The closest metaphor I can think of to describe my OAH presidency is the boulder Sisyphus had to push up the hill every day, only to have it roll back down in the night.
Here’s the morning, sunny, warm, and clear, and here’s the day’s boulder, a financial plan. You roll it up the hill. It rolls back down. The next day the boulder is a conference call. You roll it up the hill. It rolls back down. The next day the boulder is a mission statement. You roll it up the hill. It rolls back down. The next day the boulder is a strategic plan. You roll it up the hill. It rolls back down. The next day the boulder is another conference call. You roll it up the hill. It rolls back down. The strategic plan was no mere boulder. It was an eagle pecking out my liver every night.
In art school I didn’t talk about the Organization of American Historians. No one had ever heard of it, so even if I had bragged about being OAH president, people would have rolled their eyes at me in a netherworld of No Interest Whatsoever, a totally uncool realm of squares. So I have suppressed that time of travail. My presidency ended, and with its ending, the history profession passed, I assumed, into my anterior life. For years I proclaimed myself a former historian, and when asked how art school influenced my thinking about history, I maintained I no longer thought about history. Which was so very wrong.
TONGUE-LASHED IN MY studio crit by Teacher Irma, I forgot the OAH but countered with my ability to juggle several tasks at once:
I finished my book . . .
And I looked after my parents in California as my mother was dying and my father disintegrated.
That was undergraduate, Teacher Irma countered. Graduate school is different. You’re hardly ever here.
This I disputed, though I had to admit to all the entanglements of my life. I felt like I’d been in Providence a lot. I knew I’d done a lot of work, more than some other painting students. Like a chump, I carried on explaining myself as though exculpation were needed in a moment of surpassing triumph. I’m embarrassed to admit that I even sent Irma an email with the abject subject line, “It Came as a Surprise.” None of my other books had attracted so much attention, even though they’d been favorably reviewed in the New York Times and done well. At a dinner at President Ruth’s at Brown, Novelist John noted my new celebrity. He said I had finally found the right people to write about. Technically this was not true, as two of my other books had been about Americans in general. But he was right in the spirit of the thing.
A total ninny with scolding Teacher Irma, I was actually achieving a height of accomplishment. I had not only survived the devilish OAH, I had parented my parents and published a book that came in at five hundred pages in hardcover and gotten the review of a lifetime. Back at Mason Gross, I had already turned my multiplicity into art, as a collage, Chapter Revised, based on a page of my book manuscript. The ground was a wash of dark green under a page of manuscript I had shaped according to lines of text. On top of the shaped manuscript, I had sewn by hand in thick orange thread hand-cut strips of a dark red man’s tie bought at Newark’s Salvation Army. Basting the tie’s strips to the manuscript at angles to lines of typing, I obscured the text and created competing lines and conflicting narrative messages in lines as though to be read. The black-and-white manuscript, though edged organically, expressed the orderliness of scholarship; the strips of red tie, unraveling and adhered by an unsteady hand, talked over the type, posing the old riddle, What’s black and white and red/read all over?
Chapter Revised, 2006, manuscript page,
fabric, and thread on paper, 12" × 9"
So, yes, I had held it all together for years now. But, just as true, I was exhausted all the time—pressed, harried, rushed, squashed, smashed, and impossibly stretched all over the place, barely hang-ing on.
Wait, now. I was also all-powerful. Omnipotent, practically. I didn’t question whether I could balance book and art school. I even made a three-foot-high drawing in charcoal and pastel of myself doing both, with text from my book manuscript beside me, a brush in one hand, a book in the other, a Duchampian bicycle wheel for power, and a precisely drawn red alternator in place of a heart for converting one form of energy into another.
Alternator Self-Portrait, 2007,
graphite and colored pencil on paper, 33" × 23 ¼"
I had and would continue to balance book, art school, and declining parents. I’d already proven my powers. If only I had stood up to Irma with the conviction of the abilities I really had! As for mollifying her, that was pissing into the wind. Even as her hostility was turning me against graduate school, she was right about at least one thing: The History of White People, my seventh authored book, was the biggest book of my career.
