by Howard Pflanzer

How can you produce a brand new controversial American play in Mumbai?  I thought India would be an excellent place to produce and direct my new play, The Terrorist, a timely commentary on the US government policy of detention of South Asians and Muslims and the initiation of the war in Iraq.   The political climate in India was in some ways similar to the US, where the government had passed and implemented, The Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), which was modeled on the USA Patriot Act passed after 9/11.  In India as well as the US many “terrorists” were imprisoned without proper charges, access to legal counsel or a fair trial.  When the Congress party returned to power in India several years ago the act was rescinded.                                                                         

            The play is about Frank, who claims to be in security, his girlfriend, Claire, her boss, Roger, and a government agent, Paula, who is trying to find a terrorist conspiracy at all costs. The play explores each character’s particular view of terrorism.  Frank is a self-proclaimed fighter against terrorism, Claire is Frank’s supporter, Roger believes wholeheartedly in the US government’s fight against terrorism and Paula sees a terrorist conspiracy everywhere. Frank, Claire and Roger are ordinary Americans victimized by the US government.  In the end, the persecuted turn on their persecutor, Paula, in a bold reversal of roles.  Some people in the audience felt my ending did not take the terrorist threat seriously enough, while many others applauded the ending as a powerful protest against US government policies.

The Terrorist was presented at the Little Theatre of the National Center for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Mumbai for two performances, May 8^th and 10^th, 2003.  The play with a cast of four Indian actors, had a live tabla (an Indian percussion instrument) composed and performed by a young American musician, Daniel L. Scholnick.

The Terrorist was started at the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois in August 2002.   I read an excerpt to a group of the other artistic residents and several people said “it would stir things up.”  I knew I was on the right track and completed the play in the fall of 2002 before I left for India.    Some revisions and additions were made during the rehearsals for the premiere production in Mumbai.

My liaison at the NCPA, Arundhathi Subramaniam, poet and administrator, whose husband is active in the Mumbai English theatre, read the play with excitement and approved it for production.  She arranged for me to have the Little Theatre for two performances and rehearsal space as needed and available and introduced me to the key staff people.

In my first few weeks in Mumbai, I went to see every new play in English that I could, to meet the writers, directors and actors.   Indian plays written in English are being presented with greater frequency by a growing number of Indian theatre artists.   Writers are finding their voices, writing in English that is neither British nor American, but Mumbai-English, inflected by the rhythms and words of the Hindi and Marathi languages.  And many actors are performing plays in English.

I cast Radhika da Cunha, appearing in a play, Class of ‘84, as the government agent, Paula.  I auditioned a number of actors for the part of Frank, finally selecting Darshan Jariwala, who not only performs Indian plays in English, but in Hindi and Marathi.  After I chose him for the part, he was worried about his accent and I told him, “it would be an asset for the part.”   Avantika Akerkar, who was appearing in the Indian premiere of the Vagina Monologues, was cast as Claire.   As Claire’s boss, Roger, I cast Denzil Smith, a Mumbai actor with a wonderful voice who plays contemporary and classical parts.

I developed a production concept for the play that included a live tabla player on stage.  The stage at the Little Theatre was much deeper than it was wide.  I divided the stage into five playing areas: Frank’s workshop, where he is creating his “security” device, Claire and Roger’s office, a street area, a park area and a café.  Other transitional places were spun off from these locations.  The four actors remained seated at the back of the stage in a darkened area when not in a scene, along with the tabla player who performed live throughout the play.  The actors were able to move smoothly from one scene to the other underscored by the tabla.  All the playing areas had shadowy illumination which highlighted the ambiguity of the situations in the play.  The final scene of the play, where the characters are interrogated, was lit by a powerful flashlight, which was aimed at each actor’s face as he or she was questioned.

The fifth actor in the play was a musical instrument, the tabla.  It became a live musical presence.  I had listened to Indian vocal and instrumental music in a number of  Mumbai’s venues before I began rehearsing The Terrorist..   Every type of musical performance I heard used the tabla.  I thought, why not create a contemporary tabla score to emphasize theatrical elements in the scenes and link the scenes in the play.  I would use a traditional Indian instrument in a non-traditional way.  It would be a wonderful way to propel the action.   The composer, Daniel L. Scholnick, was excited by the concept and developed the score while watching the rehearsals.  After the performances, audience members commented how effective the music was in moving the plot along.

During the first few rehearsals, the actors thought the characters were simple because my dialogue is so spare, but as we worked they became challenged by the characters’ interactions.  As we explored their roles and improvised some scenes, the actors began to dig into their parts and complex characters began to emerge who defined their conflicting attitudes towards terrorism.  One of the actresses, Radhika da Cunha, had never done animal exercises in her acting classes, and we worked on her developing dog-like characteristics (listening for and smelling out terrorists) which she seamlessly incorporated into her performance as a government agent.  In the scene, which I dubbed “the discovery of the weapons of mass destruction” scene, Roger, played by Denzil Smith, did a brilliant improvisation underscored by tabla sounds, in which everyday tools: a screwdriver, a pair of scissors and a plastic hair band became extraordinary objects of terrorist menace.

My stage manager, Vijayalaxmi Londhe, went with me to the Chor Bazaar (Thieves Bazaar) in Mumbai to purchase props.  She bargained in Hindi and we bought everything from a powerful flashlight to an electrical switch that was the “security” device Frank was working on.  Going to the Chor Bazaar with its crowded streets and hundreds of shops of Muslim vendors was a theatrical experience in itself.  And I thought about the hundreds of Muslim detainees in the US imprisoned after 9/11.

To publicize the play, I obtained a list of the half dozen writers/editors who covered cultural activities in the Indian English language press and phoned each one personally.  Unlike in New York or other major American cities, it was not necessary to write a press release, but in each case when I spoke to a journalist, I pitched the basic idea of the play and the unusual circumstances of its production.  The Asian Age did a feature with a photo, “The Terrorist Strikes in May”, with a face-to-face interview about me as a playwright/director working in Mumbai, which appeared two weeks before the opening of the play.  The other press pieces were published around the time of the performance.  Midday ran an article, entitled, “Staging a Terrorist” about the subject of the play with a photo of two of the actors.  Afternoon did a feature, “The Terrorist Hits the Marquee” with a photo of me and the cast posed in the rehearsal space.  Briefer articles appeared in The Times of India and The Indian Express, which had profiled me earlier in the year.

To create further interest in the play, three scenes were performed by the actors on the tiny stage of the Tea Centre as part of the COHO Arts Festival in Mumbai to an audience of eighty people who crowded into the space the Saturday before the premiere.   The scenes were well received and this helped to produce a buzz about the play.

On a shoestring budget with great help from Indian theatre people, who worked in the English Indian theatre, the play was rehearsed for five weeks.  I focused on getting the Indian actors to perform as an ensemble and give an American feel to their performances.  Their training in Indian traditional theatre performance techniques helped them to create the stylized feel for the play that I was seeking.  It was a challenge for me to work with the actors to incorporate their techniques into my production but in the end it was greatly enhanced.

A few weeks before the production opened I was told by the director of the American Center, a career diplomat, that they would give me money to produce any other play during this time of the Iraq invasion.  I refused.  I was then asked not to mention the American Center or the Fulbright program as assisting this production in the program and publicity.  The play was officially produced by an Indian foundation under the auspices of the National Center for the Performing Arts where I was a visiting artist.

The Terrorist was performed twice to packed houses.  All the officials from the American consulate turned out including the director of the American Center.   And the Indian Fulbright newsletter did a brief article with a photo about how I had directed a production of The Terrorist with some of Mumbai’s leading actors about “the psychological effects of terrorism” which the play was clearly not about. After each performance there were questions and a discussion of the politics of the play.  Most of the Indian audience members shared my concern about American policies in Iraq and towards the detainees.  I did another short performance piece, Surveillance, which was thematically related to the play.  The Terrorist was documented through photos and a video. After the performances were over, I found out there had never been a premiere of a new American play in Mumbai before.  It seems I had made theatre history way Off-Off Broadway.

Howard Pflanzer was a Fulbright Scholar in India during the spring of 2003.   The Terrorist was given its   American Premiere at the Laurie Beechman Theatre of the West Bank      Café NYC by the Unofficial New York Yale Cabaret (UNYYC) in June 2006.

Since I have like three venues to publish it in, and I told Tao I needed a galley, I feel obliged to write a review of Tao Lin’s novel, Richard Yates. I don’t think I will ever read anything by Richard Yates. Reading Tao Lin has a way of erasing any literary knowledge one had. I eagerly anticipated this release after reading Eeeee Eee Eeee and Shoplifting from American Apparel. He sold shares in this novel to publish it and not have to work at a vegan restaurant while he was writing it.

