You have a number of options interpreting today’s photographs.

A) This is what my brain looks like when trying to write not one but two really long and involved reviews during a single week. And now darkness descends and all that’s left are the photographs.

B) This is what my cerebrum looks like (the part of the brain that handles some aspect of language) when desperately trying to find words that can be printed in a family friendly blog in reaction to the outcome of Great Britain’s election. Darkness descends there, too.

C) This is what an infinity mirror room looks like when created by a nonagenarian artist obsessed with polka dots, fully insisting that we all are same, connected souls in the world.

If you picked: Yayoi Kusama, you won. If you guessed Brexit, you sort of won. If you said braindead, you are my friend.

C, in other words, rules the objective world. A, B and C, however, are not mutually exclusive…..

The Souls of a Million Light Years Away is currently on exhibit at The Broad and each visitor braving the lines to get in is accorded exactly 45 seconds to explore the experience. Guard with stop watch on hand standing outside and calling you out.

And here are Polkadots and Moonbeams…..

There could not have been a better introduction to Iranian-born, US artist Shirin Neshat than watching one of her videos, Rapture (1999) early on in the extensive retrospective of 30 years of her work, currently on exhibition at The Broad in L.A.

Everything, but everything was binary in that experience. You sit between split screens, having to turn your head to the left to see one part of the video installation, to the right to see the other and never the twain shall meet. The left side depicts hundreds of women, the right the equivalent number of men. The females, cloaked in black hijab or chador watch, often passively, pray, are mostly silent except for an occasion of ondulation, disperse and eventually send a few of their own on a rickety boat into the depths of the Atlantic ocean (filmed in Morocco.) The men, in identical black pants and white shirts, run the length of a citadel, canons and all, climb to the roof, sing, feast, display some hierarchical order and are generally active, eventually waving en masse to the departing women from afar.

Think of it as Buñuel meets Herzog, and I mean that as a compliment. Sort of. It was visually dramatic, exquisitely staged and choreographed. The binary themes of female/male, activity/passivity, departure/arrival, even a dreamlike state vs reality that are central to all of her work, were right upfront. The video brought the issues of gender differences and religious intolerance to the fore with a sledge hammer, black and white for all to see, and yet leaving enough room for ambiguity that even the most fervent feminist could leave the screening room with an inkling of hope. Maybe.

There was that nagging thought – and one that repeatedly crept into my brain while taking in this comprehensive exhibition – as to whether we have made any progress away from the orientalist lens applied throughout history to members of non-western cultures, those exotic figures from a different world. The forced head movements between screens had me wonder about disconnection, the separation of them vs us, but also about how our gaze is steered, often away from taking in the whole picture; the staged costuming and movement of the people evoked a sense of directorial control that was reminiscent of its colonialist counterpart, chador replacing the nude bodies of those Seraglio paintings of yore as a mirror image of exotic otherness.

Don’t get me wrong: I think Neshat is superb in the way she creates visual scenarios, employs melodrama to make a point, ingeniously cashing in on our fascinations. She is powerful in her story telling and quite sensitive to contemporary concerns with exile, gendered existence, the interplay between political power and religious fervor. And she has whatever it takes to become a successful female artist in a male dominated world, never mind her exceedingly dainty, feminine appearance, dangling designer jewelry, heavy make-up and all. More power to her!

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She also has a story that is carefully tailored to underpin her art. Raised in Iran in a middle-class family in the 1950s, sent to catholic boarding school in Tehran to get a westernized education, she came to the US at age 17 in 1975 to go to college and later grad school to get her MfA. Discontent with her attempts at making her own art, she moved to New York city and worked at the side of her partner for over 10 years, tending to a cultural meeting point The Storefront for Art and Architecture. Those years were not exactly exile – that only began with the political changes in Iran prohibiting her return, and she has certainly refrained from visiting there for the last decades, now openly declaring that she never wants to go home, even if it were politically possible, and intends to leave nostalgia for the place behind.

Her first large project in the 1990s after a visit back home after years that included the revolution, the hostage crisis, and the Iraq war, propelled her like a rocket into the successful realms of the art world. The photographic series Women of Allah depicted veiled women with guns in various positioning, often looking directly at you in regal and defiant ways, overlaid in carefully applied calligraphy citing Farsi poetry, often by women poets. No longer object of stares but agents of their own gaze, these women, photographed between 1993 and 1997, projected strength, particularly in the juxtaposition of tenderness, when coupled with children, with rawness, when harnessing the weaponry, another one of those binary plots.

The writing across the bodies of the subjects felt like a membrane to me, a distancing device in the sense that the language cannot be deciphered by this Western viewer, but also as a protective barrier against too much exposure of the body parts it covered. If we could read Farsi, we would learn that two very contrasting poets are projected onto the different subjects:

“Farrokhzad’s imagery from the pre-revolutionary Iran, controversially sexual, Western, a modern rebel thirsty for life—and Taherzadeh, the new regime’s idol, utterly alien to the artist, Muslim, traditional, Eastern, revolutionary, daydreaming about martyrdom. In Untitled (1996), the woman is the object of desire, her face covered with Farrokhzad’s text. In Speechless (1996) and others employing Taherzadeh’s text, the woman willingly becomes the revolutionary sacrifice: motherly, subjugated, utterly secondary.”

While I looked at these determined faces I wondered about how the historical development in the 30 years since these photos were taken would change our reaction: if I knew these women were involved with ISIS, would I see a triumph in their courage to join the fight? If I was a Kurdish female fighter, now raped and killed for participation in a singular social experiment of gender equality, would my Iranian sisters, fighting for the right to veiled themselves again, feel like enemies or allies? Does a change in contemporary context alter the poignancy of contemporary art?

Does a change in politics alter the way we describe a country? I was reminded of one of my favorite travel books of all times, Terence O’Donnell’s Garden of the Brave in War, that describes life in pre-revolutionary Iran in the countryside, introducing world views quite different from our Western perspective and yet assuring a sense of shared humanity. How would he have depicted the contemporary state of affairs?

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Neshat has won countless awards for her work, among them the First International Prize at the Venice Biennale (1999), the Grand Prix at the Kwangju Biennale (2000), the Visual Art Award from the Edinburgh International Film Festival (2000), the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in New York (2002), the ZeroOne Award from the Universität der Künste Berlin (2003), the Hiroshima Freedom Prize from the Hiroshima City Museum of Art (2005), and the Lillian Gish Prize in New York (2006). Her contributions to important collections can be found here.

The early photographic explorations were soon joined by videos and feature films, media that I find frankly much more interesting and a better match for her strength of creating visual drama, and also requiring deeper thinking than her portrait work. The exquisitely mounted exhibition at The Broad meanders from room to room, large spaces that provide breathing room for the XL portraiture. There is something about the size (and the repetitious use of calligraphy obscuring faces across 30 years of work) that eventually strikes as dangerously close to gimmicky.

The strong emotional impact of the first series, in other words, was not matched for me in later work, now staging subjects from other countries, often by major commissions, in Egypt and Azerbaijan. People propped up in studio arrangements with photographers present (Larry Barns being a frequent and outstanding collaborator), lighting assistants bustling, and Neshat directing pose, are asked how they feel about poverty or what home means to them (the little things like mother’s food, it turns out to little surprise.) Capturing their tears in front of the recording group feels invasive to me, if not exploitative, and the size of the portraits prevents any sense of intimacy with the subjects.

Much more impressive is work that contrasts the smallness of humans, almost always women, with the largeness of landscapes or architectural molochs. The stills anticipate what the video installations confer: a striking sense of visual exploration of psychological states.

The Broad excels in placing the small auditoriums where the videos are shown in-between the spaces for photographic work – it is almost like breathing room provided, except that your breath is sucked in and held from the tension elicited by these films. It is as director that Neshat succeeds most, on both the emotional and intellectual level. (Unclear, why that did no transfer to her first major directing role in an operatic setting – she was called to direct Aida at the Salzburger Festspiele in 2017, an opera with a love triangle and political and religious oppression, right up her alley, one would think. The showcase production with Muti conducting and Netrebko in the main role was lauded, but Neshat’s directing ruthlessly panned by the critics.)

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Neshat does not consider herself a political activist. Politics affect her, though, and she talks freely about being exposed to racial profiling immediately after 9/11 and then again since the 2016 election that confronted her with more explicit racism in her own private experience. Her recent work (Roja and Land of Dreams) turns to explorations of living as an exile in the US, providing astute social commentary on trauma and war as experienced by all sides, but also linking to her feeling that she is not welcome in either culture or place.

When asked if she considers herself a feminist she answers indirectly: “If someone asks me that and they often do, I give the question back to the audience. Do they think I am? Yes they do, so I take that, it’s ok with me.” Her recurrent emphasis on the dichotomy of women being extremely fragile and vulnerable vs extremely strong and defiant might need a closer look in the context of feminist theory. The implications of gendered realities in her work, however, are fascinating and if you have a chance to see this exhibition, make sure you do!

Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again

Oct 19 – Feb 16, 2020 The Broad, Los Angeles, CA

I Will Greet the Sun Again

I will greet the sun again
and the little river that once ran in me
and the clouds that were my ruminations
and the aching blooms of poplar trees,
my companions in those seasons of drought.

I will greet the crowd of crows again,
who brought me their rich perfumes,
gifts from gardens of the night,
and my mother who lived in the mirror
and whose shape was the shape of my own old age.

I will greet the earth again,
who in her lust to create me again,
fills her fiery belly with seeds of green.

I am coming, I am coming, I will come again,
with my long hair dripping the scent of dirt,
with my eyes inflicting the density of darkness,
with brambles I’ve picked from the far side of the wall.

I am coming, I am coming, I will come again,
and the doorway once more will be filled with love
and I’ll greet the lovers standing in the doorway,
and the little girl there
still standing in love.

Forough Farrokhzad

Translated from Persian by Paul Weinfield, © 2014

Husband: “You really are drawn to dark art, aren’t you? Who is she?” Me: “What do you mean? We have a print of her’s hanging on your side of the bed.” Husband: “Print? What print? ”

Thus I offer you a slice of typical conversation overheard in our household, while dragging my beloved to a striking exhibition of works by Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945,) one of the icons of German modern art, currently shown at The Getty in L.A.

While he was muttering about the absence of visual memory, my brain was frantically searching for a translation of an untranslatable German term that is often – and mistakenly, oh so mistakenly – cited in connection with Kollwitz’ art: Betroffenheitskitsch. Betroffenheit can be translated as shock, dismay, consternation, sadness. But in this context it is probably meant to describe too much empathy verging into Kitschiness.

It was the kind of condemnation you heard from a younger generation of German artists, Martin Kippenberger among them, after over-exposure to the works of this celebrated artist who was claimed, for one, by the left (communists, socialists, feminists, you name it) for her anti-war stance and her artistic exploration of themes of social justice. Yury and Sonya Winterberg, authors of a Kollwitz biography (2015), speculate that Kollwitz’ emotional response to proletarian misery and the consequences of war was incompatible with the ironic if not sarcastic self-image that many more recent German artists have come to identify with.