ART SCHOOL INFLUENCED The History of White People, but art’s influence on my writing of history had originated years earlier. When did my turn toward the visual begin? When I was faced with Sojourner Truth, a biographical subject who did not read or write. My book Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol did not turn to art history out of respect for the image. No, I was grappling with a failure of written language, a deficiency of text. The paucity of Truth’s own words documenting her life, not pure attraction to pictures, led me to art. Focusing on image in its own right came later, with art school.
The History of White People is a visual book. In the first instance because human taxonomy, though fetishizing bodily measurement, usually turns on how people look. In the second instance because race scientists have used what they call science to prove racial superiority, and racial superiority often rests on the claim that the superior race is the most beautiful. Desire is all over beauty, as in the classical judgment of Paris that I have taken you through at self-indulgent length.
WHAT BECAME The History of White People sprang from a simple question prompted by a photograph on the front page of the New York Times in 2000. It showed bombed-out Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, in another round in the endless wars between Russia and the Caucasus, and looking like Berlin in 1945. Wikipedia says, “In 2003, the United Nations called Grozny the most destroyed city on Earth.” It certainly looked that way. Knowing that Chechnya was part of the Caucasus, I couldn’t help connecting devastation over there to a common notation in the United States. Why on earth, I wondered, are white Americans called Chechens?
You hear the name Caucasian practically every day—maybe not every single day, because calling white people “Caucasian” is like calling your car your “vehicle.” “Caucasian” proclaims an elevated purpose, like scientific truth. Medical researchers and sociologists are prime users of “Caucasian,” and they don’t use it sardonically. How, I wondered, did we get from the Caucasus, between the Black and Caspian Seas, just barely in Europe and thousands of miles from the Western Hemisphere, to “Caucasian” in American usage?
The great thing about having already written many books is that you can pursue whatever question sticks in your mind. So I pursued “Caucasian” as a euphemism for the too bald-faced label of white people. Answering my question took me to Göttingen, Germany, where I found Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, an eighteenth-century professor who picked out five skulls as embodiments of what he called the “varieties” (rather than the “races”) of mankind.
Let me repeat that: Professor Blumenbach, working according to scientifically recognized methods, picked out five skulls—skulls from five individuals—and turned them into varieties of mankind. It was as though I lost my head, you boiled all the flesh off it and the brains and eyeballs out of it, and you called it “New Jersey Variety of Mankind.” I would stand for all nine million people in New Jersey. My husband, Glenn, whom I love dearly and who lives in the same house with me, would not count. It would be my skull, not his, and not yours, that personified New Jerseyans as a whole.
Blumenbach’s prettiest skull—no dings, all its teeth, nicely symmetrical—came from a young woman from Georgia in the Caucasus, a part of the world subject to slave raids over several millennia. Blumenbach (in translation) called hers “the rea
lly most beautiful form of skull, which my beautiful typical head of a young Georgian female always of itself attracts every eye, however little observant.” The Georgian who had possessed the head that became the skull had been enslaved, brought to Moscow, and raped to death. I kid you not. Her skull, the skull of a young Georgian woman raped to death, became the emblem of white people as Caucasian.
Blumenbach’s beautiful Georgian sex slave’s skull stood for a figure that art history calls the odalisque. This is where art history and art school deeply influenced my writing. At RISD I drew by hand in colored ink a small map of the land of the odalisques, a work of conceptual rather than terrestrial geography and color. Violet and green made conceptual sense for the two seas, Black and Caspian. Bleached-out yellow and orange came purely from imagination.
