The Tears of Things

Snatch Back Your Brain, Zombie / Life In The Rebarb

by Jerome du Bois

I have become so numb to the horrific things that happen in this world that I sometimes forget there are still people who feel. -- Portland OR shock jock Marconi, in his written apology for playing the audio of Nicholas Berg's beheading on his radio show, and laughing and joking about it as it played.

Snatch back your brain, zombie! Snatch it back and hold it! -- Ice-T / J-Bone, Johnny Mnemonic, directed by Robert Longo.

I started this blog a year ago on May Day, probably the most crowded holiday in human history, from the Celts to the communists to the kooks. So I stepped modestly out of the way, until now, to note the one-year anniversary of The Tears of Things.

(Its working name was Shooting Through Tears, but that seemed too bitterly one-note, though that was how I felt a lot of the time, and it still describes what I'm doing most of the time.)

I took my cue from Daniel Dennett: "I want to play a more direct role in changing what is ignorable by whom." That's why the blog was a dream come true for me: no editor, an occupation which in my experience was simply a misspelling of idiot; and the whole world was and is theoretically within reach. I see no reason to change my basic motivation now, except to enlarge and refine my range of subjects.

[Quick aside of sincere thanks. I don't get a lot of readers, or a lot of comments; I delete comments arbitrarily, without explanation; I'm irascible; and I'm paranoically convinced that fully a third of my readers are my enemies; but one statistic on the sitemeter warms my heart: the average reading time is over ten minutes. Any writer who crafts their sentences over months knows what that means. It's not uncommon for people to spend two hours here, and read twenty pages. I'm not bragging, I'm profoundly grateful. I know how precious time is, and you take the time, and I thank you for sticking with it -- yes, all of you.]

My targets in the art world were and are hypocrisy, misogyny, cruelty, humiliation, lying (political, mainly), and above all zombification, a slack-jawed, heartlessly humorous simplemindedness which animates these topics, and which I also call The Rebarb, and sometimes sociopathy without bodies. It laughs at pain, and it's ubiquitous. You want evidence? (You mean, besides Daniel Pearl's beheading, the prison abuse photos, Saddam's Greatest Torture Hits, and the mutilated contractors?) Yes, I mean besides all those. Fresh right here, served up by Friday morning's New York Times, in Grace Glueck's review of Exit Art's "Terrorvision" exhibition in Chelsea:

On the lighter side is a takeoff by Gary Keown, via a digital print on canvas, of René Magritte's 1928-29 painting showing a pipe with the legend "This is not a pipe." Mr. Keown has chosen to replace the pipe with a box cutter and the statement, "This is not a boxcutter."

Har dee har har. On the lighter side. This week of all weeks, as we relived 9/11 with Congressional hearings on cable -- Atta brandishes a painting? -- and when too many of us heard the horrifying sounds a murderer with a blade can bring from a human throat, misnamed Grace brings us this odious . . . what, kneeslapper? My example here is pure serendipity, too -- Friday morning's paper; earlier examples litter my desk -- because The Rebarb roams everywhere, grinning like one of Goya's malicious idiots. It is my main enemy.

In what follows I'll review a small part of my year of blogging to show how this rebarbarization surfaces in just three of my targets/topics: Islam, the downtown Phoenix art scene, and Jon Haddock, warlord troll of the resinous heart. You'll laugh, you'll weep, you'll gnash your teeth -- unless, of course, you're a zombie. Read on and find out.

Islam

My first post, which I wrote just before starting the blog, criticized a simplistic sculptural take on the Israeli-Palestinian war, on Islam, and on women, at Studio LoDo in downtown Phoenix. Little did I know how often that doom-eager and doomed (in its present form) religion would insinuate itself into my art and culture writing. But it did, and I'm ready for it, every time. To me, Islam -- and the Islamic desire for worldwide umma -- is like a gigantic lake of brackish water held back by the dam protecting civilization and the shining future, its insidious liquid fingers incessantly running over and over the surface of the dam wall, top to bottom, side to side, tirelessly searching for cracks to exploit. Remember shari'a. Remember dhimmitude. Remember: One Man, One Vote, Once. And, more recently, Zayed the Iraqi dentist of Healing Iraq, in his remarks on the Nicholas Berg video, made the point that while there may be moderate Muslims, Islam is not moderate. I advise my readers to never forget that. Also, May 20th's Wall Street Journal carried an editorial by Irshad Manji urging reform, reform, reform:

Moderate Muslims, like moderate Christians and Jews, shouldn't be afraid to ask: What if our holy script isn't perfect? What if it's inconsistent, even contradictory? What if it's riddled with human biases? As an illiterate trader, Prophet Mohammed relied on scribes to jot down the words he heard from God. Sometimes the Prophet himself had an agonizing go at deciphering what he heard. What's wrong with saying so?

