Author Archives: Mira

Notes on a Tribunal

Combatant Status Review Tribunals pp. 002954-003064: A Public Reading is a two-day presentation at MoMA, today Saturday November 12 and tomorrow Sunday November 13, of a four-hour reading of transcripts from Combatant Status Review Tribunals held at the United States military prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in 2004-2005, excerpted from a collection of transcripts released online by the US Department of Defense. This event, organized by the artists Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt, Katya Sander, and David Thorne, with the participation of readers, is a really interesting way of being exposed to and absorbing some of the complex meanings of political events that have taken place under conditions of secrecy, though “in our name,” at least for citizens of the United States.

The reading is very effectively situated in the museum in a transitional space, on one of the vestigial landings of the old (or what I would call the pentimento) of the original MoMA Bauhaus-style staircase and tantalizingly near the exit (no entrance) glass doors leading to what at least today was a member’s preview to the exhibition of Diego Rivera murals. I felt strongly that Rivera would understand, he would approve–and most likely he would depict, in a boldly yet delicately drawn and painted fresco, the scene in front of him: the restrained visuals of political theater staged with readers representing presiding military officers, a recorder, the detainee, the “Personal Representative” of the detainee, all sitting around four tables set into a square surrounded by the museum audience, on rows of chair set behind the tables, as well as seated on the staircase, intent on listening while trying to tune out the noise of the crowded museum. Rivera would paint this crowd scene, perhaps providing an identificatory cartouche of the double identity of each reader: Official questioner>art historian Yve-Alain Bois, detainee Personal Representative>actress and playwright Anna Deveare Smith, (two of the readers when I was there). I’m not sure if the artists would have preferred a more advantageous setting, quieter, and larger with more room for an audience, as in the situation evidently afforded it at documenta12 as pictured on MoMA’s website for this piece:

Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt, Katya Sander, David Thorne. Combatant Status Review Tribunals pp.002954–003064: A Public Reading. 2007. Performed at Documenta12, 2007. © the artists

However I think the current site is perfect: so much better to “occupy” and reanimate the ghost of MoMA’s history within the confines of MoMA’s current physical and symbolic status as one of the Department of Defense-like corporate behemoths of the international art industry.

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Image from today's reading photographed and uploaded to Facebook by Andrea Geyer

The moment that I experienced in a short time attending this performance today offered some perspectives I had not expected. Given what is known of the way these hearings were conducted, one assumes that the readings are meant to expose the lack of transparency of the entire situation of capture, imprisonment, treatment, and legal practices as well as the seeming randomness of who ended up at Gitmo, with the fact of the impropriety of these tribunals according to military and treaty law creating the implication that all such captives are innocent. However as the proceedings I happened to witness at the reading today progressed, the narrative went from the detainee’s assertion of innocence to a close questioning by the military officials as to how, as a self-stated simple humble “worker,” he had managed to support his family in Yemen while traveling for months and on a number of occasions between Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan, where he was captured, while doing or not doing undefined jobs here and there. This lack of conclusiveness, this seed of doubt as to the veracity of the detainee, and the lack of conclusion, at least in the performance of the transcripts, as to the final determination of this detainee’s status, created a more ambiguous and complex political narrative than I had expected to experience.

9 Scripts from a Nation at War, a multichannel video installation by the same artists, Geyer, Hayes, Hunt, and Thorne will be shown at MoMA from January 24 to July 30, 2012. But participation through presence is a politically enriching act: the readings from Combatant Status Review Tribunals pp. 002954-003064 will take place again tomorrow at the museum from 12 to 4, on the second floor (free if you go to information desk and say you had done a RSVP).

A Discussion on Facebook About “Occupy Museums”

This morning artist Noah Fischer posted on Facebook an announcement for Occupy Museums:

Occupy Museums!

Speaking out in front of the Cannons

The game is up: we see through the pyramid schemes of the temples of cultural elitism controlled by the 1%. No longer will we, the artists of the 99%, allow ourselves to be tricked into accepting a corrupt hierarchical system based on false scarcity and propaganda concerning absurd elevation of one individual genius over another human being for the monetary gain of the elitest of elite. For the past decade and more, artists and art lovers have been the victims of the intense commercialization and co-optation or art. We recognize that art is for everyone, across all classes and cultures and communities. We believe that the Occupy Wall Street Movement will awaken a consciousness that art can bring people together rather than divide them apart as the art world does in our current time…

Let’s be clear. Recently, we have witnessed the absolute equation of art with capital. The members of museum boards mount shows by living or dead artists whom they collect like bundles of packaged debt. Shows mounted by museums are meant to inflate these markets. They are playing with the fire of the art historical cannon while seeing only dancing dollar signs. The wide acceptance of cultural authority of leading museums have made these beloved institutions into corrupt ratings agencies or investment banking houses- stamping their authority and approval on flimsy corporate art and fraudulent deals.

For the last few decades, voices of dissent have been silenced by a fearful survivalist atmosphere and the hush hush of BIG money. To really critique institutions, to raise one’s voice about the disgusting excessive parties and spectacularly out of touch auctions of the art world while the rest of the country suffers and tightens its belt was widely considered to be bitter, angry, uncool. Such a critic was a sore loser.

It is time to end that silence not in bitterness, but in strength and love! Because the occupation has already begun and the creativity and power of the people has awoken! The Occupywallstreet Movement will bring forth an era of new art, true experimentation outside the narrow parameters set by the market. Museums, open your mind and your heart! Art is for everyone! The people are at your door!

Day 1, Thursday Oct. 20th: Revised Schedule:
3:00 Meet at Liberty Park
Teach-in about the museums we are going to occupy
4:15 Livestream- read document in front of 5000 viewers.
Occupy the 4 train
5:00 Occupy MoMA
hours: 10:30-5:30
11 W 53rd street New York, NY
Occupy the M3 Bus
6:00 Occupy Frick Collection
hours: 10:00-6 PM
1 East 70th Street, New York, NY
Occupy the 6 train
7:00 Occupy New Museum
Thursdays 6-8 free
235 bowery
Via: Noah Fischer, Occupy Museums organizer.

[For further details see Noah Fischer’s Facebook page or mine.]

***

I found that this proposed action gave me pause and it seemed like a good topic for a Facebook discussion, which it has proved to be. I appreciate everyone’s point of view and engagement in the issues. Because not all my friends are on Facebook at all or look at FB that much, and during the day I got an email from Naeem Mohaiemen about where other than Facebook the discussion could be followed [he noted that as luck would have it will be showing a video at the New Museum during the planned protest]. So I thought it would be interesting to repost the conversation that took place today here, with the permission of my Facebook friends’ who participated, since a monologue on my part without the context would miss the point of the conversation.

This following is the conversation from about noon today to 6:30PM:

Mira Schor: I have some ambivalence about this, I’m not sure why. Yes museums have been sucked into the money entertainment mode with corporate corruption, where edge & marginality either commodified or taken out altogether, and with entrance fees prohibitive to the general public. The trend towards the corporate and the art and entertainment market has been especially damaging to the New Museum’s legacy, and especially hurtful for me as a viewer at MoMA, the favored haunt of my youth, where a private relation to art is now hard to come by (though a private relation to an individual art object is something equally critiqued by the current vanguard of social engagement art)…yet some good work is done there as well. I picketed MoMA when it reopened in 1984 with practically no women in its reopening show (see pictures at bottom of this post from that demonstration), but now I don’t feel a visceral response that this is something I can do even though it might be politic or dare I say it , fashionable, to appear to be at the cutting edge of political rebellion. But I’m open for discussion & would love to hear what some of my friends think of this Occupy Museums gesture

Richard Worthington-Rogers: my favorite targets are banks not museums

Mira Schor: well they are linked, major big city museums’ increased engagement in the out of control capitalism that has infected all parts of life is a tangible problem for all art and I understand that young artists would want to make their mark on that part of the profession

Richard Worthington-Rogers: I understand…perhaps i’m just old school and would rather lob a rock through a bank window than a museum….additionally, if the Koch Bros are funding the opera at lincoln center then action should be taken at the opera NOT a museum.

