propositions press... 2.0

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.

on wisconsin, back to the art

With all the crazy political stuff going on in FitzWalkerstan, aka the state formerly known as Wisconsin, over the last two months, I have not had time to write posts about art. I can make up for some of that with a quick review of shows I’ve seen in recent weeks.

First there was Pittsburgh. There I managed to catch the Paul Thek Diver retrospective at the Carnegie Museum of Art. I count myself lucky. This is one of those shows for which the hype is well-deserved. I haven’t seen a big show that’s hit me with such impact since Mies in America. After seeing it, I feel secure in saying that for all the new studio Ph.d’s, artist-friendly curators, and global art world integration, we just don’t make artists like Paul Thek anymore.

The highlights were three. First, the early wax sculptures that gained Thek his renown were truly blossom-like in their over-ripe ickiness, but perfectly balanced out by the coolness of metal and glass. Additionally, all of the materials gained through age, in equal parts retro-neato 1960 artifacture but still nightmarishly brutal. Secondly, the surviving images and elements of the wild, whole-gallery installations that he did in European kunsthalles in the 1970s fill a whole I didn’t realize existed in the history of installation art. The partial nature of what survives adds to the intrigue and good fortune we feel, piecing together the story of a feral and fertile art world moment. Finally, there is the recreated hanging of his final show, just before his death by AIDS. The first two highlights are each amazing, but the presentation of the final show proved the most moving in the end, with the dying artist all but ignored by the New York art world that once adored him.

Three other shows at the Carnegie were bonuses. I wandered into the hall in which the show You Are Here: Architecture and Experience was installed and discovered the etchings and video of Cyprien Gaillard. The small etchings mashed up mountainous landscapes with modernist block high rise buildings of the public housing kind. His striking video Desniansky Raio, set in (and above, in some cool ariel footage) a monumental social housing complex outside Kiev, reminds a midwesterner like myself that the massive blocks of public housing I associate with Chicago were in fact an international phenomenon. I’d like to see more of this guy’s work and I am sure we will since he is still on the young side (barely thirty, I think).

Then there was a loose installation by Haegue Yang that filled a medium sized room with odd arrangements of exposed metal racks strung with wires, light sockets, cables looped, knotted, and hung, and an assortment of metal parts. It was a bit chaotic and hard to read—though the materials seemed very deliberate, the positioning betrayed no real system. But the direct content was supplied by four television monitors on carts positioned around the room running Martha Rosler videos from her Semiotics of the Kitchen era. Odd combination, for sure, and I'm not totally buying Yang's work, but I’d never seen those videos. So why not roll with it.

The biggest and best surprise at the Carnegie was the Andrey Avinoff show in the works on paper gallery. Wow. This guy was a noted field naturalist specializing in butterflies and an amazing biological illustrator who also served as the director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History for nearly twenty years. He was also a semi-closeted fine artist who painted and drew beautifully, with an exquisite hand, shimmering colors, and a runaway imagination. And, he was a mostly-closeted gay man who painted and drew a number of lovely homoerotic works, and was one of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey’s go-to consultants on matters of homosexuality. The show included specimen cases of butterflies he had collected in Tibet and other faraway places. Like I said, wow.

I am sorry to end the Pittsburgh art report on a downer, but that is what the Ayanah Moor show at the 707 Penn Gallery was. The full wall coverage of all-text screen prints made for a striking visual experience upon entering the space, but once into the detail, the work couldn't keep its promise. The texts read as pretty interesting, the lettering was stylish but not distracting, and the voices speak to the universal experience of communities describing themselves and their home social worlds, in this case black women scenes in different American cities. But there were only something like five different voices/cities, texts/prints. For the artist who uses printmaking to cover walls, the problem always becomes one of multiples versus redundancy. If it is really about multiples, then commit to a very small number of different prints. Let’s say, one. One, repeated over and over becomes a kind of patterned drone or unending repetition, either of which has its own kind of power. If there are five, arranged with no discernible pattern, and the walls are covered by simply repeating those five, then it’s an experience of redundancy—for the viewer, it becomes an experience of always searching for more and never finding it. The expectation of complexity is raised but not delivered. That was the case here, which is not so unusual in itself, but for the fact that what I've seen of Moor's in reproduction kind of blew me away, so this was a disappointment. 

I’ll report on shows viewed in Madison and Chicago before long. 

 

the sunday after wednesday's attack and saturday's masses

This past Saturday’s demonstrations brought 150,000 people out in Madison. But unlike the celebratory mood on previous Saturdays, this was a comparatively somber day. It had to be. After Scott Walker rammed his “budget repair” bill through three days earlier, down the throats of the public, even if possibly in violation of more than one law, by Saturday the fact had settled in. Scott Walker had called labor’s bluff and labor did nothing, at least not immediately. He and the top state senate Republican, Scott Fitzgerald, then went into good cop/bad cop mode, with Walker speaking his reassuring words while Fitzgerald continued to deride all elements of the opposition, especially his Democrat senate colleagues. Either voice by itself would be irritating enough; as a coordinated follow-through to their manuveur, it galls like a hard poke from a momentarily triumphant inferior.

