Open Casket by Dana Schutz
When I went to the Whitney Museum on April 17th, 2017, one painting that disturbed me the most was Open Casket by Dana Schutz. The artist tried to portray the story of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African-American boy, who was kidnapped, beaten and murdered brutally in 1955 because he was falsely accused of flirting with a white woman. His mother, Mamie Till-Bradley, said that she wanted the whole world to see what inhumanity her son went through, so she kept an open casket on his funeral and let him be photographed. This painting disturbs me so much because I feel it does not do justice in terms of representation of what happened to the teenage boy and what happened during that era with African-American people. Not only in that era but now as well; things have not changed. African-American people do not get the same privileges as white people even after almost fifty years of the Civil Rights Movement. I see my African-American friends still getting bullied or being discriminated against because of their color.
Dana Schutz is an American artist, who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. The artist depicts grotesque, comic figures in acts of creativity or violence and mostly uses vibrant form and colors. In an interview with Bomb magazine, Dana Schutz told Mel Chin that her work responds to ‘what is happening in the world.’ She added, “In the paintings, I think in terms of adjectives and adverbs. Often I will get information from people or things that I see, a phrase, or how one object relates to another. I construct the paintings as I go along.”
I think the problem is that African-American people’s pain needs to stop being treated as raw material. Therefore, to go along with the criteria of the project and keeping in mind the artist’s work, I wanted to create a 3D piece using the laser-cutting machine as I think it is a simple technique. I wanted to use Emmett Till’s silhouette when he was a happy, teenage boy, and laser-cut three layers of those in black plexiglass of same sizes. I decided to use two black rods made out of plexiglass and make holes in all the three pieces so that I could make the pieces sit on the table as well as have gaps among them to give a 3D effect. Every day there is a new story about an African-American person getting shot or killed by the cops because of their color. Their color has become an excuse for the cops to question or doubt every African-American person. I think it is important for people to realize and be aware of what is happening in the world. They need to realize that if this is the way things go on, then humanity will be lost soon.
Emmett Till’s Silhouette
Sketch
Final Project
Since this assignment was about a negative response to an artist’s work, I am pretty satisfied with my project. It is a simple project that used a simple technique, which is laser cutting. I feel that my project defines what I was trying to explain earlier about how African-American people’s emotions are described through simple, everyday materials that hold no meaning.
If I were to make another part of this project, I would instead of having complete silhouettes in all three layers, I would have only parts of it in each layer so that when a person would look at all of them as a whole, it would form a complete image/silhouette.
Like I said, a lot of my African-American friends have experienced racism just because of the color of their skin. I, being an Indian girl, have experienced racism first hand at school and outside, so I know what it feels like. There have also been a lot of artists who have tried to Americanise my culture and traditions for their own benefit without realizing the importance of each practice.