JFK: Class Enemy
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on the main Kersplebedeb website: http://kersplebedeb.com/posts/jfk-class-enemy/
Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
Thursday, January 09, 2014
Thursday, November 28, 2013
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Monday, June 18, 2012
Anti-Capitalism and Violence: Gord Hill Interviewed by Kersplebedeb
To start with, I wouldn't limit the concept of anti-colonial resistance simply to counter summit mobilizations. But in general, I do think there's a connection in that free, autonomous societies have always resisted the rule of civilization and its empires, which the graphic you refer to was meant to depict. Looking at just the summit protests, however, they are in some ways the equivalent to battles fought against empire by tribal peoples, including forms of self-organization, autonomy, even tactics. For example, tribal peoples in Western Europe fought in a somewhat chaotic autonomous manner, while Roman legions were in massed units, lines of heavily armoured troops, etc. You can see similar forms of struggle among social movements opposing state security forces today, the Black Bloc being somewhat similar to the "barbarian" tribes fighting Roman soldiers (who look very similar to modern day riot cops).
In the section of your comic book where you talk about the fall of the Roman Empire, you show how assimilated tribal chiefs took advantage of the power vacuum to establish their own kingdoms. Some comrades argue that we're now in a period of the decline of imperialism, but is there anything we can do to prevent history from repeating itself, and today's "assimilated tribal chiefs" in the neo-colonies from similarly filling the power vacuum as warlords to set up their own fiefdoms?
The "assimilated tribal chiefs" are already circulating and jockeying for position within our social movements, if we consider the collaborative role of union bureaucrats, political party members, pacifist ideologues, etc. Internally, we make efforts to keep our autonomy and decentralized manner of organizing while defeating those that would control and contain us. In the event of a systemic collapse, what would prevent warlords as such from rising? Organized resistance capable of defeating such forces, the seeds of which must be planted now so that when the crisis matures so does the resistance. it should also be noted that even among the European tribes collaborator chiefs were targeted with death and there was significant internal struggles among tribes in responding to both the advance of the Roman empire and its collapse.
k: The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book focuses almost exclusively on clashes at protests that have occurred in the media spotlight. Do you consider these protests, which some people have criticized as "summit hopping", to be particularly strategic? Is there a particular importance in telling these stories?
gh: The summits depicted in the comic are historical events that involved tens of thousands of people directly in the streets, and which affected many more (via corporate and alternative media, etc.). They inspired many and showed the power of the people when mobilized, despite the vast deployment of state security forces. This is a strategic gain that is absolutely necessary for resistance movements. In regards to telling these stories, it is up to us to maintain our history of resistance, no one else will do it for us. It is in fact in the interests of the ruling class that such histories be erased because they are such "bad examples." I personally don't like the term "summit hopping" as it belittles the efforts of organizers attempting to mobilize against such events in their areas. It also arises from the false belief that we either organize "locally" or "summit hop," a division that doesn't exist in reality.
k: I think what you're saying there is really borne out by what we're seeing at the moment in Quebec, where some of the same people who were involved in the militant actions at the G20 or even at Montebello before that, have been participating in the present mobilization.
gh: Ya, I've heard the same thing about the #Spanish Revolution, which Occupy Wall Street was modeled after. Many of the organizers were 'veterans' of the so-called anti-globalization movement.
k: In your comic book, you show the Mohawk uprising and the Zapatistas in 1990, but then skip ahead to APEC in 1997 and then J18 in 1999. In many cities, the 90s were a decade where militant antifascist politics became an important area of action. Do you see any connection between the antifa activism of the 90s and then much broader antiglobalization movement that followed?
gh: Yes, certainly, in that many of the Anti-fa militants were key organizers in some of these mobilizations and also promoted militant tactics such as Black Blocs over those years. But I had limits on how much of the story could be told, and the anti-APEC and Zapatista rebellion more directly influenced the so-called anti-globalization movement with the focus on neo-liberalism, which I think really made people aware of the global restructuring then underway.
k: In Toronto there was Anti-Racist Action, and in Montreal we had the somewhat pathetic example of the "World Anti-Fascist League" and then (much better) RASH and SHARP; what kinds of groups were active on the West coast at the time?
