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Die Plage (The Plague)

· Harley Gaber at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education ·

In memory of Alice Meyer (z”l) who fought the rising dark forces to the end.

Tiresias:” You mock my blindness? Let me tell you this: You with your precious eyes, you’re blind to the corruption of your life, to the house you live in, those you live with – ” (415) – Sophocles Oedipus the King, translated by Robert Fagles.

DO YOU REMEMBER the unfolding of this famous tragedy? A priest implores the mighty Oedipus, the king of Thebes who rescued all his people once before, to stop the plague that’s ravaging the land. The ruler eagerly agrees, but when he starts intuiting the truth that after all might save them, he does not want to see it – just as the blind prophet Tiresias, who knows and was commanded to reveal it, has trouble naming it for fear of wreaking havoc. The truth, once it’s acknowledged, will lift the plague but also devastate the king, and his desire to remain unseeing does end up leading to his ultimate demise, including gouging out his eyes himself. Blind, after all, for real.

Perhaps you share with me a sense of needing to protect ourselves from ever more bad news, unending, constant, one development more dire than the next. It feels like our sanity depends on turning our eyes and ears away from yet more fear-inducing bits, just like the king of Thebes. Pandemic(s), the rise of authoritarian regimes drifting into fascism, wars and the ultimate threat to our existence, the devastation of our planet through self-inflicted climate change: plagues, all.

So why expose yourself to looking at depictions of the Holocaust, no matter how compelling, how educational, how directly speaking to the human heart? Won’t looking at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education‘s current exhibition, Harley Gaber’s Die Plage (The Plague) depress us even more?

We must. We must engage because we’ve known since Ancient Greece, if not before, that blind passivity does not end well. We must, because the medium that carries the message, in this case walls and walls of 390 assembled, collaged, sometimes manipulated archival photographs from 1918-1945 Germany and other objects, is more effective than a thousand words or numbers. It conveys that plagues will haunt us unless we fight them and uproot the seeds that have been lying fallow, not destroyed. And if you argue I should skip the guilt trip, since all your life you’ve faced the issues of the Holocaust to utmost saturation, I get it, but I disagree.

The only way to fight the plague is to name, to depict and educate. It requires from all of us a willingness to be confronted with the history, our part in it, its implications for the world we live in right this moment. Even when looking is hard.

A close inspection of Gaber’s installation might reveal some parallels to social and political developments right here and now. It reminds us how authoritarian mindsets are fostered and how right wing structures are organized from scratch, with the support of protofascistic organizations. We live in a time where authoritarians get increasingly elected into office internationally, like Meloni in Italy, Orban in in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, Duterte in the Philippines, Putin in Russia or are hovering in the wings, like Le Pen in France, the Partij voor de Vrijheid, (party for Freedom) PVV in Holland, and the Sweden Democrats, a right wing, Islamo-phobic populist party that won in recent elections as part of a coalition with centrists. Yesterday holocaust survivor #LilianaSegre (a victim of Mussolini’s race laws) handed over the Presidency of Italy’s Senate to Benito La Russa, a man who wants to be an heir to Mussolini, gives the fascist salute, and collects fascist memorabilia.

Just last weekend, the far-right AfD (Alternative for Deutschland) doubled their votes in state elections to over 10%. One of their politicians, Holger Winterstein, publicly danced on the slabs of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin this week, spouting phrases about the rebirth of the German Volk.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin – Photo Friderike Heuer

Many characteristics of fascism can be found in the platforms of all of these leaders, including racial purity as a basis for national belonging, a fear of White-replacement, anti-feminism, a cult of leadership and worship of the military, a rebirth narrative, suspensions of democratic freedoms, and attacks against the press. I need not spell out how all of this applies to what is going on closer to home.

***

“Perhaps the belief that consciousness permeates everything and transcends – by that I mean encompasses – the cyclic nature of living and dying, would allow us to accept the inevitable beginnings and endings of things as part of a meaningful continuity, not just a tragic aberration” – Harley Gaber, September 2010 as related in the Interviews by Robert Reigle.

HARLEY GABER (1943 – 2011) was born in Chicago into a Jewish-American family. Until the 1970s he was trained and worked as a composer, studying with Horace Reisberg in high school, then Kenneth Gaburo at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and later Darius Milhaud, among others. His minimalist work is hailed as among the most distinctive of post-World War II American music. (The link leads to a detailed review of the artist’s music.)

His interest in artistic abstraction had started early with a fascination of Jackson Pollock’s painting, which he claimed influenced his music. So did Morton Feldman‘s elegant 1963 chamber work dedicated to the painter “De Kooning,” by all reports. The cross-over between music and visual art was present then, from the beginning. So was the tendency, in both art forms, to alternate between sparseness – compression, exigence, selection – and abundance, with the former more characterizing the music, the latter the visual onslaught of the montage motifs. Major compositions include Sovereign of the Centre (1972-74),The Winds Rise in the North: String Quintet (1974),  I Saw My Mother Ascending Mt Fuji in 2009,  The Realm Of Indra’s Net and In Memoriam 2010.

Harley Gaber in front of one of his photomontage panels in 2000 – Photo courtesy of Christina Ankofska

In the late 1970’s Gaber moved from NYC to California, leaving music behind for a time, devoting himself to playing and teaching tennis, taking care of his aging parents, and eventually the montage work across a decade that resulted in Die Plage. Several trips to Germany were undertaken for archival research and exploring historic places, Weimar and the concentration camp Buchenwald memorial site in Weimar’s suburbs, among them.

KZ Buchenwald Memorial Site – Photos Friderike Heuer

By 2002 he returned to composing, as well as some forays into film-making. His view of music shifted in perspective, former technical musical tools and conceptualization of consciousness replaced by a focus on the complexities of the heart. In a profound crisis, wrecked by insomnia, he took his own life in 2011 two weeks after his last composition, In Memoriam 2010, was published, a piece commissioned by the Dan J. Epstein Family Foundation, dedicated to Nancy Epstein, who passed away in 2010 and was a close family friend of the Gabers.

***

“Eine neue Kunst muss endlich angeben müssen wozu sie gebraucht werden will. ” (It’s about time that a new form of art declares what it wants to be used for.) – Berthold Brecht, Schriften zur Literatur und Kunst.

FOR SOMEONE INTERESTED in quantum physics and in the art of the Weimar Republic, as Gaber was by all reports, photomontage seems ideally suited as a visual medium. The combination of intimate scale and monumental extent, with ever smaller units affecting each other across space, in some ways mirrored his approach to musical notation. He drew parallels between our insights from physics to how he perceived humanity to function. In quantum entanglement you cannot describe the state of one of the quanta without the state of the other one. They can only be apprehended as a unit, even if they are far apart. Gaber’s montages gave visual life to this concept: the distinct groups of a society only to be understood in their linkage to each other. Perpetrator and victim, oppressor and oppressed part of the same system under the umbrella of a deadly ideology.

Photomontage basically refers to collaging with photographs, creating new and different wholes from altered parts, telling a story. It used to be a dark room, paper, scissors and glue affair. These days computer technology allows seamless merging and alteration of digital images where all evidence of historical reality of the components disappears. At the heart of it is fragmentation and construction, playing with perspectives that encourage or prevent a subject’s visibility. The use of scale can obscure – sometimes smaller segments can distract from the larger picture, sometimes grand expansions blur your ability to see detail. Visibility, of course, will matter only if you are inclined to look. The switching back and forth between micro, macro or intermediate levels can be in itself demanding.

