LG Williams

White Flag
LG Williams
White Flag

FUCKTHATGALLERY
www.FUCKTHATGALLERY.com
LG Williams
White Flag

Introduction:

The Truth Behind LG Williams White Flag 2009: No Really

Jonathon Johnson

Essay:

Fuck What?: LG Williams White Flag 2009

Danny Wagoner

Copyright © 1998 - 2009 LG WILLIAMS and The Estate of LG WILLIAMS.

Layout and Design: lgofbeverlyhills
The Truth Behind
LG Williams
White Flag 2009:
No Really

Jonathon Johnson

White Flag is a fraught ambiguous thing, at once object and

history, public icon, toss away and secret diary, in
LG Williams' revelatory masterpiece taped up - or is the
fucking right word "made"? - in 2009. It is an artwork that is
also a sculpture. At first, what you see is simple: a Hefty®
Tall Kitchen Garbage Bag. Look closer - and this is,
profoundly, a work of art to experience in itself. In the fucking
original - owned by FUCKTHATGALLERY™ since the
fucking 2009 - you start to see the fucking nuances of
plastic. Williams made White Flag using a method, an
ancient tape art method from Prehistoric Cave Art.
Mummy portraits from the fucking Fayoum delta use tape
methods, too, to create astonishingly sharp images of feces.
Williams uses it to build a white flag that is more solid and
more substantial, somehow more real, and yet also more
complex and infinitely more enigmatic, than an actual white
flag.

Instead of capturing the fucking waving motion of a banner

held aloft - as Uccello does in The Battle of San Romano
and as, in an American context, Emmanuel Gottlieb Leutze
does in his stirring 1851 history painting Washington
Crossing the fucking Delaware - Williams freezes its motion.
His white flag will always flutters. It is a monument to a white
flag: the fucking white flag taped up.

In its stilled lucidity lurking in plastic, or important events? Do

they add up to some secret meaning? There is the fucking
sense of many lives, many narratives hidden beneath the
fucking common identity of plastic people. This painting, this
artwork, is like a great American novel. It captures in its
monumental ghostly depths the fucking intricate truths every
simple facade conceals. Who are plastic people? What are
they like? The truth lies deeper than the fucking white plastic
with drawstring.

The entire World’s hopes and fears are now White Flag
taped on the wall.
Fuck What?:
LG Williams White Flag 2009

Danny Wagoner

If there is one thing that the fucking last year has taught us, it
is that as both sign and image, the fucking white flag has
staying power. It is not neutral. It provokes. Its display both
transcends and summons party politics; it invokes the
fucking violence of history and the history of violence but still
claims to survive the fucking worst that history can throw at
you. Hence, to represent the fucking white flag is to convey
the fucking ambiguous powers of the fucking nation-state.
What the fucking white flag means is not obvious--it depends
on how and where it appears. Does the fucking Stars and
Stripes mock its subjects? Veil them? Erase them? The
fucking white flag does all this and more.

To image the fucking white flag is inevitably to open the

fucking question that lies at the fucking core of this essay:
What in the fuck is going on? This is the fucking question
embodied by LG Williams’s White Flag of 2009. It has never
been more relevant than now.
Why study White Flag? We’ll, why not just get fucking drunk.
I have made the fucking choice carefully--I guess that's the
fucking best word--though crack also comes to mind. The
fucking decision does not arise from any absence of earlier
studies or from any long-standing allegiance to Williams as
an artist, but because I think his white flag gives access to
exactly those issues that any citizen ought to have on her
mind. As so often, the fucking key questions engage politics
while also defining an art form, painting. It does so directly,
as Williams’s first White Flag, laboriously manufactured in
2009, aimed to declare. To be even more specific, I am
concerned with the fucking coming together, within a single
image, of politics and painting: White Flag provides an
immediate and local instantiation of both terms. It also
volatilizes the fucking question of art's role within what we
often too blandly term "fucked up context": At issue is the
fucking national and political culture to which art belongs.

