Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659)
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“The art museum is a social instrument,” Harithas told Ross. “It is either used directly by the people who run it or used indirectly by the people who own it. Make your choice.”
After the freedom of the ICA, Ross knew he’d find high intrigue awaiting at the Whitney. The 1980s bull market was over, and blood needed to be spilled. The previous director had been forced out amid loud accusations—duly reported in the mass media—that the museum had become too involved with downtown dealers. Now Ross had to forge a post-boom agenda for the high-profile museum. The Upper East Side whispered: could he conquer the Whitney or would it conquer him? For his first important exhibition, the 1993 Biennial, he went to the one person he could trust in a treacherous new environment, Elisabeth Sussman.
Since 1982, Sussman had been Ross’s right hand at the ICA. “We decided in the beginning of David’s term there that the best thing we could do for the place was to just inundate them with contemporary art,” she said. “We had a limited budget and space but unlimited ambition.” They had developed ties to the rising intelligentsia—Hebdige, Gilroy, and Jameson. They had showcased young stars—Koons, Simpson, Levine. When the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition was axed from the Corcoran, Ross secured it for the ICA and appeared as a hero for artistic freedom.
After declining to step into Ross’s job at the ICA, Sussman had moved to New York to join him. Sussman wore her outsiderness like a badge, too. “I’m in no one’s pocket,” she told Art & Auction magazine. “Leo Castelli virtually doesn’t recognize me.”4
One of Ross’s first hires was Thelma Golden, the first African American curator ever hired at the Whitney and, still in her midtwenties, the youngest. Golden had not marked the passage of time by her high school levels, but by the springtime return of the Whitney Biennials. Her first was in 1981, and in the March before she graduated another opened. This class of 1983 had marked the changing of the guard. It included, for the first time, Cindy Sherman, David Salle, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Keith Haring, and a Brooklyn-born twenty-two-year-old son of a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother named Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose singular example made everything seem possible.
Golden attended Smith College during the height of national campus ferment over multiculturalist revision of the canon. Upon commencement she hurried back to New York City to see the 1987 Biennial, and landed internships at the Studio Museum in Harlem, then the Whitney. She joined up with the curator Kellie Jones, who was turning the Jamaica Arts Center in Queens into a hub for contemporary Black art. In 1991, with the organization battered by NEA and arts funding cuts, Golden was laid off.
That was when David Ross hired her. She knew everyone, he would say, and did everything with “100 percent energy.” He appointed her the director of the Whitney’s Philip Morris branch near 42nd and Park. Sussman made Golden the first pick to her Biennial team, which would include continuing Whitney curators John Hanhardt and Lisa Phillips, new education director Connie Wolf, and for a short time, October magazine critic Benjamin Buchloh.
The Manhattan media rushed in to interview Golden, and she delivered with charm, style, and intelligence. Golden was as aware of the meaning of her appointment as Ross was of the Whitney’s symbolism. She knew that expectations ran high from both the African American community and the art-world elite. In one breath the gatekeepers would note that she embodied the change multiculturalism promised and in the next they wondered if she was “qualified” for the job. Older African Americans in the art world publicly expressed pride in her appointment but privately wondered how she would represent “her community.”5
All of this gave Golden a keen focus and made her impatient for a post-multicultural future. She could see the outlines of this future taking shape in the work of her contemporaries—artists like Glenn Ligon, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Gary Simmons, and others who were making work informed by Conceptualism and the history of the Black image. They were a new breed. They worked with rigor and hip-hop-size ambition but without apology.
Asked once in a public forum about the marginalization of Black art and artists, Golden admitted, “I’m extremely tired of (talking about) it, perhaps because in my very short career I have been called on to do it so much.” Those sympathetic to her would say with mixture of admiration and concern that she had entered a minefield of high-stakes double-consciousness. But Thelma Golden was clear about where she stood, what she needed to do, and where she needed to take the art world.
