American Returns—A Collage
I am coming back to America. I am trying to figure out the act of being American again.
There are two things I am now prepared to admit I was wrong about in relation to this: Lana Del Rey’s new Americana songbook, and Ansel Adams’s photographs of America. Ansel is dead, but his photographs are haunting me from a new digital generative art project by Kevin and Jennifer McCoy, Land Sea Sky. The project is about “average” landscapes, forms of collage generated to match Ansel Adams’s compositional patterns, but also to embody all of America in a sly, algorithmic archival sampling. They are three hundred short form collages each assembled in the mode of Adams’ formal photographic structure, but with parts that move like rapid-fire unsynced television screens switching between channels.
They brought him back to me, the collages, one night at 2 AM from a dirty laptop screen, hunched over. The Ansel Adams I remember is a poster of Half Dome at Yosemite in the office of my childhood home, over the old CPU and a fax machine on a slightly dented blue filing cabinet. I remember working on my homework there, in the world of that postage-stamp-perfect-Ansel, the one who was part of an America where I, that cliche of a 90’s child, still believed you could be good enough, that the sharp-cut ravines of the land were something like a promise: that if you made something of yourself, America would see you and hold you up all meritocratic shining whole, like a sky or the sheared-off face of a mountain being lit by the dawn.
But it was the tail-end of never-ending pandemic isolation now, and I certainly wasn’t a child, and here I was in London, and Ansel was transfigured digital like I was, all glitched out versions of ourselves. My hair was longer and softer around the moon of my face, and like Lana Dey Rey, here I was alone and my clothes didn’t fit, and the myths hadn’t for a long time either, and all I had left was a black bathing suit, just a black bathing suit you could see if you came over. Lana is alive and has a new album out: There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard. I didn’t like Lana before because of the Lana-coquette-Tumblr-girls, the intentionally-anorectic-with-the-implication-of-cocaine-daddy’s-girls that also liked her music. I thought I had it down, my vulnerability, my body, my feminisms. Meanwhile Adams took photographs of a country left in my memory, that I didn’t belong to, that I ran away from, whose outdoors seemed to me full of things I was either allergic to or trying to kill me. Whitman-esque robustness seemed like an accurate rebuke to my pale, torpid body and its delicate hesitations, natural and otherwise. Who was I to return this place that was broken to me, and that had broken me, dashed me against the rocks?
But regardless, I was going back to America. And even the algorithmic, forced-ordered images of Adams didn’t quite promise anything, and I wanted a promise. I wanted America to love me again. I wanted, hammer in hand, to crack nostalgia like a geode and find the jagged little crystals of possibility growing again in the dark. I wanted, if not to be loved, to find a way to live with it, the light and the shadow and the idea of the song woven through it, a woman’s voice knowing and sad, an if/then line in the national code.
Del Rey:
It's not about having someone to love me anymore
This is the experience of being an American whore
It's not about having someone to love me anymore
This is the experience of being an American whore
— A&W
I am coming back to America partly because of the art criticism I write about NFTs. Are you ready to hate me yet?
Kevin McCoy minted the first NFT in 2014 as a result of a museum hackathon. The problem was: how do you make authenticatable, individual editions of digital art, so digital artists can sell works like artists who work on paper or in paint do? Around 2020, starting during pandemic lockdowns, NFTs took off. There was a major speculative boom. Most of them were images like the now-ubiquitous Apes. But in stranger quarters, people were using the way the blockchain works as a process to mint works that were themselves procedural. This new generative art intrigued me the way Sol LeWitt did, the way patterns and systems do—the way the astronomical charts of Easter in medieval manuscripts at the Bodleian did when I was busy pretending America didn’t exist anymore. I loved and do still love some of those generative things.
But the thing is: a lot of NFT work in the boom years was what people have eventually called it out as. It was hypercapital, mostly Silicon Valley-venture-runoff-Superfund-site level stuff burning off like an accelerant, gasoline-quick. This is Ansel Adams’s historically contemporary America too: all prospectors and panhandlers and flim-flam men in San Francisco, a dazzling 1906 World’s Fair made of paper mache that would melt if it rained. This, too, the past oozing into the continuous present. And there I was, because I loved the complexity of it, because I was a systems girl, the kind who wanted to trace back each geologic line carved by path of the Colorado River until they became the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Because algorithms were lollipops with bubblegum all the way down inside if you licked them.
