viz.

Cold War Culture
Friday 21 & Saturday 22 November 2008
10.30-17.00 Lecture Theatre

Victoria and Albert Museum

London

International conference that brings together art, design, cultural and architectural historians of the post-1945 period. The Cold War was a period of high tensions and exceptional creativity, which touched every aspect of life from everyday goods to the highest arenas of human achievement in science and culture. This conference explores the major themes of Cold War Divisions, Americanisation, High Technology, and Last Utopias. The keynote speaker is Ariel Dorfman, and other speakers include Alice Friedman, Jean-Louis Cohen, Michell Provoost, David Crowley, Branislav Jakovljevic, Victor Misiano and Richard Barbrook.

£110 for 2 days, £55 for 1 day, concessions available
Supported by the Council of Europe
Book online or email bookings.office@vam.ac.uk

Photograph by John French (1960s)/Victoria & Albert Museum.

During this campaign season it's enlightening to recall a little history.
<!--break-->
This was one of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt's 1900 presidential campaign posters for a race they won handily. (McKinley was assassinated in 1901, so it was T.R. who followed through.) Note the parallels to today's political situation. The McKinley ticket is running on its record, which includes industrializing the nation, establishing financial stability, and freeing Cuba from Spanish rule. (You'll note that no reference is made to the Philippines, a less swift, clean, in-and-out kind of imperial project.) The before and after images create a straightforward visual argument about the progress that has been made under Republican rule, and McKinley and Roosevelt's brave-looking visages straddle the center of the poster. Ethos is established via their record, here visually depicted as an undeniable march toward better days. The argument? Vote for us, and we'll keep going forward together.

The issues in the 2008 campaign aren't much different: we're talking job creation, economic prosperity, financial soundness, and the success of our overseas ventures (undertaken, as the poster insists, "for humanity's sake"). But today the Republicans can't fall back on their record to convince voters that they're the safe bet.

The breakdowns and bailouts in the financial markets have created sky-high levels of fear, anger, more fear, and more anger. As the Dow drops, anxiety spikes. The situation is awful, dire, disastrous, catastrophic–a maelstrom of panic, collapse, more panic, and further collapse as investors act like crazed victims piling up against a door in a theater that has caught fire.

Don’t think that I had my money in CDs. I’ve been nailed badly and the prospects are not good for my family. But somehow, everyone needs to take a deep breath and exhale. For all the talk of pain, the term remains a metaphor for many of us. And the panic is a symptom not only of the obvious problems but also of what happens when a society becomes a market society instead of a society with a market economy.

If a photograph can help us regain a sense of balance, it might be this one:

The caption at The Guardian tells us that we are looking at a man performing with a horse at the Cavalia equestrian show in Lisbon, Portugal. The horse will be exhibiting superb training, but the roles almost seem reversed. The man looks like the lesser animal, almost like a monkey who has been trained to do tricks on the big ball. By contrast, the horse seems the epitome of nobility, a superior being who only has to show up to dominate the scene. He is the standard by which the man will be judged.

Perhaps this seeming inversion of a natural order appealed to me because of the financial world being turned upside down, and because of my wish to regain a sense of balance. And the scene is about balance–more specifically, about repose, with balance one means to that end. Indeed, the man could be a metaphor for the markets, as he balances precariously (however skillfully) on a globe than is at once unified and capable of punishing any sudden shift in his stance. Above all, however, it is something different from the madness of the markets. Sure, they will have sold tickets to the show, but for a moment a man and a horse stand in perfect equipoise. The man is on top of a small world, but not to get rich. Communion with the horse is more important than that. The sense of ritual harmony runs deep; Confucius would say that this sense of things is essential to restoring balance in the individual and the state.

I could end there, but there is need to go a step further. Repose in a theater may be too easy. The real test is real pain. This is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and observance has included this beautiful portrait:

The caption at The Big Picture says, “Nathan Gentry, age 6, sits by a window overlooking New York City traffic on September 8, 2006.” Nathan died after months of painful treatments. Although trapped in a disease that most children, thankfully, do not experience, Nathan captures so much of the vulnerability of childhood and the profoundly precious quality of life itself.