In that spirit, I have a simple recommendation for Muslims: accept the reality of the Hijazi Ultraviolets, such as this one:

The caption, from the Atlantic article, reads: "A page from perhaps the world's oldest extant Koran, from before 750 AD. Ultraviolet light reveals even earlier Koranic writing underneath. Photograph by Gerd-R. Puin." Dr. Puin has over thirty thousand of these palimpsest images, and it means, of course, that the Koran was not channeled inerrantly; it was made up by men (and women?) over time, just as most of the Torah came from the Book of J (probably written by a woman), which came from earlier, even more archaic stories. For Muslims, it's long past time for their book to be broken.

Still, Islam too often gets a pass. Consider: five months after I wrote about the Sixth Sharjah Biennial, two men from the University of New Mexico emailed me their feelings thoughts impressions about my article, and also to correct a minor mistake. I'll quote them in full here, with only minor fisking and comments, though both of them set my teeth on edge. And all spelling is in contents -- [sic] -- as they say:

From Erik/Spaceboy first: What do you really know about the Near East region? Have you ever been there with out the protection of a group of americans? Yes, Islam is different, and yes, it has produced a vastly different culture from the western world, but that doesn't make it wrong or bad. Just like there has been much blood shed in the name of the western world, there has been blood shed in the name of Islam. There is no one right way in this world, and if you're going to blast the UAE you should be willing to look at the government where you're from too. You know, the expatriot labor force of the UAE may be abused sometimes, just like americans abuse immigrant workes sometimes too, but these labor workers can make 3 to 4 times what they could make in there home land, and therefor actually support their family.
And by the way, Zain Mustafa's piece was made and signed by war protesters in Santa Fe, New Mexico, not New York. And being anti-war is NOT ant-american.

[I tell you, and I swear on the collected works of Daniel Dennett that this is true, just as I was reading this ant-american rant on my computer, a CNN headline visually blasted me: American Beheaded. It was the very first news about Nicholas Berg.]

Now let's hear from Robert McFarland, who I assume is also from UNM: Your list of frustrations with the Biennial while valid, seems somewhat unhopefull. Certainly, aspects of the show are hollow, but the art community in UAE is still in it's infancy. That it exists at all shows great progress. Art is the fine point of change, and given enough time will sever the grip of fear-based thought. With more and more of our freedoms being eroded in this country, the problems faced by the artists and curator of the Biennial are no more singular to the Arab world than they are to middle-America. "Greedy and amoral" individuals exist everywhere. There is a great deal of bad art, and there is a lot of good art silenced by political and moral bullshit. The less effective work is, if nothing else, the key to Chen Lingyang's box.

You also seem oddly surprised to find the more mercenary "Step'n Fetchit" aspect of art to be exposed. Were you naiive to it's existence, or simply objecting to it's baldness?

With time, and dedicated, constructive critique by reviewers like yourself, better work will emerge.

For the sake of accuracy, I would like to point out that Zain Mustafa's work was created in New Mexico, not New York.

Picture it: two middle-class guys, art majors maybe (who cares?), kicking it in sunshine Sante Fe or Albuquerque or Taos, and Zain Mustafa brings his little white shirts to campus to sign. Instant political art, and so heartfelt. We did something, man. (At the very time thousands of their cohorts sucked it up and barrelled into Baghdad; not all of them making it, of course.) Two males, notice -- the gender that gets all the goodies under shari'a, while women get worse than the go-by; and they staunchly defend Sharjah, which strives to be the jewel of the strictest form of shari'a. I picture two American, probably white guys with fat wallets from daddy, wearing A&F and the right tattoos, and with zero sympathy for any, ahem, Third Worlders, or for any female in the UAE except the director of the fooking farce they took part in. John Lennon wrote it true, and it's still true, "Woman is Nigger of the World," and these guys like it just fine. Severing the grip of fear-based thought, my ass. Fear of woman is at the root of it all. Your brains soak in its brine, zombies!

Just as the Koran soaks most recently in the blood of Nicholas Berg.

(Funny: I don't feel a year older.)

The Downtown Phoenix Art Scene

Another target is was the downtown Phoenix art scene, which I simply got bored with covering every First Friday, especially since it became a to-be-seen scene of mostly teens. (More on that below.)

Oh, there were opportunities, such as noting every time the next new art writer from the New Times, whoever it was that week, would use the word "burgeoning" to describe downtown -- which was every time. Maybe so -- Greg Esser owns three galleries now, Will Bruder's wedging his ego down in there somewhere -- but in the last year MARS closed after twenty+ years, New Urban Art closed after considerably less time, Paper Heart moved to Grand Avenue (more on that below, too), Studio LoDo went nonprofit, an art gallery whose name escapes me bugged out of the Shade building like a stripe-assed ape, and Shade Magazine Projects itself went nonprofit.

