It’s been more than 100 days since most of America learned about a small town outside of St. Louis, MO called Ferguson, and many more since a cell phone video went viral of a man dying from having his throat and chest crushed while being restrained by police on Staten Island. While Michael Brown and Eric Garner’s names have received the most attention in the popular press, there were many more Black people killed by law enforcement officials this year, a phenomenon that is not new or that unusual. It wasn’t just that “the block was hot” this summer, but it seemed like the entire nation suddenly felt the heat. Each time another racial injustice was revealed this year, it became more difficult to claim with sincerity that we are living in a post-racial America, or that race doesn’t have as much impact in daily life as it once did.

I know in the art world, it can feel like we aren’t really supposed to talk about this race stuff, but in 2014, it’s been really difficult to avoid the topic. There was the YAMS Collective controversy during the Whitney Biennial, discussions of how to critique the new Latin American wunderkind without bringing up Basquiat, a questionable exhibition in London, and an art dealer defending the exploitative work of an artist by saying there are worse things to be upset over… like global warming. Was it easier to report on and critique those and similar incidents because they were such blatant examples of racism? Why has finding words to discuss the aftermath and recent “non-indictment indictments” in the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown been more difficult?

I’ve struggled with writing something that said everything I wanted to say about the images the media used to tell the story of Michael Brown’s death and its aftermath too. How do art critics talk about the framing of all Ferguson protesters as rioters and looters, the visual absence of Officer Wilson, the ghost of the deceased Brown, and the use of racially coded language like “thug”? Why do we even need to speak up? In art, we critics — unless our last names are Davis, Cotter, or Saltz — don’t always have the freedom to talk about race in concrete terms for fear of accusations that we lack objectivity or may be employing our “race card” — whatever that is — or worse. None of us want to be dismissed as crazy or hysterical, people who have nothing better to do than stir up the pot and keep sleeping dogs from lying down. Besides, isn’t art free from all of those social constructs like race and gender or economic limitations…?

Lived experience tells me that we have a lot of work to do, and that there is much at stake. Responses to the media treatment of Brown like #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, where social media users paired photographs of flattering images like a yearbook portrait with something fault-finding, such as an impulsively misguided selfie to highlight the news media’s polarizing and oversimplified portrayal of black youths, is devastatingly real. If one of the roles of criticism is to reflect on the contemporary cultural moment and spark thoughtful conversations about how we experience the world, examining the visual culture associated with current events matters. Imagine how the language of critique might shift or how the range of voices and topics heard might expand if more art critics didn’t consider their primary role as that of quality control for good taste. Art objects and images have value in the world beyond their aesthetics. Objects and images help us interpret the world and give it meaning. The things we make reflect the way we see. What if we spoke of the visual language of respectability politics in these officer-involved shootings? What if we critiqued that?

There is a long and sordid history of tension between police and Black communities, a history that stretches back to the plantation overseer. So much of law enforcement practice in the U.S. has been about managing the autonomy, self-determination, and individual freedoms in a society; so much about Black community life in the U.S. has been about fighting to reclaim those same rights from those who would like to take them.

The most morally repressed and vile among us maintain the belief that people are generally hard-wired to do good. Police are supposed to protect and help the citizenry, and each time one of their number does something to shatter that assumption, most of us are still taken aback. Overgrown bullies and would-be sociopaths do not become police officers, right? Is that why CNN looped that video of Mike Brown at the corner store allegedly stealing even though the video had not yet been authenticated? It is sadly ironic that 2014 is the 50th anniversary of the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, during which the police and local Klu Klux Klan members colluded to cover up the murder of three Civil Rights workers, two of whom were White northerners.

Art critics are preoccupied with the connections between words and images and their connotations. We study, research, posit, analyze, reflect, and conjure, all in search of meaning. We know that while images are visual, they are emotive. We also understand that the way we see is different depending on how we feel or what’s happening around us. The events that seemed to culminate around Ferguson appeared so ripe for our critical eyes, but it’s been hard to fix our gaze there. Some of us may think it doesn’t concern us — that this isn’t about art — but we’re wrong.

