pros* journal issue one by Edward Sterrett

pros* Issue One Silent Witness: Violence and Representation

pros*

Issue One Spring 2011 Silent Witness: Violence and Representation

pros* pros*, Issue One, Spring 2011 pros* is published annually by the Visual Arts PhD and MFA programs at the University of California, San Diego Founding Editors: Orianna Cacchione and Edward Sterrett Editors: Elize Mazadiego and Edward Sterrett Layout: Chuck Miller Copy Editors: Orianna Cacchione, Natalie Haddad and Paul Ricketts Faculty Advisors: Grant Kester and Michael Trigilio pros.ucsd.edu uag.ucsd.edu pros* is made possible by the generous support of the Visual Arts department, University of California, San Diego We would like to thank Ken Gonzales-Day, Grant Kester, Jenn Moreno, The University Art Gallery, Judi Griffith, Sheena Ghanbari, Micki Davis, Mariola Alvarez, Gaston R. Cangiano, and our contributors.

Cover image: Nightfall II, 2006, from Hang Trees, Ken Gonzales-Day, light jet print, courtesy of the artist Cover design: Chuck Miller

Contents

Editor’s Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5

Conversation:

Ken Gonzales-Day, Grant Kester, Elize Mazadiego, and Jenn Moreno . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Responses:

The Absence Becomes the Presence: Contextualizing the “Comptom Cookout” in Histories of Racial Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25 Tania Nicole Jabour

An Alphabet for Lynching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .33 and Yet Still I, Still Life Crystal Z. Campbell

Dignity and Settler Colonialism in Silent Witness: Recent Works by Ken Gonzales-Day . . . . . . . . . . 43 Stevie Ruiz

Erased Words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49 Omar Pimienta

Rare Properties. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .53 Shane Anderson

Ken Gonzales-Day: The Metaphysics of Lynching and the Formation of Identity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .61 Diana McClure

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Editor’s Note

The contents of pros* Issue One materialized from the making of the exhibition Silent Witness: Recent Works by Ken Gonzales-Day at UCSD’s University Art Gallery. The Spring 2011 show brings Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynchings and Hang Trees – two photographic series which explores the history of lynching in the American West -- to a campus, which only a year ago experienced its own version of racialized violence. Taking inspiration from the curators’ attempt to foster a critical dialogue around GonzalesDay’s work and its relationship to our local context, this issue serves as a platform to engage in conversation but also to capture moments of a larger exchange. Following the pros* journal’s founding structure of starting with a central discussion that opens up to a group of respondents. This issue extends its reach beyond art practice, art history, theory and criticism to include voices from Ethnic Studies and Literature. This mode of interdisciplinary exchange follows the journal’s ethos to break from the traditional underpinnings of the discipline of art and art history in the interest of generating diverse explorations, new visions and critical collaborations. Ken Gonzales-Day’s work also calls for a more comprehensive conversation. Questions around representation, race, the body, memory and violence have currency in multiple fields of intellectual inquiry. The dialogue that emerges from this issue attests to strong theoretical intersections across Art and Art History, Visual and Cultural Studies, History, American and Chicano/Latino studies, Philosophy, Literature, Critical Race studies and Communications. 6

Issue One begins with Ken Gonzales-Day in conversation with the exhibition curators Grant Kester, Jenn Moreno and Elize Mazadiego. The discussion sifts through the many facets of his art practice with special attention to his works at the University Art Gallery. Through a collection of scholarly essays and artworks that contributors developed in response to the interview, the focus of the journal emerges as an interrogation of representation. Gonzales-Day prompts his respondents to complicate notions of erasure and absence in the context of history, memory, and social justice. Where photographs and language fail to present truth through representation, the journalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s contributions explore those failures in reflecting on what is not present. The condition of representation here is further complicated by the violence that underlies many of the narratives discussed - from histories of lynching to present-day experiences of racial malice on UCSDâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s campus. The contributors negotiate this problem by producing works that alteranately lean towards anticipating utopic futures and renewal or condemning us to repeated violence.

Golden Chain, 2005 from Hang Trees Ken Gonzales-Day light jet print courtesy of the artist

Ken Gonzales-Day in conversation with: Grant Kester Elize Mazadiego Jenn Moreno

From March 31 to May 20, 2011 UCSD’s University Art Gallery presents the exhibition Silent Witness: Recent Work by Ken Gonzales-Day. Ken Gonzales-Day is a photographer, installation artist and writer. He is the chair of the Department of Art and Art History at Scripps College. Gonzales-Day’s book Lynching in the West, 1850 to 1935 was published in 2006 by Duke University. The exhibition Silent Witness features the photographic projects that emerged from the research and writing of his book. In conjunction with the show the curators Grant Kester, Elize Mazadiego and Jenn Moreno interviewed Ken Gonzales-Day at his Los Angeles studio February 25, 2011. As the curators we wanted to explore with GonzalesDay the possible meanings of his work within the show, and the relationship between his art practice and larger socio-cultural issues. The following is from the conversation between Gonzales-Day and the exhibition curators. JENN MORENO: The two series that you’re showing at the University Art Gallery are Erased Lynching and Hang Trees, your most recent bodies of work. Can you talk about the two series in terms of their relationship to each other, but also how you distinguish them as separate? 9

pros* Tombstone, 2006 from Erased Lynching Ken Gonzales-Day light jet print courtesy of the artist

KEN GONZALES-DAY: The Erased Lynching is pretty self explanatory in the sense that the lynch victims have been erased from the images. The majority of images, were initially produced as postcards and were bought and sold throughout the United States. I specifically looked at images from the west, so they’re not all from California but where they’re known, they’re from California, Texas, the U.S. Mexico Border, and I tried to really deal with the regional aspect of it. None of the lynchings depict African Americans, which I think is an important thing to note because there’s no way to know that from seeing the images. The project was really trying to look at another history, on another aspect of the history that was coming up in my research for the book. And so the Erased Lynching series grew directly out of that research and the project became a response to the images I was encountering every day. The Searching for California Hang Trees or Hang Trees, as it’s also known, was a project, which grew out of my studio practice. It was really me, as a photographer, trying to think about how I would respond to this history and this information I was finding. Initially I set out with a thirty-five millimeter to look for sites and eventually moved up to the large format Deardorff camera and decided that as a photographer, part of my response was also a response to the history of landscape photography in California, which we know through Adams and Weston, and generally imagined to be an empty space, barren land that was just there for our aesthetic pleasure. So I wanted to try to use the “masters’ tools” as they say, the Deardorff, to try to create a conceptually driven project that would look an awful lot like traditional landscape photography, but would try to do something more. That, from an artistic point of view, was the challenge of the project. The two projects were always meant to be together. I think they’ve almost always been shown together.

ELIZE MAZADIEGO: I was thinking about your answer in terms of another question: since your work has been showcased globally, how do you think these photographs have been received across a diverse range of spaces and audiences?

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Some institutions or exhibitions have a preference for one or the other. So there might be more of one or the other. But I always like to suggest that they put both in, if I can, and recognize that the curators always have their own goals for an exhibition. So that’s how they evolved.

KGD: I think in general they’ve been received well. I would say that there have been all kinds of different responses. I actually was giving a talk somewhere and someone from the audience said that they were very upset at having to see all the bodies. And I had to remind them that the bodies had in fact all been erased, but they really had not remembered that the bodies were not there. I think this has to do with the emotional strength of the images, the memory of the thing is unconsciously changed when we remember it later. I think that if it’s changing perceptions, or the memory of perceptions, then it’s certainly an interesting sign. In terms of the Hang Trees, it has been very similar. People are often drawn to the beauty of the images at first, and then as they find more information about the images they’re able to think about them differently. As hard as it is to explain to people, and as hard as it is to define, this idea of a conceptually driven photographic practice still seems to provide the best explanation for my practice. I wanted it to have a certain archival feel to it, a certain sense of indexical play, tracing my own journey from the archive to the landscape. Titles are all derived from the case histories, which serves to provide the active viewer with an opportunity to either look for more information, should they wish to, or at least alert them to the fact that there is more information out there, that the work signals to a larger project. GRANT KESTER: Can you talk about what it means for you to exclude or remove the suffering bodies from these images? What forms of affect does suffering produce, and how do you think these images might transform the consciousness of the viewer? KGD: There have been many other publications on the history of lynching in the United States and the majority have looked at lynching in the south or in the Midwest, east coast. In fact there have been ten or more 11

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books that have come out since my book came out, looking at very specific regions, states, ethnicities, and many of those books have included images of lynchings. One of my initial ideas, and the one that signals that my work is part of an art practice is the removing of the bodies. The missing body is about not wanting to re-victimize these people. And I certainly did not want to direct attention to these very painful images of dead people. I didn’t want that to contribute to that legacy. In terms of my art practice, I have never exhibited any images of any lynched bodies. The book includes a handful of images because it’s attempting to address historical information and I wanted to reveal history not hide it. So the book…and that’s why the book exists, functions as another kind of speech and therefore, had to function in a different manner. I should also add that in the Searching for California Hang Trees series, I went and searched for all of the sites, not just those of Latinos. But I have gone searching for over three hundred and fifty sites. JM: Which included places in which African-Americans were lynched? KGD: I included everybody, so I went searching for the entire case list that appears in the book, with the exception of three or four sites that I still want to go to. It doesn’t mean that I found them, but I did attempt to go look. And in terms of the Erased Lynching series they’re not all of Latinos either. They’re mostly Anglo actually. I’ve never disclosed which are which because I think part of it is strategic. I’m trying to resist their re-victimization. That’s why the book includes a very specific case list, the first one ever published, detailing as many of the individual cases as I could find. If I had been given my druthers, there’d be another four hundred pages in the book because I started writing narratives for each of the three hundred and fifty cases explaining the details and citing all of the source material. But as my publisher explained, that’s not really the kind of project that they could endeavor to do and so I still have all that research, much of which has already been scanned and digitized and is available at the Claremont Colleges Digital Library as a resource for future scholars. Eventually the data will be a source of more work for me but is available for anyone. As I write in the book, I encourage people to go and look at their own cities, neighborhoods, and towns and find out how the history has been articulated, or not, in the region they’re in. EM: I’ve been thinking about this kind of interplay between research and

