“HistoryOf.Golf”
By Jonah King
Please view in fullscreen here.
HistoryOf.Golf is a web project containing video, sound and text.
To create the video element, Jonah King collaborated with California residents Joseph Miller and Richard Milanesi, two self-proclaimed avid golfers and Donald Trump supporters. King invited Miller and Milanesi to play a game of golf across the expansive western Mojave desert, which King documented. The documentation from the collaboration ultimately became this three-channel video. How the West Was Won shares the title of the 1962 ultra-widescreen American western film, which opens with this narration: “This land has a name today and is marked on maps. But the names and the marks and the land all had to be won. Won from nature and from primitive man”. This film and unnerving quote about westward expansion contextualizes the entire project— King’s ultra-wide video directly references the format of the original film, but in the place of gallant cowboys trailblazing western trails there are two older white men, in casual sports attire, playing an eternal round of golf in the middle of the Mojave Desert—a foreboding foreshadow of the consequences of climate change. Like two ghosts, the golfers seem to be forever destined to haunt the barren landscape, not with rattling chains, but with swinging golf clubs.
An audio button triggers a sound recording of the two men simply exchange dad jokes to one another. This piece is an intimate view of the two golfers who do not speak throughout the video. Once again King uses humor to probe at something more substantial. After a chuckle at a few jokes, the artist challenges the viewer to consider the essence of the jokes—what are the jokes about? Who is dominated in the jokes? From what social class are the jokes told from? and so on. The seemingly innocent telling of jokes can reveal cultural divides that King connects back to the game of golf.
Scroll down to view an epic timeline that contextualizes climate change, westward expansion, colonialism, politics, and even the creation of the artist’s own artwork through the chronology of golf. Though in chronological order, the events King features in the timeline oscillate among a variety of geological and cultural proportions. Starting from the shifting of ancient tectonic plates in 200 million BCE and ending at 2020 when Donald Trump learns of his presidential loss to Joe Biden while golfing in Virginia, King highlights everything from the invention of golf, Christopher Columbus, the movement of Native Americans throughout the west, the Declaration of Independence to the American Civil War, the production of the original film How the West Was Won, the birth and meeting of the golfers that are featured in the artist’s film sharing the same title, Tiger Woods, and the most recent California wildfires. The History of Golf is a poignant statement about the brevity of human existence and domination veiled by the artist’s cunning use of humor and coincidence.
Also inside HistoryOf.Golf is an option to purchase a wearable artwork – M.D.F.A. Hat. The slogan “MAKE DESERT FOREST AGAIN”, on dark green fabric, subverts the infamous Trump slogan to campaign to “green the desert”, a geoengineering solution to climate collapse. All profits are donated to Mojave Desert Land Trust and Native American Rights Fund.
