Azar Nafisi in Des Moines Iowa

When I went to visit my grandchildren in Des Moines Iowa, I was excited to discover that Azar Nafisi was speaking, sponsored by Drake University. She has a new book called Things I Have Been Silent About.
And of course she is best known for Reading Lolita in Tehran, perhaps one of the best titles for a book in the last ten years. But the subject of her lecture was culture and human rights, and the idea that books can speak across cultures in what she called the “Republic of the Imagination” She spoke of the power of literature to liberate and make connections betwen people. Perfect strangers can share their experiences of a book.
She also spoke about the  imagination in contrast to the idea of smugness and complacency. Villains in books are those who are blind to others. The first target of totalitarian regimes is the imagination.

Curiosity is “insubordination in its purest form” The desire to know, to question yourself, to see ourselves as question marks. Alice running into the rabbit hole is an example of curiosity. At the heart of curiosity is learning about the “other” not thinking that we already know other people.

Of course, as an Iranian, she is well aware of how ignorant people in the U.S. are about Iran and Islam in general. She spoke of how the women of Iran have refused for 30 years to comply with the restrictions of the revolution there.
Freedom means choice, responsibilty, passion, risk,
“How much are we willing to give up in order to regain passion?” She sees a crisis of vision, to be self righteous is a sign of weakness.
It was a really inspiring presentation.

Can visual art play this same role in communication across cultures? I believe so, in spite of being so embedded in capitalism. In fact, it is a perfect example of imagination as subversive to the system. A New York Times article about artists being sent abroad by the State Department in a new grant program being administered by the Bronx Museum of Art quoted Michael Krenn, author of Fall Out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American Art and the Cold War,  as saying  that “artists are not easily controlled” !!

New York City Creative Time

I have just returned from the Creative Tme Summit Revolutions in Public Practice. The entire conference is  on line at the Creative Time website. My main impression was that Trevor Paglen and his session on Geographies was one of the most compelling group of presentations in the conference. The second riveting session was led by Laurie Jo Reynolds on governments. These two panels really got to the heart of artists addresssing social issues. Much of the rest of the conference addressed structures of the art world, art schools, food ( well that is a political issue of course, but we are drowned in that subject here in Seattle..). I did miss a few though, and perhaps some fabulous insights. I plan to watch those sessions online. And in the facebook discussion going on now there is still a lot of discussion on the subject of the “art world” and how to change it, which to me is not the point. The point is the rest of the world and how artists can connect to that in their art in order to contribute all their formidable talents to changing the world.
More soon.
I am overwhelmed at the moment with proofing my book. I have been to about six different wonderful events lately that I want to write about including
The incredible Picasso Show at the Seattle Art Museum. Do not miss it.
Coup de Foudre, a performance with music by Paul Miller aka DJSpooky, Corey Baker and Melvin Van Peebles based on Jean Cocteau’s 1930 film Blood of a Poet
Nuevo York at the Museo El Barrio
Alison Saar at Lewis and Clark College in Portland
Inscape at the immigration building in Seattle
and much more.

Art and Politics Now goes to publisher

This is the work of Hana’ Malallah, an artist from Baghdad who is included in my book. The title of the work is “The Looting of the Museum of Baghdad.”

Yes, it is really true. My book is about to come out after all these years. You can read more about it on my website, Art and Politics Now Cultural Activism in a Time of Crisis. It has ten chapters on topics ranging from art against globalization, war, terror, censorship, racism, and art in support of immigration, border crossing, and ecology.
I include artists from around the world, but the emphasis is on socially engaged artists in the U.S.
Tomorrow, one of the artists, Cecilia Alvarez, is part of a group exhibition in Seattle.
Trevor Paglen is a keynote speaker at Creative Time, Daniel Heyman has been showing his art at university galleries, and the activists like the Backbone and Yes Men just keep on going.
That is just a tiny sample of the over eighty artists and exhibitions that I discuss. More soon. This is just a teaser.

Olivia Bouler and the Gulf Oil Spill

The most recent issue of the National Geographic is a must see. It has a fold out map with the layers of life in the Gulf on one side and a map of the oil wells on the other, as well as photographs of the ravaged estuaries from oil pipes, dumping, and other polluting activities. A tragic photograph of a dead baby sea turtle in a sea of brown oily mud and an image of an oil covered pelican strike to the very core of humans’ stupidity.