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invention in your photographs. But I’m also thinking about the relationship between text and image and how you’re playing with archival materials, historical documents, and through that play generating a whole other kind of archive in a way. How did you come to that interplay? How would you characterize your photographs as a play with these archival materials? And why do you choose to have one part of this history in the form of a book and then that visualized in these images? KGD: That’s a large question but I think the simple answer, the very quick and truthful answer is it’s not really a book. It’s an artist statement. It’s a very long artist statement. And it’s an artist statement that was making claims that needed to be supported. All of my projects have begun with research and often times that research is boiled down to a one-page or twopage artist statement somewhere along the way. This particular project began the same as other projects, but as I began to find more and more information I realized that there was no way for a visual project to express all of the information in one physical space. I mean if I had an infinite number of rooms or infinite wall space, perhaps there could be all kinds of ways to problem solve that, but given the realities and limitations on space, time, resources, and the amount of information that was there, a book seemed a fitting solution. At first blush, it sounds rather flippant, this idea that it’s not a book, but there are a few things that I did that were interventions into the book format. Even the cover image, for those that haven’t seen it, appears to be an image of a tree at nighttime. There’s nothing underneath the tree except for the title of the book. But the original source image, which is included in the book, shows that the original image depicted a triple lynching. So on the simplest level, if this is a book about history then the cover’s already deceptive in some sense, right. And there are a number of chapter breaks where I also include some of the Erased Lynchings into the book itself. So, for the viewer who is expecting what we might think of as a very deadpan approach to history in a book or a textbook, this already disrupts that in the fabric of the book itself, as well as in the conclusion where I sort of narrate a performance or reading that I do, as a way of re-contextualizing the project. So when you get to that point in the book it raises a number of questions that if it was experienced as a reading it might suggest something more complicated. The most important thing of all was the case list itself. Some of the cases had been published, to be clear. But many frontier and wild west books, that you may have read or might encounter, were intended for a very broad audience and often don’t include footnotes. But

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in the scholarly world today, without a footnote, such claims are going to have difficulty getting institutional recognition. So one of my challenges was to create a list of these cases and to have it backed up. Is that an art practice all by itself or is that research? I think for me, it is part of my art practice because without that information I couldn’t have begun to take any of the photographs. EM: So in terms of understanding this as a kind of art practice yet finding your text being used within other disciplines, do you feel like people have a different way of thinking of your text because you’re coming from this position as an artist rather than, let’s say, a certified historian? KGD: Yes, the most interest has been from various area studies, ranging from Women’s studies to visual studies to Chicano studies to, you know, American studies. Even American literature, at some institutions, have been using it to encourage their students to think about how to break down narrative structures and using that as a creative method for thinking about how to convey information. My goal was to get the case list out there and, as you can imagine, a case list is not the most exciting thing in the world, right? It’s a series of names and places and dates. But for me, that was probably the most important thing, so if I had to write a series of chapters in front of it to make it to fit into a form, into a conceptual frame, that opened up an opportunity to think about what stories I might want to share. I do reference myself as an artist at one point in the introduction and one point in the conclusion, because I felt that the reader had a right to know. I also identify myself as Latino in the conclusion, but not until then. Now, of course that doesn’t mean that people will read it that way, from front to back, but I felt the information was relevant. Why would I spend all this time? Well there might be some things about culture, about socioeconomic realities that inform my practice. In the ‘90s, there was a lot of debate about “beauty” and what could be seen as art. Put simply, some argued that art was about beauty and not politics. Unfortunately, that was a very deadening argument for many artists who were trying to locate their practice within a larger context. Luckily, those debates are behind us, but on some level my response has been that my lived experience informs my aesthetic choices, and that my difference may provide access to a more inclusive notion of beauty. JM: Lynching in the West is a book that is essentially about quandaries of

KGD: The question of identity continues to be a challenge for many scholars and students, and it’s a topic that still has a lot of room for work. Without skipping ahead too much, my current project takes up the question from a very different perspective by considering the Enlightenment and the legacies of the Enlightenment. But to keep to your question, the book begins with the question of justice in California. I was born here, but I didn’t know when the first legal execution was, or what the difference was between a vigilance committee and a lynching. And then there were a bunch of “western” ideas that I was familiar with, but I didn’t know really where they came from. I began by looking into the specifics of when we had the first supreme court, the first functioning prison, and looking at the various cases of summary justice and realized that there was a fair amount of slippage in terms of how California identity formation was happening, not just along racial lines, but in terms of national identity as well, and even what it was to be American. There were all these debates about freedom, about what California would be, about how it might compete with the East or with Europe and if it was going to be a lasting part of our national fabric, and not just a venture for quick riches. The question of identity was there, you know, in a sense asking what it was to be American, to be Californian, and within that, Mexican Americans had already been granted citizenship using rather complicated legal arguments. In the years to follow, California went backwards and forwards on who could vote, own land, or marry. But the mini version is that all of these ideas of difference were needing to be articulated and institutionalized on some level to determine who could be educated, imprisoned, displaced, and even killed. Since that project, I’ve moved back to the 18th century, and even the 17th century, as a way of thinking about the origins of some of these ideas, including equality, and how some of these ideas changed once they arrived here. To bring it back to your question, I have been increasingly interested in all the various articulations of difference and how and when they became institutionally recognized. This institutionalization can take the form of laws, and rights, but it can also contribute to new aesthetic models. So we could think about, and I’ve been looking a lot at instructional manuals for how to represent beauty in the 17th and 18th century, and

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identity and investigating those issues through research, yet there is some sense of ethos for these people when you discuss their histories. In terms of addressing identity politics in this way, what do you think the fundamental quality of a single person’s identity would be?

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at the academies. What were those models based on, right? The Apollo and the Venus became a kind of ideal, and symbols of whiteness, even a kind of achievement for mankind –informed by Enlightenment notions of progress. Though we no longer live in the Enlightenment, or the Age of Enlightenment, we still carry many of their legacies. And there’s been no great text or series of texts to really trace it out point by point and help us to see where some of our assumptions might still be informed by older models. So for me identity is something that is very hard to track but I look for the proof of it either in the physical world, or in text or in images. Lately, I have been thinking that beauty is a strategic tool that can be used in all kinds of ways to articulate notions of difference. JM: It can certainly be agreed upon that identity could translate to an institutionalized difference. How do you translate this into the realm of the art world and the way art institutions are formulated, mostly in terms of who’s able to come to the art institution or who is able and privileged to view your work? If they are categorized in this difference, how then are people able to enter this world, create a seemingly new identity and view your work inside of the art institution? KGD: Well I think the nice thing about art is that it’s something that is experienced in real time. In my work, people might know what the subject is of the work they’re going to be seeing, and know that there was a history of racialized violence in the United States, but to be presented with traces of that history; artifacts that we might think of using Greenblatt’s idea of the “wounded artifact,” as things that retain traces of their history, whether it’s a scribble on the back of it, a bent corner, a coffee stain, or whatever it might be. These things can begin to trigger other sorts of memories about space, place, time and surface. The experience of the visual component adds a spatial knowledge that we don’t have when we read a book. You’re experiencing the things spatially. For example, one of the things with St. James Place,which is a large wallpaper mural that I’ve done a number of different times – in fact nine different times, and which you will have in your exhibition, has been that it’s been done differently at every single institution. But the primary reason for putting it on the wall, and how it ended up there, was to get us away from thinking of images as simply two dimensional. Because photographs are three dimensional, they have weight and mass and volume and yet if you look through the history of photography, you won’t find that mentioned anywhere, right.

