Peter Norman

My friend Gissur Erlingsson sent me a link to this story at The Independent about the fallout to the late Australian Olympian Peter Norman for his role in the famous black power protest at the 1968 Mexico City games. I'd written on the image some time ago but focused on Carlos and Smith. Norman paid a heavy price for his participation in this event. It seems like the Australian government might be ready to try to rectify that somewhat. Too late.

Two Essays by Rebecca Solnit

Lately I've come across two essays by Rebecca Solnit, whose work I admire. The first is here at Orion and sings the praises of gardening for raising, but not fully addressing a whole set of political matters.

You can argue that vegetable seeds are the seeds of the new revolution. But the garden is an uneasy entity for our time, a way both to address the biggest questions and to duck them. “Some gardens are described as retreats, when they are really attacks,” famously said the gardener, artist, and provocateur Ian Hamilton Finlay. A garden as a retreat means a refuge, a place to withdraw from the world. A garden as an attack means an intervention in the world, a political statement, a way in which the small space of the garden can participate in the larger space that is society, politics, and ideas. Every garden negotiates its own relationship between retreat and attack and in so doing illuminates—or maybe we should say engages—the political questions of our time.

In particular, Solnit connects the preoccupation with local agriculture and gardening to the larger struggle against corporations like Monsanto who hope to patent as much of the growing process as they might.

Monsanto makes a cameo in the second essay, here at TomDispatch, which takes the form of an apology letter to the Mexican nation. In her letter Solnit is mostly concerned with the drug trade and attendant violence that beset Mexico mostly as a result of American demand. In part, that demand reflects an alienation from place that is the converse of gardening. So, in the end the two essays intersect not just at corporate headquarters but elsewhere (or nowhere?) as well.

The Politics of Representation

Today I saw this story in The New York Times - portraits of the people who have gotten caught up, directly or indirectly, in drug-related violence in Mexico. The question: "But for Mexico, a complicated democracy* that has historically chosen stability over reform, are talking and sharing enough?" The answer? No. The article points out the need for political remedies. Just so.
__________
* nice euphemism.

Courage: "An Open Letter from an Artist to a Mexican Crime Cartel Boss"

"Do you ever feel sorry and secretly cry? Do you sometimes look at yourself in the mirror and feel embarrassed or angry? Do you really believe that Jesus Malverde, St. Judas Tadeo and the Holy Death are protecting you? Are you willing to pay the huge price of putting your relatives and friends at risk for a relatively short life of power, sex and glamour? Do the movies and soap operas that you inspire make the daily risks worthwhile? Don’t you ever wonder if creating a truce with other cartels might actually be beneficial to you and to the whole country? Am I naïve for asking these questions?"

Photograph © Michael Macor / The Chronicle.

At In These Times this week you can find this courageous open letter by performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. In his letter Gómez-Peña addresses the performative dimensions of the violence and mayhem that the drug cartels generate. The passage I've lifted above contains a series of hardly naive questions. Unfortunately, the answer to each is very likely not those Gómez-Peña would like. And I fear that he has placed his well-being in jeopardy by speaking out.

Enrique Metinides

In The New York Tines today there is a report by Michael Kimmelman on an exhibition at the Anton Kern Gallery (NYC) of work by Mexican photographer Enrique Metinides. The pictures deal almost exclusively with random and "senseless" death and violence and suffering. The first of the images here (both © Enrique Metinides) shows the bad ending of a training flight that killed both student and instructor. The second records the grief of men at an undisclosed tragedy. And these are hardly among the most gory and graphic of his photographs.

What are we to make of this work? It brings to mind a criticism that Susan Sontag leveled at Diane Arbus.

"Arbus photographs people in various degrees of unconscious or unaware relation to their pain, their ugliness. This necessarily limits what kinds of horrors she might have been drawn to photograph; it excludes sufferers who presumably know they are suffering, like victims of accidents, wars, famines, and political persecutions. Arbus would never have taken pictures of accidents, events that break into life; she specialized in slow-motion private smashups, most of which had been going on since the subject’s birth."

Sontag faults Arbus for rendering "history and politics irrelevant," for remaining resolutely "not interested in ethical journalism," for "concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate - but without the compassionate purpose that such a subject is expected to serve." Well, compassion is perhaps not the appropriate motivation for a political project. But what of Metinides' lifelong project of recording accidents and personal tragedy? There is no sense in which it is political. Is it ethical? Kimmelman claims that "sometimes" the photographs register compassion, but "not too much." So, if ethics centrally involves compassion (a contestable claim) it hardly is ethical either.

Some time back I posted on a short essay by Susie Linfield in which she asks about the market for pictures of atrocity. She has in mind photographs of war and famine and other large scale, man-made disasters. And she wonders aloud what would prompt someone to buy and own such an image. Here the question presses itself even harder insofar as Metinides records the random and arbitrary things that befall individuals - car crashes and accidents and so forth. What would prompt someone to buy and own graphic images of such fatalities? These are not Arbus' images "slow-motion, private smashups," they reveal the excruciating outcome of real time catastrophes, making certain they are put on public display, depriving those involved, alive or dead, of privacy and solitude and whatever dignity that might afford them. Why would someone choose to buy such an image? Why would someone spend a lifetime recording them? I am perplexed.