Haven't we been constantly bombarded with the question, "look at what we've done to our black men?" Hasn't there been 35 years of serious artistic and academic criticism surrounding our understanding of race and sex in America? James Scruggs's Disposable Men takes this seemingly familiar dialogue and restructures it through a media-saturated storytelling that asks its audience to make the critical links between Hollywood monsters, multiple media markers, personal histories, minstrelsy, government experiments, and searing emotional landscapes to rediscover our fascination with 'otherness' and to give a more complicated understanding of the mental and social anguish lurking between cause and effect.
ENTERTAINMENT AND MEDIA
In the early, the Lewis Plantation
and Turpentine Still reopened its plantation for public consumption. Scores
of families visited each week to watch little
jig-a-boo children dance, sing, and play. The families joined the children
in buggy rides around the plantation and observed the adults in their natural
habitats working the land and creating turpentine—just as it would have
occurred prior to the emancipation. The Lewis Plantation was an instant success,
and over 30 years, thousands of families would visit this small South Georgia
town to interact with the past.
The visitors, most often white, received a comfortable, hospitable environment
where they were sure no slave riots would erupt, as the Plantation now paid
its 're-enactors.' The traditional and unjust class systems based
on landholding, racial demarcation, and sex were glorified, celebrated, and
offered as entertainment for any motorist willing to take his family on the
journey.
The theater, minstrelsy, and the films of studio Hollywood has made it even more accessible for a family to engage passively in a separation between the "them" (black people) and the "us" (white audience.) When not subverted by the black-face minstrel performances by white entertainers, black folk were consistently cast as maids, pick-a-ninnies, minstrels, Toms, coons, bucks, et al., and continues today with the all too familiar street thug, potential rapist, ex-con, or drugged up welfare freeloader. These stereotypes of black people perpetuate the underlying fear, disdain, and mistrust that permeate our media.
Popular media often kills off the black man in the first 10 minutes of a horror or action film (coined by critic Roger Ebert as "BADF," as in the Brother Always Dies First), and it offers the all too simplistic renderings of black men as the dazzling entertainer or hard-edged murderer/rapist. These media images and texts create a social psyche and consciousness that inform the decisions and performance of every black American man and those who engage with him.
KILLING, FEAR, AND MOB MENTALITY
The lynching of black men has plagued America for over 400 years. These often
public performances point to a morbid pre-occupation with catharsis and revenge
that lurks in communal fear.
On June 14, 1920, the John Robinson Circus arrived in Duluth, Indiana. On June 15, police arrested three young black men, employees of the circus, who had been accused of raping a white woman. "An examination of the woman that morning by Dr. David Graham, a family physician, showed no physical signs of rape or assault," yet, that evening, "Wielding bricks, rails, and heavy timbers, the mob forced its way into the jail, tearing down doors and breaking windows."
The men—Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie—were taken from jail by the mob. "After a hasty mock trial, Clayton, Jackson, and McGhie were declared guilty and taken one block to a light pole on the corner of First Street and Second Avenue East. A few tried to dissuade the mob, but their pleas were in vain... the three men were beaten and then lynched, first Isaac McGhie, then Elmer Jackson, and lastly Elias Clayton." (http://collections.mnhs.org/duluthlynchings/html/lynchings.htm)
It is disturbing to consider the amount of organized chaos that created a space—outside of law and order—where several men could be mockingly tried and killed by hundreds of participants. Just like when the angry mob pursues Frankenstein through the forest, these fear-motivated killings occur within a social rupture, where logic and method are hastily abandoned for passion and the immediate cleansing of the 'threatening other' from society.
The equally disturbing news of NYC police over-reacting to unarmed black men has been revealed by high-profile cases such as the abuse of Abner Louima in August 1997, the shooting death of Amadou Diallo in February 1999 and Patrick Dorismand in 2000. In all three of these cases, the police both misidentified the man and assumed he was carrying a weapon. When several cops take down a single black man who may look like a suspect—a black man who has no weapon and who shows no visible means of resistance—one has to wonder if it is simply a learned response to that individual's sex and race that provokes the police officer to respond lethally.
AN ARTIST RESPONDS
Driven by the appalling amount of unjust murders, James Scruggs began to
create Disposable Men a visual/aural/textual world that interplays, dialogues
with,
and contextualizes America's fascination with "otherness." Disposable
Men asks its audience to consider how that otherness transfers from Hollywood
monster to black entertainer to sexual predator. Scruggs, a video/performance
artist, developed Disposable Men through the HERE Artist Residency Program
and with the guidance of HERE co-founder and Executive Director Kristin
Marting. Scruggs has used multimedia to capture the uneasy relationship
between a
black man's vision of self and the reality of his social positioning.
Scruggs's work attempts to create spaces where boundaries are smeared and even erased—where thoughts and ideas easily push and interact with one another. Easy correlations cannot be made, and each image/text creates a space for reconsideration and emotional weight. The audience is asked, not to sit and be passively preached to, but to engage actively with the immediate experience and our shared history. And, it is through this intense communal engagement, where the audience is implicated and given ownership, that those seemingly posed questions concerning America's black men and our Hollywood monsters are given new insight, life, and understanding.