This also is a picture of repose. He is experiencing, it seems, a moment free of pain, of quiet reflection on the scene outside the window. And the scene is outside: the glass walls him in as much as it lets him see, and the outer world has shrunk to that small portal. Outside we can see scaffolding, and so he is looking at a building that will be sustained, though he cannot be. His repose comes not for keeping everything in balance, but from putting himself in relationship with what remains. He asks–and takes–nothing but a moment of peace. It seems that he has already learned how to live with less. Obviously, that is something many of us have yet to learn.

Photographs by Nacho Doce/Reuters and, via The Big Picture, Susan Gentry (©), who asked for a link to the Children’s Neuroblastoma Cancer Foundation).

Charles Burnett’s little known and nearly plotless masterpiece, Killer of Sheep, offers a tender yet realistic vision of life in 1970s Watts, the racially segregated suburb of Los Angeles where poverty, racism, and riots doomed the area to generations of social and economic oblivion. Inspired by Italian neo-realism, Burnett’s camera lingers on characters—many played by non-actors—to reveal situations of familial intimacy and communal identification.
<!--break-->
An opening scene shows a young girl in the mask of a dog. Such expressive sadness in the features of the animal hides the perceptive eyes and facial gestures of the child. Her father, Stan (played by Henry Gayle Sanders), exhausted from working shifts at a Los Angeles slaughterhouse, lays linoleum on the kitchen floor. A sensitive man, burdened with domestic duty and physical labor, Stan’s story offers occasion for audiences to reflect on the dislocation of his desire from the circumstances of his life.

Other images show children at play in an urban debris field; a young man casually walks away with a television set; children act out and are disciplined; petty gangsters arrive to tempt Stan to join them in a robbery. But the central narrative focuses on Stan and his relationship to his family and community.

This emotionally complex film, however, argues for the ambiguity of Stan’s relation to others—particularly his wife, with whom sexual intimacy is a problem. Attempts to help friends, too, often result in mishap, such as when Stan helps purchase a new engine block, only to have it fall out of the back of his pick-up as he puts it in gear. Stan’s main joy in life seems, in fact, to come through his work at the slaughterhouse, ushering sheep along to their final moments before the processing of their flesh.

Made on a budget of only $10,000 while he was a student at UCLA, Burnett’s film doesn’t try to ameliorate Stan’s situation. Instead, he argues for a vision of reality that refuses to perform to the social and racial expectations of others. He shows us, instead, a strange beauty that, perhaps against the viewer’s will, refuses to correspond to an appropriate system of values. Such tension brings viewers into a film that also denies the urgency of a crafted message, documenting instead the motives of communal actors. The final scene—a baby shower for a young pregnant woman—could have pushed the narrative into sentimentality (Spike Lee, for instance, can’t seem to live without it). Instead, viewers witness an exchange of human forces. Although we are not in the realm of Longinus’ sublime, the neo-realistic narrative nonetheless argues for a human vision that transcends social and economic behavior.

Listed in the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry and rated by the National Society of Film Critics as one of the top films of all time, Killer of Sheep is an American treasure, despite only recently acquiring the attention it deserves.

Click Above to See James Nachtwey’s TED Prize presentation.

Or for an alternate take, click on the cartoon.

Credit: Scott Stantis, Birmingham News

“Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic and carnivalesque in a vibrant democratic public culture.  We typically will not comment beyond offering an identifying label, leaving the images to “speak” for themselves as much as possible.  Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think capture the carnival of contemporary democratic public culture.

I couldn’t be happier. After years of watching new versions of one of my favorite commercials

Microsoft finally took up the challenge and came back with a counter-ad.
<!--break-->

It’s one of the clearest examples of ethos in a visual argument that I’ve seen. Bill Gates (“BG” to some) is there, looking like his next-door-neighbor-professor-y self, along with Deepak Chopra and others maybe more recognizable to people more in the know than I am. Being a PC is not depressing and brown, it’s rich and colorful and happy! It’s not office drone uncool, it’s rebelliously hip! Being a PC means you’re worldly, eco-friendly, caring and nice. A challenge to authority—but in a good way.

If you're a PC, you’re Everywoman or Everyman. And you’ve got friends.

BG sure knows how to throw down. What’ll Mac do now?

Guest post by Aric Mayer.

