In the future in 1953, the younger and never but broadly recognized artist Robert Rauschenberg, simply 26, knocked on the studio door of Willem de Kooning, 49, a newly profitable determine simply rising into the forefront amongst a rising cohort of celebrated painters in postwar New York. Rauschenberg had come to ask for a drawing — not as a part of a collegial alternate of works, which artists typically do between themselves, however to mount a direct problem by a youthful era to an older, newly established one.
Rauschenberg needed a De Kooning drawing so he might erase it.
The younger artist, in an audacious shot throughout the artwork world bow, was engaged in a symbolic act of Oedipal murder. “Erasing” De Kooning would get the incipient powerhouse out of the best way, artistically talking. The crucial gesture of elimination without delay acknowledged the authoritative efficiency of the daddy, whereas insisting that the son was essentially charged with representing a modified world. The older artist knew what the youthful artist was as much as, and he charitably accommodated the daring request.
That alternate got here to thoughts the opposite day in an pressing survey exhibition at USC’s Fisher Museum of Artwork. Los Angeles artist Ken Gonzales-Day has harnessed the ability of creative erasure in a associated — if very totally different — method. Obliteration drives a number of extraordinary sequence of conceptual works that shine within the exhibition.
“Ken Gonzales-Day: History’s ‘Nevermade’” gives a well timed retrospective of an artist who explores the best way social erasure operates in American life. Identification — race, gender, class — has been on the forefront of creative discourse for a few years, however we have a tendency to consider it as one thing being asserted or described. Gonzales-Day flips the coin, which has the sudden impact of reworking id from a solution right into a query.
The present’s main shortcoming is that the Fisher is simply too small to accommodate a full retrospective of an artist who has been making vital artwork for greater than 30 years. He works in sequence, and one typically needs for extra examples from every. It’s nonetheless value seeing. The catalog, edited by visitor curator (and USC professor) Amelia Jones, covers important territory. The urgent relevance of the artist’s work for our current fraught period is irrefutable — not least when the dizzying transformation from analog to digital tradition is harnessed to productive ends.
Ken Gonzales-Day, “The Wonder Gaze, St. James Park (Lynching of Thomas Thurmond and John Holmes, San Jose, 1933),” 2006, digital print on vinyl.
(USC Fisher Museum of Artwork)
Starting round 2002, Gonzales-Day assembled discovered, if largely forgotten, outdated images that doc astounding brutality in shaping the historical past of the American West. The images present the mob ruthlessness of lynching — the extrajudicial homicide of human beings, normally by hanging from a tree.
Rephotographing outdated photos switched them from an analog to a digital format. Then, he was in a position to digitally erase each the corpse and the rope, abandoning solely the visible context during which the horror came about.
The lynching sufferer and the homicide weapon — ostensibly the documentary images’ topic — disappeared. Weegee-style tabloid sensationalism in recording heinous crime likewise vanished. What’s left is a spectral scene, ghosted by the constraints of outdated black-and-white photographic expertise and additional heightened by the uneven glow generated by the digicam’s flashbulb. The mob has change into the topic.
“The Wonder Gaze, St. James Park (Lynching of Thomas Thurmond and John Holmes, San Jose, 1933)” is maybe Gonzales-Day’s most generally exhibited single work. Made in 2006, the 12 months the artist printed “Lynching in the West: 1850-1935,” a revealing and much-admired ebook of his groundbreaking analysis into the topic, it exhibits the aftermath of an notorious Bay Space lynching.
Two males have been dragged from a county jail and strung up on an elm tree in a park throughout the road, charged with (however not convicted of) the kidnapping and homicide of a outstanding native scion, simply 22. Tensions have been excessive, maybe due to the nationwide notoriety of the kidnapping-murder of Charles Lindbergh’s child a 12 months earlier than. The San José double homicide came about over three hours, with the tacit cooperation of a California governor, quite a few state and metropolis officers and varied civic leaders. The atrocity was broadcast stay on radio. 1000’s assembled to look at.
A barren tree rises in opposition to a flat black background in “The Wonder Gaze,” whereas scores of individuals unfold out throughout the decrease register. They’re lined up like figures on the carved frieze of a Roman sarcophagus, besides the slight tilt of the digicam has them poised to slip out of the body. Shadows of dying and the afterlife commingle within the darkness.
Many particular person faces are blurred — some seemingly deliberately, as if the unique printer of the photographic detrimental meant to protect id, defending the complicit. Others blur as a easy aspect impact of the unidentified photographer’s flash. A female and male couple strolls arm in arm, like they’re out on a romantic date, whereas a younger man simply beside them glances warily over his shoulder towards the digicam, as if guarded about being seen. A considerably older man subsequent to him does the identical, and also you wonder if they’re household.
Maybe Royce Brier is among the many milling crowd. The San Francisco Chronicle reporter gained the 1934 Pulitzer Prize for telling the grim story in distinctive journalistic element, regardless of threats in opposition to his personal life for doing so from among the extra savage within the throng.
Most gaze up on the barren tree. That’s a centerpiece of the wonderment.
Lynching’s grotesque purpose is barely partly punishment, the conceitedness of judgment not decided by a courtroom of regulation in opposition to a claimed transgressor. Along with illicit retribution, the overwhelming spectacle of public execution seeks most intimidation.
