Orientalism Redux

This is Captain Colin Mackenzie painted by James Sant in 1842.
The portrait is a major work in the Lure of the East Exhibition at the Tate Britain. The exhibition re-examines Orientalist painting, mostly concentrating on nineteenth century painters in the countries around the Mediterranean.
But this portrait is of quite a different subject. Captain Colin Mackenzie was leader of the Madras Army that was one part of the massive British defeat in Afghanistan in 1842. Sixteen thousand British and Indian soldiers and followers were massacred during a retreat from Kabul to Jalalabad according to the catalog essay by Christine Ridding.
He was taken prisoner by Muhammad Akbar Khan, the son of the ruler of Afghanistan. who had been deposed by the British forces. Apparently Mackenzie got along with him very well, and was given this magnificent attire as a present.
When he got back to London, he posed for the artist James Sant, and the painting was included at the Royal Academy, to much acclaim. Astonishing arrogance! After a disastrous defeat Mackenzie dons the garment of Afghanistan royalty and looks like a heroic leader!
As suggested by one of the critical commentators included in recordings in the exhibition, imagine today, if a British soldier donned the garb of a Taliban leader for a portrait to be presented to great acclaim in London!

The artist who stands out in the exhibition is John Frederick Lewis whose detailed drawings of the architecture of markets and cityscapes are magnificent.

The catalog includes many excellent essays that re-think Orientalist paintings. It speaks of how these painters when confronted with the realities of domestic privacy and the landscape in places like Jerusalem and Cairo, altered their vocabularies and conventions. They posed themselves and their wives in public and private settings to compensate for the fact that they could not paint women and men together and had no access to harems.

Rana Kabbani ‘s essay juxtaposes Botero’s Abu Ghraib image with Ingres Turkish Bath. He is making the comparison of the British occupation of Egypt inspiring striking paintings, and what paintings we will have from the occupation of Iraq. As he states ” might such pictures ( of Abu Ghraib) come to be seen as the Orientalist art of the twenty first century, born, like their predecessors ,of military conquest and colonial expansion and fixed in commercial exploitation? “
That says it all very concisely!

9 Scripts From a Nation at War at the Tate Modern

The Performance of the Combatant Status Review Tribunal at the Tate Modern was based on the online transcripts from the Department of Defense of the tribunals that were invented after the Supreme Court said that Guantanamo prisoners should have some rights. The fraudulent character of the tribunals came across loud and clear in the performance. There were three tribunal members, then there was a “recorder” and a “personal representative” ( that’s a substitute for a lawyer), a translator, then the detainee, he had an empty chair next to him for a witness( he had the right to call witnesses, but of course calling someone all the way from Afghanistan was impossible) Finally there was a narrator, which was not part of the transcript, but kept the audience on track.
The collaborative of artists who created the work ( David Thorne, Katya Sander, Ashley Hunt, Sharon Hayes and Andrea Geyer) selected material from the total transcripts to make a four hour performance.
The result was searing. The detainee’s words dominated the presentation. We learned that they were in Guantanamo for random reasons ( an assistant cook to Bin Laden, watching a piece of land ( which was clearly in the wrong place), getting arms training in Afghanistan to defend himself in Africa, working in a shoe shop ( again obviously wrong place),
In several cases they declared that they didn’t understand the concepts, (not surprising since we don’t either, and several declared that they had no education), didn’t know it was an Al Queda camp, etc. It was obvious that these were randomly imprisoned. In the first transcript on the Department of Defense website referenced above, the detainee seemed to only be growing vegetables.
The day after I heard this performance the Supreme Court upheld habeus corpus for Guantanamo Prisoners.
The performance was part of an installation at the Tate called “9 Scripts from a Nation at War”
It included Citizen, Blogger, Correspondent, Veteran, Interviewer, Student, Actor, Lawyer.
I was intrigued by the choice, there were no politicians, no generals, no political activists, war resistors, or demonstrators. The blogger was a composite anonymous blogger, chosen because blogs have played such an important part in the war.

In each case real people were interviewed, then their words were edited and re-presented by
actors. In choosing the veteran, they asked for veterans who were actors. The veterans were asked about the transition from civilian to soldier, how an individual dissolved into a group as a result of military routines, how someone moves from individuality and to collectivity.

