Tag Archives: Charles Bernstein

M/E/A/N/I/N/G: The Final Issue on A Year of Positive Thinking-10

The first issue of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: A Journal of Contemporary Art Issues, was published in December 1986. M/E/A/N/I/N/G is a collaboration between two artists, Susan Bee and Mira Schor, both painters with expanded interests in writing and politics, and an extended community of artists, art critics, historians, theorists, and poets, whom we sought to engage in discourse and to give a voice to.

For our 30th anniversary and final issue, we asked some long-time contributors and some new friends to create images and write about where they place meaning today. As ever, we have encouraged artists and writers to feel free to speak to the concerns that have the most meaning to them right now.

We began on December 5 and every other day since we have posted a grouping of contributions on A Year of Positive Thinking. We thank our contributors and readers for living through this time with all of us in a spirit of impromptu improvisation and passionate care for our futures.

This is the last post of the final issue.

Susan Bee and Mira Schor

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Susan Bee

This final issue of M/E/A/N/I/N/G brings back memories of our first issue, which came out in December 1986. At that time, I was a young artist and a new mother, working at freelance jobs as an editor and graphic designer. I had a baby at home and was full of optimism. Emma was born in May of 1985 and tragically she died 23 years later in 2008. I was 33 when she was born and Mira and I started to think of starting our own arts publication.

Susan Bee, “Non Finito,” 2016. Oil on linen, 24″ x 30″.

In 1992, I had my first solo painting show, when I was 40-years-old. Now, I’m almost 65 and nearing the traditional retirement age with a 24-year-old son, Felix, and a 40-year marriage to the poet Charles Bernstein. I have been a member of the vibrant all-women artist’s collective, A.I.R. Gallery, for 20 years and will have a solo show of new paintings there in March 2017. I have been teaching, publishing artist’s books, and showing my art for many years.

This election has sent me into a tailspin. I hoped to be greeting a woman president in my lifetime, and now the possibility seems remote and I am heartbroken to be facing the next four years of this administration. As a secular Jewish feminist, artist, and professor, the future in this country that my immigrant artist parents, refugees from Berlin and Palestine, came to in 1947, looks bleaker than it did just a short time ago on Election Day. Since that day, I have been taking refuge in viewing art. Through the contemplation of art and poetry, I have been trying to escape the isolation and desolation of the present moment. I know that we need to fight on and that I need to work with my community to create a strong push back to the hatred and bigotry that surrounds us. My optimism is being sorely tested by the hatred that has been empowered in this country.

Susan Bee, “Afraid to Talk,” 2016. Oil, enamel, and sand on linen, 24″ x 30″.

Now, my 30-year editorial partnership with Mira is coming to an end. However, I have no plans to retire from art and life. I am grateful that we had the opportunity to publish over a hundred critics, poets, and artists. Hopefully, the artists, writers, and other creative spirits, who have nourished our project, M/E/A/N/I/N/G, for all these years, will continue to lead the way forward and point us to a future that will enrich us all.

November 2016

Susan Bee, “Pow,” 2014. Oil, enamel, and sand on canvas, 30″ x 24″

Mira Schor

Written during the Preoccupation: Activism, Heroism, and Art.

A week after the election, a cold heavy rain struck New York in a kind of climatic embodiment of our political shock and misery. Wearing the depressing New York winter uniform of black down coat for the first time of the season, huddled in the small doorway of a fortune teller’s establishment on Lexington Avenue, I waited for a bus and I thought about what I would write about for this final issue of M/E/A/N/I/N/G.

My first instinct was to consider the role of activism in relation to being an artist but immediately my mind made a leap from activism to heroism. In the seconds between these two words, I was in tears as two stories I had been told by my mother since my childhood sprang to mind, one of political bravery, the other of personal bravery.

Please bear with me as I retell these stories, because they frame my ideas about the role of activism and the role of art and the artist in a moment of political necessity for activism.

