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The KKK is after John Sims. In September of 2004, Sims installed his Proper Way to Hang a Confederate Flag at the Gettysburg College and the Mystic Knights of the Ku Klux Klan had a bit to say about his redefinition of this weighted symbol of the South and slavery. Why were the sheetheads so pissed? Well, Sims found the only "proper" way to hang this flag was by a noose. Fitting, eh? Reverse it. Feed it right back to ’em. And the KKK was quick to call this action "an extreme act of racism against white Christian America." Interesting. |
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The United States of Amnesia—Orwell’s Invisible Flag – Paul D. Miller & Steven Psyllos
The KKK is after John Sims. In September of 2004, Sims installed his Proper Way to Hang a Confederate Flag at the Gettysburg College and the Mystic Knights of the Ku Klux Klan had a bit to say about his redefinition of this weighted symbol of the South and slavery. Why were the sheetheads so pissed? Well, Sims found the only "proper" way to hang this flag was by a noose. Fitting, eh? Reverse it. Feed it right back to ’em. And the KKK was quick to call this action "an extreme act of racism against white Christian America." Interesting.
John Sims’ "Recoloration Proclamation" is comprised of three parts: a soundtrack, a visual exhibition and a film. The soundtrack element is Remixes of Dixie, where various musicians reinterpret Dixie, a Southern heritage song, in the different contexts of jazz, blues, hip-hop, etc. The author of the following article, Paul D Miller aka DJ Spooky, was a collaborator in this effort. The visual exhibition is also a remix of sorts, and in this case of the Southern battle flag. In one instance, Sims disjoints the flag by replacing the original colors with the colors of African nationalism: red, black and green. The third piece to this provocative work is a film, but this is still a work-in-progress. This piece will focus on the reactions to the exhibit and the Confederate flag specifically by various Americans.
In targeting these symbols, Sims stirs the ghosts of our national history and allows for a tracing of the lineage of modern-day racism and our cultural situation. In the Gettysburg Redress, a video portion of the visual exhibition, Sims speaks of "a great battlefield of symbols where images, language and symbols are weaponized to protect ideologies, to inspire identification and to mark territory." These loaded symbols and identifiers have the explosive nature of an aged barrel of gunpowder. Dangerous stuff. But, these are topics that need to be addressed, especially when an organization such as the Ku Klux Klan still exists.
-Steven Psyllos
It’s been said that the past is a different place: a country with no name. It’s held together with things like stories, photographs and of course, YouTube. But, for the purposes of this essay, I want to think of it as a flag, a logo that we all can’t seem to remember. What is the flag of a country called “Amnesia”? Think of the lines, dots, stars and stripes that would make up its tapestry—make it in your mind and print it out. Put it on the internet and call it art. That would be a good way to start thinking of John Sims’ work of flag reconstructions, and their relationship to what I like to call the “politics of perception.” The philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus said way back in the day a simple phrase that embodied a lot of what Sims relates to us in his work: “all things are in motion, and nothing remains the same.” How do we look at Sims in the context of modern art without looking at the rapidly changing landscape of modern meaning?
Like Humpty Dumpty said a while ago, I guess this kind of thing means exactly what you want it to mean, which basically boils down to semantics and their relationship to the icons that make up one’s vocabulary. You see a Starbucks logo, and you get the point. You see the US flag, and you see a nation state as a brand logo. Like Humpty Dumpty said in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” I guess George W. Bush would call it “subliminabable.” See, we’re all on the same page! It’s all about getting to the “pure image”—and that’s what makes John Sims’ work so important today: his work is an art form of possibility and permutation. It contests meaning, and by doing so, manipulates the same forces that Edward Bernays would sum up in his infamous manifesto: “Propaganda.” He liked to call this kind of thing the “engineering of consent.” In the same vein, Sims’ work blends seamlessly with a world where the basic uncertainty of history has become the currency of an unknown map of the edge of the world. One can only look at his flags and think, like an explorer looking at the end of the map: “Here be dragons.” Again: think of a country called the “United States of Amnesia,” and ask yourself what would its flag be? One can look at David Hammon’s Black Power flag, Alieghiero e Boetti’s "Map of the World," Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns’ flag pieces for a start, and move forward to the dissolution of the old South African flag under the weight of the fall of Apartheid, the vanishing Berlin Wall and accompanying Soviet logo or even the old East German flag, to remember that times change, and so do logos.
