Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659)

by Chang, Jeff; Herc, D. j. Kool

  He had arrived downtown at a splendid time. In the city, venues for young artists such as The Kitchen, PS 1, Franklin Furnace, and White Columns were springing up. Artists Space was a special nexus of fresh energies. When the nonprofit alternative space opened in 1973 on the northern fringe of Soho with funding from the New York State Council on the Arts, its mission was to allow artists of a new generation to introduce their unknown, unrepresented peers to the world. It would be streetwise, egalitarian; singular in the flood of new galleries, workshops, community centers, artist collectives, and museums surging against an art world, cofounder Trudy Grace said, “locked up and controlled by critics, curators, and dealers.”1

  Outside the galleries, Donald could hear the first screams of the new in bars, clubs, and galleries from the Bowery through Soho across to Tribeca. The first punks—as they came to call themselves—intended to defy all the gestures and conceits of the old countercultures. They were opposed to everything, even opposition. “Mass movements are so un-hip,” said Legs McNeil, a cofounder of Punk magazine. Liberation movements were, he said, “the beginning of political correctness, which was just fascism to us. Real fascism. More rules.”2 Of his peers, Joey Ramone sang, “What they want, I don’t know. They’re all revved up and ready to go!”3

  At night Donald began hanging in musty clubs and airy lofts. He wore bondage pants and T-shirts screen-printed with pictures of penises. He dyed his spiky hair blue. He found himself at parties with the Sex Pistols and he joined a girlfriend in a band that called itself the Erasers. They practiced in an old bank vault in the basement of the Fine Arts Building at 105 Hudson Street in Tribeca, where Artists Space had moved their gallery. Donald befriended the assistant director, Paul McMahon, a ferociously smart and witty artist, musician, and curator who bridged the art and punk crowds. McMahon agreed to visit him at his Whitney program studio.

  Donald had been creating seven large triptychs, five feet high by seven feet long, combining black-and-white photography with charcoal drawings. He rendered these works in gray, black, and tan tones, and flush-mounted the center sections with plexiglass, a trick that mirrored back the viewer as much as it revealed the art underneath.

  The images were indistinct, jarringly juxtaposed—a nighttime flash of brownstone windows, a forest and a creek starkly rendered in black and white, a fragile Ad Reinhardt shadow; aspens and abstractions in a bank of snow, a chimney blowing smoke into a dusk sky, thin lines arcing into an eclipse. Their large Rauschenbergian fields of light, dark, and reflection were alluring and distancing at once. They hoarded meaning.

  At that moment in the small corner of the art world that McMahon and Donald called home, Conceptualism was still king. When the conceptualists emerged in the 1960s in an affluent society awash in material things and a global village aflood in images, they shared a fervent belief that art should be more than just seen. Some of them intended to save art by removing it from oppressive systems of war, racism, and capital, and transporting it back into the mind. They hoped to accomplish, as the critics Lucy Lippard and John Chandler put it, “the dematerialization of the art object.”

  Sol LeWitt distilled the movement into seven words: “Ideas alone can be works of art.”4 Art was not just about making things, but making things happen. Embedded in these ideas was the radically democratic possibility that everything could be art and everyone could be an artist. Conceptualism made it sexy to be smart again.

  To the younger crowd, there were two kinds of conceptualists. John Baldessari represented the cool kind. He once assigned his students to fill gallery walls with the text—“I will not make any more boring art.” In one of his works, What Is Painting?, he copied text from an instructional art manual: “Do you sense how all the parts of a good picture are involved with each other, not just placed side by side? Art is a creation for the eye and can only be hinted at with words.” Here was a “painting” made with nothing but words, a picture of letters just placed side by side.

  The other conceptualists were those whose ideas on power and liberation had led them to form alternative galleries like Artists Space. In 1969, Lucy Lippard’s friend Carl Andre had called on fellow artists to free themselves from the capitalist imperatives of the art world, to withdraw their work from all galleries, museums, exhibitions, and commercial relationships in order to form a “true community of artists.” Then in 1972, Andre made an installation entitled Equivalent VIII, consisting only of 120 bricks stacked on the ground, that he sold to the Tate in London for a large sum.5

  McMahon didn’t find this funny. He thought it was hypocritical. Even worse, these “rich Marxists” were now the ones keeping new artists and ideas under their thumbs. They were part of the old guard he wanted to overthrow.

