See Them ah Come, But We Nah Run

Tom Robinson in Victoria Park, 1978. Photo cred: Syd Shelton.

April 1978: In the middle of 70,000 young people who’ve come to rock against racism, me and two school friends join everyone around us singing, “Sing if you’re glad to be gay…” If we dared utter these words at school we’d be beaten up – which is what happened to two lads caught kissing in the bushes. There’s no sense of threat in this crowd today, singing along with Britain’s first openly gay pop star Tom Robinson. We’ve marched five miles from Trafalgar Square waving Anti-Nazi League lollipop placards to be part of this Carnival Against the Nazis and we will be leaving having expressed our solidarity with gay people. What an amazing day.

Leaving the area is not so much fun. As hundreds of coaches pull away from Victoria Park handfuls of racists crawl out of pubs to heckle the thousands leaving. They are hardly brave to shout at departing vehicles, but the three of us have lost our gang of school friends so we slip past the racists searching for a bus home to South East London. Meanwhile skinheads in a pub in Deptford make one of the local punk bands play “Happy Birthday” for Adolf Hitler. The majority of Deptford voters put their cross against anti-immigrant Nazi parties in the 1976 local elections. People are divided.

May: Our Sixth Form is 98% white. Racism is not as bad as it was in lower years, but there’s fear and ignorance about immigration.

Inspired by the carnival, me and some school friends agree to leaflet Eltham High Street against the NF. We meet outside the library (we are sixth formers) and an ANL man arrives on a motorbike with a pile of leaflets. As we hand them out some people are hostile, some welcome the leaflets and most don’t react at all. One bloke sees the swastika on the leaflet say National Front is a Nazi Front and sees red. “I fought against the Nazis in the war,” he spits. “We’re Anti-Nazis,” we say. “I don’t care what kind of Nazis you are, bugger off!” When we manage to clear up the confusion and he tells us about chalking slogans on the streets in the 1930s against Mosley’s Blackshirts and sticking posters on the backs of buses.

June: Despite being busy with exams, me and my mate Neal go to a gig at the Albany in Deptford. It’s a Rock Against Racism (RAR) gig, raising money for local black kids arrested under the SUS stop and search laws, and we’ve come for punk band Alternative TV. Also on the bill is reggae act Misty in Roots, from Southall. Reggae is too slow for us but there’s a toughness to Misty’s music, “See them ah come, but we naa run.” The Albany is a good venue and home to the local music scene which is growing under the jokey slogan Today the Albany, Tomorrow the World!  July 1978 I finish my exams and, without any plans of college or career, sign on the dole. There’s a real fear of unemployment amongst kids at school. The far right have been using this fact to blame immigrants and now Margaret Thatcher, new leader of the opposition, makes a speech about people feeling “swamped by an alien culture.”

Racism is moving right into the main stream. The Sex Pistols sing of No Future… I wonder what ours will be. The Albany is fire bombed on 14th July. The next morning a note is pushed through the door of the gutted building which reads, “GOT YOU.” Within days the Albany fly-posted all around Deptford a poster showing the burnt out dance floor where we’d enjoyed the gig two weeks ago. Today the Albany, the poster says above the image and below it, Tomorrow the World? It’s no longer a joke.

August: My 19 year old brother, Stuart, has joined the Socialist Workers Party and encourages me to go to a Rebel weekend of talks and workshops for young people. In the Polytechnic of Central London, there’s about 40 or 50 teenagers and students in their twenties. Stand out speaker is a little old man with wild hair and an almost impossible accent – he’s full of energy and even funny at times. The discussion about fighting the fascists is a mix of bravado and paranoia. I have a go at the dismissive tone one of the students takes towards my brother, but my brother takes the guy’s side. That confuses me. When I get home my A level results are waiting – D and E. Lucky I have no plans to go to college.

