by Olivia Laing
The Cossacks sound like something from ancient history, but for Guston they were almost as immediate a source of malevolence as the Klan. His parents had emigrated to Canada to escape pogroms in the Ukraine. They left their home in Odessa, where Babel too was born, in 1905, during an upsurge of attacks by Cossacks and a Tsarist militia called the Black Hundreds, who targeted, tortured and killed Jews. (Reich too was from this milieu. When he fled his farm during the Russian invasion, ten years later and four hundred miles away, he looked back and saw the hill behind him ‘black with Cossacks’.)
As a boy, Philip grew up on stories about hiding from Cossacks in the basement. With the Klan series, he gave himself licence to imagine his own way into the bleak rooms of his family’s past. Cellar, 1970: four pairs of hob-nailed shoes attached to legs, some sticking ridiculously into the air, some bent at an unpleasantly floppy angle, surrounded by a mess of trashcan lids and chairs. He said he was painting people in the act of diving into the cellar, but from where I’m sitting it looks like they got caught. As a Jewish artist working in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Guston knew there was no end to the capacity for human harm; that, as Freud had said, man is wolf to man. In a letter written just after the 1973 coup in Chile, he wrote: ‘Our whole lives (since I can remember) are made up of the most extreme cruelties of holocausts. We are the witness of this hell. When I think of the victims, it is unbearable. To paint, to write, to teach, in the most dedicated sincere way, is the most intimate affirmation of creative life we possess in these despairing years.’
This is where Guston’s feeling of identification with the Klansmen becomes more complicated. It turns out that he too was wearing a mask; he too had committed a violent act. In 1935, he’d changed his name from Phillip Goldstein to Philip Guston. He repainted the signature on some of his early works and kept the switch secret until the final year of his life. He asked his biographer Dore Ashton not to mention it, a request to which she acquiesced, and it wasn’t made public until 1980, in a catalogue essay for his retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. By the 1960s, the decision had begun to eat away at him. Had he been trying to conceal his Jewishness, even to Aryanise himself? And if he hadn’t, did it look like he had?
His daughter Musa wasn’t told her father’s real name until she was in college. As she explains in her sorrowing memoir, Night Studio, she knew nothing about her father’s family. She never met her aunts and uncles. There were no photographs, no albums. What she did know is that ‘my father had felt tremendous regret about having changed his name, that in his eyes it had become a shameful, cowardly act. And I knew that after the Second World War and the revelations of the Holocaust, when it became crucial for him to reclaim his Jewish identity, it was too late to change it back. His reputation was already established with the new name.’
A name change is at the very least a breach in continuous identity, severing the self into past and future elements, if not a kind of murder, the former existence decisively erased (Guston kept all the documents concerned hidden in a locked safety deposit box). It represents an aspirational attitude to the life that lies ahead, and also begs the question of what or who is being discarded. Guston said the main motivating force was his love for the painter and poet Musa McKim, who he married two years after he changed his name. He thought her parents wouldn’t accept him as Phillip Goldstein, though he also said he didn’t attempt to hide his identity as a non-observant Jew.
No longer being Phillip Goldstein also reshaped his relationship to his father, removing the permanent marker of patrilineal identity. There were reasons why this might have been appealing, and reasons too why it might have come to feel like a betrayal. Guston’s father Leib, known as Louis or Wolf, had never been happy in America. In Odessa he had been a blacksmith and in Montreal a machinist on the railway, but in L.A. he was reduced to working as a rag and bone man, spending every day gathering up the city’s trash and selling it from a horse-drawn wagon. He hung himself in 1923 or 1924, slinging a rope over the rafters of an outbuilding alongside the family home, where he was found by Phillip, his youngest son. ‘Can you imagine’, Guston sometimes asked his friends, ‘how it feels to find your father like that?’
It was after Leib’s death that Guston began to draw seriously. From the beginning he saw it as a way of transporting himself, reinventing and erasing all at once. On Sundays, his older brothers and sisters would come with their crowds of children to his mother’s apartment. He’d beg her to lie about his whereabouts, instructing her to say he was out with friends. Hidden in the closet with its single light bulb, he’d listen to them talk and feel safe and remote, reading and drawing ‘in this private box’, yet another version of Reich’s magic accumulator. Even as an adult he longed ‘to be hidden and feel strange’, a function that a false name can’t help but serve.
