A New Corner of Hell by Daniel Reeves
The last time I used an M-16 was during a nightmare ambush on January 20th 1968 along the Cua Viet River just below the DMZ in Vietnam. Our Marine Lieutenant platoon leader and 12 other young Marines were cut down by a roaring fusillade of automatic weapons and rocket propelled grenade fire in a few very long and terrible hours. We were caught out by a reinforced NVA regiment hunkered down among the mounds of a cemetery in a scene even Dante could not have conjured. I have held these 13 lost boys in my heart for almost 55 years as if frozen in time. Their lives became memory and I somehow lived on. I will be 75 years old later this year and sadly it just does not go away. All of these Marines were, for better or worse, combatants, and they were doing what Marines were trained for. Still the ways in which they died were way beyond nasty and brutish. I honor their spirit each and every day with a great and sorrowful tenderness.
It is vitally important to realize however, that they were not school children terrified and torn apart in classrooms or retired postal workers bleeding out on a supermarket floor, not worshippers in temples, mosques, and churches, or families enjoying music concerts. It is almost completely beyond credible when we are forced to witness the thousand other horror scenes normal Americans face as lives are wasted daily by gun violence in this country. Ordinary citizens are swept away under a broadside of raging insanity and a tidal wave of blind hatred.
The rock hard and undeniable truth is that assault weapons are a form of gun fetish cancer and have absolutely no place in our culture if we truly aspire to be fully human.
Sadly, we seem to be well on our sleep walking way to making a new corner of hell for our families and loved ones in every place and way possible. The folly and tragedy of this chronic loss sickens me. I simply cannot understand why and how we continue to tolerate such madness and unbounded stupidity.
Artist’s Statement
From impassioned indictments of America's culture of violence to soulful lamentations of spiritual loss, Daniel Reeves' body of work constitutes an important elaboration of video poetics. Reeves began working in video in 1979. Traumatic combat experiences in Vietnam were the driving force behind his early videotapes. Early work like Body Count 1980 developed from preparatory work in sculpture, photography and film, and culminated in the classic work, Smothering Dreams (1981), which won three Emmy awards and is included in over 30 major museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Subsequent tapes refined this work's use of poetic text and structure, addressing inhumanity, the problems of violence, dispossession and social upheaval with a highly lyrical sensibility, and from an outlook informed by philosophy, poetry and metaphysics. These later works owe much to extensive travels throughout Asia. In outlining Reeves' video poetics, Amida (1983) and A Mosaic for the Kali Yuga (1986) can be seen as forming bookends in the exploration of formal strategies, arriving at their epilogue texts through elegantly precise visualizations that echo the illuminations and exigencies of the world views being addressed. Amida's observations are entirely concrete, while Mosaic's media-weaving employs sophisticated image-processing technology.
Since 1988 Reeves has been focusing on new media projects, digital paintings, and video installations. The videotapes Ganapati/A Spirit in the Bush (1986) and Sombra a Sombra (1988), along with Sabda (1984), occupy the central ground in Reeves' body of work. In various ways these tapes were informed by poets like Federico Garcia Lorca, Cesar Vallejo and Kabir. In this way, Reeves helps us to see according to what we hear, creating elegant realizations and rhythms that inspirit the contemplations of this companion poetry. Reeves was born in 1948 in Washington, D.C. He received a B.A. and an A.S. from Ithaca College where he studied under the Veterans Administration’s disabled veterans rehabilitation program. Reeves was awarded the Silver Star Medal and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry for conspicuous gallantry while in the Pensacola naval hospital for 8 months. For more information, please visit Reeves’ website.