'The N----- Drawings' and the limits of representation

In 1982, the critic Craig Owens influentially characterized postmodern art as a “critique of representation”—that is, a critique of the notion that words or images might stand in for fixed meanings. Pictures artists, whose work was central to Owens's account of postmodernism, are best known for their practice of appropriating words and images from everyday life and recasting their meanings through framing and juxtaposition. Yet how do these politics of appropriation read today, in light of how understandings of cultural ownership and representation have changed since the emergence of postmodernism in the late 1970s? This question has scarcely been addressed by historians of Pictures and appropriation art. My paper mends this gap by analyzing a polarizing exhibition that has been largely elided by canonical accounts of postmodernism: "The N----- Drawings" (Artists Space, New York, 1979), which presented abstract charcoal drawings by the white artist Donald Newman. Drawing on archival materials and primary sources, I reappraise the controversy surrounding the exhibition, including the Emergency Coalition’s anti-racist counterorganizing and certain critics’ defense of the exhibition through recourse to poststructuralist theory. My analysis sheds new light on this pivotal series of events and argues that they reveal the painful limits and blind spots of still-canonical theories of artistic postmodernism that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It works towards a more robust, inclusive understanding of the postmodern critique of representation that accounts for an intersectional understanding of identity and difference.