Kevin and Jennifer McCoy rode out the boom mostly offline. They did a profile for the New York Times. They sold the one NFT Kevin had minted and then quietly went back to their digital art practice. Until now. Here were these new American landscapes, staring back at me from 2:25 AM in London.
Ansel Adams was obsessed with using the play of light across the full photographic plate to maximum effect. He developed and named new technical specifications for it, and became deeply invested in printing methods. The collages the McCoys make from Stable Diffusion images are lightless. AI generated images only hit the light by proxy, multiple degrees removed from the lenses that took the reference photos that trained the algorithms ages ago. They are the inverse of Adams’s precision. In a documentary video, the McCoys meticulously trace the lines of his horizons in their library of his prints. They know this. They mint the photographic collages as NFTs.
At this point they aren’t asking for love. So what is the point? The word “NFT” is a national trigger for the worst Valley techbro excess. It’s a lasered-off tattoo, initials scratched off a redwood, commemorative plates with your ex’s name on them you still use every time you need to microwave something. But I see something in it, something American. And after all, I write about these things, these things so held in the embrace of capital it is impossible to think they’re anything else. They’re art at the ends of America, stretched across its east-west poles like a clothesline shadow.
Lana’s on in the background, singing about desperate sex on the floor of a Ramada. About how the world punishes a woman for want. I worked to make this job happen because I couldn’t look away. Because I know all the dirty ways NFT art is implicated in capitalism, and because I persist in wanting some of it anyway, or wanting to understand it. Because at the end of the day, I’m implicated too. I’m just here wanting. I’m unfurling the layers of code and collage. I’m sucking the lollipop, all cherry cola. I listen to this song on repeat in the dark hours, the little hours of the morning when no one else is awake, when it’s almost lightless. Dark-room red-black.
I see a reproduction of the stationery from Stieglitz’s Ghost Ranch in a book of Ansel Adams’ letters. It has a cow’s skull on it, a bull skull with protruding horns. The cheeks are hollows into the dark, much darker than the typewritten letters, a study in contour.
Maybe I, too, just want to stand in the desert of the Southwest, and wear a wide brimmed black hat and a big black coat and let the sun hit my aging face—my always- apparently-aging face according to TikTok, which is not f64 group, Zone Method, full-use-of-the-camera-range Ansel Adams, and is all fillers and filters and not the stark monochromaticism of anything—maybe I want to stand there like she is, against the sky, and just not give a fuck. Georgia O’ Keeffe did incidentally give fucks, though, about Stieglitz, about him dying, about people not saying the flowers in the ubiquitous paintings were vulvas. They have hollows in them I notice just now. Are they buccal cheek fat removal trend flowers? O America, my newfoundland, indeed. Donne had chipmunk cheeks anyway. What does it mean that we want them again, the hollows where death goes? If you pick up a tabloid magazine at the grocery store checkout, it’s all hollows and canyons jutting out above the living evidence of the lips. Not Lana though actually, whose face is still full and soft as her signature pout.
Ansel Adams mostly only photographed people for the necessity of his commercial commissions.
Del Rey: “Give me a mausoleum in Rhode Island with Dad,
Grandma, Grandpa and Dave
Who hung himself real high In the National Park sky,
it's a shame and I'm crying right now”
Frank O’ Hara: “Lana Turner we love you get up”
We don’t get the O’Hara trajectory much these days. You don’t start at MoMa on security and get into curatorial. And the curatorial salaries for most PhDs aren’t enough to get a lease in New York, anyway. They’re basically trust fund jobs; jobs for which your income must already be incidental. Also those PhDs, the ones who would be in curatorial, are my friends. I should say, some of them were my friends, though it was mostly intentional overdoses and not hangings that created the past tense hollow; there are no National Park skies in the dim corridors of anonymous hotels, the Ramadas people go to to have torrid affairs or kill themselves. The death of the humanities is literal to us, my accursed generation. I didn’t think my life was in the pattern of the Hollywood industry life; the drugs, the James Deans, the dying young, the starlets and the tragedies. But when the stage lights go off, the overheads and the spots, they felt strangely the same, high drama; desperation. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by etc etc et alii see ample footnotes blah blah. You’ve already heard this song on the radio. I’m only still here because I happened to like a digital thing that everyone else thought was sexy at the right moment. And I know it.
