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.

“Hide/Seek” and “Approaching Ecstasy”

At the beginning of the exhibition Hide/Seek, Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, which I saw at the Tacoma Art Museum(it is up until June 10) we are immediately captured by a painting of a nude woman from the waist up, her full breasts swelling and her nipples hard, in deep shades of pink. The woman’s face suggests some detachment, but her physicality almost jumps out of the frame.

 

Astonishingly, this is an early work by Agnes Martin, an artist who became famous for paintings of abstract lines and colors so subtle that you could barely see them. She tried to destory all of her early works. This nude’s assertiveness declares desire (perhaps thwarted). It offers an explanation for the deeply withdrawn mature works. No matter how many elegies are written to those horizontal penciled lines on a beige surface, they remain, for me, an absolute rejection of physicality, of the world, of love. Martin lived as a recluse. She developed her minimalist abstractions in New York City in the early 1960s, a time dominated by aggressive men and continued them, after a hiatus of a few years, for the rest of her life.

 

The examples  from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Hide/Seek, Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, particularly fascinated me. In those years being homosexual was dangerous and illegal ( as witnessed in the famous case of Oscar Wilde), except among the wealthy in Paris. Berenice Abbott photographed some of the famous women of that time, like Janet Flanner and Djuna Barnes. These photographs are old friends. We feel that we are sitting in the room with these women. But we also know that they all made crucial contributions to culture as journalists, poets, writers, visual artists. Abbott’s photographs approaches them as individuals who are entirely comfortable with themselves.They were first immortalized as a group by Sheri Binstock’s wonderful book Women of the Left Bank.

 

 

The austere self portrait of Romaine Brooks is still the defining lesbian image of that Paris era. We know of so many extraordinary women who are not included in Hide/Seek who can be encompassed by this amazingly androgenous, male identified black suited, white shirted top hatted Brooks.

 

I am thinking particularly of Jane Heap about whom I have written two articles as the extraordinary editor of the Little Review in the 1920s. She was photographed by Berenice Abbott in a tuxedo and bow tie. Her absolutely engaged penetrating look as well as her swaggering posture, suggests her defiance, her status as a person who, according to her magazine’s slogan, “made no compromise with the public taste.” At this time, she had already published the first chapters of James Joyce’s Ulysses in her magazine and been sued for libel. in the United States. She was, in 1922, being taken up by the Paris avant-garde as a hero.

 

Abbott went back to NYC and in the middle of the 1930s she fell in love with Elizabeth McCausland, the extraordinary art critic and another  subject of one of my articles. Here you see her as an adoring young writer, on the right , with Gertrude Stein in 1934, following the presentation of Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts in Hartford, Connecticut. As I discuss in my article and my book on the 1930s, McCausland wrote eloquently and passionately about Four Saints, focusing mainly on the score by Stein, in one of her newspaper columns for the Springfield Republican.

 

Both McCausland and Abbott joined the political left in NYC, as defined a society as Paris of the Left Bank, only in the 1930s sexual identity was superceded by fighting fascism, the Popular Front, and the American Artists Congress, as I discuss in detail in my book, Art and Politics in the 1930s.

 

 

 

 

But to return to the artists of Hide/Seek, John Singer Sargent’s 1895 painting of his male servant relaxing nude on a sofa is one of many that we have never seen, no matter how familiar we are with Sargent’s sumptuous watercolors and seductive society portraits.

 

Likewise Grant Wood’s Arnold Comes of Age of 1930 tells us about Wood beyond American Gothic, at the same that it sheds light on that so familiar work.

 

Lincoln Kirstein in Dorm at Harvard by Walker Evans reminds us that most of the prominent artists and curators of that era were friends at Harvard (Alfred Barr was there too, just a little earlier) and many of them closeted. Kirstein was to be so profoundly important in twentieth century culture in the world of dance, that we treasure looking at the intelligent and concentrated young man in this photograph and knowing his future.

 

The theme of Hide/Seek is “How Gender and Sexual Identity Have Shaped Modern American Portraiture.” It was curated by Jonathan D. Katz and David C. Ward with the purpose of “tracing the evolution of sexual identities.” The scope of the exhibition is actually greater than that. Most of the people who created the images and most of the people represented in the art are all extraordinarily important to American cultural life in the last 120 years.

 

For example, there is Thomas Eakins’ stunning photograph of an aging Walt Whitman, from 1891, an iconic image, of one great artist by another.

 

 

 

 

Of the same marriage of artist and subject, is Carl Van Vechten’s photograph of Bessie Smith. the great blues singer. Vechten captures Bessie, not as the confident performer, but as a woman sadly gazing at her demons.

 

Alice Neel’s portrait of Frank O’Hara, the great poet and art critic, in profile, suggests his central place in New York City’s cultural life of the mid century.

 

These artists admired one another for their brilliant creativity. In some cases they shared a common community, in others, they created their own entourage, as with the well- known example of Andy Warhol represented in Hide/Seek, by a stunning camouflage self portrait in brilliant shades of red and magenta, that calls attention to Warhol as one of the first absolutely uncamouflaged gay artists, as well as one of the most closeted people in terms of his art and its intentions. This flame- like headdress seems to underscore that contradiction.  He  looks down, escaping our direct gaze, unlike the riveting defiant  expression of, for example, Jane Heap.

