Editor’s Introduction: Armed/Unarmed: Guns in American Visual and Material Culture

As we organized this themed issue exploring the presence of guns in American visual and material culture in the 20th and 21st centuries, we learned of a sonic artillery technology, Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRADs), that military and security personnel have been utilizing domestically and internationally since 2000 (Cheng, 2016). LRADs, which police have deployed against demonstrators in myriad events from the G20 Summit to Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, emit sounds so intense that even short-term exposure to the sound waves can cause permanent damage, in addition to the initial effects of nausea, nerve hearing loss, ear pain, fluid drainage, and immobilization experienced by those caught in the sonic cone of impact. And yet, because the technology is marketed as a tool for ‘emergency mass notification and rescue operations’ and visually discernible injury remains absent, LRADs have evaded categorization as weapons and thereby avoid regulation and prohibitions placed on weapons use and sales.

It may seem off-topic to frame a journal issue on the hyper-visible weaponry of guns with the mention of a little-known, virtually invisible sonic technology. However, the non-weapon status of LRADs gives us salient pause and foregrounds many of the key inquiries that motivate this cross-disciplinary issue on the subject of being armed and unarmed in America. What does it mean to inherit and mobilize histories of weaponized violence and its representation? How have historically oppressed groups in America – such as women and people of color – repurposed rhetorical and visual weaponry to stage interventions without reifying exploitative structures? And how have often-unnamed perceptions of institutionalized whiteness defined what legal and cultural measures of protection look like, or what is or isn’t considered a weapon or tactic of resistance? How can humanities research and cultural production utilize their capacities to make threats nameable and visible to most effectively contribute to this dialogue?

This inquiry-driven edition of the journal of visual culture addresses the omnipresence of guns in America in the age of open-carry laws, police violence, school shootings, NRA TV, and the 24-hour news cycle, while also pointing to the less detectable ramifications guns have on discourse and culture. As with LRADs (effectively designed to replace or be combined with rubber bullets), some weaponry has become visually indiscernible and profoundly diffuse. As technology and consumer demand disseminate weaponry at such a furious pace, we write with a sense of urgency. The stakes for addressing the entangled histories of vision and violence are high in the US, where the gun-related death rates (approximately 96 per day) far exceed those in other advanced nations (Chalabi, 2017) and where a new generation of activists fight for effective gun control and new understandings of self-defense. Local mythologies of American exceptionalism – grounded in the Second Amendment as national firmament, the white Western cowboy as archetypal hero, and the gun-owner as citizen – breed barriers to policy change and unawareness to how essentialist notions of innocence and deviance reinforce social mechanisms of hegemonic control. Cultural theorists have paved the way with analyses of how the optics of weapons have symbiotically and synchronously altered how we come to know ourselves, each other, and the world (Deutsche, 2010; Ellis, 1975; Virilio, 1989). This knowing is further complicated by scholars’ articulation of the racialized and gendered apparatus through which knowledge and subject formation emerge in the visual field (Dyer, 1997; Fleetwood, 2011; Gooding-Williams, 1993). In this issue, scholars, curators, and artists committed to the study of visual and material representations of gun violence build upon these discourses to interrogate the physical, psychological, and sociopolitical impact of guns, and how ‘being armed’ cannot simply be understood in terms of who carries guns. Rather, it constitutes an unfixed social landscape ripe for continued investigation.

Central to this journal of visual culture issue is the tenuous relationship of who is seen vs unseen and lionized vs vilified in American discourse about gun violence and ownership. Contemporary image-events in the media cement these relations in national memory and loom large in this issue, from the disproportionately large number of racially motivated, police-initiated gun deaths of black Americans to the ongoing devastation wrought by ‘lone wolves’, predominantly white men, in school shootings. The role of guns in the latter events has even become a moving target, so to speak, as epitomized by the NRA’s campaign following the Parkland High School massacre (February 2018) to ‘harden the schools’, which places the onus for school safety not on gun reform but on architectural design (LaPierre, NBC, February 2018). By arguing that spatially altering entrances and exits and stationing armed guards will diminish ‘school violence’, the NRA strategically displaces and effaces how guns not buildings perpetuate gun violence. President Trump’s STOP School Violence Act of 2018 appropriates this injurious semantic slippage in its omission of any reference to guns (‘STOP School Violence Act’, Senate Judiciary Committee, H.R.4909).

