Earth satyagraha

Something very special happened in "Religion and the Anthropocene" today. It went like a tremor through the room - everyone felt it.

The week's been dedicated to the Bhagavad Gita and to Gandhi's thoughts about, and building from it, in Hind Swaraj. I'd forgotten to post the Hind Swaraj text on our online platform (and no student had alerted me to its absence) so it fell to me to tell them about this remarkable work from 1909, clear articulation of Gandhi's critique of "modern civilization" and of the love/soul/truth-force (satyagraha) that True Home Rule for India would mean. It's written as a dialogue with someone who wants to kick the English out. Gandhi tries to convince him that the problem isn't (just) the English but the English way of understanding human life, economy, politics, spirituality. Thinking like their colonial oppressors, the Indian nationalists "want the tiger's nature, but not the tiger" (12). In particular, trying to fight the English with the same "brute-force" they use is doomed to failure. The interlocutor isn't easily persuaded, and offers a powerful analogy. If an armed thief comes into your house, ought you not to drive him out?

I read the class Gandhi's response, which begins by imagining how arming yourself and your neighbors against the thief would lead to a widening escalation of arms - and would probably end in disgrace. But there's an alternative.

"You set this armed robber down as an ignorant brother; you intend to reason with him at a suitable opportunity: you argue that he is, after all, a fellow man; you do not know what prompted him to steal. You, therefore, decide that, when you can, you will destroy the man's motive for stealing. Whilst you are thus reasoning with yourself, the man comes again to steal. Instead of being angry with him, you take pity on him. You think that this stealing habit must be a disease with him. Henceforth, you, therefore, keep your doors and windows open, you change your sleeping-place, and you keep your things in a manner most accessible to him. The robber comes again and is confused as all this is new to him; nevertheless, he takes away your things. But his mind is agitated. He enquires about you in the village, he comes to learn about your broad and loving heart, he repents, he begs your parson, returns you your things and leaves off the stealing habit. He becomes your servant, and you find for him honourable employment." (44)

Stunned silence, as you may imagine, leading to an uneasy discussion. Is this serious? Is it practical? Could it ever work? And yet is there any true alternative? We traced ways in which this commitment to satyagraha (religion, morality, India, interchangeable in Gandhi's argument) is anchored in the Gita's decoupling of action from concern with fruits of action, its sense that all are connected in Krishna, that there are no enemies, that the true force at work in the cosmos is love. But still, we're in a class about climate calamity. The world we know is dead or dying, dragging much of the rest of life with us. Love?



I'd put up this image of Gandhi from the New School's Orozco murals, and talked a little about how hard it is to recapture the sense of utopian hope it represented in 1931, when the toppling of the British Raj was inconceivable to most. (Hope and need?) What place is there today for a fairy story like that of the robber let alone for its utopian feel, its imagining a genuine alternative to the failed dream of western modernity? As Amitav Ghosh and Prasenjit Duara lament, Indian and Chinese religious figures early saw through the false promises of western models of national strength and prosperity but these lands' current governments want the tiger's nature. India isn't Gandhian anymore! A rousing manifesto for "climate satyagraha" written at a PanAfrican conference on nonviolence (the brief second reading the students had prepared) added to the utopian feel, and the feel of estrangement. Is love-force, soul-force, truth-force really more than a fantasy? Can we even feel it, numbed as we are? Then this happened:

Actually, said one student, the earth, doesn't the earth treat us just the way Gandhi says we should treat the robber, setting everything out for us to take?

Seismic.

The Penguin Gandhi Reader, ed. Rudrangshu Mukherjee (Penguin, 1993)

Temple mounts

A part of the New School's Orozco mural I'd never really spent much time thinking about came to life for me today. As part of the ISSRNC conference, Ines Talamanez - mother of the field of Native American Religious Studies in the US - and her students presented a fascinating panel called "We Now Speak for Ourselves: Religious Aesthetics for Creating Ceremonial Space, Chanting, Singing, and Dancing in Defense  of Our Sacred Landscapes." At the end, attention turned to the part of the mural with the Yucatan pyramid. Look, said Talamantez, that's us. She had a loop of hair just like that when she was growing up.

Mambo!

This (as they say in the world of social media) just happened. 

