SPARC returns from El Salvador

Well the times, they are changing. Twenty years ago artists worldwide lifted their paintbrushes in protest of human rights abuses in El Salvador. Artists Against US Intervention in Central America (1984) produced exhibitions, posters and events. Author, PAD/D founder and critic Lucy Lippard was a co-founder of this activism based arts group.

The late 70’s and early 80’s were exciting days for the arts and social change movement, there was a buzz of activity as a new generation of community arts activists came on the scene. The election of Reagan in 1980 marked a sudden change for artists. The elimination of CETA resulted in thousands of arts organizations disappearing. The clowns, murals, celebrations and theater arts that had animated the rural and urban communities of our childhood suddenly disappeared. At the same time US policy in Central America shifted to become much more militaristic, with US military advisers being sent to places like El Salvador.

Now, 26 years later President of El Salvador is asking for forgiveness for complicity in the killing of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero. Mural artist and teacher Judy Baca recently returned from El Salvador after completing a series of murals at the invitation of the US Embassy and the mayor of San Salvador, the tiny nation's capital city. The murals are part of a tourism initiative, but also represent a distinct change in the use of the arts as a tool of US foreign policy.

It's an exciting change, and the murals created are absolutely beautiful, well worth a visit to beautiful El Salvador.

THEY WANT YOU TO PERFUME THE SEWERS

Summer is a great time to read. If your passion is community murals you're in for a special blog treat. I’ve been rereading “Towards a People’s Art: The Contemporary Mural Movement (1977) ” by Eva Crocroft, John Pitman Weber, and James Cockcroft. So I was jazzed to see a sort of compendium book just released entitled “On the Wall: Four Decades of Community Murals in New York City” by Janet Braun-Reinitz and Jane Weissman of Artmakers. The release of this book following the elections and conversations about a new WPA is perfect timing. There is a fantastic conversation that accompanies this book on the New York Times blog.

So it’s in this spirit that I offer you, my dear readers, a bit of delicious summer reading. My friend and colleague muralist, author and teacher Mike Alewitz send me this speech by Meridel Le Sueur (1902-1996) delivered in 1988, by video, to the Alliance for Cultural Democracy conference in San Francisco. Meridel Le Sueurs' powerful voice continues to inspire and teach us. She literally had a powerful, compassionate, commanding voice and presence.

"An Injury to One is an Injury to All" Mural, Mike Alewitz

No matter your political perspective this writing helps fill some important gaps in community art history. In this period of great hope and transformation looking back at our roots is critical as we decide how best to proceed.


THEY WANT YOU TO PERFUME THE SEWERS

by Meridel Le Sueur

I bring greetings from the Middle West and also from Time. On February 22, I'll be 88 years old. I've been a writer, an artist in the Middle West, trying to find out what the true image is of our time and our country.

I believe that now is the most wonderful period of my life because for the first time we can think of a global world: a global world of art, a global world of expression, a global audience, a global people. Global was not a word in my time that you even spoke about. It wasn't in your consciousness to be global. Today the consciousness, the rising of the global people, is so wonderful, so tremendous. Such energy is released and we are released as artists from servitude to the establishment, to the death force of imperialism.

Engels said in 1877 there were only two subjects for the artist, for the creator. One was the moribund dying society, 'the corpse' he called it. The other was the newborn, being born out of the corpse, the new people, the new consciousness, the young child, the image of humanism.


Now we see this actually happening. It's no longer a theory to say "the rising of the working class " as we used to say in 1916 in the First World War. It seemed like a dream. Today you look at your television in the evening and you see the people rising. You see the children throwing rocks at the army; you see the brutal resistance of the dying class, 'the corpse' as Engels said.

Imperialism is dying. I don't think they have any way of even saving themselves. They're committing suicide by cutting off the food, causing famines, exporting our products to other countries and selling them back to us. It would be like an Alice in Wonderland death if it wasn't so horrible.

