Excerpt from an interview with painter Wayne Coe, on the occasion of his show American Hero.
Q: Is this a real movie?
WC: I get asked that a lot -- and from Industry insiders, line producers and producers! Media verisimilitude is what my work's about. I used to answer "No, it's not real" but that's a copout. AMERICAN HERO's as real as any of the film, radio or newspaper coverage of 9/11, it's as real as the Iraq war to most folks. My painting's use the forms of movie graphics and promotion as conceptual art -- to talk about the failure of painting to replace experience while society accepts media AS experience. Only 120 years ago when footage of a train was projected viewers panicked and ran out of the theatre in terror. Look at the TV show 9/11/01 -- same reaction. 600 mm shots from a half a mile away diminish people, it's Rosselini's ROME OPEN CITY, Ana Magnani's wide shot death scene. That neo-realist film showed death diminished, shot down like a dog. Now step back a half mile and you really communicate powerlessness and devaluement of life. But news events don't have disclaimers -- about how the footage might bias you. In medium and close up shots, we would empathize maybe even agreed with the choice to jump a hundred floors. I did a 12' long painting of a jumper, life size and in a medium shot you begin to empathize, like Sophocles's Ajax, after humiliation by God, he reinvests himself with dignity by choosing how to die. It's innobles him not diminishes. The coverage defined the message. The news was wholly subjective. People are still profoundly confused by media which like painting is malleable, subjective, never news and never "real" always fiction. AMERICAN HERO is about art's erasure of distinctions between reality and fiction, news and entertainment. Many people walk in and believe AMERICAN HERO is a real movie -- even painters. It's real media.
Q: What's the pitch?
WC: The ultimate rescue mission. Thousands of lives at stake. Inscrutable, evil forces planning a sneak attack against completely innocent civilians, in America's greatest landmarks. Every floor has a story. 32nd floor: Secret Service - gold, cash, arms, drugs. 97th floor: insurance adjusters risk assessment. 75th floor: the fat man who can't walk. The 100th floor: secret lovers, the shrewish stock speculator who at the last second doesn't send his pregnant secretary down to the lobby to meet his appointment, but goes himself, gets stuck in the elevator, walks out an hour later and doesn't even know what happened. And the firemen. Direction in the tradition of James Cameron.
Q: You chose to painting some elements and change scale on others that would have been done photographically?
WC: Yes, some are super-sized like the event itself, the portraits, the storyboards. I asked several name artists whether I should just photoshop the images and mount prints to foam core like actual standees. To a one they said, "paint them". My wife also insisted I paint them and they're unquestionably more powerful, personal and demanding in their own way. I was experimenting to see if the language of film exploitation art has aesthetic value. Waves of personal things are going on: to begin with, a filmmaker's love of action. Film's been a part of my discourse for almost all of my life.
It'd probably be fair to say that I have a personal fascination with morbid things. I grew up watching horror movies; I was raised on death and fear (so American!); I liked Edgar Allen Poe, Ambrose Bierce. But I find it entertaining not troubling. In AMERICAN HERO, I'm talking about the most horrific event in recent history in a context people can understand - an event movie.
hy 9/11?
WC: Hollywood makes mythology. I've been a part of it for 25 years. We manufacture legends, transforms events into spectacles. The world envies the Greeks their gift of theater, drama & myth. Somehow we are the inheritors of the great mythic traditions in our film culture. We have to come to grips with the Trojan Horse of our times, those American Airlines flights, Saudis bearing gifts.
--Robyn Perry