I read Camus' The Plague in the past. I didn't hate it. I don't really remember it.
The artwork that I am writing next to is two of the three films by Rodney McMillian showing in gallery 186 of the Art Institute until March 26, 2017.
Here is the blurb from the Art institute website:
"Rodney McMillian’s work grapples with the complexities of class, race, and place in America across a wide range of media. His video narratives explore events and figures who tend to be omitted from conventional historical accounts. Employing elements of performance, public speaking, and oral history, McMillian exposes the social and psychological consequences of economic inequality, the racism endemic to America’s political and institutional landscape, and the failed promise of freedom and prosperity for all of its citizens. Importantly, he has also spoken of—and in certain works explicitly demonstrated—a personal interest in the genre of science fiction: while his work engages the often stark realities of history and contemporary culture, it is motivated by the potential for alternative realities and future transformation. The three recent acquisitions on view represent the last decade of the artist’s work in video."
In Untitled (The Great Society) I, McMillian not only stages a performance himself reciting President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 commencement speech at the University of Michigan, but also occupies it as a black man. In doing so, he raises questions about how history and politics are themselves consistently—and repeatedly—performed. In A Migration Tale, an unrecognizable (or unnamable) character clad in a silver Ultraman mask and floor-length black cassock travels on foot and via subway. McMillian references the “Great Migration,” during which thousands of African Americans left the rampant racism of the South for the promise of a better life in northern states, makes a condensed version of this northward journey, in the guise of an anonymous, ominous, and absurd character who goes unnoticed by those he encounters. Preacher Man grapples with questions of religion and the fight for racial equality in the United States. Dressed in a traditional black suit and tie and wearing a hat, McMillian sits formally on a chair in an empty field cast in shadow and recites words of the once Chicago-based experimental jazz composer and musician Sun Ra.
Rodney McMillian. Still from Untitled (the Great Society) I, 2006. Contemporary Discretionary Fund.
The Lyndon B. Johnson speech and the Sun Ra words were most influencial in my thinking.
McMillian as Johnson encourages the audience by saying that no man has ever been in this position of great technological possibilities it was true when Johnson said it it was true when McMillian said it and it is true now. We cannot run from our days we must face our own times. The Sun Ra speech is more scatological but strangely logical. I paraphrased, pounded and molded my subjective understanding of it into my own vision in the following statement about Helen's Exile.
Helen's Exile
"Nature is still there, nevertheless. Her calm skies and her reason opposes the folly of men."
She resists by being resilient and standoffish. It is like she almost doesn't care. It is almost as if her existence is not a result of us homo sapiens noticing. The sound, smells, tastes of beauty we can choose to perceive. Are we are able to look up from our smart phones or turn down the tweets of imbeciles? Those who have stolen the attention of the clamoring press and press the riotous crowds into the streets have done so in the pursuit of reason. If he is a mad man it is only a result of the mad times we live in. We must not turn away from our time. May you live in interesting times is a curse bestowed by a passing gypsy that we all spit on. We were so busy laughing and cheering our own reason and self-centered distractions that we though she was just one more dodo that would flicker unseen and unmissed. At the mad hatters tea party we must stop spilling the tea. He will just make more.
The foolish men crossed the limit in pursuit of reason. Reason can only win with death. Peace and freedom can only come with death. The prince of peace is the prince of death. We are here now and must loom up not for reason but for liberty, beauty, and art.
Helen was fired unceremoniously and she does not visit.
I loom.
