Post Desire

The Art of Oblivion

“... just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.” ― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

DamNation still

Art has always lived at the edge between structure and entropy, whether metaphysically, psychologically, metaphorically, symbolically or directly. Neolithic cave paintings were ritualistic in their attempt to bolster humanities’ fragility against overwhelming odds. Simple hand prints on cave walls affirmed our raison d’être as we fought in our terribly short lives against the climactic and barbarous conditions omnipresent then. In a geological heartbeat we have returned to a place where similar conditions await on the near time horizon.

As the constructs of civilization began when the Natufians effectively settled some 12,000 years ago in the Levant, the seed was planted that humans would from then on, try to manufacture their environment. The rapid recognition that water could be harnessed to perpetuate an unnatural agricultural cycle led to animal domestication, villages, trade, money, etc. Art evolved slightly beyond being the bridge between terror and safety, to the bridge between the sublime (i.e. offerings to the gods) and domestication (pottery, decoration, etc.) Art served as a metaphor that repressed terror, and enabled us to overcome the elements by creating agriculture, animal husbandry and eventually production. Or so we thought. We wore icons that mimicked Gaia or Mother Earth which suppressed memories of the wild, ultimately leading us to commit matricide. It took us just 10,000 years to subjugate the global environment to the extent that we created an irreversible trend in its systems. There is no artistic symbol or metaphor adequate to unpack the dimensions of our impact on the globe. Perhaps this is why the art world has largely regressed into the tortured space of Wall Street’s Capitalism.

I have always been a believer in the sublime in art. From my early days of artistic formation I was drawn to works that lived outside or beyond the dimensions of humanity. I remember the first time I saw James Rosenquist’s F-111, mesmerized by the bravado of its scale and metaphorical power. Since those high school days I’ve seen many works of art that captivate the imagination with their grasping at the impenetrable void. Not one work in my lifetime has moved me as much as watching a section of glacier the size of Manhattan calving off of Greenland in the movie Chasing Ice.

We don’t really understand scale as human beings. Our neolithic brains have great difficulty rationalizing large scale. How do we assimilate 7.4 cubic km of ice crashing off the Ilulissat glacier in Greenland? That is enough fresh water to provide 3 liters (0.79 gallons) of fresh drinking water to every person on Earth for 348 days. The Great Pyramid of Giza is roughly 2,500,000 cubic meters or 0.0025 cubic kilometers. Therefore, the ice that calved in Chasing Ice represents the equivalent of 2,800 Giza Pyramids. The section that is shown on film breaking free represents a tiny fraction of the endangered remaining ice flows in both Greenland and the Antarctic. How does art act as a bridge now, between the terrors of climate change and humanity? Has art served for too long as an agent provocateur in our understanding of environment?

[vimeo 89928979 w=500 h=281]

A film just released (June 2014) by Patagonia called DamNation reveals the tragedy of the U. S. post-war dam building boom of 1950 to 1970. During that period of time 30,000 dams were built across the United States in a frenzy to harness nature and build a more powerful, prosperous nation. Currently there are 80,000 dams in the U.S., only 2540 of which produce any hydropower at all. Many of these dams counterintuitively destroyed habitat that now, under the current conditions of climate change, only worsen our dilemma. The movie focuses primarily on two regions of the country where hydropower was seen as a necessary and potent way to sustain the nation’s growth, the Pacific Northwest and the Western/Southwest regions of the U.S. One of the most intriguing aspects of the film is the dialogue around what I would consider performance art pieces. These symbolic gestures, first created by Earth First when they rolled a giant piece of black plastic down the front of the Glen Canyon Dam to signify it’s need to be severed, are unintentional art performances with the potential power to speak plainly to the larger symbol, the dam itself. In 1987 Earth First painted a giant crack on the (now removed) Elwha River dam to bring awareness to the destruction of millennial-old salmon spawning grounds blocked by the dam. Watching the movie, it struck me that a possible future for art in the 21st century is not activism per se, but the creation of experiences on human scale that once again bridge the divide between terror and security.

