The following is an excerpt form the book SIGNS, a collaboration between Texas-born writer and academic Barry Vacker and German photographer Peter Granser. The book was published in 2008 by Hatje-Cantz and the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Photography.

    ”BIG BANG THEORY
    YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING
    -GOD”
    — Highway billboard in SIGNS

In 1968, Apollo 8 orbited the moon, and the space age crashed in Texas, that Lone Star state of America.

Four decades later, Peter Granser captured the cultural entropy of the crash, intuitively perceiving the cosmic conditions that radiated from the moon down upon Mission Control, then from Houston across America and around the world, and now well into the new millennium. If there is a single photograph in SIGNS that expresses these conditions, an image that perhaps stands above the rest, then it is the solitary billboard standing next to an empty highway in Texas, with white letters pasted on a black background stating that God considers the big bang to be a cosmic joke. On that billboard and in this book are the Signs of existential emptiness and cosmic loneliness—with the dreams of the space age shrinking before the discoveries of the big bang, leaving creationist minds to confront the expanding universe in hopes of consoling six billion people, alone and adrift, in a galaxy of two hundred billion stars, in a cosmos of one hundred billion galaxies. Lone stars, lost amidst the big bang—these are the postmillennial conditions displayed in the photographs of Peter Granser.

Photo: Peter Granser / from the book SIGNS published by Hatje-Cantz

SIGNS is not about the Texas of myth and macho, nor is it about the Texas of modern capital and postmodern spectacle, the worlds of skyscrapers, suburbia, computer circuitry, celebrity film festivals, oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, and space shuttles guided by Mission Control. There are no images of heroic and historic Texas, the people who won the battle of the Alamo in San Antonio and founded a republic at San Jacinto, before reducing their autonomous ambitions in becoming a mere state within the democracy of America. There is no celebration of the contemporary ethnic and cultural diversity, especially of the Hispanic culture that has long-permeated the food, fashion, music, and aesthetic sensibilities of Texas. Also absent from Signs is Hollywood Texas, the frontier cowboys of The Searchers and the cowboy oilmen of Giant and Dallas. The only images that reference the myth of the wild west are the cattle drive mural on the side of a building and the metal tipi serving as a highway rest area for Texans on the move, both of which are appropriate because Texas culture has long since evolved past cowboys herding cattle and killing native peoples. After all, Texas now has the death penalty to regularly exercise its sense of frontier justice. Though the Texans shown in this book may cheer for the Longhorns, Cowboys, or Rockets, they are not cultural or economic stars in the sprawling metropolises of Austin, Dallas, and Houston, those scenes of high tech, high fashion, and high oil prices. In Signs we do not see big hair or big boots, but we do see big ideas, or perhaps the absence of big ideas in the erosion of secular and scientific culture, the entropy that makes possible creationist museums and evangelical presidents.

The universe in SIGNS is more than big skies and empty spaces, which are so abundant in Texas, especially as you move westward across the state. If there is a fundamental sense of orientation for the subjects in Signs, it is that these citizens are lost, not merely lost in the big spaces beneath the big skies of Texas or lost in the deep conspiracies in Dealey Plaza, but cosmically adrift amidst the space-time parameters of postmillennial culture, having lost—or never found—their existential coordinates for the new century, the new beginning of the next thousand years. Looking away from us, gazing at something out-of-frame, it seems as if these people are staring into nothingness, into the cultural and existential voids of an empirical universe beyond their understanding. And it was in the big bang universe that Apollo 8 crashed in Texas, precisely as it was addressing the world via Mission Control in Houston, while yearning for another “Mission Control” in the heavens.

CREATIONIST MUSEUMS AND CONSPIRACY THEORIES

    ”The FBI did it.”
    — Spray-painted on the fence behind the Grassy Knoll

Peter Granser intuitively tapped into a deep parallel that plagues American culture: the growth of creationism and conspiracy theories. In contrast to the massive megachurch, there is the rather small Creation Evidence Museum, its size consistent with the lack evidence supporting any deity. In JFK Assassination Site, we see two men in Dealey Plaza plotting the trajectory of the single bullet theory with a single finger to the back of the head. The second image of JFK Assassination Site reveals the spatial and cultural nothingness (or emptiness) rising from the “X” in Dealey Plaza. We see the fence behind the famous Grassy Knoll, the fence that conspiracy theorists believe hid the second gunman, the one who fired the fatal head shot into President Kennedy.

Over the decades, these labyrinthine conspiracy theories have morphed into massive creation myths, not unlike those in the theologies of the world. Creation myths function like conspiracy theories, in that secret unseen forces are shaping the world, and this mythos gives meaning and purpose to the believers, for whom the cosmic and cultural universes would be utterly chaotic. See table below.

PARALLELS IN CREATION MYTHS AND JFK CONSPIRACY THEORIES

Creation myths and conspiracy theories both begin with a cosmic or cultural nothingness, with a void or gap in meaning that is allegedly important for grasping the events of the material or cultural worlds. Within this mentality, a void in meaning cannot be tolerated and must be filled with something that gives unity and finality of understanding. From the need to fill a cosmic void with meaning, it usually follows that behind and beyond the events of the world (both the natural and cultural worlds) are mysterious, powerful, and unseen forces that are controlling and shaping our lives, our cultures, and even our cosmos.