Then there is the matter of representation: who is represented, how do we represent? Are we manipulated by caricature, or surreal additions, by use of symbolism and/or text? If our hold on reality is ridiculed by including absurd juxtapositions, are we turned off enough to turn away? The question every artist needs to struggle with is how to represent a topic so over-saturated in visual memorial culture like the Holocaust. How do you prevent archival photographs of boots and soldiers, trains and camps and swastikas in endless repetition from being seen as overly familiar tropes, sparking associations only to a concept, safely relegated to the past?

In Europe between the wars, photomontage techniques were used by many artists who were part of the Dadaist movement, protesting against the First World War. The surrealists soon grasped this tool that lent itself to their exploration of consciousness and free association – with quite a few women as path breakers: Emila Medková, Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, and Hannah Höch. But the real surge of photomontage could be seen when first Russian constructivist artists applied it regarding issues of social justice and then the Neuer Deutscher Verlag (New German Press), run by Willi Münzenberg, committed itself to photomontage as a propaganda tool, most famously in its flagship periodical Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (or AIZ) (Worker’s Illustrated), which it began publishing in January 1925. By 1930, artist John Heartfield, clearly a model for Harley Gaber, began to contribute his intense montages to the AIZ, attracting yet more readers. The new art form had signaled its intentions: agit-prop.

In 1931, one of my favorite montage artists, César Domeal-Niewenhuis, curated the very first exhibition devoted solely to the new art form – Fotomontage – under the aegis of the Berliner Kunstbibliothek, in Berlin. Raoul Hausman opened the event, and the montages were displayed in sections divided between advertising and political art, with John Heartfield and the Bund revolutionärer bildender Künstler Deutschlands (The league of revolutionary German visual artists) dominating those exhibits. Experimental works by Lászlo Moholy-Nagy and Hannah Höch, among others, had their own corner. I do not know if Gaber saw the catalogue or was familiar with this work, but it likely would have resonated. A fascinating retrospective of the history of art during the Weimar Republic opened in Berlin at the Staatliche Kunsthalle in 1977 – Wem gehört die Welt: Kunst und Gesellschaft in der Weimarer Republik (Who owns the World: Art and Society in the Weimar Republic). It might have been an impetus for Gaber’s new dedication given that the exhibition focused on the ways in which the artists related to the people, how they attempted to contribute to changing the world and how those actions were received. The anti-war photomontage work of his U.S. contemporary, the brilliant Martha Rosler, devoted to exposing the failure of our political class to learn anything from history, might also have been of interest to him. We will never know.

Then again, the desire to create this monumental work might have come from a uniquely Jewish-American perspective trying to map the universal principles that emerge when humans embrace or are exposed to the maelstrom of ideology and desire for dominion. By deconstructing the specifics of that moment, or of the era that produced the horror, Gaber hoped, perhaps, to lay bare mechanisms that translate generally. As a humanist he certainly acknowledged the agency of human beings, respecting moral values, but was also quite aware that living up to our potential is contextually shaped.

***

“Here the ten plagues will be enumerated, and it is a widespread—though not particularly old—custom to remove a drop of wine from the cup for each plague. This strange practice was explained to me, when I was still a boy, that wine is a symbol of joy, and because each plague caused our tormentors to suffer on our account, the joy over our own liberation is diminished…Whether this explanation may make claim to historical truth may remain unanswered, but one must recognize the poetic truth in it, because it breathes the spirit of Judaism.” Rabbi Eduard E. Baneth Der Sederabend: Ein Vortrag, (A Lecture on the Pesach Seder) published in Berlin in 1904.

ONE OF THE HIGHLIGHTS of the Passover Seder is the recitation of the plagues sent by G-d to punish the Egyptians who enslaved the Jews – that is if you share the table with young kids. With glee and abandon they dip their fingers, fling the drops of grape juice, yell the names of the afflictions, vermin among them. (Bonus: throwing the plastic frogs and locust used for decoration at each other.) The plagues seem far away, the threats averted. But much history is learned during this annual event, oral transmission linking generation after generation.

Harley Gaber did not grow up around a seder table, the household culturally Jewish, but he intuitively understood the role of children in societies that try to relate their history and, for some, keep their power hierarchies intact.

The montage display contains numerous single images of children and also groups them in ways that form more cohesive narratives. You have the (pre)-teens of the Hitler Youth right next to their Jewish age mates, ready for the trains to be transported. The uniforms of the Hitler Youth (an early unit of the Storm Troopers, mandatory participation for all youth) prepared for the soldierly character of the NSDAP, signified in-group membership, and conferred status. They had to be bought by the parents and many boys were keen on them, thinking it was cool. Children learn the values early, but also understand the power distribution, growing right into docile and willing soldiers, as long as they are not the bottom of the heap.

Top and bottom, after all, a major concept in fascistic thinking, which denies the truth that all of us are equal. In their twisted ways, race, religion, gender, sexuality, physical and mental health were markers of the hierarchy. The spatial word “unter” (below) an important suffix for power relations: there was the Untertan (imperial subject,) the Untergebene (subordinate) and eventually the Untermensch (subhuman), denying Jews and Roma their humanity.

One of the prominent texts in Gaber’s installation reads: “Wir fahren nach Polen um Juden zu versohlen.” (We’re traveling to Poland to give the Jews a good hiding.) The German verb is mostly used in the context of teachers beating their students, something children could easily comprehend. Now they weren’t the targets, but someone else was. It was not just the teaching that violent persecution of minorities was ideologically justified. Children learned early on that hatred, anger or resentment – the whole range of anti-humanistic feelings – were acceptable and even desirable, as long as they found their targets in convenient scape goats. Rote expression of loyalty in these paramilitary youth camps eventually turned to the real thing. Belonging felt good, de- individuation in those group settings eased remaining conscience.

Wir fahren nach Polen um Juden zu versohlen

Parallel to spending afternoons and evenings in these organizations (divided by age groups and gender,) indoctrination became part of the school day as well. It was not just what was NOT allowed to be read or learned, (book banning, anyone?) but importantly how curricula and instruction materials were centrally under the complete control of the party apparatus, as were the hiring and firing of (dis)loyal teachers and professors. Education was no longer geared towards the development of personality and learning, but forced the kids to put on mental blinders, uncritically digesting what was offered, a reduction to the atavistic stages of development. I see Harley Gaber’s work as enormously prescient in that the indoctrination of youth, so prominently displayed in his montages, is to be feared, and easily accomplished when education becomes usurped by those in power and ideologically or religiously driven. We see it, here and now.

***

“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.” – James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985

GABER’S INSIGHT about the interconnectedness of a nation’s strata can be found in his depictions of ordinary Germans going about their lives in union with the rising fascists, as well as conservative politicians, who engaged in Faustian bargains with the Nazi representatives in order to hold on to power. At least that was my interpretation, thinking that perhaps one of the photographs portrayed Kurt von Schleicher, the last chancellor of the Weimar Republic, eager to keep oversight over the military and appeasing his rival Hitler, eventually murdered by the Nazis during the Night of the Long Knives.

Top row, 6th panel from the left – portrait of someone reminding me of von Schleicher.

We often forget that during the rise of radical forces more moderate political parties are willing to form alliances with them in order to achieve or stay in power, with the strong belief, if one is generously speculating, that they might keep them in check and under influence within their power arrangements.(A good introduction to this topic can be found here.) That certainly was the case with Hindenburg and Hitler, or Emperor Emanuel and Mussolini, catastrophic miscalculations, both.

Just looking at the current gubernatorial race in Oregon, we have reports that one of the candidate has tied herself to “multiple far-right extremists, including a militia leader, a financial backer of the January 6th insurrection, and a Q-Anon conspiracy theorist.” Another one is reported to have sought the endorsement of the Timber Unit, a group full of extremists, and accepted their award.  She lamented to The New York Times: ‘You can see the deterioration of the beautiful City of Roses, now the city of roaches.’ Some people have interpreted that as a de-humanizing reference to Portland’s many unhoused people (a claim denied by the candidate), and a dog whistle to the far right that calls them pests. Roaches. Pest. Plague.

