Across the Great Divide

Remembering the Moral Case for Action on Education.

Reader Hal Davis forwarded me this column from a Hartford newspaper. Colin McEnroe is writing about a Connecticut court case, but he's also writing about every poor school child in the country.

I've decided that Sheff v. O'Neill is not really a legal case and that none of  [the] settlements or proposed forms of redress will ever work, unless we change.  It's a moral case. It makes a moral argument. The problem is that we don't listen to moral arguments anymore, so you've got to dress them up as lawsuits.

The thing that broke down worst of all was us -- the people with hope and resources -- and our supposed Judeo-Christian values. Those values are unambiguous about what we're supposed be be doing for others who are poor, who are sick, who are helpless.  We can do it through our churches or through Boys' and Girls'  Clubs or Big Brothers Big Sisters or through some other mentoring or intervention. But we're supposed to do it. Those values are supposed to be the spine of this country.      

But if we lived them -- even just a little -- there would have been no compelling case to make in Sheff v. O'Neill, because each of use [sic] would have identified those children as our moral responsibility, a long time ago.

School choice doesn't quite get at the kids McEnroe cites, mired in "experiential poverty," who "have never been to a movie theater or ridden a pony" or spoken to someone who has noticed their unique gifts.

Liberals have been taking a drubbing lately for making moral arguments instead of economic ones or Constitutionally principled ones.

McEnroe's piece calls us to remember the moral case for our communities and our governments.

Radiating Beauty.

Beauty to me does not sit on the surface, it radiates through how you make an example of yourself to others.

– Izabella Demavlys, interviewed by Paul Schmelzer in eyeteeth 

Demavlys is former fashion photographer now doing documentary work — currently, a series called "Without a Face" featuring portraits of Pakistani women healing after attacks by men wielding kerosene oil or battery acid.

Concrete Poetry and other Public Art in the Twin Cities.

To follow on the discussion of public art in Minneapolis, here's a cool St. Paul project I had somehow missed. 

 

The Everyday Poems for City Sidewalks project works in tandem with St. Paul’s sidewalk maintenance program and installs poetry where city sidewalks are replaced. The cost of the art installation is negligible, since the material has to be laid anyway. A stamp, inspired by contractor's stamps, impresses the text into the wet concrete.

In its first year, the project had the goal of one hundred stampings of twenty poems written by St. Paul residents, chosen from 2000 submissions.

Here's a map of locations so far. Minneapolis lists where its public art, such as these manhole covers, can be found. You may have to wait awhile before enjoying either of these projects, though.

Wasteful Spending on Artful Fountains? Hellier is all Wet.

I enjoy art, I admit. As a commuter cyclist and former thirsty urban  runner, I value public water fountains. As a consumer of city life around the world — especially in places that encourage people to be out on their streets — I appreciate how public fountains provide gathering points, from Rome to Las Vegas to Minneapolis.

And as a former marketeer, I don't oppose spending that generates PR for a good product, in this case, Minneapolis water as an alternative to overpriced, litter-producing bottled water. 

Put it all together — artful places, fresh water without plastic trash, walkable streets and promoting the city  — and it sounds like a good deal to me. Especially when the $50,000 cost per art fountain is amortized over 25 years.

Luke Hellier (a little fresh air, exercise and free water wouldn't hurt you, man) doesn't like beautiful fountains in cities run by DFL-leaning mayors.

In that blank-minded-bullying practiced by Hellier and his Twittering dragoons, the GOP has been ragging on Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak for contributing to the beauty and functionality of his city. They persist in positioning this expenditure as profligacy.

Screw art, they say. Our money is better spent locking up sex offenders forever.

(Let's hope Hellier someday googles the difference between a capital cost and a recurring cost.)

These artful fountains would be paid for out of capital funds dedicated to art and the water fund, which must be used for water projects. The money can't be spent for cops or road repair or whatever other public expenditure the GOP might pretend to support. Any "savings" here are political eyewash.

[From top: Fully amortized Portuguese public fountain, getting its picture taken centuries later; Lisa Elias Minneapolis fountain design; Andrew MacGuffie design.]

The fountains would be adopted and maintained by private volunteers instead of city crews. Try getting 25 years of free labor with your regular fountains. And building them would employ local artists and craftspeople.

Politics, though, has cut the initial 10 fountains to six and now to four, for a total cost of $200,000.

My hometown, a place so conservative I don't know why Hellier doesn't move there right now, has a vibrant public art program. It places sculpture along the city's main street and gives artists lots of exposure.

Wherever you go in the world, there will be sex offenders, prisons or not. But beauty and civic life are not that easy to find. And the reason is on display right now.

This Might Warm You Up.

Or at least feel better.

