This
interview took place in Yonkers, N.Y., on June 5, 2006. General Arthur
Prinzhorn is a highly decorated, four-star general who retired from
the U.S. Army in 2003. His youngest son, Ethan, will be receiving
his M.A. in curatorial studies from Bard in 2007. The Prinzhorns were
the next-door neighbors of the Kesslers in Yonkers.
General: Let’s get right down to it, shall we? Is your show
critical of the current war?
Jon: The show is certainly a response to our current situation. Personally,
I am highly critical of the Bush administration’s disregard
for our Constitution and the White House’s kowtowing to the
interests of right-wing groups. With an acquiescent media, our government
misled us into a war in Iraq, and it’s clear that the same thing
is happening now with Iran. But the show is less a polemic against
Bush than my personal coming to grips with the rage and alienation
that I’ve been feeling of late. How about you, General? You
have certainly been very outspoken recently about the Iraq war and
certain members of the Bush administration, especially Donald Rumsfeld.
General: As a general, you have a responsibility to the men and women
that serve under you, as well as to the civilians that you are sworn
to protect. I spoke out against Donald Rumsfeld because he has and
continues to display a complete disregard for the men and women of
the military and a total contempt for the American people. The way
he wants to fight this war is untenable—we’re just killing
innocent people as collateral damage for a failed vision of a “new”
Middle East. While I support the spread of democracy in the region,
and believe that it is incumbent that the region experience political
change, the Bush administration is going about it the wrong way. They
may very well drag us into a nuclear war with Iran where there are
no winners, only losers. September 11 should have been a wake-up call
for America to open its eyes and see how our foreign policy and dubious
attempts to protect freedom are seen by the rest of the world. But
except for a short period of flag-waving, we went back to sleep. I
say this as Congress spends the next three weeks debating same-sex
marriage—my GOD!
Ethan: But Dad, why were you so critical when we marched in protest
of the war? Isn’t that an expression of the kind of democracy
that you’re trying to spread in the Middle East?
General: I never critiqued your right to protest, I just knew that
it was useless. I had never witnessed an administration so determined
to go to war despite the worldwide mobilization against it.
Ethan: So I think we’re all in agreement that we feel lied to—Jon,
how does your show react to this perceived injustice?
Jon: Five years ago, if you had told me that I’d be making work
that addressed this subject matter, I wouldn’t have believed
you. I feel like Michael Douglas in Falling Down or Peter Fonda in
The Wrong Man—you can only be pushed so far before there’s
a reaction. In 2001, I was working on a series of mobiles that incorporated
body casts of my wife, my daughter, and myself. After 9/11, I couldn’t
get the image of what the terrorists saw from the cockpit out of my
head, so I decided to re-create it. That impulse led to One Hour Photo,
and since then the work has taken on this more politicized direction.
Ethan: So there was an explicit change in your work that was sparked
by 9/11?
Jon: The change in the work was initiated by the subject matter, but
it was propelled forward by the introduction of video into the sculptures.
This made the work come alive again. In 2004, when I did the show
“Global Village Idiot”, I hadn’t shown my work in
ten years. I had lost my voice and didn’t really know what to
say anymore. The introduction of video into the work in 2001 catalyzed
the breakthrough in the work that I was looking for. People have commented
on a return to a looser, unfinished attitude in the new work. Throughout
the ’90s, the work relied heavily on production, and I was spending
countless hours doing things in the studio that I didn’t like,
like polishing aluminum. In the recent work, when I paired the machines
to video monitors, it allowed me to be more direct in constructing
the mechanisms. At the point when they achieve the desired effect
for the camera, I leave them alone.
Ethan: In the ’80s, you became known for doing specifically
sculptural pieces that embraced elements of kitsch and found objects—how
do you see this current show as an extension of the ideas put forth
back then?
