Pictures and the Past: Media, Memory, and the Specter of Fascism in Postmodern Art 0226833070, 9780226833071

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Beyond Fascinating
1. Sarah Charlesworth at the End of Modern History
2. Memory Traces in the Work of Jack Goldstein
3. Troy Brauntuch and the Figuring of “Distance”
4. Robert Longo in the Shadow of Empire
5. Gretchen Bender’s Mnemonic Theater
Epilogue: Fascinating Again
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Pictures and the Past

PICTURES AND THE PAST

Media, Memory, and the Specter of Fascism in Postmodern Art

Alexander Bigman

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2024 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2024 Printed in the United States of America 33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24  1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83307-1 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-83308-8 (e-book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226833088.001.0001 This publication was made possible by the support of a grant from the New Foundation for Art History Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bigman, Alexander, author. Title: Pictures and the past : media, memory, and the specter of fascism in postmodern art / Alexander Bigman. Other titles: Media, memory, and the specter of fascism in postmodern art Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023048021 | ISBN 9780226833071 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226833088 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Charlesworth, Sarah, 1947–2013. | Goldstein, Jack, 1945–2003. | Longo, Robert. | Brauntuch, Troy, 1954– | Bender, Gretchen, 1951–2004. | Pictures Generation (Group of artists) | Art, American—20th century. | Fascism in art. | Art and society—United States. | Art and popular culture—United States. | BISAC: ART / History / Contemporary (1945–) | ART / Criticism & Theory Classification: LCC N6512.5.P53 B54 2024 | DDC 709.7309/04—dc23/eng/20231117 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023048021 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Natasha

Contents

List of Illustrations ix Introduction: Beyond Fascinating 1 1

Sarah Charlesworth at the End of Modern History 29

2

Memory Traces in the Work of Jack Goldstein 57

3

Troy Brauntuch and the Figuring of “Distance” 83

4

Robert Longo in the Shadow of Empire 113

5

Gretchen Bender’s Mnemonic Theater 143 Epilogue: Fascinating Again 167 Acknowledgments 181 Notes 185 Index 231

Illustrations

Figures Fig. 0.1

Art Spiegelman, cover of RAW magazine, volume 1, number 1, 1980 2

Fig. 0.2

Joy Division, An Ideal for Living, 1978 9

Fig. 0.3

Eddie Chambers, Destruction of the National Front, 1979–80 11

Fig. 0.4

Leon Golub, Interrogation II, 1981 12

Fig. 0.5

Google Books Ngram Viewer graph plotting frequency of the terms “fascism” and “fascist,” 1920–2019 13

Fig. 0.6

Robert Morris, poster for Robert Morris: Labyrinths—Voice—Blind Time, 1974 14

Fig. 0.7

Frank Stella, Die Fahne hoch!, 1959 16

Fig. 0.8

Atelier Populaire, Untitled [May 1968. Hitler tenant à la main le masque de De Gaulle], 1968 22

Fig. 1.1

Installation view of Sarah Charlesworth, Stills, 1980 30

Fig. 1.2

Sarah Charlesworth, Unidentified Man, Unidentified Location, 1980 31

Fig. 1.3

Sarah Charlesworth, Herald Tribune, September 1977, 1977 32

Fig. 1.4

Detail of Sarah Charlesworth, April 21, 1978, 1978 33

Fig. 1.5

Clipping of “The Toll in Israel: 16 Are Killed and 70 Wounded,” New York Post, May 15, 1974 38

Fig. 1.6

Detail of Sarah Charlesworth, April 21, 1978, 1978 43

Fig. 1.7

Sarah Charlesworth, Fourteen Days, 1977 46

Fig. 1.8

Temporal and perspective keys for Sarah Charlesworth, Fourteen Days, 1977 46

Fig. 1.9

Detail of Sarah Charlesworth, April 20, 1978, 1978 48

Fig. 1.10 Sarah Charlesworth, Unidentified Woman, Hotel Corona de Aragon, Madrid, 1980 51 Fig. 1.11

Clipping of “Nel Vuoto: Piu’ di Ottanta Morti,” Gente, 1979 52

Fig. 1.12 Sarah Charlesworth, Unidentified Woman, Genesee Hotel, 1980 53 Fig. 2.1

Still from Jack Goldstein, The Jump, 1978 58

Fig. 2.2

Still from Jack Goldstein, The Jump, 1978 58

Fig. 2.3

Jack Goldstein, The Pull, 1976 60

Fig. 2.4

Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1980 61

Fig. 2.5

Detail of Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1980 61

Fig. 2.6

Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1981 62

Fig. 2.7

Jack Goldstein, Two Fencers, 1977 64

Fig. 2.8

Still from Jack Goldstein, A Ballet Shoe, 1975 70

Fig. 2.9

Still from Jack Goldstein, Shane, 1975 71

Fig. 2.10 Garrard Martin, cover of ZG, number 2 (“Future Dread”), 1981 75 Fig. 2.11 James Welling, Jack Goldstein’s 11th Street Studio Wall, New York, NY, February 1978, 1978 78 Fig. 2.12 James Welling, Jack Goldstein’s Studio Wall in the Pacific Building, 506 Santa Monica Boulevard, Santa Monica, CA, July 1978, 1978 78 Fig. 3.1

Troy Brauntuch, Untitled (Sculptor with Figures), 1981 85

Fig. 3.2

Troy Brauntuch, Untitled (White Head), 1981 86

Fig. 3.3

Troy Brauntuch, Untitled (Black Head), 1981 87

Fig. 3.4

Troy Brauntuch, Untitled (Statue), 1981 88

Fig. 3.5

Troy Brauntuch, White Statue, 1976 92

Fig. 3.6

Troy Brauntuch, Untitled (Rally), 1980 95

Fig. 3.7

Berlin, Kroll Oper. Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler während seiner Rede vor dem Reichstag zur Kriegserklärung an die Vereinigten Staaten 95

Fig. 3.8

Troy Brauntuch, Thorak Studio, 1980 99

Fig. 3.9

Josef Wackerle, Rossebändiger-Skulptur, 1938 101

Fig. 3.10 Michael Lantz, Man Controlling Trade, 1942 101 Fig. 3.11

Louis Asscher, A Group of Children Sitting in Front of a Barracks, undated 103

Fig. 3.12 The Big News (March 7, 1972) 109 Fig. 3.13 The Big News (November 30, 1972) 110 Fig. 4.1

Robert Longo, Sword of the Pig, 1983 114

Fig. 4.2

Robert Longo, American Soldier, 1977 116

Fig. 4.3

Robert Longo, The Fall, 1979 117

Fig. 4.4

Robert Longo, Untitled (Eric), from Men in the Cities, 1979–83 118

Fig. 4.5

Robert Longo, National Trust, 1981 119

Fig. 4.6

Installation view of Robert Longo, Men in the Cities, 1981 122

Fig. 4.7

Robert Longo, Pictures for Music, 1979 126

Fig. 4.8

Robert Longo, Untitled (Drawing for Glenn Branca Album Cover), 1981 128

Fig. 4.9

Robert Longo, Surrender, 1979 130

Fig. 4.10 Robert Longo, Empire, 1981 131 Fig. 4.11 Page from Robert Longo and Ed Bowes, Empire screenplay, 1982 135 Fig. 4.12 Page from Robert Longo and Ed Bowes, Empire screenplay, 1982 136 Fig. 4.13 Page from Robert Longo and Ed Bowes, Empire screenplay, 1982 137 x

Illustrations

Fig. 4.14 Page from Robert Longo and Ed Bowes, Empire screenplay, 1982 138 Fig. 5.1

Gretchen Bender, Total Recall, 1987 144

Fig. 5.2

Gretchen Bender, Untitled (The Pleasure Is Back), 1982 150

Fig. 5.3

Gretchen Bender, Gargan I, 1981 152

Fig. 5.4

Gretchen Bender, Autopsy, 1983 153

Fig. 5.5

Nürnberg. Reichsparteitag der NSDAP, “Reichsparteitag der Ehre,” “Lichtdom” mit Flak-Scheinwerfern über Zeppelinfeld und Zeppelinhaupttribüne 159

Fig. 5.6

Gretchen Bender, Dumping Core, 1984 160

Fig. 5.7

Sony Betamax SL-5800 advertisement, 1980 164

Fig. 6.1

Troy Brauntuch, detail of A Strange New Beauty (White Cases), 2019 171

Fig. 6.2

Troy Brauntuch, Selected Shoes, 2019 174

Fig. 6.3

Robert Longo, Untitled (Defaced Jewish Cemetery; Strasbourg, France; December 14, 2018), 2019 176

Fig. 6.4

Robert Longo, Untitled (Nathan Bedford Forrest Statue Removal; Memphis, 2017), 2018. 177

Fig. 6.5

Robert Longo, Insurrection at the US Capitol; January 6th, 2021; Based on a Photograph by Mark Peterson, 2021 178

Plates (following p. 116) Plate 1

General Idea, FILE Megazine, volume 4, number 2 (“Special Transgressions Issue”), 1979

Plate 2

Andy Warhol, Little Race Riot, 1964

Plate 3

Still from Jack Goldstein, The Jump, 1978

Plate 4

Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1980

Plate 5

Jack Goldstein, The Chair, 1975

Plate 6

Troy Brauntuch, 1 2 3 (Opera, Staircase, Tank), 1977

Plate 7

Troy Brauntuch, Untitled (Mercedes), 1978

Plate 8

Troy Brauntuch, Untitled, 1980

Plate 9

Troy Brauntuch, Three Effects, 1977

Plate 10 Installation view of Robert Longo, Figures: Forms and Expressions, 1981 Plate 11

Robert Longo, Sound Distance of a Good Man, 1978

Plate 12

Robert Longo, Culture Culture, 1982–83

Plate 13

Robert Longo, Tongue to the Heart, 1984

Plate 14

Gretchen Bender, Dumping Core, 1984

Plate 15

Gretchen Bender, Gremlins, 1984

Plate 16

Gretchen Bender, Untitled (Landscape, Computer Graphics, Death Squad), 1987

Illustrations

xi

Introduction

BEYOND FASCINATING

T

oward the end of the 1970s, several groups of recent art school graduates converged on New York City and began to push the established traditions of minimalism and conceptual art in newly figural directions. In the course of this retooling, one particular motif emerged repeatedly: the image of the falling body. This appeared with dazzling luminosity in Jack Goldstein’s 1978 film The Jump, an animated loop in which the shimmering silhouettes of four high divers sequentially spring, somersault, and disappear into an inky void. It proved equally central to the early work of Robert Longo, who had exhibited alongside Goldstein (as well as Troy Brauntuch, Sherrie Levine, and Phillip Smith) at Douglas Crimp’s storied Pictures exhibition, held at Artists Space in the fall of 1977. His Men in the Cities drawings (1979–83) rendered the conceit in the shape of so many flailing, formally attired urbanites. These in turn materialized, airborne, in a music video that Longo and the artist Gretchen Bender produced for the 1986 New Order track “Bizarre Love Triangle,” a song with a relevant refrain: “every time I see you falling / I get down on my knees and pray.” Sarah Charlesworth’s Stills (1980), for their part, greatly enlarged seven newspaper photographs depicting people plummeting from buildings. That same year, the graphic artist Art Spiegelman illustrated the inaugural cover of Raw magazine, sardonically subtitled “the graphix magazine of postponed suicides,” with a similar image (fig. 0.1). This one is set inside the black-andwhite apartment of an imagined reader. Framed within the window beside him, a wild-eyed and brightly colored counterpart tumbles through the air.1 The figure of the falling body is hardly a novel one within the history of European art, of course. One thinks of Pieter Bruegel’s famous illustration

Fig. 0.1 Art Spiegelman, cover of RAW magazine, volume 1, number 1, 1980. Copyright © Art

Spiegelman, used by permission of the Wylie Agency LLC.

of the Icarus myth from 1560, or any number of early modern religious paintings—Dieric Bouts’s The Fall of the Damned (1460) would be exemplary, as would Peter Paul Rubens’s iteration of the theme from 1620—depicting the descent of doomed souls on Judgment Day. Andy Warhol had more recently treated the subject in his Death and Disaster silkscreen paintings from the early 1960s, one of which Charlesworth reproduced as part of her Stills. So had Alfred Hitchcock in his 1958 thriller Vertigo: Saul Bass’s iconic poster for the film featured two silhouetted bodies, spiraling into an orange expanse. Falling is a physical event, but as its enduring centrality to myth and other forms of storytelling suggests, it is also an embodied metaphor connoting failure and fallibility (no etymological relation); death and sacrifice (consider the innumerable monuments to “fallen soldiers”); sin and, in the Christian mythos, the possibility of redemption too. The aforementioned works by Goldstein, Longo, Bender, Charlesworth, and Spiegelman cannot help but mobilize these deeply ingrained associations in unpredictable combination, discouraging art historical efforts that would attribute to them any one specific meaning. Indeed, there is no shortage of ways that the motif might have resonated at the conclusion of the 1970s, a decade beset by spectacular failures, crises, and scenes of violence (Vietnam, Watergate, recession, terrorism, Three Mile Island . . .) in the United States and other Western democracies. It is tempting to conclude that the resurgent trope of the falling figure functioned simply as an emblem of the times, if not the alienation and disorientation endemic to modernity writ large. Such generalizations founder, however, on the fact that so many of the artists who employed the motif of the falling body around 1980 did so in close connection with a particular set of historical referents that might not be immediately apparent from the works themselves: namely the rise of Nazism, the Second World War, and the atrocities that attended these cataclysmic events. Goldstein, the son of a Jewish World War II veteran, characterized The Jump as a work about “control and manipulation,” inspired by the seductiveness of Nazi pageantry and spectacle.2 Longo pointedly described the figures in his Men in the Cities drawings as “doomed white people” and likened them to the ecstatic partisans in Triumph of the Will (1935), Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous documentary tribute to the Nazi regime.3 Several of Charlesworth’s Stills likewise alluded to the past and present threat of fascism. One of them, based on a source photograph from 1942, features a window-mounted poster exhorting passersby to support the then-ongoing war effort against Hitler; another, illustrating an incident from 1979, depicts a burning hotel in Zaragoza, Spain, that was believed to have been set ablaze as part of an antifascist assassination plot. The pattern persists even outside the relatively hermetic art world that Goldstein, Longo, and Charlesworth inhabited: Spiegelman produced his Raw magazine cover not long after beginning work on Maus, his major opus—still a target of the culture wars today—centered on his father’s experiences as a Holocaust Introduction

3

survivor.4 Although by no means uniform in strategy, these works clearly spiral around a common subject. What are we to make of their apparently consistent iconography? This book takes up that question as part of a larger inquiry into the work that Charlesworth, Goldstein, Brauntuch, Longo, and Bender—key members of what has recently been dubbed the “Pictures Generation,” after Crimp’s exhibition—produced around 1980, much of it fixed on Europe’s fascist past.5 Brauntuch took a particularly direct approach to this domain: between 1977 and 1983, the artist focused almost exclusively on photographs of the Third Reich that he discovered in contemporary books and magazines. These he would reprint, without caption, on fields of saturated color. In 1980 he began transforming them into large and ghostly drawings, executed in white crayon on black supports. Bender’s works of “electronic theater”— immersive video installations comprising upward of a dozen monitors—were more wide ranging and associative in their relation to the topic. Examples like Dumping Core (1984) and Total Recall (1987) intertwined footage of statesponsored violence in Central America with army recruitment commercials, state-of-the-art computer graphics, and recorded corporate logo animations to evoke the militarized theatrics of authoritarian regimes. Notwithstanding her emphasis on contemporary technologies and geopolitics, however, Bender’s view remained, like Brauntuch’s, a largely retrospective one. In the newly digitized spectacles of corporate America, she avowedly discerned and sought to amplify an echo of the Nazi Party’s Nuremburg rallies, with their visually arresting colonnades of spotlight beams (see ahead to fig. 5.5).6 Brauntuch and Bender’s projects aligned with those of Goldstein, Longo, and Charlesworth not only in their latent political allusions but also in the emphases they placed on media and mediation. As Crimp observed in a 1979 revision of his essay for the Pictures catalogue, a defining characteristic of the exhibited work had been its tendency toward palimpsestic layering: taking images and image types from films, books, newspapers, magazines, and the like, and treating them as a kind of ground to be reframed, effaced, or built on. “Underneath each picture,” he wrote, “there is always another picture,” setting imagined points of authorial origin and pictorial reference into an infinite recession.7 Brauntuch encouraged such a distanced perspective by fragmenting his source photographs or plunging them into darkness, often to the cusp of illegibility. Bender achieved a similarly fugitive effect through multiplication. Aggregating video channels and television monitors in increasingly complex configurations, she intentionally pushed her viewers’ attentional capacities to a point of “overload” and (so the artist hoped) beyond.8 Conjuring the familiar icon of the falling body was another way in which this group of artists framed and mediated its source material. And, as its recurrence indicates, the device was a privileged one. In this culturally loaded and phenomenologically resonant motif, the Pictures cohort found an emblem that captured something central to its emerging project, 4

Introduction

something that the existing critical and scholarly literature has only glancingly addressed. Several of the group’s earliest and most sophisticated interpreters, among them Crimp himself and his associate Craig Owens, characterized its work as deconstructive in the sense elaborated by philosophers and literary theorists like Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man: attuned to the constructed nature of meaning—its contingence on systemic and historically variable networks of interrelated signs, operating independently of authorial intentionality—and inclined to subvert received clichés by appropriating, restaging, or recombining imagery selected from the ever-expanding storehouses of mass media.9 Might the artists’ dual gravitation toward falling figures and authoritarian politics have borne some relation to this modus operandi, with its implicit critique of authorship and ideological convention? Though neither Crimp nor Owens made the connection, Derrida in fact evoked the Christian Fall of Man throughout his 1967 book Of Grammatology. This mythic framework, he argued, tacitly underlay the entire “ontotheological” edifice of Enlightenment-era metaphysics, a system premised on dividing intellectual or experiential presence from the degraded (fallen) systems of writing or depiction used to represent it in absentia. “The sign is always a sign of the Fall,” he wrote. “Absence always relates to distancing from God,” the ultimate author and authority.10 The embrace of the falling figure by Goldstein, Longo, and Charlesworth might accordingly be understood as yet another act of subversive appropriation: the transformation of a religious symbol into an icon of skepticism toward onto-theological dogmas and Romantic efforts to recapture primal truths—absolutes imagined to exist beyond the politicized and historically contingent realm of representation. Poststructuralist readings like these are in many ways insightful; they inform the arguments I advance throughout this book. They also possess some pitfalls, however. For one, they have tended to cast the Pictures artists’ stated concerns with fascism as a coded critique of representation writ large—what Owens, glossing the positions of Michel Foucault and Louis Marin in an essay from 1982, identified as “the founding act of power in our culture.”11 He could have cited Roland Barthes as well. “To speak, and, with even greater reason, to utter a discourse is not, as is too often repeated, to communicate; it is to subjugate,” the semiotician asserted in a lecture from 1977, a translation of which appeared alongside Crimp’s revised “Pictures” essay in the spring 1979 issue of October magazine. Hence, language itself—or, more broadly, the power-laden representational systems through which reality is divided up and made intelligible—was “neither reactionary nor progressive” but “quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.”12 Such avenues of interpretation aptly register the political stakes of the Pictures group’s appropriation tactics, but in their critical orientation toward the dynamics of “representation” in general, they Introduction

5

overlook something important about this cohort’s sustained and particular point of historical focus: namely its complex positioning in time. Interwar fascism was, in one sense, an episode from the past, located just beyond the lived experiences that bound the Pictures artists into what might credibly be classed as a “generational” group. By the end of the tumultuous 1970s, however, it was one whose relationship to the present had come to appear in many ways unresolved—complicated not only by its endless representation in the world of popular entertainment, but also by the rise of novel right-wing groups with roots in fascist ideology, and a counterpoised questioning of postwar victory narratives by activists and cultural producers on the left. This sense of chronological irresolution, I propose, is one thing that the work of Charlesworth, Goldstein, Brauntuch, Longo, and Bender set out to address. And it is something that the motif of the falling body was deeply primed to capture. To fall, in Western culture, may imply departure from a realm of divinity and self-present truths. But it is also true, on a more immediately experiential level, that to fall (or, to use the word’s Latinate correlate, to lapse) is to enter a state of momentarily dilated or otherwise altered temporality, suspended between past and future, that the continuous flow of life does not ordinarily occasion. (To lapse can mean to revert; a related term, “elapse,” foregrounds these chronological implications.) The two connotations, one cultural and the other experiential, are not unrelated: the Fall of Man, pointing at once backward toward original sin and forward toward the Last Judgment, retains the experience of falling’s complex temporality, even as in Christian doctrine the “temporal” itself becomes a metonym for the worldly and contingent as opposed to the spiritual and transcendent. The works that I explore in this book pursued an analogous state of being— temporally suspended in both the phenomenal sense and the sense of being worldly, rooted in a political world of man’s making.13 At a time of perceived social crisis and conservative reaction, they thematized the variously mediated processes that enable us to perceive reality as not only chronological but more specifically historical, with all the power dynamics that such worldviews entail. Another way of putting this is to say that they converged on the workings of collective memory, a phenomenon that social theorists were at the same moment beginning to address with newfound zeal. In the decades since, art historians have productively applied the concept of collective memory, understood as something inextricably bound up with identity and thus inherently political, to a wide variety of socially engaged work. Some have focused on the role of art in memorializing or otherwise working through historical traumas like World War II, the Holocaust, the war in Vietnam, and the AIDS crisis.14 Others have extended the field’s focus to include phenomena like critical Black memory and the rise of diasporic consciousness, in which the painful histories and afterlives of slavery loom large.15 The Pictures artists have sometimes been positioned in contradis6

Introduction

tinction to such politically committed projects, their appropriation tactics cast as toothlessly academic if not accommodating of the mass cultural artifacts they mimicked and reframed.16 This book will not entirely rescue the group from such criticisms, but it will complicate some of the assumptions that underlie them, opening up alternative ways to conceptualize the critical currents that subtended this particular movement in postconceptual figuration. The result will be a revised understanding of the Pictures artists’ position within larger cultural histories—histories of postwar art as well as of “postmodernism,” a concept that evolved in tandem with their pioneering work. Influential theorists like Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and Fredric Jameson approached the notion of the postmodern from different perspectives in their writings of the 1970s and 1980s, but each of them understood it to betoken a changed way of relating to the past: skeptical of the Enlightenment tradition’s grand (and Eurocentric) “master narratives,” and unmoored from the edifice of historical thinking that rest on them.17 The contemporaneous work of Charlesworth, Goldstein, Brauntuch, Longo, and Bender attests to an artistic culture more directly and critically engaged with such ideas (even in advance of their articulation by famous philosophers) than is usually assumed. To understand these artists’ interventions, it is necessary to parse the various ways that the specter of fascism manifested in their work from circa 1980. Before I turn to survey the broader cultural fascination with “fascism” that obtained through the 1970s and into the 1980s, forming a crucial background to the Pictures project, I hasten to acknowledge that this term is a notoriously slippery one, commonly wielded as an epithet for all manner of authoritarian or otherwise oppressive institutions, policies, and behaviors. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) could thus be introduced by Michel Foucault as a book whose “strategic adversary” was “not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini—which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively—but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”18 Umberto Eco took such expansive usage to reflect the ideological variegation of fascism itself, a patchwork incoherence that renders the subject impossible to define conclusively.19 Not everyone is willing to accept such indeterminacy, however. The political theorist Roger Griffin, for instance, has argued that fascist ideology can in fact reliably be characterized—and distinguished from other right-wing political phenomena—as a “palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism,” palingenesis meaning “rebirth”: as in, the violent dissolution of an allegedly decadent establishment (usually a democratic one) to create a radically new society in which the national community (usually defined in racial terms) and its ostensibly autochthonous culture, protected by a strong state, may at last flourish.20 A reader may find it helpful to keep Griffin’s definition back Introduction

7

of mind when evaluating the often-freewheeling uses of the term that crop up throughout this book. Ultimately, however, such efforts to demarcate the boundaries of fascism as a political phenomenon or pinpoint the essence of its motivating ideology are beside the point here. This is not a book about fascism per se or even fascist aesthetics, defined as the artistic values and stylistic conventions promoted by fascist regimes. It is rather a book about the collectively mnemonic imagination of fascism, focused on a particularly intense moment in this discursive process spanning the 1970s and 1980s. More to the point, it is about how “fascism”—in quotes—appeared to a particular group of artists during these years, and how that group made use of the concept’s very mutability to explore larger processes at the nexus of contemporary politics and historical perception.

Fascinating Fascism The Pictures artists were hardly the only ones to evoke the specter of fascism when they did. Nor were they alone in highlighting the wide variety of cues with which this increasingly fuzzy signified could be conjured three decades after the Second World War’s conclusion. In 1978, the Toronto-based collective General Idea envisioned the audience for its 1984 Miss General Idea Pageant—a fictive spectacle the group announced thirteen years before that Orwellian date and continuously promoted via FILE Megazine, its selfpublished periodical-cum-work-of-conceptual-art—as a mass of soldiers at a party rally.21 FILE’s fall 1979 special issue, titled “Transgressions,” returned to the theme: its red-and-black cover presented a young man dressed like a member of the Hitler Youth, cheekily holding a tall glass of milk that appears to have deposited a mustache-like stripe on his upper lip (plate 1).22 That same year, Jenny Holzer began circulating her Inflammatory Essays, a series of capitalized proclamations that appeared to evince extremist positions on one side of the political spectrum or the other. “violent over­ throw is appropriate when the situation is intolerable,” declared one; “a charismatic leader is imperative,” insisted another. In Europe, meanwhile, the West German painter Anselm Kiefer exhibited darkly expressionistic, epically scaled canvases exploring German cultural identity and its complicity with Nazism. The British duo Gilbert and George, for their part, portrayed London skinheads alongside martial civic statuary in their controversial 1980 Pictures, a series of billboard-scale photomurals that resembled stained-glass windows or heraldic emblems.23 These examples from the visual arts—especially the ones from Anglophone contexts—invite comparison with the contemporaneous phenomenon of punk, a mostly White subculture that made the détournement of fascist imagery a central aspect of its antagonistic program. The Sex Pistols notoriously defied the patriotic pageantry of Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee by donning swastikas and rhyming “god save the queen” with “the fas8

Introduction

cist regime.”24 ( Jamie Reid’s 1977 cover design for the single, originally titled “No Future,” defaced the regent’s visage with a graphic gag and blindfold. In an alternative version, he replaced her eyes with swastikas and pierced her mouth with a safety pin.) The Manchester-based Joy Division, a band that Longo has described himself as being “madly affected by” around the time he produced Men in the Cities, named themselves after a literary reference to Nazi sex slavery and styled their visual material in a darkly classicizing manner, even presenting a Hitler Youth drummer on the cover of their 1978 EP An Ideal for Living (fig. 0.2).25 (Following the death of singer Ian Curtis in 1980, the group’s surviving members would form New Order, another name

Fig. 0.2 Joy Division, An Ideal for Living, 1978. Enigma Records PSS 139, 7″ vinyl EP. Copyright © Joy Division. Photograph courtesy of Omega Auctions.

Introduction

9

replete with fascist connotations.) Across the Atlantic, the Ohio-based Devo adopted a cryptically eugenicist (or anti-eugenicist) moniker, a contraction of “devolution,” and performed songs like “Triumph of the Will” (1979) in identical costumes reminiscent of janitorial uniforms or hazmat decontamination suits. The No Wave composer Glenn Branca, with whom Longo collaborated on cover art in the early 1980s, announced his 1982 performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with a “spiral score” for Symphony No. 3 (Gloria) that bore a swastika at its center.26 One reviewer described the larger No Wave movement, which included musicians like Branca as well as several underground filmmakers with a predilection for narratives involving terrorism and sadomasochism, set against the gritty backdrop of downtown New York City, as “a ‘counterpoint’ culture, ‘contrechamp’ to the hippies so soft, so loving, so giving, so grooving.” It all seemed, in a phrase, the “dark vomit” of the utopian cultural interlude that came before it.27 As many critics at the time were quick to observe, such countercultural provocations coincided with a very real resurgence of far-right ideology and activism in response to changing ethnic demographics and expanding civil rights for non-White groups.28 Indeed, in the run-up to the United Kingdom’s 1979 elections, the neofascist National Front momentarily seemed poised to become the nation’s third-largest political party. Although failing in this respect, it succeeded in pushing Margaret Thatcher’s newly formed Conservative government to the right, auguring a period of heightened racial tension in London, Birmingham, and other deindustrializing urban centers.29 In the United States, these years saw the formation of a militant White Power movement that consisted in large part of Vietnam War veterans shaped by the violence and racial dynamics of that conflict, and convinced that its humiliating outcome had been the result of a “betrayal” by disloyal elites. William Luther Pierce published his galvanizing White nationalist fantasy novel The Turner Diaries in 1978; the White Power movement formally unified following a deadly clash between communist protesters, Klansmen, and Neo-Nazis at an anti-Klan rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1979; and it officially declared war against the United States’ federal government in 1983.30 Under the leadership of Jimmy Carter and especially Ronald Reagan, the latter entity outwardly distanced itself from such domestic insurgents even as it covertly supported right-wing military and paramilitary organizations elsewhere in the hemisphere—a pillar of post-Vietnam foreign policy that Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman decried in 1979 as an “institutionalization of subfascism under US tutelage.”31 In both Britain and the United States, there were artists whose work addressed these political emergencies in direct, unambiguous, and often exhortative terms.32 In 1979, for example, Eddie Chambers began a striking four-panel collage that he called Destruction of the National Front (fig. 0.3). Taking cues from the Weimar-era photomontages of John Heartfield as well as the contemporary agitprop of Britain’s Anti-Nazi League, the work 10

Introduction

Fig. 0.3 Eddie Chambers, Destruction of the National Front, 1979–80. Four screen prints on paper

on card, displayed: 82.7 × 239.2 cm, each frame: 82.7 × 57.2 × 1.8 cm. London, Tate. Copyright © Eddie Chambers. Photo: Tate.

presented a British Union Flag, rearranged to form a swastika, that over the course of the sequence fractures and finally disintegrates beyond recognition.33 That same year, the American artist Leon Golub began painting large portraits of paramilitary commandoes (Mercenaries). These he followed with scenes of gruesome torture (Interrogations), composed on paper using paint that the artist thinned and scraped to produce raw, excoriatedlooking surfaces (fig. 0.4). As Donald Kuspit noted in an article from 1981, Golub’s tableaux evoked the scale and gravitas of abstract expressionism, even as they overturned its tendency toward utopian subjectivism: what influential critics like Clement Greenberg cast as a salutary pursuit of autonomy from political instrumentalization on either side of the ideological spectrum. “The seared, worn, battered look of Golub’s figures reflects their world-historical roles”—and by extension that of art itself—“and not some preferred esthetic, still another vision of art as atemporal or eternal,” Kuspit wrote. Three decades into the Cold War, he concluded, realism remained “the only alternative to helplessness” for politically engaged artists.34 The contemporaneous projects by General Idea, Holzer, Kiefer, Gilbert and George, and the Pictures group, like those of their punk and No Wave counterparts, responded differently to the outrages of their time and the established protocols for representing (or eliding) larger histories of political struggle. To be sure, these projects were by no means interchangeable with one another. Kiefer’s work, for example, engaged a German discourse of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (working through the past) far removed from the triumphalist rhetoric that dominated mainstream discourse about the Second World War in North America and Britain. Still, these artists all distinguished themselves from counterparts like Chambers or Golub in rendering the figure of “fascism” less as an immediate threat and more as an idea: a historical signified, a political concept, and an ideology complete with a Introduction

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Fig. 0.4 Leon Golub, Interrogation II, 1981. Acrylic on canvas, 120 × 168 in. Gift of Society for

Contemporary Art, 1983.264. Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago. Copyright © 2023 The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, New York.

codified set of aesthetic markers.35 In short, they approached their subject from a second-order perspective, treating it as a discursive object—a means of ordering and understanding certain aspects of political reality—as much as a real one (if indeed, their work implicitly asked, such a division could even be retained). In doing so, they joined and intervened within an established discourse, over a decade in the making, that bore only an indirect relationship to the extreme right’s changing political fortunes. A Google Ngram search for the phrases “fascism” and “fascist” shows their relative frequency of English-language usage peaking in 1938 and 1944, plummeting to its nadir in 1958 as the more capacious concept of “totalitarianism” began to displace them, then climbing to a new crest in 1975 before again beginning, this time more gradually, to decline (fig. 0.5).36 (Tellingly, between 1958 and 1975 the graphs diverge to an extent that had not occurred before and would not recur after: these years saw the term “fascist,” prone to looser application, expand in usage more dramatically than its counterpart.) In an article from 1975, Susan Sontag famously took stock of how these 12

Introduction

trends had manifested in the arts. The first years of the 1970s, she observed, had witnessed a striking (and, in her view, disturbing) swell of “fascination” with fascism and its aesthetic trappings—real or imagined—on the part of writers, publishers, filmmakers, and other arbiters of culture.37 She pointed for example to the English translation of Yukio Mishima’s 1968 memoir Sun and Steel, released following the celebrated author and neofascist agitator’s death in 1970. She might also have mentioned Inside the Third Reich (1970), a widely read memoir by Hitler’s repentant former architect and minister of armaments Albert Speer, or Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Thomas Pynchon’s time-bending novel centered on the apocalyptic exploits of a sadomasochistic SS officer.38 Within the domain of cinema, she cited Liliana Cavani’s 1974 film The Night Porter, about a former concentration camp prisoner who forms a sadomasochistic relationship with her erstwhile warden.39 Here, too, her example was only one of many films, both popular and art-house, from the time—among them Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972), and Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien (1974)—that staged Europe’s fascist past (and the erotics of power associated with it) in striking detail.40 Even producers of comparatively abstract art, Sontag observed, had elected to participate in this collective representational project. In 1974, the sculptor Robert Morris announced a pair of exhibitions at Leo Castelli and Sonnabend Galleries with a bare-chested portrait of himself in shackles, aviator sunglasses, and an SS-style helmet (fig. 0.6). In doing so, she wrote, he effectively inducted fascist imagery to “the vast repertory of popular iconography usable for the ironic commentaries of Pop Art.”41 In this newfound predilection for fascistic imagery, Sontag perceived the imprint of an alarming social shift. Its implications, she argued, were particularly legible in the concurrent “rehabilitation” of once-proscribed

Fig. 0.5 Google Books Ngram Viewer graphs plotting frequency of the terms “fascism” and

“fascist” relative to all other terms in English-language publications between 1920 and 2019. Source: Google Books Ngram Viewer, https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fascist %2C+fascism&year_start=1920&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=0.

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Fig. 0.6 Robert Morris, poster for Robert Morris: Labyrinths—Voice—Blind Time, 1974. Offset lithograph, 36.75 × 24 in. New York, Museum of Modern Art. Gift of David Platzker. Copyright © 2024 The Estate of Robert Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image copyright © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

figures like Riefenstahl. A new photobook by the Nazi-era director, called The Last of the Nuba, had received wide release by a major US publisher in 1973; the following year, her filmography became the subject of a tribute by the organizers of the inaugural Telluride Film Festival. Sontag acknowledged that The Last of the Nuba, a quasi-ethnographic study of a Sudanese tribe and its scarification practices, wrestling rituals, and funeral rites, 14

Introduction

might at first appear benign. (At least, one might add, within a context where colonialist primitivism remained a largely unquestioned norm.) But in fact, she argued, at its core it evinced the same “fascist aesthetics” that had characterized the director’s Weimar-era films and subsequent propaganda for the Third Reich. Both entailed a “celebration of the primitive,” a “preoccupation with situations of control,” and a “glamorization of death,” all driven by underlying desires for “the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community.” In Sontag’s view, the market for products like Riefenstahl’s book—along with that for “youth/rock culture, primal therapy, [R. D.] Laing’s antipsychiatry, Third World camp-following, and belief in gurus and the occult”—indicated that “fascist longings” for similar ideals remained alive and well in the postwar America, and not just on the right.42 So did the apparent popularity of bondage-sadomasochism, with its predilection for black leather and other erotic props reminiscent of Nazi regalia, as both a sexual practice and a source of provocative imagery in films like The Night Porter and ephemera like Morris’s exhibition poster. Sontag’s polemic, which effectively reversed the more permissive attitude she had adopted in her 1966 anthology Against Interpretation, has drawn criticism from several angles that I will not rehearse here.43 The correction I wish to make, which impacts the way we view the tactics of the Pictures group, is art historical: namely, that Morris’s gesture was not as unprecedented within the domain of postwar art as Sontag made it out to be. Roy Lichtenstein had depicted hypermasculine comic book heroes that he described as “fascist types” throughout his paintings of the early 1960s.44 Gerhard Richter had painted images based on found photographs that German viewers would have readily identified as belonging or referring to the Nazi era.45 The Italian painter Franco Angeli had even incorporated swastikas and other nationalist power symbols into some of his works from the 1960s and early 1970s, as had American artists—including, significantly, several Black American artists—like the Los Angeles–based sculptor Ed Bereal.46 Little wonder, then, that the Pictures artists wound up converging on the specter of fascism in their own work of the later 1970s. Signifiers of oppression were already a central presence in many of the antecedents they had studied and embraced as models. Morris’s own practice from the 1960s, for instance, belonged to a minimalist movement that was hardly free of fascist references. In 1966, Walter de Maria produced an aluminum sculpture in the shape of a swastika and called it Museum Piece. Prior to that, Frank Stella had titled several of his landmark Black Paintings (1958–60)—monochrome linear abstractions that Longo would later cite as a formal model for his Men in the Cities drawings— with such evocative phrases as Reichstag (1958), Arbeit Macht Frei (1958), and Die Fahne hoch! (1959), this last a reference to the Nazi anthem “The Flag on High” (fig. 0.7). In an unpublished interview, Stella explained that he saw his mural-scale and sometimes flag-like canvases as visual as well as functional Introduction

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Fig. 0.7 Frank Stella, Die Fahne hoch!, 1959. Enamel on canvas, overall 121 ⅝ × 72 ¹³⁄16 in. New

York, Whitney Museum of American Art. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene M. Schwartz and purchase, with funds from the John I. H. Baur Purchase Fund; the Charles and Anita Blatt Fund; Peter M. Brant; B. H. Friedman; the Gilman Foundation, Inc.; Susan Morse Hilles; the Lauder Foundation; F. Inv. N.: 75.22. Copyright © 2023 Frank Stella / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image copyright © Whitney Museum of American Art / Licensed by Scala / Art Resource, New York.

counterparts to “fascist architecture.” Motivated by a desire to exert on his viewers the “kind of control that an architectural situation imposes,” the paintings self-consciously thematized “the fairly straightforward relationship that the artist bears to a kind of totalitarian thing and particularly a kind of totalitarian aesthetics,” predicated on a logic of imposition and control.47 Morris’s 1974 poster, for its part, literalized the similarly carceral or otherwise disciplinary overtones of the exhibition that it advertised. This included drawings of labyrinths, a series of graphite abstractions that the artist produced with his eyes closed, and an audio-based work called Voice (1974), one segment of which featured male and female readers reciting passages on dementia praecox and manic-depressive insanity (what we would today call schizophrenia and bipolar disorder) by the pioneering German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin. In a well-known essay from 1990, the art historian Anna Chave indicted minimalism as a macho “rhetoric of power,” driven by affinities for totalitarian monumentality and an authoritarian “will to control or dominate.”48 The critic Robert Hughes had reached much the same conclusion in The Shock of the New, a televised survey of modern art that British and American broadcasters aired ten years earlier.49 And in fact, Morris himself had circulated similar arguments around the same time, suggesting that he might have intended his 1974 poster as a mea culpa. Writing in 1981, by which point he had largely abandoned the abstract idioms of his earlier work to produce skull-crowned “cenotaphs” and skeletal tableaux evoking nuclear holocaust, Morris attributed an oppressively monumentalizing impulse to minimalism and abstract expressionism alike. “One of the central aspects” of both movements was “the projection of an aura of power and domination over the viewer,” he asserted, suggesting that “what has been most characteristic of American abstraction—its scale, its presence, its undifferentiated ‘all over’ or wholistic, non-decorative, ‘tough’ aspects—reflects either a confidence in or a desire for authoritarian presence.”50 The artist thus took Kuspit’s critique a step further: from his perspective, the adversarial and indeed utopian motivations behind modernist abstraction had become all but imperceptible, rendering its works so many monuments to a culture fundamentally warped by imperial power.51 The sadomasochistic imagery of Morris’s poster might have mirrored the latently authoritarian aesthetics of a work like The Last of the Nuba, then, but these objects were not in fact of the same order. If Riefenstahl’s book evinced the persistence of antimodern desires for community, tradition, and hierarchy that Nazism had weaponized, Morris’s gesture—like punk’s inflammatory rhetoric, the corpus of films that Sontag cited, and indeed Sontag’s essay itself—belonged to a novel, historically informed discourse about this persistence and its enduring capacity for exploitation by antidemocratic forces. It was also a discourse about complicity, directed, in Morris’s case, toward postwar modernist abstraction and how, he believed, its guiding purIntroduction

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suit of autonomy from politics, propaganda, ideology, and kitsch had rendered it a mute accessory to ongoing forms of oppression. Emerging as early as the 1950s, consolidating in the years around 1968, and unfurling through the 1970s, this framework altered standing norms that governed how “fascism” should be spoken of and represented. It did so in sometimes discomfiting ways that challenged established victory narratives and defied overly rigid attempts to distinguish activist commitment from ironic complacency. How does the Pictures group’s embrace of fascist-coded imagery figure into this discursive shift? Crimp’s analyses from the late 1970s suggested that the relationship was at most oblique. Brauntuch’s prints, the critic argued, effectively refused to communicate about the topic they evoked. Conveying only the “opacity” of their appropriated pictures and the “remoteness” of their historical origins, they worked instead to undermine the notion that signs could ever be transparent to their meanings, that the past could ever be made present through representation. “Reproduced in one book after another about the holocaust, already excerpted, enlarged, cropped, the images Brauntuch uses are so opaque and fragmentary as to be utterly mute regarding their supposed subject,” Crimp asserted. The artist’s carefully framed reproductions bespoke a desire “that they disclose their secrets,” but the result was “only to make the pictures all the more picturelike, to fix forever in an elegant object our distance from the history that produced these images.” That “distance,” Crimp concluded, “is all that these pictures signify.”52 Hal Foster, discussing Longo’s work in a 1983 article titled “The Art of Spectacle,” ascribed a greater significance to the artist’s historically evocative imagery, but he ultimately advanced a similar view. Though Longo’s recent performances, sculptures, and multimedia reliefs appeared to ape the awesome pageantry and monumental statuary of Europe’s fascist regimes, Foster proposed, these antiquated allusions primarily served to evince a feeling of historical dislocation in 1980s America. They suited a milieu— perhaps akin to interwar Germany in this respect—where mass-mediated imagery, politicized spectacle, and the temptations of nostalgia seemed to have overtaken “the real” and short-circuited the possibility of representing the nuclearized, computerizing, globalizing, and in many other ways distinctive present in its own terms.53 Distance, dislocation, loss: these were what the Pictures group’s historical references ostensibly signified. If such work possessed a critical potential, as both Crimp and Foster maintained that it did, its purported target remained in their accounts diffuse, coterminous with an ever-expanding realm of modern spectacle or even the powerladen dynamics of representation more generally. There were other critics at the time who ventured more straightforward explanations for the Pictures cohort’s collective turn toward fascist imagery, casting it as a readily decipherable form of political speech. In a 1981 essay called “The End of Liberalism,” for instance, the artist Dan Graham read Goldstein’s work as equating American capitalism with the totalitarian 18

Introduction

systems that its champions claimed to oppose. Visually seductive films like The Jump, he asserted, implicitly identified postwar consumer culture as the inheritor of fascist Europe’s “mass-conditioning apparatuses,” designed to suppress rational judgment.54 The curator Douglas Eklund advanced a similar reading of Brauntuch and Longo’s practices in his catalogue essay for The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984, a historicizing exhibition that he and Ian Alteveer organized at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2009. What attracted these artists to Nazi spectacle, Eklund affirmed, was not only “the frisson of taboo” but also their observation that “from the vantage point of a mediasaturated 1970s America,” such “warped aesthetics seemed more relevant to their own time than the utopian promises of modernism.” In other words, he concluded, it was the perceived proximity of Nazi visuality, not its “remoteness,” that motivated them to converge on this unseemly subject matter—a direct inversion of Crimp’s initial framing. In Eklund’s view, Crimp’s and Owens’s abstrusely theoretical lenses had caused them to miss the artists’ most urgent point: “that the stratagems of fascist art did not die with Nazi Germany, but continued on unrecognized into the Technicolor present.”55 Graham and Eklund’s correctives rightly credit the art of the Pictures group with a capacity for political resonance within the immediate time and place of its production. Yet the objects of critique they seem to posit— what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno termed the culture industry and Walter Benjamin identified, more generally, as the “aestheticization” of political life—are so expansive as to elide the artists’ historical referent in much the way that Crimp’s position did.56 While it is true that many artists and critics of the postwar generation perceived continuities between Nazi spectacle and the machinations of mass media under corporate capitalism, overly generalizing equations of these phenomena can reduce the Pictures group’s recurring imagery to so many allegorical stand-ins for the artists’ own sociohistorical context. To do so would conflate their gestures with Sontag’s and Morris’s when, in fact, they were pursuing a distinct set of concerns that those antecedents had helped make visible. Responding to books like Inside the Third Reich and films like The Conformist—key points of reference for Brauntuch and Longo, respectively—as well as to objects like Morris’s poster and the essay by Sontag in which it reappeared, these artists joined their predecessors’ political analyses with a second-order focus that in many cases became the primary motivator of their work: a focus on the role of mass-circulating images and texts in the politically inscribed processes by which we achieve perceptual, collectively mnemonic access to the past.57

An Art of Memory The modern concept of “collective memory” first emerged in the 1920s, promoted by social theorists like Maurice Halbwachs, but it was only in the Introduction

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1980s that the idea began to command serious consideration within the academy.58 Even then, critics commonly dismissed it as little more than a hypostatized metaphor. Sontag, for instance, maintained as late as 2003 that “all memory is individual, unreproducible—it dies with each person.” So-called collective memory, she wrote, “is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.” As such, she proposed, it was really just a form of myth or ideology, a skewed account of history, supported by manipulative banks of images designed to “encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings.”59 However well-intentioned such a critical position might have been, it reproduces several philosophically untenable assumptions about the nature of subjectivity and history alike. At the core of these assumptions stands a dualist division of mind from body, “true” memory from the ostensibly “external” media, among them written language and symbolic imagery, used to “supplement” it.60 The 1960s and 1970s witnessed a wide-ranging critique of such a logocentric metaphysics, decentering the Enlightenmentera construct of the rational, self-sufficient subject and with it the prevailing view of “history” as an objective, observer-independent store of facts about the past.61 From the new perspective, memory’s intrinsically biased, affective, and often pictorial nature could represent not only an intellectual liability, but also an opportunity to acknowledge the power dynamics inherent to historical discourse and to intervene in them toward progressive ends. In a dialectical reversal of the modern hierarchy, “history” thus became the object of suspicion and “memory” its corrective. As Marcia Tucker put it in her introduction to The Art of Memory, the Loss of History, a 1985 exhibition, organized by William Olander at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, that included works by Brauntuch and Charlesworth, “history, with its illusion of neutrality, has more to do with ideology than with actual events”; memory, however, “can recoup history by critically examining how, by whom, and for what purpose history is being inscribed.”62 Such a shift need not imply capitulation to amoral relativism. As the social theorist Aleida Assmann observes, it merely registers a recognition, from a potentially critical standpoint, of “the enduring power of images and symbols” as well as their “constructed character” in all forms of human thought, not least the ones that afford us imaginative access to the past.63 Assmann has elucidated the sometimes unwieldy capacious concept of collective memory by dividing it into two component types of supraindividual memory, one “social” and the other “cultural.” In her schema, social memory corresponds to what is sometimes called “living memory”: it is the communicative process by which groups of people with common experiences recollect and represent their shared past, employing not just spoken reminiscence but also written texts, works of art, and ritual objects to this end. Something like a war memorial, for instance, could serve as a 20

Introduction

mnemonic “support” for a generational group bound by its formative experience of the referenced conflict. When this generation disappears, so must the social memory it carried. The monument itself, however, may remain and become a part of the more radically externalized, temporally enduring entity that Assmann terms “cultural memory”: institutionally stabilized but continually negotiated (and indeed, often ardently contested) bodies of “symbols, artefacts, media, and practices” through which successive generations articulate their membership within a given group—for instance a nation, race, ethnic population, political collective, class, or subculture—and thus assume a place in “history.”64 To put the distinction in schematic and somewhat oversimplifying terms, social memory is rooted in discourse and supported by media, whereas cultural memory is rooted in media and supported by discourse. Both social and cultural memory rely on the “organic” substrate that Assmann terms “neural memory,” but the author, following Halbwachs, is careful to point out that this, too, is inconceivable apart from external “supports” like language (broadly construed) and the opportunities for communicative reminiscence it provides. The upshot is that there remains little compelling reason to privilege so-called individual memory over its “social” or “cultural” counterparts. In reality, the three are inextricably entwined. The poststructuralist critique of Western logocentrism helped pave the way for such a renewed and refined theorization of collective memory. The movement’s direct impetus, however, was itself historical, issuing from various forms of cognitive dissonance that emerged in the decades following the Second World War. By the late 1960s, many young people in Europe and North America had become acutely dissatisfied with the store of cultural memory developed to account for their elders’ cataclysmic experiences. At issue was the baldly self-congratulatory nature of what this store included—generally narratives of brave resistance to tyranny and valiant sacrifice in the name of freedom—but also what it excluded: the prevalence of collaborationism in German-occupied countries; the willingness of postwar governments to pardon Nazi complicity in the service of Cold War realpolitik; the perspective of the Nazi genocide’s victims and survivors; even the perspectives of the Nazi elite, whose humanization was understandably considered taboo during the initial postwar decades (hence the intense interest that Speer’s memoirs generated following their publication in 1970).65 For the members of a politicizing counterculture, the era’s aging victory narratives had come to look like something of a sham, designed to legitimate a postwar order that did not, in fact, live up to its enlightened self-image. The Atelier Populaire, a Parisian activist group composed of students at the École des Beaux-Arts, memorably visualized such perceived hypocrisies in a 1968 screen print depicting Hitler in a French Resistance armband, carrying a mask of Charles de Gaulle (fig. 0.8). The face of anti-Nazi Introduction

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Fig. 0.8 Atelier Populaire, Untitled [May 1968. Hitler tenant à la main le masque de De Gaulle],

1968. Silkscreen print on paper, 118 × 86 cm. Paris, Bibliothèque national de France.

resistance, they implied, had ended up perpetuating fascism’s legacy of oppression through his administration’s recent efforts to quell student and working-class unrest.66 A similar logic motivated guerrilla organizations like the Red Army Faction, in Germany; the Red Brigades, in Italy; and the Weather Underground, in the United States: all three justified their acts of political violence by alleging the residually “fascist” nature of their respective governments as evidenced by ongoing political repression, racial injustice, and imperialist intervention in the so-called Third World.67 Equations of Nazism and American racism were a common feature of the Black 22

Introduction

Power movement’s revolutionary rhetoric as well. A 1973 photomontage by Emory Douglas, the Black Panther Party’s minister of culture, positioned Richard Nixon beneath an image of his implied counterpart, Adolf Hitler, and stamped a swastika onto the former’s forehead.68 The forms of cultural expression that Sontag catalogued in her 1975 essay, cinema chief among them, represent another facet of this generational shift. Neorealist films of the 1940s and 1950s tended to present the war as a Manichean battle between absolute good and absolute evil, uncomplicated by the spectrum of behavior commonly placed under the signs of collaboration and accommodation. As objections to these exonerating narratives began to mount, the cinematic representation of fascism assumed a markedly different character. Films like Cavani’s The Night Porter, Lina Wertmüller’s Seven Beauties (1975), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1975), Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Our Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977), and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Lili Marleen (1981) elaborated alternative and often eroticized conceptions of the subject, unburdened by neorealist commitments to historical veracity and incredulous toward orthodox Marxist interpretations of the war as simply a cataclysmic culmination of class warfare.69 As Michel Foucault observed, the implicit subject of these auteur productions was clearly not so much the fascist past as the postwar present, a period obsessed with regulating the collective memory of fascism, yet unwilling or unable to confront the eroticization of power and the machinations of spectacle that underpinned authoritarianism and rendered it an ongoing threat to liberal democracy.70 If the earlier films had served to offer a sense of closure, moral mastery over the past, and confidence in the postwar state’s capacity to erect a new, liberal tradition atop fascism’s ruins, their successors conversely emphasized complicity—including the complicity of cinema itself in the rise of fascism and its aestheticization of the political—and the survival of repressive psychosocial tendencies in the present.71 There were also countercurrents that opposed such efforts to unmoor “fascism” from the historical specificities of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. Consider the emergence of what historians like Peter Novick have termed “Holocaust consciousness” in the United States and elsewhere.72 While Americans became aware of the Nazi genocide in the years immediately following World War II, there did not yet exist a devoted term or discourse with which to mark off this atrocity as a self-contained narrative, distinct from the broader development of the war and constituting a singular, almost sacred event in Jewish and European history. Between roughly 1960 and 1980, however, a variety of events—among them the trial of the SS commander Adolf Eichmann, in 1961, and the political fallout of Israel’s Six Day War with its immediate neighbors, in 1967—motivated Jews to reflect publicly on the genocide and consolidate a sense of group identity through its memorialization. The effects of these endeavors were widely apparent by Introduction

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1978 and 1979. These years witnessed a judicial challenge of Neo-Nazis’ right to march in Skokie, Illinois; the establishment of the Presidential Commission on the Holocaust and the Office of Special Investigations, tasked with deporting Nazi war criminals from the United States; traveling exhibitions of art from the concentration camps, one of which Brauntuch would draw on for his work; and, perhaps most consequentially, the airing of Gerald Green’s melodramatic television miniseries Holocaust (1978). Released one year after the television adaptation of Alex Haley’s Roots, which had dramatized the formation of Black American identity and its origins in slavery, Green’s series made an enormous impact in the United States as well as in West Germany, prompting impassioned debates about the political value of such mass cultural products on both sides of the Atlantic.73 The 1970s were thus a period marked by widespread reckoning with the credibility of established legitimating narratives rooted in the outcome of World War II, as well as the rise of revisionary perspectives onto Nazism and the war years, the political ends of which could vary considerably. Indeed, as demonstrated by the contemporaneous ascent of guerrilla leftist activism, Holocaust consciousness, and Neo-Nazi ideology, they could be diametrically opposed. Such conditions form a crucial and underrecognized background to the Pictures phenomenon that would consolidate by the decade’s end. Seeing that the historical referent of fascism had become newly unstable, jostled by a burgeoning glut of competing representations, artists like Charlesworth, Goldstein, Brauntuch, Longo, and Bender mobilized it to encode political commentary on the state of American politics while also reflecting more generally on the role of images in codifying national narratives and other such instruments of group identity formation. Crimp described the resulting work as setting history at a “distance.”74 In fact, it was precisely by emphasizing the constructed and indeterminate nature of representation that the Pictures group succeeded in bringing the nature of historical perception and collective memory to the fore. As Charlesworth put it in an unpublished lecture from 1987, tellingly titled “Hitler’s Nightmare: The Post-modern Possibility,” her entire practice to date amounted to “a confrontation with a changed and changing historical consciousness to which the term post modern in fact applies.” Not only “the ‘content’ but the perceptual ‘models,’ the modes of knowing are radically different than they have been in the past,” she explained. All her work from the preceding decade had on some level engaged this fact: that “our very conception of the past, as well as the future is continually being negotiated in the public sphere.”75

Chapter Overviews Charlesworth’s oeuvre is the subject of this book’s first chapter.76 Here I discuss the genesis of the artist’s Stills in greater depth, situating them relative 24

Introduction

to precedents like Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster paintings and parsing their cenotaph-like monumentality—the prints each measure seventyeight by forty-two inches, large enough to frame a human body—in relation to the subtle historical references that they include. The works’ allusions to fascism, I explain, issued directly from Charlesworth’s major opus from the later 1970s, a series titled Modern History in which the artist reproduced the front pages of newspapers without their text, leaving only photographs. In a crucial installment from 1978, she mapped the coverage of an ongoing crisis—the Red Brigades’ kidnapping of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro—by publishers spanning the globe and the political spectrum. She focused specifically on a harrowing photograph that the guerrillas had taken of their captive to prove he was still alive. In the image, Moro holds the previous day’s newspaper before a flag emblazoned with a five-pointed star, the symbol used by Italy’s antifascist partisans during World War II and thus a loaded signifier of the unresolved political antagonisms that continued to divide Italian society through the postwar decades, erupting into open violence after 1968. Charlesworth’s Stills are sometimes understood to mark a turn away from such direct political engagement, toward comparatively universal experiences of mortality and even the nature of photography as a medium. In fact, I argue, the works engaged—with newfound lyricism—the politicized processes by which “history” is represented, narrativized, and thus rendered perceptible. Goldstein’s film The Jump, the focus of my second chapter, has similarly been positioned as a turning point in the artist’s career. The last in a series of films, performances, records, and photomontages that occupied him throughout the 1970s, it directly preceded his turn toward the more conventional medium of acrylic painting. This is not the only reason that The Jump occupies such an outsized position in accounts of Goldstein’s oeuvre, however. Even before the film was completed, Crimp positioned it—sight unseen—as a paragon of the emerging Pictures ethos and its emphasis on time, memory, and media. In more recent years, interpreters have focused instead on the work’s historical evocations, finding allusions to Nazi-era spectacle in its seductive sheen and athletic iconography. Some have even claimed—erroneously, I believe—that Goldstein appropriated the famed diving sequence from Olympia (1938), Riefenstahl’s ideologically loaded documentary of the 1936 Olympic Games, as his animation’s underlying source material. In fact, I propose, what makes The Jump significant is the formally economical way it integrated these two domains, the mnemonic and the historical. This is a nexus that the artist had engaged throughout his multimedia work of the 1970s and continued to explore in his mural-scale paintings of the early 1980s, many of which reprised the figure of the falling body in the form of paratroopers derived from World War II–era photographs of air raids. Throughout this body of work, Goldstein’s stated concern was with “control”: specifically, with the role of mass-circulated images in cirIntroduction

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cumscribing individual thought and shaping what he described, in 1982, as “world narratives,” the always partial and politicized scripts with which we plot ourselves in relation to the past.77 Although they were born nearly a decade apart, Goldstein and Brauntuch both attended the California Institute of the Arts in the early 1970s, and their oeuvres clearly bear the imprint of this milieu. It was one defined not only by the encouragement of “post studio” experimentalism and a license to appropriate from popular media, but also by an embattled tradition of left-wing radicalism in which the specter of “fascism” loomed large, imbuing even seemingly abstruse projects with implicitly historical overtones.78 Turning to the work of Brauntuch in chapter 3, I propose that the artist’s dimly rendered records of the Nazi era—including drawings by Adolf Hitler, photographs of statues by the state-sponsored artist Josef Thorak, and sketches made in secret by concentration camp prisoners—thematized the functioning of pictures as collective memory traces much as Goldstein’s work had done. The artist himself did not present his project in quite these terms, however. On the contrary, he often framed his works as though they were predominantly formal investigations, describing their source images as “objects” whose historical “contexts” were of a decidedly secondary importance.79 He positioned them, in other words, as improbable successors to the tradition of postwar modernist abstraction and its pursuit of aesthetic autonomy. Reading such characterizations against the grain, I identify in Brauntuch’s work an effort both to critique and to expand the modernist paradigm in question, one motivated in no small part by its objection to totalitarian oppression, yet purged of the means to register this history pictorially or reflect on the nature of its retrospective representation. Longo, whose work I address in chapter 4, moved to New York City from Buffalo in 1977 and soon became one of Goldstein and Brauntuch’s key interlocutors. He ultimately took a more overtly political tack than they, however. His “combines” of the 1980s—monumental wall-mounted works incorporating elements of painting, sculptural relief, and sometimes-freestanding statuary—read as excoriating indictments of a post-Vietnam America, characterized by Cold War militarism and conservative revanche. So does his storyboard for an unrealized film titled Empire: A Picture of America that he developed with the filmmaker Ed Bowes in 1982. Longo’s earlier work, by contrast, had been more enigmatic. How do his stylish Men in the Cities drawings and elegiac theatrical tableaux relate to their more politically forthright successors? The Christian motif of the Fall, I argue, is crucial to understanding this connection. Marshaling this mythos in his depictions of “doomed white people,” Longo sought to convey the weight of the past on a present in which transformative change appeared more likely to be enacted by the authoritarian right than the liberal left. “Being an American seems critical at this time,” the artist mused in 1984. This position was “not something I go out to portray, rather it is a consequence I have to carry,” he 26

Introduction

explained. “In my art I am trying to deal with something like the nature of being condemned.”80 Bender, the subject of my fifth chapter, joined the expanded Pictures circle in the early 1980s (she and Longo were a couple for much of the decade) and quickly established herself as one of its most innovative members, though the relatively slim scholarly literature devoted to her work has only begun to capture the full complexity of her intervention. Departing from her peers’ predominant focus on print media, Bender turned her attention to digital technology, a domain in which she perceived opportunities for liberating perceptual “expansion” as well as avenues for ever more sophisticated forms of social control. In 1984, she published a manifesto-like statement in which she declared it her mission to “fight fascisms”—plural.81 It was to this end that she employed her multimonitor video installations, classified as works of “electronic theater.” These kaleidoscopic spectacles extended the Pictures group’s underlying inquiry into the nature of mnemohistorical perception and its externalization in media. With Total Recall, completed in 1987, Bender rendered such concerns overt. “I think who controls memory controls power,” she stated with regard to this expansive work, the title of which derives from a science fiction story by Philip K. Dick about commodified memory implants. “In this culture people who want to hold on to power, realize that they have to control memory past, present and future.”82

Endings Simply put, the aim of these chapters is to understand what the Pictures artists were doing when they evoked the specter of “fascism” in their work and commentary from the years around 1980. In this introduction, I have endeavored to sketch in broad strokes the historical, cultural, and otherwise discursive conditions to which their collective project responded: these included the precipitous rise of conservative and far-right political movements following a roughly thirty-year period of centrist dominance; a counterpoised questioning of received World War II victory narratives (and associated forms of artistic practice, such as expressionist and minimalist abstraction) by younger voices on the left; and an accompanying attentiveness to the nature of historical perception more broadly in relation to identity formation, national and otherwise. A brief word about endings is now in order. By the mid-1980s, references to “fascism,” even loosely defined, were nowhere near as dense in art, music, or cinema as they had been some five to ten years earlier. What, other than a response to oversaturation or the slightly widened historical gap between the present and the period in question, might account for this decline? One explanation is that postmodern— and, more specifically, postcolonial—critiques of Eurocentric master narratives had begun to do Introduction

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their work. For emerging cohorts of artists and intellectuals, the Second World War no longer played quite such an outsized role in framing present social issues, the roots of which were understood to lay in a global history of imperialism that long preceded, and in many ways survived, the rise and fall of authoritarian states in Europe. Another explanation might involve the parallel validation of collective memory as an interpretive framework. For the Pictures group, evoking fascism was a ready means of raising questions about the politics of cultural memory in the absence of a widely established vocabulary with which to verbalize these concerns. As exhibitions like The Art of Memory, the Loss of History attest, by the mid-1980s this theoretical gap had largely closed, affording subsequent generations of artists an extensive set of inherited terms and ideas with which to formulate related projects in more explicit or self-conscious fashion. Finally, there was the rise of neoliberalism as promoted and embodied by the Reagan and Thatcher governments. To be sure, these politicians were abhorrent figures to many (if not most) artists in the 1980s. It eventually became clear, however, that the popularity of their conservative platforms was depriving even farther-right groups of the energy that some of them had managed to attain amid the tumult of the preceding decade. The political center had shifted, momentously, to the right. Fascism and other anticonservative expressions of what Griffin terms “ultranationalism” appeared to have been shut out by this development—relegated to the wilderness with little chance of challenging the new status quo. This state of affairs obtained for over thirty years. Arguably, it no longer does.83 The ending that this book traces is, in this sense, a temporary one. Indeed, following the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the two surviving members of my assembled group—Brauntuch and Longo—promptly and effectively reprised the strategies and imagery that had defined their early oeuvres. The former produced a series of ghostly prints derived from archival photographs of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen (Great German Art Exhibitions), shows mounted annually by the Nazi state from 1937 to 1944. The latter seized on contemporary scenes of political unrest, monumentalizing them in charcoal at a mural scale alongside stormy images of goose-stepping soldiers and swastika-covered tombstones. (I consider both artists’ projects at greater length in my concluding epilogue.) Although the approach I take in this book is decidedly historical, then, my hope is that my analyses will also activate the works discussed as philosophical objects with insights to offer about our present. To ask what the Pictures artists were doing when they evoked the specter of fascism in the 1970s and 1980s is implicitly to ask what we are doing when we speak of fascism today, with issues of memory and identity more salient than ever and far-right populisms again ascendant around the globe.

