a January 17, 2010, report in Haaretz, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was informed that “if he did not ask for a deferral of the vote [at the Human Rights Council] on the critical report on last year’s military operation, Israel would turn the West Bank into a ‘second Gaza.’”
But while Western governments continue to protect Israel from accountability, insisting that economic sanctions are off the table, even welcoming Israel into the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, civil society around the world is filling the gap. The findings of the Goldstone Report have become a powerful tool in the hands of the grow- ing movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, which is attempting to pressure Israel to comply with international law by using the same nonviolent pressure tactics that helped put an end to apartheid in South Africa. A new book, The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict, will allow many more people to read the text of the report, along with contextualizing analysis. And they will be free to make their own judgments about whether Israel has been unfairly “singled out”—or whether, on the contrary, it is finally being held to account.
One of the most remarkable responses to the report came in January 2010, when a coalition of eleven leading Palestinian human rights groups called on Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to investigate Goldstone’s allegations that they were complicit in war crimes—despite the fact that the Israeli gov- ernment had refused to launch an independent investigation of the far more numerous allegations leveled against it in the report. Theirs was a deeply courageous position, one that points to what may prove to be the Goldstone Report’s most endur- ing legacy. Although most of us profess to believe in universal human rights and oppose all crimes of war, for too long those principles have been applied in ways that are far from univer- sal. Too often we make apologies for the crimes of “our” side;
too often our empathy is selectively deployed. To cite just one relevant example, the Human Rights Council has frequently failed to live up to its duty to investigate all major human rights
abuses, regardless of their state origins. So while the council boldly created the Goldstone mission to investigate crimes in Gaza, it stayed scandalously silent about the massacres and mass incarcerations of Tamils in Sri Lanka, which were alleged to have taken place within months of the Gaza attack.
This kind of selectivity is a gift to defiantly lawless govern- ments like Israel’s, since it allows states to hide behind their crit- ics’ hypocrisy. (“They should call us the day the Human Rights Council decides on a human rights inquiry on some other place around the globe,” Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said, explaining away his government’s refusal to coop- erate with Goldstone.) But a new standard has been set. The Goldstone Report, with its uncompromising moral consistency, has revived the old-fashioned principles of universal human rights and international law—enshrined in a system that, flawed as it is, remains our best protection against barbarism. When we rally around Goldstone, insisting that this report be read and acted upon, it is this system that we are defending. When Israel and its supporters respond to Goldstone by waging war on international law, characterizing any possible legal challenge to Israeli politicians and military officials as “lawfare,” they are doing nothing less than recklessly endangering the human rights architecture that was forged in the fires of the Holocaust.
One of the people I met in Gaza was Ibrahim Moammar, chair of the National Society for Democracy and Law. He could barely contain his disbelief that the crimes he had witnessed had not sparked an international legal response. “Israel needs to face war crimes trials,” he said. He is right, of course. In a just world, the testimonies collected by Richard Goldstone and now published in book form would not merely raise our consciousness; they would be submitted as evidence. But for now, in the absence of official justice, we will have to settle for what the survivors of Argentina’s most recent dictatorship have called “popular justice”—the kind of justice that rises up from the streets, educating friends, neigh- bors and family, until the momentum of its truth-telling eventu- ally forces the courts to open their doors.
It starts with reading the report.
■A bicoastal set of unrelated incidents has stirred up a heated discussion in the art world and beyond that harks back to the culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s, when right- wing politicians and pundits, like Jesse Helms and Al D’Amato and Pat Buchanan, along with religious leaders like Donald Wildmon and Pat Robertson, launched a concerted attack on the National Endowment for the Arts for support-
ing artists and venues engaged in “anti-Christian bigotry,” as Wildmon tagged Andres Serrano’s notorious photograph Piss Christ. They successfully campaigned to cancel a 1989 exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and passed legislation forbidding the NEA from funding artists and institutions that “promote, dis- seminate or produce obscene or indecent materials.”
Strangely, the central figure in the more high-profile of the current controversies is a repeat player—David Wojnarowicz, who won a lawsuit against Wildmon over the misrepresentation of his artwork in 1990. Wojnarowicz, an outspoken gay activist
The Return of the Culture Wars
As before, hypocrites are lining their coffers by pandering to ignorance and xenophobia.
