"Reenactor Reconstruction: William Pope.

L Trinket"
Andrea Fraser

Revised from a paper read on June 4, 2015

at the Geffen building of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

I want to thank Bennett Simpson for inviting me to give this talk. I'm a great admirer of William
Pope.L's work and I wanted to do it for that reason. But writing is always difficult for me and too
much of my sabbatical this year had already been eaten up by obligations that pulled me away from
the work I was wanting to do: some long-overdue writing about an approach to teaching and
engaging with art that I've been developing over the past five years. I elected to take a sabbatical-in-
residence this spring because I thought that teaching a graduate seminar on this approach would
help me focus my research and writing. When I realized I could develop a talk about William's
show out of my seminar, I was very happy to say yes.

The seminar is called "Learning from Experience" and its description is short: "The seminar will
combine reading, discussion and group process to develop an approach to engaging with art rooted
in psychoanalytic practices of "here and now" analysis ... and intersubjective observation." The
name of the seminar is borrowed from the title of a book by Wilfred Bion, a British psychoanalyst
who worked closely with Melanie Klein in London and who also worked in Los Angeles in the
1970s. Bion is known for a few different things, including being Samuel Beckett's analyst. He is
also known for applying Kleinian theory to groups and for developing an understanding of
intersubjectivity as it unfolds through projective identification and what he called the configuration
of container and contained (concepts I will return to later in this talk). Starting in the 1960s, Bion's
work was developed by A. K. Rice and others into a method of experiential learning in groups about
groups, institutions, and unconscious structures. It is a method that applies not only psychoanalytic
theory but also, I think uniquely, psychoanalytic technique in a practice of "here and now"
reflection and engagement with group dynamics as they unfold.

While most approaches to engaging with art focus on what art is (materially, formally) or what art
means, I have been applying this group-relations method to teaching art in an effort to get what art
does. My basic premise is that what art does in our encounter with it is to activate various
structures, relations and processes which, in order to be activated, must be present not only in the
work itself and its frame but also in those who engage with it. While the structures activated may be
formal, phenomenological, semiotic, social, economic, political or psychological (among others), to
the extent that they are activated in our encounter with artworks they also, always, must be
intersubjective. The most common definition of intersubjective seems to be: 'shared by or existing
between more than one conscious minds.' In psychoanalysis, however, the term refers less to what is
shared consciously than what is shared unconsciously. While what art activates intersubjectively
may be thought consciously, or may be thought unconsciously in phantasy, first of all it is felt,
experientially, and often also enacted. To say that the structures and relations activated by artworks
are intersubjective and are activated intersubjectively is to suggests that artworks exist for us as
subjectivities, or at least that we relate to them as such unconsciously. It supposes that in relating to
artworks we are relating not only to things but also to other minds or parts of minds and it supposes
that, for this reason, artworks have the capacity to activate us in ways that other objects don't. And it
supposes that this form of relating to artworks is not only projection: it is not only an intrapsychic
phenomenon through which we use objects (or other minds) as screens to support endogenous
phantasies. Rather, I am suggesting that what artworks do is engage us in a kind of intersubjective
exchange, and that while this exchange may include the activation of conscious, intellectual
processes (such formal analysis or semiotic decoding), as well physical processes (such as sensation
and movement), these conscious and physical processes are rooted in unconscious structures and
processes that remain largely unthought.

From this perspective, an artwork together with an individual viewer is understood as a kind of
intersubjective dyad. Group engagement and reflection expands this intersubjective exchange into a
larger field. This larger field may, in turn, present much clearer links than individual engagement
does between intersubjective fields and the social fields to which they are necessarily bound. In this
sense, there is no opposition between intersubjective and social fields. Rather, there is a relationship
of mutual determination through structures that traverse the boundaries of individual bodies, minds,
objects, groups and institutions.

