“Migration” the exhibition until July 5

 

Where does one begin to talk about migration to the US from the Global South? Do we begin with the racism embedded in the Constitution at the founding of the United States that designated only property-owning white men as citizens? Do we begin with the history of US intervention in Latin America, our innumerable coups from 1798 to this day that over throw any government that we consider antithetical to our economic interests or which even considered enacting programs to help ordinary people? Do we begin with Free Trade Agreements that are bankrupting the small farmers of Central America and Mexico? Do we begin with the Drug Wars, the mafia, the violence, also fueled by US dollars?  Do we begin with the detention system first set up to target the families of Chinese railroad workers in the 1880s? Or perhaps with the Immigration Act of 1965 which extended regulation to the Western Hemisphere? Suddenly migrant laborers without papers were counted as illegal aliens. I hope to create a book that will include art about all of these issues.

 

For this blog post, I will focus on the many issues raised by three artists, a poet and a community activist, in the exhibition “Migration” in the Columbia City Gallery Seattle this June.

 

 

Let us begin with Tatiana Garmendia‘s video work “New Colossus” which alters the original message of the poem inscribed near the Statue of Liberty. As we watch her sorting coffee beans more and more rapidly (an activity she was forced to do while in detention in Cuba as a child), she repeats some of the famous words of the poem            “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus:

“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

 

But as the beans are sorted faster and faster into four piles, white, and shades of brown, the Lazarus poem is increasingly overwhelmed by another set of statements:

“Send me your well to do,

your educated,

your engineers,

your doctors,

your Europeans,

your light skinned,

your well fed,

your rich with many homes,

your refugees with money

your middle class with suitcases full of loot . . .

 

Lazarus wrote her poem in deep sympathy with Jewish immigrants pouring into this country as a result of pogroms in Russia. As it is altered in Garmendia’s “New Colossus,” it reflects our vastly changed economic and social migrations of the early 21^st century. The reference is also personal, for she remembers her mother crying as she read the original poem as they entered the US for the first time.

 

This video is part of a series that the artist calls “The Triumphs.” For the first time, Tatiana Garmendia confronts her own childhood experience of detention and immigration. Born in Havana, Cuba in 1961 to a family of active supporters of socialism, they greeted Castro with delight. As a doctor, Tatiana’s father joined the army and worked in rural communities. But, not long after, political conditions became convoluted and he fell into disfavor. Tatiana’s family went into a detention camp in 1966 where they remained for almost three years.

 

 

As a young child, Tatiana witnessed atrocities and rape while in the detention camp. Her father was tortured and disabled. They finally reached the US in the fall of 1969.

In this exhibition Tatiana honors her father with a photograph of a blanket sewn with words that describe the methods used to torture him. It is a document of a ritual that she performed over many months.

 

For the artist, it was profoundly traumatic to be confronted with the reality that the US uses these same techniques at Guantánamo, and in other detention sites all over the world. The public exposure of that fact has made the depth of our hypocrisy on human rights unavoidable.

 

Tatiana has only now been able to begin to explore these painful memories. She draws on references to the Tarot and Santeria as a way to access her feelings. Santeria is a syncretic religion that grew from the slave trade in Cuba. It is also known as La Regla Lucumi and the rule of Osha.

 

Two works explore the contradiction of Castro’s charisma and the realities she experienced as a child in detention. In Fuse, we see a fusion of her own face with that of Castro’s expressing various emotions. The concept is that Castro’s mystique can actually inhabit her spirit, and those of others around the world.

In a second piece exploring Castro’s charisma, Mi Fidel, the artist takes on Castro’s mannerisms and turn of phrase; in the background are photographs of young soldiers, audiences, a soviet missile, flimsy boats of refugees trying to escape, and protest marches.

 

These two pieces embody the painful contradictions of multiple realities. On the one hand the charismatic leader, on the other, the suffering of many Cubans. It is believed in Cuba that Castro has a magical protector, a spiritual guardian that protects him, rides other spirits, and takes possession of them. The artist feels this as she takes on his identity, even as she knows “ in her body” as she dramatically stated, that he created great pain and suffering.

 

In La Patria Querida, My Dear Homeland, the artist dances with a skeleton, invoking a childhood memory of a youth who entertained herself and other children in the detention camp with a performance for which he was later tortured.

 

 

She refers to human trafficking using her own body in Border Crossing. The artist lies almost naked face up, with eyes staring, as we hear a partially coherent series of phrases “the mouth of the border has nothing to say; my border is a mouth; you crossed with nothing to say; why did you cross my home,” and many more variations on these words. These are hallucinations of a desperate woman who is either in a trance like near death state or already dead.

 

 

The motionless body is spotlighted from above, as though a surveillance airplane has found her, and at the end of the haunting soundtrack by the band Rachel’s ironically titled “wouldn’t live anywhere but here” there is the sound of a helicopter. Eerily, we realize that the woman is indeed dead in the desert, trying to cross the border, the passport stamps on her body implying it is legally entering, but she has reached the dead end of the last border crossing.

 

Cecilia Alvarez also addresses violence against women at the border in her larger than life painting of a nude woman, with stigmata, “Los Eternos Sacrificios, Eternal Sacrifices.”

 

As a radical feminist Chicana/Cubana artist, Alvarez declares her resistance to capitalism as a corrosive force that destroys people and cultures, as well as her belief in the powerful female energy that stands up to torture, trafficking, and environmental degradation. This huge woman has been tortured, but she survives in all her power, she is naked, but she is indomitable. She stands towering over us her arms raised in a gesture that is both threatening and protective. She stands guard over her unborn child as a warrior.

 

For the artist she refers to violence against women everywhere. One example is the Juarez murders, the murder of young factory workers on the border. Hundreds of these women have been killed with impunity, disappeared, often identified only by a random piece of clothing or a shoe found in the desert. These murders are unsolved, partly because these women are young, unknown, and defenseless. They left their home communities and supportive families in order to find a way to make a living. Unrooted, they live a bare life of squalor in toxic squatters’ camps, ride buses to a factory where they work all day in demanding and repetitive work, a toxic environment both socially and physically. They are often killed late at night when returning home from work, a bus may detour, or a car may take them.

 

 

 

In “La Tierra Santa, Holy Earth”, Alvarez presents a defiant mother, hair flying behind her. She gestures “stop” with her out turned palm. She is the antithesis of the passive and much worshipped Virgin of Guadalupe. This holy woman, with the moon as a halo, protects four children of the Brazilian Yanomami tribe  with her body. At the bottom of the painting the span of her legs guards a duck, panther, turtle, fish and snake. The Yanomami are the largest indigenous group living in the Brazilian rainforest. Today they are under severe threat of extinction from disease, and land loss, from mining, logging and cattle ranching.

 

This indigenous woman is protecting her progeny and the creatures of the earth, the victims of ravaging development by multinational companies, forcing migration of species as well as multiple extinctions. Because they have lived close to the land and in communion with it for thousands of years, indigenous peoples are leading the way in current resistance movements to ecological disaster and climate change ( see previous post). Alvarez’s painting honors them.

 

 

Cecilia Alvarez’s  third painting is the centerpiece of an altar dedicated to her father, Jorge Guillermo Alvarez, who came from Cuba to the US in the 1940s in hopes of earning a better living. As an albacore fisherman he respected the environment, he refused to use nets. Environmental consciousness is a deep component of Alvarez’s work.

 

Cecilia Alvarez was shaped by her childhood on the border of Mexico, in both San Diego and Tijuana. In Mexico she experienced a warm extended family at her grandmother’s home. She spoke Spanish and connected to the long history of her community. In the U.S., she was forced to speak English and stripped of her cultural values.  She remembers that Latino students were lectured on hygiene in elementary school, while white American students took art.

 

 

In front of the painting of her father, an installation of crosses movingly addresses the price of resistance, of migration, both on individuals and on the planet with the following texts:

“In memory of all the species that have lost or are losing habitat, a future, and have nowhere to migrate

“In memory of all those known and unknown who have perished trying to migrate and escape violence

“In memory to the women and children known and unknown who are fleeing natural and social catastrophe and who are victims of slavery”

 

 

 

In the collage “Resist Hate,” Deborah Faye Lawrence creates icons for ten types of hate groups in the US expanding on a map from the Southern Poverty Law Center. We see the ten icons covering the map of the country, densely in most areas. They are actually only a few of the many hate groups documented by SPLC, but Lawrence’s map is far more intense than the SPLC map. In many states she has covered almost the whole state with icons of the following groups “Anti Islamist, Ku Klux Klan, Neo Nazi, Neo Confederate, Black Separatist, General Hate, Anti LGBT, White Nationalist, Racist Skinhead, Christian Identity. Her headline, urgently calls on us to “Resist Hate.” Hate, as seen in this map, is often based on race and religion. 

 

There is much we can do every day to counter the hatred on the planet with non violent activism, both on the micro level and the macro level, but it takes a lot of awareness, a lot of constant effort. Violence is so much easier and so much more available and promoted and accepted.

 

But to resist hate means to find another way forward.  I am reading Mark Kurlansky’s book on the history of non violence, “a dangerous idea” as he calls it. He gives us the history of many defeated peace movements, but he points out that history suppresses the successes of non violent civic disobedience. For example during World War II, Denmark gave lip service to the Nazis, but then subverted all of their programs, most significantly, in preventing the deporting or Jews. Connecting to Alvarez’s conviction that capitalism is the primary evil,  Kurlansky dispels myths about wars: they are mainly about economic gain, but they are frequently promoted through hate.

 

Lawrence’s work, “Welcome (NW Detention Center),” is a partner to the Hate Map.   Fostering hatred of the “other” and pursing detention go hand in hand. “Welcome” details that system, its private corporate ownership, its absurd and arbitrary regulations, and its abuse of human rights.

