In March 2001, six months before the destruction of two much
larger (and heavily populated) twin structures, the Buddhas of Bamyan were
destroyed by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Having first attacked the Buddhas with
mortars and failed to do much damage, they declared all out war on these 1500
year old statues carved into a mountainside and obliterated them with dynamite.
The Buddhas may have been "false idols" according
to Islamic law, but that was not the initial reason the Taliban leader, Mullah
Mohammed Omar, gave for blowing them up:
"I did not want to destroy the
Bamiyan Buddha. In fact, some foreigners came to me and said they would like to
conduct the repair work of the Bamiyan Buddha that had been slightly damaged
due to rains. This shocked me. I thought, these callous people have no regard
for thousands of living human beings - the Afghans who are dying of hunger, but
they are so concerned about non-living objects like the Buddha. This was
extremely deplorable. That is why I ordered its destruction. Had they come for
humanitarian work, I would have never ordered the Buddha's destruction."
So said Omar the Humanitarian, in a flawless piece of logic.
He was angry that someone offered money to preserve cultural artifiacts instead
of for famine relief, so he blew them up. Mullah Omar did not discuss whether
the Taliban's imposition of a Neanderthal form of Islamic law, or the enormous
refugee situation caused by the civil war being fought against it, had anything
to do with the famine. But the appeal to the plight of the oppressed must have
seemed like a fine diversion for an act of cultural barbarism by the
reactionary, mysoginist, Taliban, who were only following Sharia law in stoning
the stone staues.
The San Francisco Board of Education has recently voted to
paint over Victor Arnautoff's Life of
Washington, a 1936 mural in George Washington High School, because it depicts history as it really was,
with the Father of Our Country (and largest slaveholder in the nation at the
time) in proximity to the dead bodies of Native Americans and black slaves being
sold and picking cotton on his plantation. Inspired by his socialist view of
U.S. history, Arnautoff wanted to shock people who were used to seeing the
whitewashed view of history in which the only thing going on in the Revolution is
a victory of brave white men over their British oppressors. The SFBE is duly
planning to respond by whitewashing Arnautoff's mural.
If you have not heard about the controversy you are probably
thinking, "What a bunch of conservative idiots. Another right-wing attack
on an artwork that depicts unpleasant truths." It does indeed remind us of
the efforts by conservatives like Jesse Helms and Al D'Amato's to defund the
National Endowment for the Arts because they helped pay for Andre Serrano's
photograph Immersion (Piss Christ) – a
protest against the denigration of Christian icons which was taken as its exact
opposite, a denial of Jesus. Life of
Washington is SFBE's Piss Christ,
and signals open season on works that depict the uncomfortable truths of life
in America.
But the SFBE, at least according to their rhetoric, are not
reactionaries but progressives. They say that the mural "glorifies"
slavery, genocide... white supremacy" etc. Not being art critics they do
not appear to have given much thought to what difference there might be between
depicting and glorifying. Such nice distinctions do seem to be too much to ask of
ideologues on either the right or the left.
Worse yet, the mural upsets students, they say. Erasing
artwork is apparently their idea of teaching freedom of expression: the art
upsets some people, so get rid of it. Yet the Times reported
evidence that few students thought the murals should be removed. I have not seen
a study or poll of these students by racial category, but the Times article says, "Of the 2,004
students at Washington High, most are Asian-American; 89 are African-American
and four are Native American." It wouldn't matter if there were only one
African-American student, or none – if the message of the murals were clearly
racist, and they had no redeeming artistic content, then one would have a case
for obliterating them. If they did have artistic merit there would be a case
for finding a new school building and using the old one as a museum, letting in
people who wanted to view the artwork - just as I can, if I wish, open up a
copy of slavery apologist George Fitzhugh's Cannibal's
all! but I don't think it should be required reading for high school students.
But Life of Washington is not racist
but anti-racist and does, by most
accounts, have considerable artistic merit. There's no case here.
