James W. Washington, Jr. Creativity as a path to freedom

This sculpture by James W. Washington, Jr, The Chaotic Half, was made in 1945, long before the so-called era of Civil Rights in the 1960s. I say so called because African- Americans had been fighting for their Civil Rights ever since they arrived on Slave ships.

Washington made this sculpture one year after he moved from the South to the to the Northwest (through Civil Service Employment). He wanted to speak in his art to the injustice that he had experienced in the South. He found a lot of racism in Seattle as well, but he felt freer to express his real feelings in his art. He only did three art works directly calling attention to racism, all in the 1940s.

On the right a hand puts a ballot in a box. Behind a diagonal line which serves as a partition is a KKK hood, a noose, a cross and an “all seeing eye”. The eye is the eye of surveillance, suggesting the constant vigilance that Washington had to practice growing up when, as he declared “he lived in fear most of the time.”

Growing up in Mississippi, Washington experienced the preachings of organized religion as part of the oppression that affected his spirit as much as the KKK threatened him physically.

He celebrated creativity as a means of freedom in all of his art work. When we think of the cuts in support for art programs in the schools and in our nation as a whole, we know that the freedom he spoke of, the creativity that he celebrated, is a revolutionary idea. He believed each person could find their own talent and make it work for them.

It is a radical idea even today. If culture can be liberated from materialism, ambition, elitism, academia, and its other prisons, it can speak of escape from oppression.

That is what Washington did in all his art work even after he turned to more symbolic work and away from explicit images of oppression.
And he succeeded. By the end of his life he was a celebrated artist.

"Stuff Happens" David Hare

Last night I saw the new David Hare play about the Bush administration march to the Iraq war. It was terrific.
Even though we knew the whole story, we were still sitting on the edge of our seats with the tension and stupidity, arrogance, malice, and ignorance of the whole thing. Colin Powell was the central tragic hero of the story, who tried to stand for what he believed in but was trapped into using his integrity to support lies.
SEE THIS PLAY.
The only weakness in the story was the conclusion when the Iraqi came out speaking about the tragedy of destruction and death that has been visited on their country and ends by saying Iraqis should have taken control of our own country ( as though it were the Iraqis’ fault that the US invaded them and as far back as 1953 have been meddling in their politics by overthrowing a democratically elected leader who was affiliated with Nasser’s socialism. We put in Saddam Hussein, trained him, sold him weapons, encouraged war with Iran, boycotted him, then we took him out as well as the entire country. ON the other hand, the Iraqis have a resistance which is fighting hard in order to get rid of us, in the midst of all the convolutions of terrorism that we have spawned in Iraq, and the Iraqis have not signed the oil bill that the US wants that gives away their assets ( so called “progress towards democracy.” in Bush speak.

The play has little emphasis on the economic motives, it is all about raw power .
Only at the end do we learn that Cheney’s stock options in Halliburton have gone up to 6 million in value since the war.

watch this video on Impeaching Cheney

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEzPVP6EVRk.
Then get out and make it happen! Everyone do what works for you, but do something.

Shahram Karimi and Shirin Ebadi

In the 2003 Istanbul Biennial the artist Shahram Karimi showed a work with the title “Traces” which he referred to as presenting the creative people of Iran who participated in the “collective struggle toward modernity.” Painted on rice sacks, he made realistic portraits of 248 intellectuals many of whom are dead or in exile. Beside the mural he showed a video that wandered through a deserted city, suggesting as Shirin Neshat has stated “a melancholic sense of intended annihilation and erasure of history” ( Poetic Justice 126).
I conclude about the work in my forthcoming book on Art and Politics Now,

“This work achieved a perfect dialectic between high and low culture, the political and the poetic. The mural is in a material and style of the street, and speaks to everyone directly, the video with all of its vacancies and absences is the material of Biennial culture, but it uses that vacancy as a metaphor of the absences of history. “

Here is the mural part of the work. I don’t have a photograph of the video, but I am also posting the list of writers, novelists, poets, composers, musicians, political leaders, theater directors, rug weavers, social workers, singers etc. Itis a powerful statement and record of both accomplishments and losses in contemporary Iran.

One of the people listed ( not in this detail) is the Iranian lawyer and Human Rights activist, Shrin Ebadi. She won the Nobel Prize in 2003. She is still in Iran working for legal rights for women and children, freedom of the press, the rights of political activists and other important causes. She announced in May that she would defend the scholar Haleh Esfandiari who was recently arrested in Iran. Ironically Ebadi had to sue the United States for the right to publish her memoir Iran Awakening in this country.

