After Benning, after Math: 12, 13 and counting...
by Dick Hebdige
“If each generation were allowed and expected to build its own houses, that simple change, comparatively unimportant in itself, would imply almost every reform which society is now suffering for. I doubt whether even our public edifices—our capitols, statehouses, courthouses, city-halls and churches—ought to be built of such permanent materials as stone or brick. It were better that they should crumble to ruin once in twenty years or thereabouts, as a hint, to people to examine and reform the institutions which they symbolize.” — Holgrave, Hope Party reformer, painter and practitioner of the new art of daguerrotypography in Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel, House of the Seven Gables (1851).
Email sent August 5 2010:
Dear Amy, I just left a rambling heads up on your voice mail to the effect that I'm now back in Joshua Tree after a brief stay with James Benning at his place in the High Sierras circa 1846 (no internet or cell phone coverage, no answer machine, no fancy victuals e.g. bread, eggs, etc). As a consequence of falling off the grid and ending up in Donner Party land, I didn't retrieve your messages till yesterday afternoon after the 5 hour drive down the mountains through Kern County and across the inner wastes of the Mojave. Despite the distances, the heat and the lack of amenities up there, the trip turned out to be magical and restorative though I got hit on arrival by some kind of vicious 72 hour bug. I'm always stunned by how beautiful James's place is. The house is an authentic slice of early '70s Americana projected on stilts off the sheer side of a mountain, suspended at tree-top height over a forest that stretches off for miles into the peak-studded distances that separate his idyll from the blistering Central Valley and the exhaust-laden transport hub of Bakersfield....
December 2005: “James just gave me a Bill Traylor drawing—a Baron Samedi figure in a stovepipe hat with a cane. On the back there's an inscription that reads "after Traylor, JB" and the date.” — Author's diary entry.
The Benning manse is, as I say, poised over a steep V shaped canyon...the most jaw-dropping feature is the open deck hovering like an airplane wing out into the ether, framed out fair and square with four evenly spaced horizontal planks at the top running the length of the house Japanese Zen temple-style. We'd sit there in the evenings talking into our drinks and the gathering darkness, gazing out into the blue, pink, then star-clustered distances as the hawks and eagles pinned to the sky like silhouettes on a child's bedroom wall turned into bats looping open-mouthed through swarms of flying insects. The spirit of the Unabomber presided over all, looming in the barbecued air between the deck where we were sitting and the Kaczynski cabin nestled 30 yards down the hill beneath our feet, a miniscule structure (12ft. x 10ft. x 6ft. 9in.) half-obscured by a giant Manzanita, like the gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel. By way of contrast, the Thoreau cabin (12ft. x 15ft. x 7ft. 4in.) just over to the west can't be seen at all in summer from this position. It's off to one side, completely shrouded in foliage (as if it's been placed in parenthesis). For now at least from where we were sitting—at least until that bush gets bigger—Kaczynski kind of dominates the composition....
“The nature of things is in the habit of concealing itself”. — Heraclitus, Fragment 5:4
SQUARE ONE: 2 CABINS + CONTENTS
James Benning's cabins sit 40 meters apart bedded in among thickets of scrub oak, manzanita and ponderosa pine at an elevation of 4,000 feet mid-way down a steep foothill adjacent to the Sequoia National Forest in the western High Sierras. Flanked by high bushes and oriented at different angles, each cabin, secreted in plain sight, is a one-room world unto itself. Separate but connected (there is no directly linking path) they each command similar yet completely different inward- and outward-facing views. Along with a clear glass-paneled door and contemporary equivalents of the two large windows from the hut on Walden Pond, the walls of the Thoreau cabin open onto five distinct, intensely wrought worlds:
1 'Hawkins' (The Blue Boar #2 [1989]),
1 'Ramirez' (Train Tracks with Two Tunnels, 1948-61),
1 'Darger' (At Ressurrectoation Run. Attacked by Fierce Glandelinians, one of the Vivians Hurls Grenades, 1960),
1 'Tolliver' (Self-Portrait, 1978) and
3 'Traylors' (Man in Blue House with Rooster, Blue Construction with Two Figures and Dog, Female Drinker, 1939-43).
All 7 works are exact hand-made replicas of the originals, the mimetic detail extending to media, materials, mode of execution, age and provenance of frames, etc.
July 2006. JB gave me two more 'Traylors' done on authentic mid-century cardboard—a small ink drawing in a thick square wooden thrift store '40s frame of two male figures boxing with Traylor's trademark rounded heads, beady bird eyes and curvilinear dancers' bodies and a blocky bull in red. They are deceptively simple and not at all straightforward. Like Japanese manga or a painting by Nara, the filled-in silhouettes may appear disarming and child-like at first, but once they've settled into the wall they begin to glower back at the viewer with an amused kind of ferocity. (This may be where Kara Walker got the idea for her horror-history silhouette series). The slave's gift to the master: a poisoned glass of juke joint rum made from sugar grown right here on the old plantation. It occurs to me that the second drawing could be the logo for that caffeinated energy drink/alcoholic mixer. — Author's diary entry.
James Benning, Ted Kaczynski Cabin: Window (detail), 2008. Photograph.
The views from inside the Kaczynski cabin, a facsimile of the Unabomber's former Montana home are as intense and heterogeneous as those from inside the Thoreau cabin. In addition to the solid door and the two small square windows installed asymmetrically on opposite sides as in the original structure, the perforations in the walls open (in or out depending on how you figure spatiality) onto:
1 'Black Hawk' (Dreams of Visions of Himself Changed to a Destroyer or Riding a Buffalo Eagle, 1880 or 81),
1 'Yoakum' (Idaho Falls, Braintree Pass, c. 1966),
1 'Howard' (A Man Has No Right to Defend his Family etc.,1955),
a scanned .pdf of a page of Kaczynski doodles,
a 1 in. x 3 in. scrap of paper with a motto (Taking a bath in winter breaks an Indiana law) found in the original Kaczynski cabin typed by JB on the same Smith-Corona manual model Kaczynski used to type the Unabomber Manifesto, and
a framed hand-written copy of a sheet of the 'secret' numerical code TK used to document his most incriminating thoughts and actions—1 of 3 pages found hidden inside the cabin walls after his arrest without which, as the FBI admit, the relevant sections of the Unabomber's journals would, in all probability, have remained un-deciphered.
