Yet Another Follow-Up on "Today, we are all Joan Miró" - On Art & Politics

"If people are willing, in extreme situations, to shed their own blood for freedom,
they have a greater chance of actually gaining that freedom than if they are not
willing to do so . . . But I would immediately add another important thing: such
decisions cannot be made for others. If you wish to sacrifice your life for our
common freedom, you may. If I wish to sacrifice my life, I may. But neither of
us have any right to compel anyone else to do it, or not to ask him and simply
sacrifice his life." ~ Václav Havel (1986)

In The Guardian today you can find this longish, sympathetic primer for the Miró exhibition opening soon at The Tate Modern. This gives me an opportunity to follow up on two earlier posts - here and here - that I wrote a short while back in reply to a column by Jonathan Jones, also in The Guardian. Jones admonishes Miró (and by extension everyone who voices political criticisms without setting off for the front) for lacking the courage of his political convictions. I thought his complaints were - politely - wholly unfair. I still do. I will resist the temptation to explain once again why that is so. But the article today gives me the opportunity to invoke this remark from Havel as yet another follow-up. Moralism of the sort Jones purveys is facile and politically dangerous.

Follow-Up on "Today, we are all Joan Miró" - On Art & Politics

Joan Miró. Plate 4 from the Black and Red Series, 1938.
Image © 1998 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

A couple of days ago I posted some thoughts on this column at The Guardian by Jonathan Jones. In the piece Jones castigates "us" as being like Joan Miró who responded to the Spanish Civil War from afar rather than like George Orwell who went off to fight with the Republicans. Here are some more questions. Does art have to be activist to be political? The two are not the same, after all. Is "activist" even the best strategy? What would Jones make of the long series of paintings Robert Motherwell made over the course of decades, all entitled "Elegies for the Spanish Republic"?

Robert Motherwell. Elegy for the Spanish Republic, #126 (1965-75).

Or what about another visual cut at fascism - Leon Golub's series of canvases on torture and interrogation? Are we even in a position to know - even post- Abu Ghraib - about, let alone intervene in, such practices? At least one can ask if we know enough detail to intervene in practices like those Golub depicts that we generally suspect are occurring.

Leon Golub. Interrogation II, (1980-81).

More to the point, should we be criticizing artists like Golub, Motherwell, and Miró - holding them up for thinly disguised scorn - because they are not Orwell? After all, they "just" or "only" used their art to depict horrors and consequences. They didn't take up arms. And so ...?

And, of course, in an era where one's adversaries are likely enough to be mercenaries (ex-military paid, say, by Blackwater or its corporate offspring) or child soldiers (who are basically trained sociopaths) would taking up arms be anything other than more or less certain and largely pointless suicide? Jones would surely flinch at shooting down a twelve year old, even if the child were armed. And in that instant the boy would have shot Jones - to say nothing of you or I - for his trouble. The mercenary would've killed Jones before he had time to flinch. Nothing personal in this. But what is it that Jones expects of art?

Politics does not generally involve violence. And it cannot require intervention or action across time or space or absent some coordinated movement. Nor can it demand that essentially individual level activity like painting generate immediate, unambiguous action. That is the remit of the propagandist. The works I have lifted for this post are attempts to raise questions, provoke reflection, give voice to emotions and to do those things in response to violence and terror. It seems to me that we are in Miró's debt - and in Golub's and Motherwell's too. And it seems to me that Jones misses the point.

"Today, we are all Joan Miró."

So says Jonathan Jones in this essay in The Guardian. In so doing he places a finger on the moralistic types who condemn violence and oppression but, when the chips are down, are unprepared not only "to fight for justice but also to face and tell the truth." Miró, it seems, fell into that category during the Spanish Civil War. I'll take Jones's word for that since I don't know the actual history. So, let's assume that Miró both could've taken up arms in the Republican cause and didn't.

The hero of this piece is Orwell - the anti-Miró - who both set off to fight the fascists in Spain and (in Homage to Catalonia) frankly exposed the foibles and hypocrisies of the Republican coalition. I agree with Jones on the need to engage in politics not philanthropy or posturing. But I disagree that "fine words ... spoken in support of fine ideals" are necessarily empty or cheap. And I suggest too that it was difficult enough to set off to fight fascists in Spain - where it was relatively easy to tell the good guys from the bad. In many (perhaps not all) conflicts today the demarcation is murkier.

And the complicity is deeper too, I suspect. Mubarak, of course was our client; and so too was Saddam Hussein. Our Naval fleet, I believe, anchors in Bahrain. Ought we be taking up arms? Would doing so now be too late? Now, once the people in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and lord knows where else have taken to the streets, should we be there providing armed protection? Just what is Jones suggesting? Is he trading moralism for delusion?

Beck's Campaign Against Francis Fox Piven (3)

"I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income." - Martin Luther King, Jr. Where Do We Go From Here? (1967).

"It is our purpose to advance a strategy which affords the basis for a convergence of civil rights organizations, militant anti-poverty groups and the poor. If this strategy were implemented, a political crisis would result that could lead to legislation for a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty." - Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward The Nation (1966).

In The Guardian today there is yet another story on Glenn Beck's ongoing campaign against Francis Fox Piven. I found it funny that Piven arranged to meet the correspondent from the paper at a NYC restaurant called "Havana Central."

One thing that strikes me about Beck is his ignorance about history. You can find a link to the 1966 essay by Piven (and her husband, the late Richard Cloward) that so exercises Beck here at The Nation. That is where I lifted the statement above - from the first paragraph of the essay. My point today is just to say that Piven and Cloward were advocating a strategy to implement a policy that, as I noted here a year ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. also endorsed. And since Beck has announced his aim to reinvigorate Dr. King's message, how is it that he objects to Piven and Cloward? What better way to end poverty does Beck envision than the one King came to embrace? Beck instead ought to be embracing Piven as an ally in that cause. Maybe that is why he has afforded her all the publicity that trails in the wake of his diatribes.
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P.S.: You might find this portrait of Piven and this more recent Op-Ed from The Los Angeles Times - both by Barabara Ehrenreich - interesting.

Keeping Your Eye on the Ball: Burma

Harn Lay (2010). Photograph © Platon, for Human Rights Watch.

It has been roughly a week since the military junta in Burma released Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest. At the time I noted here that while this was a welcome turn of events, it represented a quite minimal step by the authorities. There are many prisoners being held and many others who have been driven into exile. Cartoonist Harn Lay is among the latter group. He has been in exile in Thailand since 1988. Human Rights Watch has commissioned photographer Platon to portray some of the many others who have born (and continue to bear) the brunt of military rule in Burma. You can find the results of his work on this project here.

The upshot? It is important that we outside of Burma continue to speak out against the junta and its authoritarian policies. And it is more important still to devise policies that might bring pressure to bear on the junta. Many observers think that is impossible given their intransigence. For example, here are remarks (part 1, part 2) made by Amartya Sen at this conference coordinated by Human Rights Watch last month. What is called for is not just moralizing, but concerted political action.

What Rich Liberals Don't Seem to Get

Consider this comparison. Recently George Soros, who certainly is very rich and may be considered a liberal, announced a $100 million (US) "gift" to Human Rights Watch, with the funds to be dispersed over five years [1] [2]. In my ideal world the need for effective human rights monitoring would not disappear. My ideal world is not a fantasy land. But such activity would not be financed through charity. Human rights activity should not be a philanthropic enterprise. Rich liberals, though, tend to think philanthropically.