Doug Harvey, a Los Angeles–based writer and artist, is editor of Patacritical Interrogation Techniques Anthology Volume 3, forthcoming from A/C Institute.
by DOUG HARVEY
The Nation. 23 February 14, 2011
as well as a gifted visual artist and writer, died of AIDS-related illness in 1992. This past November 30, a condensed version of his film A Fire in My Belly—which contains an eleven- second sequence showing a crucifix crawling with ants—was removed from the exhibit “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in response to complaints from William Donohue of the Catholic League and Representative John Boehner, neither of whom had seen either the video or the exhibition.
“Hide/Seek” is a landmark exhibit in several ways: it’s the largest and most expensive show in the NPG’s history and the first major survey exploring gay identity to be mounted in a federally administered institution. Curators Jonathan Katz and David Ward took pains to create a scholarly and mini- mally provocative reassessment of the history of American modern art, with the hope of integrating the insights and revelations of previously suppressed gay and lesbian cultural history—a process that has been under way since the 1960s but suffered a distinctive chill in mainstream institutional support in the wake of the late ’80s commotion.
Apparently they didn’t take enough pains for the Christian right and newly empowered Republican House members, including incoming House Speaker Boehner and majority leader Eric Cantor, both of whom publicly threatened the Smithsonian’s future Congressional funding and autonomy if the exhibit wasn’t axed, citing Wojnarowicz’s video as “an outra- geous use of taxpayer money and an obvious attempt to offend Christians during the Christmas season”—despite the fact that neither had seen the artwork in question, relying instead on intelligence provided by a right-wing blogger.
Quite apart from the central enigma of how an image of ants crawling on a crucifix translates so clearly and unequivocally into anti-Christian “hate speech” (as Donohue characterized it—I must have missed that class at art school), it’s difficult to fathom what could be deemed particularly offensive in Wojnarowicz’s poetic Super-8 jumble of surrealist tableaus and documentary footage from Mexico. Although containing disturbing material—cockfights and bullfights, sideshow mum- mies, crippled beggars and, with darkly ironic prescience, the artist sewing his own mouth shut—A Fire in My Belly is pretty tame by the standards of contemporary experimental cinema, and pales next to the torture-porn of the Saw franchise or The Passion of the Christ. The NPG admitted that it had, in fact, received no complaints from the viewing public.
Offense was nevertheless taken, and within hours the NPG, with no public debate and after consulting only one of the cura- tors, removed Wojnarowicz’s film from its unobtrusive video kiosk near the back of the exhibit—whereupon all hell broke loose. Outrage went viral online, from bloggers like Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes (blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes), who devoted blow-by-blow coverage to the unraveling gaffe, to scathing op-eds in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post. Protests were organized, including guerrilla screenings outside—and projected onto—the NPG. The Andy Warhol Foundation led the pack in demanding the video’s reinstatement at the risk of losing future funding. Museums, commercial galleries and nonprofit project spaces lined up to
present the censored work, and several versions were made avail- able on the Internet. MoMA acquired a copy for its permanent collection. It was even aired on Fox News.
The Association of Art Museum Directors, the College Art Association, the ACLU and others issued strongly worded reprimands. One of the NPG’s commissioners resigned in protest. Canadian artist A.A. Bronson demanded that his work in the exhibit be removed in solidarity. The NPG refused.
The NPG refused to put the video back. The NPG refused to apologize or admit any error in judgment. It even denied that it was capitulating to political pressures, citing fabricated “public complaints” and trying to spin the act of self-censorship—
eventually revealed to have been the initiative of Smithsonian Secretary Wayne Clough—as an aesthetic curatorial decision.
Clough subsequently admitted that threats to the Smithsonian’s funding played a major part in his decision.
If you think this sounds like a tiresome, second-rate rehash of what was a farfetched and poorly scripted piece of political the- ater the first time around, you’re not alone. A good portion of the liberal outrage seemed to be over the poor quality of the script they’d been handed. The bastards didn’t even bother to find a new scapegoat but dug up poor David Wojnarowicz, who had been a physically and sexually abused street urchin before teach- ing himself to make art, and had created the film in question as an elegy for his mentor and lover Peter Hujar, who had just suc- cumbed to the same deadly virus that was coursing through the artist’s body. The guy’s not allowed to put some ants on a plastic crucifix? Jesus! Even the conservative pundits didn’t seem to know what to make of it, quickly switching to the real issue, your American tax dollars promoting homosexual perversity. Ellen DeGeneres grabbing her boobs! As a briefly glimpsed Mexican tabloid headline screams in Wojnarowicz’s film, ¡¡Sacrilegio!!