2
I thought this approach would be generative for William Pope.L: Trinket for a number of reasons.
Pope.L has described Trinket's centerpiece, the American flag, as "what we do when we are not
thinking." But how do we think what we are doing when we are not thinking? Pope.L has said about
Trinket, "This project is a chance for people to feel the flag. People need to feel their democracy,
not hear words about it." Nor, I would add, only speak words about itat least not without
engaging the experience those words may or may not contain and the structures in which they may
or may not be spoken. We can think of groups in America, even small groups, as microcosms of the
nation in which the challenge, achievement, and failure of democracy must be enacted in every
coming together. Since the late 1980s, starting with conferences co-sponsored by the Washington-
Baltimore affiliate of the A.K. RICE Institute and Howard University, psychoanalytic group
relations work has been a laboratory for investigating the interface between social identity,
authority, and unconscious mechanisms as they unfold in groups.1 Out of this work has developed
powerful tools for understanding and engaging the structures and relations that I believe Pope.L's
work takes in, takes up and activates in us.

What I'm presenting tonight is an account of a discussion among 20 participants in my seminar,

including myself, about William Pope.L: Trinket, which took place in the reading room of the
MOCA Geffen a few weeks ago. Employing the method developed over the course of the seminar,
the participants were instructed to reflect, not on the works in the exhibition directly, but on the
emotions, sensations, and associations they experience in connection with the exhibition. My role in
the discussion was to facilitate the group's work on this task, when useful, by interpreting dynamics
as they arose. My account of this discussion attempts to weave the strands of the discussion together
with my analysis of it, as well as an elaboration of the framework for that analysis. It was prepared
mostly from my own notes, although it is also informed by papers about the discussion that I asked
the students to writethere are a couple of points where I refer to these reports directly. I discussed
a draft of the talk with the other participants last night. We agreed that I should be clear that this
paper represents my interpretation of our discussionone that is not shared by all in every aspect.
We also discussed the descriptors I use to identify different participants: in a few cases, we revised

1
For an introduction to this work, see Marvin R. Skolnick and Zachary G. Green, "The Denigrated
Other: Diversity and Group Relations," in Cytrynbaum and Noumair, eds., Group Dynamics,
Organizational Irrationality, and Social Complexity: Group Relations Reader 3, A. K. Rice
Institute, 2004.

3
them. No one was happy with descriptors, including myself, but there was agreement, or at least
acceptance, that they are necessary for the account of the discussion I aim to develop. It should also
be noted that I report some of my own contributions to the discussion and that my identification of
myself in the text simply as "a European-American woman" does not acknowledge the
differentiated role I played in the group.

* * *

Our discussion of William Pope.L: Trinket begins with what was later described by many as an
"unreasonably long" silence. Was it five minutes? Ten minutes? Probably not that long, but feeling
longer. As we settle into MOCA's reading room and take in its contents, anxiety builds. This
particular silence is not silence at all. The industrial fans directed at the 45-foot long American flag
in the main exhibition space are roaring through the doors we closed to shut them out. Only we are
silent. Are we silenced by the fans? By the show? By the contents of the room?

The participants reported a range of preoccupations during our initial silence, including anxiety
about how I might use the discussion as material for this talk. Some participants, including myself,
associated one of the essays I assigned earlier in the quarter, and essay entitled "Nothing to Add: A
Challenge to White Silence in Racial Discussions" by Robin DiAngelo.2 I assigned this essay for a
number of reasons. It provides a rich account of how discussions of race unfold in interracial groups
and what may lie behind the silence of some participants. It also provides a useful summery of
analyses of white privilege and concrete examples of how such privilege is not only avoided as a
topic but can be enacted directly by white participants in discussions of race. It can appear as a kind
of racial neutrality; as racial non-identity experienced as a sense of ignorance about race, which also
may be a source shame; or a sense of illegitimacy or lack of authority to speak about race, which
also may be framed consciously as respectful of people of color and their experiences. But silence
rooted in a sense of ignorance and illegitimacy in speaking about the racial experiences of others is
also rooted in the basic premise that only others have racial experiences to speak about: the premise
that whiteness is not race and that only others have and experience race.

2
Robin DiAngelo, "Nothing to Add: A Challenge to White Silence in Racial Discussions,"
Understanding and Dismantling Privilege, Vol. 2, Issue 1, 2012, pp. 1-13.

