I Am Interested in a Mode of Experimental Behavior Linked to the Conditions of Urban Society.
I Am Interested in Exploring the Possibilities of Disorder.
I Am Based in Los Angeles and Working on the Western Front of the Great North American Culture Wars.22
BETWEEN THE PAST AND THE FUTURE
When 1992 broke out, Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña were caging themselves against the backdrop of celebrations for the five hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of America. They would soon bring their performance to the Whitney. Multiculturalism had hit an inflection point. It had also hit a cleaving point.
In her Biennial essay, Fusco had argued that “the postmodern fascination with the exchange of cultural property and with completely deracinated identity can seem for many people of color less like emancipation and more like intensified alienation.”23 Against such an everything-is-everything sensibility, Fusco favorably namechecked Gayatri Spivak’s idea of “strategic essentialism.”
Put another way, multiculturalism itself was strategic. Perhaps it did limit the expression of identities to what the philosopher David Hollinger would term the “ethnoracial pentagon” of white, Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American identities. Perhaps it might also reduce radical diversity to what Fusco called “exotic entertainment for the dominant culture.” But multiculturalism also did the important work of validating the histories of those who were marginalized, staking their claims against the ruling class for the sharing of power.
Fusco argued that multiculturalism allowed identities to change and evolve. She also concluded that in order to transform America, artists needed to:
look back to histories that have circulated mainly in marginalized communities … Although American society has defined progress as a focus on the future, we must now return to the past in order to place ourselves in that history and understand how we got to where we are. As we try to grasp at crucial parallels, and tease new stories out of them, new alternative chronicles surface; these are the latest examples of how collective memories, those storehouses of identity, once activated, become power sites of cultural resistance.24
In this sense, Fusco and Gómez-Peña’s Biennial piece, The Couple in the Cage, was not an attempt to break the mirror—as John Yau had once suggested—but to make a mirror, one that forced people to see race and see how they saw it, too. Here are all of your ugly, stupid, imperialist stereotypes on steroids, Fusco and Gómez-Peña were saying: we should all be laughing and crying.
But Fusco and Gómez-Peña would admit later that they had not anticipated how many people would do neither. Some had accepted their Guatinaui guano as God’s truth. Some were grandly entertained. And many critics simply distanced themselves from the politics, if not their own projected fantasies.
“I had thought about what I was probably supposed to be thinking, and in fact what I was thinking,” wrote Artforum contributing editor Jan Avgikos. “I mean, I can’t stand there and suddenly realize that cultural genocide is a horrible thing, or that native societies have been raped X number of times, or that when ethnic artists play with stereotypes the results are automatically instructive.”
The Undiscovered Amerindians: ‘Oh Please!’ Begged the Gentleman at the Whitney Biennial by Coco Fusco. 2012. Intaglio, engraving, and drypoint etching on paper. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates.
“What I did think about,” she concluded, “was how beautiful Fusco’s scantily clad body was—which is probably what just about everyone else was thinking too.”25 Strip away multiculturalism’s radicalism, and what was left were the imperial amusements and unseemly desires.
But Martinez would not be laughing at Fusco and Gómez-Peña’s caged-bird follies either. To him, the piece offered confirmed that ideas like Chicanismo and Latinidad were taking minorities back, against the current, in a fruitless search for an unrecoverable past. He thought of himself as an anti-essentialist, working in the present tense. But it was the future that he really desired.
At the end of April 1992, the skies over Los Angeles again filled with flames, and urban disorder was no longer a possibility. Martinez’s Biennial moment waited just beyond the fiery horizon.
THE SPEED OF SOUND, AND ALL THE NOISE AFTERWARD
Martinez had an operatic title for the museum tags: Museum Tags: Second Movement (overture); or, Overture con Claque (Overture with Hired Audience Members). The little tags were a compression of everything he had been thinking about. Perhaps they also compressed everything else his fellow insurgents had been thinking about.