New York City is one of the greatest cities of the world, and certainly is one of the most integrated and diverse.  Here you can find all cultures and all ethnicities practicing their own heritages side by side.  People who in their homelands are at war with one another here manage to find ways to coexist.  This coexistence is exhibited best in New York City’s Subway.

When the train doors close, instance and ephemeral communities are formed.  Status and power do not buy you a seat at rush hour.  On an average weekday five million riders board the train, and whether rumbling along in the darkness of the tunnels or the daylight above, community standards are created and enforced by proximity.

In an age of internet associations across geographic lines, it is becoming easier and easier for communities to form, communicate, share ideas and reinforce each other’s belief systems. The internet has the promise of a great Athenian experiment in civic discourse. Unfortunately the trend seems to be that people are increasingly able to seek out and congregate only with others who are like them, and diversity, once the great possibility of the internet and the fundamental promise of democracy, suffers, replaced by a stultifying homogeneity.

And yet, by contrast, the New York City Subway is the great leveler of class, ethnicity, and virtually any other form of difference and distinction.  It encourages the daily practice of tolerance and cohabitation among millions of users.  And by doing so  it has become a gritty sort of civic square where all, for a time, are mostly equal.

Many pictures of democracy in action will be offered over the next weeks as we lead up to one of the most important presidential elections in recent memory.  And many of these will be grand visions of power and triumph.   In the midst of this, let us not forget what a great jumble of people we are.  And democracy is a messy business, worked out in the daily act of differing peoples coming together to work out their differences — or just to live with them.

Mexican-American artist Rene Alvarado currently has an exhibit at the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts through November 12.

"Madonna and Two Horses"

Is this stuff cool, or what?

"Songbird"

If you go to the artist's website, you can see even more of his fantastic paintings -- and find out more about the artist, whom I'd never heard of before hearing of him on KUT a few days ago. On the website his work gets compared to Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo's, but I see similarities between Alvarado's work and a host of others. You can see the surrealist influence of Dali, without a doubt, and an almost Chagall-like dreaminess. Picasso is there as well. But what Alvarado brings to the table is a specifically Chicano approach to these surrealist landscapes. According to his site, he is concerned largely with the psychology of identity. His parents brought him to the States when he was 7, and it is through his art that Alvarado tells the story of creating a new life in West Texas.

Recurring images in his work are bulls, the sea, and the female form. In some paintings Alvarado seems to be asking us to contemplate the art of display, as his still lifes stare back, accusingly, at the viewer. In another eerie painting, all in red hues, three mysterious bird-like creatures look over the sculpture of a torso -- with a dolphin's head. I chose the two paintings here because they seem to represent two different directions Alvarado takes in his work: abstraction and portraiture. In the first, the Madonna's triangular form occupies most of the canvas, her dark head and halo standing out against the softer pastels. Within those pastels, horses and fish and faces lurk, swimming and whispering and standing alert. The triangle of the Madonna's form intersects with a second, shadow triangle, the base of which is the blue feathers behind the horses' heads. All these triangles -- not to mention the look of the Madonna's head -- bring to mind ancient Mesoamerican civilizations that this Madonna might have been a part of.

The second painting, "Songbird," doesn't beg for the same kind of symbolic unpacking. It's what Alvarado does with color here that's so interesting to me, the play of shade and light that makes the soft grey feathers on the bird stand out so strikingly against the woman's hair. On the right side of the painting we see the faint imprint of a flower shoot.

Alvarado has converted an old church in San Angelo into his studio, blending community, tradition, and functionality in practice as well as in his art. It may be well worth the 4 1/2 hour drive from Austin to see.

Photojournalist James Nachtwey was one of the 2007 recipients of the TED Prize. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design and it brings people from these three worlds together to spread ideas, mostly by challenging fascinating thinkers to “give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes.  These talks are available on-line at TED.com.  The annual prize winners are given a $100,000 award AND granted one WISH to help change the world.  James Nachtwey’s wish is to “break [a story that the world needs to know about] in a way that provides spectacular proof of the power of news photography in the digitial age.”  That story will break on October 3 both on-line and around the world. Don’t miss it!