Amy Sillman: here’s how old I am: I wish they’d spell canon right.

Mira Schor: Amy..I feel the same way about the Bell Hooks poster making the rounds of Facebook with chauvinism misspelled as chauvanism

Mira Schor: re the Koch Brothers and the opera, yes !

Amy Sillman: down w/ the koch bros, but up w/ opera.

Amy Sillman: ‎(i didnt mean that like “i’m down with” but as in, bad koch bros)

Chris Kasper: I’m on the fence too. And I like the issue you raise regarding “rebellion fashion”. I think there is some of that at play here. However, museums have become more and more, extensions of banks and other corporate institutions…Moma and other museums high entrance fees keeps what it has too offer for an audience of a certain demographic ,that excludes blue collar citizens (including many of those with mfas) The coroporate culture in museums is echoed in the fear and intimidatiom common in their employees, and breeds nepotism and sychophants. This extends out to many, if not most artists who have not established themselves yet. While I think some of what you raise is totally valid, I do lean more to liking the occupy museum idea more. With the exception of a less puritanical set of values with regards to having embraced gay culture long before it was fashionable, the artworld is still quite conservative in that it favors white males as who it holds up as successful (this is one issue I agree w J Saltz on). If it is better in the artworld for women and people of color than other industries, it isn’t much better. Especially for the people employed by these institutions. We should’nt pat ourselves on the back for being a progressive field at this point. Ask the mostly men who are moving crates and installing the massive works, or the mostly women at the desks with the pressure to dress way out of their salary level at 17.9% apr how progressive an industry we are.

Mira Schor: Chris what you say is true, interesting, much to think about, and only 24 hours to think about it [actually there is no date set on Noah’s original post]…as for who has critiqued the white male content of museums first best, or with most risk….but yes, no illusions as the progressive nature of the mainstream art world

Brian Sg: occupy art school, the biggest rip off there is

Amy Sillman: hey Brian Sg: did you go to art school? which one? i’m just curious because I teach at an art school (Bard MFA) and i’m not sure if they think it’s the biggest ripoff there is! I’ll ask the students, though.

Betty Tompkins: do any of you know the recording about the mccarthy era called “the investigator”? this is starting to remind me of that.

Lori Ellison: Not sure if the museums are the right focus.

Martha Willette Lewis: a lot of museums have suggested donations and I balk at the idea that what they charge (excepting MoMa- that really is extortionate) is too much: going to the movies costs a lot now, cable tv costs a lot , all of these electronic gadgets costs a lot as does wifi- the museums NEED this money. I am sad to see them pander to popular tastes but they are doing it to attract audiences, stay relevant and stay in operation. I don’t think I can support this- museums have given me hours of pleasure, taught me, entertained me. why not “occupy art auctions”instead?they seem much more directly culpable…

Lori Ellison: There was a protest at an art auction several weeks ago.

Martha Willette Lewis: this makes me really, really sad…

Mira Schor: The museums are a probably as legitimate a focus for demonstration as any other in the sense of getting a discussion going..it’s all in the timing. There were people demonstrating against MoMA when the new building opened and the director Glenn Lowry was utterly dismissive of the demonstrators (artists/activists), I can’t remember if he had them arrested or simply mocked them

Amy Sillman: I think since OWS is about BANKS AND MONEY AND WALL STREET as much as anything else, then the suggestion to occupy art AUCTION HOUSES is really interesting!

Betty Tompkins: almost all museums have a free evening. While I admire the energy of the occupy everything everywhere movement, I do have to wonder why they have not focused on governments that allow all this. i also wonder why huge job fairs have not been organized at the park.

Mira Schor: that’s already happened a bit Amy, some demonstrations recently .

Steven Nelson: Museums are intertwined with money and our current corporate mess, but it’s not museums that got us into the economic and social mess we face today. On MoMA admission, it bears noting that one can go there for free on Fridays after 4pm.

Amy Sillman: well, I’m going to stand on my pedestal today and say that what should be occupied is Sothebys, Phillips de Pury, etc. these are places where NOTHING GOOD happens at all. I’d LOVE to go out and protest the whole system of auctioning the work of living artists.

Oriane Stender: This Occupy Museums thing is misguided. It would help if the writer were more articulate. “Speaking out in front of the Cannons”? Beyond the misspelling, what does this mean?

Mira Schor: I think that there is a generation of young artists who were caught up in the intersection between the corporatization of education as of museums, and actually expected to enter the art market and succeed, financially, and I’m sorry were perhaps not sufficiently critical of any part of that. Now they are hugely in debt and of course most artists never make enough from their art or any other profession associated with art to pay back that kind of debt, so they are angry. I was on a panel at Cabinet last year about art education put together by Colleen Asper and Ad Hoc Vox.

The most interesting thing to me that cold winter night was the audience, which was packed to the rafters with thirty-ish Brooklyn-based New York artists, all seemingly wearing black–it seemed like everyone had a two day stubble, also black, and heavy eyeglass frames, also black– fixing those of us on the panel with the most intense and angry expressions on their faces, hoping we would explain to them why their incredibly expensive educations were worth the debt they had incurred.

Art has been just as shaped by the economic boom and the highly reactionary politics of the last 30 years as any other part of our culture. Although I still go to MoMA, I feel like the place where I spent my youth in a close personal private relationship with art works in an intimate space rather than a tourist destination, that space is no more. I’m sorry for those who never had it. Perhaps it is just more of a betrayal when suddenly the rose colored glasses come off and you realize you’ve been sold a bill of goods that can’t sustain you as an artist, literally and spiritually. For me, it helps to have never “believed” in art market essentialism even though that never helped me economically but perhaps that’s precisely why I find this demonstration odd, because it seems to admit to a belief that has been disappointed.

Carol Salmanson: If the target is corporate money taking over museums, then the focus should be corporate money, not museums. Otherwise everyone’s energies will be scattered all over the place, while the corporate money will continue its deliberate and strategic placement, without accountability.

Oriane Stender: I’m not thrilled about corporate money having such an influence in museums, but since arts and culture get so much less government money than they used to get, corporate money keeps the institutions alive, so it’s not altogether a bad thing. It’s complicated. I’d rather the corporations give this money to museums than some other places they could put it, like right-wing think tanks or California’s Prop. 8. Yes, the $ comes with strings attached. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Etc.

Mira Schor: I don’t know if he will participate here, but Noah Fischer who posted this says he is glad if we are having a discussion, so I think that like everything about Occupy Wall Street, they are taking the chance of acting boldly, if not overtly programmatically, to provoke discussion, and the attention they are getting for that discussion will get media attention that perhaps earlier critiques did not get. The corporate structure and backing of MoMA will not be altered by any demonstration in the long run. I think the New Museum is more ripe for a critique, given the honorable countercultural, counter art market direction of its founding mother, Marcia Tucker, much altered by the cold glitz of the current institution and the amusingly repressive reactions it has on occasion had to internal efforts at institutional critique.