To the traditionalists fearful of Golden’s contention that the center was giving way to the margins, the tags might have seemed like mere antiassimilationist chest-thumping. But Martinez was tapping into a debate that dated back long before “Black Is Beautiful” buttons.
In the June 1926 issue of The Nation, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, George Schuyler argued that the notion of cultural difference and a separate and unique “Negro art” merely flattered racists and patronized Blacks. Langston Hughes had replied:
[T]o my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering “I want to be white,” hidden in the aspirations of his people, to “Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro—and beautiful!”26
Hughes would further unpack these ideas in two of his most famous poems, “Let America Be America Again” and “I, Too.” In the latter, the poem’s protagonist dreams of the day he is no longer sent back to eat his meal in the kitchen when guests arrive, but offered a seat at the dinner table. He concludes:
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.27
Martinez was not dwelling on this history. He thought of the tags as tiny codes, pressed into tinplate-steel. What did it mean for a young urban white boy to wear a tag that read “White” when he was growing up in a culture less white than ever? What might it say for anyone to wear a tag that said “To Be” or “Imagine”?
The tags were Saussurian signifiers floating through the galleries, orchestrating operatic movements of big ideas and personalities. They opened up to endless interpretations, unforeseen interactions and reactions. When some of the security guards—the overwhelming majority of whom were of color—chose to wear one, two or several tags at once, a minor management-labor kerfuffle over uniform protocol broke out in which Martinez and the curatorial staff had to intervene. The tags democratized the museum a little. At the end of the day, everyone in the museum could go home with the tag—a work of art transacted for $6 or a work shift. They could collect them like baseball cards or Basquiat drawings.
The tags had elegance and symmetry—subversions within subversions, loops within loops of meaning. Martinez mused, “We know art affects people, but it affects ten people at a time, maybe. It’s a very slow burn. And I was interested in testing. This was a test, an experiment, right? How could I speed that up? Could I just like, slam!” He clapped one hand forward off the other. “Like, salt flats! I wanna break the speed of sound.”
“And it was just absolutely perfect.”
He had been warned not to do them. As the Biennial had neared, big New York galleries were calling, wanting to represent Martinez. At the prestigious Venice Biennale, he was showing beautiful paintings of white oil on black velvet depicting the arrests of the Red Brigade and tagged with Situationist phrases. A big Cornell University commission was coming up. Over a decade after leaving CalArts he had become one of the hottest names in the art world. But when Martinez showed his ideas for the tags, gallerists were aghast. These things were alienating and noncommercial. They weren’t beautiful. They weren’t pleasurable. They would stop his career in its tracks. He told them he could not be passive.
Martinez’s tags began the Whitney Biennial and ended it. They summarized everything that people loved or hated about the show. They
were the arrival of new messages from new voices, representations of an increasingly complex world. Or they were an artless one-liner delivered at the expense of the art-world elite.
One critic called the tags “hostile,” another “a ritual of humiliation,” two more called them “racist”—representative of a show that had been as delightful as a hive of buzzing hornets, as deep as twelve syllables, as disposable as a museum tag.28 Critics asked David A. Ross how he would have felt if a Black Muslim artist from Crown Heights had done tags that read, “I can’t imagine ever wanting to be Jewish.”29 Arthur Danto wrote, “I can’t imagine ever wanting to have had anything to do with the 1993 Biennial.”30
THE RESTORATION
And so one of the most diverse major exhibitions in the history of American art became the most critically detested show in the history of American art. The two facts were not unconnected.