 

 

 

 

The exhibition continues through to the present, with the shattering outbreak of AIDS in the late 1980s and through the 1990s, that tragic watershed in American cultural life and activism. The current century is only briefly represented. With good reason: as in the 1930s, the centrality of identity is again being eclipsed by pressing political concerns and gay rights seems to have become primarily a national focus on marriage.

 

But these artists and their subjects, were often not about sexual identity either, with some exceptions like the wonderful Tee Corinne, whose work I was so glad to see included here. Tee reveled, like Jane Heap, in defying norms, and explicitly representing exactly what she wanted to in her drawings. 

 

These artists are all about creativity, at a time when that frequently meant marginalization. Many radical artists, writers, musicians, playwrights, and dancers were and are gay. Being gay gives an intense understanding of what injustice feels like (still). They extend that awareness into many directions.

 

Part II Approaching Ecstasy

 

That is the case with the phenomenal Approaching Ecstasy, a dance collaboration composed by Eric Banks and choreographed by Olivier Wevers based on the poetry of Constantine P. Cavafy, a Greek who lived most of his life as both a bureaucrat and a closeted homosexual in Cairo in the early 20^th century.

 

Approaching Ecstasy premiered at the Intiman THeater in Seattle in May 2012. Hopefully, it will be performed again and again.

 

The musicians and singers wore black suits with bowler hats a la Rene Magritte, while the dancers of the group Whim W’him, escaped in various ways from the closet, both literally and figuratively (the only set was a folding metal frame that could be 2 or 3 dimensional, a mirror, a room, a building, a closet, or a wall.

 

As the 40 members of the Esoterics, accompanied by St Helens String Quartet, plus a harp, sang the lush sexually specific poetry of Cafavy  in both Greek and English, we were transported to a place of liberation, of extraordinary multimedia poetry in sound and movement.

 

Emerging out of darkness into light was also a crucial aspect of the staging designed by Jeff Forbes. The collaboration was much more than the sum of its parts, just as the portraits of Hide/Seek are more than the sum of their identities. I was fortunate to see these two expressions of creativity in one day.

 

One poem by Cafavy (translated by Eric Banks)
Senses (1912)

Return to me often and take me,/O senses that I love, return and take me: /Then my body will awaken, /And the cravings I once felt will flow in my blood again; /Then my lips and my skin will remember,/ And my hands will understand how to touch once more. /Return to me often and take me, in the night, /Then my lips and my skin will remember.

 

 

Cafavy is best known for his poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” which never seems to stop being an insightful commentary on contemporary politicians. But knowing this poem so well, as well as so many of his other poems, made the exclusive emphasis on his sensual love poetry all the more compelling. As with the case of the John Singer Sargent and Grant Wood paintings in Hide/Seek, bringing together the man in more than the sum of the parts that we know enriches our appreciation of what creativity means and expands our understaning of their humanity.

 

 

Waiting for the Barbarians” by Constantine Cafavy

“What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?/The barbarians are due here today./Why isn’t anything happening in the senate?/Why do the senators sit there without legislating?/Because the barbarians are coming today./What laws can the senators make now?/Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating./Why did our emperor get up so early,/and why is he sitting at the city’s main gate/on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?/Because the barbarians are coming today/and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader./He has even prepared a scroll to give him,/replete with titles, with imposing names/.Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today/wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?/Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,/and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?/Why are they carrying elegant canes/beautifully worked in silver and gold?/Because the barbarians are coming today/and things like that dazzle the barbarians/.Why don’t our distinguished orators come forward as usual/to make their speeches, say what they have to say?/Because the barbarians are coming today/and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking./Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?/(How serious people’s faces have become.)/Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, /everyone going home so lost in thought?/Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come./And some who have just returned from the border say/there are no barbarians any longer./And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?/They were, those people, a kind of solution.”

 

A Visit to Maquiladoras in Tijuana

 

I was able to visit a few maquiladoras  with Fred Lonidier, activist, artist, UCSD professor ( above), who has been working with workers rights issues at these factories since the early 1980s. He invited me to lecture to his class at UCSD. Our first stop after the lecture was the Che Cafe. In the center is Rigoberta Menchú. This is Fred’s photograph with me in the foreground joining these heroic women. The cooperative cafe has survived a lot of challenges to its existence by UCSD administrators.

 

The  next day we went to the  East Tijuana industrial district via the crossing at Otay Mesa.

 

 

Gloria Anzaldua eloquently characterized the border as “Una herida abierta”  (an “open wound”) where the Third World grates against the First and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country – a border culture. … a borderland is a vague and undeterrmined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary.” Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La FronteraThe New Mestiza, (1987,1999)

 

According to Fred, corporations have been playing games since the late 1960s with the free trade idea originally with an old promise of twin factories, one in US, one in Mexico. Only the US half usually didn’t happen.The free trade area used to extend 20 miles to the South of the border, but with NAFTA the whole country is now a free trade zone

 

It is much easier to work outside health and work regulations in Mexico.

