{"id":86303,"date":"2015-06-03T12:44:06","date_gmt":"2015-06-03T16:44:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=86303"},"modified":"2015-06-04T21:47:18","modified_gmt":"2015-06-05T01:47:18","slug":"theyre-fucking-skulls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/03\/theyre-fucking-skulls\/","title":{"rendered":"They\u2019re Fucking Skulls"},"content":{"rendered":"

Leon Golub\u2019s haunting \u201cRiot\u201d and the aloof politics of the art world.
<\/em><\/p>\n

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Leon Golub, Napalm I<\/i>, 1969, acrylic on linen, 117 1\/4″ x 213″.<\/p><\/div>

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Wounded Warrior<\/i>, 1968, acrylic on linen, 76 1\/4″ x 111 1\/4″.<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

In a discussion at Hauser & Wirth, Hans-Ulrich Obrist told of the time he and Leon Golub were discussing a book of the artist\u2019s collected writings; they discovered afterward that Clement Greenberg had died during the conversation.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a morbid art-world joke\u2014but so are Golub\u2019s canvases, which hang, as he referred to them, like \u201cflayed skins\u201d around the gallery. They complicate the sweet bedtime story of American postwar art, passed down for generations, in which power is an inner force wielded by artists, and art self-consciously demanded attention for its physical materials: paint and the square of the canvas. Written with Greenberg\u2019s theory, this tale established art as an alternate reality, without mimetic or social context.<\/p>\n

Golub, who died in 2004, was a staunch and consistent critic of Abstract Expressionism, calling it \u201cbad for the artist. These painters were essentially turning away from the world in their work,\u201d he said, \u201cgiving up on the idea that an artist might have a social role.\u201d As Pollock\u2019s last drips dried on his studio floor, the country was pounding the pavement and bodies were hitting the ground. For the artists of that era, as of this one, the realities beyond canvas were merciless. Friends were being shipped off to shoot guns in Vietnam, police batons and dogs brutalized black protesters in bright, American daylight, and the dark of black-and-white newscasts too often signified blood. <\/p>\n

Soon after 1960, the art world was letting the real world back in by stealing its daily representations and re-presenting them as art. Rauschenberg\u2019s work read like a newspaper, with headlines cut out and pasted back together; Lichtenstein\u2019s Benday dots spelled out modern romantic woes; Oldenburg blew up consumerism as a balloon ready to pop; Warhol aestheticized and repeated brands, be they soup or First Lady. All were mirrors of society, and sardonic ones, but they were only as representative of reality as a mall is\u2014commodity as portrait.<\/p>\n

Then there was Leon Golub, an outlier, not easily included in any trend or movement, but in step with what was happening<\/i><\/em>. The differences began with his surfaces, which aren\u2019t hard-edged in their boundaries. Unprimed and enormous, they\u2019re pinned to the wall by grommets; they flap lazily when viewers pass by. His subjects are people, but not individuals\u2014they\u2019re dangerously anonymous, men in an unaccountable space of moral reprehensibility, whether employed as mercenaries or unidentified, struggling in a daze, warring without context. He painted bodies, and in his earlier works he neglected even to clothe them for fear of veiling their physical reality with minutiae (Pop Art\u2019s realm). Instead, he pared his subjects down to the tragedy of humans acting inhumanely, and gave the works titles unabashedly current: Napalm<\/em>. Even when he finally gave his figures clothes, the styles were unglamorous, significant only as stand-ins for a generic \u201cuniform,\u201d with camouflage standing out dumbly against the shit-colored, flaccid canvas.<\/p>\n

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Night Scene I<\/i>, 1988, acrylic on linen, 120 1\/2″ x 157″.<\/p><\/div>\n

