ART OF THE POSTMODERN ERA FROM THE LATE 1960s To THE Earty 1990s IRVING SANDLER16 THE ‘OTHER’: FROM THE MARGINAL INTO THE MAINSTREAM The last years of the 1980s saw a significant number of artists who were “other’—that is, members of marginalized groups—African-Americans, Native Americans, homosexuals—achieve considerable art-world recog- nition with work that referred to their culture, emerging into the main- stream. In a sense the upsurge of the marginal was a late manifestation of the counterculture, the establishment redefined as the white, hetero- sexual, Western male, and alleged to be the fount of racism, sexism, and imperialism. Art theoreticians soon provided a rationale for a “multicul- tural” art, using a deconstructionist methodology that focused, as Hal Foster suggested, on “difference and discontinuity [in order to] rightly challenge ideas of totality and continuity.” The neo-Marxists in this group, increasingly unsure of the validity of the idea of the class struggle in the face of the collapse of Communism, substituted the Other for the working class. The struggle of the marginal against the mainstream replaced the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. As Foster put it, new social forces—women, blacks, other “minorities,” gay move- ments, ecological groups, students... have made clear the unique importance of questions of gender and sexual difference, race and the ‘Third World ... in such a way that the concept of class, if it is to be retained as such, must be articulated in relation to these new terms. In response, theoretical focus has shifted from .. . economic identity to social difference. In a similar way, political art is now conceived less in terms of, the representation of a class subject (a la Social Realism) than of a critique of social representation (gender positioning, ethnic stercotyp- ing, etc.). Such a change entails a shift too in the position and fune- tion of the political artist. [Now] the site of struggle ... is as much the cultural code of representation as the means of production.ART OF THE POSTMODERN ERA ‘The goal of the struggle was no longer the revolutionary overthrow of capi- talism and the establishment of socialism but a kind of ameliorating “resistance” within the existing social order—without any utopian vision in mind,’ Actually, it was sufficient to present the art of the Other in a fash- ionable art-world venue to make politically correct claims for the work." From the early 1970s on Adrian Piper’s primary content was the experience of an African-American woman in white society. As a black ‘woman who could pass for white and was often ostracized by both whites and blacks, she was well positioned to experience the unguarded attitudes of both races toward each other and to comment on them. More specifically, as a Ph.D. with a Harvard degree who moved easily in white elitist circles, Piper could be a “silent witness to the discreet racism of the bourgeoisie.”” Piper examined her own estranged experience as the locus of psy- chosocial tensions and traumas about race. Her autobiographical self became a metaphor for America’s “self.” In her search for identity, she made the personal political, fulfilling the essential requirement of femi- nism, She said: “For me, the concept of the consciousness-raising group is essential and we need to sce precisely that model invoked to deal with racism.”* As Lucy R. Lippard summed up, Piper’s continuing themes are “alienation and manipulation, failures of communication, ostracism, rejection, the ways in which the self is formed by society, the relation- ship between self and other.”* Piper's art focused on what she believed was the fear of white Americans that they might be part black. Of mixed race, she exemplified in person “the racist’s nightmare, the obscenity of miscegenation. ... T represent the loathsome possibility that everyone is ‘tainted’ by black ancestry: If someone can look and sound like me and still be black, who is unimpeachably white?” In 1975 she made a poster piece that read: embody everything you most hate and fear.”