The Tear Gas Biennial
WARREN B. KANDERS DIDN’T EARN HIS PLACE as vice chair of the board at the Whitney Museum of American Art through his good taste alone. He has also used some of his estimated $700 million fortune to make tax-deductible donations to support exhibitions at the museum. What successful enterprise has made this generosity possible? Thanks to the collective, years-long effort of activists, students, and reporters to bring everyday brutality to light, we could tell you quite a lot about Kanders’s company Safariland, which does a brisk trade supplying batons, handcuffs, holsters, and body armor to police and security forces including the IDF and the NYPD. But let’s talk about the tear gas.
Tear gas is a chemical weapon: a mist of toxic particles that inflames mucus membranes and triggers pain receptors wherever it touches. The skin burns, the eyes water, the throat swells, it’s almost impossible to breathe. This is a “less-lethal” product, but can kill and has killed people, like Layla al-Ghandour, an eight-month-old baby who died last year in Gaza after tear gas inhalation; Osman Abubakir, a sixty-two-year-old man who choked to death in February of this year in Khartoum, Sudan; and the thirty-seven people killed by tear gas in the back of a police van in Cairo in 2013. After it was trialed on the battlefields of World War I, tear gas was outlawed for military use in 1925. That same year, Federal Laboratories, a company now owned by Safariland, manufactured the first tear gas police batons for use against civilians. “The use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices, has been justly condemned by the general opinion of the civilized world,” proclaims the 1925 Geneva Protocol. But tear gas remains legal to use in peacetime, by governments on their own citizens.
Because the power of protest comes from our capacity to gather and act together, tear gas is useful to the state because it forces people to disperse. For this reason, it has been used against a vast spectrum of struggles and uprisings: American students were teargassed at Kent State in 1970 just like Sudanese students were teargassed at Khartoum University this year. In a now-infamous photograph published last November by the New York Times, a woman at the border wall in Tijuana grips the arms of two little girls in diapers as all three flee a plume of tear gas streaking from a launched canister. US Customs and Border Protection—whose agents are currently overseeing concentration camps across the country—purchased that tear gas from Safariland. Kanders’s thriving company also made the news a few years ago: It supplied tear gas and other counterinsurgency equipment to police tasked with suppressing the passionate collective response to the murders of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
Both the counterterror era inaugurated by 9/11 and the heightened unrest and instability since the 2008 financial crisis have led to a sharp increase in profits for tear gas manufacturers, a market dominated in the US by three companies. One of them is Defense Technology, a subsidiary of Safariland. In 2015, Safariland chemicals were launched at water protectors at Standing Rock in North Dakota, after which the company was sued by a protester because a canister mutilated her left arm. Safariland also made the tear gas used to disperse and defeat a 2018 May Day anti-austerity protest in Puerto Rico. “Your face starts to itch, you start crying, you have to run, you can’t really breathe well,” said Lucía Ruiz Cedeño, a nine-year-old girl teargassed at the demonstration.
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As an arts professional, I am ashamed to say that this story escaped my notice last year.
I am rectifying that now.
The rest of the piece can be found at:
https://www.artforum.com/slant/a-statement-from-hannah-black-ciaran-finlayson-and-tobi-haslett-on-warren-kanders-and-the-2019-whitney-biennial-80328
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