Noah Fischer: Wall Street is a symbolic Altar of Greed: a fitting place to start this movement, but the movement is much bigger than banks and packaged debt and bailouts. To me, its fundamentally about waking up from a bad dream in which our society has lost cohesion- the country doesn’t work for most people- people have forgotten how to work together. And while this has gone on, the wealthiest 1% have walked away with the government..and the culture- witness an era of luxurious art fairs while millions are losing home and jobs. So much about museums today reflects a top-down society where the rest of us are supposed to be mesmerized by the glamour at the top. We Occupy the big museums as both real ties to Wall Street fraud money and as symbols of a culture thats been stolen from the 99% by the elites. When we Occupy Museums, we’ll be announcing and demonstrating a new era of culture that is for everyone.

Noah Fischer: We can Occupy Auctions next week!

Oriane Stender: Re Mira’s observation about the anger young people have about their student debt: Yes, the MFA diploma mill is a giant ponzi scheme. But you are all college-educated and smart people. Did you really think, after the number of people attending art schools kept increasing, that there would be enough tenure track jobs for everyone? Galleries and collectors enough for everyone? This is exactly why I didn’t get an MFA. I did the math (and I’m no math genius). Go into debt to get a degree that a whole bunch of underemployed people have? No thanks. Sorry you drank the Kool-aid, guys. But it was labeled.

Goran Tomcic: If I remember correctly, more then a decade ago there was a huge issue with Whitney and Phillip Morris, i.e. should a tobacco company be a sponsor of the arts. Now we have Deutsche Bank being a major sponsor of Frieze Art Fair, and it had borrowed its name to the Guggenheim in Berlin: Deutsche Guggenheim even has a bank logo on the building facade. I recently closed my Deutsche Bank account as I felt I was not treated correctly and because the bank sucked a lot of money from me in enormous fees just to keep my debit account open. I moved to another bank with less fees and now I am not one of those sponsoring Frieze or Deutsche Guggenheim. As per art schools, I think this is a misplaced call for an action: I went to the above-mentioned Bard MA program and didn’t have to pay as there are scholarships, etc. I believe the art schools need to be left out of this story.

Mira Schor: Noah et al, I’d like to recommend people take a look at the information about The Woman’s Building, now the subject of one of the Pacific Standard Time exhibitions, “Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building. It was the most radical and complete experiment in a self-run politically directed education, really admirable.

As a faculty member in an MFA program, I’m torn, my students come in recent years not because they think they are going to make it, for the most part, but because they want to be in a central place where they can be exposed to new and challenging ideas (ideas that challenge their previous beliefs). Even though I feel increasingly confined by the situation, and miss terribly the atmosphere of creativity and freedom of the school I went to at the time I went to it, most of them feel that they get something for their education (though some, those who did drink the Kool Aid) also later feel terribly embittered by disappointment) and when I try to imagine alternatives to the MFA, as I discussed at Cabinet last year, you can see how rapidly necessities of institutionalization reconstruct themselves (after the first flush of experimentation, you need a space, you need money for rent, you need insurance, people need to be paid for their labor in teaching or maintaining etc…)..that’s why The Women’s Building was such an inspiring model.

Kate Kretz: Haven’t really thought about this. I am much more concerned/dismayed at the corporatization of higher education… I think that it’s going to transform this country, and makes me want to bail out to live in a place where education is the priority.

Oriane Stender: I would love to bail out. Anyone in Sweden want a middle-aged mail order bride??

Rocio Rodriguez: this whole thing is well intended but frankly…it waters down the real message…which in my view should start in occupying the capitol both houses of Congress. Once you start down this occupying street hell u can justify occupying anything. I say focus on what and who has created the problems and put us in the present economic situation. Start w/our ‘elected’ officials and demand an accounting there. A lot of $$$ passes through those halls, campaign contributions, lobbyists…they spend more time raising money for their next election than working on the country’s problems.

Goran Tomcic: Let me go back to my past and look at the former socialist countries education. It was required, grand and open (yes, it was open and they way to escape the system), and yet by the end of the 80’s there was nobody left who wanted to live in socialism and receive free education or free medical care. Now you go back to those former socialist countries and the first thing you notice is the luck of an education, nobody is reading the Classics any longer, and now we are just like the rest of the West.

Mira Schor: Rocio, I hope there are enough people to go around to focus on the multiple aspects of the culture and work in specific areas where they can have an impact, however momentary. In that sense I think it is worth doing, because the financial system needs critique, the corruption of the electoral process by money needs protest, and the art world and education are areas of culture that many of us here occupy. It’s a long term process and many contradictions. Revolutionary movements sometimes don’t have the time for contradiction until it takes them over, alas.

Ree Dykeulous: See W.A.G.E. |working artists and the greater economy. Fully budgeted/hugely endowed NY museums exploit cultural workers- aka their content providers

Rocio Rodriguez: Yes I agree with what you have said Mira the multiple aspects…they are all connected. I suppose that one only has so much time/resources to devote to protest and I see Washington as a central player to all of this and for me areas of culture are secondary (and I am an artist-who is totally dedicated to my profession) to the very present needs of many people who don’t have jobs, can’t pay for health insurance, and are worried about keeping their house. In any case its a mess all around. thx for the discussion.

Betty Tompkins: one of the huge differences in art/art education is that when I was a student we were told flat out that we should not come to NYC with the expectation of making it big or even making it small very quickly. we were told that it takes time to mature as an artist and that you did this on your own, outside of the gallery system. Today’s grads think an mfa is the same as an mba. It is not.

Mira Schor: here are some views on Hyperallergic to add to the mix. “Is Occupying Museums Misguided?” “A protest is slated for tomorrow that intends to “occupy” the Frick Museum, MoMA and the New Museum, but why?”

William Evertson: My only observation is that museums seem to be a symptom and wall street excess is a cause. I can certainly relate to the desire to expose the corporate hand that is driving these cultural icons. I wonder what the alternatives look like? With people in such need throughout the country how many would support any cultural activity?

Mira Schor: re. the Hyperallergic piece, just to play devil’s advocate for a minute , while I am wondering about this occupy museums plan, isn’t asking “what a museum of the 99% would look like and who/what would fund it” as Hrag Vartanian does on Hyperallergic the same as saying that occupy wall street hasn’t articulated specific demands>>>they have gotten people talking and put somethings on a wider agenda, so perhaps this can’t hurt either even if it seems a bit elitist in relation to the 99% meme

Sean Capone: Just do it, what do you have to lose! Keep in mind a lot of people won’t care about this action and it underscores the derisive notion that OWS is a bunch of liberal arts majors with worthless degrees. If art is for the people then go make art for the people. Or if this makes you feel better about yourself–do this. The museums aren’t the ones keeping arts funding out of the ‘people’s’ hands–you should go OccupyTheNEA. By the way, the New Museum had their Ostalgia ‘peoples art’ show all summer and the people didn’t go see it. The people want graffiti art and Tim Burton shows. Was burning a flag of dollar bills at the OWS art show a good example of art for the people? (did that really happen?!) As one of the 99% I would have rather put it in the donation box.

Betty Tompkins: ♥ hrag.

