The Design of Race: How Visual Culture Shapes America 9781474299565, 9781474299572, 9781474299589, 9781474299541

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Figures
Plates
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Vestiges in Word and Image
2 Typography and Types
3 First Impressions: Lithography and the Packaging of Race
4 Photography by Design
5 Racialized Play, Caught in Real Time
Conclusion:
Index

Citation preview

i

THE DESIGN OF RACE

ii

ii

iii

THE DESIGN OF RACE How Visual Culture Shapes America

Peter Claver Fine

iv

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 © Peter Claver Fine, 2021 Peter Claver Fine has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Louise Dugdale Cover image: Anatolii Kovalov / iStock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fine, Peter Claver, author. Title: The design of race : how visual culture shapes America / Peter Claver Fine. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020024153 (print) | LCCN 2020024154 (ebook) | ISBN 9781474299572 (paperback) | ISBN 9781474299565 (hardback) | ISBN 9781474299558 (epub) | ISBN 9781474299541 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Race awareness in art. | Arts and society–United States. | Design–Social aspects–United States. | Communication in design–United States. Classification: LCC NX650.R34 F56 2021 (print) | LCC NX650.R34 (ebook) | DDC 701/.03–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024153 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024154 ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-9956-5 PB: 978-1-4742-9957-2 ePDF: 978-1-4742-9954-1 ePub: 978-1-4742-9955-8 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

v

CONTENTS

List of Figures  vi List of Plates  ix Preface  xi Acknowledgments  xix

Introduction  1 1 Vestiges in Word and Image  27 2 Typography and Types  65 3 First Impressions: Lithography and the Packaging of Race  97 4 Photography by Design  113 5 Racialized Play, Caught in Real Time  137 Conclusion: The Physiognomist’s Gimlet Eye  159 Index  169

vi

FIGURES

I

So Tender, So Tasty  xii

II

Wy*T*Fine  xii

III Camille Acker, No Sale, photograph, 2011  xiv IV Dianne DuVall, Ceramic work appropriating mass-market ceramic gravy boats and the now infamous lithograph of a diagram of a slave ship, 2007  xv V Detail: Dianne DuVall, Ceramic work appropriating mass-market ceramic gravy boats and the now infamous lithograph of a diagram of a slave ship, 2007  xv VI Myra Greene’s My White Friends and Christina Marsh, From Here to There, Cotton Rope installed in the Truman State University Art Gallery as part of the exhibition American Race in 2009  xvii 1.1 Glenn Ligon, Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Black Features and SelfPortrait Exaggerating My White Features, 1998  29 1.2 Washington, DC, April 20, 2018: A museum visitor admires a photographic silkscreen print by Barbara Kruger titled I Shop Therefore I Am at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the National Mall  42 1.3 Hank Willis Thomas, First Round Draft Pick, 2004  42 1.4 American Anti-Slavery Society, Am I Not a Man and a Brother?, 1837  43 1.5 John Heartfield, Fotomontage “Hitler” beieiner Ausstellung in Stockholm, 1967  44 1.6 Hank Willis Thomas, Jordan and Johnny Walker in Timberland Circa 1923, 2009  45

vii

figures

1.7

vii

Carrie Mae Weems, Jim, If You Choose to Accept, the Mission Is to Land on Your Own Two Feet, 1990  47

1.8

Carrie Mae Weems, Mirror, Mirror, 1987–8  49

1.9

Carrie Mae Weems, Black Man Holding Watermelon, 1987–8  51

1.10 Carrie Mae Weems, Black Woman with Chicken, 1987–8  52 1.11

Glenn Ligon, Study for Notes on the Margin of the “Black Book”, 1991  56

2.1

New England Type Foundry (1834), specimen of printing types from the New England Type Foundry   66

2.2

Eadward-Muybridge-Birds-in-Flight, 1887  72

2.3 Hank Willis Thomas, NBA Trade, 2004  79 2.4

Glenn Ligon, Runaways, 1993. One from a suite of ten lithographs   80

2.5

Glenn Ligon, Runaways, 1993. Four from a suite of ten lithographs  81

2.6

Glenn Ligon, Runaways, 1993. Five from a suite of ten lithographs  82

2.7

Glenn Ligon, Runaways, 1993. Six from a suite of ten lithographs  83

2.8

Glenn Ligon, Runaways, 1993. Eight from a suite of ten lithographs  84

2.9 Ebony Comedies advertising for Motion Picture News, 1918  86 2.10 Jill Weisberg, White Mirror, 2007  93 3.1

Anna Robinson performing Aunt Jemima  98

3.2 Rastus and mammy caricatures, Cream of Wheat advertisement  99 3.3

Goodie Two Shoes, Apple Pies  108

4.1

We’re Dreaming of a Black Christmas, Ebony magazine, 1968  119

4.2 Merry old Santa Claus. Woodcut by Thomas Nast, 1880s  121 4.3 Scarlett Johansson in person and in her role from Ghost in the Shell  129 5.1

Currier and Ives, Lawn Tennis at Darktown, The Champion  139

5.2 Currier and Ives, The Champions of the Ball Racket: On the Diamond Field, The Darktown Yacht Club  139 5.3

Darkie’s Day at the Fair (A Tale of Poetic Retribution) World’s Fair Puck, no. 16 (August 21, 1893)  140

5.4 Currier and Ives, The American National Game of Base Ball  142 5.5

TV Dinnertime, Well Acquainted  146

viii

viii

figures

A–D Kara Walker. Slavery! Slavery! Presenting a GRAND and LIFELIKE Panoramic Journey into Picturesque Southern Slavery or “Life at ‘Ol’ Virginny’s Hole’ (sketches from Plantation Life).” See the Peculiar Institution as never before! All cut from black paper by the able hand of Kara Elizabeth Walker, an Emancipated Negress and leader in her Cause, 1997  163

ix

PLATES

1 Michael Ray Charles, The Great White Hope, 1994 2 Michael Ray Charles, The Three Legged Man, 1995 3 Michael Ray Charles, An Army of Clowns, 1995 4 Michael Ray Charles, Mixed Breed, 1997 5 Michael Ray Charles, Elvis Lives, 1997 6 Michael Ray Charles, Hear Yo Freedom, 1997 7 Michael Ray Charles, Increase Yo Mobility, 1997 8 Michael Ray Charles, Beware, 1994 9 Hank Willis Thomas, O.J. Dingo, 1980/2007 10 Hank Willis Thomas, Ode to CMB: Am I Not a Man and a Brother?, 2005 11 Hank Willis Thomas, Basketball and Chain, 2003 12 Hank Willis Thomas, Shooting Stars, 2011 13 Carrie Mae Weems, Magenta Colored Girl, 1997 14 Carrie Mae Weems, A Negroid Type, 1995–6 15 Carrie Mae Weems, And You Became a Scientific Profile, 1995–6 16 Glenn Ligon, Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background), 1990 17 Glenn Ligon, “A Loner, Sad and Shy” (Profile Series), 1990–1 18 Glenn Ligon, Untitled (I Am Not Tragically Colored), 1990 19 Glenn Ligon, Untitled (I Remember the Very Day That I Became Colored), 1990 20 Glenn Ligon, Untitled (I Do Not Always Feel Colored), 1990 21 Glenn Ligon, Untitled (I Am Somebody), 1991 22 Glenn Ligon, Untitled (I Was Somebody), 1990–2003

x

x

plates

23 Jacob Munoz, from the series Unmovable Types, 2010 24 Uncle Ben’s food display 25 You Only Live Once, 1995, print with Penny 26 Rupert Garcia, No Mo O’ This Shit, 1969 27 First World War poster, Destroy This Mad Brute 28 M&Co., what if . . .?, COLORS #4, Spring–Summer 1993 29 M&Co., So, what's the difference, COLORS #4, Spring–Summer 1993 30 O. J. Simpson mugshot, 1994 31 Hank Willis Thomas, Branded Head, 2003 32 Hank Willis Thomas, Scarred Chest, 2003

xi

PREFACE

My work on this subject began in 2002 while working on my MFA thesis in studio art, on whiteness, at the University of Arizona. My project Beyond the Pale began as what I  assumed would be an exercise exploring naiveté—my own but also the general cultures. Only later did I  begin to see the larger implications of the relationship of naiveté to the banal hold whiteness has on our cultural imagination in the United States. The inspiration for my thesis began with my ruminations over Opie, the character from the Andy Griffith Show that I had watched as a child. I had never been able to reconcile how the character of a young boy seemingly not unlike Huck Finn could be pictured growing up in the rural south in the postwar period in the complete absence of African American characters, or even it seemed caricatures. In contrast to this, the major legal victories of the civil rights movement were being secured as I was born, and images of the struggle were still very often pictured on the news, in films, and in popular media during my early childhood. My brief engagement with this phenomenon of naiveté and the absence of racialized subjects in the popular culture of my youth evolved over time into a corporate identity project called Wy*T*Fine, where I situated myself as the penultimate icon of whiteness and its prime specimen. This work began with appropriation at its center—something I will explore more fully throughout this book and especially in Chapter 1 as central to the work of many contemporary African American artists. I appropriated the label for the canned pie filling My*T*Fine by inverting the M into a W to spell Wy*T*Fine (Figure II)—subverting the meaning to emphasize the acts of consumption and assimilation through corporate identities that support standardized branded foodstuffs as a metaphor for

xii

xii

Preface

FIGURE I  So Tender, So Tasty. Source: Peter Fine, collage, 2011.

FIGURE II  Wy*T*Fine. Source: Peter Fine, collage, 2002.

whiteness. The work developed through several stages wherein I  attempted to create an identity for whiteness similar to products such as Coca-Cola or Kleenex that dominate a specific product and packaging category, which like whiteness resist all efforts to diminish their mysterious, iconic power through imitation or dilution. The thesis culminated in five flattened and splayed packages that incorporated advertising images and typefaces from Life magazine from the first four years of my life, 1965–9.

xiii

Preface

xiii

During this process, a neighbor shared with me an article about an African American educator in Los Angeles who had taken a DNA test showing that he was in fact, genetically speaking, largely Native American and to a much smaller extent European and not at all sub-Saharan African. Through some research, he was able to deduce that his family had chosen to identify as “mulatto” during the late nineteenth century in Louisiana because of established community affiliations and during an especially intense moment in the enforcement of Jim Crow laws, especially as these affected Creoles. It is worth noting that the term “mulatto” was at times ascribed to people of mixed native and European ancestry. Shortly thereafter, I  took the same racial admixture test and discovered that I myself am 78 percent European and 22 percent Native American revealing an unusually high degree of Native American ancestry for a “white American.” I then used the data and other cultural information from the test results as the ingredients for the food packages used in my thesis work. This experience helped reinforce my views on the manner in which race is unseen in “whites” owing to assimilation and that this has produced and reinforced whiteness over time. Following my thesis work, I created an interdisciplinary graduate studioseminar, Visualizing Race, that I  first taught at Florida Atlantic University. The students, mostly artists, submitted a sample of their DNA to determine their racial admixture as defined by the test; after this, they produced work in response to this empirical evidence, the critical readings, and our discussions. I  encouraged the students to contextualize the results based upon the polarizing effects of representations of race as generally accepted as natural in the United States and to explore these effects and the efforts of artists and others in attempting to renegotiate the boundaries of race from positions normally unseen. I  encouraged the students to consider issues surrounding assimilation, immigration, racial admixture, colonization, and whiteness. I  asked each to consider the implications of the test results in relation to their own identity and the validity of the evidence as visualized in the test

xiv

xiv

Preface

FIGURE III  Camille Acker, No Sale, photograph, 2011. Work by the author Camille Acker, personal ethnography of her mother's experience of Jim Crow in Houston, TX, in the 1950s. Each shoe is inscribed with text that imagines her mother’s interaction with a clerk in a shoe store and the parallel plight of an enslaved ancestor. Courtesy: Camille Acker.

results and against the historical background of scientific racism and other forms of visualization. Additionally, I  asked them to reconsider the results compared to how their personal, ethnic, and racial identities had traditionally been established through nonempirical means such as language, phenotype, community affiliation, ritual objects, and other cultural traditions (Figures III through V). It was during this initial class that I first learned through a distant cousin that members of my father’s family were slaveholders and at the start of the civil war held among them eleven enslaved persons. I knew of their military service to the Confederacy but had assumed that they were poor farmers living in the mountainous, northwest corner of Arkansas, aligned only with their home state, not with a direct and concerted interest in the slave economy. It was this same family of five brothers whose mother was half Delaware who reveal at

xv

Preface

xv

FIGURE IV  Dianne DuVall, Ceramic work appropriating mass-market ceramic gravy boats and the now infamous lithograph of a diagram of a slave ship, 2007. Each gravy boat is filled with a mixture of molasses and cornmeal that was force-fed to the enslaved over the course of the transatlantic journey known as the middle passage.

FIGURE V  Detail: Dianne DuVall, Ceramic work appropriating mass-market ceramic gravy boats and the now infamous lithograph of a diagram of a slave ship, 2007.

least one link with my Native American ancestry. My great-great-grandfather Isaac Hamilton Fine who was a boy during the civil war went on to leave a record of his interaction with at least one of the five or six children held by his older brothers and father, an enslaved teenage girl named Jane frock. Recorded in an affidavit in 1898, he stated: I am well acquainted with the claimant, she was a slave before the war and belonged to my father Jonathan Fine, she is a little older than I am, we were raised as children together.

xvi

xvi

Preface

Isaac’s belief in the relative degree of intimacy that he shared with Jane parallels the written records of other whites in describing what they clearly believed were appropriate and meaningful bonds but which were more often than not contradicted by the accounts of the enslaved. I explore these intimate fictions further in looking at packaged food products in Chapter 2. On my mother’s maternal side, there exist letters from an ancestor who left behind his Quaker beliefs in order to fight in the Union Army in support of his antislavery beliefs. In one letter, in particular, he describes a gun he would soon carry into battle as having once belonged to John Brown. Later, I learned that many Union soldiers with abolitionist ideals claimed to also possess guns owned by John Brown. It occurred to me that this gun as an object operated like a piece of the “true cross” and an extension of Brown’s martyred body—a body broken in sacrifice and an index of the violence that civil war would bring—not Christ’s body but similar to John, the Baptist’s body executed in advance of the arrival of judgment brought through the prolonged sacrifice of the nation. This caused me to consider the operations of racism on the body, the body as object, and its ability to fragment and carry meaning over long periods of time. In 2009, I curated the exhibition American Race with my brother Professor, Aaron Fine at the Truman State University Art Gallery. We conceived American Race as a reflection on the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth—the midpoint of a timeline that connects the settlement of Jamestown to the inauguration of President Obama. Through the exhibition (Figure VI), we intended to ask how race has defined what it is to be an American and how its polarizing effects have served to mythologize the American. The contemporary context of the exhibition reflected how US borders have come to be seen as increasingly insecure and at risk from without and within, while the actual geography of the United States has been continually redefined by its ever-expanding power. Historically, the irregularity of these borders has been a constant rather than a recent and unique phenomenon. Through the exhibit, we sought out how

xvi

Preface

xvii

FIGURE VI  Myra Greene’s My White Friends and Christina Marsh, From Here to There, Cotton Rope installed in the Truman State University Art Gallery as part of the exhibition American Race in 2009.

these effects have been visualized over time, over borders, and written upon the landscape. We sought work by artists exploring the variegated edges of Americanness and race, and who sought to counter or speak to the visual archive of US American identity from all sides. Some of the work exhibited came from projects by students in my class Visualizing Race. This course name provides an overarching theme for the work I have pursued in design, art, writing, curating, and teaching for more than fifteen years. The work done by my students represents as does my MFA work on whiteness Beyond the Pale, their particular positions within this arc, and the dialectic of race and representation within art and design. A portion of this informs how I have chosen to pursue this book partly as an exploration of whiteness and my own complicity in its workings. This connects me with my personal motives for extending and perhaps concluding my original thesis

xvi

xviii

Preface

project and possibly coming to terms with whiteness, race, and representation as central to visual culture and creative production in the United States for a professor of graphic design. This book is, as was my thesis, a response to my education and work as a graphic designer. There is in design a philosophical and pragmatic devotion to truth—truth to process and truth to materials—that drew me to take stock of whiteness as the most essential and problematic material of American life as white supremacy realized in visual form through the art of mechanical reproduction. This is my effort to understand the true meaning of the forms I have employed as a designer, especially in the ways that the verbal and the visual in graphic design create double meanings and often work reductively. The fact that the images and texts were drawn from the preverbal and formative years of my life, a life lived partly through popular culture has made the project seem even more essential. Many of the images are also gendered around an ideal image of childhood, which may allow the reader to conclude what they will of my relationship to the consumption of images and words.

xix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I began this project on race and representation in graphic design in 2002 while I  was pursuing my masters of fine arts (MFA), in visual communication, at the University of Arizona (UA). I  must then begin by thanking my thesis committee Jackson Boelts, Kelly Leslie, Karen Zimmerman, Paul Ivey, and especially Ellen McMahon, my graduate advisor, who allowed me time to pursue research in design history in parallel with my studio art production. Consequently, my MFA thesis “Beyond the Pale” developed into a hybrid of the two. That research also led to the creation of a series of lectures I  gave in studio arts classes. These then became part of the first course in graphic design history that I co-taught with Karen Zimmerman for majors in visual communications at UA. In 2005, following graduate school and while I was a new assistant professor, I  developed the first interdisciplinary, graduate studio-seminar course at Florida Atlantic University based largely on my experience in generating my MFA thesis work. This course, Visualizing Race, included graduate students from across the studio arts, creative writing, and interdisciplinary arts doctorate students. I most sincerely thank these students for their contributions to this project. Many of the insights in this book arose from the discussions of the many critical texts we read together. The wide variety of media and the student’s personal voices and diverse backgrounds further cultivated the book’s thesis. My brother, Professor Aaron Fine, has also figured importantly in the arc of this project. In 2009, we cocurated the exhibit American Race at the Truman State University Art Gallery. It questioned how race has defined what it is to be an American and how its polarizing effects serve to mythologize that American. In 2008, we cowrote and presented White Out, Extraordinary Rendition as

xx

xx

Acknowledgments

Metaphor for Assimilation for a panel at the College Art Association annual conference in Los Angeles in 2009. Subsequently, in 2010, we were pleased to publish this paper as a chapter in Racism and Borders:  Representation, Repression, Resistance. I received support for this project from the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Wyoming to present drafts of chapters and speak on panels at conferences including the American Studies Annual meetings in 2016 and 2017. I had help and feedback on early drafts of these chapters from the African American and Diaspora Studies reading circle at the University of Wyoming. Sarah Hagelin, Aaron Fine, and Kat Alexandrova read and edited multiple drafts and chapters. I must thank Mrs. Ivanovich, my high school history teacher, who taught Black History for which I  wrote a term paper on Marcus Garvey and also thanks to the 220 students who put up with me throughout that class. Finally, I must thank my parents, Charlotte LaGalle and Warren Fine, who named me for the patron saint of enslaved peoples, Pedro Claver, which seems to have set me on a course to explore the subject of this book.

1

Introduction

Crucial to a full understanding of the visual culture of graphic design in the United States are its material manifestations embedded in the very language of typography itself. Both the common terms—stereotype and typecasting—refer to processes involving the production of hot metal type and describe written language in solid form—a form with the ability to reproduce and multiply across a wide variety of media. However, the original meanings of these widely used terms have been obscured over time. Their essential meanings contradict our assumptions about the ephemerality of printed matter and its power to fix meaning related to race in the cultural imagination. This book begins with the assumption that the shared visual culture of the United States was established through material means largely over the course of the nineteenth century involving technologies that fixed it as essentially racialized. This occurred in step with a rapidly expanding diversity and fluidity in graphic arts production that defined the modern American experience through the art of mechanical reproduction concurrent with the mobility of African Americans post emancipation. I consider here the visual and material manifestations of this process through partial histories of three essential technologies of the art of mechanical reproduction and contemporary design and art-making. Technologies to which we now more often attribute sublime qualities as rarified art forms and processes—all of which worked to first fix racial

2

2

The Design of Race

stereotypes in the nineteenth century—typography, lithography, and photography. I  also consider how images originating in print migrated across a wide variety of media including ordinary objects of design, film, and television. I also closely consider how contemporary African American artists have appropriated these forms and media to exhibit the effects of racist and racialized images on their own experience as racialized subjects scrutinized by the lens of white supremacy.

Graphic Design as Visual Culture The work of this book entails describing the centrality of race to US graphic design specifically as visual culture and as the site for a large portion of the material production of visual representations of race. I  will be looking largely to design studies to provide the basis for speaking to the complexity of design’s impact on racial representations, especially its place in creating the distinctly visual experience of race as an act of seeing difference through mechanically reproduced images and texts. I must make clear up front that the intent of this book is anti-racist and not simply a means to describe how to make progress toward a more tolerant society. For graphic design, it is a mechanism for coming to terms with its own position and whiteness just as it is a means for me to understand my own subject position related to race in the United States. The way in which race is constituted in the United States’ imagination is unique in its polarizing mythology relative to other nations and regions, even those that are also highly impacted by colonization and the slave trade. The explicitly black-and-white nature of this mythology has magnified its visual nature, and the broad worldwide influence of US culture has further intensified its reach. I should state that this book is intended primarily for makers of graphic design, visual art, and other creative practitioners seeking to understand

3

Introduction

3

the ways that the forms they use are rich in cultural meaning and freighted with racist and racialized histories. For the graphic designer, making images and reading them are practiced simultaneously in a manner similar to Tony Morrison’s description of coming to terms with a text as a writer rather than simply as a reader. If designers are to continue to produce work and do so ethically, the meanings encoded in the forms they use must be understood and known for their historical significance. This is especially crucial now in a time of increased conflict over the very language, images, and media employed to discuss race in online media. Deep within how graphic design operates are its relationships to all other forms of design mediating our ties to many other designed experiences as well as many aspects of visual and material culture. This occurs regardless of the aesthetic quality of the graphics and depends on graphic designers to produce work in a contemporary context but as part of a long history of the graphic arts. Ignoring this has helped to produce the very blind spots that sideline race and racism in almost all discussions of graphic design. I should note that my intent is to offer a historical context for implicitly and explicitly racist modes of making and therefore thinking in graphic design not as a historian but as a critic. This criticism is both my thoughts here on paper and also my own critical making, which I detail in Chapter 3. It is often the cheap and nasty, vernacular and hackneyed, ephemeral graphics that escape our notice because they do not fall within the canon of graphic design history. Because these pass quickly before our eyes escaping our attention, we very often take them for granted not realizing how they shape the meanings of race both during their production by designers and their consumption by audiences. There has, until this book, been no singular text written for or by graphic designers on the subject of critical race studies that attempts to explain the field’s relationship to race and representation. This has persisted despite the constant production and reproduction of representations, produced daily by graphic designers and the preponderance of racialized images

4

4

The Design of Race

within the visual culture of the United States. Mine, I  hope, is the first among many books. This lack has largely been the result of an absence of a serious consideration of graphic design as visual culture and the general neglect of the implementation of the forms, tools, and methods of graphic design in a critical engagement apart from the demands of the marketplace. This continues despite the emphasis in design education and practice on design as a commodity even when one of the clearest examples of design in its commodity form can be seen in racialized imagery. My book seeks to understand the historical legacy of design artifacts bearing exchange value by examining the ways that blackness and black bodies were created and reproduced to initiate the very market for commodified imagery. The space in which these artifacts were created has often been the workspaces of graphic design—first upon the page and now the screen. In this space of largely anonymous cultural production, graphic designers have played with images and texts, often in combination. It is the very play with these forms that has helped to maintain racist and racialized images such as the tradition of blackface minstrelsy. Eric Lott describes the codes of blackface minstrelsy as inherently fluid, reflecting contradictory impulses that collide and merge, shift again, and mutate continuously as a site of negotiation over racial roles created in the production of blackness.1 In Love and Theft, he describes how these became commodified forms to deal with the complexity and ambiguity of race in US culture upon the stage. Graphic design production is itself often about the designer’s interest in ambiguity, a curiosity about how visual forms interact in often contradictory and/or complementary fashions. Ironically, the field has almost entirely ignored race as a subject while racial representation across a plethora of visual and material forms has defined how representation occurs in US culture. It should be noted that although most graphic design is produced anonymously, the vast majority of graphic designers are white, which compounds the whiteness of the field since whiteness operates largely in ways that are invisible.

5

Introduction

5

In my own graduate work in studio arts on the subject of whiteness, I  was able to rely to a limited degree on visual culture texts written by art historians, literary theory, and cultural studies for a theoretical framing of my creative production. Despite the large body of work on the subject especially from scholars of film and photography, design has typically ignored this specialization even given the centrality of typography, lithography, and photography to graphic design’s impact on racist representations. The absence of a voice in design history or design studies on race affords room for a design critic and maker to discuss the importance of the history of design and technologies of reproduction as racialized. It is vital that a dialogue emerge on the subject given the persistent impact of visual ephemera in the digital age, one where whiteness persists. This is especially true given that graphic design is currently so often the subject of “media criticism,” lumping graphic and all forms of digital design together with a wide variety of forms and technologies of dissemination. I contend that media is too broad a term and no longer speaks to the high degree of mediation in contemporary life and culture. It remains to design to critically refigure the artifacts of our visual and material culture as design. As I seek to describe the intersections of visual and material culture as they have defined race, this book provides a unique means to comprehending the largely unexamined role of design in the semiotics of representation in the United States as inherently racialized. I have, of necessity, strived to come to terms with the various theories of semiotics in order to ground this work as a study of typography as the material of language. All of these theories are to some degree pertinent to graphic design, and all of them shed light on the work of graphic design and designers as they produce representative forms and as the culture consumes them. Though none, perhaps, wholly describes the application of theory to the making of designed images and texts for mass consumption. Many of the ideas proposed by semiotics seem to reflect an interest in complexity as a value limiting their direct application to graphic design. Coming to terms with them seems to me, at least, not unlike

6

6

The Design of Race

disassembling and reassembling a firearm blindfolded and then removing the blindfold to discover you have instead created an elaborate balloon animal. In my own graduate studio work, it was Walter Benjamin in Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction2 that best spoke to the immediate need for my work to be both original and critically engaged, and recognize the historical impact of design as culture. Julie Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality as outlined specifically by Johanna Drucker in The Visible Word3 provides a near word-for-word description of the complex task that I set for myself of critically researching through making while developing my master of fine arts (MFA) thesis on whiteness. Though many disciplines claim Benjamin’s text on mechanical reproduction as seminal to their field, graphic designers actually work out its significance materially. This continues despite the invisible workings of whiteness, the fictive white subject, and the intangible nature of graphic design in the digital age. My own position in the dialogue on race in visual culture began with my creative production on whiteness, as a “white” subject. Through that work, I came to many of the same conclusions visually in my creative production as scholars writing on critical race theory. That is why I  tend to speak subjectively throughout this text to indicate to the readers my awareness of my own subject position that includes a white privilege born out of whiteness. I must also make very clear again that this book is anti-racist in its intent and not simply another step in the right direction. There are by my estimation about as many people who are committed anti-racists as there were actual abolitionists prior to emancipation—very few indeed. It is easy to assume that if we hold liberal views and think in terms of progressive values, we are working directly against racists and racism, but this assumption produces a blind spot.

Whiteness and an-“Other” I must strive to thoroughly consider whiteness in this book because graphic design as visual culture allows the production of a hyper-visible black body

7

Introduction

7

while also at once misrepresenting African Americans in ways that allow the white subject to ignore the other’s actual lived experience as visual subjects. Intrinsic to the mechanics of this are the blind spots that whiteness produces. What is confounding for the black subject is that the violence of white supremacy produces trauma that the banality of whiteness denies exists at all. The experience of trauma created by this then produces the experience of existing in those blind spots despite being able to see that others are blinded to your experience. That trauma then produces individuals unable to escape the experience of living in their own blind spot. The white subject is one produced to reinforce one’s own omnipresent position while the black subject is forced upon an-“other.” The blind spot is the primary visual metaphor of race that I will return to throughout this book. It allows the white subject to stand in a position to observe through a visual frame established during the Renaissance—a position described by John Berger4 as reserved for that subject in the Western tradition of looking toward a vanishing point but while not being looked upon. One-point perspective only provides an illusion of comprehensive sight. In fact, it limits seeing and undermines its own emphasis on the omniscient position of the white subject. In the periphery, there remain blind spots that deny the viewer access to a plurality of perspectives. These are the very spots within which African American creative production has occurred out of sight. The white subject meanwhile may claim to be “colorblind” and to “not see race,” but this is a willful blindness born of privilege. I look closely at African American artists producing work beyond the confines of graphic design but while employing many of its forms and tropes. I make the claim that this is significant because the majority of graphic designers and design educators remain white.

Images of the Labor of Black Bodies Throughout this book, I  examine the ways that African American artists have described these traumas by employing the primary forms of graphic

8

8

The Design of Race

design—especially texts and graphic images based on typography, lettering and letterforms, lithography, and photography. Their play with these forms speaks loudly to the ways that representations actually work to produce a subject. These artists activate their subjects in the blind spots between word and image and in the ways they play with the tension between these forms in a manner similar to graphic design production. Their constructions and the material ways in which they express them point directly to how graphic design can be used to critically examine the myth of white supremacy and the blind spots of whiteness through creative production. This is why I want to stress the materiality of the forms and media of graphic design as central to how meaning is produced through combining and recombining words and images. It is in this very making and remaking that we actually see how we subscribe to a visual culture that is essentially racialized. A visual culture formed through images of the labor of black bodies. The artists I discuss comprehend through their own lived experience that as long as black bodies are made to serve in this manner, they will hold value and be devalued as well, and then used and reused as commodities. The patterns of reuse and remaking employed by these artists declare the use value of the commodified black body and its essential function in the creation of US visual culture. They show us that the meaning of that culture rests on a foundation of the consumption of racialized images.

The Ideology of the Ideal: The Visual Cure I must also contend with the culture of US graphic design in the mid-twentieth century and the effort as I see it to establish an ideologically and seemingly racially, neutral aesthetic space for design—a “white space” if you will. My main objective is to question the dominance of the International or Swiss Style over US American and African American aesthetics. I want to seriously and critically assess the rhetoric of graphic design for its often naïve approach to

9

Introduction

9

race as central to how representation functions in US visual culture. I assert, as I have previously in Sustainable Graphic Design, Principles and Practice that formalist representations of graphic design in the postwar period epitomized by this style were an effort to codify—design as an ideology—resulting in its reification as the ideal. I borrow my own phrase, “the ideology of the ideal,” from ­chapter 5 of that book. This style’s representation as the ideal, rather than as it truly was ideological, was in reality a static representation of the machine aesthetic one already being replaced by postmodernism. Problematic to this is the centrality of western European male designers to the style in nearly every case and their broad efforts to establish it as the dominant style of the period. It seems highly unlikely that in an emerging postcolonial context that a small cadre of largely Swiss and German designers could possibly have developed and executed a “universal style” of design applicable to all peoples and in all places even if nonindustrialized countries were excluded. Much of the language surrounding the style used to recommend it closely hews to the more pernicious terms describing whiteness. It was and continues to be lauded for its neutrality, transparency, purity, and universality all terms that are code for whiteness5. The style persists as an important, dominant narrative of graphic design history, and in the minds of many in graphic design the penultimate expression of modernism. I  would though question its relevance as a cultural import, its doctrinaire approach, Eurocentrism, and its supposedly rational and scientific basis. The fact that the International Style was widely adopted by US corporations operating globally especially through architecture and corporate identity systems speaks not to its universality but to its brute force. This effort to establish an ideologically and—seemingly racially neutral space—was only formally aligned with many of the original goals of the new typography. A  typography forwarded by Jan Tschichold before the Second World War and then afterward rejected by him for what he came to believe were its sympathies with fascism.6 I would further criticize the International Style beyond Tschichold’s for its close resemblance to the workings of whiteness

10

10

The Design of Race

and its pernicious, retrogressive influence on US visual culture. The values proposed by many modernist typographers included efforts to create forms mimicking machine aesthetics to engender transparency, empiricism, and the ever-elusive value of universality. I say elusive because it has proven impossible for design to achieve and again for the term’s resemblance to whiteness, which operates invisibly and claims universality as a virtue.7 The purveyors of the style’s persistent use of these terms imply that it represents the logical outcome of the new typography and modernism itself—a result countered by the pluralistic qualities of the US cultural experience, earlier more radical modernist design, and the simultaneous work of the postmodernists. The success of this style in its alignment with corporate architecture, technocracy, and corporate identity in the postwar period, especially throughout the Vietnam era and the civil rights movement, allowed this stylistic innovation to lay claim to the progressive legacy of the new typography while also ignoring it. The supposedly nonideological thrust of the style did not in reality exclude dogmatism, revealing that the space it created was in fact implicitly and purposefully ideological. I  argue that this ideology contained latent, racist tendencies realized through racialized rhetoric both visual and written. This is distinct from the consistent exclusion of marginalized groups from the design canon. This is important because the wide, seemingly popular adoption of the style leaves very little if any space for African American vernacular forms to occur or remain. I have not attempted in this book to amend the canon to cover more African American designers, an important project but not within the scope of this book.

