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American Power

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Installation shot, ‘American Power’, Meulensteen Gallery (Photograph by Eli Ping)

The following essay is intended as an introductory companion piece to ‘American Power’, my contribution to ‘Young Curators, New Ideas IV’, which this year is being held at the Meulensteen Gallery in New York City.

‘American Power’ includes work by Darren Coffield, Adam Curtis and Jerry Kearns.

‘Young Curators, New Ideas IV’ has been co-ordinated by Independent Curator Amani Olu. The exhibition is open to the public until August 24th 2012.

For the press release with a list of all the show’s participants click here. Reviews and credits can be found at the end of the essay. 

Adam Curtis, ‘It Felt Like A Kiss’, Installation shot, Meulensteen gallery (Photograph author’s own)

Since the end of World War II, the United States has been perceived as having a virtual monopoly over the governing of global affairs, though its means of achieving this have been anything but monolithic. Whereas U.S. policy changes and adapts, the popular imagery of America remains pervasive and enduring. It is the prop by which American values are held in place and disseminated. America’s soft power is pop music, Hollywood, sports, cowboys, rock and roll, products, celebrities and cityscapes.

This exhibition does not aim to provide a rigorously historical or political analysis of America’s power as a nation.  An art exhibition is not best suited to achieve such an aim. It is however, the ideal setting in which to contemplate how power is communicated, envisaged and understood. American Power presents two contemporary artists and one filmmaker for whom the understanding of power is key to their working practice. All three appropriate the imagery and language of newspapers, magazines, film and advertising and recontextualize it in an attempt to expose inherent ideologies and cultural values. They continue to do this at a time during which the global status of America is in flux.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Mortgage’, Installation shot, Meulensteen gallery (Photograph by Eli Ping)

On display in the gallery are two large paintings by American artist Jerry Kearns, Repo Man (1984) and Mortgage (2012), the artist’s response to the foreclosure crisis.

Works by British artist Darren Coffield include two silkscreen prints of Marilyn Monroe and Cary Grant, as well as paintings of U.S. icons Rock Hudson, Cary Grant, Andy Warhol and Christopher Reeve as Superman centered around a contemporary vanitas, entitled Not I (2010).

Various works by Darren Coffield, Installation shot, Meulensteen gallery (Photograph by Eli Ping)

Screened throughout the day is It Felt Like A Kiss (2009) directed by Bafta-award winning filmmaker, Adam Curtis. Through the use of archive footage, music and on screen titles, the film captures the years, specifically 1958 to 1967, during which America’s post-war certainties were beginning to unravel. Segments are devoted to the assassination of President Kennedy, the Vietnam War and the counter culture of the 1960s.

Curtis is renowned for his documentary films in which he typically traces the influence, digressions and impact of particular philosophical and political ideas through recent history. It Felt Like A Kiss dispenses with the most familiar aspects of his documentary filmmaking style. Instead of his trademark voiceover and interviews, there is a diverse soundtrack of classic American tracks (including songs by Roy Orbison, Solomon Burke, Bob Dylan, Peggy Lee, Tina Turner, and the Velvet Underground) undulating in between snippets of advertisements, news, documentary footage, and ambient sound. Curtis’ narrative is limited to starkly composed screen titles.

In short, It Felt Like A Kiss is the closest thing that Curtis has made to an art-house film. It is an all engrossing audio-visual experience in which Curtis (and indeed the viewer) rapidly builds connections between disperate pieces of footage. In 2009, Curtis teamed up with the theatre production company Punchdrunk to stage an interactive screening of the film at the Manchester International Festival. In order to reach the screening itself, vistors first had to navigate a series of thematically designed rooms and corridoors, prepping them for the film’s dissection of the American dream.

The film’s credit sequence (above) suggests that Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Saddam Hussein, Lee Harvey Oswald and Enos the Chimp (the first chimpanzee launched into orbit) are all somehow connected, a notion that initially seems absurd. But as the film progresses, the lives of these individuals are shown to have fleetingly touched one another in a series of metaphoric and literal ways. For instance, in one sequence we learn that Osama Bin Laden’s favourite television show as a child was Bonanza and that the Manson family set up a commune on the show’s disused set. Doris Day’s son, the musician Terry Melcher, later met Charles Manson and offered to produce his songs, one of which, we are told, was entitled ‘Pretty Girl Cease to Exist’.  Curtis visually exploits such uncanny connections to full effect by locating and contrasting serendipitous pieces of footage that brings the film’s narrative alive.

Adam Curtis, ‘It Felt Like A Kiss’, World Trade Center construction montage (screenshots)

Curtis’ emphasis on these resonant connections is intended to disrupt our casual conceptualizing of history. Rather than understanding history as a series of linear events punctuated by key individuals at key moments (casually referred to as the ‘great man’ theory of history), the film forces us to accept that history is infinitely more complex and that our ordering of it (including Curtis’) is really our own way of assuring ourselves of any purposefulness or direction that we can read into it. As the film sardonically puts it:

Every day thousands of things happened to thousands of people. Some seemed to be significant and others did not.

