NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Cai Guo-Qiang's Explosive Olympic Remix

Cai Guo-Qiang
Footprints of History: Fireworks Project for the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing OlympicGames 2008. Photo by Hiro Ihara, courtesy Cai Studio.

via Artnet magazine, 8/19/08:

REPLY TO THE OLYMPICS CONTROVERSY

by Cai Guo-Qiang

Some 34.2 million viewers watched the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Beijing on Aug. 8, 2008. However, following the spectacular show, Western news reports charged that organizers of the event had deceived the audience by using trickery to augment the proceedings, including having a little girl lip-synch a patriotic song and representing contingents of ethnic minorities with actors. Critics claim as well that the ceremony’s spectacular fireworks show, which was conceived by Chinese art star Cai Guo-Qiang, wasn’t all it seemed to be.

The impressive fireworks display included a series of 29 giant footprints, made of white starbursts, that seemed to traverse the sky from Tiananmen Square to the Olympic Stadium. But the TV presentation of the fireworks, broadcast to the world as well as shown on the giant screens within the Olympic Stadium, included not the actual event but rather a 55-second digital film of the 29 footprints, complete with simulated camera jitter and haze, seamlessly inserted into the broadcast.

Representatives of the Beijing Games have stated that the digital trickery was necessary because the actual effect would not have been clearly visible in the prevailing atmospheric conditions, while filming it from the air would have endangered the helicopter pilot. Here, the artist himself responds to the controversy:

The explosion event Footprints of History: Fireworks Project for the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games consisted of a series of 29 giant footprint fireworks -- one for each Olympiad -- over the Beijing skyline, leading to the National Olympic Stadium. The 29 footprints were fired in succession, traveling a total distance of 15 kilometers, or 9.3 miles, within a period of 63 seconds.

It is quite customary to prepare a backup reel for major televised events of this scale, and this has been true of the opening and closing ceremonies of previous Olympic Games. We were aware of this and thus created our own reel from dress rehearsal footage of the footprint fireworks. The sequence was then created using computer graphics.

From my own perspective as an artist, there are two separate realms in which this artwork exists, as two very different mediums have been utilized. First, there is the artwork that exists in the material realm: the ephemeral sculpture. This was viewed by people attending the ceremonies inside the stadium and standing outside on the streets of Beijing. This artwork was documented from various vantage points on video, which has been broadcast by many international media outlets.

Second, there is a creative digital rendering of the artwork in the medium of video. It is a single version of the event viewed by a large broadcast audience. Such a conceptual work can exist simultaneously in these two separate realms. And perhaps to also take Footprints of History into this second realm was necessary because in many of my explosion events, such as Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters, the very best vantage point is not the human one.

CAI GUO-QIANG was director of visual and special effects at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Found Art (Soho): Unmonumental 56

Found Art (Soho): Unmonumental 56, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

 

Found Art (UES): Unmonumental 55

Found Art (UES): Unmonumental 55, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

 

McCan't

Illus.: Barry Blitt

via NYTimes Op-Ed: {excerpt}

The Candidate We Still Don't Know
By FRANK RICH
Published: August 16, 2008

[...]

With the exception of McCain's imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct.

McCain never called for Donald Rumsfeld to be fired and didn't start criticizing the war plan until late August 2003, nearly four months after "Mission Accomplished." By then the growing insurgency was undeniable. On the day Hurricane Katrina hit, McCain laughed it up with the oblivious president at a birthday photo-op in Arizona. McCain didn't get to New Orleans for another six months and didn't sharply express public criticism of the Bush response to the calamity until this April, when he traveled to the Gulf Coast in desperate search of election-year pageantry surrounding him with black extras.

McCain long ago embraced the right's agents of intolerance, even spending months courting the Rev. John Hagee, whose fringe views about Roman Catholics and the Holocaust were known to anyone who can use the Internet. (Once the McCain campaign discovered YouTube, it ditched Hagee.) On Monday McCain is scheduled to appear at an Atlanta fund-raiser being promoted by Ralph Reed, who is not only the former aide de camp to one of the agents of intolerance McCain once vilified (Pat Robertson) but is also the former Abramoff acolyte showcased in McCain's own Senate investigation of Indian casino lobbying.

Though the McCain campaign announced a new no-lobbyists policy three months after The Washington Post's February report that lobbyists were "essentially running" the whole operation, the fact remains that McCain's top officials and fund-raisers have past financial ties to nearly every domestic and foreign flashpoint, from Fannie Mae to Blackwater to Ahmad Chalabi to the government of Georgia. No sooner does McCain flip-flop on oil drilling than a bevy of Hess Oil family members and executives, not to mention a lowly Hess office manager and his wife, each give a maximum $28,500 to the Republican Party.

While reporters at The Post and The New York Times have been vetting McCain, many others give him a free pass. Their default cliché is to present him as the Old Faithful everyone already knows. They routinely salute his "independence," his "maverick image" and his "renegade reputation" -- as the hackneyed script was reiterated by Karl Rove in a Wall Street Journal op-ed column last week. At Talking Points Memo, the essential blog vigilantly pursuing the McCain revelations often ignored elsewhere, Josh Marshall accurately observes that the Republican candidate is "graded on a curve."

