Theodore A. Harris, On the Throne of Fire, 2008, mixed media collage

I first came into contact with Theodore Harris when I was given the opportunity to moderate “Art as a Weapon: Critical Thinking and the Media,” the keynote event of Culture Shock 2011 co-organized by QPIRG McGill and the SSMU (Student Society of McGill University). Culture Shock is an annual series of events on McGill University campus focused on the stories and experiences of immigrants, refugees, communities of colour and indigenous people. This year’s keynote speakers were artists Sundus Abdul Hadi [i] and Theodore A. Harris.

I was born in the U.S. in 1966 to a biracial couple active in the civil rights movement. Our family moved from Boston to Montreal in the early 1970s; however I have always felt a strong cultural connection to Black America and some of my earliest, deepest impressions are of the 1960s in the American northeast, even though I was too young to really remember this time and place. I have found much inspiration in African American art history and especially in the Black Arts Movement (BAM) of the 1960s and ‘70s.  My career has transitioned over the past 15 years or so, from social services to community work to a broader cultural work involving community art and education, situated within African diaspora histories of emancipatory education programs initiated from within the community, for the community[ii].

I immediately connected with Theodore’s art and saw it in the tradition of BAM, an impression that was reinforced as I discovered his collaborative work with renowned Black poet-playwright Amiri Baraka[iii].  Following the Culture Shock event in October, Theodore generously agreed to stay in contact with me and to discuss his work and ideas.  The following conversation represents some of the issues we have been engaging with by email and telephone in the past six weeks.

Rosalind: In addition to my appreciation of your artwork Theodore, my motivation for initiating this dialogue is my research, which explores the potential social, cultural and economic benefits of inter-generational art education that is critically and culturally grounded in the lives of Black community members.  My key interests right now are (a) understanding how the notion that visual ‘art isn’t for Black people’ is perpetuated both within the community and in art discourses; and (b) working with other community members to advance student-centered, critical multicultural approaches to art education that work to broaden conceptions of ‘art’ and ‘artist,’ and seek to examine and dismantle the powerful traditions of racism and ethnocentrism ingrained in the histories of Western art and art education.

Last summer I discovered a study by art education scholar William Charland in which he addressed what he described as the “Black avoidance of art as an area of study or career aspiration”[iv].  Charland examined the attitudes and behaviours toward visual art and the career identity of ‘artist’ of fifty-eight African American adolescents from four different high schools.  The teenagers were asked to describe stereotypes what they believed White people attributed to Blacks, and then later in the study were asked to relate widespread stereotypes that people have of artists.  Charland found, for example, a “startling overlap between informants’ understandings of society’s demeaning stereotypes of artists and African Americans” (i.e., both as poor, marginalized, moody, unable to function in ‘normal society’, etc), suggesting that “an African American adolescent who assumes the mantle of artist willingly takes on social stigma aligned with racial stereotypes as well”[v].  The teens also talked about family and community objections to an art career, something I hear often as well, suggesting that stereotype-informed beliefs about artists exist across generations.

So Theodore, given the exclusivity and elitism of formal institutions of art and what Charland describes can you talk about how you became an artist?

Theodore: First I want to thank you for moderating the keynote panel with the great artist Sundus Abdul Hadi and myself as part of the Culture Shock events at McGill University.

This is a great question and one that gets to the heart of some deep concerns for me. I was born in 1966 in Manhattan, New York City, but I grew up in Philadelphia. My mother was a single parent with a drug addiction raising my sister and me, while my father was still in New York dealing with his own addiction (which he did manage to control enough to obtain a degree in social work from NYU).  I say all that to say with all of this dysfunction my parents respected the arts; my mother could draw and play the piano very well, so music was for the most part was dominant art form in our lives, not visual art.  Jazz was always playing and I am very grateful for that because it has had a great influence on my life and work.  You see, my mother also worked at Aqua Lounge Jazz Club on 52nd street in West Philly, where greats like Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, and Art Blakey and The Messengers played and she also hung out with them.  My mom was into music in a deep way and I think music was the thing that made her the most happy.

As early as I can remember I was always drawing, whether I was in school or at home, and my mother always encouraged me to make art, but I don’t remember any one saying you should go to art school, or college period, and this is something I just started thinking about within the last few years—why wasn’t the idea ever put out there? The only person that was, somewhat, of a father figure in my life was my grandfather, who tried to discourage me from the arts.  He knew nothing about the visual arts and for some reason thought art was not reliable, in other words, ‘how can you make money from it?’  At this point I was into graffiti, so one thing he did because I guess he could see I was not giving it up, he got me a job working with a sign painter and sign builder named Mr. John Wilson and I loved it. Working with Mr. Wilson was the first time I ever held a paint brush.

Art is not promoted as a career choice in inner city public schools, which is why, among other things, I left school in the 11th grade and hung out in libraries and bookstores in the art history sections trying to figure out what life and art were about. My life is all about art, it is how I see life, I guess that is because it is the only thing I have that I think I do well. And although we lived below the poverty line, I always felt like with art I was intelligent and could make some kind of future for myself if I could stick with it. And as an artist you know what I mean, you eat and sleep art.

I am sure that reading about art and artists also improved my reading skills, because you are not just reading on the surface, you have to know what those words and metaphors mean and in turn you learn about the world through art and artists and come to understand that the block you live on is not the whole world. In my opinion this is why art is not taught in public schools in the inner city, because it teaches you how to think and understand images and that is what the business class does not want you to do; become a critical thinker and an intellectual. They don’t’ want another Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Howardena Pindell, Betye Saar, Romare Bearden, Augusta Savage. Because these visual artists and writers force you to see your self in the world, although you may disagree with what you see in the mirror they are holding up to you, you have to deal with it.

