posted on 2011-04-14, 00:00authored byJoseph Small
The inability to distinguish between skin color and culture, nationality and race, and the personal and the political, often makes finding whiteness in art difficult and furthers society's inability to examine whiteness. Many non-white artists who examine whiteness through art are marginalized. However, many white artists also confront the issues of race, and their work is often not analyzed in a racial context. This allows whiteness to remain invisible. By examining Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3, Sally Mann's Deep South, and Paul McCarthy's Class Fool, in terms of the artists' white identity, one is able to see how these artists' cultural representations align with society's definitions of whiteness. In this essay, the purpose of identifying whiteness in art is not to determine 'correct' meanings but instead to determine what meanings can be legitimately read in three artists' work.