Natalia Almada's El General

On September 12, 2010 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, I saw Natalia Almada's new film El General about her great-grand father, Mexican President Plutarco Elias Calles. More than a documentary, El General is a category-defying meditation on revolution, history and memory. (trailer at IMDb)

A school teacher who rose to the rank of general in Mexico's 1910-1920 revolution, Calles became president in 1924 and continued to orchestrate post-revolutionary Mexican politics until his exile in 1936. He is buried next to Pancho Villa in Mexico City's Monument of the Revolution. Calles continues to be a controversial figure, who is remembered principally for his unification of Mexico and his violent confrontations with the Catholic Church.

The project was inspired by six hours of audio cassettes made by Almada's grandmother (Calles' daughter) reminiscing about her childhood. However, the audio clips provide no more than a simple armature for the film, which gracefully swings between archival news footage, scans of old photos and clippings, home movies, and Chuy Chavez's brilliant cinematography of street scenes in contemporary Mexico City. Added to the mix are clips of Sergei Eisenstein's ¡Que viva México! and Elia Kazan's ¡Viva Zapata! (with Brando playing the hero, according to a John Steinbeck script).

The score is original music by John Zorn, Marc Ribot and Shazahd Ismaili, with Ribot's guitar figuring prominently throughout. (Ribot's new album, Silent Movies, to be released later this month, will include some music from the film.)

All this comes together as an epic tone poem under Almada 's careful direction (she won a Best Direction, Documentary award at Sundance 2009) and her intuitive, preternaturally seamless editing.

Working Class Heroes Purchased for Permanent Exhibition at the National Labor College

The exhibition Working Class Heroes: Selected Film Posters and Stills that I organized for the AFL-CIO international headquarters has been purchased in its entirety by the DC Labor Film Festival, in conjunction with the AFL-CIO Washington, DC Metropolitan Council for display at the National Labor College’s Kirkland Center in Silver Spring, Maryland. The exhibition space at the Kirkland Center is terrific and considerably larger than the space the show occupied downtown. This move not only keeps the works that I assembled together, but also provides a basis for creating an important archive for the documentation of films with workplace and organizing themes.

Maid to Clean

Maid to Clean. Very clever. I guess you can read it two ways. Made, as in forced, to clean. Involuntary servitude? Slavery? Diminishing opportunities? Discrimination? Or, is it made, as in formed, created, bred, to clean. As in, we are made to clean and you, customer, and you, bosses, are not – you are made for better things. Repulsive beyond comprehension either way. As is the appropriation of Rosie the Riveter – proud symbol of women’s mass entrance into (largely union) manufacturing jobs during World War II and subsequently adopted by the Chicana movement.
Rosie the Riveter (left) ¡Ya Basta! (2004) by Tina Hernández (right)

Flag as Road Kill & the USCC

This is the worst, best logo I have ever seen. It's perfect for the US Chamber of Commerce. Free enterprise has run over the flag with a Hummer. The nation's regulatory apparatus is a carcass waiting to be scraped off the highway. What were they thinking? Aside from the obvious substantive dissonance, it's a thoroughly wretched bit of design. The deep shadow behind the splatter appears mindless and irrelevant. Is floating road kill more appealing? Surely this bloody pulp of a pennant can't be trying to wave? There is a different version on their website that emphasizes the ethereal light at the expense of the shadow. Among it's other charms, consider also the logo's vapid, sloppy exploitation of familiar twentieth century art -- gestural painting, drips, Jasper Johns, Robert Frank and, perhaps, especially Claes Oldenburg's 1960 USA Flag. I'm having fun imagining the internal Chamber meetings in which the merits of this design were pitched and debated. BTW, what's the USCC's position on flag desecration legislation, constitutional amendments, etc.? Lucky for them, the Supreme Court thinks it's protected speech. Texas v. Johnson (1989)

Keywords by Raymond Williams

I’ve found myself picking up Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society by Raymond Williams frequently this semester – both to review for my Theories of Art lectures and to help prepare for a new seminar I’ll be teaching in Spring Semester, 2010 on art and public policy. Williams’ book is indispensable and hilariously brilliant. Each entry is a full-fledged essay on a word, including a study of derivation, competing uses and relationships to others words. My favorite: his winning trifecta on representation, realism and naturalism.