When Bentley Dillard and Glenn Lineberry opened Bentley Projects (that appelation again!) waaaay below Roosevelt Street, local dealers cooed and crooned -- Jim Dine to the rayskew! -- but Shade Projects' Wayne Rainey, the main downtown booster, said he hoped the new venue would encourage people to really buy art. Because they haven't been. But he was naive to expect mature art from the shallow, immature artists he promoted. Did he not think that, post-9/11, people might be looking farther and deeper than Randy Fucking Slack? Who down there confronted the fact that the world only moves forward, that we must stand up to the present peril, and that we must take all of history into account if we are to make art that is worthy of the world? Hell: I'm preaching to the deaf here.

The downtown art dynamic has always suffered because of its youth -- I mean the people who constitute the scene, create the art, run the galleries and satellite venues, not how old the scene itself is. Modified Arts, remember, pioneered and continues as a youth-music venue with a part-time art gallery attached. Metro Arts High School is right in the middle of the district. Holga's artists' mean age is probably 23. MonOrchid gallery shows fancy skateboards and Pop Retread Art. When Phoenix Art Museum Contemporary Curator Brady Roberts got a room to showcase local artists, what did he do? Got three derivative popsters to make "Sex, Drugs, and Rock'N'Roll." Yawn city. Teacher-artists like Mark Freedman (one of that trio), and teacher-writers like Joshua Rose, editor ("in-chief" now, too, eh?) of Shade magazine, encourage their students to attend First Fridays. And then they wonder why there's a crowded conga line of clueless kids with scarcely a Benjamin to break between them filling every gallery every month, and everybody else has made theirselfs scarce.

Well, the art brainiacs have a solution: Third Fridays! . . . What are you laughing about? This is as deep as it gets with this crew. From this week's New Times, a short piece by Ashlea Deahl:

To compensate for the swelling First Friday crowds, some downtown art venues are adding a second evening of events each month.

"[First Friday has] become a big party in downtown, which is great," says JRC [pronounced JERK? I dunno], owner of The Trunk Space, "but, for serious collectors or people who are looking for a more relaxed or art-focused evening, it gets to be a bit difficult."

Serious collectors. Of who? Karolina Sussland? Jeff Falk? Oh yeah. In these parlous times, it's reassuring to have such artists to inspire us.

Asafoetida / Jon Haddock

I first ran across this word in Thomas Harris's Hannibal:

The exposition of Atrocious Torture Instruments could not fail to appeal to a connoisseur of the worst in mankind. But the essence of the worst, the true asafoetida of the human spirit, is not found in the Iron Maiden or the whetted edge; Elemental Ugliness is found in the faces of the crowd.

Asafoetida, a cooking aid and folk medicine, is a sulfurous-smelling gum resin derived from fennel. According to Wikipedia, "chunks of asafoetida resin are too hard to be grated, and require a hammer to crush."

Well, I've got a hammer. And it's no accident that I summon the ghost of Hannibal Lecter, the Patron Saint of the Rebarb: all appetite, no remorse.

Today, this is the image that comes up first on Haddock's shared website. (Find it yourself, please.) I think it refers to Daniel Pearl rather than Nicholas Berg, but he's probably thinking, Wow! How prescient can you get! And he sure does ring that chime, doesn't he?

I've gone after this guy before, starting a whole megillah everyone should read. I don't intend to flog it again.

I just want to point out that the severed rat head is part of his new exhibition in a hip LA gallery. His career is definitely taking off, due in part to the constant backing of John Spiak and the ASU Art Museum. He has his whole line of cartoon drawings at this exhibition, called "Embedded," including the one that sent Catherine and I out the door; but he has also, fans will be delighted to know, deepened his depravity to include implied pedophiliac rape in a Roman Polanski tableau.

I searched his blog (again, find it yourself) to see if I could get a clue to his motivations, and especially his feelings. He has an entry called "Why Old Cartoons?" which pointed straight to this series and was my only help -- and it was revealing. These are as close to feeling words as I could find:

I've found that information transfers better if you use a language your audience is already familiar with.

This is a near-tautology, of course; but beyond that, he refers to the content of his work, which is almost invariably violent, as information.

The issues I wanted to talk about in this series have to do with how we process tragedy, and weave it into our culture.

Again: "issues," "process tragedy"? What kind of way is that to talk? We're flayed here, we're bleeding here, we're decapitated, we're burning up, asshole. And you seem to love it, Haddock.

Another layer is my (and my culture's) fascination with a certain type of violence. At a certain distance it becomes really compelling and exhilarating. The cartoons reference that necessary distance.

Ah, here we are. Can you smell it, reader? We've reached the asafoetida. Let's cut out the weasel words -- certain type, certain distance, necessary distance -- and get to the stinky resin: fascination -- compelling -- exhilarating -- it's the violence! He and his culture love it! Breathe the funky fetidity in deep, foolish fan. It's the world you made, the world you want, life in the Rebarb.

I'm just getting started.

Posted by Jerome at May 22, 2004 04:35 PM | TrackBack