JHU POLITIK
SPRING 2014 SPECIAL ISSUE
Special Issue
JHU POLITIK May 2014
THE
POLITICS OF
ART
SPRING 2014 SPECIAL ISSUE
Special Issue
the
MAY 2014
POLITIK PRESS A publication of
JHU POLITIK jhupolitik.org
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Rachel Cohen MANAGING EDITOR Colette Andrei ASSISTANT EDITORS Katie Botto Sarallah Salehi Christine Server CREATIVE DIRECTOR Victoria Scordato COPY EDITOR Peter Lee MARKETING & PUBLICITY Rebecca Grenham Audrey Moss WEBMASTER Sihao Lu FACULTY ADVISOR Steven R. David
HEAD WRITER Julia Allen MARYLAND EDITOR Adam Roberts POLICY DESK EDITOR Michael Bodner STAFF WRITERS Eliza Schultz Dylan Etzel Abigail Sia Adrian Carney Geordan Williams Chris Winer Akshai Bhatnagar Rosellen Grant Preston Ge Corey Payne Mira Haqqani Arpan Ghosh
Cover Photo Courtesy of Cuba Gallery via Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/cubagallery/6290619091/sizes/l/in/
JHU POLITIK
SPRING 2014 SPECIAL ISSUE
INSIDE THIS ISSUE INTRODUCTION
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Rachel Cohen, Editor-in-Chief
INTERVIEW with DOUG HERBERT on Arts in Public Schools ........
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VISUAL ARTS: A Minor Step Forward for Arts at Johns Hopkins ......
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DETROIT IS BANKRUPT AND CREDITORS ARE LOOKING TO THEIR RENOWNED ART MUSEUM .......................................................
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INTERVIEW with HANNAH BRANCATO on Arts and Activism ....
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Colette Andrei, Managing Editor & Shannon Libaw, Staff Writer & Mona Jia, Contributing Writer
Eliza Schultz, Staff Writer & Dylan Etzel, Staff Writer
Rachel Cohen, Editor-in-Chief
Rebecca Grenham, Director of Publicity and Advertising & Juliana Vigorito, Contributing Writer & Christine Kumar, Contributing Writer
POLITICS OF MUSIC SHARING .............................................................
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INTERVIEW with KRISTEN HILEMAN of the BMA ..........................
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Sam Sands, Contributing Writer
Valentin Weber, Contributing Writer
REMEMBERING HISTORY THROUGH ART: German Guilt in a Post-War Era ................................................................. Corey Payne, Staff Writer & Ellie Park, Contributing Writer
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JHU POLITIK
SPRING 2014 SPECIAL ISSUE
INTRODUCTION Dear Loyal Readers, Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, “If you really want to hurt your parents… the least you can do is go into the arts.” And with that, it is my honor to present to you the Spring 2014 Special Issue: The Politics of Art. Our team has spent months preparing and conceptualizing this issue, researching historical events, current events, conducting interviews and conducting investigations. And we do so guided by the humble belief that art is an instrumental yet often elusive element to understanding politics and society at large. In the spirit of JHU Politik, we made concerted efforts to look at arts issues locally, nationally and internationally. In this issue you will find an investigation into the history of arts education at Johns Hopkins, and what the establishment of the new visual arts minor means for our university. You will find an interview with Baltimorean, Hannah Brancato, the co-Founder of a national anti-sexual violence organization that strives to blend artistic work alongside activism. You will also read an interview with the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Kristen Hileman. On a national level, you will read about the battle raging in Detroit regarding their municipal bankruptcy and what role, if any, the Detroit Institute of Arts plays in this stressful situation. Additionally, you will find an interview with Doug Herbert, currently working at the Department of Education; Doug has spent his life dedicated to promoting arts and music within American public schools. You will also learn about the politics behind file-sharing music websites and why it is such a hard problem to legislate around. Lastly, with a more retrospective view, you will learn about the history surrounding art after World War II. This is an exciting and vast topic, and we know that our special issue only begins to scratch the surface. I want to thank everyone for making this such a vibrant and dynamic year for JHU Politik. We are grateful for your continued support and involvement. Leading this organization has been one of the most meaningful things I have had the opportunity to do during my time in college and I cannot wait to see where the new staff takes this publication next year. We hope you enjoy, Rachel Cohen Editor in Chief
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“We do so guided by the humble belief that art is an instrumental yet often elusive element to understanding politics and society at large.”
JHU POLITIK
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SPRING 2014 SPECIAL ISSUE
INTERVIEW WITH ASSISTANT DEPUTY SECRETARY FOR INNOVATION AND IMPROVEMENT
DOUG HERBERT
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By Colette Andrei ‘14, Managing Editor & Shannon Libaw ‘15, Staff Writer & Mona Jia ‘17, Contributing Writer
Doug Herbert is a special assistant to the Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement (OII) at the U.S. Department of Education. There he works on arts education matters and is the editor of OII’s online homepage. In addition, Doug is the co-founder of the Department’s Student Art Exhibit Program, which showcases both visual and performing arts at the headquarters of the Department on a year-round basis. From 1992 to 2004, Doug was Director of Arts Education at the National Endowment for the Arts where he received three Distinguished Service Awards for his service. Doug was also a 2005 recipient of the Arts in Education Service Award and in 2010, he was named Lowell Mason Fellow by The National Association for Music Education for his contributions to music education. Doug holds an M.A.S. in public administration from Johns Hopkins University.
