THEY CAME OUT of nowhere, Philip Guston’s Klan paintings, which is to say through a channel that opened up in his memory, connecting the violent year of 1968 with the agitations of his youth. How could you keep painting abstractions, walls of exquisitely distressed paint, when there were bleeding bodies in the streets? It had been a year of assassinations, first Martin Luther King in April and then Robert Kennedy in June. In August, like everybody else, he was watching the Democratic Convention on TV: ten thousand protestors, mostly peaceful, mostly young, getting beaten down with billy clubs by twenty-three thousand police and National Guardsmen. It made a hole in him, and out of the hole the hooded men appeared.
Guston painted his first Klansman that year; his first, that is, since the 1920s, when he’d had a series of run-ins with the Klan in Los Angeles, in their guise as strike-breakers. In response he rendered the Klansmen as evil incarnate, drawn and serious, a lynched man hanging from a crooked tree evidence of their hellish work.
In the 1960s paintings, the Klansmen were cartoonish, worn out: a tired, evil joke. ‘I felt, like everybody, disturbed about everything to such an extent that I didn’t want to exclude it from the studio, from what I did,’ he explained in 1974. ‘I conceived of these figures as very pathetic, tattered, full of seams. I don’t know how to explain it. Something pathetic about brutality, and comic also.’ He gave them cigars to smoke, cartoon cars to drive. Sometimes their robes were splattered in blood. Sometimes they painted themselves, puffing on a cigarette as they rendered the blanks of their eyeholes.
This time, Guston wasn’t looking from afar. This time, he was inside the frame. Someone, some bozo, was underneath the hood, peering out at the world through slits in cloth. You have to bear witness, Guston kept saying, but he meant more than merely watching events unfold. He wanted to know what it felt like to be evil, to live with it on a daily basis. In his studio in 1970 he scribbled notes on a yellow legal pad: ‘What do they do afterwards? Or before? Smoke, drink, sit around in their rooms (light bulbs, furniture, wooden floor), patrol empty streets; dumb, melancholy, guilty, fearful, remorseful, reassuring one another?’ Reading this calls to mind the poet Claudia Rankine’s Racial Imaginary Institute, conceived of in 2016 to investigate the ways in which the structure of white supremacy in American society influences our culture. Guston knew who the victims were. Like Rankine, what he wanted to know was who did it.
At around the same time, his canvases were filling up with objects, what he called tangibalia. Some of it was comic detritus, sandwiches and beer bottles, and some of it was sinister, disquieting, bizarrely upsetting. There were light bulbs dangling from cords, falling bricks; there were piles of bodies, piles of limbs, piles of discarded jackets and shoes. Guston knew exactly what the fruits of those night drives were. He knew the end game of white supremacy. It wasn’t necessary to show the lynched body, just the post-match litter, the possessions after the people had been dispensed with.
Inevitably I thought of those paintings as I watched footage of the Klan marching through Charlottesville and Boston, anonymous, impervious, refusing to face up to their cruelties and crimes. Old ghosts on parade, immune to reason, back in the limelight, their fists like pink hams.
On 23 October 1968, Guston was in conversation with Morton Feldman at the New York Studio School. He’d been thinking a lot about the Holocaust, he said, especially about the extermination camp Treblinka. It worked, the mass killing, he told Feldman, because the Nazis deliberately induced numbness on both sides, in the victims and also the tormentors. And yet, a small group of prisoners had managed to escape. ‘Imagine what a process it was to unnumb yourself, to see it totally and to bear witness,’ he said. ‘That’s the only reason to be an artist: to escape, to bear witness to this.’ He didn’t mean escape as in run away from reality. He meant act. He meant unspring the trap. He meant cut through the wire.