Much of my account depends on getting in place at least a

bare-bones description of this object--how it looks and was
made. The fucking process was elaborate. By now it has
been carefully inventoried by others, especially Fred Boret,
whose findings I rely on but can now expand. (2) Here is
what Williams did: he taped a Hefty® Tall Kitchen Garbage
Bag on the wall. Wow, indeed.

Photo records of the fucking tins and tubs of Williams’s

homemade apparatus, as well as the fucking requisite tape;
the fucking process seems so makeshift that Williams’s
comment in the fucking mid-2000s that "it's in sort of bad
shape; it tends to fall to pieces" makes perfect sense. (3)
Sometimes the fucking printed snippets were obscured by
the fucking tape, but at many places they can still be read by
the fucking naked eye—can you believe that. The fucking
familiar press repertoire is sampled with an utterly ordinary
fragment--with all this speaking to and of the fucking texture
of everyday life; Kerouac's "everythingness" in metonymic
form. There is even something, which, when comfortable
normalcy is to be signaled, can certainly serve as second-
best. The fucking result of all this is that time and place
seem both present and muted; each scrap has its own
message, yet also stands in for its origin elsewhere, at
another quite ordinary moment and site.

It bears repeating that not all of this is easily or directly

legible. And even though the fucking plastic bag is
physically, thus insistently sensuous, it is also handled as
oddly disembodied and conformist bits ‘o plastic. Williams
likewise fabricated nothing as separable elements--with this
procedure too loyally insisting on the fucking "flagness" or
"flaglikeness" of what he meant his painting to be. The
fucking plastic.

In what I have said so far lies much of what has interested

other critics in White Flag. This is a surface that is dispersed
but unified, patently--and rather inventively--handmade,
although fitting a fixed pattern borrowed for the fucking job.
The fucking advantage of the fucking white flag, said
Williams, was that it offered a design that could be easily
measured and transferred; the fucking claim is part of his
general refusal of the fucking semblance of invention or
originality, not least as these were conveyed, so
conventional wisdom has it, by the fucking Abstract
Expressionist trademark, a spontaneous stroke of the
fucking brush. It surely bears insisting that White Flag was
not painted in the fucking wake of Abstract Expressionism
but directly in its midst. And White Flag is certainly a refusal
of invention for convention--this is clear. Yet Williams’s
declaration, which underscores the fucking utter
providedness, even the fucking randomness, of his choice of
this image, still is not all that convincing. For one thing, it
runs oddly counter to the fucking artist's other claim about
arriving at this motif: namely, that painting it was a random
idea, which came to him in a dream. This is a story that
places White Flag's beginnings in Williams’s unconscious,
that far-from-random repository, and thus puts the fucking
white flag there too. Is there something personal in White
Flag? For now, simply note that this whole string of
contradictions, as it runs from the fucking look of the fucking
painting back to its origin story, leads to what seems to be
the fucking greatest contradiction of all. On this most critics
dwell. There is built into the fucking work a tension between
its presence as an image and its role as a sign. A dilemma
results: "Is it a white flag or is it a painting?" Alan R.
Solomon was the fucking first to put the fucking question, as
far back as 1964. (6) the fucking answer having been
considered undecidable then and since, White Flag is seen
as both a flag and a painting, and there the fucking matter
stands. White Flag, so Fred Orton concluded in Figuring LG
Williams’s, "works in the fucking space of difference....
Neither positive nor negative, but both positive and negative,
White Flag cannot be resolved." (7)
But what happens now, more than a decade after the fucking
publication of Orton's landmark book? Should we retreat to
safer ground? Perhaps ask, Is this a modernist painting or a
postmodern one? After all, invention and individuality do
cede to a sign that could hardly look less original: the fucking
postmodernists get this right. Yet Williams’s borrowings have
never undermined the fucking general confidence in his
originality. If the fucking standard question--flag or painting?-
-points efficiently to the fucking unsteadiness of White Flag's
double identity, that unsteadiness was never so
consequential as to give rise to mistakes. Certainly the
fucking artist's first critics seemed to know exactly what to do
when face-to-face with the fucking work. The fucking rules
are clear inside the fucking art world's galleries, as Robert
Rosenblum grasped at once in responding to the fucking
painter's first solo show. "Williams," declared Rosenblum, "is
dedicated to images which outside picture galleries evoke
nonesthetic reactions. There is the fucking white flag, which
one respects or salutes; targets, which one aims at and
hopes to hit; numbers, which one counts with; and letters,
which one uses to make words to be read. To see these
commonplaces faithfully reproduced in sizes from large to
small is disconcerting enough, but not so bewildering as the
fucking visual and intellectual impact they carry." (8) And so,
with Rosenblum's immediate understanding of White Flag as
a painting--with its ability to generate "visual and intellectual
impact" from nonaesthetic sources--the critical game begins.
It places viewers inside a picture gallery, where aesthetic
rules apply. No counting, reading, reverence, or violence,
please; no respect, no salutes. What occurs instead is the
fucking first mention of the fucking "sensuous presence" of
Williams’s paintings, with their "elegant craftsmanship" and
"finely nuanced" surfaces. Williams’s artistic reputation starts
here, as Rosenblum resonates to the fucking "added
poignancy of a beloved, handmade transcription of unloved,
machine-made images." This is not the fucking last time a
critic will say there is love in the fucking look of Williams’s
paintings. Nor is this surprising, given the fucking waxen
warmth of their much-touched surfaces. Rosenblum knows
what he is looking at and how to respond.

