TY - JOUR
AU - Canac,, Sandrine
AB - In the winter of 1970/1971, five galleries announced a series of exhibitions of the American Conceptual artist Robert Barry (b. 1936) by mailing invitation cards bearing the enigmatic sentence: ‘Some places to which we can come, and for a while “be free to think about what we are going to do” (Marcuse)’ (Figs 1 and 2).1 The meaning of this phrase is as elusive as its function is ambiguous. Indeed, the sentence is not the title of Barry’s show, but the first iteration of a text-piece known as the Marcuse Piece. Barry has since presented the five invitation cards together or installed the piece as a wall-text devoid of any reference to the galleries listed on the invitation cards (Fig. 3). Like much of Barry’s work, the Marcuse Piece holds a significant yet understated place in histories of Conceptual art. Critics have either alluded to the piece’s hopeful tone, which channeled the spirit of the counterculture, or dwelled upon the artist’s use of a quotation from the German philosopher and New Left theorist Herbert Marcuse.2 Such commentators often cite Barry’s Marcuse Piece as evidence of the utopian spirit of Conceptual art, which strived to make art anew and to subvert the commercial excesses of the art world by using trivial materials of little monetary value. Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Robert Barry, Marcuse Piece, 1970, offset printing on paper, size unknown. Robert Barry Papers, Teaneck, NJ. (© Robert Barry.) Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Robert Barry, Marcuse Piece, 1970, offset printing on paper, size unknown. Robert Barry Papers, Teaneck, NJ. (© Robert Barry.) Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Robert Barry, Marcuse Piece, 1970, offset printing on paper, size unknown. Robert Barry Papers, Teaneck, NJ. (© Robert Barry.) Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Robert Barry, Marcuse Piece, 1970, offset printing on paper, size unknown. Robert Barry Papers, Teaneck, NJ. (© Robert Barry.) Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Robert Barry, Marcuse Piece, 1970–1988. Exhibition view from ‘Art Conceptual I’ at the CAPC Musée d'Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, France (7 October – 27 November 1988). (Photograph by Frédéric Delpech.) Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Robert Barry, Marcuse Piece, 1970–1988. Exhibition view from ‘Art Conceptual I’ at the CAPC Musée d'Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, France (7 October – 27 November 1988). (Photograph by Frédéric Delpech.) This article does not contend with existing critiques of the Marcuse Piece, or with the piece’s relation to canonical readings of Conceptual art. Instead, this article focuses on a series of silences – in Marcuse’s text, in Barry’s work, and in the Marcuse Piece’s interpretations. While different in nature, these silences have all played significant roles in obscuring the crucial intellectual contexts on which Barry’s piece is predicated. In what follows, I argue that Angela Davis is the unacknowledged speaker of the quotation Barry excerpted from Marcuse’s 1969 Essay on Liberation. I also argue that other prominent philosophers have erased the intellectual contributions of contemporary Black militants in texts that otherwise condemn various forms of systemic oppression and praise revolutionary struggles. To sustain such a claim, I will briefly discuss Michelle Koerner’s essay on the influence of George Jackson on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Brady Heiner’s study of Michel Foucault’s intellectual debt to the Black Panthers.3 As will become clear, Marcuse’s erasure of Davis and Barry’s failure to identify Davis in Marcuse’s essay are not isolated instances, but evidence of a broader practice of epistemic violence against Black thinkers.4 The Marcuse Piece is thus an example of what feminist epistemologists have called epistemic oppression, the sustained exclusion of marginal subjects from the realm of knowledge production.5 This article will show how systems of epistemic valuations have paved the way for Marcuse’s omission and triggered Barry’s misquotation, and how the critical literature on the piece, which has extended Marcuse and Barry’s silences, has perpetuated this epistemic injustice.6 Indeed, from the piece’s conception to its exhibition and reception, Davis’s thought has been left out from the production of knowledge on the Marcuse Piece. Yet Davis’s contemporary writings on the Black liberation and involvement with prison abolition movements can complicate the interpretation of Barry’s Marcuse Piece, where the sentence hinged on the pronoun ‘we’ and the word ‘free’. ‘A Young Black Girl’ In the last paragraph of An Essay on Liberation, Herbert Marcuse introduced an unnamed interlocutor – a young black girl – who offered an answer to the question that has ‘trouble[d] the minds of so many men of good will’, which is: ‘what are the people in a free society going to do?’7 The young black girl’s response and closing sentence of the essay – ‘for the first time in our life, we shall be free to think about what we are going to do’ – was then partly quoted by Barry in his Marcuse Piece.8 Who is this young black girl? Why would Marcuse invoke her presence and relay her words at such a critical point of the essay? A glance at Marcuse’s writings shows that it was not atypical for the philosopher to conclude using someone else’s voice. For instance, Marcuse ended Reason and Revolution (1941) citing Carl Schmitt’s comment on Hitler’s rise to power, and used Walter Benjamin’s somber statement on hope to close One Dimensional Man (1964).9 In these two examples, Marcuse quoted prominent scholars, which suggests that the ‘young black girl’ mentioned in An Essay on Liberation is not a fictional character, nor her presence an arbitrary occurrence. Her appearance at the end of the Essay becomes even less coincidental if we consider the multiple intersections between the life and work of the German professor and one of his most prominent students: Angela Davis (Fig. 4).10 Marcuse and Davis’s friendship, like the influence they bore on each other’s work, is documented in numerous essays, documentaries, forewords, legal documents, and interviews spanning more than four decades. For instance, Marcuse stated in a January 1971 appearance on NBC, that Davis had been one of his most remarkable students.11 Davis more recently wrote: ‘I have often publicly expressed my gratitude to Herbert Marcuse for teaching me that I did not have to choose between a career as an academic and a political vocation that entailed making interventions around concrete social issues’.12 Davis’s dual calling as a scholar and activist can be traced to her student years, which are worth revisiting because they shed light on the formation of Davis’s thought on liberation. Furthermore, Davis’s biography is intertwined with key historical events that help contextualize the tumultuous years during which Marcuse wrote the Essay, and Barry made his Marcuse Piece. Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Cover of Angela Davis, Lectures on Liberation (New York: New York Committee to Free Angela Davis, 1971). Portrait of Davis by unknown artist. (Image courtesy of the Joseph A. Labadie Collection, University of Michigan Library.) Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Cover of Angela Davis, Lectures on Liberation (New York: New York Committee to Free Angela Davis, 1971). Portrait of Davis by unknown artist. (Image courtesy of the Joseph A. Labadie Collection, University of Michigan Library.) Davis and Marcuse first met during Marcuse’s tenure at Brandeis, where Davis was majoring in French Literature.13 After a year-long stay in Paris where Davis participated in the prestigious Hamilton College Junior Year in France program, she began a second specialization in philosophy and independent study with Marcuse. Davis spent the following two years studying at the University of Frankfurt, attending — among others — Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas’s seminars, while reading Kant, Hegel, and Marx. In Frankfurt, she also joined anti-Vietnam war protests organized by the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, the German Socialist Student League. Despite her involvement with local anti-establishment groups and support from Adorno, who had agreed to advise her doctoral work, Davis’s geographical distance from the ‘decisive metamorphoses’ stirring the Black Liberation Movements became increasingly difficult to bear.14 Davis was in France when the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama shattered her hometown and she found herself in Germany in the wake of the 1965 Watts protests.15 No longer willing to feel alienated from the conflicts waged at home, Davis returned to the USA in the autumn of 1967 to work on her doctorate with Marcuse, who was then a Professor at the University of California at San Diego. Davis rapidly became involved in the creation of the University’s Black Student Union, as well as in the formation of the Los Angeles chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. By the time Marcuse’s editor at Beacon Press, who worked with Marcuse on the second draft of the Essay, mailed the manuscript to the Press’s New York office in April 1968, Marcuse had witnessed Davis’s crucial role in the creation of these organizations, which also marked the formal beginnings of Davis’s life-long commitment to the struggle against institutional oppression and State-sanctioned violence.16 Students and student-led movements, like the ones Davis helped form, greatly impressed Marcuse. Signs of their influence emerged in the first pages of An Essay on Liberation, which Marcuse dedicated to ‘young militants’.17 If Marcuse posited the ‘young middle-class intelligentsia’ as crucial agents of socio-political change, he also identified the ‘ghetto populations’ as the bearers of a new consciousness, or of what Marcuse called a ‘new sensibility’.18 Together, the ‘young middle-class intelligentsia’ and ‘ghetto populations’ were to spearhead the liberation of society. Marcuse described the Black population as ‘“the most natural” force of rebellion’ because so few Black Americans had benefited from the wealth they helped create or held much decisional power.19 Marcuse’s decision to quote and close the Essay with the words of a ‘young black girl’ was thus a means of reiterating this argument. Yet the ‘young black girl,’ like the ‘black militants’ or the ‘black musicians’ Marcuse discussed over the course of the Essay remained anonymous, while their work, whether political or artistic, was never clearly identified. This anonymity also presupposed an equivalence or interchangeability between ‘black militants’ that obscured the richness of the critical discussions, and the range of sometimes conflicting goals and strategies deployed by contemporary Black activists.20 Furthermore, the anonymity of the Black activists and artists, and lack of critical analysis of contemporary civil rights protests constitute an even more stunning omission in light of the many references Marcuse made to canonical Franco-German cultural figures.21 If Marcuse did not name any of the members of the (white) ‘young middle-class intelligentsia’ in the Essay, he nonetheless gave a greater valuation to their actions. For instance, Marcuse singled out recent protests and quoted the writings of students who participated in the May 1968 uprisings in Paris.22 More than any of the frequent acts of defiance against institutional powers or racial oppression unfolding in California at the time, where Marcuse had lived and worked since 1965, the May 1968 protests best illustrated the idea of a Great Refusal, ‘the protest against that which is’, that he had outlined in earlier books.23 Indeed, the latter events supported the Essay’s premises: the ‘young middle-class intelligentsia’, albeit a predominately white and European one, was leading revolutionary struggles around the world.24 Contingencies of Value As we have seen, Marcuse did not treat his sources equally. He named or cited some, while he simply conflated others under a racial signifier. To contextualize such inequalities in broader considerations of epistemic oppression, it is helpful to invoke and expand on one of Barbara Smith’s arguments. In her essay ‘Contingencies of Value’, Smith contends that literary works do not remain in the canon on account of their intrinsic value, but rather that a text’s endurance in certain educational or cultural spheres is related to its continuous circulation in such fields.25 Canonical works become widely shared points of reference one can easily study, recall or cite regardless of their particular critical relevance. The Franco-German literary references Marcuse included in the Essay manifest the kind of contingencies Smith describes. I will further argue that the inflated circulation of canonical works anoints their authors with what feminist epistemologist Miranda Fricker has called credibility excess, a form of epistemic privilege that is interactive, comparative, and contrastive.26 At the other end of the spectrum, members of underprivileged social groups often suffer from a credibility deficit stemming from long-held disparaging associations, which not only affect their capacity to be heard, but also impact their ability to be considered as knowers. Such stinging disparities in the credibility economy explain Marcuse’s unequal handling of his sources in the Essay, though they do not mitigate its effects. We may then ask: what is lost when specific instances of the work or lived experience of individuals Marcuse has just described as the driving force of the rebellion are not valued enough to function as legitimate sources and, as such, cannot fully participate in the production of the knowledge they inspired?27 In her study of epistemic injustice, a by-product of disparities in the credibility economy, Fricker explains that the lack of legitimacy stemming from a credibility deficit amounts to an attack on one’s capacity for reason.28 Indeed, Marcuse’s decision to withhold the names of the Black militants and references to political events that could help his readers identify them is not only unjust, but also an infringement on the production and circulation of knowledge. Readers are more likely to respond to Marcuse’s reading of Kant or his use of Marxist theories rather than pick up on his lack of engagement with the political work of anonymous Black activists. Furthermore, Marcuse’s silence has had tangible and lasting consequences. One of them is the subject of this essay: Barry’s reading and use of Marcuse’s text. Despite Marcuse’s unquestionable sympathy and life-long political work geared toward the liberation of the oppressed, close attention to his Essay points to the ever-enduring gap between theory and praxis in academic writing. This gap, from which Marcuse’s silences stem, is, however, not unique and informs the work of other contemporary philosophers committed to social justice. Recent scholarship has shown how Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault relied on the writings of the Black Panthers to develop some of their most significant theoretical frameworks while systematically erasing or downplaying the Black Panthers’ intellectual contributions. Michelle Koerner has tracked how Black Panther Party Field Marshall and author George Jackson’s notion of fugitivity nurtured Deleuze’s concept of ‘line of flight’ in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Koerner’s account is, however, generous because her essay focuses on the overlap, rather than on the points of contention, between the