Discussion Post 8
- What is the importance of Osorio’s installation title En la barbera no se llora (No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop)?
- Explain the representation of Edwards’ ‘Some Bright Morning.’
- Why do you think Rosler parodied a cooking show?
- Do you believe assimilation is a good or bad thing? Reference Boarding School Portraits of Tom Torlino.
- Compare and contrast Ch. 1 and Ch. 19 from American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity in 350 or more words. (Think about the era and the type of work presented)
Some Bright Morning
Melvin Edwards, Some Bright Morning
by SUNANDA K. SANYAL
Melvin Edwards, Some Bright Morning, 1963, welded steel, 36 x 23 x 13 cm (The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; photo: Tim Nighswander/IMAGING4ART) Melvin Edwards
Nails, chains, and bolts
Displayed on the wall at eye-level, this abstract sculpture appears to change shape from different vantage points. From the front, it looks like a shallow, dense structure of welded pieces of metal. Moving slightly to the right, however, one notices depth: the circular base holds a hollow container that spews out the metal bits. Two sharp triangular shapes, one bigger than the other, jut out of the lower rim of the container like the hands of a clock, both pointing diagonally to the lower left. A bar resembling a lever emerges from the lower right corner, also facing down. The largest bar, when viewed from the right, appears to be a hammer that projects to the upper left. It reaches out the farthest, with a chain fragment attached to its head. Metal chunks mark the welded spots, including a lump at the tip of the dangling chain, and underscore the rugged character of the piece. The shadows, which look different with shifts in the viewers position, actively contribute to the appeal of the sculpture by echoing the irregularity of its contour
Melvin Edwards, Some Bright Morning, 1963, welded steel, 36 x 23 x 13 cm (The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; photo: Sunanda K. Sanyal) Melvin Edwards
The wall-piece, Some Bright Morning, the first in a long series of relief sculptures known as Lynch Fragments, was made by Melvin Edwards in 1963. Edwards was born in Houston in 1937. The Lynch Fragments series began early in his careerin fact while he was a student at the University of Southern California.
Beginning in the 1880s, lynchingthe public torture, mutilation, and murder most commonly of a Black person by a white mob for a perceived infraction of southern social codesbecame an insidious tool of white supremacy in the American south. Between 1915 and the 1960s, thousands of Black individualsmen, women, and childrenwere lynched across the southern United States, making it one of the darkest chapters of American history. [1] Edwardss first-hand experience of racism while growing up in Houston contributed to his acute political awareness and his involvement in the civil rights movement. One case of lynching that deeply affected him was the gruesome murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, the year Edwards entered college. Till was four years younger than him, and had been abducted, tortured, and lynched after being accused of offending a white woman.
Around the time Edwards finished the piece described above, he came across a curious phrase in a book called 100 Years of Lynching by Ralph Ginzburg. The author recounted that during the era when incidents of lynching were increasing, African American farm workers in a Florida community who were fighting for their rights received a threat from hostile white locals that they would be attacked on some bright morning. Fascinated by this chilling euphemism, Edwards used the phrase to title his first wall-piece and named the ensuing series of relief sculptures Lynch Fragments.
The rugged object, with its metal projections strongly evocative of weapons and shrapnel, becomes symbolic not only of the brutality and injustice committed against Black Americans at home and abroad (by 1965, a third of American forces in Vietnam were Black men), but of struggle against oppressive violence anywhere. Its size approximating a human head and its placement at eye-level are deliberate, provoking confrontation with the viewer. The two triangular shapes look ominous, as do the hammer-shaped metal bar pointing upward with the attached chain links. The lumps of metal at the welded spots, especially the chunk at the end of the chain, recall mutilations and wounds; and the shadows enhance the aggressiveness of the object
Melvin Edwards, Memory of Winter, 1996, welded steel, 33 x 17 x 22 cm (photo: James Nova, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) Melvin Edwards
Edwards continued to make wall pieces with a wide variety of metal components: nails, chains, bolts, locks, rail spikes, scissors, knives, hammers, and farm implements, not to mention scraps extracted from discarded metal objects. The rugged character of the early pieces in the series can be traced to the photographs that the artist took of the destruction caused by the Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles in 1965.
There are more than two hundred sculptures to date in the Lynch Fragments series, produced in three distinct phases. After the first phase (between 1963 and 1966), there was a hiatus of a few years when Edwards left Los Angeles for New York. The works from this phase appeared in his solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 1970 (the first solo show for an African American sculptor at that venue). Edwards resumed work on the series in 1973 and made a few more pieces through the following year in response to the Vietnam War. Following another brief pause, he returned to the series in 1978.