Yes, the art world is elitist and backward in its politics, because it is mostly managed by what Hans Haacke has called “Museums, Managers of Consciousness:” the 1 % class born into money who think that art is all about aesthetic pleasure, which is why war profiters see innocent people on death row or killed in war, as collateral damage.  And that drove Walter Annenberg and the blue bloods of the art world crazy: in their world art is used to disenfranchise people in the under class through promoting European art as the standard of what is human and intelligent and the rest of us as primitive and subhuman. My visual art became blatantly political after I heard and read the poetry of Sonia Sanchez; I think it was because her use of metaphors made me see what I could create with visual art, and the poetry was also a history lesson, that made me see myself in a new way.  After this I went right out and read more of her poetry and the writing of other poets and got into reading the literature and literary history of Black America and this opened up a new world to me.  I fell in love with literature and it inspired and added meaning to my artwork; before that I described my work as “just pretty colors,” I was painting mostly flowers, still life and art historical subject matter and was preoccupied with mostly formalist concerns.

The Charland study mirrors my experience, but some how I ignored the un-constructive things people would say to discourage my art and becoming an artist and kept going, because art was the only thing I had to hold onto and it kept me in museums, bookstores, libraries, and out of jail.

Theodore A. Harris, Postcard from Conquest, 2008, mixed media collage

Rosalind: Can you talk some more about your early influences and mentors?  Did someone or something in particular teach you that a Black man could be an artist?

Theodore: Off the top of my head, it was that the more books I was exposed to with African American artists’ work in them and the more African American artists I met; that was how I knew I could pursue art.  Artists such as Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, and always staring at those Blue Note [jazz] album covers reflected something back at me that was so powerful it even made me change the way I dressed; I started wearing suit jackets, dress shoes.  This in effect causes you to walk different and you take your self more seriously, you see yourself, community and world view differently and this shapes your art.  The more you know about the world the more you can teach yourself and your children to think globally.  That is why I refuse to be called a minority just because most of America claims the social construct of whiteness.  I am a citizen of the world and most of the world is made up of people of color, which makes them, the whites, the minority.

Theodore A. Harris, Assemblage for Decolonizing the Mind, for Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 2011, assemblage

Rosalind: I find this so important Theodore; it really underscores the significance of ethno-cultural influences, and how, even in the absence of direct mentorship, access to cultural history and art that we can relate to our own lived experiences can make all the difference in our lives.

I can see your concern with the global picture particularly in your anti-war pieces, and in the ways they raise questions about America’s place on the world stage.  Can you speak about the emotion and particularly the notion of violence for example, in the Collage and Conflict series?  I’m curious about whether you would describe art as a non-violent response to violence, and how you understand the use of art as a weapon.

Theodore: Yes, it is a non-violent response to violence in our homes and interpersonal relationships, but most of all it is a critique of America’s domestic and foreign policy, its self destructive militarism in the name of democracy. The Collage and Conflict series began as a compositional challenge to myself because I wanted to see what would happen. Working with the three panels all at once opened me up to experimenting with the surface, and I decided to attack it—to go to war on the surface by writing curses, setting it on fire, hitting it with a hammer, ripping it apart and putting it back together—and have figures in the piece attacking each other to raise the issue of ‘friendly fire.’  Bloody flesh wounds on the panels are meant to give the viewer a visceral feeling, as if they, their flesh, are being struck by a whip or a drone missile. And the blood that is spilled is a mirror in which I see the middle passage; our flesh in knots, fire-hosed with the slobber of biting dogs and pepper spray, under the orders of Sheriff “Bull” Connor, whose mouth is a little white tank moving backwards, camouflaged with Kara Walkers’ silhouettes.

I see art as an offensive and defensive weapon to defend your self and community, as it was in the great work Emory Douglas made for the Black Panthers’ news paper—I would say Emory is a Charles White turned up a few notches. Because of the influence of documentary film on my work, I would say the Collage and Conflict series are cinematic confrontational collages; cinematic because I see the juxtaposing and layering of images as creating a sense of movement as captured in film stills, and confrontational because of the weight of issues the work is dealing with. My work is about looking beneath the “Surface Politics” of aesthetics and formalism, to visualize a Black Aesthetic that is about “life over death” like Addison Gayle said.

Theodore A. Harris, Purple Hearts Bleed, 2008, mixed media collage

Rosalind: I find collage to be somewhat of a ‘violent’ method in and of itself, in terms of the cutting, severing, disassociating and dislocating it involves.  I notice that you refer to it as ‘surgery’ and I find your work is similar to Wangechi Mutu’s, who has also described her collages as ‘delicate surgeries.’  Both of you also use wounds in your work in similar ways.  You describe war as a ‘map of wounds’ and have said that in your work the wounds might be from shrapnel, gunfire, friendly fire… I also think of those wounds in your and Mutu’s work as wounds of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism. And the violence in yours and perversion in Mutu’s work, for me, have so much to do with the violent distortions and perversion of these systems, the ways they act on human bodies—flesh and blood—and on human-ness overall.  I’m also very intrigued by your identification of the Challenger explosion as a starting point.

Theodore: As an artist the goal of my work is to get the ideas in your head, so I would say Wangechi Mutu, John Heartfield, Romare Bearden, and I are attempting a kind brain surgery on the mind of the viewer, to do what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o termed “de-colonizing the mind.”  And yes those wounds are the result of damage done to our minds and bodies under capitalism, colonialism, Jim Crow, and the prison industrial complex—a plantation with stock options in sizzling electric chairs…I wonder if an innocent prisoner on his way to the electric chair, who has exhausted all his appeals to a crooked court, I wonder if he feels ‘Post-Black?’

In the two person exhibition “War is a Map of Wounds,” Howardena Pindell and I had at New Jersey City University, I had this quote by Amiri Baraka on the wall of the gallery above my work, for the most part to be directed at the art students: “It is a new world we want not an endowed chair in the concentration camp…art must be our magic weapon to create and re-create the world and our selves as part of it…This is my motto and the standard on which I make my work as magic weapons, created in the ‘Black Labs of the Heart.”

But another way to view that blood is to see it as the artist sacrifice in sweat and tears, Augusta Savages’ tears when she could not get back her sculpture “The Harp” she was commissioned to make for the 1939 New York Worlds’ Fair, that had been inspired by the song ”Lift Every Voice and Sing” and was destroyed after the Fair.

I was frozen when I witnessed the Challenger explosion, the images were so powerful that I started to collage them with images of crying babies, this is how I got into collage. Then I went on from there to collaging the U.$. Capitol building by turning it upside down, first done in my collage Vetoed Dreams of 1995.  Some people have asked me will I turn it right side up because President Obama is in office.  Why, because he is African American?[vi] I say no way; its too early for that, like I said before the scales of justice are not blind and even, and that is why now a world wide struggle is exploding.

Theodore A. Harris, Iced Leaders, 2011, assemblage

Rosalind: I think that may be a critical note that we might end on for now: that while our conversation for this paper has been largely driven by our common concerns and interests in relation to Black learners and communities, and Black artists and their art work, we both understand that the issues are not just “Black and White”—critical thinking, like your collages, is always more nuanced, layered and complex than that.

Theodore: From the outset it has been so great talking with you and we need you in the university and community to debunk how we see and what we think about ourselves in relation to the arts.

Leo Caraballo had been diagnosed with cancer. After encounters with doctors, oncologists, medical institutions and medical insurance agents, her cancer went into remission.

Caraballo, who invited her doctors, surgeons, and bronze sculpture foundry workers to the opening, is a socially perceptive photographer. “Visitations,” her past work, faintly echoing Diane Arbus, documents aspects of death and the funerary rituals connected with this universal passage.

“Visitations” http://www.caraballofarman.net/still/visitations/

Abouali Farmanfarmaian, has just completed his doctorate on cryonics; his dissertation, Secular Immortal, might have informed this project. He is also a film producer ( “Vegas: Based on a true story”: [2009]); and a calculating photographer.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1283971/

caraballo-farman have made several projects together. This current collaboration, Extractions, is the height of their artistic production. Their stunningly beautiful bronze sculptures are unique in contemporary art world-wide. She is from Buenos Aires and he’s from Tehran, the center of the Axis of Evil.

Extractions evolved from diagnosis-conception to completion in about 18 months: caraballo-farman, like many critical artists in New York, have avoided the shallow ambition prevalent within the arts. The current work can be fully understood if one follows their production sequence: Leo Caraballo’s genetic code instructs her body to produce treatable cancer; after exhausting discussions with surgeons they convert the MRI images into 3D models, then they introduce medical scientific knowledge and imagery to bronze sculpture-making experts in a foundry. Imagine explaining to foundry workers who normally make Statues of Liberty to now make sculptures of tumors. I was told that the foundry workers got deep satisfaction from making their bronzes.

The MRI images are what fascinated them. They could now see her actual tumors. Historically, patients haven’t had an image of what is transpiring inside their bodies. The question emerged: Could they convert Caraballo’s cancer into art?

The artists got a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a residency at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center.

caraballo-farman describe their process for the Eyebeam section of their exhibition:

“Ruins (Carcinomas), highlights breast cancer’s links to carcinogens in our everyday environment. Depicting fallen urban landscapes over-run with tumors, the pieces are based on breast cancer tumor forms, imaged and “digitally removed” through a special process devised by caraballo-farman, that combines Magnetic Resonance Imaging and rapid prototyping. The grey ‘support material’ used by 3D printers to build up a form is generally meant to be removed. But [we] used Eyebeam’s 3D printer in such a way as to maximize the architectural form of the printer’s support structures and then hacked at the structures to partially reveal the white tumor embedded.”

They were stopped in their tracks when they considered the entire image of the plastic surrounding a model of the cancer tumour inside. In not removing the 3D printer support structures, the artists faced something they did not predict: clear and direct models of high-rise buildings resembling the World Trade Towers during 9/11. With screw-drivers and other instruments, the buildings were artistically pock-marked.

The Eyebeam Window Gallery exhibits a white field filled with these high-rise towers (20 x 27 cm) with hidden models of tumors inside which we can’t see due to the faceless, horrifying, opaque grey plastic. Depending on one’s point of view, this unpredictable metaphor is accurate, or inanely simple. I walk away from the window feeling unsettled: I am a Canadian-Pakistani looking at models of buildings being 9/11-ed.

Their project comes to fruition at Ramis Barquet Gallery, 532 West 24th Street (very near Eyebeam Window Gallery).

The intelligence of “caraballo-farman / Object Breast Cancer” is to have installed their total exhibition in three contiguous galleries. One sees the metaphor of  9/11 devastation at Eyebeam; then one has to walk outside for about 300 meters to see the larger tumor sculptures at Ramis Barquet Gallery. What was inside the grey models are now larger bronze sculptures, approximately,  40 cm x 50 cm x 25 cm. The gallery swarms with 8 such pieces.

And,  just 30 meters west of Ramis the artists have set up a one-stand jewelry shop at Sebastian+Barquet Gallery, 544 West 24th Street. The tumor necklaces and worry beads are about 6 cm x 6 cm x 1.5 cm. To magnify the irony of  selling tumors to America, the artists formed a company, Object Breast Cancer, and chose a loquacious blond to do the sales pitch. I chatted with her while looking at the sharply lit jewelry. I liked her fresh, blue sky attitude. An intellectual from Haifa, standing nearby suggested that these jewels were the 21st century’s equivalent of The Evil Eye. A percentage of sales goes to cancer research.

At Ramis Gallery, I face the bronzes with fear and confusion. Am I actually going to see beauty in all this? If so, why? What could be the point of using one’s cancer to make art?

The edgeless bronze sculptures, set in front of white walls sit under the bathetic gallery lights. The tribe of metal totems hover over their stands; most have a solid, super-heavy mass core with voluminous wings of thick-and-occasionally-thin chapati-like appendages jutting out into space; there are solar flares ejaculating into the sky; there are things that flutter out of caves like waves of smooth endoplasmic recticumlum which, as one walks around, become multiple heads of Rabelaisian Canada Geese. There are holes in the cores from which there mightn’t be an escape; we see a diagram of CERN traced in a flying arm of deep brown metal; and, here is David’s finger extending out to the cool North Atlantic; in adjoining sculptures I see faces in the shapes of maps of Afghanistan and Tajikistan staring into celestial history. And, more holes, and more caves.