I don't belittle the dangers of the bomb at all, but even these dangers very often bring us together in unity, in a global unity and certainly in a consciousness of the dangers. We see now that we didn't even dream of the viciousness, of the deadliness, of the willingness to risk complete global and cosmic death; of the capitalist class. The middle class is also falling down into the working class and betraying its interests. They have too much to protect to move against death. Death is the only product of imperialism today. It's an obvious problem. They tell us they are going to kill us, and they do kill us.

So the artist has a great wonder and a tremendous influx of new life and at the same time has a great responsibility, because he must bring his skills to the rising people who contain the creation of the new world. It no longer exists in the middle class. It no longer is any good to get the grants. They just want you to perfume the sewers. They need artists to bring perfume to the terrible stench of their death. It isn't doing the artist any good. There is no place to go except to the struggle of the people today. There is no place for the artist. There is no artist arising except from the struggle of the people.

We see now that all culture comes from the people, comes from the struggle of the people. In America, middle-class culture has obscured the great vigor of American people's culture. I came up from the farm culture. When I was young there was farm music, the farm songs, a great culture of the Midwest farm and the democratic forces in the Middle West, and radical organizations like the IWW.

The IWW is something for you to look at because, there, culture was part. It wasn't separate. It was something you just brought out. Culture was part of the struggle. You could only be a poet or an artist if you were a worker, a revolutionary. The IWW taught me that culture is part of the struggle of the people. It's not separate. They never had a meeting they didn't open with poetry. They painted. They had cartoons. Their culture was immense, but more than that, it was a culture of the people. I once saw a group of IWWs learning poetry, learning Walt Whitman, in preparation for going to prison because they didn't have books, so they learned poetry. When going to the same prison they each would learn a different poem so they could bring their culture to prison.

Culture was part—it created a tremendous audience. In 1913, John Reed worked on a tremendous production in Madison Square Garden, put on by the strikers of Patterson. We used to put on affairs here from the farm. We had music, poetry, books. There is a tremendous culture, which is almost unknown and is now in danger of disappearing, like the black culture, like the ethnic cultures of the Norwegians and the Scandinavians.

This is coming up in our culture like a Vesuvian release of energy and its just beginning. Recently in the Austin strike, there was a wonderful example of the artists emerging out of the struggle. They've had a mural, which the reactionaries destroyed.* They had wonderful music. They had theater that just came out of the struggle. This is where it comes from. Go where it is. Go there. That's the only place there's life. That's the only place where there are any kind of images.

*P-9 Mural Dedication, 1986

The new images are coming from these struggles. The farm struggle recently here, for example, was one of the greatest uprisings of culture in the Middle West. The grief, the tragedy, the images... People, farmers, committed suicide. They were looking for images of their struggle: seeing their struggle as a long history, for the first time, as inevitable.

In the thirties, the workers and farmers saw that the factories would open up again, saw that there would be again prosperity even. Today, they know there is not going to be a "good" war. They know the factories are not going to reopen. The work has been exported to cheap labor in foreign countries. The steelworkers know as they are struggling and struggling to open those mills. The worker knows that there is going to be no "good" war. That there is no prosperity. That there is not going to be an end to exploitation. This in itself is a great cultural vision, a vision that is true, a vision that is possible. It is not only possible, it is necessary; it is the only continuation of the struggle of man to exist.

So I feel wonderful for you young people. It's a wonderful thing to be here now, stripping some of the illusions of bourgeois culture—the illusions of getting into those galleries, the illusion of becoming a prostitute to bourgeois culture. It’s not possible anymore, except maybe for a few. The grants are being cut off. They're not going to give out these grants anymore. They didn't work. You didn't come in and perfume the sewers. And thank God, we're not going to have those kinds of grants anymore.

What we need now is something like the WPA where a democratic culture can be supported, and a democratic audience. One of the great things about the WPA was its raising of the audiences' consciousness. There was an audience for art; there was an audience for murals. We started here a farm collective, a painters' group for the farmers to paint during the winter and have farm exhibits, this is where your audience is. The middle class is not a rich audience anymore. They don't have the images anymore. They don't have the truth.

