by Jerome du Bois
[This is a follow-up to "Heidi Hesse, Put Yourself On Flight 93," which I published exactly two years and one day ago today.]
Big news: after twenty years, artist Heidi Hesse is becoming a U.S. citizen. Big deal: she still hasn't changed her anti-American sentiments. The citizenship move is just another one of her career shticks. There was no significant event that precipitated this decision, according to her public statements. Her continuing heavy-handed, clunky anti-Americanism is obvious from examining just two of her recent works, which I saw on her website. Hesse is in no way a significant artist, but she gets play, and she keeps trashing this country. She's going after Lady Liberty again. She just won't leave this beautiful American icon alone, and she won't stop belittling the beautiful idea of America, either; and that's why I'm here again. From the eyelounge press release:
After nearly a year away, artist Heidi Hesse has returned to Phoenix with new work, new insight into what it means to be an American -- and a new resolve to seek citizenship after two decades of living in the United States. Her exhibition will be . . . in downtown Phoenix. . .
Hesse was born in Germany, raised in South Africa and Germany, and has lived in this country most of her adult life as a legal alien. Her April show at eye lounge, where she is a guest artist, will reflect her previous year spent in two diametrically opposed cultures: Korea -- among the most foreign to a Westerner -- and Omaha, Nebraska, one of the most quintessentially American. The experience of living in a country where she was automatically assumed to be an American, followed immediately by being in one where she was an outsider, deepened Hesse’s ongoing exploration of Americanism. It also inspired her to finally become an official citizen herself.
The eye lounge exhibition features painted stills from Apple Pie Project, the performance art piece Hesse made during her seven-month stint at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, for which she baked apple pies and fed volunteers the iconic American pastry and chronicled their responses. The show also comprises portraits of fellow artists at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha. During Hesse’s three-month studio residency there, portraiture became a way of deepening the necessarily short-term connections she forged with fellow artists-in-residence and became a metaphor for American mobility and, ultimately, rootlessness.
I guess she didn't put herself on United Flight 93. (I doubt she'll see the movie, either.)
Let's take a closer look at those two paintings.
Lady Liberty is probably our most dignified and noble American image. So naturally in the Rebarb she --oh yes, the female part is crucial to the trashing: This bride is way too beautiful for so many hate-filled people today-- she becomes the most caricatured and blasphemed image of our country. All kinds of silly and inappropriate things have been shoved into her hands, and she's been made to wear the worst of facial distortions and made to assume the most debased positions. Hell, every other day I see people on street corners wearing pale-green foam-rubber crowns and pale green togas, human signs for tax preparers and furniture wholesalers. A long fall for a goddess.
And now here is Heidi Hesse's Camouflaged Liberties, where Lady Liberty becomes a one-line joke, her reassuring lineaments reduced to jigsaw blobs, no more important than the blobs of camouflage surrounding her. Thuddingly obvious message: warmongers use war to justify infringing on civil liberties. And painted with all the flat-footed anti-finesse of a political cartoon.
And it isn't true. Take Hesse herself. She goes flying halfway around the world for a few months, humiliates South Koreans and insults Americans (I'll explain below), flies back to the fantastically abundant breadbasket, hangs out for a few more months, paints, chatters, comes home, and makes this crap.
Nobody got in her way. No Homeland Security gorilla came pounding on her door. (We would have heard about it, believe me.) She went away for nearly a year and came home safe and sound. What kept her safe? Who was that Woman at her side every moment? In a dangerous world --have you seen the South Korean Parliament free-for-alls? the farmer riots?-- she breezed right through, protected by the righteous power of the United States of America. Lady Liberty's mighty hand hovered over her everywhere, a reminder to the world to not mess with American citizens.
And this is how she shows her appreciation. So: she may become someone with the ultimate identity prize --a U.S. Passport-- but she hasn't changed her simplistic, blinkered, boilerplate-leftist attitude by one degree.
The second painting, from an overblown "performance piece" with apple pies, shows a hand with a spoon holding a dollop of apple pie before an open-mouthed Korean.
It turns my stomach. She spoils the sweet taste of the land of liberty --the emblematic apple pie-- by shoving in our faces the image of the arrogant, paternalistic American spoonfeeding the demeaned and dependent person of color the poisoned fruit of bullying American hegemony. (Then she asks how they like it.)
Why didn't she have them feed themselves? Think about the differences in the images, if that was what she had done. It was still a stupid idea, but at least the subjects would look more like people than helpless little nest-bound birds. I conclude, then, that Heidi Hesse wants to make her anti-American points, and she doesn't care if she embarrasses and humiliates Koreans to do so, thus becoming an even more ugly (neo-)American than those she purports to criticize.
I predict her next big piece will be a 20-foot wire sculpture of The Statue of Liberty, filled with gumballs.
Posted by Jerome at April 17, 2006 07:20 PM | TrackBack