KG's "American Prayers" article
de...@usa.net
i just read it and it's about a thousand times better than the "it scares
me when..." one. anyone even remotely literate should go and read it. it's
a bit scattered, but the main thesis is that the source of the 1960s youth
movement in america was a problematic relationship towards technology (eg.
drugs = technology) and then the pop art movement came along and sort of
glossed this over. then the punks, or at least the american ones, working
in various media in the 70s and 80s go back and use 1960s imagery to try
to bring out and deal with the original issue which got pushed aside by
the mainstream. it also sez where they got "evol" from. if you've ever
wondered wtf science fiction has got to do with punk rock (and haven't we
all) then you've got to read this article.
de...@usa.net
in a blatant display of geekiness and copyright infringment i have
transcribed herein the entire text of this article. /these/ are italics.
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American Prayers
Kim Gordon
Mickey Mouse, Marilyn Monroe, and Coca-Cola T-shirts are still popular all
over the world, proving America's ability to sell an image. But in the
'60s the youth of America, disillusioned with the American way, sought to
escape from all this by returning to past ideas of communal living and to
slogans of love and peace. Incredible violence surrounded the times. Aside
from the Vietnam war there were the Kennedy and King assassinations, and a
steady stream of violent protest demonstrations. On the level of popular
culture there were such events as the mysterious death of Brian Jones and
the Rolling Stones' tour that culminated with the deaths at Altamont. And
then there was Charles Manson and "the Family". Many people who didn't die
in the upheavals of those years remain as casualties of the '60s, maimed
either by drugs or the Vietnam war. During this time Pop art perpetuated
the myth of America as an eternally "new" culture. Its representation of
America as an entity of the moment perpetuated a pseudostate of
no-history, and the American dream of innocence. In retrospect most Pop
art appears to have reinforced the status quo, because it ceased to
examine the America beneath the icons it adopted.
Although in the beginning Pop art's ironic strategy was to glorify the
image of America's surface, its larger-than-life exaggerations brought out
the violence of consumerism. But the shock value and absurdity of these
images made the cultural critique ambiguous and entertaining. It was the
music of the '60s that really hinted at what lurked beneath the American
dream. Within the seeming wholesomeness of surf music and the Beach Boys'
brand of happy, suburban-kids' music there was "Cease to Exist", the song
Manson wrote. In Neil Young's songs, the music seduced with the illusion
of a drug-induced happy state of nature. But the lyrics -- of "The Old
Laughing Lady", for example -- expressed an unease with this borrowed
Utopian system of escape:
There's a fever on the freeway, blacks out the night.
There's a slipping on the stairway just don't feel right.
And there's a rumbing in the bedroom and a flashing of the light.
There's the old laughing lady everything is alright. [1]
"The old laughing lady" is a symbol for drugs.
The migration west to the land of psychedelia triggered the music that
expressed the contradictions of those times. The San Francisco,
Haight-Ashbury scene of drugs, love, and peace quickly turned sour.
Manson, among the quickest to surmise the end, fled south to Los Angeles,
heading for Paradise -- suburbia. L.A.'s lush landscaping only begins to
make sense when you realize that underneath it is a desert. L.A. is Ed
Ruscha's desert on fire. His paintings are analogous to that era of
apocalyptic music: Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row", the Doors' "The End", and
the drug death of Gram Parsons culminating with his body being stolen and
burned in the desert. And then, of course, there was Manson's use of the
Beatles' "Helter Skelter". Manson and the Family were tried and convicted.
The Vietnam war ended. Everything returned to "normal". By the '70s Jimi
Hendrix and Janis Joplin were dead; Jim Morrison's death followed.
