The Photographs of Doug Rickard

Detroit, MI. 2009. 2010
(http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/newphotography/doug-rickard/)

Doug Rickard (American, born 1968) studied US history and sociology, before moving to photography. He has drawn on this background in research for his series A New American Picture, which focuses on places in the United States where unemployment is high and educational opportunities are few. On a virtual road trip, Rickard located these sites remotely using the Street View feature of the website Google Maps, which has mapped and photographed every street in the country. Scrutinizing the Google Maps pictures, he composed images on his computer screen, which he then photographed using a digital camera. The resulting pictures—digitally manipulated to remove the Google watermark and cropped to a panoramic format—comment on poverty and racial equity in the United States, the bounty of images on the web, and issues of personal privacy.
His photos are now on view in MoMA's New Photography 2011 exhibition.

(Artlog)

Dallas, TX. 2009. 2010
(http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/newphotography/doug-rickard/)

Fresno, CA. 2009. 2010
(http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/newphotography/doug-rickard/)

Chicago, IL. 2007. 2011
(http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/newphotography/doug-rickard/)

New York City, NY. 2009. 2011
(http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/newphotography/doug-rickard/)

(America viewed by Americans)

NY Times about Liviu Ciulei

Liviu Ciulei directing Spring Awakening at Juilliard in 1977
(image: Bob Glass/The New York Times)

Ms. Marica Solomon signaled me the presence of a great article in the October 27 issue of NY Times on the life of Liviu Ciulei.

Mr. Ciulei (whose name was pronounced LEEV-you CHEW-lay) made films in his native Romania, but in the United States he was best known for his provocative interpretations of classic plays. Contemporary art, he once said, is one that brings all the conflicts of the world into the poem, into the theater, into the painting. And the world’s enduring turmoil often rumbled, at least subliminally, through his presentations.

Ciulei's American debut was in 1974 at Arena Stage in DC with Leonce and Lena (written by Georg Büchner), a 19th-century German absurdist political satire. The production was described then in NY Times as electric and eclectic, a sort of time capsule of world theater right up to the foolish epics of Brecht and the epic follies of Ionesco. And Liviu Ciulei was immediately recognized as one of the most imaginative directors in the world.

A Hamlet followed at Arena Stage in 1978, set in Bismarck-era Germany. NY Times called it not the triumph just of a season but of a decade.

But the most important part of the theatrical activity of Mr. Ciulei in the US was at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Here he started in 1981, with a Tempest having Prospero’s island surrounded by a bloody moat with cultural artifacts — the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa among them — floating in it. And here at the Guthrie he also directed the play that has hunted his imagination for all life: it was the play in which he had debuted in Bucharest in 1946, in the role of Puck, the play he had directed in the 1960s at the prestigious Bulandra Theatre, the play he had dreamed to put in a great movie. He didn't make that movie, unfortunately. I'm speaking about Midsummer Night's Dream. At the Guthrie, Mr. Ciulei underscored a psychological savagery and sadism in the play’s romantic roundelay, depicting Bottom, the leader of the jesterlike players, as humiliated to the core by the indifference of his royal audience. Was it a reference to the American audience that was giving him much less recognition than he truly deserved? (Many people still want the theater to be like cool lemonade when it’s hot, he once observed). Maybe he wasn't right. He had recognition, no question about it. He wanted more. He should have known that masterpieces have always been ultimately for the happy few. Was it rather a reference to his pain that he didn't render the play in a movie? It's also our pain, of those who loved his plays and his movies.

Read the whole article from NY Times at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/arts/liviu-ciulei-daring-theater-director-dies-at-88.html

(Contemporary Art)

Mircea Cantor Awarded with Prix Marcel Duchamp 2011

Mircea Cantor - Airplanes and Angels, 2008
copyright Mircea Cantor, courtesy Yvon Lambert
(http://moremilkyvette.blogspot.com/2009/03/mircea-cantor-between-film-installation.html)

Mircea Cantor is the winner of Prix Marcel Duchamp 2011. The artist was born in Romania and currently lives in Paris and Cluj-Napoca.

(video by Museum Abteiberg)

(Mircea Cantor)

Ann Hu: Beauty Remains

movie posters published by Wabisabi in Iwa ni Hana
(where beauty moves and wit delights)

Two sisters meet again after long years of separation. Fei (Zhou Xun), an illegitimate child, had been forced to leave their home and constrained to poverty, while Ying (Vivian Wu) grew up surrounded by richness and affection. Now Ying calls her step sister to come back. The father has just passed away and his will requests the presence of both siblings and their reconciliation: otherwise the inheritance won't take effect.

