1, 161, 236, 306–10, 312–4 as omission 29–30, 150 overt 3, 14, 18, 109–10, 113–5 and pay-to-play curatorial practices 175 protestors’ calls for 9, 78, 307–8, 310 regulatory and constituent 3, 11, 18 and safe places 275 self-censorship 4, 10, 13, 16, 43, 59, 103, 106, 124, 160–1, 236, 249, 305, 310, 313 and social networks 56 state 2, 43, 72–4, 77–8, 214 systemic 4, 10, 17, 301, 305 Western relocation of African cultural patrimony 235–6 Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG) 14, 155–61, 173 Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership 243 Centro Cultural Parque de España 131 Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAyC) 124 censure 2, 18, 45 Cereijido, Fabián 14. Contributing author 119–136 “Assured Pasts or Gambled Futures” dissertation 133 Cervantes, Juan 148

INDEX

CFA Indigenous Peoples Caucus 230 Chamales, José 32–3 Chang, Patty 6 Chant d’Amour (Genet) 72 Charlie Company 166 Charlie Hebdo magazine, attack on 8, 20 n.41, 105 Chatterjee, Piya 10–11 Chavoya, C. Ondine 147 Chen, Meiling 88 Chicago, Judy 82, 277 Artforum ads 5 Dinner Party 5, 93 n.32 “Female Imagery” essay 90 Chicana/Chicano/Chicanx/Chican@ art, artists 5, 14, 137–51, 151 n.1, 152 n.22, 152 n.27, 153 n.56 Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965–1985 exhibition 152 n.22 Chicano Movement 144–6, 149–50 Childs, Elizabeth C. 3 China 53, 55, 76, 167, 209, 213–8 China Avant-Garde exhibition 175 China Log (Ai Weiwei) Plate 20 Chingichngish spiritual philosophy 224 Chisholm, Shirley 160 Christian Democrats (CDU) 74 Chumash people/language 226, 230 civil disobedience 176, 178, 182–3, 185 civil rights movement 18, 28, 31, 152 n.22, 176. See also specific movements civility. See speech, civil/uncivil Clark, T. J., The Painter’s Studio 175 Clarke, Shirley, Portrait of Jason 75 class 2, 6, 11, 14, 30, 44, 110, 120, 122, 124, 127, 138, 139, 201, 271 Clifford, James 4 Clinton, Bill/William 47 n.21, 102 Clinton, Hillary 102 Cologne Department of Cultural Affairs 74, 76 colonialism 4, 11, 29, 35 n.16, 143, 227, 235–44. See also imperialism colonial incursions and plunder, British, French, German 235–41 neocolonialism 4, 8, 39, 243 Western digital 251, 254 Comisión de Agitación y Propaganda 120 commercial market 70, 73–6, 78, 200 communal cinema (kommunales Kino) 72

333

communism/communist society 3, 69, 73, 120, 159, 214 Comprehensive Employment and Training Act 223 conceptual art/conceptualism 5, 119–20, 122, 124, 126, 127, 128, 144–6, 147, 195 ideological 129–30, 134 n.29 in Latin America 126, 128–30 photo-conceptualism 31 tautological 129–30 Confederación General del Trabajo de los Argentinos (General Confederation of Labor of the Argentines/CGTA) 119–22, 124, 126–7, 131 “Plan del Primero de Mayo” 120 Confucius 214 Congo, King Leopold II’s control over 235 Conoley, Jane Close 233 n.1, 266, 275, 276–7, 278, 283, 284, 286. Contributing author 271–2 FIRE, NCAC, and DLDF letter to 266, 267–70 Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (Conaculta) 40–1 consent 13, 15, 54–6, 59, 88–9, 184 conservatives 2, 10, 43, 45, 73, 74, 90, 95, 99, 113, 175, 176, 180, 249, 308 consumerism 69–70 contemporary art 2, 6, 14, 30–1, 40, 44–5, 82, 125, 128, 143, 150, 175, 178, 209, 214, 235–6, 238 controversy 2–3, 9–10, 13–17, 42, 44–5, 53–6, 60, 95, 102, 112–3, 184–5, 204, 213, 257, 271, 274–5, 276, 278, 293, 297, 305, 308–10, 313 controversial art 11, 18, 41, 81, 91, 100, 276, 278, 289 n.9 controversial speech 8 Cooks, Bridget R. 35 n.5 “El Cordobazo” 122, 123, 129, 133 n.7 Corley, Charnesia 260 Corpus medius (Witkin) 60 Cortiñas, Nora 127 Courbet, Gustave, A Burial at Ornans 175 Courtroom Drawings (Steubenville Rape Case, Text Messages Entered as Evidence) (Bowers) 181–2, 182 Creative Campus Innovations Grant 277, 288–9 n.1 Crimp, Douglas 5, 180 Crisisss: Latin America, Art and Confrontation

334

INDEX

1919–2010 exhibition 41 critical analysis/inquiry/thinking 6, 10, 11, 18, 119, 155, 165, 278–80, 282 critical disability studies. See disability Cuban Revolution 120, 129–30 Cuellar, Rudy 148 cultural diversity 6, 14, 147 cultural heritage 6, 11–2 African 16, 235–6, 238, 240–4 Chican@/Mexican 140, 151 n.1 Iraqi 1, 18 n.2 Middle Eastern 251 cultural identity 29, 138, 140, 147, 236, 241 cultural politics 180, 199 culture police 110 culture war(s) 2–3, 11, 17, 60, 95, 106, 110, 205, 305 cunt art 90 Curtis, Erin M. 149 daguerreotypes 30–2, 60 Dahomey, Kingdom of 235, 237, Plate 23 Dallas County Records Building 298 The Dallas Historical Parks Project (woods) 298, 301 Dark Matter (Allahyari) 249–50 Daumier, Honoré 87 Davalos, Karen Mary 14, 152 n.28. Contributing author 137–154 Davidson, Susan 113–14 “Mother of God” 115 n.4 Dávila, Arlene 137–8, 141 Davis, Angela 173 Davis, Fernando, and Carnevale, Longoni, and Wandzik, Inventario 1965–1975: Archivo Graciela Carnevale exhibition 130–2 Al-Da’wa (The Call) magazine 205 Day without Art 183 de la Loza, Sandra, Mural Remix 147, 152 n.27 de la Rocha, Roberto “Beto” 139 de la Rocha, Róger Pérez 157 ¿De qué otra cosa podemos hablar? (What Else Could We Talk About?) (Margolles) 12, 37–46, 38, 39, 46 n.1, 46 n.4, 47 n.17, 48 n.26, Plate 3, Plate 4 death in art 40, 42, 51–61 farewell (Ireland/Scotland) 51 industrial management 52 natural 51–3 pornography of death 13, 51–2 rituals of Incas 51–2 violent 42, 47 n.20, 52–3 decolonize/decolonizing 227, 308

Decolonize This Place (DTP) 308 deconstruction 14, 58, 131, 133 Decoy Gang War Victim (Asco) 148 Défilé series (AES+F) 59 Delgadillo, Theresa 144 democracy/democratic rule/democratic society 2, 3, 10–1, 18, 106, 129, 163, 170, 177, 204, 214, 217 Argentine reinstatement of 120, 124, 126, 132 discursive expectations in 273 mythology of consent 89 rhetoric of choice 69–70, 170 sub/nonhuman status of bodies in 89 democratization 2, 70 of arts 203, 206 of media/communication technologies 72, 99 Derrida, Jacques 28, 44, 46 n.4, 119, 129 desarrollismo 129, 135 n.31 de-shaming 13, 98 Deutsche, Rosalyn 186 n.19 Diabloblockade, Diablo Nuclear Power Plant, Abalone Alliance, 1981 (Bowers) 177 Día de los Muertos: A Cultural Legacy, Past, Present and Future exhibition 149 Díaz Ordaz, Gustavo 47 n.19 difficult art 3 digital museums 238 Dinner Party (Chicago) 5, 93 n.32 disability and art 15, 191–8 (see also McArthur, Park, Ramps; Papalia, Carmen, Guiding String accessibility audits 194 critical disability studies 11 disability aesthetics 193 disability studies 11 diversity/multicultural curriculum and 11 as minority identity 11 and things/thing theory 192–7 wheelchair ramps 191–6 Disability Discrimination Act, UK 195 disability studies. See disability Disguised Bandit (Gonzales-Day) 33, Plate 2 DisruptJ20 protest 184 Di Tella Company 133 n.3 Di Tella Institute. See Instituto di Tella diversity 2, 5–6, 10–1, 14, 17, 54, 137, 140, 143–4, 147–9, 232, 263, 272–3, 274, 306–7, 313–4, 315 n.2 Diversity in Museum Leadership Initiative (DMLI) 315 n.2 documenta 74, 131

