Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011 (click on image to see it full frame).
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VISUALS
One of the things I most despise about living in Washington state is the ugly fact there is probably no jurisdiction anywhere in the United Estates so officially hostile to human-interest photography.
In New York City and New York state (as in every other state save Washington), anyone in public is a fair and legal subject. A street photographer is thus at least theoretically protected. Here though there is no such shield. The matter was resolved during the late 1970s in favor of censorship when the state supreme court ruled The Everett Herald and one of its staff photographers had invaded a woman's privacy by photographing her in the midst of post-traffic-accident hysteria and running the picture on Page One – never mind she was standing on the shoulder of a public highway.
Never mind too that recording the emotional aftermath of a fatal wreck is not just news photography but vital social-documentary work. This is especially true in a nation so selfishly addicted to automobiles its voters now maliciously denounce mass transit as a form of welfare, precisely as they did during the run-up to February's special election in Tacoma and Pierce County, which allowed the sneeringly rich, defiantly car-hugging suburbanites to express their hatred of transit-dependent urbanites by effectively destroying the city's bus system.
Indeed I cannot but wonder if the two afflictions – the bigotry that spawned February's malicious anti-transit-rider vote and the judicial prohibition against meaningful photography – are related: after all, bigotry is invariably a consequence of ignorance.
In any case it is Washington state's legal barrier against photographing the human condition – and the associated fact I thus have no statutory protection from assault whether physical or judicial by an infuriated subject – that prohibits me from pursuing (save on those rarest occasions I am asked to do so and therefore have access and permission) the sorts of photography to which I formerly devoted my life.
The result, always frustrating, is that when I take a Leica or more occasionally a Pentax out for a walk, what I record are seldom more than unpeopled (and therefore both meaningless and infinitely boring) studies of visual geometry.
Such work has even crept indoors: the image above was part of a series I made with my very old Tokina f/4 70mm-210mm zoom lens on a 12mm extension tube attached to my equally ancient Pentax K-1000. I was shooting by window-light with the camera on a tripod; my purpose – the prerequisite to photographing a friend's artwork – was to determine the focal length at which the lens is sharpest. This is it: approximately 135mm. The film is Kodak Ultramax 400, a few months past its drop-dead date but still ok because I'd kept it in the refrigerator. Exposure was f/16 at 1/4th of a second.
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NULLE BASTARDO
I have long known the vast majority of U.S. visual artists – many writers too – are reactionary cowards, utterly terrified by any notion of political involvement. Having witnessed this pathology in all its viciousness, I assumed it was more of the craven, Moron Nation legacy of what is commonly mis-identified as “the McCarthy Era” – the methodical campaign of suppression against artists and intellectuals that began the instant World War II ended and continues even now.
But not until der Spiegel ran a damning report on the art scene's smug silence in response to China's persecution of Ai Weiwei did I realize the problem of maliciously apolitical artists exists throughout Westernesse:
“There hasn't been a sign of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei since he was arrested in early April. And the silence from the Western art world has been deafening as well. Spiegel spoke with German curator Roger Buergel, who helped Ai Weiwei on his path to stardom, about why artists have remained so passive.”
“I think that most of them are glad to be rid of Ai Weiwei,” said Mr. Buergel. “Ai Weiwei succeeded in bridging the gap between art and politics, the only person to have done so in recent years. He has a monopoly in this respect...Young Western artists are producing works that amount to nothing more than footnotes in art history, and then this Chinese artist appears who takes a totally different approach and makes 98 percent of the art world look very, very old...there is an unbelievable resentment... something deeper, meaner (than jealousy).”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,761414,00.html (free sign-up may be required for access).
Three facts immediately become contextually significant.
The first of these is the overwhelming support the capitalist Ruling Class gives non-representational (and therefore definitively apolitical) art and literature.
Originally this support was (seemingly) disorganized – probably just another example of how the Ruling Class retains sufficient caste-consciousness it always acts in its own exclusive interest.
But after World War II the prime-mover in fostering and sustaining de-politicized work – portraying its moral imbecility as cutting-edge (and simultaneously suppressing social realism) – was the Central Intelligence Agency, thus demonstrating its function as the ultimate Sicherheitsdienst not just in the United Estates but throughout the entire capitalist world. (For details see Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War – The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, The New Press; New York: 2001).
Second is the unspeakable shallowness of capitalism's so-called “fine artists” – again a phenomenon I (wrongly) assumed was unique to this particular American elite, which is deservedly infamous for its cultoid self-obsessions and its predictably egotistical vindictiveness.
A classic example is the vicious treatment of the tragically needful Edie Sedgwick, whom I met very briefly and probably only twice, most likely amidst the oppressively privileged hurly-burly of Max's Kansas City (the memory is admittedly fuzzy), or perhaps on the opposite side of Park Avenue South at a much more short-lived saloon d'art called the Broome Street Expressway – neither a realm in which I felt especially welcome.
(Ms. Sedgewick – whom I certainly did not know well enough to refer to now as Edie – would probably not have been comfortable in any of the far-more-proletarian watering-holes at which I was a regular, the Annex and Stanley's – either Old Stanley's or Dead Stanley's – all on Avenue B, Googie's on Sullivan Street, and later, after I moved to Chelsea, the Lion's Head on Christopher Street at Sheridan Square.)
