James W. Washington, Jr. Creativity as a path to freedom

This sculpture by James W. Washington, Jr, The Chaotic Half, was made in 1945, long before the so-called era of Civil Rights in the 1960s. I say so called because African- Americans had been fighting for their Civil Rights ever since they arrived on Slave ships.

Washington made this sculpture one year after he moved from the South to the to the Northwest (through Civil Service Employment). He wanted to speak in his art to the injustice that he had experienced in the South. He found a lot of racism in Seattle as well, but he felt freer to express his real feelings in his art. He only did three art works directly calling attention to racism, all in the 1940s.

On the right a hand puts a ballot in a box. Behind a diagonal line which serves as a partition is a KKK hood, a noose, a cross and an "all seeing eye". The eye is the eye of surveillance, suggesting the constant vigilance that Washington had to practice growing up when, as he declared "he lived in fear most of the time."

Growing up in Mississippi, Washington experienced the preachings of organized religion as part of the oppression that affected his spirit as much as the KKK threatened him physically.

He celebrated creativity as a means of freedom in all of his art work. When we think of the cuts in support for art programs in the schools and in our nation as a whole, we know that the freedom he spoke of, the creativity that he celebrated, is a revolutionary idea. He believed each person could find their own talent and make it work for them.

It is a radical idea even today. If culture can be liberated from materialism, ambition, elitism, academia, and its other prisons, it can speak of escape from oppression.

That is what Washington did in all his art work even after he turned to more symbolic work and away from explicit images of oppression.
And he succeeded. By the end of his life he was a celebrated artist.

"Stuff Happens" David Hare

Last night I saw the new David Hare play about the Bush administration march to the Iraq war. It was terrific.
Even though we knew the whole story, we were still sitting on the edge of our seats with the tension and stupidity, arrogance, malice, and ignorance of the whole thing. Colin Powell was the central tragic hero of the story, who tried to stand for what he believed in but was trapped into using his integrity to support lies.
SEE THIS PLAY.
The only weakness in the story was the conclusion when the Iraqi came out speaking about the tragedy of destruction and death that has been visited on their country and ends by saying Iraqis should have taken control of our own country ( as though it were the Iraqis' fault that the US invaded them and as far back as 1953 have been meddling in their politics by overthrowing a democratically elected leader who was affiliated with Nasser's socialism. We put in Saddam Hussein, trained him, sold him weapons, encouraged war with Iran, boycotted him, then we took him out as well as the entire country. ON the other hand, the Iraqis have a resistance which is fighting hard in order to get rid of us, in the midst of all the convolutions of terrorism that we have spawned in Iraq, and the Iraqis have not signed the oil bill that the US wants that gives away their assets ( so called "progress towards democracy." in Bush speak.

The play has little emphasis on the economic motives, it is all about raw power .
Only at the end do we learn that Cheney's stock options in Halliburton have gone up to 6 million in value since the war.

watch this video on Impeaching Cheney

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEzPVP6EVRk.
Then get out and make it happen! Everyone do what works for you, but do something.

Shahram Karimi and Shirin Ebadi

In the 2003 Istanbul Biennial the artist Shahram Karimi showed a work with the title "Traces" which he referred to as presenting the creative people of Iran who participated in the "collective struggle toward modernity." Painted on rice sacks, he made realistic portraits of 248 intellectuals many of whom are dead or in exile. Beside the mural he showed a video that wandered through a deserted city, suggesting as Shirin Neshat has stated "a melancholic sense of intended annihilation and erasure of history" ( Poetic Justice 126).
I conclude about the work in my forthcoming book on Art and Politics Now,

"This work achieved a perfect dialectic between high and low culture, the political and the poetic. The mural is in a material and style of the street, and speaks to everyone directly, the video with all of its vacancies and absences is the material of Biennial culture, but it uses that vacancy as a metaphor of the absences of history. "

Here is the mural part of the work. I don't have a photograph of the video, but I am also posting the list of writers, novelists, poets, composers, musicians, political leaders, theater directors, rug weavers, social workers, singers etc. Itis a powerful statement and record of both accomplishments and losses in contemporary Iran.

One of the people listed ( not in this detail) is the Iranian lawyer and Human Rights activist, Shrin Ebadi. She won the Nobel Prize in 2003. She is still in Iran working for legal rights for women and children, freedom of the press, the rights of political activists and other important causes. She announced in May that she would defend the scholar Haleh Esfandiari who was recently arrested in Iran. Ironically Ebadi had to sue the United States for the right to publish her memoir Iran Awakening in this country.

Venice Biennale: A Note on Turkey and Lebanon

For the first time Turkey and Lebanon are officially represented at the Venice Biennale. Those of us who cannot afford to go there can visit the sites online. Turkey is represented by a quirky artist Huseyin Alptekin . Alptekin has been doing offbeat interventions in Europe and Turkey for quite awhile.

