Only doing things that one is not supposed to do and saying things that one is not supposed to say promise relief from a climate of stagnating sensibility. Being disreputable beckons. Open up. Reinstate surprise. ["Who's We?"]
Hah! I love it.
Speaking of saying things that one is not supposed to say, recall the 2017 controversy in which the artist Hannah Black requested that the Whitney remove Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Tilll’s body, Open Casket, from its Biennial show. Not only remove it; destroy it (see Calvin Tomkins, “Troubling Pictures,” The New Yorker, April 10, 2017). Black’s letter was widely condemned as an incitement to action that infringes artistic freedom. That was my own view of the matter, too. But recently I read a piece that changed my perspective. Charlotte Shane, in her review of Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom: Songs of Care and Constraint, in the current Bookforum, writes,
I, for one, found Black’s letter exhilarating, not because it filled me with vengeful glee but because it pushed against the status quo with exactitude and moral clarity. It expanded my sense of social possibility. It offered “magic—magic hard to come by elsewhere, and which can make life feel more worth living,” as Nelson writes of the art she implores us to leave alone. ["Free Fallin' "]
I don’t agree with Black’s request, but I admire her for having the ovaries to make it. Is this the kind of subversiveness that Schjeldahl has in mind? Probably not. He’s seeking “gratuitous transcendence,” “unforced pleasure.” But he is advocating “being disreputable,” and that’s what I relate to. Something Norman Mailer wrote many years ago (I’m quoting it from memory): “Better to expire a devil in the fire than an angel in the wings.”
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