Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art 2004 Library of Congress Control Number 2004100656 ISSN 15211223 ISBN 1890761062

Whiteness and in Contemporary Art

Maurice Berger issues in Cultural Theory 7 Center for Art and Visual Culture 2004 University of Maryland Baltimore County

Issues in Cultural Theory 7 Center for 2004 Art and Visual Culture

University of Maryland Baltimore County

Distributed by D.A.P. Distributed Art Publishers New York 2004 Whiteness r i and Race in L J Contemporary Art

Maurice Berger

with contributions by Wendy Ewald David Roediger Patricia J. Williams Issues in Cultural Theory 7 White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art 2004 Library of Congress Control Number 2004100656 ISSN 15211223 ISBN 1890761062

Published by the Center for Art and Visual Culture University of Maryland Baltimore County Baltimore Maryland 21250 www.umbc.edu/CAVC

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise (except for that copying permitted by Section 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the Publisher.

Exhibition schedule Center for Art and Visual Culture University of Maryland Baltimore County Baltimore, MD 9 October 2003 - 10 January 2004

International Center of Photography New York, NY 11 December 2004 - 6 March 2005

Venues in formation

Sponsors for the exhibition Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation Dorothea L. Leonhardt Foundation, Inc. Maryland State Arts Council

David Yager Foreword 8

Maurice Berger Acknowledgments 12

Patricia J. Williams Preface 16

Maurice Berger Invisible Man: An Introduction to Whiteness 22

Plates 33

Maurice Berger White: A Catalog of Works 44

Max Becher & Andrea Robbins • White Exotic 47

Nayland Blake . White Impurity 49

Nancy Burson . White Purity 51

Wendy Ewald . White Complexity 53

William Kentridge . White Complicity 55

Barbara Kruger . White Skin 57

Nikki S. Lee . White Privilege 59

Paul McCarthy & Mike Kelley • White Normal 63

Cindy Sherman . White Type 65

Gary Simmons . White Trash 67

Wendy Ewald White Girl’s Alphabet 70

David Roediger How Old and New Whitenesses Keep Showing Up, But Not by Themselves 90

Checklist of the Exhibition 104

Bibliography 108

Mission Statement 114 o

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CfQ rD t-t

Executive Director Center for Art and Visual Culture

Distinguished Professor of Art UMBC From the time I met Maurice Berger fifteen years ago, I knew immediately that our friendship would engage us intellectually and for many years. His thought-provoking and passionate writings and exhibitions, many on the subject of race and identity, have inspired me. In him I have met someone who fully understands the complex relationship between race and culture, an interest driven not by the desire to be current, but by pas¬ sion. Maurice has remained steadfast in his desire to look at this subject from multiple perspectives, always sensitive to the reality of how difficult it is to define and address. With this exhibition, White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art, and its catalog, Maurice once again provokes and inspires the viewer and reader. It is a project that asks as many questions as it answers, introducing us to new ideas and points of view while challenging persistent notions and stereotypes. In the end, it allows us to see and un¬ derstand race—a difficult subject that most of us would rather not think about or discuss—in new and even radical ways. It is our hope that this exhibition will have an impact both in Baltimore and nationally. During the show’s run at the Center for Art and Visual Cul¬ ture, we undertook a major educational initiative, employing the exhibition as a starting point for dialogue and artistic creation. The result has been encouraging: hundreds of public school students in Baltimore responded by creating artworks that ex¬ plored the issues central to the exhibition, a process that helped engender sensitivity and understanding. The work of these young people was exhibited around the UMBC campus; it added another layer of cultural significance to an already important exhibition.

9 This publication and exhibition are part of a contin¬ uum of rich, provocative, and content-driven projects organized by the Center for Art and Vi¬ sual Culture (CAVC) at UMBC. The Center, estab¬ lished as the Fine Arts Gallery in 1989, continues to focus on issues of race, identity, and culture through a range of exhibitions, publications, public art projects, and education initiatives. Finally, I would like to thank Maurice for his close friendship and deep commitment to the growth of the CAVC at UMBC.

Issues in Cultural Theory 7

Curator Center for Art and Visual Culture UMBC Fellow Vera List Center for Art &c Politics New School University New York acknowledgments This exhibition has been in the making for the past fifteen years. In many ways it began with a show I co-curated with Lowery Stokes Sims at the Hunter College Art Gallery in 1987—Race and Representation. The exhibition was the first to deal in depth with the issue of white racism and, as such, was also the first exhibition that defined whiteness as a racial category worthy of explo¬ ration and analysis. My own inquiry into white¬ ness also includes work in a context decidedly outside the art world. In 1999,1 published White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), an experimental, autobio¬ graphical text about my own racial coming-of-age as one of the few white kids in a predominantly black and Hispanic low-income housing project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Over this period, I also have searched for ways of contextu¬ alizing the issue of whiteness through art, actively seeking out work that directly and explicitly deals with the issue of white power, privilege, and racism. White: Whiteness and Race in Contempo¬ rary Art represents the culmination of this effort. I would like to thank a number of people for their assistance. Preeminently, I would like to acknowl¬ edge the unwavering support of friends and colleagues in the race studies movement: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Thelma Golden, Jennifer Gonza¬ lez, bell hooks, Simon Leung, Kobena Mercer, Maria Phillips, Adrian Piper, David Roediger, Lowery Stokes Sims, Michele Wallace, Cornell West, and Patricia J. Williams. I have learned much from them. The gallery staff was, as always, outstanding in its attention to every detail of the exhibition and catalog. Symmes Gardner, director of the Center

13 for Art and Visual Culture at UMBC, met the de¬ mands of this project with his usual wisdom, tal¬ ent, and patience. Renee van der Steldt was, as always, immensely helpful and astute, offering much needed support and advice. Antonia Gard¬ ner and John Alan Farmer served as editors in the finest tradition, attending to every editorial detail, both grammatical and stylistic, making this book stronger with each touch of their pen. Janet Ma- gruder, business manager, kept track of myriad details with her customary grace. William John Tudor’s outstanding exhibition design has gone far in helping to communicate the central issues of White. Guenet Abraham’s and Franc Nunoo- Quarcoo’s perceptive interpretation of the intel- " lectual and aesthetic issues of this exhibition resulted in a design for this catalog that is at once beautiful, resonant, and knowing. David Yager, executive director, once again has served as a powerful source of support and ideas, refusing to shy away from the complex and indeed contro¬ versial aspects of this exhibition. As usual, he en¬ couraged intellectual rigor and honesty, all in the spirit of progressive curatorial practice. On a personal note, I would like to thank my spouse, Marvin Heiferman, who offered ideas and editorial advice, each a significant contribution to this project. I thank the following foundations, organizations, and individuals for the generous funding they provided for White. This project would have suffered greatly without their generosity, goodwill, and commit¬ ment. In particular we would like to acknowledge our gratitude to Joel Wachs and Pamela Clapp of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Ray A. Graham III and Kathleen Shields of the

Issues in Cultural Theory 7 Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, Joanne Cassullo of the Dorothea F. Feonhardt Founda¬ tion, and Carla Dunlap of the Maryland State Arts Council. Our appreciation also goes to the following institu¬ tions and galleries that lent work to the exhibition: The Jewish Museum, New York, Metro Pictures, Sonnabend Gallery, and Feslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects. The essays written for this catalog by Wendy Ewald, David Roediger, and Patricia J. Williams are both exceptional and groundbreaking. I thank each of them for their extraordinary contribution. Finally, I would like to extend my gratitude to the artists in this exhibition: Max Becher & Andrea Robbins, Nayland Blake, Nancy Burson, Wendy Ewald, Willian Kentridge, Barbara Kruger, Nikki S. Fee, Paul McCarthy & Mike Kelley, Cindy Sherman, and Gary Simmons. Each has pursued a complex and uncompromising artistic vision. It has been a profound pleasure to work with them and to help facilitate their exploration of an issue rarely discussed or examined in the art world.

15 Professor of Law Columbia Law School New York James L. Dhor preface When my son was very young, he had enormous difficulty with what people meant when they referred to our being black. I’d given him all the best books, the uplifting material about struggle and triumph, with ennobling pictures and stir¬ ring stories. He knew about Martin Luther King and had read books about the necessity for black self-esteem and education and economic power and how beautiful we all were. I underscored the great crudeness of race as category—the com¬ plexity and imprecision of its meaning. Yet... “Grandma’s white,” he would say. “No she’s not,” I would say.“She’s lighter-skinned than we are. But she’s black.” “But she’s lighter-skinned than Don. Isn’t Don white?” “True. But the interesting thing is that he’s Italian, and Italians sometimes weren’t considered white a hundred years ago; darker-skinned, Southern European immigrants have their own history of having been discriminated against in many ways.” “So if Don’s family was once black and now they’re white, why isn’t Grandma white?” “Well...”—I wasn’t doing well with this—“it’s not just about color. Blackness is and isn’t a color. It’s kind of political—it changes. Sometimes it’s what the law says it is; sometimes it’s what other people think it is; sometimes it’s whatever you say it is.” “Political?” he asked, looking a little lost. “Look,” I said.“We called ourselves black to really emphasize the importance of color at a certain moment in time. But perhaps it’s easier for you to use the term African American. It’s more precise in many ways. It tells you that blackness

17 has more to do with where your ancestors came from, and anyone with an African ancestor is called black.” “So why isn’t everyone with an Italian ancestor called Italian? Why does Don keep saying he’s white?” I found it very hard to explain the arbitrariness of race and color to a very young child. It’s hard enough explaining it to myself. Its power—both visible and invisible—is so pervasive and sys¬ temic, so ordered and so ordering. This totalism is at such seeming odds with its whimsy and irrationality. After many such conversations, I finally hit upon . something that brought the point home with somewhat better success. We were having dinner one night, a nice salmon fillet. My son found some small bones in it and proceeded to com¬ plain, in terms for which I had no patience. “It’s disgusting!” he complained. “Fish have bones, young man,” I snapped. “Don’t be so spoiled, eat your dinner. We are so lucky to have food at all....” On and on I went. “It’s still disgusting,” he said sulkily. I looked closely at his plate and said, “Well, you’re in luck. Those don’t appear to be fish bones after all. I think they’re big old spider legs.” Now I freely admit that this was not a high point in the history of my mothering. He thought fish bones were disgusting? I’d give him disgusting. Unfortunately, that’s precisely what I did. My highly suggestible child put down his fork and looked utterly stricken. “I was just kidding,” I said contritely. “They’re not really!”

