Art Scene |
The Art Of Warby Jack Foran |
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CEPA exhibits explore political violence at multiple levels
The current CEPA exhibit, called Art of War, includes multiple installations at multiple venues, in the CEPA galleries in the Market Arcade, and at the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library main branch on Lafayette Square.
At the CEPA galleries, Carlos Motta’s installation consists of a single wall graphic and two large-format, small-print historical précis sheets, one on leftist guerrilla activities in Latin America since the middle of the last century, the other on US interventions in Latin America from the founding of the School of the Americas in 1946, a facility dedicated in effect if not admittedly to instructing and training right-wing elements in Central and South America in methods of combating leftist activities by pretty much whatever means necessary. The interventions handout documents the United States’ shameful record of more than half a century of opposition to populist governments or factions in Latin America and promotion of murderous dictatorships.
Three exhibits by Walid Raad include an enigmatic video montage more or less about war; a selection from a photographic catalog of the cars used in car bombings in the Lebanese wars of 1975 to 1991 (eight are shown, out of a total of 145 in the full catalog, with details, in Arabic script, on make, model, and color of the car, date, time, and place of the explosion, type of explosive used, method of detonation, and number of casualties); and black-and-white photos without words of scenes from the 1982 Israeli attack on West Beirut and feeble PLO retaliation.
On the topic of war as ideological, Tom Nicholson has a set of starkly memorable photos of charred ruins of library shelves, all that was left after devastation by Indonesian troops in East Timor, following an East Timorese vote to be an independent nation.
East Timor, a former Portuguese colony, shares an island with West Timor, which is part of Indonesia. When the Portuguese finally decided to get out of the colonial business back in the 1970s, Indonesia invaded and occupied East Timor. In the wake of a 1999 UN-sponsored ballot in which the East Timorese voted for independence, the occupying troops rampaged, targeting people and books. Thousands of East Timorese were killed, and libraries were systematically destroyed. Book collections of prominent intellectuals and political activists were also piled in the streets and burned.
This exhibit also has a positive side. It documents a project centered in Melbourne, Australia, to collect donated books to restock the national libraries, starting with the library of the National University of East Timor. A book of photo reproductions of the title pages of some of the donated books, along with the photos of the burnt-out shelves, is provided as a handout.
Daniel Joseph Martinez presents a roomful of 78 handsomely turned out wood panels naming groups worldwide that, according to accompanying explanatory material, “have attempted, or are currently attempting, to enforce politics through violence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.”
Some questions come to mind. Only 78, worldwide? But then you read on and see that some 1,700 groups have been collected. But also an odd selection of the 78 on display. A number of obvious and well-deserving candidates, such as the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, and the Taliban. But then some more dubious ones, given historical reality—for example, the American Indian Movement. Plus, the selection overall seemed skewed toward relatively obscure and low-impact Muslim groups such as the Armée Islamique du Salut, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, and Moroccan Islamic Fighting Group. Whereas there is no mention of some much more prominent and effective groups—given the stated criterion of having attempted or attempting to enforce politics through violence—such as the United States army, the Russian army, the British army, the French army, the Israeli army, etc.
Trevor Paglen has a series of large-scale time-lapse photos of the night sky with contrail-like traverse lines of otherwise invisible surveillance satellites against near infinitely distant starry background, documenting a covert American espionage program consisting of a network of nearly 200 classified information satellites.
These are stunningly beautiful photos that are also impressive in terms of the amount of sheer information they contain. The time-lapse photographs are like movies distilled and condensed to a single frame.
The explanatory material notes that the photographic technique essentially reiterates Galileo’s technique to discover heavenly bodies, namely, the moons of Jupiter, that also weren’t supposed to exist but were revealed through time-lapse observations and recording.
Last at the CEPA galleries—and to reverse the cliché, least—Martha Rosler has a series of essentially collages of war imagery and elegant room furnishings and models in modish apparel from House Beautiful-genre magazines. This is facile and flaccid stuff. Cheap irony for a nation that heard George W. Bush advise as to what it could do to share the burden and sacrifice of the second Iraq War—go out and go shopping. And what did it do? It went out and went shopping. (Relieved not have to see the coffins. And happy to pass on the fiscal costs to the next generations.)
At last look, the exhibit at the library, by artists Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani, was still being installed. (It should be up by now.) This exhibit is called Index of the Disappeared: The Guantanamo Effect, and features archival materials the artists have amassed on “post-9/11 detentions, deportations, renditions, redactions, and other disappearances,” and library books and other materials. According to a descriptive sheet, the archival materials particularly examine into the development and spread of the “CIA torture program” employed at Guantanamo and elsewhere, and challenges to the program by legal and human rights activists.
Art of War exhibit continues through August 21.
-jack foran
Reader Comments
MARIAN
13 Jul 2010, 22:36
ON THE"FOOD FOR THOUGHT LIST" WILL SURELY GO TO SEE THIS ART AS REALITY.
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