Most Americans still don't know, as Marshall writes, that on the campaign trail "McCain frequently forgets key elements of policies, gets countries' names wrong, forgets things he's said only hours or days before and is frequently just confused." Most Americans still don't know it is precisely for this reason that the McCain campaign has now shut down the press's previously unfettered access to the candidate on the Straight Talk Express.

To appreciate the discrepancy in what we know about McCain and Obama, merely look at the coverage of the potential first ladies. We have heard too much indeed about Michelle Obama's Princeton thesis, her pay raises at the University of Chicago hospital, her statement about being "proud" of her country and the false rumor of a video of her ranting about "whitey." But we still haven't been inside Cindy McCain's tax returns, all her multiple homes or private plane. The Los Angeles Times reported in June that Hensley & Company, the enormous beer distributorship she controls, "lobbies regulatory agencies on alcohol issues that involve public health and safety," in opposition to groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The McCain campaign told The Times that Mrs. McCain's future role in her beer empire won't be revealed before the election.

Some of those who know McCain best -- Republicans -- are tougher on him than the press is. Rita Hauser, who was a Bush financial chairwoman in New York in 2000 and served on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in the administration's first term, joined other players in the G.O.P. establishment in forming Republicans for Obama last week. Why? The leadership qualities she admires in Obama -- temperament, sustained judgment, the ability to play well with others -- are missing in McCain. "He doesn't listen carefully to people and make reasoned judgments,” Hauser told me. "If John says 'I'm going with so and so,' you can't count on that the next morning," she complained, adding, "That's not the man we want for president."

McCain has even prompted alarms from the right's own favorite hit man du jour: Jerome Corsi, who Swift-boated John Kerry as co-author of "Unfit to Command" in 2004 and who is trying to do the same to Obama in his newly minted best seller, "The Obama Nation."

Corsi's writings have been repeatedly promoted by Sean Hannity on Fox News; Corsi's publisher, Mary Matalin, has praised her author's "scholarship." If Republican warriors like Hannity and Matalin think so highly of Corsi's research into Obama, then perhaps we should take seriously Corsi's scholarship about McCain. In recent articles at worldnetdaily.com, Corsi has claimed (among other charges) that the McCain campaign received "strong" financial support from a "group tied to Al Qaeda" and that "McCain's personal fortune traces back to organized crime in Arizona."

As everyone says, polls are meaningless in the summers of election years. Especially this year, when there's one candidate whose real story has yet to be fully told.

Jackson Browne Sues McCain Campaign for Copyright Infringement!

Good for Jackson Browne! McLame Campaign strikes again.

via Huffington Post:

Jackson Browne Sues McCain Campaign

August 14, 2008 02:50 PM

Singer, songwriter, liberal activist and now John McCain scourge Jackson Browne filed a lawsuit today against the presumptive Republican nominee for failing to obtain a license to use one of his songs in a television commercial.

The song, "Running on Empty," has been used by McCain in his presidential bid -- apparently against Browne's approval. The music icon also claims the Senator is falsely suggesting has endorsed his candidacy.

If the whole episode strikes a nostalgic tone, it's because famous musical artists and Republican presidential candidates have butted heads in the past. Bruce Springsteen publicly complained when Ronald Reagan used "Born in the U.S.A" during his campaign in 1984.

The commercial Browne is upset by is a recent spot on energy policy that rips Barack Obama for suggesting that the country conserve gas through proper tire inflation.

"We are confident that Jackson Browne will prevail in this lawsuit. Not only have Senator McCain and his agents plainly infringed Mr. Browne's copyright in Running On Empty, but the Federal Courts have long held that the unauthorized use of a famous singer's voice in a commercial constitutes a false endorsement and a violation of the singer's right of publicity," Lawrence Iser of the Santa Monica, California law firm Kinsella Weitzman Iser Kump & Aldisert said in a press release. "In light of Jackson Browne's lifelong commitment to Democratic ideals and political candidates, the misappropriation of Jackson Browne's endorsement is entirely reprehensible, and I have no doubt that a jury will agree."

This is the second time in a week a celebrity has chastised the McCain camp for allegedly illegally using his or her material. Mike Myers, earlier this week, insisted that the Arizona Republican take down a web ad that -- mocking Obama's celebrity -- used a "we're not worthy" clip from his movie Wayne's World.

Back in July, meanwhile, the Silicon Alley News reported that...

... Warner Music Group (WMG) appears to have demanded that YouTube remove "Obama Love," a montage of press fawning over Sen. Barack Obama that had been posted on Sen. John McCain's official YouTube channel. "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Warner Music Group," says a message on YouTube.

The video, set to Frankie Valli's "Can't Take My Eyes Off You," had the makings of a rare viral hit for McCain. It had been viewed more than 200,000 times in its first three day on the Web, and helped McCain beat Obama in total views on YouTube over the past week.

"A Sudden Gust of Wind", or Paul McCarthy's Giant Turd Crashes Into Swiss Orphanage

via email (thanks DL!):

Giant dog turd wreaks havoc at Swiss museum

Inflatable artwork blown from moorings and brings down power line
Jenny Percival and agencies
guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday August 12 2008 11:49 BST

A giant inflatable dog turd created by the American artist Paul McCarthy was blown from its moorings at a Swiss museum, bringing down a power line and breaking a window before landing in the grounds of a children's home.

The exhibit, entitled Complex Shit, is the size of a house. It has a safety system that is supposed to deflate it in bad weather, but it did not work on this occasion.

Juri Steiner, the director of the Paul Klee centre, in Berne, told AFP that a sudden gust of wind carried it 200 metres before it fell to the ground, breaking a window of the children's home. The accident happened on July 31, but the details only emerged yesterday.

Steiner said McCarthy had not yet been contacted and the museum was not sure if the piece (pictured here) would be put back on display.

The installation is part of an exhibition called East of Eden: A Garden Show, which features sound sculptures in trees and a football ground without goalposts. The exhibition opened in May and is due to run until October.

The centre's website describes the show as containing "interweaving, diverse, not to say conflictive emphases and a broad spectrum of items to form a dynamic exchange of parallel and self-eclipsing spatial and temporal zones".

------ End of Forwarded Message

gmail down

gmail down, originally uploaded by jasoncalacanis.

Jason Calcanis is amassing comments w/ locations where gmail is down globally.

Blogs + Info: What is going on in Georgia

Image via

via icommons email list:

Please resend it to anyone accessible for you, mailing lists, friends as much as possible

http://tsxinvali.blogspot.com/
http://russiangeorgianwar.blogspot.com/
http://qartu.com/
http://stop-bombing.blogspot.com/
http://occupation.tspteam.com/
http://geoconflicts.wordpress.com/
http://realgeorgia.wordpress.com/
http://warnet.ucoz.org/

We are here in the ministry of education, organized a cyber-office, disseminating true info about Invation of Georgia. Russians is about to enter Tbilisi. I dont know if I will be accessing the net after

God save Georgia

Zviad

_________________
Icommons mailing list
Icommons@lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/icommons

Georgian girls looking for their friends and relatives in the wounded lists but kremlins have no shortages of bombs and lists multiplying; image via

the folllowing article is reblogged, via http://russiangeorgianwar.blogspot.com:

Monday, August 11, 2008

Black Sea Watershed

By Ronald D. Asmus and Richard Holbrooke
Monday, August 11, 2008; A15

In weeks and years past, each of us has argued on this page that Moscow was pursuing a policy of regime change toward Georgia and its pro-Western, democratically elected president, Mikheil Saakashvili. We predicted that, absent strong and unified Western diplomatic involvement, we were headed toward a war. Now, tragically, an escalation of violence in South Ossetia has culminated in a full-scale Russian invasion of Georgia. The West, and especially the United States, could have prevented this war. We have arrived at a watershed moment in the West's post-Cold War relations with Russia.

Exactly what happened in South Ossetia last week is unclear. Each side will argue its own version. But we know, without doubt, that Georgia was responding to repeated provocative attacks by South Ossetian separatists controlled and funded by Moscow. This is a not a war Georgia wanted; it believed that it was slowly gaining ground in South Ossetia through a strategy of soft power.

Whatever mistakes Tblisi has made, they cannot justify Russia's actions. Moscow has invaded a neighbor, an illegal act of aggression that violates the U.N. Charter and fundamental principles of cooperation and security in Europe. Beginning a well-planned war (including cyber-warfare) as the Olympics were opening violates the ancient tradition of a truce to conflict during the Games. And Russia's willingness to create a war zone 25 miles from the Black Sea city of Sochi, where it is to host the Winter Games in 2014, hardly demonstrates its commitment to Olympic ideals. In contrast, Moscow's timing suggests that Putin seeks to overthrow Saakashvili well ahead of our elections, and thus avoid beginning relations with the next president on an overtly confrontational note.

Russia's goal is not simply, as it claims, restoring the status quo in South Ossetia. It wants regime change in Georgia. It has opened a second front in the other disputed Georgian territory, Abkhazia, just south of Sochi. But its greatest goal is to replace Saakashvili -- a man Vladimir Putin despises -- with a president who would be more subject to Moscow's influence. As Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt pointed out Saturday, Moscow's rationale for invading has parallels to the darkest chapters of Europe's history. Having issued passports to tens of thousands of Abkhazians and South Ossetians, Moscow now claims it must intervene to protect them -- a tactic reminiscent of one used by Nazi Germany at the start of World War II.
Moscow seeks to roll back democratic breakthroughs on its borders, to destroy any chance of further NATO or E.U. enlargement and to reestablish a sphere of hegemony over its neighbors. By trying to destroy a democratic, pro-Western Georgia, Moscow is sending a message that, in its part of the world, being close to Washington and the West does not pay.