Issues in Cultural Theory 7 “I know,” he said miserably. “But it’s in my head now and I can’t get the spider legs out.” I saw in this the perfect opening for a very edifying discussion about the power of imagining compared to knowledge of physical reality. Sometimes, I told him, imagination is much more powerful than our rational knowledge. Sometimes the truth of things is very hard to grasp if it’s obscured by the associa¬ tions, the images that are put in our heads—by the lessons we learn at home or in school, by the mes¬ sages drilled into us by the media. I am an ambitious mother, and by the time I moved on to the definition of ontology, I had ground him down completely. “Mummy, you’re lecturing,” he said with the weariness of someone who had suf¬ fered enough. “Here. I’ll eat my fish.” Racial categories are a lot like those spider legs— they don’t exist in the rational world in any coher¬ ent, consistent, or scientific sense, but nevertheless have great power over us. It is an imaginary force, but one that constantly embellishes what our five senses tell us, constantly filters our experiences of taste, touch, smell, fear, beauty, humor, dignity. In this way, race does affect intelligence as well as knowledge, albeit not in the way social Darwinists think. Whiteness is a kind of cultural canvas upon which American existence is depicted in myriad artful visions of the possible. Whiteness is the site of privileged imagining, the invisible standard. It is whatever it wants to be. And blackness has been for too many generations whatever was left over. If our children struggle with race’s lack of unify¬ ing theme or crisp, clear edges, it is because its his¬ tory has been just that: mercurial and contingent. Race is a careless, deeply unconscious, and highly aesthetic phenomenon, even if that aesthetic ulti¬ mately deprives us of greater vision. How do we unimagine, or envision differently, the spider legs of race in our national melting pot? Facile pronouncements of “color blindness” are about as helpful as my telling my son to just pretend I never said a word about arachnids, you know, the big creepy ones, with the fuzzy legs that crunch when you bite into them. Don’t give it another thought, my cherub.... But undoing race requires a much more sophisticated and infinitely more subtle enterprise than that. We will need to perceive the real issues on our plate; and we will need to think very deeply about the positive expectations and negative stereotypes we bring to the table.We will have to learn to see the world in a new light. The artists in this remarkable exhibition guide us toward that noble but difficult end. These artists allow us to see things in a way that repositions our knowledge, stimulates our senses, and sur¬ prises us out of the complacency of our prejudice.

Issues in Cultural Theory 7

Ever since it was first exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1865, Edouard Manet’s Olympia has been intensely scrutinized by art historians and critics. Formalist writers have seen in the work’s flat, disjointed visual field a precursor to cubism and other great movements of modernist abstraction. Iconographers and socially oriented art historians have argued that while Manet’s image of a naked and recumbent prostitute alludes to the “chaste” goddesses of art history (Titian’s Venus of Urbino was a direct source), she represents a radical chal¬ lenge to the history of art and to contemporane¬ ous notions of public morality. The unambiguous depiction of Olympia as a sex worker with dirty feet, a black ribbon tied provocatively around her neck, and an ominous black cat by her side overtly challenges the hypocrisy of a moralistic society that sanctioned illicit sex and sexual infi¬ delity in private as long as it could not be seen in public. Marxist art historians, pushing this reading one step further, have suggested that the painting functions as a kind of visual metaphor for the phys¬ ical and psychic displacements of class and identity that were disrupting Paris in general and the lives of prostitutes in particular during the implementa¬ tion of Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann’s urban

1 planning schemes in the mid-nineteenth century. For an important One significant aspect of the painting, however, gen¬ Marxist assessment of Manet’s Olympia, erally has been underexamined or even ignored: see T. J. Clark, the corpulent black attendant who sits behind the “Olympia’s Choice,” in The Painting of white prostitute, dressed in a stark white robe and Modern Life: Paris in holding a bouquet of flowers. The woman who the Art of Manet and His Followers (New modeled for this character was named Laure, a York: Knopf, 1985), fact that has been absent from nearly all art his¬ pp. 79-146. torical studies of the work, and her presence in the

23 painting reveals much about the racial and sexual politics of Paris in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1985, the sociologist and cultural critic Sander Gilman was one of the first scholars to connect Laure to the dialectic of race in nineteenth-cen¬ tury culture and science, a dialectic in which “blackness” signified licentiousness and “white¬

ness” represented chastity.2 Artists of the period 2 Sander Gilman, often played on the stereotype of black people as “Black Bodies, lascivious and primitive, a racist notion that was White Bodies: pervasive in nineteenth-century thought. Toward an Iconography of Through the common knowledge of this stereo¬ Female Sexuality type, artists were able to suggest the titillating in Late Nine¬ teenth-Century presence of sex without sullying the reputation Art, Medicine, of the intrinsically pure and moral white people- and Literature,” Critical Inquiry, represented alongside lustful black characters. vol. 12, no. 1 Thus white characters could give the appearance (Autumn 1985), pp. 204-42. of sexual neutrality while their exaggerated black compatriots suggested otherwise. It is only by acknowledging Laure’s presence and role in Olympia, as well as by understanding how this racist iconography operated in nineteenth-centu¬ ry France, that we can grasp the extent to which the painting inverts the traditional black/white racial dichotomy in order to expose another level of hypocrisy in Parisian society. Ironically, it is the voluptuous, brazen sexuality of the white courtesan, and not the presence of the white-robed and naturally rendered Laure, that signifies Olympia’s role in the city’s flourishing sexual underground. The racial attitudes of white art historians and crit¬ ics are no different from those of society at large. Thus, it is the inherent racism of Western culture that has given the writer permission to erase Laure from the surface of Manet’s painting. The

Issues in Cultural Theory 7 ideologies and belief systems that have con¬ structed black people as demonic, marginal, or unimportant have nothing to do with blackness itself, for it is the prejudices and fears of white Europeans and Americans—values and emotions that perpetuate white power and domination— that have informed and driven racist thinking and behavior. Even before they have refused to look at Laure, the white critics and historians of Olympia have refused to see something even more basic and meaningful: their own “whiteness” and the racism that it engenders to defend and protect it. Yet, it is precisely the invisibility of whiteness that has allowed white intellectuals to obliterate Laure, and the thousands of black people like her, from the history of art and ideas. It is time for white people to acknowledge the power and meaning of their race. Today, most white people, even the most liberal, are oblivious to the psychological and political weight of their white¬ ness. If black people must evaluate the status of their blackness in relation to the prejudice they experience every day, most white people, by their unwillingness to assign whiteness meaning, are freed from the responsibility of accepting, or even understanding, their prejudices. Yet, it is precisely the acknowledgment of this whiteness that can help white people understand their racist behav¬ ior, attitudes, and complicity. As the U.S. sociolo¬ gist Ruth Frankenberg has observed, “It may be more difficult for white people to say ‘Whiteness has nothing to do with me—I’m not white’ than to say ‘Race has nothing to do with me—I’m not a racist’. To speak of whiteness is ... to assign

3 everyone a place in the relations of racism.”3 Ruth Frankenberg, The concept of whiteness is relatively new to White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Min¬ neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 6.

25 Western intellectual and cultural life. In the late 1980s, a handful of scholars and intellectuals, many of them black, used the word to denote the opposite of blackness, an idea that was as much cultural as biological. In the context of these writ¬ ers, whiteness implied both a racial color and a powerful state of mind and body—a norm that had been so pervasive in society that white people never needed to acknowledge or name it. The American writer bell hooks was one of the first scholars to popularize the concept of whiteness. She suggested that writers, intellectuals, and aca¬ demics interested in the study of racism should begin to shift their inquiry from the black victim to the white perpetrator of racism. Black people, long the victim of discrimination, have written about their vulnerabilities, suffering, and tri¬ umphs in the face of oppression and prejudice. The student of race, hooks concluded, needed to examine the source of power, instead of its vic¬

tims: “What’s going on with whiteness?”4 A little 4 more than a decade later, this question reverber¬ For an important and early example ates throughout race studies courses in universi¬ of hooks’s writing ties across the United States, Canada, and Europe. on whiteness, see “Representations White racism is not just an American problem. It has of Whiteness in disenfranchised and marginalized a range of racial the Black Imagi¬ nation,” in Black groups throughout the Western hemisphere. In Looks: Race and many European nations, for example, the inability Representation to examine whiteness and the power it affords (Boston: South End Press, 1992), white people have contributed to a racist and pp. 165-78. xenophobic social climate. Typically, many white Europeans focus on the negative implications of the influx of immigrants from Africa and Asia, rather than the expectations of a white population that has for centuries jealously guarded its own power, racial purity, nationality, and nobility.

Issues in Cultural Theory 7 In an earlier, even more perilous time, the Nazi persecution of the Jews, a hatred built on a racial- ized understanding of Jewishness, perpetuated a normative and unself-critical whiteness—the Aryan-Christian standard against which an infe¬ rior, impure “race” was compared, demeaned, and ultimately annihilated. My own work as a cultural critic and historian has centered on the racial implications of whiteness, an idea I have intuitively understood since child¬ hood. The circumstances of growing up white and poor in a predominantly black and Hispanic pub¬ lic housing project in New York allowed me to ex¬ perience race very differently from most white Americans. Many of my friends and nearly all of my classmates in public school were black and Hispanic, for example—a situation still rare in a nation where most white people have little or no intimate contact with people of color. My white skin marginalized me in the projects. It did not allow me to blend in, to appear “normal.” Thus, the unusual status of my race as a marker of difference rather than of the status quo gave me a distinct sense of my own whiteness. While I sometimes felt alienated from my neighbors, I in¬ stinctively understood that in the world outside of the projects, my skin color was valuable. It gave me power, access, and privilege. It allowed me to live my life free of the effects of racial prejudice. In public school, my white teachers expected me to excel and succeed, while embracing the self-ful¬ filling prophecy that my black and Hispanic class¬ mates were not smart enough or motivated enough to make it. In supermarkets and department stores, these students were followed by security guards down the very aisles that I walked freely.

27 Although it did not entirely prevent me from being prejudiced myself, my status as a white person in a largely black and Hispanic environment made me more sensitive to the reality of bigotry in the United States. The more my friends and class¬ mates told me about the racism they experienced every day, the more I could acknowledge the ap- v prehensive or even hostile ways most white people interacted with and discussed black people. My own observations confirmed that racism was not simply the black man’s fantasy, as so many white people wanted to believe. My white teachers, fam¬ ily members, friends, and acquaintances—relating to me as they would any other “safe” white per¬ son—frequently used racial epithets or made dis¬ paraging remarks about black people. Even in my own home, the reality of racism hit hard: my dark-skinned, Sephardic mother hated black people just as passionately as my liberal father supported the cause of civil rights and African American free¬ dom. On the night that the great civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, my mother cheered while my father sobbed. Thirty years later, I continue to see a nation fraught with racial division and in denial about the intensity and prevalence of racism. Over the last decade, as part of the research I have done on the question of whiteness, I have talked to hundreds of people

about race.5 The majority of these encounters were 5 casual, most conducted without a tape recorder. Yet Much of this research was for few of them were particularly honest or revealing. my book, White The black people I talked to were usually willing to Lies: Race and the Myths of White¬ discuss their own experiences with racism and even ness (New York: their attitudes about white people. By contrast, my Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999)—a interviews with white people were rarely as honest work that is both or self-aware. Most believed that conversations a memoir of my racial coming-of- age and an intro¬ duction to the concept of whiteness.

