The Bohemian Grove
The
Bohemian Grove is a little known exclusive 2000-acre ancient redwood grove in
Monte Rio California (about 70 miles north of San Francisco in Sonoma County)
owned by the San Francisco Bohemian Club. For over 130 years the power elite of
the political, corporate, banking, and military cliques have gathered annually
for two weeks in July to secretly talk, eat, drink and play out clandestine
occult Druidesque rituals in the woods (which includes the sacrificial burning
of a human effigy) while sharing ribald surreptitious pleasures with their
elite peers. This global ruling elite, which meets here under the designation
of Bohemia, forms hidden policy decisions in secrecy and thus outside of the
realm of public scrutiny. The Bohemian Grove retreat has hosted Ronald Reagan,
George H.W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, Bill Clinton, Dick
Cheney, and George W. Bush, among many others. A growing coalition of peace and
social justice groups have worked to expose these powerful hidden escapades,
and this is the impetus behind this series of computer-robotic assisted
paintings as well. Not only do the surreptitious, occult and possibly
compromising activities going on at the Bohemian Grove disgust me as an
egalitarian (as revealed by Alex Jones @ http://www.infowars.com/bg1.html),
but the appropriation of the term Bohemian for this secret club-land infuriates
me twice over. It is insulting to me personally in that my heritage is 100%
Bohemian (all four of my grandparents emigrated to the United States form
Bohemia). Indeed I have met and dined with the King of Bohemia, John
Dobrzenski.
In
addition, as a freedom-loving artist and bon vivant, the more general
definition of bohemian artist equally applies to me, and has been something of
a career identity for me.
Therefore, in the throes of profound disgust, I have created a series of faux-romantic digital paintings that call attention to this secretive private power club, while masking the source photographic imagery I found on the web in viral attacks and viral code. This is so as to obscure the visual recognition of the Bohemian Grove in an encoded abstract occultism of my own.
Joseph
Nechvatal
Summer 2006
The Bohemian Grove Works
each maquette designed for
a 66 x 44 inch
acrylic digital painting on canvas
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