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“There is no Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck without slavery. That’s the history and legacy of America.” An Interview with Dread Scott

« Il ne peut y avoir de Derek Chauvin à genoux sur la nuque de George Floyd sans esclavage. C’est l’histoire et l’héritage de l’Amérique. » Un entretien avec Dread Scott
“No puede haber un Derek Chauvin de rodillas sobre la nuca de George Floyd sin esclavitud. Esa es la historia y la herencia de Estados Unidos.” Una entrevista con Dread Scott
« Não pode haver um Derek Chauvin ajoelhado no pescoço de George Floyd sem escravidão. É a história e a herança da América ». Uma entrevista com Dread Scott
Thomas Bertrail et Dread Scott

Résumés

Le performeur et plasticien étatsunien Dread Scott a dédié sa pratique artistique à dépeindre le spectre de l’esclavage et de la violence qui hante le récit américain, tourmente ses institutions et mine les rapports sociaux entre les peuples. Son œuvre interroge l’histoire en veillant à engager le public à considérer ses propres certitudes sur le passé comme le présent et de susciter une réaction politique. L’artiste profane les symboles du mythe américain et défait ses héros fondateurs, rappelant la déclaration du Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver : « Les héros blancs, aux mains ruisselantes de sang, sont morts. » (Eldridge Cleaver, Un Noir à l’ombre, Paris, Seuil, 1969). Dans cet entretien, Dread Scott revient sur l’ensemble de sa carrière, de l’adoption de son nom d’artiste, à ses œuvres les plus récentes en passant par ses premiers coups d’éclat. S’il constate l’importance de l’histoire de l’esclavage pour la compréhension des rapports de domination qui régissent le monde, il invite avant tout à relire ces rapports d’un point de vue économique pour interroger le poids du capitalisme sur l’origine de ces violences.

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Texte intégral

  • 1 Dread Scott “America God Damn,” The Art Newspaper, June 6, 2020. Available online: www.theartnewsp (...)

1Dread Scott is an American artist, born in 1965 in Chicago. His birth name is Scott Tyler, he studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and graduated Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1989. As a witness to history and its writing in the present, he is the worthy heir of the artists of the Black Arts movement. Mainly using the performativity of his body and the icons of history, his artwork is an invitation to reconsider the American narrative, denouncing not only white supremacy but also the economic system in which it has taken shape—slavery—and the continuous “looting” of oppressed peoples by America since its founding. Thus, two years after the murder of George Floyd by the police of Minneapolis—described by Dread Scott as “a modern-day lynching”1—this interview looks at his past and recent artistic practice through a reflection on slavery in the light of current events.

Thomas Bertrail [TB]: You started your career at the end of the 1980s adopting the professional name Dread Scott—a name that is not insignificant since it refers to a historical figure, Dred Scott—which underlines your political and social commitment against racism and for the recognition of the suffering linked to slavery. Can you tell us more about this choice, who Dred Scott was, and what this name means to you?

  • 2 This case is often referred to as the “Dred Scott decision” or more formally “Dred Scott v. John F (...)

Dread Scott [DS]: OK. In the history of the United States, basically slavery existed in the southern part up until the end of the civil war, while it did not in the northern part. But, as new states came in, there were battles over whether they were going to enable enslavement or not, and Dred Scott was an enslaved man who was taken by his owner to a territory where slavery was not allowed. For this reason, he decided to sue for his freedom, and after several court cases it ended up in the United States Supreme Court, which ruled in 1857 that he was a property and that as such he could not even bring the case, much as a chair could not bring the case.2 Part of the ruling said specifically that there is no right that a black person has that a white man is bound to respect. This particular opinion was written with the public in mind, and it was the most well thought-out and articulated argument for white supremacy that I’ve read. It’s deeply rooted in the U.S. constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and U.S. and British law and custom up until that point. It went very much into the fact that the so-called “founders” of the country did not think of people who had been slaves—specifically African and African-descendant people—as human beings.

By taking this name, I wanted people, whenever they hear my professional name, and to the degree they know U.S. history, to have to encounter and engage with it, and more specifically with enslavement. You know, chattel slavery has been outlawed and mostly doesn’t exist in the United States as in many places in the world, but the conditions that black people find themselves in are completely based upon that history and in some ways is continuation of that legacy. Also, I have to say that at the time I took the name I had dreadlocks and my parent had named me Scott, so it seemed to me to be a very good pun. It also encompasses a sort of concept of dreads from Rastafarianism. I am not a Rasta, I am an atheist, but I did like this concept of hope, and these people who, both in Jamaica and in diasporas from Jamaica viewed it as their mission to fight Babylon. I thought that in the oppressive American context in which we lived, this name was relevant, and so I spelled the name differently from the historic figure Dred, also bringing in the concept of dread and fear.

