Yearly Archives: 2014

Letter from a schoolgirl c.1960

In a documentary about 2014 Nobel Prize for literature author Patrick Modiano, historian Henry Rousso says, “Il a..interiorisé quelque chose qu’il na pas vécu”–“he interiorized something he did not live through.” This is the story of the way in which trauma, here the historical trauma of the German Occupation of France during the Second World War, filters through generations and shapes creativity and thought.

The texture of the world at every given moment is riven with traumas, personal, political, historical and at times they compete in ways that compound the psychic damage.

For my sister Naomi and me, my father’s Hasidic background, our parents’ experience of the Second World War, their massive personal losses in the Shoah and their miraculous survival were the past we had not lived but that we lived with, that we interiorized.

Today October 10, 2014 would have been my sister’s seventy-first birthday. She died in 2001 at the age of 58, which seems very young, particularly since I was the younger sister but am now older than that age, so I like to mark her birthday each year in some way.

Ilya Schor, The Tzadik, 1950s, wood engraving

Ilya Schor, The Tzadik, 1950s, wood engraving

A few weeks ago I found a torn scrap of paper among a box of her things: it is the draft of a letter she wrote to André Schwartz-Bart, the author of the 1959 novel Le Dernier des Justes (The Last of the Just). I have not read the novel but perhaps because of Schwartz-Bart’s book and the discussions that took place around it in my childhood, and in particular because the theme of the novel and its title was the theme of a major work from 1956 by my father Ilya Schor, I am haunted by the Talmudic notion of the Lamed Vav Tzadikim, the thirty-six “”hidden righteous ones,” whose existence redeems and preserves the world, their identities hidden to others and even, perhaps most especially, to themselves.

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My sister’s handwriting was distinctive and sometimes hard to decipher, this letter for some reason more so than usual: here it is in French and then in English, with cross outs left intact to show the process of writing and certain passages marked […] as undecipherable by me.

Cher Mr. Schwartz-Bart,

Je voudrais, tout simplement, vous remercier d’avoir écrit “Le Dernier des Justes,” Je voudrais vous remercier d’avoir raconté avec tant de poésie et de simplicité cette triste histoire de la famille Lévy, et par extension de tout notre peuple. Je voudrais vous remercie d’avoir exprimé ce que nous sentons tous.

Je me demande […]  si d’autres que nous peuvent sentir ce que nous sentons. Le succès de votre livre en France et ici en Amérique semble indiquer que oui. J’espère que grace à vous et d’autres comme vous qui auront pu lutter contre notre sort – non les […], les cris, la résignation, mais l’art des moyens artistiques, les générations futures de notre peuples pourront vivre, inutile de le dire, en paix.

Je suis une jeune étudiante (17 ans) au Lycée Français de New York. Mes parents, des artistes d’origine Polonaise, ont fui Paris la veille de l’arrivée de Hitler, ont traversé la France, passe deux ans à Marseille et sont enfin venu en Amérique.  Eux, ils ont échappé mais toute leur famille, leur amis ont péri. Mon père peint son petit village polonaise avec sa synagogue, ses hommes, ses femmes: je connais bien le visage de mes ancêtres et confrères disparus et je ne peus dire le vide que je ressens à ne pouvoir jamais jamais connaitre les modèles dont s’inspire mon père.

Mon père travaille aussi fait aussi des objets religieux et décoratifs en argent,  parmi eux il a fait une porte pour une synagogue dont le thème était les Lahmed Vov, les 36…

J’essaye seulement de vous dire que je suis sure que partout où un cœur juif bat votre livre sera chéri et pleure là-dessus.

Respectueusement

Naomi Schor

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Ilya Schor, 1950s, Steps to Women's Gallery of Synagogue at Zloczow. Gouache.

Ilya Schor, 1950s, Steps to Women’s Gallery of Synagogue at Zloczow. Gouache.

Catalogue for Ilya Schor, 1956, The Doors of the 36, Temple Beth-El of Great Neck, NY

Catalogue for Ilya Schor, 1956, The Doors of the 36, Temple Beth-El of Great Neck, NY

Dear Mr. Schwartz-Bart,

I would very simply like to thank you for having written “The Last of the Just”, I would like to thank you for having told with so much poetry and simplicity this sad story of the family Levy and, by extension, that of our whole people. I would like to thank you for expressing what we all feel.

I wonder if others can feel what we feel. The success of your book in France and in America seems to indicate yes. I hope that thanks to you and others like you who have been able to fight against our fate, not the …, not the cries, the resignation, but [through] artistic means future generations of our people will be able to live, needless to say, in peace.

I am a young schoolgirl (17 years old) at the Lycée Français de New York. My parents, artists of Polish origin, fled Paris just before the arrival of Hitler, they crossed France, spent two years in Marseille and finally arrived in America. They survived but their whole families, their friends perished. My father paints his small Polish village with its synagogue, its men, its women: I know well the face of my lost ancestors and brethren and I cannot express the emptiness I feel to never never be able to know the models that inspire my father.

My father also makes religious and decorative objects out of silver, among these he made a door for a synagogue, whose theme was the Lahmed Vov, the 36…

I just want to tell you that I am sure that everywhere a Jewish heart beats your book will be cherished and wept over.

