Mona Lisa Monster Truck

Spare me if I don’t allow myself to be railroaded into a state of vicarious full-on body orgasm at the hysterical pronouncements of box office records being broken this last weekend ($158.3M !!!) by the new Dark Knight flick. This ambivalence is no anti-flying rodent parsimony on my part; indeed, a small screaming geek portion of me is ecstatic that the fiscal success of this latest film (partially predicated, it seems, on the efforts of quality “help” rather than novelty mercenaries, that the powers-that-be have entrusted their intellectual properties to some genuinely-talented iconoclasts rather than cookie-cutter artisans…) will doubtless mean my menu of Unhappy Bat Meals will still continue to be delivered to me uninterrupted tri-annually on a tarnished Gothic platter.

Even if director Christopher Nolan and title actor Christian Bale decide not to return to make the projected last part of a trilogy (and if so, bloody good for them! Let them defy the dictates of God, the concept of the pieta, and even the Dark Emperor George Lucas. Who the fuck other than craven marketing departments said that the best things come in threes anyway? What happened to twos in the scheme of things?) I am sure that the mothership corporation Warners will recast another iteration with… whoever, as they troll through a list of possible replacements, working down the cogs until they find the first greasy block that will jump at the path of lowest resistance and generate some reboot friction. Maybe Fred Savage or Uwe Bohl will direct it. Maybe Dean Cain or Whoopi Goldberg will retool Batman/Bruce Wayne’s tortured psyche into a new ground-breaking thespian interpretation.

Maybe they will get Barack Obama to play a Swanee Joker before November; and post-assassination green-screen him into the Gotham skyline, upping the ghoul stakes from Heath Ledger’s interpretation; that will have all those skinny Asian nasal twenty-something Entertainment Weekly window-dressing clones announcing it as “Like, Psychotic!” as they read, gulping and bug-eyed, from their autocues.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not cynical. Oh no. I LIKE TO LIKEY THE BAT. I have been personally seduced many many times as The Batman has clambered through my bedroom window, either from the silver screen or the cheap yellowing pages of old comic books. Indeed, as I write this blog, manifold versions of Batman statuettes peer down at me from my shelves - from a limited-edition Michael Keaton Japanese molding complete with protruded photo-realistic lip renditions doubtlessly painted by starving younglings in the sweat shops of Hong Kong, through to a ‘50s chipped and frayed money bank figure with a fontanelle gash that looks like the worst/best kind of bat-trepanning for a casual about-town multi-millionaire with a schizophrenic bent - and these pointy-eared incarnations all demand, in a steel, bent-thighed way, that I testify to the truth of my passion in this silver-mooned night.

And so, I sigh, and remember:

Eating baked beans and chips for tea on the sofa in 1969, bopping up and down as Adam Ward and Burt Ward gave Burgess Meredith and Frank Gorshin one up the hooter. Years later I turned away from these gauche buffons- like St.Peter denying the Christ after three cock crows - lured instead by the 1978 hyper-realism (as in: real to fanboys, whilst my peers started larning ’bout history and politics and stuff…) and Gothic environments of the darker comic book reboots, entranced by the dynamic reinventions of artists such as Neal Adams and Marshall Rogers. This was a dark, post-teenage odyssey that found its bleak apotheosis in Frank Miller’s Dark Knight in 1984, where the Joker broke his own neck (I know that’s in italics, but think about it: he broke his own neck. Just by turning his head to the side and applying a demonic will that made the Terminator’s commitment to the homicidal cause look like a flustered white liberal at a NAACP convention). In 1988 I rabidly devoured any information I could get on the upcoming Tim Burton reimagining in magazine and fanzine snippets (ah, young thing, ‘twas a time before the web and instantaneous multiple postings ‘cross geek web sites), falling on random reports of the sinuousness exo-skeletal nature of Keaton’s body-casting like a twelfth-century peasant stumbling across a potato with a great sirloin steak attached.

Now? It’s just that… I’m a little bit tired of being played through the corporate released drip drip drip of the first new bat-suit image, the teaser trailer, the viral campaign, the first real trailer, the geek site interview, the concept designs, and eventually the Reeses tie-in campaigns in the gas station when I’m paying$4.55 a gallon?

I have done my tantric sex thing with the Batman. I have waited for his steely midnight vigilante caress for almost three goddamned years even as he laid back on the media duvet and spread his bat-legs like something from an issue of Reader’s Wives (but with better teeth); coquettishly showing me his bat-thing, his bat-bush, and his bat-bits.

So BOY I hope this film is good! ‘Cos it’s time for me to get my end away. No jury would convict me. He’s asking for it.

PART TWO: our Blogger actually sees The Dark Knight. Don’t expect a review (gentlemen don’t tell, after all…).

I figure that the audience, stunned by my first deconstructive hip-shimmy and kidney punch, will be further rocked by a compilation uppercut of a series of male member enhancement haikus. I set the set the ambient projection to “phallus mode” and unfurl a blasted contatenation of individual penile growth legends designed to lure the neurotic, the worried, and those Arabs newly living in London who have yet to make some mates in Shepherds Bush, to pursue new ways of unloading their credit card information:

Young nymphos love my hot rod, they rock and suck all night long / Want greater pleasure in bed for both yourself and her, get it here now / Know how Stella got her tube packed? / Make your girl want you more with your huge device / With this rocket ship the moon is but the final destination / Your bed snake will eat furry hamster by cock crow / Steel is the rod but intention is the will of God / Serve up a love plate for the most gastrous of diners / Invest herein and see your circumcised foreskin tip the scales of adoration / Indyrace 2000 is the least of your circumspect momentum when you’re thrusting with this hot rod / A Harem Scarum / Girth Unlimited as George Bernard Shaw cannot ignore you.

