CULTURE FILES // HEATHER SHAYNE BLAKESLEE // AGAINST SELF CENSORSHIP IN THE ARTS
NAPTIME BY CHARLES BROWNING,
Lions Don’t Eat Straw
Artists should stop censoring themselves and make the art they want to make
by Heather Shayne Blakeslee
Volume 6 // Issue 2 // Fall 2024 // Founders
The wolf shall live with the lamb;
the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
the calf and the lion will feed together,
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze;
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
— Isaiah 11:1-9
Our divided American populace in 2024, especially in a year with a contentious presidential election, shows no signs of creating either a shining city on a hill or a peaceable kingdom together, in which red-leaning and blue-leaning constituents join hands and merrily dance in solidarity. While interracial marriages are on the uptick, and nearly 40 million people in the United States identify as mixed race, mixed political marriages are on the decline. Like the frontiersman figures in the painter Charles Browning’s work Good Chance, (see image Page 71) we’re in a canoe together, rowing in opposite directions.
I had the opportunity to speak with the artist, 61, about his show “Charles Browning: Peaceable Kingdom,” which opened at Gettysburg College on September 5. It’s hallowed ground for Americans, as 40 people died in battle there during the civil war. Two summer’s ago, I attended the national convention of Braver Angels, a political polarization organization that I volunteer for, on the college’s campus. Our conversation was brief, but I’d spent a good deal of time thinking about his art, which has been a spring board for me.
Browning and I talked about the different stories we tell about American history, and where to go from here.
“A question I've asked some people in the last few months is, ‘When was the time that you thought things were best?’” Browning says.
He’s asked the question to mostly older Americans, and while they start out drifting toward the past, they end up paddling toward the present. “Generally speaking, they wind up saying, ‘I guess it’s best right now, even though things do not feel that way in a lot of ways.’”
As Steven Pinker would remind us in books such as Enlightenment Now, we’re all much better off than nearly everyone else who has come before us in human history, but the dominant media narrative is that it’s never been worse. From both extreme progressives and extreme conservatives, we get some version of American carnage. I believe there is a way that we can acknowledge our complicated past—especially those in which families owned slaves or commandeered land from native populations—without allowing the actions of our ancestors to completely overshadow our possibilities in the present. We should, and must, find ways to row in the same direction occasionally if humankind is to exist at all in the future.
“If you want to go into my family history, I’m descended from a Revolutionary War general who was the first surveyor general of the United States,” Browning says of his relation to Rufus Putnam. (Putnam’s cousin Anne was famous for being one of the accusers in the Salem witch trials.) “He was in charge of property boundaries. He was also the leader of the first official government settlement in Ohio. So he’s known as the “Father of Ohio” … pushing the boundaries of the United States further out.” (Technically, Rufus Putnam is known as the “Father of the Northwest Territories.” If the country’s political factions finally split into multiple governments based on regional interests, maybe we’ll take to calling it the Northwest Territories again).
It’s evident in speaking with Browning that he feels as though the frontier sins of his forefathers are something he should continually reckon with as an artist, and he’s even seriously considered whether he should make art at all as a white man.
While it wasn’t what I was expecting from our conversation, I came away with the undeniable feeling that—while I was immediately taken when I saw his work because it made me smile, and frown, and squint, and think, and lean in to see what was there—it was, perhaps, a beauty trap. You could argue that instead of destabilizing our views of American history, perhaps his images are calcifying a dominant political narrative that encourages us to stay divided.
The leap
In the ’90s, Browning felt that he’d become stuck as an artist, and that maybe no one needed his voice, thinking to himself, “White men have had plenty of space to speak,” he told me. Other white male artists I’ve spoken with have also become so absorbed in a certain kind of progressive worldview about whose voice should be lifted and whose we don’t need to hear from that they considered not making art anymore. I find this a troubling phenomenon, not least of which because the amount of art that should be made is not finite, nor is there a finite number of souls who deserve to make it.
He went to graduate school later in life, at New York University. He would have been prowling the halls of academia when intellectuals such as Camille Paglia—who taught at the University of the Arts (as did, ultimately, Browning until the school shut down this year)—were pushing back on identity politics. But Browning clearly decided that he had to take the culture war into account if he was going to put brush to canvas.
“Kara Walker became the key for how I could think about this—that she was taking this position as a woman of color on the fringes of power in American history, utilizing the cut paper silhouette, which was a technique, a sort of craft technique, of the traveling artist who would knock on your door and cut your silhouette, often black. And so I flipped that, and I said, ‘Okay, if she's doing that, then the logical reversal of that to my position as a white male would be to paint the grand-scale history painting, in oils.”
Zadie Smith wrote about an early image of Walker’s titled what I want history to do to me that shows an antebellum white woman whose corseted waist is being cinched by a black slave, also portrayed with an exaggerated and sexualized body, as she pulls in the opposite direction. Smith’s essay is one of the best pieces of writing I’ve yet seen on how we grapple with our past together, what monuments mean, and how we might engage with the idea of cultural appropriation—and where we might yet go. Walker’s powerful image set Smith on a vision quest, and it’s worth quoting Smith here at length.