The result was much more mediated than the recent testimony of the Winter Soldiers. In those testimonies, brave veterans were describing the actual atrocities that they committed. They were speaking as individuals, they had re entered society from the collectivity that was forced on them in the military.They covered in detail as eyewitness accounts of the occupation, the horrors of racism, breakdown of the military, the abuse of power, pillaging, rape, and much more.

So the question is, did “Nine Scripts” work? It worked because it was so undramatic and monotone. The fundamental problem with a nation at war is, especially with Iraq and Afghanistan, is that we are just going on. These nine scripts are only a few of the parts that people are performing, the parts that are constructed in the public arena.
We just go on and on performing, as we perform we can convince ourselves that we are actively involved in stopping the war, but actually, we are just drones in a huge system that is manipulating us. The individual is embedded in the collective of society as a whole, not just as a soldier in the military. Of course that doesn’t mean we should stop for a minute our resistance. Without it we are completely lost. “Nine Scripts” represents a type of resistance to the status quo even as it records how we are all embedded. It made me want to redouble my efforts to get out into the street and protest.

Oscar Munoz at INIVA in London

Aliento 1996
Grease photoserigraphs on steel disks

Oscar Munoz is from Colombia. He speaks of the fact that violence has permeated all aspects of life for many many years in Colombia. He contrasts that to Chile, Argentina and Brazil in which people disappeared in a fixed period of military dictatorship. In Colombia it goes on and on. He does not divide some violence from another,

He invokes disappearance and the ephemeral aspect of life in all of his work in many poetic ways. Breath shown here is one example. As you breathe on the steel disc the image of people who have died appears and quickly disappears.
Breath of life, breath of death, first breath, last breath. Disappearing is a breath in a mirror, obscuring itself.
Other works
Project for a Memorial Five Screen Projection 2005 and Narcissus 2001 – 2 single screen

The image again disappears in different ways, in the first he has painted images in water on a sidewalk based on photographs in obituaries. As the pavement dries the drawing disappears. In the second he has “silkscreened” with powdered charcoal through a screen on water, and it gradually disappears down the drain. In both cases the disappearance is slow and inevitable.
One of his most recent works, not pictured, is Line of Destiny 2006, in which his own reflected face appears in water in his palm, and gradually seeps through his hand until it vanishes.
In each of these works as well as in an installation using newspaper pages that he has burned with the tip of a hot wire in a screen pattern that makes the pages illegible, the disappearaces are continuous, perpetual and unavoidable. We can fix nothing, we can freeze nothing, reflections disappear, newspapers are destroyed, In this work is pervasive sense of the futility of life, there is the loss of memory itself. It reminds me of the novel Hardboiled Wonderland and the end of the World by Hurakami, in which the loss of memory is the loss of imagination, emotion and life itself.
The exhibition is at the Institute of International Visual Art, London,

Selma’s House

These two photographs give a slight indication of the density of Selma Waldman’s life and art. One image from her living room includes a photograph of the Parthenon with soldiers in front of it from the time of the military dictatorship in Greece. It is embedded in books, fabrics, ceramics, vases. In the other photograph, from her bedroom is a Kathe Kollwitz poster above a poster of Muslim women shooting guns on a poster that declares the history of our century in chapters 1/250th second long. These images are also part of a dense setting of books, fabrics, baskets, photographs.
Selma’s house was an installation of books, artifacts, art, clippings, quotations that echoed the layers of her sensibility. “The truth of Art is meaningless without the Truth of Life.” Selma Waldman

Selma Waldman 2-23 31 – 4-16 2008

I have been unable to write on my blog for almost a month because my dear friend and wonderful artist died on April 16. Selma is on the right at this anti Iraq war demonstration in Seattle from 2004. It tells us that she was an artist and an activist, she lived what she believed in as well as leaving behind a magnificent body of drawings. As Larry Gossett from the King County Council, said in his tribute, she didn’t just contribute art or donate her time, she was part of the political activism, she put her body on the line.

