a shot of the crowd before the room filled up yesterday, from a camera held high overhead, feeling the power, and documenting all the super Lesbians, and some very enthusiastic friends and supporters
The entire event was run incredibly well, as efficiently and perhaps more efficiently than many benefits organized by non-profits that have been doing it for years. And we’ve seen a lot. Barry and I had a blast at yesterday’s first ever art benefit for the Lesbian Herstory Archives [LHA], held at the gallery of Alexander Gray Associates.
As the snow began shortly after midday, we were gathered with a lot of other people, many of them friends, many of them heroes known only from a distance, some soon to become friends. We were ten floors above the Hudson River in west Chelsea, and all we had to do was enjoy ourselves; the real champagne; the delicate cookies and savories; emcees Moe Angelos, milDRED, the artist formerly known as DRED, and Kay Turner; the work mounted on the walls; and above all the tonic of a wonderful crowd.
Oh well, we did have to wait a while for our name to be drawn, when we would be able to announce our choice of the art, but the selection was so good there was little reason for anxiety and virtually no chance that anyone would be disappointed.
But a lot of people were saddened to learn that the 80-some tickets for 80-some pieces of art had been sold out early. Many of those couldn’t come, and others did come by for the excitement, and to contribute directly to the endowment fund; maybe the LHA should rent an entire armory for their second art benefit.
Elizabeth Bonaventura Untitled, or 2010 Olympic Hopefuls casein paint on inkjet print 2009 8.5″ x 11″
We went home with the beautiful paint-on-photograph piece by Lizzie Bonaventura [no link or website] shown above, and we were able to talk to the artist and exchange contact information even before we had a chance to pick her work.
Category: Queer
Lesbian Herstory Archives Benefit, saturday at noon
Robert Giard Mabel Hampton Sees the Pigeons at the Old Lesbian Herstory Archive 1989
The archive was somewhere out in Brooklyn, and also, as strange as it may seem today, I was pretty shy.
It was somewhere around 1990, and I had just read about a place called the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Accompanying the story was a picture of this wonderful older black woman sitting in the middle of stacks of books and papers. It was Mabel Hampton. She seemed to belong to the ages already. I was fascinated, and wanted to know more.
I also really wanted to visit the place, but although I was quickly becoming more and more involved with ACT UP, I still didn’t think I knew any honest-to-goodness lesbians, at least as friends. I was also scared: The strong women activists I saw all around me were pretty fierce; besides, having grown up as a secret homo in the Midwest in the 40s and 50s, I had to confess I still wasn’t even very comfortable with straight women.
I suppose it was pretty stupid, but I was also afraid I would be very much out of place, and perhaps even be challenged by the people who I believed had good reason to be there, unlike me.
I was learning fast (about all kinds of difference), but I wasn’t there yet.
That was twenty years ago, and I feel much more comfortable in my own skin, and to my great delight, in every kind of skin. I still haven’t been to the permanent home of the Archives, today “a grassroots collection supported by a non-hierarchical women�s collective, available for all Lesbians and housed within a communal, not an academic, setting in a 4-story limestone brownhouse [sic]” (according to Mickey Weems in the Boston Edge). But at noon on Saturday Barry and I are going to begin celebrating my birthday by attending the first ever Art Benefit for the Lesbian Herstory Archives here in Chelsea, before we go off to an equally festive holiday lunch.
Unfortunately, unless you’ve already purchased one of the 80 tickets (they’re already sold out!), you won’t be able to go home with a piece of art by one of the artists who is part of their incredible list of donors. Anyone who wishes to attend the event however (I would look forward to the hot crowd as much as a chance to see the art), and support the Archives, can just show up and donate $25 cash, “more or less if”, according to the Archives site, at the door. The drawing itself begins at one o’clock.
The event is being held at Alexander Gray Associates, 526 W. 26th Street, and not at the Archives.