An artist friend once told me that as a critic I should never write the phrase \u201cSo-and-so\u2019s art is about … \u201d It makes artists bristle. But Golub is the exception. Consistently in interviews, he emphasized content. In 1996, wandering the Metropolitan Museum of Art with his wife, the artist Nancy Spero, for Michael Kimmelman\u2019s Portraits<\/i><\/em> series<\/a>, he said, \u201cAs artists, Nancy and I are both content oriented. We focus on what the images are about.\u201d A catalogue conveyed a story about Golub showing new drawings of enormous human skulls to a group of critics. The audience stroked their chins, expressed great admiration for his line, scale, and color choice. Bursting with frustration, Golub finally shouted, \u201cGoddamnit! They\u2019re fucking skulls!\u201d<\/p>\n

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Mercenaries II<\/i> (section III), 1975, acrylic on linen, 76 1\/2″ x 93″.<\/p><\/div>\n

His irritation aside, Golub refined his techniques to be as sturdy as were his principles. There\u2019s a video of Golub working in his studio<\/a>, which, though it\u2019s less than three minutes long, reveals much of his process. You can see his famous method of scraping his acrylic paint off the canvas with a meat cleaver, staining the cloth, pulverizing it. It\u2019s striking to see this nebbishy man, sweet and earnest, creating lumbering, lunging Frankensteins more than twice his size. At first glance, his imagery reads as pure boldness, but with closer inspection you notice they have very low contrast. The blacks are porous and pale, the colors muddied, sinking into rather than sitting atop the canvas. At such an unwieldy size, and typically without background painting to cover up his mistakes, his choices of pose and composition had to be well planned.<\/p>\n

In his studio he had three tall filing cabinets, which he called his \u201cAtlas\u201d: an elaborate encyclopedia of violence, organized by the physical form of its perpetrators and victims. In its drawers were folders with labels like EXAGGERATED EXPRESSIONS<\/small>;\u00a0FALLEN FIGURES, DRAGGED<\/small>;\u00a0HEADS, WOMEN LOOKING DOWN<\/small>;\u00a0WHITE WOMEN\u2014CRYING OR PAIN<\/small>;\u00a0BLACK WOMEN, HEADS, RIGHT PROFILE<\/small>;\u00a0GUNS, ETC.<\/small>\u00a0At the panel discussion, Samm Kunce described her first day working as Golub\u2019s assistant:<\/p>\n

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I was seated at a desk with a pile of cut and ripped bits [of paper]. They were arms, they were backs, they were feet … And I was to sort them according to body part and position. He was very specific about how they were to be labeled and titled and filed. But when we talk about [the category] \u201cHead Over the Shoulder, Left,\u201d the images were quite frequently horrific<\/i><\/em>, taken from the most brutal mercenary magazines, where the photographer was documenting the ripping of an arm from the body of a Vietnamese man on his knees, piling them into a car, in sequence like that. When Nancy went ding ding ding<\/i><\/em> for lunch, I wasn\u2019t really ready to have a sandwich.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

She laughed. \u201cThat was my introduction.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Time’s Up<\/i>, 1997, acrylic on linen, 93 1\/2″ x 172″.<\/p><\/div>\n

Whether clipping from sports magazines, sadomasochistic porn, or newspapers, Golub saw one theme: violence. He would compose his scenes from the different sources, inventing bodies and combining expressions, staging fights. And yet, the traces of that dismemberment remain in the awkwardness of his figures, the simultaneous specificity of their faces and the disjointedness of their interactions. Golub would often use photographs of women as source material and then, in his final canvas, depict only men. His investigation, his expos\u00e9, was patriarchy and all its flaws. Women, though inevitably perpetrators of that system, were not its signifiers.<\/p>\n

Amid all the intentional brazenness and machismo, his paintings are fragile. Walking among his earlier works, the feeling is of entering a morgue, private and visceral. Many writers have classified his works as updated history paintings or their public, populist counterparts\u2014murals. To me, beyond the elements of figuration and literalism, or the simple clarity of figure-ground relationship, the categorization is off. Didacticism and symbolism are the ingredients of those genres, and they don\u2019t resonate with the existential, absurd pastiche in Golub\u2019s work. His works defy the permanence of place and obligation that those types of painting require.<\/p>\n