“What might I want history to do to me? I might want history to reduce my historical antagonist—and increase me. I might ask it to urgently remind me why I’m moving forward, away from history. Or speak to me always of our intimate relation, of the ties that bind—and indelibly link—my history and me. I could want history to tell me that my future is tied to my past, whether I want it to be or not. Or ask it to promise me that my future will be revenge upon my past. Or warn me that the past is not erased by this revenge. Or suggest to me that brutal oppression implicates the oppressors, who are in turn brutalized by their own acts of oppression. Or argue that an oppressor can believe herself to be an oppressor only within a system in which she herself has been oppressed. I might want history to show me that slaves and masters are bound at the hip. That they internalize each other. That we hate what we most desire. That we desire what we most hate. That we create oppositions—black white male female fat thin beautiful ugly virgin whore—in order to provide definition to ourselves by contrast. I might want history to convince me that although some identities are chosen, many others are forced. Or that no identities are chosen. Or that all identities are chosen. That I feed history. That history feeds me. That we starve each other. All of these things. None of them. All of them in an unholy mix of the true and the false…”
It’s disturbing to think that in reckoning with America’s past, Browning’s paintings almost didn’t get made. Fortunately, his creative instincts kicked in, like some sort of artistic sympathetic nervous system, insisting that he breathe—that he create.
Yet. He is still tied up in the knotted riggings of history, as we all are. How to get free? Can we get free? However the series came about, Browning has produced funny and beautiful work that took two decades to complete.
Even though “ironic” and “humorous” are words that Browning has used to describe his work, I am sure someone out there will glibly take note of the fact that, in an attempt not to center himself, in exploring the tensions that Smith writes about, he ended up painting grand oil paintings, cast as a leading character.
Fooling around
Browning decided that one thing he could, maybe even should do, given his family’s colonial history, was make fun of himself.
He became the model for a woodsman character, a self-portrait, who was clueless and oblivious, and yet, as he tells it, probably still successful even if he was about to walk off a cliff, due to where he was born into society. The painting Dumbass shows exactly that, a hale, cheery, racoon-capped figure with a rabbit dancing at his feet—based on the Fool in tarot—about to step into the ether like Wile E. Coyote from a Roadrunner cartoon.
Even if Browning’s images come from a place of coerced self-deprecation, the paintings pleasingly evoke the Hudson River School and other early American traditions and are kinetically colored, energetic images. The eponymous painting from the “Peaceable Kingdom” show is a take on a series of the same name by Edward Hicks, a devout Quaker who was born in Bucks County in 1780 and who made nearly 60 versions of the paintings. They’re based on the Bible verses Isaiah 11:1-9, from which we get the proverbial phrase about lions laying down with lambs (even though the verses don’t make that actual animal pairing—it’s wolves and lambs). Known for their orientation to social justice, Quakers were among America's early abolitionists, and many are still engaged in activities such as advocating to abolish the death penalty, along with other prison reforms.
They urged their followers to “mind the light within.” According to the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, this phrase is not meant to indicate merely developing a conscience, which is “conditioned by education, personal experience, and the cultural and social environment.” It’s a deeper truth and divine connection that “illuminates, inspires, and transforms us” and “shows us how to live with love, compassion, and justice towards others.” Art and spirituality are two instincts that are closely intertwined. Much art is born from a deep and unexplainable instinct, and it’s also played an important role over time in ritual and ceremony. Its origins are not from the political bumper sticker. I want to argue here that artists should rise above their immediate cultural and social environment and instead listen closely to what calls to them from the universe.
In Browning’s version of “Peaceable Kingdom,” a black man, a woodsman, and a Native American dance in a circle while all manner of wild and domestic animals cavort at their feet. Behind them, a house is consumed by flames. A rainbow, leprechaun, butterfly, and black goat are among the unlikely celebrants (see image Page XX). When I first saw Browning’s “Peaceable Kingdom” painting, I immediately flashed to Albert Murray’s book The Omni-Americans, in which he talks about this triumvirate of colonial American characters who are all negotiating the birth of a new country together, and, as a result, becoming more like one another than they care to admit. I would argue that we still are negotiating the birth of a new country together. At some point, even this moment in 2024 will be considered Early American History. Are we not all founders, still figuring it out?
While the artist did not emphasize his experience of painting his “Peaceable Kingdom” work to me in the following manner, based on our conversation, a picture did emerge for me: First, at one point in time, he questioned whether he should be making art at all as a white man.. He then devised a character based on himself that is meant to be the object of derision, and took care to skewer colonialism, white supremacy, and the frontiersman trope (also a proxy for the myth of the lone male genius). The white figure of “Peaceable Kingdom” is also being rejected by the black and Native American figures (they clasp hands but shy away from him); and while the Native American holds a peace pipe, the woodsman conceals a pistol in his back pocket.
Despite his excruciating sensitivity, and its excellent execution, Browning took heat for painting the image anyway.
“I’ve sometimes had people come forward and say, ‘I don’t think you should be painting Native Americans,’” Browning explains. “I feel like I’m commenting on race and power from the position of the white man, and I can’t do that without depicting other races. I don’t want to not depict them and make them invisible.”