[image from the Bulger Gallery]
Jason Hanasik at +Kris Graves: “He Opened Up”
Jason Hanasik Steven Two-Faced 2007 digital C-print
Jason Hanasik Steven’s self-portrait #2 2008 digital C-print
Jason Hanasik Steven’s photograph of a man carrying two bottles of piss 2008 digital C-print
Jason Hanasik Patrick (Welcome) 2005 digital C-print
Jason Hanasik Steven (turn) 2008 digital C-print
I think it’s about the fact that guys often have trouble functioning as full human beings, but sometimes they’re offered an opportunity and they grab it; and then sometimes they lose it. I’d say this is true of both hets and homos.
The artist himself describes his project as
.
. . a photography, video, and installation project which engages image making as a platform to intervene inside Western culture’s traditions and expectations as they relate to masculinity, sexuality, and class.
We, the men of these images and me, might not sit at an equal distance from the center, but we all have a complicated relationship to what is considered normal — to our benefit and our destruction.
Jason Hanasik‘s show at +Kris Graves in DUMBO, with the (not quite) enigmatic title, “He Opened Up Somewhere Along the Eastern Shore”, is an extremely moving exercise in storytelling with photographs, mostly the artist’s own and some (not quite) “found”.
Nine images are hung along one wall of the gallery and two more hang on a section of another wall to the left, with a final object, a hand-written letter reproduced as an inkjet print, at the near edge of a third wall on the right. Most of the photographs are dominated by the figure of a young male; some of the subjects appear several times. They are all marines.
Partly because the size of the prints varies and because they are each mounted at a different height, they appear to dance in front of the visitor, but without a real beginning – or an end; this is not going to be a simple narrative.
The images in the photographs bounce around in time and in space, and touch many emotions as they do so, as does their “story” itself; it’s a story which could be written in many ways, and we can each find our own. Hanasik’s materials provide a documentation of some intense, probably under-expressed, male friendships. They remind us of the difficulty we all have in characterizing the more heartfelt qualities of these friendships, whether we are parties to them or only observers.
The men photographed by the artist are brothers. Jason Hanasik grew up in Virginia knowing both Steven and Patrick, but he became a very close friend of Patrick, the older (his BFF, in fact). Jason and Patrick played football together in High School. Jason at first hardly knew Steven, who had his own best friend. His name was Josh, and he does not appear in these images. Their relationships, especially that of Jason and Patrick, were made more complicated as they grew older and each of them gradually became aware of Jason’s homosexuality (including Jason himself), but Jason and Patrick’s friendship survived, survived even the nightmares of Iraq, from which Patrick described this affectionate daydream in a letter to Jason:
Jason Hanasik 11Mar04 2009 inkjet print 10″ x 8″
Jason was the only one of the four who did not join the marines and so was the only one who did not go to Iraq, where Steven was a part of a tragedy (the death in combat of his friend Josh on what had been the first “tour” for both of them) he was unable to share with his comrades. Then, on the first leg of an impulsive road trip with Steven something happened that changed Jason’s relationship to his best friend’s more taciturn sibling.
The title of the gallery exhibition refers to the catharsis Steven experienced while Jason and he were driving from Virginia to visit Patrick and his wife in upstate New York, Steven opened up, and it made possible a real friendship between the two for the first time. Like that shared by Jason and Patrick its emotional intimacy didn’t fit the simple antithetical forms we’re told are the only ones we can expect from male relationships.
Three of the photographs in the show were taken by the straight-identifying Steven while he was in Iraq. The two that are not self-portraits, in particular, are witness of just how inscrutable male emotions, and male sexuality, still remain to the understanding of all of us, male or female, straight or queer.
The installation also includes a video taken with a pocket camera or cellphone. It appears on the gallery wall as a smallish, faint, projected image, a short loop, and it shows two beautiful, smiling young marines dancing a tango, complete with dips, on the balcony of a barracks courtyard inside Baghdad. There is no sound.
Jason Hanasik In the Green Zone: November 2007 digital video 2008 [two stills]
The video too is by Steven.
I remember, but only as someone who was able to watch from a safe distance, the horror of Vietnam, and what it did to the men and women of my generation: And the silence; all kinds of silence. It’s excruciating to see it happening all over again.
After only a few minutes inside the gallery last week, I was already almost in tears, and at the time I had even less information than I am able to share in this post. Barry and I were fortunate to be able to hear more about the work in two conversations with the artist himself. Although at first I was somewhat reluctant to ask about the context of the project, Hanasik was generous in his replies.
