After Sinclair Lewis

Some time ago, painter Matthew Sepielli mentioned the Temporary Allegiance project at UIC (started by Philip von Zweck) and it has stuck with me for a while.

Now that the exhibit project is suspended, I finally have followed through on an idea. The banner is 4x6 feet and digitally printed on nylon (I had them made by Humphry's Flag Company in Old City Philadelphia, whose store is right across the street from Betsy Ross's House). The text reads:

When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross

I am planning to offer a limited edition of them...

Another Broadside

Getting tired of the shut-down brinksmanship...

Unseen

There's no photo in this post because I'm talking about images that are withheld from our sight. I was reminded of this by Tom Junod's piece in on the Esquire website, The Falling Man. Many of us will immediately know the picture Junod is talking about. Taken by photographer Richard Drew it ran in newspapers on September 12, 2001, and depicted a man plummeting to earth after having leaped from a soon-to-collapse World Trade Center tower.

That happened to be my first day of work at the University of the Arts, where a friend had gotten me a job teaching Senior Photo Seminar. I brought in every newspaper I could get my hands on that morning, and we spent the class examining the role of photography in understanding what, at the time, was so overwhelming and incomprehensible that we seemed to have no vocabulary for addressing it.

It was at that moment I really appreciated having known George Roeder.

George had been kind enough to serve one of my mentors in my MFA at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. At the time we met, he was putting together the Visual Critical Studies program that would launch after his untimely death in 2004. He was a great teacher and a great person and I looked forward to our regular meetings. I remember at one point I was studying something that George had been over and he shared his notes; an act of generosity and modeling from which I learned about research and scholarship more than I had learned in any grad seminar.

George's major work was The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War II, which described the way photographs of casualties were withheld from public view ans strategically deployed through the media to built up sentiment for the war when necessary. I took away two principles I still teach from working with George: what you don't see is as important as what you do see (if not more), and don't ask what an image means; ask how's being being used.

If we think about the falling man images in those terms, what happens? The media consensus that such images shouldn't be shown (and if they are shown, only on websites that cater to violent or pornographic images) can be seen in light of what else cannot be shown. Controversy has plagued images of the draped coffins of American soldiers, despite the fact that those images in no way revealed the identities of the deceased. We are routinely shown images of dead opponents in war, not to mention photos of civilians that are often used to motivate engagement in conflicts that seem remote to our interests (as we recently saw with the photos of victims of Syrian chemical weapon attacks). But images of our own dead - especially our civilian dead - threaten our resolved and might prompt us to ask why we are fighting in the first place. Therefore, the must be kept out of sights, and if decorum is the means of doing so, then so be it. We live under a tyranny of decorum; my seven year old sin routinely tells us what is 'apprpriate' or 'inappropriate'...

What about meaning and use? Roeder's book was explicit about the usefulness of the images it discussed. They were seen as potent motivators. Photography has long used this claim as a shield against accusations of voyeurism; documenting tragedy isn't just observing it, the photojournalist would have us believe, it is doing something to end it. Like Susan Sontag, I have never bought this ethical hide and seek argument. It is somewhat undermined by Junod's recounting of Richard Drew's efforts to identify the falling man and to confront his family in search of conformation of his theories. In this rather horrible episode we see the true power of images - they motivate all right, and what they bring about can be cruelty in the name of seeking truth.

Junod only brings up Eric Fischl's work in passing in his article, but I was glad to see it referenced. You may recall Fischl was lambasted for a sculpture (Tumbling Woman) he exhibited in 2002. Junod excuses Fischl's actions by saying it was "a matter of timing", and he may be right. Fischl is not an artist known for his tact, and that's okay. But in Junod's essay, he appears to come in primarily to make the case that Drew is an artist (See? We can talk about a bona-fide artist in the context of this photograph and therefore rationalize it). The tactic seems transparent.