September: At the Rebel weekend I heard about a five day march for the Right to Work (RTW). Work? Who needs it? My ambitions lie in my punk band. My brother argues, “Without the right to work you’ll never have the right not to work.” I join the RTW march from Bethnal Green Hospital occupied by staff against cuts, heading towards the TUC conference in Brighton, calling on the trade unions to save jobs, stop cuts and fight unemployment. The march is like the 1930s Hunger march of the unemployed from Jarrow, this time the lead banner reads Anger on the March. Following the reggae band Misty on the back of a lorry, four hundred teenagers and twenty-something’s from Lancashire and Glasgow and south Wales pound a path across London dressed like a rag tag army in bright orange jackets. RAR provide bands and discos in the evenings and everyone sleeps in huge circus marquees. One night the tents are pitched together and a stirring speaker whips up a storm like a old time religious preacher. After five years of betrayal by the Labour government most people present are well aware that Labour will not solve their problems, instead he argues the way to defeat unemployment, racism and sexism is socialist revolution. A debate ensues but I’m exhausted and fall asleep. On the last night before reaching Brighton Tom Robinson arrives and under a huge oak tree gets everyone singing his radical rock songs. During the song,“Glad to be Gay,” joyous kissing breaks out amongst the marchers. This is a very long way from school and I’m glad I’m here.

The next morning all four hundred of us pour down the hill into Brighton in our orange jackets like a stream of red hot lava. Anger on the March. The sense of solidarity is now so strong that when the police harass us we respond as one – and the cops get much more than they bargained for. But they punish us with arrests when we refuse to leave town – only releasing the detainees until they do. I return home to find a letter confirming I have been successful in my job application as Computer Operator for Lewisham council – yet I have never touched a computer in my life. Looking at the letter I remember the saying, “If you liked school, you’ll love work.”

* * *

The first “Carnival Against the Nazis” was such a success that 6 months later there’s another one in South London. But this time the NF outwitted the anti-Nazis.

While thousands of us dance and march behind bands on the back of lorries all the way from Hyde Park to Brixton, the Nazis hold a rally in Whitechapel, the age-old immigrant area of London and where the fascist Black Shirts were stopped in Cable Street in 1936.

An admission of the mistake and apology is in the following week’s Socialist Worker.

October: My family are always out at meetings – my Dad often goes to more than one each evening. There’s no way I’d do that, but because of my love of music and hatred of racism I go to a RAR organising meeting in Lewisham – plus I’m hoping to get a gig for my punk band.

Sitting in a circle twenty people discuss bands, venues and PA hire companies. One of the punky kids has a clear plastic bag over his head for the first part of the meeting, everyone ignores him even as the bag steams up. Suddenly he tears a hole in the bag and speaks… “Some of the punks in Bromley where I live are Nazis like my cousin and some are anti-nazi like me and my sister. You should put on a concert there.” Despite some chuckles at the plastic bag, people agree to do the gig.

November: I start shifts working on the town hall’s computer. I join the union, which should be easy as my dad is the Branch Secretary. But I haven’t spoken to him for nearly a year.

The council’s social workers go on all-out strike. The rest of us council workers are not on strike, but the social workers set up picket lines to get solidarity from Posties and other workers bringing deliveries. Hoping to spread the action the Branch Secretary refuses to cross the picket lines and management threaten to suspend him.

A mass meeting of over a thousand members votes to take action unless the threat is lifted. Am I about to be on strike for the first time?

Management step back, which leaves the strikers fighting alone. They stay out for what is called the Winter of Discontent – the final bitter months of a Labour Government who were elected when the Tories were beaten by the miners in 1974. After three months they win a 30% pay rise and their conditions are transformed.

RAR carnival in Leeds, 1981. Photo cred: Syd Shelton.

February 1979: I hear talk that Rock Against Racism is considered by other anti-fascists to be the soft end of the movement. Our motley crew are drawn together because of our love of music more than our ability to physically confront Nazis, but each month we make ourselves a potential target for the local fascists by putting on gigs in the very places the Nazis are gaining a foothold.

A good example is the gig we set up at in suburban Bromley’s Labour Club for the Punk In The Plastic Bag. The night includes a couple of Bromley punk bands alongside a reggae sound system from Deptford and luckily draws a big enough crowd of black and white youth to make the Nazis keep their distance. The Nazis hate seeing the white and black kids dancing together and the night helps to break down barriers and create unity.

April: Back in 1977 when the NF marched through Lewisham the anti-fascists were divided. Some argued for “peaceful protest” while others called for physical confrontation with the Front’s march. In what became known as the Battle of Lewisham, the local black youth joined the militant lefties and knocked the NF off the street. Since then blocking and stopping of the Front has been the accepted approach.

Leicester is where the National Front had one of their best results in the previous election and are hoping to secure their place as the third party of British politics. They plan to march through the town centre with flags flying and drums beating. Anti-fascists have other ideas.

