Open Casket (2016) is a medium-sized painting by Dana Schutz, a white female artist. The painting’s inclusion in the 2017 Whitney Biennial garnered public scrutiny over its representation of Emmett Till. In 1955, Till, a 14-year-old-boy, was kidnapped from his relative’s home in Money, Mississippi. He was beaten, tortured, and mutilated, and his murderers were acquitted. Schutz's painting depicts Till’s face and chest. Part of the canvas that contains his face is even raised to emphasize the bloating that resulted from Till's torture and drowning.
Although the piece was initially seen as an empathetic portrayal, protesters demanded its removal and destruction. Artist Hannah Black, a Black artist based in Berlin, wrote a letter to the curators of the show asking them to destroy the painting because “it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun.” This led many to question Schutz’s motives behind creating the piece.
Schutz’s work across her practice concerns the grotesque or unorthodox. But what are the ethics of centering an icon of racialized violence within a larger aesthetic tradition of the grotesque? Is Till’s image grotesque to Schutz? Should it be? Is his image just a passing interest to her? Did Schutz intend to make a political statement with her work, bridging racial trauma in the past with anti-black violence in the present? Or was it just another art exercise? Who is her audience?
As these questions suggest, Schutz’s abstract representation of Till has become a spectacle that diverts attention away from the story behind his death. We instead focus on the artist, Schutz, a white woman depicting a Black story, and that in itself is a spectacle. When the piece debuted, Schutz received praise for paying respect to Till’s memory by acknowledging our country’s horrific past. However, it is obvious that her race and gender played a major role in her success. After all, the Biennial featured work about anti-black violence by artists of African decent, but they did not receive the same amount of acclaim. This is not to say that those who review art are racist, or that “white art” is more valuable. This is to say that more people seem to favor the spectacle of Black death that Schutz created. Instead of focusing on Till and his brutal murder, we obsess over a white woman's attempt at highlighting white shame with her work. As a result, though the piece is not for sale, Schutz profits from her image of Till’s body. From this perspective, she turns Black trauma into a commodity. As Hannah Black states in her letter, “those non-black artists who sincerely wish to highlight the shameful nature of white violence should first of all stop treating Black pain as raw material.” This brings me back to an earlier question: Who is Schutz’s audience? Did she want to show Black viewers that she “understands” Black trauma? Did she want white Americans to acknowledge the story of Emmett Till? In my view, Schutz will never be able to understand Black pain because she has never had to live it. Therefore, she cannot tell its stories.
