August 24th, 2010 / 12:09 pm
Random

Using the clone stamp in Photoshop, artist Paul Pheiffer, in his digital print and video work, meticulously erases — or more accurately, imposes background space onto — surrounding areas, leaving one sole basketball player suspended in air without any context of ball, net, or other players. The result is uncanny and stunning, and initially brought to mind the Crucifixion, whose main character is also abstracted in front of a spectacle. The jersey design and player number have been removed, perhaps in wishful allegiance to John Lennon’s imagining that there were no teams or corporate sponsors. Galleries and sports stadiums function as modern churches, a place of worship [see related post]. Last night looking over this series entitled “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (ongoing, which began ten years ago), I was suddenly reminded of the lynchings against blacks, like a rope photoshopped out of our minds.

To make this simply about race would be too easy — and unfair to Pheiffer, who I think was more interested in the choreography and “frozen” aesthetics of basketball, among other sports (he also works with boxing) — but I can’t help thinking about the mythologies surrounding blacks in America, a kind of subversive one-way obsession whites have been having with “them,” from slavery onwards to ostensibly “freer” vocations like sports or rap, a more oblique slavery of economics and perceived opportunity.

In the Bible, “The Four Horsemen” are harbingers of the Last Judgment (and I shall add that the white horse is Conquest; the black horse Famine). The whole point is God is judge, not man — though our friends seen in the crowd have taken on such burden. Modern Christians have a knack for completely shitting on their book.

In Photoshop, there is an action “Erase to History,” in which the eraser, constrained from erasing the unified image, only exposes the layer underneath. With commands undo vs. step backwards and delete vs. delete permanently, our actions, impulsive or not, are chronically penultimate, always given another chance, never truly trusted to commit. Perhaps we made some bad decisions in the past, and our collective subconsciousness has us safely on a leash: tied, not hanging, to a tree. To “flatten” an image in Photoshop is to consolidate all the layers into its ultimate image. One can never go back. Most of the lynchings took place from after the Civil War to 1890, though the picture before us was taken as late as 1920. It’s too bad we don’t have an “Erase History” option. Some photos would look a lot nicer.

[More Phieffer images: here, here, and here]

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48 Comments

  1. stephen

      i like this a lot, jimmy.

  2. Timothy W Sanders

      Jimmy, can you elaborate on “a kind of subversive one-way obsession whites have been having with ‘them'”? I’m curious to know what you mean.

      Thank you for this post. I enjoyed reading it.

  3. stephen

      i typed up a bunch of hippie rhetoric, but i’ll save it. i appreciate you speaking your mind, jimmy.

  4. B. R. Smith

      There’s a great sequence on this dude’s work/process on the 2nd season of Art 21.

  5. Steven Augustine

      Lynching was Phase 2 (after Cattle-ization)… now we’re on Phase 3: Cartoonification

  6. Jimmy Chen

      guess i mean the schizophrenic way of glorifying/celebrating their culture while subconsciously fearing and resenting them, or a liberal condescending empathy for their misunderstood plight. just seems whack, and so neurotic and contradictory, that’s all.

  7. Steven Augustine

      Exhibit G: The Wire

  8. Bruiser Brody

      Love, love, love the Wire.

      Great show. Not sure it meets the qualifications of Exhibit G, but I guess I’d need to see the six preceding and following it. I identified most with that scumbag lawyer. Really happy to see him parlay that show into a Wendy’s commercial.

  9. Bruiser Brody

      My eyes always go right to the grinning kids in every noose photo I ever see.

      So surreal it makes the word’s use seem laughable.

  10. Schylur Prinz

      god, i can’t believe i have to wait to until the end of October to watch real basketball. Someone send me some ketamine to pass the time.

  11. thom bunn

      Have any of you guys come across Benjamin Markovits? Apart from being an unbelievably accomplished novelist and essay writer, he’s an interesting fish in terms of questions of race and, erm, basketball. I think it was in an article in the LRB that he talked about being ‘constantly in awe of black America’ as a youngster playing bball (I paraphrase, most probably).

      Btw, although I do appreciate the breaking down here of the mind functioning in Photoshop, I personally think it’s massively far-fetched to carry this over to how the Historical Mind functions. This isn’t so bad when you’re talking about our views of celebrity, but when it comes to lynchings and so on… there are parallels, but come on.

  12. Steven Augustine

      Just talking about the objectification (titillatification?) of the Black Male Body in Extremis. The Auto-Lynch function: On.

  13. Steven Augustine
  14. goner

      FYI, it’s actually spelled Pfeiffer.

