Will They Call it Victim Art Now?

Post Sept. 11 Notes on Art
and Images of Suffering

By Esther Iverem
SeeingBlack.com Editor

An alien landscape of twisted steel beams and mountains of rubble. Tons of office paper scattered in the wind. Smoke rising for weeks, filled with dead's spirits and the scent of unburied remains. These are among the images and memories that have begun to be gathered and utilized by artists producing work from the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States that killed 3,000 people.

"New York September 11," an exhibit at the New York Historical Society, features seven photographers' work, including an eerie, silent, 25-minute video by Evan Fairbanks that records the plane attacks on the World Trade Center. The video is shot from a vantage point on the ground and includes those moments when no one, including Fairbanks, knew for sure what was happening after dust began floating from the sky like snow. Images from this show have been reproduced in a book by the same name. Another collection, "September 11, 2001: A Record of Tragedy, Heroism and Hope," has been edited by New York Magazine.

There will be more in the months and years to come, even in our rush toward escapism, because this tragedy—quick but with ever-widening social and implications—has affected this nation like no other. Not only has it brought a new sense of grief, loss and victimhood to Americans, it has magnified the relationship of images and art to our lives, and to how we define ourselves and others—victim, hero, American, other, soldier, terrorist. Occurring at a time when the art establishment—particularly the New York Times—is clamoring for the death of multiculturalism and when people of color, women, the dying and impoverished are derided for producing "victim art," the Sept. 11 tragedy brings into sharp relief this stigmatizing label.

Gazing at the images of destruction, grief and terror resulting from this tragedy, it is difficult to imagine that any American will speak dismissively of them as "victim art." The sense of loss to the dominant culture and psyche, and to the wealthy and powerful who collect art, has been too great. Even the usual smug sarcasm, satire and irony used often to mock tragedy (and those things tragic to only some of us) have not been used during this time, except, of course, to ridicule the Taliban or Osama bin Laden.

We have a new event so wide in its horror that, like World War II and its holocaust, it is a time-arching event in the Western world. And we already know how, for all of our lives, there are never too many feature films, documentaries, books, articles, exhibits or oral history projects related to the war and the holocaust. In the meantime, new narratives about the Middle Passage, slavery and colonialism, as well as our calls for reparations, are met with indifference or hostility.

Artistic expressions based on these past events, as well as the current tragedy, reinforce a sense of privilege and double-standard in victimization. Be it the AIDS holocaust, starving refugees, racism, gender abuse or genocide, it is not the cry, that makes issue-based art off-limits to conservative critics and institutions. Obviously, it matters whose cry they are hearing— or choosing not to hear.

When Arlene Croce, the dance critic for the New Yorker, wrote her essay against "victim art" and Bill T. Jones' "Still/Here" production in 1995, she was building upon a term and extending an argument first used to dismiss work produced in the 1960s and 1970s during the Black Arts Movement. That movement provided a foundation for work in the 1980s and 1990s, such as that by Jones, which dealt with AIDS, or other international crises. Photos by Sebastião Salgado of displaced and impoverished people also gained attention and notoriety during this time.

Croce said, "In quite another category of undiscussability are those dancers I'm forced to feel sorry for because of the way they present themselves: as dissed Blacks, abused women or disenfranchised homosexuals—as performers, in short, who make out of victimhood victim art. I can live with the flabby, the feeble, the scoliotic. But with the righteous I cannot function at all."

Later in the piece, after lumping together "the multiculturalists, the moral guardians and the minority groups," she concluded, "People for whom art is too fine, too high, too educational, too complicated, may find themselves turning with relief to the new tribe of victim artists parading their wounds. They don't care whether it's an art form. They find something to respond to in the litany of pain, and they make their own connection to what the victim is saying. Of course, they are all co-religionists in the cult of Self. Only the narcissism of the nineties could put Self in place of Spirit and come up with a church service that sells out the Brooklyn Academy."

Croce's essay is instructive in revealing the subjects of her contempt—us. It also reveals the extent to which this White critic does not recognize voices raised by people of color as filled with a spirit of expression that is perfectly valid as art, even if those expressions are not a thing of beauty to her, are not muted within a conceptual approach, or even if they include people who have actually been afflicted in some way. It is this arrogance, elitism and ethnocentrism that I think will not be heard related to the new national tragedy.

When New York Times art critic Holland Cotter said in a lengthy essay last July that multiculturalism has done more harm than good for artists of color, he used the fact that some of our art has been stigmatized as "victim art" as one reason for his dismissal. He also cited the convenient but ludicrous argument that race is somehow less important in today's society (but not in Southeast D.C. it isn't!) and referred heavily to the "postblack" label given by curator Thelma Golden to describe her "Freestyle" show last summer at the Studio Museum in Harlem. But for many artists, including those of us in the post-civil rights generation, the issue is not multiculturalism or Golden's suspect "postblack" creation. The real issue, they say, is how critics and curators use such terms to control the discourse and direction of art.

