John Feodorov’s Spiritual Ambiguities

This piece Souls Awaiting a Future from John Feodorov’s recent show “Ambiguities” at South Seattle Community College Nat 18 – June 19, 2009 looks straightforward. The title tells what’s there. But actually, in the context of John Feodorov’s work it is both funny and subtle. The souls lying on the floor flat are wobbly, perhaps in some in between state of being. There is a celestial television projection, as well as stars hanging from wires. There seem to be four realities at least at work here, our own ( and what we bring to the work in terms of belief systems), the clay in betweens, the video of outer space, and the wires hanging form the ceiling with small stars at the end.
Feodorov questions our assumptions with humor and humility.
He was raised in Whittier California as the son of a fundamentalist. He travelled with his family to the Navajo Reservation to visit his grandparents and relatives. No wonder multiple realities are his focus.
He also has a particular riff in store for new agers, particularly those who borrow Indian elements for personal spiritual quests.
In his recent show in Bellingham he also showed disturbing pseudo spiritual installations

The South Seattle Community College show included a video called “We’re Feeding the Gods” dancers performing what appeared to be a type of ritual dance, but they are in a kitchen and other odd, random places, some of them pseudo beautiful. It is a real dance, but we can see that the context as it changes makes the dance seem pretentious and hollow. Perhaps that is John’s attitude to institutionalized religion as well as New Age practices.
Also in the show is the Alphabet group of small works. Some have his characteristic puffy cheeked silhouette ( the artist ?) with various eccentric tableaux. The more you look, the more you wander off into some crazy land where nothing is quite as it seems.

Dominating everything is the teddy bears, a theme John has taken up before ( see an example of his Totem Teddy here) , early in his career. In this show at South Seattle Community College there are a lot of empty teddy bears on the ground and their stuffing has been put together as a giant teddy shaped apparition, as though the ghost of all discarded teddy bears is collectively haunting us, and lurking behind that ghost is the real bear, an heroic creature, outraged by this travesty of cuteness for his grandeur.

Iran

How can we think of anything else right now. The courageous uprising of the people of Iran, across class, religious, and both urban and rural ( although most demonstrations are in Tehran). The youth of Iran led protests in 2003, but now everyone has joined in. Their dignity, commitment, and bravery is formidable. As the traditional press are expelled, BBC commentator John Leynes was told to leave yesterday, we must all communicate about the new revolution in Iran. For that is what it is. The people are tired of the fraudulent politics, hypocritical religious posturing, and totalitarian oppressions. More links soon.

I couldn’t help compare the outpouring of focused and committed demands from the Iranian people to an event I went to in Seattle on Saturday night, in which exactly the same age group were freely expressing themselves, dancing, singing, painting, performing in a whirlwind of creative expression. But most of it didn’t have much substance or any point really, which was too bad.The only point was that they were being encouraged and supported in being randomly outside the box, as in a chorus of young women dressed as angels, men in lab coats climbing up the theater to the tune of trumpets ( I liked this piece), and a young man painting perfectly terrible paintings. I went because my amazing yoga teacher was performing, and he didn’t disappoint. He is a butoh dancer, and his range of expression with his body was astonishing. One felt the absolute disruption of facade and the revelation of the violence underneath in every human being simply through the expressions, body movements and gestures.

This is the freedom that the Iranian people are fighting for. The contrast couldn’t be greater, between the young people of Iran, focused, brave, insistent on their right to be free, and the freedoms taken for granted here by ( at the Moore) predominantly young white people.
These two posters by Lida Red bring together art and the uprising in Iran.

Shakespeare’s The Tempest Then and Now

Ahh how perspectives change and yet trully insightful people all get it right in the first place. Shapekeare’s The Tempest, known as his “American Fable” currently being performed in Seattle by the Seattle Shakespeare Company, presents a contemporary perspective on the play as suggesting forgiveness. Yet this play only a few years ago was recognized as a parable of the earliest years of European colonization in the Americas. In 1609 the British were founding a colony in Virginia and England was excited. Shakespeare wrote this play using diaries by shipwrecked crews who landed in Bermuda and other primary sources.
So the story is that of an Italian duke whose dukedom has been stolen by his brother while he was brooding over books. He has landed after a shipwreck on an isolated island, but one which had indigenous inhabitants, represented in the play by Caliban.
Here is what surprised me. In 1964 in his book Machine in the Garden, Technology and the Pastoral Ideal, based on ideas he developed in the late 1950s, Leo Marx referred to this play as An American Fable did a protracted analysis of it as a reference to European civilization taming nature, the contradiction of nature and culture, etc etc.

