Arc de Triomphe

Of late, a self-inflicted mob-fueled rage and ruin has driven America into a deep ditch.  This mob—which usually refers to itself as deplorables or patriots, while others refer to them as cultists, white supremacists, and “morons…slack-jaws…stump-humpers…cross-eyed meatheads”—continues to take the political, societal and cultural position that they are The True Americans.  The work in this series, using the decidedly foreign title Arc de Triomphe, acknowledges this while commemorating the mob’s pyrrhic victories through various hillbilly triumphal arches.

The images borrow heavily from Philip Guston’s 1970s mounds of decaying garbage and limbs, translated into wood piles (their logs echo Guston’s limbs) that are lowly, common, rickety and well along in the process of irreversible rot.  Almost all the logs have been stripped of their bark in a nod to George H. W. Bush and his 1988 presidential campaign manager Leroy “Lee” Atwater who, in reference to Bush’s opponent Michael Dukakis, proudly stated he “would strip the bark off the little bastard.”  (A few years later, as he was dying from an especially aggressive form of brain cancer, Atwater apologized for the “naked cruelty” of his remark.)

Some images include an improvised curtain made from thin, cheap and often torn plastic drop cloths that either open up or close down these pathetic log pile dramas.  The curtains, in part, refer to Charles Wilson Peale’s The Artist in His Museum (the artist lifts a heavy velvet curtain to reveal a host of curiosities and oddities—most of which are dead), and Raphael’s Sistine Madonna (it’s religious context alludes to evangelical members of the mob of deplorables).

Also seen in several images is the 1980 explosion of Mount St. Helens suggesting its history of willful ignorance in the face of an unleashed destructive force that was both uncontrollable and unrelenting.  Before the eruption, the then governor of Washington State, Dixie Lee Ray, allied with private lumber companies such as Weyerhaeuser in an attempt to prevent the federal government from enforcing a large safety zone around the rumbling, bulging and smoking Mount St. Helens.  Because of the actions of Ray and the lumber companies, the safety zone was smaller and more porous than it could have been.  Over fifty people—a combination of scientists, journalists, campers, lumber workers and others—perished in the eruption.

The series’ skulls refer to both the long history of memento mori images as well as deplorables use of them as a threatening and violent symbol.  Condensation trails refer to many of the cult’s members who believe the trails make up yet one more twisted, conspiracy theory (as they spread across the ultramarine skies, the contrails cross each other, making another allusion to religion).  The pure blue skies are all ridiculously false.  Finally, the houses that occasionally appear in this series are the various homes of current justices of the Supreme Court.  The houses’ precarious perches reflect Dorothy’s tumbling house from The Wizard of Oz, the see-saw prospectors’ hut in Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, and Andrew Wyeth’s decaying bit of Americana in Christina’s World.

The sub-titles of the drawings point to locations marking dark periods in America’s history: Natchez Trace, in the 19th century, was a slave transportation route that ran between Natchez, Mississippi and Nashville, Tennessee; Hayden Lake is located in northern Idaho and was a neo-Nazi Aryan Nations headquarters in the later half of the 20th century; Spirit Lake is located at the northeastern base of Mount St. Helens; Lafayette Square is located just north of the White House in Washington, DC and was where the U.S. military in June 2020 employed an “excessive use of force” against peaceful protestors.

From Easy Rider, 1969 (screenplay by Terry Southern, Peter Fonda, and Dennis Hopper)

George Hanson: You know, this used to be a helluva good country.  I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it. Billy: Man, everybody got chicken, that’s what happened….They’re scared, man. George Hanson: They’re not scared of you.  They’re scared of what you represent to ‘em. Billy: Hey, man.  All we represent to them, man, is somebody who needs a haircut. George Hanson: Oh, no.  What you represent to them is freedom. Billy: What the hell is wrong with freedom?  That’s what it’s all about. George Hanson: Oh, yeah, that’s right.  That’s what it’s all about all right.  But talkin’ about it and bein’ it, that’s two different things.  I mean, it’s real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace.  Of course, don’t ever tell anybody that they’re not free ‘cause then they’re gonna get real busy killin’ and maimin’ to prove to you that they are.  Oh, yeah, they’re gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom.  But they see a free individual, it’s gonna scare ‘em. Billy: Well, it don’t make ‘em running scared. George Hanson: No, it makes ‘em dangerous.