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So I have tried to create experiences in which, for example, when it wraps around a corner, you physically have to turn your head from one side to the other, you physically have to walk from one end to the other, there’s no way to comprehend the physicality of the piece without moving your body through space. That’s the clue that I tried to build into the work that…that moves it beyond the textual reference. So there is research. There’s also, I would argue, a quality that is visual, that’s experienced, and that uniquely fits the criteria of art-making. EM: Speaking of the physicality of those photographs, I think that the spatial quality of these images situates the viewer as a participant in a spectacle. They’re made aware of their present gaze within a historical moment. In thinking about this effect in your work and it’s relationship to contemporary photography: do you find yourself working within the trends of contemporary photography or diverging from them? KGD: I can say that certainly there are many artists that are thinking about photography in new ways, that the notion of the window is pretty much gone or has been questioned, and is being questioned by many people. Then there is the question of the archive, which was so rich in the ‘80’s but which has also moved to a different direction. There is the question of appropriation as well, and all those sorts of canonical models that we have learned in recent generations. I think they’ve been explored and continue to be of interest but what I see most artists of my age doing, or younger artists doing, is beginning to combine aspects of all of those traditions and creating something new. EM: I think one thing that I really enjoy about your work is that we often associate photography and its ability to be manipulated or “photoshopped” as evidence of its construction of truth. Yet your work has an ability to reveal and uncover a certain kind of truth through this process. I wonder if you see this as a method, or an effective trope? KGD: I teach several seminars around these issues. So without going through all of that I would just say very simply that there are a number of canons, or models for approaching photography. They are all valid. They are all enticing. They are all historically grounded, right, so that if we want to consider a decisive moment, or we want to think about environmental portraiture, or any of these other traditions we might continue

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to work in those historical approaches, or we might not. But they still have their particular appeal. I think my practice has been to explore the limits of photographic representation. I have done earlier projects, very early when I was in grad school, where I played with the narrativity of photography, and played with all these different characters. It was a little bit on the performance side of things. But that was only one pathway. At the time, I wanted to explore the idea of narrativity and photography, but I found that it didn’t really answer the questions I was trying to ask. Then I moved to this other project that I called “analytic photography,” which was basically trying to abstract the photographic image and see if I could ever get it to register as optical, playing off of Krauss and all those ideas. Again, I found that there were limits to how far you could push the photographic image. Then I moved to this other approach, which is really more of an articulation of absence, where the absence in the image, becomes its presence. Its about the missing figure, the missing history, the missing person, the missing source, whatever it might have been, and that continues into the new work, too, which is very much about people but without having people in them – not that I’m opposed to having people. I love photographing people. I have tons of portraits that I never get to show because it’s sort of a parallel practice. I think that each exhibition is a statement of sorts, and that I take responsibility for the images that I’ve produced, and for the contexts in which I have presented them. JM: Through the very elaborate evolution of your work is there one crucial, main aesthetic influence for your work and does it come across directly with any of your newer projects or recent works of Silent Witness? Or you can choose to keep it a mystery. KGD: No, no, no. It’s not a secret. I’m just not sure I’ve thought about it. Is there an aesthetic? I mean I started as a painter. I’ve spent a lot of time studying art history. I’ve been making art for a long time, looking at art or making things on paper –whether it was art or not. That journey has, of course, been enjoyable and not everything’s going to be great, but we learn things along the way. I love art history. I love looking at objects. Within that, usually when I begin a certain project, I try to pick a model that will work for the goals of that project. The work is always asking, not just a historical question, but an aesthetic question. There is an aesthetic to even the simplest form of an archive. It’s not just in index cards, and that aesthetic could be something as simple as the categories themselves,

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or it could be the method of display, the method of presentation. It could be all kinds of things. I try to be sensitive to the idea that everything is aesthetic and that artists aestheticize, but that aesthetics and moral claims are often interlaced. I think that’s where things get complicated when we begin to think about morality and aesthetics. That’s where the mess begins to explode, because when we look for example at the classic critique of documentary images, of say, a homeless person, or a child who’s about to die, it raises all of those questions of agency. Then we’re suddenly back to this moral terrain. And even if you want to go to Kant’s Critique of Judgment, and notions of the sublime, all of these ideas of transcendence are still lingering about in studio practice. Even in post-studio practice, which is capable of creating works that can be aestheticized after the fact. The human brain wants to find patterns and ratios in patterns, and there’s a

Run Up, 2002 from Hang Trees Ken Gonzales-Day chromogenic print courtesy of the artist

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number for beauty right, it’s one point six one eight zero three three nine nine, you know, the golden mean. These are questions that even scientists are looking at. But, the question of the relationship between the aesthetic and the moral is the place where things get very, very heated for people – even today. EM: I feel like that’s something that’s more of a problem or potential burden for most photographers. KGD: Right, and we know from our Critical Studies that to represent is to be empowered. And so there’s that challenge – how do you represent disempowerment without becoming empowered? I don’t know. To extend the question to the newer work very briefly, I’ve been photographing portrait busts, initially created during the Enlightenment period to antiquity, to think about the representation of the body and look for clues in that representation to larger ideas. So questions of beauty, questions of moral judgment as they are embedded into the surface of the sculptures as a material history that often I find that people are not very well-versed in looking for or seeing because they may not know the specific context in which that image was produced or the milieu of ideas that were floating about. And a traditional history book of sculpture doesn’t have the pages to illuminate all of that for each work. So people in general walk past portrait busts in museums because they don’t have access to them. And I did the same thing. I was walking past them and I thought, you know, I need to think about this. What should I be seeing? What can I see? What is this beautifully crafted object? What can it say to me today? What is the relevance? Can there be a relevance? EM: With Profiled, the Erased Lynching and Hang Trees series, they reflect back in time to a specific historical moment while trying to be transformative for the present. How you feel Profiled speaks to a contemporary audience? KGD: Yes, I hope that it will be able to speak to contemporary issues. I mean one of the formative ideas behind it was the history of lynching in California. I have a chapter where I looked at Lavater and a number of other 18th century writers, who were talking about the relationship between moral judgment and physical appearance. As a scholar at the Getty Research Institute, I started thinking about the portrait bust collection,

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and a number of earlier texts or aesthetics, to think about how these guys thought about representing the body. Not surprisingly, the current project is informed by the resurgence of racial profiling today. The recent laws in Arizona, or if you’ve been to the airport in the last few years, you know that there are other kinds of behaviors or appearances that are being highlighted and foregrounded. I was trying to think about how all those signifiers may have functioned differently, in different times. What I also like is that people tend to see the Profiled images as being about race. But they’re sculptures, they’re plaster and marble and they have no race. It’s about signification. Of course, these sculptures were based on representations of people that had racial and ethnic origins, but it is a question of culture. We can recognize the impact of culture in racializing these objects. We are walking in front of some piece of stone and we are bringing all of this cultural baggage with us. But the work can also generate an aesthetic moment. GK: Another exhibition that will at some point be paralleled with Silent Witness at UAG is Without Sanctuary which confronts the images of lynching probably more forcefully. Can you talk about your experience when first seeing the exhibition? How did those images affect you and what kind of impact do you think they have on viewers that are both viewing that exhibition and yours? KGD: I never actually saw the exhibition. I had already started my book before that and I was hearing about it as I was working on my book. Eventually, the catalogue came out in 2000, and I was probably a couple chapters into mine. It was one of those moments where you’re thinking that you’ve been working on this project, and then thinking, “Oh, my, goodness this is no longer a useful project for people.” But when I finally did see the book I realized my project was very different. You know I was shocked like everybody else. I was moved like everyone else. I always tell my students to be very thoughtful before they look at it, because I think that once you see these images you can’t un-see them, and it becomes a part of your visual archive or your “walking museum,” or whatever you might think of memory as being. It can’t be undone. So I try to be very, very thoughtful about that. My book didn’t come out until 2006. I had probably finished in 2005. So I had a fair period of time to think about it, and it liberated me in the sense that I realized that I didn’t have to fill my book with images of lynching, that that had been done, and that that history is a very different

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history than the history I’m talking about Silent Witness only includes five images from California. My book references three hundred and fifty-four cases in California alone, so it’s a very different project. JM: Does this liberation reveal itself directly in your Erased Lynching and Hang Trees? KGD: One thing worth mentioning, to clarify for the reader, is that in order to create the list of cases, I didn’t just go to the store and buy a book. I started doing the research in 1999. First I had to read every bad western frontier novel I could find, and take notes of all the cases. As I mentioned earlier, many of these books have no footnotes, no dates, no nothing. But I had some basics. Maybe a name and a town, or a sheriff or some clue to start with. Then I would go to the microfilm. For those that haven’t done research with microfilm, I will just say it is a very, very tedious process, and you have to go inch by inch, day by day. I nearly ended up reading the daily newspapers for every day from 1849 to 1870 for Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sacramento, as well as the Steamer editions. In some cases, dates and even years are missing. The process is a little hard to explain, but if you imagine you have an eight hour day and you have to eat and have a coffee break. Then you’re talking about six hours of looking at microfilm. If you find one or two cases a day then that would be very good. Multiply that experience by five years and you get three hundred and fifty-four cases. There were more cases, and my list is not complete but I felt I had reached a good point when it was seven times the known number for the state of California. Researching for the project was a very powerful experience. I would be sitting in these cubicles, in darkness, in the basement of some library, pouring over information that nobody else in the world believed to be true. And when I would talk to scholars and others, they often were very skeptical that as an artist that I could speak to this history with any authority. As a Mexican American reading about the brutal killing of a seventeen-year-old Mexican boy for stealing a chicken, or some other offense – and some of them were terrible criminals, or were arrested in relationship to a terrible crime, but whether vigilantes and lynch mobs had the correct person is something we may never know – it was a very emotional process, much more so for me as a Mexican American, than reading about the south, because this was a history that I had no knowledge of. I had had the experience of being racialized as a Mexican American in California, of knowing what that is, of being called a greaser, a wetback, or

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whatever. So this new history of bias resonated deeply for me. There was one story I read of a whole town of Mexicans being slaughtered in Texas, you know, women, children, everyone. Again there’s was no specific documentation but there were numerous mentions of it in the daily papers. So that was my transformative experience, and you speak to no one all day long. You’re by yourself. You come out, and you’re traumatized in a way that is very hard to explain. And at some point I realized that a particular lynching site was not that far from where I was, and I just started getting in the car and decided to just drive over and look for it. Once I got to the site, of course there’s nothing to see, and I write about that in the book, this idea of finding nothing. But it was a very powerful experience. I also have created a walking tour for lynching sites in downtown Los Angeles. The walking tour gives everybody an opportunity to experience this history. I haven’t done enough research on San Diego to know if there’s another possible walking tour down there. EM: Was any part of that process also a source of healing? Do you believe healing functions in the collective experience of seeing these images? KGD: There’s certainly been a lot of writing on notions of trauma and how communities deal with trauma. Generally, it is sort of argued that the individual cannot generate healing alone, but that communities can. Of course, individuals can contribute to community discussions. So I think for me, yes, the simple answer is art heals for me. That’s why I do it. I mean for me, that’s the practice. When I can take the things I’m thinking about, and make something from them. Then, I feel like I’ve done what I’m supposed to do. That’s why driving to the lynching “sites” was so incredibly helpful and that’s why I went to all three hundred and fifty or nearly and there are many sites that I haven’t found and never will. Many of the sites are very, very vague in terms of the records, so there’s no way of knowing for sure where they are. But if I took the main road through that town then, I was in the area. In some cases, there are no clues. In other cases the trees are still standing and I could find some of the sites. But the journey was incredibly transformative. I would say, as I’ve said before, it changed my life forever. I think that is true. JM: When you think of this transformative healing, would you say this notion of community healing resonates with the racial climate of UCSD in the past year? What does it mean to have your work exhibited on campus?