(published by Peter Nellhaus in http://www.coffeecoffeeandmorecoffee.com/archives/2009/09/the_beauty_rema.html)

To remake the bond is far from easy. There is genuine attraction between them, based on nostalgia for the times of early childhood, balanced by mutual suspicion. And, from the part of Fei, there is accumulated frustration which nurtures irresistible desires of revenge. She seduces Ying's lover and what follows is a pervert erotic competition pushing any certitudes toward the realm of moving sands.

(published by Peter Nellhaus in http://www.coffeecoffeeandmorecoffee.com/archives/2009/09/the_beauty_rema.html)

Beauty Remains (美人依旧 - Mei Ren Yi Jiu), made by Ann Hu in 2005, is a movie in which the loss of certitudes plays on multiple plans. There is the loss of certitudes that have kept so far the moral universe of Fei. In the same time, as the action takes place in 1949's China, the Communists will soon take control over the country, and all certitudes of the universe where Ying and Fei have lived and competed will be lost. The two conflicting sisters, as well as their lover, will face a new world where they will be just bourgeois elements, with all consequences.

(published by Peter Nellhaus in http://www.coffeecoffeeandmorecoffee.com/archives/2009/09/the_beauty_rema.html)

This movie calls in my mind one of the masterpieces of Chinese cinema , the 1948's Spring in a Small Town (and its superb 2002's remake crafted by Tian Djuang-Djuang): there also the tumult of passions inside of a family will be brutally ended by the coming Communist regime. The difference is that in Spring in a Small Town the heroes are not aware of their near future, while in Beauty Remains the whole fabric of passion is on the backdrop of Communists' advancement. Maybe also Dr. Zhivago would come to mind.

(http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-11/05/content_2181529.htm)

In such times of turmoil, on a personal level, also on the level of your country, is it anything that remains, when all else is lost? The movie of Ann Hu comes here with a great answer: when hope dies, and love fades, beauty remains. We can loose everything which is in our control, or in the control of society, but nobody has power on what comes from nature!

So, it is a movie about beauty, which cannot be lost, cannot be taken away. That means that beauty accompanies us in all our tribulations. Only we should observe that the way beauty takes shape depends on the state where we are. There is beauty in happiness, there is beauty in tragedy; there is beauty in times of accomplishments, there is beauty in decay.

(published by Nobuhiro Hosoki in http://hosokinema.com/beautyremains.html)

I found a fascinating text about beauty in a Japanese blog (authored by Wasanabi). It is about the multitude of words that Chinese language uses for various nuances of beauty. When it comes to beauty in decay, a Chinese can use either 墮落美 [duo luo mei] or 頹廢美 [tui fei mei]. The first term, that duo-la-mei, designates a beauty that reminds us of a past state of innocence and induces a feeling of nostalgia (while in the same time perversely suggesting that the roots of the present decay were already there, in the longtime lost purity). As for the second term, tui-fei-mei, in this case beauty comes from our awareness that end is near. It is the superb beauty of the gambler who cannot escape his fate, as it is the special beauty of aristocracy in the dawn of revolution.

Beauty Remains was compared with some movies of Wong Kar-Wai: think at The Hand (WKW's episode in the triptych Eros), or at Days of Being Wild, and not only. The uncanny beauty of the images expresses the special beauty of those characters in decay, that tui-fei-mei.

(video by nyindieguy)

A last word here about Beauty Remains: the nuanced solution found for Fei, this personage of lights and shadows. There is a very interesting statement made in this regard by Ann Hu (in http://asianmediawiki.com/Beauty_Remains):

During the script development process, I always felt Fei should gain our sympathies easily. But during the shoot, I struggled with Fei’s character as she loses her innocence and hurts the ones that love her most. Is she a good person? Are her actions justified because of her family history? Are any of us ever justified when we act upon our feelings and beliefs? I was torn between rushing to judge Fei and my feelings of compassion for her.

The solution wasn’t found until we shot the final scene. The lighting was dim, and though I couldn’t see her face through the monitor, I could feel Fei’s laughter and tears. At that moment, I knew I had gained the emotional balance that I was looking for.



(Ann Hu)

Pace Gallery in Chelsea, NY: A Short History of the Light Bulb

Tim Noble and Sue Webster, sculpture, 2007
204 ice white turbo reflector caps, electronic light sequencer, holders and daisy washers, lamps, mirror polished stainless steel
(http://artlog.com/artworks/37902)

Throughout the twentieth century the light bulb was used both as subject and material in the works of artist like Picassso and Man Ray, Philip Guston and Roy Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Francis Bacon and Joseph Beuys, to name a few.The Pace Gallery in Chelsea, NY (545 W 22Street near the High Line Park) is hosting these days a group exhibition dedicated to this history. I would say, a crash course of the bulb in the modern and contemporary art.

Read more at:

http://artlog.com/events/83618-burning-bright-a-short-history

(Contemporary Art)

(New York, New York)

Regele Mihai

(http://www.hotnews.ro/galerie?galleryId=10522429&mode=photo&item=6)

25 Octombrie 2011: Regele Mihai a vorbit in Parlamentul Romaniei. Priveam emotionat la ecranul televizorului si ma gandeam la toti cei care au suferit in inima lor atunci, la 30 Decembrie 1947, cand ultimul simbol al normalitatii Romaniei lua calea exilului. Cei mai multi dintre aceia nu mai traiesc astazi. Sa stie acolo unde sunt ca dupa atat de multi ani, Istoria a facut un act de dreptate.

Liviu Ciulei

foto http://www.tiff.ro
(http://www.antena3.ro/life-show/cultura/liviu-ciulei-magicianul-care-a-transformat-teatrul-si-cinematografia-141381.html)

Ne-a parasit pentru totdeauna un mare om de teatru, unul din cei mai mari pe care i-am avut, un roman al carui talent l-a facut cunoscut dincolo de granitele tarii, pana in America, socotit pretutindeni in lume ca o mare personalitate a teatrului contemporan.

Pentru generatia mea, personalitatea lui a fost coplesitoare, si pot sa zic ca prin spectacolele sale a fost unul din polii formativi in deschiderea mea intelectuala, in intelegerea de catre mine a actului teatral, si mai mult, a fenomenelor prin care se exprima universul culturii. Datorita lui, intreaga mea generatie a invatat curajul de a privi fara complexe catre marile opere clasice, totodata catre marii contemporani.

Liviu Ciulei in filmul Valurile Dunarii
(http://www.formula-as.ro/2009/880/planete-culturale-30/albumul-cu-minuni-liviu-ciulei-cu-gandiri-si-cu-imagini-11442)

Dintre toate marile opere pe care Liviu Ciulei le-a pus in scena la Teatrul Bulandra, voi aminti numai doua, pentru ca impresia pe care mi-au facut-o atunci, in anii saizeci, imi este la fel de proaspata dupa atat amar de vreme.

Cum va place, despre care Ciulei avea sa scrie mai tarziu: cu spectacolul Cum va place, am reusit si in regie o ruptura fata de realismul socialist plat ... am creat o re-legitimare a conventiei scenice; acest spectacol a fost piatra de hotar care a marcat nasterea unei noi scoli de regie a teatrului romanesc; de aceea, cred ca e cel mai semnificativ moment din cariera mea. A declansat o cotitura spre un teatru virulent, puternic vizual, eliberand imaginatia regizorala.

Si apoi formidabila Opera de trei parale, spectacolul care m-a invatat cum sa ma apropii de marea cultura germana.

(video by hermina1957)

Si apoi toate celelalte spectacole ale sale, si filmele sale: in toate Ciulei a ars ca o torta, a dat totul: omul acesta a fost intr-adevar un geniu!

In America am vrut sa ajung sa dau de urmele spectacolelor create de Liviu Ciulei. Nu a fost sa fie. Am reusit insa sa dau de urmele unui alt mare om de teatru, regizorul Andrei Serban, care se formase la Teatrul Bulandra, sub ochiul lui Liviu Ciulei.

(Intalniri neasteptate cu Romani)

Alain Resnais

(http://www.listal.com/viewimage/1313434)

My first encounter with the movies of Alain Resnais was in the first mid of the 1960's. I was in college, studying to become an engineer, and I was often going in the evenings at the Students' Culture House, near the Bucharest Opera. By that time the Culture House was named after one of the important figures of the Communist regime in Romania, Grigore Preoteasa. As it happens, for us, young students eager for places with dance and fun, there was no connection between the name and the personage, rather something like, where are you going tonight? well, I don't know, maybe at Preoteasa, they say it's a French movie and then it's dance.

So it was at Preoteasa that I saw two of Resnais's movies: L'année dernière à Marienbad and Hiroshima Mon Amour, each one followed by discussions between us. We were young and naturally we believed that one hour of discussions would clarify everything, what troubled memory meant, and what Nouvelle Vague meant, and how to link Godard, Resnais, Truffaut, Malle, Proust, Robe-Grillet and Marguerite Durras. This was culturally pretty intensive, to be honest, the good thing was that after discussions dance followed.

Well, today in the morning I watched a documentary made by Resnais: Nuit et Brouillard, and I had somehow the feeling of closing a loop. My first encounter was in the first mid of the sixties, now I am in the second mid of my sixties. I owe you anyway to comment the two movies that I saw fifty years ago.

• Van Gogh (1948)
• Night and Fog (1955)

(Cinéma Français)

Alain Resnais - Night and Fog (1955)

(http://allaboutwarmovies.com/2011/06/16/nuit-et-brouillard-aka-night-and-fog-1955/)

Alain Resnais's documentary from 1955 (Nuit et Brouillard - Night and Fog) combines footage shot by him while visiting the places of Nazi concentration camps with newsreels and stills of the epoch, shot by Nazis, or by allies when they arrived there to liberate the surviving prisoners. It's an almost inhumane depiction of inhuman horrors, hard to watch, and raising the same questions we continue to raise since then, without finding the answers: how was it possible? how can banality of life and banality of evil be so much alike? And, maybe the most terrible question: if so many banal people were not aware of the evil during those times, are we aware now of the tragedies of our times? I'm quoting here from the movie: those of us who pretend to believe that all this happened at a certain time and in a certain place, and those who refuse to see, who do not hear the cry to the end of time.

Nuit et brouillard - 1/3
(video by Iclolwut)

Nuit et brouillard - 2/3
(video by Iclolwut)

Nuit et brouillard - 3/3
(video by Iclolwut)

(Alain Resnais)

Ghost Towns

Gold rush (and generally rush for any precious metals) has given birth to towns which soon would have anything a town should have: a hospital with a doctor and a nurse, a casino, a red light district, gunslingers and gamblers, and, of course, one or two churches. But this was in the good old days of golden times. Gold and silver are longtime exhausted, people left in search of better horizons, and what remained is what we can see today: houses where wind is the master and ghosts are his advisers.

Elkhorn, Montana
(image edited by Jake Clifford)

Elkhorn is home to Montana’s smallest state park — only one acre — designated to protect Gillian Hall and Fraternity Hall, two of the best-preserved remnants of Elkhorn’s 1880s glory days. Located about 40 miles southeast of Helena, Elkhorn was a silver town, and unlike other boomtowns was populated by couples, including many from Europe. That perhaps explains the prominence of the halls, which were the heart of the social community. Theater, prizefights, a brass band and a glee club all met here, and baseball games, bowling and horse racing were other forms of entertainment.

(Heidi Schuessler, Bing Travel)

CalicoCalico, California
(image edited by Jake Clifford)

Silver was king during the 1880s in Calico, which had 500 silver ore mines that paid out $12 million to the miners lucky enough to make their fortune here before it ran out. The town in San Bernardino County has been preserved and restored as a historical landmark and is a fun place to explore around Halloween, when weekends turn the town into a Ghost Haunt festival. Take cemetery tours, attend the dead wedding, carve pumpkins and more. Road trippers take note: This is a great side trip from Route 66 near Barstow.

(Heidi Schuessler, Bing Travel)

Bodie, California
(image edited by Jake Clifford)

In its heyday, Bodie put the wild in the Wild West. It began in 1861 as a humble home to about 20 miners. Less than two decades later, an estimated 10,000 people crammed into Bodie, creating a scene straight out of a Hollywood movie cast with prostitutes, gunslingers and gamblers. During the glory days, miners pulled more than $14 million in gold and silver from the Standard Mine, so they had plenty of money to spend on extracurricular activities at the 65 local saloons. Come Sunday morning, however, there were only two churches where they could repent. Bodie today is a state park with about 100 buildings still standing, including the jail, livery and gambling hall.

(Heidi Schuessler, Bing Travel)

Scenic, South Dakota
(image edited by Jake Clifford)

The tiny town of Scenic made headlines in August when it was sold for $799,000 to a church in the Philippines. The township, named Scenic because of its proximity to Badlands National Park, consists of about 12 acres, some padlocked buildings, the Longhorn Saloon and the post office (still operational). It’s unclear what the church’s plans are for the ghost town.

(Heidi Schuessler, Bing Travel)

Cripple Creek, Colorado
(image edited by Jake Clifford)

You couldn’t ask for a prettier setting for a ghost town, and Cripple Creek makes the most of it. This national historic district southwest of Colorado Springs preserves the feel of the days in 1890 when 10,000 or more prospectors flooded to the area mines in search of gold. They found it — by some counts more than $500 million worth was pulled from the region's mines. Pikes Peak or bust! was the rallying cry back then, but today people come here for attractions such as the narrow-gauge railroad, mine tours, gold panning, shows at the restored Butte Theater and the casinos. Events are scheduled throughout the year, such as the spooky Cemetery Tour, scenic aspen tour for fall leaf-peepers and, in winter, an ice-carving festival.

(Heidi Schuessler, Bing Travel)

(America viewed by Americans)

Cao Fei: i.Mirror

(published in New World Notes)

A movie made by Cao Fei (using her avatar name: China Tracy). I found in New World Notes an enthusiastic presentation, but I also suggest you watch i.Mirror having in mind Deeparture, the movie of Mircea Cantor. Here is a comparison between the two artists (the author is Doryun Chong, from the Minneapolis Walker Art Center):

Cantor’s nearly three-hour Deeparture (2005) is as severely economical in its setup as it is intense in its poetic potential... [Cao’s video], in contrast, is highly cinematic, condensing an entire narrative arc—albeit without spoken words... It is also frenetic and colorful, unlike Cantor’s strict and structuralist piece. If Deeparture is powerful because it is an anti-spectacle, the pleasure of [Ms. Cao's film] derives from its unapologetic spectacle. The two artists indeed come from highly contrasting lineages: while Cantor, a new-generation European conceptualist, looks toward older figures such as Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman, Cao seems to have more affinities with transnational popular culture and new Chinese cinema. With interests that range from labor conditions in Eastern Europe to post-communist ideology in contemporary Chinese mega-capitalism, the two artists similarly exhibit an acute awareness of a world in which rapid transformations and remnants of the past constantly collide and mingle. Cantor’s nonnarrative work is a highly complex architectonic of gazes of desire and apprehension, fear and alienation. These emotions and psychic reactions unexpectedly match those found in Cao’s piece.

i.Mirror - 1/3
(video by ChinaTracy)

i.Mirror - 2/3
(video by ChinaTracy)

i.Mirror - 3/3
(video by ChinaTracy)

(Cao Fei)

Cao Fei

Cao Fei - UN-Cosplayers, 2006
C-print
(published in Artkrush by courtesy of Cao Fei's Blog)

Cao Fei (b. 1978 Guangzhou, China, lives in Beijing), a video artist, theatre director, photograph, writer and blogger, has become a notable presence at contemporary art events around the world: New York at MoMA, Paris at Centre Pompidou, Minneapolis at the Walker Art Center, biennials at Singapore, Sydney, Moscow, to name but a few.

The cosplayers that inundate her videos and photographs play a double role: they are the heroes of an alternate universe Cao Fei is proposing to us (the Second Life, to use her definition), while also youngsters from nowadays's China emphasizing that a new generation has come and world is now different.

So, what are cosplayers, anyway? People dressed like manga heroes, and performing that way anywhere but on the stage: it's Performance Art. They are not playing in roles, they are rather emphasizing roles; they are not playing fictional characters, they are simply emulating the appearance of these fictional characters. You will ask me now what manga means? It's the Japanese term for comics, and cosplayers don't emulate only manga characters, but also manhwa personages, and so on.

Well, as I said the cosplayers of Cao Fei play a double role: they invite us to imagine an alternate universe and they tell us that maybe this Second Life has come: Cao Fei's works demonstrate that Performance Art is but another form of Conceptual Art.

I will come back to Cao Fei and her cosplayers soon.

• i.Mirror
  

(Contemporary Art)

The Other 3 Nominees to Prix Marcel Duchamp

There are four nominees at the Prix Marcel Duchamp this year. I've already presented a bit of Mircea Cantor's artworks. Here are the three others.

