There's no reason to think Guston liked the Klan. It's for the viewer to gaze on these painterly cartoons...
... and wonder what the hell is this supposed to mean? or just to think hmmm, there's that or whatever you think in a museum... those bastions of white supremacy!
Maybe you think, yeah, this is all cute fun or mysterious ambiguity for elite white folks but it's all made possible by an unexamined sense that black people don't matter.
Okay, but maybe Guston meant to say that — to draw you in and then challenge you to confront your impulse to accept the KKK when it's painted and in a museum.
From the NYT article:
This week, the directors of those museums released a joint statement saying that they were “postponing the exhibition until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted.”...Nuance! I saw people in my town tear down a statue of a young man who died in battle fighting against slavery, and Godfrey is criticizing the museums for failing to credit the public with high-level discernment! Of course, it's irksome for museums to over-explain the works of art, but the museums are rightfully afraid of destructive attacks on the paintings. I know the official statement is that the works need to be presented more "clearly" — what? with lots of wall cards saying the artist opposed the KKK? — but the real motivation must be a fear of violence and destruction.
Darby English, a professor of art history at the University of Chicago and a former adjunct curator at the Museum of Modern Art, called the decision “cowardly” and “an insult to art and the public alike.”
And Mark Godfrey, a curator at Tate Modern in London who co-organized the exhibition, posted a searing statement on Instagram saying that the decision was “extremely patronizing” to audiences because it assumes that they are not able to understand and appreciate the nuance of Guston’s works.
“What those who criticize this decision do not understand,” [said Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation] “is that in the past few months the context in the U.S. has fundamentally, profoundly changed on issues of incendiary and toxic racist imagery in art, regardless of the virtue or intention of the artist who created it.”...
[Guston's daughter Musa] Mayer noted in her statement on Thursday that her father’s family members were Jewish immigrants who fled Ukraine to escape persecution and that he “understood what hatred was.” “This should be a time of reckoning, of dialogue,” she wrote. “These paintings meet the moment we are in today. The danger is not in looking at Philip Guston’s work, but in looking away.”...Yes, it all comes full circle — the protests... the hated President...
Guston, who died in 1980, at 66, was a leading Abstract Expressionist until he made an artistic about-face during the Vietnam War, influenced by civil unrest and social dissent. Calling American abstract art “a lie” and “a sham,” he pivoted to making paintings in a dark, figurative style, including satirical drawings of Richard Nixon....
The danger is... in looking away!
Posts
79 comments:
If you lived in a blue state, it would be fun to hang that in your house.
And tell people the title was “trick or treat”.
Just to see who can walk out the open door of their prison.
So, one post with a picture of men covered up too much, and one post with a picture of men not covered up enough.
Nixon was easy. Agnew and Mitchell, not so much. He had a gift.
I recognized them immediately, and he doesn't have to explain what he thought of them.
Unless, of course, I completely misunderstand. It doesn't look like a celebration of leisure among the ruling classes to me.
They are all insane.
There is no logic, or sense, anywhere these people control.
The lot of them need to go.
And the institutions they control need to go with them.
They are just debris, really. Dangerous unsightly wreckage that threatens to injure and infect, and attracts vermin besides.
But where is that whirlwind that will blow them away?
Agnew's attire makes him suspect as a founding member of our Hawaiian shirt clad "boogaloo boys."
It's as least as plausible as the Steele dossier.
[T]he official statement is that the works need to be presented more "clearly" — what? with lots of wall cards saying the artist opposed the KKK?
It probably wouldn't require a 4 year postponement until 2024 to write up those wall cards to explain the artist's intent, so yeah, "fear of violence and destruction" in this time of BLM mania is probably a better explanation.
Which tells you what our artistic elites think of BLM, doesn't it? Mostly what everyone else (who is not part of BLM) thinks of BLM: stupid, impulsive violence. But our artistic elites can't be seen saying that, so they choose an artful dodge instead. Cowards!
They look like Halloween ghosts to me.
Once again, Democrats are censoring art. They want to ban EVERYTHING and remember NOTHING. They are the Fascists they are claiming everyone else are...
