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Alliances: the Left Versus Identity Politics in U.S. Art

Historical Materialism Annual Conference, London 2013

Nizan Shaked, California State University Long Beach

The Black Panther Newsletter of August 1970 featured a letter from jailed leader Huey

Newton about the Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements.” It explained

sexism and homophobia in simple and direct terms, declaring:

When we have revolutionary conferences, rallies, and demonstrations, there

should be full participation of the gay liberation movement and the women’s

liberation movement. Some groups might be more revolutionary than others. We

should not use the actions of a few to say that they are all reactionary or

counterrevolutionary, because they are not.

Having initially worked through resistance theories such as separatism and nationalism,

Newton’s turn to dialectical materialism enabled him to analyze and theorize how racial

oppression was a means to sustain class conditions. He was an integral part of

implementing solutions nation-wide—free food, health, and education programs—

sustained by local businesses and donations that struck at the inseparable axis of class

and race in the US, and brought the wrath of the establishment onto the Party.

The Black Panthers’ influence on other organization unfolded within few years. The

Women’s and gay Liberation Movements used the Party’s 10 Point Program as a template

for their own manifestos, as did the Art Worker’s Coalition—a loose group of artists and

critics in New York who had advanced from demanding artists rights, to protesting the war

in Vietnam and social inequality in the museum.

It was Jean Genet—smuggled into the US by the Panthers to rally support and funds to

free their jailed leaders—who had influenced Newton’s attention to the equivalence of

struggles. Angela Davis, an academic, a communist and an associate of the Black

Panthers, translated for Genet during his Los Angeles visit.

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Today I follow Newton’s logic and influence, to propose a model of cross-identity politics in

art, where the issue is not one’s own identity, but the fact of identity as a means of

mobilization.

I find that there exists a significant trajectory of scholarship, cultural manifestations and

artwork that have been using such cross-models of identity politics since the 1970s, but

that they have been persistently misunderstood by the anti-identity position of the Left.

Discourse shapers on the left ranging from Dissent since 1954 with editors Irving Howe

and Mayer Schapiro, to Paul Piccone of Telos since 1968, or scholars such as David

Harvey, Walter Benn Michaels, Wendy Brown and most recently Nancy Fraser, all

regarded identity politics either as a Balkanizing force, or as structurally complicit with the

liberal nation-state apparatus. Now, I am not saying that they are entirely wrong; there

indeed exists a liberal trend of identity politics that has been complicit with advanced

market capitalism throughout the neo-liberal turn, but it hardly constituted the entire

spectrum of identity politics and its possible uses. Moreover, I am still seeking a

convincing analysis of the synchronicity, because as far as I can tell there is the

simultaneity of historical processes but any cause and effect relation between identity

politics and neo-liberalism seems incidental.

Newton’s model—revolutionary inter-communalism—did not rely on identity at the

expense of the economic question, but rather defined how race was used as a tool of

economic oppression. But still Slavoj Žižek’s 1997 homage to Frederick Jameson argued

that:

The leftist politics of the ‘chains of equivalences’ among the plurality of struggles is

strictly correlative to the silent abandonment of the analysis of capitalism as a

global economic system and to the acceptance of capitalist economic relations as

the unquestionable framework.

Žižek’s oversight of Newton and his influence is echoed in some major schools of

American art history. But not for lack of evidence.

The 1970 exhibition Information at the Museum of Modern Art in New York highlighted the

relation of 1960s artistic trends to the sense of global political crisis, and a heightened

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climate of rebellion. Despite the diversity of practices represented, in hindsight the

exhibition is seen as a defining moment for conceptualism.

Curator Kynaston McShine dedicated over 40 pages of the catalogue to a photo essay

that captured the 60s spirit through images such as the 1963 civil rights March on

Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Yves Klein across from the wall of China, or hippies

dipping in a river naked with a nude Eve Babitz playing chess with Marcel Duchamp.

Another Duchamp, Three Standard Stoppages (1913-14) and Handmade Stereopticon

Slide (1918-19) were juxtaposed with News-agency photographs of the Panther Party, the

political implications for me overwhelming the clear formal thrust of this pairing. There

were many other intersections of the Duchampian legacy with rights movements as those

struggles populated a substantial part of the American political landscape. But what was

the legacy of Duchamp?

Information Catalog, 1970. Photograph by Jeffrey Ryan 2013.

In a special issue of October in 1994 and its subsequent publication as The Duchamp

Effect in 1996, the editors and their guests examined the reception and interpretation of

Duchamp by the neo-Avant-Garde. Of course, as participants remarked, the re-visitation

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of the 60 in the 90s, also aimed to determine which artistic models were most relevant for

the recent resurgence of political art.

Benjamin Buchloh summarized the project as an attempt to get past the stalemate

debates between a poststructuralist orthodoxy and a social art history. However, the

project still suffered from the same systematic oversight of the Left, reflected in Hal

Foster’s taxonomy of the exponential influence of Duchamp, and specifically the

readymade:

Such elaboration is a collective labor that now cuts across entire

generations of neo-avant-garde artists-to develop paradigms like the readymade

from an object that purports to be transgressive in its very facticity (as in its first

neo repetition), to a device that addresses the seriality of objects and images in

advanced capitalism (as in Minimalist and Pop art), to a proposition that explores

the linguistic dimension of the work of art (as in Conceptual art), to a marker of

physical presence (as in site-specific art of the 1970s), to a form of critical mimicry

of various discourses (as in allegorical art of the 1980s), and, finally, to a probe of

sexual, ethnic, and social differences today (as in the work of such diverse artists

as Sherrie Levine, David Hammons, and Robert Gober). (“What’s Neo About the

Neo-Avant-Guard?“ October vol. 70)

I have no objection, except for one blunt historical error Foster makes, when he classifies

David Hammons—a major artist working since the late 1960s—as an artist of the 1990s.

Neither Hammons, nor his preoccupations, commence in the 1990s. This periodizing

mistake sites the preoccupation with “sexual, ethnic, and social differences” in the 1990s

when they clearly date to the late 1960s, as do the cross-influences between overt

political content and Duchampian devices, evident in Hammons’ practice throughout his

career. Hammons arrived in Los Angeles in 1963, the same year Duchamp’s first

retrospective was shown at the Pasadena Art Museum, influencing the local circuit of

Black avant-garde artists that had already been working in semiotic assemblage since the

1950s.

Showing a linguistic pun as visual and physical object, in With my Tongue in my Cheek

(1959), Duchamp makes a figure of speech literal. The representation of the face and its

relief reveal that the speaker’s words tell one thing while meaning another. Only the

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negative, the relief, reveals that with his tongue in his cheek the subject cannot speak, or

that in silence, the spoken intention is reverted. Also unable to speak, Hammon’s subject

in A Case of Injustice (1970) is Black Panther Bobby Seal, charged in 1968 with intent to

incite to riot outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and by the order of

the judge gagged and tied to a chair. A body print made with margarine and pigment and

framed by an actual flag, Hammons contrasted indexical and symbolic references to the

deprivation of rights, as well as to Duchamp, vis–à–vis Jasper Jones. Transmitted through

the body of the artist, the print appears as a negative, ghostly. It is mimetic yet as a print it

is also indexical—concrete. It seems to point the viewer’s attention to the conditions of

representation, how the behavior of the raced subject is interpreted by the system, how

they will, to quote Fanon, be “fixed like dye,” and that this human relation has concrete

effects.

Hammon’s world-view echoes the contemporaneous findings of Althusser, who showed

how ideology has material consequences. The flag is a found object, found like those

given conditions of oppression that “framed” how the law was interpreted

differently for Seale, who was separated from the “Chicago Eight.” The implications go

beyond referencing the war the FBI and the government perpetrated against the Black

Panthers, to a question the possibility of democracy in the US under such conditions.

These realizations about the fact that medium and mediation, for example race as a

mediating factor in human relations, echo the slogan of the anti-war protestors who

gathered at the 68 Convention repeating for televised transmission: “the whole world is

watching,” “the whole world is watching.”