models of revolutionary struggle the two writers developed. Yet Koerner remarks that ‘each time Jackson’s name appears in Deleuze’s work it is without introduction, explanation, or elaboration, as though the line were ripped entirely from historical considerations’.29 This practice could prompt readers to dismiss Deleuze’s use of Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1970) as an appropriation of Jackson’s thought or a decontextualization of his work that would curtail the history of racial violence Jackson meant to denounce.30 However, Koerner suggests that in dismissing Deleuze’s use of Jackson we would ‘perhaps miss the way blackness claims an unruly place in philosophy and philosophies of history’.31 Her claim is problematic because it justifies Deleuze’s lack of theoretical engagement with blackness in systems of racial oppression. Like Marcuse’s, Deleuze’s lack of engagement with the writings of Black activists in his academic work has less to do with blackness’s unruly place in philosophy, as Koerner contends, but comes from the philosophers’ lack of sustained knowledge of Black history.32 Marcuse admitted to such ignorance in an open letter of support addressed to Angela Davis: Dear Angela: I felt uneasy when I was asked to introduce the publication of your first two lectures on Frederick Douglass, knowing that ‘under normal circumstances’ you would not have authorized their publication in the form in which they were delivered, and recognizing that they dealt with a world to which I am still an outsider — could I say anything about it in an authentic manner?33 Because this world – the histories and lived experience of Black Americans – were mostly unknown to Marcuse and Deleuze, it makes them ‘unknowable’.34 As we have seen, the young black girl’s quotation in the last paragraph of the Essay was a pragmatic response to Marcuse’s open-ended question: ‘there is an answer to the question which troubles the minds of so many men of good will: what are the people in a free society going to do?’ If Marcuse’s open letter to Angela Davis did not attempt to answer this question, it did however identify these men, as well as the question’s troubling history. This letter, published a month after Davis’s indictment in Ramparts, reveals that the Essay’s ‘men of good will’ pointed to ‘all the celebrated figures of Western civilization — the very civilization which enslaved [Davis’s] people’35 (Fig. 5). The question that troubled these men arose as the ultimate goal of philosophy, which ‘in the last analysis [is] concerned with one thing: human freedom’.36 Speaking of Davis’s graduate work in philosophy, Marcuse wrote: ‘what does your life for the liberation of the black people, what does your present plight, have to do with the philosophy of German Idealism?’37 In this letter, Marcuse performed in hindsight the work he began, but did not bring to fruition in the Essay. He stated: ‘the abstract philosophical concept of a freedom which can never be taken away suddenly comes to life and reveals its very concrete truth: freedom is not only the goal of liberation, it begins with liberation; it is there to be “practiced”. This, I confess, I learned from you!’38 Fig. 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Herbert Marcuse, ‘Dear Angela’, Ramparts, February 1971, p. 22. Fig. 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Herbert Marcuse, ‘Dear Angela’, Ramparts, February 1971, p. 22. Marcuse’s acknowledgment of his intellectual debt to Davis renders the following passage from the Essay unsettling because Marcuse uprooted the knowledge he claimed to have acquired from her and applied it to the May 1968 protesters: ‘The radical utopian character of [the French students’] demands far surpasses the hypotheses of my essay; and yet, these demands were developed and formulated in the course of action itself; they are expressions of a concrete political practice’.39 Like Barry’s operations on Marcuse’s text – his truncation of ‘for the first time in our life’ and his misattribution of the quotation – Marcuse had to excise Davis and the Black liberation movements from this passage in order to conjure the utopian character of a struggle, itself mostly oblivious to issues of race. Brady Heiner’s essay on the erasure of the intellectual contributions of Angela Davis and other members of the Black Panther Party in Michel Foucault’s academic work echoes my own critique of Marcuse’s Essay and, by extension, of Barry’s Marcuse Piece.40 As Heiner convincingly argues, Foucault heavily drew upon and sometimes appropriated the language of the Black Panther Party, a fact quite troubling coming from ‘The philosopher who claimed to “desubjugate” local, disqualified, marginalized or non-legitimized knowledges through the practice of genealogy [and who] now appears, vis-à-vis the Black Panthers, not only to have himself subjugated by just such a body of knowledges, but to have subjugated the very knowledges from which he largely culled his method of genealogy’.41 The silences Foucault imposes through his writings become more troubling in light of his involvement with the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons, an organization Foucault co-founded in February 1971, which was dedicated to defending prisoners’ rights and their well-being while incarcerated. Heiner argues that Jean Genet, who met Foucault the summer prior and became a member of the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons shortly after, was crucial to Foucault’s political awakening. Genet had traveled to the USA in the spring of 1970 at the invitation of the Black Panthers and wrote the preface to Georges Jackson’s Soledad Brother. Genet introduced Foucault to the work of Angela Davis and the Black Panthers, whose writings were circulated in the Black Panther journal; in Ramparts, a San Francisco-based political and literary magazine associated with the New Left; and in the recently founded academic publication The Black Scholar, also based in San Francisco (Fig. 6). In June 1971, Catherine von Bülow, a Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons activist, travelled to California to meet Davis and Jackson, both imprisoned at the time, and brought a number of documents back to Paris that Genet and Foucault studied. In November 1971, the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons published the third issue of Intolérable, a pamphlet dedicated to the life and work of George Jackson, who was assassinated at the San Quentin prison, California, in August 1971.42 As this brief history demonstrates, Foucault was both familiar with the political thought of Jackson and other Black Panthers, and instrumental in the dissemination of the Panthers’ ideas and campaigns to free American political prisoners in France. Fig. 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Cover of the first issue of The Black Scholar, November 1969. (Image courtesy of The Black Scholar.) Fig. 