Late into Wednesday night and all day Thursday, angry strike chatter filled the tweet and comment threads. Student walk-outs were floated for Friday, but no union called a strike, and no wildcat strikes erupted. Scott Walker’s move was a dare to the workers. Go ahead, strike, and see what happens, he seemed to be saying. The union leadership studied the situation in emergency meetings and decided against it. Given the lack of strike funds, the likelihood of being fired, and the possibility of public support evaporating behind a work stoppage, there were in fact good reasons for refraining from striking. The unfortunate thing is, the emotional momentum that would carry a strike forward as a real weapon of disruption, similar to how the occupation of the Capitol had brought forth a previously unknown community of support, is now lost. A strike still may be called eventually, but now it can only be a symbolic strike, a one-day affair with no real power. A disruptive strike, as a premeditated action, will surely lose public support, and therefore is off the table, unlike the spontaneous or immediate strikes that could have happened, and would have been, by contrast, driven by the emotion of the events rather than the political calculations of the leadership.

So where does this leave the Wisconsin uprising? Back home in Madison late on Friday, Sam Gould, Jerome Grand, and I worked up a flyer to pass out on Saturday, discussing this situation. We got about 400 out by hand, a drop in the bucket of 150k bodies, but nonetheless a real attempt to have people reflect on our options and opportunities at this time. It was heartening to see many, many signs supporting the Kloppenburg candidacy. To me, this showed that the April 5 election is widely recognized as the next urgent battle, and our next best chance to land a blow on the Walker regime.

The text of our flyer:

 

We will

always remember

who fired

the first shot 

in the      

class war  ❧

  

AS ONE OF OUR COMRADES, SAMUEL Á LOVE, DECLARED on the evening of Wednesday, March 9, 2011, we will always remember who fired the first shot in the class war. On that night the Republican Party of Wisconsin, led by Governor Scott Walker, played the hardliner card. No more pretending. 

After a night of loud protest in Madison, on Thursday the most aggressive part of the so-called budget repair bill—that which strips public sector workers of their right to collectively bargain—was passed by the state assembly. Walker signed the bill, rescinded his layoff notices, and now puts on a happy face, telling everybody to go along with it, that he knows better than anyone how hard the medicine is, but never fear, it is for the good of all. Arrogance is apparently a requirement for the new generation of conservative ideologues.

So even as we prepare for and attend the largest demonstration we can possibly muster for Saturday, we must at the same time consider the reality. This first phase of the struggle—heroic, inspiring, and creative in many respects—is drawing to a close. They won.

But the war is far from settled.

Their opening victory and our setback took place even as the next three fronts open up in full. They are:

1. The April 5 elections for Wisconsin Supreme Court. That is right around the corner.
2. Challenges to the legality of the new law. The day Walker signed the bill, Dane County filed a suit to block the enactment of the bill. Other lawsuits may follow.
3. Recall campaigns, already underway for state senators, and less than a year from now for Scott Walker.

Of the three fronts, the most pressing is the April 5 election. JoAnne Kloppenburg must be elected. David Prosser, who has already declared his intention to support the Walker agenda from the bench, must be defeated. The current court is split 4-3, with a conservative majority. We have the opportunity to overturn the balance. The term for a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice is ten years. Both candidates have accepted public funding for their campaigns and therefore cannot accept donations of funds from individuals. But you can help the Kloppenburg campaign through volunteering, spreading the word, and most of all, voting and making sure your friends and family in Wisconsin vote, too.

The legal challenges are mostly out of the hands of the grassroots. But here again, the April 5 election matters, because many of these laws will be decided by the courts. A vote for Kloppenburg is a vote against Walker!

The recall campaigns need all the help they can get, both in terms of funds and volunteer labor. The sixty day countdown is already down to less than fifty. Being specific to senate districts, all of them depend on the committed activism—and voting!—of local citizens. But there is no precedent for a tide of recall campaigns on this scale. By seeing these recall campaigns through to their ends, with focus and dedication, our movement can make history again.

To sum up this short analysis of where we are at, the utility of the demonstrations is fading. We in the movement must pivot; the electoral campaigns on the horizon can stop and/or undo the Walker attacks, but will depend on grassroots engagement of a level similar to that which went into the demonstrations. And it needs to happen now—both the April 5 election and the recall campaigns are sprints already underway. Many of you have attended demonstrations repeatedly and regularly over the first phase. Let’s apply the lesson from that experience to the next phase of the struggle: how do we build into our regular lives the political work that is now needed?

Scott Walker is counting on us forgetting this ever happened. He and his people will do everything they can to both rewrite history and distract. In addition to their manipulation, we’ll have to combat the natural distraction of the corporate media. This is the challenge as we move into the protracted phase of the struggle.

Electoral politics are not fun, not glamorous, and there is no guarantee that retaking control of the senate or the governor’s office will result in the undoing of the Walker agenda. This is not a philosophical argument for electoral engagement, only a view to what is immediately ahead for us. After April 5 and the recall campaigns, there will be yet more and different things to do. A culture of resistance, with variable tactics and a diversity of engagements, is what we are building. Let’s keep on building it together, in Wisconsin and around America—BECAUSE WE WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER.