To start with, his definition of art is gloriously down to earth. Williams doesn’t tell us what we want words to mean. In a kind of Wittgensteinian mad clarity, he patiently documents the actual usage through the ages. Here’s a sampling plucked from the beginning, middle and end of his two page 'art' entry (citations omitted, some abbreviations spelled out):

Art has been used in English from the 13th Century. It was widely applied without predominant specialization, until the late 17th Century, in matters as various as mathematics, medicine and angling. In the medieval university curriculum, the arts… were grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. Artist, from the 16th Century on, was first used in this context, though with almost contemporary developments to describe any skilled person. [….]

The emergence of an abstract, capitalized Art, with its own internal but generalized principles, is difficult to localize. There are several plausible 18th Century uses, but it was in the 19th Century that the concept became general. [....]

It can be primarily related to the changes inherent in capitalist commodity production…[as a]…defensive specialization of certain skills and purposes…not determined by immediate exchange (value)….This is the formal basis for the distinction between ….fine arts and useful arts. [....]

As these practical distinctions are pressed, within a given mode of production, art and artist acquire ever more general (and more vague ) associations, offering to express a general human (i.e. non-utilitarian) interest, even while, ironically, most works of art are effectively treated as commodities and most artists, even when they justly claim quite other intentions, are effectively treated as a category of independent craftsmen or skilled workers producing a certain kind of marginal commodity.


The book was published in 1976 and updated in 1983. Williams famously had no tolerance for post-modernism and the book does not take on the then-emerging vocabulary of late twentieth century criticism. Keywords is the work of a dogged Marxist modernist with a razor sharp mind and an awe-inspiring capacity for research.

A couple of other similar projects on my shelf that are more up-to-date, but in no way replace Williams' book: A Concise Glossary of Cultural Theory by Peter Brooker (Arnold, 1999) and the more extensive Cultural Theory, The Key Concepts by Andrew Edgar & Peter Sedgwick (Routledge, 2002).

Working Class Heroes: Top Ten Film Recommendations

Just an update on the exhibition of film posters and stills I organized for the AFL-CIO. Local union blogs are picking up on the exhibition all over the country; there are some prospects that it may travel after it closes here in November. And, (here only!) my top ten (film, not poster) list, which actually has 13 choices and is more or less in order of preference:

1. Salt of the Earth (1954) directed by Herbert J. Biberman. Production/distribution: Independent Production Company & Intl Union of Mine, Mill & Smelter Workers. Filmed against the backdrop of the 1950’s Red Scare by blacklisted filmmaker Herbert Biberman, the film tells the story of a strike by Mexican American zinc miners in New Mexico. When the picket line is shut down by a Taft-Hartley injunction, the miner’s wives take over. Only a few professional actors were employed – most roles are played by miners, family members and union representatives.
2. Harlan County, USA (1976) directed by Barbara Kopple. Winner of the 1976 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, this film follows a UMWA strike. Mountain culture is also front and center with music by Hazel Dickens and an interview with Florence Reece, during which the 76 year old activist sings her 1931 classic “Which Side Are You On?” a cappella.
3. Fast Food Nation (2006) directed by Richard Linklater.
4. Tout va bien (1972) directed by Jean Luc-Godard. Four years after the 1968 Paris demonstrations, a workers’ take over of a meatpacking plant provokes thoughtful (and sometimes absurd) ruminations on labor politics by employees, local union officials and management. Stuck in the middle are a journalist (Jane Fonda) and her lover, a filmmaker, who wrestle with the roles of intellectuals and artists in the struggle for workers’ rights.
5. Bread and Roses (2000) directed by Ken Loach. (Japanese poster pictured above)
6.The Navigators (2001) directed by Ken Loach.
7. Modern Times (1936) directed by Charlie Chaplin. A slapstick study of the alienating effects of the assembly line, time studies and automation. This was his final silent film.
8. Man of Iron (Człowiek z żelaza) (1981) directed by Andrzej Wajda.
9. Matewan (1987) directed by John Sayles. Based on the Battle of Matewan, a bloody 1920 confrontation between miners, who had been evicted from their company homes, and Baldwin-Felts detectives, hired by the Stone Mountain Coal Company. Filmed on location in West Virginia. Hazel Dickens appears in the film and sings the title song, ‘Fire in the Hole.’
10. Cradle Will Rock (1999) directed by Tim Robbins. Tells the story of Orson Welles’ attempt to use the WPA’s Federal Theater Project for a Broadway musical about a steel strike. Also depicts depression era politics with a broad brush (and poetic license - the chronology is a little off). Subplots include anti-communist Congressional hearings; corporate plotting to aid Mussolini; and Diego Rivera’s famous confrontation with Nelson Rockefeller over the artist’s Rockefeller Center fresco.
11. The Organizer (1963) directed by Mario Monicelli. A professor (Marcello Mastroianni) helps Turin textile workers organize to fight for better wages and conditions.
12. Mondays in the Sun (2002) directed by Fernando León de Aranoa. Workers left idle by the closure of shipyards in a Spanish port cope with unemployment and dim prospects for work.
13. Baran (2001) directed by Majid Majidi. At an Iranian construction site where Afghan refugees are illegally employed, an Afghan teenage girl poses an a boy to obtain work after her father is disabled from a fall due to unsafe conditions. A young Iranian worker resents the new employee until he discovers her secret and falls in love.

Sun Ra: Space is the Place

Sun Ra's movie Space is the Place (1974) is visually splendid, brilliant and crazy; it has the most charming special effects ever and from start to finish a knockout score by Sun Ra. The commonplace becomes profound with repetition. I remember when WPFW arranged for Sun Ra to play the Old Post Office Pavillion on Halloween. A bright moment. Also try Sun Ra's Nuclear War. BTW, what you going to do without your ass?

Michael Jackson: Blood on the Dance Floor

Last night, in a state of ecstasy, anger, and hurt, played MJ as loud as the stereo could tolerate. He was magnificent in his peculiar, excessive way -- an exemplary artist as Henry Miller describes in Tropic of Cancer, page 256, beginning with "do anything but let it produce joy....Things, certain things about my idols bring tears to my eyes: the interruptions, the disorder, the violence, above all, the hatred they aroused. When I think of their deformities, of the monstrous styles they chose, of the flatulence and tediousness of their works, of all the chaos and confusion they wallowed in, of the obstacles they heaped up about them, I feel an exaltation. They were all mired in their own dung. All men who over-elaborated. ... What is called their over-elaboration is ... the sign of struggle, it is struggle itself with all the fibers clinging to it, the very aura and ambiance of the discordant spirit.... I run with joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music....."

Working Class Heroes

Working Class Heroes: Selected Film Posters and Stills opened yesterday at the AFL-CIO International Headquarters. This is the second exhibition I have organized for the AFL-CIO. The show was expertly, flawlessly installed by Nilay Lawson and Breck Brunson. It’s open Monday – Friday, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, through November 15, 2009. The AFL-CIO is located at 815 16th St., NW (just north of Lafayette Park). Here’s some excerpts from the wall text for the show:

Film is one of the most democratic arts. As German critic Walter Benjamin observed in his seminal 1936 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, cinema dispenses with the ‘aura’ of the unique work of art destined for elite connoisseurship. For the audience, there is no single ‘authentic’ Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Royals and workers, presidents and unemployed investment bankers see copies and one copy should be as good as another. Where reactionaries saw mass media as a looming threat to great culture, Benjamin welcomed it, arguing that the mass distribution of film, especially, would open the door to new content and eventually unlock art’s political potential.