In Albania, for example, he hired Kiaja Kiuru from Finland to create a lace covering to cover one of the 500 bunkers left behind by a paranoid dictator.
Here is a photograph of one of her lace covering as shown in a gallery in Istanbul. Kaija Kiuru, originally from Lapland, created “Chamber” in 2002. Using dozens of antique circular tablecloths that the artist collected in secondhand shops, she constructed a temporary domestic shelter from the fruits of thousands of hours of work. Kiuru is concerned with the nature of home and women’s lives and the fact that 80 percent of the world refugees are woman and children. The simultaneous fragility and semi transparency of the tent created a stunning resting place.
I discussed Alptekin's work with Kiuru in
Sculpture , May 2004. Here's a quote:

"Alptekin invited Kaija Kiuru to create a lace cover for a bunker. The lace domesticated these useless shelters. The Bunker Research Group (BRG) connects reality and paranoia, derelict socialist structures and contemporary art, change and stasis."

As for Lebanon, it is one of the hottest places in the world from the perspective of wars, politics, and artists who are actually in the midst of it, figuring out ways to both simply survive and to engage with what is surrounding them as an ongoing reality. The result is a multmedia experimental group of artists who collectively address the insanity of war, suicide bombings, and public pathologies.
Here is Rabih Mroue, a performance artist:
"Searching for a Missing Employee", as performed in 2004 at the Lift Theater Festival. He uses video, news clippings archives, narratives, and a diagram of the information to try to "find" this person who has disappeared (as thousands did in Lebanon during the Civil War 1975 - 91) with only traces left of their existence)

The result is that we realize once again that history is a fabrication based on narratives and procedures that make no sense at all. If that isn't pertinent to our present moment, what is?
Mroue is not showing in Venice, but this gives a little context.
Walid Sadek ,who is showing in Venice, works in texts.
Last year in "Out of Beirut" at Oxford Modern Art he showed labels for landscape paintings by Moustafa Faroukh, a well known Lebanese artist, leaving a space for where the art work would have been and adding a poem of his own which invoked the missing landscape ( both the missing painting, and the landscape that no longer exists because of war).

Word into Art Artists of the Modern Middle East

These pictures are from a stunning exhibition last summer at the British Museum "Word Into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East"
second is the entrance to the exhibition with a sculpture Heech in a cage 2005 by Parviz Tanavoli.
first is a column by Dia al Azzawi Blessed Tigris. A poem is inscribed on it by Muhammad Mahdi

I greet you from afar, O greet me back,

O blessed Tigris, river of gardens green.

I greet your banks, seeking to quench my thirst.

Like doves between water and clay aflutter seen.

O blessed Tigris, oft have I have been forced to leave

To drink from springs which didn’t my thirst relieve.

O blessed Tigris, what inflames your heart

Inflames me and what grieves you makes me grieve.

O wanderer, play with a gentle touch

Caress the lute softly and sing again

That you may sooth a volcano seething with rage

And pacify a heart burning with pain. ( translated by Hussein Hadawi).

Homage to Palestine

As the news in Gaza gets worse and worse, I am posting some images of contemporary art from Palestine by way of affirming the fact that many people are working hard to keep Palestine culture and history alive.
This is from an installation of Palestinian art in an exhibition called Made in Palestine
The work in the foreground is by Mary Tuma
Home for the Disembodied 2000
In the background left to right are
John Halaka
Stripped of their Identity and Driven from their land from the series Forgotten Survivors 1997-2003
Samia Halaby Palestine from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River and
Rula Halawani Negative Incursions2002

The exhibition was organized in 2002 in Houston and was shown in New York City in 2006.

Memorial Day

Memorial Day 2007
We can remember it for the dreadful passageof yet another appropriations bill by the spineless Congress.- 98 Billion to continue the war, to continue to provide "military training for the Iraqis to defend themselves" and to "support out trips." In other words to pour more money into the hands of the corporations and to escalate the conflict in Iraq.

I am offering here three images as a protest. First, the ephemeral sculpture by Mike Magrath placed in Occidental Square last fall on the anniversay of 9/11. It was based on a photograph of an Iraqi man with the dead body of his son in hisarms. The sculpture is made of salt and intended to gradually disappear, just as our sense of death of Iraqis barely registers. Beneath the sculpture sleeps a homeless man, victim of the same corrosive forces of greed capitalism, that are the reasons for war and the excuse for the government to de-fund even our minimal social services.








At the time of the installation of this sculpture
(one of several) a Butoh performance brought to life the sense of struggle, oppression, and survival of the marginal others of our society. They poured sand around a second statue of a young prisoner with his hands bound behind his back and gestured to a third young boy awaiting his fate.