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Introduction

1 SARAH CHARLESWORTH AT THE END OF MODERN HISTORY

B

y the end of 1979, Sarah Charlesworth had amassed a store of seventy newspaper photographs, sourced mostly from newswire services and the New York Public Library, depicting people plummeting from buildings. This collection would form the basis for her Stills, a series of mural-scale prints that the artist debuted at Tony Shafrazi’s Lexington Avenue gallery in February 1980 (fig. 1.1). To create the finished works, Charlesworth equalized her source photographs by carefully tearing each into a vertical rectangle of a standard proportion, 1:2, and rephotographing it against a neutral white ground. In consultation with Shafrazi, she selected seven of these morbidly arresting pictures—including an outlier called Unidentified Man, Unidentified Location that she had taken secondhand from Andy Warhol’s silkscreen painting Suicide (1962), part of the artist’s Death and Disaster series—and, with the help of a downtown lab called Giant Photo, enlarged them to the monumental size of seventy-eight by forty-two inches (fig. 1.2).1 Scaled to dimensions just large enough to frame a human body, these representations of what would appear to be imminent death assume a distinctly sepulchral air, further reinforced by the epitaphic paucity of information that Charlesworth supplied by way of titles about their subjects: only the name of the person depicted, if known, and the location of the fall. (Charlesworth tellingly opted to produce the works as unique singles “because each person had only one life,” she later explained.)2 When the Reprinted with permission from Alexander Bigman, “Untimely Images, Fallen Figures: Sarah Charlesworth at the End of Modern History,” Art Bulletin 104, no. 1 (2022): 146–71.

Fig. 1.1 Installation view of Sarah Charlesworth, Stills, at Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, 1980. Copyright © The Estate of Sarah Charlesworth. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

images are displayed in series, hung high enough to loom over most viewers, the cumulative effect is that of a cenotaph-like tribute, assembled to memorialize some undefined calamity. Charlesworth’s major project of the preceding years, a thirteen-part opus collectively titled Modern History (1977–79), had hewed more closely to the established characteristics of conceptual art: rigidly defined generative systems, withdrawal of emotive content or expressive form, de-emphasized materiality, modest scale.3 Each installment of the series collated a different assortment of photocopied newspaper front pages, printed at their original sizes but with all text below the mastheads masked out, leaving only photographs and allowing new patterns of significance to emerge.4 Charlesworth’s logic of selection varied from work to work. Some installments accumulated many issues of a single source publication over a given span of time, while others gathered many different publications that were issued on a single day or featured a particular story. For instance, Herald Tribune, September 1977 and Herald Tribune, November 1977 (fig. 1.3) (both 1977) charted the titular publication’s page 1 material over the course of the stated months, effectively visualizing the paper’s editorial perspective along with its implicit biases. By contrast, April 20, 1978 and April 21, 1978 (1978) (fig. 1.4) gathered 30

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Fig. 1.2 Sarah Charlesworth, Unidentified Man, Unidentified Location, 1980. Black-and-white mural print, 78 × 42 in. Copyright © The Estate of Sarah Charlesworth. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Fig. 1.3 Sarah Charlesworth, Herald Tribune, September 1977, 1977. Installation view, C Space, New York, March 19–March 30, 1978. Twenty-six black-and-white electrophotographic prints, dimensions variable, each approx. 23 × 16 in. Copyright © The Estate of Sarah Charlesworth. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

dozens of publications from these days containing photographs pertinent to the abduction and suspected murder of Aldo Moro, Italy’s former prime minister, by the Red Brigades, a leftist guerrilla cell.5 Charlesworth fixated in particular on narratives of revolutionary struggle and oppression, including not only the Moro kidnapping but also the right-wing military coup that toppled the Salvador Allende government in Chile (Chile Piece, 1977), the unfolding of the Sandinista insurgency in Nicaragua (The Guerilla, June 4, 5, 1979, 1979), the Iranian revolution (Reading Persian, 1979), and the Polish pope John Paul II’s 1979 visit to Auschwitz (The Wall of Tears, 1979). Her series addressed material that was at once timely and incipiently historical in the weightiest sense of the term.6 Stills departed from this precedent in the vastly expanded scale of its component prints, which shuttles the series into an altogether different affective register, as well as in its images’ comparative remove from identifiable world events like the Moro kidnapping—a remove that renders the series’ motivating logic more opaque. “At the end of Modern History, I did not want to go a step further in the analytic direction,” Charlesworth would later affirm. “I wanted a more poetic form of visual confrontation.”7 Speaking in 32

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Fig. 1.4 Detail of Sarah Charlesworth, April 21, 1978, 1978. Forty-five black-and-white electrophotographic prints, dimensions variable, each approx. 22 × 16 in. Copyright © The Estate of Sarah Charlesworth. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

1980 with Betsy Sussler, with whom she would found Bomb Magazine the following year, the artist suggested that her Stills might be understood as self-reflexive meditations on the nature of photography as a kind of memento mori, a medium inextricable from “the human relationship with temporality,” which was at bottom “a relationship with your own death.”8 Once articulated, such an existential logic could be applied in retrospect to Modern History installments like April 21, 1978 as well. Indeed, with its images Sarah Charlesworth at the End of Modern History

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of a hostage who would eventually be killed by his captors, the earlier work might be seen as thematizing the mass mediation of an individual’s impending doom in much the way that Stills would do. The difference, Charlesworth explained to Sussler, was that whereas April 21 and the larger Modern History project concerned “people whose images have a particular political significance because of their status as powerful individuals,” Stills presented figures who were “simply people”—everypersons whose images happened to have been captured and commodified for spectacular consumption.9 The later series would thus seem to mark a shift in emphasis toward subjectivity and universality, complicating art historical conceptions of appropriation art as a practice forged in opposition to such hoary, humanist ideals.10 Charlesworth’s turn toward more “poetic” forms of “visual confrontation” by no means implied the evacuation of concrete political reference from her work, however. On the contrary, as this chapter will discuss, several of the images that Stills monumentalized possessed barely submerged historical resonances directly linked to the narratives of revolution and reaction that motivated Modern History. One photograph, dating to 1942, makes subtle visual reference to the then-ongoing US war effort against Nazi Germany; another, from 1979, captures what was likely an act of antifascist violence in northern Spain. These allusions to the Second World War and its ideological antagonisms meaningfully inflect the works’ memoriallike format and by extension the artist’s underlying philosophical engagement with subjectivity and time. Charlesworth’s quotation from Warhol’s Death and Disaster series likewise assumes additional significance in light of her selected source material. Warhol, too, had depicted everyday tragedies like car accidents and suicides alongside scenes of historic upheaval and crisis, among them the funeral for President John F. Kennedy and, in Little Race Riot (1964), a civil rights uprising in Birmingham, Alabama (plate 2).11 Though they were created by artists of different generations, Warhol and Charlesworth’s iconographically convergent projects may be understood as like interventions within a larger postwar inquiry addressing the politically inscribed and often aestheticized processes by which reality comes to appear “historical.” To understand the falling figure’s significance for Charlesworth’s cohort in particular—one that was beginning to understand itself as meaningfully “postmodern,” positioned at the tapering end of what the artist called “modern history”—it will be necessary to parse how the artist pitched her Stills in response to the political currents of their time.

Pop, Pictures, Postmodernity Charlesworth’s motivating interest in the dynamics of mass cultural representation has rightly earned her a central place within the expanded circle of New York artists loosely associated with Douglas Crimp’s 1977 Pictures show. Given this affiliation, her allusion to Warhol might not seem at all 34

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surprising. After all, several of the works included in the Artists Space exhibition had themselves resembled works of pop art. Consider Jack Goldstein’s Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1975), a short film in which the artist repeatedly looped the titular studio’s roaring lion mascot before a field of vivid red, or Sherrie Levine’s Sons and Lovers (1976–77), a grid of thirty-five paper panels featuring different combinations of five brightly silhouetted figures, three of them recognizable as the profiles of former US presidents Washington, Lincoln, and Kennedy. But in fact, Crimp argued, these works’ programmatic and variably materialized processes of “quotation, excerptation [sic], framing, and staging” were closer to the traditions of minimalist sculpture, postminimalist performance, and conceptual art, the “theatricality” of which had upended postwar American modernism’s dogmatic commitment to the autonomous, “medium specific” art object in a way that pop painting had not.12 They represented a newly open-ended and thus temporalized form of picturing, he proposed, more self-consciously attuned to the incompleteness and instability endemic to the act of representation.13 In a 1979 revision of his “Pictures” essay, he alighted on the term “postmodernist” to describe such deviant forms of creative practice, the results of which could be called neither painting nor sculpture and declined to transcend “the material condition of the signs through which meaning is generated.”14 Such a bracketing of the Pictures group’s Warholian precedents was, in many ways, a tactical maneuver. By the close of the 1970s, Warhol had largely dissipated his reputation for boundary-pushing invention, all but reducing himself, in the view of several leading critics from the time, to his own carefully crafted persona: a machinelike booster for consumer capitalism.15 Pictures-era “appropriation” was thought to advance a more subversive form of critique, as the term’s associations with pirating suggest. In recent decades, however, scholars have productively dislodged such period judgments about pop. They have revealed a Warhol whose most consequential body work, the Death and Disaster series, pointedly memorialized its era’s morbid preoccupations and uncanny or otherwise traumatic episodes, distending what Thomas Crow has described as the “open sores of American political life.”16 These paintings, Hal Foster has argued, thematized the media-assisted rituals of mass witness—in particular the witness of calamity and death, personalized or anonymous—that bound twentieth-century American subjects into a “psychic nation.”17 They thus assumed a function not unlike the one pursued in previous centuries by history painting, raising the question, John J. Curley has shown, of what it would mean to reprise this lately discredited genre in a Cold War era swamped by information channels that were at once newly abundant and manifestly polarized along ideological lines.18 By positioning her Stills in relation to the Death and Disaster works, might Charlesworth have been signaling her engagement with a related set of problems? For several of Charlesworth’s initial critics, the relevance of Warhol’s Sarah Charlesworth at the End of Modern History

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Death and Disaster paintings to Stills was plain to see, even if the precise nature of the relationship remained somewhat elusive. Joan Casademont wrote in a review of the Shafrazi exhibition that “if Warhol made timely media disaster a still, an icon of modern life, then Charlesworth’s ‘Stills’ are untimely, slow-moving psychological disturbances, the kind that disturb long after they have been seen.”19 Where Warhol’s works represented a “timely” response to the 1960s’ unprecedented surfeit of publicly circulating images, the critic suggested, Charlesworth’s Stills assumed a comparatively “untimely” relation to their source material, pointing beyond the punctual dynamics of journalistic mass media and instead summoning a mode of temporal perception that endowed Shafrazi’s modest exhibition space—a small, empty apartment—with the “airy, silent” ambience of a shrine.20 Reflecting on the series several years later, Jerry Saltz ventured a more concrete and loaded analogy, likewise pitched in contradistinction to the pop art antecedent that Charlesworth evoked. In Warhol’s paintings, Saltz argued, the variably inked repetition of a single image across the canvas had the effect of underscoring his source photographs’ origins as media artifacts, thereby sapping them of “the ‘aura’ of the real.” Charlesworth’s monumental pictures of anonymous victims, by contrast, functioned “more like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier,” a commemorative typology steeped in precisely the kind of quasi-religious ritualism with which Walter Benjamin had famously associated the “auratic” image and its instrumentalization, under fascism, as a means of rendering politics “aesthetic.” Such transmutation, the Frankfurt school theorist had argued, was all the more dangerous when achieved using the photomechanical technologies of mass media.21 To be sure, Charlesworth’s prints pointedly avoid offering anything like the mythically nationalized or racialized subject positions that had so acutely concerned Benjamin in the mid-1930s. But in expanding newspaper images—most of which Charlesworth tore, rather than cut, from the page, producing ragged edges that emphasize their origins in newsprint—to the scale of a memorial, the artist did engage the very two formats of mass address that Benedict Anderson, in his 1983 book Imagined Communities, deemed most central to the rise of nationalism since the late eighteenth century. Newspapers and monuments, Anderson argues, ushered in a “new way of linking fraternity, power, and time meaningfully together” following the decline of religious, cosmological, and dynastic worldviews under the pressures of industrial modernity.22 Adapting these superseded models to what Benjamin called the “homogeneous, empty time” of history, newspapers and monuments helped modern subjects understand themselves as belonging, along with millions of “unknown soldiers” and otherwise anonymous counterparts they would never meet, to a newly territorialized (and, as Homi K. Bhabha and Étienne Balibar have pointed out, often racialized) type of collectivity, united by a common destiny in much the way that religious com36

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munities conceive themselves to be.23 What Casademont perceived as the Stills’ “untimeliness” was perhaps a function of the series’ self-conscious intervention into such foundational techniques for conceptually ordering the relationship between contingency and fatality within collective life. Homing in on the religiously coded image of the falling figure, with its evocations of the mythic Fall of Man and its proleptic counterpart, the Last Judgment, within the sphere of modern journalism, Stills crystallized the tension between temporalities—divinely ordered providential time versus the empty, historical time of the daily paper—that characterizes the national imagination of community, becoming particularly perceptible during moments of pronounced social and political change.24 Charlesworth’s preceding work suggests that she saw her era as precisely such a volatile moment. One of the artist’s first recorded ideas for Modern History, for instance, had been a plan to gather all “front page disaster” stories over the course of one year, an effort that would have stood in obvious relation to both Warhol’s Death and Disaster series and his earlier, similarly disaster-oriented tabloid paintings.25 While Charlesworth never executed the plan as such, she remained sharply attuned to the heavily publicized calamities and cataclysms that punctuated the late 1970s. Her collection of article clippings and newswire photographs track the mass poisoning of cult followers in Jonestown in November 1978; the partial nuclear reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island in March 1979; and the eruption of Mount St. Helens in May 1980, to name a few examples. Along with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the hostage crisis at the US embassy in Iran, which began in November 1979 and remained unresolved at the time of Charlesworth’s exhibition at Tony Shafrazi Gallery, these events suitably concluded a decade all but consumed by geopolitical turmoil, social upheaval, and the worst economic and political crises Western democracies had faced since the 1930s.26 Many of the source photographs that Charlesworth compiled for Stills illustrated disasters of their own: high-rise fires, collapsing fire escapes, botched daredevil performances, and, of course, suicides. Although comparatively minor, these stories were not entirely unrelated to their more ecologically or politically consequential counterparts.27 On the contrary, tabloids like the New York Post often juxtaposed such local tragedies against correspondingly dire world news in such a way that the former could pictorially stand in for the latter, symbolically grafting the contours of a sensational, personalized narrative onto complex national and international affairs. Charlesworth retained two issues of the Post, one from May 15, 1974, and one from March 22, 1978, that exemplify this editorial technique.28 The first allocates its front-page coverage to the aftermath of a hostage showdown at an Israeli high school—“The Toll in Israel: 16 Are Killed and 70 Wounded,” blares the headline—and, beneath that, news of a “New Subpoena for Nixon,” the embattled president (fig. 1.5). Yet the page’s only Sarah Charlesworth at the End of Modern History

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Fig. 1.5 Clipping of “The Toll in Israel: 16 Are Killed and 70 Wounded,” New York Post, May 15, 1974, in the Sarah Charlesworth Estate Archives. Courtesy of the Estate of Sarah Charlesworth and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

photograph, depicting a body tumbling through the air against the backdrop of a modern apartment facade, illustrates neither of these stories; it belongs to an article on page 13 about a Coney Island man who leaped from the roof of a high-rise building to end his life. The later issue similarly pairs news of international diplomacy (“Carter-Begin Talks: Standoff ”) with unrelated photographs capturing the demise of Karl Wallenda, a famous circus aerialist who had fallen to his death in San Juan, Puerto Rico, as “hundreds of spectators watched in horror.”29 In setting her sights on images of 38

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jumpers, then, Charlesworth did not quit the realm of “history” but rather, like Warhol before her, homed in on one of its more iconically consistent stand-ins: an individualized emblem of catastrophe capable of representing in miniature the angst of an increasingly chaotic, irrational, and cynicalseeming era, dogged by recurrent prognostications of apocalypse in one guise or another.30 In the early 1960s moment that witnessed the rise of pop, Warhol’s “disaster” rhetoric could signify the onset of a newly turbulent, skeptical, and politically activated period in American history. By the close of the crisisridden 1970s, such imagery was more likely to be received as marking the arrival of a retrospective mood—attuned, perhaps, to what Jean-François Lyotard would characterize in The Postmodern Condition (1979) as a waning of the Enlightenment-era master narratives that had previously organized the plotting of human progress, at least in certain academic discourses.31 Dividing past, present, and future “suggests that reality is distributed equally among three parts, but in fact the past is the most real of all,” Susan Sontag stated in a 1976 interview published by the New York Times, a clipping of which Charlesworth retained for her archives. Discussing the role of artists as “memory specialists, professional curators of consciousness,” Sontag proposed that “it is only normal that we are aware of ourselves as persons in a historical continuum, with indefinite thicknesses of past behind us, the present a razor’s edge, and the future—well, problematic is one damp word for it.”32 Elsewhere in the interview, she took a more emphatically bleak position on the future’s promise, averring that “this civilization, already so far overtaken by barbarism, is at its end, and nothing we do will put it back together again.”33 Two years later, Peter Schjeldahl accounted for what he regarded as the rudderless state of contemporary art by similarly suggesting that Cold War anxieties about nuclear obliteration had produced a society unable to envision the future, whether of culture or of anything else. But in his estimation, such apocalypticism had rendered many artists incapable of perceiving meaningful connections to the past, either. “I think what makes the ’70s so eerie is the sneaking conviction we all have that this decade wasn’t supposed to happen,” Schjeldahl proposed. “We are inhabiting, in effect, the no-future of the ’50s and ’60s,” with the result being a concomitant conception of the past, or “no past,” as “a place we visit, in books and museums, with a sense of crossing an intervening chasm.” (As for artistic attempts to resurrect “tradition,” he added, “in our century [they] have often resulted in, if not mere eccentricity, some form of fascism.”)34 In the early 1980s, theorists like Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson—the latter of whom Charlesworth read throughout the 1970s, even leading a seminar-style discussion of his “Sartre and History” in 1976—would popularize related conceptions of postmodernity as a period benighted by amnesia.35 In their accounts, however, the root of this forgetfulness lay less in atomic anxiety than in the spectacular power Sarah Charlesworth at the End of Modern History

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of mass media, under which history and indeed “the real” itself were being steadily eclipsed by myth and simulation. “Whereas so many generations, and particularly the last, lived in the march of history, in the euphoric or catastrophic expectation of a revolution—today one has the impression that history has retreated, leaving behind it an indifferent nebula, traversed by currents, but emptied of references,” Baudrillard wrote.36 Jameson, for his part, foresaw a culture where “the past as ‘referent’ finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts.”37 Given the coincidence of Modern History and the more opaque, more funereal Stills with such discourses, it is tempting to argue that what the latter works commemorated was, in effect, the perceptibility of history itself: our capacity to perceive the present as meaningfully vectored in relation to an authoritatively established sequence of preceding moments and events. Yet the cenotaph-like format of Stills also complicates such a reading. To engage in the prescribed way with a memorial of this type—say, following Saltz, a tomb of the unknown soldier, or perhaps one of the monuments to “fallen” soldiers that proliferated with the world wars—is not to gaze on a past perceived, across a wasteland of mass-mediated spectacle, as insuperably distant. On the contrary, as Anderson observed, it is to be interpellated as a member of a group paradoxically defined as eternal, transcending the contingencies of social life, and at the same time palpably embedded in the forces that make up history’s warp and weft.38 The Stills, I will argue, do not simply ironize such ideological effects; they leave open at least the possibility of a subject position defined by perceived proximity to, as opposed to distance from, an unfolding arc of violent, history-driving struggle. At the same time, it is true that the works afford a self-reflexive perspective onto the very phenomenon that they instantiate. They are primed, in short, to thematize the activation of cultural memory: the common store of images and other media, memorials paradigmatic among them, through which successive generations articulate their membership within a temporally enduring social group and thus assume a place in “history.”39 Charlesworth would state as much in “Hitler’s Nightmare: The Postmodern Possibility,” the unpublished lecture or conference paper she prepared in early 1987. The artist here characterized her entire practice to date as “a confrontation with a changed and changing historical consciousness to which the term post modern in fact applies,” adding that “not only the ‘content’ but the perceptual ‘models,’ the modes of knowing are radically different than they have been in the past,” and that “our very conception of the past, as well as the future is continually being negotiated in the public sphere.”40 Her titular allusion to the Nazi dictator may at first seem a rhetorical indulgence, grandly intended to equate her practice with the twentieth century’s foremost struggle against tyranny, but the finer logic of her essay points to a more nuanced position. “At the very basis of my engagement with art and photography is an understanding that visual cul40

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ture exists as a unique language, an approach to knowing, which, while not autonomous from written or spoken language, is distinct in both form and vocabulary,” she explained.41 In a press release from the previous year, the artist likewise made reference to the notion of “visual language,” affirming that her work sought “in part to crystallize, to condense the rampant posing of the image, to wrench or distill from the chaos of the generations, the basic character, the shapes which define the horizons of our experience as a culture.”42 She viewed her promotion of such “visual literacy” as a progressive force, “which permits us as citizens (of the global economy of the sign) to speak, to create, to act with responsibility, sensitivity, and beauty.”43 As such, her work could even function as an agent of democracy, the tyrant’s “nightmare” of her 1987 paper’s title.44 Charlesworth’s observations about the nature of “historical consciousness” and its relation to the “post-modern” followed the larger discursive shift that I sketched in the introduction: one propelled by skepticism toward Enlightenment-era frameworks regarding the nature of historical knowledge, and attuned to the power dynamics inherent in any recounting of the past.45 In the course of this recalibration, Benjamin’s now-celebrated claim—that to “articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it ‘really was,’ but to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger”—assumed new relevance.46 I believe it was this transition from a “history” framework to a “memory” framework, more than concerns about photography and mortality or the dimming of historical consciousness by media saturation, that motivated Charlesworth’s work from the years around 1980 and precipitated her move from the relatively “analytic” Modern History to the more monumental and “poetic” Stills. Already in the former series, in fact, Charlesworth had begun to reflect on the profoundly political nature of mnemo-historical perception. At issue in her Moro trilogy was the dual observation, recognition of which was central to emerging discourses of postmodernism, that representation is always already historical—implicated in the power dynamics and hierarchies that shape social life and motivate the active, sometimes violent struggle to alter it—just as history, understood as a store of credible narratives about the past, is always already representational, composed of images and stories never fully extricable from the dynamics of myth.

Media and Mythology in the Years of Lead In the image of Moro that shows up across forty-five newspaper pages in April 21, 1978, the captive occupies a position wedged between two notably symbolic planes. He is “staged,” to borrow Crimp’s terminology from the “Pictures” essay, between multiple “strata of representation.”47 Behind him looms the star-shaped emblem of his captors. Before him stands a copy of the leftist newspaper La Repubblica from April 19 imprinted with a boldface Sarah Charlesworth at the End of Modern History

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headline, “Moro Assassinato?” The message intended by this image is decipherable enough, even for a viewer possessing only the most basic knowledge of its circumstances: Moro lives, as sure as photographs do not lie. Photographs do lie, of course, even if this one did happen to be genuine. The credibility of the Red Brigades’ image was particularly suspect; as its publishers widely observed, the fact that Moro’s hands are not visible suggested that it might have been a montage.48 Charlesworth, for her part, questioned the picture’s authenticity from a more philosophical angle, redolent of the poststructuralist theory she was processing at the time.49 By removing the surrounding text from the various newspaper pages in which the photograph appeared, she emphasized the mise-en-abyme structure that results from its placement on the page: a smaller newspaper positioned within a larger one, suggesting if not actually instantiating an infinite regress. The artist’s selection parameters further underscored the mediated nature of Moro’s image. Title notwithstanding, April 21, 1978 actually tracked its target photograph across a twenty-four hour news cycle that included its initial publication in a special issue of Il Messaggero on April 20, its worldwide reproduction on April 21, and its reappearance in stories from that day’s evening editions covering the public’s response to the new revelations. The latter category included photographs of people discovering the morning paper on newsstands, thus introducing yet a third level of pictorial nesting (fig. 1.6). Rather than impugning the Red Brigades’ image as a falsification, then, Charlesworth effectively bracketed the question of its documentary value altogether, instead presenting it as though it were confined to a closed circuit of representation. In Modern History, the meaning of the photograph seems more a function of its media context than a reflection of its grisly real-world origins. Another commonly noted effect of April 21, 1978 was to reveal the varying importance accorded to Moro’s kidnapping around the globe, as indicated by the photograph’s differing size and placement from source to source.50 The discrepancies in this regard are indeed striking. In Rome’s Il Messaggero, the image of the statesman in captivity occupies a full quarter page, whereas in Canada’s Globe and Mail it is dominated by a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II holding her newborn grandchild, Peter. Charlesworth’s larger Modern History project was also attuned to deeper semiotic strata, however. The Herald Tribune works, she explained, served at least in part to manifest her observation that “the main picture at the top of the page everyday was some male authority figure” like “a king, a president, a general, a pope”— but seemingly never a woman—“and down below were various missiles and rockets and bombs and military hardware,” her implication being that the two halves functioned together as an iconic, subliminal affirmation of patriarchal authority.51 The Moro image similarly represented more than just one politician’s predicament. In “unwriting: Notes on Modern History,” an essay that Charlesworth penned to accompany her 1979 exhibition of the 42

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Fig. 1.6 Detail of Sarah Charlesworth, April 21, 1978, 1978. Forty-five black-and-white electrophotographic prints, dimensions variable, each approx. 22 × 16 in. Copyright © The Estate of Sarah Charlesworth. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

series at New 57 Gallery in Edinburgh, the artist suggested that its depicted prisoner could also operate as a signifier of captivity (or, more precisely, captivation) in a more expansive sense: “and all the while it is us constructing the various devices from which we hope to escape—the neat reciprocity of our relation,” she wrote.52 In his shackled state, Charlesworth seemed Sarah Charlesworth at the End of Modern History

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cryptically to imply, Moro mirrored the position of a global newspaper readership in thrall to the ideologically tendentious feedback loops of contemporary mass media. Charlesworth’s logic took shape within an analytical framework that had been elaborated by literary theorists like Roland Barthes, whom the artist read throughout the 1970s.53 Particularly relevant was Barthes’s account of mythical speech as a “second-order semiological system” in which a given sign’s denotative meaning becomes subordinated to a more general concept that draws authoritativeness from the historical particularity of its host.54 Through the operations of myth, a weapons stockpile may accordingly transmogrify into a representative of American military might or even male rule. A Sandinista rebel, such as the one that appears in Charlesworth’s The Guerilla, June 4, 5, 1979, may similarly become an “icon of subversion” itself, to borrow the artist’s characterization of her subject.55 Whether such signification is “verbal or visual,” Barthes declared, was of secondary importance for the analyst of myth. “A photograph will be a kind of speech for us in the same way as a newspaper article,” for both formats are capable of myth’s signature alchemy: the “depoliticizing” transformation of “history into nature.”56 Myth is “interpellant speech” and “at the same time a frozen speech,” he explained.57 It presents the socially contingent as if it were eternal and thus situates the reader within a symbolic order that appears preordained. Charlesworth accordingly affirmed in “unwriting” that “to encounter language itself—visual, graphic, literate, contextual—is to experience one’s self the subject, positioned . . . called upon to observe, to participate . . . in the rhetorical manifestations of power.”58 The works of Modern History—with their newspapers emptied of text, that text’s historically specific details, and its commitment to at least the performance of objective inquiry—exaggerate such an experience of interpellation within a repressive social order, motivated by myth more than reason. But in their estrangement of ordinary news consumption, they may also prompt a more reflective response, encouraging viewers to ask questions like the ones that Charlesworth formulated, under the title phrase “Synchronic & Diachronic Structures,” in her working notes from December 5, 1978. At issue in her work, she here proposed, was the matter of “how we perceive events which pattern our image(s) of ‘history.’” “What is ‘history’?” she asked. “What types of ‘events’? What is ‘news’? What is mythology?”59 Charlesworth had first begun to explore these issues in a work called Fourteen Days that she exhibited at MTL Gallery in Brussels in October 1977, the same month that Pictures concluded its run at Artists Space.60 In keeping with her later call to engage with the “positioning” of the self by language, the artist initiated the project by instructing a gallery representative to find “all French, Flemish and Arabic papers, including extremist papers, revolutionary, working class, financial and trade journals, etc.” available in town.61 During the fourteen-day run of the upcoming exhibition, Charlesworth ex44

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plained, she would line the gallery with front pages from fourteen of these selections, tacking up each day’s publications to cover those of the previous day (fig. 1.7). Between the dates of October 18 and 31, she thus offered viewers an opportunity to simultaneously track the progression of news stories over time and compare their relative treatment by culturally and ideologically distinct publishers, representative of the Belgian city’s various linguistic communities and political factions.62 By sheer coincidence, the weeks’ stories ended up being major ones: they included the West German special forces’ storming of the hijacked Lufthansa Flight 181; the suspicious deaths of three imprisoned members of the Red Army Faction, which was implicated in the hijacking; and the resulting execution of the German businessman and former SS lieutenant Hanns Martin Schleyer, whom active RAF guerrillas had kidnapped some six weeks earlier. Accompanying this material was a diagrammatic “map” that graphically represented the newspaper installation alongside two sets of fourteen terms (fig. 1.8). The first of these sets, a “temporal key” corresponding to the chronological dimension of the newspaper installation, contained concepts pertaining to historical perception, among them “continuity,” “contradiction,” “progression,” “rupture,” and “chaos.” The second, a “perspective key” corresponding to the installation’s demographic and ideological array, alluded to social determinants of perception like “language,” “sex,” “nationality,” “class,” and “power, authority, hierarchy.”63 The installation’s final component was a catalogue essay of fourteen paragraphs, each of which appeared on a separate page above Dutch and French translations, in which Charlesworth affirmed her conviction that “a ‘meaning context’ is a ‘political context.’”64 Alluding more concretely to the corresponding installation of newspapers, the artist clarified that “multiplying the perspectives from (in) which an object/event is seen is not to speak out from a position of objectivity or neutrality, but to (re)place us at the very source of value itself,” namely, “conflicting groups in the social world.”65 It is only through the multiplication of locally contextualized and perhaps conflictual perspectives, she suggested, that “insight” might pierce the enforced consensus of “ideology,” allowing “freedom” to triumph over “repression.”66 Charlesworth’s attunement to locality did not conclude with Fourteen Days. On the contrary, the artist specifically developed the subset of Modern History pertaining to the Moro kidnapping—a subject that she no doubt selected in part because of how it echoed the recent RAF saga in West Germany—for a pair of gallery exhibitions that she had been offered in Rome and Florence during the coming summer.67 Unlike Belgium, however, Italy was not just one locale among many for Charlesworth. Since 1973 the artist had spent her summers in Tuscany, where her then-partner, Joseph Kosuth, owned a farm. (Both artists kept studios on the property, using it as a home base for their increasingly extensive dealings with galleries and museums throughout Europe.) Far from settling into the touristic detachment Sarah Charlesworth at the End of Modern History

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Fig. 1.7 Sarah Charlesworth, Fourteen Days, 1977. Installation view, MTL Gallery, Brussels, October 18–November 4, 1977. Newspapers, temporal and perspective keys, and printed catalog. Copyright © The Estate of Sarah Charlesworth. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Fig. 1.8 Temporal and perspective keys for Sarah Charlesworth, Fourteen Days, 1977, at MTL Gallery, Brussels, October 18–November 4, 1977. Newspapers, temporal and perspective keys, and printed catalog. Copyright © The Estate of Sarah Charlesworth. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

of a seasonal resident, Charlesworth in these years developed a subtle understanding of Italy’s media landscape and social dynamics, in particular those involving the nation’s emergent forms of leftist praxis. Her working notes for Modern History include political profiles of seventeen Italian newspapers traversing the ideological spectrum, among them Corriere della Sera (“big capitalist” but “anti-fascist”), L’Unità (“Communist,” “Strict party line”), Secolo d’Italia (“Fascist”), and Lotta Continua (“left of Communists”). In 1979, she contributed visual materials for an upcoming issue of the journal Semiotext(e) devoted to Autonomia, an ethos of extraparliamentary political action that coalesced into a mass movement in Bologna in 1977.68 The Italian context was, in short, a familiar one for Charlesworth, placing her in a position to anticipate the mindset of her initial viewing public with a significant degree of precision.69 Charlesworth and her Italian viewers would have been well aware, for instance, of the fact that the events of April 19, 20, and 21 did not promptly follow Moro’s abduction, that the Red Brigades had actually kidnapped the politician, murdering the five men in his escort, on March 16. The attack occurred as Moro was on his way to parliament to discuss an impending vote of confidence for a government formed by the conservative Christian Democrats (his party) and the Communists, a once-improbable strategic union, largely of Moro’s devising, that had become known as the “Historic Compromise,” rankling the country’s far left and far right alike since the beginning of its implementation in 1973. In the weeks that followed, the Red Brigades released a series of communiqués informing the Italian public that they were putting Moro on “trial” for alleged crimes in the service of American imperialism, global capitalism, and domestic right-wing oppression, and that this extrajudicial procedure had culminated in a death sentence. The unfolding drama momentarily appeared to climax on April 18, when a third party posing as the Red Brigades announced that it had executed Moro and dumped his body in Lake Duchessa, some seventy-five miles northeast of Rome.70 Charlesworth’s April 20, 1978 gathered the resulting photographs of tactical scuba divers, shown descending into holes blasted into the lake’s frozen surface, that appeared in the day’s papers, a spectacle that Charlesworth captioned in her notes as “the ridicule of the search—the manipulation of the state, the media, and ultimately the public” (fig. 1.9).71 Perceptive viewers would thus have been privy to an ironic and, as Charlesworth herself pointed out, morbidly humorous subtext underlying April 20, 1978 and its pendant April 21, 1978: the photograph disseminated by the Red Brigades on April 20, depicting Moro holding a newspaper from the day that Italian special forces were busy scouring Lake Duchessa for his body, served to confirm not just that the statesman was still alive, but more specifically that he had not yet been killed, as the increasingly impotentlooking state seemed to suppose he had.72 In other words, the intended role of the Red Brigades’ image was at once evidentiary and disputative Sarah Charlesworth at the End of Modern History

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Fig. 1.9 Detail of Sarah Charlesworth, April 20, 1978, 1978. Twenty-five black-and-white electrophotographic prints, dimensions variable, each approx. 22 × 16 in. Copyright © The Estate of Sarah Charlesworth. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

of a previous news story propagated by untrustworthy media. Given this context, the emphasized mise-en-abyme effect of April 21 could have read not only as a general observation about the semiotically unstable nature of photographic representation in mass media, but also as a more particular reflection on the Moro story’s informational and counterinformational dynamics.73 The Red Brigades, Charlesworth retrospectively observed, “were effectively kidnapping public attention” through their imprisonment of 48

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Moro, turning “the newspaper itself ” into a “battleground” between sanctioned and unsanctioned agents of historical representation.74 As for the image’s second symbolic layer, the star-shaped emblem of the Red Brigades, most Cold War–era viewers would have readily deciphered the motif as a sign of communist allegiance. For many Italians, however, the imagery was significantly more loaded: it potentially called to mind the precarious foundations of their country’s liberal postwar order, the capacity of which to survive the execution of Moro—one of its prime architects— was by no means guaranteed. The Red Brigades’ founder, Renato Curcio, had based his star on the one adopted by the antifascist Resistance movement that formed in 1943 to combat the Italian Social Republic, the German puppet regime led by Benito Mussolini in northern Italy following the armistice between the Kingdom of Italy and the Allied forces.75 In the decades immediately following the hostilities of World War II, Italy’s civil war remained an open wound, hardly addressed with any conscientiousness by the nation’s postwar governments. Such complacency came to an end in 1964, however, following the formation of a center-left government that for the first time included the Communist Party. At this point the state took a proactively revisionist stance toward recent history, at once lionizing and depoliticizing the Resistance movement by suppressing its support of revolutionary communism and depicting it as a more generalized foe of tyranny, even a protagonist of postwar liberalism.76 Curcio’s reappropriation of the Resistance star was thus an act of pointed countercoding, analogous to the disputative appropriation by Moro’s captors of the previous day’s misleading headlines. More than just a factual correction, however, Curcio’s semiotic intervention implicitly looked ahead to the formation of an altogether different national narrative. In the wake of the student-worker uprisings that had convulsed cities throughout Europe and beyond in 1968, the young revolutionary endeavored to brand his radicalization of underemployed workers, students, and intellectuals as the continuation of a single, unbroken struggle against fascist tyranny, extending back some half a century. During Italy’s turbulent and bloody decade following 1968—what has since become known as the anni di piombo, or the Years of Lead—the threat of a newly emboldened far right was very real. Following a wave of demonstrations by left-wing students, workers, and trade unions that translated into unprecedented gains for the Communist Party in 1970, the neofascist politician Junio Valerio Borghese attempted to set a coup in motion. By this point the extreme right, including agents within the Christian Democratic government and its ministries, had already begun to implement an insidious “strategy of tension” that involved supporting terrorist slaughter with the aim of sowing chaos and prompting an authoritarian takeover.77 In 1969, bombings in Milan and Rome claimed seventeen lives and injured many dozens more. In May 1974, a bomb at an antifascist demonstration in Brescia killed eight and wounded 103, and in August of that year, twelve passenSarah Charlesworth at the End of Modern History

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gers were killed and forty-four wounded by an explosive device planted on a train. The “strategy” in these outrages lay not just in establishing a state of terror, but also in sowing confusion about the motivations behind, responsibility for, and ultimate meaning of the attacks—confusion that played out across Italy’s ideologically variegated news media. In effect, the far right psychologically weaponized the breakdown of Italy’s amnesiac postwar consensus, lethally exacerbating the return of wartime social and political divisions much as the Red Brigades were doing, albeit in a more targeted fashion, from an opposing ideological position. In this regard, Moro’s plight could metonymically represent a wider condition familiar, at least to some degree, to anyone engaged with public life in 1970s Italy. To render him an emblem of the media-saturated everyperson (“the neat reciprocity of our relation”) was to acknowledge the violent realities that attended the contestation of cultural memory in an increasingly polarized era.

Falling Figures Just as the Moro image possessed a latently mnemonic structure, so several of the photographs in Charlesworth’s Stills legibly registered contexts of historical significance. One of the most striking works in the series, Unidentified Woman, Hotel Corona de Aragon, Madrid (1980), for example, represented a calamity that many initial viewers might have recognized as an affair of ongoing sociopolitical concern (fig. 1.10). The depicted figure, falling perfectly straight as her dress billows up around her head, was a victim of a nighttime blaze that engulfed the titular edifice (in fact located in Zaragoza, not Madrid) in July 1979, killing over eighty people. It was a human tragedy that cast a long political shadow, for among the hotel’s guests at the time were the widow of the recently deceased dictator Francisco Franco, their only daughter, the daughter’s husband, and several high-ranking Spanish military personnel. The presence of these officials consequently raised suspicions that the fire had been an assassination attempt by antifascist or Basque separatist groups, a narrative prominently relayed by the Italian magazine Gente, where Charlesworth seems to have encountered the story (fig. 1.11).78 This political context—one with which Charlesworth was evidently conversant, based on her newspaper clippings from previous years—places the work in immediate historical proximity to the artist’s earlier representation of the Moro kidnapping.79 The revolutionary struggles that animated Modern History here impinge on the image once again. If history bears on Unidentified Woman, Hotel Corona de Aragon, Madrid from just beyond the frame, in Unidentified Woman, Genesee Hotel (1980) it makes an iconic entrance (fig. 1.12). Lauded by one reviewer as the “strongest” work in the exhibition, the macabre photograph brims, even within Charlesworth’s close columnar crop, with an array of anecdotal detail that sets it apart from all the other images in the series.80 Its falling figure 50

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Fig. 1.10 Sarah Charlesworth, Unidentified Woman, Hotel Corona de Aragon, Madrid, 1980. Blackand-white mural print, 78 × 42 in. Copyright © The Estate of Sarah Charlesworth. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

appears suspended, arms rigidly outstretched and legs akimbo, above a shop window advertising coffee and sandwiches for ten cents. Inside the shop there are two men, one of whom appears possibly to have sighted (but surely not yet registered) the body rapidly plummeting before him. These men are not the first detail a viewer is likely to notice, however, for pressed Sarah Charlesworth at the End of Modern History

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Fig. 1.11 Clipping of “Nel Vuoto: Piu’ di Ottanta Morti,” Gente, 1979, in the Sarah Charlesworth

Estate archives. Courtesy of the Estate of Sarah Charlesworth and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Fig. 1.12 Sarah Charlesworth, Unidentified Woman, Genesee Hotel, 1980. Black-and-white mural print, 78 × 42 in. Copyright © The Estate of Sarah Charlesworth. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

against the glass in front of them there stands a bright-white poster with a startling exhortation: “Give till it hurts Hitler.” The historical circumstances of the photograph, taken in 1942, thus become unavoidable.81 Coinciding with the year in which Hitler’s regime initiated its genocidal Final Solution, the image’s unexpected reference to Nazism and the United States’ war effort has the effect of casting not just this specific work but all of Stills in terms of collective rather than individualized tragedy. Charlesworth could not have failed to appreciate the historical potency of these images when she selected them from her total store of seventy clippings. Together, their references to fascism—both the apex of its terror and its tragic survival through the artist’s present—reframe the funereal monumentality of Stills, and what Casademont called its “untimely, slow-moving psychological disturbances,” relative to the defining, if continually mutative, ideological conflict of the twentieth century. The historical overtones of Stills would become newly unavoidable in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, following which, Matthew S. Witkovsky has observed, the image of the falling body assumed an enlarged significance from which Charlesworth’s works are now inextricable.82 (The artist decided to expand the series, drawing a second set of images from her original store of clippings, in 2012.) Witkovsky rightly emphasizes the contingency of this connection, warning against regarding Stills as somehow prescient of a geopolitical event that the artist, in 1980, could never have foreseen. But at the same time, he points out, it is possible to view such unanticipated connectivity as crucial to the work and its “untimeliness” in a way that established lines of analysis tend to overlook.83 Charlesworth’s Stills retain the reportorial identity of their source material even as they approach the format of a monument designed to commemorate an imagined, anonymous collectivity. In this way, I have argued, they stage the always mediated processes of perceptual organization that make it possible to experience reality as historical—activated by ideological struggle and shaped by cataclysm—at any given moment of reception. Developed through the artist’s engagement with the violently polarized public sphere of 1970s Italy, the series attests to the real effects of cultural memory, to how the contested symbols, narratives, and identity constructions that render the past perceptible also stand to revivify its conflicts, imperiling bodies in the present. Charlesworth thus embraced and complexified an aspect of Warholian pop that art historians would only later articulate: its efforts to thematize and reflect critically on the modern imagination of community. Like Goldstein and Longo, she did so through the figure of the falling body, a suitably existential symbol for what the artist described as her series’ ultimate object of concern: “the human relationship with temporality” in an age of photographic saturation.84 Like much of the art produced by the larger Pictures group, Charlesworth’s Stills assume what might at first seem an uncomfortably ambiguous 54

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position with respect to the mnemo-historical dynamics that they engage: they evoke the aestheticization of death without overtly repudiating it. Ultimately, however, the community these works imagine is not the national one called forth by tombs of the unknown soldier, but rather the one that Charlesworth envisioned in “Hitler’s Nightmare”: attuned to the visually constructed nature of historical perception and thus endowed, one hopes, with the capacity to reconfigure it toward progressive ends. Not all of Charlesworth’s peers telegraphed such optimistic convictions, however. For Goldstein, the subject of my next chapter, the media-saturated subject of the 1970s was predominantly defined by vulnerability to increasingly sophisticated forms of “control and manipulation.” It was with this condition in mind that Goldstein opted to evoke, at first subtly and then more overtly, the histories of Nazism and the Second World War. The relationship between his thinking about mass media and his emerging historical imaginary, however, is not as straightforward as it might at first seem.

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2 MEMORY TRACES IN THE WORK OF JACK GOLDSTEIN

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o single work looms larger in Jack Goldstein’s oeuvre than The Jump (1978), a 16 mm film loop in which four shimmering figures sequentially spring, somersault, dive, and disappear into an inky void (figs. 2.1 and 2.2, plate 3). Goldstein—or, more directly, his hired assistants— achieved this visual effect with the aid of a rotoscope, a device that allows an animator manually to trace over a projected source film, frame by frame. Beginning with found footage of high divers, Goldstein converted the depicted athletes into silhouettes, filled these outlines with a pattern of glowing, reddish facets, and set them before an entirely black backdrop, purged of contextual elements like the springboard or the pool.1 As a result of this abstraction, the depicted bodies seem to vanish when they hit the water, only to rematerialize moments later for another leap. The first two routines appear in slow motion, the third proceeds at a normal rate, and the fourth is reduced to two staccato flashes of a single frame. Beautiful, enigmatic, and haunting in its enactment of isolation and recurring disappearance, the entire sequence unfolds in under thirty seconds, then begins anew. The Jump astonished many of Goldstein’s peers. Robert Longo, who screened it at the Kitchen Center for Video and Music during his tenure as interim curator there in 1979, regarded the film as technically and visually “miraculous.”2 Mike Kelley, who graduated from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) not long after Goldstein did, likewise marveled at its unapologetic use of Hollywood-style “special effects.” Deploying these techniques amounted to a bold transgression of high-modernist boundaries separating the domain of art from that of popular entertainment— bolder, even, than what 1960s pop had attempted in this regard. For Kelley,

Fig. 2.1 Still from Jack Goldstein, The Jump, 1978. 16 mm film, color, silent, 26 seconds. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (2021.M.6). Copyright © J. Paul Getty Trust. Courtesy of Galerie Buchholz and the Estate of Jack Goldstein.

Fig. 2.2 Still from Jack Goldstein, The Jump, 1978. 16 mm film, color, silent, 26 seconds. Los

Angeles, Getty Research Institute (2021.M.6). Copyright © J. Paul Getty Trust. Courtesy of Galerie Buchholz and the Estate of Jack Goldstein.

Goldstein’s gesture carried with it a renewed and expanded license to “look at the culture that we grew up in,” however kitsch that might have been, as a point of departure for one’s work.3 The same qualities that Kelley perceived as liberating could also raise the specter of something darker and more nefarious, however, particularly when viewed in light of the film’s more melancholy, existential overtones. As Goldstein himself explained, provocatively, in an interview from 1981, employing the “language of the media” enabled him to “manipulate and control the audience” using “the same processes that the culture utilizes.”4 A press release accompanying The Jump’s 1979 exhibition at the Foundation for Art Resources in Los Angeles similarly identified “control and manipulation” as “the core idea” of the film—adding, however, that the artist also “speaks of this work as a ‘leap of faith’ in the Kierkegaardian sense of the phrase.”5 Was Goldstein’s animation an enactment of freedom or a token of repression? The work leaves this ambiguity suggestively unresolved. The Jump proved to be a watershed in Goldstein’s oeuvre. In 1979, the artist turned decisively toward acrylic painting, concluding the experimentation with film, photomontage, audio collage, and performance that had secured his vanguard credentials over the course of the preceding years and so impressed his peers.6 The motif of the falling figure persisted across this shift in media, however, appearing in many of the artist’s large-scale canvases from the years around 1980.7 Goldstein had first introduced such imagery a few years earlier with The Pull, a three-panel photomontage in which the minuscule figures of a deep-sea diver, a falling man, and an astronaut respectively appear suspended before pale expanses of green, blue, and gray (fig. 2.3). In his later paintings, many of them based on World War II–era photographs depicting scenes of aerial warfare, the falling body began to assume more historically loaded shapes. Paratroopers descend from a distant zeppelin (figs. 2.4 and 2.5) and a soaring bomber (plate 4) in a pair of untitled works from 1980. An example from the following year fills out the implicit context: derived with little alteration from Margaret Bourke-White’s famous 1941 photograph of a German raid on Moscow, it depicts a nighttime sky ablaze with tracer bullets, parachute-suspended flares, antiaircraft fire, and ambient illumination from the burning Russian capital (fig. 2.6). Critics struggled to articulate the substance of Goldstein’s martial imagery, which was liable to read as just another iteration of the blasts and bombers that Roy Lichtenstein, Gerhard Richter, Vija Celmins, and other artists in the vicinity of pop had depicted some two decades earlier. Richard Flood declared Goldstein’s paintings “so one-dimensional that they beggar any attempts at interpretation,” concluding that they were “exactly what they appear to be: literal, attractive graphics.”8 Jon Hutton similarly perceived the artist’s wartime scenes as representations from which “historical fact, heroic fantasy, sentimentality, and moralizing rhetoric” had been Memory Traces in the Work of Jack Goldstein

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Fig. 2.3 Jack Goldstein, The Pull, 1976. Three chromogenic prints, each frame 30 × 40 in. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Purchase, Buddy Taub Foundation Gift and Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2009 (2009.293a–c). Copyright © J. Paul Getty Trust. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, New York.

Fig. 2.4 Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1980. Oil on Masonite, 46 × 91 in. Copyright © J. Paul Getty

Trust. Photograph courtesy of 1301PE, Los Angeles.

Fig. 2.5 Detail of Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1980. Oil on Masonite, 46 × 91 in. Copyright © J. Paul

Getty Trust. Photograph courtesy of 1301PE, Los Angeles.

Fig. 2.6 Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1981. Acrylic on canvas, 84 × 132 in. Copyright © J. Paul Getty

Trust.

“virtually eliminated,” such that “only the ‘spectacle’ aspects remain important.”9 If Goldstein’s new work was indeed so fundamentally concerned with spectacle, however, whence his sudden decision to separate it from the photographic media that continued to constitute its source material? After all, films like The Jump had demonstrated the rewards of engaging such modern formats, in all their problematic seductiveness, more directly. The artist’s progression suggested a capitulation to economic pressures; apart from such a market-driven motive, the logic behind his shift in media was not self-evident.10 The curator Douglas Eklund articulates a widely held view when he concludes, in consequence, that The Jump had marked the “summit” of the artist’s career, an achievement that his subsequent paintings “would never match.”11 In this chapter I will argue that The Jump indeed represents a crucial work in Goldstein’s oeuvre. Rather than using it to underscore established divisions between succeeding phases in the artist’s career, however, I will position the film as an inflection point within a more continuous, if evolving, engagement with select concerns that preoccupied him across his various pursuits and came to a head in the years around 1980. These concerns centered to a large extent on the power of modern media and their susceptibility to abuse, an eventuality that remained indelibly associated with total62

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itarianism and the atrocities surrounding World War II. This being the case, the historically specific imagery that initially predominated Goldstein’s painting practice might be read as allegorical, emblematizing through metonymy the same concerns about mass manipulation and social control that tacitly animated The Jump. War and spectacle most certainly converge in the visually astonishing Bourke-White photograph that Goldstein monumentalized in 1981.12 Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine a more direct embodiment of Walter Benjamin’s concluding warning from his 1935–36 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”: that, under fascism, humankind’s “self-alienation” had “reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.”13 By appropriating such highly aestheticized records of mass destruction, Goldstein activated a set of historical as well as theoretical associations that previously lay latent in his work in film and other media. Goldstein’s thinking also centered, however, on a second-order phenomenon with which the scholarly literature has not yet fully engaged: namely, the role of media in the processes, at once social and perceptual, by which we come to apprehend our reality as “historical” at all. Consider a pair of aphorisms that the artist published on the occasion of Documenta 7 (1982), where he was exhibiting an air raid painting from the previous year. “Art made from media captures the spectacle a ‘self-destructive civilization’ makes of itself,” the artist pessimistically asserted. “Paintings are like movie sets that showcase special effects as edited from a world narrative.”14 Goldstein, I propose, was deeply interested in how such “world narratives” impress themselves on the individual, which is to say, he was interested in the mechanisms of cultural memory. The Jump marked a key moment in Goldstein’s development of this inquiry and his efforts to convey it through symbolic form. For him, as for peers like Sarah Charlesworth (chapter 1) and Robert Longo (chapter 4), subjection to the mnemo-historical crystallized in the figure of the leaping, or falling, body.

Rumors about The Jump The Jump had in fact attained an outsized and in certain ways totemic significance before it was even completed. This was thanks to Douglas Crimp, who accorded pride of place to the work in progress, sight unseen, in the essay accompanying his 1977 Pictures exhibition.15 For Crimp, the import of the film lay not in its technical sophistication or spectacular sheen—qualities that he could not have verified at the time of writing—but rather in what he perceived to be its underlying philosophical gesture. This inhered in the abstractive nature of the rotoscoping process, “a drawing that is simultaneously an erasure,” and how such displacement precluded the illusion of immediacy that Goldstein’s source film would presumably have possessed.16 The artist’s act of simultaneously tracing and masking a set of found images, Memory Traces in the Work of Jack Goldstein

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the critic argued, effectively formalized a key poststructuralist insight: that “we only experience reality through the pictures we make of it.”17 Other works by Goldstein afforded similar realizations. Shortly before beginning The Jump, for instance, the artist had devised a performancebased tableau called Two Fencers (1977) that staged a bout of the titular contest—another Olympic sport—under otherworldly green spotlighting to a soundtrack evocative of old swashbuckler films, and then repeated the musical component by itself in darkness (fig. 2.7).18 Two Boxers (1979) would offer a variation on the same conceit: here Goldstein introduced a silent, cinematically strobe-lit match with “rousingly loud Prussian marching music” and followed it with the same, but at a lower volume.19 In both works, repeating the auditory component encouraged audiences to restage the preceding duels in their minds’ eyes, invariably altering them in the process. “Cued by the continued presence of the music,” Crimp observed of Two Fencers, “one might replace the original image with a scene from, say, a Douglas Fairbanks movie,” in effect re-creating one’s own perceptual experience through the lens of common cultural reference points, or “pictures”: presences that are, at the same time, “erasures” of the here-and-now. Recursive and palimpsestic, this was a process better described by the term “re-remembering” than by “remembering.”20 In the years that followed, Crimp came to regard such emphasis on

Fig. 2.7 Jack Goldstein, Two Fencers, 1977. Performance, Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneva, 1977. Copyright © J. Paul Getty Trust. Photograph courtesy of 1301PE, Los Angeles.

