NEWSgrist: *Tactical Action @ Gigantic Art Space [GAS]*

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NEWSgrist

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Vol.5, no.5 (Apr 12, 2004)

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*Underbelly*

Bulletin board: post your own news, press releases, urls:

http://pub11.bravenet.com/forum/show.php?usernum=870870569

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CONTENTS:

- *Splash* Tactical Action (GiganticArtspace.com)

- *Quote/s* Lopsided attention (Artnet.com)

- *Url/s* Tune in to Air America (airamericaradio.com)

- *Advertising The Bomb* PSYOPS leaflets (CabinetMagazine.org)

- *Disappearing Act* Dawoud Bey: Ironies of Diversity (Artnet.com)

- *Un-Dead* Internet Art Survives (NYTimes.com)

- *Spring Forward* April Benefits in NY (Artnet.com)

- *Drawing For Liberty* Art for the ACLU (event.green-arrow.net)

- *Book Grist* Think Again presents: A Brief History of Outrage

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*Splash* http://newsgrist.net

TACTICAL ACTION

Curated by Lea Rekow

April 14 – June 10, 2004

Gigantic ArtSpace [GAS]

59 Franklin Street, New York, NY, 10013

T 212 226-6762 F 212 226-6505

http://www.giganticartspace.com

OPENING RECEPTION WEDNESDAY APRIL 14, 7-9PM

Gigantic ArtSpace [GAS] loudly presents Tactical Action, a group

exhibition that asks the question ‘how can we be heard?’

Artists investigate the sociological and the political as they are

assimilated into artistic context. Individual perspectives examine

“public opinion” and “political process”, exploring the collection,

dissemination and expression of information defined not by any

specific medium, but by an attitude toward the media.

Dissidents include:

Kenseth Armstead · Stephanie Black · Joshua Brown · David Byrne &

Danielle Spencer · Kelly Dobson · Andrew Demirjian · Stuart Ewen aka

Archie Bishop · Dror Feiler & Gunilla Skoeld Feiler · Don Fleming & Kim

Rancourt · Joy Garnett · David Krippendorff · David Luke · Marc Lepson

· Robin Michals · Jeff Miller · Steve Mumford · Jenny Polak · Gardner

Post & Greg Deocampo | EBN · Michele Pred · Vernon Reid · Ben Rubin ·

Dread Scott · Karina Aguilera Skvirsky · Paul Thompson & Michel Vinaver

· Adam Whiton & Yolita Nugent · John A Wooden

Tact·ic·al (adj):

done or made for the purpose of achieving an

immediate or short-term aim; skillful planning

or arrangement in order to accomplish something

ACT·ion (n):

the way somebody or something moves or works,

or the movement itself; energetic activity; legal

proceedings to obtain compensation or to enforce

a right; important events in narrative composition;

the way in which something functions, or the effect

it produces; fighting that takes place during a war;

the operating parts of an instrument; the force

applied to a body; a command from a film director

telling actors to begin acting

Other events include:

Reading of Michel Vinaver’s ‘11 September 2001’, by Invitation

WEDNESDAY APRIL 14, 6pm–6.30pm

[RSVP required - no late seating] open to public 7-9pm

- Hit n' Run film series [large scale exterior projection in public spaces]

curated by Louky Keijsers;

- Sound Installation "Vietnam Songbooks"

curated by Don Fleming and Kim Rancourt;

- Special screening of documentary film "Life and Debt"

by Stephanie Black (Q+A with director);

- also featuring:

http://www.whitehouse.org ; http://www.georgewbush.org

An exhibition catalogue will be available.

Catalog Essay by Sharmeen Khan.

Special thanks:

Lower Manhattan Cultural Center, Ocularis, Michel Vinaver,

New Yorker Films. MoveOn.org Voter Fund...

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

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*Quote/s*

"I believe that this boxing in of art-making aspirations is as reinforced

in academia as it is within the art world itself. The history of art

practice within the last two decades warrants a critical reading if we are

to begin to unravel, contest and ultimately change this condition. It is

not my purpose here to assert anew the primacy of a high modernist

paradigm. Rather my intention is to foreground what was lost when

critical and institutional attention became disproportionately lopsided in

favor of a limited set of art-making strategies, and a group of artists

subsequently disappeared, or were subsequently shielded from public

view."