Who knows whether Leib’s death was in its specifics a tra-gedy or a relief? In discussing the personal aspect of Guston’s paintings, I’m not saying that it trumps or overwrites the abundant political meanings of his work. What it does mean is that the objects in his canvases cannot be considered neutral. Rope. Light bulb. Klansman. Cossack. Everything is imbued with meaning, at once acutely personal and a consequence of the tumbling dominoes of global events. The rope the Klansman fingers in Conspirators might not be the same one that Phillip Goldstein found his father hanging from, but it is unmistakably the rope that ties us into history, that lashes us to time. What Guston’s paintings tell us is that evil is not confined to specific bodies in specific eras. It bleeds out, seeping and staining through the years. History always comes home to roost. There is no possibility of a life uncompromised by the violence of the past.
In the reddish light cast by the tiki torches of Charlottesville, these meanings seemed painfully clear. Guston was trying to investigate the drives that underpin white supremacy, in himself as well as in the outside world. It’s hard to imagine more significant work for an artist. But when he first showed the Klan paintings at the Marlborough Gallery in New York in November 1970, critics and colleagues alike reacted with fury at his defection from abstract painting (‘embarrassing’, Lee Krasner said). Several of his friends dropped him and he received almost uniformly brutal reviews. The harshest, by Hilton Kramer in the New York Times, accused him of being ‘a mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum’, feigning primitivism to catch a vogueish wave in politically engaged painting that had anyway already ebbed.
‘It was as though I had left the church’, Guston remembered. ‘I was excommunicated for a while.’ No one could understand why he’d abandoned his sublime, shuddering regions of pure colour for such ham-fisted, lurid work. Writing decades later in the New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl recalled that he’d felt personally betrayed by the transition from refinement to abjection, a deliberate nose-dive into the trash heap. And what was the point anyway? It was 1970. The Klan weren’t even a threat any more, Robert Hughes complained in Time.
Imagine being that cosseted, that certain. Two weeks before the Klan show opened, the civil rights activist Angela Davis was arrested by the FBI, and less than a month later, James Baldwin wrote his famous open letter to her in prison. In it, he said that racism would never end until white Americans stopped taking refuge in their whiteness. He described whiteness as putting a ‘sinister . . . distance’ between the experience of white people and the experience of others. It’s this ‘sinister distance’ that allows some humans to consider others as a swarm, as trash, and it’s this ‘sinister distance’ that drives the block in their noxious work. It will not be dismantled, not until each one of us looks at what our silence is facilitating, peering, as Guston did, into the blind spot in which atrocity keeps on and on occurring.
8
22nd Century
THE CLOSEST THING TO Reich’s orgone box that I have found is a room on Lafayette Street in New York City. When I felt most locked up inside my body, almost the only thing that made me feel free was going to Joe’s Pub to see Justin Vivi
an Bond, a transgender singer and performance artist who had the gift of duende, the knack for going so far beyond the edge of safety that everyone in the room felt shaken loose, transported to somewhere strange and new.
I’d first come across Viv a decade earlier, as the mistress of ceremonies in Shortbus, a 2006 film with a distinctly Reichian sensibility. The central character, Sofia, is a sex therapist who can’t have an orgasm. Her quest for release takes her to a sex salon in Brooklyn populated by a diverse cast of queers and freaks. Despite the copious sex, which includes the national anthem being sung into somebody’s asshole, it’s appealingly sceptical about free love, not so much a manifesto of polyamory as a melancholy account of the difficulties of being a sexual body in the world. Many of the characters, particularly the dominatrix Severin, use sex as a way of hiding from real feeling. The act itself isn’t necessarily a cure for loneliness or a way of creating connection. Instead, it’s the ability to open to other people that’s presented, Reich-style, as the source of liberation: emotional vulnerability as the gateway to joy. All the sex is real and unsimulated, including Sofia’s long-awaited orgasm, adding to the tender, shaky, naked mood.
