1971: A Year in the Life of Color

Darby English is the Carl Darling Buck Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in China

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-13105-4 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-27473-7 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226274737.001.0001

This publication is made possible in part by support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: English, Darby, 1974– author.

Title: 1971: a year in the life of color / Darby English.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016012924 | ISBN 9780226131054 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226274737 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: African American art—United States—Exhibitions—History. | Art, Abstract—United States—Exhibitions—History. | Art, American—20th century—Exhibitions—History. | Contemporary Black Artists in America (Exhibition) (1971: New York, N.Y.) | De Luxe Show (Exhibition) (1971: Houston, Tex.) | Art and race. | Art and society—United States. | Modernism (Art)—Social aspects—United States. | Nineteen seventy-one, A.D.

Classification: LCC N6538.N5 E538 2016 | DDC 700.89/96073—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016012924

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

1971

A Year in the Life of Color

Darby English

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The creation of representations, affects, and desires by the human imagination is subject to conditions but never predetermined.

Cornelius Castoriadis

Painting . . . had something inherent in itself which I had to discover, which has nothing to do with what exists, it has another kind of reality. . . . And this is where it gets very challenging and the question of being alone, this becomes—I don’t think many black cats know how to be alone when it requires this kind of concentration, and when you are alone what do you have to say? Do you have anything to say?

Norman Lewis

Contents

Introduction. Social Experiments with Modernism

Chapter 1. How It Looks to Be a Problem

Chapter 2. Making a Show of Discomposure

Contemporary Black Artists in America

Chapter 3. Local Color and Its Discontents

The DeLuxe Show

Appendix

Raymond Saunders, Black Is a Color (1967)

Acknowledgments

Index

Introduction

Social Experiments with Modernism

Two photographs document an intriguing episode in late modernism that, late in the summer of 1971, moved quickly from conception to execution to the deepest reserves of historical memory (fig. I.1). The photographs were taken on August 21, 1971, in Houston. The first shows the critic Clement Greenberg standing between Helen Winkler, then a curatorial assistant to the art patrons Dominique and John de Menil, and the painter Peter Bradley. In the second, Greenberg is pictured with Winkler, Bradley, and Kenneth Noland. Residents of Manhattan at the time, Bradley, Greenberg, and Noland were in Houston to install The DeLuxe Show, which Bradley curated at John de Menil’s invitation. The DeLuxe Show presented a group of modernist paintings and sculptures in a converted movie theater located in what people sometimes call the black part of town. The first racially integrated exhibition of modern art in the United States of its scale, the exhibition was, above all else, a social experiment undertaken in the belief that the best color painting of the moment had important work¹ to do in a southern black ghetto.

Figure I.1. Helen Winkler, Clement Greenberg, and Peter Bradley installing The DeLuxe Show, 1971. Menil Archives, The Menil Collection, Houston. Photo: Hickey-Robertson, Houston.

Color painting is a loosely arranged formalism that accommodated many painters’ fervent exploration of hue, depth, density, texture, shape, and color relations’ capacity to mutually inform pictorial structures. Greenberg was a cautious commentator. However, the grinning figure in the cowboy hat at the center of the first photograph suggests that he really got into the spirit of things.² The hat brings a welcome displacement of the old familiar Greenberg. It locates him in a foreign situation: somehow we know this isn’t New York. One wonders what Greenberg is up to. The West that the Stetson evokes is more literal, differently mythical than the one Greenberg’s criticism annexed as a stage for modernist triumphs. In a way it echoes a sentiment buried deep within Greenberg’s singular criticism: his tremendous capacity for surprise.

Considerable reflection on this Greenberg triggered in me a reluctant acknowledgment that I belonged to a near-systemic culture of what Eve Sedgwick called paranoid reading and characterized as a distinctly rigid relation to temporality, at once anticipatory and retroactive, averse above all to surprise.³ The reader will recognize in paranoid reading a common disciplinary attitude toward Greenberg, one that places the critic off limits and often disparages modernism as a whole. But without renouncing this knowingness, one is powerless to understand the enterprise these photographs record. Surprise also triggered my intransigent fascination with that hat, and especially the event of its exchange.

