ART and POLITICS NOW

Backbone launch of inflated sculpture

The Backbone Campaign has completed another Summer Action Camp which culminated in the launch of this sculpture powered by helium balloons and kayaks and floated on Lake Washington in full view of the Paul Allen helicopter port off Mercer Island. The launch of the “mooning” sculpture was accompanied by a second banner declaring the disparity between the top one percent and the rest of us

Getting these banners in the air was not easy. Making these banners at the Action Camp on Vashon was fun, but it helped to be with experts.

First we figured out what we were going to say. Then we projected giant letters ( 8 feet high) onto Tyco fabric painted orange, then we cut it out and sewed it onto a netting. The giant pant sculpture required a lot of sewing on an industrial sewing machine and two huge inflated balloons to hold it up.

Even with a lot of help and skill and knowledge, the project was subject to the whims of nature, as currents and winds, gravity and heat, all created unexpected events. But the protest came off! It concluded with songs, speeches, chants and dances ( The bare ass review).

Backbone Bare Ass Review protesting greed

But the camp lasted for eight days and during that time there was both skills taught like kayaking and tree climbing, as well as protest art making and in depth programs presented by groups like Vida Urbana who are actively protesting evictions of both owners and tenants in Boston

Vida Urbana use the sword and shield to protest evictions in Boston

These highly effective organizers give advice to people who have received eviction notices letting them know what their rights are and what the procedure is. They also show up at auctions of houses and heckle buyers.

The United Workers group are calling publicly exposing the abuses of day laborers in Baltimore. They also have brilliant strategies and tactics and are realizing a lot of success in getting better wages for exploited hourly workers who can’t belong to unions. The stories of exploitation among stores on Baltimore’s Inner Harbor in national chain restaurants like Cheesecake Factory, Hooters, Pier 9 and Phillips Sea Food are mind boggling. ESPN Disney shut down with one week warning. Unitedworkers.org  organized a protest to demonstrate that developers were getting all the money from taxpayers.

This chart demonstrates that respect for human rights, sustainable practices and public benefits are intersecting actions that lead to a better situation for everyone.  These intersections can replace the current top down, divide and conquer approach of corporate developers

In the evening I did a presentation about my book Art and Politics Now, Cultural Activism in a Time of Crisis as well, showing these political activists how effectively artists use art in so many different ways to address political issues. This is my current focus, supported by funding from the Puffin Foundation.  See the rest of my website to learn more.

And that was only part of the program for one day! Anyone that attended the whole camp had an intense education in tactics, strategies, and techniques for activism. There were people who had traveled from all over the country to carry ideas back to their own campaigns. That is the idea of “Localize This!” the name of the action camp.

And speaking of organizing, on August 29 in Pioneer Square there was a protest of the Tar Sands with a march to President Obama’s office to ask him not to approve the Keystone pipeline.

Here are some pictures from that event.

Tar Sands Protest Banner going from Seattle to DC

I first heard about Tar Sands at last years Backbone Action Camp and did a blog about it then. Do really educate yourself on it read Tar Sands by Andrew Nikiforuk. But try to find a protest right after you read it or you will be really down in the dumps. He covers every aspect of the ecological disaster, human disaster, planet disaster.

Last summer at the Backbone Camp we heard from courageous young activists who were planning on blocking the giant trucks from driving from Lewiston to Alberta. Apparently they had a hundred people lying in the road in Moscow Idaho to continue that protest last week. All across the country people are furious and protesting. Here is a video about the Megaload arriving in Idaho on scenic Highway 12.

Greed must be stopped. The rape of the planet must be stopped. If not we will be stopped by nature. Tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, nuclear spills, oil spills, take your pick. The planet will win in the end. What kind of a future are we giving our grandchildren.

Scene from Seattle Opera's production of Porgy and Bess, August 2011Gershwin Opera

The Gershwin Porgy and Bess, all too briefly playing at the Seattle Opera, is stupendous. I read a lot about the history of the opera, the debates about whether it was a musical or an opera, the complaints about the stereotyping of blacks, the protests by blacks during the Civil Rights era that Gershwin’s language as well as the use of “Negro spirituals” and other popular music forms was disrespectful and poorly understanding the spirit of the original.

Forget it all! It is a magnificent story, opera, and staging. The stage is obviously influenced by 19th century American genre artists like Eastman Johnson and Winslow Homer who depicted black life in America ( there are books full of this type of imagery). The setting is a small black enclave on the sea set in the early 20th century. The Gershwin estate requires that the entire cast be African American American, the only whites are the policemen, as is appropriate. So one of the reasons the opera isn’t performed more frequently is that if an Opera company has a resident group of singers they are usually mostly white.