The Visual Cure A potent example of the ideology of the ideal appears in the film Helvetica that opens with a headshot of Massimo Vignelli, himself an icon of modernism.

11

Introduction

11

Vignelli addresses the camera and describes the practice of graphic design as an effort to “cure visual disease.” He appears unaware of the history of this exclusively racialized rhetoric and his own relationship to the American experience of race and the perception of him as an émigré designer rather than one among many immigrants. He goes further in describing the visual disease as related to postmodernism. He brushes aside the pluralistic impulses of postmodernism, implying that it is not an agent of inclusion stemming from a diverse society but perhaps a vestigial strain of modernism opposing the hegemony of the International Style. Vignelli’s comments do have a historical though highly questionable precedent in design dating to at least Adolf Loos’s 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime.”8 Loos directly aligns ornament with the supposed degeneracy of “primitive cultures,” women, and children. Vignelli’s comments reveal the latent but surprising reemergence of racialized language within a field intrinsic to visual culture production and typically aligned with progressive ideals. In another case, Victor Papanek in his seminal Design for the Real World compared planned obsolescence to miscegenation—a term created in the nineteenth century to describe interracial admixture.9 Strange as it seems, even Papanek who was at the forefront of eco-criticism in design used highly racialized language to describe the negative, consumerist outcomes of design in the postwar years. Paradoxically, he made it quite clear that he understood race played a large part in situating waste downstream of the first world. Christina Cogdell has carefully traced the influence of eugenics on industrial design in the form of streamlining.10 No such record has yet been uncovered that informs how implicit racism has remained so resilient within the language of graphic design. The persistent presence of regressive notions of race within the language of design suggests that despite its reformist roots, it too embraced exclusivity and thus instituted a cadre of insiders that has historically included very few African Americans reinforcing the whiteness of the field.

12

12

The Design of Race

I would go further in suggesting that the International Style as an import represents within a US context an effort to create a—white cultural space—free of vernacular American and African American cultural and representational modes. Modes that by nature are meant to resist dominant cultural impulses, creating a rich intertextual experience of life in word and image. This raises the question of how much we are ignoring in the visual culture of the nineteenth century an emerging African American visual vernacular since the black press is not represented in any of the graphic design textbooks that students in the United States would be exposed to. As graphic designers exist as a professional class dependent on text and image to make meaning, we must at least consider the impact of the raft of printed ephemera with which we are surrounded and which we consume. It is possible that lost within both Eurocentric graphic design modes and the nascent consumer culture of the nineteenth century is a hidden history of design that only recently has been fully revealed by contemporary African American artists as I  examine in Chapter  1. Graphic design history has definitively ignored the presence of the very black bodies on which the value of much of our visual culture has relied—bodies bought, sold, and spent as commodities. Phillip Meggs’s canon of graphic design history, A History of Graphic Design, was beginning in 1983, and for more than twenty years the first and only graphic design history textbook for students in the United States and which also contained an entire chapter devoted to the International Style. This continued with little critical commentary on the ideological assumptions of the style or its involvement in defining the corporate aesthetic of the postwar period, while also denuding modernism of its radical roots. Meggs also included a separate and complete chapter devoted entirely to corporate identity. While not ignoring the seminal and radicalizing influence of dadaism, futurism, and constructivism to the legacy of graphic design, Meggs did to some extent reify the International Style and support the supposed logic of it being the terminal end game of modernism in graphic design.11 This teleological approach to

13

Introduction

13

design aesthetics made new approaches, and forms such as “grunge” seem strikingly radical and iconoclastic by comparison and therefore handily ignored by the dogmatists of the International Style. Stephen Eskilson, in his 2007 book Graphic Design: A New History, did not devote the same degree of neutral rhetoric to the supposedly objective clarity of the International Style. In it, he quickly recognizes that its success was owed directly to its patronage by large US-based corporations and included corporate identity in his same chapter The Triumph of the International Style.12 He also spoke immediately to the denuding of the radical roots of modernist typography in order to make these visual forms serviceable to large corporate interests—interests more concerned with the style’s formulaic approach to designing than in what the originators of these forms intended. This produced a house style for corporate communication, a style that was not so much timeless as airless and which avidly avoided personal subjectivity. Eskilson again dispensed with Meggs’s neutral voice when speaking of the supposedly rational basis for the style and its dubious claim to a scientific approach to designing. The logic of the style is found less in its supposed rationality and negligible scientific approach than in its demand that the world be corporatized. Its ubiquity was less a result of its broad acceptance as culturally desirable than in the ability of corporations to exercise their power over forms big and small, in every nook and cranny from the top of the Seagram’s building to Helvetica set in nine points over ten and in a manner not unlike whiteness. As Eskilson’s was the first textbook on graphic design history to be published after Meggs’s canon on the subject, again the only textbook of its kind for some twenty years, it came under immediate criticism. Perhaps this was due to his implicit criticism of the International Style, but it was also certainly because Meggs who passed away at an early age was a beloved figure in the field. It is obvious that much of the criticism was intellectually narrow, ahistorical, and intended to stave off any sustained, critical analysis of graphic design in the United States. To defend the excellent and groundbreaking scholarship of

14

14

The Design of Race

Meggs’s and his reputation through personal attack on another scholar only points to the irrational dogmatism of graphic designers still beholden to their fetishism of this style well into the digital age and the twenty-first century. Importantly there is also Meggs’s consideration of Victorian art and aesthetics related to the plethora of graphic imagery of the nineteenth century. Much of the racialized visual culture of the United States was produced, and racial stereotypes were established in this period during the formation of our shared, nascent consumer culture. Here Meggs considers Victorian graphic design for its “traditional values.” Victorian graphic design captured and conveyed the values of the era. Sentimentality, nostalgia, and a canon of idealized beauty were expressed through printed images of children, maidens, puppies, and flowers. Traditional values of home, religion, and patriotism were symbolized with sentimentality and piety. The production medium for this outpouring of Victorian popular graphics was chromolithography, an innovation of the industrial revolution that unleashed a flood of colorful printed images.13 Meggs does not address—whose values—were being represented so colorfully through this revolutionary new technology. He seems unconcerned about the appeal of these images of “idealized beauty” nor their lasting nostalgia and reification of whiteness as a visible sign of racial purity. Meggs does not seek to counter this with racist visual representations of the era despite the fact that racist images produced by Currier and Ives, one of the largest lithography houses of the period was kept in business, saved by the explicitly racist series they produced at great profit. Drucker and McVarish gave a more nuanced, critical view of graphic design history in 2008 with another graphic design history textbook, Graphic Design:  A Critical History. They demonstrated that there remains plenty of room for multiple graphic design history textbooks, especially one that takes an explicitly critical approach. Here again like Eskilson, they devote only a

15

Introduction

15

single chapter to corporate identity and the International Style as a single whole. Drucker and McVarish begin their book with a critical salvo aimed at graphic design history set in a bold line of red, sans serif type, and strung over eight pages. Graphic Design is never just there. Graphic artifacts always serve a purpose and contain an agenda, no matter how neutral or natural they appear to be. Someone is addressing someone else, for some reason, through every object of designed communication. The graphic forms of design are expressions of the forces that shape our lives. We need a critical history of graphic design.14 The lack of a sustained critical history of graphic design, specifically in the United States is the result of several complex, historical factors in design education and practice. What is harder to explain is the issue’s persistence to this day. Graphic designers themselves are most often in sympathy with progressive causes, but the oblivious acceptance of the systematic and absolutist aspects of the International Style by many professionals and educators has been at odds with this. Drucker and McVarish are quite blunt in their assessment of the style, stating that “the pretense of a neutral, universal basis for rational communication also served to erase ethnic, cultural, economic, and political differences.”15 Drucker and McVarish point out that it was the corporation’s coopting of “identity” by these nonhuman entities itself that are so highly problematic.16 The style helped make corporations be felt and sensed by the public as singular yet noncorporeal entities while stifling, erasing, and obfuscating diverse voices.17 In light of this, the style’s utilitarian emphasis on function over individual expression seems much more sinister. In fact, the corporation as an abstract, anonymous entity, systematically concealing complex technologies

16

16

The Design of Race

and economies resembles very closely the operations of whiteness itself. In the end, a history of graphic design that lacks a critical analysis leaves no room for an examination of race.

Seeding the Postmodern Experience Necessary to understanding our visual culture is the lived experience of African Americans in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This period of reconstruction, the rapid expansion of Jim Crow, and the formulation of the new south seeded modernism itself before it had formed.18 This transpired partly through the visual phenomenon, which W. E. B. Du Bois termed double consciousness; the bodily and visual response to the experience of holding an image of oneself as seen by others as intrinsically alien, while maintaining or attempting a truer or authentic internal relationship to oneself. Shawn Michele Smith’s work on this subject as it pertains to Du Bois’ coining of this and other visual metaphors of race established an understanding of the racialized experience of the African American as fundamentally visual.19 In essence, I  argue that if we are to understand US visual culture, we need to comprehend the African American experience because it has been lived through the objectifying lens of a US visual culture dominated by white supremacy. Much of what many “white Americans” came to view in the middle and late twentieth century as a modern American experience that was alienating to their individual selves, labor, and creativity was in fact, first lived—as a visually reproduced experience of otherness—by African Americans as early as Reconstruction and certainly well established as Jim Crow gained widespread dominance. As Toni Morrison details, this is intimately fused with the notion of the American as a new white man.20 Double consciousness is vividly demonstrated in the ways that graphic design utilizes the duality of words and images if viewed through the work of contemporary African American artists who also work

17

Introduction

17

primarily with these forms. The key to this is seeing how our visual culture shaped this experience originally through printed matter that fixed images of the African and later the “Negro” in mythological forms and that sought to substantiate the fears of the majority white population through images and texts. In the simplest terms possible, postmodernism did not follow upon modernism but was born in and through it. This becomes apparent when we consider the more pluralistic impulses and shifting boundaries in US visual culture of the second half of the twentieth century. These shifts occurred as whiteness expanded and the media of television and film, contemporary art, and youth culture emerged to produce conflicts between individual identity and group identities. Central to this was not simply visual culture but specifically graphic design, realized through the expanding hegemony of print media and rapidly assisted by the advancing technologies of cultural production in film and television. Progressivist notions typically associated with technology were contradicted by the desire of white Americans to use whiteness and technology to maintain dominance over racialized and visualized others. The result was the visual evidence of latent impulses in the desire to utilize technologies of mechanical reproduction to not simply maintain racial hierarchies and their economic advantages but to encode within this racial violence perpetrated to enforce white supremacy. Basic to the workings of whiteness and its success is its essentially visual nature that makes blackness a thing that is seen, gazed at, and acted upon. This left African Americans with little agency over how they were represented other than to experience themselves as a visual phenomenon, yet truly never seen as themselves, caught within white supremacy’s ever omnipresent eye.

Summary In Chapter 1, I examine the dual use of racialized texts and images as central to the work of five important contemporary African American artists—Michael Ray Charles, Hank Willis Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, Glenn Ligon, and

18

18

The Design of Race

Lorna Simpson. These artists often rely on the seemingly naïve application of vernacular graphics of the formative, commodity-driven roots of US visual culture. They then revisualize many of the forms associated with this period and their direct impact on their lived experience as subjects. They reappropriate and interrogate their meanings to subvert or invert them, reworking graphic lettering, letterforms, and typography as signifiers of their artistic agency. The presence of text within their work makes clear that these pieces are designed to be read. The words in their work at times appear to confirm or deny the visual stereotypes presented or confront their flaws to reveal the gaps between text and image, past and present, and subject and object. I  consider their work as the creation of a new intertextuality of word and image and as an expression of the play between identity and stereotype in relation to the optics of racialized seeing. I analyze their responses to this experience in reasserting black identity against the spectacle of blackness and against the grain of white supremacy. A White supremacy seen by them not as an expression of racism alone but—the very material of racism—formed in words and images. These artists resist the denial of their agency by reasserting their presence within the same visual landscape in which they have been silenced and removed. Crucial to their work are bodies especially as evidenced within the context of a US visual culture founded in racialized representations. They write and rewrite upon images and usually side by side with the bodies they picture. Many of the works deal with flattened planes, figures of absence, and collapses that directly confront the “pure” formalism of modernism. These artists draw upon the material experience of words and the effects of rereading these in direct opposition to racialized imagery as a means to confront racism. In Chapter  2, I  examine typography—cast metal type—and how its materiality impacts its visual potency. I focus first on the specimen type of a fugitive slave produced by the New England type foundry in 1854. Mobilized across the pages of print media, the escapee is permanently situated as enslaved within a system of mass reproduction. He personifies the concept of the

19

Introduction

19

runaway but never the actual person described in the text, while being both text and image in a single containable body. He is literally a piece of type but operates metaphorically as a stereotype. This figure who has been mobilized as a piece of type, a woodcut, and an engraving begins my examination of how racialized and racist images mutate across media over many decades. I detail throughout the book how this parallels a fetishistic interest in black bodies and anxiety over whether those bodies could actually be contained post emancipation. I consider closely the use and reuse of commodified, black bodies like the runaway throughout this book. I detail how they collect value by condensing many bodies into singular, stereotypical images. In melding many bodies in one “type,” a racialized commodity is produced and is then utilized to represent value but never an individual person. The more recent metaphorical overuse of the term stereotype has undermined a critical reading of the material and metaphorical forms of graphic design. This has compounded the assumption that graphic design can occupy a nonideological space apart from its roots in consumer culture and its reliance on racialized and racist images. Scholars often fail to see the runaway as more than a specific type in the contemporary, metaphoric sense. He is though quite literally a piece of type and the material expression of slavery and written language. He is not only trapped figuratively within a symbolic system of white supremacy as an icon, he is trapped literally within the bed of a printing press as a single, contained, racialized body. The printing press begins my discussion of the logic of the machine that threads throughout this book in my quest to comprehend how racist representations persist covertly through objects and images of design. Throughout the book, I interrogate how racialized figures trouble the way that graphic design melds text and image and complicates how we see race simultaneously in both these forms. Following this, I again look at African American artists currently working to subvert their own subject position by appropriating these troubling figures and the texts that accompany them. I  look at specific print advertisements

20

20

The Design of Race

seeking runaways in the work of Hank Willis Thomas and Glenn Ligon who testify to the lingering effects of print culture on the lived experience of African Americans yet another thread throughout the book. I  reread these historical artifacts of design for how they paint portraits of the enslaved in words and therefore typography as the material expression of language. In these artifacts, I  first encounter language describing mixed-race people and how miscegenation historically complicated racialized seeing. This initiates a discussion of miscegenation, assimilation, and passing that contribute to the blind spots intrinsic to whiteness that weave through this book. I close with an examination of the work of two graphic design, graduate students from my Visualizing Race course who worked with typography as a primary signifier of race and principal component in the grammar of graphic design. From here, I  initiate a discussion of the signifying practices of graphic design that the African American artists I  discuss throughout the book enlist to challenge the white supremacy inherent to US visual culture—especially how words and images paired together in graphic design double and redouble meaning, collapse many meanings into one, and act reductively upon the black body. In Chapter  3, I  examine how lithography wedded word and image in a single impression:  a “first impression” that could be mass-produced, and circulated, to then be mass consumed. I  look at this consumption primarily through packages of ordinary foodstuffs featuring racist avatars. Chromolithography’s use in the production of paperboard packages, bags, and tins bearing images of African Americans as avatars of consumption and labor was fundamental to the creation of our essentially racialized US visual culture. I  show how Aunt Jemima packaged this phenomenon and personified the “Mammie,” while neatly containing white anxieties about the increasing mobility of African Americans within the emerging public spheres of mass production and consumption post emancipation. The use of these images in domesticating factory foods contributed to effectively ameliorating anxiety over modernity. One male complement of hers was Rastus, another

21

Introduction

21

fictional character pictured on Cream of Wheat boxes, who emasculated and reduced the African American male’s many bodies, labor, and products into a simplistic image. These figures encoded leisure for white consumers under the guise of folk traditions while shilling for the nascent realm of industrialized food production. These types have long outlasted their time and place and persist even today as some of the most valuable brands in the marketplace. They wear blackface to mask the many complications of race and capital in securing white privilege and supremacy. Like all examples of “good design,” their brand equity is produced and multiplied through their power to persuade again and again graphically and as a food that sustains the white social body. The power of multiplicity baked into these avatars parallels the stereotyping process in a marketplace based in white supremacy. I compare these avatars persuasive power enacted through the fluidity of lithography to the history of minstrelsy specifically its fascination with motion. These avatars arrested images of African Americans in time and a paradox, capturing them in motion while denying their mobility, and while making them ubiquitous through multiplicity. I again look at the work of artist Michael Ray Charles but especially his reuse of racist images from packaging and advertising born in the consumer culture of the nineteenth century. His understanding of these forms reveals racist visual codes in our consumer culture and technologies of reproduction that feed the white social body in an estranged intimacy that links cultural and sexual reproduction. Charles reappropriation of the racist ventriloquism highlights this common trope as a theme throughout this book and a prime indicator of the absenting of the black voice in the visual culture of graphic design. Like Thomas and Ligon, his artistry suggests the existence of a black vernacular secreted within the visual culture of the graphic arts. I also discuss my own creative work appropriating racialized graphic design in packaging to critique whiteness as a mass-produced, prepackaged foodstuff. Here, I detail the peculiar nonsignifying aspects of whiteness in graphic design and how

22

22

The Design of Race

this produced blind spots in the cultural imagination that led to the fiction of a color-blind America. In Chapter  4, I  examine photography in the context of graphic design, particularly the design of magazines and advertising. The skill set that formed over time through the graphic arts to become the discipline of graphic design did not initially include photography. It was though continually present in a number of intermediate forms that translated photographs materially for graphic reproduction in print. Important to this is the role of graphic designers in mediating commercial messages and how African Americans have been used in this as commodities. I look at how the photographic image signifies within graphic design and how the production values of the halftone extended its racializing, representational power. I consider the technology of photographic imagery’s influence on how we see race as being reproduced by technology and our belief that its truth effect can transcend the medium. How photography’s truth effect has served white supremacy but displayed it through black bodies is a theme that begins to emerge in this chapter. I revisit the work of Hank Willis Thomas as an artist grounded in the discipline of photography and how he considers the history of racist and racialized images through contemporary branding and advertising design. Thomas points to ways that African American artists have worked covertly through commercial images over the history of US consumer culture to subvert its tropes and resignify upon and within its forms. Finally, I  delve into the digital realm and the photographic image’s continued influence on how we see race or in many cases attempt to unsee it through new digital technologies—a futurist, ahistorical exercise that has reinforced a belief in a “color-blind,” digital future where black bodies are removed and African Americans find no place within its collapsed spaces where consciousness is imagined as white and time does not exist. In Chapter  5, I  examine the play between racialized images and objects, showing how stereotypes from print migrated to film and television. I  start

23

Introduction

23

with the chromolithographic print series by Currier and Ives, Darktown, where African Americans were pictured comically as spectacles of blackness supposedly emulating white, middle class, leisure activities. These implied that the labor of the previously enslaved should remain at the disposal of whites and that even in their leisure activities, African Americans should be held under strict, visual scrutiny at their pleasure. Even in the fleeting moments in which the figures are animated to act out a white fantasy of black spectacle, they are inextricably bound to repeat and therefore reproduce stereotypes. I assert that audiences for these images were prompted to imagine this comic effect in motion rather than simply sequentially showing a link between comics and early film. The present-day viewer can easily toggle between these digitally to see the comic effect realized in motion in the diptychs. This is supported by the fact that one image from the “Darktown” series was also created in cast metal, as a kinetic toy bank called the Darktown Battery. This casting of blackness allowed “play” with figures as spectacles of blackness in motion. Such transmutation occurred despite the seemingly hard and fast nature of the bank’s materiality. I further argue that essential to the desire to reproduce moving images was an anxiety that images could not truly be fixed, and therefore enforcing racial boundaries was at risk. The iterative process of discovery that led to both photography and film anticipated and fueled a frustrated desire to contain these nascent visual arenas of modernity and catch these actors in motion. I  spend time discussing the wide variety of racist, mechanical toys featured in the titles for Spike Lee’s Bamboozled as an expression of the desire to manipulate black bodies and control their movements. These figures display the power of mechanization over the black body, by producing it mechanically in print and then reactivating it to reproduce it as spectacle in motion. I delve into the characters at play in the Andy Griffith Show to unpack how racist caricature was revived for network television through actors playing at blackness in white face. I  return to the blackface character of the Mammie

24

24

The Design of Race

played in whiteface beyond the printed page to the screen. The persistent reproduction of this caricature in the popular medium of television shows that for African Americans, time and motion are not equal. They are constantly presented as inherently resisting progress by being pictured as they always have been while majority of the country enjoyed the benefits of the post– Second World War boom. The show’s presentation of an entirely white, fictive space produced whiteness as an unclouded vision of society. In the meantime, African Americans still appeared most prominently across media, vertically integrated into television, on packages, and film as long as they still held value as corporate avatars shilling for products.

Notes 1 Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford University Press, 1995), 3–12. 2 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings 1935–1938 (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002). 3 Johanna Drucker, Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 (University of Chicago Press, 1994), 41–3. 4 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Penguin, 1972), 16–18. 5 Richard Dyer, WHITE (Routledge, 1997), 72. 6 Robin Kinross, Modern Typography: An Essay in Critical History (Hyphen, 1992), 106–7. 7 Ibid., 44–5. 8 Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime” (1908). 9 Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World, Human Ecology and Social Change (Random House, 1972), 48. 10 Christina Cogdell, Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 52. 11 Gary Hustwit, Helvetica (Swiss Dots, 2007). 12 Stephen Eskilson, Graphic Design: A New History (Lawrence King, 2007), 298–333.

25

Introduction

25

13 Phillip Meggs, A History of Graphic Design (Wiley, 1983), 153. 14 Johanna Drucker and E. McVarish, Graphic Design History, A Critical Guide (Pearson Education, 2009), xiii–xxiii. 15 Ibid., 264. 16 Ibid., 268. 17 Ibid., 277. 18 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Vintage, 1992), 2–5. 19 Shawn Michele Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W.E.B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Duke University Press, 2004), 1–3. 20 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 4–5.

26

26

27

1 Vestiges in Word and Image

This first chapter is a look at the links between text and image in contemporary art as central to the work of five important contemporary African American artists. All these artists reappropriate and interrogate racialized texts and images, whose meanings they often subvert or invert. I consider closely their consistent use of the archetypal language and forms of graphic design especially the inclusion and reworking of lettering, letterforms, and typography as signifiers of artistic agency through mark making. In addition, I propose that their work provides a new intertextuality of text and image—an expression of the play between identity and stereotype related to the optics of racialized visual experiences. The materiality of their work is central to my argument in a consideration of these as designed artifacts, in their remediation of the verbal and the visual, and in their trade in images of blackness as consumables. This book demands that graphic design—as a process of education and creative field—recognize the central role of race in defining how representations are mass produced and mass consumed not simply as they function from a strict formalist point of view. This distinction may seem minor, but not if we consider how racialized representations are largely ignored in graphic design education and criticism which itself is quite limited within the United States when compared to other fields associated with media production and therefore mediation. Furthermore, there is no better field of study—to be studied—for its impact

28

28

The Design of Race

on the creation and reproduction of representations considering the immense output and ephemerality of graphic design production and consumption. As equally important is that no other field of study is equally concerned with and directly utilizes the verbal and the visual and none that typically marries these two in a seamless integration of what are generally accepted as opposing forms, residing in different spheres. It is this lack of bifurcation of text and image in graphic design’s direct engagement with the reproduction of both that a design perspective brings to the consideration of artists working to come to terms with the history of race in the United States. African American artists who themselves are visualized as other in images across the visual culture in art, science, and commercial imagery. This is why I  wish to examine these works if not as images always directly referencing specific historical graphic design images then as designed objects operating in the exchange of ideas and as exchangeable within the visual sphere. Glenn Ligon provides a baseline example in Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Black Features and Self-Portrait Exaggerating My White Features, no doubt a homage alluding to Adrian Piper’s earlier work by the same title (Figure  1.1). He poses himself in two identical, full-length, black-andwhite photographs with “Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Black Features” set in type beneath the left-hand piece and “Self-Portrait Exaggerating My White Features,” beneath the right-hand piece. He is perhaps obliquely referencing the stereoscope to indicate the use of the photograph explicitly as a lens. In doubling our gaze at himself, he gives us insight into double consciousness as a visual phenomena constructed mechanically through words and images. He spells out the ways that looking and naming enforce the everyday and mundane ways that these contribute to implicit visual modes of racism. By dressing himself in ordinary street clothes signaling status quo respectability, oxford shirt buttoned and tucked, clean white T-shirt, jeans with belt, and runners, he reinforces the mundane aspects of being visualized as black despite all appearances. In labeling himself,

29

Vestiges in Word and Image

29

FIGURE 1.1  Glenn Ligon, Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Black Features and SelfPortrait Exaggerating My White Features, 1998. Silkscreen ink on canvas. Two panels: 120 × 40 inches (304.8 × 101.6 cm) each. © Glenn Ligon; Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Chantal Crousel, Paris.

30

30

The Design of Race

he signifies the ways that typography draws out the inaudible, inner monologue of looking and naming without truly seeing. This intertextual approach to reading words set in type, to reading a photograph as a text that represent his body, he searches to uncover the truth of his own identity hidden within the stereotypes applied to him. This unveiling typified by Ligon’s work hinges on an acknowledgement of the several ways that the technologies of the art of mechanical reproduction have fundamentally formed the image of the African American, utilized as a commodity and a vessel of an-“other,” racialized, US national identity. Here I  analyze the response to this dynamic by these artists who reassert black identity over the spectacle of blackness and against the grain of white supremacy as not simply an expression of racism but the very material of white supremacy formed through words and images. These artists provide in contemporary terms a trenchant analysis of the racialized workings of graphic design almost entirely ignored by the profession itself. Considering these artifacts in part as design reveals the important interplay between design, commerce, technology, art, materiality, and identity in US visual culture. This consideration of visual culture as the materially reproduced evidence of racism reveals these as well as a wide variety of other actors who exert agency over visual culture—a culture enacted through and upon others whose own agency is denied. These artists resist this denial by reasserting their presence within the same visual landscape in which they have been silenced, absented, and removed. This landscape is crucial to understanding the black imagination as a potentially autonomous space of creative production witnessed by these artists. These artists write and rewrite upon images, usually side by side with bodies. Crucial to their work are bodies themselves, especially as observed and evidenced within the context of a US visual culture founded in racialized representation. Many of the works deal with flattened planes, figures of absence, and collapses that directly confront the “pure” formalism of modernism. This

31

Vestiges in Word and Image

31

is seen in Glenn Ligon’s stencils; Kara Walker’s silhouettes; Lorna Simpson’s divided, turned, and headless figures; Carrie Mae Weems’s coloration; and Hank Willis Thomas’s active, headless figures. These artists often rely on vernacular graphic forms or the seemingly naïve application of these forms that draw on the early, formative, and commodity driven roots of the US visual culture—of graphic design. They then revisualize many of the forms associated with this period and its direct impact and legacy on their lived experience. Their work questions art as commodity, as value abstracted just as they also interrogate the images and the bodies of others who are pictured and therefore abstracted, who labor to serve and to be exchanged. The presence of text within and upon these works makes clear that these works are designed to be read. The words in the texts may at times either seemingly confirm or deny the visual tropes, stereotypes, and clichés presented or confront their flaws by revealing the gaps between text and image, past and present, and subject and object. The interstitial spaces running through these apparently bifurcated forms are the blind spots in which these artists operate to reveal how the black subject has been constructed to serve a polarized vision of race. In situating their responses in the context of contemporary art, these artists displace the designed and domesticated racialized subject from its familial context and extricate its value as commodity. This is mirrored by the imagery of commodities in the exchange of commercial goods dating to reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the nascent consumer economy of the United States based in the black subject being pictured and seen as exchangeable.1 The consistent coupling of text and image and the comingling of the verbal and the visual in the work of these artists bring into relief the hybridity of African American life beginning in and through the standardization of US visual culture reproduced not for African Americans but to assert white supremacy over them as racialized subjects continuing to labor to serve. These artists draw upon the material experience of words and the effects of rereading these in direct opposition to racialized imagery as a means to confront racism.

