The Harvard Advocate

:: Summer 2004 :: Features ::

AN INTERVIEW WITH KEN GONZALES-DAY

by JENNIFER FLORES STERNAD

Ken Gonzales-Day is a Los Angeles-based artist and writer. He studied painting and art history for his BFA at Pratt Institute, and received his MFA in photography at UC Irvine. He has been a fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian Institute and at the American Photography Institute at New York University. Gonzales-Day is chair of the Department of Art and Art History at Scripps College and is an active arts writer for such publications as Artissues, OUT Magazine, New Art Examiner, and ArtPapers. The following is excerpted from a conversation I had with Gonzales-Day at his home in L.A. on November 4, 2003. This interview was part of research I have been doing since 2001 on Chicano and Chicana artists. One of my goals for interviewing artists is to represent the heterogeneity within the category o' 'Chicano/a art.' I want to explore how individual artists relate to Chicano/a identities and to other social and cultural identities that affect them, how this affects their work, and what it means for the communities that their work might engage or create. My research is also concerned with creating a dialogue between theories of avant-gardism and Chicano/a art. Such a dialogue is embedded in Gonzales-Day's work. This is addressed in the interview, when Gonzales-Day discusses how his work engages the idea of the Dadaist Readymade to examine the representation of raced and gendered bodies, and the exclusion of certain bodies and identities from historical narratives of the American West.

JFS: Can you identify ideas or concerns that are important in your work?

KGD: I think my interest in photography derives from a fascination with the ways that photographic images signify and the idea that you can change the perception of an image based on its context, whether formal or cultural. So, in the narrative images of the Bone-Grass Boy project there is a direct link to the frontier novel, to the 19th century, and to all the issues about narration; there are even references to painting. The Analytic Photography series was really more about the photographic image's relationship to modernity and to modernism in particular. Clement Greenberg, for example, argued for the notion of pure form and yet with photography, what is pure form? Is pure form descriptive space? Or is pure form light and color? And you have different movements in photography that approach the material presence of the photographic image in vastly different ways. Another series deals with oak tress and questions the history of lynching; it looks at how Latinos played into that history. It positions the photograph as a document, so there are straight, actual photographs of trees, although I don't quite know if they are the exact trees, but that's one level. On another other level, there is the conceptual framework for the project, which has guided me down thousands and thousands of miles of open highway and I keep driving because part of photography is about witnessing; the trees have been transformed in the process of uncovering the research. So that uses the photograph in a very different way and yet, one could argue that because so many Latinos were lynched in California it is very much a cultural history. In the end, the project documents something that really took place, but relocates that history in the present.

JFS: Do you think that your interest in how representation is used in formulating histories has been influenced by your own experiences with your cultural identity or other identities?

KGD: Absolutely. In my art education, certainly there was always a focus on how art related to culture. So for example, when we think of the avant-garde we think of relationship to social protest or agit-prop, and various movements developing out of specific social and political concerns or social political awareness. The interest in the uncanny or the unconscious was driven by psychoanalysis, but it was also influenced by the First and Second World War and its affect on the status quo in European society; it was about culture and the artists' ability to contribute to that culture. Also, early feminist work, and performance art, from Carolee Schneemann to Coco Fusco, can be seen as being informed by a history of work that was intended to raise social and political consciousness through the form itself. That's how the performative became recognized as a kind of protest. And yet, the form became codified as an art form as it was positioned in relationship to conceptual art; as part of the evolution of conceptual work.

JFS: Do you consider your work to have a political effect or content?

KGD: I think for me it does, but I'm also wrestling with the impact of area studies and the question of aesthetic pleasure. So on the simplest level, by replacing canonical Western images with Latino subjects, the Bone-Grass Boy project was an attempt to bring awareness to the overlap of these interests; this can be seen as political. I think that the Bone-Grass Boy project, as a textual narrative, was actually interested in changing history. So that when non-Latinos see the project they learn about a whole historical narrative, but it is a fictional narrative in much the same way that all dominant histories can be seen as fictional. They are reading about the characters in the story but in the context of events that actually happened; they are experiencing it from a perspective that you would not find in conventional historical texts. This is not necessarily true of historical fiction in general. Historical fiction is frequently written after the fact, unless you have some sort of primary source and even then you have a social-historical context from which the subject may not be able to separate themselves, as I-- as we all have. In contemporary culture, the blend that is now possible between feminism, civil rights, certain area studies, media studies, and gender studies or gender/woman studies, can all intersect. So to answer your question, my introduction to art, or to the Chicano art movement, was already part of an interdisciplinary experience.

