Antek WalczakKompromatFebruaryFeb 2nd - AprilApr 1st, 2017Gaga Mexico City

In 2006 when Bernadette Corporation premiered Get Rid of Yourself at the Kraft der Negation music festival in Cologne and Berlin, I remember one of the organizers, Diedrich Diederichsen, having minor issue with the way the word civilization was used in the video’s voice-over. Conceived as a protest of anti-globalization protest culture in the early 00s and the moderate liberal-intellectual champions of that culture (figures like Antonio Negri and the French journal Multitudes, or Naomi Klein’s No Logo), the video was made around and with a radicalized left French theory journal (Tiqqun) – and aligned itself with black bloc anarchists who’d branch off from peaceful social democrat protests and engage in running battles with riot police while smashing banks, looting convenience stores, making barricades with burning cars, and so on. This enraged the activist-organizers of the 2001 G8 countersummit protest in Genoa, who saw their carefully controlled and crafted message of social justice and equality disperse like a cloud of tear gas as the rioters burning and turning things up grabbed all the media headlines. They denounced it as the work of agent provocateurs from the police or Italian right-wing, according to their snitch logic of dialog with Power: a delusional, absurd claim. The numerous anarchist “crews” that took to the streets during those events intimately knew their membership and composition, no matter if masked and all dressed in black. Even an innocent bystander with average cognitive abilities would be able to spot a rightwing police infiltrator by the obvious difference between gangly youth and beefy fascist in terms of body language and morphology. Any single Nazi trying to infiltrate the black bloc would be resolutely attacked, and they knew that, so whenever the Italian forces of law and order decided to engage in a bit of costume-play disinformation theatrics, there would be a handful of what looked like construction workers in black hoodies, stomping around some aftermath and debris under the watchful eye of their nearby police brethren, long after the black bloc passed through and moved on. Besides, the sole fatality that July weekend was a 20 year old Italian anarchist killed by a police bullet. Liberal social democrat activists, with their inclination towards politically impotent messaging that did nothing to change the global situation and only assuaged consciences (“at least we did something, got involved, showed compassion and solidarity”), seemed to have no qualms with adopting a police mentality within the protest in order to go home feeling a little better about themselves. “It’s like, I don’t know, they need the idea of the police in order to exist,” said one of the anonymous voices on the Get Rid of Yourself soundtrack.

My analysis of protest politics of more than a decade ago is a rather circuitous route to Diederichsen’s qualms with civilization in Get Rid, which I believe were not policing and only a way of starting a conversation with the makers of a film he found interesting. They had to do with the apocalyptic tone of narrating a cultural and political situation steeped in a weariness with existing discursive forms that would prefer to tear everything down and start anew rather than engage and compromise. I recall Diedrich mentioning Oswald Spengler’s Decline of Western Civilization, a book admired and adopted by the actual German Nazis, who propagandized cultural pessimism towards civilization in their war against the Weimar government, foreign powers, jews, communists, and decadent bohemians. He also noted that emerging European rightwing populist parties were evoking the same terms of loss and cultural ruin. At the time I was drunk, anxious about the level of conversing with an established German cultural critic, and probably made a self-deprecating joke in response. Today I would have to agree a little with what he said, but also add that the both the right and the left have historically evoked the same pessimism as a way of broadening their base and appealing to the disaffected. It sparked Christian millenarian peasant revolts in Medieval Europe and informed Walter Benjamin’s particular take on Jewish Messianism, which was a more direct inspiration for Tiqqun. It could also be said that the same current runs through the radical conservatism of the Taliban or ISIL, and as well an alienated depressed teenager disgusted with suburban middle-class conformity discovering punk rock or Situationism in the late 70s to early 80s. Adopting an apocalyptic mindset and maintaining a position vis-a-vis the death throes of a culture and civilization seem to me to be motivating forces for those who would rather attempt to save or rescue a society by desperate means, and not just stand by and let things decay. No matter how evil, extreme, narcissistic or impossible, these are proper revolutionary sentiments that go hand in hand with the material conditions – injustice, inequality, poverty – of revolutions.

Feeling morbid and fatalistic about civilization, while adopting a daily attitude and to-do list around that, is one thing; actually experiencing that death and decline, is something of an entirely different order. There’s nothing to do but get caught up in the insanity of a lifespan ending, or the end of a world. To be a witness to a real death is messy and painful, an onslaught that carries an irreparable feeling of loss alongside an adrenalized instinct for survival, while citing the limits of an individual’s existence, leading to scarring and trauma. Having being lulled by a false sense of incremental progress during the second Obama term, with gay marriage, the emergence of a possibility of a few voices questioning police racism and abuse of power, I thought I was seeing signs of wear and tear in the mainstream authoritarian grip on power. Maybe things weren’t wholly awful, maybe there was a little hope in actually becoming a part of the fabric of society, instead of retreating to a subcultural pessimistic mindset while having your hands tied by New York City rents. I was wrong. Things were not only not O.K., but gallingly unfair.