Cancer flows around and around these rewarding sculptures. But what’s the reward? Is the reward to know that some thing beautiful comes from something nasty? This isn’t very deep, is it? A chicken is a beautiful bird. So is roast chicken. Walter Benjamin, in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, (1940), said this about things that are beautiful:

“The assets of culture are not only a document of culture without being at the same time a document of barbarity. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another”.

There is a reason why these artists have calibrated walking time breaks from one exhibition space to the other. Roughly 100 – 300 meters separate the exhibition spaces. This physical spacing gives the beholder time to understand roast chicken and its discontents, or to connect barbarity with civilization. One walks out into the smiling crowds visiting hundreds of other openings in the area. We’re all having a smoke outside. It’s Thursday night in Chelsea, a light drizzle infects the October evening. I’ve walked from models of 9/11-ed buildings to the Bronze Age.

The last time I had such a shock of beauty was when I saw American film-maker Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Eye, (1971: 32 minutes); a documentary shot in a Pittsburg morgue. As with Brakhage’s work, one can’t escape the root source of beauty – dead bodies which become mysterious things hovering in introspective, resplendent space. With precision, his camera trembles over the cool bodies, some with three-degree burns; some car crash victims; some bodies pock-marked with gun shots. The master’s documentary states: please, try not to run from the death that I’m showing you. If you walk out of the cinema, you might lose an appreciation of elegance; lose a sense of elegance and you’ll gain a sense of empty ambition.

caraballo-farman, have guided the audience in a similar way but without being as confrontational as Brakhage: Brakhage used a projection booth, an audience sitting in a darkened room, and a white screen on which to view the slow, methodical cutting open of dead bodies flickering by at 24 frames per second. The only way the beholder could wipe the trance would be to leave the darkened room.

caraballo-farman have, with unusual expertise, made their challenging project relevant to gallery curators, as well as oncologists, surgeons and doctors. The beholder can break the trance proposed by these two artists also: just walk out of the galleries, eat a street-cart meal made by The Halal Brothers and the viewing experience will go into remission. We’re ephemeral entities: these bronzes have a decay rate, but a slower rate than the authority of the flesh that produced them.

Julian Samuel is a friend of caraballo-farman.

www.julianjsamuel.com

caraballo-farman sites:

http://objectbreastcancer.tumblr.com/

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Object-Breast-Cancer-by-caraballo-farman/258608990849813

http://eyebeam.org/events/window-gallery-ruins-carcinomas

Regarding the Horror

http://www.caraballofarman.net/moving/horror/index.html

Visitations

http://www.caraballofarman.net/still/visitations/

caraballofarman.net

Gallery locations:

caraballo-farman / Object Breast Cancer:

Ramis Banquet Gallery

532 West 24th Street, New York, NY

Extractions

Opening Night Performance and Reception

Thursday, October 13th, 6-8 pm

Eyebeam Window Gallery

540 West 21st Street, New York, NY

Ruins (Carcinomas)

Thursday, October 13th, 6-8pm

Sebastian+Barquet

544 West 24th Street, New York, NY

OBC Jewelry Launch

October 13th, 6-8pm

Jason is a 36 year old male.  Thoroughly addicted to pushing charcoal and ink around paper, he is also the co-creator and director of EN MASSE, a large-scale collaborative drawing initiative based out of Montreal.  Graduated from Alberta College of Art and Design in 1996, with distinction.

You can see other works by Jason Botkin at: http://www.jasonbotkin.com

and for En Masse:  http://enmasse.info/

Artist Statement:

These images reflect reflection, looking in and looking out.  It is the essence of otherness, of being apart and yet, also of coming together.  Each image is a composite of smaller ones and the completion of the parts create the whole.

BY WHOLE

CLOUDS-LINES

Fridge

Looking in

Plant

POLE AND WIRE

Printed originally by Viewpoints, The State of the Arts in the Middle East: Volume IV, The Middle East Institute, Washington, DC, March 2010.  Reprinted with permission.

*******

The visual art of Emily Jacir, « Where We Come From » (2003), and Eman Haram’s photo exhibit, «Involuntary Memory» (2006), inscribe a memory that resists the systematic effacement of collective history, and a loss inherent in any displacement.[1] It is a memory that is intimate and plural, fluid and performative, that spans across many displacements and transformations. Rather than preserving a memory of what was, loss emerges in their work as continuous, not an event passed. Memory, however, rooted in the present, opens onto a future. Through different media, their work becomes a conscious intervention to counter such historical erasure and violent fragmentation. A dynamic search for form that could speak to the loss reveals how the political need not be at odds with the aesthetic. The human dimension of loss transcends any particular identity in their work without eliding the historical.

Palestinian artists are creating new transnational networks, languages, and identities, in the way they employ mass culture, performance art, and media. Their art is in turn pluralized by this use. It is a cultural expression marked by unique images and language. Like the poems of Mahmoud Darwish and the stories of Ghassan Kanafani, this art resists the erasure of Palestinian history, but it ultimately transforms and reinvents tradition through medium, image, and language. It also transforms prevalent notions of identity and of belonging. Henceforth, « dislocations felt by displaced subjects towards disrupted histories and to shifting and transient national identities» will constitute this belonging.[2] As exilic identities they are “constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformations and difference.”[3]

Eman Haram, “All the Erased Faces Haunt My Remembrances,” 2006.

In the last decade, Palestinian esthetic production, local and diasporic, has gained increasing visibility and recognition on the international scene. (Emily Jacir’s prestigious Hugo Boss Prize in 2008 and Sharif Waked’s exhibits in the Tate Modern and the Guggenheim are but the latest examples). This attention is testimony to the innovations of the young artists and is crucial to the dissemination of an artistic experience that has historically remained on the margins. It also points to a wider and more extensive experimentation that is taking place in the Palestinian cultural scene. Have the 1990’s heralded a new period of creativity in the wake of Oslo, and “as a result of the decentralization of the Palestinian political scene,” as Ilan Pappé argues?[4] Kamal Boullata notes the number of women among the leading innovators and points to the challenges of tracing developments in Palestinian art « across disconnected territories and different cultural environments.”[5]

Eman Haram, “Untitled,” 2006.

