4000 Americans and thousands and thousands of Iraqis have died in this war

What is there to say. No picture today. We have no picture of what is going on in Iraq really, just lots of misleading pieces of information, lots of deaths, and lots of money.

Here ‘s an example of “news coverage” This is from Navy Lt. Patrick Evans a military spokesperson in response to raids on the Green Zone today. ” There have been some significant gains. However this enemy is resilient and will not give up, nor will we.”

What are the gains? The destruction of the entire country and the killing of probably over a million Iraqis. The gains? fewer Americans killed?? Many fewer would be killed if they all left. The enemy?? Who is the enemy, the enemy is us. Why are we there ?

This particular article which has already been buried online, blamed the attack on “probably tensions between rival Shiite groups” What on earth does that mean? More prominent online is the article blaming Iranian backed militias. More propaganda for Cheney’s next campaign to start a war against Iran. Later on we have Mosul where the area is “the last major urban area where the Sunni extremist al-Qaida group maintains a significant presence>” What are they talking about here?

For a revealing view of the resistance from their own perspective, see the excellent movie Meeting Resistance which interviews the resistance and finds out their motives. Steve Connors and Molly Bingham embedded with one community of resistance fighters, not a “group” but a series of individuals affiliated in different ways, for ten months. They gained their trust enough to be able to interview them about what they were doing. The immediate impact of the movie is that we see the occupation by the US from their perspective, huge machines, soldiers, heavily armed invading every street, action, neighborhood. We look up at these enormously armed men and wonder what on earth do we think we are doing.
Steve Connors one of the filmmakers commented to me “I think a major problem for people attempting to remain informed by reliance on the media here in the United States is that only rarely are Iraqi’s as motivated human beings, driving events, taken into consideration. The view from here is that they lay passive as Americans enact their policy decisions upon them.”
This is so true.

New York Artists Against the War in DC

The Embedded Blanket of Lies
This quilt is a compilation of some of the lies we have heard from the government and the media over the last five years. Many of the lies were taken from this website
They have been recorded in plays like David Hare’s “Stuff Happens”, poems, performances, and even in books.
The symbolism of putting them on a comfortable quilt on a bed is obvious and layered. Not only is a quilt covered bed one of our primary escapes from reality for many hours every night, but the softness of the material is also echoing the softness of the information, all based on fabrication and the desire to frighten the American people as well as Congress into supporting the war. And of course the lies continue every day.

The New York City Artists Against the War are a large group of artists who are deeply committed to using their skills to create agit prop in protest against the war. I have posted their work here on several occasions.

Beginning the Sixth Year of the Iraq War

Washington DC
March 19
The Dead Marched in front of Blackwater
on the National Mall , near the White House, and around the city. Each Marcher wore the name of a person who had died in Iraq. They were silent and haunting. This is the simple, but effective statement that brings home the reality more than any slogan.
The power of the visual, the power of performance, the power of bringing protest into everyday life.

In addition there was a Freeze In at Union Station. Here is the video link. Again it was a protest that was part of daily life, hundreds of people just stood still in the midst of an action, then after about five minutes, they all shouted, end the war.

Controversy at the Northwest African American Museum

When Kwame Garrett and his friends intervened at the opening of the NAAM, they declared that the museum was a “Sham” . The reason is that they felt that the programs planned by the museum did not reach out to the youth who were vulnerable and dying in the street because of police brutality. The young woman holding this sign told me that the museum would not solve this problem, that is the reason for her sign. A moving interview with Earl Debnam one of the protesters who occupied the building from 1985 – 1993 was broadcast on KBCS radio on March 6, 2008.

There seems to be quite a bit of planning for youth at the museum. Brian Carter, the Director of Education, in Northwest Colors Magazine, is reported to have these plans just for a beginning.
“Carter has brought together students from four local high schools to create a Youth Docent/Curator Program. They will not only give tours of exhibits, but will also work with museum professionals to create their own exhibits. “It’s pulling the curtain back from museums,” Carter says. “Because I know as a youth I thought they were unapproachable and they’re really institutions and you’re just kind of brought there for 30 minutes twice a year.”

That can change, Carter says, by giving youth a say in how the museum operates. After being introduced to the museum and exploring a topic that they themselves chose, “they’ll fabricate the exhibit and then mount it in the gallery, and then they’ll act as tour guides and they’ll give tours of their exhibit to school groups, to organizations or individuals. What we want them to do is once they go through they program, they can be ambassadors for the museum.”

