I speak of and shoot pollution, mostly beyond the terrible neurological and pulmonary health risks, as if my real concern is keeping my mind, soul and principles unsullied, even while experiencing the very negative health consequences of working with and around chemicals. Perhaps certain things can’t be helped since they are real.
Today’s adulterant, far beyond post-mod copying, or the old deconstruction, are newer evolved versions, identity politics, activism and selfie-art. The right wing, having been schooled, and placing themselves within their media and art, are definitely squares, but it still catches on, particularly with other squares, encompassing faith-based facts, alternative facts, and misinformation, the current poison running through our media platforms, and it is this media business of big money, that, for years, has poured gas on differences that made division and polarization and even hatred, the result of making both culture and information a war, all while selling products to produce profits as the purpose less seen.
What some folks have done is make white culture and people into their own identity politics. The logic of cultural equality, when whites band together for their cause. And so it goes with concepts which, free-floating, run the gamut for anyone’s use. Sometimes concepts are enriching, or, more like gossip, and, in its worse form, poison. They do not consider the thing in itself, and its methods are up for grabs.
There’s a billionaire’s museum in Montana that recognizes the existence of dinosaurs, of course, as part of the Biblical creation story, not evolution.
Extreme right performance artists, entertainers and media stars tear down, and, reconstructing realities of their own, and coopting and flipping the old left-leaning phrases like, alternative, as their own. Trump holding a bible or his return to the White House after hospitalization in a Mussolinian photo-op, has “blurred the lines” between fiction and reality, if not better than any famed artist has done, certainly with more monumental staging and available funds.
Rightist misinformation performance art has been a real trip, but no more tripped out than the art world that prides itself on being all trump ain’t. But liars, phonies, transactional existence under a guise of friends, valuations, money and ambitions could be art stars and real estate moguls. In real estate the jackpot is the sudden overvaluation of a once prosaic or ignored property. So, too, in art and gentrification.
AUTHOR/LABORER
For an author shooting toxins and poisons, it’s a challenge, and for workers in contaminated or toxic zones, its a long haul challenge, dealing with, or avoiding or limiting exposure to chemicals.
Psychologically i was attached and equally detached from the sometimes daily subject, the Creek, that was spread out over 30 years. What i thought about, while there, curiously, wasn’t the social outrage or anger at polluting the Creek, even though it was always built to do that, but, thoughts were the same as the usual on-the-job mental dreaming and associating one does, while doing physical tasks.
Contact with pretty poison. That was both interesting and repulsive, alluring and deadly. That’s it, that’s what i thought. If you would’ve called me on the phone, which didn’t exist back then, when i was on this location, that’s exactly what i would have said. Reminds me of the poisonous work, that i needed to escape, that i would continue to do when freelance work would dry up, and tried so hard for so long to escape from, and earn better money doing what i was good at.
Bad Water Bottom is not really about the psychology and stamina it takes to get dirty jobs done. But, as an aside, in the formerly blue-collar world of Williamsburg-Greenpoint, people, needing to work and survive, who find themselves doing dirty, filthy, poisonous and dangerous work or simply mind-numbing repetitive tasks, where you have to rely on your mindset to get through, day-dream and free assiciate. A paycheck, a lot of times, just ain’t enough to get you through the day, and, on top of it, my work never pays in the first place. It is purely mind over matter, particularly here, and what i have become so good at over the years. Mind over matter, negative to positive.
Thinking about my own exposure over time, then putting it in the novel form of a movie character, it would begin with a guy, dirty, in a blue polyester work uniform out on his lunch break. He is sitting near the bulkhead of a man-made canal, and it’s low tide. In boredom, he is checking the chemical balloons in the Kills. That’s pretty much how i think, and it’s not as an artist. Not so much as an artist, but a witnessing participant who knows how to prove and remember as much as participate.
Filmmakers never processed their film, and that’s my starting point with regards to photography. There is a health price for exposure to toxic chemicals, the same way there’s a health price for losing your home to the poison of displacement. Exposed to industrial chemicals, at work, i was, then, constantly reminded of that, always becoming sick from the chemicals of printing. The experience of brute chemical exposure is one that haunts with its lingering effects on the nervous system, and it’s evenly matched with damage from contact with the arts and entertainment industry, where i thought I could get away from physical toxic exposure but found that it is no contact that is the only way to maintain health of the soul and ethics, not to mention, the original quest of truth, mixed with both capture to nail it and expression to embed it. And, while looking for physical truth as the curious photographer, i owned up to this metaphor, that is also very real, and i couldn’t deny.
Chemicals and viruses run deep, have lasting effects and can even cause death. Without protective gear and a vaccine, the only way to live is separately and social distancing.
Too bad, a simple profession, one I’m good at and deserve to make a meager living at, has to get so complicated by its own widespread weird social dysfunction. And then there is the walking schizophrenia of misinformation and alternative realities that has become the art and politics of the extreme right, and our time, particularly if your truth is a debunking.
Context? I didn’t want to hide, enhance or turn completely abstract, the context of the pollution by using software. Shot entirely on film, scanned and photoshopped in a way that pretty much mimics an analog enlarger, albeit with enhancements and refinements in shadows, highlights and targeted color balance. Abstraction, on occasion, can’t be avoided, and i wouldn’t deny the pleasure of the image, and always remember not to forget that the fact that plants it there is pleasure, entertainment, if you will, and, thus, it becomes a matter of control or direction by intention.