Corporate rock began to grow. It wasn't until the end of the '70s that the
"punk movement" was fabricated by England's Malcolm McLaren, who made it
fashion. McLaren took what he saw in a few American groups -- the Ramones,
Richard Hell and the Voidoids, and the New York Dolls -- and packaged it
in the form of the Sex Pistols, whose music proclaimed anarchy and the end
of rock'n'roll. The first real punk or anarchy group actually was the
Stooges, which came out of Detroit's high-energy garage-music scene at the
end of the '60s. Among their contemporaries were the MC5 and Alice Cooper.
When the Stooges' first record came out in 1969 they were considered
submoronic, and stood out from everything else. By the beginning of the
'80s, local groups in Los Angeles were beginning to mutate the form that
had come to be known as British punk. Because L.A. has always been very
conservative, there was never any reason to stop rebelling. In L.A.,
weirdly dressed kids are seen as a threat to suburban, family life, while
in England fashion is an escape from the distinctions of class. Each
person's facade unites him or her with a certain music faction, each at
odds with all others. In L.A., even though there are different cliques --
sometimes based simply on which suburbs the groups come from -- they all
are jumbled together as "the enemy", apart from the adult world. Just as
in the '60s hippie decor was an affront to most people's sensibilities,
now any derivation of it is looked upon with skepticism and as a reminder
of the dissension of that era.
There is now a conspicuously growing nostalgia for the music of the
'60s. Within the resurgence of music forms of that period (including surf,
psychedelic, and heavy-metal acid guitar music), there is a message in the
lyrics, which again reflect something other than that all is well in
paradise. It seems every month there's a new derivation of the Velvet
Underground coming out with a record from L.A. The Cramps (originally from
New York), who were also a big influence in L.A., seem to have spawned a
whole series of "Horror Rock" bands such as T.S.O.L., 45 Grave, Christian
Death, and the Gun Club, with its references back to blues and the devil.
The music of the Adolescents, a group from Orange County, combines the
surf and psychedelic guitar music in a powerful sound which often achieves
the uplifting feeling of the Byrds' music. The lyrics, though, are more
direct in their disenchantment with commercial entertainment and the
constructed popular culture of L.A. For example, "L.A. Girl":
We don't really care if you say we're too young
We don't waste our time tanning in the sun
We don't even care what you know or think
Spoiled rich brat you ain't so neat
Chorus: L.A. girl, L.A. world
Don't tell us how to act
Don't tell us what to wear
L.A. girl, L.A. world
You didn't create our scene... [2]
Or "Kids of the Black Hole":
No sound is heard from unit two
When there was once so much to do
It was once a green mansion, but now it's a wasteland
Our days of wrecklessness are through
Kids in a fast lane living for today
No rules to abide by and no rules to obey
Sex, drugs and fun is their only thought and care
Another swig of brew another overnight affair
Chorus: House of the filthy
House not a home
House of destruction
Where the lurkers roamed
House that belonged
To all the homeless kids
Kids of the black hole
Messages and slogans are the primary decor
History's recorded in the clutter on the floor
Inhabitants that searched the grounds for roaches or spare change
Another night of chaos is so easy to arrange
(Chorus)
The nights of birthdays
The nights of fry
The nights of endless drinking
The knights of violence
The knights of noise
The nights that had to end for good
Still not understood by the girls and boys
Carefree in their actions their morals they had none
When the girls were horny who would be the lucky ones?
