• Art Acts:Reframing the White Gaze in Claudia Rankine's The White Card
• Carla J. McDonough (bio)

"Until we are willing to look at the ways in which white Americans are culpable in the suffering of the people of color, and understand that culpability needs to be present in the representation of that, suffering will continue."

Claudia Rankine¹

"Art has always been the tool of the powerful, and also the weapon of the dispossessed: official imagery controls narratives of identity and defines what is 'right', but these representations can be creatively subverted and destroyed. You have to know the rules of the space to sabotage it."

Alice Procter²

Protest arose at the Whitney Museum's 2017 Biennial exhibit in response to Dana Schutz's painting Open Casket, a somewhat abstract rendering of the famous photograph of Emmett Till in his casket. Artist Parker Bright's critique led him to stand in front of the painting wearing a tee-shirt that read "Black Death Spectacle." Bright's physical protest was followed by an open letter written by Hannah Black that demanded the Whitney remove the painting, in which she wrote:

Although Schutz's intention may be to present white shame, this shame is not correctly represented as a painting of a dead Black boy by a white artist—those non-Black artists who sincerely wish to highlight the shameful nature of white violence should first of all stop treating Black pain as raw material. The subject matter is not Schutz's; white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraints of others, and are not natural rights. The painting must go.³

[End Page 87]

Some artists and patrons responded to this protest by arguing the dangers of censorship, while many others supported removal of the painting. The controversy led to hot debates in the art-world and culminated in the Whitney's decision to stage a public discussion about race and representation within the traditionally "white" spaces of museums. The museum asked Claudia Rankine to moderate this discussion due to her work in founding the Racial Imaginary Institute, an inter-disciplinary "cultural laboratory" that explores, counters, contextualizes and demystifies cultural ideas about race.⁴ The Whitney billed the evening as a discussion about "questions around race, violence, the ethics of representation, and the limits of empathy."⁵ Although the curators of the museum did not alter the exhibit in response to the protests, the debates about representation in visual, literary, filmic and theatrical arts continues as American culture grapples with legacies of colonialism, appropriation, and white dominance. Claudia Rankine's 2018 play The White Card immerses its characters and audience in these debates and is most fully understood in this context to be refocusing not on Black experience but on the blindness about whiteness that is a traditional part of the white gaze.⁶

These protests at the Whitney serve as representative of a broader cultural reckoning over racial representation, including the 2020 We See You White American Theatre (We See You WAT) movement in theatre. BIPOC writers of the open letter to White American Theatre repeat that "we see you" ignoring stories by and about people of color, and overlooking POC for hiring in all levels of the theatre (acting, directing, designing, etc.), while using them to acquire grants and funding.⁷ This letter, cosigned by some 300 signatories calling for action within the theatre world, led to widespread responses from theatres and theatre groups, prompting theatres to quickly post statements about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion on their websites and stage more works written, directed, and produced by people of color. Both the We See You WAT movement, and the 2017 Whitney Biennial event reflect an on-going art-world conundrum: how to change the power structure that has privileged "white spaces" that whites have the privilege of not seeing as such, spaces that have either omitted the work, experience, and talent of artists of color, or problematically appropriated them. The first step toward creating change is to acknowledge how the status quo has been maintained through white blindness. [End Page 88]

White blindness, which ironically is part of the white gaze, is...

• 艺术行为：重塑克劳迪娅·兰金的《白卡》中的白色凝视
• 卡拉·J·麦克唐纳 (简介)

“除非我们愿意审视美国白人如何对有色人种的苦难负有责任，并理解这种罪责需要体现在这种痛苦的表现中，否则苦难将会继续下去。”

克劳迪娅·兰金¹

“艺术一直是强者的工具，也是被剥夺者的武器：官方形象控制着身份的叙述并定义什么是‘正确’，但这些表现可以被创造性地颠覆和摧毁。你必须知道艺术的规则破坏它的空间。”

爱丽丝·普罗克特²

惠特尼博物馆 2017 年双年展因达纳·舒茨 (Dana Schutz) 的画作《打开棺材》而引发抗议，该画作是对埃米特·蒂尔棺材中著名照片的抽象渲染。艺术家帕克·布莱特 (Parker Bright) 的批评促使他穿着一件写着“黑死病奇观”的 T 恤站在画作前。在布莱特进行肢体抗议之后，汉娜·布莱克写了一封公开信，要求惠特尼撤走这幅画，她在信中写道：

尽管舒茨的意图可能是呈现白人的耻辱，但这种耻辱并没有正确地表现为白人艺术家所画的死去的黑人男孩——那些真诚希望强调白人暴力的可耻本质的非黑人艺术家首先应该停止以黑痛为原料。主题不是舒茨的；白人的言论自由和白人的创作自由是建立在对他人的约束之上的，并不是自然权利。这幅画必须走。³

[完第87页]

一些艺术家和赞助人以审查制度的危险来回应这一抗议，而其他许多人则支持移除这幅画。这场争议引发了艺术界的热议，并最终导致惠特尼博物馆决定在博物馆的传统“白色”空间内就种族和代表性问题进行公开讨论。博物馆邀请克劳迪娅·兰金主持这场讨论，因为她创建了种族想象研究所，这是一个跨学科的“文化实验室”，致力于探索、反驳、背景化和揭开有关种族的文化观念的神秘面纱。⁴惠特尼报将当晚宣传为“有关种族、暴力、代表道德和同理心限度等问题”的讨论。⁵尽管博物馆馆长没有因抗议而改变展览，但随着美国文化与殖民主义、挪用和白人统治的遗产作斗争，关于视觉、文学、电影和戏剧艺术表现形式的争论仍在继续。克劳迪娅·兰金 (Claudia Rankine) 2018 年的戏剧《白卡》(The White Card)让角色和观众沉浸在这些辩论中，在这种背景下，人们最充分地理解，它不再关注黑人的经历，而是重新关注对白人的盲目性，这是白人凝视的传统部分。⁶

惠特尼剧院的这些抗议活动代表了对种族代表性进行更广泛的文化反思，其中包括 2020 年美国白人剧院 (We See You WAT) 剧院运动。BIPOC 给美国白人剧院的公开信的作者们重申，“我们看到了你们”，他们忽视了有色人种的故事，也忽视了 POC 在剧院各级的招聘（表演、导演、设计等），同时使用他们获得赠款和资金。⁷这封信由约 300 名签名者联署，呼吁戏剧界采取行动，引起了剧院和戏剧团体的广泛响应，促使剧院迅速在其网站上发布有关多样性、公平和包容性的声明，并上演更多自编自导的作品，由有色人种制作。“We See You WAT”运动和 2017 年惠特尼双年展活动都反映了艺术界一个持续存在的难题：如何改变拥有“白色空间”特权的权力结构，而白人有特权看不到这些空间，这些空间要么忽略了有色人种艺术家的作品、经验和才华，要么有问题地挪用了它们。创造变革的第一步是承认现状是如何通过白盲来维持的。[完第88页]

具有讽刺意味的是，白盲是白色凝视的一部分，是……