As I recall the basic Klan M.O. was to gather in large groups, wearing masks, and terrify and intimidate people with violence and fire.
Hmmm.
I wonder, does the move to groupthink demand all variations of though be eliminated in order to ensure only the right thoughts remain? It would appear so.
Isn't it funny that one of the first things the art loving Left censors is art.
Where's Clyde?
The most 'nuanced' people in the world are nuancing themselves out of existence.
My first thought is ‘another tick on the idiocracy clock’.
Looks like Pinky from PAC Man. Wakka! Wakka!
Something similar happened to the Thomas Hart Benton mural "A Social History of Indiana" which was in a classroom at the University of Indiana. Students complained in 2017. So the provost ended the room's use as a classroom. It now appears that access to the room is available by request only.
The provost's mealy-mouthed statement address the issue is a marvel
...."Understood in the light of all its imagery and its intent, Benton's mural is unquestionably an anti-Klan work....I agree that the proper response to the Benton Murals is education, and I have been the beneficiary of a review of the work of all of these previous efforts. However, most committees have concluded that this education needs to be done in every class taught in Woodburn 100. As a result, well-intentioned efforts to require ameliorating discussion of the murals there have foundered, and ultimately been abandoned, multiple times. Instructors without appropriate academic backgrounds feel unprepared for the discussion that should surround such a sensitive set of issues, and unhappy to be taking class time for discussions that have nothing to do with the subject of the class and everything to do with the room it is in. Students are captive audiences in Woodburn 100, and those with repeated classes there resent the repeated discussions related to the classroom art, as opposed to the subject-matter of their classes...[Classroom] Woodburn 100 will convert to other uses beginning in the spring semester 2018."
"As I recall the basic Klan M.O. was to gather in large groups, wearing masks, and terrify and intimidate people with violence and fire.”
Not to mention the summary executions.
The KKK are modern-day boogeymen. The last significant event that could legitimately be blamed on a member of the KKK was Michael Donald's murder in 1981, almost 40 years ago.
Nowadays, fake KKK sightings are far more likely than actual ones. Back in 2013, Oberlin cancelled classes over claims that a KKK member was spotted on campus. Turned out to be a student wearing a blanket. In early 2017, rumors spread around Bowling Green State University of a KKK sighting that turned out to be a sheet covering a piece of lab equipment. Spike Lee's film BlacKkKlansman, while based on a true story, included a totally fabricated bombing plot. In real life, Ron Stallworth spent nine months talking on the phone to various KKK members before the "investigation" was closed.
This guy also depicted...wait for it...cigarette smoking! Maybe they should rewrite history by editing out the cigarettes in the cartoons, as the USPS did on their Robert Johnson stamp.
As a person of sensibilities, I enjoy seeing the content warnings on moving pictures - "nudity, gore, smoking" because then I know I should watch it.
I think our host is correct that the museum fears violence and vandalism more than "misinterpretation." Or maybe I should say I hope that's the case - that it's not just that the museum needs everyone to know how woke it is in the same way a bright teenager uses SAT vocab words in conversation to demonstrate her smarts.
But it would sure be refreshing if the museum could say, flat-out, "Given the situation outside these walls - the demonstrated desire on the part of some to interpret everything from the actually meaningful to the innocuous as fraught with dark messages, and the willingness of those interpreters to act violently and destructively against what they see as problematic - we are postponing this exhibit until cooler heads prevail." (It would be far too much to ask that the museum say, "Given the mobs of ideological purists roaming the streets, we don't want to risk this or the other artworks for which we are responsible by displaying these works where those mobs can see, judge, and burn them. We will exhibit these works when the current moral panic has subsided and we can again trust the denizens of this city to respect art as a vessel for meaning rather than to wish to destroy it as a graven image.")
Apoplexy over poorly drawn pac-man characters. Crazy. All they have to do is eat a banana and they'll have 30 seconds to destroy them before they respawn. Patrons get to destroy and the gallery gets its 'art'back. Win win.
Tits
with power outlets
and male genitalia years before Joe Camel.
Does this count as insect politics?
Apoplexy over poorly drawn pac-man characters. Crazy. All they have to do is eat a banana and they'll have 30 seconds to destroy them before they respawn. Patrons get to destroy and the gallery gets its 'art'back. Win win.
Self defined "hate speech", the heckler's veto, chasing speakers off campus.
I don't see a lot of that on the right. It's been a slow slide down the slippery slope, but the slope tilts left.
Some noticed years ago.
Good to see the ranks are swelling.
I dunno. If those two samples are representative of his work, I'd postpone the retrospective because, as an artist, Guston is "meh."
Doubtful that the painter had significant insights into the klan in the first place.
I swear to God, the people in charge of our institutions all think black people have the mentality and emotional quotient of 6-year olds.
Prudence, yes. Cowardice? I think not. They are being responsible stewards of the art entrusted to them. This only further illustrates the situation we face when those authorities responsible for maintaining a civilized society allow, no indeed foster, the barbarians among us to run wild.
boatbuilder: “As I recall the basic Klan M.O. was to gather in large groups, wearing masks, and terrify and intimidate people with violence and fire. Hmmm.”
The Democratic Party, then and now.
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/10/suicide-of-the-liberals
First Things - Suicide of the Liberals
Gary Saul Morson
Found on Instapundit, and at least partially relevant in this case, but in so many others of course. Its a short description of the pre-revolutionary Russian "intelligentsia", and the intellectual-moral atmosphere of the Russian elite of the day. The purpose is to draw parallels to their modern American equivalents, but the author does not do so explicitly. It is enough to describe what we already find so familiar in the modern context. The sources are, many of them, familiar - Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Bulgakov - but who has read Struve or Geifman? I did not put this all together, but now that its here I can't quibble.
"What is this strange political hypnosis? Vorotyntsev gives ground and holds his peace, “not because he felt he was wrong, but out of fear of saying something reactionary,” a word Solzhenitsyn italicizes to suggest that, in other cultures and periods, a different term of opprobrium will play the same role. Soldiers who are brave under fire cower before progressive opinion. For a long time, Vorotyntsev cannot bring himself to voice counterarguments, “and he despised himself for it. . . . It was a contagious disease—there was no resisting it if you came too close.”
Since Obama, Biden, and Bill Clinton all Eulogized ex KKK leader Senator Robert Byrd, can we cancel THEM????
agnew took some money from dairy producers, mitchell ran a full surveillance shop 'super easy, barely an inconvenience' when you consider holder (steadman) and lynch,
It's extortion by people who are willing to commit violence but too stupid to deal with nuances like this: The people you are condemning actually saw the world the same way you do.
Whatever you call it, it's an offense to the First Amendment and a prima facie indictment of public education in the US.
Our new Jacobins are ignoramuses. Their targets are pussies who scurry away from difficulty instead of confronting it head-on.
No wonder people are buying so many guns,
"And Mark Godfrey, a curator at Tate Modern in London who co-organized the exhibition, posted a searing statement on Instagram saying that the decision was “extremely patronizing” to audiences because it assumes that they are not able to understand and appreciate the nuance of Guston’s works."
Black lives seem to be destroying stuff lately without regard to nuance.
Oh for the sweet unambiguous days of “Piss Christ.” But perhaps in place of the Guston exhibit they can display satiric images of the Prophet.
If Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem were alive today he would have painted "It's Raining Klansmen."
Back to Gustin, anyone?: I remember the last time NY’s MoMA had some kind of retrospective on his late work, they said the art world thought it was so embarrassingly bad when it was first shown. But now we see he was part of the hippie movement, inspired by R. Crumb’s comics. Comparisons between the two artists were shown side by side.
These museum managers have a similar point of view as Freeman Hunt.
They think there will be some line they can draw that will hold the destruction of Leftist Collectivists seeming power from destroying what they want preserved.
Let's all yell "Wheeeee" as we slide down the slippery slope.
I LOVE Philip Gutson's paintings. I just bought the mammoth PHILIP GUSTON: A LIFE IN PAINTING by Robert Storr, a huge and heavy tome that provides in one place probably the highest number (though not all, by any means) of Guston's creative output to be found in a single volume. He started as a figurative painter, moved into his own version of abstraction, then moved back to cartoon-influenced figuration in the last decade of his life (1970-1980). Initial critical reaction to Guston's new work was mostly and harshly critical, reportedly even costing him a few friends. He persisted, and worked in that idiom to the end of his life.