The biography shines new light on her life and work. New to me, anyhow. Painstaking archival work and interviews with three of her surviving grandchildren reveal a complex story. On the one hand, she was preoccupied with death, growing up in a household that saw three of her siblings perish young. On the other hand, she possessed an extraordinary life force, was sensual, and openly acknowledged her bisexuality. The love for her children, it is hinted in the narrative, was overbearing bordering on abuse when it came to interacting with her sons in sexualized situations. Her self-assurenedness made her a center of her social circles, and many a famous artist, including Ernst Barlach and Berthold Brecht adored her. Her membership in diverse women’ organizations can be counted as early feminist engagement.

Germany has not one but three museums dedicated to her, the Käthe Kollwitz Museum in Cologne which has a marvelous collection of her works, the Käthe Kollwitz Museum in Berlin where she lived for much of her life, and the Käthe Kollwitz Haus in Moritzburg, where she rented two small rooms at the estate of friends after having been bombed out in Berlin in 1944 and where she died a year later.

Kollwitz was also hailed by the right as a safe bet of someone who had been unfazed by Nazi condemnation and offered sufficient pathos in her sculptures to serve as memorials for those killed in war and by Nazi persecution, needed when Berlin emerged as the German capital again. (None other than Chancellor Helmut Kohl ordered her work for the Central Memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany to the Victims of War and Dictatorship a few years after the wall came down.)

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So who was this woman? Someone who blazed a path into the Berlin academy at a time when males almost exclusively dominated, who won prizes, who was a sufficient threat to the Nazis to be banned from showing her work – and who simply observed everyday life, refining her skills in perpetuity to depict human suffering of the working class, the poor, and those sent to die for national ideals and imperialistic strivings. She lost a son in WW I, a grandson in WWII; she saw close friends murdered by paramilitary forces after the short-lived November revolution and the Spartacist uprising in January of 1919.

She observed, she depicted. She bore witness.

She also made it very clear that she resented being co-opted by any kind of political movement, across decades of diligent diary entries stating that she was not a political artist. She wanted to address political and social issues with her art, but from a humanist perspective, one that did not shy away from the sadness, the futility and misery that surrounded her.

Käthe Kollwitz: Prints, Process, Politics is allowing us a hard look at what she really accomplished. The exhibition features etchings, lithographs and woodcuts, from every phase of the artist’s career, alongside related preparatory drawings, proofs, and rejected versions of prints. It is a terrific learning experience, beautifully curated to showcase the evolution of some of her print cycles. Early etchings are delicate, later woodcuts become darker, more streamlined, expressionistic, although she never joined the expressionist movement per se. The viewer is expertly guided through multiple iterations of one image with explanatory pointers to what was changed and why by the artist.

This includes one of her most famous print cycles, Peasants’ War, produced across 6 years until completed in 1908. Its seven prints are eerily prescient of the tragedy about to unfold in 1914, repeating the human suffering that happened during the Bauernkrieg in 1524, a year-long revolt by poor farmers, ruthlessly crushed by the aristocracy, with over 100 000 farmers slaughtered. It was the largest and most devastating, futile uprising before the French Revolution.

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From the catalogue: According to exhibition co-curator Louis Marchesano, “Kollwitz is known for her powerful social commentary but what people often don’t fully appreciate is that the immediacy and expressive clarity of her images belie the efforts behind the works, which are products of a deliberate and measured artistic process.”

Exposure to process aside, one of the most moving contents for me was the depiction of mourners around the murdered friend and revolutionary Karl Liebknecht lying in state. As these things sometimes happen serendipitously, the very next day I came across a tattered copy of Alfred Döblin’s novel Karl and Rosa: November 1918, A German Revolution, a book I had read some 40 years ago. The novel by the same author as of Berlin Alexanderplatz describes the fragmentary revolution and the bloody terror that Kollwitz observed as well, so shortly after the horrors of the great war had ended. Here is a terrific review of the book that goes beyond Liebknecht’s and Luxemburg’s fate to sketch a crucial part of German history.

The novel was for sale as a fundraiser at the Southern California Library in LA. The library’s archive has an extensive collection of pamphlets and political ephemera from social justice causes. Among its substantial holdings are hallmarks of local activism, such as primary documents of the Black Panther Party and the Los Angeles Protection of the Foreign Born, which were saved by local residents during the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. I happened to come by when local organizers wrote postcards for prisoners for the holidays.

The community garden attached to the library is open and welcoming to the many homeless along Vermont Ave. The murals outside depict the history of women in the labor movement, among others.

Kollwitz would have felt right at home.

She was strong, demanding, ahead of her times and probably hard to live with. Her art work is extraordinary (over 100 self-portraits alone) and what is shown (and how it is shown) at The Getty provides much insight into her artistic prowess and her humanistic passions.

Käthe Kollwitz: Prints, Process, Politics – December 3, 2019–March 29, 2020, GETTY CENTER, Los Angeles, CA

https://www.getty.edu/research/exhibitions_events/exhibitions/kollwitz/

Music today is a song about the movement to honor Liebknecht and Luxemburg.

For my German readers there is a fascinating find – a former GDR children’s magazine had a record attached with an educational audio play on the imperialism, communist honor and Liebknecht’s revolt.

“One can resist [oppression] only in terms of the identity that is under attack.” Hannah Arendt Men in Dark Times, 1968.

The title alone made me curious. Was Transparency a less than original descriptor of works made of glass? Was it an absolutely clever pointer redressing the invisibility of members of the LGBTQ+ community, who were the sole artistic contributors to the current exhibition of that name at the Museum of Glass (MOG) in Tacoma? Was it an invitation to shine the light on preoccupations and concerns of this particular community, only to reveal that these are often shared by us all, no matter what community we identify with? Was it a play on the fact that transparency is successfully used for purposes of camouflage in nature, as exquisitely demonstrated by jellyfish, South American glass frogs and clear wing butterflies?

