Transcript of "Public Art, Public Response" (Art, Race, Space Symposium, January 25, 2013)

Panelist: Erika Doss

Recording available from: https://purl.dlib.indiana.edu/iudl/media/514n59x68n

It's been a good day. Lots of interesting papers, lots of great comments. And I'd like to thank the organizers of today's symposium for inviting me to participate in these very important issues concerning art and race in America as public spaces. See if I can operate this thing. It looks familiar. After studying public art for quite some time, I've come to this conclusion. And after you all have been here all day, you've come to the same conclusion. Public art is controversial. The Martin Luther King Memorial dedicated in Washington in 2011 was and remains controversial. But as Rene neatly points out, that doesn't mean that it is not also Beloved and sense of people going to it. It'll be really important to judge the National Park Service attendance figures in terms of how many millions are going. But I've heard that it's among the top three, which is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the World War II Memorial. And now this one, controversy and public art goes with the territory. It's public and it's art. But instead of avoiding or abandoning public art because it's too difficult or it's too hot to handle. I'd like to continue to advocate on its behalf. Heated debates about public art tell us about just how important issues of cultural expression and civic and national identity are in the United States today. Tell us that American public's that are supposedly apathetic and uninformed are actually keenly interested in meaningful cultural conversations that can help shape and direct American public life. Public art, as I've long argued, is largely conversational, a cultural practice. So even a cultural process that at best goes far beyond just making some kind of art and popping it down in some kind of public space. America's most significant public art projects, it's most engaging public memorials are those that are grounded in the creative examination of conventional assumptions that address issues of cultural, social, and political transformation. They invite dialogue. They encourage audiences to think. Those terms can be controversial, yielding highly emotional public responses, especially when the issues they address or as highly fraught as those of race and representation. Consider e.g. the Clayton Jackson Magee memorial dedicated in 2003 in Duluth, Minnesota, located downtown, just a few blocks from Lake Superior. The memorial recalls the June 1920 murders of three African American men employed with the John Robinson circus, which had stopped in Duluth for a single day of performances, falsely accused of sexually assaulting a local white woman. The men were arrested and incarcerated in Duluth jail in the heart of the city's business district. That night, the jail was attacked by a mob of some 10,000 people, about one-tenth of the city's population, who overpowered the police with bricks and battering rams and grabbed three of the prisoners from their cells. Dragged up a steep hill, passed a crowd of onlookers, including children and women. The three young men were lynched from the crook of an electric light pole. After they were murdered. Carefully staged photographs were taken of their battered bodies, illuminated by the headlights of automobiles and framed by dozens of well-dressed white men leaning into the center. Some on tiptoe, all in the act of posing with their human trophies. As one author describes these photographs which were widely sold and Duluth Area stores is ten sent postcards titled picture of a lynching. These are not people who are ashamed to be here. This is, I want to be in this picture built directly across the street from the site of the lynching dilutes memorial is a small courtyard plaza with a curving sidewalk and beige colored walls, incised with pattern designs. The angled walls feature the words of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Junior, and others. They are bordered by a quote from 18th century British philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke. An event has happened. Upon which it is difficult to speak and impossible to remain silent. The memorial sidewalks are embedded with the words respect, compassion, and Atonement. The brick wall and back features fading signage from the Duluth Union Gospel Mission established in 1922 and still located in this building. And a passage from Psalms 4061. God is our refuge, strength, a very present help in trouble. And beneath this, on the far right of the courtyard is the memorials mean iconographic elements. Three life-sized bronze figures dedicated to the three men who were murdered in Duluth. Elias Clayton, age 19, Elmer Jackson, age 22, and Isaac Magee, age 20. This memorial is the first in America dedicated to lynching, to what the NAACP and November 1920 declared the greatest shame in the United States. A phenomenon I call memorial Mania. Basically abroad, obsession with memory and history and an urgent desire to express and claim those terms and public culture is sweeping contemporary America. Much of it focuses on shameful and previously marginalized or ignored or under considered American subjects and histories. Consider these memorials to the victims of witch trials in late 17th century Massachusetts, dedicated to