by Jerome du Bois
Last night Catherine and I attended the first "Slide Slam" at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, where
Arizona artists talk informally about their work, then participate in a group discussion moderated by collectors, followed by light refreshments and . . .
-- but we didn't get that far. We sat through Heidi Hesse's awkward presentation (how do you forget the obvious name of one of your own artworks? how hard is it to work a laptop computer?), then it was Jon Haddock's turn.
Standing at the podium behind the laptop, Haddock explained that he was working on a series (in a visual media that he did not identify) that depicted traumatic, violent events as Thirties-style, black-and-white cartoons, using dogs, cats and rats instead of people. He also said he tried to pick events that were relatively unknown, or older, such as the Zoot Suit riots. Then he started showing images:
(bink) "Bobby Hutton, Black Panther, shot by police."
(bink) "The murder of a transsexual."
(bink) "The murder of a transvestite."
(bink) "World Trade Center --"
Whap! went Catherine's pen on her notebook. We looked at each other, stunned and horrified, as Haddock went on -- (bink) "West Bank suicide bomber" --
"Let's go," Catherine whispered to me, reaching for her coat. We grabbed our stuff and walked out. As we crossed the long, wide lobby of The Scottsdale Center for the Arts, no one else of the thirty-five audience members followed us.
We had seen enough of Haddock's work over the last three years to be familiar with his project of callously trivializing violence, and with his wearisome and thoroughgoing contempt for human dignity. One of the first pieces of his we saw -- In John Spiak's "Survival" show at some designer's apartment -- were little clay figures held by dowels in midair off a white wall, one pair from movies, the other pair . . . the other pair jumped, hand-in-hand, from one of the Towers. (It's a famous image; creeps like Tucson artist Mark Rubin-Toles, as he once told us, couldn't get enough of it. "They play it over and over again on Mexican TV," he said, smiling.)
Here again Haddock conflates single murders with mass murders (thus denigrating both), but he must humiliate the doomed victims leaning out the windows even further by turning them into dogs, cats, and rats. This pimp has no bottom.
Now I'm really looking forward to Catherine King's upcoming, comprehensive and deeply researched essay, Jon Haddock And What's Wrong With The American Male.
[UPDATE: Be sure to read the comments, where we hear from John Spiak, and reply.]
Posted by Jerome at January 14, 2004 07:31 AM | TrackBack