INDEX

documenta 12  130, 132 Dolan, Jill 89 dominant group 258, 274, 289 n.8 Doris Duke Charitable Foundation 277 Dougherty, Frazer, and Petlin and Hendricks, Q. And Babies? A. And Babies 166, Plate 15 Doyle, Jennifer 2–3, 31 Hold It against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art 35 n.16 Dramatists Legal Defense Fund (DLDF) 266 letter to Conoley 266, 267–70 Drawing Lessons (Bowers) 186 n.10 Drinking Fountain # 1 (woods) 298 Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (Ai Weiwei) 210, 212 D’Souza, Aruna 7–8, 298, 314 Duchamp, Marcel 218 First Papers of Surrealism exhibition 194 Duffy, Kevin 13. Contributing author 95–107 John Fleck Is Who You Want Him to Be 96, 97, Plate 10 Duggan, Lisa 90, 137–8 Durazo, Ana Clarissa Rojas 21 n.79 Durón, Armando 149, 153 n.55 Dutch East India Company 29 DuVernay, Ava, 13th 290 n.16 Dworkin, Andrea 60, 90 Eagle, Irving Jumping 227 East Germany (GDR) 53, 69, 74 egalitarian/egalitarianism 9, 141 Egypt Egyptian Creativity Front 206 Hanager theatre/gallery complex 202 independent artists public-private partnerships 202–3 involvement in culture 199, 200–2 corruption/anti-corruption 200–1 culture palaces 200–2 patrimony management 201 Islam and secularism 204–6 Ministry of Culture 200–6 Ministry of Interior 206 Mubarak regime 200, 204–5, 207 Muslim Brothers 204–5, 207 n.1 secular-oriented cultural producers 203–6 Supreme Council of Culture 204 Ellis, Kate 90 Ellis, Katie 11 Empowered Women Empower Women (Bowers) 183 encyclopedic museums 239–40. See also universal museums

335

epistemic injustice 9 Erased Lynching series (Gonzales-Day) 12, 32–4, Plate 2 Errata: Not Included exhibition 152 n.28 Espinosa de los Monteros, Santiago 43 essentialism 90, 125–6, 144–5, 150 and cultural difference/multiculturalism 138, 140–1, 145, 150 and ethnic-based art 144 homophobic 113 and structuralism 125, 131, 133 Essex Street Gallery 191, 194–7 Etcétera collective 127–8, 134 n.21 ethnic art(s)/artists 4, 29, 138, 141–2, 145, 147 ethnic cleansing 106 ethnic studies 11, 16, 230, 265, 274. See also California State University (CSU) ethnic studies and California State University Long Beach (CSULB) ethnic studies ethnicity 3, 6, 11, 32, 110, 138, 146, 272 ethnographic museums 235 partial truths of (Clifford) 4 Ethnological Museum, Berlin 241 Eurocentrism/Eurocentricity 165 Europe/European 39, 54, 70, 140, 184, 201–5, 214, 217, 236, 240, 244, 273 colonization of Africa 235, 241, 243 museums 16, 235–44, 245 n.13 Western Europe 10, 56, 68, 71, 230 European Community 46 n.3 European Filmmakers Cooperative 70 The Exploding Plastic Inevitable (Velvet Underground) 67 EXPORT, VALIE 67, 69 and K. Hein and Weibel, “Underground Explosion” 67–9, 71–6, 77, 78–9, Plate 7 EXPRMNTL Film Festival, Belgium 70 Ex-Teresa Arte Actual, Mexico 41 Facing Change: Advancing Museum Board Diversity & Inclusion 315 n.2 FACT (Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force) 91 Family Pictures and Stories series (Weems) 30 al-Fann Midan 203, 206 Farver, Jane 128 Farzin, Media 6 fascism/fascist society 8, 69, 106 multitudinal 8 Favela, Ricardo 148 female body 5, 13, 82, 85, 89–90 feminism/feminist activism 18, 28, 60, 82, 90–1, 176 anti-feminism 89, 180

336

art/practice 5, 13, 81–91, 101, 147, 176–8, 184, 251, 254 and representations of rape/sexual violence 13, 81–91, 185, 193 The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure 90 Fernandes, Joyce 81 Fernandez-Sacco, Ellen 140 Ferrari, León 133 n.3 FIAC Paris 182 Fields, Virginia M. 143 Figueroa, Juan José González 47 n.19 Finley, Karen 2, 95, 101, 104, 288–9 n.1, 289 n.9 A Fire in My Belly (Wojnarowicz) 14, 110–2, Plate 11 Fireworks (Anger) 72 First Amendment 18–9 n.3, 96, 105, 266, 272, 275, 287, 307 First Supper (After a Major Riot) (Asco) 148 Fish, Stanley Eugene 9 Fiz, Simón Marchán 124 Fleck, John 2, 13, 95–6, 288–9 n.1, 289 n.9. Contributing author 95–107 Blacktop Highway 97 Blessed Are All the Little Fishes Plate 9 Interview with a Degenerate 98 in John Fleck Is Who You Want Him to Be (Duffy) 96, 97, Plate 10 Madwomen 97, Plate 10 and NEA 4 2, 13, 95, 99–102, 104, 288–9 n.1, 289 n.9 No on 69 103 on The Oprah Winfrey Show 101–2 Flynn, Tom 240 folkloric (folk) art/artist(s) 139–40 For Erik Ferguson (Papalia) 194 Forbes, Jack 224 Ford Foundation 133 n.3, 315 n.2 Forest-Brown, Nancy 81, 91 Forkscrew Graphics, iRaq 168–9, 168 Forti, Simone, Huddle 68 Foster, Khanisha 290 n.14 Foucault, Michel 3 subjugated knowledges 28 Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) 266 letter to Conoley 266, 267–70 Fox, Howard 145 Fox, Sue 13, 53, 58–61 Post Mortem series 58–9, Plate 6 Fox, Vicente 45 Fox News 115 n.2, 161, 165, 168

INDEX

Fox TV 100 France 200, 235–7, 239–40, 242–4 French Development Agency 243 Fraser, Andrea 6, 180 on Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection 180–1 free inquiry 9, 14 free market 96, 99, 305 free will 89 freedom academic/campus 8–11, 17, 20 n.46, 265–288 artistic/aesthetic/creative 8, 17, 109, 125, 138, 146, 175, 200, 202, 204–6, 210, 276–7, 288, 311–2 curatorial 150 inclusive 10 social 146, 160, 170, 210–1, 213, 249, 271, 273 of speech/expression 8–10, 17, 156, 159, 162, 173, 175, 199, 204, 206, 210, 213, 214, 249, 265–288, 295, 297, 305, 307, 311–2 Freedom of Information Act 299 Frieze magazine 191–2 Frohnmayer, John 95–6, 289 n.9 From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (Weems) 12, 30–2, 34, Plate 1 From Reverence to Rape to Respect (Kauffman, King, Labowitz, and Lacy) 86 Frueh, Joanna 84 Fryd, Vivien Green 88 F Space Gallery, California 88 Fuck Off exhibition (Ai Weiwei) 210, 211 Fuerzas Armadas Peronistas 122, 133 n.6 Fundación Jumex 40–1 funding, arts 2, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18–9 n.3, 19 n.6, 60, 95–6, 99, 101, 105, 109–12, 114, 173, 175–6, 179–80, 195, 238, 241, 298 in Argentina 119–20, 124 in Australia 310–1 and the Benin Kingdom 238 in Egypt 200–4 fundraising 82, 114, 176, 179–80 Getty Foundation 139, 147, 149, 153 n.56 in Mexico 12–3, 41, 45 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) 2, 18–9 n.3, 19 n.6, 60, 95, 99, 101, 288–9 n.1 Saatchi and artist dealers 175 in the United States 2, 99, 101, 201, 298, 305 in West Germany (FRG) 70

INDEX

Gabrielino/Tongva peoples 224–6, 229–30 Galeano, Eduardo 125 Galileo 164–6, 173 Galvan, Ashley 301 Gamboa, Harry, Jr. 145, 147–8 Garcia, Rupert 148 Gardner-Huggett, Joanna 82, 91 Garduño, Ana 12–3. Contributing author 37–49 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie 11 Garza, Alberto Fierro 40–1, 47 n.13, 47 n.16 Gavey, Nicola 85 gender 2–3, 10–1, 99, 151 n.1, 261, 272 art/artists and 2–3, 5–6, 11, 30, 85, 99, 140, 150, 151 n.1, 183–5, 261, 272, 313 bias 30 identity 2 inequity 89, 183 neoliberalism and 138, 140, 150 politics of 110 studies/pedagogies of 11 transgender people/rights 151, 177, 283 violence 85, 185, 313 General Idea collective 5 Genet, Jean, Chant d’Amour 72 genocide 16, 52, 125, 160, 166, 228–30, 241, 287 Genocide Flags (CSULB American Indian Student Council) 229–30, Plate 22 Gerstmann, Evan 10 Getty Foundation 139, 147, 149, 153 n.53 Ghosh, Amitav, Sea of Poppies 314 Gielen, Pascal 180–1 al-Giritli, Hasan 203 Giuliani, Rudy 175 Glele, king of Dahomey Kingdom 237 Glicksman, Hal 139 Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s exhibition 128 globalization 6, 149, 169, 181, 214, 216–7 Glusberg, Jorge 124–6 and Argentine art 124–6 Del Pop a la Nueva Imagen 125 La Semiótica de las Artes Visuales 125 GMHC group 176 Godfrey, Mark, “The Artist as Historian” 29, 35 n.8 Gold Rush, California 229–30 Gonzales-Day, Ken 27, 32–4 Disguised Bandit 33, Plate 2 Erased Lynching series 12, 32–4, Plate 2 Hanged at the Water Street Bridge 32–3 Lynching in the West: 1850–1935 32, 34 n.1, 35 n.18, 35 n.19

