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Kristine Stiles 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). Barbara Turner Smith's Haunting (2005) "I tried to avoid the fact that I was shocked by the impact of the news all the time," Barbara Turner Smith commented, referring to daily media reports of human misery and suffering around the globe.2 Conscious of her "capacity to feel the pain, grief, and suffering of people I do not know," Smith concluded: "We can experience the depth of the human condition without it's being per­ sonal; that's the kind of haunting I have." Haunting permeates and informs Smith s art and life. From her early Xerox photocopy books and black paintings to performances that celebrate sexuality, sacrifice, spiritual quests, growth, and giving, her haunting signifies a pervasive yet generative consciousness of death that is the source of her deep sense of contingency and responsibility. Smith's awareness of the fragility of being—her inner gnawing and its link to interper­ sonal accountability—constitutes a self­regulating and self­reflexive aesthetic practice that entails both personal reflection and interdependent care. In early 1965, Barbara Turner Smith proposed to Gemini G.E.L., the Los Angeles­based artists' press of hand­printed limited edition prints, that she make a lithograph there. The print would have been an image of a gravestone about the size of the lithography stone. It would have been "chiseled looking," with a text that read "HERE LIES." A real flower would have been pressed into the surface of the print, obscuring the name of the dead person. The flower would have represented for her how "real life ... goes on and on." Smith's print would have been "a print of a stone on a stone with life in between." This would­ be print anticipated much that followed in her art. Smith had been working in the print collection at the Pasadena Art Museum s'nce i960, and she was excited about the possibility of realizing a print of her own. Informed that "Joseph Albers is busy at work at Gemini," Smith went home "fuming": Anyway, lithography was the print medium of the 19th century and not the media of NOW! What was the medium of our time, I asked? Copy machines! Which type was a truly new technology? I phoned around asking how mimeo­ graphs, photocopy machines, ditto, blueprints, etc., etc., were made. The only one that was truly different was Xerox. The image is made by electronically charged particles falling on the paper in the same configuration as the original on the plate above. These particles are plastic and need to go through a heat­ ing process to bond to the paper. The heat sinters, slightly melting the beads of plastic and they merge with the paper. So I rented the 914 Xerox machine and went nuts with it for months. Smith had recently read Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media (1964) and recognized the importance of new technologies in the creation of knowl­ edge.3 It may be difficult to recall today, when photocopy technology is taken for granted, that there was a culture without copy machines, or to appreciate the sense of unlimited possibilities to share information that they promised. But the shift from more traditional print technologies to copy machines was nothing short of revolutionary, and Barbara Smith was one of the first artists to realize its aesthetic potential.4 "I knew it was the future of communication, be­ cause once you get these machines out in every corner of every city, information transfers and people can write and self­publish their own books," she said; "and I am a populist." Smith achieved her "endless ideas" by leasing a copy machine manufactured by the Xerox Corporation. She began making photocopy books in 1966, laying real things on the copy plate: natural forms, like leaves, and found objects, like lace and fringe, that produced intricate hazy patterns. Smith then juxtaposed these images with copies of photographs, frequently of herself and her three children. In Broken Heart (1966), for example, Smith conjoined images of the organ of the heart (recto) and a picture of her daughter overlaid with geomet­ ric lines and a bisected circle (verso). In another work, Bond (1966), she photo­ copied the wrapper for the paper she used to make the books (recto) and con­ trasted that page with copies of photographs of her daughter and son (verso). Attentive to wordplay, Smith gave her book a title that simultaneously indicated its medium—Xerox on bond paper—and her more personal union with her chil­ dren. As these titles also suggest, Smith produced her Xerox books during one of the most difficult periods in her life, a time that led to separation from her husband and children and her eventual divorce in 1968. Literally coming to her rescue —like a deus ex machina, the Greek god that intervenes in a crisis­ photocopy technology provided Smith with multiple possibilities to picture her tumultuous inner and outer worlds. During this period, Smith dedicated herself to becoming the artist that she told her husband she would be when, in the 1950s, she informed him that she would "paint." She only realized the full measure of this promise when the couple dissolved their marriage after nearly two decades. The transition from housewife to artist provoked prolonged anxiety for Smith, who had enjoyed the security of a conventional upper­middle­class family life. But the role of tradi tional homemaker had also been a suffocating one — a role that Betty Friedan had brilliantly described as "the problem that has no name" in The Feminine 252 | BARBARA TURNER SMITH'S HAUNTING Mystique (1963). Friedan's book contributed to launching the feminist move­ ment, which would sustain Smith and to which she would contribute. In a work simultaneously symptomatic and declarative of her journey toward indepen­ dence, Smith preemptively recorded her liberation in Coming Out Party (1966), a paired set of images in one of the Xerox books. Standing coquettishly nude be­ hind a gossamer cloth, and literally coming out naked and performing nude be­ fore an unseen viewer, Smith asserted her bodily independence from the social and religious mores and traditions to which she had been committed. She also invited her husband to collaborate in making erotic images, but when he de­ clined she made erotic prints of herself. In the two­page layout called Undies (1966), Smith lay on top of the machine in bikini underpants, photocopying her lower torso and upper thighs. On the left­hand page, the weight of her body against the glass reveals the fold in her panties as they press into her labia, while on the facing page the inverted lace V­panel of her bikini points both up to her exposed navel and down to the cleft between her thighs. In Do Not Touch (1966), one photocopied page shows Smith's two hands and fingers, festooned with rings, seductively holding her labia apart to expose her clitoris pressed against the glass copy plate. She paired this image with a photocopy of her crotch, sitting astride the machine to expose pubic hair, labia, and upper thighs. While these body representations are sexually explicit, the blurry black­and­white technology of the photocopy veils the picture and pre­ vents direct visual access to the kind of graphic display favored in pornography. The pictures in the Xerox books signal Smith's first attempts to use her body to make art and, thus, belong to the early history of actions created solely for the pro­ duction of photographs.5 Moreover, they may be the first vaginal pictures staged for a camera in the history of body art;6 and Barbara Smith is certainly one of the first artists to use photocopy technology specifically for performative ends.7 Copying her body directly was only one of the ways in which Smith made images for the Xerox books.
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