 

These factories manufacture many household goods including televisions, furniture, mirrors, eyeglasses ( think Zeiss), and now electronics, especially high tech hospital equipment.

 

Workers have fought abuses at these factories for decades and it is ongoing to this day. Organizing is more difficult because of the disparate character of the communities which consist of people from all over Mexico who have neither familial nor ethnic bonds. New relationships have to be forged.

 

Groups like the Environmental Health Coaltion, based in San Diego/Tijuana and Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras  an umbrella group  work for justice in the maquiladoras for workers and call for justice against women who ” suffer discrimination, humiliation, and sexual harassment in the workplace.”

 

 

Before we saw the factories,we went to a muddy lot  (above) where many squatters used to live. Only a few are left at this location today.These squatters are living in the midst of toxic run off from factories, they have no services at all, no electricity, no sewage, nothing. They are newly arrived people from other areas of Mexico, who start here and sometimes work their way up to having a house in a “colonia” which actually does have city services from Tijuana.You can see one electrical wire in the photograph.

 

 

We even saw middle class homes (and middle class youth): these are the homes and children of the supervisors of the factories, or the more skilled engineers and technicians.

 

The majority of workers are making small electronic devices, with repetitive motions. Back when Gloria Anzaldua first wrote about the factories they were making cassette tapes. Today they are making hi tech electronics, the reason why so many women are employed – it requires delicate manual dexterity. But from then to now, the workers have been exposed to toxic substances that go into the consumer products that they make. Exposure to toxins is in the factory itself, and then it follows them home as the run off from the factories pours out of open pipes.

 

 

Then there is the question of labor unions, the topic that Lonidier has addressed in various ways in his important work. Lonidier has been bridging the (considerable) gap between labor unions and visual art with his work, making visible in his sophisticated, but also entirely understandable, photograph-text pieces, the struggles of workers for better working conditions. He also shows his work in both union halls and art galleries. Here is a review of a recent show he held in an art gallery.

 

The wages of maquiladora workers are abysmal, as low as $8. a day, there are no safety precautions ( a topic that Londier is known for from a 1979 work that is gaining new attention recently, suggesting how important it still is.)

 

 

 

 

If  the workers try to organize a real democratically run union, the “company union” representative is sent to the meeting to calm everyone down.When the workers return to work, the organizers get fired. Fred took me to one site of a victory, where a badly contaminated site had finally been sealed by the government after, as he said, years and years and years of hearings and protests. Naturally the government now takes credit.

 

The recession has hit this area hard, and many workers have been laid off. We in fact saw very few workers even at lunch time, when normally they would have been thronging the food stands. Apparently, the newer factories now provide lunch in the factory, probably at a deduction from a meager pay check. Plus of course, a chance for a change of pace and environment is lost.

 

 

The new factories are fortified with big fences and guards, who called their bosses as soon as we paused to take a picture. The older factories are more on the street, with a less militant atmosphere.

 

 

 

I also saw the actual border fence as it is in this part of Tijuana- several electrified fences with surveillance lights and razor wire. In Tijuana’s main crossing it goes right into the ocean.

Fred also took pictures of me photographing it.

 

After visiting Tijuana, we went to the Centro Cultural de la Raza  in San Diego where there was an exhibition called La Hermanidad ( Brotherhood) about workers of all backgrounds united in struggle. The building has murals all over it and even spreading into the park around it.

 

 

The exhibition included work by David Bacon ( stunning website) , Fred Lonidier, and works honoring people who have been lost at the border.

 

  

 

Last we visited Chicano Park, which has murals painted on the freeway supports. It has been going for quite awhile and now the murals are actually being restored. I met Victor Ochoa, one of the important muralists there. That’s his mural of Revolution with Zapata, the inspiration for the uprising of the peasants then and now.  The second mural says the earth belongs to those who work it with their own hands.

 

 

 

Most of the murals were nationalist in flavor, looking to the culture of Mexico, the Revolutionary era in Mexico, and other inspiring subjects. They are also about farm workers issues which of course are on going and, if anything all the more urgent today.

 

One of Fred’s students, Amy Sanchez, an art historian is collaborating with Misael Diaz, an artist, on a border project called Cognate Collective. They have a small shop space in Tijuana, near the border, and they are encouraging indigenous women in particular to make embroidery as well as other projects related to clothing.The indigenous women are from all different backgrounds. This is one of the painful aspects of the massive dislocations going on in Mexico as a result of free trade.

 

I want to end with this great photograph Fred took of me slipping in the mud as I left a toxic area. It seems to capture how slippery information is about maquiladoras.

Lake Atitlan, Chichicastenango, and Antigua: Dreams and Realities

     

Lake Atitlan is one of the most beautiful lakes in the world. It has two volcanoes perfectly situated to create a picturesque or even sublime appearance (ie, the difference between simply attractive and actually uplifting, according to 18^th century English categories of landscape.)

 

Naturally a beautiful place like this attracts a lot of people who like beauty in the traditional sense of the word. It is kind of like the National Parks in the US, chosen for their spectacular features, like Yosemite, Yellowstone and Glacier. It makes many people happy to see this view.