The exhibit, first presented at the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia during Pride month in 2017, will be on display in Tacoma until September 2020. It celebrates a wide range of subjects, methods and styles equal to the variability within the artistic community that produced these works. I counted the fact that the title alone made me think before I even physically entered the exhibit, as a success. As it turns out, one of many that this show delivers.

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One of the first pieces you encounter is a large disc heavily ornamented with white roses, reminiscent of a flowery Victorian doily. You see an eye, somewhat off center, which, eerily, begins to move, to blink, quite clearly spying on you. Where we Hide from No One (2017), a glass, Poly Vitro and video sculpture by Tim Tate, is part of a series that he connects to issues of commercial surveillance, a balancing act between needs for privacy and protection from threat, and as a reminder “that we are united in Orwellian defiance.”

Alternative interpretations readily come to mind. Peering out from behind an opaque surface to see if it is safe to come out, is reminiscent of what so many generations of the queer community had to do from hiding, just as the peeping Toms who did not dare to live their fantasies, peered in reverse. The saccharine display of clouds of little roses obscures the harsh reality underneath, just like seemingly frivolous costuming hides the hardness of lives often exposed to condescension if not outright condemnation.

Tate, Mount Rainier’s Washington Glass School Co-Director had his work The Endless Cycle from a different series represent the US at this year’s Glasstress, the adjunct event to the Venice Biennale. It elicits an illusion of infinity, also found in the piece specifically created for Transparency: We Rose Up (2017). The optical manipulation, looking from afar like the crown of a martyr, draws the gaze in, at times mesmerizing. It is a memorial to the legions lost to AIDS/HIV infections. Whether with mirrors, or more cutting edge videos, Tate’s incorporation of technology into a millennia-old medium creates striking effects, linking aesthetic form to social substance in innovative ways.

The tragedy of AIDS with its loss of an entire generation of men in the 1980s and 90s, appears in several works. Particularly moving was Jeff Zimmer‘s The Presence of Absence (2016) which depicts a skull overlaid with red crosses symbolizing AIDS and an etched phrase: “Your search – John Miles and Jeff Zimmer – did not return any documents.” Googling his formative first lover who died of the disease in 1995, the artist found no trace of him in the digital universe that contains multitudes of the rest of us.

One of the strengths of this show is derived from the fact that it is not just about loss somewhat specific to the LGTBQ+ community, like AIDS. All of us can relate to the mourning of lost loved ones through any kind of illness, most beautifully represented by Eric Hess who lost his husband to cancer. Swings (2017) depicts one intact, one broken swing, with its shadow resembling the shape of a chemotherapy infusion bag. The commonality of shared experience in some way magnifies the fact that there are additional burdens carried by this community that many of us who are not part of it are spared. I only wish that the existential threats to transgender people had also found their way into this display – the most recent statistics of their murders, 22 in 2019 alone, are staggering.

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Tales of loss and longing recur in this quiet show, told at times with wit and sometimes wistfulness. Take Joshua Hershman‘s Derealization (2017) for example. A panel of photographs, partially obscured by opaque glass, in front of a pin hole camera made of glass (Obscura, 2017), is open to multiple takes. On the one hand, it stands in mocking contrast to the Transparency title of the exhibit. On the other hand, it describes the clinical disturbance that many people who have been exposed to trauma or suffer from PTSD experience. Fogginess of surroundings and a sense that things are not real pervade the sensory up-take of those who have been severely harmed.

Somewhat explicitly sexual works are few and far between, cautiously stashed in corners. One wonders why, given that they exhibit the same dignity present in so many other strong pieces in this show. Whether they deal with ways to explore the malleability of the male gaze, as Amanda Nardone‘s Shatter (2017) does, or carefully tease the viewer’s obliviousness as to what the title could possibly imply, as does Walter Zimmermann‘s Pick of the Litter (2017), they make you think. My measure of success, as should be clear by now.

Works that focus on issues of gendered experience are also on display. What it means for women to break into the male dominated glass blowing world – I’ll spare you puns about glass ceilings – is beautifully captured in Kim Harty‘s To Signal to Summon (2016) which she describes as “ambiguous: A sparkling object trying to seduce or a reflective warning, signaling danger.”

Pink as in Revolution (2019) from The Wheel of Liberation Series by Sabrina Knowles and Jenny Pohlman is a circle of double-headed spears that evoke imagery of totem and power, of prayer wheels and meditation. Knowing that throughout their 25 year collaboration the two artists traveled wide and far, always searching for inspiration from women throughout time and civilizations, helps to trace the influences. As the artists explain:  “Regarding the symbology of our spears: to us they represent self-empowerment and freedom from oppression and were born from learning about the story of Nehanda during our 1997 Zimbabwe journey.”

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Washington State is often considered a LGTBQ+ friendly state. LGTBQ people are legally protected from discrimination; Washington enacted LGBTQ protections in 2006. Same-sex marriage has been legal since 2012, and same-sex couples are allowed to adopt. Conversion therapy on minors has also been illegal since 2018. The state has a new LGTBQ commission with Manny Santiago as executive director, the was created by the Legislature and signed into law by governor Jay Inslee in April 2019. The commission will identify the needs of and advocate for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer communities. The immediate goals are directed at assessing the laws that product this community, to establish a resource guide that can be easily accessed across the state, and to understand the needs of the various sub-segments of the population.

High on Santiago’s list is also education. The Museum of Glass’s current exhibition is certainly a step in that direction. Transparency teaches without ever sliding into didactic boredom.