* In 1981 Piper drew her Self: Portrait: Exaggerating My Negroid Features [189], both exploring and asserting her racial identity and calling attention to the African compo- nent in the Euro-American being. Piper's intention was to confront white viewers directly with their prejudices and compel them to acknowledge their racist—and sexist— attitudes, their fears and hatreds and the myths and stereotypes they give rise to. Her message is exemplified by two calling cards she had printed in 1986 [188]. She would present one to anyone unaware of her race who had made a racist remark in her presence. It stated: “Dear Friend, I am black. T am sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed atiagreed with that racist remark.” It went on to regret the discomfort her presence was causing just as she regretted the discomfort racism was causing her: Piper presented another card to any male who accosted her. It began with “Dear Friend,” and went on to say: “I am not here to pick188. Adrian Piper, My Calling Card, 1986, Jol Weber Gallery, New York) Dear Friend, tam black. | am sure you did not realize this when you madellaughed atlagreed with that racist remark. In the past, | have attempted to alert white people to my racial identity in advance. Unfortunate- ly, this invariably causes them to react to me as pushy, manipulative, or socially inappropriate. Therefore, my policy is to assume that white people do not make these remarks, even when they believe there are no black people present, and to distribute this card when they do. | regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as | am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is Causing me. Sincerely yours, ‘Adrian Margaret Smith Piper ee 189. Adrian Piper, Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Newoid Features, 1981, (Jokn Weber Galler, New York) Be Suh Poreraie Cnagayrating My Magroid Ferherns Ohana herANT OF THE POSTMODERN ERA anyone up, or to be picked up. I am here because I want to be here, ALONE.” She ended it with "Thank you for respecting my privacy.” In an earlier work, Four Intruders Plus Alarm System (1980), the images of four black men appear on silk-screened light boxes. But the accompanying audiotape represents four common white voices, of the well-meaning liberal, the know-nothing, the black impersonator, and the racist. "I'm antagonized by the hostility of this piece. Not all blacks are like that. ... can understand black anger because I'm angry too. ... It not my responsibility, its not my fault.... To be quite honest, I dont like blacks. ... If they're having a bad time, its a basic defect in character.” Any white viewer could recognize these stereotypical attitudes. Piper used conceptual art in order to call attention to her message However, she feared that her work, consisting primarily of photographic documentation and printed texts, would be dismissed as nonart. She broached this issue directly in Four Intruders Plus Alarm System, in which ‘one character objects to her work by saying: "What I expect is an art experi- cence, and that’s not what I'm getting.” In an installation in the DiSlocations show at the Museum of Modern Art (1991), she made the art reference absolutely clear by building an all-white room that referred unequivocally to minimal art as an art of pure artness. Within this lily-white room, she placed a minimal box in which were encased four television sets on whose screens appeared a single African-American, who declared all the things he ‘was not, among them: “T'm not scary,” “I'm not shiftless,” “I'm not stupid,” “Ym not dirty.” Piper wanted to maintain two terms at their extremes: the “white cube” identified with elitist gallery and museum spaces, and politi cal commentary that spoke of common American reality. She would not reconcile these terms, nor would she give either up.” Like Piper, David Hammons was included in the D/Slocations show, but unlike her he brought the clutter of the black ghetto into the museum. Beginning in the 1970s, he took the African-American urban experience as his subject, executing performances and street works in black neighborhoods because he felt that was where living culture was to be encountered, employing materials found there.” For example, he built gardens of wine boitles in vacant lots. On one occasion, he stood with other vendors on a crowded street selling snowballs of different sizes signed by himself. They sold out. ‘Hammons’s permanent works are pieced together from hair from barbershop floors [190], plastic milk crates, barbecued ribs, fried chicken wings, greasy paper bags, grease, rusted bottle caps, used wine bottles—each bearing the memory of a black person's lips, as he once said. Hammons spoke of the funky objects he uses as having a history readily recognizable to African-Americans. The works he composed from ‘them are compassionate, funny, and angry metaphors for the poverty ‘and racism experienced by ghetto dwellers. ‘Toward the end of the 1980s, Hammons