The reality is that this oil spill was inevitable, that the protected areas of these Gulf coasal zones are just a very thin area * as we see in the amazing National Geographic map of life and oil on the Gulf, which I cannot download for the blog*, compared to the ravaging, thirsty oil industry.

We all understand that half the population along the Gulf depends on the sea and the other half on the oil industry. So they will soon be back to drilling deep again.

But what if we all started living a different way, if we imagined a different future, and we insisted on it. We really have only two choices, the end of the planet as we know it, or going in a new direction.

I realized recently how fortunate I am that I hardly drive at all in my day to day life. The vast majority of people are imprisoned in their cars, sitting in traffic everyday. I walk, bike and take the bus. But I am lucky that I can. Lots of people would like to do that, but it takes time that most people don’t have. And most or our urban and suburban lives are designed to require us to drive.

But what if everyone just stayed home and didn’t drive one day a week, or stopped buying all those petroleum encased (organic) vegetables or just tried to buy food in packages we can re use at least once.
Small efforts.

As Olivia said at the end of her wonderful presentation in which she celebrated birds  “If insects disappeared it would be the end of the world, if humans disappeared, it would save the earth.” And then she said, “An individual can make a difference, but all of us together can make more of a difference.”  She not only drew pictures, she also went to Congress to lobby for another type of energy. I wonder if they condescended to her. She is more on the ball than they are. She has, apparently, been all over the news. But the real story is that she really cares and did something about it.

This summer and fall Congress voted billions to continue with our support for petroleum pursuing and consuming wars, as well as failing to pass clean energy support.

If the BP spill didn’t wake up Congress, what will. And of course, this was really no surprise, BP has been a bad actor all over the place with their oil fields, Alaska has been full of spills they caused.

Here’s to this young lady. She acted on what she believed in. If only we could all do that, even for one day it would really lead somewhere.

John T Williams Wood Carver Shot by Police

 

The last one is the tribal community in City Hall. The Mayor of course said it was a tragedy. But this is more than a tragedy, this is racist murder pure and simple.

The Confluence Project Story Circles at Sacagawea State Park

At the dedication of the new Confluence Site in Sacajawea State Park in mid Washington State (now pronounced Sacagawa), Maya Lin is standing in front of drummers from the Confederates Tribes of the Umatilla Indians, at their invitation. It was a thrilling and sacred dedication. There were a lot of eloquent speakers, a trumpet piece, poetry, and eloquent indigenous speakers (including Anton Minthorn and Bobbie Connor, in a photograph below) but this drumming was by far the most profound moment. The drummers saluted the ancestors of present-day tribes, their spirits in that place, and their history. Right after I took this photograph, the Native drummers asked us to not take any more photographs, so we all simply listened and experienced the connections to the past and the future. We heard incredible music and singing that seemed to come from the depths of the earth itself.

The shape of their  drums is echoed in the seven “story circles” that Maya Lin created at this site, the confluence of the Snake and the Columbia River, two mighty waterways.

Indians gathered here in large numbers for centuries, for trade, story telling and for ritual celebration. This is site no. 4 to be dedicated in the Confluence Project. Maya Lin was invited by Native leaders in 2002 to commemorate the loss of Native cultures as a result of the  Lewis and Clark expedition because they were so impressed by her work at the Vietnam Memorial.

At other sites, Lin has been quoting from the Lewis and Clark journals that meticulously noted flora and fauna as they progressed down the Columbia, as well as the villages and tribes that they encountered. The extinction of much of what they say, including Indians, villages, and the natural world, is a theme of the Conflucene Project. At this site, Lin focused on the Native traditions.

She was intrigued that when L and C came to this Confluence they spent only a short day or two here, whereas, for native peoples it was a site of great importance and they tribes spent months here.

Each Circle has a different reference: welcoming, salmon, a longhouse, rivers and the dams, mythci time, trade and last what was called the Seasonal Round, all the different animals and animals that were here. I took pictures of all the circles, but the real experience is being there, seeing their relationship to one another, our relationship to them, and our relationship to the past, present and future of the river and the land.