Respectfully

Naomi Schor

I don’t know if my sister sent the letter. Based on its contents it was written between her seventeenth birthday October 10, 1960 and my father’s death in June 1961, because in the letter she refers to my father as living.

Ilya Schor and Naomi Schor, Provincetown, Summer 1960, Photo: Ryszard Horowitz

Ilya Schor and Naomi Schor, Provincetown, Summer 1960, Photo: Ryszard Horowitz

 

 

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The Feminist Wheel

1. One certainty is that when you put together a panel or lecture series with the word feminist in it, a lot of people will show up because people, mostly women, are always hungry to have someone tell them something about feminism. It is a word that appears like a chimera and a promise. Maybe they will finally learn the answer to the puzzle of the unequal status of women in most societies.

2. Feminism is always in a state of revival, because any culture whose actual practices subjugate and devalue women one way or another cannot incorporate it into collective memory, even that of women.

3. The task of the political activist is to keep saying the same thing over and over again, repeating the same history, over and over again for decades, and greeting new arrivals to the cause with enthusiasm rather than despair. I am not always so cheerful about it.

Tweet around 9:05PM Thursday September 18 from the all too appropriately titled The Hole: @miraschor: Future feminism. Preview: is there something more basic than feminism 101? So naive & essentialist it’s all I can do not to walk out.

Earlier this month, promotional material began to circulate about an exhibition and series of events at the downtown New York exhibition space, The Hole, titled Future Feminism. The events seemed diverse and also suspect. When you see Marina Abramovic listed as a guest speaker at yet another “feminist” event, warning alerts sound for anyone who has attended any number of major feminist symposia, such as at “The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts” a two-day symposium that was held at MoMA in January 2007 and heard her inevitably begin her talk with the words, “I am not feminist artist.” It’s not that I don’t believe her, in fact I do believe her. If she says she isn’t, she isn’t. Unfortunately the complex story of her personal and artistic biography in relation to a feminist narrative and how she has learned to play the dynamics of the art world’s intersection with fame and fashion is lost on young women artists around the world who emulate her because her fame is less and less problematized the farther away it expands globally, becoming a brand rather than an artist. She’s a woman, she uses her body (now she uses other people’s bodies), she’s famous, this must be a feminist model. But if she is asked yet again to speak at a “feminist” event, then you know some star fucking is going on rather than some serious thinking about feminism…. OK never mind. Point two: what were these “13 tenets of Future Feminism” they were proclaiming? I only saw the full list last night at the panel. I’ll get to that presently.

Oh don’t let me forget the T-shirts: adjacent to the main door of the gallery is a separate storefront which was festooned with T-shirts with the slogan “The future is Female.” In the window were two blackboards, one advertised the price for the T-shirts at $20 and the other for $25. I was trying to figure out whether there were two different designs when, as the line waiting outside filled out, the young woman in the store came over, tipped the signs back so she could see them, and removed the one with the $20 price.

The women of my generation, what I’ve called “Generation 2.5”, show up for these things. We have a lot of history in feminism but we want to know what’s going on too, in a different way than the people who show without any previous background in feminism and who have that inchoate longing for an answer. So a friend suggested we go hear feminist Ann Snitow interview the “Future Feminists,” and we ran into a group of women artists friends who were there for the same reason: let’s see what this is.

And that is the basic thing: we had come to hear what these people had to say.

Eventually the speakers filed in and took their place. And then it took about a half hour until we actually heard them say anything because Ann Snitow made the peculiar choice of asking a man to talk to us about listening.

That is, Snitow had waxed enthusiastic about the FFs, how this group of friends had taken a vacation and they had talked to each other, about feminism, and this was what Consciousness Raising was, they had reinvented CR, they were interested in circles, circular forms of governance, they wanted nothing less than everything; that is to say that after Snitow had failed in introducing this group we had come to learn about, by failing to fully introduce each person, and by failing to give them any kind of historical context–as it turns out, they don’t seem to have any, but it was her responsibility as a long time feminist educator to situate these people in relation to some kind of history–after this very enthusiastic and very uninformative introduction, just as we thought we would hear from members of the group, she asked Robert Sember of Ultra-red to talk to us about listening.

And so he did, for at least 15 or maybe 20 minutes. As he went on my mind was increasingly torn between thinking, on the one hand, well this is kind of interesting–he spoke about the practice of intentional listening, space made for listening in non-hierarchical ordering of processes of change, he said that Ultra-red had been engaged in a deep investigation of the intentional practice of listening in social movements. He mentioned that women in the civil rights movement had created listening circles, building literacy out of experience, conversation into action–as he said this, having spoken by now for several minutes, and he was not the speaker we had come to hear, I thought about how the treatment of women in the civil rights and anti-war movements led directly to the women’s liberation movement, I remembered that when asked what the position of women was in SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) Stokely Carmichael said, “the only position for women in the movement is prone,” and how my anger at the casual sexist injustice of that statement was certainly part of my own early attraction to the feminist movement–by the way this well known snarky quip is not included in online collections of significant statements by Carmichael but of course he was a brilliant and dynamic figure and had a lot to say.