This moment could well mark the end of an era in Europe during which realpolitik and spheres of influence were supposed to be replaced by new cooperative norms and a country's right to choose its own path. Hopes for a more liberal Russia under President Dmitry Medvedev will need to be reexamined. His justification for this invasion reads more like Brezhnev than Gorbachev. While no one wants a return to Cold War-style confrontation, Moscow's behavior poses a direct challenge to European and international order.

What can we do? First, Georgia deserves our solidarity and support. (Georgia has supported us; its more than 2,000 troops are the third-largest contingent in Iraq -- understandably those troops are being recalled.) We must get the fighting stopped and preserve Georgia's territorial integrity within its current international border. As soon as hostilities cease, there should be a major, coordinated transatlantic effort to help Tblisi rebuild and recover.

Second, we should not pretend that Russia is a neutral peacekeeper in conflicts on its borders. Russia is part of the problem, not the solution. For too long, Moscow has used existing international mandates to pursue neo-imperial policies. We must disavow these mandates and insist on truly neutral international forces, under the United Nations, to monitor a future cease-fire and to mediate.

Third, we need to counter Russian pressure on its neighbors, especially Ukraine -- most likely the next target in Moscow's efforts to create a new sphere of hegemony. The United States and the European Union must be clear that Ukraine and Georgia will not be condemned to some kind of gray zone.

Finally, the United States and the European Union must make clear that this kind of aggression will affect our relations and Russia's standing in the West. While Western military intervention in Georgia is out of the question -- and no one wants a 21st-century version of the Cold War -- Moscow's actions cannot be ignored. There is a vast array of political, economic and other areas in which Russia's role and standing will have to be reexamined. Moscow must also be put on notice that its own prestige project -- the Sochi Olympics -- will be affected by its behavior.

Weak Western diplomacy and lack of transatlantic unity failed to prevent an avoidable war. Only strong transatlantic unity can stop this war and begin to repair the immense damage done. Otherwise, we can add one more issue to the growing list of this administration's foreign policy failures.

Ronald D. Asmus, a deputy assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration, is executive director of the Brussels-based Transatlantic Center of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Richard Holbrooke, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in the Clinton administration, writes a monthly column for The Post.

Posted by Katiee... at 7:52 AM

 

Girl Talk in the NYTimes: Steal This Hook!

Roger Kisby/Getty Images. Girl Talk, the D.J. whose real name is Gregg Gillis, performing in Detroit with his trusty laptop.

via NYTimes:

Steal This Hook? D.J. Skirts Copyright Law
By ROBERT LEVINE
Published: August 6, 2008

The D.J. Girl Talk has won positive reviews for his new album and news media attention for its Radiohead-style pay-what-you-want pricing, and on Friday night he is scheduled to play a high-profile gig at the All Points West festival in Jersey City. Not bad for an artist whose music may be illegal.

Girl Talk, whose real name is Gregg Gillis, makes danceable musical collages out of short clips from other people’s songs; there are more than 300 samples on “Feed the Animals,” the album he released online at illegalart.net in June. He doesn’t get the permission of the composers to use these samples, as United States copyright law mostly requires, because he maintains that the brief snippets he works with are covered by copyright law’s “fair use” principle (and perhaps because doing so would be prohibitively expensive).

Girl Talk’s rising profile has put him at the forefront of a group of musicians who are challenging the traditional restrictions of copyright law along with the usual role of samples in pop music. Although artists like the Belgian duo 2 Many DJs have been making “mash-ups” out of existing songs for years, Girl Talk is taking this genre to a mainstream audience with raucous performances that often end with his shirt off and much of the audience onstage.

[...]

“I want to take these things you know and flip them, which is something I’ve always enjoyed in hip-hop,” Mr. Gillis said. “This project has always been about embracing pop.”

But this embrace may be an illicit one, according to music industry executives. In legal terms a musician who uses parts of other compositions creates what copyright law calls a derivative work, so the permission of the original song’s writer or current copyright holder is needed. Artists who sample a recording also need permission from the owner, in most cases the record label. Hip-hop artists who don’t get that permission have been sued, often successfully.

Mr. Gillis says his samples fall under fair use, which provides an exemption to copyright law under certain circumstances. Fair use allows book reviewers to quote from novels or online music reviewers to use short clips of songs. Because his samples are short, and his music sounds so little like the songs he takes from that it is unlikely to affect their sales, Mr. Gillis contends he should be covered under fair use.

He said he had never been threatened with a lawsuit, although both iTunes and a CD distributor stopped carrying his last album, “Night Ripper,” because of legal concerns. (It had sold 20,000 copies before then, according to Nielsen SoundScan.) It may not be in the interests of labels or artists to sue Mr. Gillis, because such a move would risk a precedent-setting judgment in his favor, not to mention incur bad publicity.

Fair use has become important to the thinking of legal scholars, sometimes called the “copyleft,” who argue that copyright law has grown so restrictive that it impedes creativity. And it has become enough of an issue that Mr. Gillis’s congressman, Representative Mike Doyle, Democrat of Pennsylvania, spoke on his behalf during a hearing on the future of radio.

