"Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."
Shakespeare, Hamlet, II.1, line 279.
Whatever may be said of their purposiveness, or purposiveness without a purpose, 1 artworks do a number of things: acting as a mirror to a view of a world, manifesting as visible exteriority invisible interiority, conducing to an abstract universal through a concrete particular, and as Shakespeare suggests, serving to catch the conscience of our kings. Since Kant's third Critique, 2 the notion of disinterestedness has underwritten much of the discourse concerning aesthetic judgment. 'Disinterestedness' in viewer response would seem at odds with works that would serve to catch the conscious of our kings, or of ourselves. In regarding John Hitchcock's work, 'disinterested' is a problematic term. 3
One may urge, as Adorno and Marcuse have,4 that artworks have political force insofar as aesthetic experience entails the Kantian notion of disinterestedness as the basis of the autonomy of the work, and thus of its freedom from "any instrumental, practical, and, therefore, social interest." 5 Thus, in consequence of their autonomy, artworks model the possibility of an alterity outside the prevaling doxa of a social formation. While this view regards the artwork as negating the prevailing condition of the social order by positing the possibility of difference, this negation does not necessarily preclude the artwork as the instrument of critique of the prevailing condition of the social order, and indeed may be regarded as essential to the performance of such a critique from within the social formation, utilizing under erasure the terms of the culture for that critique even while critiquing those terms. Goya's Caprichos and Los Disastres de la Guerra prints are historical examples of such a critique; Sue Coe's prints constitute another contemporary example.
Hitchcock's prints draw on already printed culturally circulated images, on photographs and on photomechanical reproductions, rather than primarily relying on that which is directly drawn by the artist within the process of facture of the print. This mediation of reference conduces to obviating the distinction of the world of the work and the lifeworld, enabling a critique conducted through the appropriative repositioning-the detournement-of what is critiqued. Consider the children represented in Fright. While the faces are blurred by the shallow depth of field of the appropriated vintage photograph, the eyes of the massed children remain conspicuous. As in Christian Boltanski's use of appropiated photographs of children, the blurring of the children's faces precludes identification-identity-by transforming the specific individual into generic children, universalizing this child to all children. The indexicality of the photograph insists equiprimordially on the there-then-the radical historicity of co-presence in the facture of the photograph-and absence in the here-now of re-presentation. 6 Layered over the image of the children, a diagrammatic drawing of heavy, black lines suggests stacked geometric solids-a tall, tapered pyramid atop a cube with a cross marked on its proximal face, above a larger cube-but this is not a representation of a geometry lesson. Nor is it a representation of child's play with building blocks, though it is seemingly child-like simplicity in its deployment of line to describe volume. Still, these readings or misreadings of geometry lessons and children's play are not without basis here: the image and the print Fright concerns the condition of education of children in Indian boarding schools, with the loss of spiritual beliefs and language that education entailed. The inscription of the word "Fright" in red, filling the lower edges of the print and proximally present, makes the implicit response of children to their condition explicit.
Wanted (ndn), in which the representation of a plastic toy Indian is presented within the conventions of the Wanted poster, along with its counterpart Wanted (cowboy), with a two pistol wielding plastic cowboy figure, problematizes the cultural stereotyping of both terms of the oppositional pair cowboy/Indian. Like the Wanted prints, Crusade (soldier I) and Crusade (soldier II) use images of plastic toy soldiers layered over a field.
In Frenzy gray pistols form a patterned background, with red targets, a plastic toy soldier armed with an M-16 in front of a distinctly 1940's retro-suited image of a woman wearing gloves and carrying a purse and a bouquet while a thought-ballon suggests she thinking of a pistol, texts giving the net weight of a USDA food commodity package, and the words: "Frenzy" "Feeds" Addiction". The gesture of the soldier's extended right hand is equivocal, suggesting both protectiveness and aggression, while the rifle is effectively and extension of the left arm. The layering of the print is a correlative of the frenzy referenced by the work: the aggresion of a society layered with obsessive consumption.
Rosalind Krauss urges that "within the situation of postmodernism, practice is not defined in relation to a given medium . . . but rather in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms, for which any medium . . . might be used." 7 Nor is practice to be defined in relation to the processes of a given medium. What is salient here is not the opening of possibilites with respect to medium-though Hitchcock's works employ woodcut, relief printing, screenprinting and digital printmaking alone and in combination-but the use of the terms of a culture in reflexive critique. Here, the terms deployed are those that are at the base of culture: the production and circulation of the most basic of commodities, food-particularly commodities distributed by the USDA, from the packaging of which the schematic pig, chicken, and cow images derive-and the relationships of power and control that permeate the relationship between Hitchcock's Native American Kiowa/Comanche heritage and the dominant culture. Hitchcock's practice is at once personal, emerging from family stories, the issues arising from living on native lands in Oklahoma, and universal, engaging the broadest issues of the relationship of the individual and the social formation, and the concept of justice which may mediate those relationships.
This exhibition of John Hitchcock's work at Brookhaven College is made possible through the generosity of an anonymous donor.
John Hitchcock is Assistant Professor of Relief Printmaking and Serigraphy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Hitchcock received the M.F.A. from Texas Tech University and the B.F.A. from Cameron University. Hitchcock's recent exhibitions include: First Visions, Bemidji State University; John Hitchcock-Buyer's Remorse: Current Works on Paper; Kyoto International Woodcut Exhibition, Kyoto Art Museum; Three Aces, University of Texas at Austin; and exhibitions at Louisiana State University; Seacourt Collaborative Press, Bangor, Ireland; Institute of American Indian Art, Santa Fe; Tisch School of Art, New York University; Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, New York; American Indian House Gallery, New York; University of Oklahoma, Norman; University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls; and Intermedia Arts, Minneapolis.