22 The Nation. February 14, 2011 a January 17, 2010, report in Haaretz, Palestinian Authority abuses, regardless of their state origins. So while the council President Mahmoud Abbas was informed that “if he did not ask boldly created the Goldstone mission to investigate crimes in for a deferral of the vote [at the Human Rights Council] on the Gaza, it stayed scandalously silent about the massacres and mass critical report on last year’s military operation, Israel would turn incarcerations of Tamils in Sri Lanka, which were alleged to the West Bank into a ‘second Gaza.’” have taken place within months of the Gaza attack. But while Western governments continue to protect Israel This kind of selectivity is a gift to defiantly lawless govern- from accountability, insisting that economic sanctions are off ments like Israel’s, since it allows states to hide behind their crit- the table, even welcoming Israel into the Organization for ics’ hypocrisy. (“They should call us the day the Human Rights Economic Co-operation and Development, civil society around Council decides on a human rights inquiry on some other place the world is filling the gap. The findings of the Goldstone around the globe,” Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Report have become a powerful tool in the hands of the grow- Palmor said, explaining away his government’s refusal to coop- ing movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, which erate with Goldstone.) But a new standard has been set. The is attempting to pressure Israel to comply with international Goldstone Report, with its uncompromising moral consistency, law by using the same nonviolent pressure tactics that helped has revived the old-fashioned principles of universal human put an end to apartheid in South Africa. A new book, The rights and international law—enshrined in a system that, flawed Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the as it is, remains our best protection against barbarism. When Gaza Conflict, will allow many more people to read the text of we rally around Goldstone, insisting that this report be read the report, along with contextualizing analysis. And they will be and acted upon, it is this system that we are defending. When free to make their own judgments about whether Israel has been Israel and its supporters respond to Goldstone by waging war unfairly “singled out”—or whether, on the contrary, it is finally on international law, characterizing any possible legal challenge being held to account. to Israeli politicians and military officials as “lawfare,” they are One of the most remarkable responses to the report came doing nothing less than recklessly endangering the human rights in January 2010, when a coalition of eleven leading Palestinian architecture that was forged in the fires of the Holocaust. human rights groups called on Hamas and the Palestinian One of the people I met in Gaza was Ibrahim Moammar, chair Authority to investigate Goldstone’s allegations that they were of the National Society for Democracy and Law. He could barely complicit in war crimes—despite the fact that the Israeli gov- contain his disbelief that the crimes he had witnessed had not ernment had refused to launch an independent investigation sparked an international legal response. “Israel needs to face war of the far more numerous allegations leveled against it in the crimes trials,” he said. He is right, of course. In a just world, the report. Theirs was a deeply courageous position, one that points testimonies collected by Richard Goldstone and now published in to what may prove to be the Goldstone Report’s most endur- book form would not merely raise our consciousness; they would ing legacy. Although most of us profess to believe in universal be submitted as evidence. But for now, in the absence of official human rights and oppose all crimes of war, for too long those justice, we will have to settle for what the survivors of Argentina’s principles have been applied in ways that are far from univer- most recent dictatorship have called “popular justice”—the kind sal. Too often we make apologies for the crimes of “our” side; of justice that rises up from the streets, educating friends, neigh- too often our empathy is selectively deployed. To cite just one bors and family, until the momentum of its truth-telling eventu- relevant example, the Human Rights Council has frequently ally forces the courts to open their doors. failed to live up to its duty to investigate all major human rights It starts with reading the report. ■ The Return of the Culture Wars As before, hypocrites are lining their coffers by pandering to ignorance and xenophobia. by DOUG HARVEY bicoastal set of unrelated incidents has stirred up a heated ing artists and venues engaged in “anti-Christian bigotry,” as discussion in the art world and beyond that harks back Wildmon tagged Andres Serrano’s notorious photograph Piss to the culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s, when