Category Archives: art

Good night and

The firing–whatever you want to call it — of Keith Olbermann–matters. Many people find/found him abrasive, he was/is often self-important and pompous, sure, he has a big personality, he’s loud, though with a kind of self-aware panache, a flip side that suggested that something like real (as opposed to luridly fake, cf. Glenn Beck) humility lurked under the braggadoccio. In a corporate media atmosphere that masks unity behind the fake appearance of multiplicity of choices (all those hundreds of cable channels owned by about four corporations) and a political atmosphere where recent opinion is that Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan might not be electable now because they would seem too liberal, every voice that stands for what I consider closer to sanity and fact matters. Even whatever voice passes for “liberal” or “left” opposition within a corporate media structure matters, especially in a time where it does not seem that, in most places or at least certainly not in the United States, any movement is placing its energy into an expansively active criticality of power–as people are trapped by a pervasive acceptance of the idea that the “sixties failed” while struggling to survive in the decaying economies at least of the West in an overstretched damaged global ecology, and a global society so much closer to the regime of complicity and passivity described in The Society of the Spectacle than when Guy Debord first envisioned it.

Starting during the Bush administration, appalled by the politics and overwhelmed by political loneliness, I got through, I get through, each day by listening to and watching a series of what passes for alternative political voices in America today. A typical day, compressing the years’ changing programming into a continuum, would go like this: start the day listening to our mealy mouthed version of the BBC, that is to say NPR’s Morning Edition, I changed NPR outlets mid-stream to avoid the god-awful show The Takeaway, its tempo and superficiality raises my blood pressure–I rely on NPR but I know that, especially ever since September 11, it’s constantly pulling its punches, scared to seem unpatriotic, then an hour of the BBC World Service– gives you a sense of what it’s like to listen to short-wave radio while in an occupied country–then for a brief period in time I’d switch to the wonderful early months of Air America, starting with Rachel Maddow, Lizz Winstead, and Chuck D‘s show “Unfiltered”, followed by Al Franken with Katherine Lanpher–later in the day I would rewatch the Franken show on Sundance Channel, thanks to the generosity and political conscience of Robert Redford–it was so much fun to see the skits after having heard them, there was one which involved a plot by Dick Cheney and Karen Hughes to kill off Bill Clinton by encouraging him to eat himself to death, a GOP version of La Grande Bouffe, on TV there were Al and Katherine cracking each other up while literally stuffing their faces with goulash and bread at top speed while getting their lines out, with the waiter played by George Soros (can’t find a link, sorry, Senator Al Franken wonderful though he has been so far in the Senate given his lack of seniority, has probably been busy getting rid of as much of his comedian past as possible though some shows are available on Amazon and itunes), oh the sheer joy of those shows!

Meanwhile I’d check into dailykos, read The New York Times, I saved the November 22, 2004 issue of The Nation published after the Gore election in case such publications would soon be eliminated ( I still have it because you never know), then in the evening check into Keith Olbermann (see his Special Comment from 2006 and “Mr. President, YOU Are a Terrorist” from February 14, 2008) followed in later years by Rachel Maddow, then Jon Stewart and later The Colbert Report, and once a week I’d bask in the intelligence, information, and reason combined with a gently expressed sense of outrage offered by Bill Moyers and his panelists, alas a necessary person, I guess it was too much to ask that he work forever, ending the day Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman, again watching a radio show on TV on the CUNY channel. I admire Amy Goodman tremendously, and I love to watch her face because I imagine she looks like a Jane Eyre for our time, with a kind of plain beauty of face voicing unpleasant truths no matter what. Her program is sometimes like bitter medicine, sometimes the sheer awfulness and painful intractability of some of the political situations she reports on is just too much, but nevertheless, so important.

[In case anyone is wondering by now, I’m a news junky and I do watch a lot of TV, but I did manage to paint, teach, edit one book and write another while all this was going on!] But I’m not sure people remember anymore what the Bush years were like: every day brought another assault on something crucial, from the birds and the trees they nest in, to the air we breathe, to our rights as citizens, to war crimes committed in our name, the abominations and threats came so fast and furious that it paralyzed organized citizen response while the opposition cowered at the fear of being seen as disloyal (Hillary Clinton might be President today if she had stood up against the war early, but she was afraid to). So in that atmosphere these islands of satire, these bits of fact instead of fiction, even these big macho egos deciding to make their names by attacking power instead of sucking up to it, they made a difference. Given recent developments in the US, it might seem that these interventions ultimately failed, but oh God would it have been better without them? If you have Glenn Beck practically putting out a fatwah against a 78 year old professor of sociology through an insane process of guilt by association (see January 14, 2011 Frances Fox Piven interviewed on Democracy Now!), then you need Keith Olbermann and Jon Stewart doing their best to attack and mock him, even if their efforts don’t knock the guy off the air (but I do think Beck ought to watch Network, the end might give him pause).