This exhibition of film posters and stills represents a wide range of Hollywood, independent and foreign films that incorporate workplace and organizing themes. In some ways, Benjamin’s prediction looks sustainable. Many of the films presented here have, in fact, helped bring public attention to important stories about worker safety, the exploitation of immigrant workers, impediments to achieving union recognition and other important issues. Many, but certainly not all, are also exceptional works of art.

In the process of selecting films for representation in the exhibition, one major theme quickly emerged: the celebration of the working class hero. The movies love heroes and in many of these films, especially Hollywood’s, the plot boils down to an individual’s battle with a hostile system, rather than true collective action. In that way, the depiction of workers shares a heritage with filmland’s other rugged individualists -- the cowboy, the secret agent, the detective, the lonely genius, etc.

Nonetheless, it’s a near miracle that some of these films were produced by business corporations. The profit motive surely plays a part (Norma Rae, Erin Brockovitch, for example, were box office hits). And, the power and progressive politics of stars (Meryl Streep, Jane Fonda) and directors (Mike Nichols, Steven Soderbergh) has been a key factor in moving working class hero scripts through a system that otherwise might not be sympathetic.

Most of the contemporary movies here are independent and foreign projects that have attracted distribution by virtue of their sheer quality (and the growing influence of festivals to get them off the ground). Not surprisingly, these films take a more nuanced view of the workplace. Indicative of the profound economic shifts experienced by workers in the last forty years, layoffs have been a major theme. Mondays in the Sun, Hula Girls, The Full Monty, and The Navigators all depict workers coping with closing factories and mines, declining job security, out sourcing and privatization.

Still, the real complexity of organizing and collective bargaining mainly eludes the camera. The grit, drama and intensity of organizing campaigns and strikes is brought to life only in a few, most notably, Herbert Biberman’s Salt of the Earth (perhaps the most remarkable labor film ever made), and Barbara Kopple’s documentary, Harlan County USA.

Enlightenment Criticism

Note to art theory professors: before you teach students to disparage the European Enlightenment, make sure they’ve experienced it. Make sure you have, too.

Lou Andreas–Salomé

Currently reading The Freud Journal by Lou Andreas–Salomé. She was 50 years old when she started studying with Freud. The book documents her experiences in Freud’s often contentious weekly Vienna seminars. He became very attached to her. He brought her flowers. She visited with him at home frequently, often staying late into the morning hours talking about current issues in psychotherapy. On such occasions, Freud insisted on walking her home. By all accounts, they did not have a love affair. (Lou had broken Nietzsche’s heart thirty years earlier; she was Rilke’s lover when she was in her late thirties and the poet was in his early twenties.) Her reflections in the journal are often quite original and provocative. For example:

“It was wonderful to arrive in the Syringasse in the evening with flowers from Freud … I long thought that his concept of ‘polymorphous criminality’ was a colossal exaggeration until I realized that there is inevitably an emotion analogous to hate at the onset of all conscious awareness. We attain our separate individuality only by repelling something and being repelled by it. If hate and the doom of death are found in the underworld of our dreams, that only betokens the first point of departure – the first chilling isolation and separation without which an ego would no more come to be than would pulmonary respiration without the interruption of the direct supply of oxygen from the maternal body.”

Dulles International Airport, Baggage Area, March 2, 2009

Chris Kraus

Suggested reading before heading out to the College Art Association Annual Conference in LA: Chris Kraus’s Video Green: Los Angeles Art and The Triumph of Nothingness ( Semiotexte, 2004). There’s double resonance for CAA in LA – Kraus’s book is not only a perceptive look at LA’s art scene, but Kraus won CAA’s 2008 Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism.

Kraus writes in blood (to borrow from Nietzsche) – a passionate, highly readable mix of autobiography, art criticism, cultural commentary, sexual fantasy and fiction. (When was the last time you read a book of criticism from cover to cover in one day?) Her main lament is the blankness of the art fostered by LA’s MFA powerhouses, but, commendably, she spends more time writing about what she likes.

To put it mildly, Kraus is present in her criticism. If George Romero had written The Death of the Author instead of Roland Barthes, it would feature Kraus. She’s decisively undead and if it’s multiple subjectivities or omniscient god-complex criticism you want, you’ll have to kill her again and again and again.

