Mike Lyon: Post-Digital Prints and Drawings
March 1 – April 27, 2013

“Maggie”, 2012 80.5″ x 44″ white & black ink on pigment-tinted watercolor paper

“Until the early 1990′s I was all about the eye-hand coordination required to draw and paint visually (paint what you see). Then I became intensely curious about how image was communicated through the marks I made. I began employing automated procedures and, eventually, electromechanical tools – many of my own design and construction. I continue to be fascinated by marks and mark-making, pattern, aesthetics, the past, and the location of meaning.” — Mike Lyon

Mike Lyon is in equal parts a serious and dedicated student of both Japanese art and culture and 21st Century computer technology. Through his large-scale pen and ink drawings and woodblock prints, he pays homage to the past while being firmly rooted in the present. The tools Lyon employs to create his delicate and beautiful images are reductive digital photography, skillful use of computers and automated inventions of his own design. Lyon’s finely made works on paper consist of rhythmic meandering lines and patterns, that refine and merge Eastern and Western artistic traditions in innovative and mindful methods to construct a body of work that is provocative and powerful and seems entirely new.

Mike Lyon has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally including Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, New York; Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Aspen, CO; Abercrombie Gallery, Lake Charles, LA; Burns Atrium Gallery, Union College, Schenectady, NY; The Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Norwalk, CT; Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS; Florida Printmakers Society, Tampa, FL; Gallery of the Quebec Printmakers Council, Montreal, Quebec, Canada; Tokyo, Japan; Gallery EZOSHI, Kyoto Japan; Yad LeBanim Gallery, Tiberias, Israel; Horncastle College, Lincolnshire, UK and others.

His work is in the permanent collections of the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, MO; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Manhattan, KS.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJ7WkDLdxPI

cutting baltic birch plywood rings for the various sized balls

each ring has holes for dowel pins - two for the ring below, two for the ring above

the parts for the spheres stack up pretty fast

rings for a sphere laid out

dowel pins get glued in

rings stack up to make rough sphere shapes

clamping the glued-up rings to set

glued-up rough spheres

glued-up rough sphere mounted in lathe

At first I used a grinder to turn the spheres round and smooth - after a short while of this, I found it was much faster and easier to just use a conventional scraper tool - that way I could turn each sphere in just a few minutes

lots of turned balls - those still need end caps removed and rounded

drywall mud filled the chips and was SO easy to sand smooth in the lathe

the finished balls were gessoed, painted with carbon black acrylic, then satin lacquered

stringing balls on all-thread -- looks like everything's gonna fit

building the poplar rails joined into rectangular solid baltic birch plywood - rails have tenons, plywood is mortised.

bed is complete - plywood platform and mattress still need to be placed

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aN30BRx25xY

The inimitable Maggie Rose Mull “Let’s Fall in Love” ukulele style

As Eric Fischl spoke at the opening of America Now and Here, a young woman in the crowd stood out as though haloed in sparkler-sparks.  I asked my friend, Donald Rosenfeld, who is THAT girl? Don knew her and told me her name was Maggie Mull and he introduced us. She was working for America Now and Here, facilitating the exhibition and generally making new friends and herself useful. The next day at a lunch for participating artists, Linda and I were seated together at a table across from Maggie and several others and Maggie told about how Eric had hired her to work on America Now and Here and had sent her on a bus and train ride across America to sketch what she saw and…  I think I’ve got that more or less right. Anyway, I was fascinated and blurted out that I’d like her to model. She was charming and acted as though she hadn’t noticed the blurting part and…

Maggie, 2012, 85.5 x 44 inches, watercolor and ink on paper (pen and ink drawing on tinted watercolor paper)

detail after some hours of drawing with white ink

white ink must be about done here

black ink gets started

detail of completed drawing

detail of completed drawing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACP8FNGPzAk

The inspirational Maggie Mull on accordion with a Christmas favorite: How the Grinch Stole Christmas

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkHgzPm9PIM

Maggie appears as the hot chick who got away  in The Dardy’s amazing music video, “Perfume and Leather”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UHr4vjNJ2E

The multi-talented visual and recording artist, Maggie Rose Mull on ukulele with “My Funny Valentine”

I carved 18 blocks for this print, designing the blocks exactly as if I’d intended to hand-carve. Then I generated the code to control my CNC router and carved the blocks on a half-sheet of half-inch birch plywood. Most of my blocks since 2004 have been machine-carved this way.  Even so, I managed to ruin one of the blocks during carving (block 13) so decided to simply omit it. I can’t tell any difference without it, though theoretically it would have added 1/18th additional juicy detail to this little print.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i15kCRy6EVw

video illustrates printing of this edition – it’s a nice somewhat meditative activity, isn’t it?