JS: The Bone-Grass Boy project engages the idea of the 'Nevermade' and the 'Readymade.' It seems like a good example of the continual change in what a work signifies; and how as its contexts changes its effects--political, cultural, institutional--change. One could say: what the Readymade once articulated was avant-garde then, and now it is bought and sold, and in some ways is a very expensive object. Is this process changed when the original object is absent, as it is with the Nevermade?

KG: Absolutely, the missing object is reflected as missing, and often it's not missing on accident. A piece I haven't finished yet is an Erased Lynching series, in the sense that I take an actual photograph of a Latino who has been lynched and erase all signs of the body, the ropes, and end up with a simple photograph of a tree. The reference is to Robert Rauschenberg's Erased De Kooning Drawing (1953), which reframed the discourse around artistic intentionality and became one of the early examples of conceptual art in a number of texts. The Erased Lynching series is also a kind of double entendre, it references art history but more significantly it also references the history of lynching in California, a history that has itself been erased. So, the fact that more Latinos died (ten times more Latinos died of lynching than African-Americans in California) is a historical erasure that resonates on multiple levels. On one level, these images are gone, or at least very hard to find, but on another level, of those images that do exist, they are often copy-prints or reproductions; so there's no there there. As an art historical project these original images are already problematic because the photographers or artists are usually unknown, so there's no artist, there's no artist's hand, and there's no original. And yet, this history ties into more than just a social history and it is certainly more than just a cultural history. The possibility that so many people were killed and could be forgotten so completely tells us that, as artists, it's not impossible to recognize that there are many works that will be forgotten. But I think on the most basic level it also demonstrates that there is a tendency towards erasure, toward forgetfulness, and so the Nevermade may be the last stop on the way to oblivion. And I think part of that is also what makes the conceptual art movement so useful to so many kinds of cultural and socially-conceived identities because it allows one to talk about the discourse itself. If you can't actually change the discourse, at least you can be in dialogue with it, and even if that dialogue is not particularly noticed, it may survive somewhere in the historical record. In the Erased Lynching series this discourse is consciously embedded in the work.

JFS: If you were to think about avant-gardism in terms of art being more integrated with social practice, do you think that that's a possibility now?

KGD: I think increasingly less so. I think in many ways the art world and the popular machinations of society are moving in different directions. I mean, if you think back to the 19th century and the idea of spectacle, one easily associated with the salons, we get some semblance of the contemporary experience of the Venice Biennale or Documenta, because they truly are spectacles on a grand scale, but I don't know how much of the public that includes, or if it's really just an elaborate exhibition for people in the art world already. Does it introduce new people to art? If you think back to the Crystal Palace in London, and the idea that it wanted to show the glory of colonialism on the one hand, and the wonders of technology on the other, then one can see that the salons came out of that same moment, guided by the idea that there was a public and that all of these elements were a part of public edification. From the widening of the streets of Paris to the Crystal Palace, there was a concerted effort in the nineteenth century to imagine the public; to contemplate the notion of a public that would truly include everyone from the working class to the ruling class, and they would all stroll side by side. I'm not sure that in the current international exhibitions that we actually get many of the working classes, and we certainly don't see this social hierarchy celebrated in the mainstream. So I don't know how much we really want to invest in the art institution as a living political entity. I think it once was, perhaps, or perhaps it was just mythologized as that, but today we can raise the question and say, "How do we know what the impact of art is?" Certainly art can have influence in the academy, perhaps an exhibition can even change the shape of art history, and that may in turn change the shape of the humanities. For example, Coco Fusco's exhibition, Couple in the Cage is taught in art history and studio art programs but it's probably taught even more in cultural studies and women's studies; so maybe that is art's influence, in the sense that things cross-over. These are the works that will be memorable, but the challenge there, is still the question of aesthetics. If Clement Greenberg taught us that modern art was about the exploration of pure form, or basically the idea that there is a sort of self-critique involved in a given medium that helps to shape meaning, then how might we extend that question to area studies, to social and historical conditions, and what would the impact be?

JFS: Within this idea of the medium manifesting its own critique: my question is what that means for a work that deals with identity.

KG: Well if Greenberg tells us that painting is about the qualities of the paint, its color, its form, its edge, then what would the fundamental qualities of an identity work be? At one point, certainly within the Chicano art movement, it would be about social change. It would be about bringing theater to the people, it would be about changing working conditions for laborers and one can see that many strikes took place. And so, in response to the art movement itself, or whether anyone could imagine that the Chicano art movement would continue, or what its boundaries might be: then you'd have to sort of figure out what you're going to measure, right? What are the things you look to? Certainly many African-American artists have complained that they're African-American once a year for 'African-American Month.' One must recognize that although there is an increased awareness of Latino issues, and there are new opportunities for dialogue, it can also be a bit of a box in which difference continues to be restrictive and confining.

