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HISTORICAL CONNECTIONS:
The United States has a dismal history of recurring periods of incredible intolerance and repression.We are experiencing a resurgence of culture wars connected to a longer history of right wing oppression and violence towards people and ideas it doesn't understand or agree with.
The Culture Wars of the 80s and 90s
Culture Wars - Wikipedia entries
Here is an excellent document compiled for the CAE Defense Fund site. It gives a very thorough overview of these kinds of abuses.
Excellent related books:
Culture Wars:
Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts
B y Richard Bolton
What's The
Matter With Kansas?
How Conservatives Won The Heart Of America
By Thomas Frank
January,
13, 2006
Motion to dismiss charges "premature'
By DAN HERBECK
News Staff Reporter
Prosecution of Steven Kurtz has caused artists' outcry.
A criminal case that has upset many people in the art world will continue to move forward in federal court here.
In an opinion issued late Thursday, U.S. Magistrate Judge H. Kenneth Schroeder Jr. refused to recommend dismissal of charges against Steven J. Kurtz, a University at Buffalo art professor who was indicted by a federal grand jury in June 2004. Kurtz, 47, is a founding member of the Critical Arts Ensemble, a group whose art exhibits often criticize the federal government. His indictment touched off debate about artistic freedom and the government's efforts to tightly control the distribution of bacterial agents in the post-9/11 era.
June
25, 2005
"Statues Uncovered in Ashcroft's Wake"
After taking office, former Attorney General John Ashcroft had the breasts of a Lady Liberty sculpture covered (see below). Attorney General Alberto Gonzales recently had the covering removed.
June 23, 2005
'Violated ... again'
Kin slap art center's 9/11 pieces
A museum that is set to rise above the hallowed soil of Ground Zero has
showcased art that the families of 9/11 victims are denouncing as offensive,
anti-American - and a slap in the face of nearly 3,000 dead innocents.
The Drawing Center, a little-known cultural group in SoHo, has mounted
works linking President Bush to Osama Bin Laden and showing a hooded victim
of U.S. abuse at Abu Ghraib prison.This
article by Douglas Feiden, Staff Writer for the NY Daily News, continues
here.
Here is another article on the media-created "controversy", by Matt Taibbai for the New York Press.
Note: It was difficult to find articles that were even handed and not as reactionary as the two listed here. Both are symptomatic of the reductive, hot-headed argumentation that is typical in battles over culture.
Image: 'A Glimpse of What Life in a Free Country Can Be Like #6' by Amy Wilson
May 13, 2005
Without Cause: Yale Fires An Acclaimed Anarchist Scholar
An Interview with David Graeber
By JOSHUA FRANK
David Graeber, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale
University, and the author of Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value:
The False Coin of Our Own Dreams and Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology,
among many other scholarly publications. Last week Prof. Graeber was informed
that his teaching contract at Yale would not be extended. However, it
was not Graeber's scholarship that was ever in question; rather it was
his political philosophies that may have played a heavy hand in the administration's
unwarranted decision. Graeber, a renowned anarchist scholar, recently
spoke with CounterPuncher Joshua Frank about the fiasco. As one of our
other favorite anthropologists David Price put it, this "is a ghastly
look under the hood at how academic knowledge is manufactured at America's
'finest' institutions." The
interview continues here on Counterpunch.org
You can support Prof. Graeber by signing an online petition: www.petitiononline.com/dgraeber/petition.html
April 23,
2005
LAPD closes exhibition for "offensive content"
From the Transport Gallery site:
At 10:40 pm, April 23rd, the LAPD chose to shut down our past event, Mark of the Beast, due to the "agressive and offensive" nature of the show's content. Transport Gallery is seeking your help in exposing this obvious breach of First Amendment rights. If you attended the Mark of the Beast, and have any information or comments regarding the police's actions please contact us by email at info@transportgallery.com. Witness statements will be helpful in this situation. Thank you, TG.
April 12,
2005
"Secret Service visits art show at Columbia"
"Organizers of
a politically charged art exhibit at Columbia College's Glass Curtain
Gallery thought their show might draw controversy.
But they didn't expect two U.S. Secret Service agents would be among the
show's first visitors." This
article by Natasha Korecki continues here.
Image: Fake stamps in the exhibit show President Bush with a gun to his
head.
February 24,
2005
"Michigan artist sentenced to jail over mural nudity"
"In a particularly philistine and backward act, artist Edward Stross
was sentenced to prison last week for his mural depicting a bare-breasted
figure on a building in Roseville, Michigan, in suburban Detroit. The
artist was ordered by District Judge Marco Santia to serve 30 days in
jail, do two years of probation and pay a fine of $500 for his variation
of Michelangelo’s “Creation of Man,” illustrating a
half-naked Eve. Stross was also mandated to alter the fresco, which he
painted on the outside of his art gallery in 1997." This
article by Joanne Laurier continues here.
