13. (Meat Packing District)

The MiraculousJuly/August 2020New York

A young artist enters a museum on the opening day of a biennial exhibition of contemporary art. He makes his way to one work in the show, a well-known painter’s depiction of a murdered 14-year-old boy lying in a coffin. Inspired by an infamous 1955 lynching, the painting is titled Open Casket. The artist, who is Black, positions himself directly in front of the painting, whose creator is white, and remains standing there until the museum closes, rendering impossible any unimpeded view of the canvas. On the back of his gray T-shirt he has used a marker to write out the phrase “BLACK DEATH SPECTACLE.”

(Parker Bright, Dana Schutz)

Raphael Rubinstein is the New York-based author of The Miraculous (Paper Monument, 2014) and A Geniza (Granary Books, 2015). Excerpts from his recently completed book Libraries of Sand about the Jewish-Egyptian writer Edmond Jabès have appeared in Bomb, The Fortnightly Review and 3:AM Magazine. In January 2023, Bloomsbury Academic will publish a collection of his writing titled Negative Work: The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art. Since 2008 he has been Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Houston School of Art.