The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum Judi Werthein: Do You Have Time?

Werthein

Judi Werthein: Do You Have Time?

June 26 to December 31, 2011 The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Judi Werthein: Do You Have Time?

Do You Have Time? is a film by Argentinean artist Judi Werthein, who lives and works in Brooklyn. The project, which was commissioned by The Aldrich, originated when Werthein met David Kleinman at a dinner after a panel discussion held at the New Museum. Judi and Adam Kleinman (David’s son and Werthein’s friend and colleague) had been invited by Julieta Aranda to discuss her exhibition, and the topic of the conversation revolved around memory.

David, an unemployed New Yorker, is obsessed with the untold truths behind official American history. The film, created in one single shot lasting two hours, presents David’s personal take on North America and its history. The length and format of the piece makes it almost impossible for Museum visitors to view it in its totality. Consequently, as their experience of the work will be based on a fragment of it, Werthein avoids presenting an absolute or authoritarian history. Also, David’s version is not one legitimized by any academic degrees, yet it resonates with the views of many well-informed laymen and women.

David is very convincing in his arguments and painstakingly lists important facts that have been excluded and omitted from common knowledge, leading us to doubt the truthfulness of our established American history. Ultimately, this film asks the paramount question: “Is there an official and complete history of a country?”

As Do You Have Time? originated at a panel discussing memory, it is an exercise in recounting history by avoiding a linear use of time; that is, explaining history as a cause/effect structure where one event is the immediate consequence of a previous one. However, no event has one single consequence, hence linear history is incomplete. Do You Have Time? recounts history from David’s memory and thus is a circular and non-linear notion. When we recall things from memory it is very hard to recount them within the frame of a clear chronology—we keep going back and forth, just like David. In his retelling of history, which he calls “going on like a mad man,” characters and stories appear not chronologically, but in the particular way he remembers them. The cyclical model of time allows for revisiting events and incorporating issues that had previously been denied.

This brings David’s history closer to us, to the way we remember, and makes it perhaps more accurate than an official one. Could this history then be seen as valid? Could each of our versions of history also be just as valid? Most of us affected by historical issues are not specialists either. Yet David’s history makes us understand that history is a tricky matter and that it is possible to incorporate an infinite myriad of possibilities, revisions, and contributions— and yes, it is also possible to take for granted convenient exclusions.

One of David’s beliefs is that these are now troubling times to be an American, because Americans do not know their history and thus are condemned to repeat it. Hence, he presents his own view, which serves as a reminder and an update.

1 By quoting George Santayana, David explains the main dilemma, “America is the battleground between idealism and materialism,” and this is the basic conflict that has pervaded and permeated every transaction, whether social, political or economical, since the founding of America until today. Ideological goals and aspirations founded this country and yet we are now succumbing to another impulse; the gross materialism that was always implicit in the

American experience, albeit inherent in its founding, is now taking precedence.

This dominates our twenty-first-century history, explains David.

This country was not a product of a benign Christian ideology, although we like to think so, he says. The people who founded America were people of extreme views; slavery and the genocide of the Indians (Native Americans) were prevalent. These were the initial social structures. Hence, the founding ideology, based on religious piety, was not translated into parallel action.

In a highly exasperated tone, David clearly lets us know he is concerned that the founding of the colonies and the Indian massacres are not really studied in school. He finds it troubling, for example, that the religious people of America at that time (1637) in the Massachusetts area (the Massachusetts Bay Colony) were promulgating a racist ideology directed at eliminating the native people.

Such was the case with the massacre of the Pequot Indians in Mystic River, who were attacked at night.2 And these are hardly innocent actions from innocent people and need to be discussed—together with the religious intolerance that was rampant during the founding of the country—in order to understand that the same attitudes that were opposed in Europe were exported and transplanted to the colonies.

In contrast to those practices, David identifies other ideologists and “true heroes” like Roger Williams, who came to America to get away from persecution.

Williams founded a colony in Rhode Island based on religious freedom for all peoples, including Native Americans. This colony was true to the positive sense of the American experience. For David, this is what America should have been and can be. And yet, he feels Williams’s feat is relegated to a footnote in history and rarely fully reconsidered.

