Joe Scanlan

In the United States, the greatest performers are the ones who kill themselves. Elvis. Marilyn. James Dean. Kurt Cobain. Some say this is because we feel a tragic loss of love and profound regret for the potential that has been wasted. All the movies and songs that we will never know because our idols are no longer alive to make them. Maybe that is true, but I think otherwise. I think these performers are the greatest because we appreciate the fact that they did us a favor. They understood that to be loved is also to be destroyed, and rather than leave that job to their fans or the papparazzi–like John Lennon and Lady Di–they did it themselves and saved us the trouble of having to destroy them later. They understood that in order to be truly loved, they needed to dispose of their limited physical bodies so that their unlimited virtual images could rise and live forever, and move freely about the world, and be in a million places at once, and never have anything to compare with except other images.

Joe Scanlan, in an interview with French critic Elisabeth Wetterwald

Americans love destruction. Since September 11, 2001, it has become ever more apparent that "things that fall" present unrivaled opportunities for emotional manipulation, economic profit, and political gain. Whether world leaders, stocks prices, Martha Stewart, or the World Trade Center, each thing that falls marks a downward motion that inspires widespread speculation about its eventual rise. It is a kind of blood lust. Not for the tragic event itself, as Andy Warhol’s Disaster Paintings proposed, but for the profits to be made after the tragedy has taken place.

This reflex has become so natural to American culture that its media, its citizens, its politicians and its stockbrokers all crave things that fall solely for the gains that are certain to follow. Even Robert Smithson, the great saint of American Art, understood that re-organizing entropy into containers for distribution and sale was a way not only to make his thinking legible to the average American, but also to profit from it.

The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called this cyclical capitalist drive "creative destruction". In theory, capitalism cannot advance without perpetually destroying itself so that it can profit from its own transformation. In practice, creative destruction is most simply demonstrated by “short selling”, the stock market tactic in which a stock is sold with the intent of driving its price down, all the while being fairly confident that the stock is valuable and will eventually rise. When the stock hits what is perceived to be its short-term bottom, it is repurchased at the lower price so as to better profit from its long-term rise. Simply put, short selling forces the stock to fall for the sole purpose of profiting from it rising again. This is America in a nutshell.

Snowflakes Teardrops Flower petals Dirt Silence Brightness The World Trade Center Dictators Love Words Packages Angels Handles Sleep Celebrities Priests Coffins Airplanes Architecture Patients Politicians Stocks Factories Ashes Skies Gazes * Axes

I had a job in the great north woods Working as a cook for a spell, I never did like it all that much And one day the axe just fell.

"Bob Dylan"

In the United States, nothing can be understood that is not categorized. By "understood" I do not mean "to develop greater awareness or knowledge of". Rather, to understand something in the United States means "to group it with what it is like, no matter how superficially, in order to resolve whatever uncertainty there might be about it". German artists. Tropical fruits. People of Color. Blue States and Red States. Homosexual authors who have won a Pulitzer Prize. All are examples of categories devised for understanding things in a way that is as efficient as possible.

Even tragedies like terrorist attacks, or deaths, like the pope’s, are easily understood by Americans because, almost as soon as they occur, we compare them to similar events so as to determine their magnitude. We don’t even have to do this, really, because the media does it before we can figure out how to work the calculators on our mobile phones. We understand things in this fashion, almost immediately, for two reasons: 1] so we won’t be troubled by not understanding what has just happened and run the risk of behaving irrationally; and 2] so we can know how to feel. For example, twice as many people died on September 11th, 2001, as did at Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. So it would be accurate to say that we were 200% as upset about 9/11 as we were about Pear Harbor. Inversely, only 4% as many Americans have died in the Iraq War as died in the Vietnam War, so you can be pretty certain that Americans are only 4% as upset about Iraq as we were about Vietnam.

Marcel Broodthaers, who was about as un-American a personage as I can think of, once famously wondered if he, too, could sell something and succeed in life. His revelation, like many of mine, was attributed to the shear tenacity of Americans to turn absolutely every waking moment, gust of wind and tragic event into a certifiable monetary value. And then, after everything has been surveilled and categorized and tallied in the crushing logic of arbitrarily assigned values, Americans wonder what ever happened to their souls, their dreams, their passions.

Well, here they are: Death! Destruction! Tragedy! Mayhem! Entropy! All organized in as nice broad category that’s easy to understand. And its all for sale. Love. Love for sale.

Joe Scanlan
Things that Fall