To begin with, the story of personal bravery: my mother was very proud of her friendship with one of the most important Jewish families in pre-war Poland, that of Rabbi Moses Schorr, a religious leader, a historian, and the first Jewish member of the Polish Senate. The Schorrs (no relation) were kind, wealthy, generous, noble in bearing and behavior. At the outbreak of WWII Rabbi Schorr fled Poland towards the East where he was captured, imprisoned, and tortured by the Russians, dying in a Russian labor camp in 1941 (for more on the relation of Russia with Germany at that time, with interesting echoes in recent weeks, see here). Rabbi Schorr’s daughters survived the war, and I knew one of them well, Fela, a beautiful, kind, imperious, and broken woman, all at once. The story I was told by my mother though I never spoke of it with Fela herself, was that Fela and her mother along with Fela’s two small sons and her small nephew, all children under the age of 10, were imprisoned by the Gestapo in France. It was announced that children who were orphans would not be deported to Auschwitz so Fela and her elderly mother determined to commit suicide. Her mother took poison and died, Fela jumped out a window but survived and was saved and sheltered by doctors until the end of the war a few months later. She and the three children in her care survived the war.

The circumstances of the story were hard to believe, because it made no sense that orphans would be spared deportation and because of the cruelty of the promise, but the randomness of genocide was embedded in my consciousness as well as the emblem of maternal courage. [This story is true, you can read more here.]

The story of political bravery was embodied for me in the name Bartoszek. Franciszek Bartoszek was a friend of my parents from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. He was a painter. And he was Polish. That is to say, he was not Jewish. This was central to the story, because that was a primary distinction my mother always made, a paradox at the center of her own patriotism. If she described someone simply as Polish she also was indicating that they were not Jewish, and it meant that Bartoszek’s bravery was motivated by more than personal survival. When my mother showed me the picture of him she always told me that he was a hero. She would tell me that he would risk his life just to bring a poor woman some small amount of butter. Her admiration for him was such that I have never been able to say his name without being overcome with tears, the emotional outlet of my more fierce and stoic mother. When I was able to research him online, the story was verified: Bartoszek was a renowned Polish patriot and hero of the Polish resistance, who died in a military action in Warsaw in 1943.

From l. to r., Ilya Schor, unknown woman, Franciszek Bartoszek, Paris, 1937.

I have photographs of him with my father. They are in a park in Paris sometime shortly before the war, most likely in 1937. The photos are very small, so I blew up a detail of one to try to decipher if one could see the courage to come in the face of the man in the time approaching the crisis. When I sent this picture to Luka Rayski, a Polish artist who translated for me a stele erected in Poland in Bartoszek’s honor, he wrote back that it was “so hard to imagine, those last pre-war years.” But I thought no, it is not hard to imagine that time. Not, I hasten to add, that I think another Holocaust is coming, yet we are in such a time, a time I call the Preoccupation.

Photo detail, Bartoszek, Paris, c. 1937; Stele installed in Czarnow in 1964: Franciszek Bartoszek, “Jacek” [code name “Jack”] Born October 27, 1910 in Pieranie, spent his youth in Czarnow, Painter, Ardent Patriot, Colonel of People’s Guard, Died fighting Hitlerist occupiers, May 15, 1943 in Warsaw.

Years ago a non-Jewish friend of mine told me that she often wondered whether people would have saved her if she was a Jew during WWII. I found this strange since she was not Jewish and did not have my family’s history of the Shoah. More importantly, I had never really asked myself that question, not only because I couldn’t bear to contemplate the answer, but mostly because I was so consumed by its corollary opposite, that is, would I have the courage to risk my life in order to save someone else or in defense of a cause? From a very early age I was totally aware that if that was the test, I would fail.

The sine qua non of resistance is that you have to be prepared to die for freedom, even though of course there is a big gap between marching on Trump Tower holding “Pussy Power” signs and prison or death.

If heroism is summoned as the ultimate necessity for freedom, nevertheless practically speaking most of us who care about what is going on are considering activism. It is quite striking how many people at all levels of society are mobilizing, from the political leaders of the state of California to artists in New York City mobilizing to provide imagery and objects for the Women’s March on D.C. and beyond.

