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

Imagine Zero

Francis Bacon famously said, "I'm optimistic about nothing." I believe that was his clever way of confronting the possibilities that remain in a world that is psychotic. The author and environmentalist Derrick Jensen has said; "For us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves. The lies are necessary because, without them, many deplorable acts would become impossibilities." I believe that art can be a means of cutting through the lies we tell ourselves and an opportunity to confront the deeper meanings of our own existence. This can be conceived in a multitude of forms from humor to horror, but anything in art that fails to "deepen the mystery" is a lessor form and we should confront it as such. We are quite literally teetering on the brink of self-annihilation in this current time of our human history. I don't believe I'm overstating that or playing to melodrama. Art has always lived at a primal core of our evolution and by understanding its role and embracing its importance, perhaps we can participate in a different kind of evolutionary leap than the one we seem to be headed for. I do not mean this in some utopian fantasy, but in terms of active engagement. Identifying through our most profound and brave artistic expressions that which is meaningful and destructive to us, is a way of overcoming the crushing depression of multiple end-time scenarios. I call it imagining zero because zero as a conceptual idea becomes a metaphor for our own unimaginable potential.

Last week I saw the film The Cave of Forgotten Dreams by Werner Herzog. The film was likely the first and last film footage ever to be shot in the caves of Chauvet in France. These caves were sealed some twenty thousand years ago by a land slide, perfectly preserving the oldest known art work on the planet. Ancient drawings spanning five thousand years time remained largely unchanged in their technique and content. Made thirty-five thousand years ago when enormous ice sheets covered the surrounding mountains in three thousand meters of snow and ice, they are a testament to how art literally changed human beings. At the time homo sapiens were occupying the very same region as Neanderthals (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) a preceding branch of the human species. Although Neanderthal jewelry and some fragments of masks and pigment residue have been discovered, no other significant art has been found. Of course, we know, Neanderthals did no survive till today. Something profound happened in our evolutionary process thirty-five thousand years ago in the caves of southern France that changed the course of human evolution. It may have contributed to our dominion over the Neanderthals or at the very least our survival in opposition to their disappearance. We began to express ourselves by framing outside of objects, our experiences and the environment in which we lived. Why did we begin to draw on the wall? What was the significance of creating drawings in a dark cave that could only be witnessed by torch light? The lions, rhinoceros and antelope that were drawn with an eerie life-like realism and deliberately worked with the contours of the cave walls to create a three-dimensional illusion were our first forays into framing our existence as something outside our tactile experiences. Their dreams were reimagined as charcoal drawings sketched inside the dark caves in order to better comprehend the meaning of existence and their seat within the world.

Today we are able to reimagine our dreams in an almost infinite array of mediums from movies to video games, and we have achieved the capacity to literally re-shape our world. If we can look more closely at the world and more precisely examine what artists are expressing we have the capacity to rediscover what started us on this amazing journey some thirty-five thousand years ago, and with it, perhaps imagine a radical new shift in our species.

In the coming weeks I'll be working to expand Imagine Zero and I encourage others to more robustly participate in both commentary and offer their writing. I'm interested in this being a location for multiple perspectives and multiple viewpoints on art and its meaningfulness in today's world. If you're interested in participating please contact me through the email here and as always, thanks for reading.

