Blue

Blue Whale watching in summer off the San Diego coast? Indeed! Would have been worth it even without the half-dozen cetaceans we saw.

(Our Lego doubles illustrated how much we didn't see with the help of Manatee.) And here's Point Loma nestled with a mountain in Mexico.

Lessons from family Lego building

1) If you say everyone gets to build a floor of a certain size, someone will add a balcony. Someone else will build a penthouse. Then someone will build a wrap-around veranda, and, just because you said not to, add a wading pool for his pet manatee.
2) Don't build the elevator at the end.

Half moon over the Pacific

TJ

My Aussie nephews had a first taste of Mexico - well of Tijuana - today. What will they have thought? We used to go a lot as kids, with my mother, who missed the vitality of Latin culture from when she lived in Spain and Italy. We used to feast on freshly-squeezed carrot juice in big covered markets, and load up the car with freshly baked bread. 

A lot has changed since then. The areas just south of the world's-busies border crossing at San Ysidro seem less vibrant, perhaps because Tijuana has grown, and grown away from this area: many shopfronts were closed, and we saw no markets frequented by locals. The sad zebra-painted burros remain along Avenida Revolucion (my sister paid to have the boys photographed with one in sombreros beneath a dramatic painting of an Aztec god holding a nubile woman in his arms who appeared to be Frida Kahlo), but there was less of what I remember most vividly: tiny poor children selling things like matches or begging. There but for the grace of God go I, I thought. What did they see today?

I'm not sure who the cloth doll figures at top represent, all looking giddily to their left. Before it went out of business, Heath Ledger's place said "Tijuana makes me happy." Among Dia de los Muertos tchotchkes, a scuba-diving skeleton! The pretty glass ceiling of the barely used bus station and its empty mall. A man with many hats noticing us looking his way during a long wait on the border going home.

Taking it personally

The Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision was announced while my friends M and H were helping me finish cleaning up my apartment on Monday. It's bad news for the Affordable Care Act - though I suppose that if the ACA survives the death of a thousand cuts its enemies plan for it (if the House Republicans' nuclear option doesn't do the trick), this might wind up hastening the day we abandon the bizarre idea that healthcare should be provided through one's work rather than as an entitlement of citizenship. If Americans are entitled to something, the state needs to see they get it.

It's harder to see a possible silver lining to the growing recognition of corporations as legal persons (already a grotesque distortion of the intention of the Fourteenth Amendment) entitled to things citizens are. The baleful Citizens United ruling recognized corporations as entitled to political expression (which, since they can't yet officially vote, can only mean buying influence). Now it seems a "closely held" corporation (90% of corporations in the land) can have religious convictions, and is entitled to live out the views it is thought to share with its owners in the workplace.

The blogosphere is abuzz with nightmare scenarios of religious weirdos and reactionaries who have a controlling interest in companies claiming a religious right to avoid stipulations not only of health care but civil rights protections, etc., for reasons not just principled but pecuniary or prejudiced. Of course most religions are less than committed to full equality as conceived by our current political dispensation...

But I have to confess myself intrigued also at the prospect of endless decisions about what counts as a closely held religious view. I can't wait to hear Winnifred Fallers Sullivan's take on it. Sullivan is the author of The Impossibility of Religious Freedom, a book arguing that the American idea that we might have state recognition of religious liberty without the state's having a theory of what counts as religion is a fantasy. Decisions about what is entitled to protection are being made all the time, often at local levels, and almost always by judges who have no academic training in the question...

Ka-bloom!

Succulent in spectacular bloom backlit by the setting sun - this San Diego County really is the world of Theodore Geisel's (a. k. a. Dr. Seuss)!

Starpit

Happy reunion in California with my sister's family, visiting from Australia. As for past visits, nephews T and W join me in commemorating notable experiences in Lego. I didn't go to the La Brea

Tar Pits with them, but it was my suggestion. It may also have been my idea that the TAR PITS get so many visitors because an adventitious S makes people think it's where the Hollywood STARS are to be found.

Heavy lift

As promised, some more from the "Offense and Dissent" exhibition.

This is from an editorial from the New School Bulletin, December 9th, 1953, and marks the second (and much longer-lasting) curtaining of the Lenin and Stalin images in the Orozco murals - and an explanation of George Bates' medallion wryly celebrating "The right to look behind it."

First step toward China

An afternoon journey
from the Atlantic, a sun-gilded weave as the plane looped back westward,

over the MidWest,
darkened by clouds in great assemblages,

arriving at the Pacific at last,
skimming
the rippled
hills of San Diego's East County.

Credits

One thing I forgot to take a picture of at the exhibition opening - the curatorial team! Happily the Japanese translator of the Matsunaga piece remembered and sent us this. What an enjoyable collaboration it was!

Last Sunday of June

A nice finale to June in New York - Pride Sunday. It started with a sermon by my friend H at Holy Apostles, in part about Holy Apostles' role in the story of gay liberation in New York! Then it was taking a friend to her very first Pride Parade - the real thing truly is completely different from media images, a whole world. And then, after some fitful packing, yummy dinner with friends at our local Japanese restaurant, Geido.

