NEWSgrist: *NITE NITE – Bill Jones + Ben Neill* Vol

NEWSgrist: *Colin Keefe’s Paradise/Paradox* Vol.4, no.6 (Mar. 24, 2003)

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NEWSgrist

where spin is art

http://newsgrist.net

{bi-weekly news digest}

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Vol. 4, no.6 (Mar. 24, 2003)

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CONTENTS:

- *Splash* Colin Keefe’s Paradise/Paradox

- *NEWSgrist’s Underbelly* post your own

- *Quote/s* Plugged-in Americans...

- *Url/s* Arab Images; Desktop Subversibles

- *For Real* S t a t e o f t h e R e a l: Call for Papers

- *War Loot?* Fear for Iraqi antiquities...

- *Beyond Beirut* The Arab Image Foundation

- *Terror ‘Toons* Mirapaul on the cartoonist’s sword

- *Book Grist* Daniel Ellsburg: Secrets; New Media Reader

- *Art Obit* Jack Goldstein RIP

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*Splash* http://newsgrist.net

Paradise/Paradox

curated by Susan M. Canning

March 25 - June 15, 2003

opening reception March 30

Castle Gallery http://www.cnr.edu/cg.htm

The College of New Rochelle

29 Castle Place

New Rochelle, NY 10805

Paradise/Paradox proposes an exhibition of work by

contemporary artists in a range of medium who explore

the paradoxical nature of imaging paradise and planning

for the future.

[...] Due perhaps to the new century and millennium or as a way

of taking stock of present concerns and issues, many

contemporary artists have turned to envisioning the future.

While their imagery -- utopian, practical, visionary, conceptual,

conflicted, optimistic, pessimistic, fantastic or cathartic—

parallels similar debates about our future among economists,

politicians and cultural analysts, this common quest for a

transformative ethos--to be paradise bound, to find that city on

the hill, to envision that perfect economic system is to affirm

the quixotic and ephemeral nature of life in the 21st century.

The paradox of paradise may be that it is also about desire and

aspiration. As such, it must always remain a fantasy, one that

is, ironically, a testimony to all that is flawed and imperfect in

the present.

participating artists:

Jesse Bransford- Peter Coe - Caroline Cox - Robert Kalka

Colin Keefe - Justine Kurland - Michael Joo - Lenore Malen

Jason Middlebrook - Alison Moritsugu - Matt Mullican

Danielle Tegeder - Fred Tomaselli

splash archived at: http://www.newsgrist.net/Splash_Keefe.html

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*NEWSgrist’s Underbelly*

Check for new posts, or post your own news, press releases,

urls, opinions, rants, in the Underbelly : http://pub11.bravenet.com/forum/show.php?usernum=870870569

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*Quote/s*

“According to a research survey in December by the Pew

Internet and American Life Project, there are now 115 million

adult Americans on the Internet. On any given day about a

quarter of them get their news there. A war would increase

that number.”

Matthew Mirapaul, Arts Online (see *Terror ‘Toons* below)

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*Url/s*

1) The Arab Image Foundation

http://www.fai.org.lb

2) Desktop Subversibles

by Jonah Brucker-Cohen (brought to you by Turbulence)

http://turbulence.org/spotlight/brucker_cohen/index.html

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*For Real*

CALL FOR PAPERS [Deadline for abstracts: 22 April 2003]

T h e S t a t e o f t h e R e a l

An Interdisciplinary Conference

Glasgow School of Art, UK

21-22 November 2003

Keynote address: Prof. Linda Nochlin, New York University

[A second keynote speaker of high standing is currently being

approached.]

"How real can you get?"

The conference organisers propose a debate on the subject of

'the real' in aesthetic philosophy, criticism and practice.

"When is representation not real?"

Recent years have seen notions of reality discussed in the open.

What relationship do current views developed by this discourse

have with those tenets of realism and representation that once

provided the foundation for aesthetic study? What are the

philosophical consequences of the introduction of technologies

that increasingly blur the boundaries between art and popular

culture? What is the effect of aesthetic culture on Realpolitik?

What has happened to the notions of social realism,

verisimilitude, and the imaginary? Are they still relevant, and

how have they been changed, if at all?

"Reclaiming the real."

The organizers are also interested in how notions of reality are

affected by, and continue to affect, aesthetic practice in the

fields of art, design, and media production. With the popularity

of haptic technologies, what has happened to ^real haptics?

How do practitioners and academics view older technologies

in the light of their electronic avatars? With the development

of notions of virtual space, what has happened to our under-

standing of the body, the mind, and corporeal space?

The organisers particularly welcome proposals on, or dealing

with, the following related subjects:Reality and realism in Art

& Design History; New media technologies Virtual Reality, CGI

photography and cinema, the Internet, haptic technologies;

Modernity and Post-modernity/Modernism and Post-modernism;

Philosophies on ^the real in popular culture; Philosophy and

art/design and cultural practice; Reality television, realism in

film.

Proposals for panels (no more than three papers) and workshops

are also welcomed.

Deadline for abstracts: 22 April 2003

Abstracts may be sent by email to real@gsa.ac.uk

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to:

'The State of the Real'

Dept. of Historical and Critical Studies

Glasgow School of Art

167 Renfrew St.

Glasgow, Scotland, UK G3 6RQ

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*War Loot?*

Archeologists Fear For Iraqi Sites

Scholars urge that antiquities be protected during war

By Robert Cooke, Staff Writer

Newsday, March 20, 2003, 2:13 PM EST

http://www.newsday.com/news/health/ny-hsdig21.story

Although Iraq has long been a happy hunting ground for arch-

eologists, experts now fear that war in the Middle East will

further ruin what has become an unholy mess. In a fervent plea

published in Friday's Science magazine, leading scholars begged

armies and governments to safeguard as many archeological

sites as possible, and shut off major looting of antiquities that

is already under way in Iraq.

"Under threat is an important part of the world's cultural

heritage," said McGuire Gibson, president of the American

Association for Research in Baghdad and professor at the

University of Chicago.

Thousands of archeological sites, many of them as yet

unexplored, may be decimated in tank battles, by bombing, and

especially by looting, he warned.

Most in need of protection is the Iraq National Museum in

Baghdad, Gibson said, plus the museum in Mosul. "Both are

close to government buildings that were hit by 'smart bombs' in

the Gulf War (of 1991)," and even if both escape the bombs,

"fighting will render both vulnerable to looting."

Because of the peril, a statement signed by leading arch-

eologists around the world, published alongside Gibson's article,

admonished: "The signatories of this letter urge all governments

to recognize that fragile cultural heritage is inevitably damaged

by warfare . . . that irreparable losses . . . to all humanity are

caused by the destruction of cultural sites, monuments and

works of art."

full article: http://www.newsday.com/news/health/ny-hsdig21.story

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*Beyond Beirut*

50,000 Closer Looks at Arabs

By ADAM SHATZ

NYTimes March 16, 2003

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/16/arts/design/16SHAT.html?pagewanted=all&position=top

BEIRUT Lebanon

SOMETIMES a photograph is all it takes to shake up what we

think we know about a world, or a culture, or a people. Such

pictures don't come along often, but once seen, they are

impossible to forget, lodging themselves in the mind with the

visceral force of revelation.

"Two Women Disguised as Men," a 1929 portrait by Marie el

Khazen, a Lebanese, belongs to this rare category of photo-

graphs. The women in the photograph are sitting in plush chairs,

their legs folded leisurely, in a handsome room decorated with

Oriental rugs. Dressed in suits and ties, their heads covered by

tarbouches (a traditional Arab hat), they are enjoying the

indolent pleasure of a cigarette. They seem comfortable, even

complacent. Their husbands, if they have them, are away, and

they appear to be relishing the experience of being men for a

change.

We are accustomed, to the point of exhaustion, to women in

drag in modern photography, but Arab women in the 1920's?

This, as they say, is news. And el Khazen's photograph is all the

more startling for being so apparently artless.

