History connects the dots of our identity, and our identity was all but obliterated. Our land was taken, our language was forbidden. Our stories, our history, were almost forgotten. What land, language, and identity remains is derived from our cultural and historic sites . . . . Sites of cultural and historic significance are important to us because they are a spiritual connection to our ancestors. Even if we do not have access to all such sites, their existence perpetuates the connection. When such a site is destroyed, the connection is lost.
-Chairman Dave Archambault, II, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe
***
The minute when temperatures dropped last week I went for a bit of gallery hopping, early enough in the day that they were all empty. Nothing much to report until I entered Russo Lee Gallery, drawn by Ghosts in the Machine, an exhibition title that spiked my interest. I associate that phrase with British philosopher Gilbert Ryle who coined it to describe the mind/body dualism of Descartes and subsequent philosophers. Ryle picked apart the notion, held since Descartes’ time, that the mind is separable from the body (the ghost and the machine, respectively.) Why would an artist be interested in tackling a controversy that has been long since settled in psychological science? Maybe an allusion to the connection between materials used and concepts expressed?
I was way off – what else is new. The show’s title refers to a recruiting video from the U.S. military to attract attention to its psychological operations division. Watch it here, the selling of psychological warfare is perturbing, to say the least. Creepy, more likely.
According to native-American artist Ka’ila Farrell-Smith (Klamath/Modoc), the art work on view is conceptually linked to he surveillance state, one that uses all kinds of control mechanisms to pursue its goals, including squashing resistance to the extraction and transportation of fossil fuels and other minerals desired by industry. A deeper window into her reasoning can be found on her website in a letter to Sen. Jeff Merkley that outlines her stand as an activist as well as an artist.
Ka’ila Farrell-Smith Ghosts in the Machine at Russo Lee Gallery
Looking at her work at Russo Lee Gallery, I was taken by multiple aspects of the gray scale paintings. Some interesting visuals, some probing conceptual issues, and some imporrtant questions raised by her exposition. Visuals first: the 21 or so paintings of this body of work use repeat patterns, created by a constrained range of colors and found objects used as stencils that anchor the gaze. They have sharply defined contours and a lot of contrast that the eye is drawn to, in juxtaposition to the hazy, floating color fields that are sprayed and enhance a sense of depth, with occasional hand-drawn patterns alleviating the impact of rigid man-made machinery. They all superficially resemble each other and it takes a while for the variability underneath to emerge – I’ll get back to why that might matter in just a bit.
They also exhibit hints of pink here and there, flags of resilience in a black and white world, beautifully arranged. One of the stencils is amorphous enough that it could be a more biological form, rather than the strict geometry of circles and grids, alluding to the ghost perhaps, and assigned a central role in the smaller paintings.
Ka’ila Farrell-Smith Ghosts in the Machine 006 (2022-2023) Northern Paiute lithium topsoil, acrylics, aerosols, and graphite on panel.
Before you learn even more, these paintings do capture a sense of unease, increased by the disorientation introduced by the many overlapping layers, creating fragmented space. This apprehension is growing when you realize that the pigments are augmented by lithium-infused earth that the artist collected in her travels along the Oregon border and Nevada, site of the struggle over one of the largest lithium mines in this country.
Under the Trump administration, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management fast-tracked and approved Lithium Nevada Corp.’s new mine at Thacker Pass (Peehee Mu’Huh) near the Oregon border, 200 miles northeast of Reno, NV, and close to the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Indian Reservation. The Biden Administration has given its support for the extraction project, a cornerstone of its clean energy plans to combat climate change. Mining at Thacker Pass would provide lithium for more than 1.5 million electric vehicles per year for 40 years, claims the company.
Conservationists and adjacent tribal nations have gone to court against the project, on grounds of destroyed habitat for imperiled sage grouse, pronghorn antelope and other species in violation of environmental laws and fearing catastrophic groundwater pollution. In addition, the mine will destroy lands sacred to tribal members, site of a massacre in 1865 that killed many of their ancestors. A month ago, on July 17, 2023, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave the final green light for Lithium Nevada Corp. to go forward with construction, ignoring the claims and concerns of the people most affected by the rupture in the land, ruling against their interests.
Ka’ila Farrell-Smith Ghosts in the Machine 004/019 (2022-2023) Northern Paiute lithium topsoil, acrylics, aerosols, and graphite on panel. Detail on Left.
Ka’ila Farrell-Smith Ghosts in the Machine 003 (2022-2023) Northern Paiute lithium topsoil, acrylics, aerosols, and graphite on panel.
Some of Farrell-Smith’s paintings allude to this concrete situation, with the chemical notation for lithium – LI – in some of them, or the native-American name for Thacker Pass found in others (Peehee Mu’Huh). But the work, for me, poses a larger question, or actually two of them. For one, why has the U.S. not adjusted its mining law from 1872, a law that precluded options for environmental protection needs or negotiating Indian interests. Secondly, and difficult to answer, what do you do if the overall imperative for societies to combat the effects of the climate crisis conflicts with the needs and demands of some of its constituent groups, continuing a historic pattern of violating their rights?
Here are some facts of the legal history (I am summarizing what I learned here.) Mineral exploration on public lands is governed by the General Mining Law of 1872, which makes “all valuable mineral deposits” in public lands “free and open to exploration.” It used to be gold and silver mining that polluted water and destroyed the land. Now companies are after the so-called “green” metals, lithium, cobalt, copper and rare earth elements used in electric vehicles and other clean energy applications. And of course the return to visions of nuclear power has uranium miners surface again.
Ka’ila Farrell-Smith Ghosts in the Machine 020 (2022-2023) Northern Paiute lithium topsoil, acrylics, aerosols, and graphite on panel.
The law still allows claimants to pay an annual maintenance fee of $165 per claim in order to keep it active. Claimants – mostly multination corporation – can pull unlimited quantities of minerals from their claims without paying a cent of royalties to the minerals’ actual owner, the American public. The law contains no environmental provisions and no reclamation requirements, so corporations can simply walk away from their mines once they’re no longer profitable, leaving the rest of us to pay for Superfund clean-ups. Here are the numbers:
11.36 million Acres of public land staked with active mining claims at the end of the 2022 fiscal year. This is a 932,000-acre increase from the previous year.
228,696 Number of active mining claims covering nearly 6 million acres of federal land in Nevada at the end of FY 2021.
267,535 Number of active mining claims on federal land in Nevada as of June 12, 2023, an increase of nearly 40,000 in just 18 months.
13 Minimum number of active mining claims staked within Bears Ears National Monument since 2016. These claims were located either in the months just before the national monument was established, or after it had been shrunk by then-President Donald Trump but before President Joe Biden restored the boundaries. National monument status bars new mining claims, but does not affect existing ones like these.
$34.4 billion Value of non-fuel mineral production in 2019 on all lands in 12 Western states.
Unknown Amount of that mineral production extracted from federal lands. The number is unknown because federal agencies do not track production. Earthworks, a mining watchdog group, has estimated that $2 billion to $3 billion worth of minerals is extracted from public lands annually.
12.5% to 18.75% Royalty rate on oil, natural gas and coal extracted from public lands.
$14.8 billion Royalties paid on oil and gas production from federal lands in 2022.
$0 Royalties paid on hardrock minerals extracted from mining claims on public land, including copper, gold, silver, lithium, uranium and various “green metals,” between 1872 and 2023.
SOURCES: Bureau of Land Management, Government Accountability Office, Congressional Research Service, Earthworks, Center for American Progress
Note that about 75% of all lithium deposits are on or near tribal land. The conundrum is, of course, that not only the financial goals of the mining operations once again subjugates native-American interests. For me the bigger question is how do you weigh a planet’s need to get away from fossil fuel consumption against the clear damages done to tribal rights? Particularly when it is not even clear how much electric cars are really a net improvement for the environment, given the issues of water consumption during battery production and the lack of safe disposal strategies. Or how much the concept of “let’s build electric cars” distracts from the needs to fundamentally curb driving and flying and transporting goods long distance or stop producing unnecessary consumer goods en masse?
Ka’ila Farrell-Smith Ghosts in the Machine Details from various exhibits (2022-2023) Northern Paiute lithium topsoil, acrylics, aerosols, and graphite on panel.
The International Institute for Sustainable Development stated last year: “Lands inhabited by Indigenous Peoples contain 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity… Many Indigenous Peoples are at the frontlines of resisting the drivers of the global environmental crisis. Yet, international and national policies and laws do not recognize and support their collective rights.”
In our own country, those laws hark back to the Supreme Court’s adoption of the Doctrine of Discovery in 1873, in a case, Johnson v. M’Intosh, where it was decided that Tribal Nations could no longer claim legal title to their own lands as their “rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, [were] necessarily diminished.” Natives could not be left “in possession of their country” because they were “fierce savages whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest.” As a result, “[t]o leave them in possession of their country, was to leave the country a wilderness”—that is, land that is not commercially exploited or colonially conquered in the name of what was then viewed to be American progress.(Ref.) This is still standing law. Some environmental laws started to emerge in the 1970s and have managed to improve the protection of endangered species, with endangerment or extinction measurable consequences of mining. These laws, however, have not managed to include into their canon the inherent sovereign right of Tribal Nations to protect the lands that contain their sacred sites and the remains of the relatives. These are intangible, cultural values that were simply not taken seriously enough to be fought for by non-tribal movements.
Ka’ila Farrell-Smith Ghosts in the Machine Left to Right 009/010/017 (2022-2023) Northern Paiute lithium topsoil, acrylics, aerosols, and graphite on panel.
How, then, is the disturbance of sacred ancestral land and defiance of cultural and religious traditions, all in the name of resource extraction to further a “green” agenda (and the profits from it,) in any way different from traditional colonial exploits? I had mentioned at the beginning that Farrell-Smiths paintings superficially resemble each other quite a bit given the constrained set of colors and stencils. I feel that that in itself is a perfect metaphor for what has been done to indigenous interests: over and over and over again we see the same pattern of usurping land and harming cultural or historic sites, with slightly shifting justifications for the destruction of tribal sovereignty. Then it was the Doctrine of Discovery aimed to ban “savages” and “heathens” from standing in the way of “progress,” now it is the dire need for combating climate catastrophe on the backs of those who were perennial stewards of the land to begin with. What gives?
The work is up until the beginning of September – check it out!
We are 5,000, here in this little corner of the city. How many are we in all the cities of the world? All of us, our eyes fixed on death. How terrifying is the face of Fascism For them, blood is a medal, carnage is a heroic gesture.
Song, I cannot sing you well When I must sing out of fear. When I am dying of fright. When I find myself in these endless moments. Where silence and cries are the echoes of my song.
Lines written by Chilean artist and political activist Victor Jara before being tortured, his hands chopped with an axe, and murdered by Pinochet’s military henchmen in September 1973 at a stadium holding thousands of people rounded up by the Junta, his body thrown out into the streets of Santiago.