  McMahon and his peers had been the beneficiaries of a national expansion of collegiate arts programs launched to absorb the young baby boomers. They came from CalArts, the Whitney program, and SUNY Buffalo, where enterprising students like Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman had broken off to form the Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center. They armed themselves with Baldessari’s technique of appropriation, and applied it not just to the history of art but to the rising ocean of images in which they had been raised.

  They were all revved up and ready to go. They didn’t want bricks. They wanted the flood of stimuli, Pop with passion. They wanted their meta and their mystery, too. In 1977, Douglas Crimp—with the enthusiastic support of McMahon and Artists Space director Helene Winer—organized an exhibition at Artists Space called Pictures. McMahon and his colleagues would come to be called “the Pictures Generation.” To them the history of art was the collision of generations.

  McMahon knew that Donald Newman had a fine pedigree. And now in Newman’s studio, blown through with charcoal dust, McMahon thought he might have that extra something else, too. Winer and McMahon scheduled a show of the young man’s still unnamed works for the winter of 1979. What they liked about his works was exactly what they wanted Artists Space to be about. They were engaging and rough around the edges, fresh and inscrutable.

  On the night of February 16, 1979, when Artists Space opened the doors to the young artists, there was a massive blizzard. From then to the end of the month nothing of note happened, not even any reviews. But what happened next became an odd augury for the coming decade, as if a small cast of close friends and colleagues at the outer edge of the New York art world were in a dress rehearsal for the national opening of the culture wars.

  Perhaps an artist’s greatest fear is to have his work go ignored. And perhaps in the era of punk upheaval the act of simply hanging these works in a downtown gallery and inviting visitors to contemplate their useless beauty seemed too easy. So Donald—a handsome young white man with a bright future—had chosen to call the seven pieces in his first exhibition The Nigger Drawings, and that’s where all the troubles began.

  PICTURES AND WORDS ABOUT PICTURES

  About a month before The Nigger Drawings was to open, Ragland Watkins, who had replaced Paul McMahon as assistant director at the Artists Space, met with Donald Newman to prepare the announcement cards for his show. It was the first time Watkins learned that Donald did not want to use his last name and the first he heard of the title. “He said it was because it was about blackness,” Watkins said. “I did question him a little bit about it. Not very aggressively.”

  Watkins had grown up in San Francisco with “a raging bohemian bar-owner, a wild crazy lesbian” for a mother, Peggy Tolk Watkins, whose Tin Angel and Fallen Angel nightclubs had been the hub for the West Coast proto-multiculti bohemia of the 1950s. Then he had moved to tiny McComb, Mississippi, to live with his father, a Southern architect whose work designing government buildings and Black colleges marked him as a liberal just as the civil rights movement was beginning.

  In 1961, students at McComb’s high school were jailed for supporting SNCC’s voter registration campaign. The Ku Klux Klan began an intimidation campaign, forcing white civil rights supporters to leave town.
In the two months after 1964’s Freedom Summer, McComb saw a dozen racially motivated firebombings. “I knew the people who were doing the cross burnings, and I knew the people who were trying to put it all together,” Watkins recalled. “I had a strong sense of race and words you do and do not say.”

  He told his boss Helene Winer that he thought they might have trouble on their hands. She felt that the title was stupid and Donald’s dropping his last name was silly. But if that was what the artist wanted to do, so be it. “We were interested in freedom of speech,” Watkins said. “I think she thought, ‘Well, maybe it’s shocking, but art is shocking.’ We were supposed to be a cutting-edge space.”

  One day a reporter from Art Workers News called Watkins and asked him about the title. Watkins said Donald’s drawings were an act of self-identification, “the portrait of an artist as a nigger.”6 He had overheard Donald saying to someone that the title had come to him because he was too broke to afford the materials to frame the pieces in the way they deserved, and he repeated that to the reporter.