Ree Dykeulous: Debating whether the culture industry and all of it’s tethered institutions are unethical and participatory in an exploitative inhumane financial scheme is nonsensical- it is. The pay scale and disparities in non-profit institutions (directors and board members alike) directly reflect the inequity in other industries so it’s time to ask the museums why, esp. since, (1) they don’t distribute payment to artists but rather act as representatives of commercial galleries & auction houses, (2) act as representatives of the industries from which their monies derive. See Major Earners in the Cultural World for details. Museums absolutely DO keep payments out of artist’s hands b/c no oversight is required regarding the distribution of institutional funding by public-private partnerships (whether the monies come from granting organizations, foundations or private monies). So being as the system is at this present moment, it’s inequitable, unethical and unjust in it’s relationship with the visual artists, performers, arts writers and independent curators with whom they choose to work, and from whom they are gaming with cultural capital known as “exposure”.

Grace Graupe Pillard: I remember when I first studied art – never having gone to Art School – and discovered the wonders of art – the length and breadth of its history at MOMA and the Met and the Frick…I went there for free almost every week or more to study and discover artistis and how to paint, and how not to paint, and what I considered good and bad painting. One helped me see the other.

This can no longer be done – Now we pay – and we pay – particularly at the Guggenheim, New Museum and MOMA – yes we lucky artists can get an Artist Pass at MOMA but the Guggenheim does not even deign to allow that. I am ambivalent and really do not know why – something inside of me feels uneasy with occupying Museums. Old habits die hard. So this discussion is refreshing and making me consider and re-consider the issues.

Judith Rodenbeck: Fluxify museums; occupy the Supreme Court.

Nato Thompson: As far as I can tell, the idea of occupying everything makes sense to me. If people occupy the institutions for which they are direct constituents (artists occupying museums for example) that certainly makes a lot of sense. I think people are feeling too defensive for museums. I used to work at one and we would have embraced a conversation around audience and funding. They are public institutions accountable to a public. It would be good to have the 99 at their door. It’s like feeling defensive for a government because the people show up to vote. That is the point. If anything, I think of this is a reminder of a mission statement. Of course artists like art, they are artists. So of course they have some sympathies for museums as an idea. I don’t think this needs to be thought of as a protest so much as an opportunity to consider who art is for, how it is funded and how is it accountable. It is the same question of wall street, governance, etc. Who can disagree with these basic questions? Funny that hyperallergenic article dismisses the idea and then goes on to pontificate on why not start a museum that supports the 99 (the article asks)? Well, isn’t that what the missions statement of all non-profit museums are? And finally, art is a place where these ideas should be embraced and shared. It is about free expression and our institutions are there to embrace that. That is their role. We should think of them as an infrastructure accountable to the public and use them as such. To dismiss using them seems almost as though we have given up on them.

Betty Tompkins: I actually have the record of The Investigator, the original and i had a cd made of it as it is really rare. The actual story is quite close to what my parents told me when I was a kid…I grew up with this record.

Rocio Rodriguez: I am not sure that I fully understand Nato Thompson’s comment above. “(museums).. ‘They are public institutions accountable to a public.” Accountable? What exactly that you want them to be accountable for? Who is giving them money? Remember Jesse Helms? He wanted to make institutions that received public money accountable for the art that they showed. The following excerpt is from a Huff post article —“According to a 2006 report issued by the American Association of Museums, since roughly the late 80s museums have registered a 15% drop in reliance on public funding. Over the same period, museums almost doubled the amount of private funding they receive, counted as a percentage of their operating income. In recent years, half of American museums have shown growth in their endowments, while museums running deficits have decreased by one third. Business is private, and business is good (notwithstanding the real perils involved when museums get too cozy with corporate interests).” This was published in ’08. Maybe private contributions have dropped since the economic downturn. But I get a little concerned when I hear the word ‘accountable’ applied to ART or art institutions. It brings up the culture wars of the early 80s. Bottom line here is that museums are non-profits and they have to get money from somewhere–via government or corporate, private donors. Frankly, I happily hand over my 25$ when I visit the Met. It’s the Art, I care about and that is what I am supporting.

Betty Tompkins: excellent point Rocio.

Rocio Rodriguez: correction: I meant to say the culture wars of the late not early 80’s….one more thing…that quote from the huff post article was in direct relation to Jesse Helms effect on govt. funding.

Betty Tompkins: it was a disaster.

Rocio Rodriguez: we still feel the effects of it today.

Mira Schor: Rocio: when I was a teenager I stopped at the Met often on my way home from school. It was free. I could go in there to get lost, on purpose, and see what I would see, I could go to look at one painting. If it had cost the equivalent of $25 I would had gone much less frequently. Luckily the Met has a pay as you wish category, though most tourists don’t notice. But that is very expensive and contributes to the notion that art is only for an elite.

Rocio Rodriguez: Mira, I hear what you are saying. Yes it’s expensive even for me…but I guess I’m a sucker for art and I feel that it is my responsibility to support it.

Ravenna Taylor: what a great discussion. I love museums, almost any one of them is like a house of worship to me. I agree with so much of what each of you has said here; in particular I like the way Steven Nelson put this: “Museums are intertwined with money and our current corporate mess, but it’s not museums that got us into the economic and social mess we face today.”

I posted this same link this morning, and acknowledged having my own doubts about some of the content and the language.

But I really am terribly excited to see questions posed, with expectations of answers, and large numbers, young and old, contemplating meaningful change in the ways that our society functions, at all sorts of levels. This is truly hopeful, for me. I may not agree with everything that might happen or be proposed, but I’m just glad to celebrate an end to complacency and fear.

Rocio Rodriguez: Last time I was at the Met, I asked the guy who was selling tickets, how many people pay 25$ ?(because I was curious and the two tourists in front of me opted for a smaller donation which is fine) and he said…actually quite a few. I was surprised and glad.

Oriane Stender: The general dissatisfaction/anger at OWS makes sense. The financial industry, taxes, investments, loans – that whole world is very confusing and many people (including me) feel lost in it. But that same vague distrust and anger doesn’t make as much sense when directed at museums. Being angry at high admission fees AND at corporate sponsorship doesn’t make for a focused argument. Corporate sponsorship reduces the admission fees the general public pays. NEA funds and other government funds used to finance museums to a larger degree. Now corporations and private money has to fill that gap. If we just show up to Occupy Museums and protest “the system” we will look like simpletons.

Ravenna Taylor: for some reason I am resentful when I pay admission to the Guggenheim, and I only go there if there is an exhibit I know I want very much to see. But I don’t feel the same way about MoMA or the Met, and I have memberships there so I can walk in as often as I want…My own argument has long been: less taxes to support war action; more taxes to support culture. Then we could have government support for cultural institutions instead of war industrialists, and not have to hear the Toll Bros plugged while listening to Met Opera Broadcasts.

Ravenna Taylor: My own argument has long been: less taxes to support war action; more taxes to support culture. Then we could have gov’t support for cultural institutions instead of war industrialists, and not have to hear the Toll Bros plugged while listening to Met Opera Broadcasts.

Cole Robertson: Not sure if this came up in the 70+ preceding comments, but here’s my take: corporate support of the arts is almost invariably a corrupt enterprise. It either serves to boost the market value of the corporation’s art collection, is a PR stunt to rehabilitate a tarnished image, or is a tax dodge. Either way, nasty.

Oriane Stender: Cole, other than a soup kitchen, what would be a non-corrupt enterprise? Pretty much everybody expects to get paid for doing what they do.

Ravenna Taylor: Money is never clean. The super-rich corporations like Toll Bros or Koch Ind. could, if philanthropy were their object, make their donations and not demand they be acknowledged multiple times in multiple ways. It’s not the way the world works of course; but as an idealist I feel I must point out, it is one of the options, to donate without the need to use the donation as advertising. Considering that they are surely writing the donation off if they are paying any taxes at all, using it to promote their businesses and their images is something that shouldn’t even be permissible. Just the opinion of a crazy idealist.