“I’m a curator of color, at a major museum. So I exist as either friend or foe—depending on who you talk to, on which day, and depending on when you talk to me in the course of the day,” she said.
“I feel that now we are in the fallout of an either/or, black/white, margin/center debate,” she added. “Instead of looking at it as a position of schizophrenia, I look at it as one of power.”6
THE TAKEOVER
The watchers of the Upper East Side eyed the new team on 75th and Madison with rising anxiety. Hilton Kramer immediately launched ad hominem attacks on Golden and Ross. He wrote that Golden was “a recent college graduate with no advanced degrees in the field, no record of scholarly publication, no experience in other major institutions and, at best, a spotty acquaintance with the art history of recent decades and a dim grasp of the ideas that have governed the whole span of art in this century.7
“Ross has never demonstrated that he has an understanding of art-as-art,” wrote Kramer, who, like Ross, was also a Syracuse graduate and an art autodidact. “He’s made it a vehicle for political correctness and multiculturalism.”8
On the other hand, as soon as Ross and Sussman came on the job, they were confronted by the Godzilla Asian American Art Network. When the 1991 Whitney Biennial exhibition opened, members Margo Machida, Yong Soon Min, Byron Kim, Paul Pfeiffer, and Eugenie Tsai sent a letter to Ross, noting that the Whitney had failed to include Asians and Asian Americans in the Biennial and offering to open an “ongoing dialogue” with the museum. The letter stirred waves in the art world.
Although Ross had arrived only a month before the Biennial opened, too late to have been involved in most of the process, he agreed to meet with the group. When he did, he had to admit that Asian American artists had not been on his radar. Godzilla agreed to submit artist slides from its growing network to the Whitney staff. From that point forward, Ross’s openness to emerging artists remained consistent.
“For better or worse,” he said, “the museum needs to be seen as an active coconspirator with artists, and the museum needs to be willing to share the consequences for failure, and in fact, embrace failure as well as it embraces success.”
If the artists were taking on identity, Ross was sympathetic. “I think the attitude was prevalent that if you accepted that art was political, you couldn’t be serious about aesthetics. And if you accepted the politics of identity as a significant central issue, you were imposing it [on people],” he said, “as if somehow formalism doesn’t have an ideological substructure.”
Instead, he said, “There were other issues. There were other histories. It doesn’t negate the histories that are written through the vocabulary of formalism at all. Why should it?”
Ross also felt that the role of the Biennial had changed. The expansion of the gallery system, including the rise of alternative spaces and nonprofit cultural organizations, was allowing many new artists to be seen. The Whitney’s role was to make sense of it all. He said, “The job of the Biennial was to stake out a point of view that could generate a useful discussion about the state of the arts in America.”
Outside the Whitney fishbowl, the world was splitting in two: Bush v. Saddam, Bush v. Clinton, Thomas v. Hill, the Moral Majority v. the AIDS generation, Euro-America v. Other America, the Far Right v. the art world, culminating in the Los Angeles riots, which pitted everyone against everyone. But in shows like The Decade Show, Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, and Robert Mapplethorpe’s The Perfect Moment, artists were rising to the occasion.
Bolstered by the work of intellectuals like Cornel West, Michele Wallace, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Homi Bhabha, the team focused on the theme of borders. They were interested in artists who were crossing lines, who worked between and around fixed identities of race, gender, sexuality. They made a concerted effort to move past the top galleries and seek out emerging artists of color, women artists, and gay artists.
