Ahead of AdHoc 20, which will be out next week, we’re sharing the issue’s cover by Black Marble’s Chris Stewart. Black Marble will play at Good Room on June 6 with Body of Light and Public Memory. Stewart had the following to say about the image he made.
I came up with the idea while trying to imagine a votive or funeral arrangement for a certain romanticized (by some, not by me) American experience. The current POTUS ‘brand’ was honed/perfected in the ’70s and ’80s when the existential threat of Communism combined with a relatively prosperous time for the West sort of clarified and simplified American experience for many as a just and invaluable right to pursue individual prosperity.
The piece on this issue’s cover is meant to, from an anthropological point of view, suggest the slow death of that ‘America’ and frame the current political climate as its death rattle. It’s also a last minute attempt to recapture some of its perceived simplicity and security for those that benefited from it the first time around, or with the passage of time misremember it as better than it was.