Matthew Harrison Tedford

Profile: Eric Gottesman

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 12:20:00 -0700

Eric Gottesman. Beletu, 2000; toned silver gelatin print; 20 x 24 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

The Massachusetts-based photographer and videographer Eric Gottesman has traveled from Labrador to Lebanon, but his work in Ethiopia is among his most compelling and touching. From 1999 to 2000, Gottesman spent time in Ethiopia as a fellow for the American non-governmental organization Save the Children. Focusing on photography and representation, he worked with local HIV/AIDS organizations. In 2001, Save the Children published Gottesman’s first monograph.

More than 5 percent of Ethiopians live with HIV or AIDS, and that number is doubled for urban women.¹ Though the disease ravages the country, prejudice against the millions who suffer from it is high: In a recent report from the Ethiopian government, only 17 percent of female respondents and 27 percent of male respondents expressed acceptance toward people living with HIV—and only slightly more said they would buy fresh vegetables from an HIV-positive food vendor.² This stigma can make it difficult for photographers like Gottesman to document the lives of Ethiopia’s HIV/AIDS victims. Gottesman found that patients at counseling centers would only consent to being photographed if they were rendered unidentifiable.

In a project that would become If I Could See Your Face I Would Not Need Food (2000–04), Gottesman began taking photographs that intentionally obscured patients’ faces. He used Polaroid film so that any image in which a subject’s face accidentally emerged could be immediately destroyed. Some of the subjects in the series appear simply coy or shy, and their status as clandestine outcasts would be obfuscated by any loss of context. In Yonas (2000), a man dressed neatly in slightly oversized clothes stands with his back to the viewer, his arms crossed. He stares out a window, but a scrupulously situated curtain blocks his view. He’s positioned himself so that neither his own community nor the photo’s viewers a world away can see who he really is. His infection has forced him into a psychological enclosure, a sort of solipsism.

In other photos, the concealment of identity is more conspicuous. Beletu (2000) pictures a woman standing straight, with her back against a wall. She appears proud, or at least resolute, as she looks toward the viewer. But two hands appear from a person outside the frame, covering both her eyes and mouth. It is as if, rather than seeing and saying no evil, the subject is left unable to see or speak by the low levels of T-helper cells in her bloodstream. The image depicts how her resoluteness in the face of the virus inside of her is weakened by forces outside of her body.

n 2004, two HIV-positive patients allowed Gottesman to photograph them unveiled; he then ended the project. One of these photos shows a woman contemplatively looking just past the photographer. Her sweater is too big for her and bunches up; her sickness is evidenced in her thin face and hollowed eyes. At first, she appears less steadfast than I imagined the subject of Beletu to be, but her courage is marked by the visibility of those very eyes.

Since first beginning his work in Ethiopia, Gottesman has created several projects with collaborators and subjects suffering from HIV/AIDS. For five months in 2003 and 2004, Gottesman worked with children in Addis Ababa who were affected by HIV/AIDS. Gottesman taught the children how to use photography as a means to control the representation of their lives and their struggles living with the disease or being orphaned by it. The program put Polaroid cameras in the hands of the students in order to give them more immediate control over which images to keep or destroy. One of Gottesman’s students was Tenanesh Kifyalew, a twelve-year-old girl living with HIV/AIDS, and she became both the subject of and collaborator in a photographic series called Paths That Cross Cross Again (2004).

The series documents the duality of Kifyalew’s life: on one hand, she is an innocent adolescent with a family, friends, and toys; on the other hand, she suffers from a deadly disease that destabilizes entire nations. Her body inhabits both of these worlds. In If I Had My Own House, Kifyalew could be any girl: she poses like a dancer, mid-pirouette, in a living room. Holding a teddy bear and a parasol, she flashes a beaming white smile that is heart-wrenching because of its impermanence. Kifyalew is sandwiched between four adult family members or friends in General’s Engagement Party. Her bright eyes are absent but only in the way that anyone’s would be, showing frustration or boredom with the obligatory, ceaseless posed photos at family gatherings. Her life seems normal. She is tiny next to the others, but it is unclear whether this is because of her illness or a naturally diminutive frame.

The defiantly titled I Am Not Sick reminds viewers of Kifyalew’s other world. In the photograph, a man—possibly a doctor or nurse—holds his hands cloaked in surgical gloves up to the camera. The photo was taken at adult-navel height, showing the world as Kifyalew sees it. Though she is too small to hurt a fly, grown men around Kifyalew fear for their lives. Her doctors prescribed antiretroviral drugs to manage her illness, which can cost $700 a year in Ethiopia (over half the nation’s gross domestic product per capita).³ Like millions of others, her family could not afford the treatment, and Kifyalew died six months after Gottesman began working with her. Paths That Cross Cross Again immortalizes one promising but tragically brief life cut short by HIV/AIDS. The project makes tearfully evident the human cost of a disease that is often thought of in economic and statistical terms.

Gottesman’s commitment to the people of Ethiopia has not ended with these projects. He continues to work with children affected by HIV/AIDS through Sudden Flowers, a collective he co-founded to empower the youth of Addis Ababa through filmmaking, photography, and art. He has also created several projects that interpret the history of Ethiopian photography, a medium that was suppressed in the 1970s and ’80s by the Derg, the country’s ruling Marxist-Leninist military junta. The works are moving because they bring to life the stories of people like Kifyalew and others who dare not reveal their identities.

Eric Gottesman and Tenanesh Kifyalew. I Am Not Sick, 2004; inkjet print; multiple editions, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artists.

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NOTES:

1. Federal Ministry of Health/National HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control Office, “AIDS in Ethiopia: Sixth Report,” 2006, 6, http://www.etharc.org/aidsineth/publications/AIDSinEth6th_En.pdf.

2. United States Agency for International Development, HIV/AIDS Survey Indicators Database, “HIV/AIDS Indicators Country Report: Ethiopia 2000–2011,” http://hivdata.measuredhs.com/reports/pdf_temp/pdf_1363792074704.pdf.

3. Sydney Rosen and Lawrence Long, “How Much Does it Cost to Provide Antiretroviral Therapy for HIV/AIDS in Africa?” (Boston: Center for International Health and Development, Boston University: 2006), 5, http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PNADS002.pdf.

Profile: Doug Rickard

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 12:18:00 -0700

#82.948842, Detroit, MI. 2009, 2010; archival pigment print; multiple editions, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco.

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When I was seven, my parents bought me a globe, and my life was never the same. I religiously studied every longitude and latitude on that magical orb and soon had every country memorized. I spent weekends poring over the maps in back issues of National Geographic at the public library. Living in a wasteland populated mostly by coyotes and tumbleweeds, I embraced maps as my portals to the world beyond.

Because maps served as some of my most important educations, it’s no wonder that I am drawn to the photographer Doug Rickard’s recent body of work, A New American Picture (2009-2011). The project stems from the artist’s fascination with the world as accessed through Google Street View, a map much more visually rich than the forms that I grew up with. Rickard spent countless hours culling screenshots from his “Google road trips” (the kind of trips that many of us have taken at the computer). He then photographed these images, giving them an eerie and muted veneer. The images in A New American Picture are blurry and low-resolution photographs of photographs that were such to begin with.

Rickard meticulously chose the locations for his road trips, emphasizing images from some of the nation’s poorest communities. He found these communities by researching crime statistics or travel tips on neighborhoods to avoid in certain cities. As he cruised these streets on Google Maps, Rickard looked for the perfect pictures, searching for what he has called an “apocalyptic-like brokenness.”¹ The more than seventy resulting photographs include such images as the young girl walking her pit bull past an empty and decrepit lot, three young men jaywalking in an Abbey Road–fashion across a patched-up street, and an amputee wearing a cowboy hat and sitting idly in a wheelchair at the side of the road.

Rickard grew up the son of a mega-church pastor. His father was a friend of the late fundamentalist, Jerry Falwell, and Rickard describes his upbringing as intellectually sheltered. Following a five-year break after high school, Rickard felt that he was “ready to learn” and attended the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where he studied history and sociology.² At UCSD, Rickard was confronted with a view of the world that challenged the American exceptionalism he learned as a child. In particular, he developed a deeper understanding of America’s troubled history with slavery, Jim Crow, and civil rights. A New American Picture can be seen as Rickard’s personal journey—his own version of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835)—as he learned about the lasting impacts of America’s tragic past.

The title of the series suggests multiple new ways of approaching the visual landscape of the United States. A first reading of the title implies that Rickard’s technique and the ubiquity of Street View offer a new kind of photograph. On Google’s part, the new image is visual data from a disembodied source. There’s a bit more human agency present in Google Street View images than in a closed-circuit television feed but not by much. Rickard’s contribution to the new American picture is data fetishism and a second-nature use of appropriation. The confluence of these factors may very well be a harbinger of representation in an algorithm-infused, post-Napster world where everything is up for grabs.

But it is not just the medium of photography that’s at play in this series; new technologies and the widespread access to them may be opening up a new vision of America. From Dorothea Lange to Janet Delaney, innumerable photographers have documented America’s rough edges and forgotten corners. But never before has so much visual data been available about places where a viewer does not live or has never visited. America’s endemic and epidemic poverty is now less hidden from those who are sheltered from it. Now when one imagines twenty-first century America, the slums and ghettos of Watts, Camden, and Waco are a lot harder to Photoshop-out of one’s mind.

A New American Picture sprang from two of Rickard’s earlier projects, the websites These Americans and American Suburb X (ASX). Begun in 2008, ASX is a massive compendium of American photography that catalogs the work of hundreds of photographers. The website classifies each work by its depicted location, its exhibitions, and other keywords. The photographs are accompanied by interviews, reviews, and essays. In the logic of the blog generation, ASX provides an extensive overview of American photography. The website claims to receive more than 180,000 visitors per month. These Americans is a similar site with a more personal point of view, based on Rickard’s collections of found photography from a potpourri of subjects, including civil-rights mugshots, American housewives, the young Shaquille O’Neal, and polygamy. Browsing the archive is simultaneously looking at Americana and peeking into Rickard’s mind and interests. These are Rickard’s Americans.

Rickard’s work is captivating to me because it touches so closely on my boyhood obsession with discovering what is beyond any given bend in a road—an obsession that I have never overcome and hopefully never will. Rickard must have shared a similar obsession as he was growing up, but his exploration was stunted until he was able to break free from his family’s limited worldview. These obsessions aren’t superficial. One can unleash a deeper understanding of the world by traveling through its hidden quarters.

#40.700776, Jersey City. 2007, 2011; archival pigment print; multiple editions, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco.

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NOTES:

1. John Foster, “A New American Picture: Doug Rickard and Street Photography in the Age of Google,” Design Observer, http://observatory.designobserver.com/feature/a-new-american-picture-doug-rickard-and-street-photography-in-the-age-of-google/32028/.

2. Ibid.

One on One: Matthew Harrison Tedford on Carleton E. Watkins

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 12:13:00 -0700

Carleton E. Watkins, <i>Golden Gate, San Francisco, number 669 from the Pacific Coast series</i>, 1867

Matthew Harrison Tedford

Finding My Place in History

Growing up in suburban Southern California I developed a rather indirect relationship with history. Except for the occasional Franciscan mission or Mexican rancho, I rarely experienced history firsthand. I felt like Indiana Jones if I was in a building constructed before World War II, and there were certainly no plaques or statues commemorating important events. Many suburbs exist as ahistorical landscapes with scant acknowledgment of what preceded the latest development project. Because of this, I learned to access history through books and photographs, rarely looking for it in my daily life. History was something to be found in texts, but not something to live.

After moving to San Francisco, I began experiencing history differently — I inhabited history. The things I’ve read about happened in the buildings I see all day, every day. Relics of the Gold Rush and the Gilded Age populate the city. I walk past a building as old as the State of California every morning on my way to get coffee. The transition from suburbia to history left me searching for the notable everywhere I walk, but it has also left me looking for the familiar in historical texts or photographs. When accessing my old modes of history I now try and find my place in San Franciscan antiquity.

Photographer Carleton Watkins, famous for his Yosemite Valley photographs, moved to San Francisco in 1853 and is responsible for documenting much of the city’s rise from western town to imperial city. Watkins’s stereoscopic photograph Golden Gate, San Francisco (1867) depicts the city as it was on the verge of flourishing. The photograph shows a budding town on the southern shore of the Golden Gate, the Marin Headlands just off in the distance. Atop Telegraph Hill, the two-story wood and brick buildings (in my mind they are all saloons and general stores) have been replaced by the altitudinous homes of the city’s aristocracy and feral parrot population.

Carleton Watkins,<i> Chy Lung & Co., Sacramento St., San Francisco </i>, 1796; From the private collection of Jim Crain.

Just a few blocks away is the location of my first San Francisco residence, a Chinatown SRO. Another of Watkins’s stereographs, Chy Lung & Co., Sacramento St., San Francisco (c. 1872), documents my future neighborhood in its nascent days. According to the American Speaking Telephone Company’s 1878 list of subscribers, Chy Lung & Co, Chinese Mchts was located at 640 Sacramento Street at Montgomery Street, just a block from the building I would call home over a century later. The men walking by on the street aren’t yet in three-piece Gucci suits, but I imagine that roosters clucking in Chinatown flophouses is an amaranthine sound that will continue to meet generations of travelers and newcomers to this city.

Though I have lived in this photograph, it is unrecognizable today. The buildings here are also all gone, swapped out at some point for Citibank, East West National Bank, Bank of the West, and First Bank buildings, as well as the Consulate General of Israel and the Wells Fargo History Museum. The residue of these times, however, is not completely lost. Just out of view would have been Portsmouth Square, a critical plaza in the city’s history and the site of the first raised American flag, the first public school, and the 1848 announcement of gold found in nearby rivers. Easily one of the most important sites in the city, transformed but not gone, Portsmouth Square is still a hub of activity, as any tai chi or Chinese checkers enthusiast can ensure you. The square is the manifestation of over 160 years of history, connecting the times of Watkins to our own.

If one looks at Golden Gate, San Francisco long enough, one may realize that much more than just the architecture has changed.The shoreline is dreadfully close, engulfing the summer stomping ground of countless European tourists, a possible glimpse of what the city might look like in another 150 years. Around the time of incorporation, San Francisco’s mark on a map was dramatically different. Yerba Buena Cove covered what is now the Embarcadero and most of the financial district; its western extremity butted up right against Montgomery Street. Extreme sports fans could have probably used Telegraph Hill for cliff diving. Up the coast, North Beach was an honest-to-goodness beach. But as the city’s population exploded and the Outside Lands awaited being tamed, new territory was found by filling the sea. As the street flattened and the buildings rose, the shoreline was also extended.

History is palpable to any pedestrian in San Francisco who wants to find it. And a lot can be learned from historical records such as Golden Gate, San Francisco. But my experience of the city is transformed by combining these two approaches. It makes it easier to draw connections and fall through the rabbit hole of history. I don’t just look at buildings and appraise their age or view photographs and lament the losses they document. Instead, I understand the metamorphosis that has taken place and how it impacts my life on a daily basis.

Profile: Hung Liu

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 12:12:00 -0700

Village Photograph IV, c.1969–1975; photograph; 24 x 18 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

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In February 1948, the artist Hung Liu was born in Changchun, in the far north of China. Only months later, the city was the site of a major siege by the People’s Liberation Army. More than one-hundred-sixty thousand civilians starved to death in what was one of several battles marking the end of the decades-long Chinese civil war. The newly established People’s Republic would play a profound role in the development of Liu’s art practice. After completing high school, she was forced to defer her art career to participate in the Cultural Revolution’s agrarian re-education curriculum. During the four years she toiled in the fields, she often photographed the villagers she worked among. “I was like a journalist who went to their door, took their pictures, and gave the photos to them,” she says of the experience.¹ But photography was not always a safe pastime, as many families, including Liu’s, burned photographs to hide their bourgeois origins.

Following her labor detail in Changchun, Liu continued her education at the Beijing Teaching College, where she was allowed to pursue her art career because, in a twist of fate, she had worked as a peasant; later, she enrolled at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Though she studied Soviet Socialist Realism, she secretly sketched in a more Western style. She applied for and was accepted to the University of California, San Diego, but her enrollment was delayed while she sought permission from the Chinese government to leave the country. During this time, Liu studied calligraphy, stamp making, and ceramic painting in an effort to augment her art education with traditional Chinese practices. After nearly four years, Liu was allowed to leave for the United States in 1984. In San Diego, she was introduced to Allan Kaprow, David Antin, and Moira Roth (who was the first person to visit her studio).

In 1988, Liu had a three-month residency at San Francisco’s Capp Street Project, and the resulting work was exhibited in a downtown office building. In her proposal, she expressed interest in the relationship of Chinatown’s “myth of a better life to its reality,” and researched families who owned businesses in Chinatown.²

The exhibition, Resident Alien, included a frieze painted using tai-chi movements, columns painted with Chinese surnames, a pile of fortune cookies (anticipating Félix González-Torres’s candy pieces), and a large-scale painting of Liu’s identification card. Although she had only been in the United States for four years, Liu’s work focused on the complexities that she had already faced in navigating multiple cultural identities, which were often accompanied by false expectations of her.

In one painting, also titled Resident Alien, the date of birth of Liu’s alias, Fortune Cookie, is listed as “020784,” as if suggesting that Liu had become a new person at the same time that she became a resident of the United States. In a sense, it’s as if the siege of Changchun, years of forced labor, and time spent in college and graduate school had not been as transformational for Liu as moving to the United States. And yet, the class on her identification card in Resident Alien is “CR6,” which meant that her residency was conditional. Even with an American husband, Liu was in a constant state of uncertainty as an immigrant; any day, she could be forced to revert to her old life.

The painting Resident Alien also conjures the role of Chinese women in San Francisco’s early history, as the term “fortune cookie” is sexual slang for a Chinese woman.³Between 1852 and 1873, a San Francisco operation shipped six thousand Chinese girls to work as prostitutes in San Francisco—a whopping 87 percent of the Chinese females who arrived in the United States during that time.^⁴The city of San Francisco flourished with the help of these immigrants, female workers whose names and life stories were less important than the sexual services they supplied to miners, merchants, financiers, and sailors. Any history of the city or Chinatown would be remiss to neglect this story.

During her Capp Street residency, Liu also painted photographs of Chinese families and railroad workers, borrowing photographs from a local San Francisco family. In the wake of the 1991 Oakland hills fire, she witnessed families searching for photographs and reconsidered the photographs she took during the Cultural Revolution. Liu also returned to China for the first time in 1991, where she discovered archived turn-of-the-century photographs of prostitutes and began using them as source material for paintings. It was during this time that she began to advance the painting style she is most well-known for: large-scale paintings that pull not only from historical or personal photographs but also from Liu’s training in Socialist Realism, traditional Chinese painting, and modern European-American painting.

Liu’s 1999 piece Loom evinces her work from this period. The brilliantly colored wall-size painting re-imagines a sepia-tone photograph of a single woman stoically working at a loom. Liu says she was drawn to the dignity she found in the subject, who is not returning the photographer’s gaze. Colorful strokes cascade down the painting in a way that is reminiscent of both Chinese ink painting and American Action Painting. Liu added a flock of birds to the original image, an element she attributes to traditional Chinese painting. Liu says Loom, like many of her works, is “a very busy painting,” favoring the collision and coexistence of Eastern and Western cultures that are manifested on the canvas.

Liu has taught at Mills College since 1990, and her work continues to explore the terrain that exists between her Chinese and American identities, as well as the Russian, Chinese, and American traditions in which she was trained. Like her alias Fortune Cookie, Liu’s work is neither entirely American nor Chinese. Art history doesn’t have a neat category for Liu, and that is likely what she prefers.

Resident Alien, 1988; installation view; Capp Street Project, San Francisco. Courtesy of the Artist and Capp Street Project.

Hung Liu: Offerings is on view at the Mills College Art Museum through March 17, 2013; Summoning Ghosts: The Art of Hung Liu is on view at the Oakland Museum of California from March 16 to June 30, 2013; and Questions from the Sky: New Work by Hung Liu is on view at the San Jose Museum of Art from June 6 to September 29, 2013.

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NOTES:

1. “A World of Art; Biographical Sketch: Hung Liu,” Annenberg Learner, accessed February 20, 2013, http://www.learner.org/catalog/extras/wabios/liu.html.

2. Hung Liu, Resident Alien,” Capp Street Project Archive, accessed February 14, 2013, http://libraries.cca.edu/capp/hung_liu.html. Throughout the process for creating Resident Alien, Liu expressed a desire to not “misrepresent or esthetically displace the families involved.”

3. As quoted in: Wu Hung and Peggy Wang, eds., Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 269.

4. Jeffrey Scott McIllwain, Organizing Crime in Chinatown: Race and Racketeering in New York City, 1890–1910 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2004), 53.

5. Hung Liu on Loom,” YouTube video, 2:46, posted by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, May 5, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZjNZm27Nc4.

Profile: Claudia Joskowicz

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 12:07:00 -0700

Claudia Joskowicz. Sympathy for the Devil, 2011 (still); two-channel HD video; 9:00. Courtesy of the Artist.

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Claudia Joskowicz, who is an artist based in New York and Santa Cruz, Bolivia, creates videos that reawaken violent events and their residue from Bolivian history. Often filmed in very slow motion, these works allow viewers to focus on the intense emotions or complicated scenarios they document. Oscillating between serenity and suspense, Joskowicz’s videos first create points of entry and then confront viewers with the trauma and anguish of the videos’ subjects.

Sympathy for the Devil (2011) is a haunting peek at a commonplace interaction between two unassuming neighbors in a La Paz high-rise. The opening scene shows two elderly men passing each other, as one enters and another leaves an elevator. The man facing the camera holds his head high, averting the gaze of the other, who looks down. The former represents K. Altmann, the alias of Nikolaus “Klaus” Barbie, the German Nazi officer who earned the nickname “Butcher of Lyon” due to his torture of Jews and Resistance leaders in Vichy France. In the video, the second man represents an unnamed Polish Jew who immigrated to Bolivia during World War II and was allegedly Barbie’s neighbor, living on the floor below. The scene progresses like molasses, with almost indiscernible movement—as one might imagine feeling the time passing during such an uncomfortable situation. Did each of these men know the history of the other? Is Barbie’s distant glare evidence of hubris or humiliation?

A split screen then shows the two men lounging in their respective apartments. With differing decors but identical layouts, their living rooms have the same view overlooking La Paz. A young male accompanies the Jewish man, and his apartment has seating for several others. Though he has possibly experienced unimaginable horrors, in La Paz it seems he has family or friends, and he shares his life with others. The white upholstery and curtains imbue innocence on him. His companion puts on a record, and as the vinyl pops give way to Mick Jagger bellowing “Sympathy for the Devil,” viewers see Barbie’s apartment on the other side of the split screen.

Barbie is alone, well dressed, and pensive; his apartment has
no seating for anyone else. His curtains are crimson, as
though alluding to the blood he spilled as a member of the Gestapo. As The Rolling Stones run through Lucifer’s curriculum vitae, the frame showing the unnamed neighbor fades out and the lyrical scorn zeros in on Barbie. (Although Lucifer’s taunt, “Hope you guess my name,” came true in 1971, when Barbie’s identity was discovered, he remained in Bolivia until his extradition to France in 1983.) At the end of the video, the two men find themselves once again facing off at the elevator.

Joskowicz’s interest in depicting the history of violence in her country has brought her to events that are still shaping contemporary Bolivian politics and society. In October 2003, a social conflict over the foreign privatization of Bolivia’s vast natural gas reserves erupted in the streets of La Paz, particularly in the largely indigenous suburb of El Alto. Scores of protestors were killed in the conflict, and it resulted in roadblocks that caused food and fuel shortages in La Paz, a declaration of martial law, and the eventual resignation of then-president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. The conflict led to major changes in Bolivian politics, including the rise of the current socialist president, Evo Morales.

Joskowicz’s Every Building on Avenida Alfonso Ugarte — After Ruscha (2011) revisits this tumultuous struggle with a little inspiration from Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966). Ruscha created his famous twenty-seven-foot-long accordion-fold book by mounting a camera on the back of a truck and continuously photographing while driving. Joskowicz transposes this technique to the streets of La Paz, taking it far from legendary Hollywood to dusty Avenida Alfonso Ugarte, where much of the gas conflict took place.

Like Sympathy for the Devil, the twenty-six-minute Every Building on Avenida Alfonso Ugarte is a split-screen video. The left frame pans left and the right frame pans right, creating the illusion that these alternate views of the street are merging into one another. The left frame depicts what appears to be a typical day on the avenida: merchants selling their goods, dancers and musicians performing in the street, and people milling about and doing their business. The right frame begins similarly before passing over a phalanx of riot police, street fires, and ragtag protesters. These different scenes depict the same street, but it is unclear if the stories are hours, weeks, or years apart. The wildly different scenes in Every Building are merged into the single narrative of a society wrought into a powder keg, where an ordinary day can explode into violence at any moment.

In her other works, Joskowicz recreates moments of violence from Bolivia’s history, including the shoot-out that allegedly killed Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the quartering of Aymara rebel Túpac Katari, and the public display of Che Guevara’s body following his execution. Her works don’t just highlight Bolivian history but also are re-lived proof of the deeply global nature of the country, which is often ignored by the world community that labels it a forgotten Andean province. And yet, Bolivia has been an international crossroads since the Babylonians and Assyrians were squabbling in their fertile crescent. The advent of Spanish colonialism and then neoliberal colonialism have entangled Bolivia in the world community even more, bringing with them a new magnitude of violence. Joskowicz’s cinematic videos deftly tell these less-known historical tales with an eerie, percolating quality that compel you to watch, again and again.

Claudia Joskowicz. Every Building on Avenida Alfonso Ugarte—After Ruscha, 2011 (still); two-channel HD video; 26:00. Courtesy of the Artist.

Profile: smARTpower

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 12:04:00 -0700

Art Jones. Selector International, August 18 to September 16, 2012 (still); from a series of workshops, classes, and demonstrations, Karachi, Pakistan. Courtesy of the Artist.

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The political scientist Joseph Nye coined the term “smart power” to refer to an international diplomatic approach that balances and appreciates the use of military or economic might with more benevolent relationship building. The term rose to prominence when Hillary Clinton used it thirteen times in her 2009 Secretary of State confirmation hearing. “Smart power,” she explained, “requires reaching out to both friends and adversaries to bolster old alliances and to forge new ones.”¹ During Clinton’s tenure, the United States’s smart-power approach has encompassed tactics ranging from a commitment to distributing one hundred million clean and efficient cookstoves throughout the developing world to the execution of hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan alone, killing thousands, including nearly one hundred children.

One of the softer, even idealistic, sides of this approach is the cleverly titled smARTpower program. In collaboration with the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs so far has sent fifteen American artists abroad for up to forty-five days with the objective of creating community art projects with local partners. The first cohort was deployed across the globe from Nepal to Nigeria in 2012. Selected participants included the installation artist Pepón Osorio, the painter Rochelle Feinstein, the social-practice artist Caroline Woolard, and several others, running the gamut of art practitioners across the United States from recent graduates to established professionals.

The mid-career Bronx artist Art Jones was selected to travel to Karachi, Pakistan, to work with Vasl, a nonprofit art space. Jones, who made a name for himself with his audiovisual mixing, exhibited in the infamous 1993 Whitney Biennial and has worked with both MTV and the New York City Department of Health, among others. His multimedia work is experimental, fun, and often grounded in genres outside the visual arts, such as hip-hop. At first glance, Jones is not exactly the kind of artist one might expect to pique the interests of diplomatic bureaucrats; the Department of State does have the final say on all artists selected to participate.

Jones’s project for smARTpower was Selector International (2012), a series of classes and workshops that culminated in the creation of mobile audiovisual installations. The workshops taught sound editing, interview techniques, and DJ skills to twelve attendees, who locally sourced the sounds and images for the project. Though the workshop size was limited, the resulting work was presented at Port Grand, an open-air entertainment complex on the Karachi waterfront, and engaged the general public.

One striking image from the September 2012 nighttime demonstration shows the crowd lit by the neon glow of the homemade multimedia carts: a man in shorts and what appears to be a Heineken T-shirt, a young woman with a bobbed haircut and short sleeves, and, in the background, a woman wearing a traditional abaya and niqab.

Elizabeth Grady, the program manager for smARTpower, has said that Vasl was most interested in Jones’s proposal because, in Pakistan, “there are few opportunities for celebration and public arts engagement, because of the security situation.”² But for Jones, the project is not only about public celebration. The use of popular culture and music can be a deeply political tool, especially in a theocratic and conservative nation such as Pakistan. “I feel like this kind of social activity can explore or raise a number of concerns, topics, issues, and interests,” he told the journalist Anika Anand. “I want to produce an interesting set of spontaneous social events.”³

Jones’s fellow smARTpower participant Xaviera Simmons is one of the emerging artists in the program, but she was by no means plucked from obscurity: she is a recent graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and has worked with the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. For her project, Simmons traveled to Colombo, Sri Lanka, to work with Theertha, a Sri Lankan artist collective. The project, This Is Not Just A Dinner/Portraiture Sessions (2012), truly embodied the spirit of smARTpower. During Simmons’s Sri Lankan stay, she and Theertha hosted a series of dinners, lectures, workshops, and video portraiture sessions. Simmons interacted with local communities and traveled far from the capital to Galle, Nuwara Eliya, and Polonnaruwa, working closely with more than two hundred students.

Simmons used these discussions as springboards for considering how individuals express their identities through various artistic mediums. For the child participants in particular, this served as valuable arts education, with all the benefits such instruction is known to provide. But what is important to the smARTpower mission is not the brief support of Sri Lankan arts education but rather Simmons’s role as an ambassador, which was demonstrated by her active and genuine interaction with participants. By listening to the local community members, asking questions, and attempting to learn about their lives, politics, and emotions, she did what no predator drone can do: she made connections. After Simmons left the island, the measure of the project’s success would be the dozens or even hundreds of Sri Lankans who had experienced a meaningful relationship with at least one American.

As currently conceived, smARTpower seems to avoid being a top-down, one-way channel of American cultural distribution. If this were ever to change, the program would become deeply flawed and likely counterproductive. Both the current and future U.S. administrations must trust in the program and respect its autonomy. There’s a frighteningly fine line between propaganda and cultural diplomacy, and hubris often makes large, awkward strides.

The ideas underlying the program’s pilot project have potential. But the initiative’s two-year budget of one million dollars is less than 0.002% of the Department of State’s fifty-billion-dollar annual budget. Should the federal government decide to renew funding for smARTpower, it must consider a more committed investment, not just in the program but also in the thinking that ostensibly guides it. The success of the smart-power approach depends not on throwing art at a preexisting diplomatic strategy but on re-envisioning how the other 99.998% of the State Department’s budget is spent. It only takes one drone attack to instantly undo all of an artist’s hard work.

Xaviera Simmons. This Is Not Just A Dinner/Portraiture Sessions, August 10 to September 26, 2012 (still); from a series of dinners, conversations, video portraiture sessions, presentations, and teaching workshops with Theertha/Red Dot Gallery in Colombo, Galle, Nuwara Eliya, and Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka. Courtesy of the Artist.

NOTES:

1. “Transcript of Hilary Clinton’s Confirmation Hearing,” accessed January 17, 2013, http://www.cfr.org/us-election-2008/transcript-hillary-clintons-confirmation-hearing/p18225.

2. Anika Anand, “Bronx Artist Will Be U.S. Cultural Ambassador,” accessed January 23, 2013,
http://anikaanand.com/class-assignment-bronx-artist-will-be-u-s-cultural-ambassador.

3. Ibid.

Galleries, Labor and the Market

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 12:00:00 -0700

Critic and gallerist Mat Gleason recently penned a Huffington Post blog comparing art galleries and labor unions. His argument misrepresents the role of each in their respective industries, and in doing so he commits a disservice to artists.

Gleason’s argument goes something like this: Labor unions negotiate with management in order to ensure the best possible wages and conditions for workers; similarly, gallerists negotiate with collectors to ensure the highest prices for works of art, which benefits artists. He then explicitly compares the Teamsters and Gagosian.

The fatal flaw in this reasoning is its faulty metaphor. Artists and laborers are analogous; but Gleason and Gagosian are management, not labor unions. Collectors are customers, not managers. Consider a member of the United Auto Workers union. He or she sells labor to Ford (what we will call management), who in turns sells the fruit of that labor to customers. The UAW does not negotiate with you when you go to purchase a car. Artists also sell their labor to a middleman who then markets and sells that product to a customer for a profit, this is called a gallery.

It’s true that gallerists like to keep prices as high as possible, but so does Ford and any other capitalist. High prices for cars and paintings can result in higher wages for laborers and artists, but it’s not guaranteed and it does not preclude exploitation. Labor unions exist to advocate on behalf of the workers with those they immediately sell their labor too. Gleason’s reasoning would lead us to calling Ford a labor union. It’s a remarkable argument.

An artists union would negotiate directly with Gleason and Gagosian on their behalf to ensure, for example, that the gallery doesn’t take 50 percent of a work’s sale price or that they provide health benefits to their artists. Such a union might also advocate on the behalf of gallery staff, who often earn terrible wages and receive no benefits. They would certainly take issue with the endemic use of free, exploitative and often illegal intern labor, which can have a deleterious effect on wages, employment and social mobility.

Earlier this year Teamsters Local 814 successfully fought on the behalf of Sotheby’s art handlers to end a 10-month lockout and ensure modest wage guarantees at the auction house that conducts billions of dollars in sales. Are gallerists expected to picket themselves when their employees are unhappy? Is there reason to believe that gallerists are qualitatively different from business owners in other industries and should thus be entrusted with advocating for the rights of the labor they purchase? A fanciful notion indeed.

Car manufacturers and gallerists both have a role to play in society. They should not be vilified unless they do something villainous. But their should not be confused with those of others. They are both businesses that exist to make a profit for their stakeholders. Some businesses attain this goal ethically, some do not. Labor unions, NGOs, government regulators, lawyers and others can help level the playing field for workers who are at an extreme strategic disadvantage by themselves. At a time when wages are stagnant or declining, debt is skyrocketing, subsistence is becoming more difficult to ensure, it is irresponsible for Gleason to conflate management and advocacy, foreclosing on the possibility of economic equity in the art market.

Profile: Gabriele Stabile

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 11:42:00 -0700

Gabriele Stabile. Untitled, 2012; published in Refugee Hotel. Courtesy of the Artist.

The field of journalism has been subject to a lot of critique in recent years for doctored photographs, opinions serving as news, poor or no fact-checking, and about as many controversies as news stories. While the twenty-first century has presented several existential obstacles to the profession, there are still many journalists producing quality work. New York–based Italian photojournalist Gabriele Stabile—who has shot for the New Yorker, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal—is among these professionals.

In March 2009, just two months after Israeli troops withdrew following the Gaza War, Stabile traveled to the Gaza Strip to chronicle the aftermat.¹ While in the territory, Stabile staged himself at Gaza City’s Al Shifa Hospital, photographing the hospital’s patients and the surrounding environs. His photographs from the series appear a bit aged, though they possess none of the conspicuous qualities of an Instagram nostalgia filter. These photos humanize their subjects. Stabile documents lives, not events. Instead of just seeing news items in the sleek images of a theatrical photojournalist, I see individuals.

A graphic photograph shows a young patient, probably in his early teens, with a deep and bloody laceration on his back. He appears calm as a doctor examines him—not exhibiting the pain one would expect but nonetheless annoyed to be visiting the hospital. The photograph itself provides no details about how the boy became wounded. Did he succumb to an accident doing work around his house? Is the gash a result of the world’s most fiery geopolitical conflict? A caption tells the viewer that in fact the boy was stabbed in the back on his way to school. The tragedy of this photo is the likelihood of any of these episodes sending a child to the hospital.

In a less ambiguous photograph from the series, a Hamas militiaman wears ad hoc fatigues and holds an assault rifle as he peers through the curtains of a hospital room. The curtains are dirty and wrinkled, suggesting poor conditions within. The man pulls the curtains to his face to wipe away his tears. A caption tells us that the unseen patient with an unknown condition is a relative of the man. Momentarily, the politics of war and occupation subside and the grief of a single human is manifest. Along with the rest of Stabile’s Gaza series, these photographs present a complex world; not war porn, they nevertheless depict a place brimming with suffering.

Stabile’s most recent project is a collaboration with New Orleans–based journalist Juliet Linderman for the San Francisco publisher Voice of Witness. Their book, Refugee Hotel (2012), is a collection of photographs and interviews documenting the intimate moments of arrival and adjustment for recent refugees to the United States. The most popular notion of refugees conjures images of blue United Nations tents and trekking women with their possessions delicately balanced atop their heads. These images are indeed a reality for many of the world’s thirty-five million refugees—internally displaced persons, stateless persons, and asylum seekers. But the experiences of refugees are as varied as the nations from which they come. The simplified view of refugee life can lead many of us to neglect the fact that the family next to us at the airport baggage carousel or our neighbors may have just fled war or persecution.

Stabile’s photographs in Refugee Hotel shine a light on the often unseen or unnoticed junctures in a refugee’s life. He documented the journeys of several individuals and families, beginning with their arrival at airports in one of five cities that serve as U.S. ports of entry for refugees: Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Newark, and New York. After their arrival, these refugees spent a night at an airport hotel before traveling across the country to their new hometowns.

One photo depicts a Bhutanese refugee as he rides a bus from LAX to a nearby hotel. It’s almost impossible for me to imagine what is going through his head as I look at the image of him gazing out the window at the traffic, billboards, and strip clubs of Century Boulevard. The mix of melancholy and excitement must be penetrating. His life will never be the same. He hopes, I imagine, that this move will provide safety and stability, but he cannot be certain that it will. As with his Gaza photographs, Stabile has imbued the image with a sense of intimacy. I see the subject as a man with emotions, fears, desires, successes, and shortcomings; I do not see a statistic, one person out of thirty-five million.

One heartbreaking photograph shows no fewer than ten Somali refugees huddled in a hotel hallway. Though they had been provided hotel rooms by the International Organization for Migration, they chose to sleep in the hallway out of fear of being forgotten and left behind in the morning. The nauseating glow of hotel lighting illuminates the family as they wait idly for something to happen. The physical setting may be familiar to any viewer who has ever taken a trip out of town, but the experience pictured is inconceivably foreign. An unsettling juxtaposition, the image offers a narrow entry point into the refugee’s circumstance.

In another photograph the same family’s arrival to the Howard Johnson in Newark is documented: donning hijabs and lanyards presumably indicating their refugee status, the women usher a small child into the hotel lobby next to a luggage trolley transporting their possessions. Specks of snowflakes dot the photograph; the New Jersey winter is surely a change from hot, equatorial Somalia. When their anxious and frightening night in the hotel hallway had abated, the family was not forgotten; they picked up their belongings and headed back out—to Minnesota.

Stabile’s photographs exhibit a tender neutrality. They do not sensationalize, glorify, or villainize; instead they treat their subjects as individuals. This is a sensitive and difficult balance for a journalist to strike, as empathy is often mistaken for endorsement, collusion, or propaganda. But, among other things, it is the proper role of a journalist to understand his subjects and impart that understanding to his readers or viewers, as Stabile has done.

Gabriele Stabile. Untitled, 2012; published in Refugee Hotel. Courtesy of the Artist.

Building Walls of Hope: The Teachings of Claudia Bernardi

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 11:33:00 -0700

The Walls of Hope project in progress in Monthey, Switzerland

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Claudia Bernardi (today a professor in CCA’s Community Arts Program, but who also teaches in a wide range of disciplines, including Diversity Studies, Fine Arts, and Visual and Critical Studies programs) was a student at the university of art in Buenos Aires in 1976, the year the military dictatorship took power in Argentina.

“Those were very dark years — very tragic, painful, and violent. The ones who survived learned to look at life, history, and art quite differently.”

Later, in 1992, Bernardi accompanied the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team in the investigation of a 1981 massacre at El Mozote, El Salvador. The team found remains of 143 people, 136 of whom were children under the age of 12. Ballistic evidence proved that at least 27 shooters had been operating at the same time.

Bernardi’s role was to create archaeological maps documenting the finding of human remains, associated objects, and ballistic evidence.

These experiences and others have profoundly affected her perspective on the role of art in politics. “I am hugely interested in seeing how art can support other fields to foster enduring peace.”

She is also a cofounder of the School of Art and Open Studio, also known as Walls of Hope, in the city of Perquin, El Salvador. The organization is dedicated to arts education, human rights, and diplomacy.

Art and Activism … and Occupy

Out of Bernardi’s 10 years of teaching, spring 2012 stands out as a particularly inspiring semester. She was teaching a Diversity Studies course titled Art and Activism. “It was hardly a class, but rather a gathering of brains and souls.” She and her students explored the intersection of art and social activism in Latin America, more than 6,000 miles away … and then activism came knocking on their front doors in the form of Occupy Oakland.

It turned out to be an amazing, unintentional teaching aid. “While the students didn’t all necessarily embrace the Occupy movement, they gained a palpable experience of what a movement of that nature might mean.” They pored over every assigned reading, talked to their families and friends about the topic, and were sometimes even moved to tears.

Bernardi believes that the course’s success hinged on the marriage of the rational process of learning and the emotional process of embracing the material presented. “If half of them end up doing even half of what they think they can, the world will better,” she lauds.

The School of Art and Open Studio

Walls of Hope was founded in the city of Perquin in 2005, 13 years after the end of a brutal civil war in El Salvador. And still today, Bernardi reports, Perquin’s population is divided: There are many people whose family members perished as result of massacres and human rights violations, and there are others who still support the army and the government that ruled during the war.

Walls of Hope brings together children and adults from both sides of the fractured community. Its inclusive, nonsectarian agenda — teaching art as a means of reconciliation, diplomacy, self-expression, and community building — has taken hold. “I have been told by the right and the left that what the school has managed to create, politics never could.”

The Perquin Model in Northern Ireland

Bernardi has been invited to places as diverse as Colombia, Guatemala, Northern Ireland, Canada, Switzerland, and various locales in the United States to implement “the Perquin Model” in other communities that have confronted tragedies and divisiveness.

In 2011 she traveled to the Ardoyne district of Belfast, Northern Ireland, to work on a collaborative mural project with children at Holy Cross Catholic primary school and Wheatfield Protestant primary school.

Though the two institutions are neighbors and both school principals welcomed the mural project, the children’s parents were unhappy with the proposal, especially since local violence had escalated in July.

So, Bernardi conceptualized the creation of a mural with two homes. They started it at Holy Cross as an outdoor project and continued it across the street, indoors, at Wheatfield. Both groups of children worked with a total understanding of what the other group was saying and representing — that they were working on the “same” artwork.

People in the community told Bernardi she should be wary. “You will get shot,” they said. “In Belfast, we’d build a tunnel before a bridge.” But the prejudices of the adults were eventually overcome by the children’s excitement over working in collaboration with their unseen peers, and the realization that their Protestant and Catholic kids were expressing similar ideas.

The final “Mural of Voices” documented the children’s testimonies, thoughts, and dreams. Bernardi reports that the community did not experience any major healing as a result of the project, but that at least new questions — what she calls apertures — opened up, along with the possibility of imagining similar efforts in the future.

Walls of Hope in Switzerland

In 2012, the celebration of the international Day of Diversity in conjunction with Amnesty International brought Bernardi and three other artist-teachers from Perquin to the Swiss town of Monthey to lead another Walls of Hope project.

This small town in the Rhone valley has a population of 34 percent foreigners, many of whom are asylum seekers and refugees. Bernardi explains that Swiss laws regarding people with undocumented status are not benevolent. Though deportation is infrequent, they live in a continuous, fraught state of limbo.

She worked with 93 men, women, and children from 23 different countries. There was no single common language, but communication was achieved nonetheless. The project offered the diverse immigrants of Monthey a space to express their varied identities and hopes in a public forum in a place where they are stateless, and, by extension, usually voiceless. The success of their efforts depended on their willingness to share their personal stories, many of which were tragic.

The locals initially expressed shock at the brilliant colors — the Swiss color palette tends toward muted tones — but they eventually came to love the mural’s optimistic imagery and youthful brashness, and even began asking when another mural project would take place and how they could participate.

“Art is more effective than politics,” affirms Bernardi.

From El Salvador to CCA and numerous points in between, Claudia Bernardi’s art and teaching practices emerge from a firm commitment to peace and an unwavering belief in the goodness of students.

“The greatest moment as a teacher is when something clicks for a student. You can tell, even in their body language. They embrace the challenges and the questions. I have so much hope for the world when I see it happen. I have seen very terrible evidence of what people can do to one another. To see people willing to make a contribution with their art is so beautifully hopeful.”

California Dreaming: The Photography of Amanda Marsalis

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 11:31:00 -0700

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Amanda Marsalis’s (Photography 2001) photographs appear regularly on glossy pages across international newsstands. She shoots both editorial and advertising photography, and her clients have included Apple, FedEx, GQ, the New York Times Magazine, Vogue, and many other household names.

It is global in reach, but she describes her style as Californian, owing much to her home state.

Early Roots in Photography

Marsalis always wanted to be a photographer. Born in San Francisco, she began shooting at age 14 and steadily built her portfolio. She had her first picture published when she was in high school; it was of the band Joan of Arc, and it appeared in Transworld Skateboarding. “It was super exciting to see my work in print!” she recalls.

She enrolled at CCA in 1996. She studied with Jim Goldberg and the late Larry Sultan. At the time she was focused on fine art photography, but as it became increasingly acceptable to simultaneously work in the fine art and commercial realms, she expanded her subject matter. Her first working gig was with Todd Hido (MFA 1996), now a faculty member at CCA.

Professional Career Growth

After earning her BFA in 2001, Marsalis went straight into the world of professional photography. “I was shooting a lot more than exhibiting,” she recalls of that transition. There wasn’t any big break, like in the movies — a moment where everything suddenly changed forever. Her path has involved consistent hard work and patience. “It all happened really slowly.”

Marsalis has shot for some of the biggest names in the industry, but even these gigs inevitably started small. “Your first shoot with Vogue is inevitably a small job. It’s always baby steps; they’re testing you.” Gradually, Marsalis scored larger and higher-profile jobs. “When you start to shoot bigger stories with multiple spreads, it’s a great feeling to see your photos over eight pages.”

Wide Range of Photography Projects

Marsalis finds pleasure in a wide range of work, from editorial to travel to advertising to personal Polaroids. She sometimes grows anxious to get back to whatever she’s been neglecting: “When I’ve been shooting a lot of portraits, I want to go do travel photography, and when I’ve been traveling a lot, I just want to sit down and do some larger production shoots.”

To her, the most important thing is striking a balance that keeps things fresh and exciting.

This year Marsalis released Reproduction, a book of Polaroid photographs of flowers. In summer 2012 she had exhibitions of the photographs it features in Venice, Italy, then in Los Angeles, where she is now based. She is currently working on a catalogue of thousands of her Polaroids, a medium that for her functions like an illustrator’s sketchbook.

Although Marsalis has worked for some of the world’s most recognizable brands and publications and toured the world from Europe to Asia to South America, she keeps a modest perspective. She balances healthy doses of hard work and dedication with a commitment to continued learning and growth.

“I still feel like someone who just graduated from college.”

Profile: Tuan Andrew Nguyen

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 10:06:00 -0800

Tuan Andrew Nguyen. Hip-hop History Sampling Hip-hop History: The Red Remix, 2008; video documentation of a performance and installation. Courtesy of the Artist

The multimedia artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen has spent his life navigating the gulf between his home culture and his adopted culture. Born in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in 1976, Nguyen left Vietnam when he was only two years old. In a story familiar to many, Nguyen and his parents escaped the country on a boat before staying in a refugee camp for six months. His family eventually found sponsors in the United States, and they moved physically and culturally across the planet, spending time in both Oklahoma and Texas. Nguyen did not return to Vietnam until 2004. But as many immigrants can attest, the decades spent away did not diminish Nguyen’s connection to his home culture.

Utilizing American hip-hop and rap, Nguyen’s 2008 Hip-hop History Sampling Hip-hop History: The Red Remix looks closely at an unexpected connection between the two cultures he inhabits. The approximately nine-minute sound piece is a remix of more than sixty American rap songs and their varied lyrical mentions of Vietnam. The piece is neither homage nor critique. The samples are a motley crew, offering no easy narrative: rapper Bizarre makes light of the war that killed millions (“I drop bombs like I was in Vietnam”); Immortal Technique and Jedi Mind Tricks do the opposite (“Like government officials trying to justify Vietnam” and “They sent me here to Vietnam to kill innocent people”). The volume of references clearly illustrates the lasting impact of the United States’s foray into Vietnam on America’s collective psyche.

The influence, however, is not one-sided. In the original project, the remix was played through a custom speaker mounted to the back of a bicycle. According to the artist, such bicycles are used commonly in Vietnam to advertise goods for sale or to spread government propaganda. When installed in a gallery, the piece includes photographs of the Vietnamese rapper Wowy pushing the bike through the streets of Ho Chi Minh City.

Wowy himself is the subject of Nguyen’s Letters from Saigon to Saigon, also from 2008. This photographic project documents a letter Wowy wrote to Saigon, an American rapper he discovered through the Internet. Saigon (née Brian Carenard) conceived of his stage name in prison after reading the journalist Wallace Terry’s Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans (1985), drawing inspiration from black American soldiers in Vietnam. This historical inspiration, along with a rap-battle defeat by a fellow inmate-rapper who spat positive messages, encouraged Saigon to seek redemption through political and socially conscious hip-hop.¹

Wowy’s letter is the material manifestation of a tragic yet multivalent relationship between two nations. Neither Wowy nor Saigon could exist as hip-hop artists without what the other represents: their worlds are forever connected by war and hip-hop. Wowy is mindful of the fact that he is simultaneously inspired by and very different from Saigon, writing, “You R black … and … I’m yellow you living at a hip hop country. I’m living at a country have a 50% population never know what’s a Fucking HipHop.”

In 2006, Nguyen and fellow Vietnamese artist Phu Nam Thuc Ha joined together to form the Propeller Group to further explore contemporary Vietnamese culture within the country. Soon thereafter, Matt Lucero, Nguyen’s peer from the California Institute of the Arts, moved to Ho Chi Minh City and joined the Propeller Group. The trio, often in collaboration with other local and international artists, produces a variety of projects ranging from video art to documentary film to mock commercials.

Following on the heels of other work on Vietnamese graffiti and street art, the group created the 2010 Temporary Public Gallery as both an attempt to skirt the censorship of public art and to take over commercial spaces. As the nominally communist country races toward becoming a major player in global capitalism, the nation’s relationship with visual culture has been radically altered. Public art is regularly sterilized by the censorship bodies that regulate it, limiting what is seen to “marble sculptures in the park and some old propaganda signage attached to various walls.”²

But not surprisingly, the proliferation of commercial imagery in Vietnam has been less restrained. In order to circumvent artistic censorship, the Propeller Group rented a billboard for three months beginning in June 2010, with the intent of displaying non-commercial imagery submitted by the public. Through Temporary Public Gallery, the Propeller Group didn’t just try to appropriate a physical space reserved for commercial imagery, they tried to appropriate an entire legal system and use it against itself. Unfortunately for the Propeller Group, permission is still required for commercial billboards, and even if that process is less stringent than for public art, the group still failed to garner the governmental support to realize the project.

In 2011, the group turned a mocking eye towards modern communist-cum-capitalist governments like Vietnam with Television Commercial for Communism. They hired TBWA Worldwide, the advertising firm that created Apple’s “Think Different” campaign, to help create a campaign to rebrand the world’s five remaining communist countries. The resulting ad, despite its advocacy for one of history’s most controversial ideologies, could almost be an inspiring ad for any pharmaceutical or oil company. The sickeningly effervescent platitudes—”we make the most together,” “for a better today and a brighter tomorrow,” and “live as one and speak the language of smiles”—highlight both consumerism’s exploitation of utopianism and utopianism’s exploitation of whimsical promises and branding. Though the satire is blatant, it almost makes too much sense: If advertisers can brand Apple, a multinational corporation responsible for condemnable treatment of human beings, as individualistic and revolutionary, they should be able to do the same with the communism of China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam.³ It’s merely a matter of scale.

It is fitting that, as an artist who teases out hidden and complex connections in everyday life, Nguyen often works collaboratively and with appropriated materials. This has been an important component not only of his individual work but also of his work with the Propeller Group and Sàn Art, a Ho Chi Minh City–based gallery founded with Phu Nam Thuc Ha, Dinh Q. Le, and Tiffany Chung. Even for someone whose identity lies in two countries, the vast sea between the two can’t be traversed by a single soul. Nguyen is a truly global artist but in neither a cynical nor a nihilistic way. His work pokes and prods at the world, curious to see what it will find.

The Propeller Group. Television Commercial for Communism, 2011; video; 60 sec. Courtesy of the Artist.

Headlands Celebrates 30 Years & a Long Love Affair With CCA

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 10:03:47 -0800

Headlands Celebrates 30 Years & a Long Love Affair With CCA; available in the Fall 2012 issue of Glance and online here.

Rob Fatal and the Making of La Bamba 2: Hell Is a Drag

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 09:58:00 -0800

The Cast of La Bamba 2: Hell Is a Drag

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“I wrote a sequel to From Dusk Till Dawn when I was in seventh grade.”

So began the filmmaking career ofRob Fatal (MFA 2012). His obsession with film proceeded apace, but it took him a surprisingly long time, he says, to realize that there was a person called a director — that movies didn’t just spring into existence like Athena from Zeus’s head.

Inspired by Quentin Tarantino, Mel Brooks, and Robert Rodriguez, Fatal began writing screenplays at age 12. “I loved camp and sci-fi films before I even knew they were genres.” At 19 he borrowed his father’s camcorder and made a 30-minute film about DJs with magical turntables. “It was accidentally campy. It was accidentally bad. But it had a lot of sincerity.” Much to his surprise, it did well, even getting into a couple of festivals.

Film Maker, Filmmaker, or Artist?

Fast forward a few years. Fatal was still working in film and experimenting with video art, but not quite to the point of considering himself a filmmaker, and certainly not an “artist,” whatever that meant.

But one day, in the midst of editing a video documenting an experimental opera by Fatal’s collaborator/mentor Juliana Snapper, he recomposed portions of the footage into a new composition and showed it to CCA faculty member Cheryl Dunye.

Dunye delivered the unexpected news that what he was doing was art, and urged him to apply to CCA’s MFA program. The faculty there, she said, were pushing the boundaries of genres, and dealing with gender politics and racial identity — fields of study Fatal had been researching for years in his graduate program at Sacramento State University.

CCA presented Fatal with a place to finally bridge his dual love of film theory and practice.

La Bamba 2: Hell Is a Drag

For his thesis project Fatal reprised his tried-and-true seventh-grade formula, writing and filming a sequel to La Bamba, the 1987 biopic about the Chicano musician Ritchie Valens. La Bamba 2: Hell Is a Drag takes place 100 years after Valens’s untimely death in a plane crash in 1959. Fatal, who plays the protagonist, carries out a quest to save his own soul from a jealous gang of rock stars, including Selena, Buddy Holly, and Kurt Cobain.

Watch the trailer: http://vimeo.com/38204153

“La Bamba 2,” the artist says, “is a film made by a band of social minorities dealing with confrontational and surreal ideas.” He further describes the film as “accessible,” “funny,” and “infective.”

He began writing the script in May 2011 and finished in August of the same year. He shot for a month straight before taking a break to retool the script under the guidance of professors Jeanne C. Finley and Brook Hinton. (He also received invaluable support along the way from advisors Cheryl Dunye, Guillermo Galindo, andLynn Marie Kirby, among others.) He returned to shooting in February 2012 and first screened the film in March.

“It was hell. I could not have done this without the dedication and talent of the whole team.”

The cast is an ensemble of Fatal’s CCA peers. Maria Guadalupe (MFA 2012) plays Bob, Ritchie’s brother; Alex Hernandez (MFA 2012) plays Donna, Ritchie’s girlfriend; Robert Gomez (MA Visual and Critical Studies 2012, MFA 2013) plays Rosie, Bob’s wife; and 2012 alumna Mev Luna plays Connie, Ritchie’s mother. The assistant director was current student Jessica Leimone. More than 20 additional CCA faculty and students had roles in front of and behind the camera.

A Berkeley FILM Foundation Award

To finish post-production on La Bamba 2 (ETA is early 2013) Fatal was recently awarded a $5,000 grant from the Berkeley FILM Foundation. “It was surprising to win because they traditionally fund documentary works. I don’t think they often fund trash/sci-fi sequels to 30-year-old rock and roll films, so I feel very lucky we were awarded such a prestigious grant.”

He recalls his pitch to the award committee as going something like: “I’m taking a classic Chicano film that I loved and revered as a kid and remaking it to scrutinize archetypes of Chicanos and queers (or the lack of queers) that we see in Chicano film. These underrepresented voices need to be out there.”

The Commitment to Art Award

Fatal’s other accolades at CCA included the Ginny Kleker Commitment to Art Award (which involves a generous cash award) and the Rebecca Ora Award for Risk Taking in the Arts (also known as the Nerve Award).

Fatal admits that after his first year in the MFA program he started to have doubts about a career as an artist. “I was kind of just looking for a sign from above,” he recalls, “and then I got the email from Lynn Marie Kirby saying that I’d won the Ginny Kleker Award, that I was the first-ever recipient, and that it was a big deal.”

He researched the award’s namesake and quickly fell in love with her art. “I wanted to meet her, ask her about her work, and have her guide my work, but found out that she’d died by suicide in 2008, just as her career was beginning to take off. I was really inspired by her and I felt like she was present while I was writing the La Bamba 2 script, which investigates fame, the afterlife, and society’s collective obsession with celebrity.”

Kleker had been a graduate of CCA, and Kirby had also been her advisor. “I owe a lot to Lynn Marie Kirby, and also Ted Purves(chair of the Graduate Program in Fine Arts) and Teresa Ferguson, Ginny’s mom. If it wasn’t for that award, I couldn’t have stayed in the Bay Area, I couldn’t have stayed in school, and I couldn’t have started making La Bamba 2.

