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 History, and Visual Studies at Duke University.

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77451-0 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77453-4 (paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-30440-3 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226304403.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Stiles, Kristine, author. Concerning consequences: studies in art, destruction, and trauma / Kristine Stiles, pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-226-77451-0 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-77453-4 (paperback : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-30440-3 (e-book) 1. Art, Modern-20th century. 2. Psychic trauma in art. 3. Violence in art. I. Title. N6490.S767 2016 709.04075—dc23

2015025618

In conversation with Susan Swenson, Kim Jones explained that the drawing on the cover of this book depicts directional forces in an X-man, dot-man war game." The rectangles represent tanks and fortresses, and the lines are for tank movement, combat, and

contamment: "They're symbols. They're erased to show movement. FaW 3 tank'or 111 draw an x- and erase it, then re-draw it in a ' "em P°S,t,on-''' But whe" they're killed they're erased and

that le^s a ghost image. So the erasing is a very important element of the war drawings.... The important thing is that it's always 2005^7 v7"S7nS°n' "Conversation wjth Kim Jones: April 25, 20051 4)7 ^ Clty' KlmJone*- War Paint [Brooklyn, NY: Pierogi, images of ear'ler' J°neS described his "war drawings" as neVCr CndS Dead TsZiol rr " ^' ° »"»<>

What's the word? Thunderbird. How's it sold? Good and cold. What's the jive? Bird's alive! What's the price? Thirty twice.

Americans recognized this advertising jingle in the 1960s as the commercial that the Ernest and Julio Gallo Winery ran on the radio to sell Thunderbird, an inexpensive fortified wine that it developed in the 1950s. When William Pope.L performed Thunderbird Immolation in 1978, however, he did not know that Gallo had created the beverage especially for inner-city blacks, whose habit of mixing large quantities of forty-proof port with sugar and lemon juice was the inspira tion for its taste. Aiming to become the "Campbell Soup of the wine industry, Gallo sold some 2.5 million cases of Thunderbird in its first year of produc tion.2 Ernest Gallo, who had capitalized on this extremely lucrative market, also delighted in telling the story of how he would drive through skid-row neigh borhoods, spot someone on the sidewalk, roll down his window, and call out. What s the word?" The immediate answer came back: "Thunderbird. ' Pope.L did not need to know the historical minutia of capitalist exploitation, class arrogance, social difference (and indifference), and racism that charac terize Gallo's tale, because it is the story of his life. The artist's depiction of the poverty of his family is best exemplified in his memory of his grandmother and aunt's plight:

My grandmother would walk into stranger's yards uninvited, pull up their weeds and call it dinner. In her own yard, at dawn, my Aunt Jenny clubbed pos sums on their heads and called it dinner.... I can't stand an empty cupboard. I think it's immoral. At bottom, I think it's scary and lonely.4 1. My heart is a hole

2. What docs that mean? 1.

2. What do you mean nothing?

1. It means it is very, very sad. A receptacle —

2. For what? Is it sad now?

1. For sound Yes ft* 1.

4 2. W"hat kind of sound?d?» * £»...**F N)i» C»Was it sad yesterday?"~ n>uta tf •• Bone. The grinding together Of bone Yes *

FIGURE 21. William Pope.L, excerpt from Hole Theory, Parts: Four & Five, January 2002. First published in William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Man in Americae, edited by Mark H.C. Bessire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). Courtesy of the artist.

"Scary and lonely" are attributes of those scurrilous human beings whose very existence is socially made to be felt as an affront, an insult, to others. This is the psychic territory to which Thunderbird beckons as an aid to numbing and, simultaneously, the will to self-destruction. Pope.L narrates the somatic affect of this history of cause and effect when he writes:

1 am always afraid. I am always American. I am always black. I am always a man. The ghost inside the claim.5

This is the voice of an indomitable and exquisitely poetic spirit (figure 21). Pope.L chose a place outside of the entrance to 420 Broadway, then home to such famed New York galleries as Castelli and Sonnabend, to perform Thun derbird Immolation. There he disgorged, appropriately from a brown paper bag, objects of his performance: two bottles of Thunderbird, a bottle of Wild Irish Pose, a can of Coca-Cola, a yellow plastic cup, and a box of wooden kitchen matches. These he placed on a yellow square cloth on the sidewalk. Taking off s shoes, he seated himself on this yellow curbside dais, removing his glasses d putting them before him next to the cup. He then encircled himself with at<-hes, staging an arena for his action. Throughout the event, he spoke to no e a'so us^d the matches to write out letters, forming words on the edge cloth in front of him. His only form of verbal communication, therefore,