The hearings (Iran-Contra) were the greatest thing to show you what the middle class does to support the lie. Culture is used to support the lie, to cover the lie. Language is used to cover the lie. In those hearings, language became a tool to cover not only lying, but the death and destruction of our whole society.

So this is what is happening. It's revealed. It's not a secret any longer. They can't keep it a secret. What those bastards do in the morning is on TV in the evening. It's impossible to be secretive. They tell upon each other, in fact. They can't keep a secret from each other. You are living in a time when the front door is open, the road is open.

You don't even hardly have to choose—it's between life or death. It's between what supports creative culture and what is death to it. It isn't even a choice. It's inevitable. It's just there. You have to live it. You have to be it. You have a chance to become part of this struggle. As the Communist Manifesto ends; the only people who will save the world are those who have nothing to lose but their chains.

This is what we see in the colonial countries. People driven to hunger, to death, who literally have nothing to lose, who really rise up on the horizon on all scenes. Those great meetings are not any longer the little meetings, but the meetings of millions of people demanding life, demanding the image, the true image. So this is what you have now for your life; to go into this great life, this great new force.

We used to say, "Workers of the World, Unite." Well now we have no choice. It's inevitable. They have to unite or die. So it’s not a dream any longer. It's not a hope any longer. It's a presence, a wonderful living presence.

I'd just like to read a piece of mine that I wrote years ago, and this I hope would be the keystone in the temple of your meeting together:

Let us all return.

It is the people who give birth to us, to all culture, who by their labors create all material and spiritual values.

No art can develop until it perpetuates and penetrates deeply into the life of the people.

The source of American culture lies in the historic movement of our people, and the artist must become voice, messenger, organizer, a wakener, sparking the inflammable silence, reflection back to the courage and the beauty. He must return really to the people, partisan and alive, with warmth, abundance, excess, confidence: without reservations, being cold and merely reasonable; or craftiness, writing one thing, and believing another; not being a superior person, even superior in knowledge, in theoretical knowledge, an ideological giant, but bereft of heart and humanity.

Capitalism is a world of ruins, junk piles of machines, men, women, piles of dust, floods, erosions, masks to cover rapacity.

To these stinging sounds the people carry their young, in the shades of their grief, in the thin shadow of their hunger, hope and crops in their grief, in the dark of the machine, only they have the future in them.

Only they.

_______________________________________________
THEY WANT YOU TO PERFUME THE SEWERS
Google Doc Organized by Mike Alewitz and Denny Mealy.

A remarkable writer and life-long agitator, the biography of Meridel Le Sueur can be found at http://www.mnhs.org/library/findaids/00323.xml

*P-9 Mural Dedication/ 1986. Mural by striking meat packers - Local P-9. Dedicated to then-imprisoned "terrorist" Nelson Mandela. Destroyed by UFCW union bureaucrats.
_______________________________________________

Catalysis

By: Peter Richman

“Taking understanding into action is dependent upon seeing that we are profoundly interconnected with the world. The notion of ‘I’ is emancipated. It becomes ‘we,’ integrated into a networked society in which we see ourselves in relation to ‘the other,’ a part of the world rather than a consumer of it.” – Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle (1)

“Wow, I haven’t used my brain in such a long time,” Danielle, who works at a large insurance company, realized aloud. Twirling her pencil, she announced in a part-joking, part-earnest, part-urgently-serious voice, “Thanks you guys for making me use my brain again!” After a collective round of nervous laughter, Rashida looked up from writing in her notebook and said, “I wasn’t gonna come tonight – I’ve got a million things to do at home, but I told myself I had to come and be here for myself. This is important and my work can wait.”

The Project
Collective Imprints is a work of conceptual art, a sociological experiment, a social gathering, a healing process. It’s a public intervention and an intervention by the public, both a highlighter and a mitigator of difference. What I mean to say by this is that the complexity of the project resists a simple definition, or, more pointedly, that I myself am still struggling to figure out what, exactly, Collective Imprints is.

