welcome, double agent

It’s 1939. Outside of the night kitchen, flows the Rio Grande. Inside, a slender, black-haired woman is standing with her back to the viewer. This turning away from the camera provides an opportunity for her to pass. She passes into any race or combination there of. But perhaps more salient is that she turns away from the photographer. His name is Russell Lee and he is on the government payroll. As part of the Works Progress Administration, it’s his job to document the tenement farmer in Southern Texas. And his object? She steps to the side.

And so, where then is our gaze forced to land? Mine remains on the reflection of the naked bulb on the window. I don’t go so far as to identify it- but let it linger somewhere between electric artifact, another white excess, and ball of lightening. I know it’s the punctum- that accidental field of the photo that unintentionally punctures the viewer- but to enter its vortex is a grave prospect. It would make this problematic picture an aesthetic experience, with no narrative in sight. And as much as that may pleasure my senses, I think I can do better than that.

Acting as visual editor, I selected this particular photograph for the last pages of the “Passing” issue of Women and Performance, but I never wrote about it in the accompanying text ( visual_selections_passing.doc. ) The image ‘passed over’ depicts a blindingly white kitchen and the back of a woman. The kitchen is so clean, it spooks. Here, a homely structure becomes something more akin to a kitchen’s doppelganger – a stand-in, a stage set- with disconnected plumbing. And although it feels spooked, there is no ghost; the unremitting light ensures something that is haunted by power rather than unbelievable vestiges of folklore or the human dead. The architecture of control vibrates here- even before I provide context

Let me explain what informs my reading of this picture- a picture that consciously attempts to revise the gaze of its viewer. The dirty and unruly US immigrant and its native equivalent- the sharecropper- was a type of image not only produced by 20th century newspapers and government agencies, but fixated on. However, this fixation was not static nor did it stop at seeing: to clean the poor was to control the poor. By forcing showers, shaving their hair and burning the clothes of people, clean or dirty, crossing the border (El Paso, 1910), shame became a weaponry inside and outside of gleaming facilities. Government hygiene initiatives and commercial companies joined ranks; by painting surfaces white and filling the bathroom and kitchen with, what else, white appliances, they convinced the public that they brought errant subjects closer to the right sort of whiteness (a whiteness that paradoxically controls itself and lets itself be controlled), a type of whiteness that has been historically fused with middle class aspirations.

Given this legacy of judgement and intervention , perhaps it is not so strange that the government photographer’s visual access has been limited by his object; he is shown a kitchen where only a single dish is prepared. The very absence of the remains of cooking and eating indicates that the demands of assimilation are performed and produced by the sharecropper, regardless of race. And without the visual remains of spent meals, we can hardly envision unruly bodies that get hungry, eat, and leave messes. And the woman, who refuses the camera, and we presume cleans this kitchen, uses her body and this architecture to participate in modernity’s project. She commandeers its own instruments to deflect its gaze from real people and tender interiors.

(This aesthetic organization of power, accumulated in Lee’s photograph and dependent on control, surface and lightness/whiteness, is hardly an anomaly. Moreover, it does not disappear after 1939 or 1964 or 1992; rather it is just the location that shifts. You might even frame this behavior as rhizomatic- the manner in which it travels underground and horizontally, continously propogating itself. I begin with Lee’s South Texas photograph. I close with West Texas’ Chinati Foundation. But I’m curious about all the other iterations surfacing from Del Rio to Marfa.)

So, as we were blinded by the light and the way it translates the surface of the room within Lee’s photograph, this phenomenon can be repeated, for example, when a person wanders through Donald Judd’s cavalclade of shiny boxes at the Chinati Foundation. Every milled aluminium surface reflects the vacationing spectator without any record of who repairs and maintains the work and I think many viewers seem relieved that they have found an architecture that never questions the history of the structure of looking it encourages.

So when some writers wax positive about the manner in which Judd’s work has no content and resists analysis, I’m wondering what is behind their desire for historic oblivion and the banishment of critical thinking. Is there something about the way in that which is apparently pure thing makes no claims against entitlement that is beguiling? No questions? No demands? This begins to sound like sex work in abstract – we don’t see any bodies, but we know we are using them and we’d like them to take it without a murmur of protest. By paying good money to see the pure thing, perhaps these sort of viewers believe it is thir right to pass out of a capitalist consciousness into a moment of being that seems closer to an American bastardization of transcendence. The fictions of Passing. From one race to another. One class to the next. Of passing out of responsability into a baseline rapture.

Purportedly, some of the Latina housecleaners and Latino groundskeepers responsible for the daily maintainance of the Chinati Foundation swear that the site is haunted. Its assumed they are talking about ghosts. But I pretend that ghost is just codeword for power. So instead of hearing: “I was sweeping up but suddenly I felt like I wasn’t alone. It felt like there was a ghost moving through me”; I hear: I was disturbed because I could feel power moving through me and so I left. And the leaving bit? That is pure fantasy. There are hardly any jobs in that vast desert that aren’t border patrol or ranchwork.