Venice Biennale: A Note on Turkey and Lebanon

For the first time Turkey and Lebanon are officially represented at the Venice Biennale. Those of us who cannot afford to go there can visit the sites online. Turkey is represented by a quirky artist Huseyin Alptekin . Alptekin has been doing offbeat interventions in Europe and Turkey for quite awhile.

In Albania, for example, he hired Kiaja Kiuru from Finland to create a lace covering to cover one of the 500 bunkers left behind by a paranoid dictator.
Here is a photograph of one of her lace covering as shown in a gallery in Istanbul. Kaija Kiuru, originally from Lapland, created “Chamber” in 2002. Using dozens of antique circular tablecloths that the artist collected in secondhand shops, she constructed a temporary domestic shelter from the fruits of thousands of hours of work. Kiuru is concerned with the nature of home and women’s lives and the fact that 80 percent of the world refugees are woman and children. The simultaneous fragility and semi transparency of the tent created a stunning resting place.
I discussed Alptekin’s work with Kiuru in
Sculpture , May 2004. Here’s a quote:

“Alptekin invited Kaija Kiuru to create a lace cover for a bunker. The lace domesticated these useless shelters. The Bunker Research Group (BRG) connects reality and paranoia, derelict socialist structures and contemporary art, change and stasis.”

As for Lebanon, it is one of the hottest places in the world from the perspective of wars, politics, and artists who are actually in the midst of it, figuring out ways to both simply survive and to engage with what is surrounding them as an ongoing reality. The result is a multmedia experimental group of artists who collectively address the insanity of war, suicide bombings, and public pathologies.
Here is Rabih Mroue, a performance artist:
“Searching for a Missing Employee”, as performed in 2004 at the Lift Theater Festival. He uses video, news clippings archives, narratives, and a diagram of the information to try to “find” this person who has disappeared (as thousands did in Lebanon during the Civil War 1975 – 91) with only traces left of their existence)

The result is that we realize once again that history is a fabrication based on narratives and procedures that make no sense at all. If that isn’t pertinent to our present moment, what is?
Mroue is not showing in Venice, but this gives a little context.
Walid Sadek ,who is showing in Venice, works in texts.
Last year in “Out of Beirut” at Oxford Modern Art he showed labels for landscape paintings by Moustafa Faroukh, a well known Lebanese artist, leaving a space for where the art work would have been and adding a poem of his own which invoked the missing landscape ( both the missing painting, and the landscape that no longer exists because of war).

Word into Art Artists of the Modern Middle East

Dia al Azzawi Blessed Tigris inscribed with poem by Muhammad Mahd

I greet you from afar, O greet me back,

O blessed Tigris, river of gardens green.

I greet your banks, seeking to quench my thirst.

Like doves between water and clay aflutter seen.

O blessed Tigris, oft have I have been forced to leave

To drink from springs which didn’t my thirst relieve.

O blessed Tigris, what inflames your heart

Inflames me and what grieves you makes me grieve.

O wanderer, play with a gentle touch

Caress the lute softly and sing again

That you may sooth a volcano seething with rage

And pacify a heart burning with pain.

( translated by Hussein Hadawi).

Entrance to Word into Art, Artists of the Modern Middle East with Iranian artist Parviz Tanavoli Heech in a Cage, 2006, bronze in foreground right

Published online arteeast.org July 2006

WORD INTO ART: ARTISTS OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM (MAY 18 – SEPTEMBER 2, 2006) is a major contribution to our perceptions of contemporary art in the Middle East. I attribute its engaging nature to a combination of aesthetic seduction, clear organization, and compelling subject matter. “Word into Art” is based on the premise of the vibrancy of the traditional art of Arabic calligraphy in the context of a sacred script, as well as the transformations of the script by individual artists as they intersect with international contemporary art trends, politics, and their own regional traditions.