The meticulously constructed text, made from cutting out individual letters, says

 

“Welcome to the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma. Our ample 277,000 sq.ft. facility stands in Tacoma’s Tide Flats- a highly toxic superfund site; A Tsunami and Lohar zone that’s visible from the museums of art, history and glass. Even if you and your family have lived and worked in the US for years, you are now a prisoner of the U.S. slated for deportation. You may or may not have access to legal counsel or a translator or news! To clarify security, detainee jumpsuit colors have changed! Now your Red uniform= high risk. Orange=medium risk. Green=medium to low risk. Blue=low risk. Segregation by color helps you see that other detainees cannot be trusted. So don’t talk to them or join their hunger strikes!”

 

 

Around the edge, the small strip of writing refers to the administration of the Northwest Detention Center by the private corporation GEO. “NDC is a criminal alien requirement prison [CARP], part of the Homeland Security Department’s Bureau of Immigration & Customs Enforcement [ICE], owned and operated by GEO, a profit making corporation and one of the nations’ largest private prison contractors.” GEO receives $159. per night per filled bed from our tax dollars. There are 32,000 detention beds in the US, not counting the newly built family detention centers located in remote areas, near the border so that they do not need to comply with any US laws.

 

The text of “Welcome” is collaged on a 1950s tv tray; below it hangs four cookie cutters, made into figures with various shades of skin color and wearing four colors of uniform. The “hanging” of these figures and the use of cookie cutters implies that they are helplessly caught up in a system beyond their control, a system that is removing them from ordinary life and heading them toward death.

 

Deportation for many of the people who are detained for no crime whatsoever except a burned out tail light or expired license, or perhaps, wearing a tattoo that might suggest gang membership from thirty years ago, or a DWI from forty years ago, that deportation often means death, at the least the death of that person’s life as they lived it, at worst literal death in the country to which they are sent, which often is not their home country.

 

Furthermore, there is no “path to citizenship”.  Obama’s effort to create that path, convoluted and incredibly drawn out as it was, has been blocked in the courts. Despite renewed claims that only “convicted criminals, terrorism threats or those who recently crossed the border.” are being detained, the Detention Center in Tacoma is completely full, 1496 people in mid June , (the capacity is 1500), with almost all people who have not committed crimes. We pay $149. per day from our tax money to GEO for each person. No wonder the incentive is to keep the maximum number of detainees there under insufferable conditions. These detainees do not have any of the rights of criminals, a right to a lawyer, to a jury, to recreation, or even to decent food. They work for $1. a day ( if they were working for nothing it would be slavery), to run the facility.

 

Particularly immigrants from the global south are consistently racially profiled both by local police and by the society at large despite the fact that they are incredibly hard workers, doing work that most of us cannot or do not want to do.

 

Lawrence concisely captures these tragic contradictions.

 

 

 

 

Next Lawrence takes an ironic tone in the “American Amnesty Tray” which highlights the action taken by the  Native American Council  in December 2014, granting amnesty to 240 million illegal white people. She has placed this text over a 1940 map of the U.S. with the title, “Against Intolerance in America” by Emma Bourne.

 

Increasingly Native peoples especially in the Northwest are reclaiming their ownership of the land. In Canada, where treaties were not signed, the First Nations are winning their claims in court, effectively blocking pipelines and other ruthless development

 

Crucially, Lawrence includes the fact that “a ‘road to citizenship’ was extended by the Native Council to the European Population in this land – those without criminal records or contagious diseases. “ Since no road to citizenship has been offered to the thousands of undocumented workers in this country, that fact creates a dramatic point.

 

 

The last tray by Lawrence details a successful immigration story. That is, of course, why so many people have come here. There are successes, many of them. The foundation of our country is based on the energy brought by people from all over the world. Lucia E tells the story of a Filipina immigrant who fled the Marcos dictatorship and then followed a path to citizenship in this country as a result of community support and her ability to speak English.

 

Many of the people who are currently rounded up by the immigration and detention system do not speak English, and do not have a way forward to become legal. Sometimes they missed a single document sent to them years ago, or a single ordered court appearance, perhaps because of changing addresses. People who are in fear of their lives if they are sent “back” or who have been trafficked have the possibility of what is called “relief” or legal procedures that can lead to citizenship. No one else has any recourse.

 

 

Deborah Lawrence grew up in Southern California with working class parents who had deep roots in activism and left wing politics. She moved constantly as a child; art was her means of survival. She works with collage in the tradition of Dada artists who intentionally cut up magazines as a way of attacking capitalism. In her case, she confronts abuses in many forms, particularly against women, but she also honors women who play a leading role in resisting oppression. Her art work is defiant and straightforward, but also humorous and respectful.

Each of these artists offers multiple perspectives on migration ranging from the torture and abuse of detention, human trafficking and violence against women, abuse of children, environmental degradation, and the corrosive role of capitalism, to the hopes and dreams for a better life, that, in some cases, are realized.

 

In addition to these visual artists, our exhibition included a presentation by the activist Maru Mora Villalpando who gave us an overview of migration activism in the Northwest that includes advocating for the berry pickers in the Skagit Vallery as well as calling attention to the detention center in Tacoma. Villalpando has been able to get media coverage for an extended hunger strike in Tacoma, as well as calling attention to violence by guards against detainees. She is an articulate national advocate for the detainees.

 

Finally, we had a series of poems by Raul Sanchez, both his own work and the writings of others, which evocatively traced the stages of a northern migration from riding the “Beast” as the train north is known, to experiences at the border, to the essential work of “All Our Brown- Skinned Angels” as his book of poetry is titled. In this book, he presents exquisite poems honoring Latino workers in our society, the angels of the title.

 

“Migration” as a process and a concept encompasses all of these issues and much more. It encompasses all of us.

 

Even as xenophobia seems to be reaching a new pitch in the US this summer of 2015 among ignorant politicians and the general public, there is no denying that this nation has always been a nation of both migration and xenophobia. Other than the Native American population we have all come from somewhere else. We have enriched the country, but each migration has suffered hostility and resentment from those already here. As pointed out in an editorial in the New York Times on July 10, for example, when the Irish came in the 19th century they were vilified as criminals. After the Chinese finished building the railroads for the moguls, they were run out of town, and immigration prevented,  many were held in detention. And so now we have Mexicans and Latinos , those who, in fact, actually are holding our country together.

 

 

Led by Indigenous voices, all ages protest Arctic Drilling

 

 

Days of Action in Seattle against the Shell Arctic Oil Rig “Polar Pioneer”

 

Collaboration with Native American tribal musicians, paddlers, poets and storytellers

 

“The wisdom of the elders has taught us many things. Our ancestors had much time to observe and learn from the delicate balances and cycles of nature. With this profound gathering of knowledge and wisdom, they understood the importance of passing on the teachings to future generations. They knew how to learn, respect, acknowledge and share. Our ancient stories tell us that Great Spirit gave us everything we needed to live upon the land without want. As long as we respected each other  and the domain of the tree plant and animal peoples, and returned their bones to their people with gratitude, there would be no war, greed, hatred or destruction of ourselves and our sacred  Mother Earth. If we were to forget these teachings, the opposite of paradise would fall upon the land. We believe now is the time for us all to come together and remember this Time of Paradise. ”

 

Paul “Che oke ten” Wagner, Native American flutist and traditional storyteller from the Wsaanich (Saanich) tribe of southern Vancouver Island, British Columbia made this beautiful statement.

He played “Living Freely on the Land” on the solar powered barge at dusk during resistance to the Polar Pioneer.

He spoke of his grandmother “she would talk to the water. I do not come to disturb, I come to cleanse my spirit.  “ About the Polar Pioneer he said “that thing over there doesn’t represent respect.”

 

 

In the Northwest the indigenous leaders and paddlers give deep resonance to our climate change protests.

 

 

 

When the “Paddle in Seattle” began on Saturday May 16. it was led by Duwamish, Tlingit, Coast Salish  and other canoes filled with tribal paddlers. Then followed 300 kayaks, rowboats, canoes, and rubber rafts, and other craft  paddling across Elliott Bay to protest new Arctic oil drilling by Shell Oil in the supersensitive Chukchi Sea on the North Coast of Alaska.

 

 

The massive oil platform, so called Polar Pioneer, is being refurbished in Seattle (it was made by the same Japanese company that more recently made our giant tunnel machine, Bertha, that has been broken down for over a year).

 

Once close to the giant Shell platform parked at Terminal 5 on Harbor Island ( it is breaking many laws because of its size and function), the kayakers joined arms and raised massive banners protesting the Shell plan. They also carried individual protest flags attached to light weight bamboo rods. Backbone Campaign, Greenpeace, Rising Tide, 350.org were all represented and led by the Duwamish people, on whose land the entire Harbor Island stands. After the swarm of the water flotilla “the mosquito fleet” , there was a party in Jack Block Park, a tiny green spot attached to Harbor Island, surrounded by high hurricane fences, an “amenity” required of the Port.

 

In front of the massive rig ,the small colorful boats collectively made a powerful statement against capitalism and exploitation of the environment.

 

 

But the exciting part of this protest is that all ages participated and it took many forms.

The Washington Youth Climate Change Challenge sued Washington State Department of Ecology for dereliction of duty.

 

On Sunday March 18 the international youth group Plant for the Planet was raising funds to plant trees and go to a climate change conference in Germany to help draft language to convince the G8 in December this year in Paris to make international policy to save Mother Earth from a climate catastrophe.

Children were encouraged to draw salmon.

