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#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}At first, “Disguised Bandit†- a life-size reproduction of a century-old postcard by Ken Gonzales-Day - does not suggest anything out of the ordinary. A sparse tree cuts the center of the photograph. A group of white American soldiers flanks the tree. One man grins. The others stare passively into the camera.
But the meaning - and the power - of the image (Slide 3) resides not in what's visible, but in what's not: the “disguised bandit†suggested by the inscription at the bottom of the postcard. In the context of Mr. Gonzales-Day's art, the word “disguised†is fraught with irony: the artist has altered the photograph, digitally erasing the “criminal,†who in the original scene is a brutalized corpse dangling from the tree.
“Disguised Bandit†is part of Mr. Gonzales-Day's “Erased Lynching†series, which also includes similarly altered photomurals based on postcards, souvenir cards and published photographs of mob violence that were widely circulated and collected in the United States from the late 19th century through the 1930s. “Disguised Bandit,†like the other works in the series, upends expectations about the geography and targets of lynching: its location is the American West, not the Deep South, and its victims are Mexican, not African-American.
The missing bodies in these photographs serve as a metaphor for the expunging of Latinos, Native Americans and Asians from the history of lynching in America. There are various reasons for this historical erasure, Mr. Gonzales-Day says in “Lynching in the West: 1850-1935,†a scholarly study in which he documents and analyzes the 352 recorded lynchings and summary executions of victims of all races in California.
Ken Gonzales-Day “Water Street Bridge.†For one, th e antilynching movement that reached its height in the United States from the 1890s to the 1930s tended to focus on the widespread murder of black Americans in the context of the Civil War, Reconstruction and its aftermath, a history that preoccupied the entire nation rather than the more regional concerns of race relations in the West.
While lynchings of African-Americans in the South and elsewhere were often defined by scholars and within popular culture as illegal acts of vigilantism and murder, the killing of Latinos, Native Americans and Asians in the West was often romanticized and idealized. In countless history books, novels, comics, television programs and motion pictures, these murders qualified as examples of frontier justice, a supposedly necessary means of maintaining order during the tumultuous western expansion into uncharted territories.
As Mr. Gonzales-Day's research revealed, however, vigilante hangings in California, like those in the Jim Crow South, had a powerful racial dimension: Native Americans, African-Americans, Chinese immigrants and Latinos fell victim to the mob's anger far more often than people of European descent.
The artist's intention is not to diminish the story of African-American lynching, but to correct the historical record and broaden our understanding. Mr. Gonzales-Day, 48, a widely exhibited artist, photographer and researcher who teaches at Scripps College, is committed to narrowing the psychic distance between the viewer and the photographs of violence and death.
As the Belgian critic and curator Thierry de Duve observes, pictures of atrocities, shocking and disquieting as they may be, result in a “vanishing of the present tense.†Distilling a complex, morally troubling event into an instant, they suspend viewers in a limbo in whic h they are inevitably “too early to witness the uncoiling of the tragedy†and “too late, in real life,†to do anything to prevent it. For Mr. de Duve, this renders pictures of bloodshed particularly disconcerting - almost unbearably - by intensifying our sense of helplessness before history.
Mr. Gonzales-Day slows down the viewing process by introducing a degree of interactivity into the experience of his work. His obliteration of the brutalized corpse shifts the focus of his imagery from the victim to the perpetrator, and summons us to complete the picture in our imagination. His photographs are routinely exhibited with brief explanatory texts about their history and absences.
As if to underscore this idea, Mr. Gonzales-Day has also produced a self-guided walking tour of lynching sites in downtown Los Angeles that allows participants “to revisit places and events made infamous†in the context of their present-day lives. The tour is an extension of th e artist's own six-year pilgrimage to nearly every county in California, culminating in another series, “Searching for California's Hang Trees,†that features large-scale color photographs and billboards of lynching sites, particularly the trees that possibly served as hanging posts.
“I retraced the steps of the lynch mob and vigilance committee,†he writes of his expedition. “Standing at these sites, even the most beautiful landscape is undone. … I have documented the empty space that lies between the historically unseen body of the lynch victim with my own unseen body.â€
This walking tour, along with the missing bodies of “Erased Lynching†and “Hang Trees†(Slides 9 through 16), reminds us, too, of the power of time to erase history, in part because it is our instinct to forget the events that expose our intolerance, indifference or depravity. But it also urges us to p ut our own history into a story that few of us know. More than anything, it makes us think where our ancestors - or our own bodies - might belong: as a victim dangling above or a perpetrator grinning below.
Ken Gonzales-Day “Old Road,†2002.Maurice Berger is a research professor and the chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a consulting curator at the Jewish Museum in New York. He is the author of 11 books, including a memoir, “White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness.â€
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