Someone should inform the SFBE that high school students are
frequently endowed with brains. And those brains can surely comprehend this
"trigger warning" if it were conveyed to students in general assembly on their first day in the
school: "Our school is lucky to have some of the greatest artworks of the
Works Progress Administration, a project of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
that created public art works during the Great Depression. But these murals
depict scenes that might be upsetting to some, scenes of slavery and the murder
of Native Americans. When you see these scenes keep in mind that the artist was
drawing people's attention to the darker facts of U.S. history, injustices which
others tried to hide by making the Founding Fathers heroes without talking
about some of the evil things they did. Victor Arnautoff was a socialist who
didn't think the reality of American slavery or genocide should be painted out
of history, any more than the Holocaust should be denied. So keep that in mind
and appreciate the historic nature of the school you are attending."
But they don't have to stop there. They could also add:
"And for those who feel that there should be more positive images of
people of color we have those too. In the 1960's African-American artist Dewey
Crumpler was asked to create a new mural, which he dubbed Multi-Ethnic Heritage, and it positively depicts the struggles of
people whose rights were denied in George Washington's day."
Obliterating murals for political reasons is nothing new. One
of the most famous cases was Nelson Rockefeller's destruction of Diego Rivera's
Man at the
Crossroads at the RCA building (30 Rockefeller Center) because the
painter refused to remove a portrait of Vladimir Lenin from the mural. In May
1934, in spite of protests from many of the most famous artists of the day, the
petroleum heir ordered that the mural be plastered over.
Rivera's Dream of a
Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park was also initially removed by its owner
because it contained a portrait of a Mexican atheist holding a banner that read
"Dios no existe" (God does not exist). Rivera was finally forced to
remove the "offending" words, which happened to be true. Apparently
facts are not acceptable on murals when they offend people. The fact that
Washington was a slaveholder apparently makes no difference to the SFSB
Taliban.
The statements from the SFBE defending their vote are, in
the vernacular, a pile of sanctimonious, self-serving bullshit, and it is hard
to even give them the time of day. "This is reparations," SFBE Vice President Mark Sanchez is quotedas saying. This and undocumented references to the sensitivities of students
make up the sum total of their argument. Going from the banal to the absurd, at least if it is supposed to be an argument to obliterate an artwork, we have this:
"Native American Barbara Mumby-Huerta, who staffs the San Francisco Art Commission, challenged statements on historical accuracy, saying that the mural is ignorant of indigenous people. 'To portray a Native person face down, dead, you are trapping their soul so that they can not move on,' she said, per KQED."
Let's just say this: there is intelligence as well as
ignorance in artistic traditions in every culture and every nation, and if we
are going to sort through our entire cultural legacy and start trashing
everything that offends modern sensibilities then we will have nothing left
pretty soon. But sorting and selecting is not even what the SFBE is about – get
this: "School district spokeswoman Laura Dudnick confirmed
that although only two mural pieces stand out as offensive to members of the
community, the board’s decision would apply to all 13 panels of the mural."
I guess they made an aesthetic judgment that painting over just the allegedly
offensive images would offend more people than leaving them as is!
Recently, Sanchez and SFBE President Stevon Cook responded
to an op-ed piece in the Times by
Bari Weiss, whose credentials mainly seem to be a series of critiques of
student activism. The mural bashers' response is of a piece with the rest of
their self-serving logic: like the Taliban, the Rockefellers and others they
are putative knights in white armor serving the interests of offended minority students.
But Weiss is hardly the only one who has responsed to their intended desecration
of Arnautoff's work: over 400 artists signed a letter
asking them to reverse the decision, a fact they have not addressed and are not
capable of addressing because they have nothing of any intellectual merit to say.
Pity the students of the San Francisco school syste, whose education is being
directed by misguided, self-appointed curators.
