“And I Still See Their Faces: The Vanished World of Polish Jews,”

“What we need is a critique of visual culture that is alert to the power of images for good and evil and that is capable of discriminating the variety and historical specificity of their uses.” - W.J.T. Mitchell. Picture Theory (1994).
Labels: Talking Back to Numbskulls
Labels: Enthusiasms, Music, Paul Motian
"In March 2006 I traveled to Amman, Jordan, and in August I traveled to Istanbul to participate in interviews of former detainees from Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq. Philadelphia attorney Susan Burke (Burke Pyle, LLC.) and Detroit attorney Shereef Akeel (Akeel & Valentine, PLC), joined by lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights and Human Rights Watch are mounting a class action lawsuit on behalf of the tortured former detainees, and travel frequently to the Middle East to meet with them. Burke invited me in my capacity as an artist, to accompany them to Amman to join in the interviews of the former prisoners, driven to Amman from Baghdad. Each of the Iraqis was tortured in Abu Ghraib. None of the Iraqis were ever formally accused of any crime, and each was released without charges.
I went to Jordan to bear witness to the victims’ stories in a visual medium, in this case drypoint prints and watercolors, in an effort to attach individual faces to the Abu Ghraib story, that has interested me since first hearing of it 2004. Working with journalist Tara McKelvey, (also invited by Burke), who conducted the interviews, I drew the client’s portrait directly onto a copper plate using a stylus. I scratched the testimony I heard as it was being spoken backwards onto the plates so that once printed, the words would read forward. After three days I finished the last of my 8 copper plates and changed to painting the portraits and text in watercolor paints, completing 10. My goal was to give a voice to these victims in a way that is more direct and more human than what is available through newspaper or TV articles. This past August I returned again with Burke and Akeel, this time to Istanbul, again to witness interviews of more former detainees. I completed 10 drypoints and 9 watercolors. The major difference on this excursion was that the lawyers brought with them some two hundred non-public photos taken in the torture ward of Abu Ghraib, and, after each interview, asked the prisoners to identify
anything they could in each of the pictures. "
I think these prints successfully walk the line between, on the one hand, the anonymity of the Abu Ghriab photos and how they have been presented in the press and, on the other hand, the need to present the vitims of U.S. torture policy as individuals. Heyman manages to personalize the experience of prisoners without exposing them to further humiliation. I guess my question is how one might get his prints - and similar work - out of museums and galleries.
* I will leave to one side my thoughts on the distance between this Swarthmore enterprise and the ways the UofR student radio station (WRUR) has been integrated into the least adventuresome npr station on earth (WXXI Rochester) over the past couple of years.
Labels: Abu Ghraib, Daniel Heyman, torture
Labels: Germaine Greer
Labels: Eugene Richards
I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life's brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts and honour."
Can anyone tell me where this is from? I'd appreciate any suggestions. Thanks.
[This portrait of Berger is by Laure Vasconi and is © the photographer.]
Labels: Berger, John Berger, portraits
Labels: Artists as Critics, Berger, Dyer, John Berger
Labels: Conventions, Dewey, Pragmatism
Labels: Human Trafficking
Labels: communists, Conservatives, dissent, intellectuals, Leszek Kolakowski, Poland, Teachers, UofC
Labels: convergences, Dyer, Zhang Huan
Labels: convergences, Weschler
Labels: Best Shots
Labels: Talking Back to Numbskulls
Lalla Essaydi was born and raised in Morocco, but lives in the United States. Converging Territories was photographed in the house in which women from her family were sometimes locked up for weeks if they had transgressed the rules of Islam." (From Noorderlicht Photofesstival 2004.)
Labels: Lalla Essaydi
Labels: Cool Designs and Other Things
Labels: Talking Back to Numbskulls
Labels: fashion
Labels: Music
Labels: Lucinda Williams, Music
Labels: Prizes, World Press Photo
Labels: BushCo
Labels: Death Penalty, Legal
Labels: Prizes
Why the Classics
by Zbigniew Herbert
1
in the fourth book of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides tells among other things
the story of his unsuccessful expedition
among long speeches of chiefs
battles sieges plague
dense net of intrigues of diplomatic endeavours
the episode is like a pin
in a forest
the Greek colony Amphipolis
fell into the hands of Brasidos
because Thucydides was late with relief
for this he paid his native city
with lifelong exile
exiles of all times
know what price that is
2
generals of the most recent wars
if a similar affair happens to them
whine on their knees before posterity
praise their heroism and innocence
they accuse their subordinates
envious collegues
unfavourable winds
Thucydides says only
that he had seven ships
it was winter
and he sailed quickly
3
if art for its subject
will have a broken jar
a small broken soul
with a great self-pity
what will remain after us
will be like lovers' weeping
in a small dirty hotel
when wall-paper dawns
Labels: poetry, Zbigniew Herbert
Labels: Music
Labels: Diversity, Pragmatism
Labels: David Levi Strauss
Labels: Obituaries