***
I spent several weeks in Chile some 18 months after that fateful date, traveling from Bolivia through the breathtaking, stark beauty of the Atacama desert of the North with its abandoned nitrate – and open-pit copper mines monopolized by British and later American capital. I stayed in Santiago for a while, where bullet holes remained in plain, demonstrative view, riddling the presidential palace, La Moneda, where the democratically elected, socialist President Salvador Allende had been killed during Pinochet’s Coup d’Etat. I knew of the violence of the new regime, fully supported by American industrial giant I.T.T. and the CIA (U.S. banks also extended more than $150‐million in short‐term credits to Chile and the Pentagon sold it 52 jet fighter and combat support planes in those 18 months,) but had no clue to its extent. Today’s officially recognized number of victims of the Junta, people killed, tortured or imprisoned for political reasons, is 40,018. That might not even account for the many “disappeared,” thrown out of helicopters into the sea. Military officers responsible for Jara’s murder were finally sentenced to 15 years in prison, in 2018, almost half a century later. Slow moving wheels of justice and all that. Barely anyone talked to me in 1975, much less about politics, the country seemed frozen in shock or fear and a nightly curfew was still in place.
Jorge Tacla Injury Report/ Informe de lesions, HD film 4:25 (2016 – 2023) Courtesy of Cristin Tierney Gallery
Although the days of the Junta are over, Chile is currently under duress in other ways, equally threatening to its population, particular the working class and the indigenous folks exposed to the consequences of mining. A United Nations report from two months ago states that Chile faces a daunting series of inter-connected environmental crises that violate human rights, including the fundamental right to live in a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. The country is particularly exposed to the effects of the climate crisis, among the 20 nations with the highest level of water stress in the world. Droughts and water pollution around lithium mining are intense, the latter a major export and subject to fierce struggles over ownership, bringing an unprecedented 1.5 million people out into the streets to protest for environmental justice 4 years ago.
All this as an introduction to Chilean artist Jorge Tacla and his work (his list of many achievements found in the link), currently presented at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts, in partnership with Converge 45. The local arts organization, comprised of art professionals and business leaders, starts its Biennial officially on August 24, 2023. Planned are 15 exhibitions by international and American artists across multiple venues, tackling, as the organizers put it, “how art interacts with global power shifts in contemporary society, including how art is at the vanguard of societal redefinition and shifts towards more participatory culture.” (Watch for more reviews by various writers on ArtsWatch in weeks to come, covering the full spectrum of the shows.) The list of artist names – I have obviously not yet seen much of the work itself for the upcoming Biennial – suggests a surprising and challenging curation by art critic and author Christian Viveros-Fauné.
I. Jorge Tacla: Stagings/Escenarios.
At a time when the wagons are circled, and exclusionary nationalism (and worse ideological forces) once again raise their ugly head in so many of the countries we thought were steadfast democracies, a transnational approach to art is certainly important. Knowledge of an artist’s background, temporally, geographically and culturally, might help us to gain a greater understanding if not appreciation of his work, surely affected by specific experiential pressures. Tacla came of age in Chile during the time of the military coup and left the country for the United States in 1981, these days sharing his time between New York City and Santiago, Chile. Add to that Syrian and Palestinian ancestry, peoples exposed to inordinate amounts of suffering and oppression across their histories, a heightened sensibility for abuses of power and the consequences of displacement are to be expected. That sensibility indeed influenced the contents of his work that I encountered at The Reser, an exhibition titled Stagings/Escenarios.
There are three exhibits on view, a video, Injury Report/ Informe de lesions, that relates to the book burnings by the Chilean Junta, a timely reminder for us in our own country that the step from banning to burning is but a short one, once autocratic power is fully unleashed, and two paintings. One is extraordinary large, displayed on wooden structures that makes it look like a billboard, the other is traditionally hung. Staging, rather than scenarios, feels like an aptly chosen title for the show, given the way the paintings dramatize catastrophe.
Jorge Tacla Sign of Abandonment/Señal de abandono 60, (Detail) (20121) Oil and cold wax on canvas. Courtesy of Cristin Tierney Gallery
Sign of Abandonment/Señal de abandono 60 (offered with an instruction: interpretation left to the viewer) depicts an interior view of a room that could be a tiled kitchen transformed into a provisional field hospital, or a torture chamber, constructed with hastily thrown together cinderblocks. Central is a kind of operating table, with a side shelf of medical-looking instruments and tinctures, surrounded by amorphous forms that could be shackles or handcuffs, under a hovering cloud of markings that resemble musical notes, the echoes of resounding screams, or, alternatively, buzzing insects attracted by the remnants of bodily fluids. The one unambiguous representation in this monochromatic web of hints and suggestions is the visual anchor of a patch of blood, with a few tiny splashes detectable here or there. It steers our attention to the subjective suffering of a human being, whether harmed in situ or patched back together on a make-shift bed, creating empathy, but also narrowing our focus to victimhood. It forces a gruesome vision of physical harm, drawing us into the literal as well as metaphorical darkness of that chamber. Not much room for interpretation, frankly, if a puddle of blood gets visual place of honor.
Jorge Tacla Sign of Abandonment/Señal de abandono 60, (Details) (20121) Oil and cold wax on canvas. Courtesy of Cristin Tierney Gallery
The larger painting, Sign of Abandonment/Señal de abandono 34, displays a panoramic view of collective suffering, rather than honing in on a singular imagined body under duress. A frontal view of city blocks bombed to shreds evokes the real-life catastrophe of the siege of the Syrian city of Homs, where a three-year-long battle between the military and oppositional forces a decade ago led to indescribable acts of barbarism by Assad’s henchmen, until the rebels withdrew, and the government took hold.
Jorge Tacla Sign of Abandonment/Señal de abandono 34, (2018) Oil and cold wax on canvas Courtesy of Cristin Tierney Gallery
It is a truly interesting painting, despite flirting, at times, with clichéd ambiguity: are the pinks and coral hints at the horizon a hopeful sign of dawn, or are they the glow of still smoldering fires? Are the wispy clouds testimony to an indifferent nature, or plumes of smoke?
Jorge Tacla Sign of Abandonment/Señal de abandono 34, (2018) (Detail) Oil and cold wax on canvas Courtesy of Cristin Tierney Gallery
What made it fascinating to me is the subversive use of columnar arrangements, spatial divisions by means of subtle changes in coloration, vertical lines and actual, distinct columns that overlap on some of the four panels that comprise the entirety of the painting, The columns are enclosed in an unending repetition of violently destroyed human habitat. Columns and repetition were a device of what art historian Meyer Schapiro called “despotic art,” or arts of power, starting with baroque displays of endless columns in churches and cloisters, or colonial architecture in Egypt and India, government buildings with porticos, down to the mass media presentation of his time, then the 1930s, in the new medium of photography capturing hangars filled with rows of airplanes, or military divisions marching en bloc.
Tacla is turning the table, using those elements from the perspective of the displaced, rather than that of the abusive forces, the repetition of block after block of unmitigated destruction inducing horror, rather than awe. In its cityscape expansiveness it called to mind a 19th century painting of another hell, by John Martin – note the columnar repetition of the government buildings or an imaginary reconstruction of cities of antiquity.
Jorge Tacla Sign of Abandonment/Señal de abandono 34, (2018) (Detail) Oil and cold wax on canvas Courtesy of Cristin Tierney Gallery
John Martin Pandemonium (1841), Oil on canvas, 123 x 185 cm. Louvre, Paris. Based on John Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, where Pandemonium is the capital of Hell.
The billboard-like staging reminded me of the billboards seen on many commuter roads, displaying advertisement for (sub)urban neighborhoods: You’d be home now, if you lived here! Well, you’d be dead now, if you lived here, in Homs.
The association includes something of a dialectic, of course. Being reminded of the price of violent political conflict might make you aware of the gathering darkness around us or create empathy for refugees facing a watery Mediterranean grave during their flight. But the reassurance of not living “there” after all, allows us a distancing from those far-away places where genocide happens, enacted by “foreign barbarians,” promoting a false sense of security on our own shores.
The use of cold wax mixed with the oil paints adds to the unnerving feeling caused by the staging. It allows a manipulation of transparency, and so some of what I saw resembled the haze when you look through tears, if not through the dust that gets whipped up when buildings crumble. It also adds body and allows layering; on close inspection, the painting shows scars or buckled skin, as if skin is ripped off or has burnt to the point of melting. The association to skin really was the only direct – and shattering – link to the representation of human beings, rather than architectural ruins.
Jorge Tacla Sign of Abandonment/Señal de abandono 34, (2018) (Details) Oil and cold wax on canvas Courtesy of Cristin Tierney Gallery
I cannot help but wonder how thick-skinned the artist himself must be to make it as a wanderer between worlds, like any displaced person never quite belonging to either the old or the new. Early NYT review doubted his ability to reach high ground as a painter. That didn’t age well. Psychoanalytically absorbed reviewers attest him a profound death anxiety – I guess I’m with Maslow here, “when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” including the aesthetics of destruction as a symbol for one’s psyche to acolytes of psychoanalysis. Critics attacked his monumental work at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, a series of plates that memorialized the place of Jara’s murder and is inscribed with his name – Al mismo tiempo, en el mismo lugar (At The Same Time, in The Same Place), 2010, – as too focused on the individual, particularly when the individual in question devoted his life to collective power.
The paintings on view at The Reser suggested to me something quite different, independent of my admiration of the technical prowess to create these monumental constructions and the artist’s resilience when reenacting suffering in the process of painting. In some ways they bear witness, questioning the relationship between the aesthetic and the social, particularly the violence so ubiquitous in our world. They want us to consider, like all good political art, how we bear or enable or resist social imperatives that are associated with power and its requisite tools.
Does art manage to shape our historical thinking, and does its form help us reconfigure our assumptions about the present? Can works of political art ultimately achieve change of a kind, beyond providing a contemporary label that soothes buyers’ conscience by making them feel “progressive”, sort of an art-washing for the soul of the (neo)liberal collector? I will turn to that question in a bit. Before we get there, let me introduce the other two artists on display at The Reser.
***
“A successful work of art is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and un-compromised, in its innermost structure.” ― Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music
The quote by Adorno, though focussed on modern music, could equally well be applied to curation. Curation is hard and often does not get the attention and appreciation it deserves, particularly when un-compromising. If you are a renowned curator charged with constructing large assemblies of artists, you have to balance your ideas and concepts with the interests of the organizing institutions, who have partially mercantilistic aspirations. Biennials, art fairs and the like do infuse a place with economic activity, after all. You might also face an embarrassment of riches – die Qual der Wahl is the German phrase, the torture of choice – with regard to the number of artists at your disposal, amongst whom you have to pick and choose, avoiding the dreaded commodification, pushing an important concept and protecting the state of your reputation simultaneously.
