Steven Kaplan: What Goes Around

Chinese government muzzles Ai Weiwei: no talking, no tweeting and no travel for a year

2011-06-27T13:33:00.000-04:00

BEIJING | Fri Jun 24, 2011 6:34am EDT

(Reuters) - No talking, no tweeting and no travel for a year -- these are some of the conditions of Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei's release from more than two months in detention, underscoring Beijing's efforts to muzzle dissent.

The comprehensive gag on Ai, who is not allowed to post anything on Twitter or accept interviews for a year, raises questions about the Chinese government's repeated claims that his detention was based on economic crimes.

"The key thing is these two conditions -- the media and the Internet," a source close to the family told Reuters on Friday.

Ai has freedom of movement within Beijing, but before he "goes out, he needs to report his whereabouts to them" for a year, the source said, but declined to elaborate who Ai needs to report to.

Prominent rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang said it was illegal for the government to restrict Ai from tweeting or accepting interviews.

"A strong government that is ruled by law cannot impose conditions like these on its citizens," Pu said. "If there is indeed a criminal case, why isn't there a mention of it? Up until now, there hasn't been a notice of the case.

"This behaviour is illegal -- it's in violation of the United Nations conventions."

Social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook are blocked in China, as authorities fear these websites could allow the government's critics to organise.

But many people, including dissidents, use virtual private networks to circumvent the restrictions.

Ai has 89,117 followers on Twitter and has tweeted 60,162 times -- the last occasion being on April 3, the day he was detained.

Analysts say Ai's release is far from a signal of a policy shift by the ruling Communist Party. Authorities have muzzled dissent with the secretive detentions of more than 130 lawyers and activists since February, amid fears that anti-authoritarian uprisings across the Arab world could trigger unrest.

The Foreign Ministry said Ai, who had a hand in designing the Bird's Nest stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, remained under investigation for suspicion of economic crimes.

But police have issued no formal notice to explain why he was being held. Ai's family says the allegations are an excuse to silence his criticism.

I WENT TO BEIJING TO INTERVIEW AI WEIWEI, AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT

2011-06-27T13:31:00.001-04:00

We send our best wishes to Ai Weiwei on his release from three months of Chinese government detention. We sincerely hope that he will be able to resume his activist role as provocateur, dissident and gadfly within China, continually offering a critique of the entrenched Communist Party bureaucracy.

Thus far, he has been loath to give an interview regarding his detention, undoubtedly part of the terms of his “qubao houshen” - the deal he needed to make with his captors to obtain release. Apparently this deal includes one year of restrictions: no Twitter, no interviews, no foreign travel, and even reports on prospective trips within China.

As noted by Barbara Pollack in a recent Artnet piece, constant pressure from the Western art establishment - artists, critics, curators, museums - certainly contributed to Ai's release, but there is still the danger that his full range of artistic expression has been placed in jeopardy. This includes not just his sculpture and installation work, but also his online activism. "Now is not the time", she says, "to lessen the pressure to restore his freedom to communicate with the world."

Hans Ulrich Obrist has declared that Ai Weiwei's online activism is his form of social sculpture and his most potent form of art making. If so, now is not the time to lessen the pressure to restore his freedom to communicate with the world. While museums from Asia Society to the Hirshhorn plan Ai Weiwei exhibitions of his photographs and sculptures, we cannot ignore that his online oeuvre -- the least marketable and institution-friendly aspect of his work -- is being silenced. Until now, western museums have rarely demanded that the Chinese respond to calls for freedom of expression. With the case of Ai Weiwei, such a demand is unavoidable.

So consider this mockup of a typical tourist t-shirt my gentle prod towards the restoration of unfettered free speech and full artistic expression to Ai Weiwei, in both the "real" and online realms.

Ai Weiwei released on bail, returns home

2011-06-27T13:28:00.001-04:00

After almost three months of detention by Chinese government authorities, Ai Weiwei was released yesterday on bail and returned to his home in Beijing.

On April 3, 2011, as he was attempting to fly to Hong Kong, Ai was seized by Chinese government agents and held incommunicado. Charges against him were not stated immediately, but only weeks later, and include supposed tax evasion and destruction of documents.

Hundreds of arts institutions, thousands of people - artists, critics, curators, museum directors etc. - have been following this unlawful detention. It has become an essential issue of free speech that has transfixed the art world, has precipitated massive signing of petitions, with lots of coverage in both the cultural and mainstream press.

Previous government harassment against Ai has included beatings, bulldozing his studio in Shanghai, and shutting down his blog.

Ai's final release on bail, predicated on his confessing to trumped up "economic crimes", avoids the obvious reason for his detention: his consistent posture of criticism of the totalitarian excesses of the Chinese government.

He is by no means out of danger yet. The terms of release negotiated with the Chinese government - similar to "bail", but called “qubao houshen” - prevents him from speaking on his detention, as is obvious in the above video. Typically, prosecutors drop charges against a suspect on certain conditions, including "good behavior", while subjecting him to monitoring over a period of time during which charges could be reintroduced. He could still be tried on the bogus tax charges, while his words and activities are being closely watched by Chinese authorities. So the situation, while improved, is still tenuous.

It will be interesting to see how Ai Weiwei proceeds, based on the terms of release he negotiated with Chinese authorities. How will his detention affect his art making, his status as provocateur, dissident and gadfly within China, continually offering a critique of the entrenched Communist Party bureaucracy, its cruelty, abuses and expedience?

Links:

http://nyti.ms/lL1n0P

http://bit.ly/lVNbjg

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13878859

http://bit.ly/lXR0SY

Japanese scientist makes good on Yes Men meme: synthesizing meat from human feces

2011-06-27T13:24:00.001-04:00

A Japanese scientist has reportedly discovered a way to create edible steaks based on proteins from human excrement. Tokyo Sewage approached Mitsuyuki Ikeda, a researcher from the Okayama Laboratory, to explore possible uses for their overabundance of sewage mud. Ikeda found that bacteria in the mud had produced a great deal of protein.

The laboratory extracted those proteins, combined them with a reaction enhancer and put the mixture in an exploder which created the artificial steak. The “meat” is 63% proteins, 25% carbohydrates, 3% lipids and 9% minerals. The final product is colored red and its flavor enhanced with soy protein. Initial tests have people indicating it tastes like beef.

Scientists hope to price their synthetic the same as actual meat, but at the moment the excrement steaks are ten to twenty times more expensive due to the cost of research.

Apparently this is NOT a hoax, like the Yes Men's infamous Post Consumer Waste Recycling Program segment from their first film.

Yes Lab "Come Clean" on Peabody Energy Asthma Inhaler Hoax

2011-05-16T09:27:00.006-04:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

May 10, 2011

Tackling Childhood Asthma Not Coal Industry Priority After All
No more My Little Pony inhalers in stock

Contact: asthma@coalcares.org, (314) 472-5539

A charitable initiative by the world’s largest coal company to provide free “novelty-themed” inhalers to asthmatic children may have seemed for a moment like a (somewhat misguided) breath of fresh air, coming as it did from an industry whose emissions are directly linked to childhood asthma, and which is fighting to gut clean air legislation that would save children’s lives.

Coal Cares™ (www.coalcares.org) purported to “make asthma cool” with decorative and pop-culture inspired inhalers (“The Bieber,” “Harry Potter,” “My Little Pony,” and “My First Inhaler” were particular favorites). The site also announced that Peabody would offer $10 coupons towards asthma medication (about 5%-20% of the cost) for families living within 200 miles of a coal-fired plant. It featured a “Kidz Koal Korner” with asthma-related games for tots, an extensive asthma trivia section and FAQ (Peter the Great was asthmatic, who knew!), and a thorough condemnation of solar and wind alternatives.

It was, of course, a hoax, and it was aimed at Peabody Coal, which is lobbying ferociously against new pollution standards for power plants proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), standards the agency says will prevent 120,000 cases of childhood asthma each year in the United States. Peabody spent over $6 million lobbying Congress last year, and the industry has created a dizzying array of fake “grassroots” front groups to distort the public debate and fight legislation.

(Meanwhile, a new study by the American Lung Association notes that coal-fired power plants produce more hazardous air pollution in the United States than any other source, with the pollution killing 13,000 people a year. Coal-ash disposal alone increases risk of cancer, learning disabilities, birth defects and other illnesses due to exposure from heavy metals such as arsenic, lead and mercury.)

The Coal Cares™ hoax was devised by a group called Coal is Killing Kids (CKK), a small environmental and public health group that aims to challenge Big Coal’s expensive lobbying against sensible updates to the Clean Air Act. “We don’t have their millions, but we do have a knack for incredibly tasteless jokes,” said Veronica Tomlinson, a pediatrician and member of CKK. CKK worked with the Yes Lab, which is a project of The Yes Men to help activist groups carry out media-savvy creative actions on their own.

“Sure, it’s kind of tasteless to say that ‘Bieber’ inhalers are a solution to childhood asthma,” said Janet Bellamy, a spokesperson for CKK. “But it’s a great deal more tasteless to cause that asthma in the first place, as coal-fired power plants have been proven to do.” Added Justin V. Bond, another spokesperson for CKK: “It’s even more tasteless to disproportionately kill poor people.” Coal-fired power plants are very often built in areas populated by low-income citizens, who then bear the brunt of the health effects.

“People may laugh at our sick jokes,” said Bellamy, “but they also understand the real health impacts of burning coal. That’s exactly what the coal industry doesn’t want people to think about, because if enough of us were aware of it, we would shut these plants down once and for all.”

Another good dirty energy spoof site from the Yes Men

May 10, 2011. An interesting press release entered my Inbox this morning. It appears to be another spoof by the Yes Men. This time they take down one of the giants of dirty coal, Peabody Energy, by pretending the polluter will be offering “custom-branded inhaler actuators to children living within 200 miles of a coal plant, along with coupons worth $10 towards the purchase of the asthma medication itself.” The image above, plus access to various inhalers named for SpongeBob SquarePants and Justin Bieber, can be found at www.coalcares.org. Don’t forget to visit the Kidz Koal Korner and complete this maze.

Here’s the press release in its entirety:

Peabody Energy (NYSE: BTU) Announces “Coal Cares™” Initiative, New Nationwide Campaign Against Stigma of Childhood Asthma

ST. LOUIS, May 10, 2011 / PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — Peabody Energy today announced the creation of an innovative new public health initiative designed to combat the stigma of asthma among American children ages 0-18. With Coal Cares™ (www.coalcares.org), Peabody will offer free, custom-branded inhaler actuators to children living within 200 miles of a coal plant, along with coupons worth $10 towards the purchase of the asthma medication itself.

“Too many young Americans face daily schoolyard taunting and bullying because of a condition over which they have no control,” said Gregory H. Boyce, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Peabody Energy. “By re-branding the inhaler as a cool, individualized, must-have accessory, Coal Cares™ will empower children to tell bullies: ‘suck it up.’” Children can choose from a variety of youth-themed inhaler cases, from tween faves like “the Bieber” and “My Little Pony,” to the “Emo” and “Diamond” inhalers for older, style-conscious youth. There’s even “My First Inhaler,” for tots.

Coal Cares™ launches today in commemoration of Asthma Awareness Month, the Environmental Protection Agency’s effort to call attention to rising asthma rates, especially among children. Coal Cares™ and its Puff-Puff™ line of inhalers is the first, and most ambitious, market-friendly public health initiative of this scope of any privately-owned American company, and testifies to the energy industry’s commitment to the well-being of all citizens, including the youngest.

“Our actions are guided by a singular mission: to be a leading worldwide producer and supplier of balanced energy solutions, which power economic prosperity and well-being,” said Boyce. “Coal Cares™ brings this mission to life, empowering children everywhere to take control of their destinies, beginning with their own lungs.”

“Coal Cares™ is emblematic of the return to self-reliance that healthy entrepreneurship demands,” said James Miasmus, Vice President of Government Affairs at Peabody USA. “Costly ‘scrubbing’ technology, on the other hand, is an untested and heavy-handed intrusion into our still-vulnerable economy. At Peabody, we’re thinking globally but acting locally, and locating preventive action at the point of consumption, where it belongs.”

“Coal Cares™ isn’t just the name of a campaign,” said Kevin Briesslau, Vice President of Communications at Peabody Coal. “It’s a philosophy, a way of doing business in harmony with the community we are a part of. After all, coal is the fastest-growing fuel in the world. We’re part of America’s heritage, and we’re here to stay.”

To learn more about Peabody’s Coal Cares™ initiative, visit: www.coalcares.org.

Peabody Energy (NYSE: BTU) is the world’s largest private-sector coal company and a global leader in clean coal solutions. With 2010 sales of 246 million tons and nearly $7 billion in revenues, Peabody fuels 10 percent of U.S. power and 2 percent of worldwide electricity.

CONTACT:
Vic Ganey
Phone (314) 472-5539

SOURCE Peabody Energy

www.coalcares.org

» Steven Kaplan’s blog

This Modern World: A Modest Proposal + Soylent Green = the Medicare-gutting budget of Paul Ryan

2011-04-18T08:55:00.005-04:00

Some conservative pundits and blogs have tried to spin the draconian, Medicare-gutting budget of Congressman Paul Ryan (Republican-Wisconsin) as somehow "courageous". As an antidote to this GOP duckspeak, Tom Tomorrow borrows from A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift's satirical essay from 1729, which suggests that the Irish eat their own children, and also from the 1973 dystopian sci-fi film classic, Soylent Green.

"To pay for tax cuts for the wealthy, I believe we should euthanize the elderly and then process them into tasty snack crackers, the profits from which can be used to finance further tax cuts for the wealthy."

Speechless

2011-04-18T08:52:00.000-04:00

April 14, 2011. During the Congressional budget hearings, Representative Joseph Crowley (Democrat - NY) offered a brilliant recapitulation of Bob Dylan's silent cue card performance of "Subterranean Homesick Blues" in the D.A. Pennebaker documentary Don't Look Back. How better to show utter contempt for standard issue Republican complacency?

Copyright News: Unfair Use of "Road to Nowhere" in Political Campaign Prompts Settlement/Apology to David Byrne/Talking Heads

2011-04-18T08:49:00.002-04:00

Richard Prince is not the only downtown New York artist who has been party to a recent copyright/intellectual property litigation. But unlike Prince - who was on the losing end of a decision (currently under appeal) regarding the fair use of photographs appropriated in his "Canal Zone" paintings - Talking Heads frontman David Byrne favorably settled a lawsuit in which he was the aggrieved party for the unlicensed use of the song "Road to Nowhere" in a political campaign.

As reported in the Orlando Sentinel:

Former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist has settled a lawsuit filed by Talking Heads singer David Byrne after Crist used one of the group's songs without permission in a campaign ad last year, both parties confirmed Monday.

Terms of the settlement were not released, but it included a recorded apology by Crist that was posted on YouTube Monday afternoon. Byrne had sued Crist for $1 million for using the song "Road to Nowhere" in a YouTube video attacking Marco Rubio, one of the governor's opponents in the U.S. Senate race.

Crist said Monday that he was pleased with the terms of the settlement and that Byrne "couldn't have been a better guy" when they met last week to mediate the case...

In a statement Monday, Byrne said he was shocked to discover that the unauthorized use of songs for political ads is "pretty rampant."

"It turns out I am one of the few artists who has the bucks and [guts] to challenge such usage. I'm feeling very manly after my trip to Tampa!" Byrne's statement said. "Other artists may actually have the anger but not want to take the time and risk the legal bills. I am lucky that I can do that. Anyway, my hope is that by standing up to this practice maybe it can be made to be a less common option, or better yet an option that is never taken in the future."

Rob Pruitt's Andy Monument: The One We Deserve?

2011-04-18T08:37:00.005-04:00

Finish feels too platinum elegiac pure http://www.publicartfund.org/robpruitt/project not trashy tin foil speed freak glitz of Factory

(my Tweet https://twitter.com/#!/slkaplan about an hour ago)

Thursday, March 31, 2011. 2:42 pm. I always preferred early Warhol - Soup Cans, Most Wanted, Elvis, Marilyn, Electric Chair, Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Nico and Edie and the Velvets and Ultra Violet, Gerard and Brigid Polk, Empire, Blow Job, Lonesome Cowboys, Superstars, Ondine, Billy Name, all night amphetamine 47th Street Factory Warhol - to later, more domesticated incarnations.

There was certainly a great Union Square, Max's Kansas City, Interview Magazine stretch through the 70s, even while the celebrity silkscreens were being turned out en masse. But Pruitt's version is just a bit too staid. It conforms, is a sign of the times. Union Square is now a yuppie paradise, not the wild, dope ridden enclave it was back in the 70s. Is this the Andy it now deserves, an Andy for 2011?

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Revisit:

Several reviewers have pointed out that the "Andy Monument" sculpture seems a bit ungainly, that the posture is stiff, the placement of the head on the neck not quite right, the sports jacket and skinny pants anachronistically sourced from contemporary downtown hipster iconography, the face itself thin, squished and not recognizably Warhol. Pruitt has indicated that the statue, from the neck down, was modeled off a collector friend, Andy Stillpass, who has a "similar body type", and Greg Allen has noted that Pruitt might be pranking us, once again, with a tale of two Andys.

But beyond these considerations of shallow, brittle cleverness, of coy adoptions and the recycling of art world scuttlebutt in the conception of the piece, which was apparently researched down to its ostentatious "period" props - the Bloomingdale's Medium Brown Bag and Polaroid SX-70 - is an unfortunate joyless inertia. Warhol was a notorious voyeur with a fey, affectless overlay of "That's so great". He was also a compulsive collector, an asexual aesthete and - at least at the beginning of his career - a symbol of NYC gay street punk and camp and sneer. Little of this frisson is transmitted in this bloodless bit of hagiography, which - as noted at the top - reveals its overall cluelessness by opting for an Olympian, platinum, chromed finish which all too readily forgets the funky, crinkled tin foil origins of Andy's Factory.

Every age brings its own conventions to the fusty old genre of heroic public statuary, but if Pruitt's "Andy Monument" shows us anything about our contemporary moment, it's the reflection of a shopping mecca overlaid on the unruly urban grid, the zing of consumerist bling and a heedless, headlong attention deficit disorder which has been fully substituted for circumspection and wisdom. In this sense, it is undoubtedly the Andy that Pruitt and the Public Art Fund think we deserve.
----------------

Hyperallergic has come up with a delicious spoof which claims that the Andy Monument is actually a statue of Rob Storr, and that Rob Pruitt harbors an unrequited passion for the former MoMA curator and director of the Venice Biennale who is now Dean of the Yale University School of Art.

One anonymous source close to Pruitt said that the artist has long had a burning desire to be embraced by the married Yalie prof, and explains that the artist often stays up all night flipping through Storr’s books, reading up on his elegant theories about art and culture... This revelation would explain why Pruitt’s chrome-surfaced statue doesn’t really look much like famed Pop artist Andy Warhol and perhaps show why this very “personal” project probably shouldn’t have left Pruitt’s studio.

If not for the sheer fact of the statue hardly resembling Warhol, such a risible conjecture might never have been entertained. But after close study, I have drawn my own very different conclusions. Pruitt is apparently a Star Wars fan, and the statue, with the simple substitution of chrome for gold finish, is a dead ringer for that fussy diplomatic robot, C3PO.

The force is strong in you, young Warhola.

And really, why stop there?

We're off to see the Warhol, the Wonderful Warhol of Oz.

Lee Wells and the Blowback of Empire Porn

2011-02-22T20:02:00.023-05:00

LEE WELLS: ACTION FOR FREEDOM
ROOSTER GALLERY, 190 ORCHARD STREET, NYC
FEBRUARY 17 – MARCH 12, 2011

Pirate Flag #2, 2010, HD Video, 10 minutes

Wikipedia: Blowback is the espionage term for the violent, unintended consequences of a covert operation that are suffered by the civil population of the aggressor government. To the civilians suffering the blowback of covert operations, the effect typically manifests itself as “random” acts of political violence without a discernible, direct cause; because the public—in whose name the intelligence agency acted—are ignorant of the effected secret attacks that provoked revenge (counter-attack) against them.

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What's in a name? "Action for Freedom", the generic, boosterish title of Lee Wells' new exhibition of paintings and recycled digital video, at first sounds like a grassroots community organization, a vigilante committee, even a policy wonk's think tank. But those two fully loaded buzzwords, which might suggest engagement or advocacy in another context, are defused here, rendered open-ended and non-specific. Like other bland amalgams which tend to litter the political landscape - could Wells have titled his exhibition "New Republic" or "National Review"? - the connotation is intentionally ambiguous. Only further examination allows us to understand that one magazine is firmly located on the left of the political spectrum, the other just as forcefully on the right. But nothing in the names themselves would signal this partisanship. It is a convention rooted in usage.

Similarly, you would need to walk a mile in Wells' shoes to appreciate his particular stance. So heft that pack, soldier, and shoulder your rifle. Twenty years ago, Wells served in the US Army and just missed being shipped off to the First Gulf War by a couple of days. He experienced the military from the inside, and his ambition as an artist is to present images of American Imperial Porn as perceived by the grunts on the front lines, the MPs in the stockade, the guys driving the Humvees and the APCs. By porn, we're not just referring to the usual adrenaline-laced wash of sex and violence. Rather, it's the immersive pornography of empire building, of logistics and combat and expeditionary forces, of asymmetrical warfare, of Islamic fundamentalist customs clashing/melding with the imperatives of the West.

Back in the salad days of the British Empire, imperialism was succinctly defined by Rudyard Kipling's apologia of the "white man's burden". But this rationalization has become a bit outdated in recent years, as the military undertakes a more nuanced approach, hoping to win over the hearts and minds of occupied nations. Thus the porn of IEDs, RPGs and military jargon handily conflates with local practices from the Arab street. The porn of kitsch, of YouTube videos, of Facebook friends and tweets and shared music files, characterizes the Internet/entertainment complex of both the contemporary American GI and the wired indigenous population. While we might pray to different gods and eat separate meals, online we are all plugged into the same big motherboard.

Perhaps due to this grand commonality, "Action for Freedom" is a strange jumble of an exhibition, ambitious in scope yet seemingly offhand in its presentation. Just like the Internet, it can feel both casual and contrived, aleatoric but designed, open-ended yet framed. Through his own example, Wells seems to argue for net neutrality and open sources. He appears ready and willing to incorporate content from just about anywhere. As was true in his Perpetual Art Machine project, which compiled artists' videos in a cross referenced grid, Wells is a benign gatekeeper, presiding over a revolving door that allows images to flow from upload to download and back again, crossing national, cultural, corporate and oligarchical barriers as if these were invisible. Or perhaps to argue for that very invisibility.

In this sense, another appropriate title for the show would be "Blowback". The usual connotation of the term, in our post 9/11 world, regards Islamic terrorism on American soil and against American civilians as revenge exacted by Al Qaeda to punish the US for its Middle East policies. And this certainly remains a large part of the equation. But just as with the definition of porn, blowback can more meaningfully encompass a larger dialectic: the sharing, mangling, and interweaving of cultural content that accompanies invasion, war and occupation. It is a blending of cultural referents that arrive from the hinterlands to "contaminate" the seat of imperial power -- much as Christianity can be seen as a virus that migrated from ancient Judea to infect Rome -- creating a New World Order of signifiers, a global set of referents, codes and memes that delimit our shared information superhighway.

This is the context which most interests Wells in his dissection of Empire Porn. But as is sometimes the case with "cutting edge" work, the knife is able to cut both ways. This exhibition is given added, immediate relevance by current events, by the recent spate of democratic, street revolutions that have ignited across the Arab world, which were at least partly facilitated by Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites that helped spread the spark of popular revolt, despite attempts by certain governments to shut them down. Obviously, "blowback" is really "blow back and forth". The Internet is a tool, but also a weapon. And once things go viral, they might easily infect the regimes of Mubarak or Qaddaffi with a flu for which there is no cure.

Lee Wells with his portrait of Pat Tillman.

Let's begin in the basement of Rooster Gallery, since every show should have a solid foundation, but also because this was the gallery I visited first. It is dominated by a large portrait of Pat Tillman, the soldier's soldier, a college linebacker and pro football star who left all that behind to enlist in the Army Rangers, and who died in 2004 in the mountains of Afghanistan -- from friendly fire, as it turned out, despite a government cover-up that initially misinformed both his family and the general public. The official, heroic composite portrait, in full color, shows Tillman standing square jawed and resolute in front of a furled American flag, his name and the markings on his tunic blacked out (as a funerary gesture? or for security considerations?). Wells modifies this, rendering it in grisaille to increase the sculptural presence, but also to emphasize the shifting shades of gray that have characterized the government's mishandling of the truth about the death. It is a potent, ambivalent image. While we must laud Tillman's All-American patriotism and supreme sacrifice, the total story conjures up an unfortunate saga of US Army duplicity, their attempt to sweep the ugly, messy specifics of combat under the carpet for the sake of the propaganda machine: to make Tillman a Silver Star poster boy for uninflected, knee jerk patriotism.

The basement series of hooded houris.

On an adjoining wall, posed like the harem of the heroic warrior (those 72 black eyed virgins promised to martyrs in heaven?), are six painted images of women, each of whom wears a single article of clothing, the Islamic veil or hijab, but little else. They are splayed in various expectant postures of sexual availability, with slim hips, pert nipples and eyes staring -- seductively? insouciantly? defiantly? -- through the slits of their headgear. One even gives us the finger, with both hands.

My initial assumption, as the women seem similar from piece to piece, was that Wells organized a shoot with a single model and used the resulting photographs as the basis for his paintings. In fact, he claims to have searched assiduously online, scouring the Internet for just these images, which he found on a variety of websites, both Islamic and Western. Some are apparently taken from Muslim sex sites, advertising Arab-on-Arab kink or Turkish delight. Others seem to be domestic products, outcroppings of the great Los Angeles porn industry that employs the veil as just another bit of fetish wear. Some might be favorites of the American GIs stationed in the Middle East, inflamed by the beauty and exoticism of the local houris: typical red blooded American boys out for a quick romp with the Islamic homegirls.

Veiled Woman #4, 2011, oil on canvas, 14 x 11 inches

Others might be viewed as consciously blasphemous, challenging the strictures of Islam, seeking to violate the traditional modesty and morality advanced by the wearing of the hijab. And others, especially if the work is diaristic or employs the image of its creator, can be seen as self-empowering: Muslim women attempting to throw off the veil as a lingering vestige of the overbearing patriarchy. Or Western feminists using the veil for a bit of agitprop theater. (As in: "OK. We'll wear your hijab. But nothing else.")

Depending on their sources, these provocative images could suggest a whole panoply of intentions. But the only context given is a series of painted images arranged in a row on the wall. They are presented as sisters in flagrancy, a gang of randy yet mysterious signifiers, sexually titillating but opaque to interpretation. Wells maintains the anonymity of the Internet and the open source, leading to broad conjecture on these veiled women. (Writer's confession: It was while viewing these particular works that the term "Empire Porn" first came to mind.)

Ballistic Trauma #1, 2011, oil on panel with video on custom multimedia player, 24 x 20 inches

All work discussed thus far is found in the basement: the appetizers, if you will. Upstairs in the storefront proper is the main course, a series of wooden panels, painted desultorily in generic expressionist abstraction reaching for incipient figuration, but each with a jagged, irregular hole gouged through the middle -- reminiscent of William Burroughs' technique in his shotgun paintings from the 1980s. Burroughs was happy to blast away at his aerosol spray paint cans and make them spew paint on canvas, essentially using the shotgun as paintbrush, but for Wells the panels are just the beginning. They serve primarily as frames for LED screens that are installed beneath them, so that through each irregular hole we can view, peek-a-boo style, a program of videos that the artist has culled from the Internet.

Ballistic Trauma #4, 2010, Oil on panel with video on custom media player, 24 x 20 inches

The content of these videos encompass a full sampling of Empire Porn. They range from street demonstrations to torture sequences, from suicide bombers to the tentative exercise of free speech in the public sphere, from social unrest to police brutality, from terrorist acts to their fierce suppression, focusing on the militarization of society, the regimen of intimidation in prisons, the systems of permission and control that define a world viewed from the panopticon of the Internet. Each piece contains video images intercut from five sources, running in a continuous loop.

Completing the show is the Pirate Flag video, represented by the still image at the top of this article. Flapping in a fresh breeze off a Cape Cod beach, the flag seems iconic of the usual bad boy stereotype, but also defines Wells as a "pirate" of Internet content, a hunter/gatherer who scours the information superhighway for evidence of the transgressive, the revelatory, the enticing, the shameful and the expedient, for misbehavior and for the blowback of empire building that is always there, beneath the surface, waiting to snarl at us: "Arrrrrrrrghhh!"

As a parting example of blowback, allow me to share a message just received from Mr. Rafik Jihad, a gentleman I have never met (who could forget someone named "Jihad"?) and who I suspect might not actually exist outside my Inbox, but who identifies himself as a bank officer making a most generous offer. While some might deride this as pure, unadulterated spam, I prefer to see it as another instance of blowback from the Middle East. Perhaps Mr. Wells will soon incorporate phishing and identity theft into a body of work on the discontents of the new American empire.

From Mr. Rafik Jihad,

Complement of the day to you and your beloved family. I apologize for this intrusion, I decided to contact you through email due to the urgency involved in this matter. Do not be astonished for receiving this mail. Please, I seek your permission and would want to get myself introduce to you. I am Mr. Rafik Jihad. I work with Islamic Development Bank (IDB). I need your co-operation in receiving USD$6.5M that has been in a dormant account with my bank for 5 years which belongs to one of our foreign customer who died along with his entire family during the Iraq war in 2006. I will provide you with detailed information's on the modalities of this operation once I have your interest but I must say that trust flourishes business.

Therefore let your conscience towards this proposal be nurtured with sincerity and I will not fail to bring to your notice that, this transaction is hitch-free risk and you should keep this transaction ( CONFIDENTIAL) why because, no other person know about it, its a business between you and myself only for the safety and security of the business. I agree that 35% of this money will be for you as a foreign partner, in respect to the provision of a foreign account where this fund will be transfer into, and 65% will before me, thereafter I will visit your country for disbursement according to the percentage indicated. Remember, you will apply first to the bank for the transfer and my career as a banker, I will bring you up to date with all the information's as soon as I hear from you. If I don't hear from you within a certain period, I will assume, you are not interested.

Blunt Trauma #3, 2010, Oil and acrylic on panel with video on custom media player, 24 x 20 inches

The Emily Fisher Landau Collection at the Whitney

2011-02-10T12:29:00.007-05:00

Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
February 10–May 1, 2011

February 10, 2011. In a bit of serendipity that is hardly lost on the Whitney Museum itself, the exhibition they just opened, of work from the collection of Emily Fisher Landau, is mounted in fourth floor galleries that already honor her name. The estimable Fisher Landau collection, totaling over 400 works, was pledged to the museum in May 2010 by their longtime trustee, who has also established an endowment for continuing support of the Biennial. The show currently on view, comprising just over 80 pieces, is assembled by Whitney curators Donna De Salvo and David Kiehl, and ranges from signature work by Andy Warhol, Edward Ruscha, Richard Artschwager and John Baldessari to a vintage 1980 Susan Rothenberg new image painting, a wealth of Jasper Johns screenprints, pristine early 60s works on paper by Agnes Martin, Carl Andre concrete poetry on typewritten sheets, Felix Gonzalez-Torres jigsaw puzzles, assemblages by Nayland Blake, photo portraiture by Peter Hujar and Nan Goldin, and an early Richard Prince nurse painting, to name but a few.

It is an embarrassment of riches. As Whitney Director Adam Weinberg indicated in his introductory remarks to the media preview, for a museum to be gifted a collection of this scope and quality is positively overwhelming. Referring to the augmentation of the museum's holdings made possible by the Fisher Landau gift, he seemed as giddy as a kid let loose in a candy store. I would add that, at a moment when the institution is looking to expand its focus downtown to a new, large Renzo Piano-designed facility at the southern terminus of the High Line, the incorporation of so much world class work in one fell swoop is an expansion of equal and complementary importance.

I have never met Fisher Landau nor been to her home, but have attended numerous events at what must be considered her spiritual home, the art center she established in Long Island City, Queens in a former parachute silk factory. It is a large, well proportioned concrete building off the N line. I have visited there often enough to become accustomed to seeing particular pieces in particular places. For example, the Jenny Holzer granite benches on various stairwell landings, the 1984 Warhol portrait of Fisher Landau opposite the information desk in the lobby, the Artschwager lectern/open book piece in the library. To now find these relocated to the Whitney, relegated to a more general and possibly impersonal population, brings a mix of emotions. While the work has undeniably found a new, secure and institutionally viable locus, it also seems excised from its original, natural habitat. This passage from intimacy to institution is marked by the very first piece we encounter off the Whitney's fourth floor elevator, an 11-foot-wide Ruscha from 1983 with the words "The Act of Letting a Person into Your Home" displayed against one of his patented desert sunsets.

There is, possibly, a sadness that accompanies all notions of progress and growth. To see a collection nourished over the years by Fisher Landau's impeccable eye, with good advice by her longtime curator Bill Katz, relocate en masse to the Whitney's hallowed halls brings a certain ambivalence. Something is lost, even while something is gained.

What is certainly gained is a new curatorial imprimatur, a new perspective on cross sectioning the collection, and one of the joys of the current exhibition is when it veers from the central canon of Johns/Warhol/Artschwager/Ruscha - all of whom Fisher Landau collected throughout their careers - to her more quirky, idiosyncratic choices. For example, the 1988 Al Taylor sculpture, a helix composed of painted broomsticks mounted off the wall. The two vintage Neil Jenney text/image paintings from 1969. A 1992 Peter Cain squished car painting. Two classic 1984 works by Carroll Dunham, when the imagery, already polymorphous perverse, had not yet started its full descent down the rabbit hole of sexual orifice. A 1990 Mark Tansey existential conundrum, predating both Schejldahl's rejection and Gagosian's adoption. Two excellent David Wojnarowicz collaged map combines (1987, 1990).

The current airing of the Landau collection culminates with two pieces on the fifth floor - a 1958 Georgia O'Keeffe and a James Rosenquist mural - that bring us to another good reason to visit the Whitney: Singular Visions, an exhibition of twelve works drawn from the museum's permanent collection, each given its separate room. It tweaks the usual cheek-by-jowl assortment of permanent collection trophies into a subdued, pensive, mysterious, installation-driven display that gives some indication of what the Whitney might do with all the extra space it creates for itself downtown. Highlights among Visions include George Segal's "Walk/Don't Walk", Gary Simmons' boxing ring with tap dance shoes hanging from the ropes and dance step markings chalked onto the black mat, Eva Hesse's hanging web, and AA Bronson's chilling deathbed portrait of his General Idea partner Felix Partz.

Also notable: Jonathan Borofsky's wall drawing wrapped around the stairwell, Edward Kienholz's funky, musty installation that includes institutional mascot Peetie the parakeet, and Robert Grosvenor's "Tenerife" (1966), a site specific installation that incorporates controlled access, dynamic angles and bold cantilevering off the ceiling to splinter a knife-like form into morphing shards of perception. It delivers an essential sculptural frisson, and is one of the best reasons to make sure you do not neglect floor 5M in your visit to the museum.

Olek Tames the Charging Wall Street Bull

2010-12-27T16:20:00.014-05:00

December 27, 2010. On Christmas night, in the freezing cold before the blizzard hit New York City, crochet artist Olek and her band of enablers managed to fully clothe the famous bronze statue of a charging bull that stands in Bowling Green Park in downtown Manhattan. A potent symbol of Wall Street capitalism, the bull wore its crocheted "cozy" for two hours before the caretaker of the small triangular park arrived and confiscated the work, cutting it up and depositing it in the garbage. But first this photo was taken.

With her obsessive strategy of multicolored yarn - purple, fuschia and orange predominate - sewn up in camouflage-like patterns, Olek seems to combine the Sherwin Williams Paint "cover the earth" mandate with a desire to be the Christo of crochet. She has previously fully dressed a bicycle, an automobile and various performers in her trademark coverings, in choreographed conceptual pieces executed on the streets of New York and Miami.

In her one person show this past fall at Christopher Henry Gallery at 127 Elizabeth Street in the Chinatown/LES neighborhood, she created a room-sized installation in which every domestic object, from bathtubs to tables and chairs to telephones to X-rated samplers with texts derived from Internet chat rooms, was given the full Olek treatment. The show was called "Knitting is for Pus****" (as in "Pussies").

Paper Magazine did a photo shoot during the run of the installation, which included live performers inhabiting the room, as described in a review taken from Verbicide:

The first thing one sees in the gallery is a miniature studio apartment — nay, an average-sized studio by New York standards — covered in garishly colored crochet that looks more Beetlejuice than “home sweet home.” The entire structure is covered in crocheted yarn or plastic bags. Before entering, shoes must be removed or hospital booties donned to protect the crocheted floor. A crocheted pedestal tub is occupied by a model in a face-obscuring crocheted body stocking. The bathroom sink and toilet are crocheted. A television and phone are crocheted. There’s a clothing rack (crocheted, even as skinny as it is) hung with crocheted clothing that looks like something the Dr. Seuss characters Thing 1 and Thing 2 might wear.

Knitting may be for pussies, but crochet is all about the pussy. The apartment walls and doors are covered in framed photographs of models nude but for some crocheted clothing and crocheted timestamped text messages Olek has received: “Ur pussy is my soul mate,” “I just wanna turn u on as much as I can,” and the profound, if debatable, “Soul is the part of you that sees a lap dance every time you close your eyes.”

Here is Olek in action during the shoot, dressing a model:

The room installation reappeared in Miami during art fair week, as part of Christopher Henry's -Scope booth, with another car - a convertible - parked outside the tent on Midtown Boulevard and fully customized by crochet.

A feisty, bodacious blonde from Poland, Olek (nee Agata Oleksiak) is a self-styled "guerrilla" artist who is not at all shy in discussing her work and its intentions. From her recent press release entitled "Happy Bullish 2011":

Thank you for supporting me in the intense 2010!

I had a very successful solo show at Christopher Henry Gallery that introduced my work to an even bigger audience and brought me tons of press! I was lucky to start the year with a residency at AAI-LES and finish it with another one at Workspace, LMCC.

It was truly a year of guerrilla actions that opened a new path in my crocheted investigations. I started it with a bike and ended up with the Charging Bull as a Christmas gift to NYC and a tribute to the sculptor of the bull, Arturo di Modica, who in another guerrilla act, placed the bull on Wall Street in Christmas of 1987 as a symbol of the "strength and power of the American people" following the 1987 Stock Market crash.

This crocheted cover represents my best wishes to all of us. It will be a great, prosperous year with many wonderful surprises!!!

In another self-generated PR effort, she discusses her current internship at LMCC and her penchant for ingesting massive quantities of movies and vodka, while "aggressively re-weaving the world as she sees fit":

We have obviously not heard the last from her.

---------------------------------

Indeed, it did not take long at all. Here is an action video posted by Olek on December 30:

Two comments:

The street art was apparently accomplished on Christmas Eve, not Christmas night. And the bronze bull seems to be anatomically correct, although there is no footage of Olek wrapping his cock and balls in crochet - an action that had been anticipated with a certain prurient interest.

James Romberger on David Wojnarowicz

2010-12-24T12:35:00.000-05:00

You Killed Me First, installation view, 1985.

James Romberger - artist, gallerist, writer and collaborator with David Wojnarowicz during the salad days of the East Village - was prompted by the current censorship of "A Fire In My Belly" to pen an eloquent analysis and remembrance of his friend. Wojnarowicz’s Apostasy http://www.tcj.com/hoodedutilitarian/2010/12/wojnarowiczs-apostacy/ is an essential read.

Romberger's central thesis:

David’s oeuvre was never only about his reactions to organized religion, nor was it ever only about the AIDS crisis. Certainly the disease that would kill him in 1992 gave his work a powerful impetus, but David always took a greater global view. He examined the way that the natural world works and how our relationships with each other and the planet fit within the continually shifting narrative of history. He also expressed a complex interiority as he engaged with different media to make his sometimes lyrical, sometimes enraged or explicit, but always thoughtful and heartfelt art.

David took on heroic proportions because of his outspoken response to the AIDS epidemic. He watched his friends falling around him. After his own diagnosis in 1988, he made a concerted effort to understand the disease and to combat the people and institutions that he was able to identify as enablers of the virus through their homophobia and suppression of information...

But even earlier, in 1986 and 1987 as he watched his mentor, the photographer Peter Hujar, waste away and die, David believed the Roman Catholic Church had abandoned everyone he loved...

The imagery of Catholicism suffused his work from the beginning. David’s friend and my partner, the interdisciplinary artist Marguerite Van Cook says he had “a crisis of faith,” certainly his beliefs were sorely tested...

A Fire in My Belly has been defended as being about AIDS and not about his anger towards the Church, but David’s later motivations should not be retrospectively applied to a film that he made earlier. The Smithsonian has posted a “Q&A” on their website which claims, “This imagery was part of a surrealistic video collage filmed in Mexico expressing the suffering, marginalization and physical decay of those who were afflicted with AIDS.” However, what is being shown on Youtube and elsewhere online is not the original film, its intent has been changed because elements have been added that are misplaced in time. The versions in circulation now both have imposed soundtracks and their meaning is altered with added imagery that was made years later. David made A Fire in My Belly in 1986, before he was diagnosed with AIDS.

Street Kid, acrylic and collage, 1986.

Romberger goes on to describe a jarring private screening of an early edit of the Mexican footage that would become "A Fire In My Belly"

What followed was an assault on my senses, a view of a world completely out of control. The strobed, often violent scenes of wrestlers, cock and bull fights, lurid icons, impoverished dwellings, clanking engines, an enslaved monkey, cripples begging for coins, for bread, a burning, spinning globe—it was a picture of indifference to the value of life, Mexico as a grinding machine of poverty and cruel spectacle.

and also several installations produced with Wojnarowicz at the infamous Ground Zero project space on East Fourth Street. All fascinating reading, revelatory of the artistic process, and a window back to another era of the East Village. But most of all, a necessary corrective to much of the recent misconstrued gloss on Wojnarowicz produced in the wake of the censorship crisis.

Portrait of Bishop Landa. Mixed media, 1986.

I posted the following to Romberger after reading his text, which I again urge you to read in its entirety:

James, this is the most truthful, informed and sincere text I have read on David and on "A Fire In My Belly" since the whole censorship mess began. Congratulations. I myself have covered the controversy several times on my post.thing.net blog, but never from the "inside". You and Marguerite were privileged to collaborate with David while he was still alive, and your insights benefit from this working relationship.

Many of the pieces I have read recently suffer rather than benefit from hindsight. However well intentioned, they tend to limit David to his AIDS activism, to make him an ACT UP poster boy. Thanks for presenting the total picture. While there is no denying the effect of the epidemic in galvanizing David's attention, sharpening his acerbity and crystallizing his imagery, his "complex interiority" was already well formed before AIDS became an unavoidable presence in his life. The Mexican imagery which forms the basis of "Fire In My Belly" is informed by a love/hate relationship with his native Catholicism, with the Church's betrayal and hypocrisy, with the "crisis of faith" you perceptively examine above.

The forces of repression and reaction might think they have won a round in the culture wars. But ironically, the unintentional effect of the censorship has been to focus a belated and long overdue reassessment of Wojnarowicz's life and work. Your article is an essential part of this effort.

Mexican Crucifix, acrylic and collage on panel, 1986.

Some Thoughts on Wojnarowicz and the Never Ending Culture Wars

2010-12-24T12:21:00.004-05:00

David Wojnarowicz "A Fire in My Belly" Original from ppow_gallery on Vimeo.

December 16, 2010. The above is taken from the Vimeo page of PPOW Gallery and from the archives of NYU's Fales Library. It represents two segments, of approximately 13 and 7 minutes, that David Wojnarowicz shot and edited on Super 8 in 1986-87, which he entitled "A Fire In My Belly". It is NOT the four minute piece that was yanked from the National Portrait Gallery show on December 1. It is also NOT the video I posted earlier on this blog, with its Diamanda Galas banshee wail/dirge of "Unclean". Nor the segment I have seen with an overlaid soundtrack of a 1980s ACT UP demonstration. Wojnarowicz shot and presented his original footage without sound, a suggestion of the urgency and severity of the political climate that led to the mantra of "Silence = Death".

It is two weeks since the "silencing" of "A Fire In My Belly", and as we near Sunday's rally on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum, it's clear that the culture wars are by no means over. This is hardly news to anyone following the hurtful antics of the Tea Party. Ever more empowered by their victories in the midterm election, the same purveyors of fear and purposeful obfuscation who demonized Obama for the past two years are trying to legislate and coerce the cultural landscape, to make art conform to their hypocritical and faux Christian yardstick. The fact that their cynical misunderstanding and bad intentions AGAIN fall directly on Wojnarowicz's shoulders is testimony to the enduring raw, elemental, and confrontational power of his art. Although the forces of reaction and censorship will always find something to belittle and attempt to repress, we almost have to thank them for forcing the issue and focusing attention on work that especially needs to be discussed and re-evaluated right now, as an antidote to right wing resurgence.

First, a excerpt from the perceptive and empathetic analysis of Holland Cotter published in last Friday's New York Times:

Wojnarowicz made “A Fire in My Belly,” dated 1986-87, at a turning point. In 1987 his longtime mentor and lover, the photographer Peter Hujar, died of AIDS, and Wojnarowicz himself learned that he was H.I.V.-positive. Although his career was by then well established, he was backing off from involvement in the art world and on his way to becoming immersed in AIDS politics.

Both parts of “A Fire in My Belly” are made from video shot in Mexico, a country that Wojnarowicz found mesmerizing for its combination of vital popular culture and daily life lived shockingly close to the bone. The 13-minute video opens with a panning shot, taken from a moving car, of the streets of a Mexican town, interrupted by quick shots of newspaper headlines reporting violent crimes. These sequences are punctuated, very briefly, with a few other images: a suspended world globe; a cartoonish dancing puppet wearing a sombrero; a disembodied hand dropping coins.

Then three scenes of combat alternate repeatedly: a bullfight and a cockfight — each gruesome — and a masked and acrobatic wrestling match. Travelogue-ish sequences that follow — of a circus with performing animals and a visit to a Mesoamerican archaeological site with demonic-looking sculptures — go on too long (as does the wrestling), and the video ends abruptly when the dancing puppet is shot at with what looks like a pistol full of paint. If there is any overriding idea delivered in the video, it has to do with how violence-addicted people, and specifically men, are.

The seven-minute “excerpt” feels more packed and purposeful, and quite complete. The opening image, which will recur again and again, is of metal wheels turning, like some machine of fate. Then, interwoven and rapidly repeated, we see pairs, not necessarily juxtaposed, of related images: street beggars and armed police; Day of the Dead candy skulls and a painting of an Aztec human sacrifice; mummified bodies displaced from graves in a cemetery and an undisturbed tombstone being gently washed.

Certain images were evidently filmed in a studio: coins falling into a bandaged hand, and a hand held under splashing water; halves of a loaf of bread being sewn together, and a man’s lips being sewn shut. A short sequence of a man masturbating alternates with images of sides of beef in a slaughterhouse. The image of the crucifix with ants comes almost in the middle of all of this, between shots of bread being sewn and blood dripping into a bowl. At the end, images from the first video reappear — the puppet and the globe — both burning.

That “A Fire in My Belly” is about spirituality, and about AIDS, is beyond doubt. To those caught up in the crisis, the worst years of the epidemic were like an extended Day of the Dead, a time of skulls and candles, corruption with promise of resurrection. Wojnarowicz was profoundly angry at a government that barely acknowledged the epidemic and at political forces that he believed used AIDS, and the art created in response, to demonize homosexuals.

He felt, with reason, mortally embattled, and the video is filled with symbols of vulnerability under attack: beggars, slaughtered animals, displaced bodies and the crucified Jesus. In Wojnarowicz’s nature symbolism — and this is confirmed in other works — ants were symbols of a human life mechanically driven by its own needs, heedless of anything else. Here they blindly swarm over an emblem of suffering and self-sacrifice.

Cotter's listing of Wojnarowicz’s imagery is fairly complete, although I would add a recurring motif which functions in the 13 minute segment like a title card or periodic marker: face cards from the deck of a fortune teller (depicting characters like "The Siren", "The Drunk" or "The Scorpion") juxtaposed with the photo of an onrushing locomotive (a reference to heedless history?) carrying ever successive numbers. It seems to be an attempt at ordering the piece, the suggestion of a Stations of the Cross treatment that W. has augmented with representative elements of street culture.

Like Pasolini, Wojnarowicz was a gay activist, a revolutionary who rejected the restrictions, bigotry and repressive power of the Catholic Church YET whose cultural antecedents were fully rooted in his upbringing, in the rich symbolism of the Catholic soil. Both P. and W. undoubtedly saw the trap of using conventional Christian imagery to make art that would challenge the status quo, which is why both reinvigorated the original story of Jesus administering to the poor and downtrodden of his age by fully representing the contemporary lumpen milieu. Both were also prolific and unrepentant propagators of their own personal mythologies, conscious of their status as gay martyrs and avid to assume the mantle. (Although Jean Genet is often cited by W. and remains his most redolent antecedent in this regard.) These tendencies led P. and W. to imbue their art with the litany of a Christian experience, but willfully "tainted" with lay references to the street, to an earlier and enduring paganism onto which Christianity is but a graft. It is precisely this "taint" that angers the religious right and causes them to view the work as blasphemous. Their special anger seems reserved for the apostate, the lapsed Catholic who was offered the keys to salvation yet repudiated it, betrayed his birthright, willfully disobeyed the Church and rebelled against the full embrace of its "benevolent" conformity.

It is no accident that W. chose Mexico - not just as a travelogue of picturesque primitivisms, not just as a living demonstration of a "close to the bone" culture where the dialectics of suffering and cruelty are graphically obvious, but as the backdrop for his almost biblical meditation on the Age of AIDS. "A Fire In My Belly" is drenched in the symbolism of the body and the blood, lifted right from the Gospels: the loaf of bread being sewn together with thick red string, the lips of the artist being similarly joined, the blood dripping and overflowing the bowl, the luckless and legless begging on the road under the gaze of the police, the animals being led to the abbatoir, the sides of beef on hooks in the slaughterhouse. There is a pervasive, barely submerged violence on the street, ritualized by the masked Luchadors, fully realized in the cockfight, conflagrated by the flame eaters, domesticated in the performing circus animals, mocked by the dancing marionette under its sombrero. The action is surveyed by the panopticon of a rotating, all seeing eye (an indifferent God?). Those who choose to ignore it betray the suffering of their fellow men, and are seemingly being bribed by the infamous 30 pieces of silver, dropped from/into a bandaged hand.

Considering the heavy overlay of Christian narrative, it's a bit ironic that the so-called Catholic League (a right wing lobbyist group that actually has no institutional connection to the Church) finds the film blasphemous. W. seems to embrace the traditional Biblical progression of redemption through suffering that he learned in Sunday school. And the ten to fifteen seconds of ants crawling over a crucifix that has particularly angered the right and been seized upon as transgressive, while a mere snippet of the total imagery, seems an extension of the accepted iconography of Jesus' mortification and transcendence. In fact, what seems most dangerous, threatening and anarchistic in the film was never mentioned by its critics: the retributive, apocalyptic imagery of a world globe on fire, a map of Mexico ablaze, a puppet consumed in flames.

W.'s method of associative montage, of cross cutting action to create meaning, provides a "city symphony" that is reminiscent of early silent film practitioners like Walter Ruttmann and Dziga Vertov. Crashing images against each other to create a thesis is a brutal but efficient method of film making. By refusing any ameliorative or distracting soundtrack that might diffuse the power of the imagery, W. is forcing us to confront things directly, a strategy that is well suited to the urgency of the moment.

"A Fire In My Belly" is not a subtle work. By no means. It is a brazen cry, a strident bit of agitprop, the only honest reaction that W. could bring to a moment when multitudes (himself included) were HIV positive, when thousands were dying, and when the reaction of the state was to look the other way - when they were not using the very existence of the epidemic to demonize gay culture. As a new generation of the rabid right comes into its own, with its dumb-like-a-fox cunning and hypocrisy, it is hardly surprising that the work of Wojnarowicz is again at the fulcrum of the culture wars, a cause célèbre and a rallying point for the art world.

Some background on the Wojnarowicz censorship

Penny Starr's November 29 review of Hide/Seek on the Catholic News Service that precipitated the removal of "A Fire In My Belly":

Link

A perceptive piece by Patricia Silva on Open Salon, excerpted below:

Link

A significant act of censorship has snowballed because of one video on YouTube: a user-generated, super low-quality illegitimate copy of Fire In My Belly edited not by Wojnarowicz nor his estate; an illegal copy including an unauthorized soundtrack by Diamanda Galas. The origin of the video is unknown or unclear. At the time of Penny Starr's review, there wasn't an official video of Fire In My Belly on YouTube.

The user-generated video collage featured Diamanda Galas' This is the Law of the Plague, from Galas' controversial Plague Mass, a requiem for those dead and dying of AIDS, performed live at Saint John the Divine cathedral in New York City in 1991. Plague Mass was also attacked by the Catholic Church in the 1990s, because Galas used biblical texts to criticize and condemn the Roman Catholic Church's indifference to AIDS. So, what Donohue termed "hate speech" is actually Galas' text on Catholic indifference paired with Biblical passages showing the hypocritical context of such indifference. Galas had her own battle with censorship over this work, and won. Despite what some articles are reporting, Galas and Wojnarowicz never met, never collaborated. A friend of Wojnarowicz, Amy Scholder, confirms the two artists spoke a few times by telephone and admired each other's work, but that's it. Galas' music was never a part of any edit of Fire In My Belly by Wojnarowicz, a fact easily proved by Wojnarowicz's extensive notes and sketches for the work. Fire In My Belly is an unfinished work. A work in progress, edited for display...

By including this piece in Hide/Seek, the co-curators presented the complexities of living and dying during a time in art history when conservatism and censorship threatened creative expression; a time in history when homophobia and disregard for AIDS patients was a rampant display of political power. Removing this work from the show presents layers of irony, but real disappointment begins with the history-altering implications of censuring this piece. Not only does the removal of Fire In My Belly from Hide/Seek disrupt a proper narrative of the personal and social work and experience of LGBTQ artists in America, it is a censorship of American Art history in general, and an alarming step back for the progress of civil rights.

Ironically enough, for a show about visibility of queerness in American Art, Penny Starr's review has guaranteed that this piece be viewed and discussed far more than if it had remained in the show, waiting for someone to press play on a kiosk. To denounce an unfinished work as "Hate Speech" (an assumption based on a user-generated, unauthorized collage on YouTube) raises questions about posthumous showings of works of art in progress.

David Wojnarowicz's "A Fire In My Belly"

2010-12-24T12:15:00.002-05:00

December 10, 2010. The presumptive RepubliTroll Speaker of the House, orange-faced crybaby John Boehner the Complainer, currently bathing in a post-electoral glow, is taking a retrograde ConservaStand against freedom of expression, calling for censorship of Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, an exhibition of "gay art" at the National Portrait Gallery, and threatening a curtailment of government funds if they do not bow to his will. The NPG has cravenly caved in and removed David Wojnarowicz's 1987 video, "A Fire in My Belly", from the exhibition.

We have undertaken the necessary corrective of posting it above. And just to show that not much has changed in the Repressive Right's agenda since their glory days of Jesse Helms endeavoring to stifle the NEA, here is a relevant 1989 interview with Wojnarowicz:

And here is documentation of a protest action at NPG:

Miami Slice: Art Basel Early Bird Special. White Vinyl. Perrotin. Diet. Dorsch. Seven. (in progress)

2010-12-24T12:02:00.003-05:00

Saturday, November 27, 2010. Landing in Miami a few days before the wall-to-wall insanity commenced, I had a chance to take the temperature of the town, to selectively buzz through various Wynwood galleries and project spaces, to survey the tents of Art Miami, -Scope et. al. on Midtown Boulevard, to watch the graffiti boys throw up a mural on the side of a garage, to hook up both with the local scene and with other recent arrivals lured by the heady promise of Art Basel week.

In other words, I felt commendably and reassuringly early. That is, until Jill Clark, an art adviser from New York now relocated to South Beach, informed me that Basel-themed parties generally start in the middle of November, two full weeks before my arrival. Faced with the looming, inevitable immanence of the Great Influx and its concomitant doses of frenzy and glamor, many art dealers, club owners, party promoters, real estate speculators, fashion doyennes and benefit committees cannot resist the obvious marketing ploy. They resolutely hang their efforts on that familiar ABMB shingle, hoping to define their event as some sort of preamble - to such an extent that poor Ms. Clark was already a bit swamped by the Preface, before the page had even been turned to Chapter One of Art Basel: The Book.

Whether I was early or late to the party, I was right on time to view Wynwood in its usual ghost town mode, a working class neighborhood of streetlights blinking through the humid night sky, a semi-deserted urban grid dotted with low rise warehouses, auto body shops, fruit stands, garages. This is the "real" Wynwood, the historic Wynwood, a mixed use district of light industry, hopeful homesteads, weedy lots, "For Sale or Rent" signs on empty buildings, stray dogs and urban blight just above Miami's downtown. Only recently did it became a mecca for the art world. Aside from the exceptional and privileged moment of Art Basel, the streets of Wynwood generally come to life only once a month, during the Second Saturdays, when the galleries all stay open late. In fact, it was on just such a Saturday - although the fourth rather than the second week of the month - that I made my particular rounds.

First up was White Vinyl Space, an artist run non-profit, a large concrete bunker with high ceilings on a funky stretch of NW 2nd Avenue, across the street from Roberto Clemente Park and an excellent fresh produce stand, yet just blocks from Emanuel Perrotin Gallery and the Rubell Family Collection. Currently featured is the rather grandly titled "Five New Reasons to Live", with - count them - five Miami based artists mining the trove of found object and recycled image, the poetry of urban detritus, exhibiting their work on digital video screens and projections; as 16mm film loops; employing scatter art, sound and image, and other contemporary installation strategies.

Damian Rojo, an old acquaintance from 1980s grass roots initiatives like Artifacts and Wet Paint, is currently teaching art at Barry University. His camera is always active, and his work plays with notions of the casual or received image, with time signatures, slow motion and split screen in his post-Muybridge meditations on personal space and the Miami cityscape. In one video, a man is tortured to tears by shampoo dripped in his eyes as he is compelled to repeat the title phrase - "I always wanted to smile" - ad infinitum. In another, a stretch of the Julia Tuttle Causeway (which connects the airport to the beach) is rendered mock heroic by cars passing in freeze frame/stop motion, scored to an elegiac New Wave soundtrack.

Rojo's signature piece is a self portrait displayed in a lightbox, floating in silhouette with arms outstretched against a blue field (like the baby on the cover of Nirvana's Nevermind album), hung between two digital video screens that show the same subject morphing frame by frame: one is in slow slow motion, one in faster slow motion. The image is interrogated, dissected, in a denouement of time lapse.

Kevin Arrow, another artist I have known for 25 years, is Registrar at MOCA North Miami, where he has recently been busy securing Jonathan Meese sculptures for their upcoming exhibition. Arrow is a bit of an antiquarian of recent pop and circumstance, a scavenger and bricoleur, a memorialist and recycler of discarded slide imagery. In one piece, two slide carousels run in tandem, projecting images that have been rescued from the dumpster, providing a haunting, aleatoric history of unknown people and places.

In an accompanying found photo work, the closely cropped and faded image of a refrigerator interior elevates the random, forlorn cans of Schlitz, Bud and PBR stacked on the shelves into an Everyman parable, a maudlin take on the cheek by jowl, push and shove of the urban dilemma.

Nicole Martinez, the one woman in this boy's club, incorporates strategies of scatter art, recycled objects, the Rauschenberg combine, and the new hardware store aesthetic. Her use of industrial or commercial detritus includes a semicircular arc of glass bottles, their caps removed and scattered nearby, in an installation reminiscent of Tony Feher. They will be used in a performance scheduled for the White Vinyl opening on Saturday, December 4, as will a series a bass speakers, placed face up on the floor, to be filled with various powders (talcum, sugar) that will be spread through sonic dispersion.

Barron Sherer, an established experimental filmmaker with strong structuralist leanings, has constructed a 16mm film loop using found footage excerpted from a 1992 Hollywood B-film, Into The Sun - seemingly an appropriate title for Miami - starring Michael Pare in full military drag. It is a mediocre Top Gun ripoff that Sherer has joyfully and justifiably deconstructed through various protocols of reprinting, re-editing, and distorting the image. What began as Hollywood glop acquires new life in a frame-by-frame progression of excess and formalism. In an accompanying video transfer, Sherer has appropriated footage from Wall Street to engineer similar poetic violence to the image of Charlie Sheen.

Last but not least is Skip Van Cel, proprietor of White Vinyl Space, his jokey Miami rhyme for White Cube in London and White Columns in NYC. Van Cel owns the hacienda style, stucco-and-tile building that houses the space, and it might well be his embrace of recycling urban detritus that defines the aesthetic of White Vinyl, of using the discards of history to build new art. Certainly his contribution to the exhibition, called "Fountain" in a sly reference to Duchamp, is a readymade taken right off the Wynwood streets. It is the video of a found action: a hose, emerging from a manhole and propped on a construction scaffold, emits a steady stream of water into a flat plastic receptacle perched on the asphalt. Art is where you find it, and this piece is likely brought to us courtesy of the Miami Department of Water and Sewers.