Basement Workshop was a movement space, formed around an ideology of artists serving the people. But by the mid-1980s, art historian Alexandra Chang wrote, its leadership was destabilized by sectarian infighting and struggles between those focused on politics versus those focused on cultural production. In 1986 the Workshop closed. But by then the Asian American arts movement was broad and vital enough to survive the end of a single organization.
Invisibility remained the unfinished cultural agenda. By the end of the 1980s, national networks of artists, curators, scholars, policy makers, and educators, from Appalachians to Afrocentrists, had cohered, such as the national Association of American Cultures, and the Cultural Diversity Based on Cultural Grounding conferences organized by the Caribbean Cultural Center in New York City. They talked about “cultural equity”—expanding standards of aesthetic excellence, advancing “the cultural empowerment of our communities,” and securing parity in representation in everything from exhibitions to decision-making positions.7
Such initiatives were often supported by the National Endowment for the Arts’s Expansion Arts program, established in 1971 and reenergized after the Nigger Drawings protest, whose charge was to fund emerging arts organizations “deeply rooted in and reflective of culturally diverse, inner-city, rural, or tribal communities.”8 State and municipal arts funding for underrepresented groups grew, such as the San Francisco Arts Commission’s innovative Cultural Equity Grants program. In 1992, the NEA published a broad national survey on 543 cultural centers of color, marking a moment of official recognition of the contributions that multiculturalists had made to the “unique cultural and artistic pluralism of the United States.”9
The creative ecosystems that made up this national movement were producing large amounts of worthy art that the mainstream art-world market could not or would not absorb. So the new decade would open with ambitious identity shows. The largest was a survey exhibition called Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation: An Interpretive Exhibition of the Chicano Art Movement, 1965–1985, which opened in September 1990 in the Wight Gallery at the University of California at Los Angeles. Shorthanded as CARA—“face” in Spanish—the show included no fewer than 128 pieces and 54 mural images by 180 artists.
It had been a grassroots project of cultural empowerment and canonization, a people’s art history and an art history-making act. CARA was curated and organized by a national advisory committee made up of dozens of artists, activists, and scholars, structured not unlike a political party, with a central decision-making body and regional organizing bodies to ensure democratic input.10 It had taken seven years to assemble and toured for the next three years.
CARA meant to show the heroic telos of a Chicano art history inseparable from movement history. It began with one of the first pieces of Chicano art, Antonio Bernal’s 1968 mural painted on a humble building used by El Teatro Campesino called El Centro Cultural in the farmlands outside Fresno. Bernal had painted a line of revolutionaries—from indio warriors through Chavez, Tijerina, Malcolm, and Martin—all turned to face an unseen opponent, armed and ready for battle. After Bernal’s piece, grand murals would unfurl in San Diego’s Barrio Logan and Los Angeles’s Estrada Courts, up the coasts, across the Southwest, north to Chicago and Ann Arbor, and guilds and collectives and print workshops would fill the city streets with bright bursts of pride and protest.
CARA also gave installation space over for the more formal experimentations of urban collectives like the Royal Chicano Air Force, Los Four, and Asco. It attempted to forge a unity of an impossibly diverse group of artists, including the sweet South Texas family narratives of Carmen Lomas Garza; the fearless future-facing women of Yolanda Lopez; the starkly charged printmaking of Rupert Garcia, Malaquias Montoya, and Ester Hernández; and the spectacular sunset car crashes of Carlos Almaraz.
Timelines captured the march of history: the East Los Angeles High-School Blowouts, Alurista reading the “Epic Poem of Aztlán” and introducing El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán with Corky Gonzales at the first National Chicano Liberation Youth Conference in Denver, the founding of MEChA at a student conference at the University of California El Plan de Santa Barbara the following month, the Chicano Moratorium and the death of Rubén Salazar. Recognition and representation, CARA argued, were aesthetic, cultural, and political questions.