The second photo (fig. I.2) finds the Stetson on the head of Peter Bradley, a Yale-trained color painter who, following Jules Olitski’s lead, worked almost exclusively with a spray gun from 1965 to 1971. Greenberg and Bradley were familiar with each other through Perls Gallery, where the painter worked as associate director. Bradley enjoyed none of the commercial success of the artists popularly identified with Greenberg at the time, artists such as his friend and neighbor Kenneth Noland, or Olitski. Bradley was in it for the love of painting, an ambition Greenberg supported in him and in many other artists scantily represented in the literature on modernist practices.⁴ Lively advocacy was crucial for tastemakers and career artists alike: modernism was embattled, and its cultural project remained unfulfilled. However confident they were in their idiom’s rightness and power, those with modernist proclivities were quickly becoming (art) history. They were united in being marginalized, and this amidst widespread interest in Conceptual art, which then had little need for painting, sculpture, or galleries designed to flatter it. Indeed artists increasingly saw these as fetishes at best and obstructions at worst.⁵

Figure I.2. Helen Winkler, Peter Bradley, Kenneth Noland, and Clement Greenberg installing The DeLuxe Show, 1971. Menil Archives, The Menil Collection, Houston. Photo: Hickey-Robertson, Houston.

On some level, The DeLuxe Show must have looked to Greenberg like a way to stay in the game. But there was a great deal more to the project, for everyone involved. The surviving principals recall neither who gave the hat to whom nor any particulars about its exchange, but its movement captures the animating spirit of the exhibition project: a casual statement of affinity between the races, expressed through a shared commitment to the ongoing relevance of abstract art, cheerfully staged in a site (the black urban ghetto) that we might otherwise write off as encapsulating the pitched racial crisis in which post–civil rights America then found itself. Circumstances made modernism available to cultural politics in ways it had not been in a long while.

But perhaps we ought not to be so surprised.

Together, the photographs—specifically, the warmly experimental scene they document—remind us that two main endorsements of the more notorious elements of Greenberg’s practice were a protracted empathy with certain efforts to do things with abstract art, and an unfathomably deep concern for the conditions that permit modernism to thrive or to fail. For Greenberg, criticism was a forum not merely for the display of analytic acumen and erudition but for the public exercise of thought about the conditions of art’s necessity.⁶ His broad project teaches us to consider what things are in themselves: where they come from,⁷ how they help us to construe the discrete ambitions they subtly realize, and how our experience of them might first frustrate but then expand our conceptions of the possible.⁸ A rarely noted dialectical relationship between artistic practice and critical judgment discloses the empathic core of Greenberg’s criticism: a work is literally unimaginable apart from efforts to understand it. Criticism at once sheltered and projected one of modernism’s determining fantasies: that through a dedicated practice, the principal parties to art—the maker, the made thing, and its viewer—briefly attained a clarity and intensity no other kind of experience could offer.

Greenberg is as good a figure as any to help us recover the aspirational dimension of modernism, but my principal subject is the modernist sensibility that animated an unprecedented brief swell of dissent within black political culture that bore deep affinities with intercultural politics (another leftist formation that would become maligned, if not eclipsed, by 1971) and progressive individualism. This book looks specifically at an agenda of cultural work undertaken through recourse to late-modernist abstraction—or color painting, as it is more commonly known. Here color painting operates as a vehicle for the pedagogy I ascribe to Greenberg. Of the book’s questions, the largest are simply, what did these exhibitions do to color, actually and conceptually? And how did this doing both reflect and affect the ways the larger culture was metabolizing color? The activities I study occurred at the fringes of modernist culture, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and revived a social dimension from which modernism had been almost fully decoupled. As a result they mattered in ways that will have to be reconstructed.

On this Texan horizon, a modernist formation took shape that will be at least as unfamiliar to us as the image of Greenberg in a Stetson. It revealed a politics long buried within the modernism we have come to know largely through countermodernist art histories. For the first time since the postwar advent of the great age of American art, modernists, now on the defensive, were forced to work against the grain.⁹ Their forms had to be explosive, and they even got a little queer. The exhibitions at the heart of this study exemplify this development.

At the same time, a profound change in the timbre of modernist criticism echoed this productive deformation of canonical modernism. Relationality entered the space of modernist criticism, leading to strenuous formulations of the interactive element of the aesthetic experience invited by the new painting and sculpture. The writers exploring this experience now found that it depended as utterly on a viewer’s embodied presence and active questioning of an object’s terms as it had on the mere presence of an object to behold. The phenomenological thrust of these new positions restored a body to optical experience (Krauss on Olitski—in many ways the star of The DeLuxe Show—in 1968), and the ethical project that comprised their observations forcefully asserted that body’s contingency, how it was embedded in a sociopolitical medium (Cavell, Some Modernist Painting, 1971). Though always there, this intimacy had not until this moment been seen as salutary in critical accounts of modernist art, and indeed some exemplary texts of the era had militated against the unapologetic hereness of new art.