I feel not conscious enough of how I’m mimicking Tao Lin’s Style. Tao Lin’s Style is infectious and hypnotic. Writing about Tao Lin in Tao Lin’s style, as The Observer, or rather Christian Lorentzen, did, is hard to resist. I think the Observer was lazy. I approve of that laziness. Of course, as with Hemingway, another “bad” writer whose parody comes easy, and whom Tao Lin namechecks as much as Yates, and includes in the index, the style slips in anyway. While reading Tao Lin I find myself becoming much drier and flatter. I lose my obligation to feel strongly about anything, especially about how I feel about anything.

Tao Lin is indeed kind of a hipster writer. He’s easy to hate. I think when people say something is “polarizing” that thing often itself has an intense focus on neutrality. Some of the key phrases to use in a Tao Lin parody are “neutral facial expression” and “I feel neutral” and “said in Gmail Chat”. If you use these phrases you will be immediately parodying Tao Lin, and you don’t need anything else. Everything he writes is autobiography, or so it seems. Everything is exactly as it seems. It’s just one damn thing after another but there are some interesting elisions and refillings of previous story that are perhaps occuring more in Richard Yates.

There are more changes in Richard Yates from his previous style. Someone must have commented on the names of his characters, like how obvious it is that the main character is always Tao Lin but named like Sam or something. So he named the Tao Lin character Haley Joel Osment and the teenage Jersey girl he met on the internet Dakota Fanning. The ages are about right but the great thing about it is you still can’t actually picture the actors as the characters. I now see “Haley Joel Osment” and that represents a Taiwanese-American hipster writer to me. I wonder whether any kind of defamation charges could be brought but it’s too obviously a stunt. I am willing to honestly believe Haley Joel Osment crossed state borders to statutory rape Dakota Fanning, who is variously self-destructive. I do because those are the characters. There’s really a lot of name-dropping in this, which brings up that issue of how much writers have to be literary historians, or just more culturally aware, or whatever.

I’m afraid that it’s almost a homage to the novel’s namesake that Richard Yates has a pretty clear structure and plot, and particularly that it’s about someone simultaneously epitomizing and feeling alienated from contemporary American society. The story is most of the arc of a codependent relationship. In case you don’t know what that is, it’s when someone stays romantically involved because they feel the other person needs them and the other person (who often has some compulsion or addiction the first person enables) does more of that to get more from the first person. Neither person involved is very good and both are very depressed. What I like about depression in Tao Lin is that it’s not necessarily pathological. Halfway through the book I totally thought he’d impregnated her.

At first it seems like he just emotional abuses her and then it turns out Dakota Fanning’s been secretly binging and purging. I don’t think the “spoiler” concept is relevant here. “Haley Joel Osment” comes across as a total dick even though he does sort of know what to do. I like that Tao Lin does that with not-himself. I like the realism about this couple creating their own little world. I want to use the terms “party girl” and “cheese beast” and have someone understand them. I think Tao Lin is a party girl. I am a party girl. It’s easy to say the attitude is immature and neurotic, and I want to shrug that off as harmless and ubiquitous but the impact on “Dakota Fanning” makes it actually more morally conscious than a parody of Tao Lin. But “Shoplifting” already kind of had that underlying moral message. I think a lot of the couple’s professions of need actually sound kind of weird to me because I feel like every time I’ve said anything like that it was very very self-aware.

I don’t know. A lot of what they, and Tao Lin, do say is self-aware, but so dry that there’s no difference. I always feel like the manuscript was written with a lot less capitalization and punctuation, so it’s gone through that transformation already. Tao Lin definitely is being about neutrality in representation as a direction with an impossible goal. That’s too figurative for a Tao Lin parody. I don’t want to tell you what to do with these books but I do think Tao Lin is important to be able to parody.

I wanted to include some quotes from the book but it lost all the highlights I put in before about 2/3 of the way through and I didn’t want to be biased.

Anyway, I guess I like him because he’s familiar. He steals from places near the place where I work, but doesn’t mention stealing from us, which I appreciate. We have a similar social anxiety and detachment, and have our most emotionally intense experiences through internet chatting. He makes me think “I could do that” but this review was my chance to and I don’t think I could, or want to, and neither could that Observer guy.

Written by Ana Maria Bezanilla

Hyde Park, a strikingly gentrified bubble of academia nestled amongst unsafe territory, may have appeared on the country’s radar solely from its Barack Obama fame, but from its empty streets and desolate parks, local neighborhood kids created a dream. Shawn Bullen and Christopher Gary, along with several other childhood friends, came to be known throughout the city as IDC. What started as a crew of friends developed into a brotherhood of talent. Gary and Bullen, already natural artists, started writing graffiti in high school, surrounded by an urban landscape waiting to be claimed. Indirect Disrespect, I Define Creative, I’m Damn Cool, Intergalactic Drug Club, and I Destroy Chicago are only a handful of acronyms that came to define them and what they stood for. Over the years, the IDC family, nurtured by its founders unconditional acceptance of others and willingness to venture into any territory, grew exponentially. With this the dream grew and grew, and IDC members represented the crew through participating in commission murals, inner-city art programs for kids, and curating various art shows featuring work from friends and newcomers alike.

On August 5, 2010, Gary and three others went on a late night boat ride on Lake Michigan to see the northern lights. Early in the morning they went for a swim, including the captain, consequently leaving the boat behind. By the time all four surfaced, the boat had traveled thirty feet away, and none of them could see each other. Two of the friends treaded water for five hours desperately hoping for a rescue from the chilling water and the unbelievably strong current which pulled them apart. Once the sun rose, the two girls, very close friends of Gary, were found by a fisherman. The body of the captain surfaced, and the boat was traced to a harbor six miles away. Christopher Gary was not found, and even upon days of searching, he remains missing in the water.

Not enough can be said to acknowledge his life, love, and influence. He shone on everyone around him, regardless of others’ criticism. Gary not only excelled in drawing and painting both in the graffiti and fine art realms, but was a talented rapper who was working on various collaborations with fellow musicians from Chicago and beyond. No one could ignore that he was in the prime of his life. At 21 years old the entire city knew him. Graffiti writers across Chicagoland honored his life through tags and pieces, and this past Sunday, Hyde Park locals, IDC family members, and anyone Chris ever touched came to the 53rd street graffiti wall to pay tribute. The wall, a frequent hangout spot for the crew, constantly evolves with new works from artists every week, but at the end of that day from end to end it bore the thoughts, messages, and souls of everyone who ever loved him, and has never been more beautiful.

A couple days before Chris died he told me I was the person he respected the most. I became a part of the IDC family in a very dark time. They treated me like a sister while the rest of the world looked right through me. On a personal level IDC saved my life, and through the combined influences of all my best friends I learned to love myself and others equally. This is what the dream was. Chris, through his own quirky language, spontaneity and undying swagger represented it for all. He had many tattoos, but the one that meant the most to him was a burning candle on his chest, representing the lingering dream of IDC Arthouse, a plan incorporating the vast talents of our members, from teaching to cooking and everything in between. His loss has put our lives in perspective, and with open hearts we carry so much of his vibrancy in us. It is now our duty to make his dream, our dream, come true in ways he could have never imagined. We as a family want all to experience what we have to say, and join us in our quest to make the world fair, accessible, enjoyable, and enriching for all. As Chris would have wanted, beautiful, unimaginable ideas are about to manifest, and life begins anew.

Inspiring Dreaming Creating. RIP.

Louise and Me

New York City, Sunday afternoon, six hopefuls and Louise Bourgeois. For 30 some years, Louise (not Ms. Bourgeois- her choice), has invited artists to her home to share their work; sculptors, painters photographers, writers, dancers even . We sat. We waited. The heat. No air. Louise. Her scrutiny, the grand dame. Others present : Head griller, drivers, husbands, videographer, Pouran Esrafily, recorder of Sunday Salons. Interminable.

The moment arrives. Louise, she enters. A tiny fragile lady replete with white cap on head, for what purpose (90 degrees in the room), supported by her assistant and Pouran. They place the precious 95 year old package on pillows in chair. We greet her with “Holy Mackerel”! Her request. I uttered “Cheez Louise” and was immediately pierced; those eyes. Sweating buckets in the airless room, we were. Louise, a cool cucumber. Mandatory bringing your work to share. I brought photos. Elected to go first, I proceeded to the “hot spot”, a table, her eyes so near, don’t touch. “Why did you come”? he asks, the poetic griller. Fumble and dodge. She looks, she sees. “no, no, no”, her words. Then, instructions to pass the photos around for group appraisal, that huge ostrich egg, my throat. I braced, Louise pierces. More questions: hows and whys. I perked up. She perked up. Six weeks post Louise, new painting territory, a real reason. “Holy Mackerel”! Louise.