As he learned to weld metal, which is how Some Bright Morning is made, Edwards became enchanted by the possibilities of abstraction. The welded sculptures by artists of the early and mid-20th century, such as the Spanish Julio Gonzlez and the American David Smith, further convinced him to pursue that route. Edwards came to sculpture from rigorous training in drawing and painting and has insisted that welding metal for him is akin to drawing in the air (an observation that the critic Clement Greenberg had used to compliment David Smiths pictorial metal constructions). Despite such affinities, however, he had to be cautious about borrowing from white artists because of the precarious status of artists of color in that era, especially in the context of abstraction.
The materials and ideas of abstraction
At the time Lynch Fragments began, the American art establishmentcollectors, dealers, curators, criticsroutinely racialized artists of color. Their work was expected to actively address racial identity, yet when it did, the work was often criticized for being confined to a niche, with limited scope. When racial identity was not easily traceable, an artist was deemed unoriginal for venturing into a territory where they supposedly did not belong, such as abstraction. For instance, the Abstract Expressionist painter Edward Clark was consistently ignored by New Yorks gallery scene in the 1950s. Artists of color, therefore, frequently found themselves in a double bind, running the risk of either being patronizingly pigeonholed as a Black artist or marginalized altogether.
For Edwards, then, pursuing abstraction was walking a tightrope. Borrowing the gestural freedom from Abstract Expressionism (for example Jackson Pollock) and the use of industrial materials from Minimalism (for example Donald Judd), Edwards rejected their resistance to addressing socially grounded subjects. He wanted his abstract sculpture to allude to life; but because abstract art with social content went against the grain of abstraction in the 1960s, he had to be strategic in connecting materials with ideas
Melvin Edwards, Lynch Fragments (installation view), 19642012, welded steel (installed at la Biennale di Venezia, 2015; photo: Andrea Avezz) Melvin Edwards
After his first visit to the African continent in 1970, Edwards gradually developed contacts and friendships in several countries there and has maintained a studio in Dakar, Senegal since 2000. This international involvement has enriched his understanding of human history, progress, and identity, enabling him to be much more thoughtful about the objects used later in the series. He sees the chain, for instance, not simply as a symbol of oppression and struggle but also as a much stronger version of rope invented for greater efficiency that can stand for continuity and lineage. Likewise, the machete, a common object in Africa and its diaspora, can be both a weapon of genocide and a benign farming implement. The broader interpretive scope of these items demonstrates that while maintaining the title of the series as a reminder of the trauma that informs his racial identity, the artist has widened the reach of the series Lynch Fragments
Melvin Edwards, Song of the Broken Chains, 2020, stainless steel (installed at City Hall Park, NYC by Public Art Fund, photo: Trish Mayo) Melvin Edwards
Melvin Edwards began making large-scale outdoor sculptures in 1968 and worked on commissions alongside his more personal engagement with Lynch Fragments. His latest public piece is Song of the Broken Chains, completed in 2020. Five enormous broken chain links made of stainless steel are juxtaposed with two unbroken ones, one upright and the other horizontal.
While this monumental work appears radically different from the wall-pieces of Lynch Fragments, it is nonetheless tied to the series. Here the journey of the chain fragment that began with Some Bright Morning more than half a century ago reaches a juncture, where a mature American artist of color makes a gesture of peace with the nations racial past. The scintillating surface of the sculpture exudes optimism, albeit with a stark reminder of the history of trauma it leaves behind.
Boarding School Portraits of Tom Torlino
John Choate, Boarding School Portraits of Tom Torlino
by DR. HAYES PETER MAURO
John N. Choate, Tom Torlino [version 3], 1882 (Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center); John N. Choate, Tom Torlino [version #2], 1885 (Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center)
In these two side-by-side photographs we are presented with two faces. At first glance, the faces seem to have different appearances and identities. The first portrait, made in 1882, depicts a man named Tom Torlino. Torlino, a Native American, was a member of the Navajo, an Indigenous people native to the southwestern United States. He was also a student at the famous Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Carlisle was a federally funded boarding school dedicated to the assimilation of Native American youths in an effort to make them enculturated as Americanthat is, in accordance with cultural attributes common to middle-class Anglo-Americans of the time. With this mission in mind, Torlinos appearance in the first image reveals very specific information about his perceived identity. He wears Indigenous clothing, jewelry, a long shock of dark hair, and has bronzed skin. In contrast, the second photograph, made three years later following his matriculation at the school, we see a nearly unrecognizable Torlino. His appearance mimics that of the aforementioned middle-class Anglo-American man of the late 19th century: short-cropped hair, a respectable three-piece suit, no jewelry, and lighter skin. On closer inspection therefore, the two photographs represent the same individual, photographed before and after his arrival, matriculation, and Americanization at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Torlino was photographed in both instances by John Choate, a commercial studio photographer in Carlisle, who was hired by the Carlisle School administration to photograph some of its students.