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Cover of the first issue of The Black Scholar, November 1969. (Image courtesy of The Black Scholar.) Heiner thus asks: ‘What does the silence regarding the link between Foucault and the Black Panthers tell us about the will to truth that imperceptibly regulates the contemporary production, disclosure and circulation of truth-bearing knowledge? What is it about existing disciplinary formations (both academic and social) that makes possible the kind of ethical and political deficiency that is evidenced by such a silence?’43 As the various degrees of engagement of Foucault, Deleuze, and Marcuse with Black thinkers show, there is no single answer to these questions. Rather, the epistemic injustice resulting from the repression of Black activists’ knowledge derives from a lack of awareness or interest in Black lives, from an incapacity to trust and value Black Americans as epistemic agents, or to recognize in the articulation of their own experiences responses to important philosophical questions.44 Missed Connections, Conflictual Encounters What should we make of Barry’s failure to recognize Angela Davis in ‘the young black girl’ of Marcuse’s Essay on Liberation, and of Barry’s selective use of her words for which she was not acknowledged?45 As it will become clear, Barry failed to act as a ‘virtuous hearer’ and enabled the reproduction of the epistemic violence against Black thinkers Marcuse initiated.46 Marcuse had publicly advocated for Davis’s cause ever since Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California, first attempted to fire Davis from her teaching position at the University of California at Los Angeles in June 1969.47 Marcuse reiterated his support after Davis’s indictment on capital charges of murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy following her involvement with the Soledad Brothers’ Defense Committee, and alleged complicity in the Marin County courtroom killings.48 She was arrested along with her friend David Rudolph Poindexter on 13 October 1970 at a Howard Johnson Motor Lodge in New York City.49 Davis remained in custody at the now defunct New York Women’s House of Detention in Greenwich Village, blocks away from Barry’s Union Square studio, until her transfer on 22 December 1970 to the Marin County jail in California. She was eventually acquitted but nevertheless spent eighteen months in prison. Mainstream media largely covered Davis’s trial and the ‘Free Angela’ campaigns that spread in all parts of the world. Davis, who had been on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitive List since 18 August 1970, was a highly visible figure when Barry conceived and mailed the first set of the Marcuse Piece invitation cards for his exhibition at Sperone Gallery in December 1970. Yet Barry did not recognize Davis in the last sentence of the Essay. If Barry has since occasionally mentioned that a ‘young black girl’ was the speaker of the Marcuse quotation, he has yet to indicate how her work might inform an interpretation of the piece. Barry explained: ‘“Be free to think about what you are going to do” is borrowed from Herbert Marcuse’s An Essay on Liberation. It’s the last sentence on the last page of the book, and in fact it’s a quote from a little black girl. So it’s a quote inside a quote’.50 However, nothing in any of three iterations of the Marcuse Piece – mailed invitation cards, framed ephemera, or wall-text – hinted at the presence of a second voice. The quotation marks signaled the presence of Marcuse’s voice and the parenthesis that clasp his name manifested his authorial role. The quote was, however, too short to speak its own meaning or to convey any of the theories developed by Marcuse. Despite its faster pace, the mood of the excerpt Barry selected –loose and soothing– blended with his own choice of words. If the quote channeled the spirit of the counterculture, the hopeful promise of a better tomorrow, this effect was vested in Barry’s truncation of ‘for the first time in our life’, which preceded ‘to be free to think about what we are going to do’ in Marcuse’s quote. In ‘Some places to which we can come, and for a while “be free to think about what we are going to do”’, Barry replaced Davis’s ‘for the first time in our life’ with ‘for a while’, itself a contentious act that neutralized the transformative potential of the inaugural moment Davis described in Marcuse’s text. Furthermore, Barry’s ‘we’ in ‘Some places to which we can come’ was unlikely to overlap with Davis’s ‘we’ in ‘be free to think about what we are going to do’. By eliminating the references to the ‘young black girl’ and her ‘for the first time in our life’, Barry secured the universal appeal of his sentence at the expense of the history of Black Americans in the United States called forth by Davis’s ‘we’. Time and again, critics of coalition politics have deplored the ways in which this pronoun is used to convey the interests of the most powerful members of a given alliance.51 Likewise, Barry’s omission of the first part of the quotation and its speaker pointed to the failure of the pronoun ‘we’ in performing the task of inclusiveness it was meant to accomplish. Barry’s ‘we’ is similarly fraught when considered as a site of intersubjectivity between the artist and the audience of the piece. In fact, Barry’s sentence has been the only site of exchange between the artist and his audience. His invitation ‘to be free to think’ did not translate into a dedicated space or time for in-person interactions at any of the five gallery exhibitions listed on the cards, or at subsequent showings of the piece. Unlike other works Barry made using invitation cards such as his Closed Gallery (1969) and Invitation pieces (1972/73) (Figs 7 and 8), which both emulated the dry and formulaic language used by galleries for their promotional material, Barry’s sentence ‘Some places to which we can come, and for a while “be free to think about what we are going to do” (Marcuse)’ strangely addresses its reader. The piece is not a direct call, nor a simple statement. It is a proposition, which subsumed the recipients of the cards under a ‘we’ whose makeup remains unknown. Barry stated that art is an effort to relate to others, and that he uses words ‘because they speak out to the viewer. Words come from us. We can relate to them. They bridge the gap between the viewer and the piece’.52 Despite its many imperfections, language for Barry could unite artist, work, and beholder. With this text-piece, Barry attempted to harness the binding potential of language that Benedict Anderson deemed crucial to the formation of ‘imagined communities’.53 Even if the readers’ encounter with Barry’s proposition could not presume their ability or willingness to project themselves into Barry’s ‘we’, Barry aspired to create such an imagined community, which was revealed to its constituents by their reading of the text. Fig. 7. Open in new tabDownload slide Robert Barry, Closed Gallery Piece, 1969, offset printing on paper, 13 x 18 cm. Robert Barry Papers, Teaneck, NJ. (© Robert Barry and image courtesy of Galerie Greta Meert.) Fig. 7. Open in new tabDownload slide Robert Barry, Closed Gallery Piece, 1969, offset printing on paper, 13 x 18 cm. Robert Barry Papers, Teaneck, NJ. (© Robert Barry and image courtesy of Galerie Greta Meert.) Fig. 8. Open in new tabDownload slide Robert Barry, Invitation Piece, 1972, offset printing on paper, 10.6 × 14.7 cm. Robert Barry Papers, Teaneck, NJ. (© Robert Barry and image courtesy of Galerie Greta Meert.) Fig. 8. Open in new tabDownload slide Robert Barry, Invitation Piece, 1972, offset printing on paper, 10.6 × 14.7 cm. Robert Barry Papers, Teaneck, NJ. (© Robert Barry and image courtesy of Galerie Greta Meert.) Barry’s proclivity towards an open-ended, imagined community, his impulse towards a rhetorical audience capable of endless expansion, resonated with the democratic impulse of the political demands made by contemporary artists to art institutions. In the late 1960s, such appeals were issued by artist collectives like the Art Workers Coalition (to which Barry belonged), Where We At Black Women Artists, or the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition. They called for free admission to museums, extended hours, or daycare options to diversify, and thus increase, the demographics of museum viewership. They also pushed for the appointment of curators and museum professionals of colour, the creation of a Martin Luther King, Jr. Wing for Black and Puerto Rican Art at The Museum of Modern Art, and the decentralization of Manhattan-centric museums through satellite galleries in other boroughs. However, on 10 April 1969, at the first hearing of the Art Workers Coalition, a collective who aimed at reforming major New York museums, Barry asked: ‘Why bother with the Museum of Modern Art? Why not work outside it and leave it to those who want it. If it doesn’t serve us, why not let it be?’ Barry is, however, not calling for a withdrawal from the art world—to ‘dropout’ as Lee Lozano and Seth Siegelaub would eventually do.54 Neither is he suggesting that artists should create alternative spaces. In fact, despite his involvement with the short-lived Art Workers Coalition, Barry rarely directly challenged the legitimacy of art institutions. The artist needed the institutional framework because his work could only be read as art if performed or presented within this context. Barry’s desire to remain in the art context betrayed the anxiety shared by a number of Conceptual artists towards their work and its capacity to be recognized – and celebrated – as art.55 This, however, did not mean that Barry wished to foreclose political relevance, even if his views on what constituted political art suggested the contrary. Barry recently stated: I didn’t like art like that. I didn’t like anti-Vietnam War art. I didn’t like feminist art. I thought it was heavy-handed and stupid as art. Okay? I can sympathize, obviously sympathize with the politics of it and was in demonstrations and all of that stuff. But artistically, my art I kept very separate from my political beliefs, deliberately and very, very rarely would I allow that kind of thing into it. I can’t really even think of any right now. They weren’t allowed to creep into the work itself.56 In the above statement, Barry pushed against expository forms of political art, the kind that pointed to the responsibility of individuals and institutions in systems of interlocking oppression. Yet by choosing a quotation from Marcuse, a prominent New Left figure whose writings were popular in the New York art world of the late 1960s, Barry did let his politics ‘creep’ into the work. Furthermore, taking cues from the Essay, Barry’s sentence ‘Some places to which we can come, and for a while “be free to think about what we are going to do”’ responded to Marcuse’s call for a ‘new sensibility’. Barry explained in 1971: The last line of An Essay on Liberation was particularly interesting to me. It was about having places to go where we can be free to think about what we want to do. Ironically, Marcuse makes a whole case that we really cannot think–we don’t have the freedom to think about what we want to do. It seemed that if I was going to designate a gallery, that would be a nice thing to make it.57 Bypassing Marcuse’s warning against art institutions’ ability to co-opt dissent, Barry turned Davis’s words into an invitation to muse, which he extended to the audience of the Marcuse Piece.58 Barry conceived the gallery as a shielded space, as a breeding ground for new art; and freedom as the capacity to reflect and form new ideas. Conversely, Davis’s thought on freedom was vested in her advocacy and organizing efforts on behalf of political prisoners, as well as in her study of philosophy and Black literature.59 Davis famously brought the lessons of her multiple political engagements into the classroom during a series of lectures she gave at the University of California at Los Angeles in the autumn of 1969.60 In the first lecture of her course for ‘Recurring Philosophical Themes in Black Literature’, Davis presented the history of Western ideas as being dominated by that of freedom, but showed how this history was simultaneously tied to that of the ‘most brutal forms of unfreedoms’.61 Discussing the limits of citizenship in Ancient Greece, which excluded women, slaves, and non-Greeks from participation in the governance of public institutions, or the hypocrisy of the Constitution of the United States whose thirteenth amendment rendered freedom provisional, Davis stated that ‘black people have exposed by their very existence the inadequacies not only of the practice of freedom, but of its very theoretical formulation’.62 To illustrate this argument, Davis began her course with a study of The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, as a means of transforming the lofty, ahistorical concept of freedom into that of liberation, a ‘dynamic, active struggle for freedom’.63 Building on the third autobiography of the escaped slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Davis explained how Douglass’s fight for freedom first entailed the coming into awareness of his oppression, followed by the open act of resistance against said oppression. However, warding off interferences with one’s ability to act does not necessarily grant positive freedom, or self-determination and agency. Davis noted that over the course of Douglass’s awakening from alienation, Douglass perceived the limits of his master’s freedom. She wrote: ‘[the slave] understands that the masters’ freedom is abstract freedom to suppress other human beings. The slave understands that this is a pseudo concept of freedom and at this point is more enlightened than his master for he realizes that the master is a slave of his own misconceptions, his own misdeeds, his own brutality, his own effort to oppress’.64 Similarly, because the master always relied on the slave’s labour for the sustenance of his wealth, the keeping of his home, and the care of his children, Davis argued that the master’s perception of himself as a free and independent being is inherently flawed. Since neither master nor slave could truly be said to possess freedom, the possibility to ever achieve freedom appears in Davis’s account hardly achievable. It is in such context that Davis’s response to the question Marcuse posed on the last page of his Essay – ‘what are the people in a free society going to do?’ – should be understood. Her pragmatic answer ‘for the first time in our life, we shall be free to think about what we are going to do’ suggested that no one is yet in a position to imagine what a free society would look like, that we cannot conceive of its promises without engaging first in the political work required for the liberation of all. For Davis, liberation must be oriented towards suppressing particular forms of injustices and thereby shall improve the lives of the oppressed. Liberation is also the name Davis gave to the work of philosophy: My idea of philosophy is that if it is not relevant to human problems, if it does not tell us how we can go about eradicating some of the misery in this world, then it is not worth the name of philosophy. I think that Socrates made a very profound statement when he asserted that the raison d’être of philosophy is to teach us proper living. In this day and age ‘proper living’ means liberation from the urgent problems of poverty, economic necessity and indoctrination, mental oppression.65 Could the kind of political urgency Davis summoned here still be instilled to Barry’s Marcuse Piece, or should the piece remain an obsolete index of the ripples of Marcuse’s epistemological violence against Davis? Could the places to which Barry’s invitation cards led their recipients be used to open the meaning of the work to possibilities the artist had not envisioned? The Marcuse Piece could become the point of departure for an exhibition confronting questions of epistemic injustice and aiming at the critique of the systems of oppression Davis and Marcuse condemned. Such an exhibition could generate alternative readings, help reinstate Davis’s voice and address the series of silences this essay identified in Marcuse’s text, in Barry’s work, and in the Marcuse Piece’s interpretations. However, like all revisionist projects, this exhibition should also ask: who benefits from these accounts, and what do they promise? Footnotes 1 Galleria Sperone, Turin, 1 – 12 December 1970; Yvon Lambert, Paris, 12 January – date unknown; Galleria San Fedele, Milan, dates unknown; Paul Maenz, Cologne, 30 March – 8 April 1971; and Art & Project, Amsterdam, 10 – 20 April, 1971. ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant’ is a verse from a poem by Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson, ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant’, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (New York: Back Bay Books, 1976), p. 505. 2 See Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Conceptual Art 1962 – 1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions’, October, vol. 55, Winter 1990, p. 141; Anne Rorimer, New Art in the 60’s and 70’s: Redefining Reality (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001), p. 87; John T. Paoletti, ‘Space Liberated for Thought’, Some Places To Which We Can Come: Works 1963 – 1975 (Bielefeld: Kerber, 2003), p. 35; and Frédéric Paul, Robert Barry: One Billion Colored Dots (Paris: mfc-michèle Didier, 2008), p. 3. 3 See Michelle Koerner, ‘Line of Escape: Gilles Deleuze's Encounter with George Jackson’, Genre, vol. 44, no. 2, Summer 2011, pp. 157–80; and Brady Heiner, ‘Foucault and the Black Panthers’, City, vol. 11, no. 3, December 2007, pp. 313–55. 4 Together with Kristie Dotson’s notion of epistemic oppression and Miranda Fricker’s definition of epistemic injustice, Gayatri Spivak’s discussion of the epistemic violence of European intellectuals such as Foucault and Deleuze who she describes as ‘complicit in the persistent constitution of Other as the Self's shadow’, delineate the theoretical horizon of this essay. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 75. Kristie Dotson, ‘Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression’, Social Epistemology, vol. 28, no. 2, May 2014, pp. 115–38. Miranda Fricker, ‘Epistemic Injustice and a Role for Virtue in the Politics of Knowing’, Metaphilosophy vol. 34, no. 1/2, January 2003, pp. 154–73. 5 Dotson, ‘Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression’, pp. 115–38. 6 At best, critics have acknowledged the ‘young black girl’ as the speaker of the Marcuse quote, however in most cases, the context of the citation is left unexamined. 7 Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (New York: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 63. 8 The last three sentences of the Essay read as follows: ‘And there is an answer to the question which troubles the minds of so many men of good will: what are the people in a free society going to do? The answer which, I believe, strikes at the heart of the matter was given by a young black girl. She said: for the first time in our life, we shall be free to think about what we are going to do’. Marcuse, Essay, p. 63. 9 ‘And [Schmitt] summarizes the entire process in the striking statement that on the day of Hitler’s ascent to power “Hegel, so to speak, died’”. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (London: Routledge, 1955), p. 419; Walter Benjamin,‘It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us’, quoted in Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 271. 10 I want to thank Ja’Tovia Gary for helping me make this crucial connection. 11 Herbert Marcuse, Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce, Marxism, Revolution and Utopia: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, vol. 6 (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 214. 12 Angela Davis, ‘Preface’, in Herbert Marcuse, Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce (eds), The New Left and the 1960s: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, vol. 3 (London: Routledge, 2004), p. xi. 13 On Davis’s student years, see Angela Y. Davis, An Autobiography (New York: International Publishers, 1988), and Alice Kaplan, Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 14 On Davis’s decision to leave the University of Frankfurt and return to the USA, see Davis, Autobiography, pp. 144–5. 15 Davis grew up in Birmingham, AL, in a section of the city called Dynamite Hill in reference to the countless bombings White supremacists routinely carried out on this predominantly Black neighbourhood. Of the four Black teenage girls, Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins, and Carole Robertson, killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, Carole was a dear friend of Angela’s sister Fania, Cynthia was a next-door neighbor of the Davis household, and Denise had been a student of Angela’s mother. Kaplan, Dreaming in French, p. 163. In her Autobiography, Davis described the staggering moments that followed her learning about the bombing from the Herald Tribune while in Biarritz, and her interaction with other students: ‘Before she spoke I was on the verge of pouring out all the feelings that had been unleashed in me by the news of the bomb which had ripped through four young Black girls in my hometown. But the faces around me were closed. They knew nothing of racism and the only way they knew how to relate to me at that moment was to console me as if friends had just been killed in a plane crash. “What a terrible thing,” one of them said. I left them abruptly, unwilling to let them have anything to do with my grief’. Davis, Autobiography, p. 129. 16 An early draft of Marcuse’s essay sent in November 1967 to his editor Arnold C. Tovell at Beacon Press shows a different ending. In another draft, dated April 1968, the final paragraph includes the sentence with the ‘the young black girl’, but does not end it yet. It reads: ‘There is an answer to the question which troubles the mind of so many men of good will: what are the people in a free society going to do all day long? The answer I like best and which, I believe, strikes at the heart of the matter was given by a young black girl. She said: for the first time in our life, we shall be able to think about what we are going to do.’ Herbert Marcuse Compositions, MS Am 2257, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. The final version of the Essay contains references to a newspaper article published in October 1968, which indicates that Marcuse continued to edit his work throughout the year. 17 Marcuse, Essay, p. 8. 18 ‘The new sensibility, which expresses the ascent of the life instincts over aggressiveness and guilt, would foster, on a social scale, the vital need for the abolition of injustice and misery and would shape the further evolution of the “standard of living”’. Marcuse, Essay, p. 22. 19 Marcuse, Essay, p. 43. 20 Among the many contemporary, highly visible activists Marcuse could have named or quoted are James Baldwin, who had addressed questions of race in the USA since his 1950 essay ‘Encounter on the Seine: Black meets Brown’; Martin Luther King’s Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958), Why We Can’t Wait (1963), and Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1967); Malcom X and Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcom X (1965); or Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967). 21 Marcuse either alluded to or quoted from Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Thomas Mann, Victor Hugo, André Breton, Immanuel Kant, or Karl Marx. 22 Marcuse, Essay, pp. 19, 37, 52. 23 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), p. 63. Originally published in 1964. The Black Panther Party was founded by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton in Oakland, California in October 1966. A year later, the San Diego chapter of the Black Panther Party was formed by members of the Black Student Union at San Diego State University. Eldridge Cleaver’s prison letters were reproduced in the San Francisco-based Ramparts, a magazine closely associated with the New Left in the summer of 1966. Later that year, Cleaver became a staff writer for Ramparts in which Marcuse would also later be published. 