“Red Chairs” by Neila Mezynski

“Three Dresses” by Neila Mezynski

“Three Horses” by Neila Mezynski

reseña por Daniel Torres en Lourdes Vásquez reciente libro “Tres Relatos y Un Infortunio”

“Estoy cerca de la puerta. Presiento que cada pisada marca el final de mis días. Detengo el paso en el dintel”.
“La gente es propensa a toda clase de accidentes”.
“A Guille le falleció una pierna”.

Estas tres oraciones, que sirven de epígrafe a esta reseña, son las oraciones iniciales de los tres cuentos que aparecen en el nuevo libro de la puertorriqueña Lourdes Vázquez, titulado Tres relatos y un infortunio, publicado en la serie “Semillas de Eva”, de la editorial de la Fundación Ross en Rosario, Argentina. El propósito de esta serie es editar pequeños libritos, de 18 por 9 centímetros, para vender, además de en librerías, en puestos de revistas, farmacias, supermercados, etc., dentro de Argentina. Lourdes Vázquez es la primera extranjera que publica en esta serie, siendo todas las demás escritoras de Argentina.
En cada una de estas sorprendentes historias aparece el desastre, el infortunio, el accidente, la muerte, el dolor, la desgracia, como leimotiv de las acciones de los personajes. En “La habitación”, el primer cuento que abre la brevísima colección, se narra la vida de una hija que vuelve al Caribe desde Galicia para cuidar de sus padres envejecientes. “Accidentes”, el segundo cuento, habla de las anécdotas que cuenta Malena, una señora que limpia apartamentos, sobre los habitantes de una comunidad donde vive la narradora del relato. El último cuento, “Memoria de Guille” es casi un poema sobre un personaje fascinante, el típico viejito achacoso que descubre los límites de su cuerpo, lo que no invalida para nada su proclividad al deseo: “Guille, en la soltura de su vejez y a pleno día, quedaba quieto debajo de cualquier palo de jobos y entre el claroscuro de las ramas repentinamente surgían senos de hembras de diversas formas y color. Tanto seno le excitaba la memoria y alteraba la razón y la paz del día…”
Lourdes Vázquez es conocida por su poesía y su narrativa, la que le valió el prestigioso Premio Juan Rulfo de cuento (Francia) en el 2002. Su literatura tiene un centro solar: la problemática de la mujer contemporánea en sus relaciones con la familia tradicional que ha querido siempre alienar la identidad femenina al espacio privado de la casa. Vázquez crea, a través de su escritura, mujeres reales y fuertes que cuestionan estas artimañas que el patriarcado ha querido tenderle siempre a lo femenino.
“La habitación”, el primer cuento de Tres relatos y un infortunio, aborda la tensión cultural entre madres e hijas. La mirada que nos ofrece la narradora hacia la relación tensa que una hija tiene con su madre envejeciente es reveladora. El lenguaje delata esta tensión: “¿De dónde sale la fortaleza física de este esqueleto?”. La narradora protagonista nos pinta una imagen de la madre que va más allá de las visiones idealistas que tenemos del concepto de la maternidad. Aquí “el esqueleto” es la madre de la protagonista, y mantiene su autoridad matriarcal ante la visita de una hija ilegítima de su esposo. La crítica a la costumbre nada ortodoxa del macho caribeño que tiene hijos fuera del matrimonio humillando a su esposa ante la sociedad es mordaz. O así lo entiende la madre cuando dice: “…en esta familia las únicas hijas que existen son las mías”, afirmando su lugar de esposa legítima en el orden de las cosas. Para la hija, sin embargo, es la negación de conocer a otra hermana habida fuera del matrimonio. El rasgo que más destaca de este cuento es la distancia que toma la narradora protagonista al alejarse de la familia, y al optar por “construir mi mitología, para poder dar a mis hijos la esperma de donde puedan agarrarse”. Ella no será una madre castradora como la suya, sino que construirá su propia “mitología” más allá del seno materno y le dará a su prole esa “esperma” de la que “puedan agarrarse” para pisar firme.
“Accidentes” es un relato en el que se instala el rumor como protagonista. Malena nos cuenta, a través de la voz de la narradora, las historias de las personas que viven en un edificio de apartamentos que la misma Malena limpia, y al hacerlo, tiene un acceso ilimitado a la intimidad de sus ocupantes: “Malena me contó más tarde que le preguntó al viudo, qué va a hacer con la ropa de la difunta y el viudo respondió, ‘no sé’”. La diégesis o la narración se da de manera oblicua: de Malena, a la narradora, a nosotros: “No era muy fashionista la profe, me dijo Malena. ¡Qué buen corazón tienes Malena!, le contesté”. En este pasaje vemos el comentario de la narradora acerca de Malena y las palabras mismas de ella así como el comentario dirigido a los lectores por parte de la narradora. Todo un circuito de diégesis o narración que comienza con la primera mención del personaje en el cuento: “Todo esto me lo contó Malena mientras limpiaba mi apartamento”. Aquí Lourdes Vázquez se acerca a esa comunidad de mujeres que hablan entre sí y comentan la vida o los “accidentes” de los otros, acorde con el título del cuento en cuestión. Hasta que Malena desaparece con una sola nota: “No haga preguntas sobre mi paradero. Que sirva ésta para despedirme. He sufrido un grave accidente”. El desconcierto de la narradora protagonista la lleva a reflexionar sobre esta poética del infortunio que aquí nos ocupa: “Miré por la ventana, la gente caminaba con paso rápido y ojos de sospecha como temiendo una desgracia”.
“Memoria de Guille” en su brevedad y su efectividad es tal vez el cuento mejor logrado de la serie, no sólo por la ternura con que Lourdes Vázquez construye el personaje desde la dedicatoria (“Ay! Guille, me haces falta”), hasta la caracterización del viejito “dressed to kill” o vestido para matar, a la hora de alistarse para “su visita médica”: “Y ahora, Guille vestido con guayabera y pantalón haciendo juego. Perfumado con Old Spice, ya está listo… Vestido de inglés en expedición geográfica, vestido como un reparador de sillas eléctricas, o como un cowboy el día de su boda. Vestido Guille con gafas de Versace…”
Los achaques típicos de los viejitos a cierta edad, lo que recuerda al padre postrado en la cama del primer cuento, “La habitación”, es el paradigma que trabaja Lourdes Vázquez en este breve texto, donde la caracterización de un solo personaje clave, Don Guille, es el orden de la narración. El signo Guille encarna ese infortunio mismo que es la edad y la vejez, pero poetizado aquí por medio de las descripciones del individuo, que pese a la decadencia de su cuerpo enfermo, se viste de guayabera y pantalón “haciendo juego”, a la caribeña, llevando gafas de marca Versace. El título del cuento, “Memoria de Guille”, lo dice todo. Es el recuerdo, la imagen del tiempo detenido en un cuerpo disfrazado, como acaba la historia.

Tres relatos y un infortunio es, pues, la nueva entrega que nos hace Lourdes Vázquez como una filigrana. La edición en libro de bolsillo color naranja es como un folleto de viaje, palabra, narración y poesía, que nos acerca a tres historias sostenidas sobre el hilo fatídico del infortunio y su poética.

Daniel Torres*

· Spanish and Latin American Studies Professor at Ohio University.
· Lourdes Vázquez latest are Cibeles que sueña= Cybele, As She Dreams, Artist Book by Yarisa Colón Torres; the anthology Cuando narradoras latinoamericanas narran en los Estados Unidos (Ross, 2009) and the script: A Porcelain Doll with Violet Eyes Staring into Space=Una muñeca de cerámica con ojos violetas (Wheelhouse, 2009).

by Amiri Baraka

We are in a country whose rulers brought Africans chained in the bottom of ships to be sold into slavery for hundreds of years and now 145 years after chattel slavery formally ended and a multinational coalition, Afro American, Latinos, Asians and progressive whites elected the first Afro American president we have to debate whether racism still exists in this society. It is amazing that Americans can fool themselves so long and so often about the evil that they have done and continue to do to other Americans and the world.

To endure citizens so convinced of their own intellectual capacity seemingly earnestly arguing that racism has nothing to do with criticism of Obama’s attempt at Health Care Reform, or most things for that matter, has nothing to do with him being half Black is too ludicrous to consider, especially if one has viewed the signs in Washington, with the president of the United States depicted as a Witch Doctor with a bone in his nose and a hammer and sickle as caption. Or to witness a rotting patriot of the confederate flag shout, “You Lie” at the President of the United States. No one ever dared to disrespect the master liar, Bush 2 with such, though to prove how the rest of the world is much less deceived about that world than the defective American mind. Remember there was a brother in Iraq who threw his shoe at Bush, for which I celebrated, “Happy Shoe Year!”