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deferral and mediation as definitive not only of Goldstein’s oeuvre but also of a larger “sensibility” emerging in contemporary art, organized around the “quotation, excerptation [sic], framing and staging” of received imagery.21 He pointed, for example, to works like Sherrie Levine’s President Collages (1978–79): images from women’s magazines, cropped to the silhouetted profiles of several American presidents. These nested representations of the commercial and the national, the feminine and the masculine, likewise gestured toward the “stratified” nature of signification—how “underneath each picture there is always another picture.”22 Crimp cited Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1977–80), a landmark series of photographs in which the artist mimicked recognizable scenarios, cinematographic conventions, and female character types derived from certain 1950s and 1960s film genres, for similar reasons. These, too, were palimpsestic, superimposing Sherman’s image onto her implicit cultural referents in something like the way that Goldstein’s rotoscoping simultaneously registered and masked his own source material. The Jump thus took its place as herald of a larger movement, lately historicized as the Pictures Generation, motivated by its members’ critical fascination with the products and effects of contemporary mass culture. What kinds of cultural referents might The Jump, for its part, have evoked? Goldstein’s interpreters have increasingly prioritized this line of inquiry. In doing so, they have raised new questions about the film—and, in particular, its source material—that Crimp’s poststructuralist reading had initially rendered all but irrelevant. Was this “a ‘jump’ off a building onto the pavement,” Vera Dika asked in an essay from 2003, “or a ‘dive’ into a swimming pool?”23 Goldstein’s radically decontextualized film, she observed, inevitably invites and frustrates such queries in a way that is bound to inform viewers’ experiences of the work. And what about the original film over which Goldstein’s animators traced? Was this indeed just “stock super-8 footage,” as Crimp averred in 1979, or could it possibly have been something more significant?24 “Almost in response to these absences,” Dika wrote, “a kind of ‘rumor’ (thus mimicking a cultural code) is allowed to circulate through the gallery show of which The Jump is a part”: Through a series of conversations we learn that this sequence was originally part of a black-and-white documentary film made by Leni Riefenstahl in 1936 [sic] called Olympia. Everything changes now as history intercedes. An ominous quality clings to the image, and its very pleasure, even its simplicity, is revealed to be somehow menacing. There is also a vague sense of guilt at having participated in—at having been seduced by—its beauty.25

Dika was not the first interpreter of Goldstein’s film to invoke Olympia (1938), Riefenstahl’s Nazi-sponsored documentary of the 1936 Olympic Memory Traces in the Work of Jack Goldstein

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Games.26 In an article from two years prior, Tom Holert had likewise suggested, albeit more tentatively, that it would “be possible” to “relate the glittering high divers in The Jump . . . to the extensive high diving sequences in Riefenstahl’s Olympic film.”27 Dika, however, seems to have been the first to suggest—at least in print—that Goldstein directly derived his imagery from this infamous source as opposed to the nameless stock footage cited by Crimp, a revelation that would indeed demand a radical rethinking of the work and its significance. Writing in 2009, Eklund repeated Dika’s “rumor” as plain fact, allowing its morbid overtones to inform his interpretation of Goldstein’s film as a “meta-examination of how ever-advancing visual technologies are always, at bottom, about providing ever more pleasurable, yet narcotizing, scenarios for putting the knowledge of death at bay.”28 Philipp Kaiser, citing Eklund, has gone so far as to read The Jump’s admixture of existential poetics and spectacular form as a meditation on “the power of mass media in National Socialism.”29 Tendentious though they might at first seem, these are credible interpretations, borne out not only by the wartime imagery of Goldstein’s later paintings but also by statements that the artist himself had made about The Jump and his larger project from the time. Consider a letter that he wrote to Morgan Thomas, a board member at the Foundation for Art Resources, prior to the foundation’s exhibition of his film in March 1979. In his missive, Goldstein ventured what must have been a surprising if not shocking connection between his use of animation to “control” the work’s pictorial space, his anticipation of a future devoid of “spontaneity,” and the Nazi regime’s use of pageantry and propaganda to awe the German masses into submission.30 “I have always felt sad when viewing the Natzies [sic] in world war 2 that they lost the war since their pomp, flags, banners, uniforms, music etc. were so beautiful to watch,” admitted Goldstein, whose father was Jewish and served in the Canadian Army during World War II.31 “Does that tell us something about the nature of war and that through aesthetics we can seduce the masses for whatever ends we have in mind???”32 Looking back on his air raid paintings in 2001, two years before his death, Goldstein reiterated that he had been “interested in spectacle,” and that “war is spectacle.” The “Third Reich was pure spectacle,” he added; “they certainly understood media, didn’t they?”33 Such preoccupations were by no means lost on the artist’s initial interpreters. As this chapter will discuss, in the years around 1980 his erstwhile classmate David Salle, the elder artist Dan Graham, and the critic Rosetta Brooks all produced incisive readings of Goldstein’s practice—each of them informed, implicitly or explicitly, by Frankfurt school critical theory—as an intentionally provocative meditation on the manipulativeness of spectacle and the dangerous link between mass culture and mass politics. The German critic Klaus Honnef advanced a somewhat blunter version of the argument in 1983. “For [Goldstein], the advertising of Madison Avenue and 66

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the aesthetic of commercial mass media merely represent a contemporary variant [of Nazi tactics],” he wrote. “In reality, the modern ad councils and masters of mass media use the same source as the Nazi propagandists did: an undiminished ability to speak in affective image forms and art historical configurations, which have survived the attacks of the avant-garde undamaged.”34 Here was an interpretation of Goldstein’s imagery as allegory; his work, a critical mapping of the past onto the present. Paintings like his untitled works from 1980 and 1981 not only evoked a dark, receding chapter of recent history, Honnef suggested, but also indicated the survival of repressive propaganda tactics in a contemporary cultural landscape that, like The Jump, might otherwise appear comparatively anodyne.35 As for the claim that Goldstein drew on Olympia, specifically, in the creation of his 1978 film, this too possesses a compelling plausibility. In the 1970s, there were arguably no more paradigmatic documents-cumrepresentatives of the Third Reich’s militarized spectacle (or aestheticized militarism) than Riefenstahl’s Olympic documentary and its predecessor Triumph of the Will (1935). Long proscribed from mainstream circulation, these works resurfaced in the mid-1960s on aesthetic grounds and grew increasingly visible as Riefenstahl’s “rehabilitation,” as Susan Sontag put it, progressed.36 By the time that Goldstein conceptualized The Jump, Olympia was regularly being screened in repertory cinemas and even shown on public television: beginning in 1968, the Summer Olympics became a quadrennial occasion to air the director’s artful document of the 1936 games.37 Needless to say, the film’s diving sequence in particular would have held a special resonance for Goldstein, who regarded the airborne body as a powerful symbol and eventually established it as one of his oeuvre’s major motifs. A tour de force of cinematographic and editorial technique, Riefenstahl’s passage concludes with a slow-motion montage that cuts from one dive to the next before the pool below ever comes into view, thereby interlinking the celestially framed arcs of the athletes’ jumps into one gravity-defying spectacle. The result is at once ecstatic and vertiginous, potentially suggestive of a nation leaping toward catastrophe. Helene Winer—director of Artists Space at the time of the Pictures exhibition, and Goldstein’s romantic partner for much of the 1970s—confirms the salience that this material possessed within her and Goldstein’s circle. Circa 1978, she maintains, the merest reference to high diving would have been enough to summon Riefenstahl’s oeuvre and all its toxic ideological baggage.38 A side-by-side analysis of The Jump and Olympia, however, readily disproves that Goldstein used the latter as his source.39 The first of Goldstein’s divers, filling the vertical length of the frame, executes a backflip from a stationary position, turning one and a half times to enter the pool head first; the second, captured from a medium distance, steps forward, springs off the board, and somersaults forward one and a half times to dive in head first; and the third, filmed from above, steps forward and springs off the board Memory Traces in the Work of Jack Goldstein

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into a backflip, once again turning one and a half times to enter the water head first. Of the many dives featured in Olympia, very few of them conform to one of these formations, and each of these corresponding instances differs obviously from Goldstein’s animation, whether in the athlete’s movements on the board, the camera angle, the cropping of the figure, or another such formal detail.40 Olympia might well be considered a part of Goldstein’s work, then, but only in the sense that Douglas Fairbanks films were a part of Two Fencers. Its presence was a product of “re-remembering” or, following Dika, “rumor,” not direct inclusion in the rotoscoping process.41 This distinction might seem beside the point, considering the artist’s statement from his 1979 letter. Even if Goldstein did not trace directly over a projection of Olympia, he evidently had in mind precisely such politicized spectacle when he undertook The Jump, and he plausibly sought out footage of high diving in particular because of its indelible association with Riefenstahl’s film. (Indeed, Dika has recently clarified that it was Goldstein himself who started the rumor in question—in part by telling her, a critic, that he was doing so.)42 The artist’s recent interpreters have been attuned to these intentions. Their assumptions have no doubt also been informed by the concept of “appropriation” that emerged in the years around 1980 as a master key to the work of the Pictures group writ large, subsuming the more various tactics of “quotation, excerptation, framing, and staging” that Crimp initially identified.43 To say that Goldstein “appropriated” stock footage—material without a claim to meaningful historical or authorial identity—would make little sense. To say that he pirated one of the most notorious films of the twentieth century, on the other hand, implies a critical gesture of obvious significance, suggesting all manner of concerns regarding authorship and ethics, spectacle and agency. The attribution error is, in this sense, of only minor import in itself. The readiness with which it has been adopted, however, points to a larger and more problematic set of limitations governing the discourse around Goldstein’s work. Agency and spectacle were indeed matters of profound significance to the artist, but to place them under the implicit sign of appropriation when no such maneuver in fact occurred can mystify the precise nature of their operation within his oeuvre. The problem, in brief, is this: tethering The Jump too closely to Riefenstahl can overdetermine the film’s significance, reducing it to a commentary on Nazi aestheticism and passing over what is in fact a more nuanced relationship between Goldstein’s manifest concern with mass politics and what Crimp earlier identified as his engagement with the dynamics of memory. Crimp understood that the art of Goldstein and his peers was somehow concerned not only with media and semiotics but also with the experience of time—with the heightened, distended, or otherwise altered sense of temporality that comes with seeing reality as something endlessly deferred, or mediated, by representation. As he wrote in the Pictures catalogue, not only 68

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did the work in question involve “time spent, time lavished,” but it was also “about time, the time of reading (of a fixed stare), about the time of memory, and about those emotions which are fundamentally temporal: longing, nostalgia, presentiment, anxiety, expectation, dread.”44 Crimp was not alone in recognizing these dynamics. In a closely contemporaneous article, Valentin Tatransky argued that a recent work by Levine in which she reproduced images of children from a how-to-draw manual “subverts an image originally intended illustratively” and “fills it with the emotional resonance of memory.”45 The artist Thomas Lawson, in an essay likewise published in the spring of 1979, confirmed that his and Levine’s cohort was acutely interested in “psychological structures, especially memory and dreams.” Yet unlike the Surrealists, Lawson explained, they did not perceive in these imaginative domains a promise of liberation from prevailing societal and intellectual strictures. On the contrary, he argued, what they found in them was proof of “our imprisonment within the codes and languages of our culture” and an opportunity to explore critically this carceral condition.46 The Jump, with its darkly dreamlike rhythm of recurrence and repetition, brought these perceptual and cultural modalities to the fore, emblematizing the intertwinement of memory and mediation to which Lawson alluded even as it added a historical dimension to the discussion. In Goldstein’s implicit framework, the individualized experience of historical time cannot be teased apart from a collectively maintained, mass-mediated store of images. This, he understood, was a situation rife with potential for “manipulation,” but one over which he nonetheless believed it was possible to achieve a modicum of “control.”

The Aesthetics of Control “Distance Equals Control” was the title of the catalogue essay David Salle wrote for Goldstein’s 1978 exhibition at Hallwalls, a gallery space founded by Robert Longo and Charles Clough in Buffalo, New York. At the time of this exhibition, Goldstein remained focused on his work in media like performance and sound collage. The latter, materialized in the form of vinyl records, pursued eidetic effects akin to the one that Crimp attributed to Two Fencers, even in the absence of any visual stimuli: The Six Minute Drown (1977), for instance, combined clips of splashing noises, cries, and grunts to disquieting effect. It was the artist’s engagement with film, however, that seemed the most dynamic. While a student at CalArts, Goldstein had created a series of postminimalist works in which he recorded himself performing simple (if often painful, arduous, or violent) tasks; A Nail (1971), his first effort in this vein, captures the artist in profile as he struggles to remove the titular spike from a plank of wood using just his teeth. In 1975, he removed his body from the frame and reinvented himself as a “producer,” employing the talent and resources of Los Angeles’s entertainment industry Memory Traces in the Work of Jack Goldstein

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to create short, exquisite works of studio-caliber artifice. With The Jump, he had expanded his creative reach yet again. But what was one to make of Goldstein’s “Hollywood period” productions—psychologically charged tableaux, each centered on a single enigmatic action and motif?47 To comprehend these novel works, Salle argued, one had to understand his essay’s titular equation. Consider five examples, all from 1975. In A Ballet Shoe we see just the satin-clad foot of a dancer standing en pointe (fig. 2.8). She holds the pose as two similarly disembodied hands, one on either side, slowly pull the ends of her ankle ribbon toward the edges of the frame. When the bow unties, the hands withdraw and the dancer descends. The Chair was longer in duration, though hardly more complex in its conceit (plate 5). Over the course of five minutes, artificially colored feathers flutter down on a banker’s chair coated in what appears to be black tar, adhering to it where they make contact. The Knife, for its part, records the movements of reflected lights—tinted hues of red, blue, and white—across the length of a gleaming blade. Another work, Shane, frames a brightly illuminated German shepherd against a black backdrop, recording the fearsome animal as it repeatedly barks in response to signals from an unseen trainer (fig. 2.9). Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer achieved a similar effect through appropriation: to create this work, Goldstein extracted the lion’s roar that opens the titular studio’s films, set it

Fig. 2.8 Still from Jack Goldstein, A Ballet Shoe, 1975. 16 mm film, color, silent, 43 seconds.

Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (2021.M.6). Copyright © J. Paul Getty Trust. Courtesy of Galerie Buchholz and the Estate of Jack Goldstein.

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Fig. 2.9 Still from Jack Goldstein, Shane, 1975. 16 mm film, color, sound, 3 minutes. Los Angeles,

Getty Research Institute (2021.M.6). Copyright © J. Paul Getty Trust. Courtesy of Galerie Buchholz and the Estate of Jack Goldstein.

before a vivid red background, and repeated it on loop over the course of three minutes. There was something unsettling about these works despite their beauty. In Salle’s reading, this dark and melancholy quality issued not only from their unyielding repetitiousness and sometimes- threatening imagery (knives, attack dogs), but also from the fact that the emotions conjured by their motifs (the only such emotion Salle specifies is “dread”) seemed always to be the ones that “we expect them to have in the first place.” For Salle, such congruence called into question the existence of “something which is supposedly a positive force in life—spontaneity.”48 The implications of its absence were significant: besides being a “positive force,” spontaneity was also, according to the postwar decades’ prevailing existentialist frameworks, the moral ground of democratic politics.49 A “relationship that I will only mention here, but which is important to the cultural meaning of Goldstein’s methodology, is the one that exists between automaticity (the slip [sic] side of the coin of spontaneity) and Fascism,” Salle wrote, adding that “Jack has often said, not completely unseriously, that he considers his work to be Fascistic.”50 As Salle observed, Goldstein’s politically evocative “methodology” marked a significant intervention within the established strains of postwar American art. Whereas pop artists from the 1960s had transposed imagery Memory Traces in the Work of Jack Goldstein

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from mass media to traditional fine art formats like the canvas painting, Goldstein more faithfully replicated the production methods and surface appearances of contemporary mass cultural products—television programs and commercials in particular.51 Such convergence rendered the artist’s work uniquely suspect, not to say “fascistic”: his films exuded “a greater sense of complicity” with the entertainment and advertising industries’ manipulative and homogenizing protocols than even pop art had done.52 The “paradox” of Goldstein’s practice, Salle proposed, lay in its attempt to wrest a critical position from this very act of emulation, somehow achieving “distance” through proximity. It was precisely by “aligning [his] art with the presentational modes which are used culturally to control and limit our sense of self,” he wrote, that Goldstein sought the means “to distance or liberate oneself from that control and to establish a greater level of control.”53 In other words, Goldstein heightened the formulaic artifice of mass culture to such a degree that its machinations became transparent. At least in theory, he could thus subject those machinations to intellectual mastery and critique. At stake in this work, Salle seemed to suggest, was nothing less than the possibility of individual freedom, however momentary, from manipulation and conformity in public life. Salle compared Goldstein’s strategy of setting familiar social or cultural phenomena at an intellectual “distance” to the German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s deployment of “alienation effects” in his theatrical work.54 Yet Salle, Goldstein, and Levine, all of whom were teaching at Hartford Art School in the late 1970s, might also have arrived at the idea through another Nazi-era refugee whose work they each incorporated into their pedagogy around this time. This was Douglas Sirk, an Austrian director who fled Berlin for Hollywood and reinvented himself as an auteur melodramatist with films like All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956), and Imitation of Life (1959).55 The latter film made a particularly indelible impact on Salle, who recalls first seeing it with Levine at a screening that took place, tellingly, at the Museum of Modern Art. “I remember saying to her afterward that I really despaired of ever being able to make anything this great, a work of art anywhere near as great as that film,” Salle told Peter Schjeldahl in an interview from 1987. “I saw that film many times subsequently, and that feeling never went away.”56 Based on Fannie Hurst’s 1933 novel of the same name, Imitation of Life nominally centers on a White actress named Lora Meredith and the triangular dynamic that develops between her, her daughter Susie, and her suitor Steve, an amateur photographer. In Sirk’s adaptation, however, the emotional center of gravity soon shifts to the intertwined story of Lora’s Black live-in housekeeper, Annie, and her light-skinned daughter, Sarah Jane, tragic characters whose fates are set in motion by the latter’s resolve to pass as White. Needless to say, these plot dynamics are inextricable from the film’s affective power. What avowedly impressed Salle so much about 72

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the work, however, lay less in its storytelling and more in its deliberate stylization, its rejection of illusionistic naturalism in favor of stark lighting, artificial color, contrived symbolism, clichéd dialogue, and exaggerated expressivity. “It struck me as exemplary—an exemplary degree of selfconsciousness and control—visual control on the part of the artist in calling your attention to how he felt about the subject matter without there being any apparent intrusion of interpretive morality into the [diegetic] context,” Salle explained.57 For Levine, who lent her copies of the director’s films to Goldstein for his own seminar, works like Imitation of Life exemplified an “economy of means” akin to the one that Goldstein himself employed in his tightly focused yet psychologically affecting works of performance and short-form cinema.58 Like Sirk, Goldstein intensified the artificiality of his scenarios in a way that laid bare the conventional nature of their imagery, in effect exposing its concomitant capacity to guide and possibly manipulate a viewer’s perceptions, expectations, and affective responses. These readings accord with what the film scholar Paul Willemen, a key reference for Levine as she developed her Hartford course, hailed as Sirk’s ability to create a “distance between the film and its narrative pretext,” thereby affording sophisticated viewers a critical position onto the very sentimentality that his works so dutifully supplied for their primary audiences.59 For Willemen and several other interpreters who set about rehabilitating Sirk’s reputation in the 1970s, among them Thomas Elsaesser and the German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, films like Imitation of Life were not only melodramas but also potential metamelodramas, subtle travesties of Eisenhower-era America that dramatized, if not overtly criticized, the contradictions between its reigning fantasies of the consumerist good life and its yawning social divisions along the axes of class, gender, and race.60 Sirk could thus be understood as modeling the kind of critically selfconscious approach to spectacle that Crimp and others would later attribute to the Pictures group. Unlike Sirk’s melodramas, however, Goldstein’s films presented no humanistic narratives or straightforwardly legible social messages beneath their spectacular surfaces. As a result, they seemed merely to thematize what Salle described in his 1978 essay as mass culture’s conditioning of individual experience and consequent dooming of “spontaneity.” It was in this sense that they left themselves open to charges of complicity, even an indulgence of “fascistic” tendencies. Dan Graham took up this “fascistic” quality in an article from 1981, presenting it—and by extension Goldstein’s larger oeuvre—as emblematic of a broader cultural shift: what he greeted, in his title, as “the end of liberalism.” Contrary to the precepts of this long-ascendant ideology, Graham proclaimed, “fascism didn’t ‘die’ with the cessation of World War II, replaced by an avant-garde, progressive art, but remains the repressed collective unconsciousness of the present.”61 The slippage in that sentence between political and cultural institutions (fascism “replaced by” art) was central to the Memory Traces in the Work of Jack Goldstein

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author’s larger polemic, which equated postwar modernism with postwar liberalism—shorthand for the belief that free markets and consensus politics represented the only viable alternative to totalitarianism—by casting both as efforts to bury a political threat that in fact remained alive, lying latent even within themselves. Citing Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s comparison of American advertising and Nazi propaganda in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Graham identified “fascist” or protofascist qualities not only in the psychological manipulativeness of corporate capitalism but also in the imposing monumentalism of abstract expressionist painting, consumer culture’s purported adversary.62 He then hailed pop art and punk rock as allied attempts to unmask liberalism’s contradictions, whether by violating the modernist isolation of “avant-garde” from “kitsch” or circulating taboo symbols like the swastika.63 Goldstein’s recent work, Graham proposed, belonged to this emerging critical lineage. By submitting both the content and the techniques of popular media for sustained contemplation, he suggested, films like The Jump revealed the nature of their references as “massconditioning apparatuses like those of Nazi Europe,” designed to inculcate “terror and fear.”64 If Goldstein replicated the sheen of Hollywood spectacle, he implied, it was to expose the culture industry’s slick mechanisms of compelling conformity and achieving social control. Graham’s revisionary art historical argument—that pop, punk, and the work of the Pictures group constituted a coherent critical tradition, attuned to the manipulative nature of mass media and opposed to the liberalist ethos ostensibly affirmed by postwar modernist abstraction—was conveyed as much by his essay itself as by the forum in which it appeared. This was ZG, a London-based arts and culture magazine founded in 1980 by the critic Rosetta Brooks and the designer Garrard Martin. Previous issues of the publication carried thematic titles such as “Image Culture” and “Sadomasochism: Its Expression and Style in Film, Fashion, Photography, and Art.”65 The magazine’s fourth installment, titled “Future Dread,” presented Graham’s “The End of Liberalism” amid a variety of content addressing the recent surge of Nazi or otherwise fascist references in British and American culture. An essay titled “The Best Uniforms,” illustrated by a serially repeated photograph of a young man wearing a British Movement jacket and a Nazi armband, distinguished the earnest deployment of such imagery by followers of Britain’s neofascist groups from its more cavalier appropriation by punk and postpunk bands like the Sex Pistols, Joy Division, New Order, and the Skids.66 A profile of Jenny Holzer revealed her to be the author of a political screed that had been published in the advertising space of the magazine’s previous issue; as the profile explained, this was “not, as some seem to have believed, a proclamation of an ultra-right or ultra-left organization,” but rather a text-based work of art, part of her Inflammatory Essays (1979–82).67 A review of Gilbert and George’s midcareer survey at Whitechapel Gallery, meanwhile, identified in their work “the suggestion—both in content and 74

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scale—of a right-wing propaganda art.”68 Martin’s cover image for the issue symbolized the convoluted temporality that seemed to pervade this discourse, articulated at a moment of conservative revanche (fig. 2.10). His photomontage transformed Der Wächter (The Guard), a 1941 relief by the Nazi-sponsored sculptor Arno Breker, into a Janus figure. Peering into the future, the doubled sentry fixates simultaneously on the past. In her introductory editorial, Brooks reflected on what seemed to be

Fig. 2.10 Garrard Martin, cover of ZG, number 2 (“Future Dread”), 1981. Copyright © Garrard

Martin.

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unfolding in the present. With the consensus politics of liberalism and their assumption of a “shared terrain of reason” ostensibly in disrepute, she concluded, a patchwork of artists, urban subcultures, and marginalized social groups had improbably converged in embracing “the symbolism and rhetoric of fascism” to register their disaffection with the status quo—an antiauthoritarian reversal of Orwellian doublespeak.69 On the facing page, a collage of thematically related images illustrated the editor’s points: Nazi soldiers appear beside a homoerotic drawing of two brawny men in gleaming jackboots by Tom of Finland; David Bowie, recently accused of far-right sympathies, abuts a Hitler Youth poster; and British lads seem to give the Hitler salute to the punk rocker Siouxsie Sioux, shown modeling leather lingerie and a swastika armband.70 Placed in this context, Goldstein’s work convincingly appeared as part of a broader, transatlantic movement in which the recurring specter of fascism had emerged as a central conceit, critically troubling a receding postwar illusion of consensus and its associated forms of artistic expression. On Graham’s suggestion, Brooks devoted the entirety of ZG’s subsequent issue to the burgeoning New York art scene and Goldstein’s work in particular.71 In her profile on the artist, titled “Life in Space,” she reiterated many of the Frankfurt school arguments that underlay “The End of Liberalism.” Advertising under monopoly capitalism, Adorno and Horkheimer had asserted, “becomes simply the art with which Goebbels presciently equated it, l’art pour l’art, advertising for advertising’s sake, the pure representation of social power.”72 Goldstein’s interest, Brooks suggested, accordingly lay in the “autonomy” of mass media images from the realities of social life, and the point at which such falsified representations “become total (totalitarian) in their command.” Hence his fascination with fascist pageantry and propaganda: “the Nazis,” Brooks wrote, “were the first to fully use the power of the media, to fully exploit the falsity which the media represent.”73 Hence, also, his stated admiration for American painters of the “liberalist” era like Barnett Newman, who sought to achieve an analogous—but purportedly emancipatory—state of autonomy through abstraction. Newman pursued a state of sublime transcendence, freed from the logic of repressive institutions; he once claimed that if his work were “properly understood, it would be the end of state capitalism and totalitarianism.”74 Goldstein offered a form of emancipation better suited to his disillusioned age: the capacity to see “the imprint of popular culture in oneself,” and so to “control our self control.”75 Accompanying Brooks’s article were reproductions of three representative works: an untitled air raid painting from 1981, a detail from The Pull, and a five-frame reproduction from The Jump. What her essay left implicit these illustrations made clear. Goldstein’s recurring figure of the falling body was a at once a memento mori and a cipher for the postwar individual—in thrall to, but struggling to achieve some measure of auton76

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omy from, the variously seductive and oppressive machinations of modern spectacle. As these early analyses by Salle, Graham, and Brooks make plain, the more recent attempts to link The Jump and Olympia are only the latest in a long-standing and generally well-founded effort to discover, in the concept of “fascist aesthetics,” a key to the significance of Goldstein’s work, perhaps even that of the greater Pictures group. They are also emblematic of this discourse’s tendency to invite hardened and reductive equations between mass culture and repression—equations that certainly mattered to Goldstein, as his recurrent emphases on “control” imply, but fail fully to reflect the complexity of his art, in particular the nature of its engagement with temporality. Within a year of Brooks’s analysis, Goldstein would publish his aphorisms about how “art made from media captures the spectacle a ‘selfdestructive civilization’ makes of itself ” and “paintings are like movie sets that showcase special effects as edited from a world narrative.”76 How, exactly, did Goldstein’s politically loaded leitmotif of the falling body relate to his sustained interests in history, memory, and the experience of time?

Memory Traces James Welling, another CalArts alumnus, photographed Goldstein’s New York and Santa Monica studios in February and July 1978, documenting the constellations of photographs, advertisements, torn-out magazine images, handwritten notes, and typewritten aphorisms that covered his friend’s walls around the time that he produced The Jump (figs. 2.11 and 2.12). The later shot captures a collage-like cluster of found images depicting bodies in states of flight or buoyancy: soaring birds and leaping beasts appear alongside astronauts, parachutists, ships, and scuba divers. Welling recalls that “for Jack, the weightless figure was an emblem of momentary freedom,” but it would perhaps be more accurate to describe Goldstein’s pictures as emblems of control, expressed through their figures’ various techniques for escaping, resisting, or at least managing gravity’s force.77 Goldstein explained that such symbolism was rooted in his preoccupation with death—a through line of his practice that extended at least as far back as a 1971 performance in which he buried himself alive, leaving above ground only a breathing tube and a beacon that electronically registered the intervals of his heartbeat.78 “There was an aphorism that I wrote years ago,” he recalled in a 1981 interview. “It was something to the effect that a man committed suicide by performing a triple somersault out of a tenth story window—a triple somersault, so he controlled the timing of his death rather than it just being a straight fall.” The parachutists depicted in his paintings from 1979 and 1980 likewise represented a form of descent that was “not a free fall” but rather a controlled one, he confirmed.79 Needless to say, the highly Memory Traces in the Work of Jack Goldstein

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Fig. 2.11 James Welling, Jack Goldstein’s 11th Street Studio Wall, New York, NY, February 1978, 1978. Copyright © James Welling. Courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 2.12 James Welling, Jack Goldstein’s Studio Wall in the Pacific Building, 506 Santa Monica

Boulevard, Santa Monica, CA, July 1978, 1978. Copyright © James Welling. Courtesy of the artist.

disciplined routines performed in The Jump even more closely mimicked the “triple somersault” in Goldstein’s imagined fatal leap. In this light, Goldstein’s motif of the falling figure might indeed be understood as a memento mori, The Jump a lyrical and perhaps Kierkegaardian meditation on subjective struggle and mortal finitude. As Crimp observed, however, the artist’s preoccupation with mortality manifested also as a phenomenological interest in the experience of time more generally. Welling’s February-dated photograph confirms this orientation. In the image, seven stills from The Jump—then still in progress—appear alongside a handwritten note that represented, according to Welling, “a new direction in Jack’s thinking” and an antecedent to his Documenta text about art and “world narratives.”80 It reads: What I want “to have” from the world does not exist in the present but realizes itself in “the future” / The “future” becomes the “retreating” present / “That” retreating present takes on the form of the “past” / The “past” does not exist in terms of real time and space but manifests itself thru the mind as “memory” / My Existence therefore is a product of the mind and not the body.81

Goldstein’s division of a receding temporal current into future, present, and past recalls The Jump’s similarly tripartite structure. In the film, slowmotion footage precedes a segment at normal speed, which in turn precedes two momentary flashes of a still image. These passages may well suggest an envisioned future, followed by a rapidly unfolding present, followed in turn by a succession of residual afterimages or other such mnemonic traces. Goldstein’s use of the rotoscoping process further invites interpretation of the work in terms of memory, which since Plato’s Theaetetus has been understood as a repository of traces or impressions akin to a wax tablet or, in modern times, a photograph.82 In his note, Goldstein cleaves this mnemonic domain, the locus of “the ‘past,’” from that of “real time and space.” His ensuing deduction that “existence” is “a product of the mind and not the body” sounds reductively Cartesian. The artist’s work itself complicates such dualistic thinking, however, elaborating a more complex relationship between mind, body, and a third term that his Documenta aphorisms would make explicit: media. Goldstein’s film work had long been concerned with the nature of temporal experience. Early efforts—like A Glass of Milk (1972), in which a fist bangs on a card table with a brimming glass of milk on it until the vessel topples over and spills its contents, and Some Plates (1972), in which a figure jumps toward a precariously stacked tower of ceramic dinner plates until it collapses—thematized perceptual modalities like anticipation and apprehension.83 A Reading (1973), in which Goldstein races to recite from pages that have been set ablaze and are quickly burning from the top down, even Memory Traces in the Work of Jack Goldstein

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drew its source text from Space, Time, and Deity, a 1920 treatise on spatiotemporal relativity by the British philosopher Samuel Alexander.84 These interests assumed more sophisticated but no less pronounced form in works like A Ballet Shoe, trained on a body whose palpable state of tension foretells its inevitable release, and Shane, in which the canine’s unwavering gaze at an off-camera trainer betrays the fact that it is not barking of its own accord but rather awaiting and responding to intentionally timed cues. In a 1977 interview with the filmmaker Morgan Fisher, Goldstein situated such works in relation to the prevailing art historical categories of the time. The “Hollywood” tableaux in particular, he explained, combined minimalism’s emphasis on “objectness and autonomy”—its commitment to the definition of “something in space and time . . . our relationship to it, our distance to that thing”—with pop art’s attention to “the subject matter of our culture.”85 Ultimately, however, his films were more conceptual than either of those precedents. For Goldstein, what in fact constituted the work were the experiences “tak[ing] place in your head,” as opposed to the objects that prompted those experiences. A work like Shane, he noted, he had made just long enough so that “when it’s pulled away from you, you’re left with this thing in your head afterwards,” what would be, in effect, “a memory of that object.” Or, following Crimp, a palimpsestic “re-remembering” of it. In contradistinction to the minimalist ethos, Goldstein proclaimed, “real time and real space” were thus not relevant to his work, where mind and media intersected on a purely imaginary plane.86 Goldstein pursued a similar supersession of “real time and real space” in his vinyl records from the time: auditory collages of archivally sourced sounds and music, designed to evoke a variety of generic scenarios. Some of these scenarios were relatively realistic. The Lost Ocean Liner (1976), for instance, consisted simply of foghorns and breaking surf. Other arrangements were more cinematic. The Quivering Earth (1977) brought together cataclysmic crashing sounds and panicked crowd noises reminiscent of B-level disaster films; The Unknown Dimension (1978) compiled a soundscape more suggestive of the science fiction genre.87 Goldstein described these works as sonic “pictures,” intended to conjure imagery akin to that of his films but at “different distances from objects of reality.” As he observed, the scenarios they evoked in a listener’s imagination were “abstractions taken from an illusion to begin with” and thus twice removed from the real.88 However, the artist added, “I don’t believe that you actually have to experience something in real time and space to know it”; it was possible to “experience it in your head without having to experience it in your body.” Referring to The Six Minute Drown, he concluded, “that’s the direction my work is moving in, letting you experience the sense of an extreme situation, but at a distance, so that you can control it.”89 The records thus exemplified a widely applicable paradox in Goldstein’s work, wherein the achievement of what he called “distance”—that is, the ability to contemplate familiar, dan80

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gerous, or otherwise affect-laden scenes with intellectual equanimity, thus achieving a measure of “control” over them—was contingent on a radical elision of conventionally understood boundaries separating the work of art from its viewer’s sensorium. Goldstein’s variously cinematic, auditory, and performative tableaux from the mid-1970s might initially read as purely formal studies in tension and repetition. They might even resemble clinical stimuli—finely calibrated scenarios designed to induce the psychological states of “expectation” or “presentiment” that Crimp would later identify as central to the work of the larger Pictures group.90 Yet it is also possible to advance a parallel proposition: that Goldstein’s work was concerned not only with temporal experience in the present tense but also with the experience of history, the perception of oneself as situated within a temporal trajectory exceeding one’s own lifetime. As the artist and critic John Miller observed in an essay from 2003, the motifs featured in Goldstein’s films and performances from the 1970s were all markedly dated, more at home in “the world of his parents” than the artist’s immediate cultural milieu or even that of his childhood. “Iconographically, nothing in Goldstein’s entire oeuvre conjures up the 1970s version of the future (cyberpunk, 2001, Star Wars),” he noted. “Together, all the trained animals, fencers, contortionists and boxers instead recollect memories of 1930s or 1940s America, an America of medicine shows, minstrel shows, the circus and Vaudeville.”91 In Miller’s account, Goldstein’s cultural imaginary recorded a range of popular traditions that had eventually been marginalized by or subsumed into mass media. Yet even as these works exuded a sense of loss, he argued, they also exhumed noxious traces of the racism and exploitation that suffused their imagined era. Consider, for instance, how The Chair presents us with a piece of anthropomorphic furniture being tarred and feathered in bright hues, prominent among them the national colors of red, white, and blue that also flash across the weapon featured in The Knife. Along with Shane’s evocation of police dogs, such imagery was primed to summon not just abstract feelings “expectation” and “presentiment,” but also more socially and politically loaded states of “anxiety” and “dread” regarding, say, the ongoing history of vigilantism and racial violence in the United States—the topic that Sirk’s Imitation of Life had so poignantly dramatized.92 My argument, in turn, is this: beginning with the “Hollywood period” films widely seen as heralds of the Pictures ethos, Goldstein’s formerly individualized conception of temporal perception began to assume a more collective cast. His explorations of memory, in particular, became inextricable from a concomitant engagement with history, provocatively blurring all hard-and-fast distinctions between the two concepts. Indeed, the artist’s records, films, and performances from these years all staged exactly the elision of external media and individual imagination that defines cultural memory: the marshaling of collectively negotiated symbols to achieve perMemory Traces in the Work of Jack Goldstein

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ceptual access to the past as seen from the perspective of a particular social group, defined by its place in what Goldstein called a “world narrative.”93 More than any other work in Goldstein’s oeuvre, The Jump emblematized such an intertwinement of the subjective and the social, embodying it in the motif of the falling figure. Its tripartite evocation of future, present, and past mapped onto the individualized process by which events are transfigured into memory traces, even as its imagery stood to evoke a periodspecific reference text in the form of Riefenstahl’s Olympia. Goldstein in this way tied his evolving meditation on the nature of memory, individual and collective, to the historical reality of Nazism in particular, a trauma defined, in the artist’s telling, by the regime’s seduction of the masses through “aesthetics.” Goldstein’s gesture clearly addressed the proliferation of postwar American spectacle culture, specifically. But it might also point toward the intrinsically politicized nature of cultural memory in any context, and thus its susceptibility to manipulation for good or for ill. Not only does The Jump register the anxieties regarding mass media and social control that are commonly attributed to it under the sign of “fascism,” then, but it also reveals the inextricability of historical perception itself, including the changing cultural imagination of fascism, from this very problematic. In this regard, Goldstein’s thinking aligned closely with that of peers like Charlesworth and even more so Troy Brauntuch, who trained alongside him at CalArts and later became one of his closest interlocutors. Brauntuch, the subject of my next chapter, was a prime motivator behind the larger Pictures group’s turn toward fascist imagery. It was in his oeuvre that this material manifested first, most overtly, and in the most sustained fashion. His intentions, however, were and have to a large extent remained forbiddingly obscure.

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3 TROY BRAUNTUCH AND THE FIGURING OF “DISTANCE”

A

mong the works that Troy Brauntuch showed at Douglas Crimp’s Pictures exhibition was a 1977 triptych comprising three rectangular, blood-red panels (plate 6). Onto each of them, the artist had silkscreened an image of a different drawing. The first, positioned at the midpoint of its panel’s lower edge, depicted an opera stage as seen from a balcony; the second, occupying the center of its pictorial field, sketched a vaulted vestibule in single-point perspective; the third, wedged into its panel’s lower-right corner, presented the treaded underside of a hulking vehicle—in fact, a tank—seen climbing over a hill. Simply titling the work 1 2 3 (it would later acquire the subtitle Opera, Staircase, Tank), Brauntuch underscored the diagrammatic aspect of his arrangement even as he withheld identifying or contextualizing information about the imagery he so enigmatically reproduced. It was only through Crimp’s catalogue essay that viewers might have discovered the unsettling truth about these drawings’ origins: that they were, in fact, sketches by the hand of Adolf Hitler.1 Such a discovery inevitably freights the work with new significance or at least confirms—perhaps more concretely than the artist wished—what its redand-black color palette and juxtaposition of theatrical, monumental, and martial subjects might already have evoked obliquely. Here, then, was an act of secretive historical appropriation precisely analogous to the one that Goldstein’s recent interpreters have attributed to The Jump (as discussed in chapter 2). It is in Brauntuch’s work, more than Goldstein’s, that we encounter the dynamics of rumor and revelation parsed by Vera Dika in her analysis of the latter artist’s 1978 film. The maneuver modeled by 1 2 3 proved to be a generative one for Braun-

tuch: over the course of the succeeding five years, the artist, who is Jewish, focused his work almost exclusively on visual records of Nazi Germany. Untitled (Mercedes) (1978), for instance, incorporated a photograph of Hitler sleeping in his Mercedes-Benz (plate 7). (Seen from behind, the dictator is again unidentifiable without prior knowledge.)2 Another untitled triptych, from 1980, reproduced a selection of drawings made in secret by prisoners of Nazi concentration camps (plate 8). Later that year, Brauntuch set print media aside and began transforming his found photographs into ghostly white-on-black drawings. Untitled (Sculpture Drawings) (1981), a cycle of four vertically oriented panels of this type, tenebrously depicted the studio of Josef Thorak, the Austrian-born sculptor whom Hitler had anointed, along with Arno Breker, as official artist of the Third Reich (figs. 3.1–3.4). Only in 1983 did Brauntuch finally break from imagery linked to National Socialism or the Second World War, and even then, his brooding and mysterious compositions continued to evoke a tradition of German Romanticism that was hardly free of associations with “fascist aesthetics” as these had recently been defined by critics like Susan Sontag and Saul Friedländer.3 Brauntuch at first spoke little about these historical references, and when he did, he typically downplayed them. The press release for his exhibition at the Kitchen acknowledged that “because the images are in the public domain, it is possible that viewers may identify the contexts from prior knowledge, or may infer contexts from details of the images,” but maintained that “whether such an identification is correct or not is beside the point”: The subject matter of these works . . . is not the image, but the image of the image. The pictures may come from history books or popular magazines; in context, they often document dramatic historical situations. Brauntuch is not overtly concerned with the original circumstances. When images are liberated from context, our cultural associations are short-circuited and deactivated. Any search for meaning takes us deeper into the object itself.4

In an interview published in February 1983, Brauntuch reiterated such an apparently formalist conception of his project, defined by an attention to “objects” in seclusion from their “contexts.” Bristling at the implication that his oeuvre had taken up war or fascism as subject matter, the artist insisted that he never “used Nazi imagery in the way people have written about and objected to.” He never depicted a swastika, for example, or Hitler—at least “never his face. Never really Hitler. Never the man we know as Hitler.” If he gravitated toward such charged material, Brauntuch suggested, that was simply a reflection of its omnipresent availability, on library shelves as well as in contemporary films and other products of American popular culture. “Basically, they’re images,” he asserted. “They’re something to look at.”5 His apparent aim was to take pictures (and the works of art they sometimes 84

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Fig. 3.1 Troy Brauntuch, Untitled (Sculptor

with Figures), 1981. Pencil on paper, matted and framed: 84 × 31 in. Copyright © Troy Brauntuch. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.

Fig. 3.2 Troy Brauntuch, Untitled (White Head), 1981. Pencil on paper, framed: 84 × 31 in. Copyright © Troy Brauntuch. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.

Fig. 3.3 Troy Brauntuch, Untitled (Black

Head), 1981. Pencil on paper, framed: 84 × 31 in. Copyright © Troy Brauntuch. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.

Fig. 3.4 Troy Brauntuch, Untitled (Statue), 1981. Pencil on paper, matted and framed: 84 × 31 in. Copyright © Troy Brauntuch. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.

represented) that had been collectively instrumentalized as documents of atrocity, complicity, resistance, or simply “history,” and give them second lives as objects of private contemplation, open-ended meaning, even aesthetic judgment.6 The artist’s initial interpreters, Crimp and Craig Owens foremost among them, placed this operation under the sign of “distance” in their writings from around 1980. Works like 1 2 3, Crimp argued, affirmed the “opacity” of their appropriated pictures as well as the “remoteness” of their historical origins, exposing as fiction the intertwined ideas that signs were transparent to their meanings and that the past could be made present through representation. Owens offered a more complex reading of Brauntuch’s work, informed by Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory, but the upshot was much the same. “Brauntuch’s images simultaneously proffer and defer a promise of meaning,” he wrote; “they solicit and frustrate our desire that the image be directly transparent to its signification.”7 Within this poststructuralist framework, history—something that can be accessed only through verbal, visual, or otherwise constructed forms of reference—emerged as representation’s spectral other, an object of loss, possessing none of its counterpart’s material concreteness. Hence Crimp’s conclusion, quoted in the introduction, that the prevailing effect of Brauntuch’s reproductions was “to fix forever in an elegant object our distance from the history that produced these images.” Indeed, he asserted, “that distance is all that these pictures signify.”8 Such an analysis was in many ways perceptive. Brauntuch clearly did seek to thematize semiotic breakdown and the labor of achieving pictorial recognition, as evidenced by the artist’s various efforts to push his images to the cusp of illegibility. Crimp’s reading can also be reductive, however, if taken at face value. Approached solely in terms of “distance” and “opacity,” works like 1 2 3 are all too easily made to exemplify generalized poststructuralist precepts about the independence of meaning from authorial intention, the inherently unstable nature of the sign, and the concomitant elusiveness of history in any effort to represent the past, reducing them to little more than “a kind of iconic teaching tool in postmodern aesthetics,” as Johanna Burton has put it.9 The specific historical domain on which Brauntuch fixated consequently loses its particularity, becoming merely one of many bygone referents that the artist might have chosen: useful because of its uniquely loaded status, perhaps, but ultimately interchangeable. The fact that Brauntuch would devote five years of uninterrupted artistic exploration to such unsavory material remains difficult to explain. Douglas Eklund’s counterposed account of Brauntuch’s art (also discussed in the introduction) as being about the perceived “proximity” of Nazi spectacle—the “monumental,” “seductive,” and “coldly inhuman” aesthetics of which allegedly struck the artist as being “more relevant to [his] own time than the utopian promises of modernism”—helpfully intervenes Troy Brauntuch and the Figuring of “Distance”

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within this interpretive impasse.10 Yet this reading, too, can prove restrictive. Like many of the Frankfurt school–informed interpreters of Goldstein’s work, Eklund regards the Nazi imagery in Brauntuch’s oeuvre as a recurring allegorical cipher for objectionable aspects of postwar capitalism. Indeed, his conclusion regarding “what Brauntuch may have been trying to say, namely, that the stratagems of fascist art did not die with Nazi Germany, but continued on unrecognized into the Technicolor present,” echoes almost verbatim what Dan Graham had written in “The End of Liberalism” (1981): that “fascism didn’t ‘die’ with the cessation of World War II . . . but remains the repressed collective unconsciousness of the present.”11 In both of these accounts, the purported object of critique (in a phrase, “media-saturated mass culture in 1970s America”) is so expansive as to elide the selected imagery’s historical specificity—that is to say, its specificity as historical—in much the way that Crimp’s position did.12 Brauntuch today admits that his statements from the early 1980s, in which he described his imagery as being merely “something to look at,” were in certain ways willfully misleading, that he was, in fact, “very aware of making something where we do recognize what that thing [in the picture] is.”13 But he has also reaffirmed his project as a conceptual or metapictorial one, aptly characterized by the phrase “image of the image,” the dynamics of which have received only cursory analysis since Crimp’s and Owens’s Pictures-era commentary. To understand these dynamics, it will be necessary to reframe the relationship between “distance” and “proximity” in Brauntuch’s oeuvre, doing so in a way that accounts for the historical specificity of the artist’s imagery as well as its relationship to what Eklund identified as the “utopian promises of modernism.”14 The overarching challenge that Brauntuch set for himself between 1977 and 1983, I will argue, was to separate (or, following the Kitchen’s press release, “liberate”) his heavily laden images from their assigned roles within the continually expanding, increasingly contested edifices of postwar cultural memory—edifices designed to secure the meaning of the Second World War for a variety of nationally, politically, and ethnically identifying groups—and render them autonomous, freed from established “cultural associations” in much the sense upheld by postwar modernist abstraction. Or rather, Brauntuch’s intention was to stage such a separation, doing so in a way that tacitly acknowledged its impossibility. For five years, the artist recurrently evoked a (dimly) recognizable historical reality while paradoxically inviting viewers to regard his imagery as if it were autonomous, to adopt, in short, a provisionally modernist way of looking, premised on precisely the ideals of universality, immediacy, and presence that Crimp and Owens perceptively understood his work to contravene. Inhabiting a modernist perspective in order to reflect on the nature of cultural memory was an intentionally contradictory maneuver. After all, for figures like Clement Greenberg and Barnett Newman, modernist abstraction had been characterized precisely by its extraneousness from— 90

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indeed, its inherent incompatibility with—such instruments of group identity formation. This aversion, Greenberg had written in his 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” was modernism’s defining political virtue. The “main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view of fascists and Stalinists,” he famously asserted, “is not that they are too critical, but that they are too ‘innocent,’ that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda into them, that kitsch is more pliable to this end.”15 Not long after the war’s conclusion, Newman accordingly championed a form of abstraction liberated from the all too easily co-opted “impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, myth, or what have you.”16 Viewed in the light of this receding but by no means totally outmoded discourse, Brauntuch’s art might be understood as following a logic of abjection: his work activated select modernist precepts even as it recurrently staged the very things, aesthetic and political, that modernism in its Greenbergian formulations sought most ardently to expel. Its effect, I will argue, was neither to affirm nor demolish the paradigm in question. It was, rather, to test its premises against the changing social realities of the late 1970s and early 1980s, a moment when the perceived “distance” of the past, and the Nazi era in particular, appeared increasingly uncertain.

History at a Distance Brauntuch exhibited a total of six works at the Pictures exhibition. The earlier examples predated the artist’s direct incorporation of Nazi-era artifacts, but they shared with 1 2 3 a motivating engagement with the domains of classical aesthetics, monumentality, and spectacle. A triptych of chromogenic prints called Play, Fame, Song (1975–76), for instance, paired the titular terms with line drawings by the artist depicting a swing, a dais, and a pair of converging spotlight beams.17 An untitled set of Chromalin prints from 1976 presented a photograph of two ballet dancers (one of them Rudolf Nureyev) between flanking black panels, each inscribed with a thematically relevant phrase: “applause” on the left, “ballet dancers” on the right. White Statue (1976), for its part, reproduced the cropped head and upper torso of a Greco-Roman sculptural figure (the presence of chain necklaces suggests that the statue had been repurposed as an advertising vehicle) in the lower-left corner of an otherwise blank white field (fig. 3.5). One reviewer described these works as “delicately nostalgic reveries, treasuries of the ephemeral, occluded by a secretive, privatist sensibility” reminiscent of Joseph Cornell’s.18 Brauntuch himself has likened his appropriation-based work to Cornell’s enigmatic assemblages of found, often cinema-inspired curios, suggesting that the Surrealism-affiliated artist was, indeed, a model.19 He has also pointed to his friend Matt Mullican’s tersely labeled pictograms from the time—signs designed to elicit maximum projection by a viewer on the basis of minimal verbal or pictorial information—as an early Troy Brauntuch and the Figuring of “Distance”

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Fig. 3.5 Troy Brauntuch, White Statue, 1976. Lithograph and silkscreen on paper, 47 × 35 in.

Copyright © Troy Brauntuch. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.

influence on his work.20 The core of Brauntuch’s emerging project, however, perhaps most closely resembled Goldstein’s contemporaneous quest to set the spectacular and the seductive at a contemplative “distance,” hence the various forms of schematization and fragmentation to which he subjected his appropriated images: decontextualized tokens from the domains of art, popular entertainment, and consumer marketing. Brauntuch’s following three contributions to the Pictures exhibition departed from any such familiar precedents, however, by drawing their material from the annals of Nazi Germany. M (1977), like 1 2 3, reproduced an 92

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architectural sketch by Hitler. This one Brauntuch had discovered in Inside the Third Reich (1968), Albert Speer’s memoir about his years as Hitler’s chief architect and minister of armaments. It depicts a monument to Mussolini, envisioned by the draftsman in 1939 for what was then the Adolf-HitlerPlatz (today the Theodor-Heuss-Platz) in Berlin, consisting of an equestrian statue atop an obelisk-like plinth emblazoned with the titular letter, set before a colonnade.21 Like much of Brauntuch’s work from this period, M took the form of a triptych. On either side of the central image, the artist reproduced a drawing by his own hand that approximated the intersecting lines of Hitler’s hastily sketched colonnade. These flanking panels he additionally stamped with a small, circular image depicting a row of flags and antiaircraft spotlights arranged at one of the dictator’s infamous Nuremberg rallies— another echo of the imagined monument’s columnar configuration, realized here in even more overtly nationalistic and spectacular form.22 A work called Three Effects (1977) extended Brauntuch’s associative logic by placing a tonally inverted version of same stamp, printed in white ink on a black sheet of paper, alongside two other images of the same size and shape. These the artist aligned on a longer white panel to form a three-part sequence (plate 9). The first of the images on this longer panel, stamped in red ink, portrays a man whose dark suit, sunglasses, and headphones identify him as a Nazi war criminal on trial at Nuremberg. The second, stamped in black ink, derives from a 1944 photograph by Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s personal photographer, that had appeared in Speer’s memoir. It depicts the dictator walking side by side with his architect along a bucolic Alpine path, each of them, Speer recalled in his caption for the image, silently “dwelling on his own thoughts.”23 Silhouetted from behind against a dramatic winter sky, the duo cuts a broodingly heroic shape that calls to mind the work of Caspar David Friedrich—a debasement of the German Romantic tradition that Saul Friedländer, writing about the photograph in 1982, would submit as a prime example of Nazi kitsch.24 In juxtaposing the Hoffmann image with the rally lights, Brauntuch established an implicit equivalence between the Third Reich’s drive to manifest power through spectacle and its concomitant preoccupation with its own, heavily aestheticized self-representation. The Nazi war criminal who appears between these emblems, observing the unfolding of his trial through tinted glasses and listening to its proceedings by way of real-time audio translation, takes on the cast of an allegorical figure: withdrawn, like the prisoners in Plato’s cave, into an exceptionally mediated experience of reality. Brauntuch’s 1979 exhibition at the Kitchen further expanded his engagement with the Third Reich’s aesthetic program and surviving visual traces. Untitled (Three Drawings) (1978), a triptych of chromogenic prints in the same vein as 1 2 3, juxtaposed Hitler’s design for a U-boat with the plan of a theater intended for the Austrian city of Linz and the elevation of a triumphal arch.25 The U-boat panel also contained two smaller sketches— Troy Brauntuch and the Figuring of “Distance”

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one caricaturing a Semitic profile, the other portraying a mustachioed man who might represent the draftsman himself—that Brauntuch enlarged and presented as a separate diptych called Untitled (Two Heads) (1978).26 These works adhered to the basic formal vocabulary that Brauntuch had established two years earlier. The format of Untitled (Mercedes) (1978; see again plate 7), by contrast, was new, introducing an evocatively altar-like configuration that the artist would reprise in many of his most ambitious works through 1980. Recalling minimalist idioms developed by sculptors like Donald Judd and Walter de Maria, it consisted of three long, slim, rectangular chromogenic prints, each of them framed and glazed, arranged on the wall to form a squared and noncontiguous “U” shape. In the horizontal panel, two small photographs appear against a dark-crimson ground. On the left is the 1934 image of Hitler sleeping in his open-air sedan (sourced, once again, from the Speer memoir); on the right, a detail from the same photograph depicting a country church, seen just above the car’s windshield. The triptych’s flanking panels are predominantly black, marked only by a series of vertical white streaks along their bottom edges: truncated reproductions of the rally lights that had appeared in M and Untitled (Three Effects).27 Subsequent works employed similar configurations to somewhat different ends. In Untitled (Rally) (1980), for instance, Brauntuch paired the disjointed perpendicularity of the “U” format—in this case, closer to an “H” with an unusually low crossbar—with asymmetrical color blocking to fragment an image that might otherwise have been more readily recognizable (fig. 3.6). The photograph in question depicts members of the German Reichstag at the Kroll Opera House, where delegates assembled between 1933 and 1942 to witness such consequential pronouncements as Hitler’s declarations of annexation and war (fig. 3.7). Commonly illustrated in books, magazines, and documentary films chronicling the Third Reich on the eve of World War II, the venue was distinguished by a massive, art deco–style relief of the Nazi imperial eagle, backed by ornamental drapery that was slung to form a starburst pattern. In Brauntuch’s radically cropped, divided, and lavender-tinted version, just a few partial heads remain visible amid the drapery, the sweeping diagonals of which no longer read as fabric but rather as pure, energetic pattern. Elsewhere, Brauntuch used the “U” format’s lengthy rectangular fields to isolate and monumentalize imagery of a very different origin. His Untitled from 1980 (see again plate 8), for instance, conferred a quasi-religious weightiness to three faint drawings, reproduced against fields of vivid red, that might not appear noteworthy out of context, but can in fact claim the extraordinary status of having been made in secret by concentration camp prisoners. Brauntuch drew these pictures from the catalogue for Spiritual Resistance: Art from Concentration Camps, 1940–1945, an exhibition that traveled to ten museums throughout the United States, including the Jewish Museum in New York City, between 1978 and 1980.28 Near the top of his right 94

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Fig. 3.6 Troy Brauntuch, Untitled (Rally), 1980. Photo C-prints. Triptych, two vertical panels,

framed: 95.8 × 24.25 in., one horizontal panel, framed: 24 × 95.5 in., overall 96 × 164 in. Copyright © Troy Brauntuch. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.

Fig. 3.7 Berlin, Kroll Oper. Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler während seiner Rede vor dem Reichstag zur Kriegserklärung an die Vereinigten Staaten. Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1987-0703-507/photographer: Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst – Zentralbild.

panel, Brauntuch placed a self-portrait by the artist Malvina Schalková, created at Theresienstadt in 1944. The draftswoman faces leftward, her eyes downcast. At the midpoint of the horizontal panel below, Brauntuch positioned a landscape drawing by Louis Asscher, also from 1944, showing children seated on a patch of grass near barracks at Bergen-Belsen. Finally, toward the bottom of the left panel, Brauntuch printed a sketch depicting the heads and torsos of two dead bodies left unceremoniously on the ground, their mouths agape.29 With its image of a Madonna-like figure who appears to gaze upon these lifeless figures and a group of doomed innocents, the triptych as a whole approaches the effect of a Christian pietà.30 Strange though it may seem to regard these historically loaded works as “images of images”—formally self-reflexive objects whose content could be dismissed as merely “something to look at”—such a description of Brauntuch’s project was congruent with the early discourse around Pictures. Artists Space’s press release for the 1977 exhibition overtly asserted that though the images on display were generally “comprehensible and often common, they are removed from a context of normal association and made autonomous within an esthetic structure,” giving them “the concreteness of Minimal sculpture.”31 In his catalogue essay, Crimp affirmed that “the work of these artists maintains an allegiance to that radical aspiration that we continue to recognize as modernist,” though he initially identified symbolism and surrealism, rather than minimalism, as its prevailing points of reference.32 Only later, in the 1979 version of his essay, did Crimp characterize the works of Brauntuch, Goldstein, Levine, Longo, and Sherman as “postmodernist” for having flouted Greenbergian prerequisites like medium specificity and the aspiration to embody universal meaning. What the Pictures artists promoted in their variously graphic, sculptural, cinematic, and performative forms of image appropriation, Crimp finally proposed, was “a modernism conceived differently, whose roots are in the symbolist aesthetic announced by [Stéphane] Mallarmé, which includes works whose dimension is literally or metaphorically temporal, and which does not seek the transcendence of the material condition of the signs through which meaning is generated.”33 Just as minimalist art emphasized the literal “concreteness” of the object in space and time, he suggested, so Pictures art avowed the insuperably “material condition” of language, verbal or pictorial, as a social artifact. As for language’s (or an image’s) capacity to refer, Crimp asserted, the artists in question bracketed this function or even called it into question, attending instead to the systemic dynamics that made such reference, or its appearance, possible. In a two-part essay from 1980 called “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” Craig Owens submitted allegory, as opposed to symbolism, as the better framework for understanding such operations. Notwithstanding Mallarmé’s radical embrace of indeterminacy and openendedness, Owens observed, the broader tradition of symbolism sought 96

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to render archetypal images whose meanings, ostensibly rooted in primal strata of human consciousness, were believed to exist in a state of immediate and preordained unity with their signifiers. By contrast, allegory functions by establishing implicit networks of correspondence between multiple texts or representational codes. As such, it precludes the spontaneous intuition of universal truths, prompting instead a process of decipherment that Owens, following Walter Benjamin, understood as inescapably historical. To view the world allegorically, Benjamin had proposed, was to suppress the theological tendency to find inherent meanings or intimations of transcendence in the works and affairs of humankind; it was to attend instead to social life’s contingencies and conventionalities. Brauntuch’s “resolutely opaque” reproductions, Owens argued, exemplified allegory’s “melancholic” acceptance of language as a contingent system of absence and deferral. In “solicit[ing] and frustrat[ing] our desire that the image be directly transparent to its signification,” they chimed with Benjamin’s conception of history as something “untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful.”34 To this extent, Owens’s analysis aligned with Crimp’s. By invoking Benjamin, however, Owens gestured toward a framework that was capable, at least in theory, of superseding the strict compartmentalization of history and representation that Crimp’s “distance” framework would appear to imply. For the Frankfurt school theorist, the melancholic gaze of allegory possessed a critical, even revolutionary potential. Acknowledging the contingency of history, he believed, made possible its discursive activation by contemporary collectivities seeking to effect transformative social change; drawing allegorical “constellations” could catalyze this process by encouraging a novel reading of the present through selected moments from the past. Owens accordingly attributed to the “allegorical impulse” a “capacity to rescue from historical oblivion that which threatens to disappear”: Allegory first emerged in response to a . . . sense of estrangement from tradition; throughout its history it has functioned in the gap between a present and a past which, without allegorical reinterpretation, might have remained foreclosed. A conviction of the remoteness of the past, and a desire to redeem it for the present—these are its two most fundamental impulses.35

Allegory was, in other words, an agent of collective memory, designed to stimulate the discursive processes by which mnemo-historical perception is negotiated, codified, and contested with respect to present-day concerns. Insofar as Brauntuch’s work was allegorical, then, one would expect it to set such processes in motion. Despite introducing his essay with these remarks, however, Owens never ventured an interpretation of how works like Brauntuch’s Untitled (Mercedes) or his Spiritual Resistance triptych might activate or “redeem” Troy Brauntuch and the Figuring of “Distance”

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their historical material in the interests of present-day viewers. On the contrary, he seemed to treat Brauntuch’s work as a metacommentary on the nature of allegory that was not, itself, allegorical. In the end, Owens deferred to Crimp’s claim that “distance is all these pictures signify,” effectively reaffirming the works’ adherence to modernist (or postmodernist) self-reflexivity without pursuing the question of how their source material’s mnemo-historically resonant subject matter might complicate or at least complexify such abstractive operations. Overlooked in these accounts are the ways in which Brauntuch presented his historical referent as both proximate and remote—something made perceptually accessible through media and discursive practices that at the same time consign it to the domain of myth. What, his work implicitly asked, was the proper role of contemporary art with respect to such processes of cultural memory formation?

