I'm thinking about trying to develop an installation as a collaborative enterprise with other artists. I envision an abandoned house filled with abandoned art...piles and heaps of it. I'm not sure where this is going, but here are some notes I wrote a couple of weeks ago, where I was trying to reverse engineer the events which brought me to this point....I'd like to call this project "Collapse"
These tilted paintings have come about as a direct result of trying to deal with the problem of trying to make my two-sided “Prison Papers” framed drawings remain straight and level after they got turned over. This problem surfaced the day I was installing them, and I tried to see how bad it would be if we just allowed them to hang crooked by tilting all of them and stepping back to see how it looked. The effect was as if a bomb had gone off, or that whoever owned the exhibition space was insane. I liked the power of this experience, it was a simple device that countered the well-established gallery/ exhibit convention and it seemed to have potential to become a vehicle for communication of a political theme.
I had created tilted drawings in 1999 that could be viewed four ways, kind of like a playing card, so this device was not new to me. Since meeting political artist Luis Camnitzer through the Drawing Center’s viewing program in 2002, however I’ve been trying to realize more consciously my inclinations to create political content in my work and work toward directing it in a more politically responsive path. I began to then see this device as a way to create a sensation of disorder and disarray. A phrase, which I had used in recent drawings, justifying the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan soon came to mind: “We are fighting them there so that we do not have to fight them here.” It seemed to me that this phrase needed analysis, deconstruction and questioning and that through this device of tilting a painting I could begin to explore the immense implications that this phrase carried.
For starters, I thought, I would create an installation “here” of the kind of havoc and chaos that we have contributed to “there” as a way of beginning to deconstruct that phrase in terms of soliciting an empathetic view of “there”. The here/there thing seems also to bring up ideas of nations versus a nation –free world. If there were no nation or group to hate there would be no “there”, just all “here”. Three other elements that are part of the imagery within the paintings had come about previous to the original “Prison Papers” dilemma and now started evolving and coming into play with more meaning. The first element was this idea of “The Hand of God” reaching out from clouds to earth, giving earthlings whatever they wanted/needed to fight their wars or implement their agendas…a complicit and conveniently accommodating God. The other element evolved from the idea of the pageantry of war, that is; ribbons, medals, flags and uniforms as devices to make us feel really good about fighting wars. Their bright primary colors give us an emotional lift. (My sister sent me a link to a music video called something like a “Pittance of Time” on Veterans Day 2006, which helped to inspire this direction in my art) In my first paintings in this series these two elements merge; hands of God, hands of nations, flags, uniforms and costumes. I very soon began to think of clothing as really actual political statements, from Uncle Sam’s flag-like apparel, the flag like patterns and color of national costumes and the distinctive familiarity of historic dress, etc.
The third element is smoke or clouds...