Kento registration (notches to receive the paper carved into each block) makes it quick and easy to achieve the very precise registration required to reprduce tiny details of eye, hair, clothing, stripes, etc and the hosoban sheet size for the baren exchange makes it a snap to print quickly.  I carved and printed the entire stack of (36) sheets in long two days and, to my eye, these are gorgeous little jewels.  I LOVE the soft gray of the dry graphite pigment I used (plus some Guerra Paint and Pigment Channel Black pigment dispersion to make the darker values for blocks 9-17.  Because I printed so many blocks so quickly, moisture added during printing of each block didn’t have sufficient time to migrate throughout each sheet and the printed areas became too soft — on those sheets, I used a scrap of newsprint between the sheet to be printed and the baren in order to prevent damaging the paper fibers of those over-damp sheets. The newsprint also absorbs some of the excess moisture and prevents more serious problems.

Normally the Baren exchanges require 31 prints, but there were only 18 moku-hanga printmakers participating, so only 19 were ultimately required.  I selected a dozen prints for a ‘first edition’ of 12, and the remaining 19 decent prints for the ‘Baren edition’.

Madeline and Kit, 2012, woodblock print from 17 blocks, dry pigment, rice paste, and water on paper handmade by Iwano Ichibei, 1st edition of 12 plus Baren edition of 19

brushing pigment into block

brushing pigment into block

registering sheet

registering sheet

lubricating and protecting baren with camelia oil

printing with baren

placing just-printed sheet into take-up drawer and trying to equalize moisture among prints

prints after drying

17 blocks and studio after printing was completed

17 blocks printed - 1 block was damaged during carving and unprinted

One of the most interesting to me artists profiled in Paul Catanese and Angela Geary’s Post-Digital Printmaking is Jean-Pierre Hébert who happens to live in Santa Barbara.   I contacted Jean-Pierre before our visit to invite us into his home so I could meet him and learn more about his work.  I was a little disappointed that Jean-Pierre pointedly avoided talking specifically about his algorithmic approach to image making but I was thrilled to meet and spend time with him! He and his wife were the most gracious hosts and spent several hours with us. Jean-Pierre showed us hundreds (and hundreds) of his gorgeous ink-jet prints, etchings, dry points, plotter drawings, and other wonderful stuff.  It was great to get to meet him (thanks for writing the book, Paul)!

David Altman, Jean-Pierre Hébert, Mike Lyon

Jean-Pierre Hébert retrieves endless prints and drawings from flat file

Jean-Pierre Hébert, "ah agnes thirty one is prime", 1996, pen and ink, 5 x 4 inches

Jean-Pierre Hébert, "fractone", 2007, graphite, lead, and brown chalk, 13 x 17 inches

Jean-Pierre Hébert, Mike Lyon

Jean-Pierre Hébert, Mike Lyon

Jean-Pierre Hébert receives 2012 Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art from ACM SIGGRAPH (Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques)

Chapter 10 MIKE LYON

The ink is what makes the image… regardless of what made the marks, the paper has no knowledge of parts of the block that don’t hold ink -to the paper, they’re invisible.
– Mike Lyon

Mike Lyon is an artist living and working in Kansas City, with an extensive body of works on paper that make use of CNC machinery. With two degrees in fine art, expertise in moku-hanga (Japanese woodblock printing), and several decades’ experience in developing computer-controlled electro-mechanical systems for factory automation, Lyon is uniquely positioned within the context of post-digital printmaking. As with many individuals with interdisciplinary backgrounds, it is difficult to summarize Lyon’s creative practice, the diversity of his influences and the depth of his research.

An accomplished artist and engineer, Lyon’s facility for investigating creative outcomes for new technologies pervades his endeavors. During his studies in the 1970s, exposure to computer-generated images such as Studies in Perception No. 1 by Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton, as well as the processes used in the artwork of Chuck Close, had a great influence and still resonate with him today. Perhaps the most sustained source of inspiration for Lyon is Japanese Zen philosophy, modes of creative production, and visual aesthetics gained through years of study. A devoted collector of ukiyo-e, with prints dating from the 17th century, Lyon is also a high-ranking black belt in Shotokan karate and owns the dojo where he teaches martial arts. His absorption of Japanese culture within daily life has influenced his thoughts about image-making, resulting in a contemporary reflection on human nature through prints, paintings and drawings.

Figure 161. Mike Lyon, “Sara”, 2006. Size: 107 x 195.5 cm (3 1/2 x 6 1/2 ft). 17-block woodcut, printed in edition of ten. Permanent collection, Mirianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art. Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 162. leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton, Studies in Perception No. 1, 1966. Size: 152 x 366 cm (5 x 12 ft). Image courtesy of Ken Knowlton.

