Protest art
Wikipedia
Protest art refers to the signs, banners, and any other form of creative expression used by activists to convey a particular cause or message. It is a visual action taken by social activists to make a point clear. Protest art is also used with the intention to promote counter-thinking about the fabric of society itself. Often such art is used as part of demonstrations or acts of civil disobedience. Some key icons in protest art have been the dove, the peace symbol, and taunting messages.
Protest art relies on people's understanding of the symbols used in the art. Without understanding the piece is useless.
While some protest art is associated with trained and professional artists, an extensive knowledge in art is not required to take part in protest art. The most important part of protest art is element of social activism. Therefore, protest art requires most importantly a cause or an issue. Protest art can take on the form of a simple sign displaying a social message of displeasure or a large banner expressing discontent with something in particular or in general.
Oftentimes protest artists bypass the "artworld institutions and commercial gallery system" in an attempt to reach a wider audience through means that are most accessible to them. Instead of creating social activist art and displaying them only in art galleries where access is restricted to the "economically privileged", protest artists are trying to ensure their message reaches the most amount of people. Furthermore, protest art is not limited to one region or country but is rather a social activism method that is used around the world. For example, artists in South Africa during the 1990s created art using a range of mediums that explored memories of an integrated community that was once the heart of Cape Town.
There are many politically-charged pieces of fine art - such as Picasso's Guernica, some of Norman Carlberg's Vietnam-era work, or Susan Crile's images of torture at Abu Ghraib - which could perhaps be termed "protest art", except that they lack the easy portability and disposability often associated with protest art.
History
It is difficult to establish a history for protest art because many variations of it can be found throughout history. While many cases of protest art can be found during the early 1900s, like Picasso's Gyernica painting in 1937, the last thrity years has experienced are large increase in the number of artists adopting protest art as a style to relay a message to the public.
A piece of protest art parodying the logo of the NBA.As awarness of social justices around the world became more common among the public, an increase in protest art can be seen. Some of the most critically effective artworks of the reccent period were staged outside the gallery, away from the museum and in that sense, protest art has found a different relationship to the public.
Resistance art
Resistance art has long been a term used to describe those that use art as a way of showing their opposition to powerholders. The term has been used to define art that opposed such powers as the Greman Nazi party, and the Bolshevik Revolution. The term most recently has been applied to artists opposed to apartheid in South Africa. South African resistance artists are sometimes derogatorily referred to as "township" artists, referring to the subdivisions that black citizens were forced to live in. Willie Bester is one of South Africa's most well known artists who originally began as a resistance artist. Using materials assembled from garbage, Bester builds up surfaces into relief and then paints the surface with oil paint. His works commented on important black South African figures and aspects important to his community. South African resistance artists do not exclusively deal with race nor do they have to be from the townships. Another artist, Jane Alexander, has dealt with the atrocities of apartheid from a white perspective. Her resistance art deals with the unhealthy society that continues in post-apartheid South Africa.
CHADORS AND GRAFFITI, EU FLAGS AND ICONIC BODIES: FOUR CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ARTISTS
By Maria Petrides
‘Work grounded in protest -against fascism, moral hypocrisy, the Vietnam War, and so on -is the closest thing we have to an art that zeroes in on a crisis of public conscience and attempts to provoke viewers to think about their own relationship to a social upheaval close at hand.”1
Contemporary art stretches beyond the boundaries of an individual medium and of a single national border. With this encouragement of diversity, fluidity and mobility, art becomes a form of social empowerment by the very surrender of singularity. Reviewing the work of four artists -the Turkish-Cypriot fashion designer and installation/video artist Hussein Chalayan; the British graffiti artist known as Banksy; the New York installation artist Spencer Tunick; and the New York-based multimedia artist Anna Lascari -this piece of commentary aims to show how, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, certain art expresses its resistance through various media: whether it be social or political resistance, or resistance to any type of ‘conformity’ which may restrict the potential found in mobility and hybridity.
Hussein Chalayan’s oeuvre crosses the boundaries of fashion into sculpture, furniture objects into architecture. If one of the literary concerns of the nineteenth century2 was the ‘form’ and ‘content’ divide in literature, complicating the process of ‘content’ as it develops into ‘form’, and locating how ‘form’ becomes an expression of emerging ‘contents’ and ideas, we may find that our century is not necessarily free of this separation.
In 1891, Oscar Wilde writes in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’,
Form and substance cannot be separated in a work of art; they are always one […]. Style recognizes the beauty of the material it employs, be that material one of words or of bronze, of colour or of ivory, and uses that beauty as a factor in producing the aesthetic effect […]. The subject is conditioned by the temperament of the artist, and comes directly out of it.3
The materials of the creator, whether it be paint, objects, words or ideas, are, innately, forms that the artist chooses because of the potential s/he attributes to them. In this way, content and form are indissoluble. On the inseparability of form and idea, Gustave Flaubert writes,
“It is impossible to extract from a physical body the qualities which really constitute it colour, extension, and the like – without reducing it to a hollow abstraction, in a word, without destroying it; just so it is impossible to detach the form from the idea, for the idea only exists by virtue of the form.”4
If Flaubert makes a distinction between the two, it is to esteem form over content since, for Flaubert, content, the idea, needs to be exhibited in a given form. Nonetheless, these terms return to remind us that, perhaps, we aren’t always ready to think that they are one and the same in different ways. The fashion editor of Time5 magazine, Lauren Goldstein, describes Chalayan’s work as being more about ‘substance’ than ‘style’, emphasizing an existing angst to subordinate ‘surface/style/form’ to a ‘predecessor’ ‘depth/substance/content’. But perhaps Chalayan’s aesthetic forms, which are often informed by science, technology, and architectural theories, generate thought and provoke political complacency by the very means within their end: style. What is style, if not the coating, the ‘finish’ of an idea materialized?
Just as Chalayan’s works transcend genre and, the ‘form’ and ‘content’ divide, they also undermine the viewer’s expectations, as does, for example, his terrific runway piece (2002-3) in which naked, and what look like Western, models are wearing the Muslim chador, only not in a traditional manner.6 One is entirely naked, wearing only what looks like a leather harness over her face. Her eyes are visible. Another model is wearing half a chador, which covers her as far as her stomach. An artist with a social conscience, this image might be read as, arguably, making some commentary on the different stages of traditional wear, as some have suggested. In response to these interpretations, Chalayan describes the particular show as one that poses questions about defining territory.7 Raised in Cyprus, a divided island between Muslim Turks and Christian Greeks, his work often engages with issues of ‘stability’ and ‘permanency’: what often keeps us enslaved to a history of enmity and subordination, material dependency and self-righteousness? As Chalayan himself remarks:
“What [inspires] me [is] the way our lives are in a constant state of mobility, and how, in some ways, that could affect memory, could affect our attachment to domestic things. What would new comfort zones be in those kinds of situations? You know, it’s this whole idea of creating a refuge wherever you are. It’s quite abstract, in a way it’s a bit like meditating on solitude, maybe a bit about nostalgia, how we reminisce, creating a place within a cavity [my emphasis], all these kinds of ideas.”8
Chalayan’s use of the word cavity as a metaphor is an important one. It suggests that there is no going back to roots or origins once one becomes aware that there is no ‘stable’ place to which to return; rather, one can hope to find comfort zones, which are mobile, even if they produce some degree of uneasiness. The idea is to create a place within a cavity which may be hollow but doesn’t necessarily remain so since this crater can be filled in with memories and images, hence a sweet nostalgia of a unified past that relieves us from the weight of a stagnant history of division. The actual refuge, which for Chalayan is transient, can be found in a transformed and transforming gap. His Living Room collection (2000) demonstrates this continuous and rapid change, which prevents one from becoming attached to any particular image. Sculptural dresses convert into tables, which then transform into suitcases, offering us a wealth of images generated in the process of transitioning. His images cannot be arrested long enough to become possessions. They are shifters of shapes and forms, content and concept.
In a parallel way, Banksy’s artistic interventions are examples of several kinds of confrontations. When Banksy smuggles, humorously, into the Brooklyn Museum an altered reproduction of a 2 foot by 1.5 foot oil painting of a colonial-era admiral, holding a can of graffiti spray paint on a background of anti-war character,9 he is doing more than deprecating the elitist hierarchy of ‘high art’ still thriving in our contemporary art world. The material activity that goes into the performance of an artist who takes on the authority to shift boundaries that define what can be placed in a museum, is itself a form of socio-political resistance; a dauntless act. Banksy’s intervention is a political operation that removes an historical past of colonial imposition only to re-place it into an existing context, equally imposing, in order to comment on our present state of political affairs. In March 2005, Banksy hung in the American Museum of Natural History, a glass-encased beetle with fighter jet-wings and missiles attached to its body: what might be taken for granted to be a harmless insect, appears, here, as military, thus calamitous.
In August 2005, Banksy succumbed to the temptation to paint on the 8 to 10-metre high and 451-mile-long dehumanizing concrete wall of Israel,10 which cuts through the West Bank, severing the water resources, agriculture, and infrastructure of 6.5 million Palestinian refugees.11 Banksy himself has described the wall as ‘essentially turn[ing] Palestine into the world’s largest open prison.’12 On the wall, Banksy paints a hole shaped as though an explosive has gone through it. Through the outlet of this hole we can see a peaceful beach; however, the children, presumably Palestinian, are outside the hole, thus on the side of the wall which allows them to enjoy the pleasures of innocence simply as an imaginary oasis.13 Another intervention illustrates a girl holding a bunch of balloons blowing into an imaginary sky of freedom.14 In spite of the serenity Banksy’s graffiti evokes, one Palestinian was offended by this mediation, arguing that it ‘makes the wall look beautiful when we don’t want it to, we hate this wall.’15 Yet the art on the wall offers no illusion of beautifying what is monstrous, or of altering what lies behind it: a bulk of crime and ruthless oppression.16 By portraying the children outside the haven, we are reminded of the real conditions behind the wall that keep Palestinians confined, therefore we are aware that Banksy’s intervention provides an imagined escape from domination without altering our perception of the destruction the wall is causing. On the contrary, Banksy offers art in a prison where persecuted Palestinians17 do not have the luxury of freedom to enjoy it due to the daily setting under which they have to live. Part of this gesture, however, is to bring art to a place where the drive to create it is inhibited, and in so doing to render it accessible even under the conditions of, arguably, one of history’s cruelest crimes. The practice of making art accessible to all, and not confining it to museum and gallery spaces, as such creates a networking of improvisation and facilitates a conceptualization of the artist that depends on the innovative collaboration of the model/viewer/participant for its materialization.
Since 1992, Spencer Tunick has become an icon for his remarkable naked body installations, loosely orchestrated by himself without, however, locking volunteers into a rigorous posing. Tunick’s photographs document the real event as it unfolds. He situates thousands of ordinary bodies in public spaces, creating various forms and images on bridges and highways, on piers, and outside museum spaces.18 Not only does he transform landscapes by bringing to them human life in different colours, shapes, sizes and expressions, but he surprises us by subverting our preconceptions of nudity in photography. The naked individual who poses, quite stylishly, in a ‘private’ space, is replaced by a crowd of naked bodies, crossing the boundaries of race, ethnicity and gender. The ordinary becomes the exceptional. In this traversing of difference, Tunick makes equality visible.
The request to close off a bridge is usually reserved for emergency purposes, e.g. the proceeding of some official figure, or an authorized warning of a ‘terrorist’ threat. Yet Tunick often has large public spaces evacuated to photograph his installations. Since 1992, Tunick has been arrested five times by the authorities for endorsing ethical matters to do with exhibiting nudity in public spaces. He fought a long battle with former mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, for the right to photograph naked people on the streets. The Supreme Court ruled that his work was protected by the first amendment.19 But Tunick’s work is not only confrontational for its nude content. It publicizes what has long been reserved as a ‘private’ icon: the naked body, and does so by transforming it from the exclusiveness of individuality into a parade of social resistance. In July 2005, Tunick gathered 1,700 naked people, who went on to march, as in a protest, between the Tyne and Millennium bridges on the Newcastle quayside. These marches of the nude send an underlying message, namely, as citizens of the US these volunteers will continue to exercise their right to be photographed nude in authorized public spaces. This is the citizen’s right to her/his freedom of expression protected under the first amendment. This protest of the nude has the vigor of any demonstration in its capacity to show how plurality, whether in terms of bodies, genders, ethnicities, or national identities, is an effective means for changing a society’s status quo.
Gender, ethnic, political and social inclusiveness are fundamental elements in all these artists’ works. Anna Lascari’s latest computer-based interactive installation, Random Identity Forum (RIF), appears in the form of an entertaining video game, almost: ‘design your own flag; create a new European Union’. One enters Lascari’s website20 to find a black background with instructions on how to play. An interactive forum, RIF is a place where one can cast a visual vote based on one’s political and inter/national beliefs. The participant has the option to compose a new flag based on the 25 existing EU member countries. By choosing however high a percentage of whichever flag one chooses to preserve, the interactive voter creates a new flag, which can then be distributed to other fellow voters, or printed as a document. On the page ‘How to Play’, the artist has the following quotation posted from the official EU website Europa: ‘The idea of a citizens’ Europe is very new. Making it a reality will mean, among other things, rallying popular support for symbols that represent a shared European identity’ [my emphasis]. Indeed, RIF is an invitation to all citizens of the 25 member states to create a vision of another European Union. During an age of increasing disaffection with Western politics and leaders, people are inclined to want to take more power into their own hands.21 If the flag of the European Union – a circle of 12 golden stars on a blue background – has symbolic value, Lascari’s forum offers a space in which we can replace the existing symbol with multi-colours, creating different patterns according to our vision. But aesthetics and politics are not separate entities,22 and RIF does not seem to be advocating this either. Quite the contrary, it is through a political art that Lascari might be proposing a revisable EU, perhaps an EU whose symbolic consequence is found in a hybrid of identities and not a union comprised of countries with a definite distinctiveness under the auspice of a unilateral coalition.
Lascari’s project is powerful for the commentary it makes on the continuous issues which arises with the EU’s efforts to arrive at an influential position in world politics. However, it is the way in which the commentary is made that allows RIF to enthrall the viewer. Irony is a clever way by which to invert our expectations, and RIF does this successfully. We are invited into a meeting area to think about and modify the identities to be represented in a new EU flag, and the way to do this is by no means to do it randomly, as the title of the work ironically suggests. If neither the percentages of identities that the participant is invited to form nor the identity of the EU are arbitrarily selected, then the implication might be that what appears to be indecipherable in the final composition of a flag is, in fact, the result of a calculated proposition. If the EU takes itself too seriously during a time when there does not seem to be any current political force powerful enough to oppose US, and to a lesser extent, British imperialism, then RIF opens us up to this incongruous rivalry, by putting us, the masses, in the ranks of the EU. In other words, RIF challenges us to imagine ourselves, the citizens of the world, as the ‘Other Superpower’,23 while reminding us that as ‘players’ in the forum of RIF, we might, like the EU, be amusing ourselves by aspiring to contend with a mismatch – the US and its coalition.
It is in different ways, as I hope I have shown, that each artist expresses his/her subversive aesthetic and political dissidence. In a world of opportunistic leaders who, for the sake of financial advantage and regional supremacy have no reservations about manufacturing a myth to do with Weapons of Mass Destruction, costing hundreds of thousands lives of Iraqis while wreaking havoc in their country, one of the few tools that empowers people is resistance, and art is a means to make it visible. Our world of political art, technology, and multi-media, is revolutionary for making art more visible and accessible to anyone connected with Our-New-World-Without-Borders, and we, the People and Creators, have the power to defy any curtailing of our civil rights and censorship by expressing our resistance and persistently supporting the democratic proliferation of this innovative art.
© Maria Petrides, 2006
PhD Final, French
Bibliography
Cameron, Dan, Doris Salcedo, 'Inconsolable', New Museum of Contemporary Art, (New York: 1998).
Flaubert, Gustave. Oeuvre Complètes, Correspondance, vols. II-VIII, passim. Louis Conard, (1926-1933).
Kennedy, Helena, Renewal, ‘People and Government, After 5 May, the divorce proceedings continue’ in Volume 13, (No 2/3: 2005).
Menkes, Suzy, International Herald Tribune ‘The new sobriety: Covering up the body’, (28 February 2006).
Pappe, Ilan, Logos, ‘The Truth about Palestine’, Volume three – Issue one: (2004).
Pater, Walter, Appreciations, ‘Style’, (Macmillan and Co. 1889).
Qumsiyeh, Mazin B., Sharing the Land of Canaan, (Pluto Press, 2004).
Rancière Jacques, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, (Continuum International Publishing
Group, 2004).
Schell, Jonathan, The Nation, ‘The World’s Other Superpower’, (14 April 2003).
Wilde, Oscar, Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, (Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1997).
Wolfe, Katherine, Contemporary Aesthetics, ‘From Aesthetics to Politics: Rancière, Kant and Deleuze’, Volume 4 (2006).
Comments
1 Dan Cameron, 'Inconsolable' in Doris Salcedo, p.9 (Dan Cameron is senior curator of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and contributor to the magazine Art Forum).
2 Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and Gustave Flaubert are examples of several writers of aestheticism who began to emphasize the importance of style and aesthetics in literature, complicating notions about finding ‘meaning’ merely in the subject of a text. For more on this see Pater’s Appreciations, Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Flaubert’s work ‘On Realism’ in Oeuvres Complètes, Correspondance, p.90-95.
3 In Collected Works, p. 911.
4 Selected from Walter Pater’s ‘Style’, in Appreciations, p. 28.
5 Icon (December 2003), www.iconmagazine.co.uk/issues/december/hussein.htm.
6 This image can be found at http://www.we-make-moneynot-art.com/archives/007197.php.
7 See the article ‘The new sobriety: Covering up the body’, by Suzy Menkes.
8 Icon (December 2003), www.iconmagazine.co.uk/issues/december/hussein.htm.
9 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3447352403626976278
10 Mazin B. Qumsiyeh talks about the physical and psychological apartheid implemented by Israel, and its effects on the Palestinian people. He says, ‘unlike the physical apartheid constructed unilaterally, psychological apartheid has walls constructed from both sides. These shield people from the reality of the other side and also prevent introspection on their own shortcomings. […] A sense of hopelessness and desperation leaves many looking for “crumbs” of both material and psychological “food”’ (p.210-211). For more on how Israel is continuously violating several of the articles of The Fourth Geneva Convention refer to Mazin B. Qumsiyeh’s Sharing the Land of Canaan. Mazin B. Qumsiyeh is a human rights activist and co-founder of the Palestine Right to Return Coalition, and Academics for Justice, among other grass-roots groups.
11 Land Research Centre & Applied Research Institute – Jerusalem.
12 Guardian Unlimited, http://arts.guardian.co.uk/gallery/0,8542,1543331,00.html.
13 This image can be found at http://www.banksy.co.uk/outdoors/palestine/index.html# in the top right-hand corner of the gallery.
14 Guardian Unlimited,http://arts.guardian.co.uk/gallery/0,,1543331,00.html.
15 Guardian Unlimited,http://arts.guardian.co.uk/gallery/0,8542,1543331,00.html.
16 On 9 July 2004, the International Court of Justice issued itsdecision on the Israeli wall. The Court’s ruling expressed the following. ‘The wall is illegal. Israel must dismantle it, and pay compensation to Palestinians who have suffered financial or property losses as a result of its construction. No state should recognize the barrier as legitimate. The UN should act to implement the Court’s decision’. We have yet to see the UN execute this decision. For more on this visit the Global Policy Forum at http://www.globalpolicy.org/wldcourt/icj/2004/0727utmost.htm.
17 During an interview on the question of Palestine, the Israeli historian and Palestinian activist Ilan Pappe, says:
“The situation has only become worse in the last four years. There are several spheres of brutality that should be mentioned: the collective punishment, the abuse of thousands of detainees and political prisoners, the transfer of people, the economic devastation, the slaying of innocent citizens and the daily harassment at checkpoints.” For more see the journal Logos (Winter 2004).
18 To see more of Tunick’s images visit I-20 at http://www.i20.com/artist.php?artist_id=19.
19 The Guardian, National News (18 July 2005)
20 www.annalascari.net/RIF. For the Username enter rif; For the Password enter random.
21 In ‘People and Government, After 5 May, the divorce proceedings continue’, Helena Kennedy talks about the British people’s disengagement from political life during the last General Elections. She found that across the established, postindustrial democracies and in Britain, disengagement has four features in common: a. a declining outlet at elections. b. a declining membership of and allegiance to established political parties: A crossnational study found identification with a political party had dropped across the advanced democracies but this represented a particularly sharp fall for Britain. c. increased levels of distrust and contempt towards politicians. d. the rise of political activity conducted outside formal democratic mechanisms. According to Kennedy, ‘one of the conditions behind disengagement is that people have been led to a much greater expectation that one should take decisions on one’s own behalf rather than delegate them elsewhere.’ pp. 32-35. Helena Kennedy is a QC, Labour peer and Chair of the Power Inquiry, an independent inquiry into Britain’s democracy.
22 On the relationship between art and politics, Jacques Rancière argues: ‘[Art] is political as its own practices shape forms of visibility that reframe the way in which practices, manners of being and modes of feeling and saying are interwoven in a commonsense, which means a "sense of the common" embodied in a common sensorium’ (p, 1-2). For more see The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Further reading includes Katherine Wolfe’s article ‘From Aesthetics to Politics: Rancière, Kant and Deleuze’ found in
the journal Contemporary Aesthetics, volume 4.
23 On 15 and 16 February 2003, just days after the US invaded Iraq, the world witnessed the biggest demonstration since the Vietnam War, gathering between 6 and 10 million protestors worldwide. Many, including Jonathan Schell, a contributor of The Nation and author of The Unconquerable World, called this extraordinary antiwar movement, ‘the Other Superpower’, as an indication of world public opinion. For more see The Nation issue of 14 April 2003.
Drawing More Than Resistance, The Artist and His Voice
By Anne Bacon, May 2002
Sf-frontlines.com
“My posters are a form of self-defense. . . The corporations want artists to glorify their wars, their products, and their philosophies. I make art for my own self-preservation. The prints displayed here are not inspired by rugged individualism, but by collective humor, defiance, and lust for life exhibited by those on the margins.” -Doug Minkler
On Saturday, a few weeks back, I walked towards Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley from my Oakland home to meet with Doug Minkler. Mutual friends had arranged the meeting, and all that I knew of him was gray hair and political cartoons on the sidewalk outside of Cody's. What I found, as you'll guess, was something altogether different.
Lining the sidewalk, on easel edges, propped against chairs, and spread on tables were posters and screen prints that challenged my entire conception of political cartoons. The images on the posters shocked me from six feet away with their abstract boldness, their resistance to recognizable form and contour, and by the fearless messages printed explicitly on or below each image.
Visual images are among the most powerful of the arts in their ability to express a particular idea. However, most (especially those which venture into abstract realms) often risk misinterpretation of the intended message. This is especially true with political art, as it often deals with controversial and complex ideas, most of which are not a part of the collective conscience. Some artists accept this risk and leave each viewer to interact with the pieces in a manner appropriate to her/his experience.
This is not Doug Minkler’s approach. He is not interested in his images being represented as mere "self-expression of an internal landscape." For him, art is a natural means of expressing outrage and identifying injustice. This is why each image is accompanied by text explaining its meaning.
The images that Minkler chooses are informed by the experience of being raised in a working class family in Berkeley's university community, as well as the experience of coming of age during the Vietnam war. Minkler learned quickly about the nature of the class system, forming a class identification at a young age. In the 60's and 70's, he became a part of the culture of resistance, characterized by the "uniting force" (a conspicuously absent characteristic, Minkler suggests, of today's activists and intellectuals) of opposition to authority.
His early days found Minkler dodging induction into what he considered an unjust war by leaving the country, briefly studying sculpture, and raising, with his beautiful partner, seven children spanning almost four decades. It was here, finding himself working 50-60 hour weeks in the industrial world, and working to hold back the forces of republican conservatism by attending union meetings, that Minkler realized: It isn't enough.
Screen-printing proved itself to be the most natural way to use his art to address social injustices and the issues of his class. He determined that sculpture required too great a time investment, and the finished product would either occupy a private space in a wealthy patron's garden or vie for a single censored public space along with two hundred other sculptures. The prints were an obvious means of mass producing an illustration while maintaining ownership of the means of production, thus guaranteeing control of content and assuring that his work was seen by the broadest possible audience. Minkler began printing out of his garage in 1979, and continues to do so. Gathering his supplies from industrial discard piles, he also traded labor for supplies at a silk-screen supply house.
Minkler's images combine the most shocking aspects of abstraction, an absurd cartoonishness and obvious fearlessness, comparable in their shock value to the work of Seth Tobocman, comic book artist and author of You Don't Have to Fuck People Over to Survive. Because of his commitment to conveying this political message exactly as intended, the text makes each poster humbling and almost always controversial.
Minkler's images are shaping and reshaping. They speak well enough for themselves. Go see them outside of Cody's where Minkler has displayed them almost every weekend for the past six years. He does have grayish hair, as it turns out, so look for him there, and bring time enough to spend with the images to absorb their fearlessness and their truth. Bring your wallet too, (the artist must eat).
Drawing Resistance
The Drawing Resistance political art show is drawing more than resistance. It is drawing crowds, drawing communities of artists together, and it is drawing a curious, yet familiar controversy.
