Manifestos and Madness

“Mama always told me not to look into the eye's of the sunBut mama, that's where the fun is” —Blinded by the Light, Bruce Springsteen

10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice. —F. T. Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto (1909)

In the recent issue of Harpers Magazine an article by T. M. Luhrmann focuses on how the Christian Hippie movement of the sixties became the evangelical right of today. It was both mesmerizing and enlightening to read about this recondite subject that so few have researched. We have a strong tendency as Americans to wish for expeditious answers and ignore the deeper meaning and history behind things. To discover the Jesus Christ Superstar of my youth, that even I, a devote atheist, found inspiring, was the underpinning of much of what Democrats today despise, was nothing short of revelatory. It occurred to me, however, that we are wired for such things be it religion, art, science, etc.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvVr2uks0C8]

In 1909 a young radical named Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote the Futuristic Manifesto. That same year Nicola Tesla had presciently predicted our current wireless network we are so desperately dependent on, Ernest Shackleton had nearly died visiting the south pole and the fragmented sub-cultures of Europe were stirring with resentment toward empire. It is a compelling bookend to the denouement that was the sixties. The flower children, hippies and the Summer of Love actually set the stage for todays right wing radicalism as a bookend to Marinetti’s embrace of Futurism.

Luhrmann eloquently describes his investigation revealed the children of devote Catholics and Protestants who loved God, country and JFK bore the fruit of the evangelical, privileged class of the right-wing today. Hippies drawn to hallucinogens and free love in order to escape the confines of modernity found themselves pulled toward the security of big church love and a need to belong outside of addiction, filth and disillusion lay the open arms of evangelicals and a different, more structured religious belief. In effect this is absolutely the same thing that has happened in art throughout time. The ebb and flow of radical vision gives way to reactionary responses that reinforce accepted forms of creating. The late Thomas Kinkade, the so-called ‘painter of light’ was the most successful and popular artist in America over the past twenty years. Kinkade, just like the Futurists, leveraged a popular mythos to express a dogma, in his case a Christian ethos. Americans sacrificed critical thinking for wealth, which in turn they were denied by the elite. As Robert Hughes said of Jeff Koons,

“If cheap cookie jars could become treasures in the 1980s, then how much more the work of the very egregious Jeff Koons, a former bond trader, whose ambitions took him right through kitsch and out the other side into a vulgarity so syrupy, gross, and numbing, that collectors felt challenged by it.”

It is a parallel reflection of our inability to step back from the edge and accept the uncertainty of not-knowing. We want, damn it, we demand certainty in our society. We hold smart phones that provide instant answers, drive cars connected to satellites hovering in orbit 22,000 miles above our heads yet lubricated by a fluid born from the detritus of millions of years ago. It is no wonder we live in an age of fracture, of a potential universal schizophrenia. Marinetti and his fellow Futurists rang the warning bell of this ideation in 1909! Of course, Marinetti himself avoided the outcomes of his belief but many of his fellow Futurists fell pray to it, dying as a result of horrors of trench warfare.

Whether art, religion or science the key to enlightenment is ones ability to come back from the edge of radical experience. Science is now reaching the same boundaries of truth as all dogmas before it. Cosmologists like Leonard Susskind question the idea that truth is accessible at all. He has walked to the edge of reality and he has stepped back. This is closer to the methodology native cultures of the Amazon basin use to accept the complexities of our world. It is a fair analogy. Although, Amazonian basin tribes do not carry smart phones or access the internet, they are surrounded by a pharmacopeia that to this day is still little understood by modern medicine and science. Shaman acutely understand the relationship between the frontiers of our own imaginings, understanding and reality and the present. They say ‘plants speak to them directly’ but really mean the ingestion of psychotropics allow access to a knowledge that expands our postmodern understanding of reality. Like the best artists, scientists and devout, they approach the sublime with feet firmly planted on the ground. They do not embrace dogma, but rather the uncertainty of our world and in so doing they scrape against a kind of truth.

“If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things.” ― Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

For those hippie, Jesus-freaks turned right-wing evangelicals, the psychotropics ingestion of the sixties was a result of psychological loss. They discontent from the mainstream culture was not as it would seem a matter of direct denial of its efficacy, but rather more psychologically bound in its adherence to sociological structures that disrupted acceptance. If you’ve watched the show Mad Men then you understand this reaction. 1950’s America was a reaction to the simultaneous hubris of winning a war that we had little to do with (compared to Europe or Asia) and left America wealthier than it deserved due to its bounty of industrial resources. It was denial of death (as opposed to the Futurists) and an embrace of immortality (realized the in the dogma of corporate culture). Beware the manifesto, the embrace of certainties, liberal, conservative or otherwise as it only leads to a society of judgement, and absolution.

Anthropic Landscapes and Memory

Apologies to Simon Schama’s fine book Landscape and Memory, but my title is appropriate for discussing how we observe art. The question that often comes up with friends of mine who are non-visual artists is “how do I look at art?” At a recent open studio, a friend of mine and I were ruminating on the fact his two studio mates received a great deal more attention at these events than he did. His work is an extension of the abstract expressionist vein. His fellow studio artists create much more traditional work that harkens back to the 19^th century traditions — plein air landscape paintings and wire mesh sculptures of beautiful human bodies. One after the other we would watch people enter his studio, garnish a bewildered look and either pause like a deer in the headlights or scurry out unable to form words. I am not, by any means advocating one form over another. They are all accomplished artists in their own right. What is mystifying is the very specific reaction to abstraction (without bogging down in the argument that they are all technically abstract artists). Why are Americans adherent in 2013 to work that is based on ideas 160 years old? It is not as though Abstract Expressionism is young.

Arshile Gorky, the progenitor of Abstract Expressionism began making work pushing in that direction in 1930. In 1942, the New School artists saw a painting at Betty Parsons by Max Ernst made from dripping paint from a can tied to a string. Shortly thereafter Pollock began experimenting with drip painting until he was ‘discovered’ in 1947. The greater American public has been aware of abstract expressionism since Life magazine published its now famous exposé on Jackson Pollock in 1949, 64 years ago. So why the cognitive dissonance or at the very least, misunderstanding and mild approbation to Abstract Expressionism?

Our modern world is fraught with ambiguity and a lack of knowledge-authority. Where painting was once looked upon as the source of some of that knowledge-authority, offering a gateway to our subconscious at the genesis of apocalyptic behavior, it now holds virtually no authority. As J. M. Bernstein says, “So the disenfranchisement of art entails the disenchantment of nature, which disenchantments jointly entail the disenchantment of society.”^[i] A recent American Psychological Association survey^[ii] discovered that Millennials are the most stressed out generation yet due in large part to their hyper-connectivity with smart phones, tablets and computers. To Bernstein’s point, our contemporary world is accessed almost exclusively through the simulacrum and it’s stressing the hell out of us. If we are to believe Bacon’s approach to painting as sensation then how is that possible by looking at Pollock on your iPhone? At its core, viewers feel disassociated from abstraction because it resembles a pixelation of their simulated daily experience. On the other hand, the arcadia of 19^th century painting and sculpture, feels much more secure in its avoidance of anything digital at all. Its simulation provides a gesture toward nature and forgotten landscapes, not the advance of psychotherapy and the digital age. Despite the failings of Denis Dutton and Ellen Dissanayake’s attempts to quantify art-making as anthropological grounded^[iii], the foundations of our residual memories do seem to be made from the collective recollection of our early ancestors arcadian experiences on the great plains of the African subcontinent. Why else would Picasso be more palatable than Pollock to a global audience if not for his theft of the tribal?

Getting back to the question of how one should look at art, I have come to realize its the same as asking how do you taste food. Both are couched in a combination of epigenetics, life experiences and historical knowledge. This is the kind of thinking behind Schama’s book Landscape and Memory. Speaking on the nature of Anselm Keifer’s work in the context of German history, specifically Naziism Schama astutely comments, “For it has attached to countless artists and anthropologists who have parted company with Enlightenment skepticism about the cultural force of myth and magic and who have seen in their complicated symbolic elaboration something more than a hoax perpetrated on the naive by the unscrupulous.” There is a seduction in how we own our observations whether scholar, scientists or barista. All art is selling a seductive observation. How we look at another’s observance is highly dependent on our own seductions, experiences, genetics and memory.