As the 50th anniversary of the death of John F. Kennedy approaches, I expect we'll see the stills from the Zapruder film that held me in a terrified spell as a child. I was not yet born when that event occurred; I stand in relation to it exactly as my seven year-old son stands in relation to 9/11. But access to the imagery of that historic and tragic moment has always been as easy as getting a hold of a can of soda. Junod spends a good deal of time talking about the way the feelings of families were protected by the concealment of images of those who fell to their death on 9/11. (He even mentions how some people deny the existence of 'jumpers', explaining that "if one calls the New York Medical Examiner's Office to learn its own estimate of how many people might have jumped, one does not get an answer but an admonition: 'We don't like to say they jumped. They didn't jump. Nobody jumped. They were forced out, or blown out.'")

A new generation will discover these images, and will invent a history in which their exclusion makes sense. What will we say when they ask us why they have been hidden? George Roeder's work suggested that all those in power would be able to say is that pictures are powerful and they needed to be used strategically. Pictures are powerful, and power shouldn't be concentrated in too few hands of constrained too tightly, less it becomes uncontrollable.

Send in the clowns

Here's one for the medium-is-the-message file: I was clicking through the trailers on iTunes the other day and noticed one called Silver Circle. Being that I'll watch anything computer-animated, I took a look.

Wow. It's like a right-wing, financial survivalist's Matrix.

Trailers are meant to give you enough of a film to get you interested - to help you see if you're in the audience for the picture. So when in the first seconds you see a character attacked by an army of faceless drones behind shields that read 'Federal Reserve', you know that you're watching something whose target market is waiting for the U.N. black helicopters to touch down.

Go on and you get an especially hoary piece of conspiracy theorizing. It seems that these characters live in a world where currency is supported by governments, rather than quaint things like precious metals (which haven't supported economies since the Bretton Woods Agreements...). "Rebels" have begun minting their own currency which they claim has "value"  and that draws the ire of the Federal Reserve (remember when movies were about mysterious foreign threats? James Bond, anyone? Please?)

Zoe, our spunky, lo-res heroine, is a freedom fighter. Her ultimate foe may be Victor Brant, Chair of the Federal Reserve, but her proximal adversary is Jay, who's investigating an arson and is drawn into a  romantic entanglement (with explosions, the website promises!). They live in 2019, which, with hyper-inflation, sounds a lot like Weimar Germany, and the dollar has lost its position as a lynchpin currency. It's notable that its not predatory banks or industries that are capitalizing on this crisis - it's the our own government.

Yawn. Ron Paul made this up in 2009. Or rather, he gets a ton of credit for what has been talked about in a mess of fringy groups for decades. But when the fringe starts releasing its own animate feature films, you know it's time to start getting active.

We've seen movies as vehicles of allegory and protest before. What's amusing is when the medium of cinema gets put to use clumsily. Really? Silver Circle is lower quality than the animatics you see in bonus features for a major studio release. It is painful to watch a two minute trailer, almost as painful as watching SIMs act. It's implied on a page about the studio that director Pasha Roberts picks lo-tech 'South Park-syle' animations because they give the work counter-culture cred. Don't believe it. This thing looks like one of the (once) popular animated news re-enactments.

But why are they doing this? (Who are they? I'm not there yet - hang on) Let's read a from a post on the Silver Circle Underground Blog:

Science fiction movies often introduce ideas that are later produced by science. After all, science fiction writers spend a lot of time dreaming up technological gadgets for their heroes and villains to use. In the Terminator movie series, cyborg assassins were equipped with built-in technology that allowed them to see in infrared. In addition, their eyes could access software that provided a heads-up display full of useful information about objects and individuals in their field of vision.

To me, this looks like a classic case of if-you-can't-beat-'em, join'em. For years, citizens on the right have decried the liberal bias of the entertainment/media complex. But with the success of FoxNews, it appears that a wholesale effort is afoot to craft an alternate universe. The story quoted above goes on to describe how the government is 'compiling untold volumes of unconstitutional data' on citizens. Don't bother asking about evidence, there is none. In the real world, there are plenty of allegations - supported by data - of corporations collecting consumers' private data and selling it or turning it over to the government, but that's not exactly the same thing, really. It seems that every sin that could be committed in the Silver Circle universe must be committed by the government, and one assumes that power is the motive. Corporations, motivated by the much more fungible concept of profit, seem to be nowhere to be seen...

Hmmm...wonder why that is?

