Regarding Evil: A Summit

This self-styled summit on evil, promising contributions by Charles Manson, Unabomber expert Beau Friedlander and Matthew Barney, ironically took place the Sunday after the death of Pope John Paul II. Hosted by artist and composer Ross Cisneros, whose MIT thesis was also titled ‘Regarding Evil’, the event included artists and scholars whose task was to describe the aesthetic lure and rhetorical use of evil in politics and war. Although a front-row seat was reserved for Manson, the elderly murderer remained incarcerated in California, Friedlander was a ‘no-show’ (reportedly Ted Kaczynski’s lawyers refused to let him speak) and Barney sent along his 2004 film De Lama Lamina (From Mud, a Blade) in his stead.

Julian LaVerdiere, co-creator of the temporary Tribute in Light World Trade Center memorial in 2002, gave an illustrated lecture titled ‘Damnatio Memoriae’. Describing his aesthetic examination of the malevolent effects of raw ambition, LaVerdiere showed photographs of himself posing both as Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atomic bomb) and as former Nazi rocket scientist and NASA co-founder Werner von Braun. Political theorist Jodi Dean, the only woman in this ‘conclave on evil’, examined how the word itself has been used in significant political speeches from FDR to George W. Bush. ‘ “Evil” along with religion has found its home in Bush’s speeches’, she observed, ‘to counter vacuity with conviction’.

Artist and critic Ronald Jones questioned the role of artists in representing an amoral universe. Juxtaposing Oppenheimer’s mushroom cloud with a contemporaneous Picasso ‘Death’s Head’ sculpture, Jones claimed that only science has the potential power to project evil into the world. Artists, he contended, do not make the moral decisions to produce evil – they merely illustrate it.

Whatever his intentions, counterculture demiurge Boyd Rice, dressed in black leather and aviator goggles, provided needed comic relief. Making amplified guttural sounds accompanied by recorded pulsing and abrasive reverberations, he chanted ‘Do you want war? Yes, you want total war’ in complete darkness. He then projected two manically scribbled correspondences from his ‘good friend’ Manson, ‘one of the funniest people I’ve ever met’. ‘If he ever got out of jail,’ Rice opined before snorting a pinch of snuff, ‘he’d make a mean living in stand-up.’

The general consensus of the concluding panel discussion was that free will defines evil and that terrorism cannot be seen as an art form. The grand finale, De Lama Lamina, a 50-minute collaboration between Barney and Brazilian musician Arto Lindsay, was chosen by Cisneros not because it described the ‘harsh dichotomy of good versus evil’ but rather for its Boschian depiction of the sacred and profane. In this film about ancient religious fertility rites, nature worship and carnival Barney offered up his usual mix of body fluids, phalluses and mutant beings, all to a Brazilian rhythm.

So what did I learn regarding evil after six often gruelling hours bombarded by images of gas chambers, hydrogen bombs and office workers jumping from burning towers? Mostly that I am happy to be an artist – too impotent, it seems, to be really responsible for evil, at least according to the experts.