32

32

The Design of Race

Michael Ray Charles: Whistling While He Works In the opening pages of the catalog to his 1997 exhibition at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Michael Ray Charles appears in a photograph coyly holding a penny in his mouth in a nod to the mechanical banks I discuss in Chapter 5. Like those mechanical banks, several of the characters in this body of work include a deep coin slot in the tops of their heads. These characters are based primarily on the Sambo caricature but also morph between clowns and jesters as well. In doing so, they track the parallel phenomena of the transmutation over time of racist caricature in US visual culture as figures arrested in a timeless and negative otherness. Through these recharacterizations, Charles continuously multiplies meanings and redoubles these with texts meant to confront the reader’s viewership and the dominant narrative applied through purposefully negative stereotypes. I am considering the work of Charles here first because among these artists, he most closely mimics early American vernacular, advertising design and other graphic forms and is most obligated to these formats that define the picture plane and the worlds his characters inhabit. Significantly, he utilizes and upends forms defined typically as “Americana”—images of a nostalgic, imagined past—that still hold meaning and power in the US imaginary. He implicates us, the viewer through our own assumptions borne of sentimentality associated with a false nostalgia for these exchangeable images and objects now bearing new value as collectables. He reutilizes various printed matter such as advertisements, magazine covers, lithographs, and posters as well as objects such as packages, signs and signage, sideshow games, and paintings. Each of these again defines the field in which he plays with meaning and reanimates his characters to act against type, sometimes violently. Charles repaints the text contained in his paintings when referencing original works and in doing so rewrites their meanings. Formally and materially—by painting the words—he clearly grounds the work in the

33

Vestiges in Word and Image

33

medium of painting, and this most obviously associates it with the art market rather than with its roots in early US consumer culture. In painting, he applies meaning by reinscribing the vernacular letterforms of the nineteenth century. These historical letterforms were not typically grounded in traditional typography but were generated by the rapidly expanding markets of the time, usually created by untrained designers working in litho houses, as sign makers and painters, and job printers. The overall aesthetic defined by these works was eclectic and often profusely ornamental. Therefore, many voices were expressed in the compendium of letterforms and other visual tropes necessary for the quick and dirty production of graphic imagery. Despite this plurality of voices, the central voice that dominates in Charles’s work is his own. He codes it into the vernacular of print culture, where he asserts himself through the application of paint in rewriting existing words and inserting other texts that deviate from the message of the originals to remix various meanings. The letters appear through his reinscription to be worn, weathered, and tasked by time and use. The work’s overall surface quality is determined by his material strategy of reading through rewriting. Typically, chipped paint indicates loving wear through use and a sentimental attachment to an idealized past. Here it also indicates his work’s use value as exchangeable, and despite time it is able to retain and further encode meaning. Their time-worn appearance also indicates use and reuse and therefore their implied utility and continued potency similar to the racist avatars discussed in Chapters 2 and 4. It can be assumed that his reworking of letterforms is in part an artifact of his building up of the surface seen across the breadth and length of his paintings. The surface he builds up indicates a time-worn patina equalizing the words beyond a formal sense within the painting’s surface and as words also working against the nostalgic sentimentality of his approach. Charles colors his work not in devotion to color as pure expression or in denial of its materialism, but embracing its forms rather than its formalism. His application of paint appears ham-fisted, made to seem naïve, unfinished, and untrained, like the vernacular

34

34

The Design of Race

images he employs. His own seemingly naïve artistry forces—the naiveté of an untroubled whiteness—to consider the source of these characterizations as purposely conceived to prop up notions of whiteness based upon an imagined, preindustrial past based in minstrelsy. Though it is clear that in a sense he is revalorizing these words and images in the Pop Art tradition, raising them up above the level of applied art, I would argue this process began much earlier than Pop among African American artists working before modernism in folk traditions and in literature. Bette Sayre’s work best captures these traditions and connects Pop Art to folk art traditions. We must also include in their patrimony the common reuse of mass-produced materials, repurposed because they held commodity value and use value. We can witness this in the papering of cabin walls with newspapers for insulation seen in period photographs of sharecropper’s quarters. Through this reuse, mass-produced images entered directly into the everyday lives of ordinary people. I argue that the experience of double consciousness forced African Americans to uniquely interpret the world around them through visual means, forms, and materials outside their actual experience. This dynamic occurred before modernism was introduced or conceived in the United States and prefigures the postmodern experience, one that is based visually in pastiche and reappropriation. There is then a record and an African American artistic tradition that artists such as Charles belong to both before and beyond Pop Art. Charles and others like him are not simply following suit with Pop Art but reviving and sustaining cultural modes of resistance to dominant forms and narratives. Charles’s fierce, richly black figures burst upon the canvas to rebut the infantilized, sexualized, and very often bestial figures typical of racist caricature. The characters’ devouring of their own image in works such as Coffeemate and mirrored in Charles’s repetition of images of watermelons as gaping mouths respond to their hosts appropriation and defilement of their bodies. This directly connects the consumption of imagery to the mechanical

35

Vestiges in Word and Image

35

reproduction and consumption of images generally and specifically images of black bodies. It is Charles’s remaking of these images, the reappropriation of their representational power, that denies their place within the heritage culture of the “white” south. Grace Hale describes scenes where caricatures such as Aunt Jemima worked to support the idyll of southern white superiority as it migrated from an imagined past into a vision of southern modernity realigned with northern sympathies for a pastoral past.2 Charles reveals how images promoting consumption extended the abuse of black bodies beyond emancipation. His figures are often clowns, based in early minstrel characters, themselves objects of derision created largely to excite and entertain white working-class audiences of the antebellum period described by Eric Lott in Love and Theft.3 There are as well in his work many direct references to circus posters and sideshows further linking it to blackness as spectacle originating in the emergent entertainment industries of the nineteenth century. Charles uses the stock character of the clown not simply to enlist its humorous antics but to speak to the legacy of minstrelsy and its defiant presence not as a fantasy of the past but as yet still manifest in popular entertainments—entertainments founded, defined, and maintained as a legacy of the visual culture of the early nineteenth century in the north, apart from southern chattel slavery but still at the direct expense of African Americans. In Charles’s Forever Free series, he employs texts to ground the images as readable and seemingly knowable. These texts are often declarative, speaking above the crowd in direct address to the viewer. In The Great White Hope, a boxer suited up in a white shirt, star-emblazoned red tie, and boxing gloves is presented as the great white hope serving to deny the agency of black athletes, presenting them narrowly as performers. In his Liberty Bros. series, he presents a sideshow performer the Three Legged Man resting his giant phallus in the form of a third foot, atop a step stool on which animals and performers balance and enact tricks in the ring. In Army of Clowns, a large group of clowns advances and menaces the viewer in riotous color with hammers in

36

36

The Design of Race

hand. Here most clearly, we see figures—originally cast as objects of pity and ridicule—turn in formation against the privileged position of the viewer. They absorb and imbibe the mob’s violent energy that minstrelsy sought to contain and redirect. These characters present images of otherness so directly that they confound the false binary that produces double consciousness. They present the externalized self as it truly is as a fiction borne through the formation of whiteness established through violence. Charles often directly confronts the roots of fear of miscegenation in the use and reuse of bodies for pleasure and reproduction in biological terms and for commercial consumption as discussed in Chapter 2—in Mixed Breed, in which a zebra-headed figure springs forth as a jack-in-the-box, arching over the headline, “Don’t Count Me Out.” With arms outstretched and his tongue extended, he balances like a juggler within the words Mixed Breed. Each letter floats in a colorful ball, rendered to mimic the lettering of a circus poster. The parallel stripes of the zebra run down the length of its head that sits upon the upper torso of a half-man, atop a spring bursting forth from within a box. The zebra is no doubt meant to appear to be a hastily painted mule, a reference perhaps to the “mulatto” and as a mule bearing no fruit but somehow still producing a biological legacy of white masters and enslaved women. It is the “mulatto’s” visual potency to mask, in this case to optically obscure, to assimilate, and perhaps pass as white that confounds the perceived value of “white purity.” In Elvis Lives another of Charles’s paintings where he interrogates miscegenation, the king appears in blackface stating the obvious though often ignored fact that the cipher of rock and roll, in reality, appeared in white face to obfuscate his performance of the spectacle of blackness. He was the tipping point wherein “race music” migrated across racial lines, jumping the color line bodily in the skin of a white southerner. Elvis was the resurrection of the white negro, the hipster, and the blackface white minstrel player but without the necessity of actually corking-up. The phenomenon of Elvis has a previous

37

Vestiges in Word and Image

37

parallel in film, in the body and voice of Al Jolson. The media of sound carried Jolson over the color line in music as if to say again “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” Al Jolson’s kneeling figure from the Jazz Singer appears in Charles’s work in Hear Yo Freedom and Increase Yo Mobility. Again motion is a key agent in the moment when play with blackness suddenly shifted color back and forth in and through a body. Like early motion pictures, Elvis’s bodily movements caused slippage, and a loss of control of the fixed body photography insisted upon imposing. Charles reenacts the auditory moment in the film when Jolson suddenly speaks in declaration of the power of a brand in the object of a gym shoe. Often the work of a brand is highly reductive but should not be mistaken for a naïve use of the means of graphic reproduction by Charles. Like the Darktown images of Currier and Ives and like Hank Willis Thomas after him, Charles directs the white gaze at the pleasure and contempt that black male athletes carry in their bodies and in motion for white viewers. His Before Black and After Black diptychs, To See or Not to See, and Riding High closely and intentionally mirror the Darktown series wherein black athletes are foiled in their efforts to succeed and also act as foils for the white viewer’s desire to witness the spectacle of blackness through athletic prowess. In reasserting the power of the original Darktown series, he sets these figures in motion again. As Calvin Reid wrote in the catalog to Charles retrospective in 1997, these works illustrate “potential and accomplishment—the moment before you are reminded that you are black.”4 Charles pictures how black athleticism is part and parcel of a fascination with sexualized, black male bodies as Charles makes clear in works such as The Three Legged Man and Howta Conquer the Fowl World where a third arm or leg emerges from the groin of the figures. That these notions have persisted and been revived repeatedly, often in spite of existing and against progressive movements and moments in US history makes clear their pernicious and malicious intent to debase. They draw power from spite and the act of scapegoating borne of envy and strife.

38

38

The Design of Race

Charles’s work is ultimately a demonstration of the artist working deftly to capture what is seen and yet not seen, exactly as whiteness operates invisibly against the starkly visible background of blackness and otherness. Charles takes the figure of the stereotype and stands it upright in relief against the horizon of a white vision of the world. This reveals its very construction as a front and surface on which to project fear and self-loathing. Charles’s work describes perfectly the white southern experience as put forth by Ralph Ellison that “Southern whites cannot walk, talk, sing, conceive of laws or justice, think of sex, love, the family or freedom without responding to the presence of Negroes.”5 The piece from the forever-free series most emblematic of Charles’s oeuvre is Beware; it features a strolling Sambo-like character whistling a warning or perhaps caught in a moment of reverie before a fall met through a casual mistake leading to catastrophe. He wears a pair of shorts with two large brightyellow buttons, and white gloves resembling a hybrid of Sambo and Mickey Mouse. Of all of his characters, this is the least threatening despite the fact that he walks casually above the direct warning to “Beware.” It is among all these works the one most clearly operating as a sign. As a sign, it is of course a signifier and draws attention to the work of these figures as signs and signifiers operating as representations foregrounding the symbology of the black body. Charles repurposes the black body as a symbol in relation to words as signs that have delineated spaces and public discourse as white and therefore created to absent and exclude African Americans. Beware, because of its iconic qualities, is the closest Charles comes to trademarking appropriation itself. Hank Willis Thomas has also made efforts to extend this in his attempts to realize black as a brand. What is central to the work of Charles and all of the artists I discuss in this chapter as they employ texts is their asserting of agency through words. This agency can be traced to the significance of literacy—and therefore the written word—in nineteenth-century slave narratives. These artists rework texts and

39

Vestiges in Word and Image

39

position texts upon, against, and within their work. The inaudible character of their voices reinforces their absence in the context of the art and culture industries. The stereotypes they seek to undo appear in the commercial sphere while their work is usually cloistered in public art spaces. Charles examines the liminal space between the verbal and the visual and points to the significance of the hybridity of the two at work between subject and object, viewer and those looked upon, black and white. He attacks these on three fronts first in his abrupt juxtaposition of the verbal and visual, the hybrid nature of the black body of the individual in his experience of double consciousness, and the black body collectively. The figures Charles has created are in a sense disfiguring reenactments of the dismorphia produced in the repeated violence of being seen as outcast. Charles’s use of these bodies parallels the metaphor of scarification of the enslaved body, of the cut, seen in the marks of commodification he creates through the coin slots gouged in the heads of some of his figures. Most interestingly, it is the very reductive modes of visual expression that we now term graphic design, the very vocabulary of mechanical reproduction that in the work of Charles cannot be derided for its reductiveness because he readily deploys these to make clear their rhetorical power as “one-liners,” a power that belies their simplicity. It is their very “down-to-earth” quality that belies their power to influence and ultimately mythologize the American experience of race as a problem that cannot be addressed with just a dash of “common sense.” This is repeated in his use of the language of print advertising, with its hokey catchphrases and slogans that summarize in trite sayings.

Hank Willis Thomas: Black as Brand If Charles reworks the surface of the image through repainting, Hank Willis Thomas reifies the glossy surface quality of the commercial photograph to highlight how the form serves advertising, especially personal image-based

40

40

The Design of Race

brands and their conspicuous consumption of blackness. When we look at his images, we are caught in a blank stare not at the persons photographed but at an embodiment of a variety of societal values bought and paid for by black bodies. In between the in-betweens, we are made aware of the overall absence of black voices. Thomas appropriates photography for advertising in his work uniting historical and contemporary imagery, slyly interrogating many of the visual tropes associated with advertising design. He emphasizes photography over text as was common in the big idea realm of advertising design pioneered by graphic designers in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. Through his astute use of verisimilitude, he remediates the imagery of photography by creating images we assume to exist already—images we are typically inured to through their ubiquity. Thomas’s use of the conspicuous presence of brands and their relation to individual and group identity speaks to the visual symbolism of race itself as a vocabulary of graphic signifiers. He also raises issues of class status in his work through these identifiers of success and achievement, particularly the success that can be gained through athleticism. He speaks to my argument about the ability of our racialized visual culture to transmute through and upon objects and then again in his work to reemerge as photographs mimicking the high production values of advertising. In Thomas’s Unbranded series, he simply erases the logos and advertising copy. In an ad from 1977 for Frye boots featuring O. J. Simpson, his erasure isolates a photo of Simpson with a third leg as a symbol of the phallus exaggerating black, male sexuality as bizarre and hideous. Like Charles, he places this disturbing, dimorphic image front and center. He speaks right to the grotesque stereotyping of black masculinity and sexuality. Charles colorfully repaints the lascivious impulse to objectify, while Thomas isolates the photo, removing the words, so its true text can be read directly from the flattened surface of the photo. In another work, Thomas casts gold medallions in a variant of the specimen type of the runaway discussed in Chapter 2 along with a specimen type of the

41

Vestiges in Word and Image

41

female runaway also used in advertisements seeking the retrieval of runaways in the antebellum period. Once again, these speak to the contradictions inherent in images of the enslaved in motion, having escaped and put themselves at liberty. Thomas’s work interrogating the Nike brand interpolates the runaway by associating it with running culture and athleticism. In Thomas’s rendition, the gold chain and pendant obliquely reference upward mobility through the individual’s personal and group identification with luxury, lifestyle brands. This doubles the iconic quality of the image in the form of an object that is both a signifier and symbol, where the wearer gains vital social equity through its symbolic work when worn upon their body. Many of the brands central to hip-hop culture have themselves been appropriated in creative production and in turn have increased the commodity value of the brands, especially the logos and marks produced by graphic designers. Because Thomas intends these objects to be worn and adorn bodies, he signals their role in asserting personal identity through a corporatized symbol aligned with the corporeal, reinforcing the means by which race is itself embodied as a black, bodily commodity. Like Ligon, Thomas also reappropriates Wedgewood’s figure of the supplicant slave and its text “Am I Not a Man and a Brother.” This historical object, text, and image reemerges in Thomas’s leveraging of the forms to seamlessly reemphasize its symbolism in contemporary terms. The figure is cast in gold as a pendant and like the other pendants plays upon Barbara Kruger’s piece I Shop Therefore I  Am (Figure  1.2). Here buying power and agency are unambiguously and unapologetically presented together while acknowledging the obvious limitations of both. This piece works in tandem with First Round Draft Pick where Thomas lines up in a row, four line-work renderings of the Wedgewood’s kneeling image, pleading and praying to be picked in the first round but to “keep his chains” (Figure 1.3). As with Charles work, he ventriloquizes for the subject using a speech bubble common to cartoons featuring African and racialized characters dating to the eighteenth century. His own words are inserted above the banner that flows beneath the

42

42

The Design of Race

FIGURE  1.2  Washington, DC, April 20, 2018:  A museum visitor admires a photographic silkscreen print by Barbara Kruger titled I Shop Therefore I Am at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the National Mall.

FIGURE 1.3  Hank Willis Thomas, First Round Draft Pick, 2004. © HANK WILLIS THOMAS. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

figure and that repeats four times with each print “Am I  Not a Man and a Brother.” In this, he mimics forms associated with mass reproduction and filters them through a fine arts context to confound the typical bifurcation of images and words common to fine art (Figure 1.4). Unlike the raw surfaces of Charles’s work, Thomas harnesses the rhetorical power of the high sheen of super brands, advertising photography that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These super or lifestyle brands initiated a new era in brand power and group identification promising upward mobility, symbolically in opposition to identity politics.6 These brands sought to realign the political sympathies of marginalized groups and their ethnic, sexual, and racial identities for corporate use. Thomas very skillfully employs the formal qualities of advertising to subvert their brand messaging in the style

43

Vestiges in Word and Image

43

FIGURE 1.4  American Anti-Slavery Society, Am I Not a Man and a Brother?, 1837. Summary:  The large, bold woodcut image of a supplicant male slave in chains appears on the 1837 broadside publication of John Greenleaf Whittier’s antislavery poem, “Our Countrymen in Chains.” The design was originally adopted as the seal of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery in England in the 1780s and appeared on several medallions for the society made by Josiah Wedgwood as early as 1787.

of culture jamming typical of Adbusters, itself having roots in dadaist agitprop work of a century ago. He makes potent use of the effect of being seen as he himself is seen—as other—and as consumable. This is the very co-opting of the essential identity of individuals by corporations made to seem and act as they are defined legally as individuals (Figure 1.5). In Thomas’s Basketball and Chain, an airborne basketball player is shackled to an earthbound basketball bearing the NBA logo but absent any other text. The Nike shoe features prominently as it would in any Nike product advertisement by Widen and Kennedy but with ankle bracelet and chain linking it to the player. The marks made upon the bodies of the enslaved by shackles along with devices for holding and constraining the enslaved and for punishing those recaptured were a significant aspect of antislavery rhetoric in

44

44

The Design of Race

FIGURE  1.5  John Heartfield, Fotomontage “Hitler” beieiner Ausstellung in Stockholm, 1967.

the Atlantic world. In Mining the Museum, Fred Wilson brought together in vignettes, slave shackles and silver sets, from the collection of the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore to make obvious the relationship to class status attained through chattel slavery and objects of desire, both bodies and luxury goods. Indeed, other artists have capitalized on the gruesome imagery of slaveholding’s instruments, punishing limits on the body and labor of the enslaved. Irony and satire played a role in Wilson’s work revealing the metaphoric power of material objects, both in their substance such as iron or silver and in the mechanisms they employ literally and figuratively to enslave. It is the reproduction of the shackle and the brand that links the producer to the consumer who is made complicit in systems designed to further constrain the body and limit African American mobility. In Shooting Stars, Thomas appropriates the iconic figure of Michael Jordan’s airborne stance as he slam-dunks for Nike. The figure in mid dunk and nearly identical to Jordan’s save for a forelock is followed in pursuit by a second figure, aiming high a gun at the back of the first. The figures are realized in bright Nike red on a black referencing Jordan’s body in service of Nike and similar in form to a chalk outline of a body, yet another index of the body and the trauma of violence. It is here that I want to speak to the reductiveness of the figures not just as stand-ins alone but also in the way their simplicity enlists

45

Vestiges in Word and Image

45

and subverts the stereotype. Their simplicity cannot be overstated, but their power may be underestimated as it often is, except in the hands of an artist like Thomas, who makes clear the one-to-one relationship of racial stereotyping to the advertising industry and the formal language of graphic design. Once again in Thomas’s piece Jordan and Johnnie Walker in Timberland Circa 1923, he has hoisted the Jordan figure from the Timberland tree, the corporate mark, and siren of consumer desire. To the left of the base of the mark is the Nike tagline “Just Do It” and to the right “Keep Walking” with Johnnie Walker in full stride ready to exit the scene, stage right, into history (Figure  1.6). Thomas has reproduced the corporate mark of the tree, at

FIGURE 1.6  Hank Willis Thomas, Jordan and Johnny Walker in Timberland Circa 1923, 2009. © HANK WILLIS THOMAS. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

46

46

The Design of Race

300–400  percent normal size of what we once termed in graphic design— camera-ready. The lines of the tree are made fuzzy and rough in the process of enlargement, making it appear both antiquated and amateurish but also importantly reproduced, reproducible and widely available.

Carrie Mae Weems: Mirror, Mirror Carrie Mae Weems’s work as a photographer threads through a variety of visual culture grounded in her personal and political history. In her studied approach to the many manifestations of racist caricature and “scientific” profiles of African Americans, she reveals how thoroughly racialized representations have saturated US visual culture. I am especially interested in exploring her use of the vernacular of advertising in one particular photograph. In Jim If You Choose, she weds photography to tropes from television and film. Unlike the work of Michael Ray Charles who puts static images in motion, Jim If You Choose arrests an image from television as does another Weems piece Mirror, Mirror derived from film and fairytale. Her use of text amongst all the artists discussed here is the most seemingly unconcerned with the multiplicity of aesthetic choices available through type. Despite this, the materiality of the type speaks volumes. In Jim If You Choose, the type grounds the image in the realm of print advertising, specifically cigarette and alcohol campaigns cynically aimed at African American consumers (Figure  1.7). The uncanny manner of the photo creates an unease produced by Weems’s joining of television and print advertising, reducing the concept for a television show to a single frame. She extends this sense of the uncanny in her enlisting of the auditory, represented here materially—as type on the surface of a photograph—as if the line from the opening sequence for the television program Mission Impossible were being heard aloud by the character of “Jim,” pictured in the photograph. The

47

Vestiges in Word and Image

47

FIGURE 1.7  Carrie Mae Weems, Jim, If You Choose to Accept, the Mission Is to Land on Your Own Two Feet, 1990. © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

disembodied words from the show’s inevitable weekly phone call, like the figure of Jim, are arrested and now speak to him as he is tasked with rising above his impossible position. His very name, Jim, common and interchangeable like the rather mundane and awkward word spacing of the typographic treatment of the headline appears to be rendered in hastily rubbed down press-type. Jim is another generic moniker for African American men commonly used by slaveholders. In an example from the film Django Unchained, the character of Big Daddy refers to Django as “your Jimmy.” Jim as a character placed

48

48

The Design of Race

implausibly as the hero in his own story gazes sideways through a haze of smoke at the cheap cassette recorder on the table to his left. On the table to his far right sits a phone’s receiver lying at cords length and off the hook. Both devices bridge the action of television into print form through the auditory cue of the show’s opening sequence, setting in motion the impossible. In the still silence following the words, Jim must as the recording insists fulfill his mission and land on his own two feet. In Mirror, Mirror, Weems utilizes the photograph similarly, again halting the action of moving images that normally produce a seamless sense of motion via the persistence of vision (Figure 1.8). In both works, her attention to how the production occurs reproduces added unease with racial stereotyping. Once more, her bland type treatment reinforces this in a lack of interest in the aesthetic dimension of the text that freezes the words in time. Although ostensibly drawn from the fairytale of sleeping beauty, it is the repeated telling of it in film and television that defines how we—look at looking—that Weems is considering. This is made clear in the text, which denies an African American image of black beauty and womanhood clearly absent in the lore of fairytales retold through moving images. The poignancy of a fairytale denied to those who embody blackness as mythological is reproduced in the visual experience of the mirror, reinforcing the inherently racialized and visual nature of looking. In this case, the mirror stares back and thus speaks back through the application of the text. It is when looking to draw forth something from the mirror of herself that “the black woman” pictured is denied her role as protagonist and must face her own self loathing rather than receiving the pleasure of looking at herself as beautiful. The denial of not only her pleasure in looking but the absenting of her image in place of the mirror’s image of the person of the evil Queen shows the workings of double consciousness as essentially bodily and visual. Her internal self cannot be realized in the face of the mirror. She must draw back in order to sustain herself rather than face disappearing through

49

Vestiges in Word and Image

49

FIGURE 1.8  Carrie Mae Weems, Mirror, Mirror, 1987–8. © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

the act of looking at what appears to others as her true self. Here the intended protagonist cannot see herself in the role of the desired. Not even in the passivity of snow white as she is not white and not—pure as snow—therefore doubly impure. Weems again asks the viewer to consider the constructed nature of photography through the materiality of the frame and the typography. The woman holds the frame itself in her hands to contain her head and shoulders,

50

50

The Design of Race

but as she must turn away from it we catch her profile and then must also face the evil Queen. It is she who forms in her body our worst desires but reversed in antipathy and the impulse to reject and cast out. As in Jim If You Choose, the protagonist in Mirror, Mirror is spoken to in direct address, and the type freezes the line in a still frame so that the auditory element of film and television can be studied in its ability to stop the protagonist in time. In Jim If You Choose, a disembodied voice on the tape ostensibly calls him to action but again frozen as a still image and tasked with the impossible to “land on his own two feet.” In Mirror, Mirror, the voice speaks from within the object of the frame of the mirror, a device of framing explicitly rejecting any further overtures from the protagonist. These pieces contain black bodies already put in motion by film and television as described in Chapter 5. Here they are but still frames, like discards on the cutting room floor. Weems continues her examination of stereotypes in advertising design through the series Ain’t Jokin’. In both Black Man Holding Watermelon and Black Woman with Fried Chicken, she examines racial stereotypes formed in the nascent consumer culture of the second half of the nineteenth century (Figure 1.9). In each of these works, the figures stare blankly at the viewer in the same self-effacing manner of the typography. These two works suggest that these stock characters associated with foodstuffs and with these stereotypes are themselves blanks, created to fill whatever the viewer desires of them (Figure 1.10). Beyond Weems’s work with advertising forms and tropes, she uniquely engages with reproducible color in content and in form. In her Colored People series, she plays with alliteration as an analog to multiplicity of imagery through color reproduction in photography and offset four-color printing. In the text, we find her playing with the concept of labeling in her application of press type to a series of portraits of a variety of photos of “colored” children—in either case, referring to the subjects as either boy or girl and using the antiquated term colored to indicate the long history of objectifying African Americans

51

Vestiges in Word and Image

51

FIGURE 1.9  Carrie Mae Weems, Black Man Holding Watermelon, 1987–8. © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

as racialized visual subjects. In terms of color, she references both the color spectrum as well as four-color, CMYK printing with what appear to be color gels used in photography and applied to sets of three identical portraits. She uses the language of color to reinforce the repetition of the multiplicity of terms referring to “colored people” and their reproducibility as photographic subjects. In Magenta Colored Girl and Golden Yella Girl, she specifically references the CMYK colors of Magenta and Yellow. In this case, yellow refers to the common term yella or high-yella to describe light-skinned African American women. In Blue Black Boy, she assigns the color blue in the text and title to the subject, but the actual color is objectively the Cyan of CMYK. This is the only case where she directly uses the term Black to refer to any of the subjects in the

52

52

The Design of Race

FIGURE 1.10  Carrie Mae Weems, Black Woman with Chicken, 1987–8. © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

triptychs, completing the CMYK sequence where the letter K represents Black. She also indicates degrees of saturation as an analog to skin tone. Weems references Newton’s color spectrum terms, yellow, blue, red, and violet as well, demonstrating the inherent flaws in assigning race as color and the vagaries of the science and art of color with their overlapping and conflicting terms. In doing so, she questions the veracity of color assigned to persons other than white, while avoiding addressing whiteness itself, unseen in these works but always present in defining the photographic subject. In the work for which Weems is perhaps most well known, she further injects color materially into the discussion of the reproducibility of race through photography and over time. From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried is a series of chromogenic prints with etched text on glass. Among her work, it most

53

Vestiges in Word and Image

53

subjects—the lens itself—to scrutiny as a device in the aid of and at the disposal of white supremacy. Over the course of this project, I have sought to consider the image primarily as a commodity and not as a document, especially when utilized as a scientific instrument. For that reason, I want to first and primarily consider typography not simply as the application of words or labels but as an agent of consciousness and the internalized voice of the other. As the labels for the series describe, the text is etched into the glass that covers and secures the photos within their frames—a necessary fixture of the framing of art but more importantly a reference to the plate glass negatives likely used in many of the historic images she appropriates but significantly in the explicitly racist and supposedly “scientific” photos by Louis Agassiz. The glass allows the text to be embedded in the image but float above the photograph, to be disembodied from the portrait but affixed to the framing and the lens. This allows the voice of the other to remain attached to the image but with the subject now speaking to the viewer, doubling the look of the camera back upon the gaze. Because the text is etched into the glass, it belies its materiality and aids the reader in either engaging the words directly, face on, or if viewed at an angle to distance themselves obliquely from the voice of the subjects. The first diptych in the series utilizing Agassiz’s photographs from his 1850 effort to find or “discover” original “African types” among the enslaved in South Carolina features an enslaved woman in profile and an enslaved man facing the camera. My immediate interest in describing this set are the labels, applied by Weems by delicately sand blasting them in the glass that horizontally bisects the chests of pair. In the case of the enslaved man, it reads “A Negroid Type” naming the man in the abstract, violently forced to be read while facing the camera as an object and a type. I am of course attuned to consider the use of the word—type—not simply as a way to situate something within a taxonomy but in the term’s relationship to the stereotype and the use of typecasting not as metaphor but as technologies related to the production of cast metal type. His companion in fate the enslaved woman is paired by Weems to his left and also

54

54

The Design of Race

bare chested is labeled in the same manner reading, “You Became a Scientific Profile.” Each is colorized in a reddish hue through the chromogenic process in what perhaps may also reference the red of rubylith, a red, semitransparent commercial product used by photographers and graphic designers before digital imaging to mask images for reproduction. Each of these sets are matted within a sphere, like the iris of the lens and a device credited in film to D.W. Griffith used by him in Birth of a Nation. These images make no pretense of portraiture. They are simply crude documents created to enlist the camera against the very notion that these might be portraits of an actual person. Again in a second set of diptychs, the image and the chest of the two are bisected horizontally by the text. The first containing the enslaved man reads “An Anthropological Debate.” Weems re-centers the photographic portrait, making the body a site of debate. This both produces the body in a fixed form, as chemicals on paper and naturalizes its presence within the photographs’ surface. Aware of being utilized at crosspurposes with their own agency and humanity, the enslaved people in these two diptychs do not exactly stare blankly at the camera. There is no sense that they look through the camera to an operator or viewer with any expectation of empathy. They can only picture the cold calculations of the camera and its mechanical ability to act on them.

Glenn Ligon: Absolute Black Among the artists I discuss here that utilize text in their work, Glenn Ligon’s artistic practice is likely the best example of how a text operates materiality within visual culture as racialized. He raises the text to the status of image in the very methods and materials he employs as a painter working across several media. Ligon like Charles builds up the surface of the text as painting though Ligon works with common stencils and oil stick and then dusts these with

55

Vestiges in Word and Image

55

graphite, or coal dust, sometimes incising directly in surface of his paintings. He also works directly with the history of print culture through lithography, creating living historical documents of the political and the personal, as well as working in screen-printing, and neon lettering to light his text from within. In his stencil work with oil crayon and graphite, he raises up the words that increase in height as he builds up the text through reapplication of the media. He emphasizes the text rather than paint upon canvas. This is a fine distinction but one with a difference that reveals his intent to speak in mediums that position him in a cultural sphere where historically he would likely not have appeared at all. The easily accessible tools of the oil pencil, stencil, and graphite belie his acuity with paint and brush and his inclusive use of diverse materials and mediums. More than any other artist discussed here, Ligon enlists the broadest scope of technologies based in the art of mechanical reproduction and incorporates each with the other through a broad familiarity with these tools and their ideological implications and creative capacities. In building up the words in his texts, he plays with surface and surface quality defying legibility with each layer of words further obscuring the text. Simultaneously, the text rises above the surface in relief to reveal itself as itself. He spells out his interest in surfaces in his Study for Notes on the Margin of the “Black Book” (Figure 1.11). Here, writing directly on the surface of a photo on the top and bottom edges of the image area, he asks, “why are we always greasy? why are we always shining?” His notation to himself on the photo in ordinary marker in his own hand reveals the mundane occurrences of the stigma of race in the making of art about African Americans as here in the photo of a black man whose skin shines brightly in profile. This parallels a story told by Keenen Ivory Wayans discussing his early roles in television when makeup artists often seemed flummoxed as to how to prep him for the camera. In one instance, he noticed two makeup people whispering to each other about how to proceed, and then they simply smoothed Vaseline over his face. Ligon uses the ordinary material properties of hand-drawn marker laid on the surface of an offset print

56

56

The Design of Race

FIGURE 1.11  Glenn Ligon, Study for Notes on the Margin of the “Black Book”, 1991. Ink on book page, 11.5 × 11.5 inches (29.2 × 29.2 cm). © Glenn Ligon; Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Chantal Crousel, Paris.

to describe the surface of skin as an index of race. He writes in this same hand to inscribe on the surface of some of his paintings. His signature and voice are clearly present, but rather than laying it upon the surface he breaks the surface of the multiple layers of paint, seen in his Untitled Works in Oil, Enamel, and Graphite on Paper. Despite the oil stick’s proclivity for smudging and obscuring the text, the text remains preeminent, and the more the stencil is reapplied, the richer and deeper Ligon’s voice comes through the materials and his own process of making. In his process, the tonal value of the text is weighted until he achieves

57

Vestiges in Word and Image

57

absolute black. This is a sooty black that he typically applies most heavily to the bottom of the works using graphite on top of oil stick to emphasize the gravity of the words that speak out against the whitened surface of paper or wood built up with gesso. I want to look primarily at four that are legible to varying degrees and repeat phrases from African American literature, history, or theory related to race in America. In the first case, there is a piece from 1990, I Feel Most Colored When I  Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background wherein Ligon engages directly with making through the use of black on white. Here in naming the piece and optimizing the materials of art and design, he foregrounds the important interplay of form and content and the limited ability of black artists to fully embrace modernist forms while yet unable to extricate themselves from its workings. Ligon foregrounds the text as image to demonstrate this and to reiterate what he asserted in an earlier piece, How Can the Master’s Tools Dismantle the Master’s House from 1990. In this piece, he inscribed in his hand, into black oil paint this title, with one word stacked atop the other, from the top to the bottom of the canvas. Here he questions his own efforts at the mastery of art and art practice while considering the fundamental dilemma of the black artist in employing Western art traditions and materials. By inserting his voice—in text—rather than as image, he denies the modernist impulse in art after the 1920s to reject the text and elevate the abstract image over it.7 Following this piece, Ligon began to work in stencil and oil stick so that his hand became less present in the letterforms but more to the point the stencil along with the repetition of the phrases, over and over, emphasizes multiplicity and reproduction of images and words in a seemingly arbitrary but systematic fashion. There is also less of a sense of the beauty of hand-lettered forms, their delicacy, and their individuality. As he repeats each phrase and builds up the black, he also intensifies their blackness; so his voice grows more deeply saturated. The tonal value of the letterforms therefore varies, and a sense of grayscale is created but it is the polarization of the black on white that leaps forward, and as the

58

58

The Design of Race

title explicitly states the figuration of black bodies is most clear against a white surface. This is seen even when the body is formed in words and even when its outline grows indistinct. Ligon visited this notion more literally by integrating the outline of a human profile with stenciled text in the Profile Series from the same period. This racialized profile reappears as a trope in science and art and has also been utilized by Kara Walker and Carrie Mae Weems. Ligon continues in dialogue with the word “colored” as a notion in its association with blackness reproduced in phrases borrowed from Zora Neal Hurston; I Am Not Tragically Colored, I Remember the Very Day I  Became Colored, and I Do Not Always Feel Colored. Ligon expressly references the voice, reactivating Hurston’s by his rewriting in paint. He asserts his own singular voice in I Lost My Voice I Found My Voice by repeatedly outlining the phrase and by stacking it cheek to jowl, and up and down the entire height of the surface of the work, and also in building up the surface of the text by stenciling the phrase over and over, one word repeated atop the other. Through this device, he speaks himself into being, where he himself is not seen directly in the text that acts as index of his body. The words are outlined but not his own figure. Yet the words form as a mass joining all in a single body. There is an element of call and response in the work as he seems compelled to return in kind to the text by repeating the phrase to himself, writing and then rewriting it to hasten the effect even as the words smudge and obscure his voice and meaning. He returns to his voice as his essential self, written in text rather than figuratively in two pieces, I Am Somebody from 1991 and I Was Somebody from 1990, and reworked in 2003. In I Am Somebody, he works to recreate himself in the same manner in stenciled letterforms in black on white, repeating the phrase as always in all capitals I AM SOMEBODY. This declaration precedes the piece I Was Somebody chronologically, rendered in white oil stick rather than black on wood whitened with gesso. Ligon enlists the tactile effect of touching the surface with the eye in attempting to make the thick, white words legible against the white surface. This produces the

59

Vestiges in Word and Image

59

pronounced affect of making Ligon’s voice less visible and his body felt but not fully seen. Here, he is seemingly less “colored” in being pictured in effect in white upon a white surface despite there being no actual coloration in the piece. He inverts the color logic of working in—black and white—to call attention to the use of color or rather its absence. It is clear that he is looking to make seen the effects of the erasure of black voices and bodies in fine art production and that the tools that equip him are also those that hinder him. Ironically, in being less seen in this piece, he has through this body of work become more visible and his art a valuable commodity. In I’m Turning into a Specter Before Your Very Eyes And I’m Going to Haunt You, he again references erasure as a visual phenomenon of racialized looking and blackness as corporeal. Ligon addresses the notion of appearances as a black artist seen through the optics of race and its effects. In possibly his most iconic piece discussed at the beginning of this chapter Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Black Features and Self Portrait Exaggerating My White Features, he directs the white gaze at the belief that appearances matter and can capture observable truths in a glance. He effectively presents his own self-conscious look at double consciousness by considering his words as they materially affect the work. He labels the piece in type within the surface of the silkscreen. The type in each case is identical, as is each self-portrait in each photograph, and this redoubles the viewers’ complicity in the act of defining through looking. This further implicates them in the daily and mundane act of racialized looking, which is reinforced through his use of the common typographic treatments he employs and the casual labeling of ordinary people.