It is not only politicians, though. When celebrities, like Kanye West this week, spout unequivocally anti-Semitic statements on Twitter to their 30 million followers (there are roughly 14.8 million Jews alive) and are welcomed to the platform by the richest man in the world in short succession, it opens more space for resonance for poisonous beliefs and strengthens those who already agree. In Germany, 36.000 people marched in the state of Thuringia alone, at the beginning of October, called by the AfD to protest political conditions, with far-right extremists joined by many ordinary citizens in fear of deteriorating economic conditions due to the war in Ukraine and other political decisions around immigration and environmental protection. When right-wing extremists take to the streets together with the supposedly “middle class,” when there are no longer any fears of contact, the citizenry acts like a sounding box for the Neo-Nazis, amplifying the message. It normalizes anti-democratic positions. Harley Gaber warned us.

***

“Memory, the mind’s power of having present what is irrevocably past and thus absent from the senses, has always been the most plausible paradigmatic example of the mind’s power to make invisibles present.” –Hanna Arendt, The Life of the Mind (1977)

HARLEY GABER’S PHOTOMONTAGES attempted to make the invisible present through creative juxtapositions. He was keenly aware that only testimony, in this case a visual, constructed epic, can keep the past and its lessons alive. In that way, this installation could not be more timely for Jewish museums and institutions in a day and age where the memory of the living is receding, given that the last survivors of the Holocaust are passing on. Memory can only be kept maintained, if we transmit it, true for German and U.S. history of fascism alike. We owe a debt of gratitude to individuals as well as organizations who engage in that task.

From left to right: Melissa Martens Yaverbaum, Steve Gaber, Harley’s brother, Christina Ankofska. Harley Gaber installing one of his panels. photo on right courtesy Christina Ankofska.

After Gaber’s death, his friend Dan Epstein, President of the Epstein Family Foundation that sponsors this exhibition, and Steve Rees, a close friend of the Gaber family, organized the preservation of the work. Much time and resources went into digitizing, cataloguing and storage of 4.200 (!) montages (the 390 on exhibition are a subset based on prior selections by the artist.) This will enormously help curations of this body of work in the future.

Alerted by an article in the NYT about new and diverse approaches to Holocaust and genocide education at Jewish museums, Epstein and Rees (the co-manager of the project) approached a number of them to discuss the possibility of exhibiting Gaber’s work. OJMCHE, under the leadership of Judy Margles, decided to host the project. Margles was able to secure the talents of Melissa Martens Yaverbaum, Executive Director of the Council of American Jewish Museums (CAJM) to act as guest curator who extended the scope of the project beyond the photomontage work. You will find interesting materials that allow glimpses of the musician and philosopher as well. Yaverbaum, in turn, received support from Gaber’s brother Steve and Harley’s former partner Christina Ankofska in exploring the art and life of Gaber.

Christina had accompanied Gaber on one of his research trips to Germany, and was present for much of his work creating his montages and preparing them for one of the few exhibits he lived to see. She told me a story that she thought encapsulated his humanism, as much a part of him as were his visionary and creative talents. They left the installation of Die Plage in L.A. (LA Times review from the year 2000 here,) long after midnight, starving. Miraculously they came upon a hot dog cart, amidst a group of unhoused people. Gaber decided: “Hotdogs for all!” and they found themselves happily gorging in famished company now generously treated in the early morning hours. A Mensch, in other words, whose memory should be a blessing. It is up to us to keep his memory and that of all who perished under fascist rule, alive. Gaber’s montages will be of great assistance in that effort.

Memorial marker at the concentration camp Buchenwald memorial site. Part of the inscription for the victims, women and girls in this case, reads: “But you live as long as other humans keep you in their memory.” Many other markers are spread across the site for specific groups of victims. NON OMNIS MORIAR – I shall not wholly die. Photo Friderike Heuer

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Harley Gaber: Die Plage

October 7, 2022 – January 29, 2023

OREGON JEWISH MUSEUM AND CENTER FOR HOLOCAUST EDUCATION
724 NW Davis Street
Portland, OR 97209

Wednesday – Sunday: 11am – 4pm

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Die Qual der Wahl

How to translate this German idiom into English?

Tough Call!

Decisions, decisions!

Spoilt for Choice!

I guess they all apply when it comes to end-of-year choosing of a particular art review that I consider amazing: interesting writing, learnedness across multiple fields (poetry and literature as well as the visual arts,) an emotional hook added to the intellectual riches, clarity, and a willingness to defy majority opinion. So many to choose from.

I settled on the one linked below, partly because it is about a topic I care about deeply, more importantly because I learned so much from John Yau‘s essays over the years, and most importantly because it checks off on ALL of the factors mentioned above.

You Can’t Coat the Holocaust With Gold

The show under review, Anselm Kiefer: Exodus at Gagosian (November 12–December 23, 2022,) is almost over, but since Kiefer’s work is ubiquitous, the general insights apply whereever you see his work next. As my regular readers know, I was never a fan, given Kiefer’s loose relationship with the truth and his self-aggrandizing, although I made one exception at a show in Montreal.

Yau’s review of the current exhibition was poignant in ways I wish I had thought of:

“What does it mean to cover the lack of answers in gold …. Anselm Kiefer is the Steven Spielberg of painting. Both are masters of effect and convinced of their own genius. One cannot help but be impressed by what they do in their respective mediums. And yet, is being impressed enough? “

Photographs from last week captured nature’s gold (silver and brass) of withering ferns, rather than Kiefer’s applied gold-leaf.

***

When it comes to my own reviews of 2022, the choice was pretty easy. By far the hardest to write were Die Plage and The Central Park Five. The former because the Holocaust topic was so traumatic and the wealth of material about the artist and his own traumas required intense structuring and streamlining. The latter because the issue of racism and its horrific entrenchment in the American psyche, history, institutions and legal system is unresolved and painful to face, every single time I get up the nerve and try again

I had some difficulties with familiarizing myself with and appropriately framing Native American Art, but was happy with the results of both major reviews, The Red Shimmer of Remembering and Breathing the High-Altitude Ether of Discovery. I learned much and felt I could stimulate interest in equally uninformed readers.

The reviews I enjoyed most, of art that spoke to me with its intentionality and multi-layered meanings, were Correlations in Corvallis and Ripped Threads. I had zero guidance to go on for either, given the status of the artists, creating all their lives in relative obscurity. I had to rely entirely on my own thoughts and impressions, but also lots of freedom to speculate. I have nothing but admiration for these women even older than I, who never gave up, despite lack of even a hint of support from the established art world. For the latter, I felt there were politically important topics delivered without shock and awe or any other attention-grabbing means, just trickling slowly, subtly, intelligently into your consciousness, coloring your emotional responses. For the former I admired that the process of making art continues even when you have said all you had to say on the intellectual front. It is enough if only beauty flows at times, without pretense. And flow it did.

I very much hope that 2023 provides more opportunities to stretch myself as a writer while having my mind stretched by beauty and/or meaning.

Music: grandiosity, gold, German romanticism – you surely know what’s coming! (The beginning is very subtle, it gets louder soon.)

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Between Two Worlds.

· Leonora Carrington and David Seymour (Chim) at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. ·

Update: Due to copyright issues to be resolved, I will remove the photographs I had taken of Carrington’s work at OJMCHE or found in a book about her paintings. Stay tuned.

