Charles Gute
Beacon, New York
Whitewash Wordswap (an excerpt), 2007
Piezo print on canvas

This copy edit of a random page from the book RAHOWA! (an acronym for “racial holy war”) not only corrects standard grammar and usage, but it makes editorial suggestions that soften the text’s inflammatory tone, substituting overtly racist terms with euphemistic phrases like “our culturally diverse friends.” In this way, a text that essentially calls for mass genocide is made, at least in a superficial sense, more “palatable.”

This exercise has broader implications in terms of the power of language to gloss over or promote repugnant ideas. By making rhetorical manipulations transparent, Gute’s work is a cautionary reminder that there is a fine line between modern-day public relations spin and George Orwell’s admonition that “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

Bio
Charles Gute is a New York-based artist and editor. He has been awarded artist fellowships from the San Francisco Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and has twice been a MacDowell Colony Fellow. His work has been in group and solo exhibitions all over the country. A hardcover monograph on Gute’s work, Revisions and Queries, was published by The Ice Plant, a publishing house based in Los Angeles.

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