      Great post, though.

  15. stephen

      i like this a lot, jimmy.

  16. Timothy W Sanders

      Jimmy, can you elaborate on “a kind of subversive one-way obsession whites have been having with ‘them'”? I’m curious to know what you mean.

      Thank you for this post. I enjoyed reading it.

  17. stephen

      i typed up a bunch of hippie rhetoric, but i’ll save it. i appreciate you speaking your mind, jimmy.

  18. B. R. Smith

      There’s a great sequence on this dude’s work/process on the 2nd season of Art 21.

  19. STaugustine

      Lynching was Phase 2 (after Cattle-ization)… now we’re on Phase 3: Cartoonification

  20. Jimmy Chen

      guess i mean the schizophrenic way of glorifying/celebrating their culture while subconsciously fearing and resenting them, or a liberal condescending empathy for their misunderstood plight. just seems whack, and so neurotic and contradictory, that’s all.

  21. Steven Augustine

      Exhibit G: The Wire

  22. deadgod

      Jimmy, if we used an “‘Erase History’ option”, we’d have to repeat the worst of it.

      Oh, wait . . .

  23. Bruiser Brody

      Love, love, love the Wire.

      Great show. Not sure it meets the qualifications of Exhibit G, but I guess I’d need to see the six preceding and following it. I identified most with that scumbag lawyer. Really happy to see him parlay that show into a Wendy’s commercial.

  24. Bruiser Brody

      My eyes always go right to the grinning kids in every noose photo I ever see.

      So surreal it makes the word’s use seem laughable.

  25. Schylur Prinz

      god, i can’t believe i have to wait to until the end of October to watch real basketball. Someone send me some ketamine to pass the time.

  26. herocious

      insightful. thought-provoking. well done.

  27. thom bunn

      Have any of you guys come across Benjamin Markovits? Apart from being an unbelievably accomplished novelist and essay writer, he’s an interesting fish in terms of questions of race and, erm, basketball. I think it was in an article in the LRB that he talked about being ‘constantly in awe of black America’ as a youngster playing bball (I paraphrase, most probably).

      Btw, although I do appreciate the breaking down here of the mind functioning in Photoshop, I personally think it’s massively far-fetched to carry this over to how the Historical Mind functions. This isn’t so bad when you’re talking about our views of celebrity, but when it comes to lynchings and so on… there are parallels, but come on.

  28. Steven Augustine

      Just talking about the objectification (titillatification?) of the Black Male Body in Extremis. The Auto-Lynch function: On.

  29. Steven Augustine
  30. goner

      FYI, it’s actually spelled Pfeiffer.

      Great post, though.

  31. deadgod

      Jimmy, if we used an “‘Erase History’ option”, we’d have to repeat the worst of it.

      Oh, wait . . .

  32. micic

      Your use of “we” and “our” in reference to the American subconscious, Mr Chen, is woefully unfit, assuming a truthful surname. I direct you to the etymology of the phrase “not a Chinaman’s chance.” “They all look the same” could not have been incanted more literally than in the treatment of Chinese immigrants under the American Chinese Exclusion Act which, mind you, lasted until 1940. Near all incoming Asiatics were detained on Angel Island in SF Bay, where white overseers recorded the shapes of their heads and length of their arms and feet, as such depersonalized metrics were seen to be the only way to distinguish between them. Even today you can find Asiatic immigrants sell their state ID cards to underclassmen who then use the cards with their likeness to buy alcohol.

      To continue with your photoshop metaphors on the selective amnesiac consciousness of our (a phrase I, as a European American, can use in reference to American without self-loathing incongruity or self-parody or self-shame) history and its treatment “them,” I direct you to the conspicuous exclusion of a certain ethnic group in all of the numerous celebratory photographs taken to commemorate progress on the transcontinental railroad. 2wit: http://res.sys-con.com/author/8146/1869-Golden_Spike.jpg

      A terrific simulacrum of nineteenth century America’s view of the Chinese and Asiatics in general can be seen in the history of the town Truckee, CA. A perusal of modern primetime TV and Hollywood output provides a tidy example of how “far we’ve come” since then. In Nixon’s words to Mao, “the US and the Chinese are natural allies,” referring to extra-political arenas of trade and settlement (a Chinatown to be found in every big city.) It was what Nixon said of the Chinese and Asiatics in private – on tape – that most truthfully represents the consciousness of this nation.

