Dry Heat: Spring 2023, Issue 002

Julian Kilker, Time-compressed 360 tour of an abandoned building, Halloran Summit, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.

JULIAN KILKER

Julian Kilker’s work focuses on the intersection of visual media, social issues, and innovation.

A graduate of Cornell University and Reed College, he teaches in the UNLV School of Journalism and Media Studies. His research is published in scholarly journals including Visual Communication Quarterly, Social Identities, Convergence, IEEE journals, and The Public Historian. He has held solo photography exhibitions in Switzerland, California, and Nevada. Kilker is currently working on a book project about computational thinking and the future of photography.

A LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS

I’m in the Mojave Desert an hour and a half from Las Vegas, far away from cell service and light pollution. The usual urban stresses and noises—of traffic, alarms, text messages and phone calls—are attenuated. For me, driving to a remote desert location is a welcome passage from cacophony and chaos to stillness and contemplation. When I arrive at a familiar jumble of boulders and turn off my car’s ignition, my surroundings are so quiet that I can hear my pulse beat, and, as I move, my clothing rustle and my shoes scrape against the ground. I set up my equipment. On the battered tripod facing me is a camera cobbled together from an old Canon lens and a recent Sony digital body, its remote trigger dangling from a wire at its side. I have arrived just before the golden hour, my favorite time in the desert because it’s a rapidly shifting multi-sensory experience: dusk flows slowly from the far hills, jumping across the contours of the land. The wind picks up briefly, then dies down. The air cools rapidly and moistens, and the nearby creosote bushes exude their distinctive scent. Joshua Trees—so strange to outsiders and sometimes overlooked by locals—dot the landscape around me, their uplifted greenyellow arms becoming spiky silhouettes as the light dims.

I begin to adjust my “frankencamera,” not knowing that this is the last time I will be able to capture this scene. Within weeks, this landscape will be torched by a devastating lightning-sparked wildfire that leaves husks of the more substantial trees and only dark smudges in place of the more fragile vegetation. Although I’m here specifically to capture an image of the NEOWISE comet before it leaves our skies, I’ve long appreciated these working trips into the desert as an opportunity to hone my skills. Capturing this comet late in its trajectory near Earth the way I want is a challenging task, at the limit of the camera’s and my abilities. It is a faint smear among the stars, so dim that the camera’s automatic systems—for focus, exposure, and stabilization— hinder rather than assist my photography and I have to switch them all off. NEOWISE is in an awkwardly high position in the sky, making it difficult to combine with the landscape in a single cohesive exposure. I must balance shutter speed, depth of field, and exposure settings to capture both landscape and comet while minimizing digital noise and star trails. I draw on my earlier low-light experiences to anticipate problems, identify solutions, and explore possibilities. But those experiences are in more predictable moonlit or light-painted scenes, not this type of landscape astrophotography. It’s also been too long since my last foray into the desert and my skills are a little rusty. The lengthy drive makes this a

serious investment of effort geared towards exploring technical control and creative serendipity on location.

Contemporary artists in the American Southwest benefit from an unusual creative laboratory environment: our vast, deceptively vacant desert landscapes that reward close observation and allow space to experiment. These artists are not the first to discover this potential. Indigenous peoples created rock art and large-scale intaglios throughout our region over the last few millennia; in the 20th century, land artists imposed their visions into the earth itself. While Nevada relies on businesses of resource extraction—minerals from the ground and paychecks from tourists and locals—our generation of artists focuses (for the most part) on projects with a lighter footprint that avoid damage to their subjects. This was apparent in two recent exhibitions at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art: Spirit of the Land, a collaboration of dozens of artists curated by Kim Garrison Means, Checko Salgado, and Mikayla Whitmore, and The Mojave Project, a transmedia documentary project led by Kim Stringfellow that weaves together multiple themes relevant to our desert. Both projects highlighted the value of Nevada’s non-urban areas for artists and documentarians, both relied on observations from specific desert locations, sharpening and recontextualizing them for formal viewing, and both, importantly, encouraged interactions with and among artists and community members.

I was honored to be part of Spirit of the Land, contributing a night photograph in the tradition of a shadow play but with desert flora rather than puppets as the silhouetted main “actors.” Lowlight photography, my area of emphasis, is a visual form that often documents places that audiences can’t easily travel to, during times they might not feel comfortable visiting. The practice emphasizes non-destructive and ephemeral techniques: the locations aren’t modified, and light painting adds elements that are fully visible only in a long-exposure photograph. While this approach might appear of interest mainly to hobbyists, my experience exploring them reflects the broader impact and relevance of our desert as a creative laboratory for the arts. Low-light photography is not just creating moody photographs in near-dark settings. Its techniques, and the tools created by its practitioners to support them, broaden what a photographer can capture: more naturalistic scenes, increased hours to photograph including dusk, dawn, and by moon or starlight, experimental representations of time and motion, and more subtle use of natural and artificial lighting. In our deserts, photographing at night is akin to using a large outdoor studio because of the ability to control lighting and the privacy afforded by remoteness.