Guillaume Leblon, Le Grand Bureau, 2010
metal, plastiline, wood, glass, various materials
published by Caitlin Ruttle in Artlog
(courtesy of the artist and Galerie Jocelyn Wolff)

Visitors to a Guillaume Leblon exhibition should be ready to find their way blocked by a white cube that has crashed through the exhibition space (a piece titled Raum). The French-born artist manipulates perceptions of space and creates uncanny sculptures like L’arbre, a ginko tree with black and white leaves resting on wooden trestles. He has described his approach as follows, if you aren’t making art that challenges art, you aren’t making art that challenges you or anyone.

Caitlin Ruttle in Artlog

Damien Cabanes, Ceramics, 2006-2008
published by Caitlin Ruttle in Artlog
(courtesy of the artist and Galerie Eric Dupont)

For over twenty years Damien Cabanes has worked in figurative painting, sculpture, and drawing, refining subtle and restrained portrayals of his subjects. The oldest of the nominees, this French artist garnered a following in the early 1990s, and France’s St. Etienne Museum of Modern Art is currently celebrating his work in a retrospective exhibition comprised of 110 drawings, paintings, and sculptures created between 1990 and 2011.

Caitlin Ruttle in Artlog

Samuel Rousseau, Montagne d’incertitude, 2008
video projection
published by Caitlin Ruttle in Artlog
(courtesy of the artist and Galerie Guy Bärtschi)

Multimedia artist Samuel Rousseau has the unlikely ability to impart an eerie warmth and humor to digital artwork, often in surprising contexts like pharmaceutical blisterpacks containing tiny walking characters. Many of his pieces insert themselves into domestic settings, like the videos Rousseau has incorporated into shower drains, washing machines, and tapestries. Sometimes approaching the brink of kitsch, Rousseau comments on what Westerners hate to love about their culture. Stained glass fireplaces and animated wallpaper have given way to recent work examining the ironies of city life, currently on display at Parker’s Box in Brooklyn.

Caitlin Ruttle in Artlog

(Mircea Cantor)

Mircea Cantor: Tracking Happiness & Vertical Attempt

Mircea Cantor - Tracking Happiness, video, 2009
production still
published by Caitlin Ruttle in Artlog
(courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert)

Mircea Cantor had in 2009 a solo at Kunsthaus Zürich. The centerpiece of the exhibition was Tracking Happiness: seven women in white casually walking barefoot and carefully wiping with their brooms over white sand; each one's trace is removed by the broom of the woman who's following: a modern (or rather post-modern) avatar of Sisyphus's myth? Another film presented at the exhibition was Vertical Attempt: a boy trying to cut the water that is pouring out of the tap. Learning through trial and error?

The exhibition at Kunsthaus presented also other works by Mr. Cantor: following the tradition of Marcel Duchamp he uses Readymade objects to emphasize what he has to say, only his Readymades often come from the Romanian traditional universe and subtly send to that Weltanschauung.

(video by Heinrich Schmidt)

(Mircea Cantor)

Mircea Cantor: Deeparture

Mircea Cantor - still from Deeparture
Collection Walker Art Center, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2006
(http://visualarts.walkerart.org/detail.wac?id=3552&title=acquisitions)

Cantor’s nearly three-hour Deeparture (2005) is as severely economical in its setup as it is intense in its poetic potential. It involves two unwitting players, a wolf and a deer, in perhaps the most unlikely and artificial environment in which they can find themselves—a white-cube gallery. The artist shot the animals in 16mm film with a seemingly unforgiving eye, structuring a series of taut close-ups from various angles into a seamlessly looping video. Confounding expectations, the “natural” predator-prey relationship does not play itself out here. Instead, both animals keep their distance from each other and appear in turn tense, confused, exhausted, and dejected, even oblivious. As viewers are gradually roped into emotional engagement with the ultimately unreadable animals, they’re led to wonder if these nonhuman players serve as a blank screen upon which human emotions and psychological attachments are projected.

(Doryun Chong, assistant curator, Visual Arts, The Walker Art Center)

(Mircea Cantor: Deeparture)

(Mircea Cantor)

Mircea Cantor

Mircea Cantor - Response, 2009
corn, cut tire, wood
published by Caitlin Ruttle in Artlog
(courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert)

Mircea Cantor (a Romanian artist living in Paris, France and Cluj-Napoca, Romania) employs in his works video, animation, sculpture, drawing, painting and installation. His works elicit the ambiguities of everyday life in this postmodern era of cultural overlap with the disintegration of cultural boundaries (wiki)

His works have been presented at Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Minneapolis Walker Art Center, Centre Pompidou, GAMEC (Galleria di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo), Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico, etc.