Cole Robertson: For starters, eliminate tax breaks for increasing the value of private collections. You wanna advertise the art you own to make it more valuable, Charles Saatchi-style? Fine. Just don’t do it with taxpayer money…Ravenna, exactly. We’re underwriting their PR budgets, and it’s flat-out wrong.

[…]

Kathy Schnapper: Slightly off-topic: OccupyMuseums is reawakening all of the ambivalence within me about issues of class and the practice of Art History. Remember the first time that I read Sir Kenneth Clark’s autobiography. He wrote about his early exposure to the finer things in life and how it was essential to his development in connoisseurship. My background was blue collar, and that idea continued to haunt me and make me feel inadequate.

Recall when PASTA first organized the MOMA staff. My family were early union organizers, but somehow I felt uncomfortable with the idea of museum workers in the same union with mere laborers (of course, I grew up quickly from that absurd position).

And then there was graduate school at Columbia: At the time I had a day job working with abused and neglected kids. James Beck told me that I could not be a serious art historian and continue to do that. So for years, I never mentioned it.

Bringing all of this up, because the legacy of these experiences continues to tug at my emotions and colors some of my rational response to #OccupyMuseums Glad that they have opened up this important area of discussion.

***

I appreciate this conversation, it’s been useful to me and I hope to anyone catching up on my blog. I thank everyone who participated, and since I suspect the conversation will continue, I will update it if necessary. so, more later. Any comments to this blog post should if possible be directed to the conversation on my Facebook page so I can pick them up from there. A similar conversation on this subject took place on Stephen Nelson’s Facebook page.

And for fun, here are some pictures I found of a demonstration held in front of MoMA June 14, 1984, when the museum reopened after a major renovation with an exhibition which included almost no women artists.

Lucy Lippard and May Stevens, demonstration in front of MoMA, June 14, 1984, photo: Mira Schor

Rob Storr, Nancy Bowen, & Barbara Siegel, demonstration in front of MoMA, June 14, 1984 (Rob became Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA in 1990 (to 2002).

Demonstration in front of MoMA, June 14, 1984

Plus ca change, plus c’est la même chose: in recent years MoMA has had special funding from Sarah Peters to focus on their collection of works by women artists, designers, and architects, has hosted a number of symposia on the subject of feminism and art (I’ve commented on these on this blog and, along with other women artists, on M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online), and major women artists have had exhibitions and installations in the Atrium, and yet the majority of retrospectives, of works exhibited, and of women included in themed group exhibitions has by far remained skewed towards work by male artists… this is only to say that change is slow and hard at any major institution, and museums are perhaps even more impervious to change than governments! It is an ongoing battle of which Occupy Museums will be a new stage.

Art of the Occupy Wall Street Era

This is a slightly expanded version of a review that appeared on The Huffington Post on October 12th.

Every once in a while events in the art world and events in the “real” world mesh in a particularly fortuitous way. This is the case of the conjunction of Living as Form–an art exhibit taking place in the abandoned space of the old Essex Market on the Lower East Side, sponsored by Creative Time–with the Occupy Wall Street protest movement now taking place further South and West in Lower Manhattan.

The simultaneity of these two events was not planned, but Creative Time curator Nato Thompson is as inspired by “The Occupation of Wall Street Across Time and Space” as will be any viewer of Living as Form who is also taking an active part or interest in Occupy Wall Street.

The exhibition offers a combination of visual experience one might encounter in a college student union, a dorm, a BFA student show, and a Whitney Biennial. If you are looking for visual pleasure to offer itself up to you at first or second glance in most cases you will be disappointed. This show is part of a twenty-year direction of contemporary art away from traditional media and object-based art works towards installation, social platforms, participatory social engagement and collaboratives. Creative Time curator Nato Thompson has made it pretty clear that he is more interested in social engagement than in “participatory art,” a term used by art historian Claire Bishop: that is, if given a choice between art and social engagement, he’ll go with social engagement.

As a painter with a strong interest in political activism, I think painting and other traditional art objects can provide experience that is more than just a passive relation to commodity: a private engagement with an art work even if it not a political art work can also transmit courage and a renewed sense of the value of interiority that too has political meaning. Nevertheless I enjoyed Living as Form on the terms set by a variety of types of work included in the show. Living as Form presents the work of over 100 artists, art collaboratives, curatorial, and educational projects, I will just focus here on a few works that relate in their content and form to what Occupy Wall Street is as a popular uprising and as it has accrued some types of images and form to it.

Flyer in the Our Goods installation at Living as Form

One display in the show is organized by Our Goods.org, “a barter network for the creative community.” The walls of one booth are covered with a series of personal ads of the type you see on public bulletin boards. Here artists list their needs and the services they can offer in return, in a positivistic variant on one of the most haunting types of image circulating on the web in recent weeks via Occupy Wall Street: photos online at “We Are the 99%” of people holding up handwritten signs and notes to their computer’s camera, testifying to the impact of their lives of student debt, recent foreclosure, unemployment.

Image posted on "We Are the 99%"

Perhaps these images are the art of our time more than art seen in mainstream galleries, maybe even more than much socially engaged art, in the sense of an image typology that will speak to history: here is a recent, slightly impromptu statistical and linguistic analysis of this phenomenon. On the other hand the barter or exchange economy that is encouraged by Our Goods is part of the Millennial generation’s vision of social change, less reliant on traditional economic or governmental structures, like Occupy Wall Street a de-centered society of self-government and fair exchange of services facilitated by social media.

Another very different kind of socially engaged artistic intervention into lived urban space that has garnered a lot of media attention is Superflex’s copy of the executives’ restroom in the New York JPMorgan Chase headquarters installed inside the Olympic Restaurant in the same building as the exhibition with its entrance on 115 Delancey Street. I have to admit I expected that the executives restroom would be a bit fancier, despite the room’s black marble floor and elegantly designed sink bowl and faucet— I was expecting some more gold-plated appointments — but what’s great is that, not only is the concept of the work easy to understand and write about, something that in other instances I’ve critiqued as “Recipe Art,” but in this case very significantly this is a permanent improvement to the modest local diner.

Of the many other works of interest in the show, Peter Watkins’ five hour movie La Commune (1999) really stood out as a great work of art as well as totally timely for the present moment’s international series of popular occupations of public space in the hopes of political change. It is a black and white movie detailing the events of the populist insurrection of the Paris Commune in the spring of 1871. The film presents this historical event using the format of live television news coverage, as if this was a black and white documentary actually filmed during the Commune. It is so successful visually that I caught myself beginning to write about it as if it were a real record, rather than a recreation inflected with contemporary political tropes: in the short section. I watched at Living As Form, young working class demonstrators respond to the news interviewer shoving a mike in their face by saying how thrilled they are, then the interviewers turn to a crowd of bourgeois Parisians come to see the demonstration. “They have no plan,” says one woman, “they’re outside agitators,” says another! Sound familiar? Of course the script is written from the point of view of present day tropes, but it is quite credible that this would have been true. From what I could tell from short viewing and some research this is a brilliant film that I hope to see in full. It would be great if there were a theater revival showing now during the Occupy Wall Street autumn. The second part of the film can be viewed on YouTube in a three hour segment. It is necessary viewing for today, standing between current media coverage of Occupy Wall Street or Tahrir Square and similar inspiring though often tragic movements from the past, those revolutions that could not be televised or tweeted. Meanwhile you can see the whole film or whatever portion you come upon by chance at Living as Form.

