Nick+Connection+4

The Ten Commandments, by Arthello Beck, is a painting of a black Moses holding the said biblical documents. Moses himself was a seducer, a prophet of a tribe the first painting I chose is called The Seducer by Arshile Gorky and it’s frankly an odd painting. What does it mean? I have no idea but I liked it and it drew me to the idea of how America is often seduced by what it doesn’t understand at some level. In our history, countless times, when faced with odd belief systems, enemy styles of government, different cultures, we have responded with a sick kind of leering that degenerates either into xenophobia and possibly violent reaction or inclusion through osmosis. Whenever the osmosis takes place, we dilute the strange in society. The quote from the Grapes of Wrath is about the newfound philosophy of Jim Casy that oozes its way into the Joad family’s ideals. In this case, Casy himself is seducing them with an outwardly odd idea that is incredibly attractive given the circumstances and this. More importantly, in the context of my other choices on that second page, Moses was leading a people out of their past into their manifest destiny. In short, Moses represents a figure who tackled that same issue of overcoming the burdensome past. As I wrote about in my final paper, our nation has a preoccupation with fleeing history. Gatsby is consumed by it, Sethe in Beloved struggles with it, and Tim O’Brien in The Things They Carried fights with it as well. Moses is then a messianic figure, a Casy, a man to wrap your flag around. This got me to thinking then about the cataclysmic nature of our media. Catastrophe seems to hang off every moment, preying on how overwhelmed we are in modern life. These “messianic” figures, political figureheads, media personalities, they lead us like lemmings over the cliff whenever something seemingly awful occurs. Swine flu comes to mind. But it is when truly atrocious things occur that the evils of this perpetuation happen. This is why I chose Flood 2 by Joy Garnett. With 9/11, we had a situation in which we collectively went along with a public “leader’s” decision to wage a war against an idea. This bears some similarity to the national scramble in the face of the Great Depression where war was waged against unemployment and hard times. Sadly, this war led to stories very similar to the Joads’. War in Afghanistan and Iraq is a present day reality we have to face while we have done our best to distance ourselves from past wars such as Vietnam and their miserable consequences. Cataclysm, or at least its appearance, seems endemic to our own culture. If this culture shock could lead us to a war, what do we have to look forward to? What are we afraid of going forward with these kinds of decisions? This brought me to my last painting, Rome 5071 by Vincent Pepi. I have no idea what is going on in this painting yet this very lack of knowledge presents an almost paranoid fear. It’s as if I’m afraid to make up my mind about what it means because I’ll have to reflect on it and live with that self-conception. Coming out of disaster, our largest fear is not knowing or understanding. Ultimately, the fact that we are our own worst enemy is one of the scariest things to conceive. The scattershot quality of this painting, supposed to evoke subconscious responses with an abstract organization, leads me to try and confront this fear in physical form.