"Not even a bagpipe band?"

This is a fascinating lecture in all sorts of unexpected ways, but the biggest revelation is Lyndon Johnson's surprisingly pathetic and increasingly desperate pleading to Harold Wilson to provide British troops to help the Americans in Vietnam. You even start to wonder if the USA was ever really a superpower at all, but rather a much smaller country that found itself in the invidious historical position of having to imitate one.

Please Stand By, Pt. 2 - An Inventory of Effects

1.

Here we have the American artist Chris Burden, looking like a professional and presenting himself to the world. The above photos come from his 1971 performance art piece I Became a Secret Hippy. It was one of Burden's earliest works, executed about the time he was completing his graduate studies at the University of California, Irvine. For the piece, Burden stripped naked and laid down on the floor while a friend hammered a star-shaped stud into his chest. He then sat in a chair while another friend shaved his head with electric shears. Burden then donned the suit of an FBI agent and presented himself to the event's few attendees.

The real-world incidents that inspired I Became a Secret Hippy are so obvious that they don't warrant an explanation. In that respect, it was far from being a subtle work. But considering that it was done at the time that Burden was leaving the cloistered confines of academia and making his transition into the world of professional artmaking, no doubt its ritualistic, rite-of-passage mimicry held some ironic personal meaning for the artist.


. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


2.

By many accounts, the early Seventies were considered turbulent years -- a time of political, social, and economic upheaval. Most Americans had entered the 1960s with an optimistic vision of the future that awaited them. But a decade later, it all looked uncertain and many people were getting anxious and doubtful, not daring to guess what might happen next. A common, knee-jerk opinion on the street had it that the world was going to hell. "Shootin' rockets to the moon / Kids growing up too soon… Ball of confusion!"

Soldiers returning home after numerous tours of Vietnam reputedly experienced something akin to culture shock, finding things at home much different from when they'd departed. The rapid pace of technological change, and the societal shifts that resulted, had some in the pop-sociology realm talking of "future shock."

So when people read that somewhere a young man had someone shoot him with a rifle and then called the whole thing art, a number of people were shocked, but probably not all that surprised. This is what passes for art these days. The way things were heading, why not?


. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

3.

The incident in question -- the one that would become Burden's notorious "greatest hit" -- was Shoot, which followed I Became a Secret Hippy by a mere three weeks. On the evening of November 19, 1971, Burden and a few associates and a small number of attendees met in a low-rent art space in Santa Ana. It was, by most accounts, a pretty modest and casual affair, up to the point when -- at an "Okay, let's do this" moment in the evening -- Burden positioned himself against one of the gallery walls. A friend then raised a .22-calibre rifle, took aim at Burden, and fired a single shot.

The plan was a have a handful of spectators witness a William Tell-styled act of trust, with the designated shooter aiming at the wall just to the left of Burden's shoulder. At the most, Burden later claimed, the rifle slug was only supposed to graze him. But due to poor marksmanship the bullet instead hit Burden in the bicep of his left arm. Not having anticipating such an outcome, no one had thought to bring a first-aid kit, so a bandage had to be improvised.


. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


4.

Before we go any further, a brief overview might be in order...

Selected Works, 1971 - 1976

Chris crams himself into a small metal locker for five days.
Chris gets shot.
Chris lies in a bed for 22 days.
Chris lies down under a tarp in traffic along a busy boulevard.
Chris nearly immolates himself.
Chris dangles naked tied by a rope around his ankles.
Chris crawls over broken glass.
Chris pushes live electrical wires into his bare chest.
Chris has people use him as a human pin cushion.
Chris runs the risk of immolating himself again.
Chris gets crucified to a Volkswagen.
Chris nearly drowns himself.
Chris gets kicked down two flights of stairs.
Chris nearly sets himself on fire. (Yes, again.)
Chris lies on a shelf, just out of sight, for 22 days.
Chris lies, unmoving, under a sheet of glass for 45 hours straight.
Chris bicycles through Death Valley.

Chris does a bunch of other things during these years, but it's the more violent and alarming and supposedly masochistic things he does that everyone talks about. Thereby making him a bit infamous in the process, saddling him a reputation as the "Evel Knievel of the art world" that he grew to resent.


. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

5.

Chris Burden didn't consider himself a "performance artist," nor did he ever aspire to be one. He'd originally set out to be a sculptor. In the latter years of his studies, he became preoccupied with the task of creating interactive sculptures -- works that invited the audience to become a part of the piece, that were meant to be engaged and manipulated by the viewer. But he quickly became frustrated and deemed many of his works to be unsuccessful, because each time the audience balked at the invitation, choosing instead to maintain the role of distant and passive spectators.

To remedy this impasse, Burden decided to physically make himself a part of the "sculpture," if not the primary component of the work itself. He did this for his senior thesis project, which involved cramming himself into a 2' x 2' x 3' steel locker for the duration of five days. As word of the Burden's project circulated around campus, the curiosity factor brought a steady flow of visitors. People sat outside the locker, inquiring into his well-being and asking him why he was doing what he was doing. A few people sat for extended periods and -- perhaps confused by the dynamic -- treated him like a Father Confessor and divulged all sorts of personal details about themselves. During the final day of the piece, university administration were debating whether to have the locker cut open, fearing for their own liability in connection with Burden's project.

So, problem solved. But noted for future reference: How to calculate for the vagaries of interpersonal psychology? ¹


. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

6.

Performance art was, of course, something of a big deal in the artworld of the 1970s, and Chris Burden was regarded as one of its leading and most controversial pioneers. But performance art wasn't such an entirely new thing. It'd first been kicked around by the Futurists and the Dadaists in the early part of the century, then gone dormant for many years before being reanimated in the 1950s and 1960s, primarily by way of the "happenings" staged by John Cage and his disciples in the Fluxus movement.

If there was any recent historical precedence for the type of work Chris Burden was executing in the early '70s, it was probably Yoko Ono's 1962 Cut Piece, which involved the artist sitting silently on a stage and inviting the audience to cut of here clothing piece by piece with a pair of communal scissors. On the three occasions that Ono staged Cut Piece during the mid-1960s, the audience obliged her each time, in the end leaving the artist sitting on stage wearing little more than scraps and tatters.

Cut Piece is an often-cited work in its own right. Critics often speak of how the piece addresses gender dynamics and how these dynamics play out in terms of social power and status. But in a broader context, one could argue that it ultimately points to an interrogation of the codes of conduct in a supposedly polite society, one which eventually (or hopefully) leads to a critique of the nature of socialization itself. ²


. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

7.

On the morning of January 5, 1973, Chris Burden walked out onto a beach near the runways of LAX and fired several shots from a revolver at a 747 as it flew overheard. Burden later explained that the piece was about "impotence," since he knew in advance that the bullets would fall short of their target. Impotence in this case meaning bold but futile gestures, the inadequacy of human agency in the face of the grander scheme of things.

Still, unsurprising to learn that the FBI showed up on his doorstep with some questions about the incident a few days afterwards.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Porklips Now

A classic!

The Other Vietnam War

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Ever Pick Your Feet In Poughkeepsie?

The Paleface

Shaman's Blues

‘The growth of bureaucracy creates an intricate network of personal relations, puts a premium on social skills, and makes the unbridled egotism of the American Adam untenable. Yet at the same time it erodes all forms of patriarchal authority and thus weakens the social superego, formerly represented by fathers, teachers and preachers. The decline of institutionalised authority in an ostensibly permissive society does not, however, lead to a "decline of the superego" in individuals. It encourages instead the development of a harsh, punitive superego that derives most of its psychic energy, in the absence of authoritative social prohibitions, from the destructive, aggressive impulses of the id.’

Christopher Lasch - "The Culture of Narcissism"

"Why did you throw the Jack Of Hearts away?
It was the only card in the deck
That I had left to play."

- The Doors "Hyacinth House"


The Doors are perhaps the most curious group in the history of popular music, and in my personal opinion probably the greatest. Both a product of their era and very much the antithesis of it, they seemed to both stand apart from the spirit of the times, and yet embody the contradictions that characterised it.

The Doors themselves were children of the military-industrial complex. Jim Morrison’s father was Rear Admiral George Stephen Morrison, commander of the United States Navy’s 7th Fleet during the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident that initiated the American military involvement in Vietnam. Guitarist Robby Krieger’s father was a senior executive in the shadowy RAND Corporation, a quasi-private entity that conducts research on behalf of the U.S. military, and is notorious for its use of game theory to produce the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. When Morrison famously declared that his parents were "dead" it was for more pragmatic reasons than the obvious Oedipal symbolism. Just as it would have been awkward for him for it to be known that his father was, perhaps more than any other individual, responsible for starting the Vietnam War, so it would have been equally awkward for his father were it widely known that his son was an avatar of the counter-cultural rebellion against it.

Morrison was a far more complex and sympathetic character than the narcissistic "Lizard King" projected by his record company’s marketing department and the series of lurid, largely fictional biographies that followed his death. Those who were close to him who didn’t feel the need to cash in on his fame generally portray him as a thoughtful individual who was in many ways a reluctant rock star, and who would rather have occupied his time with his poetry or his real love, film-making. His estrangement from his family makes his background biographically sketchy, though it is known that, as is typical for the scion of a military family, his childhood was itinerant, and characterised by his father’s somewhat bizarre disciplinary regime, which eschewed corporal punishment in favour of dressing-downs and bawl-outs, as though the Morrison children were Marine cadets. The one episode in his childhood that Jim Morrison liked to divulge was when his family drove past a car accident that had left a number of Native Americans lying dead by the side of the road. Morrison imagined that he had ingested the soul of one of the dead Indians, granting him shamanic potential.

Although it has been suggested that Morrison greatly exaggerated what he had witnessed at the scene, its importance is that it gave him his first uncanny idea of the possibilities of magic. The enigmatic Freudian psychoanalyst Géza Róheim wrote in "Magic and Schizophrenia" that magic is the counterphobic action, that it gives the weak ego its first opportunity of spontaneous action against the suffocating pressure of the superego. It is this possibility of spontaneity that gives birth to The Individual, within which nests Durkheim’s Homo Duplex - social man and personal man. Fearing the terrible punishment of the social superego for "sticking out" if we say the wrong thing, we all nevertheless possess the magical possibility of using language to bring ourselves to the attention of others, of impressing them or converting them to our cause. With The Doors, Morrison launched perhaps the most spectacular attack on the social superego of the post-war era.



The Doors' self-titled debut album, released in 1967, opens with what was pretty much their manifesto - "Break On Through". The "other side" that Morrison is attempting to break through to is that of the completed shamanic initiation. For all its drama of spiritual possession, what shamanic initiation is really about is the conquering of the superego. The shaman dramatises the social consensus as possessing spirits in order to confront and ultimately control them, doubling his own strength and giving him the power to cure others. The Doors’ sound here is unprecedented - rather than riffing, it pulsates insistently, like the fragile ego declaring its courage to be. The Doors’ sound was spacious but bounded, contained within a periphery, at times almost subterranean. The Doors were not Faustian, but Magian, Spengler’s term for the cultures of the Middle-East, whose primary symbol, the cavern, manifests itself in the domes of the Mosque and the Synagogue, and whose aesthetic was that of magical transmutation, of alchemy - the symbolic conquest of the self.

The follow-up "Strange Days" long player, released the same year, delved into what would be The Doors' ur-theme - loneliness - with songs such as "People Are Strange" and "You’re Lost Little Girl". It’s likely that the continual uprooting of Morrison's childhood was as responsible for his enthrallment to this subject as his father’s disciplinary habits were responsible for his compulsive anti-authoritarianism. Loneliness has long been the essential American experience, and its anguish bore the birth pangs of a rock’n’roll that was so lonely it could die. For Morrison, this endless, anomic vista of loneliness was symptomatic of an America, and by extension a Western civilisation, that was played out, its spiritual fountainheads long since run dry.



Morrison’s uncompromising assault on the superego made The Doors politically and socially indigestible by pretty much all sides. Unlike the rest of the counterculture, they didn’t present a set of demands to be met, whether modest or radical. Their antinomian stance was one of total repudiation. Both this and their generally aloof manner ensured that they would tend to generate trouble even when they weren’t looking for it, and would find few sympathisers when they found it. Their pithily irresistible pop singles would bring them to public attention only for television producers to ban them for minor infringements of etiquette, and for the police to bust Morrison for vague misdemeanors that were permutations of the catch-all euphemism of "lewd behaviour". These fuelled an increasing perception of his general oafishness within a music industry that cared little for him. Indeed Morrison himself had always shown disdain for the music business, always preferring to hang out with bar-flies and street bums than with his fellow musicians. What was clear from his increasing consumption of alcohol, and his decreasing contributions to The Doors records was that his battle against the nomos was one that he was losing. For all this he was still capable of great acuity. After the infamous bust at Dade County, Florida, Morrison, who privately feared the possibility of prison, nevertheless made the observation that the experience had helped him understand the purpose of the U.S. Penal system: to break African-Americans.

In 1970 The Doors somehow emerged from this fiasco with something of a comeback with the "Morrison Hotel", and "L.A. Woman" albums, both of which featured Morrison back at the creative helm, and which returned to a simpler, rocking sound that was both a commercial and critical success. "L.A. Woman" was thematically the most essential Doors record, a heartbreaking document of loneliness and isolation, both felt and observed. It also showcased how subtle and supple the band’s ensemble playing could be, hitting wonderfully tactile grooves without even the barest hint of showiness. The album’s most famous track is undoubtedly "Riders On The Storm", a song, which like Joy Division’s "The Eternal", has an aura of finality that almost suggests precognition.



After "L.A Woman", Morrison’s last studio recording was of his poems, which would be released in the late 70’s as "An American Prayer". Morrison’s poetry was disdained by the critics, although this is largely due to a general misunderstanding of its purpose, which wasn’t an attempt at profundity or beauty, or to create Eng. Lit. Ultimately, it was an attempt to produce a superfluity of meaning. Anthropologists class the shaman phenomenon as a magical medical complex, in that primitive tribes experience disease and illness not as the result of objective biological symptoms, but as a spiritual, which is to say a social, attack. If a tribesman is struck by a mysterious illness then it must be the result of a broken taboo or witchcraft or sorcery. As he cannot know who or what is the origin of the illness, he is defenceless and will quickly succumb. Other members of the tribe are vulnerable to sympathetic symptoms and are also liable to go down. The purpose of the shaman in effecting a cure is to use his surplus symbolism to give the disease a meaning, which gives the tribesman his first foothold in resisting it, and then to draw it out and cast it back on its originator.

Within the confines of a primitive tribe, of course, it is easy for the shaman to identify the source of a social superego attack that initiates disease. In the complex, multi-layered societies of the contemporary West, the sources of superego pressure are as multitudinous as they are nefarious - they leak through society as iatrogenic undercurrents, manifesting themselves in random psychotic acts; as murder, suicide etc. The superego can attack in many ways - through what Ivan Illich called "the irrational consistency of bureaucracy", through the law and security services, via the mass media, or even through the peer-pressure of the hip "alternative media" that claims false fraternity (which is why uncompromising later bands like The Stranglers and Joy Division always had a deep distrust of the music press). Morrison’s poems, which seemed at once both florid and dissociated, were ultimately an attempt to try to give this nebulous force some kind of shape so that it could be handled and resisted.



Ultimately, all transgressive artists who die unnaturally are killed by the superego, whether the mechanism be suicide, drug overdose, or assassination by a deranged fan. Morrison’s death fitted perfectly within this pattern, within Marcel Mauss’s idée de mort suggérée par la collectivité, within voodoo death. Although the ostensible cause of his death was an ingestion of heroin erroneously given to him by his girlfriend Pamela Courson instead of cocaine, the ultimate cause was an ego relentlessly worn down by the pressure of the superego - compare his beaten, exhausted vocals on "L.A. Woman" to the eager yelping on The Doors' debut just four years before. Courson herself would succumb to voodoo death three years later, at the same age of 27 as her famous boyfriend. On the day that Morrison died, on July 3rd 1971, his father, that ultimate superego figure, presided over the decommissioning ceremony for the USS Bon Homme Richard, the aircraft carrier that he had commanded all those years before off the coast of Vietnam.

Rolling Thunder

The Vietnam War, like the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in our own era, is often mistaken for being an imperialist war. However, historically, true imperialist wars tend to be won quickly by the ruthless, dedicated imperialists, instead of resulting in interminable, humiliating defeats. What wars like Vietnam actually are is intellectual wars, in that their ultimate rationale derives from theories generated by small cabals of intellectuals in politically-motivated think-tanks, that are themselves dedicated to the maintenance and furtherance of the works of earlier politico-economic philosophers or philosophical schools.

These theories, usually derived from misdiagnosed, exaggerated or even invented threats, are packaged into narratives that derive plausibility by working backwards from the perceived "vulnerabilities" that are usually generated from status anxieties ("they hate our way of life") and are presented to politicians through avenues of influence previously established by corporate or military-industrial bodies that in turn stand to derive secondary benefit from any resulting conflict. Finally they are sold to the public in a series of soundbites ("The Domino Theory", "The Axis Of Evil", "The War On Terror" etc.) that turn what were originally obscure and/or marginal theories into self-evident Manichean inevitabilities.

In world history (as opposed to Western history) this kind of behaviour is a reliable indicator of civilisational decline, as it marks the moment where a society has reached a stage of wealth and comfort where it is unwilling to recognise or act on the principle that war, or any other sustained effort, requires sacrifice. The society therefore adopts the magical axiom that sacrifice can be replaced by intellect, as enacted in finessed strategy and/or technology. Only a nation in the intellectual stage in which belief in the efficacy of brainpower and technology is paramount could contemplate involvement in such wars, and indeed one of the principle self-deceptions involved in them is the belief that the enemy can quickly be overcome with either shock-and-awe firepower (technology), or by inserting small numbers of troops in advisory or policing roles to advance the cause of native allies (brainpower). In short, every effort is made to create and sustain the illusion that no serious sacrifice will be necessary.



"Rolling Thunder" was the name given to the United States’ air offensive against North Vietnam that commenced in 1965, and rolled along under various appellations ("Menu", "Linebacker", "Linebacker II") until 1972. From the start, the policy contained a striking contradiction in that though it was magically believed that sustained aerial bombing of infrastructure would persuade the North Vietnamese to capitulate, it was also considered that certain infrastructural facilities and defensive systems (primarily airfields) should be excluded from targeting for humanitarian or diplomatic reasons. This had two notable results. The first was that American bomber pilots had to fly to their targets at low-level and in clear conditions to accurately hit their targets, making themselves vulnerable to the Vietnamese defences. The second was that the policy clearly set itself up for expansion and compromise on the event that it’s initial targetting conventions failed to gain results.

Within a year of the beginning of "Rolling Thunder", the North Vietnamese had started to collect large numbers of downed American pilots, and this presented them with an opportunity for a propaganda coup, which they initiated by inviting the world’s media to Ho Chi Minh City, nominally to confirm that their prisoners were being well-treated, but with the real motive of re-framing the conflict in sympathy with their viewpoint.

What amazed (and even to some extent appalled) Western journalists was the enormous confidence the North Vietnamese had in their eventual victory. At first this was suspected of being some kind of bluff, but as the sheer ebullience of their hosts persisted, through every rank of official they came across, for the entire duration of their time in the capital, the realisation dawned that the Communists meant it. They really expected to win. And the basis for their confidence was simple - they knew that they were prepared to sacrifice more, to endure more, than the Americans and their allies.

The U.S. could never match the levels of sacrifice of their enemies, even though they had committed themselves far more than they had originally intended. The only way they could escalate their effort was through moral compromise; firstly by loosening their definition of what constituted an acceptable target (by taking in civilian areas), then by increasing the amount of ordnance dropped (by engaging heavy B-52 bombers) and finally by secretly breaking international law (by bombing neighbouring Cambodia). Even today, footage of the destruction wreaked by the American bombing of the Indochinese countryside provokes a kind of hypnotic awe. Like Hollywood, the United States military had become addicted to pointless pyrotechnics.

The lesson, which still hasn’t been learned, and perhaps for many deeply embedded cultural reasons, cannot be learned by Westerners, is that technology has the potential to be utterly degrading, in that it offers both diversions from, and false solutions to, problems that require true personal sacrifice to overcome. The cycle of identifying a problem, attempting to utilise an intellectual or technological method to overcome it, failing, and then blaming oneself is, I suspect, perhaps the underlying source of the terrible levels of depression that underpin technologically advanced societies. Perversely, every failure of technology only increases the almost mystical belief that modern society has in it, to the point where people even expect to be raptured away in Singularity with it.

Nevertheless, somewhere far up a river, deep in the Vietnamese jungle, one United States Army officer truly understood the latent power of self-sacrifice and the Human Will. A heretic to contemporary Western principles, he himself had to be exterminated.