“You have to look at the length of those samples,” Mr. Doyle said in a phone interview. “Case law gets built as cases are brought to court, and I think that more case law is going to fall on his side as this becomes more mainstream.”

Not all lawyers agree. “Fair use is a means to allow people to comment on a pre-existing work, not a means to allow someone to take a pre-existing work and recreate it into their own work,” said Barry Slotnick, head of the intellectual property litigation group at the law firm Loeb & Loeb. “What you can’t do is substitute someone else’s creativity for your own.”

Mr. Gillis chose to allow fans to decide how much they wanted to pay to download “Feed the Animals” from Illegal Art. (He plans to release the album on CD in September.) Illegal Art puts out sample-based music that falls into a legal gray area because the company’s owner, who goes by the pseudonym Philo T. Farnsworth, after an inventor of television, believes that the law limits artists unfairly.

“What the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy were doing, no one could do anymore,” he said, referring to groups that made music from densely layered samples when record companies were paying less attention to these legal issues. “We’re drawn into this because of the music we support.” [read full article...]

Golden Arches Front Seat @ Olympics

Here's a funny juxtaposition from today's NYTimes piece on China, the Olympics, economic change, and the Communist Party:

Screen shot:

Okay, now click to enlarge:

Now check out the Golden Arches on the girls' t shirts:

Women Lining Up Behind Obama

I just found this -- fun!

via The Political Voices of Women, June 17, 2008:

Big News:  Women Lining Up Behind Obama

a guest post from community member JCK who blogs at Motherscribe.   Enjoy.

Dear Los Angeles Times:

It seems that you have come up with a real “scoop” judging from yesterday’s headline:

Women lining up behind Obama

Apparently, this is BIG NEWS to you. I have one word for you since your “vision” appears to be impaired.

DUH!

I assume this is language that you will understand. What you fail to comprehend is that women vote for the issues that are important to them. Those of us who voted for Hillary Clinton can mourn the loss of her candidacy and move on. We will now embrace Barack Obama, because he supports and stands for the issues that we believe in. We will not vote for John McCain out of spite or leave a bloody, dead rabbit boiling in Barack Obama’s kitchen. No, in this particular article you did not compare women voters to the Glenn Close character in the movie “Fatal Attraction,” but that is surely the underlying message. How about if we leave fiction writing to the professionals?

“And Obama has taken a wide lead among female voters, belying months of political chatter and polls of primary voters suggesting that disappointment over Clinton’s defeat might block the Illinois senator from enjoying his party’s historic edge among women.”

Perhaps you should stop relying on “political chatter.” Let’s just look up the definition of chatter, shall we?

chat·ter
v. chat·tered, chat·ter·ing, chat·ters

v.intr.
1. To talk rapidly, incessantly, and on trivial subjects; jabber.
2. To utter a rapid series of short, inarticulate, speechlike sounds: birds chattering in the trees.
3. To click quickly and repeatedly: Our teeth chattered from the cold.
4. To vibrate or rattle while in operation: A power drill will chatter if the bit is loose.

v.tr.
To utter in a rapid, usually thoughtless way: chattered a long reply.

n.
1. Idle, trivial talk.
2. Communication, such as e-mail and cell phone calls, between people involved in terrorism and espionage as monitored by a government agency.

Oh, and LOOK! at #2 under the noun definition. It appears that chatter could be between people involved in terrorism and espionage as monitored by a government agency. Wow! There’s your scoop! Have at it.

Sincerely,

A Keyboard Wielding Democratic Woman Voter

—

Also See:

Why I’m Voting Republican (satirical video)

Celebrating Women Political Bloggers

This is nice, to be included here. (though is NG a political blog? an art blog? both or neither??)

via Informed Voters as well as Political Voices of Women:

Celebrating Another 100 Women Political Bloggers

Posted by Catherine Morgan on August 6, 2008

Celebrating Another 100 Women Political Bloggers.

All week we are celebrating women political bloggers. Monday, I posted on the first 100 women blogging politics, from our list of over 500.  Tuesday, the next 100.  And today, another 100 women political bloggers.

One of my goals for this site, is that women will use each other’s sites, to link to in their own blogs, and promote each other.

You can help promote women political bloggers, by linking to them on your own blog. And, if you know someone not on the list, please send me their link, and I would be happy to add them.

[see list]

Found Art (Greenwich Village): Unmonumental 54

Found Art (Greenwich Village): Unmonumental 54, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

 

Found Art (Tribeca): Unmonumental 53

Found Art (Tribeca): Unmonumental 53, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

 

That Was Then...This Is Now: Bob Fiore: Winter Soldier

Winter Soldier (1972 Documentary). Courtesy Winterfilm Collective/Vietnam Veterans Against the War/Photofest

via P.S.1 Newspaper, Summer 2008:
This article refers to the P.S.1 exhibition That Was Then...This Is Now

That Was Then...This Is Now: Bob Fiore: Winter Soldier

An interview with Alanna Heiss

In 1968, protests broke out all over the world in opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In 1971, Vietnam Veterans Against the War held a Winter Soldier conference, detailing the atrocities of the war by those who experienced it. As documentation of the event, the film Winter Soldier is a protest in its own right. P.S.1 Director Alanna Heiss spoke with Bob Fiore, one of the 18 filmmakers who worked on the project, about its production and its current significance as an anti-war protest.