The 1993 Biennial was “The Biennial that Had Gone Too Far,” “The Patronizing Biennial, brought to you by the Therapeutic Museum,”31 “a showcase for political correctness,” “a theme park of the oppressed,” “the most disturbing show in living memory,” “one extended exhibitionistic frenzy of victimization and self-pity,” and “the most alienating, depressing, horrifying show I have ever seen.”32
The show was about “Victim Chic,” “Mope Art,” “sound bite art,” “grievance art.” It was about “multicultural anger … at the European-American White Male,” and had “the cordite aroma of cultural reparations.”33 One pundit declared the show to be “a cultural war to destabilize and break the mainstream.”34
Then Hilton Kramer weighed in, with dyspeptic disgust and a raw woundedness. “There is no point in ‘reviewing’ the carloads of junk that David Ross’ apparatchiks have accumulated for the current exhibition as if it had anything to do with art,” he wrote. “He has brought the Whitney down to his own cultural level, which is that of a comfortably situated middle-class voyeur with a prurient interest in the fantasy life of the underclass.”35
Kramer conceded that identity was the point of the 1993 Biennial. Perhaps, unlike the white liberal art critics who had taken such offense, he had come to view the work of the insurgents less as slurs than as facts. For in the end, it was not really about them, nor was it about petit bourgeois Ross and his staff of degenerates. It was about those who had betrayed the institution, and by extension, their class, their race, and the nation itself, those who had sponsored this travesty—the old white wealth of the Whitney’s board of trustees. In his New York Observer review he was both bilious and defeated:
Don’t they understand—if only just a little bit—that this whole exhibition is, in effect, a death sentence on everything they are, everything they own, and everything they hope to pass on to their nearest and dearest? Don’t they understand that this Biennial is filled to overflowing with a rabid hatred for everything they have achieved in life? Are they really so stupid that they don’t understand that they are the targets in this assault on our society? Or are they so mired in liberal guilt for the vast wealth that they command that they are willing to collaborate in their own destruction?36
In the fall Daniel J. Martinez went to Cornell University and built a big black asterisk in the middle of the Arts Quad, not far from Willard Straight Hall. He called it The Castle Is Burning. It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the student riots in Paris, and Martinez meant for the asterisk—emblazoned with the Diogenes quote and other provocative ones like “No Player Must Be Greater Than the Game Itself”—to be a barricade, an interruption in the daily flow of business.
Students apparently understood Martinez’s intent better than many of the university administrators. The piece was quickly vandalized with swastikas and graffiti that read, “Bean Eaters Go Home,” “Kill the Illegals,” and “White Power.”
Faced with official indifference, Latino students decided that they had to protect the piece, and they formed a human cordon around it, just as progressive white students had encircled the Black occupiers of Straight Hall twenty-four years before. Then the students spontaneously marched on the administration building, and occupied it for four days, demanding that the school add Latino faculty, history courses, and resources.
Martinez sent the student protestors a fax. “When Surrounded by Dangers, Fear None of Them. When without Resources, Depend on Resourcefulness,” it read, quoting Guy Debord’s favorite Sun Tzu quote. “When Surprised, Take the Enemy by Surprise.” Cornell University soon agreed to establish a Latino Living Center dedicated to the study of Latino culture.
Martinez felt 1993 had been a banner year. In Venice and Chicago, at the Whitney and Cornell, he had excited crowds with work, pleasure, and riots. Surely the art world would open its doors to him now. Then in the first week of 1994, Newsweek featured Martinez in a list of actors, writers, musicians, and artists to watch, alongside the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, Joshua Redman, and Laura Esquivel. Martinez’s heart dropped.
“As soon as that came out,” he said, “I immediately knew it was over.”
The commissions stopped. His phone calls to galleries and curators went unreturned. Martinez had been eclipsed by his little museum tags. “It framed me as the angriest artist in the United States,” he said. “After the ’93 Biennial, people just thought I was a raging lunatic. Nobody would touch me.”
For nearly a decade after, Martinez felt as if he had been blacklisted by the art world. When he looked around, it seemed a lot of others had been, too. For the generation of artists who would follow, the lesson had been learned—say what you want, but you might be punished.
“’93 was the last shot of the war,” Martinez said. “We lost right at the moment we thought we were winning.”