Ed Ayres, founder of WorldWatch Institute has said, “We are being confronted by something so completely outside our collective experience that we don’t really see it, even when the evidence is overwhelming. For us, that ‘something’ is a blitz of enormous biological and physical alterations in the world that as been sustaining us.” Here is one of art’s fundamental roles, to expose the dimensions of human imagination beyond our everyday experiences. Art is uniquely qualified to contextualize the impending trauma that is already unfolding as a result of the beginnings of the Anthropocene era. What we so desperately need from art now is a parsing of the terrors of the sublime, of climate change, so that we might imagine a way to at the very least, to plug the gushing wound. What we don’t need from art is more pandering to money which is actually pandering to the past, the status quo which inevitably makes it less art and more visual onanism.

Rorate Caeli desuper et nubes pluant iustum (2005–2006)

There is a long standing tradition in arts relationship to environment that focuses on the symbolic and the sublime. Anselm Keifer arguably has taken this to its logical end point with his majestic, allegorical paintings and sculptures that use landscape as a symbolic metaphor to translate the myth and memory of Germany. Keifer’s has combined those elements nascent in Bierstadt, Turner, Cezanne and even Rothko and pushed them into a dimension so heavily laden with teleology they immolate landscape painting as a useful genre altogether. “The real problem—what we might call the Kiefer syndrome—is whether it is possible to take myth seriously on its own terms, and to respect its coherence and complexity, without becoming morally blinded by its poetic power.” Beyond this arose the land art aesthetes, engaging the environment directly. Unfortunately, and as extraordinary this work can be, it is increasingly become a mirror for the hubris of mankind's intersection with the environment rather than an elegy for its enduring and sustaining presence. Didactic attempts to unravel in the aesthetic our place on this blue dot is dead. Art must find a new way forward.

There is no other problem, issue or need, there is only one and in that sense we should take heart that our jobs as artists have actually been radically simplified in terms of focus. If art is a reflection of the now, the state of humanity acting as a mirror unto itself, then the only thing that needs mirroring is our own impending doom. If we cannot see fit to displace short term arrogance of our pitiful achievements in order to maintain what’s left of the wildness of this Earth, then we will surely perish as a species. “Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.” Art has much to learn from people like the late Edward Abbey and I think it comes down to effective strategies. For years I’ve been in awe of those artists whose power resides in poetic scale and what many might describe as machismo. The work of Walter De Maria, James Turrell, Olafur Eliasson, Anselm Kiefer, and Richard Serra have captivated me due to their elegiac form, sense of grandeur and push beyond human scale. I still believe there is a place for works like Lightning Field, Roden Crater or Serra’s great tilted steel forms. I am now coming to believe these works are looking more and more aligned with an age that has passed. The time of humans will only be sustained if we stop imposing ourselves so directly on the environment and begin to deconstruct some of the impositions from our past. This is not to say that humanity and art should embrace some ecotopia, because that is both impossible and equally salacious. Rather there is a middle way—a measured middle ground—and I’m hopeful art will show us the way. There are extant artists in our presence we can look to. The work of Gabriel Orozco, Mel Chin, Hans Haacke, and Diana Lynn Thompson, to name a few, are artists who provide an alternative to the monumental.

Mel Chin & Hans Haacke artworks

My nature is to be optimistic, but the current conditions of the world are making that more challenging each day. There is no real paradigm shift, no terror in people’s eyes over the imminent loss of the Western Ice Shelf of Antarctica, the ever increasing average yearly global surface temperatures of the planet or the desertification of the San Juaquin Valley. In a land of relative comfort and prosperity enamored with corporate consumerism, it is easy to understand why this is so. Films like DamNation, Chasing Ice, and Do The Math can only take us so far. Documentaries, as powerful and emotionally wrenching as they can be, are stunted by their transient, filmic nature. They are also a form of preaching to the choir. A new kind of subtle art might open the door for the middle, the unconvinced and the comfortable classes to see the real terror around us and take action. At least that’s my optimistic hope. There are points of light in the darkness but the real question is will we have the courage to flood the room with light completely before we run out of time. Once again I’ll share Schama’s words as a nod to this hopefulness;

“…it seems to me that neither the frontiers between the wild and the cultivated, nor those that lie between the past and the present, are so easily fixed. Whether we scramble the slopes or ramble the woods, our Western sensibilities carry a bulging backpack of myth and recollection. We walk Denecourt’s trail; we climb Petrach’s meandering path. We should not support this history apologetically or resentfully. for within its bag are fruitful gifts—not only things that we have taken from the land but things that we can plant upon it. And though ti may sometimes seem that our impatient appetite for produce has round the earth to thin and shifting dust, we need only poke below the subsoil of its surface to discover an obstinately rich loam of memory. It is not that we are any more virtuous or wiser than the most pessimistic environmentalists supposes. It is just that we are more retentive. The sum of our pasts, generation laid over enervation, like the slow mold of the seasons, forms the compost of our future. We live off it.”

