On Gran Fury On The Art of Protest

For the second month in a row, Artforum is looking back at the 80’s. Douglas Crimp talks with surviving members of Gran Fury, the art collective which grew out of ACTUP and the early days of the AIDS crisis. Other participants included: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Todd Haynes, and Tim Rollins. [update: these guys were in Group Material, a different collective. My bad. Thanks, Andrea.]

Gran Fury members at the 1990 Venice Bienale, image:artforum.com
Gran Fury with The Pope and The Penis at the 1990 Venice Bienale, image:artforum.com
L to R: John Lindell, Donald Moffett, Mark Simpson, Marlene McCarty, and Loring McAlpin.

Some relevant excerpts:

Tom Kalin: We went from being wheat-pasting hooligans to suddenly having real resources and opportunities and a platform from which to speak. This brought about a crisis of conscience in discussing how to articulate the group because the stakes had been raised…
Loring McAlpin: We also had a long discussion about whether we should be in the Venice Biennale at all. We had wanted to hang banners in the street, remember? And they said, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ And there was a moment when we wondered whether it was enough for us to just be inside an art institution, but we decided it was a public enough venue to merit doing it…
Marlene McCarty: I want to go to bat for Venice. We cannot forget how much press came out of that piece, which was far more public than a billboard would have been. That work got AIDS on the cover of Express.
Robert Vazquez: But we’re being disingenuous when we say that we planned to send a huge photograph of an erection to Venice, intended as a provocation to the Pope, and worried that no one would notice. We knew very well what we were doing…
Donald Moffett: What I hear now is a rhetorical neglect coming out of the White House that is very similar to where we were fifteen years ago…
That legacy (the Gran Fury Collection at the NY Public Library) is an educational resource for another generation. After all, we didn’t come out of nowhere. We dragged the history of this kind of art into the ’80s and the early ’90s. And it will be reinvented again..

Bloghdad.com/Poetry_Slam

Once in a while,
I’m standing here, doing something.
And I think,
“What in the world am I doing here?”
It’s a big surprise.

— A Confession (May 16, 2001, interview with the New York Times), from Hart Seely’s piece on Slate, “The Poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld,”

… Let me have no friends or companions
But a wine-flask and a book,
That I may avoid all association
With the deceitful denizens of the world.
If I lift my skirt above the dust of the world
I shall tower above all in total independence,
Like a lofty cypress…

— excerpted from The Ghazals of Hafiz, works of the great 14th century Persian poet, translated by A.J Alston.

Disturbingly, It Keeps Coming Back to WWI

Etaples anti-war grafitti, image:bbc.co.ukFrom a BBC report: Protestors spray painted anti-war grafitti at Etaples in Northern France, the largest British WWI memorial cemetery in the country.
What it said (in order of increasing shock and awe) “Sadaam will win and spill your blood,” “Death to Yankees (swastika included),” “Bush, Blair to the TPI [International Court of Justice],” “Rosbeefs [what the French call Brits when they hear ‘frog’] Go Home,” and “Disinterr your trash, it contaminates our soil.” The French are suitably pissed, as are the British. [thanks, Buzz.]
“”Had the public been able to see live coverage from the [first world war] trenches, I wonder for how long the governments of Asquith and Lloyd George could have maintained the war effort. Imagine the carnage of the Somme on Sky and BBC News 24.”
— Jack Straw, British Foreign Minister in the the Guardian. Read the full text. Remember that nothing remotely Somme-like has been seen on western TV.
See the Silent Cities site for the Etaples Military Cemetery. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which administers Etaple (and Thiepval, the memorial at the Somme which was the object of Souvenir (November 2001)).

