As part of the massive near year long Pacific Standard Time series of exhibitions exploring the post-World War II Los Angeles art scene, curator Michael Duncan’s survey L.A. Raw – Abject Expressionism in Los Angeles 1945-1980, from Rico Lebrun to Paul McCartney at the Pasadena Museum of California Art stands out as the most memorable and powerful—and least publicized—of all the PST offerings. An in-depth investigation of notable and less familiar artists of that period who were driven by “introspection and angst” to make “socially relevant art ,“ the exhibition raises as many questions about the current state of art in the face of equally compelling issues.

In his comprehensively researched book/catalogue (with an afterword by critic/art historian Peter Selz) Duncan traces the more recent figurative work of Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibone and Jim Shaw, even such exhibitions as the darkly illuminating 1992 “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990’s” to its roots in a “largely neglected, localized postwar legacy stemming from the figurative expressionists who dominated the art world after World War II.” At a time when American art was dominated by the highly dogmatic and exclusionary New York School of Abstract Expressionism and later Minimalism and Conceptualism, the figurative art as practiced by the forty one California artists highlighted here emphasized “a dark, reductive vision of humanity, a kind of ‘abject expressionism’ .” The prominence of the defense industry on the West Coast, the looming threat of atomic annihilation with nearby nuclear testing grounds in the deserts, Cold War paranoia, McCarthyism, and the aftermath of Nazi atrocities and U.S. Japanese internment camps, produced in Southern California an artistic climate of introspection and angst that provoked intense, emotive examinations of human psychology, culture and society.

Although subliminally manifest in the film noir of the 40’s and 50’s with their Los Angeles backdrops or in the occasional “On the Beach”, battle and monster movies, those moods and sentiments were more often eclipsed by Hollywood’s sunny musicals and TV fare promoting wholesome conformist “American values”. For serious engaged artists, however, Duncan tells us …”the oppressive political atmosphere fostered a sense of mistrust, social disconnection and a basic questioning of humanistic values.” Local murals in Southern California by Orozco, Siquieros, and Rivera were crucial, Duncan explains, as sources of inspiration for the L.A. artists of the postwar period. Further, owing to the pre-war presence of European intellectuals like Aldous Huxley or Bertolt Brecht who had fled the Nazis, a small group of émigré’ dealers who exhibited banned German Expressionism, and the exposure to the Arensberg Collection of stellar European figurative modernists like Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico, a small group of artists in what constituted the art scene, embraced expressionism and the human figure. Although all gifted in Old Masters style draftsmanship, Duncan describes charismatic artists like Rico LeBrun and Howard Warshaw as less interested in realistic rendering than in passionately and viscerally responding to “the grim nature” of their times. “Abject” as attached to expressionism then seems to refer to human misery, wretchedness and degradation, whether depictions of extermination camps, eschatological scenarios, (then) shocking sexual acts, or states of powerlessless. Thus we see here LeBrun’s cubistic closeup of a stack of decaying, emaciated limbs in his 1956 Buchenwald Cart or his The Magdalene (1950) surely echoing the contorted pain of Picasso’s victims in Guernica which LeBrun most likely viewed in its 1939 Los Angeles visit. Later ink wash on paper studies like The Oppressor (after deSade) (1962) reduce the female nude to a rear viewed, high heeled gaping orifice, a foreshadowing of the feminist art of the late 60’s and 70’s. The closely allied Warshaw is represented among other works, by the terrifying End of the World (1947), a highly theatrical, post apocalyptic scene featuring alien-like levitating figures posed in a death dance above a gloomy gas shrouded landscape. Evidence of his antagonism to Abstract Expressionism in which the lack of subject matter signified “cultural amnesia” and a degraded postwar society and culture, Warshaw steadfastly professed his “faith in human values and the transcendent possibilities of art.” A similar embrace of the humanistic and existential potentials of art permeated Jack Zajac’s sculptures from the late 50’s based on Renaissance scenes of the deposition of Christ’s body. Critic Henry Seldis writing at the time claimed artists such as Zajac displayed a “pride in the tradition of their art [that] is coupled with a true humility.” Zajac’s 90 degree angled fiberglass figure, one hand touching the ground, head turned upward is one of the most profoundly spiritual works of the era, embodying the doubts and dilemmas of world caught between momentous life and death decisions – a “where do we go from here?” Yet still others of the period like Arnold Mesches, Wallace Berman, Connor Everts, Cameron, John Altoon and Edward Kienholz pursued shocking, provocative, unabashedly erotic, anguished or subversive political narratives in response to the repressive, oppressive Eisenhower era climate. They endured accusations of public obscenity (Everts, Cameron and Berman), pornography (Kienholz), were subjected to detailed FBI dossiers (Mesches), and even had their studios ransacked and the contents destroyed (Everts). Work after work in the exhibition, though often seeming overwrought, brutal, wrenching, or tortuous, such as Everts’ highly sexualized but beautifully rendered 1965 charcoal drawings, was instrumental in setting the stage for the counterculture and the ensuing artistic preoccupations with body politics, sexual identity, and protest of the next 30 years.

By the mid 60’s, however, the first wave of postwar California artists was being displaced by a younger, hipper “Cool School” with artists like Billy Al Bengston and Ed Ruscha who celebrated what critic and painter Peter Plagens called the “Sunshine Muse” in one of the first books to define West Coast artmaking. 50’s figurative art and all that went with it was considered passe’, the “Lebrun pall” according to Walter Hopps. Robert Cremean, a sensitive sculptor whose finely finished carved wooden forms reflect a synthesis of masculine and feminine that addressed a “distinctly homosexual” orientation responded to being forgotten by presciently commenting that “art and mass culture are synonymous…where the synonym for Art is entertainment..Art for Fun and profit.” The obscurity of Cremean in contrast to Ed Ruscha’s million-dollar-plus recent auction prices is also indicative of the continuing preferences for the less explicit, more ambiguous content of that rising younger generation.

While the Cool School followed the sun and mon, figurative artists such as African Americans Rico Lebrun, David Hammons, Betty Saar, John Outterbridge, and Mexican American Judy Baca, and Japanese American Ben Sakoguchi alternatively turned their attention to challenging social issues like racial discrimination and gender equality. Baca gathered gang members to paint murals and initiated city wide projects, the most notable being the epic The Great Wall of Los Angeles which commemorated the contributions to California made by nearly every ethnicity and culture from Native Americans to African Americans. It was so vast in scale as to be virtually un-ignorable. Using images from pop culture and mass media, Sakoguchi revealed the political turmoil and media explosion of the 60’s. Never losing his sense of social commentary, he created a huge installation dedicated to victims of the AIDS crisis in 1992. Charles White’s monumental and confrontational portrayal of African American womanhood J’accuse (1966), a towering icon of dignity and immovability speaks as powerfully to the enduring racism of today as it did to Civil Rights era prejudices. Photographers like Robert Heineken and Wallace Berman– perhaps following the lead of the highly experimental Edmund Teske whose dreamy multiple exposures and composite printing techniques also embraced a homo eroticism—made use of revolutionary approaches to transcend and expand the boundaries of photography. As seen here in Wallace Berman’s image transfers and Robert Heineken’s re-formatting and collaging of mass media imagery, they addressed sexual politics, current events, and in Berman’s case, espoused mysticism. For Berman, Duncan writes it “had nothing to do with Duchampian gamesmanship or Naumanesque anomie” that were propelling the conceptual practices of the time.

In the early 1970’s, feminist Judy Chicago had established the Feminist Art Program at Cal Arts and works such as Gunsmoke (1971) a photo depicting Chicago fellating a pistol, or Red Flag (1972) depicting a bloody tampon doubling as a penis being pulled from a woman’s body, are hands down, among the most memorable icons in the struggle against sexism. Performance art such as practiced at the Los Angeles Woman’s Building was flourishing and designed to encourage participation and interaction with the audiences. Artists such as Barbara Smith, shown with her nude body covered with lipstick smooches (1977) and Nancy Buchanan with Tar Baby (1977) attacked patriarchal, mainstream media and advertising female stereotypes. Of all the performance artists of the time Chris Burden achieved the most notoriety by confining himself to extreme situations or most spectacularly, having himself shot or crucified on the roof of a VW Beetle. Multi-layered meditations on life and death, violence, spirituality, the nature of contemporary art itself, Burden’s “body as testing ground” or “physical expressionism” virtually defined performance art for several decades. Likewise, Paul McCarthy whom we see in numerous early videos staged body process and food heavy performances to explode “conventional social and cultural norms ….and to probe the human condition at its most abject state.” Even now, as Duncan states, his recent performances seem compelled to invert much of what America values—from Disneyland to kitsch. Kim Jones’ ritualistic, twelve hour walking, anti-war performances as Mudman (1973) re-enacted the pain he suffered in Vietnam and “questioned social and political events, revealing inner complexities and contradictions.” While the appearances of this work were often quite disturbing and grotesque, these artists were intent on liberation from bourgeois conventionality and limitations and often employed dark humor. As such, they shifted the despair of the postwar period to a sense that art, by becoming more visible, even sensational, could have an impact in redefining cultural attitudes and in empowering the marginalized and disenfranchised. The artists’ imposing, collaborative Peace Tower (1966) erected on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles was highly symbolic of this idealism and the desire for connecting to a wider viewership that helped shape their visions.