The 2-dimensional art show began its five-year tour around North America in September of 2001, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, home to one of the shows two curators, Sue Simensky Bietila. Bietila and co-curator Nicolas Lampert gathered the artwork from friends and fellow artists across the country. As the tour has no funding, it relies solely upon communities, traveling like a d.i.y. punk band from city to city in vans and trucks.
The only consistent characteristic is the artwork itself, covering every topic from the Zapatista liberation movement to corporate hegemony, and homelessness. Bietila and Lampert remark that "the need for a show of this nature arose out of the separation of art and politics in US culture. . . . Political art has historically been stereotyped as technically substandard or dogmatic propaganda. The show works to negate these myths and present a visually exciting show . . . (It also works) to build a community of political artists and be a source of inspiration."
And this is exactly what the show has done. In Milwaukee, as well as the subsequent tour cities of Chicago and New York City, the show attracted large and diverse crowds. In each of these cities, as anticipated in those to come, local artist communities have arranged other events to coincide with the showing: slide shows, music, festivals, readings, etc.
The artwork reflects the lives, politics and experiences of 31 artists ranging in age from their early 20's to their 80's. Among the local artists whose work is displayed is Doug Minkler, the screen print artist from Berkeley. From Oakland, local artist Emily Abendroth's work can be seen. And from San Francisco Eric Drooker, who works with scratchboard; Freddie Baer, a collage artist; and Winston Smith and John Yates, who designed album cover art for the Dead Kennedys. Other artists such as Seth Tobocman and Peter Kuper, (World War 3 Illustrated), from NYC and Carlos Cortez, best known for his posters for the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) also display one or several pieces of work.
For the most part, the Drawing Resistance show has created a safe space for these artists. In Chicago, unfortunately, the show drew some controversy when Mike James, co-owner of the Heartland Cafe took down Doug Minkler's "Stop US Aid to Israel" screen print.
The poster was replaced within a week, but the social and political implications of the censorship of one print amongst an entire show of radical political art are enormous. One is left to wonder whether certain mechanisms need to be implemented in the future to prevent such censorship. But, due to the nature of the show, Bietila and Lampert have decided to leave this responsibility in the hands of individual communities.
Galleries showing solo shows of Minkler’s work have previously objected to the same piece.Minkler refuses to be censored. If a venue asks him to take down this print, the entire show comes down. And the entire show has come down several times. After all, "Art is not a mirror to hold up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it." [Bertolt Brecht]
It will be in San Francisco and the Bay Area in April and May of 2004, but don't worry about marking your calendars now, you'll hear it coming. If Minkler’s piece is not there, be sure you let the owners of the venue and the curators of the show know what you think of censorship. In the meantime, check out www.drawingresistance.org to find out more about the artists and the journey of their art across North America. And tell your friends. The show will be in their city too.
Jack Persekian / south ... east ... mediterranean... europe
Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Centre, January 01, 2004
platformgaranti.blogspot.com
Between December 14 and 16, Platform organized south ... east ... mediterranean... europe, a conference and conversation series. The project was within the context of "In The Cities of the Balkans", the 2nd part of "The Balkans Trilogy", a project initiated by Kunsthalle Fridericianum, with writers, critics, curators and artists from Sofia, Skopje, Jerusalem, Cairo, Belgrade, Beirut, Zagreb, Istanbul, Tirana, Pristine, and Sarajevo. The meeting focused upon rethinking artistic production, cultural geography and possible future collaborations in South-East Europe and the South-East Mediterranean, otherwise known as the Balkans and the Middle East.The participants were, Rene Block, Natasa Iliç, Vasif Kortun, Suzana Milevska, Jack Persekian, Shkelzen Maliqi, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Eleni Laperi Koci, Migjen Kelmendi, Lejla Hodzic, Christine Tohme, Mai Abdu ElDahab, Katerina Gregos, and Boris Buden.
It was funded by Förderung aus Mitteln der Kulturstiftung des Bundes and organized in collaboration with Kunsthalle Fridericianum Kassel.
History
In 1948 the State of Israel was established on land that was formerly Palestine, and approximately half the Palestinian population were driven into exile, where they still reside in the Diaspora, outside the former boundaries of Palestine. “The other half live in what became of Palestine which is known as the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Israel. This geographical reality has meant that the work of Palestinian artists begins from varied locations, from the city centers of Europe and the States to the various refugee camps, and is formed by different experiences, education, backgrounds and opportunities.”[1]
The history of Palestinian art may be divided into three phases according to Kamal Boullata [2], one of the leading Palestinian artists and art historians. In the first phase (1885-1955), - the period mainly prior to 1948 which also came to be known as the year of the Nakba, the Catastrophe - icon painting was developed as one of the country’s earliest traditions of picture making. Yet the possibility of an indigenous art was aborted as a result of the uprootedness and dispersion of the Palestinian society. The two decades after Palestine’s fall (the second phase) were characterized by radical political and cultural changes in the Arab World. The visual arts enjoyed an unprecedented presence in the cultural arena, which had traditionally been dominated by the oral arts. Pioneers, mainly raised among the refugee population, forged a new Palestinian art, making their debut in Beirut which became the region’s cosmopolitan art center.
Revival
The third phase is marked by the 1967 war which led to the displacement of many Palestinians and where entire segments of the population fell under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. This region turned into a cultural ghetto. Insulated from the Arab world, a new generation of artists emerged. They came from Christian, Muslim, Druze and self-proclaimed aetheists’ backgrounds. Some received academic training; others remained self-taught.
These young Palestinians had been greatly disappointed by the defeat of the Arab armies and hence decided to take up the struggle themselves by all available means. Wherever they lived, these emerging artists sought to articulate their personal predicament in relation to the collective dream of regaining their homeland. Under military occupation exhibitions constituted a new form of political resistance. Since art was a means for expressing collective identity, Israeli authorities began to impose military censorship on all exhibitions and art activities. Even the combined use of the four colours that made up the Palestinian flag was banned, and an attempt to establish a local gallery in 1979 was aborted.
This was an important revival of the arts with an emphasis on addressing the political issues and the plight of the Palestinian people. This revival brought about innovation and creativity on the one hand, yet restricted the scope of that creativity on the other, and limited the horizon of imagination. It actually put restrictions on what’s do-able and what’s not; that it is politically motivated is desirable, and apolitical forms of expression are not supported.
Politics
As most of the cultural production was encouraged to stand in the face of the overwhelming power of the Israeli occupation - which was tearing at the very fabric of the Palestinian society, trying with all its might to deny the mere existence of the Palestinians – and to give proof to and ascertain the existence of the Palestinian identity and people in Palestine long before the establishment of Israel and the emergence of the Zionist dream, a P.R. machine was put in motion fed by the sprawling popularity of the ever expanding political factions and the enthusiasm of the young generation to be part of the liberation movement of Palestine. This P.R. machine needed cadre, and as there were so many factions operating in the field, they all had to be represented. Hence, the cultural production’s relevance was gaged against its popularity and outreach, not against its intrinsic creativity and artistic merit. To a large extent numbers mattered and political affiliations dictated the choices and preferences, and those who made it had to master, first and foremost, how to play the political game.
Size matters
In those heydays of the PLO (the Seventies) Palestinian artists found great support and enjoyed a whole lot of possibilities for exhibiting and travel. They would be invited to participate in all sorts of solidarity affiliated events, exhibiting in the corridors of the United Nations and other conference and meeting halls, presenting their work and representing Palestine and its culture and people. Yet, as most of these events were held on shoestring budgets, artists were requested to literally carry their art with them; for packaging, shipping, handling and insurance was no way to be covered. Hence, this size constraint was somehow internalized by the artists and with time not only limited the dimensions of the artwork produced but also the medium and material utilized in its production.
From another perspective, which is understood in almost every other way I tried to put it in this text, there is absolutely no serious public money for art in Palestine. Hence, artists try in most cases to fulfill demand rather than initiate supply. The most accessible market for these artists is the upper-middle and the upper classes who would want to decorate their homes with artworks which match their living room colours. This has reduced the scope of production to two-dimensional works and almost done away with sculpture, not to mention art in public places.
Public Art
When thinking about public art and its state in Palestine, trying to exercise some comparative aesthetics with other places in the world, it becomes very evident that we are dealing with incompatible situations, circumstances and contexts. These are nowhere close to normal conditions that we have to deal with in Palestine. The perpetual state of occupation, humiliation and destruction has pushed the Palestinian people beyond the limits of forbearance, and it was only but natural for people to take to the streets and start the Intifada (the popular uprising). Monuments, anywhere and in any circumstance “have to satisfy the eternal demand of the people for translation of their collective force into symbols. The most vital monuments are those which express the feeling and thinking of this collective force, which is the people”.[3]
In the context of the situation and in the last 500 years, Palestine has always been occupied by some foreign force that took control of all aspects of life, including art for that matter. Artists within this context could not take control of what is beyond the limitations of their homes, i.e. they could not consider (even if they wanted to) what is beyond the confines of their dwellings and studios as a possible venue/platform for their artwork. That’s on one level; on another level, and in this given situation, art becomes a form of resistance. Thus, what is against the occupying force cannot, only but naturally, be exhibited in public spaces, and only for devious intent would an occupier invite or commission an “enemy” artist to present work in public or private domain. Consequently, it’s not just that possibilities and resources are not available but the sheer existence of what it takes to conceptualize and realize art in public spaces is nowhere to be found.
In recent years and particularly after the empowerment of the Palestinian National Authority over parts of the occupied territories few initiatives surfaced in an attempt to urbanize the local scene (i.e. do what others did) and beautify public spaces. The concept of public sculpture in these few instances was introduced as a compromise between what could be monuments interpreting people’s force and what might have been a public work of art. Yet, according to the book Nine Points on Monumentality “periods which exist for the moment have been unable to create lasting monuments”. Graffiti immerged to become the most enduring, expressive, popular and accessible form of public art - art manifestation under occupation.
Change
In the occupied territories Suleiman Mansour is a leading figure in the art scene not only due to his articulate and expressive artwork but also because of his capability to mobilize artists, access resources for exhibitions and other projects and also connect with the outside, particularly the Arab World. With other colleagues he established in the early 70s the local chapter of the League of Palestinian Artists and worked extensively in the 70s and 80s to mobilize the artists as one body in the national struggle. But as this work was fueled by the PLO, its downturn in the mid 80s after the expulsion from Beirut and the in-fighting amongst the different factions choked-up the resources coming in to the League and hence this collective effort was nipped in the bud. This condition also reflected all aspects of life under occupation. Frustration, humiliation and desperation pushed people in late 1987 to take to the streets with anything they were left with to fight occupation. In the early years of the Intifada, disobedience and boycott were very important forms of resistance. Likewise, few artists started reflecting on their practice and wished to express this new notion of struggle in their work. Sliman Mansour, for one, wanted to participate in the boycott of Israeli products in his work. He dropped the oil paint, gouache and water colours which he would normally buy in Israel and reverted to the motherland and what it produces. Mud, straw and natural dyes substituted the imported materials and started to constitute the construct of his two-dimensional and three-dimensional reliefs. More importantly the toppling of the old ways of struggle by the Intifada – from regimented, restricted and politically captive resistance orchestrated by the PLO and its factions to an outright popular confrontation with the occupying forces – led Mansour to rework and deconstruct the former national imagery that appeared in his earlier work (the utopian images of the olive pickers, the peasant women, the traditional embroidery and Jerusalem) with mud which alluded to the actual reality of the homeland - fragmented, cracked and parched; a clash of the real with the ideal. This constituted a sort of shift from the representation of the collective national identity to questions about identity and individuality, particularly after the commencement of the peace process where a decline in the impetus to create nationalist works for popular consumption became clearly visible.
Young generation
The emerging artists in that period (i.e. early 90s) were unburdened with the need to express external emblems of nationality through overt symbols. Instead they concentrated on more subtle subjects utilizing suggestive materials that evoke personal memories as well as collective cultural textures. At the same time the first and only independent gallery opened in Jerusalem. Timed with the beginning of the peace process Anadiel gallery doubled as both a permanent exhibition space for Palestinian artists and an address/reference point for all those who wanted to make contact with local artists. It was actually the renewed interest in the Palestinian people and their affairs which was brought about by the extensive media coverage of the Intifada that gave the gallery a more important role than just selling art and making money. I should make it clear at this point that the idea of the gallery started with a commercial underpinning in the background, but this idea soon came face to face with the dire economic reality and had to be aborted. Hence, the decision to close the gallery down or keep it running was not up to a simple profit and loss calculation, but more important considerations, such as providing a venue and an opportunity for local artists to present their work, possibility of accessing venues, events and exhibitions abroad through contacts established by the gallery, and the prospect of securing financial assistance (even though little) for art projects from mainly European organizations and governments. It was actually the latter consideration that gradually led to launching the project of hosting foreign artists in Palestine, the initiation of exchange programs and residencies abroad, and securing needed financial assistance for continuing the work of the gallery. Contact with the international art scene and exposure to varied ideas, techniques and experiences re-energized the young generation and provided the fertile soil for jumpstarting the local art scene. In addition to that a fresh wave of young Palestinian artists who studied in Israeli art academies came in to break the stale and stagnant art atmosphere with bold and daring new ideas which somehow shook the foundations of the dominant old-guard aesthetics.
The gallery started a project of hosting Palestinian artists living in the Diaspora, some of whom had never been to Palestine. Having had secured foreign nationalities and passports, these artists were able to visit, of course as tourists. This project was made financially possible by the artists’ respective governments. Mona Hatoum, Nasser Soumi, Samir Srouji, Jumana El-Husseini, and Susan Hijab were among the artists hosted. Very interesting discourse ensued between the visiting and local artists on issues of representation, questions of identity and modernity, and more tangible concerns of articulation and relationship to the land and the popular imagery. The wind of change which cuts across all aspects of life, brought about much needed reflection, the revisiting of predominant dogmas and set off a new effort to break down the stereotypes and reductive categories that are so limiting to human thought and expression.
Al-Ma’mal Foundation for contemporary art
The gallery was a private initiative which did not qualify for important funding from international organizations. Yet its function was quite visible and the expansion of its capabilities and resources was imperative to propel it into a more extensive role. Hence a group of artists, architects and active individuals in the cultural scene got together and established Al-Ma’mal Foundation with the main aim to promote, instigate, disseminate and make art in Palestine. They envisioned Al-Ma’mal as a catalyst for the realization of art projects with local and visiting artists, giving at the same time special attention to working with youths and children. Al-Ma’mal, situated itself in the Old City of Jerusalem, it currently runs three programs; the Artist-in-Residence, the Workshops Network and the Productions and Publications.
Al-Ma’mal attempts to give art more possibilities to become a mode of expression and a way of life.
Notes
[1]Tina Sherwell-AlMalhi, Articulations of Identities: changing trends in the contemporary Palestinian arts, July 2000
[2] Kamal Boullata, ART, The Encyclopedia of the Palestinians, New York, Facts On File, Inc., 2000
[3] Jose Luis Sert, Frenand Leger and Sigfried Giedion, Nine Points on Monumentality, joint statement written in 1943 and republished in the Harvard Architecture Review IV, Spring 1984, MIT Press, pp. 62-3.
THE NEW NORMALCY
Artists Examine the
February 25th through March 26th, 2006.
www.art-for-a-change.com
Vallen will be exhibiting works at, The New Normalcy, a group show at Carlotta's Passion Fine Art in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles. Over 20 artists will present artworks depicting the realities of the post 9-11 world - endless war, militarism, terrorism, state surveillance and repression.
The exhibit will offer original and limited edition works of art by Mark Vallen, Robbie Conal, Gregg Stone, Gilbert "Magu" Lujan, Poli Marichal, Margaret Garcia, Francisco Letelier, Patrick Merrill, Fei Lu,
Hanaa Al-Wardi, Zandra van Batenburg, Peter Carrillo, Carlos Callejo, Thomas E. Ellis, Carlos Flores, Sergio Hernandez, Cyndi Kahn, Deborah Krall, Juliana Martinez, Manuel Martinez, Louie Metz, Laura Molina, Andres Montoya, Roberto Munguia, Cindy Nine, Robert Nuengaye, Ramon Ramirez, Wm. Neil Roberts, Keri Rosebraugh, Hector Silva, Charles Thompson, Janice Tieken, Van Arno, Amanda Unzueta, and others.
Indepth Arts News:
"Present compose: Canadian, American and European Contemporary Artists"
2001-07-05 until 2001-09-16
Ottawa Art Gallery
Ottawa, ON, CA Canada
www.absolutearts.com
The Ottawa Art Gallery presents Present compose, the second component of an incisive two-part project that probes the legacy of revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s: artistic avant-garde, cultural and social experimentation, and political and economic upheaval. Following and complementing Take Two, Present compose features new and recent works by Canadian, American and European contemporary artists, and examines, critiques, and reconfigures the current retrofitting of the late 1960s, and their complementary insurrections in contemporary debate.
Présent composé focuses on the compound nature of the present, a present both shaped by technologically-driven globalization and inflected by the return of the 1960s as revolutionary, experimental and cutting-edge. No longer unreservedly able to promise a shining future, dominant culture now resorts to pillaging events from this recent past and redeploying them, in superficially assimilable ways, to sell us the next big thing. The unfulfilled commitments of our utopia-driven past are retrofitted in the already-obsolete present to sustain hyped-up promises of a future of enhanced speed, profit and performance. This is where artists have also chosen to work, proposing alternatives which, in Présent composéé, are articulated by overlapping areas: labour, history, political resistance, the orchestration of experience, and avant-garde genealogies of art and architecture.
RESISTANCE
Spiegel Symposium 2005, March 17-March 18, 2005
February 1, 2005, www.virtualart.at
Presented in conjunction with the Institute of Contemporary Art's current exhibition Accumulated Vision, Barry Le Va on view through April 3, 2005, the University of Pennsylvania presents "Resistance," the first annual Spiegel Symposium, jointly organized by ICA and Penn's departments of architecture, cinema studies, fine arts and history of art. A series of lectures, films, panels, a reception, and tour are scheduled with a distinguished list of speakers and panelists.
American artist Barry Le Va (b. 1941, Long Beach, CA; lives in New York, NY) is among the most important figures to emerge during the late 1960s. Named for a series of installations from the 1970s Accumulated Vision, Barry Le Va surveys the artist's work from the 1960s to the present. This is the first major American presentation of Le Va's art in over a decade and the very first to bring together not only the artist's well known large-scale sculptures and drawings, but also his works in other media, including photography, sound, and books, for which he is less known.
Labeled "anti-form" or "scatter art," Barry Le Va's aggressive, room-scale installations of felt and glass challenged viewers of the art of the late-sixties and seventies. This symposium explores themes of "resistance" in the culture and politics of the period, from Vietnam protest to punk and the furthest reaches of contemporary art, music and literature.
www.eipcp.net
"Down with art that aspires to be nothing more than a spot of beauty on the ugly lives of the rich. Down with art that tries to be a glittering stone in the merciless and dirty lives of the poor. Down with art whose sole purpose is to escape a life not worth living. Work for life and not for palaces, cathedrals, cemeteries and museums. Work in the midst of all and with everyone."
Alexander Rodtschenko, Slogans, 1920/21
If one is involved with art history, then the dominant theme of the nineties - the saga of radical change along with paradigm change - seems to be less radical New Art and more about refocusing on the determination of that which counts as contemporary and relevant. In fact, what is happening is an updating of the discourses and practices with which artists were involved during the entire twentieth century.
At the beginning stands the project of modernism: committed to the spirit of the enlightenment, progress-oriented, optimistic and justice-conscious. A pre-view was already staged in one of the century's first theatre plays, Chekhov's "Three Sisters," written in 1900 and premiered in spring of 1901. Even these unhappy figures, who with their rudimentary education are cut off from all intellectual discourse in their empty provincial Russian nest, still feel the utopia of the turn of the century. In the future, happy people will exist who will no longer be able to imagine how miserably those - from today's perspective pre-modern - people, lived.
When the Revolution transformed Czarist Russia into the Soviet Republic in 1917, artists were heavily involved in designing the new society. Lenin himself repeatedly referred to the significance of their role.
In their central demands, the constructivists followed the same objectives as the entire European avant-garde after World War I: to unite art and life and to break from the indifferent autonomy of the nineteenth century's bourgeois salon art.
However, different countries and movements have attached different significance to the impulses for this break and have connected it to diverse political, social, institutional-critical or individualist demands.
To clarify: Even the Italian futurist's project was a political one, although it was tied to a deep-seated elitism, nationalism and fascism. Even the futurists were calling art back into life. In the Futurist Manifesto of 1909 there is a statement similar to Rodtschenko's: "We want to destroy the museums." Yet Marinetti also goes on to state: "We want to praise militarism, patriotism and war, the only hygiene of the world." The individual exists here merely as the man at the steering wheel; the masses are cast as extras in the stage light of glorious industrialization.
The futurists are often put forward as counter examples when art as social intervention is defined as primarily a project of the left. The futurists, however, were not concerned with actual human standards of living. Umberto Boccioni wrote in 1910, in a manifesto that follows along with Marinetti: "Human suffering interests us to the same degree as the suffering of an electric light bulb, whose trembling ends with a heart-thumping screech of color."
The critical, emancipative and enlightening claim that we identify with art as social intervention leads to its assessment as a leftist project. But what is leftist? The Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio published an essay in 1994 with the subtitle "right and left." In it, he describes the twin concepts as necessities ever after the end of state communism in Europe, at a time of economic interests' unchallenged priority over political course setting. Bobbio comes to the conclusion that it is in no way obsolete to associate the left with freedom, equality and fraternity.
Of course, also in leftist theory, the claim to social shaping through art is controversial. In the philosophy of the Frankfurter Schule there are clearly divergent views. On one hand it is obvious that there is no pure consciousness and no consciousness outside of economically determined power structures. It is still, however, remarkable that in the context of the authority-critical and trial-like art of the nineties, also projects, actions, texts and other non-object forms have long serviced their own markets. Similarly, often our own ideological character is the blind spot overlooked in the process of ideological critique.
Theodor W. Adorno assumed that art in the age of the mass media and culture industry would dissolve into a popular culture that is understandable and accessible to the masses and into a thin, mysterious and retreating avant-garde, whose hermeneutics and elitism it would defend as a reservoir of resistance. In this, he denies the possibility of an emancipative-participatory practice of art which transverses art.
Herbert Marcuse, on the other hand, sees particularly in this marginality and peripheral position of art its affirmative character - as a demarcated zone in which societal problems and neuroses can be acted out without consequences. - Once again, nothing effectuating social change. Jürgen Habermas speaks of a "false revocation of the separation of art and life," in which he meets Marcuse's "repressive de-sublimation," which means the loosening of social coercion for the purpose of better economic and institutional control.
That many of the Frankfurter Schule's ideas no longer apply in the current context has to do with the changes of the media, power structures, the creation of more and more partial audiences and forms of information and communication. The kind of problem that artists of the left must confront, for example, is culturalization - the transposing of virulent conflicts into art events. What do events such as "Film Day Against Racism" or "Anti-Xenophobia Clubbing" mean?
For Norberto Bobbio, the concept of equality is central to a contemporary leftist worldview. Art's connection to leftist guiding principles can take place on various levels. For one, in the message formulated by a work: famous historical examples are George Grosz' brutal portraits of capitalists or the worker-frescos of Diego Rivera. However, the effort to make the art business less elitist is also leftist, as was attempted for example by the "Art Workers Coalition" in New York after 1969, when it took up opposition to the white-herrscher attitude of the Museum of Modern Art. Or collaboration between artists and non-artists.
In the countless manifestos of the Russian constructivists, equality is formulated as solidarity among artists, architects and writers together with workers and farmers. The professed commonality however, besides being a very generously described aim of communist society, remains unclear.
In 1920, Tatlin announced the program of the "Productivists' Group," in which he turns against the increasing individualism of the constructivists. And in 1923, the Magazine LEF (Left Art Front), founded by Wladimir Majakowski warned: "Constructivists! Beware of degenerating into a school of aesthetics.... Production artists! Beware of becoming artisans for the applied arts. Learn from the workers while you are teaching them. Your school is the factory."
Popular art history reduced Russian constructivism to Malewitsch's "Black Square," perhaps also including Tatlin's "Tower"-design. Rodtschenko is marketed today as a photographer and Warwara Stepanowa's worker's clothing is shown at art and fashion shows next to Elsa Schiaparelli. And the term "Production Art" is rarely ever used today in the sense of an interaction between artists and industrial workers on equal levels.
The problem that resurfaced toward the end of the nineties was also not solvable at the beginning of left art: equality among artists and non-artists in projects conceived of and carried out by artists remains a fiction. Alexander Rodtschenko and Warwara Stepanowa, unlike other constructivists, consciously give up painting; yet even these production artists finally see themselves as teachers and graphic designers who work for and not with the population. Their pedagogic idealism is to be seen in the image-language which they and others, among them Majakowski, developed for the illiterate and which is used as political propaganda as well as for advertising.
In the equal positioning of the fine and the applied arts, the Russian revolutionary artists are related to art producers of the nineties. With one difference: If an artist, for example a woman artist, creates graphic art today, then that is most probably for a catalogue, flyer, brochure or other means of communication within the art industry. The kind of worker's association that Rodtschenko developed in 1925, the Club for Cultural Workers, corresponds today to the "Depot - Art and Discussion" in Vienna which was set up in 1994 by the artist Josef Dabernig.