I found that the images stand up either with or without much of a “background”. Having seen them on line before talking to Hanasik and before we visited the gallery I know they can pretty much speak for themselves. That’s why I had to get to the gallery: I wanted to hear them up close.
ADDENDUM: There is now a loop of the video, “In the Green Zone: November 2007” imbedded on the artist’s site here.
[images provided by the artist]
Obama is a disaster for the hopes of real progressives
Roy Lichtenstein Hopeless 1963
Obama is a disaster, and I say that because his failure may mean that the kind of reform which could have saved America may never be possible again.
His time appears to have run out (I’m not sure he would be interested in doing anything with it even if he were given an extension). He has utterly failed to do what he said he would do, what his supporters voted for him to do. His election, following the disastrous failure of his predecessor, and coinciding with that of a Democratic House and Senate, created an extraordinary momentum and an extremely rare political opportunity for advancing a progressive agenda. It was an environment, a moment, which we’re unlikely ever to see again. In the six months since we’ve witnessed the shocking success of the scurvy machinations devised by a radical Right which had been reported displaced and in serious disarray. They’ve given us an indication of what to expect going forward.
Our politics are a complete fraud: Any principled engagement in politics has become an absolutely futile exercise and this will remain the case unless we are able to take the system out of the hands of the plutocrats and the corporations that own it. I see no possibility of that happening.
If such a possibility were moral, or even real, I would be tempted to adopt a status of “inner emigration”*. I can say at least that I no longer argue with any American who says they don’t vote; a decision not to go through the motions which might help legitimize a fake democracy appears to be pretty reasonable in the circumstances of the present.
Although I had started to worry about the future of Obama’s “change” myth as early as late last November (see this entry), I held off publishing a more definitive list of complaints until now, finally deciding to pull it out of the “drawer” where I keep my drafts, because I just couldn’t stand looking at the subject line any longer.
In a post written only days after the election I expressed my reservations about whether Obama would be able to pull off the revolution that it would take to undue the damage which Bush administration had done, but I concluded that I believed he really would pull it off.
I was wrong. While I could turn out to be wrong again and would welcome it, today I feel certain that he won’t be able to pull off any reform and, looking at what David Sirota has called his Team of Corporate Zombies and checking off the list of the things he has done and the things he has not done, I have some real doubts about whether he ever intended to.**
For months I’ve been talking to friends about my despair over Obama’s administration, challenging anyone to point to anything which it has actually accomplished. At first most people seemed shocked by my criticism, but if they gave me any argument it would usually only be a comment about something Obama has said he would do. I’ve not been registering any shocked responses in recent weeks, and I’m hearing no arguments, so while this post’s downbeat argument might have really stood out earlier, maybe its novelty has been overtaken by events.
But I still think it’s worth taking stock of what we have lost, so here’s a partial list:
1. The Patriot Act remains almost intact
2. “State secrets” remain state secrets, and the administration argues that the privilege is rooted in the Constitution
3. The prisoners in Guantanamo, even if it the concentration camp is decommissioned, will remain prisoners; they and anyone our government rounds up in the future can be “detained” indefinitely, without charge or trial
3. The administration refuses to release prisoner abuse photos from years ago
4. The policy of rendition will continue
5. We now have an accelerated war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and our troops remain in Iraq
6. The administration shows no interest in addressing ENDA
7. Obama’s Justice Department has argued that the state has an interest in defending marriage as meaning a contract between a man and a woman
8. The administration shows no interest in addressing “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” (service people are still being discharged for being gay)
9. Addressing climate change appears to be a low priority (and coal is still being extracted through mountain-top removal)
10. Universal health care is off the table, opening the way for even more complicated for-profit systems which won’t even address rising costs
11. Recognition of needle exchange programs is going nowhere
12. Financial regulatory reform, where it is alive, has been put in the hands of Wall Street insiders