One of the first things that comes to mind when I think of John Sims’ work is how inter-disciplinary it is. John is a mathematician, essayist and artist—but don’t let any of these titles fool you. At the core of his creative process, John is someone who is searching for a structure that can link all of these aspects of life—he’s looking for what modern physics likes to call a kind of “theory of everything.” For him, math is art is text is music is math—got it? Essentially, he is someone who specializes in pattern recognition: whether it’s the mathematics of fractals, or how many lines make up the warp and weave of a flag of a fictional nation. Sims’ recent series of works have looked at some of the underlying premises of the idea of continuity and stability in American culture, and how art can or cannot reflect the way that we live today.
George Orwell’s hyper-revisionist novel 1984 is a perfect reflection of the modern times we live in: Saddam Hussein’s execution bought to us via cell phone’s grainy imagery, makes him a martyr, George Bush’s dream-world of Iraq in the face of an occupation that makes the US military just one of many competing militias where “victory” is an endless tunnel fueled by corruption and the “war on terror”—all of these are hallmarks of Sims’ project—occupied nations, corrupt federal mis-rule, local warfare based on a seemingly intractable ideology—the country could be the American South circa the Civil War as much as it could be Iraq.
A couple of excerpts from 1984 would serve well to remind us, like Sims’ work, of the precarious relationship we have to the past. In America, memory is a scarce resource and, as with Orwell, events of the present constantly shape the perception of what we like to think of the past. Sims’ work shows us the past is another country, another place, a dream world we constantly invent to comfort ourselves as we murmur in the cocoon of the media environment that the “post industrialized” world has used to replace its forebrain. Skip/fade/enter/delete: the idea of the “edit”—of constant revisions of TV, film and, now, flags, lulls us into a world where the re-edit, the revision, is a never-ending task. With Sims’ work, we look through the media landscape like a meteorite on a long flight around the known universe of signs and symbols—it returns in a predictable way, but the society that first observed it doesn’t exist anymore. Think of Sims’ work as made of composite materials, potent cocktail taken from the politics of perception—its orbit prescribed by the psychology of attention deficit disorder and amnesia.
“Remember our boys on the Malabar front! And the sailors in the Floating Fortresses! Just think what they have to put up with.”
“The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the government of Oceania itself, ‘just to keep the people frightened’.”
“The key-word here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts.”
“To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed…”
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth."
"And if all others accepted the lie which the party imposed-if all records told the same tale-then the lie passed into history and became the truth."
—Orwell
From the beginnings of the Confederate Rebellion to the end of the Civil War, the Confederate Flag went through about 3 major revisions, and the echoes of those revisions is what this essay and John Sims’s “Recoloration Proclamation”project is about. By general consensus, the Confederate “Battle Flag” was first used on November 28, 1861 by the Army of Northern Virginia by General P.G.T Beauregard to avoid confusion between the original Confederate National Flag and the “stars and stripes” flag of the Union Federal forces. The rest is history.
It’s always best to assume that history is written by the conqueror – in case after case of world history, the idea of a nation, and its embodiment in an icon or design points this out: history is malleable, and the colors and design of the flags we use to represent nations is nothing more than a long march of revisions – nothing is cast in stone. Ideas change. Icons change. Symbols change. Sims project points to the uneasy tempo of the recent series of nations added that have come into existence over the last century or so, and in doing so, he places himself as an artist not of images, but of the tenuous meanings that we bring to images. In the same world of contested meanings that Heraclitus evoked thousands of years ago, Sims images and mathematical explorations bring us to a realm where sign and signification, yes, think back to the old African American tradition of “signifyin’” link up with the icons of power to create fresh symbols from old. Like James Brown used to say, “ain’t it funky?”
