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.

Art in Cuba Now Part II Espacio Aglutinador

Espacio Aglutinador was founded in 1994 by Sandra Ceballos and Ezequiel Suárez.  The title means a space that helps people and events come together ( a root word here is gluten) . It is the oldest ongoing independent art space in Cuba that is entirely independent of the government.  Because it is a private home, events cannot be interfered with by the police.

The initial impulse for creating an art space was the censoring of an exhibition by  Ezequiel  Suárez called The Bauhaus Front in which the artist painted images on cardboard of various prominent people holding  signs that declared for example “ The Museum of Fine Arts is shit.”  It was an act of defiance against the official art venues in Havana. This Dada spirit of the Bauhaus inspired many multimedia events and exhibitions in Espacio.

The spirit of defiance and revolution against expected actions persisted inside this intimate space, even as outside the strange fluctuations of oppressions, contradictions, and successes abroad for Cuban artists continued.The social interaction is intense and powerful.

From the beginning, major critics Orlando Hernandez, Gerardo Mosquera, and Eugenio Valdes Figueroa, to name only three, have been writing catalogs and articles about the Espacio.

Espacio Aglutinador has created more than 90 events in collaboration with various artists and collectives.  Many of these artists are now famous, and often the work they showed in this space was fundamental to their later fame or brought them out of eclipse.

The main principle is that it is a space that welcomes everyone, it is democratic, including young and old, trained and untrained, famous and undiscovered, living and dead.  “It is a cultural space, nor a boutique, nor a foundation. It does not intend to be elitist or avangardist, populist or backward looking. … It is not a project, nor is it a beautiful idea on paper. ..Aglutinador is an event… The possibilities for error are infinite.” The artists that were shown there in the 1990s were chosen by Sandra Ceballos and Ezequiel Suárez. Some of them had been neglected, some had been censored, some were simply artists that they admired including US based Ana Mendieta and Coco Fusco.

One example is Angel Delgado who was actually put in prison because he did a performance piece in an exhibition called “The Sculptural Object” in which he defecated in one of the galleries on a copy of the Communist newspaper Granma. He was put in prison for six months: he took everything he had used while in prison in a wooden box, including 102 drawings and stories and sculptures of soap, drawings on hankerchiefs  (techniques learned from other prisoners),  and opened it for the first time for an exhibition at the Espacio Aglutinador in 1996. Orlando Hernandez wrote asking for his pardon:  “ I see in your exhibition not only a harrowing testimony to your sadness,  of your revulsion,  . . . but also our own shamelessness, our weakness, and guilt.” The postscript to this work is discussed on this blog, in which the writer declares that Delgado has made a successful career from this work inpsired by prisoners media, without ever taking up there cause himself.

Another artist who had an installation there was Tania Bruguera. Her performance piece Cabeza Abajo in late 1996 included 20 participants who lay on the floor tied up. The artist as a ghost like figure walks over them, suggesting oppression, the experience of collective death, a ritual landscape full of sacrificed ideals.

By 2000, as the Cuban art scene was rapidly changing, Eugenio Valdes Figueroa  wrote  “ in the midst of the tensions provoked by censorship on the Island,  Aglutinador offers a space for projects that have little possibility to satisfy the commercial  trends stimulated by the demand for Cuban art from the outside. . .  Amidst the proliferation of easily saleable formulas . . . and banal themes . . . “ it was an institution that spoke to forbidden themes and mined the uncertainties of local themes. (Espacio Aglutinador 1994 – 2004,un lugar de emergencia, p  62). Starting in 2003, a second phase of Espacio began that was even more revolutionary, without curators, without any restrictions.

One example was the exhibition “Curators Go Home” which included the piece on censorship by Celia/Yunior and friends described in my previous blog.  That piece can still be seen in the Espacio Aglutinador drawn on the wall behind the work of other artists.

Sandra Ceballos, the ongoing director of Espacio Aglutinador, is a radical both in her life and in her art. She attended the Academia de San Alejandro in the early 1980s, a productive period of Cuban art, but she herself was defiant and feisty of art school norms and was expelled for behaving as an existentialist, not a worker.

But she went back and graduated, but chose not to attend the Istituto Superior de  Arte (ISA). In the early 1990s she received a prestigious prize for her art and was given a one person show, but she chose once again to be defiant and showed radical feminist body art.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She has said that her ongoing radical activities and art have barred her from showing at any government sponsored spaces, and the one work by her in the National Museum is not on display.

 

She has worked in series, one series was focused on the fragility of human existence, the limits of our mortality in a hospital environment, another series is about the fanaticism of ideology using Fidel’s speeches as a point of departure which she wrote down frantically as though demented. Her discussion of her work and her space are on this excellent video interview.  In one amusing comment she describes the space as a send up of the pomposity and seriousness of the Museum of Fine Arts in Havana. In her small house, the art is shown in the kitchen, in the garden, even in the bathroom, as well as the tiny living room.

Two other examples of radical artists who showed in Espacio Aglutinador  are Colette Rodriguez and Carlos Garaicoa. Rodriguez’s work was described as hyperrealist and the catalog that accompanied her exhibition had a triangle of what people thought was pot attached to it.

 

Carlos Garaicoa created a series of conceptual diptychs of crumbling Havana buildings paired with austere pyramids, invoking the Tower of Babel in his title. Such an analogy was particularly apt for the strange contradictory environment of Havana, full of principles in the air, and disappointment on the ground.

Ceballos continues to sponsor radical art collaboration and events at Espacio Aglutinador. It is an incredibly important place for Cuban art as both a concept of absolute artistic freedom in the Dada tradition, and as a space that celebrates a spirit of collaboration and mutual support even as the forces of capitalism drive artists toward pursuit of individual monetary success and compromise.