the mostly female victims of a pathological public culture, of repression, religious intolerance, fanaticism, social hierarchy, and misogyny. The inscription on the Dan verse memorial reads, memory of those innocence who died during the Salem village witchcraft hysteria of 16, 92. Other shame based memorials addressed subjects such as ethnic tolerance, racial terrorism, and Slavery, raising questions about how to remember, represent and get this right. Perhaps redeem the nation's shameful and traumatic histories of racial violence and intolerance. Consider these memorials to the forced imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II and camps located in remote places in California and in Arkansas. To the murder and removal of American Indians in Colorado and Indiana to enslaved Africans and Savannah, Georgia. Here's also a Slavery Memorial in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, located on the campus of the University of North Carolina. Interestingly, in recent years, the National Park Service has taken a leadership role in developing public art projects that commemorate some of these shameful episodes in American history. Sites of shame, the Park Service declared in 1994 should be included in the park system to present a complete picture of our history. In 2000 to the Park Service began reckoning with the remains of the President's house in Philadelphia, where George Washington and John Adams and at least nine African slaves that they owned while each was president, lived 1790-1800, located 50 yd from Independence Hall. The houses former slave quarters are less than 5 ft from the entrance to the recently redesigned Liberty Bell center, where the nation's premier icon of freedom on display. Although the President's house itself was demolished in the 1830s, the Park Service launched an archaeological dig at this site and committed several million dollars towards his commemoration. Dedicated in 2010. The memorial consist of low walls that roughly frame the footprint of the original brick house. Rectangular slabs with mock fireplaces and video screens, and an interpretive program of images, text and sound recordings centering on freedom and slavery, The Making of the new nation. It will give us an opportunity to talk about the heroic and the shameful that took place on this site, observes the superintendent of the entire National Park there who adds, We, the People applies to everyone who is part of what made this nation. Today's memorial Mania is driven by heated debates over self-definition, national purpose, and the politics of representation by Adam and assertions of citizen rights by diverse publics. And persistent demands for representation and respect. These issues are not entirely new. Of course, there were plenty of conversations about appropriate subjects, styles, text, and intentionality during the statue mania craze when many patriotic lobbies and histologic constituencies, and this is in the post-Civil War era, erected multiple public memorials to certain historical subjects, like the Soldiers and Sailors Monument here. However, the memorials made a century or more ago, we're not meant to revive old struggles and debates rights Kirk Savage, but to put them to rest to show how great men and their deeds had made the nation better and stronger. Commemoration was a process of condensing the moral lessons of history and fixing them in place for all time. Statue manias, emphasis on great men and great moments from Indianapolis is major monument to the men who fought and various US wars. To Fort Wayne is equestrian memorial to its civic namesake, that's Fort Wayne, Indiana. And this would be to Revolutionary War general Mad Anthony Wayne. Embodied and all allegedly United commitment to a celebratory, monolithic and mostly masculine national narrative of historical progress, heroism and confidence. Memorial Mania, by contrast, is far less convinced of a seamless or even shared national narrative. And as far less engaged in notions of a triumphant, an exceptional American history. Rejecting a collective or consensual ideological framework. Many contemporary memorials are marked by conflict, rupture, trauma, and loss, by interest among artists and audiences alike in revisionist and often unsettling accounts of American history. Many public art projects, like the one in Duluth and the one in Philadelphia, or purposely Commission today in fact, to specifically address difficult, complex, traumatic, and shameful historical subjects. Subjects like slavery, racial violence, struggles over civil rights. Many are further engaged in a cultural turn toward public feeling. Part of a larger experiential turn Regarding American ideas about history, memory, and identity. That is, a lot of public art projects today, especially those that center on issues of cultural memory, are informed by understandings of art as an interactive felt experience. As myelin, the highly regarded designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, among many other public art projects, observes, I don't make objects, I make places. I think that is very important. The places set a stage for experience and for understanding experience. Following these prompts, I see today's public memorials as archives of feeling encoded in material form, narrative content, and the practices that surround their production and reception. They are the physical