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There is an ongoing discussion among producers, exhibitors and consumers of art regarding the role of identity politics. It is about more than “just” people of a particular race, ethnicity, gender, or religion forming alliances and organizing politically to defend their group’s interests. Hannah Arendt’s principle that one can resist only in terms of the identity under attack points to an important insight: people are not statistically, historically, or economically interchangeable. An economically secure White woman has a different existence from a poverty-stricken Black one. A CIS person is not exposed to the abuse and persecution that those labeled sexually deviant often were across history and cultures. Identity, when under threat, IS political. And the political space to explore the consequences of life as a minority and the implications of discrimination needs to be granted in public – even when it also invites ethnographic-nationalist identity politics that are currently sprouting like poisonous mushrooms on the fertile grounds of European and American right-wing movements.

To pinpoint a political identity that is under attack is a way to fight oppression, rather than a danger to inclusive, democratic values. Calls for a “shared humanity,” then, need to be heeded with caution, if they try to blot out what is the specific fate of a minority. On the other hand, demonstrations of what we all share can open the borders between groups, invite less defensive reflection and exploration. And this, I think, is what Transparency pulls off when it’s at its best.

For one, there is a focus on the human figure in gender-neutral or abstracting ways, whether we are looking at the work by Pearl Dick or Drew Mattei (I could not find a website, alas.)

For me, the most successful pairing was an installation of multiple abstracted figures, Transparent (2017), again by the perceptive team of Pohlman and Knowles, against a paint marker – mural by Natalie Hope McDonald The Line of Beauty (2019.) The figures, from the duo’s Hommage series, display fluent movements of necks, heads and shoulders, as if to turn to us or each other to form connections.

Connectedness is also the first impression you have when looking at the web of lines across the wall behind the installation. The intersections are sometimes in focus, sometimes partially obscured by the glass figures, and only eventually reveal the strong triangular elements that hold them together, a motif that is not only common in modern LGTBQ iconography, but was also used as identifier in Nazi persecution of members of this community.

The title of this piece by Niki Hildebrand, What affects one affects us all (2014) summarizes it perfectly: understanding, accepting and embracing connections allow us to act in solidarity with human beings whose identity was the source for persecution. MOG’s exhibit Transparency paves the way for such connection.

MUSEUM OF GLASS

1801 Dock Street, Tacoma, WA 98402

253.284.4750info@museumofglass.org

October 2019 – September 2020

I had let my membership at the Portland Art Museum lapse. Too much of the programming was, at best, not particularly interesting, at worst, block-buster annoying. I guess I’m not the kind who is fascinated by the history of luxury cars….

That said, there are always exceptions, some truly terrific exhibits slated, and I have always tried to report on those. Currently on show is an exhibit by 43-year old Brooklyn-based artist Hank Willis Thomas called All Things Being Equal…” I am happy to join the seemingly universal chorus of admirers singing the praises of this retrospective of profound work.

The reviews, for the most part, focus on much of what you expect about contemporary conceptual art dealing with issues of racism, sexism, violence and, yes, capitalistic oppression and exploitation. The New York Times tries to make it all about personal experience motivating art, the Guggenheim artist description focusses on “issues of identity, politics, popular culture, and mass media as they pertain to American race relations” which reappear in many evaluations of the current show, more or less verbatim (and with the word “intersection” frequently added…. ) Essays on art websites hone in on Thomas’ self description as a visual cultural archeologist. There is Cameron Hawkey’s assessment of the Portland show in our very own Portland Mercury, with enthusiasm that I share and with adjectives of tragic, intense, sincere, and slick, that I find overall fitting. Everyone agrees: the work is perceptive, incisive, historically relevant and innovative. What can one possibly add?

I have written about the general identity and politics focus in contemporary art by non-White artists for OregonArtsWatch when describing the Whitney Biennial (as it turns out, Rujeko Hockley who, together with Jane Panetta, curated the 2019 Whitney Biennial, is married to Willis Thomas.) So today I want to describe something different that struck me at the core of his work: the way he invites, if not forces, the viewer to interact with the art in ways that deepen an understanding of the issues at stake, or teach something about perspective, or lend a sense of agency that can be both, empowering and shaming. But first a (partial) outline of what is displayed.

There are some 90 pieces of his art on view at PAM. When you enter the sculpture hall at entrance level you are facing a circular arrangement of 16 28-foot -long ceiling-to-floor banners with appliquéd stars. Titled 14,719 and resembling the American flag (minus the stripes) each of these stars represents someone killed by gun violence. In 2018, mind you, a single year. You wouldn’t know that, of course, save for reading some statement in small print, or having gathered info about the exhibit beforehand. I assure you, most visitors don’t.

And yet, there is something so imposing, almost majestic about these banners that few people enter into the chapel-like interior. I waited patiently upstairs to get a shot, and finally asked painter Henk Pander who was my companion during this visit, to go downstairs and go inside after long minutes of observation with no one entering. Reverence is elicited even without knowledge of honoring the dead – is it reverence, then, for our national symbol?

Here is Thomas talking about his intentions: (the work was previously exhibited at FRIEZE 2018.)

