BFD

BFD is a popular abbreviation for Bakersfield, California. My mother was raised there, and died there, March 2003. My father winters there. Outside of Bakersfield is a town called Edison. I was born and raised in Edison, but an Edison found in New Jersey. When I was young, Edison NJ was an industrial mess of highways, factories, malls and suburbs. Driving through Bakersfield today reminds me very much of the Edison of my youth, only drier, poorer, equally polluted, and without the "cultural benefits" of the Northeast Corridor and New York City. So, in many ways, Bakersfield is actually much more dire than Edison NJ, and this is certainly so today - Edison NJ is a vastly more prosperous and progressive place than Bakersfield, with better schools, cleaner air, and lower unemployment.

Before my mother died, I went driving about Bakersfield's environs, and shot a great deal of video. From this video I culled a number of stills that I then turned into digital paintings. A few of the images are from San Francisco, for reasons I explain below. These paintings form the series here presented, BFD. Unlike most of my work, this is a very personal series of images, and much more pointedly political, in that they depict engines of the American life : oil pumps in the middle of genetically engineered corn, police cars patrolling highways amid shambled houses of the poor and dispossessed, huge SUVs in front of massive power plants. Endless endlessness.

Formal Issues:

The images are derived from video, but have been heavily processed to give the illusion that they are paintings, usually water colour. This is as much a "tip o' the hat" to Walter Benjamin's seminal essay, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, as it is a refutation of it. He describes the loss of aura about the work of art as it is now mechanically reproduced. Historically, however, since he wrote that, the record is much different - in fact, paintings have become cultural fetish objects. Extremely expensive cultural fetish objects. By making these images imitate "painting", the fetish is made clear: we relish the signifiers of painting to provide the aura of art-as-painting, while the object itself may have nothing to do with it. In this way, the aura is a product of cathexis: psychic investment on the part of the viewer.

Here, the "preciousness" of small paintings (that appear to be water colours or guache) is countered by the content: the dire environmental, political, social, and economic mess that is Bakersfield CA. However: Bakersfield, for all of its suboptimal qualities, is not a salient or aggressive actor in its own misery: its cultural and physical opposite, San Francisco, (and the Los Angeles area) are as much to blame for the horror that is Bakersfield, and the Central Valley in general, as is Bakersfield itself. Example: San Franciscans are always happy about the fresh food and produce they enjoy at low prices. However: these low prices are the product of incredibly exploitive practices in the California agricultural system. Bakersfield, as being one of the hubs of the Central Valley Agribusiness System, acts as a locus for the power centers that promulgate these exploitive practices. San Francisco provides the money. And it is all based on water pumped from the Sierra Mountains - Bakersfield is, left on its own - practicially a desert.

This metaphorically extends to the United States as a whole, especially in terms of energy consumption. Oil is the other major industry of Bakersfield, and is the heart of American industrial capitalism. As suburban families cruise to soccer practice in their SUVs, so goes Bakersfield. Hence: the arresting images of Oil Pumps amidst giant brown fields of wheat and corn... Cheap Oil and Cheap Food. Both based on a false economy of the profligate waste of limited resources.

Tour BFD and get in touch with the extremely comfortable and wonderful horror of America. It is a BFD.

Below you will find links to images in the BFD Series. Click on it to get a larger view of the image.

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