The Cabins Project, JB's tribute to the American vernacular yard art tradition is perched on the just-about-buildable edge of a hillside, public park land, defensible appropriation art practice and permissible speech. It is equal parts design-build demonstration project, historical echo chamber, political statement, conceptual-outsider art installation, living museum, artists' retreat and secessionist compound. At first glance, aspects of the project may seem congruent with broader trends in the contemporary art world, for example, the engagement of individual artists and art collectives with design, domestic living space and bare-bones architecture or with simulation and altered states of consciousness or with the genealogy of '60s West Coast counter-culture and cybernetics etc. But the Cabins Project remains, at its core, stubbornly recalcitrant and singular. Like the group of awkward loners whose works and lives provide the second-hand citational substance out of which it has been woven, it cannot be annexed by any trend or socially networked 'world' (art or otherwise) outside itself.
JB's imaginary collective is as impossible and illusory as Theodore J. Kaczynski's Freedom Club (FC)—the fictional anti-technology terrorist organization in whose name the former Berkeley math professor, raised in a lower-middle class Chicago suburb, pushed through high school at an accelerated rate and sent off to Harvard, aged 16, issued his demands, pronouncements and 'Manifesto' to the FBI, the Press, and, via them, to society-at-large during his 16-year reign of terror from a one-room plywood shack secreted on a heavily timbered 1.4 acres in Florence Gulch within a mile of Stemple Pass Road on the edge of Lincoln, Montana (2010 pop. 1,465). FC, the initials TK stamped on the metal plugs he used to cap his sometimes lethally effective lo-tech pipe bombs, before enclosing them in elaborate, hand-crafted wooden boxes and mailing them to people connected to industries and professions he disapproved of, became Kaczynski's personal signature. In all likelihood, it's only in his FC-signed communiqués, written in the ‘royal we,’ that Kaczynski, condemned to life in solitary long before his feral paradise in Florence Gulch, Montana morphed into a cell in a federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado has had recourse to the first person plural pronoun:
This message is from the terrorist group FC. To prove its authenticity we give our identifying number.... By 'freedom' we mean the opportunity togo through the power process, with real goals not the artificial goals of surrogate activities and without interference, manipulation or supervision from anyone, especially any large organization.1
JB's Cabins club is a similarly fantastic collective—an assortment of odd ducks, dissidents, recluses and marginals bound together through a speech act delivered by an outside-inside artist. It exists in here between these covers as much as, if not more than, out there in the world. Benning's paradoxical 'community'—an Army of Ones—is as illusory and non-existent from a fact-based point of view as the "American people," that other meta-fictional entity, endlessly conjured out of the ether, interpellated and spoken for in stump speeches, press conferences and policy tweets by members of the professional political and pundit class. In fact, the endlessly biddable "American People," the blimp that floats daily through the blabo-sphere, blown this way and that by competing currents of hot air (as opposed to actually existing American boots, shoes and bare feet on the ground) is what JB's FC stands against—or rather turns away from.
I have a huge love-hate relationship with this country...that's what my films underline...(they) express my frustration with being an American and question the direction this country has taken. Not explicitly but I think it's always in all my films because it's part of me. And around 1995 I decided I had only two criteria to make films from now on...to go to a place I want to be in, to really understand place, to define place as having meaning and then to look at this place (so) that it can tell me something about my life...to put my life in maybe more focus. — James Benning2
BOUNDARY FUNCTIONS: LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCUTION James's property is situated on the edge of a small berg in Tulare County, the poorest county in the state. The town is centered on a cluster of mobile homes and cabins on stilts wedged into a holler with a stream and though the map says 'California' the place has an authentic east coast Appalachian feel. There's a bar attached to a motel that's open 5 days a week and closes around 8:00 p.m. and a store that sells mainly canned goods. James's fridge contains tins of soda, a few bottles of beer and cellophane wrapped packages of liverwurst. There are also large plastic flagons of water (the tap water is contaminated with uranium). James's main source of nutrition is, of course, research and ceaseless making. Stacked up in one corner of the living room adjacent to the boxes of tapes and CDs are orderly piles of books, especially biographies and catalogues devoted to the folk/outsider artists he's so tightly drawn to, and whose work he's been copying in a series of meticulously rendered replicas for the past 7 years or so, ever since he finished working on the house. As my summer cold set in the following day, I picked up an armful of books and headed downstairs to the guest quarters directly below the flying deck and retreated to bed where I lay reading, dozing, sneezing...glancing up at intervals, as the afternoon wore on into another evening, at the apparition of the Unabomber's hut visible through the window, peeking out from behind that bush in the feverish half-light....
James Benning, Ted Kaczynski Cabin: Library (detail), 2008. Photograph.
A single shelf running the length of the west wall in the Kaczynski cabin holds 115 books stacked in 11 horizontal piles. Roughly half are duplicates taken from the 257 titles listed by the FBI in their inventory of the original TK cabin contents. The other half consists of additional 'sympathetic' inserts from JB's library, including some books owned by figures convened by Benning in "Twelve People" published elsewhere in this volume:
Sunday May 7, 1972 Found something to do with my $10 Confederate Flag. Wiped the dust off my shoes with it before polishing them. It's too thin to use as a polish cloth. ‘Wish I was in the land of cotton.’ Bang! ‘Bama. — Arthur Bremer, An Assassin's Diary3
The artist's textual additions include Arthur Bremer's An Assassin's Diary, the self-penned chronicle of the 21 year-old unemployed busboy from Milwaukee who set off on an extended transcontinental meander in the early spring of 1972 with the stated intention of assassinating Richard Nixon, only to end up at a rally in a shopping mall in Laurel, Maryland on the afternoon of May 15 severing the spine of George C. Wallace, then the segregationist Governor of Alabama, with a bullet from a .38.