“You’re trying to intellectualize something, desperately, and you’re wasting your time. That’s not a way of understanding, to make it into some kind of mini-logic. You’ll never understand by that road.” “What do you think we can understand by?” ” By your own feelings about things. It’ a visual world. You want to turn things into some kind of intellectual game. It’s not. ” – Leonora Carrington in a interview published in 2015, with Carrington’s cousin, journalist Joanna Moorhead, author of Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington.

2024 marks the centennial of Surrealism, a movement born in 1924 with the publication of a Manifesto by André Breton. Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education’s new exhibition The Magic World of Leonora Carrington joins the celebration, offering a small collection of prints by Leonora Carrington, one of the female pioneers of Surrealism and a life-long painter of mystifying imagery full of passion for an otherworldly realm.

It was Bruce Guenther’s suggestion to introduce Carrington’s work for this special occasion, and he also secured the loan of the prints from Mixografia. As the Adjunct Curator for Special Exhibitions, he made his mark on OJMCHE’s visual arts programming during the last seven years, and we were the richer for it. In addition to being connected to the art world and able to draw on a trove of curatorial experiences, he, more importantly, pursued two goals. For one, he wanted to widen the horizon of a local audience to the diversity and depth of contributions by Jewish artists, many of them unfamiliar, and secondly, intended to shoot for the moon, when it came to bringing work here that had previously seemed out of reach. Succeed he did!

He introduced us, among others, to Grisha Bruskin (Alefbet: The Alphabet of Memory) for OJMCHE’s inaugural exhibition in its current location, or a wide range of local Jewish artists’ work relating to identity and religion (I AM THIS: Art by Oregon Jewish Artists,) confronted us with the provocative, self-reflective art of Kitaj ( R.B. Kitaj: A Jew Etc., Etc.) or reminded us of the art-historical importance of feminist Judy Chicago (Turning Inward, JUDY CHICAGO). Continually, Guenther encouraged us to question, reevaluate and improve on our understanding of art in the context of Judaism. He pushed us, guided us, helped us. It is our loss that he is no longer going to surprise us with his choice of exceptional programming at OJMCHE.

***

A plethora of exhibitions here and in Europe are currently lined up to celebrate Surrealism’s centennial. Some are offering a general overview of this revolutionary art movement, others have a specific focus. Until mid-July you can visit The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium which inaugurated IMAGINE!, a touring exhibition of works of the most famous surrealists conceived in close collaboration with the Centre Pompidou (Paris). By September, Surrealism. L’exposition du centenaire (1924-1969) will open at the Centre Pompidou, then travel on to the German Hamburger Kunsthalle. On the wings of its recent blockbuster exhibition about Caspar David Friedrich and the reaches of Romanticism, Hamburg will focus on the affinities and differences between Romanticism and Surrealism in 2025. Then on to Madrid, and eventually we can visit closer to home, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This fall, the Lenbachhaus in Munich inaugurates a highly anticipated exhibition about Surrealism and anti-fascism, But live here? No thanks!, illuminating Surrealism as a political movement with an internationalist commitment in the fight against colonialism and fascism. The Henry Moore Institute in Leeds will display The Traumatic Surreal, concentrating on post-war surrealist women artists and their opposition to the patriarchy since 1960. And last but not least, a show entirely dedicated to Leonora Carrington will also open in October at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, Italy.

This – believe it or not – selective list of exhibitions points to the many facets of the surrealist movement and the fact that it has finally “arrived.” The shows will be accompanied by various intellectual explorations of the nature, origins and practical consequences of Surrealism, helping us to understand what the movement is about, its implications for our own time and where to place various artists within its margins. A movement that was dedicated to the deconstruction of rational language, to dissolving the contradiction between reality and the irrational, to resisting habitual modes of thought and perception, is celebrated by means of the traditional intellectual lens and rational analysis of art historians and/or sociologists. One wonders if the artists would have been pleased or annoyed.

I speculate, though, that Leonora Carrington (1917 – 2011) couldn’t have cared less. I think of her as a force of nature who marched to her own drummer all her life, pursuing her painting, her writing and her fervent political engagement for women’s liberation without a moment’s thought of the world’s reaction. Then again, she would likely be pleased that female artists within the movement have eventually gotten their dues, rescued from the assigned roles as muses or child-women, young and subservient, as the male founders of the movement liked to think of them and/or treat them. Across the last decades they have finally been recognized as brilliant artists in their own rights, most recently with a magnificent survey exhibition at The Schirn, Frankfurt a.M., Fantastic Women.

Born in England into a family of wealthy if staid manufacturers, sister to three younger brothers and raised by an Irish nanny fond of myths and fairy tales, Carrington rebelled from an early age. Thrown out of countless boarding schools, she enrolled in art programs and ended up in Paris at age 20, where she met and fell in love with a surrealist painter 26 years her elder, Max Ernst. He abandoned his second wife (having divorced his first, Luise Straus, who was later murdered in Auschwitz, marrying and divorcing two more during his lifetime) for Leonora with whom he settled in rural France when interpersonal drama threatened to take over their productivity in Paris. Carrington refused to be a “muse” from the very beginning and engaged in her own – and distinct – exploration of both the themes and the processes closely associated with the new movement.

Photographs removed

Leonora Carrington A Magnificent Bird Portrait of Max Ernst (1939) — Max Ernst Leonora in the Morning light (1940)The artists exchanged these portraits during a reunion in New York. Carrington, by her own desire, never saw Ernst again after that.

When Ernst was arrested by the Nazis and later escaped to New York, she fled to Spain, suffering a severe mental breakdown, made worse by inappropriate, possibly sadistic psychiatric care during inpatient treatment. She eventually left Europe on a visa provided by a marriage of convenience, and after some time settled in Mexico, finding love, committing to motherhood, and becoming extraordinary prolific in her various creative endeavors, as a painter and novelist processing her autobiographical experiences, including her psychotic break. In Mexico she was embedded in a group of close women friends who were also expatriate artists, Remedios Varo whose painted dream worlds incorporated mystical philosophy and surrealist techniques not unlike Carrington’s, and photojournalist and surrealist photographer Kati Horna. They shared various interests that, at a minimum, enlivened quotidian domesticity and, more importantly, provided substance for their creative output less chained to reality: interests in alchemy, witchcraft, mythology and more.

Photographs removed Leonora Carrington Información Secreta (1974)

Some of Carrington’s prints on hand are products of her imagination, typical hybrid figures or grotesques that combine animal and human features. The bulk of the work, however, are paintings made in the early 1970s to dress characters of a play “The Dybbuk or Between two Worlds.“ The word Dybbuk originates from the Hebrew דָּבַק ,‎ dāḇaq, meaning ‘adhere‘ or ‘cling’ and refers to the soul of a dead person, always a man, now possessing the body of a living human being, most often a woman. Written by S. Ansky who was interested in Hassidic folklore that contained elements of the story since the 13th century, the play was originally performed in 1920, first in Russian, later in Yiddish.  (דער דיבוק, אדער צווישן צוויי וועלטן; Der Dibuk, oder Tsvishn Tsvey Veltn. Here is a link to a magnificent Polish film made from the play in 1937, in Yiddish with English subtitles, a window into a world long gone.)

Alternatively, here is a short summary by a modern, feminist playwright, Lila Rose Kaplan.

“Once upon a time a woman named Leah was allowed to be in a story because she was getting married.  Her father picked her a rich husband. Then her dead boyfriend possessed her, because if a woman’s gonna take up space in a story she must not be a woman. Then they learned that Leah had been promised to her dead boyfriend before she was born.  She screamed why don’t I have any agency, but no one could hear her. So, they did an exorcism and got her unpossessed. Then she killed herself to be with her dead boyfriend or maybe she just wanted to be left alone.“

Photographs removed Leonora Carrington Leye returns transformed into the Dybbuk (1974)

Rachel Elior, the John and Golda Cohen Professor of Jewish Philosophy and Jewish Mystical Thought at Hebrew University, discusses the societal function served by the notion of possession by a spirit in her book DYBBUKS AND JEWISH WOMEN in Social History, Mysticism and Folklore. She argues that it could have been a means of escape for women who saw no other way out of the misery of oppression. Once “possessed,” women would no longer be held responsible for acting out or demanding agency of any kind, giving them a certain degree of freedom, including the refusal of arranged marriages. Of course there was a price to be paid, eventually, in the form of torturous exorcism.

