Yearly Archives: 2012

Free Speech

Free speech seems to be the latest thing, but in a strangely nostalgic way. This coming Saturday alone in New York City there are at least two events which will feature readings out loud from historical and contemporary political texts. Unfortunately I can’t be in two places at the same time so I won’t be able to attend “‘A riot is the language of the unheard’: an exercise in unrestrained speech” at The Rose Auditorium of Cooper Union at 4PM but wish I could. The event announcement includes this description:

Taking its cue from a quote from a 1968 speech about injustice and freedom by Dr. Martin Luther King, this public event engages in the use of the voice in imagining collective and political speech through short readings by artists, scholars, writers, poets, musicians, and speakers.

The event features a variety of contemporary and historic material such as re-performed texts, poetry, experimental theater, pedagogic exercises, as well as everyday collections of testimonials, essays, and private ruminations.

Envisioned as a “rough cut” anthology of live subversive speech acts, “A riot is the language of the unheard” is an experimental tribute to parrhesia, or defiant and confrontational speech. As surveillance and force is becoming increasingly utilized to control and manage resistance, this program seeks to address how the right to speak is also a politics of listening.

Later that day, from 6 to 8 I will be among a few artists invited to read at the closing event for an exhibition organized by some of my MFA students at Parsons, “Question for Revolution and Universal Brotherhood” where performances have included other public readings of political texts with an emphasis on utopian possibilities, some from the past but all for the current era. Invited participants at the closing events will also include Maureen Connor, Andrea Geyer, Heather Love, John T. McGrath, and Alex Segade.

Last week saw an iteration of the Free University in New York City, first initiated last May 1, with seminars taking place in the open air at Madison Square Park over a four day period, an Occupy-related event for once unmolested by the NYPD. Discussion included topics such as “What is Money – What is Debt” led by Sue Waters, “The Sirens and Subjection: Homer, Kakfa, and Adorno” led by Julie Napolin, “Letters to a Young Artist: What should young artists know?” led by Caroline Woolard (which was planning to begin with a reading and discussion on Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet), and “Discussion of The Alienated Librarian” led by Chris Alen Sula (a discussion inititated with students from Pratt Institute’s School of Information & Library Science of Marcia Nauratil’s 1989 book “The Alienated Librarian,” which examines the work of librarians from a labor perspective. (for the full schedule of events that took place September 18-22, click on the Five Day Schedule link on this Free University Page and for more photos from the event you can look at their Flickr page).

Inspired by the idea of the Free University, on Sunday October 14, I will lead a similar type of reading of Bill Readings’ predictive 1997 book The University in Ruins at Momenta Art as part of the current exhibition Occupy Your BFF, an exchange of ideas with Occupy Wall Street, with the involvement of Occupy related groups including the Arts&Labor group. Institutions including Parsons The New School of Design and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts are hosting some of the events listed on this schedule.

This ferment, in the case of these examples mentioned above, has centered around education within and beyond the confines of the university and in many instances focused on political texts from earlier moments of political fervor, conflict, and engagement is part of a world wide growing movement of radical critique of post-War neo-liberalism and the ravages of global, unregulated super capitalism. In the US the increase in such activity seems to be framed by the crash of the 2008 economy and the upcoming election, although some within the Occupy Movement are so convinced of the evil of the two lesser of two evils argument of our electoral choices that they are rejecting participation in the vote.

While many media voices declare that Occupy is dead or has failed, discussion about the political and economic situation and how to affect it positively, continues, large or small, public events such as the ones at educational institutions or on web-based projects such as Nicholas Mirzoeff’s year long daily blog Occupy 2012 or in small ongoing private discussion groups, the large meetings inspirational and occasionally dramatic (as people on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook share news pictures of huge mass demonstrations around the world, usually not discussed at any length if at all on American mainstream media, including such liberal sites as MSNBC, which focus on domestic events, with a tendency to get seduced by the horse-race aspect of electoral and party politics in the US). The smaller groups are interesting and moving in another more intimate way. I should note that including the Free University, I have attended only a couple of events in recent weeks, so my view is pretty limited but my sense is of a tender struggle, with a desire for positive social inclusion at the level of the everyday, for modest cumulative efforts to interject criticality but also small tangible moments of community and warmth into a media entertainment, corporatized, corrupted and alienated culture. Some of these efforts have a tentative aspect which may lead to media commentary of the death of Occupy, but these small meetings, as much as the larger public events such as the occupation of Zuccotti Park, at least reveal to each individual that they are not alone in their hopes and desires for a different and better world.

The turn to historical texts is significant in this regard. My totally unscientifc and personal view is that from the French Revolution, if you really want to go far back, through the Russian Revolution, to the crucible of the Great Depression with its powerful political battles between totalitarianism, fascism, communism and progressive liberalism, great union movements, and great battles for civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights, up to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the voices for political engagement were sharp, confident, fearless, funny, inspiring, historically rooted, with deep roots in the assertion of rebellion. The 1980s marked the beginning of the institutionalization of some of these voices into the university but underscored with a growing disappointment with the “failure” of the 60s and a creeping complicity with the corporatization of the world.

The turn to the historical texts and voices indicates a current thirst for the courage, eloquence, and, after thirty years of the triumph of irony, for the authenticity of such voices. At the same time it is quite interesting to note the trend towards re-performance, recently a hot subject of debate with regards to performance art. Events, political actions and interventions, and artworks whose contingent nature was completely a part of their meaning are now being not just celebrated but also re-performed under quite luxurious and heavily promoted circumstances–things artists and political thinkers did in conditions often of near anonymity, not that many such figures did not seek attention for their causes and themselves and document their practices as best they could, but I still would describe as near anonymity relative to current conditions of instant self-documentation, promotion, and commodification on pretty much everyone’s part. One problem is that questions of political belief and authenticity are still hard to bring up, in fact I type these words with censorious critical voices loudly whispering in my ear!

The interest in something like a Free University is also an indication, a recognition that things are not quite so rosy in institutions of higher education, just as they are not rosy in the public school system, in fact in every system. The moral economy of the 1% occurs in every part of culture: we see some of the public protests against the marketization of education, in faculty and student protests against closing of liberal arts departments, libraries, and archives and in the firing of even University Presidents, or, rather, some of these situations are so egregious that they actually get some coverage, but also we see the kinds of small repressions and erosions of knowledge bases that take place throughout the university system in favor of new global imperatives connected to the very same system critiqued by the Occupy movement. Some things will no longer be taught, and thus eventually some may then reappear in the small instances of extra-institutional education Free University proposes and is just one example of, or indicator of the need for–all the more significant as higher education becomes too expensive for even upper middle class people and begins to seem non-cost effective as jobs do not exist for the subjects being taught, particularly in the liberal arts and arts.

This is what has led me to be interested in extra-institutional teaching situations though perhaps it may be therefore inferred that even some such erosions and repressions take place right in the middle of the most progressive institutions in the name of the most advanced political positioning.

In this blog I have occasionally linked to some of the stirring political speeches and the closeness to historical turmoil that marked the generations before me. These framed my initiation into politics in my early teens: the admiration (the word is not sufficient) my parents’ generation had for Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and the policies of the New Deal–which current Right Wing politics in the US are intent on finally at long last repealing, after 80 years of concerted efforts to do so. My parents’ experiences with fascism and the Holocaust and the formative experiences of their American friends in the Great Depression and during the post-war McCarthy era were a strong influence on me as I grew up listening to their stories. In recent years as labor unions have come under attack, I have often thought about the general tendency towards progressive political thinking within immigrant groups in the US that had experienced political and religious repression in the lands of their birth and how these tendencies were part of what drove the labor union movement in the US in the early twentieth century. The political figures who I witnessed through the 60s and 70s had been formed in these crucibles and carried their traces still even as post-war economic conditions began to shift towards the situation we are currently struggling against. These are just some of the experiences that marked the atmosphere of the pre-1980s period as I experienced them, as were the examples of civil rights leaders and workers such as Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King Jr.

My interest in the possibilities of the structure of Free University seminars is based on experiences I have related on this blog before, in a provocatively titled and, significantly, pre-Occupy post, including one comment that alas will ring in my mind for years, a student’s negative comment in a faculty evaluation of me to the effect that “she made us listen to a speech by Martin Luther King” in a seminar on contemporary art issues (King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered April 4, 1967, a year exactly before his assassination). Apparently the market based expectations of students (how will this help me be a viable contemporary artist and promote my work?) clashed with my feeling that certain kinds of speech are more important than the orthodoxies of critical theory or some art discourse as well as art market gossip that still hold sway even as such types of speech are now being celebrated in the events that I mentioned at the beginning of this post happening this week in educational and alternative art institutions this week in New York City.

Politics is not for the faint of heart and can be mind-spinningly complex and soul-breakingly frustrating, as are most human beings, and because of that an engagement with politics can end up making people flee back to the interests of their daily lives. As in the past it is the realization that the safety and comfort of those personal lives are contingent and subject to larger historical forces that turns our attention again to political speech from other times when such threats were also great and yet a political perspective was more part of common thought.

Despair and possibility for political activism through speech are also concerns of my current visual work:

Mira Schor, The Bland Face of An Untransparent Authority, ink and gesso on tracing paper, 2012 — a pessimistic realist view

Mira Schor, Voice and Speech, 2010. Ink and rabbit skin glue on gesso on linen, 2010. The optimistic activist view

A Tale of Two Empty Squares + 1

For the past ten years on September 11, I’ve republished a text I wrote in the weeks after that day, to bring the texture of the event as witnessed by so many New Yorkers with their own eyes and of daily life in Lower Manhattan in the days and weeks afterwards. But this year I don’t feel like it. My need to continue the memory has been interrupted by the National September 11 Memorial which I visited November 15, 2011, for which friends and I had reserved tickets two months in advance and which turned out to be on the same day that a police raid had evicted Occupy Wall Street from Zuccotti Park.

That day I wrote down my impressions, perhaps today’s eleventh anniversary is the day to publish them.

My initial notes as written in bold face on the spot went as follows: 9/11, 45 min wait, airport security, bad vibes, hideous entrance, bad plaza (Starbucks, Metropark architecture & lamps), terrible compromise but the two pools are dark, black abyss, death, a cold corporate architecture really works, it looks both small and huge, like a simulacral sea, it’s the opposite of the Towers of Light, what goes up via light into dark here cascades down into dark.

Getting to the entrance of the memorial is an ordeal, today (November 15, 2011) an ordeal twice over. First the issue was how walk past Zuccotti Park without having time to stop to photograph the police occupying the Park. Then, corner Thames and Albany Streets, the interminable and graceless line to get into the Memorial.

This is not a promising beginning to the memorial experience. You shouldn’t have to make an appointment to visit a memorial. Even if admission is free, grief must be free to roam and it must be integrated into daily life, here the grid of Lower Manhattan, to be both special and a silent partner, there if you want it, when you want it. Last fall, a two-month wait for a daylight hour visitor’s pass was followed by a 45 minute wait in a line effectively several blocks long though snaked through police barricades on the South side of the WTC construction site (to the accompaniment of construction noise that would certainly drown out any noise from OWS). We went through three checkpoints with our visitor’s pass, only to find ourselves at the end of the line in a chaotic mini-airport security situation, with metal detectors, put your coat and bag in a plastic bin (you don’t have to take off your shoes, thank goodness given how chaotic the situation was, I figured the logic of that was that if you blew yourself up you wouldn’t take anyone else with you though the logistics were such that people would be trampled in the line slowed down). Then down another bleak work barricaded back area, and finally into the Memorial Park…you hardly know once you have entered because there is no entrance as such. So far, bad vibes and not because of memories of why you have come, in fact the wait is so unpleasant that by the time you’ve been on line for an hour or so, you forget the reason you came.

The plaza won’t help you remember. It’s really spectacularly mediocre, New Jersey Transit/ Metropark train station parking lot atmosphere including the lamps, at the moment rather silly looking trees that somehow never transcend the function of little architectural model fake trees.

The plaza has no sense of scale. Perhaps if and when the area is no longer a work site and if in that case there is free access from the streets around, there will be a flow into the life of the city, that might make it better, but as my friends pointed out, the plaza at the World Trade Center was always a cold windswept bad space. Still, we imagined various alternatives: the last vestige of facade, the bronze orb, damaged yet intact, or just the gravel of a Japanese rock garden would be better. Best would be a flat plain space with no adornment, just gravel or marble, the trees are silly, a false niceness.

The pools are the thing itself, death, loss, the abyss, the unknown.

You approach the first pool set into the footprint of the North Tower. It is both small and huge, it seems as large as an inland sea, though a strangely simulacral one, like in a sci-fi movie, yet too small to have been the footprint of such a tall building, and though ocean-like, probably the water is only one foot deep.

Inner Sea, a work on paper I did in 1981, from a dream of a vast sea within the interior of an urban structure

A shower of water cascades down the four dark stone walls of the giant square into the darker seemingly bottomless abyss of the inner square at the bottom of the pool.The water passes through a kind of comb that subtly recalls the e style arches of the WTC facade, though here the pattern goes downwards.

The design of the pools is brutal, corporate, and it really works.

Morning of September 11, 2012

As the reading of the names proceeds in the background, a kind of musical chairs game of loss–on whose name will the reader stop to reveal their particular relation of grief?– I get out James E. Young’s At Memory’s Edge: After Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture, and look again as some of the examples of “counter-memorials” in Germany in the 1990s, including from among the submissions to a 1995 competition for a German National “memorial to murdered Jews of Europe.,” in the chapter “Memory, Countermemory, and the End of the Monument: Horst Hoheisel, Micha Ullman Rachel Whiteread, and Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock.”

Artist Horst Hoheisel … proposed a simple, if provocative antisolution to the memorial competition: blow up the Brandenburg Tor, grind its stone into dust, sprinkle the remains over its former site, and cover the entire memorial area with granite plates. How better to remember a destroyed people than by a destroyed monument?…Hoheisel’s proposed destruction of the Brandenburg Gate participates int eh competition for a national Holocaust memorial, even as its radicalism precludes the possibility of its execution. At least part of its polemic, therefore, is directed against actually building any winning design, against ever finishing the monument at all. Here he seems to suggest that the surest engagement with Holocaust memory in Germany may actually life in its perpetual irresolution, that only an unfinished memorial process can guarantee the life of memory.

