CUE Art Foundation : Ken Gonzales-Day

Ken Gonzales-Day

Curated by Bruce Yonemoto

Artist's Statement

Drawing its title from a book manuscript of the same name, Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 considers the transracial nature of lynching in California from statehood to the last recorded lynching in 1935. Given the broad number of people touched by this history (Asians, Anglos, Blacks, and American Indians), many will be surprised to learn that Latinos (Mexican, Mexican American, Chilean, and persons of Latin American descent) were statistically more likely to die of lynching than those of African, Asian or European decent. The work included in the CUE Art Foundation exhibition considers, and responds to, this historical erasure though a number of conceptual interventions that interrogate the legacy of lynching and its relationship to photography. Such images once circulated as postcards, view cards, and were collected in albums. Today, many of these images continue to circulate through on-line auctions, antique stores, and archival (and not so archival) copy prints. The works included in the exhibition reflect upon this forgotten past while inviting the viewer to consider how these legacies of oppression and denial have been transformed within a more contemporary landscape. Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 is a John Hope Franklin Center book, forthcoming from Duke University Press, 2006.

Curator's Statement

by Bruce Yonemoto

On the blank screen, a luminous disk was projected without any images of people or landscapes. The assembly of empty seats attentively followed some magnificent spectacle invisible to me. Furious, I wanted to see from closer up. I climbed towards the screen. I was blinded by the light from the projector lamp and saw in the screen two holes large enough to allow a man to pass through. I put my head through one of them. A panorama of the city was spread out before my eyes. Aragon and Breton had their bellies impaled on two cathedral spires. I understood that they also had wanted to see what was happening behind the screen and the great beauty of their suicide was revealed to me.

-Robert Desnos

Much like a Freudian screen memory the photographs of Ken Gonzales-Day display, mask and translate histories many would rather forget.

Gonzales-Day's pictures act as sophisticated filters which scrutinize information that has long been suppressed. His erasures reconfigure shadowed memories at once beautiful, genuine and scary.

I would like to thank Ken for producing such important work as well as Dr. Juli Carson for her insightful thoughts. I would also like to thank the CUE Art Foundation and its Advisory Council as well as a special friend of Ken, Juli and mine, Mr. Gary Wolf.

Artist's Bio

Ken Gonzales-Day is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles. He received his MFA from UC Irvine, CA, and his MA in Art History from Hunter College, New York, NY. He was a fellow in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program. Other fellowships include the Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy and the Smithsonian Institution's American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery where Gonzales-Day was a Senior Fellow in Latino Studies. His writing has appeared in various arts publications and journals including: Art & Text, Artissues, Art Journal, Art Papers, Aztlán, Exposure, Poliester, ArtPress and NYQ. His manuscript Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 will be published by Duke University Press in 2006. His work has been included in: An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life, REDCAT at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles; Log Cabin, Artists Space, New York, NY; Picarte, Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ; Made in California, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Cyborg Manifesto, Laguna Art Museum, CA; Beyond Boundaries: Contemporary Photography in California, Ansel Adams Center for Photography, San Francisco, CA; and Reimaging the West: A New History, SF Camerawork, San Francisco, CA. Gonzales-Day is an Associate Professor of Art and Chair of the Department of Art at Scripps College.

Curator's Bio

Bruce Yonemoto has developed a body of work which positions itself within the overlapping intersections of art and commerce, of the gallery world and the television screen. His work attempts to manipulate an audience with a simultaneous recognition of the machinations of the manipulation. He believes that the composition of mass media has become a new historical site of the domination of human behavior. During Mr. Yonemoto's twenty-year collaboration with his brother, Norman, he has been honored with numerous awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Film Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Maya Deren Award for Experimental Film and Video. Most recently, Mr. Yonemoto's solo installations, photographs and sculptures have been featured in major one person shows at the ICC (Intercommunication Center) in Tokyo; the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia, and the Kemper Museum in Kansas City. He has had solo exhibitions at Blum & Poe and Lemon Sky, Los Angeles; Gray Kapernekas Gallery, New York; Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo and his work was featured in Los Angeles 1955-1985: Birth of an Art Capital at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Mr. Yonemoto is a professor of Studio Art at the University of California, Irvine.

Ken Gonzales-Day's Lynching in the West by Juli Carson

It would be bourgeois reaction to negate the reification of the cinema in the name of the ego, and it would border on anarchism to revoke the reification of a great work of art in the spirit of immediate use-value….Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up. It would be romantic to sacrifice one to the other.

Theodor Adorno, "Letter to Walter Benjamin," 1936

Three years into Hitler's reign as Chancellor of Germany, Adorno and Benjamin debated the imperative relation between aesthetics and politics in the context of fascism. Benjamin famously argued for a de-mythologized "aura-less" art, one that embraced mass technology against the neo-classical, aestheticized politics of the Third Reich. But as Adorno would remind us, we know the end of that story: cinematic technology is neither inherently critical nor Leftist, witness Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. This historical debate analogously anticipates the contemporary dialectic between "relational aesthetics" (as participatory anti-aesthetic) and formalist painting (as pure myth-aesthetic), though it is a problematic iteration of the original argument. For any literal, schematic iteration of the Benjamin/Adorno debate would inadequately explain away the massaging and feeding of gallery-goers as a willful complicity with the service industry, on the one hand, and the resurgence of expressive, formalist painting as an ego-reifying process, on the other. Where does this false polemic leave a political-aesthetic consciousness in contemporary art in the context of such xenophobic events evidenced by California's Prop 187, the Minutemen Militia border control, Bush's "guest worker" program, and the ongoing interrogation tactics (i.e. torture) at Guantanamo Bay? Any artwork borne of a critical aesthetic today must take up this debate over the representation of civil violation and/or atrocity. Perhaps this challenge is best taken up as a psychic operation aimed at a given event (within the context of art)versus the simple pictorial act of re-presentation of the event itself. This is the task of Ken Gonzales-Day's Lynching in the West, which speaks to the question of identity and identification in the dual contexts of aesthetics and politics.

