It's The End of the World ... Again ... and Again ... And Again ... and Again ... And Again ... And Again

Everyone from everywhere wanted to be at Disasterthon! in DC

If you love disaster films and Apocalyptic movies, then the Hirshhorn was the place to be on Saturday as the museum presented Disasterthon! An All-Day Marathon of Cataclysmic Classics.

A total of 6 films were shown during the event, which began at noon and concluded after midnight.  Disasterthon! was scheduled to coincide with the Hirshhorn's current exhibit Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950.

Five of the movies were selected by museum officials and they offered varying possibilities for the end of the world as we know it. They were:

• Miracle Mile (1988) - Nuclear destruction. Message from film - if a pay phone rings really early on a dark morning, don't answer it 
• The Host aka Gwoemul (2006) - A Korean toxic-chemical altered walking, climbing, bridge-swinging giant mutant lake creature. Message from film - don't dump environmentally unsafe liquids down the drain, even if ordered to by an American scientist upset with dusty bottles.
• War of the Worlds (2005) - Invading Martians intent on capturing Earth. Message from film - keep watching the skies and keep Tom Cruise nearby if you want to survive. 
• Sharknado (2013) - A Sci-Fi camp classic in which LA is threatened by sharks brought from the sea and dropped from the sky and one of the worst premises for a film (so bad it is actually good) ever created. Can't wait for its spawns - Sharknado 2 and Zombeaver) ever. Message from film - always have a big chainsaw handy for battling sky-dropping sharks. It works much better than a red-stooled, cast-iron bar seat.
• 28 Days Later (2002) - Speedy zombies take over England. Message from film - If you wake up in a hospital all alone, be prepared to encounter the environmentally-created living dead.

The 6th and final film was selected by online voters from a list of 25 titles submitted by the Hirshhorn. The winner was Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). The Stanley Kubrick atomic-era classic captures the hilarious horror when an insane general triggers a path to nuclear holocaust that a war room full of political leaders frantically tries to stop. It  is filled with messages. Here's just one - if you are bent on unleashing a nuclear air attack, make sure you have at least one Cowboy character like Slim Pickens on board so he can ride the plane to destruction in the event of a mechanical failure.

After each film, viewers got a stamp on a special Disasterthon! passport from "an official government signatory" attesting to the fact that they had seen the film. Those who made it through all six would be eligible for special prizes. (For the sake of full disclosure. I had fully intended to watch all 6. I made it thorough and enjoyed Miracle Mile, The Host, and War of the Worlds. But I only lasted half-way through Sharknado, which, unfortunately I had seen twice before. You know a film is pretty bad if even Tara Reid's frequently bouncing breasts can't keep you in your seat for a 3rd viewing.)

Disasterthon! was designed to be an interactive event so live tweeting was encouraged. As you can imagine from the subject matter, the tweeting was both clever and engaging. Here are some of my favorites from the day. (To see all the tweets, click here and begin with April 26)

• OK, now you’re just wasting ammo. #shootingblindlyneverpays
• Ever since George Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead, shopping as a respite from the waves of undead has held a special charm.
• In a zombie movie, whenever there’s a discussion about the relative safety of routes, they pick the wrong one. #narrativeexigencies
• An adult chimp can rip your arm off and beat you like a dirty rug. A chimp infected with rage… #dontopenthecage
• Shouldn’t there be a sealnado and a manateenado as well? Seaweednado? Sandnado?
• I ripped it off from that mute chick who rode around with Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes. #whatkindofnameisNova
• Collin should know better than to be a total d-bag in a shark movie. #fated
• #JawsSpoiler 20 minutes in and they shoot the oxygen tank. SMH

In between films, nuclear safety short films prepared by the government were screened, including one of my all-time favorites "Duck and Cover." I am certain the absurdity and inanity of Civil Defense propaganda films like these contributed to why so many of us took to the streets in protest in the 60s and early 70s. You can check out my theory by clicking on the "Duck and Cover" link above. This was actually produced and released by a government that expected to be taken seriously?

Here Deborah Horowitz (center) is with museum public information officer  Glenn Dixon, who has just realized that Saturday marks the 4th anniversary of Hirshhorn employment, and Rhys Conlon of the publication department.

And while the day was a fun event, there was an artistic purpose behind it, says Deborah Horowitz, the Director of Curatorial Administration and Publications for the Hirshhorn.

"The notion of end-of-the world destruction is terrifying, yet it is mesmerizing, too," Horowitz said. "The whole notion of spectacle is important to our culture. In many ways, we have become a culture of spectacle.  While this was fun, it also has weight."

So as one of the Hirshhorn's now-leading experts on damage and destruction, does Horowitz have a chosen way she would want the world to end?

"Quickly and not for a long time," she says. 

A Prices Do DC Extra

What else could you do at Disasterthon! beside watch end-of-the-world films? Here's a pictorial sample.