Susan and I decided to start M/E/A/N/I/N/G in 1986, during the Reagan administration. I remember the precise moment—standing near the corner of West Broadway and Canal Street in December 1980, a month after Reagan had been elected and a few days after John Lennon had been killed—when I had realized that a switch had been flipped. Something was over. If I didn’t grasp the full import of the switch in terms of where we have arrived now, I experienced that every value I had been imbued with had just been turned upside down, including in art. The 1980s was a very contentious decade, highly polemic and divisive but perhaps because of that it was also a bracing and inspiring time during which there was a lot of activism, including responses by artists to the AIDS crisis, to urban gentrification, and to the backlash against second wave feminism. The Guerrilla Girls’ first poster appeared overnight in Soho and Tribeca in 1985, we published the first issue of M/E/A/N/I/N/G in December 1986. But despite the political polarization, looking back, no matter what happened in politics in the ’80s, I didn’t feel that the end of the world as I had known it was upon us and like Susan I had the optimism that comes from the energy of youthful mid-life and from doing something constructive. I was 36 when we started the magazine. I had been out of art school for 13 years, I had had a full-time teaching job in Canada and had given it up to move back to New York, I had had gallery representation and my first one-person shows in New York and had lost that. M/E/A/N/I/N/G opened up my community and gave me a sense of place in the art world. It has been the only sustained collaboration I have been involved with and the many things Susan and I have in common and the differences between us, as well as the small scale of our operation–two people, two issues a year during our hard copy days–all worked for me. And when we ended our print run in 1996, if anything I felt more optimistic and confident about my own life than I had when we started.

Mira Schor, “Patriotism on the Blood of Women,” 1989. Oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches.

The word of the day in the ’80s was intervention, actions specific to a moment and which did not necessarily seek to become an institution, though inevitably many cultural interventions did. I saw editing M/E/A/N/I/N/G as a kind of activism that I was able to engage in. In that spirit, our final issue is one of many artistic responses to the election and one which, as we have always tried to accomplish in M/E/A/N/I/N/G, is an open format, non-didactic environment for artists, writers, poets, art historians and critics to express their views in any cultural or personal register that means something to them, unrelated to market concerns. As we bring our project to an end after thirty years, we feel it provides one model for long-term activism within an art community. It is small potatoes in terms of major resistance to oppression but it is something that we could do then and now. It did enlarge our community and I think it meant something to the individuals we published, whether professionally or just because they were given the opportunity to think about something and express their views or tell about their work.

Mira Schor,” The Self, The Work, The World,” 2012. Oil and ink on gesso on linen, 18″x30″

My sense of necessity to understand the changes in culture in the ’80s led me to my critical writings and changed the course of my work as an artist, though my work has from the start had a political underpinning, primarily feminist. Some of my recent works have been visceral responses to the news. But I also think that other aspects of my artistic heritage and inclinations have political valence, though they might seem to be the opposite of political, that is, that the intimate, the modest, the private, though apparently recessive in a time of spectacle, can be construed as political acts. The artist is a filter between the world and the work, as I tried to indicate in a painting I did in early 2012 right after Occupy Wall Street as I was trying to diagram the place of the private artist during a political upheaval.

MIra Schor, "'Power' Figure: No Dead Enough, 2016. Ink and gesso on tracing paper, 17"x 22 1/2"

Mira Schor, “‘Power’ Figure: Not Dead Enough,” 2016. Ink and gesso on tracing paper, 17″x 22 1/2″

Since the election I’ve noticed the pleasure, indeed the gratitude people have expressed if someone shares a beautiful work of art on social media, not necessarily an outwardly political one. We recognize and value the works that use representation, figuration, and language to openly announce their political intentions, but a painting of a flower, a small abstraction, or an ancient vase can evoke as much humanity as anything more overt and the importance of such works as heroic human activity can be intense.

Susan Bee, “A Not So Still Life,” 2016. Oil, sand, and enamel on linen, 30″ x 24″

We conceived of this final issue a few days before I stood in that cold rain, during a visit right after the election to the Guggenheim museum to see the Agnes Martin exhibition. I was particularly interested in one small early painting of narrow vertical black and white lines of uneven length. In the face of the impulse, in response to the political atmosphere, for artists to start churning out Guernicas, the smallest of Martin’s abstract paintings packs as much of a punch about human endeavor and heroism as anything that would will itself to make a political statement. Though small, the painting has great tension and drama. To me it represents as much of the power of the universe as a model of the atom and it is heroic in the way that artworks can be, evidence of one individual artist’s search for perfection in a realm that seemingly has no specific utility to daily life.