Looking at these works, I found myself thinking of how they must get put away\u2014the image of a rolled up Golub painting is a symbol of potentiality. Their enormity makes the storage difficult, an imposition on the owner, but when you need them, you shake them out as you would a banner. They are not polite or neat or pretentious. Golub said the way they hung was \u201cloose, informal.\u201d Their tension comes not from the tightness of gesso or the tautness of stretched canvas, but from the content.<\/p>\n

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Fallen Warrior<\/i>, 1968, acrylic on linen, 65 1\/2″ x 83 1\/2″.<\/p><\/div>\n

*<\/p>\n

Just off Madison Avenue, after you\u2019ve passed Valentino and Dolce & Gabbana, you turn onto Sixty-ninth Street; from the street, through Hauser & Wirth\u2019s large glass pane, you see Golub\u2019s gigantic Napalm I<\/i><\/em>, from 1969, bleeding. A deep red wound is caked to the surface at eye level, obscuring the torso of a man who is either in the midst of falling or already dead, his face contorted in pain, his body in a fetal curl and still measuring about eight feet long. Above him, a man, though kneeling, towers at an alarming ten feet. They are twins and\/or counterparts, and though together in this wall-length swath of canvas, they do not actually touch. The one unscathed extends his arm like an arrow poised for launch, directing blame and\/or signaling for help. This \u201cand\/or\u201d gives Golub\u2019s work its central power. This is happening, and\/or\u2014because the painting is based on a photograph\u2014this happened.<\/p>\n

The art world was a tough place for Golub in life, and it still is for his work. The artist himself said in an interview, \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s a real place for these paintings at present, but that\u2019s no reason not to make them. They\u2019re not really public; I\u2019m appealing to public awareness rather than making big public statements.\u201d Posthumously, Golub\u2019s words call out this uptown gallery, which has made a grave error, a naive, empty gesture, in titling the show \u201cRiot<\/a>.\u201d At the panel discussion, when I asked if that title had been\u00a0planned before or after the riots in Baltimore following Freddie Gray\u2019s murder, an employee of the gallery said the title had been chosen during the installation, when a work called Riot V<\/em> was hung as Baltimore was erupting. Another representative of the gallery later clarified that the title came earlier, in mid-March.<\/p>\n

Riot V\u00a0<\/i><\/em>is from a series Golub did in the late eighties. A foggy, evasive night sky floats around eight white men menacingly gesturing. As is typical of Golub\u2019s work from this period, there is a great deal of space left blank. In fact, nearly the entire top half of the painting is empty, so that the men, though much larger than life size, feel rooted as if to the floor, gathering around you, approaching.<\/p>\n

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Riot V<\/i>, 1987, acrylic on linen, 120″ x 155″.<\/p><\/div>\n

Riots and, sadly, the reasons they occur, haven\u2019t changed much since Golub was painting, but the commentary surrounding them has. When a riot happens now, the Internet chatters. Think pieces encourage us to see rioting as a viable form of protest<\/a>, a stance the mainstream media continues to misunderstand and misrepresent, without nuance or compassion. The articles defending riots lead to debates about strategy, to statistics on effectiveness.<\/p>\n

These analyses, though shifting popular opinion in the right direction, are theoretical aftermath. Violence versus nonviolence has always been a formal opposition. A riot is an expression, powerful and unapologetic, concerned not with form, but with content. A riot is about<\/i><\/em> something. It is about an unarmed black child shot and left in the street, a black man in a coma in a police van, a black man choked to death for selling loose cigarettes, and about the fact that these deaths at police hands happen regularly and with impunity, no matter how many times we have to witness it on instant replay.<\/p>\n

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Heraldic Predator II<\/i>, 2002, oil stick and ink on vellum, 10″ x 8″.<\/p><\/div>\n

