War – Page 8 – James Wagner

not my voice

After a night’s sleep and especially after reading this morning what others who have read my post of yesterday are saying about the subject of artistic censorship and our relationship to the world, I realized that what I wrote just wasn’t really in my voice. Although I suppose not everyone would agree, I think I was way too concerned with being gentle to everyone and everything: Uncharacteristically, I didn’t make my own position clear on issues about which I have very strong opinions.
While this next section looks like a partial creed, maybe I should just call it a small glossary, even if it won’t be arranged alphabetically.

GOVERNMENT: [okay, I know the word is missing from yesterday’s post, but that’s part of what I mean] I abhor everything the current administration in Washington stands for. I also believe that its enablers in the other two branches of government share equal responsibility for its domestic and foreign crimes, and that the corrupted system which has brought us to this juncture is an abomination we may not survive.
CENSORSHIP: I believe that censorship is a substitution for thought, and is its mortal enemy.
CHILDREN: I argue that children should be educated and protected through the active engagement of all adults, and not by a passive, dumb curriculum of barricades or screens.
LBIF: I am aware that simple-minded, do-good arts organizations can sometimes do as much harm as they do good. Sorry.
FOUNDATION FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS: I probably couldn’t say enough about the good they do.
TRANSFORMATION: I regret that when it comes to the public presentation of their work artists are not always free to determine either its site or the manner in which is presented.
SUSAN DESSEL’S SCULPTURE: I affirm that the artist Susan Dessel has a great mind and a soul which is its equal, and that her work, “OUR BACKYARD: A Cautionary Tale”, is a powerful human statement and an exceptional work of art (even if I still can’t decide whether it might suffer or thrive from the remarkable gentleness of the title attached to it by its gentle creator).

I am angry, yes, but especially after reading reactions to this story from other bloggers and those who write comments, I am also optimistic about the future of art, perhaps even socially-engaged art.
I mourn the fact that this country has virtually no use for artists and thinkers, so I’m still gravely pessimistic about the future of our polity.

Susan Dessel’s “OUR BACKYARD” censored by gallery

burma.bodies.jpg
this too is our backyard

In the twenty-first century the entire world really has become our “backyard” and along with its beauty and energy, there is also much unnecessary misery and death everywhere in that yard. Provincial fears and mindless censorship cannot reconstruct fences around the familiar, confined spaces which now open onto a much larger world, nor can they make the misery and death go away.
Susan Dessel’s sculpture, “OUR BACKYARD: A Cautionary Tale” has been censored by its current host, the Long Beach Island Foundation for Arts & Sciences [LBIF]. She had been invited to participate in its current Artist Residency and Retreat Exhibition, titled “ART CONCEIVED SINCE SEPTEMBER 11”. Support from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (NYC) made Dessel’s participation in this exhibit possible. On the eve of the show’s May 3rd opening LBIF Interim Executive Director Chris Seiz told the artist that he had been advised by some LBIF members that they found the piece offensive and were considering ending their support of foundation. In the hours prior to the opening Dessel’s installation was walled off from the rest of the gallery. Visitors who now wish to see the concealed work must first step across signage warning that them that the piece may upset or offend.
The artist has released a statement:

“OUR BACKYARD: A Cautionary Tale” was an opportunity for me to re-imagine the world as I understand it: our shared backyard. Despite the expression of dispiriting conditions found in my work, underlying it is a robust sense of hope that it might encourage viewers to consider their own role in transforming the community – local and global – through their actions and inaction.

