About Looting?

Rebecca Solnit in the Nation:

Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity. They care less for human life than for property. They act without regard for consequences.

I'm talking, of course, about those members of the mass media whose misrepresentation of what goes on in disaster often abets and justifies a second wave of disaster. I'm talking about the treatment of sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol. They still have blood on their hands from Hurricane Katrina, and they are staining themselves anew in Haiti.

Within days of the Haitian earthquake, for example, the Los Angeles Times ran a series of photographs with captions that kept deploying the word "looting." One was of a man lying face down on the ground with this caption: "A Haitian police officer ties up a suspected looter who was carrying a bag of evaporated milk." The man's sweaty face looks up at the camera, beseeching, anguished.

Another photo was labeled: "Looting continued in Haiti on the third day after the earthquake, although there were more police in downtown Port-au-Prince." It showed a somber crowd wandering amid shattered piles of concrete in a landscape where, visibly, there could be little worth taking anyway.

A third image was captioned: "A looter makes off with rolls of fabric from an earthquake-wrecked store." Yet another: "The body of a police officer lies in a Port-au-Prince street. He was accidentally shot by fellow police who mistook him for a looter."

People were then still trapped alive in the rubble. A translator for Australian TV dug out a toddler who'd survived 68 hours without food or water, orphaned but claimed by an uncle who had lost his pregnant wife. Others were hideously wounded and awaiting medical attention that wasn't arriving. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, needed, and still need, water, food, shelter, and first aid. The media in disaster bifurcates. Some step out of their usual "objective" roles to respond with kindness and practical aid. Others bring out the arsenal of cliches and pernicious myths and begin to assault the survivors all over again.

The "looter" in the first photo might well have been taking that milk to starving children and babies, but for the news media that wasn't the most urgent problem. The "looter" stooped under the weight of two big bolts of fabric might well have been bringing it to now homeless people trying to shelter from a fierce tropical sun under improvised tents.

The pictures do convey desperation, but they don't convey crime. Except perhaps for that shooting of a fellow police officer -- his colleagues were so focused on property that they were reckless when it came to human life, and a man died for no good reason in a landscape already saturated with death.

In recent days, there have been scattered accounts of confrontations involving weapons, and these may be a different matter. But the man with the powdered milk? Is he really a criminal? There may be more to know, but with what I've seen I'm not convinced.

Matteo Ricci's Big Map

The New York Times has graciously cropped Ricci's c.1600 world map to suit its readers' presumed provincial world view?


Edward Rothstein in the Times:

When a map of overwhelming dimensions and detail is presented to the ruler of a land, the homage, surely, is a kind of deference. The map is partly meant to be an illustration of the ruler’s powers, the extent of his realm, the range of learning he commands.

And yes, one of the remarkable aspects of the world map on display at the Library of Congress through April 10, is that along with its imposing scale (it is 12.5 feet long and 5.5 feet high) and grand ambitions (it encompasses the known world of the early 17th century), at its very center stands the “Middle Kingdom,” as China called itself, its mountains and rivers commanding attention with dense annotation, all of which is in Chinese.

Created by a visiting Italian-born Jesuit priest, Matteo Ricci, and apparently commissioned by the court of Emperor Wanli in 1602 — the year after Ricci became the first Westerner admitted to Peking and then the Forbidden City— this map is indeed partly a tribute to the land in which Ricci had lived since 1582, and in which he would die in 1610.

One of his commentaries on the map (placed just south of the Tropic of Capricorn), declares that he is “filled with admiration for the great Chinese Empire,” where he has been treated “with friendly hospitality far above my deserts.” Over the landmass of China, he comments: “The Middle Kingdom is renowned for the greatness of its civilization.”

That greatness can be sensed in the delicate cartographic detail that had to be meticulously carved onto six wood blocks before being printed on rice paper. Ricci’s explanatory Chinese commentary is so extensive in some regions that it seems to cover the terrain. The map was meant to stand on six folding screens and can be imagined engulfing its observer.

Snowflake Bentley

From the Guardian:

Bentley took his first successful photomicrograph of a snow crystal at the age of 19 and went on to capture more than 5,000 more images. Kenneth Libbrecht, a physics professor who grows ice crystals in his laboratory at California Institute of Technology, said Bentley's photographs were so good "hardly anybody bothered to photograph snowflakes for almost 100 years."

Stacy Hollander, senior curator of the American Folk Art Museum, which is hosting the fair, said: "Everyone's fascinated by snow. It's just magical, and he captured that magic in these beautiful photomicrographs."

In his local town of Jericho, Bentely's fascination with snowflakes earned him the nickname Snowflake Bentley. A museum there is dedicated to his life's work, housing 2,000 of his vintage prints. A book of his photographs, Snow Crystals, was published in 1931. The same year he died walking home in a blizzard.