Pushing all the limits to a point of no return
Trashed beyond belief to show the kids don't wanna learn... [3]
Or Saccharine Trust's "We Don't Need Freedom":
we don't need freedom
we don't need freedom
we don't need freedom
freedom is what ruined your brain
with creativity drugs and pain
freedom is what let you run wild
explain freedom to your fatherless child
we don't need freedom
do we now
freedom preaches disobedience
idiot rebellion false allegiance
pride waste lust and greed
we're free to obey all of these
comfortably that's how we'll be
enough for you plenty for me
we won't need actors and rock stars
all we'll want is farmers and soldiers [4]
These groups set up their own record labels and fanzines, and make
their own music instead of waiting for the lastest corporate A and R men
to come to town and package them. They have very different attitudes from
those of the rock'n'roll groups of the '60s. For example, there is a
faction of the hardcore movement from Washington, D.C., that is referred
to as "straight edge". These kids are antidrugs, antidrinking,
anti-Reagan, and antisex -- not so much out of puritanism as from a desire
to be in control, and to avoid being manipulated by the consumerist
system. These groups represent America's tradition of horror, coming from
Edgar Allen Poe and his antibourgeois, antifamily stories of incest. The
groups that have most successfully taken from a wide range of American
music -- folk, jazz, blues, the sensuous anarchy of acid guitar -- and who
combine it all in a savagery of primal emotions to express modern
apocalyptic doom are the Minutemen, Black Flag, Saccharine Trust, and the
Meat Puppets. In his review of Black Flag's album /Damaged/ (/The Village
Voice/, December 30, 1981-January 5, 1982), Doug Simmons wrote, "It's
difficult to sympathize with the rage of California's hardcore, a scene
populated mostly by the sons of upper middle class white suburbanites".
Then, later: "More than any album, /Damaged/ articulates and justifies
hardcore, especially if you accept insanity as a defense". In the version
of the song "Damaged" sung by Henry Rollins, Black Flag's present
vocalist, he talks, over the intro, about his father, who he says used to
drive him out to the country and make him recite the Pledge of Allegiance
over and over.
Raymond Pettibon is a resident artist at SST Records, started by
members of Black Flag. Besides producing record covers and posters for
SST, New Alliance, and Thermidor (the three companies work together), he
also published books of his drawings, which are available through SST's
catalogue. Wandering outside the realm of the art world and attached to a
music subculture, Pettibon can depict a wider range of subject matter than
is considered appropriate or even possible within the avant-garde of the
art world, because of the inhibiting values that prevail in that system.
Pettibon's drawings all have texts of one-liner punch lines with a twist.
The pictures are like stills edited out of a longer story. They can be
seen specifically as comic strips based on the music of Black Flag and the
Minutemen, but since they are not really done for the groups but are taken
from Pettibon's vast collection, they are ultimately statements unto
themselves. The drawings feed off the simplistic morals of made-for-TV
movies, which center around "contemporary" questions. Pettibon doesn't
feel that the themes of the drawings are his inventions. They are meant to
be cliches, unconscious scenes or situations which have appeared before. A
poster for Black Flag taken from one of Pettibon's drawings shows in the
foreground an androgynous-looking person with an insane smile on her/his
face. In the background is the unhappy face of a boy.
Pettibon was only 12 at the end of the '60s, but the events of that
decade provide one of the prominent themes in his work. There are
recurring Manson-like figures, with followers who wear the familiar X on
their foreheads. Using illustration's technique of image snowballing, in
which certain elements are repeated in different drawings, the meaning of
the images builds and changes from picture to picture, setting up a
language of its own. Pettibon's use of Manson to relate to the culture of
the '80s is akin to the use, by the punk movement of the '70s, of bondage
-- not to advocate it but to show that they were in bondage by society.
Now this L.A. subculture feels crossed out by the suburban, middle-class
paradisiacal state of Los Angeles and the "culture" in general. In the
words of Black Flag, they are "damaged".
Pettibon links the idea of regeneration through sexual satisfaction to
the idea of "regeneration through violence" [5]. Manson understood the
psychology of this process. When he first made love to new members of the
Family he would tell them to pretend he was their father. To Manson his
true father was authority, the government, the judge, the jail: "My father
is in the jailhouse. My father is your system ... I am only a reflection
of you ... But I know this: that in your hearts and your own souls, you
are as much responsible for the Vietnam war as I am for killing these
people ..." [6] The drawing on the cover of Pettibon's book /Other
Christs/ (1982) shows two hippie types and two straight-looking adults
watching a Christ-like Manson figure being crucified on TV. The viewers
all have halos over their heads; and the caption reads, "I'm glad to see
someone from our group making it". Pettibon puts the cultists on a plane
equivalent to religion, and also connects them to media worship and to
Andy Warhol's famous statement about everyone achieving 15 minutes of
stardom. He shows "the Family", or any family, for that matter, thrilled
to see their exploits talked about in the newspapers and on TV. Warhol
never did a portrait of Manson because his portraits deal with heroes, or
hero/victims: Marilyn Monroe, Kennedy's assassination, Elvis, an American
Indian. Manson is too articulate, too much a twister of language, too
effective, to be put up as an emblem of American culture.
