News and Myths, News as Mythology

Lately I’ve been thinking about my obsession with the news. Many of my friends tell me that they’ve given up keeping track of it, that it’s unnecessarily depressing, that they can know how bad things are without getting every gory detail. I begin to wonder if I’m suffering from some as yet unnamed disorder. Maybe it’s a symptom of cabin fever. Maybe right now the pharmaceutical companies are making a pill for it. “Are current events getting you down? Try Mother’s Lily Liver Pills.”

Instead of trying the pills, I’ve decided to come up with a rationalization.
I’ve begun to think of the news as the mythology of our time. What I mean is that it’s the story, whether it’s true or false, that we all share. The images of Abu Graib or of Hurricane Katrina were seen by the majority of the American public. If I say that a painting is about Hurricane Katrina, I’ve given the potential viewer a hint about its subject matter. I’ve given, I hope, a door that will allow the viewer to begin to try to enter the painting. I’m making paintings that concern the issues that concern me. At the same time, I’m trying to speak about our shared concerns and our shared history………..(Our mythology?).

Part of my purpose is to summon memory, to commit events to memory, to avoid forgetting, to keep myself from forgetting, to remind other people. The news flies by. Each disaster is obscured and erased by the disaster that follows it. When one disaster is too horrible to forget, the powers that be invent a new trumped up disaster and do their best to distract us. I feel that certain events need to be remembered.