337

Searching for California Hang Trees 32 Gonzalez, Corky, “I am Joaquin” 281 Gonzalez, Louie “The Foot” 148 Gonzalez, Rita 145–7 Gorer, Geoffrey Death, Grief, and Mourning 61 n.1 on end-of life moments 52 on natural death 51–3 on pornography of death 13, 51–2, 61 n.1 Grad, Barbara 82 graffiti 5, 84, 121, 199, 206 Gran Fury collective 5, 176 Gray, Todd 170, 172 The Great Wall of Los Angeles (Baca) 148 The Great Wall of Los Angeles: Judy Baca’s Experimentations in Collaboration and Concrete exhibition 149 Green, Renée 29 Grigor, Talinn 7 Gronk 142, 145 Ground Floor (Bowers) 186 n.10 Grupo de Arte Argentino de Vanguardia (GAV, Vanguard Art Group), Tucumán Arde 14, 119–33, 133 n.4, 135 n.39, 121, 122, 123 and Comisión de Agitación y Propaganda 120 First Biennial of Avant-Garde Art 119 and “Operativo Tucumán” 120 Grupo de Arte Callejero collective (GAC) 127, 134 n.21 La Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua 157–9 Guerilla Art Action Group 5 Guerilla Girls 5 Guerrero, Andrea A. 17, 293. Contributing author 297–302 Guffey, Elizabeth 15. Contributing author 191–8 Guide to Handling of Collectibles from Colonial Contexts (German Museums Association) 242 Guiding String (Papalia) 15, 192–7, Plate 18 Gulf Labor Coalition 183 Gulf War 171, 176 Gutiérrez, Alejandra Peña 43 Haacke, Hans 5 Haag, Pamela 89 Hackenberg, Kurt 75–7 Haeberle, Ron L. 166 Al-Haj Saleh, Yassin 8 Halle, Randall 78 Hamburg Co-op 70 Hamburger Filmschau festival 70, 71

338

INDEX

Hammer Museum 149 Hammons, David 5 Hanged at the Water Street Bridge (GonzalesDay) 32 Hardt, Michael 6, 180 Hart Island Project 104–5 Hartman, Saidiya 89, 285–6 Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and SelfMaking in Nineteenth-Century America 289 n.12 “Venus in Two Acts” 289 n.12 hate speech 3–4, 9, 111, 265, 275, 276 Hathaway, Donna 250 Hawass, Zahi 201 Hawiyya (Islamist literati) 204–5 Haydar, Haydar, A Banquet for Seaweed 204 hegemony/hegemonic discourse/hegemonic institutions 14, 28, 119, 125, 129, 131–3, 134 n.24, 146, 150, 239–40 counter-hegemony 130 Hein, Birgit 73–4, 78, 79 n.11 Film im Underground 73 Hein, Karlheinz 67, 69 and EXPORT and Weibel, “Underground Explosion” 67–9, 71–6, 77, 78–9, Plate 7 Heinecken, Robert 170 Helms, Jesse 95, 98–9 Hendren, Sara, Slope: Intercept 195 Hendricks, Jon, and Petlin and Dougherty, Q. And Babies? A. And Babies 166, Plate 15 Hera Gallery, Rhode Island 82 Hernandez, Judithe 139 Herrera, Silvino, beheading of 158–9 head of 158 Herrón, Willie 145 Hersh, Seymour 166 Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture exhibition 14, 110–13, 111, 115 n.3, 175 Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio (HIJOS, Children for Identity and Justice against Forgetting and Silence) 127 Hill, Jason 34 Hispanic art boom 141 Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Painters and Sculptors exhibition (Beardsley and Livingston) 14, 138, 141–3, 142, 150, 152 n.28 historiography, art 45, 152 n.28 revisionist 30 The History of the Luiseño People (La Jolla Reservation 1990) (Luna) 35 n.16

Hoetger, Megan 13. Contributing author 67–80 holocaust/Holocaust 98, 165–6, 217, 229, 244. See also genocide AIDS 98 California Indian 229 Jewish 165–6, 217, 244 other 166 Holy Family Fan/Perversion Fan (Poe) 83, 83 homophobia 2, 5, 96, 104, 110, 282 homosexual/homosexuality 69, 99, 110, 113–14, 115 n.2 hooks, bell 282 “Art on My Mind” 281 Horn, Steven 225 Hough, Jessica 149 Housekeeper, Barbara 84 Hsieh, Tehching 218 Huamán Poma de Ayala, Felipe 51 Huddle (Forti) 68 Hudson, Henry 29 Hughes, Holly 2, 95, 288–9 n.1, 289 n.9 Huma and Talismans (Allahyari) 253 Human Flow (Ai Weiwei) 209–10, 213, 215, Plate 19 human rights 8, 11, 39, 125, 127, 214, 217, 310 human rights movement(s) 127, 130, 155 humanism 214, 217 humanitarian 10 humanities 8–9, 11, 280 humanity 61, 77, 215, 217, 273 Humboldt Forum museum 240–1 Hunt, Melinda 105 Hunter, James Davison 2 Husni, Farouq 204 Hutchinson, Joseph 83 I Plan to Stay a Believer—The Arcadia 4 TreeSit (Bowers) 178 Iacovone, Michael Dax, 111 and Blasenstein, Museum of Censored Art 111, 112 iconoclasm 8, 235 Icons of the Invisible: Oscar Castillo exhibition 147 identity and colonialism/imperialism 29 construction of 281 disability as 11 LGBTQ 114 marked/unmarked 138, 140, 150 and multiculturalism, 141–142 museum construction of 4, 35 n.5, 126, 142, 143, 145, 147, 149–150

INDEX

and neoliberalism 14, 137–138, 140–141, 144, 146–147, 149, 150 politics 3, 142, 145–6, 150, 174 n.8 post-identity politics/art 138–139, 146 identity of artist(s) as activist 185 as citizens of the world 218 as participant observer 178 as women 90 Illía, Arturo 120 Imam, ‘Adil 205 immigration 3, 15, 177, 248, 265, 279 IMPA factory 127, 132 imperialism 10, 240. See also colonialism In Mourning and in Rage (Labowitz and Lacy) 85–6 Independent Culture Coalition of artists and arts professionals, Egypt 203 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act 223 Indians, California 226. See also California State University Long Beach (CSULB) California Indian Awareness Day 225 genocide of 16, 229–30 indigenous peoples/communities 29, 127, 224–7, 230, 233, 235–6, 240–1, 243 Industrial Revolution in England 243 Instagram 8, 182, 210, 215, 309 Instant Mural (Asco) 148 Institute for Plastination (IFP), Heidelberg, Germany 53. See also von Hagens, Gunther Instituto di Tella (Di Tella Institute) 14, 119–20, 122, 133 n.3 Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA) 40–1 Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía/ INEGI (National Institute of Statistics and Geography) 47 n.20 intellectual safety/harm 10 International Association of Art Critics 124 International Experimental Film Festival 70 Internet 56, 102, 106, 167, 185, 214–6, 218, 229, 251, 262, 306 Interview with a Degenerate (Fleck) 98 Inventario 1965–1975: Archivo Graciela Carnevale exhibition (Carnevale, Davis, Longoni, and Wandzik) 130–2 Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America exhibition (Olea and Ramírez) 128–30 Iran 16, 166, 176, 248–9, 254 Iran-Contra affair 176 Iraq 1, 18 n.2, 160, 166, 168–9, 251 iRaq (Forkscrew Graphics) 168–9, 168

339

Irigaray, Luce 28 Irish, Sharon 88 Iskin, Ruth 82 Islamic literature 205 Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), destruction of ancient artifacts 1 Israel 307–8, 311 James, Joy 287 Jansen, Sue Curry 3 Jersky, Brian 284 Jewish studies 230 Jim Crow laws 257, 298 Jodorowsky, Alejandro 312, 315 n.12 John Hancock Center, Chicago 83 Johns, Jasper 113 Johnson, Lyndon B. 47 n.19 John Fleck Is Who You Want Him to Be (Duffy) 96, 97, Plate 10 Jones, Bill T. 277 Jones, Johnpaul 225 Joselit, David 6–7 aggregative practices 6–7 globalization 6 self-authorization 6 J. Paul Getty Museum 30–1 Juaneño/Acjachemen peoples 224–6 Judd, Donald 191, 216 Kalb, Peter R. 14–15. Contributing author 175–188 Kammen, Michael 2 Kanders, Warren 310, 313, 315 n.10 Kant, Immanuel 43 Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love (Vergne and Raymond) 315 n.7 Karaca, Banu 8 Karenga, Maulana 232. Contributing author 272–4 Karp, Ivan 4 and Lavine and Kreamer, Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture 19 n.23, 35 n.5 and Kratz, Szwaja, and Ybarra-Frausto, Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations 20 n.25 Katz, Jonathan D. 14. Contributing author 109–116 Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture 14, 110–13, 111, 115 n.3, 175 Kauffman, Kathy, and King, Labowitz, and