Issues in Cultural Theory 7 about race were only for people of color. Many believed that racism was a thing of the past or that black people should “lighten up. ” They insisted that the only racism that mattered was deadly or virulent, and they became defensive when asked about their own attitudes toward black people. Indeed, only a few of the white respondents were willing to admit to any racist feelings at all, although some said they knew of other white people who were racist. Racial prejudice, of course, continues to be a reality in the United States and elsewhere. Black people now endure a racism that is generally far less violent, but no less real, than the brutal racism of previous gener¬ ations. They experience daily slights—taxicab driv¬ ers who bypass them on the street, for example, or white salespeople who, assuming they have no money, patronize them in jewelry stores and auto¬ mobile showrooms. These gestures send the clear and infuriating message that black people are not worthy of white people’s trust or respect. This mes¬ sage is further advanced by the relentless indifference and intolerance of social, cultural, and political insti¬ tutions—from a medical establishment that is insufficiently concerned with black patients’ com¬ paratively poor survival rates for cancer, heart dis¬ ease, and strokes to television networks that contin¬ ue to segregate the races into “black” and “white” programming. This clear, unambiguous evidence of white people’s insensitivity and hostility continual¬ ly reminds black people that the disease of racism is neither cured, nor under control. It is important to acknowledge, however, that whiteness does not always afford white people equal authority or status. For one, whiteness, like blackness, connotes multiple meanings, multiple

29 ethnicities, and multiple skin colors. Indeed, whiteness, like blackness, is at best an imprecise racial category. Through centuries of miscegena¬ tion, blackness and whiteness have blended to¬ gether into racially ambiguous hues that defy the very existence of racial categories. The power of whiteness depends on a number of cultural, social, political, and economic factors. Forms of preju¬ dice other than racism, for example, such as anti- Semitism, sexism, homophobia, and class bias can oppress white people. Most poor and middle-class white people, like their black counterparts, work in ungratifying jobs. Their finances are unsteady. They often cannot afford a decent education or, health care. Yet, even white people who have suffered economic and social disenfranchisement historically have been able to capitalize on their whiteness. In the United States, whiteness has been so desired and safeguarded that well into the twentieth century legal standards were established to search out blackness even in the whitest of people. Only those who could prove a kind of racial purity—a status that as little as “one drop” of African blood would deny—had a “legitimate” claim to their whiteness. Nineteenth-century European immigrants, who ini¬ tially defined themselves as Irish, German, or Ital¬ ian, eventually came to embrace the idea that they were “white Americans.” During this period, the white ruling class assuaged disaffected and under¬ paid white laborers and farmers by advocating the notion of racial solidarity. They manipulated workers into believing the myth of an endangered and precious “white race.” They perpetuated the idea that black people were the true enemies of

Issues in Cultural Theory 7 the upstanding white worker. W.E.B. Du Bois ar¬ gued in his groundbreaking Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 that white laborers know¬ ingly exchanged unnecessarily low wages for a “sort of public and psychological wage. They were given deference because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools”—privileges that did little to immedi¬

6 ately improve their economic standing.6 Thus, For more on Du Bois poor white workers were encouraged to see them¬ and nineteenth-century notions of whiteness, selves in alliance with the white bourgeoisie and see ibid., pp. 166-67. not the black victims of oppression and slavery. A century later, whiteness continues to offer white people of all classes a valuable dividend: the abil¬ ity to exist in the world without having to think about the color of their skin. Whiteness remains today no less meaningful to white people who continually reinforce their own authority and so¬ cial standing by seeing themselves in positive con¬ trast to an inferior, negative, or even dangerous “blackness.” For them, whiteness is pure and value free. It is innate. It is everywhere. Yet, ironi¬ cally, it is also invisible. The end of racism will be possible only after we find a way to see whiteness, to name it in order to examine it. Only then can we begin to understand the ways we deny the hu¬ manity and worth of people we all too often would rather not see.

Max Becher / Andrea Robbins Three Men (German Indian Series) 1997/98 Chromogenic print 30x25 5/8” Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery

33 Nayland Blake Invisible Man (detail) 1994 Mixed media Dimensions variable Courtesy of the Artist and Matthew Marks Gallery

Nancy Burson Untitled (Guys Who Look Like Jesus) 2000/01 Iris print 16x13” Courtesy of the Artist

Issues in Cultural Theory 7

Wendy Ewald White Girl’s Alphabet 2002 Chromogenic print 16x20” Courtesy of the Artist

William Kentridge Drawings for Projection Series: Johannesburg - 2nd Greatest City After Paris; Monument; Mine; Sobriety, Obesity, and Growing Old, 1981/91 16mm animated films transferred to videodisc Collection The Jewish Museum, New York

37 Issues in Cultural Theory 7 Barbara Kruger Untitled 2003 Billboard Dimensions variable Courtesy of the Artist

Nikki S. Lee The Yuppie Project (18) 1998 Fujiflex print 21x28” Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects

39 Paul McCarthy & Mike Kelley Still from Heidi 1992 Video Color, 62 min., 32 sec. Collection of the Center for Art and Visual Culture, UMBC

Cindy Sherman Bus Riders, 1976/2000 Black-and-white photograph 10x8” Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures

Untitled 2000 Color photograph 36x24” Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures

Issues in Cultural Theory 7 41 Gary Simmons Big Still 2001 Painted foam, fiberglass, wood, metal 64x 164 1/8x48” Courtesy Metro Pictures

Issues in Cultural Theory 7

The issue of whiteness and race in the visual arts has been virtually ignored by curators, art historians, and critics. Over the past decade, however, a num¬ ber of visual artists—of various races—have paral¬ leled progressive writers and scholars who have used the concept of “whiteness” to denote the racial counterpart of “blackness.” To these artists, white¬ ness is something that must be marked, represented, and explored. While much art around issues of race inferentially touches on the issue of whiteness, these artists approach the subject explicitly and directly. The result of their efforts is a range of resonant, moving, and visually compelling aesthetic state¬ ments. The visual arts can serve as an important catalyst for the discussion of race, a rare instance where con¬ temporary art can have broad social relevance. This is true because much of what defines race in culture is innately visual. Ideas and observations about race are, more often than not, communicated through visual cues, symbols, and stereotypes. To talk about race is to talk about skin color: black, yellow, white, and brown. To talk about race is to talk about the shape of the eyes or of the nose or the texture of the hair. To talk about race is to talk about clothes, or hairstyle, or body type. The important inquiry into whiteness undertaken by visual artists—represent¬ ed in this exhibition by the work of Max Becher and Andrea Robbins, Nayland Blake, Nancy Burson, Wendy Ewald, Mike Kelley, William Kentridge, Barbara Kruger, Nikki S. Lee, Paul McCarthy, Cindy Sherman, and Gary Simmons—can help us to visualize and understand something that has ironi¬ cally remained invisible in public discourse about race: whiteness. And in so doing, it can inspire us to think about race, and our attitudes about the color of our skin, in new and resonant ways.

45 WHITE EXOTIC Max Becher & Andrea Robbins

WHITE impurity Nayland Blake

WHITE PURITY Nancy Burson

WHITE complexity Wendy Ewald white complicity William Kentridge

WHITE SKIN Barbara Kruger white privilege Nikki S. Lee white NORMAL Paul McCarthy & Mike Kelley whitetype Cindy Sherman white trash Gary Simmons Max Becher and Andrea Robbins’s German Indians (1997/98), a series of large-format color photo¬ graphs, explores one of white people’s most durable myths about people of color: the noble savage or exotic native. The series examines the long-standing fascination of the German people with the American West, and particularly its Na¬ tive cultures. German Indians documents annual gatherings of Indian fan clubs in Radebeul, Ger¬ many, in 1997 and 1998. From the late nineteenth century onward, German “hobbyists” have or¬ ganized into these groups, Indianstikgruppen, dressing up as American Indians and engaging in WHITE EXOTIC “pow wows.” These clubs were inspired by the Max Becher fictional stories of American Indian life by the & German writer Karl May (1842-1912). While Andrea May’s tales were intended as a progressive critique Robbins of white, colonialist aggression, they were also innately Eurocentric and racist. The central Indian character in his writing, Winnetou, for example, evolved into a wise and civilized man only after he studied with a German teacher, Klekih-petra. Only then could his wild and ungainly habits be tamed. Only then could he learn to accept Chris¬ tianity and grow into an upstanding, moral, and God-fearing citizen. Commensurate with May’s incongruous attitudes about American Indians, the white subjects of Becher and Robbins’s German Indians, the Ger¬ man teacher, Klekih-petra, idolize Indian culture while simultaneously transforming it into blond, blue-eyed paradigms of Aryan civility. The touristlike, patronizing relationship of these hob¬ byists to American Indian culture is rooted in complex and conflicting imperatives in German culture. Such influences emerge not only from

47 May’s mixed messages, but also from the mytholo¬ gies of German anti-Semitism and Nazism. Adolf Hitler, for example, identified with the Indian as the victim of a modern, corrupt, and overly intel¬ lectual world while at the same time fashioning one of humanity’s most horrific vehicles of op¬ pression—the concentration camp—after Ameri¬ can Indian reservation camps. Beyond its implications in the culture at large, Ger¬ man Indians is also self-reflexive to the Western art world’s own historical relationship to tribal culture. A great deal of modern art, from cubism and expressionism to futurism and abstract ex¬ pressionism, often appropriated—or, perhaps •, more accurately, lifted—the style of the indige¬ nous cultures of Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the Americas. Many Western abstract painters, for example, were fascinated with the way tribal artists rendered the human face as an arrangement of seemingly simple geometric forms. Yet, the tribal artist depicted the face this way for a num¬ ber of complex conceptual, spiritual, and ritualis¬ tic reasons. For most of the past century, critics and historians of modern art, as well as the artists themselves, have discussed these African, Oceanic, or American sources for modern art in terms of their abstract, “primitive” arrangements of color and form. In effect, these artists and writers—like the enthusias¬ tic hobbyists of Becher and Robbins’s German Indians—have divorced tribal imagery from its specific cultural, social, and stylistic contexts, co-opting it to serve the white man’s curiosity, fascination, and desire.

Issues in Cultural Theory 7 Nayland Blake’s Invisible Man (1994) addresses one of the most fundamental issues of race and white¬ ness: the mutability and complexity of race itself. Invisible Man juxtaposes snapshots of the biracial artist’s youth—the artist at age five, for example, sitting between his white mother and black father and holding a stuffed rabbit doll—with large cloth sculptures of rabbits. Like Blake’s allusion to the history of his own interracial family, the image of the rabbit has served throughout his work as a metaphor of the fluidity of race. This metaphor is at once personal and historical. When Blake was a child, his parents read him the WHITE IMPURITY tales of Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit, characters Nayland Blake created by the Atlanta newspaperman Joel Chan¬ dler Harris in the late nineteenth century. Harris based these tales on stories he collected from African Americans in the South. Uncle Remus, an elderly black slave, served as Harris’s central, myth¬ ical storyteller. Brer Rabbit, in turn, served as Remus’s hero, an animal represented by Harris as black, even though his fur was white. In his black¬ ness, Brer Rabbit simultaneously signified black oppression and black triumph over slavery and racism. On the one hand, Harris equated the black man with a weak and relatively harmless and unin¬ telligent animal, a demeaning allusion at best. On the other, Brer Rabbit’s ability to continually out¬ smart the animals of prey that stalked and threat¬ ened him—in part because of his ability to work against stereotypes and expectations—made him both wily and powerful. Echoing the racial ambiguity of Brer Rabbit, Blake’s ubiquitous rabbits speak to the alchemy of race, as well as the power of blurring and transgressing its boundaries. They remind us that our generally rigid

49 and tribal view of skin color, embodied by cate¬ gories like “black” and “white,” ignores the his¬ tory of interracial sex and love—a history, like that of Blake’s own family, that undermines the author¬ ity of such categories. The Little One (1994), for example, consists of a series of five faceless black porcelain dolls dressed in white cloth bunny suits. By existing simultaneously as white and black, these “biracial” rabbits challenge the subtle, though no less intensely motivated, notions of racial purity that continue to underwrite U.S. race relations. Blake’s Reversible Bunny Suit (1994)—a seven-foot rabbit costume composed of black cot¬ ton on one side and white cotton on the other—-j similarly suggests the contingent and deeply personal nature of racial identity. These works, by refusing to represent race in typical and stereotypical ways, prefigure the next wave of antiracist thinking by imagining a broad, cross-

racial reevaluation of the idea of race itself.7 By 7 representing race as essentially fluid and culturally For more on this issue, see David constructed—an understanding often embraced by Roediger, “How people of color, but unknown to most white peo¬ Old and New Whitenesses Keep ple—they challenge the polarized, divisive view of Showing Up, But identity that drives the logic and emotions of Not by Them¬ racism. selves,” in this volume, 90-102.