An art object’s need for intimate relation was, for Michael Fried in 1967, cause to banish it from the realm of art to take seriously. Probably it had been no coincidence that he explicated artists’ widespread adoption of staining, monolithic construction, and optical color in a vocabulary of opticality, conviction, and finally presentness, to convey the critic’s efforts to prevent the loss of art that would seem to follow him collapsing into his object. For the very means of that object’s construction—say, with paints that sink into a canvas’s texture rather than massing atop it, or with color whose intensity actually blurs one’s perception of the boundaries separating not only the elements of a composition but indeed oneself from one’s object—now severely contracted the beholder’s sense of distance from what he beheld. In Fried’s criticism, art begat art with the unique forcefulness of genuine formal invention; it can seem as though viewer participation in the production of art was nearly perfunctory. But for our purposes, it is instructive that Fried had resisted still more emphatic minimalist efforts to underline participation in art’s reception. Perhaps chief among the many unintended avowals of Art and Objecthood, then, was that viewer and object no longer shared the same idea of distance as a structural necessity in the art situation.

Not every critic worked so vigorously to contain this development. Some, such as Stanley Cavell (himself a confidant and close, if differing, reader of Fried at this moment), welcomed it as a new way to understand the the fullness of a worldly encounter with art, and even used the same art that Fried believed would save art from objecthood. This criticism found a way to do modernism without abstracting away the sociality and the politics that made it matter. The avowal of one’s intimacy with the work of art; the mutual cultivation of that attachment as its visual intensity affected the whole body; the suggestion that an ethics applicable to nonart situations was already contained in this structure—these were cryptic appeals to recognize late modernist art’s immediate social relevance. Importantly, however, they were less cryptic than the criticism they revised. For them, intimacy was immanent to reception, involving what Cavell called the courage of sensuality—to marry one’s desire;¹⁰ the experience of modernist art was pedagogical, and possibly even reparative, a proving ground for compassionate participation in the public sphere, when high-stakes encounters with strong difference were the norm.

As we have seen, modernist criticism in the mid-to late 1960s worked to mask its preoccupation with the relational-ethical questions foreclosed in formalist analysis. But as we will now see, late modernist criticism, which reached an apogee in 1971, actually declared color painting to be about being with the other, in the sense that its abstractness not only spoke to but generated the necessary difficulty of living with contingency. It announced the end of a modernist project dedicated to using this art to deny the centrality of contingency to contemporary life.¹¹ It did this by shifting critical emphasis to the theme of openness (Bradley: this art is all light and open) and by privileging the inescapably relational question form (Krauss: Olitski changes the syntax of the question ‘Where?’). The paranoid variant survives. The reparative one attempts rebirth in the following pages.

The many caricatures of high modernism thrust upon generations of students by its most ardent critics permit us to think of it only as a self-indulgent elitism epitomized by Greenberg, his followers (few of whom followed him very far), and their famously closed canons.¹² In 1971, though, one saw fleetingly resuscitated that dimension of modernism that had always been primarily a social experiment: in two exhibition projects, advocates of modernist art directly engaged the politics of representation—the same politics credited in later histories with displacing modernist strategies at the end of the 1960s.

As the story goes, abstraction is no cure for the invisibility imposed by systemic racism. In fact abstraction performed crucial work within and upon the flows of black culture, by opening black culture to the same contingency that fragmented the culture of modernism. I argue that black artists who took up a place within modernism at this juncture did not undermine vigorous claims to representation so much as complicate them. The terms of this complication vary as much as the artists who effected it, but very generally, abstraction provided them with visual and verbal languages for deviance, languages that pointed away from tangible referents identifiable with mass politics.¹³

In what follows I am not particularly interested in high modernism’s dalliances with capital, its accommodation to the lobbies of financial services firms, or its mobilization in nationalist-imperialist cultural programs. Whatever becomes of modernism in the ideological programs of particular practitioners (theoreticians, artists, critics, philosophers) is also not my subject. Taking seriously what modernism—as a specific intellectual project—wanted and how it went about satisfying its desire goes beyond defining modernism, whether as a period in the development of global art, a property of particular works of art, or a distinctly stubborn critical attitude. Taking 1971 as a kind of object dilates modernism as a discrete aspirational paradigm simultaneously viewed alongside and distinguished from the collective arts of representation that bore a trenchant critique of abstraction.