KILKER

I DRAW ON MY EARLIER LOW-LIGHT EXPERIENCES TO ANTICIPATE PROBLEMS, IDENTIFY SOLUTIONS, AND EXPLORE POSSIBILITIES.

It’s no coincidence that visual artists have pushed low-light boundaries over the last two decades: digital cameras have become increasingly light sensitive and digital workflows allow immediate review and adjustment after each shot. Tom Lowe’s 2012 low-light film TimeScapes, shot partly in Southern Nevada, was groundbreaking for its smooth movement through nightscapes. Troy Paiva light-painted abandoned sites in the American West for his Lost America project spanning film and digital photography. Many others have created compelling nocturnal visions, building on a century of work by photographers such as Brassaï, Jessie Tarbox Beals, Alfred Stieglitz, O. Winston Link, and Carlos and Miguel Vargas.1 In the tradition of these artists, my own work has presented our desert as a familiar-yet-alien nocturnal environment using immersive large prints and ambient audio in my Swatch-sponsored exhibit Time in the Mojave Although the American Southwest and Switzerland are thousands of miles apart, such visions of our desert—and those of other photographers such as Sharon Schafer, whose wildlife photography has led to international exchanges between schoolchildren in India and Las Vegas—challenge their viewers to reflect on our respective environments, climates, and human activities.

images to find the comet’s position while fine-tuning the settings. It’s particularly difficult to focus in low light. One slight adjustment brings the distant landscape into focus, while another sharpens the ghostly Joshua Trees in the middle distance. Then I overshoot and the entire scene is blurry again. I adjust and repeat until my test scene is reasonably sharp and exposed, then switch to framing new compositions while compensating for the fading light.

This careful, repeated experimentation combines a meditative flow with rapid adjustments—the longer exposure periods are necessary to verify potential compositions in detail, while the quick bursts of activity fine-tune the exposure settings. All the while, I try to avoid the usual visual flaws due to dust specks, bugs flitting near the lens, and dotted trails left by aircraft. And not only aircraft: on a recent night shoot, I capture what appear to be a group of stars parading eerily in formation across the sky. These turn out to be satellites recently launched by Elon Musk’s Starlink.

Back in the desert at dusk, my first challenge is locating NEOWISE while my night vision is still adjusting from the drive. My camera is more sensitive than my eyes right now, so I capture several test

1 For a historical and technical overview of night photography, see Lance Keimig’s “Night Photography and Light Painting.”

Of the dozens of resulting images I’ll capture this evening, just a few will be worth fine-tuning. I won’t substantially edit these images, though. My selfimposed constraint is to document scenes in-camera rather than manipulate what I saw in the field after the fact. This time, I will spend several hours to create one or two final NEOWISE images that I consider worth showing to others. Although the process of creating these works is rewarding, sometimes it produces no satisfactory photographs. If I were to focus only on the tangible results, I would question the effort and energy that goes into conceptualizing and creating such works. Will shooting NEOWISE be one of the last times I commit to this effort? As I’m

Julian Kilker, Colleague preparing motion control system at Mt. Irish, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.

standing in the dark in the flow of capturing, reviewing, and adjusting frame after frame, I’m reminded that any person can drive up, jump out of their car, raise a phone and capture a similar image with much less effort and time. Mobile phone cameras are getting that good at low-light photographs. The mobile phones’ democratization of photography automates workflows so profoundly and mysteriously that they are changing how photographers approach visual projects and complicating how we understand and articulate our creative processes.

In his 1951 novel Sheep Rock, George R. Stewart recounts the history of a remote Nevada location through the innovative approach of making place the protagonist observing eons of activity from geological shaping to generations of animal and human visitors. Stewart, an English professor at UC Berkeley best known for the haunting postapocalyptic novel Earth Abides, repeatedly visited the pseudonymous site with a rotating interdisciplinary group of colleagues, discussing their insights about the location while sitting around the campfire.

Stewart began to “get a picture of the playa, spring, and rock, in time as well as space. Later, poet of the place, he will weave his colleagues’ knowledge together” in the final novel.2

An art-infused version of Stewart’s place-based multidisciplinary approach is even more appropriate today: returning repeatedly to document a remote place in our region—and interacting with others regarding that place—can tease out subtle themes inspired by even seemingly mundane locations. As Sheep Rock indicates, the practices of art and research can be deeply intertwined—this is the focus of the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities, of which UNLV is a member. We are fortunate to have the desert as a laboratory to extend our senses and reflect on ourselves, our connections, and creative practices. I’ve seen many apparently minor scenarios that hint at deeper themes worthy of scholarly and creative exploration: the subtle ripples in gravel that are the only remains of a long-vanished desert railway, raising, for me, themes of transportation networks and regional economies; the evolving fire circle and graffiti that indicate an abandoned shell of a building is actually the site of sporadic social gatherings, suggesting themes of economic precariousness and outsider art; shattered bottle remnants on the upraised arms of a target-practicedamaged Joshua Tree, raising questions about the multiple uses of public lands and environmental stewardship; splintered lumber and deep ruts hinting at the struggle to lever a stuck vehicle from deep mud on a desolate road, suggesting themes of risk behaviors and vulnerable infrastructures. Each of these scenes is the imprint of human decisions in a place, each evidence of a distinct activity that can inspire creative works and research about how and why we interact with our lands.

For all its challenges, refining my photographic techniques and tools in the desert has encouraged me to look more closely at my surroundings while provided a calm space to explore beyond my usual

practices. Photography under these conditions has led, both literally and figuratively, to different ways of seeing and documenting the world. A quick night snapshot using a phone might result in an image similar to what I create through my careful, controlled processes, but it is far less likely to create a rewarding connection to place and practice.

Place, practice, and introspection have a contested history in our region. Learning from Las Vegas, the provocative 1972 book by Yale professors and graduate students, famously challenged in both title and subject the then-popular notion that Las Vegas’s built environment had no valuable lessons for other locations.3 Now, decades later, it is more acceptable to make the case for our region’s relevance. UNLV scholars and Brookings Mountain West benefit from their Las Vegas and Southwest environs for their research. When President Obama designated the Basin and Range National Monument in central Nevada, he called it an “irreplaceable resource for archaeologists, historians, and ecologists.”

Even so, we still face challenges encouraging people to engage deeply with our Southern Nevada landscapes, which are vast, yet fragile and often overlooked by those who pass through or fly over them. Those who do pay close attention are traditionally a small and secretive lot: military and weapons testers, miners and ranchers, waste repository proponents and land speculators. And it’s sometimes not easy to travel in these remote areas: Nigerian Black Mountain Fellow Uwem Akpan describes a jarring encounter with a police officer who demanded he explain his destination during a night drive through the desert. “What are you doing in Vegas?”4

But in ways few other regions can, our stark landscapes nourish artists by providing space to ponder and practice. Art, at its best, encourages us to identify and question preconceptions; our desert setting provides ample opportunities to do so. What other state has so much public land to explore? Where else can one travel from a highly urbanized to isolated rural locations so rapidly? And what other changeobsessed locale offers so many opportunities to reflect on our past, present, and future?

One can see the results of such artistic efforts in the Marjorie Barrick Museum’s programming over the last few years. Its exhibitions are, intentionally, an excellent entry point to exploring art through the lenses of our region. Its opening receptions are opportunities to converse with an artist or fellow visitor about their relationships with our region and this influences their work. The diverse group of artists in Spirit of the Land represented similarly diverse perspectives on the proposed Avi Kwa Ame National Monument. The implicit message: if this group holds this many different views about a topic, then what of us, the viewers? What voice would you add?

3 For background on this work, see Avery Trufelman’s “Lessons from Las Vegas”

2 Donald M. Scott, The Life and Truth of George R. Stewart, 2012, p. 136

4 Uwem Akpan, “Night Driving”, The New Yorker, July 11 & 18, 2022, p. 59

Opposite Julian Kilker, NEOWISE in the Mojave 2022. Courtesy of the artist.

A NOTE ON RELEVANCE AND CONTEXT

I am writing this during the last gasps of winter in Tbilisi. It has been two years; it is March and, at last, I have the opportunity to see Mom far from home, our home/Tehran, my home/Las Vegas. But I have to seek solitude from her to write this piece about Iran. Some two to three days away from our rare fourteen days together. And the piece will be published in the U.S. In Las Vegas, but not Tehran. Are these precious few moments away from her worth it? It is only a coincidence that my situation matches the twisted subject matter of my writing. I find myself in the Republic of Georgia writing about Iran, the motherland I can’t visit; publishing in the U.S., the land that Mom can’t come to. The slogans too, I write/you can’t read, pertain to happenings in Tehran, but have found themselves around the metropolis of Las Vegas.

Dislocation is the common denominator between me and the slogans in Las Vegas, their presence is reliant on my own dislocation. They don’t belong to Vegas yet are rightfully located there. I am to write this piece about that, and I am to write about the how and the why of the odd behavior of writing these slogans in an environment they don’t seem to belong.

A revolution has started in Iran. For twenty-five weeks, men and women, young and old, have reclaimed the streets that only forty-four years ago belonged to them. For the first five weeks I, along with millions of other forlorn Iranians, sat down and watched the uninterrupted protests. “Woman-life-freedom," which we heard in slogans, rekindled a long-lost reverence for our identity as Iranians. The experience was a reclamation of the entire notion of homecoming, a restored sense of belonging to a place. I began copying these slogans in the streets of the city where I live, spraying the words that adorn the walls of Tehran, and now also the cinderblock walls of Las Vegas. Those slogans are here for the exact same reason that they were chosen to be on the walls in

Tehran; out of the desire to resist the passivity that one’s environment has forced upon one. In Tehran, what is forbidden to be spoken manifests as written slogans; in Las Vegas, what is overlooked has found itself on the walls. Though the motives may differ, both sets of slogans share a common purpose: to challenge and combat passive forces. The presence of the slogans on the walls of a city serves as a poignant reminder of a message that seeks to be heard, but has been silenced by an outside force.

In Iranian society, the force is that of apparent oppression. In contrast, for Americans, the dominant force takes the form of an all-encompassing grandnarrative lens that overlooks anything that lies beyond the borders of their land. Why concern yourself with events beyond your nation's borders, you may ask? I say for human rights that is not solely a local matter, for art and culture that globalization has torn apart, for the immigrants that have made it here but don’t know why, for the global police that makes deals with criminals, for the foreign interventions that change the destiny of nations, for the oil that ISIS sold/Iraq bought, for the very reason that for a decade I have lived in this land with you and I’m still writing about Iran. But perhaps the justification you hear is for the lost troops, the stock market crash, the gas prices, the job market, for the minimum wage, for California’s sunny sky, the Kardashians, and the cheesy art you just bought. "Woman-Life-Freedom," I write, reflects problems that have accumulated over decades and are brought to light at the site of their source.

The repetitive resurgence of anti-government protests—Kooye Daneshgah in ‘99, the Green Wave ‘09, and Aban 1398 in 2019—had instilled a sense of stagnation, raising the conviction that the prospect of change remains unachievable. The regime, too, has fueled this conviction in its efforts to eliminate any alternative. In spite of this, the alternative has materialized with the unyielding persistence of the recent protests. This time is different. The protests

NIMA

Nima Abkenar "Woman-Life-Freedom, #MahsaAmini" Courtesy of the artist. ABKENAR

haven’t stopped, distinguishing this movement as a revolution. For the first time the regime is rendered a lifeless corpse in the collective consciousness of our people. While it decays, everyday life has become a stage for competing acts of bravery, each person striving to outdo the others in their willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice. Passivity is relegated to the audience members, unable to participate in the show unfolding in our homeland, a familiar feeling for me/millions of Iranians/most immigrants. The making of slogans in Las Vegas, in my native language, is an action that I have chosen over reaction. The consequence is unclear; that is whether this action is only an acknowledgement of this oppressive passivity or an active force.

Displacement serves as an epistemological investigation into the nature of relevance, as scrutinizing the status of a displaced object prompts inquiry into the object's relevance to its present environment and the environment from which it originates. These questions of relevance are not limited to objects alone. Being the displaced individual not only is to relate to these questions but also is to experience this phenomenon from within, internalizing the throbbing change of context on an everyday basis. Every individual in the course of their displacement, regardless of whether or not they adapt to their new environment, asks this reoccurring question, “What am I doing here?” Understanding this question is the key to comprehending why the slogans are relevant in Las Vegas. The juxtaposing presence of the slogans in their environment raises the exact same question, “What are these slogans doing here?” The slogans are present in Las Vegas because the displaced individual is present there. The relevance of the slogans is conditional on someone else’s displacement. That is, the displacement of the creator provides the relevant

context for the slogans. That is, my authorship and my presence in Las Vegas provides the relevant context for the slogans. That is, these slogans are as relevant as I am in Las Vegas. That is, my displacement at seventeen is the reason that these slogans have found themselves here, and asking why they are here is a question of why I am here. Questioning the relevance of the displaced is a question that I intend to ask of the passersby in this project.

The sudden appearance of handwriting in a foreign language on the walls of Las Vegas instills a sense of urgency in the passersby. Dispersing these writings throughout town is intended to create the need for immediate attention. The spectacle of the slogans confronts people with a thread of information, a thought process, a chain of historical events that led to the writing of the slogans on those walls. The slogans disrupt the viewers and demand a response, placing the viewers in a position to decide what response is warranted. Their choice—whether to allow it to remain, seek methods of removal, or investigate its purpose—is a statement in itself which determines a clear stance towards this historical point in time. Likewise, an attitude of complacency and/or the lack of awareness in their response is also a stance. Is the writing of these slogans a work of art? It certainly can be treated as one. Its elements can be investigated in an art dialogue. But the pure motivation behind the making of these writings is activism—the struggle to counteract the passive nature of being an immigrant and caring about the motherland. Regardless of whether the act proves to be effective or not, one continues the same method of rebellion. At this point the activity could be viewed as a habit of some kind since it resembles the action I would likewise perform in the motherland. An act of rebellion. An Iranian habit.

NIMA ABKENAR

Nima Abkenar is a Las Vegas-based conceptual artist from Iran. In his work he explores the subtleties of social phenomenon and political events. His dislocation from his native home at 17 has shaped his views in art and philosophy. Nima’s interest in context has bounded his art practice with alternative non-art spaces such as commercial buildings and abandoned warehouses. For the past five years he has collaborated with art entities such as Black Mountain Institute, D-Well Las Vegas, and the City of Las Vegas Office of Cultural Affairs to create installations and develop public art projects both nationally and in Iran.

Nima Abkenar "Swear to the lost ones we are in it to the end" Courtesy of the artist.

WALLS MELANCHOLY WITHIN THE HEART OF A CONFINED SOCIETY

The signs of human conversation can be traced along walls throughout the historical formation of urban civilization and its hierarchal social systems. At the point in history when written script went beyond the transcription of religious prayers and hymns it took on a natural/political form which surpassed its preceding supernatural function. This matter, especially in the tumultuous contemporary history of the Middle East and Iran, has acquired a much more serious form. So much so, that it is possible to identify the historical path of the expressed thoughts of different social classes by tracing their writings on walls.

Although wall inscriptions in Iran have a long history— going back to engravings and epigraphs—this text addresses the composition of slogans and the reflection of present-day political and social issues upon the city walls. City, in its contemporary notion, is an encompassing network with written laws, which serves as a concentration point for populations and a hub for production and accumulation of capital. Governmental laws aimed at controlling and overseeing the populace hold strategic significance for the ruling authorities. In democratic political systems, citizens have the opportunity to engage in a dialogue with one another and to possess some level of power through participation in institutions. However, in non-democratic systems where locals lack the space for free expression, the surfaces of the city become the site of discourse or conflict between supporters and opponents of the established power system. In other words, when the individual lacks freedom of expression in the face of authority they turn to other means, such as graffiti, to assert their presence and simultaneously protect themselves from the inevitable consequences of expressing their beliefs. Thus, thousands or even millions of anonymous people take an activist approach and resort to slogan-writing as a means of speaking out.

If we consider urban inscriptions as a part of the visual, self-initiated, and political language of the

people, then we can more clearly pinpoint the cultural position of what is happening on the streets of Iran in comparison to other movements. In the student movement of May 1968 in France, the revolutions in Cuba and Mexico, or the Palestinian and Syrian opposition movements, as well as the Arab Spring, the walls were mainly used for limited and essential images or slogans. The Iranian wall inscriptions, on the other hand, especially in the past forty-five years and after the events of 1978, deal with playful language and display linguistic innovation. Additionally, popular movements in contemporary history, such as the 1954 coup or the Islamic Revolution of 1979, were severely suppressed by the central government, and censorship of the press and other means of communication were intensified. Consequently, walls have become a means of communication and a tool for information dissemination.

With this historical context, in social movements after the 1978 revolution—such as the Green Wave in 2009, as well as the recent social movements in 2017, 2019, 2022, and 2023—the linguistic structure of wall writings in cities, villages, and even roads has acquired a newer cultural and aesthetic identity and has become more noticeable to citizens. One could say that in the past two decades the etymology of words in these writings has entered a new phase. Especially with the cultural background of the Iranian people and their rich, poetic language, wall slogans have always been an insoluble problem for governments, and they have never been able to completely erase the footprints of opposing/supporting or sarcastic citizens. It is worth mentioning that the slogans which still remain from four decades ago serve as another motivation for protestors to leave their marks (fig. 1). It is as if by tagging the wall this person has the opportunity to keep the life of the movement current over time. This desire for immortality can even be

1. "Khomeini spirit of God" (referring to the leader of the Islamic revolution as a representative sent by God)

Images courtesy of the artist.

"Mahsa Amini"

2. Solicitation flyer on a utility box with other advertisements for body parts. The flyer reads in this order: "In God’s name; please do not take down the post, I’m in need; immediate sale of kidney with O+ blood type, HLE test results in hand; phone number; selling my liver as well."

doodles is only partially legible. It reads, “How much do you get…” The government agent responsible for covering the writing has responded to the message by reposing the question: “How much do you get?”

6. “For the fortieth day of the Bravehearts Mohammad Hosseini and Mohammad Mehdi Karami we will come to the streets.” The note is referring to the illegal execution of two young protesters who were hung by the Islamic government.

found among sentimental arborglyphs or writings related to illegal solicitation of body organs (fig. 2).

After every period of social change, what is most significantly transformed but becomes apparent only in the future is the alteration in language and culture. We usually do not sense changes in linguistic values unless they have a tangible form. These forms, arising from every upheaval, construct a new order that is based on disorder and chaos, and which fits into the larger system of visual culture. The words written on walls are a reproduction of that era’s cultural values. They are fervent and impassioned, conveying the language of a given present moment and the spirit of the writer. Sometimes they are explicit and formal, and refer to the main slogans of the movement (fig. 3); sometimes they are cryptic and literary (fig. 4); and often they carry a satirical and biting meaning (fig. 5), which the writer inscribes on all surfaces of the city, such as kiosks and street signs, government vehicles like ambulances and police cars, or even on the doors of houses, using tools like spray paint, markers, charcoal, and even blood.

Given the constant surveillance by the government, whether through its official and undercover forces or through cameras, writing slogans has always carried risks. That is particularly true during the recent movement, where the government has intensified its methods of pursuit in order to hold citizens accountable to the fullest extent. This becomes clearer when comparing today's wall writings with those of the 1979 revolution. In those years, government officials employed tactics similar to those used today in pursuit of protesters. However, due to limited technological capabilities and manpower, they were less able to quell the situation. By comparing the monumental slogans of up to fifteen meters in length, written in beautiful calligraphy, with the tiny two-centimeter stickers now commonly found on doors or cars, or slogans that only feature a part of the message written on walls (fig. 6), the stark contrast between the two eras becomes apparent. The shortness of the new writing illustrates the writer’s ability to control the amount of time it takes him to produce the work (fig. 7). In contrast, anxiety and fear is obvious in videos taken with personal phones. Often these video images, which are recorded quickly, with shaky framing, become central to the recent movement's news reports, adding an aesthetic dimension, and expressing the anxiety of the protesters.

The content of wall writings reflects a dissenting attitude towards the current situation, and, depending on the location, they may either feature iconic slogans or consist of numerous slogans that are only used for a brief period. One noteworthy observation is that the government makes efforts to counter this form of protest, incorporating the resources at its disposal. Their strict approach to this phenomenon can be summarized in two general ways. If possible, they either arrest the writer, and

by punishing them create terror, or they hire city contractors to cover the slogans with paint. The covering of slogans in fig. 8 is itself a forty-year-old slogan and highlights the deep-seated tensions between the government and its people. Within the structure of the Islamic/Revolutionary government of Iran, relevant institutions, such as municipalities and Basij, bombard the walls of cities and villages with their propaganda slogans and images (fig. 9). They even sometimes use wall writings to warn citizens (fig. 10). Therefore, it is not uncommon for citizens to manipulate the writings as well. From this perspective, walls become the grounds of ongoing conflict between the establishment and protesters, and the collision often produces a final and innovative piece that embodies an absurd form. The layers stacked on top of one another, representing different concepts, may seem incomprehensible or vandalistic outside their own temporal context. In this process, a slogan is written and subsequently altered by a censorship officer. For instance, they might ridicule the message by adding cartoonish images, creating a humorous effect (fig. 11). They may also modify the slogan into a meaningless phrase (fig. 12) or they may change it back to a government slogan (fig. 13). This represents a type of participation in the creation of new meanings. During times of social unrest, the walls of the streets are almost entirely covered with colors and shapes. Yet, pedestrians are aware that underneath the thick, low-quality paint used by censorship forces, their own people's slogans can be found. Thus, while the walls may seem only a cacophony of visuals, the hidden messages convey a deeper meaning and offer a means for people to express themselves (fig. 14).

In this struggle there is an attempt to live beyond the world that the government has defined, a sentiment that elevates the sloganeers to a higher status than lawbreaker. That is, the manual labor of presenting these slogans without claiming ownership with a signature, situates the author in the position of an activist. One could argue that liberation begins with such defiant behaviors. Taking control over the walls is an act of opposition and collision with the government. It removes the citizen from a passive state while reflecting the perspectives of various social classes. This act, although devoid of common artistic values, is centered on the epistemic relation between the individual and the object.

Today, streets and walls are no longer the only avenues for expression. Social media platforms enable the dissemination of messages on a larger scale. The government continually disrupts internet access with harsh censorship or imposes blackouts during protests, but hashtags mark the walls, demonstrating the internal physical connection between these writings/walls and cell phone screens (fig. 15). Both are positioned to establish a network among the minds of citizens and to encourage hope in the face of government censorship and intimidation.

7. The only remaining part of a slogan that reads “death.” The original slogan was perhaps “death to…”

8. “Shame cannot be erased with paint; death or freedom.”

9. “The supreme leader: Basij is the constitution for mobility of this regime, everyone must be part of the Basij”

10. “Caution for the abomination of Jihad”

11. A completely disfigured slogan with shapes and doodles.

13. “The Shah (king) of Iran’s palace.” An altered popular slogan written on trash cans throughout Iran that say, “the leader’s residence.”

14. A “Woman-Life-Freedom” slogan that

15. "#Woman-Life-Freedom" Images courtesy of the artist.

I’ve been thinking a whole lot about painting, about how (or if) it still matters in today’s radically changing society. Of course, it probably still does—after all, heavily invested personalities and institutions would never have it otherwise. But hey, you never know how things could so easily fall out of favor these days.

I remember in the mid ‘80s when times felt really slow, when the world felt like it was going to stay the way it had always been since the late ‘60s, when TV was the “new” technology that had been shaping and changing mainstream culture for decades. I’m not sure if it’s because I grew up in a third world country in Manila, Philippines, but for sure art wasn’t that mainstream at all, and painting was a fringe thing, almost irresponsible actually, for one to be doing in a struggling, developing world of post-martial law.

We lived in Quezon City, in the lower middle-class suburb called Cubao (pronounced koo-baow, which I think also means a local species of banana BTW), in a house made out of 19th- and early 20th-century lumber leftovers from the carcasses of ancestral homes in downtown Manila. It was also a small gallery, a studio, and an art framing business as well, in the basement, with a section of it that housed a whole bunch of workers. It was whatever it was for us to sustain ourselves—a bustling residential complex alongside several rows of apartments in a zoning nightmare of a neighborhood. Strangely enough we also lived in the same community as other painters, like Alfredo Liongoren and Romulo Olazo, “former hippies of the ‘70s” who both had the same setup of a gallery/studio/frame shop kind of home.

And then there was some work here and there throughout the day, my siblings and I helping out in whatever we could in my father’s studio. Art was something we just did as a part of our daily lives that wasn’t separate from everything else that we had to do—an odd sort of subculture, nestled awkwardly within the already-odd-enough broader culture of postcolonial Philippines. Painting was the only thing I knew at the time, in an art world that was hardly a market or industry, one that was slow and steady, and sparingly supported by proponents of “high culture.”

Dave Hickey once said that being an artist isn’t something we choose, but more like one that a community/society “elects.” He might have been right, but for me, at the time, it felt like it was a fate harshly imposed upon us whether we liked it or not. Like it was all “elect” and zero “choice.” Modern society teaches us that we are free to choose who we want to be, which is why, for many years, I have tried to fight off and steer clear of this “cultural baggage” we’ve inherited that we’ve sometimes called “identity.” Yet here I am, thrust into the world some thirty-odd years later, different yet the same.

The hills are shadows, and they flow From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

But in my spirit will I dwell, And dream my dream, and hold it true; For tho' my lips may breathe adieu, I cannot think the thing farewell.

On Darwin and Computation

It looks like Las Vegas is roaring again in 2023. It almost feels like forever riding this boom-and-bust cycle since moving here in 2009 when everything was on a seemingly hopeless downslope, then up, and down again. Now the highways are expanding, the Raiders have finally moved into their new stadium, Formula 1 is coming as well with a brandnew Las Vegas Grand Prix four-mile track right on the Strip, and public art in the entire southern region is thriving. Isn’t that what cities are supposed to do anyway? Capitalism shimmying its way to progress?

Something feels different though, as if the attitude of the city in its entirety is radically changing. Las Vegas will always be the casino capital, but pockets of other industries augmenting this enterprise (the film and fashion industry, and other cultural and entertainment venues such as the Smith Center and Meow Wolf in Area 15) have all matured a lot faster in the last decade. Is it because the Internet has given us a better way to steer and take stock of our evolving culture?

Modern technology has definitely played a big role in shaping contemporary “high culture” as that great equalizer of “virtue”—a fusion experiment converging everyone’s opinions into a giant headon collision inside that virtual tokamak we call social media. Things have gone way far beyond anything we could have ever imagined when the first bootleg of Windows came out in the 1990s. All this cultural exchange now happens in real-time blitzkrieg speeds wherein every single bit counts. We’ve barely been given ample time at all to contemplate our situatedness in the world, and in a second it’s gone—all that remains in the aftermath is an average split, a clean yes or no, blue or red, friend or foe in a black-and-white kind of stalemate monoculture. How does painting exist at all with the nuances of grays all washed out in this fast-paced 007 kind of world? Is this new pace for the new generation of artists a good thing or a bad thing: who knows? Maybe we’ll adapt, maybe we’ll settle, we’ll see.

— Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, Section CXXIII

Speaking of social media, in one of those heated debates on Facebook, I remember Dave Hickey saying that Las Vegas was the perfect city for artists to live and work. But he added that the art that we do here, at some point, must come to terms with the Strip and its ominous presence and imposing beauty, as well as its rich history that lies beneath the rubble from decades of architectural and cultural implosions. Yet somewhere in the middle of all that, he also insisted that we have managed to marginalize and neglect beauty and have instead celebrated the institutionalization of mediocrity—that art has merely become a useful sociopolitical propaganda tool to advance ideologies and critical movements. Tempting, isn’t it? But isn’t the Strip itself the epitome of aesthetic mediocrity as well? It’s interesting how worldviews can get so convoluted so easily: to consider, from an artist’s perspective, what Hickey says what artists “must” do from a critic’s point of view. See what that did there? Perhaps it’s really not that important what critics say, but what it does, how it pokes what’s inside of us, to help us look deeply into the essence of what we’re really doing here.