Agnes Martin, Untitled, 1960. Oil on canvas, 12 x 12 inches. Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Gift of the Bayard and Harriet K. Ewing Collection

On our way up the ramp, we slipped through the keyhole-shaped door into the study library to watch two short films of interviews with Martin, filmed late in her life. It was very intimate to listen to her words in a small room. She spoke about her desire not to work from negativity, her efforts to empty her mind entirely when working, and about the role of inspiration.

mira-agnes-martin-img_3094

mira-agnes-martin-img_3095

In one film she is shown carefully applying a thin reddish pink wash to the canvas. The soothing concentration on this simple activity generated enough calm and clarity for me that suddenly the puzzle of how to celebrate the 30th anniversary of M/E/A/N/I/N/G which had eluded us earlier in the year was solved: I have a blog, we could use my blog as an initial platform for a spontaneous, short deadline, final issue. I looked at Susan and mouthed, I have an idea. So we end as we began, with a Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland “let’s put on a show” production. It is the small activism of giving a few people a place for their voice, and we are grateful to all the artists and writers who found the time to respond to our call.

***

Susan Bee and Mira Schor, M/E/A/N/I/N/G, December 1986-December 2016

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We would like to thank our many wonderful contributors to the final issue: Alexandria Smith, Altoon Sultan, Ann McCoy, Aviva Rahmani, Aziz+Cucher, Bailey Doogan, Beverly Naidus, Bradley Rubenstein, Charles Bernstein, Christen Clifford, Deborah Kass, Elaine Angelopoulos, Erica Hunt, Erik Moskowitz + Amanda Trager, Faith Wilding, Felix Bernstein and Gabe Rubin, Hermine Ford, Jennifer Bartlett, Jenny Perlin, Johanna Drucker, Joseph Nechvatal, Joy Garnett and Bill Jones, Joyce Kozloff, Judith Linhares, Julie Harrison, Kate Gilmore, Legacy Russell, Lenore Malen, LigoranoReese, Mary D. Garrard, Martha Wilson, Matthew Weinstein, Maureen Connor, Michelle Jaffé, Mimi Gross, Myrel Chernick, Nancy K. Miller, Noah Dillon, Noah Fischer, Peter Rostovsky, Rachel Owens, Rit Premnath, Robert C. Morgan, Robin Mitchell, Roger Denson, Sharon Louden, Sheila Pepe, Shirley Kaneda, Susanna Heller, Suzy Spence, Tamara Gonzalez and Chris Martin, Tatiana Istomina, Toni Simon, William Villalongo.

M/E/A/N/I/N/G: A History
We published 20 print issues biannually over ten years from 1986-1996. In 2000, M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism was published by Duke University Press. In 2002 we began to publish M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online and have published six online issues. Issue #6 is a link to the digital reissue of all of the original twenty hard copy issues of the journal. The M/E/A/N/I/N/G archive from 1986 to 2002 is in the collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

All of the installments of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: The Final Issue on A Year of Positive Thinking can be accessed by hitting the “older” button at the bottom of this post and they will be made available as a PDF on M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online.

M/E/A/N/I/N/G: The Final Issue on A Year of Positive Thinking-9

For our 30th anniversary and final issue, we have asked some long-time contributors and some new friends to create images and write about where they place meaning today. As ever, we have encouraged artists and writers to feel free to speak to the concerns that have the most meaning to them right now.

We began on December 5 and every other day since we have posted a grouping of contributions will appear on A Year of Positive Thinking. We invite you to live through this time with all of us in a spirit of impromptu improvisation and passionate care for our futures.

We have more installment, of our own thoughts at this time. But today, we take a break for a scrapbook.

Susan Bee and Mira Schor

***

From Susan Bee & Mira Schor, “Introduction,” M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism (Duke University Press, 2000):

We felt, as we consider what we should name our publication, that meaning was the concept most discredited by the market-driven postmodernism that dominated art world discourse in the 1980s. While a journal such as October has staked out its title on the ground of a specific sense of history, M/E/A/N/I/N/G announced an ethical and philosophical dimension. But the slashes (technically, virgules) that separate M from E from A from N from I from N from G not only graphically indicate our connection to the influential contemporary poetry journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, they also break up the possibilities of an uninflected metaphysical belief in meaning. We put the concept back on the table of contemporary art discourse, but with a postmodern twist.

Some background details on how the first issue of M/E/A/N/I/N/G came into being provide an example of how interventions into art discourse emerge from serendipitous sparks between personal histories and historical moments, and also of how artists, can, on a very small budget and from a space of obscurity, achieve a voice in a large, noisy art world.