These voices–the humor, the facts, the satire,the outrage–these individuals acted as safe houses on the difficult journey through each day lived in a corporate, militarist, and incredibly stupid semi-fascist state (hey I’m not a TV pundit or a politician & I haven’t signed any pledge to affect civility in order to mask lack of true discourse or incredible mendacity and cruelty of certain political positions, there is fascism with a mustache, and there’s fascism with a smiley face, not exactly the same of course, but plenty that is reprehensible). The worst thing was the sense of isolation in a sea of conformity in the United States of FOX News. During the Bush years even my dear students would look at me with puzzled concern as I expressed my fears that our democracy was endangered–maybe they were right to just try to live their own lives and not look out further than each individual life’s problems and joys while I worried, but oh what a world that is building.

I think those media voices in concert helped bring about the temporary defeat of the Bush party. I wish they had joined together more often but each one did something, took some chink out of the wall, opened a tiny peep hole into another viewpoint, pointed out one item of clothing the emperor might be lacking. Alas only the temporary defeat, so that the voices continue to be necessary and new ones are needed. So out goes Keith Olbermann, with a curious choice of story by James Thurber to read at the end, “The Scotty Who Knew Too Much.”

I gather he was considered a thorn in the corporate ass despite the money and attention he brought to the corporation in question. Well, if he was, is that a bad thing? I worry about the people that aren’t. What do you have to make nice or keep silent about to keep being liked? They say nice guys finish last, but in America certainly and maybe most of the world, what is scarier is that happy talking or bland-seeming people often finish first.

While working on a syllabus on a winter’s afternoon

Turn on the radio, or rather listen online to “A Beautiful Symphony of Brotherhood: A Musical Journey in the Life of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” broadcast today on WNYC in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. I listened twice, once as I did the work I describe below, and again as I wrote this brief text.

This afternoon I took advantage of the quiet of this day, a National holiday in the cold of mid-winter, to scan reading material for my spring semester seminar. I’m beginning with a reading of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, because it remains a fascinatingly structured, astonishingly prescient, predictive book, giving a portrait of a society that in my memory was not as true when he wrote it as it is now. But from my experience the book can leave students with a sense of hopelessness, since it provides no solutions, there is no exit, resistance is futile. So this semester I want to explore an idea I have had for some time: the applicability of the concept of non-violence to art. I’m certainly not looking to propose pretty peaceful meditative pictures. Rather I want to bring attention to the model of patricidal Oedipal rebellion as central to many avant-garde gestures. I want to look to principles of non-violence as a political strategy to think of ways of existing in without slavishly adhering to the values of a market-driven, spectacular, declarative art economy. So today I was scanning some of the last chapters of Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life.

In one chapter, de Certeau reiterates some of Debord’s vision of a society written by occulted forces that negate individual agency.

This institution of the real no longer has its own proper place, neither seat not ex cathedra authority. An anonymous code, information innervates and saturates the body politic. From morning to night, narrations constantly haunt streets and buildings. They articulate our existences by teaching us what they must be. They “cover the event,” that is to say, they make our legends (legenda, what is to be read and said) out of it….These narrations have the twofold and strange power of transforming seeing into believing and of fabricating realities out of appearances. A double reversal. On the one hand, the modern age, which first arose out of a methodic effort of observation and accuracy that struggled against credulity and based itself on a contract between the seen and the real, now transforms this relation and offers to sight precisely what must be believed. Fiction defines the field, the status, and the objects of vision. The media, advertising, and political representation all function in this way. (de Certeau, 186-7).

But de Certeau’s theme is that there exists a knowledge that precedes theory and which retains voice even when speech attempts to subsume it. It is the same knowledge that causes the city dweller to inscribe living patterns of usage onto the grid of the planned city.

In turn, the “voice” will also insinuate itself into the text as a mark or a trace, an effect of a metonymy of the body … a transitory fugitive, an indiscreet ghost, a “pagan” or “wild” reminiscence in the scriptural economy, a disturbing sound from a a different tradition, and a pre-text for interminable interpretive productions.

On the radio, “A Beautiful Symphony of Brotherhood: A Musical Journey in the Life of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” is an incredibly informative and moving education in history through music, and in the power that art can have in a political movement. There are so many miraculous passages in this program: the sweet contralto and slow tempo of Marian Anderson singing “My Country ’tis of Thee” on Eastern Sunday April 9th, 1939 to an integrated crowd of 75,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, the deep uncanny voice of Odetta singing in the same spot twenty-four years later at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963 to a crowd of 300,000. “Oh Freedom, Oh Freedom, Oh Freedom over me, and before I’ll be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave, And go home to my Lord and be free.”