With this in mind we can now approach Information again, which lead into the 1970s with

the expansion of analytic Conceptual art with a capital “C,” to a more general

conceptualism, for the most part meaning synthetic practices concerned with political

reference, influenced by such intersections as Duchampian and Panther legacies. The

show rode a fine line, as several participants had been active in the Art Workers Coalition,

which up until that moment was specifically targeting this very museum that now

contained them. Was this then case of cooption?

Hans Haacke, a founding member of the Coalition, took the opportunity to address some

fundamental questions about the relation of his practice to the institution. Now canonical,

MoMA Poll (1970) referenced contemporaneous politics and activated the paradox at the

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heart of the American museum, which almost exclusively is structured a private non-profit.

Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York and previous MoMA chairman) was the

brother of current MoMA chairman David Rockefeller, who stood at the head of Chase

Manhattan at the time. Their mother, Abbey Rockefeller, was one of the museum’s

founders).

The work directly addressed both the public the museum ostensibly serves, and the

trustees who fund it, whose ties to exploitative capitalism and war profiting were being

invoked. Directing a Duchampian focus on the enunciative power of the institution to

consider the relation of its governance to wealth and politics, Haacke pointed to the failure

of the American museum to be rid of personal and conflicting interests, failing to practice

the democracy it preaches.

I hence disagree with Mel Ramsden’s 1975 critique of Haacke’s work as art merely

“about” politics, a critique that echoed that of identity art then and since. Haacke’s work

did not just “expose” the link between money, art and corruption, but which was to subject

the viewer and the trustees to the same predicament. Using the space as it should be,

Haacke addressed the public and the wealthy on the same level playing field in the

exhibition space, described by Rosalynd Deutch as his “democratising strategies.” Thus

while the political question may be referential, this use of the museum wall as a message

board, to my eyes, displays something like a threat—the threat that artists just might take

the museum up on its promise.

Also turning to the mode of the survey, Adrian Piper tacked an instruction sheet to the

wall. Installed on the same wall next to an enlargement of Andy Warhol’s infamous

statement about 15 minutes of fame, Piper instructed the viewer:

You (the viewer) are requested to write, draw, or otherwise indicate any response

suggested by this situation (this statement, the blank notebook and pen, the

museum context, your immediate state of mind, etc.) in the pages of the note-book

beneath this sign.

The information entered in the notebook will not be altered or utilized in any way.

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As opposed to Haacke, the work was not intended as mock social-science, no statistics or

analysis followed, and as such it exists more as a small archive, a capsule of the 1960s

zeitgeist.

Piper’s oeuvre is paradigmatic of the turn from a pure (analytic) Conceptual art into

politically explicit (synthetic) conceptualism. And, as Mary Kelly emphasized in 1978:

“When synthetic propositions re-emerged they did so with an altogether different self-

consciousness than before."

Between 1967-1970 Piper engaged universalist inquiry into time and space, as well as

analysis of art making models. In the series Hypothesis (1968-69) she mapped the

location of her point of view in space through two notational systems. She later introduced

the strategic use of the autobiographical genre, examining if the artist can function an art

object, drawing distinctions between the concepts of self, identity and subjectivity. This

chronology leads me to read the meaning of her later work in this order, first as

conceptual, and only then adding her particular preoccupations with race, gender, sex, or

class identities. Thus, you can have two different readings of this work:

If you read a work such as Catalysis III (1970)—where Piper wore a shirt dipped in paint

and walked around the street of NY City wearing a sing that said: “wet paint”—as a

signifier for a “colored” subject you get stuck there. This work is not about subjectivity,

neither is Hammond’s. In this work identity is not subjectivity, it is a far more abstract

category. So if you read this street performance through the minimalist/conceptualist lens,

this work is firstly about the choice to not paint, and about the recontextualization of art

outside the gallery.