Thelma Golden was searching for a third way beyond the multiculturalists’ call for positive representation and the reductive formalism of the “quality” cabal. If difference happened between perception and appearance, if race happened when people were seeing but not really seeing, how could a Black curator make people aware of the Ellisonian dilemma?
Golden threw her energies into her first major exhibition at the Whitney, an epic, transgressive show called Black Male. But many in the Black community rose against the show. Rodney King, criminalization, hypersexuality—these were reminders of the shackles, Golden’s critics said, not the redemption that they had fought for. “We as black people cannot look to the Whitney to represent us,” wrote Ronda R. Penrice.37
In 1995, the Guerrilla Girls printed flyers and posters that read “Traditional Values and Quality Return to the Whitey Museum,” misspelling intended. In the 1995 Biennial, the flyer pointed out, white males were back up to 55.5% from 36.4%, white females down to 27.7% from 29.5%, males of color down to 11.1% from 22.8%, females of color down to 5.5% from 11.4%.
Multiculturalism would continue—as a magazine cover, a marketing plan, a human resources agenda, a presidential commission, an educational curriculum, and much more yet. Beyond 75th and Madison, there was a mainstream to conquer.
But oh multiculturalism—where was your sting, where was your victory?
The Los Angeles riots seemed to expose all of Benetton’s multiculti platitudes. With its “race” issue, the Colors staff gamely tried to do something honest in an inherently dishonest situation.
CHAPTER 9
ALL THE COLORS IN THE WORLD
THE MAINSTREAMING OF MULTICULTURALISM
Everywhere everything gets more and more like everything else as the world’s preference structure is relentlessly homogenized.
—Theodore Levitt, “The Globalization of Markets”
In 1984, an Italian clothing company began marketing itself with pictures of children of all races wearing its gumball-colored polos, berets, canvas sneakers, and white shorts. They held bright balloons. They smiled, frowned, stared. They picked their noses. Against empty white backgrounds their varied skin tones pulsed with ambrosial luster. They were the children of Benetton and they seemed to come from another world,
which in a sense they had. No other world like this could be seen except through the lens of the Milan-based photographer Oliviero Toscani.
Toscani’s patron was the Treviso-born clothing magnate Luciano Benetton, who had over the course of two decades built his family business into the largest Italian fashion firm. Benetton had been opening shops in the United States since 1979 without much note until a blue-and-white rugby shirt caught on with Ivy League preppies in the fall semester of 1982. Then sales went vertical and store openings accelerated. Luciano believed his company—structured on franchising, subcontracting, and outsourcing—was perfectly set up for the Global Century. All it needed was a new image.
Toscani had a casual bush of hair and a rakish beard, a hunter’s aim and a huckster’s charm. In the sixties, he had gone to King’s Road to capture the Swinging London scene. During the Warhol years, he was in the East Village shooting the flamboyant regulars of Max’s Kansas City. He went on to work for Vogue, Elle, Chanel, and Fiorucci, making fantastically erotic pictures hawking furniture and clothes. He did an ad for a line called Jesus Jeans that pissed off the Vatican. The art featured his then-fiancée Donna Jordan’s lubricious ass exploding out of her denim shorts. The copy read, “Chi Mi Ama Mi Segua”—“Who Loves Me Follows Me.”
Behind the wit and magnetism Toscani was a man of serious and conflicting convictions. He had spent his childhood in darkrooms, at murder scenes, and at newspaper desks. He had been an assistant to his father, Fedele, a famed wartime photojournalist and photo agency head who at the age of thirty-six had captured the defining image of Mussolini’s corpse hung upside down before the crowds in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto.
If his father had made pictures of toil, grit, and conflict, Toscani was attracted to portrait photography and its parvenu cousin, fashion photography: the frank Southern mystery of Disfarmer, the expansive humanism of August Sander, and most of all, the beauty and distinction of Richard Avedon. When Benetton approached Oliviero Toscani to make his images, the photographer was reaching that midcareer moment when one begins contemplating his legacy.
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