Living as Form runs through October 16th,

“I’m 27 and Unmarried…” 40 years later

Today would have been my sister’s Naomi Schor‘s 68th birthday. She died suddenly about three months after her 58th birthday and it’s part of the strange nature of mourning that even now, after ten years, the period between the two anniversaries is for me a kind of private Via Dolorosa, an emotional undercurrent that can, even unknown to oneself, trap the speed of the everyday in a slow-moving river of mud. I woke up this morning and felt I needed to mark her birthday. I hope my readers will bear with me–there is historical material of some curiosity here, beyond the personal.

My sister was beautiful, brilliant in a thorough, deeply studious and comprehensive way; she was a strong presence, sometimes seemingly aloof, yet also dramatic–when she entered a room you knew she was there–passionate, very social, devoted to her field of work, curious about art, culture, and politics, a lover of travel, an inspiring teacher, a great but demanding friend, a great letter writer, yet also with a dark cast to her persona which, in later years, after tragedy and dramatic illness, sometimes turned to corrosive depression. She was my older sister and I worshiped her and was also fiercely competitive with her, something she found difficult when I strayed into her territory (it was bad enough I was an artist, the family profession, but then I also had to be as good a student in the school we both attended and then I started to write!). She was also incredibly supportive. I owe many important developments in my life directly to her, including where I went to graduate school and how I got to publish my first book. Since her death I have found it much harder to write about her than to write about our parents. In some way that inability on my part has replicated something she found very painful, that she was the only person in the family who was not a visual artist, so she could not “show and tell” what she did. She felt that her scholarship was not immediately accessible. Even I am intimidated by it although our ideas were similar in many respects, which isn’t surprising of course, nevertheless I have felt inadequate to write about her intellectual work. But I have inherited her collection of ephemera, the magazines and photos she collected and kept with her–a copy of Paris-Match from the 1950s with her screen idol Gerard Philippe on the cover, the New York Times from the day Robert F. Kennedy died, the first issue of Ms. magazine– and I feel that through these traces I can begin to write if not directly to her work, around it to reconstruct for myself and for others some of what she was and the historical moments she inhabited.

In my new studio is her antique glass-door cabinet whose four shelves were filled with all the books she wrote, edited, and had writings published in (by eliminating duplicates, I’ve managed to keep her full oeuvre intact while making room for one shelf of my writings!). She was a noted literary theorist and scholar. Her initial academic field was Nineteenth Century French literature and from the early 1970s she was one of the pioneers of feminist theory in the United States. She spent a lot of time in Paris in the late 1960s and the 1970s and brought her first hand knowledge of Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, and Jacques Derrida to her scholarship and teaching, at Columbia University, later at Brown University, Duke, Harvard and Yale. Among books such as Flaubert and Postmodernism, which she co-edited, Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel which includes “Hegel’s Aesthetics and the Feminine,” a chapter of my sister’s most noted book, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine, Engaging with Irigaray which she co-edited, and The Essential Difference, a differences book with she co-edited with Elizabeth Weed, and many other scholarly tomes, I found a copy of Glamour magazine from January 1971.

What was this faded woman’s magazine doing among my sister’s scholarly books? Clearly she had kept this and placed it among her bibliography, and moved it the many time she moved. It took me a couple of examinations before I found this letter tucked into a page spread:

At the time my sister was in a consciousness-raising group in New York where she was a young faculty member in the French Department at Columbia University. She introduced me to feminism and was instrumental in my applying to CalArts where her friend Sheila Levrant de Bretteville was beginning a Feminist Design Program. I went to CalArts later in 1971, where I became involved in the Feminist Art Program.

My sister was also boy-crazy, to the point that her fellow feminists would comment on it with humor, and that I would sometimes remind her that just because one of her areas of expertise was the representation of women in the Nineteenth-century novel didn’t mean she had to live her life like Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, passionate to a fault.

“I’m 27 and Unmarried. Am I worried?” My sister’s response was “Sometimes.”

Continue reading →

Somebody Had to Shoot Liberty Valance

Note: this piece does not endorse gun violence but the use of rhetoric in support of an idea, the idea of government as something that can and should help the people.

My mother used to say that, whenever George Herbert Walker Bush, Senior, “41,” would try to act tough and fight dirty, he looked to her like a sniveling wimpy little milquetoast mama’s boy whose mother says to him, “now you go back and you punch that bully in the nose.” Since the early days of Barack Obama’s presidency, a lot of people who think of themselves as intellectuals and pacifists are turning into that violent by proxy mother, increasingly inclined towards a kind of machismo, though sadly an impotent one, looking helplessly on as our country drives closer to the edge of the cliff (one of my actual recurring dreams is that I suddenly have to drive a car from the back seat because it turns out there’s no one at the wheel). The recent stirrings of dissent, despair and even some contempt for Obama, coming from his supporters (cf. recent columns by Michael Tomasky, Cornell West, Maureen Dowd, Judith Levine, and Frank Rich) have a tragic undercurrent, which is that the alternatives to Obama are so awful that even if we ever get past the dark political period that seems to await us, there may be no more of what was good about the American ideal left to salvage. As my mother also and presciently said to me one day, in about her 94th year, turning to me from watching the network news, “So, in America, soon it will be the corporations and the slaves.” (and, mind you, that was before “Citizens United” granted human being status to corporations). Meanwhile, we say “Man up” and “grow a pair.” Like bystanders in a classic movie fight scene, liberals and progressives have been hopping up and down helplessly punching the air and yelling out to the protagonist, “hit ’em with your left, kid.”

In any classic movie fight scene, you wait with increasing anticipation for the good guy to stop turning the other cheek, rise up, and sock that bully. The final fight scene in Howard Hawks’ 1948 Western film Red River is as good as any model for this classic wish-fulfillment fantasy. Montgomery Clift has rebelled against his tyrannical and wrong-headed adoptive father, John Wayne, by choosing an untested though ultimately successful path to get their cattle from their ranch in Texas to Abilene, Kansas, where the railroad to Eastern markets is and they can sell their stock for a good price. Once Clift has mutinied, taking the cattle and most of the crew with him on his pioneer journey, Wayne’s character pursues him relentlessly, vowing to kill him when he catches up with him. The movie is so entertaining that the underlying flaw in the basic plot doesn’t reveal itself until just after Clift finally strikes back, after taking a beating as Wayne matches verbal insult to punch by punch, “you’re soft, won’t anything make a man out of you.”

But, as the infuriated heroine realizes, Wayne never meant to kill Clift, because as anyone can see, they “love each other.” The Republicans don’t love President Obama, but that is not our problem. Our problem is that they don’t just hate him, they hate us, they hate children, women, sick people, old people, they have stated clearly that it is their goal that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall perish from this earth.

We’d like to see Obama get that “OK I’ve had it” glint in his eye and come out swinging, but Hawks, in effect, has pulled his punches, and the softness of this ending to what had seemed like a powerful Oedipal match, makes Red River less relevant to our current political dilemma than another Western movie: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, (1962) John Ford‘s late, 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.