If we see the art world as a hyperobject— agents, objects, dealers, artifacts and everything else you can throw in there—an aggregate of stuff so large that it’s impossible to rationalize the entropy that ensues as we each go about our own business, then it doesn’t make sense at all to question who needs what and what needs whom. If culture is some kind of perpetually selfcorrecting “working memory” that processes the complexity of interrelationships in the world, then maybe everyone’s got a role, or no role at all, maybe everyone gets to pitch in and stir this melting pot of a culture, and whatever works, just works, the rest burns out to help fuel the flames of proclivity.

I forget that painting is a kind of technology as well, though sometimes it may appear more rudimentary/primitive than it really is—hacking and slashing, squishing and scraping, manipulating the paint until you’ve almost accidentally come across what you’re looking for. What might seem like randomness and chance could very well be an elaborate system of spontaneous creativity, wherein “emergence” plays an essential role in reaching beyond “purpose” and “intention.”

Painter Manuel Ocampo says the problem with some artists is that “they cannot escape language … they hold on to it tightly the more they try to let go of it.” How else is one to express that which is unknown (to language) in the same way that poetry and philosophy does, groping its way into the darkest of depths, reaching for what is ultimately forever withdrawn from the limits of human cognition? One thing’s for sure, that the ingenuity and beauty in the artifacts we’ve created throughout human history must be undeniable proof that a much more complex system

of “mapping-out” relationships between irreducible ideas exists behind the simplicity of mark-making.

A couple of years back, I was fortunate enough to have been invited by painter Phil King to teach/ mentor in one of the most innovative painting schools in London: Turps Art School, spearheaded by YBA artist Marcus Harvey. One of the things I’ve stressed in their Correspondence Course is that perhaps we ought to think less and do more, and allow our unconscious to just do its thing. In the program, there’s a kind of clarity that’s achieved in discourse from casual conversation about painting, in keeping the “process” open enough that it preserves the irreducible nature of aesthetics from which wisdom emerges, as opposed to traditional instruction. In spite of all our intentions real progress in painting happens on its own; you can only steer so much of it until you realize there’s no choice but to allow the “imagery” to unfold on its own terms.

In the Journal of Researches, Charles Darwin states: “It is not possible for the mind to comprehend, except by a slow process, any effect which is produced by a cause repeated so often that the multiplier itself conveys an idea not more definite than the savage [sic] implies when he points to the hairs of his head.” Thinking about painting in this way reminds me of the algorithmic beauty of cellular automata, and the unprecedented level of complexity that somehow emerges from the very simplest of means. In fact, in one of these systems called Rule 30, physicist Stephen Wolfram believes that the distinct forms that emerge from simple repeating rules on a grid are the keys to understanding how the very same complex structures and behaviors emerge in nature.

Is painting just a thing that we do? A remnant of evolutionary biology, like the bark of a dog, or the chirping of birds? It’s always tempting to rationalize intention into all of these things, like assuming “love” as merely a tool to procreate and propagate, to ensure the evolutionary continuity of a species. Beyond instruction, beyond the intentions of artists, beyond the annals of art history, beyond the honoraries of prestigious institutions and galleries, beyond the rambling whataboutisms of critics, the Saltzes or Smiths of the world, what is it that we’re really trying to convey here in painting, if we’re even conveying anything at all?

For all we know, maybe that’s how we ought to “come to terms” with the Strip and its eternally evolving form—from a railway stopover, to a casino highway, into an F1 racetrack. It’s all the same as art and painting; we accept the changing pace of our evolving contemporary culture that happens right before our very eyes. We adapt, we settle, we procreate and propagate the evolution of our species, whatever it takes to get us to play out whatever or whenever its finality is.

GIG DEPIO

Las Vegas-based Filipino painter Gig Depio presents the conjunctions of contemporary and historical forces in the form of intense, often large-scale, figurative compositions. He focuses on American culture and its history, on the convergence of American, Philippine, and Spanish histories at the turn of the 20th century, and the inevitable interweaving of many different cultures from then on. A recipient of the 2016 Nevada Arts Council Fellowship Grant in Painting, he has been an exponent for art in Nevada since 2009, and has recently extended his advocacy internationally, including exhibitions with the National Commission for Culture and Arts (NCCA), Manila, Philippines in 2018, and in the 58th Venice Biennale, Giudecca Art District (GAD), Venice, Italy in 2019.

IF CULTURE IS SOME KIND OF PERPETUALLY SELF-CORRECTING “WORKING MEMORY” THAT PROCESSES THE COMPLEXITY OF INTERRELATIONSHIPS IN THE WORLD, THEN MAYBE EVERYONE’S GOT A ROLE, OR NO ROLE AT ALL

The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art supports smart, passionate art writing from Southern Nevada and beyond. Dry Heat is a platform where we can share artist interviews, essays about art that matters, and more. You can find us on the campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

This publication was funded in part by Nancy J. Uscher, Dean of the College of Fine Arts. This program is funded in part with support from Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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