If you are a local curator, no matter how talented, your choices, on the other hand, are often somewhat restricted. If you have to combine the available work with that of heavy hitters (and I consider Tacla in that category) how do you protect the other artists from being overshadowed (no matter how good they might be, they are still less known), unless you believe in clichés like “A rising tide lifts all ships?” I don’t know the answer, but there are two comforting thoughts: for one, these lesser known artists will get exposure, that potentially opens up a larger circle of viewers eventually, if the quality of the art holds its own. More importantly, in my view, is the fact that a public confronted with art that is not yet labeled as awe-inspiring or famous, will find it much more approachable, opening interest in art in general. It might be an inspiration to listen to one’s own creative impulses, or an encouragement that early or mid-career work deserves representation. That said, the work of both artists that Karen de Benedetti picked, again showing her sensitivity for pairings as in previous shows that I reviewed, will reward viewers’ scrutiny. (Malia Jensen‘s sculpture was not yet present when I visited.)
II. Karl LeClair Perceptive Omissions // Miroslav Lovric Subconscious Conversations
What unites the work on display by two very different artist, Karl LeClair and Miroslav Lovric, is how it’s grounded in personal memory. For LeClair, intensely attuned to natural environments, drawing is a way to process the changes brought about by frequent relocations, from the East Coast to Idaho and now to the Pacific Northwest. His mixed media, printmaking techniques include intaglio, relief, and monotype (all of which were generously explained to me in my ignorance, including the preparation of the various papers, if using color, with background washes of layers of thinned acrylic, like watercolor).
Perceptive Omissions is presented almost like an installation, allowing direct, unmitigated access to the paper, reinforcing a tactile quality of the prints, the geometric rigidity softened by the occasional colorwash.
Karl LeClair Perceptive Omissions (2023) All works numbered, not labeled.
His drawings and monoprints capture the shifting characteristics of various geographical environments with a surprising tenderness. I sensed a cautious approach to new objects of his affections, trying to learn about a place, as well as a a hint of nostalgia about what had to be left behind.
The pairing of representational scenes and geometric drawings somehow reminded me of Western Esotericism, like the medieval engravings of Paul Yvan. Not sure why I picked up a hint of mysticism, but there you have it. Interpretation left to the viewer…
***
Lovric’s work, Subconscious Conversations, was the most accessible to me, growing up in post-war Europe surrounded by prints of Klee, Kandinsky, Matisse, Calder or Joan Miró. The latter’s simple shapes, strong lines and colors came to mind when I looked at the present paintings and their faint surrealist connotations. Lovric, a refugee from Bosnia, another country with a recent bloody history and unresolved political conflict, works through his displacement with remembering that seems at times indistinguishable from longing. I get it. The acknowledgement that you will never be able to recover what is gone for good, once you have made a life in a different country, does not preclude a yearning for that you left behind, even if it no longer exists.
Miroslav Lovric Soul Catcher #2 (Woman) (2011) Mixed Media on Paper
He stated somewhere that his work is about hope and resilience, and I can certainly pick up a desire for optimism in the saturated, bright colors on display. It will speak to viewers, since we can all use a dose of positivity, even if woes are not grounded in political strife or experiences similar to those of the artists.
From left to right: Miroslav Lovric Autumn Tree (2020) Oil on Canvas; Red Nest (2020) Mixed Media on Paper; Questioning Bird (2015) Mixed Media on Paper.
Miroslav Lovric Garden (2021) Mixed Media on Paper
Yet I thought the strongest of the images on display was one that captured the immediacy of contemporary (pandemic) isolation, not related to the past at all. The monochromatic construction attends to traditional elements of windows and chairs, and adds a body, albeit to my eyes one that’s missing head and heart. There is corporality to the legs, but in the absence of social embrace, of human interaction, the core of a person vanishes. Or is not clearly delineated enough to be easily detected. Tell me about it.
What does it mean to consider “art as global citizenship,” part of the Biennial’s title? Certainly not to have rights, or the corresponding obligations, as expressed in Arendt’s view of what it meant to be a citizen, during an era with many people deprived of any rights as refugees from fascistic regimes. I come back to her, for one, because I’m fussy about terms: citizenship is connected to people, not “art,” with a defined set of political criteria, and secondly, because Arendt’s philosophy is increasingly relevant today in the face of immigration politics, soon to be intensified by climate refugees. Well worth re-reading.
More likely, the intended meaning of “art as global citizenship” runs along the lines of what Hans-Ulrich Obrist, the renowned Swiss curator, uttered here (or everywhere, he utters a lot):
“Art can widen horizons, dissolve borders, is obliged to bring people, ideas, concepts together. A successful piece of art has the power to change expectations and perspectives….(art) is asked to facilitate supranational dialogue.” (My translation.)
Siegfried Kracauer’s phrase from his Weimar Essays, “They were everywhere, and belonged nowhere,” a referral to the masses as a cultural phenomenon during the1920s, could, in my opinion, also be applied to these ubiquitous tropes we hear today when discussing art. One of them, “Entgrenzung,” the act of removing borders and promoting class permeability and global interconnectedness, is among the most frequently used. Can art transcend borders and change perspectives? How would we empirically assess the actual impact of political art, and has anyone done so, beyond simply qualitative reporting that people are moved, or claim to have gained new insights, or flocked to see a particular work of art?
Art as Social Practice: Tania Bruguera and her art movement ‘Arte Útil’ engages in long-term, participatory projects that include a community center, political party for immigrants, and an institution working towards civic literacy and policy change in Cuba.
We have long held that political art, through forms of social commentary, can raise awareness and inspire dialogue. Art, we believe, can provide representation for those who otherwise remain invisible or marginalized, helping to de-stigmatize on occasion. Art can be a form of memorialization of significant events, either transmitting knowledge about them to present generations who are exposed to selective versions of history guarded by those in power, or future generations who can stitch together a picture of past times and events. (I have written about the politics of memory recently here and here.)
Art as instigator: William Blake was one of the first political artists trying to dissolve borders – in this case the church- imposed rigid division between good and evil.
Certainly an early socialist perspective on art suggested artists should serve society by assuming an ethical stance to reveal the workings of ideology by describing the truth. Do we have evidence that it works? Do people still think about new perspectives an hour after they left the museum? How do we find out if people who report being moved or challenged by a piece of art translate that into behavioral changes, voting patterns, a measurable decrease in racist, xenophobic or misogynistic attitudes or some such? If there are data, enlighten me! Me, the social scientist wants to know. Me, the art lover couldn’t care less. (I am excluding visual propaganda here, which has been empirically shown to manipulate people’s values successfully. It differs from single pieces of art by the frequency with which it showers the viewer, being mass produced and co-temporally broadcast across media.)
Art as memorialization: depicting historic events as they unfolded..
Micha Ulman Empty Library (1995) (My photographs)
This is another piece of art to commemorate book burnings, in this case in Germany during the prelude to the Holocaust. The monument at Berlin’s Bebelplatz is an underground library with enough room to fit 20 000 books, totally empty. Unobtrusive, easily missed, it consists of a 5 by 5 by 5 underground space that can be viewed through a glass cover – theoretically. The weather and temperature differential often fogs the glass over, so you only get a glimpse, a vanishing view, just like memory of the era that is slowly disappeared or disappearing.
Maybe the question for evidence of effectiveness is the wrong question. Maybe we should forget about the claimed or actual function of political art, when it is so obvious that artists across history could not help but serve as mirrors for the political and/or philosophical environments and conflicts of their day. Maybe artists are driven to description in face of the uncertainty of their existence within a political system, and really good art goes beyond that by pinpointing what the political functions are of the structures and events their describe: the function of violence, for example, during an authoritarian period, or the function of propaganda to prepare for catastrophe, or the function of assigning value to keep traditional hierarchies intact. It is about expression of the artist’s views on the injustices of the world, or their delineation of possible utopias, not their intended impact on public opinion or belief systems. They have a particular talent or even genius for describing the world as they see it, contemplating possibilities as they weigh them. Whether we, the viewers, actually pick up on that or transform it into action would not affect their production, even if it is desirable that we would.
Max Ernst Europa nach dem Regen (1933) (Europe after the Rain)
Art as premonition: depicted is a post-apocalyptic, new world order with Europe and Asia melting together.
Then again, maybe we can use the fact that art has threatened existing power structures to the point where it was forbidden, persecuted, criminalized or otherwise impeded, as indirect evidence of its effectiveness. The Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (KfDK, or Fighting League for German Culture), for example, was founded in 1929 by Alfred Rosenberg, with the aim of promoting “German culture” while fighting the cultural threat of liberalism, leading to prohibition of “non-Aryan,” degenerate or progressive political art and the persecution of many artists. Similarly draconian measures can be seen in contemporary Russia or Iran.
Art as warning: Bauhaus artist Mariann Brandt weary of renewed militarization. “They are marching again.”
Art as activism: Photomontage by Hannah Höch Mutter, (1930) shown in the 1931 Berlin exhibition, Women in Distress, which she organized to fight for decriminalization of abortion; the show opened by Käthe Kollwitz.
One thing is empirically established: in times of social rupture, structural change of political systems and power struggles, societies become quite flooded with the depiction of catastrophes. If you look at the Weimar Republic, for example, there was a preoccupation with the visualization and dissection of catastrophes that seemingly emerged from the atrocities experienced during World War I, but seamlessly prepared, in insidious ways, the public for the horrors of its immediate future. The visual politics of people enamored with war and violence as an engine for society, like philosopher Ernst Jünger, filled the zone with imagery that celebrated the moment of danger, the unfolding of catastrophe. The new medium of photography lent itself to such manipulation – its mass distribution was in many cases intended to “produce docile subjects for the dawning spectacle of oppression and war.” (Isabel Gil, The Visuality of Catastrophe in Ernst Jünger’s Der gefährliche Augenblick, KulturPoetik, 2010, Bd. 10,p.87)
The Moment of Danger (Frontal Cover)
Preparing the masses: collective mourning after Lenin’s death, in New York
If we look at the ubiquity of depictions of catastrophes in all their gory details in our own time, with many other parallels to the 1930s looming, one wonders if we are in the process of being desensitized as well. Paintings of destructive consequences of war or torture like Tacla’s might rightfully warn us or make us think about the historical conflicts in parts of the world not our own (though surely underwritten by U.S. hegemonial interests,) or even be premonitions of things to come to our own backyard – I believe his art applies to anyone of those categories. But if they are integrated into a deluge of visual imagery of horror, from art, media and propaganda outlets alike, there might be unintended consequences, including the normalization of catastrophe.
Art as (scientific) witness: Forensic Architecture uses architectural evidence in cases of war crimes or other human rights abuses, often focused on how the narrative justification differs between state and victims. Nominated for the Turner Prize in 2018.
Georg Simmel, another German sociologist and Neo-Kantian philosopher who died in 1918, anticipated something he called the the Tragedy of Culture. He believed that there was a dialectical relationship between “objective culture” – the art out there, or religion, rituals, etc. – and “subjective culture,” our own development as individuals with creative or intellectual abilities. He was convinced that the onslaught of objective cultural products, massive saturation with cultural information, would stunt our psychological growth, with us shutting down in the face of overwhelming stimulation. The idea reverberates with me, and I often find myself in a balancing act when deciding what should be processed and what should be ignored. In the case of the current exhibition at The Reser, I come fully down on the “Give it a shot” side. The work deserves our contemplation.
And here is another Latin American political artist, Facundo Cabral, assassinated some years back, with a song that describes some of the ways of being an artist in the world. “I did not come to explain to the world, I just came to play.”