The Ironies of Diversity, or the Disappearing Black Artist

by Dawoud Bey. Artnet Magazine, April 8, 2004

http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/bey/bey4-8-04.asp?C=1

[See *Disappearing Act* for full article below]

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*Url/s*

Air America

Tune-in: >>>>

http://airamericaradio.com

Check out Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo and others for serious and not so

serious analysis of the political and cultural climate of the USA and

beyond. Sometimes, its a blast but at least it breaks-up the mainline news

of corporate systemic public feeding via embedded reporters, network

affiliates, etc., etc.

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*Advertising The Bomb*

Paper Bullets: An Interview with Herbert A. Friedman

byJohn Peffer

Cabinet Magazine, Issue 12 Fall 2003/ Winter 2004

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/12/pefferFriedman.php

Nickels, paper bullets, falling leaves, and bullshit bombs. These are some

of the nicknames given to war propaganda delivered by air in the form

of printed flyers. One of the earliest recorded uses of such propaganda

was in China in 1232, when kites were used to airlift notes into an enemy

prison, inciting inmates to riot. During the American War of

Independence, wind-blown leaflets were used to undermine the morale

of British soldiers in Boston, and during the US Civil War messages

promising money in exchange for arms and horses were floated behind

Confederate lines with kites. Balloons carrying packs of leaflets, in

limited use already during the Civil War, were equipped with timed fuses

and employed extensively during both World Wars. In the 1960s, China

and Taiwan were involved in a major propaganda balloon exchange

over the Taiwan Strait, and leaflets are ballooned and fired across the

DMZ in Korea on a daily basis. But it was during the World Wars that the

modern form of aerial propaganda bombardment began to take shape as

a critical tool of armed conflict. Bags, boxes, bombs, and missiles packed

with paper messages were flown or shot into enemy territory by both the

Allies and the Axis. The "Monroe Bomb" used in World War II was a

paperboard cylinder adapted from a cluster-type bomb to contain several

thousand leaflets. It was an early precursor of the fiberglass M-129

bomb, used in Vietnam and still today, which splits apart in mid-air over

target areas.

The United States Army's 4th Psychological Operations (PSYOP) Group

at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, has been responsible for designing the

propaganda flyers dropped by air during the recent invasions of

Afghanistan and Iraq. Coincident with the growing emphasis on the use

of "Special Operations" soldiers and their increased public visibility in the

press, the numbers of paper bombs produced during these operations

have also risen dramatically. During the entire first Gulf War, the Army

dropped over 29 million leaflets, of over 100 different types. Using tons

of paper, the Army littered the Kuwait and Iraq landscapes with images

favorable to the United States. In contrast, more than 150 million such

flyers have already (by early July 2003) been designed at Fort Bragg

and spread over Afghanistan and Iraq. In some ways, PSYOP resembles

an advertising agency for US military objectives. They conduct

marketing studies and "focus groups"—often composed of exiles and

enemy prisoners of war from the target country—and carry out post-

production analyses of the efficacy of their campaigns. Attention is

devoted to clarity of message, given the unique cultural preferences of

the intended recipients. Leaflets used in Afghanistan use green text to

indicate peaceful intentions, and red lettering to indicate danger or

aggression. The image of the Afghan nation in outline, or the national

flag, are included to signal allegiance with collective local interests. As

with the texts, written in Pashto or Dari using Arabic characters, the

images in the Afghan flyers read from right to left. In Iraq some flyers

have contained plain Arabic text framed, like a formal greeting card,

by a decorative border. In both conflicts, the denotation of meaning

has been dominated by the detonation of propaganda bombs littering

the landscape from above.

The following interview was adapted from email correspondence

between John Peffer and Sergeant Major (ret.) Herbert A. Friedman,

a PSYOP historian and specialist, between 23 June and 29 July 2003.

> Read Interview: http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/12/pefferFriedman.php

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*Disappearing Act*

The Ironies of Diversity, or the Disappearing Black Artist

by Dawoud Bey

Artnet Magazine, April 8, 2004

http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/bey/bey4-8-04.asp?C=1

In spite of what seems to be an acceptance of diversity as a cultural and

social fact of life, both in and outside of the art world, black artists are,

for the most part, still largely consigned to a narrow conceptual space in

which to operate.

This is particularly true if they have any hopes that their work will

become a part of the larger critical discourse. This narrow space of

expectation is one which both precludes and discourages them from

focusing on the vast range of art history and practice as the source of

their work, and instead encourages an ongoing, never-ending

reexamination of an all too familiar racial terrain, confined largely to

the black stereotype and an endless inspection of the forever

beleaguered racialized self.