Abstract Expressionism is very self referential, meaning it focuses inwardly on both a psychology of observation as well as art history itself. Pollock was equally enamored with dismantling and reconstructing the conventions of painting technique, approach and practice that came before him as he was in unravelling his on manic depression through the sensation of painting. It is asking a great deal of people in today’s existence of simulacrum and simulation to extend their own observations simultaneously inward and free of irony, as well as metaphorically toward the experience of paints plasticity in service to sensation. It’s not impossible but it is indeed an esoteric exercise that will likely only be coveted by a select few.

Retraction and reactionary behavior is a logical outcome to rapid and disruptive change. Our current obsessions with the magical realms whether religious doctrine or the Twilight movies is just such a reactionary expression. The 70’s dreams of nuclear holocaust have transformed into zombies and vampires. Our addition to tool-making in the age of accelerated progress is causing our minds to fracture and is freezing creative thinking. In just my lifetime we have gone to a firm believe in Einstein’s relativity to the notions of multiverses and anthropic string theory. This severe compression of technological sophistication and philosophical expansion combined with our hyper-connectivity (try answering a trivia question without reaching for your smart phone) will inevitably force us through to another kind of existence, whatever that may be. In the meantime, we are forced to contend with our own dissonance and longing for utopian forms as a weak justification that whatever we do technologically it will lead, contrary to all past indicators, to a richer kind of existence. The new art will have to address Leonard Susskind’s assertion that reality may forever be beyond reach of our understanding. I’m looking forward to people asking me how to look at that art.

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^[i] Bernstein, J. M. Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2006. Print. p. 241

^[ii] http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/256133.php

^[iii] I am not disputing an obvious anthropological underpinning to art-making but rather the philosophical or anthropological scientific framework that Dutton and Dissanayake use to make their particular and related arguments related to how art is made.

Cynical Hope

Modernism was born of a utopian ideal to elevate humanity through science and order. It looked inward and saw perfection, clarity and infinite creativity. The promise never came to fruition. The perfect alignment and sweeping majesty of the Plaza in Albany, NY or Niemeyer’s (who died last week) Brasilia, became monuments to the banality of capitalism and the excesses of human hubris. Hope turned to cynicism turned into postmodernism and we’ve never looked back. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UCT6J0u8B4]

Say what you will, even of minimalism in the sixties and seventees, but it cannot be said it was depressive. The coldness of minimalism was modernities mind, not the cynicism of today. Like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, minimalism offered an interior space that suggested the power of the infinite mind, that anything was possible, even if that was dangerous. Postmodernism, today’s ruling art class, is the post Punk pun. The regurgitation of modernism’s themes as self replicating memes that finds nothing profound and everything worth riffing on. This is the mood of Killing Them Softly.

The film staring an A-list of method actors is based on the book by George V. Higgins, Cogan’s Trade. Higgin’s book is paralleled closely in the movie revealing the inbred underworld of a 1970’s Boston. The movie swaps the 70’s gloom for the ironic optimism of Obama’s first election at the end of 2007. Ray Liotta and James Gandolfini appear but in roles that work to undermine their previous roles as psychopaths and killers. The central character is Jackie Cogan played by Brad Pitt, a mob hitman who reports to what he calls a “committee.” The mob leadership persistently frustrates Cogan with their corporate sensibility for slow decisions and sloppy management. It’s a mashup of The Soprano’s and The Office. The mob committee’s pointman is Richard Jenkins, who plays with finesse and understatement a corporate attache’. Cinematically, it is fresh and takes time when needed to unwind a general environment of pathos, cynicism and laissez-faire. Action takes place in slow motion or a matter-of-fact pace. The director, Andrew Dominik is more interested in sedate settings as backdrops for colorful abstraction, blurred light and what seems like a perpetual rain.

From a cinematic standpoint it is easy to see Dominik’s homage to Cassevettes and Friedkin or even David Fincher, but the sensitivity to light, especially that putrid, yellowish light of faded fluorescent fixtures was reminiscent of the minimalist artist Dan Flavin. Flavin who in the early sixties discovered mundane, off-the-shelf fluorescent lighting as his medium, pursued light as material object. The work juxtaposes banal materialism of an everyday object and the transcendent quality of light itself. The light fixtures, white metal boxes, have come to represent modernities’ egoism. He never concealed this, never tried to hide its banality.

