[Audience Chatter; audio starts at 4:38]
Good evening.
Thank you for joining us tonight for our Distinguished Clarice Smith Lecture,
featuring Lawrence Weschler. My name is Nicholas Bell, I’m the curator in charge of the Renwick Gallery.
It is actually almost with a childlike glee that I introduce Ren Weschler today.
Like many of those of you in the audience, I have been following his books for many, many years. Books that are about everything.
Books that are about the interconnectedness of the world. There’s this sort of Humboldt-ian--
I don’t know if you can, I can never say that word right--Humboldt-ian quality
to them and about how everything is in fact connected to everything.
I told a good friend of mine, just this afternoon, that this program was happening, and she said, “Tell them that his brain is awesome.”
[Laughter]
In a related note, his business card refers to him as the P. T. Barnum of the Mind,
which I also think is an accurate statement.
In fact, just this afternoon, in our brief conversation, we touched on everything from torture to politics, to art, to the ways of the world,
and I think I’ve come to think of you as somebody who is nipping at the heels of close-mindedness, and disciplinarity,
and all of the antiquated modern ways of the world
in which people try to keep themselves in silos and continue on their lives in a rather dry way.
We need more people like Ren to remind us that everything does in fact relate to everything else,
and I get a sense from just seeing a snippet of your powerpoint, that you’re going to continue
on that mission,
so, without any further ado, please join me in welcoming the wonderful Lawrence Weschler.
[Applause]
Thank you, Nicholas.
By the way, Nicholas is the curator of a show that’s opening at the Renwick in a few days, and I saw it, and
go see it, it’s really, really good.
Nicholas: Thank you. I have been remiss in my duties. Please turn--No, no, no--
Please turn off your phones, and we are doing a Q and A at the end, and when you do have a question, which, of course, you will,
please go to one of the two microphones at the side, because we are live-webcasting this.
We want to make sure that people watching this later are able to hear your questions. Alright. Yes.
Oh, yes, and of course, afterwards,
I’ve said everything except the things I’ve needed to say.
Afterwards, please join us upstairs in the courtyard
for a reception.
Alright.
Okay. So.
I’m really touched to be here in Washington actually giving this talk.
I was invited, we had a conversation about a year ago, I think, about what sorts of things I was up to, and I mentioned that I am
in the middle of working on a book, I have two or three things going on at once, but one that I am working
on is about
this remarkable piece of Ed Kienholz’s, which for reasons that I’ll explain in a second, had almost disappeared completely,
and has just recently reappeared, but to begin with, here is our hero.
And he is naked.
As he is in this picture. And that’s me, interviewing him, in 1975. He’s either naked or wearing briefs, like…
What happened was, that I was working after college in the aural history program at UCLA,
and they had gotten a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Children, there used to be this fantastic thing that just gave money for really cool projects, and the country got great stuff,
and in this case, they had gotten a grant to do an oral history of the LA art scene,
and I was the principle editor of the interviews as they were happening, and I got to choose some that I wanted to do myself,
and in one case, I definitely wanted to go do Ed Kienholz, since he traumatized me early in my life, and I thought it would be fun to
get over the trauma, and this is me trying to get over the trauma, and it’s not working.
[Laughter]
But, I was up there. He lived, at that point, half the year in Berlin, and half the year in Hope, Idaho,
although actually, he was in a peninsula beyond Hope, and his place was called, “Beyond Hope,” was the name of his compound.
He had been born in Washington State,
East Washington State.
Oh, excuse me, West Washington--East Washington State, excuse me--
and he had, near, with the lights of Spokane in the distance, he grew up on a farm.
A kind of hard life. That scene in “Last Tango in Paris,” where Marlon Brando describes having to milk the cow,
and his hard father, or the character’s hard father,
with the
spit coming down his pipe, and forcing him to stay there, and he’s milking the cows, and he sees the lights
in the distance,
and he knows that there is life elsewhere. That kind of struck me as the life of the young Ed Kienholz.
He, he had a difficult father. It was the Depression, it was a hardscrabble farm,
a wheat farm, and he learned how to do everything, and make do. So he learned plumbing and electricity, and motors, and taking cars apart and everything.
Born in 1927, by 1945, he and his father had literally come to blows, and he leaves.
His mother, incidentally, was quite devout. She taught Sunday School.
There’s a kind of “American Gothic” quality to this. She would make creches, and he would, the young Ed would help her make creches.
Anyway, by 1945, he leaves, he has all sorts of odd jobs, he spends little times in colleges.
Semester each time. He works in insane asylums, he runs cars of dubious provenance between
different cities.
He eventually arrives in LA in, by about 1953, 54, 55. He’s in LA,
and he establishes himself as Ed Kienholz, “Expert.”
He basically would do anything you needed him to do.
He’s a hunter, he’s a…
He’s quite a, very, very strong, and strong-willed, fellow.
He, he liked LA.
He had started doing kind of slap-dash, abstract expressionist things, but using brooms instead of brushes, and planks of wood, and kind of constructions,
and so forth, and he would throw them in the back of his pick-up truck,
and when he first arrived in LA, he came into town
with a toothache,
and somebody told him about a dentist who repaired teeth, of artists, for work.
As he went to this guy’s house, and he laid out all these pieces that he had been doing on the lawn,
and the dentist fixed his tooth, and he said he thought he had died and gone to Heaven. This fantastic city.
And, presently, he and, he also would begin making these small galleries in movie theatre lobbies and so forth, and eventually, he and
Walter Hopps, a young, young curator who you
all know here,
because he would eventually be a curator
at the Corcoran,
but they founded this little gallery, “Ferus,”
in the back of Streeter Blair, who was this kind of Grandma Moses figure, but he had an antique shop, and in the back, he let the boys have their gallery.
Walter Hopps, as you know, is a legendary figure.
Extraordinary person and that is the portrait that he made of Walter.
And in the back, you have all kinds of little, he’s showing a de Kooning, all these things like a used car salesman,
I guess,
and he has stash for drugs, and all kinds of things
back there.
Walter Hopps would go on to do the first Marcel Duchamp show in the history of the world,
in 1964, in Pasadena.
And that led to an occasion when Walter took Marcel Duchamp to Las Vegas.
Walter’s girlfriend was Eve Babitz, and she was annoyed at Walter, so one day when he came into the gallery,
he found Marcel Duchamp and her, playing chess, in this famous picture.
Anyway. The Ferus Gallery is a legendary, and a very, very important place, in terms of the history of art in LA.
These are some of the people, all in the gallery.
John Altoon, Craig Kauffman, Allen Lynch,
Ed Kienholz there,
Ed Moses, Robert Irwin, Billy Al Bengston.
Mainly boys. There were a few, Sonia Gechtoff, and Jay DeFeo, and a few other people showed, but it was really very macho scene.
And it’s late 50’s,
and basically, Walter contributed his,
his oak table from his, oak desk, that had been in the family for years, and
that was the main contribution he made in terms of setting up the gallery,
and then he was out most of the time, trying to rustle up collectors that didn’t yet exist in Los Angeles,
the collecting scene. Meanwhile, Ed had a little, tiny closet in the back that was his studio, and he would sit in the place for a while, and the story goes, at one point,
he and Walter had some fight about something, and he went into his closet for five or six hours, and came out with a cube, a wooden cube,
with an electric wire coming out of it, and he put it on, on Walter’s desk, and Walter looked at it and said,
“Does it plug in?” And Ed just kind of, Ed had this huge belly, which he, like a desk, a roll-top desk, and he would put his hands, and he just nodded,
and so Walter plugged it in and sort of [Banging podium] went like that, and after
after it had done that for a while, Walter unplugged it, “Nice piece, Ed.” And he said, “I thought you would like it,” and he took it away, and there were four holes drilled
into Walter’s desk, which is a
is a metaphor for his art, in a lot of ways. I mean, it really, it’s for inviting, it’s touching, and then it really gets you.