According to the protesters this isn’t directly engaging with the current crisis for black youth. A discussion with Kwame Garrett was broadcast on March 13

His perspective is that the museum fails as a community center because it has no places for community activities, performance, film and video production, radio. He calls it a high class exhibit with some housing. The class issue is fundamental to the disagreement. What constitutes culture, what constitutes community? Hip Hop is a huge community in Seattle, but it seems to have no connection to the NAAM so far. UMOJA is a Central District community festival which includes many types of arts is another example of community. But I am sure most of the participants in that festival came to the opening of the museum. And the gift shop is offering lots of community based art works.

It seems to me that the museum and the protesters aren’t really very far apart. Culture as a means of intervening in the oppressions and lack of hope for black youth seems to me what both sides want. The museum is embracing the community, and can easily accomodate all types of culture. It isn’t even one week old!

Inside the Northwest African American Museum

One of the featured artist is James W. Washington, Jr. painter and sculptor, born in Gloster Mississippi in deep Jim Crow, moved to Seattle in 1944 to become a successful artist. Here is the symbolic portrait of Mark Tobey with whom he studied for a few years in the 1940s. The James Washington Foundation put together the exhibition of this important artist’s paintings and sculpture. At the opening the Foundation also gave a scholarship awards to two art students, Theresa James at Garfield High School and the Hugo Shi at the University of Washington.

Next is the Jacob Lawrence Exhibition with his large tile mural of “Games” formerly in the King Dome and then the Convention Center.

The exhibition is dazzling. Also included is his George Washington Bush series, the story of an African American pioneer who came on the Oregon trail with five wagons.

The exhibition has selections from his Builders series

Finally, is the Journey Gallery which tells of the accomplishments of African Americans who traveled from all over the world to come to the Northwest. It comes up to the present including present day East Africans.

Northwest African American Museum Opens in Seattle!

Carver Gayton is the executive director.

And everyone was happy !

See the next entry for the inside

The College Art Association honors Chicana Artists, Yoko Ono, and Donny George

This was the year of Chicana art at the College Art Association! A formidable array of outstanding Chicana artists and one Chicano posed for this photograph at a special ceremony where many received awards. Front row left is Benito Heurto, who gave the award to Celia Munoz, ( in white on the right end of the second row). Also awarded was Amalia Mesa -Bains next to Celia.
Santa Barraza in pink at the other end of the second row, received an award from the Women’s Caucus for Art. Finally, Yolanda Lopez next to Santa Barraza also was honored. Laura Perez, front row right, has written a new book on these artists, an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the range and variety of their work.

Also receiving an award was Yoko Ono! This is not her look at the Conference, but close, she had on a big white cowboy hat.
She created a “love in” with all the people who came to hear a conversation with hard core white haired art historian Jonathan Fineberg. Instead of a serious interview, she showed some home movies, handed out little lights and taught the audience to spell “I love you” with them.
Quite an accomplishment. If art historians and artists can say “I love you” with flashing lights, anyone can! One friend of mine who was there said it went right past the brain to the heart and she found herself so moved she was crying.

Also honored was Donny George, one of my personal heroes. He was director of the National museum in Baghdad when it was looted and described the events of those disastrous days almost hour by hour as he tried to save the many treasures in the museum. His narrative was easy on the criticism of the US Forces (since he is currently living here), but he told how it took a phone conversation with a curator at the British Museum and eventually a phone call from Tony Blair directly to George Bush to get the museum protected.
George finally left Iraq in September 2006. The current state of the looting of antiquities in Iraq is no longer even discussed in the press here, but we can be sure that it is ongoing and disastrous.

A Valentine from New York Artists Against the War

These two works stand in for any comment that I could make about the absurdity of Valentine’s Day and the marketing of romance in a time of war. Meanwhile people continue to die in Aghfanistan, Iraq, Gaza, the Sudan and Darfur as well as elsewhere.
But the US election and the economy is all that appears in the newspaper. Narcissism is our main perspective and Valentine’s Day only reinforces the idea of emotions as commodities in our culture.New York Artists Against the War infiltrate a Nivea spring garden with a more important message, in the middle of Times Square.

