Category Archives: art

Watch on the Potomac

I watched Watch on the Rhine late last night, engaging in one of my favorite and oldest habits–sobbing at the movies. Because my current political fears are rooted in the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s and my earliest faint yet determinative political memories are of the blacklist and the Army/McCarthy Hearings, I am firmly of the opinion that Hollywood movies from the 1930s and 40s, particularly Warner Brothers movies, should be required viewing right now for anyone considering how to address and shape a large audience towards a sense of solidarity across ethnicities and against fascism and big money–Warner Brothers’ films of that period were among the most overtly political of the major film studio product, they celebrated the immigrant experience and the contribution of immigrants to American culture, and they were among the first studio films to depict the impact of fascism and the Nazis as specific enemies.

Watch on the Rhine is a 1943 film of a 1940 play by Lillian Hellman and the film makes few concessions to the movies–almost everything takes place in one house, on about three room sets onto which people walk in and out of doors as they had done on the stage.

Some of the acting may seem quaint in some way to people unfamiliar with the era though they are deeply, doubly familiar to me–I grew up watching these films often several times a week on TV on WOR-TV’s Million Dollar Movie program, and I grew up around adults sort of like the ones portrayed and hearing stories that make this one recognizable and credible.  The central figures are rivetingly and simply played by Paul Lukas as a German anti-fascist fighter, in ill health and damaged by a decade of resistance and flight across Europe, and his family, including his wife, played by Bette Davis, an American woman from a notable and wealthy family in Washington DC but who has shared her husband’s ideals and the life of poverty and danger these ideals led them to, and how, in a few swift strokes, the war and the danger of the Nazis are brought into the center of American privilege, safety, comfort, and wealth.

The film is unrelievedly melancholy for a Hollywood film, and also, though soberly, a call to arms and to self-sacrifice in the cause of freedom against the coming battle — Hellman wrote Watch on the Rhine in 1940, following the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939

The action takes place in the period between the Munich Agreement of 1938 and Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941, when America had to shaken from a twenty year period of isolationism. That is, it takes in the time before the cataclysm, which was foreseen but whose form was unimaginable.

This morning I awoke to the unrelievedly bad news of the day, the fact that the trump mob could damage the CIA, endanger National Security, and move inevitably towards putting political opponents on trial within months (before the 2020 election for sure) weighs heavily against the background of Brexit chaos and so on and so on. Though I have keyed my work of the last two years to the daily news, I am at the moment stymied, silenced, not sure where to grab on to and looking at contemporary art and culture for whether any of it is playing the role played by commercial film product like the Warner Brothers films.

The America created by the propaganda machine of Warner Brothers and the other big companies, mostly run by first and second generation Americans, of scrappy immigrants, corrupt politicians and the idealistic politicians, press, and the occasional rich person with a conscience who battle for justice and truth and something called America that is still imbued with idealism is not a bad place to spend some time–while someone writes their PhD thesis on Game of Thrones as a critical reflection on the resurgence of fascism and despotism across the world at a time of climate crisis, a thesis which I will skim with interest because I’m sure no will be surprised I didn’t watch it except for the most recent episode on the Seth Meyers Show where he and Leslie Jones watched the last episode together and howled with laughter.

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Further information on Watch on the Rhine  Note that the screenplay was written by Dashiell Hammett with additional scenes and dialogue by Lillian Hellman.

To see Bette Davis talk about her role and the film on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971.

A curio: a radio version of the play, with Paul Lukas, aired in 1946.

Warner Brothers films of the era with an anti-fascist narrative include: Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), Espionage Agent (1939), Edge of Darkness (1943), Action in the North Atlantic (1943), Northern Pursuit (1943), Passage to Marseille (1944), Mr. Skeffington (1944—a film whose principal theme is the cost of female vanity but which has an anti-Nazi plot twist), The Mask of Dimitrios (1944), To Have and Have Not (1944), and, most notably, Casablanca (1942).

Even though my interest currently is in the Depression and World War II and Film Noir post-War era, the full list of Warner Brothers movies includes so many great and very entertaining films, with a sense of social consciousness extending even to films produced in the 1970s and 80s.

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reminder to email subscribers

My apologies to subscribers, it’s been a while since I embedded a video clip in a post here and I forgot to mention at the top that you won’t be able to see that in your email version, you have to look at the post online, or to view my acceptance speech on the lifetime journey of an artist at the 2019 Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Awards ceremony click here.