In the European/US-American writing of art history, constructivism is seen as a formal-ism among other -isms. However, in the space of time from the turn of the century until Soviet isolation under Stalin (Lenin died in 1924) there had been a flourishing exchange of political ideas between Russian and German artists. The manifesto, for example, of the German "November-Gruppe," founded after the failed revolution in November 1918, was influenced by the Russians. Their guidelines, published in 1919, could have been taken from the New York "Art Workers Coalition's" 1969 manifesto and are also consistent with current demands:
"We want a voice and an active roll in:
All architectural projects as a matter of general interest: in city planning, in new developments, in public administration buildings, industry, social constructions, in private building projects...
The reorganization of art academies and their curricula, ...the selection of teachers by artists' associations together with the students...
The transformation of museums: eliminating prejudice from collection policies, putting a stop to the purchasing of objects which are only valuable to scholars... the transformation of museums into art centers for the general public...
Accessibility of art halls: eliminating privileges and halting the influence of privilege and capitalism...
Legislation in artists' affairs: rights for artists as inventors of ideas, protection of artists' ownership, doing away with all taxes on art works."
Not long thereafter, the "November-Gruppe" was attacked by "Opponents of the November-Gruppe" for being false revolutionaries. Today, their challengers are more prominent: Otto Dix, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch. And with this it was possible to move on to dada: to the dada movement which of course can only be understood with a much more anarchist political concept than constructivism, which dada associated mainly with the rejection of the bourgeoisie.
The ideology of constructivism had already begun to fade in the inter-war period. As of the late twenties, three concepts became the three main coordinates of art: abstraction, realism and surrealism.
Popular art historical works are picture books. Since art, through to the present, has for the most part produced images and objects, its content continues to be falsified through the convention of illustration. Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes and Roy Lichtenstein's paintings of typeset copies are reproduced in art books' chapter on the sixties. What is not shown? For example the neighborhood projects that Stephen Willats has carried out since the mid-sixties with tenants of English housing developments in which he examines, together with them, their living conditions.
The picture book as form of mediation is the side effect of an art system whose core functions through tradable goods. All major institutions within this system need an art that is transmittable through individual objects: the museums, art halls, auction houses, galleries, the accompanying magazine, etc. As soon as artists produce something other than transportable and representable objects or installations, they fall out of art historic mediation and canonization. Their visibility and with it the extent of their effectiveness is limited.
Only recently has the historical phase of concept art been dealt with by museums - the exhibition "Reconsidering the Object of Art" on the period 1965 - 1975 took place at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1996. In 1997 Catherine David designed a documenta with a conceptual-political focus. Yet the transmission of the history of ideas is always insufficient. Why is Jeff Koons known but not Dan Graham; why is Anselm Kiefer a star while no one has ever heard of Robert Smithson?
A history of activism and participation in twentieth century art: an 'other' art history with a focus on participatory interventions with critical-emancipative intention. It is clear that the constructivists and productivists can only be credited as pre-participatory art, after which they must form the base for such a story.
Why is it at all necessary to rewrite art history? Must the established canon be changed?
Shedding a new light on the historical bases and writing critical artistic practices into art history: only on this basis can art history carry weight and find a new, sustainable definition. Without this historical consciousness, it remains possible to attack socially and politically motivated art, by which authority is legitimated by turning back to an aesthetically oriented art history. In autumn of 1998 in Austria, one such attack was made by the former dean of the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst. Art's capabilities consist, Rudolf Burger wrote, "only of sensually sympathizing with individual problem moments, of symbolic or allegorical illustration, and this only in retrospect." Everything else is deemed nonsense. Or non-art.
Between agitation and animation. Activism and participation in twentieth century art:
The Duden dictionary for German foreign words and phrases explains agitation as a compelling advertisement for certain political views, animation as invigoration and excitement, activism as the emphasis of purposeful behavior and participation as (temporary) involvement.
Like agitation, activism is usually based on some pre-formulated, mostly politically defined goal, while participation claims to be nothing more than someone playing a role in some process, some event, some business that could also be at a profit or loss in an economic sense. Participatory practices in art are developed fundamentally as a result of dissatisfaction with the status quo. Whatever artists are dissatisfied with is followed by a characteristic offering of participation and enabling the participants a degree of self-determination. Participation can be based on the equality of rights and competencies and can be distributed in the sense of the allocation of social capital (knowledge, skills) to real or presumed underprivileged groups. Or animation: whereas animation - in an entertainment-oriented Club Med style, in which artists guide free-time activities - is a somewhat crude description for art projects. Art's recent 'festivalization' has offered us a number of such spectacles.
After World War II, a participatory concept of art found further development, above all in interdisciplinary collaborations.
At Black Mountain College in North Carolina, USA, the painter Robert Rauschenberg, the musician John Cage and the choreographer and dancer Merce Cunningham, among others, met each other. They developed - partly together and partly individually - works with participatory approaches. In 1952 Cage composed "4' 33''", a piece which consisted only of sounds from the concert hall. The same year, Rauschenberg painted his "White Paintings," whose integral component is the shadow of the observer. In both works, the audience was quasi instrumentalized and not individually active. That may appear insufficient by today's standards, yet historically it was a preliminary step. These examples are also interesting for a more precise definition. Without an audience, neither "4' 33''" nor "White Paintings" can exist at all, exist completely or make any sense. The extent of audience participation in projects is a question that has been very current in Austria since the early nineties. When does an artwork become an artwork? Was it when the artist Christine Hill opened her second-hand boutique - as she did in Berlin and then at the documenta X - or was it when someone first bought an article of clothing there? In any case, Hill does not define her "Volksboutique" as an installation but as a realm for social communication.
Even fluxus events and happenings were oriented on participation, yet the amount of audience participation followed lines that had been predetermined by the artist. As a result, participation sometimes meant touching the art objects and rearranging them. The German Franz Erhard Walther displays objects, often textiles with choreographic instructions - which is related to Franz West's concept of sculpture in which significance is first given by handling the objects.
This concept of participation does not of course necessarily open up a social realm.
In the sixties, the emancipation movement made an immediate dynamic impact on art. In North America, above all in the USA, the civil rights movement influenced the art scene decisively: the women's movement, the protests against the war on Vietnam, the struggle for the rights of ethnic minorities, black power. Grassroots organizations were formed, citizens organized. In 1969 artists founded the "Art Workers Coalition" after a conflict with the Museum of Modern Art. Soon the coalition organized protests and events on museum policies, the representation of women and persons of color in the art world, the neglect of the socially disadvantaged in terms of cultural offerings and last but not least, also against the Vietnam war. These actions were however not declared to be art works. The members - among them Nancy Spero and Leon Golub, Carl Andre, Robert Morris and Lucy Lippard - also carried out their work individually. At the same time, Vito Acconci was staging participatory actions with underlying political content. He spent every night for four weeks in spring 1971 on a lonely pier on the Hudson and invited the public to visit him between one and two in the morning when he would then tell them a secret. The visitor became an ally, at the mercy of the artist.
One consequence of the emancipation movement was in the cultural field of integration with less privileged groups. They were encouraged to formulate their own ideas and to find their own cultural expression. "Giving a voice" is the corresponding parole. In 1978 in a slum in South Bronx, the artist Stefan Eins founded his art studio "Fashion Moda," which became a cultural pressure cooker in which graffiti, rap, popular culture and high art were all steamed together.
Numerous related projects and initiatives can be cited: in the beginning of the eighties, the "Group Material" from the store gallery on the Lower Eastside or Tim Rollins and his collaboration with the black ghetto youths under the label "K.O.S." (Kids of Survival). In the mid-eighties, the social pressure under conservative Reagonomics and the tragedy of the Aids epidemic politically remobilized the US art scene. With "ACT UP," the "Aids Coalition to Unleash Power," artists, cultural workers and other activists worked together on strategies against the repression of the Aids crisis by the government and the increasing hysterical homophobia and art-xenophobia among politicians. "Art is not enough," proclaimed the artist-activist collective "Gran Fury."
Art or not art - in the urgency of activism, these questions were the last to be asked and would first resurface when Aids activists' propaganda posters turned up in museums.
The dominant figure of the art-politics-participation debate in Germany never doubted the status of art. With Joseph Beuys, everything was art: from his enigmatic objects to his candidacy for the Green party, from his autistic-seeming performances to the founding of the "Freien Internationalen Hochschule für Kreativität und interdisziplinäre Forschung" ("Free International School for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research") in 1974.
Art - art concepts - political practice: When is something considered art? When is it accepted and by whom? In the New Genre Public Art, or art in the public interest, as it has been practiced in collaboration with representatives of special audiences and interest groups since the eighties in the USA, the insistence on the status of art is tied to the claim of a struggle. This is also true of the seemingly endless applications of art practices in the nineties in Europe, where everything, from a charitable measure to a party, from a lecture to an interview, can be defined as art.
Since February 2000, or since the right wing, national-populist government took office in Austria, artists have played a significant role in the resistance. Interestingly, the status of art in these projects and initiatives is not even an issue.
Is it necessary to draw the conclusion that political practice by artists is only considered art when it's about nothing serious? Even within a progressive scene, the absence of a sense of history has its drawbacks. What was initially called the re-politicization of art in the nineties was rejected by various sources as a fading trend at the end of the decade - not only for conspicuously conservative reasons. The demand for an 'other' art history is also directed against this.
Further literature in:
Charles Harrison & Paul Wood (ed.): "Art in Theory. An Anthology of Changing Ideas" (Oxford/UK, Cambridge/USA 1992, 1993)
Norberto Bobbio: "Rechts und Links. Gründe und Bedeutungen einer politischen Unterscheidung" (Berlin, 1994)
The Art of Resistance
The Art-Activism Divide
By Marc Xuereb, www.zmag.org
Merging politics with art may not be a new idea, but Resistant Strains seems to have found a combination that brings out the best of both art and activism. Art, according to Canadian writer Brian Fawcett, is the communication of an idea or it’s nothing. For those who believe that the deep injustices in our society necessitate radical political changes, therefore, the content of the idea to be communicated in art is paramount. Unfortunately, those with radical politics rarely make use of the power of art to disseminate their ideas. They are more likely to engage in sit-ins, demonstrations, or public debates, all of which have their own important roles, but do not always achieve the same level of impact on the "unconverted" as art. Likewise, even radical art often gets confined to art galleries that receive little public attention beyond their own small circles.
Resistant Strains sought to bridge the arts-activism chasm by encouraging artists and activists to work together. "We wanted to encourage activists to be more creative in trying to get their message out, says Karen Topper, one of the original members of Resistant Strains. Finding funding to help them fulfil those objectives, however, was a different story, one which gave the group a firsthand experience of lack of communication between the two worlds. In seeking the support of foundations, they found that many of the left political foundations would not fund an art project, and that arts foundations generally found their work too political.
The key factor in the success of both poster series is the poster medium itself. The relatively low cost of producing posters allowed Resistant Strains to print 1,000 copies of each poster, which they could then sell at the relatively affordable price of $15 per set. This makes the posters accessible even to the lowest-budget of activist groups. To date, over three-quarters of the Zapatista posters have been distributed through a promotion strategy that mostly involved Internet list-servers and word of mouth.
Because of the medium, the posters lend themselves to uses beyond traditional activist and artist circles. The Zapatista posters were in demand in bookstores (Seattle, New York City, and Montreal), community centers (Waterloo, Ontario; Cleveland, Ohio; Austin, Texas; and Burlington, Vermont), and libraries (Center for the Study of Political Graphics in LA and the MOMA library in NY). They were a hit on the streets of Chicago, Seattle, and New York, and were sold through Syracuse Cultural Workers, Pueblo to People, and the Bread & Puppet Domestic Resurrection Circus in Vermont.
Not content to allow the posters to be confined to adorning the living rooms of the converted, activists have come up with several creative uses for them. The first poster series, on the World Bank/IMF 50th anniversary, alternately mocked the international financial institutions and described the damaging effects of their policies to people around the world. Activists joining the international "Fifty Years is Enough" campaign who descended on Washington, DC to demonstrate outside the institutions’ annual meetings made sure their actions had a lasting impact beyond their brief stay. Parts of downtown were plastered with the posters, making it difficult for people to avoid encountering one of the posters on their way to work the next week. Copies of one poster deriding former World Bank head Robert McNamara for his public "confession" concerning the Vietnam War were sent directly to his office.
In Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, a group of activists called the Mexico Solidarity Network proved that, in the right hands and with the right promotion, the posters have a real possibility of influence beyond activist circles. They were able to capitalize on the idea of the Zapatista posters as art to gain access to new audiences for their ideas. In response to the January 1994 Zapatista uprising, the group promoted the posters as an art exhibit staged at a local arts center, downplaying the posters’ politics. The result was a crowd of almost 100, most of whom would not have showed up for an event billed as an educational event about Mexico. "There is no way we would have got the mainstream media publicity we got for our event had it not been billed as an arts event," Debbie Chapman, member of the K-W group explains. "Three local papers covered it in their entertainment section, so we got people showing up who didn’t even know who the Zapatistas were."
In the highlands of Chiapas, where the Zapatistas hosted their International Encounter Against Neoliberalism and for Humanity last summer, the posters gained exposure not just to the activists from 43 countries around the world who came to demonstrate their solidarity with the Zapatistas, but with the Zapatista communities. Topper took several copies of the posters down with her to the conference. "People were coming right up to me and asking me to display them and to leave them behind with them and wanting me to translate the ones that were in English. That meant a lot to me, that the Zapatista communities really appreciated them."
To Resistant Strains, few movements have been more inspirational as an example of successful resistance than that led by the masked indigenous people of Chiapas. Not only did the Zapatistas launch the most successful denouncement of the North American Free Trade Agreement from the most impoverished region of the agreement’s reach, but their unique organizing style and avoidance of particular political ideologies are revolutionizing left politics globally. Thorne points to a May 1996 communique from the Zapatistas as an example of their position. In it, sub-commander Marcos explains that the Zapatista struggle "is not about taking power: [it] is about revolutionizing its relationship with those who have it and those who suffer its consequences...There are no recipes, lines, strategies, tactics, laws, regulations, or universal slogans. There is only one desire: to construct a better world, that is, a new one."
The Zapatistas are the only armed revolutionary movement in recent Latin American history to expressly state their disinterest in taking control of the state for themselves. Their armed uprising on January 1, 1994 elicited a brutal military response from the Mexican government. But when the news caught international attention and forced the government to negotiate a ceasefire agreement, the Zapatistas insisted on national negotiations that addressed the root causes of inequality and impoverishment in the country, from indigenous rights issues to democratic reforms to neoliberal economics and earned the respect and support of resistance movements throughout Mexico and the world.
The Posters
It was these revolutionary ideas of the Zapatistas that Resistant Strains wished to give attention to in the poster series. But given the absence of these ideas in the mainstream media, the artists had a tremendous task. Thorne supplied each artist with background material on the Zapatistas that for some was quite new information—oil production in the rainforest, violence against women, U.S. militarization, and the Zapatistas—leaving the artists to work with what struck their interest.
With varying degrees of success, each artist brought his or her own approach to communicating the all-important content of the art. Just which posters succeeded more than others, of course, will ultimately be up to each individual viewer. As Topper says, "The nature of the series is that different people like different ones, and they read different things into them. And that’s the beauty of having a visual message, because there’s not an exact interpretation that people have to have."
The idea of resistance, according to Thorne, was hard to portray in a two-dimensional poster: "The obvious images are the rebel with the gun, or the crowd in the street. And in a way they are the easier ones to use, which is a bit of a danger, because those are the images that get repeated in the mainstream media over and over again, so you get a one-sided view of what resistance is. Actually, as I was working on the project, I found that the ones that were more interesting to me were more boring, like of people sitting around in a wooden structure in the middle of the jungle having a discussion: that’s resistance to me. But it’s much harder to use that in an art piece or a poster."
Thorne’s poster, Decision ‘96, contrasts two images: a boy being fed a Ritalin pill (titled "vote"), and a Zapatista soldier (titled "fight"). To Thorne, "the idea was to question the vote as a relevant or useful act in this country, to counterpose it with some sort of more collective struggle." In the context of the hype and hoopla that surround most elections, particularly liberal admonitions in both media and educational systems that to not vote is to abdicate one’s civic responsibilities, Thorne’s "Decision" becomes a very important strategic question for resistors. Do we legitimate the system by participating in it, as liberals would have us do, thus working for the best of the system’s unsatisfactory options? Or do we fight the system from without, and demand a new one?
The poster is a good example of a theme that runs throughout the series—that resistance is worthwhile and takes many forms. According to Thorne, "the easiest reading [of "Decision 96"] is "don’t vote, just get a gun." But I am trying to use this image and the word fight in the sense of the way the Zapatistas have conceived of themselves as an armed force, which is as a sort of temporary necessity. They do not want to engage in all-out war, but they would not be doing these kind of international gatherings or negotiations with the government if they did not have an armed force. So while I may have some reservations about armed struggle, I understand the armed component is essential to what they’re doing."
Both images in "Decision 96" drew controversy. Many objected to equating the vote with taking Ritalin, a drug known for its use on children with Attention Deficit Disorder and its abuse on other children. The violent image of the Zapatista woman caused many to miss the poster’s more subtle message, according to Karen Topper. "And that’s too bad, because for me it’s nauseating reading the newspapers these days and watching the rahrahrah articles saying "we live in the U.S. and we get to participate in our democracy by voting for Clinton or Dole" when there’s really no difference between the two.
Three artists from Los Angeles—Shawn Mortensen, Patricia Valencia, and Aida Salazar—use the same image of Zapatistas as gun-toting fighters in their poster, "Third World is Your World." As in "Decision 96," the second image in "Third World" causes the viewer to pause and reflect on the juxtaposition of the two. In this case, the second image is of a woman laborer from Echo Park, California. The woman carries a bag of oranges in one hand, a bag of peanuts in the other, both cash crops grown in California which the woman obviously either picks or packages.
There is no escaping the message that the Echo Park laborer’s life is but a well-organized movement away from that of the woman in the other image, identified as a Zapatista woman from Chiapas who poses with mask and gun. Neoliberal economics is screwing Echo Park in the same way that it drives peasants in Chiapas off their corn farms and into the mountains to support the Zapatistas.
Max Schumann takes no chances with the viewer’s ability to understand his message in "Travel and Leisure." "I didn’t want to assume any prior information on the part of my audience," Schumann explains, "I wanted to be clear, but I wanted to be able to back it up." For those who care to linger in front of his poster, Schumann supplies a long, detailed list of the pieces of military equipment that American money has provided to the Mexican army. He adds, for good measure, an essay by Peter Lumsdaine of Global Exchange on the American role in the continued military repression of human rights activists in Chiapas.
Large headlines and a striking image draw the viewer into the text. Bold words across the top and bottom of the poster draw the viewer’s eyes: "Free trade—Low Intensity Democracy." The graphic is a cover of a travel magazine, manipulated to feature, as the main tourist attraction, a Zapatista fighter. "The South You’ve Never Seen" boasts the reworked headline of the cover, with the horizon of the U.S. southwest in the background.
"I wanted to deal with issues of colonization through representation, cultural appropriation, and the fetishizing of otherness in the poster," Schumann explains. "In a way, tourism makes the world safe for corporate interests: we can consume other histories and cultures as images." But in altering the cover’s landscape (which not accidentally is of a part of the southern U.S. that used to be Mexico before it was annexed) to include the Zapatista, Schumann cunningly suggests that the Zapatistas might not be as easy for corporate interests to digest. Indeed, the Zapatistas are a tremendous symbol of resistance to corporate interests for activists world wide.
To Thorne, Schumann’s poster "contains a density of information, but also a visual punch, a complicated one-liner about free markets. The viewer who doesn’t want to get into the small print can still take something away from the piece. The small print elaborates on the free market theme by positioning the weapons market as central to the concept of free markets, both in terms of profit-making, and the enforcement of repressions that make other profit-making possible."
As most activists know from experience, it is not enough to be right. We need to convince others of the soundness of our positions, and that requires more than a sound mission statement. By using the affordable, transportable, and visual medium of posters, Resistant Strains has given activists an effective way to disseminate their political messages. And for those who don’t mind being reminded once in a while that we are right, the posters don’t look too bad on living room walls, either.
Protest posters by Mike Flugennok
microsites.provisionslibrary.org/cartoons_site/mike.html
Since the early1990's. radical DC artist Mike Flugennock has produced over a hundred political cartoon posters for resistance movements ranging from groups opposed to the war in Iraq to American foreign policy to local politics. Whether used in protests against George W. Bush's "Inauguraction" or annual meetings of the World Bank and IMF, Flugennock's posters have inspired countless people to fill the streets and demand justice. As the posters have grown in popularity, they have provided motivation for a variety of grass roots social justice movements.
Besides defining a distinctive look and tone for resistance movements Flugennock's art has also inspired a method of radical postering on the street, a form of public cultural intervention that has taken on a life of its own. Over the last five years, his collaboration with the Mintwood Media Collective has helped put up thousands of posters on lampposts and electric utility boxes in Washington, Maryland and Virginia. In defiance of routine police harassment, the Collective's Lamppost Liberation Front has promoted a culture of radical advertising. Flugennock has attracted a loyal folllowing of people who "flypaste" his art with the help of wheatpaste in cities throughout the USA, Canada and Europe. In turn, this expands public access to his inspired creations through his website.
The current climate of rampant mass media consolidation has led to a trend in which many formerly indpendent media outlets now operate under corporate managemnet and federal regulations, which are by nature adverse to alternative and controversial points of view. Public postering has emerbed as a decidedly low-techbut effective means of redirecting public opinion and galvanizing social movements.
In Mike's words,
"...After four or five years' recovering from a severe radical cartoon burnout induced by the first term of Ronald Reagan, the threat of US genocide in Irag re-radicalized me. In the winter of 1990-91, I did my first hardcore political cartoons since dropping out if the Yipster Times and, inspired by the 'delivery system' used by Robbie Conal to expose Los Angeles to his work, chose to mass-copy and plaster them to as many flat public surfaces as possible with wheat paste and paint rollers instead of waiting for any newspapers or magazine editors to expose their readers to flagrantly anti-war and anti-imperialist opinions. Much to our surprise, this actually went fairly well, enough that we decided that posting political cartoons such as these -on their own, not advertising any particular event- was a really fine way to 'disturb the cofortable.' It wasn't until a while later that I found out that what we were doing was part of actually part of a real live dissident cultural trend, that of public postering or 'flypasting'. These days, ironically, it seems that the Internet has actually facilitated the spread of wheat-pasted paper posters around the world; I've gotten email on a fairly regular basis from artist/activists from places as far apart as Christchurch, Sydney, Montreal, New York City and Barcelona annoouncing how much they appreciate my work and that several thousand copies each are now adorning the streets of their cities."
"Views from the Street" presents Mike Flugennock's favorite posters, that until now have only been seen on the lampposts of DC and his website.
Resistance and Meditation: Hong Sung-dam
www.queensmuseum.org/exhibitions
October 5, 2003 - November 30, 2003
New ‘Paradise in Dream’ (New Mongudowondo), 2002, Oil on canvas, 290 x 900 cm
The Queens Museum of Art is pleased to present the first solo New York exhibition of the work of Korean artist Hong Sung-dam. Hong was born in 1955 in the Sihan Island south of the Korean peninsula into a situation of poverty and oppression. He began the “People’s School of Art” in Gwangju, a city in Southwestern Korea, in 1983, and organized an artists association in 1985. Known to South Korean authorities for his perspective on social reform individual freedom, in 1988, Hong, then exhibiting internationally, was imprisoned for his participation in the creation of a mural in North Korea depicting various injustices suffered by South Korean people. He was subjected to torture in prison, and released in 1992 after persistent protests from humanitarian groups. Since his release, his work has turned away from the specifics of war to address global issues of communication, violence, protest, and rehabilitation. Resistance and Meditation: Hong Sung-dam is part of East Wind, a two-part exhibition along with Nostalgia Today: Kim Dae-won, Ha Chul-Kyung, Kim Young-sam, co-organized by the Gwangju Art Museum. The exhibitions run from October 5 – November 30, 2003. An opening reception will be held October 5, 3-6 pm.#8221;
The exhibition will include Hong Sung-dam’s most well-known work, Dawn, (1981-1988) a series of forty-nine prints memorializing the human situation of Korea in the 1980s. In May 1980, students, workers, intellectuals, religious leaders, and other supporters of the Korean democratization movement rose up against the military regime in power in Gwangju (Hong’s home). The protests intensified, and on May 18 the military unleashed a lethal strike on its citizens. Dawn, an installation of black and white propaganda-style woodblock prints, depicts the horror of the Gwangju Massacre and the ensuing struggle for freedom. With titles such as Blood & Tears (1983), The Union World (1984), and The Gun, It’s My Life (1984), the artist weaves together historical fact and personal narrative in a compelling record of the lives of the people of Gwangju.
Hong’s “propaganda style” of the 1980s refutes both traditional and Western Modernist trends, both popular options for artists of his generation. Instead, Hong’s work is associated with the Minjoong art movement, or “People’s Art,” which emerged in response to political oppression. Minjoong art incorporated hyperreal images of violence and suffering and surreal emblemsof democracy. The visual disjointedness pointed to a unique notion of “Realism” as a “protest against reality through art,” an artform that became an important mode of communication during the revolution. Hong’s famous Minjoong-style mural in North Korea will not be shown, although it still hangs in a North Korean government museum today.
Faded Tears in the Moonlight (1995) refers to the Donghak Revolution, an uprising in January 1894 by the Gap-o Farmers. This was the first farmers' revolution on a nation-wide scale in Korea's history, and initiated public awareness about the conditions of the poor. It was an anti-feudal resistance movement seeking increased freedom and civic rights, as well as a movement for national independence and self-reliance. It is suggested that later progressive movements had roots in this farmers’ protest, which also began in May.