  33. Jimmy Chen

      “we” and “our” was directed at htmlg’s readership, primarily white. I think about the audience more than myself in writing these posts. i didn’t want to mix my race into the equation; besides, just because chinese were treated poorly does not mitigate or influence my feelings towards slavery. on a broader level, i use “we” the first person plural pronoun as ‘humanity,’ in terms of an accountability which ought to transcend race. it’s unfortunate that you are so ridden with politics to see my other, main points.

  34. herocious

      insightful. thought-provoking. well done.

  35. Eric Beeny

      Well said, Jimmy. Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismanlte the Master’s House” came to mind. I like your comment: “…the schizophrenic way of glorifying/celebrating their culture while subconsciously fearing and resenting them, or a liberal condescending empathy for their misunderstood plight.” I often think when that condescending and fearful glorification mutates into emulation. Or emulation occurs as a way of maintaining distance from that which ‘we’ fear, which is what ‘we’ simultaneously glorify. By becoming (vicariously) that which ‘we’ fear, ‘we’ can eliminate diversity by ultimately assimilating black culture into ‘ours’ and while claiming ‘we’ celebrate it and only allowing, as you said, ” perceived opportunity” for minorities to escape the historical and cultural position in which ‘we’ have placed and hope to keep for fear of a perceived sense of relative deprivation on ‘our’ part due to a perceived sense of downward mobility by comparison. I forgot where I was going with this. Oh, emulation may be an unconscious attempt to erase history. Maybe.

  36. herocious

      DISLIKE the 2nd photo.

  37. micic

      Your use of “we” and “our” in reference to the American subconscious, Mr Chen, is woefully unfit, assuming a truthful surname. I direct you to the etymology of the phrase “not a Chinaman’s chance.” “They all look the same” could not have been incanted more literally than in the treatment of Chinese immigrants under the American Chinese Exclusion Act which, mind you, lasted until 1940. Near all incoming Asiatics were detained on Angel Island in SF Bay, where white overseers recorded the shapes of their heads and length of their arms and feet, as such depersonalized metrics were seen to be the only way to distinguish between them. Even today you can find Asiatic immigrants sell their state ID cards to underclassmen who then use the cards with their likeness to buy alcohol.

      To continue with your photoshop metaphors on the selective amnesiac consciousness of our (a phrase I, as a European American, can use in reference to American without self-loathing incongruity or self-parody or self-shame) history and its treatment “them,” I direct you to the conspicuous exclusion of a certain ethnic group in all of the numerous celebratory photographs taken to commemorate progress on the transcontinental railroad. 2wit: http://res.sys-con.com/author/8146/1869-Golden_Spike.jpg

      A terrific simulacrum of nineteenth century America’s view of the Chinese and Asiatics in general can be seen in the history of the town Truckee, CA. A perusal of modern primetime TV and Hollywood output provides a tidy example of how “far we’ve come” since then. In Nixon’s words to Mao, “the US and the Chinese are natural allies,” referring to extra-political arenas of trade and settlement (a Chinatown to be found in every big city.) It was what Nixon said of the Chinese and Asiatics in private – on tape – that most truthfully represents the consciousness of this nation.

  38. Jimmy Chen

      “we” and “our” was directed at htmlg’s readership, primarily white. I think about the audience more than myself in writing these posts. i didn’t want to mix my race into the equation; besides, just because chinese were treated poorly does not mitigate or influence my feelings towards slavery. on a broader level, i use “we” the first person plural pronoun as ‘humanity,’ in terms of an accountability which ought to transcend race. it’s unfortunate that you are so ridden with politics to see my other, main points.

  39. micic

      I’m totally let down the way you use “politics” in a vague way at the end of the paragraph, referring to no specific point – a facile blanket dismiss. The political details of the Nixon quote were context/garnish, the point was his private racism and how it accurately reveals the American subconscious. My perspective is historic and personal.
      Your own race is implied in the perspective of the argument you’re making. “It’s too bad we don’t have an ‘Erase History’ option.” The idea’s that there’s this collective inherited yolk on white peoples back because of what their forebears did and how we get privilege off those things today. If your own roots are so divorced from this people, ethnicity, culture, society; if your ancestors were also the victim of prejudice and exclusion and hatred by these people, then you logically have no basis to feel guilty on behalf of it, even if you are a citizen who feels himself to be “American.” I would sooner understand an Asian feeling guilt for expatriating himself from his 1000s year heritage to join forces with a nation who treated his kind like donkeys for most all of its history, than I would understand an Asian feeling any guilt whatever over past American racism-unless this is guilt felt by proxy for whites. “we/our” as humanity is too broad for the pointed historical context of your entry.
      But I see your points. I agree with your analysis and understanding of the love/hate affair whites have with blacks. A hypocrisy as whack as the collective delusion – religious both in its maudlin & naive we-are-all-brothers empathy and its insistence on faith in the face of increasingly unavoidable scientific contradiction – that there is no such thing as race. Once you accept as scientific fact inherent differences it’s a first step down the slippery slope into value judgements that depict one race as some way preferable. With the wounds of WWII so fresh in the West’s collective memory we’ve been willing to turn the other cheek for the past 60 years, despite the of nag of reason and common sense. I’m getting too scattered at this point, but you know what I mean.. One of those brutal honesty routines.

