IF YOU EXPECT a column about art, you may have clicked on the wrong page. Though I would very much like to be writing about aesthetics, I’m afraid I cannot do so outright. The problem is simple: Our world is on fire, has been for a very long time, and we can no longer afford to avoid the why. Our country looks in the mirror and cannot recognize its face because its self-concept is built on lies. To be an American, it seems, is to be in a state of constant dissociation. Perhaps that is the fine print in our social contract—mandated distance from our inner worlds and the violence we inflict on each other.
But, if we are constantly looking away from ourselves, what are we looking at instead? The answer is, again, simple. We—this “we” primarily composed of white people—have traded a clear vision of reality away for the tawdry allure of images. Put frankly, we worship a portrait of America that has not yet come into being.
In his seminal text, Ways of Seeing, John Berger writes, “Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent.” Aristocratic portraits serve the same function as photographs: memorials of the temporal, reminders of something long since gone. America’s portrait is one of liberty and progress, but unlike the paintings of yore based on real people resting in space and time, America has built its sense of self on something that does not exist at all. That is why this moment of reckoning is so painful. We are emerging from a long period of what Berger terms “mystification,” the process through which someone “[explains] away what might otherwise be evident.”
In this visual chaos—awash with advertisements, social media, the incessant thrum of our own self-presentation—we are rarely asked to think about how our vision is molded by forces outside of our immediate awareness, namely racism and capitalism. In this context, art seems both frivolous and impossible. If we cannot even look at a video of a Black individual being murdered and see the same thing, how can we begin to talk about what cultural production may add to the conversation? Such is racism’s greatest accomplishment: its ability to cloud what we know to be true. From where I stand, “Are you sure he wasn’t a criminal?” sounds an awful lot like, “Did God really tell you not to touch the tree?”
We have spent so much time looking everywhere except right in front of our faces for the source of our sociopolitical fracturing. But, if we finally open our eyes, the afterimages of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and so many others may color every subsequent place our gaze touches. Maybe then, when we speak about art, we’ll be speaking about the same thing.
Faith-Marie Zamblé is an artist, writer, and M.F.A. candidate in dramaturgy and dramatic criticism at the Yale School of Drama. This is her final "Curated" column (for now).
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