Mainstream contemporary American painting of the mid 1970’s embraced Artforum magazine sanctioned reductivism/Minimalism or “post-painterly abstraction” in which painting was purged of narrative content or anything not intrinsic to the properties of a medium itself. The concurrent emergence of Pop Art signaled a resurgence in a type of figuration more allied with Dada and heavily doused with irony. Warhol’s Factory was in full production mode and suggestions of any cultural critiques—such as his electric chair and dollar sign silkscreens– were often undermined by Warhol’s simultaneous, most often tongue and cheek, infatuation with celebrities and success (“good business is the best art” or describing his fantasy of himself, “There goes the richest person in the world.”) While performance artists were deemed radical and boundary defying, West Coast painters who continued to work in figurative modes to explore social issues at this time did not enjoy the rising popularity and financial rewards of the influential New York scene. Lynn Foulkes, who repudiated Pop art for its “emptied content” and negative influence on contemporary art, instead made highly crafted, often gory portraits and tableaux that attacked corrupt corporate, military and art officials and bureaucrats. His strident work, soon to be the subject of a retrospective at the Hammer Museum, tragic-comically lampoons a soulless, mass marketed America with a fervor unabated since the 1970’s.

Contemporary critical theory in the 1970’s and 80’s was examining terms like “humanism” in light of patriarchy and colonial oppression so that dissent or social critique in art came to be expressed more in light of deconstructive concepts and theories and  with photo imagery and text rather than via the more loaded older terminology and “bourgeois, commodified” medium of painting.  Despite its unfashionable  approach and the lack of any significant national attention, California painters like James Strombotne, Joyce Treiman, John Paul Jones and the Swiss émigré Hans Burkhardt continued to make deeply emotional and affecting art “concerned with the human condition.”The neo-expressionist painting trends in the 1980’s lauded and revived expressionistic figuration and for a brief time artists such as German Anselm Kiefer or American Leon Golub, and a number of feminist painters engaged in disconcerting subject matter with attention to formal and technical investigations. In the L.A. Raw group, Jim Morphesis’s dramatic paint and gold leaf slathered wall constructions derived from Christian iconography are aligned with the more nationally recognized painters in their re-engagement of historical representational modes and subjects with gestural immediacy.

Duncan correctly draws the lineage from the postwar artists to contemporary artists like the late Mike Kelly whose provocative performances and installations dwelt in the underbelly of consumerist America and unmasked our glib hypocrisies. The focus of some of the most acclaimed painters like Laura Owens or Luc Tuymans at the moment, however, seems to be on abjection again. This time around, however, the effect is more of an endgame: the despair feels centered on the impotency and intimidation these self absorbed painters feel when faced with painting’s grand accomplishments and narratives of the past and a perceived inability to innovate or excite themselves or their viewers for painting’s continued relevance. That attitude is manifested in drab, uninvolved—tired—painting gestures and tropes, and an obvious lack of enthusiasm for the potentials of the medium itself—but not for the art market itself where their work briskly sells for six figures. It is worth contrasting the intensely worked canvases, fine draughtsmanship and brushwork, and the high regard for of Modernism’s formal achievements we see in L.A. Raw, with such recent studies in abjection. Moreover, with the explosion in art fairs and contemporary auctions propelling contemporary art values beyond Warhol’s most wishful thinking, the emphasis is on financial speculation and profit. As Peter Schjeldahl in his recent, New Yorker article on art fairs states, “…if there’s an art-fair style, it’s a gift-store spin: cute, colorful, bright, and shiny, with attitude (my italics). It says ‘Buy now!’……social concern [is] almost nowhere in evidence.” Superstar artists like Brit Damien Hirst have “become marketing machines unto themselves.” One has only to compare Hans Burkhardt’s My Lai (1968), titled after the infamous brutal Vietnam massacre of men, women and children, with Hirst’s cynical diamond studded skull that recently sold for millions at auction. A 10 foot thickly encrusted mire of grey earthen paint embedded with 15 actual human skulls and bone fragments, a crucifix and near 3D references to collapsed and burnt structures, My Lai was described by Donald Kuspit as “among the greatest war paintings” showing “the brutality and inhumanity not only of the Vietnam War but also of the twentieth century as a whole.” What the “abject” artists of L.A. Raw (who were anything but abject but rather idealistic and life affirming) demonstrated was an unswerving belief that challenging, even off-putting aesthetics could be enlisted in the cause of perceptual and conceptual transformation. Despite the worsening of global conditions for human rights, the impoverished and the environment, it now seems that, unlike the 41 artists in L.A. Raw, those such as Hirst have capitulated to the darker forces of humanity.

All quotes from L.A. Raw, Abject Expressionism in Los Angeles 1945-1980, from Rico LeBrun to Paul McCarthy by Michael Duncan, Published by the Pasadena Museum of California Art, Foggy Notion Books; published with assistance of the Getty Foundation 2012.

This show closes May 20th, but also that evening there is a L.A. RAW Film Night, 5:30pm, Free
Featuring films about Charles Garabedian, Conner Everts and James Strombotne
490 East Union Street, Pasadena, CA. 91101 

And from “All is Fairs” by Peter Schjeldahl, published in The New Yorker, May 7, 2012

Assassins of the Turquoise Palace, by Roya Hakakian (2011) –

Many Americans – maybe most – understand that Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution left that ancient nation with a regime more repressive than the one it ousted. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had promised, upon his return from exile, to be a gentle presence, a mere student of the Koran. Instead, he quickly became a mini-Stalin, viciously pursuing a long hit list of political enemies with the putative goal of “defending” Islam itself. Dissident students and defiant intellectuals who had been the very backbone of the revolution, resisted the theocratic repression just as strongly as the Shah’s secular tyranny. Those who failed to emigrate were jailed, tortured, killed. Those who did get out were largely the educated and well-to-do, but despite the relative ease with which they settled into welcoming communities around the world – ones in which it was possible to enjoy marvelous new political freedoms – many expat Iranians longed for their homeland and hoped that, with time and pressure from without, the reign of the theocrats would eventually crumble. They would then return home, went the dream, to the open and liberal Iran they had envisioned when the Shah was first toppled.

But pressure-from-without was not forthcoming. Iran had oil. Iran bought things, traded with the world. And Iran was prickly, not easy to boss around. When agents of Tehran murdered Persian/Kurdish activists and dissidents in France, India, Turkey, Austria, England, Switzerland, Sweden, the U.S., and elsewhere — grisly warnings to stay quiet and lay low — there was a tendency on the part of host countries to turn a blind eye, to ship captured killers back whence they came under the cover of night, perhaps in exchange for a hostage, more often simply to avoid diplomatic awkwardness and damage to commerce.

Roya Hakakian’s Assassins of the Turquoise Palace begins in the fusillade of machine-gun fire that would change all that.

In much simplified form, the book’s layout: late evening in the Fall of 1992, two armed Middle Eastern men burst into a small Berlin restaurant and blow away four figures of the Kurdish/Iranian opposition, leaving others wounded. The Persian community is shocked, but not surprised. The press is only as interested as it would be in any bloody headline-grabber until the next one comes along. Impassioned exiles-in-Germany – one, in particular, a survivor of the massacre – apply what pressure they can, clamoring that a German finger of accusation must point where it belongs: at the government in Tehran. A courageous, seasoned German prosecutor, under pressure from diplomatic officials to let the matter slide, studies the case to decide whether there is sufficient evidence to bring an indictment. After much turmoil and suspense, comes the criminal proceeding itself, where Hakakian’s emotionally and factually detailed story moves onto another plane – at least for this American.

Citizens of the United States are proud of the jury system we inherited from our British cousins. And why not? It distinguishes us from the rest of the world, where bewigged enforcers dispense justice and punishment from on high, where the law is the law: legislated, impervious to modification or interpretation by courts. How barbaric! How vulnerable to the whims of government! Thank heavens for the Constitution! For the wisdom of the common man!

Yes, but. Our system has its own rigidities. The Bill of Rights confers specific rights and procedures; it does not address anything so nebulous as a concept of “fairness.” As Adam Gopnik pointed out recently in an excellent New Yorker essay, “The Caging of America” (January 30, 2012):

…accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice. You can get off if the cops looked in the wrong car with the wrong warrant when they found your joint, but you have no recourse if owning the joint gets you locked up for life. You may be spared the death penalty if you can show a problem with your appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence that you weren’t guilty in the first place and the jury got it wrong.

Which isn’t to say our criminal justice system isn’t wonderful. It does suggest, though, that unlike Democracy, it isn’t necessarily “better than anything else that’s been tried.” We read all too often of criminals who “got off on a technicality,” and of prosecutorial misconduct that sends innocents to jail, even to the death chamber. No system is perfect.

(In case you, gentle reader, disagree with this assessment, Raymond Bonner’s highly readable Anatomy of Injustice (Borzoi, Knopf, 2012) might influence your opinion.)

