\u201cConspiracy Art\u201d in Times of Disclosure and Apocalypse<\/h2>\n
\n\u201cThere is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed.\u201d
\n<\/em>(Luke 19:40)<\/h3>\n
\nByron Belitsos<\/strong><\/h4>\n\u00a0 Political mistrust is so extreme and the pace of disclosure of deep state secrets is so slow that today\u2019s America seems awash in conspiracies or rumors of conspiracy. That\u2019s why we shouldn\u2019t be surprised that these times of paranoia have given birth to a sub-genre of conceptual art that some curators are now calling \u201cconspiracy art.\u201d Apparently, the truth-telling process, now on hold in the mainstream media, has had to jump tracks to find another vehicle for its expression: independent artists. Especially since 9\/11, art related to government conspiracy has become so preponderant that two large exhibits appeared in prestigious venues in New York City in the fall of 2018.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>In this essay I review these two shows, \u201cEverything Is Connected,\u201d now on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through January 15), and \u201c9\/11: The Collapse of Conscience,\u201d by Fredric Riskin, which was on display at Feldman Gallery in the SoHo through October. Today\u2019s political gridlock has clearly opened up a space for artists willing to step through the looking glass to put their ideas in the service of a great unveiling of hidden truth. Sometimes their art even enacts<\/i> the unveiling, but in a different dimension. Most of my review covers the show by Riskin, whose heroic effort offers renewed hope that \u201ceverything shall be revealed.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\nConspiracy Art, Emergent<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\nI\u2019ll start with <\/span>the <\/span>\u201cEverything Is Connected\u201d exhibit<\/span> at the Met, which is significant for its wide sweep of highly original art by thirty artists that covers American conspiracy theories (so-called) going back to the JFK assassination\u2014although the virtual absence of art that references 9\/11 is a disturbing omission.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>The first half\u00a0<\/b>of the show <\/b>highlights artists such as Mark Lombardi, Jenny Holzer, and Hans Haacke who have engaged with public records in an effort to graphically portray criminal networks or political conspiracies that can be precisely documented. For me the most compelling installation of this sort at the Met show was a huge drawing by\u00a0Mark Lombardi (1999), who has been called by the New York Times<\/i> \u201cthe arch-conspiracist of contemporary American art.\u201d The piece depict the Clintons\u2019 alleged conspiratorial connections in Little Rock, Arkansas. Lombardi provides an elaborate flowchart that links up scores of financiers, drug smugglers, politicians, and criminals in a web of financial and political patronage that, we are told, the artist spent years researching. This and the other pieces in this section are graphical representations of publically available facts that might comprise the narrative of a lengthy expose in a book or a long piece in Vanity Fair<\/i>.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>In another genre entirely, I can\u2019t help but give a very honorable mention in this connection to the 2017 Tom Cruise movie, \u201cAmerican Made,\u201d that shocked many by alluding to Governor Clinton\u2019s complicity in the CIA\u2019s drug-running covert op headquartered in Mena, Arkansas during the Reagan era. (Cruise plays the role of CIA pilot Barry Seal.)
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Some state crimes of this sort are becoming much better known, but what if a significant covert or criminal action is suspected, but the cover-up is elaborate and the accessible public documentation is scarce? Then we move to a more surreal realm of speculation that begins to fit the hackneyed stereotype of conspiracy theory. The Met show moves much more quickly toward this world than it needed to, in my estimation, but the pieces they curated are nonetheless compelling and often fascinating, though a few border on the absurd or caustic.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>A section devoted to art related to the Black Panthers featured a rare video loop of a Panther named Fred Hampton, an articulate young black man widely thought to be the most brilliant leader emerging in the movement in the late 1960s. Hampton rants rather lucidly about police conspiracies and many other topics concerning repression of the black power movement (which in the case of the Panthers mainly consisted of humanitarian activities directed at supporting poor urban blacks). A short time later Hampton died in what was then described to be a Panther shoot-out with the police. But a criminal trial held much later proved that his death was a deliberate, pre-mediated police raid intended to kill him. All the bullet holes pointed inward toward Hampton\u2019s bedroom; he had been shot while sleeping in his bed. Hampton\u2019s conspiracy paranoia was justified.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>I especially liked Rachel Harrison\u2019s installation \u201cSnake in the Grass\u201d (1997). This consisted of photographs that the artist took at Dallas\u2019s infamous grassy knoll. These images hang on drywall fragments suspended from the ceiling on wires in a large room; sound effects broadcast in the room are actual tapes of radio or TV reports from that day. The installation eerily raises questions still not answered about whether there was a second shooter on the far side of the knoll behind a wall, as numerous eye-witnesses have alleged. <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0 <\/span>There is just one allusion to 9\/11 in a set of paintings by Sue Williams. One of her color-saturated works actually depicts the destruction of the World Trade Center; this canvas includes the word \u201cnanothermite,\u201d a military-grade explosive that has been proven in peer-reviewed scientific journals to have been found in the dust was shed from the collapse of the towers. Truly this is art in the services of disclosure.<\/span><\/p>\nRiskin\u2019s Breakthrough Exhibit at the Feldman<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\nA more ambitious effort by a single major artist, this time limited mainly to the 9\/11 theme, was Feldman Gallery’s exbihit by Fredric Riskin that ran from September 11 to October 23.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Riskin is a Los Angeles-based conceptual artist and fine arts painter. Riskin\u2019s first conceptual art exhibit at the Feldman, mounted in 1987, was extensively reviewed in art periodicals and the popular press, including New York Magazine<\/i>, ARTnews<\/i>, Artforum<\/i>, The Village Voice<\/i>, <\/i>and Washington Times<\/i>. National Public Radio did a lengthy interview with him. <\/span>
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Mounted thirty years later, <\/span>Riskin\u2019s newest show, \u201c9\/11: The Collapse of Conscience,\u201d is based on 14 years of reflection, Fredric told me. This large immersive multimedia exhibit is a heroic attempt to get us to return with fresh eyes to the events of that day\u2014including its somber aftermath of war, surveillance, secrecy, and torture.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/themillenniumreport.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/FeldmanGalleryFlyer-v4.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Perhaps because the stakes are much higher and the truth-telling is much greater, Riskin\u2019s work received only one published review\u2014an inaccurate hit-piece by a young art critic named Zachary Small that appeared, of all places, in The Nation<\/i>, entitled \u201cConspiracy Theories Are Not Entertainment: New York\u2019s art world explores the paranoia haunting American politics.\u201d<\/span><\/a> Sorry to say, but Mr. Small comes across as small-minded, for in his haste to serve the public by warding us off from damaging \u201cconspiracy theories\u201d he entirely misses the point of Riskin\u2019s work. Small goes so far as to accuse Riskin of being \u201c<\/span>Islamophobic,\u201d when the obvious purpose of his show is to awaken our collapsed consciences<\/span>, especially in regard to Muslim victims of torture. Small also laughably claims that the artist \u201c<\/span>baldly ignores the available evidence\u201d about the collapse of the towers,<\/span> but the evidence Small offers was itself entirely ruled out in the 9\/11 Commission. Small, and his wantonly ill-informed editors at The Nation<\/i>, are the ones doing us a public disservice. Small\u2019s piece is demolished in an article by Ted Walter of ae911truth.org, entitled \u201cScolding the Art World for Showcasing \u2018Conspiracy Theories,\u2019 The Nation Doubles Down on Its Defense of the Official 9\/11 Narrative.\u201d<\/span><\/a> <\/span>
\n\u00a0 <\/span><\/span>By publishing this hack piece, The Nation<\/i>, once a prominent left-leaning magazine, shows how it has lost its critical edge. Small\u2019s review continues the left\u2019s long tradition of ridiculing those who question 9\/11 orthodoxy\u2014in this case even mocking a distinguished artist being exhibited at one of New York\u2019s premier galleries. Then again, maybe Small\u2019s piece is a step forward in a journalistic desert bereft of critical thinking, seeing that the rest of the left simply ignores voices like Riskin\u2019s or David Ray Griffin.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Gallery owner Ronald Feldman shared with me that, after he had decided to mount the show at some point, a vivid dream led him to open on September 11. A man like Feldman has deep sensitivities about who he exhibits and when, as his experience in the art world is vast. Once Andy Warhol\u2019s art manager, Feldman has by all accounts remained at the frontier of contemporary art. Feldman sees Riskin\u2019s work as ahead of its time, pointing out to me how Riskin\u2019s radical vision reminds him of similar instances in art history over the centuries. It will take a good while, Feldman explained, for Riskin\u2019s intended audience among art collectors to catch up sufficiently for the gallery to sell prints from this collection, even in today\u2019s white-hot art market.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>According to the gallery, Riskin\u2019s multimedia exhibit \u201creflects on the mystery, unseen political nuances, and dark pain of the 9\/11 attack.\u201d I would add that it especially heralds the fact that 9\/11 and the chaos and violence that has followed it remain an unhealed wound in the American psyche. Riskin points to the need for empathy and healing for the victims of our wars and torture, but the exhibit also rouses us to an activist stance through an intense encounter with jarring visual imagery and visceral truths that in too many cases are hiding in plain sight. Riskin wants us to get that we have been massively deceived about 9\/11\u2014and even about such events as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>The entrance to the show is a contained space where you face at eye-level a row of five HDTV closed-circuit TV monitors playing a 20-minute video loop accompanied by a piped-in soundtrack. This footage plus the eerie audio track sets a harrowing tone for the entire exhibit. Riskin wants, I think, to induce a liminal state of consciousness, one marked by feelings of mystery but also of foreboding. His footage strings together short excerpts from actual events of 9\/11 sliced into a montage of rare footage of political activities from that period. While some of the video materials are merely suggestive, other sequences are excerpted from hard news footage covering political figures such as Bush, Cheney, and Saudi princes. Riskin\u2019s drone-like soundtrack blends a light background beat with unsettling bells tones and tingles, sounds of a Muslim call-to-prayer, even a hint of collapsing buildings. Our immersion in this entryway space has the effect of defamiliarizing us with respect to any preconceived ideas we may have had about 9\/11. For me it induced a sense of sadness and some disorientation, but also an indignant feeling about the dark side of human nature on display.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>As you enter the main body of the show you encounter 43 wall-mounted panels of images (20\u201d x 27\u201d) paired with text boxes and other forms of text display, plus 5 large, striking prints on canvas (43\u201d x 82\u201d). Almost all of these 48 images have a grim, grainy, black-and-white look that feels like out-takes from surveillance photography you were never meant to see. This is a multimedia installation, so the exhibit rooms are also pervaded by a second <\/i>uncanny soundtrack created by Riskin. This audio loop, like the first one, is a dense, hypnotic, and eerily titillating soundscape.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Riskin\u2019s prints and panels present strategically chosen images depicting disturbing aspects of 9\/11 and its aftermath. Most are altered to varying degrees with a complex granularity as well as ghostlike or shadowy distortions that add a sense of secrecy and intrigue. To get these effects, the artist told me that he started by digitizing images (mainly journalistic or government photos), which he then reconstructed by rendering the pixels in innumerable photoshop layers, as many as 150 in some cases! <\/span><\/p>\n
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Representative panels of the show include: aerial shots of the twin towers after being hit by planes; shots of the collapse of Building 7; an ominous image of a drone aircraft; a shot of Dick Cheney hugging a Saudi prince overlaid with a fish-eye lens; a close-up of Bin Laden juxtaposed with an LA Times<\/i> headline about his death; an image of a hijacker crossing security clearance at an airport; and a close-up of the military-grade explosive thermite found in the dust around the collapse towers. Most important, I think, are disturbing Abu Ghraib torture scenes that are carefully selected, cropped, and rendered, plus actual intelligence agency memos obtained by FOIA requests that concern torture. Others of Riskin\u2019s images are harder to describe. Let\u2019s say they are enigmatic symbols that are meant <\/span>\u201cto engage that which hovers at the borders of being invisible [so as to] to bring those elements into view,\u201d\u00a0as Riskin told Zackary Small.<\/span><\/p>\n
\n\u00a0 <\/span><\/span>An equally essential aspect of this immersive show are the text boxes and text images that accompany most of the images, some rendered to look like they were retrieved from the waste basket of an intelligence operative. These are mainly written by the author, and some are only tangentially related to the image they accompany, thus giving a sense of the multi-dimensional nature of the phenomenon under observation. Many of Riskin\u2019s epigrams evoke spiritual principles and moral exhortations in the face of the brutality and nihilism of 9\/11\u2019s perpetrators, who he clearly thinks are very close to home. Others of his texts contain notions drawn from quantum physics, esoteric religion, and energy psychology that seem to exalt these ideas if considered against the dark backdrop. <\/span><\/p>\n
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Aside from <\/span>Riskin\u2019s<\/span> cryptic commentaries, I found very compelling a quote from the 1990 Geneva Convention Against Torture, and a few well-chosen scientific statements by experts, including from the inventor of the neutron bomb who states that the fertilizer bomb that destroyed the Oklahoma City Federal Building could not account for that explosion.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>As you circulate through the show, the text materials serve to guide and elevate your internal dialogue, ultimately pointing you back to exhibit\u2019s overarching message of the need for greater awareness, justice, compassion, and disclosure\u2014or the lack thereof.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Upon my first viewing, I was so moved that I proposed a public event that would bring this work to the attention of a larger audience, especially my own colleagues in the 9\/11 truth movement in the New York region. Riskin and Feldman consented to the idea,\u00a0 <\/span>and so the gallery created a second opening of \u201c9\/11: The Collapse of Conscience,\u201d which occurred on\u00a0Saturday, October 17.\u00a0I recruited several distinguished panelists to comment on the artist’s message and the gallery and I engaged in a massive outreach in the New York region with the assistance of 9\/11 activists. Also present on the panel was the artist, Frederic Riskin and the gallery owner Ron Feldman, and I acted as the emcee. A crowd of about 80 showed up to our surprise.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>The members of the panel were as follows:<\/span>
\n\u00a0 <\/span><\/span>Richard Squires, an actor, director, and distinguished writer<\/b>. His work has been featured or reviewed in dozens of publications, including\u00a0The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Art Forum,\u00a0the\u00a0Village Voice<\/i>, the\u00a0Washington Post<\/i>, and\u00a0PBS.\u00a0In addition to his play about 9\/11, \u201cA Handful of Dust,\u201d four of his previous plays have been produced. He has written and directed three films.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Panelist <\/b><\/span>Mark Crispin Miller, a distinguished professor of media studies at New York University.<\/b> Miller is best\u00a0known for his writing on American media and for his activism on behalf of democratic media reform. He is\u00a0the author of the Loser Take All: Election Fraud and The Subversion of Democracy<\/i> (2008)\u00a0and\u00a0Fooled Again, How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections<\/i> (2005).\u00a0His other books include\u00a0Boxed In: The Culture of TV<\/i> and Seeing Through Movies<\/i>.<\/span>
\n\u00a0 <\/span><\/span>William Brinnier, a retired architect licensed to practice architecture in New York State since 1984<\/b>. Bill lost his best friend, Frank DiMartini, on the 88th floor of the North Tower on 9\/11. Frank was the construction manager of the World Trade Center.\u00a0 <\/span>Bill shared his personal journey from uneasy acceptance of the official 9\/11 narrative to questioning it, and to now challenging it.<\/span><\/p>\n
\n\u00a0 <\/span>To conclude<\/span>, and to gain greater perspective in the face of a grim subject, let\u2019s turn to a bit of theology and psychology\u2014and entertain a glimmer of hope.<\/span><\/p>\nA Concluding Note on the Phenomenology of Light and Darkness<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\nFor the sake of sanity and balance, we should bear in mind that light ultimately is more powerful than darkness, despite appearances. Even Harvey Weinstein discovered that the light of truth, like physical light, is inescapable and insistent, as did<\/span> Saudi crown prince\u00a0Mohammed bin Salman<\/span>. According to its nature, the divine light\u2014if you can admit that such a thing exists\u2014seeks out and exposes falsehood, deception, and oppression, working through its many actors, especially its prophets and artists and courageous journalists. The divine spirit is, after all, ancestral to the human mind, if you can accept the theory according to which spirit is supervenient in relation to mind.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>And this is why repressed truth has an inconvenient way of being unbearably difficult to force down below the surface, as Lady Macbeth discovered<\/span>. Her need to \u201cout\u201d the stain <\/span>of her \u201c<\/span>damned spot\u201d illustrates the psychological truth that many<\/span> criminal cover-ups will out <\/i>themselves, at some point, consciously or through bizarre slips. Truth is dynamic and more buoyant than falsehood. If pushed down, it rises up with proportional force and goes an unstoppable journey back to the light of day, like a bubble down deep in a dark ocean that rises to the sunlit surface.
\n\u00a0 <\/span><\/span>In Freud\u2019s theory of dreams, the individual\u2019s deep unconscious takes advantage of the weakened ego during sleep. It incessantly produces dream images representing thoughts that have been censored during waking life. The psyche seems to wrestle with suppressed material the way the biblical Jacob wrestled with angels, revealing its hidden plenty. Freud and his successors, especially Jung, have shown that untreated trauma, falsehood, and self-deception\u2014seeking a way to release their charge\u2014can distort the mind (and body) as a means of urgent self-expression, creating grotesque dreams and fantasies, even eventually derangement. Those with eyes to see can behold the disfigurement that sets in on the faces of perpetrators like Dick Cheney.<\/span>
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Criminologists know that human conscience acts like the hydraulic pressure that moves water through a pipe. Perpetrators of crimes instinctively feel the pressure of truth forcing its way up and out; that\u2019s why many confess in the end and serve time, and it\u2019s one reason why reluctant witnesses and whistleblowers with little to gain eventually do come forward.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>In theological terms, all will be revealed when the time is propitious. Conspiracy art has become one crucial step in the uncovering of monstrous political deception, making the day closer when everything <\/i>will be <\/span>revealed. \u201cFor, there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.\u201d (Luke 19:40)<\/span><\/p>\nExamples of Conspiracy Art :<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n<\/em>(Luke 19:40)<\/h3>\n
\n
Byron Belitsos<\/strong><\/h4>\n\u00a0 Political mistrust is so extreme and the pace of disclosure of deep state secrets is so slow that today\u2019s America seems awash in conspiracies or rumors of conspiracy. That\u2019s why we shouldn\u2019t be surprised that these times of paranoia have given birth to a sub-genre of conceptual art that some curators are now calling \u201cconspiracy art.\u201d Apparently, the truth-telling process, now on hold in the mainstream media, has had to jump tracks to find another vehicle for its expression: independent artists. Especially since 9\/11, art related to government conspiracy has become so preponderant that two large exhibits appeared in prestigious venues in New York City in the fall of 2018.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>In this essay I review these two shows, \u201cEverything Is Connected,\u201d now on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through January 15), and \u201c9\/11: The Collapse of Conscience,\u201d by Fredric Riskin, which was on display at Feldman Gallery in the SoHo through October. Today\u2019s political gridlock has clearly opened up a space for artists willing to step through the looking glass to put their ideas in the service of a great unveiling of hidden truth. Sometimes their art even enacts<\/i> the unveiling, but in a different dimension. Most of my review covers the show by Riskin, whose heroic effort offers renewed hope that \u201ceverything shall be revealed.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\nConspiracy Art, Emergent<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\nI\u2019ll start with <\/span>the <\/span>\u201cEverything Is Connected\u201d exhibit<\/span> at the Met, which is significant for its wide sweep of highly original art by thirty artists that covers American conspiracy theories (so-called) going back to the JFK assassination\u2014although the virtual absence of art that references 9\/11 is a disturbing omission.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>The first half\u00a0<\/b>of the show <\/b>highlights artists such as Mark Lombardi, Jenny Holzer, and Hans Haacke who have engaged with public records in an effort to graphically portray criminal networks or political conspiracies that can be precisely documented. For me the most compelling installation of this sort at the Met show was a huge drawing by\u00a0Mark Lombardi (1999), who has been called by the New York Times<\/i> \u201cthe arch-conspiracist of contemporary American art.\u201d The piece depict the Clintons\u2019 alleged conspiratorial connections in Little Rock, Arkansas. Lombardi provides an elaborate flowchart that links up scores of financiers, drug smugglers, politicians, and criminals in a web of financial and political patronage that, we are told, the artist spent years researching. This and the other pieces in this section are graphical representations of publically available facts that might comprise the narrative of a lengthy expose in a book or a long piece in Vanity Fair<\/i>.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>In another genre entirely, I can\u2019t help but give a very honorable mention in this connection to the 2017 Tom Cruise movie, \u201cAmerican Made,\u201d that shocked many by alluding to Governor Clinton\u2019s complicity in the CIA\u2019s drug-running covert op headquartered in Mena, Arkansas during the Reagan era. (Cruise plays the role of CIA pilot Barry Seal.)
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Some state crimes of this sort are becoming much better known, but what if a significant covert or criminal action is suspected, but the cover-up is elaborate and the accessible public documentation is scarce? Then we move to a more surreal realm of speculation that begins to fit the hackneyed stereotype of conspiracy theory. The Met show moves much more quickly toward this world than it needed to, in my estimation, but the pieces they curated are nonetheless compelling and often fascinating, though a few border on the absurd or caustic.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>A section devoted to art related to the Black Panthers featured a rare video loop of a Panther named Fred Hampton, an articulate young black man widely thought to be the most brilliant leader emerging in the movement in the late 1960s. Hampton rants rather lucidly about police conspiracies and many other topics concerning repression of the black power movement (which in the case of the Panthers mainly consisted of humanitarian activities directed at supporting poor urban blacks). A short time later Hampton died in what was then described to be a Panther shoot-out with the police. But a criminal trial held much later proved that his death was a deliberate, pre-mediated police raid intended to kill him. All the bullet holes pointed inward toward Hampton\u2019s bedroom; he had been shot while sleeping in his bed. Hampton\u2019s conspiracy paranoia was justified.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>I especially liked Rachel Harrison\u2019s installation \u201cSnake in the Grass\u201d (1997). This consisted of photographs that the artist took at Dallas\u2019s infamous grassy knoll. These images hang on drywall fragments suspended from the ceiling on wires in a large room; sound effects broadcast in the room are actual tapes of radio or TV reports from that day. The installation eerily raises questions still not answered about whether there was a second shooter on the far side of the knoll behind a wall, as numerous eye-witnesses have alleged. <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0 <\/span>There is just one allusion to 9\/11 in a set of paintings by Sue Williams. One of her color-saturated works actually depicts the destruction of the World Trade Center; this canvas includes the word \u201cnanothermite,\u201d a military-grade explosive that has been proven in peer-reviewed scientific journals to have been found in the dust was shed from the collapse of the towers. Truly this is art in the services of disclosure.<\/span><\/p>\nRiskin\u2019s Breakthrough Exhibit at the Feldman<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\nA more ambitious effort by a single major artist, this time limited mainly to the 9\/11 theme, was Feldman Gallery’s exbihit by Fredric Riskin that ran from September 11 to October 23.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Riskin is a Los Angeles-based conceptual artist and fine arts painter. Riskin\u2019s first conceptual art exhibit at the Feldman, mounted in 1987, was extensively reviewed in art periodicals and the popular press, including New York Magazine<\/i>, ARTnews<\/i>, Artforum<\/i>, The Village Voice<\/i>, <\/i>and Washington Times<\/i>. National Public Radio did a lengthy interview with him. <\/span>
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Mounted thirty years later, <\/span>Riskin\u2019s newest show, \u201c9\/11: The Collapse of Conscience,\u201d is based on 14 years of reflection, Fredric told me. This large immersive multimedia exhibit is a heroic attempt to get us to return with fresh eyes to the events of that day\u2014including its somber aftermath of war, surveillance, secrecy, and torture.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Perhaps because the stakes are much higher and the truth-telling is much greater, Riskin\u2019s work received only one published review\u2014an inaccurate hit-piece by a young art critic named Zachary Small that appeared, of all places, in The Nation<\/i>, entitled \u201cConspiracy Theories Are Not Entertainment: New York\u2019s art world explores the paranoia haunting American politics.\u201d<\/span><\/a> Sorry to say, but Mr. Small comes across as small-minded, for in his haste to serve the public by warding us off from damaging \u201cconspiracy theories\u201d he entirely misses the point of Riskin\u2019s work. Small goes so far as to accuse Riskin of being \u201c<\/span>Islamophobic,\u201d when the obvious purpose of his show is to awaken our collapsed consciences<\/span>, especially in regard to Muslim victims of torture. Small also laughably claims that the artist \u201c<\/span>baldly ignores the available evidence\u201d about the collapse of the towers,<\/span> but the evidence Small offers was itself entirely ruled out in the 9\/11 Commission. Small, and his wantonly ill-informed editors at The Nation<\/i>, are the ones doing us a public disservice. Small\u2019s piece is demolished in an article by Ted Walter of ae911truth.org, entitled \u201cScolding the Art World for Showcasing \u2018Conspiracy Theories,\u2019 The Nation Doubles Down on Its Defense of the Official 9\/11 Narrative.\u201d<\/span><\/a> <\/span>
\n\u00a0 <\/span><\/span>By publishing this hack piece, The Nation<\/i>, once a prominent left-leaning magazine, shows how it has lost its critical edge. Small\u2019s review continues the left\u2019s long tradition of ridiculing those who question 9\/11 orthodoxy\u2014in this case even mocking a distinguished artist being exhibited at one of New York\u2019s premier galleries. Then again, maybe Small\u2019s piece is a step forward in a journalistic desert bereft of critical thinking, seeing that the rest of the left simply ignores voices like Riskin\u2019s or David Ray Griffin.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Gallery owner Ronald Feldman shared with me that, after he had decided to mount the show at some point, a vivid dream led him to open on September 11. A man like Feldman has deep sensitivities about who he exhibits and when, as his experience in the art world is vast. Once Andy Warhol\u2019s art manager, Feldman has by all accounts remained at the frontier of contemporary art. Feldman sees Riskin\u2019s work as ahead of its time, pointing out to me how Riskin\u2019s radical vision reminds him of similar instances in art history over the centuries. It will take a good while, Feldman explained, for Riskin\u2019s intended audience among art collectors to catch up sufficiently for the gallery to sell prints from this collection, even in today\u2019s white-hot art market.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>According to the gallery, Riskin\u2019s multimedia exhibit \u201creflects on the mystery, unseen political nuances, and dark pain of the 9\/11 attack.\u201d I would add that it especially heralds the fact that 9\/11 and the chaos and violence that has followed it remain an unhealed wound in the American psyche. Riskin points to the need for empathy and healing for the victims of our wars and torture, but the exhibit also rouses us to an activist stance through an intense encounter with jarring visual imagery and visceral truths that in too many cases are hiding in plain sight. Riskin wants us to get that we have been massively deceived about 9\/11\u2014and even about such events as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>The entrance to the show is a contained space where you face at eye-level a row of five HDTV closed-circuit TV monitors playing a 20-minute video loop accompanied by a piped-in soundtrack. This footage plus the eerie audio track sets a harrowing tone for the entire exhibit. Riskin wants, I think, to induce a liminal state of consciousness, one marked by feelings of mystery but also of foreboding. His footage strings together short excerpts from actual events of 9\/11 sliced into a montage of rare footage of political activities from that period. While some of the video materials are merely suggestive, other sequences are excerpted from hard news footage covering political figures such as Bush, Cheney, and Saudi princes. Riskin\u2019s drone-like soundtrack blends a light background beat with unsettling bells tones and tingles, sounds of a Muslim call-to-prayer, even a hint of collapsing buildings. Our immersion in this entryway space has the effect of defamiliarizing us with respect to any preconceived ideas we may have had about 9\/11. For me it induced a sense of sadness and some disorientation, but also an indignant feeling about the dark side of human nature on display.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>As you enter the main body of the show you encounter 43 wall-mounted panels of images (20\u201d x 27\u201d) paired with text boxes and other forms of text display, plus 5 large, striking prints on canvas (43\u201d x 82\u201d). Almost all of these 48 images have a grim, grainy, black-and-white look that feels like out-takes from surveillance photography you were never meant to see. This is a multimedia installation, so the exhibit rooms are also pervaded by a second <\/i>uncanny soundtrack created by Riskin. This audio loop, like the first one, is a dense, hypnotic, and eerily titillating soundscape.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Riskin\u2019s prints and panels present strategically chosen images depicting disturbing aspects of 9\/11 and its aftermath. Most are altered to varying degrees with a complex granularity as well as ghostlike or shadowy distortions that add a sense of secrecy and intrigue. To get these effects, the artist told me that he started by digitizing images (mainly journalistic or government photos), which he then reconstructed by rendering the pixels in innumerable photoshop layers, as many as 150 in some cases! <\/span><\/p>\n
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Representative panels of the show include: aerial shots of the twin towers after being hit by planes; shots of the collapse of Building 7; an ominous image of a drone aircraft; a shot of Dick Cheney hugging a Saudi prince overlaid with a fish-eye lens; a close-up of Bin Laden juxtaposed with an LA Times<\/i> headline about his death; an image of a hijacker crossing security clearance at an airport; and a close-up of the military-grade explosive thermite found in the dust around the collapse towers. Most important, I think, are disturbing Abu Ghraib torture scenes that are carefully selected, cropped, and rendered, plus actual intelligence agency memos obtained by FOIA requests that concern torture. Others of Riskin\u2019s images are harder to describe. Let\u2019s say they are enigmatic symbols that are meant <\/span>\u201cto engage that which hovers at the borders of being invisible [so as to] to bring those elements into view,\u201d\u00a0as Riskin told Zackary Small.<\/span><\/p>\n
\n\u00a0 <\/span><\/span>An equally essential aspect of this immersive show are the text boxes and text images that accompany most of the images, some rendered to look like they were retrieved from the waste basket of an intelligence operative. These are mainly written by the author, and some are only tangentially related to the image they accompany, thus giving a sense of the multi-dimensional nature of the phenomenon under observation. Many of Riskin\u2019s epigrams evoke spiritual principles and moral exhortations in the face of the brutality and nihilism of 9\/11\u2019s perpetrators, who he clearly thinks are very close to home. Others of his texts contain notions drawn from quantum physics, esoteric religion, and energy psychology that seem to exalt these ideas if considered against the dark backdrop. <\/span><\/p>\n
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Aside from <\/span>Riskin\u2019s<\/span> cryptic commentaries, I found very compelling a quote from the 1990 Geneva Convention Against Torture, and a few well-chosen scientific statements by experts, including from the inventor of the neutron bomb who states that the fertilizer bomb that destroyed the Oklahoma City Federal Building could not account for that explosion.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>As you circulate through the show, the text materials serve to guide and elevate your internal dialogue, ultimately pointing you back to exhibit\u2019s overarching message of the need for greater awareness, justice, compassion, and disclosure\u2014or the lack thereof.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Upon my first viewing, I was so moved that I proposed a public event that would bring this work to the attention of a larger audience, especially my own colleagues in the 9\/11 truth movement in the New York region. Riskin and Feldman consented to the idea,\u00a0 <\/span>and so the gallery created a second opening of \u201c9\/11: The Collapse of Conscience,\u201d which occurred on\u00a0Saturday, October 17.\u00a0I recruited several distinguished panelists to comment on the artist’s message and the gallery and I engaged in a massive outreach in the New York region with the assistance of 9\/11 activists. Also present on the panel was the artist, Frederic Riskin and the gallery owner Ron Feldman, and I acted as the emcee. A crowd of about 80 showed up to our surprise.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>The members of the panel were as follows:<\/span>
\n\u00a0 <\/span><\/span>Richard Squires, an actor, director, and distinguished writer<\/b>. His work has been featured or reviewed in dozens of publications, including\u00a0The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Art Forum,\u00a0the\u00a0Village Voice<\/i>, the\u00a0Washington Post<\/i>, and\u00a0PBS.\u00a0In addition to his play about 9\/11, \u201cA Handful of Dust,\u201d four of his previous plays have been produced. He has written and directed three films.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Panelist <\/b><\/span>Mark Crispin Miller, a distinguished professor of media studies at New York University.<\/b> Miller is best\u00a0known for his writing on American media and for his activism on behalf of democratic media reform. He is\u00a0the author of the Loser Take All: Election Fraud and The Subversion of Democracy<\/i> (2008)\u00a0and\u00a0Fooled Again, How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections<\/i> (2005).\u00a0His other books include\u00a0Boxed In: The Culture of TV<\/i> and Seeing Through Movies<\/i>.<\/span>
\n\u00a0 <\/span><\/span>William Brinnier, a retired architect licensed to practice architecture in New York State since 1984<\/b>. Bill lost his best friend, Frank DiMartini, on the 88th floor of the North Tower on 9\/11. Frank was the construction manager of the World Trade Center.\u00a0 <\/span>Bill shared his personal journey from uneasy acceptance of the official 9\/11 narrative to questioning it, and to now challenging it.<\/span><\/p>\n
\n\u00a0 <\/span>To conclude<\/span>, and to gain greater perspective in the face of a grim subject, let\u2019s turn to a bit of theology and psychology\u2014and entertain a glimmer of hope.<\/span><\/p>\nA Concluding Note on the Phenomenology of Light and Darkness<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\nFor the sake of sanity and balance, we should bear in mind that light ultimately is more powerful than darkness, despite appearances. Even Harvey Weinstein discovered that the light of truth, like physical light, is inescapable and insistent, as did<\/span> Saudi crown prince\u00a0Mohammed bin Salman<\/span>. According to its nature, the divine light\u2014if you can admit that such a thing exists\u2014seeks out and exposes falsehood, deception, and oppression, working through its many actors, especially its prophets and artists and courageous journalists. The divine spirit is, after all, ancestral to the human mind, if you can accept the theory according to which spirit is supervenient in relation to mind.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>And this is why repressed truth has an inconvenient way of being unbearably difficult to force down below the surface, as Lady Macbeth discovered<\/span>. Her need to \u201cout\u201d the stain <\/span>of her \u201c<\/span>damned spot\u201d illustrates the psychological truth that many<\/span> criminal cover-ups will out <\/i>themselves, at some point, consciously or through bizarre slips. Truth is dynamic and more buoyant than falsehood. If pushed down, it rises up with proportional force and goes an unstoppable journey back to the light of day, like a bubble down deep in a dark ocean that rises to the sunlit surface.
\n\u00a0 <\/span><\/span>In Freud\u2019s theory of dreams, the individual\u2019s deep unconscious takes advantage of the weakened ego during sleep. It incessantly produces dream images representing thoughts that have been censored during waking life. The psyche seems to wrestle with suppressed material the way the biblical Jacob wrestled with angels, revealing its hidden plenty. Freud and his successors, especially Jung, have shown that untreated trauma, falsehood, and self-deception\u2014seeking a way to release their charge\u2014can distort the mind (and body) as a means of urgent self-expression, creating grotesque dreams and fantasies, even eventually derangement. Those with eyes to see can behold the disfigurement that sets in on the faces of perpetrators like Dick Cheney.<\/span>
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Criminologists know that human conscience acts like the hydraulic pressure that moves water through a pipe. Perpetrators of crimes instinctively feel the pressure of truth forcing its way up and out; that\u2019s why many confess in the end and serve time, and it\u2019s one reason why reluctant witnesses and whistleblowers with little to gain eventually do come forward.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>In theological terms, all will be revealed when the time is propitious. Conspiracy art has become one crucial step in the uncovering of monstrous political deception, making the day closer when everything <\/i>will be <\/span>revealed. \u201cFor, there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.\u201d (Luke 19:40)<\/span><\/p>\nExamples of Conspiracy Art :<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\u00a0 <\/span>In this essay I review these two shows, \u201cEverything Is Connected,\u201d now on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through January 15), and \u201c9\/11: The Collapse of Conscience,\u201d by Fredric Riskin, which was on display at Feldman Gallery in the SoHo through October. Today\u2019s political gridlock has clearly opened up a space for artists willing to step through the looking glass to put their ideas in the service of a great unveiling of hidden truth. Sometimes their art even enacts<\/i> the unveiling, but in a different dimension. Most of my review covers the show by Riskin, whose heroic effort offers renewed hope that \u201ceverything shall be revealed.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n
Conspiracy Art, Emergent<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\nI\u2019ll start with <\/span>the <\/span>\u201cEverything Is Connected\u201d exhibit<\/span> at the Met, which is significant for its wide sweep of highly original art by thirty artists that covers American conspiracy theories (so-called) going back to the JFK assassination\u2014although the virtual absence of art that references 9\/11 is a disturbing omission.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>The first half\u00a0<\/b>of the show <\/b>highlights artists such as Mark Lombardi, Jenny Holzer, and Hans Haacke who have engaged with public records in an effort to graphically portray criminal networks or political conspiracies that can be precisely documented. For me the most compelling installation of this sort at the Met show was a huge drawing by\u00a0Mark Lombardi (1999), who has been called by the New York Times<\/i> \u201cthe arch-conspiracist of contemporary American art.\u201d The piece depict the Clintons\u2019 alleged conspiratorial connections in Little Rock, Arkansas. Lombardi provides an elaborate flowchart that links up scores of financiers, drug smugglers, politicians, and criminals in a web of financial and political patronage that, we are told, the artist spent years researching. This and the other pieces in this section are graphical representations of publically available facts that might comprise the narrative of a lengthy expose in a book or a long piece in Vanity Fair<\/i>.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>In another genre entirely, I can\u2019t help but give a very honorable mention in this connection to the 2017 Tom Cruise movie, \u201cAmerican Made,\u201d that shocked many by alluding to Governor Clinton\u2019s complicity in the CIA\u2019s drug-running covert op headquartered in Mena, Arkansas during the Reagan era. (Cruise plays the role of CIA pilot Barry Seal.)
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Some state crimes of this sort are becoming much better known, but what if a significant covert or criminal action is suspected, but the cover-up is elaborate and the accessible public documentation is scarce? Then we move to a more surreal realm of speculation that begins to fit the hackneyed stereotype of conspiracy theory. The Met show moves much more quickly toward this world than it needed to, in my estimation, but the pieces they curated are nonetheless compelling and often fascinating, though a few border on the absurd or caustic.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>A section devoted to art related to the Black Panthers featured a rare video loop of a Panther named Fred Hampton, an articulate young black man widely thought to be the most brilliant leader emerging in the movement in the late 1960s. Hampton rants rather lucidly about police conspiracies and many other topics concerning repression of the black power movement (which in the case of the Panthers mainly consisted of humanitarian activities directed at supporting poor urban blacks). A short time later Hampton died in what was then described to be a Panther shoot-out with the police. But a criminal trial held much later proved that his death was a deliberate, pre-mediated police raid intended to kill him. All the bullet holes pointed inward toward Hampton\u2019s bedroom; he had been shot while sleeping in his bed. Hampton\u2019s conspiracy paranoia was justified.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>I especially liked Rachel Harrison\u2019s installation \u201cSnake in the Grass\u201d (1997). This consisted of photographs that the artist took at Dallas\u2019s infamous grassy knoll. These images hang on drywall fragments suspended from the ceiling on wires in a large room; sound effects broadcast in the room are actual tapes of radio or TV reports from that day. The installation eerily raises questions still not answered about whether there was a second shooter on the far side of the knoll behind a wall, as numerous eye-witnesses have alleged. <\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0 <\/span>There is just one allusion to 9\/11 in a set of paintings by Sue Williams. One of her color-saturated works actually depicts the destruction of the World Trade Center; this canvas includes the word \u201cnanothermite,\u201d a military-grade explosive that has been proven in peer-reviewed scientific journals to have been found in the dust was shed from the collapse of the towers. Truly this is art in the services of disclosure.<\/span><\/p>\nRiskin\u2019s Breakthrough Exhibit at the Feldman<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\nA more ambitious effort by a single major artist, this time limited mainly to the 9\/11 theme, was Feldman Gallery’s exbihit by Fredric Riskin that ran from September 11 to October 23.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Riskin is a Los Angeles-based conceptual artist and fine arts painter. Riskin\u2019s first conceptual art exhibit at the Feldman, mounted in 1987, was extensively reviewed in art periodicals and the popular press, including New York Magazine<\/i>, ARTnews<\/i>, Artforum<\/i>, The Village Voice<\/i>, <\/i>and Washington Times<\/i>. National Public Radio did a lengthy interview with him. <\/span>
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Mounted thirty years later, <\/span>Riskin\u2019s newest show, \u201c9\/11: The Collapse of Conscience,\u201d is based on 14 years of reflection, Fredric told me. This large immersive multimedia exhibit is a heroic attempt to get us to return with fresh eyes to the events of that day\u2014including its somber aftermath of war, surveillance, secrecy, and torture.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Perhaps because the stakes are much higher and the truth-telling is much greater, Riskin\u2019s work received only one published review\u2014an inaccurate hit-piece by a young art critic named Zachary Small that appeared, of all places, in The Nation<\/i>, entitled \u201cConspiracy Theories Are Not Entertainment: New York\u2019s art world explores the paranoia haunting American politics.\u201d<\/span><\/a> Sorry to say, but Mr. Small comes across as small-minded, for in his haste to serve the public by warding us off from damaging \u201cconspiracy theories\u201d he entirely misses the point of Riskin\u2019s work. Small goes so far as to accuse Riskin of being \u201c<\/span>Islamophobic,\u201d when the obvious purpose of his show is to awaken our collapsed consciences<\/span>, especially in regard to Muslim victims of torture. Small also laughably claims that the artist \u201c<\/span>baldly ignores the available evidence\u201d about the collapse of the towers,<\/span> but the evidence Small offers was itself entirely ruled out in the 9\/11 Commission. Small, and his wantonly ill-informed editors at The Nation<\/i>, are the ones doing us a public disservice. Small\u2019s piece is demolished in an article by Ted Walter of ae911truth.org, entitled \u201cScolding the Art World for Showcasing \u2018Conspiracy Theories,\u2019 The Nation Doubles Down on Its Defense of the Official 9\/11 Narrative.\u201d<\/span><\/a> <\/span>
\n\u00a0 <\/span><\/span>By publishing this hack piece, The Nation<\/i>, once a prominent left-leaning magazine, shows how it has lost its critical edge. Small\u2019s review continues the left\u2019s long tradition of ridiculing those who question 9\/11 orthodoxy\u2014in this case even mocking a distinguished artist being exhibited at one of New York\u2019s premier galleries. Then again, maybe Small\u2019s piece is a step forward in a journalistic desert bereft of critical thinking, seeing that the rest of the left simply ignores voices like Riskin\u2019s or David Ray Griffin.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Gallery owner Ronald Feldman shared with me that, after he had decided to mount the show at some point, a vivid dream led him to open on September 11. A man like Feldman has deep sensitivities about who he exhibits and when, as his experience in the art world is vast. Once Andy Warhol\u2019s art manager, Feldman has by all accounts remained at the frontier of contemporary art. Feldman sees Riskin\u2019s work as ahead of its time, pointing out to me how Riskin\u2019s radical vision reminds him of similar instances in art history over the centuries. It will take a good while, Feldman explained, for Riskin\u2019s intended audience among art collectors to catch up sufficiently for the gallery to sell prints from this collection, even in today\u2019s white-hot art market.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>According to the gallery, Riskin\u2019s multimedia exhibit \u201creflects on the mystery, unseen political nuances, and dark pain of the 9\/11 attack.\u201d I would add that it especially heralds the fact that 9\/11 and the chaos and violence that has followed it remain an unhealed wound in the American psyche. Riskin points to the need for empathy and healing for the victims of our wars and torture, but the exhibit also rouses us to an activist stance through an intense encounter with jarring visual imagery and visceral truths that in too many cases are hiding in plain sight. Riskin wants us to get that we have been massively deceived about 9\/11\u2014and even about such events as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>The entrance to the show is a contained space where you face at eye-level a row of five HDTV closed-circuit TV monitors playing a 20-minute video loop accompanied by a piped-in soundtrack. This footage plus the eerie audio track sets a harrowing tone for the entire exhibit. Riskin wants, I think, to induce a liminal state of consciousness, one marked by feelings of mystery but also of foreboding. His footage strings together short excerpts from actual events of 9\/11 sliced into a montage of rare footage of political activities from that period. While some of the video materials are merely suggestive, other sequences are excerpted from hard news footage covering political figures such as Bush, Cheney, and Saudi princes. Riskin\u2019s drone-like soundtrack blends a light background beat with unsettling bells tones and tingles, sounds of a Muslim call-to-prayer, even a hint of collapsing buildings. Our immersion in this entryway space has the effect of defamiliarizing us with respect to any preconceived ideas we may have had about 9\/11. For me it induced a sense of sadness and some disorientation, but also an indignant feeling about the dark side of human nature on display.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>As you enter the main body of the show you encounter 43 wall-mounted panels of images (20\u201d x 27\u201d) paired with text boxes and other forms of text display, plus 5 large, striking prints on canvas (43\u201d x 82\u201d). Almost all of these 48 images have a grim, grainy, black-and-white look that feels like out-takes from surveillance photography you were never meant to see. This is a multimedia installation, so the exhibit rooms are also pervaded by a second <\/i>uncanny soundtrack created by Riskin. This audio loop, like the first one, is a dense, hypnotic, and eerily titillating soundscape.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Riskin\u2019s prints and panels present strategically chosen images depicting disturbing aspects of 9\/11 and its aftermath. Most are altered to varying degrees with a complex granularity as well as ghostlike or shadowy distortions that add a sense of secrecy and intrigue. To get these effects, the artist told me that he started by digitizing images (mainly journalistic or government photos), which he then reconstructed by rendering the pixels in innumerable photoshop layers, as many as 150 in some cases! <\/span><\/p>\n
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Representative panels of the show include: aerial shots of the twin towers after being hit by planes; shots of the collapse of Building 7; an ominous image of a drone aircraft; a shot of Dick Cheney hugging a Saudi prince overlaid with a fish-eye lens; a close-up of Bin Laden juxtaposed with an LA Times<\/i> headline about his death; an image of a hijacker crossing security clearance at an airport; and a close-up of the military-grade explosive thermite found in the dust around the collapse towers. Most important, I think, are disturbing Abu Ghraib torture scenes that are carefully selected, cropped, and rendered, plus actual intelligence agency memos obtained by FOIA requests that concern torture. Others of Riskin\u2019s images are harder to describe. Let\u2019s say they are enigmatic symbols that are meant <\/span>\u201cto engage that which hovers at the borders of being invisible [so as to] to bring those elements into view,\u201d\u00a0as Riskin told Zackary Small.<\/span><\/p>\n
\n\u00a0 <\/span><\/span>An equally essential aspect of this immersive show are the text boxes and text images that accompany most of the images, some rendered to look like they were retrieved from the waste basket of an intelligence operative. These are mainly written by the author, and some are only tangentially related to the image they accompany, thus giving a sense of the multi-dimensional nature of the phenomenon under observation. Many of Riskin\u2019s epigrams evoke spiritual principles and moral exhortations in the face of the brutality and nihilism of 9\/11\u2019s perpetrators, who he clearly thinks are very close to home. Others of his texts contain notions drawn from quantum physics, esoteric religion, and energy psychology that seem to exalt these ideas if considered against the dark backdrop. <\/span><\/p>\n
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Aside from <\/span>Riskin\u2019s<\/span> cryptic commentaries, I found very compelling a quote from the 1990 Geneva Convention Against Torture, and a few well-chosen scientific statements by experts, including from the inventor of the neutron bomb who states that the fertilizer bomb that destroyed the Oklahoma City Federal Building could not account for that explosion.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>As you circulate through the show, the text materials serve to guide and elevate your internal dialogue, ultimately pointing you back to exhibit\u2019s overarching message of the need for greater awareness, justice, compassion, and disclosure\u2014or the lack thereof.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Upon my first viewing, I was so moved that I proposed a public event that would bring this work to the attention of a larger audience, especially my own colleagues in the 9\/11 truth movement in the New York region. Riskin and Feldman consented to the idea,\u00a0 <\/span>and so the gallery created a second opening of \u201c9\/11: The Collapse of Conscience,\u201d which occurred on\u00a0Saturday, October 17.\u00a0I recruited several distinguished panelists to comment on the artist’s message and the gallery and I engaged in a massive outreach in the New York region with the assistance of 9\/11 activists. Also present on the panel was the artist, Frederic Riskin and the gallery owner Ron Feldman, and I acted as the emcee. A crowd of about 80 showed up to our surprise.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>The members of the panel were as follows:<\/span>
\n\u00a0 <\/span><\/span>Richard Squires, an actor, director, and distinguished writer<\/b>. His work has been featured or reviewed in dozens of publications, including\u00a0The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Art Forum,\u00a0the\u00a0Village Voice<\/i>, the\u00a0Washington Post<\/i>, and\u00a0PBS.\u00a0In addition to his play about 9\/11, \u201cA Handful of Dust,\u201d four of his previous plays have been produced. He has written and directed three films.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Panelist <\/b><\/span>Mark Crispin Miller, a distinguished professor of media studies at New York University.<\/b> Miller is best\u00a0known for his writing on American media and for his activism on behalf of democratic media reform. He is\u00a0the author of the Loser Take All: Election Fraud and The Subversion of Democracy<\/i> (2008)\u00a0and\u00a0Fooled Again, How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections<\/i> (2005).\u00a0His other books include\u00a0Boxed In: The Culture of TV<\/i> and Seeing Through Movies<\/i>.<\/span>
\n\u00a0 <\/span><\/span>William Brinnier, a retired architect licensed to practice architecture in New York State since 1984<\/b>. Bill lost his best friend, Frank DiMartini, on the 88th floor of the North Tower on 9\/11. Frank was the construction manager of the World Trade Center.\u00a0 <\/span>Bill shared his personal journey from uneasy acceptance of the official 9\/11 narrative to questioning it, and to now challenging it.<\/span><\/p>\n
\n\u00a0 <\/span>To conclude<\/span>, and to gain greater perspective in the face of a grim subject, let\u2019s turn to a bit of theology and psychology\u2014and entertain a glimmer of hope.<\/span><\/p>\nA Concluding Note on the Phenomenology of Light and Darkness<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\nFor the sake of sanity and balance, we should bear in mind that light ultimately is more powerful than darkness, despite appearances. Even Harvey Weinstein discovered that the light of truth, like physical light, is inescapable and insistent, as did<\/span> Saudi crown prince\u00a0Mohammed bin Salman<\/span>. According to its nature, the divine light\u2014if you can admit that such a thing exists\u2014seeks out and exposes falsehood, deception, and oppression, working through its many actors, especially its prophets and artists and courageous journalists. The divine spirit is, after all, ancestral to the human mind, if you can accept the theory according to which spirit is supervenient in relation to mind.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>And this is why repressed truth has an inconvenient way of being unbearably difficult to force down below the surface, as Lady Macbeth discovered<\/span>. Her need to \u201cout\u201d the stain <\/span>of her \u201c<\/span>damned spot\u201d illustrates the psychological truth that many<\/span> criminal cover-ups will out <\/i>themselves, at some point, consciously or through bizarre slips. Truth is dynamic and more buoyant than falsehood. If pushed down, it rises up with proportional force and goes an unstoppable journey back to the light of day, like a bubble down deep in a dark ocean that rises to the sunlit surface.
\n\u00a0 <\/span><\/span>In Freud\u2019s theory of dreams, the individual\u2019s deep unconscious takes advantage of the weakened ego during sleep. It incessantly produces dream images representing thoughts that have been censored during waking life. The psyche seems to wrestle with suppressed material the way the biblical Jacob wrestled with angels, revealing its hidden plenty. Freud and his successors, especially Jung, have shown that untreated trauma, falsehood, and self-deception\u2014seeking a way to release their charge\u2014can distort the mind (and body) as a means of urgent self-expression, creating grotesque dreams and fantasies, even eventually derangement. Those with eyes to see can behold the disfigurement that sets in on the faces of perpetrators like Dick Cheney.<\/span>
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Criminologists know that human conscience acts like the hydraulic pressure that moves water through a pipe. Perpetrators of crimes instinctively feel the pressure of truth forcing its way up and out; that\u2019s why many confess in the end and serve time, and it\u2019s one reason why reluctant witnesses and whistleblowers with little to gain eventually do come forward.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>In theological terms, all will be revealed when the time is propitious. Conspiracy art has become one crucial step in the uncovering of monstrous political deception, making the day closer when everything <\/i>will be <\/span>revealed. \u201cFor, there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.\u201d (Luke 19:40)<\/span><\/p>\nExamples of Conspiracy Art :<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n\u00a0 <\/span>The first half\u00a0<\/b>of the show <\/b>highlights artists such as Mark Lombardi, Jenny Holzer, and Hans Haacke who have engaged with public records in an effort to graphically portray criminal networks or political conspiracies that can be precisely documented. For me the most compelling installation of this sort at the Met show was a huge drawing by\u00a0Mark Lombardi (1999), who has been called by the New York Times<\/i> \u201cthe arch-conspiracist of contemporary American art.\u201d The piece depict the Clintons\u2019 alleged conspiratorial connections in Little Rock, Arkansas. Lombardi provides an elaborate flowchart that links up scores of financiers, drug smugglers, politicians, and criminals in a web of financial and political patronage that, we are told, the artist spent years researching. This and the other pieces in this section are graphical representations of publically available facts that might comprise the narrative of a lengthy expose in a book or a long piece in Vanity Fair<\/i>.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>In another genre entirely, I can\u2019t help but give a very honorable mention in this connection to the 2017 Tom Cruise movie, \u201cAmerican Made,\u201d that shocked many by alluding to Governor Clinton\u2019s complicity in the CIA\u2019s drug-running covert op headquartered in Mena, Arkansas during the Reagan era. (Cruise plays the role of CIA pilot Barry Seal.)
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Some state crimes of this sort are becoming much better known, but what if a significant covert or criminal action is suspected, but the cover-up is elaborate and the accessible public documentation is scarce? Then we move to a more surreal realm of speculation that begins to fit the hackneyed stereotype of conspiracy theory. The Met show moves much more quickly toward this world than it needed to, in my estimation, but the pieces they curated are nonetheless compelling and often fascinating, though a few border on the absurd or caustic.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>A section devoted to art related to the Black Panthers featured a rare video loop of a Panther named Fred Hampton, an articulate young black man widely thought to be the most brilliant leader emerging in the movement in the late 1960s. Hampton rants rather lucidly about police conspiracies and many other topics concerning repression of the black power movement (which in the case of the Panthers mainly consisted of humanitarian activities directed at supporting poor urban blacks). A short time later Hampton died in what was then described to be a Panther shoot-out with the police. But a criminal trial held much later proved that his death was a deliberate, pre-mediated police raid intended to kill him. All the bullet holes pointed inward toward Hampton\u2019s bedroom; he had been shot while sleeping in his bed. Hampton\u2019s conspiracy paranoia was justified.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>I especially liked Rachel Harrison\u2019s installation \u201cSnake in the Grass\u201d (1997). This consisted of photographs that the artist took at Dallas\u2019s infamous grassy knoll. These images hang on drywall fragments suspended from the ceiling on wires in a large room; sound effects broadcast in the room are actual tapes of radio or TV reports from that day. The installation eerily raises questions still not answered about whether there was a second shooter on the far side of the knoll behind a wall, as numerous eye-witnesses have alleged. <\/span><\/p>\n
\u00a0 <\/span>There is just one allusion to 9\/11 in a set of paintings by Sue Williams. One of her color-saturated works actually depicts the destruction of the World Trade Center; this canvas includes the word \u201cnanothermite,\u201d a military-grade explosive that has been proven in peer-reviewed scientific journals to have been found in the dust was shed from the collapse of the towers. Truly this is art in the services of disclosure.<\/span><\/p>\n A more ambitious effort by a single major artist, this time limited mainly to the 9\/11 theme, was Feldman Gallery’s exbihit by Fredric Riskin that ran from September 11 to October 23. For the sake of sanity and balance, we should bear in mind that light ultimately is more powerful than darkness, despite appearances. Even Harvey Weinstein discovered that the light of truth, like physical light, is inescapable and insistent, as did<\/span> Saudi crown prince\u00a0Mohammed bin Salman<\/span>. According to its nature, the divine light\u2014if you can admit that such a thing exists\u2014seeks out and exposes falsehood, deception, and oppression, working through its many actors, especially its prophets and artists and courageous journalists. The divine spirit is, after all, ancestral to the human mind, if you can accept the theory according to which spirit is supervenient in relation to mind. Examples of Conspiracy Art :<\/strong><\/p>\nRiskin\u2019s Breakthrough Exhibit at the Feldman<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Riskin is a Los Angeles-based conceptual artist and fine arts painter. Riskin\u2019s first conceptual art exhibit at the Feldman, mounted in 1987, was extensively reviewed in art periodicals and the popular press, including New York Magazine<\/i>, ARTnews<\/i>, Artforum<\/i>, The Village Voice<\/i>, <\/i>and Washington Times<\/i>. National Public Radio did a lengthy interview with him. <\/span>
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Mounted thirty years later, <\/span>Riskin\u2019s newest show, \u201c9\/11: The Collapse of Conscience,\u201d is based on 14 years of reflection, Fredric told me. This large immersive multimedia exhibit is a heroic attempt to get us to return with fresh eyes to the events of that day\u2014including its somber aftermath of war, surveillance, secrecy, and torture.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Perhaps because the stakes are much higher and the truth-telling is much greater, Riskin\u2019s work received only one published review\u2014an inaccurate hit-piece by a young art critic named Zachary Small that appeared, of all places, in The Nation<\/i>, entitled \u201cConspiracy Theories Are Not Entertainment: New York\u2019s art world explores the paranoia haunting American politics.\u201d<\/span><\/a> Sorry to say, but Mr. Small comes across as small-minded, for in his haste to serve the public by warding us off from damaging \u201cconspiracy theories\u201d he entirely misses the point of Riskin\u2019s work. Small goes so far as to accuse Riskin of being \u201c<\/span>Islamophobic,\u201d when the obvious purpose of his show is to awaken our collapsed consciences<\/span>, especially in regard to Muslim victims of torture. Small also laughably claims that the artist \u201c<\/span>baldly ignores the available evidence\u201d about the collapse of the towers,<\/span> but the evidence Small offers was itself entirely ruled out in the 9\/11 Commission. Small, and his wantonly ill-informed editors at The Nation<\/i>, are the ones doing us a public disservice. Small\u2019s piece is demolished in an article by Ted Walter of ae911truth.org, entitled \u201cScolding the Art World for Showcasing \u2018Conspiracy Theories,\u2019 The Nation Doubles Down on Its Defense of the Official 9\/11 Narrative.\u201d<\/span><\/a> <\/span>
\n\u00a0 <\/span><\/span>By publishing this hack piece, The Nation<\/i>, once a prominent left-leaning magazine, shows how it has lost its critical edge. Small\u2019s review continues the left\u2019s long tradition of ridiculing those who question 9\/11 orthodoxy\u2014in this case even mocking a distinguished artist being exhibited at one of New York\u2019s premier galleries. Then again, maybe Small\u2019s piece is a step forward in a journalistic desert bereft of critical thinking, seeing that the rest of the left simply ignores voices like Riskin\u2019s or David Ray Griffin.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Gallery owner Ronald Feldman shared with me that, after he had decided to mount the show at some point, a vivid dream led him to open on September 11. A man like Feldman has deep sensitivities about who he exhibits and when, as his experience in the art world is vast. Once Andy Warhol\u2019s art manager, Feldman has by all accounts remained at the frontier of contemporary art. Feldman sees Riskin\u2019s work as ahead of its time, pointing out to me how Riskin\u2019s radical vision reminds him of similar instances in art history over the centuries. It will take a good while, Feldman explained, for Riskin\u2019s intended audience among art collectors to catch up sufficiently for the gallery to sell prints from this collection, even in today\u2019s white-hot art market.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>According to the gallery, Riskin\u2019s multimedia exhibit \u201creflects on the mystery, unseen political nuances, and dark pain of the 9\/11 attack.\u201d I would add that it especially heralds the fact that 9\/11 and the chaos and violence that has followed it remain an unhealed wound in the American psyche. Riskin points to the need for empathy and healing for the victims of our wars and torture, but the exhibit also rouses us to an activist stance through an intense encounter with jarring visual imagery and visceral truths that in too many cases are hiding in plain sight. Riskin wants us to get that we have been massively deceived about 9\/11\u2014and even about such events as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>The entrance to the show is a contained space where you face at eye-level a row of five HDTV closed-circuit TV monitors playing a 20-minute video loop accompanied by a piped-in soundtrack. This footage plus the eerie audio track sets a harrowing tone for the entire exhibit. Riskin wants, I think, to induce a liminal state of consciousness, one marked by feelings of mystery but also of foreboding. His footage strings together short excerpts from actual events of 9\/11 sliced into a montage of rare footage of political activities from that period. While some of the video materials are merely suggestive, other sequences are excerpted from hard news footage covering political figures such as Bush, Cheney, and Saudi princes. Riskin\u2019s drone-like soundtrack blends a light background beat with unsettling bells tones and tingles, sounds of a Muslim call-to-prayer, even a hint of collapsing buildings. Our immersion in this entryway space has the effect of defamiliarizing us with respect to any preconceived ideas we may have had about 9\/11. For me it induced a sense of sadness and some disorientation, but also an indignant feeling about the dark side of human nature on display.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>As you enter the main body of the show you encounter 43 wall-mounted panels of images (20\u201d x 27\u201d) paired with text boxes and other forms of text display, plus 5 large, striking prints on canvas (43\u201d x 82\u201d). Almost all of these 48 images have a grim, grainy, black-and-white look that feels like out-takes from surveillance photography you were never meant to see. This is a multimedia installation, so the exhibit rooms are also pervaded by a second <\/i>uncanny soundtrack created by Riskin. This audio loop, like the first one, is a dense, hypnotic, and eerily titillating soundscape.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Riskin\u2019s prints and panels present strategically chosen images depicting disturbing aspects of 9\/11 and its aftermath. Most are altered to varying degrees with a complex granularity as well as ghostlike or shadowy distortions that add a sense of secrecy and intrigue. To get these effects, the artist told me that he started by digitizing images (mainly journalistic or government photos), which he then reconstructed by rendering the pixels in innumerable photoshop layers, as many as 150 in some cases! <\/span><\/p>\n
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Representative panels of the show include: aerial shots of the twin towers after being hit by planes; shots of the collapse of Building 7; an ominous image of a drone aircraft; a shot of Dick Cheney hugging a Saudi prince overlaid with a fish-eye lens; a close-up of Bin Laden juxtaposed with an LA Times<\/i> headline about his death; an image of a hijacker crossing security clearance at an airport; and a close-up of the military-grade explosive thermite found in the dust around the collapse towers. Most important, I think, are disturbing Abu Ghraib torture scenes that are carefully selected, cropped, and rendered, plus actual intelligence agency memos obtained by FOIA requests that concern torture. Others of Riskin\u2019s images are harder to describe. Let\u2019s say they are enigmatic symbols that are meant <\/span>\u201cto engage that which hovers at the borders of being invisible [so as to] to bring those elements into view,\u201d\u00a0as Riskin told Zackary Small.<\/span><\/p>\n
\n\u00a0 <\/span><\/span>An equally essential aspect of this immersive show are the text boxes and text images that accompany most of the images, some rendered to look like they were retrieved from the waste basket of an intelligence operative. These are mainly written by the author, and some are only tangentially related to the image they accompany, thus giving a sense of the multi-dimensional nature of the phenomenon under observation. Many of Riskin\u2019s epigrams evoke spiritual principles and moral exhortations in the face of the brutality and nihilism of 9\/11\u2019s perpetrators, who he clearly thinks are very close to home. Others of his texts contain notions drawn from quantum physics, esoteric religion, and energy psychology that seem to exalt these ideas if considered against the dark backdrop. <\/span><\/p>\n
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Aside from <\/span>Riskin\u2019s<\/span> cryptic commentaries, I found very compelling a quote from the 1990 Geneva Convention Against Torture, and a few well-chosen scientific statements by experts, including from the inventor of the neutron bomb who states that the fertilizer bomb that destroyed the Oklahoma City Federal Building could not account for that explosion.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>As you circulate through the show, the text materials serve to guide and elevate your internal dialogue, ultimately pointing you back to exhibit\u2019s overarching message of the need for greater awareness, justice, compassion, and disclosure\u2014or the lack thereof.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Upon my first viewing, I was so moved that I proposed a public event that would bring this work to the attention of a larger audience, especially my own colleagues in the 9\/11 truth movement in the New York region. Riskin and Feldman consented to the idea,\u00a0 <\/span>and so the gallery created a second opening of \u201c9\/11: The Collapse of Conscience,\u201d which occurred on\u00a0Saturday, October 17.\u00a0I recruited several distinguished panelists to comment on the artist’s message and the gallery and I engaged in a massive outreach in the New York region with the assistance of 9\/11 activists. Also present on the panel was the artist, Frederic Riskin and the gallery owner Ron Feldman, and I acted as the emcee. A crowd of about 80 showed up to our surprise.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>The members of the panel were as follows:<\/span>
\n\u00a0 <\/span><\/span>Richard Squires, an actor, director, and distinguished writer<\/b>. His work has been featured or reviewed in dozens of publications, including\u00a0The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Art Forum,\u00a0the\u00a0Village Voice<\/i>, the\u00a0Washington Post<\/i>, and\u00a0PBS.\u00a0In addition to his play about 9\/11, \u201cA Handful of Dust,\u201d four of his previous plays have been produced. He has written and directed three films.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Panelist <\/b><\/span>Mark Crispin Miller, a distinguished professor of media studies at New York University.<\/b> Miller is best\u00a0known for his writing on American media and for his activism on behalf of democratic media reform. He is\u00a0the author of the Loser Take All: Election Fraud and The Subversion of Democracy<\/i> (2008)\u00a0and\u00a0Fooled Again, How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections<\/i> (2005).\u00a0His other books include\u00a0Boxed In: The Culture of TV<\/i> and Seeing Through Movies<\/i>.<\/span>
\n\u00a0 <\/span><\/span>William Brinnier, a retired architect licensed to practice architecture in New York State since 1984<\/b>. Bill lost his best friend, Frank DiMartini, on the 88th floor of the North Tower on 9\/11. Frank was the construction manager of the World Trade Center.\u00a0 <\/span>Bill shared his personal journey from uneasy acceptance of the official 9\/11 narrative to questioning it, and to now challenging it.<\/span><\/p>\n
\n\u00a0 <\/span>To conclude<\/span>, and to gain greater perspective in the face of a grim subject, let\u2019s turn to a bit of theology and psychology\u2014and entertain a glimmer of hope.<\/span><\/p>\nA Concluding Note on the Phenomenology of Light and Darkness<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n
\n\u00a0 <\/span>And this is why repressed truth has an inconvenient way of being unbearably difficult to force down below the surface, as Lady Macbeth discovered<\/span>. Her need to \u201cout\u201d the stain <\/span>of her \u201c<\/span>damned spot\u201d illustrates the psychological truth that many<\/span> criminal cover-ups will out <\/i>themselves, at some point, consciously or through bizarre slips. Truth is dynamic and more buoyant than falsehood. If pushed down, it rises up with proportional force and goes an unstoppable journey back to the light of day, like a bubble down deep in a dark ocean that rises to the sunlit surface.
\n\u00a0 <\/span><\/span>In Freud\u2019s theory of dreams, the individual\u2019s deep unconscious takes advantage of the weakened ego during sleep. It incessantly produces dream images representing thoughts that have been censored during waking life. The psyche seems to wrestle with suppressed material the way the biblical Jacob wrestled with angels, revealing its hidden plenty. Freud and his successors, especially Jung, have shown that untreated trauma, falsehood, and self-deception\u2014seeking a way to release their charge\u2014can distort the mind (and body) as a means of urgent self-expression, creating grotesque dreams and fantasies, even eventually derangement. Those with eyes to see can behold the disfigurement that sets in on the faces of perpetrators like Dick Cheney.<\/span>
\n\u00a0 <\/span>Criminologists know that human conscience acts like the hydraulic pressure that moves water through a pipe. Perpetrators of crimes instinctively feel the pressure of truth forcing its way up and out; that\u2019s why many confess in the end and serve time, and it\u2019s one reason why reluctant witnesses and whistleblowers with little to gain eventually do come forward.
\n\u00a0 <\/span>In theological terms, all will be revealed when the time is propitious. Conspiracy art has become one crucial step in the uncovering of monstrous political deception, making the day closer when everything <\/i>will be <\/span>revealed. \u201cFor, there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.\u201d (Luke 19:40)<\/span><\/p>\n