Jimmy Jimmy cocoa puff. A backing beat kicks in here, if this were a movie, because in America, I tell myself all tragedies are eventually movies, or at least prestige television.
Incidentally, MoMA took photography fairly seriously fairly early, in the grand scheme of things. They also were an early museum to purchase both AI art and art on the blockchain. But you’re not at MoMA, you’re sitting on the floor of the shower with all your dead friends, and even though you don’t have that old Hollywood glamour hair, you can hear Frank O’Hara, a Midtown voice, an American voice, a voice that has a touch of camp like yours, that wasn’t a painter but loved a ballet dancer and spent summers on Fire Island and he says
“Lana Turner we love you get up”
So you get up. You get up and you stare at the buildings you can imagine living in in New York City, like you can imagine the persistence of living, like elevators that go so fast you can feel the change in gravity pulling, like skyscrapers piercing the clouds for rain, like stripped aspens stubbornly going up and up the treeline of a mountain. You look west and there are mountains and rivers and Yosemite. And Pete Seeger told you this land was your land on the rental car stereo driving to the National Parks with your parents when you were young, but now you’re not so sure about that, this land that lends itself to the contrast of greyscale where Britain doesn’t, this land that has such extremities that the lens touches.
Lana Del Rey is at best problematic. The lyrics about being a fragile white girl thing, the infamous Instagram “message for the culture” where she lists the sexualities of black artists by contrast—these are not forgivable. But I own copies of Mishima and I’m not forgivable either. And the album is good. And looking at the McCoys’ work, the inverse-average-Ansel-Adams-AI-Americas, they’re good too, despite and because of their form at once. They know they’re NFTs; they know better than almost anyone all the valences of what that means. Here are some little quasi-humans on the beach like melted figurines, and here is the cutout sky, but it’s not a sky, it’s a colour shot of a rocky Ansel Adams monolith in all the wrong places. And below, flickering like a fluorescent bulb about to go out in a chain store ceiling light, are parasails and another, impossible inland sea.
They’re supposed to look like ektachrome, the individual parts of the composite collages. Ektachrome is saturated color with a little grain—the curatorial copy says it evokes the “hazy yellow-green tint of their childhood snapshots.” It’s in some ways this is the opposite of the minimal starkness of Adams and Stieglitz, whose work on clouds the McCoys have used before. So it’s more Lana than Ansel, more invented nostalgia than memory, and it knows that and cuts back on itself. I’m not sure Lana knows that. I want her to. It’s a better America, the one that knows its ghosts. The one that only shoots on Ektachrome, only already always hauntedly.
I put on madder-red lipstick when I go out now, after the long British winter. It makes me look more alive. In the black and white, it’s a fatal aliveness, the branch of stripped tree against the sky in winter, in mountains near the snowline. Like I could blow a kiss to the paparazzi flash in the night, calling out my name Like I’ve eaten a hundred red-staining lollipops.
Lana:
“Goddamn, man child
You fucked me so good that I almost said, "I love you"
'Cause you're just a man
It's just what you do
Your head in your hands
As you color me blue….— Norman F***ing Rockwell
Whitman: “I have no chair, no church, no philosophy,
I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange,
But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll,
My left hand hooking you round the waist,
My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road.
Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.”
Song of Myself, 46
The woman I love calls it “working the trap”, the state of doing what you need to do to stay alive in America even when you know the system’s a farce, that there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism—you’ve heard it a million times, but what can you do? It’s a kind of lazy, hazy Ektachrome sadness that permeates your days. But there are moments that set it up in ultra-sharp Ansel Adams-style, that’s what the aperture f64 in the f64 group means, a kind of unrelenting sharpness, sharper perhaps than the actual eye perceives in the world. For Adams, the camera was an apparatus for seeing more truly.
I think the McCoys are trying to do this too, with their collage-average Americas. When I go to look at the collection on their gallery’s website, the URL is https://www.artwrld.com/products/short-form-collages. Note the “products.” As of this writing, you can only actually see the images of the art on two auction sites, OpeaSea and Sansa. One lists the price in a giant font next to the piece. The other prioritizes rarity statistics, a thing NFT collectors of generative art have the unfortunate habit of prioritizing, like they’re baseball cards. Maybe I just think it’s unfortunate; maybe it’s honest. Maybe it’s all product like everything else is content now, this essay too.
