The Tears of Things

Brad Kahlhamer: He Walks In Ugliness

by Jerome du Bois, with Catherine King

[Preface: Accentuate The Positive

Since the beginning of this blog, some of the comments I've received around the blogosphere, and via email, complain that I am angry, bitter, and, to quote a recent local yokel, "negitive." Not so. Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer laid it down in 1945:

You've got to accentuate the positive
Eliminate the negative
And latch on to the affirmative
Don't mess with Mister In-Between.

I'm angry, you bet, and rightly so, but not bitter. Bitterness implies stingy attenuation and retreat. Screw that. The world only moves forward. Me, too. As for negative . . .

Is it negative to uphold human dignity, the upward glance, evidence of hard-won optimism?

Is it negative to object to the degradation of women and children?

Is it negative to decry depictions of decapitations in current art?

Is it negative to condemn the celebration of superficiality, so that the cowardly and shallow may hide from the heartbreakingly significant?

Is it negative to point out technical incompetence, especially when its perpetrators are proud of it?

Is it negative to ask for some goddamn respect for the human being, the human condition, the human future?

But I don't mess with Mister In-Between. Unless he gets in my way, and most especially when he's old enough to know better . . . to be better. You hear me, Brad?]

At the time it seemed so cinema," he said. "It was only after a few weeks, when I couldn't get away from the lingering smell of jet fuel and bodies, that the reality really hit me." -- Brad Kahlhamer, 2004, reflecting on September 11, 2001.

A friend of mine said something horrible recently: ''I'm just so over 9/11.'' . . . I don't live in New York now, though I used to, and I understand fully that for those who do, such an attitude may seem blasphemously insensitive. But it wouldn't shock me if the attacks and their iconographic halos were soon the stuff of magazine ''in-out'' lists. In: ''Fahrenheit 9/11.'' Out: 9/11. -- Walter Kirn, The New York Times Magazine, September 12, 2004.

Walk In Beauty. -- Navajo maxim.

I first saw Brad Kahlhamer's work on the cover of Flash Art, July-September 2001. Ah, life was good back then, kicking back on our pile of pillows in front of the television, leafing through the new slick stack of art, fashion, and culture magazines during that beautiful summer, pre-9/11. And then, five pages in, I came across the full-page ad for his Deitch Projects Show, "Almost American." How I fervently wish this image was online, especially since it carries yet another charge -- going beyond my 2001 reaction to it -- now that I've re-examined it, and the cover, and the interview -- in light of Kahlhamer's current show at SMoCA. (More images here.)

The ad is simple: a full-bleed color shot of the artist in his studio, photographed from about eight feet behind him. A big guy in paint-spattered khakis, cut-off sweatshirt, black rubber- sole shoes, long black hair. (Probably a Native American; the "Big Eagle" on the cover is a clue, too.) To his left a tall wide window with part of the New York City skyline visible; below the window, his can-cluttered, rag-festooned paint cart. A large vertical painting hangs before him (stacked sound system amplifiers), and to his right, facing him and the light pouring in from the window, is his model, I suppose: she looks Native American, long black hair, slim and barefoot, wearing a simple shift (which she slightly, lightly lifts with her left hand). He holds her chin up with his outstretched right arm. Copy on top right, all caps: Brad Kahlhamer (in white), and below it, Almost (red) American (blue). Deitch detergent logo in lower right.

As soon as I saw this scene, in 2001, a Navajo word -- belasana -- rolled round and red into my mind from my long-ago year as a reporter on The Rez: it means apple, red on the outside, white on the inside.

Why the insult? (It isn't racial, by the way, not in my citation. Let me be clear, I mean that he is a superficial hypocrite, cheapening his heritage: Luke Warm. Or, as Catherine says, "Red on the outside, yellow on the inside.") Was I being unfair? I didn't know anything about the guy, after all. Well, add implied misogyny to the cliché cover eagle and the stereotypical studio scene. The guy looked like a sellout and a bully, too. I didn't read the interview inside, but I examined the three paintings. Basquiat was bad and way overrated, and these were bad Basquiat. Like a painter with advanced Parkinson's, still trying, still trying.

Skanky, strung-out, black-outlined jittery balloons float like once-happy faces over paint-squeegeed canvases. "US Girl Band Near Their Moon." I hate the word "girl" as applied to women. "Sacagewa + Friends," with blood splattered on Catherine and my Indian heroine's face. Misogynist, I thought. Later, this intuition would be confirmed. And he manages to uglify the baby javelina, one of the most endearing creatures in the prickly Southwest. (Catherine describes them: "Like little trapezoids with legs.")