My New School history co-teacher J celebrated the release of her amazing new book on "West Side Story" in Orozco - with dancers!

Oriented!

The New School History class met in the Orozco Room today, a space I thought I knew inside out. But then we learned something new - in the process of using it. We split the class up, one fourth assigned to study, sketch and interpret each of the four walls, then regrouped the students into foursomes with one who'd studied each wall to arrive at a synthesis. The discovery happened right at the start when, instead of assigning students by numbers we went by directions. The building, like everything on Manhattan's grid, is sort of aligned to the cardinal directions, so this was a way of telling them which wall to study, too.

And... Struggle in the Orient is in fact on the east wall! Struggle in the Occident is on the west! The Table of Universal Brotherhood beckons from the south! When talking about murals I always make the (slightly anachronistic) point that they seem to me to be outdoor as much as indoors, and when talking about the Orozco and Benton rooms I always stress the way they explode the confines of an indoor space to bring in the bustle and challenge of the outside world. But somehow I overlooked the way Orozco literally places us not just in the whirl of world history but along the axes of world geography...! 

Café Revolución

The Orozco Room was locked when "Seminar in the City" got there today, but that turned out to be for the best. For the best, also, that the A/V request got lost in the ether. It led to more quality time with the murals, and took us helpfully beyond the aura of the work of art.

Waiting for someone to come let us in made the famed Orozco Room seem that much more special, but also forbidding and even forbidden. In its current get-up, in dark earth tones and blacks, it's like entering a cave or a tomb. What fun then to get students, in the space, to imagine it not as a dark and silent holy of holies but as a cafeteria fill of people chatting and the clink of coffee cups and cutlery, the murals set off against white backgrounds and the whole space awash in light from the big windows and the bright open area outside its open doorways to the north! Still, as one perceptive student asked, who thought this was an appropriate topic for a mural in a cafeteria?

She asked this standing underneath the shackled laborers in the middle of the east wall - I'd asked students to move around and then stand in front of a section they wanted to talk about - and I confirmed, from Faculty Senate experience, that it might interfere with one's appetite, if one were paying attention. What were they thinking?

Since the display of audiovisual materials I had planned wasn't going to happen there, we had time to make ourselves at home in the room, spending a good amount of time trying to understand the mural wall by wall. We started with revolution in the East (in 1931, Indian independence was miles off and nonviolence not a proved strategy - Orozco was prophetic, or idealistic) and continued with the storied west wall with the Lenin portrait and Stalin marching in lock step with comrades of all races, all holding hammers (tittering over the curtaining - yellow!). Then to the scene facing the window, workers returning home to a family and a table full of food and books (though nobody read the affect as joyful), and finally across to the focal point of the series, another table, the Table of Universal Brotherhood (where I

noted that visionary Orozco had painted Barack Obama when a black president wasn't even a pipe dream).

I've not had occasion to spend so much time with the murals, and with curious interested people. Hadn't thought of the cafeteria tables between those two tables of the north and south walls, or of what it will have been like to sit between those utopian scenes of a suffering world struggling for redemption. Coffee with the forces of history will have been kinda exciting (or alarming) - if anyone was paying attention.

Approaching them now, though, they're ancient history, dated like the draughting instruments in the image which originally welcomed people into the light-filled cafeteria of the future. We know that Gandhi won and that Stalin lost. There's nothing visionary about it, and the British gas masks and Soviet bayonets are just quaint, as is the all-male Table of Universal Brotherhood. The muffled mural room, open only for meetings and special occasions, is appropriate just for smug resting on one's laurels. Its danger is gone. Its hope, too.

So it was probably a good thing that my sequence of responses and engagements to the murals had to take place in another room - I raced around and found that one of the classrooms on the fifth floor was free, which turned out to be providential, too. In this other room, an unremarkable everyday classroom, I showed the students the electrifying animation updating and exploding the Table of Universal

Brotherhood from the Re-Imagining Orozco exhibition of 2010, the queer response from the Art History MA students of 2012, the "feminist long table" laid out between the mural's two tables in 2014 - and some scenes (including George Bates' brilliant commissioned cartoon) from the "Red Scare, Yellow Curtain" section of Offense & Dissent, last year. I defy anyone not to be axcited by the variety and creativity here displayed!

Seeing these in an everyday room, not in the now exclusive Orozco Room itself as I had planned, made these responses seem more productive, less inward-looking and reactive. People were making new meaning, not just critiquing the old. (And then I showed them some images from the Benton Room, which was on, yes, that very fifth floor, and we briefly discussed the one-sided views of The New School you'd get from having only one of these sets of murals to refer to.) A lot for one class, but, hopefully, exciting - a living legacy!

(Find these and other Orozco images here)

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."

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!

Setting a feminist table

Orozco's "Table of Universal Brotherhood" was given a run for its money today by a feminist "long table" discussion on the "Labors of Diversity" with visitor Sara Ahmed. (That's my friend T setting it up. ) The discussion was fluid, incisive and inclusive and involved many people in the room. (Most of the people who sat down to start later got up to clear spaces for audience members to join.) The format was described in a handout of "Long Table Etiquette." It was conceived by artist Lois Weaver and, I've learned, inspired by one of my favorite films, Marleen Gorris' feminist utopia "Antonia's Line" (1995)! A noble addition to the ongoing series of efforts trying to update the 1931 mural and jump-start its idealism.

On call

Lang Religious Studies supplied the missing women to Orozco's "Table of Universal Brotherhood" at our last official event of the semester, a fabulous panel discussion of ex-students my colleague K put together under the name Calling, Career, Commitment. The alums all work in caring professions, and had enormously insightful accounts of how they found their way, how they understand their work, and how they care of in very emotional demanding work. They spoke of the importance of "lineages," support networks, humility, and how to keep enough distance between your own life and that of those you are working with to be effective - and take of your own needs, desires and relationships.

I have all sorts of reservations about monolithic ways of thinking about calling. In my experience categories like "calling" often make students panic. If only they could all have been there for this discussion which showed much more multi-pronged, open-ended and clear-eyed approaches. The great discussion continued over dinner. How does one, as an idealistic young person at a liberal arts college like Lang, make one's way in the world? All three stressed that they have many interests and no intention to give all the rest up for the one they were currently pursuing. One thought many young people might resist "being defined" by a specific goal since they'd be ashamed if unable to achieve it. Another noted that many social workers don't speak of their work as a "calling" and consider those who do self-important. All three acknowledged that decisions and even dreams are heavily shadowed by economic factors - one can forget that getting a degree also usually means taking on a considerable debt. Living out a chosen calling is something not everyone has the privilege to be able to do, and there is wisdom in the experience also of those who find meaning in lives they have not chosen.

The oldest of the alumnae was particularly full of wisdom. When someone asked how she related to people who had experiences she had not had, she said that those were the times she was most effective; when the experience was too close to her own, her own unresolved feelings could get in the way.When someone asked what to do if you felt someone with your background didn't have the right to do some kind of work you managed to get hired to do, she said: think of it as a privilege, an honor. And in some connection she said that people should think of their first few jobs as teaching them what they didn't want to do.

The picture that emerged from all the discussion was enormously helpful for me. It confirmed, and deepened, my sense - vicarious, since I got into the one-profession-for-life game just in time - that the contemporary economy, and culture, demand a more experimental and pluralist, less focused and high-stakes way of navigating questions of calling and career. And during dinner it became clear to me that we should be telling students that their experience as students at a college like ours - taking courses in several areas at the same time, some familiar and some new, and choosing a new slate each semester in consultation with friends and advisers - prepares them well for precisely this. Liberal arts provides valuable "vocational training" after all!

Offense and Dissent

 

Have I mentioned that one of the fruits of our New School history class will be an exhibition about moments when displayed art rubbed up against political and community questions at The New School? Yes indeedy - going up at the end of the semester in the main university gallery, and remaining up through Orientation, under the (working) title "Offense and Dissent: Image, Conflict and Belonging at The New School."

New research is being done on three resonant episodes (all of which we discussed in our course last semester - though I guess I haven't shared images from the third with you: see below): the curtaining of the part of the Orozco murals depicting Lenin and Stalin in the early 1950s in what was then the school cafeteria; Parsons students' replacing their scheduled senior showings with an anti-war exhibit in May of 1970; and the furor over a racist image included in an exhibition of Japanese graphic design in 1989 in the university's central gallery. Exploring and analyzing these will be a large part of the exhibit; we're supplementing display of artifacts, archival materials, news reports, etc. with timelines commissioned from illustrators working in interestingly different styles tailored to the moments and genres at play.

But that's only part of it. The other part will be generated by The New School of 2104. We've sent out a lot of invitations, and received enthusiastic signmeups in almost all cases! Here's the invite:

In addition to the three incidents, we would like to have a fourth exploration that is a present-day investigation by faculty, staff and students at The New School in dialogue with an image/installation or an element of design that they regularly encounter at the university.

We ask that you

1.     Select either ­an artwork or an aspect of design that you regularly encounter at the university to which you have a strong reaction, positive or negative, that you may not necessarily share with others.  The work should be either an image or installation from The New School Art Collection that is in the hallways, offices, courtyards and hallways of the university OR it should be an element of design—graphic, interior or architecture—on campus. 

2.     Describe briefly why you are provoked or disturbed by the image/design: How do you encounter this work?  Why does it disturb or delight you? How do others feel? Does it exclude some people in its address?  Are you left out, drawn in, disgusted, bored, taken aback?  If you could effect a change with regard to the display, design or reception of this piece of work, how might you begin? 

3.     Suggest three questions that you would use to initiate a conversation with your colleagues to make such a change possible.

We are interested in all three aspects of your response – selection, disagreement and dialogue – and will include these texts with questions and the corresponding artwork/designs, as appropriate, as part of the exhibition.

The range of excited responses suggests that we've hit a nerve.

Shared capacities

We had a final information session for the "Shared Capacities" - not not gen ed - Initiative in the Orozco Room yesterday. Free lunch served!

Curtains

In our New School history class yesterday, we took the students to the Orozco room. One student took the panorama below, which, for all the inevitable distortion, gives a remarkably good sense of it as a space. Behind J and me, you see "Struggle in the Orient," a tableau you may recognize; just beyond us are the portraits of Gandhi and Naidu. Between the windows is the "Table of Universal Brotherhood," with its multiracial vision of global harmony, occasion for many a bigoted response in its time. (Today we see mainly missing women.) To their right is "Struggle in the West" with Mexico, Lenin and goose-stepping Soviets, including Joseph Stalin. This is the wall which was once covered over with a yellow curtain - see the image from "New School Keeps Red Mural Hidden" below.

This visit was, I dare say, the highlight of a week which somehow fell flat. The analog last time round was a great success - "I think we did the three-ring circus of The New School proud today," I crowed - so this was a bit of a surprise. The week was devoted to two important programs which, for a brief time in the 1940s, made The New School an even more than usually cool place - Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop and the Ecole Libre - and the theme of art as politics. Plenty interesting, you might think... but not to our mostly Parsons students. That what we hope is a complicated but empowering sense of place means little to them was clear from my students' response to the Orozco room. It's dated; worse, in its way, it's off-limits to students. And when I showed them the recent cool student efforts to bring it up to date, indifference: what would be the point of trying to make it relevant today? It's a slumpy part of the semester in a class already dealing with the low morale of required courses, but these responses cut to the quick. Next time, we hope for more interested students; even then, we may have to leave these parts of the story out.

Aura labora

I've been looking forward to the event for first years we put on in the Orozco Room this evening for a long time: a recollection and continuation of the brilliant "Re-imagining Orozco" show put on in 2010 by the University Art Collection (with that amazing animation) and a

  

couple of Parsons classes - with a bonus presentation of the just-completed "Questions for Revolution and Universal Brotherhood" project, too. The students got to contribute to a slide show of images, and generated poems from their reactions to the work, like this one:

power religion oppression ostracization

fiery controversy imposing difference

change socialism control pride impact

motivating ombre ethnocentristic

historical representation

But truth be told I'm not sure the students enjoyed it as much as we organizers did. We relished seeing the 2010 and 2012 projects presented in this room for the first time - at one point transgressively projecting them directly on to the venerable mural: we giggled like schoolchildren.
Art's Benjaminian aura doesn't have the same complicated tingle for our media-saturated students, so neither the transgression nor the genre-busting reimaginings were quite as intoxicating to them. Still, Orozco is part of their world now. And the murals, methinks, had a blast.