President James Madison appears as he always does, bewigged and in a dark coat and cravat. He is slightly turned to his left, pale blue eyes gazing obliquely at something beyond our view. A white light glances off his forehead and lightens his ruddy face; the reds of his cheeks are matched in the reds of the draped material behind him. The cloth swings back to reveal a wooden crate, or something like that, a structure made of wood. The skin of the canvas has been cut, peeled back, and nailed to the wall. The portrait is flayed.
And it is flayed in a precise way. The chest and the mouth are sliced into strips that dangle from the canvas, or are twisted aside, through straight, uniform, surgical incisions.
The museum label says that the painting, titled Flay (James Madison) by the artist Titus Kaphar, “reveals the truth beneath.”
The question immediately arises: which truth?
One truth might be the grey-green museum wall beneath the canvas. Which is to say, the institutional support for the portrait and all that that it stands for (Madison as one of America’s Founding Fathers) is quite literally exposed. The museum is one support that has turned Madison’s face into an icon of courage and foresight (think of that oblique gaze). It is the support that allows us to see some pictures and not others.
Another truth is revealed in that wooden structure. It could be a crate. It could be the interior of a wooden ship. Both point towards the fact that Madison bought and owned and sold around 300 black Africans who traveled in crates and boats to his estate in Virginia. That is, despite Madison’s public statements describing slavery as America’s “original sin,” he actively participated in the slave trade.
Finally, there’s an emotional truth. The cuts are described as a “shredding” in the label, which references the shredders that you find in a FedEx or an office space, the kind of machine you might use to shred important documents. But it’s not really that mechanical. Only the mouth and body are cut away, nothing else. There’s an intensity of feeling to such deliberate flaying, an insistence that we ask ourselves: Who gets to speak? Whose bodies matter?
These are questions that we must ask ourselves now when we look at the endless stream of photographs of Joseph Biden in the news and as election fodder. In the context of Biden’s ironclad support of genocide in Palestine and his own double-speak, and the silencing and suppression of voices raised in protest on university campuses and in the media, how can we get to the truth beneath? Who gets to speak? Whose bodies matter?
Titus Kaphar, Flay (James Madison), 2019, Oil on canvas with nails.
See Kaphar’s Flay in the exhibition Unsettling Histories: Legacies of Slavery and Colonialism @ umma. Curated by Ozi Uduma, Assistant Curator of Global Contemporary Art
staring at the ceiling 