Carrington was not Jewish – and she certainly did not lack agency! – but the appeal of this quintessentially Jewish story must have been strong, given that it contains so many elements that spoke to her interest in mysticism, soul transmigration, the role of women in male dominated societies, and ultimately resonated with some of her own biographical experiences.

Between two Worlds: Surrealist artists surely moved between worlds, that of reality and that within the recesses of the unconscious, a magical realm where irrationality was a prize, not a burden. As a female artist, Carrington had to fight to have her own voice heard, not being subsumed as a muse, possessed by a male, however smitten. Father figures in her own life, whether her actual father or a substitute, Ernst, had controlled her existence to some extent. But the memory of forced separation from her lover might have also been evoked by the elements of loss in Leah’s world. As one who had experienced “being possessed” during her psychotic episode, the painter could surely imagine herself into the psyche of Leah, to whom this male spirit adheres, using her as a vessel for his own unfinished life. Exorcism was not simply a technical term for someone who had been forced through fit-inducing medication at the asylum in Spain. And last but not least, emigration placed you between worlds, the old and the new, neither one fully your own.

Even though the characters themselves did not spring from her imagination, the way Carrington depicted them with her own aesthetic, strangely graceful, elongated figures, infused them with a life of their own. The lithographs offer, indeed, a visual world, one that generates feelings rather than lending itself to rational analysis (which will not stop me from speculation, as per usual…). The collection traveled through Mexico, exhibited early at the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana, after they were transferred to lithographs at the Taller de Gráfica Popular in 1974. (I wrote about the political role the print studio played in Mexico previously here.)

I consider her renderings remarkable in the sense that suffering, doubt, or bitterness are anything but central – somehow I find primarily resilience in the strong colors, the androgynous representations. And maybe there are traces of rage, in purple and red. Given that the artist was raised in a staunchly catholic household, these colors might also refer to the liturgical colors associated with the Celebrations of Martyrs (red) and Masses for the Dead (purple.) Then again, we have the red stockings of the women’s liberation movement and in England, her country of origin, the Suffragettes used purple that symbolized royalty, loyalty to the cause, and women’s quest for freedom.

Photographs removed Leonora Carrington Leye y Frade (1974)

The continual presence of protective females in the vicinity of Leah echoes one of the characteristics of the artist herself: she was acknowledged as a reliable supporter of the women around her, building strong connections to women all her life. It is as if Carrington’s own strength and endurance is gifted to the female protagonist, in defiance of the customary image of Leah as the victim. The fact that some Mexican graphic elements are included also signals the possibility that a soul has come home, can come home, no longer restlessly wandering. They might reference the surrealist artist’s own political beliefs captured by the movement statement found already in 1935 in the Bulletin International du Surréalisme: “The human soul is international.”

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“Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as through a lens. This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless. If we storytellers are Death’s Secretaries, we are so because, in our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses.” – John Berger in What Time Is It? (2019)

War, like the soul, is international as well, alas. It claimed and continues to claim victims regardless of their association with the warring parties – international observers, aid workers and photojournalist have paid that heavy price for trying to inform the world. David Seymour (Dawid Szymin, 1911- 1956,) known as Chim, was one of them – he was killed, three days after the armistice, no less, by Egyptian soldiers during the Suez Crisis when British–French–Israeli forces invaded Egypt in 1956 after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal.

Chim: Between Devastation and Resurrection presents photographs that cut through to the reality of war, ignoring nationalistic or ideological fervor in favor of an empathetic response to the horrors wars impose on their victims. His lens told stories capturing both his times and the timelessness of suffering.

Born in Poland, Chim studied graphic arts at Leipzig’s prestigious Staatliche Akademie für Graphische Künste und Buchgewerbe in the early 1930s and then enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris to study physics and chemistry. He started to take photographs for a variety of journals and magazines to make money for a living and soon got a reputation to be a talented social documentarian as well as war photographer when he documented the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Together with Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and George Rodger, Chim co-founded the Magnum photo agency after WW II ended and he had returned to Europe, having enlisted in the US Army during war times. In 1948, he was commissioned by UNICEF for a project he is now most known for, documenting the war’s effect on European children. “Children of Europe” was published by LIFE magazine and in book form eventually.

David Seymour (Chim) Girls playing in the ruins of a former orphanage, Monte Casino, Italy (1948)

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OJMCHE’s photography exhibitions have been hit and miss. There have been brilliant shows (Southern Rites and Die Plage come to mind,) but also more pedestrian ones. One of the problems has to do with receiving previously curated package exhibitions that served well in their original purposes, but do not necessarily speak to contemporary questions. They also do not allow juxtapositions with work that one might choose if curating independently, to complement or off-set the photography on view.

The collection, on loan from the Illinois Holocaust Museum, and excerpted from an original show by the International Center for Photography, exhibits works that are solid, beautiful at times, and often moving. Chim was a master of the medium’s technical aspects, lighting and depth of field. He also often incorporated signs, banners, or posters into his images that functioned like internal captions, reminding us of the important legacy of Constructivism.

If a show had been independently curated, though, it could have raised a number of important issues. For one, just as the female artists within the surrealist movement have long stayed unacknowledged, much less feted, so has the legacy of female photographers in the realm of war photography. Chim has often been called “photography’s forgotten hero,” but there are a surprising number of Jewish women who documented war since WW I, continuing through the Spanish Civil War and on to WW II, and are completely ignored by the canon, no matter how remarkable.

There was Alice Schalek ((1874-1956) who lived in Vienna and is regarded to be the first woman who photographed Austrian soldiers at the frontlines during WW I. Gerda Taro (Gerta Pohorylle) was the first Jewish female photographer killed in the field, in Spain. A lifelong socialist and gifted photographer, she was the partner of Magnum-photographer Robert Capa, who, in contrast to her, has become legendary. Faigel Faye Schulman (1919 – 2021) was a Jewish partisan photographer, and the only such photographer to photograph their struggle in Eastern Europe during World War II. Honorable mention belongs to Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971) who, although not Jewish, documented combat zones in WW II as the first woman war correspondent from the US., and, importantly, photographed Buchenwald when the concentration camp was liberated.

And then there was Kati Horna (1912 – 2000), one of Carrington’s closest friends in post-war Mexico. Born into a Jewish family in Hungary, a close childhood (and life-long) friend of Robert Capa, she studied Political Science in Berlin, and, after the rise of the Nazis, photography back in Budapest. She ended up in the early 1930s in Paris, working as a freelance photographer for a press picture agency, Agence Photo. Her work shares both a modernist aesthetic and a focus on narrative with Chim’s. During her documentation of the Spanish Civil War, she concentrated on the conditions of women and children through mainly portraiture, just as we see in Chim’s later work for the UNICEF project. She utilized bird’s eye views early, as we’ve come to associate with Chim.

Kati Horna Umbrellas, Meeting of the CNT, Spanish Civil War, Barcelona 1937

David Seymour (Chim), Child’s Funeral, Matera, Italy, 1948, 

It would have been valuable to learn about the history of photographers working at the same time in the same places, with the same political beliefs and then wonder the women disappeared from view. Again.

