Date of Submission

Spring 2024

Academic Program

Photography

Project Advisor 1

Lucas Blalock

Abstract/Artist's Statement

My eyes have always been trained on a past that I did not see. I never came home from CBGBs or Max’s Kansas City at 4 am. I did not witness the birth of counterculture, nor did I watch Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show. I did not see the endless rolodex of bands who were gone before their manifestation, existing only as an exchange over beers, a name on the bill for the Mudd Club, a shambolic practice in a downtown apartment. America is devoid of the decadence of the 20th century, and the stars who represented it; my lifetime has only seen the death of heroes both underground and popular, the closure of cultural touchstones, and the gentrification of those sites that bore witness to the birth of American culture. Yet within this, traces of this bygone era – of desire, nostalgia, and opulence – can still be found, calcified and faded, all around me.

It started in the fifties. After the stagnation of the thirties and the wartime forties, America was hungry for the new and exciting, the riotous and debaucherous. Memphis answered this with the birth of rock and roll, a new pantheon of stars: Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison – and the new king, Elvis Presley. New York, meanwhile, ushered in the rebirth of the avant-garde. Artists moved illegally into lofts, and folk singers overran coffee houses. Conceptualism became the norm in art. Rock musicians turned away from tonality, and the seeds of punk were sown on the Bowery. The threads of a mythology – of what America was, of what our consumption of culture meant, and of what the ideal citizen is – were beginning to be spun and woven into elements of what we now call history.

Only with time have the true meanings of this imaginary emerged and accrued. Images fade, and the symbols of this culture are adopted, appropriated, and recontextualized; figures such as Elvis, or the work of Andy Warhol, are now bigger than their origins. They represent a grandiose view of American culture, but also an America that is deeply flawed, licentious, dark, and destructive, inflected with misogyny, racism, and heteronormativity. They provide a foil for the multivalent, complex, and ambivalent existence of an America which existed then, and which continues to exist in our present.

History can exist in forms other than known. Writing about Dan Graham’s film Rock My Religion, Kodwo Eshun states that “within [the film] could be discerned a method for elevating one's obsessions to the dimensions of mythology,” and that “even as its exclusions disqualify it as a reliable history, [the film] can be understood… as a synthetic ethnography on tribes, sects, fans and anti-families. As a series of speculations on shared states of sensation… On the necessity of forgetting as the route to immortality. As an amateur anthropology on the founding of America.” Following Graham, my work constitutes an archive and an active investigation into the histories and functions of populist culture, art history, counterculture, and photographic history that became the foundations of a new mythology. The archive is essentially a correspondence between my 21st century responses to the past, and the objects of this past. How do these objects exist now? What is their meaning and how does it dovetail into their illegibility? As John Ashbery said, its message is wise, and seemingly dictated long ago. Its truth is timeless, but its time has still not arrived, telling of danger – a danger that can no longer be ignored.

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