captlychee | The Hashtag Question

In the April 10^th issue of The New Yorker there was a profile piece on the artist…hold on. The truth is, I don't remember her name, and I don't see how I'm going to find out. Will the Kindle for PC app let me read magazines? Only one expedient way to find out!

I can't get a large enough font on the new Kindle Fire, the Kindle for PC app won't let me look at my magazine subscriptions, and I'm now charging the Kindle Keyboard to see if I can guess the spelling from the context, so let us just skip that part for the moment and go on to the nub of the thing.

Or just go to the bloody website.

Dana Schut painted a painting depicting the open casket service for the late Emmett Till, a black man who was killed in 1955 because a white woman had alleged a liaison with him. (At this point I was going to cut and paste the actual quote, but the website prevents me doing that, so fuck 'em. They could've got an acknowledgement but if they're going to use code to prevent me exercising my rights under copyright law, they know exactly what they can pull and in whose company.) When this painting was exhibited, a black man stood in front of the painting, facing it, with the words 'BLACK DEATH SPECTACLE' printed on the back of his T-shirt. Dana Schut then had to suffer all sorts of the usual abuse put about because Facebook is so easy to type in, but that's par for the course in an age where freedom of speech is handed out to everyone at the drop of a text message.

Getting back to the black guy maintaining his silent vigil. Silent intimidation comes easily to a racial group which has been let down by both the civil rights movements of the 1960's and the votes of the 2010's and which is, in any case, unsatisfiable no matter where they can sit on the bus and how many countries they've gotten control of in the past hundred years. In a country where Obama didn't pay off their mortgages and where they're watching their futures become bleaker and more disenfranchised by boatloads of Syrians and H1B visa loads of Indians and Pakistanis and where robots and Chinese strip them of the only thing of value they have left, their labour, silent intimidation is about all they have left. The late Trayvon Martin was a dab hand at it before he found out that bluff yields to action, shortly before he was put in a postion where he couldn't find out anything else at all.

So, I thought to myself, suppose I stood on the right of this black man offering his silk-screened commentary on art and art censorship, also facing the painting, with the words 'BLACK T-SHIRTS MATTER' on the back of my (white) T-shirt?

Or should it be '#BLACK T-SHIRTS MATTER'?

Without the octothorpe it's a simple slogan, which youy could ignore the same way you ignore anything coming at you off the screen, out of the radio, out of your phone or on the back of a bus stop seat, but these days the use of the noughts and crosses game board as a topic indicator on Twitter carries with it the implication to respond, and anything we respond to has, these days greater validity since it's democratically empowering in a way the vote never was, without carrying the risks of imprisonment or job termination a physical protest used to, or the shaming and bewildering attitudes that attending a protest would get you today. That and our participation adds value to the slogan, that value expressed as increased credibility. Celebrity monopod Adam Hills, whose BBC show "The Last Leg" has brought 'cripple gag' into the zeitgeist¹ uses 'hashtag' as a prefix to explaining the topic of the previous sentence all the time, even in off-air conversations I'm going to say here that I was reliably informed about, and that lends it at least the credibility of popularity. Remember that the idea being conveyed—that black T-shirts and the slogans they have matter—is exactly the same, and of course the sarcasm created by taking another slogan (also hashtagged) about black lives is still there if you've got the capacity to see it.

As to how suicidally dangerous this would be, I point out that the black guy acting as a filter for people's response to art and culture isn't likely to blow up in the gallery, but he could easily arrange a posse of his homes to kick the living shit out of me as soon as I left the gallery&mdah;even if, as would be my natural desire once going outdoors, I had a jacket over the T-shirt with no slogans on it whatsoever. Let's see a black artist do a painting of that.

Or maybe I could explain to them what I meant. It may be that there's a genetic predisposition to silently protest, by intimidation, when confronted by art you can't understand. If so, white people don't have it. Protests about crap art, such as Jackson Pollack's 'Blue Poles' and the infamous 'Vault' sculpture by Ron Robertson-Swann which has been moved around Melbourne's Central Begging District like, well, a beggar have been loud, sometimes articulate, and plentiful. Of course standing down at Batman Park or in the National Gallery of (the State of) Victoria staring at Pollack's masterpiece wearing a T-shirt saying 'CHIMP ART MATTERS' isn't going to get anyone's attention.

Nor should this post. Experimentally, I'm going to try to cross-posting it to the ol' (and I mean 'old' here, According to my profile I was living in Lake Wendouree when I set it up, so that's at least five years ago.) Dreamwidth account. misslj_author convinced me to set this up, but now that deslea is over there, too, it's convinced me to make more use of it. God knows what this post will look like over there, since it won't have the benefit of my brilliant CSS to prettify it, but the content will come shining through like a T-shirt slogan that says 'FREE SPEECH AIN'T FOR WHITEY'.