Killing Them Softly embraces the commonplace setting of criminality and the pettiness of human behavior even during moments of transcendent beauty, just as Flavin’s work demonstrates. Beauty comes in tiny moments, a slow motion bullet penetrating glass or the blurred sparklers of an election night celebration. There is a magnificent scene with Scott McNairy (Frankie) and Ben Mendelsohn (Russell) sit in some squatters’ apartment drinking and smoking. Russell is retelling a tale of his trip to Florida for some illicit activity while he shoots heroin. In and out of his fading consciousness, at the edges of euphoria the lens gently flares into a blurry, crystalline light with darkened edges. It happens only twice, briefly, but it is potent. Dominik is saying, we live in these tiny moments of the divine amidst our every day mundane existence, just like Flavin did.

Dan Flavin’s fluorescent fixtures are characters unto themselves playing out a similar drama. Look at the beauty that is possible within my electricity, they say, all the while never escaping their core nature, a mass produced light fixture used ubiquitously from the late 1950’s till today. Stare at them and they are transcendent and mesmerizing a reminder of the zen possibility of simplicity overcoming complexity. Flavin once said; “My icons do not raise up the blessed savior in elaborate cathedrals. They are constructed concentrations celebrating barren rooms. They bring a limited light.”

There is a quality of light throughout Killing Them Softly that is either fluorescent or reminiscent of it. Even the night shots where streetlight mercury vapor mimics the greenish tint of fluorescent glow. It operates as a grounding mechanism for the film, allowing it to function dualistically. On one hand, fluorescent lighting is the cheap, mass-produced lighting of the everyday and on the other, it is soft, cold and flattening, making shapes and characters vapid. The characters in Killing Them Softly are soulless, empty figures. They are deeply cynical, greedy and ironic. This is the world of Ayn Rand personified on a small scale. Jackie Cogan poignantly sums this up,

“My friend, Thomas Jefferson is an American saint because he wrote the words 'All men are created equal', words he clearly didn't believe since he allowed his own children to live in slavery. He's a rich white snob who's sick of paying taxes to the Brits. So, yeah, he writes some lovely words and aroused the rabble and they went and died for those words while he sat back and drank his wine and fucked his slave girl. This guy wants to tell me we're living in a community? Don't make me laugh. I'm living in America, and in America you're on your own. America's not a country. It's just a business. Now fuckin' pay me.”

Standing in Dia Beacon a few years ago, I couldn’t help but feel the cold and empty conceit of the American empire writ large in Flavin’s Monuments V. Tatlin series. These constructs mimicking the Russian avant-garde work of Vladimir Tatlin is also an homage to American empire. Formalism is the minister in the church of business. His dig on Tatlin and America, is the idiocy of monumental thinking. The works are transgressive towards modernism while simultaneously celebratory of it. In the same cynicism of Jackie Cogan, Flavin spoke of the work in terms of its deliberate lack of obscurity. We ignore the moments, the flashes of light, or the tiny obviousness before us in favor of something larger. Like Cogan in Killing Them Softly, Flavin’s work kills softly, from a distance and without emotion.

“It is what it is, and it ain't nothin' else. . . . Everything is clearly, openly, plainly delivered. There is no overwhelming spirituality you are supposed to come into contact with. I like my use of light to be openly situational in the sense that there is no invitation to meditate, to contemplate. It's in a sense a "get-in-get-out" situation. And it is very easy to understand. One might not think of light as a matter of fact, but I do. And it is, as I said, as plain and open and direct an art as you will ever find.”