Amidst such problematic policy-making and news coverage, the necessity of media literacy increases exponentially. Art and media images engaging with the subject of guns are, in effect, unique barometers of affect and the ethics of representing violence. For example, in February 2018, the Hirshhorn Museum postponed its scheduled public re-staging of a gun-laden image featured in Krzysztof Wodiczko’s three-story projection Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C. (1988–2000) (Figure 1) out of sensitivity and respect for the victims and families in the immediate aftermath of the Parkland shooting (Peck, 2018). First, one might ask if the museum’s gesture is meaningful or counterproductive, particularly when the work was intended to be prominently displayed near the nation’s capital amid a moment of citizen activism and governmental inaction. In today’s climate, Wodiczko’s pairing of a gun with a vigil candle visually embodies the common condolence #thoughtsandprayers, which has become a popular cynical meme (Willingham, CNN, 2018). Furthermore, while the Hirshhorn’s postponement may have reflected thoughtful solidarity with Parkland victims, this ‘sensitivity’ also registers as privileging certain types of gun-related deaths. Whereas school shootings, particularly in predominantly white, affluent neighborhoods, are recognized by the media and mourned nationally, other cases, such as the gun-related deaths of indigenous, transgender, and black and brown youth, often remain buried in news cycles if they appear in them at all. Heeding this discrepancy and its attendant social politics (when terms used in news reports like ‘inner-city’ and ‘terrorism’ infer racial, gendered, and classist meaning), this issue addresses the pervasive logics of white privilege limning gun violence in the US. We do so not to re-center white subjects, but to think about how notions of self-defense and the politics of innocence whitewash how gun violence is often discussed in the US. Within the ever-shifting contexts of violence, mourning, and political activism, the decisions to show – and not show – guns trace how long-cultivated perceptions of innocence, safety, and threat creating a tacit scale of national priority have become even more entrenched in our cultural imaginary.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1

Krzysztof Wodiczko, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C. (1988–2000), 1988–2000, C-print face-mounted to acrylic (documentation of public light projection), 29½ x 39½ in. Museum Purchase, 2000. Photography by Cathy Carver, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution. © Krzysztof Wodiczko. Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co., New York. Reproduced with permission.

The gun-inflected vocabulary we Americans use to discuss mundane events tellingly indexes the depth to which guns shape our identities and how our sense of self on a granular level of expression inherits a culture of intimidation: ‘loaded’ words, ‘go ballistic’, ‘shoot from the hip’, ‘trigger happy vs gun shy’, ‘a real straight shooter’, ‘son of a gun’, ‘shooting for [a deadline]’, ‘hotshot’, ‘bite the bullet’, ‘silver bullet’, ‘dodged a bullet’, ‘stick to your guns’, ‘sit shotgun’, ‘moral caliber’, ‘pull the trigger’, ‘bring out the big guns’, and ‘caught in the crossfire’. Within academia and shared public spaces, it is ironically a gun-related term, ‘trigger warning’, that pervades in efforts to control discourse about sensitive topics like violence, sexuality, and racism. These colloquialisms are applied to describe our very character, temperament, goals, and set-backs, revealing how multivalent and cross-disciplinary the object of analysis must be. That the majority of these idioms invite the speaker to assume the epistemological role of the shooter, to view the world as wielder of a weapon instead of potential victim, is particularly alarming, and requires further attention. Art history, our home discipline, is certainly not exempt. Multiple artists have also considered the boundedness of vision and the bullet trajectory. For example, when describing Jasper Johns’ target paintings, Robert Morris declared that, ‘Looking is conflated with a .30 caliber weapon’ (Morris, 2007: 213). In front of Johns’ targets and, for that matter Adrian Piper’s Imagine [Trayvon Martin] (2013) (see Portfolio of Artworks section), the act of looking not only takes on the conventional power dynamics associated with the gaze, but becomes overtly weaponized. As Brynn Hatton discusses in this issue, photography and film – each with its own form of shooting – contain histories, mechanisms, and language deeply imbricated with the world of firearms. These models bespeak the pressing need to continue cultivating critical dialogue around the difficult subject of firearms – to trace the historically and culturally specific visual and material entanglements of value judgments, action-taking, and gun-wielding, and the long arc of their impact.

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To study how weaponized culture informs systems of representation and power, ‘Armed/Unarmed: Guns in American Visual and Material Culture’ examines how a range of predominantly US artists, activists, scholars, curators, and legislators since the 1960s have mobilized the materials, imagery, and modalities of guns toward diverse political, artistic, and pedagogical goals. By bringing together contributors working across various disciplines and mediums, we seek to explore the intersections of artistic production, design history, guerrilla intervention, policy change, and political rhetoric as they have unfolded over the last 50 years. Although an academic publication has a tendency to court political ambivalence as a function of its distanced tone and formal rhetoric, we remain committed to researching and engaging the difficult and sensitive topic of gun violence in an effort to provide space for meditation in the midst of the barrage of news stories that often incentivize immediate reaction over slow reflection and sustained discussion. Our hope is that this collection of articles, artworks, and a curatorial roundtable contributes to the necessary and ongoing confrontation with America’s gun culture. Our chosen title for this issue, ‘Armed/Unarmed’, purposely juxtaposes the two overly-simplified but widely used categories in order to identify the problematic boundedness of these complex positions as a key site for investigation. Insofar as the right to bear arms has been deployed to survive as well as oppressive structures of power, as the armed resistance of black Americans during the Civil Rights era in the Jim Crow South (Umoja, 2013; Wendt, 2007) and the use of sonic weapons today on peaceful demonstrators attest, it becomes clear that the armed/unarmed binary - and the assumptions that underpin it - requires further historical contextualization and cultural analysis.