Liz Glynn's California Surrogates for the Getty

Nuit Banai on Liz Glynn in Artforum:

Following The 24 Hour Roman Reconstruction Project, her contribution to the New Museum’s first triennial in 2009, Liz Glynn continues to explore the fraught relationship between institutions and art objects. For her latest venture, California Surrogates for the Getty, 2009, she trawled the Dumpsters of the venerable Los Angeles institute to dig up common materials (the exhibition checklist cites “California yard waste, trash, plaster, and Victory wax”) that she repurposed to make copies of the disputed antiquities returned by the museum to Italy in 2007.

The Atomic Clock

Michael Beirut on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientist's Doomsday Clock:

For more than fifty years, arguments against nuclear proliferation have been contentious and complicated. The Doomsday Clock translates all the arguments to a simple — a brutally simple — visual analogy. The Clock suggests imminent apocalypse by marrying the looming approach of midnight and the tense countdown of a ticking time bomb. Appropriately for an organization led by scientists, the Clock sidesteps the overwrought drama of the mushroom cloud in favor of the cool mechanics of an instrument of measurement. The Clock was Martyl's idea, but she admitted she had help from a friend, Egbert Jacobson, design director of Container Corporation of America. Jacobsen suggested that the clock appear in the same design but a different color background on every issue.

Against Photography?

In 2006 Susie Linfield considered the canon of critical apprehension about the photographic medium in the Boston Review:

Put most bluntly, for the past century most photography critics haven’t really liked photographs, or the experience of looking at them, at all. They approach photography—not specific photographs, or specific practitioners, or specific genres, but photography itself—with suspicion, mistrust, anger, and fear. Rather than enter into what Kazin called a “community of interest” with their subject, these critics come armed to the teeth against it. For them, photography is a powerful, duplicitous force to be defanged rather than an experience to embrace.

(Linfield aslo has a great syllabus on the practice of criticism on her faculty website at NYU.)

Why Are There No Conservative University Professors?

Typecasting?

The academic profession “has acquired such a strong reputation for liberalism and secularism that over the last 35 years few politically or religiously conservative students, but many liberal and secular ones, have formed the aspiration to become professors,” they write in the paper, “Why Are Professors Liberal?” That is especially true of their own field, sociology, which has become associated with “the study of race, class and gender inequality — a set of concerns especially important to liberals.”

Rani Singh on Harry Smith

The GRI has just released a collection of essays on and by the great Harry Smith. Artforum has an interview with one of the editors:

I was Harry’s assistant from 1988 until his death in November 1991, and when he passed away I started the Harry Smith Archives as a nonprofit and attempted to locate, collect, preserve, and present his materials, which, due to his irascible nature and peripatetic lifestyle, were essentially all around the globe. Smith lived a very bohemian life, to put it mildly. When I’d visit him, his stuff would be all chockablock––it was really an incredible experience. Whether he was staying at the Chelsea Hotel, at the Breslin Hotel, at Naropa Institute, or in a room in Allen Ginsberg’s apartment in the Lower East Side, it was always an experience. He would have a Seminole patchwork hanging up or a frozen bird in the freezer or a film project in the works and stacks and stacks of books. The room usually had a unique odor, a mix of marijuana and Salem 100 cigarettes and whatever kind of beer or cheap vodka was on sale that week. It was all very heady.

Dark Days for Doctoral Candidates in the Humanities

Brian Croxall skips out on the MLA conference:

This year was to be my fourth year attending MLA in a row. I spoke in 2006, interviewed in 2007, spoke and interviewed in 2008, and had hoped to speak and interview this year as well. When the interviews did not materialize, I made the difficult decision to not attend the convention given the financial realities of being an adjunct faculty member. I regretted not having the chance to speak–especially on a panel titled “Today’s Teachers, Today’s Students: Economics”–but the panel chair volunteered to deliver my paper in absentia.

So as my panel is happening in Philadelphia, I decided to simultaneously publish my comments that are being read at this moment.

Barack Obama and the Political Economy of the Sign

Naomi Klein in the Guardian:

Though it's too soon to issue a verdict on the Obama presidency, we do know this: he favours the grand symbolic gesture over deep structural change every time. So he will make a dramatic announcement about closing the notorious Guantánamo Bay prison – while going ahead with an expansion of the lower profile but frighteningly lawless Bagram prison in Afghanistan, and opposing accountability for Bush officials who authorised torture. He will boldly appoint the first Latina to the Supreme Court, while intensifying Bush-era enforcement measures in a new immigration crackdown. He will make investments in green energy, while championing the fantasy of "clean coal" and refusing to tax emissions, the only sure way to substantially reduce the burning of fossil fuels. Most importantly, he will claim to be ending the war in Iraq, and will retire the ugly "war on terror" phrase – even as the conflicts guided by that fatal logic escalate in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

A California Education

Peggy Orenstein in the Times:

Nothing is more integral to that aura of possibility than the Golden State’s 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, which guaranteed that residents could attend college virtually free. The top 12.5 percent of high-school graduates were funneled into the University of California system, which included the finest public institutions in the world. The top third were eligible for California State campuses. And for anyone who was “capable of profiting from the instruction offered,” the doors of community colleges were wide open. Free! Imagine the chutzpah, the pie-in-the-sky optimism of such a plan! Class and race would no longer be an obstacle to mobility: this state would be a model of diversity, fluidity — a true melting pot.