"Two Women Disguised as Men" is one of more than 50,000

photographs in the archives of the Arab Image Foundation, a

nonprofit organization created in 1997 by a group of artists and

curators here in Beirut, with the support of a Lebanese bank, the

European Commission and private donors. They have also

received grants from organizations in Great Britain, France, the

Netherlands and the United States.

The foundation is housed on the roof of a 10-story building over-

looking the Mediterranean in Beirut's Central District. The

photographs collected here were taken by natives of the region

from the late 19th century to the present. About half the photo-

graphs are by amateurs like el Khazen, who was born to a

wealthy family in northern Lebanon in 1899 and who took

pictures as a hobby until her death in 1983.

Parts of the collection have been shown in exhibitions in the

Middle East and in Europe; last year, "Mapping/Sitting," a

portrait show, was exhibited at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in

Brussels. This summer Zeina Arida, the foundation's young,

French-educated director, hopes to put the entire collection

online (www.fai.org.lb), for use by scholars and artists far from

Beirut.

Photography arrived in the Arab world in the 1850's, shortly

after its invention, as an instrument of colonial power. The first

photographs of the region were taken by European travelers,

many of them employed by colonial authorities. Like most

newcomers to the region, they tended to be drawn to archae-

ological and biblical sites, to exotic locales and landscapes,

to anything that suggested antiquity or authenticity. The

Europeans hired young men from the region to help them, and

within a decade the assistants were taking their own

photographs.

The style of these native photographers did not differ much from

that of their colonial mentors "There is no such thing as Arab

photography," Ms. Arida insisted but their subjects did. Instead

of religious sites, or stoic peasants in Bedouin clothes, photo-

graphers depicted railways and cars, family vacations and

funerals: in short, the everyday life of the Arab world. Where

Europeans nostalgically fastened on a vanishing world of

tradition, Arab photographers were determined to show their

present while tracing the lines of the future, as if they were

willing modernity into being by the force of their gaze.

"The purpose of the foundation," said Moukhtar Kocache, a New

York-based curator who sits on the group's board, "is to locate

Arab photography in the international discourse of photography,"

where it had been all but absent.

When the group was formed, some members argued that the

focus should be on challenging Western perceptions of Arab

society. "We had a big conversation when we drafted our mission

statement about whether the foundation was a reaction against

Orientalism," recalled Akram Zaatari, a young, Beirut-based

artist and filmmaker. "We finally decided that it wasn't, because

that would reduce the project to a response." As Mr. Zaatari

pointed out, many Arabs had their own version of Orientalism,

taking snapshots of themselves in Bedouin clothes with jars on

their shoulders, or on camels made of cardboard.

In any event, a far more urgent and limited task faced the

foundation: that of rescuing photographs that were slowly rotting

in studios, in people's homes and in the archives of industries

and advertising firms throughout the region. The Lebanese

curator Fouad Elkoury, one of the founders, began by collecting

photos from family albums and boxes dating back to the 19th

century. Since then, archivists at the foundation have collected

photographs in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Morocco, Saudi

Arabia and Iraq.

As the foundation, the only one of its kind in the Middle East,

has become better known, it has received a number of important

gifts. Marie el Khazen's "Two Women Disguised as Men" was

donated by Mohsen Yammine, a private collector. Mr. Yammine

also gave the foundation his collection of more than 100 8-by-

10-inch glass negatives by Camille el Karah (1897-1952), a

Lebanese funeral photographer who created a strange, kitschy

body of images of dead people surrounded by loving family

members, hours before burial.

In Beirut, the foundation has found an ideal home. Once

renowned for its bustling elegance, its sophisticated melange of

Arab and European culture and its relatively liberal ways, Beirut

has slowly recovered its elan as one of the region's cultural

capitals since the end of the civil war in 1991.

"Even in the worst times of the civil war, Beirut was a creative

and dynamic cultural and intellectual center," said Mr. Kocache,

who grew up in Beirut and Paris and is now the director of visual-

and media-arts programs at the Lower Manhattan Cultural

Council. Beirut, he continued "is a very stressful and even

exhausting place, but it's also very passionate and contra-

dictory, and it's always in such border zones that things are

possible."