What should be considered however is, from the beginning of this racial holocaust that has enveloped the world, certainly since the fall of Mali and the defeat of the Moors in the 15th century. 1492 is not only the date of Columbus’ venture for treasure across the daunting Western Ocean, treasure and glory, both sanctioned by Papal Bull, what evil force has been behind it all. The inexorable and relentless search for maximum profit, which has always been the moral code of monopoly capitalism.

What makes the whole scenario of resistance and criticism fly about Obama, a person almost universally praised just a few months ago, is the base of this criticism originates not just with race but with profit. Only 42% of white Americans voted for Obama. Yes, they wd have preferred McCain, among the most foolish, just because he was white, but among most of the disingenuous, that preference was because they felt McCain would have made their money, especially their super profits, safer.

Need we mention that the Media represents that same disingenuous skulking crowd of losers? The media fiend Rupert Murdoch had the racist treachery to portray Obama as an ape being shot dead by policemen. (For which he should have been charged with treason by the Attorney General, it is a federal crime to simulate the murder of the President of the US.) It is very important to understand how the Media, newspapers, radio, television, magazines, films have mounted an unrelenting tirade against Obama.

Dobbs and his “Birthers” mount an endless tirade nightly. Nothing is more vicious than the Daily News except, of course, Murdoch’s trashy Mirror. But then, The Post, The Wall St. Journal, The Village Voice, Channel 9, 5 and 11 are also owned by this same Australian Zionist. It was Bush 2 that allowed this greedy hoard of media to be grabbed by one fanatic, before that it was against the law for one group, certainly against one corporation, to own different forms of the media. They could own television but not television and print media. Since Bush it is possible for one corporate monster to grab all a forms of the media and thus dominate popular opinion with one mindless cry.

In fact it was the media, Glen Beck, who introduced the current racist dimensioning of the Obama administration by calling Obama a white hating racist. Even though Obama, much to the irritation of many of his constituents , has scrupulously avoided outright condemnation of the racial taunting which surrounds him straight out or in code from various sides.

But this is clearly the way the Corporations will fight against Obama. The same way they were, until the last days, relentless supporters of the lies, economic embezzlement and cries for war, and twin wars and rugged , i.e., mindless, solipsism that characterized the Bush administration. This pervasive withering “influence” is how they direct and force the nation in directions that only benefit the 6/10ths of one percent that own the land, the communications, the banks, the factories, the food , the water, plus the means of production!

The corporate powers were divided to some extent about Bush because of his phenomenal failures. Although they were deeply involved, as Bush made certain, in the looting of US public funds , the fact that this excessive theft could not be hidden and covered, and that ultimately they would have to face this, plus the failure to resolve the wars in some kind of commercial stability created enough contradiction among the corporate dogs so that the Obama

But make no mistake, 911 was used as a pretext to directly occupy the “middle east”. This is why there is still no clarity on the who, why and how of that attack. Osama bin Laden who is supposed to have led the deed has not even been seriously tracked. His family was flown by the FBI out of the US the day after. Without even a question? Mildly curious people already know that the Bush family and the bin Laden family were business partners since the 60’s. (See the book, “The Family of Bush & The Family of Saud”. And this collaboration has been worth billions of dollars. This is how globalism worked before the term was turned into a confirming cliché of what is happening with interlocking corporate criminals in the last few years.

But what Obama faces is the defense mechanism of monopoly capitalism, its undermining, lies, used to galvanize and organize the ignorant, the racist led by their well paid and well advertised running dogs. Who in their right mind would listen to Sarah Palin about anything, yet her shrill craziness about “death panels” as the reason she opposes Obama’s Health Care Proposal actually flew across the media. The only force that provides the engine for this opposition is the Insurance companies who are protecting their high profits. What the media does is victimize the ignorant and inject the backward with racial chauvinism. But they are simply representing their owners.

What the failure to even look for bin Laden, when half the world knew he was hiding out in the Pakistani tribal areas and instead invading Iraq confirms for many of us that it was about the oil all the time. It was not the probably mock defensive counterattack on the site and origin of a 911 terrorist attack on the US that set off those wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but the determination of Corporate greed to station themselves where the oil was and so dominate it. The cutting up of the oil spoils among the big oilies certainly demonstrates that.

So that whatever Obama does he must “consider” the desires, the direction laid out by monopoly dictates. The health care struggle is a clear example of this. No matter how utterly silly it might seem, ignorant people fighting against their own interests, it is clearly a demonstration of the power of monopoly.

The economic crash in the US should be the most open example of the obvious power of monopoly capitalism even to the destruction of the nation itself. A several billion dollar surplus in the US treasury turned into the largest deficit in history. The new Klan always talk a good game about fiscal responsibility, usually while they are cheating on their wives. Marx said in the 19th century that the bourgeoisie would continue to extract more and ever more wealth from working people until they could not pay their bills and hence the banks would fail. This is the story of what just happened here in the US, and through the connections of globalism, punished the rest of the world. This was also Monopoly Capitalism’s gift to Obama, though at the same time one of the reasons he could get elected, the people’s rejection of the Bush status quo.

Just before Obama was inaugurated I wrote in the newspaper Unity & Struggle, the headline of which read PRESIDENT OBAMA: NO BAILOUT, NATIONALIZE THE BANKS AND AUTO INDUSTRY, “For close to a TRILLION DOLLARS We don’t want ‘Oversight!’ We Want Ownership! Why should we pay a trillion dollars to the rich so they can stay rich? You can’t call them management because it’s obvious they can’t manage.

“If these people running these corporations want to tell us about ‘The Private Sector’, ‘The Free Market’ and other delusions of monopoly capitalism, its ok, let them go play in the traffic. But once they blow it, and even endanger the well being of the American people themselves, then we are fools to keep giving them our money so they can throw it away on their life style and the delusion that somehow big capitalism has a long term life expectancy. …The people need to take control of these faltering industries, cut out the fat and the foolishness, let the workers run them and they and the US own them. Why should we give these millionaires our money so they can stay rich while 6000 people a day are being foreclosed?”

But Obama did bail these people out even though a couple weeks later Workers at Republic windows in Chicago, largely immigrants, seized the Republic Windows Plant because the company could not receive credit from Bank of America, even though BoA had been one of the banks bailed out by the Obama administration, presumably to extend credit such as this. My own response to this was “The BoA execs should have been led out of their offices in handcuffs”. Because these vultures of high finance private enterprise certainly cannot be trusted. “All they want to do is stay rich and live fabulously while we labor and scrape.”

The problem is that while Obama does have some admirable social democratic ideals, he must toil in a society that is controlled historically, both emotionally and structurally by the monopoly capitalist engines of imperialism’s most rapacious creature US corporate America.

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is another example of Imperialism’s power as well as ensuring the US continuing engagement in the Middle East. Imperialism needs Israeli occupiers to limit the indigenous people’s self determination and thereby allowing imperialism (US Corporations) to dispose of the region’s resources as they want. Despite the Gaza massacre and the historic failure of Israel to abide by any of the UN’s resolutions that Israel return to its pre 1967 borders and that they stop building settlements on Palestinian land, they continue because they are supported by imperialism , particularly US Oil giants and it’s rightist minions.

Obama states again and again that Israel must stop building these settlements but they continue, Israel invades and creates a military apartheid regime in Gaza, but Netanyahu still has enough support, and from the same people who supported Apartheid in South Africa, to divert attention by playing a duet with Iran’s Ahmadinejad about the Holocaust.

Racism , national oppression , the oppression of women, survive, because they are profitable to the 6/10th of 1% who own the land, mineral wealth, communication, transportation, the means of production. Some others, the middle management, who support these evils are being paid, the rest are ignorant. You can imagine, for instance, that since the majority of whites did not vote for Obama, that facing the coalition of Afro-Americans, Latinos., Asians and progressive whites, would set up the most ignorant Americans to respond to the cry,”We’ve got to get our country back!” which the media propagandists push, since what is true is that the US is no longer “White America”. No, it is multi-national multi -cultural USA.

That is why I am so insistent on educating the people about the tragedy of the Weimar Republic, in Germany, the last democratic government before Hitler. After World War One, the German people elected a social democrat as President. Then the socialists, the communists, the social democrats, the unions, the progressives, the left in general began to fight each other about whether the government was socialist enough. In the meantime, Adolph Hitler was organizing and in 1933, after the Reichstag was burned to the ground, Hitler and the Nazis seized power.

Hitler was not some demonic genius lone wolf, he was supported by some of the same corporations that still exist in Germany, Krupp,Thyssen, Schacht. Though they wd downplay now American corporate leaders also admired and supported Hitler’s rise DuPont, Union Carbide, Westinghouse, IBM, ITT, JP Morgan and many many more. Their profit is not a religious figure, they have no morality, no God, but Money!