Failed Images Shortly before his debut solo exhibition at Metro Pictures, in February 1981, Brauntuch set print media aside and began producing large-scale drawings, executed in white pencil on black paper. (Later he would use black cotton.) He continued to base these works on found photographic images that he transposed with the aid of an opaque projector, and, at least at first, he did not deviate from his established historical domain. At his 1981 exhibition, for instance, he presented his drawings of the Thorak studio, theatrically displaying each of the four-part cycle’s narrow panels on a different gallery wall to suggest an image in the round. Still, Brauntuch’s change of media marked a significant shift within his larger project. The manual transfer process allowed him to rearrange, compress, simplify, and otherwise alter his source material in a manner that he previously could not. Such flexibility afforded new strategies for inhibiting or delaying a viewer’s apprehension of his subject matter—for setting his historically removed pictures at a corresponding perceptual “distance.” It also changed a viewer’s relationship to his depicted content in a more fundamental way. Brauntuch’s prior use of photomechanical technology could suggest, however tenuously, a neutral or objective stance with respect to the documents he represented. Drawing by hand rendered his authorial presence comparatively unavoidable, problematizing anew his work’s relationship to modernist traditions and all their art historical baggage. In the Thorak works, Brauntuch’s authorial interventions were subtle but significant. His source photograph depicts the Nazi-sponsored sculptor amid a congeries of neoclassical male nudes and portrait busts (fig. 3.8).36 Though the artist’s studio appears to be suffused with daylight, his face is eerily plunged in shadow. Brauntuch’s cycle breaks this image into four vertical segments, dilating the depicted space and drawing the picture’s 98

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Fig. 3.8 Troy Brauntuch, Thorak Studio, 1980. Tape and paper, 9.75 × 6.75 in. Copyright © Troy

Brauntuch. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.

upper edge to a considerably greater height. Studio clutter and certain architectural details also disappear, yielding tightly focused views of stilllife configurations that glimmer faintly within fields of total or near-total darkness.37 Shifting the image into this nocturnal register made possible a kind of spotlight effect: the depicted objects often appear much brighter or darker than their photographic counterparts, drawing the viewer’s attention to enigmatic details that might otherwise have escaped notice, like the print of a man’s head propped just behind the foremost sculptural figure’s foot. The darkness also sets a certain mood, even a certain temporality. Although many of the objects in the source image were likely maquettes, studTroy Brauntuch and the Figuring of “Distance”

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ies, or works in progress—things just coming into being—in Brauntuch’s gloomy re-creation they instead suggest so many ruins: forgotten objects, fragments of a sundered image. Responding to the gloom, several critics seized the opportunity to reprise Crimp’s and Owens’s basic assertions about the opacity of representation and the insuperable “distance” of history.38 There soon emerged an interpretive countercurrent, however, that assigned a radically different position to history vis-à-vis Brauntuch’s ruin-like representational fragments. Michael Krugman, for instance, attributed a “nagging sense of temporal ambiguity” to Brauntuch’s faintly rendered depictions of the Thorak sculptures—representatives of a neoclassical vocabulary that had long been embraced by autocratic regimes and relatively liberal states, such as the United States, alike. In staging such ideologically adaptable material, Krugman found, Brauntuch’s drawings exuded a “generalized historical miasma that projects simultaneously back into the past and forward into the future.”39 Roberta Smith, describing Brauntuch’s “dim, ominous scenes of the studio of an officially sanctioned, obviously undegenerate sculptor,” likewise observed that the artist’s referent could as easily be “Italy, Germany, or Rockefeller Center,” the Midtown Manhattan office plaza distinguished by its massive art deco towers and comparably monumental statuary, chief among it Lee Lawrie’s exaggeratedly muscular Atlas figure from 1937.40 Far from appearing insuperably remote, Brauntuch’s imagery struck these critics as unnervingly familiar. Robert Longo confirms that he and Brauntuch were themselves marveling at the kind of stylistic convergences to which Krugman and Smith alluded—indications of the fact that “Americans and Germans were almost the same in their [artistic preferences]” during the 1930s.41 From his perspective, examples of Nazi-era public statuary like Josef Wackerle’s Rossebändiger-Skulptur (1938), a monumental sculpture of a man leading a horse installed in Kassel, Germany, were effectively interchangeable with American counterparts like Michael Lantz’s Man Controlling Trade (1942), an allegorical composition featuring a similar representation of man and beast, commissioned for the Federal Trade Commission building in Washington, DC (figs. 3.9 and 3.10). As remnants of an era before modernist abstraction made significant inroads with officialdom, such works could eerily evoke a counterfactual universe where monumental figuration had instead prevailed. (Longo recalls discovering these statues in the course of planning an experimental opera about Speer, a project for which Brauntuch was to serve as an “artistic consultant.”)42 As my next chapter will discuss, Longo’s own work recurrently staged this counterfactual reality, critically mapping it onto the increasingly reactionary political climate of post-Vietnam America. Brauntuch’s maneuver, however, was different. For him, works of Nazi art—and the interwar period’s monumental academicism more generally—were interesting less 100

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Fig. 3.9 Josef Wackerle, Rossebändiger-Skulptur, 1938. Kassel, Germany. Photo by Peter

Schlömer. License: Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic.

Fig. 3.10 Michael Lantz, Man Controlling Trade, 1942. Federal Trade Commission, 600 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Washington, DC. The George F. Landegger Collection of District of Columbia Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith.

as ciphers of contemporary politics, and more as ruins of a disgraced artistic tradition hailing from the not-so-distant past. Regarding his initial interest in Thorak, Brauntuch recalled in 2016, “I became fascinated with these sculptures that were not historical; that were probably never going to be seen again.”43 He explained that he would not have used “Monet on his ladder or Brancusi in his studio, because those things have histories to them,” which is to say, institutionally codified art histories.44 Thorak’s works of Nazi-sanctioned art, by contrast, were “failed images,” proscribed from public display and marginalized in mainstream discourses on art and aesthetics. They were, in a word, “dead.”45 As these statements suggest, what fascinated Brauntuch about Nazi art was not the uncanny familiarity described by Krugman, Smith, and Longo, but rather its manifest strangeness, its apparent irrelevance to—indeed, enforced exclusion from—a modernist tradition that had for decades claimed a total victory over it. To better understand Brauntuch’s intervention with respect to these opposed traditions, it is instructive to compare the artist’s Thorak drawings with his immediately preceding work: the untitled triptych comprising material from Spiritual Resistance. The latter exhibition contained all manner of images attesting to the Nazi concentration camps’ dismal and dehumanizing conditions. Yet two of Brauntuch’s three selections, the Schalková portrait and the Asscher sketch depicting a group of children (fig. 3.11), are exceptionally devoid of any such contextual markers or emotional cues. Indeed, one of the exhibition catalogue’s contributing essayists, Lucy S. Davidowicz, singled out Asscher’s drawing as an “idyllic” outlier that fully “belies reality.”46 Tom L. Freudenheim, writing in the same publication, accounted for such quotidian scenes by observing that interned artists often seemed to work in the manner of a courtroom sketcher, dispassionately rendering the horrific as well as the banal as they arose. Knowing that the Nazi regime would attempt to suppress any visual record of the camps, they surreptitiously assumed a role long since ceded, in ordinary society, to photographers. Such a project, Freudenheim observed, set their work at odds with the abstractive and often subjectivist protocols favored by the century’s established avant-gardes. “Few of these artists indicate in their work any strong feelings for the modernist art movements of their time,” he wrote; “the very movements whose leaders were at that moment leavening the art world of New York to such major effect.”47 Distasteful as it is to compare Thorak’s academic sculptures and Asscher’s conventionally figurative drawings, they are admittedly alike in their extraneousness to the history of modernism, the dominant expressions of which purposely made no room for such conservative monumentalism or reportorial representation. Yet they do resemble postwar modernism in one respect. Both works register or bear witness to the Nazi era in ways that nonetheless “belie,” as Davidowicz put it, this reality: for very different reasons, they each decline directly to visualize the regime’s atrocities. Movements like 102

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Fig. 3.11 Louis Asscher, A Group of Children Sitting in Front of a Barracks, undated. Pencil on paper, 16 × 21.5 cm. Israel, Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum Archives. Copyright © Ghetto Fighters’ House Archives, Israel.

abstract expressionism, forged in the shadow of war, similarly responded to their historic moment by declining to represent anything that might have been regarded as the “reality” of fascism.48 For artists like Newman, to do so would have been to lapse into the fraught realm of “memory, association, nostalgia, and myth”—the domain that authoritarian states like Nazi Germany had proven all too adept at instrumentalizing toward their own nefarious ends. Thorak’s work was emblematic of the ideologically subservient art that Newman and his cohort rejected, and in Brauntuch’s drawings, too, it may represent this antipode. Yet, like Asscher’s sketch, it may also function as a metonym for the historical events that postwar modernism refused to address directly, and which haunted it as a result. Consider again what I presented as the defining contradiction of Brauntuch’s project: the fact that he would engage in such a sustained and continuous manner with a particular historical topic, even as he insistently characterized the resulting works as context independent and aesthetically self-sufficient. In their crepuscular indistinctness, fragmentation, and low Troy Brauntuch and the Figuring of “Distance”

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level of instantaneously recognizable detail, the artist’s prints and drawings worked to delay or at least partially suppress their historical domain of reference, thereby allowing for contemplative experiences of their source images qua images—autonomous experiences paradoxically analogous to those promoted by Greenbergian modernism. The moment of recognition invariably arrived, however, and as it did, it set in motion that which postwar abstraction tended to exclude: the mnemo-historical processes of occasioning imaginative access to the past through representation. Never resolving definitively in favor of one paradigm or the other—representation or abstraction, historical reference or formal self-reflexivity—Brauntuch’s prints and drawings rather worked to keep these modalities in a volatile state of tension. It is in this regard, I would argue, that they embodied what Crimp described in 1979 as a “modernism conceived differently.”49

Brauntuch’s Studio Brauntuch’s contemporaries recall his intervention with a certain awe. Helene Winer, who cofounded Metro Pictures in 1980, credits the artist with a boldness and a “sensitivity” that set him apart from his peers, rendering him “much more influential to other artists”—especially Sarah Charlesworth, in Winer’s view—“than one would be led to believe.”50 Longo confirms that by the end of the 1970s, Brauntuch seemed poised to become “the next Jasper Johns,” another seminal figure who succeeded in reconciling postwar modernism’s formal self-reflexivity with imagery like the American flag, drawn from the domains of public and political life.51 The artist’s critical and commercial fortunes began to decline in the late 1980s, however, and by the turn of the millennium he had come to occupy a relatively marginal position within the established canon of postmodern art.52 In 2001, one young American critic surveyed a rehanging of Crimp’s Pictures exhibition and concluded that, as with Philip Smith, Brauntuch’s “slimmer renown” compared to Longo, Goldstein, and Sherrie Levine was “fairly well deserved.”53 Already by 1981, in fact, the tensions staged by Brauntuch’s work had begun attracting critical censure, leveled not so much at his inflammatory subject matter as his manner of presenting it. Smith, for instance, found cause for alarm in Brauntuch’s use of heavy, dark frames and glazing to “echo the autocratic, elegant look of the art within”—his own as well as Thorak’s. “I have trouble with the way Brauntuch’s treatment of the object itself seems implicitly fascist,” she writes. “I can’t tell if the presentation of the work protects you from the ‘truth’ of the images, or serves them up to you on their own terms, gift-wrapped.”54 Reviewing Brauntuch’s 1982 solo exhibition at Mary Boone (the gallery for which he left Metro Pictures), Jeanne Silverthorne similarly took issue with the altar-like quality of the artist’s multipanel configurations, in part because of how the quasi-religious format seemed to encourage an exegesis that the images themselves proved 104

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inadequate to support. “The paradox at the center of Troy Brauntuch’s pictures is this: on the one hand, the very muteness of the images provokes the viewer into trying to make them talk[;] on the other, attempts to get the work to confess its secrets are made to seem bruising, exertions of undue force—in effect, fascist,” Silverthorne wrote.55 In an issue of ZG from the following year (one that also included an article by Angela McRobbie titled “Fear of Fascism”), Merope Lolis restated Silverthorne’s assertion in more drastic terms, writing that efforts to perceive Brauntuch’s reticent images amounted to “a violation not unlike rape.” After surveying his oeuvre alongside Goldstein’s recent paintings of aerial warfare and David Salle’s palimpsestic juxtapositions of disparate cultural fragments, Lolis matterof-factly proclaimed the trio’s work to reveal “a society on the threshold of fascism.”56 How the artists regarded this eventuality seemed, to the author, disturbingly opaque. In a 1982 essay titled “Back to the Studio,” Owens himself revised the sympathetic reading of Brauntuch’s work that he had ventured in “The Allegorical Impulse.” What alarmed the critic at this slightly later juncture was not the artist’s historically loaded imagery, which had not changed in the intervening two years, but rather his decision to abandon printmaking for large-scale drawing. In this, Owens noted, Brauntuch was not alone. On the contrary, a recent exhibition of the artist’s work and that of fourteen other CalArts graduates, curated by Winer on the occasion of the institute’s ten-year anniversary, gave the impression of an entire cohort pivoting in synchrony.57 Over the course of its first decade, CalArts had established itself as a haven for concept-driven experimentation across media—what faculty instructors like John Baldessari, Douglas Huebler, and Michael Asher placed under the capacious sign of “post studio art.”58 Yet, as Winer and Owens both observed, many of the program’s more widely recognized alumni (the majority of whom were men) had nonetheless wound their ways back to traditional formats such as painting, drawing, and studio photography in recent years. For Winer, this trend represented not a repudiation but rather a validation of CalArts’s transgressive ethos. “The real issue,” she proposed, had never been with “painting per se but the severely circumscribed concerns that delimited the medium,” a set of calcified high-modernist rules that the poststudio curriculum effectively dissolved.59 Owens, by contrast, perceived more cynical motivations underpinning a career trajectory like Brauntuch’s. He seized in particular on the artist’s Thorak cycle, reading it as an unintended metacommentary on his own ostensibly market-driven calculations and retrograde desires. “In these works, the melancholy that pervaded all of [Brauntuch’s] previous work was transformed into nostalgia for a mode of production that is no longer available to him,” Owens wrote, quipping that “Brauntuch has not only returned to the studio; it has even become the subject of his art.”60 By abandoning the public orientation of Troy Brauntuch and the Figuring of “Distance”

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minimalist and conceptual art—their democratizing emphases on transparent composition and context-conscious display—for the auratic privacy of the studio, Owens argued, the CalArts contingent had effectively acceded to “the widespread backlash against the ’60s counterculture that motivates the Neo-conservative platform for the economic and spiritual ‘renewal’ of the US, and which culminated in November 1980 in the election of the celebrity-commodity to the Presidency.”61 Suspicions about the CalArts cohort’s political commitments only deepened as the Reagan years progressed. This much is confirmed by an article that Carey Lovelace penned for High Performance magazine in 1984. (Lovelace graduated from CalArts in 1975, the same year as Brauntuch.) Expanding on Owens’s critique, Lovelace asserted that artists like Brauntuch, Goldstein, Mullican, and Salle had not only retreated into traditional formats, but also repudiated their alma mater’s antiauthoritarian ethos on a thematic level. She recalled the CalArts campus in idyllic terms, characterizing it as a reincarnation of Black Mountain College—the storied North Carolina institution from which emerged such luminaries as Ruth Asawa and Robert Rauschenberg—in the sleepy hills of Valencia, then the northernmost outskirts of Los Angeles’s suburban sprawl.62 Committed to nonhierarchical group experimentation and activist ventures like Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’s Feminist Art Program, the institution’s fine art department had indeed offered a utopic refuge for students who could afford its relatively high tuition costs. Whence, then, came Mullican’s schematic pictograms, sometimes emblazoned on architecturally scaled banners, mapping aspects of the artist’s personal cosmology as if it were the basis for a powerful and bureaucratic-looking institution?63 Or Salle’s paintings of partially undressed women in often objectifying poses? Or, most unseemly of all, Brauntuch’s “seductive, classy, and appealingly evil” exhumations of imagery from the Third Reich? However stylistically dissimilar these works might appear, Lovelace proposed, they in fact possessed a common ethos that “celebrates methods of societal order, looks nostalgically back to rigorously organized culture, fetishizes systems and is enlaced with icons of power and personal ascendancy,” advancing, in short, the antitheses of every progressive ideal that had underpinned their authors’ art school education.64 The evolution of the Pictures group in New York may well have surprised some of its erstwhile mentors, but the oedipal narrative sketched by Owens and Lovelace is nonetheless a misleading one. It strays not so much in its characterization of the group’s work from the early 1980s, which was indeed unsettlingly provocative in its embrace of taboo themes, but rather in its highly selective portrayal of the intellectual milieu at CalArts during the first half of the 1970s—a portrayal that emphasizes the school’s poststudio program to the exclusion of virtually all else. Archival records of the institution at this time corroborate its reputation as a bastion of the West Coast counterculture, but they also register the extent to which this iden106

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tity exceeded art-specific foci regarding medium specificity and dematerialization. Equally prominent was a broader set of Vietnam-era discourses in which the specter of “fascism,” implicitly understood as the underlying telos of American capitalism, loomed large, forming what would have been a perceptible backdrop to even the most apparently abstruse exercises in postpainterly or conceptualist experimentation. That graduates like Goldstein and Brauntuch eventually homed in on representations of power and the power of representation, then, indicates not so much a departure from their student training as an effort to continue working through the major social problematics it had raised. The political ambience at CalArts was particularly conspicuous within the institute’s School of Critical Studies, where undergraduates like Brauntuch were required to enroll in multiple courses per semester in order to meet the general education requirements of the bachelor of fine arts degree.65 Here, a faculty of radical young instructors taught Frankfurt school theory and offered seminars like “Oppression in America” and “Liberation and Resistance.”66 Jeremy Shapiro’s recurring course “The Social, Political, and Intellectual Background of Modernism” emphasized the competing ideologies of capitalism, communism, and fascism prior to the Second World War. So did Deena Metzger’s “Dream and Nightmare,” which situated modern literature relative to its social contexts “with major emphasis upon the phenomena of fascism, alienation, anonymity and silence.”67 (Brauntuch remembers both Shapiro and Metzger from his time at CalArts, although he does not recall which of their specific courses, if any, he took.)68 In the second term of the 1973 academic year, Grahame Weinbren assigned short texts by Hitler alongside others by Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, and John Cage for a philosophy seminar titled “Different Ways of Seeing.” In the first term of 1975, students from all schools enrolled in an “ensemble” lecture, “War, Revolution and the Arts,” that was designed to “explore the meaning, for Americans, of World War II: concentration camps, genocide, and the atomic bomb.”69 Where instructors in the School of Art at this time—among them Baldessari, Paul Brach, Simon Forti, Allan Kaprow, and Alison Knowles—sought to parse emerging trends in contemporary art and cultivate yet untold paths forward, the School of Critical Studies offered a complementarily retrospective view, centered decidedly around the ideological precipitants and fallout of the Second World War.70 To accompany such formal instruction, the institute hosted a variety of extracurricular programming directed toward related topics. In the spring of 1971, Sherry Weber spoke on Benjamin’s philosophy of history. Jim Hurtak—who generally taught courses on myth, mysticism, and Kabbalah— organized an extensive series called “The Politics of Inequality,”71 delivering lectures (some of them entangled with conspiracy theory) such as “The German Intelligentsia and the Philosophical Foundations of the Third Reich,” “Neo-Nazism in the World Today and the ‘Die Spinne’ Operation in South Troy Brauntuch and the Figuring of “Distance”

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America,” “The Religious and Racial Bias behind the CIA Assassination of Kennedy,” and “The Rise of the Klan in Los Angeles, 1963–1971, and Its Economic Connections with South America.”72 That same academic year, the institute’s Bijou theater screened films like Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), which Siegfried Kracauer famously interpreted as a protofascist reflection of Weimar Germany’s mounting desire for order amid perceived social chaos, and Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963), the auteur director’s associative portrait of a gay biker subculture, its appropriation of Nazi regalia, and its adoration of masculine rebel figures like James Dean and Marlon Brando.73 In Brauntuch’s recollection, the theater also showed Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will on what seemed to him like a monthly basis.74 Meanwhile, reporters for The Big News, the student-run newspaper at CalArts, used their publication to highlight local forms of authoritarianism (figs. 3.12 and 3.13). In February 1972, two student journalists infiltrated and exposed the Alamo Christian Foundation, a cultlike evangelical ministry operating throughout Los Angeles. The following November, the paper’s editors republished an article reporting that Republican Party operatives had made strategic overtures to California Neo-Nazis in advance of the state’s presidential primaries. Not even the bucolic CalArts campus was free of such extremism, the paper showed: in the winter of 1972, students discovered a swastika-inscribed dagger taped along with a threatening note to their dean’s office door.75 The intellectual and political environment at CalArts during the early 1970s was, in short, complex, characterized by a progressive ethos of poststudio experimentalism, but also by an embattled radicalism that focused less on the virtues of democratic society than on the threats arrayed against it. If Brauntuch’s works from the early 1980s registered a reactionary social current, it was not one that swept in with Reagan, as the artist’s detractors and supporters alike often seem to suggest, but rather one that took root in the years around 1968, plunging the counterculture, and with it the arts, into a gradually and unpredictably evolving sense of crisis, often articulated with respect to a conception of “fascism” that was itself in flux.76 Consider the development of what Peter Novick terms “Holocaust consciousness” during these same years (as discussed in the introduction). Here was a phenomenon, exemplified by exhibitions like Spiritual Resistance, that developed in parallel to the left’s generic conception of fascism as an ever-present political threat, but that countered it in effect, emphasizing the uniqueness of the Nazi regime’s criminality rather than its comparability to present and future political formations.77 Brauntuch engaged this material, then, at a moment marked by the articulation of newly competing imperatives, both legitimate, whose divergence had yet to be acknowledged, let alone reconciled: to struggle against “fascistic” oppression in the present, but also to memorialize and psychologically process the singular atrocities of Nazism past. 108

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Fig. 3.12 The Big News, March 7, 1972. The California Institute of the Arts Publications

Collection, 1964–2014, CalArts-002. Series 1. Institute Publications, 1964–2014. Box 54. Copyright © California Institute of the Arts. Courtesy of California Institute of the Arts Library and Institute Archives.

Fig. 3.13 The Big News, November 30, 1972. The California Institute of the Arts Publications

Collection, 1964–2014, CalArts-002. Series 1. Institute Publications, 1964–2014. Box 54. Copyright © California Institute of the Arts. Courtesy of California Institute of the Arts Library and Institute Archives.

Such divergences and dualities require more complex ways of thinking about mnemo-historical perception than those employed in the established discourses around Brauntuch’s work, which have tended to characterize the fascist referent in terms of either unbridgeable remoteness or pressing proximity. The paradigm of cultural memory—in which historical perception is understood as inextricably bound up with representation, the perceived presence of the past regarded as something afforded rather than occluded by mediation—offers such a nuanced view. As I have argued, Brauntuch’s work from 1977 through 1983 effectively staged the integratedness of history, memory, and media in our perception of the past, all the while foregrounding, in its fragmentation and obscurity, the sense of temporal dislocation that can result when once-dominant historical as well as art historical narratives begin to fracture under new political pressures. In all of this, the artist aligned with peers like Charlesworth and Goldstein. Perhaps his closest interlocutor, however, was Longo, an artist who trained far from Valencia but arrived in New York City at more or less the exact moment that peers like Goldstein and Brauntuch did and quickly entered into the discussions that they had begun.

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4 ROBERT LONGO IN THE SHADOW OF EMPIRE

I

n the early 1990s Robert Longo decamped from New York to Paris, uncertain about the future of his career. He had been among the foremost beneficiaries of the previous decade’s overheated art market, and when the economy began to contract, he witnessed his patronage diminish as rapidly as it had materialized.1 Critics, many of whom had long questioned the substance of Longo’s brassy, figurative work, were just as quick to cast the artist as a has-been, his art a dated product of the 1980s. Roberta Smith dubbed him “Robert Long Ago” in a review from 1989, linking his oeuvre to a culture of toxic excess that she was eager to leave behind.2 Men in the Cities (1979–83), the large, photo-based drawings of flailing, formally attired young men and women for which Longo remains best known, have in particular come to emblematize the avarice and alienation associated with the Reagan years’ freewheeling capitalism (plate 10). In Mary Harron’s 2000 film adaptation of American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 satirical novel about a Wall-Street-banker-cum-serial-killer, two works from the series prominently adorn the villainous antihero’s uptown apartment and murder den. Reflecting on such associations, Longo has said that he felt he “was being blamed for the 80s.”3 There was, in his view, a certain injustice in this. He had always intended his work to repudiate the Cold War American culture of anxiety and violence in which he had been raised, even if it also registered his inescapable implication in these dynamics. The epically scaled “combines” that the artist began producing in 1982—wall-mounted multimedia works, typically comprising drawings, photographic prints, and sculptural components—figured such an admixture of critique and culpability in particularly overt form, often by approximating monumental for-

mats associated with imperial pomp and fascist or otherwise authoritarian rule.4 Corporate Wars: Walls of Influence (1982), for instance, cast a tangle of brawling Wall Street types as a mural-scale aluminum relief. Sword of the Pig, from the following year, arrayed three components across a horizontal span of nineteen feet: a cruciform sculpture reminiscent of a spatially compressed sword and hilt; a drawing of a nude male bodybuilder, shown from neck to knees, behind a sheet of yellow plexiglass; and a silkscreened photograph from Time magazine depicting abandoned missile silos in the American Midwest (fig. 4.1). As this chapter will discuss, much of the oppressive imagery that appeared in Longo’s combines derived from a similarly grandiose series of performance-based works that the artist produced between 1978 and 1982, ultimately integrating them into a single opus called Empire. This he produced in conjunction with a film script of the same name, pointedly subtitled A Picture of America. “Being an American seems critical at this time,” Longo explained in a statement from 1984. This position, he mused, was “not something I go out to portray, rather it is a consequence I

Fig. 4.1 Robert Longo, Sword of the Pig, 1983. Lacquer on wood; charcoal, graphite, and ink on

paper; plexiglass; silkscreen on aluminum; 97 ¾ × 229 ½ × 28 in. London, Tate. Copyright © Robert Longo. Courtesy of the artist.

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have to carry. In my art I am trying to deal with something like the nature of being condemned.”5 Longo locates the origins of such a searching, penitential project in his Men in the Cities drawings, the beginnings of which he traces back to a childhood game of “who could fall dead best”—that is, in most convincing mimicry of the violent ends depicted in TV westerns, film noir thrillers, and the like.6 The more sophisticated impetus for the series, however, was itself a second-order reflection on such popular material: this was The American Soldier, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1970 homage to the Hollywood gangster movies of his youth. Longo, having not yet seen the film itself, fixed on a single frame from its concluding scene.7 Printed in the July 11, 1977, issue of the Village Voice on the occasion of the Munich-based director’s twelve-film retrospective at the New Yorker Theatre, the image depicted Fassbinder’s nattily dressed protagonist, a German-born Vietnam-War-veteran-turnedcontract-killer named Ricky, arching forward from a fatal gunshot to his lower back. From this, Longo derived a small relief of enameled aluminum, also titled American Soldier (1977), that isolates the Ricky character in his state of existential agony, much as the drawings in Men in the Cities would isolate their own contorted subjects (fig. 4.2). It was his central contribution to the Pictures show. Thus abstracted, Longo’s image of a dying man was primed to evoke the religious trope of the falling figure, with its dual implications of past sin and future judgment, that Jack Goldstein had already begun to employ in works like The Pull (1976) and Sarah Charlesworth would soon embrace in Stills (1980). Later sculptures like The Fall (1979), a lacquered black wall relief featuring just the torso of a figure who appears to plummet from above, made such biblical allusions all the more overt, prompting interpreters like Rosetta Brooks and Howard N. Fox to venture the mythical Fall of Man as a master framework undergirding Longo’s entire oeuvre (fig. 4.3).8 I propose that the falling figure functioned more specifically for Longo as an emblem of what he termed “condemnation” in his statement from 1984. This was a state that he understood not in religious terms but rather in political and mnemo-historical ones: to see oneself as “condemned” is to situate one’s agency and one’s identity—national and otherwise—in relation to the past. As such, it was a state that the artist believed he could inhabit both affectively and critically, notwithstanding the growing chorus of critics who found in his work only the signs of an ever more emphatic fatalism.

Doomed White People Longo’s Men in the Cities drawings no doubt owe their emblematic quality, at least in part, to an accidental metonymy: the works debuted around the time of Reagan’s election—the artist first exhibited them as a series at Metro Pictures in January 1981—and consequently became associated with Robert Longo in the Shadow of Empire

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Fig. 4.2 Robert Longo, American Soldier, 1977. Enamel on cast aluminum, 25 × 13 × 2 ¾ in.

Copyright © Robert Longo. Courtesy of the artist.

the broader culture of conservatism that the administration came to represent. Yet the works also possess formal characteristics that rendered them well suited to the role, a fact that both Longo and his initial interpreters acknowledged at the time of their production. Consider the figures’ elegantly professional manner of dress: what Jeanne Siegel described in 1980 as marrying the “cool, streamlined, high style of the New Wave musician” with the “everyday uniform of the Exxon executive.”9 Longo has confirmed that he based these costumes on the garb of Wall Street workers he observed near his home in lower Manhattan, but narrowed lapels and tightened skirts 116

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Plate 1 General Idea, FILE Megazine, volume 4, number 2 (“Special Transgressions Issue”), 1979.

Web offset periodical, 64 pp. plus cover, 35.5 × 28 cm. Edition of 3,000. Copyright General Idea. Image courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.

Plate 2 Andy Warhol, Little Race Riot, 1964. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, four canvases, each: 30 × 33 in. Image and artwork copyright © 2023 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 3 Still from Jack Goldstein, The Jump, 1978. 16 mm film, color, silent, 26 seconds. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (2021.M.6). Copyright © J. Paul Getty Trust. Photograph courtesy of 1301PE, Los Angeles.

Plate 4 Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1980. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 96 × 180 in. Copyright © J. Paul Getty Trust. Photograph courtesy of 1301PE, Los Angeles.

Plate 5 Still from Jack Goldstein, The Chair, 1975. 16 mm film, color, silent, 5 minutes. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (2021.M.6). Copyright © J. Paul Getty Trust. Courtesy of Galerie Buchholz and the Estate of Jack Goldstein.

Plate 6 Troy Brauntuch, 1 2 3 (Opera, Staircase, Tank), 1977. Lithograph and silkscreen on paper, triptych, framed: 47 × 37 ¼ × 1 ½ in. Copyright © Troy Brauntuch. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.

Plate 7 Troy Brauntuch, Untitled (Mercedes), 1978. Photo C-prints, three parts, 72 × 96 in. (182.9 × 243.8 cm). Copyright © Troy Brauntuch. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.

Plate 8 Troy Brauntuch, Untitled, 1980. Photographic process on paper and articulated photograph, triptych, 84 × 132 in. (overall). Copyright © Troy Brauntuch. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.

Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.

Plate 9 Troy Brauntuch, Three Effects, 1977. Rubber-stamped ink on paper, diptych, each: 11 × 27 in. Copyright © Troy Brauntuch.

Plate 10 Works from the series Men in the Cities on view at Robert Longo, Figures: Forms and Expressions, Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY, 1981. Copyright © Robert Longo. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 11 Robert Longo, Sound Distance of a Good Man, 1978. Performance, Franklin Furnace, New York, 1978. Copyright © Robert Longo. Courtesy of the artist and the Franklin Furnace Archives, New York.

Plate 12 Robert Longo, Culture Culture, 1982–83. Acrylic on Masonite; charcoal, graphite, oil, acrylic, and ink on paper; plexiglass; 91 ½ × 147 ¾ in. Copyright © Robert Longo. Courtesy of the artist.

and graphite on canvas; 136 × 216 × 25 in. Los Angeles, the Broad Art Foundation. Copyright © Robert Longo. Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 13 Robert Longo, Tongue to the Heart, 1984. Acrylic, oil on wood; cast plaster; hammered lead on wood; Durotran; acrylic charcoal,

Collection 1970s–Present, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2019. Copyright © Gretchen Bender Estate, courtesy of Sprüth Magers. Digital image copyright © 2023 Department of Imaging and Visual Resources, the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: John Wronn / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York.

Plate 14 Gretchen Bender, Dumping Core, 1984. Four-channel video on thirteen monitors with sound, 13:00 min. Installation view,

Sprüth Magers.

Plate 15 Gretchen Bender, Gremlins, 1984. Color photographs on Masonite, 52 × 66 in. Copyright © Gretchen Bender Estate, courtesy of

Plate 16  Gretchen Bender, Untitled (Landscape, Computer Graphics, Death Squad),

1987. Color photographs on Masonite, 120 × 60 in. Copyright © Gretchen Bender Estate, courtesy of Sprüth Magers.

Fig. 4.3 Robert Longo, The Fall, 1979. Cast polyester resin on MDF, black lacquer, 96 × 60 × 28 in.

Copyright © Robert Longo. Courtesy of the artist.

to approximate the more modish styling that characterized the postpunk (more specifically, No Wave) music subculture in which he was immersed.10 Here, performers like James Chance of the Contortions famously comported themselves in a spastic, frenzied manner that Longo’s twisted subjects may in turn evoke. Whereas Chance clearly burlesqued the rumpled formalwear he donned, however, the people in Longo’s starkly decontextualized drawings are apt to appear as deranged conformists; delirious strivers who, in Carter Ratcliff ’s reading, “accept current dictates about appearance as if objections were pointless.”11 Robert Longo in the Shadow of Empire

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The figures’ violently destabilized poses, which the artist sometimes induced in his models by hurling tennis balls at them or yanking them around with ropes on the roof of his apartment building, impart a certain morbidity to such sartorial compliance.12 Longo sought to establish a provocative ambiguity as to whether his subjects were “dancing or dying”—a phrase that quickly permeated the critical literature on the series—but he often tipped the scale toward the latter state, for instance by extending a figure’s necktie to suggest a noose or evoking a noirish criminality through his use (by way of a hired draftsperson, Diane Shea) of grainy charcoal on graphite, reminiscent of black-and-white film stock (fig. 4.4).13 Such gestures inclined viewers like Siegel, Ratcliff, and others to perceive Longo’s subjects as contemporary icons of the alienation, despair, and spiritual plight brought on

Fig. 4.4 Robert Longo, Untitled (Eric), from the

series Men in the Cities, 1979–83. Charcoal and graphite on paper, 96 × 48 in. Copyright © Robert Longo. Courtesy of the artist.

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Fig. 4.5 Robert Longo, National Trust, 1981. Cast polyester resin with aluminum; charcoal,

graphite, flashe on paper; 63 × 234 × 5 in. Minneapolis, Walker Art Center. Art Center Acquisition Fund, 1981. Copyright © Robert Longo.

by Cold War brinksmanship and the ascendancy of consumer capitalism. “This fallen man (Adam), full of angst, is caught in a kind of dance of death,” Siegel wrote. For Richard Price, they suggested “blasted silhouettes on Hiroshima walls,” signaling how “we all increasingly dance to the ticking of the nuclear clock.”14 The sociocultural coding of Men in the Cities extended also to its monumentalizing format. Longo conceived of the series in terms of diptychs, triptychs, and larger groupings, composed to establish formal counterpoints that he has likened to musical chord progressions—especially the powerchord progressions characteristic of punk rock—or cinematographic montages.15 As for the mural scale of their component panels, which eventually grew to the standard dimensions of eight by four or five feet, Longo explained that he sought to rival both “the size of the movies” and their cultural impact.16 The works may also suggest more antiquated prototypes like Greco-Roman caryatids or classical friezes, a typology that Longo would even more directly mimic in subsequent works like Corporate Wars: Walls of Influence (1982).17 As early as his 1981 solo exhibition at Metro Pictures, Longo accentuated the frieze-like appearance of Men in the Cities by interspersing his drawings with lacquered aluminum relief sculptures depicting recognizable New York City buildings, each of them tilted as though collapsing in step with its human counterparts (fig. 4.5). Featuring some of Manhattan’s more architecturally imposing, and in some cases oppressive, institutions, among them the Downtown Athletics Club (completed 1930), the psychiatric building at Bellevue Hospital (completed 1939), and the detention complex better known as the Tombs (also 1939), these reliefs literRobert Longo in the Shadow of Empire

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alized the series’ titular allusion to urban space while casting this milieu as a dystopic, distinctly 1930s-styled landscape of exclusion, confinement, and control. Critics did not fail to seize on Longo’s cues. Of the artist’s jerky, startled-seeming subjects, Barry Blinderman wrote that “it is as though the Specter of 1984 is tapping each of them on the shoulder.” Kim Levin, for her part, winced at what she perceived as the work’s “chilling” yet seductive core: “power detached from ideology.”18 Even when working on paper, Longo imbued his quasi-cinematic figures with sculptural monumentality by depicting them from below—“the Leni Riefenstahl angle,” as he called it.19 The upward-facing perspective was in fact not the only compositional device that Longo borrowed from the Naziera auteur and propagandist, whose work he recalls first seeing while a student at Buffalo State University. In positioning his figures before stark white voids, he closely approximated the shots of rigid bodies against expanses of sky that recur throughout Triumph of the Will as well as Olympia.20 Such parallels appear to have been intentional. In her 1980 article, Siegel noted that Longo grouped his figures into “crowd”-like sets through which he hoped to evoke “Hitler’s mastery at staging rallies as a form of seduction,” the strategy so effectively captured by period documents like Triumph of the Will.21 Longo himself recalls how, in the years around 1980, he and Troy Brauntuch “used to talk about [how] Riefenstahl’s films . . . were the beginning of modern advertising,” marking, along with the “posters, logos, graphics, and architecture” of the Third Reich more generally, an “unprecedented attempt to influence the masses in the modern world.”22 For Longo and the historically informed set of viewers that he initially envisioned, the falling figures of Men in the Cities were primed to elide the contemporary corporate drone or compliant consumer with Nazism’s ecstatic mass subject. Longo sometimes articulated his critique in universalizing terms, characterizing Men in the Cities as a statement about the corruptive effects of power and privilege in any societal context. Hence the artist’s decision to present his models—all of whom he knew personally, and some of whom he knew intimately—as generic icons rather than individualized portraits, for instance by selecting poses in which their faces are occluded or out of view. Other statements, however, suggest a more localized and historically specific logic at play. “I want them to be everybody,” he explained about his flailing subjects in an interview from 1982. “Not exactly a master race, but archetypes.”23 Alluding, explosively, to a core tenet of Nazi ideology, Longo thus acknowledged the racially delimited nature of the group that he portrayed (all his figures look White), even as he ascribed to them the status of everypersons. Elsewhere he made this aspect of his thinking more overt. For instance, he recurrently described the figures in Men in the Cities as “doomed white people,” the ones who “built the buildings that would eventually fall on them.”24 Working within the milieu of post-civil-rights-movement America while looking to the Third Reich as his primary object of historical 120

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reference, the artist seems to have imagined his depicted figures as a decadent elite on the cusp of self-destruction, similar in this regard to the upper echelons of fascist Europe as these had been depicted in films like Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969) or Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), the latter of which Longo has cited as an important influence on his work around the time that Men in the Cities got underway.25 In describing his figures as “doomed,” Longo situated his implicitly historical material within a mythic framework of human sin and divine judgment. Christian religious references of this type pervaded Longo’s work of the 1970s and 1980s, manifesting not only in sculptures like The Fall, but also in several cast reliefs that he exhibited alongside The American Soldier at Douglas Crimp’s Pictures exhibition. In Opening Scene: “A Screaming Comes across the Sky” (1977), for example, Longo depicted the striding peasant from Jean-François Millet’s Sower (1850), an iconic embodiment of religious faith in the person of the common man. Longo’s title, drawn from the opening passage of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), jarringly reframes this art historical referent: the phrase, alluding to the Nazi-engineered rocket around which Pynchon’s dystopian narrative revolves, implies a displacement of divine providence by infernal destruction. (“The unfortunate sower, white against white, seems to be at ground zero, frozen in suspension as the unseen rocket poises overhead,” one reviewer imagined.)26 Also included in the Artists Space show was Seven Seals for Missouri Breaks, Silver Scene: “Let’s Go to the Hills and Join the Guerillas” (1976), in which a rider on horseback seems to emerge from below a horizon in seven sequential stages of appearance. The work’s title weaves an even denser set of references: The Missouri Breaks refers to Arthur Penn’s 1976 western (or anti-western) film about a gang of horse thieves contending with a deranged vigilante, while “seven seals” denotes the divine fasteners described in the book of Revelation (and famously pondered in the 1957 Ingmar Bergman film The Seventh Seal) whose sequential rupture sets in motion the events of the apocalypse, beginning with the release of the Four Horsemen who bring about mankind’s violent end. Together, these allusions effectively invert the western genre’s frontier mythos, reframing the history of settler colonial expansion through an end-times lens of reckoning and damnation. Longo’s solo debut at Metro Pictures at once extended and complexified the artist’s quasi-religious framework. Flouting the typical neutrality of modern art installation in favor of a more theatrical approach, Longo dimmed the gallery’s ambient overhead lighting and directed bright spotlights directly at his Men in the Cities drawings (fig. 4.6). The result, owing to the reflectivity of paper and the light-absorbing quality of charcoal, was that the depicted figures—whom the artist would later describe as “fallen angels”—seemed to radiate luminous halos: prolepses of quasi-divine redemption, insinuated into moments of human lapse.27 Needless to say, such providential associations complicate interpretations that would frame Men Robert Longo in the Shadow of Empire

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Fig. 4.6 Installation view of Robert Longo, Men in the Cities, Metro Pictures, New York, 1981.

Copyright © Robert Longo. Courtesy of the artist.

in the Cities purely in terms of seduction, cynicism, and sin. These drawings rather seem to have played multiple roles within Longo’s developing conceptual framework, figuring by turns—if not, somehow, at once—the oppressive monumentality of totalitarian architecture and cinematic propaganda, the ecstatic fervor of fascism’s deindividualized mass subject, and the fallen beneficiaries of an unjust society, presented to the viewer not as morally contemptible others but rather as flawed counterparts with whom one might identify as a citizen implicated, however reluctantly, in the machinations of American racism and Cold War statecraft. As Longo’s recurring religious rhetoric suggests, and his broader corpus of imagery from the 1980s confirms, the artist’s thinking was prominently eschatological, focused on images of apocalypse and questions of judgment, culpability, damnation, and, perhaps, salvation within a society he saw as defined by the effects of power, violence, conditioning, and control. Such heavily freighted admixtures of religious and political evocation were hardly unique to Longo’s work. On the contrary, they aligned the artist with a sprawling subcultural movement from the time, albeit one whose purchase on the fields of underground music and experimental cinema preceded and exceeded the more limited inroads it would make within the world of visual art. 122

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Falling, Feeling Longo formed his initial artistic sensibilities while a student in Buffalo, where he, Cindy Sherman, Charles Clough, Michael Zwack, and others in their network schooled themselves in the languages of postminimalist sculpture, performance art, and structural film.28 After Longo and Sherman, then his girlfriend, moved to New York City in the summer of 1977, however, the pair turned their attention toward the more energized activity they discovered at the city’s art world–adjacent rock clubs and independent cinemas. “The art world in the late ’70s was dying,” Longo explained to an interviewer in 1985. What little work there was that still seemed vital to him—that of Donald Judd, Vito Acconci, and Jonathan Borofsky, for example—seemed to offer no clear pathways for the development of his own practice.29 “So instead of hitting the galleries like a duty, Cindy and I went to the clubs and old movie houses,” drawing inspiration from the punk bands that played at CBGB and the European New Wave directors, among them Fassbinder, François Truffault, Jean-Luc Godard, and Michelangelo Antonioni, whose films played at repertory venues like the Carnegie Theater and Bleecker Street Cinema.30 Through these experiences, Sherman cultivated the attunement to gendered cinematic convention that famously informs her Untitled Film Stills (1977–80), many of which Longo photographed. Longo, for his part, seems to have found in both New Wave film and punk rock the blueprint for an expanded and revitalized minimalism. Godard, Longo marveled, “cuts the routine inessentials” of cinematic illusionism to arrive at an exceptionally lean narrative form.31 The operation struck him as analogous to the one that Frank Stella had performed in creating his radically reductive Black Paintings of 1958–60, another avowed model for his Men in the Cities drawings.32 (Stella’s allusions to Nazism in several of these paintings, as discussed in the introduction, no doubt also played a part in their appeal.) The visceral effect of punk, with its stripped-down power-chord progressions, likewise “helped promote and reinforce a concern with the primary levels of experience: how a work looks, how it sounds,” Longo explained. On this point he was insistent. “All my visual art,” he declared in 1980, “is completely inspired by the punk and new wave music that’s been happening in New York over the past few years.”33 As both a guitarist and a visual artist, Longo aligned himself in particular with No Wave–associated composers like Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca, pioneers of so-called noise music who married the propulsive intensity of punk with the abstractive sophistication of minimalism, resulting in something that Chatham came to regard, through his conversations with Longo, as more a “representation of rock” than rock itself.34 Proceeding from techniques developed in the previous decade by composers like Robert Longo in the Shadow of Empire

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La Monte Young and Steve Reich, Chatham deployed loudly amplified, unconventionally tuned electric guitars to elicit quasi-melodic textures from as little as a single note played over an extended duration. His Guitar Trio (1977), for instance, consisted of drums, bass, and several thunderously amplified guitars continuously playing subsets of a single E-chord, strummed over different frets to produce layered overtones that were capable of inducing a surprising variety of psychoacoustic phenomena. Branca followed suit at grander scale with works like The Spectacular Commodity and The Ascension (both 1981), leading as few as four or as many as fifteen guitarists through somewhat more varied but nonetheless limited harmonic ranges at “extreme density” and volume.35 James Welling, another artist who drew inspiration from the composer’s work, described the result as a “bone-rattling experience” of “spectacular, ear-shattering crescendos.”36 Branca, for his part, proclaimed his work to be “totally visual” in an interview from 1981. “It definitely isn’t music that’s intended to be listened to,” he added; “it’s music that’s intended to be felt.”37 The “feeling” to which Branca alluded was, in one respect, sensorial. As Welling’s recollection of their “bone-rattling” quality suggests, the composer’s performances were loud enough to produce palpable vibrations in the typically small clubs where he performed. Such intensity precluded the strictly auditory forms of attentiveness privileged within the modern concert hall, requiring a more fully embodied form of apperception. But the feeling was also emotional. This is one sense in which the music could be “totally visual”—in the sense of visionary, hallucinogenic—even as it was “intended to be felt.” For Branca himself, the impact of his music certainly seems to have been an emotive one: he claims to have spontaneously burst into tears the first time he and his musicians produced the overtone effect in rehearsal.38 The guitarist Lee Ranaldo, a founding member of the band Sonic Youth, joined Branca’s ensemble not long after experiencing a performance of Chatham’s Guitar Trio in the summer of 1979. He, too, recalls the theatrics and effects of their performances in strikingly emotive terms: Audiences sat stunned while something violent, beautiful, ecstatic and visionary unfolded before them. We were all leaning into the music, Glenn quivering and gyrating in raggedy suit jacket and fucked up pompadour. Sometimes his guitar and mine would clash, I would step forward, his strings would grate against my strings in a crucifixion pose until he forced me down to the ground, guitars grinding away all around us. Those who stayed—those audience members not driven out by the volume or unexpected nature of what they’d come to see—found themselves moved in a way that few other musical performances had ever left them. All the supposed transformative power of art was made visible to them, through the music. Few who heard this music have forgotten the experience.39

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Inflated though Ranaldo’s remarks might seem, they point to a sincere spirituality in No Wave music’s ritualistic harnessing of amplified sound. They also reveal an apparent contradiction at the heart of its aesthetic program. No Wave artists like Chatham and Branca, with their commitment to heightened “feeling” and what Ranaldo called the “transformative power of art,” unironically aligned themselves with modernism’s expressionist paradigms. Yet their compositional techniques would appear to undermine some of expressionism’s key tenets: after all, what could be less expressive (in the traditional sense) than the prolonged playing of a single note? In this case, the psychoacoustic complexity that resulted was a product more of chance—or, more accurately, the probabilistic interaction of overlapping sound waves— than of authorial intent. Such efforts perversely reconciled the emotive theatrics of orchestral music in its most Romantic articulations with a more recent avant-garde tradition, exemplified by the aleatory work of composers like Young and John Cage, defined precisely by its attempt to supersede such expressivity. Little wonder that Cage reacted to Branca’s guitar-driven “symphonies” with dismay bordering on panic. “I don’t think that the image of that power, and intention, and determination, would make a society that I would want to continue living in,” he remarked of the composer’s Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses (1981), a jangly, dissonant composition for ten electric guitars and drums that he saw performed in the summer of 1982. Branca’s ensemble, clad in black leather, seemed to resemble “one of these strange religious organizations that we hear about,” Cage continued, adding that “if it was something political, it would resemble fascism.”40 Unacknowledged in Cage’s remarks is the extent to which the No Wave artists actively courted these unseemly associations, echoing the larger punk and postpunk movements’ self-consciously perverse recycling of Nazi paraphernalia and interwar authoritarian aesthetics (discussed in the introduction). Just as Joy Division, a band that Longo described himself being “madly affected by” around the time he produced Men in the Cities, adopted a moniker associated with Nazi atrocities and styled their visual material in a darkly classicizing manner further evocative of the Third Reich, so Branca announced his 1982 performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave festival with a “spiral score” for Symphony No. 3 (Gloria) (1982) that bore a swastika at its center.41 Religious imagery, with its intimations of transcendence often yoked to violence, likewise proliferated within the No Wave scene. It appeared not only in the “crucifixion pose” spontaneously struck by Branca and Ranaldo on stage, but also in a poster advertising Branca’s appearance at Noise Fest, held at the White Columns gallery in June 1981.42 Featuring a grainy still from Victor Fleming’s Joan of Arc (1948), it depicted the titular martyr chained on her pyre, ecstatic visage turned heavenward. The cover of Joy Division’s Closer—released shortly after the suicide of the band’s lead singer, Ian Curtis, in 1980—assumed a similarly gloomy, morbid Robert Longo in the Shadow of Empire

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Fig. 4.7 Robert Longo, Pictures for Music, 1979. Six slide projections. Copyright © Robert Longo. Courtesy of the artist.

cast. Designed by the graphic artist Peter Saville, the record sleeve depicts a sculpted Lamentation scene in which four cloaked mourners stand, kneel, sit, and prostrate themselves beside a draped bier bearing Christ’s body.43 Such spiritual and affective inclinations are equally apparent in the slide projection montage that Longo designed to accompany a 1979 performance of Chatham’s Guitar Trio at the Mudd Club (fig. 4.7) Simply titled Pictures for Music, it paired the progressive structure of Chatham’s composition with a rebus-like sequence of six found photographs, linked together through 126

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extremely slow dissolves. They depict the Barclay-Vesey building’s art deco crown, standing before a cloudy expanse; a silhouetted man darting into a mysteriously light-flooded alley at night; a young boy resting his head against his mother’s; a plane taking off near a tropical coastline; another boy laying limply—possibly lifelessly—in the arms of a man before a pair of horses; and Grand Central Station’s ticketing hall, angled shafts of light streaming through its clerestory windows.44 As Sarah Evans observes, Longo’s pathos-laden images recall Sherman’s contemporaneous Film Stills in their propensity to evoke larger narratives and cinematic clichés, the same mass cultural objects that Goldstein, Levine, and Salle were exploring around this time through the melodramas of Douglas Sirk (as discussed in chapter 2).45 Like Brauntuch’s contemporaneous triptychs, however, Longo’s sequence also activates a Christian religious framework, transposing centuries-old motifs (Madonna and Child, Annunciation, Pietà) to a setting of modern urban life. Longo reprised such iconography in his cover artwork for The Ascension, Branca’s 1981 album (fig. 4.8). The record’s religiously coded title befits its propulsive, crescendoing, at times sublimely climactic tracks, in which reverberating overtones project a spatiality that several critics likened to that of church music.46 Similar associations attached themselves to Branca’s ecstatic stage theatrics, which, as Ranaldo and Cage both noted, could evoke the symbolism, violence, and primal eroticism of a cultic rite. Perhaps seeking to emblematize such imagery on The Ascension’s jacket, Branca reportedly requested from Longo an image of “two guys fucking,” a characteristically taboo-flouting illustration of what Kim Gordon, the artist and Sonic Youth bassist, described as No Wave’s masculine, orgasmic ardor.47 Longo had in fact approached this very motif in his recent work The Wrestlers (1978), a lacquered relief sculpture depicting two nude men entwined in some mixture of passion and athletic struggle. For Branca, however, he produced a more subtly suggestive image that succeeds in marrying the composer’s sexual and spiritual inclinations—not under the sign not of Eros, but rather that of Thanatos. Styled in the manner of Men in the Cities, it depicts a grimacing Branca, dragging an apparently dead man by the armpits in a way that gestures toward intercourse but also evokes the Deposition of Christ. With the man’s arms forced into a raised position, he, or his soul, appears on the verge of ascending in birdlike flight. Hardly suitable as vectors of any earnest devotional practice, Christian or otherwise, the quasi-religious signifiers that circulated through Longo’s art and the larger No Wave scene functioned as knowingly conventionalized stand-ins for such objects of emotional investment. Despite their manifest theatricality, however, they also gestured toward a very real desire to instantiate a liminal, transformative zone of collective feeling— a place, whether sited at the club or at the gallery, where “all the supposed transformative power of art” could be made visible. “I want my work to be Robert Longo in the Shadow of Empire

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Fig. 4.8 Robert Longo, Untitled (Drawing for Glenn Branca Album Cover), 1981. Charcoal and

graphite on paper, 48 × 48 in. Copyright © Robert Longo. Courtesy of the artist.

emotional,” Longo affirmed as early as 1979. “One of the best moments for me was when somebody cried at one of my performances.”48 Five years later, he elaborated that “my art is about passion and pathos and not being afraid of power,” once again adding that “I think it would be really great if somebody came in here and started to cry.”49 The ecstatically contorted figures in Longo’s Men in the Cities gave crystalline shape to these desires. In the artist’s performance-based work from the time, one encounters them and their larger political implications in more expansively articulated form.

Empire The performance that allegedly brought a spectator to tears was Sound Distance of a Good Man, a thematic follow-up to The American Soldier that Longo debuted at Franklin Furnace in April 1978 (plate 11). Here, Longo once again represented Ricky’s demise, this time in the form of a composite photograph that depicts the anguished character (portrayed by the architect and theorist Bernard Tschumi) before one of the New York Public Library’s flanking 128

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marble lions.50 Rather than incorporate this photograph into his performance as a slide projection, Longo captured it on inexpensive 16 mm film, thereby enlivening the otherwise static image with cinema’s interstitial flicker and frame-by-frame variations in scratching and grain. Marked by what Crimp described as a “confusion of temporalities,” Longo’s still film appeared between two complementarily time-bending components to form a theatrical tableau that unfolded over the course of several minutes.51 At stage left, a soprano (in fact the artist’s sister, Peggy Atkinson), dressed in a floor-length frock and bathed in purple light, sang in accompaniment to a recording of Brian Eno’s Fullness of Wind (Variation on ‘The Canon in D Major’ by Johann Pachelbel) (1975), a down-tempo iteration of Jean-François Paillard’s fulsomely romantic arrangement of the canon for chamber orchestra. At right, two shirtless male “wrestlers” in karate pants, illuminated in amber light on a glacially rotating platform, slowly mimed the exertions that Longo had depicted in his contemporaneous relief sculpture of the same name.52 In both composing and conceptualizing Sound Distance, Longo acknowledges, he took his cues from Goldstein, whose recent performance-based works had similarly utilized colored spotlights and evocative soundtracks to give flesh-and-blood performers the appearance of cinematic projections or mnemonic traces.53 But where Goldstein aimed to set familiar or cliché scenarios at an intellectual “distance,” Longo avowedly pursued something like the opposite: irresistibly moving emotional involvement, or proximity. Longo followed Sound Distance with a 1979 performance at the Kitchen called Surrender (fig. 4.9). Like its predecessor, the work was structured as a tripartite tableau, centered on a filmed photograph. Here, the latter component faded in part way through a performance staged on flanking, spotlit runways. As Longo described in his guidelines for the work, at right, a saxophonist would “blast out in the dark” and then emerge from a lighted doorway, slowly progressing down the platform while playing a “Junior Walker–style” rhythm-and-blues melody in a manner that is at first “mechanical,” then “soothing,” and finally “screeching.” Meanwhile, at left, a man and woman dressed in formalwear would slowly perform a chronological sequence of popular dances from the past thirty years, concluding with a disco groove that Longo envisioned as overtly sexual yet detached from genuine intimacy.54 (The result, one reviewer suggested, echoed the integration of “passion” and “struggle” that had characterized Sound Distance’s wrestlers: “Every step, every reach, every swing, is both affectionate and hostile.”)55 Looming over these routines was the filmic image of a GrecoRoman sculptural fragment: specifically, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Diadoumenos (Youth Tying a Fillet around His Head) (circa AD 69–96). Lit in a dramatic chiaroscuro and photographed from the waist up, the athlete is depicted in the act of tying his victory band. This fragile component has broken off of the Metropolitan Museum’s sculpture, however, resulting in a pose that instead suggests a bodybuilder flexing his bicep. Paralleling the Robert Longo in the Shadow of Empire

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Fig. 4.9 Robert Longo, Surrender, 1979. Performance, the Kitchen, New York, 1979. Copyright ©

Robert Longo. Courtesy of the artist.

leonine power symbol from Sound Distance, the ruin resonates ominously with the performance’s title phrase. Two years later, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, Longo joined these works with a third installment, Empire, to form a trilogy of the same name. Conceived specifically for the Beaux-Arts venue’s neoclassical atrium, this concluding segment opened with “fanfare-like” orchestral music and a rank of spotlights pointing directly upward in the manner of Albert Speer’s Nuremburg rally stagings (see ahead to fig. 5.5).56 At a designated point, the colonnade of lights ascended to a height of seven feet, then rotated ninety degrees to project over the audience while a “bright, martial processional” began to play (fig. 4.10). The music subsequently transitioned to a waltz as a succession of dancing couples filled the space. The performance then concluded according to Longo’s specifications: An air raid siren begins to sound, cutting through the music. As it builds, the music abruptly halts, breaking the atmosphere; the lights cut off. In the darkness the siren continues to wail, evoking panic, and then segues to another sound—the clarion call of trumpets transforming the ballroom into a

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battlefield. The dancers scurry to marked exits. Houselights and exit music fade up. The audience exists to a view of the Ellipse and the White House.57

In case the variously erotic, classicizing, monumental, and military imagery presented by the Empire cycle’s three tableaux was not enough to put a viewer in mind of Nazi-era pageantry, Longo supplied an “emcee character,” played by the artist and actor Eric Bogosian, who introduced the performance’s final segment in German, portentously urging the audience to “be happy,” for “the end is near.” Transitioning to English, he proclaimed with lapidary gravitas that “culture is not a burden, it is an opportunity,” one that “begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies in chaos.”58 Such a cataclysmic arc finds overt expression in the Empire segment’s suggestively Teutonic movement from military march, to ballroom waltz, to wartime panic scene; but it also maps unsettlingly onto Surrender’s dancebased evocation of 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s America, suggesting a certain parallel between these nations’ fates. “There is a progression from the scenes of initial beauty and overwhelming emotional appeal to the final sequence of mass participation, from isolation to assimilation and from personal expression and communication to conformity,” Brian Wallis explained in an

Fig. 4.10 Robert Longo, Empire, 1981. Performance, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1981. Copyright © Robert Longo. Courtesy of the artist.

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essay written to accompany the performance. “As a group the three tableaux represent the sequence of manipulation: seduction, yielding, and conformity.”59 Longo advertised the trilogy with a silkscreen print of the quadriga that crowns the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, an emblem of imperial grandeur that would hardly look out of place on the nearby Washington Mall. Finally, for a performance at the Kitchen in May 1982, Longo reconceived Sound Distance as a two-part performance consisting of its 1978 namesake and a new work called Iron Voices, billed as a “finale to the Empire cycle.”60 In accordance with its title phrase, a reference to the disembodied omnipresence of the Thought Police in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 (1949), Iron Voices presented a harsh and dire counterpart to Sound Distance Part I’s elegiac Romanticism.61 To begin, a black-and-white film of an urban crowd— this one moving—played between two men in military uniform, bathed in red light and accompanied by the sound of an low-frequency electronic drone. Shouldering rifles, they performed drill commands in unison and then in canon to the beat of a drum. At the conclusion of the film, the screen ascended to reveal a runway and a phalanx of five saxophonists, dressed in black and shod in jackboots. Illuminated from behind by bright spotlights that transformed them into silhouettes, the musicians gradually moved forward, playing to an aggressive, marchlike rhythm until they reached the edge of the stage. At this point a trumpeter, three drummers, and four bass guitar players joined to produce a mounting cacophony, pierced by clarionlike squeals, that culminated in abrupt silence.62 Closing down the relatively open-textured polysemy that had characterized Sound Distance Part I, Iron Voices inscribed the earlier work’s eroticism and wistful expressivity within a political framework clearly coded as authoritarian.