So I purposely didn’t read the story before hand and just in case there are other people who don’t know it I won’t give it away. But one shocker is that a New York production is changing the ending to a “Happy” ending for Broadway audiences (This link is to the commentary in response to the original article in the New York Times, with hundreds of comments). The ending, I think, is already happy, it is about love, about hope, about a lot of real life ambiguities, between home and life. The characters, who are accused by the NY production of being one dimensional are far from that, they are layered, contradictory, and full of dignity and passion. Human nature is on full display here also in a community of people that both stand together and display petty prejudice ( against a cripple or a prostitute, or having a good time, for example), who are cowardly and loving, protective and bold. The community has vendors passing through who sell fresh crabs, strawberries and honey on the comb. ( A recent article pointed out that poor people can no longer afford pricey organic food- well poor people produced organic food until recent changes in agriculture).

Also, there are many star singers, in addition to the leads, all of the arias were magnificently done, the choreography was stunning. In “It Ain’t Necessarily so” a piece that might have been choreographed as an almost minstrel piece, the dancing was brilliantly subtle.

All of the singers were passionate and profound in their emotional range, their demeanor and their enactment of the story.

But above all, I loved the Gershwin score: it contained the characters, the drama, the love, the hope, in the music itself. It was transcendent.

I can’t imagine what the NY production will do for music for a different ending since the music is absolutely matched to the story now.

At the same time the movie The Help has just been released. I read the book this summer and thought it was arrogant but intriguing- a white woman taking the voices of black maids, and their stories as the basis of a novel she is writing. It is set in Jackson, Mississippi during the Civil Rights Era. In the movie  it is one of the black maids who is the voice over throughout, she becomes the star, shifting the tone. The black actresses do a brilliant job, you can sense they are way more than the sum of the parts of this rather shallow effort of a novel.

The underlying premise of the Help is a white woman recording the stories of black maids in Mississippi in the 1960s. It is an absurd premise. No black maid would have talked openly to a white women at that time.Or even today for that matter. The result is that the stories are sugar coated, the events seem idealized, particularly the ending when Abiline (Viola Davis) loses her job and walks slowly down the street with the plan of becoming a writer. As one friend of mine said, what about the reality of losing a job, of having no money. It is a white woman’s fantasy that walks down that street.

Abilene(Viola Davis and Minnie (Octavia Spencer)

The two stars Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer celebrating the publication of the book The Help to which they contributed anonymously.

I think the author should donate her proceeds to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Comparing to Porgy and Bess, also a story written by a white writer in the South, it comes off a distant second in terms of empathy. While no white person can possibly be able to understand an African American experience and the ongoing racism in our society, at least in Porgy and Bess, there is a sense of believable humanity. The black maids, as projections from a white mind, are definately much less insightfully drawn. If there were an opera of this story, it would be quite limited in scope. I have been trying to find out if the author ever actually talked to any African Americans maid or otherwise about their experiences. Here is one good review.

In spite of all this Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer are brilliant and compelling. They add a depth that was absent from the novel.

October 19: I am amending this entry because I just read Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi. It was published in 1968. It is an astonishing autobiography of the realities of being black in Mississippi in this same time frame.  The murder of Medgar Evers in the midst of the civil rights activism of the early 1960s is in both the Help and Moody’s book. In Moody’s account, there were several marches, confrontations with police, people put in jail by the hundreds. Her book is indispensable reading for anyone who wants to understand the incredible courage of the people who participated in the early sixties Civil Rights actions in Mississippi. She herself was part of the historic Woolworth Sit In, and an active organizer with NAACP and CORE. Her book should definately be the movie that is made!

Mary Ann Peters series “Poor Liberty” is based on her outrage, as she stated,  at  the “cavalier use of the word ‘liberty’ ” by politicians.” Each of the 12 images responds to an article she read in the newspaper. Here is the whole series as installed at the James Harris Gallery until this Saturday:

Mary Ann Peters Poor Liberty 12 panels, watercolor and gouache on clayboard, 24 x 12"

The images all have  the Statue of Liberty as a point of departure, and each print refers to a different violation of the real meaning of the idea of Liberty.

They include censorship-scarecrow , decoy(pictured)  target (pictured) , wired, belly dancer (pictured), gagged and bound(pictured) ,  Jacked,  crucified, the committee, frozen, robot, and mummy.

Some of them are very specific, as in “wired”, a reference to the publicized tortures at Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere,”gagged and bound,” another reference to torture, others are more general, as in “Jacked”, a Jack in the Box, the idea of liberty being stuck in a box and popped out at someone’s whim, or”mummy” – the mummification of the true spirit of liberty. “Crucified”  refers to the loss of the constitutional separation of Church and State, an idea that seems to have been completely lost sight of today, “the committee” refers to devils and angels at a moment  in a moral decision.

