From time to time an event or experience can provide us with such an intellectual earthquake that we emerge on the other side with a new, awakened spirit, and like Plato’s allegorical cave-dwellers, we might fumble around for awhile adjusting to the light. Kant said that reading Hume woke him from his dogmatic slumbers. Nietzsche happened upon Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation in a second-hand bookshop. All young artists find their mentors on the walls of museums or galleries, or even in the art section of the bookstore. I can think of several of these earthquakes I experienced in my early 20s. But as I am now 42, it’s probably completely normal (and perhaps problematic) that the tremors are fewer and farther between. So when one does come, I suppose it’s worth paying attention to and recounting. My earthquake was a particular book, which I will come to shortly.
Like the occasional tremor, lately we’ve experienced “extreme weather events” which the mainstream press dutifully informs us cannot be scientifically attributed to climate change. Not surprisingly, this makes most thinking people wonder if said media is in the pay of the oil companies (we already know the Republican party is) and if perhaps there is some sort of conspiracy at work. While it’s perhaps literally true that no one climate event can be tied to human-inflicted global warming, and one could always point out a Katrina or a Sandy occurring in 1938 or at various times throughout recorded history, it defies common sense to ignore the frequency of these events. (We just had an election partly about this, and common sense prevailed, despite Citizens United, though few, it seems, are willing to say so.) Sandy, more than Katrina I believe, will go down as a significant historical event because it marks a passing from one paradigm to another, or to a “new normal”. The event was so destructive that those in government for the first time recognized climate change is here now, rather than some distant theoretical specter.
There was another event which happened not too long ago, this one man-made but equally “natural”. We still live completely under its shadow, trying to crawl out of the rubble, waiting for 3% economic growth again, or for China to increase its steel orders, or for the Euro-zone to come up with a miracle plan. The near death economic collapse of 2008, whether we’d like to admit it or not, brought us painfully across the threshold to a new paradigm, one which as a society we are only very slowly beginning to understand. How long will the Greek debt crisis go on? It’s been years and it’s the same old story. Do we really believe it will be resolved successfully, or will it simply, magically fade away? I think we all know how it’s going to end, unfortunately. I remember in 2007 hearing talk of the housing bubble. We all seemed to know it existed, and yet the music was still playing, the system still functioning normally. If one could only get up from the puppet show, turn around and get out of the cave, the signs of the bubble popping were all around. It wasn’t as much as a pop as a cascade, Lehman being the singular event that tipped the scales. The crash of 2008 was our economic Katrina. We still await our Sandy, but I believe it will come.
In 2007, deep in the gloom of the Bush administration, I began a body of work called The Sorrows of Democracy. The title was inspired by a book by Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, about the extreme global militarization of the United States. My inspiration for a series of paintings came from Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire, a cycle of paintings depicting the rise and fall of a fictional civilization, and one of my earthquakes as a young artist. The centerpiece of my series, The Triumph of Democracy, was based on Cole’s Consummation of Empire. Cole, in turn, was inspired by a pair of Turner paintings, The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire and The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire. I think it’s fair to say that in 2007 I worried of an eventual collapse of our society, our system, but that I had hope it could be averted. As a Democrat near the end of a two-term Republican administration, I was not alone in my feelings of hope and optimism. I think it’s also fair to say that while I sensed a collapse, I did not understand how or why it might unfold. The book that changed this for me, the experience in 2010 that marked my paradigm shift, was Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, first published in 1988.
Up until this point I felt that technology was the driving force behind many of the problems that we face, both individually and as a civilization, climate change being the obvious “problem” par excellence. The question that always drove my work, however, was why? Or, rather, how? Does technology embody some kind of mystical Schopenhauerian will? Does it necessarily guide us to greater progress? In The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil presents many convincing charts and graphs which confidently display the exponential ascendancy of the human race. Moore’s Law is practically religious doctrine in our culture. Tainter allowed me for the first time to see why: technology has been a product of energy, specifically fossil fuel energy. And as we all know, though the booming economy of North Dakota and The New York Times, among others, would have us believe otherwise, fossil fuel energy is finite, increasingly more expensive, and choking our natural world. What will save us from this? Technology, of course. I remember the moment very clearly. I put the book down and said to my wife, “We’re screwed on two fronts.”