He and I were, I mean, we were dear frenemies for, ever after that. We, we didn’t, he was,
he was a holy terror. He was a monster and also a genius, and a wonderful, wonderful man, and a really scary person.
He, Irving Blum, who took over the Ferus after Walter, and then became a great dealer in New York, eventually,
once said of Ed that,
he said, “Just quarter turn of the screw. I’m serious. Just a quarter turn,
and we could have had Adolf Hitler all over again.” A little bit extreme, but
that passage from “Applicable Discourse” all the time now, but anyway.
So I want to give you a sense of the kind of thing he began doing. This is the sort of thing he would do in the early days,
which were just clapboard slashed together, but really, this is
his version of “Leta and the Swan.”
He was also doing these things with dolls. Already, from very early on, he would take on
political themes, though he’s not exactly a liberal. He was much more libertarian.
Westerner. Gun rights, don’t tread on me,
but also a fierce sense of justice, but justice as he defined it.
But, for example, that is a piece about integration.
It’s, I think it’s called, “Little Rock Cha Cha Cha.”
This other one is a piece about the Holocaust.
He did things with dolls, all kinds of things he’d find in flea markets and so forth.
Here he is with--What happened was that gradually, the pieces kind of started coming off the wall, they would get bigger and bigger,
and would open, and so forth, and then they came out of the ground, and they had wheels. In this case, this was his “John Doe,” who was the--
That’s Irving Blum, by the way, trying to make
sense of it--
of his vision of the American Male.
And then, we’re now talking about the early 60s, 61,
62 or so.
He began making his own tableaus, going back to his
creches with his mother, and oddly enough, the first one he made, these were kind of room-size things, was a nativity scene.
You could see it, the baby is a, is a, that’s an emergency light switch, with the little doll feet,
and there’s Mother Mary, and Joseph on the camel, which is a horse, a little child’s horse, he’s being kept close, I guess.
And that was the first piece he did was a sacred scene, a nativity scene, albeit ironical,
and the second thing he did was a profane scene,
a brothel,
and this was “Roxy’s,” an amazing piece.
That was the Mad Madame.
It was a pitch-perfect recreation of 1948, 49,
Las Vegas kind of cheesy brothel, maybe early 50s, Korean Veterans coming back,
for example, and all the girls had stories.
This one here, for example, was on a sewing treadle, and if you hit it with your foot, the treadle, her legs would go flopping up and down.
This one here was a baby-faced, usually had a potato sack over her head, but then
we come down there, you can see there’s a clock
in her belly.
Open and shut garbage can. It’s very,
it’s at once prurient and moralistic, which was a combination which was typical of him,
but the main thing was that the period detail is absolutely exact.
It includes a, a cover of Life Magazine with MacArthur on it, I mean, it’s just very, very exact.
He would then do things like, one of his most famous pieces was “Back Seat Dodge,” in which
he took a Dodge,
and, by the way, you already get a sense of how he plays with titles,
what is being dodged in a back seat Dodge, and
he crunched it together, and you could open it up, and if you did open it up and looked inside,
there was a couple grappling, but the most interesting thing when you look inside, that’s mirrored,
so you would see, not only would you see that, you would see your own expression gawking at that, and it was very much, it would,
it’s like the four holes in the desk. It would come back.
Any kind of prurient or moralizing that you might do would be thrown back at you.
And indeed, after about five or six years of these these things, in fact, I think it was 1967,
when the new LA County Museum of Art opened the very first contemporary art show they did
was a show of Kienholz’s pieces up to that point,
and it created a huge uproar, and almost got the thing shut down.
Now, this is a very, you people here in this town will find this interesting, because what happened was, it’s 1967, and in 1968, there’s going to be an election for governor.
The head of the, the chairman for the Board of Supervisors of LA is Warren Dorn, and he’s heavily favored to win, and he is...
What always happens in the history of LA is that there, every four or five years, there would be some obscenity controversy, rather.
This is why, by the way, the great, great Arensberg Collection that was, which has all the incredible Duchamp and Dali and Magritte and everything,
it was the great, great, great royal collection of surrealist art, was in LA and he wanted to give it to the LA County Museum, and they wouldn’t take it because it was communist,
and that’s why you go to Philadelphia to see it today.
But similarly, in this case, Warren Dorn was sure he could trampoline hysteria about this and
protect the children.
It was always the children, we had to protect
the children,
and so Kienholz demanded that at least the supervisors come see the show before they condemned that it couldn’t open,
and so Warren Dorn and Eddie Hahn, no Kenny Hahn, I think it was the two of them.
Anyway, they went through it together, and they came into “Roxy’s,” and they were by themselves,
and they started saying, “God, it’s amazing. He has it exactly right.”
[Laughter]
“Look at this.” And they started talking to each other about how great it was, and wasn’t it great, you came through, and “Oh, god, the one I went to was”
and they were doing this, and at the end of the show, as they walked around, he pulled out a cassette, and he had taped the whole thing,
and so their objections…
This was a cartoon at the time. “It’s awful...Close the door” with the Board of Supervisors inside.
In any case, the thing that’s interesting, is that because of this, this unknown Grade B actor kind of shot up, and that’s how Ronald Reagan won the governorship,
because he defeated Warren Dorn in the primary.
I mean, Ed Kienholz would also do just harrowing things like this. This is his piece about abortion,
or it’s called “The Illegal Operation.”
It’s a truly, truly devastating thing to come upon.
And at the time, he could hardly be showing this. You go to the LA County Museum, it’s now there.
It’s a strangely beautiful, but really upsetting piece.
He also famously did “The Beanery,” the bar that they all frequented, Barney’s.
One day, he was walking into the bar, and he saw that headline outside,
“Children Killed, Children in Vietnam Riots,” and then he went inside, there were all these kinds of losers
wasting their lives, and they all have clocks for heads, they’re just killing time.
The only one that doesn’t have a clock, that’s Barney back there.
It’s a completely, incredibly accurate reproduction of Barney’s at, I think, two-thirds scale.
It’s now in Amsterdam.
In fact, there’s, and there’s Ed in the corner,
and there’s Barney.
The one that you know of his at the Whitney, perhaps, is the old lady called “The Wait,”
and you know what stuff is always…
This is an old lady with all her memories in jugs around her neck,
just basically waiting to die. She’s made of cow bones,
and you know it's up, because you’ll hear, as you’re walking around the museum, a parakeet, and the parakeet is alive, and it’s up there.
I mentioned how Duchamp came to town, and this was just around the time that Duchamp
was about to reveal, or was just after Duchamp had died, that he had been working,
contrary to what everybody thought, he had been working the last 20 years on a piece
called “Étant donnés,” which is the piece that you go to in Philadelphia,
and you go up to a door, and you have to look through, and you see this
rather startling image on the, it’s a construction
on the inside,
but what’s fascinating when you go there now is that the perspiration from years of people looking inside, has kind of made a face around the two eye holes,
and, I think, partly in response to that, Ed did his own version of it, and this is called “The State Hospital,”
and when you go up and look in there…
And it’s cold fish bowls, as I recall,
the one on top there is a goldfish, the one on the bottom, there isn’t a goldfish in the bowl, in the head.
Again, just quite devastating.
He also is one of the first people who invents, kind of conceptual pieces. One of his, where
where he would have a piece like this called “The World,” and then there would be a contract, if you bought it
for ten thousand dollars, plus X amount of money for the idea, and then X amount of money for him to execute it,
he would go some place, there was a particular place in Idaho, where he would build a large plinth, then he would sign the world as the biggest found object
he had ever seen.
Another piece he did which was quite amazing around this time was the “Non-War Memorial,” and this is before Maya Lin,
and it was at a time, think about it. What you’ll remember of Maya Lin is there was a period of about
six or seven years where we didn’t talk about it at all, it’s like it had never happened, and…
What he had proposed was to set up a factory.