Crypto-fascist hypocrites lining their coffers by pandering to the lowest common denominators of ignorance and xenophobia isn’t news. The fact that the Smithsonian folded so quickly and awkwardly is. Wojnarowicz’s successful Supreme Court case against Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association was the turning point in the 1980s witch hunts, and it made him the martyred poster boy for gay rights and freedom of speech.
Did Smithsonian officials actually imagine no one would make a fuss? They had gone out on a limb to present a historical benchmark in tolerance, then sawed the branch off behind them because some crackpot blowhards said to. Unfathomable.
B ut even more baffling is the West Coast censorship brou- haha involving the recently recruited director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, former New York commercial gallerist Jeffrey Deitch. As an advance promotion for the Deitch-helmed “Art in the Streets”
exhibit, scheduled for April, the former Manhattan art scene
fixture commissioned Italian street artist Blu to create a mural
on the enormous north wall of MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary
facility. For some as-yet-unknown reason, there was no planning
stage for this project apart from engineering logistics—no pre-
paratory sketches, no curatorial review and no oversight during
the execution of the mural, a skewed overhead image of a grid of
wooden coffins draped with flag-sized dollar bills.
Because of a shift in Blu’s schedule, Deitch was at Art Basel Miami when the mural was begun. He says he decided imme- diately on seeing it half-completed that it should be obliterated because of its inherent “insensitivity” to the surrounding com- munity, which includes a war memorial to Japanese-American World War II veterans and a Veterans Affairs hospital (as well as a US bankruptcy court and the Metropolitan Detention Center, featured on the cover of Mike Davis’s book City of Quartz).
Again, no actual complaints had been received. Again, the shit hit the fan.
Blu, back in Italy, initially held his tongue—then cried cen-
sorship. The controversy metastasized over the web, with voices of the global street-art community trying to sort out what had happened and how one of their most active supporters in the art world could have taken such action. Conspiracy theories prolif- erated: it had been ordered by LA’s billionaire art kingpin (and MOCA trustee) Eli Broad; or it was an elaborate publicity stunt designed to generate buzz in the wake of the Smithsonian fiasco.
Deitch’s fumbling prompted a reprimand by the president of MOCA’s board of trustees, Jeffrey Soros, and, in an anonymous street-art response , he was was depicted as a smirking ayatollah holding a house-paint roller. A nighttime protest was organized, with laser-toting activists projecting images of the vanished mural, plus messages like “Dump Deitch,” “Censorship Is Un-American” and—my favorite—“Post No Bills.”
As with the Wojnarowicz flap, the decision to censor was based on questionable semiotics. Although neither Deitch nor MOCA has offered any official interpretation, it’s safe to assume—given their citation of the Japanese-American “Go for Broke” Memorial and the VA facility—that Blu’s coffins were read as a specific indictment of US military policies, presumably the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. My immediate reading was a simple equation between capitalism and death; the pictorial similarity to the flag-draped coffins of fallen troops occurred to me, but the coffins were clunky and wooden, like the generic vampire model, so I took the antiwar angle as a connotative subtext rather than the main thrust. I later encountered several other ways of reading Blu’s symbolism, from the “war on drugs”
to the prison-industrial complex to the high cost of parking in
downtown LA. Admittedly, Deitch’s antiwar construal was the most common—but the idea that this was a patently offensive concept was a stretch for many in the community.
Man One is a Los Angeles graffiti artist, founder in 2002 of Crewest Gallery and at the center of a whitewash scandal of his own. In late 2007 the artist, sometimes known as Alex Poli, obtained permits to paint the concrete embankment of the Arroyo Seco where it empties into the notoriously bleak LA River. He organized an event called “Meeting of Styles,” which brought together more than 100 street artists from around the world to collaborate on a mural. It was considered a huge success until LA County Supervisor Gloria Molina—allegedly offended by a bare-breasted cartoon wood nymph—declared an emer- gency and unilaterally ordered it painted over.
Man One’s response to the Deitch/Blu affair is puzzlement.