I am for understanding the representation-abstraction relation in a way that does not reduce it to a simple choice between political engagement and apathetic retreat. Both schemes present dynamic conceptions of art as cultural work. Alas, historical portrayals don’t treat it this way. Generally, they tend to overlook the decisive factor of abstraction’s situation at the intersection between two cultural zones—black and white America—that we’re given to see as isolated and mutually excluding. Further, they do not recognize how the art’s immanent intimateness intensifies the richly relational element of the intercultural scene. In 1971 racialist representation and abstraction were equally valid responses to the same phenomenon: spreading manifestations of interracial intimacy in the context of art, which itself inhabited a visibly polarized cultural politics. In this project—after nearly half a century of art history that reflexively privileges the figurative artist as the only agent capable of doing or enabling antiracist politics—I look to the figure of the black modernist as a differently identitarian mode of being that becomes hypervisible (mainly as a problem) when the formatting and formalizing of identity becomes the sine qua non of visibility for black artists.

The impresarios of the shows I study projected a palpable optimism about the black modernist’s political capacity: Robert M. Doty at the Whitney Museum thematized it in Contemporary Black Artists in America, and Peter Bradley set up DeLuxe in a black ghetto, certain that the color work in the art would leave its mark on the local children to whom he offered the show. I write from a standpoint of sympathy with both men’s audacious efforts on behalf of the potentials of this art. To articulate what I believe those efforts entailed, I chose a similarly audacious construction—I call it artifactual color to designate not a hue or mark or object-property but a sense of color generated in the tension between color’s racial connotations and its aesthetic meanings. This tension constituted a shared factor in Contemporary Black Artists in America and the DeLuxe Show, which provisionally altered color’s valence as a term of art in roiling contemporary debates. Artifactual color’s proper domain is cultural rather than strictly chromatic: not naturally present, it is color that results from an experimental procedure. What color the interracial moment of culture is one cannot say, but its type is artifactual. In this way, historically speaking, artifactual color is an aftereffect of direct action; it is a legacy of a political form that, unlike direct action, managed to thrive in the shadow of Black Power.

On this scene modernism also became a scene of socially mediated individuality. As such, it signified a practicable belief that an artist could not merely assert her subjectivity complexly but would also render a form—an artwork—that established her desire as a worldly presence. Especially evident in 1971 was that abstract art also served as a proxy for human relationships of a depth routinely invoked by politics: my abstract painting is a proxy for my selfhood.

My explicit subjects are two exhibitions mounted in the year 1971 through which modernism briefly took up residence at the burning heart of black cultural politics. The DeLuxe Show is one. The other (whose run fell four months prior), Contemporary Black Artists in America, in New York, was the Whitney Museum’s reply to vociferous demands for art-world recognition of black Americans’ dense culture. In the midst of widespread institutional critique, black activists sought to overhaul the museum in ways that reflected the black cultural revolution sweeping the nation: it was thought that a show shot through with legible signs of difference, thereby reflecting change, would make the Whitney a truly representative museum of American art.

But instead the Whitney’s curator, Robert M. Mac Doty, created an exhibition that prioritized abstraction.¹⁴ Here modernism was a language of equality—a way partly to get the conversation back to the subject of art, but also to make the point that painting itself cannot practice discrimination. The Whitney’s exhibition should have sparked debate about what successful activism would mean. Instead it prompted vigorous invective against both abstraction and the larger issue of robust interracial sociality, which the au courant language of Black Power vigorously opposed but Contemporary Black Artists in America exemplified.

Doty understood that a widening corps of black artists committed to abstraction were demanding to be evaluated on aesthetic terms that narrow debates about representation typically did not engage. These individuals—among them Alvin Loving, whose massive geometric construction WYN . . . Time Trip I (1971, fig. I.3) adorned the exhibition’s title wall, and Raymond Saunders, a painter whose cheerful, enigmatic Marie’s Bill (1970, fig. I.4) introduces Doty’s catalogue essay—complicated the picture of black politics in ways that leading artists and critics (both black and nonblack) rarely hesitated to condemn. A commitment to modernism did more than simply escape the representationalist, collectivist black-ideological norm. Through their modernist work on canvas, in plastic, and on the cultural field more generally, these artists opened a field of differentiation within a cultural territory otherwise captured by the political formalisms of blackness. About racialist issues, however, these particular artists had remarkably little to say; by any conventional political standard their verbal statements are slim, literally and rhetorically. Working largely without polemic against a relentlessly expressive formation,¹⁵ they occupied a paradoxical situation.

Figure I.3. Alvin Loving (1935–2005), WYN . . . Time Trip I, 1971. Synthetic polymer on canvas, 147 × 324 in. (373.4 × 823 cm). Courtesy the Estate of Al Loving and Garth Greenan Gallery, NY.