The Coeur D’Alene River Fork, as the Coeur D’Alene River enters Lake Pend Oreille,
it’s kind of marsh land, it’s in Idaho, and he wanted to set up a factory, and he wanted to buy 52,000 Army Surplus tops and bottoms,
and set up a factory with just kids and volunteers coming, and they would sew the shirts to the pants, they would tighten up the cuffs and the shirt sleeves,
and they would fill them with slurried mud, and throw them into the marsh.
And as he said, he just wanted to see how long it would take to create that much death.
Of course, the problem with both that piece and, and for that matter, Maya’s, is it only begins to hint at the real death involved with the Vietnam War, but,
but in any case, it never was made, but I always thought. A key part of it was it would disintegrate over time.
He invited anyone to come and claim any of the bodies and put the purple heart or whatever of their family in, but over time,
and within 10 years, it would all revert back to nature, and it would be marshfield again.
Anyway.
That’s background. The, we can now come to 1968 and Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X
have been assassinated,
and he decides he wants to do a take on race in a serious way,
and he starts working on a project. He was, at that time, living on a hill in Laurel Canyon that you had to climb 58 steps to get to the top of the hill,
and then it was a kind of flat area, and he took apart various cars, he dismantled them, brought them to the top of the hill.
He worked on it for two years, and there is a video
of him talking.
Now, unfortunately, we weren’t able to get the sound, but I’ll be able to describe to you part of what’s
going on here.
You can see that he’s, he’s putting the different parts together. This is a,
a thing he did with the broadcaster Keith Berwick
at the time,
and he’s showing him how the thing is coming together. There were going to be five cars in the piece, and in the middle, there was going to be something else,
and he’s describing it all to Berwick, and he’s describing how he’s making the different characters, and how he plaster cast them, and at a certain point,
there’s Keith Berwick, the kind of voice
of institutional authority,
of public television in those days, and you can see him standing by the truck there, and he says, “Yeah, and so I decided I need you to be the,
the guy who’s going to be by the truck,” and so before you know it, he has Keith Berwick being plaster cast.
And, eventually, looking like that.
So this piece consists of five cars.
It’s, the five cars are, four, there’s one off to the side, a pick up truck,
four of them are in a kind of diamond, I mean, with their headlights being beamed at something in the middle,
which you can’t see at first. It’s absolutely harrowing. It is a piece that is so upsetting that it is impossible to show
when it’s finished.
They tried to show it at the LA County Museum, they can’t do it. They bring it to New York, they can’t
show it there.
The Tate is going to show it in London, they can’t show
it there.
Eventually, in 1972, two years later,
it appears at documenta castle,
and the ‘72 “documenta” is one of the great, great, great “documentas,” great art fairs,
and this is the thing that everybody remembers. They built a black,
you know like one of those tennis things, domes, and it was a sensation there.
It was, it was shown there, and it was shown at the Berlin, in Berlin,
and it was bought from out of those showings by a Japanese foundation.
It’s interesting in this context to think about the fact that it was possible to show this in Berlin and Japan, the two, in terms of the War,
but in any case, the trouble is, as it was transported to Japan,
it was on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, and pieces of it were stolen,
and by the time that it arrives in Japan, it, the it goes through customs, and I think the cars are contraband, and so they strip the cars looking for contraband,
and by the time that it arrives at the Japanese foundation, it’s pretty much ruined,
and the Japanese do the classic Japanese thing in response to this situation, which is, they put it in storage for 40 years until everybody’s dead.
And so that piece existed as a rumor by some people. More people claimed to have seen it than could possibly have seen it,
and everyone talked about how incredible it was, and it was a whisper, but it was really,
it didn’t exist. And then, when the Getty put together “Pacific Standard Time,” a few years ago, which was the big show of all the museums in LA,
it was agreed Pace Gallery and L.A. Louver got together
and contacted the Japanese, and eventually, it was brought back to Idaho, where Ed had died in the meantime, but Nancy, his final wife,
agreed to supervise its, and she, they had been working together and signing all the work.
I should tell you something interesting about Nancy. I had mentioned
the kind of thing that Ed would do, and it was thought what’s funny here is they tried, the Board of Supervisors tried to shut down his show,
and it wasn’t in retaliation, but was a classically Ed move. Two years later, he marries the daughter of the Chief of Police.
Tom Reddin, you might remember, was the Chief of Police, and Nancy Reddin was his daughter, and
they did all their work together. They signed all their work after that. She was the final of his wives, he had something like five or six wives,
but she was the one that was there at the end, and they did a remarkable amount of work, some great work together,
and she agreed to supervise the reconstruction of the piece. And one thing that’s fascinating is it probably couldn’t have been reconstructed until just about then
because of the existence of the internet and Ebay. I mean, if you needed the left rear view mirror of a 1962 Dodge Dart, you know,
you could get it on the internet, and it would have been incredibly hard before that, and so
they put together, and they showed it, they showed it first in Los Angeles, and then at the Louisiana Museum
in Denmark.
And I have here a video of what it was like, and, as I say, it was an incredibly
upsetting thing to go visit, and so you went in,
and here, I’ll just give it a start up.
First of all, it’s dark, it’s very dark, and something’s way off in the distance, and you see something, and you see these cars, and this kind of puddle of light,
and you had to walk into it, and the floor is very, very, fine, powdery dust, and it’s rather thick, so your footsteps are muffled.
There’s trees, there’s beer cans, it’s a remote place,
and so I made this video myself. It’s a lousy video, but it will give you a sense of a little sense of what it was like.
So as I say, you, you find yourself walking and trying to figure out what’s going on,
and it’s all designed so that you can’t really see what’s going on as you’re coming in, and the thing you’re really looking at,
you’re kind of looking, but it’s a bunch of men around something, they’re wearing Halloween masks,
it’s a little hard to see.
In fact, you don't, this is wrong, you don’t really look at that first, because the thing you really look at is on the right, which I'll show you in just a second,
but again, the lights are in your face, so you can’t really see what’s happening.
And the people are in the way, and then what you do, is you turn around, because you almost bump into that guy with his bulging belly,
the Keith Berwick character.
And then you see past him, and I don’t know if you can see it, but there’s a woman there,
a white woman who’s sort of retching. You, there’s a,
a wailing kind of radio of a blues station that’s playing.
She’s in the middle of retching, and you being to figure out that this must have been
the black guy’s car, and they were out, sitting, and then the local keepers of the moral order...
Is that her husband, is that her father? Her brother?
Come and they drag, you’re slowly piecing this all together,
and one of the things that happens here, for example, this guy, and you yourself are like, pulling with him, you know, because
of the way it’s set up, it’s almost like a tug-o-war,
and you look over, and you begin to realize that the legs are painted black,
and in fact, by the way, it’s legs and arms, but the middle, the body, is an automotive, metal bathtub, that you put oil in, at auto shops,
and there’s children’s letters, [N, I, G, G, E, R,] they’re floating around,
and you finally figure out what’s going on, that he is, in fact, being castrated. It’s not even a lynching
scene, exactly.
And then, as you come around to the far side,
all these guy again are wearing these terrible--
look at this guy here, with the…
It’s quite amazing, actually, when you’re actually, because he’s doing it, but he’s just looking up because the guy is screaming,
and when you finally see the guy’s head, it’s twice as large as their heads, an it’s just this agonized scream.
And about that point, you realize that this is--by the way, this is Bela Lugosi, there’s Kelly the Clown, the ghoul…
And there’s part of you that just said, “There’s no way, this is secret, how could we have possibly have known?” But then you see all of the footprints all around,
and this is stuff we knew all along.
It’s really, just an incredibly upsetting piece.
And as you walk out, you suddenly notice this.