TB: I noticed that the choice of this name obviously echoes your artistic work which is moved by the history of the United States. It was actually the re-reading of this history that allowed you to gain notoriety at the age of 23 when you exhibited at the SAIC Black Student Association exhibition, “A / Part of the Whole,” an installation entitled What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag? comprising the Stars and Stripes flag presented on the ground beneath a photomontage, and a comment book in which people were invited to enter their impressions, with the option of standing on the flag while doing so. As a student, what motivated you to create this artwork?

Fig.1: Dread Scott, What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, 1988, installation.

Fig.1: Dread Scott, What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, 1988, installation.

Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott.

  • 3 Dread Scott, 1988. What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, Dread Scott’s official website. (...)
  • 4 Dread Scott, 1988. American Newspeak, please feel free, Dread Scott’s official website. Available (...)

DS: Well, What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?3 is an installation from a body of work called American Newspeak, please feel free4 consisting of photomontages, notebooks and pens, for which I specifically incorporated the audience as an active and actual element of the artwork. The public was called on to give its opinion about the Ronald Reagan America I grew up in, which was a real nightmare of narrow mindedness, selfishness, and greed, but also an America with a warlike stance, threatening war on much of the world in a way it hadn’t since it defeated Vietnam.

Fig. 2: Dread Scott, American Newspeak, please feel free, 1988, view of the installation.

Fig. 2: Dread Scott, American Newspeak, please feel free, 1988, view of the installation.

Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott.

So, in the midst of making this work, George Bush was running for president. I mean, George Herbert Walker, Bush I, the former head of the CIA, and Ronald Reagan’s vice-president. He started appearing in flag factories as part of his campaign stops, which was odd. Nowadays, many people might associate the U.S. President with lots of flag-waving, whether it’s Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, or Donald Trump: they all wear the flag and appear with lots of flags in the background. But after the U.S. war in Vietnam, there was a lot of dissent, and some Vietnam veterans would come back and burn the American flag, just as Black Power activists would burn it. Even if people weren’t that radical, they didn’t embrace the flag in the same way, and there weren’t all these flags appearing. Yet George Bush was campaigning and saying: “We need to reinvigorate and renew patriotism as part of an overall effort to potentially wage war at lots of places.” It seemed to me, as a young person, that this out-of-touch old man was telling people: “We don’t have a king, we don’t have a queen, what we have is the American flag.”

That is why I thought I needed to make work specifically about this notion of the American flag. Therefore, I made What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, in which the photomontage consisted of the title of the artwork and, below it, two photographs: one depicting South Korean protestors denouncing the occupying U.S. army on all the military bases in their country, burning American flags and holding signs that say: “Yankee go home/Son of a bitch,” and below, a photograph of coffins draped in the American flag coming back from Vietnam and troop transports. Thus, this artwork was questioning U.S. imperialism, U.S. policy in the world, and resistance to that policy. I thought people should engage with this by thinking about what the flag represents. What does American patriotism stand for? What does America stand for?

Fig. 3: Dread Scott, What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, 1988, detail of the photomontage of the installation.

Fig. 3: Dread Scott, What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, 1988, detail of the photomontage of the installation.

Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott.

TB: By questioning this flag and allowing its desecration, you were also questioning the history of the country, which was built on the genocide of the native populations and whose wealth was accumulated through slavery, raising very fierce reactions in the comment book installed in the artwork, but also violent demonstrations against the work and the exhibition.

DS: Yes. America just quite simply is a country that was founded on slavery and genocide, it conquered and stole the land from one people and imported a workforce and enslaved them to work the land and accumulate massive wealth. If we look more globally, the western world is completely bound up with enslavement from the time that the Portuguese and the Spanish first started enslaving people as part of developing plantation agriculture. The absolute wealth of England, Portugal, Spain, France, and the United States is bound up with the history of enslavement in the United States, and both the wealth and the ideology of white supremacy which rationalize that. There is no Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck without slavery. That’s the history and legacy of America.