Coaches from both sides pour into Leicester all morning. Thousands of our side take over the city centre and rain rocks down on the master race when the cops stupidly parade them past a building site. (“I got hit by a rock against racism,” moans a copper when he later catches us fly-posting for RAR).

Two nights later in Southall a protest outside an NF meeting sounds like it’ll be a quiet affair compared to our riot in Leicester, so I spend the evening printing pages for our punk fanzine including our report from Leicester. But my mate Neal, and my brother Stuart, make the journey across London and feel like they’ve entered an occupied city, with police vans patrolling as local Anti-Nazis fill the streets in anticipation.

Cops at the Battle of Lewisham, 1977. Photo cred: Syd Shelton.

Stuart says, “That was a wild night. The police were like a conquering army, I got so fed up of the police transit vans trying to run me over, that I threw a can of paint across their windscreen. I was quite scared that night, we were getting the shit kicked out of us.”

Neal and Stuart got out just as the police’s Special Patrol Group were let off the leash.

I am asleep when my Mum bursts into my room the next morning – what is she doing? – she never comes into my teenage bedroom and anyway I am on the late shift at work.

“They killed one of us,” she says.

My Mum knew Blair Peach as a “nice gently spoken man” as they were both in the National Union of Teachers Rank and File group. She told me Blair taught ESN (“Educationally Sub-Normal”) kids and that National Front members had pulled him off his bike whilst cycling to and from the school in East London.

Going on anti-fascist marches and protests has always exhilarating and terrifying, adrenaline-fueled affairs – but from that day on they feel different again… It isn’t a game.

The general election is the first time I have the right to vote. On the candidate notice outside the polling station “NAZI SCUM” is scrawled helpfully against the name of the National Front candidate. That makes me smile, especially as I recognise my brother’s terrible handwriting.

In the polling booth, as I pick up the pencil tied to a piece of string, I remember Paul Foot saying at the Rebel weekend – “They say they are trusting you to choose who runs the country, but they don’t even trust you with the pencil.”

All the campaigning, marches, gigs, leafleting and protests has had an effect and the National Front get a knock back which they never recover from. But Thatcher wins the election and you probably know how that turns out…

This article originally appeared in two parts at the website for Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century.

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Colin Revolting was in his first punk band in 1977 while still at school in London and joined the revolutionary socialist movement soon thereafter. He is presently active with the theater company Revolting Peasants.

On Artists and Radical Ideas: A Response to Adam Turl

In a recent piece for Red Wedge Adam Turl discusses the origin, development, and subsequent art historical significance of Dada, calling it “one of the most historically important art movements of the 20th century.” Turl is surely right in characterizing Dada this way, as the provocative hijinks and derisive works of leading Dadaists such as George Grosz, Hugo Ball, Hannah Höch and Marcel Duchamp remain influential to this day. But I do not think that Turl’s approach tells us very much about the movement, given its lack of detail and woolly terminology. How, for example, are we to apprehend what Turl refers to as art’s “social-spiritual function”? What does this even mean?

“Art wants to be liberated,” Turl argues, “and that is why so many of the artists of the 20th century aligned themselves — at some level — with radical political ideas.” Art, strictly speaking, does not want anything of course, because ideas and objects are inanimate; Turl’s suggestion that 20th century artists aligned themselves with radical political ideas and movements in order to secure the “liberation” of art is in my view similarly misleading, for it assumes that artists’ goal is to win autonomy for their art. While most artists doubtless wish to live their lives as artists unencumbered by the constraints of market forces, it does not follow that these artists would also prefer their art to be dissociated from particular contexts or freed from institutional frameworks. This was certainly the case for the Berlin Dadaists, whose opposition to the notion that art belonged to a separate experiential realm distinct from the cacophony of everyday life was directly tied to their attempt to garner a working class audience.

