Robert Rauschenberg's piece "Erased de Kooning," 1953

Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting, 1951. House paint on canvas, 72 x 72 in, four panels. Collection the Artist's Estate

In his provocative article “White Noise: Race and Erasure in the Cultural Avant-Garde,” musicologist Lloyd Whitesell posits that a rhetoric of negation, or that of cultural erasure, influences the work of American avant-garde artists. The fascination with nothingness that influenced Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage seeks to dissolve all historical and social contexts in a quest to return to a tabula rasa, or blank slate. Thus, according to Whitesell, John Cage’s goal of stating, expressing, and achieving “nothingness” originated as a subversive effort to “jettison the traditional systems of signification of Western musical culture.”

This resistance to the bourgeois aesthetic tastes of Western art may be viewed as a desire to return to [or rather, to impose] a cultural vanishing point. To solidify this point, Whitesell draws on sources spanning 150 years that comment on the artists’ desire to eradicate or destroy conventions in order to return to zero. Whitesell quotes composer Harold Budd writing in 1970: “Ever since (a long time ago) I’ve pushed and pushed toward zero: Running it all down, a kind of on-going process of removal. There’s an enormous difference by the way, between Monotony and Boredom. Boredom, it seems to me, is trying to make something interesting. Monotony is making nothing interesting” (172).


This desire to return to zero expressed by Rauschenberg’s “Erased de Kooning” reminds me of an old computer program drawing program for children, Kid Pix, that I used in elementary school circa 1994. I remember that the program featured many creature ways to return to zero, to that blank screen. You could choose between a dump truck graphic that drove onto the canvas and carted away your drawing one block at a time, or for the more impatient juvenile artist, you could opt for the stick of dynamite that blew everything into oblivion. When I think about John Cage or Ernest Hemingway’s famous quote that substitutes every noun in the Lord’s prayer with “nada,” I imagine choosing the dynamite icon, watching and hearing everything I had created explode, and above all, how fun and addicting this was. (We especially liked the option of filling the screen entirely with large, colorful dots because it produced a very satisfying underwater, bubbling sound effect and filled up the screen in a matter of seconds instead of troubling to actually draw something original. This of course enabled us to blow everything up even faster).


The unique and provocative aspect of Whitesell’s article lies in his argument that this effort to return to a cultural vanishing point carries with it a message tinged with racial underpinnings.  Whitesell argues that most white artists have engaged in a characteristically European practice of cultural appropriation, that is, drawing extensively from sources of exoticism or cultural “otherness” for inspiration.  His examples of this practice range from Pablo Picasso, to George Gershwin, to Steve Reich, to the black-faced minstrel shows of the nineteenth century.  


Whitesell’s argument achieves a unique perspective because he asks his readers to shift their focus from the subjects in the foreground (Ex: an “Uncle Tom” or other African American “messenger” character), to the underlying white background.  His reasoning is that white artists use black or culturally “different” subjects as a vehicle for self-description and self-reflection.  (Hence, our focus in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is really not Uncle Tom who exists as a rather flat character; Harriet Beecher Stowe’s motive in writing the novel becomes the focal point).  The practice of including an African American spiritual messenger is incredibly common in literature; in the movie “O brother! Where art thou?” we see a blind African-American man on a chain gang as the symbol for the Greek poet Homer, to name one.


Furthermore, Whitesell sees that avant-garde fixation on nothingness as a cultural fixation on European whiteness (though seldom acknowledged).  What makes the "background" blank is a paradox: the combination of perceiving cultural whiteness as both the neutral stasis and as the medium for expressing universal humanity.  The assumption that a white-man's symphony like Beethoven 9 serves as the "universal message for humanity" can be seen as an extension of a Wonder Bread white-bread culture.  


Therefore, Whitesell argues that the process of cultural erasure in musical styles like minimalism still follows the Euro-centric goals of goal-oriented process and spiritual transcendence.  While a common characteristic of minimalism is its overall "featurelessness," Whitesell argues that this is a subtle nod toward whiteness and a fixation on purity.  


Although Whitesell alludes to Western Christianity as a mechanism of European drive, I was surprised that he did not equate his theories about "whiteness" with the allegory of the bride of Christ as the perceived moral ideal.  To dress as a [virginal] bride in white is to proclaim a lack of blemish, of stain.  Frequently, this becomes an another unfair double standard for women in that white is also seen as the quintessence of female evilness, as depicted by the White Witch of Narnia and other wintry, sexually frigid, albeit powerful females.  This concept of venerating "blankness" seems exist as a predominately masculine European ideal.  Thus, to return to the blank is to return to the realm of neutrality, that is, the sphere of the European male.  Females who share this goal-oriented, expressionless, and somewhat ruthless tendency toward cultural erasure might be depicted as cold, soulless, and inhuman.