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On the second floor, there are displays of photographs of African Americans that originated in professional advertisement; the images are cleaned of any text revealing what was up for sale, and the titles are changed in ways that use irony to direct the viewer to question what the true intentions and manipulations could have possibly been in that glitzy stock collection serving up cigarettes or the like. The series of digital prints elicits both a sense of familiarity (Oh, I remember those Virginia Slim ads!) and a double take when the new title opens a different perspective. The series called Unbranded: Reflections in Black of Corporate America 1968-2008)

A similar series, Unbranded: A Century of White Women 1915 – 2015 this time tackling the role of white women in advertisement, had less of a impact on me. Same set-up, original photos appropriated, text removed, titles invented. Perhaps it moved me less because there was a huge emphasis on preoccupation with beauty, which made these women seem equally victim to their own vanity as well as society’s sexist or misogynistic norms. Images that stressed white supremacy also assigned these women both victim and perpetrator status, when you were still reeling with what you had seen in terms of racist stereotyping and clear power differential in the first section. Here is the artist talking about his approach of reframing the images.

And yet, here I was thinking about branding for women, when I later encountered the gold-framed Feminist tote bag (for over $30 no less…) in the gift shop.

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Indeed much of what is on display seems at first glance reminiscent of commercial work to those of us exposed to ubiquitous advertisement throughout our life times. Branded, as the series is called, draws us into something utterly familiar and then upends the notions we carry into viewing the work. For example, there are numerous resin-enclosed credit cards – only closer inspection reveals them to be sarcastic riffs on the banking slogans, now switched to historic names, places and dates that link economic enrichment to exploitation of slaves and peoples of origin. In the artist’s own words:

“Increasingly in our society you need a credit card even if you don’t use it, and you get billed for it, so I started thinking about credit as a form of indentured servitude, because of the way we’re conditioned to buy into this and to carry around all this debt. And so one of my friends, Ryan Alexiev, who is a graphic designer, and I started thinking about credit cards, and we made the Afro-American Express thinking it would be an interesting way to speak about this form of indentured servitude, using imagery from the abolition movement.”

Further in, huge photographic boards at first glance seem to depict the type of black athlete who many of us root for. On closer inspection there are multiple manipulations linking these images to symbols of slavery – branding into the skin, demands for physical capabilities to the point of exhaustion and injury, ownership of your talents, and the preempting of (other)potential with the false promise of a professional sports career (which is achieved only by a minuscule number of athletes.)

The most jarring image is one of a basketball player hanging from his hand with a noose above, titled Strange Fruit, in reference to Abel Meeropol’s poem about lynching. The invisible link between black bodies from the past and present ones, both under threat to their existence in literal or figurative ways is powerfully suggested.

Sports as a war-like activity was also captured in a quilt loosely designed after Picasso’s Guernica, made out of sports jerseys from different professional teams.

The use of advertisement-like enactments was most shocking in a piece that was prohibited to be photographed. Thomas photographed his relatives at the funeral of his cousin, 2 decades ago, who had been murdered as a bystander in a robbery over a $400 gold chain. The funeral image was overlaid with the typical structure of a MasterCard ad. Socks: x$$, new shoes y$$, and eventual: selecting a casket for your son: priceless! When this image was projected on the exterior walls of the museum in Birmingham, who had acquired the work, it led to huge controversy. People mistook it for the real thing and thought it was insanely disparaging of African Americans.

Something similar happened when the artist put up political billboards across the nation in 2016, part of the For Freedom initiative that he founded together with other artists. “Make America Great Again!” superimposed on an image from Bloody Sunday’s civil rights march in Selma was a huge billboard erected in Mississippi. It was enough to have both the political right and left go ballistic.

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Which brings me back to the point of interaction with the viewer. His works are not introducing something radically new or ephemeral enough that you need an art history background to decipher it, instead his projections capitalize on our familiarity with a medium which is then reframed in ways that hit us over the head. Clearly this artist is not shy to elicit confusion, to involve us almost as confederates – I know, a dangerous term in this context – in our familiarity with cultural archetypes that are then promptly stood on their heads. He goes beyond where it really starts to hurt in revealing the manipulation we subject ourselves to, by those who want to sell us something and by him, who wants us to wake up.

He is able to drive home the point that our perspective is malleable – nowhere better than in some of his lenticular pieces that reveal different vistas depending on where you stand, physically, and your point of view when you take action to activate some of the display. (The link describes the process of how this is technically accomplished.) One minute you see a portrait that is crystal clear, yet as you move around it, the image becomes increasingly blurred, what’s black or white ends up as: gray.

The Portland Art Museum is sensitive to this point of desired dialogue: many of the written comments next to each art work are from a diverse set of viewers, young audience members included, and not the typical curatorial didactics.

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Willis Thomas is committed to exchange: here is a short clip of another project recently enacted in Brooklyn that actively invites dialogue. And today he will introduce new work at the Gordon Parks Foundation, Exoduster, about the framing of historic events and the power of story telling, in this case the story of escaped slaves and those trying to help them to freedom captured in Park’s seminal film The Learning Tree. It is a dialogue of a different kind, a response to a revered artist of whom but his work lives on.

Thomas’ twitter handle says: Artist at Large. Man on the street. Strikes me as half coy, half extraordinarily true: he is interested in walking among us, forcing reaction. In that, he succeeded.

https://www.publicartfund.org/exhibitions/view/hank-willis-thomas-the-truth-is-i-see-you/

“It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism.” –Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle – Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of Movements.

The first time I set foot into an American jail happened in New York City in 1978, while accompanying lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights during a visit to a city jail with their clients. My familiarity with the German prison system had not prepared me for what I encountered on US soil in that and later visits, starting with the physical factors of overcrowding and horrid sanitary conditions alone and amplified by reports of continual violence both among those who were incarcerated and from those who guarded them. The memory was triggered, for one, by the fact that the New York City Council voted this week to close the abominable Rikers Island Jail complex, and secondly by a visit inside a prison, this time in Oregon, but for all intents and purposes on a different planet from Rikers.

