Wayne Coe - Press

The unrelenting marketing of terror, war and societal collapse to the American people is the primary subject of Wayne Coe’s satirical work featured in an exhibition at Bert Green Fine Art in Los Angeles this past summer. Coe pokes a sharp stick into the eye of the media tornado that needs to keep feeding and fueling the twenty-four hour news and entertainment cycle. Creating a narrative installation using varied formats like storyboards, production stills, effects shots, advertisements, and theater lobby standees, Coe paints scenes from the attack on the Twin Towers, the ensuing aftermath in Afghanistan and the on-going war in Iraq.

With the increasing dissolution of the barriers dividing editorial, advertisement, and entertainment departments with our primary news channels, major and minor stories of the day are held hostage to commercial breaks and are often drawn and quartered into mini cliff hangers between adverts for technical colleges and dish soap. Playing to shareholders’ interests, “slow news days,” political mixed messaging, and Hollywood are the fodder for Coe’s remarkable body of work. Coe wanted to address the events of 9/11 because it was such a monumental, global, and mediated experience that it has provided “Big Media” infinite material for news programs, talk shows, book deals, documentaries, docudramas, mini-series, action movies and more; it’ll keep Hollywood working for years. In his own words from his artist’s statement, “Everyone I meet says, ‘You know they'll make a movie of 9/11!’ But ‘they’ already have. Was the camera that filmed the events of 9/11 the eye of God or the cynical eye of the devil? Was the camera impartial? And was the editor who said, 'cut to this victim or that missing building' an artist, journalist or propagandist? In media's hands horrific disaster turns to entertainment, victims to heroes, humiliation into patriotism—this is myth’s primal function.”

Having worked in Hollywood as a storyboarder, poster designer, creator of special effects sequences and as a director for his own feature length movie entitled “Grim Prairie Tales,” Coe understands the inherent problem framing something in a camera lens—it turns whatever you are looking at into entertainment. In his American Hero: The 9/11 Movie, series, Coe has illustrated storyboards for a fictional film starring Mel Gibson, Arnold Schwartzenegger, George Clooney, Denzel Washington, Brittany Spears, Susan Sarandon, and Tim Robbins with all the explosive intimate, and sentimental shots typical of a blockbuster disaster film. Coe read dozens of oral accounts of the attack before sketching out the action sequences for his cinematic feature. One of the key paintings in the series is “Jumper Stunt Shoot.” It shows the façade of one tower, with the stunt person flying through the air, the inflated air pillow at the bottom of the board and a silhouette of the camera crew recording the scene. There are interior and exterior scenes of a Tower being pierced by a plane. One large board shows the Tower being engulfed in a rising billow of flames and debris. The close ups show the stars in dramatic scenes of rescue and death. “Sarandon and Robbins,” is a brutal portrayal in painting, and depending on how successful the special effects are could be a profound or absolutely ridiculous scene in the movie.

The exhibition includes a copy of the mock screenplay, “American Hero: Copy Protected Red Paper Studio Script” that was sealed in a glass case and displayed on a pedestal in the gallery. A key scene is “Denzel and Brittany Spot #1-6” sequencing their out-running the flames in the burning offices, stopping for a quick breathy kiss and leaping from the tower. People did leap from the tower that day, but somehow seeing the scene as a painting with high-paid actors as stand-ins shifts the horror to humor, the tragedy to insincerity.

Using a bit of kitsch to further emphasize the camera’s ability to turn tragedy into entertainment, Coe created a lenticular print called Fuselage. A lenticular print is like those 3D blinking Jesus postcards. It was a printing technique developed in the 1940s to show motion. Coe created two paintings, one of a bustling office scene with people going about their daily business; the second shows the nose of a plan crashing through the window. As you stand in front of the print and move slightly from one side to the other the image shifts back and forth—one moment all is calm, the next death and devastation. This one piece encapsulates so beautifully all the ideas Coe is after with this body of work. As Michael Simmons said of Coe in a recent issue of Los Angeles’ new freebie art-zine Artillery, “. . . the lenticular print has the effect of never resolving the narrative.” With no resolution, the wound stays open and angry; the terror remains constant, which fosters an unstable and fearful state of being for the current administration via the media to exploit.

