Negar Farajiani Puzzles of Meanings

In Seattle at the M.I.A. gallery, we have the treat of an exhibition of work by Negar Farajani until November 16. Negar is from Tehran, Iran. I had the opportunity to talk with her about her art work and life in Iran. Negar is part of a group of young artists in many media who are based in Tehran. In addition to her own art, she also curates exhibitions and organizes projects with other artists.

I met Negar Farajani in the M.I.A. gallery, a sliver of a gallery in a downtown space run by the sophisticated Mariane Lenhardt, recently moved here from Paris, with roots in Somalia. We plunged right into a stimulating discussion about modernism in Africa. But that had to wait for another day to be completed as my main focus was to learn about Negar’s art in the gallery and life for artists in Iran.

Negar was born in Yazd, one of the oldest city’s in Iran. Yazd is in the center of Iran, a spectacular city in the midst of deserts (formerly an oasis), with historical architecture, crafts traditions, and Zoroastrian shrine. She went to art school there. Negar now lives in Tehran with her husband, who is a musician; he plays the “tar”, a predecessor of the guitar. He also composes music for films.  They have a four year old son.

The exhibition in Seattle consists of intersecting works, based on the same format, the jigsaw puzzle. The artist cut the jigsaw pieces from dry mounted photographs of things in her life such as her son’s teddy bear, an ipod, a toy car or elephant, then reassembled the images by mixing and matching (all of the jigsaw puzzles are identical in their cuts).

The result is a provocative suggestion of the intersections of cultures and the complexity of life. Inserting some unidentifiable object into a teddy bear and calling it terminator is an idea that can be understood anywhere.

 

The most identifiable group consists of a reference to a trial: the accuser, the attorney, the witness, ( see above) and the executioner.

 

It was not clear if each layer had a specific reference or metaphor, but the overall effect is that reality and truth are elusive and sometimes frightening.

But Negar emphasized that people in Iran were leading ordinary lives.  She was wearing a pink knit sweater and softer colored pink scarf hung around her neck. When I asked her, as no doubt everyone does, if she had to cover herself in black in Tehran, she said no, she could just toss this scarf over her head. So that suggests, at least for the privileged urban elite, the patrolling of women’s head coverings is in abeyance at the moment.

The artist explained to me that In Iran people often speak wordlessly with their eyes and indeed the eyes in these works were huge and expressive. But her main message was the idea of making a cultural bridge between cultures. She is hopeful that she can be a part of world peace.

This exhibition is just one fragment of Negar’s work, adapted for travel. On her website you can see the full range of her installations and projects, in many different media. One of her works is about an old spinning wool factory in Yazd now abandoned. Several artists created installations there, and Negar’s piece is a very large plastic beach ball ( “Made in China”) that is rolled around the space. Another work is called Tehran Monoxide, photographed many of her friends with children. The theme is the bad air in Tehran and how difficult it is for children to play outside, but what you see in the project is one young family after another, enjoying their small children. Such a simple set of images immediately gives us a much needed glimpse of real people living their lives.

It was delightful to meet her, and indeed, a small encounter like this with one person from Iran makes such a difference. I went home from meeting Negar and was immediately plunged into the Presidential Debate and its endless repetition about preventing Iran from getting a nuclear bomb and increasing sanctions. We have such a narrow view of the world in the US!  Culture is indeed a great bridge and a peacemaker. We are all connected by creativity. That is what makes us human on a shared planet.

 

“Living as Form” and the Hemispheric Institute: Two approaches to art and politics

Creative Time Summits (here is the schedule of the upcoming Summit) are a primary place for the discussion of socially engaged artistic practices.  Laurie Jo Reynolds (above) is one artist who has been featured several times for her important work, moving from an artist working with prisoners at Tamms Supermax Prison, to a political activist for prison reform.

 

Throughout  Living as Form, edited by Nato Thompson, a book based largely on last year’s Creative Time Summit, artists who take on political and social issues in the public sphere, are celebrated. But the (exciting) transitions currently emerging in the critical discussion of this formerly discredited practice are evident. There is a pervading anxiety about and sometimes dismissal of concepts such as ‘relational aesthetics’, ‘social aesthetics’, ‘social practice’, ‘tactical media’, ‘dialogic art’, and ‘new genre public art’. Since the 1990s these terms have been the standard vocabulary for analysing public practice art.

 

This anxiety reminds us that, in fact, immediately after this book was published, in the fall of 2011, and even as the Forum it was based on was taking place, the Occupy movement in Wall Street and the City of London as well as elsewhere around the world,  burst through traditional patterns of protest.  It had complex roots in various ideologies, including anarchism, Socialism, pacifism, anti-capitalism, and many others. In New York there was a direct connection to resistance in Greece and Spain.  It became a worldwide embodiment of living as protest. As both an aesthetic and political statement in public space, it has forced a new and multifaceted analysis of the constantly changing relationship of art and politics, particularly in the public sphere.

 

Nato Thompson, as chief curator at Creative Time, presciently adopted what he calls the ‘cattle call’ method in his introduction, which includes projects initiated by both artists and non-artists.  He suggests that non-profit organizations themselves can be ‘artworks’. This idea is both provocative and timely. Unfortunately, the cattle call also extends to his enumeration of political and social crises, which he lumps into a single paragraph, as well as to the all-too-brief discussions of artists and projects.