 

 

But of course, that is not my particular obsession as the author of this art and politics blog. I have to look under the surface of the beautiful and see what is really there.First of all as we arrived to take the boat to our beautiful Villa Sumaya yoga retreat location we saw raw sewage running into the lake at the boat dock! Wow.

 

 

    

 

Then we learned that the lake had pollution problems: algae blooms shore to shore last year was one big problem. Also in the last year the lake water level rose dramatically flooding out houses on the shore. It is not clear whether this was simply caused by larger than usual rainfalls or blocked exits to the lake, or cosmic energy (apparently the lake is an energy nexus). But the result was a lot of people lost a lot of property into the lake.

 

But aside from these ecological issues, the human ecology was provocative as well. There were many gringos living along the shore ( many healers tapping into the  cosmic energy, as well as hippies from the last century still there). During the Civil War the communities around the lake were decimated, almost all the men were killed. It was a dire situation, perhaps the reason why I still felt a sense of heavy sadness in the spirit of these people.

 

And of course poverty. The Maya mostly lived up higher on the hills surrounding the lake. The shore is the lusher area, obviously more accessible and inviting. Further up the land is really steep and dry and inhospitable, but it is there that Maya are trying to farm. We didn’t see a lot of terracing, but we did see fields planted and growing. There were exceptions to this struggling life though.

 

  

 

   

 

 

We visited San Juan La Laguna, a dymanic, proud and very clean community along the lake. It had an art cooperative, murals on many walls along the street, a women’s textile cooperative using only botanical dies to create amazing fabrics, a coffee cooperative producing shade grown coffee that is very sweet because it is grown in lower elevations (up higher the coffee gets more acid). There was a medicinal plant center, and a thriving school. We saw a center for women who are victims of violence. We took a little Tut Tut around that was really fun, with an educated driver who said he was a software engineer making a little extra money.

So that was all positive.

  

 

There are more pictures on my flikr site. and here.

 

But then as we went around on the public boat we saw very very young girls with babies, some of the babies looking sickly. Apparently the teenage pregnancy rate here is really high, partly because of fundamentalist missionary groups who ban discussion of contraception.

 

 

 

But again, there are groups who are trying to make the situation better like the Amigos de Santa Cruz, who emphasize education and training for youth to enable them to have a better life. It was founded 14 years ago and they are still going strong.

 

  

 

 Villa Sumaya where we had our sojourn in paradise at a yoga workshop is committed to this program as well as employing many local residents at the villa itself. As we worked at warrior 2 and downward dog, they cleaned the pool and served the meals. It felt pretty colonial actually, but then we couldn’t avoid the reality of being incredibly privileged, fortunate people.

 

Villa Sumaya is also committed to ecological balance and they had a great program that they participated in for non recyclables. We stuffed them in a plastic bottle, and the bottles became material for building. I loved that, as the trash that we generate every day is one of my obsessions.

 

 

 

One day we went to the market in Chichicastenanga. It was absolutely overwhelming, hundreds of textiles for sale. And lots of amazing artisanal pieces like bracelets and key chains made of beads. Apparently beadwork was introduced to the women in this area during the depths of the Civil War in the 1980s.  The sense of color was fabulous.

 

Chichi, as it is known, was also the center of Maya history: nearby many of the events narrated in the Popol Vuh, creation story of the Maya, took place. Even today, the Maya come in from the hills and practice their own religious rituals right in the middle of the Catholic Church. This is a wonderful sharing of beliefs, the result of a priest who at some point started reading the Popol Vuh in the church. More images on flikr.

 

 

Finally, we went to Antigua which was in the midst of holy week processions. Immensely heavy larger than life carved realistic figures of Christ, Mary, Joseph etc,  were carried through the city by 100s of people (sometimes children) for many hours, clearly as an act of penitence. But at the same time there was a festive atmosphere of food, balloons, and a general sense of excitement. Antigua is the old colonial capitol which had lots of ruined churches because it has been leveled by earthquakes over and over. Most of the buildings today are one story. There were tours of the ruined churches with stories of episodes like nuns being shut off from the world entirely. Today they are often used for weddings.

 

 

During our brief visit to Guatemala we met many, many people on “missions”, for a week or two or six weeks. Lots of US people down there doing a project to make life easier for the Guatemalan people, many but not all were religiously affiliated. Of course, life would be a lot easier for them if we just quit being a military bully there.  Legalizing the passage of drugs would free up money for education, health care and other good things.

 

 

Tikal A Few Thoughts by a Non Specialist

Tikal. Thousands of unexcavated sites, but Temple I, the icon of Guatemala,  does not disappoint. A  “mortuary pyramid” not a temple, it is elegant, grand, and spectacular. Pretty much invisible today is  the seated sculpture of Jasaw Chan K’awiil on the top.( 734AD). It was first discovered in 1882 by Alfred Maudsley.  The  king was buried underneath with an enormous collection of jade, mirrors, pearls ceramics, and other objects including intricately incised bones. Today we can climb wooden stairs up  some of the structures ( this is Temple II) , not the challenging  steep stone steps.