340

INDEX

Lacy, From Reverence to Rape to Respect 86 Kelly, Mary 89–90 Kent, Mike 11 Kidd, Dustin 2–3 Kimmelman, Michael 146 King, Claudine, and Kauffman, Labowitz, and Lacy From Reverence to Rape to Respect 86 King, Elaine 84 King, Martin Luther 244 King, Rodney 232 Kitchen Table series (Weems) 30 Kleinfelder, Karen. Contributing author 1–23, 274–5 knowledge(s)/knowledge practices 3–4, 17–8, 214, 274 academic 8–11, 272–4 of activism/art 261 and the human body 58 intuitive 287 museum translations of 4 problematics of 3–4 production of 8, 11, 214, 239, 272 repression/suppression of 10–11, 27–30 scientific 77 situated 275 subjugated 27–30 and visibility 236 visual 31, 34, 91 Koons, Jeff 218 Korsika, Anej 8 Koumoundouros, Olga 179–80 and Bowers, TRANSFORMer: Platform for Community Education, Activism and Fundraising 179–80, 182, 185, Plate 16 Kratz, Corinne A. 4 and Karp, Szwaja, and Ybarra-Frausto, Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations 20 n.25 Kreamer, Christine Mullen, and Karp and Lavine, Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture 19 n.23, 35 n.5 Kren, Kurt 67–70 6/64 Mama und Papa 72 23/69 Underground Explosion 67–9, 71, 74, Plate 7 Kublai Khan 160 Kuh, Katherine 193 Kunzle, David 155 La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art 151 n.15 Labowitz, Leslie 81, 85–6, 88, 90, 92 n.12

“Feminist Artists: Developing a Media Strategy for the Movement” 85 and Kauffman, King, and Lacy, From Reverence to Rape to Respect 86 and Lacy, In Mourning and in Rage 85–6 and Lacy, Record Companies Drag Their Feet 85–6 and Lacy, Take Back the Night 86 and Lacy Three Weeks in May 85–6 Lacan, Jacques 122 Laclau, Ernesto 120, 125, 127, 131, 133 Lacy, Suzanne 81, 85–6, 88, 90, 92 n.12, 178 and Bowers, Your Donations Do Our Work 178–9, 179 and Kauffman, King, and Labowitz From Reverence to Rape to Respect 86 and Labowitz, In Mourning and in Rage 85–6 and Labowitz, Record Companies Drag Their Feet 85–6, 90 and Labowitz, Take Back the Night 86 and Labowitz, Three Weeks in May 85–6 Lamassu, from Material Speculation: ISIS series (Allahyari) 1, 250–1, cover image, Plate 24 Lapthisophon, Stephen, With Reasonable Accommodation solo exhibition 195 Larsen, Nina 183–4 Latin America 126, 129, 130–1 academic freedom 10 art 46, 126, 128, 141, 147, 149, 153 n.53 artists in the United States 141 conceptual art/conceptualism 126, 128–30, 134 n.29 desarrollismo 129, 135 n.31 reception of Latin American art in Europe and the United States 126 and Washington Consensus 134 n.20 Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century exhibition 126 Latina, Latino, Latinx art/artists 141, 153 n.53, 282 Latinx civil rights movement 18 communities 282 consumers 281 Laton Lives! 178–9 Laton Lives! Reunion Reunión 179 Latorre, Guisela 149 Lavine, Steven D. 4 and Karp and Kreamer, Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture 19 n.23, 35 n.5

INDEX

L.A. Xicano exhibitions 147 Lee, John 57 Lee, Nicola 301 Leopold II, King of Belgium 235 Lepecki, André, on multitudinal fascism 8 LGBTQ 13, 18, 95, 114–5 Lhasa Club 106 liberalism 138, 204. See also neoliberal/ neoliberalism Liberation Theology movement 120, 124 Licona, Sandra 48 n.37 L’Internationale Online 8 Linton, Simi 11 Lippard, Lucy 35 n.5, 82, 86, 91, 124, 176, 186 n.19 “What Is Female Imagery?” essay 89 Livingston, Jane, and Beardsley, Hispanic Art in the United States: Thirty Painters and Sculptors exhibition 14, 138, 141–3, 142, 150, 152 n.28 Longoni, Ana, and Carnevale, Davis, and Wandzik, Inventario 1965–1975: Archivo Graciela Carnevale exhibition 130–2 Longoni, Ana, and Mestman, Del Di Tella a “Tucumán Arde”: Vanguardia artística y política en el ‘68 argentino 126–30, 132 López, Yolanda M. 145, 148–9 Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) 147 Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) 5, 139–40, 143–4, 147–8, 150 Los Angeles County Natural History Museum 100, 227 Los Angeles Goes Live: Performance Art in Southern California, 1970–1983 exhibition 147–8 Los Four 139–140, 150 Los Four: Almaraz, de la Rocha, Lujan, Romero exhibition 14, 138–40, 142, 150, Plate 12 Loyola Law School 156 Lucero, Linda 148 Luján, Gilbert “Magu” Sanchez 139 Luna, James 5 The History of the Luiseño People (La Jolla Reservation 1990) 35 n.16 Lynching in the West: 1850–1935 (GonzalesDay) 32, 34 n.1, 35 n. 18, 35 n.19 lynching, in the United States 12, 32–4. See also Gonzales-Day, Ken of Emmett Till 315 n.6 and the medium of photography 32–4 postcards featuring photographs of 32–3

341

US Postal Service prohibition of mailing of images 33 MacDonald, Phyllis 82 Maciunas, George 160 MacKinnon, Catharine, A. 60, 90 Macron, Emmanuel 16, 236–7, 239–40, 242–4 Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Abuelas 127, 130 Madwomen (Fleck) 97, Plate 10 Maira, Sunaina 10–11 Man in a Polyester Suit (Mapplethorpe) 31 Manifest Destiny 10, 227, 232 “We are all immigrants” slogan 227 Mann, Sally 175 MAP (Make Art with Purpose) 249 Mapping Another L.A.: The Chicano Art Movement exhibition 147 Mapplethorpe, Robert 95, 175 Man in a Polyester Suit 31 The Perfect Moment 14, 110, 113 X and Z Portfolios 2 Margolles, Teresa 41, 43, 45–6, 46 n.1, 46 n.4, 48 n.26. ¿De qué otra cosa podemos hablar? (What Else Could We Talk About?) 12, 37, 38, 39, 39, 41–6, 46 n.1, 46 n.4, 47 n.17, 48 n.26, Plate 3, Plate 4 Martin, Trayvon 298–9, 301 Martínez, César 145 Martínez, Daniel Joseph 14. Contributing author 155–174 Call Me Ishmael: The Fully Enlightened Earth Radiates Disaster Triumphant 161, 163, 163, 164 Museum Tags: Second Movement (Overture) 161, 162, 173, Plate 14 Martínez, Ramiro 41 Masotta, Oscar 122 A Matter of Degree (Poe) 84–6, 90, Plate 8 Al-Mawrid Al-Thaqafi (Culture Resource) 203 McArthur, Park, Ramps 15, 191–7, Plate 17. See also disability, and art McQueen, Jackson 265, 280–1 Meat Joy (Schneemann) 68 media/mass media 8, 13, 27–8, 39, 44–6, 47 n.17, 52, 55, 67, 68, 69, 85, 99, 101–2, 103, 106, 120, 122, 128, 159, 182, 204, 207, 215, 217, 242, 265 media culture 82, 85 Medicis, European Renaissance collectors 100, 238 Medina, Cuauhtemoc 12, 37, 39–41, 43–6, 46 n.1, 47 n.17 Mendieta, Ana 81, 92 n.21

342

INDEX

Rupestrian Sculptures 88 Silueta Series 88 Untitled (Rape Scene) 88 Menschen Museum (Museum of Humans), Berlin 53, 55 Mesa-Bains, Amalia 5 Mesopotamia 1 Mestman, Mariano, and Longoni, Del Di Tella a “Tucumán Arde”: Vanguardia artística y política en el ‘68 argentino 126–30, 132 #MeToo movement 183–5, 312 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 110, 114 Mexican Pavilion, 2009 Venice Biennale 12–13, 37–46 Mexico 143 drug policies 40, 41–2, 47 n.22 drug wars/drug trafficking/narco-violence 37–8, 41–2, 46, 48 n.27 Mexican artists 143–4 Mexicans/Mexican Americans 32 national identity 42, 45–6 official culture 42–3 Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) 41, 45 Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) 41, 45 and the United States 41–2, 47 n.21 tourism 48 n.27 Mex/LA: Mexican Modernisms in Los Angeles exhibition 147 Mey, Kerstin 13. Contributing author 51–63 Meyer, Kimberli 17, 300–2 CSULB dismissal of 293–7 Michelson, Annette 70 Middle East 10, 11, 184, 199–207, 214, 247–54, 307 Miles, Christopher. Contributing author 1–23 Mill, Charles W. 151 Miller, Tim 2, 95, 288–9 n.1, 289 n.9 Mintcheva, Svetlana 17. Contributing author 305–16 and Atkins, Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression 4, 305 letter to Conoley 266, 267–70 Minujín, Marta 133 n.3 Mission Viejo High School 156, 159 Mississippi Textbook Purchasing Board, ban of Mississippi: Conflict and Change 28 Model Contemporary Art Center 192, 194 modern art 193 modernism/modernist art 29, 58, 124, 138, 141, 146, 149, 150, 180