The trial that occupies the second half of Assassins of the Turquoise Palace takes place in Berlin, beginning in 1992 and runs for over five years (!). It might as well be taking place on another planet, where up is down and hot is cold.  Judges in the German criminal justice system aren’t referees who maintain order and ensure that a strict set of rules is observed as lawyers from opposing sides duel before a jury of legally untutored citizens. These judges are very much a part of the proceedings, asking most of the questions and ultimately deciding the case. It’s a examination of facts combined with a barroom brawl, in which not everything goes, but where the level of decorum and orderliness, broken only by the occasional weeping witness or fervent “Objection, Your Honor!” to which we Yankees are accustomed, is largely absent. The free-for-all atmosphere is structured on the assumption that while a jury of just-plain-folks must be fed information very carefully, a judge – or panel of judges – can’t be “tainted” with incorrect procedures. Judges can decide for themselves whether hearsay has probative value, or whether a piece of evidence should be considered in the interests of fairness, no matter how it was acquired. Focus on simple fairness, or focus on statutory rights and procedures. Who’d have thought they could produce such different mechanisms for the pursuit of justice?

The military tribunal currently trying (or trying to try) Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 suspects, in an attempt to put “fairness” over “process,” looks to be structured somewhat more like a German courtroom than an American one. U.S. legal experts have scoffed that a Federal judge would know how to control his courtroom, that a trial where suspects are free to flout the court’s authority is a mockery (link: http://nyti.ms/INrPEl).  We’ll see whether the military judge, Army Colonel James Pohl, can orchestrate a politically acceptable result.  For those who have read Assassins of the Turquoise Palace, Pohl’s approach is certainly more easily appreciated — if not approved — than for those who haven’t.

Lest anyone think “Assassins” is a dry treatise on Iranian politics and the distinctions between one criminal justice system and another – no. These elements are present and they are interesting if one is interested, as I was. But the book is, above all, a great read. The characters are nuanced, alive, their cultural subtleties made scrutable; the writing is fluid and energetic; the story crackles with drama and unexpected developments. That the events depicted are pertinent to today’s headlines and reveal a through-the-looking-glass version of what most Americans assume is the only true path to justice, is just icing on a very tasty cake.

Rosary Mantra, Jacaranda, April 21, 2012 –

The programing masters at Jacaranda were at it again Saturday night. I could not pass up any opportunity to hear Messiaen, Dutilleux and Gubaidulina together and knowing the strategic pairing acumen of artistic director Patrick Scott, along with music director Mark Alan Hilt there was surely going to be some mighty music-appreciation in store. The extra layer of resonance was provided by the complex renderings of which only an organ can produce. I can confess to little familiarity with this instrument having had very few ecclesiastical excuses to pilgrimage to the great cathedrals where normally one experiences the pipes. But Jacaranda has the double blessing, being housed at First Press in Santa Monica, of having the instrument at hand, the acoustics to support it’s mighty sonority and affording the comfort of well cushioned pews with which the audience may truly concentrate on it’s output (versus let’s say ….Disney Hall where my husband’s knees are somewhere around his chin).

Part of the blueprint behind this performance was to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the death of venerable French composer Olivier Messiaen and to pay homage to Henri Dutilleux, 96, who became the dean of French composers after Messiaen’s passing. Joining these two is the Russian composer Sophia Gubaidulina now celebrating her 80th year and who some consider to be Messiaen’s spiritual successor. While the gravitas and spiritual capital of Messiaen’s Meditations sur le mystere di Sainte Trinite (1969) and La Natvite de Seigneur (1935) are undeniable, and that Dutilleux’s poetic nature-inspired Three Strophes of the Name of Sacher, played with aplomb by resident Timothy Loo, was, as Scott put it, “the palette cleanser of the evening”, it was the galvanizing works Hell Und Dunkel (1976) and Risonanza (2001) by Gubaidulina with which I left the auditorium smitten.

That the organ is the octopus of instruments seems clear enough. As one must contend with all it’s push/pull, hands/feet and tiered keyboards, it seems a few more appendages might come in handy. We are fortunate indeed to have as accomplished a performer as Hilt who, having played Messiaen’s organ compositions his whole adult life, states: “At the pinnacle of greatness, there are only two organ composers: Bach and Messiaen. The magnificence of their designs, the profound emotional range of ideas, and huge variety of their works dwarfs all other composers for the instrument. Messiaen can transport you to a profound place that is sublime and sometimes scary, like a new thrill ride. His most famous piece, “Dieu Parmi Nous “ is like Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor  on steroids. It rocks in a way that is unbelievably thrilling.” The thunder of the opening sequence gives way to a lightness of notes that dance dreamily along, followed by an ominous foreshadowing that culminates in an uplifting suspended pronouncement. While I personally did not step away in deep belief one cannot help but be seduced by the allure of omnipotence.

La Natvite du Seigneur, IX. Dieu parmi nous, Olivier Messiaen, Jonathan Dimmock, organ

In 1976, Mstislav Rostropovich, the esteemed cellist-conductor commissioned works from twelve composers as a 70th birthday tribute to the venerated Swiss conductor and patron Paul Sacher (1906–1999). Sacher, whose Foundation is an international research center for the music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and whose library includes the estates of Igor Stravinsky, Anton Webern and Bruno Maderna, felt an equal in this night of homage. The stipulation that Rostropovich set forth was that the resulting cello works be based on S-A-C-H-E-R, or [Es-A-C-H (B-flat-E-Re] using universally agreed upon equivalencies form the three European notation systems. Dutilluex’s contribution was Trois Strophes Sur Le Nom de Paul Sacher. For as mechanical an exercise as composing by translating letters of the alphabet into notes, I think you will agree that the resulting work is mindful and engaging. Timothy Loo’s performance also had an athletic quality that held it’s own with this night’s weighty charge. All three movements were played at Jacaranda, but in 1976 Dutilleux had completed only the first. He went on six years later to complete this three movement work.

Trois Strophes Sur Le Nom de Paul Sacher, Pour Violoncelle Seul, Henri Dutilleux, Marc Coppey cello

Sophia Gubaidulina’s first and only solo composition for organ, Hell Und Dunkel (Light and Darkness) began the second half of the program. From it’s opening, fingers gleefully dance upon the keyboards with an occasional low rumble that foreshadows the darkness with which the piece concludes. But there is a continual balance at play between the dark and light. They exist passing back and forth from one duality to the next  in an earnest and solemn manner. Gubaidulina has described the dynamics of these textures as “something oriental in my subconscious. I feel at ease with the Chinese and Japanese culture — a tendency towards contemplation and quiet sounds. Then comes activity, intellectual struggle, a longing for classicism. That is my western side.”

Hell Und Dunkel (Light and Darkness), Sophia Gubaidulina, Kevin Bowyer organ

Where Hell Und Dunkel truly is a contemplation in the most Messiaen sense, Rizonanza is a reveille, an awakening. Here Gubaidulina begins with an ear piecing blast delivered by a bright piccolo trumpet then moves on to counter with the darkest most resonant bellows of the pipes. Rizonanza is scored for three trumpets, four trombones, organ and six strings and all coalesce to explore all the dynamics, push the contrasts and powerfully produce a music of extremities and resolve.

Zoe Strauss: Ten Years, on view earlier this spring at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is by far the most provocative show I’ve seen this year. Only 42 now, Strauss who was born and raised in Philadelphia, discovered photography when she was given a camera for her 30^th birthday. Approaching picture taking with a self-taught sense of freedom, she quickly adapted the medium to her already developed conceptual ideas. Having founded the Philadelphia Public Art Project in 1995, well before she began her Ten Years project, the goal of the public art program was to give the residents of Philly access to art in their everyday lives. Expanding upon this idea of accessible art, she began her annual, site-specific, and now famous installations beneath the I-95 underpass in South Philadelphia. Beneath the freeway that ruthlessly divided preexisting neighborhoods, Strauss pasted her colorful photographs to the freeways drab, cement supports. One image per side, using every column, her exhibitions existed yearly without permission from the city or apology by the artist.

Zoe Strauss: Ten Years is not a true retrospective, as the title would have you believe, but rather is the culmination of a decade-long project that Strauss began working on in 2001. Unlike her I-95 installations, the PMA’s exhibition presents Strauss’s street photographs and portraits in a pristine, museum-like fashion. Acknowledging the photographer’s homegrown roots and alternative approach toward art, however, this exhibition of 150 tightly curated images breaks form enough to include a more expansive projected slideshow of her “works-in-progress.” In a small, dark room in the middle of the main gallery, Strauss’s gritty images are seen in flashes of light followed by momentary darkness, while the wistful yet soulful voice of Billie Holiday sings You’re My Thrill. Addressing the artist’s concerns that art be accessible to the non-museum going public, and for the people featured most prominently in her photographs, the museum also helped Strauss to produce a series billboards seen throughout the city. Strauss’s photography is made of the street and for the street.

The aesthetic of street photography that Strauss has captured so well with this particular body of work, is an aesthetic that has been the most important to the history of 20^th century photography. More than any other style, street photography, whether it leans toward photojournalism or portraiture, has greatly shaped our ever-shifting notion of American identity. Female photographers have inarguably played an incredibly important role in photography in general, perhaps because photography is often thought of as the first art medium in which women participated since its invention. During my recent plunge into the annals of photo history, fishing for the important female photographers who are so often left floating on the outskirts, I discovered a great wealth of female documentarians from whose history and experience Strauss draws.

There was Alice Austen, who began photographing her friends and neighbors in Staten Island during the latter half of the 19^th century; Berenice Abbott and Lisette Model, both of whom photographed urban life and architecture in New York City in the 1930s; Dorothea Lange, who photographed migrant workers in the dustbowl for the FSA during the great depression; Margaret Bourke-White, who was considered the first female war correspondent; Helen Levitt and Vivian Maier, perhaps the first two true female street photographers, who had long and prolific careers throughout the 1950s and 60s; Diane Arbus, who is perhaps the best remembered female street photographer today.

Fitting snugly into this century-long line of photographers, Zoe Strauss: Ten Years combats the notion that street photography is somehow only a male dominated genre as it is often represented—from Walker Evans to Robert Frank to William Eggleston—and calls into question the critics who posit, with great assurance, that street photography is an outdated and irrelevant concern. As PMA’s photographic curator Peter Barberie states of Strauss’s work, “stylistically, her photographs hewed close to a well-established if not downright old-fashioned aesthetic of street images printed in small formats.” While this is certainly true, Strauss also represents anew, through the worn lens of street photography, an “epic account of everyday life.”

Strauss’s urban streetscapes describe a location, most often Philadelphia, and the urban environment that both sustains and depress the people who live there. In the truest tradition of this genre her camera picks, unabashed, through the rubble of the city. She looks for neon signs, parking lots, littered storefronts, corner bodegas selling anything, vandalization by the disenchanted, and buildings left to rot and decay. Her images are often so abstracted that they become formal hints of what would otherwise be obvious places and objects. Shattered gray mini blinds in a window in Gulfport, Mississippi, are so bent and broken they look like the tangled web of a spider, all lines and shadows. The photograph reverberates with the echoes of other similar dilapidation elsewhere. In another photograph, the angular and bright green ceiling of Nicks Pizza (2009) leaves us wondering what the rest of the restaurant looks like, and who might be eating there.

On the opposite end of the formal spectrum, Strauss also photographs streetscapes that seem, at first glance, so literal and generic they could be anywhere, but she includes in the photograph the smallest of human details. In Mom Were Ok (2005), a high-rise apartment building with a drab cement facade is brought to life by some delicately scribbled, blue graffiti that reads, “Mom, we’re ok.” Strauss works with text, signs, and graffiti in an engaging and humorous manner, taking words out of context and letting us consider them as metaphors for the city, society, and our collective identity: “We will win” is written on the side of a whitewashed wall; “Beware of Cats” warns the front door of a duplex; “Uniform City” is the ironic name of an unknown storefront; “Alarm calls police” is handwritten on a wall behind a rickety green chair. While we instinctively recoil from many of the places Strauss photographs, she also manages to capture the warmth found in depressed neighborhoods, and captures their lived-in quality that speaks to the resiliency of human nature.

Strauss’s urban portraits document the residents of Philly, and the singular faces that make up the social fabric of the city. Most of her portraits are tightly framed photographs of the face and little else, and many of the people she interacts with seem to dictate what about themselves, literally or metaphorically, they want portrayed. Many of the portraits we see are of worn and tired faces, malnourished, underfed, or overly made-up. At times she shows us awkward couples, people at work or walking the streets, going about their everyday routine or sitting listlessly without one.

In Daddy Tattoo (2004), we see a young woman with a colorful tattoo, the cursive word Daddy scrolled beneath it, carrying a 7-Eleven bag. Her face is caked with makeup, and her full lips are outlined with black lip liner. Frozen moments in time, Strauss’s portraits often become tragic snapshots of the deceased, or a moment in people’s lives when times were better or worse. In South Philly, Mattress Flip Front (2001), two boys practice flips on old, torn mattresses in the street. Both are full of youthful glee, one boy midair while the other stifles his boyish laughter behind his fist—sadly this boy died a few years after the photograph was taken during a neighborhood gunfight. Though sad stories seem to follow Strauss’s photographs, the images themselves are joyful and full of life. “The heroic act is simply that of navigating the world and being alive in one’s own skin,” Strauss says of her own portraits.

Greatly indebted to photographers like Diane Arbus and Nan Golden, who created iconic and unforgettable portraits of the “freak” subsets of society, Strauss photographs her subjects with a sympathy not always seen in the images of her predecessors. In thinking about who bares their scars, tattoos, piercings, naked body, and beaten face for an unknown camera, the voluntary feeling that permeates Strauss’s portraits is exactly what makes them feel so compassionate, understanding, and empathetic. There is a desperation to be seen and heard lurking in these photographs, and a desire for recognition and exposure by the marginalized and downtrodden. As Barberie says of Strauss, “the woman and man on the street, yearning to be heard, are the basis of her art.”

Strauss’s photographs, however, are not meant to simply describe poverty, addiction, and dysfunction, as we might expect. They are also a critique of our society’s social net, or lack thereof. She exposes for her viewers a failing system that lets the disadvantaged sink into unlivable conditions without noticing or caring. Strauss seems to address the hard edges of capitalism in her work, showing us not only the places that don’t prosper from it, but also the people who are trampled by it. Her photographs are sobering reminders that we as Americans need to remember; as Barberie states, “everyone does not get by. Adverse circumstances hedge us in. All we can do is forge ahead and make the best of things.”

The question of knowledge and what can be known is as old as literature itself. Even before the concepts of physos and kosmos [1], observations of pattern in the natural world were hatching in Babylonian omens and Sumerian riddles. Western philosophy has incubated these questions ever since, but their growth has been bounded by the problems of studying our perceptive organs with our perceptive organs. The problem of the reliability of perception and how we approximate the welt extends the epistemological current into the hearts of jurisprudence, aesthetics, semiotics, and even physics, deepening their lines and muddying their waters. Thankfully, this greatest of philosophical mysteries was declared solved in 1844 by William Henry Fox Talbot, who wrote in his illustrated serial The Pencil of Nature, ‘[The camera] may be said to make a picture of whatever it sees …. [Photographs] are impressed by nature’s hand.’ Contemporary photographic inventors Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and Nicéphore Niépce also avowed a mystical, or at least metaphysical, explanation of the disclosure of the image by Nature, and therefore the action of light upon sensitive paper as arbiter of the Truth. Thus, the invention of a mechanical device and chemical process capable of recording and fixing reality independent of human agency had solved the four thousand year old mystery of whether the human sensory apparatus was suitable for the acquisition of knowledge about the world. Or did it? Seeing is believing – or is it?

Folk theories of photography persist to this day and have in some sense become ghettoized by insistences that the aesthetic and forensic applications of photographs are pure and separable. The camera, like any other optical device such as a telescope, microscope or mirror, is subject to physical laws, and yet at times is seemingly helpless against the intrusion of inner experience. That the same camera can be employed to make geodesic measurements to a hundredth of a millimeter as well as Surrealistic collage means we are dealing with a device that can both superrectify and plumb human perceptive abilities. Thus photography works as a metaphor for the great elasticity of objectivity and subjectivity, empiricism and perspective, credibility and epistemology. That is to say, not only can we not step in the same river twice, maybe we can’t even step in it once.

Regardless of whether we come to photographs as pure art a la Stieglitz, or as forensic case points devoid of aesthetic considerations, individual images may be said to have individual histories. Filmmaker Errol Morris, in his recent book on photographic epistemology, inquires into the nature of the photograph as evidence. In six linked essays, spread across four chapters, we follow him down wormholes of history beneath the two-dimensional surfaces of iconic images by American photographers of five significant historical events: the Crimean War, the American Civil War, Abu Ghraib, the Dustbowl, and the 2006 Israeli airstrike on southern Lebanon.

Although Morris’s full-scale investigation of Roger Fenton’s twin Crimean War images is the only forensically concluded study in the book, the remaining five chapters are all the more interesting for their insolubility. We don’t need to know why at least four photojournalists made images of toys during the bombing of Tyre. What’s important is the mystery of what images actually ‘say’. Do they have meaning or merely propositional content? Or is the creation of meaning an interminable process? Can there ever be an answer to the question of what constitutes an ‘altered’ setting? What can be said about an image’s meaning when interpretations conflict? For example, the universes one enters through altered—or supposedly altered—images become limitless when the word ‘propaganda’ is invoked. Today ‘propaganda’ is a cheap operational term for whatever education program your opponents are using. But during the Great Depression, the term was less common if no less accentuated. During the FSA chronicling of dustbowl Americans impoverished by a rapid souring of the land, Arthur Rothstein’s insertion of a bleached cow’s skull into a documentary photograph became a touchstone in a media war over whether the drought was actually happening. Laissez-faire conservatives—angered by the prospect of their tax money funding an artistic project about the poor—claimed the photographs were ‘faked’ and ‘liberal propaganda.’ Were they ‘faked’ or weren’t they? Were they ‘faked’ in the same way the newspaper photos of Alexei Navalny and Boris Berezovsky were faked? In the end, it is semantic knots tied round the parcel of genre which must be untied.

