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Background information
In his out-of-print photo volume 'Goodbye America', Brad FEUERHELM (b.1977) drives us throughout an images sequence on which he activate a destructive process, a target shooting on every kind of 'American dream' decline.
“The images that Brad FEUERHELM collected, smashed, scratched, distressed, destroyed shows the perverse ideological core of American culture in agonising clarity. It is almost as if he were trying to literally tear away the simulacrum in order to expose the 'desert of the real', the void at the heart of the American experiment. In their un—altered form, these photos deliver powerful messages of community, freedom of consumption, and sexual liberation: the American promise that you can 'have it all' by simply surrendering to the authority of America’s ideological culture and its logic of exchange. By negating these liberal narratives he takes aim at the so—called 'American dream' and formulates a fundamentally nihilist politics that rejects the promise of a better tomorrow. This is a politics that shatters the idea of the American epoch, not by questioning whether history has come to an end, but rather by questioning if history ever really began. Perhaps this is his way of saying goodbye to America. His way of leaving a promise land where the milk has soured and the honey has turned to amber. But saying goodbye does not mean that he has left. Leaving is a process that is never complete. The events that structured the need for this book’s political and philosophic intervention will continue to return and haunt the world long after the American empire has turned to dust." (© Anthony Faramelli)
Content
"It’s both true and a cliché to state that the American dream is nightmarish for most of those trapped within its logic. The images in the out-of-print photo volume 'Goodbye America' by Brad FEUERHELM takes this cliché and enlivens it, horrifyingly. He snaps cartoonish and sugary day-to-day symbols of American life – McDonald’s, cheerleading, the hallowed flag itself – then 'activates a destructive process'. The images look torn, burned, overexposed; the effect is extraordinary – imagine an apocalypse visited upon Disneyland. Like the bloody, severed ear of David Lynch’s film 'Blue Velvet', Brad FEUERHELM shows that violence is integral to the American mundane." (© Yard Press, 2016)