Porgy and Bess and The Help

Scene from Seattle Opera’s production of Porgy and Bess, August 2011Gershwin Opera

The Gershwin Porgy and Bess, all too briefly playing at the Seattle Opera, is stupendous. I read a lot about the history of the opera, the debates about whether it was a musical or an opera, the complaints about the stereotyping of blacks, the protests by blacks during the Civil Rights era that Gershwin’s language as well as the use of “Negro spirituals” and other popular music forms was disrespectful and poorly understanding the spirit of the original.

Forget it all! It is a magnificent story, opera, and staging. The stage is obviously influenced by 19th century American genre artists like Eastman Johnson and Winslow Homer who depicted black life in America ( there are books full of this type of imagery). The setting is a small black enclave on the sea set in the early 20th century. The Gershwin estate requires that the entire cast be African American, the only whites are the policemen, as is appropriate. So one of the reasons the opera isn’t performed more frequently is that if an Opera company has a resident group of singers they are usually mostly white.

So I purposely didn’t read the story before hand and just in case there are other people who don’t know it I won’t give it away. But one shocker is that a  New York production is changing the ending to a “Happy” ending for Broadway audiences . The ending, I think, is already happy, it is about love, about hope, about a lot of real life ambiguities, between home and life. The characters, who are accused by the NY production of being one dimensional are far from that, they are layered, contradictory, and full of dignity and passion. Human nature is on full display here also in a community of people that both stand together and display petty prejudice ( against a cripple or a prostitute, or having a good time, for example), who are cowardly and loving, protective and bold. The community has vendors passing through who sell fresh crabs, strawberries and honey on the comb. ( A recent article pointed out that poor people can no longer afford pricey organic food- well poor people produced organic food until recent changes in agriculture).

Also, there are many star singers, in addition to the leads, all of the arias were magnificently done, the choreography was stunning. In “It Ain’t Necessarily so” a piece that might have been choreographed as an almost minstrel piece, the dancing was brilliantly subtle.

All of the singers were passionate and profound in their emotional range, their demeanor and their enactment of the story.

But above all, I loved the Gershwin score: it contained the characters, the drama, the love, the hope, in the music itself. It was transcendent.

I can’t imagine what the NY production will do for music for a different ending since the music is absolutely matched to the story now.

At the same time the movie The Help has just been released. I read the book this summer and thought it was arrogant but intriguing- a white woman taking the voices of black maids, and their stories as the basis of a novel she is writing. It is set in Jackson, Mississippi during the Civil Rights Era. In the movie  it is one of the black maids who is the voice over throughout, she becomes the star, shifting the tone. The black actresses do a brilliant job, you can sense they are way more than the sum of the parts of this rather shallow effort of a novel.

The underlying premise of the Help is a white woman recording the stories of black maids in Mississippi in the 1960s. It is an absurd premise. No black maid would have talked openly to a white women at that time.Or even today for that matter. The result is that the stories are sugar coated, the events seem idealized, particularly the ending when Abiline (Viola Davis) loses her job and walks slowly down the street with the plan of becoming a writer. As one friend of mine said, what about the reality of losing a job, of having no money. It is a white woman’s fantasy that walks down that street.

Abilene(Viola Davis and Minnie (Octavia Spencer)

The two stars Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer celebrating the publication of the book The Help to which they contributed anonymously.

I think the author should donate her proceeds to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Comparing to Porgy and Bess, also a story written by a white writer in the South, it comes off a distant second in terms of empathy. While no white person can possibly be able to understand an African American experience and the ongoing racism in our society, at least in Porgy and Bess, there is a sense of believable humanity. The black maids, as projections from a white mind, are definately much less insightfully drawn. If there were an opera of this story, it would be quite limited in scope. I have been trying to find out if the author ever actually talked to any African Americans maid or otherwise about their experiences. Here is one good review.

In spite of all this Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer are brilliant and compelling. They add a depth that was absent from the novel.

October 19: I am amending this entry because I just read Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi. It was published in 1968. It is an astonishing autobiography of the realities of being black in Mississippi in this same time frame.  The murder of Medgar Evers in the midst of the civil rights activism of the early 1960s is in both the Help and Moody’s book. In Moody’s account, there were several marches, confrontations with police, people put in jail by the hundreds. Her book is indispensable reading for anyone who wants to understand the incredible courage of the people who participated in the early sixties Civil Rights actions in Mississippi. She herself was part of the historic Woolworth Sit In, and an active organizer with NAACP and CORE. Her book should definately be the movie that is made!