The first queasy, sinking feeling registered around February 2016, right after the early Democratic primary upsets, before South Carolina, when the liberal media and the Clinton campaign were gleefully tearing apart Sanders. Something of the familiar monolithic American system I grew up under was showing its sharp, privileged teeth again, co-opting and corrupting every last of drop of goodness with fabrications of majority-based consensus to smother the opposition, and leaving it to Ivy-league enlightenment types to do the mop-up work of muting any literate autodidacts. Fast forward to the first Tuesday of last November when, like a chump, I lined up to vote for Hillary. Not exactly a fan, I was hoping to be part of a resounding message delivered at the feet of the cold, selfish, cruel Republicans. The next day, it became clear that the liberal elites had thrown Bernie Sanders under a bus like it was business as usual, thus insuring that power was just lying there unprotected for Bannon’s white nationalists to grab. Rather than deal with class inequality, they fought the left wing to defend their privileges, and opted for the right wing.

Meanwhile, everyone around me in New York City became political, and I’m suspicious of that, because I’ve always been wary of self-consciously political art. Yes/no, for/against over-reliance on content and concern with appearances of being correctly aligned seem to cover up a lot of shoddy-thinking and formal short-cutting. In my opinion, this was as bad as celebrity-culture pop art derivations that craved popularity while drawing false-distinctions of high/low divisions, all the while offering the most inept regurgitations of popular idioms. Before the election, it was possible to mildly dislike the Whitney ISP, and keep dreaming of the possibility someday of the emergence of an alternative intellectual meeting point in New York City. Afterwards, it was as if a switch on a control board lit up somewhere, and legions that previously never gave a fuck about much beyond their potential careers and sex lives, are now mobilized out to be protesting and turning leftist. And if a black bloc anarchist smashes a bank or punches a smug white supremacist in the face during the inauguration? Agent-provacateur…

Too bad for middle-aged, mid-life crisis me who was beginning to see some of the weaknesses of my younger political, apocalyptic fantasies and beginning to wonder about art for arts sake. Whatever, or, I don’t care. Subtlety or layered meanings always get stripped in the art world handling of meta-data. Brexit didn’t freak me out that much, I guess, because I never cared much for the English, and much more liked France, and Mexicans. But now I understand the post-Brexit visceral feelings of fear, uncertainty, and sadness. For all its asshole tendencies, I’ve always had faith in the USA being able to produce something interesting and rather appreciated its Americans, but now it’s dying for real, and the Trump death is shaping up to be a drawn-out, gruesome way to expire. No chance of morphine and a quiet hospice bed. Sad.

Exhibition walkthrough by the artist

One of the main concerns or approaches with the paintings in this show is the question of how to examine objects, thoughts, or moods that populate our day-to-day contemporary consciousness and attempt to reframe them from a distance that might encompass centuries while addressing phenomena that are fundamental to the human experience. In a way, without being a philosopher, the artist borrows from philosophy a concern with the primary conditions of cognition.

Take money, for example. Anyone with a rough understanding of art history might see a painting of money and immediately think of Warhol, silkscreens, Pop Art, confronting the pretentiousness of elitist high culture with a more crude, quotidian low culture. At a second glance, however, one also might notice the operations and transformations that the representations of money have undergone in these works. What is going on with the metals used as support, and the apparently natural processes distressing and eroding their surfaces (the Culture series)? And what to make of the underpainting in the three silkscreens on canvas (Downfall, War, Tribe of One), or for that matter, the three more or less direct representations painted from photographs (America, Life, Death)?

If one pauses to think about money for awhile, it is possible to ignore the dualities learned in childhood, the good-evil binaries of hard work and thrift versus selfishness and greed, and as well move on from the shorthand symbolism of money as everything that feels wrong with the world, be it capitalism, Wall Street, economic inequality, gentrification, or the art market. Abolish the art market, and what happens next? The question of assigning value to a series of objects would nonetheless remain, whether by attempting to erect some formalist structure for analyzing aesthetics (as was attempted before via semiotics and linguistics) or by relying on the power and judgement of an elected committee of tastemakers to decide what laymen see in art galleries (representational policies in the arts as extension of government). The only thing natural about valuation is the role played by human psychology in creating autonomous series of value that order the world as much as the series of real objects determined by laws of nature. Both types of orders – value and reality – occur in parallel and occasionally converge in surprising ways without being necessarily opposed in a rational way (nice things can perish and appear in nature, while rottenness persists in human values).