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The Lifetime Journey of an Artist

I’m honored to be a recipient of the 2019 Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award for my work “a feminist painter, art historian and critic.” Previous recipients have included so many women artists, writers, and activists I admire, including Ida Applebroog, Judy Chicago, Nancy Grossman, Yayoi Kusama, Yoko Ono, Miriam Schapiro, Carolee Schneemann, Nancy Spero, Martha Rosler, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Martha Wilson, Adrian Piper, Whitney Chadwick, Lucy Lippard, and Faith Wilding –the more such names I type the more honored I feel by this Award! This year my fellow recipients included Olga de Amaral, Mary Beth Edelson, Gladys Barker Grauer, with this year’s annual President’s Award for Art & Activism going to Aruna D’Souza and L.J. Roberts.

Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Awards February 16, 2019 from l to r: Ferris Olin, Ruth Weisberg, Mira Schor, Faith Wilding, Aruna D’Souza, L.J. Roberts, Amelia Jones, Kat Griefen, Janice Nesser-Chu (past and present awardees & committee and board members)

Here are my remarks at the lovely awards ceremony held in New York City on Saturday February 16, 2019.

 

For anyone impatient to get past the niceties of thank yous, the core of my remarks on the lifetime of an artist begins at about 3:58 min in.

I refer to and projected the following drawing that I did when I was about 9 or 10, one of many drawings I did at that time depicting girl and women heroines, often artists, writers, scholars, musicians, and queens of the realm, with all their books, artworks, and other treasures around them.

Mira Schor, Sea Voyages, c. 1960. Ink and crayon on paper, c.8 3/4″x 12.

 

 

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Note on Teaching: “What are the criteria by which you want your current work to be judged?”

In “Stephan von Huene, feminist teacher” my 2010 appreciation of my mentor at CalArts after I left the Feminist Art Program, I wrote that one of his strengths as a teacher was that “He respected the criteria by which I wished the work to be judged.” I am interested in what this means and how it might be useful in teaching today.

Looking back to that time, when I was 22 years old, I was knowledgeable enough to know what those criteria were for me at the time, in part because I was often made aware that the dominant criteria of the time were against calling what I did painting or even serious art of any kind, and because I was already by that time steeped in the artistic ideologies of the art world I had been born into and of art historical criteria as well–that is, even more than I could understand at the time, I was as committed to the values that chose to suppress me as were the gate keepers of the time.

As a teacher now, sometimes working with students with a limited background in art practice or history, I’m not sure they know the criteria that their work operates within, or, putting it differently, that they think in those terms. So the question to them might be, “What are the criteria by which you want your current work to be judged?”

In recent years I have phrased the question slightly differently: “what work of the past (and present) gives you the permission to call what you do art?” That seems to give people pause. Being in the middle of the struggle of being an art student, they apparently often hadn’t thought of it that way.

This leads to the question of what criteria (or what histories, along with their criteria) does your work summon, whether you are interested or aware of it, whether it is intentional or not. I have for example worked with students whose work was based on permissions established by the work of Ana Mendieta or Carolee Schneemann, but who reflexively rejected any association to feminist art history, even though every element of their work is based on those permissions or recalls the appearance and terms of that history and it seemed likely that their work would be judged accordingly by everyone operating in our artistic system. So then what are the criteria by which they want the work judged? I mean, are there other criteria that both the student and I are missing?

But back to my question,”What are the criteria by which you want your current work to be judged?” and turn it to “what aesthetic and ideological criteria have made your work possible, what aesthetic and ideological criteria does your work summon, whether it was your intention or not? What were or what are the debates surrounding the work that your work makes one think of, that your work looks like?” These are dynamic considerations once you open yourself up to them: if when looking at your work, a knowledgeable viewer sees something that relates to a type of art you don’t know about or a type of art you dislike and don’t want to be associated with, what does that mean about your work? How do you respond? What will going towards that antipathy do for your work?