And so, when this work was done, I was thinking about that and the purpose of allowing a broad audience to discuss the flag, its meaning, or the U.S. policies. There’s a comment from somebody who basically said: “Thank you for the opportunity to stand on this flag. The police killed my brother, and then walked over to kick his body to ‘make sure that nigger was dead,’ that cop was wearing a flag.” Those kinds of people normally were shut out of the conversation of what is the United States, what is U.S. patriotism, while people that are proud of America typically had the platform and freedom to talk about this. This artwork wasn’t dangerous because of the musings of a previously unknown art student, it was dangerous because all sorts of ordinary people could enter in the discussion and have a platform to talk about this. It wasn’t mostly comments like that the one I mentioned, there were also a range of comments from people who said that I should be shot, and my family made to pay for the bullets.

Fig. 4: Dread Scott, What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, 1988, detail of the comment book of the installation.

Fig. 4: Dread Scott, What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, 1988, detail of the comment book of the installation.

Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott.

  • 5 As a result of Dread Scott’s exhibition and the unrelated decision in Texas v. Johnson, the U.S. C (...)

So, to answer the question, yes, I did think about that history. But again, it wasn’t the core of the project: the core of the project was to build a piece of art to allow people who have been victimized by America to paraphrase Malcolm X, to have a platform to talk. You know, the work got controversial to the point where the President George Bush publicly called the work “disgraceful,” which I thought was a tremendous honor. Congress ended up outlawing it.5 There were demonstrations of people for and against my work, at one point 2,500 reactions. Almost all white, almost all World War Two and Korean war vets, chanting things like: “the flag and the artist, hang them both high,” evoking images of lynching. All that got out and then people around the country began to debate it. Most people, and certainly most poor people, weren’t thinking about conceptual contemporary artwork. But then, when they heard about this, they wanted to be part of this conversation.

It was a scary time, I received a lot of death threats and so did my family, my mother and the art school which was closed for two days because of bomb threats. There were people that were looking for me, I was followed, I had my mail tampered with repeatedly. But the thing was that this work mattered to people, it really showed the power of art and artists. That was really inspiring in that sense. As a visual artist, I thought my work might be seen by a few hundred people on a good day. And then, suddenly, Congress was going to the extraordinary measure of spotlighting it as a violation of their First Amendment. There’s not really a precedent like that. It showed that this work could bring inspiration to the powerless and trouble the powerful in strengthening resistance to an oppressive society and system, helping people find avenues to change it. What started out as a committed piece of art became a controversy and finally led to a wider societal upheaval.

TB: I saw you also appropriated other symbols of the U.S.’s history, the U.S. constitution in Burning the U.S. Constitution (2011) and the U.S. flag again in Emancipation Proclamation (2020). Can you tell me some about these works? Was your intention the same as in the work previously mentioned?

Fig. 5: Dread Scott, Burning the U.S. Constitution, 2011, three pigment prints, 66 × 50,8 cm each.

Fig. 5: Dread Scott, Burning the U.S. Constitution, 2011, three pigment prints, 66 × 50,8 cm each.

Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott.

DS: Well, you know, although they were created over a long period of time, each of these works has a conceptual nature that expresses my contempt for oppression, specifically in America, which has not diminished as I have gotten older. I think that in people’s thinking the U.S. Constitution is creating a similar barrier to getting free and making something new, because there’s all this worship of the U.S. Constitution, the “First Amendment” in particular. This document was written by enslavers and friends of enslavers to define the legal and political framework for a society whose economic foundation is slavery. It is arguably a radical document in 1776 breaking away from a much more literal, feudal relationship. But it is not the document which most people, good people, would write if they were trying to write the laws and rules and customs for society in 2011, when the artwork was done, or in 2022. It’s an outmoded backwards-looking document, it literally had slavery woven into it. Especially since when this so-called lofty document of freedom was written, there was a disproportionate representation in the federal government of states that enslaved people and had their own conception of freedom predicated upon owning people. So, by doing this artwork, I was challenging the ideological foundations of the U.S. Constitution, calling on people to reconsider what they think about freedom and to show some irreverence for this document which we’re told is the height of civilization.

  • 6 The proclamation applied to ten states still in rebellion in 1863, and therefore did not cover the (...)