The thing is: artists need to eat. They need to work the trap. So they can make a beautiful algorithm, they can use the language of the already-always-financialized contemporary art world anyway, and they can extrude works from it like the cylindrical line of toothpaste that comes out of the tube, that invariably echoes the means of its production in its form. I called this hypercapital because it involved large amounts of money moving very speculatively and quickly, but it’s also desperation capital. Think of commercial art in the pre-NFT American market; think of Thomas Kinkade cottages, that always looked like they were on fire from the inside out. Think of the living rooms of Disney Adults, think of the fantasy of mid-century Americana Lana sells too, but without the undercut, the knowingness. Dimpled, rosy-cheeked children sitting next to robust cops on stools at candy shops. It certainly wasn’t knowingly ironic when Lana dated a celebrity TV cop, but anyway, that’s the art that desperation capital sells you, Norman Fucking Rockwell.
When she’s desperate, Lana looks for God, and the market looks for the invisible hand to move and I look for throughlines, leylines in poetry and art and sound. Is it really any different, any better, my need for art to mean something despite or maybe even because of its invariable capitalization? This too, sings America, this conflictedness, this wanting a greater arc of purpose and meaning, all Carnegie Stout libraries and industrialists’ court philosophies. I want to think that there is a myth of a greater thing we hold in common good—the oeuvre of Ansel Adams photographs, the National Parks, the coastlines and mountains to the seas, this spent and dubious democracy.
Kiss it better, baby, the hole Eugene Debs left in my heart, the hole of possibility. I need to get on a plane from Heathrow and see the lines of the Hudson, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the flat marshy splay of the Everglades stretching out, and believe for a second in the possibility of America as something more.
Don’t hate me Walt Whitman; I need to be American again, even if I refuse to roll naked in the bushes. Don’t hate me for the soft anti-musculature of my body, for the baroque acanthine spirals of my prose, like housewife pin curls all tucked up in a shower cap. Even you Walt Whitman, manchild with your thirteen hundred lines of spiritualist florid masculinity that never quite sat right—fuck me with the myth of this country so good I can almost say “I love you” to it all the way down the highway, I-95. Because like everyone else, I need to keep working the trap, too.
Lana:
But I can't say I'd run when things get hard
It's just that I don't trust myself with my heart
But I've had to let it break a little more
'Cause they say that's what it's forThat's how the light shines in…
— Kintsugi
“I’m glad to have lived to see this happen. And here in America. All American. And I’m not a nationalist. I am idolator of perfect workmanship of any kind. And this is truly perfect workmanship. I am elated—so is O’Keeffe.”
— Steiglitz, letter to Ansel Adams on receiving his book of photographs of the Sierra Nevada, December 21, 1938
Lana borrowed that one from Leonard Cohen anyway. Maybe we don’t need to keep saying the cracks let the light in. Maybe we don’t need to keep that metaphor. After all it’s profoundly un-American in origin, linked to the specific materialities of ceramics in Japanese art and the long tail of embodied Shinto objecthood. And the things we do with the broken vessels of ourselves aren’t really that here, now, in America. I am doing the Frank Sinatra tap dance of selling you myself. That’s what the internet is for; that’s the American hustle. If I undercut it, ironize it, paste it in postmodern collage, does that make it better? If I know I’m haunted am I still a ghost?
Early in his career, Ansel Adams was also paid to produce photographs of the American landscape for the WPA. There are moments, perhaps, when it seems possible that America will get better. This was one of them, the Works Progress Administration, the closest America has ever come to a kind of socialist art funding that also served its communities—post office murals, books, plays, recordings of banjos from disappearing Appalachian folkways. During World War II, Adams also photographed Japanese internment camps at Manzanar in California, investing his subjects with a humanity and idea of American-ness that was rare for the time.
But the Adams we remember, the iconic Ansel, is cliffs and mountains bound up in shadow, the poster-print Adams above the blue-dented cabinet. Another of the Land Sea Sky series collages has a background landscape that feels like one of these pastiche Adams. It’s a ticker-tape parade moving in uneven clumps behind the vague shapes of boats in a cutout foreground, and a sky that’s really a shadow of a mountain with no flagpole on it. Floating, is a simulacrum of an American flag, but as estimated by the Stable Diffusion AI model, its stripes flap uneven-numbered in the wind and its stars are all dots and blurred lines. Because these are generated images, they have never used a photographic plate. There are no cracks in the vessel that made them. The light doesn’t get in at all. That’s the whole point.