Lorna Simpson In conclusion, I would like to consider the photographic work of Lorna Simpson who produces the greatest psychological distance between the text and image

60

60

The Design of Race

allowing us to see how she resists the gaze, placing text and image at odds with one another making more explicit the signification at work in her work. Simpson like the other photographers I  have discussed utilizes the leveling surface of the photograph, but in her case the texts are remote from but aligned through proximity with the image, often in uncanny juxtapositions. Her work is less about reappropriating images of blackness from consumer culture that employ the stereotypes of blackness. Simpson’s work is a look at the body in its figuration as a black body including her reassertion of the humanity of the individual struggling against constant denial of personal, human dignity. In many of her photographs, the figure’s head is wholly or partially blocked out or cropped, tucked into shadow, with eyes cast down, masked, blindfolded, or turned fully away from the camera. Her figures never seem caught in a momentary glance at a camera but float impassively, suspended in a long, slow shot over protracted silences wherein the subject suffers not the workings of the camera. When a text appears within her work, it usually reads in an authoritative and vaguely distanced voice. A voice similar to the mode of speaking common to the labeling of work in museums and galleries in airless, terse, dry tones, and seemingly at times sardonic. Often it is materially mundane, engraved in the plastic common to labeling and naming doors and spaces, and therefore bureaucratic. It can bring to mind Jim Crow signage, signs made to demarcate spaces legally set aside as racialized and intentionally designed to appear as natural and neutral as possible. Simpson clearly posits these signs as signifiers despite their vernacular appearance. In aligning these mundane signs with dispassionate bodies, she defies the naturalness of the text as label and labeling to demonstrate how the black body is seen and read as separate from the larger public body. In many cases where the head or eyes of the figures are not obscured, the body is turned from the camera’s gaze that persists in looking instrumentally as an agent of white supremacy. Often Simpson divides the body in the framing of her subjects. This is decidedly different than the modernist tactic of separating or isolating a

61

Vestiges in Word and Image

61

particular body part as an index of the racialized body or in the case of the feminine such as lips, beauty mark, or eyes. In You’re Fine, the figure lays in repose in the manner of the Venus but divided into three like a magician’s assistant, turned away from the camera, clothed in what appears to be a white surgical gown. Above the framing and realized in white relief and all caps reads YOU’RE FINE, while beneath it reads YOU’RE HIRED. To the left in faux gold leaf are stacked several door plate signs listing medical tests and procedures, and to the right the words SECTRATARIAL and POSITION are stacked vertically and aligned symmetrically. In Five Day Forecast, the figure of a woman is repeated, nearly but not identically in five photographs, labeled MONDAY through FRIDAY. In contrast to this, her head is cropped off just below the chin and the name of each of the five days of the workweek stands in place of her mouth. In this, she provides not an index of an individual but a label that absents the voice and replaces it with anonymous, unrecognized labor. Below the five figures of the woman sit ten words in alliteration, repeating in each the suffix MIS such as in the first case—MISDESCRIPTION. This repetition and alliteration double the sense of multiplicity of the photograph while Simpson denies the mass reproduction of the black body by keeping each photograph subtlety distinct from the other, thus leaving something remaining of the body of the individual despite her cropping of the face. Beyond disallowing the viewer from engaging the subject in direct address, Simpson often further denies the gaze by providing only an index of the body in the form of human hair—thick, black, tightly woven hair. In the diptych Back, she turns the subject in opposition to the viewer to directly confront the very act of looking. Like many of her works, the text is not truly integrated with the photograph but stands apart as a label. She labels the work “eyes in/ the back of/your head.” The subject’s hair forms a dark, dense outline of her as a portrait of her defiance with a braid of the same weight and fashion framing the labels in the second panel. The implication is of course that in being seen,

62

62

The Design of Race

she must always look to see how she is observed and take note even to the point of growing eyes in the back of her head. Simpson thus represents the essence of double consciousness as a result not of being seen but as constantly being regarded as different. In this chapter, I have examined the materiality of the text within and upon images created by African American artists as a way to consider words as artifacts of graphic design, the purpose being to understand the operations of the text within graphic design as a product of mechanical reproduction. It is the presence of texts within the work of these artists that allows us to see that the mundane and ephemeral workings of a text within graphic design carry far greater weight of meaning and history than appearances suggest. The substance of our visual culture is rooted in the creation of modes of seeing and cultural production that have mass-produced and consumed black bodies, creating bodies in commodity form with exchange value and exchangeable as products of design, mechanically reproduced. This has allowed racist stereotypes to continue to circulate post emancipation and to still labor in service of white supremacy. All the while, the very mobility of these reproducible bodies has enabled them to shift across mediums giving these the ability to cross other lines and challenge other modes through their exchange. Here are artists that understand this ironic dynamic through their own lived experience and make use of the agency of bodies to speak in an artist’s voice to this very dynamic. I present their work in order to ask why has graphic design not considered issues of race in any detailed or sustained fashion. These artists have exerted their agency to make something of the visual and material aspects of race, played out in their lives and upon their psyches. They have each to some degree produced work that resists the effects of white supremacy and turned it on its head, work that now has new value within the art world rather than the commercial sphere we associate with graphic design.

63

Vestiges in Word and Image

63

Notes 1 Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890– 1940 (Vintage, 1998), 125. 2 Ibid., 151–5. 3 Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford University Press, 1995), 15–20. 4 Michael Ray Charles (Tony Shafrazi Gallery, 1998), 6. 5 Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (Random House, 1964), 116. 6 Naomi Klein, No Logo (Picador, 2000), 27–61. 7 Johanna Drucker, Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 (University of Chicago Press, 1994), 1–8.

64

64

65

2 Typography and Types

Via typography (i.e., by definition, cast metal type), language, though constantly in flux, is made tangible and ubiquitous in its material state through the mass culture of print. We can see this quite distinctly in the racialized imagery of the nineteenth century exemplified by the specimen type of a fugitive slave produced by the New England type foundry in 1854 (Figure 2.1). Though mobilized across the pages of broadsides and newspapers, the escapee is permanently situated not simply as enslaved but operating in a system of mass reproduction. He personifies the concept of “the runaway” but never the actual person described in the text of the advertisement as having escaped. He is literally a piece of type and metaphorically a stereotype. The runaway’s presence within the larger means of mechanical reproduction contradicts the fictive, popular, and domestic images of the “happily” enslaved printed in idealized images of the antebellum south. Ironically, the stereotyping process also became known as cliché; that term then took on the meaning of a clichéd image as typified by the runaway. Both Glenn Ligon and Hank Willis Thomas have directly interrogated these meanings in their contemporary art through their own experience as racialized subjects. The stereotype was a typographic process invented by Firmin Didot in France in the 1790s and preceded the Linotype as a standardized method for setting a complete line of type by nearly a hundred years. It involved first handsetting an initial line, then making multiple molds from this original to create

66

66

The Design of Race

FIGURE 2.1  New England Type Foundry (1834), specimen of printing types from the New England Type Foundry. Source: Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, printers.

several casts, allowing for multiple impressions to be run simultaneously on different presses. Walter Lippmann popularized the term as a metaphor in the 1920s in reference to the stereotype’s ability to create a recognizable or iconic figure and through its multiple copies impress the image on the mind of the public.1 As modernism emerged in the early twentieth century, the influence of typography’s standardization and modularity furthered racial stereotypes simply by virtue of the technologies of the art of mechanical reproduction. What scholars working outside of design often fail to clearly recognize in this artifact is that he is not simply a specific “type” in a general, metaphoric sense but literally a standard piece of typography or type. He is trapped figuratively within a symbolic system of white supremacy as an icon. But he also represents

67

Typography and Types

67

the material manifestation of industrialized knowledge production wherein text and image converge through a single, contained, racialized body. His figure signifies the way that graphic design artifacts meld text and image and how their doubling troubles the way we see race. It impacts first the way text and image meld and secondly the way mechanical reproduction and racialized imagery combine to produce how we see persons as abstractions through various graphic media. The ease at which he has been reproduced and then widely disseminated complicates this again in the ways we take highly visible, graphic forms for granted in that seeing. It is the ubiquity of the stereotype created by its many duplicate forms that abstracts the way we see the other. The existence of a single character—the runaway—within the body of a standardized set of typographic forms—a typeface—figures him as systematically subsumed. Even when visualized in flight, he is securely locked into the system of chattel slavery and quite literally within the bed of a physical printing press. The cunning with which the runaway was produced as both a piece of type and an image demonstrates the accelerated effect of the graphic arts on our collective imagining of racialized bodies. As a figure, he represents a body but not the body of a single individual. He collects the many black bodies of the enslaved and the labor those many bodies represent and therefore the capital they produce. The literalness of his place as a commodity in allegorically and visually mediating the materiality of race may seem tangential to the violence of slavery, were it not for his persistent presence in a timeline that transcends the antebellum, modernity, and today’s systemic racism. The hybridity that defines the type of the runaway at the conjunction of the verbal and the visual provides the space within which artists such as Glenn Ligon and others pry apart the visual conceits of racialized subjects. My reading of this and other designed artifacts stems from my experience as a graphic designer and design educator who uses the forms forged through the art of mechanical reproduction now within the digital sphere. In my reading of these artifacts, I do not take a bifurcated view of text and image as discrete practices

68

68

The Design of Race

and forms of cultural production but consider them jointly. This allows me greater latitude and a unique perspective of the visual and material culture of printed matter through my own making. Thus, in a sense, I employ these artifacts against themselves, seeking to question their operations through a duality of words and images that defines them. Besides rejecting facetious notions of a nonideological history of graphic design, I want to stress that the basis for my argument rests in a professional stake in the practice of research through making:  creative production by designers and artists producing critical, creative work in response to our visual culture. Their engagement involves materials and processes associated with artistic practices that include appropriating racist and racialized imagery as a means to subvert white supremacy’s visual logics. As I will show through a conscious reuse of the conceptual underpinnings and material processes that challenge racist ideology, a designer or artist can invert his or her own subject relationship to that ideology and refute it. By refocusing design criticism on design’s materiality, I  return the discussion to the artifact itself: How it was produced and consumed as well as what effects this has had on the public imagination concerning racialized subjects. This is especially important with ephemeral imagery typical of the runaway slave specimen type. The very act of inking this figure upon a white background posits him within a landscape both once real and imagined. In the mind of the viewer, he was able to plausibly cross lines as a free person subverting his intended purpose and signaling the threat of escape and rebellion. As I  will discuss further, the very creation of this figure—in motion—undermined the effort to signify a runaway. By picturing him in motion, the viewer can now not see him as one with agency over his own body, potentially his own labor rather than an exchangeable commodity. This I assert is what produced an anxiety over black bodies post emancipation— despite the runaway being cast in metal as a solid object that can be locked into the bed of a press representing him in flight contradicts his purpose.

69

Typography and Types

69

If his purpose is contradicted, then also his utility as a representation of the enslaved; if his utility, then the very notion of whether his body can be controlled; if his body, then his labor and the capital it produced. What occurred through the very logic of the machine within print culture was that the art of mechanical reproduction simply outran other systems. In the case of chattel slavery, this was a system well established but relatively recently and was quite wholly dependent on violence. This violence while contradicted by progressive and democratic ideals in US culture was also consistently represented in print. While the term stereotype has been associated accurately and frequently with the origins of racialized imagery, the often misused and misappropriated definition of the now common term has undermined a critical reading of the material and metaphorical forms of graphic design. This misappropriation has in turn perpetuated the assumption that graphic design can occupy a nonideological space despite its roots in consumer culture and that culture’s reliance on racialized images. This reliance on racialized images to produce graphic forms to shill for commodities is not unlike our consumer culture’s reliance on visual commodities generally. A number of contemporary scholars assimilate the stereotype to other media or various visual and psychological phenomena. However, such comparisons such as the description of the stereotype as a projection although an apt metaphor mislay the significance of the stereotype and its pernicious, specific material agency in establishing white supremacy through the use value of print culture. The metaphor of projection works well in a psychological sense, yet it denies the materiality of the stereotype. On the other hand, in the work of the artist Kara Walker, she does consider projection historically through the silhouette. A  form in fact produced through projection and representing a distinct racialized visual process of seeing. She interrogates it as a method for making work that questions the lens itself and makes the viewer complicit. Her work draws on the signifier

70

70

The Design of Race

directly as described by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. She manipulates the material sign itself through projection but in the play of light also locates its intangible qualities and allegorical power as well. The signifying power of the stereotype rested in its ability to reproduce type in a single word or length of words, and replicate them in multiples, of that same text to be printed, and then reprinted repeatedly until melted down again and then recast. This ubiquity of words cast in metal and then multiplied produced a naturalizing effect and thus a truth effect. It is the wide multiplicity of printed matter that created the more recent metaphorical notions of the stereotype beyond its mere economy described by Toni Morrison as a means of mass-producing and maintaining white supremacy over many decades, despite the seeming ephemerality of printed matter.2 The uncanny relationship of the intangible qualities and concrete material qualities of graphic forms hides the construct of race and the act of looking, the framing of the black subject, and the very lens itself. White supremacy maintains a solid hold on cultural production extensively and persistently through ephemeral artifacts of design that are mechanically reproduced.3 No matter how thin the paper printed upon or how specious notions of race may be, they persist because they are contained within the very language and materials used to describe race itself. The ephemerality of print media and therefore stereotypes are contested by their ubiquity through the process of the stereotype just described. That ubiquity creates a sense of print having an unlimited ability to reproduce itself. In the case of the stereotype, it is white supremacy’s unhindered ability to reproduce itself by repeating the conceit of the stereotype as a truism. Through the stereotype, we believe we see a figure—in this case that of a runaway slave—but in fact the image blinds us to the realities of the enslaved. The supposed veracity of the image remains unchallenged because of the form it takes as printed matter produced through mechanical means. The logic of the machine—in this case, typography, the press, and its workings—created a sense of observable truth through

71

Typography and Types

71

mass-produced, standardized, and mechanized knowledge production. True knowledge eludes the viewer unaware of the inherent conceit in the production of knowledge made through that logic over time. Important to the logic of the machine in producing knowledge is the simple but profound mechanics of type as language, existing materially in the third dimension, and ubiquitous through cheap and expendable means in the second dimension. The original definition of typography still applies in the digital age, despite no longer being cast in metal and now where fonts exist digitally with even more ubiquity and power to systematically determine how we see.

The Logic of the Machine In English, we employ twenty-six letters to speak and forty-four phonemes in print, represented in any typeface by twenty-six letterforms. Our alphabet and therefore each and every font is a closed system. With the advent of movable type, these could then be cast in metal along with any number of seemingly innocuous ornaments such as the runaway slave. Within Gutenberg’s genius in creating movable type was the mechanics of recasting a single letterform, multiple times with exactness, making every piece of type cast from a single matrix interchangeable with every other. This interchangeability allows the same runaway to be pictured multiple times and still seem to represent each and every runaway through its ubiquity. This modularity typical much later of all industrial production would literally not be equaled until the 1800s when Colt’s revolver made the pen and the sword rivals in power to persuade through the logic of the machine.4 The cognitive process of the eye-absorbing logic that makes printed texts readable is paramount to the specific workings of typefaces as machined artifacts. The swiftness with which this effect occurs and its apparent naturalness are hidden in the mechanics of movable type. In Peter Behren’s

72

72

The Design of Race

FIGURE 2.2  Eadward-Muybridge-Birds-in-Flight, 1887.

early efforts to define a truly modernist, machine aesthetic for typography, he suggested that observing typography is like watching a birds flight or the gallop of a horse. Both seem graceful and pleasing, but the viewer does not observe the details of their form or movement. Only the rhythm of the lines is seen by the viewer, and the same is true of a typeface. (Figure 2.2) These mechanics also obscure how the introduction of new typographic forms such as sans serif type appears at first to defy readability but soon are adopted as conventional. Each letterform performs semiotically within the body of the font as an individual form, only as each letter relates to every other letter within the whole. The figure of the runaway as an ornament belonging to a font differs not at all in this, and this increases its utility as a stereotype in remaining constant and subsumed within the body of the font—both as image and text simultaneously. The mechanics of the seeing of the runaway specimen type can be compared to Muybridge’s early experiments with photography, locomotion, and persistence of vision in settling a bet of Leland Stanford’s in 1878 that in full gallop a horse’s four legs all leave the ground at once and remain

73

Typography and Types

73

suspended in air for a split second. This assumption was of course correct, but it was photography’s genius to observe the fragmentation of motion and therefore time that first allowed this to truly be observed. By setting up myriad cameras attached to a series of trip wires around a racetrack, Muybridge did indeed capture the singularity of that moment within the movement of the horse effectively stopping time. This arrested vision suggests how we read a text through the art of typography. The capturing of the runaway in the form of the specimen type traps his movements in eternal bondage within his body. This fascination with sequencing of time and capturing motion I will explore further in Chapter  5 as an important effect of mechanical reproduction on racialized images produced as spectacles of blackness.

Cunning Devices and Persons We can see the machinations of typography in its collusion with industrialized knowledge production in the creation of racialized images and texts by looking at a variety of printed matter of the antebellum United States. This matter includes advertisements and broadsides announcing the sale of the enslaved; alerting the public to escaped slaves; and seeking their recapture along with wills, bills of sale, deeds, tax rolls, and census forms. Often these ephemera featured physical descriptions of enslaved people while highlighting their unique, humanizing qualities as well as distinctly marking them as mixed race. This occurred despite their most significant qualification as enslaved people who labored in a system based on the spurious notion that they were less than human and therefore lacking any special qualities. Often the descriptions of runaways included reports of their cunningness and ability to deceive, thus obliquely referencing their intelligence. It is noteworthy that these descriptions of the physical and mental abilities of the enslaved contrasted sharply with a lack of portraiture of African Americans in the antebellum period, especially

74

74

The Design of Race

nonstereotypical works posing them in light of their abilities, the same abilities that served them well in making their escape and daily utilized to great profit by their owners. What is not unique to these printed materials describing the enslaved is their resemblance to other common advertising of the day, especially typographically. In fact, it is their mundane appearance and resemblance to the plethora of the ordinary print culture of the time that arrests the modern reader’s attention in their banality. Their typography is typical of the wood and metal type of the antebellum period. Although their page layout’s hierarchy is archaic to the modern eye, they are solidly grounded in the graphic art conventions of the time. Generally, the hierarchy of the page diminishes in scale from top to bottom, with occasional scale shifts included in the body, where novelty faces, italics, or bold type are dropped in, or where a shift is made to another typeface. Cuts or typographic ornaments of figures, especially those of runaways described earlier, are often included. Smaller advertisements are defined by the column width in which they were placed and often contained in borders. Ornamentation is usually limited to more ornate letterforms in headlines, drop or initial caps, or where emphasis is insisted upon. The sale of slaves along with common commodities reinforces the ordinariness of these forms of everyday print communication. Often the enslaved are listed for sale along with trade goods, stock, and ordinary household items—the very comforts of home. For instance, in an auction notice from Boston in 1775, an estate sale details: Tables, chairs, looking glasses, feather beds, bedheads and bedding, pewter, brass, sundry pieces of plate … a valuable collection of books, also a likely Negro lad. The notice demonstrates in stark relief why typography may never be fully extricated from the objects it describes, and with which it is surrounded, or from the location and time of its production. It must be read within its period

75

Typography and Types

75

as the visual culture of graphic design describing material objects and persons in a single breath. These ordinary, vernacular modes of advertising design were partly made more widely available and reproducible due to the relative inexpense of wood type, for its lighter weight, malleability, and material abundance during the gigantic outpouring of print culture of the antebellum period. Wood type was produced largely for and appeared widely in cheap advertising as distinctly not in keeping with the rarified typographic tradition of the book arts. A tradition associated with the refined typography of cast metal type that had only just reached its aesthetic zenith in the late eighteenth century in France where the term stereotype was born and coined by Didot. The technology of movable type was in transition in the early nineteenth century in part because wood was so cheap and easily manipulated, and because of the introduction of the pantograph. This mechanical arm when attached to a router allowed the maker to produce numerous, exact duplicates in multiple sizes of the same typeface. It made available a high degree of expressiveness acting as a prosthesis for the hand and eye, reproducing in wood type many of the decorative and florid motifs of Victoriana and for a certain amount of amateur enthusiasm for the craft. Tradespeople working in print could easily adapt hand lettering and copy existing signage and letterforms from lithographs to make a far larger variety of novelty faces. This introduction of the vernacular into the relatively refined arena of precise, handset, metal typesetting in concert with descriptions of and representations of black bodies produced the chink in the armor of the machine. Here is the moment when blackness came to be widely represented in print and thus could be (re)-presented in future by African American artists. Thus the very vernacular of blackness read in words would be established along with other typical American vernacular modes of making. Simultaneously, the photograph was introduced as a site of debate in the struggle to abolish slavery and also enforce its racialized, visual codes. To search for the visible presence of African Americans just before and right after

76

76

The Design of Race

the advent of photography, we must look again primarily at the typographic documents listed earlier. In these texts, we read very specific descriptions of the physical attributes of runaways, often their mental acuity, especially aspects of their appearance, and manner that might aid them in eluding slave catchers and common citizens. These descriptions though designed to describe and catch the escaped also served to humanize their subjects, at the very least implicitly posing them—as subjects—rather than stereotypes. In one example from the Carolina Gazette of 1802: Twenty Dollars Reward For Jack who has again Run-Away The Subscriber’s Servant Jack, who calls himself John Leech, again absconded last night. He is a short well made young Mulatto, probably about five feet five inches high, about twenty-five years of age, and a plausible; he has a thick bushy head of hair, like a negro’s thick lips, a film on his left eye, over which he sometimes wears a peace of green silk. He belonged when he was a child, to the late Ephraim Mitchell, esq. deceased, and afterwards to Francis Bremar, esq. from whom the subscriber bought him. Here we read and can see a portrait of a complex individual through the eyes of one who has closely observed that individual but missed or misread key aspects of his personality—an escapee who has named himself and who may represent himself as himself when on his own. One self possessed enough to repeatedly make his escape through his owner’s blind spots and no doubt because he was aware of his own economic value. As in Carrie Mae Weems’s photographs described in Chapter 1, Jack (or rather John) is described in color by the word (mulatto) made plain through the typography of the printed notice. He also bears on his body the marks of neglect that Harriet Jacobs purposefully remarked on in her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. These remarks now make the reader aware of the hypocrisy of slave owners in their

77

Typography and Types

77

abuse, willful blindness of, and neglect of the enslaved. In another notice from 1857 in North Carolina are pictured similar markers. $100. Reward. Runaway from the subscribed on the night of the 6th Nov. negro Man, Frank. He is about 5 ft. 9 inches in height, 37 years of age, weigh-ing about 140, of a dark mulatto color, not fleshy, some of his teeth rotten in front, with a small scar on his forehead, over one eye, caused by a kick from a horse when a child, and very polite in his manners when an end is to be gained. He is a carpenter. I am informed he has on several instances, since making his escape from my plantation, informed persons whom he has met on the road that he, himself, has been sent by me in search of a runaway. This mentioned that persons may be on their guard against his art & cunning. Previously to having made his escape, he by means of false keys, robbed my house of $160. In gold & silver— most of which was of gold. This notice goes to great lengths to describe one who if he were an entirely free, white man of the period, possessed the very well-regarded shrewdness and skills necessary to make his way in the world as a free agent of his own destiny. A man who was clearly able to discern that the very gold laid in store was earned from his labor and cunning. His politeness and manners are seen in him not as a sign of the common courtesies that white persons exchanged daily as a matter of course but a cynical display of self-interest. In addition to providing a detailed description of the escaped so that he may be seen and captured, it also attempts to reveal his nature. The notice alerts the public to the blind spot he occupies in what it describes as his “art and cunning.” The ability of whites to read black bodies as black, in this case “mulatto,” and therefore enslaved was immensely complicated by miscegenation, a subject of which it was not polite to speak but was necessary for continuation of the slave economy. Despite this, the ability of the enslaved progeny of their white owners to potentially disguise themselves as entirely white or white

78

78

The Design of Race

enough to pass compounded this complication. In the case of Ellen Craft, it was her additional enlisting of androgyny that allowed her to fool the eye by adding the complicating task of locating gender upon her racialized body. She appeared boldly in drag traveling with her husband as her supposed enslaved, male servant and herself as a man. Her ability to perform masculinity and whiteness and subvert the meanings of her own body reveals the weaknesses in assigning race to a body as a blind spot in and of itself. Her subversion of the optics of race and gender reveals the invisible workings of whiteness attached to a black body that confound the hypervisibility of black subjects confined by their status as “the eternal present of labor, reproduction, and punishment.”5 This slippage that Craft employed so stealthily reveals something fundamental to the nature of racialized representations. They have baked into them contradictory readings of “black” bodies. As I will show in Chapter 5, this increases the means by which images of black bodies move across various media as do all exchangeable images but with far wider ramifications. This also allows contemporary, African American artists to play with this slippage by signifying and re-signifying upon these images; and in the margins, and along the gutters of pages; and from the edges of the frames within films.

Bodies in Black Type Two of the contemporary African American artists covered in Chapter 1 who have directly interrogated antebellum advertisements noting the sale of slaves or the recapture of runaways are Hank Willis Thomas and Glenn Ligon. In NBA Trade, Hank Willis Thomas subverts the 1853 WM. F. Talbot notice of intent to buy “NEGROES” by comparing the same to the National Basketball Association (NBA) draft (Figure 2.3). Thomas appropriates the advertisement by extracting the standard cut of the runaway and replaces it with the NBA logo of a basketball player in black and white while keeping the text of the

79

Typography and Types

79

FIGURE 2.3  Hank Willis Thomas, NBA Trade, 2004. © HANK WILLIS THOMAS. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

original notice identical. He mimics the rough production values of early American graphic ephemera of the figure of the player within a rounded rectangle. The artist manifestly intends to call attention to the starkness of the black and white of the graphic arts and its reductive effect on black bodies. Like the figure of the runaway discussed earlier, the NBA player is in motion and again subverts a system designed to exploit his labor, yet while still confined within the picture plane of the advertisement. Thomas allows the reader to infer that the figure of the NBA player is itself black. He signifies upon him reinforcing what whiteness asks us constantly to assume. The notice features the dollar amount on offer of “$1200” most prominently in the visual hierarchy as the largest, boldest typeface, and printed in a thick, slab serif font. Thomas

80

80

The Design of Race

FIGURE  2.4  Glenn Ligon, Runaways, 1993. One from a suite of ten lithographs. Edition of 45, 16 × 12 inches (40.6 × 30.5 cm) each. © Glenn Ligon; Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Chantal Crousel, Paris.

renders visible the abstraction of bodies as commodities, and as an analog to this the abstract and arbitrary nature of money. He deftly assists the viewer in linking the labor of African Americans, the spectacle of racialized popular entertainments, and sports and the arbitrary notion of commodities, to the abstraction of bodies. Glenn Ligon has also appropriated and subverted runaway slave notices in a series of ten lithographs titled Runaways (Figures 2.4–2.8). In these pieces, he mimics the common print advertisements and broadsides for runaways from the antebellum period and includes the standard specimen types and cuts used in these. Among these, he also includes Wedgewood’s enslaved, kneeling male and female figures and a cut of Frederick Douglass as runaway from his slave narrative, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. The sentimental

81

Typography and Types

81

FIGURE 2.5  Glenn Ligon, Runaways, 1993. Four from a suite of ten lithographs. Edition of 45, 16 × 12 inches (40.6 × 30.5 cm) each. © Glenn Ligon; Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Chantal Crousel, Paris.

image created by Wedgewood in pale blue porcelain for the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade and worn upon the bodies of abolitionists portrayed a supplicant African slave in chains and kneeling. It was featured subsequently in one form or another, male and female, especially in print, throughout the antebellum period in newspapers such as the masthead of the liberator, broadsides, sheet music, broaches, and other objects such as coins or tokens, textiles, and snuff and donation boxes—finally coalescing once again in material form in 1876 at the US Centennial as the national monument to emancipation, the first national monument to feature an African American. The single, kneeling figure appears, cast in metal before Lincoln but not as originally intended as part of an armed contingent of the Colored Union Infantry. The inclusion of the text with the original figure “Am I Not a Man and a Brother” enacts the reading of the observable image of the enslaved asking the viewer to release him from his position as a slave, but this figure in fact

82

82

The Design of Race

FIGURE  2.6  Glenn Ligon, Runaways, 1993. Five from a suite of ten lithographs. Edition of 45, 16 × 12 inches (40.6 × 30.5 cm) each. © Glenn Ligon; Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Chantal Crousel, Paris.

remained for several decades even beyond emancipation as a passive recipient of charity and patriarchy. It persisted during the first highly contested and often violent period of African American suffrage, increased geographic and economic mobility coinciding in a broad US consumer culture that established many of the iconic and racialized images of mass consumption. The figure cannot find any true allegorical or metaphorical logic since it remains arrested in its position as enslaved. The story of eventual emancipation was meant through the periods of the abolitionist movement, the civil war, and reconstruction to follow a narrative logic that would empower this figure to rise, stand, walk, and exert agency to mobilize economically and politically, but he remains immovably within the white patriarchy literally cast in metal. Like the type of the runaway slave in Chapter  1, this figure never becomes

83

Typography and Types

83

FIGURE  2.7  Glenn Ligon, Runaways, 1993. Six from a suite of ten lithographs. Edition of 45, 16 × 12 inches (40.6 × 30.5 cm) each. © Glenn Ligon; Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Chantal Crousel, Paris.

a true agent of its destiny, remaining in stasis. He stands in stark contrast, securely frozen in time and unable to move. He served as a palliative to white supremacy’s increasing anxiety over the movement of the formerly enslaved across state and regional boundaries, from farm fields to cities, and across racial lines but especially in print. In each piece and with each of these figures, Ligon includes the matterof-fact descriptions of runaways common to these advertisements and enlists their antiquated language to describe himself in the present and as the subject. His self-descriptions begin by reading “Run Away” and are ironic, tongue-incheek subversions delivered in a self-deprecating and blasé manner. Each is rendered in a large bold typeface common to the antebellum period. Ligon’s use of the rich black of the text, its crisp lines, and the reductive quality of

84

84

The Design of Race

FIGURE 2.8  Glenn Ligon, Runaways, 1993. Eight from a suite of ten lithographs. Edition of 45, 16 × 12 inches (40.6 × 30.5 cm) each. © Glenn Ligon; Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Chantal Crousel, Paris.

the figures of the runaways reinforces the message that he is enlisting these historical modes of the graphic design not arbitrarily but to emphasize the rhetorical power of those mechanical arts. One piece reads of him: Ran away, Glenn, a young black man twenty-eight years old, about five feet six inches high. Dressed in blue jeans, a blue button down shirt, black shoes. Medium build. Very short haircut (not quite shaved head). Large neck. Green tinted sunglasses. By inserting himself in the runaway notice, he subverts it by enlisting himself as the subject of the very piece that denies the enslaved the right to exist as protagonists in the story of their own attempts to break free. The piece conjures up the body of the artist for the reader. In making the reader complicit in rendering the portrait of the artist, Ligon exhibits how the artist’s

85

Typography and Types

85

labor exists in this technique of directing the mind’s eye to reveal the body. A  body usually representing labor as abstracted and fulfilled through the bodies of the enslaved. Ligon’s interest in the work of the artist and the work of representation of black bodies to black labor in US history is a key function of his artistic output. He plays with type, the visible sign of language through fine art production, what remains the quotidian purview of graphic designer.