April 24, 1972 Tuesday Just another god Damn Failure4
Henry 'Hank' Aaron, dubbed the "Last Hero" in a recent biography by Howard Bryant is the only proper name from JB's "Twelve People" that escapes incarceration inside the cabin complex. Joined forever at the hip to Arthur Bremer in the universe of Benning as the one-time starring outfielder with the Milwaukee Braves through the 55 minute montage of Aaron baseball cards that take center-stage in JB's film American Dreams (1984) while Bremer's semi-literate diary entries scroll right to left across the bottom of the screen, Aaron alone is allowed to float free from the labyrinth of making-dwelling-thinking JB has dug over the course of several years into his hillside property at the edge of the Sequoia federal wilderness reserve. 5 . He alone is spared inclusion in the matrix of obsession, positioned to one side as an honorary affiliate of the JB FC, an unsullied icon from Benning's adolescence, when, thanks to his skill as an Industrial League 'sand lot' pitcher in Milwaukee in the '50s / early '60s JB, too, was for a brief while courted, as a pro-baseball prospect. 6
But then again, like Bill Traylor and Mose Tolliver (and George Wallace), as a native son of Alabama (born in Mobile, 1934), Aaron doesn't get to float that far....
The Milwaukee in which Henry Aaron arrived in 1954 was...adjusting...(after World War II to)...the arrival of thousands of southern blacks during the great migration north. The postwar increase in the black population would produce for Milwaukee one of its great contradictions, for despite its reputation for tolerance, high-quality-of life Milwaukee earned a reputation as one of the most severely segregated cities in the country.7
Among the 280 portraits of mainly working and lower-middle class students of German, Jewish and Polish stock in Benning's graduation high school year book for 1961, there is not a single black face though JB grew up just four blocks west of 'Bronzeville,' the tight rectangle of streets in downtown Milwaukee set aside for its African-American population. 8 The march through the heart of the Irish-Italian neighborhoods of South Milwaukee led by Father Groppi in 1967 that ended in a violent clash at Kosciuszko Park during which several protesters, Benning included, were beaten to the ground by opponents of desegregation may have contributed to the city's first fair-housing ordinance passed the following year, but the violence and the racism continued unabated.9 ee Bryant, and James Benning, "Off Screen Space/Somewhere Else," in Barbara Pichler, Claudia Slanar, eds., James Benning (Vienna: Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Synema, 2007) 10 Throughout the 1973 season when Aaron was poised to beat Babe Ruth's 'all-time' home-run record, he received sack loads of hate mail from white baseball fans, many hailing the future Hall of Famer as "Dear Nigger" including the following more politely framed death threat reproduced in Aaron's auto-biography:
Dear Hank, You are a very good ballplayer, but if you come close to Babe Ruth's 714 homers I have a contract out on you. Over 700 and you can consider yourself punctured with a .22 shell. If by the all-star game you have come within 20 homers of Babe you will be shot on site by one of my assassins on July 24, 1973.11
A transversal scan of the volumes on display in the Kaczynski cabin taken in the light of the preceding paragraph two hours after it was written on the replica desk in the Thoreau cabin on 7/13/11 highlighted the following:
found in Arthur Bremer's apartment after his arrest: Bradford Angier, How to Survive in the Woods (Macmillan Press, 1956);
referenced in Henry Darger's Realms; Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852; Signet, 1966);
from the FBI inventory of titles found in the Unabomber cabin: Hugh Davis Graham & Ted Robert Gurr (eds) Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives volumes 1 and 2: A Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (Sage Publications, 1979; 1989); The Basics of Rifle Shooting (National Rifle Assn, 1987); Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907; Doubleday, 1953);
from JB's library: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave Written by Himself (Boston, 1845; Anchor 1973); Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land With Blood. A Biography of John Brown (University of Massachusetts Press, 1984).
2d, December, 1859 I, John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done.12
A note containing this prophetic proclamation was handed to an attendant by John Brown hours prior to his execution for treason after the abortive raid on the federal armory at Harper's Ferry on October 16, 1859, the action that, in retrospect, eleven months before the firing on Fort Sumter, served as the unofficial opening salvo in the American Civil War. At 11 a.m. that day as the open wagon carrying the Old Man seated on his coffin entered the field outside Charlestown, Virginia where a crowd of 1,500, including the actor John Wilkes Booth, had gathered to see justice served, the abolitionist/domestic terrorist/freedom fighter/martyr to the anti-slavery cause looked up for a moment at the Blue Ridge mountains in the distance framing the gallows and remarked to no one in particular:
This is a beautiful country. I never had the pleasure of seeing it before.13
BEAUTY + THE BLOOD ≡ THE PLEASURE OF SEEING Bill Traylor; the former slave from Benton, Alabama who, from 1939 to 1942, spent his days seated on a crate with a pencil stub drawing what he saw inside the bits of cardboard blown in by the wind in the doorway of a pool hall on Montgomery's Monroe Street, spent his nights sleeping in the coffin storage room of a nearby funeral parlor by kind permission of the owner.14
Mose Tolliver, who was raised with his eleven siblings in a one-room sharecropper's cabin in Pintlala, Alabama but lived much of his adult life in Montgomery, former capital of Andrew Jackson's Confederacy, home to Rosa Parks and, from 1954-1960 of Martin Luther King, both of whom, separately and in unison, pursued John Brown's agenda by other means, spent his days sitting on a bed painting what he saw when he looked down into the sheets of plywood resting on crippled knees crushed beneath a falling crate of marble at the warehouse where he'd worked before the accident.15
