Smithsonian Secretary Wayne Clough Defends Censorship of Wojnarowicz Piece

“I wouldn’t characterize the decisions that people make regarding exhibits as ‘censorship’.” -Clough

Bullshit.

[via Towleroad]

Wojnarowicz Censorship Protest Continues

From the Washington City Paper:

Blasenstein and Iacovone will park a trailer they describe as a “Museum of Censored Art” on the 700 block of F Street NW, in two parking spaces outside the southern entrance of the museum…Inside the trailer, they will screen David Wojnarowicz’s “A Fire in My Belly,” which Sec. Clough had removed from the National Portrait Gallery exhibit on GLBT portraiture last month following pressure from conservative political activist organizations.

If you live in the D.C. area, there’s a happy hour/fundraiser for the project.  More information can be found on the duo’s website.

National Portrait Gallery Protest

A man with an iPad reinserts David Wojnarowicz’s banned video art at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Below the cut, the text of the flyer that the security officers didn’t want people to read, as found on the protesters’ blog, Silence (Still) = Death.

Krzysztof Wodiczko

Krzystztof Wodiczko is amazing.  If you haven’t seen him on Art21, I highly recommend watching his segment [part of the episode on Power].  He is making the kind of art that I find most enthralling: public art, sincere, and about issues important to humankind.  He doesn’t make objects to sell to rich patrons– he makes art that is meant to be experienced, not owned.  Below is a description of two of his projects featured in the Art21 documentary.

In his Tijuana Projection executed for InSite 2000. In this public intervention, women working in the maquiladora industry of Tijuana, Mexico wore media technology designed to project their faces onto El Centro Cultural (a spherical building that served as an excellent canvas for the human head) as they spoke emotionally of incest, police abuse, and work place discrimination in real time. As participants, their speech was courageously offered at great risk to themselves for the purpose of moral and political change. [text altered from the Wikipedia article]

In August 1999, his first “Public Projection” in Japan was held in front of the A-Bomb Dome. Motion images of the hands of fourteen people, including survivors of the atomic bomb (Japanese as well as Koreans) and the youth of Hiroshima, were projected upon a river embankment below the Dome along with their voices. [text from Ufer! Art Documentary]

Assignment: Reality

For this assignment, we were asked to film people, unobserved.  We then had to recreate the filmed scene from memory, eventually comparing the two films to note the differences between filmed reality and actual reality.  My response to this assignment, plus the script for the filmed reality, can be found below the jump cut:

David Wojnarowicz Controversy: A Response

A response to the National Portrait Gallery’s censorship of David Wojnarowicz’s video, from Andrew Sullivan in The Atlantic:

“Well, I’m a Christian and far from feeling insulted or injured or assaulted, I saw something as raw as it was orthodox. The whole video incorporates the image of Jesus as a dying, tortured man like those with AIDS: “unclean” as the audio shrieks over the image, rejected, covered by insects. It splices that image with grotesque attempts to sew a loaf of bread back together, to sew a human being’s lips back together, along with desperate images of fire and decay. We are looking at the hysterical images of a dying man suddenly surrounded by the dying, overcome by the attempt to sew life back together. To see a rejected Jesus left on the cross and on the ground to be covered by ants, is, in this context, clearly neither offensive nor heresy; it’s orthodoxy, for Pete’s sake, with the death of Jesus one of countless images of suffering and isolation.”

“This is so obvious in context that one simply wonders what on earth the fuss could be about. Maybe what is truly offensive to men like Donohue is the notion that gay men might actually seek refuge in Jesus’ similar experience of marginalized, stigmatized agony. Since the message cannot be objectionable – Jesus shares in our suffering and exemplifies it – maybe it is merely the association with gay men that appals. For the powerful and privileged like Donohue, Jesus belongs in the corridors of power and respectability, among the mainstream, depictions of him restricted to images of pristine, prissy reverence rather than the alienated, despairing, naked agony he actually suffered. The idea that Jesus died for homosexuals is insulting to Donohue; but it is what the church teaches and what Jesus lived.”

David Wojnarowicz, Censorship, Catholics

[From The Washington Post]

Today, after a few hours of pressure from the Catholic League and various conservatives, the National Portrait Gallery decided to remove a video by David Wojnarowicz, a gay artist who died from AIDS-related illness in 1992. As part of “Hide/Seek,” the gallery was showing a four-minute excerpt from a 1987 piece titled “A Fire in My Belly,” made in honor of Peter Hujar, an artist-colleague and lover of Wojnarowicz who had died of AIDS complications in 1987. And for 11 seconds of that meandering, stream-of-consciousness work (the full version is 30 minutes long) a crucifix appears onscreen with ants crawling on it. It seems such an inconsequential part of the total video that neither I nor anyone I’ve spoken to who saw the work remembered it at all.

But that is the portion of the video that the Catholic League has decried as “designed to insult and inflict injury and assault the sensibilities of Christians,” and described as “hate speech” – despite the artist’s own hopes that the passage would speak to the suffering of his dead friend. The irony is that Wojnarowicz’s reading of his piece puts it smack in the middle of the great tradition of using images of Christ to speak about the suffering of all mankind. There is a long, respectable history of showing hideously grisly images of Jesus – 17th-century sculptures in the National Gallery’s recent show of Spanish sacred art could not have been more gory or distressing – and Wojnarowicz’s video is nothing more than a relatively tepid reworking of that imagery, in modern terms.

Until Tuesday afternoon, museum staff, under Director Martin E. Sullivan, believed that “Fire” was interesting art that made important points. And now it looks as though they’re somehow saying that they were wrong about that, and that it really was unfit to be seen or shown, after all.

I consider David Wojnarowicz to be one of my biggest influences, and it’s really sad to hear that his work is being censored as late as the year 2010.  Below the cut, you can watch the censored piece, “Fire In My Belly”.

Poetic Terrorism

from T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism: Second Edition by Hakim Bey

Weird dancing in all-night computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they’re the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune – say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical manuscripts. Later they will come to realize that for a few moments they believed in something extraordinary, & will perhaps be driven as a result to seek out some more intense mode of existence.

Bolt up brass commemorative plaques in places (public or private) where you have experienced a revelation or had a particularly fulfilling sexual experience, etc.

Björk Talking about her Television

“You shouldn’t let poets lie to you.”

Note: If you only watch one video on this blog, make it this one.  It’s the best thing you’ll ever see.

Manifesto!

HUMANIFESTO OF THE RADICAL HYPHEN

Every act of creation, no matter how puerile or banal, is a political act worthy of celebration, a refusal to acquiesce to a pre-packaged reality, a glitch in the trickle-down power systems of state and capital.  Your next-door neighbor, who is tearing the shrink-wrap off her paint-by-numbers kit and settling in for an evening in her “craft corner”, is (potentially) taking the first step toward a radical questioning of political, economic, and social structures.  All that she lacks now is a community: a local, active network with an open-door policy rooted in the idea that art should be a part of everyday experience, not a privilege of institutionalized power or wealth.