Figure 163: Mike Lyon, “Anthony”, 2004. Size: 76 x 53 cm (30 x 21 in). 15-block woodcut, printed in an edition of 13. Permanent collection of McNeese State University. Image courtesy of the artist.

Lyon practiced moku-hango for years, developing a workflow that allowed him to integrate photography with hand-carving, a process that he later adapted to generating CNC tool-paths. Over time, he gained expertise in carving and printing images with ten, 20, 30 or more woodblocks in tight register -a physically demanding process that required weeks of carving. While visiting Japan in 2003, Lyon was invited to stage a solo exhibition the following year at the Ezoshi Gallery in Kyoto. Lyon immediately began producing a new suite of prints for the show. As he worked, he began pushing himself to create even larger prints, but doing so wholly by hand was becoming less feasible because the long hours of carving and printing (he hand-printed more than 18,700 individual impressions between the invitation in 2003 and the show in 2004) were causing increasing physical problems for him.

He knew that inkjet printers and photo polymer plates offered a potential way to continue working and increase the scale of his prints, but the process seemed to sacrifice so much of what he found compelling in the final images. From selecting, raising, brushing or otherwise altering the grain to changing the absorbency of the printing areas of the matrix, or creating subtle areas of gradation through delicate carving, it was clear that woodblocks were a central component of his printmaking. For years, Lyon had ‘considered building something akin to a computer­controlled Etch-a-Sketch in order to experiment with painting. When I came across an ad for ShopBot in a woodworking magazine, it fired my imagination for carving larger blocks by router’ After looking at the software and realizing that the ShopBot CNC router offered a path forward, he decided to invest in one. The influence was immediate, allowing him to complete a suite of 13 images from hand-carved blocks and another 13 images from machine-carved blocks for his solo show. Ultimately, the new approach had a profound effect on his art practice as a whole, sparking a flurry of new creative questions and avenues for his work.

Figure 164. Overhead view of the 15 cherry blocks used for the printing of Anthony, by Mike Lyon. Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 165. Digital image of 15 pre-production images used for the carving of 15 cherry blocks used in the printing of Anthony, by Mike Lyon. Image courtesy of the artist.

One of the first prints that integrated CNC carving was Anthony, a 76 x 53 cm (30 x 21 in.) print created from 15 cherry blocks. The techniques Lyon developed for utilizing the CNC router expanded his existing workflow for deriving multiple carving guides from photographs. The 15 blocks used to print Anthony are shown in Figure 164. Compare this to Figure 165 – thumbnails of the original photograph processed into individual bitmap images, just prior to being converted into tool-paths for the CNC router. The images in the thumbnails were created in Adobe Photoshop, and represent a close range of individual luminosity levels extracted from the continuous tones of the photograph, each of which will be carved on separate blocks. Through extensive experimentation, Mike has determined how many levels of luminosity and subsequently how many blocks are required to achieve a photographic, painterly, or less easily deconstructed rendering.

Figure 166. Mike Lyon, Rod, 2004. Size: 76 x 53 cm (30 x 21 in.). 16-block woodcut, printed in an edition of 12.1mage courtesy of the artist.

Figure 167. Portable Humidrawer system by Mike Lyon. Note the counterweight-balanced drawers on the left of the image, which are operated by foot control. On the right-hand side of the image, the printing area is actually a plenum with a vacuum surface to hold the block down and keep it extremely flat and in register. A vacuum suction tube exits below the printing area and off to the left to an out-of-shot industrial vacuum. Image courtesy of the artist.

Notice how throughout the Anthony blocks shown in Figure 164, there are islands of wood that are not visually represented in the final print. These islands provide paper support and are not inked during the printing process. Along with kento (registration notches), these areas must be added to the bitmaps after the image has been prepared and divided into its component layers of luminosity, shown in Figure 165. During a visit by the authors to his studio, Lyon points out that when creating the first series of prints with the CNC router, he was interested in creating a dramatic inner glow that required the minimization of attention to contours between layers. This is evident in Anthony and can also be very clearly observed in Rod, another of the portraits from 2004, shown in Figure 166.

Figure 168. One of 12 woodblocks for Aspen Grove, by Mike Lyon, during carving on a Shop Bot CNC router. Aspen Grove is a reduction woodcut -there was only a single block, carved and re-carved in stages, with a printing after each re-carving. In this photo, the carved areas (which are blue) were carved prior to the next printing -new carving is evidenced by lighter areas of the block. Image courtesy of the artist.

