White Columns’ archives have a lot of amazing stuff, but not all of it. Director Matthew Higgs regularly posts outtake gems to his instagram, like he did yesterday when he announced the upcoming White Columns Benefit Auction (June 26, tickets and exhibition start next Friday) by posting some pics of previous benefit auction checklists.
Like this one from at least 1996, when Cady Noland donated a work from 1992 that does not appear anywhere else in the public record. What is/was it? A cozily sized screenprint on aluminum, sure, but of what?
We Are All Sanpaku is a phrase that probably felt so culturally obvious at one point that it was hard to imagine having to explain it. But We Are All Sanpaku’s moment was not 1992. It had already reached New Yorker cartoon punchline by 1985. Nixon was sanpaku, and—most crucially here, I think—Charles Manson was sanpaku, too.
We Are All Sanpaku is the despairing public’s confessional response to the 1965 declaration, You Are All Sanpaku, a best-selling book on Japanese physiognomy and macrobiotic diets by a guy with at least six aliases, including Georges Ohsawa. Sanpaku, three whites, is when the sclera, or white of your eye, is visible on three sides of the iris, rather than the normal [sic] two. Like your blood type and being born in the year of the goat, sanpaku has dire health, psychological and prophetic implications.
After diagnosing the western world—and the most prominent people in the news in the 1960s and 70s, including JFK, Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon, Nixon, and Manson—with not meeting Japanese beauty standards, Ohsawa said it could be cured with brown rice.
Which, whatever, my point here is that the aesthetic possibilities of what Noland painted on that metal sheet are a rich feast, and I want to see it. Charles Manson’s mugshot that ran on the cover of LIFE? The ominous eye from the first edition dust jacket? Nixon? In the spirit of sanpaku, I might just make something up and pretend it’s real.