BEHIND THE SCENES:
WITH POET/CURATOR RICHARD MILAZZO
REVISITING OBSZINE #3

PART I

In 2017, Richard Milazzo writes in his opening lines of OBSzine3:

“I would like to address two extreme forms of pathos as they relate to communication: those who simply lie politically, that is, within the specific bounds of the polis, which we may describe as a pathetic and shameless act; and those who are the pathetic victims of exploitation (no matter how heartless this description may sound in this particular instantiation), and, as a consequence, feel and are, to varying extents, voiceless, disenfranchised, helpless.”

From my office in Paris, I have tried to share my efforts at making sense of the world with you. Either through the lens of the people I work with in our International Agency JSVCprojects, or via others who seem to jump off my bookshelves into posts at the end of any given week, called, A Walk in My Library, in other words, the public and private face of this moment.

Haven’t planned this other than making lists each week of things that catch my breath, or stop me in my tracks, never have I traveled so little and wanted to share so much. All bets are off. Everything is different. This suspension of time feels like floating in space without gravity some days, barefoot against a wooden parquet.

January surprised me. Didn’t think there was anything left to shock my system. Destroying moral conventions all used up. Thought Evil was floating around in clouds, political evil, propaganda, outright lies, propelled like hand grenades. If we could only get to the Inauguration without anyone getting shot, then came January 6.

Feels like 9/11 or the July day in 2005 when London blew up in four locations over ten minutes. Edgeware Road by LISSON a target. I was on the Piccadilly Line early that morning behind the train that blew up. The world changes, you change, we change, every one changes, ripples from a stone hitting calm pond water. I am not the writer I was on January 5. My brain recalibrates. I see Leni Riefenstahl movies (Fox news of its day) in mind, and stutter because I wonder how such lies spin into golden fleece like the run up to WWII. Well, here’s how, you all, in our life times like genocide in Bosnia, people do horrible unspeakable things to each other, people watch silently complicit. Even reaping the benefits.

Part II

I listened to Samantha Powers and before her to Richard Holbrooke trying to understand how evil smolders and then flames. Read Hannah Arendt to try to let my nervous system understand evil’s mundane daily life. The past four years have taken their toll; we see this now. The reaction in a country where racial prejudice floods the land below its surface; I would tell my fellow Europeans now having lived on this side for twenty-five years, I still explain.

At least Obama wasn’t shot, this is the backlash. How fragile everything is around us, our bodies against an unseen virus, and our body politic against this same kind of enemy. As if the earth has been cracked open and all the smoky devils in Disney cartoons spill out of the center taking aim at everything and everyone. Changing up and down; right and wrong; black and white; truth and lies into one big milkshake of sludge, a dark slimy substance pulsing up in people as they take to the streets with impunity.

Before 6 January I planned to shout-out Richard Milazzo for the brilliant on line magazine he published three years ago now with a call to arms from several dozen artists he knows over the years. Of this crew we have a community of people who knew each other in the New York art world of the 80’s. We were young together. I was among them, a writer, journalist and gallery Director at John Gibson Gallery 568 Broadway. I thought naively it would be a good way to talk about the past; what was different about the art world in the 80’s for those of us who were still alive to reflect. I also wanted to speak about colleagues and dear friends, like James and Alexandra Brown who died last year unexpectedly, before Covid. This seems like a very long time ago now. Suddenly there is much more at stake.

Part III

We cannot afford to be voiceless, disenfranchised, helpless. The artists in this publication are standing up as they did in the 80’s for a civic voice of truth to power and it has remained a deep resolve in their works and writings. For this compendium of sanity I thank Richard and all my fellow contributors with whom I was deeply honored to publish. We share this now because it is even more important than when it was first published.

The reason I wanted to do this shout-out was because in December I was feeling perhaps we had survived the worst. Perhaps we could let our collective guard down, perhaps we would manage to have a transition of power that was normal. With this optimism I wanted to salute Richard Milazzo for taking on the issue of the BIG LIE, like a gentleman poet, publisher, curator that he is. Letting art speak to power, as we are sick to our collective stomachs. Artists and writers together on Pathos of Communication. Then suddenly, I wake up and we were in a tragedy of enormous proportion. A Greek Drama in real time is news. The devil incites followers to violence on television. We watch this on cable news in Paris in real time. They want to hang the Speaker of the House, they believe THE BIG LIE that the election is stolen and the Vice President can negate the election.

Part IV

You must be kidding I shake my head. Then realize it is a lie bigger than any truth can ever be, seventy million people believe this BIG LIE and voted to re-elect the man. In 1938, remember forty four million people voted for a man who destroyed Germany and Europe in World War II. Millions were killed because of his big fat lies. He had a whole department of Big Lies.

Richard Milazzo calls us to resistance. It is our responsibility to resist tyranny and lies in whatever way we can, as artists, and writers, bear witness and resist.

“We need not belabor the former, because we know and they know who they are, since they are front and center on the political stage both the Right and Left Wings (of a governmental beast – David Hume described it as a Leviathan – that can hardly crawl much less fly or get off the ground any longer),” and/or Republican and Democratic Parties, who prevaricate covertly behind closed doors and inside backrooms, and, of course, the 70-year old toddler who is currently waxing triumphant as oligarchical leader of the United States, even as he recklessly and blindly dares Impeachment (a futile act of justice if not ending in conviction). I will not mention his name, because in fact, this is all he is interested in; advancing his name and the massive fortunes he and it as a brand hope they will amass misusing the platform of public service, which he is exploiting to the hilt, grossly and grotesquely violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution.”

Part V

So knowing what we know, that good people are not on both sides, and there are those carrying guns into Congress, spouting conspiracy theories, threatening people who disagree with them. It is going to get worse; we all are afraid of this.

“For there is nothing pathetically deformed or bankrupt about a pathos-driven voice that would forge itself into an act of resistance. What is important to understand clearly here is the content of this drive, not only as it was given to us (etymologically) by the ancient Greeks but by our seemingly inherent (if not innate) impulses to be civilized, which reflects nothing more and nothing less than the desire to become human, or commendably so, more human, even where we may view this merely (suspiciously) as a psychological or purely social construction (constructive and constructed motive or motor).”

Richard asked us to contribute within this quagmire of a dilemma after writing his introductory text in May 2017 from an Austrian hotel room overlooking Lake Attersee. A place familiar with the thumping drumbeat of history relentlessly bearing down on its borders, tearing its society into shreds, spewing its own conspiracy theories across bloody streets and alleys so history might benefit. It has given us music, poetry, art, and we are all challenged even now three years later. My goal to share elements from this magazine of witness, a compilation of sensibilities and longing, noteworthy affronts, jarring misconstrued aesthetic twists and turns; look at the ones who live on another day to bear witness.