Paint and Politics

By Robert Wittig

3:30 p.m. 6/30/02

The oil paint came first, in old second hand tubes, some found in the trash, others given me by a friend, saved for twenty years, from his student days at university. Some came from a sale ... another painter, selling off her 'student grade' paints ... big, huge, greasy tubes, with more filler than pigment, but paint none-the-less.

The pieces of canvas came next, bits and scraps ... leftovers, roll ends, cutoffs, all small pieces, 9 by 12 inches, and some, a few inches larger, but not much, stapled to stretchers made from small scraps of wood. Scraps all ... wood, canvas, paint. In 1998, I used about half of these small canvases, and then became bored with the tiny format, and abandoned the remaining 11 of them, in a dark corner of my basement, where they remained until June 2002, when paint and politics finally met, on a few small, dirty pieces of rag, stretched on wooden underframes.

The writing ... here ... came after the fact, and is incidental to the meeting of paint and politics.

CarBomb

'CarBomb' was the first one to appear. I had just finished painting a little still life of an electrical insulator that I had found in the alley ... using up all these little pieces of canvas, rather than throwing them away. (Also, it occurred to me that they would fit nicely in Priority Mail boxes ... if I sold them on eBay.) The electric insulator was about the size and shape of a hand grenade. After playing around with it for a while like a kid (really I am a kid, under the gray hair), pretending to pull the pin and lob it, all of the crap I have been seeing on TV kicked in ... terrorists, car and truck bombs, suicide bombers, and voila, the notion of painting a car with a grenade pin sticking stupidly out of the top occurred to me ... half serious, and half tongue-in-cheek, dark humour.

LetterBomb

The next painting was 'LetterBomb', with its nifty grenade pin protruding from the top ... essentially a more crude, rude, insulting rendition of 'CarBomb', spelling out the players, in blunt, ugly, deliberately misspelled words ... ideas apprehended on the evening TV news, the Internet, the New York Times ... the Anthrax letters meet the Taliban, meet the Palestinian suicide bombers, meeting the new emerging American consciousness, head on, at 90 miles per hour.

Islam-i-Bomb

The next painting was Islam-i-Bomb ... the symbol of Islam itself, with yet another stupid grenade pin protruding from it ... pull the pin, and see a major religion self-destruct, possibly taking the entire planet with it ... no more pretense left, to be stripped away from the core meaning.

It's a sad thing to see, that this is what I have to say in paint about a religion that is embraced by around one third of the human beings on the planet, but I sat in front of my easel, and that is what came out. I cannot help but wonder, how many other people there are, who would never say such things in words, but who might paint such things, if they were inclined to paint. I'm not going to write a long anti-Muslim diatribe here, that is not the point. The point is, that when the paint hits the canvas, my emotions, and parts of my brain that are not engaged in language, and reason, are allowed to speak ... and this is what comes out.

I'm glad I'm not a Muslim.

I think that their religion is being equated in the minds of most non-Muslims, the world 'round, with terrorism, car bombs, suicide bombers, airplane hijacking, misogyny, religious bigotry, irresponsible reproductive practices, and an extreme degree of religious arrogance ... so extreme that many Muslims, if not most, are ready and willing to engage in the indiscriminate use of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, in God's name.

Of course, this is only my opinion. Maybe I'm wrong.

The world will have to speak for itself.

Enrot

My next painting, 'Enrot', shifted gears completely, focusing on the ethical vacuum that exists in the American corporate culture. Just what we needed ... a new word to describe the sickness of corporate greed ... thank you, Kenny Lay.

So much for the U.S.A., being able to claim any sort of moral high ground ... On the one hand, Islam provides us with an example of just how destructive religion can be, when carried to insane extremes, and on the other hand, U.S. corporate culture handily demonstrates just how destructive the non-religious greed impulse can be. To my way of thinking, these two groups have more in common than they would like to admit ... both are consumed with issues of power, and control, and little else. Both groups think that they are better than the 'rest of us' ... the Infidels.

ShadowLiar

My last political painting for the month, 'ShadowLiar', must have been a good place to stop, as far as my brain was concerned, because after that painting, my work veered back into non-political mode.

I'm not 100% sure how this painting ties this group of five together, but I think that that is what it attempts to do. My brain only gives me insights into my actions on a need-to-know basis, and here, I must not need to know.

I think that liars are, by definition, afraid. I think that extremists, whether they are religious fanatics, or hyper-greedy business people, or power hungry politicians, are by definition, either conscious liars, or people so sick with their own shit, that their lying has become pathological.

I don't think that either Allah, or a mountain of money, will dissolve the liar's shadow, which is the shadow of fear.

In order for that to happen, we will have to stop lying.