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In what context do you see the audience reacting to this exhibition? What would you like them to pull away from the experience of Silent Witness? KGD: When I was initially approached I was brought up to speed on some of the occurrences that had happened on campus and was happy to have the work made available for the community there. I think that there are many different ways to try to inform people, to try to educate people, to try to influence behavior. In terms of finding artwork that responds to the situation, mine certainly does do that. So my hope is that it will allow people to rethink their views, or to process their experience, and to put it in a historical context. I believe that art can heal, can transform, can touch parts of the brain that a news flier can’t, or a school announcement may not, and can allow students to have a real experience, in real time and space. So the hope is, for those that choose to come into the gallery, there will be an experience that reveals they’re not alone, that these are experiences that others have had, that people have made very strong efforts to try to talk about this history, as you’re doing, in presenting the work, and as I have done in trying to create the work. And I’m happy, you know, if we have a chance to interact with people, or to share the information with people. I would also add that the book, you know, for obvious reasons, and not just to promote it, but to say that its another access point for students who may not always have access to the work. EM: The fact that the show is happening at UCSD really grants these images a specific meaning. JM: Yes, in that sense, do you think that it will create a new context for the two series by providing a conversation with our specific community? Or have you experienced similar phenomena whilst exhibiting in LA? KGD: Since I started the research and the book there have been nooses appearing on campuses in New York, in professor’s offices, and different libraries. The project really began around the bombing of Iraq. In fact one of the early shots was taken at the Hangman’s Tree Bar in Placerville, as the television reported that the U.S. was invading Iraq. In the window of the bar was a wanted poster and it said “wanted dead or alive,” very much in the keeping of the Wild West imagery. But it had Osama Bin Laden on it. Inside the bar, right above the juke box was a branch, a paper machete branch sticking out of the wall where the original hang tree had stood. It

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had a little doll dressed like Osama Bin Laden hanging from it. So that was the historical context in which it began. Then, if you remember, there were also many debates about building the wall between Mexico and the United States. And this was also part of the reason for doing the project. At the time I was thinking really specifically about U.S.-Mexico relations and the treatment of Mexican Americans in the United States today. The project was just intended to link that history to a larger history that is also not very well known, at the time. These issues are always around in the press, but never really get addressed very deeply, as we can see from our lack of immigration reform. EM: My last question is almost returning to identity. When I first saw your work it was at Phantom Sightings which was a collective show of Chicano and Chicana artists that don’t represent their identity very specifically within their work. How do you negotiate your identity, especially as we find ourselves in this post-identity politics moment, perhaps post-Chicano moment? KGD: Of course I was thrilled to be included. And I felt that the project I did was a good match for the kinds of questions that the show was trying to raise. But I know that Rita Gonzales, one of the three curators, had been very interested in trying to raise some of these questions and to move the conversation in a different direction. From my perspective, I was not in Los Angeles, or even an artist at the time of the Chicano Art movement. So, there’s a little bit of a generational question there. I arrived in Los Angeles in the middle of the nineties, so that is when I entered into the scene, and got to meet some of the more historic figures. Part of the question is going to be historical in the sense of whether people make other counter arguments. I noticed in the press that Los Angeles was much more open to the kind of argument she was making than New York. So this is something that we find as an artist as well. Some people will find one’s approach interesting and others will find it deeply uninteresting. JM: One very last question, what are you working on right now and can you tell us about your most recent body of work? KGD: Next week I have a show opening of the new work which is entitled, Profiled, at Las Cienegas Projects here in Los Angeles. Different aspects of that project will also be included in an upcoming show in May at the Barns-

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dall Art Park, which is part of the COLA Exhibition, which is funded by the Department of Cultural Affairs. I’m also doing an artist’s book, which is being published by LACMA and will be out in June. The entire project has something like seven thousand images in it so far. Many of these are just studies from the larger project. And, yes, I think that’s the main thing. I would say that the project is considering the creation, not only of the idea of race, or racial difference, but also the creation of whiteness. I’ve been looking at a lot of sculptures and early representations of race, and trying to think about historic canons of beauty and their relationship to questions of morality. For the project, I’ve photographed in The Bode Museum in Berlin, Park Sanssouci in Potsdam, L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, The Field Museum in Chicago, at The Museum of Man in San Diego, and a number of other museums, including The Getty and The Getty Villa. The work is ongoing and I will be shooting some more this summer as well. EM: Thank you very much Ken for sitting down and talking with us today. KGD: Thank you.

The Absence Becomes the Presence: Contextualizing the “Compton Cookout” in Histories of Racial Violence

Tania Nicole Jabour

On February 16, 2010, University of California, San Diego (UCSD) students threw an off-campus party called the “Compton Cookout” in mock celebration of Black History Month. The invitation promised that the party would offer a “taste of ghetto life,” with chicken, watermelon, and malt liquor. To appear “ghetto” (read: Black), men were advised to wear chains, extra large clothing, and brands like FUBU to the party. But the invitation saved the most specific instructions for how women should appear: Ghetto chicks usually have gold teeth, start fights and drama, and wear cheap clothes . . . They also have short, nappy hair . . . Ghetto chicks have a very limited vocabulary, and attempt to make up for it, by forming new words, such as ‘constipulated,’ or simply cursing persistently, or using other types of vulgarities, and making noises, such as ‘hmmg!’, or smacking their lips, and making other angry noises, grunts, and faces.1 As the excerpt of the invitation demonstrates, the students who conceived of this party relied on the most virulent racist, sexist, and classist stereo27

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types of African Americans for their “celebration.” The atrocious theme of the “Compton Cookout” and the collection of events that ensued are what the UCSD campus community generally refers to as the “racial incidents” of last year. To summarize very briefly, those “incidents” included the following: Student-of-color organizations rose up in a remarkable show of solidarity to demand that UCSD’s administration take action to create a safer learning and living environment. Students who organized or condoned the “Compton Cookout” spewed racist epithets on live student-run TV and planned a second cookout of the same name to “defend their First Amendment rights.” The incidents received national press coverage and sparked a debate in news and blog forums about race, representation, and equality. Members of the UCSD community submitted articulate statements to campus administrators (and to the press) condemning the Cookout and the structural deficits that make UCSD an unattractive, alienating, and objectifying environment for underrepresented minorities. A student hung a noose in the library. An anonymous person put a KKK-style hood on the statue of Ted Geisel on campus. There were teach-ins and teach-outs and protests and press conferences. The campus was polarized and paralyzed.2 As a graduate student and an instructor, I, like many of my peers, felt compelled to respond to the events unfolding. In addition to participating in programs related to the incidents, I held teach-ins to help my students understand, contextualize, and process what was happening on campus. During class discussions, I was deeply concerned by the level of apathy I encountered. Many of my students wondered what the big deal was: “What was all the fuss?” “It was just a stupid party.” “Why can’t everyone just get over it?” Comments like these, which I heard not just from undergraduates, but also from graduate students, professors, and staff, reflect an unwillingness — or inability — to contextualize the “Compton Cookout” in a national history of violence against and disfranchisement of racial minorities. In this short response, I use the themes of absence/presence and invisibility/visibility that Ken Gonzales-Day invokes in his interview with pros* to think through the connections between the history of lynching, Gonzales-Day’s photography, and UCSD’s racial incidents. Ultimately, I hope that Gonzales-Day’s images can generate a productive space for the campus community to consider how the invisibility of histories of racialized violence contributes to its systemic presence at UCSD and other campuses around the nation. One of my contentions is that we must approach the significance of last year’s incidents within the history of state-

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sponsored violence against and disfranchisement of people of color, which influenced (and continues to influence) not just the communities targeted, but also the discursive and material formations of the entire nation and its citizenry. But there are serious problems with asking students (or powerful administrators, or anonymous online commentators, for that matter) to historically contextualize racially loaded incidents: standard educational curriculum do not emphasize histories of violence toward racial minorities. And even if these histories are taught, the critical thinking skills required to make substantive, complex connections between the past and the present aren’t. This dilemma is apparent in the anonymous apology letter from the young woman who left the noose in Geisel Library. Characterizing the event as a “mindless act and a stupid mistake,” the student claimed that she left the noose hanging by accident and that she had never considered its connection to the racial tension on campus or to its history as a powerful symbol of violently enforced white supremacy.3 As I discovered by talking to undergraduates, many (or most?) students on this campus have little knowledge of America’s history of lynching and widespread campaigns of racial terror. Our legacies of violence against African American, Indigenous, Asian, and Latino/a communities, from the founding of this country to the contemporary moment, have been erased, obscured, or justified by dominant models of American history. These models of American history support the belief that all individuals in this country enjoy “freedom” and “equality,” while they render invisible the systemic forces that leave underrepresented groups structurally disadvantaged. Gonzales-Day voices his personal experience with this erasure when he notes that despite that he was born in this country, he didn’t know details about lynchings in the West before his research into the topic. In GonzalesDay’s interview with pros*, he shares his astonishment at the magnitude of discrimination and violence perpetrated against Mexican-Americans: I had experiences as a Mexican American in California of being racialized . . . so this history resonated deeply in my soul. I knew that there was some reason I’d been having these experiences, but I didn’t know that it traced all the way back [through] multiple generations of hatred . . . countless lives spread across the nation. I had no knowledge of that.