Henry Darger, who enlisted Little Eva and Simon Le Gris from Uncle Tom's Cabin as combatants in opposing armies of The Realms appropriated the uniforms, weapons and supplies of the Civil War to model his own private holocaust—the bloody inner war waged, brother within brother, between the lust for purity and butchery, grace and desecration, implosion, explosion and epiphany.16
And Henry David Thoreau spent a famous night in jail because he refused to pay taxes to support a government that condoned and protected slavery, heard John Brown speak at Concord, gave money to support his war in Kansas against the Border Ruffians, delivered the speech "A Plea for Captain John Brown" defending the use of violence against the "wicked(ness of) human bondage," helped one of the Harper's Ferry raiders, Francis Jackson Merriam escape to Canada, and assisted the passage of fugitive slaves to the same destination on what he called America's “only free road, the Underground Railroad...owned and managed by the Vigilant Committee.”17
They are themselves mistaken who take him to be a madman.... Ask the tyrant who is his most dangerous foe, the sane man or the insane? Do the thousands...who have rejoiced at his deeds in Kansas, and have afforded him material aid there, think him insane?... Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong? Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made? Or declared by any number of men to be good, if they are not good?... I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good and the brave ever in a majority? Would you have him wait till...you and I came over to him? — Henry David Thoreau, A Plea for Captain Brown
East of the Kansas line, Jesse Howard, born dirt-poor and white, one of nine children in a one-room log cabin in Shamrock, Missouri who, in later years, turned the roadside yard in front of his home on Sorehead Hill in Fulton, MO into a public exhibition site for his handwritten upper case opinions would, even at the age of 97, regale visiting folk art collectors with tales from his childhood, including colorful stories about the legendary outlaw, Jesse James. He recalled, for instance, how James, a hard-core Southern Loyalist who, before robbing banks had served as a Confederate guerilla and taken part in the Centralia Massacre in Clay County, MO in September, 1864 when 22 unarmed Union soldiers were scalped and dismembered "would take his horse to shop and have his shoes put on backwards" to confuse pursuing posses.18
A MAN HAS NO RIGHT TO DEFEND HIS FAMILY DECATUR. ILL. OCT 11. 1961. OF ALL THE UN=AMERICAN. UN=CIVILIZED WAY OF LIFE. 'ARREST=A MAN AND THROW HIM IN JAIL.’ BECAUSE HE HAD NO PERMIT TO CONSTRUCT A FALLOUT SHELTER. FOR HIMSELF=AND=HIS=FAMILY. — "after Jesse Howard, JB" wall text in 'Kaczynski' cabin
The Unabomber ghost stood before me throughout the entire stay, solidly visible to my aching eyes in flu-fever: thick hair amok and stiffly upstanding, JB style, a filthy fleece shirt and grease-shiny jeans hanging off his scrappy frame, startling blue eyes obscured behind the aviator shades from that famous FBI poster; the whole apparition topped with a poncho worn against the cold Montana rain, every inch of its transparent plastic surface smeared with dried mud beneath which lurked a mass of rain-smudged runes and mathematical proofs written out in a neat school boy's cursive with a black magic marker....
Ted Kaczynski, sole member of the original Freedom Club adopted tactics as ingenious as the bandit, Jesse James to throw the agents off his trail. Those tactics included, inter alia, screwing smaller-sized soles to the bottoms of the trainers he wore while on monkey-wrenching expeditions; dousing bomb parts in a mixture of oil, turpentine and water to remove finger-prints; attaching single hairs he picked up in a restroom in Missoula to the electrical tape used on one of his devices to muddy the forensics. He was alleged to have laid a sheet of paper across the envelope of a letter addressed to the New York Times in June, 1994 and written "phone Nathan R - Wed 7 pm" hard enough to leave a (barely legible) imprint thus sending the FBI on a wild goose chase with agents poring over national phone listings attempting to track down every Nathan with a surname beginning with an "R", then tracing back all incoming calls around 7 p.m. inside the time-frame established by the post mark.19
(Researchers) note...that the health, life, and genetic legacy of members of social species are threatened when they find themselves on the social perimeter. For instance, social isolation...promotes obesity and Type 2 diabetes in mice; exacerbates infarct size and edema and decreases post-stroke survival rate following experimentally induced stroke in mice; promotes activation of the sympatho-adrenomedullary response to an acute immobilization or cold stressor and delays the effects of exercise on adult neurogenesis in rats;...increases the 24 hr urinary catecholamines levels and evidence of oxidative stress in the aortic arch of rabbits.... Humans, born to the longest period of abject dependency of any species and dependent on conspecifics across the lifespan to survive and prosper, do not fare well, either, whether they live solitary live or they simply perceive they live in relative isolation. — Wikipedia entry under Social Isolation
And throughout the twenty-five years he spent alone without electricity or plumbing surrounded by his books and bomb components, his personal Nature deities, Grandfather Rabbit and the Will 'o' the Wisp" 20 and his edible companions—the rabbits, elk, squirrels, rats, mice and crickets that would end up in his stews along with wild plants and home-grown self-composted carrots and potatoes, he wrote incessantly, compulsively documenting his daily thoughts and actions, his natural history observations and Promethean experiments on more than 22,000 typed and hand-written pages, simultaneously disclosing and concealing through an elaborate, and, as it turned out, futile security-alert transcription system that switched back and forth between various languages (Kaczynski's library included primers in Chinese, Egyptian, Finnish, German, Latin, Russian and Spanish) and the numerical code he reserved for 'Q' (queer i.e. sensitive) and 'QQ' (very queer) disclosures—the whole scriptive system representing a vast confessional labyrinth into which the Unabomber would fall as he set out every morning like Dante Alighieri on Groundhog day on his walk into the dark wood.