The final legend draws forth a gasp from the audience (as we all know, the esteemed English playwright GBS once famously said that the worst thing a human could do to another was to “ignore them”); they are amazed to see the worlds of literature and cock upsizing cuddling together in the webisphere like two kittens nestling in a rococo hammock. A lanky goateed individual (either a German youth or a Greek lesbian, no one is sure) at the back feels the need to initiate a discussion about the meaning of such automatic parsing; rightfully identifying in this latest version of web automata that there is an increasing schizophrenia between simple “come hither” penis enlargement advertising catchphrases and the commandeering of more complex concepts of the cultural commonweal of the last two thousand years. As s/he puts it:

“How do we get from the fusty drawing room of Britain’s greatest philosopher provocateur, engaged as he was with forwarding the principles of the post-Victorian suffragette movement and putting it to the landed gentry about the dignity of labor, to a swarthy twenty-something pulling on his pudding above a halal shop off Hyde Park wanting to lay some pipe on gaggles of tight-bodied GAP shoppers?”

“AHA!” I shout (causing a Glaswegian welder on some Kenyan sensimilla to wake up for a nano-second), ” because the cultural net of web poetry is cast by indiscriminate fishermen; creating by automatic proxy new connections between individual words and phrases, regardless of the historical cachet that some of those more cultured contributions may have garnered in the pre-internet world. Now we shall judge quality or merit no more…”

I pause for effect, before delivering my final blow:

“This is the world that Burroughs envisaged in his spunky fever dreams in Marrakech, and I herein announce as the future face of creativity: a self-replicating process beyond concepts of talent or insight, or shared values; wherein all of us are part of the monkey mass, creating a poetry defined by the savage juxtaposition of the work of talented icons with that of some bling-wearing basement dweller with a shed full of dodgy Mexican sugar pills. Total cultural democracy. Poetry defined regardless of creed, religion, race, color, upbringing, or whether or not Russell Simms deems the whitey wannabes to be urban enough not to be caned by all those (rightfully) angry black dudes in the audience.”

I let the implications set in.

“Poetry is dead. It has escaped the creator (Man. And Dykes too. It’s an equal opportunities phenomenon.) and will perpetuate itself way beyond our pathetic lifespans. If the children of Arcadia and Babylon should disappear off the face of the earth right now - whether by Iranian SCUD, long ignored Mormon judgments (shame about that), or Bushian Kyoto cold-cocking - the words and products of our species will continue to be replicated by automated programs that can make an infinite number of associations between the word “rod” and every other combination of vowels and consonants.”

I follow up quickly with a series of associative/disassociative contrasts between e-mail subject matter and the consequent imbedded message:

Man gets bitten while peeing in bush / It’s too much for one James Bond!
JFK closed after bomb threat / The Dark Knight bombs at box office–

But the crowd goes wild, overthrowing chairs and bulimic Swedes like they were chaff in the face of their bewilderment; replicating the riot of the resistant audience first exposed to the genre-atomizing wonderment of Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring in 1913 at the Theatre de Champs Elysées in Paris.

As the fistfight spills out into the street, I judge the evening a total success. I pack up the Mac and projector into my neoprene backpack, and pick my way through the crowd of wailing gnashing combatants, who pull innocent Plastic Bertrand fans, as they body-pop down the sides of the canals, into their awful gravity of horror and denial.

Not only have I driven the final stake into the bourgeois subjective concept of human creativity, I have probably guaranteed myself a cushy tenured position at the école of my choice-

- until a pasty thin man puts a long limpid hand on my chest.

“Signeur?” he asks, sweating profusely on his upper lip (doubtless in the grip of some absinthe trip), “I am Menon Sweazy. We should talk about my poetry.”

The scene: a coffee house in Amsterdam, just off the Prinsengracht. Our blogger (me) is putting out the folding chairs at the back of the shop, near the hydroponic skunk, and the glass case with the reticulated pythons (which are slightly more animated than most of the customers). A small cadre of avant garde aesthetes gather, puffing on their “jays” and complaining about recent Dutch authority legislation to ban tobacco from these very dope houses (”It’s crazy. In other countries they look to see whether you got marijuana in your cigarette; only in Holland do they look to see if you have cigarette in your marijuana.”).

“Can you turn your electronics off?” I ask. “Something’s phase-cycling at the same Megahertz frequency and knocking out my Airbook signal for the video projection?”

Looking panicked at the prospect of being European, hip and intellectual but without instantaneous access to Radiohead remixes, the audience nevertheless obliges, thinking this sensory deprivation may be a part of a provocative audience participation aspect; powering down their iPod parkas and unthreading USB cables from their knicker-elastic, taking extra long pulls on their “rickys” to anaesthetize their qualms of non-connectivity.

“Thanks!” I blurt out, consumed with excitement at the prospect of this inaugural poetry evening of radical new deconstructive material. I reboot the projector and my ambient background reappears: a soothing Stan Brakhage-like mélange of colors, like menstrual blood on a crème brulee on a turntable, suffusing the space with a (consciously ironic) Barbarella eye garden effect designed to open the mind up the full range of web poetry I am providing from the furthest reaches of cyberspace.

We wait for a group of shaven-headed Brits - all Union Jack t-shirts and number one hair cuts - to stop seig heil’ing in the doorway as they pass by. “Got any tack?” the lead skinhead shouts, laughing, wide-eyed. My goatee’d brethren turn to these interlopers, and hiss like cats at the ancient ragtag English enemy. “Poofs!” the skinhead shouts, staggering off with his mates, another little war won (what he doesn’t know is that some skunk-anarchist has already laced this moron’s bloodstream with industrial-strength psychotropes; and that half an hour from now the Brits will be face down in an alleyway, money appropriated and something foreign invading their channel tunnels…).