I THUNDERBIRD IMMOLATION transpired through words created from the same tools that suggested his pos sible end. His language insinuated not only the spark of a corporeal conflagra tion, but the inflammatory state of his speech. Together, language and action established a visually volatile street situation. Pope.L then began to meditate, sitting cross-legged in a yoga-like pose. He used the color yellow as a formal device to punctuate and unify his perfor mance. Yellow functioned for him in a distinctive and symbolic way (in the yel low square of cloth, the yellow plastic cup, and the yellow socks) to indicate, he suggested, the color symbolizing wisdom in "tantric religion," while the Thun- derbird recalled the magical symbol for thunder and lightening, or the powerof nature for Native Americans.6 Having established for himself this atmosphere of meditative wisdom, from time to time he mixed the alcohol and the Coke together, never drinking a drop, and poured the mixture over himself. The im pression must have been that his immolation was imminent. When a gallery official came out to request that he leave, Pope.L gathered up his belongings and departed immediately. Out of place in the center of the white international art trade, Pope.L repre sented himself as the quintessential crazy street person who is bad for business. Stationed near the entrance to fashionable mercantile establishments, this ap parently itinerant black man reeked of alcohol, appeared to be ready to set him self aflame, and, probably most importantly, intimidated customers and drove away business. Thunderbird Immolation (and other street works like Roach Motel, 1978, in which the artist crawled the streets with the insect killer box attached to his nappy head) is socially aggressive and confrontational in the manner of Adrian Piper's early Catalysis pieces.7 Pope.L was not only not welcome to sit in front of chic commercial art galleries, where he was making a scene, but his mode of scenic production —performance art—was itself not recognized as a serious aesthetic form of representation outside of the marginal circumstances of alternative spaces at that time. Both the artist's person and his style of art threatened the aesthetic, economic, and racial status quo.

Pope.L has said that his performances aim to "rub myths together [to] try to

8 make fire." Visually presenting himself as an animated tableau, a living picture, Pope.L represented an aesthetic metaphor for the negation of American liberal democracy, standing for equality and justice; he also embodied the hypocrisy of these claims, metonymically being linked to the oppressive, separatist, and ex ploitative conditions of both his artistic and his social cultures even as he coun tered and exposed them. In short, Pope.L presented himself as "the ghost inside the claim," or what Kobena Mercer has described in another context as one o the 'invisible men' of the late-capitalist underclass ... [who] have become the bearers—the signifiers—of the hopelessness and despair of our so-called pos Modern condition." These men are

246 | THUNDERBIRD IMMOLATION over-represented in statistics on homicide and suicide, misrepresented in the media as the personification of [alcohol], drugs, disease and crime[;] such in visible men, like their all-too-visible counterparts, suggest that black mascu linity is not merely a social identity in crisis. It is also a key site of ideological representation, a site upon which the nation's crisis comes to be dramatized, demonized, and dealt with 9

The inflammable performance of Pope.L's black male body doubled and intensi fied the representational power of this presentational situation, contaminating both the myth of art as a universally transcendent vehicle for personal transfor mation and the myth of American culture as universally democratic. While performance art is fundamentally a figurative practice deeply inter twined with the development of figurative painting, sculpture, and photogra phy from history painting and various types of social realism to documentary, Pope.L's performative intervention in the spaces of the elite Soho commercial art market also realized a high level of conceptual abstraction. For Thunderbird Immolation rendered perceptible and palpable a moment in the alienation of a subject reduced to an object that contemplates this affect in a determined act of self-representation. Aesthetic actions, realized within such eruptive contexts, characterize the social criticality of performance art and establish its efficacy at the juncture between culture and real-time politics. Pope.L's dress for the performance reinforced his vivid understanding of this interconnection: he wore a neat white pressed shirt, a small black bow tie, and black trousers, establishing his conceptual and ideological connection to the impeccable appearance of his self-selected mentors: Malcolm X, Patrice Lumumba, and William Wells Brown (the latter widely considered to be the first African-American novelist, playwright, and historian). Like them, Pope.L took pains to display his intellectual cultivation through the sanctioned trappings of white gentlemanly attire, wearing a costume that bespoke his internal dignity and personal achievement. Thus he mixed his art and social activism with the visual decorum of white patriarchy, only to disturb the impression of balanced reason by pouring the degrading and volatile fortified wine over his body. 1 here is much to be said about the careful formal elements in Thunderbird Immolation, formal elements that conceptually reinforce the socially critical message of William Pope.L's art. The square shape of his yellow mat, for ex ample, recalled the monochromatic minimalist painting that played a key role ln his development as an artist, and, in particular, his abiding interest in the white monochromes of Robert Ryman. Indeed, a comment by Pope.L about Ry- man must be considered central to a broader understanding of Thunderbird Im molation:

As the son of Robert Ryman, it is my job to walk in his footsteps to the front door of the family mansion and burn it to the ground; then claim that the con- 'agration is not so much a rejection or celebration but a negotiation-worth-

I 'HUNDERBIRD IMMOLATION having, which must be lived consciously in the space between contradictions. In this sense, there is no such thing as contradiction, only the fire that burns amidst the networks made up of them [author's emphasis].10

Pope.L's anger and incisive intelligence is as unmistakable here, as is his penetrating insight into the deeply interrelated conditions and histories of painting and performance. The statement demonstrates how the artist trans mogrified painting into performance through a stunning articulation of poetic and artistic logic:

I could never see myself throwing that much white (weight) around He must think he's some kind of super-hero who only eats white food and only helps white people by making only white culture.... [H]is was a sociology of painting (whether he was hip to it or not).11

Pope.L had already performed Thunderbird Immolation, a work of art that pro vided his means to realize the somatic dimension of this "space between contra dictions," twenty-three years before he offered this astute interpretation of the patriarchal and racial (white) authority that underpins the audacity of Ryman's white monochrome paintings (and I, for one, shall never see Ryman's work the same again). Pope.L expresses his fury, symptomatically enough, in what is best known as "black humor," wherein the insensitivity, paradox, and cruelty of experience and existence are displayed in ordinary characters or situations that are morbidly and absurdly exaggerated far beyond the limits of normal satire or irony. As LeRoi Jones (known later as Amiri Baraka) pointed out in his discussion of the black minstrel tradition in Blues People, the "darky" is perfectly poised to pre sent black humor, and was, "at his most human excursion into the mainstream of American society,... a comic figure."12 The "darky," or black man (for black women have historically been invisible), is the prototype for the grotesquene associated with "black" humor, whose devices are that of tragic farce. Pope.L s humor inhabits this domain, investigating pathos and pushing it to the exis tentially absurd. For what is more extreme and ludicrous than a human being driven to douse himself in liquor while sitting on the curb? As Samuel Beckett once proclaimed, "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that.

Ill

Pope.L matured in a cultural climate where one watched nationwide race riots and the burning of the inner cities on the nightly television news. This was the technology that also brought home other such incendiary acts as that of the Buddhist monkThich Qua'ng Dure, who immolated himself on June 11, 1963, a a busy intersection in downtown Saigon in protest of the American-sponsore government treatment of Buddhists. In October, 1967, some ten years before

248 | THUNDERBIRD IMMOLATION Pope.L began his Crawl pieces, the works of art in which he "lowered" himself to the street in order to bring attention to what he calls "a troubled site," John A. Williams published his extraordinary book The Man Who Cried I Am, a novel that narrates the story of 1940s segregation, interracial love, African-American expa triation, and CIA racial intrigue. This critically acclaimed volume was described as a "seething, angry book," and as "intensely American."13 The man who is forced to cry "I am," is what Pope.L lowers himself to sense; "I can smell it," he wrote, describing the scent of fear at the level of the street.14 Thelma Golden has described this place as "the most despairing level [of] 'extinction.'"15 These are what are now called the "homeland" sites and backgrounds that must be born in mind to understand such an "intensely American" performance as Thunderbird Immolation. It should also be noted that Pope.L performed Thunderbird Immo lation during a period in American history when rates of violent crime (murder, rape, and robbery) increased dramatically in urban areas, when the phrase "law and order" increasingly filled the empty discourse of presidents and politicians, when the death penalty was reinstated, and when record numbers of black men began to be incarcerated.16 Also in the mid-1970s, the white supremacist group Aryan Nations appeared as the influence of the David Duke-led Ku Klux Klan waned. Thunderbird Immolation and the Crawl pieces, from the late 1970s to the present, were anything but safe art performances, then or now. Pope.L's performances belong to the mental, social, and political theater of the absurd. Few artists in any medium have been able to capture existen tial absurdity with the acute accuracy of Pope.L's performances, except perhaps William Wegman. As in some of Wegman's early video performances, Pope.L visualizes poignant existential turmoil, then adds the incomparable dimension of racism. In the end, his work is a form of revenge against the abuses that so ciety supports without appearing to break any laws. As Lenny Bruce once noted, Satire is tragedy plus time." Pope.L's humor is akin to that of Lenny Bruce in bis ability to conjoin rage with farce. Bringing humor into the context of racism reflects as well what Greg Tate observed about the liberating cultural impact of black self-confidence that was inspired by the civil rights and Black Power movements:

[1 hey] freed up more black artists to do work as wonderfully absurdist as black life itself. The impulse toward enmeshing self-criticism and celebration pres et in the most provocative avant-garde black art of the '70s and the '80s ... owes a debt to [those who made] so much noise about the mythic beauties of blackness that these artists could traffic in the ugly and mundane sides with just as much ardor.17

A long history of art in the street stretches from Dada to the International bituationists, happenings, Fluxus, agitprop and guerrilla actions, performance, nd so called public art. Pope.L's performances occupy a special place within bis history that belongs to those artists who hope to heal, or, in Pope.L s words,

249 I 'HUNDERBIRD IMMOLATION "bring attention to ... a situation taken for granted and needful of restora tion."18 His performances point to the gap between prosperity and the dispos sessed. In Singing, for example, the artist performed at a men's shelter on 3rd Street between Second and Third Avenues in New York, close to where his family lived, and where "several family members probably were housed or participated in programs. .. "19 His aunt stayed at "the women's shelter nearby." Thinking about the context of this environment, Pope.L observed:

Whereas the women's shelter was always quiet, the men's shelter was a real hangout. Every day guys would sit on picnic tables in the courtyard and talk aloud and share information about where to get food, clothing, a drink... the men's shelter could be a raucous site. A site of laughter. A site of violence. Sing ing brought the show to the show, if you will. It was the overplaying of mirth against a backdrop of greed, need, and struggle. The acting out in Singing was analogous to the acting out in the courtyard at meal times, as if to say: "Fuck it, I sing if I wanna sing, dammit. Come what may. And it will.

There is a difference between Pope.L's work and the histories of live, per formed art, especially by whites. As Richard Powell has pointed out about black diasporal cultures, there seems to be present a "structural dependence upon an acknowledged collection of life experiences, social encounters, and personal ordeals, the sum of which promotes a solidarity and camaraderie that creates community."20 Powell further notes that diasporal culture is "characterized by forms that are not only alternative to mainstream counterparts, but proactive and aggressive in [their] desire to articulate, testify, and bear witness to... cul tural difference."21 I have focused on Thunderbird Immolation because it embodies the range of themes William Pope.L has explored in his performances for over two decades, and finally because two photographs of the performance contain clues to the cumulative purpose of his work. When one studies a documentary picture of Thunderbird Immolation, it is possible to discern the following letters spelled out in wooden kitchen matches: "KF. ART WONDE " In another photograph of the performance, one can decipher the word "MAKE." Today, Pope.L no longer remembers what he wrote. But thinking about the fundamentally desperate content of his performances, the cruelty of US culture, and the survival issues of his life, is it too far-fetched to suggest that in the midst of threatening his own self-immolation, Pope.L was writing: "MAKE ART WONDERFUL?"

250 | THUNDERBIRD IMMOLATION Theory, accessed on May 31, 2007, at http://theorynow.blogspot.com/2007/05/perfor mance-simulacra-reenactment-as.html. 126. Mark Cameron Boyd, "Performance Simulacra," Theorynow.bIogspot.com. 127. Pil and Galia Kolletiv, "Retro/Necro: From Beyond the Grave of the Politics of Re- Enactment," Art Papers 31, no. 6 (November/December 2007): 45. 128. Philip Auslander, "Liveness," in Elin Diamond, ed., Performance and Cultural Poli tics (London: Routledge, 1996),198; quoted in Pil and Galia Kolletiv, 46. 129. Guy Debord, La Societe du spectacle [1967] (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 151; quoted in Sven Lutticken, "Planet of the Remakes," New Left Review 25 (January-February, 2004): 119. 130. Gilles Deleuze, Difference et repetition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968): 92,123-25, 383-84; quoted in Lutticken. 131. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans, by Walter Kaufmann(New York: Random House, 1974). 132. Lutticken, 119. 133. Abramovic, interviewed by Thompson and Weslien, "PURE RAW," 46. 134. Joseph Roach, "History, Memory, Necrophilia," in Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, eds., The Ends of Performance (New York: New York University Press, 1998): 29; quoted in Pil and Galia Kolletiv, 51. 135. Abramovic, quoted in Moulton, 87. 136. Ibid. Abramovic permitted the Belgian director and choreographer Michael Laub to direct The Biography Remix (2004), a version of The Biography that ceded Laub full con trol over the production, including permission to eliminate what Abramovic described as the "strong Balkan element" in her work. 137. Abramovic, interviewed by Thompson and Weslien, "PURE RAW , 39. 138. Letter from Marina Abramovic, in Brazil, to her brother Velimir Abramovic, April 1991, in Marina Abramovic: Artist Body, 416. 139. A link exists between these works and Abramovic's interest in the study of mag netic fields and electricity by the Serbian inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer Nicola Tesla (1856-1943). This is a potentially productive area of fur ther research on Abramovic. 140. Marina Abramovic: Public Body, 88. 141. Ibid., 118. 142. Marina Abramovic and Velimir Abramovic, "Time-Space-Energy, 406.