Valentine’s Day Joan Snyder Blood On Our Hands, USA, 2003

Joan Snyder Blood on our Hands USA 2003 oil, acrylic, newspaper on board 16 x 16 “
Joan Snyder includes a photograph taken in Baghdad shortly after the Shock and Awe campaign of a mother holding her wounded child
Here is another work by Joan Snyder, “Boy In Afghanistan”, 1988, 24″ x 30″) about a boy injured by land mines.

And a third below
Child, 1989, oil, acrylic, newspaper on linen, 8 x 12″ It makes a reference to children who are starving.

This painting by Joan Snyder is called Modern Times, 2007. The image is full of agony and suffering. It reminds me of a late work by Arshile Gorky, with its elongated and disrupted lines and incomplete forms. The colors are oddly garish and pastel at the same time. There might be three main figures, and several smaller figures, bleeding, gaping, reduced to skeletal structures. The hollow eyes and mouths drip blood. Falling figures descend helplessly. To learn more about Snyder’s way of working go to this website

Blood on our Hands USA connects in my mind directly to the iconic Code Pink action inside the Capitol building although it was painted several years before this confrontation at the Capitol building.

“the blood of millions of Iraqis is on your hands” said the protestor to Condolezza Rice right before she and other courageous Code Pink members were forcibly dragged out of the hearing room by police as they shouted “war criminal”

Joan Snyder is right though, the blood is on OUR hands. It is our money and our government and our ridiculously passive Congress that is enabling the bloodshed.

The Breach: A play about New Orleans

This is Kara Walker’s August 27 2007 cover for the New Yorker, made one year after hurricane Katrina and the drowning of New Orleans. It refers to both the event itself, and its aftermath of false hopes, bungling, and outright racist greed for land ( via the tower in the distance) . It is called “Post Katrina Adrift”
Any art historian recognizes its source in Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, another story of government incompetence that led to death by drowning.
It is fascinating to see how Walker has closely followed and adroitly altered the original.

In the Breach, by Catherine Filloux, Tarell Alvin McCraney & Joe Sutton, the central narrative of the play is based on three people on a roof top who have to fight with gravity in order not to drown, each of them falls into the water that surrounds them and is rescued, until the final concluding scene in which two are drowned. The parallel to the Raft of the Medusa is inescapable also in the play. There is also a baptism providing an ironic purifying with the polluted water that surrounds this family.

The narrative on this rooftop, between a grandfather and his teen age grandson and small granddaughter ( who speaks through her adult self), includes the psychodrama of any life threatening place, replaying small tensions and large anxieties, ranging through emotions from happy to heartbroken.
It is set in the midst of New Orleans, but it is a classic piece of theater that rises above that specific event to be almost Shakespearean in its characters. It resonates with THE flood of the bible, with Michelangelo’s Flood on the Sistine Ceiling, the story of Aeneas and Anchises, the elderly saved by the young.

Two other narratives, of an elderly alcoholic bar tender and a self proclaimed liberal reporter, who interact with the flood in other ways, one to confront his own death, the other to meet survivors who in their honesty and maturity confront the writer with his own limitations. He learns more about himself than about the disaster he is reporting. His only goal was to “expose the fiction” that the levees were deliberately breached. That pre planned agenda undid him when he was confronted with the realities of the people who had lived through this and other floods, the flood of life in general.

In the midst and moving through all of this is a figure of water, who shimmers and seduces all around her. Adding the mythical element reminded us that it was all a fiction, all a fragment of a much larger reality. Although the three playwrights continually spoke of “truth” as what they pursued, what they have really pursued is the reality that there is no truth, only human relationships.

Those human relationships of the play, today in the real world, continue to struggle against the larger forces which have now arrived to “rescue” them, by destroying their homes, and, as in so many cities, replacing low income housing with lucrative developments. The strong characters of New Orleans must continue to resist outsiders who threaten to inundate them, whether it is nature or the forces of capitalism.

The play’s use of water as a dominant mythic presence also reminded me of Kara Walker’s show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in honor of Katrina. She also emphasized the role of water “the story of muck” as she put it, by including Copley’s Watson and the Shark an image of an almost drowning and Winslow Homer’s Gulf Stream, both paintings of survival in the midst of the dangers of water (in both these paintings actual sharks- in New Orleans human sharks are circling).