But when I saw it, I was astounded by Shakespeare’s acute understanding that Europeans were going to take over, destroy and enslave the Indians in their path. A speech by Caliban states just that. Of course his position as a”primitive” and “uncivilized” human being in the play echoes the dominant perspectives of Europeans in the seventeenth century ( and still really), but Caliban speaks eloquently of his love for his island, and the fact that after he showed the invadeing European around, the Duke enlsaved him. But Caliban’s eloquence in spite of his constant assault as a sub human being by the Europeans, suggests that in the early seventeenth century there was also awe and respect for Indinas. Indeed, they were perceived as independent kingdoms, and their leaders were often celebrated as fellow royalites in these early days of European contact.

Then more Europeans ( Stephano above with Caliban) land on the Island, the result of a storm that the Duke (Prospero) caused by his magical powers in order to bring his brother and fellow plotters there.
They also want to take over the island. They suggest taking Caliban back to England as a trophy, which is exactly what was happening then with people like Pocohontas, who died very young in England. An amazing portrait of her survives in Elizabethan clothing.

The new arrivals give alcohol to Caliban and he immediately becomes tamed and subject to their will ( another perceptive prediction on Shakespeare’s part, perhaps based on a reference in a contemporary diary about the susceptability of Indians to alcohol.)
But in the end the Europeans depart, back to “civiliation”.

The program of the Tempest said not one work about all this.
All we got was “forgiveness” and that forgiveness is not Caliban’s for his oppression, but the Duke for his brother’s perfidy. So much for the new age of post racism. Well, of course Shakespeare doesn’t exactly explain Caliban’s feelings at the end of the play. The ending is unlike Shakespeare except for the dramatic death of the senior Duke. Everyone else just seems to move on without any explanation.

The trappings are Shakespeare, but the content is radically different. Go see it!

Sweet Crude A film about oil exploitation in the Niger Delta

Sweet Crude a film by Sandy Cioffi confronts us with the human cost for our thirst for oil. Everytime we get in a car, we are part of the problem represented in the movie, the ruthless oppression of the people who live in the Niger Delta, the poisoning of their water, killing of their fish, razing of their villages, beating and murder of their resistance leaders.

We need to know that if we don’t get out of our cars, our airplanes, and whatever other oil consuming toys we have,we are the reason that this part of the planet is bleeding literally and figuratively.
This brilliant film combines aesthetics and politics. It is full of information, human interest, and data presented against a backdrop of an abstract painting that suggests rusted oil drums. The footage of the river, the villages, the boats, is not aestheticized, we are not looking at pretty landscapes. We are looking at small pieces of a ravaged and ruined ecosystem. The film is documentary, but the stunning resistance, energy, and perseverence of the people who have been invaded by the thirst for oil, in spite of attacks by military of their own government, is the real message of the movie. They wanted peaceful resistance, they wanted to negotiate, they want some benefit from the enormous profits pouring out of their lands. They have no schools, no clean water, no health clinics, no fish. Yet they stay because they have nowhere else to go. They have lived there for centuries.

There is a straight line from their ruined lives to our plush comforts, connected by oil pipelines.

One of the best part of the movie is when the ABC newsman is trying to force a peaceful negotiator for MEND (Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta) to say he was an armed terrorist in league with Al Queda. It was easy to see how the news forces its own narrow cliches onto its subjects. MEND began as a non violent group that tried to work with the government, but they were repeatedly betrayed, killed outright, and subject to massive retaliation, so now they have an armed wing. It is impossible to fight massive military attacks and full betrayal of trust without armed resistance. ( And I believe in peace)

The government is currently launching an all out attack against what it refers to as militant camps. The success of these resistance groups in shutting pipelines has been impressive. Why can’t we do anything more to support them.
They must fight against Shell, Exonn, Total, their own government’s massive military assault, and world indifference. It is simply greed that prevents the governmnet and the oil companies from respecting these people, giving them the basic survival necessities. What they want instead is to remove them, just as we removed our Indians, so they can completely destroy the entire Delta is the purusit of oil production.

In twenty years, where will the planet be. We just can’t seem to change course! Instead of bailing out GM, how about paying the workers to learn how to make non polluting transportation. ?