One critic who interviewed Thompson on his thesis that NGOS, street protest and performance art are all equal was Barbara Pollack

 

Other authors in the book, and participants in the forum include theorist Clare Bishop, who sets up a relationship between the ‘social discourse’ and the ‘artistic discourse’ that can be ‘unseated’ by participatory art works. Maria Lind, a curator, emphasizes projects that include people in social and political change, while Carol Becker offers ‘microtopia’ or small solutions to big problems. Brian Holmes, a philosopher involved with the international social justice movement, and Shannon Jackson, director of the Arts Research Center at University of California, Berkeley, emphasize the 1930s Federal Theater Project as a precedent for political art in the community.

 

By far the most radical essay, though, is by Teddy Cruz, trained in architecture and design, and a dynamic thinker who up-ends these issues by placing the real world at the forefront. He begins with an eloquent critique of our current state: ‘a critical juncture in history, defined by unprecedented socio-economic, political and environmental crises across any imaginable register’.  For him, ‘our institutions… have atrophied’. His refreshing analysis of the relationship of art and economics concludes with the idea that marginal communities of immigrants are the real sites of creative thinking.

 

The rest of the book is an alphabetical listing of just over 100 artists, groups, and projects in public spaces that engage with a range of issues. The book is a valuable point of departure for its subject, although the elite cultural position of the authors limits its scope. Certain topics are popular here (those relating to urban renewal or alternative economics, for example), and other areas are barely covered, such as immigration (there is no reference to the border art of the last 50 years).

 

Equally exciting is Diana Taylor of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics  (stunning website!)  “working at the intersections of scholarship, artistic practice and political life in the Americas.”   The Hemispheric Institute has an a Digital Video Library with 600 videos on line of socially engaged performance art in the Americas over the last thirty years. As Diana Taylor put it, “As long as human beings can make room for imagination, they can be artists.”

She askes “how do resistance strategies travel?
The Institute is also “a  network of interdisciplinary and multilingual artists academics, and activists in the Americas. It creates collaborations that explore emboddied practice -performance -as a means for the creation of new meanings and the transmission of cultural values, memory and identity.” It operates in multiple countries and languages.

One of its current activities is to provide space for the Yes Lab, an opportunity for the Yes Men to interact with Occupy activists to create effective interventions in the political and public arena.
Diana Taylor agrees with the idea that embodied public poltiical activism is equallysignficant as self designated artists who create public art works. She is also erasing any distinction between art and activism, between the world and aesthetics.

Creative Time and the Hemispheric Institute are only a few blocks apart in NYC. Perhaps they have spoken with each other. I hope so.

 

 

 

The Inheritors: An Exhibition by Jo Hockenhull

 

 

We are embedded in the natural world inside and out, organs and bones;  we are in and of  the bird world, the animal world, the world of insects; some of those creatures are going to survive the human species, in the end because of our obliviousness to our place in the world.

 

That idea is a major theme of Jo Hockenhull’s career survey at the Washington State University Museum in Pullman, Washington. Hockenhull, a professor of art at Washington State University for many years, has roots in printmaking, but this exhibition demonstrates that she never stands still. Her work ranges from small prints to huge oil paintings, steel cut sculptures, works that evoke the arts and crafts movement in tones and density, and paintings that allude to the disjunctions of humans and the rest of the natural world using digitally generated images placed in the midst of expressive renderings of rats.

 

In The Inheritors,  she focuses on giant ants, with DNA helixes winding through them. Below are large transparent eggs with fetuses. Behind the ants are accurate renderings of various organs, liver, heart, kidney.  In her lecture Hockenhull spoke of how ants, who have captivated her for years, will survive after we are all gone. These huge insects are indeed the inheritors of our careless wasting of our complex planet.

 

Hockenhull’s watercolors are stunning. The early Penguin Nostalgia with a man and woman rendered with a sensuous contrapposto worthy of Botticelli, together with seven delightfully rendered penguins (obviously based on close observation of the behavior of these wonderful creatures), seem to be gazing at a display at an aquarium in which a turbulent sea tosses cherubs. The mid size scale of this work, makes it possible for us to feel as though we are also viewing this unusual display, although from a distance.

 

Many of Hockenhull’s ink drawings, done as illustrations for books, are small, with a subtle black and white decorativeness, have a strong force that counters the decorative qualities with charged purposefulness.

 

Yet another entirely different aesthetic is the imitation stone low relief paintings, many of them birds, another passion of the artist. She was inspired by low relief imagery in stone, but her reliefs, which can be independent square paintings, or a type of bas relief under a larger painting in a different style, all are her own personal interpretation of that ancient approach to imagery. (Upper right image below)

 

Hockenhull never stops exploring. I wished sometimes we could have seen more of a particular idea ( as in her Past Present Future series with the word Future crossed out, or the subtle series of paintings Sentinel Singers, inspired by Chinese funerary stele). Her interest in science comes through clearly in the large scaled xray series which were given a coherent display at the center of the exhibition. But frequently, chronology, media, and themes were broken up in the installation, disrupting our ability to follow ideas. With an artist of this intensity, that was not helpful. But nonetheless, the exhibition is an inspiration as a demonstration of the ways in which an artist can pursue multiple directions. So often today, we have the opposite, one direction, one style, one statement repeated over and over.