4
Some of the European-American participants reported feeling anxious, unable to form a cohesive
thought, ashamed of their silence but more afraid saying the wrong things. An African-American
participant reported feeling determined not to be the one to break the silence.

While the essay "Nothing to Add" is not written from a psychoanalytic group-relations perspective,
it nevertheless highlights the centrality of psychological processes such as projection and
internalization to the formation of racial identity and of racism. It also highlights one of the most
fundamental projections onto people of color: the projection of race itself. But this projection and
the white silence it produces is not just a matter of lacking the knowledge, courage or conviction to
step up. Encounters with the differences that we call racial very often seem to mobilize a massive
splitting off of all of our experiences, associations and phantasies of ourselves as racially
differentiated, and a projection of all of that into those who activate that sense of difference in us. It
is an unconscious process of evacuation through which we empty ourselves of the racial aspects of
our own social identity and experience, often to the point that we go completely blank, unable to
form any thought, unable grasp any experience of ourselves as white, as if our minds can only cling
to our undifferentiated state of whiteness in the absence of all content.

Finally, our silence is broken by one of the African-American men in the group. "Is anyone going to
say anything? No? Okay, I will." His tone is experienced as aggressive, resentful, reproachful,
frustratedfeelings he also reports. He experiences himself and is experienced by other members of
the group as an outsider. The group seems to have difficulty following what he says as he describes
and interprets his experience of the show. As he finishes his comments he asks, in a joking tone,
"does anyone else have something to add?"

To say that white people evacuate our racial contents into those we see as racially different is to say
that this is not only a process of projection, as onto a screen, but of what followers of Wilfred Bion
understand as projective identification: that is, an intersubjective process in which individuals and
groups may activate or compel others not only to take in split-off experiences, affects, and
phantasies, but to embody and perform them. And one of the most basic and prevalent forms of this
structure can be found in the way that those identified as people of color are made to represent,

5
speak to, and for raceor, in the language of group relations, to hold raceand sometimes only
race. Pope.L has written about being "humbled," "flattered," and also "devastated" by Artforum's
decision to put him on the cover of its February issue in connection with an article about the death
of Eric Garner at the hands of New York City police: "this sort of thing always seems to be
happening outside of me. It's as if someone is performing my blackness for me. All us Eric. Silly
AF. It's funny about smart peoplethey know a lot and they don't know anything at all."3

The second person to speak is also an African-American man and the third is an African-Asian-
American man. Has the exhibition authorized these men of color to take the lead? Or has it, and the
group, imposed this role on them? One of these these men speaks of feeling afraid in the dimly lit
galleries under the mezzanine leading to the room with Small Cup, a video shot in an abandon
factory in which chickens and goats feed on a replica of the dome of the US Capitol.

While psychoanalysts may believe the mechanisms of projection, introjection and projective
identification are universal, many would also agree that their particular contents and patterns are
culturally, socially, and historically specific as well as specific to the individual experiences that
may be accumulated in particular places and times by particular people. From this perspective, the
high experiential stakes that may be felt in interracial encountersand particularly between black
and white Americansstems from the volatile conjunction of the extreme racial violence that
pervades our history and present and the paranoid and depressive anxiety that belongs to what
Kleinians call our "primitive mental states." While "primitive" here refers to ontogenetic and not
phylogenetic development, the historically racialized associations of the word may be apt if we can
use them to take back those components of racial projections and recognize their primary place
within ourselves.

An Asian man in the group speaks at length about the theatricality of the show. This is taken up by a
number of participants who note the cinematic quality of the lighting and the fact that the fans were
rented from a company that supplies movie productions. There is some agreement that this
theatricality positions visitors to the exhibition as performers on a stage or in a film.