Gonzales-Day, by making use of deft erasures, vivifies the wild and depraved file.
Vigilantes demand energy, the brute authority to do as they please. From the fastidiously blurred couple to the unseen threats in opposition to a reporter, the complexities of a mob’s calls for unfold. Gonzales-Day, by making use of deft erasures, vivifies the wild and depraved file.
Normally, with a dull physique hanging limp from a damaged neck, the spectacle of ugly victimhood in a lynching {photograph} obscures the larger image. Many of the 21 small lynching images on view with the victims erased have been initially made as postcards, surprising souvenirs apparently to let the oldsters again residence know simply how a lot the sender delights in abject cruelty.
Gonzales-Day uncovered 350 cases of lynching that occurred within the state of California between 1850 statehood and the center of the Nice Despair — 10 occasions the beforehand established quantity. Most have been crimes perpetrated by whites in opposition to Latinos, Asian People and Indigenous individuals, along with a number of Black individuals. Among the many displayed choice are lynchings in at the least six different states and Mexico.
Ken Gonzales-Day, “About a Hundred Yards from the Road,” 2002, ink on paper.
(USC Fisher Museum of Artwork)
However Gonzales-Day’s “Wonder Gaze” image is bodily large too. Somewhat than discretely framed, his altered {photograph} is printed on a vinyl panel utilized like wallpaper spreading 8 ft excessive and 19 ft large, above the wainscoting of the gallery wall. The scene is made nearly environmental. And since the lynching episode it remembers was perpetrated by two white males in opposition to a 3rd white man, it gobbles up handy assumptions about “us” versus “them.”
Gonzales-Day’s billboard-sized “The Wonder Gaze” is a mural as a lot as {a photograph}. (It’s value remembering that the artist is a longtime professor on the Claremont Schools, the place José Clemente Orozco’s fiery 1930 mural of the Greek Titan Prometheus famously fills a wall in a Pomona Faculty eating corridor.) That scale issues. The women and men proven milling about and idly gazing — which we at the moment are doing within the museum — change into projections of us. So do the 2 lynched males who’ve been digitally erased. They’re gone, however we’re right here.
Close by, a beautiful {photograph} of a single gnarled tree amid inexperienced rolling hills turns into quietly apocalyptic, as if the voluptuous earth is making ready to shake off morbid recollections. Did a lynching occur right here, “About a Hundred Yards from the Road,” because the cryptic title suggests? Out within the benign however swollen panorama, so placid now however so stuffed with potential unrest, unspeakable issues have occurred. Have we simply forgotten?
Extra just lately, Gonzales-Day has been making drawings that applicable historic prints and work associated to European colonization of the Americas. These, too, delete the figures from the panorama settings of the originals — most notably from a 1760 Mexican casta (or caste) portray by Juan Patricio Morlete Ruiz, the place racial ambiguity describes the mestizo baby of a white-skinned father and brown-skinned mom. Castas charted classes of racial mixing, assigning hierarchies based mostly on proximity to whiteness.
Ken Gonzales-Day, “Untitled (After Juan Patricio Morlete Ruiz … Mexico, circa 1760,” 2021; pencil, watercolor, ink.
(Ken Gonzales-Day)
Within the drawing, the portray’s panorama context, now empty, appears newly revealed. It’s a unusual house, an orderly development towards an otherworldly infinity with none horizon. Colours change into aberrant, shifting out of the blue from greens into turquoise blue, whereas genuine nature steps apart for abstraction. The squash, cherimoya and mamey incongruously piled within the decrease proper nook recall the “strange fruit” of the mournful Abel Meeropol lynching music. Gestural markings of pencil and watercolor emphasize the artist’s hand, which underscores the human, unnatural fabrication of the casta system’s racial categorizations.
Born in 1964, erasure is integral to the form of Gonzales-Day’s personal id. As a homosexual man — notably, like Rauschenberg — he was socially invisible in a heteronormative society. Erased. In a print of his portrait {photograph} “Anthony 2” (additionally included within the revelatory present survey “Queer Lens” on the Getty Museum), the myriad tattoos adorning the younger man’s bare torso are emblematic of right this moment’s widespread insistence on command and management of 1’s personal physique. Gonzales-Day grew up throughout an period that pushed exhausting for queer visibility, so the usage of erasure as a novel creative software is impressed.
Given the reactionary extremism that characterizes energy in right this moment’s world, it is usually well timed. Just lately the White Home threatened to punish what they alleged was a left-wing community that funds and incites violence. In actuality, proof factors to the appropriate wing’s function in doing so, from the 2017 mob riot on the white supremacist Unite the Proper rally in Charlottesville, Va., to the Jan. 6 mob riot of white supremacist “Big Lie” supporters on the U.S. Capitol — the place, notably, a lynching rope was erected. Humankind might need gone mad, however the present’s give attention to the shredding of civil society charts some welcome sanity.
Ken Gonzales-Day: Historical past’s “Nevermade”
The place: USC Fisher Museum of Artwork, 823 W. Exposition Blvd., Los Angeles
When: By March 14, 2026; closed Sunday and Monday
Tickets: Free
Contact: (213) 740-4561, www.fisher.usc.edu