 

The theme in this retrospective is humans and nature, their interactions, their collisions, their contradictions, their connections.  This recent watercolor, Beginner’s Creek, suggests one possibltity for our peaceful future, returned to the embrace of the natural world.

Get Pullman on your fall travel map and see this exhibition!

 

 

The Pinter Festival at ACT

 

This is just a quick acknowledgement of a brilliant playwright and a thank you to the ACT theater for staging a Pinter Festival this summer. Harold Pinter stylistically can be placed between Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard in the British Theater. He lived from 1930 – 2008 and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. I quoted from one of his anti war poems “God Bless America” (2003)  at the beginning of my book Art and Politics Now. It was written at the beginning of the Iraq war.

 

“Here they go again

The Yanks in their armored parade

Chanting their ballads of joy
As they gallop across the big world

Praising America’s God

The gutters are clogged with the dead.”

 

His Nobel Prize lecture in 2005 was absolutely bald in its condemnation of the US policies since World War II. Pinter’s command of language is such that the speech “Art Truth and Politics” is riveting. He begins with some brief references to several of his plays; the theme of all of them is possibilities, ambiguities, and the “search for truth” which “can never stop,” as he said.

 

Indeed the four plays recently presented by ACT theater,

Old Times, The Dumb Waiter, Celebration and No Man’s Land, as well as the monlogue by Henry Woolf, who was Pinter’s closest friend throughout his life,  all are populated by characters who are speaking what they think is truth, but truth that is memory, fantasy, hopes, dreams, and invention. The characters do not communicate with each other, they seem to talk beyond or through each other ( in the case of Woolf’s monologue he is actually talking to an empty chair). The famous Pinter pauses emphasizes the lack of communication. The silences in Pinter’s plays say as much as the words. ( I found myself craving pauses after seeing his plays.)

 

His plays are located in the living rooms, restaurants, and sometimes basements of the middle class. His characters are usually doing nothing but talk, there is no action, no plot, no story, except what the characters narrate as they basically sit in one place, with a few actions ( pouring coffee, pouring scotch) to punctuate the speeches. We can hear Shakespeare, Beckett, T.S. Eliot, the whole of English literature in these speeches. They are elegant, circuitous, and fantastically long. The other characters stand in suspended animation, with just slight changes in facial expressions, as the speaking character holds forth.

 

It is a completely unpromising format.

 

Pinter does not address anything political in his plays directly (unlike Stoppard). He prefers to lay out the tapestry of words that suggest the human soul at its most poignent and vulnerable. Since he deeply  cared about language as a crucial human attribute, the forming of words, ideas, thoughts, was difficult and necessary; it follows then that, for him,  the corruption of language by politicians is a manifestation of the death of humanity.

 

Pinter saw how language was being used to tell lies about Iraq, he spoke out against it. He saw how the language of the US presidents and government, words like democracy and freedom, have always been used to justify atrocities.He saw through all the language screens because he constructed so many of them himself. But his screens are full of humanity, love, and aspiration. The screens of politicians are manipulative, devious, and malignant.

 

In his Nobel prize speech Pinter speaks of the language of politics and its absence of truth.

 

” . . . the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth, but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies upon which we feed.”

 

 

When we view his plays, we feel claustrophobic, we feel trapped in a small space, but we slowly realize that the only escape is through language, words that expand that space, that define the individuals, that reach backward in time and forward into the future. From those armchairs, we experience a sensation of the human spirit taking flight though imagination.

 

That is why we feel so trapped today, because the language of the public arena does not allow any escape, it is fantasy without any basis in humanity.

 

It is fabrication created in order to destroy, kill, and gain power. We live our lives, our ordinary lives, against a backdrop of massive delusional power  that is undermining everything we care about, that is physically destroying our country, not in the same way that we are destroying other countries, but just as relentlessly. Why on earth do we have so many homeless, so many without jobs, without health care, so many without any way to go forward, such struggling schools,  as we pour resources into war and weapons making.

 

Here’s to Pinter, one of the great writers and thinkers to bring together art and politics through his extraordinary command of the English language and all of its nuances. And it is the absence of nuance that he saw as the most revealing of the deadly goals of political discourse. For Pinter, lack of nuance means, lack of imagination, lack of thought, and in the end, lack of life.

 

 

 

Aborignial Paintings Preserve Ancestral Dreams and Maybe the Future as Well

 

 

In case you wish you were out of the city, for only another two weeks ( until Sept 2), you can take a vicarious trip to the Australian deserts and shores at the Ancestral Modern Exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum.

 

The exhibition is filled with sweeping paintings and dramatic sculptures. Many appear abstract, but actually depict insects, animals, birds, vegetation, people,  and land forms. These are no empty deserts! They are rich with rock holes, sand hills, bush foods ( raisins, edible mushrooms, fruits, grubs, vines, bananas, yams and much more). We see lizards, geese, shark, whale, crocadiles, kangaroos, possum, wallaby,  and also people (usually represented by an abstract shape). These paintings also use ancient and contemporary symbols to tell stories, often stories that are morality tales of appropriate behavior.

