Next, The Politics of Aesthetics lithograph carries us further into the fray. The infamous image of Paul Ryan weightlifting in TIME Magazine occupies center stage, taking on a profound new meaning. We can read in this an assertion of meaning from the political right. Their clumsy reassertion of meaning offers reprieve from the nausea of guilt and moral uncertainty. Ironically, this serves only to advance the power of the unscrupulous who would capitalize on this anxiety, a justification for a memorialized one-sided history. The irony lies in that these justifications are facsimiles of those originally offered by the Confederate States as NOLA’s Confederate General PG Beauregard dangles to the left.

In the foreground, a defiant philosopher stares directly at the viewer, Jacques Ranciere, who penned the essay, The Politics of Aesthetics, instrumental in the deconstructive turn in art criticism that created this new battleground for meaning. We’re taunted further by two easter egg paintings behind Paul Ryan. On the left, Gerhard Richter’s photo-realism painting ‘Dead’, showing a West German communist insurrectionist from the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Her death in prison was heavily contested. Did she commit suicide as the official line went? Or had she been surreptitiously murdered by the state? The painting re-established a defensible form of art historical painting that had evaded the 20th century critiques of art’s place in capturing history. By depicting a photograph from the newspaper, Richter problematized the line between art being disallowed from representing history while the media’s role in representing history could go on unchecked. No longer is this the case.

On the right hangs Dana Schutz’s painting ‘Open Casket’, a photo-based depiction of Emmett Till, just as Richter had done in ‘Dead’. The story of Emmett Till is painful to recount and I hope is already familiar to the reader. This fourteen year old boy who was black was brutally murdered by two men who were white. His mother, Mamie Till’s, insistence that her son’s funeral be held open-casket resulted in widespread circulation of the close-up photos in the media, shocking America into a moral consciousness that laid the foundations for the civil rights movement. Dana Schutz’s painting in 2016 was an attempt at allyship, but as a white woman, the painting was ultimately censored in a firestorm of debate in the shifting landscape of identity politique, further fracturing the place of the artist to represent the political. She could not stand on the same ground Richter had in ‘Dead’, despite her best intentions. Together these symbols awake a host of difficult questions.

Finally, we witness Vehicles of Understanding, together with General Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate forces, who surveys the wreckage as if taking final account of the battlefield, aborted works of art littering the stage, a luminous TV blathering in the center, a fractured depiction of a monumental sculpture, and a distant news anchor with their back turned to it all.

With the conceptual groundwork established in these first three lithographs; the final two, Winter Landscape and Horse’s Mouth can offer the viewer several endless explorations that I think it best not to narrate here. Instead, I leave them to you, the viewer, to ponder and interpret as you see fit, and encourage fortitude resisted knee jerk conclusions but rather to dwell boldly in the grey space that a lithograph creates by its very nature.

These lithographs linger so uncomfortably over these perilous questions of who has the right to represent anything. They push back against ever more radical propositions that some artists need not be in the conversation at all. From a litany of symbols and references, these works create a matrix of emergent meaning from which the viewer can draw forth their own questions. Perhaps these are questions that have not occurred to them. Perhaps questions that feel dangerous to ask. Perhaps questions that need to be asked.