gh: In Vancouver there was less of a fascist threat during this period. There were smaller numbers of neo-nazis organized around Aryan Nations, and there was an Aryan Resistance Movement, as well as Tony McAleer's "Canadian Liberty Net," mostly a telephone line that had racist messages and info. As a result there wasn't an active ARA chapter. We did set up a group called Anti-Fascist Info, which was mostly an informational group that organized film screenings, forums, etc. There were numerous autonomous anti-fascists who would show up at anti-racist rallies, for example in 1993 I think the Canadian Liberty Net attempted to organize a forum with Tom Metzger from the White Aryan REsistance (WAR). This meeting was shut down after militants learned of the meeting place. There was also a liberal reformist group called the BC Organization to Fight Racism (BCOFR) which had formed in the early 1980s when the KKK was more active here.
k: Your work over the years, both as an activist and a movement artist-intellectual, has focussed on Indigenous resistance struggles, which have been going on uninterrupted for over five hundred years. Yet you also obviously have an affinity for some of the traditions of resistance that emerged much more recently in Europe, especially the German Autonomen. There seem to be glaring differences between the circumstances that have given rise to these resistance struggles - to what degree do you see them as being compatible, or perhaps more to the point, what how do you see them as being relevant to one another?
gh: Yes, my main focus is anti-colonial and anti-capitalist resistance. As capitalism arose from Europe's colonization of the Americas, I see the two as intertwined. The imposition of capitalist relations among Indigenous peoples has resulted in class hierarchies, today manifested in the Aboriginal business elite and their collaborator political organizations. I think decolonization must include an anti-capitalist analysis or it risks simply being another form of assimilation (neo-colonialism). And since we have to develop anti-capitalist resistance it makes sense to study and understand such movements both historically and current. The Autonomen, as an autonomous and decentralized political force/social movement, share some qualities with Indigenous tribal society and also serve as a model for radical anti-capitalist resistance in a modern industrialized nation-state.
k: In the 1970s, at the time when the Autonomen were first developing in West Germany, and during the second wave of Autonomia in Italy, there was the related phenomenon of the "Urban Indians" - was this just a racist rip-off, or do you see there as something positive in this kind of identification, especially as the people who identifies this way may have been anti-imperialist, but really had no connection or contact with the anti-colonial Indigenous struggles here?
gh: The "Urban Indians" were probably sincere in their efforts to "decolonize" from Western Civilization, but ya it is a kind of racist appropriation of culture which would not go over very well here in North America. The ironic thing is they could have reached back to the tribal history of Europe itself--the Vandals, the Goths, Celts, etc. all resisted their colonization by the Romans and had numerous military victories, including the sacking of Rome itself on a few occasions, which seems like a great historical legacy of their own ancestors engaging in anti-colonial resistance.
k: At the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair, one of the best moments for me is when a guy came over to my table and was excited because he recognized himself in your comic - he had been arrested at the G20 and his story and\ made it into your pages. Other people i know also get a grin when they see someone who might be them. Leaving aside the question of how autobiographical your book may be, what is the significance of using art to keep alive the stories and anecdotes from these events?
gh: Tribal peoples have always used to art to maintain their histories and culture, as have social movements. In regards to the historical events depicted in the comic, I hadn't seen too much artwork attempting to maintain this history, for example with comics, which I find to be a great form of communication.
k: I imagine your art will continue to serve this function for the movement in the years to come. Do you have any future projects along similar lines that you'd like to tell us about?
gh: Not at the moment, perhaps you have some ideas?
k: Ha! Well, you could always come to Montreal, lots of interesting things happening here these days...
k: Violence is central to your stories, and the idea seems to be that the more of it, the better. Why is violence so important, and what do you have against peaceful protest?
gh: I would say violence is central to the stories I depict because they are a critical moment in the social conflict out of which they arise. It isn't every day that the state mobilizes thousands of cops and soldiers, or when thousands of militants converge on a specific battlefield as it were. In regards to levels of violence I think this is a tactical question that is very much dependent on conditions and context. In Seattle 1999 there was a fairly low level of violence engaged in by protesters, certainly in the downtown core where it was much more of a classic "police riot." In the Capitol Hill area there was more sustained street fighting, but of course the most spectacular impact arose from the small Black Bloc action in the downtown which saw a fairly low level of violence (there were no confrontations with riot police with a good amount of property destruction carried out). I have nothing against "peaceful protest" and have participated in many more such protests than "violent" ones. It's a question of tactics and strategy. I would say, however, that I am opposed to pacifist ideologues attempting to impose their beliefs on others while undermining militants.
k: Various writers have argued that violence against the oppressor can actually be psychologically liberating for people, a way of dealing with and healing from the violence of everyday day life under patriarchal colonial capitalism...
gh: Ya that was the message of Franz Fanon. I would say it can be psychologically liberating, and an important part of that is showing that the oppressor is not omnipotent, that they can be fought and even defeated. Without this people feel powerless, which contributes to apathy. People need a fighting spirit and the will to resist, and I don't think pacifism is very inspiring to a lot of people.
k: In the context of the antiglobalization movement, which you literally illustrate in your comic book, there were debates about nationalism, about cooperating with the right (i.e. Pat Buchanan, Ralph Nader, etc.), about conspiracy theories - but the only debate that appears in your comic book is the debate over violence. Did you purposefully decide to highlight this one question?
gh: Yes, I think it's a much more critical debate than those over larger strategic ones at this time, such as nationalism or conspiracy theories. I think within more radical social movements there is already an understanding around nationalism and the right-wing, a consensus of sorts that generally rejects these concepts. But within this there is a division over the question of violence and militant actions that must be resolved to some degree before greater unity of effort can be achieved. As for conspiracy theories, they certainly had an impact on the Toronto G20 due to the involvement of some conspiracists promoting the idea that the Black Bloc was a police operation, and maybe some debate on this should've been included, but by the end of the G20 comic I was seriously pressed for space...
gh: I think it can spread very far and wide in a very short period of time. I began to realize the potential for this after reading a report from Greece on the 2008/09 rebellion there, where a similar phenomenon of thousands of youths adopted the tactics and methods that had been used by smaller numbers of anarchists for years. This wasn't simply natural intuition--these kids and many others in Greek society have watched the anarchists in action for over two decades now. It's like "monkey see, monkey do" and that's the importance of showing examples of militant resistance and serving as a model of how it can be carried out. The Canucks Riot of 2011 here in Vancouver was similar--during the 1994 hockey riot there were no cars arsoned. In 2011, over 16 or 17 cars were torched, including 4 police cars. I'm sure many of these youth rioting had seen some coverage of the Toronto G20 and the four burning cop cars that resulted. The Occupy movement, whatever its shortcomings, shows that a large segment of the population believes that some form of social change is necessary. They weren't willing to join the Occupiers, but they're sitting there and observing all this social mobilization and conflict going on in the world. It might only take one incident or issue to instigate social revolt, and as conditions continue to deteriorate this potential grows. The potential pitfalls are greater repression of social movements and an increase in police controls over the population, but that's part of the process of resistance.
k: If or when things do fall apart, isn't there a risk that the racism, patriarchy, and capitalist values that people have internalized might lead significant sections of the oppressor nations, especially its middle classes, to veer to the far right?
gh: I'd say it's a very real possibility and one that we can see occurring even now, with the right-wing Christian patriot militia movement in the US. This movement expanded during the 1990s but then declined after 9/11 when the so-called "War on Terror" began. In 2008 however, when Obama was elected amidst an economic crisis, the patriot militia movement expanded rapidly with part of it mainstreaming as survivalism (itself a sign of the times). As of yet this right-wing has not coalesced into a unified movement, although all the ingredients are there for fascist style paramilitary organizing on a large scale. But the thing about the declining economic conditions is that significant segments of the middle-class may become working class, as occurred in Argentina during the 2001-02 economic crisis there.
gh: People join resistance movements for a variety of reasons--some ideological, some for friendship, some for financial reasons or personal security. But an important factor is the potential for victory--only those committed ideologically will join a group doomed to failure or defeat. If movements surrender or abandon a struggle after the first act of repression many will see it as weak and impotent. If a movement overcomes this repression and continues to advance, it will more likely gain new members and inspire others. But it also depends on the context--what is the struggle and how much emotion is invested in it by the participants? Is it a matter of life or death, is it a significant part of the core beliefs of the participants, an important matter of principle? In regards to the Quebec student strike, it seems that many participate or sympathize because it is a matter of principle (the right to education, or the right to assembly and protest). They seem to be able to mobilize the numbers necessary to defy the ban on protests and masks for the moment, but the real question will be how social movements without such a large base will fair. To answer the question more directly, I would speculate that mass disobedience of the new law would be crucial to show that the movement cannot be intimidated and controlled so easily. The disruptions resulting from the protests can create political pressure to repeal the legislation, just as they did to create it. But the movement might have to raise the level of struggle to one that it cannot maintain, given that its base, even though large by our standards, is ultimately limited. The law itself will undoubtedly contribute to the radicalization of even more people, just as the student strike itself has.
k: What do you think of the North American left today?
gh: It has great potential considering the worsening socio-economic conditions, the convergence of ecological and economic crises, etc. In general, at the moment it seems weak and fixated on intellectual efforts rather than physical activities, dominated by middle-class social democrats and their suffocating pacifist doctrine, and likely to turn tail and run at the first sign of aggression by our class enemy. The only hope lies in the radicalizing influence of militants, which is why the state sees the bogey-man Black Bloc as the greatest threat, and not those sectors of the left which can be easily co-opted. Furthermore, I think many people don't join "leftist" struggles because they see little potential for victory, and little that actually inspires them.