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Gonzales-Day goes on to describe his discovery of the fact that half a town of Mexican-Americans were murdered in Texas, and there was no specific documentation of the event. The invisibility of this history — the holes in the archives, the holes in the history books — left Gonzales-Day unable to understand his individual experiences as a racialized subject as connected to a larger narrative. Lynching, the racialized violence that Gonzales-Day specifically explores in his work, has a complex and multifaceted history. Lynching was once a non-lethal form of “frontier justice” as settlers were expanding the borders of the nation westward in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By the late nineteenth century, however, lynching became a systemic and lethal way to stabilize race, gender, and class identities. The majority of lynchings were perpetrated against African American males in the South, roughly between 1890-1940.4 But as Gonzales-Day and other historians have revealed, Caucasians, Chinese immigrants, Native Americans, and Latinos were all subjected to lynching in the Midwest, Southwest, and Pacific Northwest as well. Lynchings were foremost a public spectacle predicated upon the violent destruction of the racialized body juxtaposed against the integrity and mastery of the white bodies in the audience.5 Alison Piepmeier argues that the ritual of lynching enacted national discourses of citizenship predicated upon the conception that certain bodies belonged while others were cast as inhuman, ineligible for citizenship, and therefore unbelonging.6 Photographs of lynchings played an important role in this process of determining which bodies did and did not belong in the nation. In the late nineteenth century, when lynchings were occurring most frequently, photographs were widely presumed to capture evidentiary truths and document an objective reality.7 For example, this was the era that photographic evidence was first used in court proceedings — a photograph was assumed to be absolute proof.8 While lynchings were importantly performed outside of the legal system (a person was condemned to death for an alleged crime, typically with no proof, no court proceedings to determine guilt, and no formal conviction), popular sentiment depicted the brutal rituals as enactments of “justice” served against a “criminal” body. The photographs of lynching scenes formalized and documented the event, and the photographs, in turn, had a performative effect: the murder was legitimated by virtue of its documentation. In other words, the construct of the lynching photograph — that of the documentation of the execution of a “criminal”—offered “proof ” that the hanging body in the image was indeed that of a criminal.

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As Amy Louise Wood argues in Lynching and Spectacle, lynching photographs helped to consolidate white group identity against a perceived racialized threat. The presence of the supposedly savage criminal in the foreground of the photograph also served as “proof ” of the rationality and civility of the white lynch mob. For their powerful role in creating group identities, lynching photographs might best be analyzed alongside other late nineteenth and early twentieth century racialized imagery: anthropological photographs of “foreign” peoples, mug shots of criminals, and widely circulated images of racist stereotypes in popular periodicals. All of these representations participated in the formation of institutions (schools, museums, courts, prisons), and the development of the white middle class, who came to view itself in contrast to the presence of the objectified “Other” in the image. In Erased Lynching and Hang Trees, Gonzales-Day erases the objectified “Other,” which powerfully shifts the representational force of lynching to render the racialized violence present and visible. For Hang Trees, Gonzales-Day photographed sites in the Western United States where lynchings occurred; the old trees, haunting and gorgeous in his landscape portraits, stand as testaments, unwilling participants in an invisible — yet somehow palpable — legacy of violence. In Erased Lynching, Gonzales-Day edits old photographs of lynchings in the West to remove the hanging body, leaving the rest of the scene eerily frozen and exposed for the contemporary viewer. We see the perpetrators, the onlookers, the setting, and the phone pole or branch; but Gonzales-Day renders the rope or chain and the victim invisible. As Gonzales-Day articulates in his interview with pros*, the absence in the images becomes the presence. By refusing to display the victim, Gonzales-Day alters the representational framework to create space for a consideration of who perpetrated the violence, what purpose the violence served, and why that violence is meaningful today. Art critic Holland Cotter writes, The effect (of the erased bodies) is very different from looking at the horrific unaltered pictures, where the victims continue to be exposed and shamed as objects of casual spectatorship, exactly as their killers intended. Mr. Gonzales-Day’s work throws the emphasis on the spectators themselves and makes hard lines between then and now, them and us, difficult to draw.9

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In light of the fact that lynching has been erased from the dominant narrative of American history, Gonzales-Day’s images bear testimony to the fact that lynchings happened: they make that history present today. Yet rather than fetishize and perpetuate the victimization of the hanging “savage,” Gonzales-Day’s focus on the spectators in Erased Lynching shifts the discourse of savagery to the lynch mob. Gonzales-Day intervenes in what Amy Louise Wood describes as the consolidation of white group identity against a racialized threat. By erasing the so-called “racialized threat” and instead revealing the threat that lynch mobs posed to the life and liberty of countless racialized subjects, Gonzales-Day’s work subtly suggests that complicity with racial violence threatens our national values of justice and equality for all. Furthermore, Gonzales-Day puts his audience in the uncomfortable position of being lynching spectators themselves. As viewers of GonzalesDay’s images work through the history of what they’re looking at, they might ask themselves if and how they’re a part of the legacy of racialized violence that his images recall. What becomes visible when Gonzales-Day, to echo Cotter’s assertion, blurs the lines between now and then? What is revealed when we refuse to depict the “Compton Cookout” as “just a party” and place it in it the context of histories of racialized violence? We can see that the “Compton Cookout” relies on and perpetuates the very representations of racialized “Others” that led to and justified lynchings. The concept of dressing up as “Black” links to mid-nineteenth century practices of blackface minstrelsy, wherein white performers “blackened” their bodies and acted out derogatory stereotypes of African American culture for popular entertainment. Blackface minstrelsy offered white performers the opportunity to experience a transgressive racial identity while they exercised possession of and mastery over that racial identity.10 Additionally, the part of the “Compton Cookout” invitation devoted to “Ghetto Chicks” subtly cites early anthropological discourses about the animalistic savagery of African Americans with its descriptions of smacking lips and grunting sounds from so-called “Ghetto Chicks.” The depictions of African American women as cheap and distasteful connect to long-enduring representations of Black women as prostitutes, which were frequently invoked to justify sexual violence against them. Overall, representations of racialized “Others” as stupid, dirty, criminal, and subhuman directly connects to long-enduring and varied campaigns of racialized violence against them, of which lynching was only a part.

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Perhaps the students who hold “Compton Cookouts” and leave nooses in libraries on campuses across the nation don’t know the histories of racialized violence to which their actions connect and perpetuate. There’s a tricky dynamic with derogatory representations of racial minorities: the stereotypes are widely known, but the histories from which those stereotypes originate aren’t widely known. My research into lynching spectacles in the late nineteenth century has radically transformed my pedagogy, as I have become convinced that the students I teach need to not only know about that violence, but also possess the skills to analyze, contextualize, and to trace its resonances into the present day, even into their own lives. Similarly, as Gonzales-Day notes, his Erased Lynching and Hang Trees series came out of his historical research, which left him looking at lynching photographs every day. That experience compelled him to formulate a critical response to and engagement with the significance of that history in our current moment. I hope the students who wondered what was the “big deal” with the “Compton Cookout” wander into Gonzales-Day’s exhibit of Erased Lynching and Hang Trees at UCSD. I hope they have the critical thinking skills to work through the connections between Gonzales-Day’s images and UCSD’s “racial incidents.” And I hope that critical interventions such as Gonzales-Day’s continue the important work of making our nation’s histories of racialized violence both visible and present. Notes: 1 “Fraternity Mocks Black History Month With ‘Compton Cookout,’” KTLA News, February 18, 2010. 2 This summary of events, of course, is not comprehensive, nor does it capture the complexity of the discourses that circulated about the events. For an excellent archive of information about and responses to the “racial incidents” at UCSD, please see the wordpress. com blog titled Stop the Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia at UC San Diego (stopracismucsd.wordpress.com). The blog, which is updated regularly with ongoing issues related to social justice and the UCSD community, contains an archive of photographs, videos, news, and letters from professors, administrators, graduate students, and undergrads in response to the incidents. 3 Steve Schmidt, “Student: Noose in UCSD Library a ‘Stupid Mistake,’” Sign On San Diego, March 2, 2010. 4 James Allen, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 2000). 5 Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 6 Alison Piepmeier, Out in Public: Configurations of Women’s Bodies in Nineteenth Century America (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 130.

