Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659)

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

  Welcome … only if you can understand that it has taken years of pain to gather into our homes our most valuable possessions; but the greater pain is to see how in the movies others make fun of the way we live.…

  Perhaps you wondered what role you were playing here as you walked through the galleries: Were you a detective, a witness, a leering voyeur?

  Lineup by Gary Simmons. 1993. Synthetic polymer on wood with gold-plated basketball shoes, 114 × 216 × 18 in. (289.6 × 548.6 × 45.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Brown Foundation, Inc. 93.65a-p Photography by Jerry L. Thompson.

  You saw Gary Simmons’s Wall of Eyes, a fifteen-foot-long blackboard on which he had drawn dozens of cartoon eyes—evoking minstrel songs and Mel Blanc voices—then partially erased them as if in an agitated frenzy. You saw his other work—high-top sneakers aligned in front of a police station measuring wall, bodiless but gold-plated. Simmons called it what they called something like this in America, Line-Up. Golden called it “the inner-city equivalent of a casting call.”14 The British would have called it an “identity parade.”

  Going down a floor, you came upon Lorna Simpson’s installation, Hypothetical?, which presented a grid of trumpet mouthpieces opposite a photo of a Black man’s lips, accompanied by sounds of breathing—perhaps sighing, perhaps the exhale that had been waiting—and capped with a Los Angeles Times clipping that dated back to the riots: “Asked whether he would now be afraid to be a black man in Los Angeles if he were not the mayor, Mr. Bradley paused, then said, ‘No, I would not be scared. I would be angry.’”15

  You went into another room to find Glenn Ligon’s Notes on the Margin of the Black Book. Framed erotic Robert Mapplethorpe photos of Black men were hung with text panels, words from Jesse Helms, Jack Walls, Essex Hemphill, Audre Lorde, and some guys at bars Ligon frequented, disorienting the discussion from the old binaries of art/obscenity and censorship/freedom.

  There was Charles Ray’s other sculpture, Family Romance, a model of a white nuclear family holding hands, naked and average, except that each individual—father, mother, young son, toddler girl—was the same height, a disturbing distortion that elicited Freudian distress and Golden’s phrase, “the vertigo of displacement.”

  You entered a darkened corridor, triggering the appearance of a series of ghostly projections—a Black man, an Asian woman, a white man, an elderly woman who moved toward you, gestured welcomingly or menacingly, then turned back as you passed. This was Gary Hill’s Tall Ships, and it begged a question worthy of Octavia Butler: Would you allow what you have changed to change you?

  THE LAST TURN

  On the second floor, you stumbled upon what looked like a number of pregnant bellies mounted in shades from dark to light like Faith Ringgold’s The American Spectrum. They had been created when the artist filled a panel with various tints of flesh-colored latex and hot encaustic, then let gravity and drying do the rest. Were these meant to suggest something about the art of the Biennial itself, the birthing of something new?

  The next wall featured more than two hundred ten-inch by eight-inch chips, each painted a color within the spectrum from pink to bister brown. They seemed to be arranged randomly, but the wall text revealed an alphabetic list of names. Each name, you realized, corresponded to a unique chip and tone.

  These were Byron Kim’s Belly Paintings and Synecdoche.

  Kim had odd fascinations: abstraction, the color-field painter Ad Reinhardt, the minimalist Brice Marden, and Process Art, all interests that tilted toward the formal. The Belly Paintings had begun as an experiment when he was a young resident artist at Skowhegan. The idea of bodies—so hot in intellectual theory and multiculturalism—had been the furthest thing from his mind. He had been obsessing over process and rigor and materials and color.

  But his friends were all calling them “belly paintings.” This annoyed Kim.

  “I thought it was trivializing,” he recalled. “I was thinking, ‘No! These are more tougher, and these are more theoretical.’”

  Yet he reluctantly gave in to their interpretation. The next idea he had was even simpler. “If these are bellies,” he said, “then I can make paintings of skin color.” And he began a weird kind of portraiture, rendering his friends’ skin colors on wood chips. He stacked those paintings against his Williamsburg studio wall.

