America in the Deep Fryer

Speaking at Fort Bragg to troops and their families this summer, President Trump once again floated the idea that anyone caught setting fire to the American flag should be thrown in jail. Late last month, he advanced the threat, signing an executive order that instructs federal prosecutors to pursue criminal charges against anyone who undertakes the constitutionally protected act. “You burn a flag, you get one year in jail,” Trump vowed.

His order doesn’t mention anything about deep-frying the flag, though.

That’s what Kiyan Williams started doing in 2020. In one video documenting the New York-based artist’s project, they use tongs to lower a rectangular strip of material covered in flour and seasoned with paprika, salt, and pepper into a pan of hot oil. As the flour sizzles into an almost translucent, crispy breading, the object beneath comes into clearer view: not a piece of meat but the Stars and Stripes. The flag’s surface bubbles and pops like infected skin left untreated in one iteration; in another, its outer layer is left charred beyond recognition, save for a few faded stars. All at once, American superiority succumbs to the fryer.

Of course, desecrating the ultimate symbol of American power in a studio and then presenting it in a commercial gallery does not quite pose the same risk to an artist that torching a flag in a public place does to a protester—at least for now. Nonetheless, this kind of symbolic speech elicits disgust and condemnation from conservatives and liberals alike.

This reactive hysteria misunderstands the act of destruction as senseless—obscuring the reality that such actions are usually intentional and aimed at disrupting or revealing the brutality baked into the American project. Consider the pro-Palestine activists who in late July covered the entrance of the New York Times headquarters in red paint, creating an image of the so-called paper of record, an avatar of liberalism, soaked in blood. Or the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct, engulfed in flames during the George Floyd uprisings against police brutality and systemic racism. Or the Waymo self-driving cars and American flags torched earlier this year in Los Angeles during mass protests against the Trump administration’s deportation campaign. These weren’t acts of senseless violence. They were acts of destruction staged on the most legible backdrop this country understands: the symbols and physical manifestations of American power.

Each of these actors engaged in methods of vandalism for different reasons, but the overwhelming response to the actions remains largely the same, reiterating the value and attention afforded to totems of American empire as opposed to the actual people who live under its domain. In other words, Western culture and its corporatized media outlets fixate on the flames, conveniently eliding the systems of detention, occupation, and death that occasioned the protest in the first place.

Predictably, outrage of this sort lacks even a wink of self-awareness. California Governor Gavin Newsom, jockeying to be the leader of the Resistance 2.0, put the onus squarely on demonstrators. “The federal government is taking over the California National Guard and deploying 2,000 soldiers in Los Angeles—not because there is a shortage of law enforcement, but because they want a spectacle,” he said in a statement in early June. “Don’t give them one. Never use violence. Speak out peacefully.” Democratic Senator John Fetterman, who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from pro-Israel interest groups and remains a committed defender of the genocidal state, posted on X that same month: “My party loses the moral high ground when we refuse to condemn setting cars on fire, destroying buildings, and assaulting law enforcement.”  

There is little daylight between Democrats and Republicans on the issue. In response to the protests against ICE, the conservative-leaning magazine Arena published an essay titled “Mobs, Machines and the American Spirit.” In the piece, Jeffrey Feiwell (the magazine’s COO) claims that “the mass incineration of Waymos by a mob in Los Angeles represents the unwinding of the unique promise of America: the frontier.” To Feiwell, the American expansionist project of the frontier is not only geographic; it is an “eternal” spirit committed to continuous innovation, which necessarily includes the embrace and protection of rapid technological advancements like self-driving cars. Aside from the obvious issue of delegitimizing those protesting against families being ripped apart as simply a “mob” with “the impulse to destroy,” Feiwell’s argument illustrates how outrage against destruction is an ideological sleight of hand: empty cars are to be protected, the fate of immigrant families ignored. Though of a different order, the assassination of Charlie Kirk last week has incited a similar cycle of selective indignation: his killing condemned, the hatred and violence he championed whitewashed into “practicing politics the right way.”

As Trump’s August executive order makes clear, the American flag, that “most sacred and cherished symbol of the United States of America, and of American freedom, identity, and strength,” deserves protections that some human lives do not. To desecrate it “is a statement of contempt, hostility, and violence against our Nation—the clearest possible expression of opposition to the political union that preserves our rights, liberty, and security.” In a follow-up “fact sheet,” the administration specifically cites the protests in Los Angeles as justification for this unconstitutional effort to jail American citizens—and deport foreign nationals—who dare to torch a symbol of their oppression. Within hours of Trump signing the order, a man was arrested outside the White House for setting the flag on fire.

This outrage only pretends to take issue with the purported violence of a demonstrator’s actions (and for what it’s worth, Trump himself has violated U.S. flag protocol more than once). Rather, their actual interest lies in the preservation of America’s monopoly over violence and its definition. And according to conservatives like Feiwell, Democrats like Newsom and Fetterman, and other proponents of empire, violence is anything that impedes America’s ability to further realize its God-given promise. Throughout American history, this promise has gone by a variety of names but no matter the title, it centers on the establishment and expansion of American property and dominance through colonization, displacement, enslavement, genocide, and theft. 