German soldiers and workers marching in Berlin, November 1918

Winning an audience for Dada among Berlin’s working classes had potential material benefits. Tectonic changes following Germany’s industrialization in the 1860s/1870s increased access to education and allowed more young people (mostly men, a few women) to become skilled artists around the turn of the century — in the 1907 national census over 8500 people characterized themselves as “artists,” a significant jump from prior years. [1] However the power of conservative academies, limited number of commercial galleries, and general lack of exposure reduced most artists to living hand-to-mouth, particularly if they chose to work in a “modern” style. Rare were the artists like George Grosz who could depend on an adroit dealer. [2] Moreover, as Robin Lenman argues in his study of the early 20th century German art world, inflationary pressures that developed during the war and continued through the early 1920s inordinately affected the Bildungsbürgertum (cultured middle classes), whose financial support had propped up the pre-war market for visual art. [3] To obtain the acclaim and financial backing of the German working classes — or else a state-enterprise they controlled—would have been a great boon to artists and gone some distance toward overcoming these concerns. Such a solution was not outside the realm of possibility in the revolutionary years following World War I. In Russia, for instance, the victorious Bolsheviks abolished the private dealer system in 1918, making the young workers’ state the sole patron of contemporary art. That same year the state spent twenty-six million rubles on art, a considerable sum at that time. [4]

Addressing a working class audience necessitated the use of materials and points of view that registered with workers’ everyday experience, which typically excluded the rarefied world of art exhibitions. Visual culture for lower class Berliners comprised such unremarkable items as the illustrated newspaper read with friends during a lunch break, the advertisements littering the city, and the melodrama film shown in the back of a loud, smoky neighborhood bar. The Dadaists’ incorporation of photographs, newspaper clippings, and random text, in combination with their focus on crippled soldiers, anarchic cityscapes, broken homes, twisted men, women, and machines, was a conscious attempt to present a critical realism that spoke to the visual reality workers witnessed on a day to day basis. Such techniques likewise sought to present workers with a cultural alternative to the labor movement.

The German Social Democratic Party, along with its trade union affiliates, had long held mass media to be a threat to class consciousness, viewing workers as susceptible to potentially enfeebling and immoral influences, particularly women. In an article entitled “Against the Stupefying of Women in the Cinema,” published before the war, a party member writes:

For Social Democrats, the cinema’s most harmful effect has to be that it turns the proletariat away from the political and economic efforts of its class, that it lames the will never to rest in the struggle for freedom, that it steals time from men and women, distracting them from their continuing education, that it lays waste to the minds of our growing youth. For this reason, we must turn decidedly against the cinema as it stands today, and not merely against individual films. [5]

Efforts to democratize art and literature, so as to provide workers access to a cultural heritage that had previously been denied them, was paired with the party’s disdain for cultural fare outside the bounds of the labor movement. According to Heinrich Schulz, who along with Clara Zetkin formulated the party’s educational programme in 1906, “[a]rt should help in the class struggle by giving the worker a respite from the noise of battle — but neither too much, nor too often to weaken his political resolve.” [6]

Given the Social Democrats’ hostility toward mass media and narrow conception of art (the Communists were not much better at this time), it seems to me that the Berlin Dadaists hoped to position themselves as representatives and defenders of the workers’ desire for an art that spoke to them as equals. Wieland Herzfelde calls Dada the “Champion of dilettantism” in a text that accompanied the First International Dada Fair, explaining:

Throughout the centuries, the unequal distribution of opportunities for living and developing has produced in the realm of art, as in all other spheres, scandalous circumstances: On the one side a clique of so-called experts and talents that, in part through decades of training, in part through patronage and doggedness, in part through inherited specialized abilities, has monopolized all matters of valuation in art; while on the other side, the mass of human beings with their modest and naïve need to represent, communicate, and constructively transform the idea within themselves and the goings-on in the world around them, has been suppressed by the clique of trendsetters. [7]

Channeling widespread anger towards the German bourgeoisie was another potential means of securing working class support, or so they believed. Various events that preceded the Fair were intentionally provocative so as to elicit the wrath of bourgeois audiences and the authorities, the better to establish the Dadaists’ radical credentials and gain notoriety. In his 1946 autobiography George Grosz recalls yelling “You old heap of shit down there, yes, you with the umbrella, you dumb twit!” at a well-dressed audience member during an early Dada event and nearly all subsequent performances were forcibly terminated by the municipal police or the owners of the venue where they were held to prevent rioting. [8]

In the end the Dadaists failed in their efforts to garner support from the Berlin working classes. Though it was publicized widely, only three hundred or so tickets were sold to the International Dada Fair and there is no way of knowing with any precision how many (if any) of these tickets were purchased by workers—it did not help that the exhibition was located in the fashionable Tiergarten district of the city and that the admission price of 3.3o Marks was rather steep for lower class Berliners. In a review published five days after the Fair opened, Gerturd Alexander, the main cultural critic for the German Communist Party’s daily newspaper Die Rote Fahne, explicitly advised workers not to go, writing:

One could dismiss Dada as being merely deluded or pathological if their works were not so ridiculously small, petty and pathetically irrelevant in comparison with the grand liberation struggle of the proletariat, who alone is serious about taking down bourgeois society. The proletariat will lead and win this struggle without the independent crusade against art and culture undertaken by a bourgeois literary clique. The proletariat has no understanding for such perversities, for which the sensation-seeking bourgeoisie of the west [half of Berlin] will pay. [9]

There are a number of reasons, all open to dispute, as to why Berlin Dada did not succeed in finding an audience among the radicalized working classes. Was it that their provocative works had lost their edge, as a review of the Dada Fair by the prominent satirist Kurt Tucholsky insinuates?[10] Did increasing political differences between members lead to an increasingly incoherent modus operandi? Did the Dadaists fail to reckon with the workers’ near total ambivalence toward modern visual art? Could it be that, like the fate of most every avant-garde movement of the 20th century, we are confronted here with a case of missed connection, an incongruence between support for radical politics and an interest in radical art?

Pursuing such questions necessitates further historical inquiry attuned to the vicissitudes of artistic production and reception. Visual art, in my opinion, is not a spiritual enterprise or somehow “magical,” but is instead a form of communication. As a form of communication it is highly variable, both in terms of what it conveys and what it constitutes, but visual art always puts forward a message of some kind, even if it remains imperceptible. (Barnett Newman and many fellow Abstract Expressionist painters were adamant that their works retained subject matter, in spite of being abstract; Newman went to so as to claim that, if his work were understood properly, “it would be the end of state capitalism and totalitarianism.”[11]) For this reason I would argue that visual art is ultimately a mundane activity. In saying so I in no way intend to belittle the work of individual artists or imply that no works excel beyond their humble origins; rather I am suggesting that, when discussing artworks past or present, we not lose sight of the all too human reality in which art operates, the messy drama of manipulative patrons, supercilious instructors, malicious critics, reactionary connoisseurs, overrated hacks, brown-nosing acolytes, liars, cheats, and buffoons who have always existed alongside those who, day in, day out, struggle to make their artistic labor pay. The Berlin Dadaists may indeed have perceived the revolutionary events that arose in Germany after World War I as a chance to liberate themselves from the influence and decisions of external arbiters, but the autonomy they practiced was not only illusory, it was barren. Without the support of a working class audience (or any substantial audience for that matter), what difference did it make if Dada stood “on the side of the revolutionary proletariat”?

George Grosz (left) and Bertolt Brecht (right)

The Berlin Dadaists never could shake off the taint of being middle class artists, despite their political commitments and embrace of dilettantism (which was only a pretense, for these were trained and highly skilled artists; their works prove it). Much as they tried to downplay and lampoon their own social position, they were never taken seriously as working class equals. “You hate the bourgeoisie not because you are a proletarian, but because you are an artist,” Brecht once told Grosz.[12] Ironically, it was as illustrators, graphic designers, and caricaturists for the German Communist Party and Willi Münzenberg’s numerous cultural ventures that Heartfield, Grosz, Schlichter, and other sometime Dadaists were able to prove their political reliability, gain some financial stability, and reach the working class audience they had sought. Until the party established a centralized agitprop studio in 1926 these artists had considerable leeway regarding the content and form of their work; in fact, the satirical aesthetic employed by these artists during their Dada years more or less became the reigning style for the party for several years in the mid-1920s (much to Gertrud Alexander’s chagrin one imagines). Grosz drifted away from the party after a time, but Heartfield continued to produce posters, book jackets, and newspaper layouts for the party notwithstanding the imbecilic policies and outright falsehoods it propagated into the 1930s. Heartfield seems not to have been particularly bothered or restrained by his art’s lack of autonomy, as he was quite willing to construct images condemning fascism as well as images celebrating the (completely bogus) achievements of Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan (both of which are now well-regarded artworks I might add). We may object to Heartfield’s politics, but we would be hard pressed to deny that, for an artist, sacrificing autonomy for popularity and renown, not to mention the stability of guaranteed pay, makes sense.