Death's Fantasy

“He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare; the impulse of the living to try to read in dead eyes the answer to the Question.” ― Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage

As a little boy living in western New York poised almost exactly between the cities of Rochester and Buffalo I learned my adult sleeplessness. The sleepless nights began sometime around the age of ten or eleven. These were still the days when you had nuclear disaster preparedness drills at school. We were told where to find the bomb shelter in the basement of the school and how to move their in orderly fashion if we heard the air raid siren. An inquisitive and precocious child led to my unending questioning of my world. Every week, usually at night, I would hear the drone of B-52’s flying overhead. I asked my father one day, why the bombers were out flying at that time and where they came from. My father, not being one for sensitivity, immediately responded that they were part of the nuclear defense grid, or strategic air command that flew constantly in shifts carrying nuclear weapons as a deterrent against a Soviet first strike^[i]. Right around this same time, my parents became friends with a couple just up the street. The husband worked for FMC or the Food Machinery & Chemical Corporation in nearby Lockport, NY. He, lets call him David, was employed as a geneticist researching new techniques to increase crop production. One night while eavesdropping at the top of the stairs, I heard David say, “if there was an explosion at the FMC plant, all of western New York would be wiped out.” The train that carried FMC petrochemicals traveled right through our small town and upon hearing the train I would lay awake in a soft panic hoping the train did not derail. Perhaps this is how DeLillo’s White Noise was born. So, between the nuclear threat in Niagara Falls, and the chemical threat in Lockport, not to mention the research on nuclear fusion taking place in Rochester, I lay awake at night a lot.

During this same time, the artists Ed and Nancy Reddin Keinholtz created Still Live (1974). The art was a work of theater where the viewer became the actor in something very real. The Keinholz’s built a set piece of a typical American living room and surrounded it by barricades and barbed wire. Before entering you were asked, essentially, to sign your life away, in effect liberating the exhibition or artist of any responsibility should something go horribly wrong.

I the undersigned am at least 18 years of age. I fully and soberly understand the danger to me upon entry of this environment. I hereby absolve the artist Edward Kienholz, the owner of the piece and the sponsors of this exhibition of any and all responsibility (morally and legally) on my behalf.^[ii]

The reason for signing such a disclaimer was due to the high caliber rifle perched above the television in the living room set the Keinholz’s created, which was aimed directly at the chair in facing it. Allegedly (this was never verified) a black box controlled a random timer connected to the rifle’s trigger that could fire a live round at any time over the course of one hundred years. The Vietnam War was winding down but the country had endured more than a decade of war in southeast Asia with the networks carrying a scrolling list of the American dead, night after night during that time to the tune of 58,282. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8YCNFmWtYU&w=640&h=480]  The Keinholz’s forced violence from the virtual space it occupied for most Americans watching television to the real, by confronting them with the possibility of a very real death. In September 1974, Nixon had just resigned over the Watergate Scandal and the Symbionese Liberation Army had kidnapped Patty Hearst. IRA bombings were on the rise in London and fighting persisted in the Golan Heights of Israel. Inflation was on the rise with a deep recession unfolding across the country. This was the time of ‘generic’ foods and long gas lines. In the midst of this, Ed and Nancy Keinholz placed a work of art in the center of Berlin that directly threatened the viewer. Their goal was to deliberately disrupt and rupture the passivity Americans held toward violence and their complicity in it. “Keinholz’ theatricality was meant to heighten his critique of aspects of American society, and he attempted to construct situations in which the everyday became visible for his viewers to question and ponder—to create opportunities aimed at effecting significant change in behavior.”^[iii] The Kienholz’s were interested in revealing the everyday persistence of violence and our incorporation of it as commonplace. An earlier piece The Beanery (1965) based on a Hollywood bar he used to frequent, the viewer walks past a stack of newspapers that read “Children Kill Children in Vietnam Riots” before entering the bar. Ed Kienholz’s confrontational perspective, later shared in collaboration with his wife, focused on shaking people loose from their dream state and forcing confrontation with the system they supported. Ed Kienholz said;

It is my contention that to the extent that the major networks intertwine, we, the viewing public, are endangered...In my thinking, prime time should be understood as the individual span each of us has left to live here on earth. It’s a short, short interval and serves the best quality possible. Certainly better than the boob tube pap we all permit in the name of bigger corporate profits and free enterprise.^[iv]

