Loren Bliss: Outside Agitator's Notebook: In Response to the Atrocities in White Supremacist/Republican Arizona

Sandwiches for Mind and Spirit

In photography, a sandwich is a collage made by printing two or more negatives simultaneously, typically to increase the psychodynamic impact of an image. Collage is a medium that has fascinated me for as long as I can remember -- probably since I was a child experimenting with finger paints, glue and newspapers -- but I never took it seriously until, sometime in my early 20s and still thinking myself a painter-to-be, I discovered the works of Jasper Johns. Now it seems to me that making sandwiches is to conventional photography what poetry is to prose: not just an intellectual exercise, but the opening of a doorway to the Mysterious Otherness I know as the Muse, from whom (sometimes in fulfillment of that McLuhanesque notion of art as prophecy) the currents of real creation invariably flow, whether swift and startling as a lightening strike or slow and soft as cottonwood seeds adrift on subtle summer air. The Palin/Hitler image, the newest of these works, is a shout of protest and -- though I hope I'm wrong -- an outcry of dreadful prophecy. The other five are related only categorically, as collage, but they address a subject light-years removed from the encroaching darkness of theocratic fascism. In a sense they are its true antithetical, nurturing yang against toxic yin, the remains of the illustrations for "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer," one of the books-in-progress lost forever in the 1983 fire that destroyed my life's work. Yet despite my losses, I still find solace in the declaration of Taliesin that was to have appeared on the frontispiece of "Dancer," and I believe that -- if our species manages to survive -- Taliesin's vision, which was also the vision of "Dancer," may somehow yet obtain. Its words are given here in the form I know best, as set out by Robert Graves: "The tops of the beech trees/Have sprouted of late/Are changed and renewed/From their withered state..." (Collage and photographic sandwiches copyright Loren Bliss 2009-2010.)

Hopes Betrayed: Faces of the Health Care Fight

Supporters of health care reform and a much smaller number of its opponents -- each faction identified by its picket-signs -- gathered for the "town hall" meeting called by U.S. Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) in Lakewood on August 25, 2009. Originally scheduled for Lakewood City Hall, the gathering was rescheduled and moved to Lang Stadium to accommodate an unprecedented mobilization of pro-reform people. Cops estimated the crowd at about 2500. Given the betrayal of the reform effort four months later, such activism will probably not be seen in the U.S. again. (Two of these images -- "Single Payer Is the Solution" and "The tensions of opposites and opposition" -- were published here on October 12 and November 19 respectively.) Photos by Loren Bliss copyright 2009.

Graffiti: From Rural Bullets to Urban Bluster

When I returned to New York City in 1965 I was immediately impressed by the contrast between the graffiti I had encountered "out in America" -- the South and Middle West -- and what I saw in Manhattan. While the form and content of graffiti is sociologically important – possibly a semiotic indicator without peer -- I found the graffiti of Manhattan singularly appealing, the intellectual and aesthetic equivalents of a long-overdue breath of fresh air, and within a few days I had begun documenting it with 35mm and 120 film. (The opening photograph of this series was obviously made far from Manhattan, but I included it to establish an essential contrast.) Many more details about this particular body of work, which I briefly resumed when I went back to the City again in 1983, then abandoned after that year's career-terminating fire, are in my post of January 7, 2010. Yes I regard the best urban graffiti as genuine art, but too much of it, alas, is nothing more than a human variant on the canine practice of marking territory with spurts of urine: "I wuz here." All photos by Loren Bliss, copyright dates as noted.

Outside Agitator's Notebook...