Shooting here was not the pleasure of the picture i was shooting for the viewer. Just like any of these physical dirty labor jobs, i had an unused mind, and could easily do two things at once – the dumb physical labor and, with a free mind, one nourished by blood circulation, the ability to think freely, amidst the smelly drudgery.
On these stinky locations, one thing i continually would think about is the nature of the chemical flow and the role of tides. Like i said, i get no gratification from my pictures, but there is another kind of pay-off which is thinking freely. My hunch was right, at low tide the most embedded chemicals get sucked right out of the earth and bulkheads, and produce an endless loop, twice a day, that exposes what lurks below.
But that’s not my beef, and, the beef is both what i thought about and what got me through these shoots, which was resistance and anger.
Still, this was not foremost in my mind, and neither was the idea for the social concern of pollution, but it was positive, and a respite from the colorful horrors, while trying not to think about the reason, to be in these forgotten places, or anywhere, because it was done by choice and free will and was my responsibility.
On site I needed a will to stay there and shoot, sometimes regularly according to the tides. Any one would become acutely aware of, not so much his effort to capture the shot, but why the hell, in such a place, would you be there? Plainly speaking, why are you here with this shit? That is self-rhetorical. Think that I don’t know? I knew before i got there.
These are clearly real things. But i could be elsewhere, without a need to depict pollutions, that cloud and poison the clarity of veritable things.
Concepts float freely, while things don’t, for obvious reasons. Coming out of reality television and the entertainment industry, Trump is simply a radical right performance artist, and so is Alex Jones, or so many other big-mouthed disembodied radio hosts and so many who manufacture alternative realities, especially on social media.
Deconstructing things – reality – and sewing doubt in truth and fact, or rebuilding and constructing one’s own world is a strategy used in art, politics, media and entertainment, and, with the culture dominated by remakes and reinvention, the flip of things and ideas is seemingly all we do now. Gone wild and grown far enough today, people exist in a pre-schizophrenic state, which they like, as opposed to their actual lives, spouting the most absurd and unfounded things as truth while making themselves experts in fields where an individual will devote his entire life to.
Concepts, no matter their many and varied uses, and because of that, remain a school of doubt, gossip and untruth at their worst while they do offer an experiment, or “What if?” situation to ponder. Truth or simple physical fact that can only be one thing, and can have expressive qualities while being accurate, is more of a solid thing to trust, but no one experiences much.
Satirical, caustic and critical realism, using the sublime pleasure of the unsightly, brought to light in order to be embedded, so, in its propensity to deliver information, will capture minds, while also looking at things critically by thinking about the expanding the reaches of poison through the pleasure of the image.
BEEF
Trolls, intoxicated with ungrounded information don’t realize that there are some things that shouldn’t cross the blood/brain barrier, otherwise your health suffers, and the health of those around you, not that it should be a concern in the worlds we made for ourselves. Gossip naphthalene, phosgene ego developed in the comic friendly cancer of conceit, of simply
crawling up our own ass and liking it there, or I’m successful or I’m rich, and so great that even my shit is. Exposure to hexavalent chromium, toluene, or ethyl chloride are unhealthy and so is exposure to creeps and their gossip-concepts, untested and really not interesting.
It’s weird never to have had hatred, until i had to deal with the arts and entertainment world, the exoplanet of our cultural workers. That was plenty and enough to drive me out to a stench zone, but the same people would come to where i lived, to escape them in the first place, and get me kicked out of my lifetime rightful home then reinvent or flip it into theirs. Another added, not asked about, or discussed poison – gentrification – swept through the very neighborhood that borders Newtown Creek and the bad water.
My old joke, blight keeps the rent down, came truer than ever, but, of course, the joke was on us when the blight no longer scared but attracted investment as cheap pickings out in the boonies of Brooklyn, that now competes with Manhattan.
And, at least for myself the last metaphorical poison, is the experience of the world of art. Prior to the era of gentrification and misinformation, an expanding art and entertainment world, where it was now possible to be be known and have money in your life, high on their postmodness, and just plain high on drugs and booze, could no longer tell the difference between art based on direct contact with life and all the other kinds of art. All of it was up for grabs, and completely leveled by an all-is-fiction movement within art.
It’s never ok to mimic what’s not published yet or when the content is lived, whether stated, obvious, or not. What’s mine is not property, but experience.
These places i shoot during the Going Under projects, are devoid of people for obvious olfactory, safety and health reasons. In the case of the Creek, once in a while, there would be kids from the neighborhoods around the waterway, but not many, hardly at all, let alone on a regular basis. There were vandals, good place for it, and there were few homeless. Mexicans would crash in the empty box cars that were temporarily idle.
To draw conclusions beyond the landscapes depicted is absurd, particularly since i’ve defined and proved my intentions, knowing full well that is futile, but it’s necessary.
I’m from the area depicted, know its history by sweat, work and mind, having had jobs and lived in the neighborhood surrounding the waterway and worked for various companies in old Long Island City as a driver/laborer.
My toxicus vitale, is a resume of exposure to volatile organic compounds. First-hand laboring with the likes of benzene, toluene, ethyl chlorides and volatile organic compounds that are part of the landscape of paint and paint stripper, fertilizer, shellac, carbon tetrachloride degreasing and metal cleaning, diesel, smoke from burning wood, coal, coke, trash fumes and smoke from refining and melting steel, copper, lead and the smoke from contaminated and toxic wood and plastic that is burned.
Viewing books of landscapes, allows some peace or respite, in spite of the colorful, deadly hideousness of this whole affair. I want respite from fidelity to a source like this.
Ironically it’s also the most fitting metaphor that I have run across for understanding the pretty poison of our cultural strivings.