The photographs in the foundation's collection are remarkably

diverse in subject, genre and style. "We've made a concrete

effort to show and emphasize the pluralism of the Arab world,"

Mr. Kocache said. Many of the photographs are pictures of life in

a modernizing region: pictures of men building roads and water

pipelines, of women in the latest European fashions. These

photographs embody the hopes inspired by secular Arab

nationalism during the 1950's and 1960's, when the claims of

tradition and progress seemed easily and attractively

reconcilable. In photographs of women and men in bathing suits,

frolicking on the beaches of the Mediterranean, one catches a

no less optimistic glimpse of people at leisure, of la dolce vita,

Arab-style.

A bleaker side of Arab reality appears in social documentary

photographs of the poor. Two of the best Arab social docu-

mentarists, Hashem Madani and Chafiq el-Soussi, have tracked

the lives of Lebanese Shiites and Palestinian refugees in

Southern Lebanon, evoking the desperate circumstances and

somber dignity of their lives with the pathos and restraint found

in Paul Strand and Walker Evans.

The foundation's pluralist ethos extends to the selection of

photographers, a number of whom are not Arabs but Armenians

and Jews. "We don't use the word `Arab' in a nationalistic or

ethnic sense, but as a reference to anyone who participated in

Arab modernity," Mr. Kocache said.

Armenians played an especially important role in the history of

photography in the Middle East, particularly in the aftermath of

the Armenian genocide, when thousands of Armenian refugees

poured into Beirut, Cairo and Jerusalem. The first photography

workshop in the Arab world was established in the late 19th

century by the Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem, Yesai

Garabedian, many of whose students left the priesthood to

become professional photographers. The most extraordinary

Armenian photographer and perhaps the foundation's greatest

discovery was Levon Boyadjian, who called himself Van Leo.

The Richard Avedon of Cairo in the 1940's and 1950's, Van Leo

(1921-2002), photographed all the stars in Egypt's infant film

industry, as well as writers, politicians, scantily clad models and

singers, and people wealthy or vain enough to pay him for

portraits. A voracious reader of American film magazines, he

took pictures that resembled film stills, rich in dramatic tension

and streaked with arresting silhouettes. He worked exclusively

in black-and-white, sometimes hand-coloring his photographs to

give them the garish Technicolor look of a Douglas Sirk film.

Like Marie el Khazen, Van Leo was fascinated by masquerade.

In a series of several hundred photographs strikingly re-

miniscent of the self-portraits Cindy Sherman took four decades

later he poses in various disguises, including those of a corpse,

a woman, a prisoner, a police inspector, a sailor, a soldier and a

gangster. A strong undercurrent of homoeroticism runs through

many of the images, which revel in the ambiguities of sex and

identity. Though tame by Western standards, his photographs

have not lost their power to shock in the Arab world. When the

foundation mounted a show of Van Leo's work in Cairo, a few

photos had to be removed in deference to local sensitivities.

Van Leo's photographs were exhibited by the foundation in 1998

in "Cairo Portraits," a remarkable show of 24 Cairo-based,

midcentury Armenian photographers at the Saison Mediter-

ranenees, in Arles, France. But museums in the United States

haven't shown much interest in the foundation's work so far. Mr.

Kocache has presented some of the photographs on the

campuses of American colleges, where the reactions, he said,

have been revealing. "Students tend to say things like `Gee,

these women aren't wearing veils,' or `this couple is holding

hands.' I'm just shocked by the level of ignorance. I hope this

project helps clarify that the Arab world understands itself and

sees itself as an integral part of modernity."

But if many of these photographs might startle people outside

the Arab world, they also contain surprises for Arab audiences.

Last year, Mr. Zaatari screened a documentary film, "Tranquil

Days in Palestine," based on photographs of Palestinian life

before 1948, to a group of Palestinian children in the Sabra

refugee camp in Beirut. The pictures depicted the Palestinian

bourgeoisie, who, he said, "look more modern than many

Palestinians look now." The children refused to believe the film's

subjects were Palestinians, insisting that they must be Jews.