“A” coded numbers: 14, 95, 16, 91, 28, 41, 90, 43, 57, 16, 18, 82, 96, 67, 44, 51, 32, 98, 81, 87, 31, 3, 57, 11, 22, 0, 65, 37, 67, 57, 38, 8, 52, 23, 75, 32, 61, 38, 39, 22, 56, 82, 56, 1, 31, 3, 43, 51, 1, 57,,,
“B” coded numbers: 0, 62, 83, 17, 86, 29, 16, 30, 27, 04, 89, 20, 68, 53, 26, 23, 10, 80, 69, 45, 17, 70, 32, 90, 47, 54, 2, 95, 11, 15, 14, 90, 31, 87, 63, 8, 31, 13, 74, 50, 14, 29, 35, 83, 19, 79, 18, 22, 46, 29,,,
Using the 'secret' double key hidden by Kaczynski in the original cabin wall, the two sets of numbers above deliver the first ten words in bold of the coded journal entry translated below which TK rated 'Q':
Exxon conducting seismic exploration for oil. Couple of helicopters flying all over the hills, lower...dynamite on a cable, make blast on ground, instruments measure vibrations. Early August I went and camped out...in Diagonal Gulch, hoping to shoot up a helicopter.... Proved harder than I thought.... 2 quick shots.... Miss both. When I got back to camp, I cried, partly from frustration at missing, but mostly grief at what is happening to the country. It is so beautiful. But if they find oil, disaster.... Where can I go now for peace and quiet? 21
The entry was deciphered on 7/16/11 by JB with the following program written by JB in BASICA on a 1983 NEC computer and described in his own words below:
The computer program does the following: 1) prompts to enter the “A” code numbers 2) prompts to enter the “B” code numbers 3) subtracts B from A 4) if the difference is less than zero, then 100 is added to the difference 5) translates the difference to a Letter, Word, Number, Punctuation Mark or Word-Spacer according to Kaczynski's List of Meanings
For example: 14 is entered from the “A” list, 0 is entered from the “B” list. The difference is 14 minus 0, which is 14; and from the list of meanings 14= "E" Then 95 is entered from the “A” list and 62 is entered from the “B” list. The difference is 95 minus 62, which is 33; and from the list of meanings 33= "X". Then 16 is entered from the “A” list; 83 is entered from the "B" list. The difference is -67, which is lless than zero so 100 is added giving 33; and from the list of meanings 33= "X"; and so forth. Note that after 3 entries, the code gives: EXX, which are the first three letters of the corporation known as EXXON. — James Benning, email 7/19/11
Everything we have to do to get to the truth has to be sneaky. It seems a shame to sneak to get to the truth—to make the truth such an evil, old, dirty, nasty thing. You have to sneak to get to the truth. The truth is condemned. The truth is in the gas chamber. The truth has been in your stockyards, your slaughter-houses. The truth has been in your reservations, building your railroads, emptying your garbage. The truth is in your ghettoes, in your jails not in your courtrooms.... They put a picture of old George on the dollar and tell you that he's your Father - worship him ... they're butchering themselves every time they go on the freeway. They hate themselves. Look at the signs—STOP, GO, TURN HERE, TURN THERE, you can't do this, you can't do that.... You can't, you can't, you can't. This is illegal. That's illegal.... The police used to watch over the People. Now they're watching the people.... —Charles Manson22
Systematically cross-referencing as a counter-example the trial of John Brown, who resisted entreaties from his lawyers and family to avoid a death penalty by entering a plea of diminished responsibility due to mental impairment, lawyer Michael Mello argues that by effectively making the commencement of the Unabomber trial contingent on Kaczynski's acquiescence in an insanity plea, Judge Garland Burrell denied Kaczynski his constitutional right to participate in his own defense.23 Mello argues that whereas Brown could die a martyr to his cause, having seized the opportunity presented by a highly publicized trial to launch a withering denunciation of slavery and the government that passively supported it in morally irrefutable terms and in a resolute and dignified manner that helped to galvanize the Northern opposition, Kaczynski, another trenchantly articulate and inflexible extremist with a grandiose self-image and an inflated sense of righteousness, violently opposed to the overweening power of the state and a more subtle but, for him, no less pernicious or intolerable form of technological slavery24 was denied his day in court, confronted as he was, with a no-win either / or: either life in prison and a guilty plea as the price for his silence or free speech as a madman as the reward for a probable death sentence. Regardless of how disgusting and abominable the acts of violence perpetrated on randomly selected individuals by the Unabomber were, the actions of the judge and Kaczynski's attorneys in what turned out to be the Unabomber no-trial raised, in William Finnegan's words "fundamental questions about...the role of psychiatry in the courts and the pathologizing of radical dissent in the courts and the press."25
The Kaczynski cabin played a central role in these maneuvers. Lifted onto a big rig and stored for 17 months at Malmstrom Air Force Base 70 miles west of its original location, then transported a further 1,000 miles across the Sierras to an industrial park near the Sacramento courthouse in December 1997 at the request of the defense team, the shack was to be presented to the jury by Kaczynski's attorneys as physical evidence of his reclusive schizophrenia.26
Richard Barnes, Unabomber Cabin Sacramento, 1997. Dye destruction print, 41 x 53 in. Courtesy of the artist.
Mello points out that, while admittedly smaller than the modest cabin 'Mad' John Brown built for his family on the shores of Lake Placid, New York, the man known to his supporters as 'God's Avenger,' in contrast to Kaczynski, shared his accommodation with a wife and up to ten children. 27 And the Kaczynski cabin was originally sited on the outskirts of Lincoln, Montana, so named, in 1865, in honor of the martyred hero of Gettysburg, whose humble backwoods origins in rural Illinois are memorialized in the image of a rough hewn log cabin—patriotic icon of Americas pioneering roots—stamped into the shining bronze-colored alloy of the 2009 commemorative Lincoln penny.
Read TK cd get by on as little as $200 a year when in MT. Wd send angry letters to phone co. demanding reimbursement re. unreturned quarters frm local call box — Text message sent, 8/22/11 (160 characters)
000,000. Nothing. No confidence. No nothing. NO: 000. — Jesse Howard sign
According to the logic of the linkages pursued and manufactured from this line of inquiry, the Cabins project could be described as an historic battle-field site in the ongoing American Civil War (1861-) that ties John Brown's body suspended from a rope tied to a scaffold in a West Virginia field to the epoch of Obama, the Tea Party and a terminally deadlocked Congress.
