propositions press... 2.0

a field trip, in truths

[This essay was included in Meandering Methodologies, Deviant Disciplines, a publication produced by Public Art Saint Paul. The book is the final document from the four-year City Art Collaboratory project that brought scientists into collaboration with artists.]

My interest in science and art resonates with what philosopher Alain Badiou calls the “truth process” in his book Ethics. Written as the Yugoslav Wars unfolded, and particularly with the failed response of the Western powers in mind, Badiou composed his system to counter moral systems based on the so-called natural rights of man. He targets the cynical flexibility resulting from the universalizing claims of liberal humanism. With Badiou’s framework in mind, I found myself intrigued by the field trip taken by City Art Collaboratory scientists and artists to Coldwater Spring, as reported on the City Art Collaboratory blog. Knowing that the area around Coldwater Spring, above the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, was the site of an anti-road campaign only several years after the Yugoslav Wars, I wonder if applying Badiou’s language to a consideration of that site adds productive complexity to his ethics of truth, between abstraction and materiality, in space more than time. In understanding Coldwater Spring as a source not only of water but also of truths, and considering the ethical demands it might make in turn, I hope to advance Badiou’s political aims, which I share.

Reviewing Badiou’s system is the place to start. Greatly simplified, Badiou describes the truth process as opening with the event—a specific circumstance that occurs in time, immanently rupturing a situation, and that, whatever its temporal duration, “vanishes as soon as it appears.”1 The event divides consciousness, or a historical narrative, or a demarcation between self and other, or one’s relation to an imagined ideal, into the situation before and the situation after. But once perceived, the event is always already over. Those who experience the event are afterward called to observe a fidelity to it, and this is the basis for Badiou’s ethics. Performing this fidelity—thereby becoming an agent of truth, touching the eternal—is the ethic of the truth process. In plain language, I take this to mean carrying forward with new being, new thinking, or changed conduct that has been demanded by the revelatory event. A basic ethical failure is to go forward as if the event had not happened. The most extreme infidelity is the simulacrum of a truth, a dishonesty that legitimizes war. For Badiou, this is evil.

To support his analysis, Badiou returns repeatedly to his four-fold subjective “types”, across a spectrum from intimate to public realms: politics, love, science, and art. In politics, the subject is induced through mass experience; society is the actor. Love resides at the opposite end of the intimacy spectrum, inducing a subject in the space between individual persons. Science and art serve as intermediate zones in which the individual and the social meet. To take one of the many instances where Badiou uses the fourfold matrix to illustrate his point, he lists as exemplary events in order of politics, love, science, and art, “the French Revolution of 1792, the meeting of Heloise and Abelard, Galileo’s creation of physics, and Haydn’s invention of the classical musical style.”2 Thus, in politics he means revolution. By love, he means the life-changing intensity of amorous relations between individuals. Science and art, activity attributable to either individual practitioners or group efforts based on shared frameworks, produce paradigm-shifting insights. But he never presents his cherry-picked examples of events as existing within layers of history, much less in relation to one another.

Moving beyond the decontextualized examples of truth events he prefers, grounding Badiou’s language in a particular place reveals that different subject types may articulate truths along a common thread; in the Coldwater example that follows, in some sense all four are present. The different events entail multiple fidelities but are bound by relation of varying depths of time to the same place. Together, they produce a compound truth, at times contradictory but moving toward resolution. We could say the original truth is the spring itself, the existence of which was and is a hydrogeological event that occurs outside of human purpose.

Science can make truths legible in ways that no other endeavor can, but in contrast to the theory of relativity or the invention calculus, the self-evidence of the spring precludes the need for a formally presented insight. All science of the spring, from the earliest descriptions by explorers to latter-day hydrological measurements, only supplements the fundamental fact of flowing water.

 3

A series of Coldwater truths across subject types can be traced back to a work of art: a shimmering 1856 watercolor landscape by Alfred Sully, a commissioned officer and West Point graduate. The painting depicts the area from the perspective of the western bank of the Mississippi, above the confluence; Coldwater Spring is in the wooded foreground and Fort Snelling is off in the distance. The picture glows with summer light and the expansive skies of the northern prairie, capturing a moment when the settling of Minnesota was beginning to accelerate, and the sacred place Mndota (“where the waters meet”) was subsumed by its strategic significance. As the subject type art, the watercolor preserves a truth in the image and also exists as a truth-event in its objecthood. Sully’s image presents an event not as artistic innovation (Badiou’s preferred art reference), but as a document of opposing vectors—that of the free Dakota lands as represented by the unfenced terrain, or the simulacrum of democracy advanced by the settler nation, monumentalized by the fort. Competing fidelities ensued, resulting in the Dakota Uprising of 1862.

Sully seems to have observed a fidelity to the events of his own artistic creations. Even as he carried out his orders to secure territory, Sully is reputed to have been an advocate for Indians, treating them fairly and honestly, if not softly. To add to the truth in art already present in his Mississippi riverscape, an event in love seems to have emerged between the Anglo Sully and the great romance of his life, Manuela, his first wife, a Californian Chicana who died tragically young. Later, perhaps readable as a sort of fidelity to his mixed first marriage, Sully wed a French-Yankton woman in the Minnesota Territory, thereby contributing to the polyglot universe he found in the territorial settlements. One of Sully’s granddaughters was Ella Deloria, an ethnographer who conducted formal research on Navajo, Lumbee, and Lakota cultures. The social scientific reports she helped author contributed to both government recognition and tribal self-recognition. These published reports were events in Badiou’s sense; the reclamation and growth of tribal identities are the fidelity.

To add to these linked events in art, love, and science, and to complete the poetic redemption of the compound truth, one of Sully’s further descendants, the activist writer Vine Deloria Jr., carried forth a four-generations-late fidelity to the 1862 Dakota Uprising that Sully himself played a part in suppressing. Deloria’s 1969 book Custer Died for Your Sins helped to shape contemporary indigenous political consciousness and became a key text in the resurgence of native resistance against the imperialism of which his great-grandfather was a historical agent. Moreover, Custer Died for Your Sins came wrapped up in an event of its own moment—in the subject type politics at global scale, i.e., the worldwide systemic convulsions of the late 1960s and early 70s. A generation after that, a fidelity to the heyday of Red Power was an element in the production of a new political event, one that returns the thread to Coldwater Spring.

In 1997, in response to a planned highway widening and new interchange that threatened the spring and nearby sacred stand of oaks, a resistance movement rose up and established itself physically as an outlaw road-block encampment that became known as the Minnehaha Free State. Eventually, this became the nation’s longest ever blockage of a government road construction project. The campaign was comprised of those fighting to preserve the oaks, property owners resisting eminent domain, and the Mendota Mdewakanton Dakota, whose claims to tribal identity are interwoven with their claim on the spring. The Minnehaha Free State produced a militancy that kept the encampment going for sixteen months—we could say this was partly in fidelity to the indigenous rights and identity articulated by, among others, Vine Deloria.

The area being defended was the geographic heart of a truth-event, fidelity to which was evident not only in the road-block, but even more so through the years of grassroots political action, testimony in public hearings, court challenges, and other kinds of dedicated resistance. That fidelity prevailed to the degree that Coldwater Spring remains free flowing, and, through persistent striving, it was eventually granted governmental protection. In grappling with the problem of ethical consistency—key to combatting the moral flexibility of the neoliberal human rights frame—Badiou posits perseverance (in performing one’s fidelity to an event) as the opposite of opinion. The preservation demands made by the activists of the Free State may not have been achieved in total (the oaks were destroyed), but the perseverance following the event undoubtedly exposed the original position of the state—technocratically insisting on the road and dismissing concerns about the spring, but then later scaling back those plans—as mere opinion.

The truths of Coldwater Spring described in terms of Badiou’s system of ethics begins with the spring itself. Additionally, the spring exists as, and in relation to, multiple events, with fidelity to one event sometimes contributing to the production of another. It meanders through all four of Badiou’s subject types, by way of bloodline or political narrative. In a constructive departure from Badiou’s theory, applying his language to Coldwater Spring shows that a particular point of departure in space breaks linear time, stacking events into a single, compound truth. Furthermore, the original event, unlike the disappearing acts of Badiou’s exemplary events, remains open, perpetually reinvigorated by its flowing water.

Seen this way, the City Art Collaboratory visitors who quaffed clear water from the spring may yet express fidelities to the land in ways unforeseen, or may find themselves ensnared in their own Coldwater-threaded events—certainly in the science or arts of their training, but equally as likely, in politics or love. The hypocrisies of capital’s moralistic cloak will never be punctured without the blades of compound truths—Badiou supplies the language, but Coldwater Spring is the pure fact and the gushing event.