As I scan some pages from Mark Kurlansky’s Non-Violence: The History of A Dangerous Idea, so dangerous there is no proactive word for it, only a word defined by the primacy of its opposite, violence, I listen to the music that Dr. King listened to on the car radio as he drove alone to Montgomery, Alabama for his first job interview: Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor: Regnava del silencio,” which, he later wrote, transformed the monotous drive into a radiant experience. On one of the pages I scan for my students, Gandhi is quoted as writing: “Given a just cause, capacity for endless suffering, and avoidance of violence, victory is certain.” “Capacity for endless suffering” is key in my thoughts here, not to focus on the meditative as it sometimes appears in contemporary culture, as a panacea, but on the power of grief when it is expressed as does Mahalia Jackson, heard in this program singing at King’s funeral, “Precious Lord, take my hand,” his favorite song, which he had once requested be sung at his funeral. Every word, every syllable, every sound has meaning, deep meaning. Here is voice, both literal and metaphorical. It was listening to such voices and such “voice” when I grew up that made me believe in the power of art, in the power of language (for the good not only the bad or the stupid), in criticism too and even outrage, but never cynicism.

Anselm Kiefer@Larry Gagosian: Last Century in Berlin

News flash: either the staff of Gagosian Gallery hasn’t been keeping up with the recent controversy over the removal of David Wojnarowicz’s video Fire in My Belly from the exhibition Hide/Seek at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian, including the spectacle of another peaceful art activist being ejected and “banned for life” from the Smithsonian for quietly showing David Wojnarowicz’s video on his ipad [this story has since been amended to his being banned for 12 months only], or the Nostalgie de la Third Reich atmosphere of Anselm Kiefer’s show “Next Year in Jerusalem” had rubbed off on them when on December 18th they reacted to a few activists whose activism consisted of standing around in black T-shirts with “Next Year in Jerusalem” printed on them in English, Hebrew, and Arabic, taking pictures of themselves in front of the work, & quietly answering questions by to the harmlessly peaceful protest by having NYPD officers forcibly eject them from the gallery.

Protest at Gagosian Gallery, photo contained in an email by Laurie Arbeiter

I had wavered about whether I wanted to bother writing about the Kiefer show. The show closed last week and that would have been that until this morning when I read an email forwarded to me by artist Joyce Kozloff from one of the protesters, anti-war activist Laurie Arbeiter.

From her email:

In response to the title of the exhibition and the content of the work a small group of artists and activists decided to view the show wearing a shirt with the words Next Year In Jerusalem in the three languages Arabic, Hebrew and English. We spent about one to two hours looking at the exhibition, mainly individually, silently and respectfully with full consideration of others viewing the exhibition. We simply wore the words on our shirts and did not engage with anyone unless they struck up a conversation with us. A number of people asked some of us about the meaning of the message, gave positive feedback, showed interest, asked where they could get the shirts or occasionally questioned our political attitude toward Israel and Palestine. … We never had an incident, raised our voices, disrupted anyone, and were not approached by the multitudes of guards that were there. … We thought we were in an arena of ideas and that words on a t-shirt without any other provocation would be an acceptable method of free expression in response to Kiefer’s work. We were so very wrong.

After about one and a half hours, half of our group left and four of us remained to continue to view the show. … Suddenly, out of nowhere, two representatives from the gallery approached us. One of them asked who our leader was. It was an odd question and I responded that we had no leader. … She then said that she had to ask us to leave the gallery. … At that point, the gallery employee ordered the guards, the same ones that had observed us for close to two hours with no incident, to surround us and escort us out. I told her that there was no reason to have us removed. The gallery employee explained that they had received complaints about the words on our shirt, which were causing confusion, and therefore we would have to leave. We then decided to cover the language even though it was very disturbing to do so and we did this reluctantly, understanding the profound irony against the back-drop of the Kiefer exhibition which embodies a life’s work supposedly concerned with the horrors of state-sponsored repression, the brutality of occupation, racism, abuse of power, fascism and the consequences of forgetting history, not allowing for keen reflection in regard to current strains of unchecked power. I mentioned to the gallery employees that I thought we were in the realm of ideas inside the gallery space to which she replied that it was a private gallery in the business of selling art and that they wanted us to leave. On principle, something no longer that valued or defended in the public or private sector, we stayed, acting again in no way that could be deemed disruptive. The guards went back to their corners and we went back to our conversation. We thought that the incident was over. To all our shock, several minutes later the police arrived and completely disrupting the calm atmosphere in the gallery began to order us to leave and threatened us with arrest for trespassing.

