LITERATURE REVIEW : A World Out of Kilter in ‘Helter Skelter’

Art--visual, literary or otherwise--is nowadays seldom produced to please. Instead, artists working at the forefront often attempt to unsettle, offend and sometimes even outrage their audience. Hard work, when you stop to think that they must compete for those responses against powerful images from so-called real life. Compared to the lurid horrors of Jeffrey Dahmer, or a President who needs the powerful tranquilizer Halcion to sleep at night, or even silicon breast implants that slowly poison their carriers, what’s capable of providing real shock value?

It seems that art and society have reached the end of tradition. The familiar has dissolved. Even the human spirit appears to be de-evolving. Where art once presented us with order, recognition and meaning, we now have disorientation, disintegration and senselessness.

That disorder is at the root of MOCA’s “Helter Skelter” show and is further amplified in the exhibition’s accompanying catalogue with its collection of fiction and poetry by 10 of L.A.’s finest underground writers: Charles Bukowski, Michelle T. Clinton, Dennis Cooper, Harry Gamboa Jr., Amy Gerstler, Jim Krusoe, Bia Lowe, Rita Valencia, Helena Maria Viramontes and Benjamin Weissman.

To their credit, they do their best to shock and expose the disorder of the modern soul. Unfortunately, to their disadvantage, I think Angelenos are too anesthetized by everyday horrors to be shocked. These writers do, however, brilliantly capture the reality of the moment.

The legendary Bukowski sets the tone and sensibility for the written portion of the exhibition. In “Hell Is a Lonely Place,” a spare tale of human pain, he writes of an older couple living in a social vacuum and sinking into the abyss with the world oblivious to their fate:

he had cancer of the

mouth.

operations, radiation,

treatments

which decayed the bones in his

jaw

which then had to be

wired.

daily he put his wife in

rubber diapers

like a

baby.

Taken together, the fiction and poems collected here paint a picture of human descent. Some are serious; many are mean; a few are acerbic. Weissman and Gamboa, for example, seem to view our collective fall into the void with a sardonic farcicality. In his “Dear Dead Person” series, Weissman hilariously depicts the joy a fatal car accident brings to a discontented nuclear family.

Gamboa writes in “Rush Hour” of the abrupt fury of random violence on city streets: “A man rushed up to me the other day and swore that he would kill me if I ever dreamed of him again. I told him that I never dream and that even if I did, he wouldn’t be the kind of person that I’d dream about.” But whether the device is sardonic humor or wrenching tragedy, the intention is the same: to create urban netherworlds populated by hateful, violent, demonic and petty people who live to see their own misery and lack of humanity reflected in everything and everyone they touch.

To read, for instance, Valencia, in one of her airtight vignettes, “Indecency,” is to see our own inner ugliness suddenly become visible. She writes: “My disguise is not beautiful, and even less functional. It is the image of a creature stooped down with great weight, its legs spindly and long, its head tucked well under its burden, with eyes that gaze nervously at the ground. The creature is female, but no males exist in the species. If they did, they would be equally grotesque . . . .”

Going through the catalogue does provide some mind-jarring images because the writings are interspersed with examples of work from the visual artists.

To read Lowe’s “Werewolf”--where she writes of a young girl’s deep dread of her alcoholic father--is to encounter a personal testament to the nature of our society, the familial psychogenesis of social abuse and violence: “. . . I suspected this to be the true face of my father, who at nightfall was transformed by bourbon, growling and scratching in the depths of our house.”

To turn a few pages past “Werewolf” and see a picture from artist Paul McCarthy’s “Death Ship” performance, where a half-dressed drunken ship captain seems to be vomiting or being force-fed some bloody concoction, creates a disturbing resonance.

Cooper, a master of sexual violence, takes us in “Tense” (a selection from his 1991 novel “Frisk”), into the cool and savage darkness of a no-rules world. We follow his main character through life as he begins to develop and nurture a closely-held secret desire to murder his lovers:

“I’d started to drift off a lot during sex, which Samson didn’t particularly notice. In reality I was caressing him. In my head I’d be grabbing objects off the night table, crushing his skull, then mutilating his body . . . while he tried to dissuade me from murdering him in a brain-damaged voice.” Almost immediately, the mannequins in the exhibition by Charles Ray come to mind.

This happens again and again throughout the catalogue. In that sense, the book succeeds because it creates its own helter skelter, its own disorder.

One of the few reprieves from the unrelenting cynicism and affectation of some of the writing comes from Viramontes. As in the other work, she displays little sentiment. But there is a trace of something more than the anger, rage and amorality found in most of the collection. She writes about a young girl who rocks her dead grandmother in the bath: “The bathroom was filled with moths, and for the first time in a long time I cried . . . the sobs emerging from the depths of anguish, the misery of being half born, sobbing until finally the sobs rippled into circles and circles of sadness and relief.”

Ultimately, the writings in this catalogue do frame for us the helter skelter of Los Angeles in the 1990s. They are being produced right out of the bowels of our everyday experience. The work reiterates, quite artfully, the subterranean secrets lurking within us in this last decade of the 20th century. All of that aside, however, they are not provocative. To be provocative is to take us to an emotional or conceptual contemplation of something new. For that we may have to wait the dawn of the 21st Century.