  40. jw veldhoen

      thanks for this.

  41. Eric Beeny

      Well said, Jimmy. Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismanlte the Master’s House” came to mind. I like your comment: “…the schizophrenic way of glorifying/celebrating their culture while subconsciously fearing and resenting them, or a liberal condescending empathy for their misunderstood plight.” I often think when that condescending and fearful glorification mutates into emulation. Or emulation occurs as a way of maintaining distance from that which ‘we’ fear, which is what ‘we’ simultaneously glorify. By becoming (vicariously) that which ‘we’ fear, ‘we’ can eliminate diversity by ultimately assimilating black culture into ‘ours’ and while claiming ‘we’ celebrate it and only allowing, as you said, ” perceived opportunity” for minorities to escape the historical and cultural position in which ‘we’ have placed and hope to keep for fear of a perceived sense of relative deprivation on ‘our’ part due to a perceived sense of downward mobility by comparison. I forgot where I was going with this. Oh, emulation may be an unconscious attempt to erase history. Maybe.

  42. Steven Augustine

      “…A hypocrisy as whack as the collective delusion – religious both in its maudlin & naive we-are-all-brothers empathy and its insistence on faith in the face of increasingly unavoidable scientific contradiction – that there is no such thing as race. ”

      Sure, there is “race”; what there is no such thing of is “our” conception of it, which is purely in the name of privileging one of the pseudo-races (“white”; wtf is “white”?) over the other two constructs. Sure there are races: there are *thousands* of them.

      But we’re not going to go for the Scientifically-justifiable “thousands-of-races” model because there’s no socio-psycho-economic advantage to “whites” in that. Jews weren’t “white” in America in 1900; Italians and Irish weren’t either. And inhabitants of Southern India… who can get a driver’s license with “Caucasian” stamped on it in California today if they jump through the proper INS hoops… do you think they were “White” in 19th Century England? I’m from a wildly-mixed family (both on the maternal and paternal sides: social pressure kept the mongrels together)… a proper Racial Science would place me as a separate Race from both of my grandfathers and would separate each of them from both of their parents… but the actual category difference would be so subtle and *inconsequential*, socially, as Bloody Types: the key proof that “our” concept of race is medievalist is its *social impact*.

      “Our” utilitarian concept of Race, itself, is racist. Much of the confusion stems from the fact that Eugenics has been given a PC face-lift and is still informing pseudo-scientific conversations to this day (one of my favorite examples was the Evolution-based “explanation”, I read, for why “men prefer blondes”… presented in a mainstream News venue… Hitler would have approved).

  43. herocious

      DISLIKE the 2nd photo.

  44. Steven Augustine

      The fuzzily-defined totalities of “black culture” and “white culture” were both contributed to by people of every description. Is open heart surgery a form of “black culture” because a black guy pioneered it? Is R&B a form of “white culture” because it’s based on a European musical scale? Basketball was invented by a “white” Canadian: is it an example of Canadian culture?

      There’s a logic in talking about National, Regional or Linguistic cultures… but superimposing “Race” on these only worked in a 19th century America so segregated and Wasp-hegemonic that the blurring was minimized. Now the blurring is maximized: the “white” and “black” culture distinction is obsolete. There is unconscious privilege-distortion in the weird notion that “assimilation” is unilateral.

      “White culture” and “Black culture” are both whatever the Media-Educational-Propaganda complex (owned largely by “white” males) say they are; they are distinctions of convenience and racist in essence. The concepts have a social function and it ain’t pretty. The millions of people who think of Obama as “talking white” is proof of that. There is no hope for “blacks” in America as long as people think of pidgin English, anti-intellectuality, brute sexuality and folkloric Abrahamism as “black culture”. There *are* American sub-cultures that answer fairly well to that cluster of descriptions but they are socio-economic groupings. “Whites” just don’t want to recognize *poor* “whites” as contributing to the definition of whiteness.