—Your fellow citizens of the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor, 3/12/2011

 

 

second report on the wisconsin movement

I tell the story from where I left off. That was last Friday afternoon, February 19.

The situation at that moment: Madison public schools shut down for three days due to student walk-outs and teacher sick-outs. From Tuesday on, there had been big turnouts of union workers, high school students, university students, graduate students, nurses, firefighters, teachers, a great many public school parents, police, and all manner of supporters. Senate Democrats were still out of state, denying Walker a quorum. Jesse Jackson spoke to a crowd of thousands at the evening rally, marking the beginning of a procession of national figures to descend on Madison.

The word all that day and into the night was that the first organized Scott Walker support rally was scheduled for the next day, Saturday, from noon to three on the square. The rally for conservatives was being put together by tiny but well-heeled right-wing groups Americans for Prosperity, the Wisconsin GrandSons of Liberty, some small Tea Party groups, and who knows who else. The conservatives were already using the event as infowar—bloggers and event announcers described the Saturday counter-demo as showing the world Wisconsin’s real majority. This was a direct challenge to the six day-old movement on the level of visible numbers, bodies in the street and in the Capitol. With no new development from the governor’s office or the legislators, Saturday’s rallies would be the next chapter in the unfolding story.

The Friday evening messages flying around the part of the anti-Walker universe that is visible to me made a single point: Saturday’s turnout had to be massive. The Wisconsin movement had to write the narrative by outnumbering the conservatives 10-1 or 20-1, precluding any possibility for the story to be told without mentioning the crushing imbalance, especially given that the national media were by this day fully engaged.

The pro-labor/pro-education forces met the test. By the time we got there at noon the entire paved area of the square was filled with anti-Walker people, the inner sidewalks and the outer (more sparsely), and some of the lawn areas, plus, we cannot forget, the several thousand (still!) inside the Capitol. The rally for conservatives, organized under the banner I Stand With Walker, by contrast, gathered in the interior part of the square, well inside the corner of Main and Pinckney, and didn’t even fill it.  Even inside the mass of bodies assembled in front of the Tea Party stage, there were anti-Walker and pro-education/pro-worker signs visible. The right wing turnout would be generously granted at a thousand. The progressive side had to have been at least 70,000, and that was the estimate of the police. The space filled by bodies was more than twice that of Thursday and Friday, when estimates were at 30,000.

To give you a sense of the difference, see this video that Ben Manski shared on social media. As he says, the stationary crowd standing in front of the stage is the Tea Party rally, but there were conspicuous anti-Walker sign holders in there, too. The rest of the square, all the way around, and packing the other three corners are all us. On this day the Wisconsin movement transcended protest and became a phenomenon, something that draws attention just because one wants to see for themselves what this thing is. In this case the point of curiosity centers around whether this assemblage is as mainstream as the images depict it. Saturday proved that you don’t get 70,000 people together in the street in Wisconsin without it being a picture of America.

Later on Saturday the rumor circulated that some doctors from UW Health had made it known that they were willing to sign illness excuse forms for teachers who continued to demonstrate. Slate reports that over the weekend one or more doctors actually set up a station near the square to write doctor’s notes for any demonstrator who asked for one. Because of the dishonesty involved and the standards of integrity doctors are held to, the episode attracted a fair bit of shaming by right wing observers and prompted calls for an investigation. I prefer to interpret the action as a continuation of the domino-effect of different groups and constituencies taking the initiative to share risk, in support of one another, in real solidarity. And it is not a stretch. The doctors know that Badger Care and Medicaid are in line on the chopping block, which greatly hurting their poorest patients, not to mention the public school cuts that will hurt their own children.

Sunday turned out to be a day of rest, relatively. The weather was crummy, all day and night, cold sleet and freezing rain. Though rallies were announced, there were many fewer demonstrators. But for those who showed up, there was the Capitol, so for another day and night, the rotunda was kept occupied with people and energy. Medea Benjamin, having just returned from visiting Tahrir Square in Cairo during the crucial last days of the movement that toppled Mubarak, spent the night with demonstrators in the Capitol and reports on it here, especially the echoes of Egypt she sees and hears in Madison. What they portend, and how those echoes reverberate, and who else hears them, are all questions worth considering. My favorite Egypt reference so far: a super minimalist sign that read very simply, 18 DAYS.

On Monday the public school students and teachers returned to class in Madison. In Milwaukee, it was a President’s Day holiday for Milwaukee Public Schools. That and the fact that Monday was a state worker furlough day, made bodies available for yet another day. Jesse Jackson walked with Madison East high school students in the morning, leading his preach/chant call-and-response with them (“Say this, I AM!” I am! “Somebody!” Somebody!). Tom Morello played a show for the unions on Monday evening. Reverend Billy Talen was scheduled to appear on Tuesday. While the right wing blogosphere fulminates against the Obama administration for having been the architects of this uprising (needless to day, their imaginations are working overtime), it seems now that the left wing establishment and celebrity pool is trying to catch up with and support this locomotive of dissent, lest they miss it.

Tuesday's rallies went on as routine, almost. Again, morning and evening, and plenty of milling around in between. Unlike the festive atmosphere of last week, this was quieter but conversational. The square had become a space for political discussion, strangers talking to strangers, looking toward the uncertain future together. I spoke to metal workers from Milwaukee who told me about Walker's disasterous tenure as county executive there. I spoke with a UW custodian and a retired guy who came down from Menomonie. And then there were these two women, doing their part to change the conversation from the GOP-manufactured budget crisis to what this is really about:

The proliferating solidarities hit at least three more high points from Saturday to today. The first was the viral image of Muhammed Saladin Nasair holding his now famous sign. Wisconsinites lapped up the gift of symbolism and association, but up until this pic circulated there had not been any indication that people in Egypt could hear or see us, or that our fight mattered to them. This image sent a good many demonstrators into elation—it showed us that translocal communication, bringing movements closer together, could happen. This was quickly followed by news of Ian’s Pizza becoming a receiving station for out of town donations—hundreds of orders—to the demonstrators, including a few pies paid for by somebody in Egypt. By Tuesday, the Capitol rotunda is decorated with pizza boxes repurposed into signs.

The second high point followed weekend rumors of the Capitol police possibly readying to execute an order to vacate the building. The word was that Walker is taking right wing heat for not having already cleaned house, for letting the disorder get out of hand. Madison area firefighters, themselves exempt from the provisions in the bill that would strip collective bargaining, responded dramatically to the rumors by coming to camp out with the students on Monday night, nearly sixty of them. Supposedly, they intend to be an overnight protest presence for the duration, thereby setting up the potentially uncomfortable image of police evicting the firefighters should the governor order them out. Whether all the police would even obey the orders might even be a real question. The firefighters are putting their reputations and prestige on the line for the others even though nobody asked them to. It is impressive.

And then there was Tuesday morning. On my way down to the square I checked into WORT’s noontime discussion on, of course, the movement. Lena Taylor, one of the fourteen absent Democratic senators, was on the phone from somewhere in Illinois. While on the air, she said that she had just received a text confirming that the House Democrats of the Indiana legislature had, like the Wisconsin 14, fled to Illinois in order to deny the Republican majority a quorum. The radio host and studio guests let out a cheer. There’s only one thing better than solidarity. Contagion. 

Observations:

1)   On the “echoes of Egypt” question—yes, it is real. Scott Walker’s bill was a carefully coordinated effort, as evidenced by the fact that supportive television ads aimed at demonizing the unions were aired the day the bill was unveiled. Clearly, the frontal assault was planned in advance. Nonetheless, he and his masters, for all their money and tactical thinking, have showed their almost unbelievable blind spots, chief among them, having made their opening attack on the SAME day that Hosni Mubarak resigns. You don’t openly threaten a Wisconsin workforce with the National Guard in the very moment that a three-decade-old dictatorship in a big country (that the world media has been following for more than two weeks) goes down unless you’re practically daring people to make the association—or you are completely oblivious. However substantive are the parallels between the Madison and Cairo movements, from that moment on, the narrative opened up in a way that continues to be advantageous to the demonstrators, in terms of how we see ourselves, and how we think of ourselves as having a world audience. Walker’s blind spot hearkens back to Debord, where he says the spectacle, for all its tendencies to accumulate possibilities and thereby curtail them, loses it ability to think strategically.

2)   The battle of bodies is over. For the moment, the opposition has conceded the point. All the websites that promoted the counter demo have erased their reporting on it, in other words, have chalked it up as a loss and moved on. From there they moved to the arena of pranking, dirty tricks, and unapologetic meddling. The call for trouble makers and the out of state-driven effort to recall Democratic state senators fall into these categories. But even here the progressives have scored the first point. Today, Wednesday, by mid-morning the news broke that Scott Walker has been caught on tape in a conversation with an activist posing as billionaire conservative donor David Koch. We don’t know where this will lead in the news cycle of the next few days, but already it is big. There are calls from public interest groups for a full investigation into the relationship between Walker and the Koch empire, and journalists smell blood.

3)   While the beating heart of the movement continues to be the capitol rotunda, which during waking hours ranges from very loud to super loud (see any youtube video of the rotunda demonstrations), the movement is at a turning point. Walker is dug in, he’s made that clear. The unions are, as well. Their opening gambit of conceding all demands for employee contributions in exchange for the basic right of collective bargaining paid off handsomely in the form of a mass movement and popular support. But now they cannot concede anything else. The language of strike is in the air. When and how is the question. Before the bill gets rammed through, or only after? The workers and students must think through, must imagine what an effective strike will look like—how to maintain the beauty and love that has been communicated so well by the demonstrations, but in the form of a strike, ie a measured, targeted, well-articulated, and loving withdrawal of labor. The demonstrations have been disruptive, true, but that has not been the main story precisely because the evidence of self-organization, creativity, sincerity, and novel forms of sociality has taken over the storyline, to the point of drawing in participants who want to help author it. When Walker carries out his threat to start firing workers, which may begin as early as the end of this week, the question of a strike will move front and center. Then, for supporters from afar, the situation will also change.

4)   How to place this movement? Not only in relation to current worldwide unrest, but also in comparison to the UC campus strikes of last year, and the Republic Doors and Windows occupation that happened in Chicago in late 2008, the last two instances of real disobedience to come out of an American student or worker left? Compared to those recent American campaigns, here the worker-student divide has been successfully bridged from the inception, and the space of demonstration has been utilized very well, framing the rallies under the gravitas of the Capitol building. No complete thoughts, as everything continues to move here, but the questions of historical significance creep in. Especially when you see signs like this:

There is much more to say, particularly about under-surface tensions within the movement, and how demands beyond that of preserving collective bargaining rights might get articulated in a complementary way. The unity is strong for the moment, but attempts to break it apart unceasing, including a growing security presence at the Capitol, shrinking the public's hold on space, especially overnight. My guess is that rotunda will remain loud during the day but that the sleepovers will end this week. That will not be counted as a defeat, only a natural progression to the next sphere of contestation. On the local level, somehow I keep going back to high school students who catalyzed the movement in the first few days. Multi-hued, multi-lingual, multi-racial—they are the picture of the future, a different one than the (adorable and loving!) older mostly white workers, teachers, and parents. The young of Madison, nearly 50% of color in a traditionally white town, are usually a source of anxiety here—crime, achievement gaps, curfews, etc, etc. But now they’ve show a bit of their minds and hearts, and it gave strength to the rest of us right when we needed it, early. This will be their world, what will they do to shape it, given the chance?

To finish (for now), a short tour of the sign gallery that is the Capitol rotunda, from Tuesday afternoon, Week Two.

http://www.defendwisconsin.org/

Check the Wisconsin AFSCME website for updates on planned actions, especially now that action is being organized outside Madison, in other parts of Wisconsin: http://www.wiafscme.org/

For in town, check the Madison Activist Calendar: http://lists.madimc.org/~infoshop/activistcalendar.html

 

 

a new york journal

I just reached home after two weekends in Chicago and the days in between in New York. I went for the CAA conference, or at least that was the excuse. The last time I was in New York was the fall of 2008. It was September, around when Barack Obama’s candidacy first started to take on a sense of inevitability. The stakes of the presidential election had been raised that very week with the $600 billion bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. Creative Time’s Democracy in America Convergence Center opened over the days I was there and so did Signs of Change show at Exit Art. There was a sense of possibility in the air and in the season.

This time it was different. Signs of Change is now a wonderful book as well as an exhibition. A little more than two years into the Barack Obama administration, the United States is in the full grips of a conservative reaction. How appropriate is it that the only show I managed to see in a week in New York was AbEx in NY at Moma. Not that the AbEx artists were conservative (Motherwell’s Spanish Revolution elegies positively radiated with the vitality of revolutions, then and now), but the retreat into formalism, individual spiritual journeys, and abstract systems is a path that always stands in high relief in times when retreat from the political seems perversely reasonable from a survival standpoint. I was fortunate to walk through the show with one who knows about painting, my neighbor from Madison Derrick Buisch. True to myself, I found the drawings and work on paper as or more satisfying than the canvases. But as far as seeing other shows goes, fortunately this was New York, which meant I could see some cool and canonical things without having to go out of my way, such as…

 

The conservative climate of the nation was not in evidence at the conference. It being CAA, there were quite a few sessions that included a radical or leftist scholarship. My contribution to the conference was managing the production of the Radical Art Caucus newsletter and helping to distribute it on site. This year’s was the first issue overseen by me. The heavy lifting was done by Sam Gould of Red76, whom I drafted in by suggesting to him that we make it an issue of the Journal of Radical Shimming. Being a touch manic and always open-minded about audiences and opportunities, he jumped aboard. Sam, in turn, brought into the project (it had by this point become “a project”) our friend Mike Wolf. The two of them engaged in an extended Google chat done over two sessions about something they’re calling “critical imaginative communities.” You can read that chat here. 

Sam did the layout and the interior graphic art. I assembled the newsletter text and fed him the files. I composed and proofed the front page display text in hand-set wood and metal type, scanned it, and sent that to Sam for use in the layout. Sam had a line on a very reasonable printer in Queens, arranged for 1500 to be printed, and had the invoice sent to me.

 

Joanna Gardner-Huggett, our RAC secretary, took on the task of receiving the delivery at the hotel, right near the conference site. Over the days of the conference I called her probably ten or twelve times, trying to figure out how to pick up another bundle. The three co-presidents, Linnea Wren, Travis Nygard, and Kaylee Spencer, kept getting them from her, too. Joanna managed the central distribution point well and with good humor. Together we distributed nearly all at the conference. I blanketed the first Dark Matter session, and Alan W. Moore had the second Dark Matter session well-supplied. I started a couple of stacks going around in the jam-packed Centennial Session on Feminism. I passed them out at the Diasporic Asian Art Network meeting and at the University of Southern California reception. I got them into the hands of Margo Machida, Nicholas Mirzoeff, and Martha Rosler. Through run-ins, I got them to some of the friendly faces I first met at other conferences: Richard Meyer, Peter Mortonböck, and Helge Mooshammer. I got them to some people who are name-checked in the interior cascade of critical art players. They seemed to enjoy finding others they recognized in the jumble, and wondered about the names they didn’t know. 

JRS #12 definitely reached hundreds and hundreds of people in the field whom I do not know, and who possibly do not know any of us who were involved in the project. Also, the conference was a great place to make guerrilla placements, like at the book fair. In that sense, making use of CAA as a ready-made audience was a big success. At the same time, there could be some big improvements. For one thing, the listings info was incomplete in one vital area, announcing RAC’s Friday evening meeting and reception. Which, by the way, turned out to be organized as a terrific discussion with two visiting union organizers. I just didn’t have the information when we needed it for inclusion. And for another, the readability of the text in Sam’s radical art tribe graphic was compromised in some key places, which blunted the intended messaging. But no matter—we got it done and distributed, much to the expressed delight of many a conference goer, with only about three weeks lead time, a small budget, and only partial available attention. Not bad for a first effort, and in spirit very true to the best Red76 work.

Other highlights from those days included visiting the activist and videographer Dara Greenwald (who is taking it easy and slow while undergoing medical treatment), getting to see for the first time my collaborators Ryan Griffis and Sarah Ross present in a public event setting (along with Lize Mogel and Sarah Kanouse), and catching up with my crash-pad host Naeem (who was in full-press deadline mode). Oh yeah, and the Mubarak regime fell. That was crazy—sitting in sessions or hitting sessions with stacks of the newsletter while receiving Egypt update texts from Naeem, including a blow by blow account of the president’s final, intrasigient address to the nation.

Finally, I crossed the Whitestone Bridge for an overnight visit to Connecticut to see an elderly uncle who no longer travels. I had never driven that part of the country and was blown away by the many miles of decades and decades worth of suburban overflow from the city. Rolling past all the wealth, the northern end of what the Don Draper character once called “the Cash Belt,” all I could think of were prep school feeder populations and quiet desperation amid the boatloads of taste. The stone walls visible along the Merritt Parkway screamed affluence; the age and history represented by the hundreds-year-old wall work only come into play as a corollary to the modern day wealth of the area. Once in Cheshire, the village where my uncle has lived for 45 years, the blue collar returned to the landscape in the form of Aldi stores and Chinese buffets.

 

 

 

detroit scouting trip: labadie and the people's movement assembly

Not much time to rest after KC. The next week we were off to Detroit. For me, it was the third time in nine months. The “we” were Brian Holmes, Sarah Lewison, Claire Pentecost, Rozalinda Borcila, Amy Partridge, and myself. The trip proper started from Chicago. Sarah came up all the way from Carbondale and I from Madison, of course.

We traveled in two cars. Claire, Brian, Sarah, and Rozlinda in one. Amy and I in my car. We departed on Friday morning at around 9:30 AM, after a quick check to make sure everybody had their passports with them. We didn’t use them, but you never know when you might want to scoot across the border to Windsor. For dim sum, if nothing else.

Coming from the west, stopping by the Labadie Collection was the obvious first thing to do. I have said this before: for any leftist or radical researcher or history buff (and what radical isn’t a student of history), this place really is a must-visit. The thing is, you must go with some idea of what to request, otherwise there is just too much, especially on a first go ‘round. Well, I certainly had some ideas. I wanted to see Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (D.R.U.M.)-related publications and ephemera and a late Sixties/early Seventies radical black paper from Detroit called Inner City Voice. Inner City Voice and D.R.U.M. were contemporaneous expressions, and I was curious about how D.R.U.M. and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers were covered in the local radical press of the time.

Julie Herrada, the gracious and super knowledgeable curator of the collection, took the time to introduce all the others (this was their first visit) to the Labadie and how it works. Claire and Sarah ended up studying original copies of Mother Earth, while Amy delved into a portfolio of daily newsletters called The Punch Press, produced by and for the striking laborers of the 1937 Flint Sit-Down Strike. Those were amazing. Apparently produced everyday or nearly so, they are a moving document of organized and creative working class culture. Not only are there strike news items told in the language of outrage skewering the Fisher Body management, but also notices for union dinners complete with menus, reminders for social events like dances, and funny little hand drawn graphics. Judging by The Punch Press, the striking workers had some joyful experiences in their togetherness, even as they engaged in militant struggle and took life-changing risks.

You may enjoy excellent scans of what appears to be the full run of The Punch Press right here.