Much work today seems determined either by easy absorption of previous art styles and types as an appearance as they exist in the floating world that is Instagram and other image-sharing platforms, or by identity politics, leaving the issues of criteria relating to everything that may not be related to that identity but are existent in the work underexamined. It may seem contradictory or ironic that I would say this given that I preferred a teacher who agreed to respect the criteria by which I wished the work to be judged but as I point out, I was working from my consciousness of an artistic context, having already observed in daily life how, for example, what let’s for brevity’s sake generalize as Greenbergian formalism was a real, determinative agent in people’s work and in their careers at that time. I looked to all the art to which I was been exposed for permissions for something I already was doing, wanted to do. And, at the same time, I began to notice that I also was very drawn to the antithetical. It has been the deep roots of the former, roots in the work I loved, and the tropism I experienced towards the Other of the latter that have moved my work forward over time, as I moved through changes in the world, in the art world, and in my own expressive needs.

All of this presumes an awareness of a field of art practice, a field I visualize as a medieval military encounter, with forces arrayed strategically. Who are those forces? Today we may operate rhizomatically rather than in the earlier stages of combative ideological positions, yet within the network  there are positions that oppose each other. It is useful to have a picture and have a sense of one’s siting as any given moment.

The mechanism I describe here is also one that does not, should not end at the end of one’s schooling. Society and art change radically over one’s lifetime, so it is both essential to leave school with as deep a knowledge of the criteria one feels are relevant, as clear a picture of the field of action / the battle or points on the network)–and that field is much much more vast now than it was in the time period I was first formed as an artist. You leave with some armor for a position you can describe. Hopefully your schooling has also given you the ability and indeed the habit, the practice, of building on your initial knowledge of that field with a continued ability to be aware of the changes.

The best part of my nature is telling me that it is important to move from being aware of the parties on the field of battle of a particular moment, to being interested in one’s artistic Other, to, finally, being compassionate of that Other. Though a person who has been often been motivated by intellectual combat, literally compassionate is the word that is forcing itself into my writing about this today, starting from the point of view of a knowledgeable, stubborn, and embattled 22 year old and her compassionate teacher.

[I think Stephan would approve of my use of the word compassionate while also being aware of the irony, because both of us could be seen as feeling embattled in our lives as artists, as the years progressed and he perceived me as not just a student whose work he liked and supported but –I can’t say peer –but as someone who was saying something he respected and agreed with. In the 90s, he worked on pieces entitled What’s Wrong With Art?  and What’s Wrong with Culture?]

 

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For Father’s Day June 17, 2018: Ilya Schor, Naturalized Citizen of the United States of America

This is a wood-engraving by my father Ilya Schor, one of a series of illustrations he made in 1953 for the publication of Sholom Aleichem’s Adventures of Mottel the cantor’s son.

Mottel and his family immigrate to America from Kasrilovska, their shtetl in Eastern Europe after Mottel’s father, the cantor, dies. The events take place at the turn of the 20th century.  Sholom Aleichem began writing the book in 1902, when he still lived in Europe, and it was the last book he worked on before his death in New York City 1916. The last chapter is unfinished.

The plot may sound a bit gloomy, but actually it is a charming book, written in the mischievous and irrepressible voice of young Mottel. The first part of the book is entitled, “Mottel in Kasrilovska: Hoorah I’m an Orphan”–I first read the book some time after my father died and found the title very ironic. The second part is “Mottel in  America: ‘Try not to love such a country.'”

The image above illustrates one of the chapters on the family’s time on Ellis Island. This chapter is called “in prison.”

What are we doing on Ellie’s Island? We are waiting for our friends and relatives, and then we’ll be registered. As a matter of fact, we have already been registered over and over again. Our names have been written down, crossed out and rewritten *before* we boarded the ship, *while* we were on the ship, and *now* that we have disembarked from the ship. The same business every time. Who are we? Where are we going? Whom have we got in America? …

We had to pass over a long bridge with little doors on both sides. We had to walk in single file, one by one. At every step, we were halted and a different nuisance with bright buttons scrutinized, examined, prodded and pounded us.  First of all they turned our eyelids inside out with a piece of white paper, in order to examine our eyes. Then they examined the rest of our limbs. And ever one made a chalk mark on us and pointed where to go next, right or left. Only after this was over were we permitted to enter that large hall and find one another. By the time we got there, we were bewildered, confused and frightened.

