On the historical reality and artistic representation of Lynchings
September 10th, 2021
Lawrence Weschler & Ken Gonzales-Day
Weschler in conversation with
KEN GONZALES-DAY
On the historical reality and artistic representation of Lynchings
“Most of all, beware, even in thought, of assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator,
for life is not a spectacle, a sea of grief is not a proscenium,
and a man who wails is not a dancing bear.”
-Aime Cesare
Over the past several decades, Los Angeles based photographer Ken Gonzales-Day has been engaged in one of the most trenchant and consequential explorations both of the historical reality of lynching and of the aesthetic and ethical complications involved in blithe latter day cultural appropriations of incidents which from the very start had been cast as prurient spectacles. Several years of archival research culminated, in 2006, with his publication of Lynching in the West (1850-1935), which revealed the shocking and long-occluded extent of extralegal executions not only of blacks but of Latinos and others as well, particularly in California. This research in turn informed several subsequent projects, including one in which he compiled often hand-tinted vintage postcards celebrating local lynchings and then proceeded to honor the victims by airbrushing them out of the image entirely, inviting viewers to focus instead on the obscenely gawking spectators, and another in which he travelled all around the west, prizing gorgeous Ansel Adams-style photos of stately gnarled old-stand trees, which the viewer is only gradually given to understand were deployed years ago as the site of actual lynchings.
Ken Gonzales-Day is represented by the Luis de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles, though his interdisciplinary and conceptually grounded projects have been displayed throughout the world. In 2018, Gonzales-Day’s work was featured in “Unseen: Our Past in a New Light,” at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. He is The Fletcher Jones Chair in Art at Scripps College and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography in 2017. For more, see: https://kengonzalesday.com
This conversation is part of the series “Mr. Weschler’s Cabinet of Wonders,” as part of “SunShip: The Arc That Makes The Flood Possible,” Arts Letters & Numbers’ exhibition in the CITYX Venice Italian Virtual Pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale.