Visual Arts - Strange Fruit

Eyedrum exhibition fails to shed much light on the legacy of lynching

A show addressing the topic of lynching is a difficult proposition with many potential problems. Strange Fruit: Artists Responding to Lynching and Mob Violence at Eyedrum succumbs to some of those pitfalls, with moments of knee-jerk PC empathy and artworks that offer an impassioned but not necessarily enlightening approach to this landmine- studded subject.However, a few pieces of Strange Fruit do offer new wrinkles in our understanding of race, human cruelty and the artist’s ability to resuscitate cold, dead history.

Despite its weaknesses, Strange Fruit is a robust and necessary concept show that responds to the higher profile exhibition Without Sanctuary, featuring actual lynching photographs, at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site. It seems only natural that Atlanta artists surrounded by the ugly and also noble legacy of race relations in the South would have a lot to say about the painful lynching photographs on view.

The most commonly repeated misstep in Strange Fruit is in simply representing some of the iconography of lynching. For some artists, the dangling feet, the blood, the trees and the noose, coupled with an imagining of the horrified shudder these totems create in the audience, is commentary or insight enough. But in a culture saturated in dead-end references that depict but rarely investigate, something more is required.

Lisa Tuttle’s “The Education of Physicians” offers that something more and profits by only alluding to lynching. Tuttle succinctly evokes the dehumanization and nightmare of institutional racism by referencing personal and national history via family photographs.

In half of Tuttle’s large 100-by-36-inch diptych, dated 1908, a group of Virginia medical students stand behind their autopsy project, holding scalpels aloft. The eye is drawn to this chorus line tableaux of men standing amidst the tools of their profession and the quaint, outmoded poses they adopt. But the corpse that the men have eviscerated, which becomes a grotesque prop like the charred bodies in Without Sanctuary, is a black man whose death is so meaningless and whose soul is so irrelevant, he is not even accorded the dignity of a shrouded face.

The image is a metaphor for the degradation of lynching and the systemic disregard for black Americans’ personhood, but it also refers to the cavalier brutality and macabre practices of medical history, which places the physician on one plane and the patient far below.

Charles Nelson offers similar commentary on dehumanization by deferring, like Tuttle, to photographic history in a provocative way.

Rather than a family photograph unearthed from a relative’s attic, the image Nelson references is a Weegee-esque photograph the artist has painted onto a large canvas. “Untitled: Weegee (Call & Response)” continues the artist’s longstanding interest in his audience’s interaction with images, especially images of violence. Next to his painting of a man in a police chokehold who has been cropped off at neck-level to obscure his face, Nelson displays snapshot-style photographs of hamming, joking partygoers posed in front of the backdrop.

One woman vamps in a sexy pose, another guy holds his girlfriend in a similar chokehold. Nelson is clearly interested in how blithely people interact with the often-troubling visual imagery that surrounds them. The project becomes a commentary on how naive Americans are about their own history — treating it as some two-dimensional backdrop with little relation to their own lives.

Photo-based work like Tuttle’s and Nelson’s makes perfect sense in Strange Fruit because it illuminates some of the darker impulses of our history and shows the human desire to photograph scenes of violence as mementos, ideas also at work in Without Sanctuary.

Because some classes and races have been denied a place in American history, they have depended upon their own storytellers to record the often horrible truths of their existence. In music, legend and whispers, a secret knowledge circulates. Diana Lynch’s “Strange Fruite” deals in that folklore of horror by depicting a lynching in the ordinary materials of beads and fabric, which the artist uses to create her image of a pregnant woman kneeling in prayer or grief next to her husband’s corpse, dangling from a tree. An enormous moon created from iridescent beads cruelly illuminates the scene, the impact of which is made all the greater by Lynch’s reference to handicraft and a homespun alternative “folk” history.

For the most part, the work in Strange Fruit often feels strangely absent of rage and provocation, as if the show’s organizers, Peggy Dobbins and Kevin Sipps, were worried about somehow besmirching the Without Sanctuary exhibition, whose somber tone sets the mood for the Eyedrum show. The best works in Strange Fruit move beyond that cautious funereal ambiance to ask questions not only about our past but about how its repercussions can still be felt in some of the lingering racism and casual violence of our own day.