right- Christ. They successfully campaigned to cancel a 1989 exhibit wing politicians and pundits, like Jesse Helms and Al of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs at the Corcoran Gallery A D’Amato and Pat Buchanan, along with religious leaders of Art in Washington, DC, and passed legislation forbidding the like Donald Wildmon and Pat Robertson, launched a concerted NEA from funding artists and institutions that “promote, dis- attack on the National Endowment for the Arts for support- seminate or produce obscene or indecent materials.” Strangely, the central figure in the more high-profile of the Doug Harvey, a Los Angeles–based writer and artist, is editor of Patacritical current controversies is a repeat player—David Wojnarowicz, Interrogation Techniques Anthology Volume 3, forthcoming from who won a lawsuit against Wildmon over the misrepresentation A/C Institute. of his artwork in 1990. Wojnarowicz, an outspoken gay activist February 14, 2011 The Nation. 23 as well as a gifted visual artist and writer, died of AIDS-related present the censored work, and several versions were made avail- illness in 1992. This past November 30, a condensed version of able on the Internet. MoMA acquired a copy for its permanent his film A Fire in My Belly—which contains an eleven-second collection. It was even aired on Fox News. sequence showing a crucifix crawling with ants—was removed The Association of Art Museum Directors, the College from the exhibit “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Art Association, the ACLU and others issued strongly worded Portraiture” at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery reprimands. One of the NPG’s commissioners resigned in (NPG) in response to complaints from William Donohue of the protest. Canadian artist A.A. Bronson demanded that his work Catholic League and Representative John Boehner, neither of in the exhibit be removed in solidarity. The NPG refused. whom had seen either the video or the exhibition. The NPG refused to put the video back. The NPG refused to “Hide/Seek” is a landmark exhibit in several ways: it’s the apologize or admit any error in judgment. It even denied that it largest and most expensive show in the NPG’s history and was capitulating to political pressures, citing fabricated “public the first major survey exploring gay identity to be mounted in complaints” and trying to spin the act of self-censorship— a federally administered institution. Curators Jonathan Katz eventually revealed to have been the initiative of Smithsonian and David Ward took pains to create a scholarly and mini- Secretary Wayne Clough—as an aesthetic curatorial decision. mally provocative reassessment of the history of American Clough subsequently admitted that threats to the Smithsonian’s modern art, with the hope of integrating the insights and funding played a major part in his decision. revelations of previously suppressed gay and lesbian cultural If you think this sounds like a tiresome, second-rate rehash of history—a process that has been under way since the 1960s what was a farfetched and poorly scripted piece of political the- but suffered a distinctive chill in mainstream institutional ater the first time around, you’re not alone. A good portion of the support in the wake of the late ’80s commotion. liberal outrage seemed to be over the poor quality of the script Apparently they didn’t take enough pains for the Christian they’d been handed. The bastards didn’t even bother to find a right and newly empowered Republican House members, new scapegoat but dug up poor David Wojnarowicz, who had including incoming House Speaker Boehner and majority been a physically and sexually abused street urchin before teach- leader Eric Cantor, both of whom publicly threatened the ing himself to make art, and had created the film in question as Smithsonian’s future Congressional funding and autonomy if an elegy for his mentor and lover Peter Hujar, who had just suc- the exhibit wasn’t axed, citing Wojnarowicz’s video as “an outra- cumbed to the same deadly virus that was coursing through the geous use of taxpayer money and an obvious attempt to offend artist’s body. The guy’s not allowed to put some ants on a plastic Christians during the Christmas season”—despite the fact that crucifix? Jesus! Even the conservative pundits didn’t seem to neither had seen the artwork in question, relying instead on know what to make of it, quickly switching to the real issue, your intelligence provided by a right-wing blogger. American tax dollars promoting homosexual perversity. Ellen Quite apart from the central enigma of how an image of ants DeGeneres grabbing her boobs! As a briefly glimpsed Mexican crawling on a crucifix translates so clearly and unequivocally tabloid headline screams in Wojnarowicz’s film, ¡¡Sacrilegio!! into anti-Christian “hate speech” (as Donohue characterized Crypto-fascist hypocrites lining their coffers by pandering to it—I must have missed that class at art school), it’s