Mary Ann Peters “Poor Liberty” Series at James Harris Gallery

Mary Ann Peters series “Poor Liberty” is based on her outrage, as she stated,  at  the “cavalier use of the word ‘liberty’ ” by politicians.” Each of the 12 images responds to an article she read in the newspaper. Here is the whole series as installed at the James Harris Gallery until this Saturday:

Mary Ann Peters Poor Liberty 12 panels, watercolor and gouache on clayboard, 24 x 12"

The images all have  the Statue of Liberty as a point of departure, and each print refers to a different violation of the real meaning of the idea of Liberty.

They include censorship-scarecrow , decoy(pictured)  target (pictured) , wired, belly dancer (pictured), gagged and bound(pictured) ,  Jacked,  crucified, the committee, frozen, robot, and mummy.

Some of them are very specific, as in “wired”, a reference to the publicized tortures at Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere,”gagged and bound,” another reference to torture, others are more general, as in “Jacked”, a Jack in the Box, the idea of liberty being stuck in a box and popped out at someone’s whim, or”mummy” – the mummification of the true spirit of liberty. “Crucified”  refers to the loss of the constitutional separation of Church and State, an idea that seems to have been completely lost sight of today, “the committee” refers to devils and angels at a moment  in a moral decision.

Mary Ann Peters Belly Dancer

The belly dancer is covered in oil, the pursuit of oil is drowning the Middle Eastern culture.

poor liberty ( gagged and bound)

poor liberty (decoy)

Decoy refers to the stories early in the Iraq war of soldiers sent into war with inadequate equipment.

poor liberty (crucified)

The entire series is executed in subdues tones of browns with gouache and watercolor on a slick hard surface that allows some movement of the washes, but they don’t soak into the surface. Peters technique is unusual, her choice of close valued sepia related tones is one of her distinctive characteristics. In this case the combination of her fluid technique on a resistant surface seems to exactly correspond to her subject, the manipulation of ideas on a hardened background. It creates certain results that are on the surface of our political world for all to see. But those ideas can also be misinterpreted, misunderstood, underanalyzed, and lacking in depth.

Mary Ann Peters consummate handling of watercolor and gouache allows us to see these twelve images as both extraordinary works of art individually, and a collective statement about our current social condition.

I hope she resumes the themes she included in this 2004 series,  because all of the conditions continue to exist and even worsen. For example, target, refers specifically to the targeting of people of Arab descent after 9/11, but the arbitrary targeting of both Arabs and people of color in general  for arrest, illegal internment, and deportation is an ongoing concern that I would like to see more artists representing.

Mary Ann Peters, poor liberty (target)

Carletta Carrington Wilson’s “Poem of Stone and Bone”

Entrance to the Installation and the Conclusion of the experience with prayers hung on tree by participants

Carletta Carrington Wilson at the beginning of her tour of her installation at the James Washington House at the place where Washington received his stones

Carletta  Carrington Wilson’s installation at theJames Washington House in Seattle, in May was  provocative and moving.  Carrington is a poet, a visual artist, a librarian, an African American, an historian, a writer, and a spiritual person who deeply connected to the spirit of the James Washington House.

“Poem of Stone and Bone” was installed in the garden, the greenhouse, the house, and the studio. In her tour of the installation, Carrington elaborated on the meaning of the various subtle interventions that she created in these places.

First there was the red  Bloodline of Time passing through the garden stones and stumps, leading through the garden and into the studio

Tracing the Bloodline of Time through the stones of the garden to the studio

The Bloodline of Time

Then there was the greenhouse turned spirit house, The House Stands Firm, filled with installations of wood and stone.

Installation with the artist explaining

On the ceiling were rubbings of 19th century embossed books from some of the many books in the library at the Foundation.

Roof with rubbings of the embossed covers of books from James Washington library

Installation in  The House Stands Firm, detail

In The House Stands Firm were stones and wood found on the property, some of them had been partially worked by Mr. Washington. The egg shells refer to two primary images in James Washington’s art, the bird and the egg.

Next there were soles/souls, a reference to both Washington’s metier as a shoemaker for many years, as well as his spiritual commitment to life beyond the physical world. In his earliest years, his mother apprenticed him to a shoemaker, work at which he immediately excelled and which in some ways forecast his work as a sculptor. because he went on to specialize in orthopedic shoes.