“The way I found out it was even going up was from an artist friend, Leo Limon, who’s also a vet,” he recalls. “Leo was taking photos of the mural in process and started sending them to me, because he was staying at the Department of Veterans Affairs across the street. And he told me he was so moved by the mural that he wanted to put flowers and candles in front of it. So once I heard that Deitch decided to whitewash it—and the reasoning behind that—it struck me as pretty odd.” As it did documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald (Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price; Rethink Afghanistan), who wrote on The Huffington Post that Deitch’s decision “conveyed a deep ignorance about the veterans community in the United States, which includes a great many people who strongly oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Contacted by e-mail, Greenwald elaborated: “To be opposed to war is not to denigrate the troops or our country, it is the highest form of patriotism. The notion that anti war art is offensive is an awful commentary on the right wing smear machine and its impact on good and decent folks. The fact that an institution like MOCA should be frightened into supporting the propaganda notion that anti war is somehow not respectful is a reminder, if we need one, how much work progressives have to do.”
As with the Wojnarowicz incident, a notable side effect has been the radical mobilization of members of the affected art community to voice their dissent and protest the perceived acts of censorship. As with Wojnarowicz and the New York gay community, Deitch’s decision was unveiled to a politically primed audience. Angeleno street artists are largely of Latin American descent, and their movement traces its extremely political roots to the Chicano civil rights actions of the 1960s and beyond. At the time when Blu’s mural was painted and painted over, the nearby Autry Museum had a highly publicized exhibit largely devoted to David Alfaro Siqueiros’s 1932 Olvera Street mural. Depicting a Mexican peasant crucified under an American eagle, it had been whitewashed within a year—
allegedly by order of the downtown Anglo business community.
Could it not have occurred to Deitch how a similar whitewash- ing would be received today?
Despite institutional attempts to portray street art as merely a culturally disenfranchised subgenre of contemporary artmak- ing, unauthorized graffiti art is, at its root, a direct challenge to the central tenet of capitalism (or any authoritarian govern- ment system, for that matter): private property. Even the most
CASEY CAPLOWE
The Nation.
26 February 14, 2011
whole debate savors of a gaggle of myopic theologians straining to see how many an- gels they can find dancing on the head of a pin. A lot of us are waiting for somebody to make the pronouncement: “Could it be possible? These old saints in the forest have not yet heard anything of this, that copy- right is dead!”
Ruby Quincunx
Shoot Me Now
Carlsbad, N.M.
It’s so much fun reading The Nation. It’s a way to get all fired up to do something about the dire situation we find ourselves in. So many fronts require attention—
the wars; joblessness; homelessness; lack of healthcare and unions; dwindling re- sources; out-of-control corporations, banks and Wall Street; misguided educa- tion policies; immigration reform; pov- erty; tax cuts for the superwealthy but budget cuts to social programs. If only we could muster the will to get out there and take to the streets, contact our Congress members, make phone calls, write letters, donate to all the causes. But how do you
do all that when you’re working multiple low-paying jobs; are sick because you don’t have the money to see a doctor and are stuck eating low-quality, pesticide- laden GMO foods that make you sicker;
are being foreclosed upon and are look- ing for a cheap motel to park your fam- ily in; or are worried about your son or daughter who is fighting for questionable reasons in far-off lands because he/she couldn’t get loans to go to college and can’t get scholarships because public ed- ucation is so lacking; feel apathetic about politics because the people you vote for turn out to be different from what you hoped. Tell those neocons who want to start yet another bankrupting war, this time in Iran, to do it themselves [Rob- ert Dreyfuss, “The Hawks Call for War Against Iran,” Dec. 20]—we the people don’t have the money or the time.
Margaret Barry
American Apparatchik
Ann Arbor, Mich.
In his superb review of the recently repub- lished writings of Vasily Grossman [“The Maximalist,” Dec. 20], Jochen Hellbeck
says that a Grossman story showing the
“corrosive impact of the nuclear bomb- ing of Hiroshima on the crew of the Enola Gay” had been “inexplicably left out of the present collection.” But Hellbeck also notes that the US editor of the Grossman volumes, Robert Chandler, retailed a false description of the Ukraine famine under Stalin that aligned with the propaganda of Ukrainian right-wingers. Bear those two editorial choices in mind and the omission of the story is no longer “inexplicable.”
Grossman was anti-totalitarian but not anti-socialist. He was not a cold warrior.
But clearly Chandler is. He preferred, like an American version of a Soviet cultural apparatchik, to censor Grossman rather than to expose readers to Grossman’s cri- tique of the potential for totalitarianism inherent in US imperialism.
John Woodford
For Crying Out Loud
Winter Park, Fla.