Within minutes after the police arrived an incident unfolded that could only be described as brutal. Upon reflection, it was like a staged scene, depicting what happens when the very forces Kiefer warns us about go unchecked. The police came on very strong and at first directed their warning at us, overseen by the gallery personnel, who pointed us out to them. … The police officer was very rude and belligerent to her. All this unfolded rather quickly, within seconds and suddenly I saw him grab her forcefully, pinching the muscle of her arm as he began to drag her from the gallery. It was shocking as she was screaming that she was being hurt and yet he wouldn’t remove his grip. I heard her cry in pain all the way out as she was being removed to the entrance. …. She was badly bruised and needed medical attention and was taken to a hospital emergency room.

These are the facts of my experience as it unfolded. It was and still is traumatizing to recount and to attempt to grapple with all the implications of these events unfolding against the backdrop of the Anselm Kiefer exhibition. … Our peaceful engagement with the Kiefer exhibition was not a demonstration that day in the gallery but the gallery deserves now to be shown what a real demonstration looks like in response to what it did.

Incredibly, Renée Monrose, an artist who recently received a Masters in Divinity from the The Union Theological Seminary last spring and is now in the Seminary’s Master of Sacred Theology program, witnessed a similar incident at the gallery later the same day, December 18, and tried at some risk to intervene. It seems like Larry Gagosian’s minions are wearing brown shirts these days. They’ve lost all sense of proportion, common sense, and humanity. As Bradley Rubenstein aptly titled his critical review of the exhibition, “Achtung, Baby.”

From an email from Monrose:

I witnessed a very disturbing police incident tonight at Gagosian Gallery on W. 24th Street. It was about 5PM and a woman who was apparently being followed by guards–I don’t know why–suddenly turned on one and yelled, “Leave me alone! I just want to see the show.” I was about 10 feet away from her. She lost it and made a scene for a minute or so and then stormed out of the room. I thought she had left but when I went the reception area a few minutes later to get a catalog, she was down on the floor in the hallway, handcuffed and surrounded by at least 5 policemen. I protested and asked why in the world they need to handcuff and surround a 100lb woman who was obviously distraught (I don’t know that she was “disturbed” only that she was angry and, at that point, terrified.) They blew me off and told me to get away. I then went to the reception and complained to them. I was told by one of the young women “We have had other incidents” as if that explained the treatment of this women who was handcuffed on the floor about 20 feet away from her. The police then took the handcuffed woman into the vestibule near the front door, put her up against the wall and stood in a huddle around her. She was crying and shaking. Again, four or five of them were standing around her in a semi-circle. When I walked up to the police she recognized me from earlier and asked me to help her. I again protested and demanded to know why they were treating her this way. I was told, “She refused to leave.” … Eventually EMS came and strapped her to a gurney. She was put in the ambulance with 4 police officers standing in the doorway of the ambulance as if she were Son of Sam. When I asked an officer why they needed an army to deal with an emotionally upset women who was already handcuffed and strapped down, he told me “She might have boyfriends with guns in cars.” (this was after about 15 minutes-or more– of them having her on the floor or against the wall.) When I asked why, if they were concerned about men in cars with guns, they were all huddled around the back door of the ambulance. He said, “We have to protect the EMS guys.”!!! … The gallery was about to close and the only people on the street were the ones coming out of Gagosian. … I was the only one who confronted the police, although an elderly German man said to me as they were pulling out, “They were outrageous!” As the show inside was the Anselm Kiefer exhibit, the irony and scariness of the incident were impossible to ignore.

I filed a complaint online with the police but didn’t have any badge numbers. I haven’t received any confirmation.

I’ve never felt I needed to write about Anselm Kiefer’s work. His paintings always struck me as glum in terms of color and stolidly competent yet strangely inert in terms of composition. I found their hugeness and sheer weight oppressive physically and ideologically. If anything I found the fact that MoMA had to reinforce its walls for the 1988-89 exhibition Anselm Kiefer to support the weight of huge, often lead-covered canvases more significant than the paintings themselves.

My writing is propelled by my need to express views I hold but that I find are not being expressed elsewhere. So I didn’t need to write about Kiefer because he was so effectively critiqued by art historians such as Benjamin Buchloh, in the service of the privileging of Gerhardt Richter’s address of German history and of an overarching critique of Neo-Expressionist painting and painting itself (in the by now familiar ongoing counterpoint to his support of Richter):

On that level, the question of the possibility of the representation of German history is already infinitely more complicated in Richter’s work than in Kiefer’s since, unlike Kiefer, Richter questions even painting’s access t0 and capacity for representing historical experience). Secondly, mediation occurs at the level of painterly execution, since Kiefer’s work claims access to German Expressionist painting as the means of executing his own project of historical representation. Richter, on the other hand, emphasizes both the degree to which history, if it is accessible at all, is mediated by photographic images, and also how not just the construction of historical memory but its very conception are dependent on photographic representation. … (Buchloh, Art Since 1900, p.614).

Anselm Kiefer is only the most prominent of the German artists who have modeled themselves on concepts that Habermas has defined as “traditional identity.” In the course of their restoration of these concepts, these artists have produced a type of work…that can best be described as polit-kitsch. (Buchloh, “A Note on Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977,” October, Vol.48, Spring 1989, 100, n. 5)

But this recent show really bugged me, from the minute I walked through the gallery’s outer doors.

Above the entrance of a vast space occupied by a German were letters written in black script. In transliterated Hebrew and English, they spelled out “Next Year in Jerusalem,” the concluding line of the Passover Haggadah.

Next Year in Jerusalem? My hackles were officially raised even before I turned the corner and entered the occupied territory of Gagosian Gallery.

I still don’t really want to write about Kiefer, so here is just a précis. The installation reminded me of nothing so much as Bloomingdales’s cosmetics floor if its Christmas decorations had a Holocaust theme. The vast gallery space was packed to the gills and to the ceiling with huge lead-cased glass vitrines filled with burnt out WWII-era jet engines, Joseph Beuys-like oversized grey garments, a life-size wedding dress stabbed by shards of glass — a feminist art trope, long-since appropriated by male artists like Robert Gober — tree branches painted white which artist Joy Garnett described perfectly as being “worthy of the decor at an Anthropologie chain.” The installation also included a full-sized lead bunker containing among other things one of Kiefer’s early Nazi salute performance /photo-documentation works cited by some as examplary of the anti-monumentalism considered most suitably expressive of his post-war generation’s critique of Germany’s past, now set into a great big clunky monumental “anti-monument.” Through the vitrines one could see the crowds of other visitors to the gallery milling about while strangely obscured from view were characteristically enormous paintings so that these appeared almost as afterthoughts to the installation.

I thought about what title I’d give an essay about this show. “Arbeit Macht Gelt” seemed appropriate, in keeping with the association between the text at the entry of the show with the text on the metal entry gate to Auschwitz, “Arbeit Macht Frei,” and in keeping also with the price of the work. Overheard at the show: a youngish woman “gallerina” in mini-skirted business suit with high heels and information in hand about the work was shepherding an apparently potential buyer around. Fixing my eye away from them as if in deep contemplation of the work, I leaned into the conversation: gallerina to woman taping info into a purple Blackberry (looked as if they were talking about one of the vitrines): “$600,000.”

But maybe “Gelt Macht Arbeit” might be more correct. The work was a broadcast for how much it cost to produce it.

My friend Susan Bee had overheard the first part of their conversation, where the woman with Blackberry was apparently just learning about Kiefer and asked if he was Jewish — a reasonable inference from a show titled “Next Year in Jerusalem.”

It was in fact the nexus of aesthetic cliches in the work, its scale, size, & the obvious expense of production, shipping, and installation, with the arrogation of Judaism that I found outrageous. Big boring art, OK; incredibly expensive to produce art, whatever; huge prices, well, good work if you can get it, but the underlying positioning of Kiefer as the greatest Jewish artist of the Holocaust? That’s too much. (Though I do think it’s Mel Brooks funny that the gallery website for the exhibition has a glossary of terms including many related to Jewish religion and folklore: Gagosian Gallery as the source of a definition for Shekinah is pretty much like Madonna as a source for the Kabbalah). Thus my reasons for being incensed by the show were not exactly the same as those of the protesters, that is, Israel as a Jewish state itself engaged in political oppression, they were aesthetic and also based in my long-standing interest, rooted in my family experience (see my essay “Blurring Richter”), in how some post-War German artists (whether Richter on one side of an aesthetic/ideological divide or Kiefer on the other) somehow managed to finally win the war of eradication of Jewish subjectivity left unfinished by the Nazis.

This morning, in a kind of creepy serendipity, I noticed a link to color photographs of a Christmas celebration hosted by Adolf Hitler December 18, 1941, sixty-nine years ago to the day from the events at Gagosian. Seen in color we are so familiar with from our own experience, the Christmas decorations, albeit at Nuremberg rally scale, are more foreboding and the intense color shatters the distancing effect created by the many generations of “grey” representations that have shaped our image of the Second World War, from the accident of history that made black and white film more easily accessible and affordable than color well into the 1960s, to the reliance by Richter on grey as the emblematic color for an anti-ideological position, morally ambiguous yet also imbued by a kind of moral authenticity. In these color pictures, by klieg and candlelight, Hitler if anything looks more like his own Madame Tusseaud’s waxwork than he does in black and film still photography and film. The color both highlights a kind of artifice and reveals undercurrents of terror within the hearts of even Hitler’s most faithful soldiers.

Kiefer and Gagosian Gallery end up more Last Century in Berlin than Next Year in Jerusalem, while the color photographs of a Nazi Christmas Party in 1941 seem eerily like Today in the World.

This Past Week in Activism: Three Modest Gestures

Three modest political gestures have deeply touched me this past week:

Thursday, December 9th, in London, there was a teach-in at The National Gallery in conjunction with the street demonstrations of students protesting the tripling of educational fees by David Cameron’s government.

Teach-in about the raise in tuition fees, National Gallery, London, December 9, 2010

There is a general impression, which I often encounter among my students, that activism of the 1960s variety, including demonstrations in front of public institutions, occupations of educational and other institutions, are not effective. I am not sure that is true, but of one thing I am sure: any small engagement with the kind of political activism that brings people into a room or a public space, including the street, changes the life of the individual who participates, even if that individual does not further pursue a life of activism. You are in a room with other people, people who may think like you, people who may know more than you, people who feel passionately about things you dared not admit that you did. For a moment you are not alone. It can be stressful and confusing: you can experience some of this in play in the video clip I’ve included below, lots of people talking at the same time, a contingent atmosphere, but generally polite, good-natured, and modest, even including the behavior of the museum staff (they let it happen instead of banning everyone for life). No one on this particular clip is a great speaker, that actually makes doing something like that easier to imagine. For anyone who participated, something memorable has happened. And when I look at the picture of these people joined together in the same room with one of Manet’s four versions of The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, 1868, I am so so envious.

Edouard Manet, The Execution of Maximilian, 1867-68. Oil on canvas, 6'4"x9' 3 13/16", Collection of The National Gallery, London

The painting in the National Gallery that served as the backdrop for this week’s teach-in is the second in Manet’s series (see information about the history of the postmodern fragmentation of this work here). All the paintings of this series are big and they appear monumental, I’ve rarely been so struck and impressed by the size of art works. The modest scale of the exhibition space only enhanced this effect because the works were both monumental and intensely intimate in relation to the scale of each viewer.

This painting was included in Manet and the Execution of Maximilian, one of the best exhibitions held at MoMA. This small but intense, visually powerful, historically informative, wonderfully researched 2006 exhibition brought together Manet’s four paintings of this subject along with subsidiary paintings he painted during of the same year including his small but memorable painting of Charles Baudelaire’s funeral, along with a series of contemporaneous photographs of the execution and its aftermath, which were sources for Manet’s rendering and which included recreations, alterations, and falsifications of the actual, undocumented event, many of these by the ingenuity and dexterity of their photographic tricks and politically driven imagination anticipating Photoshop by over a hundred years. The exhibition also included a timeline of the events of the year Manet devoted to this work. Strangely relevant to ongoing discussions about political art (what is it? can art with overt political content be good art? does any so-called political art have any effect politically?) is also the fact that these works were not exhibited in Manet’s lifetime. So when I look at this picture of teh teach-in in London, with the painting providing a backdrop and visual anchor, I feel that the painting is fulfilling the role of a political art work in a way that Manet perhaps could not have anticipated when he painted it or when he put it away out of public view (in a gesture of pre-emptive self-censorship).

Meanwhile back in the States, this week saw a revival of the “culture wars” of the late 1980s, with the removal from the National Portrait Gallery of the video clip of David Wojnarowicz’s 1987 video “A Fire in My Belly.” There has been excellent coverage and commentary on this, including by Holland Cotter and Frank Rich of The New York Times, Blake Gopnik of The Washington Post, and Christopher Knight of the Los Angeles Times, as well as on art blogs such as Hyperallergic, and by Stephen Colbert on a must-see full show on art and censorship including a piece de resistance art critical analysis of Republican right wing Rep. Eric Cantor, totally brilliant because it could only be done with full knowledge and understanding of and ability to correctly use “The Language” or “Theory” but also devastatingly on target about the cliches that go with that knowledge and its vocabulary! & on Comedy Central!!!

But the gesture that most touched me was the quietest, a two-person protest that took place November 30 at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington:

This protest by Mike Blasenstein and the friend who filmed him Mike Iacovone was so simple: Blasenstein just stood there, with an ipad tied around his neck running the censored clip (best comment to this story on Hyperallergic, by Coco Lopes: “best use of an ipad ever.”) Blasenstein had explanatory flyers in his hand for anyone who might want one, which the museum security guards forced people to give back to him. Ben Davis published an interview with Blasenstein which foregrounds the spontaneity and modesty of his impulse to do this: “I just felt this is an important issue. I’m not really an artist or an activist, but when I heard that they took it down, it just seemed to send such a clear negative message. So I thought to myself, I would send my own message and bring this art back into the museum.” Could an instance of activism be any simpler?