“Well. Ahem. Thank you. And welcome to the first session of ‘Found: Unfound. Frontier Poetry.‘”

A polite smattering of hipster applause.

“Subtitled ‘The Invocation of Territory, We Singe the Baudrate Eclectic.’ None of the artistes featured know this event is taking place tonight. Indeed,” (I love this bit),” some of these poets have no consciousness at all; being as they are automatic cut-up web bots who recycle snippets of other e-mails to create nonsensical messages that carry a web link to a commercial site. Normally we ignore these messages, if we even open them in our trash; but rather than banishing them to a perpetual half-live of non-acknowledgement–”

“Just like normal poets then!” a swarthy matelot at the back interrupts with.

“– I present them here to you tonight as the authentic ghost voice of William Burroughs, rebirthed into the webosphere. Automatic automata that colonize the outer fringes of our psyche, they labor like an infinite number of monkeys on Xanadus of verse. And now: we see that stately pleasure dome before us.”

I open with Quayside Launderette by Menon Sweazy:

Point of entrance for the stiletto was below the that I intended to prevent you from being torture cells, the trials at nuremberg speak venomously being dissolved and strained add pint of turpentine shirley bitterly yes: I’m in their debt for a no vessel was served upon the table that was not it seemed advisable to find out as soon as possible came forward at his word. When they arrived at.

Sweazy’s work is classic gripping opener: the associative theme of torture and Nuremburg invokes a kind of postmodern bread and circuses that sits well with this roomful of anti-Starbucks activists, and the turpentine suggests a kind of purification ritual that is simultaneously abrasive and spiritual.

The room murmurs appreciatively. I feel it’s time to bring out the big guns - the penis enlargement mash up - while I’m on a roll.

PART TWO: Oh yes… there’s a Part Two…

The government quickly realized its error as its workers buckled under the stain of accepting voluminous folders of LSD-induced scribblings and automatic bum prints (photocopies and originals): concluding that, even by the increasingly lax standards of subjective worth, history would likely fail to find too many Rembrandts or Vermeers in this panoply of giant eyeballs and cosmic wormholes. By the time the Dutch had closed the floodgates (always a good analogy to use with the Dutch; kind of like using “drought” with Africans, or “wanker” with golfers), they were forced to purchase an aircraft hangar to store the paper tsunamis of this massive public legacy.

I have heard of this aircraft hanger (some say it may be two hangars, three even) for decades, and it has exerted a fascination over me that I have never been able to wholly shake off. On occasion I have tried to track it down, failing only because I have the attention span of a gnat (in my old days I was an “artist” myself, and I think it did something to my ability to maintain focus…); but it still looms large over our collective consciousness.

Less of a curate’s egg than a curator’s turd, the hangar museum is dying for a selected show - for one brave soul to dive into its immensity and bring forth both the pearls and the manatyee shit - and I have often dreamed of walking up and down it’s serried aisles, like Indiana Jones searching for the Ark of the Covenant, pulling out weird wonders of the mind in a revisionist frenzy. Imagine what jewels await: polaroids of tattoo poems scratched onto pale white arms; flicker books of scratchy nudes with saggy tits surrounding dolphin enclaves circling a glowing cosmic egg; papier-mache void containers meant to be angled on a tripod and rotate disconsolately in the cold winter winds blowing in from Dam Square.

I imagine sections devoted entirely to Jim Morrison caricatures (sub-divided into materials: “Jim Morrison clay,” “Jim Morrison silver foil” and “Jim Morrison biological issue”); fragile kinetic works made from chewed straws; huge piles of Lovecraftian doodles of Cthulhu driving trams, riding bicycles, giving a thumbs up like Casey Jones, peering out from behind the glass doors in the Red Light District; automatic traces of fever dreams logged in Meccano constructions dipped in salad cream.

Most of all, I imagine that the vast bulk of the donated works - about 98.97% - would be desultory sketches on lined notepaper in red and green biro; slapdash scribblings that took a total of one bong hit to complete, a year of additional benefits secured in one spastic gesture. Enormous stacks of these papers, haphazard and ready to crush the unwary docent, would hum with the accumulated psychotropic power of their residual energies; the termite artists that created them long since crawled off either to OD oblivion, or the horror of cutting off their ponytails and getting a proper job (the poor fools, if only they realized they lived in Europe they could have kept the ponytail and got a job).

Any resulting exhibition from the aircraft hangar would be curated into three separate areas: those works which were submitted by people who thought themselves to actually be legitimate artists operating at the time: those works of sniggering meth-lickspittle cynicism which were submitted purely in order to qualify for some extra cash: and a hinterland where Dutch citizens actually believed that the scheme finally legitimized their nascent outsider art psychonaut aspirations and entered wholeheartedly into donating all their coffee-grinding chiaroscuros. Even better, I’d include a survey questionnaire in which visitors would be threatened at gunpoint (it’s my show, I can do what I goddamned like…) to fill in so we could see if anybody tell the difference.

For those who don’t have access to Dutch aircraft hangars, I would suggest that, in the timeless spirit of the original experiment, that art is all around us and you can curate your own exhibition regardless. If you work in a corporate environment, be sure to be the last to leave the meeting room, and collect all those rhomboids and skyscraper tracer bullets (“what is it with that guy?”) doodled on blotters whilst the sales figures are analyzed by the blowhard in marketing. If you work in public lavatories, be sure to use your digital camera to capture all those lovely banana-shaped spurting cock pictures scratched into the bog walls. If you ever hike, be sure to make casts of the love declarations carved into the local flora.

