Recently in Arts Category

Check out Jonathan Torgovnik's amazing collection of photographs of the children of rape victims in the Congo. I became aware of his work because of a devastating photo essay in this month's Mother Jones Magazine, which you should all check out if you get a chance (it's not available online).

Whatever you might think about Code Pink or direct action, you can't argue with how incredible this quilt is. Thousands of women from over 11 countries sent in these little cozies to be stitched together--the resulting quilt reads "I will not raise my child to kill another mother's child." It's an enormous, gorgeous spectacle if there ever was one. I'm just wondering which museum is going to snap it up.

Check out the books: Returning to My Mother's House, Feminist Art and the Maternal, and In Her Own Sweet Time.

Approximate transcript after the jump.

From AfterEllen.com:

Carol Ann Duffy, 53, has been appointed poet laureate of Britain, a prestigious 341-year-old position previously held by men like John Dryden, Alfred Tennyson, William Wordsworth, Cecil Day-Lewis and Ted Hughes.

Not only is Duffy the first woman to hold the position, she is the first Scot, the first mother, and the first lesbian.

The British monarchy chooses a new poet laureate every 10 years, with the advice of the government. This time, the public was also consulted in making the appointment, although the decision was ultimately Queen Elizabeth's.

In announcing the decision, Culture Secretary Andy Burnham called Duffy "a towering figure in English literature today and a superb poet" who has "achieved something that only the true greats of literature manage -- to be regarded as both popular and profound."

You can see more about Carol Ann Duffy at her website.

Jess, the super awesome rocker Kathleen Hanna, and I went to the Whitney Museum to see the latest exhibit of Jenny Holzer, titled Protect, Protect, last week.

If you don't know Holzer's work, you should definitely check out her stuff online. In short, she does a lot of interesting installation and text work, often on themes dealing with security, leadership, morality, and happiness. She likes to infiltrate public space, and see how words and ideas are changed by their contexts. She works in a variety of media, including LED signs, plaques, benches, stickers, and T-shirts. I first learned about her from my brother, who told me about her truisms (the girl in the shirt pictured here is sporting one).

This latest exhibit is very focused on security (thus the title) and includes provocative truisms running on LED screens and poster-sized redacted reports from the military in Iraq, as well as a table of bones and some amazing looking redacted hand prints blown up to a freakish size. It was an overwhelming exhibit--both physically and emotionally. Taking in all of the horrific redacted material brought the war home in a soul crushing way, and keeping up with the LED work had our eyes blurring and a touch of a headache.

In other words, expect to leave with broken heart and brain, but also enraged and inspired. If you're not in the NY-area, her work is very assessable all over the interweb so have at it through the cushion of the screen.

My friend Ben Brown has been on a very unique road trip. Essentially he is traveling around the country with a bombed out car from Iraq, parking it, and recording folks' reactions. Here's the summary from the site:

He [artist Jeremy Deller] will travel aboard an RV with Esam Pasha, artist and formerly a translator for the Chief Advisor in the British Embassy of Baghdad and for American forces around Iraq; and Jonathan Harvey, a veteran of the Iraq war and recently demobilized PSYOP specialist. They will park in public sites to hold conversations about Iraq. Visitors are encouraged to bring objects related to Iraq, and to participate in conversations with Pasha and Harvey.

Esam Pasha and Jonathan Harvey were selected by the artist, Creative Time, and the New Museum from a wide pool of applicants interested in the project. The destroyed car on view during the project's installation at the New Museum will be placed on a flatbed trailer and hitched to the RV. As an artist who consistently privileges the concerns of social history, Deller is interested in providing a platform for discussion. The car on view in New York and on the road will be a visual aid to prompt open dialog and unrestricted conversation. When the project arrives in Los Angeles, it will be on view at the Hammer Museum until mid-May.

Here's a video that Ben made along the way:

They're nearing the end of their adventure, so be sure to check out the work. It's an amazing and, in a lot of ways, overwhelming model of bringing many different art mediums, community dialogue, and documentary work together. It's got my feminist wheels churning...what would it be like to do a similar road trip with an artifact from a bombed abortion clinic or a giant container of the 13,000 rape kits still untested in LA County?

Today, Kai Wright has a great piece in The Root about Lorraine Hansberry -- and how "she engaged both a personal and a political search for sexual freedom and articulated a still-urgent understanding of its relationship to gender equality." Kai writes,

It's unclear whether Hansberry would have called herself a "lesbian," primarily because she and others were still in the process of developing the concept of such a clearly defined sexual identity. But she dated women and, more strikingly, joined the country's first-ever lesbian political organization, the now-defunct Daughters of Bilitis, at a time when doing so made you a target of federal law enforcement.

After joining the group, Hansberry wrote a series of provocative letters to two gay journals. Daughters of Bilitis began publishing its journal, the Ladder, in 1956. Hansberry chimed in to it in May and August of 1957, while she was writing A Raisin in the Sun. Hansberry is known for her drama, but she was a prolific political writer and speaker, dating back to her early 1950s activism and editorial work for Robeson. And in her essay-length 1957 letters to the editor, she challenged members to consider the feminist case against homophobia.

"I think it is about time that equipped women began to take on some of the ethical questions which a male-dominated culture has produced," Hansberry wrote in one letter, explaining, "There may be women to emerge who will be able to formulate a new and possible concept that homosexual persecution and condemnation has at its roots not only social ignorance, but a philosophically active anti-feminist dogma."