It’s an entirely reasonable conclusion at that point to just make the damn art, because someone, somewhere, is going to say something about it, no matter what you do or say. You can either choose to be an artist or relegate yourself to silence and not be an artist. Lions do not eat straw. Oxen do. Artists are not meant to be beasts of burden. They are meant to hunt, and to be unperturbed—even sanguine—about the inevitable blood.
But this is not the message many contemporary aspiring creatives seem to be getting, from funders, from theaters, from galleries, and the like—as well as from each other, which I find to be a particularly pernicious phenomenon. The message they receive is that they must, especially if they have predominantly European ancestry, and most particularly if they are male, order only a few unpalatable items off the career menu: silence their creative instincts entirely; fall in line with centering their art on a ceaseless critique of America as a country and themselves as a person; and, if they choose to fall in line, make doubly certain that they both interrogate the country’s past and their place in it while somehow making no reference to anyone who comes from another background. They should cinch their waist so tightly that they cannot breathe, and be happy about it.
That anyone can make anything in this artistic straight jacket is astounding, but the world is better for Browning’s thoughtful paintings, which have obviously set me on my own vision quest.
When I ask him about the strictures and express my worry about the undue influence of the political realm on artists, he does tentatively relay that he has novelist friends who worry about what characters they may write, or whether their books will be run roughshod over by the sensitivity readers at publishing houses.
As ballast to his candor, after saying the word “Latino,” he quickly corrected himself to say “Latinx.” I offered to him that according to Pew research, only 3 percent of Latinos know about and have adopted this term, and he tells me he has actually been corrected by folks who occupy the other 97 percent and would prefer to be referred to as Latino or Chicano. Despite what people from these backgrounds want, many highly-educated people have been trained to believe that white-art-editor-lady expect—more likely insists—on his using “Latinx.”
I’d like to apologize to everyone about that, because it’s partially my fault. Perhaps eight or so years ago, working for another magazine, the word Latinx came up in an article, and I thought it was a typo. But after a quick internet search, I realized a local activist organization was spelling it that way. And then I looked up why, and since I am empathetic to most progressive causes and mindful of my place as white-editor-lady, I just adopted it. It never once occurred to me that it wasn’t what the vast majority of people who spoke Spanish wanted, beyond a slim number of activists. That was a bad editorial decision. It was lazy and wrong, and I regret it.
The surreal spiral
In speaking about his painting New Frontier, Browning says, “That was where I came to taking the frontiersman into a more surreal position. I started with the rainbow idea, and then it became, I’m going to do a rainbow frontiersman centaur. And then it became, I’m going to do a rainbow frontiersman hermaphrodite centaur. Then it’s like, Okay, we can take that further into disability and make an amputee centaur. So it just kind of spiraled that way.”
I loved the centaur Chiron in Greek mythology, who was the most just and wise of his kind—a noble teacher, half man and half horse, who could commune with the forest and also our more human ways of knowing the world.
As Browning’s painting is out in the wild, it’s reasonable to read it as a sincere attempt at inclusion, which would be laudable. Browning does not at all strike me as the kind of artist (and they are out there) who cynically produces art with the “right” message even if they disagree with it, because they know that it’s what’s expected of them right now and that it’s the only way they’ll get funding. He seems to truly care about destabilizing our views of American history and about justice.
But it’s just as reasonable to read “New Frontier” as a cheeky send-up of the boxes we insist artists check—also laudable. These boxes do not make real change, and more and more well-intentioned people are getting wise to that.
Perhaps it’s a little of column A and a little of column B, which I’d take. I almost don’t want to know the answer, because it might spoil the delicious tension of not knowing, and holding out hope that it’s the latter, because it would make for a bolder statement.
If I move my dominant metaphor of America through Browning’s paintings, deeply divided in “Good Chance”; reckoning with its unsavory history in “Peaceable Kingdom”; and figuring out the future in “New Frontier,” at least it’s progress. I cannot be the only person in America who believes that we can be some magical combination of just and wise. That we may have truth and beauty. I ask about whether, as Browning engages with gender, race, and disability, he might not be missing a class analysis.
“I had somebody once say, ‘You know, basically, you’re making decorative items for rich people,’” he tells me. “I do have, sometimes, a wealthy colonial figure as an alternate to the frontiersman, but I don’t think class has become a major theme in my work, except in an oblique way, with the Dutch floral still lives. Those are about wealth and consumption.” For the record, any of Browning’s paintings would look lovely on your wall. I hope he keeps painting. I also hope we—the artistic community—-give him and others a more open environment in which to do so.
My question is this: Is this narrow path—this surreal spiral of art as merely political, at its worst devolving into propaganda—really a new frontier? Or should we free talented artists to truly explore on their own, and to find new territory? Browning’s work is technically sound, well-imagined, and whimsically disturbing; the colors are gorgeous, and the narratives smart. They are beautiful, and beauty doesn’t have to be a trap. We need more beauty, in fact.
I am left wondering what artists might create if they listened less to the predominant political discourses of today’s art world, and instead gave themselves permission to mind the light within. //
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