Mr. Cantor was awarded with the Prix Ricard in 2004, and in 2011 he won the Best Dance Short Film at Tiburon International Film Festival. This year he is a nominee for the Prix Marcel Duchamp.

• Deeparture (2005)
• Tracking Happiness & Vertical Attempt (2009)
• The Other 3 Nominees to Prix Marcel Duchamp
• Mircea Cantor Awarded with Prix Marcel Duchamp 2011

(Contemporary Art)

David Ensign in the Political Theology Blog

David Ensign, the pastor of the Clarendon Presbyterian Church in Northern Virginia, has a very impressive post in the Political Theology Blog. I am copying it here, as his deep sincerity, his courage to try to answer the hard questions and to go far beyond the easy answers - all these are exemplary. We can agree with him, or disagree on one or other aspects, or even in many aspects, but let me tell you, David is a real priest of Christ.

I spent some time last week with the folks, mostly young folks, who are occupying K Street at the moment. As the old Crosby, Stills and Nash song put it, “there’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear.” Clear or not, there is something happening here, and through it I think the spirit is trying to say something to the church.

Last April, as the Arab Spring was in full flower, I had a fascinating conversation with our eldest, who’s a junior at Mary Washington this year. He was closely following the news – watching Al Jazeera streaming on line because they were covering what U.S. media was largely ignoring. He was also creating a video game to simulate the situation.

I was incredibly amused at the dichotomy: Arab kids in the street, American kid turning the experience into a video game, so I asked him why his cohort, who are shouldering so many of the worst burdens of the Great Recession, weren’t following the lead of the Arab youth and taking to the streets here.

Now I know the answer: they were getting ready.

As of last week, there were Occupy Together Meet Up groups in more than 1,400 cities and towns across the United States. There were roughly 120 active occupations in American cities. There were related demonstrations in Europe, Asia and Africa over the weekend.

While not everyone I met at the K Street occupation was younger than 30, the vast majority are, and that seems to be holding true across the country. Whatever is happening, it’s happening among young people.

More to the point, this widespread social unrest is happening precisely among the generation of Americans who feel abandoned by or failed by all of the major social systems that previous generations of Americans have come to take for granted.
Consider:

* For more than 30 years – the lifetimes of the young adults we’re talking about – American education has been a failing system. To be sure, not every aspect of it, not every classroom, not every teacher. But the system as a whole, from preschool to graduate school, is broken.
* For those same 30 years, American politics has been broken. Outside of the well-connected, it is increasingly difficult to find anyone who believes their elected leaders hear them or care what they say. If citizens no longer believe in democracy, then it’s broken.
* The failure of our politics is not unrelated to a far bigger systemic failure that young adults, statistically speaking, pay far more attention to than their elders: the failure of the environment, and, in particular, our inability and unwillingness to come to grips with the looming disaster of global climate change.
* As this cohort comes of age, the American economy has been broken as well. The unemployment rate for 18-24 year olds is double the rate for all workers. The average young adult graduates from college with $20,000 in student loan debt, and almost half of them spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent. A generation ago, fewer than 20 percent of 25-34 year olds spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent.

This litany goes on and on, but the bottom line is this: most Americans now believe that the current generation of young adults will be the first in American history to be economically worse off than their parents.

And what is the generation least likely to show up in a church, mosque or synagogue for worship? Whatever is happening, it’s happening precisely among the people whose absence is lamented in American houses of worship.

None of this is particularly new or startling, but it has occurred to me for a while that if young adults are not going to come to church – and, let’s be utterly honest with ourselves, they are not about to – then perhaps church should go to them. And not go to them asking, “why don’t you come to us?” but, rather, go to them and ask, “what’s going on in your life?” “what are you most concerned about?” “what makes your soul sing?” “what breaks your heart?” and, with respect to all of the huge issues that hang like a multi-bladed sword of Damocles over the futures of an entire generation, “what would you like to hear the church say right now?”

So I went down to the demonstration … not to get my fair share of abuse, because, even in my clerical collar, to a person, the young adults with whom I spoke were happy to engage in respectful conversation with a representative of the church even as many of them offered sharply worded harsh criticism of the church. Indeed, they have sharp criticisms. Not surprising or novel criticisms, to be sure, but sharp ones.