Her drawings are in the grand manner of old masters ( among her posters of Kollwitz, Goya, Beckmann, was also one with a drawing by Boucher and paintings by Rembrandt. ) Her studio was filled with images of human brutality from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Iraq war, South Africa, India, Afghanistan. She took the message of the holocaust and translated into a life long commitment to fight injustice and inhumanity. But her house was filled with the joy in humanity, children, workers, animals ( tiny carved figures on every bookcase), and the poetry of the everyday object over and over. Because her eyes were acutely responsive to aesthetics and beauty, she felt the bestiality of the world all the more deeply.

Everything in her house was filled with content as well as arranged with an aesthetic flair. For example, the numerous CDs that we receive offering free internet services were arranged in compositions matching their colors, a put down to capitalism and a recycling that also transformed an annoying plastic object into an aesthetic experience.

Her art was also transformative. She used only chalks and charcoals, the most fragile materials as she said, as fragile as human life, as easily broken, and she created works of art that contained both the violence and the alternatives to violence in one stroke of her arm. She could draw highly realistically or completely abstractly. She frequently incorporated text, both in the work itself or beside it, showing her sources in photographs and texts. This served to both document the incredible scenes, and to highlight her transformation of her sources. She drew often on hundreds of images in order to extract the meaning of an act. These drawings contain within them her thinking, her seeing, her feelings, her hopes as well as the reality of the condition of the world.

She herself grew up in Kingsville Texas, the only Jewish family in a company town owned by the King Ranch. She learned about discrimination early in her life. Her social activism began first in Austin in the 1950s, then was catalyzed by seeing a movie in Berlin while on a Fulbright of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. When she saw the pictures of the Sharpesville Massacre her course was set for life, not to promote herself within art structures, but to dedicate herself and her art to supporting active resistance to injustice. She was involved with Civil Rights and Anti Apartheid movements in Seattle, she was a pioneer in supporting a Middle East Peace with Israel and Palestine working together, she worked against genocide, the brutalities of soldiers driven to commit atrocities( Her series Naked/Aggression). And finally even as her show was on display of the Bosnian abuses, the Abu Ghraib images came out, and she spent her last five years making hundreds of images on small black sheets of paper, The Black Book of Aggressors.
I will add images to this later today.

Yesterday we had a memorial for her that was magnificent. We started at 5:30 and finished at 8:30 with the tributes, and we were all as brief as possible ( 30 people contributed) . We heard poetry, music, dance, prose, letters, and of course, there was an overview of her art. There was also an installation of her art, a virtual retrospective of her career and political posters. It was an amazing celebration with people speaking of her activism, her art, her political commitments to peace int he Middle East, her enormous knowledge based on reading thousands of books, all of which were in her home when she died. Her home was an installation work in itself. Images to come.

Selma! You are the finest politically engaged artist I have had the privilege of knowing.

Below is one wall of her studio with photographs of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Iraq war above her last unfinished work, The House Raid, which you see below in a separate image. Next is another room of her studio(house) with the painting Bread, a long theme in her work inspired by Elie Wiesel, surrounded by her sources. She embedded her art in texts, images, and life, from them she drew her extraordinary drawings.

Black Panthers and the White Art World

Never have I felt more acutely the separations in Seattle between white art and the real world than this weekend in Seattle. On Thursday night we had a moment of intersection (of sorts) thanks to Aperture Foundation and their publication of the amazing photographs by Stephen Shames of the Black Panthers. Stephen Shames, who is white, was friends with Bobby Seale in Berkeley and Oakland in 1966 from the time of the founding of the Black Panthers. He created a series of intimate photographs of the Panthers all over the country which have never been published before. They are on display at Odegaard and the book was sold at the Henry Art GalleryAuditorium in conjunction with a program.

We heard from Aaron Dixon and Larry Gossett about the founding of the Black Student Union at the University of Washington with only 12 students. Soon after they also founded the Black Panther Party in Seattle (although one comment on my blog suggested they were different groups) and it was the first Panther Party outside of Oakland. The picture shows some of the Black Panthers on the steps of the State Capitol, You can see Elmer Dixon right out in front. We also heard from Janet Jones who is responsible for an excellent online project about the history of the Black Panthers in Seattle. We are currently celebrating the 40th Anniversary of that historic moment. Unfortunately, UW is still dominantly white. Although there is an ethnic studies program, apparently faculty have blocked a 5 credit ethnic studies requirement for graduation. Obviously integration varies from program to program, also. Jacob Lawrence was hired in 1970 as a result of the Black Student Union pressures, and the diplomatic skills of then President Odegaard. But when I taught a course there in art history in 1997, there was no complete set of slides of Jacob Lawrence’s work !