The history of Cuban art and Cuba is frought with deep contradictions, strange slogans, rapid reversals from freedom to oppression, unpredictable promotions, and commodification of its own story, but the Cuban artists that I met continue to produce thoughtful work which successfully brings together art and critique with intelligence and subtlety.

 

 

Art in Cuba Now Part I

Art in Cuba December 2011

Gerardo Mosquera: “For the third world “primitive” is not a matter of resuscitating pre capitalist solutions which correspond to a state when internal evolution was interrupted by Eurocentric expansion of capitalism. It is a matter of making Western art in the (Third World) way and for the “(Third World) benefit. ”

( as quoted in Louis Camnitzer, New Art in Cuba, 2004.

While little that I saw in Cuba was referring to the primitive, an important fact in itself, this wonderful quote by a foremost Cuban art critic, suggests the complexity of the art in Cuba. I met with about thirty artists and was able to witness the vast differences of accessibility to international connections, money, and materials. They ranged from individual artists based in beautiful homes to artists working collectively and collaboratively and getting by on four jobs. They were all highly trained in the government supported art schools, the high school Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro and the Istituto Superior del Arte.

On the first day we met a young graphic artist at the Taller de Grafica Experimental named  Alejandro Sainz Alfonso. I bought a print from him: a Greek warrior  carrying a paper airplane on his shoulders. That seemed like a great introduction to the unpredictable week ahead. The Taller was founded in 1962 and 150 artists have passed through it over the years. Today it has about 20 – 30 members.  The printmaking is traditional media:  woodblocks, linoleum, lithography, etching.

Most of the artists I am going to write about do not have websites. Access to the internet is limited in Cuba. Think about how that changes your view of the world. Artists who have married foreigners have more access, mobility and possibilities to create websites. They seem to also have more money. One example is Reinaldo Ortega Sardiñas who is married to a Spanish wife and recently returned from two years in Spain. His work is sculpture, multimedia installation. He gave me a CD of his work (in itself an indication of resources) and told me (in English) that he does have access to the internet. His work involves some impressively expensive materials and his multimedia installations are large scale but provocative, as are his photographs.

I was struck by the photographic series, images of people entrapped by what appears to be a net made of plastic at first sight until you discover that it is made of knives or scissors.  His multimedia installation was accompanied by a dance performance by the group Danz Abierta, also with funding from abroad and an enormously creative family. Danz Albierta are even on You Tube: they have performed in NYC at Jacob’s Pillow. The performance that we saw, Mal Son ( bad song – a reference to the traditional Cuban Son music),  was intense:  dancers abruptly walking around  three short walls of a small space, with loud repetitive music– it was claustrophobic, and entrapped, like the large photographs by Sardiñas. On the back wall were filmed images of the dancers repeatedly climbing stairs.  The version performed in the US was very different, as seen on these You Tube videoes: the stage was larger, so the feeling of claustrophobia was less.

For me the most provocative artists that  I met were the collaborative pair Celia /Yunior, as they are known (Celia González and Yunior Aguiar). These artists work with contemporary Cuban social structures, regulations, and boundaries as they are rapidly changing. This image is from a piece filmed in a formerly elegant swimming pool, now surrounded by jagged chunks of concrete and completely unmaintained. The two artists brought some blow up rafts and floated around as if it was a luxurious place to be. Their work frequently turns on the contradictions of public and private realities.

One of their works, Bojeo, (Coasting), 2006 – 2008 involved a grant to go to Trinidad and Tobago where they played at being tourists with tourist cliché photographs, as they called Cuban hotels to inquire about their facilities.  The law at that time was that  Cuban residents could not stay in their own tourist hotels unless they had a foreign residence permit. So as they went around the beautiful beaches in Trinidad and Tobago, the sound track is a series of phone calls to resorts in Cuba as  learned about all of the incredible eco resorts in Cuba, but in the end they were told they could not stay at any of the hotels in Cuba. The law has since changed, but the atmosphere toward Cubans in tourist hotels is still uncomfortable. For example, they are often asked for identity cards for no reason, or they are made to feel unwelcome. The piece beautifully captures both the beauty and the clichés of the Caribbean tourist life, the amazing resources that Cuba has as an ecotourism destination, and an example of the arbitrary oppression of Cuban citizens.

Another piece by Celia/Yunior called Habana 15 segundos (Havana 15 seconds) is simply recording the replacement of a Soviet era air conditioner with a Chinese one. At the moment of exchange we see through the hole in the wall to the street outside. The exchange was meant to provide more energy efficient cooling, but of course the basic reality didn’t change much.

A provocative work that Celia/ Yunior created in collaboration with a group of friends is En Medio de Qué as part of an exhibition called Curators Go Home 2008.  Their collaborators are Javier Castro, Luis Gárciga, Renier Quer and  Grethell Rasúa. They invited friends to write on a wall about when they had been censored, either partially or completely, as well as who was the person or institution that censored them. The result was a picture of constantly changing, serendipitous censorship, dispersed information that could not be predictably mapped or even verified. The fluidity of the relationships between artists, institutions, curators, and the “system” in Cuba is its primary characteristic.

The piece became more intense when it emerged that someone from the US Interest Office had been invited to the exhibition, and the Cuban government ended by accusing the artists of being “traitors of the motherland,” a shocking experience for them. They were able to successfully defend themselves against the charge. The work exposed both the convoluted character of censorship procedures, and the ever present threat of an oppressive regime that took any exposure seriously.