13. The measures used to address the economic meltdown and bank failures, the stimulus and the bailout, were designed by and for the individuals and banks who were responsible for the Great Recession in the first place, and have neglected foreclosures, loss of home equity value, and unemployment (and underemployment)
14. No back-to-work program which might be aimed at greening American technology
15. Continued neglect of the infrastructure
16. Continued neglect of meaningful public transit programs
17. The ill-conceived and obscenely wasteful “Clunkers” program and the distraction from real, constructive change which it presented
18. Failure to reinstate the ban on assault weapons
19. “Flexibility” on the call for a halt to the illegal Israeli settlements on the Left Bank
20. Maintaining Bush-era procedures allowing the government to search (without suspicion of wrongdoing) traveler’s laptops, cellphones, or other electronic devices
21. Obama’s vaunted “Transparency” has become a joke
22. Maintaining the FISA spying-on-citizens protocols
23. Extending a free pass to Bush, Cheney and Rice for their clear violations of the Geneva Conventions
24. Expanding both the scope and power of the “faith-based” initiatives introduced by the Bush White House [added to the list Sept. 8]
ADDENDA (post-publication):
25 And now (revealed September 15) asking Congress to in fact extend three key provisions of the Patriot Act, which would otherwise expire at the end of the year
26. Unlike the last four presidents, Obama has not replaced the prior administration’s district attorneys wholesale, but has instead left in place “the majority of the Bush administration DA’s who had survived Rove’s purges intended to make sure they were loyal Republican apparatchiks” [quoted from Ian Welsh], an alarming realization for anyone whose politics are to the Left of Attila the Hun
27. [the words of Ian Welsh once again:] “Obama has not cleaned out the administration in general of Bush-era appointees and plants; indeed he has filled less spots than either Clinton or Bush II had by this point in their terms–and no, it’s not because the Senate won’t confirm them.”
28. The despicable private army formerly known as Blackwater remains in Iraq today, and the Obama administration recently extended the company’s contract there indefinitely; the firm, whose owner has styled himself a Christian crusader, also has contracts in Aghanistan
29. Once again employing the argument of “National security”, the administration is trying to weaken the “media shield” bill, designed to protect reporters against being forced to testify, which is currently working its way through Congress
One wonders just what have they been doing since moving into the White House, besides worrying about how not to offend their political enemies. Did everyone else notice that Van Jones, the man Obama threw to the dogs late Saturday night (an interesting news-hour calculation for the announcement), was one of the only genuine progressives in the White House, a real community organizer (like POTUS, before he got religion) and not a political hack like everyone else, including, I now believe, the boss?
*
Innere Emigration describes the the choice of some intellectuals, certain artists and writers, to remain in Germany (and, after the 1938 Anschluss, in Austria) during the era of National Socialism, although they were in opposition to the Nazi regime. It assumed a complete withdrawal from public life.
**
I notice that last November I included a footnote saying that in the end his race had proved to be no barrier to Obama’s achievement of the White House; today, if I weren’t in despair of Obama’s competence or even his commitment, I could easily add a footnote about the fact that from the beginning race has however proven to be behind his opponents’ mindless campaigns against every policy he has proposed: It’s almost all about that uppity negro.
[image of Lichtenstein’s “Hopelesss” from theheretik]
sorta loving it, next to the Union Square Greenmarket
Elbow-Toe Divine Hammer 2009
I spotted this curious image on my way to the Union Square Greenmarket this afternoon. It appears to be a monkish hare coupling with another (boy?) hare in the middle of some scattered groceries. It’s about two feet wide and the medium is that of a tinted b&w sticker attached to the concrete base of a lamp pole at the northwest corner of the square. I know I should recognize the indecorous artist, but I don’t.
UPDATE: Hrag Vartanian infoms me the artist is Elbow-Toe, and that the Wooster Collective has a post about the piece here, indicating that its inspiration is Rembrandt’s “The Monk in the Cornfield” (with farmer or milkmaid?)
An image of another, more sylvan, installation, this one in Brooklyn, appears on myloveforyou.
Chicago’s shiny bean, Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate”
Anish Kapoor Cloud Gate 2004-2006 polished stainless steel 33′ x 66′ x 42′ [detail of installation]
I think I expected to be charmed by Anish Kapoor’s sculpture in Millenium Park, but when Barry and I encountered “Cloud Gate” on the first full day of our visit to the city two weeks ago I thought it was even better than the reviews had reported – and even more fun than its billings.