On the other hand, the title of Emancipation Proclamation references the document that Abraham Lincoln signed on January 1st, 1863, which outlawed enslavement in states that were currently fighting against the United States in the U.S. Civil War. Most people think of it as the document that freed the slaves. In some ways that’s an oversimplification because it only applied in the states that were still in rebellion against the United States. Therefore, the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t apply for example in New Orleans and more widely in Louisiana, that the U.S. federal government had captured by defeating the Confederacy before 1863. Therefore, enslaved people were basically supposed to be returned to their enslavers.6

Fig. 6: Dread Scott, Emancipation Proclamation, 2020, pigment print, 56 × 46 cm.

Fig. 6: Dread Scott, Emancipation Proclamation, 2020, pigment print, 56 × 46 cm.

Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott.

As opposed to the political protest I did in 1989—burning the flag on the steps of the Supreme Court in defiance of the Flag Protection Act of 1989 written in part to ban What is the Proper Way to Display U.S. Flag?Emancipation Proclamation was made as an artwork: it was a performance that happened just for the camera fixing a photograph of me burning an American flag. The title takes itself from Lincoln’s document and is trying to pivot attention from something that a great white president does to free people, to people consciously freeing ourselves. In doing that, in a modern era, it is sort of getting off the American plantation and getting beyond America by burning the flag.

  • 7 Derrick Bryson Taylor, “Juneteenth: The History of a Holiday,” The New York Times, June 22, 2022. (...)

This artwork was released on “Juneteenth” which is a day of celebration in the United States for the Black community, celebrated on June 19. It commemorates the announcement made on June 19, 1865 by the Union Army, in the city of Galveston, Texas, that all slaves in Texas were to be freed, while they had continued to be enslaved and to work for about two years despite President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation which was formally in force by 1863. It recently was made a federal holiday.7

  • 8 Dread Scott, Dread Scott: Decision, 2013. Available online in Dread Scott’s official website: www. (...)
  • 9 Dread Scott, Unchained at Järnvågsplatsen, 2019. Available online in Dread Scott’s official websit (...)
  • 10 Dread Scott, Slave Rebellion Reenactment, 2019. Available online in Dread Scott’s official website (...)
  • 11 Dread Scott, White Male for Sale, 2021. Available online in Dread Scott’s official website: www.dr (...)
  • 12 Dread Scott, I Am Not a Man, 2009. Available online in Dread Scott’s official website: www.dreadsc (...)
  • 13 Dread Scott, A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday, 2015. Available online in Dread Scott’s offici (...)

TB: These artworks reveal that you constantly question history to evoke the present, notably the history of slavery and African American history. I am also thinking of artworks such as Dread Scott: Decision (2013),8 Unchained at Järnvågsplatsen (2019),9 Slave Rebellion Reenactment (2019)10 and more recently White Male for Sale (2021),11 while you refer to the civil rights struggle with I Am Not a Man (2009)12 or A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday (2015).13 So I was wondering about the methodology of your work, your way of doing historical research and informing yourself, and also what you think about the teaching in schools and universities of the history of slavery, of African American history.

Fig. 7: Dread Scott, Dread Scott: Decision, 2013, performance still.

Fig. 7: Dread Scott, Dread Scott: Decision, 2013, performance still.

Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott.

Fig. 8: Dread Scott, Unchained at Järnvågsplatsen, 2019, performance still.

Fig. 8: Dread Scott, Unchained at Järnvågsplatsen, 2019, performance still.

Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott.

Fig. 9: Dread Scott, Slave Rebellion Reenactment, 2019, performance still.

Fig. 9: Dread Scott, Slave Rebellion Reenactment, 2019, performance still.

© Photographer: Soul Brother. Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott

2

Extrait 1

 

 

Dread Scott, White Male for Sale, 2021.

Looped video of a white male on an auction block on a street corner in a Black neighborhood in Brooklyn. The video was auctioned as a NFT.

Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott. Available online: www.dreadscott.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/White-Male-For-Sale-web-copy.mp4?_=1.

 

 

Dread Scott, White Male for Sale, 2021

Fig. 10: Dread Scott, I Am Not a Man, 2009, performance still.

Fig. 10: Dread Scott, I Am Not a Man, 2009, performance still.

Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott.

Fig. 11: Dread Scott, A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday, 2015, nylon, 214,6 × 133,4 cm.

Fig. 11: Dread Scott, A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday, 2015, nylon, 214,6 × 133,4 cm.

Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott.