This piece was created in an independent space, El Espacio Aglutinador, run by Sandra Ceballos, with various collaborators since 1994. The space is in her private home, which means that what she does cannot be censored or stopped. I will talk more about her work and space in the next installment.

“Private” home until just a month ago was not quite an accurate term, as Cubans were not allowed to sell their homes, only trade them for equivalent value. They could will them when they died. Recently though the law has changed to allow Cubans to sell their homes. Since no one has any capital to do that, one can’t help but wonder if the multinational banks are circling for new prey for their mortgages. We shall see. Up until the law was changed, though, the only piece of land that a Cuban citizen could legally own was their cemetery plot. So Celia/Yunior made a piece about that in  Reserve in 2010  by digging out Celia’s back yard with an area of the same size and projecting onto it the words “Derecho Perpetuo.

The title refers to the fact that in Cuba if you own land you have a perpetual right to it, but if you don’t develop it, it reverts to the State. Of course you will always have the right to your grave! When you are dead all your rights are permanent.

The #Occupy Movement: Conversations

This blog marks my exciting experiences with  the early stages of the Occupy movement,  before the police in the service of the oligarchy started using pepper spray and obliteration tactics. You can see I look really happy here.  I was on the road lecturing on my book and I was able to visit five Occupy sites, each one has a different personality. Accidentally,  I missed the mass marches, and arrived at odd times of days, spending time talking to small groups of always extremely diverse individuals.   The spirit of the movement is certainly about conversation among people, among people in public, something that is unheard of in the U.S. for a long time. Although I am an ongoing activist, the amount of conversation I have had in all the Occupy sites with complete strangers from all walks of life,  is thrilling. That is one of the core signficant aspects of the movement. We are all so insulated in our corners of the world with our work, our families, our busy lives. Suddenly, “#Occupy ” allows us to break out of it and share common concerns.

We are joined together, we respect each other. The people united they cannot be defeated!

The second experience for me was to feel the synergy among different causes. I have written already about Seattle and its intersections with various rallies that took place while the group was based in Westlake Park in downtown Seattle: anti war, anti police brutality, abolish Columbus Day, no genetically modified foods, and the list goes on.

 

In Des Moines Iowa I was there before and after a big march, the

people were friendly, and informed  about all sorts of different issues, from economic justice to lesbian and gay rights. They told me on a Monday morning, that most of them were at work.

 

 

In NYC the energy center of the movement, I was overwhelmed by the  thrilling intersections of so many different people, their statements, their poetry, art, politics: support for political prisoners at the General Assembly, Tibet, brutality and illegal detention in Colombia, libraries, old, young, school children doing a project for social studies, the energies are many, stoic, resistant, calm, angry, it is an “Occupy” not an occupation an elderly black gentleman reminded me when I asked for directions in downtown NYC.

SYNERGY

I am constantly amazed that people think that the Occupy movement has no demands. The demands are many and clear. I picked up the manifesto in NYC and it is a sweeping statement about all the ills perpetrated by corporations.  That is the right target and the right message, all messages, anti war, detention of immigrants, black sites, environment, all come to the same problem, the corporations  spending money for immoral purposes, making bombs, private prisons, surveillance.

So the conversations were real conversations.

In Northhampton, Mass, there was not one, not two, but three different actions going on in the center of this small town, an Occupy, an anti war demonstration that has been there for years, and political signs for the upcoming election ( this was November 5).  The anti war protestors were at the center, the Occupy in a park not so visible, but there were anti war people included. Both included people of various ages, older, younger, children. And the Anti War people were handing out flyers about Occupy activities.

In Hartford, in the middle of a sunny Tuesday morning, I dragged my suitcase up a muddy hill when I was changing buses, and talked with the people who were awake. They had just had a big march, but they were there and I cheered them on and was happy to meet them.

As a journalist and art critic, I have photographed as many signs as possible, recording the people’s poetry pouring out on these signs. In Seattle they were short and to the point, in NYC there were really long long essays on signs!

We also know that all the Occupy Sites have libraries. I have donated my book Art and Politics Now, Cultural Activism in a Time of Crisis to three of them.

#Occupy Wall Street

This is a video of the poet Michael O’Brian reciting his amazing poems at OWS, Occupy Wall Street. It  has good footage giving a sense of the diversity of the activities going on there.   I have more photographs on my artandpoliticsnow flckr photostream and videos on my artandpoliticsnow YouTube channel:Drumming at Zuccotti Park NYC with other protestors

The videos include the flags waving, the sense of so many different people standing up for what they believe in.

Even the statues!

I didn’t photograph a union ironworker whose sign said he was employed and angry. When I talked to him he said he was actually lucky becuase he had work, but he was still pissed off.

This is a general shot of the encampment. And below is the work of Joshua Boulet, an artist drawing sketches at OWS. I really like his work. Buy some of it at his website.

So poets, musicians then and now, visual artists, and everybodyas a writer, artist, poet.  That is another signficance. Making signs is bringing out the creativity of every person and demonstrating the words and images are available as tools in changing the world.

As the Occupy movement is entering its new phase in mid November, it is important to hold on to the joyful connection and energy as well as the anger and discontent that is fueling this nationwide ongoing protest against the invasion of corporations into government. Here is a live stream to NYC.

 

 

 

 

 

One of the most succinct statements of where the country is going was made by Dorli Rainey interviewed on Democracy Now after she was pepper sprayed on November 15.

