Category: Politics

Jenny Holzer at Cheim & Read and Yvon Lambert

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Jenny Holzer WHITE 2006 Nichia white LED’s mounted on PCB with aluminum housing 192.25″ x 216.5″ x 5.25″ [capture from moving light of installation]

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Jenny Holzer HAND yellow white 2006 oil on linen in eight panels 33″ x 25.5″ each panel [detail of installation]

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Jenny Holzer BIG CONTAINER yellow white 2006 oil on linen triptych 103.5″ x 80″ each panel [detail of installation]

Jenny Holzer shows us what “freedom of information” looks like in a show at Cheim & Read. It’s not pretty, but its more compelling than a car wreck. The installation is part of a collaboration with Yvon Lambert, across 25th Street, where “Night Feed”, a series of very different text-based works has been installed.
From the Cheim & Read press release:

In her newest work, Holzer negotiates the political landscape after 9/11 and traces the debate over covert operations, ghost detainees, prisoner abuse, and war tragedies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay through the directives, emails, and testimonies of policy makers, soldiers, and prisoners. The documents, many of which were classified at the time they were written, originated in United States government and military agencies and have been made part of the public record through the landmark Freedom of Information Act.

It’s almost impossible to imagine how banal, or how horrible, are the parts which our government will not let us see.
Holzer’s art will not let us stop trying – to imagine, yes, but more importantly, to free the information.

MFA show shut down for reference to Cheney sex?

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Lèse majesté? Was sex the beard for political censorship?
From a story in the Fine Arts section of the NYTimes on Friday:

In addition to the hand-and-penis sculpture, works in the show included a video with sexual overtones in which women are dressed as nuns, and a watercolor of a man’s torso, with an accompanying narrative about a sexual encounter between two men, one of whom used the computer screen name Dick Cheney.

I don’t know about you, but I suspect what really might have done it for our self-appointed middle-aged, white male Parks Department guardian of public morals and social orthodoxy wasn’t the penis or the nuns (I can doubt whether Julius Spiegel cares much about either); it was more likely the combination of homosex and the Vice President of the United States.
We love Carl Ferrero’s art. Everything I’ve seen him do is mighty fine, when it’s not actually breathtaking.
I still don’t know exactly which offending image or images of Ferrero’s is/are in the show summarily shut down on May 4, but the entire world will be able to see his work and that of all the Brooklyn College MFA candidates when it re-opens in DUMBO; there will certainly be a media presence. The [second] reception will be on Wednesday May 24th from 6 to 9 at 70 Washington St. (down under the manhattan bridge overpass) in Brooklyn.

ADDENDUM: See this related story which appeared on the last page of today’s print edition of the NYTimes:

China Orders Art Galleries to Remove Paintings With Political Themes

Several galleries in this city’s thriving arts district were recently ordered by government officials to remove more than 20 paintings, apparently because they dealt with political themes, artists and gallery directors here said.

[images from Carl Ferrero]

on the Brooklyn College massacre, Riverdale Press rocks!

[this editorial is too good to stay in the Bronx; Barry reformatted it from a PDF so I could upload it here]

THE RIVERDALE PRESS Thursday, May 11, 2006
———————————————————————————————
The return of the censors