Issues in Cultural Theory 7 In 2001, the artist Nancy Burson set out to create a photographic portrait of contemporary concep¬ tions of Jesus Christ—Guys Who Look Like Jesus. “I wanted to explore how we define the image of God for ourselves,” Burson recently observed. Rather than resort to art historical icons or to de¬ pictions of Christ in popular culture, she wanted a fresh start. She ran an advertisement in the 'Village Voice and Backstage that read: “Jesus look-alikes wanted, all ethnicities.” The ad called for interested men to send in pictures of themselves. Burson con¬ ducted phone interviews with 20 finalists, settling on 16 men to photograph. Of the eight who made WHITE PURITY the final cut, one was Japanese American, one Nancy Burson black, and one Hispanic. In addition to these indi¬ vidual portraits, Burson made a digital composite of the images—an amalgam meant to suggest a “truer, more Semitic Christ”—as well as a compos¬ ite of images of more traditional representations of Christ in the history of Western art. Guys Who Look Like Jesus parallels recent attempts by scientists, artists, and writers to challenge the myth of Christ as the Aryan ideal: a god with flow¬ ing long blond hair, pale skin, and blue eyes. Al¬ though such images are pervasive in Christian cultures throughout the world, they ignore the fact that far from representing Northern European whiteness, Christ was a Middle Eastern Jew, a man no different from any other Semitic person of an¬ cient times. Recently, a team of forensic scientists set out to render a more accurate depiction of the face of Christ. The result: a blunt, round face with olive skin, dark curly hair, and a prominent nose. While this new conception of Christ exchanges one set of stereotypes for another, it is, in the words of Alison Galloway, Professor of Anthropology at the

51 University of California at Santa Cruz, “a lot closer to the truth than the work of many [of the] great masters.” Traditional art historical and religious depictions of Christ represent man in his purest and most divine state. Thus, in their depiction of Aryan perfection, such images both mirror and reinforce the vqlue and desirability of whiteness within society at large. By refusing to accept the mythic, Aryan ideal of Christ—indeed, by placing images of swarthy, dark-haired Jesus wannabes next to a composite of their Aryan ideal—Guys Who Look Like Jesus questions deeply rooted cultural associations be¬ tween whiteness and all things pure, good, and '■< sacred. It challenges us to question our knee-jerk acceptance of these myths—beliefs consciously or unconsciously driven by the need to protect white power.

Issues in Cultural Theory 7 zln the fall of 2002, the photographer and educator Wendy Ewald collaborated with white female stu¬ dents at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachu¬ setts, to explore the complex relationship between gender, race, and whiteness. White Girl’s Alphabet, the name of this series, evolved out of earlier proj¬ ects with young people designed to examine racial identity. In Black Self/White Self (1994), for exam¬ ple, the artist worked with students of different races in the recently reintegrated school system of Durham, North Carolina. The merging of two school systems, one predominantly black, the other predominantly white, had led to racial tensions. WHITE Ewald asked each student to create a written and COMPLEXITY visual self-portrait as a member of another race. By Wendy encouraging young people to think empatheti- Ewald cally—white kids imagined themselves as black, black kids as white—Ewald helped her students to confront their racial prejudices by understanding each other’s differences as well as similarities. White Girl’s Alphabet is one in a series of collabora¬ tive art projects collectively titled American Alpha¬ bets, in which the artist has used the format of the alphabet, “the literal font of our literacy,” to help students better understand the way language influ¬ ences our preferences and prejudices and how these in turn shape our self-image. In White Girl’s Alpha¬ bet, students examined two aspects of their per¬ sonal identity, whiteness and womanhood, in relationship to the words and images they saw and used every day. Initially, they discussed the ways in which their gender and race together determined how they were represented in culture—the contra¬ dictions of white entitlement and feminine weak¬ ness, for example, or the stereotype of the over-privileged white woman, and how these repre¬ sentations influenced how they saw themselves.

53 The students were then divided into small groups, each responsible for discussing four letters of the alphabet. Eventually, each student selected a series of words beginning with a single letter from that group, and finally a single word, that transcended these cliches and stereotypes by more accurately representing who they were as individuals. They then wrote brief self-portraits based on the selected word. Ewald photographed each student, images replete with the clothes and props brought from home to complete their personal “look.” Finally, students were given large-format portraits onto which they drew the selected word, as well as other words and images incorporating ideas from the t- written portraits. The images and texts of White Girl’s Alphabet sug¬ gest that whiteness is no less complicated and mul¬ tivalent than blackness. Some remind us of the su¬ premacy of the white race in U.S. society and culture. One student adopts the word normal, for example—foregrounding, perhaps unintentionally, the normative, preeminent status of whiteness. An¬ other young woman refers to herself simply as “girl,” as if the word white was unnecessary or re¬ dundant even in a self-portrait that was expressly about the intersection of gender and race. Yet other students see themselves through words that imply powerlessness, vulnerability, or weakness: “PMS,” “victim,” “weight,” or “zonked.” The intersection of race and gender in these images suggests that factors such as sex, age, and class can mitigate the privileges afforded by whiteness. Thus, in the evocative world of White Girl’s Alphabet, the word queen scrawled across one portrait may tell us more about the insecurities of its subject than her

sense of entitlement.8 8 For more on this series, including all student texts and images, see Wendy Ewald, “ White Girl’s Alphabet," in this volume, pp. Issues in Cultural Theory 7 70-89. In his four animated short films Drawings for Projec¬ tion Series: Johannesburg—2nd Greatest City after Paris; Monument; Mine; Sobriety, Obesity, and Growing Old, 1981/91, the artist and filmmaker William Kentridge produces a powerful statement about white racism, complicity, and ambivalence in South Africa at the moment of apartheid's demise. Kentridge, a white South African Jew by birth, al¬ lows the very hues of white, gray, and black, the spectrum of the charcoal drawings on which these films are based, to stand as metaphors for both racial division and complexity. Each film centers on the exploits of two characters—Soho Eckstein, WHITE COMPLICITY a ruthless, tyrannical industrialist, and Felix Teitel- William baum, a tentative, vulnerable dreamer who faces Kentridge the realities of apartheid with both circumspection and confusion. In the course of these films, we see Eckstein building his legacy of power and wealth, all the while con¬ demning his black South African workers to a life of slavery and hardship. He is depicted as vora¬ ciously hungry, abusive to his wife and workers, and uncaring about the regal South African land¬ scape that he pollutes and poisons. Yet even the pa¬ thetic Eckstein is able to show remorse, a glimmer of sadness and perhaps fear that the devastation of apartheid would soon be over, leaving millions of devastated black people in its wake. Teitelbaum, on the other hand, is depicted as physically unthreat¬ ening, emotionally complex, and perpetually uncer¬ tain and questioning. He represents yet another aspect of South African whiteness—the liberal white man who understands and even abhors the evils of apartheid, but chooses to live in South Africa and abide by its rules and laws. The power of Kentridge’s beautiful films—they are

55 composed of hundreds of lush drawings—rests in their refusal to understand white racism in simplis¬ tic terms. At times the characters begin to resemble one another visually, sometimes literally morphing into a composite image. While the reality of South Africa’s black victims is neither underestimated or ignored—the artist reserves his most disturbing depictions for the representation of slave labor and the physical destruction of black bodies under the rule of apartheid—it is the mind-set of the ruling class that remains most complex in these films. Produced during a time when South Africa’s white leaders were perpetuating unspeakable acts of vio¬ lence as apartheid was crumbling all around thehi, these films cycle through the spectrum of white at¬ titudes about apartheid, from rage on the one hand to full acceptance on the other. Some white people, including many of the nation’s more liberal Jewish population, exemplified by Teitelbaum, vocally opposed apartheid, but nevertheless remained in South Africa. Others were vociferous supporters or uncompromising opponents who were jailed for their beliefs. Still others remained completely silent, benefiting daily from the reality of institutionalized white racism. Thus, it is one of Kentridge’s goals in these films to place whiteness under an aesthetic microscope to reveal the hidden agendas, ambiva¬ lence, confusion, and uncertainty that underwrite its imperative to jealously, even violently, guard its power and status.

Issues in Cultural Theory 7 It may well be a cliche to say that race, like beauty, is only skin deep. This assertion is at once accurate, since all so-called racial types have evolved from the same genetic pool, and profoundly off the mark, since the concept of race is so emotionally and intellectually charged that it motivates ex¬ traordinary behavior. Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (2003) speaks to the complexity of race as it is manifested in the idea of “skin” as a marker of race. The image—the fingers of one white hand peeling off a dark rubber sheath from the finger of another—is evocative in its own right. In Kruger’s visual metaphor, race is both uncertain and mask- WHITE SKIN like, a layer of color that can be peeled away to re¬ Barbara veal the multiple racial bloodlines that make up Kruger almost every one of us. The image, too, under¬ scores the constructed nature of race, the ways in which we mitigate our appearance, behavior, and thinking in order to mark our individual and communal place in the racial spectrum. The phrases that Kruger lays over the image—cliches that turn on the word skin—allude to many things, such as sensitivity to attack or criticism (“thin skin,” “thick skin”), irritation (“under the skin”), shallowness (“skin deep”), sex (“skin tight”), or violence (“skinned alive”). Coupled with the artist’s provocative image, these words resonate with the angst and passions of racial meaning—the thin skin of racial sensitivity, the subtle provocations of racial interaction that get under the skin, the flaying of human flesh, the ultimate humiliation of the lynched black body skinned alive by white hands. Charged with the invectives of history, cultural norms, expectations, and stereotypes, the language of race is more than

57 skin deep. Neither neutral nor benign, it has the power to edify, empower, confuse, evade, ignore, and destroy.