Photo credit: RICHARD
LEE/DF
Artist Edward Stross, 42, beside his mural on the side of his
studio on Gratiot in Roseville on Tuesday. The painting is his rendering
of "Creation of God."
February 2005
Art group Sabotage (Austria) had artwork confiscated by the Dept. of Homeland
Security.
We were recently in
Cincinnati for an exhibition called "Incorporated". Another
group in the exhibition, Sabotage, had their work confiscated, while traveling
to Cincinnati, by the Department of Homeland Security empowered by a vague
and dangerous Patriot Act. Below are links to the web site of State of
Sabotage - their ongoing project of making a home made state. They provide
links to recent articles which are replicated below. The "fantasy"
(their term) passports that were taken were finally returned this week,
but only after there was media attention. This confiscation resulted in
Sabotage's inability to carry out a performance in the gallery spaces
of the CAC on the evening of the opening reception.
State of Sabotage
State
of Sabotage News
Wednesday,
February 16, 2005. Homeland Security seizes art 'passports': There's no
leaving the state of 'Sabotage' now
Friday,
February 18, 2005. Government to release artist's fake passports
Contemporary
Art Center
February 1,
2005
A panel Ward Churchill was on was cancelled after he received death threats
because he made unpopular statements about the workers in the World Trade
Center.
The "University of
Colorado Boulder Professor and longtime American Indian activist Ward
Churchill has come under increasing criticism recently because of his
view of why the September 11th events happened and could occur again.
Prof. Churchill was scheduled to speak at Hamilton College in New York
state this Thursday, and family members of people who died in the 9/11
incidents have been protesting his right to speak. Hamilton's website
this afternoon indicated that the panel, "Limits on Dissent",
has been cancelled due to "safety concerns," even after the
event had been moved to a larger building. Churchill's speeches, essay,
and book entitled "On the Justice of Roosting Chickens" earned
national media attention in the leadup to the cancellation of the event.
On January 31st he resigned his post as Chair of the Department of Ethnic
Studies at the University of Colorado, but not his teaching position.
" From Indybay
University
of Colorado, Boulder: Churchill Bio
Ward
Churchill's ZNet home page
Book
review and additional links
May 25, 2004
From the web site set up to defend Critical Art Ensemble:
FBI ABDUCTS ARTIST, SEIZES ART
Feds Unable to Distinguish Art from Bioterrorism
Grieving Artist Denied Access to Deceased Wife's Body
DEFENSE FUND ESTABLISHED
- HELP URGENTLY NEEDED
Steve Kurtz was already suffering from one tragedy when he called 911
early in the morning to tell them his wife had suffered a cardiac arrest
and died in her sleep. The police arrived and, cranked up on the rhetoric
of the "War on Terror," decided Kurtz's art supplies were actually
bioterrorism weapons.
Thus began an Orwellian stream of events in which FBI agents abducted
Kurtz without charges, sealed off his entire block, and confiscated his
computers, manuscripts, art supplies... and even his wife's body.
Like the case of Brandon Mayfield, the Muslim lawyer from Portland imprisoned
for two weeks on the flimsiest of false evidence, Kurtz's case amply demonstrates
the dangers posed by the USA PATRIOT Act coupled with government-nurtured
terrorism hysteria.
Kurtz's case is ongoing, and, on top of everything else, Kurtz is facing
a mountain of legal fees. Donations to his legal defense can be made at
www.caedefensefund.org
June 4, 2004
San Francisco gallery owner attacked by right-wing thugs
"In a serious assault on freedom of expression and democratic rights, Lori Haigh, the owner of Capobianco Gallery in North Beach, San Francisco, was spat on and knocked unconscious last week for exhibiting an artwork highlighting the torture of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. The assault came after two weeks of escalating threats by extreme right-wing elements." This article by Richard Phillips continues here.
Painting by Guy Colwell
Images from the assault and happenings around the Caobianco Gallery
February 15,
2002
John Ashcroft has the breasts of Lady Justice covered
"Yes, children, you can tell it’s a Republican administration
in the White House. First of all, they’re wasting the taxpayers’
money (yet again!)—and, second of all, it’s all about sex
(isn’t it always?). There’s a tempest in a bra cup heating
up in Washington, DC: Lady Justice has been busted for indecency."
The
article "Keeping Abreast with John Ashcroft", By Nicole Chardenet
continues here.