Spring 2016
On the first day of the graduate seminar Museum Interpretation Practices, offered
by the RISD Museum in partnership with the John Nicholas Brown Center for
Public Humanities, students were assigned the task of describing, deducing, and
speculating on an object’s values and beliefs, and our ideas about its time,
without the aid of exhibit labels. I chose Andy Warhol’s Race Riot,
1964.
In undertaking this assignment, I followed T.J. Clark’s
style of experimental art writing in The
Sight of Death, where he chronicles daily visits to the Getty to better
understand his shifting perspectives on his object of study, and gathers a
storehouse of experiences before synthesizing an interpretation. Clark’s
interpretive method favors the hyper-local, quotidian, and durational. If Foucault has it that power operates at all levels of society, Clark’s
criticism answers with a politics of everyday life. Combining his diaristic style with methods in material culture, artifact
studies, and critical theory, my interpretation of Race Riot, 1964 took shape as the following:
