Is This The Future of Art?

source photo by Hrag Vartanian. This mylar site-specific 'artifact' was put up on the wall of the Guggenheim in Manhattan on Sat. Feb. 22 by protesters taking up civil disobedience to draw attention to labour injustices that are part of contemporary museums.

The cited passages below are from Vartanian's article "Protest Action Erupts Inside Guggenheim Museum" published Sat. Feb. 22, 2014 on Hyperallergic, a website that explores art and its discontents.Thanks to my friend Diana McCarty for posting the article on FB.

Specifically, the various groups that banded together ("a diverse group of artists, professors, students, and activists loosely affiliated with Occupy Museums, Gulf Labor, and various NYU-related groups"), staged this action at the NYC Guggenheim to draw attention to the unjust working conditions of migrant workers who are building a new Guggenheim museum, Louvre-branded museums, and a NYC-affliated university in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. The museum/art activists link the exploitation of migrant workers with the rising debt that artists today incur and question the forced complicity that this then produces between artists and exploited labourers, which benefits elite museums and universities and their power structures. This intervention is an example of students and professors taking their words out of the academy, working with artists and activists, and putting their words into action in the community, that is, taking up education to help make social change.

Sociology professor Andrew Ross, who was part of the intervention at the museum, explains that

We’re trying to make a connection with chains of debt that are transnational, and in the various locations we’re looking at, Bangladesh, Abu Dhabi, NYU, and the art world, there’s an enormous accumulation of debt in each of these places, and the money is getting extracted by the transnational creditor class....And artists are more and more [in debt], and in order to practice art, you’re required to take on a big debt burden … so there’s a connection across many continents.....Artists should not be asked to exhibit in museums that have been built on the back of abused workers … that’s what it boils down to. When you’re acquired by a museum that does that, that’s unfair. Your complicity is being bought along with the artwork.

Expanding on the links between museums and the conditions of exhibiting, and the importance of opening a discussion on the politics of exhibiting, artist Natasha Dhillon explains that the action was “a call for solidarity and a call for museums to do the right thing....it’s important for museum goers to understand what kind of system they are participating in.” Her comment makes clear that part of the goal of the action was to interrupt the viewing practices of museum goers, to disrupt familiar ways of looking and interpreting what is in a gallery or museum, what makes up that space, where do the walls of a gallery or museum actually end, and what exactly makes up the contextual field of "the museum" or "the art gallery."

Interestingly, the action for public education on museum practices coincided with the Futurism exhibit and Carrie Mae Weems retrospective at the Manhattan Guggenheim, both which raise discussion on the connections between museums, art, and the politics  and power relations of exhibiting; as Vartanian explains: "Futurism sought to combine art and politics, while Weems is a champion of those who have been historically excluded from museums." The intervention then broadened the context of interpretations that the exhibits had opened up. Weems work intervenes in the historical silencing of African American art and ways of making meanings; the museum protest intervenes in excluding migrant labour workers from the understanding of what constitutes museum space and practices. In the UAE, migrant workers who come from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India are racialized and subordinated through hierarchies of race, ethnicity, class, and nationality; they comprise a large percentage of the total 7.8 million migrant workers in the UAE in 2013 (While this number also includes highly-skilled workers, I am not sure if it includes teachers and "expats," a term linked with Anglo and Western white-collar workers that hierachizes and grants race-privilege to non-native workers in higher paid/status jobs, who benefit from the exploitation of racialized migrant workers.)

Making the ideological connections between Saturday's intervention and the two exhibits currently on display, artist Amin Husain,  who has contributed to No Debt is an Island, as part of the art project 52 weeks by the arts collective Gulf Labor, explains that "the context is really appropriate, because they [the Futurists] talked about restructuring the universe, so clearly the museum is giving that some thought at this moment, and we want to talk about restructuring the universe without fascism and without slave labor.” What Husain's words suggest is that museums like the Guggenheim are in some sense showing themselves to be interested in opening up "the Grecian urn" to larger discussions, including the political and the economic, and the intervention last Saturday pushed open that door a bit further.

The action also included a collective chant (see Vartanian's article for the whole chant), which included a challenge to contemporary institutional practices of museums, exposing their embeddedness in an unequal transnational capitalist economy aka neoliberal globalization and questioning the future direction of museums but also asserting that museums need to address justice and take up action towards it:

Museums Should Protect Their Workers,

Museums Should Stand Up For Human Rights

Museums Should Be Raising Labor Standards, Not Lowering Them.

Is This The Future of Art?

photo by Hrag Vartanian. Museum visitors reading the manifesto tacked to the wall beside the introductory text to the Italian Futurism exhibition.

 

the tree of life on my morning path

The other day I went for a morning walk upstream McVicar's Creek. I went with my friend Lilian Mattar Patey. I first bicycled to Shuniah Knox United Church, where Lilian is interim minister, to meet her. We then walked north through the neighbourhood, behind Balsam Pit and along Margaret Street to reach the trail by the creek. Along the path, we saw a bunch of marsh marigolds ringing a swamp. Swamps always catch my eye as 'swamp' or 'bog,' which translate to 'suo' in Finnish, is in the very name of Finland in the Finnish language: Suomi. A few steps later on our path, we saw this amazing tree in someone's backyard. It was shining in the morning light; there was no missing it. The tree reminded me of the comforting and desirous beauty of the Tree of Life. It's sheltering arms, perfect symmetry, expansive canopy, circular space, and dusting of white flower petals caught our eye.  

Continuing on our way, we saw this pile of huge stones. I told Lilian that in Suomenusko, the old Finnish beliefs before Christianity came to Finland, stones as well as trees were seen to have spirits. People conversed with stones and trees for healing and for wisdom, going out into the forest for the medicine of trees and stones. Of course, stones and trees have been symbolically important to many peoples and cultures. I told Lilian, well, I don't need to tell a Palestinian like you of the importance of stones. Today stones are the remnants of the Palestinian houses that Israel has destroyed and demolished. Palestinian youth take up stones as resistance against occupation. Indeed,  a new documentary called The Stones Cry Out uses the metaphor, reality, and spiritual strength of stones to tell the story of the ongoing Nakba of Palestine, focusing on its Christian population and heritage.

Lilian's family story is part of the larger dispossession of Christians from Palestine. In the short 6 m. video above you can hear Lilian tell some of the story of her family's displacement from Palestine. She was born in Haifa, but because of the Zionist militia takeover in 1948 her family was forced to flee and found refuge in Al Quds / Jerusalem; however, they eventually met more tragedy. By telling her family's story, Rev. Mattar Patey hopes that people will broaden their understanding of the Palestinian heritage of what is now called  Israel. In 1948, Jerusalem was designated an international administration zone yet, as Lilian's story is an example, since 1967 Israel has taken large parts of it by force and today by demolition and the continuing displacement of Palestinians from East Jerusalem. Since burying her father, Lilian has not been back to her home.

Canada vs Finland

Team Canada vs. Team Finland, April 5, 2013, the 2013 IIHF Ice Hockey Women’s World Championships. Photograph: Wayne Cuddington, Ottawa Citizen

While there is plenty to say about hockey in relation to Canada and Finland, it is debatable which nation tops the other. 

  

On the other hand, on the topic of mothers, Finland clearly beats us: Save the Children’s  2012 report ranks Finland no.1 in the world for mothers; Canada trails at no. 22. What holds us back? No universal daycare and shocking numbers of impoverished children—indeed, 4800 in Thunder Bay (2006, Thunder Bay Economic Justice Committee Poverty Report) [pdf]—whose mothers, unsurprisingly, are also poor, contribute to our lacklustre ranking. A shocking 50% of Aboriginal children in Thunder Bay live in poverty (2012, LSPC) [pdf]. These shameful political and social realities reveal that on supporting mothers in all our diversities, our government is negligent, lagging behind Finland.  

That is not to say that Finland is a utopia for, like Canada, it too participates in the policies and ravages of neoliberal economics. So Finland’s ranking as #1 for mothers must be seen in the context of global-wide neoliberal cutbacks on social spending. 

However, unlike Canada, Finland keeps changing its national identity with an eye to a better world for everyone. Finland strives not only to improve the well-being of its citizens but also to spearhead positive change for the most deprived people globally. 