Sember continued, emphasizing that the commitment to actually really listen is a profound act of solidarity and care, of love in the name of the future, of transformation, of the reordering of power. He then noted that the Future Feminists were indeed a collective–later Antony said they were not really a collective, they were just a bunch of friends who hung out together. Sember made an interesting distinction between activism, where there are ones in the know, experts, where it is strategic to speak with one voice, and organizing, which is a long term process of working together, woven together by process, learning and developing. So the FFs had engaged in CR, how is feminism practiced and lived, the building of the “we,” CR had held generalizations about women up to their own experience.

At this point, I interrupted my long time practice of verbatim note taking to insert a personal comment in my notebook: It is weird to have this lectured to us–at us– with the confident voice of a white man.

He continued: The question for us tonight, what do we know? What brought you here? What did you come here to hear? He then asked for a moment of silence.

During which I continued my commentary in my notes, the other side of my brain spoke, the side that drew me to feminism: I kind of resent this quasi religious confident male voice lecturing to me about listening and Consciousness Raising and feminism even if what he is saying is of some interest. Rebecca Solnit has wonderfully named this phenomenon as “mansplaining.” It’s important to distinguish between that which patriarchy offers of history, literature, and art, which is valuable, and that I insist on assuming as my own heritage, and the mechanism of power always devolving to the male voice, so confident, so privileged, even when it is taking the side of the underprivileged. The rebellion is not so much in my anger at being talked at but in assuming a voice of my own and giving others a voice too if possible.

Now, a half hour into this event, held in a hot airless room which had been recently painted white so that it reeked of new paint fumes, would we begin the actual Q & A with the Future Feminists?

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No.

We were now asked to turn to the person in back of us, in alternating rows, and talk. The very nice young man in front of me asked me what I thought about the 13 tenets, copies of which were on each seat. I said I couldn’t believe how essentialist it all was and how out of keeping with the time it was to use words like feminine and female without problematizing them and to unquestioningly link women with nature, and he totally agreed. We had a nice chat. He had no idea of my history and I have no idea if he was familiar with the debate within feminism during the 1980s over essentialism and how corrosive it could be, which means that he had no idea that if the lady he was talking to said that something was essentialist, then the amnesiac wheel has definitely turned. Young man, you are blonde and were wearing a dark cap which I was going to ask you to take off before I spoke to you, because it was blocking my view, but after I talked to you I didn’t mind anymore; if you are out there and see this blog post, I was the lady with short white hair and multicolored reading glasses. Just want to say hello.

When the conversation finally turned to the panelists, their vagueness was such that the discussion somehow immediately reverted back to the audience. Someone asked about the gendering of language. The toxic paint fumes or the perilous effects of déja vu on the brain made me freeze. Someone suggested the word God. Only two days later did I remember that old chestnut of an example, history.

Tweet around 9:09PM: @miraschor: Language defaults to “he.” Yes, anyone here heard of Mary Daly? These people seem sweet but apparently just landed on Earth & they aren’t that young. But at last someone in the audience asks why the ” tenets” of this group are so binarist and points out there are a lot of people in the room who have been working on this — feminism– for a long time.

The audience member challenged the group: Where is the transgender in these tenets? What are your racial politics?

At this point Antony said that they were not really a collective, but an affinity group, of friends, who “took time out of capitalism to talk.” Well that is interesting. I’ve been part of groups of women who have taken time out of capitalism for all of our lives to talk. It is indeed a wellstone of strength but if you get up in front of people you have to have a bit more to say. These are performance artists, they should at least know that. At $10 admission fee. Give the audience something. But, Antony continued, “the crowd in the room is the dream we all envisioned.” If you reverse engineer that, you may end up somewhere else: we wanted an audience and we thought, hey feminism seems like something, it’s been somnolent for years, until three years ago when Pussy Riot…OMG, that is a very limited way of looking at the history of feminism and by the way, as I said, Antony said this, because,

Tweet around 9:16PM: @miraschor: By the way men are doing most of the articulate speaking. White men telling us how important it is to listen.

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Snitow asked them how they came to choose the word feminist. They said they had looked it up in the dictionary and it seemed perfect. …… They talked about how dangerous it was to use the term.–FYI, cf. my essay “The ism that dare not speak its name.” They asked, why does misogyny exist? A good question. But no one on the panel seemed to speak from experience of misogyny or a personal history with feminism, feminism was something they might have picked up in the Future Feminism gift shop adjoining the gallery. Not one of the women in the group seemed to speak from a lived existence of experiencing discrimination or misogyny.

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I had wanted to leave the event early on, mansplaining does that to me, but my natural drive to see things through because you never know what you might miss if you leave an event early was stronger than the outrage that makes me spring from my seat and stop wasting my time: as far as I remember I’ve only walked out of one quote unquote feminist event, when Camille Paglia spoke at the New York Public Library, years ago. Also my friend Maureen Connor wanted to stay and say something to them, offer some information on the history of patriarchy and misogyny and also question their activism, now that they had just discovered feminism. She eventually did speak. In her comments she quoted Gerda Lerner, see below.

As I left the Future Feminism event, people in the audience were sharing some of their own experiences and seemed grateful for the discussion, naive and ahistorical as it was.

People come to a room because they want to learn something about feminism.There is a constant need. This crowd had slightly more men in it than usual for such events. But just because people sit on a stage or give themselves a name which contains the word “feminist” doesn’t mean they have much to say.

