“Fractures & Fragments: Dismantling the Icon of American Liberty” by Charles Athanasopoulos. Catalogue Essay in In Pursuit: Artists’ Perspectives on a Nation, curated by Philadelphia Sculptors. National Liberty Museum Exhibition.
Beneath Lady Liberty, there is an inscription of Emma Lazarus’ (1883) “The New Colossus” which reads, “Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free[.]” The conceptual iconography of the American dream is ubiquitous in popular culture whether it be through conservative proclamations of the need to “Make American Great Again” or through liberal championing of multicultural diversity and racial progress. This conceptual iconography is brought to life by a corresponding rolodex of public symbols whether it be the Statue of Liberty, the first Black president, or the plethora of newly released progressive films. Enshrined in the Declaration of Independence (U.S. 1776), the iconography of American liberty relies on the simple premise that “all men are created equal.” Liberty comes from the Latin liber meaning “to be free” and, in Ancient Rome, libertatem referred to a kind of civil and/or political freedom from arbitrary constraints. A quick glance at the architecture of the Capitol Building and Latin phrases such as e pluribus unum on the U.S. dollar bill highlight how the shiny image of American liberty is, in part, imagined as the successor to Athenian Democracy and the Roman Republic. Yet, each of the seven artists featured as part of In Pursuit: Artists' Perspectives on a Nation highlight the cracks and fissures within this iconic notion of American liberty. Through their disruptions of this conceptual iconography, each artist provides their own fragmented narrative surrounding important cultural issues such as race, colonialism, gender, and national borders.
In Pursuit: Artists' Perspectives on a Nation meditates on the historical and continued reality that not all “men” share in the “liberty” bestowed by U.S. founding documents. The ghillie suits featured in Artur Silva’s All Threats Came in Waves (2024), for example, point us to a deep history of colonial interventionism and U.S.-backed coups across the globe. Silva’s use of mannequins in yoga poses along with LCD monitors highlights the symbiotic relationship between military intervention, capitalist economics, and cultural propaganda in expanding US hegemony while maintaining the veneer of benevolence. Angel Cabrales’ Five Lights (2023) and The Pursuit of Happiness: A Venture in Migration (2024) similarly fracture the icon of American liberty and benevolence by disrupting dehumanizing narratives of migrants seeking refuge in the United States. Cabrales’ use of mixed media makes present the voices of those migrants and harkens to their lived realities of criminalization and deportation. Aram Han Sifuentes’ I Often Think About How I'll Stop Bullets from Entering Your Body (2023) reminds us that even the experiences of racial others (da Silva 2007) living within U.S. borders reveal cracks within the icon of American liberty. Commenting on the backdrop of intensifying anti-Asian violence and gun violence in the U.S., Sifuentes’ oil and charcoal bodies reflect both a personal fear of their loved ones being murdered just as they reflect a collective guardedness that many Asian Americans maintain in public spaces. These fractures reveal how American liberty is extended only to those who fit the social codes (e.g., race, gender, class, sexuality) of “Western Man” (Wynter 2003).
Each artist fractures the conceptual iconography of American liberty as a means of opening space for considering different ways of thinking/being/resisting which exceed Western Man. The curtain which conceals much of the action happening in Arghavan Khosravi’s The Red Carpet (A Massacre) (2024), coupled with dripping red liquid which I interpret as blood, points to the limits of both American and Iranian notions of liberty. On one hand, one could interpret the curtain as a reference to suppressions of freedom in theocratic regimes. On the other hand, one could interpret the curtain as referencing the Western colonial desire to lift the “veil” (hijab) (Fanon 1994) worn by Muslim women and the white colonial feminist notion that such unveiling is necessarily liberatory. In these ways, Khosravi moves us beyond static and exoticized images of Iranian and other Muslim women as victims and instead emphasizes their complex subjectivity amidst various oppressive forces. Khosravi’s The Flight (2024) similarly points us to symbolic tensions between Eastern/Western imagery and narratives of freedom through its dripping Black liquid which can be interpreted as both referencing U.S. oil-driven colonialism in the Middle East (given that oil is referred to as “Black gold”) as well as the violence of theocratic oil-driven regimes in the region. Yet, the woman’s disposition in the painting depicts her looking out-of-frame toward something else, something beyond both American and Iranian notions of liberty.