Anarchy & Order

Musings on the state of beauty and the sublime.

“Beauty is your sure bet that desire, unmolested, is going to make you feel around. The Sublime is your failure to feel anything around the beautiful, knowing well it’s there.” —Faheem Haider

“Reports that say there's -- that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things that we know that we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.” —Donald Rumsfeld, United States Secretary of Defense (2002)

We are living in a time filled with visions of the apocalypse while simultaneously denying its near eventuality. Climate change is upon us. Officially or not we’re firmly seated in the Anthropocene. We will not meet our demise by way of alien space craft, zombie invasions, thermonuclear war or even the Terminator. Instead we have started a war with the planet itself and that war will more than likely going to end poorly for the human race. The concept of the entire world’s climate changing, melting polar ice sheets, the release of trapped CO2 in the tundra and a shift in global weather patterns inevitably triggering irreversible changes is more than most human beings can wrap their minds around. This is the dilemma of beauty and the sublime.

The assassination of John Lennon in 1980 and the inauguration of Ronald Reagan precisely a month later, marked the end of an era in American renewal. Ideals bound in the sublime, freedom chief among them. For a time we used our post-war prosperity to grow the cultural infusion we received prior to the war from those fleeing fascism. Lennon, another expat who chose to live in New York, was a symbol of what a culture might achieve when holding a firm grasp on the sublime. Reagan on the other hand, a Hollywood fantasy, preferred the Norman Rockwell portrait to the Pollock landscape. To Reagan any notion of the sublime was to be feared and freedom lived firmly in the real, not the abstract. Of course, that real was grounded in the tradition of rich, white men. Since then we’ve seen an accelerating erosion of abstract ideas and a continual, exponential embrace of certainty. This has led to a rise in fundamentalism, absurdist political frames like Ayn Rand Libertarianism, and a fanatical adherence to antiquated, dangerous ideas guaranteed to solidify the onslaught of climate change.

Beauty sits firmly in the Now of desire. It is tactile, emotional and lives within the boundaries of the body and our biology. The sublime fractures the Now, leaving us fumbling in the dark for the certainty of beauty. This dynamic which makes both concepts more powerful and recognizable, has been consumed by fear. The shiny culture of corporate production and our desire for the outcomes of that production—Nike shoes, BMW cars, the latest Beyoncé album—is now what stands in for beauty. It’s a deception. It has no place in the Now, only in the future. In parallel to consumerist beauty, and its replacement of democratic freedom, lies our idea of technological beauty. American fundamentalists drive automobiles and use smartphones that require a level of technological sophistication far exceeding their understanding. Yet they deny science because the science that led to the technology that provides them their comfort requires an embrace of the sublime that terrifies them far more than the certainty of an angry god.

The cognitive dissonance between technology and religion is a failure of imagination. Art is failing us and as a result our imaginations a left to fester on memetic replications of layered ironies. The inside joke of regurgitated culture is the only idea persisted, with few exceptions. Our art isn’t telling any new stories. It offers no real form of beauty because it has no stomach for the sublime. Just as technology cannot exist without the pursuit of pure science, beauty cannot exist without the sublime. The unknown unknowns are critical in our dialectic as they lead to inquiries bound by deep imagination. Art production is bound by intellectual curiosity not by talent and right now we’re sorely lacking in intellectual-aesthetic curiosity. Artists aren’t interested in redefining art, they think art-making is simply burning down the house of aesthetics in and of itself. I’m specifically thinking of Richard Prince, Tracy Emin and a cadre of followers and mimickers who pretend at art-making because they offer no real dialogue between beauty and the sublime. Prince’s effete riffs on pulp fiction book covers and Marlboro ads took whatever integrity was left in Warhol’s dialogue and flattened it into a dull plane of aesthetic purgatory. The artists who followed like Emin, et. al. have merely punctuated the effort in a pedantic ballet of aesthetic scatology.

We need a new definition for beauty and aesthetics. We have long since outgrown Plato, Kant and yes, even Heidegger but we are left with no new outline. The sublime is narrowly defined by the fear of terror. The terror of 9/11 seemed sublime because our art has been so narrow, plastic and ironic for so long. There is nothing sublime about a president standing on rubble and encouraging people to get back out there and shop.