The ideas presented in the paragraph above are taken from the artist’s initial readings of Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money (Simmel was a colleague of Max Weber, and thus also part of the emergence of the field of sociology in late 19th century Germany). This theoretical inspiration is not meant as a literal translation for the artworks, but more as a loose correlation after the fact of their making. For the Culture series, recto and verso silkscreens of a single bill of one hundred US dollars were printed with transparent ink on copper and aluminum supports, which were then treated with caustic fluids (weak acids, cleaning agents) that were next subjected to various environmental factors influencing the corrosive chemical reactions distressing and weathering the paintings. Heat from the sun, hot air from a dryer, duration of exposure, angle or position of the painting in relation to the ground that forced the pooled or splattered liquids into different directional flows were treated as controlled random gestures before the paintings were washed with water and the treatments somewhat arrested (the affected areas continued to change for hours after the paintings were rinsed, and the copper surfaces are intentionally left unprotected in order to continue oxidizing over the years while the screened transparent ink prints will maintain the current color of the metal). The overall effect of the paintings is one of erosion and maybe even fossilization of civilization over time, with copper alluding to the prehistoric Bronze Age, and aluminum referring to modern history and the Jet Age. One of the aluminum paintings is printed with a layer of randomly-generated 1s & 0s in addition to the money prints, a passing citation of binary computer code as a new era of valuation already inaugurated and well underway. Other referents that went into the works and which may or may not come through are: currency counterfeiting, illegality & criminality as realist perspectives on valuation, bricks of cash, getting paid money, always being 100, survival tactics that arise in response to economic control dictated by authority, and the US dollar as a particular objectification of subjective values embedded with economic and political currency.

Philosophy has made a bit of an unexpected comeback of late, with physicists questioning the nature of reality, and scientists factoring human agency amongst geological forces in the cycles of development and extinction on earth. The Anthropocene, along with analyses of global warming in climate science, contribute to a long perspective on change and mortality in human society that add levels of cold metaphysical fear to the familiar mourning of fading traditions and roles that animate the worries of elders and aging institutions. All the sets of silkscreen and acrylic paintings in this exhibition consider the conflicting, often colliding, appropriations and amplifications of history in effect today as Post Modernism looses its lightness and irony to grind out a kind of progress rapidly approaching the ruthlessness and brutality that the modern age was held accountable for. Appropriation as egotistical mingling of cultural signs changes flavor when blended with renewed fervor for holy war, beheadings, or leagues of white vikings banding together through video games and social media memes to collectively imagine a Caucasian califate. Long ago, white settlers to the North American colonies enthusiastically learned and appropriated the indigenous technique of scalping as efficient portable proof of killing that could later be rewarded with honor, rank, or bounty. Scalps torn from dying enemies functioning as a form of valued currency (America). The monolithic moai statues carved from volcanic rock by the Polynesians of Easter Island were copied and adopted into Western culture as kitsch symbols of primitive mystery blended with UFO fantasies, and the gaudy sensational circus mentality behind this appropriation that motivates the bottom line of not only Hollywood, the news media, and advertising, also underpins constitutional democracy and the futurism of Silicon Valley. P.T. Barnum is the father of today’s mass media communication, and these iconic buried figures offer extinction in our face with renewed parasitical meaning (Death). A takeout container from an immigrant-run restaurant of Chinese food tailored for U.S.A. tastebuds can offer a hint of the changing winds of fortune for nations and empires. China takes over the mantle of globalization while the U.S. contemplates isolationism over a serving of Beef & Broccoli, and perhaps a factory-made apple pie for dessert. The fantasists and rightwing anarchists currently wanting to make America great again might be not-so-secret admirers of Chairman Mao, with particular interest in concocting their own customized recipe for a Great Leap Forward or Cultural Revolution (Life). In terms of stylistic technique, the three paintings just mentioned with respects to their appropriated content share overwhelming flat colored backgrounds (black, flamingo, avocado) that overpower the gestures and brushstrokes of the forms and figures of the foreground. The canvas has been drained of depth, and the background becomes like a wall, for a bit of sign painting, that can then be hung on a real wall.

The third set of paintings in this show (Downfall, War, Tribe of One) were made in the late hours of production, and synthesize aspects of the first two sets of paintings. Re-using the $100 screens of the metal paintings, the artist decided to tackle the formal aspect of underpainting, which is a basic first layer in representational painting that Warhol used to backpedal the mechanical feel of his silkscreen productions and make them more painterly. It is also is an effect associated with commercial art and fashion illustration that is a foundation in the publishing of comic books, where the inking (line drawing) of the art in panels telling the story are later polished and filled in by the coloring. With these canvases, the underpainting is the dominant factor, modifying and determining the effect of the screen print they are supposed to embellish, carrying the repetitiveness into different directions. Conceived as sequential panels, like a comic, the paintings allude to a narrative while using the the face of Benjamin Franklin, Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and the emblems and seals employed by the U.S. Treasury. From obvious immolation (Downfall), to martial heavy brushstrokes possibly camouflaging tanks and cannons (War), to a ragtag recycling on Rastafarian flag colors (Tribe of One), the paintings could more or less denote the tone and seasonal progression of a Walking Dead-type apocalyptic TV series.

On a final note, the exhibition’s title Kompromat (an old KGB cold war spy term meaning “compromising information”) and invitation card were meant to evoke the mood of change that now rocks the identity of the United States in a way as powerful as 9-11 was, but viewed from a perspective that might see opportunities and advantages to this shake-up of global power.