Stephen Shames photographs are on display in Odegaard Undergraduate Library at the University of Washington. So here came the Black Panther discussion into the Henry. Good for the Henry Art Gallery for hosting the discussion.

But then Friday I decided I needed to at least open myself to see a white art show so I went to Western Bridge where there was a generous buffet and several current artists, including Alfredo Jaar ( who is Chilean). Jaar was the reason I went, and his small work did not disappoint, it was three captions about the Rwanda massacre, without the photographs, part of his larger Rwanda project. The unspeakable aftermath of the Rwanda massacre that he witnessed has been the subject of many works by the artist. But the entire rest of the white art exhibition was playful, a room full of balloons, air in the eye through a hole, a text message piece that sends little cartoon images of a bear and other games. The idea was to “activate the passive viewer”.

I went to hear Andreas Zybach on Saturday talk about his work. Inspired by a 19th century machine that produced energy from water in a clandestine way, Zybach’s work involved a large construction through which we walked that generated 6.5 horsepower energy, enough to send ink through tubes and out on the floor of the gallery. It was not, however, about environmental crisis, energy issues or anything real (except perhaps in a closet way) . It was about taking the idea of a machine that generates energy and making it playful. The entire exhibition was called “You Complete Me,” a theme suggesting interactivity, but when the ink on the floor started being used to spell “iraq” the artist decided this didn’t complete him and rubbed it out. There lies a long essay perhaps on “what is art”. Western Bridge according to director Eric Fredericksen, is about post painterly abstraction, so therefore Iraq has no place there.

It was going from Western Bridge to the Black Panthers anniversary that led to my despair. The event included speakers like hip hop artist Laura Peace(Piece) Kelly and Bobby Seale himself . People talked about both the present world of violence ( the police who killed Sean Bell had just been let off) and the tactics and strategies that the Panthers used to get gangs to work together, feed children, provide health care, educate black people politically, etc. The tactics used to break them up, infiltration by the FBI and getting them back to the business of killing each other, are exactly the tactics being used in Iraq today.

The myth of Black Panthers as simply carrying guns and threatening whites is a long way from reality, which brings us back to the photographs of the Black Panthers by Shames as well as the art work by Emory Douglas, ( this is not a link to Amazon, although it took some effort), now available in a book. Emory Douglas is the Black Panther Minister of Culture and his section of the Black Panther website is an amazing resource on all sorts of histories and references to both Black Panthers and current injustice. His posters and drawings document the strength of political art when it is done by a really good artist for a deeply felt cause in which he is engaged. ( Example below)

So back to segregation. I was sick at the isolation and narcissism of the white art world. The irrelevant playfulness of the art ( except for Jaar), at this time in our nation’s history is so sad.

I wish the intersection at the Henry Art Gallery had been deeper, longer, and more committed ( like having a partner show in the gallery). But at least it was a start. According to Jen Graves in the Stranger, the Henry has been sneaking in politics all year. I am ready for them to be less stealthy, but again, at least it is better than little bears on my cell phones. How about an exhibition of the work of Emory Douglas?

Metamorphosis : Marita Dingus’s Trash

Marita Dingus
At a presentation in Edmonds, about one half hour north of Seattle, Marita Dingus revealed some of the secrets of her approach to materials in her extraordinary art made entirely of recycled materials. Recycled we already knew, but there is a lot more to it than just reclaiming materials.

She explained in a compelling demonstration that she chose materials that were “worthless”, if they have any value at all she takes them to the thrift shop she said, holding a metal ring from a lampshade as an example. Her choice of materials is based on durability as well as the fact that they are completely useless in our society. For example, she uses the shiny plastic wrap from Bertoli products, or the spirals from spiral notebooks, or the wire from Boeing airplane construction. Her criteria also includes that ( she was making flowers out of Bertoli shiny wrap and wire as she talked), the wire needs to be easy to bend.

