L.A. Billboards

This is a post I have thought of doing for a while. Over the past six or so months the MAK Center for Art & Architecture (Los Angeles) has sponsored an exhibition called How Many Billboards? I don't really know anything about the Center; they basically commissioned twenty plus artists to create billboards that were dispersed around Los Angeles. the curators explain: "The philosophical proposition of the exhibition is simple: art should occupy a visible position in the cacophony of mediated images in the city, and it should do so without merely adding to the visual noise. How Many Billboards? Art In Stead proposes that art periodically displace advertisement in the urban environment." I think it is important to displace commercial uses for aesthetic and political ones in public spaces and so find this project appealing.

The Center now has photos* of the whole lot on line, accompanied by sometimes useful, sometimes not-so-useful (because thoroughly written in 'art speak') curatorial blurbs. Here are my three favorites in no particular order:

This first one is by Kerry Tribe, with whom I am unfamiliar. The curators write: "Tribe's billboard reflects the artist's interest in the problems associated with perception. Her abstraction of a darkening sky takes advantage of the proclivity to look up at billboards. Blending the site of the message with its airy backdrop, Tribe's image engages in a formal push and pull with perspective. Tribe's billboard transforms a space that typically directs one's attention outward (aiming the thoughts and desires of viewers toward a specific product) into a space of mental suspension, a hazy zone to lose one's thoughts within. . . . Tribe's billboard gives the viewer a mental break from the onslaught of visual imagery to simply ponder what the image might be, and what purpose it may serve."

Maybe so. To me it seems more like some sort of rip in the fabric of the sunny southern California skies, revealing the roiling troubles (social?, political?, economic?, environmental?) they disguise. Not clear sky hidden by clouds, but the reverse.

Since my tastes sometimes run to agit-prop, I also like this one by Allan Sekula. Indeed, I have posted on Sekula and the ways he has used this particular image here before. Once again, here are the curators: "Sekula deploys an image previously exhibited at Documenta 12. A welder at a construction site holding a lit acetylene torch and crouching over his work takes a moment to look directly at the viewer. The words "The rich destroy the planet" are superimposed in Spanish over the photograph. The lettering, which looks as if it were cut letter by letter from old magazines, is slightly disjunctive in scale but chromatically balanced and ultimately aesthetically appealing. The message, however, is blunt and accusatory, and it functions succinctly for both English and Spanish speakers, since these words appear similar in both languages."

Yeah, yeah. The rich are destroying the planet. And, by the way, they are working hard to shift blame onto the poor.

Finally (and hardly least) this one is by Ken Gonzales Day. And here are the curators, doing their best to obfuscate: "Ken Gonzales-Day . . . investigates, among other things, the role of photography in its relationship to the discourse of race and the dire consequences of racism Gonzales-Day's billboard project brings these histories into the present, reflecting upon how residues of oppression linger in varying forms, despite the many changes that society continues to undergo. His subjects, Bust of a Young Man (bronze with silver inlay eyes, by the Italian artist Antico) and Bust of a Man (black stone-pietra da paragone, Florence 1758, by the Englishman Francis Harwood), are owned by the J. Paul Getty Museum. Gonzales-Day photographed them as part of his Profile Series during a residency as a Getty Research Institute Scholar. The historical sculptures refer to the artistic styles and philosophies of the Renaissance and the Neoclassical period, both of which in their turn revived the achievements of Greek and Roman culture. The imaged sculptures serve as a reminder that despite the manifold social advancements we have witnessed, it is still with the vocabulary of the past that we speak today. The figures in profile also allude to the dawn of photography and the earliest technologies used to mechanically reproduce human likeness. In the third image, a Photoshop composite of the figures facing each other ignites an erotic charge as they stare into one another's eyes. As photographs of sculptures engaged in a virtual erotic dynamic, these profiles are thrice removed from their human referents, a fact which is emphasized by the brilliant highlights that bounce off the material-objects' surfaces."

As I have noted here a couple of times before, Gonzales Day produces very provocative, insightful, creative work. If I had not read the other two blurbs, I'd say this is one of the especially not-so-useful instances of art speak. Here we get lots of high-falutin' words (presented in irritatingly passive voice) to remind us that, despite our advanced technological accomplishments and embellishments, our racist past has not faded away; it still pervades our lives.
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* Please note: I've lifted all three of these images from the MAK Center web page; Photographs © Gerard Smulevich.

Making Things Visible

On Thursday evening I attended a work-in-progress screening of a new film by a very talented local film-maker Carvin Eison entitled Shadows of the Lynching Tree. The title captures the subject. I anticipate that, when finished, this film will be provocative and extremely powerful. During the follow-up discussion, a set of themes occurred to me. The first was how long the shadows actually are. As I've noted here before, many of those commenting in print on the photographs that initially broke the ways U.S. military personnel were torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib regularly draw analogies to lynching photographs. The focus in each instance was on those perpetrating the crimes instead of on their victims.