This appeared in my inbox yesterday, after Netanyahu and his brethren had pushed through legislation that a majority of Israeli citizens opposes. Unless you live under a rock, you will have heard in the news or read in our own major newspapers about the changes that drive Israel in the direction of other small, autocratic countries like Hungary and, increasingly, Poland, and the huge opposition they ignited. I thought I’ll summarize the major points best I can, but with a focus on what it implies for women, Jewish, Arab and Palestinian women alike. (Correspondingly, photographs today are street shots of women across the years.)
I used to be on the Board of the local Chapter of NCJW, the National Council of Jewish Women, before it closed its doors here in Portland, and am still receiving important information from the national group. Much of today’s information was gleaned from there.
The basics: The State of Israel has no formal constitution that anchors a separation of powers, preventing the executive or legislative bodies from accumulating too much say through a structural system of checks and balances. The judicial system, in particular the Supreme Court, served as a check on governmental excesses or violations of human rights instead, particularly those affecting minorities and women. It functioned around a “reasonableness doctrine,” which permitted the court to overturn government decisions that they felt lacked standards of basic fairness and justness, and the rulings did not require unanimity from the full bench.
The reasonableness doctrine, that very tool to curb power grabs by the legislative, has now been scrapped by the coalition of Netanyahu, far-right factions in his government and the ultra-Orthodox. More is in the wings, including the proposal that the court needs full bench agreements, and a new bill that will allow to override court decisions with a simple majority vote of the Knesset (Israel’s legislature). There is also a proposed bill that stipulates pure government control over the appointment of judges, and a proposal that would turn legal advisers who serve government ministries from professional appointees accountable to the attorney general into political appointments controlled by Cabinet ministers. Add to all that the hope of the extremist religious factions to move closer towards a theocracy, where many legal decisions will be in the hands of religious courts.
The specifics:
Last week there was an emergency meeting convened by the Labor Party and others at the Knesset under the title: “Emergency conference on the elimination of the status of women.” Points of discussion were far right proposals to advance the “right” to gender segregation, as well as their bill towards expanding the rabbinic courts’ powers in matters of divorce to include alimony and custody elements, with dire ramifications for the rights of women in divorce proceedings. And, importantly, the extremists’ move to disband the National Authority for the Advancement of the Status of Women, an independent watchdog that preserves and protects women’s rights.
The current situation in Israel is that women’s rights are not adequately protected. Women are not appropriately represented in the senior ranks of government ministries and local authorities (only 14 of the 257 local authorities are headed by women); many women are the victims of various forms of violence (the estimate is that approximately a million women and children in Israel are exposed to domestic violence); women suffer significant wage differentials in the job market; and a large percentage of working women hold low-paying jobs, especially women from groups that are the victim of discrimination, such as the ultra-Orthodox and Arabs.
If the legislative proposals became law, the situation would be far worse.
For one, the composition of any future court would shift even more heavily male and conservative, if the appointing committees would be under the control of the radicalized government. If the courts can no longer effectively provide constitutional reviews of proposed laws, the protection of women and minorities would suffer. The proposed amendment of the anti-discrimination law will harm women. Right now the law says that gender segregation is unlawful discrimination. The ultra-Orthodox would like to reinstate gender segregation in all forms, thus excluding women from public office, the courts, and the like (women are already minimally represented as is.)
Even if the courts could still fulfill their role in protecting against discrimination, the proposed bill that a simple majority of the legislative body could overrule the court, would leave women without ANY recourse.
And women’s rights in rabbinical courts are considered by many to be a travesty. Included in the proposed legislation to expand the power of rabbinical courts in civil matters is the adjudication of child support even without the consent of both parties, contrary to the current situation where if one of the spouses requests transferring the child support case to the family court, they can do so. Women who want a divorce are often forced by these courts to sign all of their rights away to be granted the legal separation. (Ref.)
Women’s advocacy groups like Bonot Alternativa called for a strike last week.
“One in three women experiences ‘get’ (divorce) extortion and are forced to give up their rights to free themselves from marriage. One in every 10 court procedures in the rabbinical court lasts over two years and causes a case in which the woman and hundreds of other women are refused a get each year and join the ranks of the agunot (chained women).”
Here is a link of an interview by Daliah Litwick of three Israeli women involved in the opposition to an expansion towards theocratic rule. It provides a lot of details of what the stakes are.
The options:
Hundred of thousands have marched in Israel in protest across the last months. Many professionals, military personnel included, have threatened strikes or absence from work duties. Eminent politicians across the spectrum, including former and current presidents, have warned against pushing the new legislation through, seeing it as a dangerous undermining of democracy.
There are also people who study resistance, in particular non-violent resistance from a general and a Jewish perspective. Just last week, a conference took place in Israel, organized by Bar Ilan University and the German University of Leipzig. Titled Non-Violent Resistance: Multi-disciplinary perspectives from the past, present and future for today’s democracies, the conference showcased lecturers from diverse fields and backgrounds. They tackled a lot, from the Hebrew Bible as Resistance Literature, to the Strategy and Principles of Non Violent Civil Resistance on a pragmatic level. It was surely no coincidence that the key note, presented by Menachem Mautner, the Danielle Rubinstein Professor of Comparative Civil Law and Jurisprudence at the Tel Aviv University, Faculty of Law, was titled – Jurisprudence for the “Bad Times.” Maybe their insight and knowledge can be applied to a contemporary crisis as Israel experiences it right now.
We will see how much and how long an active opposition to those undermining democracy can endure. Seeing the commitment by such large numbers of Israelis so far is providing some hope.
Here is NCJW’s solidarity statement from yesterday.
Here is a wild collection of variations on a theme – The People United Will Never Be Defeated.
Walk with me. Walk, I said, not run, I can’t keep up.
Running would make me tired, though, helping with sleep. Too many thoughts intruding, among them repeat disbelief when thinking about the filmed German interview of average people in an average small town wishing for the return of the NSDAP (National Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei – Hitler’s Party) while planning to vote this weekend for the right wing extremist AfD candidate in local elections. Apparently they are not extreme enough. When confronted with the question” What about the 6 million Jews murdered during the NSDAP’s rule, they shrugged. Literally shrugged. The AfD now shows 20 % in national polls.
Then again, this week saw the extremist group ˆMoms for Liberty” posting a Hitler quote in one of their newsletters. This is the group trying to get their members on every school board in the country, known for harassment campaigns against teachers, educators and parents. The group has backed bills banning transgender women and girls from playing women’s sports, and encouraged book bans. Their annual summit this year will feature multiple 2024 presidential candidates, including Donald Trump, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Also this week we have yesterday’s Supreme Court 6 : 3 decision Jones v. Hendrix, written by Clarence Thomas, that has been called a tragedy, and I cannot detect a smidgen of exaggeration. Basically you no longer have recourse in this country when you were sentenced to prison for a crime that turned out to be no crime, or for a time period that exceeds a legal limit. Habeas Corpus proceedings to correct the errors made by federal courts have been effectively denied by the right wing of the court. Justice Jackson wrote a powerful dissent, worth a read.
Meanwhile in Texas, Governor Abbot made sure that my insomnia continues: signing a new law that deprives outdoor workers of water breaks, undermining any safe guarding of the health of manual laborers. With temperatures up to 122 degrees ( 50 Grad Celsius!) this week, it is no surprise that the first workers are dying from heatstroke.
Death by maritime creatures was also on the table this week: BBC reports that the Russians have doubled their population of dolphins, trained to attack divers and/or spy, at their naval base on the Crimea naval base, that part of Ukraine they annexed illegally in 2014.
A video from 2020 is going viral again: California Kayakers getting swallowed by a humpback whale and then spit out again…. they survived. How is that going to help getting to sleep, when your kids kayak in CA???
In D.C., in the meantime, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is received with all the bells and whistles of a government courting the business opportunities and strategic relationships with the Indian Subcontinent, particularly in view of recent developments involving China. Never mind that Modi has abetted mass murder, is yielding an iron fist against any form of resistance, engages in religious persecution and has forced, bribed or persuaded mass media and social media to prevent access to any information critical of him and his government. Here is a short essay by Arundhati Roy in The Guardian that fills in the facts. I am also re-upping a link to a lecture she gave this March in Sweden on the issue of Freedom of Speech and failing democracy – a masterpiece of political thought.
And talking about democracy, before we all despair, here is some good news: last week the Michigan House and Senate both passed a package of eight election bills implementing large parts of Proposition 2, a constitutional amendment that called for numerous pro-voting changes within the Michigan Constitution. Elections matter!
In times of irritation there is always the cop out of Positive.News, a British news website that tries to make you less upset, I guess. This week I learned that a zero emissions shuttle service debuted at Glastonbury, UK, an AI pollution-preventing ‘crystal ball’ was launched to help alert swimmers in Devon when the water is too dirty, Sea Watch celebrated the return of minke whales and 60 percent of Brits now carry a reusable bottle, compared to just 20 per cent eight years ago, giving plastic bottles a shove. And no, dear British Readers, I am not making fun of this effort. Just documenting how desperately one has to look for something, anything good to counterbalance the upsetting in the world….
I also learned here that “Sleep matters for the grey matter,” with researchers from the UK and Uruguay asserting that daytime napping may help to preserve brain health by slowing the rate at which our brains shrink as we age.
That’s what I’ll do: nap. Thinking of June meadows, counting lazuli buntings and swallows instead of sheep, dolphins, humpback or minke whales.
Sleep WILL arrive. Or a shriveled brain. One or the other.
Having written almost enough to fill a weekly quota on Monday, I figured today I’ll share someone else’s observations – conveniently offered with Legos, so you don’t have to read much more either….
Ethics in Bricks continues to amuse me, or remind me of what is important to pursue or reassures me that there are people out there sharing many of my values. You find it on various social media.
Enjoy!
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And of course here is the one that refers to the most recent tragedy which reveals our values:
Here is the American Wild Ensemble with Shy Bricks by Christopher Stark, a composer new to me. Wort keeping an eye on.
In February 2022, Russia blockaded Ukraine’s Black Sea ports through which all Ukrainian bulk exports were being shipped, part of an ongoing attempt to wage war on global food security in the context of its invasion of Ukraine. In addition, the ports, through which mostly grain is exported, were mined. The Atlantic Council estimated then that globally about 47 million people were threatened with starvation due to these actions.
The likelihood of a hunger catastrophe has now stratospherically increased because of what happened in the early morning hours of June 6th, 2023, concurrent with the start of a Ukrainian offensive to push back against the Russian invaders: the Nova Kakhovka dam at the river Dnipro and connected power stations were exploded, leading to a flood of biblical proportions. For the last 15 months Russia have been killing Ukrainian civilians and destroying civil infra-structure. At the time of the explosion, which could have only worked fron the inside of the physical structure, it was in control of the dam. Destroying it brings only advantages to the Russians, not the Ukrainians – either to block a Ukrainian offensive or to cover up a retreat, or progress to a strategy of scorched earth. The desire to wipe Ukraine off the map, whether by occupation or destruction, has been expressed often enough. Locals reported an unusual accumulation of Russian troops directly adjacent to the dam and the power station the night before.