These fractures and fragments eschew philosophical certainty by throwing audiences into a liminal space of disorder (Fanon 1967) making it difficult to cling onto any particular image of liberty for epistemological closure. Instead, In Pursuit: Artists' Perspectives on a Nation makes us confront the limits of how we conceive of liberty. Anila Quayyum Agha’s This is NOT a Refuge (2019) is a striking immersive installation which holds us in such a liminal space. Much like the notion of American liberty itself, Agha’s shelter functions as an iconic mirage which seemingly offers refuge before participants realize that this shelter provides no such respite. How many dead and dying must be collateral to the mirage of American liberty before we acknowledge the need for something else? What does it mean to take that leap toward the unknown without knowing what that something else is? As Nicholas Galanin’s Neon American Anthem (Blue) (2024) reminds us, that leap toward the unknown begins with refusal; to refuse the romantic mirage of American liberty opens space for us to wrestle with the lived realities of quotidian anti-Black and colonial violence. The “can’t breathe” on the neon sign harkens to the murder of Black folks like Sandra Bland and George Floyd, and the directive to “take a knee and scream” points us to a liminal space of refusal, transgression, mourning, and catharsis which enables opportunities for different approaches to love and freedom which exceed Western Man. Marisa Williamson’s Seedbed V (2024) sidesteps the desire for a clear image of liberation in favor of a deep rhetorical ecology (Maraj 2020) – a classroom, garden, and bed – where the living interact with their ancestors and repurpose their knowledges toward tackling our present conditions. There is no singular icon of revolution or singular tactic of resistance but instead various go-bags which can be deployed contextually toward resistance, toward survival, toward something else. Williamson helps us imagine alternative practices of freedom which mean traversing spaces where there are no intellectual “charters” (Lorde 1984). There, at the threshold of “nothingness and infinity” (Fanon 2008, 119), between the constraining status quo and different potential futures, Williamson gestures toward a constant practice of discerning both the risks and possibilities in how we imagine liberation.
In Pursuit: Artists' Perspectives on a Nation presents multiple fragmented trajectories which focus on the contextual rather than trying to present a universal re-imagining of liberty. In doing so, each artist fractures the conceptual iconography of Western Man and opens space for something else. This does not mean that these artworks, just like any theories or practices, are guaranteed to fully escape the iconographic residues of Western Man. Yet, what does exceed such institutional capture within these artworks can still help us evolve our theories and practices of resistance. Namely, it reminds us to relinquish the desire for certainty and epistemological closure in favor of a nuanced orientation toward the messiness of lived experience. This means thinking through the real lived psychological tensions living in a world of violence while trying to resist the material and ideological conditions that make such violence possible.
References
da Silva, Denise Ferreira. 2007. Towards a global idea of race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black skin, white masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.
Fanon, Frantz. 1994. A dying colonialism. Trans. Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove Press.
Fanon, Frantz. 1967. The wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. London and New York: Penguin Books.
Lazarus, Emma. 1883. The new colossus. Poetry Foundation re-print. Accessed 18 May 2024. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46550/the-new-colossus.
Lorde, Audre. 1984. The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Collectiveliberation.org re-print. Accessed 18 May 2024. https://collectiveliberation.org/wpcontent/uploads/2013/01/Lorde_The_Masters_Tools.pdf.
Maraj, Louis M. 2020. Black or right: anti/racist campus rhetorics. Logan: Utah State Press.
United States. 1776. Declaration of independence. National Archives. Accessed 18 May 2024. https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript.
Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—an argument. CR: The New Centennial Review 3.3: 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.
background photo: "Statue of Liberty Black and White" by NatalieTracy is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.