 

The sense of color, abstract shapes, scale, stroke, texture is a feast for the eyes, but the stories, fables, and dreams are a feast for the spirit.

 

These artists believe that the land owns them rather than the other way around. We feel their reverence as we look at these paintings.

 

 

In the photograph above, taken at the press preview, two young aboriginal artists are creating a sacred space in the first room of the exhibition.Ismail Marka and Jamie Widenmeier travelled from Australia to make sure that the more than 100 paintings and sculptures from the Levi and Kaplan  Collection (a  promised gift to the museum), would be appropriately introduced with a sacred space.

 

They created an elliptical boat- like shape in the sand. This boat represents where life and death intersect. In the boat are three hollow eucalyptus logs, each carved by a different artist and filled with symbolism. These logs are the traditional burial site for the bones of a deceased person in Amhem Land.   Near it is a video of a dance Yingapungapu envisioning the passage between life and death.

 

 

Another painting by a collaborative group of men, the Spinifex Men’s Collaborative is called Two Men Story. This work is one of many conceptual maps created as symbolic title deeds in a native title claim to land in West Australia in the Great Victoria Desert. It includes the story of an old snake deep under ground and father and son snakes who journey through the desert.

The details of the painting represent land forms as well as snake tracks, and ancestral myths. But this painting adds another layer to the story. The Aboriginal peoples were forced off of this land by nuclear testing and the snakes are also the tire tracks of the trucks that took them away from their land. Today, the land is, apparently, once again inhabitable. But those black tracks reach into prehistory to represent a frightening snake, and into the present to represent the invasion of people who destroyed the land.

 

Most of the paintings do not refer to destruction, but all of them are acts of cultural preservation, an effort to make sure that their culture does not disappear. Ricky Maynard of the Wik people, declared in 2001

“to know the meaning of culture you must recognize the limits and meaning of your own. You can see its facts but you cannot see its meaning . We share meaning by living it. Wik people have been fighting for decades for their country [ their rights were recognized in 1996] – this passage of time has come at a high cost in denial, depression and death. How could we even begin to understand the suffering – yet the people still continue with their strong beliefs of spiritual ancestry and dreaming.”

 

And dreaming is the overarching theme of the entire exhibition. Many of these paintings are dreams, not only of people, but of a creature like the crocodle, or a potato bush, or a kingfisher or an old woman.

The aboriginal artists today are creating within the longest enduring culture on the planet; they remind us of how short has been the times of destruction, our extract culture. If only we could listen to the stories and dreams of these paintings and give into to the land, instead of believing we can use it or exploit it, perhaps we have a future.

 

Something will survive our current era, but it may not be the human race. Much more likely is the extraordinary thorny devil lizard who survives in the harsh desert of Australia by drinking the dew that lands on its own spikes.

 

The alternative reality represented by these artists is compelling They may perhaps be showing us another means of survival.  They see in a desert many types of food as well as watering holes, rather than desolation or monetary wealth. Their homes are the land, rather than a structure built on top of the land,  If we can learn from that, perhaps we can survive also.

 

Reading Poetry while on a Camping Trip

 

One of my favorite activities is to read poetry out loud to my camping partner, or to myself, in the woods, when my mind is cleared of the distractions of electronics, life’s petty minutiae, and its big struggles, not to mention the news.

 

What is left is resting my eyes on a non linear forest, large old growth trees following their own way in the forest, with lush green ferms and other undergrowth filling the rest of my vision. Or allowing the logs of the beach to overwhelm me with their unexpected arrangements. Sculptors must always despair when they look at nature. How can they possibly compete.

 

Or gazing far out to sea and adjusting to subtle shades of grey, silver, and tawny browns on an overcast day (much more restful than sunshine). Although on this trip I was overcome with sadness, as I looked at the petrified trees (ancient enormous trees whose roots are like huge snarling birds or beasts or smaller, smoother pieces that are calm resigned sea otters and bears)  warning us of the apocalypse we are creating on our planet. In their whiteness, barely emerging from the sand, is the end of our world.

 

 

So,to return to my theme,  I took three types of poetry on this trip,

First I had

Beloved Community, the Sisterhood of Homeless Women in Poetry, poetry by women who are or were homeless , some of the poems the result of workshops run by SHARE/WHEEL, an empowerment project for homeless women. SHARE stands for Seattle Housing and Resource Effort, WHEEL stands for Women Housing and Enhancement League. The link is to an excellent review with several quotes from the poets.

 

Second I had

the most recent issue of Calyx, a Journal of Art and Literature by Women that has been going for 36 years and just has transitioned to a new editor very successfully. This journal has poetry, short fiction, art work, and in this issue interviews and a essay honoring Audre Lorde. Here is a link to an excerpt. 

 

Third I had

The most recent issue of the New Yorker, which had only two poems. one called The Cello by Ruth Padel , and Eggs by Kay Ryan, coincidentally both women.

 

So all of this was poetry by women.

As I read some random poems in Beloved Community, about being cold, about being in the street, about being on the edge of life, all of the words were strong, all of the images clear. It was really affecting.

 

As I read the poetry from Calyx about women at different stages of their lives, experiencing various crisis or change, I was also deeply affected. I felt a sense of beauty and deep feeling in these poems.