There is a kind of ecstasy in perfect workmanship, Stieglitz was right. But intentionally imperfect workmanship has an ecstasy to it too, a skewed one for a world that’s a broken cup. Kintsugi uses gold to fill these cracks, torn up from seams in the strip-mined earth or sieved out in California’s cold-running mountain streams for scrip at a company store. If you don’t fill the cracks with gold, though, if you don’t run when the going gets hard, that’s a kind of American craft I can interest myself in seeing deeply, that I am glad to be alive for. And I’m not a nationalist, either.
Lana:
My body is a map of L.A.
I stand straight like an angel, with a halo
Hangin' out the Hilton Hotel window
Screamin', "Heyo, baby, let's go"
My chest, the Sierra Madre
My hips, every high and byway
That you trace with your fingertips like a Toyota
Run your hands over me like a Land Rover
In Arcadia, Arcadia
All roads that lead to you as integral to me as arteries
That pump the blood that flows straight to the heart of me
America, America…
— Arcadia
I get an echocardiogram and I can’t stop looking at the cave formations of my ventricles on the screen as my heart beats. This is a lightless image, too, made entirely with sound and translated into pixels from the cold gel and metal instrument running across my chest. The nurse tells me most people don’t like to look; it reminds them of their fragility, their susceptibility to death. Et in Arcadia ego, which is as American as a car crash. The white pulses of life are like the little white crosses of the graves that stand out so brightly against the night landscape of Ansel Adams’ Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico. If you moved one of them to the sky they could almost bisect the faint grey sphere of the moon above the stuccoed houses. The heart takes up almost the whole screen. The houses on Adams’s large-plate-format photograph are small and low to the ground, almost less perceptible than the graves.
There is something to be said for seeing in the dark, when the wide white horizon of the clouds seems to pass the mountains and the whole sky is stretched out over you. Astronomers call places where it is still possible to see a sky like this, without light pollution, “Dark Sky” sites. Many of them are National Parks and Monuments—Glacier, Death Valley, Crater Lake. Crater Lake itself reflects the stars like a perfect mirror. It is the deepest lake in America, the pit of an erupted volcano gone inverse. I have been there. I don’t remember what it was like to see my face in it, but now in my mind's eye I see the pumping arteries leading to my heart, flickering white.
I remember giggling as a child when I learned that the name Grand Tetons really meant breasts. There you go, Walt Whitman, I guess you win that one, but there really are little America landscapes everywhere now, even when you’re the furthest you can get from Dark Sky territory. I’m thinking of rows of server racks, blinking alone in data centers in rural Arkansas, the way a jet looks when it flies over a dead mall skylight in Chicago, at night in Midtown when you look out the window and see the floors of an office tower winking out one by one.
I am coming back to America. I am trying to figure out the act of being American again. I can watch the stars snap back to the places I know in this hemisphere, Ursa Major, Minor, the belt of Orion. I think the screen could be like the aims of a photograph; that we could use its mediation to find something true there. It’s the screen’s glow I see last before I go to sleep, white on the black retinal afterimage behind my eyes, blinking out. I don’t know if I need anyone to love me; I don’t know if I can love this country, if it would love me back even if I wanted it to. Maybe that’s what I want: the non-fungible token of love, the thing that can’t be changed in for something else, but what I get instead are pennies and dollars and ticker-tape stocks that do trade in and out, along oscillating peaks, each always the other implicit, the trap and the land’s own line. Maybe if I stand straight like an angel it will come to me, the way desperation can become the art of this place, the way the patterns run looping in the background. Isn’t that always the old American miracle, what desperation becomes, what we can transfigure it into?
So like Lana, like Lana Turner I get up and I tie a bow in my hair, all sparkle and new money aging into the old, and I sing America, its contrasts burned into the glass of a photographic plate; its landscapes all haunted and shadowed and desperate and brave. Trace me in the dark, and in the morning, hold me broken and new—I don’t want to be good anymore, but I still want to be enough.