is a journal of photography and text supplemented by an occasional collage. It is about life and death in the post-humanitarian United States of America. Its context is our subjugation by Ayn Rand capitalism -- the ecocidal credo of infinite greed redefined as ultimate virtue, the Bhopal-deadly dogma under which we in the Working Class are impoverished by outsourcing, intellectually downsized by inferior schools and psychologically terrorized by manufactured crises. Increasingly damned to labor in Big Business sweatshops and corporate slave-pens (if indeed we are allowed jobs at all), we are valued only to the extent we are exploitable for profit, and -- as soon as we become elderly, disabled or otherwise unprofitable -- we are flung away like broken machines and condemned to slow extermination by deliberate neglect and abandonment. The capitalist Ruling Class perfected these measures and built its prototype Moron Nation -- the state of conditioned helplessness and hopelessness it is now imposing on us all -- in the post-Civil-War South. That is also where the Ruling Class perfected Christian theocracy as its brain-police opiate and organized the Ku Klux Klan -- colloquially known as “the Saturday Night Men’s Bible-Study Class”-- as its original death squad. When the Working Class resisted, the Ruling Class belittled the Labor and Civil Rights movements as the product of “Outside Agitators” but retaliated with job terminations, mass arrests, torture and homicide. Jailed during one such episode in Knoxville, Tennessee (1963), also the survivor of three subsequent murder attempts (one of which cost the life of a brave and especially beloved canine companion), I have for many years proudly claimed the Outside Agitator label for myself -- all the more appropriately given my recognition that any artist under patriarchy (whether capitalist or socialist), is always an Outside Agitator -- a fact confirmed by our expanding knowledge of the artist’s dramatically different circumstances in the vanquished matriarchies that shaped human society for our first hundred-thousand years. While this is a long and complex topic, at its core is the realization matriarchy recognized artists as not just daughters and sons of the cosmos -- the literal truth in Taliesin’s statement “there is nothing in which I have not been” -- but as its disciples as well, the reasoning behind the invocation of the Muse with which Homer and other ancient poets begin their work. By contrast, the patriarchal system that has increasingly ruled us since the sack of Knossos mandates not only the theological prohibition of such relationships but the sociopolitical and economic suppression (or at least co-optation) of anything definitively or even implicitly female. Because artistic process violates all these patriarchal taboos even when its product appears to uphold them, art under patriarchy is always suspected of revolutionary agitation, just as the artist whether male or female is always a pariah, damned to abject poverty unless deemed exploitable for profit as a propagandist or trinket-maker. Now that “change we can believe in” has been undeniably proven a Big Lie by the betrayal of health care reform and our new enslavement via “mandatory insurance,” the material here will focus less on politics per se, more on photography, everyday life and relevant miscellany. OAN is updated weekly, typically on Wednesday nights or Thursday mornings, with occasional Extras as events or obsessions might seem to require.

01/08/2011

In Response to the Atrocities in White Supremacist/Republican Arizona

ONCE AGAIN WE confront our nation's terrible legacy of unnecessary death.

First there was the legislative murder of two patients denied organ transplants by Arizona Republicans, one named Mark Price, the other's name still kept secret by family request.

Now there's the shooting of Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, Federal District Court Judge John Roll, a child as yet publicly unidentified and at least 18 other victims – all by a gunman in Tucson.

As a result of these atrocities I am delaying the post I had written to announce an entirely new direction for this blog.

In its place I am substituting a photograph from my portfolio, a landscape I believe reflects something of the breathtaking beauty of our land, its loveliness perhaps the one quality upon which all of us regardless of ideology or race can find agreement and therefore something we can all contemplate in the solemn solidarity of mourning.

That said, please accept my apology for my longest-yet absence from this space.

Since before Christmas I've been afflicted by the worst most debilitating cold of my nearly 71 years – chest and sinus congestion, sneezing, coughing and general trainwreck malaise, strangely though with only minimal fever, as if the virus had evolved in a manner that ensures its maximum duration.

Based on the collective symptomatology of millions of fellow sufferers, this is the most wretchedly long-lasting cold in medical memory and probably in human experience. In my case it's already inflicted 23 days of misery; its dismal record – again typically – includes a few brief pseudo-recoveries followed immediate relapses and never any sustained improvement.

Quoth the I Ching: "perseverance furthers."

Apropos the above photograph, I made it while walking my dogs in Western Washington near the Canadian border in the early 1990s, another tribute to the amazing optical quality of the 38mm Zuiko lens built onto the old Olympus RC, which for many years – until its batteries were irreplaceably taken off the market in 1994 – I carried as pocket camera. The film is Tri-X at 400, processed commercially.

LB/8 January 2010

-30-

Posted at 09:22 PM in Current Affairs, Photography, Visual art | Permalink

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Loren Bliss: Outside Agitator's Notebook