All of Curtis’ films straddle a fine paradox, for whilst his documentaries aim to legitimize a particular reading of history (i.e. his own), he similuateonsly affirms that all of us effectively construct and impose our own understanding of history ourselves. As Tim Adams of The Observer newspaper eloquently surmised, ‘If there has been a theme in Curtis’s work…it has been to look at how different elites have tried to impose an ideology on their times, and the tragi-comic consequences of those attempts’.

In the case of It Felt Like A Kiss, the notion of what constitutes individuality, is continually dissected. The film’s concludes that our understanding of individuality has become narrow and stifling. It is comprehended only within the terms of free market Capitalism, fulfilling our own personal desires, and the ability to choose as consumers. Against the backdrop of a teenage girl dancing in the dark, Curtis’ titles read:

The computers that controlled the Cold War and guided the rockets to the Moon were put to a new use. They started to analyse the credit data of all Americans…so that in the future everyone could be lent money…

Adam Curtis, ‘It Felt Like A Kiss’ (screenshots)

Recently, Curtis has become much more vocal in his critique of our current narrow-minded individualism, despite the fact that his documentaries have previously targeted the dangerous allure and simplification of grand ideologies and schemes. In an interview with the Guardian’s Katherine Viner, Curtis remarked:

‘There’s no one like, say, Tolstoy, who wrote of both man in his world and the architecture of his world. Now there is no context, just the feelings of one person… Because now that there’s nothing more important than you, how can you ever lose yourself in a grander idea? We’re frightened of eccentricity, of loneliness. Individualism just wants to keep the machine stable, leads to a static world and a powerless world’.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Repo Man’, installation shot, Meulensteen gallery (photograph: author’s own)

Much like Curtis’ film editing, Jerry Kearns’ paintings conflate and fuse various points in time and space. Each canvas is a universe onto itself, where only isolated fragments are familiar to us. The presence of Ronald Reagan in Repo Man immediatelysituates the painting in the 1980s as does the hammer and sickle earring worn by the zombie. Kearns has chosen to render the scene as an ambigious and abstracted nightmare. Dollar bills are strewn among the floor and the seated figure appears to be bleeding a black substance. Could it be ink, or perhaps oil? What is the meaning of the Santa Claus figure? The ‘tick tocks’ rendered in reverse clearly suggests a regression, but of what exactly? There is an uncanny parallel between Reagan’s and the Soviet zombie’s smiles. Should we take this to signify an equating of these two world powers, and if so how can they be equated? Kearns has described himself as an ‘ambiguous didactic’. At a glance, the viewer can broadly situate the socio-political perspective of the work, but the composition is rendered so as to be as pregnant and interpretive as possible.

This approach is entirely fitting with Kearns’ choice of source material, the media. Images from advertising, films, comic books and television are reappropriated and made into something new. To force an exact narrative upon the finished canvas would constitute a denial of the diverse origins, context and meanings of those various sources. Kearns’ key observation is that the imagery with which we are surrounded every day is saturated with varying (and often conflicting) ideology. Kearns’ insistence on ambiguity serves as a concrete reminder of this, and his point is directly accentuated by the viewers’ own interpretative efforts. Indeed, despite the discernable logic of Kearns’ overall compositions, each constituent component resonates in isolation as much as it does as part of a whole.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Repo Man’ (detail)

‘Ronald Reagan was our Repo-Man. I felt like the 1950s returned in cowboy Reagan during the 1980s. Under his flag, the American right moved to destroy the legacy of the counter cultural movements’.

To underline this point, Kearns appropriates imagery from 1950s EC (Entertaining Comics) cartoons whose Publisher, William Gaines, was called to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The imagery of such serials as ‘The Crypt’, ‘Haunt’ and ‘Horror’ were deemed by some as anti-American. More saliently, the story lines and rendering of the characters can be understood to have expressed the anxieties of the age, in particular racial tensions, sexual politics and the Cold War. Repo Man depicts a short-circuited age, where the tensions of the 1950s remain. These decade old comic book characters are used by Kearns as conduits for ever present concerns.

Adam Curtis, ‘It Felt Like A Kiss’ (screenshots). In the above sequence, Curtis playfully slows down footage of Doris Day and Rock Hudson to capture them at their most paranoiac.

The effect is analogous to way Curtis uses select footage of Doris Day and Rock Hudson in order to highlight the discrepancy between the ideal (a Hollywood fantasy) and the real. It Felt Like A Kiss uses scenes from Pillow Talk (1959) and Lover Come Back (1960) in which Rock Hudson’s character flirts with Doris Day. Curtis’ on screen titles observe that in reality Hudson was a closeted homosexual who married his wife to order to hide his sexuality. The irony of these scenes deflates the apparent freedom of the American Dream, holding it accountable for its actual shortcomings. The film continues to do this in segments devoted to the role of women and African Americans, preempted by the use of Ruth Brown’s song ‘Oh What A Dream’ (which includes the lyric, ‘so disappointed, I laid back down. Oh what a dream…I had last night’) at the start of the film. Both Curtis and Kearns are keenly concerned with the pervasiveness of media imagery and the attitudes that they can inspire and enforce.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Mortgage’, installation shot, Meulensteen gallery (photograph: author’s own)

Kearns’ latest painting, Mortgage, is his response to the foreclosure crisis. The word ‘Mortgage’ makes a simple but effective title, the etymology of the word literally being ‘death pledge’. An archetypal American home, rendered in three dimensions, is reduced to a flat cut out by the stars shinning directly through its windows. Here, the home, arguably the most important of material possessions, is at its most vulnerable. Attempting to protect it (or perhaps even invade it) is the figure of Christ, dressed as a Cowboy, brandishing a pistol and accompanied by a faithful dog. Though humoursly absurd, the painting retains a sinister edge. We can see that two intruders are present given the shadows depicted on the lawn, but they lack physical presence. Christ himself looks desperately to the skies, the dog gazes in the distance, ears erect. It is clear that neither can actually see these figures approaching. The work embodies our very fear of economic processes. We may be surrounded by bank branches, bills and cash, but for the majority of people, our understanding of the overall mechanisms governing the global economic system remain opaque at best. The painting captures our frustration, desperation and inertia in dealing with the present economic crisis whilst also prompting questions about how economic power operates.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Mortgage’ (detail)

As Kearns’ compositions and Curtis’ films demonstrate, we are all drawn towards narrative and where there is none, we will attempt to create it ourselves. It is the most effective prop by which we can comfort ourselves with a feeling of completeness and purposefulness. After all, narrative itself has a structure and a linear order, a beginning, middle and end. Curtis acknowledges the power of narrative in almost all of his documentary films, many of which start with the phrase ‘this is a story about how…’. Our fondness for narrative accounts for the enduring popularity of ‘great man’ histories and the classic myths, which distill hugely complex issues. There is a modern phenomenon that offers a similar comfort. It is the celebrity.

The omnipresence of a celebrity is in itself suggestive of their importance and power, even when both may actually be in short supply. Every day we are surrounded by familiar faces who have been deemed significant. We are comforted not only by the familiarity and ordering of these presences, but also the faint suggestion that we too could, one day, be deemed as significant as these figures. It used to be that you were famous for something, a particular attribute, profession or skill. Now individuals can be famous for nothing. Paris Hilton, the Kardashians, reality television stars. All are famous for being famous. The retort that such individuals have earned such status because of their demonstrated business and publicity nous is in itself a highly seditious and hollow exercise. Celebrity is an industry founded on fostering exclusion to create exclusivity. As much as it can be comforting in its familiarity and aspirational value, when in excess, it essentially debases human interaction.

This recent incarnation of celebrity is primarily associated with America, where as the familiar adage goes, ‘anyone can make it’. It is therefore unsurprising that the majority of Darren Coffield’s distorted portraits are of famous U.S. icons. However, most of Coffield’s chosen subjects are of earlier twentieth century figures. We can therefore surmise that his interest lies in the orgins and early formation of today’s celebrity as well as with portraiture itself.

Darren Coffield, ‘Shockheaded Warhol’, 2011

Despte their distorton, Coffield’s figures remain recognizable, such is their iconic status. The portraits underline the fact that most of our communication is non-verbal. Indeed, the reason that many viewers find the portraits intially unsettling is because they disrupt the psychological process of reading the face, an inherent and unconscious part of our everyday interactions. Coffield’s paintings are a bold retort to the argument that painted portraiture is a virtually spent medium in our age of mass production and instant imagery.

Whilst Coffield and Kearns share a Pop sensibility, their working processes couldn’t be more opposed. Coffield’s scale suits the engagement with his subjects whereas Kearns’ compositions intentionally refer to the grand scale, ambition and narrative of classic history painting (established as the most revered of subjects in the eighteenth century). Given that Kearns’ paintings are self conscious collages of media imagery, his painting technique is appropriately highly refined, each register or source of imagery meticuoulsy rendered as it would appear in print (be it a fashion advertisement or a cartoon strip character). In comparison, Coffield’s paintings are rapidly produced and exhibit a sketchlike quality, his painting method a reflection of the rapidity with which we process the face.

Darren Coffield, ‘Night & Day’, 2011

Some of the portraits are rendered as shadowy silhouettes upon a single palette background (for instance Night & Day), whereas others are fully fleshed. In almost all of the paintings, viewers can glimpse minute patches of unpainted canvas. These gaps serve as Coffield’s declaration of the artifiace of portraiture. These icons are ‘true untruths’, idealized images of manicured self presentation. Celebrity harnesses the notion of intimate familarity with a subject when no such contact or connection exsists. This is at the heart of its power and hold over our imaginations. In interviews, Coffield has described the portraits as exhibiting an Orwellian ‘double-think’, that is to say that they exhibit the existance of contary beliefs and opinions simultaenously. For example, you may be familiar with Cary Grant’s films well and thus can recognize him easily. Though you have an idea of what Grant was like as a person, you do not know him at all. You have been presented less with a personality, and more with a aspirational self-presentation (in short, a lifestyle). Here we return full swing to Curtis’ concerns regarding our definition of individuality and the trappings of its marketability.

The purpose of this essay has not only been to introduce the work of these three individuals but to demonstrate how their works compliment one another. A number of common threads can be articulated through the examination of their work. The power of narrative and symbols, the operations of power, and the mechanisms of fame are just some examples.  It isn’t just that their subject matter correlates (for instance, Rock Hudson, so prevalent throughout Curtis’ film, is also the subject of one of Coffield’s portraits), nor that the works echo one another in a formalist sense, rather all three can be said to share similar socio-artistic concerns.  Though Curtis does not consider himself an artist, his documentaries have inspired a number of contemporary artists. His inclusion in this exhibition felt completely natural. Both Curtis and Kearns utilize the power of juxtaposition, the former through montage and the latter on canvas. Our current obsession with celebrity, the embodiment of unfettered and fetishized individuality that Coffield captures so eloquently, is also of concern to Kearns and Curtis.  The ingenuity of both Coffield’s and Kearns’ work is that their paintings address art historical concepts whilst simultaneously engaging current issues. Though the symbols of America’s power may seem simple, they are anything but. As I hope this exhibition has demonstrated, the real and the ideal are not without contradiction, and the ideal is never apolitical nor ideologically unbound.

Special thanks

Darren Coffield, Adam Curtis and Jerry Kearns                                                             Amani Olu and Eric Gleason                                                                                                Mia Curran                                                                                                                    Jennifer Hoffman-Williamson, Shawn Lefevre, Thomas Keelan                                       Lucy Kelsall at the BBC                                                                                                   Steph Allen at Punchdrunk                                                                                                 and Amanda Tiller

Press 

DeShawn Dumas, A Curation of Curators: Young Curators, New Ideas at Meulensteen, Artcritical.com

Chloe Wyma, Bright Young Things: Who to Watch in Amani Olu’s “Young Curators, New Ideas” Showcase at Meulensteen, Artinfo.com

Amelia Reynolds, Young Curators, New Ideas IV, Whitewall

Jamel Robinson, Best of Show: Young Curators, New Ideas IV, The Inkwell

Malcolm Harris, Declared Cool: Young Curators, New Ideas IV, The Huffington Post

Kyle Fitzpatrick, LAIY In NYC Diary: Day Eight, Nine, And Ten, LA I’m Yours

Charlie Schultz, Young Curators/New Ideas IV, Artslant

Young Curators, New Ideas IV, exhibition catalogue

Young Curators, New Ideas IV

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
 
Meulensteen presents
Young Curators, New Ideas IV
Organized by Mr. and Mrs. Amani Olu

June 7 – August 24, 2012
Opening Reception: Thursday, June 7, 2012

Meulensteen is pleased to present Young Curators, New Ideas IV, a group exhibition of twelve curators organized by Mr. and Mrs. Amani Olu opening the evening of Thursday, June 7, 2012 from 6PM – 9PM with music by Derrick Adams and DJ Imposter at the gallery located at 511 West 22nd Street. The exhibition continues through August 24, 2012 and will include a series of programs and special events.

 

Curators: Rachel Cook, Jenny Jaskey, Robin Juan, Larry Ossei-Mensah, Tiernan Morgan, Stephanie Roach, Legacy Russell, Ariella Wolens, Jordana Zeldin, Calder Zwicky, Susi Kenna & Tali Wertheimer and Court Square

Artists: Sterling Allen, Ben Alper, Pan Aterson, Amy Beecher, A.K. Burns, Darren Coffield, Jillian Conrad, Adam Curtis, Teresa Henriquez, Peter Hobbs, Brookhart Jonquil, Jen Kennedy, Jerry Kearns, Ryan Lauderdale, Liz Linden, C.J. Matherne, Hugo McCloud, Matt Nichols, Miranda Pissarides, Josh Reames, Prem Sahib, Judith Shimer, Kasper Sonne, Adam Parker Smith, Jeni Spota, Jeffrey Vallance, Julia Weist and Erik Blinderman & Lisa Rave

Covering 7,000 square feet of space over two floors, the fourth edition of Young Curators, New Ideas is the most ambitious to date with twelve exhibitions showcasing works from 29 artists. While each curatorial approach takes a unique position, there is a pointed interest in experimenting with the group exhibition format, re-imagining established mediums, objects, materials and concepts, as well as investigating contemporary issues and how they are resolved (if at all) in an art context.

Rachel Cook presents Not-Not-Not Image-Objects to explore how the photograph can act as a flattened object and a phenomenological spatial intervention. Jenny Jaskey presents a film that deals with dislocations of time and place in the built environment. Tiernan Morgan’s exhibition focuses on the visualization of American Power, and Robin Juan illustrates the change in mark making in our current generation of painters.

Larry Ossei-Mensah’s Beautiful Refuse: Materiality investigates the use of unconventional materials and processes derived from an international sample of urban and industrial developments. Stephanie Roach, in Losing My Religion, surveys two artists and mines their respective references to art historical iconography and pop culture and their expression of the intersection between the holy and secular. In ERRATUM,Legacy Russell asks artists to display work in juxtaposition to an existing text, as a means of providing a “correction” in a larger narrative as posed by such cultural documents. Ariella Wolens’ Interpretations of the Frame and Gesture considers reductive processes and negative space in a post-modern display of painting and sculpture.

In All the Boys and Girls, Jordana Zeldin brings together two artists who have transformed personal documents and discarded family artifacts into new objects that invite us to reflect upon the irrevocability of time passed, its losses, and memories. The artists in Calder Zwicky’s Sigils create sexual talismans using everyday objects—blurring the lines between the spiritual, the profane, the sexual and the social. The Artist Is Not Present by Susi Kenna and Tali Wertheimer consists of sculptures and installations that present unexpected experiences, distortions of senses and peformative directives to re-examine what falls under the purview of contemporary performance art. In The Arrow that Quits the Bow, Court Square (Lisa Williams, Ceren Erdem and Jaime Schwartz) presents pilot press…, a DIY mobile publishing house run collaboratively by Jen Kennedy and Liz Linden that is dedicated to an ongoing investigation of what ‘feminism’ means in contemporary society. Visitors to the exhibition are encouraged to publish their own writings, thereby activating the press and joining in the conversation.

Accompanying the exhibition is a full-color catalog with contributions by Amani Olu and Jamie Sterns.

Amani Olu (b. 1980) is an independent curator, writer, essayist and co-founder and executive director of Humble Arts Foundation, a New York based 501c3 committed to supporting and promoting new art photography. In addition to his work as a non-profit arts director, he also organizes the annual Young Curators, New Ideas exhibition.  He lives and works in New York and is a proud member of New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA).

Press Inquiries:
Amani Olu
Nancy Nichols
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Interview: Jerry Kearns

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Jerry Kearns, ‘Pumped’, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 84″ x 84″, Private Collection

Jerry Kearns’ work examines the use of popular imagery whilst revealing how certain images articulate America’s use of hard and soft power.  Kearns has had a long standing relationship with the legendary Exit Art cultural center in New York. Some of his work can be seen in their final ever exhibition Every Exit is an Entrance: Thirty Years of Exit Art (till May 19th 2012). Kearns’ first book, Blue Eyed Devil, a work of autobiographical fiction, will be published to coincide with his forthcoming exhibition at the Modernism gallery in San Francisco next Spring.

The term most often deployed to describe your work is ‘Psychological Pop’. That is to say that you are concerned with the impact of the various types of imagery which we are surrounded by everyday, be it advertising, comic books, newsprint and so on. Your work is not dissimilar to Pop, though it could be said to have a moral dimension. Would you agree? 

Yes, I think so. The first generation Pop artists are remembered for elevating the commercial vocabulary used in everyday communication into fine art by making hybrids reflecting commercial art methods. Early Pop is primarily remembered as celebrating its source values. The first generation is said to have ‘Americanized’ art and diverted it from its European influences. The passage of time has revealed more subtle intentions were also at work. I look at the control of information as a formable force in social control and manipulation. I think of the media as a system of symbols, signs, and codes. I accept its ideas and images with a ‘grain of salt’. So, I guess there are morality tales in my work.  There are certainly socio-political values expressed. But, I’m far more interested in recording my perception of what’s going down, than I am in offering prescriptions for change. I’m continually painting images where conflict, questioning, and struggle are players in the narrative. I like images where I’m not sure who is winning the contest.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Cold Shoulder’, 2005, collage on paper, 15.75″ x 15.75″

You’re not afraid to juxtapose different registers of imagery in your work. For instance you’ll adopt the iconography of comic books and fuse it with imagery of Christ or images of supermodels. The result is highly charged and ambiguous, the viewer forced to make some kind of sense out of it. Are some of the works intended to be more didactic than others? Or do you prefer an ambiguous terrain?

I think I gave clearer maps to possible meanings in the earlier works than in more recent images.  For me, the recent works are more layered in their references, thus, a longer read than earlier images. I use the register shifts you refer to for several roles. One desire is to suggest a quantum perspective in locating one’s position in time/space relationships.  Recent theories about time and space, such as the notion that our universe may be only one of millions or billions of others, influence my thinking. I also like the idea that the exact same event occurs simultaneously in multiple realities. As a consequence, I’m drawn to taking images from various contexts and repositioning our understanding of them by making sometimes jarring associations on the canvas. It may be that I’m an ambiguous didactic.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Earth Angel’, 1989, Acrylic on Canvas, 76″ x 100″, Private Collection

We’re so saturated with media imagery that we consciously forget that it’s loaded with an ideological content. ‘Earth Angel’ (1989) encourages a tripartite cross-examination of different imagery. You have Andy Warhol’s Elvis, Nick Ut’s iconic Vietnam War photograph of Kim Phuc running burnt and naked from a napalm strike, and John Paul Filo’s iconic photograph of the Kent State shootings. The result is an interrogation of hard and soft power.

I do like to question power, hard and soft. They sleep together.  When we first encounter an image, we generally view it in isolation, as a separate event. Often, the image has a particular purpose that is frequently hidden from view.  Over time, once isolated images morph or collage in our consciousness and form a kind of gestalt. In building the composite, we construct ways of seeing and interpreting reality.  In paintings, I suggest that possibility by overlapping and morphing imagery.  I collage so the viewer can see different notions of an idea at the same time.  Collage is a visual ‘theory of relativity’. In constructing Earth Angel, I relied on most viewers knowing Elvis as a ‘bad boy’ alpha rock and roll hero. Later, we learned he was a drug addict. And, that he was also a reactionary, famously volunteering as a narcotics agent for Richard Nixon. Of course, the fact that he was stoned out of his mind when he volunteered is liberating. The six-gun toting image of Elvis was initially a movie still. The image is famous as part of Andy Warhol’s work. When first released, the Kent State images of middle-American college kids lying on the ground, dead and dying, killed by American soldiers sent an earthquake through the minds of millions. The iconic image of the Vietnamese child Kim Phuc, napalmed, naked, running with her arms spread wide in a crucifix gesture toward the viewer, exploded across the world’s TV screens and newspaper headlines. The searing images of the child’s tragedy brought the ugliness of war to American dinner tables. Layering the wounded child in Vietnam with dead college students in Ohio, and placing Elvis in the foreground, I collaged a matrix of thoughts about a specific time and place I experienced.

It seems to be that you are consciously holding images of soft power accountable for the real, historical events that can be situated through them.

I’m certainly would like to know more about how power and control works in America. We could all benefit from knowing more. I think it is useful to explore the dark matter and dark energy behind what we think. I’m particularly intrigued by the use of imagery in relation to the two.  Whether it is the news, TV commercials, program content, magazine photos, the internet, or art itself, the control of information is central to maintaining power. I think art has a role to play in looking at the situation

Jerry Kearns, ‘Naked Brunch’, 1985, acrylic on Canvas, 96 ” x 85″, Private Collection

I find your use of comic book figures particularly brilliant. When you juxtapose them with historic imagery, you realize just how much those characters communicated certain anxieties about modern culture and American power. In particular, you tend to use the western iconography of the cowboy, the lone ranger and the detective.

Yeah, I often use heroes and villains many people would recognize. Cowboys and detectives are the same guy in different clothes.  They’re key players in moving cherished notions of male identity through time. Cartoons, newspapers, television, etc, reflect the history of popular meaning. They write the story we share, they’re an alphabet made of shared visual language. They carry collective meaning through time. Cartoons are important messengers. Most of the fragments I have quoted reflect a specific time in American culture. Most of them originated in the EC comics classic series, ‘Haunt’, ‘Horror’, ‘The Crypt’, and others published in the fifties. I love the bold noir expressionism of the drawings. Publisher, William Gaines, was called to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, to defend his freedom of expression in the mid-fifties.  Comic books, as well as other most forms of entertainment, were attacked as un-American and detrimental to children.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Right of Way’, 1992, acrylic on canvas, 72″ x 86 1/2″, Collection of Kalamazoo Museum of Art

Tell me more about your historical portraits and landscapes.

When I started painting I chose the cartoon and the newspaper photograph as my image sources. The cartoon can be personal and psychological. A newspaper photograph is an official looking public image. When collaged, they present potential for depicting interior minds and public realities. After painting that interaction for four or five years, I wanted to get out of the news, and make images with a longer time frame.  About then, a newly invented ink jet print technology began covering the urban landscape with building size advertisements. These often covered ten to fifteen floors of a building wall. Printed on giant tarps, the images read with photographic fidelity. I was excited, because it made possible a project I had been thinking about for a couple of years. The ink jet print was perfect for making large scale reproductions of 18th and 19th century portraits and landscape paintings.

Albert Bierstadt, ‘Among the Sierra Nevada, California’, 1872, oil on canvas, 72” x 120 1/8”, Smithsonian American Art Museum

I made inkjet reproductions of several iconic paintings, and then overlaid the prints with cartoon imagery, applied by hand.  When I first started the project, I didn’t know that those magnificent paintings by Albert Bierstadt, George Heade, Asher B. Durand, and others were effectively real estate ads at the time they were painted. The artists and their paintings traveled around the Eastern seaboard. Popular displays were staged in theatrical theaters. The proscenium curtain would lift to reveal the paintings in stage sets. The landscapes looked pristine, virginal, very rarely were people depicted. The light in the images was thought of as celestial and was described as being from Heaven. The paintings were presented as pictures of the ‘New Eden’. The image campaign organized around the paintings was essential to selling the audience on becoming settlers, and moving west toward our ‘Manifest Destiny’.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Fair Hearing’, 1992, acrylic on canvas, 48″ x 38″

In the case of ‘Fair Hearing’ (1992) by juxtaposing the portrait of Charles Willson Peale with that of a comic book rendition of a Native American, you’re exposing the ideology behind both images.

