Trenton Doyle Hancock, Schlep and Screw, Knowledge Rental Pawn Exchange Service, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 60 x 60 x 6” (2017). Collection of Hedy Fischer and Randy Shull, Asheville, North Carolina

To confront: to face, especially in challenge; to oppose. Also, to bring face-to-face; to cause to meet.⁵ One confronts an enemy, a difficult situation, a problem, reality, a truth revealed. The oppositional, even combative encounter adumbrated by the exhibit’s subtitle—Hancock confronts Guston—evokes not just Hancock’s facing up to an artistic father (though that too), but his commitment to taking on their shared subject: white supremacist injustice and simpleminded violence. The confrontation, then, is always triangular: Hancock confronts—and confronts us with—the Ku Klux Klan; he does so through the characters in Philip Guston’s paintings, even as Guston puts the robe and hood on himself to confront his own relationship to whiteness (not least as an assimilated Jew). For in another triangulation, Guston confronts his own guilt and feelings of complicity through the volatile and politically charged imagery of the Klan. The nesting confrontations of the exhibition are thus: each artist within himself; the artists with each other; and both artists with the casual conspicuousness and all-too-ordinary violence of white supremacist hate. As museum curator Rebecca Shaykin told me, the exhibition’s title captures these tensions: “the almost magnetic attraction/repulsion to both the subject at hand (white supremacy) and the artwork itself (by turns lovely and pink, painterly and virtuosic, violent and grotesque, disturbing and childish), as well as both artists’ impulse to shed light on social ills in order to eradicate them.”⁶

What is the obligation of the artist to the world? To the “self”? How do these two artists manage the conflict or tension between the commitment to individual self-expression and social justice? Given the venue, the question of Guston’s relationship to white supremacy (and to white privilege) as a Jewish artist hovers over the entire exhibition. If Guston’s Klan-themed paintings land barbs of social satire, they also offer covert glimpses into Guston’s inner conflicts and personal traumas. Guston, born Goldstein, later regretted his decision to Anglicize his name.⁷ As the art historian Robert Storr argues, the hooded figures of Guston’s late painting suggest “coded emblem[s]” of the artist’s “coming to terms with his Jewish heritage and the vexing problem of assimilation.” Guston apparently found a model for his escapades under the hood in the protagonist of Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry, a Ukrainian Jew who leaves the shtetl and rides among the Cossack horsemen, his hereditary enemies.⁸ Guston knew “what it meant to have a tormentor in your life,” Hancock remarks (with a nod to Guston’s The Tormentors [1947–1948]): “He provided a vehicle for me to enter into the self-directed study of what it means to be American. To don that robe and hood and go incognito. I needed him to help me figure out how to go undercover.”⁹

By the end of the 1960s, Guston “was feeling split.” “The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I,” he asked, “sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything—and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?”¹⁰ But in recouping the anti-racist and anti-fascist imagery of his youth (he had painted large politically motivated murals featuring hooded Klansmen), Guston also retrieved his early love of comics and his training as an editorial cartoonist: the Klan came back, but now in the form of buffoonish, cartoonlike clowns whose obtuse antics—“Riding Around” “Downtown” to a “Meeting,” to name a few of the titles—recall George Herriman’s Krazy Kat and the underground comix of Robert Crumb. One can almost imagine the white walls of the Marlborough gallery in New York, then a shrine to abstraction, blushing as this wave of slapdash thugs poured out upon them: smoking, boozing, and—curiously—painting. “They are self-portraits,” Guston insisted. “I perceive myself as being behind the hood.”¹¹

Among the most famous of these self-portraits is The Studio (1969), in which a Klansman paints his own self-portrait, gripping the paintbrush between the thick fingers of his meat-red hand. The clock strikes two in the afternoon; time has gotten away from him. Despite the midday hour, the prominent lightbulb dangling from the ceiling tells us that no inspiration, no light, illuminates this flesh-colored room from the world outside the studio. (I imagine the scene as if tattooed on the artist’s body.) Looking no farther than the end of his own nose, this real allegory of the artist frames a mise en abyme of empty self-regard. The furled drapes part like the curtains on a stage, as though to emphasize the showbiz moment of presentation (“Presenting . . . !”): the artist caught red-handed. In the complacency of his studio, the modernist artist is no better than a murderous thug. What Guston called “bad painting”¹² (read: figurative, narrative, down-to-earth) bears out Walter Benjamin’s thesis about modernity: “[T]here is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”¹³ And in the late 1960s, with the atrocities of the Holocaust and fresh outbursts of Klan violence on his mind, Guston felt a need to bear witness—to document, howsoever barbarically—a world in crisis.