It is a war crime, and one of epic proportions. Tens of thousands of people are threatened right now and need to be evacuated, with longterm damage to their towns and villages, some irreparably ruined, and no clean water for years to come. It is not just the flooding, and the flooding with water that contains poisonous chemicals (they expect up to 400 tons of engine oil from the plant alone are mixed in the floods), there are also mines carried by the floods that now dot the landscape.
It would already be a disaster of major proportions in peace times. Ukrainian forces and international rescue organizations are, as I write this, evacuating people in the affected region under ongoing Russian shelling. Some 80 villages with almost 1000 houses are already submerged. Further South, the grain basket of Ukraine will not only be flooded – watering systems will be destroyed that leave the land parched for decades to come, making agriculture impossible. Almost half a million people will potentially lack water that is safe to drink in addition to the effects on their livelihood, agriculture.
About 150 km upriver is the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which relies on cooling water from the now emptying reservoir. So far the IAEA says there is no immediate concern for a melt down, but the danger has to be assessed on an ongoing basis.
As so often, some small details captured my attention that really made the tears flow. It was not the mention of all of the animals (but the swans and ducks) drowning in the Kherson city zoo. Rather one environmental report stated that it is the worst time for animals in the wild to have been exposed: countless spring-born rabbits, foxes, fawns were too young to escape the flood wave of 11.5 feet (3.5. meters) and ground nesting bird nests were destroyed by the water. It is truly apocalyptic, comparable to the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Maybe it is because you can imagine a drowning fawn and the compactness of that moment of death for a whole region, literally thousands of fawns, while your mind refuses to wrap itself around starving children across the continents, little by little dying from hunger. Refugee waves from hunger zones that will be accosted and returned at the borders if their faces are not white enough. A small country, Ukraine, that lost a high percentage of the generations actively involved in military defense. A country that will be flooded by maimed soldiers for decades to come. The trauma of Ukrainian children who have been growing up under constant threat of death all around them not just the battle fields.
There is historical precedent. In 1941 the Red Army exploded the Zaporizhzhia dam to stop the advance of Hitler’s army. At the time a wave several meters high descended on the Dnipro valley, killing 10.000s of people, some say over 100.000, even though the Zaporizhzhia lake contained far less water than the Kakhovka reservoir today (it had more than the Salt Lake in Utah.) The disregard for life, human or otherwise, from flooding or starving a people into submission, like Stalin did with the Holodomor, a man-made famine that convulsed the Soviet republic of Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, is just incomprehensible. Let us not forget, though, that the U.S. is no stranger to those actions. According to the Times of Israel, on March 6, 2017, a covert United States military unit reportedly targeted a massive dam (Tabqa Dam) in Syria controlled by the Islamic State with some of the largest conventional bombs in the army’s arsenal, despite the levee being on a “no-strike list” given that flooding could put the lives of tens of thousands at risk. Apparently a catastrophe was avoided because some of the bombs did not explode.
Looks like similar luck did not extend to the Crimea and the poor people of the region and city of Kherson.
Music today: The Ukrainian anthem is called ‘Ukraine is Not Yet Dead’, composed in 1863 by Mykhailo Verbytsky to a patriotic poem by ethnographer Pavlo Chubynsky. It was the short-lived anthem of the Ukrainian National Republic in 1917 and restored as such after the restoration of independence in 1992.
I VERY much recommend listening to Yale Professor Timothy Snyder’s lecture series the Making of Modern Ukraine which is an analysis that puts the daily horrors events of this war in a historical context.
After the catastrophe in Fukushima, Germany’s governing parties, abiding by a societal consensus reached as early as Chernobyl, decided in 2011 to phase out the last remaining nuclear reactors. It finally happened exactly a month ago, on April 15th, 2023.
Nuclear Power in Germany: Finally History!
Not so for the rest of Europe, where 12 of the 27 EU-nations insist that nuclear power is the way to go. They prolong the run times for old power plants and build new ones, with Poland planning to react 6 new reactors, and Holland, Great Britain Hungary and Slovakia not far behind. The largest producer of nuclear energy, 2nd only to the U.S., is, of course, France. They have 56 reactors, with 14 new ones in the planning stages.
This is all the more astounding since France has been facing a fiasco: they do not have enough electricity to meet domestic needs, much less export for economic gain, since in 2022 more than half of its reactors had to be shut down, at least temporarily, because of grave cracks, corrosion and general decay in its aging facilities, and because the summer heat and drought affected the cooling towers, with not enough water available, forcing them to be turned off. They are also grappling with political scandals around the falsification of documents that assured the safety of faulty construction materials for new reactors.
The fact that one clings to a path once chosen even if it makes no longer any sense is called “escalating commitment.” If done by you or me – “hey I stick with a job I don’t love, because I invested so much to get to this position in the first place” – it will only harm ourselves. Done by governments, it can harm a nation, or more.
Here in the U.S. we are seeing a version of this, with people granting that the old nuclear plants were bad, but also loudly proclaiming that the new small modular reactors (SMRs) will solve our energy crisis and propel us into a cleaner, cheaper future.
It ain’t so.
To find out why, you can watch Atomic Bamboozle at the Hollywood Theatre or at the Kiggins Theatre in Vancouver, WA, in case you missed the showing at Cinema 21 that I also advertised, some 2 months earlier. Highly recommended, given my vested interest in this film as part of the production team. The documentary will be shown in conjunction with PORTRAIT 2: TROJAN, a meditative short film on the day that the Trojan Nuclear Plant was imploded and decommissioned, by Portland-based artist and filmmaker Vanessa Renwick. In case my recommendation isn’t enough, here’s on from a more familiar name:
Of particular interest for the upcoming showings are several speakers, Joshua Frank and Kamil Khan among them, who will, in turn, introduce the project, and participated in a panel discussion.
Joshua Frank wrote Atomic Days – The Untold Story of the most Toxic Place in America. The book conveys the calamitous risks and staggering costs attached to nuclear power. The author is emphatically describing the threats implicit to all forms of nuclear energy production, not just from the left over underground tanks iat Hanford, currently corroding during ever delayed clean-up activities tagged at $677 billion and growing, tanks that are leaking radioactive broth from its 56 millions of radioactive waste into the ground water and Columbia river at Hanford, and that before the damage from a potential catastrophic earthquake.
There are also related, but perhaps less familiar perspectives that need to be amplified. Here is one of the relevant commentaries on the book:
Frank, by the way, will be also on site for a discussion/community reading of his book on Saturday, June 10th 3:30 – 5 pm at the Goldendale Community Library in the context of one of the most interesting and effective programs offered by the Fort Vancouver Regional Libraries: Revolutionary Reads. (Details in link.)
Kamil Khan is the new executive director of Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility, who just recently moved to Portland. Hailing originally from Pakistan, a nuclear-capable power, he is, in his own words, aware of some of the implications of its use.
“What those celebrations of (underground nuclear testing) did not factor was the environmental and social costs of testing, maintaining, and expanding the nuclear arsenal. I firsthand saw the ramifications of a bloated military budget and the divestment from necessary social programs as a result. I was also privy to the lack of political stability and scapegoating of “enemy” countries; this nuclear flexing was a compounded abomination to the very real human suffering occurring on the daily.”
Other speakers and panel discussants are
• Jan Haaken, director and documentary filmmaker • Samantha Praus, producer • Lloyd Marbet, executive director Oregon Conservancy Foundation • Patricia Kullberg, Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility, moderator.
Photographs today are from the Hanford site and region, where the documentary film crew spent time last summer. Music is self explanatory…
I BET THE BANK that not a lot of L.A. tourists make it out to Pacoima in the San Fernando Valley, one of the 88 cities comprising L.A. County. Which is too bad, given that there is much to learn and admire when looking at the history of the area. It is also a place where you can explore over 30 murals along a stretch of a busy through-fare, Van Nuys Blvd., the Mural Mile created by local artists who care about their community and acknowledge its history. The works shine like beacons along a neighborhood dominated by auto-repair or appliance repair shops, pawn brokers and payday-loan companies, small bars, pet groomers, florists, laundromats and churches, garages and places to send money back home to the loved ones you left behind in Mexico or El Salvador.
The area has been settled for more than 1500 years, early on by the Tatavians, a tribe with a strong sense of community and gender equality, from what the historians tell us. Disaster arrived in the form of Spanish colonialist destroying much of tribal land and culture.
Painted by the HOOD Sisters (Honoring Ourselves Origins Dreams)
By the late 1880, speculative investors descended in anticipation of the Southern Pacific railroad and a likely real estate boom. They hoped to lure wealthy settlers, but the area was prone to horrific floods and so ended up as an agricultural community, with many Mexicans and later Japanese immigrants doing the hard work. After Wold War II, with jobs provided by Lockheed and General Motors, a lot of Blacks were attracted to move to Pacoima, with a housing tract named after boxer Joe Louis, establishing a large middle-class community.
Today the population of around 90.000 people is about 87% Latino, 4% Asian and 3% Black. Poverty rates are high, crime rates higher than in almost any other community in the San Fernando Valley, and higher education levels way below average compared to the rest of L.A. County. There are reports that nearly 20% of the people in Pacoima live in rented rooms or converted garages. The hidden density extends to single-family houses that are often home to several families, trying to ease the burden of insane mortgage rates. (Ref.)
Homelessness here, as across L.A. County, has increased by over 70% across the last 6 years, with many families living in campers, cars, or tents. Makeshift memorials for victims of violence or the hardship of life on the street are ubiquitous.
The problem that compounds it all is the fact that Pacoima is by far one of the most pollution-exposed neighborhoods in all of California. It has one of the highest rates of air pollution and soil contamination due to the clumps of industrial facilities, garbage dumps, land fills, the small commercial Whiteman airport, Sun Valley Power Plant, a railroad line and the surrounding 3 freeways that enclose the city, I 5, 118 and 210. Diesel trucks emit diesel fumes into heavily residential areas, and weather patterns push and hold air pollution in Pacoima against the San Gabriel and Verdugo Mountains. The geography of the region, a valley, causes air-toxic chemicals, like nitrogen dioxide and ozone to settle near ground level.
Industries using chrome plating, among others, caused immense groundwater pollution, with hexavalent chromium doing its poisonous thing. Daytime heating patterns make it worse: the groundwater is vaporized during the day and then re-condenses at night, leading to the possibility for subsurface vapor intrusion into homes. There are now five Superfund sites in and around Paicoma: American Etching and Manufacturing, D & M Steel, Holchem, Inc., HR Textron-Glenoaks, and Price Pfister, Inc. The former Price-Pfister Faucet Plant Superfund site was recently redesignated as a Brownfield for redevelopment. The gas plant, it was revealed last year, has been leaking methane gas for long periods, affecting the area as well. The results of all this pollution is an unacceptably high level of respiratory illnesses, particularly asthma in young children, in the area and of course the potential that cancer rates are going to skyrocket among exposed individuals.