She said in response to the Mayor’s apology to her

” We spoke very briefly, and I told him that he is not in charge of what is going on, that our politicians really have lost control, and this sort of brutality is now endemic all over the United States and is being controlled by Homeland Security, by the FBI, and by the military against the war on terrorism. And it has nothing to do any longer with what individual mayors may want or not want to do.” This was reiterated in Oakland when bloggers pointed out that it was the retail oligarcy in downtown Oakland that put pressure on the Mayor there to eliminate the protestors.

The current horrifying sight of police in paramilitary gear spraying, beating up and arresting peaceful unarmed protestors is evidence of the fear that this movement has put in the elite. My image of the day is that all the police will suddenly realize that they are, indeed, also part of the 99 percent and take off all that gear and join us. The live stream today showed a police captain holding a sign ” police stop being mercenaries for the wealthy” !

I wonder if the copy of my book Art and Politics Now, Cultural Activism in a Time of Crisis that I donated to #Occupy Wall Street was trashed when the camp was destroyed or it was among the books that survived. In any case my spirit is there with the demonstrators

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sopheap Pich “Compound”

 

Sopheap Pich’s installation Compound at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle is an oasis of peaceful structures that can evoke anything from bombs ( according to the artist) to fish traps, chicken coops, cages, high rises or fantasy playscapes (I thought of children crawling underneath and through these light weight structures.)

There is a lot of information about the  Sopheap Pich on the website of  Tyler Rollins because Sopheap is having a simultaneous one person show there. It features Morning Glory made of the same rattan and wire  as Compound. Morning Glories for the artist refer to a survival food in Cambodia during his childhood, when the Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia.

He escaped with his family to a refugee camp in 1979 and then to Massachusetts  in 1984. The story of the escape of many refugees with experiences in common with him is the subject of an astonishing play by Mark Jenkins, Red Earth Gold Gate Shadow Sky. The play is directed by Victor Pappas with all the actors Asian Americans, most of them Cambodian born and many who endured similar traumas as those presented in the play. There will be more performances next weekend at High Point Community Center in South Seattle.

 

The play is a reading and pantomine that includes Cambodian singing ( by a pop star in Cambodia) and Cambodian dancing ( by two young people), as a play within a play, performed at a refugee camp. The play begins with the American bombing of Cambodia (remember that in the winter of 1970) and it follows the disruption of one agricultural family to the city, back to the country side, taken by the Khmer Rouge in 1974, forced to produce food they could not eat for the Khmer Rouge, escape into the jungle, bare survival, escape to refugee camp in Thailand, several years of terrible treatment, sponsorship to US, placed in ghettoes here, gangs, difficulties ( Part II will treat the forced return of some of these people as a result of the new immigration laws, there is a photographic exhibition about some of them after they return to Cambodia that is devastating).  The period has been presented in the 1984  film by Dith Pran,  The Killing Fields and there are also books  with memories of other survivors. This production is a collaboration with Don Fels, Seattle based visual artist, Sopheap Pich who has created “visual framing” for the project, and others.

 

Sopheap had many of these same experiences: like  so many other Cambodians he went through repeated traumas. In 2003 he returned voluntarily to Cambodia. He  found his current medium, the material that comes from his childhood as the son of rice farmers, the traps of fishing and of other agricultural implements.

It is a cheap material, he harvests the wood himself. His sculptures are made from the trees, split , boiled and shaped, the wood is made into a mesh with  fishing wire meticulously wound at hundreds of intersections – the wire made from metal recycled from left over war materials that were carted to Vietnam and then brought back as resusable materials. This detritus of war was the foundation of construction material until recently.

But now Cambodia is having a huge and ecologically destructive development surge, particularly around the capitol. Sopheap’s studio was on a lake, a cabin on stilts. The entire lake  is being destroyed for development, shown in a few photographs that accompany the sculpture.

“Compound” can be a prison or a fantasy city. It is  built out of the cheapest material, it can be an allegory of the new Cambodian economy, the new cities being built as most Cambodians still live on a dollar a day. They are a compound and an imprisonment, as well as a dream and a fantasy.  They invite you to enter but prevent you from doing so.

Sopheap has rearranged the bomb like shapes to be towers of this city, in previous installations they rested underneath the city. Bombs into towers, war into development, but development built on air with the work of the peasant. These simple structures suggest all of this, even as the artist has declared that they are abstract. He spoke of creating a peaceful environment in his studio, an oasis of calm with his team of workers as they build the rattan with its intersections connected by wire.

Calm and peace. Coming out of the traumas of his past. It makes a lot of sense. In his previous work ( see the website above for his other work) he created organs, body parts out of rattan, he made reference to the war traumas more directly in his statements. Now he has moved to a less specific expresssion, and he specifically stated that he was not a political artist, no doubt coached by the international art scene that being “political” is not an accepatable concept. But abstract, allegorical, metaphorical though his work is, it is deeply political as well.

Peace is a political concept.

As part of the events in Seattle, Boreth Ly, a brilliant Cambodian academic based in Santa Cruz, discussed Sopheap’s work as well as that of other contemporary Cambodian artists, You Khin, Chakra Oeur, Sarith Peou, Aragna Ker and Seckon Leang with the theme of the trauma of memory and displacement, “home” and identity. Unfortuantely the nightmares of the past are still visited on the present, not only in their dreams, but also in present day Cambodia which is being destroyed by development. Cambodian American Aragna Ker’s image of a Superman Zarathustra provides one way forward!

 

The Istanbul Modern : Hayat ve Hakikat Dream and Reality Modern and Contemporary Women Artists from Turkey

The exhibition “Dream and Reality” at the Istanbul Modern Museum provides an overview of modern and contemporary women artists from Turkey. Since women constitute many of the leading artists in Turkey, the exhibition is a valuable survey of modern and contemporary art beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing to the present.