1 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, translated by Peter Hallward (Brooklyn: Verso, 2001), 67.

2 Ibid., p. 41.

3 Image supplied by Beinecke Digital Collection of Yale University Library.

from off the counterculture book shelf

In advance of this workshop I have been revisiting “counterculture” both as a general category of phenomenon and as that historically-specific wave in post-WWII United States which in extended form dates roughly from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s. Now that we are living through the 50th anniversary decade of the 1960s, it is a good time to ask: What does counterculture mean? Where does it reside, if anywhere? And what about the Counterculture—what is a proper perspective that history from the year 2016, as every week seems to bring the death of another figure from those frequently recalled decades?

Revisiting this history led me to read Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone, two titles from the countercultural lit canon I never read. Taking them consecutively had the effect of marking the beginning and end stages of the period, The Dharma Bums having been published in 1958 and relating stories from the middle Fifties, and Dog Soldiers published in 1974 and set in that time.

The Dharma Bums fictionalizes the adventures of a protagonist based on the author and his friends in real life. Kerouac captures the travels, personalities, and Buddhist explorations of a set of friends making discoveries against the backdrop of an American society dependent for order on a suffocating quiescence. But outside the narrow social norms of the times, the limits were unknown and the paths to freedom seem laughably available compared to the crowded and surveilled planet of today. Backcountry camping trips were easy treks into solitude, freight-hopping was a method of free transport, and gender politics were largely unarticulated. For white guys, it was a time of freedom. To me at age 47 the language reads as amusing and innocent, the story of young men living in a of fraternity of poets. As in most of Kerouac’s writings, the cast of characters is based on the real people who collectively earned renown as the Beat Generation.

The Dharma Bums features Japhy Ryder, a character sketched from the real guy Gary Snyder. Kerouac’s descriptions of Ryder’s outdoorsy ways read like a pre-history of what is now a billion-dollar outdoor rec industry. Ryder’s campcraft cooking of dehydrated foods are new to narrator Ray Smith, who describes them in a way that makes a reader hungry despite having eaten many a tasteless wilderness meal. In Ryder’s duck down sleeping bag, yab yum exercises, and a score other details, one can see the roots of modern hippie-dom, the “granola” subcultures of love and self-absorbtion that long ago took root in towns like Madison, where I live.

(For people just putting together the worlds of the Beat writers, this is a useful key to Kerouac’s characters. As well, there are many interesting essays and articles out there now about the Beats as seen through the lens of gender, including this one that brings attention to Natalie Jackson, who, along with Elise Cowen, ended up two of the known casualties of a world not ready for them.)


Dog Soldiers presents an entirely different vibe. The adventure related is no spiritual journey but rather a desperation trip fueled by drug duplicity and the opportunism of those countercultural freeks surviving the jaded post-Sixties mood. The story takes place on the downside of the high water mark, in a landscape of burned out, once-idealistic characters—types that Stone knew well from time spent in the Bay Area psychedelic scene of the mid and late Sixties. But here the drugs are numbing opioids, heroin and dilaudid, not happy face marijuana and LSD. In little more than fifteen years the California of Japhy Ryder’s mountain hikes, meditation practice, and cabin parties has turned into the sleazy California world of black market hustlers and amoral perverts, none to be trusted. Ray Hicks, the smuggler on the run, practices no Paramita of Dana; his only concern is offloading a package of heroin for a decent price, a stash that he never paid for.

Unlike in Kerouac’s world, Stone offers up fully sketched women characters in key roles, for example, Marge, a woman on the run with Hicks but chasing her own dragon all the while. Depressingly, the women in the story are about as wasted and desperate as the men. The purity of Ryder’s forests are from a different age; this tale ends with an outlaw run across the desert and a paroxysm of violence, a surrealistically described episode that reads as a fitting end to not only that particular drug deal but maybe the promise of the Counterculture as a whole. So we have on the front end the blissful, worry-free days of The Dharma Bums—the segregated South and Cold War propaganda notwithstanding—and on the far side of the arc, the cyncism and drug-hazed dread of Dog Soldiers, a paranoid hangover of late Nixonian meanness and blown optimism.

Interestingly, a transpacific element shapes the plotlines of both books. For Kerouac, it is the impending departure of Ryder to Japan, a turn in the story based on Gary Snyder winning a fellowship to study there (which led to his living in Japan for ten years). For Stone, it is the opening scenes, where his protagonist Converse, a burned out war journalist-turned-junk smuggler, makes his exit from Vietnam (Stone himself had been a correspondent assigned to report on the war). Considered in this way, both novels read as evidence of countercultural links to East and Southeast Asia—strands of proof that the US was heavily involved in Pacific Rim exchanges of all kinds over most of the twentieth century. Combining sites of an Other attractive to white Americans (zen!) and theaters of imperial overreach and colonial violence under one vast geocultural region called Asia, of course does little to sort out the particulars. And yet, most Asian Americans can trace in their family narratives the too-heavy footprint of the American empire—my family included.

Whether in reference to the Euro-attraction to “Eastern spirituality” or the antiwar analysis regarding the South Vietnamese client state, Asian Americans may have a critical view on the Counterculture’s understanding of things Asian. But Asian Americans must take care—a good number of us (again, my family stands as an example) come from lineages aligned with the reactionary sides of the conflicts that drove our families into diaspora—anti-Communists, particularly. The lack of a political consensus within Asian America and the historical culpability of respective camps creates a complication that raises the stakes. Laying a claim to countercultural legacies precisely because we may have a view of it beginning, as Ronald Takaki might say, from a different shore, seems like an important opening to follow. I am looking for cracks to widen, points from which the contradictions frozen by ideology and historical circumstance might be de-stabilized, through a strategic irreverance of ethnic references and a diasporic tramp philosophy. Let’s see where this goes.

ferguson to malcolm to madison

We took the intersection for twenty minutes, causing a stir. There, standing in the middle of the intersection of Doty Street and Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, several hundred yards from where the regressive Scott Walker only minutes earlier took the oath for his second term as governor of Wisconsin, members of the Young, Gifted and Black Coalition made their public vows as the leaders of a new movement.

The movement may be new, but some of the words used in this movement are old. Some feel like tributes. YGBC principal Brandi Grayson, a frequent chant and march leader, often finishes off a rousing passage with the full throat call ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!!! At the few YGBC rallies I have attended the response often feels fresh and committed. But a couple of times it sounded less than total, including out of my own mouth. I suppose it is in the nature of the call and response to wear down as much as to build to crescendos. In the search for renewed political militancy, this is the paradox we inhabit—caught between hot, fresh emotion and exhausted gestures.

I can hear warm, not hot, enthusiasm in my fellow demonstrators’ voices. This makes sense, seeing as how we are charged with supplying the response in a performance of words that originated in a time meaningful but mythical to many of us—the 1960s—a time that continues to loom large in our common understanding of political possibility. This is not a terrible thing—YGBC rallies have produced many surprises, including on the day of the vows what seemed like a closely held plan to block the intersection. Given the unpredictability put into play, clear historical references may be useful as familiar anchors. As long as the #FergusontoMadison movement produces truly novel situations, immediate and repeated references to historical models might be helpful signposts as the movement carves out unknown political territory. Or they could serve to confuse us, mistaking the models from the past as perfect templates for the present. The choice of battle cry is a small but concrete example of the difficult challenge faced by YGBC and all the #BlackLivesMatter activists, ie how to claim a radical tradition, but also find ways to critically advance that tradition without repeating the mistakes of movements past. 

Seven YBGC principals took their oaths while holding books of power. One of the seven, M. Adams, carried a short stack featuring a copy of Manning Marable’s book, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. Coincidentally I had finished reading the book only about two weeks before. Before, I only knew of Malcolm's story through the Autobiography and a collection of his speeches. Marable's book makes for a timely revisitation, as Marable’s scholarship serves those who oscillate between fidelity to a bygone form of militancy and organizational strength, on the one hand, and on the other, new democratic tendencies that make space for contemporary voices that the older social movements never did. The YGBC core, strong in queer and female leadership, represents the shift in boldness of visibility, and therefore the paradox of today’s condition—we honor the radical past as a political statement but live in and help shape worlds unimaginable to the ancestors.

And yet some brutal realities have not changed.

