Category Archives: General

September 11 eighteen years later

I witnessed parts of what happened on September 11 with my own ears and eyes –in that order: ears>the roar of the first plane over Western Tribeca and the crash into the North Tower, then eyes>the explosion of the South Tower into a huge mushrooming cloud of flame created as I discovered later by the second plane, which, observing from the North, I did not see. At a museum with a few of my friends about a year later, seeing a film of that moment of the black plane coming out of nowhere to plow into the tower we gasped, again, as shocked, more shocked. A murder had been committed, of thousands of people, of two buildings.

Over the years new buildings have been built, trees grow, a memorial is built, the nation goes on. Buildings representing capitalism were pulverized, but the city is plagued by a proliferation of new towers celebrating oligarchy.The planes stabbed at the heart of a city yet the city appeared to heal, but the country was mortally wounded. The attack was successful. The idea of this country, the illusion of exceptionalism was murdered, with the Trump regime evidence of the pustulent unhealed wound, the orange creature that burst into corrupt being in the explosion.

The war in Iraq in particular was a sin, a giant blundering into the unleashing of a cascade of local sectarian hatreds going back centuries which we had no understanding of, couldn’t even keep straight. We have yet to atone and we no longer pay attention.

Because September 11 and the days we lived through in its immediate aftermath were so intense, I have been thinking also of how much of has happened just to my group of friends since that day–not just the normal passage of time and ageing, and the loss of aged parents, but also shocking untimely losses and devastating illnesses.

The anniversary perhaps inevitably pushes one into the gloomily elegiac, it is so easy to fall into that tone. And it is of course not all gloom and doom on any one day, friendships have endured and new ones thrive, and there come days at this time of year which are exceptionally beautiful in the clarity and beauty of the light and the temperateness of the air. Then one emails a friend and says, it’s one of those September 11 blue skies and air.

The past week the Towers of Light have been turned on and off unpredictably. Last Thursday evening I saw this view from the Upper East Side, one beam piercing a foggy sky, the other beam stuck lower in the firmament. By the time I got home only a half hour later, the sky was clear and the lights gone, the previous view a mirage.

Here is the link to the texts and photo essays about September 11 and its aftermath that I’ve written and published on A Year of Positive Thinking over the years #9/11

Watch on the Potomac

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lifetime Journey of an Artist

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

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

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

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

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

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

Initial thoughts on the Democratic Presidential Field for 2020

As the Democratic field gets more and more crowded, and trump gets more and more clinically insane and politically dangerous, the anxiety level just rises.

My initial thoughts: Any Democrat is better than any Republican at this point in time. There is a difference between the parties, even when the Democratic Party is at its most conservative. Get real: In terms of Justices, not just SCOTUS but at the level below, it is a national emergency though of course my ideal candidate would be a progressive with the ability to communicate convincingly to a wide electorate, because it is important to provide a vision different than the one that got us to being so vulnerable to the current disaster and because some truth telling is in order: sappy “all we need is love” or “this is not who we are” type statements need to be buttressed by what we are or should be: a country of immigrants that has been enriched, literally, by immigration, for example, a country that understands we exist on a small planet–basic things like that.

It goes without saying that any pandering to the trump base is out of the question from my point of view. There is much more purchase in inspiring young voters, in keeping the activists who helped create the 2018 congressional sweep interested, while giving lifelong Democratic Party voters renewed enthusiasm.

Given that, first of all I feel that anyone who would be close to 80 at the beginning of their term is simply too old physically and also in their ability to deal best with contemporary challenges, even if they are in the vanguard of old progressive politics (Sanders). Thus no country for old men right now, Sanders and Biden, NO, please please don’t run. They also are both problematic for women who for various reasons feel it’s time for a woman. They each carry baggage on that score that can’t be erased.

As a warning, I would bring up the story of Elizabeth Holzman’s 1980 campaign for the Senate:

“In the general election, Holtzman faced Republican nominee Alfonse D’Amato and incumbent Senator Jacob Javits. After losing to D’Amato in the Republican primary, Javits ran on the Liberal Party ticket. He retained his union endorsements and drew liberal and Jewish voters away from Holtzman.[ A theme of D’Amato’s campaign was that Holtzman had never voted for a Department of Defense appropriation bill in Congress.D’Amato won the election by a margin of 1%, or 81,000 votes, over Holtzman.” [from Wikipedia]

FYI: JAVITS WAS 76 AND HAD A DISTINGUISHED CAREER BEHIND HIM AS A LIBERAL REPUBLICAN WHEN HE LOST THE REPUBLICAN PRIMARY, AND AGAINST ADVICE AND PLEAS RAN A SPOILER’S RACE THAT STUCK US WITH D’AMATO FOR THREE TERMS AND DAMAGED HOLTZMAN’S NATIONAL AMBITIONS PERMANENTLY. IT WAS A TOTAL VANITY RUN AND HE MAY ALSO HAVE ALREADY BEEN SICK WITH THE MYESTHENIA GRAVIS THAT HE DIED FROM A FEW YEARS LATER. SO NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN PLEASE. **And no billionaires please.** And sorry, no Clinton, for the age and for the baggage. She won the popular vote, she would have been a decent normal president. But times change and I think some freshness is required. And practically speaking, keep in mind there are fewer financial resources for Democratic Party candidates, so vanity candidates will siphon off important resources.

