Look at this sh**!

November 1, 2024

What made this sculpture of a doo-doo on Nancy Pelosi’s desk so controversial? Did it remind us the unacceptable behavior of the Trump supporters on January 6, 2021 who wanted to overthrow the government, or was there more to it? Those who saw it argued there was something sinister about it, looking at it as a piece of art some four years after the event that it claims to commemorate but in a critical manner. To be fair, Nancy Pelosi defecated on her own desk often enough like any good neoliberal and long before an insurrectionist literally did so. As the longest serving house speaker in history, Pelosi is known to be the most vilified, but that doesn’t mean there is no substance to the vilification she receives. The accusations of engaging in insider trading, preventing the impeachment of George Bush Jr for lying to the Congress about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, helping and trying to derail the candidacy of anyone (including Obama) who stood up against the Clinton empire, and coming too little too late to the defining protest movements like Me Too and the Black Lives Matter shows Pelosi was always one of those center right democrats who eventually allowed a person like Trump to seize power. Especially so during the later years of her service, when she became one of the chief enemies of the progressives and personally killed the Green New Deal. Nowadays she is busy calling pro-Palestinian activist Russian propaganda implants, touring to promote her book and defending her legacy, and defending Biden’s horrific policy of genocide in Gaza. Thanks to her, we now have a president who has done nothing to curb the fossil fuel industry’s hold on our future, who thinks fracking is a fact of life and sending billions to an apartheid regime that openly commits genocide is ok.

If every once in a while you find yourself agreeing with a Trump supporter that our politicians have became corrupt, on both sides of the isle, it is because people like Nancy Pelosi spent a life time insisting on centrism. One way or the another, we all do the thing that no one else can do for us. But doing it in public, in public office, in front of everyone is a big non-no. Especially if you don’t know how to clean after yourself.

Image by Allison Robbert for The Washington Post (cropped)

Image by Kevin Dietsch, Getty Images (cropped)

A Tale of Two Visions

October 11, 2024

On view in two different cities, National Gallery of Art’s American Places in DC and The FIU Wolfsonian Museum’s The Big World: Alternative Landscapes in the Modern Era in Miami, are two large scale shows focusing on early 20th century landscape art. Together they represent the striking contrast between ideological vs. humanist approach to environment and ecology. The works in the American Places portray human beings as subjects of landscapes that represent natural forces and confront their human built modernities. In contrast, the works at The Big World, which are mostly obsessed with utopian and totalitarian depictions of the nature, depict human beings as masters of the nature. I was lucky enough to see these two shows in quick succession, and found their opposing world views revealing. In Miami, the fore front of US totalitarian politics and climate change denialism. The Big World was an ideal show to look through. It mainly consisted of art that praises nature as a submissive collaborator of modernity. In Washington DC, the American Places came across as a collection of works that show human beings and nature in a symbiotic struggle against the fantasies of industrialism or victims of a failing modernism. If in Miami I was looking at romantic ideals, in DC I was confronted by a depression induced by those ideals. The contrast was easily extendable to the forms, in terms of scale, color and hues; American Places mostly consisted of works which depicted human beings as overpowered subjects of architecture and polluted industrial landscapes, using monochrome tones and low perspectives. In contrast, The Big World was packed with vibrant colors that praised and magnified industrial dreams which dwarfed their dreamers. The two shows also exposed how art can be accumulated in opposing directions and understandings of history. American Places consisted of works coming from the Corcoran collection which focuses on modern art in general. The Wolfsonian collection is almost strictly dedicated to propaganda art. The two shows also paralleled the cultural psychology of their respective cities, I believe; Miami is where our most ridiculous ideologies are kept a float and DC is where all ideologies come to die.

American Places: Featuring Selections from the Corcoran Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, on going.

https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2023/american-places.html

The Big World: Alternative Landscapes in the Modern Era, FIU Wolfsonian, Miami, on going.

https://wolfsonian.org/whats-on/exhibitions+installations/2023/08/the-big-world.html

Hitler's summer house on a porcelain plate. Image by Murat Cem Mengüç

Sustainable vulnerability

August 2, 2024

In her essay titled “Soft Talk, Thoughts on Critique,” Leslie Dick talks about the “comforting illusion” of the discursive structures we build to decipher art. She argues that human desire to find an ultimate authority, the one who knows the right from the wrong, or the good from the bad, drives us to build these structures which in return become mechanisms that perpetuate a presumed authority. Yet, she suggests, these structures are less of an authority on what they are built for and mostly exist to perpetuate and maintain the perceptions they serve. More importantly, the more rigid they become, the more likely they suffer a takedown, if not a complete erasure. Instead, Dick suggests, “discourse[s] constructed around uncertainty and vulnerability” are more sustainable and generative. And in my practice, I feel like I have been ignoring the fact that vulnerable and uncertain structures we build are far more creative, useful, and long lasting.

In fact, reading Dick’s argument reminded of an exchange I had with the farmer from whom we buy our summer tomatoes. He had only a few left on his stand and said that this would be the last of his tomatoes for the season (we are in mid July), unless there was a rainy spell which could help another patch he had to fruit. When I mentioned the heatwave and the changing weather patterns as the probable cause, he simply shrugged, saying “sometimes you get tomatoes and sometimes you don’t.” Under most other circumstances, I would have taken his words as a sign of his conservative politics and climate change denial. But, having just read “Soft Talk,” I recognized his refusal to build or buy into a discursive structure. And in doing so, he was maintaining an uncertainty and vulnerability which would probably see him through the climate change in the long run.

I have no illusions that the climate change is real and the discourse we have built around it is necessary and useful. But, at the same time, that same discourse is now more than half a century old and receives legitimate criticism. Meanwhile, world farmers have been growing food to the best of their capabilities in real time. Corporate farming, which is in bed with big oil and other corporate structures surely behaves in predictable ways, always concerned with profit margins. But the rural and urban small farmers have long embraced the uncertainties and vulnerabilities brought upon them by nature, and the climate change. This may become the real reason why they could achieve a greater generative and sustainable future than anyone else out there. Perhaps unconsciously, we are all are aware of this, and that is why more and more of us are attracted to growing food in the spaces we have available.

Beware of the Pipeline

March 15, 2024

Cycling along the Maryland side of the Potomac River, I came across this little warning sign. It cautions workers from doing any type of digging on the site due to the oil pipeline running underneath it. The pipeline cuts across the Potomac river somewhere near Blockhouse Point Conservation Park and Trail, and, as it can be seen in both photographs, it reaches to the Seneca Regional Park on the Virginia side. What fascinated me most was how small and unassuming the sign is. It appears to be a warning only for those familiar with such signage and not for the average hiker or cyclist. It is too small, hard to read and easy to ignore if you are just passing by. It's a good example of how ecologically damaging energy industry operates always hidden in plain sight.