Hong’s work balances image of struggle with optimism and hope for the future. In Baridaegi, for example, Hong depicted the bitter plight of woman who was allegedly used as prostitute for the Japanese army during their occupation of Korea. The work expresses the possibility of means of survival and transcendence beyond this life. While imprisoned, Hong was forced to spend weeks in a tank of water; now, water, once a source of great pleasure, now inspires deep fear. His folk-inspired paintings of water and wave motifs demonstrate his effort to reconcile with and achieve some forgiveness toward his captors. Rice has also become a lifelong subject for Hong, and he deals with all permutations of its relationships in the daily life of East Asians: “rice and labor, rice and struggle, rice and ideologies, rice and life, rice and death.” This exhibition consists of more than thirty paintings, prints, and photographs, and videos.
Exhibition co-curators: Jang Kyung-hwa, Chief Curator, Gwangju Art Museum and Tom Finkelpearl, Executive Director, Queens Museum of Art. This exhibition East Wind was co-organized by the Gwangju Art Museum and the Queens Museum of Art.
The presentation of East Wind at the Queens Museum of Art is made possible by Ministry of Culture and Tourism in Korea, Korean Cultural Service Korean Consulate General, Asiana Airlines, BooKook Foundation for Korean Culture, Gwangju Biennale Foundation, and The Centennial Committee of Korean Immigration to the United States.
A 150-page catalogue titled East Wind will be published by the Gwangju Art Museum.
Panel Discussion: "Convention, Convention, Korea," Sunday, October 5, 2:00-3:30 pm with Jang Kyung-hwa, Gwangju Art Museum; Tom Finkelpearl, Queens Museum of Art; Hong Sung-dam, artist; Kim Dae-won, artist; and Richard Vine, Senior Editor, Art in America. Panelists will discuss contemporary Korean artistic trends and political art in Korea and East Asia.
IS THERE ANY CONTEMPORARY CULTURE IN KOSOVO?
Umelec 3/2003, www.divus.cz
"Since 1999, the international force of
NATO and UNMIK (United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo) has
created partial freedom for people who live in Kosovo. For over ten years Yugoslavia had taken from Albanians all their basic rights to education, work, health and culture. So the 1999 “Turning Point” was considered a wave of freedom among the international public.
Albanians thought of this situation as not only an alternative new wave, but one that also held potential for new possibilities. As a result this “new” event has begun to dwell within all spheres of politics, economics, international relations and culture. Going back, from the mid-1980s to the end of the ‘90s a passive underground resistance was in place. Shkelzen Maliqi, who had been an important figure in the alternative movement since 1980s and who wrote extensively on this issue, defined this resistance as a “parallel institution,” which could be defined as a paradigmatic method of resistance. During the domination (now labeled “socialism”) of Albania and later, the post-socialist transition period frequently used this method. When Serbians took away the autonomous rights (legislative power in parliament, the closing down of the Science and Art Academy, dismissal of Albanians from their jobs, the banning of the Albanian language education) that were given by Tito to Albanian in 1974, Albanians began to create their own underground network — instead of launching a visible, planned resistance.
Although this kind of resistance strengthened Albanians’ consciousness, a state of disorganization arose, for people were unable to express themselves in public. For example, Maliqi blamed disagreements and disorder as being the main problems among Albanian Parties and this didn’t change after 1999. Today people are no longer oppressed by a regime, so instead the problem has manifested itself as an identity crisis within Kosovo. The most discussed subject by intellectuals after 1999 in the newly established Kosovo was the Albanian identity: “How should Albanian identity be defined?” Contemporary culture and art journal Java dwelled on this subject for a long time, and it is still being discussed. The focus is mostly centered on the alternative national identity, the casualties of authentic identity, and the symptoms of this in the contemporary art scene.
The identity problem could be considered an extension of non-representation in the public sphere. This problem was created by the resistance of the parallel institutions that were widespread among Albanians since the 1980s, and instead of open discussion in public, everybody created his or her own isolated space. Therefore, the issue of a movement in Kosovo contemporary art must be looked at from within this social aspect.
Curator Harald Szeemann has stressed the importance of the Albanian phenomenon, and he deals mainly with Albanian artists in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue for Blood and Honey. (We should be careful about the differences in both the issues and underground resistance styles of Albanians and Kosovo’s Albanians. Even though both issues and resistance styles seem similar, the principals are very distinct. First, the oppression in Albania was established through ideology and bureaucratic hegemony; however in Kosovo oppression was put in place through nationalistic and police-state hegemony.) After this exhibition, René Block curated In der Schusten Der Balkans, which was an important input for Kosovo contemporary art. When Block was in Kosovo he was a “messiah,” a savior in Pristina. He said Pristina was the center of the avant-garde in the Balkans in an interview in Java magazine. A statement that catalyzed avant-garde euphoria here.
As I explained, parallel institutions became the symbol and tradition of the alternative cultural and political resistance. While no Albanian art superstar exists, the most prominent Albanian artist from Kosovo, Sislej Xhafa, has become meaningful to the international art scene. The most important and well-known of Xhafa’s first performances was in 1997 for the Venice Biennale, where the artist participated, but illegally, and in an underground fashion. Xhafa was himself a parallel pavilion, and he presented the Albania that had not been invited to the show. This was done in the same underground and parallel resistance style that is so well known in Kosovo. Xhafa often speaks about clandestine and underground lifestyles in his work. He lived a long time in Pristina, and is the son of Xhevdet Xhafa, a representative of Kosovo modern art during the 1960s and 1970s. After 1999, he frequently visited Pristina from New York (where he now lives) and put on many presentations and gave many speeches (especially during 2001 and 2002, the post-Duchamp seminars he did with Mehmet Behkuki were important), which had influence on the post-René Block
period of Kosovo artists.
As an Albanian, Xhafa’s clandestine approach was significant, as he applied himself and succeeded in the international arena. With his photos of UÇK leaders, Albanian Mafioso in Italy and his borderline profane style, Xhafa was a true Albanian; he was a symbol of “Albanian vigilante” danger, and Xhafa was always aware of the labels and enjoyed playing with them.
But even more Albanian is artist Sokol Beqiri. Beqiri was active when art was being presented as a parallel institution in various areas, cafes and schools, and Beqiri was one of the first artists in Kosovo’s most political period to make contemporary art as “avant-garde” resistance.
After 1999, Beqiri’s work and lifestyle (his drinking, his refusal to leave his birth place of Peja, his experiences during the war and authentic Albanian folk attitudes) greatly influenced the younger generation. Aggression and openness in his works revealed the identity crisis and the traumas that he had lived through in Kosovo. He presented with great clarity the everyday fear that Albanians had of the Serbian
police and the brutality of para-military forces. Of Kosovo contemporary artists, only Sokol Beqiri and Erzen Shkolloli from Peja have succeeded in opening discussion on political issues in a very serious manner while in a discursive sphere. However, despite all of this, the answer to the original question is still in the negative: there is no contemporary culture in Pristina.
Both economics and pedagogical factors could be blamed for this. However the most important reason is this tradition of isolated and underground resistance, which has
created the discursive sphere in Kosovo public space.
Even though there is similarity and solidarity among the young artists in Pristina who have begun to be active on the international platform (Jahup Ferri, Driton Hajredinaj, Dren Maliqi, Lulezim Zeqiri and Tahar Alemdar), there is no continuity in Kosovo’s contemporary art history. Modernist artists like Muslim Muliqi, Rexhep Ferri, Xhevdet Xhafa, who were very active and at the academy between 1960 and 1990, are meaningless to the new wave of artists.
This attitude of young “new wave” artists shouldn’t be compared to western artists who criticize past generations and consciously reject following them. This is because the young artists of Kosovo have neither dealt with, nor faced, the artists of their past generation. They even think of this past as an empty period. The “collective amnesia” that once appeared in post-socialist countries shows itself distinctly in Kosovo. Maybe “amnesia” (called purification by Migjen Kelmendi in one of our conversations) as a traumatic experience is a good psychological strategy for countries in transition. However this healing strategy causes a kind of “a-historicity” in the social sphere. The outcome is always a postmodern conservative illusion that transforms history into spectacle.
Therefore the new wave artists in Pristina deny and pretend not see thirty years of art history in their artwork and everyday lives. Consequently, most young artists make reference to western artists like Christo (Sokol Beqiri), John Lennon and Yoko Ono (Yakup Feri), Damien Hirst (Lulezim Zeqiri), Barney and Viola ( Driton Hajredinaj) with an attitude of parody and irony in their work, but they never refer to their own older generation of artists.
What’s more, the old modernist Kosovo artists are still teaching the young new artists. (When we mention artists from 1960 to 1990, we are referring to Albanian artists. However, there are also important Serbian artists. To consider those artists taboo is another aspect of the collective amnesia.) The art students in the Fine Art Academy of Pristina rebelled against the older teachers during a two-month period between 2001 and 2002. Despite an effective rebellion by the young students, they were unable to take it into the public sphere. In his article written for the catalogue to the René Block exhibition, Shkelzen Maliqi’s opinion that this event was a starting point is a difficult sell. There are two reasons why the rebellion failed and cannot be used as a kind of starting point: First, the rebellion was organized by a “hard-core” group that was too small; and second, they were unable to transform the revolt and take it onto a planned-out, and critical level. In short, the revolt was important input, but it still lacked a manifesto that capable of defining a Kosovo new wave.
On the other hand, this rebellion and interest in the explosion of contemporary art produced a parallel institutionalization in Kosovo contemporary art. But this time the parallel institutionalization had many distinct features from the resistance of the Albanian underground of the 1980s.
The new wave artists harshly criticized Albanian national history and the symbols embodying profound cultural roots. Sokol Beqiri, who began this style of criticism,
uses the language of sailors, the Albanian flag, his family, and the message “Fuck You.” And Erzen Shkolloli (from Peja) made a video presenting the local singer Fejza Shkurte, who sings national songs. In the video, Fejza Shkurte sings, “Don’t Play with Albania,” threatening the world. The white and isolated space she is situated in shows the emptiness and amnesia of UNMIK.
Despite the existence of brave and self-critical works in Albanian culture, and there are many examples, no movement or public discussion as been stirred up. The contemporary art movement, considered a parallel institution, couldn’t create an opposition discourse, and was never established in a consciously open space. On the other hand the young new wave artists are aware of cultural and political happenings and discourses in the world, and they have access to a wide range of information. Among the new wave artists there are signs of a subculture movement under construction. Nicholas Bourriaud mentions in his book Relational Aesthetics “social exchange” within contemporary art. This social exchange doesn’t happen among galleries, audiences and artists in Pristina; the young new wave artists live the social exchange itself, in Pristina’s streets, cafes, odd passageways and one interesting music shop called “Ginger” — the most contemporary place in Pristina. In a city where everybody is a fan of Radiohead, only in this shop can you find records by Madness, Spaceman 3, Gang of Four, Iggy Pop, and CDs by Can, John Zorn, Les Negres Vertes, Residents, Laibach. Ginger’s owner, Armend, says that modern life in Pristina is divided into two groups: “charlatans who think that they’re contemporary and others who want to be like them.” The rest are Armend’s close friends. The cafes at the front of this passage are home to young artists, Hip-Hop musicians and fans (especially NR and TNT), and hash addicts. But even if these places create a kind of underground culture, this is not enough. The “Papçe” who began making videos, describe this situation very well: Underfuckinground! The fact is, Pristina is living mainstream kitsch, and it is impossible to get rid of the pop culture.
There was excitement in the air as Kosovo was being established in 1999. Four years have gone by, and Kosovo still has no
status, and it seems that it will not gain one. Only one contemporary artist ventures to criticize this situation: Erzen Shkolloli, who did a photomontage called: “UNMIK’s-Sold.” Even if the artists are aware of the situation, they are still unable to create a political and public discourse, and a manifesto with a political position does not exist. The underground position is a present day problem of visual culture — there is no need to be hopeless for the future. Because of the new generation of Kosovo artists, all new works assist in the construction of what Beuys called one critical “social sculpture.”
Veil: Veiling, Representation, and Contemporary Art.
By Meier, Prita , African Arts, 6/22/2004
www.encyclopedia.com
Veil Veiling, Representation, and Contemporary Art Edited by David A. Bailey and Gilane Tawadros
Mass media images of veiled Middle Eastern women are circulating at an unprecedented volume since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Europe (particularly France and to a lesser extent Germany) has also revitalized questions regarding national identity and secularism by focusing on the visibility of the Muslim veil and headscarf in European public institutions. The recent project Veil: Veiling, Representation, and Contemporary Art in part counters these particular visual tropes by introducing decidedly different images into the public sphere.
In the last two decades, a body of scholarship and revisionist exhibitions have highlighted the interstices between visual culture and the processes by which cultural boundaries of inclusion and exclusion are created. These critical works have sought to disrupt conventional narratives regarding cultural signs and symbols. By investigating the visual realm, including film, television, advertisements, photographs, and painting, such projects explore the ways in which visual forms operate in their representation of cultural difference. Veil contributes to this larger narrative by examining the cultural politics at work in representations of one of the most well-worn signs of "difference": the Muslim and Islamist veil. Like other paradigmatic symbols essentializing the "other," images of the veil and veiling reproduce imbricated histories of intercultural encounter, negotiation, representation, and domination. Anthropologists, cultural historians, and sociologists utilizing the critical tools of postcolonial theory have already engaged the complex histories and multiple meanings of the veil in Muslim and non-Muslim societies. Yet the vital contribution of Veil is its insistent interrogation and production of ambiguous and contested images.
Veil was published in conjunction with the UK touring exhibition of the same name, which was developed by the artists Zineb Sedira and Jananne Al-Ani and organized under the auspices of inIVA (Institute of International Visual Art) in London. inIVA has spearheaded a number of innovative exhibitions (such as "Faultlines: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes" at the Venice Biennale 2003) focusing on the works of artists and scholars from culturally diverse backgrounds and critical perspectives. The editors of Veil, Gilane Tawadros, director of inIVA, and David A. Bailey, a London-based artist, writer, and curator, have brought together a variety of essays, artworks, and archival materials exploring alternative visions of the veil. Indicative of a range of political, social, and ideological positions, the contributors offer multiple readings of the veil, ranging from a focus on its corporeal function in the performance of female identity to its immaterial role as a metaphor for censorship.
Besides the fact that North African artists are also included in Veil, Africanists will recognize the vital aim underwriting this project, since unpacking stereotypical and fetishistic images of Africa is also an important agenda for the field of African art history. Africanists will also find the authors' insights into the mercurial changes in the practice and meaning of contemporary veiling useful for exploring such practices in Muslim African societies. Furthermore, while scholars have explored the social meanings of African traditions of dressing the head (see, for example, Mary Jo Arnoldi and Christine Mullen Kreamer's 1995 exhibition catalogue Crowning Achievements: African Arts of Dressing the Head), this publication raises important issues about the ways in which this meaning circulates across multiple media and contexts. From this perspective, for example, a study of the ubiquitous West African headtie would invite new questions regarding how African modes of dress are represented and consumed by various culture producers and audiences in the West.
The preface by Reina Lewis, whose own research exploring the centrality of gender and sexuality has complicated Orientalist studies, frames Veil as an "agenda-setting" project that "shows how the heterogeneous use of veiling, as a dress act and visual trope, is endlessly repositioned by changing world events and constantly reframed by nuanced shifting responses of veiling communities" (p. 10). According to Lewis, Veil "not only shows the variety of visual responses to veiling, but also foregrounds the contingency of the viewer's interpretation" (p. 14).
In the introduction, Bailey and Tawadros position contemporary artistic practice as potentially subversive and ambiguous rather than "polemical" or "academic" (p. 19). Bailey and Tawadros contend that "[t]he strength and uniqueness of this project lie within the curatorial narrative which repositions the exhibition from the arena of ethnographic survey shows into a contemporary art context...." (p. 19). This celebration of the contemporary art world of course follows a certain understanding of the artist as someone whose ideas, strategies, and work offer a critical lens of the status quo. First developed in context of the historical avant-garde in the West, this position locates artists, such as those selected for this exhibition and catalogue, as critical cultural workers who have the ability to "disrupt the simplistic binaries" (p. 34) through aesthetic means.
From this position Bailey and Tawadros write an insightful narrative, interweaving discussions of specific works of art with analytical concerns regarding the ideological underpinnings of the veil. The authors explore such themes as the Orientalist gaze, Middle Eastern cultural idioms, and the signification of the female body and sexuality in various political, social, and cultural contexts. For example, the work of the AES art group--Mitra Tabrizian, Faisal Abdu' Allah, and Shadafarin Ghadirian--are discussed as ironic references to and evocations of the manipulative power of photography. The authors also explore how the embroidered canvases of Ghada Amer and the photographic works of Shirin Neshat comment on the use of the veiled or unveiled female body in contesting discourses of nationalism, feminism, colonialism, and resistance movements.
Furthermore, the editors have consciously chosen to include excerpts from important texts, such as Franz Fanon's Studies in a Dying Colonialism (1965) and Leila Ahmed's Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (1992), thus providing insight into the changing discourses surrounding the veil. The excerpt from Ahmed's book, titled "The Discourse of the Veil," focuses on colonial-era writings by colonial administrators and Egyptian activists. She shows how Western, Victorian colonial paternalism unfairly judged women's status in Egypt to justify the British "civilizing mission." Her text exposes the hypocrisy of colonial policies toward Muslim women, which on one hand appropriated the rhetoric of Western feminism and on the other hand enforced policies restricting Egyptian women's access to education. Her larger aim is to make a case for the liberation of women in Islamic cultures on their own terms and in their own time, without replicating Western constructs or dictates.
The excerpt by the Martiniquan psychiatrist and revolutionary writer Franz Fanon chronicles his anticolonial position in relationship to his role as an army psychiatrist and later as a participant in the war for liberation in Algeria. His text "Algeria Unveiled," written in 1959, is paired with stills from Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 film The Battle of Algiers. Both give insight into the ways in which the veiled woman became a symbol of resistance for various independence movements in Africa and the Middle East. The film stills and Fanon's text celebrate the concrete contribution of Algerian women to the resistance movement and the inability of the French administration to come to terms with Algerian social and political strategies of resistance.
Three other contributing authors speak to the changing position of the veil and veiling in three distinct cultural and political settings. Ahdaf Soueif, the well-known Egyptian-British novelist, relates the complex social and cultural codes attached to wearing the veil or headscarf in Egypt in different historical moments (1923, 1971, 2001) in her piece titled "The Language of the Veil." Her nuanced and personal perspective on the changing relationship Egyptian women have toward the veil highlights the subtle political, social, and class allegiances women project when they choose certain modes of veiling or not veiling. Alison Donnell, a British scholar of postcolonial literature, provides an incisive interrogation of American and European media coverage about Muslim and Islamist women since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Her essay, "Visibility, Violence and Voice? Attitudes to Veiling Post-11 September," emphasizes the new boundaries that have been drawn between "East" and "West" in contemporary political and wartime polemics. These fictionalized boundaries are of course particularly hard to sustain today since the public visibility of Islam and the specific gender, body, and spatial practices underpinning it are becoming more important to European and American Muslims and Islamists as well. Hamid Naficy's contribution, "Poetics and Politics of Veil, Voice, and Vision in Iranian Post-Revolutionary Cinema," draws on his expertise as an art historian and film studies scholar to chronicle the role of women before and behind the camera in the Iranian film industry since the 1978-79 revolution. He considers how filmmakers deal with new political and social rules regulating modesty and gendered segregation and focuses on the works of film directors and multimedia artists, such as Ghazel, who appropriate the veil as a vehicle for critiquing the political establishment in Iran.
Jananne Al-Ani and Zineb Sedira, who cocurated and contributed artworks to the exhibition, also wrote articles for the catalogue. Their essays give provocative insights into in their personal and intellectual engagement with the ideological baggage of the veil and the impact this baggage has on their artistic practice. Al-Ani's contribution, "Acting Out," revisits the work of various turn-of-the-century and colonial-period photographers (from Europe and Iran) and the ways in which their visual legacy has occupied later generations of scholars and artists. The vital questions posed by Sedira's essay, "Mapping the Illusive," are pivotal to understanding the larger implications of the Veil project: "What differences are there between the physical veil in Muslim culture and the mental veil in Western culture?" (p. 5), "How do I write about the subject of the veil in the West without worrying that my writing reinforces Orientalist fetishes, commodifying experience?" (p. 63).
Another key question would be to ask what the implications are of producing images and imaginings of the veil in the realm of the European art museum (with its particular audiences). Furthermore, what are the complex ideological shifts at play when images of the veil are aestheticized in contemporary art making processes? These issues of contingency and responsibility are a strong undercurrent in Veil, but never addressed directly. Of course, the realm of the contemporary art object/project is equally rife for consumption and can also lead to rarified conceptions and fetishizations. Yet the authors do attend to the multivocality of representations of the veil in the wider contemporary social and cultural context. Most importantly, Veil represents a project of cultural intervention by artists and cultural workers. While ambitious and wide-ranging in scope, at its core Veil is a platform from which twenty international artists from Muslim and non-Muslim backgrounds respond to and problematize accepted paradigms of interpretation that reduce the veil as a sign of incontrovertible cultural difference.
COPYRIGHT 2004 The Regents of the University of California
This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.
KW INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART Berlin, 2004
EXHIBITION
PRIVATIZATIONS
CONTEMPORARY ART FROM EASTERN EUROPE
www.postcommunist.de
In affiliation with the project, a film and video exhibition will take place in the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin in 2004. The topic of the presentation is the situation of art in the post-communist countries of central and eastern Europe. The exhibition shows works of video and installation art, which are based on the artistic technique of appropriation: The contemporary artists become acquainted with the anonymous, collective, state-run cultural production techniques of the socialist era and strive to create their own artistic worlds and develop artistic identities for themselves.
In their work they tap into functions and effects of the films of the Stalinist and Cold War eras, for example, and criticize them. Along these lines, in his film INTERVISTA the Albanian artist Anri Sala deals with the search for a language of the present for events in the past. He depicts not only the reluctance of the former communist Elite of Albania to devote any attention to the past, but also, in particular, the strategies of denial, suppression, shame, rationalisation and regret in light of their incapacity to articulate the past in terms of adequate present experiences as well as the hope of developing ways to comprehend what has occurred by means of art.
Video is one communication media that many artists have been working with in the post-communist era. For a long period of time, artists in Russia had no opportunity to use television and mass media for their work. When western advertising first came to eastern Europe and television began to report on artistic events, the artists soon became aware of the diverse possibilities of television and video media and their enormous social significance. They regarded video art above all as a chance of entering into a dialogue with the wide world of the media. This communication media opened up possibilities to reflect television in their own work and articulate themselves on the same eye-level as those who officially used this art of the masses. The exhibition concentrates in particular on the video film as a new, important media of post-communist art.
The video DEMONSTRATION produced by Dmitrij Gutov together with the group Radek shows how working with video and television offers possibilities of articulating a certain dramatisation of social processes. The video presents a performance. Several artists make their way towards a busy part of a city, where many people are waiting in front of a red traffic light. They then move in front of those waiting and barge ahead of them when the light for pedestrians turns green. They carry signs and banners with absurd and anarchistic slogans and thereby turn the entire flow of pedestrians into a demonstration. The video is accompanied by the film music “Heart beat, pig meat” from Antonionis’ film ZABRISKIE POINT, which serves as an allusion to the end of the 1960’s and raises questions on the possibility of political resistance in Russia under the condition of the strong influence of western lifestyle through mass culture and its technology. The exhibition shows artistic perspectives of the present from Russia, Poland, Romania, Kazakhstan, Serbia, Hungary, Slovenia and Ukraine among others. Boris Groys is the curator of the exhibition.
Anne von der Heiden
BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN 2004
Mass public/political art in London's Trafalgar Square
This past September 12th, more than 40,000 people gathered in London's Trafalgar Square for an unusual evening performance, an open air screening of Sergei Eisenstein's classic revolutionary film, Battleship Potemkin. The world-shattering film was projected on a giant screen and provided a live soundtrack performed by the Dresdner Sinfoniker String Orchestra and composed by the Pet Shop Boys.
When the radical film was originally released in 1923, it threw authorities all over the world into an absolute panic. In Germany it was censored and military recruits were banned from watching it. In France all copies of the film were confiscated and destroyed. The film was banned in cities across the US, and in Britain it was outlawed until 1954. Eisenstein's ground-breaking movie details an actual event, the 1905 mutiny of Russian sailors on the Battleship Potemkin.
The sailors endured harsh treatment by their Czarist officers until they were served maggot infested meat… which led to mutiny and the navy men taking over the ship to raise the red flag of revolution. Eisenstein’s portrayal of the people of Odessa rising up in solidarity with the rebellious sailors, only to be massacred by counter-revolutionary Cossack troops… is perhaps one of the most famous in all of cinema.
40,000 gathered in Trafalgar Square
The legendary “Odessa steps” scene not only heralded a new way of assembling film through staccato editing and juxtapositions of montage-like imagery… it introduced a new way of seeing. The Abstract Expressionist, Francis Bacon, first viewed the film in 1935 and kept stills from the movie in his studio. He frequently referenced the Odessa steps scene in his own paintings as a symbol of the angst present in our panic-stricken society.The film’s screening at Trafalgar Square was proceeded by oration from Simon McBurney, the pioneering actor-director and co-founder of the Complicite Theater Troupe. McBurney reminded those gathered that the Square held significance as a place of historic mass protest… from the 1930s marches against unemployment and the 1960s demonstrations against the Vietnam war, to the huge Anti-Poll Tax protests of 1990 and todays rallies against the war in Iraq. When the film ended, one last message was splashed across the huge screen. Massive letters proclaimed, “More than 50% of the world’s population live on or below the poverty line”… and then, “Existence = Resistance.”