Black Bodies, White Pages It is rare to find a typeface that specifically references blackness except perhaps obliquely in attempts at vaguely Africanized or clumsy multicultural like faces. One incomplete but notable exception is a logo designed to advertise Ebony Comedies of 1918, a series of silent shorts produced by the General Film Company featuring “Real Colored Players” (Figure  2.9). The design required the creation of ten original letterforms to spell out the title—Ebony Comedies—indicating that perhaps it was based on an existing novelty typeface. Each letterform in the logo requires one, two, or three hackneyed, minstrel characters to produce it. The figures contort, their limbs twist, bend, and break, silhouetted in black against the white of the page. This dimorphic presentation of black bodies and visages as objects of ridicule, promoting entertainment, points back to antebellum minstrel shows and forward to the artist Kara Walker who interrogates such silhouetted faces and figures. In this logo, we can observe much of what graphic designers work with typographically in the design of logos, mastheads, web banners, signage, corporate marks, and other institutional symbols. In it, we also see how the reductive nature of graphics enables stereotypes and masks the complexities of race especially in the polarized, black-and-white visual landscape of race in the United States. The bent and broken men that form the logo begin with the letter E, one of three letter Es, indicating that perhaps each letterform was designed exclusively

86

86

The Design of Race

FIGURE 2.9  Ebony Comedies advertising for Motion Picture News, 1918.

for this logo rather than a complex extended typeface. In the first, the figure raises a limp, broken wrist to the gaping figure to his right. In the second case, the figure forms an E by prayerfully balancing on his coattails. With the third E, the figure bends, twists, and leans awkwardly toward the smoking figure to his left. Other figures such as the B are mangled, broken, or twisted as with the last figure who canters forward on his toes, curving impossibly to form the S. All the caricatures appear ill-fittingly dressed as buffoons for the stage, loosely draped in tails, ruffled shirts, elongated gloves, and bent, oversized shoes. All these sartorial elements allow for fine detail around and along the edges of the figures, serving to ornament the letterforms. This detailed line assists to unite the figures in a single image and, although likely not derived from a typeface, the piece otherwise operates as such. Each letterform must and does relate semiotically in meaning to every other letterform. Their individual meanings

87

Typography and Types

87

are found only in relation to each other, for the bent and distended figure that forms the B would not read as such if not standing between the E and O. Like any letterform, such as the runaway slave ornament, they are subsumed within the body of the overall design as bodies commodified, twisted, and made to mean something only in relation to white bodies as normative. Semiotically, the figures present a spectacle of blackness against which white supremacy informs whiteness as that norm. On the show card pictured below, the logo is a halftone image of the same length of six “Real Colored Players,” dressed comically as sleeping police officers. Like the Darktown lithographs covered in Chapter 5, these continue the tradition of mockery of African Americans as incapable of attaining competency above the status of comic relief. This “realness” is indicated in the production value of a photographic image that lends the verisimilitude of silent film through the halftone’s ability to register gradations in skin color through continuous tone reproduction. I will look more specifically at the halftone in Chapter 4 as a key technology of the art of mechanical reproduction within the context of photography. The body copy of the advertisement goes on to describe, “Here is the laugh irresistible—Here are pictures with the spontaneous Negro mirth predominant.” The advertisement links the spontaneity of the action of film as capturing the motion and therefore the mirth and laughter associated with racist caricature. It goes on to specify “the Black-Face Act Diverted to the Silent Drama,” linking the stereotypical legacy of the minstrel figures in the logo to the modern filmic drama. I will look more closely at this transmutation of static images overtime to figures caught in motion in film and television in Chapter 5. The Ebony Comedies logo retraces how typography specifically developed to establish and enforce racialized readings of human bodies. In The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates Jr. describes language as the visible sign in the black tradition and “the commodity of exchange, the text and technology of reason.”6 Typography as the first process to be completely mechanized,

88

88

The Design of Race

standardized, and systematically designed for mass production soon outran all other systems of knowledge production. It exceeded and promoted every progressive intent but simultaneously allowed for significant blind spots in understanding the effects of the machine and its workings upon the human imagination, chief among these are specious notions of race as a visible sign. The effects of the mass production of written and visual language on how we see and think about race hide in the “systemization of all human knowledge.”7 If we retrace the history of graphic design from the invention of movable type to the present, we see ingrained in it the effort in graphic design to marry written and visual forms and that this complicates how we see race. A history defined by a troubled relationship to these forms that were often doubled and redoubled when yoked together. What emerges by the nineteenth century and remains consistent over time up to the digital age is the presence of commodified black bodies, bodies that in turn subvert and resist the workings and logic of the machine upon their humanity.

Typography and Critical Making in Graphic Design Here I  will consider some contemporary work produced by two working graphic designers for my graduate course, Visualizing Race, who enlisted typography to critique its historic influence on the visual culture of race in the United States. Their wordplay, which describes the manipulation of type and written language, reveals the tension in how the designer shifts meaning through text and image. This looks to the study of semiotics though graphic designers rarely employ this term in describing how they daily work and rework signs. It is the kinesthetic experience of manipulating typographic forms that are typically most interesting and pleasurable to the designer— the iterative process of refining textual ideas in material form rather than

89

Typography and Types

89

the dispassionate, critical analysis we associate with semiotics. Saussure’s recognition of the distinction of signifier and signified is easily recognizable to the designer as true to the act of designing with both words and images and the hybridity of that practice. Most often, it is the plurality of solutions and the wide variety of signifiers that the designer produces in searching for the most apt usage that interests them not the specificity of defining the relationship of writing to language. The question when dealing with racialized language realized materially in type is—what is being signified? Does representing difference invariably result in objectifying and unintentionally dehumanizing in creating the visible sign of difference? Does this rest on a willingness to cast a body as different, name it, and dispose of the individual? The signifier in play attached to the most spurious notion of all that the other exists to be manipulated as constantly being at the disposal of white supremacy. The trivializing of the activity of designing with type using the ubiquitous and common language and forms of graphic design minimizes how racialized forms influence beliefs about race—similar to the way that Saussure’s imagining of the differentiation of the signifier from the signified reduces the belief in the importance of the material and substantive property of language that is typography. Indeed Saussure’s stress on the arbitrary nature of the signifier reveals the capriciousness of picturing the other. The same process is at work when color is given significance as the stigma of race, even when its presence remains elusive as in the application of the one-drop rule to persons who appear “white.” Typography involves the design of typefaces. The discrete and fastidious practice of which despite type’s centrality to graphic design often eludes many graphic designers due to the fastidious skill set required. That said, type design demonstrates much of what we need to know to understand daily graphic design practice. As discussed, a typeface as a mechanized, standardized, and mass-produced artifact operates as a closed system. Despite these finite

90

90

The Design of Race

constraints, the type designer can manipulate the forms to a nearly infinite degree blurring their semiotics through hybridization with imagery. Both the designers featured here from my Visualizing Race course question how we see race by integrating themselves and the viewer into the text and picture plane. They each explore the ordinary act of reading a text combined with reading a face. Typography allows them to double the signifier and observe the flaws inherent in the gaze and the limitations of written language, especially how those limitations are exacerbated through the very language that produces the limits of an-“other.” Each has written the words in type upon a blank field with gaps between the words so that the reader must fill in those blanks with themselves to render a portrait. Each reader must deal with their own subjectivity and complicity in forming images through words that objectify. Lastly, their work draws our attention to the materiality of the type and reveals how often we assume that typography itself does not signify—that it acts as a transparent medium, allowing the words of the author to appear clearly and unmediated. Through their self-authored design work, they deny that conceit.

Jacob Munoz: Difference of a Different Sort In the course, each student took a DNA, racial admixture test that determines one’s degree of European, Native American, East Asian, and sub-Saharan African ancestry as defined by the test based on isolating specific genetic mutations. Jacob Munoz integrated racial slurs into six self-portraits, made entirely of these slurs, interpreted typographically in an eclectic mix of typefaces. This work later formed a large portion of Munoz’s MFA thesis in graphic design. Unusually, Munoz registered significant degrees of each continental group:  49  percent European, 28  percent Native American, 13  percent East Asian, and 10 percent sub-Saharan African. He created portraits representing these four categories as well as one representing his Hispanic identity and another his identity as a designer melding the five others.

91

Typography and Types

91

In his last poster, he created a pastiche of various words rendered in a variety of typefaces to form the field that reveals the outline of his face with simplified planes indicating his eyeglasses and hair against a neutral gray field of color. The piece represents the complex identity of people living in the US– Mexico border region, near El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico, where the constant movement of people over and back again has repeatedly resisted this arbitrary line. Munoz is himself a member of the Tigua nation, by definition Native-American and also Hispanic in language and culture. He designed with type the faces of unseen ancestors still viewed as stereotypes, types that have persisted in the US cultural imagination of itself as predominantly white. His posters interpolate these imagined types through a series of selfportraits that utilize what has been unseen or at least partially obfuscated by time and assimilation—his own genetic material. Munoz speaks of the unseen body in the reductive form of the stereotype on six different color fields. By manipulating words to form these false images of himself as stereotype, Munoz demonstrates what Johanna Drucker asserts that “the materiality of signifying practices, in this case typographic expression is inextricably bound up with the production of history and subjectivity in artistic practice.”8 This material engagement through making is what in graphic design gives expression to a text with words that once enlisted redouble meaning through that making. The words are redoubled when read along with the image presented—in this case, the outline of the face realized on a bright color field. Despite the digital nature of its production, his work exists both experimentally and materially on a continuum with traditional typographic production. His investigations of type as a signifying practice allow Munoz to both question the labeling of difference through words and explore the unique dimensions of race in the border region of the United States and Mexico—a place apart from both nation states where language itself is a site of conflict and alternately inclusion. The history of race in terms of the black/white binary typical of a US “white” national identity finds no real ground in this distinct

92

92

The Design of Race

region within both countries. At independence in 1821, Mexico’s African population was at roughly 10 percent, but by the period of the revolution just a hundred years later, it was closer to 2 percent. The history of assimilation and the allowance of the third racial category of the mestizo produced difference of a different sort and brown as a color that holds meaning apart from white. No such category exists in the polarized, visually animated US racial binary.

Jill Weisberg: “White” as an Almost Infinite Measure of Observable Beauty Two typographic pieces by Jill Weisberg interpret quotes related to historical notions and optics of race seen or unseen through the act of looking. Weisberg set each quote in Gotham extra-bold and then etched the texts into mirrored Plexiglas so that the words float within the border of the reflective surface revealing the gallery wall in the gaps behind the words. The reader stands before the mirrored surface, seeing a fragmented reflection of themselves in the text upon the Plexiglas. This partial reading occurs simultaneously with the reader’s efforts to read or make the quote readable while avoiding his or her own gaze. They are immediately drawn into the act of gazing and forced to interrogate that gaze. This coincides with the reader’s efforts to ascertain the meaning of the quotes, each quotes’ veracity, and applicability to themselves as they are rendered potentially complicit by their own gaze. Weisberg pictured here inserts herself in dialogue with the works as the subject as she also asks each reader to do the same. They move from the act of looking at a typographically designed artifact in a fine arts context to reading a text on a body, forcing that reader to move closer, and then draw back to make legible the text rendered in various point sizes. The first text—a quotation by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, generally considered the founder of Art History—pointedly demands that the reader consider light as agent of perception, beauty, and the body, and “white” as color and an almost infinite measure of observable beauty.

93

Typography and Types

93

As white is the color which reflects the greatest number of rays of light, and consequently is the most easily perceived, a beautiful body will, accordingly, be the more beautiful the whiter it is. (Figure 2.10) The date of Winckelmann’s quote inscribed upon the piece allows the viewer some distance in time, to step back and consider its context and relevance to today. Winckelmann is referring to whitened Greek statuary (now known to have been richly colored). His hierarchization of color undoubtedly clouded by his own contemporary notions of race as Weisberg’s piece insinuates. As any reader can see his or her facial pigment does not appear white when viewed in the mirrored surface, especially when juxtaposed against the white background of a gallery wall. They must look and be disappointed at the inferior measure of their own beauty spoken to them by the work. Weisberg’s work replicates the fragmented material experience of looking into the mirror, through the text to the wall, and the space of the gallery reflected. It is at this

FIGURE 2.10  Jill Weisberg, White Mirror, 2007.

94

94

The Design of Race

point that the reader contemplates their own daily and mundane participation in the optics of race and the belief in race and beauty as dual, observable truths—which they are already complicit in through the very act of looking. The fragmentary experience of straining to visually coalesce the face and make it one with a body that is neither white nor the epitome of beauty recalls Du Bois’s description of double consciousness in the second quote used by Weisberg: One ever feels his twoness—a negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. In this case, the reader is tasked by the words to consider the internalized experience of being looked on as the other through the eyes of a white viewer or as a body that is acted upon rather than as an agent of its own identity formation. The reader is again disappointed in trying to form his or her own face in the words that describe double consciousness. Their face remains unreconciled and fragmentary despite their attempts to conjure themselves as whole. These pieces are designed to force the reader to reread how they view race as a visualized, corporeal experience through the artificial writing of typography melded with their face. The reader witnesses the designer at work using one of graphic design’s primary forms and means of production—typography— to make sense of texts and express content. Typically, the designer is most concerned with locating the best form, specifying the typeface that best suits the content, expression, and internal logic of the text. In this making, words are made alive and speak distinctly to the reader as singular and unique ideas. On other occasions, the designer may be more interested in the autonomous function of the type itself regardless of the intent of the writer or speaker. Regardless of the approach, the type becomes the material from which words are made. That mechanical process has its own internal logic where what is

95

Typography and Types

95

spoken is spun together with the form of the typeface. The graphic designer works within a professional, creative class to produce meaning through type, and as Weisberg demonstrates, this production is inherently meaningful by virtue of the creative act of making. That meaning is produced through reshaping the text materially and metaphorically at the site where meaning is signified.9

Notes 1 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922), 76–119. 2 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Vintage, 1992), 67. 3 Richard Dyer, WHITE: Essays on Race and Culture (Routledge, 1997), 10. 4 John Heskett, The “American System” and Mass Production, Industrial Design (Oxford University Press, 1980), 50–67. 5 Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and A. Rosenthal, Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 6–7. 6 Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey (Oxford University Press, 1988), 13. 7 Ibid., 130. 8 Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909– 1923 (The University of Chicago Press, 1994). 9 Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey, 47.

96

96

97

3 First Impressions: Lithography and the Packaging of Race

Chromolithography’s use in the production of color tins and paperboard packages bearing images, specifically racialized likenesses of African Americans as avatars of consumption and labor, especially for foodstuffs was fundamental to the creation of our essentially racialized US visual culture. Aunt Jemima personified these phenomena and also neatly contained white anxieties about the increasing mobility of African Americans within the emerging public spheres of mass production and consumption post emancipation (Figure 3.1). One complement of hers in this endeavor was Rastus who served to emasculate and reduce the black male’s many bodies, labor, and products into a singular image. Both these figures served to racialize labor as black and encode leisure for white consumers under the guise of fictive folk traditions within the emerging realm of industrialized food production in the United States. Aunt Jemima’s presence in the kitchen allowed factory foods access to the domestic sphere of the kitchen and reintroduced the caricature of the mammy to white consumers at a much broader scale (Figure 3.2). The story spun by the product’s creator was one of the intimate bonds wherein Aunt Jemima passed along her recipes to her former masters to ensure these bonds

98

98

The Design of Race

FIGURE 3.1  Anna Robinson performing Aunt Jemima.

post emancipation. This type of story of the sustenance of white bodies by the mammy has been repeated as a form of commercialized folklore, such as in the story of the “Colonel’s” secret recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken. The negative, aspirational aspect of this dynamic projected across bodies seen as foreign remains in play today as witnessed by the relatively, widely, held belief that President Obama supposedly represented both internal and external threats as “non-American.” This false impression of the president is fundamentally grounded in our visual culture. A  small, crude, dancing figurine of him that I found for sale in a gas station along an isolated stretch of Interstate 70 in Eastern Colorado vividly typifies this. The elongated figure bends and swings its hips, on which rests an antiquated flip phone, as he grins broadly through the deep creases in his face. He is an object based in ridicule, objectification, and a dimorphic view that defies caricature. It defies it because it does not actually exaggerate any real aspect of his person. It depends entirely

99

Lithography and the Packaging of Race

99

FIGURE 3.2  Rastus and mammy caricatures, Cream of Wheat advertisement. Source: Ladies Home Journal, 1919.

on a false impression of him. The recent history of lampooning presidents through caricature has included exaggerating Johnson’s large ears, Nixon’s nose, jowls, and five o’clock shadow, and Carter’s buck teeth and freckles. With each of these, some aspect of their physical characteristics were magnified to reveal another aspect of their personality for comic effect. In bearing no relation to the actual president, this ceramic figurine reveals the impossibility of fully and truly reconciling the myriad ways that race has complicated our vision not only of African Americans but by extension Americans generally. The figure is in essence a minstrel character and in keeping with that performs as if in motion and by implication in drag. His implied movements are intended to contain and embody male and female, black and white, old and new, all with disgust and fascination. The fluid nature of racialized imagery

100

100

The Design of Race

signals this disgust and fascination and mirrors the ability of lithography to impart movement through its gestural qualities and ability to capture a moment in time. Like the runaway, he condenses the figure of the minstrel into a contemptuous dimorphic version of the president. What the fluidity of lithography allowed was the fixing to some degree of the changeling-like essence of the minstrel in its commodity form when printed on packages—revolutionary new packages such as the paperboard box; the bright chromolithographic surfaces of tins, paper, and cloth bags; and even children’s dolls. Upon these surfaces, the many elusive aspects of the minstrel player first performed by whites in blackface projected onto black bodies were repackaged to contain the labor of the formally enslaved. Just as new systems and technologies of transportation moved goods, they also moved people. These goods included ordinary foods, repackaged in unique combinations, via standardized food production, and delivery systems at unprecedented levels that married the consumption of food with consumption of racist visual codes. Racist avatars such as Rastus and Aunt Jemima alleviated white anxieties about the increased economic mobility of African Americans across state lines and regions post emancipation. This paralleled similar highly visible anxieties about technologies such as railroads, the telegraph, the rapid expansion of the popular press, and aspects of modernity like rapid urbanization, and mass immigration. These images utilized new or improved modes of graphic reproduction, new methods of distribution, new ways of eating, and African American labor melded with stereotypical likenesses of blackness. The representational weight of these racial stereotypes was grounded in the performative power of the minstrel who first set these stereotypes in motion. These types, such as Uncle Ben, long outlasted their time and place persisting up until today as some of the most valuable brands in the marketplace. Rastus as the face of Cream of Wheat wore blackface to mask the many complications of race and capital in securing white privilege and supremacy. Like all “good” graphic design his brand equity is produced and multiplied

101

Lithography and the Packaging of Race

101

through his power to persuade again and again through mass reproduction and consumption—both graphically and as a food that sustains the white social body. His repeatability, his acceptance as commonplace, his fronting of the familiar comforts of home made possible through black labor all make for a common and rather mundane experience of racialized consumption. This familiarity with the ordinary made possible through standardized, production of images, mass-produced as products, for a largely white consumer aided whites in assimilating to industrialized, urban life, and whiteness itself. These domesticated, fictive faces of otherness reproduced upon the smooth surfaces of paperboard and tin packages told the consumer that black labor was still controlled and that new technologies and materials would allow it to be bought and sold continuously. Ultimately, black labor was contained even as the country expanded during the very periods of reconstruction, the establishment of Jim Crow, and as the frontier finally closed in the early twentieth century just when the new south emerged. The materiality of packages like Uncle Ben’s Rice now just retired bearing images and type exemplified utility and persisted to accrue value to brands because they worked heartily and neatly contained black labor. In short, these brands still put African Americans to work at the convenience and disposal of whites. The relative food value of the goods contained being of little consequence given their ideological ability to employ race and soothe anxieties over otherness and difference. Imbedded further in this are deep anxieties over racial “mixing.” The seemingly arbitrary attachment of blackface to ready-made foodstuffs neatly packaged race and also factory-made foods using common ingredients—mixed together—in new ways. This complex mix marks the strange history of drag, miscegenation, and gender in blackface minstrel characters like Aunt Jemima. Aunt Jemima was first a song that concocted an image of a character performed for the stage by a white man, playing a black woman, that was later adapted to shill for an industrialized food product, based in a notion of an idealized “old south,”

102

102

The Design of Race

that had only ever existed as a fantasy of white supremacy. Known to African Americans to varying degrees are these multiple layers of disguise and masking embedded in Aunt Jemima and who may still perceive the blind spots in the white imagination she hides. To whites, she is the collapsed, reductive image of black labor that worked well for them because she worked happily and mutely as an object to be manipulated. This strange, interwoven history of packaged foods replaced actual intimacy between “the races” with complicated, awkward relations defined through prepackaged, commodity-based interactions well into the twentieth century. Ready-made foods standardized relations, and in their prescriptions were found new ways to pretend at intimacy. One perfectly odd example is how the Betty Crocker cake mix recipe was amended to include a single egg. The change was instituted to reach a larger female consumer given its initial failure to gain a greater market share and points to packaged food’s association with gender roles and sexual reproduction. Given the history of the mammy personified by the trademarked Aunt Jemima and even played by a series of living women, it is not perhaps so odd after all. As Michael Harris points out, it would have been impossible for a single enslaved, female servant to perform all the duties of nursemaid, cook, and complete household staff, but this is more or less what Aunt Jemima promised in a single package and person.1 As I will examine in Chapter 5, it is also the asexual and “aged” condition of the mammy that allowed her unprecedented access to her master’s household promising no sexual threat and in her uncompromising blackness obfuscating miscegenation as well. Michael Ray Charles directly confronts the use and reuse of black bodies made for pleasure and reproduction for commercial consumption in nineteenth-century lithographs, signage, and toys. He visualizes the mammy personified by Aunt Jemima as a surrogate for white pleasure and sustenance and enlists the mammy’s inclusion in an African American visual vernacular. In his painting Coffeemate, he blends the visual language of package design with

103

Lithography and the Packaging of Race

103

miscegenation as products of white supremacy, perhaps partially referencing the tune, You’re the Cream in My Coffee. In the painting, a ghostly, sycophantic, jester, or harlequin apparently in white face suckles at the breast of a prostrate “mammy” character atop his reimaged logo for Coffeemate. Below this in quotes, he has written in paint the phrase, “An integrated taste that’ll lighten the place.” Charles understands that the words written in the form of a logo are a complex text in and of themselves and that a logo is never simply a logo, and when paired with a racist avatar doubles and deepens its meaning despite its seeming simplicity. A logo like any letterform design is a text, and like any other text it can contain multiple meanings and elicit a variety of readings. Charles resignifies upon the logo to reveal its deeper, racialized meanings and expand upon them to speak back to it and through it. Charles purposefully uses the colloquial language and phrasing of advertising, employing its rhyming and repetition. His use of this phrasing eludes to the dialect imposed upon characters like Rastus from the Cream of Wheat packaging and advertising. Charles ventriloquizes for racist caricatures that themselves were made to speak in dialect to mask their labor in service of white culture’s appropriation of African American folkways. His reappropriation doubles the white mimicry of “black” dialect as Charles speaks cryptically through his reuse and rewriting. By this, he re-encodes black voices once more in defiance of white supremacy. He makes clear in Coffeemate that sexual pleasure and the act of looking upon the black body remain markers of white ownership of black bodies in the form of commodified images post emancipation. That sexual reproduction and cultural appropriation have existed simultaneously in the spectatorship of that black body. In Coffeemate floating between the two lines of text is his own signature and trademark, the Lincoln head penny, indicating his direct usage of the terms of ownership, the visual language of trademarks, and the cash value of his work. Charles once again pointedly pictures miscegenation in his paintings You Only Live Once and The Nite Stick; in the former, he incorporates a nearly

104

104

The Design of Race

life-size Barbie-like doll and in the latter a large, more infantile, sickly, plastic blow-up sex doll. Both infantilize white, female figures following the script of the supposed threat of mixed race coupling and the child-like racist caricatures that accompany these. These also mimic in part through inversion, nineteenth-century cartoons lampooning black-and-white mixed marriages, promoting fears that miscegenation and by extension rape would supposedly be perpetrated on white, female bodies. One antebellum image The Fruits of Amalgamation by Edward C. Clay illustrates this in a domestic scene wherein the leisure of the black man is countered by the childbearing labor of his white spouse. Charles forcefully subverts the racist caricature of the mammy, arresting the gaze of white supremacy through hackneyed images of sexualized, white female figures. He does this to invert the historical relationship of white men’s power over the bodies of enslaved, African women. The supposed danger of the formerly enslaved employing any degree of whiteness to cross color lines is front and center in Charles’s work, where he confronts white fears of miscegenation coupled with desire for black bodies. He counters this by visualizing the exchange of bodies through slavery reenacted in the exchange of goods and the creation of capital. In The Nite Stick, Charles’s character grips fistful of dollar bills and stuffs his pockets full of blood money while declaring, “Payback is Delicious.” He does not allow the viewer to unsee these scenes, eliminating the safety of the blind spot and the economic history of sexual exploitation of the enslaved. Charles’s keen eye in examining racial stereotypes and ventriloquism has precedents in the subversive posters of the counterculture and black power movement. In Rupert Garcia’s 1969 poster, No Mo O’ This Shit, Rastus speaks directly to the viewer to counter the ventriloquism of the caricature from the original Cream of Wheat advertisement. He speaks in black vernacular rather than the hackneyed dialect commonly attributed to African Americans when speaking for them. The manner of this ventriloquism historically denied black voices and absented them, all the while presenting blackface racist caricatures.

105

Lithography and the Packaging of Race

105

He holds the hot bowl of cereal aloft and says what everyone is thinking: “No Mo O’ This Shit.” Garcia colorized the image so that Rastus’s skin tone is brown, erasing the blackface. The image is enlarged to reveal the crudeness of the lines of the caricature to highlight that the image is a reproduction, mass-produced, as a racist commodity. Garcia has also removed the Cream of Wheat logo, a sign of ownership, along with the chalkboard sign held by Rastus, where the words written in dialect silenced him by speaking for him while still cynically trading on his image. Charles and Garcia recover the multivalent meanings encoded in blackface, prying apart the collapsed layers to resignify upon these to produce a black identity that empowers without blacking up. This mode is similar to the project of other African American artists I examined along with Charles in Chapter 1. In their work, the text is also written in type, letterform, or vernacular signage. The use of chalkboard signage of the original Cream of Wheat advertisement was intended to normalize the ventriloquism through the sign’s materiality and the symbolic use of speaking for African Americans pretending to give them voice through the everyday language of commercial signage. In the original advertisement, the text stands in for the absent voice of African Americans in the marketplace, where their true selves were substituted with racist commodities. As with the use of drag and blackface in minstrelsy by whites reappropriated by blacks in entertainments such as the cakewalk, Garcia appropriates Rastus to forcefully re-present the sign of blackness. Like the other artists in Chapter  1, Garcia’s appropriation of the visual language and formal qualities of racist caricature are reworked and re-presented to encode these tools of reproduction within a self-consciously and self-realized black vernacular.