But all events are of interest, because it’s all theater, and because of what anything reveals about the state of a politics, and because even simple truisms and naive statements can have some genuine meaning. One of the FFs, Bianca I think, made my eyes roll when she hazarded that “the future is really this utopia thing…” but then the discussion turned to apocalypse thinking and she said that “to dream that there was a future that includes human beings” is what feminism meant to her. That seemed sincere.

Tweet around 9:19PM: @miraschor: Antony:”most people don’t hope so it felt radical to suggest hope”- that’s much more interesting than their feminist stance.  I’m still tweeting at The Hole, future feminism but my phone is about to lose power.

A report of the show at The Hole and other concurrent feminism-inspired exhibitions quotes Katie Circone, member of the collective Go! Push Pops, as believing that “the future of the [feminist] movement is genderless, raceless, and boundaryless. Ms. Cercone said, ‘It explodes all definitions of what (feminist) art is and who should make it.’”

This utopian ebullience is wonderful and perhaps this will become the case if humans continue on this earth. Perhaps it is possible to all of a sudden explode old obstacles like the history of the inequality of women which Gerda Lerner among others has traced to the beginnings of archaic civilization. Instances of radical performativity can sometimes be genuinely generative of political transformation, but if there are no women, if there is no gender, then whatever society we are talking about, it is not feminist, according to the dictionary definitions of the term (“: the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities : organized activity in support of women’s rights and interests : the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes : organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests”).  And, according to the rules of the spectacle and social network society, if you make something unspecific and fun enough, it won’t threaten any status quo.

Lerner distinguishes between the “unrecorded past” and “History–“the recorded and interpreted past” and she notes that while of course women were always “actors and agents in history” with a small h, “history-making, on the other hand, is a historical creation which dates from the invention of writing in ancient Mesopotamia. …Until the most recent past, these historians have been men, and what they have recorded is what men have done and experienced and found significant. They have called this History and claimed universality for it. What women have done and experienced has been left unrecorded, neglected, and ignored in interpretation.”

Let’s put aside the “13 tenets” promoted by the Future Feminists, and–keeping in mind just some recent news items, including continued efforts to control female reproductive rights in the US, the abduction, rape, and enslavement of Nigerian schoolgirls by Boko Haram, and the NFL’s problem of how to manage reports of domestic violence by its players–consider how so much is still true from the first few of Lerner’s introductory propositions in her 1986 book The Creation of Patriarchy:

a) The appropriation by men of women’s sexual and reproductive capacity occurred prior to the formation of private property and class society. Its commodification lies, in fact, at the foundation of private property.

b) The archaic states were organized in the form of patriarchy; thus from its inception the state has an essential interest in the maintenance of the patriarchal family.

c) Men learned to institute dominance and hierarchy over other people by their earlier practice of dominance over the women of their own group. This found expression in the institutionalization of slavery, which began with the enslavement of women on conquered groups.

d) Women’s sexual subordination was was institutionalized in the earliest law codes and enforced by the full power of the state. women’s cooperation in the system was secured by various means: force, economic dependency on the male head of the family, class privileges bestowed upon conforming and dependent women of the upper classes, and the artificially created division of women into respectable and non-respectable women.

Tweet around 9:50PM: @miraschor The feminist wheel has to be reinvented all the fucking time.

 

 

 

 

 

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In the September Issue of The Brooklyn Rail

This month’s Critic’s Page section of The Brooklyn Rail, organized and introduced by artist and Brooklyn Rail Managing Art Editor Kara L. Rooney, focuses on feminism and gender in the visual arts. Rooney asked a diverse group of contributors to consider the following questions:

What is it about this particular moment that has triggered a renewed interest in feminine and gendered voices? Is the recent prominence of self-identifying feminist art a sign of social progress or institutional neutralization? Is there a compelling momentum to be gained from these “victories” and if so, where do they lead us? And most importantly, why, over 40 years after the second wave banner was raised, are we still grappling with the issue of equality? What is it about the art machine that lends itself so conspicuously to the male, white perspective? And how, as women, men, trans, queer, or otherwise self-identifying individuals do we combat current (and often invisible) systems of control in a neo-liberal capitalist art world?

Because the communities of The Brooklyn Rail, A Year of Positive Thinking’s subscribers and readers, and my Facebook community don’t overlap as completely as might seem likely, here is the direct link to my contribution, “Amnesiac Return Amnesiac Return.”

*For reference to a previous, related, writing that I cite in my Rail piece, you can read “Amnesiac Return,” my contribution to the forum, “The Question of Gender in Art, Part 1,” published in Tema Celeste, Autumn 1992, here.

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Waiting for Gort

About halfway through the 1951 sci-fi film The Day the Earth Stood Still, all electricity, indeed all machine-run power on earth stops except for that which sustains the motion of planes in flight and life-saving institutions such as hospitals. It is a demonstration to humanity, and more specifically to all world leaders, of the power of an alliance of planets which has sent a representative to Earth in the form of a very distinguished-looking humanoid by the name of Klaatu, and an invincible 8 foot tall robot, Gort. Klaatu’s mission is to warn of the impending destruction of Earth, if humankind, newly endowed with nuclear weapons, threatens to extend its destructive proclivities beyond its own planet.

