Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Chicago Joe and Holocaust Art


 

I was living in Chicago about a decade ago, on the near north side, and I frequented a neighborhood pub not long after getting separated from my former partner. It was the type of place that was most often occupied by “regulars” which is what attracted me. I wanted a living room outside my apartment where I could go to drink, talk, score drugs, and waste my life. It was a perfect place for that and it took some searching to find it. I walked for miles in all directions for at least a couple months before I found the spot. Turned out it was only six blocks from my place. If I had taken a left instead of a right on the first day of looking I might have found it right away, but I don’t think I would have been ready for it at that time. I had to exhaust as many of the possibilities as I could to know that I had found the right spot. 

Anyway, one of the first guys I met there who I started talking with regularly — three, four, five nights a week — was an artist named Joe. He was an artist in the sense that he exhibited his paintings and other works at galleries in Chicago and New York and also had his work featured and critiqued in the arts sections of the big daily newspapers on occasion. He was intelligent, witty, cynical, and bored by life which made conversations interesting in the sort of way that allows for immediate dismissal of everything said at the conclusion of any given night. He was an anomaly in the sense that most of the other regulars were lawyers, brokers, retired cops, postal workers, MMA fighters, and whatever. In other words, whenever I talked with anyone else it was about sports, gambling, women, and blow … with plenty of drunken machismo leading to violent arguments and, occasionally, brawls. And, yeah, there were women regulars, too, tough bitches — no matter how hot — who were as wild and mean as the guys. (The bar was mostly filled with DePaul students on the weekends).

So Joe was definitely an anomaly there. I didn’t realize that at first, but it became evident pretty quickly. Actually, I was alerted to this by Joe himself, mostly because he said I wasn’t typical for the place, either. I started to notice after that, but I mentioned to him at that time that I wanted to be at a place that was … mundane but filled with a slice of Chicago life, in a matter of speaking. Turns out that was why Joe liked the place, too. No highbrow assholes to impress, just throw on some grubby jeans and a shirt then drink vodka tonics until 3 AM. 

Even though I talked with Joe pretty much every time I went into the place, he or I would usually splinter off to talk with another schlub or some group of people. There was more diversity than I'm stating. A place like that made for strange bedfellows. 20-something hot grad student talking with an retired postal worker with a pony tail on a regular basis. Not sexual, but not asexual, either. For me, as another example, it was weird doing rails in the bathroom with a retired cop. I sure as hell felt safer, legally speaking, with him around, especially since he had worked the beat in that neighborhood for over 20 years. Safe to say that he knew the guys who were still at it. Probably where he got the blow. 

I won’t get into the whole thing, but I couldn't sleep last night after a memory of a conversation with Joe popped into my head. I can’t remember how we got on the subject, but we were talking about art installations and exhibitions, about the difference between art as a profession and commercial enterprise versus art as a process. The specifics are spotty for me now, but I remembered him criticizing an event he had attended, something to do with a Holocaust installation at an exhibition, and that he thought it was offensive — not in an “Oh my God, these works dishonor the lives lost, the horror of concentration camps, and celebrate bureaucratic evil.” No, he thought it was offensive because it was so tame and insulting in the sense that it was just another shovel full of dung on top of 60 years of Holocaust-related art. His attitude was, “Really? We need more installations to tell the same fucking story again?” It was as if you couldn't go a month without some Holocaust art, so much so that anything related to the Holocaust had become pert-near a tourist attraction, maybe most perniciously in the art world.

I agreed, even though I hadn’t seen that specific exhibit. Outside of the thousand-plus years of Christian art, are there any subjects that have been as overdone as the Holocaust? The cries in the 1950s and 1960s when the extent of the Holocaust began to become better and better known was examined and recorded and researched which led to an avalanche of responses. Arendt’s “Banality of Evil” explored how mass executions were planned, organized, and carried out by mind-numbed bureaucrats, but by 2006 the “banality of evil” best described how depersonalized the reactions to the Holocaust had become through saturation in film, books, paintings, plays, installations, etc., as well as in every day conversation. Hitler’s name has become so commonly used that it’s not even a caricature any more; it’s more like a placeholder for “I find this person offensive.” Really, I think it’s accurate to say that the man who started a war and systematic slaughter machine that together led to the deaths of probably more than 40 million people (estimates vary in terms of combined Allied and Axis casualties, not counting the war in Asia and the Pacific) has been disconnected from reality. I could probably get away with saying, “You know, pretty much all those Jews, gypsies, and WWII casualties would be dead by now, anyway, so was Hitler really that bad? I don’t think so. Trump seems a lot worse to me.”

Of course, that’s true if we’re talking about the present: Trump is doing more damage to the world right now than Hitler is … but only by default because Hitler is dead. But each decade that passes becomes not only further away in time but also becomes accompanied by weaker attentive and thoughtful consideration. What you are reading now (assuming there is anyone at all reading at this point) will soon be forgotten by you as you check your Twitter feed … and if you are checking a Twitter feed then it’s probably unlikely you read more than the first sentence of this before your brain started to hurt … which means I can’t possibly be offending anyone by saying that at this point in this writing because I’ve written well over a hundred sentences now. I should probably just write to entertain myself or learn something new simply by writing now that I think about it. I suppose that’s what I am doing, but I don’t want to think about it that way because it’s boring.

So, I said to Joe, “I should do an exhibit in an abandoned warehouse where, on the opening night, I march gallery-goers through the process of being shuttled onto a cattle car, led out the other side, separated into groups of men and women, take their coats, glasses, wallets, etc., then march them into separate chambers that hold about a thousand people each, and then gas them. Maybe an unbreakable but see-through plexiglass window so people on the outside can watch them being killed.”

Joe responded by saying that exhibits like that had been done. I said, “No, Joe, you’re misinterpreting. I mean actually gassing them with Zyklon B. I want to do a show where I kill a couple thousand men and women on the opening night.” I was drunk, I remember that, and I was also filled with rage based on some things my separated partner was doing to fuck me over in a variety of ways, so this fantasy filled me with real glee. I just wanted to kill a bunch of self-important jackasses who thought they were taking part in a show making a self-righteous social statement. So I cackled laughter while smiling insanely and said, “Joe, I want to kill two thousand people as part of an ‘art’ project!” That was the first time I had ever seen Joe visibly disturbed. He looked like he couldn’t really tell if I was that sick or if I was putting on a powerful, if disturbing, show for him. Truth be told, I wasn’t sure, either. I really did want to kill thousands of people for being so fucking docile and frivolous and privileged and entitled and clueless. I really wanted to create in them the actual horror of being led to their deaths. Importantly, I wanted them to be aware that they were being led to their deaths. That was the one part I didn’t know how to create. After all, even dumbshits aren’t going to choose death willingly, let alone pay a cover charge to have the privilege of being suffocated en masse.

Joe sort of gathered himself as I probably pounded another shot of something and said, “You're looking at a one-night show then.” That made me laugh and also shook me out of the psychopathic mindset that had overtaken me. I remember being mortified for a little while afterward, really shook up and frightened that I could think like that and, even worse, experience a rapturous pleasure when imagining what it would feel like to kill 2000 gallery hipsters in a warehouse in Wicker Park, Near South Side, Logan Square, or anywhere else.

But when I recovered, I said, “You know, I think my defense, after they arrested me and brought me to trial, would be to say, ‘Hey, all I did was recreate about two hours of what happened for years at Auschwitz. Why are you getting so upset about this? People throw around the word ‘Holocaust’ like it's on par with attending a high school reunion.’” No, it wouldn’t get me out of the death penalty, but the point would be made in terms of how frenzied the entire country, the entire world would be over me killing 2000 people in a supposed art exhibit compared to how people now react to the actual Holocaust. In some ways, it’s shocking to me that people can go about their lives with any sense of happiness at all knowing only about that one historical atrocity. Forget about the entirety of history including what is happening throughout the world right now, just the Holocaust alone.

9/11 is a perfect example. The country was in shock for a few years, if I remember correctly. And that was after a little over three thousand people died in the U.S. Six million in Nazi concentration camps? How many hundreds of thousands more in Japanese “medical” experiments? Probably over seventy million total WWII casualties? Clearly, there are diminishing returns on being horrified, shocked, humiliated, saddened, angered, and despaired; how differently does one react when learning that 100,000 people were killed (as they were in the Indonesian, Thai, and Sri Lanka tsunami in, what, 2006?) versus 70,000,000? Granted, that tsunami killed a 100,000, give or take (yeah, give or take a few thousand lives!), in one day. I don’t think anyone in the U.S. reacted with the same long-term grief related to the tsunami compared to how they did after 9/11. Well, there were probably some, but few who didn’t know anyone personally. Yet, with 9/11, the whole damn country was shocked even though almost no one knew anyone in the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, or the planes. Don't get me wrong, the latter response seems like the more human, empathetic response. Being filled with sorrow for years after so many people were killed, that seems right to me. Being able to brush of the death of a hundred thousand within a day? That's pretty fucking disturbing.

Then again, there's something about people being killed by other people in spectacular visual fashion that resonates in a way that people killed by natural disasters doesn't. Then there's nationalism and the like as well as visual evidence of death versus the written word's account of death. I can understand that, to a degree, people are moved more by visual images than written words, but a rational mind, a mind that operates with any sort of reason, would surely, over time, react more strongly to reading that a million people died in a day than watching a video of three thousand people dying in a day. Right? Assuming all of the individuals were strangers, that they were all part of a group that everyone still living thought of in neutral manner, not valuing the three thousand in one circumstance more than the million in the other? Curious, but people react to death with emotion rather than reason and most people seem to summon empathy primarily through sensory stimuli. Still, it's curious.

I was thinking about late night talk shows in relation to this. I don’t watch them any more, haven’t for many years except for a few accidents now and then, but I used to watch more often in my teens and 20s. I accidentally watched a Jimmy Fallon monologue recently and I couldn’t turn away because it was almost the same shit I saw in the 1980s. Except it wasn’t as good. In fact, it was painful to watch a person so unfunny constantly laughing a fake laugh at his own jokes. Pathetic. How do people watch that shit? And there are like a dozen late night talk shows on every night. As far as I know, all of them have the exact same format as they did in the 1980s and 1990s and all of them are hosted by unfunny and uninteresting people. Why? If there are a dozen talk shows doing five nights a week, an hour each, 40 weeks a year, then that’s 2400 hours of crap annually. And that’s just late night talk shows! And not one of them, as far as I know, produces anything that would interest me as much as what I’ve written here. If Jimmy Fallon spoke the words I’ve written here in a monologue tomorrow night, and I knew he was going to do it, I would want to watch that. I don’t know why anyone would want to watch the same thing night after night for decades. I was bored, painfully bored, after five minutes of Fallon (should be spelled “Fallen”).

Why are so many people so boring? Not just Hollywood, but so many other people? I’ll say this, that neighborhood bar in Chicago had more interesting characters saying and doing the weirdest shit on any given night than you’ll find on television in a year. And Facebook, oh for fuck’s sake, why does everyone play it so safe? I do not understand this phenomenon.

I think I understand why Trump attracts followers—he’s not boring and most of what we are presented in the media, on the Internet, and in person is sterile. He’s a terrifying bigot with the personality of a despot, but he isn’t boring. That might be enough to gather a crowd in a sanitized culture. But I don’t think it’s just that his views and statements and attitudes are appalling; I think some people find passion of any sort uncomfortable. If a person has bizarre ways of perceiving the world and expressing themselves then they can easily become pariahs: “I had better not interact with that guy because he’s so fucking interesting that it might rub off on me and then … I don’t know, but it wouldn’t be good! How the hell could being strange be good?! “

I might be wrong about all of this. Right, wrong, probably not the best concepts in this case. I might be misinterpreting or perhaps my perception is just out-of-whack and what I consider boring would be fascinating if a few of my neural pathways zigged instead of zagged. Could be that simple. Could be. I don’t know. This almost feels like capitulation, but I think it’s just the result of getting tired of writing. The stuff I was writing earlier is probably more interesting … and yet, I’m not always jazzy in my expression. Doesn’t take much to get there, though, and I can feel it rising again this moment. Self-doubt is typically a wake-up call. I have developed an automatic response to the awareness of feeling down about myself: Do not give in to that shit! That’s just bullshit that low blood sugar causes. I think that’s it. Not enough sleep leads to self-doubt; too many cookies leads to self-doubt; looking in the mirror at 5 AM leads to self-doubt. And so on.

Oh, yeah, now I remember why I started writing about Joe and the talk shows. I was thinking that entertainment and art —traditional art— fail to excite, in me at least, the type of liveliness that sitting on a plastic chair in a flophouse watching a junkie carve designs on his forearm with a razor blade does. Trying to make art for the sake of recognition or money, at least during the process of creating it, is likely to result in something perceptively forced. I think that would best be classified as “Fallon Art,” art that is trying too hard to be something for someone else in order to bolster ego or inflate a bank account. That doesn’t do it for me. A wigged-out dude tapping his Motel Six room key onto the bathroom mirror for two hours while rocking back and forth and grinding his teeth with his eyes wide as saucers? Yeah, I would watch that and it would definitely change the way I see the world, whether for good or bad. I say that because I HAVE watched a dude do that and freaked me out. Yet, I couldn’t get out of the motel room because I was pretty fucking sure that I would forget where I was going as soon as I got outside and that everyone who saw me would know what I knew and that they would be pissed off or terrified because I didn't hide that I knew in a culture that dead-eyed stares and fake laughter. I would have to run as fast and as far as I could before they called the cops to fuck me over in a way that just wouldn’t be good for me or anyone else, really. So I stayed put watching him intently and, freaked out as I was, I knew watching him was probably the best thing I could do, that nothing else would be able to keep me in place with such rapt attention.

In that sense, it provided security even while it freaked me out. I was amazed how much I learned about myself and about how things in the world affected me just by watching him for two hours. I also was awed by his stamina. I’m not positive it was two hours, but from my recollection, I looked at the clock quite a few times — which always distorted my perception of what had been happening and shocked me into a new way of perceiving him. That the same rhythmic action could result in so many different ways of perceiving and interpreting in a matter of hours fascinates me still. It was a really a ritual, now that I think about it. For each of us. No shaman could have taught me any more than that man did in such a short time. Well, I don’t know that with certainty, but I’d be worried about how far my mind would go off course if a shaman taught me more in too short a time. 

I'll wrap things up by saying this: Maybe a good way to teach kids how to create art or find their way in the world would be to tell them to play with leather shoelaces or kick wood, probably a 2x4, for an afternoon.