Marked by its diversity, whereby dispersal and rupture, which began in 1948, become points of inscription, this esthetic corpus does not relate a unified story of the Palestinian experience. While each artist interrogates identity in a unique manner, it is the negotiation of the personal and the collective, the historic and the esthetic that they seem to share.[6] This diversity also manifests itself in the use of the medium, in the creation of a new language in the visual work of art (photography, spatial installation, video, personal performance). Boullata argues, however, that “memory of place” unites Palestinian artists of the post-Nakba period, despite their dispersal.[7] More than individual visions, this art has incorporated aspects of global culture to affirm its national belonging as it addresses Western audiences and as it remains deeply rooted in Palestinian life. More importantly, Palestinian identity is revealed in these works as plural and dynamic.

Emily Jacir’ “Where We Come From” speaks of the fundamental link of memory and loss, life and art, the collective exile and the personal displacement: It is « coming from my experience of spending my whole life going back and forth between Palestine and other parts of the world.”[8] “Where We Come From” performs both the displacement of Palestinians and the restrictions on their movement. The artist herself, an American citizen, is able to travel. In this work, she carries out personal requests of Palestinians who cannot go home, or cannot cross certain borders of their country to see friends or family, who ask her to visit particular places and people dear to them. In documenting her visits in photographs, she reveals the absurd and abject circumstances in which Palestinians often find themselves, conditions in which they lack freedom of movement among others. She states: “I have seen the deliberate fragmentation of our lands and the isolation of our people from each other by the Israelis. This is an extreme form of violence. For me, this piece was a dialogue between ourselves across these artificial islands and borders that have been created. I conceived of this piece for Palestine. »[9] Her photos reflect the dispersion that she tries to overcome: images of absence mark incomplete lives, and yet they create links with others.[10]

One such wish is from Jihad, identified in an Arabic-English bilingual text as “Born in Shati Refugee Camp, Gaza City/Living in Ramallah/Gazan I.D. card/Father and mother from Asdud/ (exiled in 1948).” The text reads: “Visit my mother, hug and kiss her…Visit the sea at sunset and smell it for me and walk a bit…enough. Am I greedy?…I left Gaza for Ramallah in 1995 and cannot go back. I also cannot move to any place in the West Bank because of the Israeli restrictions….” A note is included at the bottom describing the visit, how they had tea, how the mother inquired after Jihad. The color image next to the text shows the back of the artist as she holds and kisses the mother who is closer to the viewer.[11]

Jacir’s work testifies to irrecoverable loss and to a belonging that persists against all fragmentation. Ultimately her images are a “memorial to untold stories”[12]: « anti-images, unspectacular private pictures,» « a self-portrait which also speaks collectively of a people, » a « personal archive as a proxy for the disappearing archives of Palestine. »[13] The artist nonetheless recognizes certain paradoxes of her art project: « Where We Come From is a failure in some way. I am not sure how to reconcile the notion that non-Palestinians are being entertained by our sorrows and dreams… »[14] Yet, consequently, she is no longer allowed to go to Gaza and to certain parts of the West Bank: « Jacir could not create this work today. »[15]

Eman Haram’s « Involuntary Memory» also ruminates on the process of loss but as erasure, sometimes due to the nature of memory but more significantly as historical effacements, a process where memory nonetheless also persists. Involuntary memory represents “the more indirect and deep sense of personal experience (times, places, feelings, and situations) that are not subject to immediate recall but instead are involuntarily triggered by objects or events associated with that experience. »[16] Calling her photographic experiments “ongoing explorations,” and “disconnected lives,” Haram suggests in this series how history is intimately at the heart of her art, where the self also issues forth a collective experience, where memory recalls a forgetting. Her photos expose the effacement, and by so doing also resist it.

Eman Haram, “Erasures,” 2007.

“Untitled” (composite digital photo, 2006) uses language in conjunction with image to clearly evoke historical erasures of identity, of the past, of collectivities. The fading, blurred images of faces recall the inscription of effacement. The black and white seems to evoke the past, as the image’s grainy quality evokes a negative of a receding original. The words too are faded, to differing degrees: “colonized” and “erased” alluding to the past, while “occidentalized,” “occupied,” and “justified” in bold, suggest the present. The word “erased” echoes with each historical violence named. An accusation and a judgment frame the words, “colonized. erased.. occidentalized.. erased.. erased.. occupied.. justified.” Language provokes, by what remains essentially unsaid. The rhythm of language coincides with the image and forcefully drills against that vanishing. Just like the suspension points, the image remains an overture rather than a foreclosed conclusion. The English words target an audience. The word “occidentalized” is used rather than “westernized,” which is an anglicized rendition of the French word. Such use further performs this process of erasure in the layering of identities: the Palestinian-American artist now living in Francophone Montreal (having lived previously in the United States, Syria, and Lebanon) has been further estranged from the English she uses. The artist’s language occupies the position of « in-between » many languages, revealing a critical posture, and “the continuous quest for a language of self-expression.”[17]

“All the Erased Faces Haunt my Remembrances” (2006, constructed digital photo) reveals the blurred images of women’s faces turned to the viewer as they advance forward.  In contrasting black forms to white headscarves, the remembrances have clearly turned to haunting, and the group of passersby strangely inhabit the self. The haunting of collectivities in both images are projections of the intimate self, the past that continues to inhabit the present. The haunting of that which should no longer be there seems to work counter to the erasure, even while defining its nature (i.e. that the haunting is that of all erasures of selves, whether political or social). The encompassing “all” embraces a collectivity of women without losing the singularity of the self.

Eman Haram, “Erase the Oblivion,” 2006.

In “Erasures,” (composite digital photo, 2007) schoolgirls are photographed from the shoulders down, in uniform clothes and postures. As education is primarily concerned with the mind, the absence of heads implies effacements by a process of education. As in the artist’s history of growing up attending a protestant school, education is linked to Western missions. The ex-ray dimension of the image exemplifies a photographic exploration of the self where the object becomes elusive. Memory captures a searing image. One panel bordered and colored arbitrarily marks a self.