Opinions over the nature and importance of factual accuracy in contemporary documentary and non-fiction literature continue to polarize. Investigation into James Frey’s memoir A Million Little Pieces caused him a lot of grief that could have been avoided had he called it a novel. More recently, D’Agata vs. Fingal have duked it out over the limits of genre and truth value in storytelling; as well, the various ongoing struggles for the appropriation of meaning in war photography and memorials. These underscore the paramount importance of the relationship between text and context, memory and depiction, knowledge and the evidence of knowledge. Can text and context ever be separable? If not, how are photographs to be interpreted beyond aesthetic considerations? This question of how photographs have histories that other art objects do not allows us to draw the important connection between Believing Is Seeing and Barthes’ Camera Lucida, another sort of meditation on the epistemic value of photographs, through which we come to understand the inadvertent and sometimes emotionally wrenching details they can contain. The most ordinary photographs, such as Amos Humiston’s ambrotype of his children, are gateways to obscured worlds of memory and the ugliness that elegies and memorials of all kinds can bring to a boil. With the punctum of the image as a kind of token, a seemingly direct emotional relationship between you and a past event is formed, and around these interpretations of the past, beliefs and ideologies form as lichen.

And yet, Errol Morris does solve a lingering mystery about the past using photo-forensic techniques. Roger Fenton and his team did move cannonballs onto the road. Mysteries can be solved and objective facts about the past are, it would seem, knowable. There are absolutes, but like stars out in space we can move forever between them without establishing their nature or position. It seems to me that Errol Morris’s filmography, and now bibliography, is increasingly charting a course in forensic epistemology.  Perhaps even after the historical importance of McNamara et al have waned, his innovative structures and answers will remain.

[1] If Nature (physos) has an Order (kosmos), then that order should be intelligible. Thus, the beginning of Ancient Greek philosophy.

Found, featuring the remarkable Peggy Blow and with cinematography by Jeffrey Atherton, completes a triptych that also includes Snout and Djinn. In these hybrid media piece we’re attempting to excavate a liminal, Bardo-type space in digital media to see what can happen there. I like the variety of the three pieces, but also the continuities between them, and how liminality shows up thematically in the texts as well as in the visual treatment. Found, for example, is interested in how permeable we are, how encounters with strangers can haunt and even alter us. Found also shines light on the resilience and forbearance of black Americans in the face of the profound structural racism that continues, demonically, to play a central role in American cultural and political life. In the wake of the Trayvon Martin tragedy, this seems timely.

Thinking about Martin’s death I recall taking a break from the rehearsal of a play several years ago, and how the actors and I began discussing our respective ancestries. At that time I had begun to appreciate in my own life the subtle shaping influence, good and bad, of distant forebears, and to encounter in my day-to-day awareness trace elements of traumas and exaltations from the remote past. As the conversation progressed I was powerfully struck by how different the experience of family history was for the black members of the cast, Peggy Blow among them. As they exchanged glances with each other before beginning to speak, it became clear to me that, after a certain point back in time, they ceased to have access to their own ancestries. Even on the level of rumor or family myth, the lines to their ancestors had been severed by slavery; their accounts trailed off in the dead end of some plantation, or some region in the slave-owning Southern states. As any student of American slavery will tell you, this severing was the explicit intention of the white slave-owners, who often took pains to break familial bonds as they cultivated a dehumanized condition historian Orlando Patterson has called “social death.” The ongoing reality of American slavery was suddenly “in the room” with us – a meaningful dimension of experience I was beginning to grapple with was foreclosed for these people by the very same historical forces that explained their presence in this part of the globe.

While I might have known this aspect of slavery on an intellectual level, the conversation brought home how the depravity of the slave trade is still active, an open account that must still be settled, a demon still on the loose. These colleagues of mine inhabited a very different world than me and were, moreover, so used to that fact being overlooked that my own ignorance scarcely registered. The racist murder of Trayvon Martin, and now the copycat killing spree in Tulsa, open a similar rift in the armor of white ignorance, and perhaps a few rays of light may find their way in and shift our collective awareness a few degrees in the right direction. My name being Zimmerman I feel entitled to point out the astonishing forbearance of black Americans in the face of the ongoing depravity of anti-black racism in our country. Along with the protests and vigils that arose around Troy Davis’ execution last year, the outrage at these morally obscene stand-your-ground laws indicates we may be on the verge of a shift in American culture, a revulsion toward the dog-whistle racism that has dominated our politics since the Nixon administration.

Forty years in the making, a revulsion of this kind would not be connected to black activism or protest politics, but rather to a deep recognition that the legacy of slavery has to be confronted simply because of the nature of things – habits of ignorance lead to problems that only grow worse. There’s a direct connection, for example, between the dark chapter of America’s slave-owning past and our inability to fend off the neo-liberal economic and political idiocies that now directly threaten our collective well-being. I recall an astonishing passage in W. G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn that, like the conversation with my actors that day, underscored for me the lingering presence of slavery in our lives. With the lucid formalism that makes his prose so evocative, Sebald is recounting a conversation he struck up with a Dutchman named Cornelis de Jong in an inn somewhere in Suffolk. Comparing Dutch and English responses to the immense wealth created by the sugar trade (Downton Abbey, anyone?), Sebald writes:

“For long periods of time there was little scope for an ostentatious display of accumulated wealth, and consequently the enormous profits that accrued to the few families who grew and traded in sugar cane were largely lavished on the building, furnishing and maintenance of magnificent country residences and stately town houses. It was Cornelis de Jong who drew my attention to the fact that many important museums, such as the Mauritshuis in The Hague or the Tate Gallery in London, were originally endowned by the sugar dynasties or were in some other way connected with the sugar trade. The capital amassed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through various forms of slave economy is still in circulation, said de Jong, still bearing interest, increasing many times over and continually burgeoning anew.”

Is that capital, do you think, your friend? Mine? To what extent is that dark capital wielding a corrupting influence over the construction of our common future?

While on one level, Found has nothing to do with Sebald’s concerns, the woman Peggy Blow brings to life embodies not only of the forbearance I mention above, but also a ferocity and resiliency that suggest accounts are no doubt still going to be settled…because of the nature of things.

—Guy Zimmerman

FOUND
Woman:
A single encounter can change us
Do you believe that?
An energy comes in
We shift and change
Something unlocks, a cascade in the heart

Did you ever run over a squirrel
Like in your car?
It’s a certain kind of very disturbing soft little bump you feel
And the spirit of the squirrel enters into you
Just joking
I ran over a snake once in Canada
Upton Canada
Snake about 6 or 7 feet long lying there on the hot tar
Yellow stripe down its side I couldn’t stop
Bump-bump
Saw it writhing up in the rear view mirror

“This place is full of thieves,” this woman said
“The Los Angeles area,” she said
Black woman, about my age
“I don’t really know how to be protect myself”
A voice behind me, I’m talking to a friend
My friend Bob – I look around
This was Starbucks, Glendale Boulevard
Outside on the patio, traffic streaming by
Middle-aged woman, thin, beautiful face, deep lines
And this white guy, younger

“I don’t know what they smoke,” she said
“But 31 thousand dollars
Is enough to keep a lot of people happy for a while”
She was sitting behind me
“I know this underground
I didn’t want to go down there
They all eyes” she said
“A lot of them scared a lot of them ain’t”
Talking to this white guy, younger

Street life. People in the street.
How it could happen – we slip through the cracks
And now we’ve spent our first night sleeping under that bridge
Down off the loading dock, behind that supermarket
This is it for me, we think
Isn’t that the scenario we run for ourselves?

“Are you having trouble sleeping?” the white guy asks
“Yeah. It’s going to take a toll on me.
When I was locked up you shoulda told me
About that,” she said.
“My own sister,” she said
“I can’t even blame it on Terry no more

I didn’t even know them other kids existed”
I remember, I was telling my friend Bob,
When my daughter was a girl I’d pick her up from school
We’d drive through the winding streets of our neighborhood
We had this game we’d play called Completely Lost
She’d sit in back in her little booster seat “turn there!” “now there!”
I’d go wherever she was pointing
Turn the car wherever she told me to:
“we’re gonna get Completely Lost!”
And we’d laugh and laugh
And then would come those delicious moments
When the street you thought you’d never seen before
Suddenly dissolves to reveal that it was your street all along

“I didn’t care how I was getting the money” she said
“I made that promise
And my children?” she says
She’s talking about her own kids now
“Yeah,” she says, “they murdered they gone
Found Tay 83rd Ave behind the dumpster
Found Shawn he was 4 years old.”
Did Bob hear her too? I don’t think he could hear it.
I’m hearing about children being murdered
Right there in Starbucks on Glendale Boulevard with the traffic
Streaming past
“They found Dee murdered behind that Ralphs over there
I can’t even cry no more,” she says

Maybe she coulda been well off like me
A white woman like me speaking to a friend like Bob
About the sister who killed those kids…?
No, that never happens in my world
So maybe it was just the mystery of her life
A life on planet earth
The mystery of her simple honesty maybe
Which made her seem sacred to me somehow…
In a way I couldn’t put words to…
On that patio outside the Starbucks on Glendale Boulevard
With the metal tables and the metal chairs