On top of the troubles and tribulations which we ourselves had suffered during our journey, on Ellis Island God has given us a glimpse into the troubles of others. If I were to tell you all the sad stories we have heard during our imprisonment on Ellis Island, I’d have to sit with you a whole day and a whole night, and talk without a stop. For example, there’s the story of a man, his wife and their four children who are detained on the Island. They can neither enter nor return. And why not? Because during the examination it has transpired that their twelve-year old daughter is unable to count backwards! When they asked her, how old are you, she replied, twelve. When they asked, how old were you last year, she didn’t know the answer. They told her to count from one to twelve. So she counted from one to twelve. They told her to count from twelve to one, but that she was unable to do. Now, if they asked *me* to do it, I’d let them have it proper. It’s no great trick… Well, it was decided that the little girl couldn’t be allowed to enter America.  Here was a problem–what would happen to the parents and the rest of the children? A stone would melt at the sight of the parents’ distress and the agony of that miserable child.

As it has always been, immigration from a beloved home is caused by poverty, the hope of a better life, longing for the family who has gone before you, and by danger.

Mottel learns about pogroms from another boy he meets on the long trip across Europe to Antwerp, their port of departure.

All the emigrants keep talking about “pogroms” but I don’t know what they are. Koppel says, “Don’t you know what a pogrom is? Then you’re just a baby! A pogrom is something that you find everywhere nowadays. It starts out of nothing, and once it starts it lasts for three days.”  “Is it like a fair?’ “A fair! Some fair! They break windows, they bust up furniture, rip pillows, feathers fly like snow…”  “What for?”  “What for? For fun! But pogroms aren’t made only on houses. They’re made on shops, too. They break them up throw all the wares out into the street, scatter them about, pour kerosene on them, set fire to them, and they burn…”  “Really?”   “Do you think I’m fooling you? then, when there’s nothing left to break, they from house to house with axes, irons and sticks, and the police walk after them. They sing, whistle and yell, ‘Hey fellows, let’s beat up the Jews!’ And they beat and kill and murder.”   “Whom?”  “What do you mean, *whom*? The Jews!”  “What for?”  “What a question! It’s a pogrom isn’t it?”

The reasons for emigration/immigration never change, only the individuals and the circumstances of specific historical moments. My parents’ immigration to the United States was tragically caused but at the same time and for the same reason exquisitely timed in terms of finding the perfect audience for my father’s artwork so that he could make his work and a unique name for himself: in the immediate post-war era American Jews just one or two generations removed from their immigrant parents and grandparents, who had fled oppression, poverty, and pogroms to find opportunity in the streets paved with gold of America, had indeed succeeded —among these were prosperous businessmen who were assimilated– to a point–their lives mirrored the white gentile American dream but they were still segregated by custom and quota to Jewish schools, suburbs, country clubs. They were devoted to community and synagogue while being major supporters of the arts.

After the war, this generation of Americans  were deeply moved by the fate of the Jews in the Holocaust–they knew that, but for immigration, they would have been among the perished as were remaining distant members of their families. They were primed to welcome my father’s tender and also erudite representations of the life of the Eastern European Hasidim he’d been born into and that he held in his heart and soul long after he had left that world for a more cosmopolitan European culture. Representations of a past that the parents of my father’s American patrons had distanced themselves from in order to succeed in the new land were now desired and valued.

In that period my father illustrated books by Sholom Aleichem and by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, all published around 1950. His illustrations for Mottel were done long before Fiddler on the Roof fixed certain clichés. They were based on his own life and collective memory, of both the rural pleasures of village life and of the deeply pious life of the Hasidim.

My parents did not arrive at Ellis Island. Their ship, the SS. Colonial from Lisbon, entered New York Harbor where immigration officers processed its passengers directly on board. It was December 3, 1941.

Israel Schor became a naturalized citizen of the United States as Israel Ilja Schor December 29, 1947. Over time his name changed informally to Ilya Schor because in America you could become what and who you wanted.

I think it is important to tell you that that my father cast his first vote as a US citizen in the 1948 election, for the Progressive candidate Henry Wallace. He voted for Adlai Stevenson twice. His first vote for a winning candidate was for John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1960. It was a big deal.

Last week amid the furor over the punitive separation of immigrant children from their parents at the border with Mexico, it was announced that the current administration is also planning to go after naturalized citizens, looking for any small irregularities and infractions in order to strip such citizens with full rights as such of their citizenship and deport them. There have been politically motivated deportations but to my knowledge deportation of naturalized citizens has not  been proposed as malicious policy not even during the McCarthy era or after 9/11, until now.

‘Try not to love such a country.’

 

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