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In a bold attempt to lift a piece of the Department of Defense’s intellectual property, a group of 16 artists have united to five-finger the words “Special Reconnaissance”—they have endeavored to hold the syllables until they are as warm as we are, taste them, carry them around in their pockets for days next to a wheat penny, listen for oceans in the whorls of a consonant, lose a letter, sully them, look at them like they’re stupid or angelic, smell them, put them away so that they can be missed—to, all in all, fingerprint the hell out of them. “Special Reconnaissance,” curated by Dylan J. Gauthier, examines the humanity in examination. It is this blue/green/brown/hazel/grey eye, this human eye that has catalogued the world this time around. There is no bl |
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Special Reconnaissance – James Hilger
In a bold attempt to lift a piece of the Department of Defense’s intellectual property, a group of 16 artists have united to five-finger the words “Special Reconnaissance”—they have endeavored to hold the syllables until they are as warm as we are, taste them, carry them around in their pockets for days next to a wheat penny, listen for oceans in the whorls of a consonant, lose a letter, sully them, look at them like they’re stupid or angelic, smell them, put them away so that they can be missed—to, all in all, fingerprint the hell out of them. “Special Reconnaissance,” curated by Dylan J. Gauthier, examines the humanity in examination. It is this blue/green/brown/hazel/grey eye, this human eye that has catalogued the world this time around. There is no black op. precision here. The cloak is hanging in a thrift store and the dagger is slicing daisies for the breakfast table. Here we find the reconnaissance of life, measured using the softest and most inaccurate device available; us.
Vera Brunner-Sung shushes us with memory. Her tender, Super-8 video, Longshore, recalls all the home movies that didn’t mean to be beautiful, but that somehow got that way in the strange instant our fathers changed from leading men to the leading man’s father. Affectionately, shakily shot, this flickering document serves as a memory of a memory, preserving a kind of quintessential past; the woods behind neighbors’ houses, the voices of ghosts from behind screen doors and the gentle machinations of our families recorded in light.
It is easy to remember Brunner-Sung’s film even if we are only seeing it for the first time. Her actors have been kind enough to be at once themselves and also archetypes for all of the people in our lives who lived in houses with front doors, or for cats that we don’t see anymore—people who have sunk beneath the ground, or who have become bodies in our mind. The frames of life are crisp, the edges have clear names like “1983” or “1992”—it is only inside the borders, Brunner-Sung reminds us, that we find this perfectly grainy thing called our lives.
James Howard Kunstler’s work presents a portrait of a standardized America where it would seem we are meant to confuse the mythology of corporations for history. Is it as simple as chaining a winged horse to the axle of an oil truck? Our brains think it is. Icons in the American night try, with all of their plastic glow, to convince us that we are masters even of strange places, and that home is never any further away than the local _________. Corporations reinforce our skepticism of newness and the cautiousness with which we are willing to commit anything to memory by convincing us that there can be many identical locations—sometimes, astoundingly, within the same few blocks. But where there is the illusion of homogeny, there often lies great specificity. In Kunstler’s portrait of a seeming “anywhere America,” there also exists a specific moment in time, at a specific gas station with a sedan making a turn in specific weather. This is magic, and therein lies the particular beauty of this scene—it is somewhere, but it reminds us of everywhere that we have never been.
Another possible title for J. Henry Fair’s aerial photography could be What Happens When Man is Given Too Big a Sandbox. His lush color shots show the best example of the beautiful damage that an opposable thumb can carry out. The raked rock of Coverup, 40 reads like a schizophrenic zen garden, and J. Henry Fair finds the culprit in all of us, blaming every one of our hands for pushing that little truck around with our need for warmth and locomotion. I quote the artist: “The photographs are environmental, thus in some sense political, but they have a fascinating beauty; each image alternating between the abstract and the concrete, possibly in the same breath.” The work is large, both in political implication and socio-geographic scope. If the world were our oyster, by now we would have bored so many channels through the mollusk’s shiny itch that there would be more empty airspace than pearl.
I would ask J. Henry Fair, “If destruction is so beautiful then why should we stop?”