In 1988, Chicago police arrested a painting; last week, New York City jailed an entire art exhibit.
In both cases, the offending art was student work on display in the year-end show that is a college art department’s equivalent of a thesis.
In both cases, the authorities acted precipitately and in violation of the fundamental right of artists to express themselves and of our fundamental right to make up our own minds.
In both cases the academic institutions that should have defended their students and the faculty that mentored them instead beat a craven retreat.
It took a federal court to rebuke the Chicago authorities for confiscating David Nelson’s mocking portrait of the city’s late mayor Harold Washington clad only in a bra and panties.
Will it take a court to stand up for the students of Brooklyn College, who, shortly after celebrating what they thought was a successful opening, saw months of work sequestered?
Last Thursday, Brooklyn Parks Commissioner Julius Spiegel abruptly locked up the war memorial in Cadman Plaza Park, which for the last five years has served as an art gallery and the venue for Brooklyn College’s year-end art exhibit.
The commissioner-turned-critic apparently didn’t like the image of a penis with homoerotic overtones or a video on Biblical themes that included sexually-charged footage of Eve in the garden. Next thing the students knew, a locksmith was changing the locks on the gallery, effectively impounding their work.
It took the college the better part of a day to decide how to respond. Then it issued a statement trying to have it both ways: “In keeping with the public nature of the space, as well as its position as an honored war memorial, Brooklyn College has respectfully decided to move the entire student exhibit to our campus. Brooklyn College has a long tradition of educating fine artists. Throughout, the administration of the College has supported our students’ rights to freedom of artistic expression. We are proud to display our student art here at the College.”
Not good enough, said the students. Told the exhibit would be moved to the college library, Marni Kotak, the students’ spokeswoman, noted that many of the 18 works were site-specific and others were too large to be exhibited effectively in the library.
“Clearly the administration of BC is thinking only of covering themselves 
 rather than taking any kind of stand at all to defend the hard work of us students,” she wrote in an e-mail. “We are generally infuriated by this tactic and are determined to either have our show reopened at the War Memorial or hold BC responsible for covering all costs for moving and reinstalling such an exhibition in another appropriate venue.”
According to city Parks Department spokesman Warner Johnston, the city had an “explicit agreement with the college that because it’s a war memorial and public space, it had to be appropriate for families.” Asked for a copy, he paused, then said there was no written agreement, but a verbal understanding. Colleen Roche, the head of a public relations firm hired by the college, refused to answer questions about the agreement and whether, if it existed, the art department or anyone in the current administration knew of it. The students say no one ever told them about it.
In any event, it is sad to see an institution of higher learning forget the lessons of the past. Only seven years ago, the city was rebuked for trying to intimidate and punish another Brooklyn institution, when a federal judge told Mayor Rudolph Giuliani that he couldn’t force the Brooklyn Museum to abandon the “Sensation” show.
The Giuliani administration then made an argument much like the one the Bloomberg administration is making now. Rejecting the contention that the museum broke its contract with the city to educate school children by showing work not fit for children to see, Judge Nina Gershon wrote, “There is no federal constitutional issue more grave than the effort by government officials to censor works of expression and to threaten the vitality of a major cultural institution as punishment for failing to abide by governmental demands for orthodoxy.”
The job of a university is to educate not only its students but the society it serves. In failing to stand up for its students’ exhibit, Brooklyn College lost an opportunity to explain the role and the nature of art. And it failed in an even more important task: to tell New Yorkers that it’s their job as citizens to judge public expression, and that no matter how provocative or potentially offensive it may be, the government has no business intruding on our ability to do so.

media censors Colbert’s witness against the emperor

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is he even capable of understanding what Colbert said?

Clearly, the only news worthy of reporting about Saturday’s White House Corresponents’ Association banquet was Stephen Colbert’s amazing performance zap, but the NYTimes story doesn’t even mention it. The only thing we learned from “the paper of record” is that the writer thought Bush was a scream.
We’re doomed. Even if we did have a revolution the media would never tell us.

[image by Hyungwon Kang from Reuters]

the people of Belarus vote with their bodies

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citizens resisting an illegitimate regime in a haze of tear gas in Minsk’s October Square

In some nations a noble and aroused people will determine to do something when it becomes clear that their “democrcacy” is a fraud. Here in the U.S. we just keep shopping. Alright, sometimes we’ll go, “tsk, tsk” when we can’t avoid being reminded of our servitude, but the regime is not disturbed.

[image, sighted by Barry, was originally uploaded on Flickr by Siarhei Leuchanka]

swimming in Iraq

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swimming on our aircraft carrier in the desert

Not many people will get to read my post or the original The Nation article available only in the print edition, but maybe a color image and the accompanying story from MSNBC will stir up some dust in the American political desert.
The huge base we’re constructing on the sight of the former Iraqi Air Force academy at Balad is one of a handful of similar imperial projects being installed inside a prostrate Iraq. No wonder we haven’t had the time or money or men to help the Iraqis. Also, none of these installations have anything to do with fighting an insurgency or preventing or reducing the severity of a civil war.

Away from the flight lines, among traffic jams and freshly planted palms, life improves on 14-square-mile Balad for its estimated 25,000 personnel, including several thousand American and other civilians.
They’ve inherited an Olympic-sized pool and a chandeliered cinema from the Iraqis. They can order their favorite Baskin-Robbins flavor at ice cream counters in five dining halls, and cut-rate Fords, Chevys or Harley-Davidsons, for delivery at home, at a PX-run “dealership.” On one recent evening, not far from a big 24-hour gym, airmen hustled up and down two full-length, lighted outdoor basketball courts as F-16 fighters thundered home overhead.
“Balad’s a fantastic base,” Brig. Gen. Frank Gorenc, the Air Force’s tactical commander in Iraq, said in an interview at his headquarters here [today’s MSNBC dateline: “BALAD AIR BASE, Iraq”].
. . . .
In the counterinsurgency fight, Balad’s central location enables strike aircraft to reach targets in minutes. And in the broader context of reinforcing the U.S. presence in the oil-rich Mideast, Iraq bases are preferable to aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf, said a longtime defense analyst.
“Carriers don’t have the punch,” said Gordon Adams of Washington’s George Washington University. “There’s a huge advantage to land-based infrastructure. At the level of strategy it makes total sense to have Iraq bases.”

Both the White House and the Pentagon have basically denied everything which suggests a long-term or permanent status for these installations.
The AP image at the top is dated Aug. 25, 2005. Our press, which has apparently had every opportunity to see the truth for itself, has basically and characteristically cooperated in the deceit – at least until now.