-v,

Issues in Cultural Theory 7 Nikki S. Lee, a Korean-born artist who lives in New York, has made it her project to infiltrate and mimic the subcultures of U.S. life. For weeks or even months she immerses herself in a community or cultural milieu—lesbians, drag queens, Ohio trailer-park dwellers, skateboarders, senior citizens, Hispanic or Japanese street kids—meticulously adopting its codes of dress, behavior, and living habits. Throughout a self-defined residency in which she lives and interacts with these people on a daily basis, Lee has herself photographed—by a friend who accompanies her, by a member of her adopted social group, or even by a passing stranger WHITE PRIVILEGE to whom she hands her point-and-shoot camera. Nikki S. Lee The photographs documenting Lee’s effort to blend into these communities at first appear to be crude snapshots, replete with date stamp and flash-trig¬ gered red eyes. Closer scrutiny reveals their visual and intellectual sophistication—their raw, uncanny ability to represent the complexity and fluidity of human identity. Of all of the series to emerge from Lee’s enterprise, The Yuppie Project (1998) is arguably the most sig¬ nificant. For several months in 1998, Lee navigated her way through a world of young Wall Street pro¬ fessionals. While these photographs play on certain stereotypes—they depict a preppie, moneyed world peopled with fresh-faced, all-American WASPs— the cliches Lee tries to inhabit also help make visi¬ ble a racial category that has, for the most part, remained invisible in U.S. culture: whiteness. It is rare for any work of art to represent whiteness per se, for we live in a culture where whiteness is so much the norm that it does not have to be named. In The Yuppie Project, Lee captures the dress, ges¬ tures, and eating, work, and leisure-time habits of

59 people who never have to think about their own skin color or the power it affords them. They work for the top stock brokerage houses and banks. They lunch at the World Financial Center. They exercise at the Equinox Gym. They pamper them¬ selves with pedicures, massages, and trips to Bar¬ ney’s. They go out drinking with other traders, analysts, and money managers. And, in almost every shot, they wear their power and privilege as comfortably as their smartly tailored clothes. The Yuppie Project explores whiteness in two signifi¬ cant ways. On one level, these images of light- skinned, straight-haired Wall Streeters resonate with the signs of white affluence and exclusivity- (the assured, cocky body language, the expensive clothes, the rituals and country-club camaraderie, the near absence of people of color). On another, more disturbing level, whiteness is represented through its relationship to the alienation or dis¬ placement that it sometimes causes in others. Lee does not depict her white subjects as overtly big¬ oted or malevolent. But the underlying racial ten¬ sions of her Wall Street experience slip into almost every frame of The Yuppie Project. While it is dif¬ ficult to distinguish Lee from her newly adopted friends and colleagues in most of her other se¬ ries—so extraordinary is her talent for blending in and the willingness of communities to indulge her—she never quite fits into the yuppie milieu. Masquerading in the fashion, makeup, and body language of these people, her Asian-ness, as well as her visceral discomfort, nevertheless read as distinctly as their whiteness. Her face is especially revealing, registering as it does the unmistakable signs of sadness and even despair. As if to under¬ score the sense of isolation that some people of color feel in this environment, Lee escapes the

Issues in Cultural Theory 7 whiteness of Wall Street to dine with another Asian financial drone in The Yuppie Project (18). Unlike the self-assured, camera-ready white peo¬ ple she photographs for the series, her companion neither smiles nor looks at the camera. Instead, he looks down at his plate. In the end, however, whiteness is no more monolithic or immutable for Lee than any other identity. In the series’ final image, Yuppie Project (30), the artist, dressed in a dark blue suit and pearls, is seen in a bookstore, holding a copy of Peter J. D’Adamo’s best-selling diet book, Eat Right 4 Your Type. Perhaps more than any other book in recent years, Eat Right 4 Your Type has popular¬ ized the idea that race, ethnicity, and gender may not be the best predictors of emotional or physical health. D’Adamo concludes that blood type— which crosses the traditional boundaries of iden¬ tity, testifying as it does to centuries of migration and miscegenation—is the most important indica¬ tor of how we tolerate certain foods or survive or avoid illnesses. Thus, in D’Adamo’s thinking, blood, and by extension whiteness itself, may be as fluid as water. This idea serves as a subtle, ironic coda to Lee’s disquieting journey into the heart of white privilege, a world where whiteness is fiercely protected, but is always blissfully, expe- 9 diently invisible.9

This essay originally appeared, in a slightly altered form, as Mau¬ rice Berger, “Picturing Whiteness: Nikki S. Lee’s Yuppie Project, ” Art Journal, vol. 60, no. 4 (Winter 2001), pp. 54-57.

61 V Heidi, a video by the Los Angeles-based artists Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley, is a collaborative work based on the Swiss writer Joanna Spyri's novel for children. The action in the video is played out by puppetlike, whitewashed rubber figures on a set composed of a Swiss chalet, the facade of an American bar in Vienna, and the interior of a bedroom. The artists expressly wanted to imitate popular film and television, all the while exaggerating the conceits and sensibili¬ ties of these disciplines. The result is a video that is at once familiar and convoluted—a classic situ¬ ation comedy or family drama filled with lurid

WHITE NORMAL images of Heidi’s abuse, both sexual and physical, Paul at the hands of her keepers. McCarthy Published in 1880, Heidi exemplified the classic & female hero and the paradigmatic image of Aryan Mike purity. The book centers on the travails of a young Kelley orphan girl, Heidi, who lives with her cruel Aunt Dete. The aunt, tiring of her niece, sends her to live with her grumpy grandfather in the Swiss Alps, a man known to his neighbors as an evil, godless old hermit. Heidi learns that the man is not evil but loving. Eventually she comes to enjoy life in the mountains, liberated by the fresh air, frolicking animals, and carefree and rosy-cheeked white people. The aunt returns and orders Heidi to live with her in a small stone house in the far more dangerous and unpredictable big city. She sees the move as an opportunity for Heidi to have a good education. In the end, the girl, bitter and unhappy away from the grandfather and outdoor life she has grown to love, escapes and makes her way back to country life. McCarthy and Kelley’s desire to retell the Heidi story through the style of the popular media ac-

63 centuates the video’s ability to challenge the image of the happy, complacent white family perpetu¬ ated by film and television. Indeed Heidi—like the media’s incessant construction of the white mid¬ dle-class family as the paradigm of normalcy and health—is built on the abiding idea of the purity and desirability of the white race, a notion that Kelley and McCarthy challenge. Rather than a tri¬ umphant tale of liberation and redemption through a life of pastoral and Aryan perfection, their ver¬ sion of Heidi is at once disturbing and perverse, refusing to accept the myths of normalcy and safety on which the white race builds its sense of superiority. ::t

Issues in Cultural Theory 7 When Cindy Sherman was a student at State Uni¬ versity of New York at Buffalo in 1976, she exe¬ cuted a series of fifteen small, black-and-white pho¬ tographs of bus riders. The series represents an early example of the artist’s signature style, in which she photographs herself dressed up in vari¬ ous guises. In Bus Riders, Sherman masquerades as a range of urban character types, people she had observed on New York City buses and subways. Alternating between black and white people, these images are at once humorous and canny: a black male street kid on his way to school, hood over his head, notebooks clutched to his chest; an uptight WHITE TYPE white businessman, legs crossed and an attache Cindy case on his lap; an awkward, self-conscious white Sherman schoolgirl, replete with plaid skirt and knee socks; a hip black city girl, wearing a miniskirt and plat¬ form shoes. In its ability to give white and black types equal weight and emphasis, Bus Riders is one of the earliest exam¬ ples of conceptual art to mark whiteness itself as an identity worthy of examination. By j uxtaposing photographs of exaggerated racial types, Sherman not only draws attention to racial differences, but makes clear that whiteness, no less than blackness, is an identity subject to naming, categorization, and stereotype. In a more recent series, Untitled (2000), the artist impersonates a range of white, female character types, from chaste country girl and matronly WASP to trailer-park mom. Once again, she marks whiteness, reminding us of the complex ways in which race—in concert with other aspects of identity, such as gender and class—mitigates power and privilege. On another, more complex, level, these works chal¬ lenge the rigid categories and stereotypes they

65 appear to embrace. Sherman’s impersonations do more than just fix identity into easily recogniza¬ ble characteristics and stereotypes, isolating surface features such as skin color, hair, dress, and gesture. They remind us that identity is to a certain extent malleable and masklike, contingent on the personal choice of how to reveal and present it.

Issues in Cultural Theory 7 In Big Still (2001), Gary Simmons has moved away from the language and symbols of urban black his¬ tory to explore the imagery of the Prohibition-era rural white South. The large-scale sculpture—a whitewashed fiberglass contraption of barrels, trash cans, tubes, and pipes—is meant to evoke a backyard moonshine distillery. Commensurate with the recent interest of artists and scholars in the most economically and socially marginal aspect of white America, so-called white trash, Simmons sees in the lives of the disenfranchised Southern hillbilly a sensibility and public image that are analogous to blackness. Thus Big Still explores what curator WHITE TRASH Thelma Golden calls the “make-shift resourceful¬ Gary Simmons ness” and the beauty of a “lean-to sensibility” that rural white Southern culture shares with urban black communities or anyone who has to make do with available resources. The work also reminds us that whiteness is not al¬ ways synonymous with privilege and that not all white people are powerful or in positions of power within society and culture. While the lives of poor white people—the denizens of the Southern trailer park, the hills of rural Appalachia, or the urban housing project—are as irrelevant and foreign to most white Americans as the lives of black people, the concept of white trash ironically represents the most clearly marked and least invisible form of whiteness. Thus, Big Still—like the discourse of white trash that surrounds and defines it—empha¬ sizes and isolates whiteness. It stands as a monu¬ ment to whiteness’s most marginal and disaffected subjects, marking it as something worthy of study and commemoration. The work is also, paradoxically, about white power and malevolence. Rather than a Depression-era

67 still, an artifact unknown to most viewers, the sculpture first appears as a large, inscrutable, and threatening device. The work’s allusion to white Southern culture of the 1920s and 1930s intensifies its ominous tone, harkening back to a time and place when white racism, even among the rural poor, was as virulent and violent as it has ever been in the United States. Thus the ghosts within Sim¬ mons’s white machine speak to multiple histories and realities—from the hillbilly’s criminal defiance of an important, if ludicrous, example of white power and control, Prohibition, to his persecution of people whose only crime was the color of their skin. T-

Issues in Cultural Theory 7

3 Cl. "C W

Artist-in-Residence John Hope Franklin Center Duke University

Senior Research Associate Center for Documentary Studies Duke University A quick perusal of contemporary art from Fluxus to Jenny Holzer suggests that it exhibits a special fas¬ cination with written language. My own work has shown a growing interest in language, especially in its ability to create barriers or alliances between groups according to gender, age, and race. Several of my recent projects have addressed the elemen¬ tal issue of how we learn written language—how we deal with language in its formal manifestations, and how this primal cultural experience profoundly affects the way we see and think about things. My first encounter with written language was the al¬ phabet printed in children’s alphabet books. In part one retrospect, I understand that the words and visual Introduction examples these books used to represent letters—a picture of a shiny new car, say, for the letter C— affirmed the worldview of the middle-class white girl I happened to be. I grew up assuming that this conformity of written expression to one’s own world held true for all children. A few years ago, I embarked on a series of language pieces titled American Alphabets, an ongoing project designed to look at our written language from various cultural perspectives. The first piece was a Spanish-language alphabet, a collaboration between myself and English-as-a-Second-Language students in North Carolina. For the second piece, I worked with predominantly African American students at an elementary school in Cleveland. In both cases, the process went like this. After exam¬ ining ABC books with various themes and imagery, each student chose one letter of the alphabet and generated a list of words—words the students commonly used—beginning with that letter. They went on to think about how they might represent or illustrate these words by means of their own