 

As I read the two poems from the New Yorker,  the pinnacle of publishing for a poet, I had to read them over and over. The first one called The Cello by Ruth Padel was full of images that, for me, didn’t cohere. The second, Eggs, by Kay Ryan, was much more compelling, short, coherent, and full of a sense of profound loss. But no stronger in its emotion than many of the poems in Beloved Community or Calyx.

 

This blog,  Art and Politics Now, is dedicated to celebrating women who are homeless  and overcome life’s adversity to write poetry, or women who are less known and will probably never publish in the New Yorker but who have a voice that sings.  One of the two poets in the New Yorker, Kay Ryan, has won a Pulitzer prize and been poet laureate of the US,  She is definately a great poet and I will read more poems by her.

 

But overall, I want to emphasize that ordinary people are brilliant, but they don’t have time to think about it, because they are just filled with the act of getting through their lives.

 

As my friend Anitra Freeman (one of the poets in Beloved Community and an editor of Real Change News, another homeless empowerment project) declared, it makes you really sad to think of all the amazing talent that is lost because of life’s difficulties.   Among the homeless population are many many poets. Among the population in general are many poets. The tiny group that publish in the New Yorker are accomplished poets, but they are certainly not the only ones!!!!

 

 

A Remarkable First Thursday in Seattle

Last night I started at the Ethnic Heritage Art Gallery in the Seattle Municipal Building on the third floor. The exhibition “Portraits” curated by Blanca Santander included works by herself

 

Alfredo Arreguin

 

 

Fulgencio Lazo, GLoria Ruiz, Jose Orantes, Rene Julio,

Tatiana Garmendia,

 

 

and Tomas Oliva.

 

I talked to several of the artists. The theme of Portraits was strikingly developed in a lot of different styles. I am providing links above to artists with web sites.

Rene Julio’s Immigrant was a self portrait. I discovered that he is mainly a mural artist, with striking murals in various restaurants in the Seattle area.

 

These artists are, of course, well known in Seattle, some more than others. What is intriguing is that the need for an Ethnic Heritage Gallery is still with us. Preston Hampton, assisted by a team of curators, all employees with the city created this gallery out of whole cloth.  Preston got some space and the Gallery now has four shows a year, representing different ethnic groups. The exhibitions include major artists as well as emerging artists.

From there we went to the “Skid Row” exhibition at OlsonKundig Architects StoreFront.  According to their press release “Skid Row” is “a multimedia installation that focuses on innovative individuals and organizations in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square neighborhood who are working to eradicate poverty and homelessness in the Puget Sound region. Like other [storefront] installations, Skid Road is a social practice experiment where everyone is welcome and nothing is for sale.

 

The installation includes the work of two artists: Mary Larson and Ronald Debs Ginther (below, one of a group of 60 watercolors that belong to the Washington State Historical Society. They are on display there until November 4. Ginther observed these scenes during the 1930s, but he painted most of them in the 1960s.

 

Mary Larson’s work is amazing. She creates portraits of her clients as she works at a public health facility. She has a relationship with the people she is painting and you can see that in their cheerful countenances. In the captions, we learn just a little about them, and the price of the work is in donations to Food Banks ( 750 cans of food, 1,250 sandwiches) . This photo doesn’t do her paintings  justice. They are really highly saturated paintings. On the lower right is a former opera singer and he performed at the opening:

 

 

 

The exhibition also has beautifully designed display boards about seven different organizations that support homeless services in Pioneer Square. There is hope to have a roundtable discussion with representatives from these groups some of whom definately don’t agree with one another ( as in the controversy about the Committee To End Homelessness.) The groups are

Bread of Life Mission
Chief Seattle Club
Committee to End Homelessness in King County
Compass Housing Alliance
DESC (formerly Downtown Emergency Service Center)
Real Change
Seattle Housing and Resource Effort (SHARE)
Women’s Housing Equality and Enhancement League (WHEEL).

King County Committee to End Homelessness

Next stop was Gallery 4 Culture and the art of Nicki Sucec. She is standing in front of her sculpture made from helicopter blades, cut into a wing like structure. The exhibition is called “Ascension.” Sucec has done some wonderful projects honoring homeless people ( look at her website). This exhibition was honoring people who have overcome severe adversity (Ginny Ruffner for example). It included portraits and audio for each person.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally we went to the new design studio/art gallery cmd.p located on 2nd and Yesler. It is a collaboration between the Sanctuary Art  and Efflux Creations. This is an impressive partnering. Sanctuary Art Center provides opportunities for homeless youth ages 13 – 25 to be creatie in many media. The director I spoke with Caroline Falt, is a dynamic and committed young women. The art works at cmd.p are for sale and 90 per cent of the money goes to the youth. The design studio is also a way for young people to have internships and to create a product they can sell ( silk screened tee shirts were on sale last night. It was a wonderful opening, with music performed by some of the youth. Usually I leave First Thursday in despair with the meaninglessness of the art. Last night I was inspired by the creative spirit alive in these exhibitions.