 

 

Over Memorial day weekend, a college student in Bellingham, Chiara D’Angelo, age 20, strapped herself for an astounding 63 hours to the anchor chain of a support ship for Arctic drilling.

 

Art, song, dance, poetry, puppets, music, chanting are all part of Seattle’s art protest traditions. The giant scale of the signs carried by kayakers were on webbed supports so they wouldn’t blow the boats away.

The small flags with great logos for individual kayaks had carefully thought out bamboo holders or designed to tie on backs.

 

Denise Henrickson made wind sock salmon that create a fleet of salmon.

The creativity of the imagery reminded me of Occupy, and certainly these protests are directly linked to Occupy in the widespread collaborative outcry against capitalism. Issues are finally interlocking with climate change and anti capitalism. The protesters represent a wide political spectrum from the Sierra Club, to Rising Tide, and Greenpeace (5 Greenpeace activists had attached themselves to the Polar Pioneer in the middle of the ocean as it crossed from Asia). But also protesting are the city and state governments because of legal violations.

 

On Monday May 18, dance and song and art shut down work at Terminal 5  as police looked on from bicycles, many of them sympathetic.  A giant earth parachute created by tireless Lisa Marcus of 350.0rg was painted with the Arctic at the center. She also made the small kayak flags and much more. The parachute floated around as people held it. There were also seagull costumes, sea turtles, oil rig signs, and many other creative graphics.

 

The protests have continued in many forms. We had the” luminescent kayaks” on June 5, a spiritual event with prayer flags, altars and beautiful music from the solar barge. Individual kayakers carried carefully designed lanterns.

 

 

 

Then Monday June 8 there was another port blockage by brave resisters linked together. The conviction is that by causing even some delay Shell will miss the drilling season for the whole summer. They seem obliviously determined though and still tout the myth of jobs and the need for oil.

 

Certainly the most dramatic moment came when the five Raging Grannies, sitting in rocking chairs, wearing photographs of their great grandchildren, with arms connected by a large sleeve, were arrested. Alex Garland’s photographs of these events are fabulous, showing the disdainful expressions of these really senior participants in civil disobedience as the police arrested them.

 

  

 

 

Sunday June 14 Idle No More Native Women Rising, held a three hour event with singing and dancing, poetry and chanting, as well as protest shouts at the rig:

 

You will not be successful
You will not make it to your destination
You will not harvest oil from mother earth
You will not pollute the ocean
You will not pollute the sky
You will not pollute our lives
I vow that you will not be successful
You will not damage the lives of our future generations

 

The Northwest, Salish Sea from British Columbia to Oregon is on the front line of stopping Arctic drilling as well as the coal trains, tar sands, and the rest of the disastrous outdated ideas of these oblivious corporations. Virtually all of these resources are being plundered to ship to China. Sightline Institute has provided us with a map of the fact that the Cascades are in the way of this massive export of resources. Already 4 of 6 coal ports have been cancelled. The Tar Sands Pipelines are disrupted. Native tribes are successfully winning battles in the courts in Canada.

 

The Polar Pioneer departed for the Arctic on June 15. Kayacktivists delayed it long enough, that it ran aground at low tide.

 

The people must win a future for our planet.

 

@Large Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz

@Large Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz honors people who are detained around the world for political reasons. In some cases, many of us do not even know about these struggles.

For example, Bahrain, which rose up against oppression in 2011, and continues to do so, is not on the world media radar. But fifteen brave activists from that country are included in Ai Weiwei’s homage. Recently, an outstanding documentary film by Jen Marlowe about Bahrain’s ongoing resistence to oppression has been released called  Witness Bahrain. 

Ai Weiwei was detained for almost three months in 2011, ostensibly for tax evasion, followed by house arrest, and he is still under surveillance and can’t leave the country. He has though, been able to continue to create work all over the world in absentia. In one venue at the Venice Biennale in 2013 he installed a group of six boxes each five feet high, the measurements of his cell, and recreated inside of them the repressive experience of detention which invades every aspect of daily life. Reading  Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman gave me insights into  that dehumanizing process survived only by the strength of the human spirit. Mahamedou Ould Slahi, still in detention in Guantanamo, details the torture he survived in the incredible Guantanamo Diary  Another recent publication that describes both revolution and detention as well as torture is Diaries of an Unfinished Revolution, Voices from Tunis to Damascus.

As we approach Alcatraz Island on the ferry, full of tourists who have no idea of the installation, we see its present and its past.  You first see “Indians Welcome” behind the sign for the penitentiary from the 1969 – 71 occupation led by Mohawk activists.

A surveillance tower still stands, but most of the buildings themselves, are now in ruins. They were occupied by the families of the guards before the prison closed in 1963 and it was creepy to read about their dances and social events.

 

As we enter the first massive space, we are immediately confronted by a dragon, his mouth wide open, his long teeth threatening. Symbol of imperial power, this dragon expresses both rage and futility. Made of dozens of kites hand painted in China, it lunges at us, suspended from the ceiling, its body weaving back and forth through the columns of the enormous space. But it is trapped. It cannot move.

The space, the “New Industries Building” served as a vast laundry room where inmates manufactured army uniforms under close guard and for a pittance (their work organized by a company that still continues to do this in US prisons to this day).

@ Large was created under the sponsorship of the FOR-SITE Foundation led by Cheryl Haines in collaboration with the National Park Service and the Golden Gate Conservancy.  She thought of the idea of an installation on Alcatraz, then happened to meet Ai Weiwei in China, just after his release in 2011. Ai Weiwei wanted to broadcast injustice inside and outside China: it was a perfect fit. But it took a lot of diplomacy to gain support: it is the first time any art event has been held at Alcatraz.

Near the dragon are “bird kites” that reference countries holding political prisoners. These threatening, unmovable birds emphasize the contradiction of their “detention” with the freedom of the many birds on Alcatraz Island, now designated as a bird sanctuary.

Ironically, the kites are titled “With Wind,” suggesting what would happen if they were able to fly, and underscoring its absence.

Some of the kites that form the dragon have quotes from human rights activists who are included in “Trace,” installed in the second vast room of this former industrial factory.

From looking up at kites, we look down to the floor at portraits of 176 people imprisoned for political beliefs in 33 countries. The portraits are constructed in small Legos, with various sizes and colors, meticulously composed by means of grids. They are arranged in a pattern set in a white (Lego) ground; we can see them as individuals, linked by a common grid of restraint.

Ai Weiwei figured it all out from China. He is also an architect, so he was able to work with models and dimensions. He understood and experienced the confinement of his detention cell  (another work seen in Venice and in a travelling retrospective recreated the exact dimensions of his detention cell). His work has frequently addressed our relationship to architectural spaces and its components.

Before I went I was dubious about the use of Lego, but actually, the digitized portraits perfectly express the barely visible condition of most of these prisoners. Volunteers in San Francisco matched the legos to templates, a demanding and complex process. Five large segments were put together over three weeks by 90 volunteers following patterns (does it echo the virtual slave labor that took place in this building?).

A few of these portraits honor past heroes like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King. At the very front are Edward Snowden and John Kiriakou.

The 38 Chinese prisoners form a single huge segment on the floor, the only group that was assembled in China. As we move through the vast room we look at faces and names.

(We can’t walk on the Legos, so we see them from an angle, again appropriate for these disappeared detainees). In a book on a pedestal, as well as online we can read each of their stories.

The artist worked in collaboration with Amnesty International to select the names to include, and of course these are only a fraction of who might have been included.

For example, for the United States, there are only six names. Where is Mumia Abu Jamail?  Why only one prisoner from Guantanamo, Shaker Aamer. I expected to see Mahamedou Ould Slahi. There are in fact still 122 prisoners at Guantanamo, 56 of whom have already been cleared for release. Those prisoners, like many of the political prisoners in @Large are all victims of a profound violation of human rights and falsely accused of actions which they did not commit.

 

We view a third installation in the same immense building, “Refraction” from a narrow passageway looking down through broken windows.  Originally, armed guards stood here watching prisoners work; we take their position. “Refraction” suggests the wing of a huge downed bird. Made from giant solar panels used in Tibet as solar cookers, it again represents immobility. On top of some of the panels are teapots or small pans referring to their original use, as well as perhaps the human spirit rising above adversity.

From the New Industries building, we descended down the hill to Cellblock A, part of the public tour of Alcatraz. Ai Weiwei had to argue to get permission to use it.

Inside these old fashioned and crumbling cells built before Alcatraz was a federal prison, we sit on a small stool in each of twelve cells and listen to “Stay Tuned,” songs, poetry and speeches by people or groups, imprisoned for their creative expressions. They speak in their native languages.  Outside the cell is an English translation. It includes familiar names such as Fela, Pussy Riot, and Martin Luther King, obviously making the statement accessible to the general public who have no idea that @Large exists, and have come simply for the standard Alcatraz tour. It is a haunting emotional experience.

Even more penetrating are two sound installations, “Illumination”, in the psychiatric isolation units of the adjacent prison hospital. Buddhist monks and Hopi Indians (who were imprisoned at Alcatraz for refusing to send their children to government boarding schools) chant, separately, in windowless spaces.

In the rest of the hospital, another installation, “Blossom,” consists of hundreds of white porcelain flowers which fill derelict sinks, toilets and bathtubs almost to over flowing. As one of the art guides said, “Porcelain is strong, but fragile, like free speech”. Putting them into plumbing fixtures suggests they could be flushed away at any time. The flowers also reference the artist’s father’s own experience in the 100 Flowers Campaign in China, when intellectuals were invited to critique Mao, only to be sent into exile. Ai Weiwei’s father was a famous poet, who was sent to clean toilets in the Gobi desert.