I believe that this boxing in of art-making aspirations is as reinforced

in academia as it is within the art world itself. The history of art practice

within the last two decades warrants a critical reading if we are to begin

to unravel, contest and ultimately change this condition. It is not my

purpose here to assert anew the primacy of a high modernist paradigm.

Rather my intention is to foreground what was lost when critical and

institutional attention became disproportionately lopsided in favor of a

limited set of art-making strategies, and a group of artists subsequently

disappeared, or were subsequently shielded from public view.

In light of several recent revisionist looks back at the 1980s, it might be

instructive to examine this era as it relates to the presence of African

American artists, since -- with the exception of perhaps Jean-Michel

Basquiat -- they have been largely rendered invisiblle in these histories.

In the early 1980s, the African American painter William T. Williams, a

maker of densely layered abstract paintings -- who early in his career

had been a practitioner of hard-edge geometric painting -- was the first

black artist to be included in the H.W. Janson text, The History of Art.

This book, which had been the standard academic art history text for

several decades, had indeed been exceedingly slow to acknowledge the

role of black artists in the making of that history. So, Williams' inclusion

was seen as something of a breakthrough at the time. Excluded for so

long, Williams now found himself placed squarely within the history of

art. But things were changing. No sooner had Williams found himself

included in the Janson text than that text itself -- along with much of

what had been considered the canon -- began to be questioned by

revisionist art historians.

Just as quickly as he had found himself acknowledged, William T.

Williams was again relegated to the shadows as this more oppositional

and less canonical sense of art history began to exert itself. He became

the proverbial baby who got tossed out with the bath water, trapped in

the revolving door of art history and deposited squarely on the sidewalk

without ever having really gotten a look around at the exalted -- and

now devalued -- company he had kept.

In addition to Williams, a host of black artists continued to remain largely

unknown. This in spite of the fact that they show in major museums

throughout the world, including the Whitney Museum and the Museum of

Modern Art, and have works housed in museum collections too numerous

to mention here. There were several Guggenheim and National

Endowment for the Arts fellowships between them. And more importantly

they remained active.

The law of averages being what it is, such a performance is usually

enough to ensure an artist at least an occasional a high-profile

exhibition, which then hopefully receives a certain amount of critical

attention, which then keeps the artist and his or her work present in the

current discourse.

Certainly, this absence cannot be chalked up to age and fashion alone,

since any number of white artists of a similar position remain very visible

on the art-world radar, in spite of the vast range of formal and

conceptual strategies that they deploy in their various works and the

shifting critical climate that surrounds them. Their works may be

variously successful and out of step with whatever the prevailing

orthodoxy might be, but nonetheless a space for them at the discursive

and critical table is always found, and indeed they never seem to go out

of fashion.

Sadly, the same cannot be said for Ed Clarke, a pioneering painter of

gestural abstractions; Jack Whitten, whose paintings have also been an

ongoing investigation into process and material; Mel Edwards, a sculptor

whose "Lynch Fragments" works fuse the tradition of welded sculpture

with deep social and political content; and Al Loving, Terry Adkins,

Tyrone Mitchell, Stanley Whitney, the late Alma Thomas, Barbara

Chase-Riboud, Charles Burwell and other African American artists who

still fail to receive their due.

And while Howardena Pindell may have gained notoriety for her seminal

video, Free White and 21, and her art-world activism that helped pull the

sheets off of the institutional racism of the art world, she is familiar to

only a few for her earlier work, which made her one of the breakthrough

black conceptual and formalist artists of the 1970s and early '80s.

It is instructive then to look at the various texts that began to both shape

and document art production in the 1980s. For while Janson and its ilk

had established a canon that was exclusive in the extreme, the new

texts, by selectively filling in the racist and sexist art historical gaps,

began to inscribe yet another orthodoxy. Most of the work that began to

come to the fore proposed a view of art and art production as a largely

-- if not solely -- social construct and practice, and thus began to favor

those artists who were engaged in the debate around issues of

representation.

The field of semiotics became a critical point of departure in art

discourse. For artists of color the prevailing discourse came to center

almost solely around issues of race and representation. And while

these new texts did indeed do much to foreground new and previously

excluded voices, I also believe they were terribly disruptive and had a

deleterious effect, since they completely eliminated or ignored whole

categories of art production that were still taking place among black

art practitioners. It seemed that in order to create an unbroken linear

progression towards the moment of multicultural postmodernity, any

artists whose works that did not fit this unbroken revisionist trajectory

were conveniently eliminated.