It is hard now to recall the extraordinary violence of the time. I’m sure my sleepless nights were exacerbated by watching the CBS Nightly News with Walter Cronkite night after night and witnessing the scrolling lists of Americans killed in the conflict. In fact, another piece by Kienholz titled The Eleventh Hour Final (1968) speaks directly to that experience, with a death list permanently painted on a TV screen that reveals a decapitated mannequin head staring back at the viewer from inside the set. The 70’s was a time of fear, uncertainty and fractured psyche in America. I remember distinctly feeling a deep sense of loss and anxiety, even at 11 over Watergate. I had been raised to believe in the Constitution and our government as essentially functioning, despite their imperfections. In 1969 I watched the moon landing and found the hopefulness of science conquering our deepest problems. By 1974, Watergate was unraveling our government, the recession hit, crime was rising and we encountered defeat in Vietnam by a low-tech insurgency. In the midst of all of this was the ever looming threat of nuclear holocaust and biological warfare. The pantheon of American cinema during the 1970’s was filled with darkness from Andromeda Strain to Twilight’s Last Gleaming reinforcing what must have seemed at the time like a real threat of armageddon, not the phony Walking Dead gorefest on TV now.

Unfortunately, the Keinholz’s Still Live was even too intense for its German audience. German authorities rapidly shut down the exhibition and arrested Ed Kienholz on “unauthorized possession of arms” and “the suspicion, of a conditional, but intentionally attempted homicide.”^[v] The piece was bizarrely rescued along with an intervention on Kienholz’s behalf by the American Consulate and relocated to Switzerland before the tableau was shipped back to the States in a crate and stored until 1982. It was briefly exhibited at the now defunct, Braunstein Gallery in San Francisco and then returned to its crate where it remains today in the possession of Nancy Kienholz.

Americans are not fond of self-deprecation or self-criticism. We like to think we are know it alls, who have all the answers and don’t need anyone, even our own calling us out on our shortcomings or bad behavior. Ever since Jimmy Carter said, “In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does but by what one owns." in his sweater in his fireside chat in 1979, we have reacted violently against any form of reality. Kienholz’s dream of threatening Americans into confrontation with their violent, sexist, racist and classist ways disappeared when Ronald Reagan was elected president. On that day, Americans firmly rejected compassion and sensibility with the delusion of the American dream. The theatrics and conceptual groundings of 60’s and 70’s art was replaced with the blinding irony of the 80’s.

So today we find ourselves immersed in a world of corporate politics where our dreams have been replaced by consumerism and our productivity and inventiveness shipped offshore in favor of the sad theatrics of reality TV. The darkness of the 70’s, which was always couched in Kienholz’s idea of real threat has been replaced by fantasy threats—zombies and vampires. The art world has matched with its own kind of fantasia, selling its soul to the highest bidder in order to provide religiosity to hedge fund managers, or as the late Robert Hughes put it, "The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive." There are a few artists who continue to push the the ideas that the Kienholz’s instigated in those heady decades of the 60’s and 70’s, like Gregory Green and Wafaa Bilal, or Banksy, but the art institutions marginalize them. In the early nineties I had the pleasure of working briefly with Gregory Green in NYC delivering art and then visited an opening of his at the Dart Gallery in Chicago where I lived at the time. Gregory had a wonderful piece he installed there called Thirty Blade Wall Installation. He had directly mounted thirty circular saw blades on their own axels and they spun away in magnificent danger, free of any protective covering or roped off quadrant. Anyone could have simply reached in and watched their fingers fly effortless about the room in wondrous horror. Green had made a more minimalist and direct homage to the Kienholz’s and I remember being very moved by the piece.

It is important that we remain connected to the effects of violence and their aftermath if we hope emerge from the lessons of the 20^th century intact. Our current obsessions are not idiopathic, but firmly couched in our inability to contend with our own past. We have never reconciled the deceit of Watergate or the trauma of Vietnam. It is no accident the 9/11 memorial is an inversion, a conceptual black hole that swallows both the living and the dead from that moment in time. It is an astounding representation of national shame that looks not toward reconciliation, empathy and hope, but toward an ever darkening cynicism and irony. After the trauma of 9/11 one could presume the nation would grow more empathic, more sensitive to the needs of others, as was witnessed in NYC in the weeks after the event. Unfortunately, the Interpersonal Reactivity Index that has been running since 1979 suggests quite the contrary. The 2011 study results found,  “almost 75 percent of students today rate themselves as less empathic than the average student 30 years ago.”^[vi] There are certainly many contributing factors to this finding but one can’t help but think that ‘magical thinking’ is a leading contender. As a nation we seem consumed by it, otherwise how could one explain the dramatic reversal away from a solid middle class? Four hundred Americans now hold as much wealth as half of our entire population.^[vii] And yet, the battle rages on against the poor. A key point in the Kienholz’s work is Ed Kienholz’s insistence on placing himself as an implicit participant in their own commentary and criticisms. Barney’s Beanery was a bar Ed frequented and he was the first to sit in front of the rifle in Still Live. His anger was directed as much at himself as it was at our collective passivity. He once took an axe to a desk at TWA as result of the airline’s disregard toward the mishandling of a Tiffany lamp Kienholz had shipped with them. He put himself firmly in the tableau, risking arrest and contempt to make an artistic gesture.