For those who haven’t seen the movie, the action of the movie takes place in an extended flashback bracketed by scenes taking place in the “present,” (around 1910) and with the most crucial scene in the movie replayed as yet another flashback within the central flashback. The protagonists of the film are Senator Ransom “Ranse” Stoddard (played by James Stewart), who, when we first encounter him is the most distinguished politician in his state returning unexpectedly and mysteriously, with his wife Hallie (Vera Miles), apparently after many years, to Shinbone, the small town in the West where his legendary political career began. The central part of the plot takes place in the past, about thirty or forty years before, and centers around a few characters: Stoddard, a young lawyer come from the East to set up a law practice who, before his stagecoach even gets to town, is robbed and beaten, and his law books ripped up by Liberty Valance (played by Lee Marvin). In Shinbone, Stoddard is befriended by Hallie, then an illiterate waitress working for a kindly immigrant couple running the restaurant, by the local newspaper editor-publisher and town drunk Dutton Peabody, and, in an uneasy alliance, by Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), a local rancher and rival for Hallie’s affections. Doniphon is always accompanied by his black farmhand, Pompey (Woody Strode) in a kind of dignified adult version of the “Come on back to the raft ag’in, Huck Honey” classic former master/former slave homosocial partnership (I’m being snarky, but Strode gives a wonderful performance, and the sparely choreographed working and affective part of this relationship gives the movie a compelling sub-texture, as is so often the case in American mythologies).

The town is terrorized by Liberty Valance, a sociopathic, brutally clever, almost ironically self-aware robber, thug, and murderer operating as a tool for the unseen cattle barons who want to prevent statehood for this Western frontier territory so that they can retain free rein over the land and its resources. He has no respect for the written law although, significantly, he recognizes that the Eastern “dude” with the law books represents the most significant threat to his power. Valance lives by “the law of the West,” the gun. He stands between Shinbone and civilization. Something has to be done about Liberty Valance.

At first glance, and as has been noted by everyone who has written about it, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a strange movie in its formal qualities and its casting. It was shot in black and white long after even Ford himself, a master of black and white cinematography in his earlier great movies, including such black and white film masterpieces as Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, and The Grapes of Wrath, had turned to color in films such as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Searchers. And even the black and white, except for a few night scenes, is much less rich and velvety than in Ford’s earlier films. To the contrary, it’s bleached out and anti-aesthetic, like a dried-out scrap of bone in the desert. The movie was shot on the cheap, using the back lot set of a television Western program, so the West as a physical space whose empty vastness was once one of the principle protagonists of many Ford movies, notably in his spectacular usages of Monument Valley, is barely present as subject and the action takes place almost as a play on sets reduced to the bare minimum of what each signifies: the saloon, the newspaper office, the restaurant. The sets and props are both extremely accurate to the simplicity of the time–the dishwashing and cooking implements in the restaurant’s kitchen for example–but at the same time they harken back to the flimsy movie sets of the earliest silent Westerns, when the West already being mythified was only a decade or two in the past. Yet this reductiveness is a strength, as the simplicity of the sets has a strangely convincing verisimilitude, and the theatrical structure–scene, scene, scene–keeps you focused on the story.

Ford knowingly relies on every trope and cliché of Western movies and of movies themselves, many of which he had helped create, from the stock cast of characters including stereotypes of major immigrant groups, from the Irish to the Scandinavian, to the classic flashback introduced by a puff of cigarette smoke. He relishes using our familiarity with these tropes to further his morality play, stripped to its essence by the deliberate plainness of the sets, the reduction in visual pleasure, the simplicity of the narrative. (One way of looking at this film is that it’s a good example the “old age style,” a phenomenon used to distinguish formal characteristic of late works by Titian, Rembrandt, or Cézanne, where the artist just wants to get to the heart of the matter and sloughs off all the fine finish he had needed to impress his audience in earlier years).

The quality of a morality play is exemplified and emphasized by the patent discordance between the ages of the two male stars and that of the characters they play. Characters in their early 20s are here played by actors in their 50s, and it shows. Their age cannot be masked by makeup. Whatever efforts made to do so only draw attention to the actors’ actual age. Yet this strange casting choice is extremely important to the greatness of the film.

First, because you can’t get swept up in their beauty or sexuality, you cannot be seduced and enter into a sutured Hollywood fantasy, so you are constantly returned to the meaning of the story.

Second, and most importantly, it’s precisely because each actor is who he is and brings to his part his own history as a representation of American character that they give the movie its unique gravitas. In fact in writing this I have been debating a formal question: do I refer to each character by his name in the movie, or by his name as actor. The idealism and incorruptibility of “Ransom Stoddard” is embedded in Stewart’s iconic role as the idealistic young Senator in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and other movies like You Can’t Take It With You, from his pre-WWII career, particularly his Frank Capra movies, yet also inflected with the toughness and desperation he brought to his own post-war Westerns such as The Naked Spur. In those movies his character becomes much more similar to many of Wayne’s characters: in Wayne’s many roles as the man of the West, he is the good guy but also often with an edge, some kind of an outlaw, beginning with the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach, a charming and good fellow but bent on revenge of his murdered brother or Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, another vengeful figure whose dogged pursuit of a kind of brutal justice is effective but founded on a bitter racism. And even though at the end of The Searchers he does not carry out the ultimate act of racial “cleansing” he has threatened throughout, he still cannot be contained in civil society. His character in Valance is named Tom Doniphon, but he is all of the characters Wayne had played to that moment, thus he is the construct “John Wayne,” a complex collaborative artwork created by Ford and Wayne himself over nearly 25 years. So these men, their faces and histories, are part of the meaning of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

The history of John Ford’s movies is also part of the meaning. For instance, Valance’s first appearance is a fascinating contrast to Wayne’s legendary first appearance, almost a materialization, in Stagecoach: in that earlier Ford movie, the stagecoach, whose occupants the audience has been introduced to so that we are already invested in their voyage, speeds across the desert in daylight until it is brought to a sudden stop as, simultaneously, the camera suddenly swoops in to the indescribably open and surprised expression of John Wayne. I’ve watched this scene dozens of times, but the speed and complexity of camera shots defies my ability to describe technically what Ford is doing. I do know that my parents saw Stagecoach in Paris just at the beginning of the Second World War, and they thought it was marvelous, the whole sweep of it and I think too the basic good and open nature of Wayne’s character represented America to them, a place they would soon set out to reach, over a year and a half exodus across occupied France where they became the endangered travelers in the stagecoach, trying to get to Lordsburg.

In Valance, on the other hand, the stagecoach unceremoniously careens recklessly out of nowhere down a narrow road at night until it is brought to halt by a gang of masked men. “Stand and Deliver,” declares the gang’s leader, Valance. Everything that was thrilling, open, bright, optimistic in Ford’s earlier version of the west is dark, cramped, pessimistic in the later version, though I think the movies are necessary companions for a full understanding of the dream of America.

The movie’s anchor scenes are of the killing of Liberty Valance, seen twice, first as Stoddard experienced it, and later as it is replayed from the point of view of Wayne. This is not a Rashomon situation, this is not about the basic fungibility of truth. Here there is the first mise en scène (the “legend”) which you as the viewer experience essentially as it is experienced by Stewart, that is as reality from the point of view of a protagonist you trust. You are definitely the spectator watching something unfold on a stage before you, carefully and excruciatingly choreographed, to emphasize Stewart’s terror and his bravery as, already shot in the right arm, he reaches trembling for his gun with his left hand.