Beyond the Pale I used a method similar to Charles, Ligon, and Thomas in my own creative work critically and creatively examining whiteness through the appropriation

106

106

The Design of Race

of images and texts found in print design. Through this activity, I  arrived at several of the same conclusions as many critical race theorists and visual artists interrogating racist visual culture. This revealed to me a grammar of racialized images and texts that lie at the core of US visual culture—one formed in and through our nascent consumer culture coinciding with the periods of reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the formation of the new South. In my work, I appropriated images of consumption from the mass culture to explore the coded messages that concern the semiotics of race and the naturalizing of notions of whiteness and American identity. Whiteness is about the body, but it is also about the perception of dominance in the United States where white people are essentially unmarked, and their race is generally invisible in its dominant position within our culture. In my work, I specifically addressed the underlying currents of meaning that appear as synonyms for whiteness, such as purity and homogeneity, as well as blandness and oblivious ignorance in the face of complex race relationships. This unmarked or nonsignified aspect of racialized language is what allows modes of white supremacy to make otherness visible while still working unseen. The false conceit of color blindness is an unseeing of race, allowing only “white” people to not be marked out as different at the cost of all others. I explored the semiotics of whiteness through a series of used-looking packages of common everyday foodstuffs, splayed upon a museum wall post consumption along with white avatars of consumption. These images are representative of a time of widespread assimilation and conformity, which overlapped with the many great social and cultural upheavals in the United States during the 1960s. What appear to be simply banal, nostalgic product slogans and seemingly benign images, I juxtaposed with concealed statistics concerning the racial makeup of the United States as the “ingredients” of our product nation. My experience with my own genetics also informed these pieces: I decided to have my DNA tested to determine my own racial admixture. The test revealed that I was 78 percent European and 22 percent

107

Lithography and the Packaging of Race

107

Native American (originally my results indicated as much as 37 percent Native American ancestry when 71 genetic markers were used, but 171 markers resulted in 22 percent in a second test). I lifted images and type from advertisements placed in LIFE magazine from my early childhood, 1965–9, and used my DNA results and the genetic lab’s discursive text of these for the ingredients on the packages. I was at the time entirely unaware of the artists I discuss throughout this book and was later surprised that through appropriation and reworking of these forms, I arrived at many similar conclusions about the language and grammar of race in its commodity form. As in the work of Charles and Garcia, I was intent on finding direct links between the consumption of graphic imagery and the consumption of cultural notions of race and sexual reproduction and surmised that this existed in racialized images associated with ready-made foodstuffs. In my piece Goodie Two Shoes, Apple Pies, I appropriated an image from a snack pie advertisement featuring two young white children and juxtaposed this with the headline “Privilege Tastes Sweet!” (Figure 3.3). I then placed and repeated a lower case letter ‘m’ between the mouths of the two children to produce a yummy, humming sound when read. I  reduced the text, images, and packages to stark black and white, blowing out the mid-tones to magnify their graphic quality. In doing so, I called attention to their status as reductive, consumable images that starkly inform the meaning of the graphic reproduction of race. I also reimagined packages for creamed casserole, saltine crackers, whole milk, and plain-vanilla cola. Ordinary foodstuffs were produced in the nineteenth century to be repackaged and by virtue of this provided a standardized version of US Americanness—a quality of being American perfected at an industrial scale to provide and sustain itself through consumption by the masses. Simultaneously, this encouraged more immigrant Americans especially those of southern and eastern European descent to enter into whiteness, diminish their own cultural

108

108

The Design of Race

FIGURE 3.3  Goodie Two Shoes, Apple Pies. Source: Peter Fine, collage, 2004.

identity, especially folkways related to language, food, and dress, and to buy and consume at higher rates. The eating and drinking of prepackaged “American” foods in contrast to ethnic foods provided a sense of being “normal” and made this visually apparent or “natural” through advertising of these foods later broadcast during popular television shows in the post–Second World War period. In my own work, I focused on typical images of white, women and children, and their sustenance and care as graphic analogs to the racist avatars associated with earlier prepackaged foodstuffs. The popularity of racist avatars and their broad usage continued, and their equity increased past the high point of mid-century, American consumption, conservatism, and conformity. This occurred because of the persistent polarizing force of race in the United States as ethnic whites became more and more like their Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic

109

Lithography and the Packaging of Race

109

predecessors. The self-reinforcing quality of whiteness required continual reinvestment through its consumption in the visual and material form of packages bearing fictive, domesticated images of blackness. The presentation of blackness as African American labor contained, standardized, bought, and sold became a normal function of US consumer capitalism. The consumption of whiteness made to seem so ordinary as to appear not to appear is what laid the groundwork for the supposedly “color-blind” society—a current aspect of white supremacy based in a self-imposed blind spot, supposedly so benign that it can somehow maintain racial equilibrium and still mark others as different but unequal. This mundane aspect of unequal representation across visual culture, especially in graphic design, where racialized and racist language is embedded in material form is not accidental. Aunt Jemima as an example of the mammy like Rastus contained and controlled the labor of African Americans beyond their roles as avatars. In Aunt Jemima’s case as a surrogate both for maternal intimacy and materially for industrialized food production, she persisted and personified the mammy as a symbol of the ideal, antebellum south from the late nineteenth century into the present as the “most widely recognized symbol of African American maternity.”2 She persists despite any evident need to maintain her constant and pervasive presence following the civil rights movement and the coinciding high point of twentieth-century populist consumerism. As in the case of many advances in the art of mechanical reproduction such as the emergence of the popular medium of television, popularity does not necessarily equate to democratic access to the means of creative production. Technologies may fuel democratic movements but their ability to reproduce at scale does not necessarily unseat stereotypical figures such as the mammy. Again in the case of the mammy realized as Aunt Jemima, her representational power was unexpectedly multiplied by technologies of the art of mechanical reproduction, new labor-saving devices for the home, and the reifying of traditional gender roles in new domestic spaces post war. After the Second World War, the kitchen

110

110

The Design of Race

emerged as the most technologically advanced room in the home while still maintaining and ever reinforcing gender roles as the most feminized space.3 Prepackaged, convenience foods such as Aunt Jemima pancake mix became even more valued for their expediency when new and improved labor-saving devices for the kitchen matched their utility. Aunt Jemima was made more visually ubiquitous and technologically advanced and then outperformed all other idealized forms of the mammy as a surrogate mother providing sustenance and saving labor. Labor encoded from slavery as black and costfree now repackaged for use by whites in the modern age. Betty Saar’s retelling of the mammy in her piece The Liberation of Aunt Jemima explains the real work of Aunt Jemima. Cloistered in a small wooden box that layers her many meanings, she stands ready with rifle, pistol, and broom. Plastered multiple times against the back of the diorama is her image from the 1950s. Her reproducibility, multiplicity, and ubiquity are all on display. She covers the interior space as in photographs of sharecropper’s cabin walls papered with newspapers, magazine spreads, and print ads. Within the skirts of the primary mammy figure is nested a secondary image of a mammy with her frightened white or perhaps “mulatto” charge. Saar’s piece encapsulates the many dependencies of race and sexuality that the visual reproduction of domesticated, black bodies as surrogates of love, intimacy, and sustenance produces. In her work, she reframes the image of the mammy to incorporate it within an African American visual vernacular—an image made to repeat and reproduce white supremacy but in Saar’s vision represented back at the white gaze that produced it. Just as the leisure class was historically served by images of women of leisure, images of blacks in portraiture were labored in much the same way. The presence of African pages and servants as status symbols in European, court paintings preceded the presence of black visages on packages and advertising. Typically, these objectified figures were pictured constantly at the ready, waiting on their fully realized masters and mistresses. Their presence

111

Lithography and the Packaging of Race

111

indicating the white subjectivity of their owners and supporting their identity in contrast to these servile figure’s labor and object-like status. In describing this trope, Rosenthal and Lugo-Ortiz write, “in Europe a black page remained for the longest time a desired asset and expensive rarity, and the inclusion of such servile figures in portraiture often became conventionalized into a type.”4 We have seen the work of Hank Willis Thomas and Glenn Ligon directly appropriate specific media of graphic design to bear witness to the past and its direct influence on their own identity as African Americans and Artists. This past was constructed through the visual and material culture of graphic design at its most crucial stage in US history. I  have also described the constructedness of graphic design in the work of Michael Ray Charles in this process of the invention in visual terms of the stereotypical forms of blackness and of the white subject—a blackness Tony Morrison describes as invoking a new white man, one without precedent and vital to the myth of Americanness and dependent on a unique Africanist presence. My own work in critical race theory began through creative practice and the direct interrogation of race through the appropriation of the media of graphic design. This is why I hold to the notion that a visual culture critique of the racialized history of graphic design must be pursued at least partly through creative practice. Although I have considered Charles’s work as a painter, producing work with commodity value existing in and through fine art production, I  am most concerned with where that value originated and how in revalorizing it as such he both questions and reclaims that value to himself and his work. The very fluidity of chromolithography directly informs his work in its ability to combine text and imagery in a highly expressionistic manner as he reworks racist avatars originally produced through lithography. It also informs this reifying process by virtue of lithography’s association with capturing the contemporary and rapidly fleeting moments of modern life as they were represented and normalized through consumption practices originating in the nineteenth century.

112

112

The Design of Race

Notes 1 Michael D. Harris, Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation (University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 93. 2 Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory (University of Michigan Press, 2008), 7. 3 Ellen Lupton, Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), 7–13. 4 Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and A. Rosenthal, Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 2.

113

4 Photography by Design

Because most of what is designed is ordinary, ready-made, and ephemeral, it easily passes before us without much notice. Analyzing photographs as graphic design helps us to understand these seemingly ordinary images in context. It brings our attention to their qualities as the mundane objects and images of and by design that surround us, fleshing out their economic, technological, and social meanings. Further analyzing photographs within specific graphic design forms, such as the covers of magazines, books, posters, websites, and a wide variety of other graphic design production reveals how the text of a photograph reads with or against a written text. We can also observe how graphic design mediates photographs, and racialized seeing, and the way photographs interpret history. This is especially true of African American history, which has been and remains so much about the visual phenomena of race as a lived experience. The skill set that began to coalesce around the beginning of the twentieth century and defined the work of the graphic designer did not initially include photography as a primary means of expression. The graphic arts were utilized to translate photographic imagery through much of the nineteenth century, mediated through engravings and woodcuts placing the photograph within the historical arc of graphic design production. Eventually, the photograph pushed aside illustration during the twentieth century as a primary means of reproducing images within that production.

114

114

The Design of Race

Over this period and through these modes of reproduction, the photograph emerged in the United States as a collective, racialized expression of individual and national identity—as whiteness—in contrast to blackness and otherness. The discovery of photography revealed new degrees of personhood technologically with the black body serving as a vessel of the racial imaginary and the other. This situated the photograph as a material allegory of race, based in a visual fiction of white supremacy, but displayed through black bodies. It was employed along with typography and lithography as one of the three principal technologies of mechanical reproduction that have defined the material production of graphic designers. Except for Charles, all the artists discussed in Chapter 1 explore the tension between words and photographs to highlight how black bodies have been situated to perform blackness in the past but affecting how the African American is seen and known today. The most recent emergence of several new critics and critical readings of photography place the photograph dead center in a contemporary reading of race. The ubiquity of the carte des visite, the snapshot, and more recently Instagram in the mass production of photographic images of and for consumption indicates the photograph’s centrality to the modern experience of identity and by extension race. Several authors have considered this primacy as emanating from the camera’s scientific instrumentality, ability to surveil, pronounce judgment, and enact and utilize the gaze. My interest lies not exclusively in the way the camera fixes the gaze but the photographic image’s materiality, as identity literally made tangible and fixed, in its static position in a system of racial domination that demands its place as fetish. Caught within the photograph as material object is the subject peering back and catching sight of the viewer. The photographic subject typically implores empathy but when posed as—the other—defies that emotive quality remaining as static figures within the archive. The individual is subsumed as a stereotype within the mechanical arts to exist and inevitably be recreated over time in a visual space that insists history to be irrevocably reproduced as a tragedy.

115

Photography by Design

115

The Whiteness of a Pale, Sea-Green, Flowing Gown A prime example of racialized if not perhaps intentionally racist photography intersecting with print design is a photograph taken by Annie Leibovitz for the April 2008 cover of Vogue featuring LeBron James and Gisele Bundchen. It immediately excited an online controversy due to the editor’s oblivious disregard for the history of race and representation in photography and design. More controversy ensued when it was revealed that there existed alternate cover photos that would not have revived racial stereotypes when the first African American man appeared on the cover of Vogue. Most critics argued against the cover for its resemblance to posters for the original 1933 film King Kong with “the beast” Kong seen gripping Fay Wray in his mighty hand and a biplane in the other while perched atop the Empire State building. Oddly, though, there exist posters and cover images much more uncanny in their resemblance to the Vogue cover. One in particular, a First World War US propaganda poster picturing a gigantic ape carrying a prostrate white woman in his left arm, her snowy bosom exposed. He moves forward against a burnout cityscape toward the viewer; in his right hand, he carries a club inscribed with the word “kulture” and a Prussian helmet, no doubt representing the Kaiser, balanced atop his head. The poster’s text reads “Destroy This Mad Brute” and in a call to action reads “Enlist, U.S. Army.” The poster produced for US audiences utilizes obviously racist imagery to excite fears of cultural devastation, rape, miscegenation, and civil collapse. Most uncanny is that the pale, sea-green, flowing gown worn by the prostrate woman and Gisele are eerily similar. The cover for the 1968 pulp novel titled simply Beauty, Beast and as that cover advertises published by the same house as Mandingo also included a white woman once again in a remarkably similar color gown, but in the antebellum style, shading her white complexion with a matching parasol. She stands close against and partially in the grip of a bare-chested black man that

116

116

The Design of Race

we must assume is—the beast to her beauty—all while an overseer menaces the pair against the background of a plantation house. The repeatable utility of these nostalgic tropes of male blackness and female whiteness aligned with racial stereotypes of beasts and brutes proves that the controversy that erupted online over the cover was not for nothing though it was refigured by some as an isolated, trivial, and perhaps racist instance. It was though not novel and does exist historically within an allegory of racialized, US images that persist beyond the printed page and did not suddenly interrupt in a singular incident within our “color-blind,” digital present. Because the photograph and cover were produced in 2008, the controversy erupted within the online media environment. As a result, very little attention was paid to the fact that the cover occurred by design in a quite typical, everyday fashion, and that the very ordinary activity of designing was what produced such a racist image. We may assume that no one involved in creating the cover intended the image to be racist or that their intentions were to produce a scandal. It is though despite any protestations very much a racist image and exists within a continuum of racist graphic production over many, many decades.

“We’re Dreaming” Santa, Black Jesus, and the Pope Some graphic designers have with some success worked to directly interrupt the sordid seemingly arbitrary history of racist imagery just described. In the 1950s and 1960s during the heyday of the International Style and of Pop Art, the advertising industry in the United States shifted significantly away from agencies dominated by WASPs and their vital connections to establishment institutions. Never really racially integrated, the shift was made mostly by ethnic, white designers and copywriters leading to more pluralistic visual representations of US culture, highly creative work, and a broad sympathy for the goals of the civil rights movement.1 How visual representations of

117

Photography by Design

117

African Americans were constructed and maintained was a key aspect of this resulting in a large increase in advertising aimed at African Americans. This occurred simultaneously with increased representations of women in advertising that questioned gendered roles and typically gendered products. African American economic agency was pictured in this context as a means of expressing personal subjectivity. The result was that African Americans were featured prominently as consumers just as the voting right act was passed to secure their role as citizens.2 This is of course quite distinct from their previous roles as avatars of consumption but not decidedly different. Brands such as Uncle Ben’s continued to front in blackface for large corporate interests, and the television show Amos and Andy continued in syndication even after it was forced off prime time. The black figure remained still squarely within the realm of consumption as a vital, visual presence serving the needs of the marketplace alongside previous explicitly racist images. The odd juxtaposition of these along with widely disseminated editorial images of the struggles of civil rights figures, black power activists, and black sports figures on television and in daily newspapers produced a very real dissonance in the culture at large.3 One provocative alternative during this period was Herb Lubalin’s series of advertisements for Ebony placed in national magazines often considering African American consumers for the first time.4 In his series, Lubalin used the photographic image to directly counter racist imaginings, personified historically in the hackneyed stereotypes of Uncle Tom figures of blackness. He worked deftly with the image of the black male figured traditionally as a commodity and now obliquely as a consumer while taking a subversive, politically minded approach to the subject in light of the times. Unique to the skill set of the graphic designer is a comprehension through creative practice of how identity is defined through consumption in the rapid and mass production of images and texts. This lack of a self-conscious regard for a direct relationship to mass reproduction and the tools of mechanical reproduction are what made Lubalin’s critique especially meaningful and

118

118

The Design of Race

accessible to his generation. Lubalin’s ads for Ebony reproduced in black and white emphasized a series of formal, racialized, and visualized notions about the reproduction of images themselves and concurrently images of blackness pictured in the tonal gradations of black and white photography. The series depended to an extent for its verity on editorial images of the civil rights movement widely seen in newspapers, picture magazines, and on the evening news. He melded this aesthetic with photographic portraits cropped to fill and lean out from the page in a manner similar to packages bearing the faces of racialized avatars. In one of his ads for Ebony, We’re Dreaming of a Black Christmas, he confronted and employed the mask and blackface as subversive concepts of disguise to circumvent the whiteness of everyday consumption (Figure 4.1). The ad featured a “black-Santa” wearing a striking, snowy white beard, against his skin with the cliché of the beard as a disguise working against type. The ability of a halftone image to reproduce a black-and-white photograph with nuanced value shifts in skin tone intensified the contrast of the bright, flat, white beard with his face. The surface value of his skin allowed the viewer to glimpse the individual behind the layered disguises and as a potential consumer—one who aspired to be represented accurately and participate in the marketplace beyond being a racialized commodity. Central to the logic of the art of mechanical reproduction within the halftone is how it allows continuous tone to be applied to both photo and text simultaneously and therefore the logical technological answer to the problem of seamlessly marrying text and image. Lubalin’s work like Pop Art revealed the workings of the machine to the naked eye, detailing the process of the art of mechanical reproduction through fine art production. These artists delighted in the crude workings of graphic design’s constructedness enlarging its raw, graphic forms of reproduction such as the dots in the line screen of the halftone used when reproducing photographs in graphic design. Their reworking of representations in glossy

119

Photography by Design

119

FIGURE 4.1  We’re Dreaming of a Black Christmas, Herb Lubalin and Irv Bahrt, Ebony magazine, 1968.

120

120

The Design of Race

advertisements, billboards, and magazine spreads of the latter half of the twentieth century gave the consumer new insight into these arts as well as elevated them. Pop created a new US American vernacular based in images that became the renewed products of our consumer culture repositioned as fine art through popular, consumerist forms that were again re-consumed. Lubalin and copywriter Irv Bahrt coyly played on the popular imagery of film and the song White Christmas shifting the lyrics to “We’re dreaming” from “I am dreaming” referencing the song from the film Holiday Inn where Bing Crosby and Marjorie Reynolds performed in blackface without irony or selfconsciousness. These actors performed their singular white identities while shifting into blackface to humorous effect and back again to white in contrast to the always fixed group identity of African Americans. Their use of blackface flattened the features of their faces while Lubalin’s Santa image provided rich modulations in value through the halftone against the flat white of his beard. Lubalin’s Santa asks us to consider him as more than a shill for products designed and marketed to majority white consumers while still employing the trope of racialized avatars to question the crass consumerism of Christmas and the blatant commodification of black bodies. His Santa grins wryly and glances coyly upward, perhaps heavenward pondering the headline “We’re Dreaming.” In so doing, he asks the ad buyer to consider the nature and possibility of wish fulfillment for an African American consumer—wishing if only wistfully to be included in the marketplace as an agent of consumption, and perhaps much more. Also present in the several layers of disguise and subterfuge of this Santa’s face is the history of African American vernacular forms described in the story of Aunt Jemima. A hidden record of identity formed in opposition to an imposed, racialized identity that of necessity secreted itself inside of commercial forms while incorporating these forms into its own vernacular as cultural resistance. In short, Lubalin is able to mimic the African American mode of signifying in playing one image against another exposing the multiple meanings imbedded in our racialized visual culture. In a sense, the Santa he

121

Photography by Design

121

signifies upon is an ironic still-frame image lost from the film Holiday Inn that was not performed but was always present. One key aspect of signifying is indirection, defined by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in The Signifying Monkey in which the viewer or reader is shown one thing that means both that thing and yet another thing.5 This can occur repeatedly within the same image, often shifting back and forth, and is especially easy to configure in graphic design since often its reductive forms depend on troping. The facility for turning a word or phrase upon itself and then linking it to another that then twists it again was imitated here by Lubalin in the face of the cypher of his Santa. First, there is the fictional, iconographic, modern image of Santa minted by Thomas Nast in the same period in the late nineteenth century as many racialized avatars such as Aunt Jemima and then later codified as a commercial avatar for Coca Cola in the twentieth century (Figure 4.2). African Americans understand the symbolic association between these because they

FIGURE 4.2  Merry old Santa Claus. Woodcut by Thomas Nast, 1880s.

122

122

The Design of Race

have never been pictured as snowy white but have been repeatedly presented as fictive, commercial images enlisted to sell products and describe the act of consumption itself. Lubalin’s Santa just as in multiple iconic images of Santa wears a white beard, often a false beard. Then there is the way that the beard isolates his skin tones in an allusion to blackface and masking but inverting its division through the white beard. Beyond the complexity of the photograph is the sly use of the advertising icon Santa, in an advertisement, seeking advertisers that obscure the import of the message. Through this, we are asked to consider several intrinsic economic and racial issues not in a revered form such as portraiture painting in a museum but in an advertisement in the pages of a magazine. If a “black Santa” cannot signify snowy white, let alone Santa why would Lubalin reuse a crass commercial image at the very moment in the 1960s when the rapid commercialization of Christmas was being widely criticized and questioned? Perhaps, this Santa’s persuasive power lies in the significance of the unnamed but still present black Jesus, a historical figure whose presence in the US visual landscape of the 1960s was especially visible. The black Jesus is distinctly not the white, American Jesus but a metaphoric, spiritual figure of liberation from slavery to the present. In Lubalin’s iconic reuse of Santa, the profane disguises the metaphysical without the bother of casting out the money changers from the temple, because in the marketplace it does not matter. In the end, the piece is not about Santa at all but as Gates describes—the free play of the signifier of the iconic within the racialized visual culture of the marketplace. Ultimately, Lubalin also divests the Santa of his sentimental value and as a result sentimental images of blackness generally. Through his work, blackness as a means to enlist the spiritual and typically a means to use black figures as symbolic of the metaphysical is dissipated. The use of commercial images within an African American vernacular of art and language is not uncommon, as demonstrated in Chapter  1. It is the result of a different relationship to commerce, of being represented not as subjects but as commodities, and in

123

Photography by Design

123

essence blanks that can be filled in or inscribed upon. These black artists have made great use of this as a way to explore their subjectivity as objects of racist imaginings. Nearly thirty years after Lubalin, Tibor Kalman, another provocative voice in graphic design, directly confronted racialized photographic portraiture based in print design.6 In the context of his already cheeky and controversial COLORS magazine for Benneton, Kalman interrogated how race when remixed upon the faces of highly public figures might challenge racialized seeing and to a lesser extent the supposed colorblindness of the period. Kalman as a designer but importantly as an editor in chief of COLORS was already using high gloss production values and bold editorial design to poke his finger in the eye of the media at large and the downstream effects of globalization. In the 1993 COLORS issue 4, he devoted the entire issue to race as a visual phenomenon in the media environment. In the issue, he racially remixed photographic portraits of five famous persons—Queen Elizabeth (as black), Michael Jackson (as white), Spike Lee (as white), Arnold Schwarzenegger (as black), and Pope John Paul II (as Asian). In the series, he utilized the rich color logic of four-color process printing to look at how graphic reproduction materially reproduces race. Significantly, the series suggests that photography itself is capable through the graphic arts of not simply recording or reproducing race but refiguring it in a racialized and futurist exercise in seeing. Already the digital sphere seemed to propose a technological means to achieving racial balance in visual terms. This notion was something of a red herring but was still provocative and slightly scandalous in 1993. By refiguring Queen Elizabeth as black, he exposed how iconic figures, famous or infamous, can represent in a nearly singular sense an entire racial category. In particular, his “blackening” of the Queen most emphasized the degree to which wealth, power, prestige, class, and notions of Western beauty are associative of race in the public mind with white, female beauty. By reimaging Spike Lee, another cultural provocateur as “white,” his persona as

124

124

The Design of Race

a racial protagonist of African American visual, identity is re-presented in a rather bland mirror image. Kalman’s remixing of Michael Jackson produces more ambivalent results, Jackson’s whitening seemed more to reinforce notions of feminine and childlike qualities of beauty associated with blonde hair, fair eyes, and white skin but also about the plastic surgery controversies that surrounded Jackson’s fame—a fascination with what was assumed to be Jackson’s own fetishizing of white skin but was more likely a white projection of the sycophantic nature of whiteness that fetishizes blackness. The technology of photographic imagery emerging at the onset of the digital age as a means to alter appearances would prove to be very enticing to professionals and amateurs. It would also ironically induce a forgetting of the history of photography—enabling a facile assumption that photography could escape its history with race embedded in the materiality of mechanical reproduction. By devoting the design of an entire issue of an international fashion magazine with an advertorial bent to the subject of race, Kalman excited a conversation that to some degree challenged the false conceit of colorblindness. In addition to his remixed portraits, he purposefully deconstructed essential aspects of graphic design reproduction in photo essays. Kalman made good use of the visual devices of agitprop originated by John Heartfield, devices also used by Barbara Kruger in the 1980s to analyze gender constructions in consumer culture. Kruger herself worked for many years as a publication designer for Conde Nast before reutilizing the tools of the trade within the realm of fine art. She cut her black-and-white images with red-and-white text in a manner similar to the constructivists to foreground the body, largely the female body. The lesson remains, in any graphic reproduction that there are visual vestiges of the violent consumption of bodies so well addressed by Linda Nochlin in her lecture and reprinted with visual essays in The Body in Pieces. Kalman addresses this in his own visual essay, over a two-page spread dividing the body in a reimagined taxonomy of race where he isolates and scales up a variety of fleshy ears, and in another spread maximizing eyes, lips,

125

Photography by Design

125

hair, and skin. He seems to have simultaneously been seeking to revisit the trope of cutting the body and the visual taxonomies of scientific racism in their relationship to visualizing race and the violence of racist imaginings. In other spreads where he pictures the nude bodies of what we may assume are Benneton models of various races, he successfully challenges the very notion of fashion magazines and advertising and what they exist to perform through bodies. COLORS was in close dialogue with experimental editorial design of the period just before the web fully emerged as a space to challenge print design. His highly eclectic use of color, bold and playful typography, montage, sardonic humor, and direct address through his editorial copy provided a direct engagement with how graphic design constructs and instructs how we see. COLORS provided a space for him to speak as a designer beyond the typical confines of the field that he clearly relished and commanded well. It is less clear whether he affected notions of race and whiteness though he made it clear that race exists as a visual phenomenon that designers help to produce and maintain if they seek not to question how they work and why. He also contributed to the notion that photographic technology in the new digital age might help users enhance or alter their appearance but not without unforeseen consequences. The cheeky sexuality of COLORS lent to the vague notion that race itself might disappear with the rapid ascent of globalization and the spreading of the values of multiculturalism. This notion was realized visually in a number of photographic treatments of technologically, racialized subjects of the period. The Time magazine cover from 1993, The New Face of America, explicitly promoted the promise that technology could eugenically and mechanically erase race while presenting a new multicultural future. The cover image presents this notion of erasure in the face of a new “Eve” that the editors purported “was created by a computer,” a dubious claim that assumes that a computer might act alone and that race would not be inculcated within new digital technologies of

126

126

The Design of Race

graphic reproduction. New technologies by this time are directly aligned with graphic design production and the increased artistic agency made possible by desktop computers, scanners, and postscript printing. This forgets of course that the remixing of negatives to produce racialized specimens was attempted in the nineteenth century in the belief that the technology of photography could act neutrally upon the body but especially portraiture. In this same context in 1994, Time fell under sustained scrutiny for significantly blackening O.  J. Simpson’s mugshot for its cover. The editors could hardly defend their manipulations when Newsweek presented the same mugshot, at roughly the same scale on their cover in the same week but without significant, visible digital manipulation. While The New Face of America cover suggested that the long history of anxiety over immigration and miscegenation might be ameliorated through digital eugenics, the mugshot cover recalled the long history of linking criminality to blackness. It forgot that the photograph was used immediately upon its invention to inventory race and index crime in the belief that it could work with absolute neutrality as the pencil of nature. That photography and the tools of the graphic arts might promise a way to visually realign how we see race failed to yield its promise. Speculative artifacts and notions of a colorblind, digital future appeared almost immediately with the emergence of desktop publishing when creative production was consolidated around the personal computer in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Speculations about new post-racial identities were linked metaphorically with a futuristic digital sphere.7 Most efforts at visualizing race were typically realized upon the surface of the skin and phenotype. This sense of race as having only surface value was related to the rhetoric of the period that touted a public embrace of diversity and harmony but with little specific interest in difference as a real value. This also included attempts at anti-stereotyping through counter images intended to upend racist stereotypes but without actually confronting whiteness and white supremacy. In this digital space of denial and obfuscation, there was no real way to represent black. Except when

127

Photography by Design

127

criminalized, the black body was unintentionally but consequentially made absent through the essentially immaterial qualities of digital representations and virtual spaces. The very attempts at creating a new aesthetic in spaces that were intended as post human and immaterial had the effect of reinforcing the obfuscating essentialism of whiteness through benign neglect. An emphasis on artifice over artifact also contributed to this in virtual aesthetic spaces creating digital analogs to period rooms posed as futurist exercises in forgetting the history of race. A later but significant and direct challenge to this was the artist Keith Odadike’s auctioning of his own “blackness” on eBay in 2001. In his piece, he made an effort to visualize how the black body was still present online despite the promises of a color-blind digital world. In refusing to supply a photograph of himself for the auction, he denied the user the ability to see his body and infer its blackness and value. In this, he allowed the user to imagine the presence of disembodied blackness online as a ghost in the machine. In one highly publicized instance in 2006, Oprah Winfrey famously featured Nancy Burson’s Human Race Machine, originally created in 2000, on her television show. Burson’s notion that the photograph could be reutilized through morphing software to counter racial stereotypes was undermined by the mechanical history of photographic reproduction itself. The machine allowed its user to optically manipulate their own image, through a set of “six races.” Each of these corresponding to racial categories first conjured up in the eighteenth century as a means to visualize racial taxonomies that idealized European aesthetic values. The Human Race Machine acted more like a combination time machine and photo booth that allowed the user to both embrace the supposed veracity of stereotypical notions of race as visible and forget that none of these had ever been fixed with certainty to any group of people whatsoever. The machine’s presentation of the surface of the body as the primary signifier of race revealed whiteness’s conceit of itself as the objective lens through which race is seen and measured. This left no obvious

128

128

The Design of Race

reason for any person of color to embrace the essential naiveté of whiteness implicit in the machine’s amnesiatic approach to explore how they might be seen as the other. Nonwhite audiences know already that difference marks them as unable to simply move unnoticed through space despite the ability of digital technologies to mobilize bodies through space, and time. More recently, the mobile application FaceApp was launched and using artificial intelligence allowed users to morph photographs of their own faces to appear—(1) younger, (2) older, (3) opposite gendered, and (4) hotter. In the fourth case of “Hotter,” the app dramatically altered the user’s face to appear significantly whiter if they were a shade or two darker than a typical “white” user. Beyond the app’s ham-fisted whitewashing of black faces, the aligning of “hotter” with whiter forced the developers to quickly drop the fourth feature due to criticism online and in print—proving once again that any digital content is subject to immediate scrutiny within the digital sphere. The developer’s blind spots were literally coded into the application, itself a prosaic tool for visualizing cosmetic enhancement as whiteness. Anne Balsamo has written about the biotechnological and the reproduction of gender as encoding of “idealized beauty” manifestly based in northern European and feminine notions of attractiveness. She has described how technology and new forms of visualizing the body especially the female body reinscribe cultural and ideological norms as biological—a body that is fragmented and flawed with the fragments serving as indexical signs of the “unruly” in a manner like indexes of race such as hair and skin. Importantly, what we must contend with now in the digital age is her understanding of how virtual technologies have flattened female interiority to produce sameness; this sameness is strikingly like that produced by screens and their illusion of a seamless, virtual reading of the world as a totalizing experience of seeing. Balsamo’s observations of cosmetic surgery practices in East Asia since the postwar period emphasizing European ideals of beauty, especially surgery to alter the eyes to appear more Western parallel a recent example in film.8

129

Photography by Design

129

FIGURE 4.3  Scarlett Johansson in person and in her role from Ghost in the Shell.

The producers of Ghost in the Shell based on the manga were pilloried in the media with accusations of whitewashing when Scarlett Johansson performed the role of Motoku Kusanagi, whereas the film is actually more problematic as an example of yellowface (Figure 4.3). As the first live-action, English language adaptation of a manga series, casting a white actor in the lead does seem especially tone-deaf to the myriad, possible racial and racist implications. The ghost in this case is human consciousness and the shell is the body. These mirror the history of technology and vision dating to at least the camera obscura and its enclosed, autonomous interiority in which individual subjectivity is contained and positioned, “to sunder the act of seeing from the physical body of the observer, to decorporealize vision.”9 The producers defended the film on the basis that any alterations to make Johansson appear Asian, post production, were dropped and that the film sought to generate a “new world” as a manga does already but not one exclusively Japanese. Virtual worlds and other immersive experiences are defined by this very collapsing of time and space that allow a white actor like Johansson to insist she was not playing the role in yellowface but “prevents the observer from seeing his or her position as part of the representation.”10 The use of a white actor in the

130

130

The Design of Race

role produces a post-human devoid of race in a body where consciousness is imagined as white. The default digital background color when erasure is employed in any digital tool is always literally white, and metaphorically, when the actor claims, as Johansson has, that her character is “identityless.” Johansson’s positioning as a kind of racial hybrid strangely parallels the colonized subject that must perform some degree of whiteness but can never truly achieve it. This is complicated by the technologies of seeing that the film presents as natural to the medium. We need to only look at the present to understand the past and how we have seen with and through technologies of reproduction. Often this has been hopeful or aspirational but still misguided and skewed by the logic of the machine within the art of mechanical reproduction. The recent controversy surrounding digital blackface as a new mode within social media reveals how very specific ways of racialized seeing persist. These memes are seen by many as simply a new form of blackface minstrelsy that may on the surface appear as innocuous expressions of emotion. Implicit in these GIFs—digital still frames put in motion—are longstanding notions of African Americans as emotional vessels for the irrational beliefs and feelings of whites. Strangely, these memes repeat and reinforce a fascination with black bodies set in motion as I will interrogate in detail in the next chapter. These are nothing more than a repetition of the spectacle of black bodies seen in minstrel figures of the past, enjoined to delight, seemingly activated by the eyes to perform while still safely containing blackness.