“Erase the oblivion” (2006, constructed digital photo) presents a likely family photo, and a seemingly natural process of fading away juxtaposed to the torn borders between the women, as if in panels, and the angst of the appeal to “erase the oblivion.” The series seems to enumerate various erasures, from the historical and the social to the seemingly natural, that occupy the self.

 Uneasy with solely political interpretation of their work, Palestinian artists also resist the eliding of its political dimensions.  While art may contribute to healing social and historical wounds, both artists are vigilant to the way art can be easily recuperated for the enjoyment of others without registering the protest.[18] This art has in its very constitution challenged such recuperations. In Edward Said’s words, this art becomes a “defiant memory,” “unwilling to let go of the past,” while being marked by change. It is devoid of “sentimental homecoming,” reflecting “a state of lucid exile,” that “offers neither rest nor respite.” [19]

—

[2] Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (NY: Routledge, 2000), p. 15.

[3] Stuart Hall, « Cultural Identity and Diaspora, » in Diaspora and Visual Culture : Representing Africans and Jews, eds. Sydelle Rubin and Nicholas Mirzoeff (NY : Routledge, 2000), cited in Fran Lloyd, Contemporary Arab Women’s Art : Dialogues of the Present (London : Women’s Art Library, 1999), p. 34.

[4] Ilan Pappé, The Modern Middle East (New York: Routledge, 2005),  p. 216.

[5] Several studies on Palestinian art have appeared in the last years, most notably Kamal Boullata’s Palestinian Art: From 1850 to the Present (London: Dar Saqi, 2009) and Gannit Ankori’s work, Palestinian Art (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). See Boullata pp. 30 and 28.

[6] See Ankori, pp. 8 and 217; see also Boullata’s work. 

[7] See Ankori, pp. 21, 18. Narratives about Palestinian art tend to locate its beginning in 1948, although many acknowledge that a vibrant art movement existed before the Nakba and is now difficult to trace.

[8] Jacir, in an interview with Stella Rollig, Belongings, p. 9.

[9] Jacir speaking to Rollig, p. 9.

[10] T. J. Demos,”Poetry’s Beyond,” The Hugo Boss Prize 2008, p. 59.

[11] See Belongings, n. p.

[12] Cited in Demos, p. 59.

[13] Andreas Bauer and Roland Wäspe, Installation Shots at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, pp. 9-10.

[14] Jacir speaking to Rollig, p. 10.

[15] Demos, pp. 61, 62.

[16] Nada Shabout, Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics (Gainesville: University of Florida, 2007), p. 122.

[17] Ankori, p. 173.

[18] For a discussion on the cooption of Palestinian art, see Yara al-Ghadban, “The Ghost in the Art Work,” blog posted by Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism Blog at 5:05 AM, September 10, 2009, can be accessed at http://jhbwtc.blogspot.com/.

[19] See Edward Said, “The Art of Displacement: Mona Hattoum’s Logic of Irreconcilables,” in The Entire World as a Foreign Land (London: Tate Gallery, 2000), pp. 7-17, Cited in Boullata, p. 176, and in Ankori, p. 154.

Bio:

Sandra Levy, originally from Montreal, now resides in Victoria, B.C. She studied art at Concordia University, École des Beaux Arts de Montréal and Arizona State University.  She also did graduate work in biology at Concordia University.  She taught art for many years at Dawson College.  She has exhibited in Montreal, Ottawa, Drummondville and Victoria and has many works in private collections. 

Artist statement:

As a scientist, I recognize trees as the lungs of the earth, purifying the air and playing a large role in energy and nutrient cycling.  As an artist I am sensitive to the magnificence, grace and power expressed in their forms, even when they are reduced to stumps. 

The titles come from the location where these works were painted. Copsewood Pond is a small, natural area, part of a nature trail. The trees are remnants of Douglas Firs after the elements and insects have reduced them to skeletons.

Tanglewood Stump, 17 1/2 x 23 1/2 inches,Charcoal 2010

Tanglewood Stump, 27 x 27 inches, Oil 2010

Thistlewood Stump, 18 x 24 inches, Charcoal 2009

Carolwood Maple, 19 x 25 inches, Oil 2009

Garry Oak, 24 x 24 inches, Oil 2010

Copsewood Pond, 22 x 24 inches, Oil 2009

Copsewood Pond Stump, 27 x 30 inches, Oil 2009

Copsewood, 24 x 22 inches, Oil 2009

Click on pictures to enlarge them.

I almost took a Sculpture class once.  The first assignment which was to create an outdoor installation and my idea was to address the manner in which a person who lives on the street becomes perceived as being of the streets, like an organic part of the urban landscape.  I propped up a stuffed human form dressed in old clothing in a corner, almost camouflaged amid discarded materials and garbage bags.  Unfortunately, it was “not art” and I ended up leaving the class, but I did continue to think about the spatial relationships between people and the materials they use and discard.

A few years later, I watched a television documentary about people who live and work in a Mexico City garbage dump.  People who work in the dumps wading through the garbage and collecting and sorting recyclable materials to sell are referred to as the pepenadores, ‘the garbage people’.  Thousands not only work but live in the dumps, building their homes out of and on top of garbage.  In the documentary a woman showed a reporter how she had organized and decorated her small dwelling, built of cardboard and scraps of metals and plastics.  She was hospitable and welcomed the guest and cameras into her space.

All over the world, -from Mexico to Manila, Philippines to Itipini, South Africa to Olinda, Brazil; from Bangkok, Thailand to Port au Prince, Haiti, to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to Managua, Nicaragua; and from Mumbai, India, to Cairo, Egypt to Tegucigalpa, Honduras to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, -people live and children are born in garbage dumps, living their lives as society’s discarded material.  The very definition of garbage, includes reference to people who are considered “totally worthless”.  The literal distinction then, between a discarded refrigerator and the person sleeping in it in a garbage dump does not exist.  Likewise, the distinction I had attempted to address in the sculpture class, between inanimate and living urban refuse.  Apparently, human worth, -the moral and social value of every person- is not a given.  Those who live in the assigned residential spaces are people; those who do not are somehow different.  As if the unstable spaces they occupy interact with their bodies, disrupting the boundary between what is interior and exterior, and creating such species as garbage-people.