The skeleton is using an asthma inhaler…
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THAT IS THE BAD NEWS. THE GOOD NEWS IS that Pacoima has a history of activism that unites many of its citizens in a fight for a better, or, in this case, healthier and more beautiful world, from tackling racist practices to now addressing environmental justice. In 1968 students from Pacoima staged one of the biggest civil rights protests in CA history, forcing massive reforms at the (now) Cal State University Northridge. It also paved the way for the school’s and state’s first Pan-African and Chicano Studies Departments.
Here is a great video introduction to their and others’ activism and a trailer to a documentary about the history of the town. Later, the NAACP and community churches organized and strategized to curtail police brutality and successfully spearheaded bans on the chokehold and use of the battering ram and focused on housing discrimination as well. Patrisse Cullors, one of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, hails from Pacoima as well.
Shakur
Painted by Kristy Sandoval and the H.O.O.D. Sisters, this mural pays homage to Assata Shakur, Tupac’s godmother and once one of the FBI’s most wanted.
It was five mothers from diverse backgrounds, however, who got together in 1996 to combat the literal toxicity of the place, founding Pacoima Beautiful, an organization that is now successfully fighting for environmental justice on a large scale. Just two months ago, their recommendations to close Whiteman Airport given the frequency of accidents and pollution issues, was heard. “The Re-envision Whiteman Airport Community Advisory Committee (CAC) voted at their final meeting to recommend the LA County Board of Supervisors pursue the closure of Whiteman Airport and immediately implement mitigation measures to prioritize public health and safety in the time leading up to airport closure.” Two years ago, their campaign against the Valley Gas Plant dangers helped deal with methane emissions. “As a result of our the community advocacy and organizing efforts, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has agreed to wean its use of natural gas and seek new opportunities for clean energy options at the site. Also there are plans to demolish the red and white smoke stacks.”
The non-profit organizes community clean-ups, Covid- outreach, electric bike programs, and nature access for kids. They also invest in arts education and local artists. Their ARTvertise program, together with OUTFRONT/JCDecaux, is designed to help transit riders experience art at bus shelters along the mural mile of Van Nuys Blvd. They show rotating work from local artists.
Their FaceBook site helps people figure out where to turn or where to participate, from offering opportunities to learn how to organize to announcement of life events of beloved community members. The organization also has 20 volunteer community inspectors who relate grievances to Clean Up Green Up, a 2016 city ordinance that prioritizes health and economic well-being for people living in some of L.A.’s most polluted districts. The ordinance ensures that complaints and violations raised by the inspectors are addressed and provides an ombudsman both for the area’s many industrial businesses trying to operate more cleanly and for the community members trying to enforce changes. (Ref.) All of this effective work to improve the health and living conditions of the community started by individual mothers having had enough. Deepest respect.
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MANY OF THE MURALS I saw after driving out to Pacoima were produced by two artists, father and son, Hector Ponce and LeviPonce.
Some are by younger artists, like Rah Azul and the gifted Kristy Sandoval. Some murals are easily accessible, others behind fences, on abandoned or guarded lots, respectively.
One friendly guard opened the electric gate so I could photograph a mural directly and told me that the depicted woman’s original cleavage had been so offensive to some part of the citizenry that it needed to be painted over. “Oh,”he said,”Ponce was going to come back and beautify the rest of the walls. I have to give him a call – we like what he is doing for the neighborhood. I have his number.”
Elvira painted by Hector Ponce
There are murals that link back to the history of the area,
“Forgotten Roots,” painted by Juan Pablo Reyes
some are addressing political issues of the presence. Some reference folktales, like the Mona Lisa now clad like La Adelita – the Mexican Revolution saw many women join as soldaderas who embraced the early Maderistas movement, with La Adelita representing them as a stand-in in a famous ballad.
Pacoima’s Art Revolution
Painted by Levi Ponce to declare an arts revolution in the area (during a time where painting murals was illegal in Los Angeles), it stands as a symbol of the fight for the arts.
Real-life luminaries include Danny Trejo, a formerly incarcerated man who became a famous movie star and now owns many local eateries. Some critics didn’t like what they saw as glorification of violence and crime, but Ponce wanted to reflect the community who, after all, had chosen Trejo as the grand marshal of Pacoima’s Christmas parade.
Then there is The day the music died depicting the most famous local musician, Ritchie Valens, who died with Buddy Holly and another bandmate in a plane crash in a cornfield in Iowa during a concert tour in 1959.
There are depictions of Latino culture,
and visions of a better future.
Without Boundaries
Painted by Sarah Ackerley and Levi Ponce. This 33′ x 75′ mural inspires children’s imagination by blurring the boundaries of reality. This variety of flying fish can actually be found off the coast of Santa Monica, CA.
A mural by Ignacio Gomez enumerating locally notable people and other folk can be found in the back of city hall,
while the front alerts to Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez, the first Latina in the city’s history to serve on the Los Angeles City Council in 2017, to represent the 7th district she’s called home her entire life, an active supporter of the mural arts.
There is clearly an important and welcome attempt to protect the community from Covid, given the extra vulnerability of a population prone to pulmonary diseases from pollution,
and there are lots of banners alerting the community to the educational possibilities for the youth.
Some of the murals on view might not have yet reached the level that signifies muralism as an art form, I’m thinking here for example of the three great Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros in the 1930s. But they are done in the same spirit: they keep significant history alive and memorialize the people who mattered to the community. They make public the concerns of a community (particularly when they are debated) and they can alert to the potential for change, when they depict alternate visions of what could be possible, particularly when they focus on inclusivity and are socially conscious. They are also creations of combined efforts of local artists, business people and other citizens, and kids who now own their participation in this community. A seminal essay by Judith Baca, Whose Monuments Where? Public Art in a Many-Cultured Society is well worth a (re)read if you are interested in the function and importance of community murals. All of this makes a difference.
Judith Baca has been one of the most prolific and recognized muralist in SoCal for the last 50 years. Her Neighborhood Pride program encouraged young artists to paint in ways that honor neighborhood history. Her Great Wall of Los Angeles, located just south of Pacoima along the Tujunga Wash and next to Coldwater Canyon Avenue in North Hollywood, is over 2,700 feet long and by far the biggest mural in Southern California. It was painted as “a bold illustration of the history of California from the state’s prehistoric past to the struggles of its ethnic minorities for civil rights and equality.” (Ref.) I have yet to visit. Many other public art projects in Little Tokyo and the Historic Core commemorating forgotten urban history were spearheaded in the late 1980s by yet another organization, The Power of Place, founded by Dolores Hayden, Professor Emerita at Yale University.
Here some more murals from Pacoima:
Levi Ponce’s 2019 monumental mural Rushing Waters follows Baca’s model. It recognizes indigenous and environmental history, and depicts both natural and manmade landmarks in and around Pacoima like Hansen Dam, the Sylmar Aqueduct, San Gabriel Mountains, the Los Angeles River, Whiteman Airport and nearby freeways, with a 25-foot tall Tataviam Village woman pouring her bowl of water onto the land comprising the center of the mural. Councilwoman Monica Rodriguez provided funding, and the mural itself was on the drawing board for over four years, eventually executed by a team of nine artists under Ponce’s leadership.
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AS THE LATE CULTURAL WRITER and Latino art advocate Ed Fuentes wrote before his death in 2019:
“Murals were designed to be art for the masses, and in the case of ethnic-based murals, spoke for those underrepresented. In Los Angeles, its own identity is lost because it’s a region people come to reinvent the city, and/or reinvent themselves. This current legacy of remaining murals, plus the manifesto of current artists, may not realize their work represents another undervalued voice: The city’s own history.”
You find murals commemorating alternative histories all across L.A., but many are disappearing. It is a nationwide trend – my city of Portland, OR, has seen similar developments. They are not just defaced by taggers or torn down by property owners. There is a whole development aligned with the gentrification of traditional neighborhoods, with newcomers either insensitive to the history captured in the art, or inclined to put up visuals that serve their own interests. A recent essay in The Guardian, Whitewashed: How gentrification continues to erase bold L.A. murals, describes the conflicts over murals between gentrifiers and inhabitants. They are fundamentally linked to other sources of tension, “property prices, the pace of gentrification, tenant evictions, the integrity of once-venerated local artists, and the ability of local city officials to act as honest brokers between the competing interest groups.”
Efforts to protect the history and the art form are direly needed. In L.A. they have the Civic Memory project, a project that pursues the preservation of community knowledge, playing an evermore important role. If you go to their website you find an astonishing volume of projects all interesting in their own ways, public art included, with in-depth debate of how to approach memorializing a past that had been submerged under representations by culturally dominant official” voices that pursued their own agenda.
Forgotten places, Pacoima included, can be resurrected via public art that is emerging from community-based vision, voices, recollections. All we have to do is visit and learn. As Ritchie Valens sang: Come on, let’s go!
When you travel, even for longer stretches of time, you have to make choices. So much to explore, to learn in Los Angeles, this behemoth of a city – there has to be some selectivity, since not all can be fit in. My own selections are usually based on two basic considerations: get familiar with the history of the place and, of course, seek out stuff that feeds my specific interests, art and politics, as you well know.
I lucked out last week with these endeavors in more ways than one. To understand the history of the greater Los Angeles area, I had read Mike Davis‘ City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles (1990) and slogged through his last book, Set the Night on Fire. L.A. in the Sixties (2020), published before his death in 2022 and co-authored with Jon Wiener. Both are seminal works about the urban history of the place and the powers that shaped it since its inception. Cultural critic, environmental historian and political activist Davis described the intersection of land development and legal or functional racial segregation in Southern California in ways quite accessible to uninformed readers like me, basing his account on interdisciplinary sources, including American history, environmental history, Marxist philosophy, political science, urban geography, architectural and cultural studies. Both books introduce the forms of resistance to segregation in housing and education, from peaceful demonstrations to riots to the engagement of artists and other intellectuals, side by side with famous civil rights fighters, political organizations, union representatives, the ACLU and uncountable numbers of students as young as high school freshmen.
88 cities, approximate 140 unincorporated areas, and communities within the City of Los Angeles.
The author introduces us to the political economy that shaped the urban sprawl, the landscape transformation, resulting in increasing inequality of living conditions and incarcerations rates, making it a dystopian place for those who fell off the wagon of the American Dream, or shall we say, were pushed off by the interest of those defending Fortress L.A. from any influx of non-White and/or poor populations. Land, seemingly endless land was the commodity, providing the base for residential neighborhoods, industry, strip malls and freeways. Richer neighborhoods, in fear of losing their exclusivity, the down-town commercial district’s business owners and realtor- and home owners’ organizations collaborated with investors, local and state politicians, and even Roman Catholic church leaders to make decisions about land-use that protected the interest of the monied classes and ended up with unimaginable sprawl.
Even though fair housing laws existed, racism won when Proposition 14 was adopted by an overwhelming majority of California voters in 1964, scorning equality and discriminating against “undesirable” homeowners and renters who were now easily excluded. The vote allowed prior law, the California Fair Housing Act of 1963, also known as the Rumford Act, to be voided, creating a state constitutional right for persons to refuse to sell, lease, or rent residential properties to other persons. (The Supreme Court declared the Proposition unconstitutional in 1967. The current legal status can be found here.) It was a pivotal moment that brought the efforts of many organizations and individuals fighting for civil rights to a screeching halt at the time.