Hank Willis Thomas: Words as Absence Hank Willis Thomas absents texts from commercial photographs produced for advertising aimed at African Americans. In his Unbranded series, he removes the logos, corporate marks, and body copy from the full-bleed photographs in

131

Photography by Design

131

advertisements. He includes in the titles of each altered piece the dates when he expropriated the texts and logos of the ads produced in direct address to African American consumers from 1968 to 2008. Although the words and brands are now absent, they remain as vestiges as we notice them in their absence. In most cases, the product and figures remain minus any marks or logos but are still largely recognizable and clearly promote commodities marketed to African American consumers not allowed to speak, but spoken for or to. What Thomas brings to the surface by peeling away the texts is the consumer as the subject of the pitch, revealing them not as individuals but as exchangeable objects, themselves commodities, widely and publicly traded. In the absence of the words contained in the advertisements are the gaps, digitally filled in but producing long stares and stony silences. In between the in-betweens, we are made aware of the overall absence of African American voices beginning with the racist images produced though our nascent consumer culture. Thomas has also astutely utilized the brand and branding in his work. He repurposes the branded identities for Nike, and the NBA already yoked together in the marketplace to question the role of brands historically. In contemporary terms, Thomas interrogates professional athleticism’s role in the identity formation of young African American male consumers through the cultures of athletics and branding. The high production values he utilizes create a near-perfect sense of verisimilitude, except where he purposefully reveals the gaps and sutures. Especially poignant are his photographic works that are devoid of texts but where the brand in the form of the Nike swoosh remains as a marker upon the racialized body. In Branded Head, he enlists the long history of images of scarification upon enslaved black bodies through the literal act of branding. Here, the profile of a shaved head bears the Nike swoosh, as a scar and as a literal brand to bring home the reality of brands historically and literally when inflicted upon enslaved persons. Most often, photographs of branded and scarred bodies were published by abolitionists as witness to the cruelty and tortures of slavery. These were

132

132

The Design of Race

printed on the assumption that the body bearing marks of inhuman treatment would induce sympathy and the view that all persons are human and therefore not property in bodily form. Because of the early use of photography in fixing images of criminality, these may have also reinforced the belief among slaveholders that the marks made through branding and whipping were indices of criminal transgressions. In Thomas’s Scarred Body, a photograph of the front of a black, male body from pubic to collar bone reveals several Nike swooshes branded primarily upon the left chest. Its resemblance to both historical images such as the Scourged Back and its uncanny and uneasy resemblance to commercial photography especially in advertising for athletic wear reveals the gaps in our racialized consumer culture that he also re-closes. Thomas alternates the tension for the viewer between the pleasure normally invoked in the body and the desire for status goods designed to further inculcate that desire and the obvious fault in the aligning of race and images of consumption and status. Thomas answers back to advertising in the very modes in which graphic designers develop the design of print ads and brands but by removing the words that produce silences. These speak louder than more didactic declaiming of the negative consequences of racialized and racist advertising.

Conclusion Photography produced a large catalog of photographic images of African Americans, coinciding with all the crucial historical events directly affecting African American history, ranging from the abolitionist movement, the Civil War, emancipation, reconstruction, and Jim Crow. Unique to this was how quickly photographic imagery was produced at scale after photography’s invention and how simultaneously the technology changed just as rapidly. In some cases, ordinary African Americans became important subjects within

133

Photography by Design

133

this larger story, and their portraits amplified their personal reality for white audiences. Such persons provided a vital counter narrative to the racist allegory supported by the many demeaning images demanded by white supremacy. African Americans being represented equally across the mechanical arts defied white supremacy at its root, whether portraying them equally as a social body in group portraiture or singularly in individual portraits. This catalog reveals the ordinary lives of African Americans and the ordinary lives of photographs. As material objects, they visually facilitate many aspects of historical moments and ultimately the identity of individuals within a larger social body. Historically for African Americans, this has meant being pictured outside the larger majority white population. On the whole, photography appeared to offer the promise of a populist visual form for materially reproducing the group identity of African Americans as they themselves saw themselves—a form capable of reproducing multiple versions of an individual, repeatedly, and again in multiple photographic representations of that same individual. Collectively, this meant that an African American portraiture might emerge that was truly representational and multidimensional. In the meantime, ordinary persons of color did appear in the same manner as typical white Americans and pictured themselves as they wished. The popular press amplified this aspirational promise of photography even before the photograph could be reproduced accurately in continuous tone in print and in full color. Engravings and woodcuts rendered from photographs in print before the introduction of the halftone in the 1880s offered a glimpse of the verisimilitude of photographic print and the truth effect it produces when printed. This record of transitional print forms of photography exposes how images mutate, gather, and reform to repeat visual notions of race over time. Photography as a technological continuum moving toward its optimal form seemed to imply that racialized images were emerging “naturally” toward a true picture of African Americans in the same manner as the technology picturing them was also emerging. In fact, the perfection of the

134

134

The Design of Race

form was acting reductively on the black social body through misrecognition. The logic of the photograph’s action of realizing the black body was finally to dominate it in its truth effect in a realization not of what was true but largely as a means to display and promote the myth of racial otherness. These various historical, material forms of photography reveal the objectlike quality of visual culture and the objectifying and potentially dehumanizing qualities of photographs. The seemingly logical formation over time of the black body through photography further coalesced in motion pictures. Film developed on the heels of photography taking decades to realize its own optimal technological form despite many of its principals being already understood. The black body as an aesthetic of ridicule and contempt of African Americans was in circulation in print and photos well before it was realized in motion. The black body was then captured in motion, set to music, time, and then dialogue but yet still stigmatized in still frame in what Walter Lippman, in the twentieth century, would broadly re-term the “stereotype.” The many spectacular renderings of black bodies already created for the popular entertainments of the nineteenth century were easily translatable to the spectacle of film and television that I will consider in the next chapter. Before this and continuing over the same period, Louis Agassiz and other scientific racists hunted for specimens of blackness to prove the racial hierarchies and classifications they sought to visualize through photography. In contrast, Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. DuBois theorized and publicly demonstrated through their own portraits, writings, exhibitions, and lectures the potential of photography to lift up African Americans by formulating pictures of themselves that defined their own subjectivity against the objectifying impulses of white supremacy—personally and politically grounded as they were in their own lived experience at the hands of those in charge of the creative means of production. As highly visible African Americans and photographic subjects, they brought their distinct understanding of subjectivity to bear in writing and lecturing about the future of African Americans when viewed as photographic

135

Photography by Design

135

subjects. They saw the labor of the camera materially fixing an image of the black body and sought to visually negotiate through it the visible place of African Americans in American life. That work was expressed over a new, wider public sphere through the popular press that was still rapidly expanding and integrating the photograph into the daily lives of ordinary people. The result was the production and wide circulation of images of African Americans that held currency like branded foodstuffs or other commodities. This commodity value increased rapidly through wide circulation, exhibiting a mobility that contradicted the long history of containing African Americans by controlling their movements and labor. White supremacy resisted this dynamic of African Americans as highly visible and mobile within the public sphere that itself was enlarging very rapidly. As I will detail in the next chapter the way in which the photograph mobilized the black body contradicted the material qualities of photographs as fixed images. Just as the technology of photography was able to fix the fleeting, intangible qualities of a person in what seemed a true portrait, it also opened up the possibility of many more portraits and possible readings of them. Embedded in these new images were contradicting forces unleashed by the technologies that produced them.

Notes 1 Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (University of Chicago Press, 1997), 89–103. 2 Ellen Lupton and J. A. Miller, Design, Writing, Research (Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 102–17. 3 Maurice Berger, For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Yale University Press, 2010), 6. 4 Lupton and Miller, Design, Writing, Research, 110–11. 5 Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey (Oxford University Press, 1988), 77.

136

136

The Design of Race

6 Peter Hall and Michael Beirut, TIBOR: Perverse Optimist (Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 240–330. 7 Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis, Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 379–93. 8 Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Visual Culture Reader (Routledge, 1998), 183. 9 Ibid., 185. 10 Ibid.

137

5 Racialized Play, Caught in Real Time

I assert that essential to the desire to reproduce moving images was an anxiety that perhaps images could not truly be fixed and neither could race. That racial boundaries and identity itself would elude Americans in seeking a US national identity based in modernity. The benefits of modernity eluded African Americans who were cast as antithetical to racialized and technological progress, especially in print culture post-emancipation. In this chapter, I  look at the play between racialized images and objects and how these reinforced racial stereotypes already in print that later emerged in film and television. A potent example of this is the Darktown chromolithographic series—or chromos—produced and sold at a great profit by Currier and Ives and which helped secure the company from financial disaster in the 1880s. In this series of prints, African Americans are pictured in single images and diptychs, engaging comically as spectacles of blackness while supposedly emulating white, middle-class activities. The activities pictured in the series were largely leisure activities, apart from work and imply by contrast that the labor of the previously enslaved should be set aside in service of whites. That even in their leisure activities, African Americans would be held under strict, visual scrutiny.

138

138

The Design of Race

Although these works feature no more than two frames, the present-day viewer can easily toggle between the frames on a keyboard to see the comic effect realized in motion through the diptychs, a viewing experience which very much parallels the contemporary, rough-cut aesthetic of internet GIFs known currently as digital blackface. I contend that the audience for the Darktown images was prompted to imagine this comic effect in motion and not simply in sequence and that this provides a link between stereotypes in print and later moving pictures. This can be supported by the fact that at least one category of the Darktown series wherein African Americans play baseball was also recreated in cast metal along with the many other racialized, kinetic toys of the period. These make apparent a desire to reinforce racial stereotypes already realized in print as the term stereotype implies. This literal casting of blackness in metal allowed “play” with figures that provided spectacles of blackness—in motion—and perpetuated modes of blackface minstrelsy into the twentieth century. This transmutation across media occurred despite the seemingly hard-and-fast nature of the mechanical bank’s materiality (Figures 5.1 and 5.2). In the final title sequence to Spike Lee’s film Bamboozled, this bank is featured along with a series of kinetic toys including seemingly the entire litany of racist caricatures of African Americans pictured in the nineteenth century. Each passes by on film, not unlike the parade of caricatures seen in the cartoon Darkies’ Day at the Fair, of the many “Africans” displayed on the midway at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 (Figure 5.3). This legion of representations resists progress, not moving forward through time but are pictured as static, hapless figures of contempt. These caricatures’ appearance in print form and as sequential works are important to their materialization not simply as toys realized in metal, wood, as lithographs on cheap fabric, and paperboard but as images put in motion with an intent to fascinate the viewer. I would go further in stating that the iterative process of discovery that led to both photography and film anticipated and fueled a frustrated desire to contain these nascent visual arenas of modernity and catch these actors in motion. The

139

Racialized Play, Caught in Real Time

139

FIGURE 5.1  Currier and Ives, Lawn Tennis at Darktown, The Champion.

FIGURE 5.2  Currier and Ives, The Champions of the Ball Racket: On the Diamond Field, The Darktown Yacht Club.

140

140

The Design of Race

FIGURE 5.3  Darkie’s Day at the Fair (A Tale of Poetic Retribution) World’s Fair Puck, no. 16 (August 21, 1893).

spectacle in early films of figures running, galloping, and tumbling forward toward modernity was a means to assuage this anxiety through humor based on ridicule. The kinetic toys in the titles for the film Bamboozled personify this dynamic as racialized playthings seen as incapable of truly participating as Americans in modernity. The play allowed by these toys and paralleled in early film is evidence that for African Americans, time and motion have not been equal. They are captured in motion but do not participate in the rapid mobilization promised by modernity so that for them, time stands still. Among the toys in this title sequence is the cast-iron bank Darktown Battery, which was intended to reproduce in material form the Darktown lithographs A Base Hit and The Champions of the Ball Racket. It recreates in metal the actions of a pitcher, chucking a penny into the gaping loins of a catcher. This imitates a

141

Racialized Play, Caught in Real Time

141

common entertainment associated with early American blackface minstrelsy in which pennies were literally tossed into the mouths of performers.1 This is seen reenacted in a similar mechanical bank of the period where the caricature catches marbles in its large gaping mouth as its eyes curl back in its head. Besides patently establishing the history and perpetuation of racial stereotypes across visual media and popular entertainments, it also illustrates several key functions of the linked operations of blackness in visual and material culture. It illustrates the way that blackness was mass reproduced, over time and in multiples as antithetical to middle-class, white, Victorian social norms. Embedded in this is an assumption of white supremacy that never considers the characters at play as anything but objects of fantasy, sport, and ridicule. Even in the fleeting moments in which the figures are animated as baseball players to perform a white fantasy of black spectacle, they are yet inextricably bound to repeat and therefore reproduce stereotypes. Their feet are cast in metal and adhere to the singular object of the bank that catches them in a double bind. Their movements are bound in their positions and are enjoined physically only in the pitcher’s arm and bent head, the stilted raising of the batter’s arms, unable to swing, and in the passive opening of the catcher’s groin and stomach. The pitcher is wound by the workings of the mechanical bank but never truly “winds-up” for the pitch. The batter cannot swing but only gesticulate in pantomime the supposedly superior performance of white players. The catcher can never truly catch and is but a vessel for ridicule and contempt, designed to play a role but not the actual game. Within the catcher and the bank are contained not simply children’s coins but the desire of white spectators and consumers to delight in the exchange value of black bodies, their physical labors, and their images as commodities. Ultimately, they remain mute and impotent bystanders to the events that subsume them in the workings of race, labor, and capital even in their leisure pursuits and past times. This mechanical bank and plaything inspired in part by Currier and Ives’s Darktown baseball prints compare quite unfavorably when juxtaposed

142

142

The Design of Race

FIGURE 5.4  Currier and Ives, The American National Game of Base Ball.

with another of their baseball prints, The American National Game of Base Ball (Figure 5.4). In this print, we see the game played in perfect order, the baseball diamond itself structuring the scene, providing a line of sight through fore, middle, and background to the vanishing point—the very point of view reserved for Western eyes. The runners are readied for the pitch and the batter’s successful completion of the hit. The spectators are also well ordered, the vast majority of whom remain beyond the outfield in a scene contemporary viewers might associate with the hushed composure of a televised golf game. The print provides the perfect foil for the Darktown print A Base Hit, where chaos ensues over an outfield fly. In fact, the play of the black characters is never seriously considered as a legitimate role for African Americans. They play within a collapsed space that like a stereotype reduces the many into the one in an overly simplified fashion. The players and spectators in The American Game of Base Ball are assumed to be white as they participate to the

143

Racialized Play, Caught in Real Time

143

exclusion of others. The attendant links between baseball, “America’s pastime,” and US American national identity are of course obvious but must be noted, given the playing of baseball between both armies during the Civil War, when hostilities were sidelined, so adversaries could compete equally across battle lines but not racial lines. The role of baseball in uniting the country during the creation of the new south in the early twentieth century and the burying of old animosities of the Civil War might seem benign if not for the blatant racism of these images and their wide popular appeal. Not every lithograph Currier and Ives produced recalled a sentimental journey like that described in the words of the popular, nostalgic song “over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go.” In The Champions of the Ball Racket, the majority of players gape and gesticulate as a runner steals second. The space in which they are positioned is compressed, and time seems to stop. The batter prepares awkwardly to swing as the pitcher readies himself, and the catcher squats down with a birdcage for a catcher’s mask encircling his head. Obviously, Currier and Ives produced many lithographic series but not all were as Meggs’s described sentimental images portraying normative values unless we concede that white supremacy is one of those key values. Neither can we assert that there are too few racist images to matter, especially given their economic necessity to consumerism and print culture. The titles for Bamboozled enlisted the spectrum of racist caricatures in similar kinetic and mechanical toys as well as many other static toys. Yet even the static caricatures belie their true function—in remaining still they are yet activated—they are figures and therefore bodies, bodies that repeat, and multiply to great effect. In one case, a figure of a smoking dandy dutifully nods in acquiescence. In another, a waiter stands ready for orders. In many cases, the toys convulse to garner laughter based on ridicule, creating a corporeal hierarchy in which whites remain in control of desired, black bodies, to be manipulated by the viewer or user. The sequence provides a retrospective exhibition of figures: dancing jigs; playing fiddles, drums, concertinas, and pianos; catching

144

144

The Design of Race

and releasing; sweeping up; jostling about in jalopies and atop alligators; and in one case cruelly being kicked aside by a mule. Even in their leisure time, they are mocked and their actions are diminished as childish, instinctive, and atavistic. There is perhaps a wish to see these figures in spiritual reverie and their motions as ecstatic. All told, the sequence provides a sad and demeaning litany of the history and impact of these images on the American psyche, the fallout of which can still be seen in a reference to President Obama “shucking and jiving” as personified by the ceramic figure I describe in Chapter 3. One mechanical toy in particular, a miniature puppet stage Three Little Curly Headed Coons holds in one vignette, three separate caricatures that alternate up and down interdependently, as if in anticipation of animated, cartoons of the twentieth century. The caricatures are rendered in lithograph resembling observational drawings and portend the future inscription of these stereotypes in film. The positioning of the three caricatures in sequence, within three separate frames, secures them as comic characters in that tradition. In being further framed within the stage, they assure the viewer that despite their movements, they remain contained by the many popular entertainments of the nineteenth century based in blackface minstrelsy. The cabinet is rendered in bright color and with the florid decorative motifs of the Victorian era, but the title is rendered in early American sans serif or grotesque calling up a sense of the modern as if to carry forth both progressive and retrogressive notions while remaining arrested in time. The mechanical nature of these toys is crucial to understanding their appeal not to childish indulgence on the part of Victorian children but adult white fantasies that make black bodies playthings. Mechanization itself is equally on display as a chief component of this appeal in which the machine is domesticated by its association with childhood and play and the racist trope of the “coon.” Through this coupling, the threat of industrialization and the labor of the formally enslaved are both contained and offer the additional benefit of entertainment secured for whites by black labor, remaining within

145

Racialized Play, Caught in Real Time

145

black bodies. The presence of these caricatures across a variety of visual media manifest in physical form and finally in motion in films without an intent to represent actual African Americans absents them and makes them invisible to white observers. The belief in whiteness itself creates a sense of an unclouded vision of society. The emphasis on the white individualized self over the racialized bodies of blacks makes it impossible to truly recognize or represent African Americans. The sequential art of comics referenced by the cabinet implies movement by carrying bodies over frames allowing time itself to transport the allegory of race in US culture. Similarly but contrasting to this are the pseudo-evolutionary timelines common to the accepted racial attitudes of both the pseudo-racesciences of the nineteenth century and the emerging fields of anthropology and sociology. Typical of these timelines in which humanity progresses over time toward its ideal in the white Anglo-Saxon male, these also issue warnings against miscegenation and supposed potential for regression. Typically, the African and racialized others in these timelines appear in static, atavistic poses from a “dark” and primitive past. The introduction of the comic strip to popular culture overlapped with attitudes of racial inferiority manifested in these timelines of supposed racial ascension. Significantly, the first African American comic strip character was a street corner, gang member, a boy called The New Bully who ruled with the aid of a straight razor. This was followed by the far more simplistic comic strip character of Sambo who was also employed for commercial means as a pitchman.

Playing in Whiteface My own interest in the phenomena of racialized images set in motion and extended allegorically across film and television began with the Andy Griffith Show, a case study in naiveté (Figure 5.5). As a child, I was curious why only

146

146

The Design of Race

FIGURE 5.5  TV Dinnertime, Well Acquainted. Source: Peter Fine, collage, 2011.

on television could a small white boy grow up in the rural south of the midtwentieth century in the complete absence of African Americans characters, or even as caricatures. This seemed especially curious to me given the presentation of Opie as a clichéd, modern version of Tom Sawyer. Over time, I concluded through my own creative work that in fact the series did include African American stereotypes but played in whiteface by white actors. We can assume this was done in order to avoid presenting black characters on network television to southern audiences during the high point of the fight over racial segregation and to avoid offending black audiences in the north through racist caricature. This of course assumes that this same audience would be happy to be excluded from the stage that television was preparing for the majority white population. The Andy Griffith Show premiered in 1960 just as a protracted battle

147

Racialized Play, Caught in Real Time

147

to remove Amos and Andy from evening, network television was concluded. The Andy Griffith Show continued until 1968—the penultimate moment of the 1960s and the same year when Bill Cosby entered the picture as the first African American male lead on television. It is worth noting that Amos and Andy and the Andy Griffith Show continued in syndication well beyond their original network time spots. The two characters central to the play of blackness in whiteface on the show were Aunt Bee and Barney Fife. Aunt Bee is typical of the commodity image of the mammy character with the obvious exception of her explicit whiteness. Despite this, she fully embodies and still transcends a succession of mammy characters seen over print, packages, objects, and film. She seems to bear no actual biological relation to Andy or Opie despite her designation as an “Aunt,” another common name given to the mammy. She offers no sexual threat and like many mammy characters is treated as asexual in her role as housekeeper. Sexuality itself is further sidelined throughout the show, which presents Andy as the patriarch in a state of sustained courtship. Aunt Bee’s figuration is also in keeping with the mammy and its ancillary “the boss,” which typically renders large, physically powerful black women as comic characters, and enforcers of racialized roles within the white household and beyond. Aunt Bee’s position is crucial to the show’s situating of black female labor in apparent service to the white patriarch. M. M. Manring points to Aunt Jemima as the most consumed image of the mammy. Through her, the white female consumer is prompted to enjoy leisure from her position in the patriarchy by allowing this prepacked foodstuff to work for her. In the case of the Andy Griffith Show, Aunt Bee occupies the kitchen as surrogate for a surrogate eliding blackness through whiteness while still enacting the mammy. Television activated and compressed in and through Aunt Bee, the many images of the mammy that have appeared in print and on packages and then whitewashed her so that white audiences could continue to take guilt-free pleasure in her service. Although mammies such as Aunt Jemima largely served as static labels, much later in the 1961,

148

148

The Design of Race

an avatar similar to her, Mrs. Butterworth, appeared in motion in television commercials, wiggling her broad frame forward across the picture plane, with her limbs locked tight to her body. The commercial’s activating of this bottle of syrup, setting it in motion unpacks how packages are implicitly both threedimensional objects of design and playthings. The backside of a 1890s Aunt Jemima package encourages the consumer to redeem the box tops on the package for a series of “funny rag dolls,” or rather the printed, cloth patterns of them. The dolls available include an “Aunty and Uncle” and “two comical pickaninnies” advertised as “all ready to cut and stuff.” The expectation of delight in stuffing the bodies and activating the “funny” figures through play both describes the clear objectification of African Americans as consumables and the very nature of packaging itself. Packaging is a recent phenomenon wherein ordinary foodstuffs were gathered in boxes and other containers with the implication that everything is contained in its totality. The phrases—the total package or the complete package—though clichés, make clear the expectations held within ordinary boxes personified by racialized caricatures. The mixing of ingredients in these boxes in order to create readily available mass consumer foodstuffs indicates another desire—the desire to make sense of modernity in relation to racialized others. “Mixing” as a notion in relation to immigrant groups along with polarizing images of black caricatures in cartoons of the nineteenth century featured prominently in popular periodicals and newspapers. The mixing itself was troubling to “native-born,” Americans but the racializing and demeaning caricatures were not. Racialized and commodified characters such as Aunt Jemima and Rastus were designed to indicate the comfort- and leisure-afforded whites to easily ingest modern systems of mass production through packaged foods despite immigrant “mixing” and the recently emancipated population. On the Andy Griffith Show, Barney Fife appears most significantly among a parade of lesser white minstrel characters. He draws on the long tradition

149

Racialized Play, Caught in Real Time

149

of physical humor and antics seen in early minstrelsy and later vaudeville. His face is especially animated to produce clownish, exaggerated expressions appearing over the long history of racial caricature. He exudes incompetency and dereliction despite his best intentions. He requires the kind patriarch Andy to guide him, gently scold him, and realign him when he inevitably fails. He personifies the hapless black characters in the Darktown series that testify to the contempt for black figures seen through the eyes of white supremacy all played in whiteface pasted over black. Meanwhile, Opie lives a life of pastoral ease aligned with a vision of the new south pictured live and eventually in full color on 1960s television. His is a life filled with false memories of a childhood unknown to nearly every American of any period and certainly the viewing audience of the time. This like the nostalgia for a fictional plantation life is a fantasy of a colorblind present defined by a nonexistent past.

Brand Equity and Racial Masquerade The persistence and brand equity of racialized caricatures as avatars for mass consumption can be more fully appreciated in the person of Uncle Ben, originally created in 1943 to promote Uncle Ben’s Rice. In 2007, Uncle Ben’s underwent a major rebranding effort that may have held some hope that he would finally be retired. The branding firm employed eventually revived him at a cost of over twenty million dollars rather than set him aside as a symbol of racial stereotyping of another time. His permanent position within the false narrative surrounding African American labor and foodstuffs post emancipation had apparently imbued him with too much equity to simply be mothballed. He was reimagined as the CEO of the corporation and pictured online within an executive suite but still referred to only as “Ben.” He still bore no last name or true identity, still called by a singular name as was common with African American workers well into the twentieth century. This practice was

150

150

The Design of Race

not limited to simply calling grown African American men boy, Tom or Uncle. The name George was regularly employed in referring to and commanding stevedores, stewards, and bellboys to fetch. In the end, the rebranding of Uncle Ben’s was had at a cost of twenty-two million dollars making clear the value of racialized images of and for mass consumption, and their clear relationship to brands, and ownership of black bodies as trademarks. Finally in the summer of 2020 due to pressure from the Black Lives Matter movement it was announced that Uncle ben’s, Aunt Jemima, and Mrs. Butterworth’s would all be phased out by their parent companies after protracted, decades long campaigns to retire these racist figures. It might have been assumed that the bright-white opacity of the figure of Barney Fife might finally have obscured what remained of the hackneyed clichés of racial caricature based in minstrelsy such as Uncle Ben.2 Barney though represents a long history of racial masquerade beyond the point where the specific notions it encoded were largely forgotten. Behind his mask remains the burnt cork, layers of identity, and subversion encoded in racial masquerade. Simply put the performativity of African Americans across the spectrum of media reproduction was born through the subversion of racial roles in an explicitly visual, theatrical form. Originally, African Americans mimicked and mocked polite white society that insisted on its own superiority in bodies poised to represent leisure at the expense of African Americans. Whites further sought command over black bodies for purposes of entertainment through performing blackface spectacle themselves, which again was reenacted by African Americans appropriating these modes of signifying. By the 1950s, public pressure to eliminate racist images in film and television became at least in part too costly to the very systems of representation they were created to support. Through these, a “miscegenated style” as expressed by Grace Hale emerged through a subversion of blackface put to use by black entertainers while viewing themselves through the eyes of white audiences. I contend in Chapter 1 that African American artists have used this strategy to

151

Racialized Play, Caught in Real Time

151

set at liberty many of the arrested and commodified images of blacks such as the “Mammy, Tom and coon.” Barney Fife presents no such opportunity, perpetuating minstrel tansvestism by layering whiteface over blackface—in his case, though the gender roles often transgressed through minstrelsy are more strictly separated through his role as deputy in the public sphere with Aunt Bee overseeing the domestic sphere. This is typical of the postwar period in which women typically returned to stricter gender roles after leaving wartime work outside of the domestic arena. Symbolic domestic labor performed on television by women in this period was more strictly encoded in Aunt Bee’s performance of the mammy on television. The revolutionary impact of this broad medium in creating both the historical moment of the period and a shared cultural context for suburbia was undermined by retrogressive racial caricature. The novelty of formerly static images of stereotypes born in print now literally captured in motion and then witnessed again on packages advertised on television and carried upon children’s lunch boxes was contrasted with editorial imagery of direct resistance by African Americans to segregation on the same medium of television. The viewer, representing a now broader definition of whiteness, was still allowed to delight in bodies activated by the eye’s play upon racial caricature. An expanded whiteness still defined in relation to polarized images of blackness enrolled many more former “nonwhites” in whiteness but further excluded African Americans. Barney Fife provides an uncanny means to understanding the function of whiteness through his visual appeal using humor and the subsuming of blackface tansvestism in his individuated body. He embodies ridicule through his slight, gaunt frame, small shoulders, and chicken wing arms. His antics closely hew to the tradition of vaudeville’s, slapstick style of humor originating in minstrelsy still seen on television variety shows of the period. He is weak, pitiable, and contemptible; his very physicality denies him a genuine masculinity among white equals aligning him

152

152

The Design of Race

with the asexual, nearly eunuch like role of Uncle Tom characters. In contrast to this is his actual white body and its operation of whiteness on television and therefore in motion. Barney embodies other contrasts as well, his physicality does not include a masculinity typical of whiteness since he must also play the part of the minstrel. He does align as a poor white with the anti-elitist roots of minstrelsy’s appeal to the working class. As David Roediger points out blackface minstrelsy contained hope, fear, fascination, and prejudice in popular form, the first real popular American entertainment with a pluralistic, broad regional, and national appeal3—a popularity based in notions of authentic black culture, and play with racial identity, and an association with the primitive countered by a modern industrial identity pictured as white. Barney’s character dissipated the threat of blackness, for a growing postwar, white audience still working to establish itself against the background of an African American culture being further marginalized in city centers. On the whole, the cast of the show promised a return to a rural, preindustrial past but without blackness where in its absence whiteness produces an empty center. In Mayberry, there is no need to adjust your set to the racial other. One might also see in Mayberry the eerie undertones of the Twilight Zone where the meaning and substance of any known reality have disappeared, and all that remains is an uncanny sense that something is terribly wrong. It is in every sense the opposite of an Afrofuturist space but one quite acceptable to white audiences despite it being pure fantasy. The Andy Griffith show also presents a nearly all-male public sphere except for Andy’s female suitors who typically represent a more modern vision of the southern United States in their roles as female and white-collar. The presence of minstrel characters such as Barney, Gomer, and Goober deny the egalitarian potential of television as a form poised to unite the country through a single popular medium, as essentially motion pictures domesticated for public consumption within the home. The absence of black characters was not simply a means to deny racial caricature a place on television but to silence black voices and replace them

153

Racialized Play, Caught in Real Time

153

through ventriloquism with characters such as Barney. This erasure of blackness prompted whites to invest more in the collective power of whiteness, rather than divest of it.4 It therefore did not create a “color-blind” space but led to the reproduction of whiteness at a scale as yet unseen, virtually the same thing. Reyner Banham described the television as vital to a second machine age, able to reproduce through moving images, digital forms, and miniaturization and just as in the first machine age also abstract the workings of a complex technology. These machinations were insufficient in creating new forms of aesthetic expression in time to adjust to progressive tendencies in the culture so that latent, often retrogressive stereotypes reemerged in more virulent forms.

Whiteness Finds Its Sweet Spot I am interested principally in how whiteness operates in contrast not simply to blackness but in the blind spot as a visual phenomenon inherent to the invisible operations of whiteness. In the case of the Andy Griffith Show, the principal characters of Andy and Opie serve to quietly instill whiteness but subtly against the prominent, whiteface characters of Aunt Bee and Barney. Andy presents a benign whiteness in a gentle, patriarchal fashion but clearly representing authority as white, male, law enforcement. Opie stands in for any number of childlike attributes contrasted with that white, male authority. Here whiteness finds its sweet spot by stealthily employing itself against itself by absenting blackness and allowing whites to further invest in a notion of themselves as nonracialized subjects.5 Andy, Aunt Bee, and Opie can happily coexist in relation to each other and other whites despite class differences between them and those they employ. Shop owners and even Otis the town drunk are allowed full access to the benefits of what appears to be a classless existence though one not free of the invisible hierarchies of whiteness.

154

154

The Design of Race

The egalitarian promise of television by virtue of its popular appeal and ubiquity intersects perfectly as a medium with whiteness as formless and intangible. It depends on blithely embracing an ahistorical naiveté based on representations of the south first presented in the early twentieth century. The show is in effect a living museum of southern heritage culture, based on the creation of the new south during that period and realized on television through bodies put in motion. Part and parcel of this is the creation in literature as part of the new south of the figure of the mammy but now on television where her labor is in a sense no longer needed being replaced by a mammy in whiteface. On the surface, the Andy Griffith Show is simply a show about “American values” and any attempt to see it otherwise is a cynical ploy meant to undermine those values. But whose values, and what is valued or devalued, and at whose expense? This points to what Maurice Berger has referred to as white’s unwillingness to assign meaning to whiteness.6 This is the very visual phenomenon of the invisible quality of whiteness that allows us to ascertain Aunt Bee’s “authenticity” but not actually see her as a racialized subject. In fact, whites are allowed to read their own experience as nonracialized subjects through her and yet feel connected to “traditional American values” without encountering black, bodies, which then subtly reinforces whiteness as disembodied.7 Given the actual lived experience of both whites and blacks in the rural and urban south in deeply racialized spaces, it is evident that the show attempts to ameliorate this by presenting small-town America as a proxy for postwar suburbia and normative value systems based on white privilege. There was a stark contrast between this presentation and the reality of the evening news of the period where racial conflict in the Jim Crow south was a daily event pictured in motion on television. The Andy Griffith Show’s homogenized version of society shortly came into conflict with the counterculture’s embrace of African American culture in the form of the blues and its impact on popular music, especially among baby boomers. As George Lipsitz describes, this enlisting of

155

Racialized Play, Caught in Real Time

155

African American culture as authentic cultural expression as opposed to the bland vision of television is itself an appropriation of blackness in the romantic tradition and a cultural whitewashing.8 In short, whites simply reverted to appropriating African American culture in order to know themselves more fully as authentically American. The development of a counterculture based in part on this notion begins at least in the late 1940s described in Dick Hebdige’s definition of the hipster and in Norman Mailer’s description of the white Negro where we see whiteness extend its ability to expropriate blackness. The white body’s ability to move through space and over time and to pass back and forth required interlocutors and liaisons who could navigate both white-and-black spaces. Bliss Broyard suggests her father Anatole Broyard the literary critic for the New York Times who was passing for white in New York of the 1940s and beyond was at least one model for Mailer’s white Negro. Although this makes clear some obvious contradictions in the mechanics of whiteness, it still points to its obvious power as the true and original “race card” in nonracialized form—a pass for passing if you will. Bodies are set in motion differently because they are used to describe difference, to define it, and produce it as a racialized visual phenomenon, though as Dyer asserts white bodies are largely noncorporeal existing not in a single character except perhaps as unbounded archetypes.9 These exist in any number of transcendent, nonmaterial forms as described by Dyer because they exist in and through narrative forms that occur in a knowledge production that is visually produced. These forms do not simply define the white experience but produce it. As Dyer explains, it is in film that—time and space—are secured as an expression of whiteness realized through light itself that enables whites unlimited mobility allowing them to move beyond physical limits—black bodies though remain fixed as racial stereotypes and do not work beyond their limits as defined originally in print.10 Motion pictures like photography developed through an iterative process of discovery initiated and pursued by several people over a number of decades

156

156

The Design of Race

and finally resulting in their optimal technological and material solutions. Embedded in these processes were racialized images based on stereotypes created in print just prior to these and further established through consumer culture. I assert that motion pictures as a product of modernity were partially the result of a desire to harness mechanical reproduction to contain black bodies in the same manner as typography, lithography, and photography. This desire arose and grew through this process of discovery and an anxiety that black bodies could not truly be contained in the mechanical age. Images in early films of trains and steamships hurtling through time and space also meant that the mobility of African Americans could not also easily be arrested. It is no coincidence that Plessey versus Fergusson involved the train car as stage set for the definitive and final legal fight of the nineteenth century over segregation. This denouement of the Jim Crow era definitively contained black bodies in racialized spaces, denying the personhood of African Americans. This disallowed and rejected African Americans from further incorporation within the larger social body and allowed whiteness to subsume all other forms of representation and still transcend racialization in the form of a white body.

