"i'll eat your shame and make you new"

This drawing was originally inspired by a discussion between Lawrence Weschler, Errol Morris, Dr. Kanan Makiya, and W.J.T. Mitchell as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival. The subject was the iconography of war and how people live with and process the myriad tragic and frightening images that have become a part of our everyday experience. It occurred to me that these iconic images fail us, or more that we fail them, in that we continually allow new atrocities to bloom, that we author many or most of these great calamities ourselves, and that we allow history to repeat itself over and over, only with more technological savvy as each new conflict arises so that we are further removed from the killing than we were the last time. When i see photos of depravity, of war, of suffering, of humiliation and dehumanization, such as the photos from Abu Ghraib that so many of us have seen, i want to believe that the images are powerful and profound enough to shock us into action, into some kind of patient and benevolent revolution to actually make the world better, to accept and respect all the differences in cultures and histories and ideologies and live amicably if not peacefully. Clearly i’m either too optimistic or too naive, because we fight, maim, lie and kill in the name of empire, religion, oil, just as we always have and likely always will. And many of us believe what we are told about the righteousness of our crimes and the trueness of our aim with little or no question because it is simply what we are told by those we expect to be in the know.

So the drawing at its inception was a collage of iconic images of war and struggle, a superimposed collection of calamity. It was my hope that the volume of sadness and destruction in this drawing would serve as a reminder for myself, an alarm to help me wake from my own apathy and disillusionment in the face of the grinding and monstrous engine of modern government and the political machine that can apparently function on nothing but the blackest crude, a reminder that i need to let history inform every decision and choice that i make so i’m not simply stumbling and blind as i move through the world, that if i am going to be a part of any change, it should be positive change.

The drawing has changed, however, and is no longer based solely in the literal, in the photo realism of our recent past, but for me it has also begun to acquire a symbolism and metaphorical nature that feels relative to our future. This piece has taken on its own life, separate from me, and i don’t feel like i control it anymore, neither the direction of the imagery used nor the execution of each individual piece of imagery, but rather that i’m slowly opening and receiving what comes in. It feels akin to the process of pollination. Foreign bodies have entered and have had a profound effect, life-changing even, and in realizing that effect, those foreign bodies become familiar and essential.

i’ve rewritten these lines a dozen times and i’m never satisfied with what appears on the page. It could be that for me there is no satisfaction in talking about my own failures as a person living today, or maybe i don’t want to sermonize what i see as the collective failures of everyone. It’s also possible that instead of all this writing and talking, all i can really do is draw a picture and let you do with it what you will.

It was not my goal to make a drawing of ruin, but when i consider where we seem to be going and how desperately we seem to want to get there, i don’t know that i could avoid it. At least, not this time.

3-24-08

Since the 19th of March, when Chicago held its 5 year anniversary rally/march/protest for the invasion of Iraq, a great deal of information has come my way that is causing me a great deal of concern. And fear. And anger. And i don't know if anyone else out there who might intentionally or accidentally stumble upon these paragraphs knows more or less than i do, but my knowledge is only starting to expand regarding where we are as a country and as a society, and even in my peripheral knowledge of the kind of insidious and deep running corruption we're living with and in, i find myself in a state of shock because so few people are responding to this information...which is available, it's definitely out there...and i know so few people who have any sense of outrage at all, who feel that their rights are being taken from them and are not anything more than sarcastic about it. As if they simply expected it and are willing to accept it because, well, what can one person do?

Habeas Corpus is gone. None of the current politicians are talking about that. This scares me. This essential right, now taken away, is one of the major dividing lines between a free society and a police state. And there's so much to say that i can't do it here. There is so so much to talk about. Habeas Corpus is just the literal tip of a vast and murky iceberg that i fear is about to sink our titanic self-image and our possibly vague and misguided ideas about what America is. And i don't want to sink.

Marker on watercolor paper.
Late 2007 – Early 2008
30 x 22