The interest in post-apocalyptic fantasies and immortality represented by the plethora of vampire and zombie movies, books and television shows is a desperate form of escapism for a country who has lost its sense of empowerment. If only we had heeded the words of Carter in 79’ and learned to begin using less and stop striving for more we might be closer to a true triple bottom line capitalism now. We might also have a more robust and meaningful culture, less interested in heroics and life after death scenarios and more involved with the real. I have written before on Francis Bacon’s rejection by many of the American art critics and I think the same could largely be said for the Kienholz’s. Ed and Nancy Kienholz’s form of intimidating and even angry art-making was sidelined and diminished by a market that preferred the promise of the sublime over the delivery of truth. Of course there is no absolute truth, but as with science, art at its best is interested in asking questions that can uncover a deeper sense of ourselves and our place in this world. In so doing, it reminds us of our interconnectedness and the fact that violence has consequences, like the rifle pointed at us from above the TV. We can only lay prostrate before the television, computer monitor or smartphone for so long before our own actions catch up to us and we realize that our fantasies have become nightmares, just like the ones I had as a boy.

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^[i] After a fair amount of research, despite B-52’s being housed at Niagara Falls International Air Field, I could find no evidence that nuclear warheads were involved. BOMARC defense missiles were stationed there until 1969 and may have carried a nuclear payload, but the air base was primarily a fighter base. The air bases with Strategic Air Command nuke’s were located in Rome and Plattsburg. In reality, during that paranoid time, it is hard to say what was housed in Niagara Falls. It was supposedly ranked 45^th as a possible nuclear strike target, which given the scale would have unquestionably wiped out southern Ontario and Western New York.

^[ii] Kienholz, Edward. Edward Kienholz: Still Live: Aktionen der Avantgarde, Projekt für ADA2. Berlin: Neuer

Berliner Kunstverein, 1975, n.p.

^[iii] Willick, Damon. “Still Live.” In Art Lies, No. 60, Winter 2008, p. 23.

^[iv] Ibid, p. 26.

^[v] Kienholz, Edward. Edward Kienholz: Still Live: Aktionen der Avantgarde, Projekt für ADA2. Berlin: Neuer

Berliner Kunstverein, 1975, n.p.

^[vi] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-me-care

^[vii] http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2011020612/understanding-extreme-incomewealth-gap

Rusting & Rebirth

In 1981 a controversy erupted over the installation at Federal Plaza in New York City over Tilted Arc a steel sculpture 120 feet long by 12 feet high. Eight years later, workers cut the sculpture into three pieces in the dead of night and carted it away as scrap. In many ways the work of this iconic sculpture’s work parallels, in an inversely proportional way the decline of what is lovingly called the American Rust Belt. Serra’s Tilted Arc cost $175,000 at the time. Serra was just rising to emergence in the contemporary art scene and was an outspoken figure, representing the paradigm of ‘working class’ emergence as befitting the American dream. Today, Richard Serra’s work requires a ‘deposit’ of $1m and costs at minimum, if he chooses your site as worthy, upwards of $3m.

The documentary Detropia highlights this decline of the very manufacturing base that gave Serra his early know-how in manipulating steel. It examines the sharp decline since 1950 in the city of Detroit and its huge manufacturing base, in their case automobiles. Filmed from the perspective of local inhabitants who have a stake in the city, the film poignantly reveals the human side to the American decline in manufacturing and in turn, the downfall of the Rust Belt. [vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/45929284 w=500&h=281]

DETROPIA Trailer from Loki Films on Vimeo.

