In the fall of 2024 as the new election cycle loomed I found myself in that anxious shiftless state of mind where cleaning up my studio seemed to be all that I could muster in terms of creative activity. The timing was good in that I was in between taking down exhibitions, having had set up new exhibitions and was ready to contemplate a review of the year for “Impolitic: 2024” at Sidle House Gallery. My original plan for this show related to the events in the Middle East starting in 2023 and spilling over into 2024. By late October the election became more pressing on my psyche. Underlying both concerns had been an impulse to create work that takes into consideration longer stretches of time, greater histories of conflict and linkages of action/reaction and ultimately the rise and fall of power structures.
In my cleaning and rearranging I came across boxes of vintage newspaper that I had accumulated from various construction projects on old homes, which I was holding onto for possible inclusion into some form of future works of art. In 2014 I had created a room-sized installation incorporating much of this vintage newspaper, but I had added to it since, thinking that I might want to revisit this media. There comes points in one’s art career and life when one has to reckon with one’s accumulations and my boxes of vintage newspaper’s time seemed to be presenting themselves as due for a do or die scenario. For better or worse I decided to do and began to envision a dense arrangement of ink printed imagery, cut out from old newspaper ads and articles, that might include figures and objects that would span a time period from the late 1800s to the 1980s and possibly to the present day. This would be a mashing of dozens of decades into a singular image that would depict a contemporary event, moment or ongoing conflict.
Loosely in mind was cataclysm, destruction or violence involving piles of home furnishings, crowds of figures and machinery. In essence, a history of technological and social development or change that reflected or suggested that, despite certain advancements, human behavior hopelessly repeats its worst habits, an inability to develop peaceful coexistence and a tendency to address its problems through violence. As the election revealed a choice by the American public to embrace the spirit of belief that our society’s best moment was at a point in the past and that our focus should be to regain that footing, I conceived of my vintage newspaper collages as imagining a form of cyclical human behavior as an undercurrent of current events, all being depicted as nightmarish mash-up of old and new into one.
Thinking of the linguistic evolution of the MAGA acronym I heard in my mind the phrase Gog and Magog, sensing that it must be biblical and wondering if its narrative could have any relationship to our current state. The many narratives found in the Wikipedia analysis qualified it perfectly for what I now saw as a new possible art series for me to explore, arisen from the cataclysms of 2023 into 2024 and a brand new societal pathway guided by nostalgia, faith and belief. MAGA on steroids would be G.A.G. & M.A.G.A.A.A.A.A.A.A.G.A. and I invite one and all to interpret the acronym as they please, taking the biblical and cultural narratives of Gog and Magog into account along with the idea that we often needlessly act in predictably poor ways again and again and again and again!