Later decades saw more subtle ways of achieving the same goals of segregation: zoning laws and security measures kept the poor away from affluent districts. Relentless and cruel, often violent policing kept particularly Black citizens and other POC in their allotted places, both literally and metaphorically. Zoning was also causal for pushing the non-White and poor populations to the perimeters of the county, within or adjacent to more dangerous environments when it comes to pollution, water shortage and now fire danger given climate change-enhanced droughts. I am summarizing these aspects of Davis’ books because it was striking for me to see the described social stratification play out in real space during a drive to East Los Angeles College, a public Community College in Monterey Park, CA.
East Los Angeles College, Monterey Park, CA.
I started in the heart of Pasadena’s historical district, a place full of beautiful, gorgeously maintained and lovingly restored mansions, then drove through the picture book landscape of Pasadena’s craftsman bungalows. 15 minutes later you come through small townships that still have single-lot houses, but now run down and clearly showing signs of economic distress. Another 20 minutes along, and you are surrounded by low income housing apartments. I parked in a strip mall adjacent to the college and was immediately taken in by a striking building that stood out against the dilapidated background: the Vincent Price Art Museum. Part of a Performing and Fine Arts Center that opened in 2011, the museum holds a permanent, major collection of fine art, with substantive work initially donated by actor Vincent Price (he of Hollywood Horror Movie fame, among others, but also a true friend to the arts and the educational efforts required to bestow knowledge of art and art history onto future generations.) By now the museum holds over 9000 objects and has hosted more than 100 shows, singular for a community college, its exhibitions thoughtfully and smartly curated.
I came to see one of them that seemed particularly aligned with the museum’s expressed mission and issues close to my own heart concerned with cultural diversity and critical thinking:
“The mission of the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College is to serve as a unique educational resource for the diverse audiences of the college and the community through the exhibition, interpretation, collection, and preservation of works in all media of the visual arts. VPAM provides an environment to encounter a range of aesthetic expressions that illuminate the depth and diversity of artwork produced by people of the world, both contemporary and past. By presenting thoughtful, innovative and culturally diverse exhibitions and by organizing cross-disciplinary programs on issues of historical, social, and cultural relevance, VPAM seeks to promote knowledge, inspire creative thinking, and deepen an understanding of and appreciation for the visual arts.
What Would You Say?: Activist Graphics from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents a selection of political prints from LACMA’s vast archives. The exhibition, which opened March 25th, is free of charge and the visitor gets gifted with a high-quality brochure, covering some of the art with prints and explanatory (bilingual English/Spanish) text that I found helpful.
Graphic art has traditionally been a vehicle for change, challenging as well as influencing political moments. Rather than just depicting, the combination of image and word can inform, comment, persuade or be used for propaganda. It has been a key player in protests against injustice and oppression; the fact that it can be easily, widely and cheaply created and distributed has made it a form that helps to connect to people and promote social change. In the late 19th century, the technology for lithographic printing advanced, and the new power-driven presses, practical techniques of photoengraving and mechanical typesetting devices helped the medium to progress. We have now added photo-typesetting, offset lithography, and silk screening to the repertoire. It has also often been a communal effort, linking artists and participants with shared goals and interest, helping to organize and to educate.
The graphics on the wall ranged from the mid 1960’s to the 2020s, covering the Black Panther’s fight against police brutality and for the empowerment of poor Black neighborhoods,
Left: Emory Douglas Untitled (Sin Titulo) 1970 – Right: Rupert Garcia Libertad para los prisoneros politicas! 1971
the issues of incarceration of innocent people and Latino activism,
Yolanda M. López Free Los Siete 1969
Jessica Sabogal Walls can’t keep out Greatness 2018
the struggle of women and immigrants for equality,
Clockwise from upper left: Yreina D. Cervantez La Voz de la Mujer 1982 – Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Women in Design: The next Decade 1975 – Yreina D. Cervantez Mujer de mucha enagua 1999 – Krista Sue Pussy Power Hat Pussy Hat Project 2016 – Ernesto Yerena Montejano and Ayse Gursoz We the Resilient 2017
and eventually the protests over the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and other Black people by police.
Jesus Barraza and Melanie Cervantes of Dignida Rebelled and Mazatl My Name is Trayvon Martin and my Life Matters. 2013
The most dominant topic, however, is expressed in posters and prints protesting war; surprisingly, I could find the issues of racial segregation and land development, so central to the history of L.A. and S.F., only peripherally – one poster about evictions, and one about the displacement of first native people and then a Mexican American community from Chavez Ravine, land appropriated to build the beloved L.A. Dodger stadium.
Favianna Rodriguez Community Control of the Land 2002 – Vote Ik We are still here 2017
The reality of racism, however, is captured by several of the works in ways that hit you hard.
Archie and Brad Boston For a Discriminating Design Organization 1966
David Lance Gaines Qui Tacet Consentit (Silence Gives Consent) 1969
The reality of the price of war, on the other hand, is brought home most strikingly in a print by one of the most famous of the artists in this exhibition, Sister Corita Kent, a member of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM) before she was driven out by Cardinal Francis McIntyre (as were later 90 percent of the order in L.A, some 150 IHM nuns kicked out. According to a report in the Times, the Cardinal, by the way, uttered these words when confronted with his stand on segregation: “…it is not a racial or moral issue. A reason for discrimination is that white parents have a right to protect their daughters…”)
Corita Kent manflowers 1969
Corita Kent’s early silk screenings used bright colors, modulating the style and objects of advertising as stand in for religious concepts. They were shown in galleries and museums across the country, the MET, MOMA and LACMA included. She later moved to political topics, with more muted colors, including the Watts Rebellion and, after multiple encounters with anti-war activist Dan Kerrigan, the Vietnam War. The poster here shows two blinded soldiers, using Peter Seeger’s song lines in despair. Man-power is broken into two words, drawing attention to the single man, all the individuals that made ups the military power, paying with their bodies or their lives.
Posters on video display. The last one above: Primo Angeli/Lars Speyer The Silent Majority 1969
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I wondered, a few days later, if the choice of concentrating on so many war/peace posters in the VPAM exhibition was perhaps linked to the choices made in another, simultaneous exhibition of graphics from the LACMA archives: Pressing Politics: Revolutionary Graphics from Mexico and Germany.
This exhibition is also shown in a gallery incorporated within an educational setting, this time the Charles White Elementary School on Wilshire Blvd. It presents political imagery that grew out of the reaction to war and revolutionary movements, from Germany’s political developments starting in 1918, to Mexico’s 1930s formation of the Taller de Gráfica Popular (People’s Print Workshop) in Mexico City.
For me it packed an additional emotional punch – I have grown up with the art of Kollwitz, Grosz, Pechstein etc. in post-war Germany and the familiarity and reminiscence of what they meant then added a layer to taking the show in. To look at the warnings expressed by art in the 20s and 30s, to know that the world was dragged into the next war regardless, and to see all this while we are witnessing another contemporaneous war on European soil was unsettling. The unsparing depiction of oppression, violence and human suffering is also strikingly different from most of the American poster selection in the show discussed above.
Some of the graphics would benefit from explanations regarding the relevant language. Take Grosz’ Gesundbeter, for example, which has three titles in different languages (he used these inscriptions fully knowing that they were not translations but expressed different thoughts.) Crucially, though, the obscenity of the action becomes clear when you understand the acronym KV, central to the image. It stands for the German word Kriegs-Verwendungsfähig – literally usable for war or fit for action, applied by the Local Board, desperate for canon fodder, obviously even to corpses.
George Grosz Die Gesundbeter 1918
Here is another title – the German says sunshine and fresh air for the proletariat (a demand by labor unions and social activists for better housing and healthier working conditions,) depicting incarcerated people walking the prison yard.
George Grosz Licht und Luft dem Proletariat 1919
The parallels we see in the German and Mexican depictions originate both from shared experiences, but also an overlap of artists in each others’ spheres. Colonialism led to an entangled history in general, but during the 1930s many German artists associated with the Staatlichem Bauhaus Weimar emigrated to Mexico, welcomed by the government of Lázaro Cárdenas del Río (1934–1940) which built the most democratic state historically experienced in Mexico until the 1990s.
Clockwise from upper left: Alfredo Zalce En Tiempos de Don Porfirio 1945 – Alfredo Zalce La Soldadera 1947 – Käthe Kollwitz Losbruch 1943 – Leopoldo Mendéz Asesinati de Jesus R. Menendez en Cuba 1948 – Käthe Kollwitz Gedenkblatt für Karl Liebknecht 1919-20.
The Cárdenas government sponsored educational program for workers and peasants, led by the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR), an association of revolutionary writers and artists that grew out of the “cultural missions” charged with propagating the revolution’s objectives in murals, graphic art and theater productions. The Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) came out of this association, and was revitalized by the many migrants that came from Europe, other Latin American countries and the U.S., all adding their own cultural experiences, artistic styles, and preoccupations. In fact, Hannes Meyer, second Bauhaus director, was appointed as head of TGP in 1942.
Erasto Cortez Juarez, Jesus Escobedo, Leopoldo Mendez, Francisco Mora Calaveras aftodas con medias naylon 1947
Leopoldo Mendez En manos de la Gestapo 1942 – Constantin von Mitschke-Collande Freiheit 1919
Arturo Garcia Bustos La industrialización del país 1947
It is a stunning exhibition, offering diversity of depictions balanced by homogeneity of concerns. I was the only one there on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, except for a friendly guard, which was just as well given the tears that welled up. The reality of war, the repeat of history’s darkest moments seemingly unavoidable, some already here, some looming, the resurgence of fascistic ideas and methods seemed to pull the rug out from under the efforts of earlier artists to warn us of dangers and call for change.
Erich Modal Revolution 1920 – Max Pechstein An die Laterne 1919 – Unknown artist: So führt euch Spartakus. Brüder rettet die Revolution. 1919
And yet. There is reason to remain optimistic. Individual commitment to social change still exists. But not just that – in L.A. alone, there have been significant collective successes across the last years. In 2006, 500.000 people protested on Wilshire Blvd. demanding rights for undocumented immigrants, a march called by labor unions, endorsed by catholic Cardinal Roger Mahoney and Antonio Villaraigosa, the city’s first Latino mayor. In January 2017, 750.000 congregated downtown L.A. for the Women’s March. And in 2019, large coalitions of communities and classrooms, teachers and students joined in the successful teachers’ strike that focussed on overcrowded schools, educational disinvestment and drainage of resources to charter schools.
Leopoldo Mendez Retrato de Posada en su taller 1956
Elizabeth Cattle Sharecropper – 1952 – Alberto Beltran El problema agrario en América Latina 1948 – Käthe Kollwitz Poster excerpt
Max Pechstein Dont strangle the newborn freedom through disorder and fratricide, or your children will starve 1919.
