Barbara Kruger’s installation was uptown in Harlem, not far from where James Luna had put on a loincloth and lay down in a sandbox with random Indian rez “artifacts.” Pat Ward Williams’s reappropriated lynching photos were downtown at the New Museum near Cindy Sherman’s photo of herself in a red bathrobe. Yong Soon Min’s self-portraits, out of which the words “assimilated alien” or “objectified other” had been cut, were shown with Mary Kelly’s photo of a dyke’s leather jacket over the word “Menacé” at MoCHA.
Gran Fury’s posters on the AIDS crisis filled the subway stations and lines. Alfredo Jaar’s corrective animation piece—which included the words “This Is Not America’s Flag” superimposed on an image of the U.S. flag and concluded with an image of the Western Hemisphere over the word America—took over a Times Square signboard.
Staffers quickly realized they would have to address a host of peculiar micro-encounters. Buses were organized to bring showgoers uptown, dropping off bewildered blue-hairs, blue-suits, and blue-bloods in pre-gentrified Harlem. David Wojnarowicz won over audiences of color with his passionate condemnation of politicians’ silence on the AIDS crisis.
The Decade Show made the case that “parallel cultures” and “parallel aesthetics” actually described the shape of the new art world. Reflecting later on the show, Michael Brenson wrote, “One problem with the word ‘quality’ is that it suggests something finite at a time when the artistic possibilities and the ways of looking at art seem infinite. This decade is not devoid of aesthetic standards but exploding with them.”27
THE MONSTER RISES
After The Decade Show, New York artists Ken Chu, Bing Lee, and Margo Machida began talking about what it might take to open an Asian American contemporary arts museum. These discussions did not result in a museum, but did evolve into the creation of a new Asian American artist network.
If the art collectives of the previous decade had been beset by debates over ideology and politics, this new network would give artists a chance to hit the reset button. Chang wrote, “[I]t was formed not as an outgrowth of Basement’s political agendas, but rather as a reaction to its own perceived need for a community of artists, critics and arts administrators to come together to focus on issues pertaining specifically to the art world.”28
For veterans of the community arts world who had their eye on breaking down the doors to the art world, a network like this was strategic for artists. Yong Soon Min, who worked at the Asian American Arts Alliance while trying to advance her work at the same time, said, “There was hardly ever any presence or visibility of Asian Americans in [art-world] exhibitions. And also then, it became evident that maybe Asian Americans might get educational programs, but never in the galleries proper.”
For a young artist like Byron Kim, the network offered something different. “Yong Soon Min, she would tell you that it was about activism, and you know, I would be lying if I told you that I thought it was about that from my point of view,” he said. “For me it was purely a social thing.”
Make Me by Yong Soon Min. 1989. Photograph and printed text on paper. Six panels, overall 96 × 120 in.
He could share his ideas, eat great cheap lunches on Tuesdays, and hang out with great artists like Martin Wong. “That guy could eat,” Kim said. “He was this skinny guy.” Since artists always showed up late, the group would move to the next cheap spot and eat again. “We’d have the three-lunch lunch,” he said. To him the network was about feeding starving artists.
For an aspiring curator like Karin Higa, it was a diverse group of the best and the brightest. “When things are not yet something, when they’re evolving, as far as I’m concerned, is the time when it is the most exciting because it’s filled with possibility, and the possibilities are endless because everyone has their own idea about what it might be,” she said. “And [the group] embodied both the kind of possibility and the excitement of what banding together as a group of people interested in race and identity could mean and also its pitfalls.”
The network would be a mainstream batteram, a conscious party, an act of strategic essentialism. They chose to name it after—who else?—Godzilla. Here was a monster created by atomic imperialism in the Pacific; he rampaged through movies in which, when Asian people spoke, the words that were heard weren’t the ones coming out of their mouths; and he was super-famous on American TV. Higa would later write, “Nothing about Godzilla was authentically Asian.”29
In the coming months the Godzilla Asian American Art Network would play an important role in the art world. But for now, it had become a locus of much artistic and intellectual activity. They put together “slide slams,” where dozens of artists could show each other their work. They plotted on how to crash the art world.
