April 16, 2004
Heidi Hesse, Put Yourself On Flight 93
Out of a clear blue sky . . .
What's the matter, is the bride too beautiful? -- Yiddish proverb.
by Jerome du Bois
Yesterday's Phoenix New Times featured a studio visit by Kathleen Vanesian to installation artist and longtime German resident alien Heidi Hesse, who is pursuing a career based on images of the Statue of Liberty, and on her own vacillation about becoming a US citizen. (Yes, these days art careers are built on such flimsy foundations.) She has a new show called "Exporting Liberty" up at Tucson's MOCA, which you can check out here or on Hesse's own website. The reader may also find a genuflecting review by Margaret Regan here, which I refer to below. I have three serious bones to pick with this artist besides her indecisiveness (which is merely her shtick): the trivialization (with gumballs and games) of the complicated country that's blessed her for so long; the conspicuous absence of 9/11 -- no reference whatsoever; it's as if it never happened -- even while she steals the Homeland Security Alert colors for her thematic cheap shots; and, most egregiously and callously, she kicks dirt in the face of every American service member now dead as a result of the Iraqi War -- after metaphorically calling them chumps, all the while not bothering to name a single one.
I've written about Hesse before, and suggested that she bypass becoming a citizen, since we need people with backbone here. Now that I know more about her intentions and background -- she's been here twenty years! -- I renew my suggestion. Here's Vanesian on Heidi Hesse:
Hesse's artwork is all about getting inside of what makes America and her people tick. Granted, her obsession with the French-made, Roman-nosed symbol of The Land of the Free may seem odd for someone who has lived in this country for 20 years and is still a resident alien, though married to a homegrown American engineer. Occasionally still taunted about her German nationality ("I've been 'Heil, Hitler'ed' more times than I want to remember," notes Hesse), the artist began a serious love affair with the American symbol of inclusiveness when she began to think about applying for American citizenship in 1999 during graduate school at Ohio State University.
"The first time I flew over the Statue of Liberty, I had a very strange reaction," she recalls. "I cried. I had no idea I had a relationship with [it]. I began drawing her and visited [the statue] and Ellis Island during graduate school."
What's strange is that she considers her reaction strange. Seems normal to me. What's stranger is that this woman has been staring at that other woman -- whose upraised and illuminating arm never tires -- for many years, and still doesn't get her message. Even Hesse's America-bashing soul sister Vanesian gets it: "the American symbol of inclusiveness." That's right: You are welcome, Heidi Hesse:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Perhaps none of this applies to Ms. Hesse, who has had a pretty cushy gig going on here in her not-yet-adopted land. The lamp lights even her work. And what is the source of that work?
She has copped the standard tired liberal line of America as a bully run by some war-hungry oligarchy, and of its people as a herd of sheep or a bunch of one-armed-bandit-jacking jokers. Check out her "sculpture" American Dream. Margaret Regan, in Tucson Weekly, helps us out here by laying down the party line:
Right inside the entranceway is a gumball machine. Pay a dollar, and you get a plastic gumball container filled with pro-America slogans. One of the plastic bubbles, you learn, contains a prize voucher--one lucky patron will win a "painting" of gumballs encased in mesh and hanging on a nearby wall. Success in America, Hesse suggests, is equal parts hard work and hucksterism. For every naïve immigrant in search of streets paved with gold, there's the Barnum sucker born every minute.
As if there were only two kinds of Americans, both idiots. Now, here's Having Your Cake And Eating It Too, another simplistic, one-trick tableau. I'll let Vanesian describe it:
an elaborately decorated Styrofoam wedding cake in the shape of the White House, presented on deliciously [!?] fake green Astroturf and flanked by hulking neo-classic columns.
You know, because we wuz robbed and Bush stole Election 2000. Well, you're probably right, but time didn't stand still either. We ate it, we had to eat it, but the country has been through worse, the day ain't over yet, and Bush's reckoning is unavoidable. Besides, some other things happened after the election, didn't they? I seem to remember . . .
Neither Hesse nor Vanesian mention 9/11, but Hesse trivializes some of our physical responses to it. Regan again:
Beyond her dollhouse-sized White House cake, Hesse plays an insider art joke with Tom Ridge's Homeland Security palette, conflating his simplistic color codes with minimalist paintings. Five "Candychrome" paintings hang along a wall, each acrylic on board saturated by a single Ridge color, re-named American Dream Green, Imperial Blue, Propaganda Red and so on.