Dessel describes LIBFs transformation of the piece as having turned the artist’s fundamental intention on its head, since it now represents our containment and continual isolation from the outside world.
This profoundly moving large-scale work was first seen at a show Barry and I curated at Williamsburg’s Dam, Stuhltrager Gallery in September, 2006. It was a site-specific installation which the artist described as a response to wide-spread images of violent death in many parts of the world. The work has been fundamentally altered with the decision to wall it in during the current show in New Jersey. Dessel sees the LIBF’s restriction of her expression as an artist as raising the new and separate issue of the role we permit art in our society generally.
It 2006 was installed in the “backyard” of the gallery in Brooklyn. There were no warnings posted, and it managed to attract more positive attention from visitors and press (both old and new media) than any other work in the group show.
The picture at the top of this entry was taken only a few days ago. It is not an image of a sculpture. Nor were any of the other horrific news images we have seen in our lifetimes from New Orleans, Jonestown, Haiti, and Cambodia, from Lebanon, Israel and Palestine, from Sarajevo, Darfur, Argentina, Sudan and Rwanda, and of course from Afghanistan and Iraq. Dessel’s “OUR BACKYARD” addresses our response to all of these tragedies and too many more, perhaps with the hope that if it helps us to engage in their reality with a shared humanity the world might do a little better going forward. I cannot begin to understand how people accustomed to viewing the horrors presented on what passes for ordinary entertainment on large and small screens today could possibly be upset or offended by twelve carefully-assembled shapes wrapped in sandbag tarp and lying on fresh sod.
I’d like to think we could do better, but the kind of censorship being exercised by a gallery in southern New Jersey this month is hardly unique even in the art world, and it’s certainly of a piece with the bowdlerization which has been standard media practice in this country for decades. It’s no wonder we continue to do so little to help prevent or ameliorate, and in fact contribute so much ourselves to creating, the catastrophes which litter our global backyard.
The Long Beach Island Foundation for Arts & Sciences is celebrating its sixtieth anniversary. I can’t know the motives behind its censorship of Susan Dessel’s art, but it’s unfortunate that so many of us will have first come to know the LBIF not for patronage of arts or science but for institutional behavior not worthy of an amateur craft club in Colorado Springs, and at this juncture that analogy may do a disservice to the city popularly considered the most radically “conservative” in the nation.
The images which appear below show Dessel’s installation before the curtained wall was in place, after it was installed, the sign at the entrance to the curtain baffle, and finally what it looked like inside the enclosure.

[Burma image from European Pressphoto Agency via NYTimes; remaining images courtesy of the artist]

May Day!

What gives them the right?
I heard the news of our latest murderous bombing strike in Somalia on Public Radio this morning, just after the network had reminded me today was May Day. Almost in the same breath which described the massacre of at least eleven people (and perhaps many more) in a home in Dusamareb as a part of the war on terrorism, there was this interesting attachment [quoting here from the BBC story on line]:

In its annual report on terrorism published on Wednesday, the US said al-Shabab militants in Somalia, along with al-Qaeda militants in east Africa, posed “the most serious threat to American and allied interests in the region”.

So which is it? Are we fighting terrorists without portfolios (i.e., non-governmental terrorists) or people who threaten our “interests”? Is it about another Red Scare or another United Fruit?
While I thank the BBC for including this information in their report, I think they might have made more of the difference between the two explanations for our rogue state’s latest atrocity, especially since the dumbed-down American public knows nothing about events which happened the day before yesterday and is notoriously incapable of making simple rational connections between facts and statements without serious outside help.
But even aside from its clear immorality, this American obsession with bombing people and things we don’t understand and in normal circumstances would prefer not to have anything to deal with is ineffective, and much worse. Reasonable people can see it’s not in our true interest, and it accomplishes the opposite of what we intend (or at least what we are being told we intend). How are what the government’s report calls our “interests” being served by these kinds of horrors? Before we try to answer that question maybe our perpetual-war shoot-em-up government should explain to us just what those interests are. I won’t even bring up the question of interests of a million dead Iraqis, but are our own lives, liberties and pursuits of happiness more secure today than they were before we had our armed forces stationed on the soil of most of the nations on earth?
Almost my first thought after hearing about the overnight raid was to put it into a more objective context [very unAmerican, that]. In my mind I decided to deny for a moment my status as a privileged U.S. citizen and I threw out the (temporary) reality of American superiority in conventional arms. The somebodies in charge in Washington think they have the right to bomb people on the other side of the world whenever they decide it’s the appropriate thing to do – to protect our “interests”. What’s to argue against the right of the somebodies in charge somewhere on the other side of the world to bomb us here? We are even more obviously a serious threat to the interests of most of the people in the world than any of them are to ours.
I believe some of them have already told us this, and I expect that bombings in Somalia and a series of aggressive wars initiated in poor countries on the other side of the planet will only persuade them of the truth of their position: That their interests are not those of the mad somebodies who author these atrocities. We can expect they will continue to remind us of this.
In 1787 Benjamin Franklin addressed the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in these words which were read to the assembly by a friend:

I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.

I had read this passage long ago, but I came upon it again yesterday while reading Gore Vidal’s erudite and extremely entertaining little 2004 volume, “Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson“. In the next paragraphs Vidal looks ahead, and back, at the government left to us today:

Now, two centuries and sixteen years later, Franklin’s blunt dark prophecy has come true: popular corruption has indeed given birth to that Despotic Government which he foresaw as inevitable at our birth. Unsurprisingly, [the current edition of a popular biography of Franklin] is now on sale with, significantly – inevitably?, Frankin’s somber prediction cut out, thus silencing our only great ancestral voice to predict Enron et seq., not to mention November 2000, and, following that, despotism whose traditional activity, war, now hedges us all around.