And they debated whether there really was an Asian American aesthetic. Machida, Higa, and others argued that there was not; the community was just too diverse. A young Paul Pfeiffer, still a grad student, an ACT UP activist, and not yet the art-world star he would become, argued that there was, and that, given Asian American artists’ lack of representation and misrepresentation, it was important to stand in support of that notion. In 1991 he spoke on a panel at Hunter College addressing this topic:
When we speak of Euro-American aesthetics, there is room for diversity and a myriad of cultural influences, many of which come from Asia and other parts of the world. But suddenly when we speak of the possibility of an Asian American aesthetic, it must either be monolithic or not viable. Our diversity, our myriad of influences, and our history of cultural interactions are problematic only when discussing Asian American aesthetics.…”30
For now the idea of identity in multiculturalism was sustained by the larger division of white/Other, inside/outside, mainstream/margin. But what would happen when artists began to really work both sides of the slash at once and those walls began to fall? In a sense, the art that fell under the heading of multiculturalism was already surpassing the idea itself, running headlong into something else, toward new unities and reconciliations, new conflicts and contradictions.
AFTER THE EITHER AND THE OR
Kay WalkingStick was the kind of artist for whom The Decade Show and the era of the identity show seemed to have been created. She had been creating challenging, beautiful, accomplished works that explored difficult questions of personal biography. And she had come from far outside of the closed circuit. Her life had been one of reconciliations.
WalkingStick was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1935 to a Cherokee father on a football scholarship to Dartmouth and a white mother from Syracuse. The two had met on a long train ride to Philadelphia. Kay was born as the youngest of five children and raised in a Presbyterian household, estranged from her father and her Indian background.
She learned to draw in church. “I was given paper and pencil in church to keep me quiet for the long sermons,” she recalled. She took up art and was trained at a women’s college in eastern Pennsylvania in the late 1950s, then settled down with her husband to start a family. “I painted at home in the kitchen,” she said. “I made a lot of bad art for about ten years.”
When her two children were older, she began showing her work at small galleries in New Jersey. She was making hard-edge figurative work, brightly colored outlines of nudes. In 1969, she had her first New York show at a place called the Cannabis Gallery. “I had a five-person show there, and five people showed up for the opening, including myself and my husband,” she said.
She enrolled at Pratt Institute on a women’s fellowship. The times were changing, and so was her art. “I had a husband, two kids, and a house in the suburbs,” she said. “I was raised by two women who both worked, who believed that women had to learn how to take care of themselves and who told me every day I had to make something of myself. So I was always a feminist in a sense. But the American Indian Movement made me realize that I had to find out who I was as an Indian. I mean, I’m my father’s daughter. I look like him. I’m big and muscular and all that. I’m probab
ly like him in other ways that I don’t know even.”
She was drawn to the tragedies of Indian history, the stories of Chief Joseph and John Ridge. She was also experimenting with paint mixtures made of wax, ammonium carbonate, water, and pigment that gave her work dense, ambrosial surfaces. She was painting, layering, carving with her bare hands. The result was her Chief Joseph series, in which paired arcs and rectangles were cut out of thick dark backgrounds in ways that suggested, as the Pueblo/Latino writer Margaret Archuleta wrote, “a death chant, long, drawn out, and mournful.”
After she had finished her graduate degree, her work came to the attention of the Flathead Salish painter Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, who was organizing Native artists around the country and doing shows. WalkingStick showed with Smith and was eager to meet other Indian artists. But her gallerist friends and former professors didn’t like the idea.
“It was suggested to me that it was an unwise move because you don’t want to appear too ‘ethnic.’ You don’t want to look like a Santa Fe Indian. You don’t want to look like you’re doing kitsch,” she recalled. “Which is, I think, pretty racist.”