The N. American left today largely inspires middle-class liberals and reformists, and the last thing they want is radical social change. The left or social movements in general will become far more effective when working class people actually join and participate in significant numbers, which I think will happen as the economic conditions decline further. I believe this is one of the reasons we must promote a diversity of tactics within out movements, because many working class people intuitively understand that radical social change requires some level of conflict, as opposed to middle-class reformists who seek to avoid both.
k: Violence aside, can you think of any other strategies or tactics that people are using presently that might challenge middle-class control of the left?
gh: I'm not sure, but I think some examples may be found in Occupy Oakland, where more people of colour and working class people were involved and radicalized what was a predominantly white middle-class movement. Another example might be the Wet'suwet'en in central 'BC' who are resisting the Enbridge pipeline as well as the Pacific Trails Pipeline, a couple of years ago they severed their connection to mainstream environmental NGO's and began working with grassroots resistance groups. But overall I think middle-class control will be undermined as social conditions continue to decline and more working class elements become mobilized in the resistance.
k: In the time that you have been involved in resistance movements, we have experienced numerous battles on multiple fronts, with both surges forward as well as defeats. What do you think we need to prepare ourselves for over the next ten years?
gh: Preparation must be based on our analysis of what may occur over the next ten years. Worsening economic conditions, ecological crisis, increased state repression... and potential systemic collapse in localized areas. Typically under such conditions there arises the need for greater solidarity and mutual aid to be practised, greater efforts at self-sufficiency (including food production, shelter, etc.), physical self-defense, survival skills, and better education on security culture. Given the growing cynicism with the current system, anti-capitalist resistance should find fertile ground for mobilizing. Anti-fascist or anti-racist efforts may become more important in some areas as well, as the state and ruling class typically resort to fostering fascist movements and racist sentiment among the population in times of crisis.
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The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic BookPaperback
96 pages
Published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2012
ISBN 9781551524443
available for $12.95 from leftwingbooks.net
Saturday, July 31, 2010
The Sculpture of Exception: The Black Bloc's Interactive Art at the Toronto G20
The Sculpture of Exception: The Black Bloc's Interactive Art at the Toronto G20 from brandon jourdan on Vimeo.
Beka Economopoulos, a member of the Brooklyn-based group Not An Alternative, interprets a moving sculpture by artists at the Toronto G20 using the “Black Bloc” method of sculpting. The piece entitled “The Sculpture of Exception,” ironically turns political theorist Carl Schmitt’s “state of exception” on its head. The state of exception, according to Schmitt, frees the executive from any legal restraints to its power that would normally apply in a given crisis situation or any situation where power needs self-legitimization.
“The Sculpture of Exception” illustrates that collective bodies can also operate outside legal restraints when governments perpetuate crisis through capital consolidation and austerity. The piece draws attention to the possibilities for refusal and non-compliance in the face of such given force and shows a dialectic that forms within this context.
Monday, September 21, 2009
2010 Certain Days Freedom for Political Prisoners Calendar
Here it is again, a beautiful political calendar created by a Canadian collective working under the guidance and inspiration of u.s. PP/POWs David Gilbert, Robert Seth Hayes and Herman Bell. Proceeds from this full color calendar go to the New York Task Force on Political Prisoners, the Palestinian NGO Adameer Prisoners Support and Human Rights Association, and the Olympic Resistance Network (ORN)-Legal Defense.
Devoted to the theme of Indigenous Resistance; in the words of the collective: "We offer this year's Certain Days Calendar as our contribution to Resistance 2010, as a reminder that no liberation movement of any kind can lead to true freedom without dismantling colonialism."