The "event" to which Lynching in the West returns is a readymade historical paradox, at once there and not there. Accounts of North American lynching within academic and popular culture have focused on the violence waged against African Americans in the southern United States, while the lynching of Latinos in California has yet to enter historical consciousness. And yet at the time of the event that Gonzales-Day addresses - 354 instances of lynching that occurred in the state of California between 1850 and 1935, the majority of which were Latino - lynchings in the West were readily documented in popular culture through the dissemination of postcards containing photographs of the lynched subject. The question for Gonzales-Day is how to approach this subject without re-spectacularizing the event and thus re-instancing it in the here and now. As Adorno again pointed out to Brecht, the Left's representation of atrocities is a problematic affair because "when genocide becomes part of the cultural heritage in the themes of [art], it becomes easier to continue to play along with the culture which gave birth to murder." For Gonzales-Day, this crisis of representation is itself the work. Which is to say, the form (or operation) of Gonzales-Day's documentation of the event is at once the content of the documentation. Drawing upon newspaper articles, periodicals, court records, historical photographs, and souvenir postcards, his study of the subject began by traveling throughout California and photographing the actual or approximate lynching site, which is to say the event's singular remainder: the "lynching" tree itself. The event is recreated as an absence of historical atrocity in the presence of what, on the surface, appears to be landscape photography. The pictorial and the obscene thus rub together through the visual negation of the subject or event, emblematic of the lost history of lynching in the rural West.

The installation itself places the viewer squarely within this site of erasure. Upon entering the gallery, we are presented with three visual "propositions": a mural-size historical photograph of a crowd focused on a single tree, a series of historical postcards framed in archival format, and a large scale "landscape" photograph of a tree. Accordingly, what we have are three instances of the lynching event: the event itself, the event's secondary documentation, and the contemporary return to the event's site. What nevertheless insists in these three different aesthetic presentations and "time zones" is the erasure of the lynched subject, the singular gesture of the artist's return to - and representation of - the event. By extension, we have three different sites of lynching's discursive erasure: documentary photography, popular culture, and landscape photography. And yet, because the viewer is put squarely in the position of erasure - there is no body for us to see and control with our gaze - we are at once, phenomenologically, put into the place of the subject of the work, both as the lynched (it could be me up on that empty tree) and the lyncher (it could be me in that lynch crowd). This operation, the aiming at the event through the very negation of the event, underscores and activates our jouissance or psychic ambivalence towards the representation of lynching (I want to see that which I don't want to see), evoking Adorno's warning that "[t]he so-called artistic representation of the sheer physical pain of people beaten to the ground by rifle-butts contains, however remotely, the power to elicit enjoyment out of it."

Which brings us back to the photographic paradox of the subject that Lynching in the West implicitly evokes; a paradox that activates the death drive in the spectator's desire to re-view historical events through the medium of photography. It is Barthes' formulation that the pleasure/pain the subject has in viewing historical photographs indexes the death drive's activation. For the desire to witness an event that occurred before one is borne, the desire to return to that very moment in time, is at once a desire not to be. "…[T]he life of someone whose existence has somewhat preceded our own encloses in its particularity the very tension of History, its division," Barthes claimed. "History is [thus] hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it - and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it. As a living soul, I am the very contrary to History, I am what belies it, destroys it for the sake of my own history." Again, this psychic operation by Lynching in the West is the site in which the subject (at once the viewing subject, the historical subject, and the subject of art) is unconcealed as present under erasure. "Unconcealment" is Heidegger's term for what Freud called the "return of the repressed." And the repressed fact that is "unconcealed" here is the very fact of the subject's essence: that surrounding the lightness of one's being is the darkness of one's own nothingness, a being that is thus paradoxically borne of, as much as it gives birth to, the subject's own nothingness.

What Lynching in the West thus "represents" is the crisis of representation itself. Recent performance and installation art theorized through the logic of Nicolas Bourriaud's so-called relational aesthetics is indicative of this crisis because what such work erases is historical consciousness in the space of a presumed, mythic "present." The panacea for this endemic might be a non-dialectical recall of Benjamin and Adorno's original debate. Such a recall would put into relief contemporary artworks that simultaneously take up a political and aesthetic proposition. Moreover, Lynching in the West aptly underscores the need to triangulate these propositions, methodologically, with a psychoanalytic proposition. This triangulation is essential when the question of representation is at stake, both in terms of historical atrocities and contemporary returns to 60s and 70s art practices. On this note, Lynching in the West performatively activates the impasse between definitive positions of subject and other, and by extension, event and history, all of which are acted out by the viewer in the space of aesthetics. In a moment when pundits make history in mass culture at lightning speed, phantastmatically dissolving us into a mythic succession of disempowered "presents," the slowing of time in the space of viewing historical events through the presentation of paradoxical identification is a critical, ethical event in itself.

Juli Carson, May 2006

Ms. Carson is Assistant Professor of Studio Art, Art History, and Curatorial Studies at UC Irvine, where she is also Director of the University Art Gallery. She has just completed a book manuscript on Conceptualism and Psychoanalysis entitled The Moebius Effect: Towards a Conceptual Unconscious in Contemporary Art.