  45. micic

      I’m totally let down the way you use “politics” in a vague way at the end of the paragraph, referring to no specific point – a facile blanket dismiss. The political details of the Nixon quote were context/garnish, the point was his private racism and how it accurately reveals the American subconscious. My perspective is historic and personal.
      Your own race is implied in the perspective of the argument you’re making. “It’s too bad we don’t have an ‘Erase History’ option.” The idea’s that there’s this collective inherited yolk on white peoples back because of what their forebears did and how we get privilege off those things today. If your own roots are so divorced from this people, ethnicity, culture, society; if your ancestors were also the victim of prejudice and exclusion and hatred by these people, then you logically have no basis to feel guilty on behalf of it, even if you are a citizen who feels himself to be “American.” I would sooner understand an Asian feeling guilt for expatriating himself from his 1000s year heritage to join forces with a nation who treated his kind like donkeys for most all of its history, than I would understand an Asian feeling any guilt whatever over past American racism-unless this is guilt felt by proxy for whites. “we/our” as humanity is too broad for the pointed historical context of your entry.
      But I see your points. I agree with your analysis and understanding of the love/hate affair whites have with blacks. A hypocrisy as whack as the collective delusion – religious both in its maudlin & naive we-are-all-brothers empathy and its insistence on faith in the face of increasingly unavoidable scientific contradiction – that there is no such thing as race. Once you accept as scientific fact inherent differences it’s a first step down the slippery slope into value judgements that depict one race as some way preferable. With the wounds of WWII so fresh in the West’s collective memory we’ve been willing to turn the other cheek for the past 60 years, despite the of nag of reason and common sense. I’m getting too scattered at this point, but you know what I mean.. One of those brutal honesty routines.

  46. jw veldhoen

      thanks for this.

  47. Steven Augustine

      “…A hypocrisy as whack as the collective delusion – religious both in its maudlin & naive we-are-all-brothers empathy and its insistence on faith in the face of increasingly unavoidable scientific contradiction – that there is no such thing as race. ”

      Sure, there is “race”; what there is no such thing of is “our” conception of it, which is purely in the name of privileging one of the pseudo-races (“white”; wtf is “white”?) over the other two constructs. Sure there are races: there are *thousands* of them.

      But we’re not going to go for the Scientifically-justifiable “thousands-of-races” model because there’s no socio-psycho-economic advantage to “whites” in that. Jews weren’t “white” in America in 1900; Italians and Irish weren’t either. And inhabitants of Southern India… who can get a driver’s license with “Caucasian” stamped on it in California today if they jump through the proper INS hoops… do you think they were “White” in 19th Century England? I’m from a wildly-mixed family (both on the maternal and paternal sides: social pressure kept the mongrels together)… a proper Racial Science would place me as a separate Race from both of my grandfathers and would separate each of them from both of their parents… but the actual category difference would be so subtle and *inconsequential*, socially, as Bloody Types: the key proof that “our” concept of race is medievalist is its *social impact*.

      “Our” utilitarian concept of Race, itself, is racist. Much of the confusion stems from the fact that Eugenics has been given a PC face-lift and is still informing pseudo-scientific conversations to this day (one of my favorite examples was the Evolution-based “explanation”, I read, for why “men prefer blondes”… presented in a mainstream News venue… Hitler would have approved).

  48. Steven Augustine

      The fuzzily-defined totalities of “black culture” and “white culture” were both contributed to by people of every description. Is open heart surgery a form of “black culture” because a black guy pioneered it? Is R&B a form of “white culture” because it’s based on a European musical scale? Basketball was invented by a “white” Canadian: is it an example of Canadian culture?

      There’s a logic in talking about National, Regional or Linguistic cultures… but superimposing “Race” on these only worked in a 19th century America so segregated and Wasp-hegemonic that the blurring was minimized. Now the blurring is maximized: the “white” and “black” culture distinction is obsolete. There is unconscious privilege-distortion in the weird notion that “assimilation” is unilateral.

      “White culture” and “Black culture” are both whatever the Media-Educational-Propaganda complex (owned largely by “white” males) say they are; they are distinctions of convenience and racist in essence. The concepts have a social function and it ain’t pretty. The millions of people who think of Obama as “talking white” is proof of that. There is no hope for “blacks” in America as long as people think of pidgin English, anti-intellectuality, brute sexuality and folkloric Abrahamism as “black culture”. There *are* American sub-cultures that answer fairly well to that cluster of descriptions but they are socio-economic groupings. “Whites” just don’t want to recognize *poor* “whites” as contributing to the definition of whiteness.