Jon: I was always interested in getting people to look behind the
curtain. Getting them to become active viewers, to investigate the
mechanism, to suspend their disbelief, and, finally, to have an experience
with the objects that I was presenting, even if many of those objects
originated as kitsch. The very early work played with pictorial space
by creating a duality between the mechanism and the screens that was
hopefully more than the sum of its parts. In many ways, this recent
video work is a return to this duality. It’s funny that you
say I became known in the ’80s. The changes in the work were
facilitated by the fact that I felt completely free to reinvent myself.
I had lost or left all of my galleries, and there was little interest
in the work. When Artforum published the double issue on the ’80s
and there was no mention of me at all, I really knew that no one was
watching me.
Ethan: I would also say that there is a related theme in both your
early works and your current show, which concerns the fetish. The
early work, it seems, plays with this notion of the fetish in relation
to objects—the complex power that we lend kitsch, for instance.
Similarly, in this current show, you refer to the power that we imbue
in the event—the fetish of 9/11. Does this resonate? Are you
ever afraid of falling into that trap of fetishizing 9/11 as so many
have, politicians as well as artists?
General: I’m going to go one step further than my son and say
that your show was exploiting the events of 9/11!
Jon: First to Ethan’s point, the works from the ’80s did
address commodity fetish, although this was never foregrounded in
my work the way it was in my contemporaries such as Jeff [Koons] or
Haim [Steinbach]. In the Asian-inspired works, it was more of an attempt
to fetishize the culture—turning exoticism and otherness into
a commodity. As for fetishizing and exploiting the events of 9/11,
there is no overestimating the harmful effect that Al Qaeda’s
ability to stage a truly murderous image-event had on the control
of image production in our culture. September 11 is a constant reminder
of America’s vulnerability and proof that we no longer have
a monopoly on big violence.
General: I don’t know if it was your intention, but the sounds
produced by the mechanisms in the show sounded like artillery fire.
I felt like I was back in the trenches.
Jon: Throughout the summer, I had only one sniper mechanism running
in the studio. “Snipers” are the mechanisms that move
the cameras in quarter turns by use of Geneva mechanisms. Honestly,
I hadn’t predicted the rhythm of the sound of seven of them
functioning at the same time. I thought it sounded like a chain gang,
but many, like you, were reminded of the sound of artillery—lock
and load. I found the immensity of the P.S. 1 space daunting, so I
chose to sculpt the space with sight lines, targets, and zones of
vision instead of physical mass. The snipers also made the connection
between surveillance and the new eye of totalitarian war—smart
bombs.
Ethan: One of the many contradictions that gave the installation its
tenor was the precision of the mechanism’s control over the
mediated “space” in contrast to the looseness of the installation,
with the hanging wires and the way that the machines were constructed.
Jon: Control over mediated space is one of the implied subtexts of
the show, especially through the use of technology. So in some ways,
the show is commenting on, as well as an example of, this. It drives
this principle at the same time as it undermines it.
Ethan: In 1954, Michel Carrouges found a structural similarity between
Duchamp’s Large Glass and the torture device described in Franz
Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony.” His insight
was that both were closed systems with one part imposing on the other.
This reminds me in several ways of your installation and your evocation
of Abu Ghraib.
Jon: The installation does become a series of closed circuits that
emanate, affect, and impose on each other. Abu Ghraib was suggested
in Theater of Ideas with the GI Joe who is standing on a box with
his pants pulled down and wearing a dunce cap. Surrounding him are
more toy soldiers hanging from the structure of the sculpture; these
are meant to evoke the images of the U.S. civilians who were burned
and hung from the bridge. Surrounding them are embellished images
of Kabuki, a form of highly stylized theater from Japan, and they
suggest a kind of scary “other” that a soldier from Kansas
might experience out on night patrol. Finally, the red splatter is
meant to frame and encapsulate the order, control, and sensuousness
of violence much in the way Kurosawa uses blood in his films.
