Concerning Consequences STUDIES IN ART, DESTRUCTION, AND TRAUMA Kristine Stiles The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London KRISTINE STILES is the France Family Professor of Art, Art Flistory, and Visual Studies at Duke University. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by Kristine Stiles All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 12345 ISBN­13: 978­0­226­77451­0 (cloth) ISBN­13: 978­0­226­77453­4 (paper) ISBN­13: 978­0­226­30440­3 (e­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226304403.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloguing­in­Publication Data Stiles, Kristine, author. Concerning consequences : studies in art, destruction, and trauma / Kristine Stiles, pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978­0­226­77451­0 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978­0­226­77453­4 (paperback : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978­0­226­30440­3 (e­book) 1. Art, Modern — 20th century. 2. Psychic trauma in art. 3. Violence in art. I. Title. N6490.S767 2016 709.04'075 —dc23 2015025618 © This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48­1992 (Permanence of Paper). In conversation with Susan Swenson, Kim Jones explained that the drawing on the cover of this book depicts directional forces in "an X­man, dot­man war game." The rectangles represent tanks and fortresses, and the lines are for tank movement, combat, and containment: "They're symbols. They're erased to show movement. 111 draw a tank, or I'll draw an X, and erase it, then re­draw it in a different posmon.... But when they're killed they're erased and fl A gh0St image­ 80 the erasing is 3 vefy 'mPortant elemen of the war drawings.... The important thing is that it's always 2005^ (SUSan Swenson' conversation with Kim Jones: April 25 0 1 4 W"°rkC'ty; WarP™<*™^ NY: Pierogi 2005], 4). Two years earl.er, Jones described his "war drawings" as mages 0 , hat ^ ends„ ^ q ^ ^ ^ A Studio Vuit wuh Km Jones, a fifteen­minute video codirected bv ' David Schmidlapp and Steve Staso (2003). Teaching A Dead Hand To Draw: Kim Jones, War, and Art (2007)' I Basic training psychologically authorizes people to kill before combat even be­ gins (figure 18). One Vietnam veteran remembered that his "drill sergeant forced the squad to crush kittens to death in their hands," reported clinical psycholo­ gist Edward Tick in War and the Soul (2005). When this soldier was unable to do the act and broke down, "declaring that it was wrong," he was "shamed until near breaking." Then, he killed his kitten. He "cried over the kitten's death," but was later able "to kill people without remorse."2 This soldier killed with a "dead hand —a term that Kim Jones, also a Marine and Vietnam veteran, would later coin in another context. Jones arrived at this association in an artist's book/sculpture he made by hand, entitled Teaching a Dead Hand to Draw, begun in 1976 and not completed until 1995—an object to which I shall return in the conclusion. For now, I wish only to introduce Jones's title as the pretext for pointing out that the hand that draws an image from the imagination (whether in pictorial, sculptural, or per­ formative language) is also the hand that draws and fires a gun. Moreover, a dead hand is a corporeal instrument able to extend the psyche trained to kill into the act itself.The relationship between a dead and a live hand is the genera­ tive operation at work in how Kim Jones translated the language of war trauma into the languages of art. Khaki Marine Shirt (2005) is a stunning demonstration of Jones's decoding. This composite object is simultaneously a wearable shirt of Marine military issue and a drawing/sculpture. On the back of the shirt, Jones drew graphic symbols of troops and movements on a ground painted white. The drawing de­ picts the opposing forces of a battle in spare black graphic signs of Xs and dots, as well as rectangles for tanks and fortresses; lines for tank movement, combat, and containment; and directional forces in a "war that never ends ... an X-man, dot-man war game."3 As Jones explains: I hey have no gender. They re Xs and dots. They're symbols. They're erased to show movement. 