[Adam Shatz has contributed reviews and articles to The New

York Times, The Nation and The New York Review of Books.]

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*Terror ‘Toons*

ARTS ONLINE

Political Targets With Moving Parts

By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL

NYTimes 3/17/03

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/17/arts/design/17MIRA.html?pagewanted=all&position=top

The best political cartoons skewer their targets. Thomas Nast

helped exterminate corruption in Tammany Hall. Bill Mauldin

pilloried military incompetence. Herblock's spotlight depicted a

shadowy Richard M. Nixon. The cartoonist's sword has been the

pen and mostly still is.

But now the Internet is giving a small group of political cartoon-

ists a high-tech way to wage battle. While many editorial

cartoonists use the Internet to exhibit their printed drawings to

a broader audience, the Internet's audio and video capabilities

have also inspired a few cartoonists to create animated political

cartoons for the Web.

The latest example of an animated political cartoon is

"Operation: Terrortubbies," put online on Friday. It was written,

drawn and directed by Don Asmussen, an editorial cartoonist for

The San Francisco Chronicle.

Mr. Asmussen has a talent for mashing together politics and

popular culture to savagely satiric effect. His two-minute

cartoon starts as a parody of how Hollywood's glossy films

romanticize war, complete with a scene from the imaginary "My

Big Fat Greek Vietnam War." The humor turns blacker when Mr.

Asmussen suggests that the Bush administration, with its

color-coded terrorist alerts, addresses the public as though it

were the preschool Teletubbies audience. The animated work is

at www.dontoons.com.

In May Mr. Asmussen will begin producing an animated cartoon

for The Chronicle's Web site. A new episode of "Action News

Family," in which a family of newscasters will discuss topical

events, will be put on the Web every other week. For Mr.

Asmussen, 38, the animations are a way to reach young people

who are more interested in entertainment than politics.

"Editorial pages are so dry," he said, "and it is hard to get kids

to read them." He intends to engage them by creating a familiar

cast of characters. "It's almost like `Peanuts' with politics,"

he said.

SFGate.com, The Chronicle's Web site, already publishes Mark

Fiore's weekly animated cartoons. Phil Bronstein, The

Chronicle's editor, said he was eager to add Mr. Asmussen,

whom he compares to Mark Twain, to the online mix. "The Web

has a lot of moving parts," he said, "and people who use the Web

often are used to animation in one form or another. If you have

the capabilities, why not use them?"

Well, why not? Surprisingly few sites offer animated editorial

cartoons. Mr. Fiore also sells his work to The Village Voice,

Mother Jones and Salon.com. The veteran cartoonist Bill

Mitchell produces three pieces a week for CNN.com, and

MSNBC.com shows Bruce Hammond's work.

Netzeitung.de, a German Internet-only newspaper, produces

several animated political cartoons every week. But most online

news sites seem content to republish cartoons from their printed

pages, a practice sometimes called shoveling.

Steve Outing, a senior editor at http://Poynter.org an online

journalism resource, said he expected more animated cartoons

as they become cheaper to make and more users gain access to

high-speed, animation-friendly Net connections. "I absolutely

believe that this form will take off in the future," he said. "I don't

think online readers will be satisfied with shoveled print

cartoons."

Daryl Cagle, who maintains the large Professional Cartoonists

Index site, disagreed. "The most popular cartoons on the Web

are on the topics that are the most popular, without regard to

color or animation," he said. Because few companies will pay for

animation, he added, there is little incentive for editorial

cartoonists to produce them as anything other than labors of

love. (Mr. Cagle's site is at http://cagle.slate.msn.com ) During

the dot-com boom, cartoonists of all kinds, lured by the promise

of Internet riches, tried producing online work, both static and

animated. When the money stopped flowing, most abandoned the

medium.

But it may be time for renewed interest in the genre. With a

possible war looming, people are apparently paying closer

attention to the news. And more people than ever are getting

their news online. According to a research survey in December

by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, there are now 115

million adult Americans on the Internet. On any given day about

a quarter of them get their news there. A war would increase

that number.