Wikipedia
Protest art refers to the signs, banners, and any other form of creative expression used by activists to convey a particular cause or message. It is a visual action taken by social activists to make a point clear. Protest art is also used with the intention to promote counter-thinking about the fabric of society itself. Often such art is used as part of demonstrations or acts of civil disobedience. Some key icons in protest art have been the dove, the peace symbol, and taunting messages.
Protest art relies on people's understanding of the symbols used in the art. Without understanding the piece is useless.
While some protest art is associated with trained and professional artists, an extensive knowledge in art is not required to take part in protest art. The most important part of protest art is element of social activism. Therefore, protest art requires most importantly a cause or an issue. Protest art can take on the form of a simple sign displaying a social message of displeasure or a large banner expressing discontent with something in particular or in general.
Oftentimes protest artists bypass the "artworld institutions and commercial gallery system" in an attempt to reach a wider audience through means that are most accessible to them. Instead of creating social activist art and displaying them only in art galleries where access is restricted to the "economically privileged", protest artists are trying to ensure their message reaches the most amount of people. Furthermore, protest art is not limited to one region or country but is rather a social activism method that is used around the world. For example, artists in South Africa during the 1990s created art using a range of mediums that explored memories of an integrated community that was once the heart of Cape Town.
There are many politically-charged pieces of fine art - such as Picasso's Guernica, some of Norman Carlberg's Vietnam-era work, or Susan Crile's images of torture at Abu Ghraib - which could perhaps be termed "protest art", except that they lack the easy portability and disposability often associated with protest art.
History
It is difficult to establish a history for protest art because many variations of it can be found throughout history. While many cases of protest art can be found during the early 1900s, like Picasso's Gyernica painting in 1937, the last thrity years has experienced are large increase in the number of artists adopting protest art as a style to relay a message to the public.
A piece of protest art parodying the logo of the NBA.As awarness of social justices around the world became more common among the public, an increase in protest art can be seen. Some of the most critically effective artworks of the reccent period were staged outside the gallery, away from the museum and in that sense, protest art has found a different relationship to the public.
Resistance art
Resistance art has long been a term used to describe those that use art as a way of showing their opposition to powerholders. The term has been used to define art that opposed such powers as the Greman Nazi party, and the Bolshevik Revolution. The term most recently has been applied to artists opposed to apartheid in South Africa. South African resistance artists are sometimes derogatorily referred to as "township" artists, referring to the subdivisions that black citizens were forced to live in. Willie Bester is one of South Africa's most well known artists who originally began as a resistance artist. Using materials assembled from garbage, Bester builds up surfaces into relief and then paints the surface with oil paint. His works commented on important black South African figures and aspects important to his community. South African resistance artists do not exclusively deal with race nor do they have to be from the townships. Another artist, Jane Alexander, has dealt with the atrocities of apartheid from a white perspective. Her resistance art deals with the unhealthy society that continues in post-apartheid South Africa.
CHADORS AND GRAFFITI, EU FLAGS AND ICONIC BODIES: FOUR CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ARTISTS
By Maria Petrides
‘Work grounded in protest -against fascism, moral hypocrisy, the Vietnam War, and so on -is the closest thing we have to an art that zeroes in on a crisis of public conscience and attempts to provoke viewers to think about their own relationship to a social upheaval close at hand.”1
Contemporary art stretches beyond the boundaries of an individual medium and of a single national border. With this encouragement of diversity, fluidity and mobility, art becomes a form of social empowerment by the very surrender of singularity. Reviewing the work of four artists -the Turkish-Cypriot fashion designer and installation/video artist Hussein Chalayan; the British graffiti artist known as Banksy; the New York installation artist Spencer Tunick; and the New York-based multimedia artist Anna Lascari -this piece of commentary aims to show how, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, certain art expresses its resistance through various media: whether it be social or political resistance, or resistance to any type of ‘conformity’ which may restrict the potential found in mobility and hybridity.
Hussein Chalayan’s oeuvre crosses the boundaries of fashion into sculpture, furniture objects into architecture. If one of the literary concerns of the nineteenth century2 was the ‘form’ and ‘content’ divide in literature, complicating the process of ‘content’ as it develops into ‘form’, and locating how ‘form’ becomes an expression of emerging ‘contents’ and ideas, we may find that our century is not necessarily free of this separation.
In 1891, Oscar Wilde writes in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’,
Form and substance cannot be separated in a work of art; they are always one […]. Style recognizes the beauty of the material it employs, be that material one of words or of bronze, of colour or of ivory, and uses that beauty as a factor in producing the aesthetic effect […]. The subject is conditioned by the temperament of the artist, and comes directly out of it.3
The materials of the creator, whether it be paint, objects, words or ideas, are, innately, forms that the artist chooses because of the potential s/he attributes to them. In this way, content and form are indissoluble. On the inseparability of form and idea, Gustave Flaubert writes,
“It is impossible to extract from a physical body the qualities which really constitute it colour, extension, and the like – without reducing it to a hollow abstraction, in a word, without destroying it; just so it is impossible to detach the form from the idea, for the idea only exists by virtue of the form.”4
If Flaubert makes a distinction between the two, it is to esteem form over content since, for Flaubert, content, the idea, needs to be exhibited in a given form. Nonetheless, these terms return to remind us that, perhaps, we aren’t always ready to think that they are one and the same in different ways. The fashion editor of Time5 magazine, Lauren Goldstein, describes Chalayan’s work as being more about ‘substance’ than ‘style’, emphasizing an existing angst to subordinate ‘surface/style/form’ to a ‘predecessor’ ‘depth/substance/content’. But perhaps Chalayan’s aesthetic forms, which are often informed by science, technology, and architectural theories, generate thought and provoke political complacency by the very means within their end: style. What is style, if not the coating, the ‘finish’ of an idea materialized?
Just as Chalayan’s works transcend genre and, the ‘form’ and ‘content’ divide, they also undermine the viewer’s expectations, as does, for example, his terrific runway piece (2002-3) in which naked, and what look like Western, models are wearing the Muslim chador, only not in a traditional manner.6 One is entirely naked, wearing only what looks like a leather harness over her face. Her eyes are visible. Another model is wearing half a chador, which covers her as far as her stomach. An artist with a social conscience, this image might be read as, arguably, making some commentary on the different stages of traditional wear, as some have suggested. In response to these interpretations, Chalayan describes the particular show as one that poses questions about defining territory.7 Raised in Cyprus, a divided island between Muslim Turks and Christian Greeks, his work often engages with issues of ‘stability’ and ‘permanency’: what often keeps us enslaved to a history of enmity and subordination, material dependency and self-righteousness? As Chalayan himself remarks:
“What [inspires] me [is] the way our lives are in a constant state of mobility, and how, in some ways, that could affect memory, could affect our attachment to domestic things. What would new comfort zones be in those kinds of situations? You know, it’s this whole idea of creating a refuge wherever you are. It’s quite abstract, in a way it’s a bit like meditating on solitude, maybe a bit about nostalgia, how we reminisce, creating a place within a cavity [my emphasis], all these kinds of ideas.”8
Chalayan’s use of the word cavity as a metaphor is an important one. It suggests that there is no going back to roots or origins once one becomes aware that there is no ‘stable’ place to which to return; rather, one can hope to find comfort zones, which are mobile, even if they produce some degree of uneasiness. The idea is to create a place within a cavity which may be hollow but doesn’t necessarily remain so since this crater can be filled in with memories and images, hence a sweet nostalgia of a unified past that relieves us from the weight of a stagnant history of division. The actual refuge, which for Chalayan is transient, can be found in a transformed and transforming gap. His Living Room collection (2000) demonstrates this continuous and rapid change, which prevents one from becoming attached to any particular image. Sculptural dresses convert into tables, which then transform into suitcases, offering us a wealth of images generated in the process of transitioning. His images cannot be arrested long enough to become possessions. They are shifters of shapes and forms, content and concept.
In a parallel way, Banksy’s artistic interventions are examples of several kinds of confrontations. When Banksy smuggles, humorously, into the Brooklyn Museum an altered reproduction of a 2 foot by 1.5 foot oil painting of a colonial-era admiral, holding a can of graffiti spray paint on a background of anti-war character,9 he is doing more than deprecating the elitist hierarchy of ‘high art’ still thriving in our contemporary art world. The material activity that goes into the performance of an artist who takes on the authority to shift boundaries that define what can be placed in a museum, is itself a form of socio-political resistance; a dauntless act. Banksy’s intervention is a political operation that removes an historical past of colonial imposition only to re-place it into an existing context, equally imposing, in order to comment on our present state of political affairs. In March 2005, Banksy hung in the American Museum of Natural History, a glass-encased beetle with fighter jet-wings and missiles attached to its body: what might be taken for granted to be a harmless insect, appears, here, as military, thus calamitous.
In August 2005, Banksy succumbed to the temptation to paint on the 8 to 10-metre high and 451-mile-long dehumanizing concrete wall of Israel,10 which cuts through the West Bank, severing the water resources, agriculture, and infrastructure of 6.5 million Palestinian refugees.11 Banksy himself has described the wall as ‘essentially turn[ing] Palestine into the world’s largest open prison.’12 On the wall, Banksy paints a hole shaped as though an explosive has gone through it. Through the outlet of this hole we can see a peaceful beach; however, the children, presumably Palestinian, are outside the hole, thus on the side of the wall which allows them to enjoy the pleasures of innocence simply as an imaginary oasis.13 Another intervention illustrates a girl holding a bunch of balloons blowing into an imaginary sky of freedom.14 In spite of the serenity Banksy’s graffiti evokes, one Palestinian was offended by this mediation, arguing that it ‘makes the wall look beautiful when we don’t want it to, we hate this wall.’15 Yet the art on the wall offers no illusion of beautifying what is monstrous, or of altering what lies behind it: a bulk of crime and ruthless oppression.16 By portraying the children outside the haven, we are reminded of the real conditions behind the wall that keep Palestinians confined, therefore we are aware that Banksy’s intervention provides an imagined escape from domination without altering our perception of the destruction the wall is causing. On the contrary, Banksy offers art in a prison where persecuted Palestinians17 do not have the luxury of freedom to enjoy it due to the daily setting under which they have to live. Part of this gesture, however, is to bring art to a place where the drive to create it is inhibited, and in so doing to render it accessible even under the conditions of, arguably, one of history’s cruelest crimes. The practice of making art accessible to all, and not confining it to museum and gallery spaces, as such creates a networking of improvisation and facilitates a conceptualization of the artist that depends on the innovative collaboration of the model/viewer/participant for its materialization.
Since 1992, Spencer Tunick has become an icon for his remarkable naked body installations, loosely orchestrated by himself without, however, locking volunteers into a rigorous posing. Tunick’s photographs document the real event as it unfolds. He situates thousands of ordinary bodies in public spaces, creating various forms and images on bridges and highways, on piers, and outside museum spaces.18 Not only does he transform landscapes by bringing to them human life in different colours, shapes, sizes and expressions, but he surprises us by subverting our preconceptions of nudity in photography. The naked individual who poses, quite stylishly, in a ‘private’ space, is replaced by a crowd of naked bodies, crossing the boundaries of race, ethnicity and gender. The ordinary becomes the exceptional. In this traversing of difference, Tunick makes equality visible.
The request to close off a bridge is usually reserved for emergency purposes, e.g. the proceeding of some official figure, or an authorized warning of a ‘terrorist’ threat. Yet Tunick often has large public spaces evacuated to photograph his installations. Since 1992, Tunick has been arrested five times by the authorities for endorsing ethical matters to do with exhibiting nudity in public spaces. He fought a long battle with former mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, for the right to photograph naked people on the streets. The Supreme Court ruled that his work was protected by the first amendment.19 But Tunick’s work is not only confrontational for its nude content. It publicizes what has long been reserved as a ‘private’ icon: the naked body, and does so by transforming it from the exclusiveness of individuality into a parade of social resistance. In July 2005, Tunick gathered 1,700 naked people, who went on to march, as in a protest, between the Tyne and Millennium bridges on the Newcastle quayside. These marches of the nude send an underlying message, namely, as citizens of the US these volunteers will continue to exercise their right to be photographed nude in authorized public spaces. This is the citizen’s right to her/his freedom of expression protected under the first amendment. This protest of the nude has the vigor of any demonstration in its capacity to show how plurality, whether in terms of bodies, genders, ethnicities, or national identities, is an effective means for changing a society’s status quo.
Gender, ethnic, political and social inclusiveness are fundamental elements in all these artists’ works. Anna Lascari’s latest computer-based interactive installation, Random Identity Forum (RIF), appears in the form of an entertaining video game, almost: ‘design your own flag; create a new European Union’. One enters Lascari’s website20 to find a black background with instructions on how to play. An interactive forum, RIF is a place where one can cast a visual vote based on one’s political and inter/national beliefs. The participant has the option to compose a new flag based on the 25 existing EU member countries. By choosing however high a percentage of whichever flag one chooses to preserve, the interactive voter creates a new flag, which can then be distributed to other fellow voters, or printed as a document. On the page ‘How to Play’, the artist has the following quotation posted from the official EU website Europa: ‘The idea of a citizens’ Europe is very new. Making it a reality will mean, among other things, rallying popular support for symbols that represent a shared European identity’ [my emphasis]. Indeed, RIF is an invitation to all citizens of the 25 member states to create a vision of another European Union. During an age of increasing disaffection with Western politics and leaders, people are inclined to want to take more power into their own hands.21 If the flag of the European Union – a circle of 12 golden stars on a blue background – has symbolic value, Lascari’s forum offers a space in which we can replace the existing symbol with multi-colours, creating different patterns according to our vision. But aesthetics and politics are not separate entities,22 and RIF does not seem to be advocating this either. Quite the contrary, it is through a political art that Lascari might be proposing a revisable EU, perhaps an EU whose symbolic consequence is found in a hybrid of identities and not a union comprised of countries with a definite distinctiveness under the auspice of a unilateral coalition.
Lascari’s project is powerful for the commentary it makes on the continuous issues which arises with the EU’s efforts to arrive at an influential position in world politics. However, it is the way in which the commentary is made that allows RIF to enthrall the viewer. Irony is a clever way by which to invert our expectations, and RIF does this successfully. We are invited into a meeting area to think about and modify the identities to be represented in a new EU flag, and the way to do this is by no means to do it randomly, as the title of the work ironically suggests. If neither the percentages of identities that the participant is invited to form nor the identity of the EU are arbitrarily selected, then the implication might be that what appears to be indecipherable in the final composition of a flag is, in fact, the result of a calculated proposition. If the EU takes itself too seriously during a time when there does not seem to be any current political force powerful enough to oppose US, and to a lesser extent, British imperialism, then RIF opens us up to this incongruous rivalry, by putting us, the masses, in the ranks of the EU. In other words, RIF challenges us to imagine ourselves, the citizens of the world, as the ‘Other Superpower’,23 while reminding us that as ‘players’ in the forum of RIF, we might, like the EU, be amusing ourselves by aspiring to contend with a mismatch – the US and its coalition.
It is in different ways, as I hope I have shown, that each artist expresses his/her subversive aesthetic and political dissidence. In a world of opportunistic leaders who, for the sake of financial advantage and regional supremacy have no reservations about manufacturing a myth to do with Weapons of Mass Destruction, costing hundreds of thousands lives of Iraqis while wreaking havoc in their country, one of the few tools that empowers people is resistance, and art is a means to make it visible. Our world of political art, technology, and multi-media, is revolutionary for making art more visible and accessible to anyone connected with Our-New-World-Without-Borders, and we, the People and Creators, have the power to defy any curtailing of our civil rights and censorship by expressing our resistance and persistently supporting the democratic proliferation of this innovative art.
© Maria Petrides, 2006
PhD Final, French
Bibliography
Cameron, Dan, Doris Salcedo, 'Inconsolable', New Museum of Contemporary Art, (New York: 1998).
Flaubert, Gustave. Oeuvre Complètes, Correspondance, vols. II-VIII, passim. Louis Conard, (1926-1933).
Kennedy, Helena, Renewal, ‘People and Government, After 5 May, the divorce proceedings continue’ in Volume 13, (No 2/3: 2005).
Menkes, Suzy, International Herald Tribune ‘The new sobriety: Covering up the body’, (28 February 2006).
Pappe, Ilan, Logos, ‘The Truth about Palestine’, Volume three – Issue one: (2004).
Pater, Walter, Appreciations, ‘Style’, (Macmillan and Co. 1889).
Qumsiyeh, Mazin B., Sharing the Land of Canaan, (Pluto Press, 2004).
Rancière Jacques, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, (Continuum International Publishing
Group, 2004).
Schell, Jonathan, The Nation, ‘The World’s Other Superpower’, (14 April 2003).
Wilde, Oscar, Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, (Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1997).
Wolfe, Katherine, Contemporary Aesthetics, ‘From Aesthetics to Politics: Rancière, Kant and Deleuze’, Volume 4 (2006).
Comments
1 Dan Cameron, 'Inconsolable' in Doris Salcedo, p.9 (Dan Cameron is senior curator of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and contributor to the magazine Art Forum).
2 Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and Gustave Flaubert are examples of several writers of aestheticism who began to emphasize the importance of style and aesthetics in literature, complicating notions about finding ‘meaning’ merely in the subject of a text. For more on this see Pater’s Appreciations, Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Flaubert’s work ‘On Realism’ in Oeuvres Complètes, Correspondance, p.90-95.
3 In Collected Works, p. 911.
4 Selected from Walter Pater’s ‘Style’, in Appreciations, p. 28.
5 Icon (December 2003), www.iconmagazine.co.uk/issues/december/hussein.htm.
6 This image can be found at http://www.we-make-moneynot-art.com/archives/007197.php.
7 See the article ‘The new sobriety: Covering up the body’, by Suzy Menkes.
8 Icon (December 2003), www.iconmagazine.co.uk/issues/december/hussein.htm.
9 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3447352403626976278
10 Mazin B. Qumsiyeh talks about the physical and psychological apartheid implemented by Israel, and its effects on the Palestinian people. He says, ‘unlike the physical apartheid constructed unilaterally, psychological apartheid has walls constructed from both sides. These shield people from the reality of the other side and also prevent introspection on their own shortcomings. […] A sense of hopelessness and desperation leaves many looking for “crumbs” of both material and psychological “food”’ (p.210-211). For more on how Israel is continuously violating several of the articles of The Fourth Geneva Convention refer to Mazin B. Qumsiyeh’s Sharing the Land of Canaan. Mazin B. Qumsiyeh is a human rights activist and co-founder of the Palestine Right to Return Coalition, and Academics for Justice, among other grass-roots groups.
11 Land Research Centre & Applied Research Institute – Jerusalem.
12 Guardian Unlimited, http://arts.guardian.co.uk/gallery/0,8542,1543331,00.html.
13 This image can be found at http://www.banksy.co.uk/outdoors/palestine/index.html# in the top right-hand corner of the gallery.
14 Guardian Unlimited,http://arts.guardian.co.uk/gallery/0,,1543331,00.html.
15 Guardian Unlimited,http://arts.guardian.co.uk/gallery/0,8542,1543331,00.html.
16 On 9 July 2004, the International Court of Justice issued itsdecision on the Israeli wall. The Court’s ruling expressed the following. ‘The wall is illegal. Israel must dismantle it, and pay compensation to Palestinians who have suffered financial or property losses as a result of its construction. No state should recognize the barrier as legitimate. The UN should act to implement the Court’s decision’. We have yet to see the UN execute this decision. For more on this visit the Global Policy Forum at http://www.globalpolicy.org/wldcourt/icj/2004/0727utmost.htm.
17 During an interview on the question of Palestine, the Israeli historian and Palestinian activist Ilan Pappe, says:
“The situation has only become worse in the last four years. There are several spheres of brutality that should be mentioned: the collective punishment, the abuse of thousands of detainees and political prisoners, the transfer of people, the economic devastation, the slaying of innocent citizens and the daily harassment at checkpoints.” For more see the journal Logos (Winter 2004).
18 To see more of Tunick’s images visit I-20 at http://www.i20.com/artist.php?artist_id=19.
19 The Guardian, National News (18 July 2005)
20 www.annalascari.net/RIF. For the Username enter rif; For the Password enter random.
21 In ‘People and Government, After 5 May, the divorce proceedings continue’, Helena Kennedy talks about the British people’s disengagement from political life during the last General Elections. She found that across the established, postindustrial democracies and in Britain, disengagement has four features in common: a. a declining outlet at elections. b. a declining membership of and allegiance to established political parties: A crossnational study found identification with a political party had dropped across the advanced democracies but this represented a particularly sharp fall for Britain. c. increased levels of distrust and contempt towards politicians. d. the rise of political activity conducted outside formal democratic mechanisms. According to Kennedy, ‘one of the conditions behind disengagement is that people have been led to a much greater expectation that one should take decisions on one’s own behalf rather than delegate them elsewhere.’ pp. 32-35. Helena Kennedy is a QC, Labour peer and Chair of the Power Inquiry, an independent inquiry into Britain’s democracy.
22 On the relationship between art and politics, Jacques Rancière argues: ‘[Art] is political as its own practices shape forms of visibility that reframe the way in which practices, manners of being and modes of feeling and saying are interwoven in a commonsense, which means a "sense of the common" embodied in a common sensorium’ (p, 1-2). For more see The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Further reading includes Katherine Wolfe’s article ‘From Aesthetics to Politics: Rancière, Kant and Deleuze’ found in
the journal Contemporary Aesthetics, volume 4.
23 On 15 and 16 February 2003, just days after the US invaded Iraq, the world witnessed the biggest demonstration since the Vietnam War, gathering between 6 and 10 million protestors worldwide. Many, including Jonathan Schell, a contributor of The Nation and author of The Unconquerable World, called this extraordinary antiwar movement, ‘the Other Superpower’, as an indication of world public opinion. For more see The Nation issue of 14 April 2003.
Drawing More Than Resistance, The Artist and His Voice
By Anne Bacon, May 2002
Sf-frontlines.com
“My posters are a form of self-defense. . . The corporations want artists to glorify their wars, their products, and their philosophies. I make art for my own self-preservation. The prints displayed here are not inspired by rugged individualism, but by collective humor, defiance, and lust for life exhibited by those on the margins.” -Doug Minkler
On Saturday, a few weeks back, I walked towards Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley from my Oakland home to meet with Doug Minkler. Mutual friends had arranged the meeting, and all that I knew of him was gray hair and political cartoons on the sidewalk outside of Cody's. What I found, as you'll guess, was something altogether different.
Lining the sidewalk, on easel edges, propped against chairs, and spread on tables were posters and screen prints that challenged my entire conception of political cartoons. The images on the posters shocked me from six feet away with their abstract boldness, their resistance to recognizable form and contour, and by the fearless messages printed explicitly on or below each image.
Visual images are among the most powerful of the arts in their ability to express a particular idea. However, most (especially those which venture into abstract realms) often risk misinterpretation of the intended message. This is especially true with political art, as it often deals with controversial and complex ideas, most of which are not a part of the collective conscience. Some artists accept this risk and leave each viewer to interact with the pieces in a manner appropriate to her/his experience.
This is not Doug Minkler’s approach. He is not interested in his images being represented as mere "self-expression of an internal landscape." For him, art is a natural means of expressing outrage and identifying injustice. This is why each image is accompanied by text explaining its meaning.
The images that Minkler chooses are informed by the experience of being raised in a working class family in Berkeley's university community, as well as the experience of coming of age during the Vietnam war. Minkler learned quickly about the nature of the class system, forming a class identification at a young age. In the 60's and 70's, he became a part of the culture of resistance, characterized by the "uniting force" (a conspicuously absent characteristic, Minkler suggests, of today's activists and intellectuals) of opposition to authority.
His early days found Minkler dodging induction into what he considered an unjust war by leaving the country, briefly studying sculpture, and raising, with his beautiful partner, seven children spanning almost four decades. It was here, finding himself working 50-60 hour weeks in the industrial world, and working to hold back the forces of republican conservatism by attending union meetings, that Minkler realized: It isn't enough.
Screen-printing proved itself to be the most natural way to use his art to address social injustices and the issues of his class. He determined that sculpture required too great a time investment, and the finished product would either occupy a private space in a wealthy patron's garden or vie for a single censored public space along with two hundred other sculptures. The prints were an obvious means of mass producing an illustration while maintaining ownership of the means of production, thus guaranteeing control of content and assuring that his work was seen by the broadest possible audience. Minkler began printing out of his garage in 1979, and continues to do so. Gathering his supplies from industrial discard piles, he also traded labor for supplies at a silk-screen supply house.
Minkler's images combine the most shocking aspects of abstraction, an absurd cartoonishness and obvious fearlessness, comparable in their shock value to the work of Seth Tobocman, comic book artist and author of You Don't Have to Fuck People Over to Survive. Because of his commitment to conveying this political message exactly as intended, the text makes each poster humbling and almost always controversial.
Minkler's images are shaping and reshaping. They speak well enough for themselves. Go see them outside of Cody's where Minkler has displayed them almost every weekend for the past six years. He does have grayish hair, as it turns out, so look for him there, and bring time enough to spend with the images to absorb their fearlessness and their truth. Bring your wallet too, (the artist must eat).
