A DARK PAST MADE VIVID IN ART OF ERASURE

AT USC, KEN GONZALES-DAY FLIPS OUR VIEW OF IDENTITY IN ALTERED PHOTOS OF LYNCHINGS

- | Review CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT ART CRITIC

ONE DAY in 1953, the young and not yet widely known artist Robert Rauschenberg, just 26, knocked on the studio door of Willem de Kooning, 49, a newly successful figure just emerging into the forefront among a growing cohort of celebrated painters in postwar New York.

Rauschenberg had come to ask for a drawing — not as part of a collegial exchange of works, which artists often do between themselves, but to mount a direct challenge by a younger generation to an older, newly established one. Rauschenberg wanted a De Kooning drawing so he could erase it.

The young artist, in an audacious shot across the art world bow, was engaged in a symbolic act of Oedipal homicide. “Erasing” De Kooning would get the incipient powerhouse out of the way, artistically speaking. The critical gesture of removal at once recognized the authoritative potency of the father, while insisting that the son was necessarily charged with representing a changed world. The older artist knew what the younger artist was up to, and he charitably accommodated the bold request.

That exchange came to mind the other day in an urgent survey exhibition at USC's Fisher Museum of Art. Los Angeles artist Ken Gonzales-Day has harnessed the power of artistic erasure in a related — if very different — way. Obliteration drives several extraordinary series of conceptual works that shine in the exhibition.

“Ken Gonzales-Day: History's ‘Nevermade’” offers a timely retrospective of an artist who explores the way social erasure operates in American life. Identity —