Funny, all I see are white canvas covers over Monet's haystacks, each numbered with a Roman numeral II. Quelle Horreur!...Monsieur Guston has difficulty in coloring between the lines!
Unperson his work!
Nuance for me, but not for thee!
hawkeyedjb said...
I swear to God, the people in charge of our institutions all think black people have the mentality and emotional quotient of 6-year olds.
They don't just vote for the people in charge of these institutions, but will violently defend them.
So.....are they wrong?
Our latter-day Jacobins are driving toward a Year Zero, in which All That Came Before must be totally destroyed, so their new world can arise Phoenix-like from the ashes, with everything precisely as they wish it were.
Yes, the destruction is easy and the rebuilding unlikely. That's why it's necessary that these Jacobins have absolute power over all, as only then can they create and maintain their Brave New World against the ever-present Enemies of the People, who might destroy it (or at least meekly object).
As always, utopians promise utopia yet invariably deliver the opposite. In the meantime, perhaps art museums will either go full-Disney (nothing that offends anyone, anytime, for any reason). Or they can offer their collections for viewing only as digital copies.
Onsite-only viewing, and/or behind a paywall, as they'll still need revenue. Or, perhaps free with minimum gift-store purchase. Reduced rates for Oppressed Class members, of course, per approved Privilege Stack.
In order to justify their embrace of the insanely radical and racist Democrat Party, liberals have to believe that there are Klansmen and Bugaloo Boys terrifying women and minorities on an almost daily basis.
Guess what group of Americans killed far more Blacks than the KKK.
Speaking of the Heg and Forward! statues, have they been returned to their bases?
If not, why not?
"black people"
I doubt they fear destruction by "black people" as such; the destroyers are as likely to be pasty-hued, or even moreso.
The First Things article that Buwaya links to is apt, especially in its closing line:
"What meets no resistance does not stop."
new Puritans
Maybe he just painted things that he saw...things that actually existed in the world.
There was a time, not so long ago, when Democrats in the south and midwest enslaved and lynched black people while wearing white robes with hoods.
I think this should never be forgotten.
“postponing the exhibition until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted.”...
Did this person just call black people stupid? We can’t show art because some people don’t understand it?
hawkeyedjb said... [hush][hide comment]
I swear to God, the people in charge of our institutions all think black people have the mentality and emotional quotient of 6-year olds.
Exactly ! They are useful as looters, though. The white Antifa break windows and let the black cannon fodder loot.
"Suicide of the Liberals" is worth reading for the similarities.
I searched for images of this guy's "works". I say, hang 'em on the wall and let BLM and AntifA trash 'em. They're just garbage already.
These paintings are obviously anti Klan memes. They were painted to slip past the Woodrow Wilson era Strong Democrat segregationist terror unit. Anyone who says they are pro Klan is a liar.
How about an explanation of the capirote that is used in Spain during Easter.
I think this is the most-posted youtube link from myself, and appropriate here.
Nuance is the hallmark of white supremacy, doncha know?
I catch the symbolism of Nixon and Mitchell, but I don't see what he's driving at with Agnew. Are those squiggles at the bottom of Agnew's portrait derivative of Steinberg and meant to indicate the interior labyrinth of the modality of Agnew's thought. Are the golf clubs presented as the modern equivalent of the fasces carried by the lictors in ancient Rome? What are those underwater goggles in the distance? Are they the eyes of God prepped to look under the surface of the Bay of Biscayne where Nixon discharges his sewage.....There's no doubt that this is great art, and it's a pity the world is deprived of the chance to contemplate it's meaning and beauty. It's only by contemplating the ugliness of Republicans that people can embrace their full humanity.
Gee, the NYT's shorts have ridden up. I am sooooooooooooooooo not bummed.
THere's a peanuts cartoon show "charlie brown's Halloween" where Charlie Brown's friend Pig Pen goes trick-or-treating as a ghost. His costume his nothing more than a white sheet with holes in it. Today, it would be banned as showing Pig Pen as a KKK member. Its insane, but that's what happens when you have a culture/media dominated by old left/liberal boomers.