Consequently, as the multicultural movement in the art world continued,

black artists ironically found an increasingly narrow space to work in if

they wanted to engage in a critical dialogue or simply remain visible. The

move towards pluralism, contrary to what it implies, ironically only

allowed for a certain kind of black art practitioner.

The closing off of these spaces of expressive and conceptual possibilities

has had dire consequences not only for the careers of black artists, but

for black art students as well, who then find themselves faced with a set

of diminished strategies and references in terms of how black artists are

represented within art history. And while one would be foolish to argue

against the power that emerges in some of these young and not so young

artists work, one can only lament the sense of truncated possibility that

work represents in light of the limitless possibilities that actually do exist.

The effective erasure of alternate black esthetic role models and

strategies has thus led to a very shallow pool from which a narrow set

of ideas are dredged.

In spite of this, younger artists such as Jerald Ieans, whose large

paintings are filled with undulating biomorphic forms; Louis Cameron,

whose brightly colored floor-based works both reference and subvert

the Minimalist tradition of Carl Andre and others; and Julie Mehretu,

whose large, densely layered "mappings" are just as rooted in a formal

tradition of mark-making as they are in the discourse around globalism,

have continued to edge onto the map in what is hopefully not only a

"post-black" moment, as curator Thelma Golden has described it, but a

post-theory one as well; a moment when orthodoxies -- both left and

right -- are finally exploded.

Such recent exhibitions of black abstract artists such as "African

American Abstraction" at George N'Namdi Gallery in Detroit, "No

Greater Love" at Jack Tilton Gallery in New York, and "Quiet As It's

Kept," curated by David Hammons at Galerie Christine Konig in

Vienna provide a much-needed affirmation that alternate art-making

strategies for black artists do and have long existed outside of the

dictates of race and representation theory, and are again being

recognized.

Likewise the appearance of the Black British abstract painter Frank

Bowling in the most recent edition of the Venice Biennale, in the "Fault

Lines" exhibition curated by Gilane Tawadros of London's Institute for

International Visual Art (inIVA), provides a much-needed sense of

historical continuity and context.

For the most part -- with a few notable exceptions -- the critical

response to these efforts remains muted at best. It's anyone's call as to

why this remains so. No doubt everything from market forces and

changing fashion along with a healthy dose of good old American racism

come into play here, along with a younger generation of art historians

and curators whose collective memories and formal training allows them

to feel comfortable consigning anything produced before the 1980s to

the torpid dustbin of retrograde modernism.

Factor in the quality issue -- as in, "They haven't succeeded because

they're not good or original enough" -- and you've got a real pot boiler

of a debate over why black visual artists are not accorded the same

creative levity as black musicians. We don't, after all, expect Sade to be

Cassandra Wilson, or presume that Black Eyed Peas operates out of a

more legitimate musical construct than Roy Hargrove.

What makes this schism easier to perpetuate, perhaps, has to do with the

failure of certain artists to acknowledge their own roots in modernist

practice. Glenn Ligon, for example, prior to the textual works that

established his reputation, was a maker of abstract paintings. That these

paintings have never been shown diminishes a crucial historical

continuity, a fact that is belied by the densely layered surface of many

of Ligon's paintings, which provide evidence, in fact, of a pleasurable

material engagement.

For all of this, the art world's table still doesn't appear to be large enough

to seat those black artists whose works function within a paradigm of a

high-modernism that doesn't obviously foreground race. Apparently such

an investment in the high-modernist paradigm is acceptable for black

artists only if there is also the attendant dissonance of race, as it is in

the racially caustic but formally rigorous work of Ellen Gallagher, whose

production has often been compared in its cool understated formalism

to Agnes Martin.

Where then are the structures to support true diversity; a diversity that

encompasses a complex conceptual vision of black humanity and art

practice that takes up the challenge of mirroring early 21st century

American hybridity in all of its multifarious glory? For black artists and

black art students I suspect that we are going to have to create these

structures ourselves, since the art world seems to have little need,

tolerance, or understanding for those who continue to work outside of

the narrow confines of the art world's intellectual and conceptual

coon show.

It's anyone's guess then as to what it will take to lift this collective

blindfold off of so many eyes and to recognize a history that while

largely ignored is indeed is still very much in the making.

{DAWOUD BEY is a photographer. An exhibition of his photographs

goes on view at Gorney Bravin + Lee in New York, Apr 15-May 15, 2004}

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