The shape of the circle echoes the shape of the drums, and their sound enveloped us creating a sense of community coming together.
It was a very moving experience.

Backbone Localize This! Action Camp

The Backbone Campaign sponsored “Localize This!” An art/action camp. Here we are at lunch. We had such a wonderful time. It brought together my three favorite activities, camping, politics, and art. I was only there for two days but it was really intense.

 This is Kim Marks. She is part of Earth First, an international environmental activist group. She covered the many different aspects of civil disobedience, starting with someone willing to be arrested, and the support for that person, then media, legal, video, public liasons, as well as connections to workers affected, medical, and communications and de briefer. There were even more.
Her second theme was also valuable. Where do we fit in the process, at what point are we intervening?? There were six places, all of them important and she mentioned that the “mountain top removal” resistance project includes all six.

extraction, destruction
money ( production)
consumption (stores)
decision ( who is accountable)
assumption ( as in cultural assumptions)
envisioning the future ( Yes Men are an example)

Of course I realized that I am always intervening in the same place, at the point of consumption, as I stand and wave an anti war sign every week. We consume war as a commodity. We eat war, we drink war. Our society is permeated by war. When we email the representatives we are intervening at the point of decision ( but better is face to face meetings). Kim actually talks to CEOS. And then there are the YES MEN!

There were other workshops on theory as well like the one by Tom Kertes.
You can seem his theme, an amazing quotation from Martin Luther King
“Power without love is reckless and abusive and love without power is sentimental and anemic” He was talking about how to have power! Useful idea.

We also had a workshop from Jay Cookson and smart meme His subject was changing the story  “How changing the story, changes the world.” Again food for thought.  He showed an alphabet of corporate logos, we recognized them all, then of plants, we recognized few. Our society is permeated by corporate marketing, we can change their story to our story.

The most devestating presentation by Rising Tide told us about the campaign to extract oil from sand (see http://oilsandstruth.org/)  in Alberta, Canada. This is a vast act of environmental destruction that few of us even know about. 10,000 acres have already been clear cut (what is called the overburden) and that is just the beginning, in order to get oil – but very little oil for the amount of oil used to get it. Gigantic trucks are going over the narrow and treacherous, and beautiful, Lolo Pass, 210 feet long! 2 to 4 barrels of oil to get one barrel of oil. Two tons of sand for one barrel of oil, http://www.endgame.org/links.html
has a lot of helpful information on this and other campaigns to resist environmental degredation.

Salmon Dinner at Localize This Backbone Camp with Chef Maia in the foreground – she really had a job, 25 people, vegan and non vegan, in a non catering kitchen!

We chose kayaking, treeclimbing or making giant mache heads. This was a real camp!
So of course I chose making heads, but first I visited the tree climbers.

This tree climber, Kathleen,  is a peace activist. Every Sunday she helps to put up a huge war memorial in Santa Monica. It is called Arlington West Santa Monica. This is her first time climbing a tree. A slew of young people were guiding her and she succeeded! These skills are for hanging banners and protesting forest devestation among other activities.
And here I am helping to make a giant paper mache  ( I am wearing the pink tee shirt from the Ni Mas Una campaign, see earlier blog) We learned step by step starting with a big plastic bag stuffed with newspaper. The features are made with shrink wrap which can be shaped to form features, I made an ear. Then we tore up paper bags, and dipped them in the cornstarch and water goo that was boiled until smooth. We smooshed the paper to break down the fibers as we covered it with goo. Then we put it on one layer at a time, alternating print and non print, minimum of three layers. That’s as  far as I got with it. Here are a few more pictures.

And last but not least the agit prop band. Bill Moyer led the way as a drummer. He actually taught us how to make music for demos. I would love to play in a band at a demo sometime. I played the cymbals. Here are some pictures of forming the band starting with Bill on a makeshift drum set.

And we really learned a lot of organizing skills, which is the point. Now I am going to get involved with a campaign.
The camp itself went on for three more days and culminated in a flash mob at Target – a point of consumption because Target gave $150,000. to the anti gay, anti worker candidate for governor of Minnesota. They collaborated with a group called Agit Pop to
sing “Target Ain’t People” as a protest to their intervention as a corporation in elections.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival

AMAZING experience. We went to 8 plays in 5 days. They have three theaters running with two shows a day each. The actors were often in two different productions in one day. We went with Georgia McDade, a friend of mine who is a Shakespeare expert, so we got lots of insights. Also, Oregon Shakespeare Festival provides educational material, both printed, in lectures, talks after the performances, back stage tours ( we toured with the actor who played Prince Hal in Henry IV Part I,) musical adaptations (Shakespeare sonnets as hip hop). This was a total immersion.

They included multimedia in several performances, film, animation, text, etc. the lighting was part of the story. When Olivia in Twelfth Night fell in love the red lights suffused the whole Elizabethan stage. In Hamlet, soliloquies had green lights and freeze action. Throne of Blood had film, black outs, brilliant lights.

And aside from the contemporary and recent plays, where you expect it, Shakespeare is all about exactly the way we behave today. Nothing has changed, greed, power, land, love, lust, betrayal, its all there, with the poetic dialogue that we have to read over and over after the play in order to pick up all the nuances.
The plays we saw in order were

Hamlet, with Don Donovan in the leading role, performed in contemporary cocktail clothes and with a hip hop performance in the middle, amazing lighting, and of course, phenomenal acting.

The play within a play in Hamlet ( where he lets his mother and step father know that he knows they killed his father) was performed to music by Outkast, J-Z, LL Kool J, and Tupac. But the lines were all from Shakespeare. What a tour de force.

Hamlet ( Don Donovan) in a suit with pink rose petals floating all around him was the great promotional image. Here is the tee shirt “What a Piece of Work is Man”

So Hamlet, for three hours and more, was riveting as both contemporary and classical. When Claudius, the step father/king, sees the play that accuses him of murder he throws up in a modern black toilet, front stage center. I haven’t ever seen a toilet onstage featured before. ( And of course, OSF has no problem with anachronisms, they love them).

The next day we saw Throne of Blood. This was Macbeth based on Kirosawa’s adaptation in film, based on his relocation of it to ancient Japan and Noh drama with its reductive movements, sounds, and gestures. It was multimedia with a huge floating screen above the stage with stunning graphics and texts. Not to mention the set and the music. Evoking early Japan.

The dialog was an English translation of Kirosawa’s clipped Japanese improvisation of the Macbeth story. So it was avant garde. It was intentionally not smoothly flowing, which I didn’t get at first. I thought it was an awful lot of layers, Scottish king in English play, adapted by Japanese film director, re adapted by Chinese director for American actors.
But visually it was phenomenal.

The last Macbeth that I saw was a feminist interpretation with the witches doubled in number and becoming a covey around Lady Macbeth. In this version, there was a Forest spirit who seemed to be bisexual, and only “Lady Macbeth”, now Lady Asaji  played brilliantly by Ako, an actress trained in Japan, who really knew about the Noh theatre that the actions in the play adopted. She bolted the whole play together, as a tiny figure in red in center stage radiating incredible power, apparently backstage as well, in her coaching of the actors on Noh movements

The same day we saw Merchant of Venice which has that famous character, Shylock, the Jewish moneylender in Venice. It was played for the first time in Ashland by a Jewish actor, and it was an opportunity for lots of education of the actors and the audience. He was the undisputed star of the show. “If you prick me, do I not bleed?” He could have been speaking for anyone unjustly persecuted and treated as less than human.

Next day we saw She Loves Me, a fun musical. It felt good to laugh and enjoy good singing. Apparently these Shakespearean actors can also sing.

The stage froze near the last act when the electricity went out in Ashland, just as the lead singer Lisa McCormick had finished a song about vanilla icecream. She sat down on her bed and said to us “want some, I think I am stuck.”
Her bed was supposed to whoosh away.