Drawing Resistance
The Drawing Resistance political art show is drawing more than resistance. It is drawing crowds, drawing communities of artists together, and it is drawing a curious, yet familiar controversy.
The 2-dimensional art show began its five-year tour around North America in September of 2001, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, home to one of the shows two curators, Sue Simensky Bietila. Bietila and co-curator Nicolas Lampert gathered the artwork from friends and fellow artists across the country. As the tour has no funding, it relies solely upon communities, traveling like a d.i.y. punk band from city to city in vans and trucks.
The only consistent characteristic is the artwork itself, covering every topic from the Zapatista liberation movement to corporate hegemony, and homelessness. Bietila and Lampert remark that "the need for a show of this nature arose out of the separation of art and politics in US culture. . . . Political art has historically been stereotyped as technically substandard or dogmatic propaganda. The show works to negate these myths and present a visually exciting show . . . (It also works) to build a community of political artists and be a source of inspiration."
And this is exactly what the show has done. In Milwaukee, as well as the subsequent tour cities of Chicago and New York City, the show attracted large and diverse crowds. In each of these cities, as anticipated in those to come, local artist communities have arranged other events to coincide with the showing: slide shows, music, festivals, readings, etc.
The artwork reflects the lives, politics and experiences of 31 artists ranging in age from their early 20's to their 80's. Among the local artists whose work is displayed is Doug Minkler, the screen print artist from Berkeley. From Oakland, local artist Emily Abendroth's work can be seen. And from San Francisco Eric Drooker, who works with scratchboard; Freddie Baer, a collage artist; and Winston Smith and John Yates, who designed album cover art for the Dead Kennedys. Other artists such as Seth Tobocman and Peter Kuper, (World War 3 Illustrated), from NYC and Carlos Cortez, best known for his posters for the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) also display one or several pieces of work.
For the most part, the Drawing Resistance show has created a safe space for these artists. In Chicago, unfortunately, the show drew some controversy when Mike James, co-owner of the Heartland Cafe took down Doug Minkler's "Stop US Aid to Israel" screen print.
The poster was replaced within a week, but the social and political implications of the censorship of one print amongst an entire show of radical political art are enormous. One is left to wonder whether certain mechanisms need to be implemented in the future to prevent such censorship. But, due to the nature of the show, Bietila and Lampert have decided to leave this responsibility in the hands of individual communities.
Galleries showing solo shows of Minkler’s work have previously objected to the same piece.Minkler refuses to be censored. If a venue asks him to take down this print, the entire show comes down. And the entire show has come down several times. After all, "Art is not a mirror to hold up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it." [Bertolt Brecht]
It will be in San Francisco and the Bay Area in April and May of 2004, but don't worry about marking your calendars now, you'll hear it coming. If Minkler’s piece is not there, be sure you let the owners of the venue and the curators of the show know what you think of censorship. In the meantime, check out www.drawingresistance.org to find out more about the artists and the journey of their art across North America. And tell your friends. The show will be in their city too.
Jack Persekian / south ... east ... mediterranean... europe
Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Centre, January 01, 2004
platformgaranti.blogspot.com
Between December 14 and 16, Platform organized south ... east ... mediterranean... europe, a conference and conversation series. The project was within the context of "In The Cities of the Balkans", the 2nd part of "The Balkans Trilogy", a project initiated by Kunsthalle Fridericianum, with writers, critics, curators and artists from Sofia, Skopje, Jerusalem, Cairo, Belgrade, Beirut, Zagreb, Istanbul, Tirana, Pristine, and Sarajevo. The meeting focused upon rethinking artistic production, cultural geography and possible future collaborations in South-East Europe and the South-East Mediterranean, otherwise known as the Balkans and the Middle East.The participants were, Rene Block, Natasa Iliç, Vasif Kortun, Suzana Milevska, Jack Persekian, Shkelzen Maliqi, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Eleni Laperi Koci, Migjen Kelmendi, Lejla Hodzic, Christine Tohme, Mai Abdu ElDahab, Katerina Gregos, and Boris Buden.
It was funded by Förderung aus Mitteln der Kulturstiftung des Bundes and organized in collaboration with Kunsthalle Fridericianum Kassel.
History
In 1948 the State of Israel was established on land that was formerly Palestine, and approximately half the Palestinian population were driven into exile, where they still reside in the Diaspora, outside the former boundaries of Palestine. “The other half live in what became of Palestine which is known as the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Israel. This geographical reality has meant that the work of Palestinian artists begins from varied locations, from the city centers of Europe and the States to the various refugee camps, and is formed by different experiences, education, backgrounds and opportunities.”[1]
The history of Palestinian art may be divided into three phases according to Kamal Boullata [2], one of the leading Palestinian artists and art historians. In the first phase (1885-1955), - the period mainly prior to 1948 which also came to be known as the year of the Nakba, the Catastrophe - icon painting was developed as one of the country’s earliest traditions of picture making. Yet the possibility of an indigenous art was aborted as a result of the uprootedness and dispersion of the Palestinian society. The two decades after Palestine’s fall (the second phase) were characterized by radical political and cultural changes in the Arab World. The visual arts enjoyed an unprecedented presence in the cultural arena, which had traditionally been dominated by the oral arts. Pioneers, mainly raised among the refugee population, forged a new Palestinian art, making their debut in Beirut which became the region’s cosmopolitan art center.
Revival
The third phase is marked by the 1967 war which led to the displacement of many Palestinians and where entire segments of the population fell under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. This region turned into a cultural ghetto. Insulated from the Arab world, a new generation of artists emerged. They came from Christian, Muslim, Druze and self-proclaimed aetheists’ backgrounds. Some received academic training; others remained self-taught.
These young Palestinians had been greatly disappointed by the defeat of the Arab armies and hence decided to take up the struggle themselves by all available means. Wherever they lived, these emerging artists sought to articulate their personal predicament in relation to the collective dream of regaining their homeland. Under military occupation exhibitions constituted a new form of political resistance. Since art was a means for expressing collective identity, Israeli authorities began to impose military censorship on all exhibitions and art activities. Even the combined use of the four colours that made up the Palestinian flag was banned, and an attempt to establish a local gallery in 1979 was aborted.
This was an important revival of the arts with an emphasis on addressing the political issues and the plight of the Palestinian people. This revival brought about innovation and creativity on the one hand, yet restricted the scope of that creativity on the other, and limited the horizon of imagination. It actually put restrictions on what’s do-able and what’s not; that it is politically motivated is desirable, and apolitical forms of expression are not supported.
Politics
As most of the cultural production was encouraged to stand in the face of the overwhelming power of the Israeli occupation - which was tearing at the very fabric of the Palestinian society, trying with all its might to deny the mere existence of the Palestinians – and to give proof to and ascertain the existence of the Palestinian identity and people in Palestine long before the establishment of Israel and the emergence of the Zionist dream, a P.R. machine was put in motion fed by the sprawling popularity of the ever expanding political factions and the enthusiasm of the young generation to be part of the liberation movement of Palestine. This P.R. machine needed cadre, and as there were so many factions operating in the field, they all had to be represented. Hence, the cultural production’s relevance was gaged against its popularity and outreach, not against its intrinsic creativity and artistic merit. To a large extent numbers mattered and political affiliations dictated the choices and preferences, and those who made it had to master, first and foremost, how to play the political game.
Size matters
In those heydays of the PLO (the Seventies) Palestinian artists found great support and enjoyed a whole lot of possibilities for exhibiting and travel. They would be invited to participate in all sorts of solidarity affiliated events, exhibiting in the corridors of the United Nations and other conference and meeting halls, presenting their work and representing Palestine and its culture and people. Yet, as most of these events were held on shoestring budgets, artists were requested to literally carry their art with them; for packaging, shipping, handling and insurance was no way to be covered. Hence, this size constraint was somehow internalized by the artists and with time not only limited the dimensions of the artwork produced but also the medium and material utilized in its production.
From another perspective, which is understood in almost every other way I tried to put it in this text, there is absolutely no serious public money for art in Palestine. Hence, artists try in most cases to fulfill demand rather than initiate supply. The most accessible market for these artists is the upper-middle and the upper classes who would want to decorate their homes with artworks which match their living room colours. This has reduced the scope of production to two-dimensional works and almost done away with sculpture, not to mention art in public places.
Public Art
When thinking about public art and its state in Palestine, trying to exercise some comparative aesthetics with other places in the world, it becomes very evident that we are dealing with incompatible situations, circumstances and contexts. These are nowhere close to normal conditions that we have to deal with in Palestine. The perpetual state of occupation, humiliation and destruction has pushed the Palestinian people beyond the limits of forbearance, and it was only but natural for people to take to the streets and start the Intifada (the popular uprising). Monuments, anywhere and in any circumstance “have to satisfy the eternal demand of the people for translation of their collective force into symbols. The most vital monuments are those which express the feeling and thinking of this collective force, which is the people”.[3]
In the context of the situation and in the last 500 years, Palestine has always been occupied by some foreign force that took control of all aspects of life, including art for that matter. Artists within this context could not take control of what is beyond the limitations of their homes, i.e. they could not consider (even if they wanted to) what is beyond the confines of their dwellings and studios as a possible venue/platform for their artwork. That’s on one level; on another level, and in this given situation, art becomes a form of resistance. Thus, what is against the occupying force cannot, only but naturally, be exhibited in public spaces, and only for devious intent would an occupier invite or commission an “enemy” artist to present work in public or private domain. Consequently, it’s not just that possibilities and resources are not available but the sheer existence of what it takes to conceptualize and realize art in public spaces is nowhere to be found.
In recent years and particularly after the empowerment of the Palestinian National Authority over parts of the occupied territories few initiatives surfaced in an attempt to urbanize the local scene (i.e. do what others did) and beautify public spaces. The concept of public sculpture in these few instances was introduced as a compromise between what could be monuments interpreting people’s force and what might have been a public work of art. Yet, according to the book Nine Points on Monumentality “periods which exist for the moment have been unable to create lasting monuments”. Graffiti immerged to become the most enduring, expressive, popular and accessible form of public art - art manifestation under occupation.
Change
In the occupied territories Suleiman Mansour is a leading figure in the art scene not only due to his articulate and expressive artwork but also because of his capability to mobilize artists, access resources for exhibitions and other projects and also connect with the outside, particularly the Arab World. With other colleagues he established in the early 70s the local chapter of the League of Palestinian Artists and worked extensively in the 70s and 80s to mobilize the artists as one body in the national struggle. But as this work was fueled by the PLO, its downturn in the mid 80s after the expulsion from Beirut and the in-fighting amongst the different factions choked-up the resources coming in to the League and hence this collective effort was nipped in the bud. This condition also reflected all aspects of life under occupation. Frustration, humiliation and desperation pushed people in late 1987 to take to the streets with anything they were left with to fight occupation. In the early years of the Intifada, disobedience and boycott were very important forms of resistance. Likewise, few artists started reflecting on their practice and wished to express this new notion of struggle in their work. Sliman Mansour, for one, wanted to participate in the boycott of Israeli products in his work. He dropped the oil paint, gouache and water colours which he would normally buy in Israel and reverted to the motherland and what it produces. Mud, straw and natural dyes substituted the imported materials and started to constitute the construct of his two-dimensional and three-dimensional reliefs. More importantly the toppling of the old ways of struggle by the Intifada – from regimented, restricted and politically captive resistance orchestrated by the PLO and its factions to an outright popular confrontation with the occupying forces – led Mansour to rework and deconstruct the former national imagery that appeared in his earlier work (the utopian images of the olive pickers, the peasant women, the traditional embroidery and Jerusalem) with mud which alluded to the actual reality of the homeland - fragmented, cracked and parched; a clash of the real with the ideal. This constituted a sort of shift from the representation of the collective national identity to questions about identity and individuality, particularly after the commencement of the peace process where a decline in the impetus to create nationalist works for popular consumption became clearly visible.
Young generation
The emerging artists in that period (i.e. early 90s) were unburdened with the need to express external emblems of nationality through overt symbols. Instead they concentrated on more subtle subjects utilizing suggestive materials that evoke personal memories as well as collective cultural textures. At the same time the first and only independent gallery opened in Jerusalem. Timed with the beginning of the peace process Anadiel gallery doubled as both a permanent exhibition space for Palestinian artists and an address/reference point for all those who wanted to make contact with local artists. It was actually the renewed interest in the Palestinian people and their affairs which was brought about by the extensive media coverage of the Intifada that gave the gallery a more important role than just selling art and making money. I should make it clear at this point that the idea of the gallery started with a commercial underpinning in the background, but this idea soon came face to face with the dire economic reality and had to be aborted. Hence, the decision to close the gallery down or keep it running was not up to a simple profit and loss calculation, but more important considerations, such as providing a venue and an opportunity for local artists to present their work, possibility of accessing venues, events and exhibitions abroad through contacts established by the gallery, and the prospect of securing financial assistance (even though little) for art projects from mainly European organizations and governments. It was actually the latter consideration that gradually led to launching the project of hosting foreign artists in Palestine, the initiation of exchange programs and residencies abroad, and securing needed financial assistance for continuing the work of the gallery. Contact with the international art scene and exposure to varied ideas, techniques and experiences re-energized the young generation and provided the fertile soil for jumpstarting the local art scene. In addition to that a fresh wave of young Palestinian artists who studied in Israeli art academies came in to break the stale and stagnant art atmosphere with bold and daring new ideas which somehow shook the foundations of the dominant old-guard aesthetics.
The gallery started a project of hosting Palestinian artists living in the Diaspora, some of whom had never been to Palestine. Having had secured foreign nationalities and passports, these artists were able to visit, of course as tourists. This project was made financially possible by the artists’ respective governments. Mona Hatoum, Nasser Soumi, Samir Srouji, Jumana El-Husseini, and Susan Hijab were among the artists hosted. Very interesting discourse ensued between the visiting and local artists on issues of representation, questions of identity and modernity, and more tangible concerns of articulation and relationship to the land and the popular imagery. The wind of change which cuts across all aspects of life, brought about much needed reflection, the revisiting of predominant dogmas and set off a new effort to break down the stereotypes and reductive categories that are so limiting to human thought and expression.
Al-Ma’mal Foundation for contemporary art
The gallery was a private initiative which did not qualify for important funding from international organizations. Yet its function was quite visible and the expansion of its capabilities and resources was imperative to propel it into a more extensive role. Hence a group of artists, architects and active individuals in the cultural scene got together and established Al-Ma’mal Foundation with the main aim to promote, instigate, disseminate and make art in Palestine. They envisioned Al-Ma’mal as a catalyst for the realization of art projects with local and visiting artists, giving at the same time special attention to working with youths and children. Al-Ma’mal, situated itself in the Old City of Jerusalem, it currently runs three programs; the Artist-in-Residence, the Workshops Network and the Productions and Publications.
Al-Ma’mal attempts to give art more possibilities to become a mode of expression and a way of life.
Notes
[1]Tina Sherwell-AlMalhi, Articulations of Identities: changing trends in the contemporary Palestinian arts, July 2000
[2] Kamal Boullata, ART, The Encyclopedia of the Palestinians, New York, Facts On File, Inc., 2000
[3] Jose Luis Sert, Frenand Leger and Sigfried Giedion, Nine Points on Monumentality, joint statement written in 1943 and republished in the Harvard Architecture Review IV, Spring 1984, MIT Press, pp. 62-3.
THE NEW NORMALCY
Artists Examine the
February 25th through March 26th, 2006.
www.art-for-a-change.com
Vallen will be exhibiting works at, The New Normalcy, a group show at Carlotta's Passion Fine Art in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles. Over 20 artists will present artworks depicting the realities of the post 9-11 world - endless war, militarism, terrorism, state surveillance and repression.
The exhibit will offer original and limited edition works of art by Mark Vallen, Robbie Conal, Gregg Stone, Gilbert "Magu" Lujan, Poli Marichal, Margaret Garcia, Francisco Letelier, Patrick Merrill, Fei Lu,
Hanaa Al-Wardi, Zandra van Batenburg, Peter Carrillo, Carlos Callejo, Thomas E. Ellis, Carlos Flores, Sergio Hernandez, Cyndi Kahn, Deborah Krall, Juliana Martinez, Manuel Martinez, Louie Metz, Laura Molina, Andres Montoya, Roberto Munguia, Cindy Nine, Robert Nuengaye, Ramon Ramirez, Wm. Neil Roberts, Keri Rosebraugh, Hector Silva, Charles Thompson, Janice Tieken, Van Arno, Amanda Unzueta, and others.
Indepth Arts News:
"Present compose: Canadian, American and European Contemporary Artists"
2001-07-05 until 2001-09-16
Ottawa Art Gallery
Ottawa, ON, CA Canada
www.absolutearts.com
The Ottawa Art Gallery presents Present compose, the second component of an incisive two-part project that probes the legacy of revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s: artistic avant-garde, cultural and social experimentation, and political and economic upheaval. Following and complementing Take Two, Present compose features new and recent works by Canadian, American and European contemporary artists, and examines, critiques, and reconfigures the current retrofitting of the late 1960s, and their complementary insurrections in contemporary debate.
Présent composé focuses on the compound nature of the present, a present both shaped by technologically-driven globalization and inflected by the return of the 1960s as revolutionary, experimental and cutting-edge. No longer unreservedly able to promise a shining future, dominant culture now resorts to pillaging events from this recent past and redeploying them, in superficially assimilable ways, to sell us the next big thing. The unfulfilled commitments of our utopia-driven past are retrofitted in the already-obsolete present to sustain hyped-up promises of a future of enhanced speed, profit and performance. This is where artists have also chosen to work, proposing alternatives which, in Présent composéé, are articulated by overlapping areas: labour, history, political resistance, the orchestration of experience, and avant-garde genealogies of art and architecture.
RESISTANCE
Spiegel Symposium 2005, March 17-March 18, 2005
February 1, 2005, www.virtualart.at
Presented in conjunction with the Institute of Contemporary Art's current exhibition Accumulated Vision, Barry Le Va on view through April 3, 2005, the University of Pennsylvania presents "Resistance," the first annual Spiegel Symposium, jointly organized by ICA and Penn's departments of architecture, cinema studies, fine arts and history of art. A series of lectures, films, panels, a reception, and tour are scheduled with a distinguished list of speakers and panelists.
American artist Barry Le Va (b. 1941, Long Beach, CA; lives in New York, NY) is among the most important figures to emerge during the late 1960s. Named for a series of installations from the 1970s Accumulated Vision, Barry Le Va surveys the artist's work from the 1960s to the present. This is the first major American presentation of Le Va's art in over a decade and the very first to bring together not only the artist's well known large-scale sculptures and drawings, but also his works in other media, including photography, sound, and books, for which he is less known.
Labeled "anti-form" or "scatter art," Barry Le Va's aggressive, room-scale installations of felt and glass challenged viewers of the art of the late-sixties and seventies. This symposium explores themes of "resistance" in the culture and politics of the period, from Vietnam protest to punk and the furthest reaches of contemporary art, music and literature.
www.eipcp.net
"Down with art that aspires to be nothing more than a spot of beauty on the ugly lives of the rich. Down with art that tries to be a glittering stone in the merciless and dirty lives of the poor. Down with art whose sole purpose is to escape a life not worth living. Work for life and not for palaces, cathedrals, cemeteries and museums. Work in the midst of all and with everyone."
Alexander Rodtschenko, Slogans, 1920/21
If one is involved with art history, then the dominant theme of the nineties - the saga of radical change along with paradigm change - seems to be less radical New Art and more about refocusing on the determination of that which counts as contemporary and relevant. In fact, what is happening is an updating of the discourses and practices with which artists were involved during the entire twentieth century.
At the beginning stands the project of modernism: committed to the spirit of the enlightenment, progress-oriented, optimistic and justice-conscious. A pre-view was already staged in one of the century's first theatre plays, Chekhov's "Three Sisters," written in 1900 and premiered in spring of 1901. Even these unhappy figures, who with their rudimentary education are cut off from all intellectual discourse in their empty provincial Russian nest, still feel the utopia of the turn of the century. In the future, happy people will exist who will no longer be able to imagine how miserably those - from today's perspective pre-modern - people, lived.
When the Revolution transformed Czarist Russia into the Soviet Republic in 1917, artists were heavily involved in designing the new society. Lenin himself repeatedly referred to the significance of their role.
In their central demands, the constructivists followed the same objectives as the entire European avant-garde after World War I: to unite art and life and to break from the indifferent autonomy of the nineteenth century's bourgeois salon art.
However, different countries and movements have attached different significance to the impulses for this break and have connected it to diverse political, social, institutional-critical or individualist demands.
To clarify: Even the Italian futurist's project was a political one, although it was tied to a deep-seated elitism, nationalism and fascism. Even the futurists were calling art back into life. In the Futurist Manifesto of 1909 there is a statement similar to Rodtschenko's: "We want to destroy the museums." Yet Marinetti also goes on to state: "We want to praise militarism, patriotism and war, the only hygiene of the world." The individual exists here merely as the man at the steering wheel; the masses are cast as extras in the stage light of glorious industrialization.
The futurists are often put forward as counter examples when art as social intervention is defined as primarily a project of the left. The futurists, however, were not concerned with actual human standards of living. Umberto Boccioni wrote in 1910, in a manifesto that follows along with Marinetti: "Human suffering interests us to the same degree as the suffering of an electric light bulb, whose trembling ends with a heart-thumping screech of color."
The critical, emancipative and enlightening claim that we identify with art as social intervention leads to its assessment as a leftist project. But what is leftist? The Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio published an essay in 1994 with the subtitle "right and left." In it, he describes the twin concepts as necessities ever after the end of state communism in Europe, at a time of economic interests' unchallenged priority over political course setting. Bobbio comes to the conclusion that it is in no way obsolete to associate the left with freedom, equality and fraternity.
Of course, also in leftist theory, the claim to social shaping through art is controversial. In the philosophy of the Frankfurter Schule there are clearly divergent views. On one hand it is obvious that there is no pure consciousness and no consciousness outside of economically determined power structures. It is still, however, remarkable that in the context of the authority-critical and trial-like art of the nineties, also projects, actions, texts and other non-object forms have long serviced their own markets. Similarly, often our own ideological character is the blind spot overlooked in the process of ideological critique.
Theodor W. Adorno assumed that art in the age of the mass media and culture industry would dissolve into a popular culture that is understandable and accessible to the masses and into a thin, mysterious and retreating avant-garde, whose hermeneutics and elitism it would defend as a reservoir of resistance. In this, he denies the possibility of an emancipative-participatory practice of art which transverses art.
Herbert Marcuse, on the other hand, sees particularly in this marginality and peripheral position of art its affirmative character - as a demarcated zone in which societal problems and neuroses can be acted out without consequences. - Once again, nothing effectuating social change. Jürgen Habermas speaks of a "false revocation of the separation of art and life," in which he meets Marcuse's "repressive de-sublimation," which means the loosening of social coercion for the purpose of better economic and institutional control.
That many of the Frankfurter Schule's ideas no longer apply in the current context has to do with the changes of the media, power structures, the creation of more and more partial audiences and forms of information and communication. The kind of problem that artists of the left must confront, for example, is culturalization - the transposing of virulent conflicts into art events. What do events such as "Film Day Against Racism" or "Anti-Xenophobia Clubbing" mean?
For Norberto Bobbio, the concept of equality is central to a contemporary leftist worldview. Art's connection to leftist guiding principles can take place on various levels. For one, in the message formulated by a work: famous historical examples are George Grosz' brutal portraits of capitalists or the worker-frescos of Diego Rivera. However, the effort to make the art business less elitist is also leftist, as was attempted for example by the "Art Workers Coalition" in New York after 1969, when it took up opposition to the white-herrscher attitude of the Museum of Modern Art. Or collaboration between artists and non-artists.
In the countless manifestos of the Russian constructivists, equality is formulated as solidarity among artists, architects and writers together with workers and farmers. The professed commonality however, besides being a very generously described aim of communist society, remains unclear.
In 1920, Tatlin announced the program of the "Productivists' Group," in which he turns against the increasing individualism of the constructivists. And in 1923, the Magazine LEF (Left Art Front), founded by Wladimir Majakowski warned: "Constructivists! Beware of degenerating into a school of aesthetics.... Production artists! Beware of becoming artisans for the applied arts. Learn from the workers while you are teaching them. Your school is the factory."
Popular art history reduced Russian constructivism to Malewitsch's "Black Square," perhaps also including Tatlin's "Tower"-design. Rodtschenko is marketed today as a photographer and Warwara Stepanowa's worker's clothing is shown at art and fashion shows next to Elsa Schiaparelli. And the term "Production Art" is rarely ever used today in the sense of an interaction between artists and industrial workers on equal levels.
The problem that resurfaced toward the end of the nineties was also not solvable at the beginning of left art: equality among artists and non-artists in projects conceived of and carried out by artists remains a fiction. Alexander Rodtschenko and Warwara Stepanowa, unlike other constructivists, consciously give up painting; yet even these production artists finally see themselves as teachers and graphic designers who work for and not with the population. Their pedagogic idealism is to be seen in the image-language which they and others, among them Majakowski, developed for the illiterate and which is used as political propaganda as well as for advertising.
In the equal positioning of the fine and the applied arts, the Russian revolutionary artists are related to art producers of the nineties. With one difference: If an artist, for example a woman artist, creates graphic art today, then that is most probably for a catalogue, flyer, brochure or other means of communication within the art industry. The kind of worker's association that Rodtschenko developed in 1925, the Club for Cultural Workers, corresponds today to the "Depot - Art and Discussion" in Vienna which was set up in 1994 by the artist Josef Dabernig.