Alanna Heiss: What was your role in the creation of Winter Soldier?

Bob Fiore: The filming of Winter Soldier was in 1971 at the height of anti-war protest. I was a part of an organization called Filmmakers Against the War with 17 filmmakers who wanted to attempt a meaningful protest. We got together to film the Winter Soldier proceedings, because we thought the media would ignore them. Which they did.

AH: What was the motivation to collaborate with other filmmakers and to use film as a form of protest?

BF: We were all filmmakers so it was the obvious thing to do. Veterans that we were working with decided to organize this conference to coordinate information about the war because it was unclear what was going on, since things were not reported in the press. The conference was in Detroit and we had very little money so we slept on the floor of a church basement. Everyone’s hard work was volunteered and we got some film stock donated.

AH: How did the film circulate, and what communities supported it?

BF: We got a lot of support from the art world. Robert Rauschenberg was very helpful in trying to raise money. He arranged for us to show a demonstration reel at Senator Jacob Javits' apartment. We also had screenings in art galleries--they became little theaters.. When you made a film, aside from theaters, there wasn't any place to show it. I did some filming with Richard Serra and Robert Smithson--I had made Spiral Jetty with Smithson in 1970--who were both interested in protesting the war. Smithson had just come back from Kent State where he did his piece, Partially Buried Woodshed. Then the shooting at Kent State occurred and that politicized everything we did. At that time I lived on 13th Street and I used to cook dinner for friends. Smithson and Serra would come and look at screenings of Winter Soldier. Their influence contributed to the unrelenting quality of the film. There was also an organization of artists, Artists for Peace, led by Carl Andre. I don't know if they did anything except meet at Max's and drink, but they were hunting for ways to protest in a meaningful way.

AH: When Vietnam Veterans Against the War formed, it was the first time that veterans joined activists and students to address the Vietnam War. What was the impact of this first-hand voice?

BF: It was the first time I had seen veterans speaking from their own experiences. In the case of Scott Camil, who is one of the Winter Soldier participants, speaking helped him understand what in fact had happened. I think this understanding grew as more and more people who had been in Vietnam grasped the situation. It became clear what our actual policies were, as opposed to what the government said we were doing. I had never met a veteran until we began filming and they were deeply disturbed but were trying to understand what had happened to them. As soon as you met them, you knew it was something radical. The same is true in Iraq: people coming back are disturbed.

AH: How was the film initially received?

BF: At the time, the film wasn't shown in the U.S. at all except at the Whitney Museum and at Cinema 1 on the East Side, and we were not able to get it on TV. It was just too strong. But the Europeans were more receptive. We showed it at Cannes and at the Berlin Film Festival and there was a large distribution in England, France, and Italy. Back then there was no VHS or DVD, so there wasn't any way to show the film other than in theaters, and eventually it languished.

AH: What kinds of reactions did viewers have to the film?

BF: The film is a very powerful experience and it can be shocking. One of the first times we showed it was in 1972 at the Berlin Film Festival. When the film started, we were standing outside. About five minutes later a woman came running out and puked in the lobby. In Berlin there was a lot of sympathy for the Vietnamese and antipathy for Americans. The Europeans didn't support the war at all.

AH: With the most recent Winter Soldier conference, does the condemnation of the war by veterans still hold the same weight? How does the echo of the previous Winter Soldier inform our perspective on Iraq?

BF: The relaunch of Winter Soldier was at Lincoln Center in 2005. After a screening, some of the veterans from the film invited Iraq War veterans up on the stage. I think in the same way that Winter Soldier was a discovery of what was going on--people pooling their experience to get a broader idea of what was happening--the Iraq War veterans began to realize that their experiences were part of a larger context. That allowed them to find a voice for themselves. One of the reasons for privatizing the army and doing away with the draft was because so many drafted people experienced what war was like and wouldn't keep quiet about it. I don’t think it worked. It made for docile soldiers for a while in Iraq, because they were so-called professional soldiers. But war is war, it's horrible no matter when and where. With the filming of the recent Iraqi Winter Soldier conference, the situation is different. Now everything can be done on the Internet. When we first made Winter Soldier, there was no alternative to network news and newspapers. In terms of making information available, it's really different than it was then. Whether people understand or not is a different question. Winter Soldier is an attempt to describe what kind of war our country fights. Unfortunately the war in Iraq is very similar in the amount of destruction and havoc we’ve managed to visit on innocent people. Sometimes I speak after the film and almost inevitably people will ask, "Why hasn't everyone seen this?" That response points to the fact that this information exists, but is not available. That is why the film is still relevant.

AH: With our current war in Iraq, is there renewed interest in the film?