difficult the lowest common denominators of ignorance and xenophobia to fathom what could be deemed particularly offensive in isn’t news. The fact that the Smithsonian folded so quickly and Wojnarowicz’s poetic Super-8 jumble of surrealist tableaus awkwardly is. Wojnarowicz’s successful Supreme Court case and documentary footage from Mexico. Although containing against Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association was disturbing material—cockfights and bullfights, sideshow mum- the turning point in the 1980s witch hunts, and it made him mies, crippled beggars and, with darkly ironic prescience, the the martyred poster boy for gay rights and freedom of speech. artist sewing his own mouth shut—A Fire in My Belly is pretty Did Smithsonian officials actually imagine no one would make tame by the standards of contemporary experimental cinema, a fuss? They had gone out on a limb to present a historical and pales next to the torture-porn of the Saw franchise or The benchmark in tolerance, then sawed the branch off behind them Passion of the Christ. The NPG admitted that it had, in fact, because some crackpot blowhards said to. Unfathomable. received no complaints from the viewing public. Offense was nevertheless taken, and within hours the NPG, ut even more baffling is the West Coast censorship brou- with no public debate and after consulting only one of the cura- haha involving the recently recruited director of the Los tors, removed Wojnarowicz’s film from its unobtrusive video Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, former New kiosk near the back of the exhibit—whereupon all hell broke York commercial gallerist Jeffrey Deitch. As an advance loose. Outrage went viral online, from bloggers like Tyler Green B promotion for the Deitch-helmed “Art in the Streets” of Modern Art Notes (blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes), who exhibit, scheduled for April, the former Manhattan art scene devoted blow-by-blow coverage to the unraveling gaffe, to fixture commissioned Italian street artist Blu to create a mural scathing op-eds in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and on the enormous north wall of MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary Washington Post. Protests were organized, including guerrilla facility. For some as-yet-unknown reason, there was no planning screenings outside—and projected onto—the NPG. The Andy stage for this project apart from engineering logistics—no pre- Warhol Foundation led the pack in demanding the video’s paratory sketches, no curatorial review and no oversight during reinstatement at the risk of losing future funding. Museums, the execution of the mural, a skewed overhead image of a grid of commercial galleries and nonprofit project spaces lined up to wooden coffins draped with flag-sized dollar bills. 24 The Nation. February 14, 2011

Because of a shift in Blu’s schedule, Deitch was at Art Basel downtown LA. Admittedly, Deitch’s antiwar construal was the Miami when the mural was begun. He says he decided imme- most common—but the idea that this was a patently offensive diately on seeing it half-completed that it should be obliterated concept was a stretch for many in the community. because of its inherent “insensitivity” to the surrounding com- Man One is a Los Angeles graffiti artist, founder in 2002 munity, which includes a war memorial to Japanese-American of Crewest Gallery and at the center of a whitewash scandal World War II veterans and a Veterans Affairs hospital (as well as of his own. In late 2007 the artist, sometimes known as Alex a US bankruptcy court and the Metropolitan Detention Center, Poli, obtained permits to paint the concrete embankment of featured on the cover of Mike Davis’s book City of Quartz). the Arroyo Seco where it empties into the notoriously bleak LA Again, no actual complaints had been received. Again, the shit River. He organized an event called “Meeting of Styles,” which hit the fan. brought together more than 100 street artists from around the Blu, back in Italy, initially held his tongue—then cried cen- world to collaborate on a mural. It was considered a huge success until LA County Supervisor Gloria Molina—allegedly offended by a bare-breasted cartoon wood nymph—declared an emer- gency and unilaterally ordered it painted over. Man One’s response to the Deitch/Blu affair is puzzlement. “The way I found out it was even going up was from an artist friend, Leo Limon, who’s also a vet,” he recalls. “Leo was taking photos of the mural in process and started sending them to me, because he was staying at the Department of Veterans Affairs across the street. And he told me he was so moved by the mural that he wanted to put flowers and candles in front of it. So once I heard that Deitch decided to whitewash it—and the reasoning behind that—it struck me as pretty odd.” As it did documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald (Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price; Rethink