But it’s also an incredible photo opportunity, and this was one of those rare times I totally went with it. The underside of what Chicagoans had early on dubbed “the Bean” is described as an omphalos, or navel, a complex, curving indentation whose mirrored surface multiplies anything found beneath it, but in the other images I snapped the same afternoon I concentrated entirely on the first of the foreshortened Barrys I spotted above me.
“Then and Now” at the LGBT Center
Bill Mutter Bunny Boy, Devil Boy, Pinnochio Girl (dates unknown) ceramic sculptures, dimensions variable [installation view]
I think what you see above was the most intense image I carried home in my head from the opening of “Then and Now” at the LGBT Center last night. For the longest moment, when I spotted them just as I reached the busy stair landing where these smallish (2 1/2 to 3 1/2 feet tall) figures were installed in a corner to the left, I was still almost totally distracted by a conversation with Barry about an installation we’d just seen. I absolutely didn’t know what I was looking at for a few seconds, but I remember I was almost giddy with delight and at the same time a little unbalanced by their suggestion of some kind of horror.
They seem to be children in halloween costumes, but the members of this little band clearly represent some kind of outsiders, especially when seen in the context of the building where they’ve been assembled, although in fact, like all the undisguised queers they seem to represent, they would be outsiders virtually anywhere.
I know little more about the artist than what I learned from this link, and in the last paragraph of this 1987 New York Times review of a group show.
What follows are images of a few of the other works installed on 13th Street, some of it from the 1989 “The Center Show” show and some of it chosen by the artists in that show for inclusion in this one. All works dated “1989” are works installed twenty years ago.
Gran Fury RIOT 1989 acrylic on canvas
fierce pussy [title not supplied] 2009 black and white xeroxed posters on wall, dimensions variable [large detail of installation inside a multiple-toilet room marked “ALL GENDERS” on the door]
Leon Golub Heretic’s Fork 1989 oil on wall [installation view]
Nancy Spero Elegy 1989 acrylic on wall [installation view]
Tre Chandler A narrative of ga(y)zes 2009, 90 ink on paper drawings; 10 ink on paper post-its, dimensions variable [large detail of installation]
Stephen Lack Boy on Wall 1989 oil on wall [large detail of installation]
queer marriage: California goes both ways
with good in one hand
and evil in the other
Barry and I happened to be visiting the Metropolitan’s newly-reworked American Wing on the same day the California Supremes announced their decision on queer marriage. There didn’t seem to be one jot of a connection between the two events when we started out, but I eventually manged to find one.
I spent much more time with the nineteenth-century sculptures in the glass court than I might normally have expected to because we were with the artist Sarah Peters, whose work has been inspired by the milieu in which these earlier American masters flourished, and by their skills, although she finds her own space in interpreting that world anew and commenting on what the artist and his/her contemporaries thought of it through her own drawings and sculpture.
I was also eager to investigate what had inspired Holland Cotter’s terrific piece on the galleries which appeared in the Times last Thursday.
The female nude by Hiram Powers, intended as a California allegory, attracted my attention primarily for the odd props the figure was holding, especially the divining rod which she grasped so demurely before her smoothed pudendum. My mind jumped back to the news of the day when I read the note on the museum card, which reads in part:
Inspired by the California Gold Rush of 1849, Powers devised the following program for this allegorical figure: “. . . an Indian woman . . . stands in a reserved and guarded posture and with a watchful expression, holding the divining rod in her left, and pointing with it down to the earth, under a large quartz crystal, which supports the figure on the right. Quartz is the matrix of gold and the divining rod is the miner’s wand, or the sceptre of ‘California’ . . . In the right hand, which is held behind, there is a branch of thorns, to finish the allegory for she is the miner’s goddess, or ‘Fortune,’ and as it is usual to represent the Goddess ‘Fortune’ with good in one hand and evil in the other [my italics], by suitable emblems I have done so with ‘California,’ and the moral is that all is not gold that glitters. . . .”
What California gives, she also taketh away – sorta, sometimes, possibly only for a while. Maybe the queers will eventually make out, er, . . . that is, within a structure certified by the state.