The two of us first met when we were children through the acquaintance of our parents, Miriam and Sigmund Laufer and Resia and Ilya Schor, all of whom were artists and Jewish refugees from Europe who arrived in New York City in the 1940s. We met again in the late 1970s, as artists living and working in New York City.

Bee had a great deal of experience in publishing and book design. She has designed, edited, and produced many small press and commercial publications as well as having designed L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, which was co-edited by her husband Charles Bernstein. In the early 1980s, Schor had begun to write about gender representation. In the fall of 1986, our disgust with the increasingly overhyped art scene was the final spur to publishing a journal. Over lunch near our studios in Tribeca, we just said, “let’s do it,” not unlike Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, deciding “let’s put on a show.”

Mira and Susan in Provincetown, MA, at St. Mary of the Harbor’s Beach, 1984.

Mira and Susan, with issue #5, spring 1990, in the apartment of Mira’s mother Resia, New York City

Susan and Mira, photo by Sarah Wells, 1991

We held a party to celebrate our final print issue, it was on Mira’s birthday, June 1, 1996. Here are some of our friends and contributors from the first ten years of M/E/A/N/I/N/G.

l. to r., Martha Wilson, Carolee Schneemann, and Emma Amos, M/E/A/N/I/N/G party June 1996.

l. to r., NIna Felshin, Maureen Connor, and Emily Chen, M/E/A/N/I/N/G party June 1996

l. to r., Nina Felshin, Maureen Connor, and Emily Cheng, M/E/A/N/I/N/G party June 1996

Carolee Schneemann and David Humphrey, June 1996.

Brad Freeman and Johanna Drucker, 1996.

Rudy Burckhardt and Charles Bernstein, M/E/A/N/I/N/G party June 1996

David Diao and Mimi Gross, M/E/A/N/I/N/G party June 1996

Susan and Mira, M/E/A/N/I/N/G party June 1996

We had a reception at Accola Griefen Gallery in New York December 15, 2011, to celebrate the 25th Anniversary issue of M/E/A/N/I/N/G:

Mira and Susan, photo ©)Lawrence Schwarzwald

Mira and Susan, photo © Lawrence Schwartzwald

l. to r.,Tom McEvilley, Jerry Rothenberg, and Charles Bernstein, M/E/A/N/I/N/G 25th Anniversary party at Accola Griefen Gallery, December 15, 2011

l. to r.,Thomas McEvilley, Jerome Rothenberg, and Charles Bernstein, M/E/A/N/I/N/G 25th Anniversary party at Accola Griefen Gallery, December 15, 2011, photo ©Lawrence Schwartzwald

Bradley Rubenstein and Joan Waltemath, M/E/A/N/I/N/G 25th Anniversary party at Accola Griefen Gallery December 15, 2011, photo ©Lawrence Schwartzwald

Reception for 25th anniversary issue of M/E/A/N/I/N/G, Accola Griefen Gallery, NYC, with Kat Griefen, Kriten Accola, Jackie Brookner, Bob Berlind, Toni Simon, Lenore Malen, Nancy Princenthal, and more, December 15, 2011

Reception for 25th anniversary issue of M/E/A/N/I/N/G, Accola Griefen Gallery, Susan Bee and Mira Schor, with Kat Griefen, Kristen Accola, Mary Lucier, Jackie Brookner, Bob Berlind, Judith Linhares, Nancy Princenthal, Lenore Malen, Bradley Rubenstein, Hermine Ford, and more, December 15, 2011, photo ©Lawrence Schwartzwald

Time passes, but friendships and community continue.

From l. to r., Johanna Drucker, Susan Bee, Mimi Gross, and Mira Schor at the opening of “Views and Vignettes: The Work of Miriam Laufer,” Susan’s mother, at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, August 11, 2016.

from l. to r., Mimi Gross, Susan Bee, and Mira Schor, at the opening of their show “Three Friends,” at Tim’s Used Books, Provincetown, August 19, 2016.

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One more installment of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: The Final Issue on A Year of Positive Thinking will appear here this week with statements by Susan Bee and Mira Schor.

