By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, March 18th, 2011 
“I believe that intellectuals have played crucial roles in the making of democracy and in the ongoing practices of democratic life.” With this sentence, I opened my book Civility and Subversion. Motivating the writing of that book was a developing misinformed (to my mind) consensus that intellectuals played an important role in the democratic opposition to the Communist order, but they would be relatively unimportant for the post Communist making and running of democracy. I thought that this was a terrible mistake, and I tried to show that in the book. In short, my argument was that intellectuals play a democratic role, not when they purport to provide the answers to a society’s problems, but when they facilitate deliberate discussion. Intellectuals are talk provokers. Discussions at Deliberately Considered over the past week demonstrate my point. We have considered and opened discussion about important problems.
On Monday, Vince Carducci introduced and analyzed the photography of John Ganis, art that confronts the damage we do to our environment, showing beauty that displays destruction. Carducci observes that “Ganis describes himself as a ‘witness’ rather than an activist. And yet his subject matter and its treatment clearly indicate where the artist’s loyalties lie.” But it is the ambiguity of the work, its internal tension that provokes and doesn’t answer political questions that facilitated a discussion between Felipe Pait and Carducci, comparing the destruction of the BP oil spill with the devastation in Japan. This could inform serious discussion about my reflections on man versus nature. We are present. We have our needs. How does it look when we satisfy them? What are the consequences? I think that this reveals that the power of the witness can sometimes be more significant than that of the activist. Carducci and I have an ongoing discussion about the value of agit prop. He likes it. I abhor it. I think Ganis’ work, with Carducci’s analysis of it, as the devastation in Japan was unfolding, supports my position.
![]() DC Week in Review: Art, My Town, and Japan
By Vince Carducci, March 14th, 2011 
Witnessing can be a significant act. Witnessing through art opens deliberate consideration, as is revealed in this post by DC regular, Vince Carducci. -Jeff
For more than 25 years, photographer John Ganis has been documenting the American landscape in lush panoramic color images that use the tools of photographic convention subversively in order to investigate the intersection of nature and culture, especially in places where the former is losing ground to the latter. In his book Consuming the American Landscape, he collected more than eighty images in which toxic waste dumps, strip mine tailings, and other scenes of environmental degradation are rendered with all of the grandeur characteristic of the work of Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter. This past summer Ganis turned his lens toward two of the most infamous examples in recent memory, the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and a much-smaller yet still devastating pipeline leak into the Kalamazoo River in southwestern Michigan.Recently, his latest work was exhibited at the Swords Into Plowshares Peace Gallery in downtown Detroit.
In classic landscape photography, the wide-angle lens and high-resolution detail are devices that serve to convey the majesty of the environment and elicit awe for those parts of the world still seemingly untouched by humankind. In Ganis’ hands, these techniques suggest instead cognitive dissonance, a disparity between form and content: on the one hand the allure of the refined aesthetic with which the images are rendered and on other hand the revulsion at the recognition of what they are about.
In BP Oil Spill Containment Booms, Louisiana (all images 2010, courtesy of the artist), floating orange tubes meander back from the foreground to a horizon that bisects the picture plane. Watercraft of various configurations can be seen in the distance. The ocean in the bottom half of the picture reflects dappled light under the bright blue sky . . .
Read more: John Ganis: Ruptures and Reclamations
By Vince Carducci, February 10th, 2011 
Vince Carducci blogs about art and culture in Detroit at Motown Review of Art. He has written for many publications, including Artforum, Art in America, the Brooklyn Rail, and PopMatters.
The term “agitprop” has a negative connotation among American thinkers in the Western liberal tradition, a residue of the high-culture/mass culture debates of the Cold War era. In his DC post on the Belarus Free Theater, for example, Jeff Goldfarb writes:
“They [the actors] create a free space in a repressive society. They do so not just to make a political point, but a cultural one, creating art, not agitprop.”
Part of the anxiety rests in the hermeneutics of suspicion, the perception that ideology, which agitprop is at the service of, ultimately deals in false consciousness, that it’s a veneer that serves vested interests and thus occludes “true” knowledge. Critical theory awards a privileged position to “art” as resistant to ideology due to its ostensible autonomy. And yet even Theodor W. Adorno, arguably the most mandarin of the Frankfurt School meisters, acknowledges a dual nature for art, characterizing it in Aesthetic Theory as both autonomous object and embedded social fact. (Early on in that famously gnarly tome he writes: “Art perceived strictly aesthetically is art aesthetically misperceived.”)