Soles Souls outside the Greenhouse

Blue Bottle tree

A blue bottle in a tree, referring to the blues, and also warding off evil spirits, was barely visible  as we left the garden to go into the studio.

Inside the studio, the model of a slave ship that Washington had collected was given a central position, along with the slave chains that surrounded it – these were key catalysts at the house for the artist long before she began her residency.

We Have Eaten the Forest : Model of Spanish Galleon slave ship at James Washington House

The ship, a 15th century Spanish galleon is, according to the artist, ” the key element highlighting the tremendous changes wrought on humans, animals and nature stemming from the West African trade in slaves.”

The artist also enhanced  pieces of furniture like the piano with an installation of stones, or bones.

Piano with intervention

On the way to the lower studio were photographs of Washington with quotes from his autobiography

Carletta  Carrington Wilson installation, detail quotes from James Washington

Carrington recited her poem consisting entirely of the titles of James Washington’s books in his library

Carletta Carrington Wilson reading Poem of Stone and Bone

Finally, there were her collages based on Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly‘s images of various scenes of the Civil War combined with subtle  fabrics.

Here is an example including an image  set in the principal square of Savannah, Georgia a year before the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863

Carrington Wilson, Hannibal Prince Among Slaves, December 21, 1861 media collage

Carletta Carrington Wilson deeply explored Washington’s  books, his stones, his garden, his home, his studio, and enriched our experience of all of these dimensions of both his life and his legacy. Yet, she was also absolutely herself as she explored, adding her own responses and feelings, her own aesthetic sensibilities with color, shape, words, and objects. We were left with a sense of drifting back and forth in time from the Civil War to the present, from Emancipation to our current world. Carletta  Carrington Wilson gave us continuity with the past and a step into the future. Her installation also gave us a sense of peacefulness and hope, at a time when they are sorely needed.

Remember Me: Voices of the Silenced in Colombia: Art Exhibition

This exhibition is created by people who are on the front lines of violence in Colombia. The exhibition is being circulated by Witness for Peace Northwest  in collaboration with Lutheran World Relief.

“The artists are families and friends of those who lost their lives in the violence. Despite the fact that much of the violence has been fueled by billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars sent to the Colombian military over the past decade, few people in the United States know much about it.” from the brochure

Image from book about young boy who was forced into military under false pretenses

detail of Quilt created by families of disappeared

Deatil of installation with hundreds of photographs of disappeared and missing

The "game" is to use the wooden scoop to shovel the photographs in the box

Small cut out photographs of families of disappeared

Sculpture showing children pulled into the process of violence

Paintings by children about the violence

Some of the products using palm oil, a crop that is devestating the jungle

The exhibition had the following categories: The Disappeared, the Displaced, the War and Women, Massacres and the Cruelty of War, A precious Resource at Risk (Children), The War and Children, Silencing the Voices of Change, Assassinated Leaders and Plan Columbia. It concluded with an analysis of Plan Columbia and the sources of violence, as mentioned above in the multi billion dollar “drug war” and other devastating actions like the free trade agreements. There is  currently a new Colombia Free Trade agreement on the table that will further “put corporate profits ahead of people and the environment” . Why is this so familiar. But we can at least be educated and resist here in the US. The small farmers and Afro Colombian communities are losing their land and extra judicial killings are carried on with impunity.

While the artists who created the art works in this exhibition are children and adults who are largely working directly from their emotions with only minimal training, famous artists like Fernand Botero have also addressed the same issue as in his painting “Massacre” Also Beehive Collective has made an amazing print about the Plan Colombia. I discuss both of these artists in my book Art and Politics Now, which you can read about on this very website.

“Social Security” An art exhibition engages the world

The exhibition Social Security, curated by Deborah F. Lawrence in collaboration with Jayme Yahr, director of the Kirkland Arts Center, is an exhibition that addresses politics from several different directions and in many media. Right at the entrance is a confrontational glass work by Lauren Grossman called Rocker. Two big red heads face off on high poles on a base that rocks back and forth. The open mouths poised in debate or argument, it is hard to say, but since they are red, we can assume , they are vociferous! Just as political debate ought to be in this country.Back in the day that we had political debate.

Lauren Grossman Rocker 2010 glass steel iron and lead 82x36x27"

Nearby are John Feoderov’s sardonic paintings Emergence no 3 and 4. Odd shaped heads back to back, mouths open, but not communicating. They are coming out of cesspool like slime,  framed in a snake, probably a cobra who has swallowed a rabbit. His other Emergence painting is equally dark in its world vision, painful to view.  These people are anguished and barely surviving.