M/E/A/N/I/N/G: The Final Issue on A Year of Positive Thinking-1

We published 20 issues biannually over ten years from 1986-1996. In 2000, M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism was published by Duke University Press. In 2002 we began to publish M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online and have published six online issues. Issue #6 is a link to the digital reissue of all of the original twenty hard copy issues of the journal. The M/E/A/N/I/N/G archive from 1986 to 2002 is in the collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

Our 25th anniversary issue came out in November 2011, sparked by the transformative moment of Occupy Wall Street. During the past year, we considered marking the 30th anniversary of our collaborative project by publishing a final issue in hard copy, a format we still cherish. Entropy and life intervened. Now, in the wake of the recent election, when the optimism of Occupy is dramatically reversed, we have decided to produce our final issue as a series of posts on A Year of Positive Thinking. Subsequently all the material will be permanently posted and archived on the M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online site.

We have asked some long-time contributors and some new friends to create images and write about where they place meaning today, as we stand weeks before the official inauguration of the right-wing government takeover that has so many of us depressed, terrified, grieving, angry, and trying to figure out what activism we can engage in and how we can balance our dedication to our art with our existence as citizens, local and global. In keeping with the contingency of the time, they have chosen to submit a text, a poem, an image or video clip, a painting, drawing, photograph, or collage, that expresses their views, desires, fears, and thoughts at this time. Hopefully, something that will burrow into people’s consciousness, appeal to their humor, educate, enrage, or inspire.

Because we have always focused our publication on a broad range of issues deeply relevant to the arts community, and because this is our final issue, we also have welcomed reflections on the impact of our entire project over thirty years, including our forums on meaning, on motherhood and art, on racism, on feminism, on resistance, on collaboration, on privacy, on trauma, and on art making over a lifetime from youth to older age. As ever, we have encouraged artists and writers to feel free to speak to the concerns that have the most meaning to them right now.

Every other day from December 5 until we are done, a grouping of contributions will appear on A Year of Positive Thinking. We invite you to live through this time with all of us in a spirit of impromptu improvisation and passionate care for our futures.

Susan Bee and Mira Schor

Charles Bernstein: For M/E/A/N/I/N/G

bernstein-fire-and-ice

Charles Bernstein’s Pitch of Poetry, new essays, was published in 2016 by the University of Chicago Press. His most recent book of poems is Recalculating (Chicago, 2013). In 2010, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems. Bernstein is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is the director of PennSound. More info here. Bernstein’s “For M/E/A/N/I/N/G,” about the crisis in art criticism in the mid-80s, was the first essay in the first issue of M/E/A/N/I/N/G.

Johanna Drucker: Past Optimism and Illusions of Agency

The optimism of M/E/A/N/I/N/G was almost assumed, beginning as it did with the initial force of the Women’s Movement behind us, chronologically speaking. The stage had been set by the (truly) courageous work of Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer, and the other women who had confronted the patriarchal culture directly, demanding fundamental rights. I was not one of those women marching in the 1970s, and the systematic consciousness-raising that had to proceed through the culture had its effect on me only slowly. One of the myths of artistic identity was exceptionalism. Somehow one would find one’s way on account of it, be exempt as well as distinct, and thus transcend the social processes of oppression or exclusion. Naiveté takes many forms. That was mine. But the shared illusion was optimism about agency—as if social forces could be detourned, contravened, or transcended through self-willed action, individual or collective. Our belief was founded on the notion that barriers and obstacles could be identified and addressed through activism. Our concept of agency was instrumental. We believed that focused and directed activity could have an effect. We even saw those effects in legislation and Supreme Court rulings.

Why did we imagine, then, that progress would always be forward in its drives? That battles once won would not have to be fought again? That was where we missed a deeper historical and cultural understanding. The asymmetries of gender are real. If we look globally, and across diverse areas of cultural life—medicine, education, health, civil rights, and financial opportunity—the right to self-determination is still far from guaranteed. Even in our own highly privileged environments, the asymmetries operate every day to position women differently from male colleagues at the same level of accomplishment, stature, and age. The means by which these symptomatic realities are enacted are not themselves fully apparent.

In the recent election, which will mark a major turning point in the history of the West, not just America as a failed experiment in maintaining the elements of society required for a viable social contract, we see how far we have not come. Not only because we did not elect a woman president, but because the rhetoric of misogyny, the backlash against women’s rights, and most fundamentally, rights over our bodies, is so stridently angry. Optimism is gone, at least for now, and the elegy to optimism must give rise to activism and support for the generations ahead. We know that, and yet, these moments have the feel of real tragedy, the broken figures of characters caught in the inevitability of forces against which we had thought we had some power.