Domestic science class at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, c. 1903 (Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)
Torlinos physical transformation was to be perceived by the contemporary viewer as the byproduct of Torlinos education at Carlisle, one of the earliest federally funded, off-reservation, Indigenous boarding schools. The curriculum sought to forcibly assimilate the students through religious evangelization, learning English, physical exercise, and acquiring a marketable skill that would serve them after leaving the school. In sum, Torlino and his classmates were seen as needing a sort of transfiguration from their perceived savage origins as Indigenous peoples into civilized, self-sufficient Americans, per common cultural definitions and norms of that time.
Before-and-after portraiture
However, Choate was known to dress up the students and stage them for the before portrait, to make them look more savage. He had an array of props, costumes, and studio lighting tricks to darken the skin tone, which was intended to play to pre-existenting racial prejudices. Conversely, in the after portrait, he would commonly intensify the studio lighting to lighten skin tone. These studio pyrotechnics, as well as the photographic before-and-after formula itself, were commonplace in both Europe and the United States throughout the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. Indigenous peoples around the colonized world were ritualistically photographed in these ways, which tended to reinforce pre-conceived racial and cultural stereotypes commonly held by European-American viewers. Taken together this photographic technique is called before-and-after portraiture. It is usually intended to display some sort of progress or evolution perceivable in the individual between the first and second photographs.
Indigenous assimilation
Choates portraits of Torlino were taken at the behest of Richard Henry Pratt, an army officer and Carlisles first superintendent. Pratt advocated for Indigenous assimilation to resolve the so-called Indian Question, a political debate crystalized in Francis A. Walkers influential 1874 book The Indian Question. [1] This question had two parts, and considered the following:
What shall be done with the Indian as an obstacle to the national progress? What shall be done with him when, and so far as, he ceases to oppose or obstruct the extension of railways and settlements?[2]
John N. Choate, Tom Torlino [version #2], 1885 (Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center)
Like most European Americans at the time, Walkera former Commissioner of Indian Affairsviewed Indigenous Americans as savage and heathen peoples who were morally and spiritually unredeemable, and thus Pratts assimilation school had its skeptics. Photography provided documentary proof that Pratts studentsyoung people taken from reservations often thousands of miles away and transported to Carlislecould be reeducated and made into contributors to national progress. Prints of these photographic negatives appeared side-by-side in school publications such as newsletters, magazines, and yearbooks. All of this had a political end: to secure increased funding from the federal government for Pratts assimilation experiment.
Choates photographs of Torlino were intended to be both instructional and moralizing. They were instructional in the sense that they displayed correct evolution within the persons photographed. In other words, the person had successfully navigated the assimilation process and had acquired a new persona: the ideal middle-class American citizen. However, Pratt demanded more than just instruction with these photographs. He wanted Choate to convey to Pratts intended audiences that the person in each picture was fundamentally transformed morally. They have (seemingly) accepted Christ as their savior and had left behind heathen Indigenous spiritual practices. In short, they had been saved.
Manifest Destiny
In addition to these dynamics, a further examination of the broader social and political culture within the United States at the time is needed to fully place these images in proper historical context. Throughout the 19th centuryespecially in the decades following the Civil Warthe federal government sought to annex and incorporate the expanding nations vast physical frontier and to claim the land and resources it contained. This was codified in a doctrine called Manifest Destiny. Essentially, this doctrine underwrote the governments economic agenda of westward expansion by giving it a moral fervor. Expansion was often cast in moralizing terms and as a spiritual and moral clash between binary forces: savagery versus civilization. Importantly, Manifest Destiny ultimately had its justification in then-current interpretations of the Bible. Many Christian Americans of the 19th century perceived the relatively new nation as a New Jerusalem freed from the social and religious bonds of the captivity of Rome (a metaphor commonly used to describe Catholic Europe). Part of this destiny was the fulfillment of a perceived spiritual covenant with God, in which American Christians felt obligated to purify the frontier of heathen elements, notably uncivilized Indigenous Americans. The American historian Frederick Jackson Turner summed up this viewpoint succinctly in 1893:
In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wavethe meeting point between savagery and civilization the frontier is the line of most rapid and effective civilization.[3]
The taking over of the savage frontier and introducing civilization was positioned as both progressive and moral. The pair of photographs shows the improved and saved Torlino on the right, who is compared to his previous savage and heathen former self on the left. These seemingly didactic images have a deeply troubling history, steeped in racist ideologies that placed white, European-descended Christians above Indigenous cultures, as they contributed to the stereotyping and erasure of Indigenous identities and ways of life.