propositions press... 2.0

rest in power and for the rest of us

General Baker, Ernesto Laclau, Maya Angelou. Sam Greenlee. Lately Yuri Kochiyama and most recently Ruby Dee. The ranks of the movement ancestors grow by the week. As I write, I wonder who of the radical generation’s s/heroes will make for an earthly exit next?

As we accelerate into a remaining decade’s worth of fiftieth anniversary observances, those faces of the Sixties who have managed to survive into elderhood will pass with regularity from here on out. That is what it felt like when the world rolled through all the WWII 50th anniversaries. The commemorations were also an extended elegy to the passing of a generation.

As for the rest of us, we really are the ones we have been waiting for, simply because we are the ones who remain. So it  is, the surprising turn of time, for generations ascending a new position vacated from above and pushed into from below. 

In my boxes of old letters I found a nearly twenty year-old note from by Yuri Kochiyama concerning the wrongfully convicted worker David Wong. The letter gives a feel for what an experienced and enthusiastic organizer Yuri was, reaching out to people one by one. Shortly after receiving this I learned of Yuri's long history and of her association with Malcolm X. The postscript is pretty funny. The scribbles at the bottom are from when I grabbed a pen and tested its flow on the nearest paper, probably to take a message while on the phone. It is a habit.

She included with the letter blank petition sheets and leaflets for events. One event was titled The David Wong Case: a forum on the history and political issues held at Art In General. Another leaflet carries an excellent summation of the case on one side and on the other a notice for a "luncheon" event at the Asian American Writers' Workshop.

*

Being what is conveniently called a Gen X-er, my political education leaned heavily on the half generation ahead of me, those of Baby Boomer age. As they finished with their formal, political, and cultural educations and the Seventies wore on, young people joined the general workforce, many of them as educators. Education underwent a mutually tempering dynamic. The idealism of new teachers whose values were forged in the struggles and social shifts of their youth met with the rigidity and structural dysfunction of the institution. If cynicism crept ever more surely into the attitudes of the teachers who had entered the job with invincible belief, the distortion went both ways. The institution was softened, classroom by classroom. People of my age benefitted. In our childhoods we had adult role models who were halfway closer to me in age than were my parents. Going into my teens I related to them like older cousins or young aunts and uncles. They spoke a culturally familiar language but came of age before my consciousness arose. They owned a counterculture by producing it, whereas I came to claim it by studying it. 

What Boomers and Gen X-ers have in common is the homogeneity of generational experience. Millenials, by contrast, can be broken down into a plethora of sub-groupings, subcultures, extremes of privileged or disadvantaged experience, and even different generational lineage—in the Millenial generation there are quite commonly persons of the same age for whom one set of parents are Boomers, another Gen X-ers, and another early Millenials, kids having kids. All social spectra are wider, the menu of consumable culture is as vast and as flat as the culture-scape of YouTube, the matrices of identity are endlessly fluid, and the scale of the world’s problems are unprecedented. As the last of the Civil Rights s/heroes fade—perhaps the final generational upholders of an old-skool reverential dignity, so foreign to most who were raised in the age of irony—I wonder about taking a seat as an elder in the future in relation to the youth of today, for whom a generational identity may no longer make sense.

I see comrades a generational rung above me move into their top steps and I feel my childhood finally slipping away. This is the pre-death, the warm-up for the final act in the mortality plays we are all fated to perform. 

*

Of the recently departed radicals, the closest to me was my artist hang-out pal David McLimans. He was an illustrator living in Madison with a talent for making political commentary come to graphic life. He lived the narrative of his time—he went from an outstate Wisconsin youth to a go in the military in the Vietnam era. Incapable of getting with the imperial mission, Dave went disciplinarily limp, passively forcing the Navy to discharge him. From there it was back to the land, settling a corner of the Driftless Area with a group of lifelong partners in idealism who have hearts for the non-human world. By the time I met him, Dave had been making it as an independent artist for many years. Though less well-known than the folks listed above, nonetheless Dave probably reached considerably more people through his prolific graphic contributions to national op-ed pages and magazines, and through his acclaimed environmentally-themed children’s books. 

I came to know Dave in the last four years, spending frequent Thursday nights in the company of an artist brotherhood simply referred to as The Lodge, of which Dave was a beloved member. Lodge discussions usually hover around current events, political rants, and field reports so I only saw Dave’s work on the occasional non-Lodge visit. Usually I would interrupt him working at his desk in the front room of his International Style house. He would talk me through the various in-progress designs of cut paper and maybe complain about feeling rusty in the hand after weeks of screen time. Having to shake off the stiffness is something I can relate to, but even at my most dexterous I have never had the evident hand skills that he did. He was truly gifted.

Part of living means moving ever closer to death. For artists, builders, and other people who make things, one’s creations usually outlive the maker. Inanimate objects and material artifacts last many times the length of a human life. Artists live in a kind of dual space-time, being trapped in our perishable bodies but putting our life energies into the careful creation of things that will be around long after. Dave seemed to stretch in both directions of this paradox, thinking through in his creativity the ephemeral and the permanent. He produced hundreds of images for the fleeting attentions of the daily newspaper reader. But he also assembled dozens of sculptures out of found materials resistant to disintegration—bits of detritus with no meaning other than as eternal trash, to which he granted renewed life as art, decoration, and ritual object. Dave, gone before he could fully inhabit his elderhood, created art for a globe that unceasingly spins a new day somewhere at every instant, as well as for the world to be, when humans stop counting days.

* 

These scans are of Dave’s spreads included in the book Graphic: Inside the Sketchbooks of the World's Great Graphic Designers. 

 

 

 

ox-bow to sundance, or benton harbor to braddock

This post belongs under the tag “mental-spatial corridors.” It is about how two places got connected in my mind—two places that I have never been, but were introduced to me by persons from those places, while we were visiting two other places. The two places I was introduced to are Benton Harbor, Michigan, and Braddock, Pennsylvania. The two places in which I found myself a visitor when getting these introductions are Ox-Bow and Sundance.

By description, Benton Harbor and Braddock are mirror images in comparison to Ox-Bow and Sundance, on the levels of institutional nature, class wealth, popular reputation, and racial composition. It is strange to be comparing municipalities against a private art school and a private resort, but they are all places—pieces of the earth, named and demarcated. Had I traveled to Benton Harbor or Braddock I probably would have visited particular places within the city. Instead, I only have the names of the cities—and what I have read and been told about them—to think of as places. With Ox-Bow and Sundance, by contrast, I have the real experience of having been to them, and more or less fixing them in memory with specifics of time, place, and sensory input.

But Benton Harbor and Braddock are places where people actually live, raise families, grow old, and die. People work at Ox-Bow and Sundance, and visit. Nobody really lives there. They are mostly places for employment and for retreating from where the visitors actually reside. So while I made it to neither Benton Harbor nor Braddock, I met people whose lives had been shaped by those places as children and who still maintain ties through family. To put it another way, Benton Harbor and Braddock host societies while Ox-Bow and Sundance are society hosts. Meeting somebody from Benton Harbor or Braddock is meaningful in a way that meeting someone “from Sundance” does not even make sense.

But these four places—two and two—were linked in my experience.

I was at each by invitation.* Given that my times at both Ox-Bow and Sundance were made possible by professional opportunities, I am realizing how my mental maps are often determined by the concretely capitalized opportunities of which I avail myself. Put another way, what does it say about our structures of creativity that I or any artist could associate Benton Harbor and Braddock not for their Rust Belt similarities alone, but for having discussed those deindustrialized cities while participating in programs at two notable pockets of the highly privileged? In the case of my 2012 summer, a Rust Belt corridor of poetic travel tying together Benton Harbor and Braddock became visible to me through real travel enabled by the wealth of the elites.

Benton Harbor has been on my mental radar ever since Alex Kotlowitz’s book The Other Side of the River: A Story of Two Towns, a Death, and America’s Dilemma was published in 1999. It was one of those books I never got around to reading but heard about plenty through the public media echo chamber, especially in Chicago, where I was living at the time and where Kotlowitz is a local literary star. In the last year or more Benton Harbor has been in the national news for the appointment of an unelected emergency manager to run the city. One of the controversies had to do with a land grab—related or unrelated, depending on who you ask—in which a jewel of a public park bequeathed to the city by a prominent Benton Harbor family many decades ago would be partly privatized through a golf course development. Rachel Maddow brought the story to a national audience, thereby shining a spotlight on the vultures that descend on broken cities, an increasingly common happening across the Rust Belt. There was a local resistance movement, led by a Reverend Pinkney. This was about all I knew of the story when I got to Ox-Bow, though the pattern sounded all-too-familiar.

A staff artist at Ox-Bow, Jerry Catania, a lifelong resident of Benton Harbor, offered me his perspective. He declined to criticize the emergency manager, spoke harshly about the decades of corruption and city mismanagement, and expressed relief over the city finally moving forward with some real changes, even if that meant having to accept the appointment of an emergency manager. Jerry described his years of frustration with the city commissioners as a small businessman, artist, and youth art educator. He pointed out that the new mayor, a youngish new-blood African American leader who is not a part of the old guard, cannot get the commissioners to co-operate with him, either. He also downplayed the land grab, describing the park as having been neglected for season upon season over decades, to the point of it being woefully underused and ignored. He was glad to have some reinvestment in the city, exclusive though the golf course may be.

I have no basis for evaluating any of Jerry’s opinions and testimony. All I can say is, he was sincere, informed, and committed to living and working in Benton Harbor, and is fully invested in its future. Far from a corporate type, or a conservative of any stripe, Jerry’s views are shaped by his experiences and first hand observations rather than an ideology. His vision was limited to the conventional, however. Jerry privileges tourism as the answer to Benton Harbor’s ailing economy, and did not seem to consider his city in the regional or global context. Such contextualization would not necessarily change his feelings about recent developments, but might open his imagination to a radically different lakefront of the future—one dependent on neither philanthropy nor private recreation, but on changed human relationships. Nonetheless, being immersed as I am in the daily struggles of public schooling through my daughter (and that is in Madison, a very well-funded system), I completely understand how everyday, all-the-time challenges push out visionary thinking—as I am sure the youth education Jerry is doing in Benton Harbor has its share of difficulties.

While at Ox-Bow I also became acquainted with the affable artist John Bankston. He spent his days there roaming the studios, including using up a couple of afternoons hunched over a woodblock in the print shop where Isak and I were teaching. Turns out John, too, is a native of Benton Harbor. Though San Francisco-based and influenced (see this video), John still has family in his hometown. I asked him if he stayed abreast of Benton Harbor news. He proceeded to run through the controversies with the familiarity of one who has the city’s history in his blood, but with the distance of a once-a-year former resident, long ago having left for higher education and a career. John did not have the same passion as Jerry, and instead spoke as one whose memories of the place ceased accumulation upon young adulthood. Taken together, Jerry and John brought a personal counterpoint to the reported stories I had heard and read, thereby inoculating me from quick conclusions about what is happening in Benton Harbor, and what an artist and activist like myself might have to say about it.

Fifteen hundred miles to the southwest of Ox-Bow is Sundance, the luxurious and spectacularly beautiful resort property owned by Robert Redford. It was the site for this year’s Creative Change Retreat, a gathering of cultural workers, donors and foundation people, and political organizers to which I was lucky enough to have been invited. My fellow artists in attendance included LaToya Ruby Frazier, a conceptual documentary photographer who hails from Braddock. Just as with Benton Harbor, I had heard and read about Braddock but never met anyone who actually grew up there as a native. What I knew was what most artists had heard—that Braddock was a mini-Detroit, that artists were moving there for the cheap property, and that controversies surrounded the town’s young activist mayor John Fetterman, a guy who ran with the idea that ramping up the arts could help revitalize the town. Most notoriously, he supposedly struck a marketing deal with Levi Strauss that in effect represented the town to the rest of the world, but paid fees straight to Fetterman’s non-profit instead of to the town’s treasury. The advertising campaign stamped Braddock as a "frontier," a place from where people fled and left empty. Frazier's family (and many others) never left.

LaToya added quite a bit of additional information from her perspective as one who has witnessed this latter-day influx of homesteading artists, most all of whom are white and many of whom come with some financial security of family assistance and/or upper middle class upbringing, and none of whom have the sensitivities or intimate knowledge needed to navigate the fraught terrain of competing local agendas, old divides, and the long-standing inequalities of power particular to the town. LaToya is in a delicate position, knowing as she does the nuances of the town’s politics while gaining art world recognition for her work. At the same time, she feels the burden and challenge of having a greater investment in the town’s future than the newcomers, if only because her relatives and longtime neighbors live there, and are not moving to the next hip town that catches an online buzz. Listening to her, I learned something about the complexities and unintended consequences of using arts as a catalyst for economic change. Also, she made me think hard about what it means to belong to a place, to be rooted so deeply that one’s work in some profound sense always will belong to that place.

And again, I felt like I had been introduced properly to Braddock without having gone there. That it was at Sundance that I had the opportunity to come face-to-face with the passionate commitment of a person fully invested in the town, and not at the town itself, begs the question, what exactly is this system of circulation we artists travel? What is the connection between Benton Harbor and Braddock, as represented by encounters with these people, when these encounters are engineered through the peculiar mobility afforded to contemporary artists?

The larger point is, the fact that these voices were delivered into my hearing through the vehicles of privilege that are Ox-Bow and Sundance underscores the complexity of any analysis I might offer of Benton Harbor’s political situation or of cultural politics in Braddock, and the contradictions of any position I might take. Based solely on the corridors of connection—the multifaceted, multi-directional streams that connect these four places for me—a democratic opposition equal to the forces of enclosure now at work will necessarily take forms far beyond the familiar. The contradictions cannot be resolved, so it will be a form that inhabits the contradictions, rather than ignores them. That is another way of saying, perhaps indirection of movement in today’s chaotically organized world is the fastest way to not only be genuinely introduced to a place otherwise superficially represented in media, but also to be reminded that the threads tying together places like Benton Harbor and Braddock, or Ox-Bow and Sundance, or any combination among the four, exist precisely because of the proximate flows of people, resources, and ideas—complex, yes, but ultimately organized according to the profit-generating logics of capital. This is not to be reductionist, but to acknowledge that living in and through these flows at times offers opportunities for relationships with places and fellow human beings that fall outside of the spectacularized relations constantly served.

]

Sometimes eighteen hundred words need some help. Consider the two views below, both hand drawn by me.

First is a conventional (if minimal) mapping of the four places. The direct scaling down of spatial relationships results in an image not at all compelling. In fact this map obscures the relationships that made the whole experience, that is to say, the relationships that brought all these thoughts into being.

And second is a poetic mapping, an indirect representation, one that takes into account the irresolvably different scales at work: individual personalities, the places one visits or is from, how information travels between people but also across space, and the global system that made these connections possible. If nothing else, the second map/image was a lot more fun to draw.

*These summer encounters only happened thanks to the amazing management at Ox-Bow and the visionary organizers from the Opportunity Agenda, who put together the Creative Change Retreat. 

interviewed by 小雨

Xiaoyu XIA, an astute student from Shanghai taking classes at the University of Chicago only for this summer, conducted an interview with me by email. It was in fulfillment for an assignment in Rebecca Zorach's summer course on Contemporary Art and Community. Xiaoyu wrote up the interview so skillfully, I had to share it. The section on Mess Hall is long because Rebecca had used one of my descriptions of Mess Hall as an assigned reading. Anybody seeking info on Mess Hall now would best be served by getting in touch with keyholders directly. 

＊

July 21, 2012

A Maze and a Map: A Conversation with Dan S. Wang

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

One the night of his trip back to an ancestral hometown in Shandong province, China, Dan S. Wang, the independent artist who was born in the American Midwest in 1968 to immigrant parents, drew a sketch in his hotel. Later, as a printer, Wang turned it into an experimental printing, which looks like a map and a maze as well. Also, a series of printings then repeated these elements and patterns. See at http://prop-press.net/experimental.htm. Together they remind me of the novel by Jorge Luis Borges, A Garden of Forking Paths, in which the maze set up by Borges not only deludes a Chinese Professor to kill an eminent foreign Sinologist, but also, in an allegorical way, utters a question: who can represent China? Even more allegorically, the way to claim one’s identity is also the forking path of otherness– just like a map sometimes is also a maze?

And this leads to the theme of our conversation. But before that, I would like to apologize for not being able to have this interview in person and extend my appreciation for the support from Wang, who is now in Michigan for Ox-Box a summer artists’ camp.

Self Identity: “I have always been Chinese”

My questions mainly focused on the theme of “identity.” Inspired by those prints, my first question was still about that trip: is it root-seeking, a way to reclaim the self-identity as a Chinese person? By reclaiming this identity, to what extent do you think you can represent China as a overseas Chinese artist?

“It is not about ‘reclaiming’,” said Wang, “because I don’t feel that I have ever lost anything. I have always been Chinese, just a particular kind of Chinese. Insofar as I have a personal journey embedded in my work, it is only ‘claiming’ in the sense that, as one of the infinite variety of Chinese peoples around the world, I am taking part in the work of determining the spectrum of possibilities available under the identity category ‘Chinese.’ That is what I personally and professionally claim to represent, one possibility for what it means to be Chinese.”

And then, to answer my doubts on his intentional use of Chinese elements and its potential “danger,” he said, “[in claiming and representing this possibility], this of course requires a level of engagement with a variety of elements of culture that are shared broadly across the many Chinese peoples, ie language, value systems, relationship with the land, family relations, etc. I have always had differing levels of engagement, but enough to be secure in my identity as a specific variety of Chinese. My entire graduate school art output used signifiers of Chinese, Asian, Asian-American, and Chinese American culture and experience. I made a conscious decision in 1997 to end the use of those vocabularies exactly for the reason of exoticization, art world ghetto-ization, and other ways of being marginalized based on identity. On the positive side, I had also by then accumulated a backlog of concerns that had only peripheral connection to issues of identity, and I was anxious to create work about them. Since that time (about fifteen years ago) I have been very careful about when and where I emphasize ethnic identity, but because I work in a largely white art world, I do have occasion to make the emphasis regularly.”

The Identity of a Space: “Problems” are not necessarily unhealthy

When asked about his preference among the titles, Wang gave a short answer: “I would choose the title Independent Artist, because it allows for including within it the other two as roles and activity.” It seems that he kindly neglected the latter part of my question, which is about “the tension between these vocations, between the theoretical/academic thinking, the realistic concern and the aesthetic creativity”–but perhaps, he had already answered that.

However, my questions then are more relevant to his identity as an organizer. To outline the formation and identity of Mess Hall, Wang said: “Mess Hall is much more participatory than a conventional art space, meaning one that is modeled on commercial galleries, non-profit organizations, and even community art centers. Mess Hall was founded as an experiment informed by a wider spectrum of models and precedents. Anarchist infoshops of the 90s, antiwar drop-in centers of the 60s, communal settlements of the 70s, art collectives of 80s, Spanish and Italian social centers of 90s…these are some of the sources for how Mess Hall developed its culture of governance and management. In this way, Mess Hall departs from the artist/audience dichotomy enforced by art world institutions. I would say it has been a literally successful departure given that a number of people who simply participated regularly eventually became keyholders who helped to manage, maintain, and direct Mess Hall.”

True, but is there any problem in the process for nominating keyholders? “There were several intense arguments in my time as a keyholder, and I know that there have been some since.” Wang admitted, “The process for nominating keyholders was not systematic, at least that was my experience. Many factors went into the invitation and recruitment process, foremost among them the confidence in a nominee’s potential dedication to the work of internal dialogue, task-fulfillment, and efficient communication. At the same time, it was an informal process—there was never any formal application procedure, interview process, or time frame for adding keyholders. One’s professional or reputational status held little sway, and that is a good thing, quite at odds with art world tendencies, but one’s personal reputation mattered a great deal. The process was always somewhat contradictory, but it seemed to function. I cannot speak to the process as it is currently conducted.”

Then, presumably this “internal circularity” of Mess Hall does claim its self-identity as an art space, but could it be possible that, on the other hand, it also suggests the egoism and the possibility that it is but part of the culture industry which it should have been against to?

Again, this is a short but powerful answer: “I would say that the ‘problems’ of egoism and personality are not necessarily unhealthy, that a project like Mess Hall must include space for strong voices, for a fluid group dynamic rather than one made static through a fixed decision-making system, even if that means there is the potential for serious internal disagreement.”

The Identity of Art in Our Time: “Critical”, not “Radical”

After the last two layers of the theme, I assumed that our conversation might have touched on its third layer, that is, the identity of Art in modern society. Still, I am concerned about the intrinsic demarcation between “insider” and “outsider” within the so-called “identity”.

My next question may sound too idealistic (well, as idealistic as I always have been): “Could Art, especially the radical art, truly have the power to be oppositional to capitalism apparatus, or is it just another specimen of the apparatus itself?”

This is Wang’s answer: “There can be no ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of capitalism, only degrees of enclosure by capitalist logics and degrees of attention by capitalist entities. Whatever its potential for offering usable paths less constrained by capitalist logics, critical art consistently performs the service of exposing the workings and depth of historical capitalism. Even as attached to the apparatus itself, critical art can do this.” And after this, he added, “Note that I do not use the term ‘radical art’, but instead prefer the term ‘critical art’, which makes a reference to the critical theory tradition.”

To Wang, the difference between “radical art” and “critical art” really matters. At first, I thought this was just his accuracy on terminology as a researcher or probably his respect for the academic tradition from Frankfurt School. But his answer to my next question might have indicated something more profound.

In this question, I treated Mess Hall as a case study for the relationship between people and questioned its potentiality in “breaching capitalism's definition of social relations” as Wang had pointed out in his article. Wang gave a very detailed description and explanation: “Social relations as cultivated by Mess Hall represent a very small but nonetheless meaningful divergence from capitalist social relations, beginning with the landlord-renter relationship. Mess Hall owes its landlord very little in monetary terms, but quite a bit in terms of gratitude and respect. So it is different than the standard landlord-renter relationship, and even though there is a legal structure that codifies the power inequality, the informal economy of attention and reputation provides the keyholders with a power of their own, equal to or perhaps greater than that of the landlord. This is only one aspect of changed social relations at Mess Hall. ”

“Obviously, it is not about changing capitalism as a whole.” he added, “Nothing will outstrip capitalism but its own terminal contradictions—if the worldwide social revolutions of the 20th century could not, then any kind of art will not, either. But those contradictions are now taking the form of proliferating crises, at all scales and in all places. The instability we see all around us is a new norm. Projects like Mess Hall contribute by offering small examples of new stabilities, new forms of social security, a new aesthetics of governance and group decision-making. No matter how small, these realities will grow in value as the world we have inherited continues to crumble.”

Isn’t this the true meaning of being “critical”: always keep the acuteness to reality and never give up the patience and promise for future? At certain points, we may find the modernity just like a maze, so well-designed and so self-sufficient that embraced all of us, erasing our identity. But a maze also means a space pre-designed in itself, a possibility for us to escape. Isn’t this the true meaning of “critical”–isn’t this the true meaning of “art”–that the maze given by the reality is also a map for the future?

 

the dying art of hitchhiking

Traveling the Madison-Chicago expressway corridor is all about routine. Lots of people do it on a regular basis. In other words it can be very boring, as predictable as zipping across concrete at 70 mph can be.

So it was a treat when the other day I picked up a hitchhiker for the first time in quite a few years, as much for me as for him. This man was sitting on the side of the road at an entrance to a South Beloit truck stop with a sign that said I-39 South. He and his dog rode with me for about fifteen miles, to where our temporarily common paths diverged.

It had been years since I had given a lift to a thumb-traveler, mainly because I do not see hitchhikers very often anymore, even though it seems that I drive more frequently than ever. Hitchhiking is a mode of travel that seems to have declined markedly in the last fifteen or twenty years. You would think that with the rise in gas and automobile prices and unemployment among the young we would be seeing an uptick in hitching. But no. These days the culture of Fear, now as American as apple pie, trumps even the once-powerful national longing for adventure and the irresistable draw of a free ride. Instead of hitting the road and exploring this vast land our young men (not sure hitching was ever that imaginable for women) are sitting on couches, scared of what is over the horizon, brave enough only to do battle in make believe video worlds. Do we need any more evidence of the empire in decay? 

Turns out this fellow was a brother of the road, a modern day vagabond, what Hunter S. Thompson would have called a Road Person. John was his name, shabby but very polite, looking weary after ten years of hitching and tramping. The story he told me was that he had to reach Missouri to apply for a new ID card, the last state from which he’d had one issued. His wallet had been stolen a year earlier and since then he’d had nothing but trouble finding work and a stable living situation. Even when he could find the work (he had all his construction worker tools with him), he’d have trouble getting hired.

Starting out from Florida at age 21 and now 31, having gone through his young man’s period of deadhead drifting and numerous cross-country sojourns, John was ready to stay put for a while in Green Bay, where he’d found a steady job with a builder friend. He wants to get an apartment of his own but that was all on hold until he could show Somebody Who Matters a proper ID.

We spent our short time together trading thoughts about hitching rides, how things have changed since I hitched a few trips back in the 1980s. Together we bemoned the security state and what it has done to relations between strangers. He said what irks him the most are the strapping clean-cut white dudes driving pick-ups who never stop to let him catch a ride in the box. It would not bother him, he testified, except that he still gets a fair share of rides from little old women driving alone. I said it is ironic, but perhaps unsurprising. Sometimes the people who have the least reason to fear are the most fearful. 

John likes to draw. When I dropped him off he took the time to pull out a couple of his drawings, pieced together from notebook paper and rolled for travel. The first he calls Dragon and Harlot, based on an episode from the Book of Revelations. He explained to me that he was scared out of his wild phase through the harsher parts of the Bible.

The second is a Sponge Bob Jerry he did as a gift for his niece who is a young, post-Jerry deadhead. Imagine growing up with Jerry Garcia as a departed mythical figure but having Sponge Bob Square Pants as a very present television companion. Considered in that way, I suppose this picture makes sense.

So, where is all that dark matter of cultural production that Greg Sholette talks about? Some of it, at least, is on the side of the road, waiting for a ride. As soon as I pulled away, John went back into an undetectability in relation to me and most of modern America—he has no email address, phone number, street address, or cyberpresence. John is still in that other America, the one I passed through every now and then in younger years, but that has become largely invisible to not only the mainstream, but all of the mediated cultural spheres we live and work in–the art world, academia, creative industries, "alternative scenes." Though I feel for his exhaustion, I am gratified to know that it still exists.