Trump’s talent for alarmingly erratic policy positions did not disappoint Tuesday during his first formal Congressional address. At a White House meeting just hours before the speech, the president vacillated about one of his most fervently defended issues: immigration. He alluded to creating a pathway to citizenship for undocumented people, but then reinforced his crackdown agenda during the speech, describing the threat of “lawless chaos.” It appears the same incoherency afflicts local governments. New York City is officially a Sanctuary City, but what that means, and how it will actually play out during Trump’s tenure, remains unclear.
In response to recent ICE raids throughout the United States, a coalition of immigration and criminal justice reform organizations rallied New Yorkers to protest on Saturday, drawing hundreds of people to Washington Square Park. At least 40 undocumented people, including a Bushwick man, were detained in New York City during the week prior to the event, among 600 other similar cases across the country.
A five-cent tax on disposable plastic bags is looming over New Yorkers, and many of us seem to be worried that a touch of mindfulness about unnecessary waste is going to turn us all into linen-pant-wearing, hybrid eastern spirituality weirdos who are really pumped up about goji berries.
Alessandro Penso, [An Afghan mother and child wrapped in an emergency blanket after disembarking on Kagia Beach, Lesbos, Greece], October 18, 2015
These days, the art scene around New York seems to be attempting a response to the zeitgeist post-November 8 with a new spirit of political urgency. Maybe the public has imposed new standards for the purpose of creative work; anything that doesn’t stir dissent, criticism or reflection has a tone of triviality. The stakes are higher now, and curators appear to know it. Many exhibits have a self-critical justification woven into the work, addressing the question, “What should media do?”
Take the Park Avenue Armory’s exhibit Manifesto, a multi-screen installation by filmmaker Julian Rosefeldt interrogating the societal role of the artist in late capitalism. Last week, the International Center for Photography opened its own exploration, Perpetual Revolution: The Image and Social Change. ICP inaugurated the exhibit in tandem with a workshop on its campus called “Visual Resistance,” which put artists in conversation about their contributions to mobilizing effective change. Perpetual Revolution, meanwhile, addresses that question from a different vantage point. In the curator’s words, it intends to “examine the relation between the overwhelming image world that confronts us, and the volatile, provocative and often violent world it mirrors.”
James Balog, [Clip of calving Ilulissat Glacier in Western Greenland in 2008 from Chasing Ice], 2012.
Walking into the gallery space, a wall-sized looping video of glaciers collapsing lures you to stand face to face with the weightiest issues of the day: climate change, the refugee crisis, #BlackLivesMatter, terrorist propaganda, radical right fringe groups, and gender fluidity. Each room is dedicated to a different topic with media ranging from huge video projections to classic film prints to interactive screens of activists’ Instagram accounts. In keeping with ICP’s core focus, all of the work can loosely be interpreted as photography. The mosaic of different approaches, however, creates a uniquely exploratory environment, compelling viewer participation while examining the possibilities of commentary art.
In the first room about climate change, a NASA animation of yearly temperatures around the world morphs from deep blue to alarming fields of red— shockingly emotive for a scientific graphic. On the opposite wall, a collage artist addresses the topic with more explicit arguments. All-caps sharpie lettering announces, “We cannot understand the problem without reconciling many centuries of hegemonic exploitation” and, “Confronting climate change means addressing these many crises in their full complexity and enormous scale.” The piece, Confronting the Climate: A Flowchart of the People’s Climate March by Rachel Schragis (2014-16) mixes Post-It notes, handwritten text bubbles and cutout black and white images of protesters pulled from Google. The multi-layered effect seems to parallel the tensions and complexity of dialogue about the issue. Schragis solicited input from 50 climate justice organizers, all merging in one expansive work.
NASA, Climate Time Machine: Global Temperatures, ongoing video.
Meanwhile, a film plays in the background. In The Arctic in Paris by Mel Chin (2017), an Inuit man dressed in traditional fur regalia walks through the cosmopolitan streets of Paris towing his sled behind him. It was filmed the day after the café shooting in 2015— a juxtaposition of destruction, one immediate, the other gradual. “We have always adapted,” the man asserts prophetically. As a viewer, you are implicitly called to wonder how?
Mel Chin, The Arctic in Paris, 2017.
In each room, your presence in the gallery feels more loaded than typical spectating, as if bearing witness demands engagement beyond the museum walls. In “Flood” the curators interrogate the deluge metaphor used to describe refugee migration, writing, “The event is imbued with fear, a sense of inevitability and loss of control.” A projection from the ceiling of transforming images dart over a 3D map of the mountains in Syria. One wall shows a refugee camp photographed with a thermographic imaging— Richard Mosse’s metaphor in Idomeni Camp, Greece (2016) for the techniques used for border surveillance. He critiques the societal fear cast on migrants, and in so doing, our own relationship to media seems itself surveilled.
People grab headsets and watch YouTube videos. They swipe through social media accounts on the walls, and lean in close to highly detailed collage. The level of participation is perhaps making its own point: these are not issues we can just passively observe. Whether the curators invoke “revolution” to describe how media has changed, or to stimulate mass disruption, the exhibit demonstrates that whether we want to or not, these are topics we will have to confront.
Hundreds gathered in Tompkins Square Park last night in a “Rally Against Hate,” responding to Donald Trump’s executive orders on immigration. The president’s directives last week to bar entry of immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries has particular poignance in the East Village, a neighborhood that has long been defined by its immigrant community. The park has served as a gathering space for protest for over a century, from the 1857 immigrant outcry against unemployment and food shortages, to its 1960s incarnation as a counterculture activist hub, to the Trump outrage last night.
The tell-tale row of white police vans lined the periphery Washington Square Park, hinting at some dissent needing to be contained in the distance. As usual, chanting masses converged closer to the nucleus of the park, as if calling for political triomphe below the gleaming white arch. “No ban, no wall, no prisons, no pipeline!” Drums cracked, dancing erupted, and fists rose tall. Trump has occupied the highest office for under a week, and already, his executive actions are posed to threaten the lives of millions of Americans, just as promised.
Millions of demonstrators are feeling the glorious tide of Saturday’s Women’s March dissipate and recede, their clever signs demoted to campy craft artifacts and their pink headwear tossed into the hamper. It’s Tuesday and we haven’t quite crushed the patriarchy, dismantled white supremacy, or saved the climate. What’s more, America’s new head of state has already pushed alarming executive actions.
Burning Man devotees notoriously host decompression parties. Likewise, plenty of organizers have come up with ways to take the edge off of post-demonstration ennui. Here are a few ways to keep your activist spirit alive, beginning this week, and hopefully continuing for the next four years.
This week, we present a series of longer pieces unraveling the histories of storied buildings.
Japan Premium Beef at 57 Great Jones Street. (Photo: Hanna Wallis)
Below the sparkling glint of a crystal chandelier, slabs of meat rest behind glass as if displayed in a museum. Each label is handwritten in gold ink on a black card, leaving a sense of mortal weight; something lost, commemorated, aggrandized.
The little butcher shop at 57 Great Jones Street lacks any trace of blood or a stained smock. It gives no hint of the secrets lurking in the building’s history, like an art icon’s untimely death or the 1905 murder that catalyzed the decline of the Italian mob in the Bowery. The shop’s unexpected elegance hides the death intrinsic to each of its products. Steaks appear as objects of art, an impression their price tags reinforce.