Another no: please not Beto O’Rourke. I was electrified by his visits to immigration detention centers at the border in June. For the clarity and passion of his presence and his comments at that moment, I am grateful to him. I donated to his campaign, I wish he had won the Senate race in Texas. I’m even marginally interested in what he is doing right now driving around the country, but it seems more of a kind of art work, a performance piece that may develop into a mature political identity or something else. So, I don’t think so, even though he meets the longing for a Jimmy Stewart Mr. Smith Goes to Washington type of guy, a young white hope. NO, not now.

Of the candidates who have already announced, I find the three top women qualified and effective each in their own way. Compared to any Republican each would be fine. I mean, that’s not saying much since trump has buried the bar in the lower depths of hell. However here are some of my preliminary views with some reservations.

I feel that Warren, who is a good communicator and feisty in a good way, is stuck with her basic views on economics and doesn’t make the broader connection for the American people that would be so important, the link between current tax policy favoring the rich and all the other anti-middle class and poor and pro-super rich GOP policies, with the country’s inability to invest in schools, roads, new technologies. She needs her message to get bigger.

I never trust Kirsten Gillibrand–there’s her early support of the NRA, and her role in the Al Franken affair, which still rankles. But then I listen to her and she can be surprisingly effective and might have appeal with the electorate beyond New York State. I think she shouldn’t be underestimated. I also always wonder if I don’t discriminate against her because of her girlish looks and voice.

(though speaking of voice, is it too much to ask for someone who didn’t yell at us..not just Sanders and trump of course, but also Andrew Cuomo, god what a nightmare)

Kamala Harris is a strong candidate. She exudes the aura that she can do it, she can take it. She has the energy and just the requisite amount of experience and freshness. However for all that I was a bit disappointed with her in the Judiciary hearings this fall, where she would seem to be moving in for the kill and then not do it, for reasons unknown to me (for example she must have known that Kavanaugh had watched Blasey Ford’s testimony when she asked him if he had, no prosecutor would go fishing without having the info, so she got him to lie, but then didn’t tell him there was evidence he had watched. Why not? Still don’t get that). I think that Rachel Maddow picked up on her strengths and appeal when Maddow somewhat surprisingly and it seemed to me very prematurely and possibly unethically put her imprimatur on Harris’s campaign for the nomination.

Cory Booker has the best announcement video, out today, incredibly well put together. He’s likable and he’s been smart about supporting other Democrats around the country, but he seems a bit of a lightweight, and he has pro-Pharma and other reactionary history, and while I respect his privacy about his personal life, I wonder if that very discretion won’t be a liability in the glare of a national campaign.

There are a couple of other candidates or near candidates I just don’t know enough about, and then there is the one who is considering but so far holding back from announcing a run and that is Senator Amy Klobuchar. I think of her as the Angela Merkel of the field. I think her placement in the mid-West and her ability to win by huge margins in a conservative area is strong and her speech at the Kavanaugh hearings was a knock-out. I am not utterly convinced by “Minnesota nice”– I mean I think it is authentic to her but we need an avenger also–so I would hope she would show also more of the toughness of that speech and also use her Minnesota nice to move slightly to the left in terms of some policy.

Sherrod Brown is another mid-Western nice, he’s making some going to Iowa gestures, he’s OK, but I’d rather Klobuchar and she has better winning percentages.

I also think of the very talented women who are not positioned to run for President in this cycle, Stacey Abrams for example, and hope we see their candidacies in the next cycle. I hope Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez matures into a potential candidate. She’s brilliant, but she’s 29 and has been in public office for a month, let’s take a deep breath. But a Democrat has to win in 2020 for us even to think we’ll have anything like real elections in the future.

Another point: I’ve noticed on Facebook posts by men, many are happy to put together tickets where the female candidates or possible candidates (Klobuchar) are always in the VP position. I don’t see a single one of those women choosing that as a viable alternative to being a Senator. It is more the patient white man’s long game. These women are going for the top position now.

The question of who can win, winability, is misplaced: character and general affect are important certainly, but the new formula, for worse (the current occupier of the White House) or for better, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is that a candidate who is able to speak with truth and conviction about policies that maybe branded as radical can win in the current atmosphere. Be truthful and positive. And someone has to be the adult in the room.

Finally I would wish for the contemporary equivalent of Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Both were very good politicians, and/but also had good politics, good instincts, instilled enthusiasm and courage. They arose in the greatest moments of crisis in our history and were able to use both sides of their personality to bring us through. We are in another great moment of crisis. I’m not sure if any of these candidates has that inner core but all are decent enough. We’ll see. I think for someone to put themselves through such a brutal process they have to have what it takes to win, but one also hopes for a sense of destiny, not of entitlement but of generosity of spirit, something that I think Obama had and was able to exude. They have to have a personal sense of destiny that you are the one to take on the challenges of your country at that moment.

If we can’t defeat this creature from the depths of hell who has invaded our country and is destroying it daily, then fuck us.

#2020presidentialcampaign #SenatorElizabethWarren #SenatorAmyKlobuchar #SenatorCoryBooker #SenatorKamalaHarris #BernieSanders #JoeBiden #BetoORourke #RachelMaddow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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