Philip Guston, The Studio, oil on canvas, 48 x 42” (1969). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Promised Gift of Musa Mayer © the Estate of Philip Guston

A similar “documentary” urgency drove Hancock to reawaken Guston’s slumbering ghost in 2013. Guston’s influence had “gone dormant” in Hancock’s practice in the early aughts. But now he had begun to dig deeper into the history of the Klan and white supremacist groups active in his hometown of Paris, Texas, and the South more generally. He had known some facts about Paris and its violent past; now he dove headfirst into archival research, hunting down names and dates. In discussions with his mother and nonagenarian grandmother, he heard horror stories of the infamous lynching of the Black teenager Henry Smith at the fairgrounds where Hancock had played while growing up; Smith’s body had been dragged down his grandmother’s street. To process his traumatic discoveries, and to vent his frustration and anger, Hancock fantasized about a meeting between his alter ego Torpedo Boy, an egotistical Black superhero prone to self-sabotage, and Guston’s Klansman avatar. What would happen if these two characters were to meet up in a picture plane?¹⁴

Answering this question led to Epidemic! Presents: Step and Screw (2014), for which Hancock put on his editorial cartooning hat (the title of his weekly comic strip for the student newspaper East Texan was Epidemic!). Part graphic memoir, part art installation, Step and Screw consists of 30 black-and-white panels, framed and installed in two rows inside a shed lit by a single hanging bulb. Recapitulating the two rows of the panels, the work itself unzips along two parallel tracks that at first seem entirely unrelated. Comic-strip panels run along the top half of the mounted frames, rolling out the story; underneath, lettering charting a timeline of events is excised directly into the mat board and painted over with gesso. The entries interweave events from Hancock’s personal and family history, including key moments in his development as an artist, with Guston’s biography, as well as the history of Klan activity in Hancock’s hometown and fantastical occurrences from Hancock’s “Moundverse” mythology (such as the transfer of the consciousness of Torpedo Boy from the Jewish helicopter pioneer Henry Adler Berliner to Hancock at birth). The visual effect is ghostly, haunted, like the absent-present imprint of a long-forgotten memory.

The linear comic strip narrative that forms the top layer of the work began as a crude one-liner. I imagine a variant on the classic “lightbulb” joke (“How many X’s does it take . . . ”), with an additional allusion to the racist stereotype embodied by the vaudeville star Stepin Fetchit (“step and fetch it” when spoken slowly). The story goes like this: Guston’s Klansman lures Torpedo Boy into a shed to change a lightbulb. Torpedo Boy is irritated by the request, but dutifully climbs onto a footstool and even puts on the paper bag he’s given for his head. (I wondered whether it was the very one worn by the posing child in Guston’s If This Be Not I? [1945].) When the lights go on (“Eureka!”), the negative contour drawing and black backgrounds of the shed’s interior irradiate into a close-etched, black-on-white graphic style. And now, our hapless hero discovers himself surrounded by sinister hoods beneath a noose-like “lightbulb.” A hooded figure straight from Guston’s Drawing for Conspirators holds out a piece of rope. In the twist ending, Torpedo Boy stutters out: “Oh shit you didn’t tell me you were, you didn’t tell me you were . . . were . . . were . . . PAINTERS!”

As an immortal being, Torpedo Boy is not worried about becoming the Klan’s next victim; it’s the painters who pose the threat. The punchline registers a double-edged barb about the pretensions of political art. The joke’s on you guys: How many painters does it take to screw in a lightbulb, anyway? Of course, the satire also cuts in the other direction: Hancock pokes fun at the treatment of certain pieces of controversial art as if they could inflict actual harm (cf. the rhetoric describing Sam Durant’s Scaffold as “an act of violence,” “a slap in the face of the Dakota people”).¹⁵ We chuckle at the absurdity of an immortal superhero cowed and trembling at the thought of . . . painters! Then too, I imagine that the episode reflects upon Hancock’s coming-to-voice as an artist, on his “entering the painters’ clubhouse,” so to speak. In this light, the “step and screw” two-step confronts his own visibility in an art world founded on legacies of exclusion, colonialism, and imperialism. Through Torpedo Boy, Hancock imagines himself stepping onto the auction block, a commodity for sale; or else, he acts the part of Stepin Fetchit, buying his inclusion at the high price of self-degradation. If you thought Klansmen were bad, Hancock seems to say, try painters—they are really out to screw you.