No really. We were just treated to a whole year of politics based on the idea that a lie told loudly and often becomes truth. Now see a new kind of lie - one predicated on omission, one that claims that everything wrong with the country today comes from the doings of its government. With citizen ire directed toward the government - an institution that carries out the will of its people - no one has time to care about the greed and indifference of corporate entities whose greatest concern appears to be that there is too much money out there - too much for them to control it all.

Lately my work has led me from a once-sunny and mildly postmodern/ironic attitude toward codes to a much more sinister place lately. We are hearing all sorts of weird newsspeak like 'liberty filmmaking' and 'truth language'.  I have become interested in the various cyphers and verbal secret handshakes or hate groups and anti-government organizations, most of whom operate under the delusion that they are the ones with real freedom and a frightening responsibility to save the rest of us.

We could ignore this. That may be the best strategy. But I am afraid that the people who think that it's a good idea to oppose our government through violence and fear-mongering propaganda rather than through the political process will keep up their rhetoric and some people may start believing them. Critical thinking skills are not something we can count on in the electorate these days, and Silver Circle looks like the latest attempt to take advantage of that situation. We are living through the consequences of unchecked access to guns and ammunition no, something we should have had the political will (if not the moral responsibility) to oppose. I have enough trouble letting a bad movie ruin my day, let alone my country.

When Presidents Paint

Images from Gawker.com

With the discovery that George W. Bush has been secretly at work on paintings, the art world experienced something on the order of a tear in the space-time continuum. 

Citizens of that utopia called 'the art world' have had to deal with the severe cognitive dissonance that results from liking the work and loathing the source.

Bush, after all, is remembered as the man who cut taxes and relaxed regulations on the wealthiest American citizens and industries. After 9/11, Bush squandered the good will of the world and led America into two wars whose primary purpose appears to have been to provide unending work for defense contractors. His administration perfected Orwellian newspeak with educational reform programs that had such benevolent names as 'No Child Left Behind' that rewarded 'achievement' while fundamentally skewing the goals of education. In the last election, we watched as chagrined candidates from his his party pretended his administration hadn't existed.

But W's paintings have been popping up on Facebook and all over the Internet (1,590,000 Google hits for "George W. Bush paintings" and counting). People seem to like them for their naivete. People are reminded of art they love, from history or from the present. One of the funniest lines of reasoning (one Jerry Saltz touches on) is the symbolism of the bathtub in Bush's pictures and its connection to other artists. Art, after all, is about art, right? So it only makes sense that if George W. Bush is making paintings, they should be connected to other paintings.This is the sort of pop culture soul-searching Slate was made for.

Some people have been quick to point out that Hitler was a painter, too. On the other hand, Jimmy Carter was a poet. Being Hitler didn't make Hitler's paintings 'good' or 'bad' any more than being Jimmy Carter redeemed the ex-president's verse. The confusion of the person for the product - the most profound muddle faced by artists in the 21st century - is at the core of this problem. People who hate Bush struggle to figure out how they can like his paintings...or even rationalize their existence.

But it's startlingly easy to resolve this conflict - one needs only to remember that not all paintings are art. Before crowd-curating, Marcel Duchamp described how things made by people are ratified by discussion in a 1957 statement, The Creative Act (you can listen to Duchamp here...). W's paintings need to be seen for what they are - the products of a hobby enjoyed by retired individual who emailed them to his sister. He didn't put them on display in a gallery or museum. They weren't discovered - they were hacked into. The assumption that they are art appears to rest on the medium in which they have been made - paint. As an industry, the art world is pretty good at separating things made with paint into categories of 'works of art' and 'museum-quality oil paintings' that wish they were art. Here is yet another opportunity to practice such discernment.

What' really tragic about this is all the wasted time. I am as guilty as everyone else of giving Bush's pictures more attention than they deserve by adding to the melee. While thousands of artists produce work that we could be talking about - attempting to contribute to a millennia-long conversation about cultural value by producing objects and images and setting them into a context of other objects and images - we are spending time rooting through the private emails of someone who much of the world regards as a war criminal.

Let's make sure the former president is remembered for the right things.

Acceptance Speech Word Clouds