A Picture of America Empire was also the name of an illustrated film script, later retitled Steel Angels, that Longo coauthored with the filmmaker Ed Bowes and long attempted (without success) to realize as a feature-length production.63 According to Longo, his storyboarding for the project began as early as 1976 or 1977 and played a generative role in the development of both Men in the Cities and the Empire performances, originating key imagery for the former (the film begins with two suit-clad men fighting against a blank sky, then slowly fades to a shot of a skyscraper) and prompting his development of the latter as a kind of “solid movie.”64 The precise order of priority between these projects is in fact unclear. A Kitchen press release for the film, titled Empire: A Picture of America, described it as “a series of tableaux—living pictures” concerning “the seduction and violence of our visual culture” and stated that the project “stems from an idea developed in performance” by the artist.65 Whatever the relationship may have been, the Empire storyboard that Longo finalized between 1981 and 1982 clearly parallels and expands on the 132

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politically coded, psychosexual motifs of the artist’s contemporaneous performance series, making it a useful interpretive key to his broader oeuvre around those years. Similar in tone to neo-noir thrillers like The Parallax View (1974) and Taxi Driver (1976), Empire sets out to tell “the story of American civilization—the culture, the people, and the government.” It does so by way of four character groups, each centered on an emblematic figure. The first of these personae is Arthur Diamond, a crass nightclub comedian who traffics in tales of urban violence and draws uncomfortable laughs by mocking his city’s marginalized. The second is Donna Calfana, a woman in Arthur’s city who brutalizes the comedian in a brawl. The third is Bill Oliver, a Black dancer whose role remains a silent one, and the fourth is Peter Stringer, a conservative politician and presidential candidate.66 Plot and character development being minimal, it is the conceptual opposition of these emblematic figures that generates the film’s meaning. Where Arthur personifies an embittered machismo, his antagonist, Donna, represents a parallel generation of progressive women who, the male screenwriters imagined, “have forged new roles, devised new directions, but are still struggling with the inability to move” within a patriarchal society.67 Bill’s voiceless movements in turn contrast with Stringer’s canting political speech, while the former character’s identity as a Black man implicitly establishes his counterpart as an agent of White power. In one scene, Bill performs a dance before the United States Customs House building in lower Manhattan, a reminder that his “ancestors were among those items traded” before 1861 (fig. 4.11). Moving in the shadow of the Customs House’s monumental Beaux-Arts statue groups—allegorical personifications of Asia, America, Europe, and Africa, sculpted by Daniel Chester French during the first decade of the twentieth century—Bill wordlessly expresses “a different version of the world.” The imperious Stringer, meanwhile, prowls the cavernous, “orange marble lobby of a building in the financial district” nearby, assembling with a group of men whose valedictions, rendered in slow motion, “sound like the slow dying roars of extinct giant mammals.”68 Empire’s allegorical dynamics unfold through a sequence of visually and auditorily associative passages, many of them related to motifs that Longo had employed or would soon employ in his music, drawing, sculpture, and performance art. The film’s title card fades in to the sound of electric guitars that form a “sheet of sound,” subsequently described as a “music of sonic grandeur,” that Longo imagined Branca would compose.69 After the opening clash between two Men in the Cities–styled figures, one of the combatants strides away to the “horns and drums” of “a colonial army”—sounds akin to the martial accompaniment of Iron Voices. In the scene that follows Arthur and Donna’s nightclub scuffle, Stringer’s children play “who can fall dead the best” on an otherwise empty beach. Comprising slow-motion footage interspersed with freeze frames, set to “sad and romantic music,” their “morRobert Longo in the Shadow of Empire

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bid ballet” recalls several aspects of Sound Distance. So does a later shot of Stringer’s wife and her lover, entwined “in deep gentle embrace,” revolving “as if on a turntable.” Bill’s dance, for its part, appears against a backdrop of civic statuary, much as the Fassbinder-inspired Ricky character had done. This scene in turn precedes a series of shots depicting public monuments, followed by “stock footage” of riots and an equestrian statue being torn off its pedestal with ropes (fig. 4.12). Although avowedly inspired by Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov’s October (1928), the sequence is set to the music of Richard Wagner, suggesting a fascist putsch rather than a communist revolution.70 The storyboard concludes with an extended montage of rapidly intercut imagery, initially placed by Longo under the subheading “Iron Voices,” that transparently reframes the film’s key themes through the lens of Reaganera politics.71 It begins with a campaign speech by Stringer comprising boilerplate calls to revive “the American spirit” of freedom, democracy, and the pursuit of prosperity. The oration’s liberalist platitudes are belied, however, by the date of its delivery. After referring to unkept promises made by the opposing party “back in 1980,” Stringer, shown wearing reflective eyeglasses in a threateningly tight close-up, invokes the voyage of the Mayflower “three hundred and sixty-four years ago in 1620.” He thus reveals the narrative’s present to be 1984, with all the Orwellian associations this year entails. As Stringer’s speech continues, the storyboard cuts to a train of images depicting an America defined by the racism, militarism, and libido of emasculated male aggressors. Between shots of a subway car, factory floor, airport runway, office space, stock exchange, suburban tract, schoolyard, and highway—stand-ins for the rationalized spaces of modern urban life— Longo and Bowes interpolate a scene of White police officers beating Bill and two other Black men, and another in which five nude male “models” pose on a beach to a voice-over chant: “What do we want out of life? / Not a house and not a wife / Do we want to fight again? / We all want to act like men.” Eventually, the models gear up in “desert operations uniforms” and cross the beach to a missile silo, triggering stock footage of fighter jets, tanks, and helicopters set to the “groovy, heroic music” of “Army recruiting commercials” (fig. 4.13).72 The film concludes with slow-motion footage of a white-collar urban crowd, similar to the material that Longo would project between armed guards in Iron Voices. Captured from a variety of raking perspectives, including the monumentalizing “Leni Riefenstahl angle,” and accompanied by a voice-over passage from one of Diamond’s earlier monologues about the rise of predatory street criminals, the densely surging group of professionals assumes the threatening appearance of a spellbound mass (fig. 4.14). Longo never publicly circulated his script. Nonetheless, his public soon became familiar with Empire’s core imagery and themes by way of the artist’s combines, which allowed Longo to juxtapose resonant imagery in much the way his and Bowes’s storyboard had done. Sword of the Pig, for instance, 134

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Fig. 4.11 Page from Robert Longo and Ed Bowes, Empire screenplay, 1982. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2014.M.6). Copyright © Robert Longo and Ed Bowes.

Fig. 4.12 Page from Robert Longo and Ed Bowes, Empire screenplay, 1982. Getty Research

Institute, Los Angeles (2014.M.6). Copyright © Robert Longo and Ed Bowes.

Fig. 4.13 Page from Robert Longo and Ed Bowes, Empire screenplay, 1982. Getty Research

Institute, Los Angeles (2014.M.6). Copyright © Robert Longo and Ed Bowes.

Fig. 4.14 Page from Robert Longo and Ed Bowes, Empire screenplay, 1982. Getty Research

Institute, Los Angeles (2014.M.6). Copyright © Robert Longo and Ed Bowes.

clearly corresponds to the sequence at the end of Empire where nude models transform themselves into infantrymen and descend into a missile silo.73 Culture Culture, a two-panel combine from 1982–83, similarly harkens back to Empire’s Wagner-scored interlude of revolutionary iconoclasm (plate 12). At left, the work presents an acrylic painting of an equestrian statue, precariously tilted and suggestively cropped at the neck, that Longo modeled on the monument to Simón Bolívar at the southern border of Central Park. Juxtaposed at right is a drawing of an aging man in a dark jacket and tie, shown holding a telephone receiver to his ear. Although the latter image was in fact based on a photograph of Longo’s father, viewers perceived in it the familiar visages of world leaders like Yuri Andropov, the Soviet Union’s Communist Party secretary, or Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister.74 Dramatically tinted by a pane of red plexiglass, the drawing was intended to suggest just such an authority figure, captured in the process of “calling in more troops.”75 As Longo’s critics pointed out, the significance of such works seemed paradoxically to be both overdetermined and opaque.76 Tongue to the Heart (1984) was especially enigmatic (plate 13). The work sets a plaster bust of an agonized male figure, shown with his head lowered and hands pressed against his ears, above a drawing of a storm-tossed yellow sea. Beside him, a hammered-lead relief depicts a monumental hall in plunging perspective. With its series of receding, austerely rectilinear piers, the space is distinctly reminiscent of fascist architectural exemplars like Speer’s marble gallery for the Reich Chancellery (1939) or the exhibition halls of the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana (1938–43). It also resembles Longo’s sketch of the marble Wall Street lobby where Springer and his financial backers emit their “slow dying roars” in the Empire storyboard. Flanking the relief on its other side is a photograph of a discordantly rapturous-looking figure, exposed on backlit, orange-tinted Duratrans film. Cut to the shape of a scuba mask or the opening of a balaclava and suspended amid a black, rectangular void, it depicts only the person’s eyes, glistening as they gaze intently upward. This component’s intimation of transcendence gives the work as a whole a distinctly spiritual cast, shuttling the artist’s long-standing religious framework into its darkest chapter yet.77

Art for Brave Eyes Altogether, Longo’s art from the years around 1980 mapped out what interpreters like Robert Hobbs identified as a distinctly post-Vietnam America— one freighted with wayward militarism, decadent imperialism, emasculation anxiety, and wistfully directionless nostalgia—using visual allusions to Europe’s fascist past.78 “I’m going to be the person who blows the whistle,” Longo told Maurice Berger in 1985. “I watch the visual mechanisms of culture, which are so sophisticated—the way the Nazis turned Germany into a Robert Longo in the Shadow of Empire

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Nazi state, for example. That is like child’s play compared to the mechanisms that exist now to turn this country into something quite horrific.”79 Fascism “isn’t just dictatorial regimes, it’s a way of thinking,” Longo later explained. It “doesn’t just come in on leather jackets and motorcycles; it comes in on bumper stickers and television.” Fascism, he went so far as to proclaim, “is our visual culture.”80 In all his aforementioned projects, Longo had endeavored to expose this repressive grammar, even if that meant producing imagery not so easily distinguished from its object of critique. As with Brauntuch’s work, critics increasingly came to regard such maneuvers with skepticism and disapproval. In a review of Sound Distance Parts I and II, Sally Banes charged Longo’s “images of power, dominance, and eroticism” with “celebrating rather than ‘deconstructing’ a political system that can only be repugnant.” Noting that the performance coincided with a five-hour television adaptation of Albert Speer’s memoirs, broadcast by ABC, Banes identified Longo as the product of a decade-long preoccupation with such material. Having “grown up seeing [Hans-Jürgen] Syberberg and Riefenstahl and hearing the debates about fascism’s fascination,” he, too, had come to capitalize on its shock value, Banes suggested. “It’s one way to be avant-garde,” she wrote. “But in light of the current political climate, it’s a way that seems unpleasantly amoral.”81 Longo’s massive combines, with their visually bombastic intimations of authoritarianism, likewise troubled some reviewers. Surveying an exhibition of Longo’s work at Metro Pictures in 1984, Ellen Handy doubted whether such “large, glossy, expensive artworks, which cannot avoid suggesting corporate logos, or at least the sort of art which ought to hang in a hotel lobby or an investment firm’s boardroom,” could in fact function as agents of social critique in the manner that the artist claimed for them.82 Jean Fisher delivered much the same conclusion in more unsparing terms. Longo’s work, the British critic wrote, “is the corporate image, the contemporary equivalent of late Victorian civic sculpture in its naïve eclecticism, sentimental melodrama, and grandiose materiality,” making it less a “critical comment on the dehumanizing effect of corporate power (Longo’s apparent subject matter) than a mimicry of it packaged in the conventions of high art.”83 Such negative commentary appeared to rankle Longo, prompting him to disavow the relevance of fascism to his work but also to defend his pursuit of visual and affective “power,” a two-pronged approach that sometimes led to revealing self-contradictions. “If you don’t like something today—if it makes you nervous, uncomfortable—you shout, ‘Hey, man, fascist!’” the artist complained in 1985. Mere moments later, however, he seemed to substantiate that very allegation: Yeah, I’m interested in grandeur, in monumentality. And when I see Triumph of the Will, I think, wow, gimme one of those black shirts. I mean, the Third Reich knew all about visual seduction, and the idea of visual 140

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seduction is very fascinating to me. Seduce somebody with an image? That’s amazing stuff. But fascist art? No. The kind of art Hitler liked was slop, junk, sentimental crap. I make art for brave eyes. I want you to look at something and feel it.84

The quotation exemplifies several of the ambiguities that underpinned Longo’s project of the early 1980s. He implies, first, that his work is of an abstract nature, concerned with “the idea of visual seduction” in itself. The Third Reich, he suggests, offers a signal case study of this phenomenon, imbued with critical lessons for the present. Yet he also acknowledges an aspiration to make his own work seductive in this very manner, even citing the Nazis’ affect-driven instrumentalizations of design, cinema, and other such modern media—as opposed to the regime’s comparatively conservative fine art program—as a positive model for his practice. Longo’s implication was that the Nazis “seduced” for evil, whereas he harnessed monumental formats and the emotional appeals of mass culture toward benign ends. Looking back in 2003, the artist admitted that his gambit had not been altogether successful. “I wanted to take an aggressive position in a culture I thought was sick,” he explained. “The bombastic nature of the work, especially the combines, I felt was a language of our time,” but “in hindsight, one risks becoming what one critiques.”85 It was this same willingness to risk complicity, however, that makes Longo’s early work an object of unique historical significance. Even at the time of its production, many of the artist’s peers and interpreters understood that his intertwinement of “seduction” and critique had cut to the core of his era’s defining debates regarding ethics and aesthetics. Just as Goldstein paradoxically sought to achieve an intellectually “distanced” perspective on popular culture by eliding the divide between his appropriation-based work and his viewers’ sensory and mnemonic faculties, Longo counterintuitively claimed to pursue a critical purchase on American culture by engaging audiences on the level of affect, a type of response commonly associated with irrationality, manipulation, and the authoritarian political outcomes that his works formally and iconographically evoked. Hence his interest in the raw, emotive impact of Branca’s music, the melodramatic intensity of Fassbinder’s films, and what critics identified as the similarly soap operatic quality of his own combines.86 Such models empowered him to “compete with things [that are] basically oppressive, like advertising,” in a way that he felt minimalism and conceptual art’s more rarefied visual (or antivisual) strategies could not.87 In thus centering the role of affect in his work, his project paralleled a rising neoexpressionist current as well as the art of Gretchen Bender, one of that current’s fiercest critics.

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5 GRETCHEN BENDER’S MNEMONIC THEATER

I

n the mid-1980s, Gretchen Bender produced a pair of multichannel video installations that she classified as works of “electronic theater.”1 Dumping Core, which she debuted at the Kitchen in 1984, distributed rapidly intercut clips of recorded television news programs, animated corporate logo sequences, and abstract computer- generated graphics among four separate channels shown on thirteen monitors, arranged on multitiered platforms in a black-box auditorium (plate 14). The work’s successor, Total Recall (1987), was even more complex, arraying digital graphics and appropriated television content—much of it focused on scenes of war or displays of military might—across eight video channels, twenty-four monitors, and two rear-projection screens (fig. 5.1). Bender explained the former work’s title phrase as computer programming jargon for the process by which an overloaded processor “spits out accumulated data to make room for more input.”2 Her installation, a darkly kaleidoscopic spectacle of stuttering 3D graphics and often violent imagery, mimicked such an automated deluge. Set to a propulsive soundtrack of electronic music, sound effects, and sampled audio recordings composed by Stuart Argabright, Michael Diekmann, and Shinichi Shimokawa, the work subjected audiences to an analogous state of information overload. But as Bender explained, the point of occasioning such perceptual crisis was not to overwhelm her viewer. It was rather to induce what she called “overdrive”: a state of hyperactive, decentered, yet nonetheless critical attentiveness, adapted to the ever more expansive, sophisticated, and “manipulative” media environments of 1980s America.3 In classifying Dumping Core as a “video performance” and, later, a work

Fig. 5.1 Gretchen Bender, Total Recall, 1987. Eight-channel video on twenty-four monitors and three rear-projection screens with sound, 18:02 min. Installation view of Gretchen Bender: So Much Deathless at Red Bull Arts, New York, 2019. Copyright © Gretchen Bender Estate, courtesy of Sprüth Magers. Photo by Lance Brewer.

of “electronic theater,” Bender was in part acknowledging her work’s spectacular manner of display: bleacher seating, darkened room, “choreographed” video channels set on stagelike risers. But the phrasing also served to signal her divergence from what she, a self-identifying “television artist,” regarded as the overly restrictive norms of “video art.”4 For predecessors like Vito Acconci, Lynda Benglis, Dan Graham, Joan Jonas, Beryl Korot, and Richard Serra, video recording and its accompanying mechanisms of live, closed-circuit transmission had offered a novel means of documenting taskbased actions, exploring the act of looking and the state of being beheld, and otherwise extending the performative dimensions of their various postminimalist practices. The processual, often purposely monotonous nature of the resulting work could hardly have been more alien to mainstream television’s alternately commercial, informative, and narrative directives.5 Yet “this apparent lack of relation,” the poet and critic David Antin proposed in 1975, was in fact “a very definite and predictable inverse relation,” an implicit—or, in some cases, explicit—negation of a “frightful parent” by rebellious offspring. As a result, Antin concluded, no matter “how differ144

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ent from television the works of individual video artists may be, the television experience dominates the phenomenology of viewing [video art] and haunts video exhibitions the way the experience of movies haunts all film.”6 Bender, along with artists like Dara Birnbaum and Nam June Paik, charted a path beyond such spectral filiation by directly appropriating, manipulating, and sometimes mimicking the products of video art’s mass cultural counterpart.7 Not only did she draw her source material from television by recording it with the help of a novel technology, the videocassette recorder (VCR), but she also edited these clips into rapid-fire barrages that effectively exaggerated commercial television’s signature discontinuity, frenetic pacing, and attention-grabbing visual ploys. In doing so she negotiated perilous terrain, akin to the one that Goldstein had traversed some ten years earlier in his filmic (and, in David Salle’s estimation, “fascistic”) meditations on “control” (discussed in chapter 2).8 Bender insistently framed her electronic theater as critiquing rather than accommodating its source material. In an essay called “Political Entertainment” that appeared in TV Guides, a collection of writings on the titular topic that Barbara Kruger edited in 1985, she asserted that her goal was to undermine broadcast television’s “single plane of equivalent flow”—the stupefying yet authoritative train of illogical successions that “puts lemonscented detergent next to killing in South Africa” and has “the curious ability to make politics entertainment and aesthetics fascist.”9 Hence her rapidfire editing and multiplication of channels across many different screens in space. “When you look at [just] one screen, you cannot compare or contrast what you are seeing with anything else,” Bender explained. “There’s one source coming at you which presumes the authority of its viewpoint.” Whereas “if you have several TVs going at once, you can see the structure [of television programming] and watch it with more critical consciousness,” attending to its “abstract codes” and “underlying patterns of social control.”10 Echoing the Frankfurt school–inspired claims commonly made on behalf of her peers engaged with print media, Bender in this way characterized her project as a pursuit of intellectual mastery over mass culture’s manipulative tactics and ideological undercurrents. “We run interference patterns in order to perceive structures,” she affirmed in 1984, “in order to transcend them; in order to explore fascisms.”11 Bender published the latter declaration in a manifesto-like statement that she titled “The Perversion of the Visual.” Comprising ten evocative proclamations written in the collective voice of a nascent avant-garde, the text goes some way toward illuminating the complex intertwinement of art, technology, and politics that underpinned the artist’s project from around the time she produced Dumping Core. “We live the memorex life in preparation for accepting expanded mental, emotional, and physical visual concepts,” Bender began, referencing the manufacturer of magnetic tape whose omnipresent television advertisements from the early 1980s (cenGretchen Bender’s Mnemonic Theater

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tered on the tagline “Is it live, or is it Memorex?”) boasted its product’s capacity to simulate the real.12 Artists, she continued, must respond to “the short-circuiting of reality by the media” by “manipulat[ing] the manipulations of ‘reality’” to produce a Brechtian “double-distancing” effect. Such an endeavor, Bender proposed, was not entirely negative. It was also meant to activate a latent emancipatory potential in the visual technologies that media companies had developed and deployed toward stultifying ends. “The present contains optical tools to ignite inner expansion through exterior manipulations,” she affirmed, adding that artists who “carry a belligerent knowledge of the present make new technologies look like old art.”13 Bender’s personal writings and published statements confirm that she viewed advanced technology—especially the television-computer nexus that her works evoked—as a kind of battleground where social power and even the nature of subjectivity itself were at stake. “I think artists should be spending their money on VCRs instead of paint on canvas,” she told Interview Magazine in 1985: I used to think that computer programming was for secretaries. But now I’m convinced that there will be a great “mental expansion” in the near future and it will be closely tied in with the visual expansion made possible by the computer. You can see it on TV. The computer-made special effects are preparing us for being able to see more abstractly than ever before. You can see how people are being guided, how people are being manipulated.14

For Bender, technologically mediated or “abstract” vision represented a potentially emancipatory “expansion” of humankind’s perceptual faculties, but also an opportunity for mass manipulation and control by unchecked corporate power. “I tend to want to depict all the computer graphics that are on television because I think the next area of visual expansion and psychological repression is there,” she reiterated a conversation with Cindy Sherman from 1986.15 Elsewhere she made her concerns still more explicit. “I see it as a real important thing that we [recognize] this next psychological or physical state as being brought to us by corporations manipulating our brains,” she told the Washington Times in 1985.16 With Total Recall, Bender framed such concerns in more specifically mnemonic terms, giving new expression to what she had earlier called “the memorex life.” The work’s title, also the title of a 1990 blockbuster by Paul Verhoeven, derives from Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (1966), a science fiction tale about commodified false memory implants. Its radically distributed structure embodied what Bender described as an analogous “externalization” of memory by mass media in the present—a phenomenon she understood to entail profound political implications. “I think who controls memory controls power,” the artist stated with regard to her installation. “In this culture people who want to hold 146

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on to power, realize that they have to control memory past, present and future.”17 How Bender’s electronic theater intervened in these dynamics remains an open question. In her interview with Sherman, the artist explained that her evolving method was to “mimic the media” while “[turning] up the voltage on the currents so high that hopefully it will blast criticality out there.”18 When “forced to watch 14 screens positioned on different spatial planes,” she maintained in another interview that year (published under the title “Gretchen Bender: TV Terrorist”), “you can attain a critical edge through overload.”19 Yet the sheer complexity of works like Dumping Core and Total Recall—frenetic, immersive installations that Bender aptly described as hallucinogenic—stresses one’s capacity to achieve the sort of ratiocinating distance that the artist’s stated ideal of “critical consciousness” would seem to imply.20 To skeptics, such works might rather have called to mind the nefarious brainwashing apparatuses depicted in films like Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) or Alan Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974). Although cinematic rather than televisual (both take place in darkened theaters), these devices likewise inundated the films’ protagonists with torrents of positively and negatively charged sounds and images, montaged, in The Parallax View, at a rate designed to outpace conscious attentiveness and judgment.21 In an essay from 1984, Thomas Lawson noted the apparent disconnect between Bender’s visually assaulting spectacles and the grandly emancipatory claims she made on their behalf. “In a world in which most people are hedging their bets on the future an enthusiast of technological overload has to seem like some kind of crazy optimist, or a government spokesperson,” he quipped. “With a cool ambiguity Gretchen Bender plays it down the middle.”22 Besides being a “crazy optimist” or “government spokesperson,” however, an enthusiast for technological overload could also be a modernist in the mold of figures like Walter Benjamin, whose writings from the 1930s Bender read intently, or the Bauhaus master Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, whose 1947 text Vision in Motion Bender referenced in her notes from the early 1980s.23 Using language similar to that which Bender would employ in her discourse on “overdrive” and “visual expansion,” Moholy-Nagy defined his book’s titular phrase as “a synonym for simultaneity and space-time; a means to comprehend the new dimension.” It was “the artist’s duty today,” he proclaimed, “to penetrate yet-unseen ranges of the biological functions, to search the new dimensions of the industrial society and to translate the new findings into emotional orientation.”24 Benjamin, in his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” had similarly characterized cinema as a “training ground” for the development of new and revolutionary perceptual habits. Countering the common charge that films induced a merely “distracted” state of viewing, inferior to the more “absorbing” forms of contemplative focus afforded by traditional, “aura”Gretchen Bender’s Mnemonic Theater

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laden works of painting and sculpture, Benjamin argued that the medium in fact prepared audiences to perform altogether “new tasks of apperception,” keyed to the pacing, complexity, and politics of modern urban life. Conservative attempts to suppress this revolutionary function by ritualizing cinema—by attempting to render it auratic despite its nature—were not only retrograde but potentially dangerous, Benjamin warned; they were complicit with Nazism’s broader effort to “aestheticize” the political.25 Bender’s description of television as a medium characterized by its “curious ability to make politics entertainment and aesthetics fascist” explicitly echoed the Frankfurt school theorist’s conclusions. The contested “training ground” that Benjamin described, she suggested, had migrated to a new medium.26 Bender’s affinity for the manners and methods of the interwar avantgardes, anachronistic though it might seem at a moment suffused with talk of the postmodern, was equally apparent in the manifesto-like organization of “The Perversion of the Visual,” not to mention her perception of contemporary social life as a struggle between fascist and antifascist forces. In this sense, the artist’s call to “explore fascisms”—plural—amounts to more than just excitatory rhetoric. As this chapter will argue, Bender understood the Nazi era as a paradigmatic moment within an ongoing intertwinement of advanced technology, perception, cognition, and memory under conditions of mass media. Beginning with her print-based work of the early 1980s and continuing through her crowning installations of electronic theater, Bender ardently sought to expose the potential for repression endemic to such entwinement, even as she endeavored to unleash what she, like Benjamin, understood to be an emancipatory potential rooted in the very same nexus. This, her 1985 press release for Dumping Core concluded, “is the future— overload becomes overdrive.”27

The Perversion of the Visual The political thrust of Gretchen Bender’s oeuvre is economically if enigmatically encapsulated by a work called Gremlins, produced on the cusp of her turn toward video in 1984 (plate 15). Composed of four photographic prints, mounted on contiguous Masonite panels in a two-by-two grid measuring some four by five feet, the collage sets up a startling biaxial composition. Its upper-left and lower-right quadrants each present a computer-generated linear pattern. The first of these suggests a three-dimensional labyrinth of interlocking circuitry. The second, a tightly spaced sequence of kinked vertical streaks, recalls the wobbling abstractions produced by a poor television signal. The lower-left quadrant constitutes a different sort of “interference pattern,” to borrow Bender’s terminology, that the artist created by placing a transparent silkscreen positive before a television screen and photographing the resulting superimposition.28 Two eyes, one belonging to the televi148

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sual substratum and the other to Bender’s pictorial overlay, stare out from this montage. The former, gaping and bloodshot, belongs to a grotesquely sweat-slicked head that is framed in extreme close-up. The latter, atomized by a halftone screen, gazes forth from a contrastingly equanimous visage, represented in the idealizing manner of a classical portrait. The upperright panel, for its part, presents a relatively unmodified black-and-white photograph. Captured by the photojournalist John Hoagland in 1980, it depicts two bound and barefoot women’s bodies lying face down, blood pooled around their heads, on a roadside barrier—a scene of slaughter that many of Bender’s initial viewers would have readily attributed to the then-ongoing civil war in El Salvador. (The conflict claimed not only the depicted women’s lives but also the photographer’s around the time that Bender completed her work.)29 The cumulative result of these juxtapositions is unmistakably dystopian. Yet the web of allusions they encode—further complicated by the artist’s title, which references a contemporaneous comedy-horror film of the same name but might also recall the folkloric creature’s World War II– era origins as the imagined cause of mechanical malfunctions in British aircraft—is bewilderingly complex.30 Before moving to New York City and beginning her career as an artist, Bender belonged to a Marxist-feminist silkscreen collective based in Washington, DC.31 The imprint of this training is evident in her work from the early 1980s through Gremlins, with its skillful deployment of photomechanical media and uncompromisingly critical perspective. In The Pleasure Is Back (1982), for instance, the artist silkscreened partial reproductions of corporate advertisements and details of works by lionized male artists— among them Jonathan Borofsky, Sandro Chia, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Longo, Isamu Noguchi, A. R. Penck, and Julian Schnabel—onto square tin panels organized in cruciform shapes, columnar stacks, and frieze-like bands (fig. 5.2). Such juxtapositions commented acerbically on the era’s swollen market for contemporary art, with its inequitable and conservative distribution of rewards. In particular, they took aim at the kind of neoexpressionist painting that critics like Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Craig Owens, in articles that Bender cited and annotated in her working diaries, had identified with a rising “cultural climate of authoritarianism.”32 Bender’s notebooks also suggest, however, that the artist formulated her early silkscreen works with an eye toward Cold War geopolitics. In one diary entry, the phrase “The Pleasure Is Back” (a slogan then in use by Barclay cigarettes) appears as a subtitle. Preceding it is a main title, “Beirut,” that Bender crossed out and replaced with the word “War,” a reference to Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon in the summer of 1982. In the succeeding pages, Bender repeatedly asked herself how war might “be made obscene again” in a society saturated with cinematic and televisual representations of violence. Images of bloodshed seemed to have lost their capacity to shock, Gretchen Bender’s Mnemonic Theater

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Fig. 5.2 Gretchen Bender, Untitled (The Pleasure Is Back), 1982. Enamel ink silkscreened on sign

tin, 72 × 72 in. Copyright © Gretchen Bender Estate, courtesy of Sprüth Magers.

becoming what the artist, quoting the documentary filmmaker Leo Hurwitz, described as “acceptable abstractions.” (Hurwitz’s 1961 film Verdict for Tomorrow covered the trial of the Nazi SS officer Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.) Envisioning her art “as propaganda rather than beautiful feelings that gently transcend the everyday,” Bender declared it her intention in these 150

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pages to “do a Guernica of my own,” that is, to pierce the prevailing apathy of her time by updating Pablo Picasso’s stirring indictment of Spanish fascism for the 1980s present.33 Bender would ultimately pare The Pleasure Is Back from its prefatory title and eliminate the presence of any imagery tied directly to war, thus foregrounding her critique of neoexpressionism and consumer culture. Still, some of the artist’s works from this period obliquely register the antimilitarist sentiment that sparked her productivity. In Gargan I, an atypically sculptural work from 1981, a three-legged base of lacquered wood supports a parabolic superstructure that tapers to a menacingly spear-like point (fig. 5.3). At Fictive Victims, a group exhibition Longo organized that year at Hallwalls (now the Contemporary Art Center) in Buffalo, New York, Bender installed the sculpture before an untitled silkscreen work in which two images of beaming female models, drawn from magazine advertisements, appear beneath an upside-down photograph of Cubed Curve (1972), William Crovello’s U-shaped steel sculpture situated outside the Time and Life building in Midtown Manhattan. (In her catalogue essay, Valerie Smith cites it as an example of “implacable public minimalism.”)34 Viewed straight on, the suggestively rocket-shaped Gargan both formally echoes and appears to skewer its minimalist counterpart, drawing out the fortresslike appearance of the corporate plaza and vertiginously upended office towers that surround it. In the silkscreen works that followed The Pleasure Is Back, Bender’s juxtapositions of art and military technology became increasingly overt. Heroes in the Air (1983), for instance, reproduced two paintings of solar eclipses by Jack Goldstein alongside a video-processed image of a work by Schnabel, two panels of computer-generated graphics, the picture of Cubed Curve, and the photograph of a remote antiballistic missile system that also appears in Sword of the Pig, Longo’s combine from the same year (see again fig. 4.1).35 Another work, Autopsy (1983), paired David Salle’s recent painting of that title with an advertisement for the Lockheed Corporation’s digital image processing technologies (fig. 5.4). In the Salle-derived section, a field of colored rectangles abuts a photograph of a nude woman seated on an unmade bed. (In the original work she wears a conical bra and headpiece resembling a dunce cap, but Bender pointedly erased these garments from her appropriation.) The Lockheed ad, formally echoing the painting’s tile-like pattern, presents four brightly colored and increasingly abstracted renderings of an armored vehicle behind an overlying tagline: “teaching a ‘blind’ computer to see a tank.” Works like these extended Bender’s implicitly feminist critique of contemporary painting, but they also introduced the germ of something new.36 In Autopsy, for instance, we find the conceptual apposition of warfare, digital technology, vision (here articulated as the tactical, computer-aided overcoming of a war machine’s inherent “blindness”), and mortality (signaled not only by the pictured artillery but also by the work’s title, with its evocation of a postmortem examination) that would subsequently animate Gretchen Bender’s Mnemonic Theater

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Fig. 5.3 Gretchen Bender, Gargan I, 1981. Wood with gloss lacquer finish, 120 × 32 × 32 in.

Copyright © Gretchen Bender Estate, courtesy of Sprüth Magers.

Gremlins. What was the connection that Bender sought to establish between this deathly nexus and postmodern art? Bender produced her 1983 collages shortly after Ronald Reagan’s announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or “Star Wars” program, an effort to develop computerized missile defense systems comprising lasers, particle beams, and other such technologically sophisticated weaponry that could be deployed from both land and space.37 Her imagery evocatively registered such high-tech saber rattling, and with it the reheated Cold 152

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Fig. 5.4 Gretchen Bender, Autopsy, 1983. Enamel ink silkscreened on sign tin, color photographs

on hardboard, 64 × 96 in. Copyright © Gretchen Bender Estate, courtesy of Sprüth Magers.

War brinksmanship that had come to define the Republican administration. Indeed, the computer-generated graphics that Bender incorporated into her work from around this time were directly implicated in the technologically expanding universe of national defense. With the help of Amber Denker, a friend employed at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT), the artist sourced these images from laboratories developing digital visualization and 3D rendering tools under the aegis of the US government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).38 In juxtaposing such material with allusions to contemporary art, works like Heroes in the Air and Autopsy conveyed what Bender would later describe as the irony inherent in initiatives like DARPA: that “a lot of the development, experiments in new visuals are done through the anti-humanistic zone of our culture, which is the military.”39 Art and war had been subsumed within a technologically expanded landscape of the visual. It was incumbent on progressive artists, Bender believed, to reflect critically on this novel state of affairs—more critically, she implied, than her male peers had thus far managed. Gremlins marked a decisive shift in Bender’s oeuvre and its relation to the moment’s wider political context. The artist’s previous efforts had largely Gretchen Bender’s Mnemonic Theater

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veiled their allusions to Cold War militarism or embedded them in grainy, degraded images that primarily called attention to their status as appropriated media artifacts.40 By contrast, the Hoagland photograph in Gremlins made its real-world referent—clearly legible as an extrajudicial execution, even for viewers who might have been unfamiliar with the scene’s exact precipitating circumstances—unavoidable. In related works like Red Dawn (1984), Drone (1984), and Untitled (Landscape, Computer Graphics, Death Squad) (1987), Bender redoubled this unflinching turn toward documentary realism, and with it her association of political violence with digital abstraction. Red Dawn, a multipanel work named after a contemporary action film (about a group of teenagers resisting an invasion of the United States by Soviet, Cuban, and Nicaraguan forces), combines the central images of Autopsy and Gremlins: here, tanks from the Lockheed ad encircle the death squad victims depicted in the Hoagland photograph. The two-panel Drone, which Bender exhibited at a 1984 group show organized as part of the nationwide Artists Call against US Intervention in Central America, reduces Gremlins to just the Hoagland photograph and the static-like pattern.41 In the untitled work also known as Landscape, Computer Graphics, Death Squad, a black-and-white photograph depicting a room heaped with mutilated corpses appears beneath a splotchy abstraction, reminiscent of an aerial photograph obscured by clouds, and above a computer-generated image of gleaming, red, ribbonlike forms (plate 16). Arrayed in an irregular configuration, they roughly echo the tangle of bodies shown above them. These works resonate perhaps more directly than any others in the artist’s oeuvre with her assertions in “The Perversion of the Visual,” not least her resounding call to “explore fascisms.” By itself, Bender’s pluralization of the term might suggest its colloquial usage as a pejorative catch-all for any institution, policy, or behavior deemed oppressive. The artist’s recurring allusions to state terrorism in Central America, however, suggest a more concrete set of referents. Only a decade or so earlier, few mainstream observers would have gone so far as to describe El Salvador’s sham-democratic military government as “fascist”; that appellation remained reserved more or less exclusively for the dictatorships of interwar Europe. By the end of the 1970s, however, prominent voices within the American left had begun extending the term to include the various authoritarian regimes that had assumed power throughout Latin America, often with semicovert US support, during the preceding decade. In a 1979 book titled The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, the first volume of The Political Economy of Human Rights, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman decried the “institutionalization of subfascism under US tutelage,” dismissing the Jimmy Carter administration’s pledged commitment to human rights as so much empty rhetoric. “At the end of World War II, if some prescient commentator had described the terror regimes that now dominate Latin America,” the authors darkly 154

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proposed, “liberals would have derided this visionary for spelling out the likely consequences of a Nazi victory.”42 Such discourse took on new urgency following Reagan’s election in the fall of 1980. Where Carter had at least performed a morally deliberative stance regarding geopolitical intervention to the south, Reagan baldly established his commitment to remote support for anticommunist governments throughout the hemisphere, whatever their internal politics might be, as a pillar of his administration’s foreign policy.43 In 1981, Richard Falk introduced a revised edition of Michael T. Klare and Cynthia Arnson’s 1977 study Supplying Repression: US Support for Authoritarian Regimes Abroad by lamenting the impending consolidation of a “distinctively American Gulag” under such a doctrine. Dissent from the American citizenry, ostensibly distracted by consumerism and benighted by “media bias,” “secrecy,” “special interest lobbying,” and “the black arts of ‘disinformation,’” appeared to the author unlikely.44 Herman likewise blamed centrist media outlets for public indifference toward the United States’ massive investment—what would soon become its largest foreign policy expenditure since Vietnam—in El Salvador, the United States’ “holocaust client state.”45 Analyses of this type circulated heavily among Bender’s community of politically engaged artists. Excerpts from each of the aforementioned texts appeared, for example, in the spring 1985 issue of the New York–based art and theory journal Wedge. Titled “The Imperialism of Representation / The Representation of Imperialism,” the publication presented a collection of essays and statistical documents addressing US foreign policy, framing them in a language of poststructuralist critique that was attuned as much to Cold War geopolitics as to the processes by which such efforts are communicated, visualized, and conceptualized.46 Edited by Phil Mariani and Brian Wallis and designed by the artists Louise Lawler and Mark Magill, the issue counted Jonathan Crary, Carole Ashley, Robert Flynt, Suzanne Jackson, Silvia Kolbowski, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Allan McCollum, Deborah Poole, Laurie Simmons, and John Strauss among its contributing producers. (Bender had included several of these artists in Public Vision, a group exhibition she co-organized with Nancy Dwyer and Cindy Sherman at the White Columns gallery in 1982.)47 Its publication coincided with Timeline: The Chronicle of US Intervention in Central and Latin America, a collaborative exhibition organized by the artists collective Group Material at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens.48 In this discursive context, Bender’s contemporaneous call to “explore fascisms,” paired with the artist’s photojournalistic sources, would have possessed a clear and specific resonance. Indeed, her primary readers might well have mapped the conceptual chiasmus established by Wedge’s two-part title onto the biaxial composition that organizes Gremlins, assigning “the representation of imperialism” to the Hoagland photograph and “the impeGretchen Bender’s Mnemonic Theater

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rialism of representation,” more ambiguously, to the work’s counterpoised digital abstractions. Although Bender herself did not use the phrase “imperialism of representation,” she did write in 1990 that a primary concern of hers from the previous decade had been the “fascism of abstraction,” or “how the abstract can be led to the service of fascism.”49 Gremlins, with its side-by-side presentation of nonfigurative imagery and the victims of a right-wing military or paramilitary campaign, signaled such concerns. It figured the intertwinement of televisual technology, political power, and repression that would soon become the artist’s abiding object of critique. Speaking in 1991, Bender clarified that her interest lay in “how we allow ourselves to see and, simultaneously, not to see the socio-political landscape we’ve created for ourselves,” a matter of visuality thematized by the layered eyes of Gremlins and the reference to blindness in Autopsy’s Lockheed tagline. We “know we fund death squads in El Salvador, but we never have to see the dead bodies, or we see the aestheticized versions of them through photographs,” she continued. “I want us to feel how disturbing it is that we flatten our politics of death through visual representation.” As for her use of computer-generated imagery, Bender explained that she regarded such artifacts as representations of “the highest end of our visual imagination”— the frontier of what she called “visual expansion.” Photographs of death squad victims, by contrast, represented the abject “low end” of this spectrum. And yet, she observed, “we fund both [of the] projects that provide these visuals”: just as the US government’s Department of Defense had supported the digital visualization laboratories Bender plundered at the New York Institute of Technology, so its Department of State had trained the Salvadorean military battalions directly or indirectly responsible for the scenes of slaughter that journalists like Hoagland captured.50 By the perverse logic of Cold War statecraft, Bender’s wildly disjunctive-looking images could thus be understood as improbably linked facets of a larger sociopolitical phenomenon. Works of contemporary art, her appropriations suggested, ought to mediate between the “high” and the “low,” revealing their interconnectedness in a manner that she likened, using a term drawn from physics and electronic communications, to an “interference pattern.”

The Fascism of Abstraction The development of Bender’s oeuvre suggests that the final significance of print-based works like Gremlins may lie in their self-conscious inadequacy, their allusion to perceptual phenomena that they themselves, mere prints on Masonite panels, were not materially capable of mobilizing. Bender seemed to imply as much in a notebook entry dated March 23, 1983. The occasion for her commentary was a panel discussion she had attended at the International Center of Photography, organized around the theme “Photography as Ideology: When Is the Camera a Weapon?” The panel’s interlocutors included 156

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Abigail Solomon-Godeau, the historian and theorist of photography; Martha Rosler, the artist and political activist; and Susan Meiselas, a photojournalist widely lauded for her coverage of the Nicaraguan Revolution and her intrepid documentation of the ongoing bloodshed in El Salvador, including a mass killing of civilians that would eventually become known as the El Mozote Massacre.51 Bender’s commentary suggests that she was less than satisfied with the group’s prescriptions.52 “No answers as to how to make the viewer think outside the frames, even though that was questioned repeatedly,” the artist wrote. “Seems obvious to me that more satisfying visuals are needed than just 2D single imagery. That’s [why] motion and ‘film’ (all variants of) make so much sense as basics to continue pushing.” The “single imagery” of static prints, paintings, and sculptures, with their promise of contemplative visual experiences “you can sink into,” had become a source of merely “nostalgic value,” she concludes. “However uncomfortable it feels like, you can’t sink into imagery anymore. . . . That ‘meditation’-like feeling, however spiritually nourishing or satisfying it was, has to give way to the next level.” Even as she typed her thoughts, Bender noted, a broadcast of Steven Spielberg’s special-effects-loaded film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) played on her television, exemplifying the extent to which mass culture had surpassed fine art in marshaling advanced technology toward forms of “visual expansion.”53 Bender’s writings from this time are replete with calls for artists to renounce traditional formats favored by the market and likewise embrace technology’s cutting edge.54 “I have to learn to understand the tools that the rest of the world is using,” she told an interviewer in the spring of 1984, “or why bother being an artist?”55 In fact, by the time she gave this interview Bender had already developed a process enabling her to move beyond “2D single imagery.” By placing the transparent film positives used for her silkscreen prints before a television screen, the artist discovered, she could produce “interference patterns” of the sort that occupies the bottom left panel of Gremlins while directly incorporating television’s continuous state of fluctuation into her work. Reality Fever (1983), Bender’s first single-channel video, comprised recordings of several such silkscreen-TV overlays: images of an electric chair, a heap of dead bodies, and a drawing by Keith Haring, among other things, appear before the backdrop of a cable television broadcast, prompting chance associations. Wild Dead, which Bender debuted in 1984 at the Manhattan nightclub Danceteria, introduced yet another degree of fragmentation by splitting its recorded imagery, edited in rapid-fire barrages, between two video feeds that the artist distributed among four stacked monitors. Yet even this configuration seemed overly congenial to the antiquated forms of “meditative” viewing that Bender hoped her work might supersede. With Dumping Core, she graduated to a more radically immersive and spectacular format, designed to produce perceptual effects that static counterparts like Gremlins could only indicate. Gretchen Bender’s Mnemonic Theater

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Dumping Core begins with tape of a computer-generated cubic structure rotating before a starry background. Several geometric and linear abstractions of this type—animated versions of the three-dimensional forms the artist was incorporating in her print-based works from the time—appear throughout the montage, often, as with Gremlins, in conjunction with depictions of political violence. The Hoagland photograph, for instance, follows an unnerving auditory interlude comprising stuttered, fragmentary comments by the hosts of Entertainment Tonight on the “Hollywood censorship wars” and their implications for first amendment rights to free speech. Tinted a vividly artificial shade of green as though viewed through nightvision goggles, the image appears alongside a kinetic, crystal-like animation. This digital counterpart in turn weaves Hoagland’s photograph into a hallucinatory montage of launching rockets, firing artillery, and prowling attack helicopters; excerpts from the superhero cartoon He-Man (1983); footage of a soldier stomping on the head of a prone and barefoot man; and several excerpts from Videodrome (1983), David Cronenberg’s gruesome science fiction film about malevolent corporations and televisual technology gone awry.56 Dumping Core’s Hoagland-Videodrome sequence reprised the abiding imagery of Bender’s oeuvre to date in newly dynamic fashion. Other segments introduced altogether novel material. Indeed, the work largely revolves around one of these additions: digitized corporate logo animations—threedimensional motion graphics, produced using tools similar to the ones that the engineers at NYIT were developing under Defense Department sponsorship—of the sort that had begun to punctuate advertisements, network promotions, and opening program sequences in the preceding months, giving the medium of television a novel and adrenalizing hightech sheen.57 Early in the montage, Bender truncates and repetitively “stutters” two such animations, one taken from an advertisement for AT&T, the telecommunications and information technology giant, and the other from a promotion for Trinity Broadcasting, a Christian television network that began distributing its programming via cable in 1978.58 In the former ad, bundles of electronic data flow through the wires that encircle what was then AT&T’s new, globe-shaped logo, designed by Saul Bass following the company’s government-mandated divestiture of Bell subsidiaries in 1982. In the latter one, a Celtic cross glides into position before a night sky while the three-dimensional emblem of a white dove descends onto its center, forming the Trinity Broadcasting brandmark. Undercutting the air of benevolent authority these organizations intended to project, Bender adds an audio clip of battle cries and machine-gun fire that instead draws out the military and imperial connotations of their chosen symbols—what might evoke, in Trinity’s case, the similarly flared iron cross of Nazi Germany, or, in the case of what Bender described as AT&T’s brazenly “fascist” logotype, an image of “the earth in bondage.”59 158

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Bender sought to unmask what she understood as the ulterior function of such newly animated brandmarks: to awe and dominate a public composed of passive television viewers. “There is a monumental quality to a lot of this stuff,” she observed in 1985. “The music is Wagnerian. They mimic this glossy fascist stuff.”60 Later Bender elaborated the analogy. “In a way these corporate logos are deathless: they’re clean, gleamy, and they fly through space,” the artist mused in 1991. “They don’t decay, they are awe inspiring like Hitler’s Nuremburg lights, these abstract, pure, beautiful lights going through the sky,” she continued, referencing the colonnades of spotlights that Albert Speer designed for the Nazi dictator’s party rallies (fig. 5.5). “Somehow they’re outside of us and they’re bigger, more powerful, more eternal than we are.”61 Bearing out such grim allusions, Dumping Core concludes with a sequence that conjoins several computer-generated abstractions with recorded animations of a gleaming Mercedes-Benz logo, a satellite in orbit, and a waving American flag. The montage also includes slow-motion footage depicting the unveiling of Robert Graham’s Olympic

Fig. 5.5 Nürnberg. Reichsparteitag der NSDAP, “Reichsparteitag der Ehre,” “Lichtdom” mit

Flak-Scheinwerfern über Zeppelinfeld und Zeppelinhaupttribüne. Bundesarchiv Bild 183-19821130-502/photographer: Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst – Zentralbild.

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Gateway (1984), a zinc-plated pedestal surmounted by two extremely muscular cast-bronze figures that would have been at least as much at home in 1936 Berlin as they were in 1984 Los Angeles, that year’s host city for the quadrennial games (fig. 5.6). Finally, the Hoagland photograph appears once more, this time overlaid with vertical and horizontal black bars that converge to suggest a swastika. Conflating fascism with corporate capitalism was commonplace among the artists in Bender’s extended network. Consider Dan Graham’s 1981 essay “The End of Liberalism” (discussed in chapter 2), a text that Bender annotated extensively. Among the passages she transcribed was a quotation from Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment about how consumerism “makes technology into psychotechnology, into a procedure for manipulating men.”62 In “Signs,” a reflection on “the visual rhetoric of both art and public signs” that Graham published in Artforum the same year, the author even more directly anticipated the equation Bender adumbrates in Dumping Core. His article reproduces CBS’s ocular logotype beside an

Fig. 5.6 Gretchen Bender, Dumping Core, 1984. Four-channel video on thirteen monitors with

sound, 13:00 min. Installation view, Collection 1970s–Present, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2019. Copyright © Gretchen Bender Estate, courtesy of Sprüth Magers. Digital image copyright © 2023 Department of Imaging and Visual Resources, the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: John Wronn / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York.

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epigraph, by the artist Jeff Wall, about the role of “Hollywood and Madison Avenue” in eroding democratic norms. The “political discourse of bourgeois democracy” had been eclipsed, Wall asserts, by the “new advertising discourse of Fascist/Democratic Europe/America.”63 By the 1980s, Graham affirmed, the repressive logic of consumer capitalism had become all but inescapable. As for Bender’s familiarity with National Socialist aesthetics, this seems to have come in part from scholarly accounts like George Mosse’s The Nationalization of the Masses (1975) and Robert Taylor’s study of Nazi architecture, The Word in Stone (1974). (Bender recorded both texts as recommendations from Sherrie Levine, who had studied under Mosse as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin.)64 Historians like these offered a somewhat different perspective on the function of aestheticized “signs” in Nazi Germany. Mosse, for instance, questioned traditional Marxist emphases on propaganda and manipulation in explaining the regime’s appeal. Nazism, he asserted, was not only a totalitarian phenomenon, founded on terror and deception, but also a religious one. Through its complex system of myths, rituals, and symbols, the Nazi Party effectively sacralized public space, establishing a pervasive, quasi-liturgical environment in which exclusionary conceptions of the German nation and its “popular will” emerged as objects of collective worship.65 Benjamin’s “Reproducibility” essay, a text that loomed particularly large in the development of Bender’s oeuvre and the critical discourse surrounding it, would have reinforced such interpretations.66 As Lutz Koepnick explains, what Benjamin found disturbing about Nazi aesthetics lay less in the regime’s use of reproducible images to mobilize potential supporters—after all, such tactics were equally indispensable to the Communist left—and more in its perversely ritualistic use of such postauratic media to produce the kinds of quasi-religious effects that Mosse catalogued. These included the deification of Hitler as the object of a Führer cult; the sanctification of working-class Germans as members of an embattled racial group whose collective will the dictator purported to express, even as his party often worked against their economic interests; and the mythologization of the Nazi government as a site of magically decisive action and autonomy, unbridled by dissent, bureaucracy, legislative procedure, and other such features of modern democratic governance.67 Speer’s Nuremberg rally light formations, which the architect described as “cathedrals of light,” are emblematic of this ritualizing maneuver: here, mass-produced units of a militarized industrial product succeed in generating, through their repetition, the semblance of a sacred liturgical space. The Nazi regime was unique in the centralized fashion with which it wielded such aestheticization, as well as in the genocidal telos of its strategy. Yet the underlying phenomenon, Koepnick notes, was not so different from ordinary commodity fetishism. This similarly marshals modern media Gretchen Bender’s Mnemonic Theater

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to imbue consumer products with magically transformative or restorative qualities, often pitched in implicit opposition to the alienating character of modern life.68 Bender, in likening computer-generated logo animations to Speer’s cathedral-like light displays as entities “somehow . . . outside of us and . . . bigger, more powerful, more eternal than we are,” suggested that such cultic styling and the ritualistic reverence it fostered had indeed carried over to the machinations of postwar corporate capitalism, reaching new heights under Reagan-era neoliberalism. The opening sequence of Dumping Core, with its juxtaposition of the AT&T globe and the Trinity Broadcasting cross, repetitively “stuttered” and set to the sounds of warfare, gave updated form to Benjamin’s core warning: that when new media are used to simulate old ritualism, the results are likely to be at once conservative and violent. With electronic representation locked onto a course of seemingly endless expansion, Bender joined a generation of critics in embracing Benjamin’s analysis as, in Koepnick’s words, “a tool . . . to shed light” not only “on the staging of political action in Nazi Germany but also, by analogy, on the postmodern blurring of culture and politics, media and power”—a blurring in which television was understood, by the early 1980s, to be the most insidious technology of all.69

Political Entertainment Anxieties about the deleterious effects of commercial television were long established, as was the obverse belief that its component technologies possessed a latent revolutionary or utopian potential that artists might help activate.70 In the early 1980s, however, a number of sociopolitical and technological developments combined to imbue such discourses with new urgency while in subtle but significant ways transforming them. The landslide election of Reagan, a president distinguished by both his Hollywood background and his skillful ability to manipulate televisual media for political advantage, was one such catalyst. His victory empowered the religious right in its crusade to “clean up television”—hence the debates about the “Hollywood censorship wars,” sampled in the Dumping Core soundtrack—even as it prompted network executives independently to seek out programming they believed would appeal to conservative viewers.71 For critics on the left, meanwhile, the arrival of a hawkish Republican administration focused and intensified concerns about what Chomsky, Herman, Falk, and others identified as media bias: the tendency for large publishers and television networks, many of which were owned by conglomerates with various financial interests, to become de facto mouthpieces of an incumbent government. Cindy Sherman alluded to the dangers of such consolidation in her 1986 interview with Bender, observing that “most of the corporations who own movie companies also own TV stations and radio stations . . . and oil.”72 Carol Squiers and Phil Mariani, in an essay titled “I Got Stockholm 162

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Syndrome from the NBC News” that they published alongside Bender’s “Political Entertainment” in Kruger’s TV Guides, more concretely charged the titular broadcaster—which, they pointed out, “is owned by RCA, a diversified company also involved in the production of government defense systems and services”—with echoing the Reagan administration’s preferred narratives regarding anti-American violence in Beirut and El Salvador, repackaging them as objective news.73 The first term of America’s TV president, as his detractors called him, happened to coincide with a number of mechanical innovations that literally accorded new visibility to televisual representation and its underlying technologies. Architecturally scaled video boards like Mitsubishi’s Diamond Vision and Sony’s Jumbotron appeared between 1980 and 1985, concretizing prognostications of a twenty-first-century metropolis marked by the seamless introduction of moving images into public space. (Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s 1982 adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, realized such a vision in memorably dystopian form.) Within the domestic sphere, these years saw the more immediately transformative arrival of VCRs. Besides making possible a new home video market, the device enabled ordinary consumers to store, pause, rewind, decelerate, and accelerate received television content for the first time—a set of capabilities that Sony, in a 1980 advertisement for its Betamax system, heralded as offering “the freedom of complete control” over “the restraints of time, memory, and circumstance” (fig. 5.7). Bender, for whom such technology proved indispensable in producing works like Dumping Core, assigned a certain credence to claims like these. In “Political Entertainment,” she suggested that the “private time systems” afforded by the VCR had enabled a positive “psycho-social detour” from broadcast television’s established perceptual regimen.74 The underground filmmaker Mark Rappaport, in his contribution to TV Guides, likewise registered his improbable approval of home video technology. “It’s an appliance that would have been endorsed by Walter Benjamin, delighted Max Ernst, and has inspired Steve Martin to greater heights of delirium,” he wrote. “Who am I to say no?”75 There were also voices of skepticism in Bender’s peer group, however. Kruger, for one, concluded TV Guides by reproducing the Sony Betamax ad—in which a shadowy male figure, enthroned in an armchair and silhouetted by halolike backlighting, holds aloft a gleaming VCR remote as though it were his scepter—with a warning. Television is “making us think that its total control is our freedom and that our freedom is its total control,” the artist wrote, bringing out the unnervingly Orwellian undertones of her appropriated image.76 Jonathan Crary, in an essay from the previous year called “Eclipse of the Spectacle,” more precisely articulated the anxieties toward which Kruger gestured. Expanding on Jean Baudrillard’s prognoses in “The Ecstasy of Communication,” a 1982 essay that Bender likewise read and annotated extensively, Crary argued that the impending “convergence of home Gretchen Bender’s Mnemonic Theater

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Fig. 5.7 Sony Betamax SL-5800 advertisement, 1980. Used by permission of Sony Electronics Inc. All rights reserved.

computer, television, and telephone lines” represented the conclusion of a television “system which functioned from the 1950s into the 1970s” and the arrival of an altogether new and more completely rationalized “social machinery,” predicated on the commodification of “digitized data” in a state of “pure flux.”77 With this new machinery, Crary warned, came the opportunity for still more extensive forms of control over consumers’ sensorimotor, perceptual, and cognitive habits. “The passive consumption of images that characterized the sixties spectator is over,” he asserted. “If television then still allowed aleatory experiences of drift and anomie, the VDT [video display terminal, i.e., home computer] imposes a highly articulated, coercive apparatus, a prescriptive mode of activity and corporal regimentation.”78 From a twenty-first-century perspective, the VCR may seem to represent little more than a detour in television’s inexorable march toward digitization. In the early 1980s, however, this magnetic tape–based format would have concretized the medium’s basis in electronic technologies akin to the ones that computer processors then deployed, hence the Sony Betamax ad’s cybernetically inflected language of “control” and “memory.” For observers inclined toward narratives like Crary’s, then, the VCR’s apparently benign 164

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interactivity might well have signaled the approach of a more oppressive, disciplinary correlate. With the popularization of personal computers still some years away, theorists like Baudrillard could credibly nominate television, instead, as “the ultimate and perfect object” for the emergent “era of connections, contact, contiguity, feedback and generalized interface that goes with the universe of communication”—an electronically administered world in which “our own body and the whole surrounding universe become a control screen,” subject to manipulation by unseen forces.79 Total Recall, Bender’s 1987 installation premised on her realization that “who controls memory controls power,” thematized these concerns. The work begins with an array of recorded television commercials for General Electric products, played backward and in slow motion. Subjected to these disorienting manipulations, ads intended to offer comfortingly nostalgic pictures of American life take on a creepy, doleful quality. Their featured technologies—television sets, camcorders, boomboxes, alarm clocks, and so forth—read as alien incursions into the family hearth, rather than benign enhancements of it. Confirming such intimations of violence, Bender juxtaposes this material with selections from the 1986 film Salvador, Oliver Stone’s fictionalized story of a photojournalist who becomes embroiled in the titular country’s civil war. (Bender’s repeated clip, which shows the protagonist raising a video camera to his eye, renders emblematic the integration of violence and representation that the film as a whole both critiques and perpetuates.) These selections are joined in turn by slow-motion footage of a surging crowd, akin to the one that Longo had envisioned for the conclusion of his film Empire, and a montage of rousing television commercials for the US military, the most fantastical of which depicts a medieval knight on horseback who, upon receiving a magically glowing sword from his king, is transformed into a modern-day marine. Bridging these sequences are several dynamically kinetic interludes comprising abstract computer graphics and the latest gliding, gleaming logo animations then being aired by ABC, NBC, Fox, and other broadcasters. With its vast array of monitors and screens, Total Recall exceeded even Dumping Core in complexity, inviting, it would seem, precisely the decentered, attentively scattered, historically disconnected forms of subjectivity that Baudrillard foretold. Bender rejected that theorist’s pessimism, however; she held fast to her belief in art’s capacity to precipitate a leap from passive overload to active overdrive. “I . . . believe that an acceleration into, rather than a resistance to, our multi-layered visual environment will reveal structures or open windows to the development of a critical consciousness,” she reiterated in 1991, even if it is one “we can’t yet perceive as useful from within our immediate vantage point.”80 The statement admits to a certain amount of blind faith in the artist’s calculations. Ultimately, Bender relied on her major installations from the mid-1980s to substantiate her Gretchen Bender’s Mnemonic Theater

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sometimes grandiose claims. With their evocations of Nazism alongside contemporary Cold War conflicts, these works of electronic theater reconfigured samples of computerized mass media to transformative effect, yielding afterimage-like insinuations of the political struggles and power relations that the amnesiac medium of commercial television seemed intent on forgetting.

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Epilogue

FASCINATING AGAIN

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hat became of the Pictures Generation? In one sense, it has only just come into being: the phrase was popularized as recently as 2009, when Douglas Eklund and Ian Alteveer presented their canonizing exhibition The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As signaled by that exhibition’s date range, however, the phrase’s referent is widely understood to have disappeared sometime in the 1980s. David Rimanelli asserted as much in an essay from 2001, written in response to a rehanging of the Pictures show at Artists Space. “By the time the ’80s gave way to the ’90s—with the Gulf War, the recession, and the politicized attitude toward the AIDS crisis, to which Crimp gave himself wholeheartedly as both theoretician and agitator,” he wrote, “Pictures had run its course.”1 Though individual careers have continued to progress and garner public recognition, Eklund concurred, Pictures as a group phenomenon or movement possessed an identifiable beginning and an equally definitive conclusion. Artists like Charlesworth, Goldstein, Brauntuch, Longo, and Bender eventually settled into separate paths, motivated less by collective dialogue or preoccupations held in common than by the formal particularities and intellectual fixations that distinguished their respective oeuvres. It is of course typical for artistic movements and other forms of collective activity to possess limited lifespans. The concept of the “generation” is illuminating in this regard: while individual members of a demographic cohort go on living, their “generational” perspective remains anchored to a historically circumscribed set of formative experiences, discourses, and institutional structures that may dissolve or fall out of step with changing circumstances. Later events like the AIDS crisis and the First Gulf War,

Rimanelli implied, effectively eclipsed the focal points that originally bound the “Pictures Generation” as a group. Eklund likewise cited AIDS in accounting for his exhibition’s temporal scope, as would Michael Lobel in a review that rightly emphasized the very literal ways in which the epidemic shattered New York City’s arts communities.2 (Though most of the artists identified with Pictures survived the crisis, Lobel pointed out, the same could not be said for the critics and curators—among them Joe Bishop, Craig Owens, and Paul Taylor—who, along with Crimp, had played a crucial role in theoretically framing their early work.) Eklund also noted changes in the art market, which swelled over the 1980s to a degree that the Pictures group could scarcely have imagined back in 1977, and increasingly resembled the domains of consumer culture and media spectacle that constituted the artists’ source material. Such convergence, the curator proposed, intensified the once-productive problematic of “complicity” to a breaking point, pushing artists to adopt alternative approaches.3 Whatever the explanations, the question of what brought the Pictures moment to its end remains inextricably tied to the question of what those historically specific contexts, focal points, and discursive frameworks were that momentarily bound the associated artists into a collective entity or network in the first place. There are many complementary answers to the latter query, the explanatory value of which will vary depending on which constellation within the Pictures network one is considering. In this book I have endeavored to advance just one such answer. Charlesworth, Goldstein, Brauntuch, Longo, and Bender, I have argued, pitched their early work in response to an unfolding intergenerational struggle to define the meaning of the Second World War and the relevance of Nazism or fascism to contemporary political realities in the United States and Western Europe. The artists harbored strong beliefs about those realities, which encompassed incidents of guerrilla terrorism and the consolidation of far-right extremist groups, the ascent of a reactionary new conservatism in response to the liberation movements of the 1960s, and geopolitical intervention by the United States in Latin America and the Middle East, to name a few salient examples. By the early 1980s, however, they had all converged on what I have identified as a second-order concern with the nature of collective memory itself: the complex of discursive and representational processes through which we plot ourselves in relation to the past. Their work from this time often encoded legible political commentary, but it also reflected in a more philosophical mode on the role of images—and by extension artists—in expanding temporal perception and thereby forging, reinforcing, undermining, or transforming group identities, national and otherwise. In the final segment of the introduction, I ventured a few explanations for why this project increasingly detached itself from the specter of “fascism” as the 1980s wore on. One possible factor was the enduring popular 168

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success of Reagan-Thatcher conservatism, a development that, disheartening though it might have been to observers on the left, effectively displaced the more extremist voices and apocalyptic prognostications that had been able to circulate amid the political volatility of the 1970s. Another factor was the newfound traction of collective memory as an explicit discursive framework—and, more to the point, the embrace of this theoretical language by artists for whom Nazism and the Second World War represented only one chapter within a longer history of racial imperialism. I am thinking here of Black American artists like Carrie Mae Weems and Fred Wilson, exact contemporaries of the Pictures cohort. (They were born in 1953 and 1954, respectively, making them the same ages as Longo and Brauntuch.) Their work from the early 1990s likewise drew on a postconceptual idiom of appropriation and image-text combination—but employed it to highlight the afterlives of slavery and the complicity with White supremacy of representational practices such as anthropological photography and museological display.4 Their interventions resonated in turn with the emerging practices of slightly younger artists from Renée Greene to Kara Walker, Isaac Julien to Rachel Whiteread, Thomas Hirschhorn to Walid Raad, all of whom were elaborating novel ways to explore the domain of memory, personal and collective, in a variety of media. In 2004, Hal Foster would cite several of them in an article surveying the rise of an “archival impulse” in contemporary art.5 Meditations on memory by no means disappeared from the Pictures artists’ later work. Brauntuch’s photographs and grisaille drawings have continued to exhibit the hazy fragmentation of fugitive recollections, imbuing private moments and domestic scenes—his wife asleep, his prowling cat— with the same ghostly pallor that he has employed in monumentalizing the traces of very public traumas, among them the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, the 1992 uprisings against racist policing in Los Angeles, and the 1995 murder trial of O. J. Simpson. Longo’s large-scale work in charcoal, the medium he has employed almost exclusively since 2000, has assumed a similarly oneiric and oftentimes mnemonic quality. His inaugural series of this type, the Freud Cycle (1999–2008), depicted the apartment of the famed psychoanalyst—needless to say, a key memory theorist—as documented in the days before he left Vienna, fleeing Nazi persecution. Charlesworth, for her part, expanded her memorial-like Stills in 2012, allowing their falling figures to resonate with recent memories of 9/11.6 In keeping with the work of their emerging counterparts, then, these artists took the strategies they had developed earlier in their careers and applied them to a widened domain, one that could include but was by no means limited to the historically specific points of reference that had once, circa 1980, supplied a common and consistent ground, supporting the Pictures group’s capacity to function as a collectivity. World War II and “fascism,” as self-evident metonyms for Fascinating Again

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the phenomenon of collective memory writ large, belonged to a cultural and generational perspective whose time had passed. Or at least, so it seemed until quite recently. Generational perspectives do not invariably slip into obsolescence; the contingencies of history can imbue them with new relevance. Such was the case around 2016 and the years following, when it suddenly became clear that far-right populist movements had achieved once-unthinkable traction everywhere from Brazil to India, Hungary to Israel, Great Britain to the United States. “Fascism” was making headlines again, just as it had done amid the reactionary currents of the 1970s.7 As though on cue, the two surviving members of my quintet, Longo and Brauntuch, began reprising iconography and representational strategies that they had introduced some forty years prior. By way of conclusion, I will briefly consider this recent body of work. What more might it tell us about the artists’ practices from the years around 1980? What might the latter in turn tell us about the discursive atmosphere we are living through now?