Brian Duffy, the editorial cartoonist for The Des Moines Register,

said he intended to return to the Internet. For four years Mr.

Duffy produced animated versions of his print cartoons for the

paper's Web site, but he stopped about a year ago. He said his

editors were keen to restart the feature in about a month.

Online cartoons range from lightly animated efforts like Mr.

Duffy's to full-scale productions like Mr. Asmussen's. Mr.

Fiore's work falls in the middle. Mr. Fiore, also based in San

Francisco, said he was able to earn a living from syndicating his

weekly cartoons, so he stopped producing printed pieces last

June. He said it took him about three times as long to make an

animation as a print cartoon.

Mr. Fiore, said, "I can play on people's eyeballs and emotions

more than I could on the page." For instance, in a recent cartoon

ridiculing the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, Mr. Fiore added a

sappy soundtrack to heighten the tone. (An archive of Mr. Fiore's

work is at www.markfiore.com)

Mr. Fiore works alone, but Mr. Asmussen collaborates with an

animation director, Michael Lipman. As a result, their cartoons

can take several weeks to produce. This means that Mr.

Asmussen must make sure they are not dated by the time they

go online. The "Operation: Terrortubbies" opening was revised

after duct tape faded from the news. Mr. Asmussen said such

changes forced him to predict where world events might lead.

"It's like you're playing chess with the news," he said.

If printed political cartoons work best when they take a well-

aimed poke at their target, animated cartoons should inflict

multiple punctures. But Lucy Shelton Caswell, a journalism

professor at Ohio State University who studies the history of

newspaper cartoons, said she had observed little of this. "The

animated cartoons that I have seen seem to have a frenetic,

jerky pace, or they are very slow," she said. "A really good

editorial cartoon just goes bing."

At least one political cartoonist who stopped producing

animated work is eager to return. Clay Bennett, who won the

2002 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, made four short

animations in the mid-1990's before he was hired by The

Christian Science Monitor. "There's something about bringing

your creations to life," he said. "You can certainly understand

Dr. Frankenstein's excitement when you see things move and

breathe."

+++

Don Asmussen: http://www.dontoons.com/

San Francisco Chronicle: http://www.sfgate.com/

Daryl Cagle's Professional Cartoonists Index: http://cagle.slate.msn.com/

Mark Fiore: http://www.markfiore.com/

============================

*Book Grist*

Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

by Daniel Ellsberg

Viking Press; (October 10, 2002)

ISBN: 0670030309

Daniel Ellsberg on the war with Iraq on

the Ellsberg.Net Weblog page

http://www.ellsberg.net/weblog.htm

from Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670030309/ref=ase_ellsbergnet-20/103-3114281-7117466

The publication of Daniel Ellsberg's memoir, Secrets, at this

particular moment is undoubtedly coincidental, but there is an

eerie timeliness about it. . . . Some may be tempted to dismiss

his arguments. . . . but skeptics should put aside their doubts

and read the book. Secrets is an often gripping account by a

controversial figure of a tumultuous era that still troubles and

divides us. It underscores the need to understand history in

areas of the world whose destinies we presume to shape. It

provides important insights into the national security bureau-

cracy that produced the Vietnam War, the system that helped

sustain it and the ethos and code of loyalty among officials that

held it together. If we're looking for a warning signal as we

teeter on the brink of yet another war waged on the basis of

information considered too important to share with the public, we

should look no further than in these pages.

Los Angeles Times: BOOK REVIEW

A man for all seasons, by George C. Herring

http://www.calendarlive.com/books/bookreview/cl-bk-herring13oct13.story

---------------------------------------------------------

The New Media Reader

edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort

book design by Michael Crumpton

MIT Press (2003)

ISBN: 0262232278

Six years ago an NYU CAT-sponsored project began to create a

resource for understanding new media’s foundations - aimed at

educators and students, technologists and artists, critics and

journalists. // http://www.cat.nyu.edu

More information + excerpts: http://www.newmediaread