In the European/US-American writing of art history, constructivism is seen as a formal-ism among other -isms. However, in the space of time from the turn of the century until Soviet isolation under Stalin (Lenin died in 1924) there had been a flourishing exchange of political ideas between Russian and German artists. The manifesto, for example, of the German "November-Gruppe," founded after the failed revolution in November 1918, was influenced by the Russians. Their guidelines, published in 1919, could have been taken from the New York "Art Workers Coalition's" 1969 manifesto and are also consistent with current demands:
"We want a voice and an active roll in:
All architectural projects as a matter of general interest: in city planning, in new developments, in public administration buildings, industry, social constructions, in private building projects...
The reorganization of art academies and their curricula, ...the selection of teachers by artists' associations together with the students...
The transformation of museums: eliminating prejudice from collection policies, putting a stop to the purchasing of objects which are only valuable to scholars... the transformation of museums into art centers for the general public...
Accessibility of art halls: eliminating privileges and halting the influence of privilege and capitalism...
Legislation in artists' affairs: rights for artists as inventors of ideas, protection of artists' ownership, doing away with all taxes on art works."
Not long thereafter, the "November-Gruppe" was attacked by "Opponents of the November-Gruppe" for being false revolutionaries. Today, their challengers are more prominent: Otto Dix, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch. And with this it was possible to move on to dada: to the dada movement which of course can only be understood with a much more anarchist political concept than constructivism, which dada associated mainly with the rejection of the bourgeoisie.
The ideology of constructivism had already begun to fade in the inter-war period. As of the late twenties, three concepts became the three main coordinates of art: abstraction, realism and surrealism.
Popular art historical works are picture books. Since art, through to the present, has for the most part produced images and objects, its content continues to be falsified through the convention of illustration. Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes and Roy Lichtenstein's paintings of typeset copies are reproduced in art books' chapter on the sixties. What is not shown? For example the neighborhood projects that Stephen Willats has carried out since the mid-sixties with tenants of English housing developments in which he examines, together with them, their living conditions.
The picture book as form of mediation is the side effect of an art system whose core functions through tradable goods. All major institutions within this system need an art that is transmittable through individual objects: the museums, art halls, auction houses, galleries, the accompanying magazine, etc. As soon as artists produce something other than transportable and representable objects or installations, they fall out of art historic mediation and canonization. Their visibility and with it the extent of their effectiveness is limited.
Only recently has the historical phase of concept art been dealt with by museums - the exhibition "Reconsidering the Object of Art" on the period 1965 - 1975 took place at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1996. In 1997 Catherine David designed a documenta with a conceptual-political focus. Yet the transmission of the history of ideas is always insufficient. Why is Jeff Koons known but not Dan Graham; why is Anselm Kiefer a star while no one has ever heard of Robert Smithson?
A history of activism and participation in twentieth century art: an 'other' art history with a focus on participatory interventions with critical-emancipative intention. It is clear that the constructivists and productivists can only be credited as pre-participatory art, after which they must form the base for such a story.
Why is it at all necessary to rewrite art history? Must the established canon be changed?
Shedding a new light on the historical bases and writing critical artistic practices into art history: only on this basis can art history carry weight and find a new, sustainable definition. Without this historical consciousness, it remains possible to attack socially and politically motivated art, by which authority is legitimated by turning back to an aesthetically oriented art history. In autumn of 1998 in Austria, one such attack was made by the former dean of the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst. Art's capabilities consist, Rudolf Burger wrote, "only of sensually sympathizing with individual problem moments, of symbolic or allegorical illustration, and this only in retrospect." Everything else is deemed nonsense. Or non-art.
Between agitation and animation. Activism and participation in twentieth century art:
The Duden dictionary for German foreign words and phrases explains agitation as a compelling advertisement for certain political views, animation as invigoration and excitement, activism as the emphasis of purposeful behavior and participation as (temporary) involvement.
Like agitation, activism is usually based on some pre-formulated, mostly politically defined goal, while participation claims to be nothing more than someone playing a role in some process, some event, some business that could also be at a profit or loss in an economic sense. Participatory practices in art are developed fundamentally as a result of dissatisfaction with the status quo. Whatever artists are dissatisfied with is followed by a characteristic offering of participation and enabling the participants a degree of self-determination. Participation can be based on the equality of rights and competencies and can be distributed in the sense of the allocation of social capital (knowledge, skills) to real or presumed underprivileged groups. Or animation: whereas animation - in an entertainment-oriented Club Med style, in which artists guide free-time activities - is a somewhat crude description for art projects. Art's recent 'festivalization' has offered us a number of such spectacles.
After World War II, a participatory concept of art found further development, above all in interdisciplinary collaborations.
At Black Mountain College in North Carolina, USA, the painter Robert Rauschenberg, the musician John Cage and the choreographer and dancer Merce Cunningham, among others, met each other. They developed - partly together and partly individually - works with participatory approaches. In 1952 Cage composed "4' 33''", a piece which consisted only of sounds from the concert hall. The same year, Rauschenberg painted his "White Paintings," whose integral component is the shadow of the observer. In both works, the audience was quasi instrumentalized and not individually active. That may appear insufficient by today's standards, yet historically it was a preliminary step. These examples are also interesting for a more precise definition. Without an audience, neither "4' 33''" nor "White Paintings" can exist at all, exist completely or make any sense. The extent of audience participation in projects is a question that has been very current in Austria since the early nineties. When does an artwork become an artwork? Was it when the artist Christine Hill opened her second-hand boutique - as she did in Berlin and then at the documenta X - or was it when someone first bought an article of clothing there? In any case, Hill does not define her "Volksboutique" as an installation but as a realm for social communication.
Even fluxus events and happenings were oriented on participation, yet the amount of audience participation followed lines that had been predetermined by the artist. As a result, participation sometimes meant touching the art objects and rearranging them. The German Franz Erhard Walther displays objects, often textiles with choreographic instructions - which is related to Franz West's concept of sculpture in which significance is first given by handling the objects.
This concept of participation does not of course necessarily open up a social realm.
In the sixties, the emancipation movement made an immediate dynamic impact on art. In North America, above all in the USA, the civil rights movement influenced the art scene decisively: the women's movement, the protests against the war on Vietnam, the struggle for the rights of ethnic minorities, black power. Grassroots organizations were formed, citizens organized. In 1969 artists founded the "Art Workers Coalition" after a conflict with the Museum of Modern Art. Soon the coalition organized protests and events on museum policies, the representation of women and persons of color in the art world, the neglect of the socially disadvantaged in terms of cultural offerings and last but not least, also against the Vietnam war. These actions were however not declared to be art works. The members - among them Nancy Spero and Leon Golub, Carl Andre, Robert Morris and Lucy Lippard - also carried out their work individually. At the same time, Vito Acconci was staging participatory actions with underlying political content. He spent every night for four weeks in spring 1971 on a lonely pier on the Hudson and invited the public to visit him between one and two in the morning when he would then tell them a secret. The visitor became an ally, at the mercy of the artist.
One consequence of the emancipation movement was in the cultural field of integration with less privileged groups. They were encouraged to formulate their own ideas and to find their own cultural expression. "Giving a voice" is the corresponding parole. In 1978 in a slum in South Bronx, the artist Stefan Eins founded his art studio "Fashion Moda," which became a cultural pressure cooker in which graffiti, rap, popular culture and high art were all steamed together.
Numerous related projects and initiatives can be cited: in the beginning of the eighties, the "Group Material" from the store gallery on the Lower Eastside or Tim Rollins and his collaboration with the black ghetto youths under the label "K.O.S." (Kids of Survival). In the mid-eighties, the social pressure under conservative Reagonomics and the tragedy of the Aids epidemic politically remobilized the US art scene. With "ACT UP," the "Aids Coalition to Unleash Power," artists, cultural workers and other activists worked together on strategies against the repression of the Aids crisis by the government and the increasing hysterical homophobia and art-xenophobia among politicians. "Art is not enough," proclaimed the artist-activist collective "Gran Fury."
Art or not art - in the urgency of activism, these questions were the last to be asked and would first resurface when Aids activists' propaganda posters turned up in museums.
The dominant figure of the art-politics-participation debate in Germany never doubted the status of art. With Joseph Beuys, everything was art: from his enigmatic objects to his candidacy for the Green party, from his autistic-seeming performances to the founding of the "Freien Internationalen Hochschule für Kreativität und interdisziplinäre Forschung" ("Free International School for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research") in 1974.
Art - art concepts - political practice: When is something considered art? When is it accepted and by whom? In the New Genre Public Art, or art in the public interest, as it has been practiced in collaboration with representatives of special audiences and interest groups since the eighties in the USA, the insistence on the status of art is tied to the claim of a struggle. This is also true of the seemingly endless applications of art practices in the nineties in Europe, where everything, from a charitable measure to a party, from a lecture to an interview, can be defined as art.
Since February 2000, or since the right wing, national-populist government took office in Austria, artists have played a significant role in the resistance. Interestingly, the status of art in these projects and initiatives is not even an issue.
Is it necessary to draw the conclusion that political practice by artists is only considered art when it's about nothing serious? Even within a progressive scene, the absence of a sense of history has its drawbacks. What was initially called the re-politicization of art in the nineties was rejected by various sources as a fading trend at the end of the decade - not only for conspicuously conservative reasons. The demand for an 'other' art history is also directed against this.
Further literature in:
Charles Harrison & Paul Wood (ed.): "Art in Theory. An Anthology of Changing Ideas" (Oxford/UK, Cambridge/USA 1992, 1993)
Norberto Bobbio: "Rechts und Links. Gründe und Bedeutungen einer politischen Unterscheidung" (Berlin, 1994)
The Art of Resistance
The Art-Activism Divide
By Marc Xuereb, www.zmag.org
Merging politics with art may not be a new idea, but Resistant Strains seems to have found a combination that brings out the best of both art and activism. Art, according to Canadian writer Brian Fawcett, is the communication of an idea or it’s nothing. For those who believe that the deep injustices in our society necessitate radical political changes, therefore, the content of the idea to be communicated in art is paramount. Unfortunately, those with radical politics rarely make use of the power of art to disseminate their ideas. They are more likely to engage in sit-ins, demonstrations, or public debates, all of which have their own important roles, but do not always achieve the same level of impact on the "unconverted" as art. Likewise, even radical art often gets confined to art galleries that receive little public attention beyond their own small circles.
Resistant Strains sought to bridge the arts-activism chasm by encouraging artists and activists to work together. "We wanted to encourage activists to be more creative in trying to get their message out, says Karen Topper, one of the original members of Resistant Strains. Finding funding to help them fulfil those objectives, however, was a different story, one which gave the group a firsthand experience of lack of communication between the two worlds. In seeking the support of foundations, they found that many of the left political foundations would not fund an art project, and that arts foundations generally found their work too political.
The key factor in the success of both poster series is the poster medium itself. The relatively low cost of producing posters allowed Resistant Strains to print 1,000 copies of each poster, which they could then sell at the relatively affordable price of $15 per set. This makes the posters accessible even to the lowest-budget of activist groups. To date, over three-quarters of the Zapatista posters have been distributed through a promotion strategy that mostly involved Internet list-servers and word of mouth.
Because of the medium, the posters lend themselves to uses beyond traditional activist and artist circles. The Zapatista posters were in demand in bookstores (Seattle, New York City, and Montreal), community centers (Waterloo, Ontario; Cleveland, Ohio; Austin, Texas; and Burlington, Vermont), and libraries (Center for the Study of Political Graphics in LA and the MOMA library in NY). They were a hit on the streets of Chicago, Seattle, and New York, and were sold through Syracuse Cultural Workers, Pueblo to People, and the Bread & Puppet Domestic Resurrection Circus in Vermont.
Not content to allow the posters to be confined to adorning the living rooms of the converted, activists have come up with several creative uses for them. The first poster series, on the World Bank/IMF 50th anniversary, alternately mocked the international financial institutions and described the damaging effects of their policies to people around the world. Activists joining the international "Fifty Years is Enough" campaign who descended on Washington, DC to demonstrate outside the institutions’ annual meetings made sure their actions had a lasting impact beyond their brief stay. Parts of downtown were plastered with the posters, making it difficult for people to avoid encountering one of the posters on their way to work the next week. Copies of one poster deriding former World Bank head Robert McNamara for his public "confession" concerning the Vietnam War were sent directly to his office.
In Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, a group of activists called the Mexico Solidarity Network proved that, in the right hands and with the right promotion, the posters have a real possibility of influence beyond activist circles. They were able to capitalize on the idea of the Zapatista posters as art to gain access to new audiences for their ideas. In response to the January 1994 Zapatista uprising, the group promoted the posters as an art exhibit staged at a local arts center, downplaying the posters’ politics. The result was a crowd of almost 100, most of whom would not have showed up for an event billed as an educational event about Mexico. "There is no way we would have got the mainstream media publicity we got for our event had it not been billed as an arts event," Debbie Chapman, member of the K-W group explains. "Three local papers covered it in their entertainment section, so we got people showing up who didn’t even know who the Zapatistas were."
In the highlands of Chiapas, where the Zapatistas hosted their International Encounter Against Neoliberalism and for Humanity last summer, the posters gained exposure not just to the activists from 43 countries around the world who came to demonstrate their solidarity with the Zapatistas, but with the Zapatista communities. Topper took several copies of the posters down with her to the conference. "People were coming right up to me and asking me to display them and to leave them behind with them and wanting me to translate the ones that were in English. That meant a lot to me, that the Zapatista communities really appreciated them."
To Resistant Strains, few movements have been more inspirational as an example of successful resistance than that led by the masked indigenous people of Chiapas. Not only did the Zapatistas launch the most successful denouncement of the North American Free Trade Agreement from the most impoverished region of the agreement’s reach, but their unique organizing style and avoidance of particular political ideologies are revolutionizing left politics globally. Thorne points to a May 1996 communique from the Zapatistas as an example of their position. In it, sub-commander Marcos explains that the Zapatista struggle "is not about taking power: [it] is about revolutionizing its relationship with those who have it and those who suffer its consequences...There are no recipes, lines, strategies, tactics, laws, regulations, or universal slogans. There is only one desire: to construct a better world, that is, a new one."
The Zapatistas are the only armed revolutionary movement in recent Latin American history to expressly state their disinterest in taking control of the state for themselves. Their armed uprising on January 1, 1994 elicited a brutal military response from the Mexican government. But when the news caught international attention and forced the government to negotiate a ceasefire agreement, the Zapatistas insisted on national negotiations that addressed the root causes of inequality and impoverishment in the country, from indigenous rights issues to democratic reforms to neoliberal economics and earned the respect and support of resistance movements throughout Mexico and the world.
The Posters
It was these revolutionary ideas of the Zapatistas that Resistant Strains wished to give attention to in the poster series. But given the absence of these ideas in the mainstream media, the artists had a tremendous task. Thorne supplied each artist with background material on the Zapatistas that for some was quite new information—oil production in the rainforest, violence against women, U.S. militarization, and the Zapatistas—leaving the artists to work with what struck their interest.
With varying degrees of success, each artist brought his or her own approach to communicating the all-important content of the art. Just which posters succeeded more than others, of course, will ultimately be up to each individual viewer. As Topper says, "The nature of the series is that different people like different ones, and they read different things into them. And that’s the beauty of having a visual message, because there’s not an exact interpretation that people have to have."
The idea of resistance, according to Thorne, was hard to portray in a two-dimensional poster: "The obvious images are the rebel with the gun, or the crowd in the street. And in a way they are the easier ones to use, which is a bit of a danger, because those are the images that get repeated in the mainstream media over and over again, so you get a one-sided view of what resistance is. Actually, as I was working on the project, I found that the ones that were more interesting to me were more boring, like of people sitting around in a wooden structure in the middle of the jungle having a discussion: that’s resistance to me. But it’s much harder to use that in an art piece or a poster."
Thorne’s poster, Decision ‘96
The poster is a good example of a theme that runs throughout the series—that resistance is worthwhile and takes many forms. According to Thorne, "the easiest reading [of "Decision 96"] is "don’t vote, just get a gun." But I am trying to use this image and the word fight in the sense of the way the Zapatistas have conceived of themselves as an armed force, which is as a sort of temporary necessity. They do not want to engage in all-out war, but they would not be doing these kind of international gatherings or negotiations with the government if they did not have an armed force. So while I may have some reservations about armed struggle, I understand the armed component is essential to what they’re doing."
Both images in "Decision 96" drew controversy. Many objected to equating the vote with taking Ritalin, a drug known for its use on children with Attention Deficit Disorder and its abuse on other children. The violent image of the Zapatista woman caused many to miss the poster’s more subtle message, according to Karen Topper. "And that’s too bad, because for me it’s nauseating reading the newspapers these days and watching the rahrahrah articles saying "we live in the U.S. and we get to participate in our democracy by voting for Clinton or Dole" when there’s really no difference between the two.
Three artists from Los Angeles—Shawn Mortensen, Patricia Valencia, and Aida Salazar—use the same image of Zapatistas as gun-toting fighters in their poster, "Third World is Your World." As in "Decision 96," the second image in "Third World" causes the viewer to pause and reflect on the juxtaposition of the two. In this case, the second image is of a woman laborer from Echo Park, California. The woman carries a bag of oranges in one hand, a bag of peanuts in the other, both cash crops grown in California which the woman obviously either picks or packages.
There is no escaping the message that the Echo Park laborer’s life is but a well-organized movement away from that of the woman in the other image, identified as a Zapatista woman from Chiapas who poses with mask and gun. Neoliberal economics is screwing Echo Park in the same way that it drives peasants in Chiapas off their corn farms and into the mountains to support the Zapatistas.
Max Schumann takes no chances with the viewer’s ability to understand his message in "Travel and Leisure." "I didn’t want to assume any prior information on the part of my audience," Schumann explains, "I wanted to be clear, but I wanted to be able to back it up." For those who care to linger in front of his poster, Schumann supplies a long, detailed list of the pieces of military equipment that American money has provided to the Mexican army. He adds, for good measure, an essay by Peter Lumsdaine of Global Exchange on the American role in the continued military repression of human rights activists in Chiapas.
Large headlines and a striking image draw the viewer into the text. Bold words across the top and bottom of the poster draw the viewer’s eyes: "Free trade—Low Intensity Democracy." The graphic is a cover of a travel magazine, manipulated to feature, as the main tourist attraction, a Zapatista fighter. "The South You’ve Never Seen" boasts the reworked headline of the cover, with the horizon of the U.S. southwest in the background.
"I wanted to deal with issues of colonization through representation, cultural appropriation, and the fetishizing of otherness in the poster," Schumann explains. "In a way, tourism makes the world safe for corporate interests: we can consume other histories and cultures as images." But in altering the cover’s landscape (which not accidentally is of a part of the southern U.S. that used to be Mexico before it was annexed) to include the Zapatista, Schumann cunningly suggests that the Zapatistas might not be as easy for corporate interests to digest. Indeed, the Zapatistas are a tremendous symbol of resistance to corporate interests for activists world wide.
To Thorne, Schumann’s poster "contains a density of information, but also a visual punch, a complicated one-liner about free markets. The viewer who doesn’t want to get into the small print can still take something away from the piece. The small print elaborates on the free market theme by positioning the weapons market as central to the concept of free markets, both in terms of profit-making, and the enforcement of repressions that make other profit-making possible."
As most activists know from experience, it is not enough to be right. We need to convince others of the soundness of our positions, and that requires more than a sound mission statement. By using the affordable, transportable, and visual medium of posters, Resistant Strains has given activists an effective way to disseminate their political messages. And for those who don’t mind being reminded once in a while that we are right, the posters don’t look too bad on living room walls, either.
Protest posters by Mike Flugennok
microsites.provisionslibrary.org/cartoons_site/mike.html
Since the early1990's. radical DC artist Mike Flugennock has produced over a hundred political cartoon posters for resistance movements ranging from groups opposed to the war in Iraq to American foreign policy to local politics. Whether used in protests against George W. Bush's "Inauguraction" or annual meetings of the World Bank and IMF, Flugennock's posters have inspired countless people to fill the streets and demand justice. As the posters have grown in popularity, they have provided motivation for a variety of grass roots social justice movements.
Besides defining a distinctive look and tone for resistance movements Flugennock's art has also inspired a method of radical postering on the street, a form of public cultural intervention that has taken on a life of its own. Over the last five years, his collaboration with the Mintwood Media Collective has helped put up thousands of posters on lampposts and electric utility boxes in Washington, Maryland and Virginia. In defiance of routine police harassment, the Collective's Lamppost Liberation Front has promoted a culture of radical advertising. Flugennock has attracted a loyal folllowing of people who "flypaste" his art with the help of wheatpaste in cities throughout the USA, Canada and Europe. In turn, this expands public access to his inspired creations through his website.
The current climate of rampant mass media consolidation has led to a trend in which many formerly indpendent media outlets now operate under corporate managemnet and federal regulations, which are by nature adverse to alternative and controversial points of view. Public postering has emerbed as a decidedly low-techbut effective means of redirecting public opinion and galvanizing social movements.
In Mike's words,
"...After four or five years' recovering from a severe radical cartoon burnout induced by the first term of Ronald Reagan, the threat of US genocide in Irag re-radicalized me. In the winter of 1990-91, I did my first hardcore political cartoons since dropping out if the Yipster Times and, inspired by the 'delivery system' used by Robbie Conal to expose Los Angeles to his work, chose to mass-copy and plaster them to as many flat public surfaces as possible with wheat paste and paint rollers instead of waiting for any newspapers or magazine editors to expose their readers to flagrantly anti-war and anti-imperialist opinions. Much to our surprise, this actually went fairly well, enough that we decided that posting political cartoons such as these -on their own, not advertising any particular event- was a really fine way to 'disturb the cofortable.' It wasn't until a while later that I found out that what we were doing was part of actually part of a real live dissident cultural trend, that of public postering or 'flypasting'. These days, ironically, it seems that the Internet has actually facilitated the spread of wheat-pasted paper posters around the world; I've gotten email on a fairly regular basis from artist/activists from places as far apart as Christchurch, Sydney, Montreal, New York City and Barcelona annoouncing how much they appreciate my work and that several thousand copies each are now adorning the streets of their cities."
"Views from the Street" presents Mike Flugennock's favorite posters, that until now have only been seen on the lampposts of DC and his website.
Resistance and Meditation: Hong Sung-dam
October 5, 2003 - November 30, 2003
New ‘Paradise in Dream’ (New Mongudowondo), 2002, Oil on canvas, 290 x 900 cm
The Queens Museum of Art is pleased to present the first solo New York exhibition of the work of Korean artist Hong Sung-dam. Hong was born in 1955 in the Sihan Island south of the Korean peninsula into a situation of poverty and oppression. He began the “People’s School of Art” in Gwangju, a city in Southwestern Korea, in 1983, and organized an artists association in 1985. Known to South Korean authorities for his perspective on social reform individual freedom, in 1988, Hong, then exhibiting internationally, was imprisoned for his participation in the creation of a mural in North Korea depicting various injustices suffered by South Korean people. He was subjected to torture in prison, and released in 1992 after persistent protests from humanitarian groups. Since his release, his work has turned away from the specifics of war to address global issues of communication, violence, protest, and rehabilitation. Resistance and Meditation: Hong Sung-dam is part of East Wind, a two-part exhibition along with Nostalgia Today: Kim Dae-won, Ha Chul-Kyung, Kim Young-sam, co-organized by the Gwangju Art Museum. The exhibitions run from October 5 – November 30, 2003. An opening reception will be held October 5, 3-6 pm.#8221;
The exhibition will include Hong Sung-dam’s most well-known work, Dawn, (1981-1988) a series of forty-nine prints memorializing the human situation of Korea in the 1980s. In May 1980, students, workers, intellectuals, religious leaders, and other supporters of the Korean democratization movement rose up against the military regime in power in Gwangju (Hong’s home). The protests intensified, and on May 18 the military unleashed a lethal strike on its citizens. Dawn, an installation of black and white propaganda-style woodblock prints, depicts the horror of the Gwangju Massacre and the ensuing struggle for freedom. With titles such as Blood & Tears (1983), The Union World (1984), and The Gun, It’s My Life (1984), the artist weaves together historical fact and personal narrative in a compelling record of the lives of the people of Gwangju.
Hong’s “propaganda style” of the 1980s refutes both traditional and Western Modernist trends, both popular options for artists of his generation. Instead, Hong’s work is associated with the Minjoong art movement, or “People’s Art,” which emerged in response to political oppression. Minjoong art incorporated hyperreal images of violence and suffering and surreal emblemsof democracy. The visual disjointedness pointed to a unique notion of “Realism” as a “protest against reality through art,” an artform that became an important mode of communication during the revolution. Hong’s famous Minjoong-style mural in North Korea will not be shown, although it still hangs in a North Korean government museum today.
Faded Tears in the Moonlight (1995) refers to the Donghak Revolution, an uprising in January 1894 by the Gap-o Farmers. This was the first farmers' revolution on a nation-wide scale in Korea's history, and initiated public awareness about the conditions of the poor. It was an anti-feudal resistance movement seeking increased freedom and civic rights, as well as a movement for national independence and self-reliance. It is suggested that later progressive movements had roots in this farmers’ protest, which also began in May.