BF: Around 1991, I showed the film in a class my daughter was taking at Sarah Lawrence on the history of Vietnam. The students saw it as an historical document because there was no war going on. The film didn’t have any immediate relevance. Instead, they mostly asked why the Vietnam War was such a passionate subject with their parents. With the Iraq war here has been an enthusiastic and renewed interest in the film. Dennis Doros and Amy Heller of Milestone Films have put the film in theaters, on television, and have made it available on DVD. It's available on Netflix. Before, it was an effort to keep the film alive, but now it is thriving.

Vernacular Photography: Archaeology & Retro-Futurism

A few excerpts that struck me from two separate reviews that touch on photography and the vernacular:

via Village Voice:

Project Spaces at Location One and White Columns
Follow us, dear reader, into the secret annexes
By Martha Schwendener
Wednesday, July 9th 2008

[...] In the project room over at White Columns, Oliver Wasow works more like an archaeologist, sifting through annals of recent photography. Just as archaeologists favor ancient garbage dumps for the mother lode of information they provide about a past culture, Wasow's "Expansible Catalogue" also focuses on junk--or at least the kind of photography that doesn't make it into art-history books.

Wasow's photos, displayed in a hodgepodge of sizes and frames, are hybrids of pictures he took and joined digitally with images cribbed from unidentified sources. Certain themes repeat: the digits of historically significant years ("1945" looming tall over a heap of rubble); an abandoned wagon wheel surrounded by tufts of prairie grass; a retro-futuristic landscape with domes protruding from the ground.

Some of Wasow's interventions are so subtle that it's hard at first to tell what he's done, though others contain more obvious fantastical elements (like a landscape lodged in a living room). But what's funny is how we often know, intuitively—or, more precisely, through repeated exposure to pictures in books or media sources—what many of these images are supposed to "mean." The isolated wagon wheel signifies the sacrifice and hardship of our western-bound forebears; the huge year dates and the domes, some kind of post-apocalyptic future.

What's also interesting about Wasow's project, though, is what it tells us about how we read photography. Art photography was and is about staking out a signature style, while vernacular photography is interesting for almost the opposite reason: Certain weird tropes get codified and repeated over and over. Only, in Wasow's work, the familiar and the strange mix together to create a new, expanded (expansible!) vocabulary of images.

Wasow borrows the title of his project from Wallace Nutting, an early-20th-century photographer who sold his photographs in department stores. He's also borrowed Nutting's distribution system: Images here are sold, in signed, unlimited editions, for only $10 to $100. Now, virtually all of us can be collectors. If only we all had those backyard sheds to house our private museums.

via Artnet Mag:

ANONYMOUS IS A PHOTOGRAPHER
by Robert Moeller
7-30-08

[...] By 1900, George Eastman finally had the camera he wanted. For 20 years or so, Eastman had layered improvement over improvisation, purchased competing patents, and produced camera after camera. With the introduction of the "Brownie," which could be sold for only $1, a corner had been turned. This magical box, with its image-making power, allowed almost anyone to become a photographer -- and many did.

The Brownie remained in production, in various versions, until 1970, and was responsible for producing millions upon millions of snapshots. Amateur photographers turned the camera on their immediate surroundings, and their pictures remain provincial and mundane, of interest largely to their own circle of family and friends. The resulting works orbit around tradition, the home and family, and are often as deliberate as they are naïve.

Interestingly, though technology has changed, our ways of recording the personal haven't. Though the analog snapshot may have been rendered obsolete by the digital age, one needs only to peruse a photo-sharing website like Flickr.com to understand that our collective finger remains on the shutter. Not only do we all take pictures, but we all take pictures of the same things.

In this vast sea of images, some stand out. A tension, a chafing between innocence and intent, can produce surprising results.

[...] As Sarah Greenough writes, optimistically, about the snapshot in her vibrant introduction: "Liberated from the constraints of the marketplace, they are curious mixtures of originality and conventionality that often present highly inventive pictorial solutions -- whether by accident or intent -- while simultaneously preserving inherited subjects and poses."

[...] As Marvin Heiferman notes, "Snapshots may appear to be naïve, but they are seldom innocent." In Now Is Then: Snapshots from the Maresca Collection, in which Heiferman's essay appears, the tone struck is earthier than The American Snapshot, perhaps reflecting the tastes of the collector, Frank Maresca. Himself a photographer, Maresca brings a wider lens to bear: the inclusion of people of color, a knowing sexuality, hints of violence and disarray.  

Even the photographs themselves seem rough and weathered, mementos pawed over and gazed upon. In one photograph from the 1960s, a boy dressed in a suit poses in front of a television set. The photograph is so lined and creased that its texture adds a swirling, painterly intensity to the picture. Maresca's collection has an urbane grittiness that is missing from The Art of the American Snapshot, which seems more pastoral and quiet by comparison.

As Maresca says in an interview included in the book, "These pictures would have something ‘off’ about them." And that something resonates with a tabloid fury that these anonymous photographers must have known as well.

[read on...]

Found Art (Soho): Unmonumental 52

Found Art (Soho): Unmonumental 52, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

 

Found Art (Chinatown): Unmonumental 51

Found Art (Chinatown): Unmonumental 51, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

 

Back to the Futura!

via Crooked Timber:

 

Back to the Futura

by John Holbo on July 26, 2008

So, about that Obama-in-Berlin poster.