 

 

Tikal, one of the great mesoamerican sites in Central America, still emerges from deep jungle in the lowlands of Northern Guatemala. It is at the center of a large biosphere, but actually a lot has been clear cut (Various Europeans starting in the 1890s : the British logged for mahogany. The sites emerged as the logging occurred.) This jungle biosphere is the home to 60,000 people. Five days walk through the jungle would have taken us to El Mirador, another huge site. Next time!

 

 

We stayed at the Tikal Inn at the site, an amazingly beautiful little hotel, with a swimming pool, and comfortable rooms. We felt really decadent, compared to previous visitors as recently as the 1990s, while the Civil War was still going on and the government was not able to have the luxury of catering to tourists. Although we had electricity for only two hours, we never missed it.

 

 

 

 

Right at the lodge were all sorts of beautiful birds,  like this oscellated turkey,and it was easy to walk to the site.

 

 

We took several tours with guides,all of them well-informed on various topics, history, geology, ecology, birds, engineering, religion, dating systems. Here is a guide pointing out the dating system on an onsite stele.

 

The most exciting tour was getting up at 4am to walk through the darkness and hear the jungle awaken from the top of Temple IV. It started with a single howler monkey, then a conversation between them, then the birds began, first a single one and then a chorus of many different birdsongs. I am a novice birder, but they were whistle like, sharply repeated, and some faster some slower. In the background the howlers continued, like the bass in an orchestra. The original music. As the mist lifted, the monkeys subsided and the birds got more varied and louder.According to one expert guide,  there are 400 species of birds here, including 65 migrating birds.  I saw about 20 including the Toucan, known as a flying banana because of his big yellow beak and the Red Lored Parrot.

Apparently quite recently the howler monkeys were almost extinct, according to a guidebook written in the late 1980s.

 

 

 

The  small coatimundi was everywhere, an anteater like small creature which had the run of the site as soon as the people left.( I think they may be overbreeding).

We also saw leafcutter ants who have an extraordinary division of labor.

 

By far the best experience was spending a day in the jungle exploring, Temple VI: I was helped up by a steel armed worker for the National Park. Above another Park employee is taking a picture of the big rain god mask on the upper part of the temple.

 

 

Then Complex G, an amazing complex of  buildings with lots of corbelled arches.

 

 

 

 

 

 

and the Central Acropolis where one of the excavators, Teobert Maler, set himself up from 1895 – 1904. It is a multi courted series of buildings on different levels and with many plans. Fascinating to explore. This photograph doesn’t tell you much.

 

 

 

 

The central area of Tikal has about 200 stone monuments including stele and altars. Most of them are now in the two on site museums, one called the Ceramic Museum, the other the Stone Museum, although the Ceramic museum also has Stele including the most famous no 31. This photograph is pretty impossible to see

(taken illegally), but it represents the ruler Siyaj Chan K’awiil ( Sky Born K’awiil) 411- 456 AD flanked by portraits of his father Yax Nuun Ayiin with enormously complex symbolic regalia. and a representation of him in the headress emerging from a split in the sky.

 

Altar no 5 was in the Stone Museum, and a painting of it was on the wall of our hotel dining room. Two rulers Jasaw Chan K’awiil and another  leader are conducting an exhumation ritual with the bones of a high ranking lady between them.

 

      

 

 

An amazing item in the Stone Museum, aside from the many stelae, was a wooden lintel from Temple 4 ( I think it is a replica). There were a lot of wooden lintels on these temples, many of which have been taken off to museums in Europe, with amazingly intricate representations of various rulers. Many more objects from burials are also to be found in the National Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (the old guidebook I have written by William Coe of the University of Pennsylvania mentions several jade pieces stolen from the Tikal museum in 1981).

 

Apparently the site was occupied and temples and other structures were built over a period of 1100 years.  Starting in the Preclassic which is about 600 BC, then a Classic Period 250-900 and the Post Classic. Most of the structures date from 550 – 900, the so called Late Classic, but underneath the visible structures are layers of earlier buildings, as well as burials. Under Temple I the burial had 8 kilos of jade objects.

 

The construction of Temple I appeared in a model at the Popol Vuh museum.

 

 

Leverage and ropes were used to move the colossal blocks (exactly the same system was used for the John T. Williams commemorative totem pole raised in Seattle Center in 2012.) Who were the laborers? Were they devout, were they slaves? Who were the designers, the engineers? It was evident as we visited the site, that the Maya were brilliant engineers, particularly with stone buildings and organizing water supplies. This sign suggested the complexity of underground tunnels used for transporting water.

 

 

They separated fresh water supplies in various categories.

 

The technique of making quick lime to hold the stones together was also explained, difficult and time consuming. We saw kilns that survived as well as underground storage areas for chocolate, maize and nuts. Human waste was used as fertilizer.

 

The so called “Mundo Perdido” had several amazing structures.  East of its main pyramid are three smaller structures that serve to mark the point on the horizon where the sun rises on the solstices and equinoxes.  Behind us is one of the pyramids that show the influence of Teotihuacan design.