111 draw a tank, or I'll draw an X, and erase it, then re-draw it in a different position. Or 111 make a line of tanks that shows them moving FIGURE 18. Kim Jones, Walk from WPA to White House to Vietnam Memorial, April 30, 1983, Washington. Performance sponsored by Washington Project for the Arts. Photo­ graph © Mark Gulezian, Quicksilver Photographers. Courtesy of Kim Jones and Pierogi Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. through their two-dimensional world. But when they're killed they're erased and that leaves a ghost image. So the erasing is a very important element of the war drawings... .The important thing is that it's always changing.4 Jones augmented the drawing by adding a wood frame on the middle of the back, which is also overpainted in white with line drawings that continue the action.The frame is embedded in the shirt and projects from it, isolating a sec­ tion of the larger drawing that appears overall to be a circular encampment, framed as such in the middle of the back, this part of the drawing also doubles forand looks like a target, marking its wearer as the object of assault. In addition 'o its original function as a shirt, the framing device enables the shirt/drawing/ sculpture to be converted into a tabletop/cover that stabilizes the object flatly °n a surface where the drawing may be observed more closely, as if by those who ould plan battle strategy. Thus does Khaki Marine Shirt serve multiple pur- P ses, as do many military items carried into the theater of battle. ^ Photographed wearing this drawing/sculpture/tabletop object, with his covered in pantyhose, Jones became a generic Marine with the burden of orn on his back, targeted for death. Jones has noted that his war draw- shL^ '"'<e 3 ^'ary~^'ke a WI"iter keeping a daily diary."5 In this way, the very Marin11 ^ ^at'< recor<^s a daily meditation on his inner life, his memories as a test 3n^ ^'S cont'nued sense of self as a soldier. But the photograph also at- 'he sh'' C ^Ct t'13t S'tS uneasily on d's back, as the embedded frame distorts i forcing Jones s body into an unnatural pose. Jones's naked arms ex- I TEACHING A DEAD HAND TO DRAW tend awkwardly from the garment's short sleeves, and his "dead hand" dangles ready to do battle and draw the war of which it is a specter. Khaki Marine Shirt must be understood both as a work of art and a relic of the Vietnam War that has never ended for Jones, whose art must be considered the precise aesthetic expression of the Vietnam War for how his unique language of artistic forms simultaneously indexes and expresses its physical conditions and psychologi­ cal toll. II. The kitten story recounted above amplifies Jones's Rat Piece, carried out in the Union Gallery at California State University, Los Angeles, on February 17, 1976. At the beginning of this event and in the company of viewers, Jones trans­ formed himself into his persona that became known as Mudman. Disrobing and covering parts of his naked body in mud, he then pulled pantyhose over his head to cover his face and strapped onto his back a towering macabre sculp­ tural apparatus made of (among other materials) twigs, foam rubber, and mud lashed together with electrical tape. Spotting a photographer taking pictures of his action in the gallery, Jones asked if any had been taken before he had donned the mask. When the answer came back negative, Jones is reported to have commented: Good, because I don't want my face in this."6 As "perfor­ mance is not acting for Jones, his insistence on visual anonymity reinforced an aesthetic determination to draw the representation of a "mudman" such that actions undertaken as that icon would stand in for the experiences of others.8 Jones then read a text that referred to a range of emotions, which one viewer de­ scribed as feelings about his nakedness, the structure on his back, reactions to his performance and to himself as though the structure were part of his physi­ cal being, feeling like a mad thing caught in the wind, trying to escape and to identify his feelings. 0 Another witness remembered that the performance had a theme of needing recognition."10 Following his verbal commentary, Jones doused three rats confined in a cage with lighter fluid, and burned them alive.11 The rats screeched as they burned, and Jones bent down and screamed along with the tortured animals.12 In this tragic action, Jones pictured the viciousness of war and its haunt­ ing residue in his imagination, conduct, and very ability to endure senseless talitv. In his screams, Jones dislodged parts of the radical intrusion of the p nt of war and death on his psyche that is the legacy of trauma, defined nctly as a normal response to extreme stress resulting in chronic anxiety, also presented the public with a faceless apparition able to carry out such '°'ence as a means in itself, and violence as a force to conjure the may em of the Vietnam War.