As Marable tells the story, the event that first brought Malcolm to public attention (including, significantly, to the attention of the NYPD’s secret operations unit) happened in 1957. Malcolm put his stature on display when a crowd spontaneously assembled in response to a police beating of three Harlemites who had verbally intervened when they witnessed a young man being roughed up by NYPD officers. Two of the three men were members of Harlem’s Temple No. 7 (later renamed Mosque No. 7), where Malcolm had been minister for going on four years. One of them, Johnson Hinton, was beaten badly aross the face and shins and then dealt the further indignation of being jailed for resisting arrest. Malcolm calmed the vengeful mass, which had grown to an estimated two thousand and gathered in seething anger outside the police station. To the frightened amazement of police, Malcolm did what they could not—he sent the Fruit of Islam home with a wave of his hand and authoritatively dispersed the crowd. Later, when, in a #Ferguson moment, a grand jury failed to indict the officers responsible, Malcolm blasted the decision and his life as a public political voice began. 

*

Malcolm’s emerging politics generated friction in all directions—between him and the white establishment, between him and the largely southern Civil Rights leaders, and, fatefully, between him and Nation of Islam leadership. Elijah Muhammad lead the NOI on an apolitical path, basing its low level of engagement with current events on an ideology of separatism and self-reliance. But political differences are not what drove Muhammad to dismiss and eventually attempt to silence his top minister. Same with personal jealousies—they played a part but did not define the split. The split hinged on Malcolm’s knowledge of and negative response to Muhammad’s exploitative sexual adventures, which played out in the insular circle of his young female personal secretaries. In other words, for these men, Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm, who perceived themselves as dealing with fates of entire peoples, destinies and histories writ large, the absolute and irreconcilable source of conflict seemed to come from the realm of intimate relationships and personal sexual behavior. Here again, contemporary relevance is not hard to spot.

It is tempting to take the story as simple confirmation of that adage by now worn thin, that the personal is political. Of course it is. But that is a starting point in an analysis, not a final conclusion. Also, there can be no way to adequately frame the misdeeds of the Messenger according to today’s points of reference, supplied as they are by a toothless left reduced to spending enormous energy parsing microaggressions and individual cases of sexual misconduct on elite college campuses while the business of brutal capital accumulation proceeds without obstacle on all fronts, churning up lives by the millions. Here is the value in Marable’s telling of the story, the lesson for today. He throws into high relief Elijah Muhammad’s sexism as more than a matter of interpersonal politics. Rather, it was a general political disaster. 

Muhammad and the NOI foregrounded black existence as the everyday contradiction, and claimed that it could be resolved only through adopting the Messenger’s teachings. That meant accepting a disciplined, absolutist structure and a readymade racial theology. Because of this very rigidity, the NOI found great success (as exemplified by Malcolm himself) in cultivating membership from among the current or ex-incarcerated, thereby introducing into the NOI a pronounced class element. The numbers of rank and file who came out of the urban street culture differentiated the NOI from the Christian middle class blacks who were the face of the Civil Rights movement. Malcolm’s work with the educated activists he attracted to his Organization of Afro American Unity and his late drift towards the MLK wing of black activism produced class tensions incommensurable with the dominant NOI culture. The same could be said of his revised racial analysis, based on the multi-racial realities he witnessed on his international travels. Thus, Malcolm’s evolution as a political thinker and organizer resulted in tension traveling in multiple directions. A scandal falling within the zone of any of them might have grown into a general crisis, unraveling relationships along all lines of fissure.

That event happened to explode within a set of relationships in which power was distributed according to gender, as it happens in an autocratic context by which the women of the NOI were made clearly subservient to the men. Beyond the extremism of Muhammad’s own behavior towards women, this framework for managing gender roles and divisions of labor brought the unpleasantries of contradiction to the intimate sphere, including in Malcolm’s fraught and unsatisfying connection with his wife, Betty (one of many controversial aspects brought to light in the book—watch this video for short but intense debate that touches on Marable’s treatment of their private life). But it is important for us to recall that the women who bore the Messenger’s children, and who had their lives strictly and cruelly constrained afterward, but who chose to never describe their experiences to people outside the NOI, did not use the terms made familiar by second wave feminism, “the personal is political.” In relation to the discourse of second wave feminism, the women of the NOI lived apart in time, place, and sociopolitical context.

Marable certainly makes it clear that Malcolm’s great blind spot was his inability to form a political analysis through the lens of gender. Nevertheless, Marable’s complete tale makes me believe that the oppressive gender dynamics at the top of the organization caused a split because Muhammad’s serial transgressions could not be kept separate from the other tensions then also eroding unity and trust. Rather than reducing Muhammad’s infidelities to a matter of interpersonal politics, I believe it is more useful to think of Malcolm as having to navigate a layered matrix of contradictions in which alternately a race, a class, or a gender fissure might take center stage as the focal point of a crisis—all while the other fissures remain in play and can never be excluded. Seen in this way, the legacy of Malcolm even fifty years after his assassination provides us with a new starting point. Far from being an end, diversity is the problem with which movement partisans always begin—and not a diversity simply of static social identities but rather of constantly shifting and differently weighted antagonisms.

*

An oath taken today on Marable’s book says this: We who were once invisible even to our own esteemed leaders, who have suffered exploitations seen and unseen through generations, are, as the ultimate survivors, central to the struggles ahead. No more blind spots, no more excuses. 

Having to negotiate between a powerful historical example and their own lived experiences—absorbing The Then but finding ways to act effectively in The Now—is undoubtedly a tall order. When social movements really succeed and change a society, one consequence is that later generations have to contend with the received history. Fixing histories in Hollywood movies, stone monuments, and passive holiday observances does the opposite, it severs the past from the present. Casting contemporary problems as unfinished movement business is a way to connect the achievements of the ancestors to the challenges of our time. The YGBC-led activism in Madison is more than an inspiring local manifestation of the post-Ferguson movement for racial justice. With demonstrated commitment, a strategy of issuing radical (and radically realistic) demands, and an evident openness to tactical creativity, this movement has the potential to play out as the best case scenario, whereby a fresh culture of political engagement reinvests the retro-saturated cry ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE! with a multi-dimensional analysis and intersectional agenda.

Finally, in addition to quoting from the past, and perhaps as an antidote to the pitfalls of scripted nostalgia, the other stand-by call and response chant at YGBC events leads from the present moment in the other direction, towards the future, in words and feeling. It is a chant that lays claim to future victory—something that will happen—in a contemporary cadence equally suited to the sporting spectacles out of which it was born and those celebratory moments in this new struggle, when we look around the occupied intersection, at each other, amazed to see that we really are the leaders we have been waiting for.

 IIIII…

            (crowd: IIIII…)

Be-lieeeeve…

            (Be-lieeeeve…)

That weeeee…

            (That weeeee…)

Will win!

            (Will win!!!)

 

(together, fast!)

I believe

that we will win!

 

            I believe

            that we will win!

 

                        I believe

                        that we will win!!!

rest in power and for the rest of us

General Baker, Ernesto Laclau, Maya Angelou. Sam Greenlee. Lately Yuri Kochiyama and most recently Ruby Dee. The ranks of the movement ancestors grow by the week. As I write, I wonder who of the radical generation’s s/heroes will make for an earthly exit next?

As we accelerate into a remaining decade’s worth of fiftieth anniversary observances, those faces of the Sixties who have managed to survive into elderhood will pass with regularity from here on out. That is what it felt like when the world rolled through all the WWII 50th anniversaries. The commemorations were also an extended elegy to the passing of a generation.

As for the rest of us, we really are the ones we have been waiting for, simply because we are the ones who remain. So it  is, the surprising turn of time, for generations ascending a new position vacated from above and pushed into from below. 

In my boxes of old letters I found a nearly twenty year-old note from by Yuri Kochiyama concerning the wrongfully convicted worker David Wong. The letter gives a feel for what an experienced and enthusiastic organizer Yuri was, reaching out to people one by one. Shortly after receiving this I learned of Yuri's long history and of her association with Malcolm X. The postscript is pretty funny. The scribbles at the bottom are from when I grabbed a pen and tested its flow on the nearest paper, probably to take a message while on the phone. It is a habit.

She included with the letter blank petition sheets and leaflets for events. One event was titled The David Wong Case: a forum on the history and political issues held at Art In General. Another leaflet carries an excellent summation of the case on one side and on the other a notice for a "luncheon" event at the Asian American Writers' Workshop.