To be sure, WalkingStick had no desire to make what she termed “wish fulfillment for a white culture: art by the ‘Vanishing American.’”31 She had to admit they had a point. She thought, “How often did Robert Rauschenberg talk about his Indian heritage?”
For WalkingStick, identity was complicated. She said, “I really want to make it on what I’m doing in the studio. I really want to be seen as an American artist who’s also a Native. I think that’s the way most Native people prefer also.”
But, she added, “If I’d wanted to not be Native, I could have. I always thought that this was what you do—you present yourself the way you really are. I am who I am. And that was what was important—to present myself as this biracial women who was part Cherokee, who identified as Cherokee.
“I just couldn’t imagine not being who I was,” she said. “Still can’t.”
In 1984, she was asked to do a painting for an exhibition entitled Homage to the American Elm. She told the curator, “I’m not Seneca and I don’t do realism.” But the curator knew she was some kind of Indian—couldn’t hurt on grant applications, could it?—and asked her to take on the work anyway.
“I did a painting of the American elm with my hands just to see what it would look like, and I kind of liked it. So I put it next to an abstraction I was working on. I said, ‘Aha!’” she recalled. “One was like a snapshot, a memory of an immediate thing, and the other had a lasting impression of the earth and its geology. And the whole thing kind of grew from there.”
WalkingStick had arrived at her generative idea—juxtaposing texturally thick, minimalist abstractions with images of vast archetypal landscapes. She believed that people were hardwired to make distinctions and set up dualities—Self/Other, Order/ Chaos, Nature/Culture, Form/Content. During the 1980s, such binaries had become politicized—White Male/Other, Formalist/Multicultural, Art/Kitsch, American/ Un-American. For WalkingStick, the binaries plunged into the personal—White/Indian, Childhood/History, Land/Body, Tradition/Innovation, Ancient/Abstract. By exposing the process of building oppositions, she could allow viewers to form their own conclusions, reach their own accords.
The Decade Show had included two of her diptychs, Canyon De Chelly, a piece that she later destroyed, and Loss, one of a gorgeous, emotionally harrowing series of paintings, featuring primal shapes reminiscent of her Chief Joseph series paired with images of waterfalls and river rapids rendered largely in black, white, and scarlet. This series, which included paintings entitled The Abyss and Grappling with Chaos, described her emotional state. Her pride at being included in the show with artists she admired—Eric Fischl, James Luna, Howardena Pindell—was tempered by the grief she felt over the recent passing of her husband.
While The Decade Show secured a lot of press, WalkingStick noticed that much of the critical reception focused on the meaning of the show as opposed to the work of the artists. “I guess I, like a lot of other people, thought that something big would come of this, that we’d all be picked up by major galleries and have huge careers,” she said. “And of course it didn’t happen.” In five years, she had gone from “don’t be ethnic” to “you’re just ethnic.” Was that progress? Wasn’t there another choice?
WalkingStick was moving into criticism and curation as well, helping to introduce the world to older and younger American Indian artists. Now that the door seemed to be opening for some, she had her eye on the next door. “Not to receive serious critical review is a kind of disempowerment,” she wrote in an issue of Art Journal on “Recent Native American Art” that she coedited in 1992. “If there is no in-depth critical discussion of the value of the work that is included in these exhibitions, then multicultural exhibitions become just another way to segregate artists.”32
In fact, very soon, the art of multiculturalism would receive intense scrutiny, but perhaps not the kind she or her peers had been seeking.
A security guard at Biennial of the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993. Photo courtesy of Daniel Joseph Martinez & Tilton Gallery.
CHAPTER 8
IMAGINE/EVER WANTING/TO BE
THE FALL OF MULTICULTURALISM
If art is made to belong, it seems to me that it is the poorer for it. This is especially the case when art is made to belong to art itself.