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For an anxious half-hour, though the Earth does not actually stand still in its orbit, as suggested by the film’s title, everything that is considered “progress” and symbolizes the power of humankind–is disabled. Needless to say, all but the few earthlings who have had personal contact with Klaatu, react with fear and aggression rather than curiosity and awe. This cessation of power is Klaatu’s ingenious response to an Albert Einstein-like character’s challenge for a demonstration that will convince world leaders of the alien powers without inflicting any destruction.

When I was a teenager the gears of my mind jammed every time I heard the title of the Broadway musical, Stop the World–I Want to Get Off. It’s hard to reconstruct why this title confounded me. I could understand the stop the world part, not the get off part. Later, I would think, Stop the world, I want to get on, because I felt I was in a race where the other racers were halfway down the track before I’d tied my shoelaces (the art rat race).  And now I think, Stop the world, I want to stay on.

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The news this summer has been bad, bad, bad. There is no direction you can turn to for relief or optimism. I look to the Science Times and think, I guess it’s a good thing that MIT has developed “origami robots,” I bet the scientist and engineers working on that feel the world is going forward in a good way, and, granted, with the greatest of human optimism, Facebook friends post pictures of their ineffably confident newborn babies and grandchildren, but otherwise chaos, cruelty, and stupidity reign and the future often looks like a slow moving tsunami that turns out not to be that slow. If the earth with its inhabitants were someone’s child, it would be getting a time out right about now. There is a deep deep need for a moratorium, a bank holiday of global scope, a detox. It’s time for an intervention. We need a year of humanitarian ceasefire, or decades, and by ceasefire I mean not only of intractable sectarian battles and ancient hatreds, but also of global assaults on the land and on the fishes in the sea, of stupidity in leadership such as couldn’t even be imagined at the depths of the McCarthy era, when The Day the Earth Stood Still was made. As any individual who has suffered a personal loss or incurred an injury can attest, recovery takes much more time than is ever allowed and there are so many wounds that need to be healed around the world. Healing needs time, rebuilding needs time, learning needs time, time for constructive work, and time for rest.

There is no activity on earth today that could not benefit from time to lie fallow. The Earth may have to stand still to go forward.

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The Day the Earth Stood Still is a model of cinematic economy and an engagingly tight little amalgam of genres–film noir / sci-fi / political thriller. It’s not a monster movie like many other sci-fi horror films from the period, like The Thing, Them, Godzilla, although what sets the narrative in motion, like the others, is the development of the atom bomb.  The word “monster” is uttered only once: as Klaatu, an extremely elegant and hypercivilized figure with a British accent (as played by British actor Michael Rennie) who for good measure has taken as his cover name the Jesus of Nazareth referent, “Mr. Carpenter,” from the dry cleaning slip he found in the beautifully fitting suit he stole to escape the authorities, walks down a street in Georgetown at night looking for a place to stay, he overhears a radio broadcast, “there’s no denying that there s a monster at large.” The irony is patent. The only monster at large is human fear and stupidity. Even the robot Gort is a sleek modernist creation, unlike a Golem made of base matter, he is imperviously metallic and, most of the time, absolutely immobile, though we are told his power knows no bounds.

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As for being a sci-fi movie, there is very little effort made to go beyond a business-like exposition of sci-fi tropes of the era: some Theramin-like sound effects, a glowing white flying saucer that appears above the Capitol dome in Washington D.C. before it lands in a park, near a triad of baseball fields and the Lincoln Memorial, a couple of vaporizations of  armaments and later of a couple of men here and there. The exterior and interior of the space ship is basically Bucky Fuller’s Dymaxion House converted into a flying saucer.

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And it’s not exactly a film noir, because the noir topos of woman as the source of corruption is reversed into a proto-feminist story: the heroine, “Helen Benson,” a war widow, played by Patricia Neal, a woman of modest means with a young son to support, immediately feels empathy with the creature spoken about on the radio, and later she resists the social imperative to marry her boyfriend when he reveals his craven ambition and self-regard in betraying Klaatu. Instead she risks her life to save humanity. Yet a lot of the action takes place at night, with a rich blackness punctuated only by street lights and neon signs of the city, recalling some of the tightly plotted, low-budget, location shooting, police films of the era, like The Naked City. The noir is not atmospheric and foggy, it is crisp, and for that all the more menacing.

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The radio as a primary source of news is a recurrent theme of the film, a kind of communications hearth around which groups of people around the world gather. One of the charms of the film is the way that director Robert Wise makes especially effective use of what were even at the time long clichéd cinematic tropes and conventions of montage so that one can both step back and admire known methods of cutting used in a workmanlike fashion and still be thrilled and informed by them at the same time.

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In particular, several times in the film, in order to advance the story and denote the global impact of the event, he creates quick montages where the same event is shown as experienced and reported simultaneously in different countries around the world, each country represented in a ten to twenty second vignette, with low budget sets, using stock footage: a village in France signaled by what is clearly a film stage set seemingly left over from the beginning of Casablanca and countless other Warner Brothers World War II movies, Moscow with a group of women in babushkas huddling together with the Kremlin in the background, American gathered around a radio at a gas station or in front of a radio store, people playing cards with the radio on in the background in the boarding house where Klaatu finds a room. Announcers from Calcutta to London, military personnel from bases in Florida to Britain–each nationality is telegraphed with a few easily recognizable signifiers. Television appears only peripherally, it is not yet the main medium, though there is one eerily predictive moment early in the movie where American TV news announcer Drew Pearson, as himself, looks into the camera and says, “the ship landed in Washington at 3:45 PM…Eastern Standard Time”–Walter Cronkite must have seen this movie.

