Why is ‘The Asian’ so white? Receipts for Today’s NY Times Article

NY Times Article

This came out in today’s NY Times: Asian Art Museum to Remove Bust of Patron. That’s Just a Start, by Carol Pogash.

The Times’ article takes the Asian Art Museum’s bust of Nazi sympathizer Avery Brundage as a point of departure to explore the museum’s checkered past in light of their director’s recently initiated #BLM PR campaign. The museum was originally founded around white supremacist Brundage’s largely unprovenanced collection.

 

 

A Compelling Response

Please see “Hoodless and Institutionalized” by artist Chiraag Bhakta, aka Pardon My Hindi.  Bhakta’s work has been featured on this blog twice previously.

Correction to the Times:  Brundage Tortilla Art (2012)

We’d like to offer one correction:  In the Times, Director Jay Xu claims to only have become aware of Brundage’s white supremacist history as recently as 2016.  However, longtime subscribers to this blog might recall that back in 2012, we created edible tortilla art featuring a graphic of Brundage as severed Buddha head (left) that was distributed to museum-goers along with the informational flyer below.

Flyers were distributed discreetly to AAMSF visitors throughout a Matcha event in 2012

We also blogged in 2015 about how Brundage’s racist roots can be traced back to his presidency of an Aryan fraternity in his college days. 

Who was Avery Brundage?

Receipts for the White Gaze

Since one of us is quoted several times in the article, we’d like to provide a few receipts.

“Historically, at this institution, there’s been a white gaze defining what ‘Asia’ means,” said Scott Tsuchitani, an Asian-American artist.

Mr. Tsuchitani, the artist, objected to the racial impact of the culture of the museum. He said that over many years, the museum has exhibited “a pattern of repeatedly exoticizing, hypersexualizing, playing dress up with Asian cultures.”

Receipts linked below:  (just a sampling)

• Exoticizing
• Hypersexualizing
• Playing “Dress-Up” with Asian Cultures
  • Maharajah
  • Yoga:  WhitePeopleDoingChanting
  • Samurai:  1, 2
• Not to mention:  Exhibiting Stolen Goods while Censoring Where They Came From

Why is ‘The Asian’ So White:  a problem of positionality

If the Asian Art Museum

• was founded by white people around the mostly unprovenanced collection of a white supremacist, and
• white people have remained in key positions of power on both board and management throughout its history, and
• in 2020, white staff outnumber Asians by roughly 2:1, Latinx by 4:1, and Blacks by 7:1,

then what steps can we expect the museum to take as it scrambles to declare support for Black Lives Matter and professes to reckon with a history so fraught with whiteness?

We as an institution have not done enough. We must take action and become the change we wish to see in the world.

While the museum has begun to denounce Brundage’s racism, it has not accounted for its own cultural capitalization of the racist’s ill-gotten collection.  If the collection at the heart of “The Asian” is a product of U.S. imperial violence in Asia, then what is the nature of the museum’s positional relationship to Asia and local Asian American communities?

If a white institution is knowingly in possession of goods stolen from Asia, then what is the obvious action that must be taken to “become the change we wish to see in the world”? Relocating the imperialist’s bust or removing his name from museum initiatives offers nothing in the way of either restitution or meaningful corrective action at a structural level.

Welcome to “The Caucasian”

The same racial logic that would capitalize on a racist’s collection of stolen goods  underwrites, for example, the transformation of the relatively innocuous “Arts of Japan: The John C. Weber Collection” into a hypersexualized “Seduction” opening, complete with performers (and staff?) in yellowface.  Over time, practices such as these have repeatedly served to center whiteness by racializing Asians as foreign Others, in effect functioning as a Caucasian Art Museum that extracts racial capital from Asian cultures and bodies.

This pattern of symbolic violence implicitly shares an underlying racial logic in common with that of the late Nazi sympathizer himself.  It will take more than public forums and incremental hires to fundamentally change an operational common sense that continues, even now, to defend its history of whiteness in the face of criticism from Asian American voices.