 

The surviving (all but 4 destroyed by the Spaniards) codices from the Maya contain predictions and knowledge about planting, weather, and cyclical patterns that relate to the purpose of the “Mundo Perdido.”

 

We tried to imagine how Tikal would have looked, swarming with people and the temples brightly painted.The sculptures showed clear evidence of the arrival of people from Teotihuacan in the design and the sculpture (and representations of Tlaloc, the rain god, who is all over Teotihuacan).

 

 

They arrived in 389 AD according to new understanding of the dating system. Thus much of what we see at Tikal is a blend of Mexicana and Maya styles. And of course we are looking at the culture of the elites. There were many ordinary houses, but they have all disappeared. Apparently they dispersed into small communities in the jungle when the large city complex fell, but today there  is still an active sacred alter near Temple I in the Central Plaza.

 

 

One theory of the decline of Tikal as a grand empire center is that there just wasn’t enough land to cultivate or water to support the population as it expanded. But the decline was also probably because of warfare among different Maya, just as today, we are squandering our resources on warfare and despoiling the environment.  But what will be left of our culture in a thousand years ? Maybe piles of rusted military equipment that accidentally survives.

 

According to one guide (on Temple IV at dawn) these temples had small chambers in which elites ate magic mushrooms and snorted various leaves that made them very high a lot of the time.

 

And of course the Maya survive until today, despite all the efforts to obliterate them and ongoing taking of their land (see previous post). The  elegance and dignity of the people is remarkable given what they have been through over the centuries. According to the National Museum of Archeology brochure there are 24 different ethnic Maya groups in Guatemala today. But it declared “Guatemaltecos somos todos.” Creativity wins!

 

 

 

My May 1st

I arrived at Westlake around noon on May 1, the sun was shining. Youth Speaks was performing amazing songs and dancers were breakdancing on the concrete spontaneously. It was a joyful sense of celebrating creativity, resistance, and talent. I was particularly thrilled with the voice of a young man named Lorenzo. The sign behind the dancer says “Decolonize”

    

 

 

I was surprised there weren’t more people there. Suddenly a lot of people arrived who had been marching a few blocks through downtown. The change of mood was immediate. They looked shaken and angry. A man on the stage spoke of what had just happened, but the group was still going forward with the demo. One friend I talked to said, oh yes some tear gas. But I felt the sense of dark anger. Later I learned that as I was enjoying creative expression in Westlake, the “black bloc” had broken windows and aroused the police to tear gas. Who is this black bloc???? Supposedly they are “anarchists” but the anarchists I talked to said they had nothing planned like that. Are they skinheads mascarading as anarchists??? It certainly seemed like that, in spite of their “anarchist websites” sited in the paper.

The result was anger among the other marchers, but certainly their spirit was not broken at all. The Occupy will continue to be non violent. I was impressed that the news media actually distinguished these people as vandals that weren’t from Occupy

 

 

 

So then I went onto the immigrant rights march which started at Judkins Park at 5PM. I went with a young woman who is out on bail from detention, having been held because of an expired license. Her family managed to raise the enormous sum of $5000. And she was reunited with her small daughter after three weeks, but deportation hangs over her head if the police decide to question her for any reason at all.  She doesn’t even have to have done anything. She was told to stay at home. She can’t work because she doesn’t have a work permit (which she is trying to get).  They took away her drivers license, so she can’t drive. Veracruz, where members of her family live, is riddled with gangs, and incredibly dangerous. She has lost cousins who have been murdered.

 

  

 

We looked for groups at the march who might be interested in her situation (she is fortunate to have legal help also). She wants to be public about it, which is incredibly brave. All of a sudden the march was very real. It was a protest, but also a lot of people fighting for a life with work, family, and hope for a future. Simple ideas. Simple hopes. But in the last few years, the immigrant situation has deteriorated severely. Deportation has escalated . 46,000 people were deported last year who have US children.

 

 

 

The mood of this march compared to the first one I went to in 2006 was somber, resistant to giving in, full of chants “the people united can never be defeated.” It was large, several blocks long.

 

  

 

 

 

When we reached downtown on Union street and headed west toward the federal building, a huge crowd joined us! It doubled the size of the march. Probably they were from #Occupy and the Westlake area? It was exciting even as it started to pour down rain.

Unfortunately the news was dominated by the “state of siege” downtown, lots of reactions, boarded up stores etc, rather than the important messages of these two groups of people: resisting corporate power, and standing up for a life free of surveillance and pursuit. But really, the people who were in these events felt the strength of numbers, felt the power of the people, and I personally felt the joy of creativity among the dancers and singers  and art making that I saw at Westlake at noon.

 

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Guatemala Part I Museums in Guatemala City

 

On the day we arrived in Guatemala, staying at this very pleasant hotel near the airport, President Otto Perez Molina announced that he wanted to decriminalize drugs and drug trafficking through his country. Other Latin American and Central American leaders also support reform of drug policies like President Santos of Colombia and Laura Chinchilla of Costa Rica. What a good idea!