I’m now married to a beneficiary of that vision. My husband, Steven, a native Angeleno, is the son of a factory worker and a supermarket checkout clerk — Japanese-Americans who were interned during World War II and did not themselves attend college. Four years at a grand total of about $4,000 (including rent and ramen) changed his life: it didn’t ensure his success, but it provided the opportunity for it.

Flash-forward three decades. The state’s budget crisis led to cuts of $800 million from the U.C. system in 2009; $500 million from C.S.U.; and $700 million from community colleges. In December, the state regents increased U.C. student fees by 32 percent. That means, once you factor in books, room and board, that a year at Berkeley, the system’s flagship school, will top $30,000 next fall — hardly most people’s idea of gratis.

Ralph Steiner - Mechanical Principles (1930)

Klinger's Glove

Object as Subject: Photographs of the Czech Avant-Garde

Frantisek Dritkol, Nude with Vase, 1927

On the topic of Czech photography, the Phillips is running a great show on Czech modernist photography:

Object as Subject: Photographs of the Czech Avant-Garde
October 10, 2009-February 7, 2010

Some of the most innovative approaches to photography were pioneered by the Czech artistic avant-garde in the early decades of the 20th century. After the establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918, a vibrant cultural life sprang up around Prague, fueling the minds and imaginations of a generation of photographers, including Jaromír Funke, Jaroslav Rössler, and Josef Sudek. Object as Subject: Photographs of the Czech Avant-Garde examines the important role of objects in the Czech avant-garde's exploration of the formal concerns of abstraction. It presents 30 photographs by 10 Czech photographers, from abstract compositions of the 1920s by Funke and Rössler to surrealist photographs of the 1930s by Adolf Schneeberger and František Vobecký. Departing from conventional approaches to still life, Czech photographers experimented with dramatic effects of light and shadow, bold geometries of line and form, and unusual perspectives. The American expatriate Man Ray had a profound influence on his Czech contemporaries. Man Ray's radical experiments reached Czechoslovakia in 1922, a time of growing Czech interest in abstract art. Ultimately for the Czech avant-garde, objects provided a laboratory for formal investigations of abstract principles of light, shadow, geometric planes, and space. Within this framework, objects functioned as vehicles for abstract expression, affirming their powerful role in the creative process.

Louise Jacobson of the Washington City Paper reviews:

Unlike the pictorialist, almost old-fashioned work exhibited earlier this year in “Picturing Progress: Hungarian Women Photographers, 1900–1945” at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the contemporaneous work of Eastern European men in the Phillips Collection’s “Object as Subject: Photographs of the Czech Avant-Garde” does really seem ahead of its time. From the flat, proto-abstract-expressionist arrangements of Jaroslav Rossler to the shiny, industrial-product abstractions of Jaromir Funke and Arnos Pikart, the visual and conceptual boldness of these images rises above the warm-toned, less-than-sharp printing techniques available to photographers of that era. Of special note are two compositions by Frantisek Drtikol that pair a shapely nude with angular shapes—a not-so-subtle allusion, presumably, to that most celebrated of avant-garde works, Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase.

More on Drtikol

Tichy upcoming at ICP

Etudes Photographiques recently ran an interesting piece on Tichy by Marc Lenot:

The Invention of Miroslav Tichý

How is an artist invented ? How is a photographer propelled from obscurity to fame in a few short years? How do exhibition curators construct a narrative around a photographer and his work? What factors determine the success or failure of such a narrative? This article highlights the curators’ work in attaining artistic recognition for the Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý. Initially exhibited unsuccessfully under the label of ‘outsider art,’ Tichý achieved renown in 2004 when the curator Harald Szeemann presented him under the aegis of contemporary art. He was subsequently honored with an award at the Rencontres d’Arles and exhibited at Kunsthaus Zurich, then at the Centre Pompidou, and his works were acquired by numerous collections. The critical analysis of schemas of presentation and legitimation that vary according to the context in which the works are being presented – outsider art or contemporary art – highlights the role played by curators in the artistic recognition of the Czech photographer; their work, however, runs up against the resistance of the artist himself.