 

punch press, flint sit-down strike bulletin

 

strike bulleting, menu, 1937

 

strike bulletin graphics, 1937

Julie hooked me up with all the materials I could possibly digest. Particularly interesting was a D.R.U.M. publication titled “The Midwest and the League.” The opening article was about the black revolutionary workers movement and the regional particularities of the industrial midwest, from an early Seventies perspective. There was also an interview with one Mike Hamlin, evidently one of the founders of the League and a main activist in D.R.U.M., and, furthermore, one of the editors or main writers for Inner City Voice. The design is subtle but clear, with a minimum of graphic elements, very readable layouts, and a choice of display text that maintained a uniformly militant tone. Designers of radical publications today could certainly take a lesson from this pamphlet.

the midwest and the league

 

early seventies interview with Mike Hamlin

 

fredy perlman's not the only detroit-paris connection!

Then, the serendipitous began.

vintage issues of inner city voice

Julie, who kept checking in with us because of her curiosity about our impressions (and seeming to like having the opportunity to reacquaint herself with some of the holdings through our fresh eyes), mentioned that there happened to be a conference going on that day and the next, and that Mike Hamlin was scheduled to speak. Wow. We printed out the conference schedule and decided it was too good to pass up, especially since it was free and held right there on the Michigan campus. We resolved to attend the Friday evening panels, of which there were two.

 

julie @ the labadie

So after a cheap dinner in the student ghetto, we made it to the Labor and Economics Panel and, after that, the Movement Panel: What Is “IT”?, the “it” being the “it” in the conference title: Take It Back, Bring It….

Mike Hamlin was on the first panel and he was intense and excellent. I could sum up his fifteen minutes by simply quoting him: “I was a revolutionary then, and I am a revolutionary now.” Yup. Dean Baker was pretty good, too. Arturo Rodriguez spoke about farmworker organzing back in the day, but was mostly quiet during the discussion segment. The drag of the panel was, unfortunately, the youngest participant, a Michigan student named Yousef Rahbi. He was introduced as an experienced student activist, but most of his exhortations fell into a category of sentimental idealism that bordered on the embarassing. For example, he urged those in the audience to dispense with ideological thinking and keep utopic visions in mind when acting in the day to day by remembering “the beautiful scenes…of dogs and frisbees, people really living.” I kid you not. Where are the young radical lions I have known, the Emily Formans and Daniel Tuckers of today, when you really need them? Because Mr. Rahbi wasn’t it.

mike hamlin @ take it back, bring it forward conference

The second panel was much better. Al Haber, from the original first generation SDS cohort, presided. Rich Feldman from the Boggs Center sat on the panel and was awesome. His longtime friend and our Chicago pal Bill Ayers was on it, too. Ron Scott, former Panther and now doing Peace Zones for Life activism in Detroit, kicked butt. He put on a clinic for how to stay rad while embracing new complications that blur the old lines of antagonism, say for example, between cops and inner-city residents. Bob Zellner, who was active in SNCC, gave an inspired presentation. I really hate to say it, but again, the weakest presence was the youngest person, a woman who had done much for Michigan Peaceworks, Laura Russello. She chose to speak about therapy and wellness for activists. Yes, important, but not all that relevant on a panel about movement lineage, inheritences, and innovation. It could have been analytical, with something to say about how movement work can be disfiguring, but her treatment was rather superficial, I thought. As well–maybe we got a skewed sampling since we only attended the one evening session, but the panel composition was awfully male. Out of ten contributors there were only two women. What is up with that?

But it was worth attending. It was fun to see Bill Ayers in a non-neighborhood context, and Julie ended up going, too. And Sarah Lewison recognized Peter Linebaugh sitting in the row behind us. He is a radical historian who teaches in Toledo but lives in Ann Arbor. Our colleague Brett Bloom met him at some event in Europe and turned on the rest of us to his lectures online. So we got to make his acquaintence, though I’m not sure he knew what to make of four of us mobbing him all at once. All I can say is, it could have been six.

 

Interview - Peter Linebaugh - The Magna Carta Manifesto

Anyway, we were off to Detroit after that, for a late night arrival.

The main feature of the next day was the Detroit People’s Movement Assembly, held at the Central United Methodist Church. There were probably about forty-five or more people there. Maureen Taylor kicked things off with a rousing welcome, an impassioned and downright furious condemnation of the latest DTE disaster, in which a family whose heat had been cut off by the utility suffered a deadly fire when they were forced to turn to space heaters for warmth.

There was some general USSF stuff discussed, but mostly it was very Detroit-centric. What I mean is, most of the time was spent on short presentations by four activist initiatives already underway with actions timed to coincide with the influx of USSF activists in June. After the presentations, we broke into small work groups around each of the four campaigns. There were worksheets provided that had outlines and blank lines for strategy, target, message, action, etc. This part of the PMA was clearly an organizing session, but which was open to anybody who came to the PMA, not only including but especially welcome to the out-of-towners. Here is some footage from the PMA, this bit featuring Steph Guilloud of Project South.

Stephanie Guilloud at PMA, 3/13/2010, Detroit from Dan S Wang on Vimeo.