Now we need to recognize that social forces have their own agency, own capacity for repressive and backlash actions. We who have so long critiqued Reason should not be surprised when it does not prevail. Our charge is to model our understanding of the workings of the social world differently than in the Newtonian mechanics of the past. The concept of agency has to be re-conceptualized within the forces of occulted and intractable conditions, as a systemic complexity to which we are subject, not merely—or even—self-directed participants. Illusions about agency make its actualization elusive. Much work lies ahead. M/E/A/N/I/N/G provided a start point, but now, with checks and impasses, the work to be done is less clear perhaps than it was when the struggles seemed identifiable and lines of conflict were able to be drawn with some certainty.

Johanna Drucker is an artist and writer known for her typographic work, innovative writing, and interest in the visual dimensions of language and knowledge. She has written and published widely on topics related to contemporary art, digital media, and aesthetics and is currently the Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. Drucker’s text, “LES IMMATERIAUX: Long-term Effects of the Exhibition” appeared in the first issue of M/E/A/N/I/N/G.

Sharon Louden—Artists: Calling for a Mandate

Oceti Sakowin Camp, Standing Rock Reservation, North Dakota on Thanksgiving Day, November 24, 2016.

As I write this essay on a plane from Minneapolis to Miami, I am looking forward to seeing all kinds of art this week. I carry with me the memories of my time with the incredible people I met at Oceti Sakowin Camp, Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota last week. Hyperallergic editor Hrag Vartanian had the idea to visit Standing Rock over the Thanksgiving holiday. We (with Veken Gueyikian and Vinson Valega) were there to support the water protectors, talk with artists, and stand in solidarity at the front lines of demonstrations against the Dakota Access Pipeline. My perspective is one from an artist embraced in the strong and always welcoming artists’ community which I found at Standing Rock.

Artist Yatika Starr Fields (second from the left near his painting) poses with admirers of his work at Oceti Sakowin Camp, North Dakota.

Entering the camp, I thought there may be some resistance to our visit. I couldn’t be more wrong about that initial trepidation. The actions and conversations that took place at the camp were coming from a peaceful, loving place. What the police and military were doing was not. They were systematically and aggressively taking human rights away from Native Americans.

As artists, some (if not most) of us have been misunderstood and not accepted most of our lives. And often times, we are censored. What I learned at Standing Rock was a reaffirmation of the strength of our community. Given our current political climate, there is a clear urgency to preserve creativity as a human right. Thus, I’m calling for a mandate that all artists share their wealth.

What does it mean to share “wealth” while so many of us are struggling? As artists, we are privileged and have a tremendous amount of assets that we often do not recognize. These assets include managing and bouncing back from failure, naturally creating things from nothing and sharing our most intimate truth in the way we know how. And we do it well by sharing it with others, in exhibitions, performances, or just in simple conversation. By showing up and being present in any situation, we become sources of validation for those seeking creativity. Because we carry so many assets within us, we can create opportunities for our fellow artists and the general public.

Our visit to Standing Rock reinforced that there will inevitably be human rights violations under a Trump presidency. We have a responsibility to our fellow artists to share every opportunity that is received. If you have an exhibition, why not suggest others to show with you? If you receive a grant, perhaps use the profits to create a project with others. If you can write about another artist’s work, do it and circulate it widely. If you can hire artists, pay them a living wage. Refer artists to others who can open doors for them or simply inquire about their work, which can go a long way. I know this fluid practice will be an example for others to be able to speak freely in a compromised society.

Surrounded by capitalism at the fairs and away from the kindness and strength of the Native artists in North Dakota, I’m reminded that anywhere there is creativity, it must be recognized. If all of us shared each other’s work, inevitably doors will open. At the end of the day, it’s the natural assets that all artists embody that will further our growth no matter what obstacles are put in front of us. This is an opportunity to use our power, which should never be underestimated.

Oceti Sakowin Camp, Standing Rock Reservation, North Dakota, the day after Thanksgiving, November 25, 2016.

Sharon Louden, “Windows” (detail) aluminum and steel screws, dimensions variable, at the Tweed Museum of Art, Duluth, MN.

Sharon Louden, “Windows” (detail) 2015. Aluminum and steel screws, dimensions variable, at the Tweed Museum of Art, Duluth, MN.