Megan, a young woman from Richmond, a military vet, decried the church’s hypocrisy about sex, and especially the way the church has condemned gays and lesbians. Megan’s friend, Mary, nodded in agreement, and wondered why the church condemned people of other faiths. Will, a young man who grew up Lutheran in suburban Maryland, said that it is hard to take seriously an institution that takes its ancient scriptures literally, especially when it comes to questions that are answered definitively by science. He said, “you’d be better off if you stuck to the parts of the Bible that are written in the red letters.” Ah, yes, the red letters, the parts that are attributed to Jesus. The things like, “blessed are the poor,” or “love your enemies,” or “I came that you might have life.”

The folks I spoke with at the occupation certainly do not want to hear anybody tell them, “believe the orthodox creeds about Jesus or you’re going to hell.” That makes no sense to them whatsoever. But they do find Jesus to be a powerful and attractive figure. The Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount makes sense to them. If the church reflected that Jesus, then they might find something attractive in it, as well. Of course, that Jesus is the one whose own religious leaders sought to trap and, eventually, to have executed. That Jesus did not spend much time huddled behind stained glass windows. That Jesus did not surround himself with only the most respectable types. That Jesus did not care overly much for institutionalized religion. That Jesus was constantly on the move, and he was clearly much more interested in building a movement than in cultivating an institution. That Jesus was in the streets. That Jesus was occupying Israel. And from that midst of that occupied zone he offered up the most creative readings of his own ancient texts.

He went up on a mountainside – outside, occupying open space – and he said, at least the way my southern ears hear it, “y’all have heard the religious authorities teach you about what these ancient texts mean, but from where I stand – here, amidst people struggling in an unjust economic system with failing religious institutions – from where I stand those texts say something different. You have heard, ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’ but from where I stand that just leaves the whole world blind. So I say, ‘do not return evil for evil. Pray for those who persecute you.’ That’ll confuse the hell out of them!”

Jesus offered up what I’ll call “occupied exegesis.” That is to say, he did his reading of sacred scripture not in the confines of the temple but out in the street where the theological rubber hits the road of life. That’s where he found himself confronted by the thorny question of taxes. Funny thing about that question: it turns out controversies over taxes are nothing new under the sun, and under the autumn sun shining down on the occupied zones in my part of the world this weekend you could find a lot of folks complaining about taxes – about who pays and who doesn’t, about who owes what to whom. When the powers that be confronted Jesus on the question of taxes he knew that if he said, “yes, pay them,” he would be capitulating to Rome whose taxes were a constant reminder of the hated occupation. On the other hand, if he said, “no, don’t pay them,” he would be executed immediately as a revolutionary insurgent.

Jesus’ response to the question about taxes – “render unto Caesar the things that belong to Caesar’s and to God the things that belong to God” – satisfied neither side, and it is not going to solve the problems that are at the heart of the Occupy Wall Street movement, either. Nevertheless, his words are particularly instructive for the church if we want to have anything at all to say to the present moment.

Writing in Sojourners years ago, Jim Wallis said of this passage, “Jesus didn’t give a clear and direct answer to the specific question being asked. Rather, he put it in a larger framework of worship, idolatry, and ultimate loyalty. The issue at stake here is: what do we owe to whom?” (Jim Wallis, Sojourners, May, 1983). In a way, I think that the occupation of our cities is doing the same thing. If there’s one thing I heard over and over again from McPherson Square, it was a deep desire to move beyond the political logjam of Left and Right, Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative, and the related accusation against the church for being too politically aligned with the Republican Party in particular. While that accusation is clearly not accurate for churches such as the one I serve, it’s abundantly clear that the loudest part of American Christianity for the past 30 years has been the conservative segment.

In pushing beyond that either/or, I believe the occupation is pressing us all to ask one basic question: “what do we owe to whom?” Critics have been complaining that there’s no clear agenda to the occupation, no set of demands, that nobody really knows what these folks want. I think what they want is for all of us to sort out what belongs to whom, and to figure out together how we return it. As it turns out, according to Walter Brueggemann, that is the Biblical definition of justice. Justice amounts to sorting out what belongs to whom and returning it to them. The church has history and insight with this question, and now the youth of our time are insisting that this question be front and center in our national conversation. Could this be, against all odds, our time?

(Church in America)