That in the backseat of the car, they brought along a 10-year-old boy,
to teach him lynchcraft, that’s the word that’s used for the things you need to know if you’re going to lynch somebody, the lynchcraft.
He’s kind of stunned.
It is an absolutely
harrowing. I’ll stop there, just.
One of the things that’s powerful about it, is how the musicality, almost, of, I don’t want to aestheticize it too much, but
how things are in the way, and you can’t see, and how he’s very much in command of your,
of what you’re seeing,
such that at the end, he gets you.
And keep in mind, the piece is called “Five Car Stud.”
It’s a wager.
It’s five cars, and then you come around, and [bangs podium], you know. Tough luck, you lose.
You lose, we all lose, but the way in which its orchestrated reminds me a bit of, well, reminds me of two things.
There’s that extraordinary Wallace Stevens poem,
because, which, "The Anecdote of the Jar," which you all know, but I’ll read again.
"I placed a jar in Tennessee,
and round it was upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it and sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground, and tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare, it did not give of bird or bush, like nothing else in Tennessee.”
And there is this quality that this is the epicenter of American history,
that you’re looking at. It’s absolutely so radioactive, so
gravitationally strong, and again that, I was going to show you, it’s similar to what it’s like if you go, next time you come to,
this is another lynching scene, by the way, if you think about it. This is “The Burghers of Calais,” and they’re all coming out
from the besieged city, and they’ve offered themselves to be killed, in the story,
but what's fascinating in terms of how Rodin does it, is, next time you see it, and this is again, just me with my iPhone camera,
but notice how, as you walk around,
it’s all hands and faces, and whenever you, for example, you’re looking at that face right now, but suddenly it’s going to get blocked by that hand,
and suddenly another face will show up, but the moment it gets blocked,
you see that face back there.
And then, as you come around, and you can see it again,
it’s all hands and faces, and again, as you continue moving around,
suddenly, when that face disappears, this face will come into, and then as this shoulder blocks this face, you can look at this face.
That hand will show up, and then as you come over here, there will be...
Again, that quality of constantly guiding you and controlling you
is very much the sort of thing that is the real-life experience--and look at, just as he disappears, you’re back here at this,
and just as he kind of disappears, you’re going to see a face showing up there.
Anyway. A similar kind of thing happens
with these pieces. Let me just.
It’s interesting, by the way, that the boy he had, he would do these plaster castings, and it was the black friend of his son he had,
and it was always a whole family thing going on. So they, they, he ends up being the plaster cast for the white boy that’s getting to watch what’s happening.
Nowadays, of course, you,
there’s the political correctness question of whether a white person, and it’s not just a political
correctness question,
but a serious question about whether a white person has the right
to portray this. It is interesting that exactly the same year in 1968, exactly the same image was done by a black artist in San Francisco, named Mike Hernandez.
There’s a painting.
And there’s a whole question, also, whether
he has the right to aestheticize it, to turn it
into a tableau.
There’s all kinds of moral queasinesses involved.
Having said that,
I want to make an argument that this is not finally a piece about blacks, it’s a piece about whites.
The overwhelming question that you are left with,
is why are those people doing that to that guy.
There’s not just a black guy in this picture, there’s all these white guys, and who are they, and what are they doing, and why, who are we watching it?
One of the things that happens is you go home, and you notice that you had this white powder all
over your shoes,
and it’s really hard to get it off.
You’ll polish your shoes two or three times before that white powder comes off, because he has kind of an oily-ness keeping it on, it’s very strange.
And, in terms of aestheticizing it, it’s the whole point that lynchings in the south, and then in the North too,
by the way,
were themselves quite consciously tableaus.
That’s an actual one. Set up as tableaus and postcards made and shown, and there was all kind of aesthetic considerations
when these things were turned into postcards. This horrible, horrible history. Nor is this ancient history.
Let’s see, it’s hard. I don’t want to subject you to…
In terms of Kienholz’s own life, as I said, he was born in 1927, and 1931, you had the
the Scottsboro Boys. Nine boys accused of rape, along with the executed, was a legendary case.
In 1952, it was the McGee case, and that, this was a case in the Mississippi High Court,
where a black man was accused of rape, and his defense was not, that in fact
he and the woman were having an ongoing relationship, and he had wanted to get out of it, and she had accused him of rape,
and this is the chief justice, this is 1952, of the Mississippi Supreme Court,
addresses the NAACP and ACLU, or it was CRC, actually, appeals, and he
objects to the revolting insinuation that they are making.
“If you believe or are implying that any white woman in the south who has not completely down and out degenerate,
degraded and corrupt, could have anything to do with a negro man,
you not only do not know what you are talking about, but you are insulting us, the whole South.
You do not know the south, and do not realize that we could not entertain such a proposition, that we could not even consider it in this court.”
1952.
In 1955, of course, you have the Emmett Till case, in which a 14 year old boy either did or didn’t whistle
at a woman,
and was subsequently beaten so viciously and horribly,
that he was killed, and his mother, up in Chicago--this was a boy who lived in Chicago, who had been sent down to spend time with his grandparents--
and was brought back, and famously, she had refused to close the coffin, and wanted everyone to see what had happened to her boy, and the boy’s face was indeed
twice as large as it had been.
Famously, in the case of Emmett Till,
the jury found the people who did it not guilty. They immediately held a news conference, and in Life Magazine, were quoted as saying,
“When a n****r gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he’s tired of living,”
they said of the 14 year old boy.
In 1957, there actually was a castration,
and it was by members of Asa Earl Carter’s KKK branch in April ‘56, September of ‘57,
they abducted and took a black handyman named Edward Aaron. They castrated him.
Asa Carter, of course, never had to do any time for this. On the contrary, he became part of
George Wallace’s staff.
He was very important in George Wallace’s various campaigns, and then, weirdly, you know, go figure, retired from that line of work
and became a novelist and wrote,
“The Outlaw Josey Wales.”
In 1960, you had the great Caryl Chessman case in, not a black man, but a rapist who was put to death
in California, that had a huge impact on Kienholz at the time, just around the time that Ferus was starting,
and he did pieces around that. He was galvanized around that.
In 1966, one of the pieces that Kienholz did, those concept tableaus, was called “The Black Leather Chair,”
and I’ll read you the description that he had in a frame, if you wanted to buy this piece.
“This is a tableau about the Negro in America.
The piece is simply a black leather chair, completely encased in a block of Lucite plastic, and mounted on a suitable base.
On the left side is a tunnel in the plastic, where the viewer can reach in and touch one small portion
of the chair.
It’s possible that I will never be able to make this tableau, as I do not have the chair in my possession at this time.
It is stored in an attic in Texas, and is the property of a Negro family there.
I am told by a friend that, although his family is reluctant to part with it, he will be able to get it for me sometime in the future.
The leather on the chair is made from the skin of his great-great-grandfather.”
So, he had obviously been thinking about this a lot.
So, anyway, the point is, this is not ancient history.
One of the things that is always so exasperating is the way that people talk about slavery having ended,
in 1865, so this is ancient history, this is history that goes right up to the present.
And I want to suggest that with this piece in 1970,
Kienholz has American history as as it were by the root, by the stalk.
Race is the originary sin of American history.
It is the fissure that keeps on giving, is at the root of every American exceptionalism.
Why the weirdness about guns, the weirdness about healthcare in America,
why we don’t have super fast trains, why we don’t have everything that every normal country has,
can come down to this same pattern that recurs over and over again.
Class, the ordinary class politics that have been the engine behind,
and I mean just ordinary class politics that have been the engine behind every other developed country’s development,
keep on getting fractured by race in this country, and they, and it doesn’t go on.
And I, the book that I’m trying to write is partly tales of my freneminess, my frenemy-hood with Ed, and telling great stories with him because he was hilarious and
incredibly generous, and incredibly mean-spirited and scary, and loving, and horrible, and everything at once.