“I’m in love with a man
Started me smoking dope
He made me curious
What he was getting out of it
He raped that lady to get them demons
Laying in there
Man, how do you explain all this?
Mexican demons
Sperm crawling up in there
I had to do a LOT of research
To understand
I got into it, man it’s deep
I’m talking about planets getting destroyed
How do you take the demons out?
Read to em.
Singing certain prayers
Even take a séance”
(Pause)
She said

Ever hear of a monkey trap?
Little cage they put up in the trees with some nut inside it
Some piece of sweet fruit in there
And a monkey reaches in with his little paw
But when he takes hold he can’t pull his arm back out
His hand is too big with that nut inside it
That piece of fruit
And all he needs to do is let go of that prize
He’ll be free again to scamper around and scratch all his friends
And sing and howl

I don’t know about demons
I believe in ghosts, I told him
Is a demon same as a ghost?
No, ghost is different
Entity roaming the earth so long
And then you got shadows
You say
You got an out of body experience
You can lay there and still be gone travelling
I used to love to go to sleep in jail
I just learned I didn’t know
I had all these gifts
But these are the gifts I’ve been blessed with
A white woman like me

“You went through the door?
Is that the question to me?
Yeah, I did
Well, my attitude is
I know that I have abilities
Sort of a regular person
But my goal is to make it to heaven
How many times a day
It ain’t no easy job
I never thought I’d get out
Selling dope, prostitution, dancing
I was wild
When I went down there last time I made a promise
Changed my life
Got my respect back
Not going to throw it away
No dealer, no addict
I got tired of it
I can get up and read in the morning now

Because lets remember
What happens next revises the meaning
Of everything that came before
Do you see this?
It can make you dizzy
Because we are not separate from each other
In the way that we imagine
We are not separate from anything in the way that we imagine
That’s the only thing it’s important to know
And she knew it as well as I did, a white woman
I mean…or….

“I haven’t seen them in six years” she said
“Ambushed em,” she said
“Took your case
Over to the junkie court
Try to steal my kids,” she said
“Cover up for your killings”

Aren’t you as certain as I am
That the world is miraculous all the way down?
Aren’t you as sure in your heart?
Aren’t you always hoping to know what to do
With that knowledge
How to act, where to go, what to say?

“How many times
I got to go through the door?”
“I’m already down
How many times you gonna kill me?”
That’s what she said
And then I got up and I had to go.

(Pause. Looks off. Blackout.)

3. UNCOVERED
Metaphors don’t always line up: a suitcase can be an emblem of belonging to a place, and of ensuring the safety of one’s belongings; it can also signify something less benign — a grave, a place where things lie out of sight.

This third suitcase is hypothetical in part because it doesn’t have the physical existence of one carried by an individual hand; hypothetical too because, carried by many people, it may reveal the belongings of an entire nation.

During my several-month 2011 sojourn in Spain, I was amazed and moved by the country’s  accomplishments during its Transition: a new Constitution, free democratic elections, moves toward autonomy for its regions, all of this accompanied by literature whose intent is to explore issues of history and memory that cannot be resolved, at least not yet. In Javier Cercas’ Anatomy of a Moment, about the 1981 attempted coup d’etat at the the Spanish legislative assembly,  a reviewer in n + 1 writes that {it} is “secretly and not so secretly about so many things it seems to verge on the inexhaustible . . . the responsibilities of citizens and the performances of their leaders, the peculiarities of heroism, the vice of politics, the ingratitude of democracy, the courage of bourgeois decency, and the final irrelevance of motive.” This is a literature that virtually shakes images to see what might fall from them, in this instance the live television broadcast of the coup which Cercas screens again and again, each time finding that it yields  multiple and complex meanings, a literature that implicitly asks of society to do the same.

In 2000, the volunteer organization Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, founded by Emilio Silva and Santiago Macias, and made up of archaeologists, anthropologists and forensic scientists, began to locate places of executions, collect oral and written testimonies, and excavate bodies from mass graves. As of October 2009, the group had identified the remains of one thousand seven hundred victims; it is estimated that as many as fifty five thousand lie buried across the country.

One of these exhumations, in the village of Villamayor de los Montes outside of Burgos, was documented by photographer Francesc Torres in a book and exhibition entitled Dark is the Room Where We Sleep, which quotes the testimonies of local townspeople, many of whom had lost parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts: “Here is probably the only way that people will know what really happened, because my children, for instance, when you tell them, they don’t believe it. . . It’s not that they don’t believe it, it’s just impossible for them to think that that could happen. The only way they believe it is by seeing it here.”

After the bones were exhumed, forensically examined and returned to their relatives, the graves lay empty for the first time in sixty eight years. The residents of Villamayor de los Montes carried the remains of their families in somber procession to the cemetery, to rest in new graves marked with their names.

In 2008, Spanish investigating judge Baltasar Garzon opened an official nation-wide investigation into the disappearances of opponents during Franco’s regime, calling for a nation-wide exhumation of the mass graves. By then Garzon had successfully argued in an international court that crimes against humanity demand a standard of universal justice that is over and above national law. However, he was indicted and tried by Spain’s Supreme Court for exceeding his judicial mandate by violating Spain’s 1977 legal amnesty.  Recently Garzon was acquitted of these charges, but was found guilty in another politically motivated case  in which he was accused of illegal phone-tapping. The conviction prohibited him from practicing law for eleven years, a sentence that stops his efforts to investigate and exhume the Franco-era crimes.

I must confess: before I began to read and think about the exhumations, I too questioned their point, countering their value with the recriminations they would inevitably bring. Even more heretical, I wondered at the need for an individual grave, whether being placed among the human jumble was commemoration enough. Now I believe a voice from Villamayor de los Montes: “When you see an open grave, you know, if you did not before, that it is absolutely necessary to recover the victims, to take them out of the gutters, the  dumps, the wells, and the mines, all anonymous holes they were thrown into like animals.”

This is a voice that speaks beyond Spain. When I began writing this essay in late February, The New York Times reported that Dover Air Force Base in Delaware — the entry point for the nation’s war dead, and hallowed ground for the military — used its mortuary to “dispose of body parts of some victims of the 2001 Sept. 11th attacks by burning them and dumping the ashes in a landfill.” There were no bones left to recover.

Of Walter Benjamin and his suitcase, I had asked earlier: what is too heavy?  These graves answer that question; they weigh us all down. Only when their contents are acknowledged and released to the living, paradoxically freeing Spain from the onus of individual blame, will the earth be relieved of its burden.

EPILOGUE
Time stopped for Walter Benjamin one night in Portbou; later, it stopped again when his bones were put into an unknown grave. Time stopped during the 233 m. change at Portbou’s railway station. Time was ordered to stop when Garzon’s judges invoked the pact of forgetting.

Time, though has its own imperatives.

Among the many art projects that honor Benjamin in Portbou, there is one that I find especially  touching. Several years ago a group of young Italian artists filled a suitcase with objects that had symbolic value to each of them, then hiked along Benjamin’s escape route where, at a spot along the way, they buried the suitcase. They have written, ‘We will post the objects we have left inside it and the geographic data in order to find it and dig it out. Everyone can go back to that place, find the briefcase, add his special object and post its story and its photo on this blog.The object chosen has to answer to the following question: What you would put in the briefcase, if you were pushed to escape from home like Benjamin did 70 years ago?’ They add, ‘This is our way to remember Benjamin and all those people – migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, vagrants and homeless – forced to escape from home.’

The destination of the young Italians was the official memorial to Benjamin, a great work of public art on a cliff in Portbou. Made in 1995 by Dani Karavan,  ‘Passages‘ is a steel tunnel cut into the ground, passing through the cliff edge and coming out overlooking the sea.

A few steps before what seems to be a certain tumble, there is a sheet of plate glass that demands contemplation and return; inscribed on its surface, in several languages, is this quotation;  ‘It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless.‘

It is the end of the journey of the three suitcases. Time has done its work. These young artists have walked, buried, passed on the information for how and where to add to what they’ve started.

Cantares, from Dedicado a Antonio Machado, Poeta, by Joan Manuel Serrat a song that was important to the generation growing up in fascist Spain in the sixties.

All things pass
And all remain
But we, ourselves, we pass,
We pass making paths,
Leaving tracks on the sea. . . .
and the refrain
Traveler, there is no path, you make the path as you walk.

They sit on the steps of the memorial and pay tribute to the man who inspired it and because they are young, to themselves and their art-making. In beauty and awkwardness, they perform both elegy and hope. The steps to the sea can hold it all.

This is a tale of three suitcases, two real, and one hypothetical, each journeying at different times and in different directions, but bound together by a shared history and place.

Two of these journeys center on Portbou, a Catalan town close to the French border. In 1939, Spanish Civil War refugees traveled through Portbou on the way north to escape Franco’s reprisals. Two years later, a small contingent of Jews, among them Walter Benjamin, clambered over the same Pyrenees, walking south to flee the Nazis. I picture this town like a dissolve in a film: the frame at  the center where both images — one fading out, the other in — are equally present.