Notes 1 Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford University Press, 1995), 63. 2 Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Duke University Press, 2003), 5. 3 David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Haymarket, 1991), 116. 4 George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Temple University Press, 1998), viii. 5 Tyler Stallings, WHITENESS: A Wayward Construction (Laguna Art Museum, 2003), 15.

157

Racialized Play, Caught in Real Time

157

6 Maurice Berger, White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art (Center for Art and Visual Culture, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 2004), 25. 7 Richard Dyer, WHITE: Essays on Race and Culture (Routledge, 1997), 4. 8 Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, 118–28. 9 Dyer, WHITE, 14. 10 Dyer, WHITE, 37.

158

158

159

Conclusion: The Physiognomist’s Gimlet Eye I wrote this book on the edges of two vastly different frontiers defined by interiority. One is the much-revered American frontier that Wyoming defines in the present moment, a frontier edging ever inward toward the center of the continent away from the ever-expanding notion of manifest destiny at the core of the myth of the US American west. The other frontier is the decolonized black imagination of Black Panther, conjured by Stan Lee whose papers are stored just steps from my office in the archives of The American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. The frontier was declared closed in 1910 a short twenty years after Wyoming achieved statehood. This occurred as the new south was solidifying symbolically as a means to unify north and south after Jim Crow was thoroughly established as Federal law across the United States in 1896. It might have been assumed that the cowboy would have been retired at the same moment as the frontier’s closure after that figure’s central role in the “winning of the west.” Since then, he has served symbolically and indefinitely to meet many aims. Time has acted reductively upon the true figure of the cowboy erasing his blackness and Hispanic origins producing the figure cut by the “typical” cowboy as the ultimate expression of individualized, white, Western masculinity. The symbolic landscape in which he works is spare, often strangely silent,

160

160

The Design of Race

monotone, and isolating while ironically somehow also liberating. In a sense, Wyoming is the perfect setting for his work where labor is still often seasonal and itinerant, blown about by the vagaries of the boom and bust cycles of the energy economy. In contrast, the spaces of Black Panther are a world apart in every way—one that is highly complex defined by a beauty manifested in a multidimensional visual aesthetic. An aesthetic enriched by a range of colors in hue, saturation, and value that denies the myth that Africa was forgotten in the diaspora rather than as it was in truth obscured and erased. The film features expansive horizons, mountain vistas, an economy of riches, and a surplus of creative power and expression. It is a representation of black power existing parallel to both the west and the colonial past. Significant within Black Panther’s aesthetic and a vital feature is the typeface designed for the film as the auditory and material expression of the Wakandan language. The creators understood that embedded in the smallest details of typography are ideologies and that in creating a typeface that speaks in Wakandan, they could speak for the many silenced and absented voices of African and African American history. Wakanda is a decolonized black space apart from the historicizing power of whiteness, a visual and ironically almost always intangible expression of white supremacy—a power continually reproducing itself by creating white persons and places that do not and never did exist. A fantasy and fiction of race that has at times been checked but so far not diminished. Within this fantasy and deeply embedded in it is the idealized, plantation of the antebellum south that blossomed in the white imagination over time as a lost world of white paternalism. This imagined space is closely contained, specifically delineated to keep white and black separate but somehow happily trapped together in the past. Along another axis lies the American West where white supremacy exists within the boundless visual space of the horizon—in a place where “cowboys

161

Conclusion

161

and Indians” have been pictured on film and in television in scenes of combat deciding who would own America’s wide-open spaces. An America without strict borders when concerning the mobility of whites and where somehow the Vaquero has vanished beyond the border. This is boundless fiction of the west, where few black bodies exist largely removed from the true record. In actuality a quarter of working cowboys were African Americans. The eternal present of the ever-expanding west of manifest destiny offered no presence for black bodies and in this mirrors the current notions of “post-racial” and “color-blind” digital futures. Richard Dyer sums it up perfectly in describing the Western as the film genre that best typifies whiteness in a place and time unhindered by a history, produced by genocide, and always moving past limits as an expression of manifest destiny in which borders expand and protect. Dyer writes: The Western as an imaginative form which purveyed the experience, the thrill and exhilaration, of the exercise of enterprise. It is in the visceral qualities of the Western—surging through the land, galloping about on horseback, chases, the intensity and skill of fighting, exciting and jubilant music, stunning landscapes—that enterprise and imperialism have had their most undeliberated, powerful appeal.1 As Dyer notes in contrast to the openness of the West, the antebellum south is a domesticated and claustrophobic space. We can see the conflation of these spaces in Django Unchained, providing an example of the figure that—the black cowboy—might cut if dropped into the antebellum south. Tarantino does just this, perhaps to rescue his own peripatetic narrative by locating a silhouette of the black cowboy in the Deep South as a means to imbue the formerly enslaved character of Django with heroism and male singularity in contrast to the dandyism of the white male characters. His hat, boots, holsters, spurs, and cigarette provide the visual cues required to anchor his silhouette in a heroic display of agency, competency, and mobility.

162

162

The Design of Race

Kara Walker cuts just such figures in her art, positioning them in the Deep South as flat black bodies against white. Her dimorphic twisting of those bodies and the exaggerated features and ornamentation of them in crisp contours deny a rose-colored vision of the plantation south. Walker utilizes the silhouette to aid the viewer in understanding the links between art, technology, entertainment, and racialized looking. She employs and interrogates instruments of art and science and the ways these have defined the very act of looking as a form of white supremacy. In looking, the eye becomes the lens and prosthesis of the gaze and the other—the seen—that which is captured through looking. The silhouette—like all likenesses—is but a projection captured in fine line detail. Walker plays with the notion of the likeness from a period when few genuine efforts were made to accurately capture the image of the African American (Figures A–D). Walker’s silhouettes have many things in common with the reductive forms of the graphic arts seen in the Ebony Comedies logo in Chapter 1 but without drawing on specific commodified images of African Americans seen in the popular press and entertainments of the nineteenth century. This is doubtless because she focuses on domestic, antebellum imagery of the enslaved and the slaveholder. She forcefully rejects a sentimentalized image of the old south and plantation life as an ideal. The figures she cuts in line and flat planes are images of the secret life of slavery rather than the fictionalized and popular notions of the domesticated spaces of slavery. She directly counters the fanciful, familial aspects of slave life, highlighting instead the violence its maintenance required as well as its traumatizing effects on the body. Though flat and reductive, her figures are not themselves objectifications but players that pretend to be contained in the viewer’s gaze and the fiction that the observable will produce if not the truth, then a near likeness. Walker’s hand produces lines that are highly active, threaded together, overlapping, and dense. When she cuts her silhouettes, she literally draws the eye to the edges in sharp detail. In Walker’s use of the cyclorama, her figures, rendered in

163

Conclusion

FIGURES A–D (Continued)

163

164

FIGURES A–D  Kara Walker. Slavery! Slavery! Presenting a GRAND and LIFELIKE Panoramic Journey into Picturesque Southern Slavery or “Life at ‘Ol’ Virginny’s Hole’ (sketches from Plantation Life).” See the Peculiar Institution as never before! All cut from black paper by the able hand of Kara Elizabeth Walker, an Emancipated Negress and leader in her Cause, 1997. Cut paper on wall, 144 × 1,020 inches (365.76 × 2,590.8 cm). Installation view: Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2008. Photo: Joshua White. Artwork © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

165

Conclusion

165

black paper and affixed to walls, remain unframed as the viewer turns about to unwrap the scene. The actions of the figures on white walls with their bodies overlapping reinforce the interplay of the positive and negative shapes that are produced by the variegated lines of the figures and the other shapes they form. Though most of Walker’s figures are cut in black paper to represent blackness, she does cut figures of white slaveholders and catchers in black, thereby accomplishing what few have ever done effectively: making whiteness strange. She pictures whites with pinched and pointed noses, flattened rear ends, bloated bellies, sloping foreheads, jutting jaws, limp and distended phalluses, and beady eyes. She employs the physiognomist’s gimlet eye to see white as the other. In her world, the slavers do not escape her view, and it is the fine-toothed details the silhouette produces that reveal the flaws in the bodies of white perpetrators of racial violence. She creates a spectacle of the grotesque that equates the common and deliberately dimorphic presentation of black bodies with white bodies and the disgust associated with bodily fluids, excretions, and miscegenation. She creates and explicitly names her works as allegories to describe the nature of race in America as a living record of images, objects, words, and bodies strewn over time. Thus, Walker’s work presents the origin story of the creation of the myth of race in America as polarized, one that hides but never fully obscures the true genesis of the American. Part of her work in making whiteness strange is to deny the viewer the archetypical white figure personified by the cowboy or other hero or white savior figure. White male figures appear as they would have during the antebellum period in what today seems an odd assortment of styles and poses. They resemble the riverboat men of the period of what was then the southwest and the Deep South, which in many places still was a frontier. Here, white male figures appear in high-waisted pants, blousy shirts, and a variety of floppy, weathered hats that provide no distinguishing profile. In most cases, their outfits reinforce the strangeness of whiteness, not because they are not true to the period, but because the masculinity of that time as such is not familiar to

166

166

The Design of Race

a contemporary viewer. However, the characters are still stock and resemble any number of white male figures observed and recorded in the paintings of Eakins or Homer, or in the writings of Twain. Contrasted with these white figures are the stereotypical or clichéd images of African Americans that Walker interrogates through her play. Like the work of the artists in Chapter 1, Walker freezes the action of the figures disallowing the white fantasy of blackness as a living spectacle. It is this denial that is often at the core of the complaint by whites that they are now somehow disadvantaged if African Americans are represented equally in the visual or material realms of culture. The pleasure had in observing black bodies and manipulating them with the eye, over decades, and now stretching across centuries is at the root of much of American popular entertainment. It is one thing to imagine a nation where voting rights and access by African Americans to the public sphere of politics exist and are regarded as “fair.” It is another thing entirely it seems to disengage from the act of looking on black bodies for pleasure, as a simple, naive pleasure when that seemingly passive act has always been available to those deemed to be white. Thus nostalgia for a fictional past that though it never existed has been rehearsed and performed as an allegory of Americana to the point of seeming perfectly natural and benign. What my grandfather would have called “a bunch of happy horseshit.” What I  have tried to express in this book is that this very naiveté hides the complex, visual allegory of race in America embedded in the mechanics, tools, forms, and media of graphic design. Once the means to mechanically reproduce images and texts was achieved at a mass scale and each married to the other, it allowed the stereotype to emerge out of that material, mechanical sphere into the imaginative and metaphorical sphere. The machines that made the mass reproduction of graphic forms in print possible, once put in motion in film acted in step with white supremacy to continually reproduce blackness as antithetical to whiteness. The multiplicity inherent in the art of mechanical reproduction made its output ubiquitous, and though ephemeral, it was

167

Conclusion

167

infinitely reproducible and therefore somehow normative and inevitable. All of this occurred before an aesthetic or iconography of and for the machine age was achieved or even demanded, as it was by the modernists in Europe in the early twentieth century. This caused blackness as a popular, powerful representative form to arise and be reproduced in the press and commercial spheres of print culture before the machine age could come to terms with its own progressive intent to reshape the world as modern. Most of the images of blackness imagined and widely reproduced to serve notions of white supremacy have been ignored as secondary to the history of graphic design. This is due to their primary place within the baser commercial arena of advertising rather than the more elevated, formalist artifacts of graphic design canonized after the field matured in the later part of the twentieth century. This figures them as vestigial forms and rightly as retrogressive images of an earlier time but from a time not so long ago as to be ignored. Sadly racist and white supremacist, imagery and words continue to appear and mutate over time and within new forms that seem even more infinitely powerful and perhaps vitriolic than before. Whiteness as a fiction has manifested itself as white supremacy to create blackness and to dominate the other. It insists on a white body, politically, socially, and racially as “American” in contrast to other bodies that cannot be made white and that must be separated. It also acts sadistically to achieve its wholeness demanding that others continually, masochistically cut themselves into small pieces to demonstrate their subjection to the white body or suffer racist violence. Despite racist and white supremacist imagery being largely introduced during the nascent period of commercial culture and before an aesthetic for the machine age could be defined, these images persist and retain value. They have literally accrued value in many cases as major brands achieving remarkable success in the marketplace despite being rejected by most people as wholly racist and far beyond the scope of what is acceptable. All of this begs the question of what might be done to discontinue the entire racist project of white

168

168

The Design of Race

supremacy or alleviate the problems it causes to allow time to address racism. One overlooked area is educating designers as to the systematic use and reuse of forms that are implicitly racist or racialized and to insist on a true visual literacy among visual communicators. Second to this should be an accounting within graphic design education of the sustained and self-imposed ignorance of these forms to produce a new visual literacy. A visual literacy based in the material means of production of designed images and texts, one that can be taught across the liberal and creative arts that include a design component. It is of course my hope that this book provides some impetus for this endeavor.

Note 1 Richard Dyer, WHITE: Essays on Race and Culture (Routledge, 1997), 33.

169

INDEX

Absence xi, 4, 5, 18, 30, 39, 40, 59, 130–1, 146, 152 Adbusters 43 African American aesthetics 8, 10–12 Afrofuturism 152 Agassiz, Louis 53, 134 Americana 32 American West 159–61 Amos and Andy 117, 147 Andy Griffith Show xi, 23–4, 145–8, 150–4 assimilation xi, xiii, xx, 20, 36, 69, 91, 92, 101, 106 Aunt Jemima 20, 35, 97–8, 98, 100–2, 120, 147–8, 150 Bahrt, Irv 120 Balsamo, Anne 128 Bamboozled (Lee) 23, 138, 140 Banham, Reyner 153 Beauty, Beast 115 Behrens, Peter 71 Benjamin, Walter 6 Benneton COLORS 123, 125 Berger, John 7 Berger, Maurice 154 black bodies 6, 20, 22, 40, 50, 60, 75, 77–8, 100, 110, 114, 127, 130, 131, 134–5, 143, 161, 166 absence of 22 abuse of 35 anxiety over 68, 104 caricatures of xi, 23–4, 32, 34–5, 46, 86, 87, 97–9, 103–5, 138, 141, 143–5, 148 commodification of 4, 8, 12, 19, 41, 62, 88, 120, 141, 150 control of 23, 79, 156 emasculation of 21, 97

fetishization of 19 and labor 8, 67, 85, 97, 101, 110, 137, 141, 145 as objects of ridicule 36, 85, 98, 134, 140, 141, 144, 151 reappropriation by Black artists 38, 39, 58, 60, 61, 79, 102–4, 162, 165 and sexuality 103, 104 and whiteness 144, 154, 155 see also minstrelsy blackface 21, 36, 100, 101, 104–5, 117, 118, 120, 122, 130, 138, 150, 151 see also minstrelsy; Mammie/Mammy figure; whiteface black Jesus 122 blackness 17, 23, 30, 39–40, 73, 75, 126, 134, 141, 159, 165, 166 and athleticism 35, 37, 40–1, 131, 132, 138, 139, 141–3 and black bodies 4, 114, 127 and graphic design 27, 35, 85, 87, 111, 122, 167 and identity 18 and lithography 137, 138 and painting 36–8, 58, 59 and performance 124, 130 and photography 48, 60, 118 and stereotypes 100, 102, 105, 109, 116, 117 and television 147, 151–3, 156 and whiteface 23, 24 see also minstrelsy Black Panther (film) 156, 160 black Santa Claus 118, 119, 120, 122 blind spots 3, 6–8, 20, 22, 31, 76–8, 88, 102, 104, 109, 128, 153 Brown, John xvi Broyard, Anatole 155

170

170

Index

Broyard, Bliss 155 Bundchen, Gisele 115 Burson, Nancy 127

and foodstuffs 20, 34–5, 100, 101, 106, 117, 149 of images and words xviii, 107, 117–18 and packaging 20 and race 3, 8, 20, 35, 97, 101, 114, 132 of whiteness 109, 118, 122 Craft, Ellen 78 Cream of Wheat 21, 99, 100, 103–5 Crosby, Bing 120 Currier and Ives 14, 23, 37, 137, 139, 141, 142, 143 see also Darktown

capitalism 109 carte des visite 114 Carter, Jimmy 98 Charles, Michael Ray 17, 21, 32–3, 38–9, 102, 105, 107, 111 After Black 37 Army of Clowns 35 Before Black 37 Beware 38 Coffeemate 34, 102–3 cultural reappopriation 34, 35 Elvis Lives 36–7 Forever Free series 35 The Great White Hope 35 Hear Yo Freedom 37 Howta Conquer the Fowl World 37 Increase Yo Mobility 37 letterforms 33 and miscegenation 104 Mixed Breed 36 paintings 33–4 Riding High 37 Three Legged Man 35, 37 To See or Not to See 37 use of posters 33, 35, 36 use of text 103, 104 You Only Live Once 103–4 chromolithography 97, 111 civil rights movement 116–18 Clay, Edward C. 104 Cogdell, Christina 11 collapses 18, 20, 22, 30, 102, 105, 142 color-blindness 22, 106, 109, 116, 127, 153, 161 comic books 145 conformity 106, 108 conservatism 108 constructivism 12, 124 consumption/consumerism xi, 5, 28, 36, 82, 102, 108–9, 111, 120, 143, 152 of blackness 40, 124, 149–50

Dadaism 12, 43 dandyism 143, 161 Darkies’ Day at the Fair (cartoon) 138, 140 Darktown (Currier and Ives) 23, 37, 87, 137–40, 149 Didot, Firmin 65, 75 disguise 102 dismorphia 39 Django Unchained (Tarantino) 47, 48, 161 double consciousness (Du Bois) 16, 28, 34, 36, 39, 48, 59, 62, 94 Douglass, Frederick 80, 134 drag 78, 99, 101, 105 Drucker, Johanna 6, 14–15, 91 Du Bois, W. E. B. 16, 94, 134 see also double consciousness (Du Bois) DuVall, Dianne xv Dyer, Richard 155, 161 Eakins, Thomas 166 Ebony Comedies 85–7, 162 Elizabeth (Queen) 123 Ellison, Ralph 38 empiricism 10 engravings 19, 113, 133 Eskilson, Stephen 13, 14 eugenics 11, 126 Eurocentrism 9, 12 FaceApp 128 fascism 9 Fine, Aaron xvi

171

Index

Fine, Isaac Hamilton xv–xvi flattened planes 18, 30, 162 formalism 9, 18, 27, 30, 33, 167 futurism 12, 22, 123, 126, 127 see also Afrofuturism

171

Kristeva, Julia 6 Kruger, Barbara 41, 42, 124

Jackson, Michael 123, 124 Jacobs, Harriet 76 James, LeBron 115 Jane (enslaved) xv–xvi Jim Crow xii, 16, 31, 60, 101, 106 Johansson, Scarlett 129 John Paul II (Pope) 123 Johnson, Lyndon B. 99 Jolson, Al 37 Jordan, Michael 44

Lee, Spike 23, 123, 138 see also Bamboozled (Lee) Lee, Stan 156 see also Black Panther (film) Leibovitz, Annie 115 letterforms 8, 18, 27, 33, 57, 58, 71, 72, 74, 75, 85–7, 103, 105 lettering 8, 18, 27, 36, 55, 75 Life xii Ligon, Glenn 17, 20, 21, 54, 65, 78, 80, 84–5, 105, 111 How Can the Master’s Tools Dismantle the Master’s House 57 I Am Somebody 58 I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background 57 I’m Turning into a Specter Before Your Very Eyes and I’m Going to Haunt You 59 I Was Somebody 58 Runaways 80–4 Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Black Features 28, 29, 30, 31, 59 Self-Portrait Exaggerating My White Features 28, 29, 30, 31, 59 Study for Notes on the Margin of the “Black Book” 55, 56 use of text as image 54–7, 59 use of the word “colored” 58, 59 Lincoln, Abraham xvi, 81, 103 linotype process 65 Lippman, Walter 66, 134 Lipsitz, George 154 Loos, Adolf 11 Lott, Eric 4, 35 Lubalin, Herb 117–8, 120–2 Lugo-Ortiz, Agnes 111

Kalman, Tibor 123–5 Kentucky Fried Chicken 98 King Kong 115 Kleenex xii

Mailer, Norman 155 Mammie/Mammy figure 20, 23, 97–8, 99, 102–4, 109–10, 147–8, 151, 154 Mandingo 115

Garcia, Rupert 104–5, 107 Gates, Henry Louis 70, 87, 121, 122 Ghost in the Shell (film) 129 Goodie Two Shoes, Apple Pie (Fine) 107–8, 108 Greene, Myra xvii Griffith, D. W. 54 Gutenberg, Johannes 71 Hale, Grace Elizabeth 35, 150 Harris, Michael 102 Heartfield, John 124 Hebdige, Dick 155 Helvetica (film) 10 Homer, Winslow 166 Hurston, Zora Neale 58 imperialism 161 Instagram 114 International/Swiss Style graphic design 8, 9–15, 116 intertextuality of text and image 6, 12, 18, 27, 28, 30

172

172

Index

manga 129 Manring, M. M. 147 Marsh, Christina xvii masking 102 materialism/materiality 23, 33, 138 and graphic design 8, 18, 27, 30, 67–8 and packaging 101, 105 and painting 54 and photography 46, 49, 53, 114, 124 and race 67, 69 and text 62 and typography 90, 91 McVarish, E. 14–15 Meggs, Phillip 12–14, 143 minstrelsy 4, 35–6, 87, 99, 105, 151 and blackness 85, 130, 138 and lithography 21, 140–1, 144 and packaging 100, 101, 150 and painting 36–7 and whiteness 34, 99–100, 148–9, 151–2 miscegenation 11, 20, 36, 77, 101–4, 115, 126, 145, 165 Mission Impossible (TV show) 46 mixed marriages 104 modernism 9–13, 16–18, 30, 34, 57, 60, 66, 72, 167 see also formalism Morrison, Toni 3, 16, 70, 111 Mrs. Butterworth 148, 150 mulattoes xiii, 36, 76, 77, 110 multiculturalism 85, 125 Munoz, Jacob 90, 91 Muybridge, Eadward 72–3, 72

Papanek, Victor 11 paternalism 160 patriotism 14 Piper, Adrian 28 Plessy v. Ferguson 156 Pop Art 34, 116, 118 postmodernism 9–11, 17 Presley, Elvis 36–7 propaganda posters 115

Nast, Thomas 121 National Basketball Association (NBA) 43, 78–9, 131 Nike 41–5, 131, 132 Nixon, Richard M. 99 Nochlin, Linda 124 Obama, Barack xvi, 98, 144 Odadike, Keith 127

racism 18, 143, 168 blind spots to 6 on the body xvi as implicit 11, 28 opposition to 6, 18, 31 sidelining of 3 as systemic 67, 168 visual modes of 28, 30, 31 see also scientific racism; white supremacy Rastus 20–1, 97, 99, 100–1, 103–5, 109, 148 Real Colored Players 85, 87 Reid, Calvin 37 Reynolds, Marjorie 120 Rosenthal, A. 111 runaway slave 19–20, 40–1, 65, 67, 68, 70–4, 76–84, 87, 100 Saar, Betty 110 Sambo figure 32, 38, 145 Saussure, Ferdinand de 89 Sayre, Betty 34 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 123 scientific racism xiv, 125 semiotics 5, 106 Simpson, Lorna 17, 59 and the black body 60, 61 “eyes in/the back of/your head” 61 Five Day Forecast 61 You’re Fine 61 Simpson, O. J. 40, 126 slippage 37, 78 Smith, Shawn Michele 16 snapshots 114

173

Index

Stanford, Leland 72 symbolism 40, 41 tansvestism 151 Thomas, Hank Willis 17, 20–2, 31, 37, 38, 65, 78, 79, 79, 105, 111 Am I Not a Man and a Brother 41–2, 43, 81 Basketball and Chain 43 brand placement 40–4, 131 Branded Head 131 First Round Draft Pick 41, 42 Jordan and Johnnie Walker in Timberland Circa 1923 45 Scarred Body 132 Shooting Stars 44 Unbranded series 40, 130–1 Three Little Curly Headed Coons (toy) 144 Tschichold, Jan 9 Twain, Mark 166 Twilight Zone 152 typography 65–7, 70–1, 73, 88–9 cast metal type 18, 23, 53, 65, 75, 138 design of typefaces 89, 90 ornamentation 74 wood type 75 Uncle Ben 100, 101, 117, 149–50 Uncle Tom figures 117, 152 US American aesthetics 8, 10, 11 ventriloquism 21, 41, 103, 104–5, 153 Vignelli, Massimo 10–11 Walker, Kara 58, 163–4 use of silhouettes 31, 69, 85, 162, 165 and whiteness 165, 166 Wayans, Keenen Ivory 55 Wedgewood, Josiah 41, 80, 81 Weems, Carrie Mae 17, 31, 53, 54, 58, 76 Black Man Holding Watermelon 50, 51

173

Black Woman with Fried Chicken 50, 52 Blue Black Boy 51 From Here I Saw What Happened 52 Golden Yella Girl 51 I Cried 52 Jim If You Choose 46, 47, 50 Magenta Colored Girl 51 Mirror, Mirror 46, 48–50 vernacular of advertising 46, 47, 50 Weisberg, Jill 92–5 whiteface 145–9, 151 whiteness xi, xvii–xviii, 14, 17, 127, 155, 165–7 and consumer products xii, xiii, 21–2, 106–9 and film 160, 161 and graphic design 2, 4–11, 13, 16, 20, 79, 87, 101, 105, 116, 118, 125–8 and painting 34, 36, 38, 104 and performance 78, 124, 130 and photography 52, 114 and privilege 6, 24, 145 and television 147, 151–4, 156 white supremacy 19, 22, 106, 160, 166 African American artists’ critiques 2, 8, 18, 30, 53, 60, 62, 68, 87, 103–4, 110, 114, 162 and photography 126, 133–5 and product marketing 21, 102, 103, 109 and the runaway slave 66–7, 69, 83 and spectacle 141, 143, 149 and violence 7, 17 in visual culture xviii, 16, 18, 20, 30, 31, 89, 167 whitewashing 128, 129, 147, 155 Wilson, Fred 44 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 92, 93 Winfrey, Oprah 127 woodcuts 19, 43, 113, 133 Wray, Fay 115 Wy*T*Fine xi

174

174

1

PLATE 1  Michael Ray Charles, The Great White Hope, 1994, acrylic on paper with Penny.

PLATE 2  Michael Ray Charles, The Three Legged Man, 1995, print with Penny.

2

PLATE 3  Michael Ray Charles, An Army of Clowns, 1995, acrylic on paper with Penny.

PLATE 4  Michael Ray Charles, Mixed Breed, 1997, acrylic on canvas with Penny.

3

PLATE 5  Michael Ray Charles, Elvis Lives, 1997, acrylic on paper with Penny.

PLATE 6  Michael Ray Charles, Hear Yo Freedom, 1997, acrylic on paper with Penny.

4

PLATE 7  Michael Ray Charles, Increase Yo Mobility, 1997, acrylic on paper with Penny.

PLATE 8  Michael Ray Charles, Beware, 1994, acrylic on paper with Penny.

5

PLATE 9  Hank Willis Thomas, O.J. Dingo, 1980/2007. © HANK WILLIS THOMAS. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

PLATE 10  Hank Willis Thomas, Ode to CMB: Am I Not a Man and a Brother?, 2005. © HANK WILLIS THOMAS. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

6

PLATE 11  Hank Willis Thomas, Basketball and Chain, 2003. © HANK WILLIS THOMAS. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

PLATE 12  Hank Willis Thomas, Shooting Stars, 2011. © HANK WILLIS THOMAS. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

7

PLATE 13  Carrie Mae Weems, Magenta Colored Girl, 1997. © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

PLATE 14  Carrie Mae Weems, A Negroid Type, 1995–6. © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

8

PLATE 15  Carrie Mae Weems, And You Became a Scientific Profile, 1995–6. © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

PLATE 16  Glenn Ligon, Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I  Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background), 1990. Oil stick, gesso, and graphite on wood, 80 × 30 inches (203.2 × 76.2 cm). © Glenn Ligon; Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Chantal Crousel, Paris.

9

PLATE 17  Glenn Ligon, “A Loner, Sad and Shy” (Profile Series), 1990–1. Oil on canvas, 32 × 22.13 inches (81.3 × 56.1 cm). © Glenn Ligon; Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Chantal Crousel, Paris.

PLATE 18  Glenn Ligon, Untitled (I Am Not Tragically Colored), 1990. Oil stick, gesso, and graphite on wood, 80 × 30 inches (203.2 × 76.2 cm). © Glenn Ligon; Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Chantal Crousel, Paris.

10

PLATE 19  Glenn Ligon, Untitled (I Remember the Very Day That I  Became Colored), 1990. Oil stick, gesso, and graphite on wood, 80  × 30  inches (203.2  × 76.2 cm). © Glenn Ligon; Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Chantal Crousel, Paris.

PLATE 20  Glenn Ligon, Untitled (I Do Not Always Feel Colored), 1990. Oil and gesso on wood, 80 × 30 inches (203.2 × 76.2 cm). © Glenn Ligon; Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Chantal Crousel, Paris.

11

PLATE 21  Glenn Ligon, Untitled (I Am Somebody), 1991. Oil stick, gesso, and graphite on wood, 80 × 30 inches (203.2 × 76.2 cm). © Glenn Ligon; Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Chantal Crousel, Paris.

PLATE 22  Glenn Ligon, Untitled (I Was Somebody), 1990–2003. Oil stick, gesso, and graphite on wood, 80 × 30 inches (203.2 × 76.2 cm). © Glenn Ligon; Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Chantal Crousel, Paris.

12

PLATE 23  Jacob Munoz, from the series Unmovable Types, 2010.

PLATE 24  Uncle Ben’s food display.

13

PLATE 25  You Only Live Once, 1995, print with Penny.

PLATE 26  Rupert Garcia, No Mo O’ This Shit, 1969, color screenprint on wove paper. Courtesy of the Artist and Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, CA.

14

PLATE 27  First World War poster, Destroy This Mad Brute.

PLATE 28  M&Co., what if . . .?, COLORS #4, Spring–Summer 1993. Tibor Kalman, Oliviero Toscani, Karrie Jacobs, Paul Ritter, M&Co. Offset lithograph on paper. Gift of Ti … Source: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum/Art Resource, NY.

15

PLATE 29  M&Co., So, what’s the difference, COLORS #4, Spring–Summer 1993. Tibor Kalman, Oliviero Toscani, Karrie Jacobs, Paul Ritter, M&Co. Offset lithograph on paper. Source: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum/Art Resource, NY.

PLATE 30  O. J.  Simpson mugshot, 1994. Time fell under sustained scrutiny for significantly blackening O. J. Simpson’s mugshot for its cover.

16

PLATE 31  Hank Willis Thomas, Branded Head, 2003. © HANK WILLIS THOMAS. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

PLATE 32  Hank Willis Thomas, Scarred Chest, 2003. © HANK WILLIS THOMAS. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.