71 bodies, by using props, or by drawing on photo¬ graphs they could make of representative objects. I shot the actual photographs. The students looked through the viewfinder, examined the Polaroid proof prints, and offered suggestions as to how the objects should be arranged to illustrate their letters and words. These projects confirmed the vivid tensions between our formal “ruling” language and the valence of language for people who do not share many as¬ sumptions of the general culture. They underlined the way in which the alphabet, the literal font of our literacy, expands our understanding of the self, allowing us to see ourselves and the issue of race in a fresh light. In the fall of 2002,1 extended this project by looking at how young women, particularly white women such as myself, choose to portray themselves in language. I worked with students at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, a boarding school with historical significance for the entire country. The students and I began by talking about the posi¬ tion of women throughout the school’s history. We looked at material gathered from its archives, including journals, photographs, and memos deal¬ ing with the role of female students over the years. Much of this material was utterly unfamiliar to the students. To this mix, I added my own experi¬ ences as a student at Phillips in the late 1960s. We went on to investigate how the girls use language today—in email, for example—and how the lan¬ guage of fiction and films aimed at girls reflects their problems and aspirations. Following these discussions, girls who lived in the same dorm

Issues in Cultural Theory 7 chose words they felt were most representative of them as individuals and a group. I was interested in finding out how the girls’ choice of words and images reflected the ongoing cam¬ pus debates about gender and race. (For some time, the students’ intellectual life had been focused on thoughtful, if cautious, discussions about these topics.) How, for example, did the young women’s language prevent them from asserting political in¬ fluence in the school? Or how did the way a white student expressed herself represent her status in society? When I read the chosen words aloud, the girls were astounded at how revealing they were. A few remarked that the list of words was “sad.” Others mentioned that the overwhelming theme was sex.

73 Issues in Cultural Theory 7 75 Issues in Cultural Theory 7 77 Issues in Cultural Theory 7 79 Issues in Cultural Theory 7 81

attitude n. &C adj. The encapsulation of intensity and emotion of the human experience. Someone with attitude is as India Arie says in her song—a queen. Hilary Jay

barefoot adj. Naked feet. I’m happiest when I’m barefoot. Katherine Dunn

communicating v. 1) Keeping in touch with another person (via tele¬ phone, email, letters). part two 2) Talking and/or writing with another person so as Texts to keep in touch. edited by I’ve been communicating with my friends back Wendy home since I got here. I keep in touch with them Ewald mainly through emails, but talking on the phone is easiest. I have been mailing letters to one of my friends weekly just to tell her what’s up. I am expecting another letter from her soon. I’ll talk to you later. Emily Watson

delinquent n. & adv. Someone (typically a teenage girl or boy) who has dysfunctional tendencies. The term is usually used in reference to someone who misuses drugs or alcohol, but can also just be the name given to someone who behaves in a dysfunctional manner, breaking the rules, etc. After Scott dropped me at home I hung out with Kate. ... I can’t believe that my little sister is a freshman in high school, and she has a boyfriend . . . unreal. .. . that’s too bad about your friend that got busted . . . but you’ve got to admit that what she did was pretty stupid. . .. I mean

83 com’on, use your head. But I am sure she is really sweet and normal and not some freakish juvenile delinquent. When she gets to college, nobody will even notice if she is drinking water or vodka. excerpt from an email to Chloe Lewis education n. Anything you have learned, whether through'books or through experience. I think most people are here for the education. Of course, that means classes like calculus and Amer¬ ican history. But this school also educates you in other areas as well: how to live away from home, deal with stress, dress for the weather, etc, Allegra Funsten flirt n. & v. One who sexually teases others in order to get them to desire her/himself. Typical. There she was, surrounded by the hockey players, the football players, and the soccer play¬ ers. Each boy leaned his chest in to listen to the stories and jokes. Each one seized his chance to poke and tickle her. Melissa Vondres, I had to admit she was beautiful: long, flowing blond hair brightened by her skyblue eyes, and dark charcoal eyelashes that never stopped dancing. But I hated her. I’m not sure if the hatred was because she was such a flirt, always teasing the boys, making them all think they had a chance, or because she could be a flirt because of her radiant beauty. Maybe a combination of disgust and jealousy. Nyssa Lieberman girl n. A strong, feminine, smart, crazy being. What does it mean to be a girl? Different things for different people, but for me it means being whatever I want to be. It means being an athlete

Issues in Cultural Theory 7 and a tomboy but also liking to wear a skirt from time to time. It means hanging out with boys while also knowing that there is nothing like girlfriends. Katherine Martin

hardcore adj. Intensely loyal, die-hard, especially regarding athlet¬ ics, extremely dedicated to achieving a specific ath¬ letic goal. She trained everyday. She added on to her manda¬ tory sport workouts. She pushed herself to the max, training her body to perform to the highest potential. She was hardcore and her work ethic was hardcore as well. It paid off. Caroline Lind

insecure adj. Being unsure of who you are or how you fit in. Everyone has insecurities, especially those people who have not found their special.qualities, or the things that set them apart from those they pass on the path. At one time or another we all struggle to find our niche. We are all human; therefore we are insecure. June Gordon

jacked adj. Having muscles. My best definition of jacked comes from experi¬ ence. Someone will notice my strength and say, “Geez, you’re jacked!” They mean I have some muscles on me. Kelsey Siepser

kiss n. &C v. A sign of affection that expresses one’s love for another. When my friend’s grandfather passed away, I heard her crying. Immediately I went to her room

85 to console her. I gave her a kiss on the cheek and told her I’d be there for her. Emmy Grote and Sarah Smith luscious adj. 1) Highly gratifying to taste or smell; delicious. 2) Delighting any of the senses. Her luscious lips touched the delicious pea'ch. Kristen Miller mum n. A mother who is a best friend: someone who under¬ stands everything without words, when to step in and stay out, when to advise and when to listen. My Mum is the flame that never goes out, no ..*y matter what. Katherine Martin normal adj. Typically describing something that is usual or conforms to the standard. Often people prefer to think of themselves and be thought of as normal. However, how does one know what is normal? Something is only normal when it has conformed to its surroundings and does not stand out. However, if moved to a differ¬ ent surrounding, the previously normal thing would become strange or different. Nothing is ever truly normal. Jessica Chermayeff orgasmic adj. (derived loosely from the Latin orgasm) Deliciously WILD; out-of-control in greatness; excitement- inducing. The ripe, chocolate-covered strawberry in the middle of June was simply orgasmic. Lauren Holliday

Issues in Cultural Theory 7 pms n. Premenstrual syndrome. When I have pms, I am crabby, bloated, major cramping (Advil please!) and cry about anything the least bit emotional, or occasionally for no apparent reason. Kelsey Siepser queen n. A woman born into prestigious authority, and therefore developing grace and sophistication. Her poise and grace were known throughout society: at school and at home. Her delicate smile had awed many, for they were fascinated and transfixed by her elegance. She was the queen, a worldly woman who was known and respected by all. Sarah Wendell rebel n.& v. An individual who examines his life carefully and then dedicates himself to changing what dissatisfies him, despite possible social or political boundaries and consequences. I see many rebels in my life. I see kids on drugs, angry at their parents; I see abused women getting a divorce. I see adults struggling to get the educa¬ tion they never received as a child. I read about rebels fighting for freedom in their country, or other rebels fighting to change customs or adapt them to the times. A rebel is passionate and determined; a rebel fights for what they want. My perception of a rebel is positive, while in another place or time rebels are viewed with hate and intolerance. Clara Amenyo

87 sentimental adj. Being sensitive, nostalgic, or emotionally attached to events of the past. I’m the most sentimental person I know; I save everything and make scrapbooks all the time. Lindsey Locks tearful adj. Fragile, close to tears. She was tearful. Walking alone through the cold winter rain, the pain was nearly too much to bear. Gail MacKinley

understand v. To put oneself in another’s position. We are the best of friends. I know what you are thinking. You know what I am going to say and we both understand. June Gordon

victim n. Someone who has suffered as a result of an action or belief. I think girls today are victims of many things— not only physical abuse but also of a more subtle inner abuse that holds them back from fully expressing themselves. Margaret Coffin

weight n. A contributing factor to one’s appearance. Girls often are so concerned with their appear¬ ance that they focus on their weight. They eat very little in the dining hall believing that the skinnier they are the prettier they will be. Emily Grote and Sarah Smith

x-rated adj. X-rated is a rating applied to something particularly illicit or inappropriate for younger people due to sexual or violent content.

Issues in Cultural Theory 7 The movie was x-rated because it had many sexual scenes. Jessica Chermayeff young adj. An adjective that few people associate themselves with because those who are young either don’t admit it or haven’t the analytical component to their lan¬ guage to describe it. To be young is to be infallible in some respects; scared and ignorant in others. At school we seldom realize our youth. We hide it behind winter cloaks of school tradition, as if we had the capacity to adapt so easily. Katherine Dybwad zonked adj. The catatonic state of being preceding long hours of study. Zonked from too much study of European history, she lies sprawled over her opened books. Emily Ma

89 7) O S 3

3 7) Q < CD 71

Babcock Professor Afro-American Studies and History University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Fifty years ago, mainstream artists and intellectuals did not set out to critically represent, or to study, or to trouble, white racial identity. Of course, James Baldwin and others inquired deeply into what made some people think they were white, and what results their commitment to whiteness had for the whole nation and the world. But such inquiries, largely by people of color, were margin¬ alized and indeed hardly comprehended. To speak as a white intellectual—to create as a white artist—did not usually imply awareness of one’s own peculiar racial interests, let alone patholo¬ gies. People of color carried those burdens. Whites could articulate universal truths. It was easy, even natural, to be white. One of the many great results of the freedom move¬ ments of the 1950s and 1960s was to open up the possibility that whiteness could be broadly under¬ stood as a source of unease and critical reflection. How people became white has assumed increasing importance as an historical question, how they stay white as a sociological one, and with what results as a moral one. Such questioning is fragile. The loud anti-affirmative action insistence that a brief historical period of stop-and-go enforcement of civil rights law has magically erected a “color¬ blind” United States coexists with the fact that white families are about seven times as wealthy as Black and Latino ones. One result is to allow white opinion to again claim universality, and to fret over the allegedly narrow race-thinking of people of color. Nonetheless, we still are benefici¬ aries for the moment of a productive post-civil rights uneasiness where whiteness is concerned, and this brief essay concerns how to nurture such disquiet. It warns against who would foreclose