I came to Portbou in 2011 to pay homage to Walter Benjamin who spent his last day and night in the town, and also to continue my engagement with The Museum of Exile whose mandate encompasses Portbou. Had I known then of all of the other artists and writers who had preceded me and created their own responses to the place, Walter Benjamin in Portbou, I could not have come there with fresh eyes.

As it was, familiar with only a few films, I saw not the melancholic, economically diminished town that is described in many  accounts, but rather a food stand built into a cliff, ready to sell crepes to the many tourists who come to swim,  lie on the beach, and eat, as I did in one of the many restaurants lining the bay. Later, walking through town, I saw a striking graffiti of a young woman bedecked with a necklace comprised of letters spelling out HIGH TECH, a complex if ambiguous sign of what I take to be a protest against globalism. In other words, in my brief time there, I  found, and brought  away with me, images of the present.

I  walked up a hill to Portbou’s cemetery, terraced above the Mediterranean where the Pyrenees end; this is the cemetery that Hannah Arendt described to Gershom Scholem in a letter, calling it “one of the most fantastic and most beautiful spots I have seen in my life.” She also wrote that her search for traces of Benjamin was fruitless: “I have found nothing, his name was nowhere.”

On the day I was there, I saw signs of a more general caring and tending: a family-plot in a niche, its provenance hand-lettered to identify those encased there and those for whom it is destined. I saw watering cans, their handles hooked into a communal rack, for visitors who want to water fresh flowers.

In the midst of all these presences, I felt  an absence, most keenly when standing in front of a cairn of stones often thought to be the marker for Benjamin’s grave (In fact, Benjamin’s bones lie elsewhere in the cemetery in an unmarked grave). When visitors pause at the cairn, they are invited to pick up a small stone and place it alongside the others, a custom as old as Biblical times when there were no large headstones in the desert.

Here, where stones  are placed to perpetuate the existence of  a man,  we begin the tale of the three suitcases.

1. LOST
In January 1938, in the port of San Remo, Walter Benjamin said goodbye to Theodor and Gretel Adorno who were sailing to New York. When they advised him to do the same, he replied: “In Europe there are positions to defend.”  He waited too long. In 1940, Nazi troops took Paris. Benjamin’s only chance of escape was to get to Banyuls in Southern France and then walk up a trail  that crossed the Pyrenees over a six hundred meter pass and then wound down to Portbou where, with a visa obtained for him by Max Horkheimer, Benjamin was to go on to the United States. The walk had to have been difficult for him; an asthmatic with heart problems, he was carrying a heavy suitcase, sometimes translated as briefcase. Lisa Fittko, his guide across the Pyrenees, has written an account in which she quotes Benjamin as saying “This is my new manuscript.” She asked him, “But why did you take it on this walk?” “You must understand,” he said, “that this briefcase is the most important thing to me. I cannot risk losing it. It is the manuscript that must be saved. It is more important than I am.”

What was in the briefcase? For Lisa Fittko, the question was irrelevant: the suitcase was what Benjamin should have left behind before he went up into the mountains, where it slowed down his own progress and everyone else’s as well. Sympathetic and brave though Fittko was, to her Benjamin’s suitcase had to have been a liability.

Having found his way to Portbou, Benjamin learned that transit visas had been cancelled the previous day; his group was to be sent back to France where they surely would be killed. On the night of September 25, 1940, under house arrest at the Hotel Francia, Benjamin is believed to have killed himself with an overdose of the morphine that he carried for self-medication. The precise circumstances of his death are in contention; undeniable though is that a forty eight year old genius was found dead in the morning. The death certificate, says Fittko, recorded the contents of the suitcase as “. . . papeles mas de contenido desconicido” — papers of unknown content.  A week later at the inquest, officials inventoried his possessions:  “. . . a leather briefcase such as businessmen use, a man’s watch, a pipe, six photographs, an x-ray picture, glasses, various letters, magazines, and also some money.” No manuscript. Shortly, the briefcase itself was to vanish. Neither case nor manuscript has ever been found.

For that matter, we don’t know if there even was a manuscript in his suitcase. Whatever it was, was it more important than his own life? Or was the idea of lasting, of making a difference to posterity, commensurate with his life? When the house of Europe is on fire, as it was then, what was necessary to carry out of the burning building? A life? A life’s work? What is too heavy?

2. RECOVERED
The second suitcase traveled north, carried by photographer Agusti Centelles. Centelles’ journey began close to Portbou’s train station, a spectacular building that suggests its 1929 origin at the time of The Barcelona International Exposition. High above the town, the station is, quite literally, a break in time. Because the Spanish railway gauge is 233 millimeters wider than the French gauge, trains must switch from one to the other in what I see as a last gasp of nationalism. Local legend has it that during the change, time stands still. In fact, precious minutes went by when the Republican Army could get supplies, and Jews — those who could afford to escape by train — could gather their belongings and descend into the station’s vastness, its arching glass roof evocative of Europe’s arcades that had stimulated Walter Benjamin’s imagination.

This station is so iconic that I don’t think it’s stretching things to speculate that it might well be the one that Catalan poet/songwriter Lluis Llach had in mind when he wrote A l’Estacio, whose refrain is  que contigo esperan la senal de la llegada de aire nuevo, de un gesto nuevo, de un paso nuevo, de un tren nuevo (. . . with you they wait for the signal of the arrival of fresh air, of a new gesture, a new step, a new train).

A l’Estacio, sung in Catalan by Lluis Llach

Because Portbou was an active site of Catalan resistance, it became a particular target for Nationalist bombings. To shelter its citizens, the Town Council built tunnels close to the station. Through one of these tunnels went Agusti Centelles in 1939, taking with him a suitcase filled with negatives. As official photographer for the Republican government, he knew he had to keep this suitcase with him; if the negatives were to be found (as some were, because he couldn’t take them all), Franco’s troupes would use them to identify and retaliate against their opponents.

When the Spanish refugees made their way over the border to France, they had no idea that they were headed to improvised internment camps where they would sleep in tents, with only the most meager provisions of food, water, and medical supplies. The entire area surrounded by barbed wire; they were, in effect, prisoners.

Centelles spent seven months in these camps, first in Argelès-sur-Mer and then in Bram, near Carcassone, where he photographed the appalling conditions. To prevent his negatives from being stolen, he slept clutching his suitcase in his arms. In 1939 he was allowed  temporary leave from the camp to work on the harvest; that permit became final when he was given a job at a photography studio in Carcassone where he secretly made counterfeit identification documents for members of the French Resistance. After several arrests, Centelles had to leave. He entrusted his suitcase to the family who had taken him in during his exile and set off, unburdened by weight but heavy with loss, on a clandestine journey back to Spain.

The suitcase stayed in the family’s attic for more than three decades. It was not until 1976, the year after Franco died, that Centelles was able to return to Carcassone to retrieve the negatives that he now feared would be gone. The suitcase was still there, the negatives intact. Centelles spent the rest of his life restoring, copying and cataloguing each image, bringing to light what had been hidden for so many years — and, regrettably, hidden too for years afterward through lack of interest. Though Centelles is now referred to as the Spanish Capa, the international photography world only ‘discovered’ him in 2009 when the Jeu de  Paume presented an exhibition of his work — the first time that his images had been seen in France, perhaps because they exposed the shameful treatment of the refugees. In 2011, they were seen for the first time in the United States in a show and symposium at New York University.  Twelve thousand negatives and plates — the entire collection, among them images his grown children had discovered in a rusty biscuit tin in their father’s laboratory — has been sold to Spain’s Ministry of Culture, at last held in a repository for historical memory.

But what did those years do to Centelles –  the first three decades after his first return from France, when he was prohibited from openly working as a photographer? And later, in the second three decades that followed its retrieval, as he faithfully brought his images back to life, did he wonder what was the meaning of witnessing if the evidence remained in darkness?

8/28
Dear Paul—

Here’s another game.

On the surface it is much simpler than Singing Pillow.  It doesn’t even have a name.

We play this game in the boys’ bedroom.  It is the room to the right of the stairs as you come up them.  Half of this room is tucked away under an eve creating a secret corner quality which makes it a favorite place for us for we can easily make forts and clubs and private places. (That, as they say, is a whole different story.)  Our father exposed the beams in here early on and so the dark ceiling adds to the cave like quality.  The small dormer windows open out onto a huge ash tree whose bright green leaves reflect an odd light that often fills this room.  There are also two small doors in the room that lead to attic storage spaces.  These prove to be, to Georgie and me, much more interesting when we are teenagers, for in these cubby-holes we hide our vodka, our pot, sandwich sized baggies full of magic mushrooms. But this is later, after childhood.

The time I am talking about here is when the pink and white vinyl box stereo sits on one of the dressers and a Sarah Vaughan poster hangs above one of the beds, which happens to be Little Richard’s.  Next to that same bed are much smaller pictures tacked up on the wall—diagrams of the human brain, cross-sectional and dorsal views—frontal lobes, occipital lobes, temporal lobes, central fissure, motor cortex, cerebellum, cerebral peduncle, thalamus, corpus callosum, lateral fissure.

Georgie’s corner is more boyish, baseball mitts and comic books.  He has a couple of Elvis records that he has to beg Richard to play.  Richard trades favors.