The introduction of the CNC router into the printmaking studio helped Lyon to expand image size and address mounting issues of fatigue, but it also introduced practical problems. Particularly, the larger size and increasing numbers of blocks began to generate difficulties with regard to keeping paper damp for long periods of time and with the handling of large pieces of thin, damp paper. Coupled with the fact that he does not work with assistants, some mechanical solution seemed necessary. To Lyon, the answer was to design a specialized vacuum table to hold blocks flat during printing. This table also integrated a specialized humidor to keep paper damp within a sliding drawer that delivered the paper directly over the block. The drawer was controlled by foot pedal, and allowed him to create these prints alone. He called this apparatus the Humidrawer, and it proved essential.

The impact of the CNC router and the Humidrawer on his productivity was dramatic. Lyon comments that all of a sudden, he ‘could work at printing a set of blocks while his machine assistant was busy carving the next set: His inventive solutions and unique workflow allowed him to complete the series of prints for his solo show in Kyoto, and it would eventually lead to experimentation with new approaches towards generating the printmaking matrix as well as new approaches towards painting and drawing. In the meantime, he was interested in increasing the scale of his prints even further and refining the Humidrawer system.

Figure 169. Mike Lyon, Aspen Grove, 2007. Size: 38 x 25 cm (15 x 10 in.). Printed by Shinkichi Numabe. Published by Mokuhankan. Image courtesy of the artist and David Bull of Mokuhankan.

Figure 170. Mike Lyon, Aspen Grove, 2006. Size: 195.5 x 107 cm (61/2 x 12112 ft.). 12 woodblocks printed in an edition of six. Image courtesy of the artist.

Since his CNC router was capable of carving full 122 x 244 cm (4 x 8ft) sheets of wood, Lyon was prompted to create an even larger Humidrawer that utilized a garage door opener for the linear motion system in place of the counterweight. Additionally, this version of the device integrated a self-designed and built pinch-roller press with a stationary bed, which allowed him to work with enormous paper, printing from blocks up to 122 x 244 cm (4 x 8ft). The large Humidrawer and woodblock press shown in Figure 171 demonstrates a number of improvements from the previous version, including an additional drawer for receiving printed states that does not interrupt the flow of paper through the system. Mike has used this updated version on many of his largest prints, including Sara Reclining, Aspen Grove and Grass 2.2. The successful integration of the CNC router into his studio practice inspired Lyon to consider expanding the capabilities of the machine. Perhaps due to his background in factory automation, he approaches the CNC device as an electromechanical platform that can be adapted for his needs. This adaptability offers an opportunity to expand, re-map or otherwise modify the capabilities of the router while retaining the aspects of CNC that are valuable for a given technique. Replace the router with a pen and you have a CNC drawing machine; replace it with a needle and you have a CNC drypoint machine. This is not to suggest that the replacement is trivial, but Lyon modestly points out that he has not invented anything when he designs a new headstock for his ShopBot. Of course, the results, seen in his artwork, are hard to mistake for anything other than a generous application of expertise and ingenuity. Lyon’s experimentation has resulted in a diverse number of artworks including drawings, paintings, and even mezzotint-like intaglio prints as shown in Figure 174 (overleaf). The idea of using the machine to create mezzotints required the design of a number of custom attachments-some to roughen the surface of the plate similar to the hand-rocking process, others that would allow him to burnish. In Figure 175, you can see three custom attachments for the ShopBot in which a roulette, drypoint needle and ball burnisher are mounted within a length of plastic pipe. These pipes are almost the diameter of his router’s mount, so he is able to utilize the existing headstock for holding these tools in place. Additionally, these tools are mounted in their pipes in such a manner that they have some downward tension, so that if there are minute variations in the flatness of the plate, the tools will still push into the material. Lyon used the roulette and drypoint needle to scratch parallel lines, tightly packed together, on a copper plate. Then, he would rotate those lines and scratch again, repeating this process several times until the entire plate had a uniform roughened surface.

Figure 171. Time-lapse view of Mike Lyon printing Grass 2.2 in the summer of 2010, using his large Humidrawer system, which incorporates the linear motion system from a garage door opener to deliver dampened sheets of paper to the pinch-roller press. Note. in the lower right section of the image, a receiving drawer for the most recently printed state. Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 172. Mike Lyon, Grass, 2010. Size: 183 x 57 cm (72 x 22112 in.). 16 woodblocks printed in an edition of four. Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 173. Detail of Grass, by Mike Lyon, 2010. Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 174. Mike Lyon, Sarah Reclining, 2005. Size: 23 x 30 cm (9 x 12 in.). Mezzotint proof printed by Anthony Kirk, Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Norwalk, CT. Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 175. From left to right, drypoint needle, roulette and ball burnisher- each of which is mounted in an 11 cm (4’12 in.) tube that can itself be mounted on Lyon’s ShopBot CNC router. These tools were used in the creation of the Sarah Reclining mezzotint plate. Images courtesy of the artist.

Figure 176. Copper mezzotint plate, 23 x 30 cm (9 x 12 in.), used for the Sarah Reclining print. Image courtesy of the artist.

Once the dark background tone had been established, Lyon switched over to a custom burnishing attachment to bring out the light tones. Again using tool-paths created by separating a photograph into a number of individual luminosity levels, he began by burnishing the plate from light to dark tones. In this case, though, he prepared the tool-paths so that the machine would overdraw lighter areas each time. So, if there were 24 levels of luminosity in total, the lightest area would be burnished 24 times. The result of this process, which took nearly a month of continuous burnishing, is shown in Figure 176, the plate for Sarah Reclining.

The resulting image has mezzotint-like qualities, such as the rich, dark tones from which the figure emerges-but the process introduced a number of technical challenges. First. working the plate for that length of time began to harden the surface to the point that it was beginning to crack, and tiny flakes would be dislodged. Also, the threaded rods that move the machine’s headstock up and down began to develop wear from the unusually prolonged repetition. While the problem of material breakdown could be addressed through tool-paths, the issue of machine wear was more problematic.

Figure 177. Large ShopBot router at Mike Lyon’s studio in Kansas City. The router is set up to hold an ink pen that is raised and lowered via a custom solenoid headstock designed by Lyon. Image courtesy of the artist.

Regarding the unforeseen challenges posed by integrating CNC machines into his practice, Lyon remarked, ‘You really have to have confidence that you’ll be able to solve engineering problems when they arise.’: This is certainly the case with Lyon’s latest series of portraits-enormous, larger-than-life size pen and ink drawings-which utilize the ShopBot. For this series, he developed a solenoid-driven pen that allows him to create hundreds of thousands of Z-axis movements, but without wear and tear on the rack and pinion, an innovation that came about specifically because of his experiences with creating plates for mezzotint-like images. These enormous portraits, which require miles of drawn lines to complete, would not be possible without this. Though he plays it down, Lyon’s ability to use his engineering expertise in conjunction with his art practice provides him with the ability to create artworks with CNC technologies without becoming too enchanted with the means of production. This sober perspective is critical. As soon as one sees that the ShopBot is no more or less important than the brayer or burin, etching press or etching tank, work in the studio can uncompromisingly focus on the ideas embedded in the artwork itself. Lyon’s facility with his tools. and the years of experience spent honing them to his needs, certainly provide him with that clarity.

Figure 178. Mike Lyon, Joel, 2011. Size: 221 x 114 cm (87 x 45 in.). Drawing in black ink and white ink on heavy watercolor paper tinted with quinacridone and carbon black pigments. Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 179. Detail of Joel by Mike Lyon, 2011. Drawing in black ink and white ink on heavy watercolor paper tinted with quinacridone and carbon black pigments. Image courtesy of the artist.

PURCHASE POST-DIGITAL PRINTMAKING BOOK ON AMAZON.COM

Cambodia 3, 2012, 32 x 61 inches, watercolor with pen and ink on heavy watercolor paper

detail

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkikqBoim2s

the drawing in progress on May 10, about 72 hours prior to completion

Cambodia 2, 45 x 85 inches, completed May 13, 2012, pen and ink drawing in white ink and black ink on pigment-tinted paper

detail of center of drawing

detail from top center of drawing

detail from upper left of drawing

Choeung Ek, about 17 km south of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, is the best-known of the sites known as The Killing Fields, where the Khmer Rouge regime executed about 17,000 people between 1975 and 1979. Mass graves containing 8,895 bodies were discovered at Choeung Ek after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime. Many of the dead were former political prisoners who were kept by the Khmer Rouge in their Tuol Sleng detention center.
Today, Choeung Ek is a memorial, marked by a Buddhist stupa. The stupa has acrylic glass sides and is filled with more than 5,000 human skulls. Some of the lower levels are opened during the day so that the skulls can be seen directly. Many have been shattered or smashed in.

The young men and women whose remains are the subject of my recent drawing were imprisoned by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia during the late 1970′s. Confined in S-21 Tuol Sleng detention center, people were shackled like sardines in what had once been classrooms, tortured for months (sometimes years) in the most ghastly ways imaginable, brutally murdered, and buried in shallow stinking graves in the countryside just outside Phnom Penh.  Of the more than 20,000 sent to S-21, only seven survived.

excerpted from “US intervention in Cambodia: from bombs to ballots“ by David Roberts, Senior Lecturer in International Politics, University of Ulster dw.roberts@ulster.ac.uk, Covert Action Quarterly Fall 1997:

There was little room for irony in Washington this summer as Congress puffed itself up with outrage over possible foreign influence in the US electoral process. “The American people have the right to know” intoned Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM), “and we have the highest duty to determine whether there was a concerted plan by foreign governments to infiltrate our electoral process.”

Applied to the US, the rhetoric is melodramatic and hypocritical; used to describe the US role in Cambodia, it is glaringly inadequate. The legacy of US interference is written in blood and misery across the map of Cambodia. Although the bombing has stopped, and the world has a “new order,” the US is still interfering in the domestic affairs of this small nation. And elections are only one part of the strategy.

On the surface, the recent ouster of Norodom Ranariddh, the leader of the UNCINPEC (National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful, and Cooperative Cambodia) royalists, by his coalition partner Hun Sen, head of the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), seems a straightforward enough violation of democratic practice; it also appears to have little relationship to Washington. But the surface in Cambodia is shallow indeed and the roots of this coup lie deep and entangled with a history of US interference spanning almost three decades.

Although the US weapons of choice are now dollars and ballots, in the 1970s, they were bombs and troops. Then, as the war in Vietnam spilled across its borders, the US under Nixon and Kissinger launched “secret” and murderous air attacks on Cambodia’s eastern border in its effort to wipe out Vietnamese communists. When revelations of this violation of a neutral country reached the anti-war movement and sparked public protest, the US temporarily halted the bombings and deployed a covert army of ground troops. But as soon as the political heat died, the bombers flew again and rained down the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on a country which had no quarrel with the US.

Apart from killing innumerable Cambodians and returning parts of Cambodia to the Stone Age, Washington’s military and political intervention had other, long-lasting consequences. In March 1970, just after US ground troops invaded, a ClA-backed coup deposed King Norodom Sihanouk. His pro-Washington replacement, Lon Nol, who ruled from 1970 to 1975, was a weak, corrupt despot rejected by much of the nation. Antagonism to his regime, outrage over US bombing, and the starvation and destruction which flowed from Washington’s policies in Southeast Asia breathed new life into Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge. From the jungle where it had been banished by Sihanouk in the 1960s, the movement rapidly built popular support.

Out of the inferno of civil war and foreign invasion, the Khmer Rouge and its leader, Pol Pot, gained strength and in April 1975 took power. Declaring “Year Zero,” they closed down Cambodia and began dragging the country back to a pre-industrial era devoid of the foreign influence they blamed for the country’s woes. In the process, Pol Pot split Cambodian society in two. His “new” people were those the regime distrusted: educated professionals who had lived cozy lives in Phnom Penh and members of the former government. Corrupt and corrupting, they were executed by the thousands. The second group, the “old,” were rural peasants whose lives were romantically seen as hard but honest and who were to be more trusted because they were uncorrupted by modern city life and Western influences. To prevent their contamination, Pol Pot ordered the abolition of memory. Money and medicine were abolished. The national bank was blown up. The library, repository of much of Cambodia’s precious history, was turned into a pig-sty The Catholic cathedral was razed to the ground, and Cambodia’s ancient religion of Buddhism was outlawed.

Then came the genocide. Under the pretext of US bombings, the Khmer Rouge emptied the capital, Phnom Penh, which was swollen with refugees. Leaving behind homes and possessions, up to 1.5 million people were expelled to a countryside devastated by “secret” bombing, invasion, and five years of civil war between the troops of Lon Nol and Pol Pot. One journalist at the time described the evacuation as the greatest caravan of human misery the world has ever seen.”

In the three years and eight months that followed, Cambodia entered the darkest period of its history and experienced a unique, horrific auto-genocide. Looking to explain why its impractical, flawed, and intellectually bankrupt revolution had gone asunder, the Khmer Rouge, like so many before them created “enemies within” and accused its terrified victims of being CIA, KGB, or sometimes both. People suspected of “crimes” against the Khmer Rouge organization, who perhaps wore glasses or spoke foreign languages, were often sent to a small converted school in Phnom Penh where Pol Pot’s henchmen extracted false confessions and imposed sentences. Of the 20,000 who entered Tuol Sleng, seven survived. One, an artist, Heng Nath, whose work appears on this page, painted recollections of cruelty that beggar belief. The images haunt the tragic, dilapidated school: Scorpions are coaxed from a box next to a woman as her nipples are pinched with pliers; a man suspended up side down in water is electrocuted; prisoners are forced to eat their own excrement. The reign of terror, slavery, overwork and starvation that spread throughout the country claimed between one and two million lives.

Helping Pol Pot

With the regime enjoying tacit economic, political and military support from China, it looked as if the horror would end only when there was no one left alive to blame. By 1977, even as Cambodia descended into chaos, some of Pol Pot’s troops along the border with Vietnam had been sporadically murdering, looting, and raping Vietnamese villagers. Then, on Christmas Day 1978, Pol Pot’s vast and grisly social experiment came to an abrupt end. The People’s Army of Vietnam, in response to growing attacks by Khmer Rouge Eastern Zone cadre, entered Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge was by this stage in such disarray that the People’s Army, despite being unprepared for such an operation, pushed Pol Pot’s “army of genocide” to Thailand on Cambodia’s western border, and deposed the brutal dictator.

With assistance from Vietnam, Pen Sovann and Heng Samrin became heads of Cambodia’s defacto government until Hun Sen took over in 1985. At 35, he was the youngest prime minister in the world and was supported politically and economically by Hanoi. Vietnamese civil administrators quickly withdrew, but elements of the army remained to help defend the population from Pol Pot’s forces. The People’s Revolutionary Party of Kampuchea (PRPK- later the CPP) inherited a country in ruin; the nation lacked the most basic infrastructure-money, health care and transportation networks had all but ceased to exist; most of the country’s human resources, doctors, teachers, engineers had been slaughtered or died of malnutrition and overwork in the agrarian “experiment” gone grotesquely wrong.

But over the next decade, rather than provide desperately needed aid, the West and China, led by Washington, withheld assistance and instead pumped aid, money, and arms, often through Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) conduits, to the Khmer Rouge and its newfound “allies” in the refugee camps in Thailand. Also withheld was formal recognition and a UN seat, without which Cambodia could not get the development aid so crucial to the mammoth task of rebuilding from the ruins of Year Zero. To this date, it retains the ignominious distinction of being the only country in the world to have been denied development aid by the UN. Instead, the world body surrendered to superpower realpolitic while thousands more Cambodians died in floods and famine.

Not satisfied with an aid embargo, Washington continued to demonize and punish both Cambodia and Vietnam. Humiliated by losing to a Third World peasant guerrilla army, Washington saw its chance to extend the war and elicit revenge by isolating Vietnam and punishing poor Cambodia, whose only mistake, as award winning British journalist John Pilger once wrote, was having liberators from the wrong side of the Cold War.

US Intervention

For more than a decade, the Khmer Rouge, protected by Western and Chinese antagonism to the Hun Sen government, continued to wage guerrilla war from its bases on the Thai border. Then, with the end of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and Vietnam backed away from supporting Hun Sen. The Khmer Rouge, however, supplemented continuing international support from the US, China and Thailand with extensive logging and gem mining from its resource-rich control zones on its western border with Thailand. A tortuous peace process-originally blocked by secret US diplomacy because the deal didn’t suit Washington’s interests-resulted in the establishment of the most comprehensive, intrusive, and expensive UN peacekeeping operation to date. From November 1991, the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) employed over 22,000 people including more than 6,000 civilians, and carried out staggeringly successful elections against enormous odds in a hostile, complex, and demanding environment. About a month before the elections, amid claims of UN partisanship, the Khmer Rouge withdrew its participation in the elections. Nonetheless, the polling took place from May 23 to 28, 1993, against a backdrop of intimidation and threats of violence by Pol Pot and his guerrillas.

The charge that elements of the UN were partisan was accurate, but the victim was not the Khmer Rouge. The October 1991 Paris Peace Accords that paved the way for the giant peacekeeping force had been skewed from the beginning. Washington, along with Beijing, had consistently influenced the Accords to marginalize Hun Sen’s CPP, which (in various guises) had controlled Phnom Penh since 1979. Both China and the US also insisted on including the Khmer Rouge in any peace plan. Thus, allegations that the UN and US were trying to exclude the Khmer Rouge neither follows precedent, nor explains the covert political machinations that characterized aspects of the peacekeeping operation.

US intervention in the electoral process itself was multifaceted, although not necessarily coordinated. It was guided by Washington’s desire to extend the Cold War demonization of Vietnam and Cambodia into the post-Cold War order. Since Vietnam-after ousting the genocidal Pol Pot-had helped install the predecessors of the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), Washington extended its animus to Han Sen. While around the world, far worse rulers basked in US warmth, Cambodia became a special target. Again, its involvement was an accident of geography, as it had been in the late 1960s and early 1970s when US bombers illegally flattened its eastern border in pursuit of Vietnamese communists.

The politics of punishment that characterized the 1980s also marked part of the UN peacekeeping operation in Cambodia. Unfortunately, the few official government sources corroborating this agenda do so with tantalizing slips of intention, rather than direct admissions. However, information assembled from a wide variety of non-governmental sources, from researchers and aid workers, and from documents leaked from UNTAC show where, how, and by whom US influence over the Cambodian election process was exerted.