Then, later, there is the second mise en scène, (the truth), where the same exact events are re-shot from a greater distance, and a different angle, as experienced by Wayne. Just as there is ultimately no doubt of which version is true, this dual iteration of staging is precise, concise, it is even didactic, like a textbook of basic film staging, reverse shots, reverse angles, reshooting the same staging from a different place in the proscenium theater that we occupy. What in the first iteration was lived by Stewart, in the second becomes a spectacle in which Wayne and “Pompey,” as unseen spectators in the dark affect the outcome without being seen before they vanish into the night, having played their parts with physical economy and precision.

So what does The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance have to tell us about our current predicament? You have the skinny young lawyer from the “East”–Obama the law professor and community activist from Chicago up against John McCain, the rich guy from the West and the many thuggish representatives of the unseen cattle-barons (The Koch brothers, FOX News, et al). The nitty gritty of politics take up a big portion of the movie. There is a great scene in which the townsmen assemble in the saloon to chose a delegate to the statehood convention. The cattle barons who are against statehood are represented by Liberty Valance, who nominates himself as delegate to the convention even though he is not a resident of the town–Marvin’s line reading of Valance’s retort–“I live where I hang my hat”–is particularly wonderful. The cattle barons’ interests are also promoted by a Major Cassius Starbuckle, a grandstanding politician who with florid oratory vilifies Stoddard as a killer and puts up for nomination a fellow in a fancy white suit who gallops onto the stage on a white horse (Texas Governor Rick Perry, anyone?). The Starbuckle character is every political snake oil salesman, shill for the Man, and was already so familiar a type that at the time the movie was made this type had been already been satirized for years in Looney Tunes cartoons as “Foghorn Leghorn,” always getting lost in vain and aimless oratory. We know these clowns, we’re still surrounded by them, the Glenn Becks and all the others.

The crux and the complexity of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is that “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” actually didn’t shoot Liberty Valance but his distinguished political career is built on the public perception that he did. At first glance this seems like a perfect example of the political mendacity and inauthencity we’ve become all too cynical about and most critical analyses of the film focus on the line spoke by the journalist who having heard the whole story of what really happened, destroys his notes, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” That has become the take-away quote from the movie.

Another common view is that “The hero doesn’t win; the winner isn’t heroic,” except for one thing: the movie’s crystal clear demonstration that, though his career is built on a “lie” or a “legend,” Ransom Stoddard is a courageous man, maybe even more courageous than the man who actually did do the shooting (or, more accurately, the effective shooting). It is the question of courage and the dilemma of how best to achieve justice that are more interesting to consider given the current political moment.

The man of words, the figure Dowd refers to as the “egghead,” (a misnomer for Stoddard–the definition of the egghead, a term used to describe Adlai Stevenson, the thinking man’s Democrat in the early 1950s, is the intellectual as pathologically indecisive–but Stoddard does decide), the representative of the law does give in to the need for the gun, even though the gun is old, he can’t shoot straight, he is alone, and he’s wearing an apron to the gun fight–indeed, significantly through much of the movie, we’ve seen him in this humiliatingly feminized (dis)guise: literally he is wearing an apron because he’s taken a job washing dishes at the restaurant. But he does stand up for his beliefs, he does risk his life, or is prepared to sacrifice it, because of his belief in the law.

There is a very important scene in the movie which shows us what Ransom Stoddard truly offers the country: in a shabby one-room schoolhouse he has welcomed a significantly diverse student body, Mexican children, girls, adults, even the black man Pompey is allowed to attend. Here, significantly, Stoddard wears a suit, the mantle of his future authority. And the subject beyond the a b c s, is democracy. “We’ve begun the school by studying about our country and how it is governed.” The Scandinavian restaurant owner continues, “It’s a Republic which is a state in which the people are the boss, that means us, and if the big shots in Washington don’t do what we want, by golly we don’t vote for them no more–anymore, anymore.”

Later, there are two key instances where Stoddard is also shown to be willing to walk away from a political career, first because he is disgusted that it would come to him because of a violent act, second when he discovers it would be based on a lie, and, third, when he tells the whole story to a journalist.

The man who did Shoot Liberty Valance may also be courageous but his motivation is basically apolitical, he did it because the woman he loves asked him to help, and his act is cold blooded, the recognition of a necessity, the solution, the radical social remedy to evil, as he himself acknowledges, it was “cold-blooded murder but I can live with it.” Yet he loses everything: by letting Stewart get the credit, he loses his girl to Stewart, and by helping create a civilized country based on law, he loses his individualistic identity. We know what happened to Stewart, his resume is repeated by various characters, Governor, Senator, Ambassador to Britain, Senator again, possible Vice-Presidential candidate. Wayne’s life in the years that passed between the central flashback and the “present” are blank. He lived out his life until he died. That’s it. And the country has becomes the United States of America, for better or worse–the film’s conclusion is pretty ambivalent about that.

Of course the polished politician we see at the beginning of the movie, in the frame taking place in the “present,” may well have made many compromises of these noble ideals of democracy in his noted career, no doubt smoothly negotiating in favor of the forces of “civilization,” symbolized by churches, schools, and the well-functioning industrial development symbolized by the railroad.

Stoddard does state that he wants to accomplish change without violence, he hates the violence everyone else espouses. But in the end he stand up with a gun. And in the end someone does shoot Liberty Valance. The movie doesn’t seriously question the fact that Valance must be eliminated for civilization to thrive. But one thing is for sure, it took two men to kill Liberty Valance, the man of law, “the egghead,” and the man of the West, the individualist who is basically good but is willing to use a gun if necessary because he doesn’t care about the consequences, he has no ambition to protect. But the point is, again, the man of law in the end is willing to sacrifice ambition to what he feels is the greater good, the elimination of evil and the success of a “good” government. It’s a stark moral, the ends did justify the means. It’s also an American story, revolutions including the Civil Rights movement succeeding through the actions and words of men of law and men of extreme speech and action, working together if sometimes oppositionally to achieve a goal that may be as tempered as the settling of the West but better than the alternative. While saying that the end does justify the means, the film acknowledges how much this is intellectually a contradictory and morally a deeply troubling position, and that the history of America is based on such demonic bargains.

Meanwhile we’re surrounded by Liberty Valances and the cattle barons they stand in for. For whatever the reasons armchair psychoanalysts can come up with, Obama just has not seemed to adapt to the territory he finds himself in, he’s a man always dressed for yesterday’s weather. His compulsive policy of conciliation with a vengeful and single-minded enemy have been a tragically unsuccessful strategy.

Or, he won’t fight back, and one can only conclude that he won’t fight back because he doesn’t believe in what the people who elected him want him to fight for. In his September 8th speech, he appeared to get tough, to man up. The next week it was announced that his plan for economic relief would be paid for by cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. It is hard at this late date to take the “manned-up” rhetoric as anything but just words. We aren’t convinced he actually believes in the New Deal principles that made the American Century great and livable for a wide proportion of America. Meanwhile wealth disparity and the poverty rate in America increase shamefully while Americans, not given much of an alternative, turn to the quasi-fascist, anti-government, pro-super capitalism rhetoricians of the extreme right. They are our Liberty Valances. They are working for our cattle barons. Someone has to “kill them,” but with belief in ideas, not guns.

In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, in one scene instead of a whole movie like High Noon, Ford economically telegraphs that Ransom Stoddard is alone against Liberty Valance, as two fellows just walk away from him, leaving him standing, in his apron. But yesterday a bunch of people tried to occupy Wall Street. Maybe that is what the people can and must do, not just stand behind Obama, but push him from behind and go ahead of him, until, if only for political advantage, he won’t just “man up,” but belief up. Stand and deliver. Somebody has to shoot Liberty Valance.