From Cellos to Pens: Cultural Events that Provoke

I think both the street and the gallery (or concert hall or theater) can be equally subversive, creative, and engaged. The classically trained musician, actor, or writer, has a depth of understanding that can give them (if they choose) a great freedom  to speak, to defy, to break rules and to be explicitly political as well. Of course they are part of the Capitalist system, they need money to create, but within that parameter, defiance and a model of breaking boundaries is most possible among the most creative thinkers. And those are the thinkers whom I most admire.

 

 

First of all there is  Joshua Roman . He is in a class by himself as a musician. He is currently Artistic Director at Town Hall  in Seattle, an democratic venue that supports performers in all media and at all stages of their careers.

 

Recently, Roman created a two hour plus concert that was all cellos, ranging from a solo by Roman himself performing a newly commissioned work by Mason Bates, to a full component of eight cellists playing together. The cello is an extraordinary instrument, it has the range and textual variation of an entire chamber music ensemble. The program, brilliantly selected, ranged from medieval to the up to the minute Bates, with a full symphony by Brazilian composer Hector Villa-Lobos,   an arrangement of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven, which followed the Death and Resurrection of an Angel by Astor Piazzolla, and other pieces as well. There was humor in the order of the works, deep variety in the character of the works, and a thrilling evening of music all together.

 

We are extremely fortunate in Seattle to have Joshua Roman as Artistic Director at Town Hall ( he resigned from cello first chair after two years, he was awarded the seat at the age of 22)  The other concerts that he brought to town like Brooklyn Rider and Alarm Will Sound, were also over the top- classically trained musicians performing experimentally. The best of both worlds. Senational!

 

 

We also attended some performances at the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, which is increasingly branching out beyond Shakespeare, while still keeping its core. We saw three wonderfully creative productions, (and a moving Henry V) :

 

The White Snake, based on a Chinese Fairy Tale, with stunning staging,

 

 

 

 

a humorous and extraordinary interweaving of Medea, Macbeth and Cinderalla,

 

 

and finally a hilarious The Very Merry Wives of Winsor, Iowa, adapted by Alison Carey from the play by Shakespeare.

 

Each of these plays was uniquely transforming tradition into contemporary theater.

 

Bringing together “Medea Macbeth and (Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical) Cinderella” was really crazy. According to Bill Rauch and Tracy Young, who created this odd partnership, this work is a “lifelong passion”. They explain that the themes overlap: “ royal ambition, magic, transformation, parent/child relationships and the roles of women in a male dominated society.” This project lives at the crossroads between populism and experimentation.”

 

But as the plots crossed and the dialogue was tossed from one story to another, we felt primarily the amazing power of actors to take on such an experimental mélange while maintaining the integrity of each part, heavy and serious in Macbeth and Medea, and clichéd sentimentality in the case of Cinderella.  The original plays were all there, except that the characters kept switching from one play to another. The Hammerstein musical numbers were sung by everyone. It was riveting, impossible to take in, and yet also hugely entertaining.

 

The Very Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa was a contemporary story, with Senator Falstaff being set up as the fall guy, just as in the original Shakespeare play, in fact it followed the scenes, acts and even dialogue of the original, but it was all contemporary issues (gay marriage for one), and contemporary language couched as Shakespearean ( “ the recycling cometh”)  and contemporary people, (and the Iowa State Fair as the grand finale).

 

 

 

Then, back in Seattle, I went to “Words on Water: Indian Writers in Conversation,” at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, three brilliant thinkers who addressed India and Pakistan from strikingly different perspectives.

 

Three writers were featured:  M.J. Akbar, a journalist and Executive Director of India Today,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nayanjot Lahiri, a scholar of Indus Civilizations and author of Finding Forgotten Cities

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and Urvashi Butalia, writer and co-founder of India’s foremost feminist publishing house, Kali for Women and author of the profoundly important book, The Other Side of Silence, voices from the partition of India.

 

 

 

 

M.J. Akbar was interviewed by journalist Shiraz Sidhva, Nayanjot Lahiri had a conversation with VIkram Prakash, Professor of Architecture at the University of Washington and author of a book on Chandirgarh. But  Sonora Jha, Associate Professor in the Dept of Communications at Seattle University took the prize for the most elegantly worded interview in her conversation with Urvashi Butalia.

 

The most striking aspect of the event was that the three authors presented three very different views of Pakistan.  M.J. Akbar, who declared that he was a Muslim, asserted that there are four pillars of modernity: democracy, freedom of faith, gender equality (equality before the law) and economic equity ( meaning avoiding the deep chasm between rich and poor). He declared that Pakistan failed in all four, a concept he also develops in his book Tinderbox.

 

His analysis of why we are still allied to Pakistan in the “war on terror” was that the US lost its way . He called it the Marshall Petain partner, allied with the Taliban, in an Islamic Space. Petain was, of course, the  leader and betrayer of France during Vichy, more loyal to Nazi ideas than to French freedom.  Likewise Pakistan, in Akbar’s view, is a failed state because it is based on faith, the idea of a sanctuary for Muslims is not a viable foundation for a modern state.

 

He also mentioned at the conclusion of his talk that the Islamists were destroying culture in Pakistan created before the founding of Islam in 711, including Mohenjo Daro, the crucial Indus Valley site, and a World Heritage Site that should be protected by the UN. I have not found confirmation of that, but they are destroying other World Heritage Sites, for example in Timbuktu.