So I didn't bother with the interview, conducted by someone named Michael Cohen, since my opinion of Flash Art's tired pomo obfuscation was quite low, and I set the magazine aside. Now, though, let's read the introductory paragraph, for both the reader's and my own edification (good luck):

Exploding and imploding the myths of the American Old West, Brad Kahlhamer has recently emerged into the front ranks of contemporary New York painters. His jagged cartoon lines and swirls of earth-colored pigment reconfigure painting as an open-system able to encompass multi-ethnic and street cultures from Native American iconography to Zap comix. In an era poised between capitulation and diversity [what does that mean?], Kahlhamer has left the recycling of previous abstract styles behind him. Instead he rummages through the dust-bin of history to organize jagged intellectual rushes which encourage viewers to reconnect with social roots and identity.

Still awake? One more quote, about his influences:

My graphic styles have been influenced by many sources: comic artist Gary Panter's sketch books, "Maus" author Art Spiegelman's politics, Henry Darger's episodes, along with the Drawing Center's 1996 Plains Indian drawing show.

Again, this was 2001. Years passed, didn't they? Yes; three. And some of us grew. But now we have fresh tears, and more to come.

In early October, Catherine, checking out azcentral.com, came across Kahlhamer's SMoCA show. She began reading, and when she read the sentence that begins this piece -- "At the time it seemed so cinema" -- she started to seethe. It was those two twee words --

so cinema

-- that made her want to grind her teeth. I'll get back to that wormy phrase, curled in the pulpy core of Brad Kahlhamer's soul.

So I read the azcentral.com article, checked out the SMoCA site, Googled his images -- and then, remembering, I dug out the Flash Art article-interview. I read, looked, reread, ruminated . . . chewing the dry pulp of this man's life. And then we took in the exhibition at SMoCA.

It's called "Let's Walk West." Yeah, let's walk, man, see what we can see.

[Because I have, Brad. This belagana, this white guy, walked the desert between Scottsdale and Mesa dozens of times, years ago, long before you even left for the City you didn't deserve or appreciate. I've lived in hogans and teepees, I've done vision quests, sweat lodges to make you faint, I've choked the peyote down right next to the Fire Tender, I've seen the otter skins dance in the long lodges near Black River, Wisconsin, I've wrestled with the eagle on the South Dakota plain, and I've seen the shadows of the bears swiping their paws at the drummers. I have stood outside the hogan north of Window Rock in the very shank of the night, night after night, rubbing my face with stars they were so close, a reassurance in a darkness so fat, deep, and bowel-freezing one could believe in everything. What do you know, belasana? What have you learned in your walk?]

So we walked the four walls of his hideously similar skull-heavy scribblings, his shredded eagles, his dessicated "girls," ("fear of girls' moon," he scrawls creepily), his skeletal selves, his anemic skies, his braids -- attached to almost everything -- made of lazy commas . . .

At one point hours later, while discussing the show at home, Catherine burst out with: "My eagles would soar in the bluest sky!"

This guy's eagles look like strung-out tweakers, which means they fit right in with the rest of his figurative depictions, whether animal, vegetable, mineral or, saddest of all, human. Brad Kahlhamer -- Ugh, Jr.'s, alter ego, I hear -- makes everything he touches, draws, or paints ugly: men, women, children, animals (javelinas!), birds, music, cacti, the sun, flowers, mountains, the desert itself. He honors not a single eagle feather as it should be and has been for thousands of years -- as a symbol of maturity and farsightedness. (Catherine says, pointing to the eagles and the javelinas, "His hand makes no distinction between feathers and fur." She's right; just go look.) The human face, the human hand, the human soul all look the same to him: twisted rags, toss them in the corner.

Even the human skull, the crown on the throne of everything that makes us who we are, and a sobering reminder of our mortality, gets no respect at all from this shallow man, even though you can see he's got one in his studio to draw from life (just lying on the floor, too! there's a photo in the catalog). On one wall of this exhibition we see 164 crappy watercolor drawings of skulls slapped up side by side, interspersed with pen scribblings and spiderwebby idiocy, as if everything ripped from Kahlhamer's fevered, one-track brain, and poured onto the drawing pad, should be carefully caught before it reaches the floor.

"No photographs," says the headphoned attendant, when Catherine raises the camera. Of course not; should we take off our shoes as well? Genuflect? Where's the spittoon, by the way? Hey, lady, come back here . . .

Kahlhamer has also made a big deal about straddling two horses -- Native American and white middle-class -- and, honoring neither, he renders both into a stringy glue of flying black braids and empty-eyed, open-mouthed balloon-shaped heads trailing withered bodies, floating in blasted, inhospitable landscapes. Being biracial, or even being biracial and adopted, is no big deal nowadays, and, after all, he is a middle-aged man.

He also makes a big deal about being inspired by the 1996 Plains Indian Ledger Drawing show, and the Heard Museum dutifully lays several out for display at SMoCA. The first thing you notice is how thoroughly he has ignored them, since they are neat, coherent narratives, sad and dignified.