Jon Stewart breaks down the bombast of Fox News and the dramatic national consequences of Tuesday's election of our new president, Scott Brown.

*****

Jon Tevlin writes about artist Brant Kingman's conflicts with Minneapolis zoning authorities.

Kingman says the events he hosts are community art. The city says they are dangerous parties.

"It just so happens my medium is people," Kingman said the other day while his newest artwork played on a computer -- a video of naked people dancing while he "painted" them with colored lasers. "I try to bring people out of themselves."

I've attended one of them. The live music was very good. The crowd, diverse, although maybe self-selecting for a tolerance of pretentiousness. The food was ample and high quality and the beer was free.

The wood fire was too smoky for my taste, but his braziers were cool looking, and I never felt close to being endangered. The few commenters on the Strib column seem to agree.

Here's one where Jeff and I probably agree, too.

*****

Then, there's this story, where an artist goes without fire altogether.

SERIOUS cold, Justen Ladda said, is when the sponge in the kitchen sink feels like wood or the toothpaste freezes or the refrigerator turns itself off, as it did one particularly frigid day last winter. Not that Mr. Ladda, a 56-year-old sculptor who has lived heat-free in his Lower East Side loft for three decades, is bothered by such extremes. “Winter comes and goes,” he’ll tell you blithely, adjusting his black wool scarf and watch cap. (Along with fingerless gloves, long underwear and felt slippers, they are part of Mr. Ladda’s at-home uniform when the mercury dips.)

Death, Taxes and the American Way.

Yesterday, I was in a Telluride art gallery for the opening of a show featuring the work of a friend. Since we were driving back that night, I had to lay off the Colorado-made vodka being poured. And since I was in Colorado, I missed Drinking Liberally with the candidate I'd most want to have a beer with — Tom Rukavina.

(Who would I put on the opposite end of the scale, among the DFL candidates? John Marty and Mark Dayton, just because I doubt having beer around would loosen up the conversation in either case. Come to think of it, hard to imagine Rukavina getting any looser than he already is.)

Since this is about crossing the divide on occasion, I'd have to pick Marty Seifert as my top GOP beerpanion, unless Norm Coleman were available, in which case, I'd pick him and... no, I'm going to stay high road on this one.

Anyway, when I returned, I read Spot's piece on the estate tax repeal for 2010, and its implications for the estates of people unlucky enough to die in 2010. In the words of the New York Times editorial he quotes:

The bottom line is this: there will be many more losers than winners under estate-tax repeal, and the losers will be among Americans who are farther down the wealth ladder.

As Spot notes, the estate tax is not a "death" tax. ("Death tax" is not just a propaganda line used by anti-tax zealots. The term has crept into official Treasury Department and other government documents during the Bush Administration.) Death is an event we all get to attend, and most of us will never have to pay such a tax, as heirs or posthumously. 

Instead, the estate tax is tax on the transfer of value from one party to another — as with most taxes, in the form of wages, interest, sales of property or goods, and realized capital gains. (Property taxes, motor vehicle taxes and pollution taxes are among the exceptions.)

The preferred argument against the estate tax is that it would hurt heirs of small businesses and family farms, which with the exemptions in place before the 2010 repeal, was nonsense. This happened very rarely, in cases where the estate holders failed to take advantage of planning safeguards in the tax law.

Which brings me back to Telluride, a former remote mining town transformed by a ski hill and lot of money arriving in seven- and eight-digit bundles. Most of those family ranches, from Ridgway (cowboy fantasy of Ralph Lauren) to Telluride, have already passed into the hands of wealthy trophy homeowners, speculators, developers and the over-extended.

Yesterday, we watched a woman buy about six pieces of art gallery jewelry (no price tags visible) just for giggles. Somehow, she was able to make it through the day, despite the estate tax.

Emmer Shows He's a GOP Prospect.

I left the comment below over at mnpACT!, where Dave Mindeman dropped a flag on Rep. Tom Emmer's "I don't know why someone hasn't floated taking some of that arts and entertainment tax and putting it toward the Vikings stadium."

Um, you just did, although in a way that allows you to step out of bounds and deny it was your idea if someone tries to tackle you. This maneuver shows Emmer is clearly GOP governor material.

Another commenter noted that Legacy amendment,  stuck in the state constitution by voters in 2008, says what the arts money is to be spent on "arts, arts education, arts access, and to preserve Minnesota’s history and cultural heritage."

Emmer is in the legislature, and he may not be the only one there who equates "arts" with "entertainment." Still, despite all the drama over the years, it's not going to be too difficult to cut the Vikings out of the arts definition.