Word into Art consists primarily of contemporary works on paper and ceramics, as well as a few paintings, most of it collected by the British Museum since the 1980s. The show attracted a huge grant from Dubai Holding, enabling the museum to have an entire summer of Middle Eastern Programming, as well as an opening symposium that included artists and art historians from Palestine, Iran, Iraq, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States. (1) Because of this funding the museum also commissioned major art works as part of the exhibition, including Blessed Tigris by Iraqi artist Dia al Azzawi, a towering sculpture in the entry of the Great Court of the Museum. The tower is inscribed with a painfully lyrical poem by Iraqi poet and journalist Muhammad Mahdi al Jawahiri who died in 1997. (2)

Although the British Museum has always defined colonialism in art, with its massive collections of sculptures and other art forms removed from countries all over the world, in this case its historical collections provide a deep resonance for the contemporary art works. Venetia Porter, British Museum Curator of Islamic art and the Contemporary Middle East, also demonstrates a deep respect for the Arabic language. She has chosen to include brochures and displays that lay out the Arabic alphabet and some of its different scripts in order to engage the public on more than a superficial level. She also acknowledges the problem of designating the work as “Middle Eastern” (3)

Word into Art reveals an international contemporary culture of which outsiders to Arab culture usually have only the barest glimpse. Reinstallation of Islamic Collections is ongoing at many museums, but pairing historical works with contemporary art is much more productive. It informs us that these countries, of which we hear so much these days in the news, are not simply historic sites or “contemporary war zones full of terrorists” but sites of a sophisticated contemporary culture.

In contrast to the typical Biennial exhibition, which has by now achieved a slick formulaic (one could say colonizing) presentation of aestheticized videos and large scale works with excess uses of materials that say little, this exhibition declares itself to speak, and speak clearly, on many different levels, about contemporary culture. Two of those international Biennial artists appear here, Shirin Neshat and Rachid Koraichi, but now we can understand their perspectives more completely.

The British Museum exhibition is divided into four parts: Sacred Script, Literature and Art, Deconstructing the Word, and Identity, History and Politics. The exhibition opens with a juxtaposition of an elaborate Ottoman Tuğra (official signature) in classical Diwani script and a contemporary emblematic work, by a prominent Iranian sculptor, Parviz Tanavoli. Working in large scale bronze, Tanavoli cast the single Arabic word “heech” written in nasta’liq script and placed it in a cage. The word means “nothing” in Persian. (4) Tanavoli is a central figure in recent Iranian art history, specifically as part of a movement called Saqqakhaneh. (5) The museum commissioned three other “heech” sculptures from Tanavoli in red, yellow, and green, which appear in the Great Hall. Also in this entry gallery are photographs of all of the artists in the exhibition, thus underscoring that they are contemporary men and women. The first room prepares us for an exhibition that honors tradition, transformation of tradition, and the contemporary world.

“Sacred Script” focuses on the fact that Arabic script originated in the writing of the Qur’an, the word of God to Mohammed, in the 7th century. Consequently, it has always had a sacred aspect that sets it apart. In the first gallery, the artists are from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Japan, China and Turkey. One theme, the curator explained, was to demonstrate that Arabic calligraphy linked with the spread of Islam exists all over the world. (6)

The most visible calligrapher was Hassan Masoudy, an Iraqi living in France, who created the main insignia of the exhibition. The posters feature the phrase from an early Sufi master “I follow the religion of Love, whatever way Love’s camels take, that is my religion and my faith,” in red Kufic script, then the creatively enlarged word “love” in a sweeping gestural movement. (7) Thus in the first section of the exhibition, we are already aware that Arabic has sacred roots and functions—that it is a living, international art expression, and that it is constantly being transformed by contemporary artists, as well as practiced in many different styles of script that cross geographical and historical boundaries.

In other words, the monolithic Arab and monolithic Islam, as promoted by politicians and the Western media, metamorphoses into a subtle, spiritual, worldwide, changing contemporary culture before we leave the first gallery.

While all of the works in the first section are designated as sacred because they directly quote the Qur’an, the second section of the exhibition “Literature and Art” emphasizes another dimension of Arabic, its powerful, long lasting poetic and literary traditions (its endurance partly based on oral recitation and memorization in school). The references include pre Islamic poets, mystics, Sufi masters, and recent poets from countries who use Arabic or Persian, including the famous Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. His beautiful “Birds Die in Galilee” is the poem in a book of monoprints by Algerian artist Abdullah Benanteur: “Flocks of birds fell like paper/into the wells/and when I lifted the blue wings/ I saw a growing grave/ I am the man on whose skin/chains have carved a country.” (8)

The artists work with literary traditions in varied ways, ranging from illustrations of specific texts to abstract references, in styles with meticulous detail or free form expressionism. Sometimes, two artists refer to the same poet such as Adonis, the well known Syrian poet and literary critic who now works in Beirut. Adonis’ poem “Beginnings of Words” is presented in a book by the Palestinian artist Kamal Boullata with text framed in geometric shapes, while Iraqi artist Dia al- Azzawi gives us an expressionist figurative rendering of “Harlem,” an excerpt from Adonis long narrative poem A tomb for New York from 1971. What is obvious from these two examples, and indeed every work in this section is that the cultured artists, poets, and intellectuals of the Arab and Persian world revere one another, and form a culture that crosses national boundaries continuously, both in their work and in their own physical positions within that world. Shirin Neshat, inscribing the poetry of Iranian Farough Farokzad on her photographs, and Rachid Koraichi collaborating with Algerian novelist, Mohammed Dib, are part of a tradition of homage.