Her own wardrobe is entirely made of recycled clothes and materials, “things get cut up many many times” she said. When she spent several years in Texas, she packed up all of her belongings in large bags made from recycled fabric, and her purse is based on a clorox bottle covered in fabric. She uses “hot sticky glue” and she said, “people say this is not art material why shouldn’t it be?”

Marita is truly living close to the earth as well, she raises chickens, and eats their eggs at her home that she shares with her mother ( who also helps with her art) on five acres of old growth woods in Auburn. Her family moved there in the fifties. It is next to the cemetery, at that time the only place that African Americans could live. This is one of her bags below.



All of the talk about our carbon footprints, ecology, global warming, living green. Marita has it all figured out.
We don’t have Marita’s artistic ability to reclaim only the useless into art, but we can think about every single thing we throw away every day and try to cut it in half, re use it, not use it, or give it to a thrift store. Giving up take outs, plastic bags, and packaged food, even re using paper napkins as toilet paper, every little bit helps. I’ve tried to save some useless items, like the plastic tops of coffee cups and let them accumulate, waiting for art to emerge. I had the idea of hanging them on my Christmas tree. It didn’t quite happen(family objections), but I looked at the plastic tops and lived with them for a long time, as they piled up, confronting my own waste, instead of flinging it out of sight. Of course the theme for Marita is more profound, as an African American she is reclaiming what is considered useless in our society and giving it value as an aesthetic expression.
Here are two of Marita’s Water Babies as an inspiration.

A unique partnership Daniel Minter and the James Washington House residency

Daniel Minter Artist in Residence, James Washington House, Seattle Wa
Daniel Minter is seen here working in the studio of James W. Washington, Jr. . Mr Washington died in the year 2000, and it was his dream that his home and studio could be a facility for creative collaborations. Daniel Minter was the first artist to take part in a residency at the house ( which includes a place to live for the artist). He collaborated with Washington by using stones left behind that Washington had selected for sculpture but never used, creating an assemblage with Washington’s used chisels, and re using a hollow tree trunk that Washington had chiseled out, but never developed. Minter’s work includes references to the African American life in America on many different levels,
Minter grew up in South Georgia in a small town, but he always knew he wanted to be an artist. As a child he drew in in the dirt. Later he went to art school. His work is an homage to the extraordinary people, spirituality, histories, and experiences that he experienced both growing up and since then.

His most recent series currently on view at the Northwest African American Museum, Seattle, is a series of evocative portraits of the people of Malaga Island off the coast of Maine. In the early twentieth century this diverse community was forces to leave the island, many of them were sent to an insane asylum in order to make way for development. Minter found descriptions in the papers of the time of the people as a “subhuman eye sore”.
The works he created in the residency at the James Washington House are also an homage to Washington himself, who, according to Minter, “represents everything that I am attempting to do and he did it alone. There were a lot of James Washington Jrs. who were not able to do that, there was no path open for them. He made his own way through stone. I am very honored with Washington’s gift of his opening the way for me. ” ( lecture Seattle March 25, 2008)
Here are some of the pieces that he created in collaboration with the spirit of James Washington.

Artemesia RIP

I have lost a member of my family.
Someone told me they liked personal information in my blog, of which I have very little. Today though is different. I must write in honor of my dear cat, Artemesia, whom we found dead yesterday under our front steps, after six days of wondering what happened to her. She was almost 20 years old and had a good life, and clearly had gone cat like to find a dark place to die, but that doesn’t make my devastation any less.

I can’t help but think about the thousands of family pets in Iraq who have been lost to the war, as well as the thousands of animals of all sorts who have been traumatized and killed. We never hear about animals in Iraq at all, only our troops, and “the enemy”. Imagine how many families must have lost their pets and livestock to death and loss in the last five years. I did find a blog entry about cats in Baghdad, strays of course, who are heading for Americans who have the food and warmth. How many Baghdad strays were once family pets? Here is another blog by an Iraqi girl. She is a cat lover, but she left all her pets behind when she went to Syria and knows nothing of them. Probably they have joined the strays described in the first blog.