Moreover, to her credit, Kraus’s rejection of prevailing professionalized modes of art-making and talking about art does not pitch her backwards into reactionary beauty fetishization, like many of her contemporaries. She likes broadly conceptual, project based art that is engaged with the city and its many communities.

Still, it may be a little jarring for new readers to credit opinions on fine art from a writer who claims to be a former prostitute, topless dancer and domination/submission addict who trolls the internet for sexual partners to punish and humiliate her. Is connoisseurship of the many modes of sexual debasement a qualification for talking about art? Put another way, does having strange men come in your face (one of Kraus’s reminiscences) give you any insight into the experience of looking at contemporary art? Well, if you put it that way, I guess it’s kind of perfect.


Also check out LA Artland: Contemporary Art from Los Angeles (Black Dog Publishing 2005). It’s a flawed, but useful Taschen-style arts-poitation coffee table book edited (and with good essays by) Kraus, Jan Tumlir & Jane McFadden. Another useful book is Sunshine Noir, a catalogue for the 1997 show of the same name organized by Lars Nittve and Helle Crenzien for the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art Humlebaek, Denmark.

Ornette Coleman, Virgin Beauty (1988)

Album of the Day, Month, Year: Ornette Coleman's Virgin Beauty

I bought this album probably not too long after it came out in 1988, didn’t like it and put it away. Don’t think I’ve heard it since. First of all, Jerry Garcia on guitar struck me as a cop out. Unlike most of my generation I was never a Dead Head. Born and raised on John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Archie Sheep, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Monk and Miles, Charles Lloyd, John Handy (and James Brown) -- the Dead always bored me my to tears. I went to one concert and feel asleep. (I did like the Dead’s first album a lot – haven’t heard that for years either. Still have the LP but never play vinyl anymore.)

Anyway, in the fashion of Ornette’s early, great double quartets, Bernie Nix and Charles Ellerbee also play guitar on Virgin Beauty. Al McDowell and Chris Walker contribute dizzying, syncopated, snappy, cracking, trebly bass lines. Denardo Coleman and Calvin Weston fire up the drums. The only voice not doubled is Ornette’s horn.

Listening to it my studio yesterday, I was transfixed, knocked out, in love, amazed, captivated. I danced all by myself for nearly an hour. This is a great band swinging, funking, rocking and bluesing with that crazy, piercing alto totally in command over all the commotion. And then, there’s a magnificent, soulful Ornette solo at the end. What was I thinking? Ornette’s always ahead of the curve, but how could it take me so long to catch up with this one?

Dolores Huerta and Barbara Carrasco Visit Chicano Art & Experience at the AFL-CIO

Legendary labor organizer Dolores Huerta visited our show yesterday with distinguished artist Barbara Carrasco. Barbara’s portrait of Dolores is in the show. In fact, the print we have is signed by both Barbara and Dolores.

Dolores, along with Cesar Chávez, is a co-founder of the National Farm Workers Association which evolved into the United Farm Workers of America. She was instrumental in the grape boycotts that brought the farm workers’ struggle to international attention. At 78, she is still very active in progressive politics and social change in her work as an individual and through her foundation, the Dolores Huerta Foundation. (pictured at right: Barbara Carrasco, Rex Weil and Dolores Huerta with Carrasco's Dolores. You can also see, behind Barbara, Sun Mad by Ester Hernández)

p.s. the show is featured on WETA-TV's Around Town. See the Janis Goodman review here (scroll down to 'art reviews.')

Big Al Carter (1947-2008)

R.I.P.

photo by David Peterson

The Washington Post Magazine

Chicana Art and Experience

I am working on a new curatorial project for the AFL-CIO -- organizing an exhibition of women artists whose art reflects the interests and concerns of Chicana workers. The show, which includes more than 30 prints, paintings, photographs and posters, opens at the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, DC on November 19, 2008 and continues until May 31, 2009.