And I have all kinds of stories, but then I also want to take a look at this piece,
and what I’m doing is I’m interrogating the
rear-view mirrors.
There are, of the four cars, there are eight rear-view mirrors,
and so I have eight moments in the history of the United States where I’ve looked at this problem of the…
And I begin all the way back with Nathaniel Bacon. Do any of you know about Nathaniel Bacon?
This is a really amazing story. Nathaniel Bacon, the first thing you have to understand is that slavery does not go all the way back.
In fact, racism doesn’t go all the way back in the history of British America.
Jonestown is 1620, or something like that, and then
up until,
up until the 1670s, there are no slaves in Virginia, or on the plantation anywhere.
They have indentured servants, and then the indentured servants are of two types. They are of very, very poor
whites from Scotland and Ireland, and so forth and so on, and England,
and other places in Europe, who pay their way over, put themselves in bond,
they are bonded, which means that they owe money to the person that hired them, and once they paid it off, they can be freedman, but until then, there are in bond.
And there are similarly, there are blacks who have freed themselves through various things in the Caribbean,
either through escape or something, and they end up in the United States, the colonies,
and there is no racial tension between them, apparently.
There’s all kinds of evidence, fascinating evidence, that they are all together, they’re just indentured servants, there’s all kinds of things going on, and
things go like that, but what’s happening is that America, right away, from the very beginning, was a con job.
All these people are invited to come to America, but the choice land on the coast has already been taken over by the first people who got there,
so everybody else is being forced to go further and further inland,
and what happens as you move west, in Virginia for example, you get smaller land holdings,
and the smaller landholders on the inside are bumping up against the Indians,
and they’re having all kinds of conflicts. The people on the coast don’t want to have fights with the Indians,
and Nathaniel Bacon, who is going to lead a rebellion of small landowners,
against the property on the coast, and you want him to be a hero, but in fact, the reason is he’s furious they’re not killing all the Indians,
so he leads, and he takes his army, and his army grows and grows, and it’s all these indentured servants, whites and blacks,
and all these small landowners, who march, and end up burning down Jonestown.
and, this just catches the attention of the land, of the landed gentry on the coast,
and there’s a paper trail for all of this, they figure out, we gotta do something about this, and what we have to do is start bringing in slaves.
And slaves of a particular kind. They cannot be slaves brought from the Caribbean, because those people have all been politicized.
We want to bring them from Africa directly,
we want to make sure they’re not of the same tribes, and it’s, this is all in writing at the time, in the letters they’re writing each other.
One of the advantages of this is that the white indentured servants
will identify the white landlords, because at least they aren’t black slaves.
And this is very much thought out. How can we break up the natural alliance between the indentured servants? It begins there.
So, I have a whole bunch of stuff about that. Then I turn, eventually, to,
to the Declaration of Independence, but before we even get there, the whole pre-history of the 1770, and 1750, 1760, 1770, is all backwards in America.
There’s an extraordinarily interesting book that just came out by Gerald Horne called “The Counter-Revolution of 1776,”
and it’s rather clear that what, that what is bothering the whole group of people on the,
of the, particularly in the South, but in the North as well, because, by the way, the North is making a huge amount of money on the slave trade.
The greatest money in the Americas on the slave trade is coming into Newport, Rhode Island.
Those fortunes end up founding Brown University, but, as people at Brown have been having to deal with in recent years.
But more to the point, in the south, there is increasing sense on the part of England, back in England, that the whole thing with slavery is unsavory,
that there’s problems with it, and England is focusing, doesn’t really care about the colonies in the United States, in America.
They are mainly interested more and more in India,
and so it’s a problem for them, and you begin to have cases in British courts where, for example, slave owners from America go to London,
and their slave escapes, and appeals to be given his freedom, and in 1772, there was a judgement
that slavery is so horrible that, it’s so horrible that it could only be justified by positive law.
There has to be a law for it, and there isn’t one in England, so no, the black is freed,
and this is so upsetting, and there’s a, another few instances like this that, that committees of correspondence are founded.
We all talk with great pride about the communities of correspondence, and Liberty, and so forth and so on.
They are all founded, initially, over anxiety about what’s going on in England, and how they’re going to get rid of slavery, and
then what’s really fascinating is all the rhetoric leading up to the revolution is, you for example, remember “Give me Liberty or give me Death,” with Patrick Henry.
The lines before that is “The King wants to make slaves of us. Can’t you feel your chains?”
These are all these Virginia, all these incredible orators
who are talking about, they don’t want to be slaves to King, and in fact, that all goes back to Locke,
who was a very important for Thomas Jefferson, a hundred years earlier. All the stuff that Locke had written that is the foundation of America,
he was writing at the same time that he was A) writing the South Carolina constitution that had slavery in it,
and B) had major interest in slave companies, himself.
In fact, in, among enlightenment philosophies, you don’t get, they keep on talking about how it’s important to be
the broke liberty, you can’t be allowed the king to treat you like a slave, but they have no interest in actual slaves.
The first philosopher in the history of the West, who was interested in actual slaves is Hegel.
The man, at which comes from the Haitian Revolution that’s happening just around the time that he’s
about to turn
to talking about the Master-Slave relationship and so forth, but all the rest of them
are all, have, while they continue to use the language of slavery, have no interest in that. And that eventually, you know, of course,
shows up in the Declaration of Independence, we could talk about that at length,
but the thing that happens then, is that the Revolution is very difficult for, it puts the Blacks in an interesting
situation because the English immediately say, “Any of you slaves who leave can be free.”
And so, suddenly, in the South, there’s this great anxiety, an many, many do leave and join the British Army,
but the great dangers if the British lose, they’re going to be in real trouble,
and indeed, on the far side of the war, when the Articles of Confederation are set up, there’s great anxiety in the south about
these slaves who had had a whiff of freedom: What are we going to do, how do we keep them down?
Meanwhile in the North, you have Shay’s Rebellion.
This is something that doesn’t get talked about too much. I mean, it’s the sort of thing you don’t hear much about in American history, but
the people who had fought in the war, the whites,
none of them, literally, I think it’s almost 6 or 7 of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were in the army.
The Revolutionary Army.
All the rest of them, in fact, many of them, were profiteers. John Hancock was a slave trader
and had a big business going and so forth, and in any case, when the war is over, these poor yeoman farmers of the North, for example,
in Massachusetts in particular, are paid in Script, which are “I.O.U’s,”
and suddenly, the bankers, who had sat out the war in Boston, started foreclosing on their farms,
and they present the script, and they say, “Here, use this.” And the bankers said, “No, we want real money,”
and they started foreclosing, and there’s a rebellion, and the militia is called out to put down the rebellion, and the militia joins the rebellion,
and at this point, the slave owners of the south, and the bankers, and the property classes of the North realize they have a problem.
The Confederation, the Articles of Confederation, there’s no central government, there’s no such thing, and they convene.
By the way, something that has no particular, it’s a, the Constitutional Convention is very,
it’s kind of a self-appointed thing. It’s not at all clear what standing it has except these guys get together, these property classes,
and they come up with the Constitution, which has all kinds of wonderful things in it, especially once you add the Bill of Rights.
It has the, a very intelligent things about it, the balance of powers. All those things are in it.
But it is, essentially, a contract between, between property classes of the North and the South, to make sure that the mob
doesn’t get control, the great majority doesn’t get control. That’s why so much of it is written in language that prevents actual direct voting.
It’s all about that, and if you read the Federalist Papers, it’s a fever about how to prevent that from happening.
Graber, the guy who founded Occupy Wall Street was recently written a fascinating essay where he
talks about how we, today, think of republic and democracy as synonyms.
They were opposites, and the people in Philadelphia were terrified of democracy,
which they associated with the Greeks, with Plato, with Thucydides, with civil war, with anarchy.