Koraichi is also included in the next section of the show “Deconstructing the Word”. His usual position within international Biennials, as a token Middle Eastern artist using Arabic writing, is here embedded in a context that reveals what his work is really about. Deconstructing the Word refers to the resonance of the Arabic letter forms in themselves, as aesthetic objects, nationalist signifiers (for the modern abstract artists of the mid century in Iraq for example (9)), magical incantations and protections, and talismans as sources of healing. Many of these qualities are aspects of Koraichi’s use of Arabic. He is a smuggler bringing these powerful references to European public art. (10)

Another familiar name that makes a surprise appearance in this section is Siah Armajani. His early work Letter, 1960, is based on his love of Persian poetry and calligraphy. That rich connection has metamorphosed in his American public art into texts in English (such as quotes from Moby Dick in a Seattle public art work). Ceramic art by Tunisian artist Ben Slimane, includes repeated letters that are sometimes legible, sometimes not, invoking a tradition of religious incantation. Another stunning ceramic piece by Saudi artist Faisal Samra is shaped like a peaked hat densely inscribed with Arabic letters separately written in the style of amulets meant to ward off evil.

The final section of the exhibition, “Identity, History and Politics,” includes artists who foreground political subjects, even as they continue in the tradition of framing image and words, poetry and writing, as a single entity. In a work where we might ignore the Arabic writing in the background, it is now clear that the word and image are inseparable. For example, Khosrow Hassanzadeh is an Iranian artist who makes large paintings that invoke Persian miniatures in their style. A figure (a self portrait of the artist) kneels against an ornamental background, but texts on his chest and across his head refer to his disillusionment with life. As a child he was forced to fight in the Iran/Iraq war, an eight year war encouraged by the United States (who armed Saddam Hussein), in order to destabilize the region. The poem as translated in the exhibition reads in part “And the act of demolishing becomes a basis for another destruction and each destruction follows a demolition after a construction. And when everything is destroyed, it is only the legend that seems real.” (11)

Artists left to right Laila Shawa Children of war, children of peace, 1995 silkscreen on canvas; Chant Avedissian Umm Kulthum’s greatest hits, 1990s, pigment on recycled board, Sabah Naim Cairo Faces, 2005, painted photograph on canvas and newspaper

An example of Palestinian Laila Shawa’s long term photographic project Walls of Gaza dominates the last room. Two large scale paintings repeat a silk-screened photograph of a little boy who appears to hold a stick that can be a play gun or a play hobby horse. Behind him is bright orange, yellow and pink graffiti that the artist has photographed. The text is illegible, the graffiti in Gaza is routinely spray painted over by Israeli occupiers.

Kareem Risan detail

The most searing images of the entire exhibition for me, though, were two small scaled works by Iraqi artist. Kareem Risan. In the first untitled work, he created a thirty page book in mixed media which has the appearance of a burnt, destroyed book, with orange, black colors, and a hollow center. It has no text. The artist refers here to the burning of the Baghdad library shortly after the United States’ invasion of Iraq. It has horrifying significance because of the deep connection and central position of words, poetry and books in Arab and Persian culture. Risan’s second small book called Uranium Civilization uses dark blood reds and blacks combined with spirals and pyramids to refer to the use of depleted uranium as a cause of illness and death following the first Gulf War.

A book by Maysaloun Faraj, History in Ruins, is made out of ceramic with the two sides tied together with straw. The text is an invocation of God and the question “why.” The surface appears burnt. The work makes reference to the destruction of not only the library, but also thousands of cuneiform tablets that were stolen at the beginning of the occupation. (12)

The exhibition as well as the book that accompanies it, which includes detailed explanations of each work, and a helpful introduction by Venetia Porter, is an invaluable intervention in the usual clichés and stereotypes that dominate Western understanding of the Arab and Persian world. The overall message is straightforward: a belief in poetry, humanity, and reverence as an alternative to materialism, capitalism, and power struggles. The international artists presented here are part of a powerful oppositional force that offers an alternative world view to our cliché media messages.