—Odin Cathcart

Call Me Ishmael

“Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.”1

In May of 1961 the artist Piero Manzoni meticulously prepared ninety tins of Merda d’artista or “Artist’s Shit”. He weighed each tin to match precisely 30 grams, labeled and signed each one. In August of that year the tins were exhibited at the Galleria Peseta and priced according to the current equivalent price per weight of gold at that time. These pieces were a follow up to work where Manzoni thumb-printed hard boiled eggs and handed them out to the audience so they could “devour the artist”. Manzoni’s scatological artwork nearly 50 years later is a fitting commentary on western culture’s materialistic and disposable attitudes. The irony that anything ‘produced’ by an artist was worthy of purchase was a blatant reference to societies attitudes not only toward art, but consumption. In the 21^st century consumption has reached a level well beyond Manzoni’s imaginings. Instead of bodily excretions and expelled breath, today’s empty consumption takes the form of entertainment; movies, TV and video games. With film the nourishment of the carefully packaged and contrived stars (actors) is what fuels the consumption. It is a mimicry of the time when kings and queens ruled Europe and the populace dulled the pain of their oppression by living vicariously through the overindulgent, flamboyant behavior of the very people’s lives their suffering supports. If you are a true artist-actor swimming in this pool of glazed-eyed, ignorant, petulant expression today, it must be maddening. Many a celebrity has found solace in drugs or suicide to escape the pressures of mass expectation in the past.

It is the isolation and pressure of a celebrity life that is the focus of I’m Still Here, the masterful performance piece by Joaquin Phoenix. In this faux documentary Phoenix bravely navigates the landscape of public expectations of celebrity and its human toll. His nearly 15 month long performance required the isolation and obsession of Ishmael in Melville’s Moby Dick. Like Ishmael’s turn to the sea in self exile, Phoenix leverages his formidable acting ability to expose a publics false ideas on celebrity. The brilliance of I’m Still Here is in its duality. Phoenix knows that to unmask the veil of tatemae in Hollywood he must pretend to be its victim, it’s sacrificial lamb. Revealing truth always comes with a price and I’m Still Here has exacted a toll on Phoenix and Affleck both in terms of the commitment required and the fact the film has not done well at the box office. To give up one’s life to pretending for such an extended time which required lying to nearly everyone close to you must have been an incredibly painful experience. It is one thing to play a character who satirizes for 20 minutes a day on screen as Stephen Colbert does and another to live in satire every day for over a year. Unquestionably Phoenix took a financial hit as well by walking away from film projects during his own performance and in turn potentially alienating people who controlled his future destiny in film making. That isn’t a trivial matter of money but of the ability of an artist to work as an artist.

I’m Still Here is one of the finest performance art pieces ever created. Combining the potency and mass appeal of films with the dialogue of celebrity worship, Phoenix was able to reach a much broader audience than even Marina Abramović’s, The Artist is Present. Phoenix demonstrates a very particular aspect of our culture that is the longing for a larger life. Entertainment and the celebrity around it have formed such a perfect foil for our own reality, we have lost ourselves in it, blinding us from participation in our own lives. We crave the superficiality and shininess of Hollywood because it provides a reality where anyone can attain greatness and success without credentials, education, social status or family lineage. Blame Shakespeare. The man who unintentionally molded great drama’s from the myths of history for crowds of common, working-class folk, he elevated acting to a metaphysical state that so enticed in its language and presence that it created a culture of wanton aspirations. That idea has grown into an enormous industry where actor’s are paid tens of millions of dollars per film and live like 17^th century royalty.

Phoenix’s performance about a constructed reality feeds aspirants all the cliché and pap expected and then turns its back in laughter. By forcing the viewer to indulge in the faux drama of an actor’s decline, Phoenix and Affleck are asking us to look more closely at our own realities. I’m Still Here aims to shake loose our daily dream state where actors lives are more important than our own. It is as much a scolding film as an entertaining one. If forces us to realize, that in this Facebook world we really never know anyone, perhaps not even ourselves and we should be cautious to form judgement on those things we know little of. It asks us to be wary of the illusions created by those with the means to create whole worlds out of computer generated visuals. We laugh at Phoenix’s attempts in the film to break free of his own image and venture down another career path, that of a rapper called JP, but there is bitterness under the clownish behavior. Once you’re committed to hunting the great white whale, the obsession owns you and escaping from it is very difficult. Phoenix’s performance piece, hoaxumentary is both an artistic expression of the complexities and pratfalls of celebrity and celebrity worship, but a cathartic act where an actor brilliantly finds a way out of his own image and hopes to escape the weight of his brother’s death from the same.