The final installation “Yours Truly” appropriately placed in the dining hall of the prison, offers an opportunity to correspond with political prisoners: post cards are pre addressed to the people featured in “Trace.” We can tell them directly that we are thinking of them. It is surprisingly moving to reach out personally to those imprisoned, and know that even this simple act of communication can break through the devastating isolation of those lost in a prison or detention system.

Set inside the infamous Alcatraz prison, in the middle of the overwhelmingly beautiful San Francisco Bay, with cormorants and gulls flying around us, intensifies the experience of @Large as it calls attention to the huge injustice of politically motivated imprisonment worldwide.

 

Alcatraz itself  had its share of political prisoners as well. In addition to the Hopi, conscientious objectors from World War I went there. Alcatraz is mainly famous for the prisoners who arrived after it became a federal prison for the “worst of the worst” in 1933.That is what the tour seems to emphasize.

 

Ai Weiwei, with the help of an unusual coalition of public and private organizations, has pulled off an enormous coup in @Large. The installation layers image and symbol, fact and metaphor, freedom and detention; it includes history and the larger contexts of imprisonment and human rights. The media of kites, and Lego and porcelain, as well as music, poetry and chants,  underscore the fragility of freedom itself. Ai Weiwei has had his passport revoked by the Chinese government, but his outspoken protest of unjust imprisonment and detention and his stand for freedom cannot be contained.

 

“Any artist who isn’t an activist is a dead artist.” Ai Weiwei

Rameschwar Broota and Nalini Malani at the Kiran Nadar Museum in Delhi

 

On our first afternoon in India, we started with two world famous sites, the stunning Humayun Tomb (1565), the forerunner of the Taj Mahal and two newly restored nearby tombs, all part of an extensive necropolis in that part of Delhi. Then we went on to the Qutb Minar (1190), a minaret surrounded by a mosque made of recycled Hindu temple pieces.

But I was most excited to visit director and curator, Roobina Karode at the spacious Kiran Nadar Museum.

There we immediately immersed ourselves in the large scale paintings in the career retrospective of the work of Rameschwar Broota,”Visions of Interiority: Interrogating the Male Body 1963 – 2014.”   In person, Rameschwar is soft spoken and understated. As he took us through the exhibition, he described his work in a quiet voice that belied the extraordinary experience of the works themselves.

The first paintings we encountered seem to swell and flow on the wall, water, bodies, landscapes (I wish this was a bigger image, I am offering you a detail also here). But the undercurrent is both beautiful and threatening. Because of the large scale, and the subtle emergence of the body only in parts, in white lines on a dark ground, I felt unmoored, as though these works were creating a new world of which I was not a part, but which might envelop me.

Aside from the scale and imagery, the meticulous process that Broota has invented to create these works requires enormous physical stamina and discipline (some of them refer to principles of yoga, a practice he follows). He paints many transparent layers of close valued paint, silver,sepia, blue, black on the surface, then draws the imagery by scratching with an ordinary razor blade. The thin white lines emerge from the darkness and coalesce into the eerie flows.

The sense of continuity between the liquid coursing through veins in a body and the water flowing in the sea was unnerving. These works for me suggest the impending and ongoing ecological crisis of the planet. Its details emerge clearly, a foot, a body within the flow, but the overall scale is beyond us, beyond the canvas, stretching into a larger world. These works are referred to by the artist as “Traces of Man” or “Metamorphosis” in which the human figure is part of a huge environment.

 

 

Broota focuses on a vulnerable male body. Much of the art in India is based on the female figure, heroic males or mythological creatures. These works are explicitly male (except for one based on his wife). In another series called “Runners” from the 1980s we see a lonely man separated from the world, seemingly existentially running or standing, or hanging upside down. “Prisoner of War” somberly presents an anonymous and generic prisoner.

Earlier work by the artist is more explicitly political. One series from the 1970s refers to politicians by using apes, in various amusing and cynical postures, as in “The Same Old Story.”  Still large in scale, these satiric apes perfectly represent the political process in its self serving and and self referential narcissism.

The curator states:

Broota’s ‘Man’ in his primeval presence goes through the ambivalence of body and being, spirit and matter, fragility and resilience. With the trepidations of age, time, death and disintegration, one encounters the presence of male vulnerability in Broota that pushes the heroic male to often acquire an anti-heroic position.”

Broota, together with his wife Vasundhara Tewari Broota are both long time art teachers at Triveni Kala Sangam, the historical Delhi art school, founded by Sundari Shridharani in 1950, and designed by Architect Joseph Stein . Today it still has free classes. Rameschwar has been Head of the Art Department there since 1967.

Vasundhara is also an outstanding feminist artist. I was able to visit her studio on the following day.  Here is an example of one of the paintings. She has recently shifted from small figures to very large ones. This painting of her daughter titled “Eye of the Tiger” 2012 suggests the emotional turmoil of adolescence. Its off center composition and layers of different moods are a stark contrast to her earlier work of women practicing centered yoga poses.  But looking at her facebook, it appears that taking chances with many different types of images is characteristic of her work.

 

At Kiran Nadar, we also saw the last part of Nalini Malani’s retrospective “You can’t keep acid in a plastic bag.”  This section’s title referred to her often referenced mythic women “Twice Upon a Time: Cassandra, Sita, Medea.” Malani seems to also follows science fiction: this image with its huge centipede like creaturecoming out the mouth reminds me of the symbiot people had inside them in the tv show “Stargate.”

 

Malani’s pioneering medium, reverse painting on mylar, here displayed in five adjacent and interconnecting panels (more usually on rotating cylinders with lights shining on them so that they project moving shadows) creates an  unsettling presence, her work cannot be seen as material, the imagery seems to be changing before our ideas. Malani layers many literary and visual sources including pre Mughal frescoes from Rajasthan, Greek mythology, Western art, Indian history, Chinese art, evocative but unidentifiable botanical and biological creatures, (Nalani’s earliest drawings and watercolors were inspired by biology and botany ), her invented monsters, and much more.

 

For decades Malani has engaged deeply disturbing social issues through the representation of the human body such as in the “Mutants,” series about the horrifyingly deformed babies born after the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests.

In “Twice Upon a Time” monsters lurk, the earth seems to be enclosing many crawling creatures that suggest centipedes and worms or skeletal animals; oversize and overweight male figures, human or subhuman, occasionally dressed in a suit, suggest violence. Airplanes threaten pilgrims.

Andreas Huyssen, one of my favorite critical thinkers describes them thus

“It emphasizes the fragmentation and debasement of human form, but it does not suggest a currently fashionable anti-or post-liberating escape… there is no romanticization here of some otherness… nor is it… a take on the once fashionable Western exploitation of the abject. It is rather a way of registering and visually transforming the real violence and mutilations of the human , in specific historical and by now global contexts, without ever violating what once could call an ethics of the gaze on violence.”  ( Nalini Malani In Search of Vanished Blood, Hatje Canatz documenta 13, 54.

In other words, Malani never loses her own direct emotional response to what she is representing and neither do we. We deeply feel the disintegration, disruption, deterioration of the planet, of the human condition as we look at her work.

Malani herself became a refugee from Pakistan, when she was only a year old at the time of the Partition of India and Pakistan, but it was not until the 1992 attack on the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya by Hindu mobs that she returned to that memory.

“In Search of Vanished Blood” a poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz quoted by the artist conveys the nightmare of violence that leaves no trace. Here is a short excerpt:

“There is no sign of blood, not anywhere.

I’ve searched everywhere.

The executioner’s hands are clean. His nails transparent.”

This poem is one point of departure for her astonishing work of the same title at Documenta 13. Another reference point for this work is Cassandra by Christa Wolfe. The voice of Cassandra speaks in the sound track of the installation which creates an immersive environment of rotating mylar cylinders that create a frightening shadow play.  

For many decades, Malani has addressed violence, political and personal, as well as cultural. Recently she has been horrified by the manipulation of Gandhi’s philosophy for political power and violence by the now Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi (who allowed the riots  to rage unchecked in Ayodhya and even to encourage them.)

I first saw Nalini Malani’s work at the 2003 Istanbul Biennial installed in the huge underground Roman era cistern, a fitting place for her work, with its shadowy distances punctuated by heavy columns and eerie lights. I remember the moving mylar cylinders with mythical references that projected on a wall like a shadow play: As I wrote at the time:

“Nalini Malani’s work in the Yerbatan Cistern was magical. Her rotating circular acetate discs projected overlapping sequences of the shadows and reflections of fantastic beasts interspersed with guns and skulls on the wet floor, wall, ceiling. Projected against this was footage of the bombing of Hiroshima during World War II. Malani’s work took time to penetrate. The first impression was soft colors, light, and music. But as the bombing interrupted it, the fantasy world was psychically invaded by death and destruction.”

Malani’s embeds her work in deep philosophical roots. One of those roots is based on her formative years in Paris in the late 1960s when she came in contact with Simone de Beauvoir and other major thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Luis Althusser, and Roland Barthes.

Malani is acutely aware of her privilege created at the expense of the backbreaking labor of others, a situation so obvious in India where the medieval and the contemporary still exist side by side, the oxen pull the plows, as the wealthy drive the cars. As she has put it “I had a studio in a wholesale electric bazaar, and for me, the anomalies were that a lot of high tech instruments were being carried by porters on their heads. These people made homes without walls on the pavement, and during the rains they used the packing material that came from the boxes of high tech computers and sound systems to protect themselves from the rain.” ( 18 In Search of Vanished Blood)

 

Nalani provided a cover illustration for Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence, Voices from the Partition of India, (Duke 2000) one of the most intimate and revealing studies of the devastating impacts of the Partition on women, children and families. That silence is the foundation of consent and amnesia. The Partition is a blatant example of the power of arbitrary political decisions to cause death and trauma. But its after effects have only recently been exposed, unlike our ongoing wars everywhere in the world.