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7 John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 8 Ibid. 9 Holland Cotter, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Art in Review; Ken Gonzales-Day,â&#x20AC;? The New York Times, September 22, 2006. 10 Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

An Alphabet for Lynching Crystal Z. Campbell

A is for Archive. She is studying to become a doctor. There are no doctors in her family. It is the dream of her parents. It is becoming hers. It is becoming of her. B is for Beauty. At your university, you come across an exhibit of photographs in the library called Hidden Faces of La Jolla. For the first time since you started school here, you are caught slightly off guard. You scan the black faces in the photos alongside the scribbly text and wonder why this is news. One of your professors is black. And what about the woman that smiles at you in the parking office. And the college, the college named forâ&#x20AC;Ś C is for Coon. She has little time for parties. Today is the exception. She closes her Organic Chemistry book and logs in to Facebook. D is for Delay. You can hardly wait. You have never been to Compton but you have black friends. Tonight you will cover your face with burnt cork and brag about the size of your member while watermelon juice dribbles from your gold grill. You will tell everyone how much you enjoy drinking purple Kool-Aid from a plastic red cup. E is for Erasure. She tells her parents she is getting used to it there. She remembers to smile at snide remarks. She bites her tongue often. She cannot afford to fail.

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F is for Form. You did not plan the party. You and everyone else know it was just good, clean fun. G is for Ghetto. She pauses when she hears this word. She knows it is not intended to be a compliment. H is for History. You are not sure why your fraternity is under fire. Especially when no one was hurt. I is for Incognito. A noose is found within the Brutalist architecture of the main library. She is oddly comforted. J is for Justice. On your way to class, you walk past the newly renovated Price Center. You notice the sea of black faces congregating in your path. You wonder why they have not come together before. K is for Keloid. She stands in solidarity with people who have come to protest. She appreciates the bodies that are here merely to avoid class or to get a good story. She knows media spin relies on a critical mass. She sits in her Organic Chemistry class pondering the relevance of sublimation, reaction energy and transition states. L is for Libel. You maintain your innocence. M is for Modernity. She is the first one in her family to attend college. She finds the word nigger in a student newspaper. She learns the paper receives funding from the university. She looks up the meaning of institutional racism. N is for Null. You know the first amendment by heart. Your father is a lawyer. Your father championed Proposition 209 so everyone could have equal opportunities to advance.

P is for Punctum. You receive a text from a friend inviting you to an art show in the University Art Gallery. You see nothing more than photographs of random trees and picturesque landscapes. A photo of a small crowd standing under a utility pole leaves you confused. You do not read the wall text. Your friend tells you these trees and posts were used for lynching.

AN ALPHABET FOR LYNCHING

O is for Ontology. She takes for granted the water around her. She is quick to forget that she resides on a desert oasis. She walks briskly across sacred Indian burial grounds and calls it exercise.

Q is for Quality of Living. She inhales the fresh coastal air advertised by local real estate agencies. She has a nice dorm room. She cannot complain about the weather. She eats citrus daily. She appears content. R is for Real Pain, Real Action. You decide to do a little research. You happen to be standing near someone who works at the gallery. He tells you about the people in the photographs. You are surprised to learn that some of the erased bodies may have looked identical to your own. S is for Still Life. She has seen a book of lynching postcards in the library. She would like to borrow the book. She is told the book does not circulate. She tells them she will be a doctor. She must learn to accept denial. She must learn to accept death. T is for Trauma. You are blocking this out. You know what real pain feels like. Your parents should have divorced nine years ago. You know they stayed together for you. This talk of racism and lynching is outdated. On your campus tours, you welcome prospective students to a post-racial environment. U is for Universalizable. She is a skeptic. She secretly does not believe in Western medicine. She is dedicated. She has a good memory and decent people skills. She could make informed diagnoses. She chews on raw garlic with anticipation. 37

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V is for Visibility. You feel as though you are being attacked without being called by name. W is for Witness. She does not have to see the white hood of a Klansman perched on a bronze statue to know what it means. X is for Xenolith. You affirm that you and your friends are content with the campus climate. You believe that other campuses and other options exist for the discontent. Women and people of color are strongly encouraged to apply. Y is for Yield. She will not become too distracted. She cannot change the world. She will be the first doctor in her family. Z is for Zenith. You have been trained to look ahead. You are learning to look above. You strain to look below.

Yet Still I, Still Life

Haunted by imagery of lynching for many years, Crystal Z Campbell uses art to interrogate the aesthetics of death. Yet Still I, Still Life features photographs taken prior to an outburst of racial incidents at UCSD in 2010. These images are paired with photographs staged in the aftermath. Together, the diptychs float in the crevice of lynching politics using the code of the still life while unpacking the semiotics of a noose. Campbell was a San Diego Fellow at UC-San Diego, earning her M.F.A in Visual Arts in 2010. She is currently a Van Lier Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program in Studio Art. www.crystalzcampbell.com

previous spreads: Yet Still I, Still Life (For Ms. Nelson) 2010 archival digital print copyright Crystal Z. Campbell courtesy of the artist Yet Still I, Still Life (For Ms. Lorde) 2010 archival digital print copyright Crystal Z. Campbell courtesy of the artist

Dignity and Settler Colonialism in Silent Witness: Recent Works by Ken Gonzales-Day

Stevie Ruiz

Popular cultural memory of lynching spatially has concentrated on anti-Black racism in the American South. Amateur photographers documented such acts of terrorism, circulating lynching images in the form of postcards across the United States. Lynching was a form of entertainment for middle class White familiesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;police officers, lawyers and judges included. This meant lynching was palatable for mainstream audiences, public events that were celebrated. The practice of lynching also occurred in communities throughout American West, including places such as California, New Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico Border region. Ken GonzalesDayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s two exhibitions, California Hang Trees and Erased Lynchings, document such legal violence against Mexicans, Chinese and Indigenous people in the early twentieth century. The joint installation entitled, Silent Witness: Recent Work by Ken Gonzales-Day, is an exhibition planned to open at the University of California, San Diego in March 2011. The installation chronicles a different story about the history of settler colonialism, American empire and race relations in the West. This essay analyzes a recent interview with artist Gonzales-Day detailing his vision of the exhibition as a space of political possibility. In doing so, I will examine how Chicano/a and Latino/a cultural politics historicize state sponsored violence to energize activism concerning contemporary race relations that remain unresolved, even today. 45

pros* East First Street (St. James Park), 2006 from Erased Lynching Ken Gonzales-Day light jet print courtesy of the artist

This exhibition includes a decade’s worth of Gonzales-Day’s archival photograph research on tree lynching in California. An estimated three hundred lynchings occurred in the American West—while lynching rates against Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were significantly higher than any other racialized group. It is surprising to learn, as Gonzales-Day notes in his interview, that lynching occurred in this geographical context where he grew up unfamiliar with this violent history. Indeed, Gonzales-Day interweaves such an approach in Erased Lynching to catch audiences off guard by removing lynched bodies from photos. Photographed bodies in lynching postcards were removed to avoid a second form of victimization. The absence of these bodies draws attention to the crowds that rallied around lynching trees, witnesses to such violence. This approach forces audiences to question their own anticipation as to what they are bearing witness to and who they are looking for (see figure 1). Law and punishment were central to organizing social relations in the West, and still are. Lynching events were places where White fraternalism was invented, creating the uniformity of a singular American identity.1 This American identity was based on gender conforming ideologies that defined White masculinity among settler colonialists. In the American South, for example, protection of White women’s sexuality from Black men was used to justify lynching. Indeed, the prevention of interracial sex between Blacks and Whites were avenues used to preserve White supremacy. And, this discursively naturalized healthy conjugal relations as heterosexual and between sexual partners of the same race. Such terrorism waged against Mexicans and Mexican-Americans worked differently than anti-Black racism in the American South. In the West, accusations of petty larceny, theft

DIGNITY AND SETTLER COLONIALISM IN SILENT WITNESS

and vagrancy were primary reasons solicited for lynching Mexicans. This meant, capital punishment in the West required a different set of legal excuses based upon which racialized community was being targeted. The remnants of lynching trees still lie embedded in California’s landscape. Gonzales-Day documents different topographies at former lynching sites by incorporating contemporary still photographs in California Hanging Trees. Stereographs highlight how these ecologies of violence remain unmarked at geographical locations represented as benign, even beautiful. Indeed this installation provokes participants to connect histories of settler colonialism with racial violence today. This technique plays with temporality in a way that forfeits any suggestion that photographs taken at lynching sites remain anachronistic—against the relevance of modern time. Instead, Gonzales-Day’s documentation of barren landscapes –or, as he notes, empty spaces—are the places that continue to go unrecognized. Empty space was the geographical dimension classified by European settler colonialists as justification to remove Indigenous people from land-terra nullius. Such a legal category was used by settler colonizers in the Americas to gain access to land--under the protection of law. GonzalesDay’s exhibition on empty spaces presents them as memories that facilitate dialogue about the unevenness of capital punishment enacted by law enforcement--but also how annexation of land was critical in the institution of racial hierarchies. These racial hierarchies were reinforced through lynching. Silent Witness is an example of how an artistic practice makes use of contested publics. Dignity denied in lynching practices is still unrecognizable in California’s built environment. This means that barren landscapes that remain unmarked can become transformative sites for political action. Chicana/o and Latina/o activists have incorporated memories of the dead to politicize such public spaces. For example, activist mothers of murdered and missing women in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juárez have taken over public spaces with memorial installations throughout the city.2 Such performances of memory include reenactments and the incorporation of ceremony to remember the dead. Such a technique has been critical in transformative politics throughout the Americas.3 This activism inspired a generation of Latina/o artists and intellectuals to write about artistic practices incorporated by mother activists in Latin America (see figure 2). Artist Judy Baca, for instance, has incorporated still installation photography of murdered and missing women in her exhibition, Hijas de Juárez (Daughters of Juárez) in order to rally attention for the plight