Could you describe your experiences working in arts education? I’ve been fortunate to have worked on arts education policy and practice issues since 1976, when I managed a performing arts center in Prince George’s County, Md., and since 1980, at the national level, first with VSA (formerly called the National Committee, Arts for the Handicapped), followed by 17 years at the National Endowment for the Arts, and the last 10 years at the Department of Education. It was also good fortune that my years at the Arts Endowment coincided with that agency’s laser-like focus on the arts as a basic subject in K-12 education. We practiced what I referred to as the 4 C’s – catalyze, collaborate, communicate, and convene – in our efforts to point up shortcomings in policy and practice, encourage, and support efforts to address them. In those years at the Arts Endowment, our interagency collaborations with the Department of Education made possible such things as the National Voluntary Standards in the Arts, a return of the arts to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, national surveys of the conditions of arts education, and creation of the Arts Education Partnership, now in its nineteenth year.
What do you think is the importance/place of the arts in public education? What benefits do students gain from arts education? For me, there are two answers to the question of the arts importance. The arts, on the one hand, are our most profound means of understanding ourselves and our fellow humans. Notwithstanding poetry and narrative, words often fail us when it comes to expressing the thoughts and feelings that make us human. Isadora Duncan once said, “If I could tell you what
it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.” The arts are about ideas, and young people need to know they have ideas and they need to have opportunities in school to express them. The lack of arts education for many students today in our high-needs schools, and especially those students who drop out before graduating, brings to mind something that Ernest Boyer, the former U.S. Commissioner of Education and chairman of the VSA’s board in the 1980s, said: “A lot of kids drop out of school because no one ever noticed that they dropped in.” Through the arts, students also develop the “soft skills” of empathy, perception, and the dual appreciations of beauty and diversity; and all of these must be nurtured in the child’s formative years so they may be valued and practiced later in life. On the other hand, I also believe that the arts, when integrated with the other core subjects, especially in the elementary grades, can up the game of teachers to engage students. And arts integration helps students to reach high levels of academic achievement.
What performance indicators are used to evaluate the conditions of arts in public schools? The simple answer is that the ones that we have are not adequate. At the local level, it’s up to individual schools and school districts to report on the extent of arts education offerings to parents and the public. And that varies tremendously – from some commendable efforts of late in major school systems that have thoughtfully evaluated and reported on those conditions to essentially no transparency beyond student report cards and the annual school board budget deliberations during which arts advocates are forced to “save the arts” as too often they’re first thing to go when dollars are tight.
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JHU POLITIK
SPRING 2014 SPECIAL ISSUE
Photos Courtesy of The U.S. Department of Education Nationally, the Department of Education periodically conducts a national survey of the conditions of K-12 arts education. This most recently occurred with the 2009-10 school year. The report, Arts Education in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools: 1999-2000 and 2009-10 you can find online. Both principals and teachers – K-12 arts specialists as well as elementary classroom teachers – responded to questions about the amount of time devoted to arts instruction and diversity of course offerings, their qualifications for teaching the arts, numbers of students receiving arts instruction, methods of both instruction and assessment, integration of arts with other subjects, availability of properly equipped spaces, adequacy of equipment and supplies, and use of community arts resources. The Arts Education Partnership offers an excellent “tool kit” for exploring both the survey’s findings and their implications for schools and advocates, and can also be found online.
also a “back-to-basics” movement that gained tremendous momentum in the mid-‘80s following the release of the report A Nation at Risk.
How do these conditions differ across the country?
What should be done to improve the state of arts education?
As Education Secretary Arne Duncan said at the April 2012 release of the survey report, it’s a “bad news” story for many schools that offer minimal or no opportunities for arts learning. “Unfortunately,” he said, “the arts opportunity gap is widest for children in high-poverty schools.” For instance, nearly all – 97 percent – of the nation’s lowest-poverty elementary schools offered music instruction in 2009-10, while that percentage fell to 89 percent in the highest-poverty schools. The opportunity gap was more pronounced at the secondary level: 81 and 80 percent of the highestpoverty schools offered music and the visual arts, respectively, compared to 96 percent of the lowest-poverty secondary schools. Secretary Duncan characterized these disparities as “absolutely an equity and civil rights issue.”
Lots of things, but one, as I just mentioned, is to take seriously the importance of the arts in early childhood, from pre-K through the primary grades, and in the elementary grades generally. For many years now, the premier organization for early learning, the National Association for the Education of Young Children, has included the arts in its developmentally appropriate policies and practices. And the basis for that position is the research that affirms the ways in which the arts uniquely enable children to develop cognitively, physically, socially, and emotionally. It’s based on evidence as well as theory.
What do you think is the most significant barrier to expanding or promoting arts education in public schools? It’s hard to think of one single barrier, particularly regarding the expansion of arts education, but the misconception that we are naturally artistic, or that it’s a matter of nature and not nurture can lead us to think that we only need arts magnet schools or specialized academies, like the Baltimore School of the Arts, to accommodate the “talented students” with opportunities to study the arts as a serious matter. Another major obstacle is the steady diminution of arts education, especially when taught by arts specialists on a regular basis for all students. In the elementary grades that began in the 1970s and continued into the 1980s caused by two trends: shrinking local budgets and freezes on local property tax rates. There was
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In far too many school systems where the arts are not core in elementary schools, students arrive at middle and high schools without a foundation in music and the visual arts (and not even an awareness of dance and creative drama or theatre), leaving them unprepared to do standards-based work in the arts. Moreover, when the arts are not part of the elementary core, parents don’t witness the ways in which arts learning enables their children to tackle cognitive challenges and strengthen both their social and emotional development. Without this understanding of the arts’ role in education, parents are ill-equipped to ask about arts opportunities in middle schools, where the arts, in the best of circumstances, struggle to compete for time and resources.
