Philip Guston Now and Trauma Culture

What this retrospective tells us about the Art World and liberalism's demise

Guston’s retrospective at the National Gallery is full of wall text warning the viewer about potentially traumatic material (the cartoonish KKK figures mentioned i the earlier post) but also LOTS of biographical information to make sure that we all knew that Guston was a very traumatized person. His father hung himself when he was ten. His brother was killed in a freak accident when his car rolled over him and crushed his legs. He saw photographs of the recently liberated concentration camps after World War II. The Forbes Review gives a good overview of Guston’s tragic early life. His father was a boilermaker in Canada, but after moving the family to Los Angeles, Guston’s father worked as a rag picker to earn a meager living. The trauma narrative is almost an apologia for Guston’s obsessive redrawing and repainting of the hooded figure.

It is hard to imagine that the hooded chain smoking artist figured above would be offensive to anyone as an image: but the curators, minus Mark Godfrey who protested against the postponement of the show and was eventually suspended by the Tate Modern because of his public show of dissent feel that we all need to be coddled and protected.

Guston seems to have worked through his relationship to being traumatized by seeing the KKK on rampages in Los Angeles, but he does it in a particularly painterly way. His self portrait is self deprecating, anti-heroic: he is hooded by his traumatic past, but has also mastered it, one part through identification and creativity.

I haven’t read the Storr book on Guston, I haven’t bought the catalogue and read the essays. I’m just your amateur art viewer, trying to make sense of how and why some of the most powerful artist institutions in the world and their leaders would recoil at showing Guston’s work during the annus horribilis of 2020. Did their over the top therapeutic attitude to museum goers actually allow this show to reach more people, perhaps from the working class milieus in which Guston grew up?

I don’t think so. I’ll take a deeper dive into the Guston material because his retrospective was amazing to see. I felt transformed by the art and irritated by the wall text. We live in a suffocatingly administered world where elites pretend to care about our feelings. I will leave it at that for today.