  But even as Watkins defended Donald publicly, he felt ambivalent. “There are words and then there are contexts,” he said many years later. “There are no bad colors in the visual arts. It’s only in combination, it’s only in context they become disagreeable, and I think the same is probably true for words.”

  Paul McMahon saw nothing wrong with the title. “It was not a racist statement. Donald’s not racist. Nobody at Artists Space is racist,” he said. “What Donald did was that he exposed a generational rift.”

  Like Watkins, McMahon had grown up in a household with ties to the music scene—his mother had booked artists like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. He had grown up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the only white kid at the Bobby “Blue” Bland shows. “I hung out with Black people and when I saw one white face in the mirror I was very angry toward that white face until I realized it was me,” he said. “I had a self-hatred thing, and thinking I was Black was part of it.”

  Once he had aspired to becoming a lead guitarist in a rock band. But at Pomona College he took a jazz appreciation class with a young Black professor named Stanley Crouch who disabused him of the notion, told him that whites would never be qualified to play the blues. With that McMahon stopped playing his guitar and began focusing on art, leaving a largely Black world for a largely white one.

  That was about the time he met Helene Winer. She was the only woman on the art department faculty, and was sometimes asked to pour tea for the male faculty members, an insult she refused. Winer had an uncluttered mind, a no-nonsense nature, and an affinity for young mavericks. She began to mentor McMahon, in whom she saw a gangly, gregarious, long-haired undergrad with a talent for finding where the action was.

  After college McMahon started a wildly successful exhibition night at the modest after-school arts center where he taught in Cambridge, Massachusetts, luring big names like Sol LeWitt, Dan Graham, Laurie Anderson, and many of the CalArts Mafia to show their work and party. He had made fast friends of the like-minded self-starters from Hallwalls. In 1976, Winer hired McMahon at Artists Space. They committed themselves to showing young artists and questioning the organization’s radical legacy.

  At its founding, Artists Space had incorporated two Art Workers’ Coalition demands that MOMA had rejected—the idea that artists should curate fellow artists and the formation of an artist registry, an open-source bank of slides of any artist who wanted to do a show, from which artists could democratically select shows. Both proposals were meant to break the exclusivity of the art world. In its early years, the system worked. Barbara Kruger, Jonathan Borofsky, Laurie Anderson, and Adrian Piper got early Artists Space shows, as did United Graffiti Artists, the first gallery graffiti exhibition ever.

  Winer and McMahon hated this process. McMahon joked, “I was thinking of doing a show called ‘Former Lovers, Relatives, and People I Owe Money To.’”7 They felt Artists Space exhibitions often lacked coherence, context, and—what would soon become the art world’s most loaded word—quality.

  Reverting to the traditional selection process would break the power of the old guard, allow for more competition, and make room for the next generation. These young artists had, Winer said, “new ideas and that happy energy and ingenuity to get the job done without great financial demands.”

  Hallwalls’s Cindy Sherman became Artists Space’s front-desk receptionist. Others picked up odd jobs around the office. Soon they were helping consult on exhibitions and select artists for the shows. They felt like insurgents. They were helping move the center of the art world from to 57th Street to Soho.

  On July 7, 1977, McMahon left the staff to focus on his music and art.8 But he did not go far. He and his close friends had helped turn the Artists Space loft in Tribeca’s Fine Arts Building into a floating world of shows, concerts, and parties. Susan Wyatt, the youngest staff member, remembered being thrilled that her circle of art-geeks had suddenly become so cool. She said, “It was kind of ridiculous and lame and we thought it was wonderful.”

  A POP HISTORY OF A TROUBLESOME WORD

  In 1964, the comedian and activist Dick Gregory had written that he and his fellow civil rights marchers were trying “to change a system where a white man can destroy a Black man with one word. ‘Nigger.’”9 But Southern segregationists weren’t the only ones with a fondness for the word. Northern antiracists and avant-gardists—from Harlem Renaissance patrons to the Beatniks to the White Panthers, from Carl Van Vechten to Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer to John Sinclair—had used “nigger” in a different way, to define their own identity politics. Were they doing this in poetic solidarity, a joining of arms for the battle? Was it racial innocence, a mask of cool bought at a discount?