You could view the movie posters  created especially for the event by Hirshhorn artists

 You could picture yourself in Sharknado 2.

This is me meeting Jaws ...

... and this is Zoe, Deborah Horowitz''s 6-and--half -year-old fearless daughter

You could compete for Hat-astrophe prizes for best disaster-themed head wear.

 You could buy special Disasterthon! t-shirts and other end-of-the-world items.

Glenn with his Hat-astrophe and Deborah model the for-sale event t-shirts

Or you could view the art from the exhibit that started all this day of disaster-movie madness.

Damage Control: How Artists Destroy to Create Art

A woman strolls down a city street, wearing a flowing turquoise dress and red shoes straight out of Oz. She’s happy, carefree and carrying a torch lily—which she proceeds to swing, with glee and the greatest of ease, into the window of a parked car.

This 1997 video installation, Ever Is Over All, by Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist, encapsulates the beauty, irony and transgression at the heart of “Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950,” now on view at the Hirshhorn Museum. 

The exhibition traces the theme of destruction in contemporary art from the early atomic age to the present. The show begins, aptly enough, with a bang: Harold Edgerton’s footage of nuclear detonations.

Steve McQueen: Before He Won His Oscar

If you want to see cinematic work made by Oscar award-winning director Steve McQueen before his best picture movie 12 Years a Slave," you need to head to the Hirshhorn Museum on the National Mall.

There you can view McQueen's 4:35-minute, silent, black and white "Deadpan," which is included in the exhibition Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950.

The short, filmed in 1997, is a re-staging of Buster Keaton's 1928 scene in "Steamboat Bill Jr."

In the film, McQueen stands motionless as the side of a house falls on him. McQueen escapes injury because the house falls in such a way that he is framed through a glass-less window.

In the catalog that accompanies the exhibition, McQueen explains that his film has "a lot to do with being framed, about frames, window frames and the frames of houses."

It also represents "being framed within the broader, wider society and the individual within the frame standing up. So you can escape ... even when you're out, you're in," he added.

Critics have said the endless repetition of the building's collapse suggests an obsessive need to re-stage a traumatic event.

Damage Control, which is on display until May 26, explores the ways in which artists have used destruction as a central element of art to comment on cultural and social issues of the post-nuclear age.

All She's Still Saying Is Give Peace a Chance

This month we've seen a new British Invasion of media about the Beatles almost the same as that which also exploded when John, Paul. George, and Ringo first set foot in American in February of 1964. We had the Grammy tribute concert celebrating the Beatles' historic first performance 50 years ago on the Ed Sullivan Show. Then, of course, there was the re-creation of the band's 35-minute, 12-song, first American concert right here in DC.

Well, in the event you are in the DC area and you aren't yet Beatled out, you can head to the Hirshhorn Museum to check out art work by one of the most important non-Beatle players in the Beatles' story - Yoko Ono.

In 1969, one year before the Beatles broke up (at the time, and even today, there are fans who blame Ono for the dissolution of the Fab Four), John Lennon married Yoko and the pair remained united in their art and music until Lennon was tragically gunned down in 1980 outside the couple's apartment in New York City.

Yoko Ono, far right, speaks at the Hirshhorn

Ono's work is included in the exhibition Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950. The exhibit features creations from artists influenced by the fear and uncertainty caused by the threat of imminent annihilation posed during the immediate decades following World War II and the anxiety that still resides in our contemporary world today.

Ono appeared at the museum to discuss her work, and naturally, she spoke much of her relationship with John and how they influenced each other.

"I didn't wish for it, but I met John and my whole life changed," Ono said. During much of their time, both in music and art, the couple delivered a blistering critique of the social conditions of the 60s and 70s.

"People would ask - 'what is she doing here' and I would say trying to make it a peaceful world," Ono told the crowd of art and Beatles lovers.

"With John's assassination, I know the pain that people go through," she said. "But we can survive all this together. I know we can if we use our brains. We all have brains. They think they can control us but we can change the hate to love and the war to peace. We just need a clear, logical head to know what is going on."

"We think 'I shouldn't do this' - but if all of us stand up it will be very difficult to beat us. They (the oppressors) will be very lonely. They won't even have servants," she added.

"Not too many people choose to be activists. Well, John and I were activists. Today people ask me - 'Yoko, are we going to have doomsday (which is a recurring motif in the Damage Control exhibit)?' I say, well it is up to us. If we are all so dumb, we will," Ono said.

Now 81 years old and having spent more than 30 years without John, Ono acknowledges that she has changed. For one thing, she focuses much more on her Japanese past and her ancestors. "I thought I was escaping that and being a rebel. But today, I know family history is important."

"There are so many beautiful things now. Whenever I get depressed, I take a look at the sky. It is so beautiful," she concluded.