General: There is something sensuous about violence. For many soldiers,
fighting becomes as much an addiction as a duty. It’s funny,
because walking through your show oftentimes I wasn’t quite
sure if I liked your work because the images were attractive or because
they were so gruesome. Is there a history of artists reacting to war?
Jon: For me, Dada is the most poignant example—they were responding
to the mechanized bloodbath of World War I. But the title “The
Palace at 4 A.M.” comes from a great Surrealist work . . .
General: What does the title refer to?
Jon: It refers to a Giacometti sculpture of the same name in MoMA.
I’ve always loved the piece for its sense of staging, a theatrical
mise-en-scène that feels like a model for a stage set about
a dream sequence. When I read reports of our troops stationed in Saddam’s
palaces and heard about Abu Ghraib, I thought “The Palace at
4 A.M.” was an appropriate title for the entire exhibition;
it evokes the insanity that happens at that hour, when no one is watching.
General: Did the show change a lot when you mounted it in Hamburg?
It seemed so specific to the P.S. 1 space. How is the show in Hamburg
different?
Jon: The interesting thing about the show is how flexible it is. Since
the snipers are based on zoom lenses, it doesn’t matter if the
target is five feet away or a hundred, the show could expand and contract
accordingly. In New York, the show was mounted in that giant room,
which acted metaphorically as the grand public ballroom of the palace.
The smaller rooms adjoining this were more private chambers, in which
I placed many of the figurative works. In Hamburg, I used the billboards
to create a series of rooms that allows the viewer to come upon the
show’s ideas in a slower fashion. When they view someone on
a monitor, they can’t just turn around and see them, since they
will most likely be in another room. I cut holes in the walls and
mirrors, and the billboards have been refigured to create more of
a labyrinthine trip through the looking glass; sections of the show
are lit with flashlights mounted to the cameras and acting like searchlights.
Shock and Awe, a piece in which a photograph of Baghdad being bombed
is cut and taped to the window in such a way that it covers the actual
sky and becomes part of a composite image, turning the outside world
into a prop, took on an odd and unexpected dimension in the Hamburg
installation. A camera, trained on the street, happens to photograph
the neighborhood where Mohamed Atta had lived while he planned the
destruction of the Twin Towers. The idea of this show began as a reaction
to the toppling of the World Trade Center. In a haunting and bizarre
bit of chance, the Hamburg installation returns to the place where
9/11 was masterminded. There are also some new pieces for Germany,
such as a sniper that uses an airplane window from my flight over
. . .
General: You mean a picture of the window on your airplane?
Jon: No, no . . . the actual window.
General: Jon, you stole an airplane window?!
Jon: Well, I guess I did. Hey, the plane was literally falling apart.
When we landed, the window had come loose, so I stuffed it in my bag.
It’s inset into a wall with a view of a brick wall through it.
There’s also a new piece at the entrance that has a camera inserting
itself into a silicone vagina—this piece creates a double insertion,
one with a camera entering a vagina that brings you into the mediated
world telegenically, and then the billboard of the woman’s crotch
that you physically walk through to enter the show. It immediately
sets up the symbiotic relationship between the camera and the viewer,
which continues inside as spectator and performer, voyeur and exhibitionist.
General: Well, I can’t say that the missus liked walking through
the vagina to get into your show. It seemed a little blatant and,
according to her, a poor decorating choice.
Jon: I was really thinking about the relationship between pornography
and war that surfaced when the Iraq invasion began and the only place
to see uncensored footage of battles was on amateur porn sites. These
sites began as a place to post nude photos of girlfriends and wives
but then became a place for U.S. troops to post videos of gruesome
war scenes so that their family and friends could have a more accurate
idea of what was really going on in Iraq. The viewer enters the show
through a vagina, which belongs to a wall-size photo of a naked woman
from behind. The image comes from an X-rated magazine, but all the
sexually explicit details have been removed. I wanted the viewer to
be reborn into the show; however, I didn’t want this to be a
clean or simple birth, but one complicated by the media’s infatuation
with disaster and titillation. These image-collages are also mimetic,
commenting on the media’s own desire to excite and unnerve.
