DOOMSCROLLING to PARADISE

What do these striking images ask of us?  Are these prints of a polarized AMERICA, ablaze in protest, a mirror?  Are they a clarion call, a call to arms?  In a new year where so many issues surrounding American social, political and economic life feel unresolved, what does “Doomscrolling”, Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston’s electrifying show at Petzel Gallery, tell us about where to go from here?

So much of the power behind this installation of 18 large-scale woodcut prints, is letting these once in a century events—from May 24th, 2020, the day The New York Times memorialized, “U.S. DEATHS NEAR 100,000, AN INCALCULABLE LOSS”, to the January 6th insurrection at the capitol, a year ago—ruminate with you, image after striking image. 

Tightly packed, this somber installation serves to create a chapel-like effect—a place to sit with what remains.  As the press release states: “Doomscrolling, a relatively recent activity induced by disturbing, perhaps mind-bending, current events, is ‘the act of spending an excessive amount of screen time devoted to the absorption of negative news.’” 

“Doomscrolling”, is in many ways a guide, a template, on how to navigate the onslaught of images in our hyper-polarized and ever-increasing digital world.  The use of layered images—these being highly sophisticated, visually vibrant and high-impact montages—highlights the pivotal role we have in educating humanity on how to read and deconstruct images; make connections between them, and learn about their origin and dissemination. To be clear, these images are not propaganda, far from it. What I am suggesting is that these prints operate as a tool to help us identify propaganda when we are confronted with it.

So let’s tease out what is at stake before we can understand why strategy is important. I want to channel that moment when learning becomes infectious, when your mind jumps on that ephemeral surfboard, and you internalize the visual power of storytelling.  I want my six year old niece to bottle that magic and serendipity because it is a tool that cannot be stripped, but like a seed, needs to be continually watered and developed.

This does not relieve the fact that we are in the midst of an ongoing battle against a racist system that wants to revoke essential freedoms, freedoms that allow us to reimagine our own image, tell our own story. This discussion reminds me of the late and prescient Kathy Acker. Her ideas on narrative structure and resistance to singular identity is a strategy that can serve us well here. In her lecture, “The Killers”, Acker argues for the continued examination of novelistic structure: “One: The time it takes to write a novel. Two: the time it takes to read a novel. Three: the fictive time. The time within the story or narrations. So in this sense a novel, structurally, is a time triad.”

This shatters the way we think about novelistic structure—the unknown space within it—and provides an opening from which to examine other structures. Her ideas on the open and fractured relationship between the real and fictitious gives artists and writers, alike, the license to play but also grow.  She advocates for the necessity of risk—for us to take more chances, to go off the deep end.  Explicit in her argument: invent the fiction of your own agency, “there lies the political, the realm of political power.”

Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston’s “Doomscrolling”, elegantly bring this idea to a crescendo. While their collaboration reminds us that we need to stay vigilant and reflective in the way we consume images, they also give us the license to be transformative and eternally hopeful.

Zorawar Sidhu & Rob Swainston’s “Doomscrolling”, is on view at Petzel Gallery through February 12th. 35 E 67th Street, New York, NY.

—Steve Rivera

01.17.22