Boom

ARTnews June 2012 has an article by Barbara Pollock called "Under Destruction." The subheading reads: "Playing on the pervasiveness of images of destruction and devastation in the news and in Hollywood movies, artists are making works that range from violent to chillingly disquieting." I've been watching trailers for the new Batman movie all week. Bridges dropping into water, football fields on fire. Sometimes things line up.

I see a lot of movies, and movies are full of explosions, now more than ever. I don't know what they burn to get the plumes so fat and curling: fuel, wood, feathers, gas. (I ran out of white dove feathers to soak up the hot piss that comes from your mouth every time you address me. -- Fiona Apple, "Regret") Whatever they burn, it isn't missed. An explosion on film is clean and makes a finishing sound. It removes something while raising a sign of the removal, saying, look at how gone this is. People make tons of money off it, and some of that money is mine, though it is getting harder for me to watch things burn on screen. I recognize that the feeling I get when I watch an explosion is the same feeling I get when I put a huge glob of paint on a surface and spread it to the edges. If I didn't believe so strongly in the abhorrence of capital punishment, I might feel the same way when I read about an execution. A narrowing of options. I can add more paint, I can wipe it off, I can do all kinds of things, but I am no longer building something with pieces, balancing. The hand that smears the paint, which is an extension of the gut, is tired of balancing and confused about alignments and ready to fill a part of the sky. Or the whole sky, if you are seeing it from the ground. 

It is a response to frustration and loss of control -- if we can' t follow the narrative, we end it. There aren't many professions that let a person do this, but painting is one of them. The direct gesture seems to need no translation. A motion made in painting could be the same as a motion made in basketball, or in braiding hair, or in running away from something dangerous. When I fill a surface with paint in order to destroy it/make something new, It feels like an act of utility, not art. But when I see explosions in movies I feel both this act of utility (relief, completion) and a sense of shame (waste, resignation). Yes all the people in the building are dead but now we can walk away. Watching a bomb when removed from it is the experience of an image, a very expensive image that is crafted to make us feel something in our stomachs. The people who make these images want that feeling to go unexamined. Image making in painting is also about the stomach. I want to listen to my body when I paint. I want to know what it means when my body says blow it up.

Katelyn Eichwald, Untitled, 2012. Oil on paper, 8.5" x 11"