Ethan: True. Throughout the show, you use still images that mirror
the titillation and violence of the actual show, so you constantly
have this double experience of understanding this chaos interactively
and through the still. Can you talk a bit more about your use of appropriated
images and source photos? For example, what about the piece The Office?
Jon: I began with four coffee-table books that I bought at the Strand
bookstore in New York—all of them were tributes to the efficiency
of American power and might. These books were the readymades, and
I used them as a starting point to build my own narratives. The pages
got ripped out, cut into, painted on, and collaged together to form
new stories. This propelled the work forward, and I built the machines
to drive the narratives. In New York and Hamburg, The Office is the
first piece that you see, and it presented the idea of the corporate
lull, an antidepressant-laced monotony, the incessant calm that is
only a prelude to the shit storm that you were about to experience
through the encroaching entryway. I also think of it as a recruiting
office; traps that are set in small towns to enlist undereducated,
undervalued human flesh and bones that have become yet another part
of Cheney’s collateral damage in Iraq.
Ethan: And how do the Swans figure into this ennui or sedation?
Jon: The Swans refer to extreme-makeover reality shows such as The
Swan and Nip/Tuck. I took images from popular women’s magazines
and made cuts in them to reconfigure their shape and image. The strategy
is tied to Dada practitioners of photo collage such as Hannah Hoch
and John Heartfield, but sculpturally they follow a line that began
with Picasso’s Cubist sheet-metal guitar. The viewer completes
the representation of the women, which are mounted on walls, as they
approach the pictures; a surveillance camera captures the composite
image on a screen. It is sort of a riff on that line from the movie
Jerry Maguire, “You complete me”; in these pieces, the
viewer literally does. The Swans refer to the fashion, commodity,
and celebrity culture that dominate our lives. They are a way of taking
back some power by subverting the images that control us, making these
images our own. I made most of the Swans in a week, one led to the
next and there were some violent ones. I took a sledgehammer to Winona
Ryder’s face. But most of the pieces were produced with nip
and tuck procedures—after the photograph was mounted to aluminum,
it was cut with a jigsaw. I must admit, I was in weird violent zone
last summer as I was creating the P.S. 1 show. I had to work fast,
and it didn’t allow me time to doubt myself. Only having four
months to produce the show was probably a positive thing.
Ethan: Jon, but I find it a bit disconcerting that all the images
that you tore apart are of women. Is there a reason for this?
Jon: I tore apart men’s faces elsewhere in the exhibition, but
for different reasons. The Swans are all women because we live in
a culture where women’s bodies are objectified, and with television
shows like The Swan and Nip/Tuck, these pieces are a kind of extension
of what’s already happening. Women’s faces and bodies
are distorted in ways in which the artificial becomes the ideal. Individual
traits are replaced by shapes and textures never found in nature;
bumpy noses, crooked teeth, frizzy hair, little breasts are erased;
and real people are turned into freakish fakes. Lips and breasts and
brows are so incredibly distorted but have become so ubiquitous that
they’re beginning to look almost normal, almost natural. I’ve
always liked playing with that in my work—artificial nature.
General: Who is the hairy guy? He’s definitely gone AWOL.
Jon: Yes, General, he has. He was originally made for Party Crasher.
I used an English collectible figure and customized him with horsehair.
In fact, he’s an Arab character. My initial instinct was to
make a self-portrait: an aging, suntanned hippie; me, if I had made
a few different life choices. But when he was finished in the studio,
people would come by and ask me who the homeless guy was, or the terrorist.