Some more general remarks by Young have bearing on the type of memorial that has become the default style in the United States, first expressed in Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial which so brilliantly melded modernist abstraction with literary content-the names etched on the marble surface. Lin’s piece has a quality of the antimemorial, as it is set into the earth and is quite un-obstrusive in the landscape, really it is an inscription into the earth (see picture on Wikipedia site as observed from above) until you are right up along it where only at its center does it reach above the visitor’s head. A visit to it is a surprise, because it just kind of appears as you walk towards it and its meaning can only be understood through walking by with your body and observing other people interacting with it. It’s intimate. What the designers of the 9/11 have borrowed from Lin is the most successful, thus architect Michael Arad‘s design for the pools and his use of inscribed names. The landscaping is clearly a huge concession to the demands of urban planners, politicians, victims’ families, and real estate forces who would not have understood a less utilitarian and conventional approach.

Like other cultural and aesthetic forms in Europe and North America, the monument–in both idea and practice–has undergone a radical transformation over the course of the twentieth century. As intersections between public art and political memory, the monument has necessarily reflected the aesthetic and political revolutions, as well as the wider crises of representation, following all of the century’s major upheavals–including both World Wars I and II, the Vietnam War, the rise and fall of communist regimes in the former Soviet Union and its Eastern Europeans satellites. In every case, the monument reflects both its sociohistorical and its aesthetic context: artists working in eras of cubism, expressionism, socialist realism, earthworks, minimalism, or conceptual art remain answerable to the needs of both art and official history. The result has been a metamorphosis of the monument from the heroic, self-aggrandizing figurative icons of the late nineteenth century celebrating national ideals and triumphs to the antiheroic, often ironic, and self-effacing conceptual installations that mark the national ambivalence and uncertainty of late twentieth-century postmodernism.

A number of the monuments described in the book seem to have a relevance to the 9/11 Memorial. Artist Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz‘s The Hamburg Monument Against War and Facism and for Peace, from 1986, was a “forty-foot high, three foot-square pillar ..made of hollow aluminum plated with a thin layer of soft dark lead. Visitors were invited to inscribe their own names on the monument with a steel pointed stylus and as soon as a five foot section was filled with names it sank “into a chamber as deep as the column was high.” Over seven years the monument disappeared. “The best monument, in the Gerzes’ view, may be no monument at all, but only the memory of an absent monument.”

An unrealized project submitted to the 1995 competition by Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock also stays in my mind: Bus Stop–The Non Monument proposed “an open-air bus terminal for coaches departing to and returning from regularly scheduled visits to several dozen concentration camps and other sites of destruction throughout Europe.” The artists called for “a single place whence visitors can board a bright red bus at a regularly scheduled time for a nonstop trip both to such well-known sites as Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Dachau and to the lesser known massacre sites in the east, such as Vitebsk and Trawniki.” Finally, “at night the rows of parked and waiting buses, with their destinations illuminated, would become a kind of “light sculpture” that dissolves at the break of day into a moving mass to reflect what Bernd Nicolai has called “the busy banality of horror.”

You know that the designers of the 9/11 Memorial were well versed in the history of these memorials and countermemorials.

November 15, 2011

Speaking of unwelcoming windswept spaces, on my way home I circled Zuccotti Park, now occupied by the NYPD, with Occupy Wall Street, ordinary New Yorkers, and the press occupying the periphery. In a weird topsy turvy opposites world, the police now occupied the park, and the occupiers surrounded them.

The problems of the 9/11 memorial and the political atmosphere that led to the Occupy movement are linked, as the reaction of the United States to the attacks of September 11 in some way was a disturbing mirror image of the forces that attacked on September 11 (a mirroring described in the 2004 BBC Documentary The Power of Nightmares, which posits parallels between the rise of the American Neo-Conservative movement and the radical Islamist movement, making comparisons on their origins and noting strong similarities between the two. In a way the destruction of the United States continued via its own internal processes of paranoia and ulterior political motives unrelated to the actual event–let’s just start its wasting of resources on a war on the “wrong” country…many others have developed these ideas better than I can do.

The truest antimemorials to 9/11 were perhaps the modest, temporary ones that sprang up on the site in the months after September 11, and the simple constructions on the site that were built for early anniversary observances.

Site of the World Trade Center, cardboard circle, September 11, 2002, New York City

And the most outstanding memorial remains The Towers of Light, or The Tribute in Lights. It seemed last year that we were seeing the last of them as authorities were grumbling about electricity costs. But tonight as in the past several years I’m going downtown to get as close to them as I can.

I don’t plan to go back to the Memorial until it is, if ever, integrated into the flow of the city, and I can walk there as my feet and spirit take me. That would be what–one little fragment of–democracy looks like.

“it all”

Mira Schor, “it all,” June 25, 2012, ink & mixed media on tracing paper, 6 1/2″x 8 1/2″

Drawing inspired by Ann-Marie Slaughter’s recent Atlantic Magazine article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” a very thorough article, honest about her own position of privilege, and about ways in which society might be reordered at least at the level of power that she is speaking to in order to insure that women could participate in political decisions that affect women’s lives.

A Discussion on Facebook about Feminism

Yesterday the New York Times Sunday Review lead editorial was “The Campaign Against Women.” The editorial focused on a number of recent state and federal laws put forward and passed by Republican legislative majorities affecting women’s reproductive rights, healthcare, equal pay and domestic violence protection, among others (and they didn’t even mention recent laws requiring transvaginal ultrasound probes for women seeking abortions).

I posted the Times editorial on Facebook with the query “is there still a need for “Woman”-focused feminism or would other theories and political positions be more useful?” This query partially emerges from instructive and provocative conversations I had with some of my students this past semester in a course on Feminist art practice about a range of political and theoretical identifications and positionalities some of which I experienced as being in stark contrast to the actualities of female experience around the globe as well in our own seemingly privileged culture.These conversations suggested more study and rethinking, and, if I’m not sure I can alter some of my deeply held views, I see in renewed focus other points of views that I need to rethink and study further.

The ensuing comments thread is an example of what can occasionally make Facebook an interesting space for discussion among people who are not in the same room and who may or may not have ever actually met, beyond its role monetizing your personal data for the benefit of Facebook. The people who participated, some of whom rarely “speak up” on Facebook to my knowledge, were articulate, informed, and clearly cared deeply about the issues raised. I learned from their comments and responses in this thread, as participants discussed some of the parameters of the impasse in which feminism occasionally seems trapped, between developments and positions on the “left” and the “right.” With the permission of my Facebook friends who participated I am republishing this comments thread here, to expand the readership. I have done this once before, in the spirit of extending conversation when it seems worth it: I would encourage anyone who wants to engage in this discussion to do so on the Facebook comments thread and I will add them to this blog entry if they continue the discussion in a productive way.

Fung-Lin Hall: I just posted for John Stuart Mill… he was for women’s rights.

Tracey Harnish: I was just talking about this with another artist. How young women do not seem like to like the term feminism. It seems like something new is needed, but what? This regressive Repub stance is unbelievable!

Lori Ellison: OWS is forming a feminist movement inside of the ideas already percolating.

Ula Einstein: good question Mira! I don’t have an answer yet. and Tracey, I wonder if young women don’t like it because they don’t fully understand the history; although Feminism is not a word I use much either. I am completely interested in who and how we are as women c0-creating change, consciousness and culture. hmmmmmm.