 

Nayanjot Lahiri, as a scholar, spoke at length about the difficulties of deciphering the writing from the Indus Valley Cultures, the important work that had been done in India since Independence in discovering hundreds of new Indus Civiliations sites, and of the crucial work of Pakistani archeologists in their work at the major Indus Civilization sites, all of which are in Pakistan since 1947. When I asked her after the lecture about Akbar’s assertion that Mohenjo Daro was being destroyed by Islamists, she said she didn’t know about it!. Perhaps it is simply being destroyed by erosion and neglect.

 

But the third speaker really stole the show for me. Urvashi Butalia was engaging, humorous, humble, profoundly engaged and an articulate speaker on the subject of her work in creating the book The Other Side of Silence. Butalia’s own family suffered from the Partition, her mother’s brother stayed behind with his mother in Pakistan and converted to Islam. She herself worked to heal the forty year old wounds of that separation as she bravely went to visit him in Pakistan, and his story starts her book.

 

But interviews that tell of the painful and horrifying violence against women during the Partition are the heart of the book. For example, one women speaks about dozens of women in a village,  including herself, that threw themselves into a well to avoid being violated, but some women survived because there wasn’t enough water to drown them all. This story and others were the basis for some of the paintings by Nilima Sheikh, that I wrote about in my book Art and Politics Now.

 

Urvashi Butalia declared that Pakistan was a deep part of who she was and of her life, in spite of the restrictions for Indians who went there. Lahiri, as a scholar is studying the common cultural roots of India and Pakistan, Akbar as a journalist has written a book on Pakistan called Tinderbox, which tells of the dangerous conditions in that country today. Three authors, three views. It was immensely enriching to hear these writers, as here in the US, our main information is limited to drone strikes in Pakistan and their random murders.

A few thoughts on Fremont Solstice, We the People and Occupy Living Rooms

Recently, I have been neglecting this blog. Too many activities, notenough time to think about them. So here are  a few

events that I have attended or participated in so far this summer.

We the People Festival followed the famous Fremont Solstice Parade, an outstanding Seattle tradition of crazy creativity and supposedly no politics and everything made by hand. No mechanized vehicles either.

 

It was a stark contrast to the “Pride” Parade the following weekend, in downtown Seattle. All the groups that I saw were sponsored by corporations and even wearing matching tee shirts with messages.

(the most shocking was Wells Fargo, one of the kings of foreclosures,  with marchers wearing tee shirts that read “no place like home.” )

 

So just being creative as an independent free spirited person is a political act in our current world of corporate control. The act of making wonderful costumes that suggest imagination and humor is already subversive!

In addition politics can imbue a piece without any obvious reference to political issues.

 

 

For example, the giant dragon made out of 10,000 plastic bottles was a potent statement in itself.

 

 

 

 

We the People Festival was not afraid of being political, but we made games about political issues. Apparently the main organizers had met at the Occupy movement in Seattle. So this ongoing creative expression was an outgrowth of that. The event was really extensive, lots of displays and games.There was a “New Economy Game” just next to Gas Works that was a giant board game with all sorts of ideas for local changes that can make a difference.

I made a bean bag toss about rebalancing the budget away from military spending. People said the military budget holes were way too small, those are the oblong shapes (the red line above the toss is part of the very long red line that represented the US military budget in a piece by Fred another participant.  But people really enjoyed tossing bean bags into new priorities like funding for green transportation, schools, healthcare and creativity. A simple act, we originally planned it to be more complicated, gave people a real sense of satisfaction, and who knows maybe they went home and thought about the issues a little more. I am wearing my “unarmed civilian” hoodie from “We will Not be Silent” a potent  NYC based group of artist activists who constantly infiltrate the street with their pointed signs.

 

The idea of a bean bag toss was a result of synergy. I started out with a monopoly game idea and it evolved with lots of other people throwing in ideas, into a bean bag toss.

 

During the planning meetings we made a lot of the games with recycled materials. One of the organizers has a travelling art supply in her car, and she finds materials in all sorts of unexpected ways. Another person works at an event planning business and gets lots of vinyl after the event is over. Hundreds of recycled bottle caps were used in another game. All in all it was a ton of fun and a new way for me to act on my desire to bring together art and politics.

 

I also had an event in my living room, Occupy Living Rooms:  “Something I Can Do: Voices From Occupy Seattle.” Three actors Meg Savlov, Rich Hawkins, and Christine Nyland performed for an audience of about ten people.  The prolific and intense theater artist Ed Mast was director and co writer with Christine Nyland.  The performance was literally in the middle of my small living room, with the audience sitting on our sofas and chairs, the script lying on the floor in the center of the room. We heard the voices of many different members of Occupy mark  the various stages of Occupy  from the first idealistic days to the last days of sleeping outside in the rain ( in Seattle’s version) . Of course the movement has now morphed into various separate directions, GMO, foreclosures, student debt.

But there is also an insidious attack on the organizers, accusations and police raids. This is frightening.

 

 

 

 

 

Documentary Photography meets Google Street View and Twitter

 

Two recent shows in Portland featured artists incorporating twitter and Google photographic images, and one exhibition affirmed  that traditional photojournalism is just as crucial a practice as ever.