Jointly curated by Levent Çalikoğlu Chief Curator at the Istanbul Modern, Fatmagül Berktay, Zeynep Inankur and Burcu Pelvanoğlul, the exhibition offers an opportunity to look at an important chapter of contemporary art history.

The title of the exhibition is based on the title of a novel co authored by Fatma Aliye and Ahmet Mithat. But Fatma was initially identified on the cover only as “a woman.” Fatma was also the author of an 1891 essay on Muslim Women (Nisvan-ı Islam) defending women’s rights. Although women in the late Ottoman era ( note mainly urban, upper class women)were actively promoting women’s rights, this famous first female novelist (the novel was a  “Western” genre and new to Turkish writers at this point) was unnamed on the cover of the book. The position of women in the late 19th and early 20th, right before the Republic, is important to pinpoint as privileged freedom within the limitations of traditional Ottoman customs and Sharia law.  ( read Reina Lewis Rethinking Orientalism for one  account of some of these negotiations.)

Educational reform in the Ottoman society led to a demand for the rights of women. The first essay in the excellent catalog for this exhibition by Fatmagül Berktay outlines the relationships of women and society in the Ottoman era and early Republic. They published magazines and newspapers, and participated in meetings and charity organizations. There were by the end of the nineteenth century 40 women’s magazines and 300 books that examined the relationships of men and women. They also began to struggle for their rights. After 1908 “they began to force the limits of Sharia law and go out into the public space, to expand the means of education and to earn the right to work in the public sector, in short to bring down the walls  that separated them from society.” ( p. 33) A University of Women was opened in 1914; a  School of Fine Arts for Girls in the same year, although the first art school for girls had opened as early as 1864.  Men and women studied  together by 1921 even before the  founding the Turkish Republic.

An interesting omission from the new catalog that appears in the pioneering exhibition by Tomur Atagök Cumhuriyet’ten günümüze kadın sanatçılar (Women Artists from the Republic to the Present Day) (1993) as part of the Women in Anatolia Series in honor of the 75^th anniversary of the Republic, is that women’s equality in modern Turkey can be traced back much further to the nomadic cultures of Anatolia. More specifically, as Atagök summarizes women “played a central role in economic life in rural Anatolia” and produced much of the embroidery, dressmaking, carpet weaving and other handcrafts. (p.12) The tradition of sequestering women during the Ottoman years actually was an inheritance of  Byzantine culture.  But the “new woman” of the early Republic was still part of an oppressive, patriarchal society.

Today, as one country after another in the Middle East is throwing over dictators, the spread of Islamist ideas is rapid. Knowing how women resisted Sharia in Turkey at the turn of the twentieth century might be of use today as the new Libyan government immediately declared that it wants to institute Sharia, and Iraq has stepped back to the dark ages in its treatment of women.  Afghanistan women outside Kabul are still wearing burkas as we saw in the PBS series Women, War and Peace .

“Hayal ve Hakikat”  begins with benchmark historical artists, among whom the most famous is Mihri Müşfık,(1886-1950?) the first significant women oil painter in Turkey (oil painting, like the novel, was a “western” import, see Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red) .  In the painting  Mihri Hanim documents her assertive attitude, as well as her negotiation with the rules of the veil. Her dark veil is completely transparent. Mihri Hanım  together with Müfide Kadri (1890 – 1912) led the way for women as part of the artistic culture of the late Ottoman society. There is a detailed discussion in the catalog by Burcu Pelvanoğlu of these early years. Many of Mihri’s students became prominent professional artists such as Fahrelnissa Zeid and  her sister, Aliye Berger included in both the exhibition of women artists and in the main display in the Istanbul Modern. Sadly Mihri Hanim herself died in poverty far from home.

 

Hale Asaf, Mihri Hanim’s niece is also a major figure in the early period.  More modernist, and cubist, she represents the next era of oil painting in Turkey. But the really spectacular painting in this exhibition from the mid twentieth century is by Aliye Burger, Sun Rising, 1954 that embraces expressionist colors in a stunningly near abstract composition.

 

 

Jumping to the late twentieth century, Canan Beykal honors Mihri Hanim in her piece Mihri Hanim’s Column,1993 a small doll sculpture that reinvokes the artists self portrait in three dimensions. It inhabits the gallery, imbuing the present with the past.

 

 

Tomur Atagök’s own painting and installations are an important connection from the latetwentieth century to the present. In the work in this exhibition, Plastic Paradise, or Don’t Soil,(1987) ( see beginning of blog) she works on steel panels with an expressionist style dominated by shades of pink and red. Her theme at this time was the contradictions of society for women: as the women on the right are enjoying themselves, a man with a knife threatens them. But her work also addresses environmental concerns about the planet in both the title and the suggestion of the empty landscape on the left.  Atagök mixes popular culture with expressionist references to political events.

Füsun Onur also spans the late twentieth century to the present with spare conceptual art that is both playful and full of threat, as in Untitled, 1993, a chained up chair with her name on the seat.  The chair is a symbol of power, property and social status ( catalog p. 130), she undercuts their function with the chain ( or in other works soft gauzy fabrics).

 

 

Nur Kocak has used a pop art aesthetic paired with photo realism  to make searing comments on some of the  ironies of women’s position in Turkish society.  In this work she is addressing the impact of fame on Turkey’s first female director Cahide Sonku during the 1930s.