By valuing content, Golub was ultimately staging a critique of real world powers; being a painter in his particular time, he was doomed by the constant assumption that he was critiquing the art world. He inverted the staunch morals of form that we call Greenbergian Modernism and reassigned morality to the only beings that actually have it: people. His canvases are not action painting, but paintings of action. A journalist\u2019s job is to analyze riots. What Golub did was make us look at the fight and ask why it was happening. His subjects are the pawns, not the powerful, and the only commodities we see are guns. He shows us the moment when violence has become inevitable.<\/p>\n

His works are as much about strife and pain as they are about its depiction. Cobbling together scenes from the Atlas, his process was not unlike the television producer asking for the shot of the black men burning the cop car, of the aggressive mob, of the broken store window. Golub\u2019s blank backgrounds, his canvas\u2019 flapping edges, indicate what you won\u2019t see on television, and you definitely won\u2019t see in the art world: the mother weeping as she ends her prison visit, the man\u2019s fearful heartbeat as he passes a cop car, the minimum-wage pay stub.<\/p>\n

Golub was concerned with what the public is given to look at and with forcing them to see. He was making work he knew wouldn\u2019t be bought, either intellectually or with money. He once said, \u201cIt\u2019s a good feeling to know that the work is aggressive enough to hold its own\u2014I don\u2019t mean with other art but with reality, bare-ass reality!\u201d His work makes visible the fantasy space of the art world, a world of luxury commodity<\/a> so diametrically opposed to the spaces where riots actually happen, where people are poor and incarcerated<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To this day Golub\u2019s work is largely excluded from art history, and so in the art world we should be grateful to see it displayed so extensively in the pedestal of prestige that is Hauser & Wirth. In the art world we can call it prescient: a well-timed show. In the art world, we can kid ourselves and say it\u2019s a free gallery and anyone can come in. But outside the art world, \u201cRiot\u201d is the name for something happening right now, a world away.<\/p>\n

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Colossal Torso III<\/i>, 1960, lacquer on canvas, 82 1\/4″ x 1 1\/2″ x 96 3\/4″.<\/p><\/div>\n

Sarah Cowan is a freelance writer and a video editor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She lives in Brooklyn.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cRiot\u201d is at Hauser & Wirth<\/a> through June 20.<\/em><\/p>\n

All images \u00a9 The Estate of Leon Golub, courtesy of Hauser & Wirth. Photos by Christopher Burke<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leon Golub\u2019s haunting \u201cRiot\u201d and the aloof politics of the art world. In a discussion at Hauser & Wirth, Hans-Ulrich Obrist told of the time he and Leon Golub were discussing a book of the artist\u2019s collected writings; they discovered afterward that Clement Greenberg had died during the conversation. It\u2019s a morbid art-world joke\u2014but so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":792,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2384],"tags":[35,18344,18346,18343,16424,17127,18342,16472,18347,4524,4154,2426,8902,3863,18349,3195,18348,18345,13512,14787],"class_list":["post-86303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-look","tag-art","tag-clement-greenberg","tag-figurative-panting","tag-freddie-gray","tag-hans-ulrich-obrist","tag-hauser-wirth","tag-leon-golub","tag-luxury","tag-michael-kimmelman","tag-modernism","tag-paintings","tag-politics","tag-prison","tag-protests","tag-riot","tag-riots","tag-samm-kunce","tag-skulls","tag-the-sixties","tag-violence"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLeon Golub\u2019s \u201cRiot\u201d & the Art World\u2019s Political Blindness<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Golub\u2019s paintings at Hauser & Wirth are haunting and political\u2014but they also foreground the aloofness of the gallery world.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/06\/03\/theyre-fucking-skulls\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"They\u2019re Fucking Skulls by Sarah Cowan\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"June 3, 2015 \u2013 Leon Golub\u2019s haunting \u201cRiot\u201d and the aloof politics of the art world. 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