Back to the game.  Here we are, odd light flooding the space.  We stand near one of the beds.  I stand with my back against Little Richard’s body.  He wraps his arms around my chest, loosely at first.  I start to take deep, deep breaths.  I start taking deep breaths very quickly.  I keep going for as long as I can, hyperventilating.  When I can go on no longer (when I sense that I am beginning to fade) I take one last breath and hold it, pressing the air down into my lungs.  At that same moment Little Richard squeezes me as hard as he can, right around my ribs.  The next thing I know I am on my back, on the bed, and coming up out of a dense, gray fog, fingers and toes tingling.  Little Richard and George are sitting next to me, their laughing faces the first things I see.  I start to giggle too.

The stoney wonderful part of this is in the waking up, those waves, swellings of disorientation that undulate through my body, sometimes converging, crashing into each other right at my waist, right in my groin, warmth spreading outward double-fold as I slowly come up and out from under.

Some of window-green shines into my dark, momentarily lighting that internal mine-field, clear glimpses—oh clarity—frightening, honest, and yet so elusive.

What’s a person to do, Paul?  What’s a person to do.

Now it is Little Richard’s turn.  His back is against my body.  My arms are around his chest.  He breathes.  He hyperventilates.  I squeeze him.  He faints.  He wakes up in his mine-field, my face close to his, laughing him back from where, Paul?  Tell me, from where?  Where did Little Richard live?

We can play this game for hours, first my turn, then Richard’s, then Sweet George.  Summer afternoons vanished into hazy blue-green dreams, chasing the illusive moment between the unconscious world and the conscious one.

Five days—

Claire.

8/30—Thursday—6:30—Claire’s Hour
Dear Paul,

Today is an anniversary of sorts.

Let’s see if I can type it to you without falling apart.

Twenty years ago today I got into my VW and drove away from the honey farm for the last time, hot blades pulling out entrails, I couldn’t stand it.  Back then I thought when you loved someone and they loved you back that nothing could break it. Now I think nothing should be able to break it.

I love Daphne like I love Georgie or Richard and it’ll always be inside me and I don’t see how anything I could do would stop it from flowing back and forth if she knew me and I thought she knew me.  I thought she loved me.  When she said “It’s time for you to go” I thought she was joking.  I even laughed.  But then she said it again, her eyes straight on mine, no hint on her face of anger, but something detached so that I knew she meant what she was saying, that she really wanted me to go into my room, pack up my bags, get into my car and drive away.

We were in the apiary.  I finished supering a couple of hives and then within forty minutes, less than an hour anyway, I had, once again, packed all my worldly possessions into the VW and had hit the road.  I did it, I drove away.

One important rule: none of these guys we picked up at the Cadillac could come back to the homestead.  At the time, though, no rules made any sense to me, so I kept breaking this one.  At first she was lenient, but then one of these hoodlums stole some stuff from her, some jewelry of her mother’s and then another one of them kicked up the furniture in the living room.  She told me, she warned me.  “No more chances,” she said.  Of course I had to find out if she meant it.  The last one committed the worst sin.  You see Daphne reared queen bees too, beautiful ones, fertile and lovely.  She didn’t raise a lot of them but bee keepers throughout the United States and Canada coveted Daphne’s queens.  Anyway, this joker, drunk as a dog, went out into the queen yard in the dark and got into her baby nuclei.  Enough worker bees got to him so that we had to call the medics.  And he basically destroyed a summer’s work as far as rearing queens went.  It was ugly.  And so I had to go.  It looks silly on paper but at the time it didn’t feel that way.  It still doesn’t.

As I drove down the long dirt drive away from the bee-farm I kept looking back and seeing Daphne in the middle of the path all fuzzy through the tears, standing there with the late afternoon summer sun brushing against her right side, her green khaki pants rolled half way up her calves, her tee shirt half tucked in and half out.  I kept thinking she’d signal me back, give me one more chance.

I have an ocean of sadness in me.  Yeah.  A fuckin’ ocean.

Claire

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

 Frottage & Even As We Speak, Available on Amazon April 2nd

Readings:
Beyond Baroque —March 31, 7:00pm
681  Venice, CA 90291
(310) 822-3006

Katharine Haake, Mona Houghton, Chuck Rosenthal, Ramon Garcia

Booksoup—April 15,  4:00 pm
8818 Sunset Blvd.
W. Hollywood CA 90069

Katharine Haake, Mona Houghton

The Last Bookstore —April 21, 7:00pm
453 S Spring St, entrance is on 5th St

Katharine Haake, Mona Houghton, Karen Kevorkian

June 26
Dear Paul,

Daphne had about twenty years on me, and yes she would have been the perfect mother, and yes my fantasies ran in that direction.  Those feelings, though, didn’t surface until the middle of the time I spent with her.  In the beginning I guess I fell into a confused kind of love with her.  I kept misunderstanding everything.  Like one night we had smoked some pot and we were sitting around in the living room, looking over the desert—a lightning storm out on the horizon, spectacular—and I put my head in her lap, which was fine, I mean, Daphne, a physical kind of person, lived inside her body.  And so I put my head in her lap, and I loved her by then, in an adoring helpless way.  Anyway, so we were there on the couch, my head in her lap, and she started to run her fingers through my hair, her nails on my scalp.  I can feel it now, and hear it, that sound, all a kind of bliss, and then I don’t know what happened, I guess I must have taken her other hand in mine and, and I kissed it and I, when I was kissing it, I must have put her fingers into my mouth—and suddenly everything changed—it horrified her.  Disgusted her, I guess.  Wonderful Daphne, though, didn’t hold it against me.

But she made it clear she liked straight sex.  “Simple and uncomplicated,” is how she put it, and she liked to have it regularly, too.  Every week or two we’d go into town to the Cadillac Bar and pick-up guys.  We’d go back to their trailers or their motel rooms, or their apartments and we’d have ourselves some fun.  “Plain old clean American fun,” as she would say. Now don’t get me wrong.  By “straight,” by “clean, American fun,” I mean heterosexual.  When it came to doing it Daphne liked variety and the unorthodox.

She was a wonderful teacher.

I stayed there for two years, lived in a little room off the tool shed.  The honey farm, out in the middle of nowhere, high on a butte.  I grew up a lot out in the desert with the cactus and the Joshua trees and the stars that hung there in the sky, divining the future.

Daphne also knew the value of education.  That first September she took me over to the Antelope Valley Community College and got me enrolled in some classes.

That’s when I started to study biology.  The bees.  I liked the logic of their lives.

Claire.

P.S.  Of course I screwed it all up.

June 29
Dear Paul,

What is it that each tear means as it makes its way down my cheek?  To you?  I can draw you extensive diagrams of the eye, the glands, ducts—the lachrymal apparatus.  Did you know you could sever the fifth cranial nerve and prevent all reflex weeping, no matter how potent the tear gas.  Applying cocaine directly to the eyeball halts all reflex weeping as well.

It’s the sad shit we’re concerned with, isn’t it?  The unutterable shame that we wallow in.

John cares more than anyone should, as I am sure you will agree.

By the way, I can write the letters.  I can send them.  Don’t read them if you don’t want to.  Throw them the fuck away.

Claire

July 3
Dear Paul.

Happy fourth of July.

I’ll agree with you.  Technically speaking we are not talking about reflex weeping here, in the scientific sense of the word.  We are discussing “psychical weeping.” And  cutting the fifth cranial nerve leaves psychical weeping unaffected, intact, and so psychic pain can and does escape, can evidence itself, can seep out of the body.  But I don’t like to cry in front of anyone.  It makes me question my motive in exposing whatever pain it is that makes its way down my cheeks.  It also gives the audience permission to ask, to probe, to expect words, enunciations, and I don’t know how to translate.  You don’t believe that, that words slip away, that I can’t find them, but it is true; it isn’t that I won’t, it is that I can’t.

I wanted to give you the thirty six twenty.  It isn’t fair of you to subtract that from this month’s bill.  I want it accounted for.  Tax purposes.  Please reflect this in any  future billing.  This month’s payment includes an additional seventy two forty.

Claire

July 6
Dear Paul,

Yes I can be very forthright.  You forget I teach in the L.A. Unified School District.

I heard about shrinks going away in August.  The last two weeks, huh?  I can survive.

Claire

July 9
Dear Paul,

Worker bees have five eyes: two compound and three simple.  If a whole hive got sad, why they could drown themselves in tears.

Claire.

p.s. Maybe I could drown us in tears, you and me.

p.p.s.  Do you cry?

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

 Frottage & Even As We Speak, Available on Amazon April 2nd

Readings:
Beyond Baroque —March 31, 7:00pm
681  Venice, CA 90291
(310) 822-3006

Katharine Haake, Mona Houghton, Chuck Rosenthal, Ramon Garcia

Booksoup—April 15,  4:00 pm
8818 Sunset Blvd.
W. Hollywood CA 90069

Katharine Haake, Mona Houghton

The Last Bookstore —April 21, 7:00pm
453 S Spring St, entrance is on 5th St

Katharine Haake, Mona Houghton, Karen Kevorkian