Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659)

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

  Kalman’s redesigns for Artforum and Interview magazines brought him to the attention of Toscani. “I didn’t particularly like the things he did with M&Co. What I really liked about Tibor was his brains,” Toscani said of Kalman. “We were like brothers. You know, like, ‘Tibor, you are an asshole.’ ‘Well, Oliviero, you are a piece of shit.’”

  In charisma, creativity, and contradiction, Kalman was every bit Toscani’s equal. He once angrily wrote, “Corporations have become the sole arbiters of cultural ideas and taste in America.” But he also advised designers to find themselves “lunatics” with lots of dough: “Treat them well and use their money to change the world.”19

  Kalman entrusted a young journalist named Karrie Jacobs, an art and design critic for the New York Times and Metropolis magazine and a graduate of the iconoclastic Left Coast college Evergreen State, to write and edit his public speeches in that signature tone, equal parts irony and earnestness. After Toscani and Kalman met she quickly assumed a much bigger role in their evolving ideas.

  “The two of them had a lot in common,” she recalled. “Both of them are gifted in thinking in one-liners, very concise little ideas that get under people’s skin even though they seem simplistic beyond belief.”

  One of the first things Toscani and Kalman did together was to collect and sort through thousands of news photos from the Sygma and Magnum agencies. “Tibor and Toscani were sitting around in Tibor’s office and they called me in and asked me to react to a pile of photos,” Jacobs recalled. “I went through the pile and said which I thought were too horrifying. The ones that come to mind are the guy dying of AIDS and the car blown up, someone in Italy being assassinated. Those are the ones that I said, ‘Those are absolutely ‘no way.’” Toscani and Kalman thanked her, then used in Benetton’s 1992 campaign, “The Shock of Reality,” many of the photos she had rejected.

  Gone were the fashion photo conventions, the white backgrounds, the colorful clothes. Toscani was returning to his teen years as a runner for his father’s photo agency. He was delivering photos of a dead mafioso; an African soldier holding a human shinbone; a Bosnian soldier’s bloodied clothes; Albanian refugees clambering onto an overcrowded ship bound for Italy; and most controversial of all, the dying AIDS patient David Kirby in a hand-colored, retouched Pietà-like scene. Then he was slapping the United Colors of Benetton logo onto them. Appropriation art had become appropriation advertising. Reality had fallen in lockstep with what visual culture scholar Nicholas Mirzoeff would call, after Debord and Baudrillard, the “parade of copies.”20

  Toscani argued that he was waking people up. “You can see a news photo of the fighting in Sarajevo, and it’s in context; it conforms to your expectations. Shocking violence in the news is normal,” he said. “But when you take the same photo out of the news and put a Benetton logo on it, people pause and reflect on their position on the problem. When they can’t come to terms with it, they get mad at us.”21

  And American advertisers got very mad. “This is desperate advertising,” the American marketing giant Jerry Della Femina told Advertising Age. “The object of advertising is to get people to feel better about the product you’re selling. This stuff insults the intelligence.”22

  But underwritten by the one of the world’s biggest knitwear companies, Toscani had recreated capitalist realism, remade it for an era of disbelief in government and capital. And the shock cycle of ad → protest → company response → earned media → big sales continued to turn.

  DIVERSITY IS GOOD

  In advertising terms, print was archaic. All the good money was going to television. But Toscani went to Luciano Benetton and told him that doing an in-house magazine would put the company back in control of its communications strategy. It need no longer be at the mercy of traditional magazines that might choose to block their ads, or buying agencies that might lose their spine. Plus a house magazine could properly contextualize the company’s values. It would be called—what else?—Colors.

  Jacobs said, “Tibor called me on a Saturday and said, ‘Hey, we’re these two big guys wearing sweaters sitting around talking, come join us.’ And so I went over to M&Co.’s office on a Saturday afternoon and sat around Tibor’s office with Tibor and Toscani for a long time talking about what this magazine could be.”

  “They were talking about doing a magazine that was going to be really global and optimistic and upbeat and happy and I kept on saying, ‘But, but, but there’s this war going on.’ I remember I made the obvious point about ‘I don’t want to do a magazine about sweaters’ and Toscani went, ‘No, no! This will not be a magazine about sweaters.’”