Bureaucratic hurdles to enter the Northeast Portland minimum-security prison were surprisingly few; my pre-approved camera was checked both at entry and upon leaving, and the dress code requirements (no blues allowed, lest you couldn’t be differentiated) were minimal. For this one-time visit I did not have to undergo volunteer training, thus being spared the instruction not to be open to manipulation from prisoners, an aspect that always struck me as sowing suspiciousness and bound to instill an us vs them attitude right from the start.

What brought me to the Columbia River Correctional Institution (CRCI) was an invitation to attend the premiere of a video of The Inside Show, a variety show that was created, performed and filmed this summer by the men serving time at CRCI. The project was the brainchild of a gifted young woman, (Salty) Xi Jie Ng, a recent graduate of PSU’s Art and Social Practice Program, who directed, edited and co-produced (with Jacob Diepenbrock and Spencer Byrne-Seres) The Inside Show. The PSU program has been involved with bringing art and artists to prison through Columbia River Creative Initiatives, a series of artist run programs and classes held at this minimum security prison in Northeast Portland, Oregon.

I cannot think of a better example of collectivity, defined as the experience or feeling of sharing responsibilities, experiences and activities, than the one provided in this collaborative effort between those imprisoned, those who come in from the outside to volunteer, those who deliver material support from the outside (the media arts center Open Signal and PICA, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, among others) and an inside administration that sees the value of creative engagement and makes it possible. The notions of hope and optimism derived from collectivity were surely echoed in the conversations I had with those on the inside as well as with one man who is currently on a re-entry path on the outside who agreed to be interviewed after a second showing of The Inside Show, this time at PICA.

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“The chronicle of a man, the account of his life, his historiography, written as he lived out his life formed part of the rituals of his power. The disciplinary methods reversed this relation, lowered the threshold of describable individuality and made of this description a means of control and a method of domination.” 
― Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

The mess hall was filled with a big crowd, consisting both of those who had participated in the project and their friends, and those who were curious. There were certainly nowhere close to the 600 men currently serving time at CRCI (usually the last 4 years of a sentence,) but I cannot tell if for lack of interest or some administrative safety rules given limited space in the mess hall. Once the video was introduced by the hosts Christian (Scotty) Freeman, David (Ohio) Phipps and director Xi Jie Ng, the mood that seemed relaxed to begin with became truly upbeat. The hall was filled with loud laughter, mine included, since many of the skits were truly funny.

The variety show consists of five episodes that will be published via You Tube across the span of the next months. Central is a repeated segment, Microwave Magic, that deals with recipes that can be prepared with available ingredients from the commissary. It’s pretty ingenious with what talented cooks come up with under such restrictions; it is more poignant when you consider that food is one of the few “legal” sensory experiences available to those in prison, food that is not exactly meeting anything other than nutritional needs when delivered from institutional kitchens.

A sketch about carrots, Pocket carrots, also poked fun at the availability, or lack thereof, of food when you crave it.

Aspects of prison life are frequently targeted in those skits, in ways that make you wonder should you laugh or cry. Guest star Fred Armisen, who you might remember from SNL or Portlandia, for example, participates in a fashion show that drives home the point of prison dress code which eliminates all possibilities of individual expression.

There are musical interludes with pieces written and performed by the men,

interviews between buddies about the effects of military deployment in war zones and PTSD,

funny sports roundtables, stand-up routines with robots, and explanation and performance of Native-American drumming circles.

During the braiding demo – different styles of braids are preferred by different individuals – the barber made a point that was echoed by several men who talked to me about the art project: “I meet all kinds of people who I would otherwise have no contact with: Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos, Asians, they all come to get their hair done.”

Even though segregation among different prisoner populations is much less pronounced at CRCI than, say, the Oregon State Penitentiary, the maximum security prison in Salem, OR, it still exists. Sign-up for participation in the production of The Inside Show crossed those self-selective barriers. That kind of collective integration was perhaps not the main goal, but surely counts as a positive side effect.

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Mark Arnold is a man so filled with ideas running at hypersonic speed in his head that he practically vibrates. Recently re-established outside prison walls, facing severe restrictions still for the next 4 months, he nervously paces before his Q&A performance at PICA, wondering how it would go in front of a live audience. His explanations of his creative process, the way the project came together, the impact it had on those involved turn out to be fluent, persuasive, emotionally touching.

Born and raised in Portland, he has by his reports filled many roles in life, as a sergeant in the National Guard, a general manager at McDonalds, a welder, a participant in radio broadcasts at KVAN in Vancouver, WA, and more. He was one of the main writers for The Inside Show, ideas flowing and put into form that were then meticulously rehearsed. The pure volume of output is matched by astute observation.

The day after the show’s outside launch, his stress now dissipated, Arnold returns over and over during a long phone conversation to what he considers the most important point. “There are many programs at CRCI helping to pass time, or encouraging you to do this or that with a particular rehabilitation goal in mind. THIS project allowed you to be creative in a way that expresses yourself, the way you are, and being seen for who you are. Having your humor or ideas acknowledged by others boosts your self-esteem. That matters, particularly when you are fighting life-long addiction.”

Agency, accountability, and the politics of responsibility come up a lot in my conversation with Arnold, and also in the short comments made by CRCI residents during the show’s premiere. The idea that people chose to commit crimes for which they will be locked up, and can learn to make better decisions to avoid recidivism in the future, puts the stress on individual behavior. What it omits is that structural obstacles interfere with the best of intentions, not to say justice. I, as an educated, older white woman, am less likely to be imprisoned than a young, poor person of color for the same crime. More importantly, if conditions at post-release do not provide necessary access to regular employment, safe housing, medical care that includes continued addiction prevention and/or treatment and re-integration into a community that is itself healthy at its core, re-offending is a statistically likely outcome for people with few means. To paraphrase Michelle Alexander from her book The New Jim Crow, the criminal justice system will be primarily concerned with the management and control of the dispossessed.