Obama’s most important and most daunting task is the Regulation of Monopoly Capitalism. He must find ways to shut down their anarchistic dismissal of the common good, the needs of the masses of people in order to make their profits and super profits. The attempted regulation of the banks was much too timid. At the point of the recent crash there was a great opportunity to nationalize (that dirty word) both the banks and the auto industry. It might sound crazy coming out of the mouths of the paid stooges in the media, but these same kind of thing has been done in Europe since World War 2.

It’s obvious that the corpses will wage maximum struggle about this just as they are doing around health care reform, which raises Mencken’s axiom that you can never overestimate US citizen’s ability to resist bit time con persons. But Obama must find ways to stop the flow of capital out of the country, stop the abandoning of factories and the outsourcing of jobs, which reduce whole cities to near ghost towns.

Immigration, is another huge problem, since the corporations favor the flow of non documented workers for the same reason they do anything else, to make super profits by being able to pay these workers less, and at the same time undermine the American workers’ attempts to raise their standard of living (just as they did with the black immigrants pitting them against white workers in the earlier part of the 20th century). But we must not go for the ghost, we must still seek to unify into multinational united fronts, in the same way we united to elect Obama. Again, this is not “White America” it is multinational America, and we need a People’s Democracy, a United Front Government, not one dominated by Monopoly Capital.

The Senate and the House Representatives are mainly filled with lobbyists for Monopoly Capitalism not representatives of the People. We do not even need a senate, just a single house, based on one person, one vote. Obama handicaps are the monopoly capitalist media and the character of the governmental body itself, willed as it is with lobbyists for the same monopolists. Plus the deeply ingrained racism of the white America and some in Black America as well, Mr. Steele , the Real Public Coon, or the Negro lady in Martha’s Vineyard who criticized Obama for not “reaching out to the Black elites”, who characterized Michelle Obama as a “Ghetto girl” should make that clear.

But Obama’s strength is the strength of the multinational united front that elected him. That is a basis for struggle for a People’s Democracy, which is the next step in our needed movement toward actual socialism.

Amiri Baraka Address @ Fla Intl University 09

Janet Bruesselbach responds to Chavisa Woods and Art Less on The Girleye Show.

Thank you for wrapping your superior minds so attentively around this tawdry project. So I think what’s coming together is an awareness of the tension between feminisms. Namely, a contention of how best to address Laura Mulvey’s legacy and the “male gaze”: do we subvert the supposed dominant paradigm by rearranging the organs, or nullify the her mere Freudianism by proliferating the other configurations that had always appeared?

This namely comes to light when A notes that there’s nothing in many of the photographs that indicates authorial gender: “Slowly, we come to understand that it is the essence of the radical (and a slap in the face to both Laura Mulvey and the men whom she rightly criticized) for these photographers merely to portray their subjects with the variegation natural to two (or more) humans playing in the light, linked and loving through a camera lens, and nobody shunned or stopped or subjugated by the process at all.” This is the nullifying side, analogous to moderate feminism, arguing variations of style as genderless. Whereas a radical could say that in order to reveal that such disembodied art inherently oppresses, we must actively pursue unfamiliar forms, we might also claim the paradigm by majority, or reverse the unfamiliar into the canny.

Though not the only strategy, I was drawn sometimes in images to what I knew, not historically specifically, but of the conventional uses of stock photography, the myths it proliferates, and the role of women in generating and managing these images. Part of what I try to get at with “formal queerness” concerns an interest in professional interactions between women. This isn’t necessarily “linked and loving” or without power dynamics and communication errors. It is perhaps related to my interest in understanding what “generic” is to me personally and how it differs from how similar people see it.

So yes, this gets to A’s best point: the collection is regrettably mono-ethnic. It’s unfortunate considering Tribes’s mission of diversity. I’d all too easily turn this into a parody of Stuff White People Like in honest self-defense. I guess I didn’t find any photographers of color, and Marie’s stranger on the subway became a token to highlight the unfair consistency.

To address the other criticism A made, of the subjects’ gender, which she already de-polarized fairly well: the focus of the show narrowed in the making. At first, I was considering photographers of a range of genders, although always addressing feminist issues. Without actually prodding at gender boundaries, we might take femaleness or femininity or whatever the as-opposed-to-what theme is here for granted by limiting it to cisgender. Cassie may have re-titled several photos to negate gender-identified names, hopefully not out of a depersonalizing pressure from me, but to let the androgenous continuum decouple from the models’ names. Even trans men are girls too. My only regret is an accidental exclusion of transwomen.

Perhaps I’m keeping too specific here, and perhaps we’re all happier spared my nitpicking on content and symbol. The show’s faggot-coined shadow title indicates a parodic encouragement of the medium’s (being bodies and cameras and everything that surrounds them) more confrontationally radical interpretations. Yet the actual title is a take on the show-within-the-show (The Girlie Show, sold by the inclusion of a funny black man) on 30 Rock, whose protagonist has lately been the feminist feminists love to hate. Treating a diversification as a simple inversion still invites a complication of the sexual politics involved: Does the subject possess the artist if their autonomy penetrates the lens, as Chavisa suggests? When each image is the evidence of a different reinterpretation of a seemingly limited set of givens, we can see either something only these women could do, or something anyone (or thing!) could do. Is anyone insulted if I’m more excited, and intend more of a compliment, by the second?

A girl eyes GIRLEYE: WOMEN LOOKING AT WOMEN by Art Less (April 2010)

All too often, looking at a collection of fine art “women regarding women” pieces is like inspecting a crèche of Tracy Enim clones. When you’ve seen the Enim originals, you know that this cannot be an easy sight to behold. Perhaps inspired by a collective misreading of Audre Lorde, certain feminist fine artists of the late twentieth century indulged a tendency to chuck out technique in its entirety, with the unfortunate, and predictable, result that many pivotal artworks of that movement come off rather worse in the looking than in the retelling. It is thus with great joy that I report that the photographs in Girleye: Women Looking at Women are by and large gorgeous, but also acutely conscious of sexual politics. (Fiiiiiinally!)

Instead of trouncing technique and tradition by, say, sculpting vulvas out of used car parts and calling them art when the spackle is dry, many of the artists of Girleye have instead chosen to (mis)appropriate the techniques and styles of their most misogynistic forebears for their own, empowered ends. In particular, the young, preternaturally skilled Lauren Goldberg channels the surrealist misogynist Man Ray through her photographs Disconnect and Distance.

That Ms Goldberg has even thought to rework Man Ray instead of, say, posing for him as a model would have constituted, from Man Ray’s or his contemporaries’ points of view, a radically feminist act. Isn’t progress grand?

Meanwhile, the sensitive and gifted Cassie Olander conjures Imogen Cunningham’s Triangles and similar carnal landscapes through her photograph “Unity”.

Cunningham was, of course, a woman as well, so the homage initially seems uncomplicated. When the viewer, however, realizes that “Unity” teasingly, almost coyly depicts two nude women locked in a soft embrace, it becomes clear that Olander is repurposing Cunningham’s lauded and, by now, canonical means to send a still unconventional, perhaps radical message.

With LES, Anne Marie Hansen kills her father with rebellious joy and an almost mathematical elegance. The image is simple, powerfully so. A drunk girl in a tacky gold bathing suit dangles a bunch of grapes before her open mouth. The crook of her elbow suggestively obscures the head of a young man standing just behind her. The viewer’s gaze comes to rest on his not-yet-distended swim trunks.

With this image, Ms Hansen lays waste to Magritte, American Apparel ads, real pornography and countless other misogynistic portrayals of women reduced to their capacity as passive sex-recipients . . . by using their motifs and techniques to shoot a message of female sexual hunger straight down our hungry maws. (My father was quick to note that Hansen has reworked surrealist painting The Rape as The Grapes. Let the artist make of this what she may.)

Many other photographs in the set are simply beautiful portraiture. Amanda Palmer (making one of several cameos) has bad sunburn. A pair of nimble clowns practice what looks like acroyoga. Swimmers dot the surf like foam. Progress shows subtly, like light through a lattice. Slowly, we come to understand that it is the essence of the radical (and a slap in the face to both Laura Mulvey and the men whom she rightly criticized) for these photographers merely to portray their subjects with the variegation natural to two (or more) humans playing in the light, linked and loving through a camera lens, and nobody shunned or stopped or subjugated by the process at all. Most of all, that we cannot tell by any trick that these photographers were female is, upon (another) reflection, a most gorgeous happening.