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of gendered and racial violence. This instillation’s art has been useful for activist-artists and mothers to create solidarity networks in the fight to redress impunity and restore their daughter’s dignity In the 1990s—Indigenous social movements---such as the Zapatista uprising in Mexico drew international attention to the plight of Indigenous peoples in the Americas.4 In this conflict for human rights, Zapatistas occupied public space and used cultural aesthetics such as virtual sit-ins [cyber warfare]. According to the Zapatistas, this fight was over the basic recognition of dignity--- human rights. The occupation of semi-publics was an expression of the continuing conflict that Indigenous people have had over land rights since colonialism. The call for basic human rights ---dignidad—was recognition of the historical and continuing fight against

Figure 2: This is the site of the “Cotton Field Murders” where activist mothers installed pink and black crosses to memorialize murder and missing women in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Eight bodies were found in 2001 in this deserted lot across the street from AMAC headquarters, a United States based NGO to represent multinational corporations. Photograph taken by author. 48

DIGNITY AND SETTLER COLONIALISM IN SILENT WITNESS

colonialism by Indigenous people in Mexico. And, this is why artistic practices such as Gonzales-Day’s Silent Witness is significant to how power is contested across multiple scales. Gonzales-Day’s work spatially carves out publics to contest long-standing histories of settler colonialism and racism. Yes, the specificity of learning about lynching is significant, but the more critical message is to understand what you should do with this knowledge. Knowledge from the bottom up, the dark side of history—the work we do in Ethnic Studies--is shaped by futuristic possibilities. Such futures are what give hope and energy to social movements like the Zapatista uprising and mother activism in Mexico. The significance of Silent Witness is that it energizes collective action that resonates beyond mere intellectualism. Gonzales-Day’s work matters because it creates the vocabulary to envision a future world that redresses dignity and basic human rights. Out of this space of political possibility we undo the work of settler colonialism and White supremacy.

Notes: 1 Ken Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West: 1850 - 1923. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 2 Stevie Ruiz, “Memory, Borderspace, and the Gendered Politics of Representation” (M.A. Thesis at San Diego State University, 2007). 3 Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the Mexico–U.S. Borderlands, (New York: New York University Press, 2008). 4 For more information about conceptions of dignity---see Luis Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009) and Gustavo Esteva, “Celebration of Zapatismo” in Humboldt Social Journal 1 (2005), 139.

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Erased Words Omar Pimienta ya sé que con tus propias hojas secas se han nutrido de nuevo tus raíces. Antonio Machado Poemas del Árbol.

KEN: That’s a very good question. The majority of images

postcards bought and sold

the lynching images of course look at another history images I was encountering every day respond to this thirty-five millimeter starting to look generally imagined the two were always meant to be together there might be more of one or the other and then ask me, tell me how I might fit into that emphasis Sometimes it’s good fortune to reformulate its self different responses. upset to see all the bodies fact all been erased postcard size emotional strength unconscious memory perception is certainly an interesting sign

indexical journey derived from case histories more information alert there’s more information What was the name of the book, the lynching book? …I’ll just start over

ERASED WORDS

the Hang Trees People are often not really that beautiful that is used perhaps too much. someone will come up with a better term in the future

that’s why the book exists speech the only place where you find some examples sites that I still want to go to I at least went out looking for trying to resist desire to re-victimize statistics or numbers or whatever narratives for each large question the simple answer. the very quick and truthful answer a book Its statement It’s a very long one-page two-page short statement This project those other projects to express all physical space I infinite number of rooms of wall space to go back though an image of a tree at nighttime the tree except the book three bodies hanging from a book already deceptive the fabric of it itself the final conclusion of the previous chapters the end of a book Yes, I’ve had a lot of… and so if I had to…write certain questionings denied or just not articulated The question of identity is… a vigilance committee and a lynching what it was to be American going to be, indeed, not just a site citizenship of this new notion of nation California went backwards articulated and there’s been no great text or series of texts beauty is a wonderful tool an institution in real time 51

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And so even the bent corner or this coffee stain the notion of the window is…is pretty much gone or…or has been Dare we say that? I don’t know. I wonder if we can… pose certain questions if that happens I feel that I’ve been successful I know that that won’t happen with everyone And… that’s an invitation extended there’s certain pathways that might be enjoyable for them vistas that they might like to see. Yes. No, I think, you know, They are all valid all enticing Explore limits photographic representation But that was one…one idea I had didn’t really answer the questions I take responsibility images that I’ve produced context in which I presented them No, no, no. It’s not a secret I love looking at objects the simplest form of an archive as simple as the categories themselves but that…that to be aesthetic is not, is not a moral… the mess begins to explode because then we… aestheticized at some point in the future don’t know relationship is the place And so there’s that challenge I embedded into the surface of the sculptures walk past portrait busts Profiled images as being about race or being racialized your visual archive or your memory as being And that they can’t be undone I was trying to ask knowledge of this history or could speak to it

That is a great question there’s no way of knowing for sure

There’s no clues necessarily to find

ERASED WORDS

Mexicans killed, you know, women, children, everyone I’m just going to drive over there. drive and look. And I would… Maybe that’s a project we should work on

In other cases the trees are still standing. people make other counter arguments will probably refine their understanding of the term and refine the… the notions of these communities. Department of Cultural Affairs. canons of beauty and questions of morality Thank you.

Rare Properties Shane Anderson My work over the past few years has focused on issues related to landscape. I have been investigating the ways in which we invest in and occupy space, trying to gain a deeper understanding of how landscape can function as an index of the relationships between social groups and their environments. Landscape representations are attitudes of awareness, and how we interpret them confronts us with shared visions of ourselves and of the world. Rare Properties is a body of photographic work that emerged from an investigation into the landscape and wilderness representations that I encountered during a series of travels through towns across the American West. The project focuses primarily on locations that have become artistic centers for those whose work depicts the surrounding wilderness. In resort towns like Jackson Hole and Park City, as well as more urban areas like Santa Fe, the western art scene is very active. Hundreds of art galleries offer works that nostalgically depict the landscapes, wildlife, and personages of mythical frontier life. The mythology is potent, even when we realize how delusional it is. The same mythological impulse that animates the galleries lining the streets of resort towns is suffocating the wilderness that it so blithely stands in for. Paintings of bears, mountain lions, and sweeping vistas celebrate the world that is being destroyed by the ski villages and condos that bring patrons to these galleries. The destructive element of this mythological impulse carries within it the legacy of a perilous revisionism that erases the violence, complexity and banality of history, leaving in its place the blind iconicity of a narcissistic amnesia. This displacement is as much about local economies of land development as it is about constructions of national identity. Rare Properties attempts to re-frame the mythical potency of these images by picturing them against the far less mythologically resilient filigree of incidental details that constitute the ideological framework of their distribution and consumption.

previous spreads: Mountain Trails Gallery, 2009 copyright Shane Anderson courtesy of the artist Jackson, Wyoming, 2008 copyright Shane Anderson courtesy of the artist Wildlife Crossing Construction, Highway 93, 2009 copyright Shane Anderson courtesy of the artist House of Representatives, Helena, Montana, 2008 copyright Shane Anderson courtesy of the artist

Jackson, Wyoming, 2008 copyright Shane Anderson courtesy of the artist Wildlife Diorama, Nine Pipes Museum of Early Montana, 2010 copyright Shane Anderson courtesy of the artist Rancho Bernardo, California 2010 copyright Shane Anderson courtesy of the artist

Ken Gonzales-Day: The Metaphysics of Lynching and the Formation of Identity

Diana McClure

Art has the potential to act as a point of departure for the viewer who chooses to be a co-creator in The Artist’s intention – the transformation of consciousness. Artists ask questions, process questions, and explore questions. They generate, invigorate, and interrogate perspectives. Aesthetic, political, historical, and ultimately metaphysical in the case of Ken Gonzales-Day’s recent bodies of work: Erased Lynching, Hang Trees, and the book Lynching in the West, 1850-1935. Movement is an essential ingredient of art. The object may remain still or the performance may end, but its energetic essence lives on in work imbued with that invisible power we all know but can’t name, a power that alters psychic terrain by force, subtle penetration, pleasure, or otherwise. It is this idea of the movement of consciousness that Gonzales-Day invokes as a catalyst for change through his resuscitation of America’s landscape of lynching. The work creates an immaterial link between past, present, and future through visual and textual identification with nature, race, violence, memory, the historical record, and technology.