A Strange New Beauty The centerpiece of Brauntuch’s 2020 exhibition at Petzel Gallery, A Strange New Beauty, was a set of thirty-two photo-etchings. Like photographic negatives, they presented their subject—the marble-accented galleries of a grand museum—in inverted tones of spectral white and velvety black. Inside the depicted spaces we see no visitors, only arrangements of academic landscapes, neoclassical nudes, portrait busts, and equine statues, their shadowing and dark bronze surfaces eerily aglow. Handwritten numerical annotations indicate that the source images were archival, but Brauntuch’s transformations separate his prints from any straightforwardly documentary function, imbuing their mise-en-scènes with an ominous and otherworldly cast. Separate groups of digital prints—one, subtitled Black Cases, is tonally reversed; the other, subtitled White Cases (fig. 6.1), is not—depict an ornate vitrine, the reflections in which confirm its placement within the same milieu. Yet something looks amiss about the vitrine’s sparse contents, which vary from work to work. For one thing, each of the titular cases includes a women’s shoe, incongruously positioned beside small figurines and statuettes. Another detail gives away the artist’s digital sleight of hand: in each image, the reflection of a marble nude rises impossibly above the vitrine’s glazing. These towering but attenuated figures come to occupy their own spectral domain, positioned somewhere between the archived world and ours. The possibility that viewers might at first misrecognize the works’ historical context was evidently important to Brauntuch, who took care to avoid and, where necessary, efface identifying markers such as swastikas or busts of Hitler from his found photographs.8 As had been the case in his 170

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Fig. 6.1 Troy Brauntuch, detail of A Strange New Beauty (White Cases), 2019. Five laser-exposed fiber prints, overall: 25 ¾ × 188 in.; each: 25 ¹³⁄16 × 23 ⅛ in. Copyright © Troy Brauntuch. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.

exhibitions from the late 1970s and early 1980s, he left it to his gallery to reveal—or, for viewers possessing any familiarity with the artist’s oeuvre, confirm—the discomfiting fact that he had derived his source material from the annals of Nazi Germany: specifically, the digitized and publicly accessible archives of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen (Great German Fascinating Again

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Art Exhibitions).9 These were doctrinal counterpoints to the regime’s better known (and better attended) exhibition of “degenerate” modernism from 1937. Organized by Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s personal photographer, the Great German Art Exhibitions were mounted annually at Munich’s Haus der Kunst between 1937 and 1944. The semitransparent nudes that Brauntuch superimposed on his appropriated vitrines are works by Josef Thorak, whose statuary figured prominently in the exhibitions’ curatorial programs. The shoes inside the cases hail from the present day (another work in the Petzel exhibition, Selected Shoes, frames the advertisements from the New York Times where Brauntuch discovered them), but the founder of their brand, Coco Chanel, was a contemporary of the Austrian sculptor. Like him, she was a person of celebrated aesthetic refinement; she was also a Nazi sympathizer.10 Brauntuch evidently sought to highlight such perverse convergences of art and politics, hence his morbidly ironic title phrase.11 In 2020 as in 1980, critics expressed discomfort with Brauntuch’s provocations. What was the artist trying to say by juxtaposing Nazi propaganda with recent newspaper ads for designer clothing? “There is something truly irresponsible in taking this parallel seriously,” David Carrier admonished.12 For Zack Hatfield, writing in the pages of Artforum, “the intention of all this distorted museography felt plain and well-placed: See how fascism influences on a subliminal level.” And yet, he concluded, “there was something conceptually thin, possibly glib, about the artist’s strategy of ironized connoisseurship” and the “deathly, complicitous glamour” of his resulting work.13 Such readings likely took their cues from Petzel’s press release, which proposed that Brauntuch had manipulated his archival selections so that they might “generate new meaning within our current socio-political climate,” and had paired them with contemporary fashion advertisements to “consider how ideology can transcend generations and normalize into quotidian spaces.”14 But what, exactly, might be the transgenerational “ideology” linking Hitler’s state-sponsored academicism to today’s luxury commerce, other than just bourgeois conservatism? To conflate the latter with Nazism in its genocidal specificity would indeed be glib. Yet this is far from the only meaning that Brauntuch’s juxtapositions might project. Consider more closely Brauntuch’s Selected Shoes (2019) (fig. 6.2), the series of five newspaper advertisements from which he sourced the highend loafers, stilettos, and pumps that reappear, transposed to the context of Nazi Germany, in A Strange New Beauty (White Cases). The artist took care to obscure all references to their brand, leaving only the shoes, their names, and their prices. But he also exhibited another ad (Chanel, 2020) that he left unchanged, giving the fashion house away. This one, printed in the January 1, 2016, issue of the Times, bears a New Year’s benediction: “may the year ahead be joyous and bright.” For a historically informed viewer, the reference to Chanel might well evoke the eponymous designer’s wartime allegiances and thus suggest a meaningful connection to the likes of Thorak. 172

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There is another important aspect of the artist’s appropriations, however, that even a viewer without such background knowledge might observe. In each ad, the day’s page 1 headlines remain visible through the newsprint, their reversed lettering faintly filling the empty spaces that surround the fetishized footwear. “G.O.P.’s Path to Presidency: Tight but Real,” reads the title of a news analysis by Nate Cohn from November 2014; “Young Palestinians Fan Flames of New Uprising,” declares another from October of the following year. Behind Chanel’s New Year’s benediction lies a story about the failure of France’s police to prevent the terrorist attacks that had claimed 130 lives on November 13. A morbid irony thus suffuses the corporation’s empty wish that 2016 be “joyous and bright.” Indeed, the words take on still larger portent in view of the upheavals that would define this momentous year, among them Brexit and the election of Donald Trump—key components of the “current socio-political climate” cited in A Strange New Beauty’s press release.15 Given such adjacencies, those designer pumps and loafers may operate something like the tabloid photographs of falling bodies that Charlesworth collected in the course of planning Stills. However unintentionally and indeed improbably, they function as metonymic stand-ins for prevailing states of political affairs. In fact they work as two-pronged indexes: further paralleling Charlesworth’s works from 1980, they point to today’s news as well as toward a set of Nazi-era precedents in a way that may encourage viewers to draw connections between the two. But they also act as screens, blocking the stories that are printed on their rectos, much like the midcentury glamour of Chanel’s designs displaced more sordid memories of collaboration and accommodation in Nazi-occupied Paris. In my chapter on Brauntuch’s early work, I argued that the artist saw modernist abstraction and its avowed ideological opposite, represented by the work of Thorak, as similarly operating both as index and as screen, at once evoking and eliding the atrocities of fascist rule. One effect of Brauntuch’s project, I proposed, was to raise a more expansive concern with the functioning of images in collective memory formation, and the fraught position of the artist in this process. A Strange New Beauty reiterated those concerns anew. Brauntuch’s exhibition might not have meant to say much about Nazi “ideology” at all, then. Indeed, the artist seems to have taken an interest in the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen precisely for their lack of obvious ideological hallmarks. Without context, they could easily be mistaken for a suite of old masters galleries in any number of national collections, past or present. Petzel’s statement that “Brauntuch’s exploration of this archive allows the imagery of the Great German Art Exhibitions to generate new meaning within our current socio-political climate” hits closer to the mark, at least in how its phrasing withdraws the artist’s own beliefs or intentionality from the equation. In a post-2016 climate, the imagery will all but automatically generate the new political meanings; Brauntuch simply “allows” it Fascinating Again

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Fig. 6.2 Troy Brauntuch, Selected Shoes, 2019. Collected newspaper advertisements from the

New York Times, 2015–17, 15 ¾ × 46 ¾ in. Copyright © Troy Brauntuch. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.

to do so. If the artist himself perceives analogies between interwar fascism and the authoritarian currents of our present, he does not impress them forcibly on his viewer. Ultimately, his work reflects on our propensity to draw such analogies at all, our tendency—inescapable and, indeed, politically indispensable—to see the present through scrim of selected moments from the past in a way that simultaneously points and screens. What is the proper role of the artist in all of this? To that question Brauntuch supplies no easy answer. This commitment to aporia may explain why Longo’s work since 2016 has tended to receive the warmer reception. At a time when artists have been eager to establish clear connections between their professional lives and their political commitments, Longo developed an approach comparatively free from doubt and excessive selfreflexivity—or at least, so it might at first seem.

Fugitive Images The years since 2014, when Longo began the expansive series of charcoal drawings collectively titled The Destroyer Cycle, have been among the most 174

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energetic of the artist’s career. Longo himself regards this work as the strongest he has ever produced, and he does not hesitate to identify the source of his creative sprint: the drawings “come from a place of rage,” he explains, rage “about our current political state.”16 The image that initiated what would become the Destroyer project—only conceptualized as such in 2017, following Trump’s election—was a newspaper photograph depicting militarized riot police in Ferguson, Missouri, after the killing of Michael Brown by a White police officer. This Longo would tweak and expand to a size of seven by ten feet to create the work subtitled Ferguson Police, August 13, 2014 (2014). Since then, he has monumentalized similarly iconic images of seafaring refugees, defaced Confederate monuments, demonstrators at the 2017 Women’s Marches, the executed Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, goose-stepping soldiers in Pyongyang, anti-Semitic vandalism, and, in the cycle’s concluding installment, the storming of the US Capitol by Trumpsupporting insurrectionists on January 6, 2021. Together, Longo’s selections suggest a world in crisis and a nation on the brink of authoritarianism, akin in this regard to the interwar German antecedent that the spray-painted swastikas in Defaced Jewish Cemetery; Strasbourg, France; December 14, 2018 Fascinating Again

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(2019) invariably evoke (fig. 6.3). The Destroyer series is by no means entirely pessimistic, however. Works like Nathan Bedford Forrest Statue Removal; Memphis, 2017 (2018), in which two cranes loom over the theatrically floodlit monument, erected in 1905 to commemorate a Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader, project at least a glimmer of hope for progressive change (fig. 6.4). Part of the intention behind these works, Longo has explained, was simply to arrest some of the “fugitive images” that inundate us daily in the deluge of our ever-expanding media “storm” and afford them the possibility of longer, slower looking—a kind of looking that the handmade facture of large-scale charcoal drawing (undertaken with the aid of numerous assistants, working in a studio affectionately dubbed the “coal mine”) can promote.17 But Longo does not simply appropriate existing photographs and transpose them into different media. He significantly manipulates and sometimes even melds his source images, finessing compositions and intensifying light-dark contrasts to achieve the kind of epic, emotionally supercharged effects he has consistently been seeking since the 1970s.18 (“I make pictures not of what I see, but of what I feel,” he says.)19 He characterizes the

Fig. 6.3 Robert Longo, Untitled (Defaced Jewish Cemetery; Strasbourg, France; December 14,

2018), 2019. Charcoal on mounted paper, 96 × 144 in. New York, the Jewish Museum. Copyright © Robert Longo. Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery.

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Fig. 6.4 Robert Longo, Untitled (Nathan Bedford Forrest Statue Removal; Memphis, 2017), 2018.

Charcoal on mounted paper, 70 × 120 in. Copyright © Robert Longo. Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery.

results as “hyperreal,” thus sidestepping the maligned category of photorealism and its implications of technically proficient superficiality. “I want to create a more perfect image, like a memory,” he explains.20 The materiality of charcoal plays a part in this, too: its velvety deposits soften edges, creating the oneiric quality I cited earlier with respect to the artist’s Freud Cycle. Charcoal’s nature as “dust and . . . burnt material,” as Longo puts it, can also evoke cave paintings produced some thirty millennia ago in essentially the same medium, prompting viewers to adopt a postapocalyptic perspective onto the present as though it were a similarly vanished past.21 Longo marvels at how “people’s memories have become so geared by images that they remember things almost photographically,” but as I have been insisting throughout this book, such formulations can be misleading.22 There is a sense in which external media quite literally constitute our memory, as indeed they always have. To characterize Longo’s works as mnemonic, then, is not to imply that they simulate an inner, individualized experiential domain, but rather that they intervene within a memory landscape that is always already social and extended by technology. The fact that images of monuments have played such a prominent part in The Destroyer Cycle—the Forrest statue; the Strasbourg tombstones; the graffiti-covered base of the monument to Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia—is significant in this regard: Longo’s works function much as the monuments they Fascinating Again

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picture do, anchoring and shaping our sense of history. In the 1970s and 1980s, the monumentality of Longo’s work remained more tightly linked to the contested memory of fascism, but even then this signified stood in for a wider state of current political affairs, affairs that were themselves inextricable from the ways in which the Second World War had been memorialized and countermemorialized in the intervening decades. That was the point of Longo’s Empire cycle and the series of sometimes fascistic-looking combines that it generated (discussed in chapter 4). In Destroyer, allusions to World War II play a more secondary but ultimately similar role, shaping the artist’s “picture of America” as it has developed into arguably its most fully realized form. Reviews of Longo’s recent work have been overwhelmingly positive. Some critics have raised the old anxieties regarding his imagery’s potential ambiguity and thus susceptibility to misuse, but none has appeared to regard that susceptibility as a major concern. David Ebony, for example, wondered whether rendering the insurrectionists of January 6 at mural scale might risk inadvertently aggrandizing them (fig. 6.5). Having raised this conceivable objection, however, the author promptly dismissed it, concluding that “the anonymity of the characters”—one of them conceals his

Fig. 6.5 Robert Longo, Insurrection at the US Capitol; January 6th, 2021; Based on a Photograph

by Mark Peterson, 2021. Charcoal on mounted paper, 92 ½ by 134 in. Copyright © Robert Longo. Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery.

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face behind a Trump beanie, sunglasses, and American flag bandanna; another wears a gas mask—“and the ominous tone of the work . . . preclude any effort to glorify this event that resulted in the deaths of five people.”23 Writing about the same drawing, a nearly eight-by-eleven-foot panel titled Insurrection at the US Capitol; January 6th, 2021; Based on a Photograph by Mark Peterson (2021), Tim Griffin resolved the issue by a different logic. “As we know,” he wrote, “the emotions of the viewer are apt to determine the narrative: whether these figures are insurrectionists or patriots, assaulters or heirs of these halls in all their symbolism.” The “feeling—or the rage—will guide the collective reading,” and collectivities will vary in this regard.24 But if Longo’s drawing raises the uncomfortable prospect of its own potential misappropriation, Griffin suggested, it does so in order to thematize this very possibility, commenting self-reflexively on the propensity of people in opposing camps to imbue identical information with diametrically opposing meanings. The critic’s reading hinged on a saliently disjunctive element of the artist’s composition: reaching into the frame from the right is an arm wielding a smartphone, poised to record the historic scene as a future object of commemoration just as Peterson, the photojournalist, is doing from a (presumably) opposing ideological position. Multiple acts of representation thus spectacularize the event from different perspectives even as it is unfolding. Longo’s drawing in turn restages this divergent staging, emblematizing the contested character of collective memory in an intensely polarized era. Longo’s works reflect on the constructedness of memory, then, even as they participate full tilt in its construction. Griffin’s text seems almost to perform the equivocality inherent to such a project. He describes the Destroyer Cycle drawings as “historical works for a time when the very construction of history is newly and continually unsettled, inevitably underlining how, and why, subjects are apt to recast meaning on their own terms.” Yet he also describes history as having lately entered into a process of selfclarification, with old myths crumbling of their own accord and thereby rendering superfluous the more aggressively deconstructive approaches employed by Longo and his peers in the myth-enveloped 1980s. “Whereas his earlier compositions might have evoked surrounding systems,” Griffin writes, “his most recent pieces capture what is made visible when the myths can no longer obscure what lies beneath the surface, and when representations no longer function as they once did—or, perhaps most accurately, when the unreal finally meets the real.” From statements such as these, one might conclude that only the right still mythologizes, “recasting history on its own terms.” Longo’s take on history, by contrast, merely amplifies apparent truths, “rendering visible what has been systemically occluded in America’s myths of itself, and has lately risen to the fore.”25 To be sure, there is no equivalence between today’s far right and the progressive movements that inform Longo’s recent drawings. The latter remain Fascinating Again

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grounded in reality in a way that the former does not. Still, there is occasion for pause in the relative ease with which Longo’s recent work has gained acceptance among its intended audience, especially in comparison to the far more skeptical reception that he received in the 1980s when his political messaging was less self-evident, his compositions more fragmentary and opaque. Perhaps there is something to be said for the aporia and doubt that those “postmodern” works conveyed and Brauntuch’s recent works still do—as indeed do Longo’s, insofar as they call attention to their affectively manufactured “hyperreality” and acknowledge their participation in a contested process of collective memory formation, rather than purporting to transcend it. Often hastily dismissed or criticized as apolitical irony, such distancing maneuvers represented an effort by the Pictures group to affirm the constructed nature of all historical representation and to apply this recognition universally, holding themselves to account as much as their political or mass cultural targets. In Brauntuch and Longo’s post-2016 projects, then, we find a distillation of two entwined yet competing tendencies that had been present in their cohort’s work from the beginning: on the one hand, a residual commitment to the postwar modernist ideal of maintaining art’s autonomy from political instrumentalization through strategies of opacity and self-reflexivity; on the other, an acutely felt need to acknowledge the untenability of such distinctions and exceed the restrictions they impose.26 When one makes one’s subject matter the politics of the immediate present, strategies of modernist distancing become more fraught; it is natural and indeed necessary to set one’s circumspection aside and take a stand. In the years around 1980, the Second World War offered a means to circumvent such difficulties. Lying just beyond the Pictures artists’ living memory, this removed yet everpresent referent allowed them to engage with present politics while also affording them the separation that they needed to thematize the workings of collective memory from a second-order perspective. In undertaking the latter effort, they helped to launch a novel way of looking that would significantly shift established perspectives concerning pictures and the past.

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Acknowledgments

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his project took shape in turbulent times and is no doubt a reflection of them to some extent. It is also a reflection of the supportive, convivial, and rigorous intellectual environment at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, where, between 2017 and 2020, I began the research from which this book emerged. I am particularly grateful to Robert Slifkin, whose thinking about memory and monumentality pushed my work in new directions. He has remained my primary reader and most incisive interlocutor for nearly a decade. Thomas Crow’s seminars on postwar London and Los Angeles offered crucial opportunities to explore the diverse artistic currents of the 1970s and 1980s, and his own scholarship remains an enduring model; I can only strive to emulate the clarity and erudition of his writing. Sincere thanks are also due to Eve Meltzer, who guided me through the varied field of conceptual art; Alexander Nagel, who prompted me to think about temporality in relation to postmodernism; and Alexander Dumbadze, who generously shared his insights into the work of Jack Goldstein and has provided steadfast professional support. The completion of this book would not have been possible were it not for a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. I am deeply grateful to Colin Jager, William Galperin, and Andrés Zervigón for affording me this opportunity. Andrés’s work on John Heartfield and the politics of photographic appropriation in interwar Germany had been a key point of reference for me, even before I came to Rutgers. The seminar he co-organized around the contested identity of photography raised exciting new ways to think about the medium. My gratitude extends to Michelle Smiley and the other seminar participants

who shared their work and offered vital feedback on mine during the 2020– 21 academic year, supplying a much-needed sense of intellectual camaraderie amid the grim conditions of a global pandemic. In subsequent years, Rutgers’s Department of Art History offered me a similarly rewarding professional home. I thank Laura Weigert, Carla Yanni, and Danielle Vroom for their mentorship and administrative support. I also thank my students at Rutgers and elsewhere for giving me the opportunity to talk through the ideas that animate my research. This book benefited from the contributions of many people beyond the orbits of the IFA and Rutgers. Hal Foster, Romy Golan, Ara Merjian, and the late Douglas Crimp graciously took the time to speak with me in the early phases of my research. So did Helene Winer, Troy Brauntuch, Robert Longo, and James Welling. Crimp’s and Foster’s illuminating criticism from the 1970s and 1980s remains foundational to my analyses. Recognition is also due to Douglas Eklund and Ian Alteveer, whose 2009 exhibition The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 helped lay the groundwork for my project. The artists I discuss have been a continuing source of inspiration as well. I extend my sincere thanks to the teams at Metro Pictures, Paula Cooper, Petzel, Sprüth Magers, the Robert Longo studio, and the Sarah Charlesworth Estate—especially Matthew Lange, Alex Baye, Sam Tsao, and Ryan Muller— for facilitating these connections, sharing their extensive knowledge, and undertaking myriad forms of archival and logistical support to advance my project. I am similarly indebted to the committed staffs at the Getty Research Center, the California Institute of the Arts, Fales Library and Special Collections at NYU, and the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. I had the opportunity to present my research at several productive conferences and speaking engagements. I am grateful to Imogen Hart and David Peters Corbett; Amy Hamlin and James Romaine; Laura Lake Smith; the graduate students at UCLA’s Department of Art History; and the faculty at Johns Hopkins University’s History of Art Department for their invitations and their feedback. The editors of Art History, the Art Bulletin, and Representations also offered me valuable opportunities to publish essays directly or indirectly related to the material in this book. I thank Dorothy Price and Samuel Bibby; Milette Gaifman and Lillian Tseng; Diana Wise and Whitney Davis for their feedback and encouragement. Art in America has also been a supportive home for my critical writing since 2019; Mira Dayal’s editorial rigor and acumen pushed me to hone my writing just when I most needed to do so. Finally, I am deeply grateful to the entire team at the University of Chicago Press: to Susan M. Bielstein for supporting my initial proposal; to Dylan J. Montanari for his incisive commentary on key chapters; to Dylan and to Victoria Barry for shepherding my project through the editorial process; and to the anonymous readers whose astute queries and observations helped me refine my manuscript and conceptualize its concluding epilogue. Funds for this project came from several sources. Initial research was 182

Acknowledgments

supported by fellowships provided by the Vilcek Foundation and the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation. A Global Research Initiative grant from NYU allowed me to travel. Generously illustrated art history books, I have learned, are costly to produce. The New Foundation for Art History and the Institute of Fine Arts both provided crucial support in this respect. My sincere thanks to Christian Kleinbub and Christine Poggi for helping to ensure my project’s financial viability. Finally, I am profoundly grateful to my family for their love and unwavering support. I dedicate this book to my wife, Natasha.

Acknowledgments

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Notes

Introduction 1. It would be possible to enumerate still more examples of the trope from these same years. In April 1978, for instance, Bernard Tschumi exhibited a series of “advertisements for architecture” at Artists Space in New York City. One of them paired a photograph of a man being thrown out of a window with the caption “to really appreciate architecture, you may even need to commit a murder.” The cover of David Bowie’s 1979 album Lodger, a collaboration with the artist Derek Boshier, portrayed the performer sprawled on the ground as though he were the victim of a similar deed. For a contemporaneous review of Tschumi’s experimental work from this time, see Kate Linker, “Bernard Tschumi: Architecture, Eroticism, and Art,” Arts Magazine 53, no. 1 (November 1978): 107–9. My thanks to Stephen Campbell for bringing the Bowie cover to my attention. 2. See the press release for The Jump at Foundation for Art Resources, March 16– 24, 1979, “Press Releases and Program Notes, 1979–1981,” Dorit Cypus Foundation for Art Resources Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. See also Sande Cohen, “Not History: Remarks on the Foundation for Art Resources, 1977–1998,” in David E. James, ed., The Sons and Daughters of Los: Culture and Community in L.A. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 118–20. 3. See Emily Prager, “Mondo Longo,” Interview Magazine 18, no. 5 (May 1988): 88; and Jeanne Siegel, “Lois Lane and Robert Longo: Interpretation of Image,” Arts Magazine 55, no. 3 (November 1980): 157. 4. The first installment of Maus appeared in the second issue of Raw, where Spiegelman would serialize the story through the 1980s. In January 2022, the school board of McCinn County, Tennessee, unanimously voted to remove Maus from its curriculum, prompting a nationwide outcry over conservative censorship. For the completed work, see Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (New York: Pantheon, 1996).

5. The “Pictures Generation” label was popularized by a major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See Douglas Eklund, The Pictures Generation, 1974– 1984 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009). 6. “In a way these corporate logos are deathless: they’re clean, gleamy, and they fly through space,” Bender mused in 1991. “They don’t decay, they are awe inspiring like Hitler’s Nuremburg lights, these abstract, pure, beautiful lights going through the sky.” See Gretchen Bender, interview with Peter Doroshenko, in Doroshenko, Gretchen Bender: Work 1981–1991 (Syracuse, NY: Everson Museum of Art, 1991), 10. 7. Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 79, 87. 8. “This is the future,” a press release for Dumping Core asserted: “overload becomes overdrive.” See “Gretchen Bender: ‘Dumping Core,’ a Staged Video Performance,” undated press release, Gretchen Bender Papers, 1980–2004, box 1, Project Files: Dumping Core, 1984–1991, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 9. See Crimp, “Pictures,” 75–88; and Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, Parts 1 and 2,” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, ed. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 52–87. 10. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 283. 11. Craig Owens, “Representation, Appropriation and Power,” Art in America 70, no. 5 (May 1982): 10. 12. Roland Barthes, “Lecture in Inauguration of the Chair of Literary Semiology, Collège de France, January 7, 1977,” trans. Richard Howard, October 8 (Spring 1979): 5–6. 13. This emphasized temporality is something that Crimp observed and perceptively contrasted with the quasi-religious antitemporality of high modernism as defined by Michael Fried. Yet, as I discuss later in this introduction as well as in chapters 2 and 3, the historical dimensions of such a newly emphasized temporality fell by the wayside in Crimp’s canonical texts. See Crimp, “Pictures,” 76–77. 14. See, for example, Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Lisa Saltzman, Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); and Mark Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 15. See, for example, Leigh Raiford, “Photography and the Practices of Critical Black Memory,” History and Theory 48, no. 4 (2009): 112–29; Huey Copeland, Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Cheryl Finley, Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019); and Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Commerce, and Cotton in the Atlantic World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021). Michael Rothberg applies a memory framework to decolonial nationalisms in Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 16. See for example Heather Diack and Erina Duganne, “Not Just Pictures: Reassessing Critical Models for 1980s Photography,” Photographies 10, no. 3 (2017): 235–43. Thomas Lawson, whose Real Life magazine provided a key forum for “Pic186

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tures” discourse, anticipated such critiques as early as 1982. In an essay accompanying his survey exhibition “A Fatal Attraction: Art and the Media,” he described the Pictures group’s defining gambit as an attempt to gain some critical purchase on mass culture by reframing and even mimicking that culture’s most problematically seductive qualities. “It is an admittedly tricky operation, and one which inevitably confuses the liberal fellow travelers,” Lawson wrote. “The reformers consider this work ‘retro chic,’ dangerously close to the authoritarianism we all know we should abhor.” In a sense, he admitted, they are correct, and yet in his view the more outwardly progressive alternative was surely worse: “a safely sanitized ‘political art’” amounting to “a truly abject acquiescence, a silent affirmation of the status quo.” See Thomas Lawson, “A Fatal Attraction,” in Thomas Lawson, ed., A Fatal Attraction: Art and the Media (Chicago: Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 1982), 4. The prevailing argument in favor of Pictures-era appropriation has historically been a feminist one, most often articulated on behalf of women artists in the group like Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, and Laurie Simmons. See, for example, Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” in Bryson et al., Beyond Recognition, 166–90; and the first five essays in Rosalyn Deutsche, Not Forgetting: Contemporary Art and the Interrogation of Mastery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). 17. The phrase grands récits, translated “master narratives” or “metanarratives,” comes from Jean-François Lyotard. See Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), xxiv. 18. Michael Foucault, “Preface,” in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, AntiOedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), xiii. 19. See Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995, 12–15. 20. See Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1991), 26–52. The literature on fascism is vast. For a few more recent overviews of the topic, see Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage, 2005); and Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (New York: Random House, 2018). 21. General Idea comprised AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal. For the article associated with their “audience” projection, see their “Rehearsal of the Audience,” FILE Megazine 4, no. 1 (Summer 1978): 48. 22. “Mr. Bill knows that fascism is a bottomless cup but he’s liable to forget the unquenchable thirst for this intoxicating brew,” reads the accompanying editorial. “To help him remember we’ve introduced this new cocktail. We call it Nazi Milk. The recipe? Nothing exotic. Something found in most homes. A basic ingredient with an Oedipal aftertaste, preferably white.” See “Editorial,” FILE Megazine 4, no. 2 (Fall 1979): 17. 23. For more on Gilbert and George’s work, see Alexander Bigman, “Gilbert and George’s 1980 Pictures and the Spectre of Nationalism in Postcolonial Britain,” Art History 44, no. 5 (2021): 978–1010. There are many more examples of fascist imagery in the art of this time. The curators of Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture, for instance, paired Bender’s electronic theater with a work by Richard Baim entitled Rise and Fall (1985), a sequence of slide projections that, in Bob Riley’s account, addressed “issues of public control through art, archiNotes to Pages 7–8

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tecture, and fashion” by juxtaposing “decontextualized images from contemporary society” with “archetypal fascist monuments, and classical sculpture.” See Bob Riley, “Notes on new Media Theater,” in Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1986), 108. 24. Jon Savage quotes the British punk rocker Siouxsie Sioux as saying that wearing a swastika was “always very much an anti-mums and anti-dads thing.” In Savage’s gloss, “the wearing of the swastika served notice on the threadbare fantasy of Victory, the lie of which could be seen on most urban street corners.” See Savage, England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), 241 and 108. 25. Longo stated that he “would listen to [ Joy Division’s] music all the time. Their music and their gigs and the way the band was formed and their end—the lead singer eventually hung himself—was parallel to Men in the Cities. They too had this misinterpreted Neo-Nazi quality and classical typeface for all their announcements.” See Robert Longo, interview with Richard Price, in Robert Longo, ed., Men in the Cities, 1979–1982 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), 100–101. The phrase “Joy Division” originated in the 1953 novella House of Dolls by Ka-tzetnik 135633 (the penname of Yehiel Feiner), where it referred to groups of Jewish women forced to work as prostitutes in concentration camps. For more on Joy Division’s Nazi references, see Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 111–18; and Jon Savage, “Introduction,” in Deborah Curtis and Jon Savage, eds., So This Is Permanence: Joy Division Lyrics and Notebooks (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2014), xiii–xxviii. 26. My thanks to James Welling and Robert Slifkin for bringing this announcement card to my attention. For more on No Wave music, see Marc Masters, No Wave (London: Black Dog, 2007); and Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 27. Jackie Raynal, “Letter,” Cover 5 (Spring/Summer 1981): 26. For more on No Wave cinema and its thematic inclinations, see Sarah Evans, “Situating Cindy Sherman: Artistic Communities, Critical Agendas and Cultural Allegiances, 1975–1984” (PhD diss., University of California at Berkeley, 2004). 28. See, for example, Lester Bangs, “The White Noise Supremacists” (1979), in Greil Marcus, ed., Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 272–82. 29. See John Solomos, Bob Findlay, Simon Jones, and Paul Gilroy, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (London: Hutchison, 1982); Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (London: Routledge, 2004); and Nigel Copsey, Contemporary British Fascism: The British National Party and the Quest for Legitimacy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 30. See Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), and Kyle Burke, Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). 31. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights, vol. 1, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Boston: South End, 1979), 41. 32. Another example would Mike Glier’s White Male Power series, a group of works on paper portraying “senators, game show hosts, national monuments, 188

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clergy,” and other representatives of the titular privilege, that the artist exhibited at Annina Nosei Gallery in 1981. 33. For more on Chambers’s work, see Rasheed Araeen, “The Success and Failure of the Black Arts Movement,” in Shades of Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain, ed. David A. Bailey, Sonia Boyce, and Ian Baucom (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 22–26. 34. See Donald Kuspit, “Leon Golub’s Murals of Mercenaries: Aggression, ‘Ressentiment,’ and the Artist’s Will to Power,” Artforum 19, no. 9 (May 1981): 53. For Greenberg’s position, see “Avant Garde and Kitsch,” in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 539–49. 35. On the larger discourse of “working through the past” in Germany, see Theodor Adorno, “The Meaning of Working through the Past,” trans. Henry W. Pickford, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 89–103; and Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior, trans. Beverly R. Placzek (New York: Grove, 1975). On Kiefer’s art in relation to the Nazi past, see Andreas Huyssen, “Anselm Kiefer: The Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth,” October 48 (Spring 1989): 25–45; and Lisa Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 36. A key text in the discursive shift away from fascism toward totalitarianism was Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken, 1951). On Google’s Ngram software, see Jean-Baptiste Michel, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, William Brockman, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy, Peter Norvig, Jon Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak, and Erez Lieberman Aiden, “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,” Science 331, no. 6014 (December 16, 2010), 176–82. 37. See Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism” (1975), in Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 73–108. 38. The years following Sontag’s article also saw a spate of popular thriller novels involving plots by former Nazis to regain power, among them William Craig’s The Strasbourg Legacy (1975), Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil (1976), Ben Stein’s The Croesus Conspiracy (1978), Robert Ludlum’s The Holcroft Covenant (1978). 39. Mishima committed ritual suicide after attempting to incite a neofascist coup in Japan. 40. For discussions of such “Neo-Decadent” cinema and its fascination with Europe’s fascist past, see Saul Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, trans. Thomas Weyr (New York: Harper and Row, 1984); and Kriss Ravetto, The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Pasolini’s Salò was a particularly prominent point of reference among members of the downtown New York arts community in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1981, the artist Thomas Lawson published an analysis of the film, illustrated with reproductions of work by Brauntuch, Goldstein, and Longo, in the pages of Flash Art. See Thomas Lawson, “Switching Channels,” Flash Art 102 (March/April 1981): 20–21. 41. Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” 101. 42. Sontag, 91, 97. 43. Sontag’s sweeping condemnation of S&M sex was conservatively moralistic Notes to Pages 11–15

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in a way that can obscure the subtler insights of her critique. For a discussion of these dynamics, see Linda Mizejewski, Divine Decadence: Fascism, Female Spectacle, and the Makings of Sally Bowles (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 23–36. In her 1963 essay “On Style,” Sontag had explicitly defended Riefenstahl’s work on aesthetic grounds. For an analysis of this discursive shift, see Bonita Rhoads, “Sontag’s Captions: Writing the Body from Riefenstahl to S&M,” Women’s Studies 37 (2008): 942–70. For another psychoanalytic study of fascist ideology in terms of gender and sexuality, see Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 1, Women, Foods, Bodies, History (Oxford: Polity, 1987); and Male Fantasies, vol. 2, Psychoanalyzing the White Terror (Oxford: Polity, 1989). For a scholarly account of bondagesadomasochistic practice and imagery in postwar queer cultures, see Juan Antonion Suárez, Bike Boys, Drag Queens and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). 44. Responding to the comment that “a curator at the Modern Museum has called Pop Art fascistic and militaristic,” Lichtenstein stated that “the heroes depicted in comic books are fascist types, but I don’t take them seriously in these paintings—maybe there’s a point in not taking them seriously, a political point. I use them for purely formal reasons, and that’s not what those heroes were intended for.” See Roy Lichtenstein, 1963 interview with G. R. Swenson, in John L. Russell, ed., Pop Art Redefined (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969), 93. 45. For a comparative analysis of political reference in the work of Richter and Andy Warhol, see John Curley, A Conspiracy of Images: Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and the Art of the Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2013). On Richter’s work in particular, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022). 46. On postwar Italian art in relation to the country’s fascist past, see Romy Golan, Flashback, Eclipse: The Political Imaginary of Italian Art in the 1960s (Princeton, NJ: Zone Books, 2021). Ed Bereal’s 1965 assemblage American Beauty included a swastika filled in with the US stars and stripes. For a reproduction, see Rebecca Peabody, Andrew Perchuk, Glenn Phillips, and Rani Singh, eds., Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art 1945–1980 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011), 113. 47. Longo has said that there is a “real relationship” between the black paintings and Men in the Cities, with both representing “a very direct, formal approach to something without any leaks.” See Robert Longo, quoted in interview with Richard Price, in Longo, Men in the Cities, 1979–1982, 97. For an analysis of Stella’s own work and commentary, see Mark Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 107. 48. See Anna Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” Arts Magazine 64, no. 5 ( January 1990): 50. 49. In the series’ second chapter, originally called “The Powers That Be” but retitled “The Faces of Power” in the book adaptation from 1982, Hughes suggested that the “minimal form” in both art and architecture was inherently “coercive.” Hence, he suggested, the formal similarity between the towering, black stone slab at Mussolini’s Chapel of the Martyrs—a “gripping prediction of Minimal art,” displayed at the dictator’s Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution in 1932—and the comparably imposing geometries employed by US government projects like the Empire State Plaza in Albany, New York. See Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), 108–9. 190

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50. Robert Morris, “American Quartet,” Art in America 69, no. 10 (December 1981): 98. For more on Morris’s work from this time, see Rachel Stella, “When Kitsch Becomes Form,” in Katia Schneller and Noura Wedell, eds., Investigations: The Expanded Field of Writing in the Works of Robert Morris (Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2015); and Kevin Lotery, “Folds in the Fabric: Robert Morris in the 1980s,” October 171 (Winter 2020): 77–114. 51. Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 548. Another landmark critique of abstract expressionism as an affirmation of the postwar political order was Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 52. Crimp, “Pictures,” 85. 53. Hal Foster, “The Art of Spectacle,” Art in America 71, no. 4 (April 1983): 146–98. Foster developed and refined his argument over the course of the decade. See Hal Foster, “Collision: Robert Longo and Hope,” in Robert Longo: Drawings and Reliefs (Akron, OH: Akron Art Museum, 1984), 18–20; and “Atrocity Exhibition,” in Howard N. Fox, ed., Robert Longo (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1989), 51–62. 54. Dan Graham, “The End of Liberalism,” ZG 4 (1981): n.p. 55. Eklund, Pictures Generation, 1974–1984, 103, 104. Eklund expands on this argument in “Troy Brauntuch: The Early Work in Context,” in Lionel Bovier, ed., Troy Brauntuch (Zürich: JRP Ringier Kunstverlag AG, 2010), 49–60. 56. The key references are Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 94–136; and Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version” (1935–36), trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 19–55. 57. Brauntuch reproduced several photographs from Inside the Third Reich in his work of the late 1970s, discussed in chapter 3, and he cited the importance of Sontag’s essay “Fascinating Fascism” in conversation with the author, January 2020. Longo has cited The Conformist as an influence on his work from the time. See “Oral History Interview with Robert Longo, 2009, Jan. 30–31,” n.p., Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 58. For a concise overview of the development of collective memory as a concept, see Jeffrey Andrew Barash, “Collective Memory,” in Sven Bernecker and Kourken Michaelian, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory (New York: Routledge, 2017), 255–67. Halbwachs’s work on collective memory would be published only after his death in a Nazi concentration camp. See Maurice Halbwachs, La Mémoire Collective (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997). 59. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2004), 85–86. 60. This conception dates back at least as far as Plato’s Phaedrus, in which Socrates denigrates writing as a cause of forgetfulness rather than an aid to memory. Jacques Derrida effectively critiqued such “logocentric” metaphysics in texts like “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, ed. Notes to Pages 17–20

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Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); and Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). In more recent years, proponents of “externalist” philosophies of mind have produced a parallel critique of mind-body dualism, premised on the position that cognition is embodied and, as such, always involves processes that extend beyond neural activity in the brain to include implements, such as written language, from the wider world. See, for example, Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” Analysis 58, no. 1 (1998): 10–23; and Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009). 61. See, for example, Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1973); and The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982). 62. Marcia Tucker, “Foreword,” The Art of Memory, the Loss of History (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1985), 5. 63. Aleida Assmann, Shadows of Trauma: Memory and the Politics of Postwar Identity, trans. Sarah Clift (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 18. 64. Assmann, 20. In this book I typically revert to the phrase “collective memory” to preserve its political valences and avoid the unintended implication that “cultures” are somehow fixed or unitary entities. I make exceptions in cases where I wish clearly to distinguish the processes of “cultural memory” from those of “social memory.” 65. For an exemplary overview of how this revisionary struggle unfolded in France, see Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 66. For more on the Atelier Populaire, see Liam Considine, “Screen Politics: Pop Art and the Atelier Populaire,” Tate Papers 24 (Autumn 2015): n.p. 67. I take this phrase from Félix Guattari, who describes the Red Army Faction’s strategy as an “attempt to reveal the intrinsically fascist nature of their democratic bourgeois regimes, while waiting for the avant-garde of the working classes, together with the oppressed masses of the Third World, once more to grasp hold of the old torch of the struggle for socialist revolution.” See Guattari, “Like the Echo of a Collective Melancholia” (Semiotext[e], 1982), reprinted in Semiotext(e): The German Issue (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2009), 105. For more on guerrilla leftist organizations in the 1960s and 1970s, see Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 68. Douglas titled the photomontage “Class Brothers.” For a reproduction, see Sam Durant, ed., Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas (New York: Rizzoli, 2014), 164. 69. With the release of films like Love Camp 7 (1969) and Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS (1975), there also emerged a well-defined and widely popular Nazi exploitation genre that departed starkly from existing treatments of the subject, crudely capitalizing on fascism’s taboo sex appeal while violating established injunctions against visualizing the Holocaust. For more on this genre, see Daniel H. Magilow, Elizabeth Bridges, and Kristin T. Vanderlugt, eds., Nazisploitation! The Nazi Image in Low-Brow Cinema and Culture (New York: Continuum, 2012). 70. This was how Michel Foucault read The Night Porter and Lacombe Lucien in 1975. See Michel Foucault, “Film and Popular Memory,” in Sylvère Lotringer, ed., 192

Notes to Pages 20–23

Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston, trans., Foucault Love: Interviews, 1961–1984 (New York: Semiotext[e], 1996), 122, 127–28. 71. As Thomas Elsaesser observes, “German fascism was the first political ideology which borrowed the materials, the techniques and the mise-en-scène of its self-image from the cinema and show business: fabric and drapery, flood lights and recorded sound, scaffolding and plaster became the preferred props and elements: cinema, theatre, music, drama, pageantry and what has been called ‘Stimmungsarchitectur’ (mood-architecture) found their way from the stage and screen into public life. As a result, cinematic representations of ‘Nazism’ after Nazism are of necessity involved in a dimension of self-reference or mise-en-abyme.” See Thomas Elsaesser, Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), 135. 72. On “Holocaust consciousness,” see Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 1–15. For more on this topic, see also Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); and Kirsten Fermaglich, American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares: Early Holocaust Consciousness and Liberal America, 1957–1965 (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2006). 73. Brauntuch drew his material from Leonard A. Schoolman, ed., Spiritual Resistance: Art from Concentration Camps, 1940–1945 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979). On the enthusiastic popular reception of Holocaust and the intellectual debates it prompted, see Andreas Huyssen, “The Politics of Identification: ‘Holocaust’ and West German Drama,” New German Critique 19 (Winter 1980): 117–36; and Michael E. Geisler, “The Disposal of Memory: Fascism and the Holocaust on West German Television,” in Bruce A. Murray and Christopher J. Wickham, eds., Framing the Past: The Historiography of German Cinema and Television (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), 220–60. 74. Crimp, “Pictures,” 85. 75. See Sarah Charlesworth, “Hitler’s Nightmare: The Post-modern Possibility” (1987), in box 48, Sarah Charlesworth Estate Archives, Brooklyn, NY. In this unpublished, typewritten manuscript, various spellings were used (e.g., “Post-Modern,” “Post Modern,” “post modern,” “post-modern”); in quotes from the text, the original is followed; in the title, the conventions of title casing have been applied. 76. A version of this chapter was previously published as an article. See Alexander Bigman, “Untimely Images, Fallen Figures: Sarah Charlesworth at the End of Modern History,” Art Bulletin 104, no. 1 (2022): 146–71. 77. Jack Goldstein, “Jack Goldstein,” in Documenta 7, vol. 2, ed. Saskia Bos (D + V Paul Dierichs GmbH, 1982), 134. 78. “Post Studio Art” was the name of a course that John Baldessari began offering in 1972. See the course catalogue for term 2, 1972, in California Institute of Arts Publications Collection series 1, Institute Publications, 1964–2014, box 18, folder 1, CalArts Special Collections and Institute Archives, Santa Clarita, CA. 79. See the press release for Troy Brauntuch: An Exhibition, March 31–April 21, 1979, at the Kitchen Center for Video and Music. See Kitchen Videos and Records, box 14, folder 9, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. See also Robert Becker, “Troy Brauntuch,” Interview (February 1983): 73. 80. Robert Longo, quoted in The Heroic Figure, ed. Linda L. Cathcart, exh. cat. (Houston, TX: Contemporary Arts Museum, 1984), 65. 81. See Gretchen Bender, “The Perversion of the Visual,” Effects 2 (1984): 7. Notes to Pages 23–27

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82. Gretchen Bender, quoted in unpublished interview with Tim Druckrey, Gretchen Bender Papers, 1980–2004, box 2, Writings, Interview Drafts: Gretchen Bender Interview by Tim Druckrey, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. The Philip K. Dick story is “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (1966). Paul Verhoeven’s film adaptation from 1990 bears the title Total Recall. 83. I refer to the recent rise of far-right factions led by figures like Donald Trump, in the United States; Viktor Orbán, in Hungary; and Jair Bolsonaro, in Brazil. As Jan-Werner Müller has argued, these expressions of right-wing populism resist homogenization under any single banner, particularly one like “fascism,” which is rooted in the political conditions of the last century. Nonetheless, the events of January 6, 2021, confirmed the severity of the threat that such groups pose to liberal democracy. See Jan-Werner Müller, “Populism and the People,” London Review of Books 41, no. 10 (May 23, 2019), https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41 /n10/jan-werner-mueller/populism-and-the-people. See also Samuel Moyn, “The Trouble with Comparisons,” New York Review of Books (May 19, 2020), https://www .nybooks.com/online/2020/05/19/the-trouble-with-comparisons/.

Chapter 1 1. For accounts of the production of Stills, see Susan Fisher Sterling, “InPhotography: The Art of Sarah Charlesworth,” in Sarah Charlesworth: A Retrospective (Santa Fe: SITE Santa Fe, 1997), 77–78; “Matthew S. Witkovsky and Matthew C. Lange in Conversation,” in Sarah Charlesworth: Stills, ed. Matthew S. Witkovsky (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 29; and Leslie Dick, “Intentional Accidents: Reflections on Sarah Charlesworth’s Stills,” X-Tra: Contemporary Art Quarterly 18, no. 3 (Spring 2016): 4–31, especially n. 17. 2. See Sarah Charlesworth, “Oral History Interview with Sarah Edwards Charlesworth, 2011 November 2–9,” n.p., Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 3. On the origins of conceptual art, see Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). On the movement’s use of “systems” and its engagement with structuralist theory in particular, see Eve Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 4. There are some partial exceptions. The Guerilla, June 4, 5, 1979 (1979) and Movie-Television-News-History, June 21, 1979 (1979), both of which gathered stories pertaining to the revolutionary uprising in Nicaragua, retain the original captions beneath their images. April 19, 20, 21, 1978 (1978) and Reading Persian (1979), which respectively concern the Moro kidnapping and the Iranian revolution, each contain one newspaper reproduction with all its original text in place. 5. In the literature on Modern History, Moro is sometimes misidentified as “Prime Minister” rather than “former Prime Minister.” In fact, he led the government from 1963 to 1968 and again from 1974 to 1976. Witkovsky further misidentifies him as “Socialist” when in fact he was affiliated with the Christian Democratic Party, toward the opposite end of the political spectrum. See Matthew S. Witkovsky, “Stills,” in Witkovsky, Sarah Charlesworth: Stills, 10. 6. Chile Piece is distinguished from the ensuing Modern History works by the fact that it retains all article text. Charlesworth exhibited the work on only one occasion—an exhibition in “solidarity with Chilean democracy” at Cayman Gallery, 194

Notes to Pages 27–32

in 1977—and did not regard it as a finished work. See box 5, Sarah Charlesworth Estate Archives, Brooklyn, NY. 7. Charlesworth, quoted in Sterling, “In-Photography,” 77. 8. See Sarah Charlesworth, “Dialogue: Sarah Charlesworth with Betsy Sussler,” Cover 1, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 1980): 24. Charlesworth’s interpreters have accordingly circumscribed the monumentality of Stills and the inevitable religious associations of its motif within a tightly self-reflexive framework, oriented toward the particularities of the series’ component media. See Dick, “Intentional Accidents,” 5; Kate Linker, “Artifacts of Artifice,” in Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld, ed. Margot Norton and Massimiliano Gioni, exh. cat. (New York: New Museum, 2015), 21; and Hal Foster, “Seven Types of Ambiguity,” in Norton and Gioni, Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld, 13. 9. See Charlesworth, “Dialogue,” 24. Moro was killed on May 9, 1978. Charlesworth exhibited April 21, 1978 in August of that year. 10. In the early 1980s, the term “appropriation art” gained currency as a label for film, video, and especially photomontage-based practices involving the recontextualization of images pirated, often with little alteration, from mass cultural products or other works of art. See, for example, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art,” Artforum 21, no. 1 (September 1982): 43–56. 11. On the significance of suicide in Warhol’s work, see Christian Hite, “The Art of Suicide: Notes on Foucault and Warhol,” October 153 (Summer 2015): 65–95; and Douglas Fogle, “Spectators at Our Own Deaths,” in Andy Warhol / Supernova: Stars, Deaths, and Disasters, 1962–1964, ed. Douglas Fogle (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2005), 11–19. For a recent account of Modern History in relation to Warhol, see Mark Godfrey, “Modern History,” in Rochelle Steiner, ed., Sarah Charlesworth (Munich: Prestel, 2017), 133–40. 12. Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 87. In the curator’s original catalogue essay, “Pictures,” in Douglas Crimp, Pictures, ed. Douglas Crimp and Helene Winer (New York: Artists Space, 1977), 28, he acknowledged that the exhibited work “has important connections with questions raised by Surrealism and Pop art” as represented by such artists as Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol. In the revised 1979 version of the essay, this art historical framework has disappeared. 13. For a more recent elaboration on Crimp’s theorization of the “picture” and its relation to medium specificity, see Tamara Trodd, “Thomas Demand, Jeff Wall and Sherrie Levine: Deforming ‘Pictures,’” Art History 32, no. 5 (December 2009): 955–76. 14. Crimp, “Pictures,” 1979, 87. 15. Buchloh, for instance, characterized Warhol’s work as a “blatant reaffirmation of the conditions of cultural reification” in “Allegorical Procedures,” 56. For similarly skeptical period accounts, see Roland Barthes, “That Old Thing, Art” (1980), in Post-pop, ed. Paul Taylor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 21–31; Carter Ratcliff, Andy Warhol (New York: Abbeville, 1983); and Robert Hughes, “The Rise of Andy Warhol,” in Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 44–57. 16. See Thomas Crow, “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol,” in Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 62–63. Notes to Pages 32–35

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17. See Hal Foster, “Death in America,” October 75 (Winter 1996): 55. 18. See John J. Curley, A Conspiracy of Images: Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and the Art of the Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 117–59. For an earlier account of Warhol’s work in terms of history painting, see Anne Wagner, “Warhol Paints History, or Race in America,” Representations, no. 55 (Summer 1996): 98–119. 19. Joan Casademont, “Sarah Charlesworth, Tony Shafrazi Gallery; Laurie Anderson, Holly Solomon Gallery,” Artforum 18, no. 10 (Summer 1980): 85. 20. See Casademont, 85. Charlesworth recalls that Shafrazi had “sort of put all of his furniture in storage, and . . . just turned his apartment into an art gallery. And so the show was kind of crowded in there; it wasn’t a very large apartment.” See Charlesworth, “Oral History Interview,” n.p. 21. Jerry Saltz, “The Implacable Distance: Sarah Charlesworth’s Unidentified Woman, Hotel Corona, Madrid (1979–80),” Arts Magazine 62, no. 7 (March 1988): 24. For the relevant Benjamin passage, see “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 242. For an extended analysis of the “aestheticization” thesis, see Lutz Koepnick, Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). 22. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006), 36. 23. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, 264. On the centrality of race to nationalism (and the absence of its discussion in Anderson’s initial framework), see Homi K. Bhabha, “‘Race,’ Time and the Revision of Modernity,” in The Location of Culture, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Taylor and Francis, 2004), 356; and Étienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 13, no. 3 (Summer 1990): 329–61. My thanks to Joanna Fiduccia for pointing me toward the Balibar text. 24. Speaking in the mid-1990s, Charlesworth confirmed that she conceived Stills with a theologically framed reference point in mind; namely, Thornton Wilder’s 1927 novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey. See Sterling, “In-Photography,” 77. In Wilder’s story, a Franciscan monk in eighteenth-century Peru witnesses the collapse of an Inca rope bridge, resulting in the deaths of five people, and sets out to uncover details of the victims’ lives in a fruitless attempt to prove that their fates were a result of divine providence. Following World War II, the journalist John Hersey famously adapted Wilder’s conceit to the tragic circumstances of Hiroshima, illuminating the bombing’s human toll by telling the stories of six survivors. See Hersey, Hiroshima (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946). 25. See the Sarah Charlesworth Estate Archives, box 16. 26. Charlesworth retained four issues of the Washington Post from March 31 through April 4, 1979, pertaining to the Three Mile Island incident. See the Flat Files in the Sarah Charlesworth Estate Archives. A clipping about the Jonestown massacre, an Italian magazine article pertaining to the newly installed Khomeini regime in Iran, and a newswire photograph of the Mount St. Helens eruption are held in the Sarah Charlesworth Estate Archives, box 12. 27. Charlesworth’s early working notes for Stills focus not just on suicides and leaps of desperation, as the finalized set of images ultimately would, but also on stunt jumps, daredevil performances, and even reported “levitations.” See

196

Notes to Pages 35–37

the Sarah Charlesworth Estate Archives, box 1. Ultimately, the artist dismissed the latter categories as too “gimmicky” and “frivolous” to suit her purposes. See Charlesworth, “Dialogue: Sarah Charlesworth with Betsy Sussler,” 23. 28. See the Sarah Charlesworth Estate Archives, box 33. 29. New York Post, March 22, 1978: the quote comes from the caption beneath the photograph on page 1, on which no other text from the article appears except the headline, “Karl Wallenda Killed in Fall”; the story itself, “Karl Wallenda Dies in 120-Foot Plunge,” by Ralph Blumenfeld, begins on page 7. This story also appeared in a 1978 issue of X Magazine, an underground film journal cofounded by Sussler. The issue focuses on the then-ongoing sagas of guerrilla terrorism in Europe, evidencing the salience of Charlesworth’s chosen topic within downtown Manhattan’s tightly interlinked creative communities. See X Magazine 4/5/6 (1978): n.p. 30. Another eschatologically loaded news staple with which Charlesworth concerned herself at this time was the UFO sighting; however, she never developed her collection of this material into a finished work. For Charlesworth’s collection of stories and newswire photographs pertaining to UFO sightings, see the Sarah Charlesworth Estate Archives, box 12. 31. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). 32. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Art, Sex and Politics,” New York Times, February 8, 1976, sec. 2, 36. The article abbreviates an interview originally published in the fall of 1975 by the journal Salmagundi. See Susan Sontag, Robert Boyers, and Maxine Bernstein, “Women, the Arts and the Politics of Culture: An Interview with Susan Sontag,” Salmagundi 31/32 (Fall 1975–Winter 1976): 29–48. For the clipping, see the Sarah Charlesworth Estate Archives, box 2. 33. The New York Times article highlights this particular statement in the form of a pull quote. See Sontag, “Notes on Art, Sex and Politics,” sec. 2, 36. 34. Peter Schjeldahl, “The Hydrogen Jukebox: Terror, Narcissism, and Art,” Journal: The Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art 19 ( June–July 1978): 44. 35. Charlesworth led the discussion on Jameson’s chapter “Sartre and History” during a session of her Marxist-feminist meeting group from circa 1976. A typewritten sheet of discussion questions is held in the Sarah Charlesworth Estate Archives, box 16. For the subject text, see Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 206–305. 36. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 43. 37. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 ( July/August 1984): 64. 38. See Anderson, Imagined Communities, 5–7, 9–12. On the rise of monuments to the “fallen soldier,” see George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 39. Aleida Assmann, Shadows of Trauma: Memory and the Politics of Postwar Identity, trans. Sarah Clift (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 20. 40. Sarah Charlesworth, “Hitler’s Nightmare: The Post-modern Possibility,” n.p., Sarah Charlesworth Estate Archives, box 48. The contents of the paper make clear that it was written to be read aloud (it begins by addressing the audience

Notes to Pages 37–40

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gathered “this evening”), but the archives do not include information about exactly where this talk might have been delivered. The manuscript is only sited and dated “New York, New York, February 9, 1987.” 41. Charlesworth, n.p. 42. See press release for Objects of Desire at International with Monument, March 1986, in the Sarah Charlesworth Estate Archives, box 48.2. 43. Charlesworth, “Hitler’s Nightmare,” n.p. 44. “Hitler’s nightmare,” she concludes, “is a truly democratic world that accepts Jews, Blacks, PortoRicans [sic], Women, Homo sexuals [sic], Buddists [sic], Christians, Atheists and Whirling Deverishes [sic] as Humans. . . . This is the only alternative to the chauvinism which the atomic bomb and its apocalyptic threat poses. It is towards this alternative that I work.” See Charlesworth, n.p. 45. See, for example, Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1973); and Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982). 46. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 255. 47. Crimp, “Pictures,” 1979, 87. 48. See, for example, Henry Tanner, “Kidnappers Issue Photo of Moro Purportedly Showing He Is Alive,” New York Times, April 21, 1978, A1. 49. In the mid-1970s, Charlesworth recalls taking a “structuralism course” at the New School with a “great teacher”—possibly Marshall Blonsky, who taught classes like “Semiotics: The Manipulation of the Signs and Symbols of Mass Culture” and “Advanced Semiotics: The Rhetoric of Mass Culture and the Suppression of Personal Consciousness” in 1974 and 1975. In general, Charlesworth recalls, she was “studying a lot of semiotics then, reading all—you know, Barthes and—there was Sontag, which wasn’t semiotics, but after all the New School—Derrida and Foucault and Umberto Eco.” See Charlesworth, “Oral History Interview,” n.p. 50. For analysis along these lines, see Linker, “Artifacts of Artifice,” 21; and Rochelle Steiner, “Tools and Magic Wands,” in Steiner, Sarah Charlesworth, 13. 51. Charlesworth, “Oral History Interview,” n.p. 52. Sarah Charlesworth, “unwriting: Notes on Modern History,” in Modern History (Second Reading) (Edinburgh: New 57 Gallery, 1979), 4. 53. Charlesworth’s notebooks from the late 1970s include various references to Barthes, including commentary on his essay “The Photographic Message.” A syllabus that Charlesworth produced in the early 1980s for her own course “Semiotics of Photography” included his Mythologies. See the Sarah Charlesworth Estate Archives, boxes 16 and 3, respectively. 54. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Noonday, 1991), 113. 55. Charlesworth, “unwriting,” 28. 56. Barthes, Mythologies, 109, 128, 142. 57. Barthes, 124. 58. Charlesworth, “unwriting,” 1. 59. Sarah Charlesworth, working notes, in the Sarah Charlesworth Estate Archives, box 1. 60. Fourteen Days marked Charlesworth’s inaugural exhibition of work presented under her own name; that is, without her then-partner Joseph Kosuth as coauthor. 198