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Klaatu is an interesting figure: despite the Christ-like reference of his cover name, or perhaps in accordance with it, he is an unsentimental–and an unsentimentalized–figure, arrogant in the face of human stupidity. “I’m impatient with stupidity, my people have learned to live without it,” he tells an aide to the President of the United States–a curious wording which suggests that stupidity is something one feels the need of but can learn to do without. “I’m afraid my people haven’t,” replies the aide ruefully, since all he can come up are lame excuses about all the diplomatic impasses and impossibilities when Klaatu insists on speaking to all world leaders because he “will not speak to any one nation or group of nations.” He has come to “warn you that by threatening danger, your planet faces danger.” His “patience is wearing thin.”

When challenged to provide a demonstration of the alien power, he wonders, should he “take violent action, leveling New York City perhaps or sinking the Rock of Gibraltar?” He agrees to a demonstration that will be “dramatic but not destructive:” for a half-hour, the earth stands still, “electricity has been neutralized all over the world.” Again the montage, London’s Piccadilly Circus, New York’s Times Square, Moscow’s Red Square, factory turbines, trains, cars, dishwashers, milkshake mixers, electric cow milkers, and the elevator in which Klaatu reveals the plot to Helen, every thing stops. A half an hour later, everything starts again.

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The earth is not receptive to Klaatu’s warning and his contempt for earthlings’ stupidity is not improved by his brief time on earth, during which he is shot twice and killed once.  Only the kindness, curiosity, and faith of a boy, a woman, and one brilliant scientist may redeem the planet from immediate destruction.

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Klaatu is resurrected by Gort. Before the ship leaves, he speaks to dignitaries assembled around the spaceship:

I am leaving soon and you will forgive me if I speak bluntly. The universe grows smaller everyday and the  threat of aggression by any group anywhere can no longer be tolerated. Security for all or no one is secure. Now this does not mean giving up any freedom except freedom to act irresponsibly….We live in peace without arms or armies…free to pursue more profitable enterprises…I came here to give you these facts but if you threaten to extend your violence, this earth of yours will be reduced to a burned out cinder. Your choice is simple: join us and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration. The decision rests with you. We shall be waiting for your answer.

Judging from the news this summer, we are a lot closer to getting burnt to a cinder.

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Another episode from popular culture that brackets the Cold War period offers what at first glance seems like a more idealistic voice from those years. It is another “day,” Day of the Dove, an episode from the original Star Trek series. The crew of the Enterprise receives a distress call from a human settlement on a distant planet. When they arrive, no sign of the settlement that contacted them remains. A group of Klingons appears, brought there by a similar call, from a Klingon settlement. They accuse each other of conspiracy and genocide and set upon each other, as a ball of multi-colored flashing lights flickers. It looks like the international radioactive hazard symbol set ablaze and in motion like spinning fire crackers. They accuse each other of dishonoring a peace agreement and of testing new weapons. As their anger grows, the ball of light becomes bigger and redder.

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They all beam up to the Enterprise, unaware of the entity of flashing lights which follows them on board. Out of contact with Star Fleet, and propelled at warp 9 towards the edge of the galaxy, rage grows.

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The premise of the plot is that this situation has been engineered by the flashing light, an entity which feeds on anger. It keeps the waring parties’ numbers balanced to ensure endless conflict, reviving injured crewmen if necessary, and it replaces their state of the art weaponry with swords and sabers to force the combatants backwards in the history of armament, from the disembodied impersonality of phasers to the savagery of hand to hand combat. It feeds them false memories of trauma and injustice to stoke the fires of hatred and vengeance: Chekov raves about how the Klingons murdered his brother, Piotr, and goes rogue to rape and kill any Klingon he can get his hands on. Upon hearing this, Sulu doesn’t understand, “he never had a brother, he’s an only child.” Kirk observes, “Now he wants revenge for a non-existent loss.”

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The crew of the Enterprise has the benefit of Mr. Spock’s scientific rationalism: a cool and unsentimentalizes figure much like Klaatu, down to the high cheek bones and to the arrogance of superior mental abilities, Spock is the first to see that there is something strange about the situation and, of course, find it “fascinating.” He realizes that the alien’s energy level increases with each battle, “it subsists on emotion,”and  “it has created a catalyst to satisfy the need to promote the most violent mode of conflict.”

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Once the Enterprise crew figures out what to do in order to prevent an eternity of senseless combat, they have to persuade the Klingons to participate in a course of action: stop feeding the beast, first by means of a temporary truce and ultimately by throwing down their weapons and laughing at the entity. As in The Day the Earth Stood Still, it is up to a woman, in the case Mara, the Klingon chief’s wife, to create the bridge between the groups and prevent destruction.

Star Trek was a left leaning show produced during the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement, with Women’s Liberation lurking on the horizon–the last show, Turnabout Intruder, is about a woman’s assaultive experiment in gender/body transfer because her love for Kirk is warped by her rage against gender inequity. In Day of the Dove racism is a major subject: the Enterprise crew understands that something is seriously amiss, that they are behaving irrationally and unlike themselves, when they begin to lob racist remarks at one another, notably when McCoy calls Spock a “half-breed:” later Spock confesses that for a moment he too had felt “the sting of racial bigotry…most distasteful,” he sniffs. Nevertheless it is telling that the script is unconsciously racist itself: the Klingons are portrayed as the more war-like and stupider race, more violent, less curious, compared to humans and Vulcans, and being a Klingon in those early shows is denoted very simply by greasy dark brown facial make up.