Montoya, Malaquias 145, 148 Moran, Jennifer 295–7 Morgan, Robin 90 Morsy, Muhammad 15, 206–7, 207 n.2 Mosquera, Gerardo, Crisisss: Latin America, Art and Confrontation 1919–2010 exhibition 41 Mother of God (Rauschenberg) 113–4 Mouffe, Chantal 125, 131, 133, 134 n.24, 311 Mubarak, Husni 15, 200, 204–7 Muhheakantuck—Everything Has a Name (Buckingham) 29 Mühl, Otto 75 Mulcahy, Cynthia 298 multiculturalism 7, 27, 138–43, 145, 148–50 multitude 6 Mulvey, Laura 176 Muñoz, Cecilia Alvarez 149 Munroe, Alexandra 15–6. Contributing author 209–19 Mural Remix: Sandra de la Loza exhibition 147, 152 n.27 ¡Murales Rebeldes! L.A. Chicana/o Murals Under Siege exhibition 149, Plate 13 Musée du Quai Branly 240 Museo del Barrio 312, 315 n.12 Museum of Asian Art, Berlin 241 Museum of Black Civilizations (Musée des Civilizations Noir/MCN) 16, 236, 241–2 Museum of Censored Art (Blasenstein and Iacovone) 111, 112 Museum of Children’s Art, Oakland exhibit of Palestinian children’s art 173 Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) 147–8 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 128, 141 Museum of Latin American Art (MoLAA) 147 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York 5, 112 Museum of Modern Egyptian Art 201 museum practices 4 artists’ critiques of 5 and discrimination 161 and diversity 315 n.2 interrogative 4 covert vs. overt censorship 14, 109–15 (see also censorship/censoring) postmodern museology 180 as social work 4 “White Cube” 193 Museum Tags: Second Movement (Overture) (Martínez) 161, 162, 173, Plate 14 MuseumNext survey 310

INDEX

museums. See specific museums #museumsarenotneutral 298 My Lai Massacre 166–7 myth(s)/mythology of assimilation 152 n.22 of consent 89 and photography 34 of rape 85 of Tucumán Arde 131–2 re-appropriation of 251 of settler colonialism and exceptional democracy 10 Nafizi, Azar 277 NARAL organization 176 Narula, Monica 6 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 15, 200 National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) 266, 305, 307–8 letter to Conoley 266, 267–70 National Conference on Race and Ethnicity 271 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), United States 2, 13, 19 n.6, 95–6, 99, 288–9 n.1, 289 n.9 decency clause 18–9 n.3, 95–6, 102 NEA 4 controversy 18–19 n.3, 95–6, 99– 102, 104, 175, 277, 288–9 n.1, 289 n.9 National Gallery of Art 110, 115 n.1, 312 National Portrait Gallery 14, 95, 110–3 National Register of Historic Places 224–5 National Socialist Party 67 national/state identity 13, 42, 45–6, 69–70, 73–4, 78–9, 125–6, 143, 200, 216 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), 1990 4, 225, 231 Native American Indian Commission, Los Angeles 233 n.1 Native Americans 5, 18, 32, 160, 224, 223–33 See also American Indians Nazi(s) 67, 76–7, 105, 160, 166, 241 nedjnedj ken (Maatian philosophy) 272 Negarestani, Reza 250 Negri, Antonio 6, 180 neocolonialism 39 neoliberal/neoliberalism 6–8, 11, 14, 126, 132, 137–8, 140–7, 150, 313. See also liberalism Newsom, Gavin 230, 232, 233 n.1 apology on genocide of California Indians 230 N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk/N*W*C*/NWC (Agustín, McQueen, and Basco) 17, 265–88, 289 n.13, 290 n.15, Plate 27 Nicaragua

343

Iran-Contra Affair 176 mural by Róger Pérez de la Rocha and others 156–7, 157 Sandinista(s) 130, 155–9, 172 US intervention/occupation 155, 158–9, 158, 172, 176 9/11 terrorist attack 10, 155 1965–1975: Reconsidering the Object of Art exhibition 126 No on 69 (Fleck) 103 Nochlin, Linda 175–6 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) 203 Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Training—Tree Sitting Forest Defense (Bowers) 178 Noriega, Chon A. 145–6, 147 La Nueva Imagen group 125–6 Obama, Barack 146–7 Oberhausen Manifesto (1962) 70, 79 n.6 objectification 12, 31 obscene/obscenity 1–2, 57, 60, 68–9, 72, 78–9, 93 n.32, 100 Occupy Movement 176 O’Dell, Kathy 87 O’Doherty, Brian 193 Ogbechie, Sylvester 16. Contributing author 235–46 Olea, Héctor, and Ramírez, Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America exhibition 128–30 O’Neil, Dilara 187 n.39 Onganía, Juan Carlos 119–20, 124 Ongaro, Raimundo 120, 124 Open Casket (Schutz) 315 n.6 Open Letter to the Audience (Allahyari) 249 Open Secrets Parts 1 & 2 (Bowers) 183–5 “Operativo Tucumán” 120 Opoku, Kwame 245 n.13 oppression 3, 8, 18, 184, 251, 257–263, 282–4, 286, 296 Orange County Museum of Art 147–8 Our Compliance (Powell) 257–61, 258, 262–3, 264, Plate 25 Ovonramwen, Oba (King), Benin Kingdom 237–8 Owens, Craig 176, 186 n.19 Pacific Standard Time (PST): LA/LA, Getty Foundation 14, 139, 147, 149–50, 153 n.53, 153 n. 55, 153 n.56 Pacific Standard Time (PST): Los Angeles Art, 1945–1980, Getty Foundation 14, 139, 147, 149–50 Pahwa, Sonali 15. Contributing author 199–207

344

INDEX

PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) 183 Paksa, Margarita 133 n.4 Palace of Fine Arts Museum, Mexico 41 Palestine 173, 307–8, 311 Panek, Peter 86–7 Pantheon Press 28 Papalia, Carmen 193–4, 196–7. See also disability, and art Alice Wexler on 195 For Erik Ferguson 194 Guiding String 15, 192–7, Plate 18 “Open Access Manifesto” 196 Paquette, Catha. Contributing author 1–23 Parker-Jeannette, Cyrus 270, 283, 290 n.17, 295, 297. Contributing author 276–7 Parker, Theodore 244 Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) 41, 45 Pastor Mellado, Justo 42, 45 Pateman, Carole, “Women and Consent” 89 Patronato de Arte Contemporáneo (PAC) 40, 43 Pennington, Orville 158, 174 n.3, 174 n.4 Performance Lessons (Bowers) 186 n.10 people of color 139, 277, 282–3, 286, 295. See also race discourses between 286 lynching of 3 (see also lynching, the United States) and museums 301, 314 structural/institutional silencing of 287 systemic oppression of 282–3 People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond 284 Pérez de la Rocha, Roger, and others, mural 156–9, 157 The Perfect Moment (Mapplethorpe) 14, 110, 113 Performance Lessons (Bowers) 186 n.10 Peronism 120, 122, 129, 133 n.6 Petlin, Irving, and Hendricks and Dougherty, Q. And Babies? A. And Babies 166, Plate 15 Phantom Sightings: Chicano Art after the Movement exhibition 14, 138–9, 144, 144–6, 150 Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts 312 King Phillip II 51 Picasso, Pablo, Women of Algiers 100–1 Pinkowski, Emily 82 Piper, Adrian, Calling Cards 260 Piss Christ (Serrano) 2, 20 n.41, 100 Plambeck, Lynne 177 Planned Parenthood organization 176

Plastinarium, Guben, Germany 53, 61 n.9 La Plaza de Cultura y Arte, Los Angeles 149 Poe, Joy 82 Holy Family Fan/Perversion Fan 83, 83 and issue of consent 88–9 A Matter of Degree 84–6, 90, Plate 8 Rape Performance 13, 81, 84, 86–91, 87 Ring True Taboo exhibition 81, 84, 86 police 13, 69, 72–3, 75–8, 177, 301. See also culture police violence against 41 police brutality/violence 18, 99, 120, 122, 125, 132, 167, 283 against Blacks 17, 232, 260, 262, 265, 293, 295–6, 297–8, 300–1 police intimidation 259 political activism. See activism political art 14, 127, 130–1, 142, 150, 155, 175–8, 180–1, 183 Pollock, Griselda 89, 184, 186 n.19 porn revolution 74 pornography 60, 68 anti-porn activism 90, 93 n.36 anti-pornography legislation 60, 90 of death 13, 51–2, 61 n.1 hardcore 69, 72, 90 heteronormative 90 legalization of (1972) 72, 74 soft-core 84 wars 82 Porter, Liliana 133 n.3 Portillo, José López 47 n.17 Portrait of Jason (Clarke) 75 post-Fordist theory 180 post-identity art 138–9, 146 postmodernism/postmodern art 5, 149 Post, Robert C. 3 Post Mortem series (Fox) 58–9, Plate 6 Powell, Ashley 16–17. Contributing author 257–64 letter to The Spectrum 257–61 Our Compliance 257–61, 258, 262–3, 264, Plate 25 Walker’s letter to 257, 261–2 primitive/primitivism 29 privilege white 16, 258–61, 262–3 dominant group 274, 289 n.8 El Proceso de Reorganización Nacional 125 Progressive Art Production Agency 13 progressives/progressivism 2, 74, 76, 112, 114, 204, 287