*

Being what is conveniently called a Gen X-er, my political education leaned heavily on the half generation ahead of me, those of Baby Boomer age. As they finished with their formal, political, and cultural educations and the Seventies wore on, young people joined the general workforce, many of them as educators. Education underwent a mutually tempering dynamic. The idealism of new teachers whose values were forged in the struggles and social shifts of their youth met with the rigidity and structural dysfunction of the institution. If cynicism crept ever more surely into the attitudes of the teachers who had entered the job with invincible belief, the distortion went both ways. The institution was softened, classroom by classroom. People of my age benefitted. In our childhoods we had adult role models who were halfway closer to me in age than were my parents. Going into my teens I related to them like older cousins or young aunts and uncles. They spoke a culturally familiar language but came of age before my consciousness arose. They owned a counterculture by producing it, whereas I came to claim it by studying it. 

What Boomers and Gen X-ers have in common is the homogeneity of generational experience. Millenials, by contrast, can be broken down into a plethora of sub-groupings, subcultures, extremes of privileged or disadvantaged experience, and even different generational lineage—in the Millenial generation there are quite commonly persons of the same age for whom one set of parents are Boomers, another Gen X-ers, and another early Millenials, kids having kids. All social spectra are wider, the menu of consumable culture is as vast and as flat as the culture-scape of YouTube, the matrices of identity are endlessly fluid, and the scale of the world’s problems are unprecedented. As the last of the Civil Rights s/heroes fade—perhaps the final generational upholders of an old-skool reverential dignity, so foreign to most who were raised in the age of irony—I wonder about taking a seat as an elder in the future in relation to the youth of today, for whom a generational identity may no longer make sense.

I see comrades a generational rung above me move into their top steps and I feel my childhood finally slipping away. This is the pre-death, the warm-up for the final act in the mortality plays we are all fated to perform. 

*

Of the recently departed radicals, the closest to me was my artist hang-out pal David McLimans. He was an illustrator living in Madison with a talent for making political commentary come to graphic life. He lived the narrative of his time—he went from an outstate Wisconsin youth to a go in the military in the Vietnam era. Incapable of getting with the imperial mission, Dave went disciplinarily limp, passively forcing the Navy to discharge him. From there it was back to the land, settling a corner of the Driftless Area with a group of lifelong partners in idealism who have hearts for the non-human world. By the time I met him, Dave had been making it as an independent artist for many years. Though less well-known than the folks listed above, nonetheless Dave probably reached considerably more people through his prolific graphic contributions to national op-ed pages and magazines, and through his acclaimed environmentally-themed children’s books. 

I came to know Dave in the last four years, spending frequent Thursday nights in the company of an artist brotherhood simply referred to as The Lodge, of which Dave was a beloved member. Lodge discussions usually hover around current events, political rants, and field reports so I only saw Dave’s work on the occasional non-Lodge visit. Usually I would interrupt him working at his desk in the front room of his International Style house. He would talk me through the various in-progress designs of cut paper and maybe complain about feeling rusty in the hand after weeks of screen time. Having to shake off the stiffness is something I can relate to, but even at my most dexterous I have never had the evident hand skills that he did. He was truly gifted.

Part of living means moving ever closer to death. For artists, builders, and other people who make things, one’s creations usually outlive the maker. Inanimate objects and material artifacts last many times the length of a human life. Artists live in a kind of dual space-time, being trapped in our perishable bodies but putting our life energies into the careful creation of things that will be around long after. Dave seemed to stretch in both directions of this paradox, thinking through in his creativity the ephemeral and the permanent. He produced hundreds of images for the fleeting attentions of the daily newspaper reader. But he also assembled dozens of sculptures out of found materials resistant to disintegration—bits of detritus with no meaning other than as eternal trash, to which he granted renewed life as art, decoration, and ritual object. Dave, gone before he could fully inhabit his elderhood, created art for a globe that unceasingly spins a new day somewhere at every instant, as well as for the world to be, when humans stop counting days.

* 

These scans are of Dave’s spreads included in the book Graphic: Inside the Sketchbooks of the World's Great Graphic Designers. 

 

 

 

justseeds in milwaukee, again

I walked the 100 block of State Street some weeks ago and something didn’t feel right. I stopped and looked the storefronts up and down. It was gone. Ian’s on State was gone. I guess the WI Uprising—the social movement that lived on Ian’s pizza—is really over.

Not it is not. Ian’s, that is. I didn’t know they had moved across the street. As for the movement, it is going into hibernation, if you can call sleeping on a hair trigger hibernation.

*

In spring of 2009 the print media artists’ cooperative Justseeds opened a large-scale graphic art installation in the Union Art Gallery of UWM. I noted back then that the installation Which Side Are You On? was one of the most effective uses I had seen of an exceptionally difficult exhibition space. A cavernous zone with an odd foot print, the suffocating concrete architecture of the Union Art Gallery normally washes over whatever feeling emanates from the work on display. In that takeover, Justseeds did not merely tame the space, they bent it to their will.

In March of 2013 Justseeds does it again, only better than the first time. Compared to the earlier project the new installation, Uprisings: Images of Labor, is edited and simplified, but not in any way compromised or lessened. Elements have been reduced, formats unified, and the stylistically diverse design work, typography, and handworked imagery allowed full visibility. This time around the group attacks the walls neither as aggressively nor as freely as they did four years ago, but instead grabs attention through an aerial hanging of numerous but repeating forty-inch screen prints.
The multi-point messaging effectively broadens our ideas of what qualifies or defines itself as a labor struggle. At floor level the installation is a village of Justseeds activity and production—tables for blocks and brayers, books for sale (including, I was happy to see, a short stack of Deep Routes), small prints and publications on display, pulp vats and floor tarps for a papermaking station, and other stuff I didn’t get around to scrutinizing.

What is interesting to me is taking the two shows as a measure of time in social movement terms. Picture a line beginning in March of 2009 and ending in March 2013, with March 2011 in the center. The Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions and Arab Spring, the Wisconsin Uprising, the movement of indignados, Occupy Wall Street, and other insurgent flare-ups happened over the year halfway between the time of the two shows. In 2013, it makes some sense, in fact, to think of the current installation not as a “show” but an occupation. Not comparable to 2011’s actual social movement occupations of political space, obviously, I am speaking rather of a functional gesture and/or metaphorical act that extends the dream of those beautiful, frightening, and exhilarating occupations of 2011—events that currently sit on the two-years-later cusp of falling into the slow fade of memory. 

But Uprisings: Images of Labor is also more than a retrieval of the once-heady feeling of recent movements gone stale, particularly in Justseeds’ strategy of organizing a two-day free conference (shadowing the SGCI academic conference), of which I attended for a half day.
The programming created exactly that which our social movements need now, spaces in which partisans since dispersed by defeats and exhaustion can freshly connect, educate each other, exchange views, and be visible to one another.

Lane Hall and Lisa Moline's breakdown of OLB encounters with law enforcement set the afternoon tone of movement self-analysis.
By the time we had an intense twenty-minute audience discussion about feminist politics, feminist process, and feminist criticality following Meredith Stern’s afternoon presentation, a vibe of shared struggle and respectful inquiry settled into the room.
In other words, in an art event Justseeds created temporary conditions for what arose organically during the capitol rotunda occupation in Madison, the occupation of Zuccotti Park, and (on an incomparably huge scale) the occupation of Tahrir: a social forum. After 2011, the constituent elements of social movements are searching for space within which to locate themselves. Justseeds, with special effort by the Milwaukee-based members, has that space for a little while. In as potentially cold a gallery as the Union Art Gallery, this was a feat of social engineering equivalent in spirit to raccooning the birdfeeder.  

 

 

 

 

detroit journals, 2012

10/30/2012: As of last Sunday and for the two evenings before that, this little frame house long abandoned and brought back to the world of warm bodies by the artist couple Jon Brumit and Sarah Wagner, was full of voices, movements, spirits. It was a Compass gathering. Now it is Tuesday and in the house are just I and the spiders. Even they are not much for company, static as they are for the cold season.

This latest of Detroit excursions started with my attentions on family at the beginning of the weekend and then shifted over to Compass by noon on Sunday, except for a short overlap on Saturday night. It was a bit stressful because there was no place near the D*Flux house for my family to stay, and no affordable vacancies in the downtown area because of the World Series, forcing me into driving between the city and Southfield, where the three of us stayed.

Helpfully, on this trip Rozalinda shared with me a few of her further thoughts on the social construct of nuclear parenting as it remains unaddressed in practice by the better part of the left movement spectrum. Her critique rings true, I must say especially in relation to parenting teenagers, who require very imaginative solutions to the problems posed by their needs. I never thought about it deeply before I became a parent myself, partly because frankly I never had to, and partly because the people closest to me with the divided attention problem mostly deal with small children. For better or worse, there is a popular starting point for the conversation about family-inclusive practices in relation to small children, and that is childcare (and how to best provide it, how to ensure its quality, how to pay for it, etc). I never did think about it much beyond that, even though childcare as conventionally imagined is ultimately on many levels a stop-gap. But for adolescents it is even harder because the conversation has no obvious starting point.

