HELLO VICTIMS

essay by Catherine Taft

Resurrecting the layered cultural imagery of a recent-past, Brian Kennon’s Hello Victims is a compilation album that rides an indistinct boarder between scrapbook fandom and social commentary. Entombed in a tight black case, Hello Victims is a triad of neatly bound, self-published books, each embossed with black titles pressed into matte black covers. The three works establish a loose narrative arch that extends from a preface to a main feature followed by a quipy addendum. Comprised of stills and textual quotations from hand-drawn ‘zines, Metal bands, album jackets, live concert performances, art history, and Western movies, each printed image must be carefully read for its referential meaning and often contemptuous content.

The series begins with “Preface: ‘Tripping Corpse Four’ Raymond Pettibon, This is 1968, not 1967,” an almost exact reprinting of Pettibon’s fanzine based on the grisly ironies of 1960s escapism. Kennon’s duplication includes a found comic frame on the title page; in this single drawing, Kennon connects Pettibon’s early-eighties critique of hippydom to his own belated regard for the punk movement. Pettibon’s already cynical comics resonate with a sharp criticality as Kennon links the two burnt-out and co-opted youth cultures. In a further “countercultural” linking, the artist reproduces a Pettibon mushroom cloud for a piece that hangs on the gallery wall over the books. Underscoring the project’s heavily metallic motif, this boldly printed wall piece offers instant visual gratification; however, the auxiliary poster relies on the three books to bring its nuanced connotations into the foreground.

Considering that Pettibon’s early graphic work was fated for manifold reproduction on punk rock concert flyers and album covers, Kennon assumes Pettibon’s utilitarian roots to situate his printed art work in a commonly accessible medium, the artist’s book. By publishing books, Kennon hopes to regain an intimacy in art viewing, a quality that can be lost at crowded museums or off-putting galleries. Though they are formally exhibited on low, coffee table-like pedestals, his books are also available in local independent bookstores for an audience that extends beyond the structured art world. The artist intends for his viewers to have time alone with these works, to survey each image and draw his or her own conclusions; this philosophy is very much in keeping with Hello Victims’ theme of alienation as empowerment.

As the self-titled second book of Hello Victims begins, we are met with a desolate desert landscape that spreads over the first page recto. The image is taken from the opening of “For a Few Dollars More” (1965), the second film in Sergio Leone’s legendary Western trilogy. The Western genre continually makes use of the arid desert wasteland as the decisive metaphor for the lone gunslinger’s internal psychology. Austere, empty, and inhospitable to life, the outsider cowboy moves through this topography apart from society and its dictated laws. Gradually, Kennon introduces more Western movie stills amongst his pages: a pile of wooden coffins, the aftermath of several shootouts, a noose tied to a hanging tree, the barrel of a six-shooter pointed at the viewer’s gaze. Scattered throughout the book, each still comes up against an unexpected partner, Heavy Metal music. Through iconic album covers, transcribed song lyrics, publicity photos and concert snapshots, Hello Victims assembles a composite sketch of the rock star as lone gunslinger.

Kennon’s series of musical references makes conceptual leaps that are not disconnected from the Western flick. We first visit the roots of Thrash poster-boy, Lemmy Kilmister; in dated and captioned photos, we see his early seventies start in the spacey band Hawkwind give way to Lemmy’s notorious glory as Motorhead frontman. We read a passage from Black Sabbath drummer Bill Ward before encountering the full frontal stance of a young Ozzy Osbourne. Taking an unforseen turn, Kennon steers his book towards a grim destination: the pseudo-satanic Black Metal underground of today. Through Kennon’s careful juxtaposition we begin to notice the similarities between each Metal faction rock god and the anti-hero cowboy. A relaxed medium shot of Clint Eastwood follows close on the heels of a solo staged Lemmy. Their postures are confident, authoritative, and hyper-masculine. The vertical stance of Lee Van Cleef is set adjacent to the stiff pose of the corpse-paint wearing Infernus, guitarist of the Black Metal band Gorgoroth. Both men’s hands are poised at their hips in anticipation of fast draw gun dual. The book continues with a series of stills depicting actors having their cowboy hats shot off their heads, a particularly castrating affront. For those who are well versed in Black Metal history, these images might recall the movement’s violent genesis that spawned suicidal head traumas and ritualistic decapitations (bloody scenarios that happened regardless of the music itself).

Kennon laces Hello Victims with obscure Black Metal references that quickly draw on the filmic signs of old West mortality. A skull and cross-bone Hellhammer album cover reminds us that “only death is real.” On a black and white Darkthrone album cover, a frosty face emerges from a shadowy forest. The forest is not a transparent allusion to the Western genre, but as Kennon demonstrates, its use in Black Metal imagery is as symbolic as the vast desert is to the gunslinger ideology. Originating in Norway and spreading through much of Northern Europe, Black Metal bands invoked their surrounding forest environment as emblematic of an idealistic dystopia. Followers of Black Metal rejected the “herd mentality” of Christianity and mainstream society, and tuned towards Satanism and Paganism as alternative modes of reactionary expression. Thus the forest became a realm free of civilization in which heathenistic chaos could thrive. In Hello Victims, Kennon takes the hazy woodlands of Metal and splices them into his own Western narrative. In so doing, the artist discovers a dualistic frontier where both the rock star and the cowboy can roam in a mutual openness to aggression and estranged withdrawal.

It is precisely this notion of an “open aggressor” that provides the namesake art work with its eloquent title. Taken from the Lyrics of Motorhead’s 1979 song “Sweet Revenge,” the phrase is a straight-forward annunciation of dominance over one’s enemies. Without beating around the bush, Lemmy shouts “Hello Victims” with a calculated consideration for those he will make suffer in (semantic) submission. Kennon recognizes this same sort of upfront honesty in the character of the gunslinger. This type of man is painfully clear about whom he will inevitably gun down. This type of man makes no apology for his actions. At high noon, he will offer up his own life to the luck of the quick draw. This man looks death straight in the eyes and spits right in its face. Kennon is not staging a showdown between the outlaw and the metal rocker. He simply proposes that both kinds of men are, by nature, honorable antagonists who perpetually indulge their subversive appetites.

Though he has composed the dissident world of Hello Victims, Brian Kennon resists entering into this territory of disparaging masculine role play. Instead the artist/author assumes a much different vantage for himself, that of the fan. Retaining the spark of fanatical amazement and “useless” musical knowledge, Kennon becomes part of the audience, a spectator in the crowd versus the rocker cowboy with a solo show. His books should not be read as an obsessive shrine to Heavy Metal and spaghetti Westerns. This would ignore the work’s complicated interplay of production, reproduction, mimesis, documentation, commemoration, and aesthetic invention. With deliberate balance, Hello Victims acknowledges its popular source material in homage (all the while turning its back on the unwritten history of appropriation art) yet still manages to return to canonical “high art” in a crafty and astute way… I won’t give away the ending (addendum) of Hello Victims, but I will say that Kennon has an ace up his sleeve and ends up playing art history through a Marshall amplifier.

June 1, 2005