3
William Pope.L in conversation with with Zachary Cahill, February 20, 2015,
http://artforum.com/words/id=50371

6
I reflect on the roles presented for us in Pope.L's Trinket: the sightless performers of Migrant,
blindly groping our way through confined and uncertain spaces; the chickens feeding mindlessly in
Small Cup, oblivious to the structures and symbols we are destroying in the process; the band of
wandering Reanactors, trapped in an interminable rehearsal of old conflicts. I imagine that our
group will enact all of these roles in turn. But there are other roles as well, the most prominent being
the role of Pope.L himself.

In his book Experiences in Groups, Bion introduces the concept of projective identification by
describing the feeling of "playing a part, no matter how difficult to recognize, in somebody's else's
phantasy."4 While other analysts viewed projective identification as a figment of paranoid
imagination, Bion understood it as central to the functioning of groups and one of the most basic
forms of psychological contact. Through functions he later described as those of "container and
contained," Bion theorized a process in we put unbearable parts of ourselves and our experiences
into other people, not only to disown them, but also to communicate and potentially transform them.
This containing function became central to how Bion understood psychoanalytic work, as the
analyst takes in, holds, tolerates, survives, metabolizes and modifies these unbearable parts and
makes them safe to take back, reown, and acknowledge. In approaches to group relations based on
Bion's work, these functions are untethered from the roles of analyst and patient. Projective
identification and containing are understood as a process that all participants are engaged in and
also aim to work (or work through), not only intellectually in interpretation, but also through
unconscious and physical processing in phantasy, affect, and enactment. I believe that this is also
what many artists do and what Pope.L does in particularly powerful and effective ways. He
metabolizes and transforms some of the unbearable parts of ourselves and our society that have
been split off and re-presents them to us, inviting us take our projections back into our own bodies
and minds through our enactments and reconstructions of his work.5 This is the work Pope.L does,
but he can't do that work for us, no matter how much we might want to use him to relieve us of its
difficulties. He can only provide us with the opportunity to do that work together with him.

4
Wilfred Bion, Experiences in Groups, London: Tavistock/Routladge, 1961, p. 149.
5
For a discussion of working through racial projections, see Kathleen Pogue White, "Surviving
Hating and Being Hated: Some Personal Thoughts about Racism from a Psychoanalytic
Perspective," Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Vol. 38(3), July 2002, 401-422.

7
An African-Asian-American man commends the openness of the work to a range of interpretations
and readings. A number of people agree that the wall texts, which are much more direct and
explicit, disservice this aspect of the work.

At MOCA, the openness of Pope.L's work and the generous space it leaves for interpretation seems
to invite a play of projection and association in our engagement with it. But with this openness there
is also a resistance to interpretation, even a destruction of meaning, qua qua6; of narrative
overstretched in time7; of symbols, literally and materially. Symbols exist here as objects of
considerable ambivalence: carefully crafted, then ripped to shreds, or left to rot, in darkness, or
muted, illegible, or even rendered void. Symbols appear as objects to be destroyed, not interpreted.
To interpret here is to put oneself in the path of a storm and risk falling to pieces. If the exhibition
sets for us the difficult task of holding the tension between what one participant described as the
work's "unregulated imagination" and its "uncompromising specificity," that task is made difficult
to fulfill by the anxiety of being torn apart. And so, it seems, the openness and specificity of the
works are torn apart instead, split into different spaces, functions, and roles.

A European-American woman in the group expresses shame about not having prepared by reading
up about the show. She also speaks of being suspicious of how artists, art institutions and art
patrons might use a radical critique of white supremacy. Another European-American woman
describes being surprised at feeling real emotion and real sadness in the show: this is unusual for
her in museums so there must be something in the show that allows for such vulnerability.

Fear, shame, suspicion, sadness: these very different affects and mental states may be held by
different members of an audience and seen as alternatives to each other, with some seemingly more
directly motivated by the work and others "just projection." Yet, as contradictory as they seem, how
they appear and move through a person or a group may be produced quite directly by ambivalence
in the work itself that is difficult to hold, or by aspects of works that are themselves split off or split

6
A quotation from Samual Beckett's novel How It Is that Pope.L that uses in various ways in the
exhibition.
7
A reference to the four-and-a-half-hour video, Reenactor, which is presented in four different
spaces in the exhibition, all but one without sound.

8
apart by the artist, the curator, or within the institutional frame. These affects exist and unfold not
only in the space of bodies, objects and institutions but also in the time of moving through and
processing the experiences and associations that activate thema processing that may include their
rapid transformation and displacement.

A European-American woman calls attention to the wall of mostly empty shelves in the reading
room that seems to be devoted to the show: it's sad that there aren't enough books about the artist
so they had to put multiple copies of just these few. Our attention turns to the materials on these
shelves. In addition to copies of books by the artistit is noted that one is entitled Black People Are
Croppedare multiple copies of Samuel Beckett's novel How It Is and black t-shirts folded around
book-like objects. One of these t-shirts shows a standing figure beating a prone figure with a stick
and reads "Trust me, I'm a police officer"; another reads "I can't breathe." The group begins to
speculate about who selected this material. A consensus emerges that it must have been the curator
or a museum educator. A European man expresses anxiety about not having enough time to really
see and understand the show.

The transformation and displacement of these affects and associations can be seen to unfold within
particular structures: in this case, where psychological structures meet the structures of the works
and the exhibition. One can consider this as a point of encounter between what Kleinians call
internal or psychic reality and the external social reality of cultural objects and institutions.
Kleinians understand this psychic reality to be structured, above all, by unconscious phantasies that
build up in response to stimuli through cycles of projection and introjection as the mind struggles to
process and contain experiences. For Bion and others, however, institutions are themselves also
built up by unconscious phantasy and serve as containers, not only for social and cultural contents,
but also for dis-integrating anxiety that we use them to hold for usand also from us.8 Art
institutions may serve this function for artists, curators and staff as well as for audiences. In this
framework, phantasies are not opposed to facts or reality but understood as facts of psychic reality.
And this psychic reality is understood as permeating andthrough the intersubjective fields of
groups and institutionsalso constituting a part of social reality. From this perspective, the

8
See, for example, Elliot Jaques, "Social Systems as a defense against Persecutory and Depressive
Anceity. In Klein, Heimann, Money-Kyrle, eds., New Directions in Psychoanalysis, London:
Tavistock, 1955.

9
opposition between fact and phantasy, between what can be known as external fact and what is
"only" imagined, projection, or speculation, may represent a defense against what phantasy holds.
And in this sense, while the ambiguity often favored by artists and art institutions may serve to
maintain a space for phantasy and the play of projection and displacement, it also may serve as a
defense against locating and owning these phantasies and against the social as well as psychic facts
that activate them.

A European man recalls difficulty breathing when he entered the museum. An African-American
woman describes the sound of the fans as isolating, making communication difficult. A European-
American woman describes the sound as shocking, first impressive, then oppressive. Another
European-American woman recalls reading an article about how very windy places make people
more aggressive and notes that the sound forces us to speak loudly. An African-American man
observes that in the reading room, we are cut are off from the wind generated by the fan: we're not
breathing. A European-Canadian man notes that the flag is guarded both for its safety and for ours.
A European-American woman notes that both of the guards near the flag are African-American.

The aggression activated in the exhibition is circulating and difficult to locate. Are we its subjects?
Or its objects? If not us, who? Or what? We took refuge in the reading room from the wind and
noise of the fans, but from what else? We found that we that we could not escape the noise
completely. We also found, in the reading room, references to race and racial violence far more
explicit than anything found in the artwork itself. The ambiguous status of this material seems to
contribute significantly both to what it activates in us and to our difficulty in addressing it.

Differences within the group begin to be noted: a European-American woman observes that the
group has divided itself almost completely by gender. An Asian woman notes how differences in
response correspond to differences of specialization in our MFA program. An African-American
women and a European-American man join in identifying a feeling of anxiety. However, the former
locates that anxiety in the exhibition space, while the latter locates it in the reading room and
describes finding the exhibition unexpectedly relatable, unthreatening, and unintimidating. The
group goes on to discuss inclusion and exclusion by art works and museums in terms of class and
access to information. An African-American man notes that he does not see Pope.L's work as

10
commercial, but speculates that the show must have been expensive. A European-American woman
wonders if the contents of the reading room reflect the curator's white guilt. A European man
evokes cynicism in reference to the transformation of cultural capital into economic and symbolic
capital and notes that the mezzanine is named after a former curator. The question of whether or
not the show is genuine is raised. An African-American man says yes, but not where we're sitting:
the show is not all black and white, but it is reduced to black and white in the reading room.

The group seems to be using splitting and projection to deal with the anxiety about aggression and
its own internal differences that have been activated by the exhibition. Tentative efforts at
recognizing difference within the group and within the space of the exhibition are countered by
assertions of identification and belonging. When attention is drawn to inclusion and exclusion in the
group, this is quickly displaced and attributed to outside forces: the museum, its staff and patrons.
Guilt, cynicism, and lack of authenticity are evoked, but linked to these forces as well. The group
advocates for multiplicity, ambiguity, and ambivalence, and yet begins to divide its world into good
and bad attributes, expelling what is considered bad from both Pope.L's work and the group itself by
locating it in other people and institutions.

A European-American woman observes that it seems easier to reflect on other people's relationship
to the work than on our own. An African-American man associates the flag installation to the lights
that commemorate the twin towers destroyed on 9/11. A European-American woman joins in,
saying that the work evokes memories of 9/11 for her, an event that she was traumatized by.
Another African-American man notes that the 9/11 lights are always in the wrong place. Another
European-American woman observes that the 9/11 museum is very manipulative, but this show isn't.

The group returns to the work of trying to track the aggression activated by the show. The flag
installation activates feelings of trauma and victimage, but where should this condition be located?
The violence of show's central installationwhich I will describe as the violence of the fan blades
cutting the air, the violence of the air currents roaring through the space, the violence of the fabric
whipping and ripping in the wind, and the violence of threatening a powerful symbol with

11
destructionis now associated with political violence against America and some of its citizens by
non-Americans. But is there another force at work? A force that not only attacks, but manipulates?
A force that locates this violence in the wrong place, now, and always?

An African-American man observes that direct engagement with race has been identified by the
group as bad. An African-American woman suggests that the selection of books and t-shirts
associated with the show in the reading room is like an inside joke about black art. She wonders if
the institution is using them to project a particular identity onto the artist. A European man
wonders why we are so focused on the few things in the room that evoke race, when there are so
many other books on the shelves.

Through association with the material in the reading room, the violence of the installation is now is
linked to racial violence. And this racial violence has, in turn, been linked to racial projection. Is the
museum projecting race? Or the artist? Or the group itself? The identification of direct engagement
with race as bad raises the the question of whether the idea of racial projection itself has emerged as
a kind of container into which the group is putting its anxiety about racial difference, serving as a
defense against engaging race directly and particularly against engaging racial violence.

A European-American woman describes feeling an all-encompassing sadness. She describes

Trinket as a "future memorial" to an idea of democracy that has been completely unraveled by the
terrible things America has done. Another European-American woman adds that it's common to
deal with guilt by memorializing it.

The violence of the installation is repositioned again, not as the violence of non-Americans against
America, but the violence of America against America itself. With this displacement in geopolitical
space we also find a displacement in time: to future recognitions of past wrongs that cannot today
be recognized. But clearly, they can be felt. And with this formulation we begin to understand the
structure motivating some of these displacements and reversals: the difficulty in holding together
the subject and the object of violence; the difficulty of holding violence that can't be split off as the
violence of others; the difficulty of containing our own violence against ourselves, against our

12
collective self, our intersubjective self; the difficulty of recognizing our violence as directed not
only at what may threaten us, but at what we also value, also are, and also love.

Pope.L has asked, "What do you do if you move in a world without mend?"

An African-American man states that in the US we are all mixed race, but our racial identities are
split off, isolated. A European-American woman states that the American flag belongs to white
males.

