Cross Purposes

by Susan Phillips

art

Not content to be simply an art gallery, the Slought Foundation prides itself on encouraging provocative conversations. A planned cross-burning event—with hate-crime connotations and a free-speech dispute with the University of Pennsylvania—shouldn't disappoint.

Slought, a West Philly gallery with a focus on the contemporary and the theoretical, is using Marcel Duchamp's penchant for nondecorative art as a heady point of reference here, but the eerie sight of a Klansman's hood atop a wooden sculpture leaves little to contemplate. It's just plain scary.

African-American artist David Stephens' "Non-Retinal: Kovert Konflagration Kovenant" takes its cue from the 2002 Supreme Court ruling Virginia v. Black, which distinguishes between cross burning as intimidation and cross burning as protected free speech.

So Stephens, who is blind, decided to pursue his own form of cultural appropriation and take back the burning cross. "I want to demystify, de-horrify, and de-terrify the idea of a cross burning," he says. "Do the flip side and make it my own kind of thing instead of something just the Klan can do."

Who says racist rednecks get to have all the fun?

The crosses Stephens wants to burn stand only a foot and a half high. He says the burning, which along with his other abstract crosses, crowns and panels of braille depict a fractured conversation between two Klansmen and two biblical figures, attempts to spark a discussion not just about cross burning but about the power of symbols.

"The cross is an element of cultural transposition," he says. "The Christians appropriated the cross from the Romans, even though the Romans used it as a device to torture and murder them."

But neither the Christians nor the Klan has ever had to contend with the bureaucratic feudalism of the University of Pennsylvania, which owns all the open land in the vicinity of that tiny vassal, the Slought Foundation. And Penn has held countless conversations among lawyers, provosts and administrators, who promptly doused the flames of free speech with fire-code safety regulations.

So what's a law-abiding cross burner to do in the City of Brotherly Love?

"Well, it looks like we might have to use barbecues," says Slought Foundation director Aaron Levy.

Break out the marshmallows.

"An Intimate Burning" with David Stephens, Fri., Dec. 3, meet at Slought at 6p.m.; "Non-Retinal: Kovert Konflagration Kovenant" exhibit runs through Jan. 31, 2005, Slought Foundation, 4017 Walnut St., 215-222-9050, www.slought.org.