James Nachtwey’s Homepage

Carolee Schneeman’s controversial sixties-era films remain to my mind some of the most visually provocative reflections on the “deep and meaningless” facets of life during that turbulent period. Meat Joy (1964), made during an era of U. S. Cold War propaganda, Vietnam War escalation, and multiple political assassinations, celebrates flesh in a context that, at first, may seem anachronistic. And yet, American military and economic claims on the world provided artists of the period a safe space to reflect on the body and cultural taboos associated with libidinal experience.

Today, Meat Joy is a delight to view. The French voices and Dylan-esque harmonica background provide a feeling of joie de vivre that correlates with the playful embraces of scantily clad women and men. When processed fish, chicken, and sausage enter this orgy, I thought, okay, Schneeman is going to drive the metaphor down our throats (maybe not literally, but close enough). But visually, the performance remains so compact, visually kinetic and complex, and surprisingly light-hearted, that the gesture of, say, a fish, squeezed up tight between a young woman’s thighs, is, well, marvelous to behold in this context.

Schneeman’s argument, however, materializes the body—bringing it out of our minds, where too often it exists in submission to social and cultural ideals. By recontextualizing bodies on a stage in orgiastic abandon to the performative moment, the arms, legs, and torsos we see give definition to the space around them, and ask viewers to see bodies at play as they explore tabooed social boundaries.

Fuses (1967), by contrast, presents bodies in a much more intimate, domestic setting. With only ambient beach sounds to supplement the 22-minute, 16 mm film, the intimacy between Schneeman and her lover, James Tenney, is mediated through frequent narrative cuts, image-layers, and post-production manipulation of the celluloid itself. Despite the occasional glistening, post-coital cock, Fuses distances the audience from an experience of literal fucking. Instead, viewers witness an argument for how sexuality can be internalized and reflected on as an experience of the mind as well as of the body. If anything, the film is grounded in a mimesis that recalls the mental state during sex, with rapid image juxtapositions, visual submission to the body, ambient sources of light through a window, intrusions from a pet cat, and glimpses of the face of the other.

While the argument is made in a specifically hetero-context, the intrusion of ecstatic otherness often experienced in sexual intimacy is revealed here, making this a unique, and valuable, film about an area of life that typically remains hidden from popular view. Unlike pornography, which is about manipulating the image-as-product, aiming stylized sexual acts at a particular audience’s desire for physical gratification, Fuses, with its gorgeous shifts of light over the room and textured visual tableau, invites speculation from viewers on attitudes about sexuality, bodies, and expressive, if unconscious, forms.

I find films such as these compelling because they challenge our notions of suasion in the epideictic mode. Without explicit narratives—or even spoken arguments—we are left with the performative gestures of the visual frames of the films themselves.

Will the 21st century be a chronicle of cities or deserts? The stark contrast may seem artificial, but powerful forces are pushing global development in both directions at once. On the one hand, many hundreds of cities are growing rapidly and many of those are thriving. They are the sites of tremendous concentrations of wealth, human capital, social energy, information, and innovation. In the US, cities such as New York and Chicago are experiencing record levels of young people living in the urban core, which historically is a vital source of commercial and cultural progress. If rising energy prices keep that generation from migrating to the suburbs, then the transformation of the urban environment will continue. The future, then, will look like this:

I love this photograph of London at night. The city is a living thing, pulsing with vital forces, growing relentlessly along natural paths. The lighted arterials flow like roots feeding a plant, like blood vessels coursing through the body, like water cutting through rocks to become the channels of a great river carving the landscape. That landscape is suffused with both energy and density–an incredible concentration of social organization and electricity. This achievement is marked by the bridge and the river in the upper right of the photograph. The coordination of human enterprise and natural constraint is there in miniature, an historical token whose small scale and simplicity underscores the enormous amplification of social, political, economic, and technological power characterizing modernity.

So why talk about the desert? Because all that electrical power has to come from somewhere, and the enormous changes wrought by modernization in China, India, and elsewhere are–like the industrialized nations before them–rapidly depleting all natural resources, not least those that are non-renewable.   Urbanization has been aligned with global warming and greater inequities in wealth, education, and many other social goods. To put it bluntly, one way to make a city (and a civilization) is to turn the surrounding area into a desert.