Mira Schor: I may be misinterpreting them but this semester in my Feminist Art Practice course my students and I had a heated discussion (well, I was heated) over a statement made during the conference I hosted at Parsons (*at the moment the conference is partially online–please note introduction for order of speakers which appear as individual videos–but not the discussion segments, when these go online I will link to them), where one participant said she had no trouble with the identification feminist, but she did have a problem with the identification Woman, this was related to a queer identification and queer theory/discourse, adopted by most of the students whether gay, queer, transgender, or straight, & some at least still had some issues with the term feminist although of course they would agree with feminist political points of view. It is most curious. My point was that when the most brilliant minds of a generation in a relatively privileged culture take that position (I’m thinking of people like Judith Butler who many of my students idolize, for her gender work as well as more recent writings on war, non-violence etc) , then when women’s rights are under assault, there is no discourse to defend them, because discourse has migrated, in this case, to queer rights, which are important, but I do not think are the same thing, and so feminist activism seems to be disabled…I could go on and on, as my students discovered with some alarm!!!

Ula Einstein: again, thanks for letting us know the Context: Mira: I don’t think they’re the same thing either. and yes: then when women’s rights are under assault, there is no discourse to defend them, because discourse has migrated, in this case, to queer rights, which are important, BUT I DO NOT THINK ARE THE SAME THING, and so feminist activism seems to be disabled

Lori Ellison: Feminism is more important than ever. I heard an interview with the creator of the TV show Girls on Fresh Air and Terri Gross said at her age they were pressing to be called women. Dunham blithely glided over that. I think there is a gathering storm over the War on Women as the media has called it. And Obama. There will be a lot of women who in earlier times were able to take certain things for granted and never think deeply about feminism that will now.

Donna Ruff: I heard that interview too, and am kind of horrified by the series- I don’t mind being referred to as a girl, having gone through the woman era, but the humiliating and confused actions of the girls on the show- if this is indicative of a generation it makes me very sad. Of course it’s fiction but is this a piece of the anti-feminist, anti-woman zeitgeist?

Lori Ellison: Yes, the internalized backlash.

Mira Schor: Donna I don’t get HBO, but friends have told me about how disturbing it is to see the young women on Girls accept totally degrading sex without question making the women on Sex and the City positive feminists for insisting on their own pleasure! it is worrisome if a generation of women raised during the Reagan/Bush/ and yes the Obama years would allow so much of the misogyny always threatening to overwhelm any civilization to go unquestioned and unopposed. The less clear opposition and questioning there is, the more years to again denaturalize that misogyny.

Monika Weiss: For years I thought in the West there was no more need for “women focused feminism” because we were on a different level of fighting otherness and underprivileged conditions, as opposed to some non-Western countries and continents, where women focused feminism was and is still a necessity. In light of recent developments here on the Right, with their attempts to undermine most of the women rights we have achieved in the 20th century (short of preventing us from voting–but perhaps this is coming as well, since the other legislation debated now is as absurd as voting prevention, perhaps because voting is not good for raising kids, and takes our female minds –if there are any –away from the households) — thus I have to admit that yes, we do need, once again, fully on, a “women focused feminism”, which would be positioned under the agenda of defending human rights as such.

p.s. There are good reasons why so many of our students love Judith Butler and especially her more recent books on war and violence — perhaps because there are connections, some obvious and some more hidden from general view–between oppressive systems that treat woman as an under-class, under-human, and other forms of oppression such as war (which in Butler’s terms is always already a crime) with those “not grievable” lives. I think this is a time not only for “women focused feminism” but a larger critique of a culture or civilization that makes possible a reversal of human rights. This is a great question by the way, thank you Mira for asking it.

Donna Ruff: The alarming thing is that it’s no longer something to be identified as a movement by those on the Right, because the Right has migrated to the center. As for the series, it’s not just degrading sex, but sex with no feeling whatsoever. Along with a sort of nihilist drifting through life and relationships.

Mira Schor: Donna I don’t think the Right has migrated to the Center, the Right has migrated to the extreme right, and everyone else has moved right accordingly, so that today’s “center” is basically mid 20th Republican or worse. For example many of Nixon’s domestic policies would today be perceived as left, even socialist by the standards of the more rabid Republicans, whereas many agree that Pres. Obama basically has the policy outlook of a moderate Republican pre. Gingrich.

Donna Ruff: Yes, after I posted that I realized I had worded it badly! What I meant was that these attempts to deny women’s rights through legislation aren’t coming from some right wing extremists, but from the House Speaker and Republicans who should have more moderate, and Representative (ironic use of word) views. So that the so-called Right has spread like a mutated virus.

Monika Weiss: This is of course true-we have lost the Left in this move towards the Right and extreme Right. how to position the feminist movement now, in this context of loss of Left?

Terry R Myers: Mira, I assume you know Monique Wittig’s essay “One is Not Born a Woman”? I’m curious if the student in your class that you mention above knows Wittig’s work?

Mira Schor: Hi Terry, thanks for the reference to Monique Wittig’s essay “One is Not Born a Woman”. I don’t have a copy of the essay (do you happen to have a PDF?). I can’t speak for whether my students would agree or disagree, though on the face of it, most likely would agree. There just seems to be a very fine line between several verities: one is not born but becomes a woman..yes, since each culture and class interprets that role differently…but hormones do make for gender coded differences>and so interesting now that we have gone from feminism to queer to transgender surgeries and hormonal treatments that reinscribe the body…somewhere between “Woman” being a cultural construct and the loss of an effective feminist activism, there’s been a mutation with political effects.

Mira Schor: In response to Monika Weiss’s interesting comment et al, I think it is certain that this could not be passed now: This UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS passed by the UN in 1948 under the leadership of Eleanor Roosevelt.

“Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world…”

Elaine Angelopoulos: My position and experience (to this day) has always told me that I cannot separate Feminism from Queer, Class, and Racial concerns. These are threads among many. It’s like atom splitting, and thus nuclear (as in disaster). We may all have our subaltern positions, but we all have to acknowledge the Other. Making fun and denegrating the Other is what falls prey to larger devisive mechanisms rather than moving forward. I may not know Butler from the back of my hand, but I know enough to say that people read what they want into text because they want to identify with it so much, and to believe that it represents their being. I know this is a stance that makes people sigh and roll their eyes in frustration.

Donna Ruff: Not surprising that Butler would be popular with students, who are looking for ways to self-identify with academic underpinnings! Mira, are you saying that this cultural backlash is due to the blurring of gender identification? Fear-based, as these movements usually are?

Something that I honestly never considered, though it now seems obvious to me.

Jen Bradford: Highly recommend this review of Girls (“The Loves of Lena Dunham” by Elaine Blair | The New York Review of Books). Brushing it aside as internalized woman-hatred misses a lot, and will make conversations with students pretty difficult moving forward.

Terry R Myers: Hi Mira – I think I do have a PDF somewhere – searching . . .

Monique Wittig, from "One is Not Born a Woman," 1981, thanks to Terry R. Myers for sending me a PDF so promptly!

Donna Ruff: Jen, thanks for posting that, it’s a good read. I guess removing myself from a literal reading of the show, I’d still characterize myself as, in her words, “admiring but distinctly nervous.”