Online vs in the street a debate on activism

I am having an ongoing debate with my thirty something daughter about street activism vs internet activism. I tend to dismiss people who just sit at computers all day as not "real" activists".

She claims that "internet activism is *equally* important, and that if you focus more time on one type of activism but not the other, that doesn't mean you aren't an activist. In other words, just as people who only go to protest marches but never use the internet can still be activists, so can people who are active in internet communities but don't go to rallies."Her example is that the Gonzales scandal is a result of internet activism at salon.com and Talking Points Memo http://talkingpointsmemo.com/

I think that people with signs in the streets, and especially with brilliant street art, is still best way to get our message out. It is also exciting, stimulating, and makes anyone who participates feel better. She feels street protests are claustrophobic and finds anti war demonstrations depressing.

I participated in A28 action last weekend, all over the country people wrote out impeach, passed out signs, and banners, etc. It was huge, and we all felt connected, even though we are also an online community. It will live in in both cyber and reality.
I say you have to have BOTH.

Iraq in Fragments and Orientalism

Independent films can be racist without realizing it, much like racism in a place like Seattle in general. The film Iraq in Fragments, made by Seattle filmmaker James Langley presents a classic liberal view of a racialized, impoverished, fanatic, backward, “other.” The focus on impoverished “primitive” families reinforces prejudice about life outside the United States and the need to “save” people with “democracy,” a thinly disguised translation of the manifest destiny of the nineteenth century. It is discouraging that this film has been so widely celebrated. Its nomination for best documentary demonstrates that the entire film industry is oblivious to its own Orientalism, and ignorant of the realities of the fact that Iraq was a modern country before we got there.

The fact that the well meaning and courageous Langley uses the voices of young boys and old men almost exclusively, underscores his paternalism toward the poor communities to which he turned his lens. An outtake from the film, a section that focused on a young mother and her sick child, equally emphasized impoverished living. The setting of impoverishment against stunningly photographed landscapes is a tourist perspective, much like the imagery that comes with requests for funding from many well meaning agencies.

What a film like this doesn't tell us is that many Iraqis are well educated and accomplished professionals, with one of the best medical and educational systems in the Middle East. Legally, women had more rights than in most countries in the Middle East. It was a secular country.

We have destroyed that. Most of the middle class, artists, writers, poets, playwrights, dancers, singers, doctors, teachers, lawyers, dentists, have been forced to leave ( mostly since 2006, when Langley made his film, they were still there). Women have been prevented from working and forced to cover themselves and leave the house only with men, while living in fear of being killed (for that transformation see Baghdad Burning blog, the author of which has just announced that she must also leave ( April 26). The clerics are controlling women's morality and legal decisions after decades of secular law. Now the only people left fan the flames . The isolated puppet government has no support to resist signing the oil law that gives away all the resources to multinationals. Then Bush can declare a victory and leave.

The "fragments" of Iraq, the three part approach presented in the film, also is a hallucination of American foreign policy. We have created the Civil War through our selective backing and training and arming of various fundamentalist militias. Before us there was one country of Iraqis, who were a peaceful people.

Artists Against the War

Artists against the War, New York City in collaboration with other groups, handed out a petition for impeachment and supporting documents. It was designed as a tabloid newspaper and delivered to every congressional office.

This is a brilliant direct action in the halls of power as Congress is wimpering and whining and unable to really take a stand, except with a feeble bill that they basically invited Bush to veto.

AAWNYC/ART (Activist Response Team) also did a stunning banner drop with the section of the contitution about impeachment in the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building .

They are potent artist activists. Images of their actions are available through their website http://www.aawnyc.org

The sophistication of the visual images designed by artists makes a huge difference in their effectiveness. It also demonstrates their courage and determination to great rid of this President who is ruining Iraq and our own country as well. The soomer artists join the activist camp, the better, we cannot afford the luxury to follow our own private paths anymore.

WASHINGTON, D.C.FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:HIGH CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS - WE WILL NOT BE SILENT

TODAY, APRIL 26, 2007, A.R.T.* OCCUPIED THE HALLS OF CONGRESS IN A DRAMATIC TWO-PART ACTION.

Multiple actions occurred in the early afternoon today inside the Hart Senate Office Building. Eight New York activists were among the 15 plus arrested.

First, in a massive distribution, A.R.T. hand-delivered a 20-page tabloid petition to every representative. It contained documentary evidence for indictments, literally putting impeachment back on the table.

Then, at 1PM, in a spectacular visual feat, A.R.T displayed the full text of Article II, Section 4 to the Senate as a 30-foot banner drop in the Hart Office Building atrium.

A second 30-foot banner read "YOUR SILENCE YOUR LEGACY". Organizers said, "We must magnify the refusal of Congress to uphold the Constitution. Their silence equals complicity in the flagrant crimes of this administration."Contact: *A.R.T. (Activist Response Team)email: stateofemergencyaction@gmail.com