As nations compete for ever more limited resources to achieve the benefits of modern civilization, one outcome could be a lot more of this:

This beautiful image is from the Sossusvlei Dunes in Namibia. The caption in the New York Times describes the country as one of “stark beauty and riveting contradictions.” If you want riveting contradictions, you don’t have to go to Namibia, and the picture has more in common with London as well. Note how the desert trees have the same ancient natural form as seen in the aerial view of the world city. The reversal of the color fields emphasizes their similarity: the branching pattern is gold on dark in the city, and dark on gold in the desert. In place of the teeming life of the city, however, here we see an environment defined by scarcity. And in place of density, we find stability gained by resisting erosion.

Deserts, like cities, are the result of both human and natural forces. London is the sum total of millions upon millions of decisions yet still subject to the deep interdependencies shaping the planet. Deserts will grow or shrink depending on how humans are or are not able to cooperate with each other regarding resource consumption, economic regulation, and other requirements for a sustainable modern civilization. Taken together, these two photographs remind us of one more thing: just as natural beauty is evident in both the city and the desert, nature couldn’t care less whether humanity brings itself to success or failure.

Photographs by Jason Hawkes/The Big Picture and Evelyn Hockstein/New York Times. For more of Jason Hawkes‘ stunning photographs of London, go to this post at The Big Picture. The Times story on traveling in Namibia is here.

Credit: SomethingAwful.Com

“Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic and carnivalesque in a vibrant democratic public culture.  We typically will not comment beyond offering an identifying label, leaving the images to “speak” for themselves as much as possible.  Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think capture the carnival of contemporary democratic public culture.

Cartoons—your everyday, old-fashioned ones—are one of my true loves. I haven’t studied graphic art theory, I don’t get into manga, I have no idea who the radical artists are out there. I think it’s a great medium, full of possibilities for telling stories, presenting viewpoints, making people laugh and think. Heck, I learned most of my Vietnam-era US political history from reading old Doonesbury books. Graphic novels? I’ve read two (V for Vendetta and Fun Home) and loved them. But let’s just say I’m a casual but enthusiastic lover of the comics.
<!--break-->
This one is called Spot the Frog by Mark Heath. I learned about it from another website, where someone who follows these things more actively said this was one to check out. So I did. I loved it—but couldn’t quite pinpoint why. There’s always been something about its cuteness that’s more than just cute. And then I saw the first panel of this strip. I was immediately homesick for Maine’s winters, for the beauty and quiet that lie all around, even surrounding our largest cities. I know this snow, I know that sun. I can tell you just about what month it is, and the temperature; I know what I’d be wearing if I were there. The simplicity of Heath’s two lines for snow covered hills not only allows me to fill in the scene with my own memories, but it is the scene. The simplicity is there in real life—those hills are just two lines, no detail, no movement, absolute silence.

Except for the frogs. They’re just silly.

[Mark Heath stopped the strip this past July, but they’re still running old ones at comics.com. You can find the one above here.]

Call for Papers

Taking Sides: The Role of Visual Culture in War, Occupation and Resistance

Radical History Review Issue #106:

The Radical History Review solicits contributions for a special issue on visual culture in war, occupation and resistance. Artists have often taken sides in ideological conflicts and in actual conflagrations. In terms of visual culture and resistance, the literature and music of the South African struggle, the murals of Belfast and Derry in Ireland and the poetry of the many Latin American movements for change are relatively well documented. Less analysis is available on the role of artists on one side or another of recent conflicts. Wars of Liberation and popular revolts such as those in Angola, Algeria, Iran and the Basque Country spring to mind. Despite the scale and impact of the Vietnam War, little knowledge is available in terms of the role of visual culture in the mass mobilizations against both the French and US occupations. Approaching five years into the occupation of Iraq and with numerous groups engaged in resistance, what form does visual culture play in demarcating opposing political positions? How have artists in colonized or oppressed nations viewed themselves and their work in terms of the largely western models that shape what is commonly defined as ‘art’ (the gallery, theater etc)? What has been the role of visual culture in support of imperialism or colonial expansion, as well as officially ‘state sanctioned’ cultural production?