Something about this cultural moment jolted our collective “we” to action. Americans are talking with strangers about the way they live their lives and we’re struggling to understand how others might experience the world. Art is a powerful tool for increasing understanding and bridging seemingly “un-bridgeable” gaps. As protests across the country continue, I’m hoping the art world isn’t caught sleeping again, but instead, makes room for more of its practitioners and participants to add critical perspective to the tidal change the entire world seeks. If art is who we are when no one else is looking, perhaps criticism can help reveal even more of what’s been hidden in the dark.

The post The Critic as Activist: Thoughts on Race, Voice, and Agency in the Art World appeared first on artcritical.

Juliet Helmke on aerial photography
Kurt Ralske on Richard Prince
Sabrina Mandanici on Samuel Fosso
Alexandra Nicolaides on the photographs from Ferguson, MO
Lindsay Comstock on Melanie Schiff
Lee Ann Norman on appropriation
David Carrier on Harry Roseman
David Carbone on Balthus

Full index entry for “photography” at artcritical

“HUBS” is a new category on artists and subjects discussed multiple times at artcritical

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The words followed a well-worn refrain: “An unarmed, black teenager was shot and killed by police in….” Fill in the place. In this case, it was Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014. Later, we heard his name: Michael Brown, 18. Brown was fatally shot by a white member of the Ferguson police department, Officer Darren Wilson. Brown was unarmed, walking in his own neighborhood, then shot at least six times by Wilson, and his body left in the street for over four hours to be seen by his friends, family and neighbors. Anger flickered into a flare. On the evening following the shooting, protesters coming from a vigil at the site of Brown’s killing were met by police with military weapons. In addition to peaceful protests, rioting and looting did occur off and on over the last month.

The ease and speed with which the police donned military armor and weapons, while supported by military vehicles, to meet fellow citizens is disturbing. These images are a warning to all American citizens. A “militarized police” (a new phrase for the common lexicon) has become a standard police action. Most recently, police used similar military weapons both during the Occupy protests and in the search for the Boston Marathon terror suspects. Lines that should be firm — between protest groups with an agenda; a search for violent, unknown terrorists; and a shocked, angry, and grieving community — have been worryingly shattered.

Before we knew Michael Brown’s name, images appeared on social media. Antonio French, an alderman from St. Louis, posted a photograph on Twitter, on August 9 at 4:55 pm. It is a strange tableau: a row of nearly all-white policemen stand on one side of a tape cordon. Their stance — legs firm, hands on their belt buckles — projects arrogance in its studied nonchalance. A lone black officer stands at the far left edge of the photograph, as if stepping out of it. A handful of black men and women sit and stand on the other side of the cordon. One man faces the police, gesturing; another looks at him with arms crossed; three men sit on the ground with their backs to the police. The monotone deportment of the policemen contrasts with the restless uncertainty among those on the other side of the tape. The contradiction in French’s comment, “Tensions are high, but the scene is peaceful in #Ferguson,” adds to the confused disquiet. David Carson, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch staff photographer, posted a photograph at 5:07 pm. People coming together from different places begin to head in the same direction. Carson writes: “Cops have cleared the scene of shooting in Ferguson upset crowd gathering talking about marching to police station… [sic]” In the forefront of the image a couple and child are talking together. Another woman watches the accumulating crowd. In every place along the road, people’s postures are becoming decisive.

The subsequent images of black protesters and white police are familiar. To see them is to see the marches against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama in the spring of 1963. The police relentlessly attempted to subjugate the marchers with high-pressure hoses, police dogs and arrests. Now-iconic photographs of young African-Americans, with their hands on their heads as they are sprayed with torrents of water or bitten by dogs, galvanized support for the Civil Rights movement. On August 9, 2014, at 9:04 pm, Carson posted a quadriptych: a snarling German Shepherd held back by a policeman; protesters with arms raised; a confusing but clearly agitated interaction between police and protesters; a group all looking at the place where Brown died. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized the protests of the Birmingham campaign as a series of deliberate, non-violent actions intended to challenge the laws of segregation, inevitably resulting in black youth in conflict with white police. In contrast, the protests in Ferguson began spontaneously (though they are now planned). Images of the protests first circulated through social media and then were picked up by other media outlets. Much like the protesters themselves, the images stuttered into tremendous activity. In contrast to the photographs of the Civil Rights movement, the effect of the unstructured exchange of images is harder to pinpoint. The glut of images momentarily overwhelms. How does it spur change?