In any case, there were plenty of reasons for my time-segregated weekend having to do simply with scheduling and the aforementioned distances. So I only enjoyed about an hour of the full Compass effect on Friday night. It is wonderful to be with Compass collaborators in any situation, including the institutional setting of MOCAD for our screening of the Monsanto Hearings and book release, especially while the exhibition Vision in a Cornfield is up. On Sunday afternoon, after the second of the two lightly attended but invigorating public events, the group began to disperse. I missed not only the full group in its nighttime form of deep, joyful discussion lubricated by love, but also in its daytime form of group drift. In this instance the outing was conceived, researched, and scouted by Rozalinda B, in keeping with her work around Foreign Trade Zones and migrant labor justice in the Chicago area. Early Sunday morning the group ventured out to view selected Detroit FTZs, evidently containing the faceless warehouses in which is parked a considerable fraction of the world’s aluminum stocks. Who knew? Well, according to Compass research, Goldman Sachs knows this well. The London Metal Exchange is where the prices are set and the futures traded, but Detroit is where tons of the actual material is held.

By Sunday evening the group of nine melted down to five, with five leaving and one (me) rejoining. We were smaller but charged up fresh from an appearance by Cheri Honkala, the Green Party VP candidate, only about nine days before the election. Ms. Honkala, who described the Green Party ticket as "Jill Stein from Harvard, and Cheri Honkala from the School of Hard Knocks," laid into the System. She was not there to discuss the Green Party program, but rather to critique directly the deadliness of the status quo. She had as openers our Detroit acquaintences Maureen Taylor and Elena Herrada, and a special warm-up by the Rev. Pinckney of Benton Harbor. We couldn't pass up a photo op with Cheri.    

After that it was another freewheeling late night Compass gab-fest. Brian and Claire burned the threads brightly as usual. Such a pleasure, although I tend to get a little lost when the property rights discussion takes off. That is because unlike responsible intellectuals Claire and Brian, I never bothered to read John Locke. And I do not plan to, not after Nick S, a grad student from southern Illinois who joined us for the weekend, briefed us on what Locke says in his three applications of the Digger Winstanley's argument for autonomy to the argument for private property rights. Got it. Sort of.

*

10/31/2012: More powerful for me is what I am reading, a D*Flux house copy of The Algiers Motel Incident by John Hersey. The event as Hersey reports it is gripping by itself, but that he could not have known in 1967 what Detroit would become decades later makes reading it alone on cold rainy nights in Detroit in 2012—in fact, on both Devil’s Night and Halloween, still notorious nights in Detroit for the long shadow cast from the bad old days—feel especially elegiac. It is as if the Rebellion wrenched open a new set of historical possibilities, but none of them were taken, and I am visiting the city that grew from the default path that ensued. The New Left proved unable to avail itself of the new or refreshed opportunities due to unresolved contradictions within the movement. Big labor certainly could not either, bound in partnership as it was to the industrial capitalism that it ostensibly resisted. The forces of Black liberation failed in the same as well, due to their unresolved contradictions. Instead, the rot of corruption, dysfunction, and disinvestment set in, hollowing out the pride that once existed in the word public. The economic and physical void left when capital flees now moves into the last of the vulture stages: the late return of speculators, this time would-be emergency management profiteers.

Because Detroit has evolved into such a visually sublime city, with evidence of a once-dense urban terrain confirmed only through absence and fade, I cannot help but read the book with massive visualizations and curiosities about what Detroit looked like in 1967. Not the famous sights of Belle Isle, Tiger Stadium, or the flagship Hudson's department store, but the seedy stretches of Woodward, the commercial strips along Grand River and Gratiot, and the small machine shops and parts factories that dotted the city by the hundreds—the cityscapes that probably nobody bothered to record. All that remain are decaying fragments here and there. The moving imagery of the Prelinger compilation Lost Landscapes of Detroit helps, but much of it is in black & white, or very grainy and degraded color. Very beautiful in its aging, but I want images that are better preserved, still and not moving. The neon palm-decorated motel sign featuring the “Africa-whispering name” as described by Hersey, sits in my head tugging at retronaut pleasures, in full color. Thanks to the wonders of the Web and a vintage motel postcard, here it is, an answer to one of my desires: to have a picture of the Algiers Motel, which even by 1969 had been renamed, two years after the police killings of the Incident.

Today the corner of Woodward and Virginia Park bear the trace of previous decades in the negative, through empty spaces. The car wash behind the motel mentioned by Hersey is still there, but there is nothing but a lawn where the motel once stood.
In 1967 that and most other spaces were full I am guessing, but how healthy did they appear then? It says a lot about the illusions of our world today if Detroit entered its terminal crisis 45 years ago despite having visually apparent vitality.

The racism of the policemen involved in the incident is made evident particularly in the words of Robert Paille and David Senak. Theirs is a racism built of neither a pointed prejudice nor a self-aware loathing, but rather a pervasive and personally-felt negativity in attitude toward whole groups of people. It is a negativity that precludes any benefit of the doubt and any true witholding of judgment, not to mention forgiveness. On the contrary, it is a glacial racism of slowly accumulating resentments. Paille on the Negroes: “It just seems that the more you give these people, the more they want.” This again resonates deeply with this moment. It is a few days before the general election of 2012. The hard right hatred of Barack Obama exceeds anything that was directed at George W. Bush. The rich-poor white coalition of rural conservatives, suburban elites, and disappearing white workers is rabid. The feeling comes from resentment: the Obamas are living like kings while the rest of us are struggling, and they only got in there because of their race! Indeed the putrid slogan belies a constituency. 

Hersey draws a clear picture of the troubled entry into adulthood of directionless working class black urban young males–a latent force of talented, brutalized, traumatized beings now three generations lost. For example, from all the descriptions of him, one of the three youths killed, Auburey Pollard, comes across as too quick to fisticuffs and way more intense than was good for him. He is described as a promising draughtsman and generous guy, but he also clearly did not care to consider the consequences of playing the role of muscle. These none-too-flattering leanings are conveyed through the words of his own family and friends, not Hersey's imaginary rendition. But Hersey reports contradictions and reversals as they occur. For example, one of the witnesses and a friend of the deceased, Michael Clark, comes across as arrogant and uncooperative in court, to the point of dislikeability, even by most of the other young men. 

Presenting his unvarnished findings with regard to the flawed characters he found in researching this tale, Hersey's writing strangely hints at an age to come, in which the post-traumatic moral impurities, real or fabricated, of individuals are exploited expertly by the Right. The absolute injustice of the slayings–Pollard's clearly being a confessed police killing–is in no way lessened by the sometimes unsavory profiles of the young men. Hersey's research presents the criminal policemen, Officers Senak, August, and especially Paille, as surpassing the mediocrity of the victims in one chilling respect, at least: an insensitivity to their own violence. 

*

11/01/2012: I imagined coming to Detroit to think about and travel Cass Corridor and University Research Corridor. That was the ostensible starting point for my research residency at MOCAD, but my focus quickly devolved. By noon Monday, my first day alone, I fell into the general poking around that I often do when traveling solo. That day was spent waiting for messages to get to people I hoped to see (did I bother to arrange any of that beforehand? No, that would be way too organized), so I let myself get side-tracked by the products, the interiors, and the people of Hello Records, John King Books, Dabl’s African Bead Museum, Source Booksellers, Lo & Behold in Hamtramck, the food at the Yemeni Café, and the coffee and sweet rolls at Avalon. Those are the places I spent my money, and if the opportunity presented, time in conversation with shopkeepers and acquaintences.

I recommend a leisurely browsing of all the places named above, and eating at the Yemeni Café, a Hamtramck hang-out for Yemeni dudes (but warmly welcoming to all) that serves an excellent combination platter of lamb, vegetable gallaba, and fragrant rice. I cannot judge the food for its authenticity, but it was so tasty I went there three nights in a row. 