began to show increasinglyAL INTO THE MAINSTREAM in art-world venues, for example, Exit Art in 1989 and PS. 1 in 1990. In the large room of Exit Art, he introduced a toy train painted blue, which trailed in and around upended baby-grand-piano lids and through a tun- nel under a mound of blue-dusted coal. Music was piped in from four speakers, two playing John Coltrane, one Thelonius Monk, and one James Brown's “Night Train,” accompanied by Hammons’ own voice repeating “All aboard the night train.” In the gallerys small room, he installed two spiraling glass constructions, one standing, one lying, from ‘empty bottles of Night Train wine. The piece cross-referenced the role of the train in African-American history and culture—the underground rail- road, the freedom train, the A train to Harlem, Coltrane's Blue "Trane album, and even Night Train wine." And the blues: “what did I do to be so black and blue?" Hammons's major work at PS. 1 was titled Higher Goals. Taking as his subjects jazz and basketball, both pivotal in ghetto life, he ringed a large room with seven twenty- to thirty-foot-high hoops: one a bottom- less garbage can; another, a red plastic milk crate; and still another—and 190, David Hammons, Untitled, 1992 (Copyright © 1998 Whitney Museum of American Art)ART OF THE POSTMODERN ERA its backdrop—embellished with bottle caps. At the opening of his show, Hammons staged a pickup basketball game in the gallery, accompanied by the raucous jazz. of the Jemeel Moondoc and Jus Grew Orchestra, set on a stage ringed with chain-link fencing, Art critic Calvin Reid com- mented: Higher Goals acknowledged the genius brought to the game by African-American athletes while decrying the excessive influence the game has over black youngsters. Yet clearly Hammons is beguiled by the game's jazz-like mixture of speed, improvisation, shifting struc- ture, physicality, and mythic community stature. The performance produced an impressive cross-fertilization between two disciplines, ‘music and sports, utterly distinct in execution and sensibility.” Much as Hammons’s work is rooted in the ghetto, it also refers to art, as he said, situated “somewhere between Marcel Duchamp, Outsider art, and Arte Povera.”" It also calls to mind the actions and objects of Joseph Beuys." Moreover, his work is related to commodity art. However, Hammons is closer in sensibility and intention to Mike Kelley and Ilya Kabakov than to Haim Steinbach or Jeff Koons. In 1963, the year of the historic civil rights march on Washington, Melvin Edwards began to weld steel reliefs he titled Lynch Fragments [191]. Made in three periods—1963-67, 1973, and 1978 to the present— they number more than 150. Composed primarily of hooks, knife blades, handcuffs, hammers, saws, and railroad spikes, they are roughly the size of a human head or an African mask and are hung confrontationally at eye level. The Lynch Fragments call to mind manual labor and, more strongly, slavery and torture. Indeed, clenched like a fist about to strike, they embody Edwards's anger over the situation of African-Americans. Like Edwards, Martin Puryear created abstract sculptures with imagistic references [192]. He was influenced by minimalist sculpture, which he first saw at the Venice Biennale in 1968, but diverged from it in that his work is extraordinarily varied, often biomorphic, hand- made, and suggestive of things in the world. The imagery ranges from circle reliefs to open buildinglike structures to bulky monoliths. Puryear's pluralism resulted in part from his nomadic existence: He was a teacher for the Peace Corps in West Africa, an art student in Sweden and later at Yale, where he earned an MFA. and a Guggenheim Fellow in Japan. Puryear cross-bred the diverse cultures that he experienced at first- hand and their histories, for example, the story of Jim Beckwourth. Born in the late eighteenth century, the son of an African-American slave woman and a white man who lived as a frontiersman became a chief of-OTHEM: PROM THE MARGINAL INTO THE MAINSTREAM 191. Mel Edwards, Whispers, 1991-92. (CDS Galler, New York) the Crow Indians, panned for gold in California, and was a guide and translator for the U.S. Army in the Cheyenne Wars. Puryear's forms often refer to the African and African-American experience; for example, the bronze chair in Bodark Arc (1982) resembles a Liberian chieftain’s chair. But he was most interested in First and Third World crafts—the work of the woodworker, basketweaver, quillworker, joiner, cooper, and wheelwright. Storr wrote that while living in Africa, Puryear “understood implicitly that although an African-American, he, as much as anyone of European extraction, was an outsider to the customs of the people among whom he lived.” Consequently he “dedicated him- self to learning the ‘trade secrets’ of the local builders, which raised no problems of cultural expropriation or improper pastiche.” His aim was “to recover the creative possibilities offered by highly refined crafts that have been marginalized by industrial society, or simply lost to it.” He used these techniques to make abstract constructions with modernist sculpture in mind.50 ART 0 POSTMODERN Ei 192, Martin Puryear, Dumb Luck, 1990, (Private collection, California) Jimmie Durham believed that thinking about Native Americans had been contaminated by Euro-American interpretations—abiding images of the “Indian” as “Edenic innocent, uncivilizable savage, noble savage, infantilized adult.”” Through performances and site-specific as well as portable works incorporating texts, he set out to deconstruct the stereo- typical representations of Native Americans invented by a dominant white society, and he did so with telling wit. Don't worry—I'm a good Indian. I'm from the West, love nature, and have a special intimate connection with the environment. (And if you want me to, I'm perfectly willing to say its a connection white people will never understand.) I can speak with my animal cousins, and believe it or not, I'm appropriately spiritual. (Even smoke the pipe.)* Durham’ relief sculpture Self-Portrait (1987) [193], a prototypical work, is a flayed skin overlaid with inscriptions referring to his situation as a “redskin,” both an object of white oppression and a proud Cherokee person.” It is at once a hunting trophy, a crucifix, and a museum piece.”‘rue ‘orn ROM THE MARGINAL INTO THE MAINSTREAM In such depictions of the Native American, he entered into “the current discourse about primitivism and the collection of primitivism ... and how it operates in society, What is primitive? Who are the primitives? Why do people like primitivism? Why is there neo-primitivism?"" But seriousness is leavened with humor, even though it is never clear whom the joke is on. Pocahantas’s Panties, encrusted with feathers and beads and purportedly “On Loan from the Museum of the American Indian,” prompted Luis Cammitzer to question whether Durham's purpose was “to Jaugh at himself or to bite the viewer's head off.’ Most likely both. ma 193. Jimmie Durham, SelPortrait, 1987. (Courtesy ofthe nist and Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York)194, Robert Mapplethorpe, Self-Portrait, 1985, (Copyright (© 1985 Estate of Robert Mapplethorpe) ARD OF THI posTMor ERN ERA In the 1970s and 1980s homosexual artists began to use their lives, their subculture, and the AIDS plague that devastated their community as subject matter. There had been precedents, in the work of Gilbert & George and David Hockney, but homosexual imagery became more open and direct in the 1970s, making the private public as never before, and entering the mainstream. In the middle of that decade, Robert Mapplethorpe began to photo-document the New York gay scene. Central to his body of work ‘was a series of self-portraits in which, like Cindy Sherman, he presented himself in a variety of roles—as a horned devil, drag queen, gangster, terror- ist with a machine gun, man-about-town in black tie, and so on [194]. He commented: “Most of the things I've photographed I've been involved in directly in one way or another. ... T was experimenting with my own sensi- bilities. I was finding out about myself.” Mapplethorpe’s most notorious models were naked males engaged in homoerotic practices. They were inspired by his own desire, but he also distanced his subjects, dehumanizing them with an icy formality and the stylishness and finish of high-fashion photography, with an eye to the “fine art” photography of such historic figures as Man Ray and‘THE ‘OTHER’ PROM THE MARGINAL INTO THE MAINSTREAM George Russell Lynes. Indeed, part of the attraction of his pictures is the way in which often repellent subjects, for example, sadomasochistic sex- ual acts, such as a fist or whip shoved up the rectum, are aestheticized. Ingrid Sischy wrote that Mapplethorpe courted controversy: [He] leaped on the sex taboo in art as though it were the last frontier to explore. Instead of circling around homosexuality, Mapplethorpe made it an unavoidable subject for anyone looking at or talking about his pictures. Instead of being afraid that homosexuality would ruin his career, Mapplethorpe used it to forward his reputation, He was a photographer who took advantage of all the taboos and mysteries surrounding sex and homosexuality. They were his keys to doing something that would be noticed." ‘And noticed he was. His provocative photographs were even condemned in the U.S. Congress and gave rise to calls for censorship and a contro- versy over federal funding of the National Endowment for the Arts. The art world supported Mapplethorpe's right to photograph what he pleased. Nevertheless questions were raised about the morality of his more salacious works and whether their subjects distracted so much from his artistry as to be unsuitable in art. During the 1980s Mapplethorpe played down explicit homosexual- ity and instead focused on conventional portraits; flowers, which are erotic in much the same way that Georgia O'Keeffe’s flowers are; and nude black men, who though fetishized are treated more as sculptures than as sex objects. But as Sischy concluded: “Of all his subjects, sex is the one that most clearly reveals his intuition and his cleverness. In fact, only a small proportion of his work is on this topic, but this is where his contribution to photography stands out.”* David Wojnarowicz confronted AIDS both as a victim of the dis- ease, an elegist of dead lovers and friends, and a gay activist [195]. Commemorating Peter Hujar, who died of AIDS, Wojnarowiez made a collage painting, which included nine photographs of Hujar on his deathbed, a twenty-dollar bill, germlsperm images, and an anguished typewritten text about the causes of AIDS, having the disease, homopho- bia, and political neglect of the epidemic.* An untitled 1984 construction consists of an animal skull covered with maps, whose mouth is clamped with barbed wire and between whose teeth is a globe covered with dollar ls. The symbolism was clear: The AIDS dead are worldwide, and the living cannot get the dollars needed to fight the disease because their advocates are gagged. Homosexuality, homophobia, and AIDS were not Wojnarowic7s only subjects. He had what Lucy Lippard called a “cinematic memory.” As he remarked:wu 195, David Wojnarowiez, Untied (Clocks and Ants), 1988-89 (PROM. Inc., New York) ART OF THE POSTMODERN ERA Inside my head behind the eyes are lengthy films running on multi- ple projectors; the films are images made up from information from media ... childhood memories of the forest I lay down in; the sur faces of the earth I scrutinized and some are made up of dreams. Sometimes the projectors run simultaneously sometimes they stop and start but the end result is thousands of feet of multiple films crisserossing in front of each other thereby creating endless juxtapo- sitions and associations.” Indeed, Wojnarowicz evolved a private store of images culled from dreams, most of them nightmares, which he juxtaposed in what seemed to be a free-associational manner; this repertoire included animals and reptiles, tornadoes and volcanoes, brains and bones, a horror mask, maps, wrecked trains, sex acts, money, and blood cells." Whether it referred to death or dreams, Wojnarowicz’s vision was unhinged and full of menace. Mapplethorpe died of AIDS in 1989, Wojnarowicz, in 1992. John Coplans took as his subject himself as aged “other,” comment- ing, as he put it, on “a culture that hates old people.”” In Polaroids that he began to take in 1984 and first exhibited in 1987, his subject was his own vulnerable and deteriorating naked body. He recorded the ravages of time—his sagging chest, fat belly, misshapen feet—with a clinical eye to detail and a self-deprecatory and sardonic wit [196]. His perception of his body is at an opposite pole from Mapplethorpe's cold vision of per-THE ‘OTHER’: PROM THE MARGINAL INTO THE MAINSTRI fect physique. Indeed, Coplans’s photography “is the stuff of Mapplethorpe’s worst nightmares.” To achieve greater immediacy, Coplans enlarged close-up photographs of his body and/or its parts, segmenting them in multipanel sequences to make them gargantuan, Much as the decrepit body is the source of his dis comfort—and fears—he takes comfort in its image and embraces it Moreover, there is something tragic but grand about it, in a King Lear sense—and not only because ofits monumental size. 196, John Coplans, Self;Potrait (Feet, Frontal), 1984. (Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York)ART OF THE POSTMODERN ERA ‘The growing concern with social issues—the AIDS crisis, censor- ship, sexism, and racism—led to increased art-world interest in installa- tion and performance art. The most notorious performance artists were feminists, such as Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, and Annie Sprinkle, whose sexually explicit tirades against the abuse and exploitation of women gave rise to controversies over their alleged pornography. But the art-world reception of these and other performances was mixed; none of the artists received the general approval that Laurie Anderson, Eric Bogosian, and Spalding Gray had. Installation art fared better, as David Hammons began to work in art-world venues and the work of Christian Boltanski, Iya Kabakov, and Magdalena Abakanowicz was widely shown. Although these artists were often considered “political,” they rarely dealt with topical issues, certainly not in their best work. Rather thay began with their own experience of a social nature, in the case of Hammons, life in the African-American ghetto; Kabakov, communal living in the Soviet Union; and Boltanski and ‘Abakanowicz, the experience of World War II and the Holocaust. Christian Boltanski’s primary subject matter was fleeting child- hood, made even more fleeting by intimations of death. In 1972 he began to make large photoworks—the most moving of which are room-size installations—of nameless children, for example, Jewish high school stu- dents in 1931. He rephotographed photographs, enlarged and cropped them so as to blur them, and mounted them in cheap tin frames. He then highlighted each with an inexpensive gooseneck lamp from which electric cords dangled [197]. The lamp both illuminates and obscures the close-up images in a manner that evokes interrogation and torture. In some works Boltanski juxtaposed the photographs with beat-up tin bis- cuit boxes, The children in these out-of-focus, fugitive-looking images are assumed to be dead, and the boxes suggest that they contain the last documents and remaining personal possessions of the deceased." The awareness of death is also felt in other of Boltanski’s works, consisting of piles of used clothes, like those collected in the concentration camps. Boltanski evidently had both the Holocaust and his own lost child- hood, which he sought to recover, in mind. In an autobiographical narra- tive, possibly fictional, he claimed that during World War I his Jewish father was hidden by his Catholic mother in the cellar of their house while she publicly decried his “desertion” of his family. His wartime mythmaking calls to mind that of Beuys, as does his use of “nonart” relics allegedly from his past and their presentation in display cases, and his allusions to genocide. Boltanski’s works are effective not only because they evoke the Holocaust movingly but because their references are oblique, which is the only way a subject so horrific can be creditably dealt with. More generally, they are visual requiems for all innocent vic- tims.bl ) ice Biic nec ES ml" = ae |.ANT OF THE POSTMODERN ERA Ilya Kabakov took as the subject of his installations squalid and tragicomic life in Soviet Russia, focusing on the communal apartment, or kommunalka. Entire families from disparate social, ethnic, and cul- tural backgrounds were forced by the Stalinist regime to inhabit crowded and dreary spaces, sharing bathrooms and kitchens. Kabakov commented: “Life as we live it here is dominated by a... feeling of extremely closed spaces. ... It is an unpleasant feeling.” It results in an “individual who is always closed up within himself. ... The deeper you sink into yourself, the quicker you discover yourself projected into this enormous void, if you can think of the sky as a void.” Kabakov’s best-known work is titled Ten Characters (1988), which “touch all the problems of my own self."® Each individual—The Untalented Artist, The Man Who Flew into His Picture, The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away—or rather his pathetic story—is represented by his room. They all try to forget or escape their dismal reality. The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment built a rubber-and-wire cata- pault and shot himself into outer space, the evidence of which is a gap- ing hole in the ceiling and official documentation reporting his disap- pearance (198]{1991. Kabakov himself escaped to the West, “discharge{d] from the mad- house.” Nevertheless, he continued to be a resident of a remembered dreary and claustrophobic kommunalka, “I know no other self.” In interviews he has despaired of being understood by anyone who had not lived in the Soviet Union. He need not have worried; the atmosphere of his installations conforms increasingly to that of today’s world in strife among hostile racial, tribal, and ethnic groups. [As a Pole, Magdalena Abakanowicz said: “My whole life has been formed and deformed by wars and revolutions of various kinds, mass hatred and mass worship.”*. Her installations of nearly identical, anony- mous, hollow figures in burlap, the cousins of Giacomettis elongated personages, call to mind inmates in concentration camps. The works in the War Games series, begun in 1987, consist of fallen massive tree trunks carved with chainsaw, ax, and chisel [200]. Their severed limbs, whose stumps are bandaged with burlap or encased in steel, are metaphors for dismembered yet still armored soldiers fallen in battle Michael Brenson wrote: “They lie broken yet indestructible, impotent yet endowed with imposing phallic power. Wounded and immobilized, these survivors of human and environmental devastation are blessed with an infinite capacity for resistance and regeneration.” The installations of Boltanski, Kabakov, and Abakanowicz. (Hammons should be added to this list) are rooted in personal experience that suggests broader national and human concerns. Their content is oppression and pain but not hopelessness. The underlying message is that humankind is indomitable.from His Apartment, 1980-88. (Collection‘THE “OTHER: FROM THE MARGINAL INTO 7 AINSTREAM. Just as marginalized groups within the Western art world achieved growing recognition, so did Third World artists, whose painting referred to their indigenous cultures. Recognition was difficult for them to achieve in the face of the claim by “conservative” advocates of Eurocentric culture that it was man's greatest achievement and thus had superseded all other cultures. “Liberals” whose bias was anticapitalist, anticolonialist, and anti-Western pointed out that Western culture was created primarily by white heterosexual males and did not necessarily transcend nation, race, and gender, as “conservatives” supposed. Challenging what they believed to be the narrow Eurocentric interpretation of the “conservatives,” “liber als" stressed the role that economic and military power played in the hegemony of Western culture. They also rejected the assumption of its universality and superiority and instead “privileged” Third World artists along with homosexuals and Western people of color: In 1984 a show titled “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern at the Museum of Modern Art coupled primi- tive and Western modern works. The show presented primitive art merely as the source of Western modern art and did not consider it in its own context and right as art. Thomas McEvilley challenged the premise of the exhibition in Artforum, writing that it “shows Western egotism still as unbridled as in the centuries of colonialism and souvenirism.” William Rubin, the curator of Primitivism, rebutted, and an acrimonious argu ‘ment ensued.” With this controversy in mind, Jean-Hubert Martin mounted The Magicians of the Earth in Paris (1989). In it the works of one hundred 200. Magdalena AAbakanowie2, Anasta from the series “War Games,” 1989 (Marlborough Gallery)ART OF THE POSTMODERN ERA artists, fifty Wester, fifty non-Western, were juxtaposed “with no impli- cations of hierarchy or centrality—or with a conscious attempt to have no such implications.” One of the show's organizers, Mark Francis, said: “We wondered, what would it mean to show the avant-garde from China? What should art from Australia consist of? Would you show art by white postmodernists, or contemporary aboriginal art, or both? The same questions had to be asked in India, Haiti, Brazil, and dozens of other places.” The show surveyed Third World art as it has never been before, called Western art-world attention to it, and indicated that a number of the participants merited serious consideration.” NOTES al Foster, “For a Concept of the Political in Art,” Art in America, Apr 1984, pp. 17-19- parking lot in Washington, D.C, a group of ten blacks vandalized it. They regarded the picture as racist, attacking it with sledgehammers and partially Aestroying it. Hammons had it rebuilt but installed jnan art world venue. aia eeetrected in the art ofthe “other” often took 14, Elizabeth Hess, “Getting His Due,” Vllage Voice, Jan Conflicting positions. For example, feminists, often, 1, 1991, pL conde clase, ad lige interest in the class struggle 15. Reid, in "Kinky Black Hain” wrote: “The use of fat, ‘or anti-imperialism, felt, pianos, and animals so associated with Beuys 13. Clive Philpot, "Adrian Piper: Talking to Us," in Adrian hhave their parallel in the hair, chicken wings, barbe- Piver: Reflections 1967-1987 (New York: Alternative feue bones, and paper bags of Hammons; materials ‘Museum, 1987), p-9. ‘Used and reused, thick with traces ofthe artist’ life 4. Nicola Upsom, “Adrian Piper: Smiling at Strangers.” for with essentialist experience from the world ‘Second Shift (Spring 1993): 9. ‘beyond the gallery's door” (P. 63). 5. lacy Lippard, Intruders: Lynda Benglis and Adrian 16. Robert Stor, “Martin Puryear: The Hand's Propor- Pipers in John Hovell, ed, Breakthroughs: Avant- tion! in Martin Puryear (New York: Thames & Garde Antsts in Europe and America, 1950-1990 Hudson, 1991), pp. 132-33, (New York, Rizoli, 1991), p. 130 17, Timmie Durham and Jean Fisher, “The Ground Has 6, Ibid ‘Been Covered,” Arforum "Summer 1988" p 101 7. Ibid, 18, Lucy R. Lippard, “Little Red Lies,” in Jimmie [8 Adrian Piper had been active asa conceptual artist in Durham: The Bishop’ Moose and the Pinkerton Men the New York art world since 1967. (New York: Exit Art, 1988), p. 22 9, Rober Storr pointed this out ina talk at New York 19. Rushing, “StratesicInterentions.” University, Dee. 12, 1991, 20. Lippard, “Little Red Lies,” p. 24 10. Coun Reign “Chasing the Blue Train,” Art it 21. “Conversation between Jimmie Durham and Jeanette “America, Sept. 1989, p. 196. Ingherman,” in Fimmie Durham: The Bishop’ Moose, ‘Hammons had one-person show in 1975 at p.30. Just Above Midtown, a gallery devoted mostly to 22. Luis Camnitzer, “Jimmie Durham: Dancing Serious Showing minority artists, in which he exhibited Dances,” in ibid. p 8. ‘Works made of greasy bags and barbecue bones. 23, Susan Weiley, "Prince of Darkness, Angel of Light” 11. Reid, “Chasing the Blue Train,” p. 197. Art News, Dec. 1988, p. 108 LD. Rillicfones ‘David Hammons’ Exit Art Installation, 24. Ingrid Sischy, “Photography: White and Black,” The 1989" [New Yorker, Now, 13, 1989, p- 136. Mapplethorpe did 13, Calvin Reid, “Kinky Black Hair and Barbecue Bon hot only take shocking photographs of naked males Street Life, Social History, and David Hammons, vis Mogasine, Apt, 1991, pp. 61-62. Hammons's ‘most notorious work was @ 14-by-16-foot portrait of T blond, blue-eyed, and white skinned Jesse Jackson, ‘withthe title inscribed on the surface: "How Ya Like ‘Me Now?" While the portrait was being installed in a land theie body parts. One series was Focused on the naked body of Lisa Lyon, a bodybuilding champion. He photographed her in a variety of stereotypical female roles, among them sex kitten, high fashion model, and sadomasochistic dominatrix. It is signifi tant that Mapplethorpe should have selected for his2 33. ‘THE “OTHER PROM THE MARGINAL INTO THE MAINSTREAM 3 subject a woman who made her muscular body look 34. Victor Tupitsyn, “From a Communal Kitchen: A masculine Ibid, p. 137. See Jerry Saltz, “Notes on a Painting: Not Going Gentle," Arts Magazine, Feb. 1989, pp. 13-14 1. David Wojnarowicz, In the Shadow of Forward ‘Motion (New York: PPOW Gallery, 1989), np. quoted in Lippard, “Out of the Safety Zone,” Art it America, Dec. 1990, p. 134 Lippard, “Out of the Safety Zone,” p. 132. Vince Aleti, "Body Language: John Coplans Takes It Off, Village Voice, Mar. 26, 1991, p. 80. Elizabeth A. Fraiberg, “John Coplans: The Aboriginal Man," Q: A Journal of Are (May 1990): 28 ‘See Nancy Marmer, “Boltanski: The Uses of Contra- diction,” Artin America, Oct. 1989, pp. 169-80, 233. Claudia Jolles and Viktor Misiano, "Erie Bulatov and Iya Kabakov in Conversation with Claudia Jones and. Viktor Misiano,” Flash Art (Nov-Dec. 1987): 81. Robin Cembalest, “The Man Who Flew Into Space,” ‘Art News, May 1980, p. 179. 35. 36 37 38 38. 40, ‘Conversation with ya Kabakow” Arts Magazine, Oct. 1991, p. 54 Alanna Heiss, Magdalena Abakanowice: War Games (New York Institute of Contemporary Art, PS. I, 1993), p.2. ‘Michael Brenson, “Magdalena Abakanowicr's “War Games’: Monumental Horizontality” in ibid, p.9. ‘See Artforum, Nov. 1984, Feb. 1985, May 1985, and Mar. 1990, ‘Thomas McBvilley, “Overheard: Former Beaubourg. Director Jean-Hubert Martin Talks with Thomas -McE¥illey.” Contemporanea 23 (Dec. 1990): 110. Edward Ball, “Interviews: Mark Francis,” Flash Art an=Feb, 1990): 157. One painter, Cheri Samba from Zaire, was singled out and exhibited widely in the West. He employed the technique of sign painting to comment in image and text with wit and sympathy on the aspirations, foibles, and problems of his people.