Large crowds would greet the show in its ten-city run, which included a stay at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC. As UCLA Chicano Studies professor Alicia Gaspar de Alba sifted one day through the documents that CARA had left behind, she found a handwritten note in one of the comment books from the show’s stint at the Albuquerque Museum of Art. It read simply: “I loved this exhibit. It’s like looking in a mirror. It’s really seeing the heart of my people.”11
Art critics seemed to have seen a different show. William Wilson’s Los Angeles Times review scanned like an old anthropologist’s field notes, full of half-digested ethnic notions. “CARA shows a complete sensibility,” he wrote. “It’s socially concerned, inbred, romantic, proud, nostalgic, ceremonial, masochistic, fetishistic and original. Where would the Anglos have been for fashion after World War II without the zoot suit?”
And more: “CARA’s collective look becomes a simile of a stay-with-the-gang subculture. That works among the home folks but in a larger world, it’s different—as proven by the growth of numerous artists here. Now they are in the Wight Gallery, which once housed a retrospective of Henri Matisse.”12
That such street-primitive, “stay-with-the-gang subculture” had been allowed into the spaces where we housed the highest eternal accomplishments of our civilization caused not a little unease in art-world quarters. In the Washington Times, Eric Gibson dismissed the entire show as visual affirmative action, writing, “[I]t is simply another attempt to cater to and/or pacify some political interest group, all at the expense (as always) of any real aesthetic standards.”13
RETURN TO JERICHO
By then art-world formalists, following the neoconservative intelligentsia, were mobilizing their own forces. In the New Criterion, Hilton Kramer extended the stakes of the campus culture wars back to the art world in an essay called “Studying the Arts and Humanities: What Can Be Done?” He concluded, “The defense of art must not … be looked upon as a luxury of civilization—to be indulged in and supported when all else is serene and unchallenged—but as the very essence of our civilization.”14
The insurgent multicultural avant-gardes were a horrifying sign of chaos and misrule. If the formalists were reacting against the words “recognition” and “representation,” they were also rallying around another word: “quality.” The Q-word pronounced merit, order, universality, and timelessness. It was the opposite of that other Q-word: quotas. It summoned a time before the 1960s, before the barbarians started in with their comic strips and news clippings and defaced flags and stacked bricks and music videos and race riots and heathen animal rituals and vagina-shaped banquet tables, back when a picture was a picture and a drip was a revelation.
Here, too, was a clash of worldviews. For the formalist, everything anyone needed to know about art was within the frame. Art that was worth celebrating was beyond the grip of time. Its beauty was evident in its formal qualities of composition, technique, color, line, space, and the other components that made up its natural essence.
Everything else was irrelevant—history, context, and even the artist himself, with his distracting talk about inspiration and intent. Artists might pour into their work emotion, memory, meaning, and soul—but those were things of which the formalists were most suspicious. Concern for worldly matters, the things beyond the frame, might only reveal an artist who aspired to something that was less art than mere propaganda. “The purely plastic or abstract qualities of art are the only ones that count,” Clement Greenberg famously wrote.15
Formalism was a language made for and by elites, a way through which art history would be recorded. It never aspired to be a way throug
h which the masses might encounter and enjoy art. And although these critics would summon the full thrust of thousands of years of “civilization” on their side, their school of thought—not unlike that of the Western Civ traditionalists in the academy—had been ascendant only since the 1940s, the moment they had fled from Social Realism, seeking to establish the global hegemony of homegrown Abstract Expressionism by extolling its transcendence and purity.
Yet many American artists expressed an opposite point of view. “Everything is propaganda for what you believe in, actually, isn’t it?” Dorothea Lange once told an interviewer. “The harder and the more deeply you believe in anything, the more in a sense you’re a propagandist. Conviction, propaganda, faith.”16 Her words came to define Social Realism, and yet they seemed as applicable to Pollock as herself.