My first major exposure to Chicana/o art was in 1992 when I reviewed the landmark Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation (CARA) exhibition at what is now called the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The show was viewed then as highly controversial and panned by the Washington Post's Paul Richard (as too political). I wrote a lengthy response to Richard's review in the Washington City paper defending the show. The work in the AFL-CIO show reprises some of the artists who were represented in CARA, but adds newer voices as well. If you're in town, contact me and I'll walk you through the show. I think it's a bold move for the labor federation, which is deploying its exhibition program to include politically aggressive art and to emphasize the diversity and pluralism that is a reality both in the art world and the world of work at large. The artists include : Barbara Carrasco, Ester Hernández, Cecilia Concepción Alvarez, Laura Álvarez, Favianna Rodíguez, Yreina Cervántez, Juana Alicia, Irene Simmons, Delilah Montoya, Laura Molina, Tina Hernández, Yolanda López, Carmen Lomas Garza, and Kathy Vargas. I want to thank each of them for participating and underscore what a pleasure it has been to be in touch in connection with this show. You can see more images at the AFL-CIO's website: http://www.aflcio.org/aboutus/history/art/chicana_explanation.cfm

The images reproduced , clockwise from the upper left are ¡Ya Basta! by Tina Hernández; We Are Not the Enemy by Favianna Rodriguez; Cihualyaomiquiz, The Jaguar by Laura Molina; Humane Borders (from the series, Trail of Thirst) by Delilah Montoya; and Sun Raid by Ester Hernández.

Picturing Politics: Artists Speak to Power

Picturing Politics: Artists Speak to Power, which I organized for the Arlington Art Center, is open! If you are in town, don’t miss the reception this Friday, September 5, 2008 from 6:00 to 9:00 PM, which should be a great party. I hope you’ll also have a chance to visit during a quieter time because all this outstanding work requires and rewards sustained attention. (The exhibition closes September 27.) If you’re out of town and/or can’t get there, the catalog is available from AAC [contact info is below].

The artists/collaborations are: Renee Stout, Mary Coble, Judy Byron, Randall Packer & John Anderson, Jefferson Pinder & Matt Ravenstahl, José Ruiz, Rick Rinehard, Alberto Gaitán & Victoria F. Gaitán, Lisa Blas, Wendy Babcox & Meg Mitchell, Helga Thomson, The Pinky Show, Benjamin Edwards, and photographs by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans from the Independence Fund and the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum.

This show is an ambitious and courageous undertaking for the AAC, which deserves your support! (Images, clockwise from top left, by José Ruiz, Helga Thomson, Steve Danyluk, and The Pinky Show. )

Arlington Arts Center

3550 Wilson Boulevard,

Arlington, Virginia 22201

(703) 248-6800
http://www.arlingtonartscenter.org/exhibitions.htm

Romantics and Conceptualists

I am preparing an advanced art theory class over the summer called Contemporary Art Theory: Markets and Collecting for the University of Maryland in fall. It's taking me back to all that critical theory culture industry biz: I'm reading parts of Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment this week -- especially the chapter on Enlightenment as Mass Deception. For me, it 's tough going. Also threw me back to Heidegger, sad to say. But I found some help: Timothy Clark's Martin Heidegger, which is a very readable, comprehensive look at the philosopher's poetics. Heidegger is essentially romanticism on steroids in my view. Part and parcel of that romanticism is a bitter critique of instrumental reasoning that furnishes a basis for the dark views of institutionalized, commercialized culture later offered by Debord, Baudrillard, Foucault and Jamison -- all of whom, in one way or another, seem to provide aid and comfort to Conceptualism as a subversion of the mainstream uses and abuses of art.

I don't teach Heidegger in my regular Theories of Art class. It's not just because he's difficult and essentially wrong. Almost all art theory is difficult and wrong. I'm more concerned that reading Heidegger is just too laborious -- slogging through all the neologisms, and jargon to come up with insights that are more simply and emphatically stated elsewhere ... earlier in Nietzsche and later on, in Marcuse's The Aesthetic Dimension, which I like.