Our culture and our art is trapped in an adolescent understanding of beauty and the sublime. A true imagining of the sublime is to ponder what lies beyond the infinite, to be so overwhelmed by the breakdown of physicality and the Now, that we are paralyzed. We attach words to these experiences but they all fall woefully short—altered states, the uncanny, transcendence, the infinite—are all our weak attempts to add context to that which has none. The failing in this is its lack of recognition that the sublime is not ‘out there’ in the intangible ether, but lives inside all of us in the form of consciousness. The voice inside our head as we interact in the Now, fractures the nature of any form of tangible reality. As Daniel Dennett says,

“The salmon swimming upstream to spawn may be wily in a hundred ways, but she cannot even contemplate the prospect of abandoning her reproductive project and deciding instead to live out her days studying coastal geography or trying to learn Portuguese. The creation of a panoply of new standpoints is, to my mind, the most striking product of the euprimatic revolution.”

Grasping the infinity of available ideas is what makes us human.

Viewing images of the Hubble telescope’s view of the cosmos is an aesthetic experience that marries beauty and the sublime. The images of giant gas clouds millions of light years across our galaxy can be seen as physically beautiful. Recognizing the origins and time/space dimensions of those gas clouds disrupts their aesthetic value and seats them in the sublime. Our cultural cult of personality teaches us that beauty is precious, pretentious, and idealistic. The art world’s reaction to this admiration of the plastic-pretty with classical ugliness. A didactic and equally immature response to the current realities of our world. Entering the realm of the sublime gives shape to beauty precisely because it suddenly becomes precious against the abandon of the former. Art isn’t a response to anything, when it works. At its best it provides us a slim grasp of the Now in order to allow access to the infinite. Robert Hughes said it best during the apex of Reaganism,

“What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.”

The Bleakness That Bonds Us

I am a child of Watergate. When I was in grade school in the 1970’s it was an all consuming subject, even among eleven and twelve year olds. My small town high school library made sure there was a special reserve section that dealt with the issues surrounding the continuing unfolding of the scandal and eventual disgraceful resignation of a president of the United States. As a adolescent the idea that a president would not only lie but manipulate the infrastructure of the U.S. government to win re-election was nearly impossible to swallow. My parents were products of the post WW II boom. They went to college to gain teaching degrees which our government paid for in order to promote a more robust democracy in the wake of the atrocities of fascism. It was a time of relative idealism despite the assignation of John F. Kennedy just three months after my birth and later Martin Luther King and his brother Bobby. It was a time of hope despite the insipid bombing of Cambodia, the knifing of a young man at Altamont during a Rolling Stones concert and the hideous plague rained down from the Manson family in L.A. The remnants of 1950’s America was still holding charge in small town America. I was taught even then, at that early age about civics, citizenry and the idea of a functional government. My father voted for Nixon, twice and my mother voted first for Humphrey than McGovern, but I was taught to respect differences because the vote is what enabled reconciliation. Republican government with democratic underpinnings was the greatest form of government known on Earth, and despite it’s faults, it was to be respected.

Then came Watergate. It was as if I learned that one of my uncles was a child molester or heroin dealer. I had no personal opinion about the president, but the mere fact that the leader of the free world could lie under oath and deceive on such a large scale was nearly impossible to comprehend. Today, that would be the bane of naivety and I would be laughed at out loud by nearly every school child with any remote sense of current affairs. We all sit and watch The Cobert Report or John Stewart’s comedy news and we take it in stride that our government is filled with idiots, charlatans and deceivers, but in the spring of 1974 the unfolding idea of that our president could be involved in orchestrating something as petty and foul as a break in of the Democratic National Headquarters seemed as reasonable as suggesting that aliens were living at Area 51 in Nevada. It was an odd time because the aftermath of the 60’s still came to bear and much of television was divided between the ostrich in the sand and confronting very directly, somewhat cynically and very much sarcastically the fact that all was not well with our society. All In The Family, Mary Tyler Moore, M*A*S*H, and Soul Train ran at the same time as The Waltons, Little House on the Prairie and American Bandstand. Children, even precocious 11 year olds weren’t capable of sorting out the cultural dissonance taking place at the time. Watergate, changed all that. It made real in a televised cultural way that our society was deeply corrupt at its core. There was no more room for a beautiful landscape of democracy that would self-correct. You knew, even then, there was no coming back from what was uncovered with Nixon’s dirty dealings. Sure, governments and centralized power are always prone to corruption, but what uncovered the deceit of Nixon was the fourth estate. Today there is no more fourth estate. Woodward and Bernstein would have been laid off by now.