I’m Still Here is on its surface a great joke, a prank played out on film, just like Manzoni’s cans of artist’s shit (which reportedly contain no such substance). It owes its greatest debt to Duchamp who found no separation between art and life as he pretended to abandon art-making for chess, all the while toiling away on Etant Donne. Duchamp understood fully the power of comedy in unmasking the falsehoods of dramatic constructs. As Duchamp spent years living modestly, and playing chess he toiled away at a masterful artwork which directly confronted the horrors of realism. Phoenix see’s our society for what it is — plastic, false and desperately grasping for substance. He wants to unravel reality TV and the psychodrama of Hollywood fantasies to force our confrontation of personal realities with greater vigor. The lives of performers like Britney Spears, however artificial on the surface are played out in the reality of their own daily lives. Her alcoholism and lack of substantive education, not to mention a historic lack of parental guidance is thrust against an even larger canvas of public spectacle and expectation. There are those with the constitution and intellect to survive this (Robert Downey Jr.) but many succumb, as did Joaquin’s brother River. The persistent airplay of Joaquin’s desperate 911 call attempting to save his brother’s life remain a persistent horror in Phoenix’s memory. He knows first hand the dangers of taking oneself too seriously and falling prey to the constructs of an industry built on professional lying. The pernicious and fickle expectations of an audience are built on fear and the public’s inability to realize the surreal portent of the actors they observe. It is Shakespeare’s most cynical of phrases “All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.”2 that provides the arena for the oppressive irony of today’s so-called entertainment. It was intended as sophistry from the character Jacques in his heavy-handed and pretentious lecture on the Seven Ages of Man, but it has become the banner advertisement for a shallow, woeful culture that has no center, no soul. Phoenix and Affleck hope to use cinema as foil against itself, an irony against irony as the mundane, profane, ideological and spiritual have been used by Duchamp, Manzoni and Cattelan in their art. It is Francis Bacon’s statement “The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.” that rings true for Phoenix, for within mystery we find ourselves, threadbare and naked against the cosmos. In art irony comes with a predisposition to question its authority and give the viewer an almost preternatural disposition for introspection or dismissal with little in between. This disposition comes from our limited understanding of art as a vehicle for the delivery of creative expression and singular visions. It has a deep history that is sunken in our unconscious with roots going back tens of thousands of years. Film and photography hold no such sway as they’re historically infants. The nature of their medium is one that appears to mimic our own reality, at least in terms of its visual representations masking its true artistic underpinnings. Screenplays for the most part, are carefully constructed devices which build upon centuries of play acting. It is a collaborative effort built with collectives of people most of whom are intent on feeding a beast that will in turn provide profit to its backers. Artists like Cattelan and Phoenix/Affleck are interested in deconstructing our myths and fantasies in order to undermine the dream state that these models construct. They see the corruption at the heart of these devices and want to dismantle it to liberate us from its imprisonment. In a recent interview in Interview Magazine, Cattelan talks about the trap of money for the artist;

Part of the blame can be put at the artists’ door, too—no question. But I see our involvement more as a consequence. When there is too much money at stake, the whole system gets corrupted. Artists can be very vulnerable to these mechanisms...It’s in our nature. If you are a plumber, there is an objective way to establish whether you put together a great piping system or not. Art is a bit more slippery than that. So, when you fill a gallery with dirt and someone comes along waving wads of bills, it’s difficult not to take them because they become a tangible acknowledgement that what you’ve been doing actually makes sense. 3