No, I'm not going to make fun of the small handful of right-wing blogs that got fake-alarmist about it, hinting that it kinda sorta looked Fascist. My question is related, however. Being a sensible and knowledgeable sort of person, as opposed to some sort of crazed wingnut, when I look at the poster I see not Fascist art but an homage to German modernist styles of the 1910's and 20's. Being the sort of person who futzes with fonts, I also see an example of art that would have been actually illegal under the Nazis. Quoting from German Modern, by Steven Heller and Louise Fili [amazon]:

After the Nazi's rise to power in 1933, however, when the Dessau Bauhaus was closed (the school had moved from its original home in Weimar in 1925), it was forbidden to use modern design or sans-serif typefaces such as Futura, which Goebbels called a "Jewish invention." Rigid, central balanced composition returned and traditional (and often illegible) Fraktur type was touted as symbolic of the glories of the nation. (17)

The Bauhaus was birthplace to New Typography, by Jan Tschichold, father of Futura. [UPDATE: No, sorry, it was Paul Renner. But the font was associated with the Bauhaus.] I've long been curious about how this whole 'forbidden to use modern design or sans-serif typefaces such a Futura' was enforced in practice. (I like the idea that maybe the Germans lost the war because of a font gap. They were all going blind, trying to read the Führer's orders in Fraktur.) But I've never actually read a full discussion of this, and I’ve read inconsistent brief mentions.

Example: the wikipedia entry for Art of the Third Reich has this to say. "The poster became an important medium for propaganda during this period. Combining text and bold graphics, posters were extensively deployed both in Germany and in the areas occupied. Their typography reflected the Nazis' preference for Fraktur over modern sans-serif typefaces, which were condemned as cultural Bolshevism (although Futura continued to be used owing to its practicality). The use of Fraktur was prevalent in advertising--which was a state monopoly--and books published during the Third Reich."

So were they allowed to use Futura or weren't they? Obviously they wouldn't have been allowed to use Gotham, which is the Futura-resembling but definitely American typeface Obama uses. It doesn't look German. But exactly how did the Nazis set about stamping out serifs? "Lost Serifs Sink Ships!" I'd be curious to read about the minor craziness that must have ensued.

The source for this section of the wikipedia article is Graphic Design: A Concise History, by Richard Hollis [amazon]. Which I've not seen. But I can't imagine such a title has much room for extended discussion. It makes sense, on reflection, that advertising would be a state monopoly, because it’s such a potential source of subversion. Sticking big letters on everything. It also makes sense that you can't oblige everyone to advertise using Fraktur. You can’t read that stuff on a moving bus or train. The wikipedia article also discusses the rather well-known fact that there was a serious schism in Nazi art promotion/censorship circles between those who that wanted to champion suitably Nazi-fied aspects of expressionism as dynamic and modern (Goebbels was one of these, until the Führer put his foot down) and the rest. So it isn't wrong to think that some Nazi art looks like German expressionism. Although it is certainly wrong to think that all German modernism looks like Nazi art.

I found a review by Heller of Art of the Third Reich, by Peter Adam:

Disappointingly, Adam gives short shrift given to graphic design. The Nazis are often credited with the most successful national "identity," ever designed; and its visual propaganda was among the most effective in the modern world. Adam allows that the ideals behind the other arts were manifest in applied art, but does not give the same exacting detail into creation of, say, posters and advertisements as he does the other arts. Given the totality of Nazi control, it would have been fascinating to know why Goebbels brought back German Fraktur to replace sans-serif, which he was reputed to have called a Jewish invention. Or why some years later the more legible sans-serifs do make their way back into German typefoundries replacing Fraktur as a dominant typeface.

Maybe the typeface wars of the Nazi era are unwritten history. I'll just conclude with a few final thoughts.

The art for the cover of the Adam book is interesting because it looks – to me, anyway – like more tasteful 20's-style expressionism/Russian constructivism than the Nazis actually produced for their war posters. I can understand why book designers would do this. It's a way of saying: don't worry, this isn't actually a Nazi book. It's a book about the Nazis. But eventually the effect of this sort of thing is to make 20's-style expressionism look more Fascist, to our eyes.

And here are a couple of relevant images from the Heller book. First, a poster that looks sorta like the Obama poster, compositionally:

It's from 1919.

Then, a couple of examples of how expressionism really has trouble not looking irrelevantly sinister, in light of subsequent developments. The evil Jew is going to steal our awesome magnet! No, I take it you are supposed to identify with the sinister, hook-nosed devil-motorist. I want more power!

Here's another weird one. Our metal package fasterers are so great that you could use them to handcuff someone to a cement block and, presumably, throw him in the river to drown? (You’ll sleep easier, knowing your customers are sleeping with the fishes?) Is it supposed to be a joke? Is it just a somewhat badly designed ad, because it’s too morbid? I dunno.

These posters are from 1915 and 1919, respectively.

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