A big part of the week's equation was the crummy weather. The days forming the heart of my visit were dominated by storms, rains, and chilly winds blown through the interior by Hurricane Sandy. For three days I'd leave the house at about ten and not return until I holed up for the night starting at around eight o'clock. I stayed indoors during the day, just not in the house, but rather in stores, coffeeshops, and libraries, and driving around town. Instead of taking the walks I had hoped, I opted to stay warm, dry, and more or less sedentary. Staying warm meant leaving the house because it is heated by wood stove. The warmth is terrific, but it takes over an hour for the fire to attain a charcoaled state, and thereafter requires the constant feeding of wood. Being the sole occupant and therefore the only one working the stove, it was easier to only have to start and tend the fire at night and then let it die as I went to sleep, instead of having to keep it going during the day.

Hurricane Sandy was only one of the events that made this particular week memorable. There was also the aforementioned World Series and Devil's Night. The Tigers home games took place on Saturday and Sunday, losing both, and with that the Series. On Tuesday and Wednesday, for Devil's Night and Halloween, the city imposed an early curfew for youth.
 And  there was the imminent election, featuring a scion of Michigan royalty challenging the centrist African-American president, as well as a number of interesting ballot initiatives. On Monday I dropped by the Teamsters hall on Trumbull and picked up a yard sign.
I may not be a Michigan resident but the collective bargaining amendment put in front of the voters under Proposal 2 contained more than an echo of the WI Uprising.

To sum up the historic week: the Tigers lost, the storms of Sandy kept most people in and washed out the expected Devil's Night fires, and the Romney campaign pretty much threw in the towel on the candidate's home state. But rain or no rain, these were no ordinary days to be visiting Detroit.

 11/02/2012: My final night in Detroit was enlivened by the appearance of the artist Åsa Sonjasdotter. We met some years ago in New York. At that time she was just beginning a new job in Tromsø, in the far north of Norway, helping to establish an art department at the university there. She was back in the States to take part in a show in Cincinnati and had a week or two for traveling around the region. She'd made her way from New York to Ohio, from there to Chicago, and then back eastbound. Being a food activist and an artist of critical engagement, she had intense curiosity about Detroit. As well, she has experience traveling and working in some of the desolate urban industrial landscapes of the post-Soviet cities of northern Russia. 

We went to Windsor for Chinese food, confused the Homeland Security man upon re-entry with our convoluted stories in response to the question "how do you two know each other," and lingered into the night with discussions about art, politics, and of course Detroit. Jon gave us a tour of the D*Flux Sound House–a house around the corner from their homestead as of now entirely given over to sound installation/recording/performance experiments. The house itself is an instrument, set up currently with deep looping bass rumbles triggered by the opening of the front door. The interior paint job was executed by two visiting artists from L.A.

The next day, Friday, I left for family visits in Ann Arbor. Åsa stayed for another day or two, courtesy of Jon and Sarah, and continued her solo drift from there. In Ann Arbor I made a last acquisition in my research residency book hunting: a hardcover edition of Lewis Mumford's The Myth of the Machine. I skipped the Port Huron at 50 conference, napped at my uncle's house, and drove home with a mobile library of Detroit-related, -relevant, and/or Detroit-found titles. I resisted the urge to lift Jon's ratty copy of the Hersey book, partly because I knew I could find it in Madison. The next week, it might have even been on Election Day, I called Paul's. They had a copy for three dollars. Who really needs Amazon when you live in the mrcc?

 

 

 

 

 

 

wi uprising @ year one

It was one year ago that the outward ripples of the Tunisian uprising were felt across borders and through unlikely differences in context. One of those places that saw a righteous outrage directed at a local tyrant in early 2011 was Madison, Wisconsin. Beginning on the day Mubarak fell, Wisconsinites opened their Friday after work routine with the surprise announcement that Scott Walker's so-called budget repair bill, set for a vote early the next week, would end the collective bargaining rights of the state's public sector union. As citizens read the fine print, they found that the bill contained other controversial measures, as well, such as a provision to sell off some publicly owned energy facilities on a no-bid basis. A variety of constituencies found reason to mobilize.

Thanks to the grassroots info-activism of individual citizens from all quarters of the state, the rapid circulation of information through social media, and the prevailing global mood of ya basta (and in this sense, Madison has long been a very global town), within a matter of hours our governor crossed the all-important line of perception, going from harmless amateur to despotic, venal, and dangerous egomaniac. Then, as Walker dug in his heels, the movement to criticize, resist, and now to oust him, gained traction through months and months of renewed outrages committed by him and his Republican lieutenants. Right up to, literally, this very moment. As I type this post, the Republican-controlled Assembly are preparing to ram through yet another of their controversial, poorly-written bills. This one would effectively gut Wisconsin's regulatory apparatus that has successfully conserved wetlands across the state, giving in wholesale to the well-financed interests of irresponsible short term wealth-generating development. It would also have the effect of heaping additional unworkable duties on the DNR, setting that agency up for failure. This is a prime example of T.C. Frank's wrecking crew in action. 

So at the one-year mark, what does it look like going forward? The many subplots and numerous controversies of the last six months have recently been reduced to three main storylines, each with its own actors, antagonisms, and possible outcomes. Now fully developed as political narratives, how they play out from this point will shape the contours of the Wisconsin movement for at least the first half of 2012 and possibly the second. The three stories are 1) the massive grassroots recall effort and election, 2) the battle over new mining up north, and 3) the ongoing FBI John Doe investigation into illegal activities in Scott Walker’s office when he was Milwaukee County Executive and running for governor in 2010. 

The overwhelming enthusiasm of the petition-phase of the recall campaign shocked even the optimists. Gathering over a million signatures means that two of every five would have to be invalidated, an insanely unrealistic prospect, thereby crushing the Republicans' first defense. As well, in absolute numbers, the total comes very close to the 1.2 million votes that Walker received in 2010, indicating how widespread the disapproval really is. Most importantly, given the grassroots nature of the recall effort, this contest is being written as a David vs Goliath story, and therefore a possible turning point in electoral strategy beyond this one election. The David (the WI movement, leading the Democrats and not the other way around) and Goliath (Walker, Koch, ALEC, WMC, money, money, money) story, helped along by citizen reporting on the forces organizing behind Walker, has opened this struggle to a possible outcome in keeping with the idealism that has fueled the movement thus far. If the movement capitulates to the conservative tendencies that are already emanating from within the Democratic Party and union leadership, it will have been another opportunity lost.   

Up north, anticipating what would be in effect a ground invasion, the tribes and their allies are ready to defend their lands, through the courts, and physically if necessary, in the hills. There are successful treaty rights and environmental defense campaigns within the recent memory of a great many Wisconsin activists; organizers are confident in their abilities to form strong native/settler, urban/rural coalitions and use all tactics, from lobbying and media work to civil disobedience and direct action. The state’s strong environmental constituencies (remember, Wisconsin is the state of Aldo Leopold and Gaylord Nelson) are already on the same page in opposing the proposed new mining, and the strict regulatory regime that ranks Wisconsin one of the states least friendly to mining is a legacy of the victorious grassroots-led anti-mining/land preservation struggles that happened fifteen years ago around the proposed Crandon mine. Are the Republicans really anxious to go to the ground in the face of people who are willing to sacrifice their own lives before seeing the ruin of their land and culture? Are they that foolish? Yes, they are. When the invasion begins and the struggle takes a turn toward the dramatic, if the movement articulates its moral, scientific, and economic positions wisely, the chances are good that in one way or another Scott Walker's image and reputation will take another lasting hit. With any luck it would be politically fatal, career-wise.

And, finally, the drip-drip-drip criminal investigation that has placed a chokehold around Walker's inner circle raises the possibility that the other dogs are willing to cut him loose to save their own future ambitions (remember, Paul Ryan and Reince Priebus have their own delusional plans). Walker has retained a legal team, now that the John Doe investigation has the feds breathing down his neck, and I'm sure even his corporate backers are beginning to formulate their own Plan B. As far as I can tell no arm of the WI movement has a contingency plan should Walker be indicted before a recall election is scheduled, even though at this point it seems like a real possibility. I am not even sure what happens. Is he removed from office? Does an indictment trigger any sort of impeachment process? Or will the state's Republican cabal of the Fitzgeralds, JB Van Hollen, and the David Prosser state supreme court work to protect him? Our theocratic lieutenant governor Rebecca Kleefisch is also the target of the recall campaign, and will likely stand for early election along with Walker. But could there be a situation in which she assumes the office of governor and thereby invalidates her recall? Given the tangled plots and unprecedented nature of this whole thing, the legal minutiae yet to be wrangled over cannot be underestimated. How we, as the grassroots engine of the movement, write this narrative is the question. Above all, we must continue to find ways to keep the stories open enough–through both well-timed political offensives and the attendant shaping of the mediated narrative–for a possible outcome that definitively reduces the present and future power of the regressive forces. 