As with any major news story there are always “spin offs,” and Coe has his “spin off” paintings related to stories that got the full media blitz—stories manipulated into mini series by the networks. Coe has followed the successful morphing of Osama bid Laden into Saddam Hussein and the war on Afghanistan shifting to Iraq. These works aren’t necessarily part of a large coherent series like “American Hero,” but they focus on major events that consume every single news program for weeks on end. “Photo Op,” is Coe’s rendition of one of the infamous human pyramid images from Abu Ghraib Prison. “Regime Change,” is the settling of a turf war at the local and global levels. These paintings are tough, witty, and poignant and show his ability to make strong editorial comment; a direction Coe is interested in pursuing in the illustration world and the inspiration for his moving from Los Angeles to New York City this year.

Coe’s work was recently shown in New York as part of the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art’s third annual “Peekskill Project 2006,” opening September 17 through October 7. The Center hosts a citywide exhibition with over a 100 artists’ works being displayed in store windows, galleries, at the train station, waterfront, parks, and vacant lots. Coe was given a large 7 x 7 foot store window on Division Street to display his work. He sent five of his scale model boxes including “US Occupation,” “Human Pyramid,” “I.E.D,” “Rescue and Betrayal of Jessica Lynch,” and “Guantanamo Guard Dog,” and the following artist statement: “The Supreme Court recently ruled that if schools receive federal funds, they must make all students personally available to Army recruiters. My work explores how children are exposed to and sold WAR (by corporations, licensed war machine designs by the US government and paid for by parents) by removing the killing machine’s content (murder) i.e., making them into TOYS. This makes sense, as who fights the wars on behalf of the US but its children? In a single hobby store I counted 17 corporate model manufacturers. I present war model boxes with the core content restored (war fantasies, torture realities, government propaganda, military industrial economics, and legal methods for robbing and enslaving indigenous populations).” Over the first weekend of the event, the store owner took umbrage with his work and removed it. Coe, nor the art center, know where his art is. Is this action censorship or theft? Whichever, Coe’s work has hit a nerve and he plans to continue needling those sensitive areas between media hype and political misconduct.

We need artists like Wayne Coe, Joseph Bertiers, Sandow Birk, and Nancy Chunn –all painters fascinated with history, current affairs, and mythology—to help us digest what is happening and see it in a larger context. By rendering these images as paintings, Coe is asking us to slow down, look closely, and think. He wants us to ask questions like: Why do we think this way? Why do we condone these actions? Why do we do nothing? In warning the American people about making the military industrial complex our primary economic resource, President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his Farewell Address on January 17, 1961 said, “Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.” Coe is reflecting back to us in his paintings the dreadful community that is our current reality. He feels a personal responsibility for the misbehavior of our government and forced to participate in the collusion because his tax money is funding the war machine. He may be critical of the media and the camera lens, but he also acknowledges that if no one had their cameras on September 11 or at Abu Ghraib Prison then how would we know. We need to be made aware of what is happening in the world while at the same time remaining critical of the delivery system. Coe is watching.

If you are not currently living in a state of constant outrage, then you are not fully human. You may be a physically beautiful person, but if you are not frothing-at-the-mouth pissedoff, then you are closer to a petunia. You may be nothing more than a very kind person, in which case you are more puppy than human. You may simply be happy. If so, you possess the temperament of a head of cabbage.

Wayne Coe is neither flower, nor pet, nor vegetable. He’s a Los Angeles-based artist whose art screams, piercing through the fog of war and its primary enabler, human stupidity. His series, “American Hero” and “Pop Terror,” redefine the events of September 11, 2001 and the resultant carnage in Afghanistan and Iraq as they force the viewer to look past the media spin and confront not only the horror, the horror, but the way it’s sold back to us. Coe’s art beseeches its audience to THINK AGAIN and not settle for the obvious or propaganda or purely emotional response.

Coe is a 45-year-old resident of Glendale and husband and father of three children. He has over twenty years of experience in the movie racket as a storyboarder, poster designer, and creator of special effects sequences. In 1990, he wrote and directed a feature horror film called Grim Prairie Tales, starring James Earl Jones and Brad Dourif. His labors in Hollywood have obviously given him insight into the knee-jerk psychological reflexes of movie audiences or, more plainly, how people can be told what to think. His fine art explores the confusion between truth and entertainment and how citizens become swindled by politicians and corporations selling ideology and products.