Walking around the neighborhood after I left the exhibition, the occasional public or street art made it clear that activism is alive and well. A work in progress, standing on the shoulders of the many activist artists who came before. Grateful that decisive museal curation introduces and reminds us of the modernist vanguard.
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.” – Karl Marx The German Ideology (1845)
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“As a matter of fact indeed, this generation, that grew up with the “end of history” of Francis Fukuyama, does not seem to be affected by the central historical events of their life time in any enduring way … [This generation is] pragmatic, history-less, free from economic and ideological system conflicts of the Cold War, grown up after the “end of history”. If you look at this generation through the lens of the events of its history, it does not afford any strong “interrelation”, no strong generational “narrative”. – Anna Sauerbrey, Machtwechsel: Wie eine neue Politikgeneration das Land Verändert. (Change in Power: How a new Generation of Politicians changes the Country.) (2022)
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“Let us remember we will never truly breathe whole breaths, as whole beings, as a whole country and people, until we reach a collective reckoning, and repair … until we become whole and so can exhale into a place of healing at the depths of the blood and marrow in our bones. Imagine that breath.” – traci kato-kiriyama Navigating With(out) Instruments. (2021)
I WOULD HAVE have almost missed the small plaque, easy to escape my attention that was held by so many other sights: a gorgeous botanical garden unusually laid out across steep slopes, an indescribably beautiful location, a forest of blooming camellias, bulwarks of birds of paradise hedges, lazy lizards, groves of mulberry trees, surrounded by pristine canyons, with a green sheen after all this rain.
Having spotted it, however, and later reading up on what was hinted at, led to contemplation of memory cultures and their variable perspectives, depending on who you ask. Or who has the power to shape the narrative, as the case may be. All that happened during a visit to the 165- acres Descanso Gardens in La Cañada Flintridge, CA, some 10 minutes outside of Pasadena, which contains one of the world’s largest camellia collection with some 800 species and as many as half a million camellias in bloom simultaneously, if you visit in the early months of the year. A spectacular sight.
One might be pleased to see an acknowledgement of the history that transpired after President Roosevelt issued his infamous Executive Order 9066 in March 1942, authorizing the removal and incarceration of over 120.000 Japanese American women, men and children on suspicion of being potentially dangerous enemy aliens. Some 70.000 of those rounded up with lightning speed were actual American citizens.
Or one might wonder why the text refers to War Relocation Centers instead of Internment camps, or even concentrations camps as Roosevelt himself and other U.S. officials referred to them. The War Relocation Authority, the federal agency created to manage the incarceration process, succeeded with a political spin and created euphemistic terms, calling the forced removal an “evacuation,” incarceration “internment,” and the facilities “relocation centers,” rather than concentration camps. (Certain American Jewish institutions, the National Holocaust Museum among them, reject the term concentration camp, fearing that it invites false analogies to the Holocaust, demeaning history. Others, like Michael Rothberg, a UCLA professor of English and comparative literature who holds the 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies, point to the fact that not only Jews were detained in concentration camps, and defines them as “mass detentions of civilians without trials,” many of which happened before the German atrocities – e.g. the 19th century Spanish in Cuba, the British in South Africa during the Boer wars, or China’s extrajudicial camps for millions of Muslim Uighurs who face systematic brutality and dehumanization.) (Ref.)
Moreover, one might wonder what is implied in the simple statement that the founder of this garden, newspaper publisher E. Manchester Boddy, purchased plants from Japanese nurserymen, namely the contents of Star Nurseries, headed by Francis Miyosaku Uyematsu and Mission Nursery, headed by Fred Waichi Yoshimura. If you go to the history section of the garden’s website, (and who does, pray tell?) you get a few more sentences: “These people’s terrible loss, reflecting years of labor, was Rancho del Descanso’s immediate gain. The purchase of their plant inventories became the basis for Descanso Gardens’ first signature collection.”
“Can’t you just for once enjoy a garden and help us vicariously admire the scenery?” I hear from the back rows. You know me. Or should, by now. Nope! Important history to convey.
IF YOU LOOK AT scholarly exploration of what actually happened, including archival research, oral histories and interviews with surviving members of the families, a different narrative emerges. (I am indebted to Wendy Cheng, Associate Professor of American Studies at Scripps College, who gave me access to her 2020 article Landscapes of beauty and plunder: Japanese American flower growers and an elite public garden in Los Angeles, a combination of factual revelations and incisive analysis that taught me a lot.) Summarizing best I can, the original official story around Boddy’s acquisition was that of a friend of the Japanese community paying a “fair price” for priceless treasure during hard times, his generosity appreciated, the ruling narrative goes, by those who had few other choices before seeing their entire stock destroyed.
Alternatively, one can see this act as a form of plunder, reminiscent to me, as a German, of the forced sales of Jewish art and property to Nazi vultures or collaborating opportunists. Legality aside (hey, these people did nothing illegal, if they acquired stuff on the cheap as the opportunity arose…) plunder can be defined as a dishonest acquisition of property, whether through violent dispossession of native lands or orderly transfer in business settings during structurally disordered conditions that allowed to prey on vulnerable minority groups. The losses incurred by Japanese Americans? Estimates are that 75% of those incarcerated lost all of their property. Overall economic losses (not adjusted for inflation) are presumed to lie in the $1 to $3 billion range. Half of the total number of flower growers in the L.A. region were Japanese, some 90% of them working on leased land due to racist tenancy laws instituted in 1913 (Alien Land Law.) Businesses on that land were taken over by Whites, after Pearl Harbor.
There is a small but well designed Japanese garden wit the tallest flowering cherry tree I have ever seen.
Boddy’s “fair price,” as the term appeared in the narrative of the garden (rescinded only 4 years ago), was in reality likely a 5th of what the stock of mostly camellia and ranunculus from three different nurseries was worth. Some 300-320000 plants changed hand for the Uyematsu nursery alone (the garden gives a far lower number) from a horticulturist known across Asia as one of the most gifted and successful cultivators. They included seedlings that Uyematsu had nursed for over 12 years and that Boddy propagated at Descanso, and eventually named, an implicit assertion that he was the original cultivator. As far as we know, no further tracing of the actual provenance has been undertaken since the 1942 transaction.
In addition, even though Boddy acknowledged publicly that the historic circumstances were unjust, there is archival evidence that his dissatisfaction with the camellia deal led him to try and shut the nursery down for other sales, offering lower whole sale prices for gardenias and azaleas. He also initiated a bitter and long-lasting law suit against a third nursery, the Yokomizos, for breach of contract after they returned from the camps, suing them for land and damages – a suit that was settled shortly before trial. That story seems not to be included in the history of the garden at all.
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WHY IS IT IMPORTANT to get the facts right and display them in a fashion that allows, or even forces people to remember? Has our nation not done enough to acknowledge the injustice committed against Japanese Americans? Official narratives – – the ruling ideas as Marx would have it — admit to wrongdoing, but also defend its necessity (legal cases) or claim that it was an aberration (congressional acts), or point to the fact that victims were given compensation, or point to a larger arc of progress in the U.S. that has incrementally increased diversity, equality and inclusion, insisting we have left the dark past behind.
Except, we haven’t. Hate crimes against Asian Americans have risen sharply across the last years and countless political groups as well as state governors fight against DEI policies across the nation, never mind attempting to constrain education about the actual history of this country by radically privatizing it, blackballing facts that are not congruent with the ideas of American exceptionalism and the moral superiority of those living on the shining hill.
Different memory work, not the official narrative, needs to get done in the area of Japanese incarceration, argues Erin Aoyama in the L.A. Review of Book, as “a process of locating and listening to stories about the past, reckoning with how they shape our families and communities in the present, and then sharing these stories and our experiences within them with others.” The first generation of imprisoned Japanese Americans often preferred to be silent about their incarceration in the early postwar years,”burying the shame, the fear, and the pain to rebuild their lives.” But new generations, she argues, can and do embrace memory work as a way of engaging with the past that impels each of us to action in the present, questioning the official story.
Image from the JANM website announcing the exhibition.
Some museums pick up on that as well, and it is worthwhile exploring exhibitions that open a door to the past, like the current one, Don’t fence me in, at the Japanese American National Museum in L.A.
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However, we also need to be aware of a paradox, namely that any specific memory culture alone does not promote change, and even might provoke a backlash. Looking to Germany as an example that I know, we see a country that has by far more Holocaust memorials and Jewish museums than other European countries, Holocaust education as part of every school curriculum, and official commemorations of historic dates that spelled doom for its Jewish citizens. Yet antisemitism and Holocaust denial or relativization thrive, and according to the World Jewish Congress in 2019, 41% of Germans thought Jews talk too much about the Holocaust. The notion of Germans as victims holds a special place in certain political circles, and the joke among German Jews that all of us know not a single German who didn’t claim they personally rescued a Jew or are related to someone who did, doesn’t come out of thin air.
There is a funny disconnect between the fact that non-fiction books about third-Reich related history reliably win prizes and journalist Anna Sauerbrey’s observation, listed above, that current generations of politicians are not anchored in the history of the country. In 2022 alone we saw winners of the German Non-Fiction Prize and the highest award in his field, the Prize of the Historisches Kolleg (Institute for Advanced Study in History) go to authors dealing with the political developments between 1918 and 1945.
Some scholars claim that we need to go beyond dichotomizing victims and perpetrators to understand the increase in “virulent racism and racist violence” even in the presence of a memory culture that is dedicated to educating about historical trauma. For A Memory Culture beyond Victims and Perpetrators, an essay written by Michael Rothberg, as an introduction to Valentina Pisanty’s book The Guardians of Memory (CPL Editions, 2021), helped me understand some of the issue – and also link back to the case of Manchester Boddy, friend to and plunderer of Japanese Americans.
Rather than solely distinguishing between evil and innocence, we need to look at the complexities of roles assigned or assumed during historic conflicts. There are not just victims, perpetrators, bystanders and the Just. Rothberg suggests another category, that of the implicated subject, those who enable, benefit from, and perpetuate injustice and inequality without being direct perpetrators and without controlling the regimes that produce injustice. Failure to intervene, or cooperating and consenting to the horrors that are committed, indirectly entangles us. Many of us are in some ways also implicated because we have inherited the history of oppression and violence of the past:
“…implicated subjects are certainly not guilty of the crimes of those who came before them, but by virtue of their membership and participation in national collectives they bear historical and political responsibility for those wrongs — and for the legacies they leave behind. One of the shortcomings of the familiar Holocaust memory culture, we might say, is its inability to activate recognition of our ethical and political implication in injustices — not just those that are past, like the Nazi genocide, but those in which we continue to live.”
We have a collective responsibility that goes far beyond the individual one of the Boddy’s of the world — non-evil people just out to make a deal, telling themselves that they are on the morally right side by giving hand-outs to friends in distress –to assess history in all its painful truth involving colonialism, slavery and racism, to reveal our own implication, the way we perpetuate to this day the inequalities they have wrought. Only then can we hope to breathe whole breaths, as Japanese American poet, author and activist traci kato-kiriyama envisions our future.
A good thing to contemplate in an extraordinary garden.