The Nerve Award

There’s an equally interesting story behind the Rebecca Ora Award for Risk Taking in the Arts. Rebecca Ora (MFA 2010) won the coveted Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship when she received her MFA. (This award is given each year to exceptional graduating MFA students at several different colleges and universities working in painting, sculpture, mixed media, or performance art.) Ora has since used a portion of her winnings annually to support CCA MFA students who create challenging work.

“Rebecca Ora and I had really heated conversations about politics, the body, and gender identity. It was good for me to be prodded that way and to have to defend what I was doing. Ultimately, she was extremely supportive.”

Boot Camp for Artists

Graduate school was not an easy time for Fatal, but he acknowledges that it delivered the right mix of challenge and validation and that he left a stronger and more focused artist. “Grad school puts you through the wringer. It’s like boot camp.”

Just prior to graduation, he screened the latest cut of La Bamba 2in Timken Lecture Hall. To a packed house. “It was, hands-down, one of the most inspiring and profound days of my life.”

“Because I didn’t know any better, the goal had always been to get to Hollywood,” Fatal continues, “and now that couldn’t be further from my thoughts. My peers and instructors at CCA have shown me another path. A unique path made by my own ambitions and values.”

He has found a niche and a voice he didn’t even know existed back when he was writing roles for Harvey Keitel and George Clooney as a middle-schooler in Sacramento.

“CCA has been essential to my development as an artist. The support I got from the faculty and the college’s location in the Bay Area were critical. For anybody who is dedicated to creating radical, different, and ambitious work and is looking for a challenge, CCA is wonderful place to call home for a couple of years.”

Profile: Zoe Strauss

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 09:56:00 -0800

Zoe Strauss. “La Corona,” Billboard Project, 2012; installation view, Philadelphia. Courtesy of the Artist.

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A little over three millennia ago, Homer’s Odysseus embarked on a now-famous ten-year journey from Troy to Ithaca. In the original story, the Cyclops and Sirens suggest a homecoming of uniquely Greek proportions, but over the centuries the tale has been the basis of everything from James Joyce’s Ulysses to the Coen brothers’ film, O Brother, Where Art Thou? Homer’s epic also provided the conceptual framework for the photographer Zoe Strauss’s recent mid-career retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Zoe Strauss: Ten Years.

The ten years in the exhibition title isn’t a strictly accurate marker of time but signifies the journey—an unusual one—that culminated in Strauss’s hometown retrospective. Strauss’s career as a photographer began later and more abruptly than many others’. On her thirtieth birthday, Strauss received a camera as a gift. She was not a trained photographer and had never graduated from college, but she immediately began to document the people and places of Philadelphia. Soon after, in 2001, Strauss began presenting her own solo exhibitions under an elevated section of I-95 in South Philadelphia. Every year around May, Strauss would affix her photographs to the concrete pillars of the highway overpass, the grey columns a substitute for the traditional white cube. Strauss did this every year until 2010, selling her prints for five dollars and engaging directly with her audience. Strauss was always present during these day-long exhibitions, signing her works.

The concept of I-95, as the project came to be known, was expanded with the Billboard Project (2012), a component of the retrospective. Channeling her Hellenic hero, Strauss called I-95 an “epic narrative about the beauty and struggle of everyday life.”¹ Strauss took her photographs out from under the freeway and put them above it, expanding this epic to a larger scale. The piece comprised fifty-four billboards with her photographs on them from January to March or April 2012. Scattered throughout the Philadelphia landscape, these usual sites of commercial narrative now told the stories of people Strauss encountered on her travels throughout the United States. As if Venice Beach or Anchorage represented her Troy, Strauss was back in Ithaca to tell her story.

Though Strauss’s images intimately depict the joy, sadness, and malaise of everyday life, the photographs themselves are truncated versions of the real work—their symbiotic relationship with the city when exhibited on numbered billboards. Billboard 1, “La Corona,” featured a portrait of Antoinette Conti, a second generation Italian-American, above a cleaners on the corner of East Passyunk Avenue and Reed Street. By itself, the photograph is a nice portrait, a close-up of an anonymous frowning woman. It is not particularly striking. However, when viewing documentary photographs of the installation and approximating what a pedestrian or passerby would see, the image is quite strong. The scene is almost comical, not because the portrait is funny but because it is a far cry from what is expected in its place, amidst the brownstones and Dunkin’ Donuts. Ms. Conti stares out at the viewer as if she were begrudgingly hawking Budweiser, all-day deodorant, or a thrilling new Michael Bay film.

In many ways, Billboard Project resembles a guerilla marketing campaign—or those expensive, highly crafted simulations of guerilla marketing campaigns. Recently my own neighborhood was taken over by billboards ominously and ambiguously warning, “Ted is coming.” I soon found that Ted is just a pot-smoking teddy bear who is best friends with Mark Wahlberg. Like this advertising campaign, Strauss’s billboards carried no indication of what they referred to or what they meant; without further context, the cynics among us could run wild. And yet, a frequent traveler of Philadelphia streets might begin to notice scenes from a fractured story.

The almost ironic juxtapositions of “La Corona” did not dominate this narrative. On John F. Kennedy Boulevard near Thirtieth Street, a pair of billboards struck much more somber notes. Billboard 44 shows nothing but a spray-painted plywood sign nailed to a telephone pole, reading, “Don’t Forget Us.” Next to it was number 45, “6200 Block of Osage Ave, 2011,” a scene of several dirty and dilapidated homes overrun by ivy. My immediate association with these two images was Hurricane Katrina—in particular the handmade signs that littered neighborhoods in its wake and the homes it destroyed. In fact, “Don’t Forget Us” featured a photograph taken in Grand Isle, Louisiana, but “6200 Block of Osage Ave, 2011” uses an image that is unrelated, a scene from West Philadelphia. Nonetheless, commuters on JFK Boulevard likely may have overlooked these facts. Even without any idea of where these photographs were taken, a viewer senses something distinctly American about them, and that is their tragedy: from the Aleutian Islands to Puerto Rico, despair and decay can be found across the country.

But these obstacles are not insurmountable. Strauss’s American epic depicts a people as strong and resolute as Odysseus. Life in this troubled nation is not without laughter, dance, and expressions of love, as many of Strauss’s photographs depict. The final billboard in the project, number 54, gives away the moral of the story. To the side of an empty rural highway, a sign reads, “Stay Alive.” Whether this is the dictum of a transit authority bureaucrat or a crafty culture-jammer is not clear. Regardless, the message seems to be the same: wherever you are going, you can get there.

In some ways, it takes a lot of hubris, or at least chutzpah, to equate your work with Homer. It’s also a bit sensible. After all, Odysseus wasn’t a real man; it doesn’t take much courage to be a fictional character. Real epics are much less grand or romantic, their heroism more subdued and humble. These are the tales Strauss has documented throughout her burgeoning career, and they’re more real than any myth.

Zoe Strauss. “Stay Alive,” Billboard Project, 2012; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist.

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NOTES:

1. Roberta Smith, “Zoe Strauss: ‘Ten Years, A Slideshow,” the New York Times, July 12, 2012,http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/13/arts/design/zoe-strauss-10-years-a-slideshow.html

Sticks, Stones and Phones

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 09:54:52 -0800

Sticks, Stones and Phones: Aquaponics innovator Kijani Grows lays claim to Oakland; available in the Fall 2012 issue of Wilder Quarterly.

Profile: Jayson Musson

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 09:50:00 -0800

Jayson Musson, a.k.a. Hennessy Youngman. “How to Be a Successful Artist,” uploaded May 2, 2010; Art Thoughtz, 2010–present; video; 3:00 minutes. Courtesy of the Artist.

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White people don’t want their nigga artists being just like them. —Hennessy Youngman

Despite his varied work with textiles and illustration, Jayson Musson is most known for his alter ego Hennessy Youngman, the host of Art Thoughtz, a YouTube series tallying more than a million views. Each episode covers a topic that is deftly and bluntly explained by Youngman—ranging from relational aesthetics to Louise Bourgeois to “Beuys-Z.”¹ Race is a common and explicit theme in Art Thoughtz, but there is an often-overlooked element of the series’ racial implications.

The first Art Thoughtz episode, “How To Be A Successful Artist,” proposes a 98-percent effective formula for succeeding as an artist, including two key points: be white and be male. If a white male paints a flower, Youngman explains, it is simply a painting of a pretty flower. If a black artist paints a flower, it becomes a “slavery flower—flower de Amistad,” and if a woman paints the same flower it becomes “a metaphor for her vagina.” Citing the problems with this formula for non-white artists, a later episode offers tips for aspiring black artists. Consoling black artists, Youngman instructs them on how to “exploit the shit out of white people.” Musson’s explicit critiques of the art world are cogent but not unheard of. For decades, artists and critics have decried the racial, gendered, and classist hierarchy that is affectionately known as the art world. Musson adds to this body of work in a way that is infinitely more accessible and pleasurable than most obfuscated and arcane dissertations or politely pedantic exhibitions.

On the surface, however, Art Thoughtz doesn’t advance these ideas or critiques all that much. The content of the show is certainly humorous, such as Youngman’s claim that relational aesthetics exists solely as a means for poorly socialized MFAs to meet new people by “forcing them into odd activities at their own, poorly attended art openings.” The power of the act is the delivery, the character himself. If the comedian John Hodgeman, a stereotypically white, academic character, delivered these same lines, we would all laugh, but we would be laughing differently. When a viewer laughs at Hennessy Youngman, he or she is implicitly admitting or acknowledging that there is something amiss about a character more culturally fit for a rap video than discussing Nicolas Bourriaud, “Rococo trappings,” the economics of art, and the whole of graduate-school syllabi.

I laugh every time I hear Youngman stumbling over and failing to correctly pronounce Bourriaud’s name, but why? I certainly can’t correctly pronounce the names Apichatpong Weerasethakul or Rirkrit Tiravanija. But if I fail to pronounce any of these names, my infraction may be passed over, or I may receive slight rebuke for failing to live up to the cultural role of an educated, middle-class white man. I likely wouldn’t be laughed at. Donning an oversize Spiderman baseball cap and several gold chains, and referring to himself as “the Rowhome Raconteur,” Youngman is instead rendered silly—a mercurial jester.

Youngman’s knowledge of art history and theory is clearly deep, nuanced, and mature, but his character is not afforded the same weight and seriousness as other critics because of his race and assumed class. Musson himself holds an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, and there’s no reason to doubt that Youngman does as well. In out-of-character interviews, Musson is well spoken and articulate—shorthand for meaning that he mirrors or approaches acceptable white and middle-class speech patterns. Recall when then-Senator Joe Biden called then-Senator Obama “the first mainstream African-American [to run for President] who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” and when Senator Harry Reid said more directly that President Obama possessed “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” Ivy League JDs and prestigious faculty positions don’t mean anything if one doesn’t talk the part. And Youngman doesn’t. The New York Observer recently reviewed an exhibition of Musson’s work, titling the piece “Henny From the Block: Jayson Musson Is Not an Idiot, He Just Plays One onYouTube,” contrary to any evidence that Youngman is anything but intelligent—he’s just doesn’t speak art-world-white. Art in America has called Youngman “Ali G with an MFA,” despite the fact that Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G character is generally ignorant of the subjects he speaks on. These articles position a working-class black man as an idiot because he encourages his speech to show his race and class.

In fact, Youngman is the embodiment of the satirical advice he gives in “How To Be A Successful Black Artist.” In this episode, Youngman puts forth what he calls the jazz principle: “White people, they wanna consume the exotic other… They don’t really want to understand you, because if they understood you, you’d be just like them.” Youngman also explains the role black artists play in entertaining white people and keeping them guessing: “[White people] love seeing the ‘other’ doing shit like they would do but still kind of detached and different. So you could hip-hop that shit out”—like Hennessy Youngman himself. The character is an exoticized graduate student. Youngman discusses the same subjects and uses the same buzzwords as the cultural elite, but his racialized persona renders him laughable, a mimicking philistine.

The takeaway of Art Thoughtz shouldn’t be that if one laughs at it, he or she is racist; that has all the sophistication of a political rally. Rather, finding the character Hennessy Youngman funny should accompany one’s acceptance that, no matter how many diversity scholarships or classes on social activism augment it, the academic and commercial art world is still deeply racist and classist. Participants in the art industry need not conform to the Youngman archetype, but until that archetype is no longer funny, we must address the prejudices and expectations that keep such a hierarchy alive, even (and especially) if we benefit from it.

Jayson Musson, a.k.a. Hennessy Youngman. “How to Be a Successful Black Artist,” uploaded October 7, 2010; Art Thoughtz, 2010–present; video, 8:43 minutes. Courtesy of the Artist.

Zena Adhami: The Right Person, the Right Time, the Right Place

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 09:48:00 -0800

Zena Adhami’s 2012 Design MFA thesis presentation

View slideshow

During the height of the Arab Spring,Zena Adhami (MFA Design 2012) was watching from her apartment in San Francisco as revolution erupted back home.

She decided to make it the subject of her CCA graduate thesis: an examination of the specific media and technologies that were making it possible for her to stay informed from halfway around the world.

This time of upheaval also represented a culmination of Adhami’s efforts to reconsider graphic design as a more politically engaged pursuit. “Every once in a while there’s a degree of social consciousness among designers, but usually I feel that they’re talking to themselves, and that’s a failure of design intelligence,” she opines.

This confluence of massive social change happening in the world, her own moment of being in a rigorous academic situation, and her own status as an insider-outsider (a Middle Easterner currently living in San Francisco) came together to make her see her profession and the world in entirely new ways.

Founding Photography and Design Magazines

While an undergraduate at the American University of Sharjah, Adhami collaborated with fellow students to found Soura Magazine, Dubai’s first publication that was by and for local photographers and designers. “The concept of such a publication was totally new,” she says.

After graduation, she expanded on this idea and cofoundedBrownbook Magazine, “a platform for the younger generation in the Middle East to express day-to-day issues that are not necessarily political, but cover all aspects of life.”

Her role in the operation included content development, editorial direction, and art direction. She credits her success to her personal understanding of the frustrations of young, creative Middle Easterners who need a platform for expression.

“What began as a guide to everything interesting in the region slowly evolved into a raw exploration of the real image Middle Easterners are thriving to project to the whole world.” Brownbookhas continued to be successful, and currently boasts worldwide distribution.

The 9th Sharjah Biennial

While working on Brownbook, Adhami was constantly asking herself how to situate design in an artistic context. She found that in Dubai, the field of design didn’t receive the appreciation it did in other parts of the world.

It was her work with the 9th Sharjah Biennial, the burgeoning international art event hosted in the Emirate of Sharjah, that allowed her to rethink what design meant for her. Adhami pitched the biennial office on the idea of creating a map of the city, highlighting the life of locals, with an intended audience of biennial visitors. This simple idea grew into a larger interactive project, which she worked on with the biennial’s staff.

Her creativity flourished in this environment. “I learned so much from the media department, as we both had the same intention (highlighting the city of Sharjah) but different perspectives. Mine was to reframe design in the art context, and theirs was to make local culture accessible to visitors.”

To San Francisco and CCA

It was this same interest in transdisciplinary approaches that led Adhami to CCA for her graduate studies. She was drawn to the multifaceted approach of the Graduate Program in Design. “It was a great opportunity to combine my three interests: visual culture, visual articulations of politics, and new media.

“The experimental environment of the program made me comfortable working in situations that might have previously seemed difficult — where the outcome might not be crystal clear, and the path of discovery might take me into unexpected places,” she explains. She pays special credit to faculty member Martin Venezky for introducing her to the idea of graphic design as experimentation.

San Francisco itself, one of Adhami’s favorite cities, also played a role in her decision to attend CCA: “The city provided an amazing intersection of design and technology. I was exposed to a lot of new ideas and discussions that I wouldn’t have acknowledged if I’d studied somewhere else.”

The Arab Spring Erupts

Adhami was in San Francisco working on her MFA when violence erupted throughout the Arab world. “It was an emotional time,” she recalls, “but the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt resurrected a sense of pan-Arabism in me. I felt so proud of being an Arab.”

And because these were truly 21st-century revolutions, she was able to stay up to date on the people’s demands and discussions thanks to social media and the Al Jazeera news network. Recognizing that it would be a lost opportunity otherwise, Adhami decided her thesis should attempt to understand the Arab Spring using graphic design as a tool, focusing on the very technologies that gave her access to the revolutions.

Specifically, she looked at the significance that was placed on social media over the course of the events. She asked: Can social media platforms be agents of freedom, or just tools for the expression of a desire for freedom?

Though she was personally drawn to her subject, it was surely also a source of emotional stress. “I sometimes felt that I had a huge burden on my shoulders — that I was faced with a lot of questions and no easy answers.” Sometimes she even questioned her whole premise: What does graphic design have to do with revolution? Who am I to judge these events? How can I speak for the millions of protesters and dissidents?

But throughout the process, her mentor Barry Katz reminded her: “You are the right person, at the right time, at the right place to be exploring this topic.”

Everyday Dubai

Since graduation Adhami continues to look at the Arab uprising as an ongoing project. “We are witnessing an important moment in the Middle East, and there are a lot of questions that remain unanswered, chief among them: Are social media platforms really liberating interfaces? And what role can graphic design play in aiding social change?

“Once the body protests,” she explains, “graphic design can be used as a tool and a medium to amplify people’s voices on the ground.”

Since returning to Dubai, she has also began work on a new project based on her interest in the intersection of “graphical and urban spaces from the perspective of both place and memories.” The project, Everyday Dubai, explores how media and data shape the material form of the (constantly changing) city.

Every day she creates a new work representing a specific location — a billboard, a park, a beach, a luxury hotel. Through these works she reimagines everyday urban spaces specifically from a graphic designer’s perspective.

Zena Adhami on Cargo »

#PussyRiot: Dance, Dance Revolutionaries

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 09:46:00 -0800

“Three young women are being detained by Russian authorities for allegedly performing a protest song in a cathedral as part of feminist punk group “Pussy Riot”,” 2012. Amnesty International/Flickr/Creative Commons.

The arrest and trial of three members of Pussy Riot, the Russian riot grrrl band and art collective, has captured worldwide attention. Imprisoned after their impromptu February 21, 2012, performance at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, the case has shined a light on Russia’s struggling democracy and conservative gender politics. But what about the piece itself? We risk ignoring an important lesson if we gloss over Mother of God, Drive Putin Out as work of art.

A YouTube video of the blasphemous performance begins with three members of Pussy Riot—Maria Alehina, Ekaterina Samutsevich, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova—dressed in colorful tunics, tights, and balaclavas. Commandeering the altar and resembling petite luchadores, the trio kneels, crosses themselves, and mock prays while the soundtrack recites a slew of epithets:

“Shit, shit, the Lord’s shit!” / “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, become a feminist” / “Patriarch Gundyaev believes in Putin/Bitch, better believe in God instead” / “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, put Putin away/Рut Putin away, put Putin away”

The 1:53 long video ends with the group being pushed out of the cathedral. The performance was brief and silly, but ignited an international controversy. The timing was pivotal, capitalizing on discontent and political frustration in advance of Vladimir Putin’s inevitable comeback; the performance took place less than two weeks before Putin’s well-orchestrated presidential election, which saw him rise to power again after a four-year hibernation as Prime Minister.

Days later, the trio was arrested and they have been in jail ever since, with a verdict due today, at 3 pm Moscow time. UPDATE: Days later, the trio was arrested. They have been in jail ever since, and were sentenced to two years of prison on August 16, 2012.

Alehina, Samutsevich, and Tolokonnikova do not fit the usual profile of national security threats. They are not former KGB agents; they are not Mohawk toting anarchists; they are not Chechen terrorists. They are young women wearing pink, green, and baby blue; two are mothers of small children. From Potemkin to Beslan, this is not what security threats have looked like.

It is not simply that these are women—Russia has had plenty of female activists. Pussy Riot directly confronts the austere nature of politics. Most disobediently, these particular women appear to be having fun, offering an alternative to bureaucracies, NGOs, legal briefs, ad hoc committees, and pedagogical lectures. Like the punks from whom they draw inspiration, Pussy Riot opts to play the political game with their own rules. This defiance may be more offensive to the state than uttering a few sacrileges.

In her autobiography, anarchist and fellow Russian feminist Emma Goldman provides insight into the importance of this approach to politics. As a youth, a boy told Goldman that dancing was not appropriate for an agitator. Goldman recalls in Living My Life that she did not believe that a cause that stood for beauty and freedom should deny her life and joy. Furious, she told the boy that their cause could not expect her “to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister.” “If it meant that,” she continued, “I did not want it.” Eighty years since Goldman wrote this passage, it has been condensed into the apocryphal yet pithy quote, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”

Pussy Riot has created a revolution that embraces joy. Pyotr Verzilov, Tolokonnikova’s husband and a spokesperson for the group, explained the rationale behind Pussy Riot’s tactics: “These actions provide visual language for public protest in Russia. So people see that political issues can be raised in a variety of very different ways… Everyone has to do politics. This is the main issue. And everyone has to do politics in the way that is closest to you.” Pussy Riot’s approach acknowledges that politics (and protest) should be as dynamic and multifaceted as life itself. Their struggle would be immediately compromised if their tactics required self-denial.

Pussy Riot at Lobnoye Mesto on Red Square in Moscow, 2012. Photo by Denis Bochkarev/Creative Commons.

Just prior to her fellow band members’ arrests, “Garadzha” explained the name Pussy Riot: “A female sex organ, which is supposed to be receiving and shapeless, suddenly starts a radical rebellion against the cultural order, which tries to constantly define it and show its appropriate place.” This name takes two things women are often forced to sacrifice—their biology and their agency—and foregrounds their importance to the group’s political existence, and it does so with a playful smirk.

The flipside of this mirthful embrace of femininity might be Cyndi Lauper’s pronouncement that “girls just want to have fun.” With all due respect, girls want a lot more than that. Many of them also seem to want careers, education, control of their bodies, political power, economic equity, and the ability to express themselves, among other desires that are less conducive to chart topping lyricism. Pussy Riot, like young Goldman, has found a way tap into their humanity and femininity without foreclosing on the possibility of a deep, political life. Somewhere between puritan radicalism and Cyndi Lauper, Pussy Riot has staked its claim.

Watching Mother of God, Drive Putin Out, it is as if Pussy Riot says, “You oppress me, and yet I smile.” An amazing thing about all governments and regimes is that they are, in some ways, illusions. They are very complex illusions, with guns and bombs, but they only exist and hold power so long as enough people think they do. Putin, like all emperors, is naked. Pussy Riot bypasses the system that gives him legitimacy and demonstrates its frailty. They do not do this by cordially disagreeing with his politics; they do it by living an alternative. It is unlikely that Alehina, Samutsevich, and Tolokonnikova are smiling in their jail cells, but like the illusions of democracy or autocracy, reality can be less important than impression. The Russian people have seen them smile. They have seen it millions of times, and they have read about it and talked about it. The entire nation is now aware of an alternative form of politics. Some people despise it, but others are learning from it and participating. Pussy Riot’s gesture is small, but it is necessary. It is the amalgam of these small gestures that can, should enough of them arise, change policy and culture.

The complexities of realpolitik can make it difficult to believe that a bunch of punks in pink can challenge a nuclear superpower. But the Russian government offers all the evidence needed: states do not make political prisoners of those whom they do not see as threats. Prime Minister and former President Dmitry Medvedev recently doubled down on the case against Pussy Riot: “In some countries the responsibility for such actions would have been much more strict.” The subtext: We’d kill them if we could get away with it.