Clifford Geertz offers a solution to the problem in “Ideology As a Cultural System.” For Geertz, ideology isn’t necessarily deceptive (in the service of what he calls “interest”) or symptomatic (a manifestation of what he calls “strain”) but instead is a semiotic system that uses metaphor to “grasp, formulate, and communicate social realities that elude the tempered language of science” (and I would add formalist aesthetics). From that perspective, what is called agitprop might be less normatively called visual culture, part of a semiotic system in which art is simply one aspect, if a culturally privileged one. I think of this with respect to the work of Dylan Miner, which was on view in Detroit last fall.
An assistant professor in . . .
Read more: The Art of Dead Labor
By Rafael Narvaez, February 3rd, 2011 
 I agree with Daniel Dayan that the general commitment to make visible all things hidden is deeply problematic, as I explored in my initial post on WikiLeaks. But, this doesn’t mean that making previously secret things public is always without merit. Political judgment is at issue. Here, Rafael Narvaez, a sociologist originally from Peru, will consider the issue, as it applies to the situation in his native land, and, more generally, third world dictatorships, drawing upon the writing of Mario Vargas Llosa. -Jeff
After receiving the 2010 Nobel Prize for literature, Mario Vargas Llosa gave an interview with Inger Enkvist at the Swedish Academy. Enkvist begins by asking broad questions pertaining to the role of literature, of fantasy, the humanities, etc. He then asks about one of the key themes in Vargas Llosa’s work.
“In your oeuvre one often finds fanatics, characters that are cynics, politically, and also skeptics. And almost always there is a fracture [in your narrative] separating the world of politics and the world of ethics or morality. Can you comment?”
Vargas Llosa, with his usual nonchalant straight-forwardness, answers:
“I come from a world [Peru] where politics, generally and save exceptions, has been in the hands of the worst kind of people […]; a world that has had a very entrenched history of dictatorships that have been very violent and very corrupt; a world where politics seemed to be the monopoly of cheaters [pícaros], of bandits, of the most violent people. Naturally […] there have also been decent people, idealists; but they have been generally defeated, left in the margins –destroyed, in the end. So it is not at all strange that my oeuvre presents a view into political life in Peru and Latin America [which shows] such tradition of violence, of large-scale corruption, of thuggishness […]. In Latin America politics has generally been a terrible source of violence, of corruption, of backwardness. It would have been absurd and unreal for me to describe such political world as it were a world of generous beings, of idealistic characters who work for the common good [begins to . . .
Read more: Mario Vargas Llosa, The Politics of Gesture in Peru and Beyond
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, January 31st, 2011 
 It’s been a busy week at DC and in the world, thus a slight delay in this post.
Indeed, last week has been “restlessly eventful,” as Robin Wagner Pacifici might put it. The main event has been in the Arab world, particularly in Egypt. But closer to home, President Obama gave an important State of the Union address. In both cases, we can see that something new is emerging, that tomorrow will be strikingly different from what yesterday was. Change rather than continuity is the storyline.
Obviously, Egypt appears to be more consequential. It would seem that there is real democratic promise and a promise of an end to stagnation, in a country and region with a history of great cultural and political achievements, mostly frustrated in the recent past. The outcome is uncertain, who wins and who loses is unknown, but clearly a page has been turned.
Less dramatically, President Obama for the first time seems to have been understood on his own terms, as a creative centrist, making advances in changing the nature of the center in the United States. Given the power of the United States, this may indeed be eventful.
Egypt and Beyond
I particularly appreciate the post by Hazem Kandil. He points out how conventional ways of understanding politics and history, not only in the media but also in academia, did not anticipate what is now happening before our eyes. I would underscore two aspects of this, which in fact coincide with my last two book projects, The Politics of Small Things and the forthcoming Reinventing Political Culture.
Kandil illuminates the gap between past and future, as Arendt depicted this. All the studies of Egypt as “thoroughly Islamized,” with powerful “mosque networks,” “social welfare circles,” mired by “identity politics,” and informed by and organized around symbols and rituals, suggested that the culture of political culture points in the direction of authoritarian continuity. His note demonstrates how we must consider cultural creativity, along with cultural continuity in political and not only in artistic matters.
Now, look again at the Muslim Brotherhood. Note . . .