The week ended with Senator Bernie Sander’s nearly 8 hour filibuster-like speech Friday December 10th, explaining and lambating the tax cut deal arrived at by President Obama and the Republican Party.

The speech can be seen on Senator Sander’s website as well as on C-Span. Here is a clip:

I only found out the speech was happening late in the day through comments on Facebook, I would have loved to watch it live but I watched about an hour and a half later that evening. I kept on trying to change the channel, thinking well , this is very interesting but let’s see if there’s something else on, but then going back to it: it was in its own plain spoken way, riveting. Sanders reminded me of the kind of politician I grew up witnessing: contrary to today’s cookie cutter hairdos with pre-fab talking points, you could count on a greater number of stalwart liberal figures, often speaking with emphatic local accents — Sanders is the Senator from Vermont but he’s from New York and sounds a lot like Bella Abzug to me — and they weren’t “Socialists” in those days, they weren’t “Independents,” they were in the Democratic Party, one of the reasons I’ve stated for being a “yellow dog Democrat.” It was fun and inspiring then, it was inspiring and a welcome respite now. I couldn’t help but think of what might happen if just one other Senator did this, and then one other one and then one other one, maybe pretty soon the cautious, craven and cowardly would begin to see a group to blend into and next thing you know you’d begin to have yourself a movement.

One can dream: each of these events is a drop of water in the worldwide tsunami of reactionary activism (tsunami, uh oh, cliche alert, but I’m thinking not only of the big crashing wave type of tsunami, but also the slowly inexorably rising water type that seems to have us suddenly clinging to lamp posts as our feet unexpectedly get wetter and wetter), seemingly, maybe even surely, futile for the moment, but still, are we not better off that a group of students and teachers occupied the National Gallery in front of Manet’s wonderful painting, and that two guys just decided to show up at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. and use an ipad for peacful protest, and that a United States Senator had the guts and stamina to give a speech that if people could hear it, they would be persuaded by it? Let’s say they are all dreamers and what they did won’t change any immediate policy. OK. But what a greater nightmare we’d be in if such people did not do such small gestures of activism.

“I Love You With All My Hearth”

Today, December 5, 2010, would have been my mother Resia Schor’s 100th birthday. This is not just a nostalgic realization looking back at a deep past, as it was for me in 2004 which was my father Ilya Schor‘s centennial: he had died in 1961 so forty-three years separated his death from his centennial. My mother died only four years ago, nine days before her 96th birthday. So 100 wasn’t such a stretch. But she had no wish to make it to this landmark. “God forbid!” she said when at one point I explained to her that if she lived to but also died in 2010 I wouldn’t have to pay any estate taxes (an amusing conversation in the light of this week’s disgraceful actions in Congress!). She had retained her excellent memory, her very left politics, her judgment of people unblurred by sentiment, and her courage intact, but when the encroachments of age threatened her independence and her ability to work, she had had enough. When my friend Tom Knechtel said goodbye to her after a visit to Provincetown in the summer of 2006, he said, “I hope I see you here next summer.” “I hope not,” she answered, flashing a beautiful smile.

When I began A Year of Positive Thinking I said that it posed the challenge to myself to find contemporary art that I love but that I would also write about significant artworks, films, and political actions and speech from the near and the deep past that have given me the courage to become and continue to be an artist and an activist. No artists are as important to that personal history as my parents Ilya Schor and Resia Schor.

Resia Schor, Mezuzah, 1985, silver, c.5″x4″x1″

Resia Schor, Mezuzah, 1985, detail, doors open: gouache and gold leaf on paper

When I was a teenager, my mother and I mostly lived alone together. My father had died and my sister Naomi was living away from home, at graduate school and then in Paris. Whatever the tensions that my adolescence and the grief and loss we both held inside our individual hearts imposed on us were tempered among other things by how much I loved the work in silver and gold that she had turned to in order to support my sister and me. I was a fan of her work, and I now sometimes think that if I gave her one thing it was that enthusiastic support.

In the 1950s in New York, she painted and exhibited abstract gouaches in a style reminiscent of Philip Guston. When my father died, she was fifty years old and had two daughters, eleven and seventeen years old. She had no other family. It never occurred to her to look for another man to help her support her children although it was the logical or the more traditional solution to her perilous situation. Instead, figuring that she couldn’t make a living from painting, she took up the tools of my father’s trade as a silversmith, jeweler, and creator of Judaica, transferring her abstract, modernist aesthetic from the soft medium of paint (and the arena of “high art”) to the hard medium of precious metal that challenged her forms in a more powerfully creative direction (though in the area of “craft” as defined by American art at the time).