The true irony of I’m Still Here is its honesty. The film is an incredible demonstration of what is expected of an artist in order to create something viable, that shakes loose the dominant paradigm. Phoenix gave up more than a year of his life to live a rouse. He lied to everyone outside his inner circle, including David Letterman, and put is actual career at risk. He sacrificed his own well-being both physically and psychologically in his tragicomic portrayal of himself. Where Cattelan can replace himself with actors and avoid the glaring eye of the masses (lets face it, fine art has a tiny audience in comparison to film) Phoenix, nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of another tragicomic figure, Johnny Cash had to endure the persistent ridicule and media blitz that came with his performance piece. Affleck has commented that the most challenging aspect of creating the performance was convincing Phoenix’s agent, Patrick Whitesell to green light the project. Casey Affleck told Whitesell, Phoenix (his prized client)planned to convince everyone he; “has lost his mind and make him as unattractive as possible, you would think he would have me killed immediately.” 4  It is precisely the honesty of the film that makes it difficult to watch and undoubtedly resulted in its poor box office numbers. The only true irony is that Phoenix will now have to spend a great deal of energy repairing an image he damaged in the name of his own art. The terror of I’m Still Here is the reality that Phoenix and Afflect choose to remain locked within the devices of the industry they have openly, brutally dismantled.

“Getting lost like that is my drive.”

—Joaquin Phoenix

1 Moby Dick, Herman Melville, 1851. Chapter 7, The Chapel, p. 36; Harper & Brothers publishers, NY, NY.
2 As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII [All the world's a stage] by William Shakespeare
3http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/maurizio-cattelan/
4 The New York Times, September 16, 2010 by Michael Cieply, “Documentary? Better Call It Performance Art. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/movies/17affleck.html

The desert of ideas

As we depart the oughts and move squarely into the teens of the 21st century our collective conscious seems to bookend the one that I entered college witnessing. After watching Avatar for the first time this week, several things became crystal clear about the current state of affairs. There is much chatter lately among the punditry regarding the ineffectual state of the Democratic party and liberals in general. The right-wing might be crazy conspiracy nuts but they sure to do stay on point and get things done. On the other hand the Obama administration seems frozen in conciliatory conversation and aggressive compromise. Well, the pundits, satirists and talking heads should watch Avatar. It is obvious to me that so-called liberals are trapped in an ecotopian dream-state that envisions a fantasy world where fairness rules and the davids slay the Goliath's of the right. Cameron’s bleeding heart, indigenous loving fantasia mirrors in many ways the beliefs and actions of liberals throughout America. If only we could all get along.

I entered college with the shooting of John Lennon and the movie Blade Runner topping the box office. This during the powerful rise of the conservative Ronald Reagan. Before Ridley Scott started making vacuous movies about legends (the lousy remake of Spartacus called Gladiator and the soon to open Robin Hood) he made extraordinary, artful visions of a bleak future where we were imprisoned by technology and were forced to come to terms with the fierceness of nature. The acrid, orange air of LA is filled with billowing clouds of fire from oil refineries while hover cars push up above the constant rain and din in order to navigate the largely evacuated landscape. This is the vision of Blade Runner, a planet ravaged by centuries of industrialization and enterprise where the smart inhabitants leave the scarified surface for the “outerworlds.” This vision based on the paranoid genius of Philip K. Dick is the world of Blade Runner. Technology is viewed as a continuation of our current rapacious desires, where genetics runs wild and the wealthy simply abandon that which they’ve contributed to destroying. In my mind that is the reality we are headed for, not some ecotopian, blue-bodied re-imagined experience of ourselves.

I’ll do my best here to avoid commenting on the insipid dialogue and recycled plot lines of Avatar and focus on the visual aspects of the film. The CG & 3D is the dazzle that appears to be blinding everyone from thinking. As mythic-loving creatures we are prone to what’s called locked-in syndrome in software development. When technology was a stone tool or a copper sword, locked-in myths like Beowulf took hold, later replaced by the magic of Merlin and the visions of Hamlet. These are the stories that are the backbone of western society and they are the narratives that have been locked-in to our collective conscious (Joseph Campbell did an extraordinary job of revealing this in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces.) This myth-making is now a dangerous achilles heel for us. Technology has raised the bar several orders of magnitude where myths now have the potential to be falsely lived through virtual environments, 3D movies, and HDTV. Even those forms would be benign enough on their own if they weren’t being expressed in warfare with pilotless drones, robotics and computer simulations. Video games have already been reinforcing something Avatar heralds — you can’t die. In a video game you re-spawn or are reborn to fight another day and try again to defeat the fill-in-the-blank. Avatar ends (and I’m sure I’m the last person on earth to have seen the movie so I’m not spoiling anything here) with the lead character being reborn into the body of his avatar Na’vi body.