Happy May Day.

ADDENDUM: For me one of the most painful parts of the continuing nightmare of our post-2000 world has been the deathly (literally) silence of most of the people of this country. We may repeatedly have been proven powerless, our opinions irrelevant to the conduct of the state, even when polls and balloting have finally revealed clear opposition to what is being done in our names, but how can so many still remain silent?
This bombing raid will go almost totally unnoticed, and unremarked.

[image of Howard Fast’s pamphlet, with Rockwell Kent illustration, from trussel.com]

to hell and back with Ratzinger

Goya Inquisition Scene (1816) oil on panel 18″ x 28.75″ [three notes: beginning in the Middle Ages the Church had prescribed the conical hat, generally yellow, as a distinguishing mark for Jews; Jewish conversos were the principal concern of the Spanish Inquisition; from 1981 until 2005 Josef Ratzinger was head of the Vatican department formerly known as the Inquisition]

I just did a search from this site, and I see that there are already two pages listing my various posts on Josef Ratzinger. I was hoping he’d be dead before I’d have to do another or, even better, irretrievably compromised by some spectacular scandal. I really didn’t want to have to think about this man again, and I certainly wasn’t going to display another picture of that freaky face*. Virtually everything he stands for disgusts me.
Okay, except maybe the part about “peace”, but I know he doesn’t actually mean it and, like the Dalai Lama, he’s certainly not going to embarrass our own “infernal” warrior king while he’s over here. By the way, I also don’t anyone believe a word he says about freedom or democracy. I was raised a Catholic, educated by Augustinians and Jesuits and studied history as an undergraduate and graduate student for ten years. I can assure you that the Church establishment has never cared what form governments assume so long as church interests aren’t compromised. [cf. Eugenio Pacelli and Reichskonkordat]
Also this week, don’t expect any homilies on capital punishment from Ratzinger, who we are repeatedly reminded has a boundless respect for life. Might hurt the sensibilities of the former “Texecutionor”.
But the holy fiend is coming to New York again, and although both he and his office are increasingly irrelevant, apparently even to most Catholics, I just can’t maintain my blackout on the latest Ratzinger developments. I was struck by something I saw in the joint statement he and his D.C. host just issued. George Bush. Now there’s another pathetic excuse for an appointed ruler (so who’s using whom on this visit?). It seems they both wanted us to know how much they respect human rights and diversity. I’m used to these lies from the White House but I just couldn’t ignore it coming from our sanctimonious short-term visitor, since he’s never ignored me or many of my friends, or anyone else whose integrity and rights he regularly impugns. I’m talking about all queers and all women, just for starters, but you can certainly add anyone not of the strictest, doctrinally-acceptable religious persuasion (that is, his own).
There is one incident in particular in Ratzinger’s past, one which I cannot forget, one which was never disavowed. It’s a statment which continues to reflect this narrow, clueless disciplinarian’s real approach to the diversity of mankind rather than the “respect for his vast pluralistic society”, he affected yesterday in Washington. In 1992, during a period of particularly virulent antigay violence in the U.S., he authorized a Vatican proclamation which said that that when lesbians and gay men demand civil rights, “neither the Church nor society should be surprised when … irrational and violent reactions increase”.
Perfectly consistent with the Church’s traditional mode of addressing its own evils: Blame the victim.
Still we bleed, queers of every gender and our straight sisters as well, not least because of his vile ministry.
Josef Ratzinger arrives in New York on Friday. I’m sincerely hoping that at least some New Yorkers will know how to receive him properly.

*
although I’m not the first to notice that, on the other hand, his devoted personal secretary is pretty damn hot, even if this is way off subject (maybe)

[image from marxist.com]

ADDENDUM: [in the form of an appendix] For the complete text of a document describing queers as a “troubling moral and social phenomenon” and denying them a status from which they might argue for their rights, see the letter, “Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons” on this Vatican site. This is a document which Ratzinger had authored, as head of Roman curia office once known as the Holy Inquisition. It was published by his old boss Karol Wojtyła in 2003.

Al Qaeda has been running Washington

all Washington getting friendly with the boss

Ted Rall saw only part of the story when he described the shoddy construction of our bases in Iraq, with its fatal consequences for our military personnel. In a cartoon dated 4/14 he wrote: “No one is that inept. Haliburton is obviously working for Al Qaeda.”
I would go much further than Rall, altering that statement to read:

No one is that inept. Our entire government, the White House, Congress, even the Supreme Court, is obviously working for Al Qaeda.