Notes to Pages 41–44

61. Sarah Charlesworth to Gilbert Goos, September 17, 1977, the Sarah Charlesworth Estate Archives, box 7. 62. Six of the newspapers she included were in Flemish, six were in French, one was in German, and one was in English. In a letter to the Italian gallery director Maurizio Nannucci, the artist explained that together they represented a “broad political spectrum.” Charlesworth to Maurizio Nannucci, the Sarah Charlesworth Estate Archives, box 4.1. Schleyer’s kidnapping also appears in Herald Tribune, September 1977. 63. An installation photograph of this “map” is included in the Sarah Charlesworth Estate Archives, box 41. Michel Foucault distinguished historical approaches oriented toward continuity from those oriented toward discontinuity and rupture in The Archaeology of Knowledge, a text that Charlesworth may well have had in mind when organizing her work. See Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 3–17. 64. Sarah Charlesworth, Fourteen Days (Brussels: MTL, 1977), paragraph 8. 65. Charlesworth, paragraph 10. 66. Charlesworth, paragraph 8. 67. “And just then, when I was thinking about what I might like to make to attempt to show in Rome, the prime minister of Italy, Aldo Moro, was kidnapped by the Red Brigades. And I went, ‘woah, there might be something here.’” See Charlesworth, “Oral History Interview,” n.p. (Moro was in fact the former prime minister. At the time of his kidnapping, he was only a member of parliament). 68. Working notes, the Sarah Charlesworth Estate Archives, box 9. Charlesworth, along with Kosuth and several others, is credited under a section labeled “visuals” in the front matter of Semiotext(e) 3, no. 3 (1980). Exactly what she contributed is not clear. For overviews of Autonomia, see Michael Hardt, “Introduction: Laboratory Italy,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1–10; Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi, eds., Autonomia: Post-political Politics (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2007); and Jonathan Mullins, “What Remains of the Italian Left of the 1970s?,” World Picture 8 (Summer 2013): 1–13. 69. Charlesworth’s first exhibition of Modern History was in Florence at Zona, a noncommercial gallery founded by the conceptual artist Maurizio Nannucci. It was not uncommon for such artist-run galleries in Italy to have more or less explicit affiliations with the extraparliamentary left. Aera Gallery, for example, associated itself with the group Lotta Continua. My thanks to Ara Merjian for informing me about this. 70. For an overview of the media’s response to the events, see Robin WagnerPacifici, The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 71. Working notes, Sarah Charlesworth Estate Archives, box 5. 72. “And then I also did a piece, April 20, 1978, which is when they said, you know, they’d assassinated him and thrown his body in the lake. And the two pieces are quite funny together.” See Charlesworth, “Oral History Interview,” n.p. 73. A number of scholars and commentators, beginning with Leonardo Sciascia, Italo Calvino, and Jean Baudrillard, remarked on how the Moro affair seemed a ghastly realization of structuralist literary theory’s key tenets regarding the indeterminacy of meaning. For overviews of this discourse, see Jennifer Burns, “A Leaden Silence? Writers’ Responses to the Anni di Piombo,” in Speaking Notes to Pages 44–48

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Out and Silencing: Culture, Society and Politics in Italy in the 1970s, ed. Anna Cento Bull and Adalgisa Giorgio (London: Legenda, 2006), 81–94; and Giuseppina Mecchia, “Moro’s Body between Enlightenment and Postmodernism: Terror, Murder, and Meaning in Jean Baudrillard and Leonardo Sciascia,” in Remembering Aldo Moro: The Cultural Legacy of the 1978 Kidnapping and Murder, ed. Ruth Glynn and Giancarlo Lombardi (London: Legenda, 2012), 108–21. For an account of how Modern History was informed by this discursive context, see Beth Saunders, “Modern History in and out of Context: Sarah Charlesworth’s April 21, 1978,” in Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy, ed. Douglas Eklund and Ian Alteveer, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018), 96–105. 74. Charlesworth, “Oral History Interview,” n.p. 75. See Alberto Franceschini, Mara, Renato e io: Storia dei fondatori delle BR (Milan: Mondadori, 1988), 32. 76. For more on this revisionary process, see Philip Cooke, Luglio 1960: Tambroni e la repressione fallita (Milan: Teti, 2000); and Philip Cooke, “‘A Riconquistare la Rossa Primavera’: The Neo-Resistance of the 1970s,” in Bull and Giorgio, Speaking Out and Silencing, 172–84. 77. For more on the “strategy of tension,” see Anna Cento Bull, Italian Neofascism: The Strategy of Tension and the Politics of Nonreconciliation (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007). 78. Charlesworth tore out and retained the page containing the image she uses in Stills. The caption below explains, “it is believed that the fire was provoked by a terrorist attack by the ETA [Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, the Basque separatist group].” See the Sarah Charlesworth Estate Archives, ephemera folder. 79. Charlesworth’s archive contains, for example, a 1976 newspaper clipping about the rise of Basque regionalism in post-Franco Spain. See “Strikes and Demonstrations Ebb in Spain,” in the Sarah Charlesworth Estate Archives, box 2. It is also worth noting that Charlesworth had audited a course on anarchism taught by Sam Dolgoff, an anarchist and scholar of the Spanish Civil War. Her notes for the class are held in the Sarah Charlesworth Estate Archives, box 8, and she also recalls the experience in Charlesworth, “Oral History Interview,” n.p. 80. Elizabeth Frank, “Sarah Charlesworth at Tony Shafrazi,” Art in America 68, no. 4 (April 1980): 131. 81. These details were registered by some initial reviewers. “Here a woman spreads her open arms and legs, balancing herself horizontally like Superman, as she plunges toward what in the next micro-second must be almost instantaneous death. The time is the 1940s, we are fighting Hitler, and coffee costs a dime.” See Frank, 131. 82. Witkovsky, “Stills,” 19. For more on the images of “jumpers” captured on September 11, and in particular Richard Drew’s iconic “Falling Man” photograph, which was likened in the press to the motif of the Unknown Soldier, see Sharon Sliwinski, “Icarus Returned: The Falling Man and the Survival of Antiquity,” in Contemporary Art and Classical Myth, ed. Isabelle Loring Wallace and Jennie Hirsh (New York: Routledge, 2016), 199–215; and Julian Stallabrass, “Memory and Icons: Photography in the War on Terror,” New Left Review 105 (May–June 2017): 29–50. 83. “The series is not prescient,” Witkovsky writes, but it is “an invitation both to consider our historical and societal ‘place’ in the world and to assess the structures of meaning within which we operate.” See Witkovsky, 19. 84. Charlesworth, “Dialogue: Sarah Charlesworth with Betsy Sussler,” 24. 200

Notes to Pages 49–54

Chapter 2 1. The exact method through which Goldstein’s animators achieved the jewel effect is not documented. However, in 1979 Douglas Crimp explained that it was the result of “shooting the animation through a special effects lens that dispersed the image into jewellike facets.” See Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 79. 2. See “Reflections by Robert Longo” in Richard Hertz, ed., Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia (Ojai, CA: Minneola, 2003), 172. 3. Kelley explained that he appreciated The Jump because “growing up in the sixties, anybody of my generation would have a huge investment in a film’s special effects. It would be almost like the height of beauty and nobody in the artworld had worked with that. I was glad that we could finally start to look at the culture that we grew up in, that means something to us, and that someone was going to try to do something with that. That was refreshing.” Kelley quoted in Meg Cranston, “Haunted by the Ghost: Jack Goldstein, Now and Then,” in Hertz, Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia, 212. 4. Jack Goldstein, quoted in “Michael Newman Talks to Jack Goldstein,” ZG 5 (1981): n.p. 5. See the press release for The Jump at Foundation for Art Resources, March 16–24, 1979, “Press Releases and Program Notes, 1979–1981,” Dorit Cypus Foundation for Art Resources Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 6. The Jump was Goldstein’s last film until Underwater Sea Fantasy, begun in 1983 and not completed until 2003. Most of Goldstein’s records date from 1976–77, but he did produce a few additional works of this type in 1979 and 1984. Goldstein produced twelve performances between 1971 and 1978, followed by two more in 1979, and one in 1984. 7. In these works, Goldstein deployed his expertise in car detailing to achieve perfectly even surfaces free of gestural incident. He also trained assistants to carry out the task. See Jack Goldstein, “Helene Winer: Artists Space and Metro Pictures,” in Hertz, Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia, 93. 8. Richard Flood, “Jack Goldstein,” Artforum 19, no. 7 (March 1981): 80. 9. Jon Hutton, “Jack Goldstein,” Arts Magazine 56, no. 5 (1982): 17. 10. Craig Owens offered an account that reiterated but also complicated accusations that Goldstein’s maneuver was purely market driven. His paintings’ anti-expressive brushwork, Owens observed, created a cinematic effect reminiscent of his films. See Owens, “Back to the Studio,” Art in America 70, no. 1 ( January 1982): 105. 11. Douglas Eklund, The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009), 119–20. 12. The effect is one that the editors at Life magazine overtly acknowledged in their initial presentation of the image: “the crash of the anti-aircraft guns and their deeper echo were described by Miss Bourke-White as a classical chord in counterpoint to the jazz of the whining planes and the whistling bombs,” they captioned. See “Moscow Fights Off the Nazi Bombers and Prepares for a Long War,” Life 11, no. 9 (September 1, 1941): 16. 13. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version (1935–36), trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, Notes to Pages 57–63

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in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 42. 14. Jack Goldstein, “Jack Goldstein,” in Documenta 7, vol. 2, ed. Saskia Bos (D + V Paul Dierichs GmbH, 1982), 134. Goldstein later published the same group of aphorisms in the first issue of Tricia Collins and Richard Milazzo’s Effects magazine. See Jack Goldstein, “Mind over Matter,” Effects: Magazine for New Art Theory 1 (1983): 9. 15. Crimp knew about the film only what Goldstein had told him in conversation. Email exchange with the author, May 2019. 16. This particular phrase comes from Crimp’s subsequent revision of the essay. See “Pictures,” 1979, 79. 17. Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” in Pictures, ed. Douglas Crimp and Helene Winer (New York: Artists Space, 1977), 3. 18. Documentation of subsequent performances indicates that Goldstein altered the color of the lighting from green to red. In a cable television interview from 1977 for “Paul Tschinkel’s Inner-Tube,” Goldstein describes the music as “suspenseful music, like you’d hear in a film with Errol Flynn or something.” The interview is included in Jack Goldstein: Pictures and Sounds, DVD, produced by Paul Tschinkel, 2014. 19. See Jack Goldstein: Feuer/Körper/Licht, ed. Jack Goldstein and Karl Manfred Fischer (Erlangen: Städtische Galerie Erlangen, 1985), n.p. 20. Crimp, “Pictures,” 1977, 6. 21. Crimp, “Pictures,” 1979, 87. Crimp prefaces the essay by saying, “I think it is safe to say that what I am outlining is a predominant sensibility among the current generation of younger artists, or at least of that group of artists who remain committed to radical innovation.” He more recently reflected on his thinking in Crimp, Before Pictures (Brooklyn: Dancing Foxes, 2016), 254–63. 22. Crimp, “Pictures,” 1979, 79, 87. 23. Vera Dika, Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 27. 24. Crimp, “Pictures,” 1979, 79. The actual nature of Goldstein’s source material remains undocumented. Crimp himself acknowledges that Super 8 film seems an improbable medium for “stock footage.” Email exchange with the author, May 4, 2019. 25. Dika, Recycled Culture, 28. 26. The exact sources of Olympia’s funding have been disputed. The current consensus is that the film was a joint venture by the Nazi regime and the Olympic Commission. See Thomas Elsaesser, “Leni Riefenstahl: The Body Beautiful, Art Cinema and Fascist Aesthetics,” in Women and Film: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. Pam Cook and Philip Dodd (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 192. The International Olympic Committee withheld permission to illustrate this book with images from the film. 27. See Tom Holert, “Managing Fascination: Jack Goldstein, Hollywood and the Desire for Control,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 4 (2001): 46. In a footnote, Holert credits the curator Ann Goldstein and her husband, Christopher Williams, who graduated from CalArts in 1981 and likely encountered Goldstein’s work while a student there, for the Riefenstahl “suggestion.” 28. Eklund, Pictures Generation, 1974–1984, 121–24. Eklund does not cite Dika or

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Notes to Pages 63–66

any other scholarship when claiming the Riefenstahl appropriation, raising the possibility that he independently arrived at the same belief. 29. See Philipp Kaiser, “Why Not Use It? Painting and Its Burden,” in Philipp Kaiser, ed., Jack Goldstein × 10,000 (Munich: DelMonico Books, 2012), 130–31. Marie B. Shurkus repeats Kaiser’s assertion that The Jump was derived from Olympia in her review of his exhibition. See “Jack Goldstein: Operational Pictures,” X-Tra 15, no. 3 (Spring 2013): n.p. 30. The letter to Morgan Thomas is quoted in Sande Cohen, “Not History: Remarks on the Foundation for Art Resources, 1977–1998,” in David E. James, ed., The Sons and Daughters of Los: Culture and Community in L.A. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 118–20. In an interview from a few years prior, Goldstein explained to the filmmaker Morgan Fisher that “that’s what the industry gives me: resources, effects, control. I can do or make anything I want.” See Jack Goldstein, quoted in Morgan Fisher, “Talking with Jack Goldstein,” Journal / The Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art 14 (April–May 1977): 44–45. 31. I am grateful to Alexander Dumbadze for sharing these biographical facts with me. 32. Goldstein, 1979, quoted in Cohen, “Not History,” 120. 33. To this he added, in bitter jest, “I would have made a good Nazi!” See “Jack Goldstein, Helene Winer: Artists Space and Metro Pictures,” in Hertz, Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia, 97. 34. See Klaus Honnef, “Jack Goldstein,” in Klaus Honnef and Barbara Kückels, eds., Back to the USA: Amerikanische Kunst der Siebziger und Achtziger (Köln: Rheinland-Verlag, 1983), 88–89; translation by the author. 35. The Italian curator Fulvio Salvadori read in Goldstein’s paintings a cryptotheological vision of the rapture, figured through allusions to Nazi aggression. See The Mystic Lamb, ed. Jack Goldstein and Fulvio Salvadori (Geneva: Centre d’Art Contemporain, 1982). 36. Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” in Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 73–108. See the introduction for a discussion of this text. 37. The New York Times reported on Olympia’s television airings accompanying the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City—this was the first time it was shown on US television—and the ill-fated 1972 Olympics in Munich, which Riefenstahl photographed for the Sunday Times of London. It seems likely that the pattern would have repeated in 1976, when Riefenstahl was feted at the Montreal games as a guest of honor. See “N.E.T. to Televise ’36 ‘Olympiad’ Film,” New York Times, September 27, 1967, 95; and John J. O’Connor, “TV: One-Upmanship by Channel 13 on the Olympics,” New York Times, August 26, 1972, 53. In February 1977, the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton screened the diving sequence from Olympia as part of a thematically organized film program. Beginning in September 1977, New York’s Channel 13 aired a fourteen-part series called Films of Persuasion that included Triumph of the Will. On March 24, 1978, New York City’s Goethe House screened Olympia. The film appeared again on April 18 of that year at Carnegie Hall Cinema. See, respectively, David L. Shirley, “Museum Offers Offbeat Film Fete,” New York Times, February 6, 1977, NJ8; Guy Flatley, “At the Movies,” New York Times, September 2, 1977, 50; Howard Thompson, “Going Out Guide,” New York Times, March 23, 1978, C17; and Howard Thompson, “Going Out Guide,” New York Times, April 18, 1978, 44.

Notes to Pages 66–67

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38. “Everything is very seamless. [Goldstein] sees this film by Leni Riefenstahl, which everyone saw in those years, and said, ‘oh, that’s an amazing image.’ And then it carries all of this baggage with it; other information that we all remember and know. You know exactly what those films were about, and so if that image is just flashed at you, you’d know exactly where it was from. Maybe you don’t any longer, but at that time everyone was quite interested in those kind of Nazi images.” Helene Winer, interview with the author at the Metro Pictures gallery, May 2018. 39. Since rotoscopy involves manual tracing, there is always the possibility that Goldstein’s illustrators departed from their source footage in some regard, thus making it impossible to definitively identify the work’s source on the basis of formal comparison alone. However, the differences I have observed are substantial enough that the likelihood of Goldstein’s illustrators using and then altering Olympia seems exceedingly low. Many thanks to Colin Williamson for his assistance in comparing the two films. 40. In my conversations with Crimp and Longo, the aforementioned accounts of The Jump’s provenance elicited telling mixtures of surprise and skepticism—not that Goldstein would have drawn inspiration from such a source as Olympia, but that he would have actually utilized such loaded footage without ever telling them he had done so. Email exchanges with the author, May 4, 2019, and July 22, 2019. 41. Dika has recently acknowledged that “some or all of the footage in The Jump could come from ordinary athletic sources, say from a college diving competition or from a more contemporary Olympic event.” See Vera Dika, The Pictures Generation at Hallwalls: Traces of the Body, Gender, and History (New York: Routledge, 2023), 95. 42. Dika, 94. 43. Crimp, “Pictures,” 1979, 87. See also, for example, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art,” Artforum 21, no. 1 (September 1982): 43–56. 44. Douglas Crimp, “About Pictures,” Flash Art 88–89 (March–April 1979): 35. 45. Valentin Tatransky, “Collage and the Problem of Representation: Sherrie Levine’s New Work,” Real Life 1 (March 1979): 9. 46. Thomas Lawson, “The Uses of Representation: Making Some Distinctions,” Flash Art 88–89 (March–April 1979): 38. 47. This phrase was first offered by the filmmaker Morgan Fisher in his interview with Goldstein. See Fisher, “Talking with Jack Goldstein,” 42. 48. Salle interspersed his essay with aphoristic fragments chosen from Goldstein’s notebooks. The one that pertains to Salle’s analysis of the work in terms of “spontaneity” is titled “A Brief Interview” and reads “Q: Who are the role models for the persona projected by the work? A: All of us. Q: If you could live in any time, what would it be? A: The future, the far future so I wouldn’t have to worry about spontaneity.” See David Salle, “Jack Goldstein: Distance Equals Control,” in Jack Goldstein, ed. John Maggiotto (Buffalo, NY: Hallwalls, 1978), 5–6. In 1983, Rosetta Brooks paraphrased the sentiment in more loaded terms, writing that “Goldstein lives dangerously, i.e. he would like to live in the future where choice doesn’t exist.” See Rosetta Brooks, “Life in Space: An Examination of the Work of New York Artist Jack Goldstein,” ZG 5 (1981): n.p. 49. See for example Jean-Paul Sartre, “Masses, Spontaneity, Party,” Socialist Register 7 (March 1970): 233–49. 50. Salle, “Jack Goldstein: Distance Equals Control,” 6–7. 204

Notes to Pages 67–71

51. “The new formalist look of imagistic work seems more connected to the esthetics of television than to the logic of an art historical strategy.” Salle, 5–6. 52. Salle, 2. Goldstein reacted negatively to what he perceived as Salle’s damaging charge of “complicity” with such institutions. See, for example, his remarks in Meg Cranston, “Over Here: Interview with Jack Goldstein,” in Kaiser, Jack Goldstein × 10,000, 208. 53. Salle, “Jack Goldstein: Distance Equals Control,” 2. 54. Salle, 9. 55. These artists’ joint interest in Sirk is discussed by Howard Singerman in Art History, after Sherrie Levine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 23–46. See also Eklund, Pictures Generation, 1974–1984, 107–11; and Molly Nesbit, “Without Walls,” in Nesbit, Midnight: The Tempest (Los Angeles: Inventory, 2009), 113–16. 56. David Salle, quoted in David Salle and Peter Schjeldahl, eds., David Salle (New York: Vintage Books, 1987), 21. 57. Salle and Schjeldahl, 22. 58. See Singerman, Art History, after Sherrie Levine, 27–28. 59. See Paul Willemen, “The Sirkian System,” in Willemen, Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 91. Singerman notes Levine’s familiarity with Willemen’s writings on Sirk in Art History, after Sherrie Levine, 28. 60. See for example Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1987), 43–69; and Rainer Fassbinder, “Fassbinder on Sirk,” Film Comment 11, no. 6 (November–December 1975): 22–24. 61. Dan Graham, “The End of Liberalism,” ZG 4 (1981): n.p. 62. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 94–136. 63. Graham developed his thinking on these subjects in a piecemeal fashion, a fact that perhaps contributes to the essay’s somewhat fragmentary character. He first broached the topic in “Punk: Political Pop,” published in the Journal / Southern California Art Magazine 22 (March–April 1979): 27–33. Subsequently, he adapted large sections of “The End of Liberalism” into an article called “Theater, Cinema, Power,” in Parachute, June, July, August 1983, 11–19. 64. Graham, “End of Liberalism,” n.p. 65. See ZG 3 (1981) and ZG 2 (1980), respectively. (The numbering of ZG proceeded somewhat irregularly: the first two issues, from 1980, are numbered 1 and 2, and the next three issues, from 1981, are numbered 1, 2, and 3; following that, there was a shift, with the next issue numbered 7; and from there the issue numbers proceed sequentially to 15. In citations here I have adopted the publication’s final system of numbering the issues sequentially; thus I call the third issue ZG 3 and the fifth issue ZG 5, rather than calling them ZG vol. 2, nos. 1 and 3.) 66. See Marek Kohn, “The Best Uniforms,” in ZG 4 (1981): n.p. 67. Jean Fisher, “The Will to Act,” ZG 4 (1981): n.p. The installment of Inflammatory Essays printed in ZG 3 (1981) begins, “rejoice! our times are intoler­ able. . . . only dire circumstance can precipitate the overthrow of oppres­ sors”; it concludes, “the apocalypse will blossom.” Notes to Pages 72–74

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68. Martin Pouret, “Art and Purity,” ZG 4 (1981): n.p. 69. Rosetta Brooks, “Future Dread,” ZG 4 (1981): n.p. 70. Also included is the classically styled cover of “Muscle Bound,” a 1981 single by the London-based postpunk group Spandau Ballet. Their band name, like Joy Division’s, was a Nazi reference: Spandau prison was the Berlin detention center in which the seven highest-ranking war criminals convicted at Nuremburg served their sentences between 1947 and 1987. 71. Brooks cites Graham’s role in prompting the issue in “Reflections by Rosetta Brooks,” in Hertz, Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia, 122. Also discussed in the issue are the No Wave composers Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham. Thomas Lawson presents a survey of recent New York movements (“We Must Embrace Our Joys and Sorrows”) including the Pictures group, No Wave music, and the No Wave cinema of Amos Poe, Beth and Scott B, and Eric Mitchell, to which he ascribes a “rhetoric of urban terrorism as a response to fascistic systems of political control.” The issue additionally includes “War Picture,” an excerpt from Richard Prince’s Menthol Pictures (1980) in which the artist describes a scene from the 1941 British war drama, 49th Parallel, that he had discussed with “a writer acquaintance, who likes to occasionally brief a small group of artists on the mechanics of fascism.” See ZG 5 (1981): all articles unpaginated. 72. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 132. 73. Brooks, “Life in Space,” n.p. 74. Barnett Newman, “Interview with Emile de Antonio” (1970), in John P. O’Neil, ed., Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 307–8. 75. Brooks, “Life in Space,” n.p. 76. Goldstein, “Jack Goldstein,” 134. Goldstein later published the same group of aphorisms in the first issue of Tricia Collins and Richard Milazzo’s Effects magazine. See Goldstein, “Mind over Matter,” 9. 77. James Welling, “Jack Goldstein’s Studio,” in Kaiser, Jack Goldstein × 10,000, 101. 78. “That one performance defines and exemplifies my body of work up until today,” Goldstein later affirmed. See “Jack Goldstein,” Journal of Contemporary Art 1 (Spring 1988): 38. For more on this work and its intellectual milieu, see Thomas Crow, “The Art of the Fugitive in 1970s Los Angeles: Runaway Self-Consciousness,” in Lisa Gabrielle Mark and Paul Schimmel, eds., Under the Big Black Sun: California Art, 1974–1981 (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2011), 44–62. 79. Goldstein, “Michael Newman Talks to Jack Goldstein,” n.p. 80. Welling, “Jack Goldstein’s Studio,” 98. 81. Jack Goldstein, quoted in Welling, 98. 82. On the history of tracing, writing, photography, and the like as metaphors for memory, see Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 137–54. For a poststructuralist reading of Goldstein’s oeuvre, including The Jump, in terms of tracing and the nature of memory, see Jean Fisher, “Jack Goldstein,” in Jack Goldstein: Feuer/Körper/Licht (Erlangen, Germany: Städtische Galerie Erlangen, 1985), n.p. 83. Goldstein’s postminimalist sculptures from the early 1970s were likewise designed to be, or at least appear, precarious, thus prompting similar attitudes of expectancy or anticipation. For more on Goldstein’s early sculptural oeuvre, see Marie B. Shurkus, “Lessons from Post-minimalism: Understanding Theatricality 206

Notes to Pages 75–79

as Pictorial Value,” in Rebecca McGrew, ed., It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969–1973 (Pomona, CA: Pomona College Museum of Art, 2011), 73–95; and Alexander Dumbadze, “Of Passivity and Agency: Jack Goldstein,” in Kaiser, Jack Goldstein× 10,000, 12–25. 84. For the relevant passage, see volume 1, chapter 1, of Samuel Alexander, Space, Time and Deity: The Gifford Lectures at Glasgow, 1916–1918 (London: MacMillan, 1920). 85. Goldstein, quoted in Fisher, “Talking with Jack Goldstein,” 42. 86. Fisher, 44, 42. 87. For detailed descriptions of each of Goldstein’s records, see Klaus Görner, “The Records—a Closer Look,” in Susanne Gaensheimer, ed., Jack Goldstein (Frankfurt am Main: Museum für Moderne Kunst, 2009), 109–29. James Welling recalls that The Unknown Dimension played alongside The Jump at Goldstein’s 1979 exhibition at the Kitchen. See “Reflections by James Welling,” in Hertz, Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia, 111. 88. Jack Goldstein, quoted in Chris Dercon, “An Interview with Jack Goldstein, 1985,” in Gaensheimer, Jack Goldstein, 167. Goldstein once suggested that “the physicality of the record itself can be analogous to our own bodies, with the sounds that are produced analogous to one’s own ‘mind’” and the grooves “analogous to memory.” See Jack Goldstein, “Notes on the Phonograph Records,” in Artists Space Archive, series 1, box 6, folder 1, “Bands, 5/2–5/6 1978,” Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University. 89. Goldstein, quoted in Fisher, “Talking with Jack Goldstein,” 45. 90. Crimp, “About Pictures,” 35. 91. John Miller, “A Trailer for the Future,” in Jack Goldstein, Daniel Buchholz, and Christopher Müller, eds., Jack Goldstein: Films, Records, Performances and Aphorisms 1971–1984 (Köln: Galerie Daniel Buchholz, 2003), 10. James Welling confirms that Goldstein found the circus “fascinating,” and that the two of them attended a show around 1977. See Welling, “Jack Goldstein’s Studio,” 92. 92. Miller, “Trailer for the Future,” 11. 93. Goldstein, “Jack Goldstein,” 134.

Chapter 3 1. See Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” in Pictures, ed. Douglas Crimp and Helene Winer (New York: Artists Space, 1977), 14. 2. Crimp again supplied the missing information. See Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 84. 3. See Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” in Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 73–108; and Saul Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, trans. Thomas Weyr (New York: Harper and Row, 1984). Brauntuch cites Sontag’s essay, initially published in 1975, as a salient point of reference for him and his peers in the years around 1980. Conversation with the author, January 2020. For a period essay connecting Brauntuch’s work to Romanticism and its fraught political connotations, see Rosetta Brooks, “Troy Brauntuch: Life after Dark,” Parkett 11 (1986): 6–15. 4. Press release for Troy Brauntuch: An Exhibition, March 31–April 21, 1979, at the Kitchen Center for Video and Music. See Kitchen Videos and Records, box 14, folder 9, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Notes to Pages 80–84

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5. Troy Brauntuch, quoted in Robert Becker, “Troy Brauntuch,” Interview, February 1983, 73. 6. Asked where he would ideally like to see his works hung, Brauntuch responded, “by a beautiful table or at the top of a stairway or in a bedroom at night when the lights are out or in the morning—private. The nature of the work is private.” See “Troy Brauntuch,” Interview, February 1983, 73. 7. Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, ed. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 55. 8. Crimp, “Pictures,” 1979, 85. 9. Far from emphasizing the specificity of Brauntuch’s Nazi references, however, Burton pushes Crimp’s position even further. “But I wonder if Brauntuch’s [work] was, precisely, a failed attempt to recapture the horror of Nazism or, if in a larger sense, it was more a failed attempt to recapture—or simply to get close to— anything at all,” she writes. See Johanna Burton, “Familiars: On the Work of Troy Brauntuch,” in Lionel Bovier, ed., Troy Brauntuch (Zürich: JRP Ringier Kunstverlag AG, 2010), 99–100. 10. Douglas Eklund, The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009), 103. 11. Eklund, 104. For the Graham quote, see Dan Graham, “The End of Liberalism,” ZG 4 (1981): n.p. 12. Eklund, Pictures Generation, 1974–1984, 103. 13. Troy Brauntuch, conversation with the author, January 15, 2020. 14. Eklund, Pictures Generation, 1974–1984, 103. 15. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 548. 16. Barnett Newman, “The Sublime Is Now” (1948), in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory 1900–2000, 582. 17. Brauntuch told me that the work was inspired by David Bowie’s 1975 hit “Fame,” and the performer’s “somewhat fascist” theatricality more generally. Conversation with the author, January 2020. 18. Gordon McConnell, “Every Picture Tells a Story, Don’t It?,” Colorado Daily, September 29, 1978, 20. McConnell was not the only one to make this comparison. Carrie Rickey called Brauntuch “the Joseph Cornell of Naïve Nouveau,” the author’s dismissive term for Pictures art and other forms of postconceptual representation. See Carrie Rickey, “Naïve Nouveau and Its Malcontents,” Flash Art 98–99 (Summer 1980): 38. 19. Brauntuch explained to me, for example, that his Untitled (Sculpture Drawings) were about “displacing the original image and putting it into more of a Cornell-like space.” Conversation with the author, January 2020. 20. Brauntuch states that “conversations with Matt [Mullican] had a lot to do with how my work developed . . . although his work was much more conceptual.” See “Troy Brauntuch with Allie Biswas,” Brooklyn Rail, December 6, 2016, https:// brooklynrail.org/2016/12/art/troy-brauntuch-with-allie-biswas. 21. See Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs by Albert Speer, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 132. Brauntuch also associated the letter “M” with Fritz Lang’s 1931 thriller by that title, about the pur208

Notes to Pages 84–93

suit of a serial child murderer through Berlin. Brauntuch noted the Lang reference to me in conversation, January 2020. 22. This image fragment is derived from another photograph included as a plate in Speer, Inside the Third Reich. 23. See Speer, plates. 24. See Friedländer, Reflections on Nazism, 72–74. 25. The theater design comes from another plate in Speer, Inside the Third Reich. For the associated passage in the text, see Speer, 118. 26. These titles reflect the organizational system used in Lionel Bovier, ed., Troy Brauntuch (Zürich: JRP Ringier Kunstverlag AG, 2010). According to Eklund, however, they were originally conceived as a single work in five parts. See Eklund, Pictures Generation, 1974–1984, 175. 27. A final component of the exhibition, Untitled (Sleeping) (1978), consisted of a photographed and enlarged drawing of Hitler’s capped and bowed head as it appears in the reproduction from Untitled (Mercedes). Brauntuch positioned this drawing at the entrance to the gallery, thus introducing viewers to material that would only subsequently assume its grim significance. According to Eklund, Brauntuch sought to suggest that “everything we were about to see upon crossing the threshold of the exhibition was through the mind of the mysterious figure at the entrance”—a ploy he had observed in the dramaturgy of Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman. See Eklund, Pictures Generation, 1974–1984, 173–74. 28. See Leonard A. Schoolman, ed., Spiritual Resistance: Art from Concentration Camps, 1940–1945 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979). 29. Brauntuch explained to me that he rotated the image ninety degrees counterclockwise so that one of the figures would appear to be looking skyward. Conversation with the author, January 2020. 30. The work also includes a smaller, black-and-white panel that appears to depict barracks with a single streak of light flashing through the sky. It could represent a shooting star or artillery fire; either way, this pendant sounds a muffled note of hope. Brauntuch himself identified the portrait as a “Madonna-like face” and suggested that the images operated as “that sort of [religious] narrative.” Conversation with the author, January 2020. 31. See “Pictures: Press Packet, September 24–October 29, 1977,” in Artists Space Archive, series 1, box 4, folder 11, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University (my emphasis). 32. Crimp, “Pictures,” 1977, 28. 33. Crimp, “Pictures,” 1979, 87. 34. Owens, “Allegorical Impulse,” 54–55. For Benjamin’s statement, see Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso Books, 1977), 183–84. 35. Owens, “Allegorical Impulse,” 52–53. 36. Brauntuch recalls discovering the image in an anthology of photographs from Life magazine, though I have not been able to confirm this source. 37. Presented behind reflective Plexiglas, this darkness prevented some viewers from being able to make out much of the composition at all. Richard Armstrong, for instance, wrote in his review of Westkunst that “of Brauntuch, I can truthfully say little. Not only were his big photographs or drawings or drawn-upon photographs so framed as to make a blinding glare reflect every inquiring look, but their imagery was so opaque, so illegible as to discourage any further looking once past Notes to Pages 93–99

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the wall of glass.” See Richard Armstrong, “‘Heute,’ Westkunst,” Artforum 20, no. 1 (September 1981): 85. 38. For example, see Douglas Blau, “Troy Brauntuch,” Flash Art 104 (October– November 1981): 53. 39. Michael Krugman, “Troy Brauntuch at Metro Pictures,” Art in America, May 1981, 140. 40. Roberta Smith, “Separation Anxieties,” Village Voice 26, no. 12 (March 18–24, 1981): 78. 41. See Robert Longo, quoted in “Oral History Interview with Robert Longo, 2009, Jan. 30–31,” n.p., Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 42. Variously titled Laws of Mass and Speer: A 20th-Century Faust Story, the opera would have dramatized the implication of aesthetics and repression under German fascism. However, it never progressed beyond preliminary sketches. See Robert Longo, quoted in “Oral History Interview with Robert Longo,” n.p. The Kitchen’s records contain demo tapes for Speer that are dated 1981 and 1983 and attributed to Longo, Joe Hannan, and Steve Giuliano. See Speer (1981) and Speer (Demo) (1983) in Kitchen Videos and Records, annex K2003777 and K2003778, Getty Research Institute. Paul Gardner refers to the work as Laws of Mass in “Longo: Making Art for Brave Eyes,” Art News 84, no. 5 (May 1985): 65. It is referred to as Speer: A 20th-Century Faust Story by Johanna Burton, who notes Brauntuch’s employment as “artistic consultant.” She quotes the group as stating, “our work is not intended to exalt or exonerate [Speer] but rather to hold him up as an example of an artist seduced into serving power.” See Burton, “Familiars,” 108n14. 43. Brauntuch would return to Thorak’s work in series from 2016 and 2019, the latter of which I discuss in my epilogue. For the artist’s quote, see Troy Brauntuch, Talking Pictures with Troy Brauntuch and Robert Longo, December 10, 2016, video recording, courtesy of Friedrich Petzel Gallery, https://vimeo.com/196462692. 44. Troy Brauntuch, quoted in “Troy Brauntuch with Allie Biswas,” n.p. 45. Brauntuch, Talking Pictures with Troy Brauntuch and Robert Longo. 46. Lucy S. Davidowicz, “The Holocaust Landscape,” in Schoolman, Spiritual Resistance, 29. 47. Tom L. Freudenheim, “Art from Concentration Camps,” in Schoolman, Spiritual Resistance, 35–36. 48. When American modernists addressed historical cataclysms like the Holocaust, they did so obliquely. On this topic, see Mark Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 49. Crimp, “Pictures,” 1979, 87. 50. No other artist, Winer elaborated, would have dared to bring such highly charged historical material into the gallery, still considered “this neutral arena of observing things.” Conversation with the author at Metro Pictures, May 2018. 51. “In particular, Helene Winer was incredibly helpful in steering me to artists she found exciting,” Longo recalls. “People like Troy were on the top of the list. He was going to be the next Jasper Johns, and Matt [Mullican] was going to be the next Joseph Beuys.” See “Robert Longo,” in Claudia Gould and Valerie Smith, eds., 5000 Artists Return to Artists Space: 25 Years (New York: Artists Space, 1998), 81. Longo even claims that Winer and her cofounder, Janelle Reiring, decided they would not open Metro Pictures at all unless Brauntuch agreed to join the gallery, so import-

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ant an asset did they consider him to be. See “Oral History Interview with Robert Longo,” n.p. 52. Brauntuch left Metro Pictures for Mary Boone before 1982 and stayed until 1988, but by the late 1980s his sales had declined. His next gallery, Kent Fine Art, represented him until the market crash of 1991. For many years Brauntuch exhibited only at Mai 36 Galerie in Zürich, Switzerland. He is now represented by Petzel. Brauntuch summarized the trajectory of his career in “Reflections by Troy Brauntuch,” in Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia, ed. Richard Hertz (Ojai, CA: Minneola, 2003), 132–41. 53. See Scott Rothkopf, “Hit or Myth,” Artforum 40, no. 2 (October 2001): 133. 54. Roberta Smith, “Separation Anxieties,” Village Voice 26, no. 12 (March 18–24, 1981): 78. 55. Jeanne Silverthorne, “Troy Brauntuch at Mary Boone,” Artforum 21, no. 1 (September 1982): 76. 56. Merope Lolis, “Twin Desires: The Art of Troy Brauntuch, David Salle, and Jack Goldstein,” ZG 8 (1983): n.p. 57. The exhibition also included Ericka Beckman, Ross Bleckner, Barbara Bloom, James Casebere, Erich Fischl, Gary Hall, Mike Kelley, Donald Mewman, Pierre Picot, and Tim Zuck. 58. As mentioned in the introduction, John Baldessari began offering a course called “Post Studio Art” in 1972. See the course catalogue for term 2, 1972, in California Institute of Arts Publications Collection series 1, Institute Publications, 1964–2014, box 18, folder 1, CalArts Special Collections and Institute Archives, Santa Clarita, CA. 59. Helene Winer, Exhibition: An Exhibition of Current Works by Artists Who Are Alumni of the School of Art and Design of California Institute of the Arts (Valencia: California Institute of the Arts, 1981), 11. 60. Craig Owens, “Back to the Studio,” Art in America 70, no. 1 ( January 1982): 106. 61. Owens, 101–2. 62. Carey Lovelace, “CalArts: California Institute of the Arts and the Rematerialization of the Art Object,” High Performance 7, no. 1 (1984): 36. 63. For a 1986 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Mullican installed a series of eight 20 × 20 foot banners featuring abstract, blackand-white pictograms set against red backgrounds. During the exhibition, an unknown vandal slashed them—possibly, Mullican has suggested, because of their political appearance. “These flags were red, black, and white, twenty by twenty feet each, with very fascist overtones, or seemingly so. So I had no problem with them being slashed.” See Matt Mullican, quoted in “Matt Mullican in Conversation with Michael Tarantino,” in Matt Mullican: Subject Element Sign Frame World, ed. Nikki Columbus (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2013), 93. 64. Lovelace, “CalArts,” 37. 65. This department assumed various names over the 1970s, including Critical Studies, Humanities, and simply Complementary Education. 66. “Oppression in America” was taught by Judy Adler in spring of 1971. “Liberation and Resistance” was taught by Jack Seeley in the spring of 1971, fall of 1971, and spring of 1972. Jeremy Schapiro taught a course devoted to the work of Frankfurt school theorists including Adorno, Benjamin, Habermas, Marcuse, and others in the spring of 1972 and fall of 1973. See the corresponding California Institute of

Notes to Pages 104–107

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the Arts course catalogues, in California Institute of Arts Publications Collection series 1, Institute Publications, 1964–2014, box 17, folder 10; box 17, folder 11; box 18, folder 1; box 18, folder 2; box 6, folder 12; and box 18, folder 5, CalArts Special Collections and Institute Archives. 67. Metzger taught “Dream and Nightmare” in the spring and fall of 1972. Shapiro taught “The Social, Political, and Intellectual Background of Modernism” in the fall of 1973 and the spring of 1974. See the corresponding California Institute of the Arts course catalogues, in California Institute of Arts Publications Collection series 1, Institute Publications, 1964–2014, box 18, folder 2; box 6, folder 12; box 18, folder 5; and box 6, folder 13, CalArts Special Collections and Institute Archives. 68. Conversation with the author, January 2020. 69. See the corresponding California Institute of the Arts course catalogues, in California Institute of Arts Publications Collection series 1, Institute Publications, 1964–2014, box 6, folder 12; and box 6, folder 13, CalArts Special Collections and Institute Archives. 70. Enrolling in the painting rather than the poststudio department, Brauntuch worked primarily under the mentorship of John Mandel. 71. CalArts did not archive calendars past 1971, but presumably its programming continued through the early 1970s in a similar manner, given that there were no major organizational or faculty changes in these years. For the record of Weber’s lecture, see California Institute of the Arts Calendar, May 7–15, 1971, in California Institute of Arts Publications Collection series 1, Institute Publications, 1964–2014, box 10, folder 8, CalArts Special Collections and Institute Archives. 72. “Die Spinne” refers to an illicit network believed to have helped Nazi war criminals flee to South America following World War II. For records of Hurtak’s lectures, see the institute’s calendars between April 8 and May 29, 1971, in California Institute of Arts Publications Collection series 1, Institute Publications, 1964–2014, box 10, folder 8, CalArts Special Collections and Institute Archives. 73. See the institute’s calendar for November 30–December 4, 1970, and February 18–28, 1971, in California Institute of Arts Publications Collection series 1, Institute Publications, 1964–2014, box 10, folder 8, CalArts Special Collections and Institute Archives. For Kracauer’s argument, originally published in 1946, see Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 43–128. For more on Scorpio Rising and the relationship between postwar queer culture and authoritarian symbols, see Juan A. Suárez, Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 141–80. 74. Conversation with the author, January 2020. 75. See “Fools for Christ: Inside the Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation,” Big News 1, no. 4 (March 7, 1972): 6–11; “Republicans Cheat Nazis,” Big News 2, no. 4 (November 30, 1972): 11; and “Dear Dean Corrigan,” Big News 1, no. 4 (March 7, 1972): 1; all in California Institute of Arts Publications Collection series 1, Institute Publications, 1964–2014, box 23, folder 20; and box 23, folder 3, CalArts Special Collections and Institute Archives. 76. Douglas Eklund, for instance, has claimed that Braunutch’s Hitler appropriations, begun in 1977, “show the mistrust and suspicion that Brauntuch and his circle had for the Neo-expressionism in the arts that swept in along with reac-

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tionary political and cultural movements at the dawn of the 1980s.” Neoexpressionism, however, was barely on the horizon in America at the time of the Pictures exhibition. Moreover, it is not clear whether Brauntuch felt such antipathy toward neoexpressionism, even after it did arrive. The artist himself has explained that he left Metro Pictures for Mary Boone in order to join artists like Julian Schnabel, who was one of his earliest collectors. See Eklund, “Troy Brauntuch: The Early Work in Context,” in Bovier, Troy Brauntuch, 59; and Brauntuch, “Reflections by Troy Brauntuch,” 132–41. 77. See Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).

Chapter 4 1. Longo discusses this moment in his career in “Oral History Interview with Robert Longo, 2009, Jan. 30–31,” n.p., Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; and Marta Gnyp, “Taking a Split-Second of Eternity Forever: Interview with Robert Longo,” Zoo Magazine 54 (2017): 109. 2. See Roberta Smith, “Once a Wunderkind, Now Robert ‘Long Ago’?,” New York Times, October 29, 1989, H46. 3. See “Oral History Interview with Robert Longo,” n.p. 4. Longo described his work using the term “fascism” or a variation of this phrase in, for example, Michael Brenson, “Artists Grapple with New Realities,” New York Times, May 15, 1983, H30; Maurice Berger, “The Dynamics of Power: An Interview with Robert Longo,” Arts Magazine 59, no. 5 ( January 1985): 88; and Paul Gardner, “Longo: Making Art for Brave Eyes,” Art News 84, no. 5 (May 1985): 59. 5. Robert Longo, quoted in The Heroic Figure, ed. Linda L. Cathcart, exh. cat. (Houston, TX: Contemporary Arts Museum, 1984), 65. 6. An adult version of such play acting informed what is probably Longo’s earliest body of work connected to his Men in the Cities drawings: a 1976 series of black-and-white photographs depicting Longo’s friend and fellow Buffalo-based artist Kevin Noble dressed in a dark suit, throwing his body into the air. Longo’s interest in falling or fallen bodies predated even this, however. In 1975, for instance, he created a work called Body Tracing for which he produced a chalk outline of his body splayed on a field of grass, the result of which was reminiscent of a forensic crime scene investigation. For Longo’s comments, see “Oral History Interview with Robert Longo,” n.p. On Body Tracing, see Vera Dika, The Pictures Generation at Hallwalls: Traces of the Body, Gender, and History (New York: Routledge, 2023), 71–73. 7. Longo confirmed that he had not actually seen The American Soldier at the time that he produced his sculpture, in an email exchange with the author, July 2019. 8. See Rosetta Brooks, “Robert Longo,” Artforum 21, no. 10 (Summer 1983): 84; and Howard N. Fox, “In Civil War,” in Howard N. Fox, ed., Robert Longo (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1989), 23. 9. Jeanne Siegel, “Lois Lane and Robert Longo: Interpretation of Image,” Arts Magazine 55, no. 3 (November 1980): 157. 10. See “Oral History Interview with Robert Longo,” n.p. 11. Carter Ratcliff, “Robert Longo: The City of Sheer Image,” Print Collector’s Newsletter 14, no. 3 ( July–August 1983): 97.

Notes to Pages 108–117

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12. Longo’s methods for producing his source photographs are noted in Suzanne Muchnic, “Constant Lure of Longo’s ‘Men,’” Los Angeles Times, March 31, 1986, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-03-31-ca-2245-story.html. For Longo’s source photographs, see Robert Longo, Robert Longo: Men in the Cities, Photographs 1976–1982 (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2009). 13. Longo introduced the notion that his depicted activity was “somewhere between death and dancing,” adding that it is “really quite doomed,” in 1979. See press release, “Robert Longo: Boys Slow Dance,” Kitchen Videos and Records, series 2, box 44, folder 2, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. 14. See Siegel, “Lois Lane and Robert Longo,” 157; and Richard Price, “Save the Last Dance for Me,” in Robert Longo, ed., Men in the Cities, 1979–1982 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), 87. 15. See Robert Longo, interview with Richard Price, in Longo, Men in the Cities, 1979–1982, 88–89. He has since cited music by the Sex Pistols and the Ramones as exemplary of the chord changes he had in mind. See “Oral History Interview with Robert Longo,” n.p. 16. Robert Longo, quoted in Grace Glueck, “The Very Timely Art of Robert Longo,” New York Times, March 10, 1985, H24. Elsewhere he reiterated that “the scale of the drawings has a relationship to the size of a movie” but added that “the drawings are trying to make the impact that films make. Films appear to be more influential and have a greater impact on the culture than art does.” See Robert Longo, quoted in interview with Richard Price, in Longo, Men in the Cities, 1979– 1982, 103. 17. Carter Ratcliff, for instance, described the figures as modern caryatids “unable to do their jobs” of holding up buildings. See Longo: The City of Sheer Image,” 96–97. Longo himself cites the Pergamon altar in his interview with Richard Price in Longo, Men in the Cities, 1979–1982, 97. 18. See Barry Blinderman, “Robert Longo’s ‘Men in the Cities’: Quotes and Commentary,” Arts Magazine 55, no. 7 (March 1981): 92; and Kim Levin, “Robert Longo,” Flash Art, March 1981, 40. 19. For Longo’s reference to Riefenstahl, see Gardner, “Longo: Making Art for Brave Eyes,” 63. 20. The specific venue was the Media Studies department at the nearby State University of New York at Buffalo. Email exchange with the author, July 2019. Riefenstahl’s technique is discussed in Thomas Elsaesser, “Leni Riefenstahl: The Body Beautiful, Art Cinema, and Fascist Aesthetics,” in Women and Film: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. Pam Cook and Philip Dodd (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 192–93. 21. Siegel, “Lois Lane and Robert Longo,” 157. 22. Email exchange with the author, July 2019. 23. Robert Longo, quoted in Lisa Lyons, “The Anxious Edge,” in Eight Artists: The Anxious Edge (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1982), 7. 24. Longo calls the figures “doomed white people” in his interview with Emily Prager, “Mondo Longo,” Interview Magazine 18, no. 5 (May 1988): 88. In his interview with Richard Price, he likewise noted that “Men in the Cities were white people, no ethnic groupings, just doomed souls. They’re the people who built the buildings that would eventually fall on them.” See Longo, Men in the Cities, 1979– 1982, 91. 25. See “Oral History Interview with Robert Longo,” n.p. 214

Notes to Pages 118–121

26. Gordon McConnell, “Every Picture Tells a Story, Don’t It?,” Colorado Daily, September 29, 1978, 23. 27. For a reference to Longo calling his figures “fallen angels,” see Fox, “In Civil War,” 23. 28. Longo assisted the structural filmmaker Paul Sharits, who worked along with Hollis Frampton in the University of Buffalo’s Media Studies department. For more on this chapter in Longo’s professional development, see Sarah Evans, “There’s No Place Like Hallwalls: Alternative-Space Installations in an Artists’ Community,” Oxford Art Journal 32, no. 1 (2009): 95–119; and Dika, The Pictures Generation at Hallwalls. 29. Longo cites his admiration of Judd and Borofsky in Gardner, “Longo: Making Art for Brave Eyes,” 63. He has frequently acknowledged Acconci, whom he worked for as a studio assistant at one time, as well, for instance in “Oral History Interview with Robert Longo,” n.p. 30. Robert Longo, quoted in Gardner, “Longo: Making Art for Brave Eyes,” 63. Longo references the New Wave directors mentioned here in “Oral History Interview with Robert Longo,” n.p. 31. Robert Longo, quoted in Gardner, “Longo: Making Art for Brave Eyes,” 63. 32. Longo acknowledged Stella as another model for his drawing practice in his interview with Richard Price, in Longo, Men in the Cities, 1979–1982, 97. 33. Robert Longo, quoted in Michael Shore, “Punk Rocks the Art World,” Art News 79, no. 9 (November 1980): 83, 78, emphasis in original. As Sarah Evans has detailed, Longo and Sherman’s predilections aligned them with the No Wave scene. See Sarah Evans, “Situating Cindy Sherman: Artistic Communities, Critical Agendas and Cultural Allegiances, 1975–1984” (PhD diss., University of California at Berkeley, 2004), 269–421. 34. See Rhys Chatham, “Composer’s Notebook, 1990: Toward a Musical Agenda for the 1990s,” liner notes for An Angel Moves Too Fast to See: Selected Works 1971–1989 (Table of the Elements, 2003). 35. Glenn Branca, quoted in Gary Zimmerman, “Interview with Glenn Branca,” ZG 5 (1981): n.p. 36. See “James Welling Talks to Jan Tumlir,” Artforum 41, no. 8 (April 2003): 217. For more on Welling’s work in relation to No Wave, see Alexander Bigman, “Acts of Feeling: James Welling and the New Expressionism,” Representations (forthcoming). 37. Branca, quoted in Zimmerman, “Interview with Glenn Branca,” n.p. 38. See Marc Masters, No Wave (London: Black Dog, 2007), 125. 39. See Lee Ranaldo, “On Branca, Chatham, and NYC Music Scene 1979–80” (2003), in Sonic Youth Etc.: Sensational Fix, ed. Roland Groenenboom (Düsseldorf: Kunstalle Düsseldorf, 2008), 32. 40. Cage took issue with what he saw as Branca’s domineering role over his musicians, who seemed to lack any “freedom” to interpret the piece independently of the composer’s direction. He also objected to Branca’s emphasis on climactic force, which he likened to the work of Richard Wagner. See John Cage, interview with Wim Mertens, “So That Each Person Is in Charge of Himself ” (1982), printed in the liner notes for Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses (Atavistic Records, 2007). 41. On his enthusiasm for Joy Division, see Robert Longo, interview with Richard Price, in Longo, Men in the Cities, 1979–1982, 100–101. For more on Joy Division’s Nazi references, see Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 Notes to Pages 121–125

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(New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 111–18. The band name Sonic Youth, Longo observes, could also be a tongue-in-cheek allusion to the Hitler Youth organization. Interview with the author, July 2019. The substance of these inflammatory signifiers was not always easy to ascertain, suited as they were to embittered reactionaries—the “white noise supremacists” identified by music critic Lester Bangs in his 1979 essay by that title—and hardened liberal bohemians alike. See Lester Bangs, “The White Noise Supremacists” (1979), in Greil Marcus, ed., Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 275. 42. The Glenn Branca estate withheld permission to illustrate this work, but a reproduction can be found in James Welling: The Mind on Fire (Milton Keynes, UK: MK Gallery, 2012). 43. On the genesis of Closer’s cover art, see Pat Gilbert, “The Outsider,” Mojo, April 2005, 78. 44. “What happens is you have six pictures that actually become, like, twentyfour pictures,” Longo explained, “because that transition between each picture was another picture.” Interview with the author, July 2019. 45. See Evans, “Situating Cindy Sherman,” 321. 46. Describing the music on The Ascension, David Fricke identified “a kind of cathedral resonance that changes first into a clipped locomotive rush and then dissolves into amplified shrapnel.” See David Fricke, review of The Ascension, in Melody Maker, February 6, 1982, 18. Rosetta Brooks, for her part, wrote of Chatham and Branca’s work in general that “the effect is a new kind of spatiality in music, reminiscent of the spatiality of religious choral music.” See Brooks, “The Art Machine,” ZG 5 (1981): n.p. Discussing a performance of another work, by Chatham, in which Longo played guitar, Kim Gordon noted that the opening notes sounded like “church bells.” See Gordon, “Trash, Drugs, and Male Bonding,” Real Life 3 (March 1980): 11. 47. “If I had my druthers—and this is not a joke—the cover of The Ascension would have been two guys fucking. Instead I said [to Longo], ‘Kind of make an implication of this.’” Glenn Branca, quoted in Howard Wuelfing, “Glenn Branca Interview,” Forced Exposure 16 (1990): n.p. Describing a 1980 performance of Chatham’s “The Out-of-Tune Guitar” that included Longo, Gordon wrote that “simultaneously Wharton Tiers, Robert Longo and Jules Baptiste begin—crashing into the air and moving forward like a locomotive in somebody’s wet dream.” See Kim Gordon, “Trash Drugs and Male Bonding,” 11. 48. Howard N. Fox, “Desire for Pathos: The Art of Robert Longo,” Sun and Moon 8 (Fall 1979): 72. 49. Suzanne Muchnic, “Is L.A. Ready for ‘Crash Course’ in Longo’s Art?,” Los Angeles Times, November 8, 1984, K2. 50. The lions, representing Patience and Fortitude, were created by the BeauxArts sculptor Edward Clark Potter in advance of the library’s 1911 dedication. Longo explains that he sought to compose a single shot with both Tschumi and the lion but found that he could not frame this as desired, so he superimposed two separate images instead. Interview with the author, July 2019. 51. See Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 83. Longo notes that the initial performance of the work, which was not recorded, was relatively short—around three or four minutes long. Subsequent performances staged at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in 1981, and the Kitchen, in 1982, lengthened the duration of the work to more like ten minutes. Interview with the author, July 2019. For a 216

Notes to Pages 125–129

recording of the Kitchen performance, see Kitchen Videos and Records, audiovisual material, K2003196, Getty Research Institute. 52. Longo explains that he took inspiration from Women in Love, Ken Russell’s 1969 film adaptation of the D. H. Lawrence novel by that name (1920). The combatants hail in particular from the film’s “gladiatorial” scene, in which the narrative’s male protagonists engage one another in a contest of nude, “Japanese-style wrestling” before the amber glow of a roaring hearth. See Brian Wallis, “Governing Authority: Robert Longo’s Performance Empire,” Wedge 1 (1982): 67; and Robert Longo, “Oral History Interview with Robert Longo,” n.p. 53. Email exchange with the author, July 2019. Kay Larson applied the same terminology to Longo’s work, writing that he achieved a “distancing” effect with his “sedate portrait of two turning figures.” See Kay Larson, “Old and New ImageMakers,” New York Magazine, January 1981, 56. 54. For Longo’s performance notes, see Robert Longo, “Empire: A Performance Trilogy,” Wedge 1 (Summer 1982): 67–71. Longo originally submitted these notes to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in advance of the work’s production there in April 1981. See “Empire: A Performance Trilogy,” in the Corcoran Gallery of Art Curatorial Department Records, Washington, DC, series 23, box 31, folder 18, “Robert Longo Proposal, 1981.” 55. Wendy Perron, “The Structure of Seduction,” Village Voice, May 28, 1985, 9. 56. Longo confirms that this reference was intentional in “Oral History Interview with Robert Longo,” n.p. 57. Robert Longo, “Empire: A Performance Trilogy,” 71. 58. Longo, 70. 59. Wallis, “Governing Authority,” 65. 60. See press release for “Sound Distance Parts I and II,” Kitchen Videos and Records, series 2, box 44, folder 2, Getty Research Institute. 61. The famous phrase occurs at the moment the protagonists learn that their illicit love affair has been surveilled by the state. “‘You are the dead,’ said an iron voice behind them.” See George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet Classics, 1950), 221. 62. For a recording of this performance, see Kitchen Videos and Records, audiovisual material, K2003196, Getty Research Institute. My description is based on this footage as well as a review by Sally Banes that shortly followed the performance. See Sally Banes, “The Long and the Short of It,” Village Voice, May 18, 1982, 87. 63. Longo and Bowes produced one script dated 1981, and a revised version dated 1982, which includes more detailed drawings that are credited to both Longo and the artist Mark Innerst. Around 1981, Longo produced a polished promotional packet introducing the film as a “feature-length motion picture” to be “distributed in the emerging theatrical marketplace for independent American films, as well as the traditional art-house theaters,” with a creative team including Vera Dika (producer), Mary MacArthur and Carlotta Schoolman (coproducers), Robert Longo, Ed Bowes, and Eric Bogosian (writers), Glenn Branca, Peter Gordon, Joe Hannan, and Jules Baptiste (composers), Gretchen Bender, Eric Bogosian, Grethe Holby, Bill T. Jones, and Cindy Sherman (performers), and Longo (director). See Project Folder in “Robert Longo, Empire,” Kitchen Videos and Records, series 2, box 44, folders 3 and 4, Getty Research Institute. Later in the 1980s, Longo hired a professional screenwriter, Richard Price, to rework the script. Still, it never found a funder. Longo shared this information with me during our conversation on July 2019. Notes to Pages 129–132

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64. Grace Glueck reported that Longo “began to hatch” the Empire / Steel Angel project in 1976. See Glueck, “Very Timely Art of Robert Longo,” H24. In an interview from 1986, Longo dated the project to the following year, stating that “in 1977, as Men in the Cities formalized, so did the desire to make films. I storyboarded an idea for a short movie that grew into the Empire / Steel Angel film project. It was the seed. . . . Men in the Cities was like a movie being made by an individual instead of a corporation.” Robert Longo, quoted in interview with Richard Price, in Longo, Men in the Cities, 1979–1982, 102. Earlier, however, Longo had conversely suggested that the Empire film, and by extension the Empire performance series, had followed from his work on Men in the Cities. He explained that “one of my major reasons for doing the movie, ‘Empire,’ was that the pictures that I was making [for Men in the Cities] became more and more complicated for me to shoot, photographically, and I started to need more and more people to help me, I practically needed a movie crew to start shooting the pictures. So I thought, ‘Hell, I’ll make a movie and I’ll have all the 35 mm film to make the stills.’ So with ‘Empire,’ the original version of the script was created over the last year and a half as an art work [namely, the Empire performance trilogy]. It became like a solid movie.” See Robert Longo, quoted in Robert Longo: Talking about “The Sword of the Pig” (London: Tate Gallery, 1983), 11. 65. See press release for Empire, a Film by Robert Longo (undated), in “Robert Longo, Empire,” Kitchen Videos and Records, series 2, box 44, folder 4, Getty Research Institute. 66. Robert Longo, Empire script, 1981: n.p. See “Robert Longo, Empire,” Kitchen Videos and Records, series 2, box 44, folder 3, Getty Research Institute. The Diamond character was clearly written for Eric Bogosian, whose standup-like performances had a similar tone. Longo and Bogosian were friends and toured European clubs together when Longo was in a band. Bogosian recalls how he once agitated a Berlin crowd by goose stepping as part of his routine. “I wasn’t sure if Robert and I would get out alive, but then they started cheering.” See Gardner, “Longo: Making Art for Brave Eyes,” 65. 67. The women in Empire, according to Longo’s promotional statement, “move mysteriously from one fiction to another: from the soap opera that they watch daily to the soap opera that is their daily lives. Each faces desire that never completes itself, disaster that is always threatening. As women they have forged new roles, new directions, but are still struggling with the inability to move.” See Empire Project Folder press materials in “Robert Longo, Empire,” Kitchen Videos and Records, series 2, box 44, folder 4, Getty Research Institute. 68. Robert Longo, Empire script, 1982: n.p. See “Robert Longo, Empire,” Kitchen Videos and Records, series 2, box 44, folder 4, Getty Research Institute. 69. Longo lists Branca as composer in his promotional packet for the film, and it is clear from the description that the artist had his work in mind for this initial overture. See Project Folder in “Robert Longo, Empire,” Kitchen Videos and Records, series 2, box 44, folder 4, Getty Research Institute. 70. Robert Longo, Empire script, 1982: n.p. See “Robert Longo, Empire,” Kitchen Videos and Records, series 2, box 44, folder 4, Getty Research Institute. Longo explicitly cited Eisenstein’s film as a reference for his multimedia work from 1982– 83, Culture Culture, which likewise depicts an equestrian monument that seems to be toppling over. Presumably he had this material in mind when writing Empire as well. See “Oral History Interview with Robert Longo,” n.p. 218