The role of visual culture in conflict situations also prompts an examination of the implications of artistic ‘neutrality’. Despite current global instability many artists and cultural producers, especially in the western artistic tradition, consider their work to be apolitical or neutral. Can artistic neutrality be said to exist in conflict situations, or is culture ultimately, in the words of Edward Said, “…a battleground on which causes expose themselves to the light of day and contend with one another?” (Culture and Imperialism).

This issue of RHR is particularly interested in exploring these questions.

A partial list of topics of interest is available here.

Radical History Review solicits article proposals from scholars working in all historical periods and across all disciplines, including art history, history, anthropology, religious studies, media studies, sociology, philosophy, political science, gender, and cultural studies. Submissions are not restricted to traditional scholarly articles. We welcome short essays, documents, photo essays, art and illustrations, teaching resources, including syllabi, and reviews of books and exhibitions.

Submissions are due by November 15, 2008 and should be submitted electronically, as an attachment, to rhr@igc.org with “Issue 106 submission” in the subject line. For artwork, please send images as high-resolution digital files (each image as a separate file). For preliminary e-mail inquiries, please include “Issue 106″ in the subject line. Those articles selected for publication after the peer review process will be included in issue 106 of the Radical History Review, scheduled to appear in Winter 2009.

Liberty Mutual, the insurance company, is the sponsor of "The Responsibility Project," a multimedia effort to get people to consider what it means to do the right thing. The project was spawned by the overwhelming public response to a Liberty Mutual commercial -- you've probably seen it -- in which a chain of strangers in some urban setting do nice things for each other without recognition. The "nice things" are mostly small acts of courtesy -- we're talking moving a stranger's coffee cup away from the edge of a table so that it doesn't fall off, opening a door, keeping a van from backing into a motorcycle. Not world-changing acts here. Yet the argument of the commercial, apart from "buy Liberty Mutual," is that these chains of small acts of kindness have big results. With Hem's weepy song "Half an Acre" playing in the background and city-dwellers pausing in contemplation of an unexpected kindness, wistful looks in their eyes, the commercial probably elicits a groan from the cynical and a tear from the sentimental. Or, if you're like me, a tear followed by a groan. That was the seed. The flower is a website with numerous short films exploring the issues of responsibility, obligation, community, and, yes, serendipity. The website reads, "We believe that the more people think and talk about responsibility, and even debate what it means, the more it can affect how we live our daily lives. And perhaps, in this small way, together, we can make the world just a little better." I watched one of the short films, "The Lighthouse," which was all about the way a community comes together to keep the lighthouse lit and prevent a ship from foundering disastrously on the rocky shore. It was sweet. Inspirational. Manipulative? Now, it's not that I don't think that discussion of these issues is important. It is. And it's not even that I object to pathos-laden appeals to duty. But something about an insurance company sponsoring this discussion really bothers me, probably because these short films, while interesting statements on their own, are being used in the service of promoting Liberty Mutual. "The Responsibility Project" is an ethos-builder for the company. But is that a bad thing? Check out the website; I'm interested to know what others think.

The science section can be a pleasant diversion from the overheated controversies on the front page of the newspaper, but this week there is a connection that shouldn’t be overlooked. Let’s start with the science.

This is a portrait of three langurs, an endangered species residing in southern China. Between hunting and deforestation, they were on a steep slope toward extinction. This population was down to 96 when Chinese biologist Pan Wenshi began studying them in 1996. Today, despite continued development in the area, they number around 500.

The picture above may look like a nuclear family but actually is a mother, child, and another female. Monkeys have social organization, one might even say polity, to survive, and this population may even be experiencing socio-political evolution from patrilineal infantide to negotiated power sharing. What is equally impressive is how Dr. Pan called on human social organization to develop a more effective strategy for saving the langurs. Instead of enclaving the endanged population and focusing all his resources on them, Pan worked at improving the infrastructure for the human population surrounding them. Soon the villagers had clean water, medical services, a school, and more sustainable energy–basic infrastructual needs that required only smart designs, effective advocacy, and not a great deal of money. One result was that the forests recovered and villagers started to protect the monkeys from hunting.