Writing in the light of the Harlem Renaissance, W. E. B. DuBois argued Black artists were finally shaking off post-bellum feelings of shame and inferiority. They were experiencing “stirrings of the beginning of a new appreciation of joy, of a new desire to create, of a new will to be.” They had in their protean powers the ability to expand American ideas of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. DuBois said:
The apostle of Beauty thus becomes the apostle of Truth and Right not by choice but by inner and outer compulsion. Free he is but his freedom is ever bounded by Truth and Justice; and slavery only dogs him when he is denied the right to tell the Truth or recognize an ideal of Justice.
Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists.17
But by the late 1960s, in his position as New York Times art critic, Kramer was deploying formalism to deny Black visual art any value. He reviewed Henri Ghent’s 1968 show at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Invisible Americans: Black Artists of the 1930s, under the headline “Differences in Quality.”18
He dismissed the work of these divergent artists as “mainly banal, academic, and incompetent. Some of it is plainly amateurish.”19 He wrote, “In matters of artistic standards, there is no ‘justice’ in the social sense. There are only the values which artists themselves have established through the practice of their art.” Here was a closed circular logic. The title that accompanied Kramer’s 1977 review of Dr. David Driskell’s Two Centuries of Black American Art exhibition—a broad survey of 200 works by 63 artists spanning 1750 to 1950, including Robert Duncanson, Edmonia Lewis, Elizabeth Catlett, and Sargent Johnson—was even blunter: “Black Art or Merely Social History?”
“We,” Kramer wrote, the first person plural a deliberate choice, “do not feel the presence in this exhibition of any stringent esthetic criteria in its selection.”20 Driskell’s poor selection seemed to Kramer to reveal the inadequacy of a “Black esthetic.” The notion of “Black art” had little to no value in describing timeless form. It was useful only as content, as “social documentary.” Artists, Kramer argued, needed to be thought of solely in art-historical terms—as neo-primitivists or social realists, as modernists or abstractionists—not socio-historical terms. But if in the intervening decade he had learned a little about some Black artists, it was undoubtedly due in part to the same group exhibitions he felt bound to dismiss.
Formalism paralleled capitalist realism: let us act as if we had always recognized the greatness of artists we once (and still) objected to seeing. It restated the lie of colorblindness: I refused to see you before because of your color, and now that you have revealed my blindness, I see you despite your color.
For Black artists, this presented an untenable double bind. They were ignored as individual artists. But the group shows that presented them were never worthy of being seen. And even if they aspired to formalist standards of beauty, they might still be seen as just artists of color. What they put into the frame would not matter. They would still be judged for who they were outside that frame.
It was Laforest on the bridge. The absurdity chased itself in circles.
Small wonder that many heard in the invocation of “quality,” “No Colored Allowed.” In a famous essay memorializing Jean-Michel Basquiat’s career as the “flyboy in the buttermilk,” the cultural critic Greg Tate wrote:
In every arena where we can point to Black underdevelopment or an absence of Black competitiveness there can logically be only two explanations: either Black folks aren’t as smart as white boys or, racism. If the past twenty years of affirmative action have proven anything it’s that whatever some white boy can do, any number of Black persons can do as good, or, given the hoops a Black person has to jump to get in the game, any number of times better. Sorry Mr. Charlie, but the visual arts are no different.21
Curators and artists of color such as Kinshasha Holman Conwill argued that those most ready to deploy the Q-word were the least qualified to judge the merits of art by artists of color. She recalled:
I remember being on panels on the NEA where it would be some well-known white artist, and people would say ‘We don’t need to see the slides.’ And I’d say, ‘Oh yes we do, we’re evaluating what’s being presented to us, not who we know or who we like.’ Same token, we would be looking at people of color and people would say, ‘I haven’t heard of these people’ and I’m saying, ‘The point is to review the material in front of you, you know?’… Like in criminal cases, [a person of color] didn’t have a jury of one’s peers.
In 1987, in conjunction with the opening of that year’s Whitney Biennial, an anonymous feminist collective wearing gorilla masks opened a downtown conceptual show called Guerrilla Girls Review the Whitney. It was art as pure protest, the art of exclusion. The highlight of the show was a “Banana Report” in which they laid out the numerical facts of continuing invisibility of women and artists of color.