The White House and Congress, by the leave of the Supreme Court, have together killed a million civilians and made refugees of five million more. Washington, with our approval, has laid waste the wealth, infrastructure and institutions of an ancient people and handed over those who survived to terrorists who had never before had access to their lands. It has bankrupted us all, as well as our children and our children’s children. It has blown through the accumulated capital of the world’s respect for our nation. It has totally distracted us from national and international problems which really have to be addressed. It has destroyed our liberties. It has mounted and maintained the most successful worldwide Islamic terrorist recruiting campaign ever imaginable. It has shut our doors to the contributions of both friends and strangers, and darkness has spread across a land and a people once spirited and open.
These are incredible accomplishments of which Al Qaeda could not have dreamed in a hundred years had our government not decided to cooperate with its agenda – and free of charge, it would appear.
They tell us the war is going to go on for a hundred years. I suppose we no longer need to ask why they haven’t found Osama.

[image of a 16th-century woodcut illustrating the medieval christian fantasy, the “Witch’s Kiss”, from About.com]

war is not over

five years and, unfortunately, still counting.

The caption to this Reuters photograph reads: A protestor takes part in a demonstration marking the fifth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion in Iraq, in Washington, March 19, 2008.

[image by Jim Young from Reuters]

play in your own yards, and leave Spitzer alone

William Hogarth Enthusiasm Delineated 1761

This is stupid, if not just evil. No, I’m not talking about Eliot Spitzer. Let him deal with his family; it’s not our concern. People are screaming at the Governor about his marital infidelity and announcing or calling for the end of his career. Meanwhile, George Bush’s murder count in Iraq, already in the hundreds of thousands, continues to mount and no one will pull the plug or talk about impeachment.
I simply don’t care what kind of sex the people I vote for engage in, just as I insist that they not care about my own – or yours either. Murder and other high crimes I care about.

[image from payer.de via fortunecity]

Times Square bomblet outperforms march of a million

In 2003 nearly a million people marched in the streets of New York against a war (to which the majority of the country was opposed even then) only days before it began and the U.S. press hardly mentioned they were there, but last night a small explosive was detonated outside the door of the Times Square military recruiting station, presumably intended to send a similar anti-war message. This time a protest somehow manages to stir the media.
Our democratic system isn’t working; peaceful protests are not considered newsworthy. It would be nice if we could believe that the only people who are learning this lesson are those who would not consider violence a reasonable means of effecting political change.

[first image by David Karp of AP; second by Keith Bedford of REUTERS; both found on Yahoo!photos]

no, not that “Armory show”, and not Breuer’s building

Drill Hall floor of the Armory

Drill Hall vault of the Armory

We were at the press preview for the Whitney Biennial this afternoon. This year the venue has been expanded to include the Seventh Regiment Armory, in whose extravagant nineteenth-century precincts many of the exhibition’s performance art elements (including some interactive experiences scheduled throughout the next month) have been assigned high-ceilinged rooms and closets.
But I as I wrote last week I always have a lot of trouble resisting the aesthetic and historical seductions of architecture like this even when there’s exciting contemporary art to be seen. So here I am writing a post preceding my observations of this year’s Biennial with a couple images of the Armory which shelters some of the installations, and to show that I’m not indifferent to the charms of Marcel Breuer’s own hall, I’m including a view of his lobby ceiling, one of my favorite details in the Whitney itself.

lobby ceiling of the Whitney

The Seventh Regiment Armory’s “American Aesthetic”

Louis C. Tiffany window in the Library of the Armory

I’ve been walking through the front doors of the Administration Building of the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue for decades, but until this past Monday I had never had a glimpse of that late-nineteenth-century monument’s most elaborate rooms, in the wing north of the monumental entrance hall. They are just about as vigorous an expression of the American Aesthetic Movement to be found anywhere, but they have been pretty much hidden from the public, their beauties increasingly neglected for the lack of funds to maintain them. Today they are being restored to their original glory by the Seventh Regiment Armory Conservancy.
I was taken by surprise that we were permitted access that during The Art Show of the ADAA, and Barry and I were also in something of a hurry that afternoon, so I didn’t have a chance to get more than a few images before having to rush out. Fortunately it was a beautiful sunny day, so the Tiffany windows and much of the rooms’ other, largely-undisturbed, ornament probably looked their best – at least for now.
When the restoration is completed these rooms will look even richer, as much of the original color and detail had been watered down or replaced by alterations over the years. For instance, the panels to the left of the window in the picture below are now covered with a dull velvet fabric, but were originally painted with a blue field behind a stenciled silver and copper chain mail [it was an armory, after all] pattern.

detail of the musicians’ gallery in the Veterans Room