Bond was ravishing in that film, a vision beyond age or gender, in a flapper’s sequinned dress and elbow-length gloves, projecting a smoky, after-hours world-weariness that was immensely seductive. The first time I ever encountered the concept of being non-binary was when I was talking about it a few years later, on a sofa in New Hampshire with my friend Joseph, who had a cameo in the orgy scene. I said something about Bond, and he gently corrected my description, informing me that the pronoun wasn’t he but v.
At the time, my own gender was like a noose around my neck. I was non-binary, even if I didn’t yet know the word. I’d always felt like a boy inside, a femme gay boy, and the dissonance between how I experienced myself and how I was assumed to be was so painful that often I didn’t want to leave my room and enter the world at all. Ten years ago, trans issues were nothing like as visible or widely discussed as they are now, and what discussion there was focused on the transition from male to female, female to male. It was a step forward, but it didn’t address the problem of what to do if neither gender fitted you. What I wanted as a trans person was to escape the binary altogether, which seems so natural if it includes you and so unnatural and violently enforced if it does not. I wanted Hirschfeld’s forty-three million genders, resplendent and unpoliced, a pool you could dive into and swim away.
You can hate what happens to bodies categorised as female while also remaining sceptical about the notion of two rigidly opposed genders, coloured pink and blue. Even Andrea Dworkin understood that. Though we think of her now as reifying gender, what she actually wanted to do was to dissolve the binary altogether, whatever the transphobes who’ve claimed her might say. ‘We want to destroy sexism, that is polar role definitions of male and female, man and woman’, she wrote in Intercourse. ‘Androgyny as a concept has no notion of sexual repression built into it . . . It may be the one road to freedom open to women, men, and that emerging majority, the rest of us.’
Bond was the most visible non-binary person at the time, a pioneer who as well as creating the pronoun v had invented the gender-inclusive honorific Mx, now so prevalent that my English bank offers it as an option. The experience of encountering someone who insisted on claiming their own gender was so exciting it made me feel dizzy. My feelings of confinement would start to lift each time I walked across the East Village to Joe’s Pub, climbing the big steps on Lafayette with my heart running a little fast. I always sat at a table in the front, usually with a friend or two, drank a glass of bourbon and waited for the things that weighed on me to be transformed. I was never sure if it would happen, but it always did, and afterwards I was at a loss to say exactly what had taken place, only that I felt some constriction or binding had been removed and that my body was streaming with life.
There was a cover Bond used to do at the time of two linked songs from near the end of Kate Bush’s 2005 album Aerial. The first was a dreamy account of a naked moonlit swim on a deserted beach, a testament to voluptuous bodily pleasure. Then the sun came up and the mood changed with it, becoming witchy and feral. Bond stood poised on the edge of chaos, controlling dark knots of energy that swirled through the room. It was physical, the sense of space expanding. It always reminded me of Lorca, who in his famous lecture on duende said of the flamenco singer Pastora Pavon: ‘she managed to tear through the scaffolding of the song, but allow through a furious burning duende.’ A few paragraphs on, he added: ‘when this escape is perfected, everyone feels the effects.’
I loved hearing those songs, but they were only a prelude to the psychic turmoil of the closing number, ‘22nd Century’, which Viv always introduced the same way. ‘This is a song by a Bahamian voodoo priest by the name of Exuma, but I do feel that it speaks to my experience and the experience of my people.’ Then v would snap the word HA, and launch into a death rattle of images, swaying like a cobra. Back in 1970, Exuma had looked into a dark glass, seeing a strange ashy version of the decades ahead. He predicted a world where everything was in apocalyptic disarray. It came very fast, the words tumbling over each other, a vision of turbulence and instability that hung menacingly in the air. A plague in the 1990s that made me think of Aids, and now of course of Covid-19. Men becoming women, women becoming men. Animal liberation, liberation of women, the end of disease, no babies being born, man as his own god, no oxygen in the air. It was coming and it was coming now, radiant and terrifying. Viv’s head was flung back, hair sleeked into a chignon, arms aloft, clawing the future into being.
*
The Obeah man Exuma might have written ‘22nd Century’, but the most famous rendition belongs to Nina Simone, though it nearly dropped out of history altogether. She recorded it in February 1971 as part of the session for Here Comes the Sun, but it wasn’t included on the album or written in the session log. It didn’t resurface again until 1998, when a researcher who was putting together a compilation album stumbled across it in the RCA vaults, where I imagine it had been pulsing ominously in the cloistered dark.