BTW, it would certainly help if we could remember to call it “civil marriage” rather than “marriage”, which in this benighted land always means religion is involved. That way we might be able to get the folks over 30 to go along with the concept.
For those still interested in the allegory with which I started this post, here’s “California” in full figure:
Hiram Powers California 1850�55 (this carving, 1858) marble 71″ x 18.25″ x 24.75″
[third image from Metropolitan Museum of Art]
Keith Haring’s “Once Upon A Time”, 20 years old today
I’ve seen it described as his masterpiece; it’s almost certainly his most personal, exuberant and uninhibited expression of pure sexual jouissance.
Twenty years ago today Keith Haring finished his men’s room mural, “Once Upon A Time”, on the second floor of the LGBT Community Center on West 13th Street. Then he signed and dated it. The detail shots above show that it remains there today, pretty much as he left it, with one important exception: The ancient toilet fixtures and partitions which brought both great relief and great joy to the building’s habitues over the years have long since been ripped out. Sadly, the room appears to have fallen into desuetude.
But, wait, is that actually a conference table I see in the picture below?
While Haring’s room-size installation may have been the most extravagant, it was just one of many works included in The Center Show [see video], organized in 1989 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Stonewall. These additional artists included, among others, Leon Golub, David LaChapelle, Barbara Sandler, Kenny Scharf, Nancy Spero, and George Whitman, and much of their work remains inside this amazing, reinvented 165-year-old school building today, continuing to enrich the dynamic energy it both encourages and shelters.
The Center is putting on a show again this year. It’s entitled “Then and Now“, and it’s intended to commemorate the 1989 events with a new installation by a new catalog of artists, although without the permanent, applied-directly-to-the-walls part of the original. It opens tomorrow, May 28, with a free reception from 6:30 to 8:30, and it will remain installed throughout the summer.
The artists invited this time around are:
Trisha Baga, The Brainstormers, Ian Campbell, Tre Chandler, Chi Peng, Abby Denson, fierce pussy, Daphne Fitzpatrick, Lola Flash, Alex Golden, Rory Golden, James Kaston, Jillian McDonald, Bill Mutter, Deirdre O’Dwyer, James Rohmberger, Jamel Shabazz, Nathaniel A. Siegel, Lori Taschler, Wu Ingrid Tsang, Forrest Williams, and Sarah Nelson Wright
Scouts turned into child soldiers (think Hitlerjugend)
�This is about being a true-blooded American guy and girl” – Imperial County sheriff’s deputy
The Explorers program, a coeducational affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America [BSA] that began 60 years ago, is training thousands of young people in skills used to confront terrorism, illegal immigration and escalating border violence . . . .
While reading this incredible lead article on the front page of today’s NYTimes, my jaw dropping ever lower as I digested its horrors, I suddenly had the odd, faintly-heartening thought: Should we be grateful for one small favor? I mean, as homos we are fundamentally excluded from BSA membership, which normally means no participation in any of their fun and games or lovely overnights, so at least the Boy Scouts of America and their affiliate, the coeducational Explorers program, aren’t teaching violence, militarism, xenophobia, racism and fascism to our own young people (or at least not to those boys and girls who dare to be out while teenagers).
But seriously, this is appalling, so appalling that I had to think about whether this was April Fool’s Day.
These are children, and they’re being given “soft” guns, sometimes shooting real guns (�I like shooting them,� [one 16 year-old girl] said. �I like the sound they make. It gets me excited.�). They are taught how to fight ill-defined or subjective categories of enemies like “illegals”, “terrorists”, “active shooters” and marijuana farmers. No, I didn’t see anything in the article about taking down homos; maybe we’ve made some progress.
The program is restricted to kids 14 or above, but the reporter, Jennifer Steinhauer, suggests there seems to be some wiggle room: One sheriff’s deputy supervising a local post as a volunteer avowed, �I will take them at 13 and a half”.
The story primarily covers towns in Imperial County, in Southern California. It’s the poorest county in the state, ” . . . and the local economy revolves largely around the criminal justice system. In addition to the sheriff and local police departments, there are two state prisons and a large Border Patrol and immigration enforcement presence.”
Our older monsters are creating new monsters.
[Todd Krainin image from the Times]