Though a wooden performer in public, we know that through it all Walker's been shaken. He has attempted to spin himself a softer image in recent weeks, miserably, baldly dishonestly, and unsuccessfully. (Playing the compassionate card is not his forte; neither is being honest). But the tone deaf narcissists our careerist political system produces–and Walker is precisely such a product–never really comprehend the message, even if they sense an external threat. Scott Walker is an embodied example of what Debord wrote more than a generation ago: the spectacle is incapable of thinking strategically. And we knew this as early on, when he made a calculated move to play the role of Dairyland Dictator on the very day that Egypt's Mubarak ended his career with a literal escape for his life. Can you say political blind spot?

Blundering his way through, with all the resources that large amounts of cash can buy him, but with none of the kind that don't come with a price tag, Scott Walker now faces a crisis every which way he turns, each one of his own making. Whether Walker realizes it or not, he can never go back. Apart from the hardcore ideologues, his support has evaporated, even as his people lamely manage his deteriorating image and reputation, as exemplified by this sorry effort at staging, and then spinning, a pro-Walker event. It is safe to say Walker's done. Only the ending has yet to be written.

The relevant sign you'll see in this video, shot earlier today at the tail end of the noontime rally (after most of the people left, and before the larger afternoon rally that happened later), is the one held up by the firefighter, first at 3:36 and then at 7:18 with interaction.

    

And one year ago? Let's remind ourselves of what the mood was. Anxiety, disbelief, and a vague hopefulness in a movement yet to fully blossom, tempered by the depressive expectations of a collective lifetime of cynicism. The video below is from noon on Tuesday, February 15, 2011: the occupation of the Capitol began about fourteen hours after it was recorded. Massive demonstrations went on for weeks afterward, generating a whole culture of activism, resistance, and grassroots leadership. John Nichols' review of notable actors and events is only the very tip of the iceberg.

The movement continues, with arrests of activists being tweeted from the Capitol as I compose this, and the disgraceful dead-of-night passage of the wetlands destruction bill as I edit. 

 

 

 

 

a book, from cell 29 to room 458 (with an ocean view)

Steamed clams for dinner and a marion berry cobbler for dessert. Sideways rain and a cozy fire in the hotel room. Hot tubs, a movie, and a book. A view of waves pounding, the tide coming in, and a jigsaw puzzle on the table. 

For a short two days we are doing what winter vacationers do on the Oregon coast every year, plus enjoying this year’s speciality: Santorum jokes. 

Vacations are about getting away, but like all our Oregon trips, this one is the yearly homecoming. Our household has Oregon roots on both sides, so our trips fall under the heading of our travel corridors: back and forth, once a year, Portland/Salem/the coast to Madison/Chicago/the Midwest. But on this trip out the book I have before me takes me back the way I came, back to the places where a lot of it started for me, namely Detroit and Chicago.

I found this volume in the anarchism section at Powell’s in Portland. I was about to pass on it because $40 is a lot to pay for an old book that has seen better days.
The spine is damaged and the copyright page is torn. The corners are turned and overall, despite its lasting beauty and impressive durability–appreciate the lettering on the cover: gilded and feathered elegance in anarchism!–it is a book that clearly has been through many hands. (I wish I could perform a Josh MacPhee-style interpretation of the cover, but I cannot find later editions against which to compare.) But this isn’t just any title or any volume. This is a book of writings by Albert Parsons (aka husband of Lucy Parsons), one of the Haymarket martyrs and an anarchist printer, published posthumously. I cannot say for sure if it is a first edition, but it is copyright dated 1887 with no other dates, and the book has the look, feel, and construction of an object 125 years old. So, really, it would have been difficult to forgo even without this clincher: upon examination I noticed that it bears a stamp from the Wayne State University Libraries.

Therefore it is entirely conceivable that this very object passed through the hands of the Detroit anarchists who made up the radical world that influenced a good number of us young people back in the 1980s in the suburbs of Oakland County. Maybe the Detroit printer Fredy Perlman, who helped to usher into the English-speaking world the theories of Debord and the Situationists, held this very book in his hands. Maybe the activist lawyer Kenneth Cockrel, who did so much work for the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and who had earned a degree in political science from Wayne State, had racked up overdue fines on this book. Mine is not as good a story as my bibliophile friend Kevin Connolly’s tale for the ages, but in terms of a single book tracing a personal and social history generations after its publication, and the possiblities of connections we can now dream about, it is the best I have had.

But what does the journey of this volume say about the corridors of time and space that a strain of radicalism may travel? The book took shape in the cell of a wrongly condemned anarchist in the Cook County Jail,

 became a published reality shortly after the state-sanctioned murder of the author, landed for who knows how many years in the collection at Wayne State, which for many decades was one of the most accessible of America’s public urban universities. And then the book was returned to commercial circulation via Powell’s Books. Between those steps there were undoubtedly other stops—circulation through private collections, sales and re-sales, years on the shelves belonging to now unknown shops, libraries, owners, or borrowers--maybe in Michigan, maybe in Oregon, and who knows where else. In early 2012 it comes into my hands, slightly callused from guitar and presswork but mostly soft like an intellectual’s, suffering invisibly from carpal tunnel, to take back to the Midwest. Is it the completion of a circle or just another returned book in the great cosmic radical library? 

Given the battles being fought in Wisconsin, the Rahm Emanuel mayoral disaster unfolding in Chicago, and the ongoing contested destruction and reconstruction of Detroit, it feels good to be returning home with a book that others used in their midwestern-global struggles from earlier times. Maybe the timing puts a digestible veneer on my hydrocarbon privileges. If it were only about collecting this would be just another instance of radical nostalgia. To safeguard against that, who, in my turn, can I influence? Anybody out there want to borrow this book?

 

a chimerican revolutionary celebration

Tomorrow, July 1, 2011, is the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. There will be many celebrations and occasions of reflection and appreciation, in all media. Chinese internet portals will be festooned with commemorative banners, television specials will air, and a major motion picture will be released. You can't miss the Party's birthday decorations around town, not least in Tiananmen Square:

There is no way to fairly assess both the accomplishments and disasters of Communist Party Rule in anything less than a multi-volume study. As much as the cold warriors of the West would have us believe that communist systems are simply and only evil, the fact remains that for China the CCP was the only force able to impose stability after a half century of unbelievable social and economic chaos. This is something that the Party itself never ceases to boast. On the other hand, it is also true that the Party makes mistakes, sometimes on a massive scale. Some of the worst problems facing China now are being exacerbated by issues having to do with the political system. Without being prepared to write a long essay about specific things, it is pointless to go beyond saying that.

But what I can say is, what would be better than following the Party's party, with a celebration of our own, and to do it Beijing. Especially since the Fourth of July is only three days later. So, here it is:

Celebrate American Independence Day with The Journey West! 

Monday July 4, 2011 at 19:00 2011年7月4日 周一 19:00 

Parade begins at 19:00 sharp at The Journey West Travel Office. 

Come celebrate the day America became America and declared independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain on July 4, 1776.

To commemorate this historic event that happens every year in America we will hold an abridged reading of the Declaration of Independence followed by a parade of simulated fireworks, fire eating, jugglers, music and classic American BBQ (barbecue) featuring hot dogs with all the fixings, corn-on-the-cob, Coca-cola, Pepsi and of course apple pie! Special discount price on all package tours! 

来参加美国独立日的庆典！庆祝美国在1776年7月4日从大不列颠王国独立出来。为了纪念这一历史性事件，我们将宣读部分独立宣言的内容，同时还准备了烟花，音乐，魔术及传统美式烧烤，热狗，汉堡包，番茄酱，可口可乐，百事可乐以及必不可少的苹果派！  

The Journey West Travel Office/西游旅行社 is a performative installation that casts a critical eye on global tourism created by American artists Dan S. Wang and Stephanie Rothenberg.