INDEX

protest/protestors 3, 15, 38, 48 n.36, 74, 115, 200, 204, 206, 227, 265, 287, 313, 315 n.4, 315 n.6 and activism 95, 155, 176–9, 182, 184–5, 210, 313 Black Lives Matter 232 against Body Worlds exhibits 54–5 campus protests 9, 307–8 DisruptJ20 184 and museums 5, 109, 112, 308, 310, 312–3, 315 n.4, 315 n.6 NAACP 266, 276, 280 1968 “Underground Explosion” 76–8, 77 against 1969 Hamburger Filmschau 70–1, 71 against 1970 Underground Film Festival 73 protest art 155–6, 159–61, 166, 169, 184, 199, 229 against Second Gulf War 171 and social media 182, 185, 307 against United States intervention in Central America 155 Valencia 177 value of 17, 308 and “We are all immigrants” slogan 227 public art 86, 145, 149, 223, 229, 282 public education 9 public good 2, 8 Puvungna 224–6 Chingichngish spiritual philosophy 224 culture and self-representation 226–7 2016 NAGPRA reburial of ancestors 225, 231 (poster) United Descendants of Puvungna Council (UDPC) 226, 233 n.1 Q. And Babies? A. And Babies (Petlin, Hendricks, and Dougherty) 166, Plate 15 queer/queer art 95–96, 110–5, 147 anti-queerness 263 attacks on queer artists 96, 110–1, 146 queer art history 114–5 queer studies 14, 113–4 Queer Nation group 176 Quigley, John 177–8 race 2, 3, 12, 16, 69, 110, 138, 141, 257–64, 265–91, 293–303, 313. See also people of color and art 2, 3, 11, 16–7, 30–2, 276, 298, 315 n.6 histories of 6, 30–2, 35 n.16 and museums 294–5, 301, 313 and neoliberalism 138, 141 pedagogies of 10–1

345

and police brutality/intimidation/violence 17, 232, 259–60, 262, 265, 283, 293, 295–6, 297–8, 300–1 stereotypes/slurs 5, 17, 31, 141, 265–6, 272, 274–5, 276–7, 280, 282, 288 race relations 274, 295 The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII) 308, 315 n.6 racism/racial hostility/racist attitudes and constructs 2, 244, 257–64, 265–91, 293–303 anti-racism 5, 263, 297 and art 2, 5, 30–2, 34, 160, 257–64, 265–91, 293–303, 309 and college campuses 257–64, 265–88, 289 n.8, 289 n.13, 290 n.14, 290 n.15, 290 n.17, 293–302 institutional/ structural/systemic 5, 258–260, 287, 296, 300 and multiculturalism 142 and museums 241 Powell’s letter to The Spectrum on 257–61 reverse racism 140, 301 and trauma 16, 34, 35 n.16, 258–60, 285, 315 n.6 Radical Women in Latin American Art, 1960– 1985 exhibition 149 Raicovich, Laura 17. Contributing author 305–16 Ramírez, Mari Carmen 128–30 and Global Conceptualism exhibition 128 and Héctor Olea, Inverted Utopias: AvantGarde Art in Latin America exhibition 128–30 Ramps (McArthur) 15, 191–7, Plate 17. See also disability, art and Rancière, Jacques 34–5 n.1 Rankine, Claudia 308, 315 n.6 Ransom, Brittany 16. Contributing author 247–54 rape. See sexual violence Rape Performance (Poe) 13, 81–2, 84, 86–91, 87 Raqs Media Collective 6–7, 20 n.34 Rathje, Pat 91 Rauschenberg, Robert, Mother of God 113–4 Raven, Arlene 82 Raybon, Melissa 297, 301 What’s goin’ on?: HOW I FEEL 301 Raymond, Yasmil 315 n.7 Reagan, Ronald/Reaganomics 90, 95, 101, 159, 163, 176, 180 realism 144–5, 175 Record Companies Drag Their Feet (Labowitz and Lacy) 85–6, 90

346

INDEX

Recovered Factory Movement 127 Red Conceptualismos del Sur 131 Renzi, Juan Pablo, Tucumán Arde publicity sticker 122 repatriation 4, 12, 16, 225 of African cultural patrimony 235–46 repression/repressive forces/repressed 10, 15, 28, 31, 44, 67–8, 75–6, 114, 124–5, 128–9, 139, 249 respectability 77, 286, 290 n.17 restitution 12, 16, 127, 138–9, 146, 150 for African cultural patrimony 235–46 The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Towards a New Relational Ethics (SarrSavoy report) 236–40, 242–4 reverse racism 140, 301 Ricoeur, Paul 28 Rivas, Pilar Tompkins 147 The Road to Aztlan: Art of the Mythic Homeland exhibition 14, 138, 143, 143, 145–6, 150 Roberge, Michele 265–6, 268, 271, 272, 276–7, 281, 283, 288 n.1. Contributing author 277–8 Robertson, Rachel 11 Rockefeller Foundation 133 n.3 Rolling Stone magazine 157, 159 Romero, Frank 139 Romero, Rachel 148 Romo, Terezita 147 Rosendahl, Bill 159–60 Rosler, Martha 186 n.19 Rota Ivancich Palace 37, 40 Rourke, Daniel 16 and Allahyari 249–50 and Allahyari, The 3D Additivist Cookbook 249–50 and Allahyari, The 3D Additivist Manifesto 249 Royal Niger Company 238 Roznovan, Elena. Contributing author 279–80 Rupestrian Sculptures (Mendieta) 88 Russell, Marta 196 Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract 195 Saatchi, Charles 175 Sadat, Anwar 200 safe space 279–80 Sain, Robert 179–80 Salcedo, Doris 38–9 Salinas de Gortari, Carlos 48 n.36 Salon of 1850, Paris 175

San Francisco State University College of Ethnic Studies 230, 232 Sandback, Fred 194 Sandinistas. See Nicaragua Sandino, Augusto Cesar 158 Santamarina, Guillermo 41, 48 n.37 Sarr, Felwine, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Towards a New Relational Ethics (Sarr-Savoy report) 236–40, 242–4 Savoy, Bénédicte, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Towards a New Relational Ethics (Sarr-Savoy report) 236–40, 242–4 Sawiris, Naguib 205 Schapiro, Miriam, “Female Imagery” essay 90 Schmelz, Itala 41 Schneemann, Carolee 89 Meat Joy 68 School of Art Concerned Students of Color and Allies, CSULB 17, 293, 301. Contributing author 294–7 School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) 82 Schroeder, Michael J., “Photo USNA1-4.11. Lt. Orville Pennington with head of Silvino Herrera, August 1930” 174 n.3, 174 n.6 Schulman, Sarah, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination 107 n.1 Schutz, Dana 308 Open Casket 315 n.6 Scoates, Christopher 288 n.1 Scott, Joan Wallach 8, 9 on academic freedom 10, 20 n.46 Searching for California Hang Trees (GonzalesDay) 32 Sears, Richard 227 Segovia, Cintia Alejandra. Contributing author 279–80 Self Help Graphics & Art 149 Seligman, Rachel 186 n.14 Senghor, Leopold Sedar 236 Sengupta, Shuddhabrata 6 Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection exhibition 175 Serrano, Andres 95, 175 Piss Christ 2, 20 n.41, 100 Servitje, Aimee 43 settler colonialism 10, 35 n.16, 227 sex and AIDS crisis 2, 5, 13, 95–6, 98–9, 101, 103–5, 107 n.1 health and safety 180

INDEX

and Internet 56 obscenity 68–9, 93 n.32, 100 organs 76, 90 and pornography 13, 60, 68–9, 72, 74, 82–4, 90, 93 n.32, 93 n.35, 93 n.36 representations of 56, 69, 72, 74, 78 and spectacle 71, 82 sexism/sexist discourse 2, 5, 276 heterosexist narratives 90 Sexton, Jared 290 n.19 sexual differences 10, 89, 110, 114 sexual politics 77, 98, 101, 114 sexual repression(s) 75, 114 sexual revolt 67 sexual revolution 68, 99, 101 sexual violence 81–2, 84–5, 91 appropriation of online/social media images of 182–5 and feminism 13, 81–2, 85–8 and issues of consent 13, 15, 88–9, 184–5 rape culture 85, 89, 90–1 representations of 13, 55–6, 82, 86–8, 91, 183–5 and trauma 13, 82, 85, 88, 184 sexuality 3, 6, 10–3, 68–9, 72, 85, 110, 114–15 ambiguous 104 and censorship 2, 4, 78, 83–4, 100–6, 204, 249 and death 55–6, 59, 95–6, 98, 103–5 and gender 5, 85 heterosexual/heteronormative 85, 90–1, 98, 114, 138, 150 histories of 6 homosexual/homosexuality 69, 99, 106, 110, 113–14, 115 n.2, 127 Latina stereotype 282 minorities (sexual/queer) 9, 114 and neoliberalism 138 pedagogies of 10–1, 88 queer 114–5 representations of 59, 72, 74, 78, 100 Shaked, Nizan 12, 14, 146. Contributing author 27–36, 155–174 Shapiro, Dennis 86 Sharpe, Christina, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being 289 n.12 She Who Sees the Unknown series (Allahyari) 250–1, 253, 254 Sherman, Cindy 180 Shiell, Timothy C. 9 Shoot (Burden) 88 Shu‘ayr, Muhammad 204 Siebers, Tobin 193