Mira Schor: ‎Jen, thanks I’ll take a look..actually don’t think my students are watching TV.

Jen Bradford: I don’t mean you (or they) have to watch or approve of the show – but it could tell you something more complex about where they’re coming from.

Mira Schor: absolutely

Terry R Myers: Mira – I just sent you an email (with the PDF of Monique Wittig’s essay)

Monika Weiss: Regarding the UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS, the problem, the old problem is with our body. When does it cease to be “Everyone” simply because it is impregnated or even “almost impregnated”, on its way to be such, thus the life of a woman as only and mainly the live of a future mother and not a life of an equal citizen [one of the great books on this is “Women and children first: feminism, rhetoric,and public policy” which is a look at policies that make this view dominant] . If according to some, “Everyone” begins in the “seed” itself, and wherever that “seed” lands, is a land occupied by it, so to speak, then women cease to be subjects of such declaration of rights, soon after they have been “landed” … (contraception rights debate being the current example) — this is an old medieval argument (in Western tradition Virgin Mary is a vessel but not a full human being-no other agency–and in my mind I imagine her always already beheaded) — this is all returning full speed now, “the reproductive rights” debate having repercussion for other areas of human rights, including gay rights in a sense that of course if the marriage is an assumed act of an official procreation the it is not a union of two independent human lives… [the question remains, what discourses and actions are appropriate now, in light of the loss of real Left]

Kikuko Tanaka: For me…. feminism is the sets of interdisciplinary knowledge that brings justice to all the people, through the emancipation of the people in the feminine status, including women, sexual dissidents, the poor, non-whites, foreigners, immigrants, children, the insane and the criminalized.

It is sad that the Universal Declaration of Human Right still remains our goals to be achieved, and despite the UN’s declaration and its humanitarian efforts, the UN itself has also functioned as an another form of empirism: western domination of the racial others.

Republicans are too backward in the country presumed to be advanced. We have more and more knowledge about how oppression and domination work. But how can we make real changes? Voting and protests are important, but they do not seem enough. What do we do?

Mira Schor: Monika and Kiko, so we are at an impasse? (I mean if the Declaration of Human Rights is seen as a flawed document by the global “left”, and honored mainly through being ignored and breached, because if I understand correctly, it is the product of the Enlightenment, which itself seems devalued by all sides, from the left because it was a product of the patriarchal, colonialist West and by the right for all the reasons we can imagine (poor stupid enslaved people make it easier for rich people to have total power)…not expecting any of us to have an answer

Kikuko Tanaka: I don’t want to think that we are at an impasse! though sometimes, I cannot escape that feeling…

Yes…Universal Declaration sounds right and comforting on the surface, but idea of “right” itself presupposes the existence of an “individual autonomous being” who are entitle to possess “property.” It is true that idea of human rights has helped to improve general work condition, but with an intention to prevent the rises of socialism….

Emily Caigan: I am joining late, but if it’s ok – I’ll jump in. I usually start teaching Feminist Art and Culture by reading The Declaration of Sentiments from the Seneca Falls Convention. The 1st wave feminist issues helps ground the conversation – especially since men and women of color were very active ( the race issue became problematic later). Gender Studies is an important topic mostly for third wave and LGBTQ for second wave. Basically it reminds us about many rights that we did not have 100 years ago and that women in other countries don’t have today. THEN we get into art and culture. I may do this in order to keep my sanity :).

Mira Schor: Emily, very interesting to hear how you organize your course. I’ll keep it in mind. As you say, start with life and general history, not with art. I have thought about starting a version of this course next year with statistics relating to women’s rights from beginning of second wave and from now, to focus on actual rights and lack thereof, actual facts about women’s lives, because I think that there is a sense of “the way it was” and now with huge gaps of knowledge about life for women at both ends of the time frame.

A thirty year old woman today may find it hard to really understand that 40 years ago she would have had no significant women teachers in graduate school and few role models in the art world, but at the same time she may also not realize to what degree sexism still exists at the center of what seems on the surface like a much improved world. This is something I myself find surprising: 40 years ago I never dreamed that at this point in my life I would be up against deeply ingrained patriarchal operations within my most inner circle in the art world, despite so many gains, and that it would be so much harder to cope with because it is embedded within networks of friends and supporters, and because it is unspoken, even with a strong support network of like-minded women: the lack of a larger movement makes it impossible to point to something and say, look, look at what is going on here. And of course I’m no longer protected by the gloss of youth, which always helps a lot and may insulate the student generation, as it did me to some extent: but I came of age during the women’s movement and very significantly I had seen in my teens how my mother fared when she was widowed, young, how society had favored the man and the couple, and how difficult it was for a woman alone, and how heroic any woman is who battles through on her own talent and wits.

Monika Weiss: The UNSPOKEN is the key word here, I agree, and the impossibility to “point at it” because of the apparent lack of a larger movement (although I would like or hope to believe that we don’t need a glow of youth to deal with this). Yes, there has been some progress and female graduate students today have some wonderful women role models to look up to. But there is a new kind of resistance to this “progress” within graduate environment– and the art world in general — some, the opponents, point out that this thing, let’s call it feminism at al, is “not so interesting” anymore, or as that which “has been done before”– this despite the Wack! etc. and other recent exhibitions resurrecting early feminisms in art). There is an uncanny level of reversal embedded in this process too akin to the political reversal going on today. But somehow I still maintain a basic trust in the promise of education. P.s. and yes, I also agree with Emily Caigan that we need to teach Feminisms [in any of the contexts of contemporary art] by first discussing the main historical and socio-political contexts etc.

Emily Caigan: I should mention that my course does not exist in Art History dept., but instead in Women’s Studies, along with a course that is called Performing Feminism. I was once called a “threat” because of my teaching and my students only receive AH credit if they are BFA majors. I appreciate these conversations immensely on FB. Mira, your story about your mother would be vital to an intro in any women’s studies class. It’s moving to me. My mom was a young widower and right up until she died in 2010, she said to me, ” You have no idea…”. Monica, ( hi, btw) It is absolutely the ” problem that has no name.” Here we are trying to name it.

Monika Weiss: responding to the earlier question about our condition of suspension inside an “impasse”–yes, I believe we are. It

It is still the same old problem with modernity and its multiple shadows. The Declaration offers a pretty good path, but we still disagree on the subject of who is a human being and who is not. Or perhaps, what it exactly entails and for whom. There is still a problem with our shallow and diversified understanding of equality of human rights–which are acceptable when they are offered within our own circle but not so crucial for “others” and elsewhere. And then there is again the problem of body, especially body marked by otherness, thus the body that is female, gay, colored is still an “obstacle” for the individual who inhabits such marked body–since white male and straight body is still being Privileged. This has also economic consequences. So the battle for gender equality as the battle for human rights, is and has always been the SAME with all other battles that take on otherness and power structures. Why this impasse though? Perhaps because we somehow managed to convince younger generations of women (and workers and some of the third world etc.) — that the battle has been won, at least on the policy level, or at least in the “developed” world. The level of shame or ‘threat’ that comes with even those words “feminism” or “socialism” is the unexpected twist or result of the lack of vigilance. I guess I am going in circle here, where all roads lead to Left, and the Left is being mourned by us in this conversation. [Meanwhile Chicago is demonstrating, and, as I said before, I still have some trust in education, in universities and in cities, as places that a certain potential is honed…]

Susan Silas: re: Girls, it seems pretty generation specific. My daughter, who is about 5 years younger doesn’t seem to relate to it….I still think there is something meaningful in the category “Woman” despite the theoretical discourses that put emphasis elsewhere because 51% of the world’s population is considered biologically female and the political backlash is against all of those persons no matter how they self-identify. Some of the stratification in the women’s movement developed because of insensitivity to the concerns of women with different identifications and experiences due to race and class and that splintering has never really been mended or adequately addressed but it allows some male intellectuals to dismiss feminism as a form of identity politics by listing it along with a list of very the specific identity concerns of much smaller groups when the overall concern is one of over half the population. Somehow, the question needs to be reformulated but not by letting go of the entire category unless there is really a better one to supplant it strategically.