The Future

Here is my grandson Max again. I haven’t posted a picture of him since he was born. You can see that he is a jolly little boy now. He is a great little boy at 17 months. He loves books, he loves to play. He loves music. He loves people.
So I am thinking about his future. Will he only have electronic books to read, will he have to read the news only online, will he have a small electric car to drive.
As I read the news that says “has the recovery started?” “Obama suggests 50 mph in ten years”
as I receive organic foods in plastic containers, and keep on driving my car, I wonder why we aren’t getting it. We can’t recover back to what we did or my grandson and everyone else won’t even have a planet to live on. I feel as though I am living in an alternate reality. Do the people working for plastic industries have grandchildren, do car manufacturers have grandchildren? Why aren’t we talking about tiny vehicles like the parking people drive, why aren’t we just totally getting completely a new perspective.
We can’t recover back to building more sprawl, on the road suspended.

Then there is a family on my block who has lived here for about forty years. They lost their house because of a 20,ooo dollar loan. It was auctioned for 120,000. bought by a developer, who is remodelling and will get probably 450,000 for it. Is this recovery? I call it inhumanity and greed.

And then there is the scandal of health care. In the one year I had insurance I saw the way the doctors were milking the system scandalously requiring unnecessary tests etc.

I am teaching my favorite subject, Art and Politics in the 1930s. at the moment, the subject of my previous book ( ten years ago). At that time artists worked in collectives encouraging each other to represent the problems with capitalism, with racism, with health care, with poverty.
Where are those artists now when we need them to re -imagine our planet completely. Where are those artists putting pressure on the government to completely change directions.
Where is imagination going? A strange article in the New York Times yesterday talked about artists “hard times loosens creativity” . Apparently lack of sales is encouraging artists to think more creatively. That was the way the colletives started in the 1930s, no sales, so they could do what they wanted, and what they wanted was to address the problems of the world.
I hope that happens again!

We Shall Remain

Titus Kaphar at the Seattle Art Museum

Titus Kaphar’s exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum is a brilliant response to the mythmaking American art exhibition from Yale, Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Kaphar is literally laying the conqueror to rest as seen in this cut out conquistador who is now removed from his heroic context and lying on the ground. He was part of a performance piece that Kaphar did in Soho, in which he actually included the cutting of the canvas in the performance.

This is called Mother’s Solution, it is about passing in the African American Community, passing for white of course. It is deliberately painted in a pseudo untrained style, as though this bourgeois black family couldn’t afford the more slick technique of the top artist. The cut out woman is passing for white. Her space is empty.

In the next painting her mother  hides behind a tangle of shredded  canvas. 
This work is about tarring and the punishment for blacks who are discovered to be passing.

George George George – the hand you see in the lower left is from the famous George Washington Crossing the Delaware as is the image of George. Titus is calling attention to the fact of that black hand,  the hand of a slave, later freed, Prince Whipple. He has flipped the image of George into a playing card like double. George Washington played some tricks. He had lots of slaves, and he didn’t come out against slavery.

William Kentridge revisited

I am writing again about South African artist William Kentridge because I have learned a lot more about him from the catalog for the amazing exhibition in San Francisico, which I won’t be able to see. This image is from Stereoscope, eighth of nine animated hand drawn films that Kentridge made about Soho and Felix. Soho is a bureaucrat who is buried in the system. Felix is a creative sensual personality who has an affair with his wife. In this frame from the film, you see Soho in 1999, after the end of Apartheid, after the Truth and Reconciliation commission, with his suit crying a sea of blue. The blue water is flowing everywhere, he is dejected. The blue water is cleansing, but his world has disintegrated. He knows he is guilty, he cannot deal with it. His whole world was numbers, control, greed, money, paper pushing. In the final film of the group, Tide Table, Soho is on the beach reading a newspaper, as people go in and out of the water. It seems to be a type of remission.
The work by Kentridge is about the position of the privileged white artist in the midst of a political system the he rejects, but is also part of, with the white bureaucrat who is greedy and rich, and the creative artist as stand ins for aspects of Kentridge himself. Apartheid, a system of detestable oppression, formed him , supported him, and made him a famous artist . He refers to it as a rock that he carries within him.

In the exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery, Stereoscope is on exhibit along with Memo, a shorter film that is also about a bureaucrat in the midst of a sea of black ink that eventually takes him over. Other works in the show are filled with classical references, the Three Graces, Melancholia. and of course his famous Procession that encompasses the procession of refugees, of political marches, of protestors, of disenfranchised, of mindless followers, all are part of it. Kentridge, since the end of Apartheid refers to South Africa as a post anti apartheid society.