This raises a series of further questions. If it is not autonomy per se that artists seek, but instead the means for sustaining their practice and reaching an audience, how might this impact our conception of 20th century avant-garde movements? How might it affect our conception of cultural politics and the political significance of art? Finally, as activists committed to the renewal of a viable socialist project we ought to consider how artists might or might not seek to relate to such a project. Do socialist politics resonate with artists’ lives? Do artists radicalize differently than others?

Footnotes

1. These changes are discussed by historian Peter Paret in his study of the Wilhemine-era artworld, The Berlin Secession: Modernism and Its Enemies in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1980).
2. Grosz’s dealer during the early years of the Weimar Republic was Hans Goltz, who owned a gallery in Munich and published the art magazine Der Ararat. Goltz represented Grosz as far back as 1916, when the artist’s other regular patron was, surprising for an anti-militarist, a wholesaler to the Germany army. Beth Irwin Lewis’ study of Grosz, George Grosz: Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), remains one of the best on this artist during the interwar period, second only to Barbara McCloskey’s, George Grosz and the Commuist Party. Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918 to 1936 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
3. Robin Lenman, Artists and Society in Germany, 1850-1919 (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 1997).
4. For further details regarding this history see Maria Gogh, “Futurist Museology,” Modernism/Modernity 10, no. 2 (2003).
5. Roland, “Against the Stupefying of Women in the Cinema,” from an unpublished collection of writings on early German cinema edited by Anton Kaes.
6. W. L. Guttsman, Workers’ Culture in Weimar Germany. Between Tradition and Commitment. (Oxford; New York: Berg, 1990), 31.
7. Wieland Herzfelde, “Introduction to the First International Dada Fair,” trans. Brigid Doherty, October 105 (Summer 2003), 101.
8. Quoted in Hanne Bergius, “Dada Triumphs!” Dada Berlin, 1917-1923: Artistry of Polarities, Montages-Metamechanics-Manifestations, trans. Brigitte Pichon (New Haven, Connecticut: G. K. Hall & Co., 2003), 52. This book is the translation of Bergius’s earlier Montage und Metamechanik. Dada Berlin — Artistik von Polaritäten(Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2000).
9. Gertrud Alexander, “Dada (Austellung am Lützowufer 13, Kunstsalon Buchard,” Die Rote Fahne, July 25, 1920, reprinted in Die Rote Fahne: Kritik, Theorie, Feuilleton. 1918-1933., ed. Manfred Brauneck (München: Fink, 1973), 77.
10. “The exhibition itself looks like a messy junkshop. A fat stuffed sailor hangs on the ceiling and looks down blessedly from upon the turmoil/mob of old hatboxes, cardboard, rusted nails, very improperly placed dentures and speckled paintings below. It is somewhat quiet in the small exhibition, and no one is outraged anymore. Dada — big deal.” Kurt Tucholsky, “Dada,” Berliner Tageblatt, July, 20, 1920, reprinted in Dada Berlin. Texte, Manifeste, Aktionen., ed. Karl Riha (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun. GmbH & Co., 1977), 125-136.
11. Newman’s varied statements on art and society can be found in Barnett Newman. Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill (New York: Knopf, 1990).
12. Quoted in David Clay Large, Berlin (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 200.

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Grant Mandarino is a PhD candidate in the History of Art at the University of Michigan.

A Subtlety, or the Question of Whether Blackness Can Have Body Sovereignty

I never went to Brooklyn. Maybe that makes me one of the lucky ones? My first encounter with  A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby exhibit was via Facebook. A well intentioned friend had tagged my name above an article about the work. Upon seeing the cover photo, I avoided the post for two weeks. Although I dutifully clicked the “like” button, I could not view the content. Like most people, I was overwhelmed by the Sphinx.

Oh, that Sphinx. Initially, I could say nothing comprehensible. “Embarrassed pain, flung naked, and why?” were just a few soundbites sprinting over the hyperventilation. But as a long fan of Kara Walker, I gave the exhibit another try. An Art 21 exclusive provided my second chance. I got to hear Walker personally discuss her work and provide some historical context.  In the video she stated a sugar subtlety was a delicacy made exclusively for and in the image of it’s consumer.  The consumer being particularly “royalty, nobility and clergy.” With this new understanding, I immediately thought “is this a work about body sovereignty?!”

