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Josh Bricker
Josh Bricker An artist's statement
In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers, many of us sought solace in what used to feel normal, in everyday events. I remember going to a UCLA football game in search of some sense of stability. Before the
opening kickoff, as they always do, spectators stood for the National Anthem. As a lone trumpet solemnly sounded in the far corner of the stadium, a palpable feeling of unity and patriotism filled the Rose Bowl. The crowd, normally bifurcated by college allegiance, was made one in song as 95,000 spectators began
and healing exploded into an orgy of jingoism and techno-fetishism. As a sports fan and former U.S. Air Force Serviceman inured by the constant encroachment of the martial upon the social body, I had viewed fly-overs as benign expressions of patriotism. However, that UCLA game in a newly post 9/11 world yielded an awakening in me. It was an awakening to the power of military spectacle and direct proof of how its exploitation of mob mentality can instantly mobilize a wounded people. My piece, God Bless Deterritorialized America (endo-colonization in the age of technofetishism) is a translation of that moment at UCLA when I broke free of the militaryindustrial psychological conditioning that involuntarily shackles American society. God Bless Deterritorialized America (endocolonization in the age of techno-fetishism) examines the link between sport and the military in contemporary America. The deterritorialization of the American landscape refers to the colonization of public spaces (in this instance sports arenas) by the U.S. military, which brandishes its weapons thus preying upon and reinforcing the state of popular fear. In this state of deterritorialization, the border between the civilian and the martial is intentionally obscured. As a result the battlefield has been symbolically extended into our everyday experiences and public spaces.
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singing in unison. While initially moved by this, an extreme disquiet immediately supplanted my fellow feeling at the end of the Anthem as a deafening, militaristic roar spectacularly erupted, in the form of four FA18 Hornets flying overhead. In an instant, a collective public in the process of mourning
Every piece of footage and sound was intentionally culled from video sharing sites such as Vimeo, WikiLeaks and YouTube, highlighting their potential as egalitarian cultural archives fit for artistic investigation. Constructed to emulate viral videos, the work rejects the conventional relationship of the static viewer consuming traditional media; instead it exists as a challenge to the highly regulated nature of consumer capitalism. Rather than viewing the work as discrete and finished, I view it as a fragment of a larger, developing body of research that addresses the merging of simulacrum and reality brought on by the military-industrial-media-entertainment complex. Because I post all my work on YouTube—a fundamentally interactive and unstable platform—there is a real possibility for anyone to appropriate my work from the site, transform it and re-circulate it as a new work. Situated within this ideological framework, the video and my praxes can be seen as a meditation on cultural poaching, to use military parlance, as a “force multiplier”.
An interview with
Josh Bricker Hello Josh and welcome to Stigmart: to start this interview, would you like to tell our readers something about your background? Are there any experiences that particularly impacted on the way you create your works? Sure. The most important thing to understand about me is that my practice is inextricably linked to my personal background as a soldier in the United States Air Force and a childhood spent in a small, working-class town in California dominated by pop culture, chain businesses, and high school sports. It wasn’t until I went to graduate school that I was really able to unpack my experiences as a soldier and critically examine my practice. As I slowly dredged through my military experience and childhood, themes of power, nationalism, social conditioning, propaganda, and play, began surfacing with greater and greater regularity.
Josh Bricker
the artist to speak intelligently about things he or she knows. I think that final critique opened up a much more nuanced sense of the possibilities when one combines inductive processes with critical theory.
My early works were poorly articulated and too laden with personal meaning to be accessible. In the last critique before the summer break, one of my advisors, tired of my awkward, unarticulated tiptoeing around of the obvious blurted out something about my needing to read Foucault, Chomsky and Huizinga and hastily bolted for the door. To him, and probably every other faculty member it was blatantly obvious that my work needed to move beyond the personal. That to be of any consequence my focus necessarily had to expand beyond personal experience to include the social and cultural mechanisms that had led to my enlistment. In retrospect an obvious move, but at the time it was a major epiphany. I spent that summer reading and thinking. Armed, for the first time, with critical insights into these machinations I was able to analyze my experiences and articulate them clearly.
Also, I don’t want to suggest here that I had no agency in my own enlistment. I do, however, want to suggest that there are myriad competing cultural pressures constantly playing upon the decisions we make, influencing the paths we take. Without the analytical tools and time to critically examine these external pressures I was susceptible to the subtle, omnipresent forms of social conditioning that define much of contemporary life, particularly the brand of jingoistic rhetoric prevalent in many conservative households, of which mine was one.