I grew up just 40 minutes east of Buffalo, NY. In the 1970’s Buffalo was a big flourishing city with a manufacturing base built on the Bethlehem Steel mill in Lackawanna, General Motors and Standard Milling. It was also just south of the world famous Niagara Falls, which provided robust summer tourism to the area. Unfortunately by 1971 Buffalo’s population, much like Detroit, Cleveland and Pittsburgh was already experiencing a downward trend. As of the 2010 census Buffalo’s population stands at 261,000 almost precisely 50% of it’s high point in 1950. 1971 saw the announcement that Bethlehem Steel would lay off 50% of its workforce due to competition from Japan and Germany. By the end of the decade that number was mirrored by other steel mills, General Motors and the milling operations. Combine that data with the superfund site discovery in 1978 called the Love Canal and it is easy to see why Buffalo’s population has declined so dramatically. In the last ten years alone, Buffalo’s population has declined 10% while housing prices plummet along with the rise in crime and unemployment.

Richard Serra bounced back nicely from his defeat by a federal courthouse in 1989. He has seen the expansion of America’s most important modern art museum, the Museum of Modern Art in NY with planning that specifically took into account the promise of his retrospective. In many ways this is a cruel irony. I in no way am diminishing Serra’s work or his standing as one of the greatest 20^th century sculptors. Rather I am pointing out that the artist that brings us most of our global cultural recognition works in a material that harkens back to an era when American dominated the international manufacturing landscape. Now we dismantle Detroit’s ruins, angling toward an ‘urban farmscape’ so the scrap that is salvaged by the destitute there can be shipped to China and reprocessed into junk we don’t need. The dominant grandeur that is a Richard Serra sculpture no longer lives in the cities that made that expression possible.

There is a glimmer of hope in Detropia, where young artists are relocating to Detroit in order to find cheap rents and lots of space to experiment and create. Detroit has always been a hot bed of creativity, especially in music with Motown and Techno. If there is an American spirit left it could very likely find its home in the rebirth of Detroit. Add this to the fact that for better or worse the planet is getting hotter and the southern states that seemed cozy to baby boomers will not be so appealing to future generations. Finally, if we can sideline petty politics long enough, we can find Detroit may have a huge potential for reinventing our economy through renewable technologies. Little known is that Detroit contains 1400 acres of abandoned salt mines below its surface that could be a future containment vessel for carbon sequestered or hydrogen storage. Serra, a child of the depression, understands how learning from decline and war can produce great art. Lets hope it does the same for the young artists moving to the Rust Belt.

As the film points out, where Detroit goes, so goes America. We need to be weary of globalization, the emergence of the Chinese economy and our destruction of both unions and the middle class. We have added over 1 million millionaires since Obama took office while production of automobiles continues to move to China and Mexico. If you think this is a matter of pure labor costs as some would like you to believe and overpriced union demands, think again. In 2010 Germany produced 5.5 million automobiles to America’s 2.7 million. The average German auto worker made $67.14 per hour (including benefits - and keep in mind they have socialized medicine in Germany) while U.S. auto workers were paid $33.77 an hour. BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen are some of the most profitable auto manufacturers in the world. Last year, Germany is fourth globally in manufacturing as a percent of GDP and fourth overall in total manufacturing production. China is now number one, with the U.S. as number two, however we’re 7^th and declining as a percentage of GDP and Germany’s population is a mere 80 million compared to our robust 300 million and China’s enormous 1.1bn. All this from a country that was largely razed to the ground 60 years ago. As the head of the local autoworker’s union says in Detropia, “a service-based nation is weak.”

I don’t mean to downplay the complexity of the problem which involves race, the military industrial complex, a shift away from limitations on banking and wealth that FDR put into place and Reagan through Clinton dismantled, but we certainly have the means. I hope Detroit becomes a parable for emergence, decline and rebirth rather than just decline.

Addendum:  This was posted to Co.Design daily about a watch company that is repurposing Detroit space and making high end leather goods and watches called Shinola. "After looking at a number of cities, the team decided to establish the company in Detroit, the former manufacturing powerhouse and something of an American throwback itself. It’s a tidy fit that, like the Shinola name, Detroit too is in the early stages of a 21st-century reinvention."