So he became my hippie/homeless/terrorist dude, a kind of floating
signifier. For “The Palace,” he returned as the central
character in Evolution. Using two different Arab heads, I customized
the readymade to make four characters. The transition has him waking
up in the burning embers of the WTC, on a blog site kissing the troops
in Iraq, as a four-star general, and, finally, after receiving a Botox
treatment, he becomes a Republican Senator.
General: Are you trying to say that these types are one and the same?
Jon: They all occupy the same world stage at the moment, and they
push up against and react to each other.
Ethan: Can you talk about why you used that one piece of prerecorded
footage from Google Earth that showed P.S. 1 and Phoenix getting blown
up?
Jon: Like the cameras trained on the street, I wanted to further complicate
the proposition of the exhibition by adding footage that I might have
made in my own low-tech way using cameras, photographs, and machines.
Besides, Google Earth is the most amazing surveillance source available
for artists to steal from.
Ethan: Do you think of your work as interactive art?
Jon: My work has included the viewer for many years, so in that sense
it’s interactive. Isolated Masses from 1985 had a heater that
slowly warmed the viewer if they got close to the work. Path of a
Carp from1987 had an electric eye and voice chip that welcomed the
viewer in Japanese. In my new work, everything changed when I removed
the background in Party Crasher and the hairy dude occupied the same
space as the viewer. This premise of including the viewer continued
in Heaven’s Gate, Gisele and the Cinopticon, and exploded in
the “The Palace at 4 A.M.” The viewer certainly interacts
with my show whether they want to or not by constantly entering the
work—completing and disrupting the camera’s sight lines.
Ethan: How much of the show was conceived in your mind beforehand?
Jon: The original pitch to P.S. 1 was nothing like how it turned out.
The ideas for the show snowballed as I began working with images that
I tore from the books and spending more time at P.S. 1 over the summer.
The show grew organically and changed direction as I progressed, much
like the way my individual sculptures evolve. In the end, “The
Palace at 4 A.M.” turned out to be much more image-based than
my previous show, “Global Village Idiot.”
General: I remember that your dad had a workshop in the basement of
your house, but I don’t remember you spending much time there.
Were you trained in engineering?
Ethan: How would you know if he spent time there? You were never around!
Jon: My dad was a bricoleur and my brother is an engineer, so the
genes are in the family. I’ve picked things up along the way,
and the mechanisms are based on trial and error. I had the idea for
a mechanism that would have intermittent motion and turn a camera
90 degrees. I worked on this for weeks, and when I finally succeeded,
someone came to my studio and informed me that it was a Geneva mechanism,
invented centuries ago for clock mechanisms.
Ethan: You always talk a lot about play in your work. How do you build
play into the process?
Jon: This is difficult. Making work that has to function involves
a lot of methodical labor and engineering, so I have to create spaces
in the pieces that allow a more intuitive, faster way of working.
Almost all of my sculptures begin with me sitting on the floor in
my studio playing with a video camera and found objects.
Ethan: It’s obvious how the airplane images work in your installation.
Why did you include the cutouts of Hummers?
Jon: I want to cry every time I think of Earth Day in 1970, when we
buried a car in high school. Who would have thought that thirty-six
years later, people would be driving around in Hummers as a status
symbol? Thomas Friedman says it all in his op-ed piece “In My
Next Life” in the New York Times: “Then I at least want
to be the owner of a Hummer—with American flag decals all over
the back bumper, because Hummer owners are, on average, a little more
patriotic than you and me. Yes, I want to drive the mother of all
gas-guzzlers that gets so little mileage you have to drive from gas
station to gas station. Yes, I want to drive my Hummer and never have
to think that by consuming so much oil, I am making transfer payments
to the worst Arab regimes that transfer money to Islamic charities
that transfer money to madrassas that teach children intolerance,
antipluralism and how to hate the infidels. And when one day one of
these madrassa graduates goes off and joins the jihad in Falluja and
kills my neighbor’s son, who is in the U.S. Army Rangers, I
want to drive to his funeral in my Hummer . . . stopping at two gas
stations along the way.”