What they liked, was a Republic, which was Roman, it was a senate, it was only the rich people got to be part of it and so forth.
In any case, and then, in terms of our terms, the most amazing thing is the three-fifths clause,
and I always misunderstood the three-fifth clause, that slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a person. That’s in the constitution,
and I used to think that that’s outrageous that they’re only three-fifths of a person, but that’s all wrong.
It’s outrageous that they’re as much as three-fifths of a person because what that is about is it’s a compromise between the North and the South,
that, in doing the census, which is going to establish how many people get to be in the House,
every slave, even though none of them can vote, will count as three-fifths of a person,
so that if a slave owner in the South has a hundred slaves,
his vote will count 61 times the vote of a Northern person who doesn’t have it.
Is it any wonder, as a result, of that, and keep in mind the president is chosen by electoral college, which is based on the Senate, which is chosen by the state legislators,
and all this kind of stuff, results in the fact that because of this complete skewing of how elections were done,
five of the first seven presidents, for thirty-two of the first thirty-six years were slave holders.
40 of the first 48 years, 50 of the first 64 years. That the speakers of the House, the Senate president, were almost always from the South.
But the majority of cabinet members, the Supreme Court Justices. It was only in 1863
that Tawney, a slave owner, chief justice was replaced by Chase, who was not a slave owner,
and that in turn leads to, I’m going to cut very quickly past slavery itself and the Civil War, just cause it’s talked about so much,
but it leads to the crisis that we eventually have.
And I wanted to then, the standard history you see here is the Emancipation Proclamation,
and the slaves are free, they’re given 40 acres and a mule, and everything’s fine after that.
And of course, we know it isn’t, and then the next thing that happens is actually the part I want to come to, in terms of this lecture,
is the events of 1876. It’s really interesting, by the way. I don’t know if it’s true today for high schools, but I know it was certainly true in my time that,
that you would go through US History 1, two or three times in your high school education, and US History 1 was supposed to go to 1898,
and History 2 was supposed start in 1898, and always what happened is you got bogged down in the battles of the Civil War,
endless discussion about the Civil War, and that will be on the test, and then suddenly,
class is over, and US History 1, the same professor starts in 1898.
And you know why, because those years between 1865 and 1898, it’s all those boring presidents, it’s all those boring things,
and the reason is, the real reason is, because there’s no way of telling US history without how appalling and decisive it was.
Everything in America is decided in those years
right there,
and the key event there is, you do indeed, initially, right after the Civil War have Reconstruction,
which is the Federal government imposing some kind of justice for blacks and to liberate blacks in the South,
and it comes to a head in 1876. With the
election of 1876,
one of the most fascinating events in the history, do you know who was running?
You’d think it might be worth knowing? It’s Hayes vs. Tilden. Hayes is a Republican.
The Republicans are ostensibly the party of Lincoln, they were also the party of Wall Street at that point,
and Tilden was a Democrat. Tilden was the
Democrat, and
in the popular vote, Tilden wins.
And indeed, in the electoral college, he is one vote shy of winning, and then the dirty deal is done, and
Hayes promises the Southern states that if they will give him their electoral vote, he will remove the Federal troops, and Reconstruction will be over.
They indeed do that, and, and it’s quite remarkable what happens at that point, because
you think of the rest of that history, is the history of the robber barons, and labor movement.
There is a period--This is, by the way, the very years when Bismarck, for example, in Germany,
Bismarck is setting up social security,
because he has to. There’s a strong left, and if he doesn’t do it himself, there will be revolution,
and this kind of demands of labor are happening at this moment,
and what happens is labor, white labor of the North does not come to the support of blacks in the South,
and in 1877, you have all these soldiers being pulled out of the South,
and that’s when you have all the armories being built all over. The armory in New York, the armory, they all come from that 1870’s,
because why do you need federal troops in all these towns? In Pittsburgh, in Cleveland, in all these places, you need them to put down labor unrest.
W.E.B. Du Bois later writes, “Thus labor went into the Great War of 1877 against Northern Capital, unsupported by the Black man,
and the Black man went his way in the South to strengthen and consolidate his power, unsupported by Northern labor.”
Suppose for a moment that Northern labor had stopped the Bargain of 1876, and maintained the power of labor votes in the South.
By the way, I should have, I realized I hadn’t been following the slides here, of all these things.
“But suppose the Negro, with new and dawning consciousness to the demands of labor, as differentiated from the demands of capitalists,
had used his votes more specifically for the benefit of White Labor," if he had been allowed to continue voting,
but he is no longer allowed to vote.
And in fact, what then happens, and this is really important, because 1865 is when you first have the first black babies being born who were never slaves,
and 21 years later, in the 1880s, they began to be men, and they’re uppity,
and that’s when you get the Ku Klux Klan, which had been very strong in trying to put down the uppity blacks,
and that there you have Rutherford B. Hayes--I'm sorry, I completely forgotten all my slides to show you--
and there you have the Robber Barons.
The point is that, initially, you have a rising up of rural people, of workers that are initially together. This is the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s.
You have populist movement. It initially is a
cross-racial movement,
and once again, race is used, and this is the thing that will happen over and over again.
Whenever you begin to have an uprising of, for egalitarianism, ordinary class politics,
race is used to break up burgeoning alliances.
It’s always based on sex, and of the fear of sex, and it takes the form of violence.
Happens over and over again, and culminates in 1896, with Plessy versus Ferguson,
and the setting up of Jim Crow Segregation.
This is also increasingly when you begin to
have lynchings.
Think about, there had not been lynching during the slave days because blacks were property.
You didn’t destroy property. You might sell it to somebody else, or, but you didn’t, you didn’t destroy it.
Lynchings really kick in in the 1880s, 1890s, and it is a, it’s overwhelmingly to beat back
the promise of this beginning of populist, in which then by itself turns racist, and then you get some of the
really demagogues,
but this is where you get the terrible lynchings.
There’s this kind of weird, I was mentioning, the sexual quality. The great, here is, for example, from, lets see, when is this?
This is a Memphis paper in 1885, I think.
“In each case,” the editors say,
“the crime was deliberately planned and perpetrated by several Negroes. They watch for an opportunity, and when the woman,
women, were left without a protector, it was not a sudden yielding to a fit of passion,
but the consummation of devilish purposes, which has been seeking and waiting for the opportunity.
This feature of the crime not only makes it the most fiendishly brutal,
but it adds to the terror of the situation in the thinly-settled communities.
No man can leave his family at night without the dread that some roving Negro ruffian is watching and waiting for this opportunity.”
And so forth and so on. One of the things that’s so remarkable about this incredibly fevered language, and about the White Woman
as the symbol of Southern purity, and later on, a purity up north as well, because lynchings will take place up north.
But one of the things that’s so weird  is that, in fact, just the opposite was what was mainly happening.
I mean, when you see, it’s obvious that most blacks in America today are not black-black, African-black.
They are all kinds of different shades of mixture and
so forth,
and I guarantee you that the vast majority of those are not because black men raped white women, and white women gave birth to those kids. It’s because
white men were constantly during slave times, using black women, and then
because the white woman in the South is such an image of purity, and has to be so sexually pure, it’s a way of subjugating the white woman as well.
And that in turn means that the white men go into the prostitutes and so forth for wild sex, and then come home, and the white woman is a symbol of
purity and so forth, and that is very much a way of subjugating the white women.
And you begin to have these incredible lynchings, which are, again, always performative,
they are spectacles. Photographs are taken.
The white people are seen proud. They have souvenirs.
Cairo, Illinois, 1909.
Duluth, Minnesota, 1920.
But the point about all this, what I’m trying to bring out,
is once again the great, great people documenting it are Ida Wells, and W.E.B. Du Bois, and many others,
but that this is a way of keeping, not only blacks down, but keeping whites down.