Wonky Black Sea Map, 2009, ink on paper, 14" × 17"
From art history I knew the countless museum paintings of odalisques, the most famous by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Grande Odalisque, who is not wearing clothes, followed by countless others, more and less clothed, by painters like Jean-Léon Gérôme and Henri Matisse. Their titles allude to slavery, slave markets, and harems, with young, mostly female beauty the constant. In the nineteenth-century United States, Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave allowed viewers to ogle a naked white girl in the interest of high art. There is no such thing as an ugly odalisque or an old odalisque. Tipped off by art history, I chronicled the way themes associated with the odalisque, enslavement and beauty, made their way into science. I began my chapter 5, “The White Beauty Ideal as Science,” with the pioneering eighteenth-century art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who established the hard, white aesthetic for the art of ancient Greece.
Having answered my original question of why white Americans are called Chechens, I needed thousands more words and nearly a decade to complete my book. In order to refute the all-too-common notion that ancient Greeks and Romans thought in the same racial terms as we use today, I began in antiquity. Yes, yes, they could see that some people had darker and lighter skin than others. But they didn’t turn those distinctions into race, which wasn’t invented until the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Upper-class ancient Greeks, who staged their manly games in the nude, derided their Persian enemies for being pale. In Greek eyes, Persians’ lack of suntan presented physical evidence they spent too much time indoors; paleness impugned Persians’ manhood.
After correcting errors about the ancients, my book had to come up to the present time to explain how we got to where we are now. This all took much longer than I had planned. Mounting travail exacted its toll on my own body, whose writing machine demanded peanuts and wine. I was getting fatter and fatter. My body could stand the puffing up, but the gain, oh no! made my face look its age, its old age. Either I push on with the book or I slow down, rest up, do my exercises, and, once rested up, eat right. I pushed on with everything.
During my time at Mason Gross, my own art made its way into The History of White People has four graphite drawings on page 26, images of the so-called monstrous races of people thought to exist in the Middle Ages.
Page 26 of The History of White People, 2010.
Four 2008 drawings are ink and graphite on Yupo, 12" × 9"
At Mason Gross, I turned two of those drawings into litho-graphs, one three-dimensional in dark forest colors, one a Warholesque multiple in Warhol-esque brightness.
TOP: Dog-head, 2009, lithograph, approx. 5" × 7" × 2"
BOTTOM: Golda’s Sciopod, 2009, lithograph, approx. 5" × 12"
History into art.
17
YOU’LL NEVER BE AN ARTIST
You know now that Teacher Henry proclaimed his truth that
I may show my work.
I may have a gallery.
I may sell my work.
I may have collectors.
But I would never be an artist.
And you know my retort,
Henry, that’s bullshit.
Ontology or epistemology? The twentieth-century German Bauhaus notion that art cannot be taught held on until right down to Henry at RISD. Within that mystic ideology of the ontological An Artist, education cannot really help make art. As someone who had been in academia her entire life, I clung to my belief in education, whether my teachers did or not. Thank heaven Artist Friend Denyse reassured me that the language of visual art could be learned.
I figured out that “You’ll never be an artist!” was meant mean-spiritedly, as a way to take me down a peg—knock me off my high horse, put me back in my place, something like what that drunken Harvard lawyer at dinner in the Berkshires tried to do. That realization came only later, as I felt my own way into making my own art. Friends suspect I may have threatened my teachers, who may have been struggling against misgivings over their own status as An Artist artists. I don’t know. Be that as it may, Henry’s comment both enraged me, as I recognized it as criminally bad teaching, and humiliated me, by feeding into my colossal graduate-student insecurity. His comment doubtless said more about him than about me, which was of absolutely no help whatever. I was only thinking about me.
I WASN’T FEELING appreciated for my real strengths—intellectual sophistication and visual ambition. To the contrary, my strengths felt like impediments. Better to make abject images of toasters and trash bags or paintings in which accidents conveyed enigmatic meaning. Recognizable meaning seemed embarrassing to the painters around me, and, I suppose, if I had been a more acceptable painter, meaning would have embarrassed me, too. But it didn’t embarrass me, and I persisted along my own singular path. That path brought recognition in the world I had come from, in the form of commissions for book and journal covers. Signs reproduced details from two panels of my Harriet Tubman series. Fierce Departures and Chronicles, by the poet Dionne Brand, used abstract drawings I had made by hand and then digitally recomposed in colors that were bright and subdued. For the cover of My Dear Friend Thadious Davis’s book Southscapes, the designer used two searingly colored drawings I had made from a black-and-white 1930s southern photograph. My artwork was circulating outside my art school.