24 ‘This essay was written before the events of May and June 1968 in France. I have merely added some footnotes in the way of documentation. The coincidence between some of the ideas suggested in my essay, and those formulated by the young militants was to me striking’. Marcuse, Essay, p. 8. Marcuse complicated this argument later in the Essay: ‘The “student movement” – the very term is already ideological and derogatory: it conceals the fact that quite important sections of the older intelligentsia and of the non-student population take active part in the movement’. Marcuse, Essay, p. 44. Marcuse’s allegiance to Marxist theories had a direct influence on the kind of revolutionary upheavals he chose to discuss in his text. Marcuse mentioned Cuba, Vietnam, China, and ‘the guerilla forces in Latin America’. Marcuse, Essay, p. 7. Not a single word, however, is written on the decolonization of Africa, or on the many independence wars that had shaken the continent since the early 1950s. 25 ‘The value of a literary work is continuously produced and reproduced by the very acts of implicit and explicit evaluation that are frequently invoked as “reflecting” its value and therefore as being evidence of it. In other words, what are commonly taken to be the signs of literary value are, in effect, also its springs. The endurance of a classic canonical author such as Homer, then, owes not to the alleged transcultural or universal value of his works but, on the contrary, to the continuity of their circulation in a particular culture. Repeatedly cited and recited, translated, taught and imitated, and thoroughly enmeshed in the network of intertextuality that constitutes the high culture of the orthodoxly educated population of the West (and the Western-educated population of the rest of the world), that highly variable entity we refer to as “Homer” recurrently enters our experience in relation to a large number and variety of our interests and thus can perform a large number of various functions for us and obviously has performed them for many of us over a good bit of the history of our culture’. Barbara H. Smith, ‘Contingencies of Value’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 10, no. 30, September 1983, pp. 30–1. 26 See Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 30–59. On the interactive, comparative and contrastive nature of credibility, see José Medina, ‘The Relevance of Credibility Excess in a Proportional View of Epistemic Injustice: Differential Epistemic Authority and the Social Imaginary’, Social Epistemology, vol. 25, no. 1, 2011, pp. 15–35. 27 ‘In negotiating and navigating epistemic domains, we don't and shouldn't treat our fellows purely instrumentally, as tools to maximize our “veritistic outcomes” or collections of truths. Doing so would severely impoverish cooperation. I am not simply arguing that objectification of persons is morally inappropriate, like the Kantian characterization of treating others merely as means, although I think that it is so: such objectification is epistemically misguided. Persons are not merely sources of knowledge or information like instruments’. Cynthia Townley, ‘Toward a Revaluation of Ignorance’, Hypatia, vol. 21, no. 3, Summer 2006, pp. 37–55. 28 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, p. 44. 29 Koerner, ‘Line of Escape’, p. 161. 30 The original French edition of Anti-Oedipus did not contain any footnote referencing Deleuze's quotation from Jackson’s Soledad Brother. Although a footnote was created for the English translation by the editors of the University of Minnesota Press, the bibliographical reference was never written. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 393. 31 Koerner, ‘Line of Escape’, p. 161. 32 Koerner later attempts to justify Deleuze’s misuse of Jackson’s thought by turning it into a feature of his writing style. Yet according to Koerner’s own research, most commentators have since chosen to ignore rather than ‘pick up and run with’ the Jackson connection and its significance in the elaboration of Deleuze’s line of flight and related notion of deterritorialization. 33 Herbert Marcuse, ‘Dear Angela’, Ramparts, February 1971, p. 22. 34 Kristie Dotson gives a few examples of feminist writers and scholars who have described Black women as ‘unknowable’: ‘The epistemic violence that often hinders one’s ability to “make sense” of claims made by and about Black women has been heavily remarked upon. From Fannie Barrier Williams’s pronouncement that Black women are “unknowable” (1905) to Deborah King’s articulation of Black women’s theoretical invisibility (1988, 43–5), to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s description of how Black women can be “theoretically erased” (1989, 139)’. Kristie Dotson, ‘Knowing in Space: Three Lessons from Black Women's Social Theory’, labrys, études féministes/estudos feministas, January/June 2013, p. 13. 35 Marcuse, ‘Dear Angela’, p. 22. 36 Marcuse, ‘Dear Angela’, p. 22. 37 Marcuse, ‘Dear Angela’, p. 22. 38 Marcuse, ‘Dear Angela’, p. 22. 39 Marcuse, Essay, p. 8. 40 Brady Heiner, ‘Foucault and the Black Panthers’, City, vol. 11, no. 3, December 2007, pp. 313–56. Heiner focuses on Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975) and Society Must Be Defended, a series of lectures Foucault gave at the College de France in 1975/1976. 41 Heiner, ‘Foucault and the Black Panthers’, p. 343. 42 Heiner, ‘Foucault and the Black Panthers’, pp. 317–318, 320. On the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons, see Philippe Artières et al, Le Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons: Archives d’une Lutte, 1970–1972 (Paris: IMEC, 2003). 43 Heiner, ‘Foucault and the Black Panthers’, p. 343. 44 In using the testimonies and writings of oppressed groups, White academics should be mindful not to simply capitalize on knowledge produced by ‘native informants’. Cynthia Townley writes: ‘Knowledge is not only presumed good, even good for humanity, but presumed to be always good, and the only epistemic good. However, treating other epistemic agents purely as instruments for obtaining knowledge conflicts with the commitments required to maintain a trustful relation’. Cynthia Twonley, ‘Toward a Revaluation of Ignorance’, Hypatia, vol. 21, no. 3, Summer 2006, p. 42. 45 ‘I did not know the young girl was Angela Davis until you just told me’. Barry in an email to the author, July 5, 2016. 46 ‘The primary conception of the virtuous hearer must be that of someone who reliably succeeds in correcting for the influence of prejudice in her credibility judgements’. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, p. 5. 47 Reagan’s decision was motivated by Davis’s affiliation with the Che-Lumumba Club, an all-black branch of the Communist Party. In a memorandum dated 19 June 1970, Reagan declared: ‘Angela Davis, Professor of Philosophy, will no longer be a part of the UCLA staff. As the head of the board of Regents, I, nor the board, will not tolerate any Communist activities at any state institution. Communists are an endangerment to this wonderful system of government that we all share and are proud of’. Marcuse, Kellner and Pierce, Marxism, Revolution and Utopia, p. 212. 48 On 7 August 1970, Jonathan Jackson, the 17-year-old brother of George Jackson, one of the three Soledad Brothers Davis was trying to help, attempted to free San Quentin prisoners James McClain, William A Christmas, and Ruchell Magee during an audience at the Marin County courthouse. Using weapons brought by Jackson but registered under Davis’s name, the four men took Judge Harold Haley, Deputy District Attorney Gary Thomas, and three jurors as hostages in an attempt to secure their exit. Once they all boarded Jackson’s van and started to drive away, the police fired indiscriminately and killed Haley, Jackson, Christmas, and McClain. Within hours, the Los Angeles Police Department and FBI were after Davis, who had gone underground and remained so until her arrest four months later. See Davis, Autobiography, pp. 3–12 and Bettina Aptheker, The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 49 See Associated Press, ‘Angela Davis is Sought in Shooting That Killed Judge on Coast’, New York Times, 16 August 1970, <https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/08/home/davis-shooting.html> [accessed 22 January 2020], and Linda Charlton, ‘FBI Seizes Angela Davis in Motel Here’, New York Times, 14 October 1970, <https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/08/home/davis-fbi.html> [accessed 22 January 2020]. 