The split between the romance of technology and its effects that
erupted in the '60s, glossed over in the work of most Pop artists, was
usurped by Robert Smithson. Now in the '80s Mike Kelley presents this
unresolved situation again, but from a viewpoint of confusion rather than
through Smithson's idea of gradual decay or entropy. Kelley is a
performance artist who in the last couple of years has extended his work
into the art gallery. Many of the props he uses in his performances have
been shown in gallery installations. Additional paintings, drawings, and
sculpture often deal with the same themes as the performances, but stand
on their own as installations and as individual works. Imbued with a sense
of energy and motion, they can be connected either directly to the
performances themselves or to a sense of performing. Their tentative
quality suggests that they are mementos of the artist's overall activity
and ongoing thought process rather than precious objects unto themselves.
In this way the artist is more powerful than the product.
Like Pettibon, Kelley uses the gesture of illustrative cartoons as an
appropriated, ordinary form, and as a means by which to contrast
extraordinary images. His playfully vulgar subject matter and juvenile
sensibility make the postconceptual and structuralist influence on the
work nearly invisible. He uses structuralist devices to make fun of the
myth of rational thought which led to the myth of progress. Kelley creates
a superstructure that shows the mechanics of nature to be as complex as
the superstructure of technology. He points out that this seamless world
of seeming perfection is in the hands of humans who are neither seamless
nor perfect, allowing the possibility for anything to happen. Kelley's
man, often the character he plays in his performances, has an overactive
libidinous nature. As he tries to "control" his quest for "the sublime"
the sacrificed emotions, finding no outlet for expression, build on
themselves, eventually manifesting themselves in some taboo display which
reduces him to a kind of monkey's ass.
Kelley's work is often associated with that of Jonathon Borofsky. The
look of the artists' installations is similar, but the differences between
them are enormous and significant. Because Kelley works up an actual
juvenile energy, the world he creates is immoral, as opposed to Borofsky's
moral order. Kelley's embarrassing takes are like Freud gone haywire. His
swirling, pulsating lines create a sense of erotic fixation and project a
horror and incestuous smothering not unlike that caused by Poe's houses of
death, or, to give a more contemporary example, the movie /Alien/. In
/Alien/, the being grows into a huge phallic monster which strangles and
engulfs the spacemen; their technology is helpless against it. In a work
entitled /Buried Treasure/, 1983, Kelley illustrates reward and
punishment. The piece consists of two drawings in a vertical diptych. The
top drawing shows a treasure chest sitting in a hole, while the bottom
drawing shows a hole filled with garbage. Around the top of the lower
drawing is written (right side up), "Someone else's waste material";
written upside down along the bottom of the same drawing is the phrase
"The reward comes only from strict adherence to directions". Around the
edges of the treasure-chest drawing -- beginning across from the top and
going down the side, along the bottom and up the other side -- is a text
that begins, "The right hole must be examined carefully to exhume the
nugget of satisfaction-treasure..." You have to twist your head upside
down and sideways to follow the meandering text. Having done this you feel
a little foolish, reduced to a lower state -- like a dog digging a hole,
following the scent of reward.