His interest in Mozart’s opera, the Magic Flute, with a dancing rhinocerus in the animated proscenium setting behind the singers, suggests the absurdity and the beauty of the world. Kentridge does not suggest solutions to political problems, he does not advocate, instead he offers simply his own personal confusion and misgivings. He owes a lot to the early Russian avant-garde of utopian art after the Russian Revolution as well as Duchamp and Dada. But he too is dejected, he recognizes that utopias have always failed, ideologies don’t work. What is left for us. Perhaps only sitting on a beach reading a newspaper as the inevitable tide of water washes over us.

Rita Robillard’s beautiful exhibition

Well I decided it was time to get personal. This is Henry and me sitting inside Rita Robillard‘s installation Lookout/Outlook about fire look outs. Well it isn’t really about fire lookouts, its a statement about the environment paired with an homage to a lost friend. You can see the glowing images set in the midst of dark backgrounds in the installation in the background. Those glowing images are sunsets photographed from fire look out towers, where Rita stayed with her then partner Doug in the 1990s. Doug recently died and this exhibition is a type of homage to those special experiences she had with him. The darkness of the ground is both a darkness of the environment, the shining sunsets, the light of love, but also the life and death of her own relationship, as well as the forest itself. There are a lot of layers here. Robillard has created subtle, rich surfaces with experimental types of printmaking on a large scale. The works are technically subtle, but the overall effect envelopes us. Outside this enclosed space were other images that related to the threatened environment.

Rita and I go all the way back to Gramercy Park in New York City, a beaux art park from the 19th century, which is now a precious piece of real estate with most of its old trees gone, as well as its hedges and its charm. When we lived there it was an ordinary park, rather useless for young children to play in, too much gravel and no playground equipment. We made up games in the dirt about cowboys and indians, but were usually chased away.

Rita and I have had long conversations about life in New York City as our lives have intersected in so many places since then ( including the rusitc, rural Pullman Washington.). We are both marked as New Yorkers for life. The edge of nature/culture is sharp for those of us who grew up in New York. We feel its preciousness, its vulnerability acutely because we had so little nature in New York. I remember walking around the park on the sharp iron spikes that protected the park.
Here is a picture of Rita and me in front of a piece about Gramercy Park,

Art and Activism

This last weekend I went to two amazing fundraisers that both featured art and activism. The first was a collaboration between Chaya, an organization that helps domestic violence victims from South Asia that live in the Seattle area. and Tasveer, a non profit that sponsors South Asian independent film festivals . They presented films, dance, non fiction readings, and an amazing performance piece called Yoni Ki Baat based on the Vagina Monologues from a South Asian perspective. Ten woman told their stories with dignity, drama, and humor, ranging from childhood traumas to adult dating.

The second fundraiser was CARA, Communitites against rape and abuse. They also emphasized the intersection of art and activism, with hip hop performers, many of them quite young offering inspiring lyrics about their lives and the street and their losses. The audience was mainly African American, but the keynote speaker, Andrea Smith, was a Native American activist and she said CARA was also organizing around justice for Indian boarding school victims. The boarding schools introduced sexual abuse and drug abuse into native communities. Andrea is the author of INCITE: Women of Color Against VIolence.

The contrast between the two groups was dramatic. The first, Chaya, featured only women performers, many of them elegantly dressed although one was a Tibetan transgender who wore a suit and necktie. But the performances were on a stage with sophisticated projections, sound and music.

The second group was very grass roots. We met in a room that felt like an old defrocked store with wooden floors and big windows. We had a wonderful dinner and everyone was relaxed and chatting. The performers wore various low key clothes like the street related low pants look.

But the biggest difference was for Chaya the focus in the performances was on domestic violence related to specific South Asian cultural practices and prejudices. The dance performance focused on the selling of young girls into the sex trade. The dancer adapted traditional Asian dance to tell the story of one young girl who was sold into sex, but then was able to escape.

At the CARA event the focus was on communities in a more public sense, the problems of instiutitonalized violence, jails, police, and gangs. We have had a lot of gang murders in Seattle lately.

Both of them were reaching out to the community though. And both embraced young people being given a way to express themselves through creative words, music, dance, film. In both cases we saw the power of art to give a means of expression to people.

Both are great groups.