Where, then, the rhymes and reasons to this set? There are many. We can start with the most unsubtle geometry exploited to great effect by the expert artists whose work is featured here—or perhaps, given the show’s very particular theme and patterning, by their curator. To put it bluntly: sexually evocative arcs and swoops and circles, punctuated, or punctured, by the occasional blunt or slender pole, abound in the collection. The vivid plethora of ovoid-and-spike figurings conjure an almost subliminal, spooky mentation reminiscent of Charles Burns’ Black Holes, which turned the vulva-shape into a repeated signifier of horror, a foreshadower of doom nested in appearances of the unexpected—such as a dissected frog’s back, a cut wrist, a lake where children skinny-dip. (Really, if you haven’t read a copy yet, you must—it’s the rare graphic novelist who can make the vulva into a Lovecraftian destroyer of worlds, and absolutely terrify you to pieces with it, and then make you cry.) I leave the viewer to pick his or her own incautious, revelatory path through the darkling bogs and brambles that litter the track of Girleye with a beauty, and a stillness, and danger.

Additionally, and flowing nicely from my bogs’n’brambles metaphor if I do write-so myself, bathing imagery pervades the show. Including the web-only images, roughly one sixth to one seventh of the pieces either allude to bathing or actually feature a nude lady bather or set of bathers. Factor in the joyous lesbian kissing, lesbian sex, and—let’s face it, people—lesbian hairstyles on display in several of the other photographs, and the images of happy women cavorting in water take on a rawer, sexier connotation.

In fact, the show seems to posit the old Radicalesbian message that one of the most authentic ways for women to relate to one another happily as women is by the art of sexual love. In Anne-Marie Hansen’s “Naughty”,

a seemingly drunken reveler tilts a frenemy’s chin toward hers in a parody of sexual love, a parody that conceals revulsion. Immediately, for your own psychological wellbeing if for no other cause, contrast this deeply discomfiting (though beautifully done) image with Beth Hommel’s soothing Kiss,

a gentle expression of adoration between women who are real lovers, at least for the moment the camera saw.

Speaking of sex, or politics, or merely the bonds imposed, displaced, ignored or adored by the act of looking: a teasing kind of bondage pervades the images of Girleye. Cassie Olander wraps one subject in a dress of loose bondage tape marked “DANGER”, and another in what looks like a symbolic bracelet of packing tape about the upper arm. Allison Green wraps two nude females against one anther in a web of loose bondage tape that looks a bit like toilet paper or crepe streamers. One thing is clear—these bonds aren’t holding anybody anywhere. Are they jokes, suggestions, denials, teases? On or of the viewer, always—the bondage never holds the subject, in these photos. Greene also photographs two straight lovers turned away from each other in a scarlet bed, a strip of pure white tape pasted across their snuggly bods. The photographer seems to suggest that the bonds—of love, sex, of matrimony, for all we know—that hold these lovers together are as flimsy as the tape she has strewn atop them. (A commentary on the “sanctity” of marriage? Or just of young lusts?)

One rather wishes that curator Janet Bruesselbach’s work had been featured in this show. Indeed, the images seem to have been selected so that, en masse, they resemble one of her massive artworks. With her physics-defying, anatomically incorrect oil orgies and other acts of sly painterly nihilism, Bruesselbach has assembled a career out of teasingly cinching and severing the ties of artist to subject, subject to viewer, male to female, armpit to elbow and whatever else you can think of, always with an eye to disassembling old theory and provoking transformation. The child of two eccentric physicists forever rusticating in one of the more precarious reaches of the rarefied Malibu wasteland, Bruesselbach understands difference with anything but difference, and from more angles than even her most multiply valenced works could invite you, dear Reader, to contemplate.

So it is surprising and perhaps offensive, with all the above dimensions of diversity in mind from both curator and photographers, that all the subjects of Girleye (minus one) are white. One doubts that the artists of Girleye have conspired to constrict the scope of femininity to a single, whitewashed point. Rather, the show evidences by strong implication that the photographers simply don’t hang out with many people who aren’t white. Even Hommel’s Mail Order, a seeming send-up of (Third World, usually nonwhite) mail-order brides, features a white subject as the mailed party. The only actual nonwhite subject in the entire set appears to be a stranger to the photographer (Hansen in this case). Most other subjects meet Ms Hansen’s gaze with ease, evincing familiarity if not friendship. Her lips parted slightly, this subject gazes straight ahead, meditating to the music on her iPod as she wills the subway ride to be over. She appears to be a stranger whom Hansen happened to snap on a long train ride. The image is remarkable for its ordinariness, its emotional opacity. Hansen never knew her subject’s story and, therefore, we viewers will never know it, either.

Another note on difference: one wonders if artist Cassie Olander’s male-presenting subjects Liz and David (and I mean to mark the subject named David especially) would especially desire their images used in a collection of women who are nominally looking at women. The above are also two of the only brooding subjects in the entire show, and their haunted eyes shy from the camera’s shutter, leaving us only with the impression of hunched shoulders and obsessively pomaded hair. Hardly a representative image of butch or—more appropriately—trans moodiness, unless these two just started on their testosterone regimen, in which case, of course, all bets are off (just kidding!). I for one am willing to believe that Ms. Olander accurately captured sad moments in the lives of these two subjects, and from Olander’s other, also beautifully felt work must believe that Olander selected these moments, not to portray transmen as a sad breed generally but to show us the sadness of the falling cherry blossoms, as they happened to fall.

Maybe David and (probably) Liz are not transmen in the first place, but playful young women who happened to butch it up for their respective shoots. Maybe, maybe. But maybe not. What if they are transgendered? What if they really aren’t women? What if they hate the very idea of being included in this show? Well, have I got an interpretation for you.

Noted drag warrior and gender obscurist James St James writes wisely in his novel Freak Show (if you will allow me, dear Reader, to extend and wriggle a bit in this authorial stretch) that the transfolk of our society are trammeled and trashed by the violent misapprehensions of our culture, but the very chains (of thorns or flowers, of iron or of gold) that yoke transfolk into endocultural conflict enable them to act as revolutionary agents, and aching reminders of the impermanence of “fates”.

If this were a slightly academic article and not a (bl)o(g)nanism, I’d write some lameass transition phrase like:

If my interpretation of St James is to be believed, we may celebrate Girleye’s inclusion of transmen—not for the men’s futures qua men, but for the intersection of their futures with their girlish pasts. Or, to misappropriate the oft-appearing Amanda Fucking Palmer, girls will be girls will be boys with no warning. Such transitions imply a potential for our own . . . into boys, into women, into whatever the hell we want, be it sexes or genders or any of the manifold wondrous identities that lie not between our legs but in our lives.

Trans is Latin for across, after all. It would be great if transmen, biowomen, and everyone in between could appreciate the plenitude of identities open to them throughout their lives. And that’s just what this show is for. Let us embrace David, Liz, and all the rest with open arms and mouths and water-forms, and hope that perhaps they like us, too, just a bit at least . . .

On that note, let us close by oh so gleefully misusing a monster quote from that master of misuse, and of potential-play, Donald Barthelme, masquerading here under the voice of a woman impregnated with a fetus by three men—in our interpretation, a woman who becomes us, impregnated with transformative potential by the girls of Girleye:

The engendering force was, perhaps, the fused glance of all of them. From the millions of units crawling about on the surface of the city, their wavering desirous eye selected me. The pupil enlarged to admit more light: more me. They began dancing little dances of suggestion and fear. These dances constitute an invitation of unmistakable import—an invitation which, if accepted, leads one down many muddy roads.

I accepted. What was the alternative?

9

Chavisa Woods on the Girleye Show

        Entering ‘World Feminisms’, the inaugural exhibition for the Elizabeth Sackler Center at the Brooklyn Museum, some years ago, I overheard a fifty-something white suit whispering to his viewing partner that he was “So tired of women trying to pass their bodies off as art.” I wondered, but unfortunately did not ask, what the man thought of endless centuries of men “trying to pass” women’s bodies off as art. John Berger, speaking of the use of the female body in classical nudes noted, “Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” Berger claimed that a man’s presence in an image was suggestive of what he was capable of doing to you, while the woman’s presence was suggestive of what she would or would not allow to be done to her.

        The artists in the Girleye Show make no apologies for ‘trying to pass their bodies off as art,’ simultaneously occupying spaces as object, appearing- yes, being watched- yes, yet actively so. These women are watching themselves being watched, but not as a suggestion of what they might allow to be done to them; they watch themselves being watched as an acknowledgement of what has been done to them, and, like the subaltern abjuring their position by speaking, through the appearance of active acknowledgement, they suggest what they are capable of doing to you, the viewer and, more importantly, what they are capable of doing to and for themselves.
I have always interpreted Berger’s quote as not only speaking of identity of the art object, but also of the identity of the female viewer looking at themselves as passive art objects. In Lauren Goldberg’s “Looking Glass”, a woman leans into the viewer, peering through a magnifying lens, her right eye dominating her gaze. Berger’s formational notion is exemplified with an ironic twist, the object of the art is not quite watching herself being watched, but watching the viewer watch her; a subtle but volatile difference. In this piece, the audience is acknowledged and challenged.