Among the points made about the mural by the artists is:
"Its meaning and commitments are not in dispute. It exposes and denounces
in pictorial form the US history of racism and colonialism. The only viewers
who should feel unsafe before this mural are racists." Artists 1, "Educators"
0.
Other heavy hitters of the art world are starting to weigh
in. Rocco Landesman, former Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, wrote
a letter that was printed in the NY Times
on July 3. On July 26 art critic Roberta Smith also weighed
in. (Go to this link for pictures of the murals.) Both of them mentioned
the similarity of the SFBE's planned action to the Taliban's demolition of the
Bamiyan Buddhas, and Smith also mentioned Rivera's Man at the Crossroads. But what they missed is the terrifying
similarity in the logic of these acts: let's destroy this artwork because it
makes decent people uncomfortable. Let's make the world a better place by
removing this unpleasant reminded of the past.
Which makes me wonder: has the school board also banned the
reading of Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, both of whom used the
"N-word" in some of their stories – although it is perfectly
plausible that they put the "N-word" in the mouths of characters who
would have used it, while neither endorsing such use nor intending to demean
people of color?
Leni Riefenstal was an ardent Nazi who made the film Triumph of the Will as a promotional
Nazi video. As a Jew, not to mention the son of a survivor of the Battle of the
Bulge, my discomfort at watching it is mitigated only slightly by the passage
of time since those horrid events. But watch it I did, not just to remind
myself that evil can at least temporarily triumph, but because its deplorable
effectiveness makes it one of the greatest early examples of documentary film.
True, it is not shown daily in my school, but suppose I went to a film school where it was required viewing - should I object and refuse to watch it? Why? It may have been intended as a picture of an
Aryan future, but there could not be a better portrait now of national
insanity.
Explicit sexuality makes some people uncomfortable. We do
have a responsibility not to show young children certain things that would
upset them, for the simple reason that they are not capable of understanding
enough to put those things in context. But when someone wants to cover up a
painting or sculpture because people capable of adult forms of reasoning (am I
giving everyone too much credit?) might be offended seeing David's naked penis
or whatever, it is not a matter of being sensitive to the feelings of a certain
social group but of pandering to a lowest common denominator that it is the job
of cultural institutions to educate.
Oh, did I say a bad word? Yes, perhaps the next thing the
SFBE Taliban should do after they've spent over half a million dollars to destroy
art is to obliterate the word "education" from the entrance to their
offices. Apparently it offends some people. Them, in particular. After all, if the
geniuses of the SFBE are capable of raising the $600,000 it is estimated to cost
to remove the mural, why haven't they raised it to buy textbooks and technology,
raise staff salaries, improve infrastructure, or even – I can't believe I
thought of this – build a new building where the still anonymous offended
students can conduct their education in blissful isolation from unsettling
images? (Maybe that would take a little more money, but there are plenty of supposedly
progressive Silicon Valley billionaires who should be more than happy to help
with such an admirable cause.)
Victor
Arnautoff, whose politically progressive mural is to be whitewashed, was an
assistant to Diego Rivera. Apparently the destruction of socially critical
ideas on walls is a great source of agreement between the alleged Bay Area
reformers and the man who is mainly remembered for the violent death of dozens of
Attica inmates and corrections officers. Arnautoff was a prolific painter who
did quite a few murals in the Bay Area and elsewhere. Most of them raised
controversies due to his left wing views. Maybe they should all be painted
over? That would eliminate much of the legacy of a major American immigrant
artist, who brought a critical perspective to U.S. culture and history. Could
the SFBE possibly see that that is something to be preserved and supported
today, rather than attacked?
Arnautoff taught numerous future artists during his career as
a professor at the California School of Fine Arts and, for 25 years, at
Standford University. After a 1955 series of lithographs in which he criticized
Richard Nixon and McCarthyism there were calls for his removal, and he was
hauled before the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee. He survived
this assault and remained on the faculty. But his work may not survive the
assault of putative liberal educators in an atmosphere where the desecration of
left-wing art counts as "reparations". "Intentions don't matter" said one official. Yes they do, say almost every art, literary or cultural critic I've ever read.