Read more: DC Week in Review: Egypt, The State of the Union, Between Past and Future
By Vince Carducci, January 24th, 2011 
Vince Carducci blogs about art and other aspects of culture in Detroit at Motown Review of Art. He has also written for Artforum, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other publications.
On January 3, the online culture news service Flavorwire ran an item on a new book of photographs by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre titled “The Ruins of Detroit.” Marchand and Meffre are French photographers who worked in the city over the last year or so as part of Time magazine’s “Assignment Detroit” in which a cadre of journalists took up local residence and reported on what they discovered. Detroit has long been a poster child for urban disinvestment and Marchand and Meffre discovered plenty of evidence of it.
The genre Marchand and Meffre mine is known locally as “ruin porn” and artists of all media here have been ruminating on the city’s gradual return to the state of nature for decades. (For a couple of the more interesting examples, see the work of Scott Hocking and the blog of painter Stephen Magsig “Postcards from Detroit.”) But while the city”s deliquescence holds an admittedly romantic allure, there is another potentially more fertile tendency emerging that I’ve come to call “the art of the commons.”
The art of commons has sprouted up in spaces created by the erasure of the distinction between public and private as part of the city’s wholesale abandonment over the last forty years — there are upwards of 80,000 vacant buildings and lots in Detroit and the population is less than half the postwar peak of approximately 1.9 million. Artists and other social entrepreneurs are using this preternatural environment to rethink notions of community and the role of art and other aspects of culture.
Perhaps the most well known is The Heidelberg Project, begun in 1986 by Tyree Guyton. Working with his grandfather Sam Mackey, Guyton began cleaning up vacant lots in his neighborhood and used the castoffs collected to create dozens of outdoor art installations. As with other examples of the . . .
Read more: Detroit & the Art of the Commons
By Robin Wagner-Pacifici, January 10th, 2011 
The recent movie “The King’s Speech,” has been well and broadly reviewed for the wonderful acting of stars Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush. The film recounts the story of the arduous treatment of King George VI of England’s debilitating stutter. While the film tells a story of what media pundits call “an unlikely friendship” between Lionel Logue, an Australian actor manqué who has developed a speech defects practice and the imminently to-be-crowned British monarch, it addresses many issues relevant to the mystery of sovereignty itself. As we approach President Barack Obama’s second State of the Union address, and think about our own executive’s voice, “The King’s Voice” can be gainsaid for the way it animates key sociological insights into the nature of political legitimacy, sovereignty, democracy, and the role of the leader’s rhetoric in binding a nation together (especially a nation at war).
Ever since Ernst Kantorowicz analyzed the medieval theological innovation of the “king’s two bodies,” (a theology that managed the contradictory ideas that the king is divine and thus immortal and that the king is mortal and thus vulnerable to corruption and disease), we have recognized the ways in which real-world kings and presidents have been maneuvering to appear human and transcendent simultaneously. Other sociological and anthropological work on transcendence, political ritual, war and legitimacy (Durkheim, Weber, and Geertz spring to mind) has made us conscious of the ways that rulers use their bodies and their voices to demonstrate and symbolize the collectivities they rule. Historically they have done so by highlighting their sovereign exceptionalism. At the same time, an American democratic diffidence toward transcendence and the divine has also insisted that our leaders be “just like us.”
“The King’s Speech” draws our attention to the role of the voice of the monarch in addressing the nation and, in moments of national peril, literally constituting the nation as a self-conscious entity ready to make sacrifices. George VI, catapulted by the abdication of his older brother into being king, must make an important speech as Britain goes to war in September 1939. He stutters badly under . . .
Read more: The King’s Speech, the President’s Speech
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, January 6th, 2011 
There was an interesting profile of the politics of small things in the New York Times. A report on The Belarus Free Theater, which is in New York, performing at La Mama. This theater resembles the kinds of theaters I have studied. They create a free space in a repressive society. They do so not just to make a political point, but a cultural one, creating art, not agitprop. It is not surprising that one of their major admirers and supporters is Tom Stoppard whose work fits in a similar tradition of serious philosophically informed politically significant work.
But I noticed in the Times account and in other reviews and reports of their work an approach that I find problematic: the notion that great art is correlated with bad politics. Great art in the face of repression is heroic and certainly worthy of notice, but I think it is far from clear that repression is a particularly good basis for artistic achievement. To the contrary, I believe it is distance from repression, after the fact, from exile or in spite of repression, that political problems are best confronted artistically. Consider Stoppard’s work as an important case in point.
