Looking back at my graduate school ordeal at Art Center, I see that one of several related issues I was struggling with was how navigate an exit from formalism, which up to that point I had embraced because it seemed to be the only alternative to the theatrical vacuity of postmodernism and identity politics. I had to encounter formalism in its utterly debased and sterile Greenbergian form to begin to understand that I had succumbed to a false choice. The exigencies of thesis production led me to stake out as explicit an anti-Greenbergian position as I was then capable of. So although I had entered graduate school with the intention of renewing my painting practice, I ended up making photo-based propaganda. I was then an avid reader of Brecht’s poetry and wanted to find a visual equivalent. The result were the works that comprised my thesis show. The title of the exhibition was taken from one of Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”
Several works made up the show:
- The title piece consisted of two facing 12-foot high photographic enlargements of Malevich surrounded by his students and a woman in Belarus holding aloft the defunct Soviet flag on the 90th anniversary of the October revolution. In between, a video monitor flashed segments of the image of the woman holding the flag.
- Diet enlarged a reproduction of John Heartfield’s photmontage, Hurrah, die Butter ist alle!
- Empire paired a small photo of Black Panther activist Fred Hampton‘s blood-soaked deathbed with an enlargement of the iconic footprint left on the moon by one of the Apollo 11 astronauts. The floor-placed enlargement was segmented into multiple inkjet prints abutting each other and placed in such a way that to view the picture of Hampton’s deathbed and read the accompanying text, the visitor had to step on the footprint picture on the floor and possibly disrupt it. Hampton was assassinated by Chicago police on December 4, 1969. The moon landing took place July 20, 1969. Forty years later, only the moon landing was widely commemorated.
- POV consisted of 10 images of men undergoing retina scans by Coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. In all the photos, the photographer is positioned behind the soldiers.
- Penal Colony was a column of stacked Styrofoam coffee cups inscribed with the text of Franz Kafka’s story, “In the Penal Colony.” It alluded to both the method of the execution machine in Kafka’s story and a technique used by some Guantanamo Bay inmates to circulate their poems.