Figure I.4. The opening spread to Robert Doty’s essay in the Contemporary Black Artists in America exhibition catalogue, featuring Raymond Saunders, Marie’s Bill. Reproduction of Marie’s Bill courtesy of Raymond Saunders. Photo: Arthur Evans.

What distinguished Bradley and Doty from other modernists of the time were their insights that exhibition could serve as a platform from which to denounce the vogue for segregated art exhibitions and other isolationist cultural forms. They shared with a number of artists from whom we’ll hear a conviction that modernism brought its serious practitioners a broader cultural base and a sympathetic community comprising blacks and nonblacks alike. These artists did not withdraw from racially mixed relations, despite their difficulty. Nor did they allow the all-encompassing grasp of racialist rhetoric to drive them from public discourse. Instead these agents chose to point their language away from that which conventional politics would present. Interrupting the circulation of replicable meaning, they reconfigured race’s discursive public in the process. We can think of their art-related statements and topics of conversation as alternative practices of dissent, which accompanied and maybe stemmed from abstract art practices.

This cohort met a strong theory—a proudly segregationist politics of representation—with a weak one of abstraction. Bringing that out now means, for me, directly confronting the problem of theoretical amplitude. I attempt nothing less than to rescue the weak theory of abstraction from various attempts to bind it to a strong theory of racial separation propounded by African American / black art history, which appropriates abstract art to a racialist cause. This has been difficult work, possibly due to the limitations of weak theory. Or it may just show how hard it is to perform weak theory under the pressure of one’s own deeply held commitments to do a certain kind of historical work: the kind that the term rescue seems perfectly to capture; the kind that may appear to contrast the collective viewpoint absolutely to the individual one, when it doesn’t mean to; or the kind that may appear to insist that other readers simply get the art wrong, which of course they don’t.

The need to account for the extraordinary historical value of experiments such as The DeLuxe Show and Contemporary Black Artists in America entails a difficulty for the historian. I will be the first to admit that interpreting the artists’ linguistic dissent—which accompanied or may have stemmed from the visual practice of abstraction—involves a degree of projection on my part. In marked contrast to the experiments conducted by this study’s protagonists, the same period ushered in a conception of art and activism shaped by a pervasive vocabulary of acute social crisis. All but lost against such a background are what Julia Bryan-Wilson astutely calls "emerging, possibly political forms of art and related aesthetic practices not legibly political to common sense. So the art-historical imagination identifies the 1971 efflorescence in art with the familiar ruptures of the 1960s—social and economic, theoretical and political."¹⁶ In art as such, the chief criterion became the explicitness of the political code. Yet the truly characteristic art of this time is better captured by the term practice and expresses utterly what Robert Morris in 1970 declared to be a shift [in] priorities . . . from making and viewing to unified action within the art community against the intensifying conditions of repression, war, and racism in this country.¹⁷ As Bryan-Wilson notes of one such action—captured in a photo of the artist Tom Lloyd’s young toy gun–toting son during a picket of MoMA by Art Workers’ Coalition members—many of these protests against the art world’s racist exclusions recalled black militancy, and they serve today as a reminder that the politics of racial inclusion had serious stakes¹⁸ (fig. I.5). But the young child in the photo, his frankly adorable camera-smile so sharply out of step with the dramaturgy of rebellion, calls forward another dimension of these activities as well. Like any revolutionary scene, this one was choreographed not merely to revise outlooks but to shape them. It involved an explicitly pedagogical component, offering lessons, even to the very young, in how to present a politically black face to the existing order. And the early twenty-first-century art-historical imagination doesn’t readily accommodate subtler manifestations of anti-exclusionary politics, such as the exhibitions considered here. It’s been especially uncurious about the politics of various freedom movements and the acts of closure upon which solidarity depended. This notion of politics makes it hard to historicize the closures on which these movements were often founded—including the phenomenon whereby, all too often, the same respect for difference that these movements sought to universalize, that gave them their purpose, ended at the boundary of the collective.

Figure I.5. Tom Lloyd’s son holds a toy gun while picketing in front of MoMA with the Art Workers’ Coalition on May 2, 1970. Photo © Jan van Raay.

Action against racism has never taken only one form. Arguments about redress constitute a politics themselves, and in 1971 one such argument had abstract art as its primary vehicle. To appreciate the politicality of color painting at the time, one must first recognize that the dominant criterion of political art—explicit coding—diminishes object-sense in favor of reading-for-relevance, as though objects can’t be relevant to anything that really matters. For within the contemporary constrictions of black art shows, the presence of a color painter would be seen to mitigate any curatorial ambition