The travel office is open Saturday and Sunday from 12:00-15:00 through July 17th and by special appointment ([email protected]) 

Recent post about the project on Artforum.com.cn:

“西游计划”的网站设计；西南部的“大美国实验基地游”项目是由一个隐藏的军事基地，政府的秘密空中旅行，和监狱的著名权威Trevor Paglen领团。

“西游计划”（“The Journey West”）是两位美国艺术家王念华（Dan S. Wang，中西部）和史蒂.罗森博格（Stephanie Rothenberg，纽约）的合作项目，他们在北京创立了一个旅游机构，推销另类的“美国游”，他们也让几位旅游机构的工作人员，帮助将旅游项目推广给公众，同时也举办与旅游相关的艺术家表演，七月中旬结束。关于项目详情，可登陆网站, 七月四日美国国庆日，他们将举办派对，用传统食物（玉米和热狗）待客，还有吞火和杂耍表演。以下罗森博格谈艺术项目。

我的作品运用相似的消费者交流方式，比如旅行社，或者我的“血汗工厂”，或者脱口秀，以有点荒诞的形式提醒我们对自己在经济体制内所起的作用的意识。通过让一切极端和夸大化，暴露出组织结构和它的机械性。这也是我们想让旅游办所要做的事情，但因为太新颖了，很难预料人们能从当中获得什么。

但它却是贯穿了事实和虚构的界限，因为这些旅游都是真实的，但当中虚假的部分，我们完全是一个功能性的旅行机构，同时又是一个艺术项目。作为新的商人，也许在鼓楼我们并没有最佳的市场策略，我们尚不知道如何将这些旅游活动售出，也许明年夏天我们会回来，开着一个小车，去三里屯或CBD。

我们的目的是想挑战主流旅游，这些旅游都是围绕地标性的景观等级展开，我们想要质疑的是这些地标性景观的重要性。比如，每个人都想去好莱坞，想看山上的好莱坞地标，它代表着一种文化或一个群体，但这些其实是很空洞的或表面的。所以，我们提供由艺术家打造的旅行，作为导游，这些艺术家们都是更能介入社会的导游，比如“自由女神半日游”，一位环保主义者带领人们穿行中央公园，在那里你可以觅食。这些都是具有教育性的项目，是那些未被听到的声音，它们研究政治和历史，某个地区当前的社会环境，比主流旅游所承载的要多得多。但它们也会给出你为何想去一个城市或公园的主要原因。我们要挑战的就是主导性的历史。

这个机构是想构建露西-里帕德（Lucy Lippard）在《本土传统》（Lure of the Local）中所说的“批判性旅游”（critical tourism）。我们也正在看迪恩-麦康纳（Dean MacCannel）的《旅客阶层理论》（Theory of the Tourist Class），这个是对托斯丹-凡勃伦（Thorstein Veblen）100年前写的《休闲阶级理论》的谐谑，此书在今日依然言之凿凿。

 这项目最初的想法是王念华和我碰到了一个来纽约的南方朋友。我们讨论的文化标识完全是和历史断裂，

这也是全球化的一个问题之一，有趣的是它们在不同文化里被重新语境化的方式，这些我和Dan在这里都感受过。我们经历的究竟是一种模拟产物还是一种普遍化的全球文化？其它国家是否仍受到美国文化的影响？

在爱德华-伯汀斯基（Edward Burtynsky）的《人造风景》里，一位中国女孩带领着参加了一座中国工厂，她所运用的言辞具有美国企业文化色彩，但是与中国式价值观结合起来的，所以我们在旅游行业里雇佣年轻的中国人，这样，他们做推销，我们帮助整合。我们想知道的是再次挪用意味着设么？中国正在挪用我们的企业文化，但他们赋予其自己的价值观，之后卖回给我们。我们想反过来，将它们（在美国的旅行）卖给中国观众。

这些都是和我们对旅游的批评、文化标识、保真性有关。还包含一个完全不同的元素：展览模式。一种表演与装置艺术但逃跑传统画廊则发生于公共空间。我在北京碰到过几个中国艺术家，都是在这种关系性和情势性的状态下创作，如Michael Yuen和他的驴车，或者如马永峰和Forget Art。

这是一种文化殖民主义么？很多这样的情势关系艺术出自欧洲的社会政治运动，策略性媒介和方式在美国以“批判艺术体”（Critical Art Ensemble) 这样的人开始。它们是对这个商业化、

单一的艺术世界的回应，人们从哪里受到这些影响而做这样的事情呢？就如Forget Art的澡堂介入一样“地点：龙泉洗浴”项目，我觉得那真是非常明智的，之所以行之有效，因为也是在草场地。

— 文/ 采访 / 安静

 

http://artforum.com.cn/words/3667 

 

The travel office is located at 43 Zhonglouwan Hutong Dongcheng District

东城区钟楼湾胡同43号

directly between the historic Drum and Bell Towers and next to the Drum and Bell bar.

Check our website for details on special events and package tour discounts http://www.bestjourneywest.com. 

 

************************************** 

 

Dan S. Wang http://prop-press.typepad.com 

Stephanie Rothenberg http://www.pan-o-matic.com

 

 

china drift: professors yang and wen meet the young generation at homeshop, beijing

Some of us diasporic Chinese who “return” to China sometimes have family and kin obligations that other visitors do not. Even though I am two generations removed from the mainland, this is still the case for me, depending on where I go in China. Sometimes it is a pain, and sometimes it is a pleasure. On this trip my primary obligation was more than a pleasure, it was a real blessing.

The Wang clan has had a long and close family friendship with a man named Yang Xianrang. He is a friend to my father’s side, with a very close history over three generations dating back to the days of my grandparents in the intimate circles of the Chinese minority in Korea. Professor Yang went to study in Beijing as a teenager, in 1944, tested into the Central Academy of Fine Arts for university, and went on to a long career as a faculty artist and then a dean at that school. He visited my family on his first trip to America and stayed with us for nearly a month, around 1981 or so, and that’s when I met him as a kid. He spent those days painting in our basement, and both I and my parents have works of his from that time hanging in our homes today. Shortly before he retired from CAFA, my mother and I visited him in the winter of 1992 in Beijing, my first time to the mainland. After retiring, he joined one of his children in the United States, first in Philadelphia and then in Houston. After sixteen years, he returned to Beijing for the twilight of his career. In the year 2011 he is eighty-one years old. On this trip, making it a point to visit Uncle Yang was a priority. But this is the Drift, so why not fold him in, somehow?

He trained as an oil painter, spent many years working in water colors, and then turned to traditional ink and brush painting. But his widest renown was earned as a woodcut print artist. He produced a number of the iconic graphic images from the revolutionary period, including works such as these. Being Central Academy professor for so many years, Professor Yang also has the satisfaction of having taught a number of artists and scholars who later went on to international prominence, including artist/printmaker Xu Bing and art historian/curator Wu Hung.     
  

We invited Professor Yang to HomeShop for an informal conversation, which turned out to be a cross generational encounter the likes of which I’ve never really heard of, much less experienced. HomeShop promoted the event up and down Bei'ertiao Hutong in the old-fashioned way, with posters.  Professor Yang brought along a friend of his, Professor Wen, an oil painter who was one of his early students but is now also retired from the Central Academy. Professor Yang spoke of his period as a woodcut artist, the whys and hows of his woodcut activity. He told of how his image of Zhou Enlai became a popularly disseminated image that broke through to the mass level, with ordinary people buying mass reproductions of it. Together they described their work and careers, showed examples from catalogues they brought, and took questions. They shared their perspectives on the art market boom in China, the influences of European art traditions, and their reflections on having had such traditional training. They took some questions about art education, how CAFA has changed. Professor Wen in particular expressed suspicions about the art market. He told a great story about how he had sold works to a Japanese collector who then asked him to sign the works. He acceded. But then the collector asked him to alter and then sign a canvas painted by another artist. Professor Wen found the request appalling, refused and broke off the relationship. 

Michael and Elaine took a turn explaining to the two elders the activities of HomeShop. Running through the various functions of the space (residency, design, translation, food work, etc) seemed to confuse them. But there ended up being two significant areas of connection and understanding. One was revealed when the younger generations expressed their skepticism about the turbo-speculative art market, their distaste for the vacuousness of meaningless monumentalism, and their sincere desire for serving a public and community. There are of course substantive and irreconcilable differences in the particulars of practice having to do with the innumerable changes in the world over the last sixty years, but some of us felt that a shared spirit could be found.

The other connection came with the final encounter of the morning, in which we showed these two old-school masters the large poster produced by the Beehive Collective, The True Cost of Coal. Sarah Lewison had the brilliant idea of bringing a cache of these with us to China, the land of dirty coal, and here one was unrolled to great effect. Professors Yang and Wen could see that in addition to the digital and social media of our contemporary world, there remains a special place reserved for handworked media—and specifically pencil drawing and illustrative figure drawing—in our toolkits. They were extremely impressed and greatly heartened by the quality, the detail, and the social responsibility evident in this work.

Photos by Claire. 

Professor Yang inspecting the True Cost of Coal poster.

Elaine Wing-Ah Ho, Professor Wen, Professor Yang, and me.