Visual Language Manifesto (personal)

A visual language about having conversations about race despite discomfort about the subject should be low-key. A loud language could be used to speak over more important voices and one too quiet is performative in its ability to be ignored. It should be spoken, not shouted, not whispered. This language should regard my culture's and ethnic identity's relationship with race. This language should never exclude people of color. This language must never refer to whiteness as default.

Becoming comfortable with conversations of race/ dealing with discomfort when speaking of race

Practice 3 - Cultural Diversity
Group 2 - Module B
Team 1
AG Granickaite

Subject

Notes on how conversations of race happen in the media:

Making art about race as a white person:

A Syllabus for Making Work About Race as a White Artist in America
Ryan Wong

Micro Syllabus 1:
How Does Racial Bias Function in the Mind of the White Artist?
AK Garski

White Artists Need to Start Addressing White Supremacy in Their Work
Angela Pelster-Wiebe

7 Things You Can Do To Make Your Art Less Racist - A comprehensive How-To-Guide
Sandrine Micossé-Aikins

Black Bodies, White Cubes: The Problem With Contemporary Art’s Appropriation of Race
Taylor Renee Aldridge

To be loud is to speak over the voices that should be central. It is to appropriate imagery and experiences

How to avoid doing this?
Critically analyze your work.
Who is it for? A white audience to gawk at? Am I showing off how woke I am with this work or am I actually engaging with the experiences I do not live? Why should I be making this work? Is my work taking the place meant for someone else? Do I understand what I'm doing? Is there an aspect of race in my work that I am ignoring in favor of my own ego?

To be quiet is to avoid conversation, be noncommittal with your statements. It is to not call out wrongs. It is removing race from your lexicon (thus making whiteness the normative way you view the world)

How to avoid doing this?
Make art, discuss the subject.
Ask yourself why you have decided to not explore the racial aspect of a topic. Is your art capable of exploring these topics? Have you created a color-blind reality within the canon of your wok? Why is that, how can you move past it? Read, speak to people, explore work outside of your subject, form opinions and tell others about them. Are you still complicit in white supremacy in art, now that you've learned past your comfort zone?

Following "A Syllabus for Making Work About Race as a White Artist in America -Ryan Wong"

Objective :"This course offers a starting point: assignments for the white artist to understand their own racial position. This is a subject that I’ve rarely seen addressed, perhaps because keeping the silence around it is in fact instrumental to whiteness."

Requirements: "Introduce constructive discomfort both within yourself and among your white-identified peers, social circles, and families. Be prepared to release long-held assumptions."
This syllabus answers the question "how can we become more comfortable with conversations about race, as white people."

Week One, Drawing: Sketch a psychological portrait of white shame.

Week Two, Performance: Mark the whiteness of your social circles.
"Don’t normalize. Think about the long history of racial terror and segregation that made your hometown all white. If you enter a big room of white people, feel, for a moment, how creepy that is. Draw attention to this fact."
My friendships are based on my social circles, my social circles are determined by my education (that being a student at WdKA), my location (Rotterdam), my upbringing (child of Lithuanian democrat) etc. At this moment my circle of close friends is primarily white, I've met most of these people in the animation major (a primarily white class). When I came to Rotterdam from Lithuania I was blown away by the amount of different people here, only to realize the diversity within the city does not translate to the university and subsequently the art industry I will be searching for work in. What about whiteness makes an art education more accessible? Is that the only factor of the homogenous nature of my social circles?

Bonus Assignment: Desegregate your art circle.
"If you’re invited to a panel or group exhibition, ask for the racial makeup of the participants. If the majority are white, ask why. If there’s not a good reason (e.g. the exhibition is critically investigating whiteness), decline. Encourage other invited white artists to do the same."
If it is appropriate I'd like to ask, why are the majority tutors and students at WdKA white? What is the academy doing to encourage more people of different cultural backgrounds to apply?

Week 3, Research Question: When did you discover you were white? (Can be completed in any medium)

I remember very clearly realizing being white doesn't mean looking white but instead that it is a political position where racism is designed to help me succeed instead of hurting me.

Week 4, Conceptual: Find, document, and archive your family’s relationship to the three root traumas of American history — slavery, genocide, and warfare.
This assignment is not helpful for me and my family's history, racism in America puts white Americans in a situation of complicity. While as a white person I am complicit in racism taking place in Europe today, my family historically (as this takes place in still very homogenous Lithuania) is much more complicit in classism, xenophobia, antisemitism in my home country. I can't think of a way to document racism from people who have experienced racism only in the context of world news and the media being made in Hollywood. Racism in my family was taught to us through the media and systemic European prejudice, it would then seem lucky that there are not many people who can be hurt by the prejudices ingrained in society in Lithuania. However the previous statement makes it sound like I am overlooking the longstanding racism towards the Roma in all of Europe, but outside of rude statements I cannot claim to know of any instance where my relatives have engages with this community.
Overall I cannot directly connect to the root traumas of racism as it is understood in the Western world, racism acts as an export from the west to cultures that otherwise have no historical precedent to be racist. This in the end is a symptom of white supremacy, if all white people, despite historical relevance, participate in the racism that looks down upon the global majority, than the idea of the "white race" and our "superiority" is maintained.