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Another question raised by exhibiting images of the effects of previous wars relates to war reporting in our contemporary society flooded with war imagery. LACMA’s exhibition ‘Imagined Fronts – The Great War and Global Media,’ closing after a long run just this week, reminded us of the role of photography in a war-torn world. Photography can be used as a tool of propaganda to generate both psychological and material support for the war effort. Likewise, it can be utilized to create empathy with its victims and oppose war actions. The borders between propaganda and information are porous, since war parties strive to claim that their efforts are just if not heroic, intending to legitimize their efforts, or dehumanize the opponent.

David Seymour (Chim) Boy in bombed building, Essen, Germany (1947)

(Essen was one of the most heavily bombed cities in Germany, with 90% of its urban structures destroyed. A seat of heavy industry in the Ruhr region, it housed over 350 forced labor camps during the war mining coal and producing weapons, working for Krupp and Siemens. Alfried Krupp was sentenced in the Nuremberg trials, but pardoned by the US in 1951. Some people reliably get away with anything.)

War photography during the World Wars and up until the Vietnam war was regulated and controlled by states and military, censorship included. Imagery of direct violence and death was traditionally avoided, replaced by clichés. In fact Richard Nixon attributed the loss of the Vietnam war to the media’s willingness to show violent images of the victims. I continually wonder how the availability of phone cameras in people’s hands and easy internet dispersal have changed the impact of photography, now depicting participant horrors beyond our imagination, the fate of the victims and the actual unfolding of violent acts in real time. Do we accept their veracity or are they manipulated? Do we avoid them for fear of drowning in helpless bystander feelings? Will they distance us from understanding war because they come from sources that we associate with the “enemy?” Can war documentation cut through hate, anger, resentment, violence and destruction, change minds? Could it in 1956, can it now?

In reviewing the LACMA exhibition, my thoughts were these:

I have no definitive answer. This exhibition’s imagery most meaningful to me, a pacifist, namely the depictions of suffering and the satirical stabs at those who financially gain from war, will likely not speak to those eager to go to war, just as racist propaganda posters embraced by them do nothing for me. Maybe our ideological or political divisions prevent us to think through art that does not confirm our preexisting beliefs. To that extent, art will not be able to produce change, given the strength of our biases.

It is certainly worth a further discussion, and I hope Chim’s images will provide a starting point for exploring these issues at OJMCHE. The last photo he took before he was killed two days later, encapsulates war’s human toll – two wounded civilians sharing a mattress with paltry enough to eat. Half a century later we still see the same pictures, multiplied by thousands. Stories told through a lens were intended as a wake-up call. It seems, to no avail.

David Seymour (Chim) Civilians, Port Said, 1956

OREGON JEWISH MUSEUM AND CENTER FOR HOLOCAUST EDUCATION
724 NW Davis Street
Portland, OR 97209

Wednesday – Sunday: 11 – 4

Chim: Between Devastation and Resurrection

The Magic World of Leonora Carrington

July 7 – October 13,2020

Special events:

Opening Reception this Sunday July 7, 1:30 – 3:00 pm.

Goddess of Surrealism: A Lecture About Leonora Carrington with Dr. Abigail Susik

August 8 | Event starts at 6 – 7pm, Doors open at 5:15pm for reception

The Life and Work of David “Chim” Seymour, presented by Ben Shneiderman

July 21 | Event starts at 2pm – 3pm, Reception at 3pm – 4pm

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Exquisite Gorge II: Felt Worlds.

“To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.” — ― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

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The last time I was surrounded by, no, immersed in dots, was during a visit to The Broad, L.A.’s museum of contemporary art. If you braved the eternal lines for Souls of a Million Light Years Away, you were accorded exactly 45 seconds to explore the experience once you entered a room full of mirrors and LED lights – guard with stop watch on hand standing outside and calling you out. The installation by nonagenarian artist Yayoi Kusama, obsessed with polka dots, fully insisting that we are all connected souls in the world, felt more spectacle than art, ready for the Instagram crowd.

My visit to Xander Griffith, one of the fiber artists for the Exquisite Gorge II project at Maryhill Museum this summer, put me among the dots again, this time made from felt – but the experience could not have been more different, on so many dimensions, length of time and friendliness of interaction included.

Practicing his art might make his soul grow – looking at it sure lifted mine.

Xander Griffith sitting underneath one of his felt “paintings.”

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THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECT II

“…a collaborative fiber arts project featuring 13 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence. The project, again initiated by Maryhill Museum of Art and following the original one by printmakers in 2019, takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project II, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”

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Originally from Arizona, Griffith is a quick-witted young artist who discovered felt some eight years ago and has pursued working with it with a passion ever since. (He used to do Improv – would have loved to see him there as well!) One of the inspirations came from a chance encounter at the Portland Art Museum when he was visiting Portland from San Diego where he then lived and collaborated with the non-profit arts organizations Sol Diego Arts Collaborative and the San Diego Collaborative Arts Project, working on diverse large-scale creative projects. With no connection to pointillism or any other impressionist artist – Griffith started to work in shipping right after high school, never exposed to formal art training – he was struck by the effects of this painting by Théo Van Rysselberghe.

Theo van Rysselberghe Plage à marée basse à Ambleteuse, le soir (Beach At Low Tide, Ambleteuse, Evening) 1900

He started to cut, roll, shape and manipulate prefabricated felt, the kind you can purchase at any craft store, building, with a hot-glue gun, tableaux that contain entire worlds .

There is no shyness around color, partly driven by what is available, partly an expression of the enthusiasm Griffith brings to describing a world containing beauty. He used to buy the acrylic or rayon-wool blend fabrics by the yard. Eventually he could afford bolts, then cartons of bolts, which lowers the risk that the manufacturers change hue or saturation while he’s in the middle of a project.

Nature in all of its variation is a focus of the displays, but you have to look for it – the felt paintings manage to surprise you with a lot of hidden detail, in color as well as form, once you’ve gone beyond the first overall impression of a riot of saturated pattern. The art reveals itself really with successive inspections, making you interact much more actively with each piece than you would have presumed. (Find the frog or the heron below.)

Griffith is closely connected to nature, living with a rather large snake, a rabbit, and the occasional injured squirrel being nursed back to health, together with his longtime partner in a duplex in Vancouver, WA. The rooms are filled with his creations, a joyous riot of shapes and hues.

Lou Palermo, Maryhill’s Curator of Education, in conversation with the artist.

After the first years of the typical emerging-artist struggles, he was chosen to display his art at Portland Airport. The tableaux were exhibited along the entire Concourse B and thousands of people encountered them. He’s not lacked for commissions ever since, now able to create his art full-time. Here he explains in a short clip his approach to making these felt paintings.

I was taken by the fluidity of the work, unfiltered and unafraid, a sense of improvised decisions guided by intuition, and occasionally “corrected” by removing misplaced sections through application of heat from the back (a great willingness to sacrifice all that labor-intensive placement.) This is one of the contrasts that I alluded to earlier, when remembering Yayoi Kusama‘s work: if you look at the dot patterns on her ubiquitous pumpkins there is nothing that is not pre-calculated to the millimeter, and precision reigns supreme.

The Japanese artist has freely talked about the traumatic events in her early years during a childhood burdened with parental abuse, and I have always wondered if there was an obsessive, even compulsive yearning to control environments with precision, despite their seemingly cheerful subjects.

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I had another association to Griffith’s approach with something much more closely related visually: Aboriginal Dot Art. A short overview of the history of Australia’s most famous art form can be found here. The almost 80.000 years old indigenous culture without a written language was ephemeral in its art. Some rock paintings survived, but most of the stories told and symbols transmitted were drawn on sand or bodies, quickly removed, meant to preserve ancient knowledge within tribal boundaries, kept secret from outsiders.

