John Keene & LA Times Weigh in on the Matter of @VanessaPlace

For those of you keeping up with the current debate around Vanessa Place's conceptual project, @VanessaPlace, do check out the LA Times on the AWP aspect. 1) "Interestingly, AWP didn’t cave on grounds that Place’s work is racist. It caved to the pressure." 2) "So a messy brouhaha over artistic expression is too distracting for an organization devoted to creative free expression to handle? Free speech, and art, can be messy. The better solution for AWP: Re-instate Place and build a panel discussion around the intersections of art, racism, and offensiveness."

AWP is an organization "devoted to creative free expression"? Who knew. Anyhow, may we also point you to an essay posted the night before last by John Keene, "On Vanessa Place, Gone With the Wind, and the Limit Point of Certain Conceptual Aesthetics."

The piece--while it addresses Kenny Goldsmith and his reading of Michael Brown's autopsy, the Mongrel Coalition, anti-Semitism as deal-breaker if ever employed in similar fashion, and more--starts with Hattie McDaniel's character in Gone With the Wind, Scarlett's dear "Mammy," "who was not just a character in the novel and film but a social archetype and offensive stereotype, with deep roots in the white Southern and broader American racist imaginary. That stereotype, it cannot be emphasized enough, still resonates today," writes Keene.

And in a further clarification of @VanessaPlace, Keene references other parts of the larger GWTW project, including the publication in Drunken Boat of her 2009 artist statement ("work of fiction (?)"), wherein Place writes (to paraphrase) that she steals from Margaret Mitchell what Margaret Mitchell herself has already stolen (Place posted a longer update of this statement on Facebook yesterday). Keene quotes from the earlier version:

This piece—the gleaning of all passages in Gone With the Wind in which “nigger” features prominently (omitted are other racial epithets or denigrating enactments), then set in a block of text, a slave block—aims to remind white folks of their goings-on and ongoings. Self included, for there is personal guilt there as well, given my family is not just Caucasian American, but Southern, Virginian, as they say, “by the grace of God.” And God’s grace carries with it a certain responsibility for the error of blind loyalty (see, Abraham & Isaac). Too, GWTW is still a very much beloved bit of Americana (Molly Haskell recently published a book on Scarlett O’Hara as feminist icon, and last year’s Best Actress Oscar was announced to the soaring strains of “Tara’s Theme”), with very little attention paid to its blackface, or that its blackface is blackface. Or that, in such texts, characters are to people as people may be to property. So I have stolen Margaret Mitchell’s “niggers” and claim them as my own. In a funny way, I am replicating Huck Finn's dilemma/conversion: to understand that keeping (not turning in runaway) Nigger Jim is stealing, for which one may well go to hell, and to do it anyway.

He responds:

There is so much to criticize here, from the idea that this text will remind "white folks of their goings-on and ongoings"--really? did this text have this effect on any of its white readers?--to the personal guilt which elides the larger social and historical guilt, violence and trauma not only of chattel slavery, but of Civil War and post-bellum violence, forms of debt peonage and forced imprisonment, Jim Crowism and de facto and de jure segregation, redlining, and on and on. The elision of the societal and social in favor of the personal is a common liberal gesture, and it fits with a perspective that can call out individual racist moments or events (which is a good thing), but maintains naieveté and innocence before the systems and structures of racism and white supremacy that make white (skin) privilege and power possible, and does not seek to dismantle them.

Moreover, who must be elided or erased for GWTW to be a "much beloved bit of Americana"? Whose graves and bodies must be trampled on, without a second thought? And, as I need not say, not only is it deeply disturbing to hear a queer white woman talking about stealing Mitchell's "'niggers'" and claiming them as her own--in the process commodifying and reifying them--but placing herself in the affective space of the naïf Huck, with his partial "innocence" of the fact that, at one level, as Jane Smiley has pointed out, he was taking his "friend" into ever greater danger, made literal when Jim was re-re-enslaved in Arkansas. In other words, she was reproducing the very power relations she allegedly aimed to be critiquing.

Keene goes on to look at another iteration of Place's GWTW project in the form of "Miss Scarlett" and the accompanying editor's note that appeared in Poetry's 2009 Flarf and Conceptual Writing portfolio:

Another version of this project appeared in the July/August issue of Poetry, in which "Miss Scarlett" appears. I will not quote the piece here, but I will reprint the note beneath the poem, which reads as follows:

NOTES: Taken from Prissy’s famous scene in the movie version of Gone with the Wind, Place phonetically transcribes the “unreliable” slave’s words, which are then set in Miltonic couplets. Through the simple act of transcription, Place inverts our relationship to Margaret Mitchell’s best-selling and beloved American epic by prioritizing the formal aspects of language over Mitchell’s famous narrative. With this deconstructive move, Place illuminates the many subtexts embedded in the text concerning plays of power, gender, race, and authorship. By ventriloquizing the slave’s voice as well as Mitchell’s, Place also sets into motion a nexus of questions regarding authorship, leading one to wonder: who is pulling whose strings?

Again, so many issues. A conceptual, which is to say formalist white-gaze gesture, involving the screenplay version (whose authors included the white screenwriters Sidney Howard, Oliver Garrett, Ben Hecht, Jo Swerling, and John Van Druten) of racist author Margaret Mitchell's rendering of purported black speech, is supposed to represent a "deconstrutive move" that reveals subtexts in the text concerning power, gender, race, and authorship. As if those are not already legible in the very fact of who wrote the novel and the screenplay, and who directed the film, let alone the life experiences of any black American person living in the United States in the era in which the film was set, or was made! Quite a few people reading Mitchell's novel, or watching the film, or reading Place's poem, realize quite clearly "who is pulling whose strings." The question is, who doesn't? Or who isn't even being considered--who is being elided and effaced?--in the conceptualization Place's poem engages and enacts?

So many issues indeed. Keene does not devalue Conceptualism itself when putting this piece in context, however.

However you chart the genealogy, conceptual practice remains a valuable path in contemporary imaginative culture. Not every conceptual project or action succeeds, however, and none exists outside a given framework or frameworks that do not automatically endow and invest it with value and meaning. Content, form, style, and the project's originators and practitioners (if there are any) matter as much as the contextual frame of the conceptual piece. For example, a conceptual project that plays on the idea of unspeakable but publicly objectionable ideas has a different meaning in a society in which types of speech are banned or criminalized by possible imprisonment or death than it does in a society in which all types of speech are possible, though liable to social sanction. To put it another, self-evident way, no conceptual project is value-free, and all are political in some manner or fashion.

Read it all at J's Theater.