If you can keep blacks from uniting, from having a vote, they will have absolutely no income,
or very, very little income, and you can pay whites what Du Bois called “the wage of color,” which is, “At least they’re not black,”
and whites are willing, they don’t organize, they don’t turn this thing upside down, because they identify in their whiteness, with the white, with the white ruling class,
and whenever there begins to be a thing, when things come together, they can threaten them with, “If you do this, you’re going to end up with sex.”
You also have the role of Christianity is very, very important. There’s a great passage from
a book by, I forget her first name. What is her last name? She’s the daughter of the great Civil War, the great historian would,
but she recalled lynching as spectacle, and she writes, “‘It’s exceedingly doubtful if lynching could possibly exist under any other religion than Christianity,’
wrote Walter White, an anti-lynching activist and NAACP leader during 1929.
For White, it was no accident that the states with the highest level of lynching were those whom which the
greatest majority of the church members were protestants of the evangelical wing of Protestantism.
Not only had these churches indirectly given their approval to lynching and other forms of race prejudice,
but the very nature of evangelical worship for whites, created a particular fanaticism,
which finds its outlet in lynching.”
There are these amazing stories you read of, the most powerful one that I read was of,
was about a white sheriff. What all was happening, was that there was a man, a black man was accused of having raped a white woman.
He is put in jail, and the mob comes around, or the white, the crowd,
and they demand to have him out so they could just lynch him, and usually he’s headed back. And this is
a sheriff,
at the time, a white sheriff, saying, writing,
“I went into that cell block with every intention of fulfilling my oath and protecting that man.”
There’s a crowd outside, he was going to protect the black man.
“But when the mob opened the door and the first half-dozen men standing there were leading citizens,
businessmen, leaders of their churches and the community, i just couldn’t do it.”
Isn’t that amazing? It’s the flip side of what you always hear, you know?
I just couldn’t bring myself to turn over the Jewish family, I just couldn’t do it, and this was just the opposite.
The function of this is partly, as I say, to, to terrorize blacks in the South, especially.
You get Richard Wright in “Black Boy” in 1937,
and keep in mind, this continues clear through the Roosevelt Administration,
in which there’s attempts to have anti-lynching legislation. They never pass.
Eleanor Roosevelt is an ambassadress to the communities of color among other things,
but at the end of the day, Roosevelt has to have the Southern committee chairmen on his side.
Keep in mind, these southern committee chairmen are in power because they’ve got gerrymandered districts,
they are, they are extremely conservative, extremely racist, and
so, basically, he doesn’t, he does some stuff on class, but he will do nothing on race.
The army remains segregated during the entire war,
and yet, at the end of the war, you have all these people who fought Nazism, all these black people who come back, and they’ll be damned if they’re going to stand up,
and you have a rise, once again, and you have a growing movement in the 50s, and once again, it has to be crushed. So you have Langston Hughes,
and Paul Robeson, brought before McCarthyism hearings and so forth.
And then, as you get, as the Civil Rights movements really get going, you have these horrible events,
very powerfully horrible. In my case, I come from the town that Schwerner came from. These are the three,
these are the guys in Philadelphia, Mississippi, who are trying to, Freedom Riders and the black guy.
Schwerner and Goodman, and what’s his name, I forgot. Chaney, yeah.
And they are kidnapped, killed.
Eventually, finally, you have the march in Washington, but once again, this leads to,
just as you’re beginning to have that whole liberal movement in the 60s,
and you’re beginning to have the war on poverty, you’re beginning to have all that stuff come together,
Martin Luther King gets shot,
and the key point I want to make here
is that I’ve taken you through a series of
rear-view mirrors,
but the question is, what is the--In the year 1970, what are the headlights of those four cars looking at?
And they’re looking at the creation of the
Southern Strategy.
That’s the year Nixon, very consciously, is saying, you know, we have to flip the entire South Republican.
With Barry Goldwater in 64, you have the beginning of the American Racist Party
as a response to the upsurgence 60s. It all takes the form of dog-whistle politics.
What’s fascinating under Nixon, under Barry Goldwater, you still had people who would say,
“John Birch Society,” people and so forth, who would just be out and out racists.
You can’t do that anymore. George Wallace is an out and out racist, you can’t do that anymore. You had
to find ways
of talking the same language through
dog-whistle politics,
and there are endless tapes of the White House, I’ll be doing a whole thing on this
in a book of Nixon just outlining: We have to let people know about law and order,
the war on drugs,
all this kind of thing happening. And then,
when Reagan starts his campaign, we talked about Reagan a few minutes ago.
Do you remember where Reagan starts his campaign?
Philadelphia, Mississippi.
The town where Schwerner and Chaney and Goodman had been killed.
He starts his campaign for president at the County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and when it gets
pointed out,
“How can you do that?”
He says, “Who’s talking about race? You have race on the mind. Why do you keep talking about race? These are good people.”
And all the dog-whistles are in full blare. That comes all the way to the present.
That’s why you get this sort of thing.
An attempt to get a sliver of the kind of healthcare that is true of every other country.
And many, many poor countries that you cannot get in the United States because politics is arranged in such a way, and we just saw it yesterday in Kentucky.
Kentucky, which has the best health exchange
in the country,
just elected a Tea Party guy for governor, who is going to get rid of that health exchange.
Which is to say that whites in Kentucky, poor whites in Kentucky, would rather make sure that Black people not get anything,
even if it means that they don’t get anything.
And that kind of, and if you remember the very origins of the Tea Party,
was about government giveaways, all this kind of language, and all the racism, and once again, we come back to Ed.
And he has his finger, he’s making this piece right when that is being cemented, and when
the history of our last 40 years are coming into existence.
There’s Ed and Nancy.
Anyway. I could tell you more stories about Ed, and would be happy to, but in fact, what I want to do, is close with a quote from James Baldwin.
Let me go back here.
Again, the question is, what are those people doing to that guy.
Why are they doing that?
And again, why is it sexual, why all that stuff. Why is that happening?
And Baldwin, and nothing personal.
Can I just stop for a second and talk about Baldwin? James Baldwin is the most important person to be reading right now.
Of that generation of writers, and I’m talking about Styron, and Capote, and Gore Vidal, and
that whole generation. The most salient, the most pertinent, the most
desperately important to read is Baldwin.
And you get a sense of why. He’s by the way, one of the most beautiful essayists that the English language
has produced.
But, here is, I want to close with this quote of Baldwin’s from “Nothing Personal.”
“It is of course in the very nature of a myth that those who are its victims, and at the same time, its perpetrators,
should by virtue of these two facts be rendered unable to examine the myth, or even to inspect, much less recognize that it is a myth,
which controls and blasts their lives.
One sees this, it seems to me, in great and grim relief, in the situation of the poor white in the Deep South.
The poor white was enslaved almost from the instant he arrived on this shores,
and he still enslaved by a brutal and cynical oligarchy.
The utility of the poor white was to make slavery both profitable and safe, and therefore the germ of white supremacy, which he brought with him from Europe,
was made hideously to flourish in the American air.
Two World Wars, and a worldwide depression, have failed to reveal to this poor man
that he has far more in common with the ex-slaves whom he fears, than he has with the masters who oppress them both for profit.
It is no accident that ancient Scottish ballads and Elizabethan chants are still heard in those dark hills.
Talk about a people being locked in the past.
To be locked in the past, means, in effect, that one has no past, since one can never assess it or use it,
and if one cannot use the past, one cannot function in the present, and so one can never be free.
I take this to be, as I say, the American Situation in relief, the root of our unadmitted sorrow,
and the very key to our crisis.”
I think he wrote that some time in the mid-60s. It is absolutely as true today, it seems to me,
and it’s the kind of thing, I think, that Ed Kienholz was wrestling with in “Five Car Stud.”
Thank you.
[Applause]
So, I am happy to take questions if people have them. Yeah? Let’s start over there.