THUNDERBIRD IMMOLATION: WILLIAM POPE.L

AND BURNING RACISM

1. This essay first appeared in Mark Bessire, ed., William Pope L. Eracism (C ambridge, MA, and Portland, ME: MIT Press and the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, 2002), 36-42. 2. Laura Lee, The Name's Familiar: Mr. Leotard. Barbie, and ChefBoyardee (Gretna, LA:

Pelican, 1999), cited in http://www.uselessknowledge.com/ll/gallo.shtml. 3. Ellen Hawkes, Blood and Wine: The Unauthorized Story of the Gallo Wine Empire New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993; reported in "Ernest Gallo," PBS and WGBH/Frontline, 1998. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/president/players/gallo.html. 4. William Pope.L, e-mail to Mark H. C. Bessire, December 17,2001; hereafter Pope. / Bessire. 5. Ibid. 6. William Pope.L, fax to the author, June 23, 2000.

419 |NOTES TO PAGES 241-246 7. The artist has acknowledged Piper's performances for the ways in which they opened a space for a new kind of "readability and legibility in a way that no other artist was doing at that time." Pope.L/Bessire. 8. William Pope.L, e-mail to the author, January 17, 2002. 9. Kobena Mercer, "Engendered Species: Danny Tisdale and Keith Piper,'" Artforum 30, no. 10 (Summer 1992): 75. 10. Pope.L/Bessire. 11. Ibid. 12. LeRoi Jones, Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America and the Music That Developed from It (New York: William Morrow, 1963), 83. 13. Graham Hodges, foreword to John A, Williams, The Man Who Cried I Am, second edition (New York and Chicago: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1967,1985), unpaginated. 14. William Pope.L, fax to the author, June 23, 2000. 15.Thelma Golden, "My Brother," in Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Con temporary American Art, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), 22. 16. Manning Marable, in "Racism, Prisons and the Future of Black America," has writ ten, "The rate of incarceration of black Americans in 1989 had even surpassed that experi enced by blacks who still lived under the apartheid regime of South Africa." http://www .zmag.org/racismandblam.htm. 17. Greg Tate, "Cult-Nats Meet Freaky-Deke," in Ftyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contmporary America (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1992), 200. 18. William Pope.L, fax to the author, June 23, 2000. 19. Ibid. All of the following discussion of "Singing" comes from this fax to the author. 20. Richard Powell, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 13. 21. Ibid., 15.

BARBARA TURNER SMITH'S HAUNTING

1. This essay first appeared in The 21st Century Odyssey Part II: The Performances of Barbara T. Smith (Pomona, CA: Pomona College Museum of Art, 2005), 37-50. 2. Barbara Turner Smith, telephone conversation with the author, September 4, 2004. Smith and I exchanged numerous e-mails related to questions and drafts of this essay. Rather than litter the text with footnotes, I note here that all subsequent quotations of the artist come from these e-mails. 3. Smith was interested enough in McLuhan's work to make Scan I (1974), a work ad dressed to his ideas. 4. Edward A. Shanken has written a history of the photocopy machine in art:

Starting in 1962, the New York School of Correspondence Art, founded by Ray John son, used photocopiers as a tool for propagating Mail Art.... Bruno Munari's "Ma chine Art Manifesto" of 1938 anticipated his series Xerographie Originale begun in 1964. Taking a more conceptual approach, German artist Timm Ulrichs's Die Photo- kopie der Photokopie der Photokopie (1967)... photocopied] an encyclopedia entry about photocopying, then copying the copy through ninety-nine successive genera tions, revealing the intrinsic qualities of the process as the image degraded. Sonia Landy Sheridan started using copy machines in the late 60s and was artist-in- residence at 3M, where she used their first color copier in 1969.

Edward Shanken, e-mail to the author, October 27, 2004.

420 I NOTES TO PAGES 246-252