As Adam writes over on TAPPED, A Raisin in the Sun is a play that most of us read in school. It's undeniably a classic. But that's not all Hansberry wrote. We remember her for her anti-segregation activism and anti-racist writing, but not so much her bold statements (oh, and you better believe they were bold!) on gender inequality and homophobia. As Adam puts it,

When Hansberry was taking on the evils of segregation and "we just want to be left alone" white racism, we applauded, but when she started talking about "homosexual persecution" we stopped listening.

Props to Kai for getting us to listen.

These are just a few excerpts from some of my favorite poets. I thought I'd pass them along as a bit of a break from your undoubtedly harried Thursday:

"You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves."
-Mary Oliver, "Wild Geese"

"One day I'll give birth to a tiny baby girl
and when she's born she'll scream
and I'll tell her to never stop

I will kiss her before I lay her down at night
and will tell her a story so she knows
how it is and how it must be for her to survive

I'll tell her to set things on fire
and keep them burning
I'll teach her that fire will not consume her
that she must use it"
-Nicole Blackman, "Daughter"

"the cab driver asks
what my favorite position is
no tip given"
-Felice Belle, "true story"

"i see you blackboy
bent toward destruction watching
for death with tight eyes"
-Sonia Sanchez, "haiku"

"I may have lost

My attention for Logic
But I see beautiful
Children circumventing cruelty

Nearly every day and it raises
The question--what have you done
Lately for the safety

Of our feelings? Have you offered your seat on a crowded
Downtown subway car

To a man in perfect physical health
Because he had tears in his eyes? Neither
Have I, not yet, but at least

I considered it in writing."
-Chris Martin, "Jokes for Strangers"
(Yes, he's my big brother.)

Feel free to leave your favorite lines in comments!

Sean Penn won the Oscar for his portrayal of Harvey Milk. Check out his acceptance speech below.

Related:
Milk: I sure didn't learn about this in high school.
Harvey Milk Deserved a Better Film than Van Sant's Low-fat Biopic.

And it took a white director to make sure we got there! OK, OK, I will try to be less cynical. I know, I should be totally psyched that Slumdog Millionare won so many Oscars, including best picture. Any visibility for South Asians is good right?

Right. And wrong. I personally didn't think Slumdog Millionare was an Oscar worthy movie. I thought it was creative, beautiful, interesting and had a great soundtrack, but I didn't understand how it was Oscar worthy. Where was the complexity of the characters? Where was the deep cross-cultural analysis that helps us understand the South Asian condition? Where was there any agency displayed in the character of Latika? How did this story help the plight of the South Asian national citizen outside of reinforcing stereotypes of India?

I guess I have more questions than I have answers. And the questions I ask were certainly not the ones considered by the Academy in choosing this film. To be clear, I loved this movie and I saw it twice. The second time I brought my family, and my father a staunch Indian nationalist, hated it. He didn't like the way it portrayed India. I do not hold the same politics as my father and I felt that it actually held more truth about poverty and corruption in India than we would like to admit. But once you sift through the amazing imagery, adorable kids and soundtrack you are left with a coming of age story, only the story is not really for Indian audiences.

And despite its attempt at a narrative of social progress, Slumdog reinforces that which is hopes to ameliorate. Mitu Sengupta has an excellent piece up at Alternet about the policy implications of films like Slumdog Millionare that lump together the stereotypes of the poor.

It is ironic that "Slumdog", for all its righteousness of tone, shares with many Indian political and social elites a profoundly dehumanizing view of those who live and work within the country's slums. The troubling policy implications of this perspective are unmistakeably mirrored by the film. Since there are no internal resources, and none capable of constructive voice or action, all "solutions" must arrive externally.

After a harrowing life in an anarchic wilderness, salvation finally comes to Jamal, a Christ-like figure, in the form of an imported quiz-show, which he succeeds in thanks to sheer, dumb luck, or rather, because "it is written." Is it also "written," then, that the other children depicted in the film must continue to suffer? Or must they, like the stone-faced Jamal, stoically await their own "destiny" of rescue by a foreign hand?

Go read her whole piece, it gives a vastly different view on the film than what has been discussed in the mainstream media.

Finally, as a feminist, I had a really hard time with the character of Latika. I understand that in Boyle's imagination, Latika was like any third world woman. A helpless victim that can't speak up for herself and stays in an abusive relationship, until she is saved by another man. Outside of oversimplifying the complex ways that women of color experience AND resist violence within their own communities, it reinforces stereotypes of helpless third world women. I must say, I tried to ignore this plotline in the beginning. Perhaps if I thought about it too much, I would come out against a film that is supposed to "help" my people or because I just wanted to enjoy something for once without the nagging reality that this story doesn't make sense without the depiction of a violent patriarchy. But the unfortunate reality is that in order for South Asians to make it into the mainstream, they have to cater to the lowest common denominator of universal experience. And that is of course one where women have no agency, especially in the context of the third world. I mean that is why we are fighting all these wars right? To save women!

So yes, of course I am excited that Slumdog did so well at the Oscars. It makes me happy that all these South Asian actors are in the spotlight along with the genius of AR Rahman and MIA. However, it is only one step and we must resist the desire to homogenize the Indian experience that we know so little of in actuality, based on a fictitious film directed by a white man.