Malani and others are breaking that silence by actively creating space for us to begin to understand not only that atrocity, but also other nightmares that have resulted from political violence. That she uses mythic sources such as Medea and Cassandra, as well as Sita, all women who suffered at the hands of men, emphasized the global oppression of women. Mythic sources come out of cultural sources, emerge from society’s subconscious.

 

Broota and Malani both confront us with large ambiguous spaces and unsettling imagery that does not allow us to peacefully experience their work. They embed their art with different aspects of the vast Indian history and philosophy, but their art also joins the current global conversation on the state of the earth and whether we will continue into the future.

 

A valuable conversation of past and present: Three Special Exhibitions of Indigenous Art in Seattle

Last night I went to the Duwamish Longhouse  just south of Seattle for a poetry reading that included  Sasha La Pointe, the granddaughter of Vi Hilbert, the great savior of the Lushootseed language, whose portrait hangs in the lobby of the longhouse. Sasha has a lot of presence. What a proud history she has to draw on as a poet!

We are richly endowed in the Northwest with contemporary Indigenous artists working in all media. Fortunately we have two art museums here with a significant commitment to presenting their art. Currently, both the Seattle Art Museum and the Burke Museum are offering a valuable conversation between past and present Indigenous artists. As with all conversations, the complexity of these relationships emerge only gradually.

In spite of all of our efforts to brutally obliterate them in every way possible, indigenous people survived along with a few of their artifacts such as the magnificent work in the The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection on loan to the Seattle Art Museum from the American Federation of the Arts. Historic works like these along with their mythic stories handed down by word of mouth,  as well as such surprising sources as Edward Curtis, enable contemporary Native artists to honor, revitalize and reinvent their past. The variety of media, content, and layers of history give the works both a compelling presence.

Sometimes those traditions have been re excavated only since the 1980s as in the case of the Yup’ik people of Alaska. Sometimes the artistic and cultural traditions have been known since the turn of the 20th century, when even at the height of cultural oppression, a few artists continued to work, such as Charles Edenshaw.

A few of the works on display at the Seattle Art Museum are amazingly early, such as this piece from the Columbia River Basin. Look for the other Columbia River partner piece from the 19th century that has a “she who watches” image on it, taken from the painting on rock near the Dalles from thousands of years ago, and a major theme for contemporary artist Lillian Pitt ( not included in the exhibition)

In other cases, much has been completely lost, but contemporary indigenous artists find ways to save what they can and re interpret it, as in the annual canoe journeys that have recently allowed tribal groups to gain a new sense of communal identity.

Preston Singletary transforms a raven rattle from wood into glass, adding his own interpretations that are steeped in respect for tradition as well as contemporary life. (The piece illustrated is similar to the one in the exhibition.)

Reverence for the natural world has led many indigenous people to the activism necessary to save us. Happily, white environmental activists are now joining with them as never before

In the first gallery of the Seattle Art Museum’s “Indigenous Beauty: Masterworks of American Indian Art from the Diker Collection.”   wooden Yup’ik masks from Alaska honor each creature that had been killed during the hunting season. They were given away each year, unlike so many other works in the exhibition that were made specifically for sale to tourists.

Organized as clusters of different media ( and do take note of the extarordinary range of different materials here), the exhibition includes works from the Western Arctic through to the Woodlands of the East Coast.

Some are quite familiar to us such as baskets from both California and the Plateau tribes, but we dramatically see the impact of white traders in the increased scale and new designs. Best known is Louisa Keyser who successfully pioneered large baskets with new motifs and new combinations of materials at the turn of the twentieth century.

 

 

Katsina dolls made by the Hopi were meant to be very personal to an individual, and only with persuasion did the Hopi create Katsinas for sale to tourists. This ogre Katsina is one of them.  Since the original purpose of Katsinas is to provide an individual with  guidance on how to lead a good live, this obviously was not made for that purpose.

 

Beaded regalia which began after contact with white traders was taken in elaborate directions in both design and color by the Plains and other Indian groups such as here the Nez Perce from Idaho. This shirt would have been made before we started chasing those tribes North and stealing their land in the 1870s ( at the same time that Yellowstone National Park was created).

 

Historical continuity mixes seamlessly with innovation. An exceptionally large pot by Hopi artist Nampeyo from 1900, was built with coils rather than on a wheel. It features a mixture of archeological references and contemporary inventions. Nearby is an anonymous water jar from 1150 painted with a large hand in the midst of abstract patterns, an absolutely unique object.

 

The Seattle Art Museum partnered the visiting Diker collection with “Seattle Collects Northwest Coast Native Art” which is also filled with surprises. Look for the unique argillite piece collected by Bill Holm, the eminent and groundbreaking art historian of Northwest Coast Indian Art.

The large painting by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas stands out in “Seattle Collects.” It combines Japanese Manga style and native Haida art motifs. Yahgulanaas dynamically explained his work in terms of form, history, and storytelling ( Red: a story of the punishment that results from a life lived for revenge). The artist is also one of the original Haida to resist logging on ancestral lands in the 1960s.

Equally  provocative is the Burke Museum’s “Here and Now: Native Artists Inspired ”subtly installed by the museum’s designer Bridget Calzeretta. Based on the unusual concept of a living museum collection in which contemporary artists are encouraged to interact with specific objects, the exhibition marks the 10th Anniversary of a program at The Bill Holm Center that provides financial support for native artists to visit the collections. They don’t just look, they handle the art works, and they feel their energy transmitted to them. As Alison Bremmer put it “I was hit by the energy I got from the piece. I think the artist who made it would be really proud to know that it still carries that feeling all these years later.”

The Burke discovered that, after their visit, the artists’ work changed. In a dramatic demonstration of the impact of a program, they are pairing the work that most inspired a specific artist with a corresponding contemporary work. The result is a subtle and fascinating conversation between traditional art and contemporary arists. The contemporary works  include close copies of older works in order to keep the traditions alive,  creating a contemporary art work with the same  materials and making a contemporary painting that directly connects to our culture.

David Boxley did a copy of a Feast Dish (see above). He declares “The original artist was really really good. It’s always been an inspirational piece for me . . . we all follow the same two dimensional design rules and what makes one artist different from the next is how he interprets his style into that strict set of rules.”

Lou-ann Ika’wega Neel created a contemporary art work of felt, suede, copper and abalone buttons, all traditional materials, inspired by a traditional wool cloth, one of the earliest acquisitions of the Burke Museum.

 

 

Sonny Assu starts from historical regalia to create an abstraction that incorporates ipods: “ Having my great-great-grandfather Chief Billy Assu’s Chilkat regalia placed on my shoulders was part of the inspiration for this painting. This piece compares chiefly nobility – embedded with the knowledge and wisdom of his years as a chief – to how we formulate social status today through consumerism, branding, pop culture, and social media. “

Alison Bremner based a work on the traditional copper Tinnah, an object exchanged at potlatches as a sign of generosity and status. She painted it with the “all seeing eye” of Satan from our dollar bill, marking it with the money economy that supplanted its historical purpose.

Nothing could be more apt to “Here and Now” than the original Eagle mask that inspired the Seahawks logo in the mid 1970s, borrowed just for this exhibition. The wooden mask would have been worn in a ritual dance. In the midst of the dance, it opened to reveal the ancestor of a family group. The logo connects one of the most popular rituals of our contemporary world to one of the fundamental rituals of the indigenous Northwest.

As a finale of “Here and Now” a woven work by Tommy Joseph incorporates the logo of Idle No More, the crucial environmental activist movement based in Canada.

From the Yu’pik mask, honoring the animals killed in a hunt, to Idle no More, honoring the earth by resisting its rape, this cluster of exhibitions, provides the continuity of indigenous cultures over thousands of years, its compulsions and rituals, its complex techniques, and its extraordinary creativity. They underscore that this creativity is embedded in a reverence for the interconnected spirits of the natural world that provides us with a crucial perspective. If we listen to this conversation and take part in it, we may find a way forward from our current crisis.

“Permanent War: The Age of Global Conflict”

On September 11, 2001, privileged white Americans in New York City finally experienced what people of color everywhere already knew: civilian life in the US thinly masks a massive military endeavor that perpetrates death all over the world. On September 11, it backfired on us and erupted in our midst, physical and unavoidable. Likewise, the protests over police murders, #Black Lives Matter, highlighted our militarized police state, exposed and documented by smart phones.The hardware from wars streams directly into local police forces and into our lives.

Technology changes the experience of war, making it both more immediate and more detached.

“Permanent War: The Age of Global Conflict,”  an art exhibition at the Boston Museum School Gallery curated by Pamela Allara,  confronts us with artists who address the continuous presence of military actions past and present on the globe today. More than that, though, it focuses on the new dehumanization of war through technology.

We already know that our children and grandchildren need astute parenting to avoid being inundated by the military paradigms that penetrate every aspect of popular culture in games and toys and films and Hallowe’en costumes. Even more insidious, “war games” prepare them for the real thing.  Of course, that is not new. How many of us played “cowboys and Indians” as children!

Pamela Allara states in her introduction to the exhibition: “If one is to judge from the artistic record provided by museum, human history has been synonymous with constant warfare. . . . the United States has based its economy on maintaining military dominance. However, the goals of our military interventions remain vague, as the many conflicts surfacing world-wide rarely have clear lines of demarcation between right and wrong, totalitarianism, or freedom. In addition, due to increasing mechanization, the very nature of warfare has changed, further challenging the concept of a ‘just war.’”