embodiment of public affect, visual and material bodies whose meanings correspond to their affective nuances. Effects stems from the Latin word affect us, and basically means to afflict or two touched. And I think it's probably best understood as physically expressed emotion or feeling. Today's memorial Mania is shaped by many different public feelings, including grief, fear, gratitude, anger, and shame. Contrary to a hub or masi envision e.g. of a rational collective public sphere in which sensible citizens exchange ideas and come together and cool and calm discussions and actions. American public life is marked by highly effective and diverse emotional conditions. Consider all public feelings are mobilized and manipulated. And today's debates over health care, gun control, electoral politics in discussions on abortion, immigration, fiscal responsibility, the war on terror. Today's memorial Mania is no different. And today's public art projects typically are shaped by these affective dynamics, these emotional responses. The operative effect, engaging dilutes Memorial, both in terms of its making as art and its meaning to its audiences is shame. So what then does the recovery of shameful histories and spaces reveal? And how do shame based memorials help Americans make sense of their past? What does she mean in America today? Who is shaming and whose ashamed? Most significantly in terms of today's discussion about art, race and place and space. What are the ethics of remembering and representing object histories and images? How can we make art about shameful subjects like slavery and racial terrorism without perpetuating their causes. The white supremacists presumptions deny black subjectivity or re animating their effects. The dehumanizing pain of people treated as lessor's. Shame is defined as a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt. Shortcoming, or impropriety. Shame is that which we find painful or humiliating to talk about or to look at, or to make public art about. Public expressions and representations of shame then emerge when diverse publics pursue new forms of critically engaged knowledge. While shame typically stems from personal and self analysis, it is also inherently social and has civic and moral possibilities. As psychologists Silva and Tompkins observed in his study on affect. The nature of the experience of shame, guarantees of perpetual sensitivity to any violation of the dignity of man. Shame, as other critics observe, is intensely productive politically and conceptually and advancing a product, a project rather of everyday ethics. In contrast with traditional American memorials that honor heroic individuals and triumphant historical moments such as the Washington Monument or the Jima memorial, the Marine Corps memorial in Arlington Cemetery. Shame based memorials posit, counter narratives of violence, trauma, and sociopolitical complicity. Challenging normative understandings of a virtuous American history, countering national and local assumptions of blameless snus or innocence. Refusing historical amnesia about episodes and events that we'd rather forget or deny. Shame based memorials, redress issues of social, political, and moral accountability. Importantly, they do so by representing violence and trauma without voyeurism and without dehumanization. Note how dilutes memorial depicts the three young men who were lynched in 1920, not as victims and not as heroes. After the Civil War and throughout the 20th century, American racist made full use of Acts and images of racial terrorism to extend the dehumanized inequities of slavery and to the sustained assumptions of white superiority. Lynching, e.g. was a deliberate and largely unchecked restraint on the autonomy and citizenship of the black body or any other body that threatened white power. I'm showing here a few examples of Ken Gonzalez day's work. He's a photographer based in California, has taken a lot of printed images of lynchings and removed or erased the body from these particular images. Lynching was a cancerous eruption, not just in the deep south but all over this country. In California, in Wyoming, in Texas, and Indiana, in Minnesota. The United States of Lynch or dumb, as Mark Twain put it in a vitriolic essay, he wrote in 1901, was a nation infected by an epidemic of bloody and sanity's a nation that suffered from an advancing disease that Twain called a mania. Horrified by a newspaper story about the lynching of a black man and his home state of Missouri. Twain denounced lynching as a spectacle of public infamy and moral cowardice. The contagion. Here's another example of some of his work, ten Gonzalez day, the contagion of spectacle lynching attracted thousands of participants and spectators, many of whom took pictures and collected souvenirs. The exhibition without sanctuary, lynching photography and America, which some of you may have seen, um, has traveled the various museums over the past decade and is now online. Features over 100 lynching postcards that circulated in America even after 1908, when the US Post Office outlawed the mailing of items, quote, tending to incite arson, murder, or assassination. Lynching rituals and pictures function to create cohesion and community among those Americans who felt threatened by those they perceived as outsiders or others. Throughout the 20th century, the federal government repeatedly failed to