This, in turn, brought to mind a second theme (on which I've posted here and here) revolving around the difficulty of depicting power and powerlessness. The difficulty, in particular, is how one might mitigate the risk of exploiting victims or sensationalizing violence and suffering while still capturing the evils of, say, torture or terror or genocide. This brought to mind the work of Ken Gonzales Day who - as I noted here - has used some photoshop-like-technique to erase the victims out of lynching photographs, leaving behind only the perpetrators. Here for example is a detail from one of these altered photographs; it was initially taken at the lynching of John Holmes at St. James Park in San Jose, CA in 1933.

Detail St. James Park (2006) © Ken Gonzales Day

We no longer witness Holmes's body dangling from the tree. As a result we are able to see more clearly the spectators and perpetrators. Arguably, we can discern even more. In a perceptive short review for The New York Times of a 2006 exhibition of Gonzales Day's work, Holland Cotter wrote:

"In each of these pictures, though, the artist has erased the body of the victim, leaving everything else intact. The tree or telegraph post used for the hanging is there; so is the crowd of witnesses and executioners, posing for the camera or staring up at what is now empty space.

As the artist Kerry James Marshall demonstrated in paintings using lynching photographs and a comparable mode of selective erasure, the effect is very different from looking at the horrific unaltered pictures, where the victims continue to be exposed and shamed as objects of casual spectatorship, exactly as their killers intended. Mr. Gonzales-Day's work throws the emphasis on the spectators themselves and makes hard lines between then and now, them and us, difficult to draw."

Cotter here drew my attention to Marshall, with whose work I am unfamiliar. The relevant work seems to be this triptych:

Heirlooms and Accessories (2002) © Kerry James Marshall

Although in this reproduction you cannot quite make out the suppressed background, Marshall leaves a spectral impression of the original photograph of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion Indiana. Each of the women whose face is encapsulated in a locket witnessed the event.

The way that Marshal lays the necklaces clearly suggests that the spectators lives, and those too, of their descendants, are tethered to this violent scene. With that gesture, he enables us to ponder things that might otherwise be occluded by horror - things like complicity and, thereby, inheritance and continuity. Like Gonzales Day he is using photography to provoke us into seeing that the subject of the images might just as well be victimizers as victims.

Uses of Photography - "Exile of the Imaginary"

Well, here is a question. I came acrosss an advert for a current exhibition called "Exile of the Imaginary: Politics Aesthetics, Love" among the adverts in the most recent issue of ArtForum
(March 2007). I knew I'd seen the image in the poster someplace before. Sure enough it is a detail from a photograph taken at the lynching of John Holmes at St. James Park in San Jose, CA in 1933. I had seen related images (plates 80-84) in Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America about which I've posted before. In that post and another I raised the issue of "meaning" and "use" in photography.

This poster raises, I think, some unsettling issues about the uses of photography. One of the artists included in the exhibition is Ken Gonzales-Day who last fall had an exhibition entitled "Lynching in the American West, 1850-1935" at CUE Art Foundation in NYC. (The exhibition was curated by Bruce Yonemoto and was accompanied by an essay composed by Juli Carson. Yonemoto is among the artists included in the "Exile" exhbition which is curated by Carson. Small world.) In any case, Gonzales-Day has undertaken to "erase" lynching as in this image:

According to the Artist: "More than simply retracing the forgotten lines of history, the Erased Lynching series directs our gaze to invisibility itself. Gleaned from the archive, regional museums, and eBay; these photographic images of Western lynchings were altered. The bodies of the condemned and the ropes are removed but the lynch mob, if present, remains fully visible, jeering, laughing, or pulling at the air in a deadly pantomime. As such, this series strives to make the invisible -visible." In this altered image the body of John Holmes no long swings from the tree above the assembled crowd (even though in the publicity still for the exhibition one can still make out the rope wrapped around the tree trunk).

Now, this strikes me as an astoundingly creative enterprise. I do not mean to criticize Gonzales-Day; in fact, I want to track down more of his work.* My worry, rather, is about the poster and the other publicity for the "Exile" show. As you can see, the poster reproduces a detail from the left side of this image (which, as the following image shows, Gonzales-Day reproduces as a large - 120 X 280 inch - mural). I am extremely uneasy about using this brightly colored slice of a retouched photograph of a lynching as a publicity poster that in no way acknowledges the original provenance of the image. ArtForum reproduces the larger black and white image I've lifted here in the same fuscia color as the bottom part of a full page advert that is itself embedded in a 100+ page expanse of other advertisements. (See page 227.) I cannot quite put my finger on it, but something seems amiss here.

As I wrote in my earlier posts, I think James Allen has done an immense service by pushing us to confront the evidence of systematic racial violence in the U.S.. Likewise, Gonzales-Day, by highlighting both the quite large number of lynchings in the Western states and the fact that Latinos constituted a disproportionate number of the victims of those acts of violence, has undertaken a much needed task. But images do not speak for themselves. And the publicity advertisements for the "Exile" show seem to me to suffer precisely because they re-embed a horrific event in speechless silence.
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*Gonzales-Day has published a book Lynching in the American West, 1850-1935 with Duke University Press (2006) in which he recounts his inquiry into the subject.