  By the early seventies, following civil rights activist and teacher Jerry Farber’s galvanizing essay “The Student as Nigger,” the underground papers were buzzing with manifestos for the “Hippie as Nigger” or the “Artist as Nigger.”10 As feminism spread, John Lennon and Yoko Ono wrote a song, “Woman Is the Nigger of the World,” with no apologies to Zora Neale Hurston’s character Janie Crawford’s famous line, “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.”11 There would be Lenny Bruce, Ralph Bakshi, and Blaxploitation movies.

  Downtown artists and Artists Space board members Vito Acconci and Dennis Oppenheim appropriated Black talk for the “authentic” soundscapes in their installation art meant to bring the street into the gallery.12 When punk laureate Lester Bangs left the Motown of Berry Gordy and the MC5 for the Bowery of Richard Hell and the Ramones, he appeared in a black leather jacket and a black T-shirt with white iron-on letters that read, “Last of the white niggers.”13

  All this was part of a very old process dating back to when a scrum of rebel colonists stormed three ships in Boston Harbor, some costumed as Indians, some masked by lampblack, and proceeded to toss the cargo overboard. The Boston Tea Party was, the historian Philip J. Deloria wrote, “a generative moment of American political and cultural identity.”14 This righteous uprising, this spectacle of misrule, this first minstrel show was less a love poem to the Other than a romance of the Self—destroying, creating, breaking things open.

  Two hundred and five years later, working-class heroine Patti Smith—her bandmate Lenny Kaye had said they thought of themselves as “the White Panther Party, New York Division”15—brought the romance to stomping, ecstatic heights. “In heart I am an American artist and I have no guilt,” she howled on their 1978 album, Easter, as if in an amphetamine rush. The band then tore into their biggest anthem and as they squalled to a climax, she growled, “Jimi Hendrix was a nigger, Jesus Christ and Grandma too. Jackson Pollock was a nigger! Nigger niggerniggerniggerniggernigger nigger!”

  “Rock N Roll Nigger” was the name of this song, burning on the righteous confusion of rebellion with rejection that had powered so much twentieth-century American art. For the white avant-garde, “Nigger” was the darkness at the edge of town, the last sign out of ci
vilization on the highway to freedom. “Outside of society,” she sang, “they’re waiting for me!”

  Donald loved the song. Perhaps it consecrated his newfound circle of punk heretics, sacralized his rebellion, his own freedom run. “Patti Smith talks about ‘rock-and-roll niggers’ and people call each other ‘nigger’ all the time,” he said. “I was just using the word as poetry.”16

  THE LETTER

  Two and a half weeks after the opening of The Nigger Drawings, on Monday, March 5, 1979, a letter arrived at Artists Space addressed to Helene Winer and signed by a cross-section of Black and white artists. It read:

  OPEN LETTER TO ARTISTS’ SPACE

  A white artist exhibiting abstractions at Artists’ Space from February 16 to March 10 has titled his show “The Nigger Drawings.” We assume this was chosen as some sort of puerile bid for notoriety, but we are amazed that the staff of Artists’ Space has lent itself to such a racist gesture. Surely it must have occurred to you, if not to him, that this was an incredible slap in the face of Black and other artists, of Black audiences and of everyone connected in any way with one of our leading alternative spaces. Did anyone object to these antics, or is social awareness at such a low ebb in the art world that nobody noticed? The appalling title is an abuse of the esthetic freedom artists allegedly enjoy in this society. We hope some sort of explanation from you is forthcoming.

  At the bottom of the letter, Lucy Lippard had scribbled a note: “Helene—Sorry about this but how could it have gotten by?”17

  Winer was stunned. She knew many of the signers very well. She was working with Lippard on a show of British leftist art. Carl Andre was an early Artists Space supporter. Faith Ringgold had shown there. Other Black artists had signed the letter—Black Emergency Cultural Coalition cochair Cliff Joseph, Tony Whitfield, and Howardena Pindell. Winer was most horrified that Pindell’s name was on the list. She had thought of Pindell as a close friend.