enact anti lynching legislation. State and local courts were similarly unresponsive. And Duluth, e.g. only three men from the 10,000 member lynch mob were tried and convicted for rioting, each serving less than 15 months in prison. No one was ever convicted for the murders of Clayton, Jackson, and McGee. Although African-Americans and Duluth never forgot what happened in 1920s, memories of their murders, memories of the murders of these three young men faded from the historical record and they became instead the stuff of fiction and folk music. Writer Sinclair Lewis move to Duluth in the mid 1940s to work on his 1947 novel kings Blood Royal, which focuses on post-war American racism and references a lynching in a Minnesota city he named grand republic. It's an interesting novel. And musician Bob Dylan, who was born in Duluth and whose father lived in an apartment in downtown Duluth. In 1920, opened his 1965 song Desolation Row with these lines describing his hometowns, notorious lynching. They're selling pictures of the hanging. They're painting the passports brown. The beauty parlor is filled with sailors. The circus is in town. Renewed consideration of Duluth lynching began in 2000s when a series of books and articles with titles like Duluth shameful past and Duluth lingering shame were published. Historical recovery led to the formation of the Clayton Jackson Mickey memorial committee, spearheaded by local journalist, some of whom we see here, community activist and teachers all disturbed by this lack of historical knowledge about it's racist past and recurrent episodes of racism in its contemporary present. One of the first initiatives of the committee was to organize a citywide reading, the lynching of Duluth, a book about the murders. Next, collaborating with the city of dilute, the Duluth public Arts Commission and the Minnesota Historical Society. The committee raised several hundred thousand dollars to build a memorial with donations from area churches, law firms, community chest, local schools, and an undisclosed amount from Bill Berry, a former member of the band REM, who was born in Duluth. Fundraising included benefit concerts, poetry readings, and a screening of Strange Fruit, a documentary film about the haunting song that Billie Holiday first recorded in 1939 about lynching in America. Over a three-year period, the committee revived civic remembrance of dilutes 1920s lynching, and simultaneously constructed widespread civic support for the commemoration of its victims. Dilutes memorial negotiates the fraught dimensions of American history. First, it remembers a shameful moments of racist violence and inserts this memory stain into the historical narrative. Second, rather than projecting an idealized story of triumph over adversity, whereby victims become heroes, are focusing only on traumatic representations of degradation. This shame based memorial articulates an interaction among victims and their perpetrators. That is Alice or bark and writes in his discussion of political restitution, enables the rewriting of history, the rewriting of memory and historical identity in ways that both can share. Dilutes memorial does this by shaming viewers with text and image. The memorial designer Carlos Stevenson observes. Most people read the memorial from left to right. By the time they get to the information about the lynching in the panel on the far right side and see the bronze figures. The word you has been used three times in the various quotes. Third, unlike other shame based projects, dilutes memorial is framed by bearing witness, which is Shawna Fellman explains is not merely to narrate, but to commit oneself and the narrative to others, to take responsibility for history or for the truth of the occurrence. Bearing witness liberates the victims of trauma from historical amnesia and restores their humanity. It connects us, obligates us to one another, rights Kelly Oliver, who argues that witnessing is the basis of human subjectivity and as such as an ethical and social responsibility. Consider how dilutes memorial focuses on the three wrongly accused men. Rather than reproducing images of white mob violence and black victimization. And unable to find other pictures of Clayton Jackson and muggy. Artists stepson model the seven foot bronze figures on local high school and college students who posed for her. Each young man is depicted in period clothing, vest, suspenders, narrow belts, buttoned down, shirts, caps, jackets, and stands with confidence, self-assurance. His eyes cast slightly upward, glancing across the street to where he was murdered. A narrative account of their lynching is sand blasted into the wall nearest there sculpted torsos. The words impossible to remain silent, and their names are incised above their heads. The word atonement is writ large directly under their feet. This appeal to voice and to name segways with this nation's emphasis on individualism and the unique self. The appeal to reconciliation meshes with national directives to build a better, more democratic, more inclusive America. The underlying principles of civil rights and other rights-based models of citizenship in our nation today. For some Americans, shameful moments in the past are just that in the past and hence removed from present day feelings of responsibility. I didn't live, then it's not my problem is one typical response or why bring