Tony Oursler is another artist who uses homestyle animation and a
childlike scrawl as a means of recapturing the viewer from the slick
technological manipulation of the entertainment business. He works
primarily in video and video installations, producing darkly humourous
works. He begins by seducing the viewer with a lush and sensual array of
sets. At times his narrations are the stories of the sets themselves as
they collapse and metamorphose into something else. In /Spin Out/,
1983-84, Oursler presents the story of man and his evolution into the
future. One of the tape's sequences, a flashback to biblical times, shows
a shepherd and his sheep on a hillside looking out peacefully at a starry
night. Suddenly a constellation is delineated and changes into the face of
E.T., then into a demon, then into a good god, and finally into a god
shedding tears for man. Oursler imitates the way the media manipulates and
fabricates our past and future. Elsewhere his use of the soap opera genre
turns sentimentality into social parody. /Spin Out/ literalizes the
"suspended disbelief" that describes the state of the movie goer who
desperately wants to believe the experience he or she knows to be
two-dimensional. Oursler's work, like Pettibon's and Kelley's, is imbued
with detail, which contributes to its dramatically realistic quality. This
modern realism used to be called science fiction. The moral at the end of
the tape is that "nothing will happen to modern man". The puppet figure of
man is absurdly not killed off. Just in the nick of time it is jerked away
from disaster by a string. Among many other things, Oursler here is poking
fun at America's religion of optimism.
The dark, obsessive edge that holds Oursler's tapes together could
easily get lost in more formal concerns, as his work begins to achieve the
seductive qualities of entertainment. However, Oursler's sense of life as
a version of David Cronenberg's TV-paranoid /Videodrome/ allows his work
to hold to his critique. Recently Oursler showed one of his tapes at the
New York club Danceteria. The tape was looped footage of two children, a
boy and a girl, playing with plastic ray-guns. For ten minutes the sound
of the toys blasted through the sci-fi-like, utopian environment of the
club's video lounge, driving a lot of people out and symbolically killing
off the '60s/'80s myth of the seamless relationship between popular
culture and art. Most video and art shown at the club works only as
ambient decoration. Oursler's new tape, 1984-85, is titled /Evol/ --
"love" spelled backward. The reference to the '60s is blatant.
The '60s manufactured an illusion of "here and now"; in the '80s truth
passes into fiction and out again, history is recycled into the present
without a context, and the present has become a leap of faith, as we sit
back and enjoy the ultrafast life of MTV. In the '80s the art world has
come to mirror the fast-food culture that Pop art ended up glorifying. In
one way or another Pettibon, Kelley, and Oursler, with their psychedelic,
seemingly expressionistic styles, connect this moment to the '60s to lead
us back not for nostalgic pondering, but for a confrontation with this
crucial time.
By focusing on the split between the romance of technology and its
forces of control they can isolate the manipulations that Pop art glossed
over. Instead of producing ironic grand glossy icons to the products of
popular culture, these artists are looking at its seamier sides. They do
this by looking not down from above, but at themselves. Their use of male
adolescent sexuality and the cartoon genre exaggerates and magnifies
dynamics in human relationships not often visible in art, film, or TV.
Their work belongs more to the literary tradition of Melville or Twain
than to current figurative painting.
Kim Gordon is a member of the band the Sonic Youth.
1. From Neil Young, "The Old Laughing Lady", /Neil Young/, (c) 1969 Broken
Arrow/Cotilion Music.
2. From the Adolescents, "L.A. Girl", /Adolescents/, (c) 1981 American
Lesion Music.
3. From the Adolescents, "Kids of the Black Hole", /Adolescents/, (c) 1981
American Lesion Music.
4. From Saccharine Trust, "We Don't Need Freedom", /Paganicons/, (c) 1981
SST Records.
5. The phrase is taken from Richard Slotkin's essay "Dreams and Genocide:
The American Myth of Regeneration throught Violence", first published
in /The Journal of Popular Culture/, Summer 1971.
6. Quoted in Vincent Bugliosi (with Curt Gentry), /Helter Skelter: The
True Story of the Manson Murders/, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1974
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