I’m making this distinction between the fracture of a belief that I encountered in my youth back in 1973-75 and now because I think the monumental difference between the two eras is quite simply, back then there was a belief to begin with. It seems today that adolescents aren’t silly enough to believe our government works or that politicians are held accountable or even that what they see on television is reality, but rather that it is all a shifting landscape of available cynical gestures ready for the proverbial YouTube mashup. Authenticity is nearly dead and gone and what remains is mocked openly for it’s naive sensibilities and lack of adherence to the only remaining god, money. It should come as no surprise than, that our most culturally mainstream art form, television has created two powerful dramas that ooze of disdain and contempt for all things moral, righteous or truthful and that deny the concept of authenticity as a strategy, shouting its finality from their bully pulpit.

True Detective and the second season of House of Cards act as agreements in an argument with no contradictions. These dramas about police work in the heart of Louisiana and the machinations of our central government in Washington, DC, accept bleakness as religious doctrine. Both shows a denuded moral landscape so tangible it is like smelling a peach at the apex of its ripeness on a hot summer day. The fine art world, if we can any longer call it that, has remitted a similar ripe oblivion but exhibits it in a way largely inaccessible by the average American, let alone any real admirer of art. Matthew Barney’s latest plethora of shit (literally) filmic opera promises a more esoteric rendering of the aforementioned television dramas. But few will ever see Barney’s high fashion elitist rendition of scatalogical infinity, but many will see House of Cards and True Detective. The new dramas hint back to the fears of the 1970’s (nuclear war, the beginning of the AIDs plague, sexism, and government corruption from the top down) but instead offer a new outpost in post-postmodern explication that insists we should all make peace with the fact that all is lost, rather than remain firmly connected to any remnant of hope. At least, dare I say, there were rafts one could reach out for in the river of shit of the 1970’s. What make these new dramas even harder to digest is the fact that they are so profoundly well acted and written. There is no wink or nod to McLuhan’s Bonanza Land, as in David Milch’s magnificent Deadwood. House of Cards 2 and True Detective forego the Shakespearean rhetoric and ode to westerns in favor a unannounced punch in the nose. Thank you sir, may I have another.

Maybe what bothers me most about all this acceptance of corruption, hate, violence, darkness and sexual malaise is the complacency around it. More than affecting a new kind of awareness, a call to arms that we should all recognize something is terribly amiss about our culture ala Network (1976), we are left alone in the dark to contemplate time being a “flat circle”. True Detective in particular acts as a model for the two extremes that represent themselves in modern America. On the one had we have the greatest increase in religious extremism and fundamentalism in our history, and on the other, the unraveling of time/space with the discovery of the Higgs Boson. I should be celebrating M-theory being used as an expository monologue in American mainstream television, but instead it just makes me sad. To hear Matthew McConaughey recite multiverse theory and superimposition betrays it the wonder it deserves despite his lilting Texas accent. Pizzolatto’s message is clear, we’re all rodents on an endless treadmill doomed to repeat ourselves. Similarly, Francis Underwood, played by the extraordinary Kevin Spacey (who reminds me there is still hope for acting after the death of PSH) has a similar take on time/space, except that his is beholding to only one ideal—power. For the Underwoods as DC power couple, even rape can be turned into a power grab ratings gambit. Even Camille Paglia blushes at Claire Underwoods coldness and calculation.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUfN8wL5zKY&w=560&h=315]I worry that we are less and less impacted, touched, and influenced by art and that it simply serves as yet another device to placate our boredom and hold hands as we walk the flat circle of time. Indeed, Barney’s River of Fundament, loosely based on Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings, is a nod to the perpetual flat circle of time. In some ways the current cultural dynamic is ancient in its parsimonious positioning of romanticism against cold pragmatism, but there is something deeper at play. We are regurgitating centuries of culture on top of itself to the point of blurring any recognition of origin or meaning. We are forcing end game thinking and you can see it in all the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic art being made. This recursiveness will doom us to a self fulfilling prophecy if we can’t see something other, in effect, evolve. Where is the art that will evolve us? Where is the hope?

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.

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.”