Big Government small government no government at all
The Cabins Project is also, of course, in case you hadn't noticed, exclusively a men's club: a homo-social Free Masonic Lodge in the time-honored tradition of the Revolutionary era. Only one woman—Julie Ault—is allowed admission as an honorary affiliate, in her capacity as convener of and contributor to the published version. The X-ing out of the XX chromosome within the project's DNA is attributable, no doubt, in varying degrees, to historical, cultural, biographical and genetic factors. A case in point: the incidence of autism and Asperger's syndrome in the USA currently runs three times higher in boys than in girls, (though this may indicate a diagnostic discrepancy with similar symptoms being interpreted differently across the genders).
The stereotype of the asocial obsessive-compulsive male, prone to repetitive behaviors, with limited empathy and, in some cases, a propensity for math has been fixed within psychiatry for more than a century:
The...word autism was coined by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1910.... He derived it from the Greek work autos (meaning self), and used it to mean morbid self-admiration, referring to "autistic withdrawal of the patient to his fantasies, against which any influence from outside becomes an intolerable disturbance"...."(A)utistic aloneness" and "insistence on sameness" are still regarded as typical of the autistic spectrum of symptoms. — Wikipedia entry under Autism
Falling ill at JB's house turned out to deliver a pitch-perfect research opportunity though I got overly fixated on the Unabomber bios. Being confined to bed like a child with measles was the ideal position from which to absorb the grim(m) tale of Ted K's preternaturally lonely life ....
It's been suggested by more than one author that TK may have selected victims with names or addresses with woody connections e.g. Percy Wood from Lake Forest etc. More than one author claims Kaczynski was drawn to the word by its rich literary history and multiple metaphorical connotations e.g. “provoked to madness; dumb, catatonic, rendered speechless by trauma; having an erection etc.”28
It's probable that K has never had sex with another person outside himself though, naturally, he thought about it a lot, especially when young. He went on just three dates with a woman he met while working at a factory called Foam Cutting Inc (another FC) during a brief return trip to Chicago in the '80s. After the third date, she told him never to contact her again.... After suffering systematic emotional abuse at Harvard as a volunteer subject in experiments conducted by a sadistic CIA psychologist named Dr Henry Murray, he went on to do a PhD at the University of Michigan and, at one point, decided he wanted a sex change, not because he felt like a woman trapped inside a man's body (though this was the canny explanation he'd rehearsed for the psychiatrist), but because he reasoned that was the only way he'd ever get direct access to a woman's body as an erotic object. Sitting in the waiting room at the psychiatrist's office, he realized he couldn't go through with it - too humiliating – pleaded insomnia and exam nerves, was given a prescription, and, once back on the street, had the epiphany that turned his world upside down and right way up—the solution to his dilemma was...he would KILL the psychiatrist. Later the list of targets expanded to include “a scientist, a businessman, corporate employee, a big shot and a communist” (though his actual victims would also include secretaries, student interns and other surrogates at one or two removes from the designated addressee)....
Thoreau, whose unusual appearance included, according to one contemporary, "hair which looked as if it had been dressed with a pine-cone... disheveled attire that bore signs of tramps in woods and swamps" 29 and a neck beard which Louisa May Alcott averred "will most assuredly deflect amorous advances and preserve the man's virtue in perpetuity"30 did indeed remain celibate his entire life after his courtship of Ellen Sewall foundered on her father's interdiction. The man who saw in "Wildness...the preservation of the World"31 and who extolled "the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet"32 grew squeamish when confronted with lyrical allusions to actual sex acts in the work of Walt Whitman, a poet he otherwise admired ("He does not celebrate love at all. It is as if the beasts spoke.").33 As a good Transcendentalist, Thoreau sought to sublimate what he called "the generative energy" and advocated sexual continence as an aid to manly vigor and clear thinking.
December 26 2004 JB just gave me a Mose Tolliver "Moose Lady" done in house paint on board—a big round head with wide set eyes, straight stripe nose and oyster mouth over an upturned crescent banana with feet at each end and a skinnier crescent the other way up with tiny hands attached. The whole composition revolves round the Lady's open vulva—a crimson oval that bores into the soft pastels of the rest of the picture like a Black & Decker drilling into aluminum siding on a Sunday morning. JB suggests I hang it in the living room next to the dartboard. As with a genuine Mose T. there's an authentic pull-off tab from a 1977 beer can JB bought at an antique store in Porterville tacked into the back to hang it from. Below the tab in the bottom right hand corner, an inscription reads "after Tolliver, JB".
James Benning, After Darger, 2008. Watercolor and ink on Manila paper, 18 x 23 in.
...The Lady will take some accommodating but the 'Darger' pencil drawing he gave me for Christmas two years ago was a definite keeper - very fine and delicate: two identical Vivian girl nudes standing together in three quarters profile, one in front of the other like Siamese twins, The duplicated figure derives from a Darger source material magazine cut-out JB took from the room on Webster Street that HD never got around to undressing/adapting and transposing to The Realms so it's a genuine JB "after Darger'' one-off rather than a copy. I hung it by the bedroom window before I put in blinds and sometimes I'd wake up in the morning and glance up at it from the pillow with the sun streaming in behind my head and think—what if neighbors with binoculars call it in and I get raided? Middle aged man living alone in open sight in hillside desert shack in bedroom without blinds + little girls + penises. As it turned out, the issue resolved itself over time without human intervention as the drawing, exposed directly to the strong Mojave light gradually disappeared in a slow-motion reprise of Rauschenberg's erasure of de Kooning but I still regret the loss though not, I hasten to add, to the same extent Darger himself for much of his life mourned the loss of the 1911 newspaper photograph of "little Annie Aronburg" (probably based on real-life five year old Chicago murder victim, Elsie Paroubek). It was the loss of the latter that drove HD and a fellow bachelor to form the Society for the Protection of Children and, some scholars argue, to launch his single-spaced 15,145 page life-work The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm Caused by the Slave Rebellion, the multi-volume series that documents in detail the torture, spiking, throttling and evisceration of the Vivian girls at the hands of the Glandilineans. 34 — Author's diary entry.
Among the volumes added by JB to the Kaczynski book collection is Sloan Wilson's 1979 novel, Ice Brothers.