John Feodorov Emergence 4 2010 acrylic and canvas, 72 x 72

John Feodorov Emergence 3 2010, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 72

Another compelling work in the exhibition is Pam Keeley’s Trust Me Here is another  large head (Obama’s) with the words Trust Me sealing its mouth,  surrounded by a sea of struggling people. Keeley is referring to the election of Obama and the huge sense of betrayal that many  people  feel over his failure to act on the principles he declared during the election.

Pam Keeley Trust Me 2008 - 2010 acrylic ink and graphite on paper 44 x 36"

detail

Bill Whipple’s wooden sculptures that we can manipulate, such as .CEO, were amusing. As we turned the wheel a cog  controls the bent over bodies of two workers:  the elite are controlling their oppressions. This theme which can be traced back to Rivera’s Detroit murals of the Ford Motor Company, and other artists, is  a Marxist image, although it is little too gimmicky for such an urgent subject.

Bill Whipple CEO 2002 - 2010 fireboard, paint hardware, 32 x27x4

Charles Krafft creates porcelain weapons and security cameras, sinister and seductive, precious and threatening. See Ai Wei Wei posting for another security camera, that one in marble.

Charles Krafft Grenades handpainted slip cast earthenware

Charles Delft CCTV Camera hand painted slip cast ceramic

Kevin Wildermuth 27.7 billion dollar bill which lays out the cost of war for Washington State  is a straightforward statement that ought to be on a billboard and every Metro bus. I was disappointed it was the size of an actual dollar bill, given how strong the statement is.

Bell Wildermuth 27.7 billion dollar bill archival ink jet print, 17 x 16 x1

Of course Deborah Lawrence’s commanding collages were one of the highlights of the exhibition. Her shredded flag series on old high school maps are potent both politically and aesthetically. Speaking of scale, this is a great scale for her. Lawrence always combines astute critique with a way forward, which is a crucial dimension. Her New Preamble to the Constitution offers what we ought to be doing now, like “sign the Kyoto Treaty,” “Renounce the Drug War”  “Ban Racial Profiling” “Provide Health Care for All”

Deborah Lawrence New Preamble 2008 acrylic paper and fabric collage on recycled paper and map on recycled canvas map

Also upstairs is the subtle and beautiful work of Lou Cabeen. Cabeen seduces us with aesthetics, drawing us into “Too Late in Asking: A Litany of Loss” about Mountain Top removal. It records the names of places lost in a green canvas book. The accumulation of loss is deeply moving and underscores the catastrophe of Mountain Top Removal. Although Rainforest Action Network, Beehive Collective and other strong art groups are opposing it, it is still expanding, most recently to Eastern Wyoming, the Powder River Basin. The plan is to export the coal through coastal cities in the Northwest to China in hundreds of railroad cars.

Lou Cabeen Too Late in Asking A Litany of Loss, 2010, hand dyed, painted, and discharged cotton, artist book 16.25 x 38.5

Also included in the exhibition was The Game of Life, several board games that focused on “privilege” “immigration” and  racism in a game called “urban ghetto.” Each of these games was provocative and obviously done by artists who really thought about the issues. There were a lot of details. I wish we could have played them and they could be marketed. Although it was fun to look at them, I think the impact of actually playing each one would be much greater.

Jessie Wilson Fresh off the Boat edition

detail

Lara Kaminsky Urban Ghetto detail

Tina Russell Game of Life Privileged Edition

The glitzy privileged edition of course was the most magnetic, which is why elites in society are  so drawn to greed and more and more money.

The show demonstrates yet again how many choices and possiblitites there are for artists who wish to address social issues, humor, sarcasm, games, and just plain political statements framed with aesthetics to make them more powerful.

Venice Biennale Part 5 Bengladesh

This pavilion was adjacent to the Iraqi pavilion on Via Garibaldi also in the Foundation Gervasuti. Five artists are included. Each is using a different medium and addressing an entirely different subject. These artists are the contemporary heirs to a long tradition of art in this part of India, as explained in the curatorial statement by Mohamed Mijarul Quayes Those familiar with the history of art in the last century will be familiar with the Tagore family during the late Raj. Bengali artists turned to a new synthesis of early Indian art traditions, rejecting the academic art styles brought by the British colonizers.

The five artists in the Bengali pavilion today are far removed from those years, but they also show a willingess to depart from accepted norms, to reinvent new ways of thinking about old ideas. Perhaps most dramatic is the installtion by Mahbubur Rahman’s I was told to say the words

The installation is shocking even horrifying, you may wonder why I even included it: an image of pigs covered in the skin of cattle and goat,  inside cages of barbed wire. He is addressing the attitudes to domestic animals in Bengladesh, cows are domesticated, but not pigs. The installation confronts us with a horrifying vision of animals trapped in the skin of another, the contradictions of our perceptions of one animal and another based on social or religious conventions. These animals are projections of prejudice and social acts, they are symbols of ideas that do not make any rational sense, or which cannot conform with civilized perspectives. 

Rahman I was told to say these words

Tayeba Begum Lipi has two works,  I wed Myself, shows the artist dressing for a wedding as both the male and the female ( I show only one side here)

Tayeba Begum Lipi I Wed Myself

The other is a room size installation of oversize bras made of razor blades. Both address gender issues and the contradictions in all societies betwen constructed identity, traditional attitudes to women and the realities of women. The razor blades are threatening anyone who encounters them, an armor of protection to any woman who wears such a bra.

Tayeba Begum Lipi Bizarre and Beautiful

The Utoipan Museum by Imran Hossain Piplu imagined the finds of a future archeological excavation of our contemporary culture which he refers to as the Warassic Era from 1600 – 2000 AD in which all the artifacts were different type of munitions. But in his imaginary excavation the guns themselves have skeletal remains. So anyone who is reconstructing our society will recognize our main obsession with weapons, but they will also be relics of a past age. When they are discovered they will all be obsolete and unknown so the artifacts will have to be deciphered as carefully as today’s archeologists decipher the fossils of ancient geological eras. The combination of science and war with art was provocative.

Imran Hossain Piplu The Utopian Museum

Wartopia "fossils" of weapons

 These were the artists who were the most striking in the installation. In addition it included a photograph installation by Promotech Das Pulak Echoed Moments in Time, photographs of ruined sites of historical signficance in which the artist has inserted himself.

Promotesh Das Pulak Echoed Moments in Time

and the work of Kabir Ahmed Masum Chisty, a video, drawing installation related to the theme of Medusa 

Kabir Ahmed Masum Chisty Quandary

Kabir Ahmed Masum Chisty and Imran Hossain Piplu

One of the pleasures of the Venice Biennale is to meet artists from all over the world. It reminds me of the fact that living in the US we are incredibly self absorbed and narrow in our daily thinking. When we think of the rest of the world it is almost inevitably in terms of war and terrorism. The Utopian Museum by  Imran Hossain Piplu reminds us of that fact, while the other artists provide intersections with concerns of cultures everywhere, gender, history, and myth.

Venice Biennale Part 4: The Future of a Promise Contemporary Art from the Arab World

Untitled (Arabes)

What a wonderful name for this pavilion at this point in history. And the name was created before the Arab spring in December according to the curator Lina Lazaar. But the pavilion definitely has a sense of exhilaration in many of the works. There is no theme that ties the work together, although several of them address travel and borders.  But what is obvious is that contemporary art from the Arab world can go in any direction as suggested by the signpost by Ziad Abillama with every sign pointing to “Arabes”. The artists are from many countries, and have as many trajectories. Another underlying fact is that contemporary Arab art is a hot commodity, driven by galleries and auctions, as well as collectors based particularly in Saudi Arabia, Qattar, and Dubai, and other wealthy emirates. The current exhibition is funded by a group called Edge of Arabia which is going to publish a book of the same name on the contemporary arts of Saudi Arabia.

The  Future of a Promise is an aesthetically compelling show, for the most part not confrontational. Two Palestinian artists make acute work about housing issues. Taysir Batniji in particular created a riveting photographic installation, GH 0809, an abbreviation of Gaza Houses 2008 – 2009 (right after the Israeli invasion of winter 2008-09). He co- opts the format of real estate advertising to present listings of houses in the Gaza strip, many of them ruined, with comments like “building on stilts… beautiful exposure, inhabitants 27 people.” His subtlety makes one aware of both the absurdity of the listing, as well as the ruinous situation in Gaza, where materials for reconstruction have been blocked (although that is finally changing following the Egyptian change in government).