 

report on the hamilton wayzgoose

Mister Koppa and I made the trip to the first ever Hamilton Wood Type Museum Wayzgoose.

mister koppa with the wood border stamping machine

What’s a wayzgoose? Back in the day it was the end of summer bash thrown by the master printer for his shop underlings and apprentices. And now, I guess, it’s the kind of event the Hamilton staff put together for us–“us” being a gathering of type nuts, artists, letterpress printers, typographers, graphic and type designers. About 50 were in attendance. Mister Koppa and I were just about in the middle of the pack, age-wise. It was good to see so many young people turning out, seeing this as a living thing.

We were treated to power point presentations by Rich Kegler and Juliet Shen on the first evening. Juliet Shen told the story of working with Pugent Sound Salish tribes to design a font for the preservation and continuation of the Lushootseed language, which is down to ten or less native speakers, and having the font cut as a new wood type by Hamilton.

 

juliet shen and the lushootseed font design project

She had an elegant explanation for why she approached Hamilton about producing a new face in wood type, and in a language that does not use the straightforward Latin alphabet. She said simply, working and printing in wood type is better for getting the young people interested in learning to read, speak, and write in the language. 

The second day was organized around four different presentations, including a demonstration of the pantograph router by Norb Brylski, one of the old-timers from the Hamilton workforce. This man was a printer with his own shop first, and then after leaving that part of the trade spent years cutting wood type faces for Hamilton, in time becoming a master of the pantograph router, understanding all the nuances of the tool. This tool, in which the pantograph is machined to such a quality of stability and precision that it can be attached to a router run on pressurized air, was at the heart of the Hamilton production of wood type, and one of the main reasons decorative faces could be produced cheaply enough to be used widely in commercial printing. 

All throughout the demonstration people got to ask him questions. Most were of a technical nature. Paul Aken asked him about the shoulder height and depth of the counter (sorry, those are cast type terms). I asked him how they measured the productivity of each pantograph operator. He said that management had figured out a standard of output, so many fonts in a given face in a given size in a given amount of time. I can’t remember if he said it was all charted out or not, but that’s how I’m picturing the information. The reason this is crazy to think about is, this was a pretty skilled kind of work, including having to cut by hand every single inside corner to a sharp angle for many faces, because the router bits all leave a round corner. Quantifying all that across the room full of pantagraph operator-craftsworkers, such that the information could be figured into larger decisions regarding the future prospects of the company, was probably a typical industrial efficiency problem for the time. I think it was one of the Moran brothers who noted that over the decades there had been a great many women in this occupation. I also asked Mr. Brylski if he was in a union. He was; I think he said it was the carpenters and joiners union. 

Richard Zauft, under whom I studied about thirteen years ago, led a hands-on print session using for the first time the newly unveiled Hamilton face, Carter Latin, the first typeface designed by Matthew Carter for wood type. Matthew Carter has done just about everything a guy can do in the field of typography and type design, but it turned out he hadn’t ever designed for wood type. So this, too, was (for type nuts, at least) a pretty special moment, and super fun to do. Hundreds of proofs were made over the course of the day, including many on paper taken from a shop scrap pile, with entertaining results. Matthew Carter was there, presiding like a pleased patrician grandfather.

richard zauft, typographer

Jim Moran gave us a wonderful introduction to and status report on the recently acquired inventory of printing blocks from the old Globe company of Chicago. I don’t know what the proper name of the business was. It might have been Globe Print, or Globe Printing, or Globe Show Print. They were in the business of letterpress printed advertising. Movie posters, rodeo, car racing, and circus posters, and signage for grocery stores and small retailers.  And some political signage, including a lot of blocks for the old Illinois US Senator Dirksen. I’ve never seen anything quite like this, in terms of a fusion of material and social history. Who were these people in the 40s, 50s, and 60s who were going to rodeos, circuses, and scary movies? The whole thing had the air of a healthy working class world, with its own amusements and nascent consumer economy. Jim made the point that some of the circus posters that feature clowns are actually quite sinister, with the clowns playing as figures of chaos and menace. So what was life like for the classes of citizenry who consumed the thrills and contrived scares of the circus midway and freak shows? Who shopped at the stores that advertised their meat discounts in the windows? And whom Senator Dirksen wanted to reach? Lots to wonder about there. Unfortunately, not much is known about Globe. Jim is starting to get some leads on the company, people who may have been involved, but it sounds like that is in an early stage. 

partial posters in the men's bathroom, hamilaton wood type museum

The Hamilton staff and volunteers are slowly making their way through an estimated 1400 blocks, many of them damaged, and all of them having arrived in a completely disorganized state. The story is, the Globe company cleared them out and packed them for storage, but then they were somehow left in a tractor semi-trailer for 25 years, and practically forgotten. A whole bunch of type came along with it that they are also sorting. Some of the blocks are just amazing, and the proofing of them is what is a great motivation for putting in the labor. 

Most of the blocks are carved or cut vinyl. But check out this one, which is pure woodcut, handcarved.

from the globe collection, hamilton woodtype museum

 This place is the mecca of wood type, no question. For the letterpress printer, there’s interesting stuff at every turn.

 

just another amazing specimen sheet, hamilton wood type museum