347

Siguenza, Herbert 148 SILENCE=DEATH Project 5 silence/silencing 3–4, 8–9, 12, 38–40, 44, 46 Silueta Series (Mendieta) 88 Silverman, Raymond A. 4 Simone, Nina 248 Simpson, Gail 88 Simpson, Lorna 298 al-Sisi, Abd al-Fattah 206 6/64 Mama und Papa (Kren) 72 Skidmore College Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery 180 Slanguage Studios 297 Slope: Intercept (Hendren) 195 Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery 110, 112, 115 n.3 Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) 152 n.28, 155 social change 14, 129, 155, 182, 184–5, 259, 263, 283, 288, 298, 310, 313 Social Democrats (SPD) 74, 76 social media 182–5, 206, 281, 306–7 social order 9, 73 social work 4 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, “Suitable for Framing” 180 South Ivan Human Heads: Bearded River God (Allahyari) 252 Southern California 11, 14, 16, 224 American Indian community in 223–33 exhibition of Chican@ art in 137–151 cultural events 224 feminist art programs in 82, 90 Southern Poverty Law Center 111 Soviet Union 77 Speak Theatre Arts 17, 265–6, 268, 271 See also N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk/N*W*C*/NWC (Agustín, McQueen, and Basco) spectacle 12, 32–4, 54, 57, 71, 82, 170, 180, 183 speech anti-Semitic 111 civil/uncivil 9–10, 273–4, 286–7, 290 n.17, 295 and epistemic injustice 9 free. See freedom of speech/expression inclusive 10 offensive 9 regulation of 3 sponsorship 5, 42–3, 305 Spray Paint LACMA (Asco) 5 Springer, José Manuel 40, 43, 46 n.3, 48 n.33 Staatliche Museen zu Berlin 240

348

INDEX

Stalin, Joseph 160 State Historic Preservation Officer, California 233 n.1 State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970 exhibition 147–8 stereotype(s) 5, 17, 31–2, 126, 141, 176, 265–6, 272, 276, 282, 288 Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute 7 Still Life, Marseille (Witkin) 60 Stone, Craig 16. Contributing author 223–34 Blind to History 229, 229 cultural arts questions for students 225 Strange Rituals series (History Channel), “Last Rites” episode 57 Streb, Matthew J. 10 Strother, Zoë 235 structuralism 125, 131, 133 Suarez Barajas, Griselda. Contributing author 280–4 subjugated knowledge 27–30 A Subtlety (Walker) 17, 260, 309, 315 n.8, Plate 26 Sulkowicz, Emma, Ceci N’est Pas un Viol 91 suppression/suppressive forces 1–3, 5, 8–9, 11–6, 18, 27–8, 33, 42–5, 82, 98, 103, 120, 132, 137, 193–6, 206, 209, 214, 247, 251, 285, 305–8 Swaggart, Jimmy 96 #sweetjane (Bowers) 181–2, 185 Szwaja, Lynne, and Karp, Kratz, and YbarraFrausto, Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations 20 n.25 Szymanek, Angelique 13. Contributing author 81–94 Take Back the Night (Labowitz and Lacy) 86 Taller Popular de Serigrafía collective 128 Tchelitchew, Pavel 112 Teixeira, Ruy, “The Coming End of the (US) Culture Wars” 3 13 Most Wanted Men (Warhol) 100 13th (DuVernay) 290 n.16 Three Weeks in May (Labowitz and Lacy) 85–6 The 3D Additivist Cookbook (Allahyari and Rourke) 249–50 The 3D Additivist Manifesto (Allahyari and Rourke) 249 3D printing technology 1, 16, 247, 249–51 Tongva/Gabrielino peoples 224–6, 229–30 totalitarianism 214 TRANSFORMer: Platform for Community Education, Activism and Fundraising

(Bowers and Koumoundouros) 179–80, 182, 185, Plate 16 transgender people/rights 151, 177, 283 Trump, Donald 184, 248 Tucumán Arde (Tucumán Is Burning) (Grupo de Arte de Vanguardia) 14, 119–33, 133 n.4, 135 n.39, 121, 122, 123 23/69 Underground Explosion (Kren) 67–9, 71, 74, Plate 7 Twombly, Cy 113 UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center 147 UCLA Fowler Museum 147 Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974–1981 exhibition 147–8 “Underground Explosion” (K. Hein, EXPORT, and Weibel) 67–9, 71–6, 77, 78–9, Plate 7 Underground Film Festival 73 Undoing Racism workshop 284 United Descendants of Puvungna Council (UDPC) “Declaration of the Rights of United Descendants of Puvungna Council” 226, 233 n.1 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People 226, 233 n.2 The United States 3, 18 n.2, 160–1, 166–7, 170, 176, 217, 248, 265, 298, 306, 310 academic freedom 10–1 AIDS crisis 2, 5, 13, 95–6, 98–9, 101, 103–5, 107 n.1, 176–7 Americans with Disabilities Act 192, 195–6 and Argentina 126 The Capitol 155 censorship controversies 2, 14–15, 16, 109–13, 175, 249 Civil War 30–1 Comprehensive Employment and Training Act 223 culture wars 3, 60 and drug trafficking 12, 39, 41–2, 45, 47 n.19, 47 n.21 First Amendment 18–9 n.3, 96, 106, 266, 272, 275, 287, 307 genocide 16, 160, 229–30, 250 genocide, cultural 16, 230 imperialism 10 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act 223 and Mexico 41–2, 47 n.21 and My Lai Massacre 166–7 Native American Graves Protection and

INDEX

Repatriation Act 4, 225, 231 and Nicaragua/Contras/Sandinistas 155, 158–9, 164, 172 patriotism 160, 170 Pavilion at 2009 Venice Biennale 37, 40, 42, 44 Supreme Court 13, 19–20 n.3, 96, 102, 266 and West Germany (FRG) 68, 74, 77–8 universal museums 16, 235, 237, 240. See also encyclopedic museums Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) 40, 43 University of California, Davis Native American Studies Department (NAS) 224 University of California, Irvine (UCI) 302 University of California, Los Angeles Wight Art Gallery 152 n.22 University of California, Riverside Sweeney Art Gallery 178–9 Untitled (Rape Scene) (Mendieta) 88 Vaca, Andrew. Contributing author 284–5 Valdez, Luis 281 Valdez, Patssi 145, 149 Vallejo, Linda 149 Vallen, Mark 148 Vance, Carol 90 vandals/vandalism 5, 161, 238, 262 van de Loo, Otto 76 Velez, Chris 301 Velvet Underground, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable 67 Venice Biennale, 2009 12–3, 37, 40–1, 43–6 Vergne, Philippe 315 n.7 Video Instructions: Tips on Censorship (Allahyari) 248–9 Vieja Gloria (Bowers) 177–9, 178 Vietnam War 72, 160, 166–7, 169–70 violence 43, 88, 182, 184 discursive 9, 12 epistemic 130 gendered 85, 185 and masochistic performance 87 narco-violence 12, 37–41, 44, 47 n.22 and photography 12, 32–4, 84–86 police. See police brutality/violence racial. See race sexual. See sexual violence spectacle(s) of 12, 32–4, 82, 170 Virno, Paolo 6, 180–1 von Hagens, Gunther 13, 53–8, 60–1

349

anatomy art 13, 53–8, 60–1 Body Worlds exhibitions 13, 53–58, Plate 5 California Science Center ethical review of Body Worlds 54–6 Institute for Plastination (IFP), Heidelberg, Germany 53 issues of consent 54–6 television programs/series 57 voyeurism 32, 58, 88, 91 Waldron, Jeremy 9 Walker Art Center 309, 315 n.7 Walker, Hamza 150 Walker, Kara 17, 257, 263, 309. Contributing author 257–64 letter to Powell 257, 261–2 A Subtlety 17, 260, 309, 315 n.8, Plate 26 Walking Mural (Asco) 148 Walsh, Rodolfo 120, 124 Walton Family Foundation 315 n.2 Wampole, Barbara 177 Wandzik, Ana, and Carnevale, Davis, and Longoni, Inventario 1965–1975: Archivo Graciela Carnevale exhibition 130–2 Ward, David 110 Ward, Frazer 88 Warhol, Andy 67 13 Most Wanted Men 100 WARM Gallery in Minnesota 82 Washington Consensus 127, 134 n.20 Weber, Shirley 232 Weems, Carrie Mae 27 Family Pictures and Stories series 30 From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried series 12, 30–2, 34, Plate 1 and Hidden Witness: African Americans in Early Photography exhibition 30–1 Kitchen Table series 30 Restless after the Longest Winter You Marched & Marched & Marched Plate 1 and revisionist historiography 30–2, 34 Weibel, Peter 67, 69 and K. Hein and EXPORT, “Underground Explosion” 67–9, 71–6, 77, 78–9, Plate 7 Weiss, Rachel 128 Wells, Carol A. 14. Contributing author 155–174. See also Center for the Study of Political Graphics Wenger, Jane 83–4 West Bank 308 Western museums 16, 235–44 West Germany (FRG) 67–79