The events of 9/11 were the early signals of a new paradigm shift. It provided a window to the roots of terror by the disenfranchised in a new century. Technology has equaled the playing field of conflict in unexpected ways because of our 21st century commitment to technicism. This is witnessed by the use of cell phones to trigger suicide bombers and roadside IED’s, the use of a plane as a missile and recently the hacking of our pilotless drone cameras. These are the strategies of the disenfranchised. They are actions built upon the anxiety that disproportionate access to wealth and a state of perpetual war have promoted. James Cameron gets it exactly wrong in his plot on how the Na’vi, led by a human insider would have responded to overwhelming force and the destruction of their sacred tree. The Na’vi would have assuredly used a kind of terrorism as response. This is absent in the movie for the very reason I stated earlier, Cameron is blinded by thinking the old paradigms of natural balance are still in place. The Cherokee despite early victories learned rapidly that a Na’vi-like strategy only results in your enemy (who holds considerably superior technology) will simply return in greater overwhelming force and greater technology. The absurdity that arrows, no matter how large are a match for modern day weaponry only adds to the delusion of Avatar. Violence begets more violence. Vengeance is a failed strategy.

There are of course exceptions to this rule. Vietnam serves as one of them. However, desire to maintain war is predicated on the value of the resources. Geopolitical positioning simply isn’t enough of a driving force to continue such a conflict. If Vietnam had contained the largest oil reserves on earth, we’d still be there. Of course in Avatar the entire point of the film is a corporations plundering of the natural resources of the Na’vi planet. What’s curious to me is, Cameron clearly is creating a political film underneath a visual spectacle but he’s not really interested in doing the heavy lifting that requires. Instead he thinks a dabble of commentary and a modicum of plot will be enough to enrich his political position. There are no journalist characters, as there are in so many good political films, nor is there any idea of the connection to earth. Several times throughout the movie the corporate demons and military commanders state their concern for the PR end of the genocide, but never is there any indication precisely how this information would get back to earth.

It is impossible to love technology and believe in an ecotopian future. This dualistic thinking is perpetuated throughout Avatar. On the one hand, Cameron is suggesting technology brought by the humans only serves their greed and avarice and on the other he believes the technology of the Na’vi is quaint and enlightening. Both societies are waring societies, they simply have different levels of technology. How long before the Na’vi take over some of the remnants of human technology? To me it is this language of hope that encourages complacency when it comes to understanding what stands in the way of us solving gigantic global problems that threaten our very existence. When Republicans in our government take on a unilateral attitude of “no” to everything, we as liberals, if we are true liberals must face it squarely and revolt. No amount of hope or reconciliation is going to suffice. Great things were not accomplished in history by committees but rather by the enduring and persistent efforts of individuals working toward a greater good. However, just as Cameron’s hero takes on mythic proportions in Avatar, we must be cautious not to blindly follow those individuals whose brilliance creates breakthroughs for us. As the British were wise to vote Churchill out of office once the war had ended, so must we be willing to vote those representatives out of office who do not pursue solutions but rather compromise. You can’t compromise with a corporation because its very charter is sociopathic in nature. We should pay attention to representatives who say they will reform corporations while they simultaneously accept money from them. Heed the words of Adam Smith, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public…” We especially need to be cautious of being dazzled by 3D renderings and the promise of utopian solutions as a means to solving our problems. Naiveté is equal to apathy and ignorance when it comes to politics. Avatar has the political naiveté of a 7 year old while tackling very adult concepts.