And, by the way, feel free to leave if you need to leave. If anyone wants to hang around for questions.
Audience member: Thank you for, I thought you made excellent points. I don’t want to disagree with you. I would just like to
mention something. Seymour Martin looks at another sociologist who talked about status anxiety.
You bring up the point that the property classes wanted to divide and conquer by stirring up animosity between poor whites and poor blacks.
Status anxiety also holds, it's a psychological need for some people who feel so downtrodden, such low self-esteem to find someone lower on the totem pole.
That’s why most of the Ku Klux Klan are mostly from the lower class. The,
and also, just my final point, one of the worst and most terrifying episodes of racial violence in the country, was the Draft Riots
in New York, during the Civil War. Mostly by Irish workers against black people, and this was because of, well I won’t get into this,
but this is not engineered by the upper classes. So there’s a strong undercurrent,
not just politically, but psychologically motivated, and feelings of animus between white and black
in this country.
Weschler: The point, one thing I pointed to make out, essentially, you can now go to college and do white studies,
and what’s interesting about white studies, and this comes back to Baldwin, by the way, is Baldwin would
often say to interviewers, “I’m not black unless you need to be white.”
And what’s fascinating is the history of whites in America, because Irish, in particular, were black.
Jews were black. Latinos right now are black,
and those are all the construction of whiteness.
Right now, you have Donald Trump constructing whiteness
by making it distinct from Mexicans, let’s say, or whatever. We have a whole history of, by the way, people who were
themselves black, and once again, this comes back to the point, though, why they weren’t uniting together?
And, and, and they were, I would, a point I really want to make clear is that
it is very, very often the wealthy, and I don’t mean that they sit in a room and figure this out,
but it is totally in their interest to have policies that break up these things,
and Ta-Nehisi Coates has been absolutely spectacular on this.
You know, when you talk, it’s exactly the point that Franz Fanon makes, that people aren’t underdeveloped,
some people are underdeveloped and some aren’t, no. People are underdeveloped by other people.
There are policies that underdevelop.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, his thing on
the redlining. It’s no surprise, none of the stuff that happens when you read the paper today, and why there’s these things. This was all policy,
and it was policy that, in terms of voting, required that
hundreds of thousands and millions of people voted against their own class interest,
and that was thought through, and that seems to be it. And the moment, the key moment in contemporary history, in the lifetime of many people in the room,
when that was being precision engineered was 1970.
And go read the Nixon Tapes on this. It’s just absolutely fascinating. Over there, yeah.
Audience member: Yes sir. It’s very useful, and important to have all this history recapitulated in our public arena,
especially for those that don’t know it already. It’s a huge mountain of scholarship, some of which you’ve cited,
and of course, to have this tied to an artist I’ve never even heard of before is also very useful information.
In terms of sources, since you mentioned the origin of racial history, it’s important to understand, I think the most important book to read on the subject,
which is Theodore W. Allen’s 2-volume, “The Image of the White Race,” which is out being lectured about around the country by Geoffrey Perret,
whom I’ve known for 25 years. I, we collaborate with him in New York on various things,
who was also the scholar Hubert Harrison which is one of the most important black intellectuals of the 20th century. East Harlem soapbox orator,
and so I would suggest that, since you mentioned Gerald Horn and these various sources, that if you want to read the origins of racial slavery,
you need to read Theodore W. Allen’s “The Invention of the White Race,” which deals with this question of what whiteness,
in a much more profound way, than the fashionable way which it’s become treated in liberal academia.
So I just wanted to mention that, and also, to thank you for bringing this historical perspective to public arena.
Weschler: One thing I do want to make clear is that art matters.
Art is not something that should just be in a box somewhere. That it is the occasion that art provides occasions for some serious thought,
and it’s, in all my art writing, I try to bring, I try to do that.
I agree with you completely, but there’s several… It turns out that there’s lots of really, really, really good books,
and in terms of that stuff between 1865 and 1898, is an absolute scandal how little people know.
I had an interesting thing happen a few years ago.
I’ll date it, it was during the great Vermeer show that was here in Washington,
and I was with a friend who was...
Tom Eiso, the great entomologist, the bug scientist who had given a talk at the Natural History Museum, American Museum of Natural History in New York,
and he had invited me as his date, and we went upstairs, and the Board of Governors was
having a dinner
for him, and I thought it would be a hundred people, and it was like,
twenty of us at two tables, in the New Guinea room,
with tuxedoed black waiters. It was so weird. And we were eating, and I, at one point, said,
“It’s strange, with the Vermeer, with that show down in Washington right now, and
and you see the three at the Met, and the three at the Frick, and you know, so I tell you, you can pretty much see all of the Vermeers in North America right now.”
and the woman next to me, “How did Frick make his money?” And I said, “Oh, by killing workers.”
It was in fact, literally what happened. Carnegie, he was, Frick was the, Frick was the number two person
to Carnegie.
Carnegie went on vacation for two years, back to Scotland, while Frick machine gunned all kinds of strikers, and that went out of state, Carnegie came back,
and that’s indeed how he, I mean, that’s the kind of thing he did.
The person next to me says, “Excuse me, that woman over there is my wife, and she is Frick’s great-great-granddaughter.”
And I said, “Well, it’s true.”
[Laughter]
Anyway, gotta be careful in those audiences. Over here, yeah.
Audience member: Again, I really appreciate the use of art to tell history. I guess the question that I have is,
how do we learn from this experience, because what we’re seeing now, and I’m glad that you sort of brought it back home to where we are today,
how do we learn from this experience? We see the attacks on unions, we see the xenophobia in which you’re right, Latinos are now the new blacks.
But all of it is really destroying labor,
and devaluing labor in this country, and so, you know, art is one way of bringing it to the fold, when we’re seeing it talked about again,
particularly among black artists. But the question is, how do we get this into the larger discussion, because this is really an issue of labor,
and how do we, and where labor will go in the future, because it also ties to where America will go in the future.
Weschler: It’s the fascinating you’ve said. There’s a whole history on the left, whether, of casting it that way, which I frankly tend to agree with,
another way of putting this, I believe in class, in ordinary class-based politics,
in which you would have strong unions. That’s, by the way, things are so much more effective in Germany and France, and so forth.
But there’s a whole counter-history in America of separatism, of black radicalism,
and, or the different interest groups and so forth and so. And that’s a whole
business of things, but it seems to me that one of the things that, that just, the history needs to be told to people, and,
and everybody does it in their own way, and one of the things I do in my own writerly career, is that I go back and forth between doing,
on the one hand, writing about torture in Latin America, which we were responsible for, but then writing about…
I go back and forth between political tragedies and cultural comedies.
In a way, this book is trying to do them both at the same time.
You have to find fresh ways of doing it.
And, it’s extremely…
We’re about to enter an extremely tight situation, where, where if,
you know, I mean, a huge problem, it seems to me. You don’t need to hear about my political opinions, but,
but the bottom line is, depending on how the next election turns out,
you could have a Supreme Court which will make sure that only property people vote in America.
They will gerrymander, they will get rid of unions, absolutely. That would, that thing’s coming up in this next round, we’re going to see union rights decimated,
and that’ll depend on the next three or four Supreme Court nominations.
It’s conceivable that if they can be held off,
you might begin to have a little bit more hope, but
right now, between disenfranchisement, the cutting back of the voting rights bill,
it’s now more blatant than it’s been since the 1880s and 1890s. It’s unbelievable.
Citizens United and all that stuff. It’s all part of the same thing. And once again, I think that culture’s one of the ways you get at it.
You get at it with better stories than they have,
and so that’s the job of art, the job of writing.
And, I guess that’s part of what I try to do.
And you also try to keep it funny when you can.
Emcee: Mr. Weschler, thank you very, very much for the presentation.
[Applause]
Weschler: So apparently there’s a reception back there, so I’ll be up with you in a second.