Losing my own pet makes me grieve for all of them as well. We never hear about the ruin of the natural world in Iraq either, we bombed orchards, date palms, we are destroying the lush fruit production in Iraq, poisoning the land with depleted uranium, poisoning the future as well as the past. In a book I read about the first Gulf War a garden destroyed by the war was described in loving detail.

Back to my cat. She was a wonderful pet, very loving, always there when I came home, always there to climb into my lap and be stroked as she purred loudly. That is what she lived for love and affection, caring, and more love. It is the way the world is meant to be. How far we seem to get from that simple fact.

Dear Artemesia Rest in Peace.

The Mainstream Art World is Really Far Gone!

Looking at the dreadful “Redrawing the Art World Women who are expanding the boundaries of how we see, what we see and where we see it” in the March 23 New York Times Magazine, I was reminded of just how corrupted by capitalism the mainstream art world has become. On the cover Muccia Prada in some sort of pricey black dress( the devil wears Prada?) is framed by John Baldessari on the left, and a variety of other well known men and one young (little known) women. Notice that the woman looks like a child and is covering her mouth as though she has been caught by surprise. The many men adopt various confident poses. The photographic style purposefully imitates Irving Penn in several places in the magazine, angular black poses against a blank background. No context, no connection to what is going on in the world. Clearly these artists and this patron do NOT expand boundaries at all!

Then there are the art haulers modelling multi thousand dollar (leather) jumpsuits. Can we have a clearer message that art is meant to play the fashion/style game, rather than actually say something important.

Mari Ramirez is one bright note in the issue, but her show “Inverted Utopias” primarily priviledged abstraction rather than the deep social engagement that characterizes most of Latin American art.

Fortunately, there are many artists out their who are not embedded with capitalism, or who are turning it on its head, as reported in this blog and in other alternative sources. I am also writing on it in my upcoming book, Art and Politics Now: Cultural Activism in a time of Crisis.

The reporting on visual art in the New York Times is embarrassing. Other arts, theater, literature, poetry, dance, all of them are engaged with current political issues and that engagement is reported in the newspaper. Visual artists are represented as completely disengaged.

A review of the amazing book by Roberto Bolano, Nazi Literature in the Americas reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, is focusing on the power of literature to create myths that support fascism. The book contains entirely imaginary writers who are preoccupied with mythmaking as the junta tortures people in Chile, the point is the fact that writers have power to create stories that can either support fascism or resist it. Bolano’s book suggests that most writers’ preoccupation with aesthetics and other academic concerns feed into the acquiescence to power that corrupts us and makes us passive instruments, rather than active resisters. For Roberto Bolaño . . .”literature is an unnervingly protean, amoral force with uncanny powers of self-invention, self-justification and self-mythification. The mythmakers, he suggests, certainly do matter.” While I would have liked a review of a book that focuses on mythmakers who are resisting capitalism, at least political context is included. All art has a political context, but you would never know that from reading mainstream art coverage.

Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker, for example, whose reviews of shows such as the Whitney Biennial celebrate the most vacuous, empty art in the show. Surprisingly a non art reviewer caught up on Julia Meltzer and David Thorne, who actually made an effort to address something current, although their most political work was shown outside the Biennial at the Armory.

These two artists got multiple grants to try to represent Syria through their lens. Narcissism has been placed at bay at least a little bit. NEIL MACFARQUHAR who wrote the article writes on Muslims, the Middle East, and other important topics for the New York Times. He recognized that these two artists know that there is a world out there. What he didn’t tell us is why they chose Syria and why they chose the particular format that they came up with a type of mime by an actor responding to questions. “We will live to see these things or Five Pictures of What might come to pass” seemed colonizing to me, but at least the artists went to Syria on their own, outside of the system and filmed subjects according to their own choices, not based on pressures from the international art world. The theme is intense, a culture caught between Islamic Fundamentalism, US pressures ( I would say the war in Iraq) , and a “repressive regime” as they refer to it ( that is an unexamined generality that could be further elaborated on in order to avoid a cliche perspective) . Of course the Syrians might see the pressures quite differently. It is not clear how they came with this triad of concepts.

Julia Meltzer has done other socially engaged work. She cares about the world. I would love to know how she decided to make the jump from the LAPD to Syria! But at least she cares.