Recently too, The New Yorker published this extended piece on the Koch brothers - David and Charles - who are also extremely rich and certainly right wing extremists. Koch & Koch are, according to the report, "the primary underwriters of hard-line libertarian politics in America."* They generously fund "think tanks" and political candidates and, now, the putatively "grassroots" Tea Party. All, of course, on the premise that those whom they fund toe the Koch party line.** The aim is to define the political and policy agenda (or disrupt the efforts of others to do so), not just clean up messes or remedy some "problem." This is not charity, its politics.
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* "Only the Kochs know precisely how much they have spent on politics. Public tax records show that between 1998 and 2008 the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation spent more than forty-eight million dollars. The Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, which is controlled by Charles Koch and his wife, along with two company employees and an accountant, spent more than twenty-eight million. The David H. Koch Charitable Foundation spent more than a hundred and twenty million. Meanwhile, since 1998 Koch Industries has spent more than fifty million dollars on lobbying. Separately, the company’s political-action committee, KochPAC, has donated some eight million dollars to political campaigns, more than eighty per cent of it to Republicans. So far in 2010, Koch Industries leads all other energy companies in political contributions, as it has since 2006. In addition, during the past dozen years the Kochs and other family members have personally spent more than two million dollars on political contributions. In the second quarter of 2010, David Koch was the biggest individual contributor to the Republican Governors Association, with a million-dollar donation. Other gifts by the Kochs may be untraceable; federal tax law permits anonymous personal donations to politically active nonprofit groups."
** "David Koch has acknowledged that the family exerts tight ideological control. “If we’re going to give a lot of money, we’ll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our intent,” he told Doherty. “And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don’t agree with, we withdraw funding.”"

The Casualty Gap

Every once in a while people in my discipline get it right. They deploy their fancy quantitative methods to establish - at least as solidly as any piece of social research can establish anything - what grandma knows. In this book* two young guys named Kriner and Shen show that disproportionate numbers of poor and minority Americans are sent off and die when we have a war. And they show too that public opinion about war is inversely related to awareness about this "causality gap." I have spent a bunch of time here complaining about how our so-called liberal media has been complicit in the BushCo war effort precisely to the extent that it failed to report on the casualty numbers from Iraq and Afghanistan. And while I tend to agree with Andrew Bacevich's review in The Nation (he says that we ought not await public outcry based on democratic norms but hope instead for a "pay as you go" policy for wars, essentially hitting the civilian population in the pocketbook) the book nevertheless strikes me as an important contribution.
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* Douglas L. Kriner and Francis X. Shen. The Casualty Gap ~ The Causes and Consequences of American Wartime Inequalities. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Why Glenn Beck is Right (Meaning Correct, Not Just Reactionary)

Glenn Beck speaks at his 'Restoring Honor' rally in front of
the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, Saturday, Aug. 28, 2010
(Image © AP Photo/Alex Brandon).

I never thought I'd say it, but here goes. Glenn Beck is right! Reviving the message of Martin Luther King , Jr. would indeed go considerable distance toward restoring honor to America.

Unfortunately, Beck fails to grasp the implications of his call; MLK Jr.'s message entails radical politics of just the sort that he and his reactionary followers would find appalling. After all, King preached a message of progressive political-economic reform. For instance, he demanded a universal guaranteed income to directly address the widespread poverty that plagued the U.S. in the 1960s and continues to do so today. He also spoke and acted in solidarity with striking workers - indeed, he was shot in Memphis where he had traveled to support the demands of sanitation workers seeking to exercise their right to form a union. King also spoke eloquently against American military aggression in Viet Nam; his message on that score translates more or less seamlessly to our current disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. So, let the Merry Becksters re-orient their politics to accommodate King's message. We'd all be much better off.

The fact that those on the left are so pre-occupied with the resonance of King's "I Have a Dream" speech, suggests that they too ought to look more closely at Dr. King's message. He did not stand for freedom and civil rights in the abstract, but for freedom deeply embedded in circumstances of solidarity and justice and peace and equality.

Changing Conventions in War Photography (2)

So, I thought perhaps I was being too hasty in talking about the emergence of a new convention in war photography, one that places a premium on the 'human interest' aspect of American troops. You know, shots of the military personnel being just guys. So I had a quick, admittedly unsystematic look. The top two images below made it into the pictures of the day at the Lens blog at The New York Times last week. The top one, though, I lifted from The Washington Post who had also published it. The rest were easy enough to find on-line. Note - three different agencies, a half dozen different photographers. And we end up with the soldier in tee shirt and shorts, again.

Life in a war zone can mean improvising, including for exercise,
as illustrated by a U.S. soldier from the 1st Squadron, 71st Cavalry
at a forward operating base in Kandahar Province in Afghanistan.
The number of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan is expected to
peak at 150,000 in coming weeks. July 19th, 2010
(Manpreet Romana/agence France-presse Via Getty Images).

A U.S. soldier watches an Afghan movie on TV while relaxing at
Combat Outpost Nolen, an outlying base for the 2nd Brigade of the
101st Airborne Division, in the volatile Arghandab Valley, in Kandahar,
Afghanistan, Wednesday, July 21, 2010. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd).

A United States Marine from Bravo Company of the 1st
Battalion of the 2nd Marines eats watermelon as he rests
following a gunbattle as part of an operation to clear the
area of insurgents near Musa Qaleh, in northern Helmand
Province, southern Afghanistan, Friday, July 23, 2010.
(AP Photo/Kevin Frayer).

U.S Army First Lieutenant Sean Snook from Concord,
Massachusetts, and Alpha Company, 4th Brigade combat
team,1-508, 82nd parachute infantry regiment tees off
at FOB Bullard in Zabul province, southern Afghanistan,
February 12, 2010. (REUTERS/Baz Ratner ).

A U.S. Marine throws a football at Delaram base in
Nimroz province, southern Afghanistan January 24,
2010. (REUTERS/Marko Djurica) January 24, 2010

Spc. James Lollis, right, who was on his way to the gym, and an unidentified
soldier from the 2nd Battalion 12th Infantry take cover as incoming fire
hits inside Command Outpost Michigan at the Pech River Valley
in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, Saturday, Dec. 19, 2009.
(AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills).

There are, of course, many, many pictures of American troops, mostly in full combat gear, on patrol - sometimes they are engaged in firefights, sometimes they are menacing Afghans of various descriptions, sometimes they are talking to groups of kids or even kicking a soccer ball with them. These images are familiar enough. So the sorts of images I've lifted here are not exactly crowding out those more 'standard' images. However, with the exception of the occasional photograph of marines mourning the death of a colleague, images of death and destruction - the actual consequences of war for Afghans and the U.S. military - are exceedingly rare. In fact, other than the image of Joshua Bernard that generated so much controversy last fall, I don't recall seeing any. That may not be intended by the photographers who are covering the war, but it surely is politically convenient.

Changing Conventions in War Photography & the Disaster in Afghanistan

U.S. Army soldiers of the 1-320th Alpha Battery, 2nd Brigade of
the 101st Airborne Division, look towards insurgent positions
during a firefight at COP Nolen, in the volatile Arghandab Valley,
Kandahar, Afghanistan, Saturday, July 24, 2010.
(Photograph © AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

Over the course of the afternoon I had an interesting and helpful exchange of comments on this earlier post. My interlocutor, photographer Tim Hetherington, has taken exception to the post, interpreting my comments as questioning his integrity. I certainly did not intend the post in any such way and indeed stated as much at the outset. I apologize to Tim if I created that impression.

Having said all that, I thought it might help to depersonalize the disagreement. Let's not talk about Tim's work. My concerns are two. The first is directly political in the pedestrian sense; it centers on whether whether our troops in Afghanistan are serving our national interest. I stand by my judgment that they are not. They are there enacting a misguided policy. We can argue the question, but I am pretty confident about where the preponderance of evidence will fall.

My second concern has more to do with the politics of photography. Here is the nub of the issue: why is it acceptable to depict our military adventures in Afghanistan with images like the one I discuss here, whereas images like the one I discuss here generate an uproar? My concern is that we are witnessing not just the sort of censorship (and accompanying official rationalizations)* of images of war that prevents the media from showing even flag draped coffins being unloaded at military bases, but also the emergence of a parallel convention wherein we will get sanitized views of war dressed up in tee-shirts and boxers as though the soldiers just happened to be camped out there and came under attack totally by surprise. That is what I meant by visual euphemism.