  That’s where they sat until a friend, Paul Blood, came over to see Kim’s belly paintings for a show he was curating. Blood was instead struck by the flesh paintings. He told Kim that if he made more, he could fill an exhibition wall with them and even mount them next to a work by rising star Kiki Smith. “Kiki Smith?” thought Kim. “OK then.”

  Kim began heading out to the Williamsburg library and McCarren Park and asking random people to pose. Then he would take their name, write it on the back of the chipboard, and proceed to mix up colors to match his subject’s skin tone. In the next month he did a hundred of them. Blood hung them next to Smith’s piece, and Synecdoche began its journey to the Biennial.

  In an issue of Godzilla’s newsletter Kim wrote an earnest manifesto with an ironic title, “An Attempt at Dogma.” “‘Synecdoche’ as a whole will have the look of a huge, formalist painting,” he wrote. “While I want these chips of brown and beige to push in and pull back and give visual pleasure, I also want them to have the mundane flicker of an art that is inclusive as a matter of fact.”16

  And there was your Biennial—a synecdoche, the part representing the whole, every manifesto a song, every inclusion an invitation, every breath a relief.

  Or perhaps instead your Biennial was a mess of big vacuous pieces of “Oh Duh” white hating male dogma that was now mercifully almost over, except for those irritating museum tags clipped near your neck.

  I CAN’T

  IMAGINE

  EVER WANTING

  TO BE

  WHITE

  Museum Tags: Second Movement (Overture); or Overture con Claque (Overture with Hired Audience Members) by Daniel Joseph Martinez. 1993. Courtesy of the artist and Roberts & Tilton Gallery.

  When Daniel Joseph Martinez had been asked to participate in the Biennial, the tags had not been his first proposal. He had initially suggested projecting at night a Diogenes quote onto the Whitney’s exterior: “In the Rich Man’s House the Only Place to Spit Is in His Face.” That was Martinez’s style. Inside his head and outside the house was where he liked to work.

  He had always been small, a wiry loner. He had learned to armor his gentle, idealistic core with an intensity that might melt rebar and bore through concrete. He had grown up in the Lennox section of Los Angeles, a barrio separated from the airport and the west-side beach suburbs of El Segundo and Westchester only by Interstate 405. To him, Lennox felt closer to Inglewood, the neighborhood of poor whites to the north, and to Watts, the neighborhood of poor Blacks to the east where he saw flames lighting up the skies the summer he was eight years old.

  Martinez was the only child of Mexican Americans from the old mining town of Durango, Colorado. He felt that he had not chosen to be an artist—he had been born that way. Not long after the Watts riots Daniel threw his first art show. He hung his drawings and paintings on a fence in the alley behind the projects where he lived, and invited the neighborhood kids to come see them.

  The exhibition came down the same day it went up. As he was giving his first artist talk, some young thugs came in, ripped the works off the walls and trashed them, then proceeded to kick his ass. If Martinez was going to survive as an artist, he needed to think hard.

  He went back to them with a proposition. “Look,” he said, “I’ll make you guys a deal. I’m tired of getting hurt. And you guys are all a bunch of idiots; you do all this bullshit but then you all get caught. You get thrown in jail, someone else beats you up, someone gets shot. I wanna make sure I have complete protection. What I’ll trade you for is my brains. You tell me what you wanna do and I’ll figure it out for you.”

  With the partne
rship struck, he was never bothered again. “In fact,” he recalled with a chuckle, “at that point, other people tried to buy me off ’cause I just happened to be good at thinking. And they were all a bunch of morons.” By the time his family moved to the Aliso Village projects in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles, he was confident he could handle himself.

  Daniel had been the only one in his extended family to be born in a big city, the only one for whom Spanish was a second language. Although his father had never earned a college degree, he had become an aerospace engineer at Hughes Aircraft, designing machines of space exploration. All that young Daniel knew of his work was that when the big rocket launches came on television his father was never home but somewhere else—in Houston, perhaps, or someplace called Cape Canaveral.