Guston's paintings look like Crap. So cancel him.
The big problem with the KKK is that they were all Democrats.
If they had been republicans they would not be erased. They would be highlighted.
It’s probably a reasonable fear that wannabe Klansmen might walk into that gallery, see that painting and think “Cool! That’s what I wannabe!” Right? It looks like a regular recruiting poster! Or are we really just waiting for the millennials to grow up? Because that’s gonna be a long wait.
It’s certainly possible to be so stupid that you assume that everyone else is stupid. Indeed, it’s Progdom’s default setting.
Totalitarians, whether of the Nazi, Bolshie, or BLM stripe, don't do nuance.
There is no logic, or sense, anywhere these people control.
Twilight faith. Pro-Choice quasi-religion. Mortal goddesses, and gods, too. Everyone has a right to define reality in their own image.
Idiot leftists mindlessly tearing down Hans Christian Heg.
or
How the left pushed Ann out.
Leave Casper alone!
I think what would happen is that the affluent ticket holders wishing to view the exhibition would be attacked, harrassed, and assaulted at the museum entrance. The woke mob would never need to see the paintings to be enraged, just like they don't need to have rational reasons for anything else they do. Antifa is about destroying the social order and rich and the symbolism of the KKK in a painting works nicely. It is just like calling Trump a Nazi or white supremacist because some white nationalists voted for him.
Would art loving "liberals" even want to go through that kind of mob to see an art exhibition? No, they are not courageous enough to fight back even when their own freedom is at stake. Or at least not yet.
@Rob:
Oh for the sweet unambiguous days of “Piss Christ.” But perhaps in place of the Guston exhibit they can display satiric images of the Prophet.
I take your point, but it's always worth pointing out that Immersion (Piss Christ) was (a) only controversial because of the word "piss" (b) not anti-religious or blasphemous but rather a critique of the degradation of religion (c) an incredibly beautiful and haunting photograph of an otherwise cheap, plastic crucifix.
wendybar said...
Once again, Democrats are censoring art. They want to ban EVERYTHING and remember NOTHING. They are the Fascists they are claiming everyone else are..."
Interesting tidbit: in a first season episode of 'Homicide: Life on the Street,' the detectives were talking about whether Spiro Agnew's bust should be removed from display because of his disgraceful exit from office. Seems like this sort of thing has been going on for a long while, just not as out in the open.
I looked Philip Guston up in Wikipedia. Thoughts:
1) He’d been dead 40 years. I doubt he cares very much what museum curators think of him and his work.
2) His real name was not Guston; his name at birth was Goldstein. The chances that he was sympathetic to the KKK is so close to zero it makes no difference.
3) The stupid and ahistorical run deep in modern leftists.
Where was Bebe Rebozo?
"I take your point, but it's always worth pointing out that Immersion (Piss Christ) was (a) only controversial because of the word "piss" (b) not anti-religious or blasphemous but rather a critique of the degradation of religion (c) an incredibly beautiful and haunting photograph of an otherwise cheap, plastic crucifix."
ABSOLUTELY. If the word "piss" had never been associated with that beautiful image, and if Andres Serrano had never made public the bodily fluid in which he immersed the plastic crucifix--only one of several plastic figurines he photographed immersed in urine--all those condemning the photo would be praising it as a powerfully beautiful image of the crucified Christ...which it is. If I were inclined to want to display images of Christ in my environment, that would be the image I would choose, as it is the most compelling and mysterious image of the crucifixion that has ever been created.
They should replace the offensive images with R.Crumb's masterpiece:
http://heretical.com/miscella/rcnoa.html
The big problem with the KKK is that they were all Democrats.
Yes, destroying statues, art, books, history, is a cleanup operation under cover of protests.
I, as a somewhat lapsed Roman Catholic, failed to burn down any museums over Piss Christ.
Is it too much to ask the woke faithful to reciprocate for all other artistic endeavors?
It wasn't the Klan; it is the family of Casper the Ghost.
My son disagrees- but the painting in the post reminded me of Pac-Man ghosts. Are Pac-Man ghosts reminiscent of KKK?
Post a Comment