But when someone burns an American flag, they are advancing an argument on behalf of valuing human life over property. To desecrate the flag, in other words, is to reveal that the flag itself stands for the devaluing of human life. A blood-soaked New York Times points to how Zionists weaponize journalism to obscure genocide in Gaza. A police station engulfed in flames is to suggest that it represents the furthest thing from defending “public safety”; it is the means by which America has terrorized and abused black people for centuries.

As the state continues to enact policies that encroach on our freedom to dissent, the indelible connection between the artist and the protester becomes more prominent: the artist prompts the protester, the protester prompts the artist. And the precarity of one speaks to the precarity of the other. As a result, artists, protesters, and their expressions of dissent are becoming equally culpable in the eyes of American leaders.

Following Trump’s order against flag burning, it is not a stretch to speculate that his administration will soon target artists appropriating the flag and other symbols of American empire. He’s already launched a crusade against American cultural institutions. In February, Trump assumed control of the Kennedy Center and has been at work molding it in his image ever since: he honored red-blooded American icons Sylvester Stallone and George Strait in August and then a month later offered the Center’s stage to right-wing Christian extremists eager to indoctrinate Gen Z.  (Ticket sales have plummeted.) And now the “OUT OF CONTROL” and turbo-“WOKE” Smithsonian Museum is under review by the White House, even though the institution has remained largely in line with Trump’s whims. This was most apparent after the painter Amy Sherald canceled her upcoming solo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery upon learning that the Smithsonian considered removing a painting of a black transgender woman portraying the Statue of Liberty. “When governments police museums, they are not simply policing exhibitions,” the artist wrote in an op-ed for MSNBC. “They are policing imagination itself.”

Though frightening, Trump’s ideas are not particularly novel. In 1988, the Chicago-born, black artist Dread Scott asked a question similar to the one Williams gets at with his fried flags. In his work called What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, shown at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Scott included that question printed above a black-and-white photomontage—in which American flags are burned by South Korean students while others are shown draped across coffins aboard a U.S. military transport. Just below the print was a ledger prompting the audience to offer their own answer to the question. In order to do so, though, you had to stand on the American flag, which lay neatly below as if it were a rug.

The reaction was all too familiar. Then-president George H. W. Bush called the installation “disgraceful,” as did the entire U.S. Congress, which moved decisively to outlaw displaying the flag on the ground.“ I don’t know much about art, but I know desecration when I see it,” said Republican Senator Bob Dole, who introduced the measure. In 1990, Scott became a defendant in United States v. Eichman, a Supreme Court case that affirmed flag desecration was constitutionally protected free speech and invalidated the law passed a year earlier.  

Williams and Scott are, of course, not the only artists who’ve used symbols of America to advance a critique of empire. Consider Alan Michelson, a Mohawk artist based in New York who disrupts the idol of George Washington in Hanödaga:yas (2018), or Town Destroyer. In this work, Michelson projects historic maps, documents, portraits, and other materials onto a bust of Washington so as to tell the real story of a violent campaign during the Revolutionary War in which he led his army to pillage the homeland of the Haudenosaunee. The reputation of Washington, power-washed to the point of inaccuracy, is corrected as he becomes a name and symbol synonymous with the theft of Indigenous land.

There’s also Mark Alexander’s American Bog (2013) paintings, which depict icons of America—the flag, Lincoln, Mickey Mouse, JFK—as relics of a lost era unearthed from a peat bog. They’re sludgy, wrinkled, and faded from years of decomposition, implying the inevitable decay of the empire that birthed them. Another project that engages with symbols of American empire includes the Toppled Monuments Archive, an artist-run collective founded in 2020 that records defaced, toppled, and removed imperialist and Confederate monuments. Here, we see the inherent relationship between the artist and the protester, as the work of the artist becomes that of archiving the protester and their actions. In one image within the archive, a Christopher Columbus statue in San Francisco is strapped to a crane, his face and hands still stained in red paint as he is removed from his pedestal. In another, Andrew Jackson valiantly rides a horse in Jacksonville, Florida. His plaque is overwritten in red paint: “SLAVE OWNER,” it reads, with Jackson, too, stained in red.

Perhaps one day in the future, the Statue of Freedom—the bronze woman who stands atop the dome of the U.S. Capitol—will, too, topple to the ground. Kiyan Williams renders that future as a likely present in Ruins of Empire (2022), displayed in Brooklyn Bridge Park as part of the Black Atlantic exhibition. In Washington, the State of Freedom, standing tall and strong, holds a sheathed sword, a shield, and a wreath of victory. She’s meant to be Minerva or Bellona, a goddess of war made American. But here, she is no longer triumphant—she’s fallen from her perch and is slowly sinking into the earth. America’s goddess of war has collapsed under the weight of her own mythology; parched and blistered, she dries up in the sun. If rain comes, it won’t offer much relief, only accelerating her erosion. Sooner or later, she’ll crumble further into the soil.

Williams takes a similarly fatalistic (optimistic?) view of the White House in Ruins of Empire II or the Earth Swallows the Master’s House (2024), which renders the façade in soil and depicts it sinking, slowly, into the ground. Atop the disintegrating structure’s roof, an American flag remains, waving upside down in the wind. I’d hazard a guess that the White House’s current occupant would find this display of the flag displeasing—but then again, within a day of signing the executive order attempting to re-criminalize flag burning, he’d gotten distracted by the need to defend another sacred symbol of America: the Cracker Barrel logo.