DS: The important thing to understand about my artwork is that a lot of it works from the premise that the past not only sets the stage for the present, but exists in the present in new forms. That’s an important conceptual theme that runs through a lot of my art. And that is the reason I did Slave Rebellion Reenactment, or White Male for Sale. It wasn’t to talk principally about the past, although it does talk about a specific past, but it’s to talk about the present and enable people to look at the past to understand something of the present.

In getting to the question of the teaching of history, that is something I can talk about, but more about how I was educated than what currently happens. But I could speculate a little bit about contemporary education. When I was learning, much of history was taught as great men and important dates. It was very disconnected from the present and from reality. Something happened on some date, something else happened on some other date, some “great man” did something, means talking about Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation. Many people would have learned about that, but they wouldn’t have learned why that was necessary. What was the counterpart in a certain sense? Why was there enslavement? Did enslaved people have any opinions and anything to do with the Emancipation Proclamation? Did it have anything to do with war strategy, as opposed to just signaling that Lincoln was benevolent and suddenly saw black people as human beings? None of that is really taught. You learn that the Emancipation Proclamation was signed and went into effect on January 1st, 1863, and then something else happened, looking at it from the perspective of Civil Rights, and then a woman, Rosa Parks, sat down on a bus in 1954, and then there was a march on Washington in 1963 and then racism. It’s kind of a very simple view of history that just looks at some specific dates. And they don’t connect well with what happened in between, what was going on.

I think specifically that the United States don’t talk that much about slavery, and the degree to which they were involved and responsible, that was the case when I was at school, but I think that is also largely true today. It is not understood as something that is foundational to the United States. Yet it is just really simple, there would be no United States or England as we know it today without slavery and all the cotton. It is just the tremendous wealth that was created, the whole expansion of the way the United States was built, its relationship with England. What was driving the working class and the accumulation of wealth in Liverpool and in Manchester was cotton that was grown in the United States, which was fueling the expansion, sale, and the accumulation of wealth by capitalists in England, and then also affecting the countries of Africa.

If we look at the attempted coup d’État that occurred on January 6, 2021, led by the former President of the United States, Donald Trump, and his supporters, one of their main grievances is that black people voted in key cities, preventing his election. This brings us back to what is slavery, what’s the history, what’s the legacy of this, and how white people in general, but specifically working-class white people have been pitted against black people to shore up wealthy people who are almost exclusively white. That’s the history of America: most white people aspire to be as well off as these wealthy people. But all white people knew they were better off than enslaved people who were exclusively black in the United States, and whose aspiration for freedom threatened their supremacy. Understanding that tells you a lot about the present.

  • 14 Renée Ater, “Examining the Cauldron of What is America: An Interview with Dread Scott,” Public Ar (...)
  • 15 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Boston, Beacon Pr (...)
  • 16 Dread Scott, On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide, 2014. A (...)

TB: I read the interview you did with Renée Ater for Public Art Dialogue in 202114 quoting Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s book Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History,15 which refers to slavery in the United States as “a ghost, both the past and the living presence,” and the difficulty of representing it. Your work responds to this difficulty and perfectly depicts this ghost that can be sensed in the U.S. flag, in the Constitution, but also in the functioning of the police force or of the economy, as you suggested. Also, your approach to representing it is an active response to aspirations for freedom. I am thinking especially of On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide (2014)16 and Slave Rebellion Reenactment (2019) in which there is no miserabilist vision but on the contrary a lively approach revealing a culture of resistance, notably through the intensely performative practice of your art using the body as an artistic device. Can you tell me more about this practice which reminds me of the Black Art Movement period, aiming to make art a source of pride, empowerment, and education?

Fig. 12: Dread Scott, On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide, 2014, performance still.

Fig. 12: Dread Scott, On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide, 2014, performance still.

Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott.

DS: There’s a lot of black artists that are being celebrated now, and a really great artist, Arthur Jafa, made a couple pieces that are just amazing, such as Love is the message, the message is Death (2016) pairing the joy and the horror of black history. I think that’s important because not enough people look at the horror, both past and present, including on a psychological level. However, I do think that it is fundamental to highlight that any social movement for progress has come from masses of people. The U.S. Civil War, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, were all carried by millions of people fighting to change the world for the better. I mean, we look at the U.S. Civil War by thinking that there were a couple of generals and a president who did something well, but the North would not have won that war if it weren’t the enslaved people putting down their tools, walking off the plantations and actively taking up arms to fight for the North. And the Civil Rights movement was not just Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, it was all sorts of ordinary courageous people in different ways determined to illegalize discrimination known as Jim Crow. I don’t think that the Civil Rights or Black Power eras suddenly ushered in a time of freedom in some great sense, but I do think that there was a significant change that did happen, and it was made by ordinary people. That’s not well enough understood, I think.