91 discussion of the ways in which the United States has been and is a white nation. As importantly, it cautions against the temptation among ourselves to think that seeing and naming the ways in which white identity serves to answer all questions, rather than raising new questions and new combi¬ nations of them. Last summer, instead of starting this essay, I went on a bike ride. Ten minutes into it, I crossed paths with a garbage truck. Ramshackle and staffed by young white workers, the truck sported the busi¬ ness’s name uncertainly lettered on its side. That name echoed the most famous trash business in U.S. popular culture: “Sanford and Sons.” Twd- minutes later, an aging SUV passed me. Tricked out with some extra bits of chrome, it featured a crude sticker in the back window: PO PIMPIN’. The coincidence of seeing these two vehicles not a half-mile apart seemed to fully vindicate my ride-don’t-read approach to finding literary inspi¬ ration. I returned home eager to write about the ways in which African American comedy—Redd Foxx had made his “Fred Sanford” television character our most celebrated junk hauler and dealer—and slang shaped the self-image of white kids, even in central Illinois. Greeting me at home was our teenaged son, Donovan, ready to burst all bubbles. Maybe, he objected, some guy named Sanford owned the junk busi¬ ness, and his sons helped out. Maybe they never heard of Redd Foxx. With regard to “pimpin’,” Donovan commanded local knowledge and spoke with even more assurance. When his friends, re¬ gardless of race, said they were “pimpin’” (i.e., dressing up) for a date, they used slang from youth culture, not necessarily African American

Issues in Cultural Theory 7 culture. I recovered, but not entirely, when the In¬ ternet and a student reminded me that “Po Pimp” was a 1996 hit by the Chicago hip-hop duo Do or Die. With the reputed “world’s fastest rapper,” Tung Twista, sitting in, the cut featured an inter¬ nal rhyme of “P-I-M-P-ology” with “dese ho’s bi¬ ology.” Two years later, Do or Die were back with “Still Po Pimpin,” whose lyrics reflected on how to move from “low cash” to a Caddy. Elsewhere, in “Pimpology,” the emphases were on the difference between sex in a Dodge (and in a garage) and in a “Lexus coupe smoked out,” and on remaining a “Po P-I-M-P” with “M-O M-O-N-E-Y.” The SUV probably had an apt sticker, and one reminding us of the complicated ways in which contemporary whiteness is as much about appropriating other cultures as it is about creating boundaries. But Donovan could still counter that maybe those kids in the SUV bought it with the window decoration already affixed and had no idea what it meant. The last word was not going to be mine. Nor will the last word be mine in broader debates with critics of those of us who study whiteness in the United States, past and present. Those critics charge that we tend to see race everywhere, draw¬ ing loose connections from evidence open to mul¬ tiple interpretations. The critics sometimes draw on powerful anti-intellectual and antitheoretical traditions. Often enough they clearly seek to con¬ strict talk of race, of racism, and reparations for slavery and segregation. To talk of white identity and white privilege historically, they argue, im¬ poses (post)modern moralizings and categories on the past. To talk about white privilege and white identity in the present, they continue, needlessly rakes over old coals and misses the fact that the

93 United States has gotten over race. Thus, we liter¬ ally never have to reckon with whiteness. In such forms, it is easy to dismiss many attacks on the critical study of whiteness. The greatest danger to the study of race, however, comes not from hostile critics but from an overconfidence that presumes that uncovering the role of whiteness in stfuctur- ing the ways that misery is inflicted and accepted in this society straightforwardly offers simple and pat answers. We need self-criticism. In any case, there’s no dismissing Donovan. Donovan is profoundly right in at least two regards. First, racial meanings circulate within a world of commodities. The racially coded SUV gets bought and sold by people with various investments in the symbolism of the sticker and the vehicle. One can imagine, for example, white kids not getting the meaning or origins of “PO PIMPIN’” and therefore choosing not to trouble themselves with removing the sticker. One kind of white consump¬ tion of the van would be to buy it in part because the combination of chrome and lettering meshes with a desire to see in marketed distortions of Black culture a violent and exciting alternative to poor whiteness. Or perhaps the signage might at¬ tract a young white middle-class suburban buyer, of the sort to whom hip-hop now massively mar¬ kets itself, one identifying with pimp-dom as mi¬ sogyny, hardness, and over-consumption—one given his parents’ old SUV and looking forward to a Lexus. Another buyer, or car dealer, might remove the sticker to make the SUV suitable for soccer-mom-and-dad-dom, without African American racial markers. Such examples suggest the second level on which Donovan’s critique hits the mark. His observation

Issues in Cultural Theory 7 that white teenagers exist in youth cultures re¬ minds us that no one is only white. Thus, the van buyers we imagine have distinct class positions, sexualities, genders, and ages and are white in profoundly different ways. To appreciate this point is critical because any politics that hopes to free people from the miseries associated with whiteness cannot talk only or mainly about “giv¬ ing up” white identity and privilege. It must also show that “white” people can become more a part of communities, more able to defend their rights as youths or as workers, more able to express sexu¬ ality—in short, more human—as they disillusion themselves regarding seeing their interests as white. Exposing the ways in which whiteness has mani¬ festly been able to hide in plain sight—to deter¬ mine what color flesh-tone Band-Aids would be and who gets to borrow, market, and buy whose culture—has of necessity occupied the energies of writers and artists wanting to study race criti¬ cally. But to miss the ways in which whiteness remains at times ineffable and multiple is to de¬ fault on developing mature and politically useful analyses. We must point to the many roles of whiteness. Whiteness enables some whites to rule, and causes others to come to grips with being ruled. It enables some groups to express their particularity confidently, even as it causes other groups (or the same group at other times) to con¬ form to assimilationist pressures. Our task is thus almost never to say that something “is really about race.” It is to show how whiteness exists in a complex history and a multiply inflected present. A telling example of the need to both expose white privilege and to avoid casting matters solely in

95 those terms also reached me recreationally. While we were visiting a Florida beach in the summer of 2002, the front cover of a free golf magazine arrested my attention. The headlines of Fore: The South’s Golfing Monthly presumably do not often reference hip-hop lyrics. But there it was: “HOOTIE JOHNSON FIGHTS THE POWER.” The headline’s first two words will be familiar to those who fol¬ low golf. Johnson, a banker, chairs the governing board of the Augusta National Golf Club, home of the crown jewel of U.S. golf, the Masters Tour¬ nament. The last three words sample a militant rap by Public Enemy. The power that Hootie has fought is, according to Fore, “the New Politically Correct Morality.” Martha Burk, chair of the National Council of Women’s Organizations (NCWO), allegedly personifies that morality, by virtue of her group’s threats of a protest of tour¬ nament sponsors if Augusta National continues to have only male members. Johnson’s response evoked the specter of country clubmen as an “en¬ dangered species.” It caused Fore to credit him with “one of the bravest political statements we’ve heard in twenty years.” His press release held: “We will not be intimidated. . . . We do not intend to become a trophy in [the NCWO’s] tro¬ phy case.” Fore sampled Public Enemy even as it insisted that race had nothing to do with the current contro¬ versies at Augusta National. Hootie was a man, not a white man, in the publication’s view. The male-only policy, it editorialized, was fully separa¬ ble from the club’s poor “historical record in deal¬ ing with people not of the white Caucasian Anglo-Saxon persuasion.” Fore would have risen in opposition, readers were reassured, if Chair-

issues in Cultural Theory 7 man Johnson were reasserting the right to main¬ tain Jim Crow membership. In general, this same story frames press coverage of the exclusion of women at Augusta National. The Masters had a race problem and then in 1990 got rid of it when Augusta National admitted its first African Amer¬ ican members, as civil rights groups pressured the professional tour not to play tournaments at Jim Crow clubs. Now women wanted in. The commentary of the great New York Times sportswriter Robert Lipsyte took a lonely con¬ trary position, one insisting on the continuing centrality of race in any discussion of the Masters. Branding the tournament as the “most oppressive sports event I have ever attended,” Lipsyte color¬ fully and aptly observed that “Augusta [National] has preserved a whiteness and a greenness that has encouraged discrimination throughout the golfing world.” Among much else noteworthy in his analysis was the extent to which he broke with casting matters as the “Hootie v. Martha Show” and instead focused on the club within a web of institutions. That Lipsyte should stand out for his acknowledgment that the Masters is still one of the nation’s whitest places puts him in much the same position as those scholars of whiteness who risk seeming cheerless and passe for pointing out that white supremacy builds on the oppressive past and operates now. Because Augusta National today has just over one percent Black members (probably, membership figures are closely guarded) and because the Masters is regularly won by Tiger Woods, we have allegedly moved on from race to gender problems. No matter that Woods is currently the only African American holder of a touring professional’s card for major

97 tournaments on the men’s side. No matter that as of 2000, the Professional Golf Association (PGA) tours, male and female, and the Senior PGA com¬ bined contained fewer African American athletes than the National Hockey League. No matter that things are not getting better; seven of the eleven African American touring pros golfed the Senior competitions. If whiteness is supposedly over at the “color blind” Augusta National, the necessity to dwell on the past is also gone. The wonderful recent Louisiana- based detective novels of James Lee Burke take care to point out that some of the trees that characters pass were slave-planted. What golf L announcer would point out that Augusta National was laid out on what had been a plantation? Who, in the context of both race and gender exclusions, has reflected on the name Masters? Or that the city of Augusta itself erected a monument to the Confederacy as the most “white and fair” of na¬ tions? Who revisits tennis great and sports histo¬ rian Arthur Ashe’s reply to the question of whether golf is the sport most lacking in social enlighten¬ ment: “If you don’t count polo.” When the past is invoked, it is not to establish the ways Augusta National was planted as a white place, or to emphasize that the PGA dropped its whites-only “Caucasian clause” only in 1961. Instead, the institutional exclusions of the past become a way to shield Hootie Johnson’s most famous predeces¬ sor, Augusta National Chairman Clifford Roberts, from charges of bigotry. Roberts, who presided over the period of exclusion, whose family delighted in saying they bought a “family of Ne¬ groes” along with a farm in the twentieth century, who enjoyed “darky” stories, and who deplored

Issues in Cultural Theory 7 “miscegenation,” was simply expressing his clay’s attitudes. It would, according to David Owen’s recent popular history The Making of the Mas¬ ters: Clifford Roberts, Augusta National, and Golf’s Most Prestigious Tournament, “be hard to put racism to it” when judging Roberts’s record regarding African Americans. The further genius of Lipsyte’s position is to realize that the corporate-subsidized “whiteness and greenness” of the Masters emboldens its gender as well as its racial discrimination. That is, he does not stop at saying that Hootie Johnson’s position remains a white thing, using privacy rights to jus¬ tify membership policies leaving Jim Crow all but intact. The point for Lipsyte is not to change the subject back to race, but to see that the subject is both race and gender. In Evelyn Coleman’s recent thriller, What a Woman’s Gotta Do, set near Au¬ gusta, doomsday scenarios involving the erection of an all-white world unfold alongside plots to engineer an all-male one. The connections are what interest Coleman and Lipsyte, and what should interest us. One unhappy result of the inability to keep track of race and gender together has been a tendency to silently assume that, as Louise Newman puts it, feminist demands articulate “white women’s rights” unless clearly stated otherwise. Given the history of white women as the main beneficiaries of affirmative action, given the racial demogra¬ phics of Augusta National, and given the ways in which elite class status falls to whites, it is perhaps natural to assume that the demand to open the club to women implies mostly the inclusion of white women. Even so, it is remarkable how thor¬ oughly Burk’s quoted positions in the press erase