The conversation above took place May 20. Today’s New York Times featured the following front page story, above the fold, “THE NEW AMERICAN JOB: More Men Enter Fields Dominated by Women.”

More than a few men said their new jobs had turned out to be far harder than they imagined.
But these men can expect success. Men earn more than women even in female-dominated jobs. And white men in particular who enter those fields easily move up to supervisory positions, a phenomenon known as the glass escalator — as opposed to the glass ceiling that women encounter in male-dominated professions, said Adia Harvey Wingfield, a sociologist at Georgia State University.

For men, the glass escalator, instead of women’s two traditional possibilities in that fragile material, the glass slipper and the glass ceiling. Yes, let’s all get on that.

Two Years of a Year of Positive Thinking: A Table of Contents

My first post on A Year of Positive Thinking was published April 28, 2010. In “Looking for art to love in all the right places” I teased out the different ways one can fall in love with an art work, as opposed to a person. My first project was to go out into New York city galleries in search of art that I love, in keeping with the goal of the blog, which was to turn my attention to the art work that sustains and inspires me, in contrast to the works with which I have engaged in equally vital though perhaps more “negative” polemical battles in many of my other writings.

As a friend said, well, that lasted about two weeks.

It’s true that it has not always been easy to stick to the positive though as I point out in the “About” page of this blog:

A Year of Positive Thinking may turn out to be a battleground between the two sides of my personality, something like Cassandra and Pollyanna! Cassandra tells truths no one wants to hear and Pollyanna actually does the same thing: she’s not the sweet cloying character we think of when we use the name in a disparaging way, she looks right at what she sees in the dysfunctional little town she has come to live in and her engagement with the people she meets sets in motion positive change.

I have published fifty-two posts in two years and I intend to continue for a while longer, although other writing projects I’ve been germinating may claim my attention. The year of a positive thinking is a metaphorical time frame.

Publishing a blog allows for instant communication but it also fosters instant oblivion, in a way that a book does not. I hope this table of contents featuring about thirty-eight posts will help give a sense of what I have done in these past two years, essentially writing another book, one which despite the availability of the material on the blog’s archive, I would love to sometime see published in hard copy book form, a form which I think still has a gravitas and a usefulness that online material does not.

Trying to find an order of subject matter is hard because the blog format, with its capacity for links and pictures and the web’s orientation towards a more diverse range of writing than the strictly or even partially academic has fostered my already marked penchant for associative thinking. Also, parenthetically, blog publishing allows for the immediate accessibility through links of material that in a book would be consigned to the endnotes and left to the reader’s enterprise to delve into further. And the writing style of the blog posts owe much of their tone and flavor to the kind of more personal and informal writing that I enjoyed salting away into the endnotes of my books. Whereas my two books each focus pretty evenly on feminism, painting, and teaching, the blog has given me the opportunity to comment on political events, write about film, delve into personal memory, and occasionally veer towards the photo essay. In keeping with this fluid, infinitely connected textual and visual frame, this table of contents of blog posts will put specific posts into more than one section when it seems relevant, in order to be true to the content and to connect to the most readers, true to the web environment of samplers, and surfers, and multi-taskers, and Google and Wikipedia addicted readers of this time. Within each section, the posts, linked for instant accessibility of course, are listed in chronological order with a little summary of the subject and an occasional excerpt. This table of contents does not contain links to named people and events, these exist within the posts themselves.

Preface: “About”

Introduction: Looking for art to love in all the right places (April 28, 2010)

I’ve fallen in love with many more artworks than I have men and without giving anything away I’d have to say that I’ve had better luck with the artworks I’ve loved and even the ones I’ve hated. No painting I’ve ever seen was married or loved someone else, or got in the way of my need for independence or solitude, and if I’ve tired of a work, having taken from it all that I needed and then outgrown it, the parting has always been amicable with the possibility of hooking up again always open to me. Meanwhile, and you can fill in the personal analogy or not, I pay a lot of attention to works I really dislike and get a lot of energy for my own work as a result.

Feminism:

Two posts were directly related to the Modern Women project at MoMA, including exhibitions and conferences:

Stealth Feminism at MoMA (May 16, 2010)

On gradually realizing during a random visit to the museum that individual works by women artists and small shows of works by women artists were scattered throughout the museum, like treasures in a treasure hunt that has not been advertised as such.

MoMA Panel: Art “Institutions and Feminist Politics Now” (May 23, 2010)

A recap of a day of panel discussion held at MoMA, held May 21, 2010, as part of their Modern Women Project.

According to Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Photography, these curatorial discussions and initiatives emerged from a desire for greater transparency within the institution; she described the participants’ organization as non-hierarchical and cross-generational. The nature of this feminist work had forced departmental boundaries to be breached as researching work by women forced a greater transdisciplinarity. …

This question of permission is both the positive and negative side of the whole story: better to get the permission — which can only come from an activism brewing from below anyway — than not get the permission. But any freedom or rights based on patriarchal noblesse oblige or realpolitik can be withdrawn when it serves the institution, which is why continued vigilance and activism are always necessary. Some might take issue with the idea that it is better to get that permission and get some feminist action in a dominant institution such as MoMA but I think it all has to happen all over all the time and over and over again (over and over because feminism has tended not to have a good institutional memory, even if you take into account that we live in an ahistorical time).

A Great Artist (on Louise Bourgeois) (May 31, 2010), written the day Louise Bourgeois died.

Sometimes an artwork hedges its bets, or, by some minute concession to accessibility, in some tiny betrayal of form, apologizes for itself. I never detected that in Bourgeois’s work.

Stephan von Huene, Feminist Teacher (September 4, 2010) written about my mentor at CalArts, with whom I studied after I left the Feminist Art Program.

Biographies of Women Artists: Instinct and Intellect (July 10, 2011) Some thoughts about Lee Krasner, on the occasion of a New York Times book review of Gail Levin’s biography of the artist.

“I’m 27 and Unmarried…” 40 Years later (October 10, 2011) I use a piece written by my sister Naomi Schor for Glamour Magazine in 1971 to reflect on the early years of the Women’s Liberation Movement and how some of contradictions and societal imperatives of that time may still exist despite many advances for women in the United States.

A Feminist Correspondence (December 9, 2011) This post republishes my appreciation of British feminist art historian and psychotherapist Rozsika Parker from November 22, 2010, with a more recent quite extraordinary correspondence this post initiated, between me and Parker’s collaborator, the art historian Griselda Pollock.

