September 2010 Archives
We are all BananaRepublicans.
Obama has claimed the right to assassinate American citizens whom he suspects of "terrorism," merely on the grounds of his own suspicion or that of the CIA, something Bush never claimed publicly." -- The World Can't Wait
Also, "Obama says that the government can detain you indefinitely, even if you have been exonerated in a trial, and he has publicly floated the idea of 'preventive detention.' "
Also, "unsurprisingly, the Obama administration has refused to prosecute any members of the Bush regime who are responsible for war crimes, including some who admitted to waterboarding and other forms of torture, thereby making their actions acceptable for him or any future president, Democrat or Republican."
May I add an annex to The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today, which is now on in New York at The Museum of Modern Art? The MoMA show features works by lotsa biggies -- Atget, Bellmer, Brancusi, Brassaï, Duchamp, Frank, Friedlander, Gaillard, Höch, Kertész, Man Ray, Nauman, and too many others to cite. Straight Up features Stephen Deutch (1908-1997). He's so little known this is the best biographical link I can find for him.
A longtime friend of Nelson Algren's, Deutch was born in Budapest, Hungary. He studied sculpture there at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts.
In the '80s, when Steve and I became best of friends, in Chicago, he was always carving wood pieces. They were invariably sensual abstractions of the human form, as you can see from the photos. But while he kept his hand in as a sculptor, he made his living as a commercial photographer.
Archer, 1933-34, Wood sculpture, Paris
Steve and his wife Helene arrived in Chicago in 1936, from Paris, where she had been working as a fashion photographer. Helene taught him her trade. "I was a pretty good photographer," she recalled in an interview for a retrospective essay by Abigail Foerstner in Stephen Deutch, Photographer. "With his sense of lighting, Steve brought everything alive." Foerstner writes:Lovers, ca. 1989, Wood carving
They opened their first studio in Chicago within weeks of their move to the city. They had arrived during a remarkable era of American photography. In 1935, a corps of photographers began roaming the country in what would become an eight-year odyssey to record the ravages of the depression for the Farm Security Administration. ...Most photographers signed up for a career in the arts, the studio or on the streets as photojournalists. But Deutch straddled all three camps with his magazine photo essays about Lena Horne, Joe Louis and Duke Ellington and his maverick studio style that gave commercial shots an unstaged spontaneity. Most poignant of all was his work as an artist on self-assigned projects that captured the life of a city from its blustering politicians to its mentally wounded. From start to finish, from Paris to Chicago, he sculpted with light in photographs that tell a story of the connectedness of all things.
Kama Sutra #2, ca. 1989, Wood carving
Compassion was perhaps an even greater touchstone of his work than sensuality. This is especially clear in his photojournalism, whether it was his "Twilight World" series of 1964-65 about the Dixon School for the Mentally Retarded, which was published by the Chicago Daily News and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, or his "Bench Sitter" series of the mid-1950s, about which Studs Terkel wrote:
Aside from Edward Hopper and his use of light in accentuating loneliness, I know of no one else who has so poignantly captured that feeling as Deutch does in his bench people. We see two elderly ones sharing a park bench, yet they are at a distance from one another: far apart and back to back. In the background, casually dominant, is a sports-car dealership; "JAGUAR" is the only word we see. It is enough. At the school for retarded children, we see one: she has bedecked herself with assorted dolls as elegantly as a young society matron in sable furs. She, too, is someone to reckon with.
Stephen Deutch [Photo: Helene Deutch]
There could have been no warmer friend than Steve. But his warmth was available to anyone. This is evident not just in his work as a photojournalist. Consider "Clochard," a concrete casting from the early 1930s, which portrays a blind accordion player he saw in the Paris metro. Steve captured the humanity of the figure, it seems to me, while avoiding the least hint of sentimentality. Not too shabby.
Clochard, ca. early 1930s, Paris [Photo: JH]
Went to see the exhibition "Experimental Women in Flux" at the MoMA Library. There was much to like, although it's a small exhibit. I got a kick out of this feminist blast:
fluxus can be lots of fun when the boys let you on their boat
sometimes they throw you off the boat
you have to be NEAT all your words games philosophy
and things you make have to be NEAT (except for wolf and claes
they can smear their pages its o.k.)
if you dont wear underpants or show your pussy you get pushed
over the side (except not by jean-jacques philip larry or ben)
in england the boys gave me the fluxus boat to steer we
traveled with water ropes bricks milk shoes and blood
when i came home george wrote a bad letter about my crimes
operatic political sexual metaphoric motors caressing mess and
showing my pussy i could always sneak onto the happenings boat
it was bigger with louder music and open all night
nitsch and muhl came there with their dead pets
it used to be fun making things with alison takako and yoko
it was o.k. if we rowed but not to steer
i dont know if charlotte's embrace of all of us was flux-us or not
sometimes no one can read labels in the dark
fluxus from the far east moved by neon light and ironed wedges right into
canal street i never saw them fighting for a window seat gino and francesco always said we could all play together
that is because those italians dont want to listen
to two popes in one life time
When Barack Obama rebuffed calls for an independent truth commission, choosing not to investigate George W. Bush and his cronies as war criminals, he forfeited whatever moral authority he might have had as president. In his Aug. 31 Oval Office speech announcing "the end of the combat mission in Iraq" he even heaped praise on Bush for his so-called patriotism. At yesterday's White House news conference he actually said, "One of the things that I most admired about President Bush was, after 9/11, him being crystal-clear about the fact that we were not at war with Islam." Does he really believe that? Does he think anybody believes that? What else does Obama "most admire" about his predecessor? He must be kidding.
Postscript: Read the response at Political Irony, a blog that covers "humor and hypocrisy from the world of politics."
Yes, we know about 9/11. We're still reeling from it. The event itself was catastrophic. But the pols and war profiteers have put it to ruinous use ever since. So I'll save my customary Best 9/11 Memorial posting for next year, when the 10th anniversary comes around. Besides, how many times can you post Still the Best 9/11 Memorial or Still the Best 9/11 Memorial, Redux ... without cheapening the idea? Instead, on a tip from a staffer, have a good laugh at this piece of CIA history.
Have a look at the Web site for the Fluxus exhibition Experimental Women in Flux at the Museum of Modern Art Library. The curators write:
In the spirit of MoMA's publication of Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art in June 2010, the Museum Library features experimental works by women that form part of the newly acquired Silverman Fluxus Collections Reference LIbrary. With a focus on artists' books, event scores, exhibition catalogues, periodicals, an examples of the alternative press, the exhibition includes publications by Alison Knowles, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi, Yoko Ono, Dorothy Iannone, and others.
The exhibition -- organized by Sheelagh Bevan, with David Senior -- sounds pretty cool, especially since they had the wisdom to include lots of Charlotte Moorman, Mary Beach's provocative "Now," originally published in the little magazine The San Francisco EARTHQUAKE No. 3 ... way back in 1968 it was ... as well as Alison Knowles' book, Journal of the Identical Lunch, also published in the Stone Age ... back in 1971 ... by Nova Broadcast Press. And check out this terrific commentary-cum-video about the show.
Abbie Conant, that is -- the trombonist, actor, singer, poet, feminist, and professor, whom Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.