JFS: Do you consider your work to be performative?

KGD: I guess I do in the same way that Cindy Sherman might consider her work to be performative. They depict events that took place, but they were just taking place for a very small audience. I think there is an aspect of the work that is definitely performative, and the question that came up for me with the Bone-Grass Boy was that, in trying to represent such a complicated social and cultural history, who could I get to play these characters? Could an Irish person play a Mexican during the Mexican War? It's certainly conceivable, if we consider visual art in the same way we consider theater, then there would be no reason why a good actor couldn't be able to play the part. On the other hand, in photography, it's not simply the narrative of the image that is communicating information; it's also the sign, the index, and the idea that we all want to know the race of the subject. In the Coco Fusco, video version of Couple in the Cage, there is one person who critiques their performance by arguing that they are not dark enough to be convincing at 'natives.' So the question is: What it is to signify racially? In considering the Bone-Grass Boy, if I just had the narrative description and I had other people in it, would that still communicate the cultural specificity to which it referred? At the same time, the decision I made was that since it was a history that I embodied, It was my responsibility to play all these characters because they were drawn from disparate elements of my genetic past, none of which were pure enough to stand in for the whole. It was a risk I wanted to take because that was the discourse I wanted to engage and I felt that my presence would add something to that discourse. I don't know if that was true or not but that was premise from which I began.

JFS: Has there been sufficient attention paid to the differences between in your work and Cindy Sherman's?

KGD: Generally no. Oftentimes people will say 'Oh this is just like Cindy Sherman,' and my standard response is, 'I didn't know she was Latino!' Meaning, that I think there is a difference, on many levels, but certainly on the most basic level. If Cindy Sherman, as she's written about, represents the every-wo-man; you know, that she stands in for every woman, then my project does just the opposite. I'm not standing in for a whole gender, or even for a whole race. I'm standing in for the specific; for the one, the two, or the three. Sherman's work embraces whiteness as universal claim in way that a Latino body (at this point in time), cannot.

JS: With the analytical photography: could you talk about your interest in the identification of skin?

KGD: The interest in skin derived, in part, from the Bone-Grass Boy series. I was specifically looking to responses to race that were triggered by that project. While I might have thought of it as a Nevermade, others saw it simply as performative, as a cultural display. So I started asking: Where is that coming from? In part, of course, it was coming from the narrative portrayed in the images but I was also thinking about the photographic medium and its ability to represent space through the camera's lens. The photographic image flattens even the most staged or theatrical of images. In photography, one can use cropping as a means of shaping or drawing attention to space, using this stage to address formal concerns about light and composition, but it is also about the subject, the person captured as document. I was interested in the relationship between photography and the archive, and the document and the index. Allan Sekula has written a great deal about the nature of the photographic archive and its relationship to criminology; the ways various physiological properties were studied, measured, catalogued, and the manner in which these archives could then be used to identify criminals in the nineteenth century. In my own research into the history of lynching I went further back, to physiognomy, phrenology and typology; wondering how the treatment of the Latino image might have been influenced by these "sciences." Though they are now called the pseudo-sciences, in their time they were considered to be science, and many contributed to Social Darwinism, and so on. So I was interested in the idea of what the photograph was actually capturing. If, for example, a photographic profile was used to identify criminals, or to identify ethnic types, then how might the photographic portrait itself be a convention that could trigger other kinds of debates? I was thinking about what one includes or excludes in the frame, and I was also thinking about the digital image and the fact that it is possible to manipulate the photographic image. This returns to your question about the avant-garde and the idea that, historically, the avant-garde wanted to embrace new technologies and new approaches; to incorporate these techniques into their work was to be at the forefront of aesthetic liberation. My embrace of digital technology was an attempt to imagine new possibilities and to wonder if these new forms might create a new kind of discourse, one that could talk about race, ethnicity, gender, and class. That was part of what drove the work. Questions about whether there could be a formalist photography also played a role. I begin the series with the idea of the grid-- very structured and a reference to both the archive and to Greenburgian formalism, and as the series progressed, the grid dissolved. The images became strange -- photographically, and as I argued in my essay on "Analytical Photography;" they were a description of, if not a literal space, then at least a symbolic space where differentiations between object and subject, between space and image, became unfamiliar and allowed for a slippage between different but highly coded representational systems. For me, using the skin was the most direct way to address the question of signification, but it became a departure point for aesthetic inspiration as well.

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