Like other public institutions, school systems respond to not just demand, but demand that’s based on facts and solid reasoning. In the case of school boards today, it’s been said their mantra is “In God we trust and everyone else better bring evidence.” Well, there is evidence about the positive effects of arts teaching and learning, and the evidence is growing and more widely available through AEP’s ArtsEdSearch. Which leads to my other suggested action. As a field, arts education has generated a significant and growing body of research pointing to undeniable connections between robust arts education offerings (arts-rich schools) and increases in non-arts but important understandings, skills, and habits of mind that prepare students for success in academics, from pre-K through college, as well as in their careers and work lives, and, most important in my view, in the quality of their lives as creative adults who are better prepared to contribute to a healthy democracy.
JHU POLITIK
VISUAL ARTS:
SPRING 2014 SPECIAL ISSUE
A MINOR STEP FORWARD FOR ARTS AT JOHNS HOPKINS
By Eliza Schultz ‘15, Staff Writer & Dylan Etzel ‘17, Staff Writer This month, for the first time in University history, five seniors will graduate with minors in the visual arts. While the visual arts have had a presence on campus for forty years, the program only gained official academic recognition this past summer when the Homewood Schools Academic Council approved a proposal for a new visual arts minor. As of today, thirteen students have enrolled in the minor, and others have expressed their intention to pursue it. Central to the creation of the minor was junior Rachel Riegelhaupt. In a petition circulated in 2012, Riegelhaupt called upon the University to formally recognize students who have “devoted much of their time towards art.” But students in the visual arts program covet a bit more than University recognition. In the petition, which garnered several hundred signatures, Riegelhaupt also lamented the limited available studio space, as well as the small selection of courses. Freshman Julia DeVarti, who plans to declare her minor in the visual arts next year, noted the paucity of classes as a “main flaw in the program.” Since the minor was established, classroom space devoted to the visual arts has remained limited to three rooms. And, while an additional course was offered both this semester and last, the program has not been able to permanently hire new faculty members to teach them on a longterm basis. Their “shoestring budget,” as Director of the Homewood Art Workshops Craig Hankin refers to it, has not yet been raised. To be sure, the minor has only existed for just a few months, which Hankin considers to be very little time “on the clock of an institution like Johns Hopkins.” But still, the University has not announced any future plans to expand the visual arts program with respect to funding and space. And yet, given the history of the visual arts at Johns Hopkins, the mere recognition of students who have completed the necessary coursework is quite noteworthy. Exactly forty years ago, in 1974, Hankin was a junior undergraduate at Johns Hopkins with a major in art history and a passion for the visual arts. However, he had no on-campus outlet to pursue the latter. At nighttime, Hankin took classes at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). He describes the experience of being a visual artist at Johns Hopkins at the time as “very, very lonely.” It was at the same time that Eugene Leake, a renowned landscape painter and former President of MICA, approached officials at Johns Hopkins in an effort to bring an informal studio program to Homewood. President Steven Muller was receptive to his proposal, and, in response, opened a small 600-square foot studio where University affiliates could draw or paint live models once a week. The studio program was an immediate success, attracting undergraduate and graduate students, faculty members and their spouses, department secretaries, and even non-affiliates from the Baltimore community. Before long, demand was so high that it expanded into a semiweekly program, with requests for a third day. Leake then hired Hankin, who had just completed his graduate studies in painting at MICA, to help teach what had been named the Homewood Art Workshops. Over time, the informal studio hour began to function more as an official course in which students enrolled prior to the start of the term and completed at the term’s end. But visual arts classes were not regarded with
the same legitimacy as other academic courses. In 1981, Hankin tried to arrange for students to receive credit for their work in the studio. Although he eventually secured a single credit for the three-hour courses, his task was not easy to accomplish. According to Hankin, the administration met him not only with “indifference, but also hostility. It was not overt, but there was a real lack of support.” The administration failed to see the merit to the program, likely because the visual arts did not clearly align with the greater reputation of the University, a bastion of science and research. Academic legitimacy was not the only hurdle for the Homewood Art Workshops. Despite the popularity of the studio program, courses continued to be held in the 600-square foot, L-shaped studio on the first floor of Merryman Hall, a building that has since been demolished. Given the difficulties of these spatial constraints, eventually, the Homewood Art Workshops moved to the more spacious basement of Merryman. Although the new studio was an upgrade with respect to space, other problems arose. As a former aeronautics tunnel and firing range for the Reserved Officers’ Training Corps, the new studio was airless. After a student nearly fainted from turpentine, a fluid used to clean brushes, a hole was punched through the upper part of the cinderblock wall, the only part of the room that was above grade, to serve as the sole window. “It was seriously awful,” says Hankin of the basement studio. “You cannot teach about light and color in a submarine.” Funding was also a problem. Hankin recalls that the salary was “so disgraceful” that he was “embarrassed to ask people to teach” in the Homewood Art Workshops. The opening of the Mattin Center in early 2001 was a watershed in the history of the visual arts program. That January, the Homewood Art Workshops moved into the complex, where it now is able to offer its students a dark room and two 1,100-square foot studios. For the first time in nearly thirty years, the program did not have to compromise studio space for natural light. Since the program relocated to its new home, the profile of the visual arts on the Johns Hopkins campus has risen. Last spring, the Homewood Art Programs, which encompasses forty student performing arts groups and the Homewood Art Workshops, received a donation from University President Ronald Daniels. The portion allotted to the Homewood Art Workshops has enabled the program to offer an additional two classes over the 2013-2014 academic year, and will continue to fund one class for the next three years in addition to those already offered. Although generous, this donation does not represent a sustained commitment to the program, and there is much work to be done in terms of the University recognizing the validity of the visual arts. For example, because they are not affiliated with an academic major, faculty in the Homewood Art Workshops are not considered professors, and thus do not receive the same salaries and benefits, as their colleagues in Film and Media Studies and the History of Art. And decades after Hankin fought the administration for a single course credit, many threehour classes still receive a mere two credits. But Hankin remains hopeful that the Homewood Art Workshops will eventually receive the full recognition that it deserves. “The culture of the University has changed,” he says. For now, the creation of a visual arts minor demonstrates a promising step in the right direction for the arts community at Johns Hopkins.