This is especially evident in Finland’s progressive position on Palestine. Finland, along with Denmark, recently granted full diplomatic status to Palestine, upgrading theirPalestinian missions to embassies. Finland, a member of the advisory commission of UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency), focuses its monetary aid to Palestine on education and improving water supplies and sanitation, along with developing freedom of the press and a civilian police. 

Since 1997, PALFEP, the Palestinian-Finnish Education Programme, has worked on assisting the educational goals of Palestinians. Even Finnish Church Aid unequivocally assists Palestinians as part of their mandate of “working with the poorest people, regardless of their religious beliefs, ethnic background or political conviction.” 

While some churches in Canada, such as the United Church, have a progressive position on Palestine, the Christian Zionism of the religious right has sway over the federal government, buttressing a fervent support of Israel even while Israel builds illegal settlements in the West Bank, dispossesses Palestinians from East Jerusalem, and regulates and humiliates Palestinians daily at checkpoints and the ‘security wall.’  

Recently, Canada’s actions have served to bring hardships to—even offend—Palestinians and their dreams of a self-determining nation state. Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird recently met with Israeli Justice Minister Tzipi Livni in occupied East Jerusalem. Nabil Shaath, a former Palestinian foreign minister, called this action a “slap in the face to the Palestinian people” and an “unprecedented offence that severely damages” Canada’s relationship with Palestine and the Arab world.

Canada’s seven-year-long support of the blockade against Gaza continues; a blockade which The International Committee of the Red Cross and the UN Human Rights Council consider illegal. In 2012, Canada strongly opposed granting Palestine non-observer status at the UN General Assembly. Why? Baird expressed fears that Palestinians will file war crimes against Israel in the International Criminal Court and demand the stop of settlements. 

This is nothing less than confounding: The Jewish settlements on Palestinian land are illegal according to international law. Why would we want to stop a nation from filing war crimes? Aren’t we for justice? For using legal methods to get results? 

This is also a contradiction as the majority of Canadian aid to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank so far has focused on security, prosecution services, and the criminal justice system, including $50 m. for building a court house. We give them money to develop legal and security infrastructure, yet we don’t support Palestine’s legal claims internationally?

It seems we have no shame in exposing our hypocrisy and, once again, scorning and abandoning international standards as we see fit. 

Canada’s training of Palestinian security forces is to the benefit of Israel.
(Issam Rimawi / APA images)

But it is building security forces that Canada is most interested in; as Yves Engler, writing for Electronic Intifada reports, "Most of the Canadian aid money has gone to building up a Palestinian security force overseen by a US general," a security force which benefits Israel.  Engler cites former deputy foreign minister Peter Kent as saying the bulk of the $300m. in aid went to security, and Canadian security personnel numbers in Palestine are the second largest deployment after Afghanistan.

The above aid, which also included private sector economic development and lastly, flip to Finland’s humanitarian focus, health and education assistance, expired in March. It is now under review. In punishment for the Palestinians seeking (and gaining) non-observer state status at the UN, Canada suspended the renewal of $300 m. in aid to the West Bank Palestinians. Baird has threatened that the Palestinians will have “consequences” if they take Israel to the ICC. Baird also demands that the Palestinians “immediately resume negotiations with Israel without preconditions.” 

It is unclear why Baird believes Canada has the global clout—or reputation—to demand acquiescence of another sovereign nation. Does he believe that the Palestinians will bow to Canada’s demands in fear of losing $300 m.? In light of the Jerusalem Post recently reporting that PM Harper has transformed Canada into Israel’s most dependable ally, why would Palestinians grovel for more slaps in the face?   

Canada’s new global identity as arrogant bully is troubling. On the other hand, one thing that marks Finland as exceptional is its commitment to prescient thinking to enable peaceful global co-existence for all peoples, including the Palestinians.  

On the question of Palestine, Finland leads Canada.

political cartoon from the Halifax Herald; image source

Israeli General on 'security fencing': "it is indeed a monster"

Israel has recently completed its 'security fence' along its border with Egypt. This line snakes ominously through the Negev Desert.

Q: beside Israel, what other nation is entirely physically fenced in?

True, the US has built a separation wall on its border with Mexico, but it does not yet have a physical wall on its northern border with Canada, although it had been suggested by some. That plan was scrapped; instead, drones, "boots on the ground and greater integration with Canadian law enforcement" will be manning the border (and I think 'manning' is not sexist in this usage as most of those "boots" will be male and the ideology of militarism and security come firmly from militarised masculinity and the power of the male military hierarchy, even though there are women eager to perform hegemonic masculine militarism).  