I hope so. The ‘official’ portraits of the time operated in much the same way as the landscapes. I wanted to draw attention to the fact that those images had a very specific social and political impact. My intention, whenever I use a fragment or reproduction, is that it carry forward some of its history and intentionality.  In a way, these paintings symbolically deface American history and art. That’s how some people saw the works. To me, they were like Duchamp’s drawing of a mustache on the‘Mona Lisa’. I was putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa’s of American history painting.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Repo Man’, 1984, acrylic on canvas, 84″ x 94″

One will find uncanny resonances in your paintings. In ‘Repo Man’ (1984), a grotesque, grinning zombie has the same expression as the photograph of Ronald Reagan placed in the background. What was the context behind that painting?

‘A grinning zombie’, I like the sound of that. Ronald Reagan was our Repo-Man. He took away many of the freedoms the population had won in the previous two decades. He always had a twilight zone dark side to him. I felt like the 1950s returned in cowboy Reagan during the 1980s. Under his flag, the American right moved to destroy the legacy of the counter cultural movements.  They were out to ‘take back America’ from the decadence of the sixties. Reagan was the sheriff disciplinarian, riding back to clean up the town. He killed the unions, went after progressives, disciplined the universities, and changed the tax structure in favor of the wealthy, for starters. For me, the noir styled EC cartoons I quote seemed perfect for describing the time warp I felt. Zombies and werewolves were useful myths for describing my dismay. I’ve heard that vampires were initially symbols for greedy European aristocracy.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Foreign Affairs’, 1987, acrylic on canvas, 90″ x 90″, Collection of Ronald Meyers

Your work expresses a dissonance between how men and woman communicate and are represented in visual imagery. In ‘Foreign Affairs’ (1987) we see a couple lying in bed before the U.S. Capitol. There’s an emotional gulf between them and the scene suggests that some sort of violence has taken place, be it physical or emotional. The ambiguity makes it unnerving.

I’m drawn to images where the viewer in not sure what happened just before or after the moment on view. That unknown quality gives the painting a kind of cinematic motion.   Around the time I made the painting, there were news stories circulating about sexual peccadilloes in Washington. While watching TV coverage, I was looking through some newspaper photos and saw the capital dome image.  I was caught by the male/female power in the image. The capital dome is a giant cement breast filled with the milk of white male political power. Foreign Affairs collages a very private moment, rendered as a cartoon, against the building. What is going on between the man and the woman is any body’s guess.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Lesser Offense’, 1993, acrylic on canvas, 72″ x 62″

In ‘Lesser Offense’ (1993), the woman implores the man and his response to her is rendered in reverse. They too are emotionally isolated.

I depict relationships that sometimes make me uncomfortable and I’m not sure why. There is a lot of contradiction and conflict in my work. That has been my experience. I’ve seen a lot of conflict and contradiction. My view of it is framed by my personal experiences, as well as what I see among my peers, my friends, and the world around us. I see a lot of conflict and isolation in reality, and in the media.

Throughout the last decade you have been examining Christ as a savior figure. One could interpret your depictions of Christ as a critique of religious fundamentalism though I understand there have been some positive interpretations of these paintings too?

During 2003-2004, I fixated on the ways fundamentalism controlled our reality. Islamic and Christian, fundamentalism seemed to be dictating destiny. As for Jesus, he has been the Christian West’s warrior/savior for two thousand years.  He is the alpha hero, one of the key sources of male identity in our culture. My family is Southern Baptist, from rural North Carolina. Jesus was the most influential image of my childhood. As for my use of his image now, I play with his and my meaning. I give him choices to make, things to do. The viewer judges. My use of his image is not limited to being a symbol for the rejection fundamentalism, though I do reject it.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Tucson’, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 72″ x 112″

When I first viewed these paintings, the one specific feature that really unnerved me was the clear, blue sky in the backgrounds. It took me a while whilst  processing the fundamentalist imagery, to realize that it reminded me of 9/11. That calmness was a disturbing component of that day.

Yes it was. I was in Manhattan and well know the quality you’re describing. The tragedy yanked America into twenty-first century global terrorism. Before the attack, people knew about terrorists, such as Bin Laden, through television reports from far away. It was a distant, almost other worldly, phenomenon. Boom…here it was in Manhattan. I was on the Lower East Side, and watch the whole thing like it was a movie. Afterward, I started painting blue skies, and continued, over and over, dozens of clear September blues, for quite a while after. I can still see my idea of 9/11 blue. I think I use it to portend an unknown action that is about to burst the peace.