So, when I did Slave Rebellion Reenactment, it wasn’t a project about slavery. This performance reimagining the 1811 German Coast uprising—a revolt of slaves in parts of the Orleans Territory—was a project about freedom fighters who had this vision of overthrowing the system of enslavement by seizing all of Orleans territory in 1811, and setting up an African Republic that would have outlawed slavery much in the way Haiti did. But when I highlighted that history, having people reenact the freedom fighters today, and brought that past into our present without focusing on the horror of slavery, some people asked: “Well, why didn’t you show the violent repression of the rebellion in 1811?” I told them: “If you want to see black people being killed by white people just turn on the news, you can go to YouTube and see cops murdering actual black people.” Everybody knows that white people did some shady things from the 18th century to the present day. But most people don’t know that hundreds and thousands of black people got together and figured out that the way to get free was not individual escape, but collectively overthrowing the system of enslavement. I think this is the boldest and most radical vision of freedom in the United States at that time.

Fig. 13: Dread Scott, Slave Rebellion Reenactment, 2019, performance still.

Fig. 13: Dread Scott, Slave Rebellion Reenactment, 2019, performance still.

© Photographer: Soul Brother. Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott.

I mean, if you’re looking at freedom, it’s just a concept: why the hell are people studying people like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington? They were enslavers and friends of enslavers. Why not study Charles Deslondes, Nat Turner, or Denmark Vesey? Those were people who saw that you couldn’t get to adjust society without overthrowing enslavement. The people who understood that were the enslaved, not Thomas Jefferson, not George Washington, not Ben Franklin, the “founders of the American democracy.” If you’re interested in the concept of freedom, studying people who were more in keeping with the way we, in the modern era, understand freedom: that would seem to make a lot of sense to me. Knowing that, the vast majority of people today would look back at periods of enslavement, whether it was in the islands like Santo Domingo, Martinique, Guadeloupe, or in the United States. I want to point to buried histories that people could access to rethink their concept of this past. In doing that—giving agency to ordinary people in the present—I hope my artwork contributes to a movement for revolution. That’s what I think art is all about.

TB: You were talking about the Slave Rebellion Reenactments and the way you are talking not only about the past, but also about revolution and current struggles. This performance also seems to draw attention to an important part of your work, which is the intersectionality of struggles. Indeed, a lot of the photographs of this performance depict powerful women, but also very unexpected and hostile environments, with plants and factories which seem to be polluted and corrupted. So those struggles—feminism, environmentalism, anti-racism—appear naturally all to be linked together in your general artwork.

Fig. 14: Dread Scott, Slave Rebellion Reenactment, 2019, performance still.

Fig. 14: Dread Scott, Slave Rebellion Reenactment, 2019, performance still.

© Photographer: Soul Brother. Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott.

DS: Well, I think that these struggles are very much linked. And from a historical perspective, you can see that women played an important role in that rebellion. Also, it would be historically inaccurate if it was just all men doing the reenactment, I knew that women had to be part of this. One of the key leaders of the rebellion, a man named Charles Deslondes, had relative freedom of movement. He went from plantation to plantation, and recruited people who became his lieutenants, who in turn recruited other people to be part of this rebellion. This uprising was the largest rebellion of enslaved people in the history of the United States with over 500 people involved but it wasn’t successful, despite its bold vision. Learning from the means used by Charles Deslondes and the rebels of 1811, I built Slave Rebellion Reenactment by word of mouth. I talked to about 40-50 people, in one-on-one conversations, the way Charles Deslondes would have had to, and those people in turn became kind of my lieutenants and went out and recruited other people.

