New American Paintings: Caldwell, Ken Gonzales-Day at Luis de Jesus

 

by

Ellen C. Caldwell

“Ken Gonzales-Day at Luis De Jesus.”
New American Paintings, 17 Dec. 2012, Los Angeles.

Excerpt:

“Ken Gonzales-Day’s recent show, “Profiled | Hang Trees | Portraits,” at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is deeply rich and intellectually challenging.  A well-established artist and researcher, Gonzales-Day challenges his viewers and the way in which we as a country remember.

The gallery is comprised of two rooms that are joined by a small hallway, yet the space still feels intimate. The nature of the work plays on this feeling and as a viewer, you do not just bear witness to the histories that Gonzales-Day recalls, you feel complicit in them as well. – Ellen C. Caldwell, Los Angeles Contributor

In this show, the gallery combined three of the artist’s ongoing series, as indicated by the trio of titles “Profiled | Hang Trees | Portraits.”  In the photos displayed from Hang Trees, he photographs trees that were once used for lynching in California.  Directly across from these trees is the Portrait series, displaying portraits of three Latino men, whose age and ethnicity match that of the men who were lynched from the trees facing them.  Representing a part of American history that most Americans are often quick to forget (due to a complex layer of reasons: cultural amnesia, a lack of ownership, shame, sadness, anger, and also the tendency to bury history), these trees bore witness to hate crimes, torture, and corporal punishment.

In these photographs, Gonzales-Day presents large trees with twisted roots, interwoven branches, and thick, established trunks, all indicating their age and wisdom of the years.  Large landscape photography is his medium, yet there is something palpable and weighted in these landscapes, leaving the viewer feeling empty, alone, and heavy.  His photos capture scenes of stillness, echoing the history held in these remote places.  The land holds the history—just as on the coasts of Normandy and Peleliu.  Something about the beauty of a place is juxtaposed quietly and undermined by the atrocities and horror that once occurred there.

In his installation The Wonder Gaze at LACMA’s Phantom Sightings in 2008, Gonzales-Day positioned viewers in a mirrored room, surrounded by photographs of onlookers viewing a lynching. He digitally erased the actual lynching, so the crowd surrounds the viewer, looking to something we know is there, but is missing. Some have argued that by removing the images of the actual lynched subject, that Gonzales-Day is in a sense dumbing down the narrative, and covering up the history all over again by not showing the violence done to the lynched “criminals” or “victims” (depending how you see it). I would argue however, that in these places, you can’t write over the history or erase it, because even in the erasure of the lynching itself, you can sense and feel the history—it is in the dirt, the trunk of those hallowed trees, and the roots in the ground. And it is also in the blood on our hands.

At LACMA, viewers walking through the exhibit literally became part of the lynch mob. He shifted the subject of these original postcards and photos so that the spectacle in question moved from the person being lynched to the crowd watching the lynching. The viewer is then part of this spectacle, complicit in the killing, in the hate, and in the very act of watching. And as such, the viewer also dons an inferred mask of whiteness, viewing, justifying, and even celebrating these lynchings.

As in The Wonder Gaze and Hang Trees (as well as most of Gonzales-Day’s works), we are looking on actively and we are part of the history. His work imitates the forgetting or cultural amnesia that has occurred historically by showing and physically documenting that erasure itself. By placing us in the midst of these histories, we are forced to remember them and find our role in them, whether onlooker, lyncher, or lynchee.

In the other room, Gonzales-Day’s photographs from his Profiled series tell a different story, though they explore a similar underlying theme: whiteness and its construction. Photographs from large, established and iconic museums display busts, statues, and sculptures of human heads that feel and look real. As the profiles of statues are paired together in different photographs, Gonzales-Day establishes certain juxtapositions to display racial constructions over time. Sculptures gaze at one another and interact with each other in critical and even confrontational ways.

On another wall, photographs document museum sculptural archives and the very process of collecting. Knowing the history of Enlightenment pseudo-sciences such as physiognomy and craniology (used to produce empirical racial categorizations), one can see that these museum collections house more than just art and instead house physical remnants that weighed into both documenting and establishing the divide between whiteness and “other.” These sculptures were made by European and American artists to help scientists research different physical features of people of non-European decent. These studies were used to establish theories about how physical traits dictate other traits such as intelligence, capability, and social ranking. And they were also used to justify certain violent histories, both here in the U.S. and abroad–colonization at large, slavery, forced conversions and missionary endeavors, westward expansion and the Indian Removal Act, etc.

In his photographs, these inanimate subjects wear museum tags around their necks. And the space Gonzales-Day creates in this room is completely eerie. The busts look so similar to the kinds of anthropological photographs used for the same means and ends that they literally look at once life-like and totally dehumanized, all at once. There is a meta-narrative that runs deeply through this back room, as these are photographs depicting sculptures, which were sculpted from photographs and sketchbooks, which were originally sketched from living, breathing people. There is a creepy feeling, knowing that the people inspiring these images were actually itemized, tagged, and categorized in the very same way as the art object itself. It is the definition of objectification, quite literally, and Gonzlaes-Day brings this history back to life in a compelling and haunting way.

Source: New American Paintings (site no longer exists)