Afghanistan), who wrote on The Huffington Post that Deitch’s decision “conveyed a deep ignorance about the veterans community in the United States, which includes a great many people who strongly oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” CASEY CAPLOWE Contacted by e-mail, Greenwald elaborated: “To be opposed to sorship. The controversy metastasized over the web, with voices war is not to denigrate the troops or our country, it is the highest of the global street-art community trying to sort out what had form of patriotism. The notion that anti war art is offensive is happened and how one of their most active supporters in the art an awful commentary on the right wing smear machine and its world could have taken such action. Conspiracy theories prolif- impact on good and decent folks. The fact that an institution like erated: it had been ordered by LA’s billionaire art kingpin (and MOCA should be frightened into supporting the propaganda MOCA trustee) Eli Broad; or it was an elaborate publicity stunt notion that anti war is somehow not respectful is a reminder, if designed to generate buzz in the wake of the Smithsonian fiasco. we need one, how much work progressives have to do.” Deitch’s fumbling prompted a reprimand by the president of As with the Wojnarowicz incident, a notable side effect has MOCA’s board of trustees, Jeffrey Soros, and, in an anonymous been the radical mobilization of members of the affected art street-art response, he was was depicted as a smirking ayatollah community to voice their dissent and protest the perceived holding a house-paint roller. A nighttime protest was organized, acts of censorship. As with Wojnarowicz and the New York with laser-toting activists projecting images of the vanished gay community, Deitch’s decision was unveiled to a politically mural, plus messages like “Dump Deitch,” “Censorship Is primed audience. Angeleno street artists are largely of Latin Un-American” and—my favorite—“Post No Bills.” American descent, and their movement traces its extremely As with the Wojnarowicz flap, the decision to censor was political roots to the Chicano civil rights actions of the 1960s based on questionable semiotics. Although neither Deitch and beyond. At the time when Blu’s mural was painted and nor MOCA has offered any official interpretation, it’s safe to painted over, the nearby Autry Museum had a highly publicized assume—given their citation of the Japanese-American “Go for exhibit largely devoted to David Alfaro Siqueiros’s 1932 Olvera Broke” Memorial and the VA facility—that Blu’s coffins were Street mural. Depicting a Mexican peasant crucified under read as a specific indictment of US military policies, presumably an American eagle, it had been whitewashed within a year— the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. My immediate reading was allegedly by order of the downtown Anglo business community. a simple equation between capitalism and death; the pictorial Could it not have occurred to Deitch how a similar whitewash- similarity to the flag-draped coffins of fallen troops occurred to ing would be received today? me, but the coffins were clunky and wooden, like the generic Despite institutional attempts to portray street art as merely vampire model, so I took the antiwar angle as a connotative a culturally disenfranchised subgenre of contemporary artmak- subtext rather than the main thrust. I later encountered several ing, unauthorized graffiti art is, at its root, a direct challenge other ways of reading Blu’s symbolism, from the “war on drugs” to the central tenet of capitalism (or any authoritarian govern- to the prison-industrial complex to the high cost of parking in ment system, for that matter): private property. Even the most 26 The Nation. February 14, 2011 fume-addled taggers and careerist sneaker-designer wannabes The credibility Deitch has built in the street-art com- know that. From the first forays of graffiti artists into galleries munity has stood him in good stead during this crisis. Apart and museums in the 1970s, street-art community members and from Blu, none of the more than fifty artists tapped for “Art observers have suggested that institutional endorsement dis- in the Streets” have withdrawn from the show. And although ables the essential mechanism of graffiti art’s significance, while the community has been polarized by the overpainting of Blu’s undermining its identity as a constantly mutating, communally mural, very few voices are demanding the cancellation of the created folk idiom with a divisive art star agenda. landmark exhibit. Clearly, Jeffrey Deitch believes otherwise. Over the course Both these incidents seem like blunders made in haste, of his art world career—first as a consultant to collectors, then, perhaps from a sense of urgency brought on by the threat of starting in 1996, with his own gallery, Deitch Projects—he has instantaneous publicity in the Age of Tweeting. Ironically, this championed many visual artists straddling