        The socio-historical relevance of the content of the pieces included in the Girleye show might be the first thing one notices when entering the exhibition, but it definitely will not be the last. The structure and skill pervading the anatomy of the photographs pull the pieces beyond a political narrative steeped in, for some, (not for me), a daunting haze of feminist identity politics, into a complexity of diverse narratives and visual constructions. If not, how could they ‘pass their bodies off as art’ so convincingly?

        Beth Hommel’s Palms and Knees catches the viewer with a stunning play of light on water. The black and white ripples of the wave outward from the center create perhaps an ominous flower, the stigma (flower’s center) of which being a woman drowning, or perhaps she is reaching out, being born from the center of the thing so indicative of a flower, which also posses a stigma of another sort. These invocations inferred simultaneously are not necessarily the ultimate culmination of the work; an immediate and lasting visual image.

        This image is a departure from the other of Hommel’s works included in the exhibition- for instance, Caress, which shows the torsos of two women in muffin-like dresses enjoying an intimate embrace, and Kitchen, displaying two woman in a kinetic moment of passion in front of an open refrigerator door; photos presenting a narrative between two characters whose relationships to one another are cast in as unambiguous a light as the vibrant colors saturating the print.

        Cassie Olander mediates on texture, using skin as her canvas in two pieces, Silver and Vulnerability. Ultimately she presents us with compelling and resolute portraiture in Reaching, Contemplative, Bubbly, and Danger. These are obviously not snapshots, but simple scenes set to capture the character of the subjects, which she has done clearly, simply, with incisive precision. In all but Danger, you walk away with the feeling of having been privy to something very intimate of the subjects. With Danger, a nude woman wrapped in police tape, the statement made is indicative more of the person as an identity than the identity of the person, yet not any less relevant than the former.

        Anne Marie Hansen, on the other hand, has depicted, beautifully, human movement and photographic motion with what appear to be a series of unrehearsed snapshots. Swimmers depicts, as you can guess, four women swimming. The shot is rendered from high above, a godlike position of viewing. This black and white image recalls tales of sirens. Miss Mercier is a snapshot of a woman covering her face with a scarf, the top half of her face obscured by a hat. Her eyes are smiling at us. This is a seemingly simple scene. The narrow slot through which the eyes gaze is reminiscent of a veil, yet the covering of her face creates a greater intimacy and provocation than would have been present if her full face had remained un-obscured.

        Finally, Lauren Goldberg presents us with a series of lush images, some snapshots, some constructed scenes. The line present throughout all of the images is the vigilance of the artist. Whether rehearsed or on the fly, Goldberg has captured the exact moment, the exact scene that will invoke a complex visceral response, while remaining loyal to a contract of beauty so often broken when content borders on disturbing. I shy away from calling the images poetic. They do not rhyme. There is no final stanza. Rather, they are each a series of chords stuck at once, creating a discord in which the mind is able to find some harmony. I will not describe them to you, but make especially sure to view Distance, Stairs and Crying Statue.

        In the Girleye Show, woman act, women appear and disappear, watch you watching, watch themselves being watched and know what they can do. Janet Bruesselbach has brought together a robust group of artists whose works compliment one another, while promising that around the next corner you will find a new and varied angle from which to approach the art you are currently practicing; the art of looking.

The first day, March 10, of member previews of the Marina Abromovic retrospective at MoMA, Steve Cannon asked me to take him up there to say hello to her. He remembered interviewing her by email eight years ago when she spent 6 weeks living in three exposed, spartan rooms at Sean Kelly gallery for House with an Ocean View.

In “The Artist Is Present”, on MoMA’s second floor, he understood she would be present, and therefore wanted to present himself to her and mention he’d interviewed her.

“The Artist Is Present” consists of Marina sitting at a table, for three months of MoMA open hours, in the middle of a large open space under massive lights from four corners. Museum attendees are invited to individually sit across from her. She does not speak. She barely emotes. She sometimes rests and shifts when she needs to.
When we got there, there was a line to sit with the artist. We didn’t notice the line, and when the middle-aged tourist who had been placidly staring Marina down got up, I tried to guide Steve out there. Naturally the next person in line moved faster and we retreated. It would have been very curious to have heard and seen Steve trying to engage the Present Marina: the perfect communication of the blind with the mute.
The power of many of her works does derive from her visual impact as a tall, very striking, seemingly ageless woman, and the long dress she wears during The Artist Is Present emphasizes that. Yet performance art is a field whose aesthetics derive very little from visuality itself and can primarily consist of description. Some of Marina’s best works are rejected proposals. Many are explicitly self-destructive or masochistic to the point of the audience having to call 911 to revive the artist. The best, indeed, rely on trust games with the audience. Documentation is the form in which performance art becomes present and possessable by museums. This means it’s more perceptible to the blind than almost anything else that has grown from the Visual Art field (touchable sculptures and sound installations still cling to a certain visual-spatial approach), at the expense of reliance on the verbal.
The rest of the retrospective fills the sixth floor. MoMA makes a point of announcing that this is their first performance art retrospective. It’s also a great deal of attention given to a female artist, one who is, as she puts it, the “grandmother” of performance art. In the seventies her work was done in collaboration with German partner Ulay, and the documentation makes it seem that she was the more passionate and dedicated to the interventions they staged, higher profile, the brains of the operation. My favorites are those done with no props, or few, like AAA AAA AAAA (in which they scream louder and louder at each other) or one in which they slap each other. Perhaps the best-known is “Rest Energy”(video), consisting of Marina holding a bow with Ulay holding an arrow cocked in it towards her heart. The best of these were videos - only the less dangerous are reperformed in the retrospective, prompting accusations of a declawing by historical institution. Marina and Ulay’s relationship was their work and vice versa, and their collaboration ended through hiking along the Great Wall of China towards each other and then separating. In her maturity, Marina’s performances and films tap her Slavic roots and often include dedications and reperformances of other artists’ work.
Marina’s own work is reperformed in shifts by an army of the body-aware. One of the best is that in which she and Ulay stood naked in a narrow doorway facing each other, while everyone who entered the gallery pushed past them. In the reperformance the gap between them was made large enough to pass by without turning sideways, which Marina was uncomfortable about, but arguably the average body passing through in 2000s America is larger than that in 1970s Europe - a suggestion that, when I brought it up, was considered a bit taboo. When Steve passed through between his two dates, we suggested he face the woman and we the man. He gently stepped on the man’s feet and rubbed noses with the woman.

The most interesting part of this was peoples’ expressions as they came through. A camera crew shooting a feature film documentary on Marina noticed us, and later interviewed Steve and the female performer about experiencing art after losing his sight. “Do you smell them?” were among the stranger questions. My co-date Hilary Maslon answered: “He smokes, he can’t smell anything.”
In his usual humor, Steve claims that he writes about art easily by just saying what the artist says. One element of this show was that the art itself could potentially react to how I was describing it - although the performative discipline is not to do so.
The performer enjoyed, as I would too, the occasional jostling and scratches, that provided some relief from standing in one place for two hours or more. After all, when you’ve set yourself up to break down your physical boundaries with strangers, violation is the best possible thing that could happen, and yet distance reasserts itself as it must. The prescriptiveness of the verbal documentation and proposals convey far better than any warm analysis the numinosity, zen or shamanistic qualities of Marina’s art.

by Christopher Heffernan

The cult classic Trout Fishing in America, written by Richard Brautigan and first published in 1967, has been released in a new edition by Mariner Books, a subsidiary of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.  The book has not been published on its own since the early ‘80’s when Houghton Mifflin began packaging Brautigan’s books together in single volume sets with Trout Fishing in America set together with The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster and In Watermelon Sugar.  The new standalone edition, costing $13.95, and running 112 pages has a warm introduction from former poet laureate Billy Collins but also comes with a startling peculiarity.  For the original edition and the subsequent packaged editions after the covers had been a picture of Brautigan with a woman in front of a blurred statue of Benjamin Franklin.  It may at first seem like it does not matter but the first chapter of the book speaks directly about this cover, so it seems strange that Mariner decided to change the cover to the childlike drawing of a fish that was used for the dedication page and instead put the photo that is the theme of the first chapter called “The Cover for Trout Fishing in America” inside the book, just before the introduction.  Of course the book business demands that as time goes by and tastes change so must covers change but with a post modern tour de force that uses meta as one of its key elements and has the first chapter titled and dealing directly with the cover, it is self defeating to change it. 