Taysir Batniji

Yazan Khalili’s Colour Correction adds bright colors on the buildings of the Al-Amari Refugee Camp located as he says “inside/beside/outside Ramallah City.” He speaks of the “unbearably unstable relationships between Palestinians and their surrounding landscape.” By adding day-glo pink, turquoise, purple,green, orange, on the buildings he is suggesting both the tragedy and the possibilities for a better future.

Another artist who dazzles us with an enormous work based on personal trauma and embedded in Middle Eastern culture is Lara Baladi.

Lara Baladi Rose with the artist standing in front

As her father died of cancer, she documented the residue in coffee cups from visitors to the family in order to predict the future. Rose is a large abstract work that includes representations of six months of these residues. The large scale and specific imagery give it resonance.

Raafat Ishak

Several of the artists addressed travel: Emily Jacir’s Embrace, appears to be a circular luggage conveyor that moves as you approach it, but which, in its emptiness, suggests futility; Raafat Ishak’s  Responses to an immigration request  from one hundred and ninety four governments.in 194 panels includes the flag of each state rendered in intentionally insipid pastels, with a summary of the repetitive responses ( or a blank if there was no response).  The homogeneity of bureaucracy around the world and its ability to obstruct individual freedom is the theme. Third, and most offbeat is Manal al Dowayan’s Suspended Together. 200 fiberglass doves frozen in place in the installation. Each one is covered with the document required for Saudi women to travel (with a male relative), underscoring that no matter how powerful women become, the restrictions on their travel in the Arab world still exist everywhere. (It is intriguing that the Saudi pavilion has two women as the artists, with an emphasis on their world wide travel.)

Manal Al-Dowayan Suspended Together

And of course as painters, Ayman Baalbaki with his extraordinary surfaces depicting just the faces of freedom fighters wearing the characteristic keffiye and Ahmed Alsoudani’s frightening images of disaster, are entirely different in technique, but equally compelling as art.

Ahmed Alsoudani

Lina Lazaar in front of the painting by Ayman Baalbaki

Altogether there were 22 artists each addressing a different topic in a different medium. The real message of the show was to demonstrate the sophisticated range of art from the Arab world, carefully not called “Arab art.”   Some of these artists have been expatriots for decades, others are still living in their country of origin, some are in places of conflict, others in cities of great wealth. Some are religious followers of Islam, others are Christian. All of the works are understandable to an uninformed viewer who is not Arab. Is this therefore simply contemporary art that happens to come from artists who have Arabic roots, and marketable in the international market since it does not challenge or obscure. There are many many artists who could have been included. Why were these chosen?

The curator, Lina Lazaar, poses the question “Can visual culture . . . respond to both recent events and the future promise implied in these events?” The future promise is the demands of the recent protestors in the Middle East for democracy, freedom to speak their minds, freedom to participate in their countries, to replace authoritarianism with governments responsive to the people, to have economic opportunity, even just employment. Do these works address that?  Sometimes. Is the repression of those desires what lies in the future. In some cases. Is that indicated here? Occasionally.

It is intriguing to compare this to the Iraqi pavilion (and Alsoudani appears in both), in which the artists’ anguish comes through clearly as does a coherent and urgent subject, in equally successful art. The shift in the relationship of art to politics is subtle. At what point are artists willing to push us further? At the point of events such as the complete tragedies in Gaza and Iraq.  At the point of the urgency of the young media artist Ahmed Basiony killed in Tahrir Square. At the point of Ai Wei Wei’s exposure of the arrests of Chinese intellectuals on social media. He has been courageously standing up for everyone else who is silent. Thank goodness he has been released. He stands as an example of what is necessary for the future promise to be realized. To stand up for what we believe in. The young workers of the Arab world have been doing just that. Let us hope that artists can be real partners in these hoped for futures as often as possible.

Photograph of Resistance in Bahrain( not in the exhibition)

Venice Biennale Part 3: Egyptian Pavilion honors Ahmed Basiony Artist and Activist 1978-2011

Ahmed Basiony Avant Garde artist

As a direct connection to the popular surge of demand for democracy in the Arab world, the Egyptian pavilion honors young media artist/activist Ahmed Basiony ( 1978 – 2011).

He was brutally murdered in Tahrir Square on January 28^th, 2011 as he was filming the uprisings. The day before he had been beaten, but had decided to return.

Basiony was a radical in his art and his politics. He was a pioneer in experimental digital media, an unusual field in Egypt because of the lack of courses and the lack of resources.  He was also a tireless teacher and crucial inspiration among the younger generation of Egyptian artists

Basiony footage in Tahrir Square and his performance piece

He had been filming for four days in Tahrir Square. His last postings on his facebook page are “Please O Father, O Mother, O Youth, O Student, O Citizan, O Senior and O more. You know this is our last chance for our dignity, the last chance to change the regime that has lasted the past 30 years. Go down to the streets, and revolt, bring your food, your clothes, your water, masks and tissues and a vinegar bottle, and belive me, there is but one very small step left . . . If they want war, we want peace, and I will practice proper restraint until the end, to regain my nation’s dignity.”

In the Egyptian pavilion Basiony’s footage from Tahrir Square alternated with his art work 30 Days Running in Place from a year ago. It shows the artist running in a transparent sweat suit with sensors on the soles of his shoes and his body, that translated into a visual diagram. He did this performance for one hour a day for 30 days. It expresses an incredible frustration and sense of futility. See this discussion about it. Also here is an outstanding  Nafas that gives an overview of all aspects of his career.

30 Days Running in Place

The sense of futility and entrapment in the work, its abstract purpose, contrasts entirely with the alternating images of the crowds in Tahrir Square that he photographed in late January. On the day he was killed, his camera was taken away and has never been recoverd. His body was missing for three days. When it was finally found, it was evident that he had been intentionally shot by a sniper and his body intentionally run over. Many members of the media were killed on the same day.

So the pavilion is dedicated to this young and brilliant artist, we see the idea of his pent up frustration in his Running in Place work, and the idea of action and resistance in the footage from the square. I think his heartfelt call for action explains that he was indeed wanting the government to fall so much, for the future of his children (he leaves behind a young son and a one year old daughter) and for all the children of Egypt. Their goals were realized, the government fell. We hope that the new government will respect the wishes of the young and organized people from all aspects of Egyptian society who brought this about. It is not at all clear that they will.

Venice Biennale:Part 2 US Pavilion

Holding Ai Wei Wei poster "Say what you need to say plainly and then take responsibility for it. "

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s multiple installations in the U.S. Pavilion featured an amusing and political conjunction of creative expression and capitalism. Outside the pavilion, a massive upside down tank from the Korean War has a treadmill installed on its right track.  A USA track and field athlete runs on it priodically to make the treads turn ( and a loud noise).  What is the metaphor here? Track and Field (2011) combines two of the most manic preoccupations of the U.S., war and competitive sports, both of them supersized and overcharged,  run at vast expense and with nationalistic fervor. But requiring the athlete to operate the tank is also funny and subversive, suggesting the fundamental uselessness of war in its repetitive, endless, mindless, operations.  The super fit USA athlete running on a treadmill on a track of an out of date tank emphasizes the futility of the operation.

Inside the pavilion are several other installations that also bring together odd pairings: Armed Freedom Lying on a Sunbed includes a scaled down replica of the statue on the top of the national Capitol in Washington D.C. lying on a tanning bed with its blinding light. The pavilion’s title Gloria, the Spanish word for “glory” evokes the feelings of the mid nineteenth century sponsors of this elaborate, Athena- like warrior goddess with its large headdress of eagle’s head, feathers, and talons.  It  still echoes today since the  statue appears on the medals given to soldiers and civilians who serve in Operation Iraqi Freedom.  Placing her in a sunbed is amusing, as though she is taking a break from her warrior goals, or it could even refer to our military might in the blinding heat of Iraq. All of Allora and Calzadilla’s works can be read in many ways, which is what makes their work so fascinating.

An ATM machine in a pipe organ, replaces the sounds made by pipes with electronic music generated by making a transaction. The creative instrument is repurposed in order to be driven by commerce, but the linear desires of buying and spending are undermined by the music that plays as a result.  Finally, there are two scaled down replicas of business class airline seats on which a male and a female gymnast perform. The dancers actually perform on a balance beam that replaces the armrests of the seats. Their creative performances again render the seats unusable, undermining the status and comfort of the business class traveller. It is amusing to imagine this actually taking place in a business class cabin where driven capitalists work on their next deals as dancers extend legs and arms on adjoining seats.

Finally, three videos refer to the resistance movements to the US military exercises and environmental devastation in Vieques, Puerto Rico.

The pavilion combines humor and politics as well as simple entertainment in a way that leads us to think in different ways about capitalism, war, and creativity. IT can be deep and critical, or funny and absurd, according to our dispositions and inclinations. The element of Duchampian readymade and Cage musical humor gives the work of these two artists an opportunity to actually make strong political statements masked behind really amusing ideas.

Venice Biennale 2011 Part I: The Iraqi Pavillion

I found the Iraqi pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which was located outside the Giardini and Arsenal area, to be riveting. BBC’s prestigious director Alan Yentob, a BBC filmmaker, is making a major documentary about it. Yentob is Jewish Iraqi, growing up in the UK where he came in 1948, a year in which the Iraqi Jewish community was decimated by recruitment to Israel and the founding of the state of Israel that disrupted a formerly peaceful multi cultural relationship between religions in Iraq.

His documentary on BBC, unfortunately not available online, is brilliant and thorough, interviewing each of the artists at length. I have a copy which I hope I will be able to post in some way.

Located in the decayed Gervasuti Foundation building, the Iraqi exhibition had the theme of “Wounded Water.” The theme is both absolutely pertinent to Iraq and a resonant reference point for the works in the exhibition. Each of the artists approached it entirely differently, but together they reinforce the main message, the ongoing disaster that is contemporary Iraq with a particular theme of the difficulty of finding clean water.

The installation in a crumbling building underscores the condition of the infrastructure in Iraq, the theme of water focuses on the most urgent problem facing everyone in the country. In  Ali Assaf’s video Narcissus a man leans over a slow moving stream. The lighting is Caravaggesque, from above. Gradually detritus appears floating down the river, a box, a document, photograph, scraps, until the water is barely visible. It is a quiet slow moving piece.

Ali Assaf al Basra Narcissus

The artist is from Basra a place that used to be a beautiful city. When he returned he found it in ruins, its river polluted. Assaf also has an installation work dedicated to Basra that included, when I saw it an unfinished pyramid of dates ( some contaminated with depleted uranium from the first gulf war of 1991) , family photographs from long ago, splashes of oil on the wall, and a video with a series of stills of birds caught in the Gulf Oil Spill accompanied by a childhood song about the river and birds that the artist sings in Arabic with subtitles. The intersections of oil, pollution, environmental disaster, family, nostalgia, made this one of the most compelling installations in the pavilion.

Ali Assaf, detail of al Basra with video of oil soaked birds of Gulf Oil Spill accompanied by children’s song

Ali Assaf Family photographs, detail of Installation al Basra

In Azad Nanakeli’s Destnuej (Purification) has  two adjoining images, a man is pouring water over himself as at a hamam on the left and gradually being engulfed by blood and then oil on the right.

Azad Nanakeli Destnuej (Purification)

Nanakeli also made a second resonant work called Au, Water. It is an installation with three oversize traditional water spiggots, and underneath a sea of plastic bottles. Dimly lighted, the water bottles at first look like a crystalline structure, then are revealled for the rubbish they are.

By far the most amusing in a deadly way is Adel Adibin Consumption of Water, a two room installation, one sparsely furnished with a filing cabinet and a chair, and a video of the sky, the second with a video of two business men who enter into a duel to the death using long neon lights as swords.

Adel Adibin Consumption of Water video installation

Walid Siti’s Beauty Spot animates the waterfall that is illustrated on an Iraqi bill, a waterfall that no longer exists since Turkey built a dam north of Iraq on the Tigris river and cut off the water. He also had a stunning installation of the  dried up Great Zab river, a tributary of the Tigris, made with red mylar, that filled the entrance hall at the beginning of the exhibition.

The  painter Ahmed Alsoundani,  appears in several other exhibitions at the Biennale. His turbulent compositions cascade on the surface of the canves, revealing  horrible scenes of carnage, death and destruction. Here is an interview with him about the pavilion and his work

Ahmed Alsoudani Untitled 2011

Alsoudani’s statement was intriguing. He went to graduate school at Yale and it was clear that he had been told that he had to be “universal” and not too personal. His statement reiterated this art school language, even as his art is wrenchingly specific once you look at it closely. Although he does make reference to other  art work, such as holocaust photographs and Goya, it is also strikingly original with almost the all over surface quality of a carpet. It depicts an Iraqi holocaust without any equivocation. His art is not specific to the theme of the exhibition as were other artists, but it is certainly pertinent to the theme of disaster in Iraq.

This was a brilliant pavilion, with art grounded in extreme anguish. It addresses one aspect of the environmental disaster of Iraq. For one part of the human disaster see my previous post on the monument  to murdered Iraqi academics by Dia al Azzawi.

For more commentary on the Iraqi pavilion see the very complete coverage here.