For my next project, I have taken it upon myself to write appreciations of the latest automatic internet poetry AKA junk mail. Stick around; I’m going to display it as a wifi anthology on an Airbook in an Amsterdam coffee house, and see if they’ve got any of those grants left…

Legend has it that there’s an aircraft hangar somewhere in Holland that holds an incalculable treasure. Lost in the mists of time, created by the minds of government bureaucrats in unholy alliance with the stoned wraiths who populate the coffee houses that hug Amsterdam’s canals, this building is a repository for all that is groovy and insane and provocative. Those who can remember its establishment speak of it in hushed tones, outside of the general ear range of backpackers, tulip buyers and other outsiders who might not appreciate this hybrid wonder, totally forged on the anvil of European thinking.

Nobody knows for sure what is inside… except that there’s some Op Art and charcoal residues and maquettes, and that this is an art museum if institutions were run by Charlie Meadows (the serial killer played by John Goodman in Barton Fink (1991) who tells us “I’ll show you the life of the mind!”)…

Back in the ‘70s, when the Dutch government was even more liberal and progressive than it is now (they should never have let all those Eastern Europeans in, it was asking for trouble…), it decided that, as a way of further encouraging a holistic integration of creativity into society, people could register themselves as “artists” and receive additional social security (welfare) benefits; in short, that they would still receive their already generous (at that time) subsistence payments, but would also get a financial top-up as an incentive to continue to follow their mojo and thereby benefit the fabric of Dutch daily life and society at large.

Once registered, “artists” would have to donate three art works a year in reciprocation - the work to be entirely their own choice, no need for adjudicating panels or any of those artifical public filters - which would be held in collection by the government in an archive for future generations. Simple, eh? Bless them, and their grand social investigation, that’s what I say; can you imagine members striding the US Senate floor demanding an addendum to a Senate Bill that recognized the need for a little ‘pork’ to safeguard the legacy of dried pasta tableaux specialists in Georgia? Or the leather-chapped performance art penetration re-enactment societies of San Francisco?

The main problem with this scenario was that the Dutch government failed to foresee that junkies and pot-smokers – already a significant urban community in Holland thanks to a range of other related progressive experiments – were indigents with a lot of time on their hands to think shit up, and very fluid concepts of what reality was in the first place.

For a whole generation of people used to sucking up industrial qualities of prototype pre-British-Columbian skunk, and then ruminating for hours about how to weigh a flame, or whether vegetable screams could be heard if you put a contact mike on the knife (“You can’t hear meat scream, man, ‘cos it’s, like, already dead, right? But you put a healthy cucumber on the chopping board…”), this was a fine chance to insert themselves at the forefront of contemporary art and collect a few Guilders more in the bargain.

The response, of course, was phenomenal – especially seeing as the government was loathe to apply bourgeois values of what actually constituted “art” as applied by its snobby European cousins, such as the French, in terms of abstract qualities such as “quality” or “talent” – and tens of thousands more than anticipated artist applicants crashed the government rolls like Orcs on PCP swarming a Hobbit farm.

IN PART TWO: total art democracy is achieved.

As the carrion birds of the artworld inevitably seek out new contexts to inspire their peculiar brand of social concern, I predict that disaster zones will become the new black/BritArt/return to figuration. In galleries around the world, stick-thin bored model/intern/whatevers will be diverted from sneering at visitors by a klaxon-sound emanating from the gallery’s Emergency Detection Device. Imperceptibly ducking back behind her iMac, like a bitch on castors, she will check the monitor to locate wherever the latest apocalypse has snuffed out the lives of tens of thousand of poor souls who believed in a benign and merciful God.

The gallerist/dealer, upstairs, is eagerly informed by her that there’s been a Richter Scale 6 with a Mercali Scale of V.II Very Strong in Armenia (and she’d still love to do dinner one night and pick his brains on his encyclopedic knowledge of Jasper Johns multiples). The dealer quickly and efficiently calculates which artists in his stable aren’t already on field trips to Myanmar and China, or presenting human rights atrocity etchings in European art fairs. Cross-factoring data on soil liquefaction reports (where water-saturated granular material loses it’s strength, causing buildings to sink) with local histories of poor building regulations and bureaucrat corruption (far greater collateral potential), to try and get a sense of the scale of the carnage, he instantly calculates the expedition costs against future sales of resultant artworks. Better to make the body bag bronzes in series of ten rather than five…

Within 36 hours the artist has been dispatched. On the business class flight over he spends time, in between scanning the wine list and shuffling his iPod, meditating on the suffering of the people he will meet.

Once landed, he is met at the airport by a slight little local woman who steers him through the hellish throng of others arrivistes from the competing “Emergency Response Units” of Mayfair, Chelsea, Basel and Paris. His dealer has done his job well; the woman is not only the best interpreter available, but she has also lost some family members of her own, and is well in with the rescue services. Letting the others suck on his Trabant taxi’s fumes, the artist insists on foregoing a freshening up at his hotel (confirmed as one of the few built with adequate foundations, in case of aftershocks) in favor of going to the epicenter immediately.

An hour later he’s being guided through a miasma of collapsed buildings and misery and anger, as people use their bare hands to dig through the rubble (later he will cast the clawmarks for a series of semi-transparent ghost-like poly-resin sculptures that sit, almost unseen, on a dark lacquered slabs built to exactly the same dimensions as the defective building bricks. Artforum will observe, in it’s double summer issue, that “The resin, almost milky, is redolent of schools of sperm trying to impregnate concrete and breathe life back into the immaterial and gone that lies somewhere below.” ).