I began to construct the Study for Berth Series as a response to what I had learned.  I found referring to the space on which the Study was being built as a garbage dump problematic and began calling it ‘the village’; not to deny the location, but to acknowledge a space where people live together as a community.  The documentary and subsequent research had left me pondering the human drive to organize and decorate the spaces in which we live, and the role this ordering plays in defining a space as “home”.  I had recently been told that a family member “did not have an address” and was living in his car in a major American city.  I wondered; is not having an address the same thing as being homeless?  What qualifies as a ‘home’?  And how does having a particular kind of ‘home’ protect us from melding with our environment?

I used many personal artefacts in the Study, parting with them and symbolically with various pasts each signified in my life (…a piece of the old such-and-such that so-and-so gave me or that I saved from such and such…). The idea of passing these things on to be recycled by the population of the village added a ritualistic and cathartic element to the project.  Reusing the items drained them of their former meanings and I found recycling material culture and giving new life to the fragments as a way of resituating my self in the world.  

Eventually the ‘village’ became too crowded, and The Berth Series was born, in a way an expansion from the dump into a shanty town or barrio.  I chose the word berth thinking about how each of us are born (birthed) into certain circumstances, with more or less space to manoeuvre and reposition ourselves.   We each are assigned a starting berth in the world, and this personal location largely determines the kinds of subjects we become and our possible future locations.

Throughout the series I struggled with a fear of romanticizing poverty, while wanting to capture the beauty of both the strange aesthetic of colourful debris and of the human interaction and daily living that was taking place within each space.   I was mindful of coveting an imagined non-industrial, non-materialistic, indigenous culture.    Working with the individual berths quite different than the village; it felt as though there had been a growth and fragmentation, and that the berths represented a new form of alienation and containment.  Compartmentalizing impoverished people in the margins of society enables us to control how much of them and the reality of their circumstances that we see and likewise, most of the berths have lids that can close and safely suppress, if not conceal the contents.  Viewers have to get close to the berth, repositioning either themselves or the berths in order to truly gaze at the colourful people going about their lives inside.

Sieglinde Lemke has argued that a diaspora aesthetic (referring to the African Diaspora) is concerned with the dialectic of the ‘home’ and the ‘host land’, and often reflects a nostalgic yearning for diasporic roots[i].  This frame can be applied to the Berth Series in that the work reflects such nostalgia and concern with ‘home’ and homelessness, but the success of the work remains questionable.   Several viewers have commented that they would like to live in a particular berth, suggesting that I captured something desirable in the berths, -perhaps a sense of communalism,-but not the stark, toxic reality of living amid garbage.  The one time the Series was exhibited feedback included one viewer who wished she had the outfit one of the figures in a berth was wearing, and another that felt it was a shame that the berths were ‘such dreary colours’.  In the way these comments suggest, I have found that especially treated individually, the berths are too easy to treat like decorative little underdeveloped doll houses.  They need the strength of their numbers to make a statement, so the twenty-four berths should have been attached together.  To exhibit them again I would use no less than one hundred, precariously stacked and attached to one another on a mound of rotting garbage.

I have found traces of the ideas behind both my attempted outdoor installation and The Berth Series realized with great success in the work of Nigerian artist Dilomprizulike, “The Junkman from Africa”, and therefore conclude this reflection with a brief discussion of his work.  Dilomprizulike builds assemblage people out of ‘junk’ and old clothing that he finds in his environment.  He lives with his family on an isolated compound in Lagos called the Junkyard, where he runs the Junkyard Museum of Awkward Things and now offers studio spaces, artist in residency and international exchange programs.  For Dilomprizulike “The junkyard is a heap of things that we call junk, but really, a heap of materials that tell stories, just like Lagos is a heap of human beings, cars and stuff that tell stories as well.”[ii]

Dilomprizulike was born Dil Humphrey-Umezulike.  He explains that his name Dilomprizulike is an icon, and that an icon “is defined as the significance or the meaning of a thing.”[iii]  His comment recalls the weight attached to naming in African cultural traditions, and in naming himself the “Junkman from Africa” he assigns himself the role of junk-keeper, while at the same time flirts with the identity of junk-man, like the pepenadores in the Mexican dump.    He refers to his name as the meaning of a thing rather than of a person, thus blurring the boundary between himself and his junk.  For Dilomprizulike, the meaning of his life lies in his role as Junkman; not just any Junkman, but The Junkman from Africa.  At a 2005 exhibition Dilomprizulike commented that contents of the rucksack worn by one of his figures are “pointers to what is happening in his life”.  When asked “who is he?” the Junkman answered “He is one of us.”[iv]

Dilomprizulike’s assemblage installations refer to what he describes as “the alienated situation of the African in his own society” and remind us that African dislocation and fragmentation exists within the continent as well as without.  The artist explains: “The alienated situation of the African in his own society becomes tragic. There is a struggle inside him, a consciousness of living with the complications of an imposed civilisation. He can no longer go back to pick up the fragments of his father’s shattered culture; neither is he equipped enough to keep pace with the white-man’s world.”[v]  As has been noted elsewhere, Dilomprizulike’s description of the struggle to achieve balance “between the Nigerian city-man and his bruised knowledge of his authentic roots”[vi] echoes Frantz Fanon’s analysis of black alienation resulting from colonialism and the legacy of the colonial encounter.[vii]

Dilomprizulike’s figures appear to be of the environment in which they are installed and also appear to be of one another.  As artist Uchechukwu James-Iroha has put it in reference to Dilomprizulike’s 2003 “Waiting for the Bus” (shown), the work seems to be one piece “broken into individual, but very organized bits”.[viii] The achievement of this sense of oneness creates the sense that the figures exist and move communally, in this case waiting together for the bus “to the promised land, in the form of economic prosperity, development and better lives.”[ix] 

And perhaps to ward against any nostalgic Western pining (diasporic or otherwise), on being asked if he feels an association with the figures waiting for the bus, Dilomprizulike’s response is that “The work – as pieces, individuals or as a whole – are living their own lives, we are watching them. There are no sentiments about them.”