The first Star Trek series’ episodes were notoriously low-budget–more uses were found for bubble wrap than imagined in any philosophy!! It was television’s brand of modesty, similar to The Day The Earth Stood Still, but with the additional economy of time:the narrative had to fit into the 50 minute hour of network time, so each scene is instrumental and gets right to the point. There was a spareness to the message that had made so many of the episodes memorable.

Which film is closer to present day concerns? Though The Day the Earth Stood Still is a Cold War artifact, its paranoid uneasy spirit is closer to our time than Day of the Dove. In 1951, 6 years after WWII and Hiroshima and Nagasaki the message is, Stupid humans, stop before you are destroyed by your own stupidity. And humans don’t look too promising. But in Star Trek in 1968 at the end of a decade of cataclysm but also of liberation movements, relative prosperity, and of social and technological optimism, the humans and their enemies understand that their violence is being instigated by a force that feeds on rage and they are able to stop and laugh the entity out of power. But the truce is temporary. The entity is not destroyed, it just spins off into space, in search of the anger it needs to survive, which it has surely found here on earth.

In The Day the Earth Stood Still, alien forces have the power to destroy the Earth. They are ultimate judges with a police force of robots like Gort. In Day of the Dove, human (and other species’) inherent proclivity for stupidity and violence are incited by an alien force who enjoys the spectacle of war. As Spock says, “Those who sit back are the Gods.” In both cases, humans have the ability to step back and chose another path. The Star Trek episode leaves us with at least a temporarily instrumental decision to do so.

*

This summer, I reread a slim book, War and The Iliad, by Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff, two Jewish women living in France at the start of the Second World War who unbeknownst to each other each wrote an essay about the Iliad. Having reread the essays, I feel I must read them again and again, because they are mirror images that are nevertheless very different, like the two examples of popular culture I’ve mentioned here. As I read I thought about the obscene discrepancy between being able to read on a chaise lounge in a garden near the sea on a moist and breezy summer day and the circumstances suffered by so many victims of wars and cruel aggressions happening at the very same moment around the world as well as of relentless economic and social inequalities and injustices being perpetrated at home. This summer the world seems to spin the safe and the endangered closer together in a centrifugal motion towards disaster, although some of the safe may not see how they are as implicated and endangered as the rest of humanity. In her essay, “The Iliad, or the poem of force,” Weil quotes from the Iliad,

“She ordered her bright-haired maidens in the palace / To place on the fire a large tripod, preparing / A hot bath for Hector, returning from battle./ Foolish woman! Already he lay, far from hot baths,/ Slain by grey-eyed Athena, who guided Achilles’ arm.”

Far from hot baths he was indeed, poor man. And not he alone. Nearly all the Iliad takes place far from hot baths. Nearly all human life, then and now, takes place far from hot baths.

What power do the Gods have? In The Day The Earth Stood Still, the aliens from afar have the power to incinerate the earth, and both Klaatu and Gort have god-like qualities, Klaatu has both an Olympian impartiality, he doesn’t care what people on earth do to each other so long as they don’t do it to any other planet, and he has a Christian ability to spread the Word and to be resurrected, while Gort has the implacability of a graven idol. Bespaloff writes, in “The Comedy of the Gods,” a chapter of her essay “On The Iliad,” “Everything that happens has been caused by them, but they take no responsibility, whereas the epic heroes take total responsibility even for what they haven not caused.” The Trojan war is a form of spectacle and entertainment for them, “Condemned to a permanent security, they would die of boredom without intrigues and war.” Of Zeus, she writes, “There is nothing of the judge in this watcher-god. A demanding spectator, he accepts the law of tragedy that allows the best and the most noble to perish in order to renew the creativeness of life through sacrifice.” But Weil writes, “Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims, the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it,” even the Gods.

Weil writes, “The progress of the war in the Iliad is simply a continual game of seesaw. The victor of the moment feels himself invincible, even though, only a few hour before, he may have experienced defeat; he forgets to treat victory as a transitory thing.” As illustrated in The Day of the Dove, the alien force that feeds on rage must keep the waring parties evenly balanced: Weil points to the “extraordinary sense of equity” in the Iliad…”One is barely aware that the poet is a Greek and not a Trojan.” Bespaloff writes, “Sprung out of bitterness, the philosophy of the Iliad excludes resentment. It antedates the divorce between nature and existence.”

Weil describes why it is so hard to end combat:

Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death’s face….On each of those days the soul suffers violence. Regularly, every morning, the soul castrates itself of aspiration, for thought cannot journey through time without meeting death on the way. Thus war effaces all conceptions of purpose or goal, including even its own “war aims.” It effaces the very notion of war’s being brought to an end. To be outside a situation so violent as this is to find it inconceivable; to be inside it is to be unable to conceive its end. Consequently nobody does anything to bring this end about. In the presence of an armed enemy, what hand can relinquish its weapon!