Twelfth Night is everyone’s favorite play. We saw it earlier this year at the Seattle Shakespeare Company. Amazingly, a lead in She Loves me, played Olivia in Twelfth Night on the same day. Olivia is the rich woman who falls in love with Viola/ Cesario as a boy, one of Shakespeare’s favorite games. Viola is pretending to be a boy after being wrecked at sea and left almost on her own, also falls in love with Orsino, the wealthy prince in love with Olivia. So we had in the original Shakespeare, a boy playing a girl who become a boy, who is still a girl. In this play it was a girl being a boy, not so hard, but actually the love relationships required enormous skill.
And of course, Shakespeare was so far ahead of his time in all this playing with gender identities.
He has wonderful powerful women in all his plays too.

The next day we saw Pride and Prejudice. Beautifully performed and staged, superb acting. And the man who played the wastrel George Wickham became that same evening
Prince Hal in

When this play started out, it was a bit draggy, I thought this is why I never before appreciated the history plays of Shakespeare. Lots of people being slaughtered, narrated by boring characters. But once the Prince Hal scenes began, with the wonderful character Falstaff, carousing among the people with Hal, it was thrilling. An incredible marathon for the actors, including deaf actor Howie Seago, who was incorporated right into the play with signing ( he was also part of Hamlet, as the ghost, but with far fewer lines). The fight scenes were staggering, apparently the sword scenes are rehersed twice right before the show goes on every single time, once at half speed, once at full speed, and Prince Hal matched off with Hotspur, another extraordinary actor, Kevin Kennerly, who also played the lead,Washizu (“Macbeth”) in Throne of Blood.
And then the very next morning we had Prince Hal for a back stage tour at 10am after a double bill the day before.
 

Final play was American Night, with Culture Clash from LA, again a new media production, with singing and probably 10 costume changes per actor. American history seen in a dream before Juan Jose takes his citizen exam. He meets all the people left out or the perspectives changed, or the events excised, or the people who should have been included or not included. It was a brilliant romp and a telling political statement, going all the way up to the Gulf Oil Spill and the Tea Party, racist anti immigrationists in the present. Here is an interview with Richard Montoya about this play.

Apparently, I picked the right year to start coming to Ashland. Bill Rauch is from the heart of the LA alternative theater scene, and he is bringing in people, ideas, and vibes from that scene. It is really exciting.
 
So that was our marathon in Ashland.

Violence Against Women, Part II

This spring in Philadelphia there was an extraordinary exhibition “Ni Una Mas/ Not One More/The Juarez Murders“. It was held at Drexel University’s new art space the Leonard Pearlstein Gallery. Although I was unable to attend the exhibition, I have received the catalog, and various other reference points, including photos posted on facebook and videos online.

The Juarez Murders have been going on for a long time: since 1993 more than 800 girls and women have been murdered. These killers target young women who are working in maquiladoras (sweat shops) in the “free trade zone”. Mexico has 4000 maquiladors and one million workers. Women are lured to work in them because of the hope of making money for a better life, but in the factory life they exist outside of Mexican social structures. Inside the factory, they are prey to employers who treat them as sex objects. On their way to and from work, they are vulnerable to anyone on the street. Many Mexicans see these zones as places of economic prostitution between Mexican and the US.  according to gender theorist Jessica Livingston:
“Global captialism depends on these women to assemble its commodities. While multinational coporations profit from the maquiladors in Juarez, the murdered women and their families bear the cost of global capitalism.”

Diana Washington Valdez is the courageous and intrepid reporter for the El Paso Times who has analyzed why the killers have not been caught. She states that the murders come from different power relationships, gangs who kill as initiation rites, elites who know they can get away with it and kill for pleasure, serial killers and copy cat killings. The police and other authorities are often complicit in the cover-ups or lack of investigation.

Celia Alvarez Munoz’s work is featured on the cover of the catalog Ni Una Mas, it shows a simple pink shift dress, with a razor with cocaine on its edge, at the crotch, blatently referring to the interersection of sex, drugs,workers, and death. These cut offs by Munoz raise the same issues with the red sequined zipper that resembles a flow of blood. These two works are part of a larger installation by the artist Fibra y Furia, Exploitation is in Vogue

The exhibition “Ni Una Mas” included a tribute to Frank Bender, who as a specialist in facial reconstruction  used skulls of murder victims in Juarez to reconstruct their faces and help to identify them. He was in great danger as he worked on the faces, even drugged by high officials and threatened.

The exhibition also included well known artists like Kiki Smith, Yoko Ono, Coco Fusco, Nancy Spero, Tim Rollins and KOS. All together there are 19 artists in the catalog. 

Some of them made works specific to the exhibition, others contributed work that pertained specifically to the subject, and others were more indirect.

Yoko Ono made a “heal” button, and a poem “Our body is the scar of our mind. We are the oasis of our planet, we can move mountains, heal planet, heal earth, heal us.”

From the photographs, the Art March (see the video linked above) was the high point of the event, taking the message into the streets with a march of hundreds of people wearing pink tea shirts that referred to the pink crosses for the women murdered in Juarez. The exhibition addressed real issues, calling people’s attention to the problem and demanding that solutions be sought.

Of course, the powerful array of forces lined up in Juarez makes it difficult, but at least the gallery made a committment to making a statement and to publicizing the murders. If such an exhibition could take place in galleries all over the country it would really make a difference. Wake up Art World! Down with Narcissism.

Violence Against Women

Lately there have been several different works that call attention to violence against women in our contemporary world. I will mention them in order of my encounter with them

First is of course Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,( original title, Men Who Hate Women)  and The Girl Who Played with Fire ( I haven’t read the third one yet). These two books describe  a lot of violence against women, but there is also the fabulous heroine tough Lisbeth Salander, who has survived unspeakable violence against herself and is on a virtual crusade to punish those who perpetrate the violence. And we cheer her successes even though her methods are also violent because of the violence of her opponents. As a second theme, that relates to violence against women, the books are also a send up of the profession of journalism and the use of mindless sensationalizing smears.

The second forum for addressing violence against women is the play Ruined by Lynn Nottage. I have actually seen it twice, in London and in Seattle in a production by the Intiman Theater. The Seattle production was the original NYC cast and director. The night I went we had the understudy Victoire Charles, who was fantastically good in the lead part which required a huge range of emotions from sassy, sexy, and strong, to terrified and finally, happy (the hardest part to make believable).

Both productions confronted us with the position of women caught in the midst of meaningless war, guerilla conflicts, and their limited choices for survival.
1 be tough, tough, tough.
2 prostitution is preferable to sex slavery and rape
3. children are sacrificed toother people’s violent desires
4 traditional society’s perceptions of the position of women and contemporary war’s utter disregard of respect for women are a terrible mismatch
The women of the cast were fantastically good, different types, different experiences, all of them riveting us with their personal stories. The stories are real, they are based on interviews that the playwright conducted by women from the Congo. The men of the cast seem more types, than individuals, but there were a lot of types within the general theme of guerillas, traders, and commandoes. There was one sensitive man, but each one had a range of strong feelings.
Then there is that other less emphasized theme, that the meaningless war was being waged today in the Congo for the rare minerals that go into all of our electronic gadgets. So as with the BP oil spill we are all implicated.

In partnership with the play Ruined  we went to see the movie Call and Response at the Northwest Film Forum, sponsored by Seattle Against Slavery. The film was bascially a documentary about a Concert to End Slavery, organized by Justin Dillon who is interviewed about how he came to do the concert. He includes amazing musicians like Emmanual Jal who survived being a boy soldier, Imogen Heap, Natasha Beddingfeld, and Dillon himself, Talib Kweli, and interviews with Ashley Judd, and the actress Julia Ormond as well as Nicholas Kristoff and others. It also included facts like there have one million people enslaved in the US in the last ten years and only 50 convictions. That there are17,000 people in sex slavery today, it is the single most lucrative enterprise (but Ormond pointed out the continuous flow between guns, war, drugs and slavery).
The magnitude of the problem is staggering. Everything we buy is probably touched by slave labor. This is sex trade that is getting younger and younger, we saw children of six or seven offering sex services. We saw the drug induced prisons for women sold out of villages for tiny debts, but we also heard from people who are trying to help people to get out.
All these media, novels, theater, film, music, addressed the same problems, the same issues. Collectively they are overwhelming. But there are many groups working on doing something, the meaning of the title of the film is here is the call, let us all respond.