In 1971, dot paintings found their way into permanence for the first time, when Aboriginal people were encouraged by a teacher, Geoffrey Bardon, to draw and paint murals, then paint on canvas. Given the general visibility of the art, the need to preserve cultural symbols, it is speculated, led to heavy layering and over-dotting of the paintings as a way to hide and protect their sacred elements in the works that held special internal cultural value.

Yumari by Uta Uta Tjangala, 1981. Courtesy of the British Museum

One can see some similarities in the way animals are embedded in Griffith’s dotted worlds. What sets his work apart, though, is the fact that it has become increasingly three-dimensional. Let me first say: No matter how hard you try, photographs don’t do the work justice. I was really surprised how much looking at the real thing changed the perception – and the feeling the pieces elicited. There is sense of depth, even movement, of warmth from the materials used, that simply doesn’t come across in photographs.

This is particularly true for his approach to depicting his Columbia river section that is to be displayed at Maryhill’s Exquisite Corpse project come August 6th.

His felt creation of some aspect of the landscape are slowly taking shape, still under experimentation.

The individual pieces are stuffed with more hand rolled felt flecks, the manual labor going in to these creations intense.

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Xander Griffith is a burner. He has attended the annual Burning Man event in Nevada’s Black Desert as well as its regional off-shoots countless times. The open-air art installations and community celebration has grown into a metropolis, one week of the year, that admits close to 80.000 people, charging $575 for a main ticket per person and a $140 vehicle pass plus fees. Cheap it ain’t. Yet tickets were sold out 29 minutes (!) after online sales opened this year after a Covid hiatus. (There are more to be had across different sales venues until August.)

The experience is clearly one that people yearn for, and that enriches them in so many ways that they live with the costs, economically as well as pragmatically: you have to bring everything in (15 gallons of water per day per person included) and cart everything out from an environment that has above 100 degrees during the days and is cold at night. Sustainability is writ large, and requires effort, particularly given that so many art installations are burned to the ground by the end of the week, and so many participants arrive by plane and endless car rides.

What draws so many artists to Burning Man is an environment that has yet to find its match. The folks at the Smithsonian tried to expose this to a larger public with an exhibit about Burning Man 4 years ago at the Renwick Gallery for Contemporary Craft. No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man explained it this way: for one, the scale at which you can work in the desert location is unmatched. Just imagine, 55 ft pieces surrounding you everywhere. Secondly, the installations are complicated enough that they require a community to be set up, only a collective of artists/workers with diverse skills and backgrounds can make them happen. And finally many of the pieces have an interactive quality – their kinetic, light or sound components, their invitation to touch them or climb them, all expect and encourage an involvement of the viewer.

This last component is certainly deeply lodged in Griffith’s art – the pieces invite you to touch, to feel, to peruse. I also am willing to go out on a limb, that the spiritual aspects of the Burning Man culture have found their way into the souls of many of the participating artists – here is a short talk by the exhibition curator that partially speaks to that.

Of course we cannot look into souls, but Griffith’s work is currently used to soothe some agitated ones. PDX airport has recently opened a new sensory room which is available to passengers 24/7, designed to be a therapeutic space particularly for travelers living with anxiety or along the spectrum of autism. His felt designs might be calming, or they might spread joy. I certainly look forward to seeing what he comes up with for the installation at Maryhill, soul growing as we speak.

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And here is FELT, some sufficiently old psych-prog-rock album to match my mood and age that I listened to when I drove home, through Vancouver neighborhoods full of lush murals on neighborhood stores, a sun way too hot for March but perfect for a band from 1970s Alabama. “Felt” is, of course, not just the material used in the art described, but also the past tense for the verb “feel.” Feeling itself can have two meanings: to touch or have a sensory experience of something, or to perceive or experience something emotionally. The one-wonder album elicited the latter, Griffith’s art, on the other hand, invites both.

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Art on the Road: The Whitney Biennial 2019

Sometimes I wonder if I am actually visiting the same exhibits that I have read about in the mainstream reviews. Take the Whitney Biennial, for example. Introduced by the Museum’s founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1932, the Biennial is the longest-running exhibition in the country to chart the latest developments in American art. This year’s exhibit was reviewed as Young Art Cross-Stitched with Politics by Holland Cotter in the New York Times, explained by ArtNet’s Ben Davis as The 2019 Whitney Biennial Shows America’s Artists Turning Toward Coded Languages in Turbulent Times and featured by the Wall Street Journal’s Peter Plagens as Still Protesting, but to What End? (with an entry paragraph that describes the exhibition as filled with work expressing political and social grievances, but feels like it may be preaching to the converted.)

The Whitney museum as seen from the terrace

I won’t waste energy on debating if the time for protests is over or on wondering where you possibly find circles of “converts” at the WSJ.

I will also mention only in passing that the NYT review’s title sets a condescending tone that is utterly misplaced. Young art implies, however subtly, that maturation is yet to come, and cross-stitch is a stab at a predominantly female activity that amounts more to craft than art (with apologies to the embroiderers of the Bayeux Tapestries…) If he meant interwoven, a far more neutral term, he might have just said so.

I do want to give reviewers’ claim of “(artists) turning to coded language or deliberate obscuring,” some closer inspection, though. Code has always been part of visual language, as anyone having taken Art History 101 or graduate seminars on Renaissance Painters, the old Dutch Masters or Expressionist Woodcuts – you name it – can tell you. What is obscuring code for one, however, is a potent signifier for another: it all depends on knowing the language immanent to the “code.”

And this is where the power of the exhibition kicks in: demonstrating the brutal division between those of us who are clueless about what many of the artworks imply, and those who get it the blink of an eye, being familiar with the expressed contents via the reality of one’s daily existence. We might share the same space, in world and museum alike, but we surely do not share a language or the experiences eventually captured by that language when it relates to race, gender, disability, and access.

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These attributes are not randomly chosen: Rujecko Hockley, who brilliantly co-curated the exhibit with Jane Panetta, described them in her catalogue essay as those, when made central, were the most relevant works found across the country. What the curators, in turn, made central in this first exhibit organized completely during the Trump-era, are women of Afro-Diasporic heritage, the majority of artists on display. They include Alexandra Bell, Janiva Ellis, Steffani Jemison, Tomashi Jackson, Autumn Knight, Simone Leigh, Jenn Nkiru, Las Nietas de Nonó, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Wangechi Mutu, Jennifer Packer and Martine Syms, among others. Smaller numbers of African-American and Hispanic men are also included, as are artists from the LGTBQ community or those living with disabilities, and the occasional white person, who convinced with equally intense and allusive works (Nicole Eisenman stands out in this regard, with a gargantuan, ebullient, scatological installation that I will try to decipher at another time.)

Nicole Eisenman Procession (2019) Details

The exhibit is dominated, then, by work from artists whose daily experience is incomparable to that of us average well-to-do white folks visiting this show. The work alludes to the aggressive assaults on minority existence, both by individuals and state-sponsored power, in no uncertain terms. Nowhere could I detect “a retreat from clarity (… one of the hallmarks of the show,”) or “an emphasis on interior life rather than performing for an audience,” as stated by previous reviews.

Quite the opposite: all falls into place once you read the work in the context of its connection to or reflection of each respective community. Public exposition of dissent, not interior life, marks what is on display, once you put the work in the context of current expressions of resistance by groups of people who up until now did not show up in the halls of the elite art institutions, or only as token individuals.

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Let me make my point clear by juxtaposing some of the art I either particularly liked or found representative of racial discrimination in the show, with communal artistic expressions that I photographed during the 48 hours before and after visiting the Biennial, on the streets of Harlem and Bushwick, the East Village and Williamsburg, respectively, during my short visit to NYC. The call and response between art in the museum and community context outside of it will hopefully convey what I’m after.