Art Provocateur Jake Chapman @The Hirshhorn

They've been called the enfants terribles of Britart. They have been accused of making provocative art that is nasty, horrific, and psychotic. When they burst onto the art scene in 1992, they described themselves as "sore-eyed scopophiliac oxymorons ... disenfranchised aristocrats, under siege from our feudal heritage ... our bread is buttered on both sides ..."  It has been said that their art strikes at "the fears that lie at the heart of the Western psyche". They have given their intricate, involved works name likes "Fucking Hell" and "If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy We Would Be."

But to Jake Chapman, the younger of the two Chapman Brothers, the appropriate response to his and Dinos' work is not shock, but laughter. "We're very serious about humor," says Jake. "Humor is the most destabilizing appropriate response to death. I think (our work) is  truly funny".

Recently, the younger Chapman appeared at the Hirshhorn to discuss the Chapman Brothers art as part of that institution's current major exhibition Damage Control. The brothers have a piece "Insult to Injury to Injury" in that exhibition.

In that piece, the Chapman have taken a portfolio of 80 etchings from Spanish master Francisco de Goya titled "Disasters of War" and "reworked and improved" them by placing puppy and insect heads on the figures.

As part of his presentation, Chapman read a grotesque original story involving an inventor, an apparatus, a woman named Chlamydia, hot sex, and monkeys both in and out of cages, while a film about the Brothers' latest exhibition in London's Serpentine Sackler Gallery "Come and See" played in the background. That film featured several shots of one of the Chapmans' recurring figures, models of Ronald McDonald, one of the symbols of the ubiquitous fast-food chain. Chapman explained that they like to use McDonald's in their art because "it went from a Utopian idea of cheap food for everyone to a capitalistic motif that plots the downfall of the West. There was this strange trajectory where the clown loses his humor."

Chapman admits that he and his brother like to create art that overwhelms and assaults. "We want to kill the eyes with art," he said. But the artist says its harder to now create surprising works. "Our art doesn't settle for stability. It seeks out instability. But art is always being appropriated into the critical culture," he said.

In an earlier interview printed in The Guardian, Chapman put it this way: "The idea of making 5,000 little toy soldiers all running around mutilating each other, and then find pathos in that - it's alarming that people are prepared to cathartically reappropriate these things which are so redundant and void. It took us three years to make 5,000 people. It took the Germans three hours to kill 15,000 Russian prisoners of war".

A scene from "Fucking Hell".

Chapman says he and his brother are trying to make "a schizophrenic body of work. We want a frenzied, berserk attack. We're trying to attack the idea with as many perspectives as possible. We want to make it impossible to reduce the work to one particular thing."

He believes he has reached an understanding of why so many people fail to grasp the work. "They make the mistake of thinking that the work is about them. But it is about political discourse," Chapman said.

Jake (on left) and Dinos

He adds that while he does believe Hell to be more interesting than Paradise, he is not as disturbed as some people believe when they encounter his art. "I really lead a boring life. But I do believe that art should have something to do with pleasure. Art lets me expedite the fantasy of my life as being more interesting than it is."

Chapman's art has attracted some, to put it mildly, strange fans. "I remember this one girl. She used to bring me sweets and bundles of notes. Then she said, "don't call the police; I am not dangerous. Which immediately made me want to call the police because I was now convinced she was dangerous."

Over, Under, Next

Venus of the Rags - Michaelangelo Pistoletto

Before 1913, when artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque first incorporated commonplace, mass-produced images and found objects into their art, everyday materials were regarded as simple bric-a-brac, not items to use in creative works.

Since then, artists around the world have embraced the idea that art could be scavenged from fragments and detritus found in the everyday world. 

Recently, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gallery on the National Mall, an exhibition entitled Over, Under, Next, which featured more than 100 examples of collage and assemblage primarily drawn from the Hirshhorn’s collection, was on display.  The exhibition closed last Monday.

Among the materials found in the art were butterfly wings, glass shards, doll parts, crumpled automotive metal, jigsaw puzzle pieces, clothing, straight pins, furniture, sand, and brightly colored pill capsules.

Here is a sample of the art you would have found, some of which is still on display in permanent exhibits at the museum. 

This is a closeup of the objects ....

... that produced Monsters of Paradise, Times Two by Fred Tomasello

The Easter Bunny as art from handbags

Tales, Tidbits, and Tips
The Over Under Next exhibit may be gone, but you can view the next major exhibit headed to the Hirschhorn. That exhibition which will open on Oct.24  is entitled Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950 and is the first in-depth exploration of the theme of destruction in international contemporary visual culture. The display will begin in the aftermath of World War II, under the looming fear of total annihilation in the atomic age, and will explore the continuing use that artists have made of destruction as part of the creative process—sometimes sinister, sometimes playful, often iconoclastic, and always challenging.