As a very specific confirmation of my point that good politics promises to make particularly great art, I thought about a theater – cultural group I know in the neighborhood of the Belarus Free Theater, Pogranicze (Borderlands) of Sejny. It is a foundation, community center, social service agency, social movement, cultural institute, art center, music school, and theater, among other things, with its roots in the Polish Student Theater Movement. Its founders were active in that movement. In 1989, the fall of the Communist order challenged them. What is the role of an alternative movement, when in a very real sense the alternative won? The victory was unanticipated even by the leaders of the political opposition, as it was with the rest of the world. The founders of Pogranicze . . .
Read more: Bad Politics = Great Art?
By Irit Dekel, December 26th, 2010 
Irit Dekel is a graduate from the New School currently on a postdoctoral fellowship at Humboldt University of Berlin.
Visiting the exhibition Hitler and the Germans: National Community and Crime at the German Historical Museum, I found very little new about Hitler and even less about “the Germans.”
I did find interesting the display and discussion of the national community as connected to perpetration. However, the presentation of crime, or perpetration, lacked individuals and their daily choices and was instead filled with examples of the masses looking for security and stability. The exhibition was celebrated in the local German press as revolutionary simply for showing so much of Hitler, and for connecting his rule to the German people.
It is not a small thing, this act of naming, and the exhibition does that, but then compiles exhibits: posters, photos, Hitler’s aquarelles, busts and books and Nazi advertising in materials that were mostly used for propaganda.
There was a fear expressed in the press around the opening of the exhibition that right wing extremists and Neo- Nazis would come and admire it, now in the open. Those worries were dismissed as the curators assured the prospective visitors that Hitler is not presented spectacularly, and so those loathed groups, which also “probably do not go to museums,” would not come.
Here is the first time where presumption about class, education, racism and origins from the former east could be easily detected but not explicitly discussed.
The mix of thinking about what is presented in the exhibition together with how it will be consumed was at the center of the exhibition’s review in the German press (see, in German, a review in the Spiegel). The curators Prof. Dr. Hans-Ulrich Thamer, Dr. Simone Erpel, Klaus-Jürgen Sembach made sure that whenever a photo of Hitler is shown with his gaze directed at the camera, the affect of dimming light and photos of Nazi crimes will flicker in the background, so that the visitor is always reminded of the crimes together with whatever else they might feel or think of 1933-1945.
An interview for the center-left weekly Die Zeit focused on the historical . . .
Read more: Hitler and the Germans: National Community and Crime
By Michael Corey, December 17th, 2010 
In recent posts, Jeff and Elzbieta have each commented on how revealing back stage moments can destroy understanding and meaningful action. I agree.
However, I also believe revealing the back stage is sometimes crucial for widening understanding and establishing the grounds for critique. An interesting example is the documentary Restrepo, winner of the Grand Jury Prize-Documentary at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, produced, directed and filmed by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington
From the director:
The war in Afghanistan has become highly politicized, but soldiers rarely take part in that discussion. Our intention was to capture the experience of combat, boredom and fear through the eyes of the soldiers themselves. Their lives were our lives: we did not sit down with their families, we did not interview Afghans, we did not explore geopolitical debates. Soldiers are living and fighting and dying at remote outposts in Afghanistan in conditions that few Americans back home can imagine. Their experiences are important to understand, regardless of one’s political beliefs. Beliefs are a way to avoid looking at reality. This is reality.
Restrepo is the name of a now abandoned U. S. Army outpost located in the six-mile-long Korengal Valley in the eastern province of Kunar, Afghanistan near the Pakistan border. The outpost was known as one of the most dangerous Army postings in the world.
Restrepo portrays the back stage and the front stage. Moments of human frailty, the boredom of a stranded soldier, the pain of a war wound are the back stage truths of military life, normally shielded from view. The well-publicized front stage: awards ceremonies, dedications to fallen soldiers, moments of valor. Understanding both parts of a soldier’s life is crucial to understanding their experience.
The back stage in this documentary (as opposed to the Wikileaks situation) was obtained with the explicit consent of the U. S. government. In fact, few limitations were placed on the project by the US military, and most concerned security and privacy. The filmmakers were sensitive to the way they depicted the wounded and dead–but they still did it. Restrepo is a dual-sided coin.
Anyone who has . . .
Read more: Restrepo: A Constructive Public Airing of Back Stage Moments?
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DC Week in Review: Art, My Town, and Japan