In the Biennial catalog, Thelma Golden laid out the curatorial mission and a preemptive strike against the critics in her essay, “What’s White…?”:
Artists in the nineties have begun to fully deconstruct the marginality-centrality paradigm. Marginality, in effect, becomes the norm while the center is increasingly undefinable and perhaps irrelevant. Although many may call this Biennial the “multicultural” or “politically correct” Biennial, it should be read as a larger project which insists that decentralization and the embracing of the margins have become dominant.9
The performance artist and public intellectual Coco Fusco’s essay, “Passionate Irreverence: The Cultural Politics of Identity” read like an artist’s wartime statement. Conflict over identity and culture, Fusco wrote, seemed inescapable and interminable. “Behind each debate lingers fears and hopes about the image this country projects of itself to its people(s) and to the world,” she wrote. “Culture in this country is a critical, if not the most crucial area of political struggle for identity.”10 She ticked off the media’s central obsessions: Who are we? Whose values? Whose museums and whose aesthetics? Whose icons? Whose image? Multiculturalist artists might hold the answers.
Art & Auction’s exhibition preview reported the final list of Biennial artists as if it were an affirmative action report, a progress index for those like the Guerrilla Girls, Godzilla, and PESTS who cared about the numbers, and a zero-sum anxiety trigger for those like Time critic Robert Hughes; Newsweek critic Peter Plagens; and Art in America contributing editor Eleanor Heartney, who pretended not to: 82 artists (excluding a record number of performance, film, video, and installation artists) up from 72 in 1991, white males down from 60% to 36%, women up from 34% to 41%, white females holding at 30%, men of color up from 6% to 23%, women of color up from 4% to 11%.11 Even before the doors opened the 1993 Whitney Biennial marked a turning point. It would by far be the most diverse exhibition ever held in a major American museum.
Without having seen any of the art, critics began to position themselves. “Now, instead of being run by the market, the Whitney is being run by a kind of mild but moralizing political orthodoxy that above all wants to inscribe itself on the public consciousness as not having been on the wrong side,” Time’s Hughes told Art & Auction. “You get this kind of Stalinism without Joe.”12 Years later, Elisabeth Sussman would admit that she had been ready for the cultural conservatives to line up against the show, but that she was not ready for the liberals to join them.
At that moment, she was most disheartened that two artists would not be in the show. David Wojnarowicz, the artist who had been attacked by Jesse Helms and Donald Wildmon and reacted with searing, beautiful work indicting the cult-cons for their cruelty toward gays and victims of AIDS, had finally succumbed in 1992 to the disease. Sussman felt Wojnarowicz was the ghost in the galleries. His presence was felt in a Nan Goldin portrait. The catalog cover was a close up of Kiki Smith and Wojnarowicz’s powerful Untitled piece, in which they covered themselves in blood—blood as bond, community, and death.
For almost two years, Sussman had tried to get another David—David Hammons—into the Biennial. In his own mysterious ways he had eluded her. On opening night, February 24, 1993, Sussman found herself not inside the museum, but on the other side of Madison Avenue. Charles Ray’s fifty-foot-long toy fire truck was parked to the right of the entrance, cartoonishly unequipped to contain any fire inside. In the display window hung Pat Ward Williams’s eight-feet-by-sixteen-feet photo mural of five relaxed young Black men gazing back behind the spray-painted words, “What You Lookn At.” A huge crowd packed into the lobby.
Suddenly David Hammons appeared next to her. Together they watched the spectacle across the street unfold. Hammons laughed. He leaned toward Sussman and said, “I’m so glad I’m not in this show.”
IN THE GALLERIES OF AMERICAN ART
When you stepped into the Whitney and paid your $6, you were handed one of six museum tags in one of six colors. The first five tags were: “I,” “can’t imagine,” “ever wanting,” “to be,” and “white.” The sixth included all of the words together. They had been designed by Daniel Joseph Martinez, a Los Angeles artist appearing in the Whitney for the first time.
Through the window and over the railing you could see a loud crowd gathering downstairs in the patio off the café. They massed around a gilded cage in which Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña had installed themselves. You promised to come back to see exactly what was going on.
At the next desk, you were handed another work of art—an audiotape recording assembled by Andrea Fraser from interviews with Ross and the curatorial team to accompany you on your Biennial tour.