This may seem outlandish and bombastic to those who live free of punk rock persecution. As Jessica Bruder of the New York Times recently wrote, “the idea that music can help change things, rather than just sell expensive coats, isn’t very popular here right now.” The lack of American prison cells filled with famous punks is a testament to this. Over the last three decades, punk, like other subcultures, has been integrated into mainstream society. Bad Religion’s Greg Graffin teaches evolutionary biology at UCLA and Cornell, Patti Smith recently appeared in an episode of Law & Order, and even Chumbawamba put out a record with a multinational conglomerate. But as Bruder reminds her readers, this is not the case everywhere. In Indonesia, sixty punks were recently sent to reeducation camps; emo kids in Iraq are being murdered, following an interior ministry statement equating emo to devil worship; and in Iran, playing rock music is punishable by flogging. These subcultures are threats not just because they offer alternatives, but because they live them. The hard work and ostracization of punks past in the United States allows the current generation to inhabit whatever claim to society’s mainstream they have. Still, in the United States there are those that are murdered, arrested, or driven to suicide for asserting alternative ways of living, especially in insecure realm of gender and sexual politics.

Pussy Riot’s message to the oligarchs is simple: no matter how much democracy is eroded, they will always have their humanity, femininity, and agency. Recent events in the Arab world illustrate what happens when malcontents decide to stop accepting the illusions they are presented with. As messy and violent as the Arab Spring has been, breakdowns of illusions have been very real for Ben Ali, Gaddafi, Mubarak, and Saleh. For Pussy Riot, regardless of today’s verdict, their political embrace of play attacks these illusions in their own country. For Putin, play is realpolitik.

Postcards from Kassel: Parks, Politics, and Empanadas at dOCUMENTA (13)

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 17:04:00 -0700

Elizabeth Dorbad and Ann Schnake, “Kunsthalle Fridericianum with Empanadas,” 2012

Every five years the art world descends on Kassel, Germany, for Documenta. For 100 days, venues across the city present one of the world’s largest and most prestigious art events to hundreds of thousands of visitors. The 2012 edition is curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and features an all-star list of hundreds of international artists, from William Kentridge toSong Dong.

Showcased amidst these luminaries are a few CCA graduates and faculty members — including Amy Balkin (Fine Arts faculty),Ann Schnake (MFA 2012), Elizabeth Dorbad (MFA 2011),Shaun O’Dell (Fine Arts faculty), and Ruth Robbins (MFA Social Practice 2010) — whose works explore such diverse subjects as parks, politics, and empanadas.

About Documenta

Documenta was established following World War II as a means for bringing the German people together after the disastrous cultural policies of the Nazi regime. Since the first edition in 1955, attendance has exploded from 130,000 to more than 750,000 — that was in 2007, for Documenta 12 — and it has grown from a regional art fair to a global phenomenon.

Christov-Bakargiev’s vision for dOCUMENTA (13) was to look across art and nonart fields of inquiry to present “artistic research and forms of imagination that explore commitment, matter, things, embodiment, and active living in connection with, yet not subordinated to, theory.”

Amy Balkin and Public Smog

Fine Arts faculty member Amy Balkin is one of the featured artists. She presents documentation from her ambitious ongoing projectPublic Smog, which seeks to establish a clean-air park in the earth’s atmosphere. “The iteration shown at dOCUMENTA (13) is an effort to inscribe the entire atmosphere on the UNESCO World Heritage List,” she explains.

She sent letters to 186 nations in the six official languages of the United Nations, seeking a UNESCO State Party to lead the nomination process. She received 13 replies. Many were form letters. A few were thoughtful and engaged rejections of her proposal. And one, from the Kingdom of Tonga, expressed genuine interest. Tonga, however, lacked the resources to lead a nomination.

In response to this impasse, visitors are encouraged to fill out postcards (provided) and mail them to their own governments, urging them to lead a coalition for inscription of Earth’s atmosphere to the list on an emergency basis. She calls her participation in Documenta “a great opportunity to put this work in front of a large audience and ask: Is there a political moment within an art exhibition?”

As of mid-July, German visitors have signed more than 35,000 postcards for mailing to the current German minister of the environment.

Ann Schnake & Elizabeth Dorbad: Itinerant Structures

Ann Schnake (MFA 2012) and Elizabeth Dorbad (MFA 2011) are in the new edition of Documenta via their work Itinerant Structures: Traveling Medicine Show & Empanada Stand, a pop-up sculptural café and performance space. The piece is part of a performance series curated for Documenta by the art collective Critical Art Ensemble.

Itinerant Structures includes a collaboration with former Chez Panisse chef Sylvie Osborne-Calierno as well as various performances by artists and musicians, from a confused waitress playing a violin to a bureaucrat grilling customers for illuminating thoughts. Dorbad describes it as operating “in a fictitious economy, where theater, food, and beauty are offered in exchange for ideas regarding unmet needs, sociopolitical conditions, failing economies, and whatever the viewers want to discuss.” The work also makes various historical references.

Schnake explains: “Early medicine shows hawked snake oil and ‘Indian medicine’ for curing ills, bringing ideas of the Wild West, magic, and entertainment to the bored and the desperate in small towns. We will peddle warming food, the occult, a cacophony of ideas and suggestions of the types of far-reaching possibilities that emerge from hurricanes and erratic weather systems, feminine wildernesses, and other destabilizing forces, sweetened by touches of domestic kindness gone feral.”

The duo made the empanada their delicacy of choice because it is a food emblematic of the nomadic. According to Schnake, the portable Galician pastry originated as the Indian samosa and eventually made its way to Europe, South America, and the Philippines. Thus it is an excellent accompaniment to their work and to an international art exhibition that features artists and visitors from dozens of countries, not to mention satellite venues in Alexandria, Banff, Cairo, and Kabul.

Healing Wounds, both historical and physical

Dorbad reports that the news of the acceptance of the Documenta proposal came as a surprise. “The more I learn of the history of the dOCUMENTA exhibition regarding its role as a post-WWII antidote to the cultural darkness of Nazism, and its continued role questioning and defining the interface of art with contemporary society, the more interested and excited I am to participate.”

Schnake agrees that it is “wild, exciting, and scary.” She gains her resolve from an unusual quarter: her past experience in emergency rooms and county clinics working as a nurse practitioner. “I learned the lesson of taking one’s work very seriously and not blinking in the face of fear, intimidation, or pus-filled wounds. I would say that since I spent many years in service, I’m OK with feeling I can claim a place in the world of ideas.”

CCA alumna Ruth Robbins (MFA Social Practice 2010) and CCA Fine Arts faculty member Shaun O’Dell are also [participating in dOCUMENTA (13).

Following Documenta, Amy Balkin will be working on A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting for Carbon 13, a group exhibition at Ballroom Marfa in Marfa, Texas, on view August 31, 2012, through February 17, 2013. Balkin refers to the piece as “an archive of things from places that may disappear owing to impacts of climate change.” The work asks what it means for a place to disappear — a question of imminent interest to places such as Tonga. The Archive is open for submissions atsinkingandmelting.org.

Elizabeth Dorbad’s upcoming projects include a solo exhibition ofItinerant Architectures at the G11 Galerie Berlin. The work is an ongoing series of photographs, sculptures, and architectural interventions that began with dilapidated trailers in the California Sequoia wilderness, moved to demolition sites Berlin, and will continue on to its next stop in Amsterdam in September 2012.

Upon her return from Germany, Ann Schnake will be collaborating with the San Francisco-based MicroClimate Collective, presenting a series of dinners and building a local version of the Traveling Medicine Show.

The White Privilege Field Guide to Progressivism

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 21:54:00 -0700

There is an existential crisis afoot throughout much of the United States. Many members of the demographic known as “white progressives” find themselves torn between their chosen political identity and their biological (and sometimes economic) identity. Many of my peers seems to have difficulty in reconciling these different, but not incompatible, identities. This often manifests in awkward comments, self-denial, and patronizing behavior. As a writer intimately familiar with the experiences of the white, middle class progressive, I offer this field guide as an attempt to find nuance in the realm between privilege and progressivism.

You can accept and even embrace being white without being a white supremacist.
It is OK to be called out. It is OK to be wrong. It is OK to learn.
There is a very fine line between being open to having frank conversations about race and possibly offending people. Understand this, be thoughtful, and if you offend someone, apologize, adjust, and continue to share your opinions on the subject.
Don’t treat severely economically distressed neighborhoods as ethnic theme parks.
It’s great that Tupac or Cornell West or bell hooks or Carlos Mencia said something that concurs with your opinions on race relations, but this does not make it law. There are literally billions of non-white people on the planet, each with his or her own opinions.
When saying unambiguously non-offensive things, whispering when you get to words like “Mexican,” “black,” or “Jew” implies that you think there is something dirty about these words. There isn’t.
You found love with someone of a different race. That’s great; I hope you two are happy together, but you don’t have to make a big thing out if it.
The struggles of the Black Panthers, Zapatistas, and the African National Congress are very exciting and inspiring, but don’t feel left out because you haven’t had similar struggles; feel lucky. Please do not try and replicate these struggles in places they do not exist.
It is OK to like country music.
It is OK if you work at a corporation. If it makes you feel any better, those of us in the non-profit world can assure you that corruption, cronyism and exploitation exist here as well. These are endemic to human culture and are not byproducts of IRS tax filing statuses. Please continue to make our widgets.
If you went to college, you are allowed to be proud of this and other accomplishments. You should be able to find a way to do this without denigrating those who have lived their lives differently than you.
You are, however, still responsible for the work you do. No job is free from moral conflict; please use common sense and nuanced thinking to decide when the conflicts are too large to justify.
If listening to Kanye West isn’t a form of “acting black” for you, don’t assume that listening to Blind Melon and wearing Vans is a form of “acting white” for those who are not white.
Know that white people sometimes need your help too. Please don’t choose an ethnicity or race as a pet project; that’s what sewing and extreme wake boarding are for.
When traveling the world, don’t rank countries by their “authenticity.” You don’t need to visit places overrun with American tourists and cruises named after Nordic kingdoms, but the residents of those places probably think of their lives as rather authentic.
The anarcho-syndicalist book club at Sarah Lawrence College may oppose any interactions with formal governmental structures, but know that poverty, starvation and oppression are real, and their victims often rely on working with that status quo to receive some level of relief.
You don’t need to pretend you are OK with female genital mutilation if you are not.
Speaking to your black coworker in an abnormally polite manner does very little in the way of remedying the residual effects of slavery.
If you haven’t decided whether you think the term “African-American” or “black” is more appropriate, that’s OK. Either term is probably more suitable than “persons of Haplogroup A3b2-M13 descent.”
With all the talk of being open to discussing race, remember that sometimes your opinion isn’t necessary. It’s been taking our people awhile to come to terms with this, but sometimes it’s not really about us.
If you have wealthy parents or a trust fund, count yourself as lucky. You don’t need to flaunt your wealth, but you don’t need to pretend to be poor. Self-renunciation is not the antidote to ostentatiousness.
If you’re not particularly interested in the culture of Appleby-in-Westmorland, don’t assume your friends are strongly invested in Accra, Mazatlan, or Hanoi. Likewise, just because they may have been born in Redondo Beach doesn’t mean they’re not invested in those places.
You will be a victim of racism at some point, but depending on the severity, you might want to just drop it.
Things that are OK to say in one inter-racial friendship may not be OK to say in another. This will confuse you, until you realize that these are two separate human beings.
Race and class are pretty complicated, bro; have a strong heart and thick skin and you’ll get through this.
Keep in mind, this list was written by a middle class white guy.

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Amy Balkin and Public Smog

Ann Schnake & Elizabeth Dorbad: Itinerant Structures

Healing Wounds, both historical and physical

The White Privilege Field Guide to Progressivism