  By the late sixties, his father was depressed. While his white colleagues were climbing the ladder on his innovations, he had hit the glass ceiling. The daily sandpaper-chafe of racism in Los Angeles had become intolerable. “It psychologically broke him,” Martinez said. “My dad was a proud man.” His parents announced they were moving back to Durango. Soon the sixteen-year-old Daniel was living on his own.

  The counselor at his Jesuit high school suggested that he apply to art schools, a notion he had never imagined. He put together his first portfolio, sent off applications, and was rejected by all of them. But he had not applied to CalArts. In an interview there, he impressed school officials, who offered him a full scholarship. When he enrolled he realized that he and an African American were the only students of color in the school. Later he understood what it meant to be the first kid from the projects of Lennox and East Los to come into the floating world of Valencia.

  Martinez took classes led by the top conceptualists, was freed from slavish devotion to form, liberated by Asher’s explorations of context and Baldessari’s and Huebler’s brainy wit. “The combination of my street experience with this new influx of extremely dense Eurocentric thinking about art—they are the elements that made the chemistry that made a lot of who I am,” he said. “But it was a cold, harsh, alienating place. I felt a lot of animosity. And that ‘How did I get into this school,’ you know?”

  In time he found his voice. He made a replica of an AK-47, painted it white, and mounted it upside down. On it he stenciled in army-style letters, “MARTINEZ, PATRON SAINT OF LOST CAUSES 73–74.” He stretched a canvas and wrote in black three words: first “I,” then right below, “HATE,” and farther down with a slight tilt, “WHITE.” The painting was part of a series that he called, “I hate everyone and everything; I am at war with the world.” In studio crits, his classmates did not know what to say to him.

  These two pieces would be among a small number from his youthful years to survive time’s sundry disasters—earthquakes, floods, and fires. Martinez hung them above his mantel at his modest book-cluttered home in the Crenshaw district. He still got a kick out of them.

  “It had nothing to do with race,” he would say to guests. “I just hate white. Period.”

  Then he would grin broadly and let out a long satisfied laugh.

  POST-IDENTITY BEGINS

  After leaving CalArts in the middle of a master’s program and finding himself back in the neighborhood, Martinez heard of a group of unusual Mexican American artists who called themselves Asco.

  Young veterans of the 1968 East Los Angeles High-School Blowouts, Asco had emerged on Whittier Boulevard. They decided to turn the popular low-rider cruising-strip—which had also been the setting for the 1970 police riots against the Chicano Moratorium—into a site of high-concept street theater. In Walking Mural, members dressed up as a Christmas tree and La Virgen de Guadalupe in Black. Another, in the words of one of the leaders, Harry Gamboa Jr., appeared as “a mural that had become bored with its environment and left.”17 Then they marched down the boulevard to defy the city’s prohibition of Mexican American Christmas parades and to criticize the stagnation of the Chicano art movement. Here was a group that got the absurdity of it all.

  From Whittier Boulevard they went downtown to announce themselves on Wilshire Boulevard. In 1972, they were in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art wondering why there were no Chicano artists on display. When Gamboa confronted a museum curator with the question, he was told that Chicanos did not make art, they formed gangs and wrote graffiti. That night the group returned to tag the entrances with their names. These were placas, yes, but also the biggest wall labels ever. They called the piece Spray Paint LACMA. They crowned their achievement by declaring that they had “momentarily transformed the museum itself into the first conceptual work of Chicano art to be exhibited at LACMA.”18

  Asco stood against both the racists and the nationalists. They took their name from the reaction they heard from both: me da asco (it disgusts me). “Asco saw identity as less a question of form and content—that is, a proper name—and more one about the context for speaking and being heard,” wrote Chicano art scholar Chon Noriega.19

  Daniel Martinez had missed the Chicano Movement, whose formative events had taken place before he was in his teens. He had also missed the Chicano art explosion. He had returned from Valencia feeling that identity might be a trap. “Identity was necessary because we didn’t exist,” he said. “As soon as identity was established, that’s the same moment it needed to be rejected.” He felt that the members of Asco shared his ambivalence, so he joined up.