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JHU POLITIK
SPRING 2014 SPECIAL ISSUE
Detroit Is Bankrupt and Creditors are Looking to their Renowned Art Museum
By Rachel Cohen ‘14, Editor-in-Chief
S
Part of Diego Riveria’s famous “Detroit Industry Murals” | Photo courtesy of the Detroit Institute of Arts
hould Detroit have to sell off its art collection in order to pay its bills? To what extent is art off limits from municipal politics, especially when worker pensions are at stake? Over the past year these thorny ethical questions have cast an uncomfortable shadow over the Motor City. When the city of Detroit filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy this past summer— with debts estimated at between $18-$20 billion—many wondered how on earth the city would find the funds necessary to recover from this colossal financial crisis. With an estimated 700,000 residents, Detroit is the largest city by population ever to file for Chapter 9. The city also scored the largest municipal bankruptcy filing in United States history. Unlike many other large art museums around the country, the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) is owned by the city and some of its 65,000 pieces were purchased with city funds. The internationally renowned collection includes, among others, enormous murals by Diego Riveria, famous pieces by Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Pieter Bruegel, Edgar Degas, Rembrandt and historic ancient sculptures. Christie’s, a fine arts auction house, appraised the art purchased with city funds to be worth between $454 million and $867 million, but some experts have speculated that the art could be worth more than $2 billion. In March 2013, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder appointed Kevyn Orr to serve as an Emergency Manager for Detroit’s financial operations. After Detroit filed for bankruptcy in July, Orr requested an appraisal of the citypurchased art. Orr’s spokesman Bill Nowling told Reuters, “We obviously don’t want to get rid of art” but “if we are going to ask creditors to get a big haircut, we have to look at how to rationalize all of the city’s assets, including the artwork.”
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Photo Credit United States National Library of Medicine, Portrait of William L. Poole
The threat of auctioning off the city’s art has yielded great controversy. “In the world of the great museums, this is unprecedented as far as I know,” said Ford W. Bell, president of the American Alliance of Museums. “People need to understand that this is so much more than a Matisse in a museum,” DIA Museum Director, Graham W. J. Beal said. “It’s a piece of American history.” But, on the other side of the issue, significant problems loom. Political leaders remain struggling to figure out what will be done to meet the city’s pension obligations—benefits that retirees and other employees have been legally promised. Officials estimate that Detroit’s pension obligations could be underfunded by as much as $3.5 billion, which means the city will have to either take money previously spent elsewhere to pay for it, or somehow disclaim its payments. Many city employees, who have planned their retirement around this expected money, argue that pensions are protected under the Michigan Constitution. Indeed, Article 24 of the Michigan Constitution states that public pensions “shall not be diminished or impaired…and the state must help to make sure pensioners are paid in full.” A poll commissioned in late September by The Detroit Free Press and WXYZ-TV found that while 78% of Detroit respondents opposed selling DIA art to pay creditors, 75% of respondents also opposed cuts in city workers’ pensions to pay off debts. Something’s gotta give. Museum officials hope to reach what they are calling “The Grand Bargain” with the city: in return for helping Detroit pay off some of its pension obligations, they want the city to relinquish ownership of the DIA to a nonprofit organization. This handover would shield the museum from future financial responsibility related to Detroit’s debts.
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SPRING 2014 SPECIAL ISSUE
“In the world of the great museums, this is unprecedented as far as I know.”
But as Tom Campbell, Director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, put it, “Even in the darkest days of New York City’s fiscal crisis of 1975, and the national economic meltdown of 2008, the cultural treasures closely identified with our own city were never on the table -- never considered an asset that might be cashed-in during a crunch to bridge a negative balance sheet.”
Entry Hall | Photo courtesy of the Detroit Institute of Arts
In January, the DIA announced that it would raise $100 million for pensioners, joining private philanthropic foundations, including The Ford Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which had already pledged $370 million towards the effort. Governor Snyder also asked his State Legislature to provide an additional $350 million. The hope is that this combination of state and private money, totaling a fund of $800 million, could both protect the art collection and help the city pay off its pension obligations. Politically, the last thing any politician, especially a Republican facing reelection, wants to be portrayed as is “bailing out” Detroit. “This is not a bailout of banks and other creditors. This is focused on helping reduce and mitigate the impact on retirees. It’s focused on protecting assets,” said Snyder in a press conference. But money is fungible, and thus it is unclear exactly what money will go where, and when. Many organizing workers groups allege that investors, bankers and international businessmen will indeed be repaid handsomely as they continue to lose their promised retirement benefits. This “Grand Bargain” was proposed by mediators in the bankruptcy, led by Chief Judge Gerald Rosen of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. In a press release, the DIA calls the deal, “a win/ win/win strategy”, saying it provides for a quick exit from years of costly litigation, gives money to pensioners, and protects the museum’s valuable art. However, it is uncertain whether this “Grand Bargain” could actually prevent creditors in bankruptcy court from demanding the art to be sold. The fact is that Detroit has relatively few assets beyond its valuable art collection and the city remains in massive debt.
Many argue over the impact that selling the art would even have for the city of Detroit. Some say it would be a shortsighted betrayal, hurting Detroit’s ability ever to revive itself economically. Others argue that it is a move precisely for Detroit’s economic revival. Museum officials warn that selling off its precious art would hurt future donor prospects, sending a clear signal that Detroit is a failed urban experiment which cannot sustain serious investments or investors. At the end of February the city filed a blueprint for what their plan to emerge from bankruptcy might look like, which included the Grand Bargain. The plan largely rested on steep cuts to city workers’ pensions and retiree health benefits as well as decreased payments to bondholders. It called for police, firefighters and those departments’ retirees to take a 10% cut to their current pension payment while all other city employees and retirees to accept pension cuts of 34%. Orr, in an effort to resolve this crisis as fast as possible, said that if unions drop their objections quickly, then police and firefighters would get a 4% pension cut rather than 10%, and city employees would get a 26% cut, not 34%. “The plan is unfair and unacceptable,” Al Garrett, president of the Michigan branch of the American Federation of State and Municipal Employees, responded in a statement. “Retirees cannot survive these drastic cuts.” By mid-April, city officials were already offering considerably greater concessions. Six more weeks of negotiations yielded a new proposal where the city offered to reduce municipal retirees’ pensions by 4.5%, down from 34%. Retired police officers and firefighters would see no cuts to their pensions. The new plan also includes the elimination of cost of living increases to municipal workers; retired police and firefighters would continue to receive them, albeit reduced.. It remains unclear how labor unions and the committee representing retired workers will respond to the new offer. No doubt, the city and the DIA want to resolve this issue as quickly and painlessly as possible. But with many groups of creditors—with varying degrees of power—seeking retribution, Detroit’s litigious future, and its politics of art, are anything but over.
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JHU POLITIK
SPRING 2014 SPECIAL ISSUE
INTERVIEW WITH CO-FOUNDER OF ART-ACTIVIST COLLECTIVE
{ HANNAH BRANCATO { By Rebecca Grenham ‘16, Director of Publicity and Advertising & Juliana Vigorito ‘16, Contributing Writer & Christine Kumar ‘16, Contributing Writer
Hannah Brancato, an organizer who lives in Baltimore City, founded and runs the artist-activist collective FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture along with Rebecca Nagle. Formed in 2010, FORCE is an organization committed to starting difficult conversations around the epidemic of sexual assault in the United States and to educating individuals, communities, and governments on how they can support survivors of abuse and violence. Hannah Brancato holds a BFA in Fiber and an MFA in Community Art from Maryland Institute College of Art. What is the mission of FORCE and how did the organization form? FORCE is an artist-activist effort to upset the culture of rape and promote a counter culture based on consent, and we do this as artists through media stunts and public art actions. Rebecca Nagle and I started FORCE in 2010 as an art exhibition called FORCE: On the Culture of Rape. It was a group exhibit identifying and naming what rape culture was, highlighting artwork that was about rape and about survivors’ experiences. We sought to dispel myths about personal work not being “good art.” From there we started to think a lot about how to expand our audience. The show we put together in Baltimore was at a DIY art space and only the art community really came out to that. While I think the information was transformative for them, nobody else saw it. So at that point we started developing our consent underwear, and from there the whole PINK thing happened.
Tell us about PINK Loves Consent, which was your most publicized action. In 2011 we conceptualized PINK, an effort around consent-themed underwear. We realized that it’s more effective to get people talking about rape culture if you’re framing it in the positive, if you’re saying, “here’s an alternative”. We found some really problematic slogans on Victoria’s Secret PINK underwear, like “Sure Thing,” and “No is a Way to Flirt.” We knew right away we wanted to do something with that. The project evolved over about a year, so we developed the language and the branding, and we knew we were going to do what’s called a “culture jam,” which was pretending we were the brand and inserting our message into it. We used a tactic of mobilizing a social media army of about one hundred people nationwide, students and non-students, but we were definitely focused on students, because we wanted to have a conversation with their primary audience, the folks that buy the underwear. We then encouraged people to make their own underwear. Since then a lot of student groups have gotten in touch with us that have started their own consent programs on their campuses. The place where it went the most
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viral was Tumblr, where it spread really widely, and the users of Tumblr are exactly the age that we were targeting, so that worked very effectively.
FORCE uses a variety of media, from work on the National Mall to online. Why have you bridged that gap? We are multimedia artists, so that’s a great question. Social justice movements can really uniquely use art and culture. So actually we begin with our end goal, our objective. We don’t say “huh, I really would like to screenprint underwear” and then find some way for that to fit in; we identify some kind of a bigger problem and then identify what tactics would work best to address it. And it does tend to focus on language, and visual culture, and these public spaces, advertising, that kind of thing. But I think that the same kind of methodology could be used for any social justice work.
We would love to talk about survivors, and how you feel focusing on their rights and needs can be combined with public action and art. Do you ever feel like these two objectives come into conflict? I would say that not every survivor is going to be ready or in a place, or ever want to be in a place, to engage with public action. However, it’s not really an opportunity that’s available on any level at this point. So what we’re doing is starting to create that model. And this is all based on this model in this book by Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery, where she writes that the private space available in crisis models is essential to healing, but after survivors are able to tell their stories in those private spaces and find support in their smaller communities, survivors who have undergone the most successful healing are those that become activists and create living monuments through their actions. So the essential part is connecting back to community, but it’s also making something more important than the traumatic experience that has altered your life forever. And removing the responsibility from you as an individual and connecting your personal experience with this societal problem that is not your fault, where survivors are [normally] so stigmatized in our culture.
JHU POLITIK
SPRING 2014 SPECIAL ISSUE
Photo courtesy of the Baltimore Fishbowl
The Monument Project is your most recent appeal to the larger national stage. Can you tell us about that and what you see as the ultimate goal of it? Last year we started this proposal that there should be a permanent monument to survivors of rape and abuse with a poem on the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool. What we’ve started to build is an international network of support for that work. What we’re able to do with the monument is decentralize these efforts even more, taking the spotlight a little bit off of us as an organization and saying, this is happening across the country, and showing how much work is going on and that this is in the air is really encouraging for the movement building. For the Monument Quilt, a collection of stories from survivors of rape and abuse that will blanket the National Mall in 2016, we’re doing a series of workshops and a nationwide tour displaying parts of the quilt. The point of the project is creating a public space for survivors. It’s really giving people ownership over how they’re engaging, how they’re telling their story and using the resources and ability we have to bring people together for a moment and put the quilts back out in the world afterwards. We’ll blanket the National Mall and then distribute the quilts to groups across the country and create a digital map and archive, so that those groups can see what each other is doing to improve community response and create public healing space. Of course the whole thing is a movement to build a permanent monument to survivors on the National Mall, which we think would be symbolic of a commitment to improve community response and a belief that rape can end.
Have you ever gotten any negative reactions or backlash from anyone on the National Mall? No, actually, when we’re there it’s interesting to see how open tourists are to seeing this space that’s specifically about being there to support rape survivors. A lot of these kind of public projects are about raising awareness, and we think about it a little differently, where first all the allies that are there are there to support survivors. So yeah, random passerby, children, families, they engage with the quilt. And I think it goes to show that it’s not scary or bad to create this kind of public space.
What do you think government should be doing and do you have any specific policy goals? The reason we use our nation’s capital as a backdrop is because as a position of power it shows what we in the U.S. have as a common ground, and it uplifts the stories of survivors to be in that open, big, powerful space. We’re now starting to connect more with policy. The Violence Against Women Act last year did reverse a couple of problematic elements of policy related
to Native American women on reservations, but there’s still more work to be done. We are also in touch with a couple of lawmakers that have been working on military sexual assault, and we’re very connected with [college] campus groups on sexual assault. We will be leading many of the consent orientations that are part of required preventative education in colleges now because of the campus sexual assault bill.
How do you feel about projects that are similar in message but not in mode, like Take Back the Night and 1 Billion Rising? So I think that there has to be many different platforms. Those examples are interesting because it depends on where it’s happening. We were at a small really conservative school in Vermont, that was totally changing its campus culture, and the administration was uninterested in making reforms about sexual assault. Doing Take Back The Night at that school was extremely radical because they were being asked not to and they got this big backlash, so it ended up being a really useful strategy. I think that with these projects people talk about them being exclusive, but groups have to decide for themselves which model works for them. We need more and more models, more and more platforms. Project Unbreakable is an example of one of those platforms, where it exists online, it’s very clear about its role, and it’s a great outlet for survivors to share their stories and experiences. I think it’s all necessary, and we also need to continue to remain critical, give each other feedback, build relationships, doing it in a kind and compassionate way without tearing each others’ work down, since it takes such an incredible amount of time and energy to do this stuff.
How do you respond to those who see sexual assault as an unimportant issue, or those who assert that often survivors bear some responsibility ? That is a huge part of rape culture, that is victim blaming plain and simple. I’m very clear about that; it’s not nuanced, it’s not difficult for me to understand, and so I think that when people are engaging in victim blaming they’re adding to rape culture and it’s damaging, ultimately, to the work that folks are doing. We’re always really clear about what our values are and what our stance is, and I’m not interested in compromising that because that’s the mainstream point of view. I’m willing to have a conversation with people. Sometimes people will come in and say, “maybe people just shouldn’t wear those short skirts.” And that’s a big red flag, if somebody sees rape and the first thing they think is the woman shouldn’t have been wearing a short skirt, that’s, you know, somebody who has probably used that as an entitlement to rape somebody in the past. So I engage with conversation, I invite people in and offer them information and tell them why I think they’re wrong, invite them to come back, and people are usually very willing to listen.
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JHU POLITIK
SPRING 2014 SPECIAL ISSUE
The Politics of Music Sharing By Sam Sands ‘17, Contributing Writer In the past couple of decades, music sharing—the act of illegally posting songs and albums for free download and universal access—has gained an enormous global following. Music sharing websites now exist all over the world and, despite their illegality, they seem to be increasing in popularity. But what is it about these sites that have made music sharing such a success? The principal reason sites like Pirate Bay, Napster, YouTube Converter, and many others have been, and continue to be so successful at attracting users is because they follow the number one law of pleasing the consumer: free is better. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, music sharing sites are able to provide the exact same quality product with significantly less effort on the consumer’s part. This is what makes music sharing so unique and distinct from things like movie pirating, and recording live concerts. In these other situations there is always some aspect of the product quality that is lost when it is uploaded online. With music, the quality remains identical because it is actually identical. Listening to a song downloaded from Pirate Bay sounds the same as the song you’d hear on the radio because both songs likely came from the same file. Additionally, these music sharing sites require no set up; most of the programs which allow people to buy and store music come pre-installed on all devices. Music downloading sites are designed so that files are already formatted for compatibility with a person’s media storage. This model stands in contrast to legal music sites like iTunes or Spotify, which require the user to not only register for their services, but also to download specific programs in order to enjoy the music. The incentives are clear: people are drawn to fast, cheap and easy sites. The fact is that they are illegal, although many people do not realize this fact, or choose to ignore it. However, the law in this area is quite ambiguous. There are, in short, four different kinds of copyright offenses: direct, secondary, contributory, and vicarious. At first glance, these appear so similar as to be essentially the same law. But the true difference between them, in a legal sense, is intent. In majority of copyright lawsuits, the key issue is “intent of the operating party”. This is what led to the downfall of Napster in 1999 when the site first came under fire. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Napster for contributory copyright infractions. The site was posting copyrighted music with the intent of making it freely available to the public, without paying royalties to the recording artists. These actions were clearly illegal and the fact that the site was a single entity made prosecution a fairly straightforward process. The hope was that by shutting down Napster, music piracy would be stopped or at least slowed significantly. Yet Napster’s death did not bring about the end of music piracy. Today, sites have evolved into a different breed. Most no longer consist of a single entity that posts all of its music content, rather they are open forums allowing users to post their individual content and others can choose from what is available. Technically speaking, the functions that these sites perform (sharing videos, songs, etc.) are not really illegal. The problem is that people use these forums and actions to share copyrighted content, which is illegal. In order to shut down these sites, prosecutors would have to show clear evidence that the owners of the music sharing sites acted with “intent” to infringe copyright laws. To demonstrate just how difficult this is, one can look to the strategy behind the site, YouTube Converter. This site allows users to copy a web link of a YouTube video and have the site convert and download the video into an MP3 file to one’s computer. It began innocuously until users realized it was extremely easy to take music videos and use YouTube Converter to download the song for free. So while this is music piracy, it is based on a model where individuals take videos off of a well-known and established site
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and convert them one by one. The site creators technically have nothing to do with it, so there is no obvious intent (on the creators’ part) to infringe on any laws. Thus, we have a legal quagmire. As for the individuals around the world who upload and download content to and from sites like YouTube Converter, officials have historically considered them minor targets, preferring instead to focus their attention on the “big fish” providers. That, coupled with the sheer numbers of individual users, has made it virtually impossible for law enforcement to successfully combat the rise of music piracy. So where does this leave us? Well for starters, unfortunately the issue is not at the top of most organizations’ To-Do lists. Police departments simply do not have the manpower or the resources to deal with the problem on any sort of a major scale. Even if they did, arresting more people would not solve the underlying technological problem. As long as the law remains murky, the problems will persist. Many believe that the government must fix the problem through legal reform, and this opinion is supported, most importantly by the music community itself. The American National Music Council, in a statement on their website, says that “we must deliver now to our Congressional representatives, [and] to the White House” a message that the problem of file sharing must be stopped. A legal approach however carries its own set of problems. In 2011, the “Three Strikes” Law was passed as an amendment to the Copyright Law of 1994. The amendment states that after a person is found with illegal copyrighted material in their possession and given three warnings, the owner of the copyright can take the accused before a tribunal where they can face penalties of up to $15,000 . The problem is that this amendment specifies that after three strikes the owner of the Internet account can be taken before the tribunal, yet unfortunately the account owner is usually not the person actually doing the downloading. This means that parents, school boards and landlords could be called before a Tribunal for the actions of their children, students, and tenants respectively. There are even more problems to consider when thinking about what to do about file sharing issues. How would a punishment be designed that is both fair and a realistic deterrent? Currently, the consequences are a number of fines that range in price based on the severity of the incidences. If that fails to deter people now, the only next step up would be to give jail time for offenders. But so far, no one has felt comfortable equating music piracy to that of more serious offenses by punishing piracy in this manner. Beyond penalties, the next challenge is to determine how to catch the huge numbers of people that download music illegally. The most viable option so far is to keep track of users who visit sites providing avenues for illegal downloads. However, many contend that this approach constitutes a breach of personal privacy. In order for an agency (whether that be governmental or private) to track people based on these sites, they would have to track down individual IP addresses, trace them to computers, and then search through the person’s history and hard drive to prove intent. Another argument against this idea is that any monitoring of people’s online activity by any agency could appear to be the beginnings of censorship. For music lovers out there on a budget, there are some remaining options. There is the iTunes “pay per song” but also sites like Pandora, Spotify, and Rhapsody. With these, instead of actually downloading the songs, individuals can simply stream the music. This is legal because the sites pay the artists royalties each time a song is played. The downside for consumers is that these services are supported by often annoying advertisements. Of course, it is probably preferable to hear a short ad than to pay a $15,000 fine for piracy… that would be a rough tune to hear.