Part of the difficulty of holding together the subject and object of violence is that neither our social,
psychic, nor intersubjective worlds are undifferentiated. What may begin as differences between
pleasure and pain, good and bad, sought and avoided, inside and outside, subject and object, self
and other, develop into complex psychological and social structures built up over cycles of
projection and introjection, objectification and embodiment. Internal impulses may be experienced
as internal threats, split off and put into external containers; external threats are internalized and
directed against ourselves or split off again. Histories accumulate in institutions, individuals and the
social and psychological structures that define them, generating patterns of seeing, understanding,
representing, relating, and enacting in which differentiated roles and identities become fixed and
confined.

A European-American woman reintroduces the phrase "white guilt." The African-American man
who broke the opening silence asks directly: What is white guilt? Do you have white guilt? Does
anyone in this room have white guilt?

The task of holding our own violence against our collective selves, rather than splitting it off as not
me or not us, requires that we recognize our differences and how that violence has unfolded within
the structures of our differentiation. By way of "white guilt," this violence is now identified as white
violence, but does holding it require that some of us own it?

A European-American woman speaks of being paralyzed and silenced by guilt. She speaks of the
inability to hold our long history of racial violence, not only as past, but immediate and real. She

13
recalls that when she came into the museum someone said to her, "You look like you're dying," and
she replied, "Yeah, you should wrap me in the flag." She describes her heart pounding when she
speaks about race and the fear that she will hurt someone again. Another European-American
woman speaks of the ideal of color blindness as a lie when racism is systemic. A third European-
American woman speaks of realizing that she has privileges that are not earned and feeling helpless
to fix that inequity.

What is white guilt? Is it the persecutory guilt of counter-attack and reprisal? Or the depressive guilt
of self-reproach and remorse? Is it the acceptance of responsibility or only its emotional discharge?
Is it guilt that requires us to turn our violence upon ourselves and be buried with it, or can we use it
to heal? Can it motivate us to repair the damage we've done, or does it condemn us to damage
more? Does it represent a displaced, even narcissistic sense of individual responsibility for racism
that is structural and systemic, or is it a necessary step changing those structures? Can it motivate
ethical action or does it disable any form of agency, including our capacity to make reparations?

An African-American man says that he's never heard white people talk about white guilt.

Perhaps what this guilt is is less important than the question of whether we can own it, even without
knowing what it is. Can we own our violence and fear of violence, our own badness, without
putting it into others, whether in paranoid reversals that project violence into black men and conjure
phantasies of anti-white racism, or in depressive guilt enacted as silent avoidance and projected as
fear of moral attack?

Another African-American man says, "I am also afraid of hurting you."

Can these relations of harm, and fear of harm, be transformed into relations of care?

He goes on to wonder what is being held by the non-Americans in the room who have been largely
silent in the discussion. A European man notes that for him, the American flag does not hold race
but American imperial power. He also wonders what happened to the group's earlier conviction
that the work in the show resisted being reduced to race.

14
The group turns to other differences. Black-white relation in American cannot hold all of the
differences that have been activated by the show. The Europeans and Canadian in the group seem to
be holding skepticism and impatience with the discussion, its focus on the interpersonal rather than
the semiotic and on race rather than class and geopolitical power. They may also be holding a
frustrated impulse to act that is both activated and suspended by the exhibition itself in the tensions
it maintains, and may be further disabled by a feeling of guilt that identifies agency with harm.

Someone notices what is described as a "rogue onion" perched on the thermostat in the reading
room. It is a component of Polis or the Garden or Human Nature in Action, one of the works in the
show. It could only have been placed on the thermostat by the artist. The group reasons that it must
have been the artist who put the t-shirts there as well. The group wonders if any exhibition exists
outside of its political and cultural context.

The group's perception of the exhibition has shifted. Aspects of the exhibition that have been split
apart are put back together and group's phantasy of the relations between artist, curator, and
institution turns from exploitation to collaboration. We notice that the lights have been turned off in
the exhibition space. The museum is closing. We look through the glass doors of the reading room
as the fans are turned off and watch as the flag goes limp and falls to a platform below it that
prevents it from touching the ground.

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