...on June 10, 1980—(United Airlines president Percy) Wood's birthday—he received a package posted from Chicago containing what seemed to be a copy of Sloan Wilson's novel Ice Brothers. In fact, behind the title page the book had been hollowed out to contain a bomb. When Wood opened it, the device exploded, inflicting serious cuts to his face and upper left leg. The bomb...like its predecessors, was carefully—almost lovingly—put together, out of ordinary household materials. Inside the excavated book, the bomber had filled a section of galvanized pipe with smokeless powders, wired to a fusing system consisting of two D-cell batteries. Opening the cover completed an electrical circuit-detonating the powder.35
Another JB addition to the library (which also contains a volume from TK's own collection by Henry Jacobowitz entitled Electronics Made Simple [Doubleday, 1963]) is Raymond F. Yates, A Boy and a Battery (Harper & Bros, 1959).
The latest method of producing current is that of converting atomic energy directly into electric current.... The materials and parts that enter the construction of the atomic cell (are) Strontium 90, the container (holds radioactive material), silicon wafer (transistor-type junction).... The young experimenter cannot hope to make his own atomic cell or battery at this time. He cannot purchase one either. The author is including this chapter on the atomic battery merely to give the young reader some idea of the exciting advances that are being made in the field of science and electronics. — Raymond F. Yates, A Boy and A Battery (1959)36
One way of modeling how the Cabins Project functions as a 'live' assemblage primed to light up, blow up, overload and crash at any moment at any of the myriad points of entry open to the reader/viewer/navigator within the network of connections out of which it is composed is via the metaphor of the electrical circuit, especially as in DC where the current is conducted through a wire from a negative to a positive terminus—let's say, for the sake of argument, from Kaczynski to Thoreau or vice-versa—though to complicate the picture, the charge is prone at any time to suddenly reverse so that the system is not simply infinitely extendible—circuits within circuits within circuits—but inherently unstable—sets within sub-sets of further sets—as it oscillates violently between AC and DC, art and autonomy, art and appropriation, originality and replication, secession and succession, outside and inside, authorship and autism, reason and psychosis, wild(er)ness and control, withholding and disclosure, civil disobedience and terror etc. etc. ad infinitum.
The charge will circulate so fast and in so many directions at once that the circuit will short, blow and burn out.
Connecticut, Connect-I-cut" cries little Joey. In his study The Empty Fortress, Bruno Bettleheim paints the portrait of this young child who can live, eat, defecate, and sleep only if he is plugged into machines provided with motors, wires, lights, carburetors, propellors, and steering wheels: an electrical feeding machine, a car-machine that enables him to breathe, an anal machine that lights up. There are very few examples that cast as much light on the regime of desiring-production, and the way in which breaking down constitutes an integral part of the functioning, or the way in which the cutting off is an integral part of mechanical connections. — Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari37
James Benning, After Kaczynski, 2008. Pencil on paper, 10 x 8 in.
EDEN AFTERMATH: CRAFT - CONTROL JB's Cabins Project is also, and finally, (for the purposes of this essay), a meditation on the inexhaustibly exhausting trope of the American Eden where, whatever history, knowledge and experience might have to say about it, the serpent and the apple still hang forever, side by side, upon the tree, unheeded and unplucked. Eternally renewable innocence remains American exceptionalism's most noteworthy miracle. So Paradise Lost is regained in the honest, clean construction of the cabins accomplished in the time-honored Transcendentalist d.i.y tradition established in the spring of 1845 by Thoreau on a rise by Walden Pond, and in every view of the pristine, unspoiled landscape framed inside the cabin windows. It is found again in the fugue-like looping to infinity of the folds and tracks and tunnels that preoccupied the artist in the copy of the Ramirez painting; in the cranial conflation of the outer and the inner in Yoakum's Braintree Pass: worlds within worlds within worlds without end. Paradise is lost and found and lost again in the page torn from a Dept. of Indian Affairs ledger book on which Black Hawk, in a trade for subsistence rations with the reservation agent, painted his extraordinary vision of apocalypse—an Avenger dread enough for Little Big Horn. It is placed on hold and put in check, voodoo-style, by Traylor; pushed off the human scale and made bestial and sublime in Tolliver's Self-Portrait; found again, and lost for good in Darger's bloody Realms; and is finally laid to rest in whatever that thing is coiled up inside the nest of Ted Kaczynski's numbers.
A: 65,63,87,32,10,76,64 44,93,90,19,34,83,85 49,31,78
B: 54,8,67,18,45,42,53 20,71,79,6,18,70,53 35,10,57 — Kaczynski coded journal (see first four words in bold below)-
Berkeley bomb did well for its size. It was sprung by Air Force pilot, 26 yrs old, name Hauser, working on a Masters deg. in Electrical Eng.... Witness said, "whole arm exploded," blood all over the place. Also there was damage to one eye.... Further search of newspapers yielded.... Hausers arm was "severed or nearly severed." Tips of 3 fingers torn off. Use of arm and hand will be permanently impaired, to what degree not known. Hauser father of 3 kids. He was working toward PhD, contrary to other paper that said Masters. He was afraid his "dream" was ruined. Dream was to be astronaut. Imagine grown man whose dream is to be an astronaut.... Recently I camped in a paradise like glacial cirque. At evening beautiful singing birds were ruined by the obscene roar of jet planes. Laughed at the idea of having any compunction about crippling airplane pilot.
craft n. 1. skill esp. in practical arts 2. a boat or vessel 3. cunning; deceit vt to craft, to make in a skillful way — The Oxford Essential Dictionary (American Edition), 1998
In the act of copying by hand a drawing of a manzanita bush rooted in a hillside, the copyist, intent on every detail, soon gets lost inside the labor, the blind mimetic trance as the wood inside the paper fades back into the outline of a tree, and, in that process of absorption, all the connotations of craft come into play: humble skill and cunning; dexterity, accomplishment and masterful deceit. God and Devil both are in the details. Hand and eye become a single vessel sailing on a surface towards a destination that's been mapped out in advance.