The high-resolution media images of the interactions between police, protesters, and looters differ from the amateur images coming out of Ferguson. The saturated colors and sharp details produced by professionals have a sense of stability and act as part of a narrative. Scott Olson, a photographer for Getty Images, was arrested for photographing outside the designated media area. This restriction seems to violate first amendment press protections and appears completely arbitrary considering the ubiquitous presence of cellphone cameras and social media. Olson’s photograph of August 11 shows a dozen police officers in army fatigues, gas masks, and Kevlar tactical body armor, aiming rifles at a single protester with his hands over his head. Someone has graffitied, “Fuck the police” on a mailbox. The gross disparity in force is unjust in the extreme and a cause for distrust. By contrast, cellphone images bring action on the fringe into the heart. The images of looting on a loop — nighttime, fire, masked, tear gas, at the QuikTrip or Shoe Carnival — are bewildering in their daily repetition and indeterminacy. The impression, it is only that, is of indistinct violence. Cellphone photographs and films are blurred, raw, shaky and unexpected. They catch the act as it is occurring and as quickly pass it on. Chaos and panic are echoed in rapid movements, grainy stills and spontaneous utterances. The iconic images of the social media era will not have the visual clarity of Olson’s photographs, or those of Birmingham. As the ease of production and access to images increases, the idea of a single iconic photograph as an agent of change will no longer exist. Instead, it is the exchange of imagery — tweet, retweet, like, favorite — as the galvanizing action.

Of all the images to come out of Ferguson, pictures of Michael Brown himself are those that most need to be seen and valued. In a haunting video, Piaget Crenshaw, a witness to the shooting from her apartment, captured the immediate moments after Wilson shot Brown. Wilson stands, shoulders slumped, looking at Michael Brown’s body. No details can be seen clearly, heightening the shocking simplicity and tension in the aftermath of the encounter between the man and the teenage boy. However, the sequence’s broadcast on CNN distracts from its poignancy. Michaela Pereira interviews Crenshaw, sitting with her lawyer. As it played on CNN’s program New Day, the video, shot on the cellphone vertically, has to be adapted to fit the horizontal aspect ratio of the television. In the central third, Wilson paces with Brown’s blurred body. On either side, the two pillar boxes are distorted echoes. The effect is like tunnel vision. The faces of Pereira and Crenshaw join the looping film on screen to discuss what Crenshaw saw. In its raw form the video pierces; mediated by CNN (as such videos were on other cable news shows) it is surreal, even grotesque.

A much-circulated photograph of Michael Brown shows him in green and red robes for his recent high school graduation. He has a little smile and a little facial hair, both in keeping for a boy of his age. His posture is tall and straight. Officer Wilson did not see the Brown in that photograph when he shot him. Instead of an unarmed teenager, he probably “saw” someone much like the looter photographed by Carson for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. That man’s face is covered and a gun sticks out of his belt. He is anonymous and threatening. Hilton Als, in his essay, “GWTW,” which addresses photographs of lynching, writes, “So much care, so much care is taken not to scare white people simply with my existence.”[1] He recounts crossing the street to avoid frightening white women, not coming up behind a neighbor at his front door, and more than one encounter with the police where he is surrounded with guns pointing at him.

Wanted (a collaboration between Harlem youth, Dread Scott, No Longer Empty, Stop Mass Incarceration Network, Kevin Blythe Sampson, and Street Attack) tackles the misperception of Black and Latino youth as criminals. Wanted posters, featuring individuals rendered anonymous except for race, were included as part of an exhibition organized by No Longer Empty, “If You Build It,” at Sugar Hill Apartments in Harlem that ran from June 25 to August 10, 2014. The posters continue to be displayed on sidewalk sheds and storefronts throughout Harlem, drawing crowds, unsure of what they are seeing at first, looking closely and reading the details. Using bureaucratic, police-like reports of “suspicious behavior,” such as walking or gesturing, they account the systemic view of Black and Latino teenagers: they are threats and they are disavowed as individuals. They are anonymous — until death. On too many occasions and in too many places, unarmed black teenagers have been threatened and/or killed by the police and armed civilians. The widespread dis-recognition of teenagers like Michael Brown is a profound social crisis and must end.

[1]Hilton Als, “GWTW,” Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe: Twin Palms Publishers, 2000), 42.

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