But after that, nothing. I haven't been able to find out, for example, what Mr. Kahlhamer's ethnic or tribal background might be. He doesn't mention it. He doesn't refer to any other Native American art, either, past or present. I myself am not familiar with a lot of Native Ameican art, but Catherine is. She handed me a book from her collection -- Anasazi & Pueblo Painting, by J.J. Brody, 1991 -- that quite clearly shows a wide range of abstract and representational art going back to 1000 BC.

Kahlhamer could have benefited from perusing this book. For one thing, most of the people depicted have full, and graceful, bodies, with arms and legs and hands and feet, unlike most of Kahlhamer's ungainly creatures, who seem all head, and ugly, empty heads, too.

By coincidence, December 5th's NYT Book Review, art section, carried this reference, which I'll quote in full:

When European settlers first pushed westward across the Appalachians in the late 18th Century, they encountered geometric and serpentine earthworks on a monumental scale. Local Indians could tell them nothing about the origin of these mounds, and Romantic Europeans, reflecting the prejudices of their times, assumed there could be no tie between the ingenious "Lost Race" that erected these structures and the contemporary Indian population. Actually, as a team of scholars under the direction of Richard F. Townsend makes clear in the handsomely illustrated Hero, Hawk, And Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South (Art Institute of Chicago / Yale University), the link was direct, and the remarkable objects excavated from the system of earthworks -- reflecting complicated trade routes and folkways across the Midwest and South -- are the earliest North American art. The streamlined "birdstones" and "boatstones" (weights for spear throwers) from the Archaic period (circa 6000-500 BC) would have delighted Brancusi. Among the Hopewell artifacts cut from sheets of mica during the "Woodland" period (1000 BC to AD 1000) are a heart-stopping talon of a bird of prey and an outstretched hand with bent thumb and elongated fingers. In such luminous objects there is, as the book notes, "a suggestion of communication between the human community and the world of spirits beyond."

Now go examine the "talons" of Kahlhamer's eagles. They look like coat hangers, unable to grasp even a blade of grass. And consider the human hands as well. Do they look competent, supple enough to make guitar chords?

And what does he have to say about the world of spirits beyond? Back in 2001, this is what he had to say about shamanism:

I am interested in ideas of belief [!]. Spirituality could imply organized religion, vortexes, or robed dwarfs. This year I was able to visit Jerusalem, a sundance in Green Grass, South Dakota, and Vegas. All these places can offer relief or they can provoke. I'm interested in how religious ideas are transplanted into a modern world they don't work in -- a spiritual version of the Beverly Hillbillies. Right now I'm really just beginning to take the steps towards a fuller understanding of shamanism, a primitive term if I ever heard one.

(I'll get to the bolded part in a moment.)

You don't have to be Jewish or Lakota or Nevadan to be insulted by this dismissive flattening of behaviorial categories. People on their way to Vegas wouldn't be happy being detoured to either the Holy City or Green Grass, SD. Nor vice versa for the others. Notice also how he handles volatile, vital ideas with long tongs: "I am interested in ideas of belief."

This was in 2001. Then the dreadful day came, and he was there, he was right there in the middle of it, and you can read his reaction in the first epigraph above: duuuhhhh . . . it seemed so cinema. Just like his buddy Art Spiegelman: I don't like it; what do I do? waaaah! I know, I'll make believe it's make believe -- cinema, in a word, sooo cinema.

Then, not long after, this 45-year-old man left NYC and moved into his parents' winter home in a retirement community in Mesa, Arizona, and began painting again in the converted carport.

And his new paintings don't look much different than the pieces in the "Almost American" show, or those, here on this Google page, in between 2001 and now. It's as if 9/11 never happened.

Now, I don't expect everyone to mark the event in every artwork; but I'm suspicious of any artist for whom 9/11 looms no higher than a speed bump. And what did he say? Oh, yes:

I'm interested in how religious ideas are transplanted into a modern world they don't work in -- a spiritual version of the Beverly Hillbillies.

Instead, a newly-minted spiritual version of the kamikazis jammed their murderous way into a modern world they don't work in, smashing it right in his face . . . He was there . . . He . . .

Wait a minute. Hang on. Where's that Flash Art ad? I found it, and I looked again closely at the window that opened out into the New York City skyline. Oh, man. I dug out several magnifying glasses. Oh, my God. Oh, you bastard. One was there, right there, one of the Towers was framed in the right side of the window, close enough to fill nearly three-quarters of the tall window.

Damn, he was there that day. He looked out that window. Nobody knows how many people, trapped in those burning hells, had to jump that day. He must have watched some of them falling. And then the towers themselves.

And then he goes home to Mom and Dad's empty trailer, begins to scribble, splatter, and squirm -- takes some desert walks, maybe -- and lo and behold, these terrible paintings are the shaman's offering.

Sham man. So cinema. And no artist, Deitch stamp notwithstanding.

Posted by Jerome at December 8, 2004 11:52 AM | TrackBack