"Cultural heritage," following "history" as it does, seems to mean Native Americans, German Turners, Slovak miners, Irish entrepreneurs, Norwegian ministers and Rondo dwellers, among others. But what about General Mills, Polaris snowmobiles and a sports franchise "meant to reflect Minnesota's place as a center of Scandinavian American culture" that has been around longer than most Minnesotans have been alive?

We can thank Rep. Emmer for illustrating so soon the folly of trying to work around legislative gutlessness by putting more bricks in the state constitution.

Shelter Report: Art Project.

Jasmine seems to think this is what I look like.

I guess the diet is working.

The Falcon and the Snowmen: Facing Reality.

 

[Photo Left: Lisa James, Merced Sun-Star Virgin of Guadalupe appears in a stone. Photo Right: Dorothea Lange, Colonist to Alaska from Minnesota]

The northern Plains were drying up and blowing away. As successive plagues descended on the Dakotas, residents thought they might be witnessing the end of the world. The New York Times printed a photograph with a caption that could have run in The Onion: “Cattle Invade a State Capitol. A herd driven from the drought area contentedly grazes on the Capitol grounds at Bismarck, N. D.” It provoked a storm of protest — first that the photo was faked, and then that its caption led to a false inference.

If one can imagine the political animosity that would have been generated if, as part of the current stimulus package, President Obama introduced a national documentary photography program, then it is possible to understand the opposition that the F.S.A. faced. Fiscal conservatives did not want to see their hard-earned tax dollars spent on relief, let alone a government photography program, of all things. And in Arthur Rothstein’s photograph of a sun-bleached cow skull, Roosevelt’s opponents had found their proof of government waste, duplicity and fraud.

Filmmaker Errol Morris continues his series about what contemporary observers can learn from the photography of the Great Depression.

What makes these accusations of photo-fakery utterly perverse is the claim that they unfairly portrayed a drought. The photographs led the viewer to infer that the Dakotas were experiencing a drought. But the Dakotas were experiencing a drought. One of the worst droughts in American history. Was the real issue that the cow had died of old age rather than drought? Or that the cow skull had been moved less than 10 feet, as Rothstein later claimed? Or had been moved at all? Or that multiple photographs had been taken? Or was it merely an attempt to shift the nature of the debate from the agricultural problems facing the country to an argument about photography and propaganda?

What makes an image not true? When does an art-directed photo move from documentary art to propaganda? How does the viewer's suppositions about the reality portrayed affect the response to a photo?

The Virgin of Guadalupe appears in California orchard stones, turtle shells and burned pancakes because of what a person of faith perceives in some random arrangement of contrasting colors and shapes. Here, the photo is unvarnished representation — any meaning or trickery is all in the mind of the beholder.

The meaning and emotional content of Lange's photo of the Alaska-bound Minnesotan depend greatly on its artful lighting and composition — and also on its context — but not upon any information conveyed intrinsically within the frame. 

Today, it seems evident that Lange's heroic images were carefully directed and shot. Surely no impoverished immigrant boarded a Depression-era steamship in such natty duds or paused so pensively before gaze-paralleling rivets. We could place him in GQ unretouched, and he could sell us every article of his clothing: the newsboy cap and the wool shirt with its collar jutting just so out of the stippled leather jacket. Instead of a young man heading for an uncertain future in Alaska, we might see a hunk who helped give Sarah Palin her accent.

The truth is that most images we see are manipulations — maybe not as fraudulent as the footage of the Boy in the Balloon — but altered all the same, with lighting, framing, lenses, wind machines, make up, point of view, safety pins, glycerine, PhotoShop, cropping, captions and editorial selection from perhaps hundreds of variations. Finally, these are submitted for examination through the filters of our own prejudices and desires.

A balloon goes aloft and transfixes a nation because of a made-up story. An unseen drought becomes real to the rest of the country because of a cow skull arranged in a landscape. A hog farm becomes a presidential ranch because a Texas front man puts on a cowboy hat.

Holy Virgin of Guadalupe, deliver us!

Beating Swords into Paper.

Untitled, Jon LaFalce
Pulp printing on combat paper

I've had a busy week and am feeling unpeaceful right now for missing most of A Week for Peace at Minnesota Center for Book Arts that brought in the Combat Paper Project and the Warrior Writers Project.

The Combat Paper Project collaborates with local groups like MCBA and Susan Hensel Gallery to sponsor papermaking workshops, where local veterans are given the opportunity to use uniforms worn in combat to create cathartic works of art.

The uniforms are cut up, beaten into fiber and formed into sheets of paper. Later, text and imagery created by veterans are printed on the sheets. The goal is to use art to help individuals reconcile their personal experiences and challenge traditional narratives surrounding service, honor and military culture.

Some of the work is headed for the Carleton College Art Gallery, October 22nd through November 18, 2009.