Of the 26 executive orders President Donald Trump signed on the first day of his second term, one was billed as “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship,” barring the government from “any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.” In his address to Congress a few weeks later, Trump reiterated this point: “I have stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America. It’s back.” [...]
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In 1989, Scott, born Scott Tyler, was a 24-year-old art student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and participated in a show there with an installation titled “What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?” It required visitors to decide whether or not to step on one in order to answer that question in a guest book. In response to the piece — which also included a photomontage of South Korean protesters burning an American flag paired with an image of American flags draped over soldiers’ coffins — thousands of veterans rallied outside the museum building, and Scott received multiple death threats. Senator Bob Dole denounced Scott, whom he identified as a “so-called artist,” on the Senate floor. President George H.W. Bush described the work as “disgraceful.” Several months later, Congress passed an amendment, the Flag Protection Act of 1989, making the deliberate placement of a flag on the ground a criminal offense. Scott and a few friends and activists responded by burning flags on the steps of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. Their arrest led to a 1990 Supreme Court ruling that the federal law against desecrating the flag was unconstitutional. — N.H.
I was a young radical who thought that art could change the world. Then, suddenly, I had a work that was part of the national discussion. And it wasn’t just being discussed by the powerful but by the powerless — people from housing projects were standing in line for over an hour to see it. When Congress and the city of Chicago intend to outlaw your work, it shows the power of art, but also the extraordinary lengths [to which] the government is willing to go, including ripping up its own Constitution, to suppress the voice of a previously unknown undergraduate art student.
I didn’t know anybody making a career as an artist, so I wasn’t thinking, “Oh my God, I’m never going to show again.” Having grown up in Ronald Reagan’s America, with all the narrow-mindedness and selfishness and greed that it embodied — and then George H.W. Bush continuing that legacy — to be able to speak truth to power was fantastic. But then, of course, there were people who felt they couldn’t show my work. And then there were art institutions that lost funding after they did show it.
One thing I realized is that my personal fate and safety were bound up with defending this work, and that, if I wanted others to defend it, I had to be strong myself. If I’d suddenly said, “Look, I just want this to go away,” then my network of support would’ve also fallen away. I thought, as I said at the time, that if Black people hadn’t been willing to offend the sensibilities of white people, we’d still be chattel slaves. The flag flew over the Supreme Court during the Dred Scott decision [an 1857 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court declaring that enslaved people weren’t American citizens and couldn’t sue for emancipation]. This was the flag that the cavalry carried as they massacred Native Americans. I wanted people to talk about those ideas. And if my life was a little disrupted, so be it.