It was a wonder I didn’t lose my mind, or maybe I did. On some level I knew myself to be a super-duper intellectual, author of a blockbuster book, an Argonaut venturing where few dared to tread, et cetera, et cetera, Superwoman but not in such tight skimpy clothes. I was a star and a dud, simultaneously.
TOP LEFT: Cover, SIGNS, 2010
TOP RIGHT: Cover, Fierce Departures, by Dionne Brand, 2009
BOTTOM LEFT: Cover, Chronicles: Early Works, 2011
BOTTOM RIGHT: Cover, Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature, 2011
SO WHO THE hell is An Artist? Joseph Beuys said everyone is an artist, which is manifestly not true, either potentially or in terms of how you spend your time. It does seem that anything can be art, not only Marcel Duchamp’s urinal and bicycle wheel, but also the contents of your dorm room or a list in a tent of everyone you’ve ever slept with. Arthur Danto supplied an answer that still serves: art is what is shown in the context of art, that is, what’s put on a pedestal in galleries (is my living room a gallery?) and exhibited in a museum (what’s a museum?). A value judgment suspended between market value and aesthetic imagination. Add what the art world calls the critical consensus, what critics agree is the right stuff, along with three queries: Who counts as a critic? Where does the criticism appear? When do you take your snapshot to capture consensus?
I wish I could say this reasoning comforted me on a daily basis—it did not. I didn’t have to contend with the armies of negativity every day. But those armies bivouacked right nearby, ready at any time to defeat me. Just holding them in their barracks exhausted me.
I didn’t know whether my fellow painters were struggling against armies of their own, even whether they were hearing criticism that made them question if they should or could stick it out. One rule about being An Artist is never to voice doubts, about your
self or about your work. “They” will use your doubts against you, especially if you are a black artist. That rule seemed to hold even among white artists, who even before so much as a hello were always touting where they had just gotten off the plane from and the places their work was being shown.
My fellows could have been doubled over in psychic pain in their studios or enjoying their Narragansett beers in serene self-assurance, leaving me as the only one hanging on the precipice of quitting. Intellectually I knew I was not the only one in the world harboring doubts. Later on when I would tell that story, someone would reply with their version of discouragement, their or a friend’s leaving art school decades ago in the bad old days or only yesterday, often a woman, but sometimes a man, usually white, because non-white students in art school are rare. At the time I felt alone in my miserable alienation. Conflicting thoughts, confounding emotions as my everyday situation.
I held yet another set of thoughts at the exact same time. Sure, I might not be good enough, but many artists, An Artist artists, aren’t good enough in other people’s eyes. The curator of MoMA’s PS1 told Dana Schutz, one of the leading painters of our time, “You must be the worst painter I’ve ever met.” If you didn’t know Amy Sillman and Nicole Eisenman were huge successes, you might question whether their draftsmanship was “good enough.” I had overheard students belittle the painting skills of Kehinde Wiley, President Obama’s official portraitist. And I knew my own surprise at Jackie Gendel’s artist’s talk, where she showed the progression of her art as she made figurative paintings. A lot of them were badly drawn and badly painted. But she had people on her side as she kept at it. Jackie Gendel is An Artist with gallery representation. Another cool visiting artist, Trenton Doyle Hancock, sent RISD students into raptures with work on a mythological scale, pulp culture, cartoons, imaginary fantasy worlds, text, personal and biblical narrative, all rooted in the art history of Hieronymus Bosch, George Grosz, Philip Guston, and R. Crumb and carried off with faux naive craftsmanship. His work exceeds judgments of “good” or “bad.” I saw his work in his gallery in Chelsea. Definitely An Artist.
Old In Art School Page 19