Another great event which embodied potential for the future of the United States, explains David, relates to a similar problem that arose in New York in the 1640s, when Peter Stuyvesant (Director-General of New Amsterdam, later New York) was dictatorial and initiated religious persecution of others, including the Quakers. In reaction to this, one of the great events in America took place on Long Island in 1657, when the Flushing Remonstrance was written by those who stood up to Stuyvesant.3 Signers of the decree who were members of the Dutch Reformed Church suffered the risk of arrest as Stuyvesant tried to send them back to the Netherlands for trial; so the consequences of signing this document were substantial and severe.

“The Flushing Remonstrance is one of these brilliant, courageous

acts that every American should know about, which is basically a cry for religious tolerance in the colonies,” explains David.

He understands this document as a model for the First Amendment, created some one-hundred years before the Declaration of Independence 4 and the Constitution. The problem, it seems, continues today, when in order to prove someone is qualified for a government position the person is described as “a person of faith.” This goes against the Constitution of the United States and to demonstrate his point David reads Article VI, third paragraph, where it

states that all officers shall be bound by the oath or affirmation to support the Constitution, “but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

In that context, David believes the great legacies of America are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And the latter is a document that reveals the Framers (David challenges the term “Founding Fathers” because it reeks of paternalism, and renames them the “Original Patriots” or the “Framers” of the Constitution) were weary of the religious persecution of the colonial period.

They inserted a warning regarding the test of religious faith and took religion out of the requirements to hold office in this country. They were aware of the dangers of extremism that religion can bring and left religion as a very private matter.

America was founded by a rationalist approach to social organization, insists David. He brings to our attention the opening phrase, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and 5 the pursuit of Happiness,” in the founding documents. He focuses on the “selfevident” wording that challenges the notion that we are exclusively endowed by a creator. For him “self-evidence” means that the formula can be deduced through logic and the activity of the rational mind, and thus through means other than a religious perception or revelation. He concludes that America was founded on both a rationalistic and a scientific approach, and that in this sense it was an experiment.

The opening statement of the Constitution, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union ...” means that this is a particular and rational experiment in social organization; that it is not perfect yet. For David, the Framers were committed to the idea of an experiment in self-government, and this is the primary greatness of America and its contribution to world history: self-government.

America has produced a great culture and achievements such as democracy and the expansion of civil rights (which David considers we now seem to be going back on). America also produced its own native-born philosophy with William James, John Dewey, and Charles Sanders Peirce; great native art forms, such as jazz; and accomplished genuine signature architecture by Louis Sullivan, the Greens, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Yet few people revisit the work of the aforementioned philosophers, jazz is not as popular as it could be, and these architects’ buildings are being torn down. Why do we do that? “Why do we turn our back to our art and culture?” asks an exasperated David. He immediately makes the case that today there is an unfortunate trend against intellectualism, a harmful backlash against science. The paradox lies in that this specific and scientific thinking was a pre-eminent element of the Constitution.

We are now turning away from the application of reason on which the country was founded. Not only that, but by doing so we are also turning away from the Constitution, as David reminds us. In the Constitution, Article I, Section 8, it states that the roles of the government include “To promote the Progress of

Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” For David, this promotion of progress is an original intent that would help create a more perfect union, but we are not taught this at school. We are also not taught about sex, health, money and, of course, our country.

The film ends just as David realizes he forgot something and comes back on screen to explain the critical nexus between Santayana and his thesis of idealism and materialism, and how it reaches a critical point in post-Civil War America.

He explains that post-Civil War is the point where we could have gone in two directions: a free and progressive society or the other road, the one we took, which resulted in the rise of capitalism and its mutation into a corporate society.

Today, in that corporatist society one percent of Americans control more than ninety-five percent of the goods of the country. With this scheme, we are headed back to feudalism with an oligarchy and plutocracy.

The post-Civil War era saw the rise of modern corporatism amid the elimination of small entrepreneurs and the amalgamation of corporate entities with the objective of controlling markets and crushing competition. The corporate giant has one legal responsibility: material profit.