I am reading a history of non-violence at the moment and the author points out that there is no word for that concept in any language, except as the negative of violence. Gandhi tried to create a word, “satyagraha”(“truth forces”) but it did not gain traction. The author, Mark Kurlansky, also points out that the concept of “just war” came from St. Augustine, as an “apologia for murder on the battlefield. He declared that the validity of war was a question of inner motive. If a pious man believed in a just cause and truly loved his enemies, it was permissible to go to war and to kill the enemies he loved because he was doing it in a high-minded way” [i]!!!

The loss of a semblance of a consistent reference point for a “just war” (what Christianity used to be)  underlies the ever shifting “high-minded” explanations for war today. In this exhibition, it includes Euro-US wars from the late nineteenth century to the present moment and around the world.

The chronological point of departure is Paul Stopforth’s Empire Building based on a stone fort from the Anglo-Boer War of 1899 – 1902. A great pun, the title refers to the European resource grabs in Africa. The technology of surveillance has not changed much since then in terms of its principles. Stopforth doubles this austere tower and makes no exit for the oppressors.

Another South African, Paul Emmanuel addresses the present in that country in his video that witnesses the dehumanization of entering the military. After his head is shaved, the cheery blond becomes a frightening skin head, losing his individuality entirely. This relatively minor act of transformation signifies the much larger loss of humanity that people undergo as they enter the military.

A collaborative work between poet Steve Dalachinksy and artist Sig Bang Schmidt, goes back to World War I for its source photography as they address in word and image the unchanged nightmares of war.That mechanized war perpetrated horrors on humans and cities beyond anything previously imagined. But from our perspective today, the “war to end all wars” seems short: 1914 – 1918, only four years. And it actually ended, albeit with a treaty that led to the next war.

Recently Matthew Arnold revisited sites of World War II in Libya, and found derelict bunkers still in the landscape. Aside from the fact that we barely think about North Africa when we remember World War II, you can hardly see the bunkers in this photograph, all the more chilling as a comment on the meaninglessness of war.

Bonnie Donohue presents another site of derelict World War II bunkers in Vieques Puerto Rico, an American military base built on land expropriated from local people in 1941. Her entire project, installed in these bunkers, explores the “cultural, economic and health consequences of the U.S. Navy’s sixty-year occupation of Vieques, Puerto Rico as a military base and bombing range.” She even found a person who described the inhumane orders that forced his family to pick up and move their small shack themselves when the US arrived with its “just war,” right after the Pearl Harbor bombing. Only after massive protests, did the US finally leave Vieques in 2003.

These three works are in the section of the exhibition called “Landscape as Cemetary,” a potent description. That theme builds on American art and its tradition of land as a political site in the movement West, but with a new twist in the works of Donahue and Arnold with their lugubrious bunkers.

Another theme in the exhibition is “Living with War”which includes more recent wars and their ongoing damage.

In the 1980s Bill Burke visited men who continued to identify with their past as the part of the genocidal Khmer Rouge that terrorized Cambodia from 1972 – 1975. The former soldiers are still proud of “their weapons and terrorist strategies”. In this photograph damage in its development echoes exactly the long term damage in people’s lives and minds caused by that fruitless “domino theory” war in Southeast Asia.  

Lamia Joreige, one of a group of artists who emerged in Beirut just after the long Lebanese Civil War (1975 – 1990), presents us with the repetitive damage of war under the theme “Combat as Performance”. Her three channel video based on archival photographs, reenacts a woman running on one screen, a man dying on the other, and the sea tinged with red in the center. The deadly repetition of terror and death for ordinary people caught in a war zone speaks to yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Its antecedent is Picasso’s Guernica, the first artistic representation of what is today a continuous reality, bombing from the air of unsuspecting innocents. But Joreige does not convey terror, only the repeated act of running and dying. Its unemotional re-creation echoes the detachment we have from the reality of bombing, which we so briefly experienced on 9/11.

Claire Beckett presents another type of performance in a simulated Iraqi village built by the US military as training camps in a California desert. Beckett features the play acting in which veterans or out of work actors play the parts of terrorists or devout muslim women. The contrivance of these scenes as the actors break for lunch clearly exposes the arrogance and stupidity of the exercises.

 

Haroun Farocki’s Serious Games II is based on virtual reality military training tapes, under the theme “Conflict as Media Entertainment.” These eerie robotic scenes clearly manifest that “just war” is making the world safe for commodity capitalism: we see Coca Cola signs hanging in the street.  The absurdity of the actions, the us and them paradigm (in this case the other is barely represented), and the final victory scenes with tanks rolling into the town, clearly convey our hubris. But Farocki’s also emphasizes the difficulty of distinguishing simulation, fact, fiction and reality as a result of the invasion of technology into war in all its aspects.

Richard Mosse’s juxtaposition of veterans playing video games in a hospital with drone videos (again pirated) of actually killing people by remote control.  We watch the drone drop its massive, multimillion dollar payload bomb (reduced to a puff of smoke) on a remotely observed human being, assumed to be a terrorist by someone operating the machine in Utah.  Then the screen switches to the veteran with a joystick killing in a simulated Middle Eastern village.

Training for torture is Coco Fusco’s topic: she and a group of women enlisted in an actual torture training program using techniques developed by the US military to teach soldiers to resist being tortured. Here, we have training that is all too real, but at the same time it is a performance. The women who participated felt its horror, and many of them could not complete the program, even though they had volunteered to participate. The line of reality, simulation, fact and fiction is erased when people experience the brutal methods of interrogation that have become standard in today’s military.

At the same time, the lackluster response to the recent CIA report on our standard practice of torture, demonstrates how innured we are to it. Guantanamo Diary, by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who has been detained for twelve years and is still not released, was recently published. It is a first hand account of torture hand written by Mohamedou in English that he has learned while in detention. Its heavily redacted text and years of legal actions to get it published speaks volumes about the CIA desire to prevent any first hand understanding of our technological wars. I am currently reading this riveting book. It details torture in its minutiae: day to day deprivations by heat, cold, sound, pain, hunger, insult, nudity and bodily function. Sign the ACLU petition to free him!

While some torture techniques are ancient, some, such as shocking the victim with electricity, also relates to another chilling theme in the exhibition, “Mechanized Bodies.”

We have seen mechanized bodies in the photographs of what a soldier wears today in terms of protection, armor, firepower, and vision equpiment.  Ken Hruby, Adam Harvey, and Trevor Paglen take the idea in new directions ( The work by Paul Emmanuel discussed above is also in this group).

Hruby’s distrubing/humorous constructions called “Short Arm Inspection” suggest prosthetics, dismemberment and a subtle type of torture (the short arm is the penis, inspected by Drill Sargents in demeaning ways). Even as we laugh, we get the point of the extreme discomfort these inspections would have caused.

Harvey has created anti drone clothing that confuses heat detection technology (of course, in reality people have low cost substitutes like woven straw in Yemen and elsewhere).

Trevor Paglen, a geographer and an artist, obtained pirated video from a drone, its impersonality chilling, even as we know it is operated by a human being. He makes depersonalized drone warfare visible through its technology. But his concept reflects his training in geography, as he refers to the “infrastructure” needed for this type of warfare: “You end up developing a state within a state that has very different rules and different ways of operating than what we would think of as a democratic state.” He wants to help us “see secrecy.”

Most moving of all is Iraqi Jamal Penjweny’s video Another World (2013). I conclude with this work, as it is not simulated, it is footage of real people. Penjeweny filmed young men smuggling alcohol into Iran. It includes interviews with the men explaining the desperate financial conditions that led them to pursue this dangerous occupation. Shortly after the film was made, two of these men died. The reality of these deaths, what our immoral political leaders call “collateral damage” brings home the actual on the ground effect of war. For all our technology, the human body is subject in war to forces beyond its control and ultimately many people are dying because of that, including these young men.

“Permanent War” presents the repeated destruction and instant death  of war enabled by contemporary technology. It explains our detachment from the realities that people today in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, and so many other places (Yemen for example) live with every day, as the drones perpetually buzz, bomb, and kill.   We are permeating our society with permanent military culture. Thanks to this exhibition, we are now more aware of some of its insidious methods.

Rodrigo Valenzuela, the 13th man and the end of Utopia

 

Rodrigo Valenzuela’s  “Future Ruins” exhibition at the Frye Art Museum aptly characterizes where we are at this moment in Seattle, and in other cities that are tearing apart their historic urban fabric in order to cater to the rich with high end housing.

 

In his large installation Hedonic Reversal, Valenzuela presents us with constructed modernist ruins,  with off kilter perspectives and installed as though in the midst of a construction site with shadowy ghosts of collapsing buildings painted on the wall. Here is a short video that sets the tone as he was creating the work http://www.rodrigovalenzuela.com/

He carefully explained his process, chalk, styrofoam strips, to suggest collapsing buildings, rephotographed over and over, but that has little to do with the overall significance of the works and the installation as a whole.

We see here the end of modernism, the collapse of utopia, the final chapter in a cycle that began with the Constructivists in the early 20th century. Artists like those of De Stijl, and the Russian Constructivists believed that art could build a new society, they idealized worker housing as a humane place, scaled to ordinary people, with usable spaces and shared community.

Yesler Terrace in Seattle is based on those ideas. Yesler Terrace is a community with shared public spaces and small scale. It was the first integrated public housing in the country. It is being torn down in order to make way for new market rate housing and high rises.Several enormous towers are being built on a part of the land sold way under market value to Vulcan, Paul Allan’s company.  When Yesler Terrace was built it represented a utopian principle in action. Now its destruction  stands for the end of those principles.