Mary Ann Peters Belly Dancer

The belly dancer is covered in oil, the pursuit of oil is drowning the Middle Eastern culture.

poor liberty ( gagged and bound)

poor liberty (decoy)

Decoy refers to the stories early in the Iraq war of soldiers sent into war with inadequate equipment.

poor liberty (crucified)

The entire series is executed in subdues tones of browns with gouache and watercolor on a slick hard surface that allows some movement of the washes, but they don’t soak into the surface. Peters technique is unusual, her choice of close valued sepia related tones is one of her distinctive characteristics. In this case the combination of her fluid technique on a resistant surface seems to exactly correspond to her subject, the manipulation of ideas on a hardened background. It creates certain results that are on the surface of our political world for all to see. But those ideas can also be misinterpreted, misunderstood, underanalyzed, and lacking in depth.

Mary Ann Peters consummate handling of watercolor and gouache allows us to see these twelve images as both extraordinary works of art individually, and a collective statement about our current social condition.

I hope she resumes the themes she included in this 2004 series,  because all of the conditions continue to exist and even worsen. For example, target, refers specifically to the targeting of people of Arab descent after 9/11, but the arbitrary targeting of both Arabs and people of color in general  for arrest, illegal internment, and deportation is an ongoing concern that I would like to see more artists representing.

Mary Ann Peters, poor liberty (target)

Entrance to the Installation and the Conclusion of the experience with prayers hung on tree by participants

Carletta Carrington Wilson at the beginning of her tour of her installation at the James Washington House at the place where Washington received his stones

Carletta  Carrington Wilson’s installation at the James Washington House and Foundation in May was  provocative and moving.  Carrington is a poet, a visual artist, a librarian, an African American, an historian, a writer, and a spiritual person who deeply connected to the spirit of the James Washington House.

Poem of Stone and Bone ( this link is the artist’s introduction, not the poem which is available as an audio here).  is available as an audio  was installed in the garden, the greenhouse, the house, and the studio. In her tour of the installation, Carrington elaborated on the meaning of the various subtle interventions that she created in these places.

First there was the red Bloodline of Time passing through the garden stones and stumps, leading to through the garden and into the studio

Tracing the Bloodline of Time through the stones of the garden to the studio

The Bloodline of Time

Then there was the greenhouse turned spirit house, The House Stands Firm, filled with installations of wood and stone.

Installation with the artist explaining

On the ceiling were rubbings of 19th century embossed books from some of the many books in the library at the Foundation.

Roof with rubbings of the embossed covers of books from James Washington library

Installation in The House Stands Firm, detail

In The House Stands Firm were stones and wood found on the property, some of them had been partially worked by Mr. Washington. The egg shells refer to two primary images in James Washington’s art, the bird and the egg.

Next there were soles/souls, a reference to both Washington’s metier as a shoemaker for many years, as well as his spiritual commitment to life beyond the physical world. In his earliest years, his mother apprenticed him to a shoemaker, work at which he immediately excelled and which in some ways forecast his work as a sculptor. because he went on to specialize in orthopedic shoes.

Soles Souls outside the Greenhouse

Blue Bottle tree

A blue bottle in a tree, refering to the blues,  hidden as we left the garden to go into the studio.

Inside the studio, the model of a slave ship that Washington had collected was given a central position, along with the slave chains that surrounded it – these were key catalysts at the house for the artist long before she began her residency.

We Have Eaten the Forest : Model of Spanish Galleon slave ship at James Washington House

The ship, a 15th century Spanish galleon is, according to the artist, ” the key element highlighting the tremendous changes wrought on humans, animals and nature stemming from the West African trade in slaves.”

The artist also enhanced  pieces of furniture like the piano with an installation of stones, or bones.

Piano with intervention

On the way to the lower studio were photographs of Washington with quotes from his autobiography

Carletta Carrington Wilson installation, detail quotes from James Washington

Carrington recited her poem consisting entirely of the titles of James Washington’s books in his library

Carletta Carrington Wilson reading Poem of Stone and Bone

Finally, there were her collages based on Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly‘s images of various scenes of the Civil War combined with subtle  fabrics.

Here is an example including an image  set in the principal square of Savannah, Georgia a year before the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863

Carrington Wilson, Hanibal Prince Among Slaves, December 21, 1861 media collage

Carletta Carrington Wilson deeply explored Washington’s  books, his stones, his garden, his home, his studio, and enriched our experience of all of these dimensions of both his life and his legacy. Yet, she was also absolutely herself as she explored, adding her own responses and feelings, her own aesthetic sensibilities with color, shape, words, and objects. We were left with a sense of drifting back and forth in time from the Civil War to the present, from Emancipation to our current world. Carletta  Carrington Wilson gave us continuity with the past and a step into the future. Her installation also gave us a sense of peacefulness and hope, at a time when they are sorely needed.