[ii] Dilomprizulike quoted in Wood, Molara (2005) “Dilomprizulike: Wear and Tear”, The Gaurdian, Nigeria Retrieved 31-07-2009 from: http://www.odili.net/news/source/2005/apr/17/1.html

[iii] Dilomprizulike, quoted in “Dilomprizulike: The ‘Junkman From Africa’ (Nigeria)”, in Spring, Chris (2008) ANGAZA AFRICA: African Art Now.  Exh. Cat. Laurence King Publishing Ltd., London. p. 92.

[iv] Wood, Molara (2005)

[v] Dilomprizulike (2002) Africas: The artist and the City: A journey and exhibtion”, quoted in “Biographical data: Dil Humphrey-Umezulike”, African Success: People changing the face of Africa.  Retrieved 31-07-2009 from: http://www.africansuccess.org/visuFiche.php?id=165&lang=en

[vi] Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent (2005), Teachers’ package.  Hayward Gallery, South Bank Center, London. Retrieved 31.07.2009 from: http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/minisites/africaremix/source/AfricaRemix.pdf

[vii] “Biographical data: Dil Humphrey-Umezulike”

[viii] Quoted in Wood (2005)

[ix] ibid

 All works below by rosalind hampton except Image 5 and 12.  These works are by by Dilomprizulike.

Self-taught in traditional photographic practice, dating to the 1960′s, David Duchow switched to the less-polluting digital in the late 1990′s. In 2001 he began to flip images, creating a Rorschach-like mirrored result. Central to his work is the harmony of music, or spoken word, and image.  See “Season in Hell” or “Summer”, amongst the videos at You Tube, for examples of this. Steve Kilbey recites Rimbaud in Season in Hell, to a series of altered Duchow self-portraits.  He also commissioned David to make videos for a recent album and projected his images on a large screen during concerts in Australia. Kilbey’s art-rock group, The Church, debuted David’s work as a backdrop in concert at the Sydney Opera House in July of 2003.

To quote Steve Kilbey, from his blog, “The Time Being” (of August 31, 2008):

“In mirror images of nature David locates an incredible symmetry.

Gods and devils appear; Hindu deities hidden in the patterns of a tree’s roots….

The images merge slowly into each other.

They dissolve, producing more illusions and half-sightings….”

The Video:

Friends Are Gone was made in May of 2009, to the song of this title, by Steve Kilbey and Martin Kennedy.

Photography:

01 A Face in The Crowd: a photograph of ice, with dead bulrush reeds imbedded.

02 Street Seen NYC : it’s 1972, streets of New York City… mirrored and altered…. Elements of  drawing. Shades of sepia.

03 Montreal Street Seen  0017/6: this image began as a straight photo of a butcher in his shop window, with fluorescent lights above.  The original was transformed, through hundreds of steps in Photoshop.  The butcher isn’t discernable any more… replaced by an imaginary figure, seemingly in a state of prayer, in the centre of this Rorschach image.

04 The New Mexico Desert: summer sky, pastel, tinted. The 1980′s; forays into desolate spaces with captivating skies.

05 At Nature’s alter: My rural “back yard”, Fred’s pasture.

06 Radium Hotsprings, British Columbia: flipped positive and negative, pastel interplay and counterpoint.

07 Nature’s alter #2: Forest floor vegetation…. Certain elements emphasized.  The light falls a certain way.. and then the appearance of a head, torso, arms raised.

08 McGill Campus… dream image of decades past: I was commissioned in the late 1980′s to photograph certain McGill University buildings. This is one of those photographs, mirrored vertically.

For more information regarding David Duchow’s work:

His website:    http://www.artman8764.com/index.htm

You tube Channel:    http://www.youtube.com/user/artman8764

Not What You Say Video:      http://www.vimeo.com/2342083

File Under Travel Video:      http://www.vimeo.com/2341711

Photos and Video  © David Duchow 2001-2009

Music in the Video  © Steve Kilbey and Martin Kennedy 2009

Artist Biography: 

Lyne Lapointe’s career dates back to the early eighties, when she rapidly made a name for herself as one of the most promising artists of her generation. Between 1983 and 1994, Lyne Lapointe created ground-breaking sight specific works in collaboration with critic and artist Martha Fleming. These public art projects took place in abandoned buildings in Montreal, as well as in New York, London, Madrid and São Paulo. Lapointe has since moved from this collaborative undertaking and, in 2002, a survey of her solo work was organized and toured by the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, followed by a number of individual and group exhibitions across the country and abroad. Lapointe’s work is included in major Canadian public and private collections.

The following exhibit was shown at the SBC galerie d’art contemporain in Montreal, from Septermber 24 to October 25, 2008 and included a special musical performance with Jean Derome, Saturday, September 27, 2008.  

La Clef

La Clef is a kinetic installation made up of eight elements featuring diverse musical instruments, mechanisms, electric motors, and mixed media. The instruments include a cither, a mandolin, an accordion and a rain maker. In the series, Ms. Lapointe focuses on automata and the damaged body. She probes the fallible machinery of the human body, which, despite all, withstands accidents and the imperfections it is fraught with.

Jean Derome is a saxophonist, flutist, composer and improvisational musician, a member of a number of jazz ensembles, and the founder of the Ambiances Magnétiques label.

He is as a major creative force in the current Quebec music scene and has participated in numerous international projects. His improvised performances create an artistic dialogue with the works of Lyne Lapointe. The eclecticism and plurality of the acoustic and visual languages is unique to these artists.   (Extracted from text by:  SBC galerie d’art contemporain)

All Photos:  Lyne Lapointe.   La Clef, Courtoisie de SBC galerie d’art contemporain, photo : Bettina Hoffman, 2008.