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On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide,, 2014.
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Dread Scott’s edict is make
“revolutionary art—to propel history forward.” Since
the early 1990s, after graduating from the School of the Art Institute
of Chicago and completing the Whitney Museum of American Art’s
Independent Study Program, Scott has joined the ranks of
historical/political artists, following in the footsteps of John
Heartfield, George Grosz, and Leon Golub, along with his activist
contemporaries Ai Weiwei, Nari Ward, and Berry Bickle. By using his work
to raise awareness of social injustices, Scott makes clear his
intention of challenging the status quo. He employs irony and humor to
make powerful statements pertaining to pressing issues, including
freedom of speech on a global level, state-levied violence against
citizens, class inequality, and racially motivated oppression.
In Scott’s lexicon, the phrase “by any means necessary” means deploying
performance, installation, collage, and painting to convey his ideas and
ideology. Without being didactic, he convincingly articulates the
concerns of marginalized communi-ties across America—the incarcerated,
urban youth, and the 99%.
Historic Corrections, which was included in “Screenings: Public
& Private” (2004)
at a small museum in southern New Jersey, offers a good introduction to
his thought-
ful shock tactics. Scott’s contribution to this exhibition exploring
representations of the black body beyond stereotypes featured images of
incarcerated black and Latino men juxtaposed against a photomural
backdrop of the 1919 lynching of William Brown. A replica of a wooden
electric chair stood in the center of the installation, surrounded by
mechanized police batons mounted
on wooden stands. Historic Corrections knocked a sleepy suburban
community out of its somnolent state and initiated a dialogue about
everyday inequities just outside the museum’s doors. The batons, each
striking a cast fiberglass head every 10 seconds with a hard, resounding
blow, were linked to live, unedited reports from a police radio.
Viewers could walk through the environment and experience it from
different perspectives: sometimes seeing the “urban youth” as jailed
criminals, and other times, sharing their space. Everyone who confronted
the work felt its impact. Many viewers of color sympathized with the
sentiment of the piece, while some white viewers cringed and questioned
the relevance of mounting such at work at a museum.
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Historic Corrections, 1998.
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Courting controversy is not new for
Scott. His performance work, Money to Burn (2010), part of his “It’s the
Economy Stupid!” series, predated Occupy Wall Street by a year. In this
case, Scott was a soothsayer, a John the Baptist crying in the
wilderness about economic affairs in the United States and paving the
way for organized protests. His 1988 work What is the Proper Way to
Display a US Flag? generated hundreds of responses from visitors to the
gallery of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and
a direct rebuttal from then-President Bush. In creating this
controversial installation, Scott’s intent was to defy compulsory
patriotism. His efforts continued with an action in which he (together
with Joey Johnson—defendant in the 1988 Supreme Court flag burning
case—Dave Blalock, and Sean Eichman) burned flags on the steps of the
Capitol Building to protest the Flag Protection Act of 1989. As Scott
describes it, this act “would have outlawed criticism of the flag, which
is one step from outlawing criticism of the government. The
legislation contained specific wording that was added in response to,
and which would outlaw…What is the Proper Way to Display a US Flag?” In
1990, he and his collaborators appeared before the Supreme Court in
United States v. Eichman as a consequence of their protest.
Scott was not raised as a revolutionary, though his mother was
fairly radical, her political views inspired by the ferment of the 1960s
and shaped by the philosophy
of the Panthers. His father, on the other hand, was politically
conservative, and he believed that the way to uplift black people
resided solely in hard work, though as a small businessman, his
experiences with racism hindered the family’s economic success.
Scott’s activism began to emerge during his college years, when he
was trying to make sense of the world. He was greatly influenced by the
punk scene and the writings of Bob Avakian, and he eventually became a
supporter of the Revolutionary Communist Party. America at that time was
in the throes of an escalated Cold War. Scott cites Ronald Reagan as
instrumental in the instigation of proxy wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador,
South Africa, and Mozambique, not to mention the nuclear arms race. The
politicization of Dread Scott commenced under this climate of
instability and uncertainty, and armed with a philosophical base and
time to research, he surfaced as an artist committed to sociopolitical
engagement. His professional name—part reminder of the Dred Scott case
and part conceptual play on fear—is an essential part of that artistic
identity.