The brainchild of community artist Michael Schwartz in conjunction with West Philadelphia arts space The Rotunda (2) , Collective Imprints is a ten-week, community-based, participatory visual arts collaboration. The ultimate goal – but not the ultimate purpose – of the project is to create two 4’ x 40’ murals on masonite panels to be installed in front of the venue’s two overhanging balconies.


According to the invitation to participate, offered as an open call to all of Philadelphia, the project aims “to bring together diverse groups and individuals who make The Rotunda the vital venue that it is. In doing so, we will discuss The Rotunda’s mission statement,” which reads:

“Fueled by the belief that art is a catalyst for social change and that the arts can lead to the formation of meaningful partnerships between the University of Pennsylvania and its surrounding community, The Rotunda is a community gathering place for the promotion of arts and culture.”

What distinguishes Collective Imprints from most murals – a distinction especially relevant in Philadelphia, the mural capital of the world – is that it is not a paint-by-numbers project. Rather, all ideas are generated and converted into visual artwork by the participants. “We want people to broadcast here,” said Executive Director of The Rotunda Gina Renzi. “We want to know what they think of this city, what it needs, what their street sounds like on a Saturday night, and what The Rotunda’s commitment to community-based programming means to them.”

A Critical Approach
Community artists are often considered artist-activists, artists who use their craft as a tool to promote a certain kind of social change. This approach regards their art as purposive – hinging on and limited by its political concerns – and thus unavoidably suppressed, albeit in the name of reform. Rather than viewing arts-activism as merely diluted art, however, I argue that the artist-activist should instead be seen as a synthesizer – an artist and an activist – for although the two roles are inextricably linked, they are nevertheless two distinct, discrete roles.

To properly mark this distinction, community art demands critical assessment from two different angles: (1) that which focuses on the participants, the art they create, how they create it, and the effects the project has on the communities involved, and (2) that which focuses on the artist facilitator as navigator and captain, coordinating individuals (of their own free, and generally eager, will) into a grand artwork of an eerily divine scope and stature. The first approach is more apparent, more discussed, and, unfortunately, more often a reason for community art’s silent dismissal from the higher ranks of the art world. What many fail to see, however (the view through the second lens) is the artist facilitator as an artist crafting his medium – human beings. Community artists are sociologists, certainly, but they also extend beyond the reaches of sociology, for their work is an actively engaged, real-time, non-analytical, non-repeatable practice. Community arts, then, can be seen as a humanist extension of process art, for in their work, the facilitator’s people and management skills are his or her artistic skills, the very happening of the project the piece itself.

Collective Imprints: An Experiment in Democracy
Bill came to each session with a different instrument – one week a banjo, another week a zither, yet another a balalaika customized with parts from a sitar. He told us how he built instruments, how he engineered instruments, how he collected instruments. And while he was one of the few participants to come to almost every session, he never once touched the mural. Instead, he played, and he played wonderfully. While we worked on the panels, he transformed Collective Imprints into a concert.

Far from resenting or even dismissing the music, Schwartz – and the whole group – enjoyed and encouraged Bill’s playing. His music became ingrained into Collective Imprints, his contributions no more or less than anyone else’s, and it is this openness, this egalitarian stance towards people and their ideas that truly defines the project. Collective Imprints is space – physical space, social space. It is a weekly time and location and community that anybody can take advantage of any way they like. Most people do, in fact, decide to work on the mural, but if they choose otherwise, they are no less of a participant.

One week, a school teacher brought a group of students from low-income, high-problem homes to Collective Imprints, and one of the boys spent the two hours sitting by himself in the corner. He wouldn’t introduce himself during the icebreakers, he didn’t participate in the discussions, he didn’t even sit with the group.

And it was completely okay.

Nobody coerced or pressured him to participate; he wanted to sit in the corner, and so he did. “Who knows what he’s gone through today just to get here,” Schwartz remarked after the session. “This is a safe space, and that’s how he chooses to express himself.”