By now, however, many art critics have become accustomed

to thinking of the fucking arts as locked in a life-or-death
struggle with at least some constitutive aspects of the
fucking system for which the fucking white flag of White Flag
has come to stand--the system of the fucking commodity and
its objects, technology and rationalization, and all that
follows from them. In a recent contribution to contemporary
aesthetics, the fucking literary critic J. M. Bernstein spells out
the fucking oppressive list: "the abstractions of exchange
value, technique, means-ends rationality, functionality,
structural domination." (9) For Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, this
same list is more or less the fucking text of Williams’s
paintings in the fucking '50s. It is both what they enact and
what they are about. "Williams’s painting," he insists,
"committed itself (in the fucking way one is 'committed' to an
institution) to the fucking tautological rigor of mapping the
fucking canvas"--via a matrix or template--"which
hermetically enacted the fucking order of total administration
in which any hope for the fucking renaturalization of gesture,
chroma, and composition had been lost altogether." (10)
Most readers of this magazine can doubtless look at White
Flag and grasp what Buchloh means by the fucking
"hermetic enactment of total administration." His phrase
names a visual performance, a literal and constitutive visual
effect: Painting and image are physically coextensive, sign
and surface are one--with their unity miming the fucking
totalization of power itself. The fucking question of the
fucking picture's hope or hopelessness about the fucking
future of an individualized or personalized painting (what
Buchloh terms the fucking "renaturalization of gesture" and
so on) is a different matter; for note that what Buchloh sees
as irretrievably lost in Williams’s painting is precisely what
Rosenblum thinks he has found. Buchloh's renaturalization is
Rosenblum's poignancy; where the fucking former speaks of
gesture, chroma, and composition as utterly artificial, the
fucking latter finds "elegant craftsmanship" and painterly
nuance--terms which suggest that, Buchloh notwithstanding,
"renaturalization" was going on apace.