 

 

A few pioneering artists began to show conceptual art in the late 1970s. Starting in the 1980s and particularly in the 1990s, the Turkish contemporary art scene has flourished. Of the 74 artists in the exhibition,  50 of them are still active, born in every decade of the twentieth century from the 1930s to the 1980s.  Ahu Antman’s essay in the exhibition catalog analyzes the relationships between these artists and larger trends, particularly feminism, in twentieth and twenty-first century art. She touches on the emphasis on empowering women in the Republic, but primarily she examines the ways in which these artists explore a wide range of contemporary approaches to media, subject matter and content, much of it explicitly relating to women in society.

Among the artists shown, the selection of the particular art work does not always stand as an indicator of the artist’s primary contribution to contemporary Turkish art. Gülsün Karamustafa’s Postposition, (1995) five quilts found in a bazaar and framed with gold gilt fabric, are an indicator of the contradictions of kitsch taste and the conservative ideology of those who buy it, only indirectly suggests that artist’s position as a major contemporary artist. Her work encompasses many themes, migration, orientalism, prostitution, women in popular culture, and much more.

The work of Hale Tenger is a crucial early installation by the artist in which she evokes potential violence in society with a great vat of red colored liquid and dozens of swords suspended above. It is not a feminist work, but it addresses the threat of violence which includes women. “The School of Sikimden Aşşa Kasımpaşa (I don’t give a fuck anymore)” 1990, was prompted by a letter bomb that killed a female professor and other acts of violence. Tenger addresses social issues, but cannot be considered a feminist artist; she does not focus on women specifically.

Among benchmark artists is Inci Eviner who has always gone her own way in terms of materials and content.  Her current medium is video, but eccentrically.  Fluxes of Girls in Europe. ((2010) superimposes videos of almost 70 moving female bodies on a satellite image of Europe. The women are small scale, although large on the map of Europe. They are accompanied by a text with words that describe their actions, “tear,” “stab” (catalog p.159).  These women seem to be trying to break free, but failing to do so.

Many of these artists have been prominent for decades. They adopt a wide range of media and subjects, suggesting the real depth of art by women in Turkey. For example, aside from those mentioned, there are several generations of conceptual art (Ayşe Erkman, Canan Beykal, Azade Köker, Gul Ilgaz, Nancy Atakan) , social activism (Nil Yalter, Esra Ersen, Selda Asal, Ipek Duben), references to folk art or history (Selma Gürbüz, Handan Börüteçene), classical art (Candeğer Furtun,) environmental issues ( Neriman Polat, Elif Çelebi, Canan Tolon), and a combination of several of these ( Aydan Murtezaoğlu).

 

I will focus on a few artists with whom I was not as familiar. Şükran Moral’s provocative video Bordello, 1997, in which the artist herself plays a prostitute, is a wonderful challenge to traditional attitudes . It was actually performed in a brothel on which she hung the sign “Museum of Modern Art” and held a sign declaring that she was “for sale.” ( catalog 174). Nilbar Güreş’ video Undressing (2006) was a delightful send up of the veiling controversy in Turkey and elsewhere, as well as a compelling social commentary. The artist began entirely covered, and step by step took off one head covering after another, each one identified with a name of a specific person, but each one also representing a different social or cultural identity in Turkey. Her work underscores the oversimplifications with which this issue is often defined. Another pair of videos by Aslı Sungu’s Just Like Mother, Just Like Father (2006) also spoke about attitudes to women and what they wear, but here in the context of parental approval, as the artist kept changing between outfits that reflected different identities.

Kezban Arca Batıbeki’s installation from her Cage Projects 2 Kitsch Room Project: “Where To?” was rich with meticulous details that accumulated into a reference to the same urban migration culture that Gülsün comments on.

Güneş Terkol sews images that address identity through dress as well . Gözde Ilkin accumulates, also mainly working with fabric, a serendipitous collection of objects from everyday life.   Ilkin is part of a collective called Atılkunst which created an audio tour of the exhibition which brings us back to the beginning of the story in the early twentieth century.

The exhibition with its excellent catalog essays documents the major role that these artists play in contemporary art in Turkey. Many of them are not politically affiliated with feminism per se, but, as suggested in this brief discussion, many of them address topics that engage social issues that concern women.  Of course, with any exhibition of this type, there is always a question of why this group was chosen, and other well-known artists ( like Suzy Hug-Levy and Şirin Iskit, just to name two) were omitted. On the whole though, the exhibition is a major contribution to literature on contemporary art in Turkey.

One of the biggest ironies of the exhibition though was the introduction by Emine Erdoğan, the wife of the Prime Minister and the juxtaposition of her attire-  elegant, but extremely conservative, with a thorough head covering with the ultra chic and contemporary Oya Eczacıbaşı the wife of the director of the  Eczacıbaşı foundation.

Occupy Seattle and Abolish Columbus Day October 12

Today on Columbus Day Indigenous groups turned out at the Occupy Seattle site to demand the abolishment of Columbus Day, there were dances, drumming, songs, and a few speeches. They were also in support of Occupy Seattle on the other side of Westlake.

Those folks were having group meetings about media, peace and justice, and “demands” . Strategizing the way forward. I hope some of them were listening to the speeches especially by Jamal who mentioned the Hopi prediction that  those who live in villages of stone will wake up to find them gone. We are waiting for the day. The indigenous have a long view. They see the land as permanently occupied already. So it is a logical connection for them to join up with the Occupy Seattle movement. There was a big discussion about whether to change the name to Decolonize Seattle/Occupy Seattle, the vote was to leave the name the same. Indigenous peoples have played a prominent role in the Occupy Seattle demonstrations over the weeks. Probably more so than in other Occupy places. That has given the Occupy Seattle an historical perspective on the theme of exploitation since the land of downtown Seattle was historically Duwamish, a tribe that hasn’t even been recognized. In this region we have dozens of tribes that are beginning to do better as a result of revenues from casinos and the annual canoe journeys. The first provides new monies, the second build culture and community.

 

 

 

Istanbul Biennial Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial)

 

 

The 12^th Istanbul Biennial, curated by Jens Hoffman and Adriana Pedrosa offered art that created intersections of aesthetics and politics, both historically and in contemporary art.  The curators chose to distance the exhibition from  immediate political reality, but the same issues such as pursuit of oil in the Middle East, government oppression and loss of human rights, have been with us for decades.  The geo political framework of the exhibition spans most of the twentieth century and the early 21^st century. One of the earlier bodies of work is by Tina Modotti, an ardent communist who supported workers’ revolutions in Mexico in the 1920s. She is represented by photographs in the scale, but  not the context of her original work: it often appeared on the cover of New Masses.  Martha Rosler’s  Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful  series on the Vietnam War ( rather than her Iraq series of 2004), underscores that obliviousness to the atrocities of war has not changed.

 

The curators chose to call this biennial Untitled (12^th Istanbul Biennial) in homage to Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957 – 1996), whom they celebrate for his ability to “infuse” the elegance of post Minimalism with political statements.  The early 1990s was of course the height of the AIDS  crisis and many artists were rejecting the abstruse for direct political statements. In this Biennial works by Gonzalez-Torres create a point of departure for group shows (although his works are only referenced in the catalog):  Untitled(Abstraction), Untitled (History), Untitled (Ross), Untitled (Death by Gun), Untitled (Passport).  Surrounding these group shows were over fifty solo shows by artists who connected to the adjacent theme show. The design of the exhibition by architect Ryue Nishizawa  enhanced this sense of satellites revolving around a central galaxy, with individual gallery spaces defined by corrugated metal walls for each solo artist, But the installation was  also a maze.

This was an intentional act on the part of the curators and the architect: they referred to it as echoing the experience of walking the streets of Istanbul. The result was a sense that we could make our own show. We were free to ignore, or return, there were empty spaces between the gallery spaces, there were rooms that led us nowhere or back in a circle.

 

The first solo show that I encountered, Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect by Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck and Media Farzin made clear the curators’ intentions and perspectives. It consisted of a contexualization of early 1940s modernism, most specifically the 1943 mobiles of Alexander Calder which he himself described in terms of “cosmic nuclear gases.”

The artists recreate the work, and also alter the original in a photograph by writing on the abstract shapes the names of world leaders who at that time were juggling for influence: Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill,  etc.. They also provide contextual events in 1943 such as the beginning of the Manhattan Project.

The rest of the gallery is filled with other examples that contexualize modernist art with other historical benchmarks and the simultaneous U.S. pursuit of oil and “cultural diplomacy” in the Middle East such as excerpts from Longines Chronoscope of the early 1950s, with experts expounding in much the same way that they do today, diagrams of the oil fields on Iran and Iraq from the Cheney Energy Task Force( whose shapes reminded the artists of a Calder mobile), and  a 2006 article by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker “The Iran Plans.” Nothing has changed in the US perspectives, but as Z magazine stated recently “As the  Arab Spring continues to challenge dictators, demolish old structures and ponder road maps for a better future, the U.S. remains committed to its failed policies, misconceptions, and selfish interests.” (Ramzy Baroud, “U.S.-Arab Disconnect: Revolutions Restate Region’s Priorities,”) October 2011

 

The group exhibition Untitled (Abstraction) was the least provocative in terms of art and politics. Historic figures like Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape were juxtaposed to recent artists who frequently did riffs on familiar works such as the shovel ready -made by Duchamp. Clara Ianni’s Trabalho Abstrato (Abstract Work/Labor, 2010 was a shovel with a square hole cut into it, thus rendering it useless and a play on the Marx idea of “abstract labor.”

Adriana Varejao transformed  abstract slashes inspired by Lucio Fontana  into a depiction of literal wounds.

But among the solo shows affiliated with the abstract section , the work of Dora Maurer, an Hungarian artist who began to  create conceptual art in the early 1970s in the midst of oppression and communism, again provides the contradiction of context and production that can be so provocative. Her subtle conceptual pieces were  an active protest against the world in which she was living ( she is still a major contemporary artist in Hungary.)

 

The Untitled (Death by Gun) group show swung between absolutely literal representations to historical images that did not gain by their loss of context. Some artists recreated intense experiences of the past, as in the video work by Edgardo Aragon who hired his young cousins to re-enact  rituals, games and killings that actually happened in his family when they were involved with organized crime.   Mat Collishaw’s giant photograph of a bullet wound was so confrontational  that it became sexual and abstract. This installation included iconic historic images like “Matthew Brady’s” ( done by various members of his studio)photographs of the Civil War. It juxtaposed the photograph by Eddie Adams of a street execution of a Viet Cong fighter with the equally well- known image of Chris Burden being shot as an art performance. What does this tell us? That the art world is effete, or that this shooting was part of the pervasive gun culture of this time that continues to the present.

 

Even the contemporary work had historical references:  Kris Martin’s Obussen II, used huge ornately decorated howitzer shells from World War I, and Kristen Morgin’s The Third Of May, reenacted the famous Goya using clay models of Pinocchio and Mickey Mouse as victims of the firing squad.

Are the curators avoiding the realities of death by gun in the present?   With the choice of Ali Younis with his hundreds of toy  soldiers,

or Eylem Aladogan’s gun stack that morphs into feathers,

they opted for the literal, but it feels like a mannerist literal. Even more literal and yet more than that are the photographs of Letiizia Battaglia done while she was working as a photojournalist in Sicily in the mid 1970s: the dead victims of Mafia hit men are unmediated and blunt.  There  is a direct connection between these Mafiosi murders and  the targeted murders coming from camera phones in Afghanistan and Iraq or the unphotographed murder of unarmed “enemies”  like Osama Bin Laden and Anwar al-Alwaki by drones.