The ramifications of this are too great to go into with any depth in this essay. For the last two years I have been grappling with how to articulate it. After intellectually internalizing this fact, however, the puppet show begins to make sense. One can see that Katrina, the crash of 2008 and the ongoing debt crisis, Sandy, along with countless other events such as droughts and spikes in oil and food prices, are not isolated events at all, but form a mosaic of interlocking pieces. Literature more recent than Tainter’s work, particularly Richard Heinberg’s The End of Growth, illuminates how the news of the day fits into this picture.
In early 2009, in the depths of the recession, I began a new body of work which I originally entitled The Singularity. Broadly speaking, my subject was what James Howard Kunstler calls “techno-narcissism,” the all encompassing ideology of our culture, bordering on religion, which I felt would allow the people of the world to go on ignoring the lessons of 2008. I believe in a way I was right. What I did not understand as I embarked on this work was that the world as a natural system would not let them. At some point in 2010, I changed the title to System. These nine paintings, produced from 2009 to the middle of 2012, were made in the midst of a personal revolution. I was not the same artist, the same person, at the start as I was at the finish.
I’ve always felt that art-making is really a form of philosophy, and its chief value is the opportunity it affords the artist to engage in deeper questions which our everyday culture cannot accommodate. This varies from artist to artist, but for me it ultimately comes down to the prime question of philosophy: how to live. While it would be arrogant to think I’ve ever fully answered that, at least in some small capacity, through the making of this work, through the vehicle of making art, in all its daily struggles, frustrations and detours, I have come to some conclusions which will guide me into new work, new territory, both artistically and personally. A success like this goes a long way for me to answer the question that always hangs over every artist: why even bother with art in the first place?
Normally I sit down to write a statement about a particular body of work upon its exhibition. This provides me with closure, an opportunity to close one chapter and begin another. I write this on the day that this exhibition was to open at a gallery in New York. Sandy had other plans, and the date has been moved to the spring of next year. The Chelsea gallery, along with many others in the neighborhood, had several feet of water in it just last month. New York and New Jersey continue to clean up from the devastation inflicted by the storm, a process both physical and psychological I expect will continue for months, even years.
The world has changed over the last decade in ways we cannot fathom, and it will continue to into the foreseeable future. The pace of change will quicken and our ability to understand it, whatever small amount we can now claim, will diminish rapidly. The post-apocalyptic genre of movies, television and literature have blinded us to the reality around us by presenting a single event which marks before and after. It’s not as if we will wake up one day and find ourselves living in the world depicted in The Road. Art and culture help us to make sense of our place in history by providing an intelligible narrative. Real life doesn’t work that way. We can only ascribe narrative and meaning after the fact. Instead, we are so in the thick of complexity, lost in the web of a chaotically unfolding history, that we express our fears, our truths, in forms that we can understand. Think of them as dreams from our cultural unconscious, and they go back to the dawn of industrialization itself, from Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, to the current TV series Revolution. In a way this is a disservice to society because it assigns these fears to the realm of fiction, or worse, science fiction, which is all too easily dismissed. You walk outside the multiplex and life goes on as normal. Jung believed an individual who ignores such alarm bells from his or her unconscious develops neuroses. It’s not a stretch to think of our global civilization in those terms. The Roman Empire was collapsing long before the sack of Rome, though I doubt many ordinary citizens in the years prior would have perceived it so. Life went on, events piled up, and it all simply passed into what we call history. I’m afraid we now find ourselves a similar place.
This raises serious questions for all of us as members of a global civilization, an economy, a society, a community, a system, which it seems we cannot live without. Specifically for me it raises profound questions about the role of the artist, and the future of art; similarly, we all must question our own individual roles and the parts we play in this unfolding societal drama.
In complexity theory, system-lock is the phenomenon of being trapped in something because its methods have been too deeply ingrained in everyday use, and the cost to change would be too great to bear. The QWERTY keyboard was a system employed specifically so the manual typewriter wouldn’t jam, but it’s now outdated. To me it’s painfully obvious that our system, “the system”, however one may define that, is horribly broken. As a society I believe we are convulsing out of the paradigm that says “it’s flawed but we can fix it”. I believe as the days go by, more and more people will no longer hold this to be true. The questions of our day will become: How painful will the passage be? Do we have a choice as to what our new paradigm will be, or has it already been determined by past events? Did we ever really have a choice?
But, as Tainter points out, the nutrition levels of the average European after the collapse of the Roman Empire actually went up.
Benjamin Edwards
November, 2012