Since the 1960s, artists have increasingly incorporated guns as materials and metaphors in order to confront violence and systems fostering asymmetrical power. When examining this corpus of material over the past six decades, two resonant modalities emerge. In the 1960s and ‘70s, a number of artists mobilized armament as a means to empower the disempowered. In contrast, since the 1990s’ rise in mass shootings and this decade’s BLM and March for Our Lives activism, artists have tended to draw attention to guns as brutal, ubiquitous instruments that kill innocent civilians and particularly target black and brown bodies. We considered these models when we conceived of and implemented this dialogue as a panel titled ‘Outgunned and Outmanned’ for the 2017 College Art Association’s annual conference. There, we began not simply with the concept of guns in art and visual culture, but more specifically with an interest in exploring the principle of stealing an enemy’s weapons. This strategy of counterinsurgency was outlined by Che Guevara in his 1961 manual, Guerrilla Warfare. Guevara explained how small oppositional bands across the globe could disrupt colonial, neocolonial, and dictatorial governments by learning how to operate guns and seizing the weapons of their enemies. While they may have been outnumbered, Guevara explained, they would not be outmaneuvered. These tactical methods of intervention were quickly adapted for cultural production in the 1960s and ’70s, as artists increasingly depicted guns, sculpted with guns, and implemented situations of armed resistance, as in the case of guerrilla performance art. An unintended outcome of these powerful appropriations of the weaponry/tactics of their enemy (whether that be violence generally or a specific armed oppressor) is that they can run the risk of bolstering the romance of guns or desensitizing viewers. These tensions similarly complicate and self-consciously haunt this journal issue as it considers artists’ engagement with guns, and seeks to confront without exploiting racialized terrorism, police brutality, and the militarized state of enforcement and ‘safety’ in the United States.

In six featured articles, we have invited scholars working across diverse disciplinary boundaries – art history, performance studies, legal studies, material culture studies, studio arts, design history, and museum studies – to examine the subject of arms in relation to race, gender, social movements, technology, display, and vision itself. Within several of the articles, guns as cultural artifacts come to the fore as a common thread. Building upon her expertise in curatorial practice and design history, Michelle Millar Fisher addresses the systemic exclusion of contemporary firearms from histories of design told in academia and art museums. Fisher examines how a few recent exceptions have sought to redress this absence, exposing perhaps an imminent sea change in curatorial practices in material culture and design. Brynn Hatton considers the history of the AK-47, the iconic weapon of ‘Third World’ revolution, and its appropriation by contemporary Vietnam-based collectives The Propeller Group and Le Brothers to track interwoven histories of imperialism, film, installation art, and violence. Hatton’s article is certainly not the only contribution to this journal to reveal the porous and fluid nature of ‘American’ gun violence, which aggressively surpasses conventional geographic borders and informs global war and insurrection; other examples include Atteqa Ali’s discussion of her post-9/11 exhibition on violence in Pakistani art (see Curatorial Roundtable) and Hilary Robinson’s discussion of Milica Tomić’s post-Cold War intervention into Belgrade’s urban space (see Portfolio of Artworks section). Activist and graphic design professor Colette Gaiter focuses on the graphic production of the Black Panther’s Minister of Culture Emory Douglas, whose work she was instrumental in making visible to growing audiences in early exhibitions. Gaiter unpacks how the Black Panthers developed at once what the FBI termed ‘the biggest threat to national security’ and an archetypal American hero found in television, comics, Westerns, and science fiction with all the necessary criteria: armed, cool, well-dressed, speaking truth to power, and caring for children. Douglas’s images, Gaiter explicates, at once established close kinship with ingrained representations of power, piqued racial anxieties, and promoted survivalist resistance.

