Selected PHOTOGRAPHY & FILM INSTALLATION
The Promise of Happiness: Stranded Images from the Age of Revolution
4-screen Moving Image installation. 16mm, Film, Analog Video, Digital Video. Southern Exposure Gallery, San Francisco, CA. 2016
Click here for Installation Documentation Video
The unearthing of the 30 year old film I made during the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua becomes an occasion to think about a range of revolutionary struggles that shaped the second half of the 20th century, as well as to explore how these revolutions – especially the Soviet, Cuban, Vietnamese and Nicaraguan struggles -- shaped my own politics and aesthetics. As these revolutions pass out of the present and transform into “history,” the many visual records and accounts of these events begin to unravel and lose their context. But yet, the images remain. Now as free floating signifiers whose meanings are more often determined by the experience of the viewer than the maker. What is the fate of such film and photographic images as they move through time? As we begin to see the images as Images, we begin to understand how inextricably intertwined the history of modern revolutionary movements are with the history of film and photography, media whose origins, like Socialist Revolution are also inextricably linked with the utopian impulses of modernist social transformation.
What happens to those joyful, sometimes triumphant, images when those revolutions are destroyed or disappoint? Do they, in turn, become images of failure? What is to become of such images as their meanings become unmoored by the shifting currents of history? Stranded objects is a term used by Eric L. Santner to describe “the labor of recollecting a cultural inheritance fragmented and poisoned by an unspeakable horror.” The question for me is, how do such “stranded objects” become part of a historical narrative that helps transform the present? Or has this history and its artifacts become so much cultural baggage, exhausted, now merely nostalgic impediments to our critical rethinking of the past and original reimagining of the future?
Within this installation, the medium is not only the message, it is history itself. Not just image documents of past struggles, this piece is also an archeology of Cinema, exploring the different ways filmed images have shaped our ideas of revolution—their color, texture, resolution. Their flickering light!
Here I return to my own 1986 film Nicaragua: Hear-Say/See-Here, filmed during the Contra War in Nicaragua in 16mm film, as well as to my more recent digital video The Promise of Happiness Pt #1 Vietnam, shot in Vietnam from 2001-2005. I place these visual accounts in the context of a range of film and video newsreels and other archival materials that documented the Vietnamese and Nicaraguan struggles and their victories. These images are further contextualized by an even earlier moment of film history—that of the Soviet Revolution, in images from the landmark film Earth (Zemlya), (1930) by the Ukrainian director Alexander Dovzhenko. All of these indelible images, placed in relation to one another, become revolutionary narrative exploded! We move among and between these images and geographies, gleaning, often by chance, relationships and contexts and emotions that are as fluid and ephemeral as History itself.
Mother (after Bellini)
Digital video, 32, individual ink jet Photographs on paper. 2014. 24'x 4'. Worth-Ryder Gallery, Berkeley 2014
In 2014, I created a 24’x16’ photographic installation: Mother (after Bellini) consisting of 32 16”x16” individual portraits of Sybrina Fulton mother of Trayvon Martin, Lesley McSpadden mother of Michael Brown, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva mother of Dzhokhar Tsanaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and Shirley Sotloff, the mother of journalist Steven Sotloff. The piece explores the image of the Mother in contemporary media. These portraits made from video frame grabs of interviews of four mothers of young men killed in highly publicized recent violent events, as they themselves, became media events. Their relationships and parenting were scrutinized as a way to explain the actions of their sons. The photo series ask us to explore the image of the Mother as at once archetypal and contemporary. The installation, raises the specter of the history of western representation, and its archetypal narratives of the Mother as the giver of life, the nurturer, the shaper of her children and their future on the one hand, and the Mother who devours, seduces, and poisons, on the other. The Mother is one who is at once innocent and duplicitous. The Mother’s joy and her suffering, her pain form a maternal archetype that is at once misogynist and adulatory; from the earliest paintings and sculptures of the Pieta and the Madonna with child, to today’s sensationalist 24 hour news cycle, such tropes of the mother are used to explain, exploit, sensationalize both the victims and perpetrators of acts of male violence.
The Exquisite Corpse of the Unknown Veteran
The Exquisite Corpse of Tomas Young
Drawn by Jeffrey Skoller, A. Laurie Palmer and Asma Kazmi
San Francisco Art Commission, San Francisco, CA. 2016 - 2017
Tomas Young, Specialist (SPC/E-4) (November 30, 1979 – November 10, 2014) was an Army veteran of the Iraq War. At 22, four days after the 9/11 attacks, Young joined the Army thinking he would be sent to Afghanistan to bring Al-Qaida to justice. He was instead sent to Iraq, and within five days of deployment Young was shot in the spine and paralyzed from the chest down. Gravely wounded, Young returned to the US and became one of the first veterans to speak out publicly against the war and a leading voice in the American anti-war movement. Despite constant pain from his injuries he travelled extensively until his death, speaking out about the betrayal of US veterans and the American people by Bush administration, which lied about the reasons for the invasion of Iraq. Young was the embodiment of the way the direct experience of war can transform consciousness and personal politics. He went from entering the Army as young man uncritically believing the President’s rationale for the Iraq invasion to understanding how he and other young soldiers were manipulated, lied to, and used as fodder for the economic and political ambitions of the US corporate state. The letter he wrote shortly before his death, “My Last Words to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney," articulates this beautifully. I think it is one the great pieces of anti-war literature and should be read by all young people thinking of joining the military.—Jeffrey Skoller
A Message to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney From a Dying Veteran From: Tomas Young
"I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries...I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all--the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.
I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because...I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans--my fellow veterans--whose future you stole.
Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago...you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.
I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks... I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to "liberate" Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called "democracy" in Baghdad and the Middle East...I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history...I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11...We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn't lying a sin? Isn't murder a sin? Aren't theft and selfish ambition sins?...
My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness."
Recently Rediscovered! SERGEI EISENSTEIN'S CAPITAL: Now Streaming!
