S M I L E R S

S M I L E R S presents its third exhibition, REPORT FROM NORI MOUNTAIN, inspired by a notoriously fictitious document published in New York in 1967.

Participants were reached through a combination of direct invitations, requests to suggest another artist in one’s stead, and selections from a first experiment with an open call (posted on April Fool’s day, not coincidentally). All were, however, provided the same emoji-infested prompt, which proved only slightly less confusing when supplemented by a few sentences of what S M I L E R S was seeking in its so-called “transmissions”. What came back through this self-imposed static was brilliantly motley—some of the works (from those tapped by others) arrived without making prior contact with their makers. Tremendous gratitude is therefore due to these Believers who have brought to the table a strange and fantastic array of creations in various media. Personal interpretations of the science fiction genre come together in the spirit of a traditional science fair: a showcase of individual talent while ultimately—communal. Stated at the welcome risk of undermining its curatorial principles, this group show is the visual product of weird communication and wild feats of mutual trust.

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At the height of the war in Vietnam, a “top-secret report" surfaced (staged as a leak from the Kennedy Administration) with the findings of an investigation into what would happen to the United States if “a condition of permanent peace” were to take hold. The document postulated that the end of global wars would mean the destruction of the nation’s military-driven economy and society as it was meant to be—fearful and complacent to reside within the familiar parameters of government policy. To generate the same conditions that had kept citizens in line, diabolical intervention would be necessary, including but not limited to: deliberate pollution of the atmosphere and water supply, phony UFO scares, eugenics, and population suppression. In truth, it was not the work of an authentic “Secret Study Group”, but of authors Leonard C. Lewin and Victor Navasky with help from the economist and diplomat John Kenneth Galbraith. Prescient, rigorous, technical, and redundant, their “report” was so expert in its satire that it triggered a wave of paranoia that has respawned numerously in the decades that followed in the form of conspiracy theories, secondary hoaxes, extremist ideologies, and other dangerously oblivious misconstructions of clever leftist banter.

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In Vietnam-era America, the moment was ripe for the same fear-mongering that the anti-war hoax sought to criticize, and opportunistic right-wing agendaists seized upon the proliferation of absurd misinformation. The text’s ironic origins and incendiary language have been further decontextualized in a new age of internet-powered echo chambers, and its legacy is a cautionary tale. Here, treated with some levity, it serves as S M I L E R S’ chosen work of SCI-FI (a choice also asked of each participant to accompany their transmissions) in deploying this project, which became difficult to control and altogether irreversible once unleashed. This was the point: to let artists’ feedback inform the exhibition environment, even if the original message mutated as the pseudo-viral game of telephone played out. Transcription errors and misinterpretations make for a more interesting specimen.

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It is worth adding to this story that the document, whose full title is REPORT FROM IRON MOUNTAIN: ON THE POSSIBILITY AND DESIRABILITY OF PEACE, is named after a real decommissioned iron mine in the Hudson Valley of New York that was purchased in the early 1950s by a man who made his fortune growing mushrooms and needed a dark place to do so. When the mushroom market proved moldy, he saw a business opportunity in the anxiety fomented by the Cold War in offering to safeguard corporate information from nuclear attack. The mine then became an enormous subterranean facility for a document storage company (that also kept sensitive government records, adding further plausibility to the spoofed version), which in 1951 adopted the name Iron Mountain Atomic Storage Corporation. More recently, the company (now simply Iron Mountain) has expanded into high-value art storage and has absorbed several smaller, long-established art storage companies. It is amusing (or disturbing, although certainly a now common instance where reality has the makings for a decent SCI-FI plot…) to imagine an underground stronghold of untold cultural treasures hidden for eternity within a villainously named former mushroom kingdom.

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Still underground yet for public consumption, an exceptional group of artists from around the globe and at all stages of their careers gather at the base of Nori Mountain, and “in these uncertain times”, the report from S M I L E R S is one of hope, joy, humor, and an abundance of good will towards a space which has been elevated by the artists and minds that have lent themselves to this unusual venture.

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