Anyway, the relationship of romanticism to conceptual art appears more complex in this context. They appear at odds on the surface, but they have a common gene -- the goal of truth bearing via estrangement or 'defamiliarizing' the familiar in order to counter a petrified, oppressive social reality. I put it this way:

With the Romantic era came the notion that artists have some special capacity to speak the truth; it wasn't until the age of Conceptualism that they bothered to do any research.

(at right, image from A Breed Apart, Hans Haacke, 1978; one of seven panels first exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, near one of British Leyland's factories. British Leyland declared bankruptcy in 2005; its brands are now owned by Chinese and Indian companies. A Breed Apart documents the company's complicity in South African Apartheid.)

The Artist's Journey into the Interior by Erich Heller (a proponent of German Romanticism and a teacher of mine at Northwestern, where he taught for many years); the cover is the often reproduced Casper David Friedrich painting, The Wanderer Above the Mists (1817-18). My favorite book of Heller's is The Poet's Self and the Poem: Essays on Goethe, Nietzsche, Rilke and Thomas Mann.

Victims of Communism/Victims of Memorials

Family came to visit this weekend and naturally they wanted to see the Victims of Communism Memorial (VCM). Well, no, they didn’t really. It’s just that I’ve taken them to all the other memorials and they hadn’t seen this one yet. In fact, they had never heard of it. (It's located at Mass. Ave. and First St., NW). It was dedicated on June 12, 2007 by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an organization established pursuant to HR 3000, sponsored by Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Senator Claiborne Pell, and Senator Jesse Helms (and signed by then President Clinton) "to construct, maintain, and operate in the District of Columbia an appropriate international memorial to honor victims of communism..." On behalf of DC, thanks.

To be fair, the VCM is far from the worst looking public sculpture in Washington DC. It’s not even the worst looking memorial. The competition in both categories is fierce and, perhaps, the subject for further discussion and disputation. (Have you ever really looked at the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial at Judiciary Square?)

In case you did not gather from the image above, the VCM is a petite, intentionally crude version of the Statue of Liberty (SOL). It’s intentionally crude because, in true Society of the Spectacle (SOS) fashion, it is an imitation of a picture of a simulacrum of a representation. In short, the VCM reprises photographs of the 1989 Tiananmen Square copy of the SOL. This is beginning to sound all Iwo Jima in it’s complex relationships of copies to copies.

Oddly, onsite there is no discernible reference to the sculptor. A little research discloses its author to be Thomas Marsh of Orange, Va. According to his website, Marsh has done portrait sculpture of Betty White and Dick Van Dyke for Disney World, lots of religious statues and so on, all of which appear to be perfectly serviceable.

So much for the art and artist and on to the utterly loathsome, hypocritical, swollen bad consciousness of the whole despicable project. The VCM foundation claims that it’s a tribute to “the 100 million people who have been killed by communist totalitarian regimes worldwide,” which they pointedly describe as a 'holocaust.' On the sculpture’s base is inscribed, “To the more than one hundred million victims of communism…” (emphasis added). Well, that’s both more and less – bigger number, but 'victim' could mean anything, really – not necessarily dead. Not much here in the way of confidence inspiring precision, let alone documentation. To paraphrase Reagan, a million here, a million there, pretty soon you’re talking about real numbers. Why do I think these are the same people who would quibble over figures on Iraqi victims of the illegal US occupation down to the ones column?

The difficulties with the VCM are too immense and too complex to address in one posting. Can I just say that for Washington, where creepy politicians, capitalists and bureaucrats spent half a century supporting vicious fascist regimes, sponsoring death squads, encouraging, paying for, and directly ordering countless murders of democratically inclined left wing activists, labor leaders, and human rights workers all over the globe, this should be an unbearable stain. Except, it’s so small, so over the top in it’s misguided intentions that it’s really just kind of pathetic and ridiculous. I suggest a visit soon. Maybe 10:30 AM on June 12 for the anniversary celebration. There a lunch at Georgetown Law School afterward.