  Asco was the cool center of the East Los alternative scene, punk pachuc@s in black leather and lipstick and shiny New Wave suits who owned the night. No mythic Aztlán icons here. Instead, they made drawings, murals, mixed-media installations, stills for fake and actual movies, “experimental telenovelas,” plays, events, and “nonevents.”20 And then suddenly Asco was no longer, imploding in a series of bitter public fights.

  Now Martinez rejected the iconography, philosophy, and methodology of Chicano art as nostalgic and essentialist. Still, he shared the belief that every human act was political, form and content were inextricable, that art could create a language for something that did not yet exist, and this language needed not to be whispered but screamed.

  “The idea of masterpieces was a joke. Who would want to make a masterpiece in this day and age?” he said. “It seemed to me that the most viable thing, the most exciting thing to be doing as an artist was to be experimenting like a scientist: mixing everything up, moving around, changing content, asking different questions, hybrids of forms, mutations.”

  He sought art that could resist easy consumption, ally itself with the underdog and outcast and of color, impose itself on the environment, and sweep everyone up in its intervention.

  WORK PLEASURE RIOT

  By the 1990s, Martinez settled into practicing what was being called “new public art,” the often explosive result of two colliding trends: intensifying culture-war polarization between arts administrators and their political patrons, and city leaders’ need to soften the displacing impact of urban redevelopment with new art commissions. In cities where the liberal elites bankrolled both gentrification and the arts, public art could crack open the contradictions, offer the possibility the futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti had celebrated of massing “great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot.”21

  In 1991, long before Rudy Giuliani inserted the term into national discourse, Martinez titled a Seattle Arts Commission–funded work Quality of Life and ignited an uproar. At the height of holiday season, he hung 150 banners on streetlamps in the downtown retail-shopping district. On one side, a banner might read like a bank ad—“Do you have a trust fund, savings account, or a credit card?”—on the other, like a personal crisis—“Choose one: Do you buy food, pay rent, or buy shoes for the kids?” Business leaders protested, asked how anyone could consider this art, fretted that guilt was a poor lubricant for commerce.

  In San Francisco, Martinez and his collaborators, the artist Renée Petropoulos and the architect Roger F. White, entered a city competition for a work that
would cap the expansion of the Moscone Center, whose construction had flattened blocks of tenements, dispersed a working-class immigrant Filipino American community, and left behind the Yerba Buena cultural district, a complex of gleaming shopping malls and museums. In presentation after presentation, city leaders assured the finalist teams, “This is going to be a wonderful neighborhood.”

  Martinez, Petropoulos, and White proposed four thirty-six-foot-high steel signs that would straddle Howard Street: “This,” “Isa,” “Nice,” “Neighborhood.” At night, on the signs facing Chinatown, Chinese characters repeating the message would light up. Those facing in the other direction, toward the Mission, would flash the message in Spanish. By giving the city leaders exactly what they wanted, the three won the competition. But powerful local newspaper columnist Herb Caen, who perfectly understood the anger and irony the artists had embedded in the work, began attacking the proposal. The project was permanently tabled.

  Martinez moved next to Chicago, to team with Sculpture Chicago’s curator Mary Jane Jacob on a project they called Culture in Action. The University of Illinois at Chicago was dismantling a Greek-style agora in the center of its campus. The outdoor theater had failed its modernist mission as a commons. Students feared walking through there at night.

  Martinez arranged for the agora’s granite remains to be moved to a muddy public space called the Maxwell Street Market that served on weekends as a community farmer’s market and that the University had recently purchased and fenced in with chicken wire. The agora’s ruins were reborn as a new granite floor for the market. Martinez did not tear down the fences, but he replaced University signage with placards commemorating the city’s radical labor history. He then helped organize a day of carnival marches that took thousands of community members from the Maxwell Market to two other neighborhoods, one Black and the other Mexican, bringing an afternoon of joy to the segregated city.

  Here was a different kind of appropriation art, played out on a grand physical and historical scale. In an artist statement he sent to the Whitney, he proclaimed: