Essay for Riot for a Rose

ROCKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!

Clint Burnham

In a recent letter “Open Letter to Premiere of BC”, a call was made for a public enquiry of the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) for reasons including: ‘The 62 Missing (/Murdered) Women from Downtown Eastside” and "The vicious attacks at Guns and Roses concert” (The Province, August 7, 2003, p. A7). This linking of Canada’s most notorious alleged serial killer (Robert Pickton) with police and crowd mayhem at a cancelled rock concert displays the social context for the Vancouver polity: indeed, cancelled public vents in the province (sandcastle competition in White Rock, festivities in Kelowna), and the notoriety of Vancouver crowds at other stadium events (according to the Monster Truck Rally organizers, Vancouver audiences are the rowdiest on the continent) suggests that a lack of public decorum and concomitant policy brutality/slackness characterize the local scene.

It is in this context that Mark Neufeld’s India ink drawings of participants in the GN’R riot of November 7th, 2002 provide us with an occasion to think about youth, subcultures, police repression, and the relationship between art and surveillance camera images posted by the VPD on the website http://www.city.vancouver.bc.ca/police/gun&roses/allimages.htm.(1) So the first question—or perhaps the final aesthetic question—lies in how Neufeld’s drawings can hope to do something different than the video/web images. The latter presumably exist to aid the police in their investigation (it should db noted that the open letter suggested above calls on an investigation of the police for their actions at the riot). Images implicating the police officers have not, needless to say, circulated with the same resource, but see the PIVOT website for other allegations of police brutality (http://www.pivotlegall.org/). The video/web images combine a low-res look with an efficient method of distribution; like Gulf War I&II images they seem to guarantee their veracity with just such a lack of definition. The panopticon depends not on veracity but implication. Neufeld’s drawings carry that aesthetic forward in a paradoxical desire (as the artist put it) to return the rioters to anonymity. Neufeld is caught in the jaws of his own making here. It is as if rock fans have two choices: either be “known to police” or just be another fan.

It is this dialectic that I want to explore in this short essay. Neufeld’s career thus far as an artist bears the common marks of our multitasking milieu, a milieu in which if you don’t make music, put on shows, do art and at least one other pursuit, you’re an anomaly (one in which, for some reason, we keep calling each other slacker). We’re all cultural workers on various short-term and part-time contracts. In this economic situation, a nostalgia for the culture of permanent employment, “real” blue collar jobs, reigns supreme: this is a retro inflected, Main St./Mt. Pleasant aesthetic ideology of red neck chic and rocker fashion, of shows at the ANZA and coffee at LUGZ/SOMA/Cuppa Joe, of trolling the Sally Ann and Saint Vinnies for thrift “scores”. Neufeld’s resume includes the sublime hoser realism of the Heads I&II drawings and the post-meters funk of Baron Samedi ESQ, a knowledge of costume and tribal markings as developed as anywhere in the post Dick Hebdige, post Donna Gaines, post cultural studies, post Mike Kelley world of youth culture art—Damien Mopett, Ron Terada, Brian Jungen, Jason Maclean and Jason Wood, Kyla Mallet and Royal Art Lodge.

The competence marked, it has to be said that the politics (though not the aesthetics) of this movement or tendency are formalistic and apathetic about the current historical cultural moment. Of course that’s ok – political art is worse than apolitical art in any other context than a demo or rally. And important and effective “social work” is being done by people of exactly the same milieu—the clerk at Portland housing SRO in the downtown eastside is more likely to listen to the White Stripes than…well, I can’t even think of a political band—political music is almost without exception done by washouts and has-beens the likes of Billy Bragg. 

But the political stalemate of work like Neufeld’s can tell us much about the current situation even while it avoids direct comment. For surely the implications of that formalistic impasse—that the drawings use the aesthetics of a certain Richteresque smudginess to rescue the subjects, symbolically but also via the practico-visual, from the repressive state apparatus (“The Man”)—suggest that aesthetic formalism and political quiescence go hand in hand. I can’t think of a more important lesson for today’s class.

What I mean is the following. When disgruntled G’NR fans rioted at GM Place last fall, they were moving out of their anonymous role as fans—those who consume passively, whose actions in the arena are just so much backdrop for the band(2). Becoming rioters, active subjects of history, they are then “captured” on “film” (on tape and in bits) and threatened with punishment—both immediately through the actions of the Police, and eventually through the actions of the courts.

Neufeld’s drawings return the rioters to their place as fans through the paradoxical method of aesthetics. So at first glance, then, what seems to be a liberal action on the part of Neufeld is compromised both by its belief in both an autonomous art practice and by the resultant passivity of the fans-rioters-fans. Take Neufeld’s image of whom the VPD call (interpellate) as suspect or party 15: the girl or boy with long blond hair and a foam mesh cap (Montreal Canadiens? Molson Canadian? Vancouver Canadians? ) The betrayal of the image in Neufeld’s drawing?]the turn away from the repressive instrumentality of the video image (or the emancipator anthropological realism of the Heads series)—implies an institutional difference between video verite and drawn indeterminacy that doesn’t, as they say, hold up in court. (Indeed, think of the notoriously bad skills of typical courtroom artists, the inadequacy of their images of Robert Pickton, Paul Bernardo, O.J. Simpson, etc.) And, too, if that fan-rioter was smashing doors at GM Place, that is taken away from them just as surely as the video surveillance seeks to attach blame.

1 This has been the most popular City Of Vancouver web page in the past six months. When it initially went up, city IT workers had to scramble to handle the traffic, giving rise to questions of audience (the varying reasons surfers went to the site: voyeurism, to see themselves or their buddies [shades of Menace II Society] and/or to help the police).

2 It may be already passé to think of fans as passive. More and more since the 1980s, it seems that mass culture has decide to incorporate the fans or audience as contributors/workers: from America’s Funniest Home Videos to American idol.