I have always believed that the best art starts from a place of personal experience, allowing
In my family any questioning of America’s indiscretions, particularly those concerned
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with the use of military force, was tantamount to an act of sedition. Graduate school provided the space I needed to critically engage some of my tacit and unarticulated assumptions (to borrow a phrase from Cornel West), about American culture and the military-industrial-entertainment complex. Allowing me to break free of the conditioning that had shackled me to a belief system not fully my own.
How did you come up with the idea for God Bless Deterritorialized America? In the weeks following 9/11, I went to a UCLA football game in search of some sense of stability – football was something I had loved and played as a kid. Before the opening kickoff, as they always do, spectators stood for the National Anthem. As a lone trumpet solemnly sounded in the far corner of the
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stadium, a palpable feeling of unity and patriotism filled the Rose Bowl. The crowd of 95,000 spectators, normally bifurcated by college allegiance, was unified in song. Initially, I was moved by this, but by the end of the Anthem that fellow feeling was supplanted by an extreme disquietude as a deafening, militaristic roar spectacularly erupted, in the form of four F-A18 Hornets
flying overhead. In an instant, a collective public in the process of mourning, fellowship, and healing exploded into an orgy of jingoism and weapon worship. As a sports fan and former U.S. Air Force Serviceman, I had formerly viewed fly-overs as benign expressions of patriotism. To be honest, I never thought about them for a second after they occurred.
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Deterritorialized America,” is a translation of that moment at UCLA when I broke away from the military-industrial psychological conditioning that shackles American society. The link between sport and the military in contemporary America is the fundamental theme you explore in your work. Could you introduce our readers to this concept?
However, that UCLA game in a newly post 9/11 world yielded an awakening in me to the power of military spectacle and direct proof of how exploitation of mob mentality can instantly mobilize a wounded people. It illustrated the extent to which we Americans had become inured by the constant encroachment of the martial upon the social body. “God Bless
While there is a long history of the relationship of sport and war, American sporting events are the apotheoses of this. U.S. military power and technological supremacy in the form of fighter jet fly-overs, helicopters hovering, parachuting exhibitions, booming gun salutes, epic video tributes to the troops, even cameos from jumbo bomber planes are the norm in American sports arena. Depending on the aircraft, flights are either slow, allowing for maximum appreciation (festishization) of that particular war machine’s aesthetic qualities, or come at a high velocity—the faster, sexier fighter jets usually blowing by, flexing their proverbial muscles. The effect of all this is the aestheticization of state sponsored violence. The flames of nationalism stoked every weekend across the heartlands. Less common, but equally dramatic are the mock invasions of playing fields performed by parachuting elite commando units like the
U.S. Navy SEALs or Green Berets into arenas. Their uniforms and equipment are plastered with kitsch American iconography: bald eagles, American flags, dog tags. All this incites orgiastic fervor. Fly-overs and parachuting exhibitions almost always coincide with the playing of the national anthem, ensuring maximum patriotic bang for the buck. The result is a metaphorical battlefield rammed with such force and regularity into our everyday experiences and public spaces that it is unnoticeable to most. It’s just “how it is” on any given Sunday in America. By brandishing its weapons within the civic sphere the U.S. military reinforces the post 9-11 state of emergency and fear obscuring the boarder between the civilian and the martial. Deterritorialization of the American landscape refers to these moments of colonization. And these moments when seemingly neutral public spaces, like sports stadiums, become a part of the military propaganda apparatus. More than 60 years have passed since the pamphlet by Guy Debord: the manipulation of mainstream moving-images had a remarkable political aim for the French philosopher, while nowadays artists seem to be attracted by found footage manipulation in order to explore deep psychological issues, whether the footage has a "private" source (old super8 home movies) or not (fragments from mainstream films). In your works, you success in mixing these two aspects, creating a sort of "micropolitics of desire". How do you achieve this balance between "political" and "private"? I never thought about my practice within a specifically Deluzian framework; but a “micropoilitcs of desire” captures the philosophical and political intention behind my work quite succinctly. I might steal that from you. When I made the transition into video art, I developed a loose set of rules that I still follow: 1. All of my videos must emulate the look of viral videos. (I believe that conforming to this aesthetic rule increases the works potential impact, while demonstrating the medium’s potential for political use.) 2. All of the footage used has to be culled from the same virtual communal spaces the work was meant to
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comment on and exist within. (I feel that shooting my own footage or appropriating it from mainstream sources like a Hollywood film does not have the same effect as footage taken directly from amateur sources. The familiarity of amateur footage is meant to instill viewers with a sense of comfort, allowing them to relate with what they see on the screen, increasing the likelihood that the
piece will resonate long after viewing, or so my theory goes). 3. All of my work is posted back on YouTube. (Doing so removes me from the marketplace, liberating me from the pressures of the pleasure economy. Who wants to buy an artwork they can see on the web for free? It is also a way to remain faithful to the open source ethos of Internet culture. By reposting my work to such a
fundamentally interactive, unstable platform, I am exposing it to the very potential I exploited to make it: appropriation. Once posted, anyone can rip my video from the web, transform it and recirculate it as a new work.) And finally, and maybe most importantly, 4. I have tried to make works that ‘show, not tell’. (I have tried to develop a visual language that allows for exploration, is
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not didactic or proselytizing. This, of course, asks questions and invites viewers into a dialogue.) As a self-imposed proposition this can be very tricky. How does one say anything of importance without being overly forceful or didactic? I daresay that September 11 has in a way impacted on the way you perceive
modern society: could you explain how? By the way, do you think that Art could influence huma behaviour on a socio political aspect? The events of September 11th turned my gaze inward toward America’s transgressions. For the first time, I was confronted by America’s position as global
This sense of exceptionalism has burrowed into the American psyche. It is manifest in generations of disastrous foreign policy that have slowly extended American military power into every corner of the globe. Presidents from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush have sought to reshape the world in America’s image. Underwriting that desire has been two core beliefs: the belief that American ideals are universal; and the belief that the use of military force is the primary and preferred vehicle for the exportation of said ideals. (How else can one explain the attempt to institute a Jeffersonian democracy in Iraq?). As a result, our relationship with the international community can be characterized by bullying less technologically advanced nations in order to maintain an antiquated, imperialist foreign policy. According to Chalmers Johnson, the US military maintains 761 military “sites” abroad. When one considers that there are less than 200 countries in the United Nations, the extent of US imperial overreach becomes grossly obvious. To your second question, I always have the same answer, which often surprises. I don’t think art can meaningfully contribute to sociopolitical transformation in any real way. I have a rather pessimistic view of art with respect to its ability to promote or actively generate meaningful change. I have yet to see any evidence to the contrary and, until I do, I will maintain that it can’t.
hegemon, yielding a desire to critically examine the misguided unleashing of American military adventurism. What I have come to realize is that America has been infected by a bombastic rhetoric of exceptionalism, beginning with John Winthrop’s City Upon A Hill speech of 1630, in which he suggests that our existence would illuminate the world.
I think it’s primarily a matter of audience and obscurantism on the part of many artists. Social/activist practices are such a specific subculture, locked within the ivory tower of the art world, particularly the academic/biennial art world, that, when exposed to the general public, their potency is extremely limited at best and completely impotent in most cases. The end result is often a stilted, esoteric discourse, predictably circular and insulated amongst a sympathetic cognoscente. Despite my stated cynicism, I do my best to make work that communicates with a larger audience, independent of the oft restrictive and exclusive art world. As a corrective mechanism and guided by an egalitarian impulse, I still upload every video I make
directly to video sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo in hopes of expanding the discourse. Why the effort if I’m so convinced no good will come of it? Because it’s the only way I know how to ward off the persistent nihilism that fills me every time I make or look at something. We find that your art is rich of references, for example the concept of deterritorialization reminds us of Gilles Deleuze's Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Can you tell us your biggest influences in art and how they have affected your work? I’m probably a little different from most artists in this respect, but I don’t really look at much art or follow many artists. I prefer pop culture Captions and4theory. Movies, television shows and books influence me most. My practice is heavily research-based, so I end up doing a lot of reading, which inspires and feeds my work. What's next for Josh Bricker? Currently I am working on a series of paintings that touch on similar themes of military adventurism, gaming, play, American exceptionalism, etc., as in previous work. As for what’s next, I have just embarked on a teaching career in tandem with my practice. So I’ll be busily working my way towards growing and integrating those elements together to hopefully continue making work people find interesting along the way. Thanks for sharing your time and thoughts with us, Josh. No problem. I appreciate your interest and the opportunity to speak with you about my work.
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