In reflection on his paintings depicting hooded KKK characters in various acts of simple daily life, Philip Guston noted in an interview nearly 50 years ago that, “They plan, they plot, they ride around in cars smoking cigars. We never see their acts of hatred. We never know what is in their minds. But it is clear that they are us. Our denial, our concealment.” After seeing a Guston retrospective at the Tate Modern a few years ago, and seeing the evolution of Guston from social realist to abstract expressionist to this more iconic work, it’s amazing how confrontational these works really are and were. They have often been mistaken as passive, but when Guston said of the time he made these, the 1960s onto the end of his life in the 1980s, "The war, what was happening in America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I... sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything—and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?" He was making political paintings because how could you not?
This is important to consider and understand now. How can you not make political works when the world is raging in a firestorm around you? I found myself thinking this in the midst of this wonderfully constructed exhibition, pairing one of contemporary arts most provocative and narrative artists of the 21st century, Trenton Doyle Hancock, with the works of Guston in Draw Them In, Paint Them Out at the Skirball Cultural Center. This isn’t a random pairing; Hancock’s work has been in conversation with, in dialogue, borrowing and utilizing the visual identity of Guston’s KKK characters in his own artistic language. It has often seemed to be a passing of the baton of how painting can be a discussion of time and political turmoil. It can also be an expression of how the cartoon and comic is a force for storytelling in fine art.
That is to say there is humor in the confrontation with evil. What I have always loved about Hancock and Guston’s work in conversation is that it shows how much they turn evil into slapstick comedy when it leaves the context of it’s violence and destruction. Guston would paint KKK characters driving in their cars with cigarettes looking rather banal and simply confused. This happens in Hancock’s masterwork, a comic strip presented here as an installation piece, where his Black superhero named Torpedoboy is constantly confronting Guston’s KKK characters in the most domestic of settings. They both make evil feel underprepared for their off days, but menacing when they head to work, so to speak.
Having Guston, the child of Jewish immigrants from Odessa (present-day Ukraine), and Trenton Doyle Hancock, a leading Black contemporary artist based in Houston, Texas, in dialogue for the first time feels essential as we look at the ways in which art is being pulled back from its role as pursuer of social justice and provocateur to power structures. As a white-washing begins to take place in our nation’s institutions for fear of financial and violent retribution, Hancock and the work in Draw Them In, Paint Them Out continues to explore the dual realities of why paintings can be made. —Evan Pricco