Weil and Bespaloff both offers hints of what might be necessary for such a laying down of arms: compassion and an understanding of the balance of power. Weil writes, “The strong are, as a matter of fact, never absolutely strong nor are the weak absolutely weak, but neither is aware of this. They have in common a refusal to believe that they both belong to the same species.” Bespaloff makes an interesting comparison between Homer and Tolstoy’s understanding of “the fatality inherent in force,” but in one point she finds Tolstoy wanting:

In the spirit of equity, however, Homer infinitely surpasses Tolstoy. The Russian cannot restrain himself from belittling and disparaging the enemy of his people, from undressing, at it were before our eyes. The Greek does not humiliate either the victor or the vanquished. …Opponents can do each other justice in the fiercest moments of combat; for them, magnanimity has not been outlawed. All this changes if the criterion of a conflict of force is no longer force but spirit. When war is seen as the materialization of a duel between truth and error, reciprocal esteem becomes impossible. There can be no intermission in a contest that pits–as in the Bible–God against false gods, the Eternal against the idol.

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The most famous line from The Day The Earth Stood Still is the sentence that Klaatu tells Helen she must say to Gort if something happens to him: “Klaatu barada nikto.” The meaning is never translated for us, but in context it seems to mean one or both of two things: “Klaatu needs to be resurrected,” or “Klaatu says, Don’t destroy the earth out of vengeance because I have been killed.” So at a time of calamity and conflict, destructiveness and in one of the worst periods I have lived through because of human stupidity and inability to accept any Others as equal or mirror images, or to act on scientific facts (Mr. Spock’s “fascinating”), I can just say, Klaatu barada nikto, Klaatu barada nikto.

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Some thoughts on the meaning of success for an artist, Or, The art school and its former customers

Today I receive from a former student one of the many exhibition notices I get, for a group show, including other former students. It’s a phenomenon rarely discussed: faculty who teach over a long period of time track the careers of their former students over years, not all of them but those who stay in their memory and on their screen, and among these not just the few who make it big, possibly bigger than the teacher–in fact often those former students never even keep you in the loop, because they are doing so well and most likely feel their teachers had no role in their success, and perhaps quite rightly so, and they may even erase their education from their bio notes–but from the ones who two, three, and more significantly five or ten years on, continue, getting their work into galleries, organizing group exhibitions with some of their fellow artists/former classmates, their immediate cohort.

You can see the patterns of friendship and allegiance and ideology, you can see the struggle to just get a show in the city you live in much less the global arena that the rhetoric claims we are training them for. As an artist I know how hard that struggle is just to continue to make work and try to get yourself out there and create a discourse around yourself in the face of jobs done to survive and in the face of waves of new fresh MFAs and in the face of the sheer difficulty of continuing and defining oneself, and growing. If you continue at all, if you continue to grow as an artist, that is, you remain alive within thought, maintaining a belief in your work that is inflected with self-criticality and willingness to expose yourself to challenge, you have achieved a measure of success, though not success as it is presented in the media as defined by monetary value nor necessarily success according to dominant values in art academia at any given moment and place.

Educational institutions often don’t show enough interest in many of their former students’ accomplishments, particularly if they are of this journeyman nature rather than of the spectacular framed by the market and selected elite art institutions. The individual teacher who has had a human relation to the individual student and who has at best invested some of her own life energy into someone else, has a different relation to the former student than the institution which moves on to what can only be best described as both new future product, but also current customers who are by definition fungible. Faculty who teach a long time in sense have deeper institutional memory than the institution itself and what their memory holds may even be inconvenient: the institution is always reconstituting itself as being up to the latest date, that is both the genuine desire, the rhetoric, and the marketing ploy. It seeks to, it promises to prepare the student for what it sees as the future that the student will live in, which is of course an important goal, particularly when education is increasingly generating enormous student debt, but inevitably the institution’s concept of the future is based on ideologies that are themselves date-stamped in one past or another. Only rarely is there a fortuitous near synchrony between the ideology and the school–we mark those in history, the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, Yale, NSCAD, CalArts, among these, each at specific moments in time even if the institution continued to exist past that moment of cultural synchrony.  When the institution asserts that its goal is to shape the artist /citizen of the future, it may call on new ideologies that it feels necessitate the erasure of the old ones so it is inconvenient if long time faculty know that former students who are successful according to the terms of the new ideology in fact emerged from instruction in the old, discredited regime.

This is part of what I think of when I receive the email announcements from one former student or another, from last year or two decades ago. When I posted a version of this text on Facebook a couple of days ago most people took it as an appreciation of the teacher / student relation, and of the struggle just to continue to be an artist and thus a questioning of  what definitions of success are for the artist. But that very questioning is embedded within the experience gained over a lifetime of being an artist who teaches in institutions of higher learning in the arts and how that very experience is considered by the institutions.

Teaching is also a very human interaction so that for better or worse, patterns of favoritism based on aesthetic, political, and philosophical ideology, but also on the simple relations of affinity and friendship persist through time, past graduation, favoring some students over others depending on the regime in place.

However the lack of connection between student and educational institution is also a mutual thing: many MFAs programs do have websites for former students to send in notices of exhibitions but most former students don’t use them. Nevertheless the institution is more likely to be indifferent to markers of the every day survival of the every day artist, rather than to the star turn which will reflect best on the institution.

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