Soon a similar women-of-color group calling itself PESTS stepped up the attack on “art world apartheid.”22 If Spiral had once used aesthetics to combat invisibility, PESTS now had the language of cultural equity. Howardena Pindell conducted a study of underrepresentation in the art world, which she described as “a closed circle which links museums, galleries, auction houses, collectors, critics, and art magazines.”23
In the 1987–88 Art in America annual, the group took out two full-page ads. The first featured a picture of a solitary table setting, as if for a banquet that had been suddenly canceled. In flowery italics, the setting card read, “The Following New York Galleries Are 100% White,” and listed thirty-eight galleries, including the hottest galleries of the decade—Annina Nosei, Leo Castelli, and Metro Pictures. The second ad listed twenty-five more that were overwhelmingly white.24
These flyers from the anonymous group PESTS began appearing in 1988 at New York art-world gatherings.
PESTS’s motto was, “We plan to bug the art world!” And just like the Guerrilla Girls, its hit-and-run tactics rocked the liberal art-world elite. On the exclusive streets of Soho and Chelsea, gallerists fretted over how to both contain these anonymous reputation-wreckers and sign up artists of color as quickly as they could.
ALL IDENTITY
By the summer of 1990, multiculturalism’s time seemed to have arrived. The critic Maurice Berger asked the question that artists of color had been asking for decades: “Are art museums racist?”25 The Decade Show would have to be a response, in Holman Conwill’s words, “a Joshua move” to bring down the Jericho walls of art-world segregation.
The Decade Show’s grand provocation was its subhead: “Frameworks of Identity.” The 1980s had been a decade of excess, both commercial and intellectual. The early decade’s art market boom had created—and destroyed—sizzling young artists and flash-bang movements like Graffiti, Appropriation Art, Neo-Expressionism, and Neo-Geo as fast as the bubble economy could transact. As political reversal continued and the cultural turn began, the leftist avant-garde went bookish, French, and British, mostly, going high-cryptic with their deconstruction and post-everything theories.
If you had been an auction-drunk gallerist, you might have missed the rise of what Peraza called “parallel cultures” and �
�parallel aesthetics,” and their reframing of “separate but equal.” And if you had been a jargon-addled critic, you might have missed the distinctiveness of the insurgency that these parallel cultures and aesthetics signified.26 “Frameworks of Identity” suggested a third way to view the moment—that form and content were inseparable; that the artists exploring questions of identity, many of whom had not already been anointed by the gallerists or the critics, had quietly made much of the best work of the 1980s; that the sheer volume of great unseen work might forcibly transform the art world.
Physically, it sprawled beyond the gates and across the great city—from the New Museum and the MoCHA spaces on lower Broadway to the Studio Museum’s building on 125th Street. It would feature no fewer than 134 artists and four artist collectives, a list shaped in lively joint meetings between the staffs of the three museums. The culture wars had certainly expanded the category of Other. The curators shared a faith that some sort of new kind of unity might be pulled out of their grand massing of the Opposition.
Superstars of the decade—Basquiat, Prince, Holzer, Serrano—would be recast in a new light, away from the casino hazards of the auction block or the fluorescent inquisitions of government meeting rooms. Other artists, like Pindell, Ringgold, Robert Colescott, Mel Edwards, Adrian Piper, and Jimmie Durham, would demand rethinking. Long-deserving artists like Tomie Arai, Edgar Heap of Birds, Cecilia Vicuña, and Kay WalkingStick would finally step into the spotlight.
If Kramer had argued that identity art had nothing to say formally, the curatorial teams would prove him wrong. They would not organize work by race, gender, or sexuality, but by theme: the New Museum would house works on myth/spirituality/media and discourse/media; MoCHA on biography/autobiography, gender/sexuality; the Studio Museum on social practices/cultural criticism, history/memory/artifact.
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