In any case the two of us were never more than strangers accidentally adjacent one another at a bar and therefore making casual smalltalk as we waited for the barman to serve our drinks, but even then, probably in 1967, maybe earlier, neither her warmest most surreptitious smile nor the armor of celebrity could hide her vulnerableness or conceal an aura of impending karmic doom so memorably heartbreaking I was not the least surprised by her death in 1971. My instinct had been to reach out to her, and not merely from lust, but of course I dared not do so.
Indeed I still occasionally wonder what accursedness kept her from finding a true lover – man or woman it matters not – with whom to seek “a stone, a leaf, an unfound door” and all the other markers on what Thomas Wolfe recognized as “the lost lane-end into heaven”: that is, to psychic and psychological healing and survival.
The point though is how the cruel abandonment of Edie Sedgwick by various celebrities exemplifies the sociopathic indifference of the “fine artists” to the human condition and thus to human tragedy. So does the Ai Weiwei case. Each, despite that one circumstance is very different from the other, is a tragedy that in another era might at the very least have birthed impassioned reaction – a poem, a novel, a play, a true biography for Ms. Sedgewick; mass protests on behalf Ai Weiwei – any response better than this oppressed and oppressing Moron Nation silence of oppression.
(Yes, a film entitled Factory Girl was made about Ms. Sedgewick in 2006, but it so trivialized her life, a Village Voice reviewer denounced it as “Edie for Dummies.”)
Meanwhile let us never forget this nasty silence and the malevolence it bespeaks is nothing more than yet another manifestation of the toxic indifference with which the capitalist Ruling Class regards its victims, whether 100 years ago at Triangle Shirt Waist or today in the capitalist “fine art” scene, the principals of which are as greedily predatory as their Wall Street benefactors.
The third relevant contextual fact in this sullen refusal to protest the Ai Weiwei vanishment is the hatefulness of capitalism's “fine artists” toward those few cultural workers who yet dare publicly recognize and act upon what earlier generations knew as an absolute aesthetic truth – that there can be no art without political consciousness. The intensity with which the reaction of the “fine artists” channels the anti-intellectual tyranny of the capitalist Ruling Class is indeed its perfect microcosm.
Though I have seen this sort of thing first hand many times and heard of it many times more – especially in academia (where the antagonism of the “fine arts” disciples toward political awareness approaches the intensity of medieval religious warfare) – the worst example I've yet witnessed occurred in Seattle where a crowd of “fine art” photographers shouted down W. Eugene Smith when he attempted to answer a question from a fellow photojournalist – a question the local Ansel Adams cultists perceived as “political.” The incident, which occurred in March 1976, was memorable not just for its breathtaking rudeness toward a guest speaker but for the vicious politics of apolitical conformity it so vividly exposed.
As Gene said immediately afterward, it is typical of a certain “orthodox mentality” to despise sensibilities like his own, to go to any length to suppress vision that seeks to “penetrate...deeply into the area of all the effort that mankind has gone through.”
Alas – and as the Spiegel report confirms – that “orthodox mentality” has since become the sole allowable norm of Western “fine art.” The obvious follow-up discussion, on the meaninglessness (and therefore utter absurdity) of the (alleged) distinctions between “commercial art” and “fine art,” will have to wait for another time: soon.
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DIALOGUES
I had nothing to say all week – at least nothing worth sharing. The content of the news has become so predictable and so overwhelmingly depressing, I can scarcely bear to read it, much less watch and listen via MSNBC. It's obviously too little too late in Wisconsin and everywhere else in the Middle West – once again the politically fatal lack of ideology and organization. It's more of the same in Washington D.C. – DemocRat betrayal facilitated by GOPorker belligerence. And all of this is framed by the terrifying probability of deliberate mass murder, the looming real-time deaths of millions of seniors and disabled people killed not by terrorists but by politicians: the malicious termination of our Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid stipends, whither by national default or by the genocidal savagery the GOPigs are demanding as a condition for raising the debt limit.
Such is capitalism in action.
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MISCELLANY
I originally set the following news item aside for inclusion in “Nulle Bastardo,” but that section contains too much real tragedy to be diluted by this glaring example of Moron Nation absurdity as reported by Associated Press:
“Ghoulish budget cuts taking place in Olympia are bringing out the zombies. About three dozen face-painted protesters walked, shuffled and crawled to the (Washington) state Capitol on Friday, arriving shortly after most lawmakers had left for the day. The Friday the 13th protest included songs and chants as law enforcement officers watched with amusement in the Capitol rotunda. The zombies are denouncing how the Legislature is balancing the budget, mocking lawmakers as brainless.”
http://www.thenewstribune.com/2011/05/13/1664409/zombies-shuffle-to-wash-capitol.html
I wonder who organized this insulting protest: what better way to trivialize the real plight of capitalism's victims.
Next we'll have clowns on pogo-sticks protesting foreclosure (“don't bounce us out of our homes”), or a legion of Charley Chaplin tramps demonstrating against unemployment (“joblessness is a bummer”) – anything to make light of the miasma in which we are drowning and the viciousness of the capitalists and their political lackeys who are pushing us under.
LB/14 May 2011
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