Vincent Valdez - The City I, 2016
A year after the events at the Whitney, a similar outcry occurred in response to Vincent Valdez’s painting, The City I, which depicts huddled Klu Klux Klan members staring ominously back at the viewer. Despite two years of preparation for the painting’s public debut, which included reaching out to over one-hundred community organizations, funding educational programs, and even changing the color of the guard’s uniforms from a somber gray to a light blue,18 the painting was still met with protests of a particularly racial nature, as exemplified by this protester's statement: “The artist is Mexican American and while Mexicans experienced racism in the Western Hemisphere, the KKK historically terrorized and murdered African Americans to a larger extent.”19 Valdez later responded in an interview that, as a Mexican-American, he should be considered a person of color, and therefore has the right to address racism in America.20
Unlike Open Casket, The City I offers very little in the form of abstraction. The KKK members are depicted in photorealistic black and white, highlighting the contrast between their white hoods and the black night sky in the background. The threat of violence is not reduced by abstraction, but amplified by realism, allowing Valdez to escape the stylistic criticism that was leveled against Schutz. But for the protestors responding to the display of Valdez’s painting, the problem was not the object itself, but the identity of the artist.
The protest of The City I and Valdez’s subsequent response are exemplary of the hierarchy of victimization that has tangled itself in our notion of offense. In this instance, according to the offended, only those with the correct cultural and ethnic background have the right to comment on or sympathize with the suffering of historically oppressed groups. The fact that Schutz is white and Valdez is Latino should exclude them from commenting on black suffering, even if their stated goal is to draw attention to these issues, and so we arrive at the absurd scenario of protestors protesting protest art.
This mentality has profound consequences, not only for artistic freedom, but for the public perception of the arts and the social issues they represent. The idea that controversial and traumatic subjects cannot be artistically represented except by those who are the victims of such subjects constrains artists to produce work that falls within the boundaries of their identity as it is perceived by others, and thus limits the ability of these artists to truly represent the issues and of their time. If we examine Valdez’s response to the controversy —that he, as a minority, has the right to address racial violence in America— would that imply that the majority (i.e. white people) do not have the right to address the racism of which they assume culpability? Even if they address it in a way that decries racial violence? Among those who protested Open Casket and The City I, the answer is a resounding “no.”
Again, this warped mentality has led to the replacement of a standard of quality with that of identity. Hughes makes the argument that “An artist’s merits are not a function of his or her gender, ideology, sexual preference, skin color or medical condition, and to address an issue is not to address a public.”21 With the exception of ideology, the same could be said of an artist’s faults.
The necessity of political art is at odds with this limitation of identity which dictates that only certain artists are allowed to make work pertaining to certain political issues. This trend is particularly dangerous because poorly executed art put on the pedestal of public display risks trivializing the social issue it represents as well as the arts, in general. Again, Hughes states bluntly that, “...new activist art is so badly made that only its context —its presence in a museum— suggests that it has any aesthetic intention.”22 When viewers are exposed to a piece that aspires to some form of social justice but falls short in its execution, they might understandably wonder why they should care about the message or the art. Enabling artists to make work about the issues of their time, as opposed to the issues of their identity, not only broadens the talent pool that curators have to select from when putting together exhibitions themed in social issues, but also allows for the diversity perspective and opinion that these issues deserve.
In addition to these potential consequences, a standard of offense that puts so much emphasis on identity risks reducing artists to little more than that, with some being excluded from certain topics because of their identity while others are expected to dedicate their practice to calling attention to perceived oppression because they belong to a group that is considered oppressed. As stated by Jennifer Gonzalez in her response to Hal Foster’s Artist as Ethnographer, “By focusing on the notion of identity as a valorizing representation of the ‘self,’ many scholars ignore the possibility that the artworks in question might be intended to dismantle categories of identity, to reject essentialist notions of ethnicity, to destabilize typologies of containment.”23 If we place undue emphasis on the identity of the artist, we not only risk limiting the work of artists whose identity does not carry the status of “victim,” but also reducing the work of minority artists to an expression of their victimhood.
This is not to say that work by artists that point to injustices against their own identity is not legitimate or necessary. But in cases where artists are trying to “dismantle categories of identity,” a standard of critique that always evaluates a work in relation to the artist’s identity ends up reaffirming those categories. As Jennifer Doyle summarizes in Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art, “...the work’s politics will be put through a distortion chamber, and its critical dimensions will be reversed. In all of these cases, the artist’s racial or ethnic identity will orient discussion of her work, resolving the work’s difficulty by pointing to the artist’s identity as its ultimate meaning.”24 In an ethic of critique in which an artist’s identity holds “ultimate meaning,” it follows that the artist’s intended meaning is negated.
Those within the professional art industry should weigh the creation and exhibition of pieces dealing with traumatic issues against the potential consequences of offending viewers, as needless offense serves no one. The problem is that the consequences of offense are now incredibly severe– one such consequence being that the original message of the piece, as well as the respective messages of other pieces in the show, get drowned out by controversy. The other artists at the Whitney Biennial, where Schutz debuted Open Casket, whose work also carried with it important and urgent social meaning, were effectively sidelined by the ruckus and media attention caused by the protestors.
On the subject of consequences, it is worth noting that in both cases, the paintings remained on display despite protest. However, there have been other instances of pieces being taken down, vandalized, or in the case of an installation by the artist Sam Durant, ceremonially buried.25 Staff have lost their jobs and artists have been asked to alter proposals in an effort to avoid, or make reparations for, offense.26 The resulting effect is one of self-censorship in which those involved in the making and displaying of art stifle advocacy and expression in an effort to prevent controversy- a steep price to pay to avoid offense.
But to make the claim that protests like these are never worth the associated consequences is to ignore the fact that there are plenty of pieces that have been and continue to be made which could be considered unjustifiably insensitive and offensive. It is undeniable that some works cause genuine pain in the way they mishandle or misrepresent an issue. Sometimes a well-intentioned, socially aware artist can take it too far. Just as artists should have the right to make works that are offensive, intentionally or not, viewers should also have the right to protest. The issue is not with protest, itself, but the arguments with which protestors advocate for censorship. While it is presumptuous to assume the authority of determining whether someone’s anger or pain is valid, especially given the subjective responses that contemporary art elicits, it might be helpful to investigate under what circumstances offense justifies a work’s public lambasting.
A criterion of offense in which the evaluation of the art-object is prioritized over the identity of the artist alleviates the aforementioned ethical issues associated with silencing artists and removing their work on the basis of who they are and not what they make. A standard that carries with it the possibility of apriori disqualification based on factors that are out of an artist’s control (i.e. race, gender, nationality) is inherently inegalitarian and antithetical to free expression, whereas a standard that considers the content of the object itself offers universal applicability regardless of race, sexuality, nationality or any other personal identifier over which the artist in question has no control. This caveat of “control” is crucial because there are some aspects of our identity which we do have control over, and when it comes to the notion of offense, it is impractical (and arguably unethical) to ignore them.