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.”

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