In your blog you rightly captured what it was that Rosie gave us and me in terms of making me a feminist writer on art: that things mattered deeply and seriously and that art touches on things that matter to us as we live them. That was what saved me from a bloodless and remote art history which i still cannot inhabit. (G. Pollock)

Women Artists:

Since there is much contestation over the designation feminist and in order to make access to posts about individual artists easier, I thought I’d create this separate category, of the notable posts on specific women artists.

Looking for Art to love–MoMA: A Tale of Two Egos (May 8, 2010)

Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present is itself a tale of two egos: downstairs, that of the individual living woman whose body you can witness and potentially engage with at some level, and, upstairs, the projected ego of the woman who has hijacked curatorial common sense, whose many incarnations are screaming at you in an unpardonably cacophonous, unedited installation, who has created a kind of Disneyworld of the Spanish Inquisition through her use of re-enactors in stressful situations while rewriting the history of performance art so that she exists sui generis, without any historical context.

A Great Artist (on Louise Bourgeois)

A Remembrance: Sarah Wells (June 6, 1950-June 6, 1998) (June 6, 2011) On the work of a wonderful artist and a wonderful person, a dear friend exactly my age, who died too young, on her birthday.

Biographies of Women Artists: Instinct and Intellect

Art (painting and sculpture):

Reality Show: Otto Dix (June 28, 2010) I’ll let one of my readers sum this one up:

I’ll confess, when I saw the tweets start flying about Mira Schor’s essay on Otto Dix, Greater NY, and Bravo’s Work of Art, I was skeptical. How the hell was she gonna fit any of those, never mind all three–at once–onto a blog called A Year of Positive Thinking?

By gum, she pulled it off.

Otto Dix, a brief footnote: drawing and ideational aesthetics (July 5, 2010)

Under the circumstances, I was struck by the speaker’s use of the word “ideation” as a substitute for the word drawing. It stuck in my head partly because it is sort of a cool word, with its pseudo-scientific and vaguely military/corporate buzz. On the other hand it’s somewhere between annoying and sinister in its implications to art making.

Postcard post (August 8, 2010) In this set of virtual postcards to my readers, I write about some of my favorite works of art and works of popular culture, including Andrea Mantegna’s The Dead Christ, the sculptural program of the North Portal of Chartres Cathedral, Giotto’s frescoes from the Scrovegni Chapel, Star Trek, and Buster Keaton.

Anselm Kiefer@Larry Gagosian: Last Century in Berlin (December 24, 2010) The forcible eviction of a few peaceable demonstrators by the NYPD from the Kiefer exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in December 2010 was the spur to consider aspects of this body of Kiefer’s work with its inflated production values and questionable arrogation of Judaism.

Above the entrance of a vast space occupied by a German were letters written in black script. In transliterated Hebrew and English, they spelled out “Next Year in Jerusalem,” the concluding line of the Passover Haggadah. Next Year in Jerusalem? My hackles were officially raised even before I turned the corner and entered the occupied territory of Gagosian Gallery. I still don’t really want to write about Kiefer, so here is just a précis. The installation reminded me of nothing so much as Bloomingdales’s cosmetics floor if its Christmas decorations had a Holocaust theme.

The fault is not in our stars but in our brand: Abstract Expressionism at MoMA (October 3, 2010)

This led me to think about the work through the lens of the Brand. At first this seems to contradict approaches to art-making that are characteristic of the period, such as the picture plane as the arena of existential search. But of course most of the artists in the first two generations of Abstract Expressionism became known for a particular stylistic brand: drip (Pollock), zip (Newman), stroke (de Kooning), chroma (Rothko). Here then are some major case histories from the main exhibition.

Money can’t buy you love but art friendships can create joy (February 6, 2011) This post, about the exhibition “Poets and Painters” at Tibor de Nagy Gallery last winter, allowed me to consider the joyful and creative network of friendships among artists including Rudy Burckhardt, Yvonne Jacquette, Edwin Denby, Alex Katz, Mimi Gross, Red Grooms, Joe Brainard and Ron Padgett, John Ashberry, James Schuyler, Frank O’Hara, Jane Freilicher, and Larry Rivers, among others.

There is a particular kind of collaboration among artists who are friends that is special because it takes place outside of the frame of the art market, often before each individual’s path is fixed and their fate is determined, that is before some become rich and famous, while others struggle along, and still others die or vanish from the scene into another type of life than the one of the artist. Such moments are nearly impossible to sustain, but it can be pretty conclusively proven that these are often the happiest times in the lives of these artists and often too those artworks that later are seen to have the greatest market value emerge from just these moments of friendships and creative projects undertaken in relative conditions of anonymity, for the sheer joy of making and the pleasure in shared ideas.

Wonderment and Estrangement: Reflections on Three Caves, parts 1 and 2 of 3 (July 28, 2011) & part 3 (August 18, 2011) A consideration of three caves, the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave featured in Werner Herzog‘s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the cave inside a malachite mine deep in the Ural Mountains featured in a 1946 Russian children’s movie The Stone Flower, and the cave whose entrance lurks in the shadow of Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert, which was on special display at the Frick Museum in New York last spring.

You may once have had experiences of wonderment and delight, perhaps most uniquely in childhood, in your imagination, reading a book, hearing a story, or seeing something of incomparable beauty. You’d think being an artist would give you continued access to such experiences but for the most part life as a professional artist is at best a negotiation among the constantly changing realities of contemporary art, the limitations of one’s own abilities, and some internal core ability to still experience such wonderment when it presents itself, despite competitiveness, jealousy, and the infrequency of such experiences. Basically we once experienced wonderment and now we do the best we can. So when we do on rare occasions experience wonderment or delight, it is notable, and for a moment we may return to the prelapsarian intensity, awe, and joy first experienced in childhood and which is part of the secret fuel for a lifetime of art practice.

Art of the Occupy Wall Street Era (October 12, 2011) On Creative Time curator Nato Thompson’s exhibition, Living as Form

Youthfulness in Old Age (December 8, 2011) On expansive creativity in old age, exhibitions of later works by Joan Mitchell, Richard Artschwager, and Matta.

You put a spell on me (January 1, 2012) on two extraordinary exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini and Heroic Africans: Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures.

As a teacher, I’m interested in how one can use art or artifacts that may seem inaccessible or irrelevant because they were made in ancient or foreign cultures seemingly alien to our own and also because works like these African sculptures or Renaissance paintings seem to have already been digested, for once and for all by our own history, so that our ability to use them appears doubly blocked. How do you use old art? How do you use any great art while not sinking into preciousness?

As a sub-theme to this section, one thread that runs through several posts is the importance of drawing as a way to apprehend the world. Several posts feature my love of drawing, including works by Philip Guston and Otto Dix, and the importance of drawing to my own art practice becomes a practical tool to circumvent institutional prohibitions of photography in special exhibitions, in posts such as Otto Dix, a brief footnote: drawing and ideational aesthetics, Looking for art to love in all the right places, You put a spell on me, and a post about The Mourners at the Metropolitan Museum, Looking for art to love, day two: uptown from May 1, 2010.