“Forget about the event, because no more than 50,000 people were touched by the event,” Coe recently told me, with regard to 9/11. “99.9% of the world saw the TV show. It’s the most successful TV show ever and had lots of spinoffs. But no one else is touched physically by the event.”

“American Hero” is presented as scenes for a fictionalized film about 9/11 accompanied by screenplay portions, much of it based on oral histories. Some of the pieces are meticulously detailed paintings, such as Flight School, 2003 [shown above], which presents the perspective of one of the hijackers (accused of being “cowards” by The Decider-In-Chief) heading into the second World Trade Center tower while smoke pours from the first — a perspective very few Americans have ever considered. The effect is heightened by the artist’s purposeful optical illusion. The oncoming but faint towers are dwarfed by the size of the control panel. On first viewing, they’re easy to miss (I did). When one “sees” the entire picture, it’s shocking.

One person who saw the piece hung out of context in a group show, saw the words “American” and “Hero,” and blogged that “Wayne Coe is one sick motherfucker,” thinking that Coe was inferring that the hijackers were heroes. Coe contacted and assuaged the misunderstanding blogger, but in further conversation with me, he notes the inherent contradictions. “I think that if the hijackers had been John Wayne and this had been evil Japan and this had been a suicide run, then this would have all the makings of a 1950s patriotic film. One against many. For God and country. The last full measure of devotion,” Coe riffs in jingoistic sound bites. “So I was just taking a look at that perspective and wondering if perhaps some of those irrational, war-like impulses were re-contextualized, it might make us re-examine the way we look at patriotic war.”

Another strikingly devastating Coe oil, inspired by an actual account, depicts flaming humans walking by a Gap store advertising “QUICK DRAW — drawstring cargos” in its window. The juxtaposition of the horrific with the mundane world of corporate brands suggests that the latter may not be so mundane. “That painting encapsulates my feeling when I saw 9/11 goin’ down. The complete valuelessness of the consumer to the people selling them goods.”

The two-shot lenticular Fuselage bounces between an antiseptic office and the bloody mayhem caused by the nose cone of a jet plowing through its windows. The use of the lenticular — a novelty we may remember best from Cracker Jack prizes — has the effect of never resolving the narrative, because depending on where the viewer is standing, it’s calm to chaos and back again. The artist has a unique take on this piece. “To me it’s really about childbirth because I’ve seen all my children born and it’s the violent, blood splattering, screaming thing. In the end, no one’s hurt.” Here — and in another image of the exploding interior of a jet — Coe proves himself beyond politics. Who hasn’t wondered what it was like to live through and/or die that day or through any manner of catastrophe?

Other pieces are presented as movie storyboards, one sextet “starring” Denzel Washington and Britney Spears as office workers forced to jump from a flaming tower. “That one was in a form invisible to the public,” explains Coe. “It’s in entertainment industry language. Until we film it and turn it into media, we don’t believe it.” The artist breaks the fourth wall in Jumper Stunt Shoot: a stuntman falls from a burning tower while a film crew on a raised platform gets the shot. “OK, CUT! ONE HOUR FOR LUNCH!”

It’s surprising how few, thus far, have objected to Coe’s point of view. While the mediation of reality is at issue here, two New York stockbrokers who saw the work, for instance, were impressed with the realism. My bet is that when “American Hero” plays Peoria, the response will be different. 9/11 has become a sacred holiday. We’re not supposed to toy with it, deconstruct it, impugn its myth. Yet while Coe is an irreverent critic, he’s not crass. It’s permissible for a CNN anchor to inform her audience that The War On Terror is brought to you by General Motors. She’s not only blatantly exploiting the tragedy, but The War On Terror WAS not-so-circuitously brought to us by the demand for fossil fuels; the addictive, acquisitive, consumptive needs of America’s capitalist empire; the desperate necessity to SELL AND BUY. To call attention to this isn’t callous — it’s merely honest reportage. “If I hadn’t put movie stars in them, they’re kind of like historical paintings,” says Coe.

Coe’s recent Los Angeles show “Pop Terror”, which was at Bert Green Fine Art, encompasses the “American Hero” series and goes beyond to include 9/11’s “spin-offs.” One of the strongest, Guantanamo Guard Dog, is yet another of his sleight-of-draw, depth of field tricks: a healthy German Shepherd stands proudly in the foreground of a deep green pasture; a leash around its neck held by an out-of-view master. Only upon closer scrutiny do we notice the blindfolded, gagged, kneeling, orange jumpsuited prisoners in the background. The canine resembles one of those TV hounds that pulls Little Jimmy from drowning in a flood, drags him to safety, calls an ambulance, builds a dam to stanch the flood, then cooks dinner and reads the kid a bedtime story. This beast’s gig in the real world is to munch on the testicles of swarthy, questionably imprisoned men.