As if on cue, I just found the image above festooned across the top of the home page at Huffington Post accompanying a story on the publication of classified records of the Afghanistan debacle (here and here too). Given the information that was released today, the confidence I noted above is growing.
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* For examples of censorship see, e.g. [1] [2] [3] ...

On the Ethics of Representation: Missing the Point Entirely

From: Stoned to Death, Somalia, 13 December.
Photograph © Farah Abdi Warsameh/AP.

Today The Guardian carried this column by Sean O'Hagan on the morality of photojournalism. His ruminations were prompted by this series of photographs by Farah Abdi Warsameh that won 2nd place in the "general news" category at the World Press Photo awards. (I've lifted one of the photos above.) The photos show a man being buried up to his chest and then stoned to death by a group of masked men. The man who was killed (should we say executed?) was named Mohamed Abukar Ibrahim and he had confessed to committing adultery. The judgment and execution, according to news reports, were carried out by an armed fundamentalist rebel group called Hizbul Islam. The rebels forced hundreds of local residents to watch the performance. I say performance because this is clearly political theater - horrific, no doubt - but no less theatrical for that. The rebels - who are party to a proxy war in the failed state known as Somalia - are trying to pacify the locals by terrorizing them.

O'Hagan engages in a hand-wringing exercise about the ethics of the photographer and the voyeurism of 'we' the viewers. In the process he, predictably enough, invokes that arch-moralist Susan Sontag. Against that background he raises a set of absurd worries about consent and communication between the doomed man and the photographer. I find this stunning. This is, after all a war zone; and it is entirely likely that the photographer was himself not given any choice than to record the events. This was theater after all. And repugnant as this execution is, it is one part of a broader political and military conflict. In closing, O'Hagan quotes Sontag:

"There is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it … or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be."

This is Sontag at her most ridiculous. But even by these standards there is a case to be made for publishing these images. Might it not be possible that viewers "could learn from" them? We could learn that this was a terrorist act. We could learn that the 'government' against whom the rebel groups is, in fact, rebelling is sponsored by the U.S. and other western nations. We could learn how quickly many of our fellow citizens were willing to use these images to condemn "Islam." I'm sure O'Hagan could come up others if only he'd stop wringing his hands and ask questions.

Not Just a Metaphor - The Marketplace of Ideas

This report in The Nation reveals how your cable news networks have become a soap box for corporate shills. This is bi-partisanship at work. Both Democratic and Republican lobbyists are taking part. And note too that it is not just right wing nuts at Fox who are offensive on this. It is the "centrists" and "liberals" at CNN and MSNBC too! This is not a free press, it is a press that is bought and paid for. We cannot rely on the ethical scruples of the corporate shills or the networks here. This is a political problem.

On the Obama Administration's Policy on Extra-Judicial Assasination of American Citizens: A Quiz

Which of these things is unlike the others?

(1) "Governments shall prohibit by law all extra-legal, arbitrary and summary executions and shall ensure that any such executions are recognized as offences under their criminal laws, and are punishable by appropriate penalties which take into account the seriousness of such offences. Exceptional circumstances including a state of war or threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency may not be invoked as a justification of such executions. Such executions shall not be carried out under any circumstances ..."*

(2) "Being a US citizen will not spare an American from getting assassinated by military or intelligence operatives overseas if the individual is working with terrorists and planning to attack fellow Americans." ~ Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair**

(3) "No person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law . . ." ~ Constitution of the United States of America, Amendment V
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*Principles on the Effective Prevention and Investigation of Extra-Legal, Arbitrary and Summary Executions, E.S.C. res. 1989/65, annex, 1989 U.N. ESCOR Supp. (No. 1) at 52, U.N. Doc. E/1989/89 (1989). Find document here.
** See news report here based on earlier report here based on initial report here.