In this context, the Supreme Court made a crucial decision in 1886 regarding the Santa Clara vs. Pacific Railroad case. The Court ruled that the corporation was entitled to be considered an individual and thus protected by all the rights that are given to one. David’s take is that this was the beginning of the rise of the modern corporation, where money is more important than people, legalizing the shift in power from the people to those who control the money.

The hysteria that we know, he says, is because the American Empire, which we thought was so secure, appears to be crumbling. It is hard to believe that, in a country where the founders used scientific principles as a guide, people today have trouble talking about evolution; we are abandoning our higher values.

Science and reason are open for self-criticism; the flexibility of reason, which was the principle behind the legal and political structures, was our country’s strength. “Some people argue that the single greatest thing in America, in recent history, was the public university system in California, which has more Nobel Prize winners than the Ivy leagues,” David explains. The system of public education is under assault. This, he believes, is where our strength lies: the free expression of intellectual curiosity, and intellectual drive. If we lose that strength, we are cutting our own throats. “But,” he concludes: “Rome cut their own throats; the Ancient Greeks cut their own throats; France and England cut their own throats in history; I guess that is the way of empires.”

Judi Werthein is an artist who likes to provoke discussion through work that deals with economic justice and human rights. She garnered international attention with her project Brinco (2006), based on her research into the immigration debate, which resulted in her design (and production) of sneakers that specifically addressed the needs of those crossing the border from Tijuana to San Diego. The sneakers that she gave away in borderline Mexican shelters

were equipped with a compass, map, and painkillers, and embroidered with the Aztec eagle. In her mind, providing this specific population with useful tools embodied a compassionate gesture; however, her artistic endeavor was perceived very differently by the United States authorities. The sneakers were also embroidered with the label “this product was manufactured in China under a minimum wage of $42 a month, working twelve-hour days,” bringing attention to the outsourcing commonly practiced by many American corporations that base their production on economic injustice and the breach of human rights.

Similarly, her work Do You Have Time? and David’s vigorous statements may seem, to some, outrageous; but for others, like her, they may make absolute sense or are at least worth revisiting. Werthein’s work in general documents the deterioration of great ideas and ideals that seem to be becoming derailed and which she believes we should still try to embrace.

Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, curator 1 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/santayana: For George Santayana (1812–1952) “integrity or self-definition is and remains first and fundamental in morals” (Persons and Places, p. 170). Self-knowledge requires a critical appreciation of one’s culture and physical inheritance, and the ability to shape one’s life in streams of conflicting goods within oneself and within one’s community.

2 http://www.colonialwarsct.org/1637.htm. “At the time of the Pequot War, Pequot strength was concentrated along the Pequot (now Thames) and Mystic Rivers in what is now southeastern Connecticut. Mystic, or Missituk, was the site of the major battle of the War. Under the leadership of Captain John Mason from Connecticut and Captain John Underhill from Massachusetts Bay Colony, English Puritan troops, with the help of Mohegan and Narragansett allies, burned the village and killed the estimated 400 to 700 Pequots inside.” This battle was crucial in shifting the power over to the English.

3 http://www.nyym.org/flushing/remons.html. The first paragraph of the Remonstrance of the Inhabitants of the Town of Flushing to Governor Stuyvesant, from December 27, 1657: “You have been pleased to send unto us a certain prohibition or command that we should not receive or entertain any of those people called Quakers because they are supposed to be, by some, seducers of the people. For our part we cannot condemn them in this case, neither can we stretch out our hands against them, for out of Christ God is a consuming fire, and it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” 4 Written by Thomas Jefferson between June 11 and June 28, 1776.

The Constitution was written in 1787.

5 David states the Constitution opens with such a phrase, yet this is the opening for the Declaration of Independence.

Brinco, 2006

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This brochure was made possible, in part, by the generous support of Figge von Rosen Galerie, Cologne and Berlin.

Do You Have Time? (video still), 2010 Courtesy of the artist and Figge von Rosen Galerie, Cologne Commissioned by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

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