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said the fence [through the Negev]

"was a sign of improved Israeli security. He has called the fence evidence of his efforts to insulate Israel from the turmoil of the Arab Spring revolutions and the influx of mostly Eritrean and Sudanese migrants, which he has portrayed as a national-security threat. ... Israeli security officials say Sinai has increasingly become a haven for militants from the Gaza Strip, local Bedouin tribes and global jihadist groups. Israel is also building a fence on the border with Syria, the prime minister's office said."

Netanyahu's rationale echoes the security apparatus and Islamophobic discourse common in Western nation states such as Canada and the US, a discourse embedded with racism of which Israel has its own multiple forms.

Ironically, the workers who have been building the barrier along Israel's border with Egypt are the very people that Israel wants to keep out of the country and one of the reasons it is building the 'fence': the Sudanese.

Israel already has a 'fence' along most of its border with Syria, but Israel is adding to it as well as fortifying it (appropriate word, 'fortifying' as it is linked to settler colonials building forts against the so-called natives).

Below is a photo of part of the Israeli security wall along what Israel defines as its border with Syria.

After finishing the 'security fence' along the Egyptian border, Israel will then build a 'security fence' along its border with Jordan.

Also, Israel has been busy fortifying its 'fence' along its border with Lebanon:

I wonder if these are "Arab Isreali" workers building the 'security fence'?

Of the 'security fence' being built along Israel's border with Egypt, deputy director general of the Israeli Defense Ministry, Brig. Gen. (res. ) Bezalel Treiber states:"It is indeed a monster...Seen from the Egyptian side, the fence overall is quite frightening."

Mice may well burrow their way to the other side, but will other desert animals pass in their migratory routes? And what of the Bedouin, whose traditional migratory land this is?

The 'fences' mapping out the borders of Israel are part of its system of segregation, of which the Apartheid Wall is its most heinous human rights abuser. It not only appropriates Palestinian land, but causes untold suffering to Palestinians caught in its oppressive encircling through restricting and preventing access to lands, education, health, recreations, community, religious institutions and is a formidable military tool of death, injury, and humiliation to Palestinians. 

image source: Tear Down the Wall 

This image is very gothic. I'm reminded of Frankenstein. It is dystopian. The wall is, of course, horrifically detrimental to the Palestinians, but what must it be like for the Israeli soldiers who go inside this dungeon? 

Mary, Mary

Downtown in front of the Waverley Library each December a large nativity scene is set up. This is Mary, mother of Jesus, with one of the wise men  and a sheep behind her. Her hands look awfully big for her face, which looks childlike.While the male figurine is brown-skinned, Mary is not. Western Christians have re-imaged the mother of Jesus, making her more European-looking -- and sounding. Jesus's mother's name was Miriam, but that was changed to Mary in English.

Here is what the nativity scene looks like. Joseph on the right, the Three Wise Men in the back and the cows and sheep scattered about. The empty space in the straw bed is for the baby Jesus, who is put there either on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. If Jesus is not there yet, shouldn't Mary's stomach be heavily pregnant? Or is her body also miraculously un-womanly looking even while she was pregnant? Strange. This nativity scene is quite traditional.

This, however, is more what the nativity scene would look like if we envisioned Bethlehem beyond the myth -- to the reality of occupation. Today, if Jesus were to come to earth and be born in a manger in Bethlehem, Mary and Joseph and the three wise men and the animals would have to deal with the Apartheid Wall. Now, Mary and Joseph, being Jewish, would be able to pass through the Wall without permits. I'm not sure about the Three Wise Men, though, as they would be arriving from Iran, Arabia, and India. Maybe they were all Jews, too? Not sure. Would the IDF let them through?

The olive wood nativity scene above is made by a Palestinian Christian artist from Beit Sahour, trans. the Shepherd's Field. (The nativity scene is for sale; click on the link below): 

In 2007 as an act of quiet resistance, he made a "walled nativity set" - a nativity scene where the wall stopped the wise men from getting through to the Holy Family. He said “I made these sets as a protest at what is happening to the local community of Bethlehem and Beit Sahour”. Beit Sahour - is in the Bethlehem area, where 87% of the land has been taken by the Israelis. "We are surrounded by the wall and our freedom of movement is denied".