 

But of course the US opposed it at the Summit of the America’s regional Latin American meeting in Cartagena Colombia, offering instead more money for “security”, our main export guns. The escalating violence in Central America and Mexico is related to the Plan Columbia that was like according to Greg Grandin, a “tsunami” just as those countries were coming out of years and years of devastating civil wars (also fueled and equipped by the US). In addition CAFTA ( Central America Free Trade Agreement) and NAFTA are destroying markets for local farmers, leading to a void filled by the drug market. Finally, as Grandin pointed out along with Ethan Nadelmann on Democracy Now, there are powerful forces in the US who benefit financially from the “drug war”.

 

But it gave the first day of our trip to Guatemala a positive feeling.

 

Two weeks after we came home we learned of a march by 15,000 campesinos and peasants who were demanding approval of bills that would protect their livelihoods from mining companies and other multinationals who were forcibly evicting them from their land and having protestors arrested.

         

 

So against those two bookends  I will speak of our trip to Guatemala which was intended as a break from my continuous exploration of art and politics. I went there for the unusual purpose of a Yoga Workshop on Lake Atitlan with my exceptional instructor in Seattle, Douglas Ridings.

 

 

Before the workshop we went to five museums in Guatemala City, the Popol Vuh, a beautiful collection in a contemporary building that draws on motifs from Maya Temples, and paired with it the Textile Museum, which would loom large in our experience of Guatamala ( a fact we didn’t know on our first day). For more photos of the artwork inside the museums see my flikr site.

 

 

 

The next day we went to the  National Museum of Archeology and Ethnology which had a mural by a modern artist in the lobby and a special exhibition about the site of Waku in Peten, School children were having a special event there also and were looking at their history.

 

 

 

 

 

At the National Museum of Modern Art/Carlos Merida, we saw some excellent painting and sculpture from the 20th century

 

 

 

 

 

and the Museum Miraflores

 

 

 

in the incredibly upscale Galerias Miraflores shopping mall which is on part of the site of the ancient city of Kaminaljuyu that thrived for almost 2000 years.

 

 

 

All of these museums were beautifully installed and full of information about Mayan culture. Popol Vuh (named after the Mayan Creation Story)  included artifacts from two underwater sites from the bottom of Lake Atitlan and the nearby Lake Amatitlan.

 

The Textile Museum next to the Popol Vuh traced the history of textiles back to 5000 B.C. and the development of the back strap loom, still in use today. The Spaniards introduced sheep wool, silk and linen, and in the end of the nineteenth century chemical dyes were introduced.

 

Many changes have occurred since the 1970s including machine made embroidery, and the use of synthetic fabrics like rayon, but as we witnessed, the textile tradition today in Guatemala is still thriving.

 

Textile patterns are symbolic, one of the reasons the Spaniards feared this art expression. That may explain why in contemporary fabrics the arrangement of colors is always random as is the repetition of patterns. A motif is always varied by size, color, and other small details. But the sense of color is stunning. The basis of the colors is in botanical colors from plants, but the desire to create these beautiful textiles is an inherent aspect of Mayan culture for centuries (in neighboring Honduras everything is black and white) . It is wonderful to see these traditions still thriving after so many years of slaughter in the 20^th century and during the years of Spaniard rule.

 

The countering of violence with art is stark in Guatemala.

 

The National Museum of Modern Art reflected the region’s deep roots in brilliant colors and abstract patterns: artists were making extraordinary sculptures and paintings in the modernist tradition throughout the 20^th century. The best known is of course Carlos Merida,

 

 

 

 

 

but in addition there were artists Roberto Ossaye.Calvary, from 1953 is only one of many strong paintings from this era.

 

 

This is the work of Rodolfo Abularach The Shock 1956.

 

 

And then recent artists like Roberto Cabrera, This piece had a lot of found metal parts attached to it. It is called Transfiguration and it was created in 1969.

Efrain Recinos  Grand Music 1970. The massive sculpture of wood was a combination of organ, tank and Mayan temple. I had to take the photograph on the sly and it was in the back of the museum, so the photograph doesn’t do it justice. He is a major contemporary artists in Guatemala. 

 

 

 

Erwin Guillermo  has the piece in the foreground above called Que Pasa 1951. Margot Fanjul’s crocodile with small figures on its back and in its mouth. It seemed like a Holy Week icon processional icon, but in honor of Guatemala instead of religion. But it suggested a lot of struggle.

 

 

Magda Eunice Sanchez expresses the agony of the Civil War in Guatemala. Indeed Sanchez’s affecting image Girl with Her Hair in the Wind suggests the frozen fear of the ordinary person during this war that lasted from 1960 – 1996:

 

it  killed 200,000 people, 83% Maya. 40,000 to 50,000 people disappeared and one and a half million were driven from their homes. It was later identified as a policy of genocide. Human rights violations were perpetrated particularly against women amidst the culture of violence, by Guatamalan army soldiers trained by the US. The US involvement goes back to 1953 when CIA forcibly removed Arbenz Guzman from office in 1954: from 1944 – 52 liberal economic reforms had strengthened civil and labor rights of the working class and peasants.   Works in the museum suggested some of the agony of those years.