 

Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, also known as the Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts, showed “No Man’s Land” by Mishka Henner and “Geolocations, Graduates Walking Round” a project by Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman.  The first impact of both of these shows is that they are intentionally mirroring the twin realities of pervasive triviality and loss of privacy.

 

Mishka Henner’s work, based on stills from Google Street View cameras started from reading online male forums discussing the locations of local sex workers, Henner found the locations on Google Street View and downloaded the image of the women there ( with no confirmation that they were actually sex workers) . The women are consistently far away from the camera, photographed from a moving car with a high vantage point, and their faces are blurred out. We have no relationship with them, other than a distant drive by view (elaborated in the accompanying video in the exhibition providing the complete footage of the drive by).

 

 

“Geolocations, Graduates Walking Round” was trivial in a different way. Based on Tweets with location coordinates, the artists photographed the location, then paired the tweet with the image. The image seemed inconsequential (like the Tweet), but sometimes, as here, amusing.

 

I was offended by Mishka Henner’s work, his depersonalized representations of unidentified supposed sex workers. As a privileged male artist, he seemed to be condescending, trite, and exploitative. Many others  have pointed this out as well, some even calling for the suppression of Henner’s book.  In no case does he identify any of the women or provide any context what so ever for them as sex workers, or the sex worker industry. He simply assumes the position of Google Street View and prints up frames as his copyrighted photography.

 

His defense of the works is that he feels that eliciting sympathy is “romantic” and a cheap shot, the impersonal view is more contemporary, depersonalized surveillance is what is happening on the planet. He also points out that the subject is a traditional topic for photography, so he is playing off of that history with his work.

 

He fails completely in my opinion to arouse any response what so ever except that he is an arrogant white guy. He is the real subject of these photographs. There are many artists expropriating images from Google Street View these days, for many purposes. All of them are working with the issue of surveillance, originality, authorship in the age of Google Street View. Miska Henner’s work, because of his topic, becomes simply traditional voyeurism and cruising.

 

The second exhibition “Geolocations, Graduates Walking Round’ became less mundane in comparison to the work of Mishka Henner. Knowing that these images were actually taken by the photographers, subtle details began to emerge, as well as an intriguingly serendipitous relationship between their triviality as subject, and the triviality of the tweet. They had an abstract, formal quality, an amusing reinvention of modernist aesthetics based on utterly uninteresting subjects – an anti-utopian, heroic impact that completely contradicts the principles of high modernism, even as they have strong modernist references in their compositions.

 

But poetic absurdity is the main theme.  Photographs as locations based on the tweets are actually arbitrarily chosen. Coordinates give 360 degrees of possibilities. The artists selected which way to look, and the direction they chose is tangentially related to the tweet itself, not exactly visually, but in the sense of a certain blankness or dead end f1uality.

 

My favorite example was “Has gained a new ability today, ability to take a hint.” Here. the three lines dangling from a tarp and the single dot, with the window to the left obviously are a play on Mondrian, and  is matched with the tweet. That single dot in the center, that diagonal tie down, could it be we can see Mondrian taking a hint? The  modernist aesthetic was cleverly undermined.

 

 

 

Then I went to a third exhibition at the I witness gallery in the Northwest Center for Photography. The photojournalist Leah Nash spent more than a year with five people diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. Four of them are featured in photographs in “A Different Kind of Normal: Stories of Asperger’s Syndrome” and one, a dancer, mother of two, in a video.

 

 

We see these people as individuals who are living their lives according to who they are and what they like and what they want to do. They are remarkable photographs and remarkable people. I felt a sense of relief to see these straightforward images, they were not eliciting pity or romance, as Henner so dismissively characterizes traditional photojournalism, they were eliciting respect and even some awe at these individuals. The photographer emphasizes them as people with feelings of love, joy, discouragement, and exhaustion, as well as close relationships with members of their families.

 

A statement in the show stated that  Asperger’s Syndrome as a subset of Autism is being eliminated as a diagnosis. There is no comment on that fact, but if you think that this diagnosis gave all of these people a distinct identity, one can’t help but wonder what the result of taking that terminology away will have on them. Now they will simply be identified as autistic, a diagnosis that includes a broad range of different types of behavior and a diagnosis that is expanding exponentially, from 1 in 10,000 in the 1970s to 1 in 110 today.  Asperger’s Syndrome has been defined as “high functioning autism.”

 

Leah Nash’s photographs not only educated me about Asperger’s Syndrome, they also made me think about the way that people define themselves, the way that society defines them, and how those two interact or contradict one another.

 

Mishka Henner claimed he did not want people to feel in response to his photographs, he wanted them to think. But the thinking he generated did not really stimulate any larger insights into society, humanity, or the state of the world. It stopped at the cliché that Google Street View is invasive and pervasive.

 

Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman fall in the middle. Their photographs are intentionally undramatic (although they are aesthetically constructed) , and they make a point about individuals risk of ( desire for?) public exposure (in the tweet, in the location), but they also exist as an act on the part of the photographers to wed those two media in a way that provided some provocative partnerships and a wonderful send up of the modernist aesthetic.

 

All of these exhibitions point to the fact that documentary photography is in transition as a result of new technologies, but Leah Nash’s work suggests that engaging with individuals is still an indispensable dimension of photography.