Several articles critically examine performances of armed and unarmed bodies, whether through performance art proper, an individual’s navigation of policed public space, or the performativity of gun ownership in action and in media images. Faye Gleisser traces the emergent, discursive ‘politics of the misfire’ in southern California during the 1970s through a comparison of Chris Burden’s iconic performance Shoot (1971) and Chicano collective Asco’s collaborative conceptual practice. Gleisser argues that Asco’s engagement with the contradictory lawlessness and innocence of white masculinity provides a necessary framework for revisiting the political implications of Shoot, as a paradigm that illuminates parallel processes of validation and oppression in American society. Patrice D Douglass focuses on the dissent issued by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in Utah v. Streiff, a Fourth Amendment case on lawful police searches. Douglass examines how the ongoing logic of slavery underwrites gendered and racialized bodily autonomy and freedom from physical invasion under the law, as well as how articulations of fear and threat mobilized to invalidate Black individuals’ legal rights, are in fact essential to the internal mechanics of the laws themselves. In the final article, performance studies scholar Lindsay Livingston, via close consideration of the Bundy family’s ‘Bunkerville’ standoff in 2014, troubles the fundamental visual theatricality embedded in performances of white gun ownership. Together, these articles illuminate the web of investments in which gun culture sits and the ways in which it often becomes a vanishing point in the manufacture of social rituals of trust and distrust or vulnerability and endurance.

As many of the articles attest, artists’ questioning and theorizing of gun culture materially manifest as art objects and installations, helping to cultivate visual literacy and galvanize a public pedagogy for debate and reflection. In this issue, the Portfolio of Artworks presents a relevant multigenerational selection of contemporary artists working across a multiplicity of mediums including video, photography, sculpture, installation, performance, painting, and drawing. Tensions arise when the artworks adopt layers of somber, seductive, and/or humorous tones, plunging viewers into the plural, complex attitudes that guns, and ideas of self-defense and harm, muster. The artworks serve as compelling interjections into our discussion of armament and visual culture; selected artists include Vija Celmins, Dana Chandler Jr, The Yes Men, Corey Pickett, Adrian Piper, Cara Levine, Milica Tomić, and Kelly Gallagher. In order to give context to each work and articulate its core stakes and questions, each artwork is accompanied by a brief explanatory text written by the artist or by an author deeply invested in that artist’s practice.

The third and final section of this issue features our Curatorial Roundtable, which seeks to chronicle the challenges curators face when displaying artworks incorporating firearms and to facilitate discussion about the display of charged imagery, like that elicited by the Hirshhorn’s postponement of Wodiczko’s projection. When the work of curating necessitates jumping quickly from one project to the next, knowledge produced by these experiences is typically lost to the ether of art world workflows and fiscal years. As such, we have solicited the participation of four curators active in the display of artists who refashion guns and narratives of violence in museums, galleries, universities, and even a commercial gun show. Each of the curators resolved to take up this subject in response to a particularly charged moment in the last 30 years. Jonathan Ferrara’s idea for Guns in the Hands of Artists is rooted in the 1990s when the school shooting at Columbine created a rupture in the news mediascape surrounding guns and the framing of discussions in terms of whiteness and traditions of virtue and health (see Kobayashi and Peake, 2000). Atteqa Ali’s Playing with a Loaded Gun: Contemporary Art in Pakistan opened in New York at apexart after 9/11 amid aggressive rhetoric of protectionism, masculinity, xenophobia, and Americanness. Susanne Slavick began developing Unloaded in the aftermath of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, which saw a spike in both gun sales and pleas for gun control, a now well-established pattern following mass shootings (Cornell, 2016). Finally, Kathy O’Dell’s Gun Show opened in 2017, in closer proximity to an ongoing series of mass shootings across the US – including in Miami, Las Vegas, and most recently Parkland, which redoubled new surges of youth activism. All of these exhibitions sought to hold space for critical, open discourse, operating independently of, yet in dialogue with, the infrastructural and political might of the NRA or, in the case of Ali’s show, the military industrial complex. These curators, in response to a questionnaire, reflect upon curatorial activism, installation choices, diverse publics (many of these shows attracted viewers from both the left and the right), the problem of aestheticizing violence, and the critical role of educational programming and dialogue.

The themes addressed in this issue are in no way exhaustive but part of a much longer and larger conversation. To reveal how the subject indeed spins into numerous directions one might consider: Niki de Saint Phalle’s participatory shooting events and gunshot paintings (1961–1964) as explorations of art’s destructive power; Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Death by Gun (1990) with its list of 460 individuals killed by gunshot during one week in 1989; Pedro Reyes’ dismantled guns transformed into musical instruments in Disarm (2013); and Hank Willis Thomas’s meditation on the ways capitalism fuels the same economic networks that reinforce commodity consumerism and the gun industry in Priceless #1 (2004). Artists’ varied engagements with the lived consequences of mythologies that surround being armed and unarmed, of making targets and becoming a target, underline how confluences in design, technology, and marketing practices have always been inextricably linked to the psychological and physical impact of violence. The work of honing and sharpening a cross-disciplinary visual literacy that can more acutely name such relations, particularly as rapidly shifting technological advances like 3D printing make weapon production terrifyingly accessible, becomes ever-more urgent. We hope this volume can lend multiple vantage points into the ways our violent culture produces not only nameable, visible threats that arm some and disarm others, but also ambiguous, imperceptible sources of danger that shift and move in and out of legibility.