Situated between the stark dialectic of Untitled (Abstraction) and Untitled (Death by Gun), lie the three other group shows:  Untitled (Passport) Untitled (History) and Untitled (Ross) –the third name refers to Gonzalez-Torres’ lover who died of AIDS. This section addressed themes of love, identity and sexuality and was the most historically focused and least provocative in terms of contemporary choices of work.

 

Untitled (Passport) lent  itself to more subtle negotiations between aesthetics and politics.  Several artists included resonant passports: Sue Williamson’s For Thirty Years Next to His Heart (1990) was a passbook for black South Africans; two Palestinian artists Dor Guez and Baha Boukhari referred to the constantly changing status of Palestinians.

Rula Halawani’s Intimacy, are close up images  of people’s hands  as they get out their documents at a checkpoint  at the Qalandia checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah ( Halawani’s black and white photographs in the “history” gallery juxtaposes contemporary ruins to historic photographs of villages in Palestine.)

 

Untitled  (History) included Aydan Murtezaoglu’s well known work referencing Ataturk’s teaching Turks the Roman alphabet in the late 1920s as part of his language reform, as well as many works that utilized archives, books, and other documents to underscore the incompleteness and arbitrariness of what is included in history.

Some seemed a bit pedantic, others more compelling such as PAGES reconstituted a shredded letter from an American diplomat at the Iranian embassy just before the student take over. Volupsa Jarpa Library of No History based on declassified CIA documents referrng to Chile between 1968 – 1991 was mainly an unreadable aesthetic.

There was again an emphasis on the aesthetics of the printed page, the redacted printed page, the shredded book, the book turned into artwork.

Altogether the exhibition was elegant and provocative, as with all biennials, there were artists included that were astonishingly weak,. The unusual choice to emphasize historical work to such a great extent, as well as an obvious predominance of Palestinian artists (The Ford Foundation provided funding to include Arab artists) and an almost absence of American artists ( a cut in the US budget?) also points to other hidden political agendas that are not even mentioned in the exhibition, but which certainly framed it.

 

I had some favorite pieces including Taysir Batniji’s Watchtowers, Israeli guard towers in Palestine that directly quote the industrial imagery of Bernd and Hilla Becher  in Germany, but with obvious differences: these photographs were taken by a surrogate photographer in a hurry, they are illegal images, and they are not derelict at all.

Rosangelo Renno’s  Immemorial also invokes modernism in its grid structure, but that impersonal geometry is abruptly interrupted by the faces of young men in a series of photographs that Renno found in archives: they are young men who died building Brasilia.

 

Underlying tragedy is more indirectly invoked in the Camilo Yanez  video  of the National Stadium in Santiago, site of both heroic  and horrific events . We see rolled up cubes of grass and crumbling seats  as the history of the place disappears.   Simryn Gill’s series My Own Private Anghor, also documents  the collapse of modernism in hauntingly post minimalist photographs of abandoned window panes in empty unfinished houses in Kuala Lumpur. Abraham Cruz Villegas collection of political posters from various intense events in Mexican history and Elizabeth Catlett ( who is still working, but whose aesthetic was shaped in the 1930’s and 1940’s) also look backward to a time when artists directly engaged events.

 

While continuity with the present can be argued throughout this exhibition, its emphasis on both the literal and the abstractions of historical modernism, particularly conceptual and minimalist structures created a strange dynamic between the current burning state of the planet and the place of art in that discourse. Artists can engage directly with what is happening now, but in choosing this historical and aesthetic route, these curators suggest that the examples that have withstood the test of time can speak to us almost more directly, than a piece responding to the immediate event.

 

And, indeed, this split of the literal and the abstract is actually where we are now. On the one hand, drone warfare replaces human beings on the ground. The computer screen replaces the equipment in the field, the concept of war itself has become abstracted into perpetual war on terror. The defined wars of the past, with their titles, places, historical beginning and end, are definitely a relic of the black side of modernism. Today we have permanent war, word play, no social participation in the idea of sacrifice for a war, all of it making for a permanent abstract background to our daily lives, a background that many people don’t even bother to acknowledge as the single biggest fact of our contemporary world. This biennial is a bit like that: it includes a lot of abstraction that is post minimal framed with political discourses, but in the end, the world of politics is background to the elegance of the works, and is often even invisible.  On the other hand, we have the extremely literal and specific protests occurring around the world by masses of people who have nothing more to lose.

 

This exhibition offers a new variant on the theme of art and politics. Some critics and the curators themselves are saying that it is a reaction to the more specific art and politics of the last three Istanbul Biennials. They are trying to move the equation closer to aesthetics, which in their definition is late modernism.

That may explain the pervasive sadness that I felt. For in reaching for modernist aesthetics, they are reaching for a lost cause, a failed project, a twentieth century dream. Today, we need something entirely different, and that is actually being formed on social media, with mass connections of disenfranchised and economically bankrupted youth, workers, unionists and with protests like those in Wisconsin or in New York City.  Occupy Wall Street protests against the dictatorship of the corporations; protests in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East are against ruthless political dictators often backed by the US. So against the abstraction of drones and warfare we have the physical messy, open, people based  multi media, multi issue protest against oppression and the economic systems of exploitation and war that drive it. That is the contemporary dialectic of art and politics. Where it leads us is still to be discovered.