Another week, a different teacher brought a group of high school girls from North Philadelphia. Most of them spent the time chatting, but one girl sat to the side and drew a detailed boom box with a winding stream of musical notes going into the left speaker and out the right. Schwartz encouraged her to transfer the image onto one of the panels, and after feebly protesting, she took a seat in front of the boards and began to draw. Another woman was drawing a winding bike path on the same board, and soon their sketches began to overlap and intersect. They decided to work as a team – while some of the other high school girls stopped chatting and started listening to their iPods – and after an hour of collaboration, the two had fused their ideas into one inspired image. The boombox became a building with a group of dancers bursting through its cassette-deck doors, and the bike path – now with both bicycles and musical notes – winded through the building’s speakers. In the open space of Collective Imprints, these two strangers – a black teen and a white adult – were free to work together, and the inventiveness of their joint effort testifies to the potential of such freedom.


Such space, of course, does not just happen, does not exist solely because a group of people are in a room. The space is organic yes, but it is certainly not spontaneous. It requires maintenance and preservation, constant attention but not too much attention, a direction firm enough to ensure its sustainability but also open enough to ensure its sustainability. In short, it needs a gardener, and this is Schwartz’s role as artist facilitator. He cultivates dialogue and fosters creativity, all the while ensuring that his plant – the project, the mural, the participants – continue to grow. Schwartz nurtures people, but to best appreciate the theoretical implications of his work, I find it useful to begin by looking at another community artist.

Tim Rollins Plus K.O.S.
Two artistic practices take place in the Art of Knowledge Workshop: that of Tim Rollins, and that of Tim Rollins + K.O.S. The latter, a collaboration between the artist Rollins and the “learning-disabled” Kids of Survival, is more evident, more approachable, and more acknowledged. The group reads literature from the Western canon, from The Wasteland to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, discusses their reactions, and transfers “these fragments of literary criticism […] onto the large, flat grid, or field, of printed pages” (3) (Tim Rollins + K.O.S. cover their panels/boards with the pages of the book they are exploring).

This side of the workshop – the art of Tim Rollins + K.O.S. – can be seen as the activist side, the political side, and we can easily compare it to Collective Imprints. Both collectives discuss their ideas, distill these thoughts into images, and combine the different pieces into a cohesive whole. One aspect where the two differ, however, is that Rollins brings art to the socially disadvantaged; he provides a legitimate voice to those whose voices are all too often considered illegitimate. In this respect, Tim Rollins + K.O.S. has a greater immediacy, urgency, and sentimentality. Schwarz, on the other hand, gives a voice to those who have been delegitimized for entirely different reasons. The participants in Collective Imprints are not marginalized because of who they are, or how they are (after all, the group is an almost-close-to-representative cross-section of the sixth most populous city in the United States), but rather because of where and when they are.

Tearing Down the Art-Industrial Complex
During one of the earlier sessions, I admitted to Schwartz that I dislike drawing. I told him that whenever I try to draw, or map, or chart my ideas into something visual, I feel like I run into a brick wall. I’m an okay thinker, I said, but when it comes to the visual creative manifestation of my ideas – nothing.

I’m not sure what I was expecting him to do, how I anticipated he’d advise me. I assumed it would be an art lesson, a basic drawing tutorial, maybe even a concession that some people just aren’t visual artists. But instead of teaching and instruction, he offered me a diagnosis and a prescription.

We performed a few technical exercises designed to separate my hand (and the act of drawing) from my mind (and the act of thinking). And after just a few minutes, Schwartz told me the problem – I was too critical, too analytical, too concerned – not even concerned, but obsessed – with what the final image would look like, that before I even picked up my pencil, I had already stifled my imagination.

And he was right. (4)

Schwartz explained that this blockage is the result of what he calls the art-industrial complex, so named because the primary focus is on the finished product, the final piece. Creativity is not an innate talent, but rather a skill to develop, and the art-industrial complex suffocates that development. Instead, Schwartz argues – and this is a crucial component of Collective Imprints – the emphasis should be on the very process of creativity itself. To move towards a more egalitarian society, we need to unlock people’s imaginations, free their minds to envision that such a society could even exist.