Resia Schor, Mezuzah, 1983. White metal, Plexiglass, gouache on paper, 12″x9″

My mother was a modernist through and through, unlike my father for whom modernist abstraction was a visual language he could speak articulately but it was not his mother tongue: he had deep roots in the philosophical but also the visual traditions of Hasidic folk culture going back to the Middle Ages and it was his unusual gift to carry these into the twentieth century.

Some of my aesthetic and political point of view was formed in these early experiences of art in my home. The curious and problematic thing was that the essence of modernist abstraction was conveyed by her work, but in a form that was generally considered a lesser modality: that of small scale and craft. Yet each piece was so obviously a sculpture.

Resia Schor, Fragmented Mezuzah, 21976. Brass, Plexiglass, gouache on pape with Mezuzah text, c. 12″x6.5.” In a radical and iconoclastic geture, my mother took the mezuzah and turned it inside out, revealing and cutting into small fragments the samll talismanic text that had always been hidden and not to be touched by a woman.

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

Resia Schor, The Moon, 1967. Pendant, silver, gold, precious and semi-precious stones, c.3″x2.5″

Resia Schor, The Moon, back

When potential customers came to visit, there would be the ritual of showing the work: she would gradually open one case and soft pouch after another, unwrap little tissue paper packets, laying out gold and silver pendants and pins studded with sapphires, emeralds, and rubies, heavily sculpted silver Mezuzahs, chains whose silver and gold links and blue African blue glass beads made from ground lapis lazuli tinkled softly, and earrings made with ancient beads from “Roman excawations.” At the end of the unveiling, a profusion of treasures would cover the coffee table in our living room. I never tired of seeing the work and better yet of handling it, wearing it, sculptural, glowing, deeply satisfying as an aesthetic experience that was tactile as well as visual. Her rings in particular became part of my identity.

Resia Schor, silver and gold rings from the 1980s to the 2000s

I also loved to watch my parents at work, in the small “maid’s room” of our Upper West Side apartment. When my father was a teenager, before he went to The Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, he had been apprenticed in a kind of medieval guild practice as an engraver and goldsmith, and his gestures at work, with metal as with gouache and brush, were light and deft. My mother had watched him work, she claimed he had taught her some basic skills. After he died she took one course in soldering, but basically she taught herself to make her own work. But her body language at her work was different than his, more determined, she radiated an intense and physical absorption.

Resia Schor, soldering, summer 2002. Video still from Mira Schor, “The Tale of the Goldsmith’s Floor,” 2003

When my mother was about 8 years old, spending the summer at her grandparents’ house in a small village near Lublin, in Poland, there was a fire next door, always a dangerous event, but all the more so in a small rural community of wooden houses in the early years of the twentieth century. Left alone, as the aunt who was in charge of her ran out with her own small children, my mother decided to save the bedding, so she tied all the pillows up into a sheet, and got her bundle and herself out of the house. Later they could not untie her knot.

This story always seemed metaphoric and predictive of my mother’s strengths and abilities. She was courageous and had presence of mind: when, as she sat with my father and friends in a café in Paris in May 1940 and saw French peasants from the East pushing their belongings and their elderly relatives in wheel-barrows through the streets of Paris, with their livestock in tow, she understood that she, my father, and their friends, poor Jewish émigrés, must leave at once and so, early the next morning, they fled, with only a few lumps of sugar and a change of underwear, a day ahead of Hitler’s army.

English was the fifth language she learned, after Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew and French: when I was at summer camp, she once wrote to me “I love you with all my hearth.” One of the important images of my adolescence is of my always very elegant little mother wearing goggles, hair covered in a dirty bandana, face blackened by metal dust, carbon, and red metal polish, wielding a gas-powered torch over a gas burner on our kitchen stove to solder her large silver mezuzahs. Vulcan’s sister at a domestic forge.

The heat of that unquenchable fire inhabits a recurrent dream I have had for many years that the burners on my stove spontaneously alight and like the burning bush, the flame cannot be extinguished and the bush is not consumed.

Video still, “The Tale of the Goldsmith’s Floor.”

In a 1974 letter to his sister Janice, Jack Tworkov wrote about my mother “[…] alone in the house, always fighting loneliness, but better off than most because she has a work in hand and makes a living from it. ” (from The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov). “A work in hand,” those are powerfully meaningful words to describe her and to describe what I feel I learned from her – the importance of dedication to a self-created aesthetic task pursued in daily practice. To have a work in hand gave meaning to her life and to mine and my sister’s.