The book is divided up into 47 sections or chapters, each with a title, and ranging in length from one page to roughly six.  It is a quick read and a fun read and it is a read you can always go back to as the undercurrents that Brautigan deals with offer a depth that lurks in the back of each chapter and the back of the reader’s mind so that there are always new connections to be made and new feelings to be felt.  The sections are split into different threads and themes with some recurring but with no over all coherent story, making it lyrical.  But this does not make it any less of a novel.  What engages the reader is, first, Brautigan’s prose style; smooth, light, with easily read and digestible sentences that move easily and naturally from one to the other.  Then there is the clash of themes where, here, drama does not build in the character’s lives, it is built in the reader himself as the different images and scenes, descriptions and events constantly push into and pull each other along.  And then there is the aspect of metafiction, fiction that reflects upon itself.  Brautigan takes it and puts in the first chapter and references the cover, as mentioned, a photo taken in front of a Benjamin Franklin statue in a park in San Francisco. 

The self referencing is important as it starts the function of building the book as an experience in the reader.  Good books make reading an experience so that the reader is not following a story but actually having emotional reactions to the work, is actually feeling and creating memories of feeling; so what Brautigan does by opening the book with a discussion of the cover is telling the reader that the event isn’t a story, or the book, but is actually the reader, as the reader must go back and observe the cover and now knows that the author who is now the narrator knows that he is writing a thing and he’s telling you he’s writing it so that like all good metafiction he points out that the thing is not the Thing but is a reflection of it and that the real Thing is life itself.  And then he goes on with the other themes, most particularly the degradation of America, as an optimistic description of the statue of Ben Franklin statue and the word WELCOME facing the four directions, are coupled with bums at a church across the street waiting for free sandwiches.  It is a scene of poverty and a clash with the manufactured image of America that moves throughout the book.  The image is then heightened by a Kafka quote that reads, “I like the Americans because they are healthy and optimistic.”

This degradation through its many facets, the rise of technology, loss of value, loss of a connection with something more natural or organic, etc, runs the length of the book and is paralleled and contrasted with the other large thread that is of pastoral scenes of fishing.  Many of these scenes involve a family, moving around from campsites in America, illustrating the splendor of the country and the depth of its natural beauty while at the same time reinforcing the book with the metaphor for fishing, sustenance, a theme as old as Christ.  What is remarkable about the book is that although Brautigan has forgone classic structure he retained one of the oldest themes, that of life returning life to itself with the symbol of fish.  That this lost connection with nature can be retrieved through fishing.  Over the centuries this theme often involved a redemption, usually of land or character but always in the end of life.  Brautigan knows this but does not state it.  Instead he gives the reader events and description so that instead of being told what the problem is it is made implicit and instead of being told what to do about it the book, being set up as an event itself, activates the reader’s own sympathy or empathy or even urgency.  This is one of the key elements that made it such a hit in the ‘60’s.  It was a true cry, a sign, pointing directly at the clash of technology and nature and that nature was loosing—as Brautigan points out when addressing the camping craze in America that the Coleman lamp has become the beacon of these people and that it is “unholy”; and as he points to the rise of consumerism which is wonderfully illustrated in the section titled “The Cleveland Wrecking Yard.”  In this chapter the narrator finds out about a place that sells streams for trout fishing, that you can go there and build a stream, paying for it by the foot, stock it with fish and even surround it with trees and shrubs and wildlife to make a perfectly manufactured natural setting.  Brautigan’s light style makes these few pages seem almost cutesy as the narrator is picking out what he wants and discusses options as if buying a car with the salesman.  But those Brautigan undercurrents begin to creep up and the astute reader will begin to realize that it is a simple but poignant and strong commentary on, what was at the time, a rising consumerism that is now our everyday way of life.  Though we do not buy trout streams by the foot, almost everything else in our society, including our health and our bodies, has become commodities for profit. 

What stands out in the book, though, as truly astounding, is the relationship that “Trout Fishing in America” has with the reader, that it is a thing, not only the book itself, but in the book “Trout Fishing in America,” exists as an object to be explored, a personification, an event and even an entity unto itself.  Brautigan begins this creation of Trout Fishing in America as an entity right in the second chapter where the narrator wonders about when he first heard about Trout Fishing in America and there is a response after his brief musings by Trout Fishing in America itself.  This sets the stage for Trout Fishing in America not being simply an activity or even a pastoral state of mind to be reached in the tranquility of nature, but an actual entity, running around out there.  It moves, it talks, it does things.  It is at the same time a hotel and a bum named Trout Fishing in America Shorty.  It is all these things and more and Brautigan does not waste his or the reader’s time by trying to define it or explain it so that the reader may on his own grasp it.  This is where his having the book as a true experience comes into play, because it is the event of reading all of the chapters and sections against each other where Trout fishing in America is all of these different things and exists as different things, undefined and explained in their relationships that, in the end, the reader must put it all together into the actual experience, the way that any person who lives through an event puts the pieces together for a full understanding. 

It is not all completely out of bounds.  In the end Brautigan brings the pastoral family of campers to the city and the park in San Francisco with the Franklin statue that starts the book, pinching the whole thing off almost as it had begun.  Here, with their little girl, they come across Trout Fishing in America Shorty who, old and broke and nearing death beckons to the child who at first pays him attention then with a flippancy and frivolity runs away.  It is a scene of contrasts and foils, of warmth and desperation, of family and loneliness that is offered to the reader, so typical of this book and Brautigan, with no implicit meaning other than what the reader can get from it with his own senses.  

Over all the book is short and accessible, easy to read, and easy to read on many levels.  It is an exquisite example of post modernism and a triumph of literary themes and explorations that edge into the prophetic.  It is almost sad that this book is a cult classic, that its association with the 60’s and the counter culture movement has basically trumped its validity as solid work of fiction.  Hopefully, now, enough time has gone by and with the publication of this new edition by itself the up and coming generation of readers will see Trout Fishing in America for what it truly is.

(crowd-sourcing)
Having met David Hammons twenty tears ago (if not more), I know his motto has always been, how to stay ahead of the game.

On a personal level, I’ve always thought of him as someone who never followed trends. His ideas about art have always been something new and different.

              For example, at one point he was selling snowballs on the corner of St. Marks and 2^nd Ave, and at another time he took telephone poles, and placed basketball goals atop the poles, which he showcased in an empty lot in Harlem. He called this piece, Higher Goals.

              Then, at one time, while sitting at an opening at a Gerhard Richter show at the MOMA, David said he wanted to do a show at Tribes. When I asked him what the content would be, David was quiet and said nothing. He instructed me to leave what I had on the wall, and said he would be by the next day.

              The next day he came by, took a newspaper, rubbed it against the wall where the frames were, producing an outline on the wall. This process took him less than an hour. He shook my hand and said, “I’m ready.”

              The next day, Robert Storr, who was the chief curator of contemporary art at the MOMA, and Jack Tilton showed up wanting to know, ‘where was the art. David called it invisible art. Unfortunately for them, there was no art to be taken from the walls.

              It was then six months later that he repeated the same process down at Ace Gallery, leaving the whole space devoid of art objects, with a woman sitting at a computer, next to someone playing the violin. That was the art.

              It was somewhere around this time that I introduced him to Mireia Sentis, who wanted him to do a show in Spain. He had no idea as to what he would show, or how much he could charge the institution. 

              She explained that his show would take place in the Crystal Palace in Madrid, which the Spanish had built to collect flowers from the Philippines. Meanwhile, Mr. Hammons had been invited to produce a show in Poland. He sent them a fax announcing the date of his arrival in Madrid.

              It was right then and there, he hit upon the Idea of the Global Fax Festival. Aside from A Gathering of the Tribes, David contacted an array of other galleries and institutions, which had shown his work over the last twenty odd years.

              And on opening night, during a thunderstorm in Madrid, he had people sending faxes from all over the world. The faxes rained in from fax machines which were suspended from the ceiling of the Crystal Palace, while Butch Morris was performing written and improvised music. The faxing went on for an entire month. That is, whenever artists, writers and musicians dropped by Tribes, we had them shoot a fax over to Madrid. The same was true for the other participating institutions.

Over the course, over 10,000 faxes were received. From those, a book was produced, including over 300 faxes from all over the globe. Some artists whose work can be found in the Global Fax Festival booklet include: Andrew Castrucci, Butch Morris, Sarah Fergisun, Giuseppe Gallo, Jack Tilton, Alecia Romero, Amy Ouzoonian, Amiri Baraka, Stanley Whitney, Elana Oscar, and many others. Pieces include drawings, prints, manifestos, news articles, poetry and more. One piece features a sketch of Dali’s famous mustache. Another is simply the word, BUSH! with the exclamation point illustrated as a noose.

              Originally, when Mr. Hammons got wind that the show would take place in a glass enclosure, he thought it would be a good idea to use sledge hammers and stones to destroy the entire space. But the Spanish government had disagreed. Global fax festival was plan B.

His latest foray; he was invited to do a show in Vienna. He came up with idea of smells. He would fill the space with various odors, and this would be the show.  Mr. Hammons has always been one who thinks of making art out of nothing, and nothing seems to be his forte.