And so, the project found the people who needed to be part of it, for whom it mattered. And that turned out to be disproportionately many women, and a lot of queer people, for whom this history of rebellion in radicality mattered, people who were upset by current society who were like: “Hell no, we don’t want to live in this society, and if these rebels from 1811 could be applied in the present, we want to be part of that! Now, we got to get free!” Having women participating also enabled knowing how this history of rebellion exists in the present. A lot of women and gender non-conforming people found this a vehicle to act on it, the work was far stronger because of that. By their presence the project has been taken to a place that I didn’t think of and didn’t imagine. It was much, much better, it was beautiful, it was one of the most liberated and exciting spaces I’ve ever been in. It’s not just a question of my desire to express intersectionality, but the people who are the rebels, coming forward and wanting to fight. It both represented the past and what exists in the present, and is a guidepost for the future.

You know, Slave Rebellion Reenactment isn’t just about black pride, but about people getting free learning from the history of the enslaved. Also, I think it was an important hallmark to have Native Americans as part the reenactment, which was historically accurate. Part of this history involved indigenous people who were important allies. Some were enslaved, while others were living in the region and sometimes had freedom of movement while the slaves did not. So, they participated in this uprising for freedom, including by spreading some of the words. I wanted to honor and celebrate that history, but also make a point about the present, going back to this America that was founded on slavery and genocide. How have indigenous people historically been part of this struggle? But also, what can we learn from their experience and important legacy in history, and how can we build bigger bonds? Because, today, the land is still stolen. If, you look at the powerful environmental struggle at Standing Rock in 2016, Indigenous people were the first to oppose the Dakota Access pipeline, and then welcomed other activists to come join the struggle and learn from them. It was important that it could be represented, and that was largely embraced.

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Notes

1 Dread Scott “America God Damn,” The Art Newspaper, June 6, 2020. Available online: www.theartnewspaper.com/2020/06/05/dread-scott-america-god-damn [last accessed, December 2022].

2 This case is often referred to as the “Dred Scott decision” or more formally “Dred Scott v. John F.A. Sandford;” see: “Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857),” available online in National Archives: www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/dred-scott-v-sandford [last accessed, December 2022].

3 Dread Scott, 1988. What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, Dread Scott’s official website. Available online: www.dreadscott.net/portfolio_page/what-is-the-proper-way-to-display-a-us-flag/ [last accessed, December 2022].

4 Dread Scott, 1988. American Newspeak, please feel free, Dread Scott’s official website. Available online: www.dreadscott.net/portfolio_page/american-newspeak-please-feel-free/ [last accessed, December 2022].

5 As a result of Dread Scott’s exhibition and the unrelated decision in Texas v. Johnson, the U.S. Congress decided to make flag desecration illegal in 1989 with the Flag Protection Act. Scott was one of four people arrested for burning flags on the steps of the U.S. Capitol in protest at the law. The case was appealed up to the Supreme Court in United States v. Eichman, which finally ruled in favor of Scott and the other protesters and found the federal laws regulating flag desecration unconstitutional. See Robert Justin Goldstein, Burning the Flag. The Great 1989-1990 American Flag Desecration Controversy, Ashland, The Kent State University Press, 2013, pp. 77-90.

6 The proclamation applied to ten states still in rebellion in 1863, and therefore did not cover the 500 000 slaves in four states that were not in rebellion (Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, and Missouri), nor did it apply in Tennessee and southern Louisiana (occupied by the Union). Emancipation in these areas was to take effect by decision of the individual States and/or following the signing, in December 1865, of the Thirteenth Amendment which outlawed slavery in all U.S. territories.

7 Derrick Bryson Taylor, “Juneteenth: The History of a Holiday,” The New York Times, June 22, 2022. Available online: www.nytimes.com/article/juneteenth-day-celebration.html [last accessed, December 2022].

8 Dread Scott, Dread Scott: Decision, 2013. Available online in Dread Scott’s official website: www.dreadscott.net/portfolio_page/dread-scott-decision/ [last accessed, December 2022].

9 Dread Scott, Unchained at Järnvågsplatsen, 2019. Available online in Dread Scott’s official website: www.dreadscott.net/portfolio_page/unchained-at-jarnvagsplatsen/ [last accessed, December 2022].

10 Dread Scott, Slave Rebellion Reenactment, 2019. Available online in Dread Scott’s official website: www.dreadscott.net/portfolio_page/slave-rebellion-reenactment/ [last accessed, December 2022].

11 Dread Scott, White Male for Sale, 2021. Available online in Dread Scott’s official website: www.dreadscott.net/portfolio_page/white-male-for-sale/ [last accessed, December 2022].

12 Dread Scott, I Am Not a Man, 2009. Available online in Dread Scott’s official website: www.dreadscott.net/portfolio_page/i-am-not-a-man/ [last accessed, December 2022].