JB's reconstructions, copies and transcriptions are exercises in redemption—rescue operations directed at forms of art and knowledge, culture and critique, ways of being and seeing that have been pushed into the margins, either neutralized and isolated within literary or folk/outsider art traditions or patronized as minor or manual, uneducated or too smart or discounted altogether as extremist or insane. In the process, he reasserts the value and productive force of solitude and solitary accounting at a time when the rights to privacy in and secession from today's control societies have effectively been abrogated.
For, after all, when we come back from our sojourn in the wilderness and log on—and who can afford not to do either these days?—we are forced willy-nilly to comply with the single overarching diktat such societies insist upon: our voluntary internalization of the organizing protocols, priorities and goals including self development, self discovery, self expression, self improvement that in a globally wired neo-liberal environment, and in an increasingly literal and preemptively coercive way are now routinely programmed into the workaday creative applications that are currently reshaping the psycho-social genome. The scope of that techno-corporate-governmental demand for control now extends through every scale imaginable from the nano, the genetic and molecular across the global and on all the way out beyond the earth's atmosphere where the satellites are orbiting, and, beyond that, to the inter-planetary level. All those minerals waiting to be mined.
Nonetheless, we would do well to remember in the context of a project devoted to an investigation of the possibilities for self-reliance, radical autonomy, radical difference and radical dissent still remaining or extinguished for the individual(ist) (American male) monad in 2011, that the scale that really counts from the interested vantage points of the multitude of monitoring agencies that cluster on the internet, and similarly organized social networking technologies, is the individual user: the cookie cut-up on-line user profile that gets updated, tracked, monetized and monitored with each keystroke, download, posting, purchase, Google search or credit card application that we make.
And make no mistake when you gaze up in wonder at the stars while out there in the wilderness on a camping trip or into the clear blue light of the cell phone as you upload a text while sitting in your car stuck in traffic, something beyond human, something post-human, something alien, if you like, that couldn't care less about your individual welfare, is looking back unblinkingly at you.
Control is not discipline. You do not confine people with a highway. But by making highways, you multiply the means of control. I am not saying this is the only aim of highways, but people can travel infinitely and "freely" without being confined while being perfectly controlled: That is our future. — Gilles Deleuze 38
SQUARED ROOTS: ONE IS THE UNIT NUMBER I think it is telling that a man who for so many years seemed to embody in his films and in his person the road-ready restlessness of the generation that witnessed the construction of the US freeway system (begun in 1956) and that grew up associating the expanded spatial scales and accelerated rhythms of a car-centered culture with what it means to be free and in America should choose to park up, dig in and build out from one spot at this moment. It's not just about slowing down with age or rising gas prices (though Benning's inner Rain Man will certainly have run the numbers on his budget and the actuarial tables and made the necessary adjustments).
JB's unpacking of the James Dean persona imposed upon him (especially by the Europeans) but embraced by the artist, none the less, in whatever spirit of ambivalence or irony, has led to some surprising developments in terms of gender performance. A young neighborhood boy, dropping by to pay a visit unannounced a few years back, struck dumb by the spectacle of James sitting on the porch doing needlework received, in lieu of a greeting, the following explanation, delivered without his host looking up from the multi-colored coverlet draped across his lap:
I belong to a quilting motorcycle gang.
Film, the medium with which JB is principally associated, is, of course, just another mode of replication. The discipline of copying by hand and building three-dimensional structures that double up as guest accommodation, spare but serviceable work spaces, meditation cells and remote location viewing platforms, far from representing a departure for JB, are logical extensions of his filmmaking practice over the course of four decades. Beyond the structural and compositional lessons from fabrication and facsimile learned and put to use by JB as a film-maker, the most pressing imperative for Benning remains unchanged: to get himself into the work and out of its way—to build something beautiful to the very best of his ability, to lose himself in the labor process, and then to start again. James Benning is fanatically productive and prolific—40 films and counting (plus 3 lost shorts), installations, photographs and now 2 cabins and their not un- so much as a-classifiable contents. As the years race by, the projects begin to blur and overlap. The intervals between them get shorter and shorter as the spiral circles in upon its center. There are no vacations. There is no spare time.
When JB is filming, all the labor goes into setting up the shot. Once the shot is framed to his satisfaction and the light is right and the world is settled right around the edges of the frame, he begins counting down—he will check the image one last time inside the viewfinder, and in a single integrated gesture without looking up, push the button, turn on his heel and quickly walk away, shoulders raised, like a mining engineer bracing for a detonation:
...I'm looking for an answer within the mind. Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967) was completely upsetting and at the same time thrilling, and it questioned narrative and the way light hits the screen, That film was an explosion - and I want some more explosions. — James Benning39
May 18, 1996. Had heated argument with JB at (CalArts) graduation party in Val Verde re. the Unabomber Manifesto while enveloped in smoke from student-dug bar-b-q pit, I called Unabomb actions morally indefensible and labeled Manifesto politically naive Luddism, James said it said stuff no one else is saying about technology that really needs saying. He also specially likes the bit about the Left being "over-socialized" i.e, too pc, self-censoring, timid, sanctimonious, bourgeois, elitist, deferential re. corporate power, identity politics, law, social etiquette etc to go toe to toe with the powers that be/the Right. I conceded that that sounded interesting and admitted I hadn't actually read the Manifesto but would maybe do so now (though I still think maiming 17 random people and killing 3 just to get published is a bit excessive not to say downright psychotic). — Author's diary entry.
The square root of 2 is irrational. It can't be expressed as the quotient of two whole numbers. It can only be defined between two intervals—a lower and an upper bound—where the interval gets smaller and smaller but can only close at infinity.
One is the unit number: all arithmetic flows from the number 1. — James Benning in conversation, 7/19/11
One world at a time....40 — Thoreau on his death-bed, responding to former minister and family friend, Parker Pilsbury who, observing how close Thoreau stood to "the brink of the dark river," wondered how the "opposite shore might appear" to him.
Excerpted from East of Borneo.