 

Christmas in the looking glass

image source
It's the beginning of December, and I'm already getting irritated by the glee of Christmas that I find everywhere I turn. People all around me, folks on Facebook, work colleagues, and people who should know better are all falling into the well of simulacra, Baudrillard's idea that what is false is more believable and desirable than actual reality.

The more untrue, the more we believe it to be true. The bigger the illusion, the happier our delusion.


When are Western Christians today going to move beyond the myth that they have created about the Holy Land? Believing in the story about Bethlehem in the Bible as if it were alive today? When are the majority of Christians going to wake up to what is really happening in Bethlehem today? Do they know there is an Apartheid Wall built by the Israelis and policed by the IDF that restricts the movement of the residents of Bethlehem? Do they know that the people of Bethlehem need passes and permits? Do they care?

It's this living in the looking-glass world where everything is childishly innocent and joyful that I find so irritating.

Oh Come All Ye Faithful, indeed. Get ye head out of the Christmas card and look hard at the wall.

The Child is Not Dead

The other day, talking with a woman who I had not met before, we got into a discussion of poetry. She told me that she recently watched a movie about a South African poet called Black Butterflies; it is fictionalized history about the life of Ingrid Jonker, a white South African writer. Jonker, like a number of other white female poets of the 60s and 70s such as Sylvia Plath and Ann Sexton, committed suicide. Like Plath and Sexton, her words could not save her. Jonkers, like Virginia Woolf and the fictional Edna Pontellier of Kate Chopin's The Awakening, walks into the waves and drowns herself.  

The woman I met told me that Jonker struggled with her racist father who supported apartheid. She said that Nelson Mandela had used lines from a poem by Jonker when he gave the first address to the first African Congress. The story goes, Jonker had written the poem for her father, to help him move beyond his apartheid thinking; instead, after she read it to him, he tore the poem in two. I guess she must  have expected that as he had a high-ranking position in the National Party as a censure of writing.

When I looked up her poem and read it, I immediately thought of how her narrative thread leads to Palestine and resonates with other poems written by other women who are also writing about children who live--and are killed--within racist apartheid violence. I thought of poems by Ibtisam Barakat, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Lisa Suheir Majaj. The lines of hope with which Jonker ends her poem, hopefully, will one day come true for Palestinians as they have for black South Africans: no more passes. The demonstration in Sharpeville in 1960 was an anti-pass rally; 169 black people were killed by the Afrikaners police; today we commemorate this massacre on March 21, the International Day Against Racial Discrimination. 

Al-Dalu children killed by Israeli missiles in Gaza this November 18. There names and ages: Jamal Mohammed Jamal 6; Yousef Mohammed Jamal 4; Sarah Mohammed Jamal 7; and Ibrahim Mohammed Jamal 1. You can find the names of the 33 children killed by Israel this November on the Palestinian Centre for Human Rightswebsite.

When will Palestinian children be able to travel the land without passes? When will Palestinian children be able to step from behind the shadow of an Israeli soldier? Not be dead? When will Palestinians no longer be subjected to a racist and humiliating pass system? Gain the human right of free movement not policed by Israelis? No checkpoints. Without a pass. When will that day come?

The child is not dead 

by Ingrid Jonker

The child is not dead 
The child lifts his fists against his mother
Who shouts Afrika ! shouts the breath
Of freedom and the veld
In the locations of the cordoned heart

The child lifts his fists against his father 
in the march of the generations
who shouts Afrika ! shout the breath
of righteousness and blood
in the streets of his embattled pride

The child is not dead not at Langa nor at Nyanga 
not at Orlando nor at Sharpeville
nor at the police station at Philippi
where he lies with a bullet through his brain

The child is the dark shadow of the soldiers 
on guard with rifles Saracens and batons
the child is present at all assemblies and law-givings
the child peers through the windows of houses and into the hearts of mothers
this child who just wanted to play in the sun at Nyanga is everywhere
the child grown to a man treks through all Africa

the child grown into a giant journeys through the whole world 
Without a pass