Notes to Pages 132–134

71. Longo broke his 1981 storyboard into four sections: “Eyes of Giants,” “Sex and Clothes,” “Desperate Cities,” and “Iron Voices,” but these titles do not reappear in the 1982 draft. 72. All quotations from Robert Longo, Empire script, 1982: n.p. See “Robert Longo, Empire,” Kitchen Videos and Records, series 2, box 44, folder 4, Getty Research Institute. 73. Speaking about the work in 1983, Longo stated, “it seemed that everything women have attained in the last ten to fifteen years was being taken away and I just wanted to make a piece that was about being of that ‘male macho mentality’ but also realizing its demise. It seemed like I was part of the machinery that was crushing certain achievements.” Longo, quoted in Robert Longo: Talking about “The Sword of the Pig,” 3. 74. Robert Hobbs, for instance, suggested both of these statesmen as possible referents. See Robert Hobbs, Robert Longo: Disillusions (Iowa City: University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1985), 6–7. 75. “This was, like, the guy, like [Yuri] Andropov, or something like that . . . the guy who’s, like, basically calling in more troops.” Robert Longo, quoted in “Oral History Interview with Robert Longo,” n.p. In the year that followed, Longo continued to evoke the specter of fascism in works like Black Palms (1983), We Want God (1983–84), Solid Vision (1983–84), and Kill Your Darlings (1983–84). For an analysis of these works, see Hobbs, Robert Longo: Disillusions. 76. John Howell, for instance, found the artist’s works “so overdetermined, so packed with meaning, that they implode, turning into non sequitur billboards of mystifying—rather than mystical—import.” See Howell, “Robert Longo, the Brooklyn Museum,” Artforum 24, no. 2 (October 1985): 120. 77. Longo suggested that the image could depict “an astronaut going so fast that he suddenly sees God.” See Gardner, “Longo: Making Art for Brave Eyes,” 64. Howard N. Fox has described Tongue to the Heart as “nonsectarian and noncreedal,” yet “as profound and heartfelt a religious work as any in this century.” See Fox, “In Civil War,” 40. 78. See Robert Hobbs, “Robert Longo: His Milieu, His Dis-illusions,” in Hobbs, Robert Longo: Disillusions, 23. 79. Longo, quoted in Berger, “Dynamics of Power,” 88. 80. Longo, quoted in Fox, “In Civil War,” 47. 81. Banes, “Long and the Short of It,” 87. Syberberg, a West German director, generated controversy with his epic 1977 film Our Hitler: A Film from Germany, released in New York in 1980. For an analysis of Longo’s oeuvre in relation to this work, see Hal Foster, “Collision: Robert Longo and Hope,” in I. Michael Danoff, ed., Robert Longo: Drawings and Reliefs (Akron, OH: Akron Art Museum, 1984), 18–20. 82. Ellen Handy, “Robert Longo,” Arts Magazine 59, no. 1 (September 1984): 32. 83. Jean Fisher, “Robert Longo,” Artforum 23, no. 1 (September 1984): 116. 84. Longo, quoted in Gardner, “Longo: Making Art for Brave Eyes,” 63–64. 85. Robert Longo, quoted in Mary Haus, “Robert Longo Talks to Mary Haus,” Artforum International 41, no. 7 (March 2003): 239. 86. Reviewing Longo’s exhibition at Metro Pictures and Leo Castelli in 1983, Lynn Zelevansky wrote disparagingly that “these works utilize clichéd images that evoke soap-opera emotionalism followed by a sense of vacuity.” See Lynn Zelevansky, “Robert Longo,” Art News 82, no. 4 (April 1983): 152. 87. Robert Longo, quoted in Glueck, “Very Timely Art of Robert Longo,” H24. Notes to Pages 134–141

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Chapter 5 1. The initial press releases for Dumping Core, from 1984 and 1985, describe it as a “staged theatrical performance” or “electronic performance.” With Total Recall (1987), her next work in this format, Bender adopted the phrase “electronic theater” instead. See “Gretchen Bender: ‘Dumping Core,’ a Staged Video Performance,” press release, Gretchen Bender Papers, 1980–2004, box 1, Project Files: Dumping Core, 1984–1991, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; and “Total Recall: Electronic Theatre by Gretchen Bender,” advertisement for screening at the Kitchen, May 7–9, 1987, Gretchen Bender Papers, box 2, Project Files: Total Recall, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 2. See “Gretchen Bender: ‘Dumping Core,’ a Staged Video Performance.” 3. See “Gretchen Bender: ‘Dumping Core,’ a Staged Video Performance”; and press release for Gretchen Bender, Dumping Core, at the Kitchen, Thursday, December 6, 1984, Gretchen Bender Papers, 1980–2004, box 1, Project Files: Dumping Core, 1984–1991. 4. In an unpublished interview with Tim Druckrey from 1991, Bender stated that “I always say [my electronic theater is] performing televisions. I say I choreographed the channels together, various sections of advertisements or demo reels.” See Gretchen Bender Papers, 1980–2004, box 2, Writings, Interview Drafts: Gretchen Bender Interview by Tim Druckrey, 3. Bender expressed her preference for being called a “television artist” in Michael Welzenbach, “Video Art: The Medium Is the Message,” Washington Times, August 16, 1985, 4M. She was reported to disparage “the elitist stance assumed by an earlier generation of video artists” in Susan Britton, “Immaculate Reception: Commercial Free Television from Six New York Video Savants,” NY Talk, July 1985, 37. Bender stated that “the video art of the 1970s became very ghettoized in the eighties’ art world” in her interview with Peter Doroshenko, in Doroshenko, ed., Gretchen Bender: Work 1981–1991 (Syracuse, NY: Everson Museum of Art, 1991), 5. 5. For more on video and its implicit, usually negative relationship with television, see Helen Westgeest, Video Art Theory: A Comparative Approach (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 20–78. 6. See David Antin, “Television: Video’s Frightful Parent,” Artforum 14, no. 4 (December 1975): 39, 36. Works like Richard Serra and Carlotta Schoolman’s Television Delivers People (1974), for example, made their critique of television overt. 7. Bender told Doroshenko that as of 1982, when she began thinking about moving into video, she was unaware of Birnbaum’s work. See Gretchen Bender, interview with Doroshenko, in Doroshenko, Gretchen Bender: Work 1981–1991, 5. Nonetheless, Birnbaum’s major works from the time, such as Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978–79) and the double-monitor Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry (1979), remain an illuminating object of comparison in the analysis of Bender’s electronic theater. On Birnbaum’s work, see Pamela Lee, New Games: Postmodernism after Contemporary Art (New York: Routledge, 2013), 159–207; and T. J. Demos, Dara Birnbaum: Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (London: Afterall, 2010). As Tamara Trodd has recently observed, “Birnbaum’s videos . . . absorb the viewer’s attention into the images on-screen,” whereas Bender’s work, “with what has been described as its ‘signature, barrage-editing style,’ forces the viewer out.” See Tamara Trodd, “welcome! Elizabeth Price and the Life of Objects,” Art History 42, no. 3 ( June 2019): 576. 220

Notes to Pages 143–145

8. See David Salle, “Jack Goldstein; Distance Equals Control,” in Jack Goldstein, ed. John Maggiotto (Buffalo, NY: Hallwalls, 1978), 6–7. 9. Gretchen Bender, “Political Entertainment,” in Barbara Kruger, ed., TV Guides: A Collection of Thoughts about Television (New York: Kuklapolitan, 1985), 27. Her remark about detergent and killing in South Africa is published in Welzenbach, “Video Art: The Medium Is the Message,” 4M. 10. Gretchen Bender, quoted in interview with Peter Doroshenko, in Doroshenko, Gretchen Bender: Work 1981–1991, 5. She stated that the “collision of screens could multiply the opportunity for a critical examination of this mode [of representation], thereby reducing it to its abstract codes,” in Bender, “Political Entertainment,” 27. The artist explained that from television’s “equivalent flow I tried to force some kind of consciousness of underlying patterns of social control” in Cindy Sherman, “Interview with Gretchen Bender,” BOMB Magazine, Winter 1987, 23. 11. See Gretchen Bender, “The Perversion of the Visual,” Effects 2 (1984): 7. Earlier drafts of “The Perversion of the Visual” can be found in the Gretchen Bender Papers, 1980–2004, box 1, Project Files: Dumping Core, 1984–1991. 12. In one variant of the commercial, the jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald hits a note that breaks the mirror in which she is framed. A voice-over statement then reveals the song to have been a recording, prompting the slogan: “Is it Live? Or is it Memorex?” My thanks to Thomas Crow for alerting me to this campaign. 13. See Bender, “Perversion of the Visual,” 7. Bender occasionally cited Brecht as a model for her own practice. In an unpublished interview from 1987, for instance, she noted that the playwright sought, like her, to “criticize and entertain at the same time.” See Gretchen Bender, interview with Alexander Gray, 1987, Gretchen Bender Papers, 1980–2004, box 2, Writings, Interview Drafts: “Gretchen Bender: An Engaged Artist, Interview by Alexander Gray,” 11. 14. Bender, quoted in “Gretchen Bender,” Interview Magazine, May 1985, 43. 15. Bender, quoted in Sherman, “Interview with Gretchen Bender,” 20. 16. Bender, quoted in Welzenbach, “Video Art: The Medium Is the Message,” 4M. 17. Gretchen Bender, quoted in the unpublished interview with Tim Druckrey, Gretchen Bender Papers, 7. 18. Gretchen Bender, quoted in Sherman, “Interview with Gretchen Bender,” 23. 19. Gretchen Bender, quoted in Catherine Bush, “Gretchen Bender: TV Terrorist,” L.A. Weekly, March 29–April 3, 1986. Many of Bender’s initial interpreters seemed to accept the artist’s logic at face value. See, for example, Jonathan Crary, “Gretchen Bender: Total Recall,” in Bender, Gretchen Bender: Total Recall (Houston, TX: Contemporary Arts Museum, 1988), n.p.; Tricia Collins and Richard Milazzo, “The New Sleep: Stasis and the Image-Bound Environment,” Art Journal 45, no. 3 (Fall 1985): 245–46; and Keith Broadfoot and Rex Butler, “Dumping Core: Time Bends,” Eyeline Magazine, June 1988, 13–15. 20. Writing in the early 1990s, Bender described Dumping Core as a work characterized by “hallucinogenic overdrive.” See Gretchen Bender, “Proposal for 3rd Electronic Theatre (New Media Theatre) by Gretchen Bender,” Gretchen Bender Papers, 1980–2004, box 1, Correspondence: Business, 1985–2003. 21. The control mechanism described in Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange is actually a form of aversion therapy. The mechanism in The Parallax View corresponds more closely to the form of unconscious mind control typically denoted by the term “brainwashing.” Here the protagonist, Joe Frady, is immobilized and subjected to a slideshow by the shadowy Parallax Corporation, which is involved in recruiting Notes to Pages 145–147

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political assassins. The montage begins by pairing a series of title cards—“Love,” “Mother,” “Father,” “Me,” “Home,” “Country,” “God,” “Enemy,” and “Happiness”— with congruent sequences of photographic images. All are positively coded except “Enemy,” which is accompanied by images of Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, and Fidel Castro. As the montage continues to cycle through these categories, however, negatively coded images and pictures of political extremism increasingly creep in. In one rapid-fire sequence following the “Country” frame, for example, images of George Washington and John F. Kennedy bookend photographs of Nazi and NeoNazi rallies; in another, an image of the US Capitol building is followed by photographs of Ku Klux Klan rallies and a lynching. 22. Thomas Lawson, “Nature Morte,” in Infotainment, ed. Peter Nagy (New York: J. Berg, 1985), 39. Mariëtte Haveman took an even more critical stance toward Bender’s rhetoric, dismissing “The Perversion of the Visual” as “bombastic nonsense.” See Haveman, “Le Grand Cadavre,” Zien Magazine 8 (1985): 5. 23. Her diary from 1980, for instance, includes ten pages’ worth of passages transcribed from the 1939 essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” See Gretchen Bender Papers, 1980–2004, box 2, Notebooks: 1980, and box 1, Project Files: Miscellaneous Notes, 1982–1997. 24. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1969), 12, 11. 25. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version” (1935–36), trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 40–41. As Susan Buck-Morss has clarified, the tactics that Benjamin feared were not so much aestheticizing as anaesthetizing. See “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October 62 (Autumn 1992): 3–41. 26. Her diaries from the early 1980s also contain several pages of notes on Italian Futurism along with a tellingly Benjaminian interjection: “how about technology and no death?” See Gretchen Bender Papers, 1980–2004, box 1, Project Files: Miscellaneous Notes, 1982–1997. 27. See “Gretchen Bender: ‘Dumping Core,’ a Staged Video Performance.” Bender attached a crucially redemptive significance to the latter concept. As early as a 1983 letter to Collins, she maintained that “the mind is becoming ready to transcend the sense of and limitations of sensory overload and is beginning to desire and crave more complexity visually.” See Gretchen Bender, typed letter to Tricia Collins, Gretchen Bender Papers, 1980–2004, box 1, Correspondence: Business. 28. Bender commonly used the phrase “interference pattern” in a generalized sense, but it seems particularly applicable to her overlays, a technique she established in 1983 and would elaborate, in various forms, through the early 1990s. In an interview from 1984, Bender explained that her intention was to take information transmitted by mass media, “layer” it, and “bounce it back in, in a distorted form,” creating a “kind of interference pattern [that] also reveals structures better.” See Gretchen Bender, quoted in Sylvia Falcon, “State of the Art,” East Village Eye 5, no. 42 (April 1984): 35. 29. Hoagland was killed in a firefight between Salvadorean government troops and guerrillas on March 17, 1984. His photograph Two Young Girls Found alongside the Highway to Comalapa Airport had been included in El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers, ed. Harry Mattison, Susan Meiselas, and Fae Rubenstein (New York: 222

Notes to Pages 147–149

Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1983). It is misattributed to Meiselas, another prominent photojournalist who covered the conflict, in the catalogue for Gretchen Bender: So Much Deathless (New York: Red Bull Arts Center, 2019), 9. 30. Gremlins (1984), directed by Chris Columbus, is not the only Hollywood film from the time that Bender referenced in her work. She also cited Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters (1984) and James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984), both of which likewise center anxieties about advanced technology. 31. This is the phrasing used by Peter Doroshenko in his introduction to Bender’s 1991 retrospective catalogue. He describes the group’s activity as “printing banners and T-shirts for various political demonstrations.” See Peter Doroshenko, “Introduction,” in Doroshenko, Gretchen Bender: Work 1981–1991, 2. Bender, in a typed biographical narrative from 1997, describes the organization as an “artists [sic] silkscreen collective” and dates her involvement between 1974 and 1978. In 1980, Bender writes, she “moved to New York City to pursue my focus as an artist in the art world.” See Gretchen Bender, “short biographical narrative,” Gretchen Bender Papers, 1980–2004, box 2, Project Files: So Much Deathless, 1997. 32. Bender stated in a 1984 interview that “it was apparent about three years ago that in the art world, oddly enough, most of the men had returned to painting and it seemed right in line with the neo-conservatism in the country.” See Falcon, “State of the Art,” 35. Buchloh wrote of a rising “cultural climate of authoritarianism,” one that darkly indicated “political realities to come,” in “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting,” October 16 (Spring 1981): 40. In a notebook entry dated October 12, 1981, Bender wrote that an acquaintance named Nancy “told me to read Buchloh’s article in Oct (‘Ciphers of . . . etc.’) and I’ll read it tonight.” After Documenta, Craig Owens expanded Buchloh’s critique. In an article titled “Honor, Power, and the Love of Women,” which Bender read and annotated, he concluded that “what we are witnessing,” in art as well as “every level of intellectual, cultural, and political life at present,” is “the emergence of a new—or renewed—authoritarianism masquerading as antiauthoritarian.” See Craig Owens, “Honor, Power, and the Love of Women,” Art in America 71, no. 1 ( January 1983): 11. For Bender’s notes, see Gretchen Bender Papers, 1980–2004, box 2, Notebooks: 1981, and box 1, Project Files: Miscellaneous Notes. 33. See Gretchen Bender, undated notebook entry, Gretchen Bender Papers, 1980–2004, box 2, Notebooks: 1982–1984. For Hurwitz’s full statement, see Christian Williams, “A Viewfinder,” Washington Post, May 24, 1983, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1983/05/24/a-viewfinder /482f0856–28f9–48f7-b1dc-b1b3f2d45c5f/. 34. Valerie Smith, “Fictive Victims,” in Fictive Victims, ed. Robert Longo (Buffalo, NY: Hallwalls, 1981), n.p. 35. Archival photographs suggest that Bender sometimes displayed the components of Heroes in the Air as two separate works. My thanks to Ryan Muller for providing research assistance. In a review, Jean Fisher mistakenly attributes “the sculpture in front of the Time & Life Building” to Max Bill. See Jean Fisher, “Gretchen Bender,” Artforum 22, no. 8 (April 1984): 84. 36. Bender regarded Salle’s work as sexist. Her antipathy toward his art comes up frequently in her notes from the 1980s. For example, see Gretchen Bender, unpublished essay, Gretchen Bender Papers, 1980–2004, box 1, Project Files: Flash Art, 1987. Notes to Pages 149–151

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37. Reagan’s announcement of the program was broadcast on March 23, 1983. 38. According to the curators of Bender’s 2019 retrospective, Denker “would sneak Bender into [the institute] after hours.” Here, Bender “would record footage directly off the lab’s supercomputer monitors, illicitly granting [herself] access to technology that wouldn’t be accessible to the public for years to come.” See catalogue for Gretchen Bender: So Much Deathless, n.p. 39. Gretchen Bender, quoted in the unpublished interview with Tim Druckrey, Gretchen Bender Papers, 5. 40. For period interpretations of Bender’s work in terms of media and mediation, see Hal Foster, “The Expressive Fallacy,” Art in America 71, no. 1 ( January 1983): 81–83, 137; and Jonathan Crary, “Gretchen Bender at Nature Morte,” Art in America 72, no. 4 (April 1984): 189. 41. The exhibition was held at Metro Pictures in January 1984. For an overview of the Artists Call initiative, see Jamey Gambrell, “Art Against Intervention,” Art in America 72, no. 5 (May 1984): 9–19. 42. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights, vol. 1, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Boston: South End, 1979), 41. 43. For more on Carter’s inconsistent stance toward interventionism in Latin America, see Derek K. Buckaloo, “Carter’s Nicaragua and Other Democratic Quagmires,” in Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 246–64. 44. Richard Falk, “Introduction: Human Rights and the Repression Trade,” in Michael T. Klare and Cynthia Arnson, Supplying Repression: US Support for Authoritarian Regimes Abroad (Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies, 1981), ix, viii. 45. See Edward S. Herman, “US Interventionism: Reality and Rhetoric,” Wedge 7/8 (Winter/Spring 1985): 37. For a scholarly study of state terrorism in El Salvador between 1978 and 1991, see William Stanley, The Protection Racket State (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996). 46. See Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, “Document 1: Free World”; Edward S. Herman, “US Interventionism: Reality and Rhetoric”; and Michael T. Klare and Cynthia Arnson, “Document 5: Public Safety,” Wedge 7/8 (Winter/Spring 1985): 14–15, 35–42, 54–57. The issue also reproduces excerpts from several other scholarly books addressed to related topics, along with interviews and essays by Edward Said, Jurgen Habermas, Victoria de Grazia, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and others. 47. “Public Vision,” an all-women exhibition, presented work by Bender, Dwyer, Sherman, Kruger, Lawler, and Simmons, as well as Jennifer Bolande, Diane Buckler, Ellen Carey, Sherrie Levine, Diane Shea, and Peggy Yunque. 48. For more on this exhibition, see Claire Grace, “Counter-time: Group Material’s Chronicle of US Intervention in Central and South America,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry, no. 26 (Spring 2011): 27–37; and Art Demonstration: Group Material in the 1980s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022), 101–73. 49. Gretchen Bender, “Artist’s Statement” circa 1990, Gretchen Bender Papers, 1980–2004, box 1, Biographical Material: Artists Statements. 50. Gretchen Bender, quoted in interview with Peter Doroshenko, in Doroshenko, Gretchen Bender: Work 1981–1991, 7. 51. For more on the massacre and its effective cover-up, see Mark Danner, The 224

Notes to Pages 152–157

Massacre at El Mozote (New York: Penguin Random House, 1994); Joan Didion, “The West Wing of Oz,” in Political Fictions (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 60–118; and Leigh Binford, The El Mozote Massacre: Human Rights and Global Implications (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016). 52. There is reason to believe that these interlocutors might not have entirely agreed with one another, either. Rosler had recently published a sharply critical review of Meiselas’s 1981 photobook Nicaragua, arguing that its lushly color-printed illustrations of the Nicaraguan revolution had a depoliticizing, even “anti-realist” effect. See “A Revolution in Living Color: The Photojournalism of Susan Meiselas,” In These Times, June 17–30, 1981, cited in Martha Rosler, ed., Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975–2001 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004), 253. Years later, Rosler would soften her critique, placing less blame on Meiselas and more on her publisher. See Rosler’s revised essay, “Wars and Metaphors,” in Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975–2001, 245–58. 53. Gretchen Bender, undated notebook entry, Gretchen Bender Papers, 1980– 2004, box 1, Project Files: Miscellaneous Notes, 1982–1997. 54. “Art can’t hide anymore,” Bender wrote in typed notes for her 1984 essay “The Perversion of the Visual.” “It must meet the desire for visual expansion. Only the tools of the present can facilitate this. Why rub two sticks together to make fire when you can light a match or flick a switch, etc.,” she wrote. See Gretchen Bender, undated notes, Gretchen Bender Papers, 1980–2004, box 1, Project Files: Dumping Core, 1984–1991. 55. Gretchen Bender, quoted in Falcon, “State of the Art,” 35. It is worth noting that this interview appeared alongside an account of life in El Salvador amid the conflict. See Bob Schapiro, “Both Sides Now: A Report from the Fronts,” East Village Eye 5, no. 42 (April 1984): 9, 52. 56. It is easy to see why Bender would have gravitated toward Cronenberg’s film, the title of which refers to a transformative television signal that comes embedded in images of sadomasochistic violence and collapses all boundaries between reality and televisual representation for viewers who receive it. The signal’s discoverer, a Marshall McLuhan–like media theorist named Brian O’Blivion, perceives the potential for a revolutionary expansion of the human sensorium in this “hallucination machine” and hails it as “the next phase in the development of man as a technological animal.” His optimism proves to be misplaced, however, as the sinister Spectacular Optical company promptly harnesses Videodrome as a mind control device in its effort to “toughen” and “purify” American television viewers for “savage new times.” While the political worldview of the Spectacular Optical company is only sketchily defined, Cronenberg employs a number of cues to suggest that far-right machinations are afoot. In one scene set in Max’s apartment, for example, the camera lingers on a composite photograph of a ballerina who has the head of Adolf Hitler and a swastika emblazoned on her leotard. 57. In an unpublished interview with Alexander Gray from 1988, Bender explained that “I did my first performance piece, Dumping Core, in 1984, when all the three-dimensional computer graphics had just hit the networks, all the network logos. It was incredibly thrilling, this visual thrill to watch this stuff on television. I did that performance piece using all these logos relentlessly. I wanted to get the feel of what the time was like, which was basically—television is shooting us up with adrenalin, and we’re getting all jacked up and we don’t know where we’re going with it.” See Alexander Gray, “Gretchen Bender: An Engaged Artist,” 8–9, Gretchen Notes to Pages 157–158

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Bender Papers, 1980–2004, box 2, Writings, Interview Drafts: Gretchen Bender: An Engaged Artist, Interview by Alexander Gray, 1988. 58. Bender speaks of “stuttering” the AT&T logo in Gretchen Bender, interview with Peter Doroshenko, in Doroshenko, Gretchen Bender: Work 1981–1991, 6. 59. Bender described the AT&T brandmark, with its “fiberoptics wrapping up the globe,” as “such a fascist logo” in “Gretchen Bender: An Engaged Artist, Interview by Alexander Gray,” 10. Later she stated that it had a “benevolent but fascist quality to it,” suggesting the “earth in bondage.” See Gretchen Bender, Meet the Makers artist talk at the Donnell Library Center, January 18, 1990, quoted in catalogue for Gretchen Bender: So Much Deathless, n.p. 60. Bender, quoted in Welzenbach, “Video Art: The Medium Is the Message,” M. 61. Bender, interview with Peter Doroshenko, in Doroshenko, Gretchen Bender: Work 1981–1991, 10. 62. For Bender’s transcription, see Gretchen Bender Papers, 1980–2004, box 2, Notebooks: 1981. For the cited texts, see Dan Graham, “The End of Liberalism,” ZG 4 (1981): n.p.; and Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 94–136. 63. See Dan Graham, “Signs,” Artforum 19, no. 8 (April 1981): 38. 64. Bender noted both of these titles, along with the phrase “how the Nazis gained power through culture,” under the header “old old notes: reading list from Sherrie—3 yrs ago.” See Gretchen Bender Papers, 1980–2004, box 2, Notebooks: 1982–1984. On Levine’s work with Mosse as an undergraduate, see Howard Singerman, Art History, after Sherrie Levine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 26–27. 65. See George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975), 1–20. 66. As early as a 1982, Gerald Marzorati began a review of A Likely Story, a group exhibition at Artist’s Space that marked Bender’s New York debut, by referencing the theorist. “What’s likely about this show,” he wrote, “is that the artists are reading Walter Benjamin and [ John Berger’s] Ways of Seeing,” the latter of which, a 1972 critique of the European canon, drew heavily on Benjamin’s ideas. See Gerald Marzorati, “Art Picks,” Soho News, March 9, 1982, 32. The “audaciously outré field of computer graphics” that Bender’s work engaged, Walter Robinson and Carlo McCormick declared in an article from 1984, seemed “key to art in the age of electronic reproduction.” See Robinson and McCormick, “Slouching toward Avenue D,” Art in America 72, no. 6 (Summer 1984): 150. 67. Lutz Koepnick, Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 3. 68. Koepnick, 187–212. 69. Koepnick, 2. 70. The negative stance toward television was well encapsulated by books like Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (New York: William Morrow, 1977), which presented the medium as inherently reductive and conformist. A cautiously optimistic position, by contrast, was projected by Beryl Korot and Phyllis Gershuny in the inaugural 1970 issue of their video art journal Radical Software. Here they asserted that “television is not merely a better way to transmit the old culture, but an element in the foundation of a new one,” and that “our 226

Notes to Pages 158–162

species will survive neither by totally rejecting nor by unconditionally embracing technology—but by humanizing it; by allowing people access to the informational tools they need to shape and reassert control over their lives.” See untitled editorial in Radical Software 1 (Spring 1970): n.p. 71. For more on these shifts, see Mark Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988); and Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 221–72. 72. Sherman, “Interview with Gretchen Bender,” 20. 73. See Carol Squiers and Phil Mariani, “I Got Stockholm Syndrome from the NBC News,” in Kruger, TV Guides, 4. 74. Bender, “Political Entertainment,” 27. 75. Mark Rappaport, “Let Them Eat VCRs,” in Kruger, TV Guides, 21. 76. See Kruger, TV Guides, 35. Martha Rosler would later reproduce the same image in her article “Image Simulations, Computer Manipulations: Some Considerations,” originally published in Afterimage in December 1989, reprinted in Rosler, Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975–2001, 260. 77. See Jonathan Crary, “Eclipse of the Spectacle,” in Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brain Wallis and Marcia Tucker (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 284, 287. Bender filled nine diary pages with notes on Baudrillard’s “Ecstasy of Communication,” carefully plotting the author’s prognosis of a society so thoroughly networked that all interiority, depth, alienation, and even spectacle would disappear, leaving only the “smooth operational surface of communication” in all its quasi-pornographic “obscenity.” See Gretchen Bender Papers, 1980–2004, box 2, Notebooks: 1982–1984. For the cited essay, see Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” in Hal Foster, ed., The Antiaesthetic (Port Townsend, WA: Bay, 1983), 145–54. 78. Crary, “Eclipse of the Spectacle,” 293. Crary would later elaborate these ideas at greater length. See Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 75; and Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013). 79. See Baudrillard, “Ecstasy of Communication,” 146. 80. Bender, interview with Peter Doroshenko, in Doroshenko, Gretchen Bender: Work 1981–1991, 4.

Epilogue 1. David Rimanelli, “Signs of the Time,” Artforum 40, no. 2 (October 2001): 132. 2. See Michael Lobel, “Outside the Frame,” Artforum 48, no. 1 (September 2009): 252–55. 3. “The main goal of the present exhibition and catalogue is to reexamine the development of the group from its inception in the early 1970s to its gradual semicapitulation to an art market more closely aligned with advanced capitalism as it took shape in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan,” Eklund wrote. AIDS “would also draw an immediate and legitimate veil of mourning across the decline and fall of an art world that had enjoyed relative autonomy from the expanding media and consumer culture up to that point.” See Douglas Eklund, The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009), 17. 4. The relevant works are Wilson’s Mining the Museum (1992–93) and Weems’s From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995). For analyses of these works, see Notes to Pages 162–169

227

Huey Copeland, Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 23–64; and Yxta Maya Murray, “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried: Carrie Mae Weems’s Challenge to the Harvard Archive,” in Christine Garnier and Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, eds., Carrie Mae Weems (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021), 115–39. 5. See Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (Autumn 2004): 3–22. 6. One can only wonder how Goldstein and Bender’s practices might have developed under more propitious circumstances. By the mid-1990s Goldstein’s work had narrowed to a series of poetic texts that he produced prodigiously but shared with no one, having exited the New York art world without a trace. Bender labored unsuccessfully to secure funding for a third work of electronic theater, titled So Much Deathless, through which she hoped to further investigate “our travels, as ‘extended’ thinking beings, through the ‘visual expansions’ of virtual existence.” See Gretchen Bender, “Proposal for 3rd Electronic Theatre (New Media Theatre) by Gretchen Bender,” Gretchen Bender Papers, 1980–2004, box 1, Correspondence: Business, 1985–2003, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 7. The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik claims to have been “among the first to use the f-word about Donald Trump” when he wrote in May 2016 that “there is a simple formula for descriptions of Donald Trump: add together a qualification, a hyphen, and the word ‘fascist.’” Following Trump’s election and the deadly Neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that took place in August 2017, such labeling became widespread. See Adam Gopnik, “Going There with Donald Trump,” New Yorker, May 11, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/going-there -with-donald-trump; and “Calling Trump the F-Word,” New Yorker, September 12, 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/calling-trump-the-f -word. 8. Alexander Bigman, “Troy Brauntuch,” Art in America 108, no. 3 (March 2020): 82. 9. Documents relating to the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen can be viewed at https://www.gdk-research.de/. 10. See David Pryce-Jones, Paris in the Third Reich: A History of the German Occupation, 1940–1945 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1981), 19–31; and Hal Vaughan, Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War (New York: Vintage, 2012). 11. This phrase was also the title of a 2016 exhibition of Edgar Degas’s monotypes, organized by the Museum of Modern Art. See Jodi Hauptman, ed., Degas: A Strange New Beauty (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2016). 12. David Carrier, “Taking Appropriation Too Far,” Hyperallergic, February 22, 2020, https://hyperallergic.com/543547/troy-brauntuch-a-strange-new-beauty-at -petzel-gallery/. 13. Zack Hatfield, “Troy Brauntuch,” Artforum 58, no. 8 (April 2020), https:// www.artforum.com/print/reviews/202004/troy-brauntuch-82495. 14. Petzel Gallery press release for Troy Brauntuch: A Strange New Beauty, January 15–March 14, 2020, https://www.petzel.com/exhibitions/troy-brauntuch9. 15. Beyond the borders of the Anglosphere, 2016 witnessed the recapture of Aleppo by the Syrian state; the ouster of Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff; the quashing of an attempted coup in Turkey; and the election of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. 228

Notes to Pages 169–173

16. Robert Longo, quoted in Marta Gnyp, “Taking a Split-Second of Eternity Forever: Interview with Robert Longo,” Zoo Magazine 54 (2017): 105. 17. Fugitive Images was title of Longo’s 2019–20 exhibition at Metro Pictures. Longo discusses his desire to “slow down images” from the “constant image storm that we live in” in A. Moret, “Robert Longo: Storm of Hope,” Installation, 2021, https://installationmag.com/robert-longo-storm-of-hope/. I learned the “coal mine” nickname from Longo’s studio assistants during my visit in July 2019. 18. For example, Longo explains that to create Untitled (Raft at Sea) (2017), he combined a photograph he discovered in a Doctors without Borders brochure with a photograph he took at the Long Island coast. See Dan Duray, “Robert Longo: Men, Monsters, and Museums,” Garage, July 31, 2017, https://www.vice.com/en/article /3knm89/robert-longo-eistenstein-goya. 19. See Tim Griffin, “More Real Than Real,” Artforum 60, no. 2 (October 2021), https://www.artforum.com/print/202108/tim-griffin-on-the-art-of-robert-longo -86702. 20. Robert Longo, quoted in Shanti Escalante–De Mattei, “Robert Longo Discusses ‘Moral Imperative’ That Drives His Latest Work,” ArtNews, September 2, 2021, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/robert-longo-guild-hall-pace -gallery-exhibitions-1234602803/. 21. Robert Longo, quoted in Duray, “Robert Longo: Men, Monsters, and Museums.” 22. Robert Longo, quoted in in Moret, “Robert Longo: Storm of Hope.” 23. David Ebony, “One Work: Robert Longo’s ‘Untitled (Insurrection at the US Capitol . . .),’” Art in America, October 6, 2021, https://www.artnews.com/art-in -america/aia-reviews/one-work-robert-longo-untitled-insurrection-us-capitol -1234605851/. 24. Griffin, “More Real Than Real.” 25. Griffin. Kate Fowle has also framed Longo’s recent work as a reflection on “what it means to render ‘Truth’ in pictures.” She keeps the term in scare quotes, citing Hal Foster’s 1989 characterization of postmodernist art as using “representation against representation in order to disrupt our naïve belief in its referential truth.” See Kate Fowle, “Proof,” in Kate Fowle, ed., Proof: Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo (Moscow: Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2017), 38, 49; and Hal Foster, “Atrocity Exhibition,” in Howard N. Fox, ed., Robert Longo (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1989), 53. 26. In a series from 2013–14 called Gang of Cosmos, Longo painstakingly translated works by abstract expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Willem de Kooning into charcoal. He explained that he had always felt a “kinship” with the abstract expressionists and marveled at “what it was like trying to make art in the 1950s, following World War II, after the world had tried to destroy itself and European ideas of art no longer had the same relevance. It must have been an incredibly exciting time to be an artist and to express something meaningful beyond all the rhetoric.” See “Time Traveling: Robert Longo in Conversation with Kate Fowle,” in Fowle, Proof: Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo, 109.

Notes to Pages 175–179

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Adorno, Theodor, 19, 74, 76, 160 AIDS, 167–68, 227n3 “Allegorical Impulse, The: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism” (Owens), 96–97 allegory, 19, 63, 67, 96–97 Alteveer, Ian, 167 American Soldier (Longo), 115, 116 American Soldier, The (film), 115 Anderson, Benedict, 36, 40 Antin, David, 144 apocalypticism, 39, 121–22 appropriation art, 68, 195n10 April 20, 1978 (Charlesworth), 47, 48 April 21, 1978 (Charlesworth), 30, 33, 33, 34, 41–43, 43, 44 Art of Memory, the Loss of History, The, 20 “Art of Spectacle, The” (Foster), 18 Ascension, The (album), 127, 216n46– 216n47 Asscher, Louis, 96, 102, 103 Assmann, Aleida, 20–21 Atelier Populaire, 21–22, 22 AT&T, 158, 226n59

authoritarianism, 23, 108, 140, 149, 154–55, 175, 187n16, 223n32. See also fascism Autopsy (Bender), 151, 153, 156 “Back to the Studio” (Owens), 105–6 Baim, Richard, 187n23 Ballet Shoe, A (Goldstein), 70, 70, 80 Barthes, Roland, 5, 44 Bass, Saul, 3, 158 Baudrillard, Jean, 40, 165, 226n77 Bender, Gretchen: art and military technology and, 151–54; authoritarianism and, 223n32; chapter overview, 27; Cold War geopolitics and, 149–51; corporate logos and, 158–59, 162, 225n57, 226n59; critical reception and, 144–45, 147; DARPA and, 153; documentary realism and, 154; Dumping Core and, 143, 147– 48, 157–59, 160, 221n20; electronic theater and, 143–44, 144, 145, 147, 156–57, 220n4, 221n10, 244; the falling body and, 1; fascism and, 4, 145, 148, 154–56; Gargan I and, 151,

Bender, Gretchen (continued) 152; Gremlins and, 148–49, 153–54, 156, 245; interference pattern and, 148, 156–57, 222n28; lack of funding and, 228n6; manifesto and, 145–46; media bias and, 162–63; media manipulation and, 146–47, 163–64, 225n57; National Socialist aesthetics and, 161–62; overdrive state and, 143; silkscreening, 149–50, 150, 151; technology and, 146, 162–64; Total Recall and, 143, 144, 146–47, 165–66; US support for authoritarian regimes and, 154–56; visual expansion and, 156–57. See also fascism; Nazism; Pictures generation; specific works Benjamin, Walter, 36, 41, 97, 147–48, 161 Betamax, 163, 164 Big News, The (CalArts), 108–9 Birnbaum, Dara, 145, 220n7 Black Power movement, 22–23 Blinderman, Barry, 120 Bowes, Ed, 132–39, 135–38, 217n63 Bowie, David, 185n1 Branca, Glenn, 10, 123–25, 127, 128, 215n40, 216n46–216n47 brandmarks. See corporate logos Brauntuch, Troy: allegory and, 96–97; CalArts and, 105–11, 109–10; capitalism and, 90; chapter overview, 26; critical reception and, 89–90, 100, 104–5, 172, 208n9, 208n18, 209n37; distance and, 89, 97–98, 100; election of Donald Trump and, 28; galleries and, 211n52; Kitchen exhibition (1979), 93–94; Longo and, 100, 104; memory and, 169; Nazi aesthetics and, 4, 89–90, 93–96, 95, 96, 98–99, 99, 100–102, 170–74, 171, 212n76; 1 2 3 and, 83, 89, 236; Pictures exhibition and, 91–92, 92, 93; postmodernism and, 96; Selected Shoes and, 172–73, 174; Sontag and, 190n57, 207n3; A Strange New Beauty and, 170–72, 171, 173; Thorak works and, 98–99, 99, 100, 102–4; Thorak works in comparison to preceding work of, 102–4; Untitled (Mercedes) and, 232

Index

84, 94, 97, 237; Untitled (Sculpture Drawings) and, 84. See also Pictures generation; specific works Britain, 10 Brooks, Rosetta, 74–76, 206n71 Burton, Johanna, 89 Cage, John, 107, 125, 215n40 CalArts (California Institute of the Arts), 105–11, 109–10, 212n71 capitalism, 113, 119, 160–61 Carrier, David, 172 Carter, Jimmy, 154–55 Casademont, Joan, 35, 37 Chair, The (Goldstein), 70, 81, 235 Chambers, Eddie, 10 Chance, James, 117 Chanel, Coco, 172–73 Charlesworth, Sarah: April 20, 1978 and, 47, 48; April 21, 1978 and, 30, 33, 33, 34, 41–44, 43; Casademont on, 36–37; chapter overview, 24–25; collective memory and, 24, 169; the falling body and, 1, 28, 29, 31, 50–55, 197n29; fascism and, 3; Fourteen Days and, 43, 44–45, 46; Herald Tribune series and, 30, 32; historical consciousness and, 40–41; Italy in the 1970s and, 41–45, 47–48, 48, 49; Modern History and, 30, 37, 47; myth and, 44; narrative focus of, 32; September 11 terrorist attacks and, 54; UFO sightings and, 197n30; visual confrontation and, 32–34; visual language and, 41; volatility of the era and, 37–38, 38, 39; Warhol and, 35–39. See also Pictures generation; Stills; specific works Chatham, Rhys, 123–25 Chave, Anna, 17 Chomsky, Noam, 154–55 Clockwork Orange, A (film), 147, 221n21 collective memory: allegory and, 97–98; cultural expression and, 23–24; guerrilla organizations and, 21–23; Longo and, 179–80; modern concept of, 19–20; Nazism and, 21; Pictures group and, 6, 169; racial imperialism and, 169; role of artists and,

39; supra-individual memory and, 20–21 consumerism, 71–74, 155, 160–61. See also capitalism corporate logos, 158–59, 162, 186n6, 226n59 Corporate Wars: Walls of Influence (Longo), 114, 119 Crary, Jonathan, 163–64 Crimp, Douglas: Brauntuch and, 89; Pictures essay and, 4–5, 63–64, 68–69, 96, 202n21; pop art and, 35; temporality and, 68–69, 81 Crow, Thomas, 35 cultural memory. See collective memory Culture Culture (Longo), 139, 242 Curcio, Renato, 49 Davidowicz, Lucy S., 102 Death and Disaster (Warhol), 3, 29, 34–35 Defaced Jewish Cemetery; Strasbourg, France; December 14, 2018 (Longo), 175, 176 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 153 Deleuze, Gilles, 7 Denker, Amber, 153, 225n38 Derrida, Jacques, 5 Der Wächter (The Guard) (Breker), 75 Destroyer Cycle, The (Longo), 174–80 Destruction of the National Front (Chambers), 10–11, 11 Devo, 10 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno), 160 Diamond Vision, 163 Dick, Philip K., 146 Die Fahne hoch! (Stella), 16 Dika, Vera, 65–66, 68 Documenta 7 (Goldstein), 63, 77, 79 Drone (Bender), 154 Dumping Core (Bender), 143, 147–48, 157–59, 160, 221n20, 244 Ebony, David, 178 “Eclipse of the Spectacle” (Crary), 163 Eco, Umberto, 7 Eklund, Douglas, 19, 62, 66, 89–90, 167– 68, 212n76, 227n3

Elsaesser, Thomas, 193n71 Empire (film script) (Longo), 132–39, 135–38, 217n63–217n64, 218n64, 218n66–218n67, 219n73 Empire (Longo), 130–31, 131, 132 “End of Liberalism, The” (Graham), 18– 19, 76, 160 Evans, Sarah, 127 Falk, Richard, 155 Fall, The (Longo), 117 falling, 3, 6. See also falling body, the falling body, the: Derrida and, 5; in European art, 1, 3; fascism and, 3–4; The Jump and, 57, 58, 59, 77, 78, 79, 82; Men in the Cities and, 115; as a metaphor, 3; Pictures group and, 1, 6; Raw and, 2, 3; September 11 terrorist attacks and, 54; Stills and, 50–54, 51–53; subversive appropriation and, 5. See also Charlesworth, Sarah; Goldstein, Jack; Longo, Robert; Spiegelman, Art fascism: and the arts, 8–15, 17, 67, 100, 170–72; Bender and, 145, 148, 154, 156; CalArts and, 106, 108; corporate capitalism and, 158–60; cultural fascination with, 7–19, 9, 11–14, 16; definition of, 7; as a discursive object, 11–12; the falling body and, 3–4; frequency of English-language use of, 12, 13; Goldstein and, 71–73, 76–77; No Wave music and, 125; Pictures group and, 3–4, 18–19, 27– 28, 168, 170; punk and, 8–10; right wing populism and, 28, 175, 178–79, 194n83; Stills and, 54. See also authoritarianism; Nazism; Pictures generation; specific artists and works feminism, 149–53, 187n16 Ferguson Police, August 13, 2014 (Longo), 175 FILE Megazine, 8, 231 Fisher, Jean, 140 Five Victims (exhibition), 151 Flood, Richard, 59 Foster, Hal, 18, 35, 169 Foucault, Michel, 23 Fourteen Days (Charlesworth), 43, 44–46 Index

233

Freud Cycle (Longo), 169 Freudenheim, Tom L., 102 Gang of Cosmos (Longo), 229n26 Gargan I (Bender), 151, 152 General Electric, 165 General Idea, 8 Gilbert and George, 8 Glass of Milk, A (Goldstein), 80 Goldstein, Jack: acrylic painting and, 59; agency and, 68; A Ballet Shoe and, 70, 70, 80; The Chair and, 70; chapter overview, 25; critical reception and, 59, 62, 66–67, 81; cultural memory and, 81–82; Documenta 7 and, 63, 77, 79; experimentation with film and, 57, 58, 59; the falling body and, 1, 57, 58, 59, 77, 78, 79, 82; fascism and, 71–73, 76–77, 82; film and, 69–70; “Hollywood period” and, 69–72, 81–82; The Knife and, 70; lack of funding and, 228n6; media and, 62–63, 66–67, 74; Olympia and, 65–68, 77; perceptual experience and, 63–65; pop art and, 35; preoccupation with death and, 77; The Pull and, 59, 60; The Quivering Earth and, 80; rotoscoping and, 63–64, 79, 201n1, 201n6, 204n39; Shane and, 70, 71, 80; The Six Minute Drown and, 69, 80; spectacle and, 62–63, 65–66, 68; studio of, 77, 78; temporal experience and, 79–81; time and, 68–69; Two Boxers and, 64; Two Fencers and, 64, 64, 69; The Unknown Dimension and, 80; Untitled and, 59, 61–62. See also fascism; Jump, The (Goldstein); Nazism; Pictures generation; specific works Golub, Leon, 11, 12 Gordon, Kim, 127 Graham, Dan, 18–19, 73–74, 76, 90, 160, 206n71 Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon), 121 Greenberg, Clement, 11, 90–91 Gremlins (Bender), 148–49, 153–54, 156, 245 Griffin, Roger, 7 Griffin, Tim, 179 234

Index

Große Deutsche Kunstausstellungen, 28, 173 Guattari, Félix, 7, 192n67 guerrilla organizations, 22, 32, 41–42, 44, 47–48, 48, 49–50. See also Red Brigades Guitar Trio (Chatham), 124, 126, 126, 127 Handy, Ellen, 140 Hatfield, Zack, 172 He-Man (cartoon), 158 Herald Tribune series (Charlesworth), 30, 32 Herman, Edward S., 154–55 Heroes in the Air (Bender), 151, 224n35 Hitler, Adolph, 83. See also Brauntuch, Troy; fascism; Nazism “Hitler’s Nightmare: The Post-modern Possibility” (Charlesworth), 24, 40–41 Hoagland, John, 149, 154–55, 158, 160, 222n29 Hoffmann, Heinrich, 172 Holert, Tom, 66 Holocaust, the, 23–24, 94–96, 102–3 Holocaust consciousness, 23, 108 Holzer, Jenny, 8, 74 Honnef, Klaus, 66–67 Horkheimer, Max, 19, 74, 76, 160 Hughes, Robert, 17, 190n49 Hurtak, Jim, 107 Hutton, Job, 59, 62 Ideal for Living, An (album), 9 “I Got Stockholm Syndrome from the NBC News” (Squiers and Mariani), 162–63 Imagined Communities (Anderson), 36 Imitation of Life (film), 72–73 Inflammatory Essays (Holzer), 8, 74–75 Insurrection at the US Capitol; January 6th, 2021 (Longo), 178, 178, 179 Interrogation (Golub), 12 Iron Voices (Longo), 132 Italy. See Charlesworth, Sarah; Moro, Aldo; Red Brigades Jameson, Fredric, 39–40 Joy Division, 9, 9, 125–26, 188n25

Jumbotron, 163 Jump, The (Goldstein): as an inflection point Goldstein’s career, 62–63; control and manipulation and, 59; the falling body and, 1, 57, 58, 59, 77, 78, 79, 79; fascism and, 3, 71–73, 76– 77, 82; Graham on, 19; memory and, 82; Olympia and, 65–68, 77, 202n26, 203n37, 204n40; rotoscoping and, 63–64, 79, 204n39, 233; visual effects and, 57, 58, 201n1. See also Goldstein, Jack Kaiser, Philipp, 66 Kelley, Mike, 57, 59, 201n3 Kiefer, Anselm, 8, 11 Knife, The (Goldstein), 70, 81 Koepnick, Lutz, 161 Kroll Opera House, 94, 95 Kruger, Barbara, 145, 163 Krugman, Michael, 100 Kuspit, Donald, 11 Landscape, Computer Graphics, Death Squad (Bender), 154 Last of the Nuba, The (Riefenstahl), 14–15 Lawson, Thomas, 69, 147, 186n16 Levin, Kim, 120 Levine, Sherrie, 35, 65, 72–73 Little Race Riot (Warhol), 34, 232 Lobel, Michael, 168 logos, corporate. See corporate logos Lolis, Merope, 105 Longo, Robert: being an American and, 114–15; Brauntuch and, 100, 104; chapter overview, 26–27; Christian religious references and, 121–22; Cold War American culture and, 113–14; collective memory and, 179– 80; combines and, 113–14; condemnation and, 115; critical reception and, 113, 116, 119–20, 139–40, 178–80, 229n25; The Destroyer Cycle and, 174–80; election of Donald Trump and, 28, 175; Empire and, 114, 114, 130–31, 131, 132; Empire (film script) and, 132–39, 135–38, 217n63–217n64, 218n66–218n67, 219n73; the falling

body and, 1, 115, 213n6; format and, 119–20; Gang of Cosmos and, 229n26; Iron Voices and, 132; Joy Division and, 9, 125, 188n25; on The Jump, 57; memory and, 169, 179; monumentality and, 177–78; Nazism and, 3, 120–21, 130–31, 131, 132, 139–41, 178; No Wave music and, 123, 126, 126, 127–28, 128, 215n41; solo debut at Metro Pictures and, 121–22, 122; Sound Distance of a Good Man and, 128–29, 216n51, 217n52, 241; Surrender and, 129–30, 130. See also Men in the Cities (Longo); Nazism; Pictures generation; specific works Lost Ocean Liner, The (Goldstein), 80 Lovelace, Carey, 106 M (Brauntuch), 92–93 Man Controlling Trade (Lantz), 100, 101 Mariani, Phil, 162–63 Martin, Garrard, 74–75 Maus (Spiegelman), 3–4, 185n4 media (mass): Bender and, 147, 162–66; bias in, 162–63; collective memory and, 39–40; fascism and, 74, 76–77, 145–46; manipulation and, 146–47, 163–65, 177, 226n70; Nazism and, 66–67; power of, 62–63; technology and, 163–64 Meiselas, Susan, 157, 225n52 memory, 20, 69, 79–82, 191n60. See also collective memory Men in the Cities (Longo): capitalism and, 113; the falling body and, 1, 115, 213n6; format and, 119–20; impetus for, 115; Nazism and, 3, 120–21; religious imagery and, 115–19, 116– 19, 121–22, 127, 240. See also Longo, Robert Metzger, Deena, 107 Miller, John, 81 Missouri Breaks, The (film), 121 Mitsubishi, 163 Modern History (Charlesworth), 30, 37, 47, 199n67, 199n69 Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo, 147 Moro, Aldo, 30, 41–42, 45, 47–48, 48, 49, 194n5, 199n67, 199n73 Index

235

Morris, Robert, 13, 14, 15, 17 Muller, Ryan, 224n35 Mullican, Matt, 91–92, 106, 208n20, 211n63 myth, 44 Nail, A (Goldstein), 69–70 Nathan Bedford Forrest Statue Removal; Memphis, 2017 (Longo), 176, 177 National Front, 10 nationalism, 36 National Trust (Longo), 119 Nazism: appropriation of ideological props and, 193n71; Bender and, 161–62; Brauntuch and, 84, 93–94, 95, 96, 170–72, 171, 173–74, 212n76; corporate logos and, 159; film and television and, 147–48; Joy Division and, 9; The Jump and, 65–66; Longo and, 3, 120–21, 130–31, 131, 132, 139– 41, 178; Nazi exploitation film genre and, 192n69; party rallies and, 159, 159, 161–62; Pictures group and, 3–4, 168; Sonic Youth and, 215n41; Stills and, 54. See also fascism; Pictures generation neorealist films, 23 neural memory. See collective memory Newman, Barnett, 76, 103 New Order (band), 1, 9 New Wave film, 123 New Wave music, 116 1980 Pictures (Gilbert and George), 8 Novick, Peter, 23, 108 No Wave movement, 10, 123–26, 126, 127, 206n71 Nuremburg rally. See Nazism Olympia (film), 65–68, 77, 202n26, 203n37, 204n40 Olympic Gateway (Graham), 159–60 1 2 3 (Brauntuch), 83, 89, 236 Opening Scene: “A Screaming Comes across the Sky” (Longo), 121 Owens, Craig, 5, 96–98, 105–6 Parallax View, The (film), 147, 221n21 “Perversion of the Visual, The” (Bender), 145–46, 225n54 236

Index

“Photography as Ideology: When Is the Camera a Weapon?,” 156–57 Pictures (exhibition), 1, 4, 19, 34–35. See also Bender, Gretchen; Brauntuch, Troy; Charlesworth, Sarah; Goldstein, Jack; Longo, Robert Pictures for Music (Longo), 126 Pictures generation: appropriation tactics and, 6–7; collective memory and, 6, 180; and complex positioning in time, 6; deconstructivism and, 5; end of, 167–68; fascism and, 3–4, 18–19, 27–28, 168, 170; subversive appropriation and, 5. See also Bender, Gretchen; Brauntuch, Troy; Charlesworth, Sarah; Goldstein, Jack; Longo, Robert Pictures Generation, The (exhibition), 167 Pierce, William Luther, 10 Play, Fame, Song (Brauntuch), 91 Pleasure Is Back, The (Bender), 149–50, 150, 151 Political Economy of Human Rights, The (Chomsky and Herman), 154–55 “Political Entertainment” (Bender), 145–46 postmodernism, 7, 39–41, 89, 96–98, 162, 180 presentiment, 81 President Collages (Levine), 65 Pull, The (Goldstein), 59, 60. See also Goldstein, Jack punk, 8–10, 123 Quivering Earth, The (Goldstein), 80 racism, 10, 22 Ranaldo, Lee, 124–25 Rappaport, Mark, 163 Ratcliff, Carter, 117 Raw (magazine), 1, 2, 185n4 Reading, A (Goldstein), 79–80 Reagan, Ronald, 155, 162–63, 169, 227n3 Reality Fever (Bender), 157 Red Brigades, 32, 41–42, 47–48, 48, 49–50 Red Dawn (Bender), 154 Riefenstahl, Leni, 14–15, 65–68, 204n38 Rimanelli, David, 167–68

Rise and Fall (Baim), 187n23 Rosler, Martha, 157, 225n52 Rossebändiger-Skulptur (Wackerle), 100, 101 rotoscoping, 57, 63–64, 79. See also Jump, The Salle, David, 69–71, 204n48 Saltz, Jerry, 36 Salvador (film), 165 Schalková, Malvina, 96, 102 Schjeldahl, Peter, 39 Selected Shoes (Brauntuch), 172–73, 174 Seven Seals for Missouri Breaks, Silver Scene: “Let’s Go to the Hills and Join the Guerillas” (Longo), 121 Sex Pistols, 8–9 Shane (Goldstein), 70, 71, 80–81 Shapiro, Jeremy, 107 Sherman, Cindy, 65, 123, 162 Shock of the New (Hughes), 17 Siegel, Jeanne, 116, 120 “Signs” (Graham), 160–61 silkscreening, 149–50, 150, 151 Silverthorne, Jeanne, 104–5 Sirk, Douglas, 72–73 Six Minute Drown, The (Goldstein), 69, 80 Smith, Roberta, 100, 104 social memory. See collective memory Some Plates (Goldstein), 79 Sonic Youth, 215n41 Sontag, Susan, 12–13, 20, 39, 189n43, 207n3 Sony, 163, 164 Sound Distance of a Good Man (Longo), 128–29, 216n51, 217n52, 241 Sound Distance Parts I and II (Longo), 140 Spandau Ballet, 206n70 spectacle, 62, 66, 68 Spectacular Commodity, The (Branca), 124 Speer, Albert, 159, 159, 161–62, 210n42 Spiegelman, Art, 1, 2, 3–4, 185n4 Spiritual Resistance: Art from Concentration Camps, 1940–1945 (exhibition), 94, 96–97, 108 Squires, Carol, 162–63 Star Wars (Strategic Defense Initiative), 152–53

Stella, Frank, 16 Stills: creation of, 28–29, 29, 196n24, 196n27; cultural memory and, 40; the falling body and, 1, 3, 31; fascism and, 3; historical overtones and, 50–55; September 11 terrorist attacks and, 54; Unidentified Woman, Genesee Hotel and, 50–51, 53, 54; Unidentified Woman, Hotel Corona de Aragon, Madrid and, 50, 51–52; visual confrontation and, 32–34; Warhol and, 35–36. See also Charlesworth, Sarah Strange New Beauty, A (Brauntuch), 170– 72, 171, 173 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), 152–53 Supplying Repression: US Support for Authoritarian Regimes Abroad (Falk), 155 Surrender (Longo), 129–30, 130 Sword of the Pig (Longo), 114, 114 Symphony No. 3 (Gloria) (Branca), 125 Tatransky, Valentin, 69 temporality, 6, 36–37, 68–69, 79–81, 186n13 Thorak, Josef, 84, 102, 172 Thorak Studio (Brauntuch), 99 Three Effects (Brauntuch), 93, 239 Tongue to the Heart (Longo), 243 totalitarianism: modern media and, 62– 63; in place of fascism, 12 Total Recall (Bender), 143, 144, 146–47, 165–66 Trinity Broadcasting, 158, 162 Triumph of the Will, 67, 120 Trump, Donald, 28, 175, 228n7 Tschumi, Bernard, 185n1 Tucker, Marcia, 20 Turner Diaries, The (Pierce), 10 Two Boxers (Goldstein), 64 Two Fencers (Goldstein), 64, 64, 69 ultranationalism, 7. See also fascism Unidentified Woman, Hotel Corona de Aragon, Madrid (Charlesworth), 50, 51–52. See also Stills United Kingdom, 10 Index

237

238

United States: guerrilla organizations and, 22, 168; Holocaust consciousness and, 23; investment in El Salvador and, 155; mass cultural products and, 24; the 1970s and, 3; White Power movement and, 10 untimeliness, 36–37 Untitled (Brauntuch), 94, 238 Untitled (Goldstein), 59, 61–62, 234 Untitled (BlackHead) (Brauntuch), 87 Untitled (Eric) (Longo), 118 Untitled (Landscape, Computer Graphics, Death Squad) (Bender), 246 Untitled (Mercedes) (Brauntuch), 84, 94, 97, 237 Untitled (Rally) (Brauntuch), 94, 95 Untitled (Sculptor with Figures) (Brauntuch), 85 Untitled (Sculpture Drawings) (Brauntuch), 84 Untitled (Sleeping) (Brauntuch), 208n27 Untitled (The Pleasure Is Back), 149–50, 150, 151 Untitled (Three Drawings) (Brauntuch), 94 Untitled (Two Heads) (Brauntuch), 94 Untitled (White Head) (Brauntuch), 87 Untitled Film Stills, 65 “unwriting: Notes on Modern History” (Charlesworth), 42–44

Videodrome (film), 158, 225n56 visual language, 41 Voice (Morris), 17

VCRs, 163–64 Vergangenheitsbewältigung, 11

ZG, 74, 75, 76, 205n65

Index

Wall, Jeff, 161 Warhol, Andy, 232; the falling body and, 3; pop art and, 35, 39; Stills and, 28, 31, 34. See also Death and Disaster (Warhol) Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, The (Chomsky and Herman), 154–55 Weber, Sherry, 107 “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (Dick), 146 Wedge (magazine), 155 Weinbren, Grahame, 107 Welling, James, 77, 78, 79, 124 Western logocentrism, 21. See also collective memory White Power movement, 10 White Statue (Brauntuch), 92, 92 Wild Dead (Bender), 157 Willemen, Paul, 73 Winer, Helene, 67, 104–5, 210n51 Witkovsky, Matthew S., 54 “Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, The” (Benjamin), 147–48, 161 Wrestlers, The (Longo), 127