In Global Feminist Ethics edited by Rebecca Whisnant, and Peggy DesAutels, it states that:

A person’s body is her territory — not something she merely owns, but something she is. In much the ways that peoples typically require and seek sovereign territory to support and make possible their common life, a person must have effective sovereignty over her body in order to enact fully her humanity and her particular identity as a person (p.161).

So to me, in the safety of my apartment, Walker was inviting me to eat myself. To partake in effective sovereignty over myself as a person, by reflecting on my own history. She was asking me to bite into what it still means to be black and a woman in America. Here was my image on a national scale, and now was the time to  digest it.

Like the mammoth mammy, the experience is at once concrete and ephemeral. Concrete in the sense that the politics playing upon my body are fixed into a gargantuan, material structure; otherwise known as the American caste system. However like sugar, the construction is ephemeral. Common granulated white sugar only lasts indefinitely, if it is untouched. Such a fact debunks the impervious impression of a white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy  and reminds us that anything is erodible through resistance. What is created can be crushed.

Thus in my seclusion, the taste of the Marvelous Sugar Baby was not sweet, but I believed it was mine! At last, it was mine! My territory had been returned; my sovereignty recognized. By being served this over due delicacy, I was avenging my ancestors, whose limbs and lives were commonly mutilated in the sugar mills, and who did not get to have an authority over their own likeness—their own humanity. Far away from the actual exhibit, I believed this symbolic gesture offered authority back where it belonged. Other people, white people, could look at it, but surely they knew it wasn’t theirs to taste? Surely they understood the irony; the subtlety’s edible tradition of power, and self ownership? Surely, they knew it was not their’s to make definitive decisions about. It was not theirs to eat.

This was, at last, our subtlety.

Or so I thought. And then I learned what really was going on in Brooklyn.

* * *

A friend told me.

We were discussing the sculpture and she asked me if I had heard about any inappropriate behavior at the exhibit. I told her I had not.

With a heavy heart, she sighed and finally admitted, “Some white people going to this show — they’re just acting crazy.” I cringed immediately knowing what she meant. The horror wouldn’t come from people being disrespectful — but straight up colonial.

The first essay I read on the matter was “Why I Yelled at the Kara Walker Exhibit” by Nicholas Powers. Poor Mr. Powers. He hoped that with the work’s full title, “A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant,” that people would have some sense of reservation. That they would be considerate of the ongoing historical pain conveyed here. Nope.

Among the antics, Powers states he witnessed a white man folding his arms “gangsta” style as he posed with his son — next to one of the molasses sculptures of a slave boy. Next an elderly white woman took a photo of her daughter flippantly smiling next to said slave boy. Finally Powers describes, “I forced myself to go to the backside of the statue and saw there what I expected to see, white visitors making obscene poses in front of the ass and the vulva of the ‘Subtlety.’ A heavy sigh fell out of me. ‘Don’t they see this is about rape?’ I muttered as another visitor stuck out his tongue.”

Smaller components of A Subtlety.

Finally such behavior was not deterred by the presence of the We Are Free project. Powers states members of the group handed out stickers, that stated “We are Free” to all audience members in order “to remind white visitors that the descendants of slaves were in the room, present and watching the whites pose in front of their history like tourists.”

I deeply emphasize with Powers' pain. However I cannot agree with his conclusion.

Powers states “Yes, Walker has the freedom to express herself. But what do you expect will happen if you put a giant sculpture of a nude black woman, as a Mammy no less, in a public space?… Instead of challenging the racial power dynamic of white supremacy, Walker and Creative Time… simply made the Domino Sugar Factory a safe space for it…. sad thing is thousands of visitors are still seeing a sculpture that symbolizes the history of racial violence with no guidelines on how to interpret it.”

Again I understand Powers’ rage. The evident trauma he and others are feeling is justified and mirrored in my own heart. Yet, I cannot concede that this behavior should be policed or erased from the exhibit. Why? Because it is revealing. And I think that is the point. Walker cannot control the structural politics Powers is referencing. In a material strata, any place becomes safe for oppression. Even if the exhibit handed out cue cards, it would not disrupt the caste system. However the exhibit can highlight it’s existence—which is particularly important in a country that loves to claim that it is “post-racial.”