350

INDEX

and art. See “Underground Explosion” democratic identity 73–4, 78 and documenta 74 and porn panic 67–70, 76 and United States 68, 74, 77–8 Wexler, Alice 195 Wharton, Margaret 82 What Else Could We Talk About? See ¿De qué otra cosa podemos hablar? white supremacy 230, 262–3 White, Timothy P. 230, 232 Whitney Museum of American Art (WMAA) 161, 162, 180, 308–9, 313, 315 n.6 Whitney Biennial, 1993 146, 161 Whitney Biennial, 2004 177 Whitney Biennial, 2017 308–9, 310, 315 n.6 Whitney Biennial, 2019 310, 315 n.10 Whittington, Keith E. 8–9 Wiest, Rolf 75 Wilderson III, Frank B. 289 n.12 Williams College Museum of Art 147 Williams, Jaye Austin. Contributing author 285–7 Wilson, Darren 301 Wilson, Fred 5–6, 29 Wilson, Jackie Napoleon 30 Wilson, William 139–41, 150 Winegar, Jessica 15. Contributing author 199–207 Witkin, Joel-Peter 13, 53, 59–61 Autoerotic Death 59 Corpus medius 59 Still Life, Marseille 60 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 38 Wojnarowicz, David 95, 110–2 A Fire in My Belly 14, 110–2, Plate 11 Woman’s Building in Los Angeles 82

Women Against Pornography (WAP) 90, 93 n.36 Women Against Violence Against Women organization 85, 90 Women of Algiers (Picasso) 100–1 Women’s Action Committee 176 woods, lauren 17, 293–8, 301 American Monument 25/2018 17, 293–4, 294, 296–302, 299, 300, Plate 28 The Dallas Historical Parks Project 298, 301 Drinking Fountain #1 298 World War II 129, 217 X and Z Portfolios (Mapplethorpe) 2 XSCREEN Kölner Studio für unabhängigen Film 13, 70–6, 79 alternative programming 75 parallel programming 75 protest against 76–7 public/private space 74 theater space 72, 74, 78 Yakub (Nation of Islam) 273 Yamada, Teri Shaffer. Contributing author 288 Yazbeck, Alessandro Balteo 6 Ybarra-Frausto, Tomas, and Karp, Kratz, Szwaja, Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations 20 n.25 Youngblood, Gene 70 Your Donations Do Our Work (Bowers and Lacy) 178–9, 179 YouTube 8, 102, 106, 171, 285–7 Zamudio-Taylor, Victor 143–4 Zimmerman, George 301

Plate 1  Carrie Mae Weems, Restless after the Longest Winter You Marched & Marched & Marched from the series From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, 1995–6, chromogenic print and etched text on glass. © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Plate 2  Ken Gonzales-Day, Disguised Bandit, Erased Lynching Series #1, 2006, chromogenic print on archival mat board. Courtesy of artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.

Plate 3  Teresa Margolles, ¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? Bordado (What Else Could We Talk About? Embroidery), 2009, detail of collaborative embroidery work in Venice—use of gold thread to embroider the narcomensaje “hasta que caigan todos tus hijos” (“until all your children fall”) on fabric collected from execution sites on Mexico’s northern border. Courtesy of artist, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, and James Cohan, New York.

Plate 4 Teresa Margolles, ¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? Embajada (What Else Could We Talk About? Embassy), 2009, framed color print, intervention at the United States pavilion at the Giardini of Venice with fabrics with blood of individuals executed on the north border of Mexico, April 2009. Courtesy of artist, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, and James Cohan, New York.

Plate 5  Plastinated body of a pregnant woman viewed by a museum visitor at the Body Worlds exhibition by Gunther von Hagen at the Museo Miraflores in Guatemala City, July 6, 2012. REUTERS/ Jorge Dan Lopez.

Plate 6  Sue Fox, Mother, 1997, from the series Post Mortem, black-and-white silver gelatin print. Courtesy of artist.

Plate 7 Still from Kurt Kren, 23/69 Underground Explosion, 1969. 16mm, color, sound, 5:30. Courtesy of sixpackfilm.

Plate 8  Joy Poe, A Matter of Degree, 1979, mixed-media installation. Courtesy of Artemisia Gallery Records, Ryerson and Burnham Archives, Art Institute of Chicago.

Plate 9  John Fleck in Blessed Are All the Little Fishes, 1989. Courtesy of John Fleck.

Plate 10  Kevin Duffy, video still from John Fleck Is Who You Want Him to Be, 2019, showing John Fleck in Madwomen performance. Courtesy of Kevin Duffy and John Fleck.

Plate 11  David Wojnarowicz, A Fire in My Belly, 1986–7, film still. Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz, P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York, and Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University.

Plate 12  Exhibition catalog, Los Four: Almaraz/de la Rocha/Lujan/Romero, 1973, University Art Gallery, University of California, Irvine. Photo by Jeffrey Ryan. Courtesy of the University of California, Irvine, and Frank Romero.

Plate 13  Exhibition catalog, ¡Murales Rebeldes! L.A. Chicana/o Murals Under Siege, 2017, Angel City Press. Photo by Jeffrey Ryan. Courtesy of LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes.

Plate 14 Daniel Joseph Martínez, Museum Tags: Second Movement (Overture) or Overture con claque – Overture with Hired Audience Members, 1993, paint-and-enamel-on-metal tags, 1993 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Courtesy of artist.

Plate 15  Irving Petlin, Jon Hendricks, and Frazer Dougherty. Q. And Babies? A. And Babies. Offset lithography on paper, 1970, poster published by Artists’ Poster Committee of Art Workers Coalition, New York. Photograph by Ronald L. Haeberle. Courtesy of Jon Hendricks.

Plate 16 Andrea Bowers and Olga Koumoundouros, TRANSFORMer: Platform for Community Education, Activism and Fundraising, 2013, Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. Photograph by Arthur Evans. Courtesy of the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College.

Plate 17  Park McArthur, Ramps, 2014, sculptural installation consisting of aluminum, plywood, wood stain, duct tape, wooden planks, hardware, nonskid tread, shim, brass hinge, laminated chipboard,  wooden stick, steel flashing, crating wood, cabinet door, paint, electric tape, fluorescent spray paint, and adhesive vinyl. Courtesy of artist and ESSEX STREET, New York.

Plate 18  Carmen Papalia, Guiding String, 2015, sculptural installation, red cord. Photo by Kristin Rochelle Lantz. Courtesy of artist and Model Contemporary Art Center, Sligo, Ireland.

Plate 19  Ai Weiwei, Human Flow © 2017 Human Flow, UG. An Amazon Studios release. Film still featuring boat from Libya crossing the Mediterranean with refugees from Eritrea, Somalia, and other locations. Courtesy of Amazon Studios and Participant.

Plate 20  Ai Weiwei, China Log, 2005, ironwood. Courtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York, gift of Lybess Sweezy and Ken Miller, 2012.

Plate 21  Tribal flags of California State University Long Beach (CSULB) Native Alumni, 49th Annual CSULB Pow Wow at Puvungna, 2019. Courtesy of Art Neri.

Plate 22  Genocide Flags, 2015, California State University Long Beach American Indian Student Council installation, Puvungna. Courtesy of Craig Stone.

Plate 23  Royal statues of the Kingdom of Dahomey. L to R: half-man and half-lion of King Glele, attributed to Sossa Dede, Benin, Abomey (1858–89); half-man and half-bird of King Ghezo, attributed to Donvide or Sossa Dede, atelier Akati, Benin, Abomey (19th century); and half-man and half shark of King Behanzin, attributed to Sossa Dede or the Houeglo family, Benin, Abomey (1890–2). Displayed at Quai Branly Museum, Paris, November 23, 2018. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer.

Plate 24  Morehshin Allahyari, Lamassu, 2015, from the Material Speculation: ISIS series, 3D-printed resin with embedded portable data-storage device. Photo by Charlie Nordstrom. Courtesy of artist and Sapar Contemporary, New York.

Plate 25 Ashley Powell, Our Compliance, 2015, urban installation. “WHITE ONLY” elevator. Courtesy of artist.

Plate 26  Kara Walker, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, 2014, polystyrene foam and sugar, approx. 35.5 x 26 x 75.5 ft. Artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

Plate 27  Promotional poster in university bookstore for N*W*C* performance on September 24, 2015, at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center, California State University Long Beach. Courtesy of the Carpenter Performing Arts Center.

Plate 28  lauren woods, American Monument 25/2018, 2018, detail of Archive I room with view into Autopsia room, University Art Museum, California State University Long Beach. Courtesy of artist.