Talk is cheap and implicit bias trainings are limited, so here’s a proposition.  What can we learn from the dramatic transformation unfolding all around us? Rather than framing this through a lens of liberal reform, how might we apply the radical logics of abolition and decolonization to remake this institution in a way that centers the needs, voices, and perspectives of the very communities whose cultures are on display?

In closing, we return to Bhakta’s “Hoodless and Institutionalized“:

If the museum wants change, the change needs to be radical, and the structure can’t remain. To start, the current leadership needs to step down. White people in high positions in the education, curatorial, PR, and other departments need to step down. White people on the board should step down…

What do a Racist Frat and the Avery Brundage Collection have in common?

Brotherhood Forever @ Sigma Alpha Epsilon: linking racist bus chant to white supremacist art collector

In the news today is a headline about the closure of a chapter of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) fraternity after a video was leaked showing its members singing a virulently racist song:

There will never be a ni**er at SAE

You can hang him from a tree

but he’ll never sign with me

There will never be a ni**er at SAE

As Inside Higher Ed reports, SAE is “touted as the only national fraternity founded in antebellum South,” and fittingly its chapters around the country have histories of racist and anti-semitic actions:

2014:  Clemson ‘Cripmas’ party.

2014:  University of Arizona SAE’s physical attack on Jewish frat

2013:  Washington University SAE’s alleged racist pledge activity

Not to mention their widespread history of sexual assault, despite their creed of ‘The True Gentleman‘:

2015:  Yale bans SAE for sexual misconduct violation

2015:  Iowa State SAE chapter suspended in sexual assault case

2014:  Stanford suspends SAE housing as result of sexual harrassment

2014:  16 yr old raped at Johns Hopkins SAE party

2014:  Sexual Assault reported at Emory SAE on Halloween

2014:  Rape Allegations at Loyola Marymount SAE

2013:  UNM revokes SAE charter due to Sexual Assault

2013:  Sexual Assault at SMU SAE

2012:  Former UT Austin student sues SAE for Sexual Assault

2011:  Cal Poly SLO arrest in SAE Sexual Assault

Why are we reporting on this here? In connection to our previous post on white supremacy at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, it’s worth noting that Avery Brundage—around whose largely unprovenanced Asian art collection the Asian Art Museum was founded—was not only an SAE member, but a president of the Chicago SAE alumni chapter.  In “Avery Brundage and Racism,” Maynard Brichford notes that SAE’s National Laws stated in 1931 that “any male member of the Aryan race” was eligible for membership, and excluded any person whose parent was “a full-blooded Jew.”  Between 1921 and 1960, Brundage was the subject of no fewer than four SAE fraternity magazine articles.

All this to point out that white supremacist structural racism—and the racist cultural events it produces—does not come from out of nowhere nor does it happen by accident.  It is of a historical and structural continuum, and deeply rooted in institutional memory, alive and well here in San Francisco.

Much more about Avery Brundage’s racist, sexist, anti-semitic past can be found here (along with subversive tortilla art).

His connections to anti-semitism can be traced back to his university days, where he presided over a Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity chapter which operated with an official policy (emphasis added):

“In 1931, the fraternity’’s National Laws stated that “’any male member of the Aryan race’” was eligible for membership, and provided that no person who has a parent who was “’a full-blooded Jew”’ was eligible.”

As president of the American Olympic Committee, Brundage’s fraternization with Hitler and his emergence as the “preeminent American apologist for Nazi Germany” around the Berlin Olympics in 1936 are well documented.  Shortly after Jesse Owens foiled Hitler’s intended demonstration of Aryan supremacy by winning four gold medals, Brundage suspended Owens from the AAU, an act which thereafter “barred Owens from competing in any sanctioned sporting events in the U.S.”

Two years after Brundage played an instrumental role in preventing a US boycott of the Berlin games, his construction company was awarded the building contract for the German Embassy in the United States because of his “sympathy toward the Nazi cause.”

By 1953, a year into a twenty year reign as president of the International Olympic Committee, Brundage came to favor the elimination of women from Olympic competition.