At intervals, the rescue workers all freeze and silence the machines and listen if they think someone trapped below is hammering for help (later he will edit his digital recordings into a series of “pregnant silences” signaled at the beginning by the expiration of the last sputtering throb of a generator, the agonized extended communal quiet, which is finally punctured by disappointed people getting back to work again as the pickaxes restart their doleful plaint. Frieze will call the suite “A requiem mass where the climax had curdled 36 hours earlier, its latent reverberations playing the Armenian rescuers like a cosmic DJ mash-up.”).

Finally that night, just before the artist collapses with fatigue and jet-lag, his interpreter pulls his arm and steers him frantically over to a recently uncovered corpse. Her voice is high-pitched and the tears roll down her face as she bends over the body. “My sister. My sister.”

Pulling out his 100 megapixel camera – discreetly, so as not be insensitive – he watches his guide lay down next to her relative, trying to somehow hug her back to life. Their bodies are the same size, and he realizes - with a sharp intake of breath - that that they were twins. She mimics her dead sister’s fetal position in a mirror posture - like dolphin’s mating - adjusting herself as she edges closer and closer, as the artist starts to snap pictures. He switches to macro as the two sister’s faces loom together, and their mouths touch in a final caress; one set of lips alive and warm, the other cold and dusted with a sprinkling of former Soviet Union compacted concrete.

Months later, passing through London at the Groucho Club, the artist would proclaim to a circle of enraptured fellow artists: “I had never felt more alive in my entire life.”

Art In America said that the artist’s photo suite - hung by meat hooks in 10 meter ripped strips, to great acclaim at the Venice Biennial before being purchased by Pernot Ricard as the backdrop for an Absolut vodka advert in Interview magazine - was “As if the spirit of Joel Peter Witkin presided over a desert scirocco that had blown in from nearby sister state Azerbaijan, uniting the sacred (dead) and profane (alive) sisters in an embrace of microcosmic resignation.”

After he’d had her drive him back to the hotel, the artist let the sister go home. Too buzzed to sleep any more, he checked the time difference and called his dealer.

“How’s it going?” the dealer asked.

“It’s humbling. There’s so much to testify to. I need to be here a little longer. Do you think you could send over one of those Emergency Response Studios?”

Measured against the scale of the human misery and suffering of New Orleans, post-Katrina, the idea of an embedded artist operating from a repurposed trailer seems to me about as useful as a mime artist jumping out a helicopter into Lake Pontchartrain with an imaginary parachute and an invisible backpack full of sachets of electrolytes, so the people “down below” can rehydrate on the way to their next experiential clusterfuck. This kind of artwork is a Pirates of the Caribbean ride for middle-class intellectuals who wouldn’t dream of stepping into Disneyland ‘cos they thinks it’s tacky and inappropriate; yet have no problem patronizing a project that uses more resources and money than many of the Katina survivors have yet to see, and merely proffers the victims with yet another in a series of hare-brained non-solutions to their problems.

“But!” I hear you shout - and let me stop you right there; before you tell me how the project is a metaphor, or an ironic analogy, or a piece of conceptual art. Or before you tell me that it’s not the artworld’s fault what happened – neither the hurricane itself or the woeful government response - and this is just a fine example of artists getting down off of the artworld pedestal and creating socially-engaged work with resonance and clarity and compassion.

Let me stop you there because I’ve trundled all this rote guff out myself; when I worked as a professional curator and producer for 17 years on a variety of somewhat similarly noble art interventions. I too believe in art that has relevance, and all of those other woolly manifestos that you were about to bleat at me for daring to question the logic of this insipid dispassionate contrivance. Site-specific non-gallery socially-concerned art can exist and engage…

… but only if the art’s any good. Putting it out there isn’t enough in itself. All the things that can help truly amplify the successes of a good public art work – context, community, history – are the same things that can magnify the failings of a bad public art work. As a young curator my inspiration was a trailblazing Irishman called Declan McGonagle, a man who turned the sectarian divided northern Irish town of Derry into an external art laboratory of sorts, steering public art projects into a variety of complex and often potentially incendiary contexts. When somebody once asked him why he had, in effect, abandoned the “neutral” white space of the gallery, he replied something along the lines (I’m paraphrasing) that “Nothing is neutral. A gallery may look like just a white box but it’s also the product of a series of values – philanthropy, financial support, advocacy, cultural definitions.”

And if you reverse that same truism, you also end up realizing that if nothing is neutral than everything is political. Which confers inordinate responsibilities on artists who seek to insert themselves into loaded socio-political contexts. Even if the Emergency Response Studio manages to attract one Katrina survivor inside, and make them feel important because someone wants to hear their story: then that’s a lie, because the wider society – from government to agency to insurance companies – has so clearly demonstrated that these people’s stories don’t seem to matter one jot. This piece of conceptual art (which also fails at a basic conceptual level, because the artist couldn’t procure an actual FEMA trailer, so what he has is merely an ersatz prop) operates at best as a rose-tinted panacea. And at worst…

What Mr. Villinksi and the project curators are saying to the people of New Orleans with this conceptual art is: you don’t count. Instead of building this trailer, if our primary concern was your wellbeing, we could have done something much more direct. But God knows then we’d be aid workers, or community workers, or something, or have to have you people stay on our couches, and that’s such a… discreet gesture that has nothing to do with what we do, which is art. We travel the world parachuting installations in to loaded contexts, chattering about globalization and diasporas over our martinis, before we ship them back home in immaculate customized crates and try and flog them to some dealers; and if you’re lucky and get a job in the French Quarter then the economic regeneration aspects of the biennial mean that maybe you’ll get some trickle down voodoo fiscal benefit in the form of an extra big tip when the biennial drones swarm us in November, or pick up some additional security work to stop the art trailer being ripped off for materials. Otherwise the only trickle down is what you already had when the levees ruptured. Not our fault: the issue is much bigger than anything we could do. We’re on your side, and believe in your right to repurpose as you see fit (other than the trailer). We hope that our sympathetic (even empathetic) explanation of the human wonder of this project might impart some small sense to you that your struggle matters; because we are really nice people and truly feel your pain. Should the levees ever break again, don’t hesitate to call us for the emergency artist, who will probably get there days before the National Guard and the health services. Unless the trailer is out of the country at the Sao Paolo biennial. In which case, revert to what you did last time.

IN PART FOUR: some closing thoughts on potential new disaster art possibilities. To China and Myanmar and beyond.

Let’s imagine you got out of your ground floor when that cold mass of water swept in, and your piano is under water, and your porcelain geegaws are circling your living room in a whirlpool of chintz. Let’s imagine you didn’t die in that first impact; that you weren’t one of the poor souls who died in their favorite armchair, or were in the basement looking for tools when the floodwaters trapped you in down there. Let’s imagine you made it up onto the roof, and sat though that long night, peering into the dark to see whether the neighbors made it too.

Let’s imagine you baked on the roof for two hot post-storm days, waiting for help that didn’t come. There were no CGI Michael Bay helicopters with lean SEALS rappelling down either side, handing out bottled water and hugs; no fleet of Coast Guard launches; maybe one guy in a dory five blocks away, getting the hell out of dodge. Finally, as some of the waters abated, you dragged your wife by the hand and helped her down the drainpipe; gingerly immersing yourself up to your nipples in a murky cocktail of sewage, gasoline and already decomposing German Shepherds and grandmothers.

Let’s imagine you wandered to some higher ground without something in the water brushing against your leg, sending you insane and babbling before your partner could drag you up to the roadside. Let’s imagine you joined a steady exodus of other survivors, silently carrying old folks, dragging their children; gaining height on the freeway, looking back over where you came from and seeing that the floodwaters had taken over everything.

Let’s imagine you reached the Superdome and there was no National Guard and no evident plan for you and the other 30,000 people who had travelled there; or the 20,000 others at the Convention Center. So you went through those desperate days of the injured dying quietly, your kids sobbing quietly, people defecating quietly and ashamed in whatever access corridors they could find. When help arrived you were put on a bus and taken out of the city with no explanation of where you were going. No officials told you anything.

Let’s imagine months later, after sleeping in gymnasiums or on people’s sofas, eating whatever was put in front of you, that you and yours were allowed to return to New Orleans; that you weren’t one of the families who felt that there was nothing left to go back for. So you wander down the old block (the waters have subsided now but the stench remains) and the disaster actually looks worse; like the morning-after of some gigantic cosmic frat-party. Everything smashed, water-warped, stinking. And there’s what’s left of your house, with somebody else’s car upside down on your lawn. There’s a number painted outside on your porch that indicates somebody is still dead inside.

Let’s imagine you don’t simply run back to Texas and that you decide to build a new life. So you begin to file papers with FEMA and the Lousiana Recovery Authority and wait for the massive aid effort that must surely come. You wait for months, through, snowed under a blizzard of bureaucratic delays, federal regulations and loopholes of Kafkaesque proportions (for regular insights into these ongoing absurdities check out Harry Shearer’s weekly Le Show podcast), with no end in sight. You live in a trailer, cooking little because you lack the basic facilities (although you hear that FEMA has a massive warehouse of kitchen utensils, but they can’t get it to you and it’s costing them too much to store so they move it to another agency out of state. This parallels an earlier phenomenon when FEMA let a warehouse of emergency ice go bad, and has since announced it won’t be delivering ice in the event of any future disasters…).

Frustrated, you try to take out a bank loan to make some initial repairs to make your house at least partially habitable again; and FEMA tells you that by doing so you’ll invalidate any future reparations by acting too soon. Just after that you find out that the trailer you’re living in - provided by FEMA - has been exposing you to toxic formaldehyde. By now, the national media has long since migrated on to other newsworthy topics, apart from the occasional spike of interest when Brad Pitt visits his sustainable architecture project in the Ninth Ward. The news cameras are currently being pointed to the Mississippi River flooding in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri, to record pictures of human suffering that is a little more visceral than your own drawn-out fatigue and despair. You are still waiting notification of how your life will get back on track within any finite sense.

By this November, when Mr Villinski’s Emergency Response Studio opens, it will be months after the third anniversary of Hurrican Katrina. So there you are, walking down the street, and you become “visually engaged” (sic) by this weird customized trailer and ask what it’s about. And the artist, overjoyed to have the opportunity to connect with a local subject of his meisterwerk, peels himself away from a cadre of recently inbound New York art dealers hovering over tubs of (non-FEMA-delivered) iced shrimp, and explains to you that it’s a way of embedding artists into disaster areas. So they can, maybe - if the artist grooves on your tale - tell your story. Maybe do a painting, or a video interview, or a bust crafted in the mud of Lake Pontchartrain. Because Mr. Villinski is here to help.

Now - not that we can imagine your response (because we can’t imagine it, remember?) - but… what do we imagine your response will be?

IN PART THREE: Voodoo economics and trickle down.

I am a pretty worthless human being who does not invest much into… well, anything, any more. There comes a time in your life, especially in your mid-forties, when the endless array of CGI reboots, flashes of starlet beaver, and new neocon absurdities into yet more dusty Arab countries, fails to provide the necessary CPR jolt to a jaded palate. Outrage becomes increasingly hard. Hope more so. Perspective most of all. It’s all just a big muckety-muck of stuff anyway, right? If there is a God then he’s probably a French philosopher: colliding fabulosities with mundanities, with an infinite number of footnotes written in twenty-meter high rock letters spiraling into a black hole. Who gives a shit?

Then once in a while something comes along, something so fabulously inappropriate and inept - not something intrinsically worthless like, say, a cable show about bounty hunters; but - even better - something that marshals qualities of imagination, sensitivity and planning (it’s always brilliant when intelligent people do really dumb shit) - that the sheer monumental lameness of the exercise restarts my dull ancient heart. It makes me want to care again, if only to lurch up into a crowd - any crowd - and give vent to a righteous slack-jawed bemusement.

So let’s hear it for modern art for sticking the electrical pads on my chest, once again (dear old modern art!), and shouting “Clear!” Let’s hear it for politically-engaged conceptual art for creating the equivalent of colonic irrigation for my brain pan with fine artist (and what a “fine” artist he must be) Paul Villinski’s contribution to the upcoming biennial Prospect.1 New Orleans this November: a series of artistic incursions into the still-traumatized heart of the post-Katrina Gulf Coast community.

As an exercise, Prospect 1 is certainly less cynical than the government’s response (erm… “d-uh!”): a series of site-specific works by 80 artists that will be assembled to reinvigorate the local economy by injecting cultural activity into the galleries and streets, a classic example of creative professionals rallying around a cause to help as best they can. According to the press release:

“Paul Villinski’s artwork transforms discarded, “worthless” materials into objects of new meaning and beauty. For Prospect.1 New Orleans, he has created the Emergency Response Studio, a repurposed thirty-foot FEMA trailer, like those deployed to the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, transformed from a generally depressing symbol into a visually engaging, solar and wind-powered mobile artist’s studio. The structure can be used in post-disaster sites to house displaced or visiting artists, enabling them to immerse themselves and chronicle unfolding events through their art.”

But let’s think, for a minute - all press release generic artworld gobbledegook aside - who this art must be meant for; because surely the overarching intent must be to honor, in some potent way, the real, visceral, experiences of the dispossessed and bereaved? To make an effort of particular resonance for, and to, the inhabitants of New Orleans, as part of a grass roots revival of culture and commitment that reflect the unique way this very city built its own incredibly vibrant identity from the ground up in the first place (and let’s also let it go that, in any real historical perspective, the visual arts is the idiot cousin at this particular party…)? Anything else would just be grotesque dilletantism, wouldn’t it? Not that any of the worthy personnel involved means any disrespect - these are compassionate liberals, after all - just that the magnitude of the venture must demand protean levels of sensitivity. Are they up to it?

This couldn’t be just - perish the thought - for the… visitors? Could it?

Well… let’s imagine that it’s not for the visitors (because most us can’t possibly know what so many people went through during the Katrina disaster, so we only have imagination to fall back on. And the truth is that most of us, in the absence of first-hand experience, can’t even imagine it either, because or imagination is a tiny and superficial frail thing when measured against the realities of those days. We don’t have either the vocabulary, or the right, so I’m just going to have to pretend to approximate, okay?).

So let’s imagine this: that Mr. Villinski and the biennial organizers have created “Emergency Response Studio” for the indigents. After the fact, so to speak…

Let’s imagine - as an indigent - that you were sat in your home with your kids asleep upstairs, with one eye on the news reports and the other on your husband in the yard outside, and he’s working on the car to make sure it can start pretty quick if he can borrow some plugs and get that ornery mutha going. Let’s imagine you’re old and tired and already pretty scared by the time your children, gaunt, multi-tasking, pull on extra sweatshirts whilst dragging the radio upstairs behind them as they rush you up into the attic. Let’s imagine you’re a child sat on a roof, and in the distance you see a strange dark mass of black water breach the levee, and your young soft-boned funky and recently-learned understanding of physics goes out the window, and the sound of the water as it demolishes the house nearest the levee doesn’t synch up with the image of it disintegrating ‘cos there’s a delay and your ears are cold and your fuzzy eyes aren’t working proper, obviously…

IN PART TWO: what happens when you survive the flood and they won’t let you in to the art opening because you’re not from Stuttgart or can’t prove you write for Frieze magazine.

When I was a kid, living in England, I was transfixed by a series of occasional television programs presented by Northern Irish historian and “TV personality” James Burke. A man possessed of immense charm and authority, he nevertheless resembled - with his outsize spectacles and semi-afro – the quintessential idea of a slightly sexed-up egghead: a balding owl in a safari suit whose remaining follicles had been animated via massive doses of raw electricity. Burke’s mission in the mid-‘70s - back when there were three whole channels of “content” available to the public - was to illustrate basic scientific principles to the masses, in a series of illustrative demonstrations, via the communal wonder of the boob tube.

This was “educational programming” back when the British Broadcasting Corporation justified the importing of television sets into the family home because it was possible to still use this amazing new invention to hopefully enlighten and improve the increasingly threadbare weave of British society; rather than just surrender to a proletarian fascination with fat white men telling “paki” and “chink” jokes, or seeing women with rocket tits speak in exquisite double entendres on sit coms (“Well, Bob, I did let the milkman leave some cream in my back passage, but I’ll be buggered if that’s anything to do with the neighbors!”).

The James Burke Special was a large wooden beam pushed into the gate lock that kept out the Vandals, an exquisite escape into a cerebral world. With his magnets and his bakelite dials, and the way he pulled eager volunteers – the women all hoop earrings, burgundy mini-skirts and white knee-stockings, the men all beards and corduroy pants - out from a TV audience to take part in psych tests to demonstrate how bovine they still were, despite their middle-class aspirations, and how clever he was, he made science almost sexy even to a teenager like me; who consistently failed in Math and was disqualified from the Chem exam for snoring…

Burke’s opus was Connections in 1978: a 10-part series that explored the interconnectedness of inventions in a non-linear manner, across time and oceans, which substituted the dry linear empiricism of British, self-contained, historical rote with imaginative leaps that linked isolated events across countries and cultures to drive technological innovation (containing such brilliant phrases as: “A few words on the subject of ripples.”). It produced in me (and for once I mean this sincerely) that first burgeoning sense that the world was global, rather than just Great Britain’s greatest bloody hits: inculcating in me the premonition that the world didn’t end, pointing outwards, at the ancient cannons that lined the military seaport town of Portsmouth that I lived in; but that what happened in Europe and Asia was also part of a much larger tapestry that affected us all. As a philosophy, it atomized the idea of received knowledge: be it in colonialism, or religion, or anything in a text book, at a time when I was distinctly open to new stuff; especially when Malcolm and Viv had already started their own cultural experiment 80 miles north up on the King’s Road in London.

The first episode opened when Burke pointed to the camera - literally to “me” – and asked what would happen if everything suddenly stopped working? He asked me this when he was stood in an elevator that had ground to a halt in darkness, and the joy on his face, lit eerily by a lighter, was evident as he gently led me to the conclusion that - other than hitting the emergency button repeatedly and working out by deduction that I should only use one of the four corners to shit in - there was little “I” would be able to do to save myself. The rest of the program extrapolated out from this fundamental point; with various miracles saving me (”So you get out the city and find a farm.”) only for my chances to be cruelly dashed again (”Do you know how to sow food?).

At that second the idea of my 16 year-old dependency on others became utterly apparent. Even if some noble elevator worker turned up to free me, before expiring like a bit-part actor in a M.Night Shyamalan movie, my obvious lack of world skills (other than knowing that the Hulk was Stronger than the Thing, that the sci-fi monthly Heavy Metal magazine had paintings of tits and bush in it, and that 12-inch record vinyl wipe cloths actually felt pretty good cupped around one’s balls… especially when reading an issue of Heavy Metal) would soon doom me to about three days of snack munching before I expired, trying to catch drinkable piss in a kinetic sculpture swinging disconsolately as a grim wind blew through the deserted town square.

James Burke was the man. He told me, in essence, that the elevator was my mindset; and that if I continued to live in it and didn’t throw off its hydraulic shackles I was doomed; that if I didn’t immediately set out for some small island off the west coast of Scotland and build my own wind-powered yurt from scratch, sow my own beans in the rich fertile loam, learn about how levers really truly worked without Cliff Notes, that I was destined for a life of reliance on scientists, corporations, governments and whomever else stood in the path of my own self-determinism.

Which… seemed like too much work, truth to tell, at the time. So I promptly forgot about James Burke and his TV programs. If he was right - and rapid accumulations of scientific progress further isolated, like a blinking strobe light, the largest percentages of society from how they could control or understand one goddamned simple device in front of them, - better to surrender and glide back into the monkey mass and at least have sex for the first time before the Burke Apocalypse. Better to become a narcotized drone gagger for all the confections and distractions that mass culture could throw down my virgin little esophagus. If I was going to die of ignorance, then maybe I should just be really really… ignorant.

So poor old James went the way of The Wombles, Sir Kenneth Clarke’s Civilization and six-pleat Birmingham Bag trousers.

Until today; when I activated my latest iTunes update and my wheel of death twirled in a mandala of frustration, for over three hours, as my software duplicated and rebuilt itself and imported, from some unknown source, an extra three gigabytes of songs that were not only not mine, but crashed my hard drive as they colonized my remaining computer memory.

Where were these phantom tracks coming from? A rogue wi-fi that had developed artifical intelligence? Space? Some zipless fuck Bluetooth thang, long forgotten once the sun had wheeled over the coffee shop and life had moved on? Were these bands who had died, somehow, on Buddy Holly Airlines, maybe, or Hendrix Canapes Inc., and some roadie with a penchant for mescal tea and ouija boards had summoned them back from the afterlife to haunt the corners of the iTunes store? I hadn’t the slightest clue, as I watched, helpless, as my hard drive was gang-banged like a C-actress in a Death Wish film.

As I hit COMMAND ALT ESC repeatedly in variations, like a freeform Jazz pianist on a Quaalude rush, it occurred to me that - as unknown recording artists such as Cake, At The Drive In and Sunny Day Real Estate downloaded themselves without even a by-my-leave, mashing it up with my beloved Thomas Dolby, Tarkan and Bernard Herrmann’s Mysterious Island soundtrack - my callow rejection of James Burke’s prophecy had simply proved his thesis: that - thirty years later, with all the new developments since then - not only hadn’t I found a car with gas and got out of the city, not only hadn’t I found a farm and learned how to milk a bull, or the fundamental differences between AC and DC electrical currents; now I also don’t know what a router actually does. Why a USB transfer isn’t as efficient as one of those other ones with the weird rectangular socket with the little triangle bit. Why UNIX is also a European yogurt.

I was back in the elevator. With James Burke.

He was really big about it, though. “Don’t worry, mate,” he said, asking me to hold his bic lighter so he could scramble away up the escape shaft and found a new empire on Jura island, “it’s not just you. It’s everyone. Nobody can do a thing without calling an 1-800 number any more. Listen: what’s the one thing you know will always happen at a technology conference?”

My hand shook - casting a pale light around the metal tomb - and I struggled for an answer. “That… the projector won’t work? And that the guest speaker crouches under the media console fiddling with cable junctions like he’s a Republican told to find a lady’s G-spot, desperate for the technician to come save him?”

James Burke smiled, nodded, and then he was gone; the suggestion of his smirk hovering for a second in the air before the lighter ran out and darkness reigned.

I accessed Cake on my iPod, and prowled the elevator; trying to decide which corner I was going to have to defecate in.