Politics:

My Whole Street is a Mosque (August 19, 2010) This piece was written when there was a media furor over the plans to build a mosque near Ground Zero and it occurred to me how absurd this was when the street that I lived on in Lower Manhattan, Lispenard Street, effectively was an outdoor mosque, when men pray on the sidewalk several times a day. This blog post ended up on The Huffington Post and was one of my few experiences with going viral, in a very modest way.

Confessions of a Yellow Dog Democrat (October 21, 2010) Attempting to reconcile my own profound disappointment at the timidity of Democratic party politicians with the reasons I could for many years call myself a “Yellow Dog Democrat,” I tried to cram as many references with as many links to as many great moments in American history, some which I witnessed, some which I already experienced as legendary, as I could, in order to give younger readers a sense of why anyone would still identify with a political party or regret no longer identifying with it.

This Past Week in Activism: Three Modest Gestures (December 12, 2010) How Manet’s The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, 1868, at the National Gallery in London, becomes a potent witness for a teach-in of students protesting the tripling of educational fees by the Cameron Government, and other valiant political gestures.

Should we trust anyone under 30? (with some excerpts from “Recipe Art” and other essays (June 20, 2011) Concerns about generational reversals, as observed before Occupy Wall Street.

Somebody Had to Shoot Liberty Valance (September 18, 2011) The relevance to our current political dilemmas of John Ford’s late masterpiece The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a starkly simple, cinematically almost archaic yet profound meditation on the role of violence in creating the American democracy and on the nature of history itself.

Art of the Occupy Wall Street Era

A Discussion on Facebook About “Occupy Museums” (October 19, 2011) A topical example of the kind of Facebook discussion thread which at its best is a new form of group authorship. Bonus: photos of a 1984 demonstration outside the renovated MoMA to protest the lack of women in the inaugural exhibition.

“Books are like people” (November 15, 2011) The destruction of the People’s Library by the NYPD seen through the lens of art historian Leo Steinberg’s remembrances of the signal importance of books during his childhood as a young refugee in Berlin and London.

Teaching:

All my writing is an extension of my deeply felt vocation for teaching but some texts specifically address conditions and specifics of teaching art.

Teaching Contradiction: Reality TV and Art School (August 27, 2010) On contradictions that exist within the expectations placed on artists studying in MFA programs around the country, as suggested by the end of the first season of the Bravo Network reality show “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.”

While working on a syllabus on a winter’s afternoon (January 17, 2011) Listening to “A Beautiful Symphony of Brotherhood: A Musical Journey in the Life of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” while planning a syllabus including works and writings by Guy Debord, Michel de Certeau, John Cage, and Simone Weil (& see also Should we trust anyone under 30? to learn more about what happened in that class.)

Film:

Magic Tricks in the Dark (May 14, 2010), on William Kentridge‘s installation of 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès

In the Wave (May 20, 2010) a comparative appreciation of the films and the artistic friendship of Francois Truffaut and Jean Luc Godard, inspired by Emmanuel Laurent’s documentary Two in the Wave.

Money can’t buy you love but art friendships can create joy This post includes an appreciation of Rudy Burckhardt’s films including Money, (1967), his first feature film of his 200 or so films, with script by Joe Brainard, about a money mad billionaire played by Edwin Denby, a film which combines a goofy, spontaneous home movie feeling (with actors including the artists Red Grooms, Mimi Gross, Yvonne Jacquette, Neil Welliver, Rackstraw Downes, as well as these artists’ children, Jacob Burckhardt, Titus Welliver, and Tom Burckhardt–now all adult artists engaged in film, acting, and painting).

Somebody Had to Shoot Liberty Valance

Wonderment and Estrangement: Reflections on Three Caves, parts 1 & 2 (July 28, 2011) a post inspired by Werner Herzog’s film Cave of Forgotten Dreams and my rediscovery of the 1946 Soviet era children’ film, The Stone Flower.

Conditions of Writing a Blog:

Three blog posts from the summer of 2011 examine the conditions of contemporary web publication and readership, centered around instant readership tracking mechanisms such as Google analytics, and their effect on what gets written about, and the increasingly compressed time available for elucidation of artworks and events, in relation to earlier forms of hard copy small journal publications, with a post devoted to two essays by John Berger, “The Moment of Cubism” and “The Hals Mystery.”

Invisibility and Criticality in the Imperium of Analytics (July 31, 2011)

The Imperium of Analytics (August 2, 2011)

The Berger Mystery (August 11, 2011)

Family:

These texts form the nucleus of one of my next book projects, an artistic autobiography into which I would fold my parents’ lives and artworks.

For Father’s Day: Ilya Schor (1904-1961) (June 18, 2010), a celebration of my father Ilya Schor’s work, featuring some small paintings made in Marseilles, France while my parents awaited a visa to America.

“I Love You with All My Hearth” (December 5, 2010) an appreciation of my mother Resia Schor’s work, published on what would have been her 100th birthday:

That my mother as a person had sought economic survival through her own aesthetic labor was already a lesson in feminism for me and my sister. And, as she developed her own style and techniques in her new medium, it became intriguingly clear that my parents’ work embodied a strangely crossed gender art message that in itself contributed to my sister Naomi and my involvement with feminism and perhaps too to the slightly unusual flavor of our feminist outlook. Inasmuch as art movements are gender coded, my father’s work — folkloric, figurative, narrative, Jewish, delicate, light in weight — carried a feminine code. My mother’s work, abstract, muscularly sculptural although still relatively small in scale but heavy in weight carried a code that would seem to be masculine, as those terms are used.

“I’m Unmarried and Single…” 40 Years Later (October 10, 2011). On my sister Naomi Schor’s birthday, I begin a task I hope to continue, of writing about her via the magazines she collected over the years, to address her intellectual life through the popular culture she loved and the political events we lived through together, rather than through her notable work as a feminist theorist and scholar of French Literature and psychoanalytic theory, a body of work too daunting for me to address effectively.

Orbis Mundi (April 24, 2011) An essay prompted by a major move and the resulting intimate contact with my family’s archival ephemera and their collection of art objects, including a mysterious ceramic ball with Christian liturgical associations, which lays the path for my future project of writing an artistic autobiography in a photo essay format.

So I have bucked an American axiom, that you can’t go home again. I have returned to the building I was born into, and to the beautiful apartment I moved into when I was five–the day I first saw the apartment with my parents, taking the elevator from our smaller apartment a few floors below, is the moment where my conscious memory truly begins. Thus infuriating circumstances have precipitated my taking on part of what I consider my destiny, that is to archive and to mark as best I can the memory of my family’s life, particularly my parents’ lives in Warsaw and Paris before the War, their escape from Nazi-occupied Europe, and their creative life in New York as the background for the path I have taken in my life as what I would call an inflected American.

Although it would seem that I should set aside A Year of Positive Thinking in order to more fully develop the project of writing such an artistic autobiography as well as another one of developing my writings about teaching art, while continuing to teach and, of course, do my work, I am reluctant to do so because it is hard to give up any space for public speech, even if, as a self-published blog with a modest readership, I am speaking while standing on a tiny slippery stone in the middle of a vast ocean of media and opinion. So, in the sporadic fashion of the past two years, I plan to continue for a while longer..if anything because even just the goal of looking for art I love, and the occasional discovery of such work, is a lifelong proposition and can only help expand my cultural life as an artist.