While he had no objections to the Nazi salutes at Berlin in 1936, Brundage reacted furiously when Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists at the Mexico City Olympics as they demanded, among other things, the ouster of Brundage as IOC president.   Under Brundage, the IOC ordered the suspension of the athletes and spread rumors threatening to strip them of their medals.

Few were interested in examining why anyone would feel compelled to challenge an International Olympic Committee that coddled apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia, didn’t hire black officials or would be led by an avowed white supremacist and anti-Semite, Avery Brundage.—Dave Zirin, The Nation, June 2012

Sotheby’s knowingly tried to sell stolen Asian art?

Via NY Times: Prosecutors File Arguments in Effort to Return Cambodian Statue, 8/21/12

Federal prosecutors seeking to repatriate a 10th century statue to Cambodia filed court papers Monday accusing Sotheby’s of knowing the sculpture “was an important piece of cultural property that had been stolen” from a remote temple complex when the auction house put the massive sandstone artifact up for sale in March 2011.

A 2011 Sotheby’s catalog shows a thousand-year-old statue believed to be from the Koh Ker temple in Cambodia. (New York Times)

Despite testimony from multiple experts declaring it stolen property, Sotheby’s continues to argue for the right to sell the Cambodian temple statue for as much as $3 million on behalf of its Belgian “owner,” shamelessly arguing that “that no one has provided proof the item was stolen.”

As if the temple monks had a yard sale, but failed to keep receipts?

No, the lack of provenance of this statue is in keeping with what researchers found of the Asian antiquities collected by Norton Simon (Pasadena), Walter C. Mead (Denver), Sherman Lee (Cleveland), Avery Brundage (Asian Art Museum), John D. Rockefeller III (Asia Society NY), and others.

But since those collections were formed before international heritage laws went into effect, they are apparently immune from this kind of scrutiny and repatriation effort.

Tortilla Subversion at Asian Art Museum

Eat, Pray, Take:  Tortilla screen-printed with Hoisin Sauce at the Asian Art Museum’s Matcha event last Thursday.  Click to enlarge.  (Photo: Terrance Graven)

A week ago (7/26/12), one of our founding members served as special guest artist of The Great Tortilla Conspiracy, at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco’s monthly Thursday evening Matcha event.

This month’s Matcha was the culmination of a year-long “unofficial residency” project at the museum by artist Imin Yeh called SpaceBi.  For this event, Yeh invited more than two dozen APA and local artists to participate, which is unprecedented in that it is close to two dozen more than are typically invited by the museum. (Action-packed event Program here)

The Great Tortilla Conspiracy was among those invited, and the Conspiracy in turn invited me as their special guest.  Museum management was reportedly “thrilled” to learn of my participation.

“Do US Museums have looted Asian Artifacts?”

Via ArtsJournal:  “Do US Museums have looted Asian Artifacts? Feds Want To Know”

“Federal authorities are asking American museums to scrutinize their collections for items that they have obtained from a veteran Manhattan art dealer now accused of possessing antiquities stolen from India and other countries.”

The New York Times 07/28/12

The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco may not be named in the above-linked NY Times article as a recipient of objects from accused art dealer Subhash Kapoor, but has indeed been named as such in his bio (pdf) and on the Art of the World website (now shut down).

Federal agents in Manhattan seizing statues linked to Subhash Kapoor. (US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, via NY Times)

It’s worth recalling that while the lack of provenance of many of the objects in Asian antiquity collections of individuals such as Norton Simon in Pasadena, Avery Brundage at “The Asian”, and John D. Rockefeller III at Asia Society in New York is well noted, the question of illicit excavation does not apply to objects in collections formed before 1970.

This is thanks to UNESCO’s “Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illlicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property,” which is more concerned with “antiquities that have no provenance and first came to light since 1970, the date of the UNESCO convention.”

In other words, there’s a statute of limitations on stolen or looted Asian art that only goes back to 1970.  Colonialism, even from the mid-20th century, gets a pass.  How does that work?

Even at that, UK did not sign on to the 1970 convention until 2003, Switzerland 2004, and as of 2006, Germany, Denmark, and Holland had yet to ratify.