Concerning Consequences
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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. 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 1 2 3 4 5 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 © This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1992 (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 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 " ^' ° »"»<> <o»raW: « chm d7 K'Te5' 3 v'deo codirected by avid Schmidlapp and Steve Staso (2003). Thunderbird Immolation: William Pope.L and Burning Racism (2002) I 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. II 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.