Midsummer is lilies!

The right to look behind it

Some more of George Bates' great illustration on the Orozco story...

Offense & Dissent tour

I'm not going to be able to capture the whole of "Offense & Dissent: Image, Conflict, Belonging" for you, in part because it really is an experience in a masterfully designed space. If you have a chance to go to 2 West 13th Street between now and September 3rd, do pay it a visit!
The first thing you'd see would be yellow, almost a barrier. It evokes the yellow curtain infamously pulled across parts of José Clemente Orozco's murals during the Cold War. (Can you guess whose portraits? It's not Satan and Leviathan!) My colleague/co-curator J has found evidence suggesting it may have been curtained for most of a decade! As you approached you'd notice a wonderfully witty graphic on the wall, a sort of comic-book version of the story, the inspired work of George Bates in response to our research. Co-curator R, who runs the gallery, had the brilliant idea to commission two works of "interpretive" art to bring the visual to an otherwise very text-heavy exhibit. (More) One of the many pleasures of this process has been working with these artists and seeing them come up with works of incredible graphic intelligence which are also beautiful. Here's the other side of the Orozco display.

The archival materials - in facsimiles slightly smaller than actual size - are spread out in a loose and, we hope, inviting way - no glass or plexiglass between the viewer and them. A few highlights are enlarged overhead. Each episode has a color - remember the exhibition logo?The next one you'd see, if you continued clockwise past the "Red Scare, Yellow Curtain" episode, is blood red. Named "Graphic Peace Offensive" it recalls the pop-up antiwar show "My God, we're losing a great country!" put on by seniors at the Parsons School of Design in 1970 instead of their senior show. Some of the works from this intentionally unsigned group show found their way to our archives - and now on to a wall of our show. This episode isn't complicated in the way the others are, but packs a real punch.

 

One of the things I hope happen over the three months the exhibit is up is that some of these artists hear about the show and come tell us more 

about what was happening. Nowadays we too quickly assume that the New School divisions of the university are the politically engaged ones, but this show came out of Parsons culture just months after the merger with TNS, and may have been the first appearance of Parsons work in a New School setting. A historian who wrote about "My God!" in a book on art and Vietnam war has been in touch with us already... he saw the show in the Graduate Faculty, had no idea it had come from Parsons!

The next space you enter is blue (though you'll also be noticing a busy natural-light filled space beckoning in the distance), its striking headline "Is racist art 'freedom of expression'" from a student protest flyer. This section tells the story of the "Matsunaga Affair," when the blackface logo of a Japanese soft drink company in a work shown as part of an exhibit in this very space triggered an act of protest/ defacement/self-defence by poet Sekou Sundiata - the X. Our show marks its 25th anniversary.

Being the most recent, this episode also yielded the most archival material. It too is accompanied by a work of interpretive art, this in invocation of the 1989 show design by Dimitry Tetin. I think it brilliantly makes the point that the larger structures of power and prejudice

suffuse our world in ways we might not even be aware of most of the time. Behind New School and Parsons catalog images are pixelated images of David Dinkins, Pat Robertson, a Mapplethorpe male torso, Ronald Reagan and Aunt Jemima which are visible only from a distance!

I'll go into some of the details and morals of the Matsunaga/Sundiata story some other time; for now suffice it to say we have lots of angles, and a provocative sense of an unfolding and constantly changing story. The visitor, too, is probably ready to move on by now, to the big space.

Covering the walls on both sides is a photo gallery of current New School spaces, some of them with beautiful or confronting works of art in them. Each has been chosen and discussed by a member of the community (staff, faculty or student) in a little essay displayed in the

center, a delicious taste of the many fascinating ways of seeing and engaging housed in our walls recalling (and inspired by) last summer's "Masterpieces of Everyday New York" show. The individual essays are crying out to become a book, so you may have a chance to read them in that form someday, if not in situ here; the curator of the university art collection also wants to post them in the spaces/with the art works they discuss after our show comes down! (Each ends with three questions with which one might initiate a conversation about the work/issue.)

All pretty awesome, huh? Well, you can be part of the show too! There's one more wall waiting to be filled...

I close for the night. But wait, you may ask, where are the archival materials themselves, the heart of the show? I hope you've got a sense of where and how they are laid out, and might someday share some particulars (most will be available in perpetuity on the website of the University Archives) but I guess I've also shown that the exhibit works pretty well even without them! Our hope is that visitors will be drawn into the historical textures and voices as they move in and out of the various displays and stories. Part of the beauty of Manuel Miranda's exhibition design is this generosity, forcing no particular trajectory through the stories, allowing discoveries and rediscoveries at various levels of concreteness. The freshness and power of the contemporary voices should lead back to the older ones, too. And there's lots to read!

Officially open!

Nice turn-out for the opening of Offense & Dissent tonight, confirming that our exhibition designers have done a magnificent job creating

ambiance, sightlines, flow, spaces for discussion... More pics tomorrow!

Opening!

Yes!