So why am I telling you this? Because in the front section of the newspaper you can read all about the $700 billion bailout plan for reckless financial corporations that is being pushed by the Bush administration. That’s the same administration that refused to regulate the industry or address any of the danger signs that have been accumulating for several years. I’ll let that go, because now the key question is how to protect the economy. And that’s why we need to pay attention to Dr. Pan instead of Treasury Secretary M. Paulson Jr. and company.

The gist of the administration proposal is that we have to save the few in order to save the many. The few don’t deserve to be saved, that that’s not important; they are likely to salvage enormous personal fortunes despite financial malpractice, but that’s a separate issue; there are no obligations in place of continuing incentives for mismanagement, but this is not the time for that; the costs are excessive and are to be paid by millions of people who have done no wrong and will be harmed by the payout, but we don’t have time to do anything else; this is contrary to the reigning ideology that is one cause of the disaster, but we must be practical rather than principled or “partisan.” Or so we are told.

I’d like to think that this debacle is one of the last vestiges of the political economy of twentieth century oligarchy. That’s too optimistic, of course, but it does suggest that the complex problems of the twenty-first century require smarter, less resource-intensive, and–let’s say it–more democratic solutions. The approach taken by Dr. Pan, for example. His basic idea is that in order to save the few, you have to save the many.

There has been a lot of talk about prudence lately in respect to both Wall Street and the presidential campaign. The administration’s bailout is not prudent. In the name of saving the system it puts system sustainability at risk. While claiming that the issue is of the highest seriousness, it refuses to take the time for adequate deliberation. Instead of concentrating on foundational issues such as a fair distribution of wealth, maintaining essential infrastructure, providing adequate regulation for a modern economy, and otherwise protecting the basic social contract that undergirds the society, it ransoms all that for a quick fix.

The plan may go through. A similar propaganda campaign led to another trillion dollar disaster not too long ago, so the cynical money may be on Paulson. Whatever happens, the rest of us need to start emulating Dr. Pan’s approach. He had specific advantages that favored its development, of course: he was far from the center of power, had little money, and cared about more than his own self-interest. Come to think of it, we may have a lot in common.

Photograph by Peking University Chongzuo Biodiversity Research Institute.  The accompanying story is here.

Jeremy Blake’s Century 21 (2004)—the final installment in a trilogy inspired by the narrative of eccentric firearm heir, Sarah Winchester—digs into the psychic tableau of the American West. It’s gorgeous—and horrific.

The frames of Blake’s image montage are layered with different media, including gouache, ink, still photography, CG graphics, and 16mm film. Such image density creates a striking vividness of form that is part acid trip, part interlinear homage to the haunted legacy of Winchester’s eccentric "mystery" mansion, constructed in San Jose, California, from 1884 to 1922. The trilogy was screened for the first time in the U. S. in 2004 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Through these haunted surfaces and images—cartoon cowboys, iconic silhouettes of gunfighters, the tongue-like extensions of succulent plants—viewers observe the formation of narrative around the slowly paced repetition of key figures. Using these elements, Blake is able to address our attitudes toward property, freedom, and, to quote Robert Plant, the “deep and meaningless” contexts of daily life. He also asks viewers to reflect on the paranoia extant in the surfaces of objects and figures that populate the national narratives of individualism, ownership, and deal making.

In a frame that repeats throughout the film, the silhouette of a lone man on horseback arrives, head down, to be overtaken by images of geodesic domes and signage for Century 21, Century 22, and Century 23—forlorn but suggestive sites in Blake’s western geography. The accompanying Aaron Copland soundtrack is layered with the sounds of strong wind and other digitally enhanced elements to deliver a feeling of anxious vacancy.

Compare this with last Thursday’s image of Nancy Pelosi, Ben Bernanke, and Henry Paulson, who met to reaffirm world financial markets that they had a plan for handling the current mortgage/credit crisis. The tension in their faces betrayed the hopeful content of their message. I can’t help but wonder if Sarah Winchester’s paranoid legacy isn’t being carried over into Washington and Wall Street—the ghosts of bad decisions and short-term greed returning to make claims on the conduct of the “American Way of Life”—something that, as Dick Cheney once said, is “non-negotiable.”