Bloghdad.com/MidEast/Takeover/Beta-Test

In Washington Monthly, Joshua Micah Marshall (his stellar weblog: Talking Points Memo) has a sobering look at the neocon view of Baghdad-as-beta for “rolling the table,” i.e., regime changing the entire Middle East. Slate‘s Kaus realizes that this explains Rumsfeld’s hubris and micromanaging (cf. Sy Hersh) a small military footprint–so Baghdad’s fall puts Teheran, Damascus, and Riyadh (!?!) on notice.
One conclusion of Marshall’s article: this neocon war strategy is self-fulfilling prophecy; the more they pursue it, the more “painfully necessary” constant war becomes. “The White House really has in mind an enterprise of a scale, cost, and scope that would be almost impossible to sell to the American public. The White House knows that. So it hasn’t even tried. Instead, it’s focused on getting us into Iraq with the hope of setting off a sequence of events that will draw us inexorably towards the agenda they have in mind.”
Which puts me in a coining mood (Hey, why should Jarvis have all the fun?). The war to begin all wars.

My Juror Waiting Room Survival Kit…

…is mostly books, and gym stuff, since there are two gyms near the courthouse. I searched several used bookstores* for a paperback copy of Infinite Jest, which I could rip into more portable chunks. But I learned an obvious lesson: if you go to a used bookstore with a specific book in mind, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Here’s what I discovered instead:

On The Best Way To See The daVinci Show

Go right now, before it closes. You’ve got three minutes. Just after 8:00, there wasn’t any line at all. Galleries were crowded at first. Seeing the drawings required surrendering your personal space in this strange, silent, dance, like having to get out of a hundred elevators. But the throngs fell away, and when we left at 9:30, artist friends were sauntering back for a leisurely second lap.

Bloghdad.com/Post-War/Rebuilding

Jeff “Buzz” Jarvis suggests I give bloghdad.com to the (eventually) liberated Salam Pax, who he notes is “the true Baghdad Blogger.”
I like it.
To make it happen, I’ll link up with an NGO and petition the ITU liaison at the UN’s Interim Iraqi Administration Authority and… oh, what the hell, just get me Richard Perle on the horn.

Bloghdad.com/Blame_Canada

When Bush’s Ambassador to Canada, Paul Cellucci, blamed Canada for not supporting the Administration’s war policy, it set of waves of self-criticism and anguish across the whole country (granted, they probably do that a lot up there…). Aaron has a day-by-day, um, breakdown of the whole crisis on 601am.
In today’s Halifax Herald, the Nova Scotian writer Silver Donald Cameron sets the record straight. After turning the Administration’s French taunts of “Remember WWI? WWII?” back on the US–which entered the wars three and two years after Canada–Cameron adds “Remember September 11th,” that day when Canada took 40,000 stranded US airline passengers into their homes on a moment’s notice. [via IP]

Bloghdad.com/Sabbath

Gary Wills’ NY Times Magazine article, “With God on His Side,” a long look at presidents’ pressing God into the service of politics. Keywords: “Missed you at bible study,” (an unsubtle slam in the Bush White House) and “muscular Christianity.”
Wills closes with an excerpt of Mark Twain’s “War Prayer,” written to protest the US invasion of the Philippines.

Bloghdad.com/About

So rather than reinvent the war-related weblog wheel, develop an RSS/XML aggregator that categorizes all the war-blog posts by politico-ideological slant, or simply redirect it to Slate, I’ve decided that Bloghdad.com will be an unpredictable feature where I point to some war-related post or another that lays siege to my attention.
And the Bloghdad.com first strike: Jeff Jarvis’s Buzz Machine, Saturday Edition.
Why? Jarvis leads off with “Also click here to go to my war news weblog,” yet he still posts eighteen war-related stories in one day. Disagree with him if you want (and I do, a lot), but get used to it; it’s urban blogfare.