The video installation titled El Sisifo (Sysiphus) films workers as they pick up garbage after a game. . Sisyphus, the well known Greek story, tells of a king who was punished for deceitfulness by being forced to roll a heavy boulder up a hill only to have it roll down again. It suggests the repetitiveness and meaninglessness of the efforts of these workers punished with minimum wage or below because they have been accused by our society as poor people, as workers, as undocumented migrants. The rich accuse the poor and the poor follow a continuous round of mundane labor that serves the rich.

They are the 13th Man, as Rodriguo puts it, after the 12th man (the fans, the public) leaves. He films up close to a single worker with his uniform for a “cleaning service” (a service industry notorious for its exploitation of non union labor). The worker conscientiously finds every cup left behind and puts it in a garbage bag. But the artist also maintains a larger context, as he films from a distance: the tiny, anonymous workers move through the empty stands almost as though choreographed.On one of the videos a worker diagrams his route through the stadium, a dizzying set of movements.

The background sound track of “Pep talks” by sport coaches create an eerie contradiction to the silence of the stadium.

Rodrigo addresses worker issues in two other works.  Diamond Box films the undocumented day laborers who stand by the road waiting for work. They are filmed in an anonymous studio setting, silent, but accompanied by a soundtrack of the stories of crossing the border, and their lives here. Their words are recorded in subtitles in English. It is a moving work, as the film protects the identity of the workers, underscoring their silent place in our economy, at the same time that we listen to their unbearably painful and hazardous life. By disconnecting the words and image, by having the workers simply sit silently, we sense the distance between what we can understand, what can be documented, and what has been experienced.

Rodrigo does not hide his elite intellectual approach to worker subjects. He came here as an undocumented migrant himself, but with an art degree and carpenter skills, and he describes reading Kant at lunch as a worker on construction sites. Later, he realized that the stories of his fellow workers were extraordinary. He mentioned to me that many of the day laborers have degrees as plumbers or technicians, but they have lost all possibility of professional employment by coming here, and often live in shelters in a state of deep depression.

A third video Maria TV addresses female domestic workers (nannies and maids) in a “Playback Theater”  format which is described on Wikipedia as follows:

“Someone in the audience tells a moment or story from their life, chooses the actors to play the different roles, and then all those present watch the enactment, as the story “comes to life” with artistic shape and nuance.”

Rodrigo starts the piece with an excerpt from a TV  “novella” about a woman who is told to leave her child forever, a strange echo of the real tragedies of separation that women choose when they leave their families behind in order to make money in the United States to send to their children. (They always believe they will be gone only a short time, but usually stay for many years. Enrique’s Journey  by Sonia Nazario is the story of one of those children coming North to find their mother and what happens after they are reunited). The actresses enact both the melodrama of the novella and the real anger and frustrations of the domestic women.

The artist declares that he is functioning at the border of documentary and fiction. His own experience of crossing the border is never told as a narrative although sometimes he seems to refer to it as in “Walk by Night” which films the desert day and night from a moving vehicle. It is not clear if the artist actually walked across this desert or is re imagining this space as one which has been crossed by so many migrants.

Rodrigo Valenzuela is attracting a lot of media attention and awards. He is well on his way to being an art star. His subject matter of the undocumented workers and their lives and (nonexistent) homes is distant from his present life in the United States (He gained citizenship by marrying).

One hopes that he doesn’t lose his soul in the glitz of art market success. The people and places he has been representing come out of the shadows of accusation, cliche, prejudice and exploitation. His success can hopefully enable him to cast an even stronger light on the human beings who stand so heavily accused in our society, but without whom our culture would collapse, to become ruins  much like that vision of the future suggested in Hedonic Reversal.  I still remember May Day 2006, the largest immigrant march to that date, when downtown Seattle came to a standstill as immigrants marched for their rights.

Delhi Feminist Artist Gogi addresses the 2012 Gang Rape of Nirbhaya

 

 

 

ALTAR FOR NIRBHAYA by Gogi Saroj Pal

“At the heart of Gogi Saroj Pal’s art is the understanding of female complexity” ( Mary-Ann Milford-Lutzker in Gogi Saroj Pal, The feminine unbound, Delhi Art Gallery, 2011)

Gogi Saroj Pal, a radical feminist artist based in Delhi, India has spoken out about the contradictions for women in India for many years. Her most recent series  “Altar for Nirbhaya”  is dedicated to the 23 year old victim of gang rape in 2012. Nirbhaya, meaning “courageous one” is a pseudonym for the name of the victim. She was raped on a bus in Delhi enabled by a bus driver who drove around the city for over an hour while five men raped her after attacking her boyfriend.

It is a horrifying story. Two weeks later she died. What makes the story all the more upsetting is that she had hoped to provide free medical care to the poor after she finished medical school. Her family is poor, they had worked hard to enable her to get an education.

Her story ignited rage all over the world. But now three years later, we have all stopped thinking about her. Gogi’s paintings remind us vividly of the violence of that attack and the death of the victim. The sickle at the center piece of several works refers to an attribute of Kali, the Goddess of Destruction.

The contradictions for women in India loom larger than any other country in the world. As Gogi has said

“Our mythology is crooked and so is our mentality,” says Pal. “As we celebrate Navaratri [Hindu Festival of Lights in honor of Durga the universal mother], we also kill a girl child, and as we worship goddesses for money, we continue to rape our women.”

Indeed, in India the worship of Durga is a hugely popular festival, Durga is regarded as the universal mother. Goddesses in general prominently figure in Hindu mythology and daily ritual practice: there is Lakshmi, Vishnu’s consort, the Goddess of Wealth; Saraswati, Brahma’s consort, is Goddess of Art and Knowledge; Durga ( “the invincible”) is a manifestation of Parvati, consort of Shiva, Goddess of  love, fertility and devotion. Parvati’s older sister is the powerful goddess Ganges and mother of the much loved Ganesh. And on and on, there are 167 goddesses listed online most of them variations of the same principles.

Gogi’s work has long been about the female spirit. She transforms ancient figures into contemporary forms. Rather than the obvious goddesses (although she has depicted Kali Goddess of Time, Change and Destruction), her work includes obscure mythical creatures based on early Sanskrit texts including the Kinnari ( (part bird, part female), nayika ( heroine) Kamdhenu, (wish fulfilling cow), burraq  (dancing horse/human), hatha yogini ( firm, unyielding female yoga practioner). She has transformed these creatures and characters in her own way to express female power, resilience, and the contradictions of contemporary Indian society.

The only other specific historic person she has represented is Nati Binodini, a 19th century stage actress who defied conventional society, to pursue her career.

Born in Neoli, Uttar Pradesh, in the foothills of the Himalayas, where her father was a freedom fighter, Gogi also comes from a family who defied conventions. Her grandmother was the first woman to take a professional job in Lahore in the beginning of the twentieth century. She was also a pioneer in removing her outer heavy veil, leading to accusations that she was “naked”.

Gogi defiantly depicts all of her women as sensuous nudes who are also powerful and independent. Their big eyes examine us, challenging us to interfere with them. Sometimes they take on impossible yoga positions,  or fly through the sky. Their sensuality is not only the result of their luxuriant shapes, but also the stunning, highly saturated colors the artist adopts. Still, as one art historian points out, Gogi was going against the flow of feminism as she pursued her commentary on women through naked bodies. It is partly the result of her grandmother’s act of defiance in removing the veil. Partly, the fact of the contradiction that women’s power  according to societal norms, must be hidden from men behind coverings, and therefore it becomes  a means of oppression.

The new work for a young woman who wanted to fly through the sky, but was cut down from her dreams by a ruthless, ignorant act of violence includes a sickle, in several versions. A sickle is a traditional means of cutting, a reference here to the violence of destruction, as well as an attribute of power in the hands of Kali.  In one painting, a silhouetted dark ghost of a powerful female strides away from us: grasps the sickle herself. This young woman sought to create change in society like Kali, the Destroyer of Time and Death. The painting suggests a space beyond our world. Unique in Gogi’s work we do not see her face, or her body, only a shadow.

Nirbhaya’s death as a sacrifice to social forces beyond her control, also looks back to the tradition of sati, the sacrifice of a woman on the funeral pyre of her husband, or even father, something Gogi has also represented.

But Gogi is honoring Nirbhaya, her hopes and dreams, even as she gives us the image of blood spattering over an empty rectangle, an empty life.

The ongoing violence against women in all parts of the world becomes part of the content of this group of paintings, as Gogi deeply understands both the history of powerful women and their vulnerable position in a changing world.

 

 

 

American Art at the Newly Expanded Tacoma Art Museum

THE AMERICAN WEST: THE HAUB FAMILY COLLECTION AT THE TACOMA ART MUSEUM

Elk Buffalo, The Monarch of the Plains created in 1900 by Henry Merwin Shrady sets the tone for the exhibition in the new wing of the Tacoma Art Museum, designed by Olson Kundig Architects. Shrady drew his buffalo in a zoo. This monarch of the plains, like so many of the Native leaders depicted in these paintings at this time, was captured and confined.

The mighty buffalo is a frequent subject in the Tacoma Art Museum’s new collection of 295 works of American art by 140 artists acquired by a generous donation from the Haub Family. In a later gallery, we are confronted by the fauve-inspired Buffalo at Sunset by Apache-affiliated artist John Nieto painted in 1996. In between is Frederic Remington’s Conjuring Back the Buffalo of 1889, filled with skulls, which marks the condition of the buffalo at the end of the 19th century: almost extinct as a result of widespread and intentional slaughter.

The effort to exterminate the buffalo failed. They are now not exactly thriving, but numerous. Native peoples also survived attempts to exterminate and assimilate them and to terminate their tribes. Today many aspects of their cultures are being resurrected and reshaped in dialog with the contemporary world. More than that though, as profound speakers and savvy activists, they play a crucial part in contemporary efforts to stop the devastating practices causing climate change.