the border between has been the source of most of the subsequent grief, as well as the gutter and the white cube: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith the medium by which Wojnarowicz’s film and Blu’s mural have Haring, Chris Johanson, Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, been seen and given thoughtful consideration by millions more Swoon, Os Gemeos, Shepard Fairey and more. The “Art in people than would have done so before their “censorship.” It’s the Streets” exhibit—which, barring unforeseen circumstances, not even clear what was being excised from the NPG show— will still open in April—is obviously more a labor of love than the squares backed off after their token victory, but there’s still Deitch’s poorly received debut, recasting the just-deceased a gay portrait show up at the Smithsonian. The only discern- Hollywood legend Dennis Hopper as a retrospective-worthy ible content is the incoming Republican Congress flexing its LA art star. “This show is my life’s work,” confirms Deitch . cultural micromanagement muscles, apparently dreaming of “I have a mission. I believe in these artists coming from this a time not so long ago when hysterical witch hunts actually circle. They’ve been excluded from museums for thirty-five resulted in the suppression of heretical ideas instead of their years. They’re not really let into art history as first-class citi- widespread dissemination. And with far more consequential zens. It’s one of my missions: to present a case for this work. censorship battles being waged on the terms of the brave new I’m bringing to Los Angeles one of the most radical shows ever digital world—I’m talking WikiLeaks—these clumsy attempts presented in a museum. With outlaws. Every major street artist at hierarchical symbolic propriety seem like so many exercises that I’ve worked with I’ve had to bail out of jail.” in epistemological nostalgia. ■ Letters (continued from page 2) do all that when you’re working multiple says that a Grossman story showing the whole debate savors of a gaggle of myopic low-paying jobs; are sick because you “corrosive impact of the nuclear bomb- theologians straining to see how many an- don’t have the money to see a doctor and ing of Hiroshima on the crew of the Enola gels they can find dancing on the head of a are stuck eating low-quality, pesticide- Gay” had been “inexplicably left out of pin. A lot of us are waiting for somebody laden GMO foods that make you sicker; the present collection.” But Hellbeck also to make the pronouncement: “Could it be are being foreclosed upon and are look- notes that the US editor of the Grossman possible? These old saints in the forest have ing for a cheap motel to park your fam- volumes, Robert Chandler, retailed a false not yet heard anything of this, that copy- ily in; or are worried about your son or description of the Ukraine famine under right is dead!” daughter who is fighting for questionable Stalin that aligned with the propaganda of Ruby Quincunx reasons in far-off lands because he/she Ukrainian right-wingers. Bear those two couldn’t get loans to go to college and editorial choices in mind and the omission Shoot Me Now can’t get scholarships because public ed- of the story is no longer “inexplicable.” ucation is so lacking; feel apathetic about Grossman was anti-totalitarian but not Carlsbad, N.M. politics because the people you vote for anti-socialist. He was not a cold warrior. It’s so much fun reading The Nation. It’s turn out to be different from what you But clearly Chandler is. He preferred, like a way to get all fired up to do something hoped. Tell those neocons who want to an American version of a Soviet cultural about the dire situation we find ourselves start yet another bankrupting war, this apparatchik, to censor Grossman rather in. So many fronts require attention— time in Iran, to do it themselves [Rob- than to expose readers to Grossman’s cri- the wars; joblessness; homelessness; lack ert Dreyfuss, “The Hawks Call for War tique of the potential for totalitarianism of healthcare and unions; dwindling re- Against Iran,” Dec. 20]—we the people inherent in US imperialism. sources; out-of-control corporations, don’t have the money or the time. John Woodford banks and Wall Street; misguided educa- Margaret Barry tion policies; immigration reform; pov- For Crying Out Loud erty; tax cuts for the superwealthy but American Apparatchik budget cuts to social programs. If only we Winter Park, Fla. could muster the will to get out there and Ann Arbor, Mich. How about this for a slogan? “Speaker take to the streets, contact our Congress In his superb review of the recently repub- Boehner—a crying shame” [“Letters,” members, make phone calls, write letters, lished writings of Vasily Grossman [“The Jan. 31]. donate to all the causes. But how do you Maximalist,” Dec. 20], Jochen Hellbeck Robert J. Havel Copyright of Nation is the property of Nation Company, L. P. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.