Slowly turning over…

That last class was fun. I’d brought too many books, and had to take them home… (ugh!, a lug). That night, a massive party at Arleen Schloss & Ray Kelly’s lofts commemorated the 20th anniversary of the Plexus event “Purgatorio” at Cuando cultural center. It was a kind of extended “happening,” chaotic, sexy, exciting, and fabulously meaningless. All long gone, and long ago. Remembrance of a good time… Sunday Leon Golub was remembered at the Cooper Union Great Hall. It was packed. Golub was a great painter, renowned for his giant sized canvases depicting military irregulars torturing prisoners. Throughout his career, he and partner Nancy Spero were active in organizing political groups among artists. They had lived in Paris, and were appalled to see the U.S. take up the imperial role of France in Indochina. Leon worked to organize the Peace Tower in L.A. in 1967, and in New York he was active in the Art Workers Coalition, and later in Artists Call (against U.S. intervention in Central America). As a painter with roots in Abstract Expressionism, Golub is almost a classic social realist. He is one of the “castigators of society.” In the words of Rob Storr, he paints “things that you know to be so but you found difficult to think about.” Today he is “barely tolerated and rarely mentioned in academia.”
I ran out after the memorial despite seeing many friends in the lobby drinking the free wine (what a great combination! memorial and a kind of wake…), and shot up to Paula Cooper Gallery for the remnant benefit auction to benefit Critical Art Ensemble’s defense (http://www.caedefensefund.org/). This is a well known case, I thought, of the artist who is being prosecuted under Patriot Act bio-terrorism provisions because the group’s work targets Monsanto Corporation products… and now a second member of the group looks likely to be indicted. But many people have never heard of this! Well, the artists came out, the collectors followed, and CAE defense raised a grand chunk of change for legal defense.
Monday night I went to see Coco Fusco talk to a global cities class at NYU about her project for the 1997 Johannesburg Biennial, “Passbook Control Station.” Coco talked about her college days, when in 1978 she encountered the divestiture movement, in which activist students sought to force schools to drop their South African investments. It worked, and the apartheid policy ended. Still, Coco noted, “you cannot overturn decades of social conditioning overnight,” and her trip to Johannesburg with its intense poverty, elaborate security measures, and atmosphere of “enforced calm” impressed her deeply. She felt as if she had undergone a time travel journey to the era of Reconstruction (the post-slavery USA of the 1870s). The project she conceived for curator Olui Enwezor’s biennial was a “re-enactment” of the passbook control system – a station for making the passbooks, and another for checking them – that ruled the lives of blacks and people of color in South Africa during the Apartheid period. The project was fascinating, since it really hit a nerve with the South Africans, both black and white.
It was interesting she referred to it as a “re-enactment,” since in this case an artist is borrowing from a kind of popular theatrics – the long-running culture of battlefield re-enactors, and the historical parks which feature personages in the dress, trade shops and manners of people in the past. She seemed to be borrowing quite directly from the recent re-enactments of slavery, most notably at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. These dramatic reminiscences of a deeply traumatic past have elicited heartfelt reactions from the public, crying children, outrage and “intervention” on behalf of the actors playing slaves… Much of the same kind of reaction appears to have happened during Fusco’s piece in Johannesburg.
Well, I don’t know who is reading this… But next week we’re going into structure for real. Reading my article in the “Journal of Radical Political Economy” (Fall ’04) on the political economy of art, and looking at Mary Anne Staniszewski, Believing Is Seeing: Creating the Culture of Art.
In terms of what we’re trying to get over here, I recommend you read also Stevphen Shukaitis’ intro to his Greenpepper magazine issue on “Life Beyond the Market.” Although this issue is not yet online, Shukaitis posted the essay to the Au-Top-Sy list: http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/aut-op-sy/2004m08/msg00059.htm.
BTW -- This is Complacent.org (see last week’s blog about William Etundi of same). They are having a planning meeting for a block party upcoming. This should be a good opportunity to see artists thinking collectively about what they can do that is exciting and provocative.
Thursday, April 21st
7pm to 9pm (or so)
At Subtonic (below Tonic)
@ 107 Norfolk Street,Details at – http://www.firstwarmnight.com/dreamers/