Ethan: Those seem to be the dots you’re trying to connect in
your show . . .
Jon: Yes, the show is about connections, connecting the dots of causality.
Some of this is created by the camera movement combined with the machines
acting as editing machines, but also from the viewer’s movements
and cognitive understanding of the show. The belligerent insistence
to start a war; antiwar protests; consumer culture, which keeps everyone
dazed and confused; Shock and Awe; Bush watching Shock and Awe on
TV; you watching Bush watching; someone watching you watching Bush
. . . In New York, the final piece I made was The Drowned World, which
refers to Hurricane Katrina, the tragedy that exposed the fact that
we can’t answer the needs of our own citizens, especially if
they’re poor and black, and that the government is more anxious
to pay for civic construction in Baghdad, even if not much is built
and especially if the money goes to Halliburton. A touchstone of this
show was the film Apocalypse Now and Coppola’s desire to play
with and personalize the history of the Vietnam War, creating narratives
that subjectively expressed the insanity of the situation. The difference,
of course, was that Apocalypse Now was made after the war. That’s
why I was so struck by the television show Over There, the scripted
docudrama about our troops in Iraq as it was occurring. There’s
no better example of the immediacy of the absorption of life into
mediated experience. I believe we have come to a point where there
is a separation from experience and the image; the image has become
liberated from the experience, such that through the news, the Internet,
and various other media, we encounter an overload of imagery, what
Paul Virilio calls a visual crash.
General: I’m so sick of cameras everywhere I go—being
filmed all the time. I suppose it could be a deterrent for perpetrators,
or maybe we’re gathering more visual information that[‘than’?]
we could possibly use. Even so, the military is at the forefront of
the intelligent processing of all of this audio and visual information.
Ethan: Yeah, with AT&T’s help and personal rights being
sacrificed . . .
General: You know what they say, sonny boy, you have to break some
eggs if you want to make an omelette. Jon, can you talk about the
use of surveillance in the work?
Jon: The constituent character of surveillance—mediated cultural
experiences augmented by anxiety—is present throughout all my
work since 9/11. However, “The Palace at 4 A.M.” and some
of my newer pieces respond specifically to the Iraq war and the unlawful
occupation of that country. Unlike “Global Village Idiot,”
which was composed of eight or nine discrete sculptures, “The
Palace at 4 A.M.” implicates the spectators, turns them into
the surveilled subjects, and refers to our ambiguous role in these
recent world events. The play of camera, image, and monitor is ubiquitous,
and spectators are constantly disrupting sight lines, thereby becoming
active viewers/participants in the installation.
Ethan: As much as the show addresses surveillance and the media, it
also insists on an unmediated experience . . .
Jon: The show is meant to be experienced. There is heat generated
by the television sets, the smell of rubber from the miles of electric
and coaxial wire, the sounds of the snipers imitating gunfire. There
is a wave of experiential stimuli, which leads the viewer through
the installation. While “The Palace” conceptually foregrounds
the role of and our relationship to the media, it is in many ways
a tribute to the unmediated experience. The machines are a physical
experience for the viewer to actually have, quite different from viewing
videos in a dark room.
Ethan: And yet it comments brilliantly on the image production of
our time.
Jon: One of the show’s intentions is to oversaturate the viewer’s
visual stimuli and expose the world as a prop for the constant fabrication
of images to feed our collective desires. Reality shows and photo-op
wars are an unambiguous manifestation of this phenomenon and an example
of the democratization of voyeurism. The exhibition is emblematic
of our historical moment, where time and imagery are conflated, so
that our relationship to experience becomes increasingly confused
and distorted. This complexity is internalized by the viewer, who
simultaneously becomes spectator, performer, voyeur, and exhibitionist.
If we are to appreciate our infatuation with and proximity to surveillance,
then, for me, the question becomes not How can we destroy the camera?
but How can we undermine the surveilled image and empower ourselves?