  “We talked about the spirit of the magazine. About optimism and being global and how cool it was that Benetton had all these stores everywhere so there would be this distribution network,” Jacobs recalled. “But I don’t remember anyone saying, ‘Oh yes, this is going to be the standard-bearer for the notion of multiculturalism.’ We were not thinking in those terms. It was about Toscani wanting a place where his ideas could flow freely and be uncensored and Tibor wanting very badly to be the editor of a magazine and me wanting to do something that was lucrative and fun.”

  Colors was nothing if not ambitious. Beginning in late 1991 it would be published semiannually in no fewer than five bilingual editions: English and Italian, German, Spanish, French, or Japanese. The budget would be $3 million. The print run would be an astounding 800,000 copies—in Kalman and Jacobs’s environmentally correct metrics, 6,000 trees. It would be distributed on newsstands. And in its stores, it would be packaged with the seasonal catalogs.

  As for content, Toscani had one rule: “I don’t want a magazine made with news and celebrities.” Instead the magazine would look bold and loose like an after-hours freestyle design project and read like a series of tightly edited, jargon-free, impossibly hip cultural-studies assignments.

  The first issue’s cover featured Toscani’s photo of a wailing, just-delivered baby girl against his trademark blank background. Bilingual cover lines radiated around her. The image recalled Toscani’s fascination with the innocence of babes—it was an image pulled from a previous United Colors campaign—and heralded the arrival of the “rest of the world” beyond the old monoculture where diversity, affluence, and style converged in a knowing, colorized, consumer-friendly white space.

  Colors would reveal the world’s cool young tribes to each other. It featured activist groups of gay police officers and black models and abundant white space. It celebrated avatars of hybridity, groups Kalman and Jacobs called “cultural transvestites”: Polish cowboys, Japanese hip-hoppers.

  “The idea is a simple one,” Jacobs wrote in the first issue’s editorial-cum-manifesto, “Diversity is good.”

  In that statement of purpose, Jacobs tried to encapsulate the ideals she, Kalman, and Toscani had crystallized through hours of endless argument. Colors—and by extension, Benetton—would favor a forward-thinking grassroots authenticity, new-gen cultural relativism and “we’re all connected” techno-optimism that would become voguish in the coming Internet age. If identity was the future of capitalism, that future was here.

  But there remained a central contradiction. In sunny chatty prose, the voice that defined Colors’s early years, Jacobs wrote, “We think that positive change mostly comes from the bottom and percolates upward,” and that “your culture (whoever you are) is as important as our culture (whoever we are).” But how could it live up to those claims especially with the smart, worldly audience of young people it wanted to attract?

  Jacobs admitted, “We were sort of wrestling with what is our position in the world, and ‘How can we be taken seriously if we’re being financed by this sweater manufacturer?’” She thought hard about how Colors could “do something honest in a situation that was inherently dishonest.”

  Finally, she chose to give her post-Watergate, post-Marxist Evergreen skepticism a ride. She wrote, “What happens when corporations use imagery to make statements about social
and political issues? Well you can’t trust those statements any more than you can trust the statements of politicians.” She pushed further, challenging readers to challenge Benetton on the gap between its own imagery and actions: “What does the company actually do to promote racial equality? Do their hiring practices match their image?”

  But her editorial ended on an ambivalent note: “[W]e feel a little funny about being global. It makes us feel like we’re McDonald’s, and we’re not. We don’t want to sell our culture to you. We want you to tell us about your culture.”

  She didn’t—because, really, she couldn’t—challenge her readers to ask why they should.

  HOW YA LIKE ME NOW?

  Out in the real streets, Rodney King was getting the hope beaten out of him. In Congress, the culture wars were exacting their casualties. In retail and advertising, companies were losing their retail margins with suddenly brand-indifferent baby boomers, who had given up tastemaking for nesting; and struggling to understand a new generation, who were more diverse, tribal, and resistant to the old pitches than ever. Then the Los Angeles riots broke out.