Bonus Assignment: Sell the work and use the proceeds to pay reparations.
When will we finally face our failures and crimes and pay those reparations systemically? My actions are important but without systemic change any move I make will be too small to create a dent in the status quo.

Evaluation
"Although completion of all the above assignments is encouraged, congratulating yourself will lead to an automatic fail. This is, after all, the basic work of accessing your own humanity."
This is merely an exercise, a first attempt at speaking about race in any official capacity. I am unhappy with my answers, but now that the first drafts are written I can improve at this. However that raises the question: Is it selfish for me to focus this much on myself on the topic of race?

Marlon James: Why I'm Done Talking About Diversity

Not only do we want to have conversations about race, we want these conversations to escape the ongoing cycle seen in media regarding these conversations.

A racially motivated event occurs -> it is discussed -> "we've already spoken on this subject" -> "thus the subject must have been solved" -> denial of the issue.

Rinse and repeat.

Only once the cycle stops can these conversations be constructive.
Only once the conversations are constructive can the right actions be taken by the people who CAN make a change.

It is important for me to learn to talk about race because once I can have a mature conversation about the subject, the people who these conversations actually affect can respond to me honestly.

Project Proposal

-> Images are difficult to use since all images have baggage, symbolism, and metaphor. Any person in our audience can interpret an image as they see fit.
-> An image feels like a cop-out, since we're learning to make direct statements we should make sure the statement in our work cannot be misunderstood.
-> Thus we should make statements

Medium:
-> interactive art
-> lots of thoughts/ideas

Material:
-> tissues/thin paper as a nod to white fragility

Goals:
-> audience interacts with the work
-> the statements raised encourage conversation
-> creating a starting point for white audiences

Target audience: white people who are ready to learn how to have these conversations.

Important aspects:
Layers -> conversations of race are very complicated and nuanced, there are many places you can start and there is always overlap
Transparency -> we need to be transparent about why we are having these conversations as to put us in the same vulnerable position the global majority is in.
Conversation -> there must be an environment made to encourage speaking about the work and the topic that are brought up.
Avoiding exploitative imagery -> as white artists we can fall into creating visual stereotypes in our work, we must make efforts to avoid this
Color -> do we make the project stark white as a nod to white supremacy, or should we create an environment that is colorful and welcoming
Interaction -> how do we want the audience to interact with.

Teaching white people about racism is emotional labor, a burden that only falls on people of color. With this project hopefully we can propose a way for white people to start these conversations without our hands being held and our feelings put first.

Racism doesn't care about your feelings

Confronting racism is not about the needs and feelings of white people
Ijeoma Oluo

Is there a way for a white person to learn and speak about race, without turning it into a self-improvement contest?
How can I avoid being a white savior, and be an ally instead? Where is that line drawn?
Is being humble when approaching the subject enough?

Claudia Rankine's work explains the racism people experience in a gentle way, she explains the way one feels when facing microaggressions and systemic racism in a very emotional way. As a person of color just explaining what happens to you doesn't explain the emotional toll that it all takes.

As a white person MY feelings should not be the main concern when discussing racism.

“Part of our job as a curator is to be mindful of what’s happening, not only in the contemporary art world, but also in the world at large,“ she says. “Last summer after the murder of George Floyd, I had read about the AMENDS project that Nick Cave and Bob Faust had put together in Chicago, and it started because Nick Cave and Bob Faust are both creative partners and life partners, so as an interracial couple, they had these very difficult conversations.“

AMENDS begins with “Phase I: Letters to the World Toward the Eradication of Racism,“ which features open letters from community leaders discussing their own role in the perpetuation of racism here in Madison.

Becker Solomon says that the physical act of writing a chosen message, quote or apology for all of State Street to see is impactful in itself.

Ideally:
The viewer enters a gallery space, it is lit by warm light. Maybe some red spotlights are pointing at the table to create slight strain on the eyes of the viewer (because caring about racial conflict takes effort just as viewing the work does). In the room is a round table covered with many thin napkins covered in red and black writing. Among the texts are quotes from people of color about how we should approach social justice, their experiences and their wishes. These quotes are obscured in a captcha-like manner, with red ink. The audience has to use a tool (a red-lens magnifying glass ) to read them. Some napkins have notes in red, these are thoughts of the white creators of the piece, they are prompts for the audience to ease into the peace and to think about.
This is a conversation that the viewer has to make an effort to "hear" and participate in.