Hong’s work balances image of struggle with optimism and hope for the future. In Baridaegi, for example, Hong depicted the bitter plight of woman who was allegedly used as prostitute for the Japanese army during their occupation of Korea. The work expresses the possibility of means of survival and transcendence beyond this life. While imprisoned, Hong was forced to spend weeks in a tank of water; now, water, once a source of great pleasure, now inspires deep fear. His folk-inspired paintings of water and wave motifs demonstrate his effort to reconcile with and achieve some forgiveness toward his captors. Rice has also become a lifelong subject for Hong, and he deals with all permutations of its relationships in the daily life of East Asians: “rice and labor, rice and struggle, rice and ideologies, rice and life, rice and death.” This exhibition consists of more than thirty paintings, prints, and photographs, and videos.
Exhibition co-curators: Jang Kyung-hwa, Chief Curator, Gwangju Art Museum and Tom Finkelpearl, Executive Director, Queens Museum of Art. This exhibition East Wind was co-organized by the Gwangju Art Museum and the Queens Museum of Art.
The presentation of East Wind at the Queens Museum of Art is made possible by Ministry of Culture and Tourism in Korea, Korean Cultural Service Korean Consulate General, Asiana Airlines, BooKook Foundation for Korean Culture, Gwangju Biennale Foundation, and The Centennial Committee of Korean Immigration to the United States.
A 150-page catalogue titled East Wind will be published by the Gwangju Art Museum.
Panel Discussion: "Convention, Convention, Korea," Sunday, October 5, 2:00-3:30 pm with Jang Kyung-hwa, Gwangju Art Museum; Tom Finkelpearl, Queens Museum of Art; Hong Sung-dam, artist; Kim Dae-won, artist; and Richard Vine, Senior Editor, Art in America. Panelists will discuss contemporary Korean artistic trends and political art in Korea and East Asia.
IS THERE ANY CONTEMPORARY CULTURE IN KOSOVO?
Umelec 3/2003, www.divus.cz
"Since 1999, the international force of
NATO and UNMIK (United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo) has
created partial freedom for people who live in Kosovo. For over ten years Yugoslavia had taken from Albanians all their basic rights to education, work, health and culture. So the 1999 “Turning Point” was considered a wave of freedom among the international public.
Albanians thought of this situation as not only an alternative new wave, but one that also held potential for new possibilities. As a result this “new” event has begun to dwell within all spheres of politics, economics, international relations and culture. Going back, from the mid-1980s to the end of the ‘90s a passive underground resistance was in place. Shkelzen Maliqi, who had been an important figure in the alternative movement since 1980s and who wrote extensively on this issue, defined this resistance as a “parallel institution,” which could be defined as a paradigmatic method of resistance. During the domination (now labeled “socialism”) of Albania and later, the post-socialist transition period frequently used this method. When Serbians took away the autonomous rights (legislative power in parliament, the closing down of the Science and Art Academy, dismissal of Albanians from their jobs, the banning of the Albanian language education) that were given by Tito to Albanian in 1974, Albanians began to create their own underground network — instead of launching a visible, planned resistance.
Although this kind of resistance strengthened Albanians’ consciousness, a state of disorganization arose, for people were unable to express themselves in public. For example, Maliqi blamed disagreements and disorder as being the main problems among Albanian Parties and this didn’t change after 1999. Today people are no longer oppressed by a regime, so instead the problem has manifested itself as an identity crisis within Kosovo. The most discussed subject by intellectuals after 1999 in the newly established Kosovo was the Albanian identity: “How should Albanian identity be defined?” Contemporary culture and art journal Java dwelled on this subject for a long time, and it is still being discussed. The focus is mostly centered on the alternative national identity, the casualties of authentic identity, and the symptoms of this in the contemporary art scene.
The identity problem could be considered an extension of non-representation in the public sphere. This problem was created by the resistance of the parallel institutions that were widespread among Albanians since the 1980s, and instead of open discussion in public, everybody created his or her own isolated space. Therefore, the issue of a movement in Kosovo contemporary art must be looked at from within this social aspect.
Curator Harald Szeemann has stressed the importance of the Albanian phenomenon, and he deals mainly with Albanian artists in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue for Blood and Honey. (We should be careful about the differences in both the issues and underground resistance styles of Albanians and Kosovo’s Albanians. Even though both issues and resistance styles seem similar, the principals are very distinct. First, the oppression in Albania was established through ideology and bureaucratic hegemony; however in Kosovo oppression was put in place through nationalistic and police-state hegemony.) After this exhibition, René Block curated In der Schusten Der Balkans, which was an important input for Kosovo contemporary art. When Block was in Kosovo he was a “messiah,” a savior in Pristina. He said Pristina was the center of the avant-garde in the Balkans in an interview in Java magazine. A statement that catalyzed avant-garde euphoria here.
As I explained, parallel institutions became the symbol and tradition of the alternative cultural and political resistance. While no Albanian art superstar exists, the most prominent Albanian artist from Kosovo, Sislej Xhafa, has become meaningful to the international art scene. The most important and well-known of Xhafa’s first performances was in 1997 for the Venice Biennale, where the artist participated, but illegally, and in an underground fashion. Xhafa was himself a parallel pavilion, and he presented the Albania that had not been invited to the show. This was done in the same underground and parallel resistance style that is so well known in Kosovo. Xhafa often speaks about clandestine and underground lifestyles in his work. He lived a long time in Pristina, and is the son of Xhevdet Xhafa, a representative of Kosovo modern art during the 1960s and 1970s. After 1999, he frequently visited Pristina from New York (where he now lives) and put on many presentations and gave many speeches (especially during 2001 and 2002, the post-Duchamp seminars he did with Mehmet Behkuki were important), which had influence on the post-René Block
period of Kosovo artists.
As an Albanian, Xhafa’s clandestine approach was significant, as he applied himself and succeeded in the international arena. With his photos of UÇK leaders, Albanian Mafioso in Italy and his borderline profane style, Xhafa was a true Albanian; he was a symbol of “Albanian vigilante” danger, and Xhafa was always aware of the labels and enjoyed playing with them.
But even more Albanian is artist Sokol Beqiri. Beqiri was active when art was being presented as a parallel institution in various areas, cafes and schools, and Beqiri was one of the first artists in Kosovo’s most political period to make contemporary art as “avant-garde” resistance.
After 1999, Beqiri’s work and lifestyle (his drinking, his refusal to leave his birth place of Peja, his experiences during the war and authentic Albanian folk attitudes) greatly influenced the younger generation. Aggression and openness in his works revealed the identity crisis and the traumas that he had lived through in Kosovo. He presented with great clarity the everyday fear that Albanians had of the Serbian
police and the brutality of para-military forces. Of Kosovo contemporary artists, only Sokol Beqiri and Erzen Shkolloli from Peja have succeeded in opening discussion on political issues in a very serious manner while in a discursive sphere. However, despite all of this, the answer to the original question is still in the negative: there is no contemporary culture in Pristina.
Both economics and pedagogical factors could be blamed for this. However the most important reason is this tradition of isolated and underground resistance, which has
created the discursive sphere in Kosovo public space.
Even though there is similarity and solidarity among the young artists in Pristina who have begun to be active on the international platform (Jahup Ferri, Driton Hajredinaj, Dren Maliqi, Lulezim Zeqiri and Tahar Alemdar), there is no continuity in Kosovo’s contemporary art history. Modernist artists like Muslim Muliqi, Rexhep Ferri, Xhevdet Xhafa, who were very active and at the academy between 1960 and 1990, are meaningless to the new wave of artists.
This attitude of young “new wave” artists shouldn’t be compared to western artists who criticize past generations and consciously reject following them. This is because the young artists of Kosovo have neither dealt with, nor faced, the artists of their past generation. They even think of this past as an empty period. The “collective amnesia” that once appeared in post-socialist countries shows itself distinctly in Kosovo. Maybe “amnesia” (called purification by Migjen Kelmendi in one of our conversations) as a traumatic experience is a good psychological strategy for countries in transition. However this healing strategy causes a kind of “a-historicity” in the social sphere. The outcome is always a postmodern conservative illusion that transforms history into spectacle.
Therefore the new wave artists in Pristina deny and pretend not see thirty years of art history in their artwork and everyday lives. Consequently, most young artists make reference to western artists like Christo (Sokol Beqiri), John Lennon and Yoko Ono (Yakup Feri), Damien Hirst (Lulezim Zeqiri), Barney and Viola ( Driton Hajredinaj) with an attitude of parody and irony in their work, but they never refer to their own older generation of artists.
What’s more, the old modernist Kosovo artists are still teaching the young new artists. (When we mention artists from 1960 to 1990, we are referring to Albanian artists. However, there are also important Serbian artists. To consider those artists taboo is another aspect of the collective amnesia.) The art students in the Fine Art Academy of Pristina rebelled against the older teachers during a two-month period between 2001 and 2002. Despite an effective rebellion by the young students, they were unable to take it into the public sphere. In his article written for the catalogue to the René Block exhibition, Shkelzen Maliqi’s opinion that this event was a starting point is a difficult sell. There are two reasons why the rebellion failed and cannot be used as a kind of starting point: First, the rebellion was organized by a “hard-core” group that was too small; and second, they were unable to transform the revolt and take it onto a planned-out, and critical level. In short, the revolt was important input, but it still lacked a manifesto that capable of defining a Kosovo new wave.
On the other hand, this rebellion and interest in the explosion of contemporary art produced a parallel institutionalization in Kosovo contemporary art. But this time the parallel institutionalization had many distinct features from the resistance of the Albanian underground of the 1980s.
The new wave artists harshly criticized Albanian national history and the symbols embodying profound cultural roots. Sokol Beqiri, who began this style of criticism,
uses the language of sailors, the Albanian flag, his family, and the message “Fuck You.” And Erzen Shkolloli (from Peja) made a video presenting the local singer Fejza Shkurte, who sings national songs. In the video, Fejza Shkurte sings, “Don’t Play with Albania,” threatening the world. The white and isolated space she is situated in shows the emptiness and amnesia of UNMIK.
Despite the existence of brave and self-critical works in Albanian culture, and there are many examples, no movement or public discussion as been stirred up. The contemporary art movement, considered a parallel institution, couldn’t create an opposition discourse, and was never established in a consciously open space. On the other hand the young new wave artists are aware of cultural and political happenings and discourses in the world, and they have access to a wide range of information. Among the new wave artists there are signs of a subculture movement under construction. Nicholas Bourriaud mentions in his book Relational Aesthetics “social exchange” within contemporary art. This social exchange doesn’t happen among galleries, audiences and artists in Pristina; the young new wave artists live the social exchange itself, in Pristina’s streets, cafes, odd passageways and one interesting music shop called “Ginger” — the most contemporary place in Pristina. In a city where everybody is a fan of Radiohead, only in this shop can you find records by Madness, Spaceman 3, Gang of Four, Iggy Pop, and CDs by Can, John Zorn, Les Negres Vertes, Residents, Laibach. Ginger’s owner, Armend, says that modern life in Pristina is divided into two groups: “charlatans who think that they’re contemporary and others who want to be like them.” The rest are Armend’s close friends. The cafes at the front of this passage are home to young artists, Hip-Hop musicians and fans (especially NR and TNT), and hash addicts. But even if these places create a kind of underground culture, this is not enough. The “Papçe” who began making videos, describe this situation very well: Underfuckinground! The fact is, Pristina is living mainstream kitsch, and it is impossible to get rid of the pop culture.
There was excitement in the air as Kosovo was being established in 1999. Four years have gone by, and Kosovo still has no
status, and it seems that it will not gain one. Only one contemporary artist ventures to criticize this situation: Erzen Shkolloli, who did a photomontage called: “UNMIK’s-Sold.” Even if the artists are aware of the situation, they are still unable to create a political and public discourse, and a manifesto with a political position does not exist. The underground position is a present day problem of visual culture — there is no need to be hopeless for the future. Because of the new generation of Kosovo artists, all new works assist in the construction of what Beuys called one critical “social sculpture.”
Veil: Veiling, Representation, and Contemporary Art.
By Meier, Prita , African Arts, 6/22/2004
www.encyclopedia.com
Veil Veiling, Representation, and Contemporary Art Edited by David A. Bailey and Gilane Tawadros
Mass media images of veiled Middle Eastern women are circulating at an unprecedented volume since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Europe (particularly France and to a lesser extent Germany) has also revitalized questions regarding national identity and secularism by focusing on the visibility of the Muslim veil and headscarf in European public institutions. The recent project Veil: Veiling, Representation, and Contemporary Art in part counters these particular visual tropes by introducing decidedly different images into the public sphere.
In the last two decades, a body of scholarship and revisionist exhibitions have highlighted the interstices between visual culture and the processes by which cultural boundaries of inclusion and exclusion are created. These critical works have sought to disrupt conventional narratives regarding cultural signs and symbols. By investigating the visual realm, including film, television, advertisements, photographs, and painting, such projects explore the ways in which visual forms operate in their representation of cultural difference. Veil contributes to this larger narrative by examining the cultural politics at work in representations of one of the most well-worn signs of "difference": the Muslim and Islamist veil. Like other paradigmatic symbols essentializing the "other," images of the veil and veiling reproduce imbricated histories of intercultural encounter, negotiation, representation, and domination. Anthropologists, cultural historians, and sociologists utilizing the critical tools of postcolonial theory have already engaged the complex histories and multiple meanings of the veil in Muslim and non-Muslim societies. Yet the vital contribution of Veil is its insistent interrogation and production of ambiguous and contested images.
Veil was published in conjunction with the UK touring exhibition of the same name, which was developed by the artists Zineb Sedira and Jananne Al-Ani and organized under the auspices of inIVA (Institute of International Visual Art) in London. inIVA has spearheaded a number of innovative exhibitions (such as "Faultlines: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes" at the Venice Biennale 2003) focusing on the works of artists and scholars from culturally diverse backgrounds and critical perspectives. The editors of Veil, Gilane Tawadros, director of inIVA, and David A. Bailey, a London-based artist, writer, and curator, have brought together a variety of essays, artworks, and archival materials exploring alternative visions of the veil. Indicative of a range of political, social, and ideological positions, the contributors offer multiple readings of the veil, ranging from a focus on its corporeal function in the performance of female identity to its immaterial role as a metaphor for censorship.
Besides the fact that North African artists are also included in Veil, Africanists will recognize the vital aim underwriting this project, since unpacking stereotypical and fetishistic images of Africa is also an important agenda for the field of African art history. Africanists will also find the authors' insights into the mercurial changes in the practice and meaning of contemporary veiling useful for exploring such practices in Muslim African societies. Furthermore, while scholars have explored the social meanings of African traditions of dressing the head (see, for example, Mary Jo Arnoldi and Christine Mullen Kreamer's 1995 exhibition catalogue Crowning Achievements: African Arts of Dressing the Head), this publication raises important issues about the ways in which this meaning circulates across multiple media and contexts. From this perspective, for example, a study of the ubiquitous West African headtie would invite new questions regarding how African modes of dress are represented and consumed by various culture producers and audiences in the West.
The preface by Reina Lewis, whose own research exploring the centrality of gender and sexuality has complicated Orientalist studies, frames Veil as an "agenda-setting" project that "shows how the heterogeneous use of veiling, as a dress act and visual trope, is endlessly repositioned by changing world events and constantly reframed by nuanced shifting responses of veiling communities" (p. 10). According to Lewis, Veil "not only shows the variety of visual responses to veiling, but also foregrounds the contingency of the viewer's interpretation" (p. 14).
In the introduction, Bailey and Tawadros position contemporary artistic practice as potentially subversive and ambiguous rather than "polemical" or "academic" (p. 19). Bailey and Tawadros contend that "[t]he strength and uniqueness of this project lie within the curatorial narrative which repositions the exhibition from the arena of ethnographic survey shows into a contemporary art context...." (p. 19). This celebration of the contemporary art world of course follows a certain understanding of the artist as someone whose ideas, strategies, and work offer a critical lens of the status quo. First developed in context of the historical avant-garde in the West, this position locates artists, such as those selected for this exhibition and catalogue, as critical cultural workers who have the ability to "disrupt the simplistic binaries" (p. 34) through aesthetic means.
From this position Bailey and Tawadros write an insightful narrative, interweaving discussions of specific works of art with analytical concerns regarding the ideological underpinnings of the veil. The authors explore such themes as the Orientalist gaze, Middle Eastern cultural idioms, and the signification of the female body and sexuality in various political, social, and cultural contexts. For example, the work of the AES art group--Mitra Tabrizian, Faisal Abdu' Allah, and Shadafarin Ghadirian--are discussed as ironic references to and evocations of the manipulative power of photography. The authors also explore how the embroidered canvases of Ghada Amer and the photographic works of Shirin Neshat comment on the use of the veiled or unveiled female body in contesting discourses of nationalism, feminism, colonialism, and resistance movements.
Furthermore, the editors have consciously chosen to include excerpts from important texts, such as Franz Fanon's Studies in a Dying Colonialism (1965) and Leila Ahmed's Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (1992), thus providing insight into the changing discourses surrounding the veil. The excerpt from Ahmed's book, titled "The Discourse of the Veil," focuses on colonial-era writings by colonial administrators and Egyptian activists. She shows how Western, Victorian colonial paternalism unfairly judged women's status in Egypt to justify the British "civilizing mission." Her text exposes the hypocrisy of colonial policies toward Muslim women, which on one hand appropriated the rhetoric of Western feminism and on the other hand enforced policies restricting Egyptian women's access to education. Her larger aim is to make a case for the liberation of women in Islamic cultures on their own terms and in their own time, without replicating Western constructs or dictates.
The excerpt by the Martiniquan psychiatrist and revolutionary writer Franz Fanon chronicles his anticolonial position in relationship to his role as an army psychiatrist and later as a participant in the war for liberation in Algeria. His text "Algeria Unveiled," written in 1959, is paired with stills from Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 film The Battle of Algiers. Both give insight into the ways in which the veiled woman became a symbol of resistance for various independence movements in Africa and the Middle East. The film stills and Fanon's text celebrate the concrete contribution of Algerian women to the resistance movement and the inability of the French administration to come to terms with Algerian social and political strategies of resistance.
Three other contributing authors speak to the changing position of the veil and veiling in three distinct cultural and political settings. Ahdaf Soueif, the well-known Egyptian-British novelist, relates the complex social and cultural codes attached to wearing the veil or headscarf in Egypt in different historical moments (1923, 1971, 2001) in her piece titled "The Language of the Veil." Her nuanced and personal perspective on the changing relationship Egyptian women have toward the veil highlights the subtle political, social, and class allegiances women project when they choose certain modes of veiling or not veiling. Alison Donnell, a British scholar of postcolonial literature, provides an incisive interrogation of American and European media coverage about Muslim and Islamist women since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Her essay, "Visibility, Violence and Voice? Attitudes to Veiling Post-11 September," emphasizes the new boundaries that have been drawn between "East" and "West" in contemporary political and wartime polemics. These fictionalized boundaries are of course particularly hard to sustain today since the public visibility of Islam and the specific gender, body, and spatial practices underpinning it are becoming more important to European and American Muslims and Islamists as well. Hamid Naficy's contribution, "Poetics and Politics of Veil, Voice, and Vision in Iranian Post-Revolutionary Cinema," draws on his expertise as an art historian and film studies scholar to chronicle the role of women before and behind the camera in the Iranian film industry since the 1978-79 revolution. He considers how filmmakers deal with new political and social rules regulating modesty and gendered segregation and focuses on the works of film directors and multimedia artists, such as Ghazel, who appropriate the veil as a vehicle for critiquing the political establishment in Iran.
Jananne Al-Ani and Zineb Sedira, who cocurated and contributed artworks to the exhibition, also wrote articles for the catalogue. Their essays give provocative insights into in their personal and intellectual engagement with the ideological baggage of the veil and the impact this baggage has on their artistic practice. Al-Ani's contribution, "Acting Out," revisits the work of various turn-of-the-century and colonial-period photographers (from Europe and Iran) and the ways in which their visual legacy has occupied later generations of scholars and artists. The vital questions posed by Sedira's essay, "Mapping the Illusive," are pivotal to understanding the larger implications of the Veil project: "What differences are there between the physical veil in Muslim culture and the mental veil in Western culture?" (p. 5), "How do I write about the subject of the veil in the West without worrying that my writing reinforces Orientalist fetishes, commodifying experience?" (p. 63).
Another key question would be to ask what the implications are of producing images and imaginings of the veil in the realm of the European art museum (with its particular audiences). Furthermore, what are the complex ideological shifts at play when images of the veil are aestheticized in contemporary art making processes? These issues of contingency and responsibility are a strong undercurrent in Veil, but never addressed directly. Of course, the realm of the contemporary art object/project is equally rife for consumption and can also lead to rarified conceptions and fetishizations. Yet the authors do attend to the multivocality of representations of the veil in the wider contemporary social and cultural context. Most importantly, Veil represents a project of cultural intervention by artists and cultural workers. While ambitious and wide-ranging in scope, at its core Veil is a platform from which twenty international artists from Muslim and non-Muslim backgrounds respond to and problematize accepted paradigms of interpretation that reduce the veil as a sign of incontrovertible cultural difference.
COPYRIGHT 2004 The Regents of the University of California
This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.
KW INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART Berlin, 2004
EXHIBITION
PRIVATIZATIONS
CONTEMPORARY ART FROM EASTERN EUROPE
www.postcommunist.de
In affiliation with the project, a film and video exhibition will take place in the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin in 2004. The topic of the presentation is the situation of art in the post-communist countries of central and eastern Europe. The exhibition shows works of video and installation art, which are based on the artistic technique of appropriation: The contemporary artists become acquainted with the anonymous, collective, state-run cultural production techniques of the socialist era and strive to create their own artistic worlds and develop artistic identities for themselves.
In their work they tap into functions and effects of the films of the Stalinist and Cold War eras, for example, and criticize them. Along these lines, in his film INTERVISTA the Albanian artist Anri Sala deals with the search for a language of the present for events in the past. He depicts not only the reluctance of the former communist Elite of Albania to devote any attention to the past, but also, in particular, the strategies of denial, suppression, shame, rationalisation and regret in light of their incapacity to articulate the past in terms of adequate present experiences as well as the hope of developing ways to comprehend what has occurred by means of art.
Video is one communication media that many artists have been working with in the post-communist era. For a long period of time, artists in Russia had no opportunity to use television and mass media for their work. When western advertising first came to eastern Europe and television began to report on artistic events, the artists soon became aware of the diverse possibilities of television and video media and their enormous social significance. They regarded video art above all as a chance of entering into a dialogue with the wide world of the media. This communication media opened up possibilities to reflect television in their own work and articulate themselves on the same eye-level as those who officially used this art of the masses. The exhibition concentrates in particular on the video film as a new, important media of post-communist art.
The video DEMONSTRATION produced by Dmitrij Gutov together with the group Radek shows how working with video and television offers possibilities of articulating a certain dramatisation of social processes. The video presents a performance. Several artists make their way towards a busy part of a city, where many people are waiting in front of a red traffic light. They then move in front of those waiting and barge ahead of them when the light for pedestrians turns green. They carry signs and banners with absurd and anarchistic slogans and thereby turn the entire flow of pedestrians into a demonstration. The video is accompanied by the film music “Heart beat, pig meat” from Antonionis’ film ZABRISKIE POINT, which serves as an allusion to the end of the 1960’s and raises questions on the possibility of political resistance in Russia under the condition of the strong influence of western lifestyle through mass culture and its technology. The exhibition shows artistic perspectives of the present from Russia, Poland, Romania, Kazakhstan, Serbia, Hungary, Slovenia and Ukraine among others. Boris Groys is the curator of the exhibition.
Anne von der Heiden
BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN 2004
Mass public/political art in London's Trafalgar Square
This past September 12th, more than 40,000 people gathered in London's Trafalgar Square for an unusual evening performance, an open air screening of Sergei Eisenstein's classic revolutionary film, Battleship Potemkin. The world-shattering film was projected on a giant screen and provided a live soundtrack performed by the Dresdner Sinfoniker String Orchestra and composed by the Pet Shop Boys.
When the radical film was originally released in 1923, it threw authorities all over the world into an absolute panic. In Germany it was censored and military recruits were banned from watching it. In France all copies of the film were confiscated and destroyed. The film was banned in cities across the US, and in Britain it was outlawed until 1954. Eisenstein's ground-breaking movie details an actual event, the 1905 mutiny of Russian sailors on the Battleship Potemkin.
The sailors endured harsh treatment by their Czarist officers until they were served maggot infested meat… which led to mutiny and the navy men taking over the ship to raise the red flag of revolution. Eisenstein’s portrayal of the people of Odessa rising up in solidarity with the rebellious sailors, only to be massacred by counter-revolutionary Cossack troops… is perhaps one of the most famous in all of cinema.
40,000 gathered in Trafalgar Square
The legendary “Odessa steps” scene not only heralded a new way of assembling film through staccato editing and juxtapositions of montage-like imagery… it introduced a new way of seeing. The Abstract Expressionist, Francis Bacon, first viewed the film in 1935 and kept stills from the movie in his studio. He frequently referenced the Odessa steps scene in his own paintings as a symbol of the angst present in our panic-stricken society.The film’s screening at Trafalgar Square was proceeded by oration from Simon McBurney, the pioneering actor-director and co-founder of the Complicite Theater Troupe. McBurney reminded those gathered that the Square held significance as a place of historic mass protest… from the 1930s marches against unemployment and the 1960s demonstrations against the Vietnam war, to the huge Anti-Poll Tax protests of 1990 and todays rallies against the war in Iraq. When the film ended, one last message was splashed across the huge screen. Massive letters proclaimed, “More than 50% of the world’s population live on or below the poverty line”… and then, “Existence = Resistance.”
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