  The second issue of Colors hit the stands in that burning spring of 1992. Its cover featured one of the images that had shocked Jacobs: a recent news photo of hundreds of Albanian refugees fleeing ethnic violence, clambering by rope aboard a rusting, severely overcrowded ship bound for Bari, Italy. Kalman and Jacobs had come up with cover lines about immigration’s transformational impact on “un mundo Viejo,” the Old World, saying it brought “new music,” “new food,” “new romantic possibilities,” and “new excuses for parades.”

  But while the text offered consumption and celebration, the image bespoke pressure and panic. Globalization had accelerated the forces of change. Neoliberalism, the state ideology that accompanied globalization, was about the flight of capital and the state from the spaces of the living. For those wired into the new world, globalization did mean connection. For others, it meant displacement and uprootings of people on a previously unimaginable scale. The Colors dialectic was trying to nimbly balance the cheery optimism of global flows with evidence of the profound, widening divide.

  The staff felt caught between its ideals—uniting the world—and its audience—the elite youth of the connected class. Through its first three issues it was unsure of what it wanted to say and to whom it was speaking. “[B]ecause this magazine is produced by people from about 30 different countries, published in five bilingual editions, and distributed globally, we’re not sure anymore which culture is ours,” Jacobs wrote in the third issue’s editorial. “We have cultural vertigo. We feel dizzy.”

  But when the Los Angeles riots broke out on April 29, 1992, just as they were putting the third issue to bed, Jacobs believed that they suddenly had a focus. Was it possible to be honest about the way people saw race and the problem of racism in a publishing situation that was inherently dishonest? “I think this thing started out cynical,” Karrie Jacobs recalled, “and by the fourth issue we began believing in what we were doing.”

  As she would later write in that issue’s editorial, “If there’s one topic Colors was destined to address, it’s racism and the devastation caused by racism.”

  In Milan, Toscani was preparing an installation opening for the same Venice Biennale that had included Daniel J. Martinez. His piece would be hung in a former church. It was fifty-six close-up photos of people’s genitals—the source of all this gorgeous, restless diversity. In Manhattan, Jacobs and Kalman were discussing ideas for the new issue.

  “This was the process. He and I would have a meeting and then he’d go off and hang with Toscani for some period of time and then he would come back from Italy looking tanned and healthy,” Jacobs recalled. “And he’d come back and say, ‘Well, Toscani and I have an idea! We should do an issue about race,’ and we’d say, ‘Oh, what a good idea!’” From here forward, each issue of Colors would have a single thematic focus.

  In early 1993, as the Whitney Biennial opened, Colors’s fourth issue hit the stands.

  The cover featured a Black woman and a white man standing naked and slightly—and oh so sexily—insolent against Toscani’s white background, as if they, too, weren’t at all sure about this experiment. They were covered only by the printed words “RACE Attitude Lies Truth Power First Dates and Sex.” Over the white man’s feet, in smaller print, were the words: “We’re looking for trouble.”

  Jacobs and her staff found themselves in the middle of a broad soul-searching debate. The questions had started with “How many races are there?” They ended up at, “What is race anyway?” At the outset of her time at Colors she had asked readers to hold Benetton accountable around the question of diversity. Now circumstances had pushed the envelope further. Could a radical critique of imperialism and racial discrimination be advanced in a magazine financed by a sweater manufacturer?

  Jacobs wrote in her editorial, “[I]t occurred to us that while the physical differences between peoples and individuals are real—all we had to do was look at [staffers] Amma, Soyeun and Catalina—the monoliths called races are a purposeful invention, once used to make Europe’s slavery and colonial conquests seem moral and inevitable.”

  A Do the Right Thing–inspired feature depicted smiling faces identified by the ethnic insults used against them and the victimizers who used them (“‘TUNDRA NIGGER’; who: Inuit; from: Alaska; by: white Alaskans. ‘HAIRY WHITE BARBARIAN’; who: Nordics, etc.; from: anyplace but Japan; by: Japanese”). Kalman and Jacobs stared at a headshot of an African man for a long time, and debated whether they should put the word “nigger” with it. To do so would admit and implicate them in a deep history and context.