Across the way, the giant Hummer -- or Gummer, as the gallery workers like to call it -- is filled with gumballs in the same Homeland colors.
Here they are:
The Ridge colors make an easy target -- the only kind Hesse can hit -- but notice how horizontalizing them undermines the true, actionable hierarchy behind the colors. The whole vertical setup is like a triggered thermometer. Hesse dismisses the fact that when the country moves from yellow to orange (I don't know what stupid names she had for those), thousands of people now stand on a wall for a double-shift; thousands more roll out at godawful hours for godawful things; jet engines roar and everyone's at risk; millions of muscles and minds flex in defense -- for you, Heidi Hesse, for your sorry ass. You are welcome.
As for the Hummer, how fun. Not long before I wrote these words (around noon), MSNBC's Carl Rochelle reported from Baghdad that at least a dozen Humvees are now missing, probably stolen, maybe being re-rigged by insurgents as stealth bombers on wheels. US uniforms are easily available. It's enough to make all those gumballs turn to ammonium nitrate in your mouth, eh, Heidi? Well, maybe not her; she's pretty callous. Regan again:
It's a stand-in not only for the military hardware chugging around Iraq, but for those gasoline-guzzling SUVs and civilian Hummers back home.
In a note, Hesse writes that she got the idea for this piece the day the United States invaded oil-rich Iraq. She was sitting in a Phoenix café, watching SUVs go by, "thinking about the people who were going to die to support the luxurious American ways."
For her, it's about oil and selfish Americans. For her, there are no Iraqis. There is no Iran, Syria, no wider geopolitical implications; just the stupid American sheep letting Cheney et al. backstab everyone et cetera ad nauseum.
Finally, let's look at the ominously-named Backroom Deal. (Don't they get tired of these clichés?) Here is an installation shot, and two details, one of the foosball table, one of the flags. Regan, one final time (and thank you for doing a lot of the work here):
The final piece of Exporting Liberty is the proverbial smoky back room where important political decisions are made. Hesse has set up a foosball game populated almost entirely by powerful white males, Condoleezza Rice notwithstanding. The idea is that they control the world, and you don't. Their decisions are not without consequence.
On an adjoining "memorial wall," small American flags, row on row, memorialize each and every American who has died in the war on Iraq. The day I was there, I counted 553. But Hesse is a realist. She's allowed plenty of space, and drilled plenty of extra pegholes, to accommodate more flags as needed.
It looks sensitive, doesn't it? But look closer. In this context, the flags represent fungible, hapless, anonymous victims of the foosballs players. Brainwashed fools. No, Ms. Hesse; listen up:
Every one was a volunteer, and every one has a name.
Here is a list of American combat casualties in this Iraqi War, as of April 14, 2004. And here is one name I'd like to highlight for a moment: Wisconsin National Guard Private Michelle Witmer. In the twenty years that you, Ms. Heidi Hesse, have pursued the paper-thin concepts behind your projects, waffling all the way, Ms. Witmer lived the entire arc of her life, and died standing up for all of us at the age of twenty. Yet your fan calls this wall a "memorial."
I have two suggestions for you, Ms. Hesse.
First, put the names on the flags -- and how they died, and when, and where. You can have interns do it -- you know, like an Ann Hamilton. Or, you can do it yourself -- you know, like an Ann Hamilton. (And drape an American flag over the foosball game.)
I want you to do it yourself, because I have a thought experiment for you. It's about your apparent two-decade indecisiveness about dual citizenship. You can ruminate while you write. It's simple:
Put yourself aboard Flight 93.
Do some research, read some books and articles about those who didn't have your twenty years to make up their minds, to vote on something crucial -- they had twenty minutes. If your artwork, to quote Vanesian again, is truly
all about getting inside of what makes America and her people tick,
then the tragic success of Flight 93, as NZ Bear called it, would be an excellent place to begin.
Still, I somehow feel that this deal will never be sweet enough for you -- you can't even see the beautiful bride -- and you will never realize that everybody counts, that every citizen and non-citizen here, in your quasi-adopted land, counts, from every soldier's name on every gravestone, to those who went back up into the Towers, to everyone who had to jump on that horrible day, and to all who had to vote to take a desolate Pennsylvania hillside into their shuddering embrace.
For liberty.
UPDATE 4/22/06: On April 16, 2006, I posted this followup.