—Paul Chan, “What Art Is and Where It Belongs”
In the pecking order of New York’s great art museums, the Whitney Museum of American Art tailed the Met, the MOMA, and the Guggenheim in endowment, attendance, and prestige. But to the multiculturalists clamoring for representation in the galleries, the Upper East Side guardians casting a nervous eye on their gates, and the relentless media circling like coyotes, the Whitney was as appropriate a setting for a showdown as could be imagined.
The museum had been founded by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney to champion working American artists against European predominance. She had been a maverick—an accomplished sculptor and a strong supporter of women artists and young modernists, including Alexander Calder, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Stuart Davis, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. She opened the Museum in Greenwich Village in 1931 only after the Met refused her collection. Not long after, she held her first Whitney Annual, in order to showcase great artists dismissed in their own country.
After World War II, the rise of Abstract Expressionism—and the school of formalist criticism that accompanied it—came to define the highbrow side of American global cultural hegemony. In a sense, the Whitney’s mission had been accomplished. But by the roaring eighties, all eyes around the world returned to the hothouse New York scene.
Even after the 1987 market crash, the Whitney felt like the most compelling space in town. Every leadership tussle, every curatorial shift, every gala opening was scrutinized and dissected. And the Whitney’s new director, David A. Ross, cut the kind of stylish profile that generated lots of copy. What other museum could drive the arts, style, society, and gossip pages, all at the same time?
By then, Gertrude Whitney’s Annual had long since become a Biennial. But the sweeping survey of contemporary American art remained the museum’s signature event. It was a star-making, zeitgeist-defining machine that left no one—least of all, the formalists and the highbrows—remotely neutral. The art critic Steven Kaplan summed up the Upper East Side ritual:
For three months every other Spring, this most prestigious and wealthy museum dedicated to the exhibition of American art serves up its version of the best and the brightest, raising the hackles of critics, the ire of excluded artists and galleries, and providing a sitting target for jibes, in-jokes, innuendo, and controversy.… It’s downright unfashionable for any professional observer of the arts scene to approve wholeheartedly of the exhibition.1
The exhibition had also long been a recurring target for activists. Ten weeks before the 1970 Annual, Faith Ringgold, Lucy Lippard, Poppy Johnson, and Bre
nda Miller protested the lack of women’s representation, demanding that half of the artists chosen be women, and half of the women be of color. They left tampons and cracked eggs in the galleries for the curators.
By the late 1980s, Guerrilla Girls and PESTS had revived the issue of representation with flyers, pamphlets, posters, and counter-exhibitions. The poet and critic John Yau wrote a much-discussed Arts magazine article pointing out that Jean-Michel Basquiat was the only artist of color invited to a Biennial that entire decade. “For the artist of color, the news is still the same,” he wrote. “The past was horrible, the present is grim, and the future is bleak. The art world continues to admire its carefully cultivated brand of sensitivity. Advice: Break the mirror and drive the glass home.”2
WHOSE MUSEUM?
In February 1991 David A. Ross plunged into the Whitney fishbowl. He was a flash of color—a quotable renegade, a devoted artist’s advocate, and a mediagenic crowd-pleaser, seemingly cut from the mold of Gertrude Whitney herself. In fact Ross had grown up far from the WASPy Upper East Side, where careers in arts administration were like family inheritances. Instead he was the son of a dentist in the Long Island village of Malverne. Although little had been made of the fact, his appointment had been historic: Ross was the first Jewish American director of the Whitney.
His career had taken him through the Long Beach Museum, the University Art Museum in Berkeley, the music industry, and finally the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. It was not the kind of CV that comforted much of the art-world elite. The influential critic Robert Hughes once described Ross as “Pat Rileyesque,” and he did not mean it as a compliment.3
Ross’s career had begun with a generational confrontation. At Syracuse University, he had been a loud and proud ’68er, growing his Jewfro long and marching against the war. Assigned by a newspaper to photograph the new director of the university’s art museum, Ross grew impatient with waiting for his subject and started insulting the man. That man, a radical curator named James Harithas, was duly impressed, hired Ross on the spot, and gave his young apprentice a philosophy.
Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659) Page 17