It is hard to imagine the horror of the Civil War after the horror of colonialism, slavery, slaughter. How did anyone survive. “Socialism” from 1944- 1952 was the only period when rights of the people were even considered.

And today, we have the people marching as they are being evicted from the lands by a new wave of multinational mining corporations. .

 

 

 

 

 

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Rabih Mroué The Pixelated Revolution

” Syrians are filming their own death” – that is how the Pixelated Revolution begins- with this text. A few images are available on this photostream.  Rabih Mroué is seated on a bare stage in front of a table with a computer. A large wall looms behind him.  The projection combines succinct quotes about the “rules” of pure film which he has altered to make more pertinent to Syria: “Shoot from the back and do not show faces in order to avoid recognition, pursuit and subsequent arrest by security thugs ” with  live footage from cell phones held by citizen journalists in Syria  that he has downloaded off the internet.

The footage is carefully selected to focus on the extraordinary fact that as Syrian citizen journalists are recording the horrible violence in Syria, they are themselves being shot and often killed. The recent case of  Rami al-Sayed, who posted over 900 videos on the Syria Pioneer  site   His cousin Basil al-Sayed also a citizen journalist was shot and killed in late December;  had been filming in Homs before he was killed, posting on the same site. The piece that Mroué focused on the most was an 83 second clip of a “double shooting”, a man holding a camera phone is filming a sniper, and then the sniper takes aim and shoots at him. We do not know if he died.

The drama of this exchange, why didn’t the photographer move away from the sniper, the fact that he must have felt invisible, although he wasn’t, the point blank shooting, are all subject of discussion in Mroué’s piece. In Beirut where it was shown there were other issues raised as well, issues also raised by Mroué’s piece shown at INIVA last spring, “On Three Posters, Reflections of a Video Performance”, only it is much more intense in The Pixelated revolution. The three posters refer to three “takes” of a suicide bomber’s video -” Reflections” are Mroué’s analysis of whether he is exploiting the videos for his own ends.

In selecting and downloading footage taken by citizen journalists in the ongoing horror of the Civil war in Syria, Mroué is doing something even more questionable according to the art critic Kaelen Wilson-Goldie:

” Should they be making art in their studios or joining protesters on the streets? Should they be agitating as artists, activists or day-to-day citizens? If artists have already been dealing with subjects such as corruption, injustice or social inequity for years, then how can they avoid having their work co-opted by the new fervor for revolutionary fare? And if they decide to take on and work through the uprisings in their art, then how can they do so without coming across as naïve, belated, opportunistic, callous or crass?

“For me these are very intriguing questions,” says Mroué, “and they’re also a kind of trap. One of the things we always say is that art needs distance, and that art needs a kind of peace. But at the same time, with the revolution in Tunisia, or the revolution in Egypt, or the violence in Syria, when are we allowed to talk about it? How long do we have to wait before we can make a work? I think there are no limits, no defined times.”

So the immediacy of these works is overpowering, and yet we see these dramatic videos in the safety of a performance space in Seattle. Is the artist making a shallow exploitation of violence?  He has said that he is not an activist, he only wants to “provoke himself” not other people. So does that mean that his distance reflects neutrality, a cold intellectuality.

Definately not, it is a stance that protects him from despair and enables him to respond to a tragic ongoing nightmare in the country right next door to his own. Damascus is closer to Beirut than Portland is to Seattle. And keep in mind that civil war raged in Lebanon for a very long time, and he lived through that first hand. How would we be responding to such murder and mayhem that nearby, by fleeing, by remaining mute, by speaking?  Mroué  has chosen to speak, but with a formal framework loosely ( and sometimes even humorously) based on ten rules of “unvarnished cinema” the so called Dogme 95. 

So the fact that he can take on Syria at all is an indication of the depth of his commitment. The use of immediate documentary is part of a now established tradition in Beirut that began during the 2006 Israeli bombardment as discussed in another Wilson-Goldie article “The War Works, Videos under Siege, Online and in the Aftermath, Again”  in Art Journal Summer 2007 (apparently not available online.)  But in that case it was the artists themselves as well as the citizens of Beirut who were filming their own war. In the case of Syria, Mroué is looking from the outside.

Mroué pointed out that there have been virtually no outside journalists in Syria ( that was not quite true- recently several incredibly courageous journalists  smuggled themselves in and have been both shot and killed. Jon Lee Anderson has just published a piece in the New Yorker based on his courageous interviews with both sides of the conflict.

The footage that we see on syria pioneer is a lot of bombing and gunfire, as well as terrified and injured children, women, men. It is very hard to look at, hard to assimilate. So Mroué has done us a favor, he has created a distance from which we can understand and think. We are introduced to thinking about what is happening.

That is a crucial first step. Mroué has said he doesn’t “want to be a martyr for the sake of art” but the reality is that he does succeed in giving a news ignorant US audience one dimension of the nightmare that is going on for the average person in Syria. The “Syrians are filming their own death.” Very sadly, on the very day that I was writing this 13 activists were killed smuggling one photographer, Paul Conroy, out of Syria. Paul Conroy was with Marie Colvin when she was killed in Homs.