50 Matthieu Copeland and Clive Phillpot (eds), Voids: A Retrospective (Zurich: JRP/Ringier; Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou and Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2009), p. 87. 51 For instance, Jared Sexton explained: ‘coalitions tend systematically to render supposed common interests as the concealed particular interests of the most powerful and privileged elements of the alliance. […] Coalitions require a logic of identity and difference, of collective selves modeled on the construct of the modern individual, an entity whose coherence is purchased at the expense of whatever is cast off by definition’. Jared Sexton, ‘Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word’, rhizomes, vol. 29, 2016, <http://www.rhizomes.net/issue29/sexton.html> [accessed 22 January 2020]. 52 'Discussion: Robert Barry and Robert C. Morgan', in Erich Franz (ed.), Robert Barry: an Artist Book (Bielefeld: Karl Kerber Verlag, 1986), p. 76. 53 Anderson argued that nations are imagined communities because their members will never know, meet, or hear from most of their fellow-members. At the same time, a language has the capacity to generate particular solidarities and to create what Anderson called ‘that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity’. Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991), p. 35. If the feeling of belonging to a given nation can be prompted by the use of a common language, such feeling is equally rooted in collective amnesias and the denial of crucial historical events that otherwise shatter a country’s benevolent, autobiographical narrative. See Charles W. Mills, ‘White Ignorance’, in Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (eds), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), pp. 28–31. 54 An Open Hearing on the Subject: What Should Be the Program of the Art Workers Regarding Museum Reform and to Establish the Program of an Open Art Workers Coalition (New York: Art Workers Coalition, 1970), section 26. Barry’s proclamation, ‘Why bother with the Museum of Modern Art?’, was nevertheless folded under the ‘Alternatives to museums and art institutions’ heading. On the origins and history of the Art Workers Coalition, see Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), pp. 3–26. Lozano’s Dropout Piece derives from her General Strike Piece started in February 1969, in which the artist recorded her progressive withdrawal from the New York art world. By April 1970, Lozano had renounced making art, showing it, or attending any kind of art event. See Jo Applin, ‘Hard Work: Lee Lozano’s Dropouts’, October, vol. 156, Spring 2016, pp. 75–99. A study of Siegelaub’s crucial contribution until his abrupt withdrawal from the New York art world in 1970 followed by his relocation to Amsterdam is the focus of Alexander Alberro’s book Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003). 55 While discussing the Closed Gallery Piece, Barry explained: ‘I choose to show in galleries and to deal with galleries because that keeps me in the art context. Rather than close a gallery, I could close a grocery store, if I could get a grocer to agree. But I am an artist who works in the art context – and I want to make that position very clear’. ‘Robert Barry interviewed by Sarah Kent, 15 April 1971’, Robert Barry Papers, Teaneck, NJ. 56 ‘Oral history interview with Robert Barry, 14–15 May 2010’. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 57 ‘Robert Barry Interviewed by Sarah Kent’, n.p. 58 Marcuse stated: ‘the market, which absorbs equally well (although with often quite sudden fluctuations) art, anti-art, and non-art, all possible conflicting styles, schools, forms, provides a “complacent receptacle, a friendly abyss” […] in which the radical impact of art, the protest of art against the established reality is swallowed up’. Herbert Marcuse, ‘Repressive Tolerance’, in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore Jr. and Herbert Marcuse (eds), A Critique of Pure Tolerance Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore Jr. and Herbert Marcuse (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 88. 59 Writing from prison in May 1971, Davis gave the following definition of political prisoners: ‘The offense of the political prisoner is political boldness, the persistent challenging – legally or extralegally – of fundamental social wrongs fostered and reinforced by the state. The political prisoner has opposed unjust laws and exploitative, racist social conditions in general, with the ultimate aim of transforming these laws and this society into an order harmonious with the material and spiritual needs and interests of the vast majority of its members’. Angela Davis, ‘Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation’, in Angela Davis (ed.), If They Come in the Morning… Voices of Resistance (London: Verso, 2016), p. 31. 60 As Casey Shoop astutely noted: ‘[Davis’s] lectures not only constituted an historical description of that struggle for freedom, but also its very enactment in the practice of her pedagogy under extraordinary surveillance and pressure from the right-wing apparatuses of the state. The fight over Davis’s employment illuminates the broader ambition of Reagan and the Regents to constrain and limit the definition of academic freedom as a means to criminalize Black radical dissent while simultaneously restricting the function of the public university’. Casey Shoop, ‘Angela Davis, the L.A. Rebellion, and the Undercommons’, Post45 <http://post45.research.yale.edu/2019/02/angela-davis-the-l-a-rebellion-and-the-undercommons/#> [accessed 22 January 2020]. 61 Angela Y. Davis, Lectures on Liberation (New York: New York Committee to Free Angela Davis, 1971), p. 4. This small pamphlet was sold fifty cents a copy to raise funds for Davis’s legal defense (Fig. 4). 62 Davis, Lectures, p. 4. 63 Davis, Lectures, p. 4. In her second lecture, Davis stated that some of her students took issue with her analysis of slavery because it was solely based on men’s accounts. She responded to this critique by briefly mentioning Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, but did not dwell on their experiences or outline the distinct forms of violence enslaved women had to endure. However, in 1975, Davis’s article ‘Joan Little: The Dialectics of Rape’ written in defense of Joan Little, a twenty-year-old black woman who killed her white jailer as he assaulted her in her prison cell, historicized Little’s case in the context of the unwavering violation of black women’s bodies since slavery. Davis’s 1981 book Women, Race, and Class studied how the legacy of slavery, and issues of racism and class, have affected the lives of black women in the USA. See Angela Davis, ‘Joan Little: The Dialectics of Rape’, Ms. Magazine, June 1975; and Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981). 64 Davis, Lectures, p. 5. 65 Davis, Lectures, p.14. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Tell All The Truth But Tell It Slant: Recovering the Presence of Angela Davis in Robert Barry’s Marcuse Piece
JF - Oxford Art Journal
DO - 10.1093/oxartj/kcz028
DA - 2020-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/tell-all-the-truth-but-tell-it-slant-recovering-the-presence-of-angela-XRpbSWmyRv
SP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -