TRIP OUT WITH MICE
Nando Alvarez-Perez at Agatha’s
I planned to go to bed early, but I’ve been staring at a photo of Mickey Mouse wrapped in chains and glowing with ruby red light, trying to figure out what it means. This photo appears on the cover of “Confessions from the Imperial Core,” a small booklet published by Nando Alvarez-Perez in conjunction with his recent exhibition at Agatha’s Studio. You could take a copy home or, like many of us at the opening, cozy up on a sofa and read it right there on the spot. The title refers in part to the show’s peculiar setting: a confession booth at the former Catholic girls’ school where Kyla Kegler and others now share a studio. It was Kegler’s bright idea to turn the two confessionals into exhibition spaces.
At the opening, people take turns going inside the small, windowless room. It’s pretty much the opposite of a white cube, with lots of wood and brown wall-to-wall carpet. Glossy photographs hang on each of the walls. They depict sealed-off, claustrophobic spaces like the one we’re in now: shallow alcoves containing illuminated objects. These scenes feel connected, like they’re all from the same parallel universe of bright red light. I’m not sure whether to call these images still lives — because they document arrangements of everyday things — or icons, because each features a central object of reverence: Mickey Mouse, JFK, Money, an iPad. The work seems to reference both traditions, along with a whole lot of other stuff. Reference and association are the name of the game here. There’s even a reference library of books arranged in a row on the floor as you first enter the booth. Each title is sandwiched between a prison bed sheet and a Polaroid photograph. I learn later that the books are the source material behind both the exhibition and essay.
Nando Alvarez-Perez, The Project for a New American Century and the Great Man Theory of History (detail), 2021. UV print on aluminum, polaroids, wood veneer panel, finishing hardware, 15 3/4 x 31 3/4 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Nando Alvarez-Perez.
Not all artists write. That’s what I’m thinking at the opening: how unusual it is for an artist to write something other than an artist statement. Instead of explaining the photographs and objects that make up his installation, Alvarez-Perez decided to write an essay about conspiracy theories and why we should take them seriously. It reads like a manifesto. By contrast, the installation is slow and shy to unfold, like a puzzling dream or a crime scene. It reminds me of Adam Curtis’s films, where atmosphere and tone are given as much weight as “the facts.” All of Alvarez-Perez’s photographs strike me as attempts to materialize in a less utilitarian and more seductive language the ideas developed in the text; to show us what the imperial core actually looks and feels like. In Alvarez-Perez’s words: “When we look at the history of globalization, the growth of the military-intelligence apparatus, the hideous stories of Jeffrey Epstein and his powerful friends, the emergence of QAnon, and the events of January sixth, we are looking at different aspects, on different scales and on different timelines, of the same thing.”
Right now, late at night, I’m looking for a way into this image of a mouse, a way to write about Alvarez-Perez’s whole “thing”: the art and the essay. What I’m noticing is that both feel weirdly impenetrable, like I can’t get past the hard, shiny surface of this photo to reach the mouse . . . or crack open the kaleidoscope of references laid out in the text. So I’m just gonna wing it. I’m gonna trip out on this mouse and see where it goes. I’m gonna ask “What if?” and get funky with it. Because I think that’s what Alvarez-Perez’s work gives the rest of us permission to do: to trip out on the dark visual artifacts — and the failed magic — of American neoliberalism. Here goes:
What’s this mouse made of? It looks like concrete. I’m used to seeing Mickey Mouse in full color, not as a chunk of gray cement. Apparently things are stripped of their color when they pass into the imperial core. Or maybe the only thing left to see here, the last remaining asset in the hollowed-out middle of the USA, is a cheap lawn decoration that somebody tossed to the curb. That’s where Alvarez-Perez found Mickey, in his neighbor’s trash. Isn’t it sad to throw away a bird bath? Or is it a wishing well? Or is it a urinal? It looks like Mickey might be about to pee, or maybe he’s getting ready to jerk off into a bucket that’s already full of milky liquid. Did I mention this photo is hanging on the “priest” side of the confession booth?
So, wait, is Mickey Mouse supposed to be Jeffrey Epstein burning in hell (but never testifying in court) for his sins? Epstein haunts Alvarez-Perez’s whole project even though he doesn’t appear in any of the photos. Sex is similarly insinuated but never shown in these images, which look like they were all shot in the same cheap motel room. Then there’s the strange stack of objects installed on the “penitent” side of the booth, including: a bedsheet, a sci-fi novel about sex slavery written by Donald Barr, and a photograph of a painting of Bill Clinton wearing what looks like Monica Lewinsky’s famous blue dress.
I heard once that great paintings contain all three primary colors. There’s no yellow in Mickey’s closed-off world, just red and blue, but he’s not alone on the wall. He’s part of a larger work called The Project for the New American Century and The Great Man Theory of History. To his right are fifteen yellowish Polaroids arranged in a grid. From a distance they remind me of Mike Kelley’s ectoplasm photographs: bursts of eerie whiteness that look like clouds, balls of cotton, heavenly bodies, or ejaculate (you pick). You have to get up close to see that half these Polaroids repeat the same image of the World Trade Center exploding on September 11. Interspersed are three unique shots of 1) the January 6 attack on the Capitol, 2) the filing cabinet broken into at the Democratic National Committee’s Watergate headquarters in 1972, and 3) at the center of it all, a blurry collage of presidents’ faces that looks like a Freemason made it.
Nando Alvarez-Perez, The Project for a New American Century and the Great Man Theory of History, 2021. UV print on aluminum, polaroids, wood veneer panel, finishing hardware, 15 3/4 x 31 3/4 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Nando Alvarez-Perez.
At least I think they’re presidents. These faces could also represent the men (George Bush, Bill Kristol, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and others) associated with the 1997 founding of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC): a think tank dedicated to preserving US global dominance. A quarter of the way into this new century, we’re familiar with the wars and their aftermaths that are PNAC’s legacy. In his essay, Alvarez-Perez asks whether these consequences were unintended blowback or part of the plan all along. He likewise questions the “Great Man” theory of history, which would have us believe that idiosyncratic individuals (rather than groups of actors with shared economic interests) bring about world events. As Alvarez-Perez writes in a set of unpublished notes related to the installation: “9/11 is still chalked up in the mainstream media primarily to the burning hatred of one Islamic fundamentalist, living out of a cave.” Is that who Mickey’s supposed to be?
Speaking of blowback, there’s a cheap plastic fan mounted to the wall directly above Mickey and the Polaroids. Kegler tells me the fan was already here in the booth, and that Alvarez-Perez decided not just to leave it where it was but to turn it on. Its hypnotic whir adds a truly weird dimension to the experience of looking at these images and considering the cyclical patterns behind the events they document. As the essay points out, these events remain “inadequately explained” while accounts that question the official narrative are “either forgotten about or dismissed out of hand as ‘conspiracy theories.’”
Even though he’s stuck to the same panel, Mickey’s got his back turned on all this, on all eight World Trade Centers. He doesn’t want to know about the unknown unknowns. He doesn’t want to look at Alvarez-Perez’s photo of JFK with a missing face or think about what Jeffrey Epstein knew before his alleged suicide. Mickey doesn’t have time to connect these dots. He’s too busy watching cartoons. I ask Alvarez-Perez at the opening if the mouse in his photo refers to the Walt Disney movie Fantasia (1941). He replies: “I’m not sure which mouse it is.” This answer cracks me up, and I write it down in my phone, knowing it will make a good title for something.
Nando Alvarez-Perez, Bed sheet Materialism, 2021. White T180 twin jail bed sheets, book, polaroid, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Nando Alvarez-Perez.
In Fantasia's Sorcerer’s Apprentice sequence, a powerful wizard leaves Mickey Mouse alone to perform the mundane task of fetching buckets of water. Mickey decides to cut corners by enchanting a nearby broom to do the work for him. Except Mickey isn’t a wizard by any stretch. He’s just a mouse toying with magic he can’t control. That’s why all hell breaks loose. The broom can’t be stopped. It begins multiplying itself, over and over, until there’s a renegade army of brooms bringing in so much water that the place begins to flood. Lucky for Mickey, the real wizard returns just in time to stop the madness and the mouse gets away with a mild scolding.
Marx and Engels summed up the failed magic of capitalism with the phrase “All that is solid melts into air.” They were describing the inherent instability of a system that regards wealth accumulated without productive labor (i.e., by cutting corners) as the highest virtue. You can read the full quote from The Communist Manifesto right here in the confession booth. Alvarez-Perez scanned a portion of the text off the screen of an iPad and hung the image on the wall opposite Mickey and the plastic fan. It’s hard to make out all the words because there’s a competing image of a sunset reflecting off the scratched-up screen of the device. This visual noise obscures the passage’s hopeful conclusion: that with enough exposure to capitalism’s “everlasting uncertainty and agitation,” people would “at last be compelled to face with sober senses [their] real conditions of life”
Confessions from the Imperial Core, 2022, installation view, Agatha’s. Photo: Nando Alvarez-Perez.
It hasn’t worked out this way. Far from inducing sobriety, neoliberalism has introduced ever more intoxicating entertainments for the masses — like iPads — while incentivizing elites to pursue increasingly complex schemes to game the system. The 2008 financial crisis is one example where the spoils of a Fantasia-style gambling spree-turned-catastrophe were privatized and the losses were socialized. Democrats and Republicans alike repeated the phrase “too big to fail” to justify the bailout, as if failure was a bug and not a feature of this system. Alvarez-Perez’s essay argues that we should follow the money and call bullshit on two-party oligarchy.
A large amount of money is on display in the first photo we see upon entering the booth. It floats in an otherworldly haze of red light. Behind this crass display of wealth is what looks like a dignified allegorical still life featuring still more allegorical images from the past. I’m not sure what to do with this bottomless pit of symbols. It’s easier to focus on the bright red cash. Or the title: It’s Not Magic, It’s Money. You could say that about The Walt Disney Company as a global enterprise or the QAnon conspiracy: another bottomless pit of symbols that masses of Americans became committed to deciphering. Wasn’t there an economic incentive behind the spread of so much nonsense? It wasn’t just Alex Jones and lesser-known “influencers” who made real money off online ads and Disney-style merchandising efforts. The QAnon myth also helped solve one of the Republican party’s biggest problems: how to persuade US citizens to vote against their own economic interests, and when that failed, to dispute the election results and storm the Capitol.
Is this the plot that Mickey’s cooking up in his cauldron? Is he supposed to be Ron Watkins, dropping Q bombs from the Philippines and enriching his family’s business in the process? Was Ron really the wizard behind the curtain of QAnon, or is he just a dude whose computer skills and sociopathic tendencies got him mixed up in a much larger plot? Does it matter what’s real and what’s fake? I was surprised to learn that Alvarez-Perez made all but one of these images without Photoshop. The tableaux really existed in front of his camera. The illusion of floating money was achieved not with digital magic, but with careful lighting and a clear acrylic surface. The faux wood paneling that frames these photographs was found in Alvarez-Perez’s attic. As he reflects in his notes, the material “seemed a fitting surface for this content: it’s a sort of overt lie, a lie without pretense, a lie that’s not even pretending it’s a lie but which is still lying to you.”
Alvarez-Perez’s essay accuses Biden-style Democrats and the mainstream liberal media of a similar travesty. They lie to our faces by conflating absurdist QAnon-style conspiracies with “far spookier and more tangible” theories of where elite power comes from and how it operates:
We have reached a point in American cultural life where we’re constantly presented with a sort of flattened negative ontology of conspiracy theories: all conspiracy theories equally exist, and all are equally false. In a media environment saturated by quikbake op-eds, reporting that is either outrageously lazy or purposefully deceitful, and in which many Americans, frankly, accept fictional depictions of historic events as factual ones, this has become an increasingly easy deception to pull off. But when you have John Oliver telling you that it’s a conspiracy theory that the CIA was involved with the assassination of JFK, and Washington Post “quizzes” declaring, incoherently, that 9/10ths of Americans “believe” in one conspiracy theory or another — conflating the QAnon hoax with the reality of Jeffrey Epstein — we have a word for that which has been in annoying overuse but which is, here, perfectly apt: gaslighting.
Is this Mickey Mouse’s situation? Is he an ordinary citizen stuck in an incomprehensible world where the confusion between what’s real and fake is a source of fascination and trauma? Or is Mickey Mouse just an artist searching for a new way to represent the darkness of our times? Maybe he’s torn between his revolutionary politics and the pleasure he gets from lighting up allegorical scenes in his studio. I think Alvarez-Perez made a sane choice with this exhibition to do both: to write persuasively about his political views AND to make some art. That essay gave us something more concrete than a mouse to focus on and argue about at Agatha’s first-ever exhibition. Let’s hope it becomes a tradition.
by Julia Dzwonkoski
Julia Dzwonkoski is a painter based in Buffalo, NY. Her recent work looks at contemporary life through the lens of ghosts, stars, and inventions for the end-times.