"Imagery is so powerful because it says something about who you are," says Willie Birch, a painter living in New Orleans who is represented by galleries there and in New York City. "Multiculturalism has always existed. The problem I have is that now people want to say that it's dead. They're bored. They feel they have accommodated us and they want to move in whatever direction the next thing is—and that's the joke. As long as the dominant culture controls the art world, they will continue to come up with whatever jingle they come up with to describe us, or to satisfy whatever their fancy is. We get caught in this trap of being validated by someone else."

"How could we possibly be "postblack" if we are still dealing with a pre-Civil Rights mentality in terms of image representation in America?" asks cultural critic Kevin Powell. "Unfortunately, we now have visual artists who happen to be Black, as well as cultural gatekeepers who happen to be Black, who happen to be embraced by the White or mainstream world because, in a sense, they are not trying to question institutionalized White racism at all. They simply want to be absorbed into the landscape which, to me, is the most profound sort of self-hatred."

"That's what power is—the ability to interpret a situation," says Renaldo Davidson, a painter based in Manhattan. "I think postblack is a way of not dealing with a lot of things that some people don't think exist—but do exist. It's like a giant eraser."

The same artists that critics like Croce derided, those with issue-related art, are now not the ones feeling the sense of irrelevance reportedly felt by so many artists in the aftermath of the attacks. Black artists interviewed for this piece in particular bristled at any suggestion that the attacks have decreased the relevance of their work.

"When you don't have a calling that is legitimate, then every time something happens, you are going to question yourself," says Akili Ron Anderson, an artist based in Washington, D.C., who works in stained glass, paint and sculpture. "When we depict a certain reality, it doesn't have any title except for truth," Anderson added. "If we're depicting slavery, we're not depicting a style. We're not depicting victimhood. We're depicting a truth."

Kalamu Ya Salaam, a poet, author and educator based in New Orleans, says that American artists didn't lose their innocence on 9/11. They lost their ignorance. "When someone says they have lost their sense of innocence or sense of purpose, I ask them, 'how could you have been innocent and grew up in America? And what sense of purpose did you have if you lost it in that attack?'

When Lucy Lippard, a White woman, wrote "Mixed Blessings: New Art in Multicultural America" (Reprinted by The New Press in 1990) she stepped into a fray that would lead her to also conclude that the argument over multiculturalism was really all about politics.

"I'm on the left and I make no bones about it," says Lippard, a writer, cultural critic and activist based in New Mexico. "But people in the mainstream have a difficult time with issue-oriented art. People in the mainstream art world just dislike the idea that art can have any kind of social impact. And I think that's because art has been something owned and traded by the ruling class, which likes to think of art as objects, rather than as a way of having a voice."

The African American community, even when its voice has been muted, has always been compassionate. We have mourned and fought for this country, even when it has not mourned or fought for us. Even in the aftermath of this current tragedy, when images of heroism and grief have not represented our suffering, when there has been a double standard of treatment and compensation for many Black victims, when we have reflected on discrimination experienced from police departments, fire companies, the financial sector and the military, the primary instinct in the Black community has been still to embrace all. Even if we think that many Whites are feeling the sense of insecurity and terror that Blacks have faced for generations, the dominant tone has been one of empathy, not scorn. When Cornel West spoke to VIBE magazine, he spoke of how 9/11 had "niggerized" America:

"The first thing that came to my mind was that that America was being niggerized—learning what it meant to be unsafe, unprotected, subjugated to arbitrary violence and hated by people who have power you," West said. "I thought of the immense suffering of the people in those buildings. Then I thought of the lynch victims in American history who were castrated. And I actually witnessed the castration of American civilization, the two phallic symbols being completely cut off."

By exploring the power and emotion behind the images of Sept. 11, this essay is not intended to belittle them or the pain that they represent. But, at the same time, the current tragedy should not be used to further belittle and marginalize images and art borne of pain and tragedies in the larger world. If a Zimbabwean creates art about the death of an entire continent from AIDS, that is not a lesser art or image. If a Brazilian creates an ode to the destruction of the rainforest and the world's ecosystem, that is not a lesser creation than the expressions that come from 9/11. These expressions are not in a separate category of "victim art."

If there is really a unity that has come from 9/11, perhaps it will be this sense of shared humanity and suffering. But will it be? Or will we, with our dark skins, still be the "other," unmourned?

Esther Iverem's reviews also appear on BET.com.

-- February 21, 2002

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