If we realize the true extent of the damage we have incurred to our nation and the damage we have inflicted to the globe, only then can we begin to repair it. If we persist in wishing upon a star for some popular uprising led by a mythical hero that somehow manages to overthrow the military-industrial complex in favor of a new ecotopian paradise (the essential plot of Avatar) then we are doomed to failure. This wishing only leads to complacency and as Thomas Jefferson said, “All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to = remain silent.” There is a deafening silence in the message of Avatar and worse it is being fed to 100 million viewers.

The philosopher Slavoj Žižek has much more thoroughly and eloquently described these ideas in his book “Welcome to the Desert of the Real”. Buy a copy and tell Mr. Cameron to buy it too.

A Clockwork Van Gogh

"It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen." -Alex, from A Clockwork Orange

2009 the final year in the decade, appropriately of naughts (the decade of 00), is nearing it’s end here in the west. I’m sitting here watching A Clockwork Orange by my favorite director Stanley Kubrick, and I am reminded of Van Gogh. It’s the violence of change, you see that comes to mind as the year draws to a conclusion. Uncertainty is ugly, rough and violent.

We like to look for order amongst chaos as we humans are responsible for creating more chaos and violent behavior than any other entity on this planet. Van Gogh’s struggle was one of awareness. He saw the world in it’s true form, bright, vibrant to the point of near blindness and aggressive. The potency of awareness can be overwhelming and we find ways of avoiding it at all costs. We hide behind our simulacra and simulations hoping to deaden the persistence of the natural world that we have spent millenia attempting to avoid. Van Gogh confronted nature head on, absorbing it’s vibrant brutality. He wasn’t interested in assimilation but the acceptance of uncertainty that came with the color of the world. Color to him was a metaphor for this natural violence and he emulated it in his own epileptic fits eventually disintegrating into interictal dysphoric disorder. The violence of nature was whole, manifested as a real human existence, not as some simulation or painted reality. Van Gogh attempted to paint what he experienced rather than share some hallucination of the imagined.

In A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick emulates this same kind of violent nature (as imagined by Burgess in the original novel) but within the context of societies’ attempts to cure it as a natural experience. The pseudo-modern world of 70’s future-kitsch serves as the plastic, fantastic background for the escape from the mundane. The lead character imagines the world as purely violent and acts on impulse, as horrible as that can be in its manifestation. Society reacts, aiming to cure the ills of this madness, much as it rejected the imaginings of Van Gogh. Inevitably the cure is worse than the illness and the message is lost on the whole. The real madness of course, is the social constructs that work outside of nature and conceal real experience, thereby leading to violent imaginings as an excuse to avoid the prison of the unreal.

It would be easy to accept beauty as the logical, the imagined math of Bach as opposed to the chaotic emotional violence of Beethoven, but that wouldn’t leave room for the full spectrum of experience. Without the extremes, without the violence of Fauvist imaginings experience grows dull and one outcome is our own manifestations of violence. What is persistent is fear, and it manifests itself in the disempowered. The crooks become cops and the cured protagonist falls victim not only to his own uninhibited actions in the acceptance of the chaos of living, but in society’s systemic reaction to uncertainty. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony becomes the metaphor for pure, emotional confrontation in the movie. What was once an illusive idea, sought after through the lead character’s imaginings, manifested in his violence becomes a prison of the real as he is reformed to fit the mold of society’s banality.

Ultimately, it is boredom and the lack of imagination that bring the ugliness of violence to light. Violence as a metaphor to nature’s potential and persistence of uncertainty is a concept only found in the imaginings of artistic spirit. The healthy manifestation of reality is found in our acceptance of uncertainty and the balance between Bach and Beethoven not the contradictory competition between the two. Salvation doesn’t live at the end of a cure or rehabilitation from real experience, but in the acceptance that we are responsible for our natural position within the world and our acceptance of it’s uncertain consequences rather than our persistence of our own violent acts. A Clockwork Orange brilliantly outlines the holistic responsibilities at play that are the complex interactions of human beings - natural, and real, not fictional inventions of our own.