99 the category of women of color. Calling for equal treatment of women while ignoring the race and class inequalities among women, the campaign against Augusta National recapitulates too much of the history of organized feminism and raises the possibility that whiteness can hide in even some feminist institutions. How different the campaign might look if it were seen as beginning with the agitation of Anita DeFrantz, who presided over the Executive Com¬ mittee of the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) in 1996. An African American woman, DeFrantz objected to including Augusta National as a golfing venue for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, raising the issues of both race and gender exclu¬ sions in arguing, “The competition should happen where the world is truly welcome, before and after the Olympics.” Indeed, the extent to which race is effaced in recent reporting on Augusta is remarkable. The current phase of the controversy began, though this fact is almost wholly ignored, with pressure not from Burk, but from African American Augusta National member Lloyd Ward. Ward, also a USOC official, campaigned behind the scenes, and Burk thought she was only “fol¬ lowing up” on his efforts. One of the most eloquent messages of support came from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which expressed its soli¬ darity with the pun, “‘Fore’ward in the struggle.” NAACP leader and Georgia native Julian Bond eloquently sided with inclusion, even as he aptly warned against “racially profiling” Tiger Woods into playing the lead role in protests. When the city government considered laws in early 2003

Issues in Cultural Theory 7 severely constraining upcoming feminist protests against the Masters, Black representatives voted solidly against the proposal, with one member acidly remarking that Klan marches had never produced such restrictions in Augusta. The great Latino champion Lee Trevino’s powerful protest of dressing in the parking lot, not the clubhouse, when playing the Masters is a part of golf lore. And yet the frame for stories remains one in which a white woman leader articulates matters in a way that ignores both her own racial position and that of women of color. Such a framing mat¬ ters, as for example when Burk so hectors Black journalists and (especially) Tiger Woods on the need for them to support (white) women that African American writers are moved to wonder why white journalists and golfers are not similarly responsible for protesting. At their low point, such naive representations of the relationships between African American struggles (consigned to the past) and (white) women’s struggles in the present end in ESPN’s John Saunders accusing Burk of using the “blood” of the civil rights movement to further “her battle.” Clear thinking about whiteness, about its ability to borrow and to exclude, about its relationships with other identities, and about the institutions in which it hides will not end such tensions as those between Saunders and Burk. Even less can the study of whiteness, however critical its edge, cre¬ ate a sense among working people, regardless of color or gender, that they have much at stake in the quarrels over who gets into Augusta National. But in building the kinds of coalitions that can address and change the racism, the male privilege,

101 and the social exclusions that structure the com¬ manding heights of golf and of political economy in the United States, an awareness of how white¬ ness keeps showing up—in changing forms and never by itself—is indispensable.

Issues in Cultural Theory 7

Dimensions are in inches. Max Becher & Young Man With Shield, 1997/98 Andrea Robbins Chromogenic print From the German 30 x 25 3/8 Indian series Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery Young Man With Shield, 1997/98 Chromogenic print 30 x 25 3/8 Courtesy of Sonnab end Gallery Knife Thrower, 1997/98 Chromogenic print 30 x 25 3/8 Courtesy of Sonnab end Gallery Chief’s Wife, 1997/98 Chromogenic print 30 x 25 3/8 Courtesy of Sonnab end Gallery Man With Blackened Face, 1997/98 Chromogenic print 30 x 25 3/8 Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery Three Men, 1997/98 Chromogenic print 30 x 35 1/2 Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery Meeting, 1997/98 Chromogenic print 30 x 35 1/2 Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery

Nayland Blake Invisible Man, 1994 Mixed media Dimensions variable Courtesy of the Artist and Matthew Marks Gallery

Nancy Burson Untitled, 2000/01 From the series Eight Iris prints on vellum Untitled (Guys Who Each, 16 x13 Look Like Jesus) Courtesy of the Artist Ancient Jesus Composite Iris print on vellum 16 x 13 Courtesy of the Artist Contemporary Jesus Composite Iris print on vellum 16 x 13 Courtesy of the Artist

105 Wendy White Girl's Alphabet, 2002 Ewald Twenty-six chromogenic prints Each 16 x 20 Courtesy of the Artist

William Drawings for Projection Series: Johannesburg- Kentridge 2nd Greatest City After Paris; Monument; Mine; Sobriety, Obesity, and Growing Old, 1981/91 16mm animated films transferred to videodisc Dimensions variable Collection The Jewish Museum, New York

Barbara Untitled, 2003 Kruger Billboard Dimensions variable "L- Courtesy of the Artist

Nikki S. The Yuppie Project (18), 1998 Lee Fujiflex print 21 x 28 Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects The Yuppie Project (23), 199 8 Fujiflex print 21 x 28 Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects The Yuppie Project (19), 1998 Fujiflex print 21 x 28 Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects The Yuppie Project (15), 1998 Fujiflex print 28 x21 Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects The Yuppie Project (4), 1998 Fujiflex print 21 x 28 Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects

Issues in Cultural Theory 7 The Yuppie Project (17), 1998 Fujiflex print 28 x 21 Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects The Yuppie Project (30), 1998 Fujiflex print 21 x 28 Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects

Paul Heidi, 1992 McCarthy Video & Color, 62 min., 32 sec. Mike Collection of The Center for Art and Kelley Visual Culture University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Cindy Bus Riders, 1976/2000 Sherman Fifteen black-and-white photographs Each, 10 x 8 Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures Untitled, 2000 Color photograph 36x24 Edition of six Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures Untitled, 2000 Color photograph 36 x24 Edition of six Collection of Ann & Mel Schaffer Family Collection Untitled, 2000 Color photograph 36 x24 Edition of six Collection of Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica

Gary Big Still, 2001 Simmons Painted foam, fiberglass, wood, metal 64 x 164 1/8 x 48 Courtesy Metro Pictures

107

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109 Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Interrogating ‘Whiteness,’ Compli¬ cating ‘Blackness’: Remapping American Culture.” Ameri¬ can Quarterly. Vol. 47 (September 1995), pp. 428-66.

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The Center for Art and Visual Culture (CAVC) is a non-profit organization dedicated to the exhibi¬ tion of contemporary art and culture, the publica¬ tion of catalogs, CDs, DVDs, and books on the arts, and educational and community outreach projects. The Center’s programs—geared to stu¬ dents, faculty, as well as the general public—serve as a forum for exploring the philosophical and aesthetic issues of the day. The Center is commit¬ ted to rethinking the relationship between arts in¬ stitutions and the public, placing special emphasis on well-written, viewer-friendly catalog and wall texts, rigorously documented and researched cata¬ logs, the lucid application of critical and social theory to build connections between visual culture and the society at large, and creative exhibition and catalog design. Disciplines represented in¬ clude painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography, digital art, video, film, television, design, architecture, advertising, and installation and performance art. The Center reaches both national and international audiences through its publication and traveling exhibition program. The exhibitions it sponsors— one-person, retrospective, thematic, and experi¬ mental projects—give voice to artists, subjects, and curatorial approaches often ignored or under¬ represented in mainstream museums. Venues for these shows have included The Addison Gallery of American Art (Andover), Barbican Centre (London), Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Blaffer Gallery (Houston), Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, International Cen¬ ter of Photography (New York), New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), Santa Monica Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem (New York),

115 The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College (Saratoga Springs, New York), and The Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh). The Center’s catalogs and books are fully illustrated and contain essays on issues of critical theory, art history, criticism, and art and visual culture by distinguished writers and scholars. In 1997, The Center inaugurated a new biannual book series, Issues in Cultural Theory. The Center’s publica¬ tions are distributed internationally by Distrib¬ uted Art Publishers. To further its mission, The Center continues to explore the possibilities of new media—including Web-based publicatioas, online symposia, and interactive CDs and DVDs of exhibitions for those unable to participate directly in The Center’s activities. The Center is dedicated to furthering the role of education in the arts. Symposia, lecture series, conferences, film series, workshops, courses in museum studies, and artist residencies stimulate an ongoing dialogue about contemporary art and culture—from K-12 school-based initiatives to adult education and community outreach in Baltimore City. In 2000, The Center’s first com¬ munity outreach program was the Joseph Beuys Tree Partnership. This project represented a col¬ laborative effort with more than twenty organiza¬ tions in Baltimore, including the Baltimore City Public School system. In 2002, The Center’s community outreach program hosted a project by Maria Elena Gonzalez, Magic Carpet/Home.

Issues in Cultural Theory 7 Center for Art and Visual Culture David Yager Executive Director Symmes Gardner Director Maurice Berger Curator Renee van der Stelt Projects Coordinator William John Tudor Exhibition & Technology Designer Janet Magruder Business Manager

Issues in Cultural Theory Maurice Berger Series Editor Antonia Gardner Managing Editor John Alan Farmer Copy Editor

Book design by Guenet Abraham Cover design by Franc Nunoo-Quarcoo Printed in Iceland by Oddi Printing, Reykjavik Book composed in Sabon and Grotesque

Distributed by D.A.P. Distributed Art Publishers New York 2004

117

Berger, Maurice, 1956- White : whiteness and race in contemporary art

1 Minimal Politics: Performativity and Minimalism in Recent American Art Maurice Berger 1-890761-00-1 2 Bruno Monguzzi: A Designer’s Perspective Franc Nunoo-Quarcoo Contributions by Rudolph deHarak, April Greiman, Ikko Tanaka, Gene Federico, Pierluigi Cerri, Marco Franciolli, and Dieter Bachmann 1-89076l-01-x 3 Adrian Piper: A Retrospective Maurice Berger Contributions by Laura Cottingham, Jean Fisher, Kobena Mercer, Dara Meyers-Kingsley, and Adrian Piper 1-890761-02-8 4 Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations 1979-2000 Maurice Berger Contributions by Jennifer Gonzalez and Fred Wilson 1 890761-04-4 5 Postmodernism: A Virtual Discussion Edited by Maurice Berger Contributors include Maxwell Anderson, Dan Cameron, Donna De Salvo,Wendy Ewald, Chrissie lies, Caroline Jones, Kellie Jones, Michael Leja, Simon Leung, Olu Oguibe, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rosenblum, David A. Ross, Jerry Saltz, and Michelle Wallace 1-890761-05-2 6 Paul Rand; Modernist Design Franc Nunoo-Quarcoo Contributors include Massimo Vignelli, Diane Gromala, Marion Rand, Ivan Chermayeff, Milton Glaser, Derek Birdsall, Jessica Helfand, Gerald Gross, Wolfgang Weingart, Armin Hofmann, and Takenobu Igarashi

1-890761-03-6 Issues in Cultural Theory 7 White.: Whiteness and Race Book Series in Contemporary Art Maurice Berger Contributions by Wendy Ewald, David Roediger, and Patricia J. Williams 1-890761-06-0 15211223 ISBN 1890761032 Distributed by D, A.P, New York