I keep thinking of the late, great satirist Terry Southern and Dr. Strangelove, his and Stanley Kubrick’s nightmare comedy about nuclear holocaust. Coe, like Southern and Kubrick, juxtaposes the very real and the barely believable. He doesn’t mince paint — he is terrified. This is the point of terror, after all, “theirs” as well as “ours”. Coe’s genius is that he recognizes the absurdity of absolutist thinking and, hence, the humor in it too. If they laugh in Peoria, they will hopefully be outraged at the artist’s targets at the same time.

Wayne Coe is fascinated by impacts. Crashes. Fatal accidents. Like Warhol’s car wreck and electric chair series or Cronenberg’s sexualization of the body breaching of human skin, Coe’s paintings depict death and disaster with energy and insight, capturing not only the immediacy of the moment, but a psychological impression. Best known for his award-wining directorial special effects work in (Brazil, Seven, Minority Report, Spiderman), Coe brings his expert technical abilities to bear on this series of unsettling, impossible, and essentially true pictues of fiery death. (SND)

I’ve long thought that the disaster movie genre, of which Independence Day is a perfect illustration, is a barely disguised exploitation of a fantasy of unlimited consumption. Hyperkinetic, assaultive, relentlessly propelled by seamless special effects, the disaster movie is the visual equivalent of the “all you can eat buffet,” with the world at large as the ultimate object of consumption, effortlessly consumed and just as effortlessly restored so it can undergo endless cinematic variations on its destruction. Perhaps a more succinct way of putting this is to say that the disaster movie is the pornography of rampant consumerism.

The enabler of this ready transformation of disaster into entertainment at the hands of the corporate media is the nature of the photo-based image itself. What could not have been foreseen at the dawn of photography, when the medium promised its audience a heightened contact with reality, is that the photographic image, by inserting aesthetic distance between reality and its voyeuristic consumers, would render reality itself strangely unreal. So much so that when a real (as opposed to staged) disaster strikes, the millions who “witness” the disaster at a distance through news programming, as opposed to first hand, are prone to a habitual disbelief, which even nonstop replaying of the disaster imagery can’t quite seem to allay. As a headline from the satirical weekly, The Onion, put it, in the wake of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, “American Life Turns Into a Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie.”

When confronted with images of actual catastrophe so close to home that their urgency is unavoidable, we are put in the position of having to abruptly cease consuming disaster as entertainment and having instead to come to terms with the shocking possibility of our own vulnerability. But that transition is not at all easy to make. That it is not may be cause for a troubling feeling of guilt, even a sense of complicity with the catastrophic event.

It is this unease that Wayne Coe’s little gouache images of a plane piercing the curtain wall of a skyscraper, and the imagined mayhem this sets off inside, exploits. Falling elevators are turned into ovens (Elevator Falling). A massive flaming aircraft engine cuts a swath through an office with the overhead fluorescent lights still burning (The Engine). The forward mass of a plane entering the building’s interior scatters debris and bodies moments before we know it will explode (Fuselage). Coe, who is himself a filmmaker (he wrote and directed the 1990 horror flick Grim Prairie Tales) has stated that as someone who has worked in the movie industry (his other credits include posters for films such as Seven, Brazil, Minority Report, and several others) creating “hyper-real fictions for consumption” used to trouble him. With these paintings he deploys storyboard art to place us in the midst of the defining event of our time. This shoves the process of exploitation over the edge.

The provocation may strike some as callous, the more so in light of my reflections here. But if so I would also suggest that Coe’s imagery calls to mind the much larger and profitable callousness of the corporate media. Equally important, these paintings reveal the limits of images in and of themselves to capture the meaning of the events they frame. The emotional impact of a personalizing view more often than not is a means of manipulation rather than illumination. Is that the case here? You’ll have to work that out for yourselves. We are all stamped with an indelible imprint of 9/11, but what it means remains less clear than paintings that place you into the midst of the action, or than the startlingly vivid images of the atrocity that were broadcast throughout the world in real time.