WITH ART BY
- Leonard Peltier
- Gord Hill
- Simone Schmidt
- Nidal El Khairy
- Theah Gahr
- Favianna Rodriguez
- Oscar Lopez Rivera
- Jesse Purcell
- Martin Matxco
- Ange Sterritt
- Jesus Barraza
- Jacobo Silva Nogales
WITH WORDS ABOUT
- Statement for Oglala Commemoration (by Leonard Peltier)
- Why Protest Vancouver's 2010 Olympics? (by Gord Hill)
- The Frontline is First Within Our Hearts and Minds (by Robert Lovelace)
- Addameer's Campaign to Stop Administrative Detention (by Addameer)
- Defending a Common Home: Native/non-Native Alliances Against Mining Corporations in Wisconsin (by Al Gedicks and Zoltan Grossman)
- Resistance 2010! Resisting the G8 and the SPP (by Jaggi Singh)
- Puerto Rican Political Prisoners and Decolonization (by Oscar Lopez Rivera)
- On White Solidarity with Native American Struggles (by David Gilbert)
- Basque Political Prisoners (by Ivan Apaolaza Sancho)
- No 'Justice' for Canada's Indigenous Women (by Maya Rolbin-Ghanie)
- Side Effects (by Jacobo Silva Nogales)
- The Chicano Nation: An Internal Colony Forges Its Indigenous Identity and Resists the Legacy of Euro-Amerikkkan Colonialism and Imperialism (by Alvaro Luna Hernandez)
$12.00 each, for ten or more for $8.00 each
(plus postage)
Friday, April 25, 2008
Cuba! Art and History from 1868 to Today: some impressions
It had been a good fifteen years since i had gone to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the previous time having been when my grandmother visited from overseas. This was not without some regret on my part, looking at pretty pictures and learning about different folks who drew or painted them being something i think i'd enjoy, but still i don't go - partly it's a lack of time, partly it's just not something i ever think of when i do have a spare day.
When i walked by the museum last week i saw this big poster for the Cuba! Art and History from 1869 to Today exhibit and thought "that looks interesting," but by for the aforementioned reasons had stopped thinking about it by the time i got to Peel. But then by happy coincidence one of our houseguests mentioned he had heard of this very exhibit - apparently the largest collection of Cuban works ever displayed outside the country - and wanted to go while he was in town, so a plan was struck and when half-price Wednesday evening rolled around, off we set.
Simply in the hopes of not forgetting it all by this time next year, here's what i thought.
First off, note to self: when visiting the Museum of Fine Arts, bring a pen and notepad. They don't provide anything beyond a glitzy-but-empty magazine you can take with you afterwards to remind you of what you saw. Not a list of artists, never mind a list of paintings. i had assumed i'd be able to find the information online, but (as you'll see) no such luck. & the book they sell at the end, with tiny reproductions of everything in the exhibit, costs $70, so that's kind of out of the question.
Cuba! Art and History from 1869 to Today contains about 400 works - paintings, drawings, photos, posters, a couple of old films and a few installations - divided into five chronological sections.
When you first enter, you're in confronted with this enormous, stunning landscape showing lots of green, cliffs in the background, breathtaking stuff. No, i don't remember the name of the painting or the artist - see my problem? - but it makes an impression. Really a stunning piece.
It and the first two rooms constitute the "Depicting Cuba, finding ways to express a nation" section, spanning 1868 to 1927. The art here is all paintings, with several other landscapes, some pastoral scenes, and an interesting juxtaposition of two paintings of teenage girls - one white, one Afro-Cuban entitled "Girl of the Sugar Cane" or some such.
But the real eye catcher in this room is a depiction of the execution of Hatuey, a Taino cacique who had resisted the Spanish in Hispanola (the island that today is Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and had then fled to Cuba to warn the Indigenous people there of what colonialism had in store. According to Bartolome de las Casas, he showed those who he came to warn a basket of gold and jewels, explaining:
Here is the God the Spaniards worship. For these they fight and kill; for these they persecute us and that is why we have to throw them into the sea... They tell us, these tyrants, that they adore a God of peace and equality, and yet they usurp our land and make us their slaves. They speak to us of an immortal soul and of their eternal rewards and punishments, and yet they rob our belongings, seduce our women, violate our daughters. Incapable of matching us in valor, these cowards cover themselves with iron that our weapons cannot break...The blurb accompanying the painting explains that, having been captured, about to be killed, Hatuey was approached by a missionary who asked if he wanted to go to heaven. Probably about to offer baptism or last rites, expanding the colonialists' military win into an ideological one. The guerilla leader turned this around on his captors, though, responding with a question of his own: "Are these white men going to heaven also?" The missionary responded in the affirmative, to which Hatuey answered that, in that case, "I don't want to go to heaven."
The story, which i have no trouble believing, is more moving than the painting, which while pretty, really doesn't evoke either the horror of the situation or the stakes of what was being fought over. Rather you have this typically handsome muscly guy with a loincloth - oh that must be Hatuey - looking into the sky while an old dude with an incredible beard seems to be pleading with him. i mean it could have been like that, but i doubt it.
Gotta be careful dismissing stuff as clichéd when its from two centuries back, though. i mean, maybe it wasn't cliché at the time, maybe it was an accurate portrayal, one which because it worked to move folks way back when, laid the basis for a a set of conventions and visual shortcuts and stereotypes which today strike us as cliché? i dunno...
Next room was photos. Gotta say, i'm not a great fan of photography, so i skipped through quickly enough. A few did catch my eye though - guys working sorting tobacco, other guys working i believe unloading coal on the docks, women working in a textile factory... one thing all of these folks have in common is they look tired, very tired, unlike the paintings in the previous room where everyone - slaves, soon-to-be-executed guerillas, young folks, everyone - looks wide awake like they're posing on a movie set.
i'm not sure if it was in the photo room or next that we enter our next section, "Arte Nuevo, the avant-garde and the recreation of identity" spanning 1927-1938. But suddenly things get interesting. The blurb on the wall explains that Cuban artists were now trying to portray reality as they saw it around them, not some kind of idealized "Cuba" as it was imagined. The style is what they call modernist i think, and painters were obviously not trying to give a photo-realistic view of things, but by making people less detailed, they manage to convey much more emotion.
One artist, and one painting, stand out from this period for me.
The painting, which i believe was called Workers or Trabajadores, i don't remember the painter (see my problem!), shows two guys piggy-backing a third. It's left unclear whether because he's hurt, or dead, or just dead tired. In the background there's all these buildings, factories, and there's a nice juxtaposition between the three guys in the foreground and the background of architecture. It works.
The artist who stands out for me - in fact, the artist who for me constitutes the highpoint of the entire exhibit - is Marcello Pogolotti. (The curator must have liked him too, because he gets his own room.)
Like many of the artists featured, as a member of the privileged classes, Pogolotti was born in Cuba but spent his childhood and early adulthood abroad, mainly in Europe but also for a few years in the united states. During this period he fell in with the surrealists, and then the futurists in Italy.
Now, i never knew a lot about the futurists, and most of what i ever did know i have forgotten. But my impression was that they were an artistic movement in line with Fascism, especially in its revolutionary, forward-looking aspects, exulting the machine and technology and embodying the spirit of the age to come, a spirit they were very enthusiastic about. So while interesting, i wouldn't have expected to find anything politically inspiring to come from that quarter.
Pogolotti, however, appears to have been an anti-fascist futurist, albeit one who may have taken his time coming to anti-fascism. But then again, from memory, these artsy types often take their time getting places, and the futurists as a whole i imagine took their time lining up for Mussolini. According to an article from Art Nexus, it was Pogolotti's Nuestro Tiempo series of charcoal drawings which got him kicked out of Fascist Italy in 1932, though it would seem that for some time he allowed his "apolitical" or pro-fascist futurist friends to continue including his work in their exhibits, until he finally broke with them in 1934. According to the Art Nexus article:
In Paris, Pogolotti became close to the Revolutionary Writers and Artists Association, led by Louis Aragon. He showed his works alongside theirs on a couple of occasions, without abandoning the formal achievements of Futurism. He kept painting factories and machinery, now incorporating the “human pulse” of work and of the class struggle, expressed in relationships of dominance, subordination, and symbiosis between those machines and human subjects, and in the tension of diagonal lines.
El Capitalismo by Pogolotti
Several pieces from the Nuestro Tiempo series are included in the Montreal exhibit, and as i said, they're some of the best stuff there, explicitly anti-fascist and anti-capitalist. There's an interesting interplay between mechanical imagery, gears and pistons, often incorporated directly into bodies, especially the bodies of the oppressor. The most memorable piece for me was "Bloodbath":
When i saw the actual drawing, at first i thought it was a big fight or a melee between the people shown all intertwined. The cops or soldiers firing guns into the crowd seemed just part of the dark background, but then suddenly i could see it - folks weren't fighting each other, they were being mowed down.
Unfortunately, some of Pogolotti's anti-fascist pieces seem to suffer from the weaknesses of the broader anti-fascist movement of his day. One shows Nazis whipping workers, with a fat-cat capitalist holding them on leashes - while i remember what i said about clichés above - perhaps at the time this represented a cutting edge insight - today this is a hackneyed view, obscuring more than it reveals.
Another charcoal piece shows Hitler with four or five penises, and (again, only discernible to me after i'd been staring at it for a minute) someone leaning over revealing their naked bum in the background. The idea, i guess, being "Hitler's gonna fuck you in the ass" - again, in step with its times perhaps, but both homophobic and missing the point all the same.
For me, the funniest piece by Pogolotti is the one that obviously impressed the curator the most, so that it ended up on the cover the the $70 commemorative book the museum put out about the exhibit:
Titled "The Young Intellectual", according to the accompanying blurb the artist's intention was to portray the intellectual as a combatant, threatened by an ominous figure outside (the bird with the scythe). His weapons an open book and the typewriter by his side, our hero is apparently presented with a stiff back "to show that intellectuals are not weaklings." Really, that's what it said. i like it, but i hope you can see why it makes me laugh.
(Pogolotti died in 1988, but there is no visual art from him after the thirties: he went blind in 1939. Living until just before his death in Mexico, he devoted the rest of his life to literary and art criticism.)
The least interesting sections of the exhibit for me were the two that came next, "Cubanness, affirming a Cuban style" spanning 1938-1959, and "Within the Revolution, Everything - against the revolution, nothing" spanning the 1959-1979 period.
Not that they were entirely lacking: works by Wilfredo Lam certainly stand out, muppet-like in their zaniness, really bursting with life like some friendly yet fierce drug-induced vision. Take a look at this, for instance, Lam's The Jungle, which i got off the internet but which i believe was at the exhibit, along with many other of his works:
Lam, like Pogolotti, was born in 1902. His father was Chinese-Cuban and his mother Afro-Cuban, while her mother was one of the many African slaves who supported the country's economy; like so many in this show, Lam went to Europe in his youth, finding himself in Spain at the time when revolution was in the air. According to wikipedia:
Throughout Lam’s travels through the Spanish countryside, he developed empathy for the Spanish peasants, whose strife, in some ways, mirrored that of the former slaves he grew up around in Cuba. Therefore, at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Lam sided with the Republicans where he used his talent to fashion Republican posters and propaganda. Drafted to defend Madrid, Lam was incapacitated during the fighting in late 1937 and was sent to Barcelona.With the Republican defeat Lam took up residence in France, until the Nazis invaded, at which point he returned to his native Cuba.
Really, what struck me seeing Lam's fantastic and slightly deranged works was how much surrealism obviously drew from innovations and art forms from outside of the metropole: Lam in particular seems to have learned about and brought "African" artistic styles to his friends in the "European" cutting edge art scene.
As for all those OSPAAAL posters, put out after the revolution in solidarity with struggles and groups the Castro regime supported around the world - they're great, of course, but in a sense they deserve their own exhibit with lots of commentary. Put on one half of one wall, they seem a catalog of struggles which to most people may be meaningless, or else not understood. Although i think done properly the OSPAAAL posters could have impressed me more than anything else, presented as they were they seemed trite, reduced to a wall full of propaganda, nothing beyond that.
In any case, here you can see them all online if you're interested: just go to the OSPAAAL website.
Not knowing much about Cuba - part of my aversion to the Pathfinder types i guess - i was slightly surprised at how some artists began to voice criticisms of the world around them by the 1980s, as shown in the final section, "The Revolution and Me, the individual within history", bringing us up to present. NOT that there is anything denouncing state repression or the marketization of class relations or any such - the "critique" in this period remains subdued or implicit, nothing like the works of a Pogolotti explicitly showing the blood and guts of oppression, of state repression or the broader capitalist system which is clearly a factor in the continuing misery of people around the world, including people inside Cuba.
The only way in which global capitalism is attacked is in the form of the Blockade, the u.s. embargo on Cuba. On the one hand, this is understandable, given the incredible hardship the decades-long attempt to starve people into submission has inflicted on the island. Nevertheless, what with the expansion of a capitalist tourism industry within Cuba, and expanding class divisions, it is striking that these topics were nowhere mentioned. In a similar vein, while a blurb gives a one-sentence nod to "sexism and homophobia" in art in the revolutionary period, we see neither examples of this sexism or homophobia in what is included, nor do we ever see any artwork criticizing this. Indeed, women artists are utterly missing from the exhibit (there are only eight included, and i only noticed one of them), and there is not a single visible queer expression.
For whatever reason, the only pieces i found moving in this last section were installations, not drawings, prints or paintings.
One artist - again, forget the name, and can't find it on the net - wrote out the word "UTOPIA" in Russian letters made of measuring tape, a smart way i thought to communicate a bunch of ideas at one time.
Another wrote out the word "Blockade" in concrete letters in front of a maquette of the island. This was surprisingly effective.
By far my favourite two pieces here were both by Alexis Leyva Machado, who prefers to go by the name "Kcho". The first of these, titled "In Order to Forget", consists of a canoe atop an "island" of beer bottles, shaped in the same form as Cuba itself. It can be read various ways, but according to various blurbs it would seem Kcho's work deals with migration, and this was certainly the theme throughout that room, so that's how i took it. Neat and smart:
The second installation i actually thought was much smarter, and worked very well, though i have not been able to find it online. It was also by Kcho, and it ends the entire exhibit. It consisted of a darkened room with large flat surface, on which stood dozens of candles in different states of melting. Some seemed just like blobs, while others were recognizable as buildings of various kinds - according to the guard i asked, many are historic buildings: the eiffel tower, the vatican, etc. and once i was told i think i made out the twin towers. Many burning, many having gone out. (Each morning they are re-lit, and as they melt away completely they are replaced.)
This alone would be interesting, but what to me made it great was three close circuit video cameras filming the entire thing and displaying alternating shots of it on a screen above. Every ten seconds or so the perspective would change, but no matter which camera angle was being used, what appeared on the screen was just a narrow slice of what you could see on the table. Much of the table could simply not be seen, no matter which perspective was being displayed, or at least could not be seen on the screen.
For me, this summed up my misgivings about art and representation in general, how the perspective used always leaves out much of what is actually going on. A shortcoming that seems unavoidable, and was certainly not avoided in this show, like it tho i did. For a piece of art to sum up why art makes me uneasy was a very nice surprise. A great finale.
This was a good show, but it was by no means complete, and should not be presented as such. Women, who make up well over 50% of the people depicted, were practically absent from the list of artists. This is inexcusable, and that the exhibit was organized by Nathalie Bondil, herself the first woman director the Museum of Fine Arts, is just another example of how useless it is to count on change coming down from above.
But again: this is inexcusable. There is a long and established herstory of women making important, and widely recognized, contributions to Cuban art - at Havana's 1927 "New Art Exhibit" six of the eighteen artists featured were female, and women had been accepted in the country's art academies since 1879. Amelia Pelaez participated alongside Wilfredo Lam in Cuba's "First Exhibit of Modern Art" in 1935, and would earn her place as "one of the most important painters of the continent." Other renowned female Cuban artists include Mirta Cerra, Antonia Eirez, Lesbia Vent, Flora Fong, Nancy Franko, and Julia Valdes. While Pelaez and Eirez both have work in the Montreal exhibit, they don't have much, certainly not enough to mitigate the overwhelmingly male vision.
Similarly missing is anything explicitly critical of the regime in power, or of the continuing intrusion of capitalism into peoples' lives. Not that i expect this is present in other exhibits put on at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, but still, it's an absence worth noting.
Despite these holes, i enjoyed this trip to the museum. Definitely, taking a few hours to look through other people's eyes is an exercise well worth doing. Hopefully, i'll visit again before another fifteen years go by (shit, that would be 2023!). Gotta remember to bring a notepad and pen next time, though...
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Radical Art
i'm going to be updating my "Radical Art" links page and thought i'd post this here, asking you all for any suggestions...let me know, as i don't get around to doing this shit too often...
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Three New T-Shirt Designs from Kersplebedeb
And just in time for the Anarchist bookfair this weekend...
it's an old IWW image, as many of you will recognize, only with some new text and red red lips... funny thing is, the person is assumed by most to be male in the original, but some people have been referring to this version as "she" - a draft version included the words "fuck your assumptions" across their chest - the background "abuse of power comes as no surprise" i saw graffitied on a wall, and is one of the most basic of political realizations...
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This was an early Soviet poster promoting literacy (in the original, the person was shouting "books"), early enough in the daze for most folks to have felt that what was happening in the USSR was an example of permanent radical social change... it was subsequently used by anti-fascist women in Spain and then by radical dykes in the united states - of course all those days are either going or gone, as are many of the realities of the 20th century, but at the same time capitalism remains and remains just as deadly and able to summon up nightmares that seem dead and buried - thus the word on the side "against the new racist capitalist patriarchy just as bad as the old racist capitalist patriarchy"
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No i did not get Marcos to pose for me - some of you will know who did, others won't... the full original quote goes "The right to rebellion, to defy those who oppress us with different alibis (always the gods of Power and Money with different masks), is universal" (April 2003, quoted in The Quotable Rebel)... the burning police car is from an old flier made after the White Night riots in San Francisco...
As you know, you can see all my t-shirts on the Kersplebedeb T-Shirt page here...
As you know, you can see all my t-shirts on the Kersplebedeb T-Shirt page here...
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