Rather than taking objects and recoding them, Scott uses objects
already charged with polarizing significance—the American flag, the
electric chair, the Constitution, the Bible, the black male body—and
recontextualizes them in ways that coerce reconsideration. In the
performance I Am Not a Man (2009), Scott walked the streets of Harlem in
symbolic protest. The crucially altered sign that he carried recalls
the signs used in the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike, a major civil
rights protest that sought equal treatment and safer working conditions
for black sanitation workers. Scott’s appropriation of that famous sign
and his addition of the word “not” pay homage to civil rights-era
struggles while underscoring the limitations of those efforts.
Intentionally stumbling and losing his pants, he punctuated the
hour-long walk with humiliating moments designed to elicit reactions
from passersby while calling attention to the persistence of racism in
American society.
Since 2000, he has increasingly addressed the issue of racial
profiling, the identification of black men as criminals by the police
and the American government via the justice system and policing tactics
used
in urban, suburban, and rural communities. This issue has come under
acute public scrutiny since the death of Trayvon Martin
at the hands of a vigilante and the grand jury verdicts in the cases of
Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and events continue to unfold as more and
more incidents are witnessed and brought to light across the country.
Public opinion has viewed the deaths
of black men at the hands of police in Ferguson, New York, Baltimore,
and other cities as wrongful, and innumerable protests
have filled the streets of towns across the U.S. since August 2014.
(During “Radical Presence,” a 2014 exhibition at Minneapolis’ Walker Art
Center devoted to the performance art of black artists, Scott and other
participants posted up-to-the-minute blogs reacting to current events.)
Postcode Criminals (2011–12) foreshadowed the rise in public
consciousness concerning extreme policing tactics such
as Stop and Frisk, a strategy that targets black and Latino urban youth
in the U.S., and Stop and Search in England. Collaborating with Joann
Krushner, a London-based artist, Scott encouraged more than 100 youths
to tell their stories through photography, film, collage, and poetry,
describing a world in which they are constantly under surveillance and
subjected
to interrogation by the police. The educational aspect of this project,
which introduced participants to diverse technologies, culminated in a
multimedia exhibition
at the Rush Gallery in 2011. At the same show, Scott premiered Stop, a
compelling video installation of life-size, projected images of six New
York and Liverpool youths, who recite the number of times they were
subjected to Stop and Frisk/
Stop and Search policing tactics. The young men ranged in age from 19 to
29.
Scott critiques American society from diverse angles and conveys its
contradictions, especially in relation to the declaration of
inalienable rights—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Gazing
through the lens of marginalized communities, he exposes the underbelly
of a capitalist system that exists within and subverts a democratic
matrix. Arrested innumerable times for his protests and public
performance works, Scott brings to public consciousness hidden realities
within the American landscape—attitudes and practices that in recent
years have ignited into clear focus.
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Let 100 Flowers Blossom, Let 100 Schools of Thought Contend, 2007.
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Scott exhibits widely throughout the
U.S.; his most recent works include Dread Scott: Decision, a performance
piece built on understanding democracy’s roots in slavery that was
first staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. In 2014, No
Longer Empty sponsored Wanted, his community-based project addressing
the criminalization of youth in America. A series of fake wanted
posters, each featuring a “police sketch” of a young adult, a
description, and a statement of the alleged offence, appeared throughout
the streets of Harlem. The sketches, executed by former police forensic
sketch artist Kevin Blythe Sampson, are simultaneously specific and
meaningless, just like the “offenses”: for instance, “On Saturday May
17, 2014, at approximately 12:30 AM, a male black, 16–24 years of age
was wearing a black waist length jacket and dark pants. The male was
observed engaging in conversation with other males.” Earlier this year,
Historic Corrections was re-installed in “Counterpublic” at The Luminary
in St. Louis. The 1998 installation will be restaged as the performance
Historic Corrections: Slave Rebellion Reenactment in New Orleans in
2017, reenacting the largest slave rebellion in American history, the
German Coast Uprising, near New Orleans in 1811.
A.M. Weaver is a writer based in Philadelphia.
Watch these videos on Dread Scott and his work
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Listen to audio from the piece ...Or Does it Explode? here.
Scroll to the bottom of the page to listen.
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| For more information on Dread Scott click here.
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