Tag: war

I write in the night, but I see not only the tyranny. If that were so, I would probably not have the courage to continue. I see people sleeping, stirring, getting up to drink water, whispering their projects or their fears, making love, praying, cooking something while the rest of the family sleeps, in Baghdad and Chicago. (Yes, I see too the forever invincible Kurds, 4,000 of whom were gassed, with U.S. compliance, by Saddam Hussein.) I see pastry cooks working in Teheran, and the shepherds, thought of as bandits, sleeping beside their sheep in Sardinia; I see a man in the Friedrichshain quarter of Berlin sitting in his pajamas with a bottle of beer reading Heidegger and he has the hands of a proletarian. I see a small boat of illegal immigrants off the Spanish coast near Alicante; I see a mother in Ghana, her name is Aya, which means Born on Friday, swaying her baby to sleep; I see the ruins of Kabul and a man going home; and I know that, despite the pain, the ingenuity of the survivors is undiminished, an ingenuity which scavenges and collects energy, and, in the ceaseless cunning of this ingenuity, there is a spiritual value, something like the Holy Ghost. 

I am convinced of this in the night, although I don’t know why. The next step is to reject all the tyranny’s discourse. Its terms are crap. In the interminably repetitive speeches, announcements, press conferences, and threats, the recurrent terms are Democracy, Justice, Human Rights, Terrorism. Each word in the context signifies the opposite of what it was once meant to. Each has been trafficked; each has become a gang’s code word, stolen from humanity. 

Democracy is a proposal (rarely realized) about decision-making; it has little to do with election campaigns. Its promise is that political decisions be made after, and in the light of, consultation with the governed. This is dependent upon the governed being adequately informed about the issues in question, and upon the decision-makers having the capacity and will to listen and take account of what they have heard. 

Democracy should not be confused with the “freedoms” of binary choices, the publication of opinion polls, or the crowding of people into statistics. These are its pretense. 

Today the fundamental decisions, which effect the unnecessary pain increasingly suffered across the planet, are being made unilaterally without any open consultation or participation. For instance, how many U.S. citizens, if consulted, would have said Yes to George W. Bush’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol over the carbon-dioxide greenhouse effect, which is already provoking disastrous floods in many places and threatens, within the next twenty-five years, far worse disasters?

 It is a little more than a century ago that Dvorák composed his Symphony from the New World. He wrote it while directing the National Conservatory of Music in New York, and the writing of it inspired him to compose, eighteen months later, still in New York, his sublime Cello Concerto. In the symphony, the horizons and rolling hills of his native Bohemia become the promises of the New World. Not grandiloquent but loud and continuing, for they correspond to the longings of thse without power, of those who are wrongly called simple, of those the U.S. Constitution addressed in 1787. I know of no other work of art that expresses so directly and yet so toughly (Dvorák was the son of a peasant, and his father once dreamed of his becoming a butcher) the beliefs that inspired generation after generation of migrants who became U.S. citizens. For Dvorák the force of those beliefs was inseparable from a kind of tenderness, a respect for life such as can be found intimately among the governed (as distinct from the governors) everywhere. And it was in this spirit that the symphony was publicly received when it was first performed at Carnegie Hall on December 16, 1893. Dvorák was asked what he thought about the future of American music, and he recommended that U.S. composers listen to the music of the Indians and blacks. The Symphony from the New World expressed a hopefulness without frontiers which, paradoxically, is welcoming because centered on an idea of home. A utopian paradox.

 Today the power of the same country that inspired such hopes has fallen into the hands of a coterie of fanatical (wanting to limit everything except the power of capital), ignorant (recognizing only the reality of their own firepower, hypocritical (two measures for all ethical judgments, one for us and another for them), and ruthless B-52 plotters. How did this happen? The question is rhetorical, for there is no single answer, and it is idle, for no answer will dent their power yet. But to ask it in this way in the night reveals the enormity of what has happened.

—from WHERE ARE WE? by John Berger, from the introduction to Between the Eyes, Essays on Photography and Politics, by David Levi Strauss, excerpted in the March 2003 Harper’s

full text here

From Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam” (April 30, 1967, Riverside Church, New York)

He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. “Ye shall know the truth,” says Jesus, “and the truth shall set you free.” Now, I’ve chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam because I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing, as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we’re always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we must move on. Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony. But we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.

Jenny Holzer, Black Garden, 1994 

“’I think that when people come into this garden, which is too dark and
too black and too regular, and then read the texts on the benches – it
will be impossible not to understand what it is about. That is what I
hope, in any case.’• Unequivocality of meaning is one of the thematic
concerns of the work of the American artist Jenny Holzer. Since the
early eighties she has been known for using electronic strip advertising
to place very personal, socio-politically committed and harshly lit
messages for debate in public city places. With this project realized in
the early nineties in Nordhorn, a district town in Lower Saxony, on the
German-Dutch border, she chose a garden as her medium for the first
time. Holzer felt that electronics were too insensitive for the project’s
location. For this reason she took the risk, with expert advice from the
American landscape artist Dee Johnson and the local municipal gardener,
of designing a municipal park by the war memorial “Am Langemarckplatz,”
built there in 1929.
As the “Nordhorn Monument,” this memorial was originally erected
for the “gloriously fallen heroes” in the wars of 1870/71 and 1914-18. At
the centre of the slightly raised, simply designed round arrangement
is a circular sandy limestone slab with the names of soldiers who were
killed. On the centre of this was a cylindrical plinth with the sculpture
of a naked, kneeling youth. “It is the fallen who support life,” the
inscription on the plinth still reads today. But the sculpture by
Hermann Scheuernstuhl, stylistically speaking a
work of Neue Sachlichkeit, is missing. The National
Socialists had it removed in 1933 because of its
nakedness and allegedly negroid features. They
made the square, which was renamed Langemarckplatz
in 1938, their preferred heroic memorial in the
town. The new name refers to the battle near
Langemarck in Flanders, where the German army
was reported to have suffered heavy losses in the
First World War. According to a report by the Supreme
Command of the German Army in November
1914, young war volunteers, prepared to fight
and lay down their lives, stormed and took the
enemy positions with the German national anthem
on their lips. This story, deliberately made into myth and used for propaganda
purposes under the Third Reich, in truth contradicted historical
facts and was later revealed by historians to have been deliberate
false reporting for the purpose of glorifying the war.
The town restored the memorial in 1959. The missing sculpture was
replaced by a supposedly neutral bowl of fire. 23 bronze plaques in
memory of the Nordhorn Second World War dead were added by the
long brick retaining wall above the lower section of the park; there
was also a plaque in memory of victims of political and racial persecution. But discussions about the place’s controversial history and the
name of the square did not start in Nordhorn until 1986, and led to
Jenny Holzer’s commission to redesign the memorial in 1989.
Directly adjacent to the old, raised round memorial
she created a second circular garden in the lower
part of the park, placed in the middle of the clearing
between old park trees. This new garden is considerably
larger than the memorial grounds and forms
a kind of echo of the existing arrangement. The layout
of the addition resembles a medieval monastery
garden, but it is also deliberately reminiscent of
a target. Concentric circular beds are separated
from each other by circular paths, and divided into
twelve parts by two paths running on a cross pattern
towards the central round bed. The bed edgings
in red Bentheim sandstone and the path surface
in red brick chippings underline the provocative
character of the garden, but they also correspond with the dark
red brick walls and steps in the old memorial. Five simple sandstone
benches, two in the old and three in the new area, are also shared
design features, reminiscent at first sight of the 1929 originals.
But appearances are deceptive. New inscriptions in German and
English provide drastic descriptions of the horrors of war and make it
essentially impossible to use the benches: “It is the war zoo. It is a
landmark. Pilots name it. Burned all over so only his teeth are good. He
sits fused to the tank. Metal holds the blast heat and sun. The ocean washes the ead. They are face up face down in foam. Bodies roll from swells to the open in the marsh.” 

In stark contrast with the shocking effect of these texts, the small Arkansas Black decorative apple tree with its black fruit in the middle of the new garden seems an almost grotesque cliche, cynical–or is it ironic? The Black Garden makes it clear how difficult it is to create an anti-monument that would not make anyone enthusiastic about war….This garden in the shade of the old park trees gets its name and its strangely melancholy atmosphere from the fact that the whole of the slightly sunken site is filled with plants with dark to black foliage and dark blossoms. Black Mondo grass, dark-leafed geranium and common bugle with dark purple leaves cover most of the beds. Copper berberis, copper beeches, and copper plums with their dark pink blossoms frame the site and create accents at certain points. One of the impressive climaxes in the flowering calendar is the blooming of hundreds of black tulips on the outer edge of the target, The artist planted white tulips only in a small bed in front of the memorial plaque for the victims of National Socialism. Theplanting is adapted and extended in consultation with Jenny Holzer yea  by year.”

—From In Gardens: Profiles of Contemporary European Landscape Architecture by Udo Weilacher

Harutyun Simonyan   Uterus, 2002

The installation in the waiting room of Erlaufer Bahnhof is a kind of anti-monument that symbolizes the importance of the monument in relation to the collective and the individual symbolically with the terms “outside” and “inside”. In the video “Uterus”, the Armenian artist returned to a fetal state in an imaginary womb. At the same time, he transmitted the outside of the station to the interior of the waiting room via video camera.

Alice Creischer, Feindsliebchen, 2002

Alice Creischer related her video work “Feindsliebchen” to the encounter of the American and Soviet generals in May 1945 in Erlauf. In the video she describes this encounter and the consequences on the basis of symbolically inserted objects. The video was shown in the anteroom of the Erlauf inn “Mostlandl”. At the railroad crossing, the artist also installed props from the video: a chair (in the movie it says: “the seat of the lurking”) or trouser legs (“the subjects that were under surveillance”). On an accompanying leaflet the artist had printed a sailor song. It was sung in the video as a representative of the moment when the two generals met each other.

Source: erlauferinnert.at

Jenny Holzer

Memorial at the main square in Erlauf, 1995

The memorial of the American artist Jenny Holzer consists of three parts: In an octagonal pillar made of granite, a headlamp was inserted, the beam of light in the dark far into the sky. In the floor panels that lead to the stele, are engraved associative aphorisms of the artist on the subject of war and its everyday life, which sound like phrases. The planting was conceived and realized in cooperation with the landscape architect Maria Auböck.
Literature: Friedensdenkmal Erlauf. Jenny Holzer / Oleg Komov, Catalog of the Lower Austrian Provincial Museum, de / en / ru, Österreichische Kunst- und Kulturverlag, Wien 1995