While writing this piece, entirely by coincidence, I
discovered a form of personal connection with Arnautoff. My uncle, the
photographer Harold Roth, was stationed in the Bay Area when he was training as
a paratrooper during World War II. (He was never deployed as far as I know.)
There was a competition for army artists in his service division, and he
entered a photograph entitled "Vermont Landscape". Among 475 works
submitted, his photograph was selected as one of 180 to be exhibited at the San
Francisco Museum of Art, and one of only 30 to be sent on to a national
competition. There were photography and fine arts juries of four persons each,
and presumably both had to vote on works sent to the national competition. The
photography jury included two outstanding photographers, Dorothea Lange and
Imogen Cunningham. The most well known name in the fine arts jury was Victor
Arnautoff.
But this distant personal connection to Arnautoff, through
my uncle (another progressive artist, who made a major contribution to a community
program in the Bronx called The Point, which helps poor children learn photography)
has little to do with my sentiments about the planned actions of the SFBE.
Those sentiments are a reaction to the perversion of progressive politics by
the senseless actions of a gang of ideologues. If anyone needs further
confirmation of Arnautoff's anti-racist sentiments they can read this. What a
grave-roller it would be if he were to find that his mural is to be destroyed
by administrators who call themselves defenders of oppressed minorities.
Rockefeller got away with his acts of vandalism, not to
mention wanton killing, but the SFBE Taliban may not fare as well. The
destruction of public visual art is now prohibited by law, specifically by the
Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990. Among its provisions are:
Grants such an author [i.e., the artist] the right
to prevent any destruction, distortion, mutilation, or other modification of
that work which would harm his or her reputation or honor
Extends such rights 50 years beyond the author's
death (or co-author's, in the case of a joint work) with respect to visual art
works created as of the effective date of this Act.
Arnautoff died in 1979, so the SFBE Taliban may need another
10 years before they can legally proceed with their white paint assault; maybe
by that time some actual educators will be in charge. Being in a public
institution, George Washington High School is ultimately owned by the people of
San Francisco, so any citizen may have standing to sue for the destruction of a
common cultural heritage. And there is reason to think they might win, too,
given this recent decision:
Ruling that graffiti — a typically
transient form of art — was of sufficient stature to be protected by the law, a
federal judge in Brooklyn awarded a judgment of $6.7 million on Monday to 21
graffiti artists whose works were destroyed in 2013 at the 5Pointz complex in
Long Island City, Queens.
In November, a
landmark trial came to a close in Federal District Court in Brooklyn when a
civil jury decided that Jerry Wolkoff, a real estate developer who owned
5Pointz, broke the law when he whitewashed dozens of swirling murals at the
complex, obliterating what a lawyer for the artists had called “the world’s
largest open-air aerosol museum.” (from The
New York Times)
San Franciscans might
have standing, but so might Arnautoff's heirs – he died in 1979, and perhaps
there are living descendents who care enough about his legacy to stop the West
Coast Taliban from protecting students in the wrong way.
So, finally, you are no doubt wondering what African-American
artist Dewey Crumpler thinks about destroying the mural that he was brought in
to "respond" to? He was interviewed
by artnet news, and I couldn't imagine
a better way to end this discussion than by quoting him. You really need to
read the whole interview, about his own mural and his views on art and society.
But the following will do for here:
"I thought 50 years ago that
it should not be destroyed—because there are elements that are just waiting in
the wings to take down other art, and they will use this argument to do exactly
that."
"If you run away from history, you’ll never
change history. You have to confront history. Art is a teaching tool. That’s
why every culture in the world uses it.
All the conversations and emotions stirred up by a
work of art are part of what that work of art means. My mural is part of
the Arnautoff mural, part of its meaning, and its meaning is part of mine.
If you destroy his work of art, you are destroying mine as well."