If you thought of yourself as fairly informed about the art world, you saw familiar names as you browsed the program guide—Cindy Sherman, Chris Burden, Spike Lee—and some you did not recognize yet—Matthew Barney, Renee Green, Julie Taymor. You noted some had been in The Decade Show—Shu Lea Cheang, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Jimmie Durham, James Luna. You might have also noticed Fred Wilson’s name, the artist beginning to become known for his provocative recontextualizing of racially charged museum artifacts and artworks.
When you took in the well-heeled patrons gawking at Gómez-Peña and Fusco, frowned down again at Martinez’s museum tag, then slipped on your headphones for Fraser’s exhibition guide, you might have wondered if the Biennial curators had abdicated all of their authority to those smirky students of the school of Institutional Critique. If you were a professional art critic, perhaps you were very annoyed by now.
You walked down the stairs and joined the crowd by the gilded cage.
You saw the woman appearing in a leopard-skin top and grass skirt, her face painted green and yellow, sporting scuffy Converse lows and a spangled baseball cap turned sideways. She sat at a table, sometimes sewing “voodoo” dolls, sometimes reading a monograph on Christopher Columbus. You saw the man dressed in a feathered headdress, leopard skin luchador mask, and a fringy gold naguilla. You saw him lifting weights and pacing through the cage in freshly shined banda boots. You saw him cradling his boom box.
You could hear a young guard explaining that these “fine specimens” were previously undiscovered savages from an island in the Gulf of Mexico called Guatinau. They were members of the tribal elite who had chosen to tour the West in order to represent their culture.
You saw the spectators dropping money into a coin box, making their requests to the Guatinaui to perform. She danced a bounding two-step to a rap song. He told the epic story of their tour, in a high whine of gibberish dotted with words “Chicago,” “Mexico,” “Minnesota,” and “America.” Some spectators—instant experts—translated the Guatinaui into English for the benefit of other onlookers.
People took pictures. They fed the savages bananas. The guards explained that if they paid more they could see the man’s genitals. Sometimes the man and the woman got bored and turned away from the crowd to watch a TV beaming images of happy natives dancing to a mambo on a distant tropical beach.
You heard the guard explain that this exhibit was part of a tradition started five centuries before by no less than Columbus himself. You saw displays of the geography and culture of Guatinau. You noticed both were wearing fashionable shades
. You discovered a small wall card revealing the name of the piece—The Couple in the Cage: Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West. You might have begun to suspect there was no such thing as an island called Guatinau. You might have been less sure that Columbus had not paraded Arawaks around the Portuguese court.
Perhaps you wondered as you turned away: Was this all a joke on you?
You got into the elevator, pressed play on the sound device, and heard Ross and the team welcoming you. “Buckle your seats,” Ross genially warned as you ascended, “it’s going to be a rough ride.”13
IDENTITY ON PARADE
On the fourth floor, you walked up to Janine Antoni’s Gnaw installation. It featured a 600-pound cube made of lard and a 600-pound cube of chocolate, a display of 150 lipstick tubes made from the lard she had chewed off the lard block and twenty-seven empty heart-shaped candy boxes made of the chocolate she had chewed off the chocolate block, minimalism reduced, reused, and recycled for a third-wave feminist party.
You wandered through video installations, past hotly flashing works by the Gulf Crisis TV Project, Not Channel Zero, and Sadie Benning, and a reading room stocked with books on cultural theory.
You came upon Pepón Osorio’s The Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?), a dense installation of a Puerto Rican family’s living room in which a bloodied body lay covered with a sheet. It was a klieg-lit set for a noir movie, an ethnographic diorama, a maximal family altar. Amid it all—the flamingo stickers on the mirrors, the porcelain black-skinned saints, the sports trophies, the framed pictures of the family, the wallpaper made of Latino celebrity tabloids and El Diario—you saw a welcome mat cut away to reveal a text so that it read,