"Spectres of Liberty" by Ryan Griffis

“Spectres of Liberty,” ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art. (DVD Magazine)

Text by Ryan Griffis

Spectres of Liberty is a project by New York-based artists Dara Greenwald, Josh MacPhee and Olivia Robinson that took place on May 30, 2008 in the city of Troy, New York. For this highly visible and site-specific project, the artists created a spectre, or ghost, of the Liberty Street Church, an extremely significant institution in the history of the Underground Railroad and the movement to abolish slavery. The site where the Church once stood is currently a parking lot, the building itself having burned down in 1941. But on May 30, the spirit of the church would be awakened, reminding Troy's residents that the Church and its members' efforts to end oppression were never contained in the architecture, nor did their outrages at injustice remain in the past. The artists recreated the structure of the church in the form of an inflatable building made of clear plastic, designed to-scale and based on archival photographs.

Along with the ghost of the Liberty Street Church, the artists also called up the ghost of one of its most outspoken leaders and abolitionists, Rev Henry Highland Garnet. Garnet is recalled through images and quotations, but most of all through the reanimation of a speech he delivered to the National Negro Convention in Buffalo, NY in 1843. The speech, deemed so radical at the time that it was rejected by the convention, called upon slaves themselves to reject slavery, rather than playing to the consciences of slave owners or progressive whites. When it was later published and deemed valuable by the larger abolitionist movement, Garnet spoke to the urgency of his message, saying:

"The Address was rejected by a small majority; and now in compliance with the earnest request of many who heard it, and in conformity to the wishes of numerous friends who are anxious to see it, the author now gives it to the public, praying God that this little book may be borne on the winds of heaven, until the principles it contains shall be understood and adopted by every slave in the Union."

The Spectres of Liberty project was organized to take advantage of a regular public event, the Troy Night Out arts walk, a monthly arts and culture event similar to those that occur in cities across the United States. Parasitically attaching itself to the time and space of this cultural booster event, the project could interface with a critical mass of people in a relatively short period of time, obviously a necessity given the project's ephemeral nature. But, the project did not assume an uncritical relationship to the definition of public that usually accompanies such officially sanctioned cultural events. Both art walks and memorials create a specific relationship between the public, history and the creation of culture where the public is a spectator, an empty vessel into which knowledge can be poured. Here, the artists created a temporary memorial that is itself literally an empty vessel meant to be filled.

While it is the air pushed in through a fan that physically inflates the ghost-like form of the recreated church, symbolically, it is the call to action by Reverend Garnet that initiates its raising. Spectres may be a participatory and open event, inviting a public to come inside and discuss its meaning, but it acknowledges that the public was, and continues to be, comprised of a multitude of communities with unequal power. The project provided a public hearing for repressed histories, such as the stories of Troy activist Steve Tyson, who is responsible for the placing of the historical marker recognizing the church, and the work of the Underground Railroad History Project.

The Spectres of Liberty project recognizes this multiplicity of publics, and the inequity found between them, most clearly in its response to the form of national memory, embodied in the preservation of national landmarks and the construction of memorials. As scholars and critics of preservation policies have pointed out, historic and cultural preservation in North America is overwhelmingly based on architectural integrity and  aesthetics. This, of course, has led to the preservation of the wealthy and white portions of history. Only about 1% of the over 80,000 sites in the US National Register of Historic Places are associated with African American heritage, despite the obviously  large impact of the African diaspora on the development of the United States.

Animating Rev Garnet's speech on the ghostly walls of the inflated church, the artists reveal the gap in this construction of the public. If the Reverend's words are speaking to a public, it is one that has historically been excluded from official public life. A white and contemporary audience must read these words, in their historical context, as neither the object nor subject of address. Slaves, and perhaps by extension their descendants, are the public Garnet speaks to. They are the intended subjects and agents of change. The agency of whites, both progressive and racist, is treated as a condition of the landscape, a force that must be reckoned with, but not a force that will end oppression itself.

But the artists behind Spectres of Liberty, by challenging the construction of a homogenous, white public in the time of slavery, also present a challenge to the contemporary production of historical memory and memorialization. Rev Garnet's words are not projected backwards, as merely documentation of an often overlooked history - they forcefully point to the continued assumptions of a dominant white public where largely white institutions produce knowledge for white audiences. Most National Parks for instance, create an image of uncontested national unity and identity, despite the often violent conditions behind the expansion of territory that preceded their creation. Such spaces and places, are the norm, while spaces that speak to non-white audiences are promoted as especially ethnic or serving a minority audience. 

The question that the artists seem to pose here asks who might the contemporary audience be for Rev Garnet's words? The artists, finding his speech of relevance today, offer the militant call for direct action up for consideration. When paired with the artists' formal decision to use the temporary form of an inflatable structure, the appeal to direct action proposes a more participatory model for the creation of public memory. Here, the project responds to critics that charge architectural monuments and memorials with the construction of static interpretations of history. Even more critical, however, monuments often facilitate the forgetting of history, since they are designed to do the remembering for us.

Memorials and monuments to the end of slavery and the achievements of the Civil Rights movements of the 20th century often create the appearance that these struggles ended with some particular speech by a heroic figure in a dramatic time. They encourage us to move on, to say to ourselves that we are better than that now, that we have learned from our mistakes and don't need to carry them with us. A singular public consumes these stories at appropriate times and places, observing the official accounts recorded in marble, bronze and didactic markers, without the need to remember or question them. However, as Spectres of Liberty reminds us, the public is a fractured collection of different publics, with different stories, perspectives and power. This project challenges us to consider the differences that divide the public, that these publics are varyingly the subjects and objects of history - those making history and those acted upon by history. It also shows us, through Rev Garnet's words, that the line between subject and object should not be considered fixed - that slaves were indeed part of the struggle for their own liberation. Finally, Spectres of Liberty questions the discreet timeline of slavery and its end, projecting calls for liberation into the present and future.