A Review of “White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art”
What does “critical race” art look like? The introductory text for White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art, curated by Maurice Berger at the International Center for Photography (ICP) (in New York City through February 27), makes it seem like the exhibit to follow will engage whiteness and race from a perspective that understands what is at stake. Berger states that the show critiques images of whiteness because “failing to mark whiteness” to probe it and assign it meaning” means failing to take a hard look at a vital component of the social construction of race.” However, most of the works and the way in which they are collected do not look hard enough at the white supremacy behind images of whiteness. Rather, the exhibit is a kind of meditation on representations of whiteness rather than on what has and continues to contruct them. By insufficiently critiquing the mechanisms of oppression and privilege that make up “whiteness,” the exhibit promotes a conversation that lets white people off the hook. The works do not invoke the sense of complicity with racism that good critical race theory and art make possible. This is especially important to say because the exhibit has received positive reviews (see 1, 2).
Three aspects of the exhibit contribute to a depoliticized conversation about whiteness. First, few of the works include sufficient context against which one might “see” the forces constructing “white.” Second, most of the works do not invite white U.S. viewers to identify directly with the violent and oppressive underbellies of the images. Third, Berger does not hold the artists accountable for the ways in which some of them obfuscate whiteness.
For example, Max Becker’s and Andrea Robbin’s “German Indians” from 1997/98 shows German hobbyists “playing Indian,” a practice that is relatively easy to see as commodifying and coopting oppressed peoples’ cultures while ignoring their present day struggles. However, Germans aren’t the only ones doing this. These practices continue in the U.S., through comparable hobby groups (at least one of which is charted by Congress), through sports teams, and through the YMCA’s Indian Princess/ Indian Guide programs. Images of any of these might have provided a telling contrast and comparison. However, if white U.S. viewers are not aware of these connections, they won’t be much more likely to be after this portion of the show. Instead, it allows them to point the “racist” finger at the Germans without having to look at their own complicity in coopting Native cultures. The selections from Nikki S. Lee’s “The Yuppie Project” (1998) are subject to a similar problem. In the accompanying text we learn that the photos of her posing as a member of Wall Street culture is one example of her artistic ventures into various sub-cultures (such as lesbians and drag-queens). If Berger had thought to include one or two of her works with other sub-cultures, “white Wall Street” subculture would have been more starkly exposed as such, something to be studied, mimicked, investigated, played with. Instead, Wall Street remains “normal” and Lee, as an Asian appearing person (who is actually of Korean descent) fits all too neatly into the office and sidewalk scenes due to “model minority” stereotypes. It becomes interesting to wonder into Lee’s intentions, enjoy the fun she may be having at the expense of white yuppies around her, begin to imagine what she sees from her interloper perspective. Unfortunately, however, the possibilities of revealing or examining white Wall Street are only just touched upon.
Cindy Sherman’s “Bus Riders” (1973) make for compelling art; however, in representing herself as a black person, she uses blackface makeup that reproduces stereotypes rather than bringing these white and Black appearing “bus riders” more closely in relation with each other. Without acknowledging this effect in the accompanying text or by contrasting her work with anything else, it remains unclear whether Berger sees her work or the problems of her work as the comment on whiteness. Left up to the viewer, it will depend on whether one has the language and awareness of blackface stereotypes to make this connection.
One set of works that inspires something more than a flat reading of whiteness-as-representation include Nayland Blake’s “Invisible Man” (1994), a seeming window into the biracial artist’s childhood. His bunnies with black plastic face-like forms in shiny white bunny suits watching the actual dollhouse/ theater where Blake animates small white fabric dolls on a video screen behind the bunnies is disturbing and intimate, simple and challenging–whiteness as a cute suit enveloping something black and less defined.
A number of recent exhibits in New York have offered more trenchant examinations of whiteness without necessarily naming it as such. Without Sanctuary, the book and exhibit of postcards of lynchings that that traveled to the New York Historical Society in 2000, scathingly critiques white depravity and relentlessly implicates white U.S. viewers. Kara Walker’s wall-size cutout silhouettes at the Studio Museum in 2003 and other venues depict the “American racial psyche,” the twisted, sexualized, violent, nightmare-like collective conscious of white supremacy. Laylah Ali’s cartoon-like figures in “Greenheads” are in extremely hierarchical and violent (and somtimes tender) relations with each other, evoking race through green and “white flesh skin” tones. Two of these three examples are of whites and Blacks; I cannot excuse my narrowness. I am trying to point out that artistic critiques of whiteness, what could be included in a category “critical race” art, abound. And these remain better, from a racial justice/ critical race perspective, than what Berger has collected at ICP.