DRAWING ON MEMORIES OF VIOLENCE AND DISPLACEMENT

Millie Chen suggests that spectacle can be destructive, but the shared act of looking, and looking back, can also build empathy.

Millie Chen, “Prototype 1970: War, children, it’s just a shot away | Four dead in Ohio | I Love Beijing Tiananmen | Excuse me while I kiss the sky,” gouache, watercolor, ink and graphite on paper (2016, photo courtesy Millie Chen)

In her new show at the University of Colorado-Boulder Art Museum, the artist Millie Chen explores alienation and memory by borrowing from historic images of violence: the site of a coup, a sky full of military choppers, a university where students were shot to death. Millie Chen: Four Recollections includes “Prototype” drawings that double as wallpaper mock-ups, with color scales in the margins for prospective production, and one example fully realized on a gallery wall. When I spoke with her, she declared, rather mysteriously: “The wallpaper is insidious.” Chen has made a drawing for every year of the 1970s, most decorated with patterns inspired by Op-art (also called optical art) and embedded with recognizable scenes of violence.

In “Prototype 1970” (2016), an orange sun sits high in the yellow sky, and its flat rays widen as they travel from their source — a familiar graphic not only in rock band posters of the decade, but also in Communist propaganda. (Only Mao’s smiling face, or a hammer and sickle, seem to be missing to complete the reference.) A swarm of helicopters flies toward a depiction of Mary Ann Vecchio, a witness to the Kent State shooting, who kneels in the foreground. In the famous picture from May 1970, Vecchio knelt in front of the dead body of a student, but here only her shadow is visible. Nearby are 7 men at a public shaming from China’s Cultural Revolution; rising in the center is a wild mass of Jimi Hendrix’s hair, threatening to eclipse the sun.

By combining the visual approach of wallpaper with iconic images of human suffering, Chen seems to illustrate a warning by the theorist Guy Debord: that spectatorship can dehumanize the people being watched. In The Society of Spectacle, Debord argues that spectacle — “the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity” — can be expressed through propaganda, entertainment, or iconography. Spectacle avoids supplementing a real lived experience, instead becoming an abstraction, or as he harshly calls it “added decoration.” Once images are isolated and accumulate copies, he says, they separate rather than unify society. Fittingly, in the last drawing in the series, “Prototype: 1979” (2016), people are almost entirely absent from scenes of Shahyad Square in Tehran and The Greensboro Massacre in North Carolina…………

https://hyperallergic.com/429348/drawing-on-memories-of-violence-and-displacement/