*****

The War On Vietnam Prolonged

… more than two decades of US foreign policy in the region using both covert operations and overt pressure. In the 1980s when all foreign aid to Cambodia was embargoed, the US tried to isolate Phnom Penh and Hanoi, to eliminate the CPP and its political predecessors, and to continue punishing Hanoi. The goal, noted journalist John Pilger, was to sweep “away the last vestiges of Vietnam’s humiliation of the US, with the aim of overseeing a pro-American anti-Vietnamese, IMF-indebted regime in Phnom Penh”

But even more destructive than under mining reconstruction efforts in this war ravaged country were efforts by Washington-with Western complicity and extensive Chinese military and diplomatic aid- to restore the Khmer Rouge to diplomatic credibility and military prowess. US and

Chinese vetoes in the UN Security Council ensured that the Khmer Rouge, and not the de facto regime in Phnom Penh, held Cambodia’s UN seat. Washington also established the Kampuchea Emergency Group and its successor the Kampuchea Working Group which established links with the Khmer Rouge and other groups, and helped funnel information, aid, cash, and weapons 67 Facilitated by representatives who would later join the Info-Ed division in the UN peacekeeping operation, this clandestine operation worked to shore up Pol Pot’s forces.

By consistently supporting Pol Pot and torpedoing regional deals that might have ended the conflict and condemned the Khmer Rouge to isolation and ineffectiveness, the US guaranteed continuing conflict and instability. Meanwhile ClA-led disinformation campaigns ensured that Phnom Penh would remain in near virtual diplomatic, political, and economic isolation for over a decade. And when the end of the Cold War appeared inevitable and the tepid as Raul support for the US and China’s onerous intervention in Cambodia began to wane, Washington, along with its more powerful allies in Beijing, sought to control any peace deal. “The reason for the inventing of the Peace Process ” Vickery reminds us, “was not to marginalize the Khmer Rouge, nor to end a war, but to forestall the danger of a [CPP] victory, or its recognition. The peace deal removed the last of Vietnam’s troops-which had been defending Cambodians from the marauding Khmer Rouge-and ensured that the CPP lost more weapons than the guerrillas. While a 70 percent cut across all parties seemed fair in principle, in practice, the Khmer Rouge could conceal its weapons in remote mountain and jungle hideaways while the government had to surrender its arms stored in garrisons. Even Sihanouk took umbrage, advising Hun Sen to “surrender your worst weapons and give your ill-trained, poorly motivated troops to UNTAC for demobilization because otherwise there will be no balance between you and the Khmer Rouge … [and] there has to be balance before there can be peace.”

Ultimately the plan to destroy the CPP failed, but not for want of trying. The 1993 Cambodian elections suggested strongly that Washington, in pursuit of its foreign policy goals, sabotaged free and fair elections, even when run by the United Nations. Having weakened Phnom Penhs position, and compromised Vietnams sup port for its former allies with promises of “normalization” in return for cooperation, the final stages of the operation to punish both Vietnam and Cambodia were little more than war by other means.

If the hypocrisy was not so appalling, Cambodians might be cheered to hear the halls of the US Congress ring with condemnation of foreign interference in an electoral process. But while the scandal in the US surrounding campaign contributions is mainly a melodrama of political posturing, in Cambodia the result of interference in the electoral process is a tragedy of horrific proportion. The unstable coalition the US and others forced on Cambodia has promoted infighting and crushed development.

Again, the Cambodian people are the losers, victims of policies created thousands of miles away by comfortable bureaucrats who have turned a blind eye to consequences of three decades of devastating interference. In the 1970s, the US anti war movement helped stop the bombing that was surely not a secret from those on whom destruction rained.

In mid-l990, Americans who penetrated the mist of media propaganda demanded that President Bush stop aid to the monsters of Pol Pot’s creation. But while many Americans joined cause with the Cambodian people, Washington embraced the demon of revenge. US cynicism to ward Cambodia and its own people ironically parallels that of the Khmer Rouge during the Pol Pot regime to the Khmer innocents: “Preserve them, no profit. Kill them, no loss.”

 

March 23–October 12, 2012

This exhibition, drawn from works of art in the Kemper Museum’s permanent collection, explores the portrait and the still life as depictions of objects imbued with both personal meaning and wider cultural iconography. The memory of an activity stilled, a hint that someone has perhaps just left the room, is present in the still lifes on view. The portraits depict not just the person, but also the ways in which clothing and objects act as cultural signifiers.

(see “Sarah” drawing original post)