The first step to accomplishing this is to unshackle individuals from the confines of that complex, to generate a democratic space free of social, political and economic barriers. And this act of generation brings me to the second artistic practice that happens in the Art of Knowledge Workshop.

Tim Rollins Minus K.O.S.
Tim Rollins + K.O.S. should be considered a work by Tim Rollins. For, as obvious as this claim may be, such a collaboration does not just materialize. From the bureaucratic side of organizing the collective to the pragmatic side of organizing the kids, the very existence of Tim Rollins + K.O.S. is, I believe, a work of art.

What makes the analysis tricky, however, is this: I imagine that Rollins faces any number of issues on any given day when working with his students. I am sure that he has to coordinate, that he has to respond, that he has to maneuver, and while all of these actions are his artistic practice, none of them can be appreciated from an outsider’s perspective. I know that Rollins has to be a captain, but because I am not a part of his team, I can only speculate as to the nature of his leadership (i.e. his art).

Collective Imprints: An Experiment in the Arts
That insider’s perspective, then, is the view through the second lens, the approach that regards the method by which Schwarz guides the group as a processual artistic practice. I can appreciate it because, and only because, I am a part of it, for the work defies any form of documentation. The mural itself is, in many ways, simply a residue of the process – the final product, as it were, deserving secondary attention at best. Photographs miss the interactivity, description misses the vitality, even a video of the group dynamic falls short, for anybody watching would only be seeing somebody else participate in the work.

This evasion of, even indifference to, formal recording comes as no surprise because Schwartz’ work is born of a different artistic framework than that which values documentation. Collective Imprints is not a piece to be seen, or to be understood; it is a piece to experience, and it is this human element – the inconsistency, the unpredictability, not knowing if enough people will show up one week to even have a session – that gives it its life.

An Undocumented Artist?
This inability to document the project ultimately leads to perhaps the most pressing issue – what does Schwartz, as a fine artist, sacrifice to do a project like Collective Imprints? Or, in his own words, “can [this] process produce aesthetically pleasing results?”

These are the primary issues facing community arts today, and they address the necessity of striking a balance between the creative process and the finished product. Community-created murals are often criticized as looking “amateurish,” but is this really such a criticism? A final-product approach to art leaves little room for anything that looks crude, unsophisticated, or disproportionate. But when the finished piece is seen as the result of a certain kind of process, the irregularity in a mural comes to mirror an irregularity in society. A defect here, a peculiar combination there – these deviations from the accepted vocabulary come to signify more than simple visual images. In so doing, community arts can then force us to redefine our aesthetics, to align them not with an institution but with ourselves. As Danielle noted during Collective Imprints, if we’ll allow it, community arts can force us to use our brains.

Notes:
1. Leading Through Practice. March, 2007. Accessed from http://www.a-n.co.uk/
2. The Rotunda presents over 250 events annually, ranging from rock, electronic, jazz, and hip hop, to music from around the world, ambient, activist, spoken word, theater, panels, film, exhibits, dance, education, and various experimental forms of art and performance. National acts often perform side by side with local artists, illustrating Philadelphia's eclectic and robust music scene. As an alcohol-free, smoke-free venue, The Rotunda provides a critical social alternative for all ages, and opens its doors to the public [usually for free] for cultural events as well as a meeting, rehearsal, classroom, and workshop space for various West Philadelphia and citywide organizations, after-school, and youth programs. http://www.therotunda.org/foundation.html.
3. http://shs.westport.k12.ct.us/jwb/Collab/KOS/Rollins.htm
4. A tangential, anecdotal, but still very-much-related aside: My first (and only) memory of trying to draw is from when I was six or seven years old. I remember it vividly – I wanted to draw a sunset I had seen on the beach in Florida. The image was crystal clear in my head (and it still is), but I struggled to put that vision onto paper. It’s not my happiest memory, to be honest – it ends with me tearing paper and throwing markers, but I’m sure that the clarity with which I still recall it indicates the magnitude of its impact on my psychology. When Michael diagnosed my hyper-criticality, it was the first thing that came to mind.