Here is a Biennial sculpture by Simone Leigh, who has had a meteoric rise as an artist across the last years, with her sculptures and installations exhibited and collected by major institutions, including a major commission for the Highline. Leigh exposes and reframes assumptions about Black female experience, undermining the stereotypes at the same time as she describes them. (She also integrates her artistic practice with real-life engagement, having opened self-care centers targeted at minorities to counteract the health threats faced by women of color.)

Simone Leigh Corrugated Lady (2018)

The ceramic sculpture has the proportions and solidity of a tank which stands in tension with the transience of alluded housing materials reminiscent of the makeshift shantytowns of poor African or Caribbean countries, corrugated metal and thatched roofs. The face, as is often the case in Leigh’s work, lacks eyes. Another woman who perhaps does not want to see the world, which, to begin with, does not see her or gazes at her with racist or male contempt. The power emanating from the squatness of the Gestalt comes across as a summons to those of its likeness: strength exists, and it exist in you. The refusal to look hints at the possibility of choice: it is up to you to not grant eye contact to a world that has forever kept you from power and choices. The reference to poverty warns of the obstacles in the way.

The real-world counterpart, the daily experience of young women of color, is spelled out in a public display at W 125th St and Malcom X Boulevard. The power to choose, in this case softness, is impeded by various oppressive factors in the social realm, poverty included. Each female portrait has text on the reverse side, listing the impediments to a freely elected state of being. Inside and outside the museum, then, we are called on to acknowledge the obstacles for women of color that are not usually shared by their white counterparts. This is not about interior life, but about external constraints, and non-random constraints at that. Scientific studies by Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty and Inequality support this point. Read them and weep – maybe your eyes will be washed away, too.

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Then there is Tomashi Jackson’s work which focusses on NYC’s ways of taking away housing and buildings from African-American and Hispanic property owners in manners possibly illegal and assuredly immoral, throughout the history of the city – as early as 1853 when Seneca Village was dislodged to make room for Central Park to 2019 when whole suites of buildings were snatched to make way for gentrification in Brooklyn.

Tomashi Jackson The Woman is King (Mary and Marlene)(Simultaneous Contrast) (2019)
A portrait of Marlene Saunders, 74, who almost lost her Crown Heights brownstone.

A detailed description of the artist’s approach and artistic decisions can be found here. Jackson encountered an investigative series in Kings County Politics describing the contemporary scandals around property theft and linked them to similar events more than 150 years ago. We are not talking about redlining, or similarly Jim Crow-inspired tactics, but actual confiscation of property through trickery.

The work is collage-like, merging time periods and representative faces into each other seamlessly, with gradations of color-induced abstraction to concrete representational photographs, buttons or other three- dimensional objects. In form it reminded me of the street collages you find in so many of New York’s doorways, layers upon layers of images and text merging into meaning; in content it is reminiscent of murals that depict ethnic connections to certain neighborhoods. Echoes of the core issue, housing scarcity and discrimination in exclusionary societies, can be found whenever you open a newspaper – if the topic still seems obscure, read this!

Door Collage in Bushwick

Williamsburg: The Rich killed NYC
Mural depicting a map of the Lower Eastside neighborhood and Hispanic inhabitants

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The link to artistic preoccupations out in the community is perhaps best exemplified by a painter who started out as a graffiti artist, Pat Phillips. Born in England in 1987, he grew up in Louisiana with a father who was a corrections officer. His work focusses, often with a wickedly satirical bent, on Black experience through the lens of the history of racism and violence tied to or emerging from cultural divisions. His contributions to the Biennial consists of three works, one rather large, that connect the dots between slavery, imprisonment and the resurgence of symbols that originated with the Revolutionary War: the Gadsden flag. As symbols go, this one has seen many interpretations, but is generally embraced by Tea Party members, Second Amendment defenders—and even Libertarians who are perpetually worried about government overreach.

Pat Phillips Untitled (Don’t Tread on Me) (2019

Phillips’ large painting, Untitled (Don’t Tread on Me) depicts someone’s hands nailing a snake skin with the first words of the flag slogan, with part of a weapon and a holster visible and a tear gas canister lettered Riot Control all stashed away behind a fence.

Pat Phillips The Farm (2018)

It hangs opposite to a painting called The Farm (the nickname for one of Louisiana’s most notorious prisons, the State Penitentiary named Angola) that contains references to agricultural slave labor seamlessly morphing into contemporary prison labor, field-bound as well. The third painting in the group, Mandingo (DON’T TREAD ON ME), combines the snake, prison uniforms, and a headless body trying to cut off the head of the snake, in the saturated yellows and blacks that we also find so often in large graffiti.

Pat Phillips Mandigo/DON’T TREAD ON ME (2018)

The paintings perfectly embody current developments resulting from anti-immigrant policies and a resurgence in racist practices: “Under lucrative arrangements, states are increasingly leasing prisoners to private corporations to harvest food for American consumers.” If you find this message obscure, may I suggest you crawl out from under your rock. Or better still, stay there and read Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement. My Story of Transformation and Hope by former Angola inmate Albert Woodfox.

Opportunistic violence is part of both worlds, within the incarceration culture, and outside of it, both in the world of rightwing zealots and that of gangs or rivals in environments that foster toxic masculinity.

My community match was found in Bushwick, depicting hands, prominent in Phillips’ art, holding on to some type of tool or weapon,

and a large mural of Biggie (the notorious B.I.G.,) a.k.a Christopher Wallace, a pathbreaking Brooklyn rapper, who had seen prison multiple times from the inside, was heavily involved in the growing East Coast–West Coast hip hop feud, and was murdered in a drive-by shooting in 1997.

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Current events, like the suffering and death brought upon Puerto Rico by 2017 hurricane Maria are evoked by Daniel Lind-Ramos‘, Maria-Maria (2019). A stylized Virgin Mary, clad in the traditional blue veil made from disaster relief tarps, coconuts, tubing and other materials, might be a spiritual beacon but seems, bent in grief, no good for practical relief. The lack of government intervention on any reasonable scale left humanitarian assistance to non-profits like Mercy Corps, who list the harrowing consequences of the hurricane now, 2 years later, here.

Daniel Lind-Ramos’, Maria-Maria (2019)

Puerto Rico, and echoes of spiritual longings, are remembered in the streets as well. Take this mural by the Italian duo Rosk&Loste which depicts a Hispanic young child surrounded by a halo filled with tropical ferns, holding what is perhaps a crisp but might as well be a communion wafer. The false promises of the Ray-Ban advertisement (more Magdalena than Mary) above it only enhances the sense of innocence and fragility of the young one.

If we open our eyes in the communities around us, we’ll be able to gather all necessary vocabulary to take back to the museum.

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Guggenheim fellow and National Book Award winner Ibram X. Kendi has a new book out – How to be an Anti-Racist – that invites contemplation of what anyone can do to move forward beyond discrimination and hate. The son of Kendi’s formidable literary agent, Ayesha Pande, told her and me over dinner how he and his classmates on their way up-town in the subway would always stand in front of a seated white person, knowing with certitude that the last ones would get up and leave by 96th street, freeing a seat for the rest of the ride into West Harlem. But a decade and a half ago, the worlds were strictly divided, known to a child. That might be different today with ever creeping gentrification, but little has changed in principle. Exhibits like the 2019 Whitney Biennial bring home the fact that race and class perpetuate separated space, with sets of knowledge confined to each community, and shared language still a missing link. We have to believe that it can be changed. Reading Kendi might be a first step. Learning to decode in front of marvelous, gut wrenching art might be another small move in that direction.

The Whitney Museum of American Art. 99 Gansevoort St. New York, NY 10014. The exhibit closes September 22nd, 2019.

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