Jerry Kearns, ‘Bag Dad’, 2003-2004, acrylic and collage on paper, 21″ x 26″, Collection of San Francisco Museum of Art

Muscular figures appear throughout this period of your work. Why were you drawn to them?

I think my bodybuilders are images of distorted power, political and cultural. While we flex our muscles around the world, domestic media culture is obsessed with body opposites.  In this time that the majority of the population are carbohydrate bloats – debilitated and ill, the media preaches the rewards of having the best abs and the tightest clothes available.  Muscle and fat – greatness and obesity, gyrate through the landscape, at home and abroad. The muscular steroidal freaks of the bodybuilding scene lend me a tool for juxtaposing conflicting material and mental realities.

Jerry’s mock-up images next to ‘No! No! Yaaaee…’

Would you say your work demonstrates the contradictory nature of beliefs and images?  That a photograph of a skimpy model has as much hold over us as an image of Christ?

I try to make images that engage the conversation between reality, perception, conception, and belief. I try to make works that are both believable and unbelievable, that present a dialogue between contrasting realities. We live in a world that is made of multiple realities.  We’re biology based, and heading toward rebirth as cybrog technological. I’m painting the space between the two morphing realities. Although my body is bound by nature, I live mostly within a timeless culture, where definitions constantly dissolve and reform. I have to engage the space in-between.

In your upcoming book ‘Blue Eyed Devil’, the protagonist says as one point that ‘art is a cheap shot for immortality’.

That’s a complex idea, said first and better by others. The idea is that art and culture are ways of diverting the mind from death. The making of objects, buildings, movies, etc., is a vain stab at immortality, because these creations will outlive us.

Jerry Kearns’ studio

Recently you’ve begun replacing the clear blue skies with starry darkness.

During the recession of the last four years, we entered the night. We’re well into it. I don’t need to list the pain and chaos the Wall Street heist of the economy has wrought. Corruption and deception are leading us further into the darkness.

Since your historical works in the 90s you’ve found digital technology and printing to be an important part of your work.

I’ve always enjoyed Andy Warhol’s use of printing as painting. Like him, I want to use current advertising technology to produce my imagery. Magazines, newspapers and comic books, are all printed. I like the correspondence between the initial form and my fine art use of the source material.

There have been a number of high profile copyright lawsuits in the arts lately. Given your use of source material have you ever encountered a problem with a particular image?

Back in the early 1990s, I was invited to meet with lawyers for EC comics regarding possible violations. They were generously open to my work. We drew up a simple agreement granting limited use as long as I acknowledged the source. None one else has contacted me. Clearly, there can be copyright questions posed about my work and the work of hundreds if not thousands of artists over the past fifty years. Creating by quoting mass produced images is as natural as breathing to many artists of my and subsequent generations. The impulse is an inevitable part of our mediated experience. As I understand it, copyright law, drafted to protect written works, was not written for imagery. I’ve talked to a variety of copyright expects. They were divided on a number of definitions with regard to images. How much of the image you use, and whether you interfere with the marketability of an image is important. Are you’re competing with the original in some way? Are you using it alone or in relation to other imagery? Are you making an ironic or satirical remark? I’ve paid for copyrights at various times. If you try, you’ll find that there are multiple copyrights linked to media images. You could pay for two or three of them and still remain vulnerable. There’s no easy solution to it. Sometimes, with historic imagery and cartoons, I’ve credited the original artists on the back of my painting. The whole point of my work is that it originates in culture. I want viewers to know that the images are from magazines, newspapers and movies. I’m not trying to obscure that. To understand my work you need to view it as repositioned excerpts and quotes from other forms of visual culture.

Jerry Kearns, ‘One Trick Pony’, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 72″ x 92″ (detail)

To end, I want to briefly discuss your book ‘Blue Eyed Devil’. How much of the material is autobiographical?

Its all me, and the things I’ve been through. I think of the text and images as a ‘beggar’s lie’, that’s based on a careful attention to the facts. The story works like a dream. Sugar, the main character, is confused about who he is. Overly identified with Jesus and certain movie characters, he can’t see an authentic shelf. He spends a lot of time looking for his soul, which he isn’t sure even exists, and so forth. He worries that the physicists are right, and there isn’t much beyond the neuron goo that animates our brain. Finally, Sugar is almost totally preoccupied with building his story as a hedge against disappearance.

It can be quite harrowing to read because the details are often very personal, though you’re making the point that much of our own self identity is totally invented by the imagery and culture that surrounds us.

The story tells of Sugar’s struggles with understanding the relationship between daily experience and mythology. If pushed, I’d say the self, or the soul, lives in the story we invent to describe the passage of our body through time. In Blue Eyed Devil, Sugar mythologizes my experience. The result presents Sugar as an amalgam between his biology, his direct experience, and the media experiences bringing him the world beyond his body.

Jerry Kearns’ website: http://www.jerrykearns.com