Sympathetic Models
05/14/20
By Christopher Michael Hefner
While all of this is unprecedented and colossal, it is also simply an amplification of tensions that were already very real. Sometimes it seems like people in power can’t recognize themselves without a finger on a trigger, and a boot on the throat of the natural world. Either way, much of what was peripheral only a few months ago is now front and center for everyone. The scratching at the door has now burst into the room, attacked our guests, upset the furniture, and climbed onto the kitchen table, where it stands on a pile of smoldering linen and broken glass, gnawing on our dinner. We have no choice but to stand still, work, and wait for it to wander back out into the night.
I’m not exactly sure how this relates to my image. Of course, many of us are experiencing a sort of peeling-off from our previous senses of ourselves, whether by necessity, opportunity, terror, or boredom (or any combination of those). Others seem to be willfully doubling down on their previous notions of what order and justice look like. I honestly don’t know where I land on this scale. I’m an extremely fastidious person by nature, and so order is essential to my ability to focus and access the parts of my brain that I need to do work. Justice, for me, has a lot to do with figuring out the maximum amount of ways to connect whatever it is I’m doing to some notion of the Greater Good. This sounds ostentatious, but what I mean is that while I’m extremely fortunate to make something like a living making art, I’m also aware that I have a fair amount of privilege following me around. There are comparatively few roadblocks to my life, and very few people question or challenge my decisions and motives. This could enable me to distance myself from issues that don’t affect my life directly, but I feel very strongly that any sense of separation from people who are being directly oppressed is dangerously illusory. As such, I try to find ways to make my work an avenue of support for rectifying these injustices in whatever small manner available, like donating a portion of my art sales or tithing my stimulus check.
I don’t really have a regular schedule, even in the best of times. Often my work is already done with the currently requisite social distance, and that has always provided me with a necessary alternative to The World, such as it is. My drawings take anywhere from 20 minutes to 10 or 15 hours, depending on size and complexity. Often I end up liking the faster ones the most, but I know any piece is done when it feels balanced and simultaneously resolved and active. Usually, there’s also a feeling that I’m about to fuck everything up by picking at it too much. Shortly after that, once I’ve definitely started ruining things, it’s time to stop. I still find joy there, in a way.
I predominantly work in charcoal. Charcoal is elemental. It’s complex vegetable and animal matter reduced to carbon, one of the simplest, most stable and longest-known elements, through destruction by fire. Processing the images I see and imagine in the world by rendering them in carbon on paper, a material forged in a similarly destructive and creative process, overlays entropic and generative cycles, to me. On some level, everything in charcoal becomes a memento mori. It’s one step removed from cave painting.
I’m fortunate to have access to three spaces in my little quarantine universe: my apartment, my girlfriend’s apartment, and the studio we share. I see the bike rides between these three places a lot (Bridgeport, Pilsen, Humboldt Park). I see my girlfriend’s cat a lot. We (the cat and I) don’t really get along, but we try. I have a portable drawing kit that I am perpetually packing and unpacking, and I spend a lot of time with my cast iron pans too. My leather gloves feel more necessary than ever. And I see my oven, which used to belong to Ken Nordine, which means it is also a pseudo-religious relic, to me.
I’m certainly saying “yes” to the habits and systems I’ve built up over the years to participate in and consume culture, again with the hope of connecting that to some notion of the Greater Good. I love sharing music. Music is the artwork I consume the most of and the medium I prioritize in many ways, but I don’t really make it. It’s important to me to have something that’s just magic, that doesn’t have my sooty fingers all over it. I love DJing because I get to be outwardly excited about and endorse something I had no hand in making. (Good news: I’m setting myself up to be able to make live mixes at home, meaning new, sterile episodes of NIGHT TIME will be possible soon.) And when I’m on tour with ADULT., I am both uninvolved and involved. I help with stuff, and I’m asked my opinion and I give it, but I don’t have to perform in a traditional sense. I just get to agree with people who really love what Nicola and Adam do. Just like with DJing, I can be unabashedly wild for a piece of work without drawing attention to myself. I can participate without ruining the magic.
As I move between my three spaces, I think about questions, possibility, and tension. While the fragmentation we feel now does directly amplify the fragmentation surrounding us in pre-pandemic days, we might also see the mutual aid networks we’re building as micro-models for forward motion. This, I hope, will not be lost in the poisonous fog of a misguided desire to “Get Back to Normal,” a state that never really existed for most of us, anyway.
Christopher Michael Hefner is a Chicago-based visual artist and filmmaker. Follow his work at christophermichaelhefner.bigcartel.com and @christophermichaelhefner.
Christopher Michael Hefner worked on this piece with Mairead Case, the Quarantine Times Thursday editor. Every week, Mairead selects a Chicagoan to share a commissioned creative response to the pandemic.