Simone could find deep registers of emotion in even the flimsiest of lyrics, and she could also channel those emotions towards political ends. The most powerful numbers in her repertoire were the ones that allowed her to express mixed feelings, to carry rage, hatred, bitterness alongside yearning, joy coupled with despair. She once said she had a narrow vocal range, but she knew how to make her voice change shape, roiling from gravel to honey and back again. Like ‘Pirate Jenny’ and ‘Mississippi Goddam’, ‘22nd Century’ is one of the gravel songs, in which her ongoing vision of liberation is yoked to a nine-minute fantasy of retribution and punishment, judgement day come at last. Exuma’s apocalypse song allows her to slice back and forth, a prophetess of a post-human future in which all the tortuous old bodily categories have been dissolved.
Guitar, shaker, something wooden, clicking out a clave. Then steel drums rolling repeated notes. She comes in at her leisure, almost remote against the pulsing calypso rhythm, unfolding a harrowing vision of unbreathable air, deformed and damaged people. Everything is changing, changing, changing. Gender has become unstable, right wing slips into left, the people with the power no longer have control, time itself upends. Her voice is menacing, absolutely authoritative and yet she also wrings something joyful from the litany of disasters ahead. The drums bubble as she bends a wordless aaaaaa, keening slowly, keening fast. Dogs and death, the end of marriage, the end of god. She shouts it out like a preacher, hexing the powers that be. ‘Don’t try to sway me over to your way. Your day, your day will go away.’ Near the end she shifts into a rapid-fire scat, language itself breaking down into syllable and sound. It’s frightening in the way that freedom is frightening: a world in which all the things that occasion subjugation can no longer be said to exist.
Simone’s version of ‘22nd Century’ is an artefact of the same political moment as Philip Guston’
s Klan paintings, emerging in response to the shattering events of the late 1960s, when it seemed as if the civil rights movement had been destroyed by the assassination or imprisonment of many of its leaders. The Nina singing was a woman in frank despair. Her marriage to Andy Stroud, the ex-cop who managed her career, had just broken up. She’d recently left what she’d taken to calling the United Snakes of America and gone into exile, but like her friend James Baldwin she’d fled pursued by ghosts. As she recounted in her memoir, I Put a Spell on You, they were all dragging along behind her: her father, her sister, the movement, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, her marriage and all her hopes, every one of them a corpse.
She’d come late to the civil rights movement, but once she decided to involve herself she’d gone all in, total commitment. Like Andrea Dworkin, like Malcolm X, it had taken her a while to process the stunning realisation that the injustices she’d experienced and witnessed were not reality per se, the natural and permanent order of events, but instead a deliberate system built on exclusion and supremacy: a situation that could be resisted, perhaps even remade. What she remembered from her childhood in Tryon, North Carolina was silence. No one spoke about the racism that everyone could see, and she understood even then that the silence was a product of violence, the consequence of an unspoken and omnipresent physical threat. ‘I had not made a connection between the fights I had and any wider struggle for justice because of how I was raised’, she explained. ‘The Waymon way was to turn away from prejudice and to live your life as best you could, as if acknowledging the existence of racism was in itself a kind of defeat.’
Her name wasn’t Nina back then. She was born Eunice Waymon in 1933, a month after Susan Sontag, the sixth of eight children. When she was three, her capable, beloved father nearly died from an intestinal obstruction. She was appointed his nurse through the long and painful convalescence, making him liquid meals from eggs and sugar and washing the ugly wound perhaps ten times a day while her mother kept the family afloat working as a housekeeper for white people. Mary Kate Waymon was a Methodist preacher, a cold, purposeful woman; in Simone’s own word a ‘fanatic’ who disparaged all worldly things, regarding even popular songs as sinful and polluting. The whole family was musical, but Eunice was unprecedented in her talent, and from the moment she first picked out ‘God Be With You ’Til We Meet Again’ in the key of F, her legs too short to reach the pedals, it was decreed that she would become the first black American concert pianist, a phrasing she stuck to throughout her life, though she must have known by adulthood that at least three women had preceded her to the title, Hazel Harrison, Natalie Hinderas and Philippa Schuyler.