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Part I: Body In Gonzales-Dayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Erased Lynching series another perspective on the history of lynching in the United States of America is engaged. With a focus on this history as it unfolded in the west among non-Africans, Anglos and Mexicans primarily, the work offers an exploration of identity through the body and the nature of man. Starting with the title Erased Lynching, the removal of lynched bodies from historical images via contemporary technological tools splinters memory and perception in multiple ways. The photograph becomes a subjective object, the focus of contemplation shifts, and the link between truth and power is destabilized. The artist acts as an information architect and the dissemination of information becomes a major player in identity formation. Through this alteration psychic pain takes a deep languorous breath and alternative perspectives begin to offer healing balm. The focus of the history of lynching shifts from the suffering, violence, and physical power dynamics between men, to the landscape of the mind and the origins of its power to act. Gonzales-Day employs an exploration of spatial knowledge in his choice of photography as a medium. The physicality of photographs, as alterable objects that he installs within space in numerous ways, detangles the viewer from a 2D engagement with framed images into a 3D world of expansive murals and installations. His arrangement of the work in different formations in various galleries forces viewers to move around the work and to understand it as something with weight, mass, dimension. This practice levitates the subject matter of bodies in agreement as spectators and their physicality beyond time and into space. It is simultaneously of the past but resonating in the present with implications for the future. This time collapse is where the photograph takes the viewer into 4D consciousness, where there is no polarity. The idea of absence is central to both the Erased Lynching and Hang Trees seriesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. In the former, the lynched body is absent, and in the latter the lynched body and the spectators are absent. Only the tree in a landscape remains constant in both series, collapsing lynched body and spectator into the category of human being in relation to landscape. This absence taken in conjunction with the movement into a 4D continuum of consciousness that the photograph, as object and substantive content, invoke, folds back onto the viewer. With the tree in a landscape as their link, the contemplation of the mindset of each spectator, or lynched body, across time and its

Part II: Mind Gonzales-Day’s production of an artist’s statement as a book, Lynching in the West, 1850-1935, designed to meet academia’s legitimization standards––factual research or rather domains of agreement––speaks to the nature of mind, intellect, thoughts, and facts as absolute identity markers. Conversely, his visual statements reveal the fluidity, subjectivity, and mobility of mind, intellect, thoughts, and facts. Although 2D artwork appears static and 3D books appear definitive through articulation in material form, in both cases content stimulates mental movement engaging with an evolving stream of consciousness for artist and viewer. This play between material structure, immaterial thought movement, and action is central to Gonzales-Day’s photographic and literary body of work as a whole. Gonzales-Day is able to engage the vitality of nothingness––and its sisters, empty space, the why region, or 4D consciousness sans absolutes–– by entering into the academic process as an artist. Within that structure of process––primary resource research, response to the existing canon of literature on the topic, footnotes, and claiming a position––the academic becomes a tool for a visual entryway into a transformation of consciousness. Excavation of the unknown, and the synergy between the visual object and written word, function as a metaphor for the invisible link between body and mind that is at the heart of the Erased Lynching and Hang Trees series. Facts and thought streams, which, when stagnant, create some sense of security, order, or structure, delineate a historical record from which

THE METAPHYSICS OF LYNCHING AND THE FORMATION OF IDENTITY

relationship to the viewer’s mind is now the focus of consciousness. The degrees of absence in each series also imply mystery––the why of the matter. An answer that the mind contemplates, formulates, and then resonates in a process that mirrors the minds of the inhabitants of time within both the present moment and the historical photograph. When the focus on physical violence between bodies, and a subsequent visceral reaction, is removed from the equation, the focus moves to physical motivation––the rationale that led to action. What is not seen takes center stage in the way that Ghandi and Martin Luther King used non-violence to penetrate to the root of a matter. Or, in the way that Zen Buddhism or minimalism speak to what lies, and is actually active and full of vitality, in empty space. By highlighting the contrast between violence and non-violence the discussion moves to why? And, why is a question of the mind. The pre-meditation chamber of action.

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people can pick and choose aspects of their identity. For the surface culture surfer, whether at the level of the academy or popular culture, identity becomes grounded in a set of parameters from which all action and reaction takes their directives. The reality of the unknown is conveniently ignored.1 Gonzales-Day’s process for this project included a review of 21 years of microfiche film, inch by inch, day by day, of California newspapers from 1849-1870 to locate clues to stories on lynching; subsequent road trips to potential lynching sites of 354 cases; and a thorough perusal of the historical record of the history of lynching in America, which primarily focuses on the south, midwest, and Africans in America. Narrative details of each of the 35 cases that did not get published in the book are in the archives at Claremont College. Gonzales-Day’s disruption of mind identities through the generation of visible thought streams––Mexicans and Anglos as lynched bodies, the malaise of the spectator’s mind, and land as a conduit of consciousness–– creates a tectonic shift in identity as it relates to the racial body in America and how identity is framed in general. The black body, the black man, is no longer as fixed as the quintessential symbol of American psychosis and violence against the body. He is liberated––slightly––from a fixed identity point picked out of the historical record. The problem of human-to-human violence couched in identity politics is also jerked from a restrictive analysis grounded in the physicality of the body and race/ethnicity to one that confronts the nature of the human mind. What makes this liberation powerful is when that shift finds a presence in popular culture, the site of mass mind formation––collective consciousness, collective action. The crowd. The spectator. Gonzales-Day’s insertion of this body of work into public landscapes of the mind and popular culture via the placement of his photographic images on billboards, the exhibition of his visual work, and the availability of his written text, is a gesture toward the transformation of consciousness central to The Artist’s intent. And, a gesture available to all who have the will to engage in a more intricate exploration of visual culture and the mind as tools for the benevolent evolution of human relations. Gonzales-Day’s use of technology speaks to its neutral position as a tool and creation of the mind and body of man. Microfiche, Photoshop, billboards, cameras all become extensions of how the operator perceives and responds to his/her own identity. For the Hang Trees series, which captures images of possible lynching sites found in the research, GonzalesDay’s choice to use a large format Deardorff camera initiates a technologi-

THE METAPHYSICS OF LYNCHING AND THE FORMATION OF IDENTITY

cal conversation. In dialogue with famed landscape photographers of the west, Adams and Weston, the use of the Deardorff, a tool of the masters, is engaged for a different telling of the spirit of the landscape. A contemporary story unfolds based on the mental and physical identity of the artist while a historical story unfolds through content and the land as witness to the mind action of man. Technology is used to facilitate the storytelling of this continuum of consciousness. One that twists and turns as memory is reflected back on itself through points of identity formation in the historical record that engage what is unseen, but embedded in the land, beyond any visible body or frame of mind.

With none but the omni-present stars to witness, 2002 from Hang Trees Ken Gonzales-Day chromogenic print courtesy of the artist

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Part III: Spirit The Hang Trees series confronts identity as the body and/or mind by offering a third perspective: identity as the movement of consciousness. The consciousness transformed into thought that inspired site-specific executions of bodies in conversation with groups of bodies as spectators, remains in certain landscapes, identifiable by the inner drive of the artist, his use of the historical record, technological tools, and a knowing that is absent in material form. Gonzales-Day chose to not fill his book or his photographs with images of lynching. A substantial record of the visuals of the practice already exists. Sensitive to the powerful impressions that these images can leave, his work creates space for other impressions: impressions of the spectator and his mind in Erased Lynching, and impressions of absence and its metaphysical implications in Hang Trees. The consideration of absence is isolated in Hang Trees through the removal of spectators and the contemporary nature of the photographs. The existence of time and space become implicated in absence. The historical record implies that these incidents occurred in a certain time and space––but, a location that is ambiguous due to holes in the historical record. Another way of knowing comes up for consideration. The landscape as a site of consciousness transformation where the viewer/artist enters into a dialogue with the knowing of the past, the knowing of the now, and their relationship through an invisible web of consciousness.2 A network of energy that morphs into thought streams and ideas that dictate action in the body, retraces its steps back into consciousness, transforms into new thought forms for new generations, and so on. Trauma, emotions, healing, a transformative process that is at the heart of the story of lynching as we know it, must engage the mind and its transformation in order to take place. A certain sense of self emerges that lies beneath these experiences and permeates time and space. Gonzales-Day’s deep engagement of points within a particular time space continuum become emblematic and suggestive of a larger universe of identity that extends beyond any two points in time. A loosening of identity grounded in stagnated thought streams called facts creates a certain inner spaciousness. Gonzales-Day’s loosening of the mind through this work, which allows the heart to breath and experience a return to its full nature, is extremely important.3 For all those who relate in some way to the history of lynching in America and beyond, his journey can act as point of departure for movement past identity parameters that seek their definition through opposi-

Notes: 1 In general, meditation is about quieting the mind, becoming a witness to our thoughts, their movement, and their impermanence - becoming a student of the self and the unknown. In this process the idea of an absolute identity in terms of race, gender, class, emotions, or memory slowly dissolves. See: Shundo Aoyama, Zen Seeds: Reflections of a Female Priest, (Tokyo: Kosei Publishing Co.,1990). 2 See Sri Aurobindo, The Mother (Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1972). Aurobindo’s body of work as a thinker, activist and mystic, worked to integrate the West’s focus on the perfection of the physical, material and mental areas of human life with the ancient and evolving spiritual and philosophical canon of the East. 3 Gonzales-Day’s work is important because it shakes up memory, and thus attachment to memory, calling into question the building of the present moment on incomplete, unhealthy or false memory. See: Guru Nitya Chaitanya, That Alone: The Core of Wisdom, (New Delhi: DK Print World LTD, 2003).

THE METAPHYSICS OF LYNCHING AND THE FORMATION OF IDENTITY

tion and stagnation - stifled identity formations being a source of battles between absolutes. When the movement of consciousness breathes life into thought forms, alternative ways of knowing enter into an integrated and reflective consideration of action. Identity becomes less of a battleground and the fluidity of humanity’s movement can invigorate an optimal experience of relationships with the material world, the body, and its creations.