Now it is essential to remember the intent of Walker’s work. Walker has stated, “My work is all about the now. I approach this work the same way a Harlequin Romance novelist might approach it, all the history, the petticoats, it’s all artifice, just a ruse to tantalize the viewer.” Cunningly, Walker deposits what appears to be a relic, and it’s only after you’re engrossed do you realize that the narrative, and the politics, are contemporary.

This is why the Subtlety is so exposed. This is why it is not protected. Powers is right, the work is about rape. The work is about ongoing imposition. It is about the lack of body sovereignty. In a white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy the oppressed cannot have full autonomy. The power dynamic will always be askew. Thus self ownership of one’s image, history and narrative can  never be secure, they are always at risk of being hijacked,  and dishonored.

The lack of body sovereignty the exhibit displays is further depicted in the article Why The Behavior of White People Shouldn’t Be Policed At the Kara Walker “Sugar Baby” Exhibit.

In this particular article, Charing Bell, describes how she and her friends decided to process the molasses children and the Subtlety. These women of color decided to be intimate with their history. They decided to pose affectionately with the work. Finally they decided to make an ironic statement. Bell states,  “I suggested that we pay homage to another exploited black woman, Sarah Baartman, and twerk for our own pleasures in front of Mammy Sphinx. ‘It’s a reclamation as much as it is a diss,’ I said reassuringly.” However the rest of her group is hesitant. Charing continues stating, “There was concern about jobs and appearances, but I suspected that underneath it all, there was a fear of what the gawking white folks might say and what they thought. So half of our group decided to split the difference and take a back shot – just like the girls on Instagram, YouTube and in music videos, whose own sugar is often misunderstood, misappropriated and flat-out objectified. It was our way of showing solidarity while drawing connections to the Mammy Sphinx and the other kinds of sugar babies throughout history.”

But this beautiful moment of solidarity is of course interrupted, and imposed upon. Before the girls can even take their own personal photograph,  “hordes of peering white eyes” descend and begin photographing the women—of course without their permission. A crossroads is presented. Do they continue?  Charring states, “It was disarming… We could choose to scream at them, defend and hide ourselves away from the gaze somewhere in the corner. Or we could smirk and throw up our own figas* to their intrusion. We chose the latter, and my only regret was that we didn’t twerk.” (*A figa symbol is a physical sign of opposition or insult in Portuguese).

Although the article appears to have a triumphant end, one must question why the intrusive white gaze, is more threatening than the prospect of losing one’s job? Or rather do the women sense that the standards and sanctions set by these gazes, can disturb their jobs? Here we get an implicit sense of how much power is tied to whiteness. For the individual gazes themselves would mean nothing, if they were not  able to create material consequences.

The intrusions depart from mere disrespect and become colonialism, when they are able to bind and define us. For instance presently we have learned that a society that centers an imperial white gaze can ban our natural hair from our professions, murder our unarmed with impunity, decide when our companionships become gangs, choose without warrant when to search our persons, homes and vehicles, and finally dismiss our eye witness accounts of deaths and abuse, as if they were conjecture and not evidence.

Thus in a failed democracy the unprotected Sphinx is accurate.

The co-option of the subtlety is accurate.

For, as Global Feminist Ethics would state, “ the systematic deprivation of bodily sovereignty defines the oppressed condition (p. 161)”

We are not free.

* * *

So where do we go from here?

We understand that art can be a call for action and we face that the systematic denial of body sovereignty can only be cured by systematic action. We must have civic engagement. We must organize. We must demand legislative measures that dismantle the police state. We must fight for due protection and a living wage in the work force. We must highlight and protest the intentional conditions that keep black civilians in economic, educational and political underclasses. Finally, we must understand that the whole system is intentional and intersectional. We must find our allies. We must connect the global dots.

Recently citizens grappling with militarized occupation in Palestine were giving protesters in Ferguson, Missouri tips on how to handle tear gas.

We must understand that we are not alone.

Finally, when Kara Walker was discussing her initial associations with sugar, and the sugar industry, she concluded with, “Ruins… everything was just in ruins.”

I’m tired of ruins. I know you’re tired of ruins.

Yes, the state is tall and appears indomitable.  But like the Sphinx it was made on the backs of our labor. It could not be here without our efforts. It can be broken by our efforts.

Granulated, white sugar lasts indefinitely only if it remains untouched.

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Melanie West is a cartoonist and writer in Rochester, New York.