'This is what our dying looks like':Elegeía for Emmett Till1 Jared Sexton (bio) Emmett Till is dead. I don't know why he can't just stay dead. —Roy Bryant What will one have to say, in response to Dana Schutz's open casket? To ask this, out loud, would sound, without further inquiry or explanation, like a reference to a funeral service, a wake or a viewing. To say this loudly, while out and about, before the uninitiated or uninformed, would sound like a question about elegy. Elegeía, in the ancient sense of the term—to cry, lament, mourn—for one they may not know. They may not know that this one is white or woman or mother or artist or highly educated or professionally successful. They may not know any country of origin or religious faith or languages spoken. They would have no real sense of any ethical bearing or political beliefs and affiliations. The uninitiated or uninformed would not know any of these things in detail, and none for certain. They would only know that there had been another death and that we were gathering before a body, searching about for a response. No color, no texture, no context, no points or lines or planes in the vast space-time continuum. The cause, too, would remain obscure. "What was the cause?" they would ask, among other things, because they would care about all of the above. They would care, even if they only overheard the opening question: How to speak well of the dead? Emmett Till, a young black boy from Chicago, was abducted, tortured and killed by two local white men while visiting maternal relatives in the small town of Money, Mississippi on August 28, 1955. He was fourteen years old when Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam (and perhaps other accomplices) murdered him and attempted to disappear his mutilated body in the Tallahatchie River. Carolyn Bryant, a young white woman shopkeeper, accused Till of making sexual advances against her when he entered the store to buy candy. Her husband and her brother, once she relayed her version of events, imagined they were avenging a violation of her honor and upholding their solemn duty when they set out to discover and destroy Till. That they were overcome with rage and enjoyed something about the violence they inflicted along the way is beyond question. That the tight-knit white community-the police and the press, the judge and the jury-closed ranks reflexively around them is indisputable. That this was, and is, a deeply rooted dynamic in this and every other society structured in racial dominance goes without saying. The life and death of Emmett Till was singular. The forces that conspired around him, drawn most immediately from the history of postbellum anti-black terrorism, were long-standing, broad-based and [End Page 60] overwhelming. The violence done to him was not unique, but its meaning and significance, its symbolic and material force, may be uniquely obscure. And this is despite and due to the harsh light illuminating the forensic photographic evidence that announced to the world that Mamie Till-Mobley was forced, again and again, to see something terrible and terrifying in her son's remains (Till-Mobley & Benson). Dana Schutz's Open Casket (2016) was featured at the 2017 Whitney Biennial. She painted it, according to the Washington Post, "in response to a slew of shootings of black men by police during the summer of 2016" (Gibson). But the reductively glossed rationale was more complex upon closer scrutiny. ArtNet news asked Schutz in a previous interview, "What was the genesis of the painting? How did you decide to tackle this subject in particular, and what meaning do you think you add to the subject with this work?" She replied: I made this painting in August of 2016 after a summer that felt like a state of emergency—there were constant mass shootings, racist rallies filled with hate speech, and an escalating number of camera-phone videos of innocent black men being shot by police. The photograph of Emmett Till felt analogous to the time: what was hidden was now revealed. The...
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Feb 16, 2018
Román Hurtado-Pérez + 4
Open Access