On Sokurov On His Film On Art


Russian Ark, dir. Aleksandr Sokurov, image:guardian.co.uk

In the Guardian, Jonathan Jones talks with Aleksandr Sokurov about his latest film, Russian Ark, and he retraces the path of the single 96-minute Steadicam shot through the Hermitage with the museum’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky. I’ve written about this before, but what comes through here is a double view of serious passion for art.
The Hermitage dominates the lives of those who work there: It “has its own school where children can learn archaeology and art history from the age of five, preselected for curatorial lives like gymnasts or violinists.” Piotrovsky appears as himself in the film, talking with his deceased father, who was also director.
And for Sokurov, encountering art, not just seeing or presenting it, was a central goal of the film. “Sokurov films paintings from the side, in normal lighting, so that reflections – as they do – obscure one part of the picture and make the texture of its surface visible.” One encounter Sokurov provides is Rembrandt: “When you meet the real painting, you meet a real creature. Rembrandt left part of his physical being in his painting – every time you come up to a painting, you feel part of this energy, this sense of something being alive.”
Sokurov dismisses modern works—the museum’s famous Matisses don’t make the film’s, um, final cut–saying “the main criterion in art is time. It seems to me that those artists who are considered modern classics are to be tested by time yet.” And the director chides film for utterly lacking historical awareness (“due to the lack of cinema museums,” he claims) even as Jones points out the contrast of the unedited Russian Ark and its Russian Avant Garde antecedents–like Eisenstein, who also filmed in the Hermitage–whose “great modernist aesthetic” of editing became the foundation of our entire visual language.
So, Sokurov, what’s a better way to spend four hours today, watching my Criterion Collection Andrei Rublev DVD (aka, the cinema museum?) or standing in line at the Met for the last day of daVinci? “Museums make culture stable,” Sokurov notes, and they perform an invaluable conservative function, that is, conserving the “real creatures” of our collective past. As Sokurov would no doubt agree, in contemporary art, the artist leaves no part of his physical being in his work: he leaves his thoughts, his mind, his idea. And when I encounter a Felix Gonzalez-Torres light string, fabricated with parts off the hardware store shelf, I still have a sense of something being alive.

On Memorials Near The Pentagon

Air Force Memorial, James Ingo Freed, image:af.mil

Earlier this month, the Air Force unveiled James Ingo Freed’s design for the Air Force Memorial, which will be located on a ridge overlooking the Pentagon and the Pentagon’s own recently announced September 11th Memorial. The design is inspired by fighter jet contrails, which I can’t complain about, since my disappointment with the 9/11 memorial competition drove me to a similar–but more jarring, and far less elegant–concept for the Pentagon Memorial.
What I objected to was the many designs’ near-total emphasis on the individuals who died, to the exclusion of the greater import of the event. What turned out to be the winning design, in fact, was the apotheosis of this trend; it features 184 “memorial units,” aka benches, with individually lighted reflecting pools. I blame a bathetic misreading and misapplication of Maya Lin’s minimalist memorial language. But I’ve written a lot of this before.
What’s new, though, is Bradford McKee’s piece in Slate, where he points out an other, more fundamental flaw in the Memorial plan: no one will be able to actually visit. The Pentagon’s chosen site is essentially inaccessible, for both logistical and security reasons. Oh, and it’s right next to a noisy highway.
To imagine the resulting memorial’s best case scenario, just look at the completely unvisited Navy and Marine Memorial, which is located on the Potomac in the Ladybird Johnson Memorial Park, part of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Memorial Grove, aka the landscaping along the highway.

On Providing Aid and Comfort to the Enemy

No, not Iraq, I mean one of the other hundred+ countries who aren’t “with us,” that “second largest landmass in North America,” the nation high-sticking our northern border, Canada.
I’ve fled to Canada for 1) research/groundwork for the Animated Musical, part of which is set in Montreal, 2) skiing in Mont Tremblant, a hothoused attempt to create a Quebecian Aspen or Park City, which ends up looking like Universal Studios CityWalk, 3) to get away from the incessant, empty haze of American media on the war, and 4) to hang out with my wife, who’s attending an astrophysics conference at said resort.
Here’s a status update: 1) rather than repeatedly dig their car out every morning, driveway owners in Montreal put up these temporary plastic tent garages, which look like crappy greenhouses. Also, they bilingualize everything, even things that shouldn’t be translated, like steak au poivre and croissant. That’s all I can reveal at this point. 2) It’s raining at Tremblant, so skiing is losing out to weblogging in a room full of telnetting physicists. 3) Canadian media, or the CBC, at least, is comparing the breach with the US over Iraq to the whole softwood export turmoil. Yep, coming to Canada’s certainly put the war in perspective for me. 4) well, one outta four ain’t bad.