13 Dread Scott, A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday, 2015. Available online in Dread Scott’s official website: www.dreadscott.net/portfolio_page/a-man-was-lynched-by-police-yesterday/ [last accessed, December 2022].

14 Renée Ater, “Examining the Cauldron of What is America: An Interview with Dread Scott,” Public Art Dialogue, No. 11/2, 2021, pp. 120-140.

15 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Boston, Beacon Press, 1995.

16 Dread Scott, On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide, 2014. Available online in Dread Scott’s official website: www.dreadscott.net/portfolio_page/on-the-impossibility-of-freedom-in-a-country-founded-on-slavery-and-genocide/ [last accessed, December 2022].

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Table des illustrations

Titre Fig.1: Dread Scott, What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, 1988, installation.
Crédits Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/slaveries/docannexe/image/7219/img-1.jpeg
Fichier image/jpeg, 903k
Titre Fig. 2: Dread Scott, American Newspeak, please feel free, 1988, view of the installation.
Crédits Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/slaveries/docannexe/image/7219/img-2.jpeg
Fichier image/jpeg, 255k
Titre Fig. 3: Dread Scott, What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, 1988, detail of the photomontage of the installation.
Crédits Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/slaveries/docannexe/image/7219/img-3.jpeg
Fichier image/jpeg, 317k
Titre Fig. 4: Dread Scott, What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, 1988, detail of the comment book of the installation.
Crédits Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/slaveries/docannexe/image/7219/img-4.jpeg
Fichier image/jpeg, 535k
Titre Fig. 5: Dread Scott, Burning the U.S. Constitution, 2011, three pigment prints, 66 × 50,8 cm each.
Crédits Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/slaveries/docannexe/image/7219/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 2,9M
Titre Fig. 6: Dread Scott, Emancipation Proclamation, 2020, pigment print, 56 × 46 cm.
Crédits Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/slaveries/docannexe/image/7219/img-6.jpeg
Fichier image/jpeg, 2,7M
Titre Fig. 7: Dread Scott, Dread Scott: Decision, 2013, performance still.
Crédits Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/slaveries/docannexe/image/7219/img-7.jpeg
Fichier image/jpeg, 222k
Titre Fig. 8: Dread Scott, Unchained at Järnvågsplatsen, 2019, performance still.
Crédits Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/slaveries/docannexe/image/7219/img-8.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 334k
Titre Fig. 9: Dread Scott, Slave Rebellion Reenactment, 2019, performance still.
Crédits © Photographer: Soul Brother. Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott
URL http://journals.openedition.org/slaveries/docannexe/image/7219/img-9.jpeg
Fichier image/jpeg, 694k
Titre Fig. 10: Dread Scott, I Am Not a Man, 2009, performance still.
Crédits Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/slaveries/docannexe/image/7219/img-10.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 921k
Titre Fig. 11: Dread Scott, A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday, 2015, nylon, 214,6 × 133,4 cm.
Crédits Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/slaveries/docannexe/image/7219/img-11.jpeg
Fichier image/jpeg, 750k
Titre Fig. 12: Dread Scott, On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide, 2014, performance still.
Crédits Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/slaveries/docannexe/image/7219/img-12.jpeg
Fichier image/jpeg, 924k
Titre Fig. 13: Dread Scott, Slave Rebellion Reenactment, 2019, performance still.
Crédits © Photographer: Soul Brother. Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/slaveries/docannexe/image/7219/img-13.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 5,6M
Titre Fig. 14: Dread Scott, Slave Rebellion Reenactment, 2019, performance still.
Crédits © Photographer: Soul Brother. Courtesy of the artist Dread Scott.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/slaveries/docannexe/image/7219/img-14.jpeg
Fichier image/jpeg, 530k
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Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

Thomas Bertrail et Dread Scott, « “There is no Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck without slavery. That’s the history and legacy of America.” An Interview with Dread Scott »Esclavages & Post-esclavages [En ligne], 7 | 2022, mis en ligne le 22 décembre 2022, consulté le 18 avril 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/slaveries/7219 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/slaveries.7219

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Auteurs

Thomas Bertrail

PhD candidate in history of art, Université Rennes 2 / Coordinator of research activities at the Musée national d'art moderne – Centre Pompidou (France)

Dread Scott

Performance artist (USA)

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Droits d’auteur

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Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

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