At the far end of the sculpture gallery (its plentiful natural light carefully controlled by the architects), a conversation begins. Beside a 1978 bronze sculpture of Chief Washakie by Harry Jackson, the words of the Chief spoken exactly one hundred years earlier eloquently state the physical restraints of those years:

“The white man, who possesses this whole vast country from sea to sea, who roams over it at pleasure, and lives where he likes, cannot know the cramp we feel in this little spot…every foot of what you proudly call America, not very long ago belonged to the red man.” —Chief Washakie, 1878

By including this stirring description by Chief Washakie of the nightmares of forced resettlement, Tacoma Art Museum Haub Fellow, Asia Tail, begins the task of reframing the romanticized concepts of the art of the West on display in the Haub Collection. Affiliated with the Cherokee tribe, Tail explained, “The quotations are just the beginning of a project to integrate Native voice and presence in this exhibition.” Four compact interior galleries display a selection of 120 paintings from the Haug collection. The understated design reflects Olson Kundig Architects’ surprising philosophy that art, not the architecture, should dominate at an art museum. The new wing is meant to evoke both a railroad boxcar and a longhouse, two references to the West embedded in Tacoma.

Comments by both Haub Curator of Western American Art Laura F. Fry and native speakers appear beside many of the paintings and sculpture throughout the exhibition.

For Junius Brutus Stearns’s The Meeting of Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison at Vincennes, 1851, Laura Fry focuses on the artist’s love of ancient history: “In creating this fanciful image some 40 years after the Shawnee leader’s confrontation with General William Henry Harrison in 1810, Stearns presented the scene of an American conflict between two epic leaders in the same light as the legendary events of ancient Rome.”

But we also hear from Tecumseh himself “The only way to check and to stop this evil, is for all the red men to unite in claiming a common and equal right to the land. … The white people have no right to take the land from the Indians, because they had it first; it is theirs.”

Wanata (The Charger) Grand Chief of the Cherokee by Charles Bird King purposefully, but with somewhat pathetic results, tries to give Wanata the pose of European “grand manner” portraits. The artist never met Wanata, so he made up the portrait from someone else’s sketch. King was commissioned to paint portraits of the Native leaders who came as delegates to negotiate with the US government in 1821. The idea of a vanishing race was already creating Indian galleries on the East Coast in the 1820s.

 

Next to Canonicus and the Governor of Plymouth by Albertus del Orient Browere, Tail comments “This painting hints at the long history of conflict between Native American tribes and the US government. Native leaders have continued to fight, long after Canonicus’s time, to protect their people and advocate for their rights. Because of the efforts of our ancestors, millions of Native Americans from hundreds of nations are still here today.” Obviously this is a direct refutation of the prevailing ideology behind the paintings of native leaders in the 19th century, that they were a vanishing race.”

Scott Manning Stevens (Director of Native American Studies at Syracuse University) points out in his catalog essay that including the Northwest in the concept of the West integrates the hundreds of native groups practicing various ways of life. It moves beyond the limited cliché framed by Western movies that focus on cowboys and Indians of the High Plains. The catalog also includes insightful essays by Fry and Peter Hassrick (Director Emeritus and Senior Scholar of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming) as well as color illustrations and discussion of individual artworks.

The collection includes many surprises (most of the works have never been exhibited before), including a work by Rosa Bonheur, and paintings by Robert Henri, Thomas Hart Benton, Maynard Dixon, and Taos school artists, as well as examples of landscape painting by such well-known artists as Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran.

Some people I spoke with felt strongly that the museum should work much harder to deconstruct the clichés of the West in the labels and in the organization of the display. I would have liked to see more contemporary native art.

Curator Laura Fry understands the issues. She spoke of complicating given ideas citing, as an example, the multiple racial backgrounds of cowboys. Asia Tail’s project represents an ongoing commitment on the part of the museum to expand native voices.

 

The museum also commissioned a public sculpture outside the new wing by Seneca artist Marie Watt: Blanket Stories, Transportation Object, Generous Ones and Trek. The artist invited community members to contribute blankets that would be cast in bronze at the Walla Walla Foundry. Each donated blanket has a story that can be accessed on the museum website. It creates a giant relaxed x shape in front of the museum, a concept that could have many meanings.

Clearly, the museum is interested in framing the collection of art of the American West in new discourses. I look forward to hearing about further programming that will introduce new ideas and voices to counter the traditional romantic perspectives in art of the Haub Collection.

 

City Dwellers: Contemporary Art from India at the Seattle Art Museum

GANDHI WITH AN IPOD!

A life size red fiberglass figure of Gandhi painted with glitzy red automobile paint and holding an iPod leaps out at us in the first gallery of “City Dwellers, Contemporary Art From India,” works on generous loan to the Seattle Art Museum from the collection of Sanjay Parthasarathy and Malini Balakrishnan.

Debanjan Roy’s sculpture defiantly alters our image of the humble white-garbed Gandhi. We are a long way from the non-violent Gandhi, who was murdered in January 1948 in the aftermath of the extreme violence of the Partition of India and Pakistan. (See the film Earth by Deepa Metha for a potent telling of that time). The red color of this sculpture refers to that violence; the shiny synthetic material refers to the contemporary reality of India, commercial, business oriented, and materialistic: the antithesis of everything that Gandhi believed in and lived.

Valay Shende’s gold studded motorscooter is a magnificent statement that belongs also in the concurrent Pop Art exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum. It is popular culture glorified with gold. Shimmering, tactile, and seductive in its generous curves, we can visually immerse ourselves in this scooter with its mixture of the modern and the contemporary.

All of the work in this exciting exhibition plays with the past and present, upsets clichés and fixed romantic notions of India, and provides insights into where this huge and dynamic country is today. At the same time, it is clear that all of these artists have great reverence for their own history, both cultural and historical. I can’t help envy contemporary artists in India for the enormous wealth of cultural references at their disposal.

Nandini Valli Muthiah places the blue-skinned Krishna in contemporary surroundings. In contemporary India, Krishna frequently appears in full size statues  and reenactments in religious processions. Here we see him up close and brooding. We can see the intricate details of his costume, the painted blue of his skin, and a glimpse of his inner life. The juxtaposition of myth and reality is deeply moving. Muthiah conveys the burden and responsibility and perhaps the inspiration of renacting Krishna in these unusual photographs.

Vivek Vilasini photographed dozens of people seemingly standing on an historical façade of a Hindu temple in South India. If we look closely we see a catalog of contemporary Indian people from school children in uniforms to women in saris. The artist himself sits near the top in contemporary dress. Vilasini seems to have been able to pose all of these people in such a way that we are convinced they are actually standing on the narrow ledges  of the temple where the gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon have cavorted for centuries. Goodbye Hindu gods, hello contemporary India

Pushpamala N and Clare Arni perform and restage publicly available imagery from historical paintings to police mug shots and, of course, Bollywood posters. So effectively are they re-created that you always have to look twice to know that they are not the real thing. Their work is political: they are looking at female clichés, oppresions, and assumptions by foreign photographers who romanticize India. Here is a provocative analysis of her work and other artists in the exhibition.

One of the most fascinating photographs in this series is the Tamil leader who is also a film star reenacted by the artist, based on a magazine cover. So we have several layers , and a deep reflection of politics and power as a performance both by Pushpamala N and by Jayalalitha, the film star who became a Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu. She was recently arrested and is just out on bail this month.

Manjunath Kamath’s amazing triptych, of which we have only the center panel here, has a dizzying array of references. Looking at it is a treasure hunt to see what we can spot. But before descending into the details the overall coherence of the piece dominates, the artist plays with perspective space in a way that corresponds to the compicated spaces of sophisticated Mughal painting that show interiors and exteriors, gardens and landscape, near and far all at once.

I can easily spot some of the cultural references: Superman, and Picasso, and tourists taking pictures. But there are other references I would like to know more about. I particularly love the juxtaposition behind the sofa of Christ, the bull and the red uniformed Chelsea Pensioner ( identified immediately by my British born husband).

 

 

 

 

 

MUGHAL PAINTING POWER AND PIETY Asian Art Museum July 19 – December 7, 2014. The dazzling exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum is paired with Mughal Painting: Power and Piety at the Asian Art Museum, a small, but intense selection of miniature paintings along with objects similar to those that appear in the paintings, such as daggers, rings, and necklaces. This dialog of two and three dimensions is provocative, and helps us to look much harder at the tiny details of the miniatures (magnifying glasses are provided). Mughal painting initially was the result of the amazing rule (1556-1605) of the enlightened leader Akbar who unified India. He embraced Persian cultural traditions, as well as reaching out to include all religions, created a huge library with books in many languages, and brought artists, scholars, translators and holy men to his court.

Although he was a Muslim, he sought unity among different traditions. Akbar altered the course of Indian history and art in a way that lasted many centuries. In a brilliant lecture at the Asian Art Museum by LACMA associate curator of Islamic Art Keelan Overton ( who also curated the exhibition which will be followed by a second installment on Decmber 9) , we learned the ways in which these miniatures were put together in albums for the pleasure of the elite.  Once you start looking, you can seem seems and additions, glued together just the way we make albums today.

Akbar’s ecumenical philosophy and Gandhi’s non violence have long vanished in India. Since Independence in 1947, sectarian violence has repeatedly erupted in India to devastating results, but today, the religion of capitalism is the dominant force and focus of disruption. These contemporary artists provide us with both critique and humor. A fiberglass Gandhi with an iPod? Krishna in a four star hotel room? Makes perfect sense.