As the media and politicians continue to blame faulty mortgages and risky decisions by Wall Street bankers in an attempt to scapegoat the nearest and most exposed playerz of the current financial meltdown, Blake’s visionary tableau of angst argues that national narratives of acquisition, confrontation, and macho individualism influence our ability to make decisions and act within the environments we inhabit. Heroism is outpaced by tragic misfortune and violent contradictions of desire. Our manipulation of the material world, Blake seems to argue, backfires as paranoia and fear catch up with us—and the ol’ homestead awaits foreclosure.

It is hard to find much to smile about in the news these days what with the U.S. economy in the toilet, sectarian conflicts erupting throughout the world, and nature following its own rhythms and paths to devastating destruction. And so when I saw this picture featured front and center on the NYT website yesterday with the headline “A Vision of Tourist Bliss in Baghdad’s Rubble” I broke out in laughter –and then I double-checked the URL to make sure I hadn’t inadvertently clicked on the website for The Onion.

The man we are looking at is Humoud Yakobi, the head of Iraq’s Board of Tourism, who is looking to convert a small, bombed out island in the Tigris River and within sight of the Green Zone into a fantasy island getaway that would include a “six star” hotel, an amusement park, and luxury villas “built in the architectural style of the Ottoman Empire-era buildings in Old Baghdad.” It would be topped off with – and I kid you not – the “Tigris Woods Golf and Country Club.” The only thing missing, it would seem, is Ricardo Montalban’s “Mr. Roarke” and his sidekick Tattoo. The problem, it seems, is not only finding financial backers to fund the 4.5 billion dollars to underwrite the enterprise, but reckoning with the fact that the target audience—Western tourists—tend to be “sensitive to bombings and things like that” (at least in the opinion of the head of the media relations department of Iraq’s tourism board).

The return to normalcy will surely require venture capitalists willing to take risks on Baghdad’s future and so perhaps we should not be overly cynical here. And yet it is hard to be anything but cynical when the NYT’s “Week in Review” features another story that presumes to underscore the first stages of the return to “calm” and “normal” with a photograph of a mother and child walking about safely in a mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood:

Of course, one cannot look beyond the edges of the photographic frame, and so it is impossible to see what, if anything, enables or secures the apparent calm and safety.  And as if to acknowledge this absence the NYT slips in two small clickable photographs sutured together in a sidebar labeled “Street Scenes”:

It is important, I think, that the two images function as a vertical diptych, forcing the viewer to take them in seriatum as part of a coherent narrative.  The top photograph, the caption tells us, shows members of the “Awakening Council” controlling a local “checkpoint.”  The bottom photograph is a car bombing from “early 2007” and is captioned as a once “frequent” scene.  The implication then is that the only thing that stands between the bombed out cars and the scene of relative calm  in the Sunni-Shiite neighborhood are these local militias.

This logic of the visual narrative is impeccable and if we stop here we might be inclined to read the story as designed to animate support for U.S. policy and the Bush administration’s Pollyanna conclusion that “the surge” has helped Iraq recover its middle American, Main Street calm.  But I think another possibility has to be considered.  For surely one implication of the visual logic has to be that just as one needs to look outside of the frame of the first photograph to discover what might be supporting the relative calm, one needs equally to look outside of the diptych to discover what supports the Awakening Councils—which are, after all, groups of former Sunni insurgents funded as mercenaries by the U.S. government as part of a “hearts and minds” campaign –and to wonder what will happen when that support dissipates.

The answer to this question is by no means clear, but given the history of this region one has to assume on par that the return to sectarian violence is a very real likelihood.  And so we come back to the article that reports Hamoud Yakobi’s plans to build a luxury, tourist retreat on an island in the Tigris River.  It really is an absurd fantasy, but then again perhaps no more absurd or fantastic than portraying a neighborhood controlled by former insurgents hired as mercenaries by a foreign and occupying government as somehow a return to normalcy.  And maybe that was the point all along.

Photo Credits:  Max Becherer/Polaris and New York Times; Ali Jasim/Reuters.

 

Photo Credit:  Erin Gay/AP, Seattle Times, September 14, 2008

“Sight Gags” is our weekly nod to the ironic and carnivalesque in a vibrant democratic public culture.  We typically will not comment beyond offering an identifying label, leaving the images to “speak” for themselves as much as possible.  Of course, we invite you to comment … and to send us images that you think capture the carnival of contemporary democratic public culture.