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Art as a vehicle to regain individuality and establish personhood lost in the eyes of a society that stares at the crime, but not the person behind it, is a focus not just of the incarcerated men, but also of those bringing art to prison in the first place. Harrell Fletcher, MFA Art & Social Practice Program director and Ausplund Tooze Family Professor of Art and Social Practice at PSU, is instrumental for the Columbia River Creative Initiatives. He’s been involved with numerous projects at the prison in the last few years, bringing his students into the process, starting comedy classes, and advising Answers without Words, a year-long collaboration between artists at CRCI and photographers around the world, initiated by German artist Anke Schüttler. In addition, The Inside Show co-producer Spencer Byrne-Seres has led a collaboration with Outerspace Gallery and Erickson Gallery to program group exhibitions and projects from artists both inside Columbia River and outside of the prison (the program is supported by the Regional Arts and Culture Council).

Fletcher is part of a skit trying to introduce conceptual art, quickly followed by one of the funniest bits of the evening, “art teacher” Ohio introducing a version of painting by numbers of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. With his self-deprecating wit and warmth, and quick retorts always at the ready, that man could hold his own at any given SNL performance.

The driving, powerhouse force behind it all is Xi Jie Ng. Salty, as she is known, was born and educated in Singapore, to parents who valued rationality, tradition and caution – not necessarily in that order. The current detente between them and their daughter, an artist and rebel since childhood, is quite a remarkable achievement, with love extended from both sides. Salty applied to the PSU program three years ago after simply having googled art programs in the USA. Her accomplishments as a communications major and photojournalist assured acceptance into the program, which takes only about five students per year. As I write this she is on her way to an invited artist residency at UMass at Dartmouth, having graduated from PSU this year with an MFA in Art and Social Practice.

As director of the variety show, she had to be able to connect to the performers but also to call the shots in an environment that was often full of tension. As editor of the videos, she had to deal with a huge amount of material and cull it into something that was representative: not too sleek, but also providing evidence of the capabilities of those on the inside. The crediting process, listing all of the varying roles that contributed to the show’s success, will hopefully enhance the CVs of those soon to be looking for employment. In her words: “By pretending we were a functioning production team, we soon became one.”

I am always drawn to people who exhibit unusual combinations of traits. Salty scores high on that assessment scale. A tendency toward deep self-reflection is counterbalanced by a steely determination to guide her projects to success, unearthing and pursuing every resource possible, with promotional skills that equal her artistic creativity. Without a smidgen of savior syndrome or do-gooder mentality, she possesses a passion for working with populations who have reached the bottom rung of society’s normative scaffold. A serious, self-contained demeanor alternates with giddy bouts of participation in some of the show’s funnier skits. If she doesn’t burn out with her candle lit at both ends, she will go far. Can’t wait to see what she does next.

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“I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!” 
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

Caught in my very own stereotyping, I am surprised to hear Nathaniel Hawthorne referenced by a prison administrator when I try to get some answers to my questions. To use CRCI’s rehabilitation manager James Hanley’s own words:

“I think about Hester Prynne and Nathaniel Hawthorne. She was required to wear a scarlet “A” for the rest of her life in Hawthorne’s A Scarlet Letter. In his novel the “A” stood for adulteress. Our society places a scarlet “F” on felons. It’s hard for someone to rebuild themselves and their relationships with such a stigma.”  

A writer and poet himself, Hanley is convinced that the arts help people learn to navigate the world. He associates the opportunity to express oneself through art, music, poetry, comedy, and film with people’s ability to stay in touch with who they are, or in most cases, to find themselves. His own experience with art as a source of power and purpose is something he hopes the incarcerated men will come to share. The institution itself, with new leadership under Superintendent Nichole Brown, tries to provide community connections through a variety of programs that often depend on volunteers, including Arts in Prison, Living Yoga, Music Studio, Liberation Literacy, SAGA (Sexuality and Gender Awareness), Men’s Circle, AA & NA meetings, and Inside/Out classes.

The Inside Show was a core program – and the connectedness between Hanley (who is credited as executive producer) and the men he manages was palpable. They freely gave respect and gratitude to him, not just in public but also in the non-public conversations I had with them. This image among the performers describes it well.

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Countless films and TV shows are re-enacting prison experiences. Autobiographies by former residents of prisons tell their stories. I know of at least one  film made in prison, Madeleine Sackler’s O.G.., using those serving time as actors, narrating a story that describes familiar experiences in a penitentiary.

There is writing from poets who were sentenced to life without parole at age 16, like Oregon’s own Sterling Cuneo, who is a 2019-2020 PEN America Writing For Justice Fellow, a 2019 Oregon Literary Arts Fellow and a two-time PEN America Prison Writing Award winner for his essay Going Forward with Gus (2018); he is also co-author of the play The Bucket (2018.)

There are podcasts, like Earhustle, that describe daily realities of life inside prison by those living it, as well as stories from the outside, post-incarceration in St. Quentin.

The Inside Show differs in the sense that it communicates visually between actors and viewers, expressing ideas coming directly from the performers, not a film script written by someone on the outside.

Seeing and hearing a real person who resides on the inside while we are on the outside creates a relationship, however fleeting. It might challenge our stereotypes, reframe our perceptions and perhaps ease a path to engagement or a willingness to use our political clout to help change and improve society’s post-release conditions. This kind of communal involvement is expressed in the words of the American activist Eugene Debs:

While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Just remember: Some of us can walk out of there. Others can’t.