NOTES:

1. For the complete program visit www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk

2. “I greet you from afar, O greet me back/ O blessed Tigris, river of gardens green/I greet your banks, seeking to quench my thirst. /Like doves between water and clay aflutter seen. /O blessed Tigris, oft have I been forced to leave/to drink from springs which didn’t my thirst relieve./O blessed Tigris, what inflames your heart/inflames me and what grieves you makes me grieve./ O wanderer, play with a gentle touch;/Caress the lute softly and sing again. That you may soothe a volcano seething in rage/And pacify a heart burning with pain” transl by Hussein Hadawi.

3. She commented in a public gallery talk that the definition of “Middle East” was loosely expanded to include artists from countries in North Africa and, at the symposium, stated that the artists preferred national identities, in spite of all the obvious political problems associated with that. Another perspective offered to me by Shiela Blair, author of Islamic Calligraphy, Edinburgh University Press, 2006) was that “Western Asia” would be more accurate.

4. Nasta’liq means “hanging script” based on a dream about flying geese according to legend, popular in India and Iran from the fifteenth century.

5. Rose Issa, Ruyin Pakbaz and Daryusy Shayegan, Iranian Contemporary Art, ( Barbican, 2001) on the Saqqakhaneh school and its use of the reference to the martyrdom of the Prophets grandsons denied water at Karbala in the 7th century, 18,19. The cage may reference a grill to which religious talismans are attached at votive fountains. When pressed for what the work means, the artist declared it meant “nothing”, but in his repetition “nothing” became a philosophical statement.

6. In order to underscore the idea that calligraphy is a living changing tradition, the Museum brought in five artists for a Sunday afternoon program. Professor Fou’ad Kouichi Honda, came all the way from Japan, to demonstrate refined Ottoman based calligraphy which he studied for ten years in Istanbul. Behnam Keryo, an Iraqi living in France, wrote in traditional cuneiform on clay tablets . Mouneer al Shaarani from Syria wrote in traditional North African script, Lassad Metoui Tunisian (living in France) created a large scale work as a contemporary performance.

7. The poem is taken from Muhyi al Din Abu Bakr ibn Muhammad ibn al-‘Arabi

( 1165 – 1240), an influential Sufi master. These words come from a collection of 61 mystical odes. Venetia Porter with contributions by Isabelle Caussé, Word into Art, Artists of the Modern Middle East, British Museum 2006. Venetia Porter, Word into Art, p. 61.

8. Word into Art, 52. Translated by Kabbani 1986.

9. Nada Shabout, “Modern Arab Art and the metamorphosis of the Arabic letter, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at Arlington, 1999.

10. This term is used by Simon Harvey “Smuggling Practices into the Image of Beirut,” Out of Beirut, Oxford Modern Art, Oxford, exh cat, 2006. This exhibition is on until July 16.

11. Venetia Porter, et. al, Word into Art, p. 103 for the entire poem.

12. Maysaloun Faraj, also owns the Aya Gallery in London and organizes exhibitions. Maysaloun Faraj, ed. Strokes of Genius, Contemporary Iraqi Art, 2001 is an invaluable reference on contemporary Iraqi art.

Homage to Palestine

As the news in Gaza gets worse and worse, I am posting some images of contemporary art from Palestine by way of affirming the fact that many people are working hard to keep Palestine culture and history alive.
This is from an installation of Palestinian art in an exhibition called Made in Palestine
The work in the foreground is by Mary Tuma
Home for the Disembodied 2000
In the background left to right are
John Halaka
Stripped of their Identity and Driven from their land from the series Forgotten Survivors 1997-2003
Samia Halaby Palestine from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River and
Rula Halawani Negative Incursions2002

The exhibition was organized in 2002 in Houston and was shown in New York City in 2006.

Memorial Day

Memorial Day 2007
We can remember it for the dreadful passageof yet another appropriations bill by the spineless Congress.- 98 Billion to continue the war, to continue to provide “military training for the Iraqis to defend themselves” and to “support out trips.” In other words to pour more money into the hands of the corporations and to escalate the conflict in Iraq.