  “Maybe that’s what it should say,” Jacobs said later. “But the idea of publishing a magazine, in fact, published by this billionaire, that was read by young people everywhere, in which we were trumpeting the word ‘nigger’ in big type just seemed ultimately to be wrong. And I think it would’ve made the piece stronger, but who are we to be disseminating that word? What would it mean?”

  In what she thought of as the issue’s coup de grâce, Jacobs pulled together two infographic spreads, the first headlined, “Here’s where the people live,” illustrating the size of countries by population. “Here’s where the money lives,” read the next, this time proportioning nations by wealth.

  “In this issue of Colors, we’ve outlined the physical differences between the earth’s peoples. But to be honest,” the spread read, “we don’t think racism has anything to do with skin, hair, or eyes. Those features just provide easy targets. Racism is about money and power.”

  But Jacobs’s spread would produce nothing like the reactions to Kalman’s. First there was an article entitled “How to Change Your Race,” jabbing lightly at Cosmo and Glamour in developing the theme of race and desire as social constructs, examining how Chinese, whites, and Blacks used plastic surgery to alter themselves. Across the bottom of the page, a half-Black, half-Native American model was made up as a dark-skinned African, a white woman, and an Asian woman. If appearance was so mutable, what did that say about our perceptions of difference?

  But that was just the appetizer. Kalman and Toscani assembled pages of ravishing nude male and female Latino, Black, and Asian hotties. Small captions were inserted alongside their faces and appropriate body parts: “What would it be like to have sex with someone of a different race?” “Will they want to do it with their socks on?” “Will we be embarrassed by the things they cry out in the heat of passion?” The message: racism could be resolved, per MC Busy Bee, with sex and more sex. Jacobs mused, “We should have somehow put all that dense (race and wealth) information next to the naked people.”

  Finally Kalman conceived a spread he called, “How Ya Like Me Now?” which would be, he had written, a “series of retouched photos changing [the] race of some well-known internationals.” With primitive and expensive proto-Photoshop software, designers executed the photos and the feature appeared under a new title:
“What If?” Arnold Schwarzenegger got short dreads and a Wesley Snipes tan. Pope John Paul II turned Japanese. Spike Lee was wiggerized. A skin-lightened, blond, and blue-eyed Michael Jackson looked like, well, Michael Jackson. Queen Elizabeth became a Jamaican browning.

  Jacobs was annoyed that so much time had been spent on such a thin idea. “To me it seemed like the dumbest gimmick,” she said. “And for better or worse, it’s the thing that this issue is remembered for.”

  Kalman had been inspired by no less a provocateur than David Hammons, who had expressed his anger at the tragedy of Jesse Jackson’s defeat in the 1988 Democratic primaries by mounting a blond whiteface metal cut-out painting of Jackson across from the notably colorless National Portrait Gallery, tagged with Kool Moe Dee’s line “How Ya Like Me Now?” At the time local Black activists had toppled the installation and destroyed it. Now Kalman had reappropriated the idea for a kind of an update of Toscani’s United Contrasts campaign.

  The Black Queen Elizabeth, from Tibor Kalman’s “How Ya Like Me Now?” spread: “People are upset, and that’s the way change happens.”

  “The idea was that if you could separate the person from their race you could then figure out how you feel about the race versus the person,” Kalman said in media interviews. “So when you look at the Black Queen, you think, ‘Does she dance better? Is Buckingham Palace playing cool Caribbean music at its receptions? Does the Black Schwarzenegger look stronger than the white Schwarzenegger?’ And as you explore these questions you become conscious of your own racism.”23

  The resulting controversy only reaffirmed his point. On both sides of the Atlantic, tabloids exploded. “The Pekinese Pope,” scoffed the Daily Express. “The African Queen,” blared the Daily Mirror. One angry royalist wrote to the Toronto Star, “It’s disgusting. I have nothing against the Blacks, but if we had wanted a Black Queen we would have had one.”24 Kalman just said to Katie Couric, shrugging, “I mean people are upset, and that’s the way change happens.”