all that up again? It's too painful, says another person. But as Aaron Lazaro explains, just as people take pride and things for which they had no responsibility, such as famous ancestors and great accomplishments of the nation. So too must these people, except the shame of their family and their nation's accepting national pride must include willingness to accept national shame when one's country has not measured up. This accountability is what we mean when we speak of having national identity. In Duluth, diverse publics deeply ashamed of their cities and their nation's failure to curtail racial violence in 1920. And determined that such shameful acts of racial terrorism never be repeated came together to build this memorial. Importantly, the memorial represents violent death without heroism or voyeurism. It doesn't make heroes of these men or make them into martyr, into martyrs, because those are categories of risk, bravery, and sacrifice that they did not choose. Rather visualizes them as ordinary Americans to whom shameful things were done. Highlighting their individuality and shaming the voluntary, entirely conscious behavior of dilutes lynch mob. This memorial appeals to contemporary notions of social justice. As Tompkins argued, shame can work as a form of social and civic cohesion. The fact that the other identifies sufficiently with others to be ashamed rather than to show contempt strengthens any social group in its sense of community. Dilutes memorial seems to have done exactly that. Dedication ceremonies in 2003 were attended by some 3,000 people and included a silent March, prayers and a speech of apology from Warren read, a fourth-grade teacher from Kingston, Washington, who was horrified to learn while researching his family's history. That is, great grandfather had been one of the leaders in Duluth lynch mob. His voice choking with emotion, read apologize to Clayton Jackson and muggy during the remarks, during his remarks and observed. True shame is not in the discovery of a terrible events such as this, but in the refusal to acknowledge and learn from that event, he added, I stand here as a representative of my great grandfather's legacy, and I willingly place that responsibility upon my shoulders. Remembrance ceremonies are held each year at the memorial and the history of the lynching is become part of Duluth public school curriculum. Students visit the memorial each year with field trips. College scholarships are offered for best essays and improving race relations. Members of the memorial committee also network with other communities around the nation who are likewise working to confront historic wrongs and create a present and future were a true and deep racial reconciliation is achieved. This includes the Moore's for bridge memorial committee in Northeastern Georgia, which aims to make a memorial at the site where two African-American couples, one pregnant and one, a recent World War II veteran were lynched in 1946. Bark and observes that expectations that nation's act morally and acknowledged their own gross historical injustices emerged from shared public feelings that they have shamed fully failed to live up to their ideals. Can work to right those wrongs. Shame has enormous potential then as the revitalizing instrument of shared national and by extension, civic purpose centered on redeeming the past, or as Paul put it earlier this morning, owning up. Now, admittedly, redemption is a paradoxical proposition. The idea of slavery and lynching or any kind of violence and terrorism being redeemed in American public art in order to justify contemporary political agendas is horrifying and cynical. But redemption does not have to be defined only in terms of narratives of domination or denial. Redemption actually has multiple meaning. To buy back, to free from harm, to repair, to make good to a tone. George Shulman argues that a way to engage redemption as a moral and politically progressive project is to focus on redemption of, rather than redemption from two, both recover and make good on that which is flawed. This is the directive offered in Duluth memorial, where the shame of racial terrorism has recovered. Its victims are witnessed and remembered as human beings, since citizens, as a national historic subjects and its legacy and the larger legacy of American racism and racial violence is redeemed through ongoing present day acts, civic acts of restorative justice. This nation can never be freed from the stain, the sin of its shameful transgressions nor should it. But memorials like the one in Duluth, show how America's shameful histories can be made meaningful through public art. I want to add a few comments. Public art is not an Emilia relative. It cannot solve social ills. It is not curative. But public art can spark conversations about social issues and political causes. The key then in public art projects is maintaining nuanced and creative conversations that raise consciousness, invite dialogue, and hopefully generate progressive political and social change or transformation. I'd like to add to that. I don't support a moratorium on memorial making in America because that denies public representation to those long excluded from having a voice, a presence in the public sphere. I advocate instead for projects that thoughtfully and creatively prompt us all to imagine a better nation, a more perfect union. Thank you.