I am offering here three images as a protest. First, the ephemeral sculpture by Mike Magrath placed in Occidental Square last fall on the anniversay of 9/11. It was based on a photograph of an Iraqi man with the dead body of his son in hisarms. The sculpture is made of salt and intended to gradually disappear, just as our sense of death of Iraqis barely registers. Beneath the sculpture sleeps a homeless man, victim of the same corrosive forces of greed capitalism, that are the reasons for war and the excuse for the government to de-fund even our minimal social services.

At the time of the installation of this sculpture
(one of several) a Butoh performance brought to life the sense of struggle, oppression, and survival of the marginal others of our society. They poured sand around a second statue of a young prisoner with his hands bound behind his back and gestured to a third young boy awaiting his fate.

Online vs in the street a debate on activism

I am having an ongoing debate with my thirty something daughter about street activism vs internet activism. I tend to dismiss people who just sit at computers all day as not “real” activists”.

She claims that “internet activism is *equally* important, and that if you focus more time on one type of activism but not the other, that doesn’t mean you aren’t an activist. In other words, just as people who only go to protest marches but never use the internet can still be activists, so can people who are active in internet communities but don’t go to rallies.”Her example is that the Gonzales scandal is a result of internet activism at salon.com and Talking Points Memo http://talkingpointsmemo.com/

I think that people with signs in the streets, and especially with brilliant street art, is still best way to get our message out. It is also exciting, stimulating, and makes anyone who participates feel better. She feels street protests are claustrophobic and finds anti war demonstrations depressing.

I participated in A28 action last weekend, all over the country people wrote out impeach, passed out signs, and banners, etc. It was huge, and we all felt connected, even though we are also an online community. It will live in in both cyber and reality.
I say you have to have BOTH.

Iraq in Fragments and Orientalism

Independent films can be racist without realizing it, much like racism in a place like Seattle in general. The film Iraq in Fragments, made by Seattle filmmaker James Langley presents a classic liberal view of a racialized, impoverished, fanatic, backward, “other.” The focus on impoverished “primitive” families reinforces prejudice about life outside the United States and the need to “save” people with “democracy,” a thinly disguised translation of the manifest destiny of the nineteenth century. It is discouraging that this film has been so widely celebrated. Its nomination for best documentary demonstrates that the entire film industry is oblivious to its own Orientalism, and ignorant of the realities of the fact that Iraq was a modern country before we got there.

The fact that the well meaning and courageous Langley uses the voices of young boys and old men almost exclusively, underscores his paternalism toward the poor communities to which he turned his lens. An outtake from the film, a section that focused on a young mother and her sick child, equally emphasized impoverished living. The setting of impoverishment against stunningly photographed landscapes is a tourist perspective, much like the imagery that comes with requests for funding from many well meaning agencies.

What a film like this doesn’t tell us is that many Iraqis are well educated and accomplished professionals, with one of the best medical and educational systems in the Middle East. Legally, women had more rights than in most countries in the Middle East. It was a secular country.

We have destroyed that. Most of the middle class, artists, writers, poets, playwrights, dancers, singers, doctors, teachers, lawyers, dentists, have been forced to leave ( mostly since 2006, when Langley made his film, they were still there). Women have been prevented from working and forced to cover themselves and leave the house only with men, while living in fear of being killed (for that transformation see Baghdad Burning blog, the author of which has just announced that she must also leave ( April 26). The clerics are controlling women’s morality and legal decisions after decades of secular law. Now the only people left fan the flames . The isolated puppet government has no support to resist signing the oil law that gives away all the resources to multinationals. Then Bush can declare a victory and leave.

The “fragments” of Iraq, the three part approach presented in the film, also is a hallucination of American foreign policy. We have created the Civil War through our selective backing and training and arming of various fundamentalist militias. Before us there was one country of Iraqis, who were a peaceful people.

Artists Against the War

Artists against the War, New York City in collaboration with other groups, handed out a petition for impeachment and supporting documents. It was designed as a tabloid newspaper and delivered to every congressional office.

This is a brilliant direct action in the halls of power as Congress is wimpering and whining and unable to really take a stand, except with a feeble bill that they basically invited Bush to veto.

AAWNYC/ART (Activist Response Team) also did a stunning banner drop with the section of the contitution about impeachment in the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building .

They are potent artist activists. Images of their actions are available through their website http://www.aawnyc.org

The sophistication of the visual images designed by artists makes a huge difference in their effectiveness. It also demonstrates their courage and determination to great rid of this President who is ruining Iraq and our own country as well. The soomer artists join the activist camp, the better, we cannot afford the luxury to follow our own private paths anymore.