Piper is part of a trajectory of practice that brought analytic principles to consider the

synthetic, the particular. Perhaps we could say that this mode anticipated Etienne

Balibar’s theory of Equiliberty—the attempt to reconcile the contradictions between

universal definitions of citizenship and the particular nature of rights.i

Piper’s influence is central to understanding models of later practices that developed

through the 1980s and became visible in the 1990s, where a Duchampian legacy

bifurcated by the politics of the 1960s and 70s was seen in context art, service-based

practices, and a broad application of feminist, queer, post-colonial, and critical race

discourses to conceptualism. Those were brought to bear on the continuing dialogue with

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artistic authorship, the status of the art object, the framework of the institution or the

conditions of viewer reception.

For example Renée Green’s homage to Adrian Piper, Import/Export Funk Office (1992)

traces the migration of US radical history to its influence on an international flow of hip-

hop culture. An image circulating within the installation’s elaborate archive juxtaposes its

two intellectual parents: Angela Davis and her mentor Adorno form the genealogy for

Green’s fusion of a conceptualist approach with a critique of the disciplines. Since the late

1960s a demand for new disciplines that can tell another history sounds in the Black

Panther’s fifth demand on their ten-point program that read “we want education that

teaches us our true history.”

There is a history of identity politics that is a series of interventions into existing

disciplinary paradigms and institutional frameworks. Historical focus will prevent

periodization and contextual mistakes that see identity politics as autobiographical, or

narrative, because they are not.

In his article titled “‘1968’: Periodizing Politics and Identity,” Kobena Mercer was perplexed

by the irony that on the twenty-year anniversary of the late 1960s, the political

achievements of identity politics were still missing from a majority of works that attempted

to historicize the era’s revolutionary moment. Emphasizing an argument put forth by

Michele Wallace, Mercer writes:

In my view, what is at stake in contemporary representations of 1968 is not just the

question of who is excluded and who is included in the story, but the way in which

organic connection between the New Left and the new social actors are subject to

a process of selective erasure and active forgetting.

Mercer was never one to uncritically celebrate identity politics. He identified instead the

function of identities as significations open to appropriation on either side of the political

spectrum neither regressive nor progressive. Also looking at the Panthers as a model

Mercer charted analogies, alliances and inter-influences between various articulations of

liberation, based on very different modes of identification.

There have been in art since the late 1960 a tendency of cross-identity politics, an attitude

similar to Kimberle Crenshaw’s use of “inter-sectionality” in legal studies. There is a very

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simple claim to be made here for identity as a transitive rubric, identity is universal,

everyone has one. Historically, single identities such as black, or compound issues like

Lesbian, were tools of survival, an emergency struggle where the most immediate and

obvious means of mobilization were activated, again, as a means for survival. This is a

historical fact in the US context. A correct chronology is necessary if we are to

acknowledge that the strategies of identity politics were not always native, and that they

have dramatically evolved several times over. Those who use identity politics as a

sounding board, who see it always already as a bad object, are for the most part engaging

a false dichotomy, arguing with a position that is long gone, confusing cause and effect

and thus are the ones distracting us from forming an inter-communalist front.

Dr. Nizan Shaked Nizan Shaked is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History, Museum and

Curatorial Studies at California State University Long Beach. She is currently working on a book

titled The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent

                                                                                                               • A section of this paper has been presented previously in “Alliances,” Universities

Art Association of Canada Annual Conference, Concordia University, Montréal, QC Nov. 1-3. Chairs: Amelia Jones, Erin Silver

For images of artworks see: http://radfilms.com/Angela_Davis_Jean_Genet_B.html http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/marcel-duchamp/with-my-tongue-in-my-cheek-1959 http://lacma.wordpress.com/2011/08/25/recent-works-by-david-hammons-at-lacma/ http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/faculty/budgett/algorithmic_art/haacke.html http://radfilms.com/Angela_Davis_Jean_Genet_B.html http://www.elizabethdee.com/sites/opening_edg/files/webmaster/image/reneegreen/1992_ImportExportFunkOffice_InstallationView_LG.jpg i The tension between the two ideals of modern democracy is that equality, social rights and political representation, is irreconcilable with the concept of liberty as the freedom citizens have to contest the social contract. Our current condition shows a contradiction therefore between the rights of the person against those of the citizen, and this notion is ingrained in the constitutional nation-state.