Sharon Louden is an artist, advocate for artists and editor of Living and Sustaining a Creative Life books.

Tatiana Istomina: Some thoughts on fear and permanence

It is hard for me personally to come to terms with the new American reality. Having lived in this country for thirteen years, I developed a sincere trust in the American democratic system and a belief that, despite many drawbacks, it continues to sustain basic ethical values. Such belief does not come easy to someone who, like I, was born in the Soviet Union and came of age at the start of Putin’s rule in the post-Soviet Russia. Lately I have found myself reverting to my Russian habits of coping with a horrible political climate – staying away from politically-oriented social media, avoiding reading or watching news, mentally blocking all thought about future, etc. It is easy to dismiss such an attitude as defeatist. However, for millions of people around the world it ensures their ability to go on with their lives despite the daily feelings of dread, depression or imminent danger. They learn to direct their energy away from active social or political engagement – which in many countries is pointless and mortally dangerous – to cultivating personal relationships, building families, cooperating on local projects, writing poetry or making art – in short, creating alternative worlds to their abhorrent reality. Such work needs to go on even in the darkest of times, to sustain the seeds of possible futures for when the society is ready to change. It is a quiet work, and the results may be difficult to detect, but this makes it all the more necessary. Perhaps it is not accidental that in Russian language, “to be silent” is an active verb.

Over the past three years I have worked on a project that used drawing and storytelling to explore various concepts of danger and fearfulness in American society. I invited different people to tell me a “scary” story about anything that concerned them in their lives or the life of the society, and to draw in response to another person’s narrative. I then reworked the stories and drawings into short films and released them online. The stories of many participants expressed not only their personal anxieties, but also the collective fears caused by major social and political problems in the country. As a result, the collection of “Scary Story” films has become a reflection of the psychological landscape of contemporary America, with its racial and economic tensions and polarized opinions on issues such as climate change, women’s rights, gun control, etc.

The video excerpt below may well be symptomatic of the mood of deep anxiety and uncertainty that has pervaded the country in recent years. “A happy guy’s story” narrated by James Biderman, with drawings by Barbara Westermann, was recorded in 2014, and released in 2015. More videos and information about Scary Stories may be found on the project’s website.

Tatiana Istomina is a Russian-born artist based in New York; she works with painting, drawing and video. She is also an art critic writing for several online and paper publications and for her blog, Metaleptic.

Toni Simon

Exhale the finite glow of our forgotten planet. If only we had a parachute of elastic carbon to forestall its demise.

To be without a backdrop when there’s no curtain, that’s the imitation. Too elusive to be apprehended by pursuing parables and forestalled by that very wicket that we tripped over to begin with.

We are back at the start with only a cart and a wheel.

toni-simon-earth_stars72

Toni Simon is a multimedia artist living in Brooklyn. Her illustrated book of prose poetry Earth After Earth was published by Lunar Chandelier Press in 2012. She is collaborating on a literary/visual project entitled Dear Air with poet Joanna Fuhrman.

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Further installments of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: The Final Issue on A Year of Positive Thinking will appear here every other day. Contributors will include Alexandria Smith, Altoon Sultan, Ann McCoy, Aviva Rahmani, Aziz+Cucher, Bailey Doogan, Beverly Naidus, Bradley Rubenstein, Christen Clifford, Deborah Kass, Erica Hunt, Faith Wilding, Hermine Ford, Jennifer Bartlett, Jenny Perlin, Joseph Nechvatal, Joy Garnett and Bill Jones, Joyce Kozloff, Judith Linhares, Kat Griefen, Kate Gilmore, Legacy Russell, Lenore Malen, Mary Garrard, Martha Wilson, Maureen Connor, Michelle Jaffé, Mimi Gross, Myrel Chernick, Noah Dillon, Noah Fischer, Peter Rostovsky, LigoranoReese, Rachel Owens, Rit Premnath, Robert C. Morgan, Robin Mitchell, Roger Denson, Sheila Pepe, Shirley Kaneda, Susanna Heller, Suzy Spence, Tamara Gonzalez and Chris Martin, Faith Wilding, William Villalongo, Susan Bee, Mira Schor, and more. If you are interested in this series and don’t want to miss any of it, please subscribe to A Year of Positive Thinking during this period, by clicking on subscribe at the upper right of the blog online, making sure to verify your email when prompted.