[image by Jacob Silberberg from the AP via MSNBC]

‘Permanent Bases’ and Rachel Corrie, both in The Nation

There are few issues more important to our own survival and that of the entire world than the state of Israel and the war in Iraq. In two consecutive issues this month The Nation‘s contributors offer enlightenment in these areas to even the most knowledgeable reader.
I usually skip the many articles which only reflect what I already know or suspect, but I couldn’t do without those which highlight this magazine’s ability to reliably report or sensibly argue what what I’m unlikely to find anywhere else. These two fill that description in spades.
Unfortunately only one of these two particular reads are available on line, but you’re depriving yourself, The Nation, and the nation if you aren’t already a subscriber.
An excerpt from Tom Engelhardt’s”Can You Say ‘Permanent Bases’?“, which is not on line:

To this day, those Little Americas [at least four “super-bases”] remain at the secret heart of “reconstruction” policy in Iraq. As long as [Halliburton] keeps building them, there can be no genuine withdrawal. Despite recent press visits, our super-bases remain in policy silence. The Bush Administration does not discuss them (other than to deny their permanence). No plans for them are debated in Congress. The opposition Democrats generally ignore them.

An excerpt from Philip Weiss’s “Why These Tickets are Too Hot for New York“, which is available on the magazine’s website:

As George Hunka, author of the theater blog Superfluities, says [about New York Theatre Workshop’s cancellation of the play, “My Name is Rachel Corrie”], “This is far too important an issue for everyone to paper it over again, with everyone shaking hands for a New York Times photographer. It’s an extraordinarily rare picture of the ways that New York cultural institutions make their decisions about what to produce.”
Hunka doesn’t use the J-word. Jen Marlowe does. A Jewish activist with Rachelswords.org (which is staging a reading of Corrie’s words on March 22 with the Corrie parents present), she says, “I don’t want to say the Jewish community is monolithic. It isn’t. But among many American Jews who are very progressive and fight deeply for many social justice issues, there’s a knee-jerk reflexive reaction that happens around issues related to Israel.”

“Sophie Scholl-The Final Days”

Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct. It is certain that today every honest German is ashamed of his government. Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes – crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure – reach the light of day? If the German people are already so corrupted and spiritually crushed that they do not raise a hand, frivolously trusting in a questionable faith in lawful order of history; if they surrender man’s highest principle, that which raises him above all other God’s creatures, his free will; if they abandon the will to take decisive action and turn the wheel of history and thus subject it to their own rational decision; if they are so devoid of all individuality, have already gone so far along the road toward turning into a spiritless and cowardly mass – then, yes, they deserve their downfall.
– from the first leaflet of the White Rose

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Barry climbing the stairs of the light court in Friedrich von Gärtner’s 1840 main building of Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität*

The German film “Sophie Scholl-The Final Days” will be at the Film Forum at least through next Thursday. I don’t have to draw too much of an analogy here (it will come naturally enough to anyone who sees the movie), but it should not be missed by anyone sensitive to what is going on around us today.
Sure, we don’t yet have a provocation equal to that which created the White Rose inside wartime Nazi Germany, but today the almost non-existent opposition to the current regime in Washington is still embarassingly out of proportion to the evil it represents.
Even without official government controls our press is dead, and even though they haven’t been put in a camp as a threat to the state, the Democrats have been voting Republican for years. Both “estates” have been doing the work of the regime unbidden, giving it an apparance of legitimacy it would otherwise lack entirely.
In Germany sixty-three years ago political opposition was punishable with death. At the university in Munich a handful of courageous students and one professor decided that even the record of their resistance was worth such a sentence. They had few illusions that their work might bring down the governement or impact it in any significant way.
Today in the U.S. we haven’t yet been complicit in the death of millions, although such big numbers are totally irrelevant to a single grieving mother or child. Our own political murders are real enough already. But are any of us be able to match the morality and the courage of Sophie Scholl and her friends? The overwhelming evidence of the extraordinary extent of our cooperation with this deadly, pathological White House gang, or at best our indifference, lethargy and even our incompetence as its opponents on any level, appears to give us an answer.

*
In 2002 Barry and I visited the university, where I had spent some time in the early 60’s. I lived on Willi-Graf-Straße. This image shows the central hall where Hans and Sophie Scholl stacked most of their leaflets and strew the remainder over the railing onto the floor below.

[the text at the top was taken from The Shoah Education Project]

nobody in charge

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I think I can speak for a lot of people on the Left if I say that for a long time we’ve been in a state of despair because of our belief that the radical Right was pretty much in absolute control of things at the top.
But today, as I stare at the national and international news stories now unfolding regularly, each headline topping the outrageousness of its predecessor, I’m thinking it should be pretty clear to all of us that absolutely nobody is in charge in Washington [and I suspect this isn’t what Republicans meant by small government].
Somehow I’m not feeling better yet.
May the luck of the simple fool save us from total annihilation, since it’s clear we won’t make it with our cleverness.

[image from History of Magic]