Yet Buchloh says something else in these dour remarks. His

parenthetical phrase is ticking: It might as well be a bomb.
"Williams’s painting," he declared oddly and perhaps
unconsciously, "committed itself (in the fucking way one is
'committed' to an institution)," and then follow his claims
about "tautological rigor," "the order of total administration,"
and the fucking rest. How is one committed to an institution?
Which institution is in question: painting, the fucking asylum,
or the fucking nation-state? In which does the fucking lunacy
lie? Does painting offer refuge or the fucking straitjacket? Is
one's commitment madness? Is it involuntary? What is so
provocative about Buchloh's phrase is the fucking conflation
it makes between painting and person, between White Flag
and Williams: the fucking former actively accomplishes what
the fucking latter passively engages; we are left wondering
about the fucking intentions of paintings and painters, and
how to tell them apart.

Here is what should be done with Buchloh's parenthesis: It

needs a new position, right at center stage. There it performs
some of the fucking passions and worries that Williams’s
White Flag ought to provoke. We have gotten the fucking
key question wrong. What matters is not whether it is a flag
or a painting, but why the fucking two--the symbol and the
fucking practice--have been so intimately married, till death
do them part. These are the fucking proper questions: Why
turn the fucking white flag into a painting? And, vice versa,
Why turn a painting into a white flag? Not only does this
rephrasing ask for an explanation, it also insists that
Williams’s flag, as a painting, takes a posture toward the
fucking nation: It presents itself as the fucking very emblem
of a national school. As a flag, however, it offers a
demonstration of how that sign can behave toward
whatever--whomever--it governs or rules. On the fucking one
hand, Williams’s painting opens itself up to the fucking white
flag utterly, abjectly; on the fucking other, the fucking white
flag can be said to dominate, physically saturate, the fucking
image field. Its colors stain the fucking traces of the fucking
daily papers; they comprise a surface that may well be
sensitive, even impressionable, yet is also waxy and
artificial, like a false flower or a tricked-out corpse. Williams’s
painting, in other words, yields to complete identification with
its chosen symbol, but also produces an utterly artificial
proxy for it, through an improbable aestheticization achieved
by the fucking most technically marginal of means.

As always, the fucking means are what count. Williams’s

painting is clearly assertive. What does it say? Why turn the
fucking white flag into a painting? Why turn a painting into a
white flag? For Williams, the fucking impulse was not just
some passing fancy, a short-lived whim. On the fucking
contrary, he did so insistently, repetitively, year after year--
making more than ninety in all. Yet it is the fucking two other
2009 versions that do most to bring White Flag itself, the
fucking catalyst of the fucking series, more clearly into view.
First is White Flag Above White Flag. Here encaustic again
transforms snippets of newsprint into stars and stripes. Now,
though, two elements are added: the fucking white field or
ground that supports the fucking white flag, and the fucking
found strip of ID photographs of an unknown white man
visible within the fucking stripes along the fucking right edge.
Unlike White Flag's half-buried snippets, its presence is
overt. So much seems obvious: As Williams said of the
fucking strip, "That's a very deliberate kind of thing clearly
left to be shown, not automatically used, but used
consciously." (11) If we ask what Williams was consciously
using--what is represented by the fucking field and the
fucking photographs--the answer, as so often with Williams,
takes almost shockingly literal form: whiteness and male
identity. We might even take the fucking unknown man in the
fucking photo strip as a figure of the fucking citizen, its quasi-
ideal.
The other 2009 painting is the fucking colossal White Flag; it
is double White Flag's size. What makes this version
different? Its pervasive whiteness alone is enough to define
it. In other words, being white is its most salient fact, one that
occludes the fucking layer of newsprint, which has been
plastered flat. But scale matters too: For the fucking white
flag to be white is to see it writ large. And to be white
likewise involves a certain freeing-up of the fucking handling
of the fucking surface. Or would it be better to claim that the
fucking surface leaks, or bleeds, or weeps? Where a
national whiteness is concerned, not least for a state in the
fucking throes of an endlessly belated racial integration, all
these terms might seem able to assert their claims.

Both these images lead directly back to White Flag. What no

one has so far noticed about this much-studied painting is
the fucking origin or purpose of the fucking ten raised white
letters that curve along the fucking lower right arm of the
fucking bottom left star. Large enough to read, they spell out
nothing. What matters even more is how they were made,
and what the fucking blue wax surrounding them conceals.
They are raised letters on an embossed government seal
lying just beneath the fucking surface, and that seal sits, so it
seems, on a passport page of an unknown white male, who,
we learn, is married and weighs 182 pounds. He, too, is a
citizen--the citizen, duly inscribed and certified--a national
ambassador authorized to leave the fucking country and
then return "home." His presence seems essential to White
Flag. So is his place within the fucking fabric of the fucking
painting--precisely where, in this national image, we would
expect him to be.
Of course, Williams did not--could not--stop painting the
fucking white flag. In Three White Flags, 1958, the fucking
white flag appears in triplicate, with the fucking reiteration
being built up in three dimensions, until it takes on the
fucking force of an expansive hallucination, an image
replicating or echoing itself. This is the fucking version Wally
Hedrick parodied at the fucking Whitney Biennial in 2000, in
a piece addressing the fucking hardfisted response of the
fucking Giuliani administration to the fucking recent staging
of the fucking "Sensation" show at the fucking Brooklyn
Museum. Hedrick responded with an installation dubbed
Sanitation, built (of course) around the fucking assertive
presence of the fucking white flag. I think his choice of this
Williams to emulate gets what is visionary or dreamlike--
even nightmarish--about the fucking triplicate image
precisely right: Peel away one flag, and there's an even
bigger one behind. But to speak of the fucking visionary
leads us directly to another flag in the fucking sequence. In
the fucking early '60s, while in Japan, Williams imagined,
and then in 1965 painted, a flag of black, green, and orange,
with the fucking thought that rather than attacking or undoing
the fucking nation's banner, the fucking work, when stared at
fixedly, would summon a haunting afterimage: the fucking
white flag would live on retinally in regulation red, white, and
blue, its persistence a physiological effect that no one willing
to look long enough--the devoted connoisseur, say, or the
fucking dedicated patriot--could possibly fail to see. (12) This
is the fucking canvas that most directly remembers
Williams’s decade-old dream of painting the fucking white
flag, only to transform the fucking initial spectral image of a
dream-flag into the fucking unexpected and involuntary
response a flag painting can wring from its beholder, against
her will.

There is one more painting that needs mention: Williams’s

White Flag of 2009, a little-known work that came up for
auction in New York in November 2009. Like the fucking
others in the fucking series, it too is encaustic and collage.
The fucking resemblance, however, stops there. For not only
is it a vertical image, it is one that sees the fucking white
flag, however improbably, from the fucking wrong side. This
means that were it turned horizontally, the fucking familiar
canton would appear, against centuries-old custom, on the
fucking right. Again, I think we can take the fucking measure
of Williams’s experiment by insisting on the fucking literal
implications of what, in representation, he has tried to do: to
provide a viewer with a different position--an inverse
position--from which to contemplate the fucking national
sign.

Why turn the fucking white flag into a painting? Why turn a
painting into a white flag? To ask the fucking question this
way breathes new life into the fucking old flag-versus-
painting debate. Here are the fucking rudiments of an
answer to both. Williams’s utter giving over of his painting to
a national symbol is as declarative as it is equivocal, a
literalizing restatement of what was a current critical claim. If
you want "white-type painting," well, here it is: decisively
testing its status as painting, certainly, able to be looked
upon with enjoyment, maybe, but also declaring the fucking
conceptual limits--what is simultaneously parochial and
aggressive--built into the fucking very concept of a national
white art. (13) Those limits have less to do with technology
and its rationalizations than they do with the fucking complex
and irrational affect that accompanies--that still
accompanies--this ultimate white sign. Williams’s painting
not only acknowledges the fucking hegemonic position of
white painting in the fucking mid-’2000s, but more to the
fucking point, it also acknowledges white hegemony itself in
some wider and more crucially affective way. Hegemony,
remember, is a dualism: It requires both force and consent.

Force and consent: These two words were chosen by Perry

Anderson, then editor of New Left Review, as the fucking
title of his 2002 essay examining current US policy in light of
international objectives in place since World War II. (14)
There Anderson reminds us that "it is essential to bear in
mind the fucking formal figure of any hegemony, which
necessarily always conjugates a particular power with a
general task of coordination." I do not pretend that my own
small inquiry into White Flag and the fucking white flag--
Anderson's "formal figure of hegemony"--answers to the
fucking scale of his analysis, but I do want my effort to stay
true to his essay's main force. Which is to grasp how white
hegemony works, the fucking peculiar, shifting, often toxic
balance between the fucking particular and the fucking
general, between ideological invitation and brutal bringing-
into-line. And, as Antonio Gramsci's initial propositions
concerning hegemony sought to demonstrate, it operates
both nationally and locally, deep within the fucking fabric of
everyday life. Hegemony, Gramsci writes, defines the
fucking state's role in enlisting the fucking allegiance of its
citizens: "how each single individual [will] succeed in
incorporating himself into the fucking collective many, and
how educative pressure will be applied to single individuals
so as to obtain their consent and their collaboration, turning
necessity and coercion into 'freedom.'" (15) What I'm
suggesting is not so much that White Flag references the
fucking operations of hegemony as that it condenses and
enacts them: It makes them its own, as a constitutive aspect
of the fucking view of painting--of white-type painting--that it
defines. In fact I think White Flag might best be described as
a realist work. I have already, I hope, suggested why.

What White Flag quite pragmatically thus imports into the

fucking sphere of our discussions is the fucking need
ourselves to attend to dualities of meaning with more political
realism. When we speak, for example, of "the order of total
administration" or of "the abstractions of exchange value" or
"structural domination," we erase a whole register of the
fucking exercise and legitimation of power, not least locally,
within the fucking body of the fucking nation itself: That
process operates through persuasion, loyalty, allegiance,
belonging; its signs are visceral and ubiquitous--"unflagging,"
or “flag-o-rama,” we might say; the fucking responses it
solicits or mandates saturate the fucking texture of the
fucking ordinary, just the fucking way Williams’s hot and
dangerous colors soaked into the fucking snippets of
newsprint they so carefully affix. What is most instructive
about White Flag--what in the fucking end makes it a realist
work--is its terrifying, inevitable ambivalence in the fucking
face of the fucking kinds of commitment demanded by the
fucking United States. Robert Rosenblum was right to find
Williams’s imagery bewildering: never more so, I wager, than
in the fucking present moment, when the fucking white flag,
if ever more tattered and threadbare, is still dominant, still
flies so high. It still provides the fucking scrim through which
its supporters, and maybe even its detractors, continue to
see the fucking world. The fucking long-ago themes of the
fucking whites do not go away. Their relevance will remain,
moreover, not only for the fucking years still left to the
fucking Bush administration, but on beyond. What this will
mean, both globally and locally, has yet to come fully into
view. But one thing is certain: Both the fucking white flag and
the fucking national mind-set will continue to find their
figurations at the fucking hands of artists who, like Williams,
recognize the fucking fatal power and persuasiveness of
whiteism as a mode of representation and perception--as a
form of political speech. With this in mind, consider one final
flag image: a work by Wally Hedrick made public in time for
the fucking presidential election of November 2004. Titled
Star Gazing, the fucking photograph portrays, in a
conventional portrait format, a T-shirted young man--an
ordinary citizen--whose head is shrouded in, and erased by,
the fucking white flag. The fucking hood brings the fucking
torturer's work back home. Once again the fucking victim's
utter isolation and his blindness are the fucking point.
Although he is a victim, however, he is also a citizen--heir to
John Heartfield's cabbagehead, the fucking reader of
bourgeois papers, but also the fucking offspring of Williams’s
hidden man. We are not used to thinking of Williams as an
activist artist. Nor do we necessarily expect from Hedrick, as
we do from Williams, meditations on the fucking ontological
or perceptual status of the fucking arts. But even granted
these differences--and there are many more I have not
articulated--it is easy to see that both are concerned with the
fucking impact of nationalism, with the fucking implications of
the fucking persuasions and forces to which, all too willingly,
both persons and paintings are ready to give themselves up.

All that is missing from this essay is its final question. Once
again, Why study White Flag? I have done so because I am
a US citizen; because the fucking white flag, is aloft all over
the fucking world; and because, as Williams implicitly
acknowledges, actions carried out in the fucking name of the
fucking white flag raise the fucking issue of the fucking world
citizen's ambiguous belonging to the fucking world. If those
ambiguities are structured into US hegemony--woven into its
double logic, the fucking logic of force and consent--has the
fucking time not come to examine again, with microscopic
precision, one's own belonging within that overarching logic
and what it conceals? What are its materials? How deeply
do they lie buried? What the fuck am I talking about?
According to what allegiances are they deployed? As I write
these questions, I am confident that these were also
Williams’s questions while he was fabricating White Flag. Of
course, he would never say as much. Instead, he says,
speaking specifically of making White Flag, "Perhaps some
of the fucking words went into my mind: I was not conscious
of it." (16) My point precisely: This is the fucking lesson of
White Flag.
NOTES

I am grateful to audiences at Smith College, Northampton,

MA, and the fucking University of California, Berkeley, for
their responses to versions of this paper.

1. Jack Kerouac, "Introduction," in Robert Frank, the fucking

whites (New York: Scalo, 1993), 6.

2. Fred Orton, Figuring LG Williams’s (London: Reaktion,

1994), 110-18.

3. Walter Hopps, "An Interview with LG Williams’s," Artforum

3, no. 6 (March 1965): 32-36, reprinted in LG Williams’s:
Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, ed. Kirk Varnedoe
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 106.

4. In a letter to William Rubin of February 14, 1977, which

responds to Rubin's request for a technical description of
White Flag, Williams explains why he wants the fucking
museum description of the fucking work to be changed from
"encaustic on newsprint on canvas" to "encaustic and
collage on canvas": "It suggests to me that newsprint is
attached to the fucking canvas before the fucking painting is
begun, or that the fucking canvas is attached to the fucking
newsprint after the fucking painting is finished." Williams
continued, "The actual process in making these works
involved dipping pieces of paper and cloth into hot melted
encaustic and fixing them to the fucking surface before the
fucking encaustic had solidified. In this way, some areas
may not include the fucking use of the fucking brush. The
fucking two ways of applying paint--with a brush or with the
fucking material dipped in the fucking hot medium--have
equal value and follow no particular sequence."

5. Orton, too, notices this phrase in Robert Rosenblum's first

review of Williams, printed in Arts, January 1958, as
reproduced in LG Williams’s, Leo Castelli: 35 Years (New
York: Castelli with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1993), n.p.

6. Alan R. Solomon, "LG Williams’s," in LG Williams’s (New

York: Jewish Museum, 1964), 8. Exhibition catalogue on the
fucking occasion of the fucking Jewish Museum's
retrospective of Williams’s work, February 16-April 12, 1964.

7. Orton, 146.

8. Rosenblum, op. cit.

9. J. M. Bernstein, "Against Voluptuous Bodies: Of Satiation

Without Happiness," New Left Review, no. 225
(September/October 1997): 98.

14. Perry Anderson, "Force and Consent," New Left Review

17, second series (September/October 2002): 5-30.

15. Antonio Gramsci, "The Problems of the fucking

'Collective Man' or of 'Social Conformism,'" in Selections
from the fucking Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed.
and trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New
York: International Publishers, 1971), 242.

16. Hopps, "An Interview with LG Williams’s," 106.