JHU POLITIK
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SPRING 2014 SPECIAL ISSUE
INTERVIEW WITH CURATOR AND DEPARTMENT HEAD AT THE BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART
KRISTEN HILEMAN By Valentin Weber ‘14, Contributing Writer
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Kristen Hileman has been both the Curator of Contemporary Art and Department Head of The Baltimore Museum of Art since 2009. Established in 1914, the BMA celebrates its centennial this year with a myriad of events and a brightly decorated front facade. Previously, Hileman worked as an Associate Curator at the Hirschhorn Museum and at the Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C.
As a museum curator, what sources do you take advantage of to stay up to date on the intersection between arts and politics? In terms of art, I am lucky because I have a travel budget, so the best opportunity for me to see what is going on right now is to travel to the art fairs and the biennials and see first hand what artists are doing. I like to go to exhibitions or fairs, where there is a broad cross section of artists, so that I can not only see what more established artists are doing, but also what younger artists are producing. That is my permanent source of learning about artists. I would not say that I have one single source for looking at political art. In looking at these broader exhibitions one often finds artists who do have a political agenda in their work.
How, if at all, does censorship affect your work? I have not really experienced censorship here at the BMA. I think that there is a great respect and tolerance for artists and their ideas and the need to communicate them and recognition that museums are a powerful place, where difficult topics and conversations can happen in a safe environment.
How is the BMA’s strategy of financing impacted by a tightening federal and state budget for art? Since 2008 museums across this country have faced several financial challenges, because there has been a shrinking of funds available, not only from government sources, but also from private individuals. It is a challenge that all museum’s face and one that has led to being very careful about expenditures and thinking of more economical ways doing what we do.
What did you think of the scare in Detroit where some people wanted to sell off the Detroit Institute of Arts’ fine art to pay off the city’s debt? It is more than a scare. That question is not fully resolved yet; it’s not over and settled. I am a strong believer in the power of museums and the role that they play in the specific fabric of the community. I think that rather than being looked at as financial assets, objects in a collection should be in some ways considered invaluable tools for teaching— for having constant conversations about different issues, different time periods, and different geographical locations. Museums really are something that helps to bring the community together and give it a sense of a center, a sense of civic pride and they contribute to a common experience for people who live in a community. To say the least, it is troubling that a city like Detroit, with a very outstanding collection, is in a position where there are certain sectors that are considering treating those objects as financial assets.
How much political art can a museum bear? And how can political art help or hurt the museum? Not every artist makes political art, or overtly political art. It would not be appropriate for a museum only to put up political art, because what we really want to do is show the very best work that has been made in any given time and that includes the full spectrum of artistic production.
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JHU POLITIK
SPRING 2014 SPECIAL ISSUE
A Look Inside the Collection... The right question to ask oneself as a curator, or anyone who plays a role in building collections is: Am I making good judgments about what I think will be relevant now and also in the future?
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Certainly political art should be part of a balanced program of collecting art. It should be drawn from different cultures, it should reflect different backgrounds of artists and it should be appropriately diverse in its content.
Has there been artwork displayed in the BMA that has been particularly politically controversial? Can you describe it and some of the reactions? Perhaps the most controversial artwork in the collection would be Matisse’s Blue Nude from 1907. We have to think historically and, interestingly, controversy does not always have to do with political content. It can do with an artist introducing a very radically different way of seeing the world around him. The painting was burned in effigy at the Armory Show (International Exhibition of Modern Art, 1913) by students at the Art Institute of Chicago, because it challenged their skills and techniques and their perception of the world of an artist. And now today we celebrate it as the great masterpiece of this collection. That story speaks to the power of art and the power of artists who transform the way we see. I throw that story in there to remind everyone that art stirs up the world in different ways and they do not have to be simply representing a particular political belief or point of view.
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Do you think political art is more common in the U.S. compared to other major countries? Why or why not? I do not think it is. There are many artists in South Africa, who make political work, certainly artists coming from Europe, there are some interesting examples of artists from states from Eastern Europe. I do not think it is specific to a particular country indeed because we live in a very international art world, where in some ways the kind of geographical borders are open and there is a conversation that happens among artists who do have social and political things to say that might be specific to their countries, but that is also part of a broader international interest.
Recently the BMA exhibited political art works by the renowned American photographer An-My Lê. What is the political message? The power of An-My Lê’s work is that, while it addresses different aspects of the U.S. military it does not have an overt political agenda. The photographs on one level are very sublime, beautiful, lush images of the landscape and the people and the equipment within the landscape. At the same time it reveals the civil scope and the scope in which the U.S. military conducts its military operations and there are images in which one sees the risk and the vulnerability of the American troops – the men and women who participate in the military. It is good work, because it is not overly simplified. It does not have just a single message to make, but can be read in many different ways. In that way, it shows the complexity of this very important part of U.S. society, its military operations.
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4. 1. “Amanda and her Cousin Amy in Valdese, North Carolina”(1990) - Mary Ellen Mark 2. “Fedallah” (1988) - Frank Stella 3. “A Wall for Apricots”(1968) - Anne Truitt 4. “Areas for Action, Day 12: Cut Out Female; Laurie Close-Up”(2011) - Oliver Herring
JHU POLITIK
SPRING 2014 SPECIAL ISSUE
Remembering History Through Art: German Guilt in a Post-War Era By Corey Payne ‘17, Staff Writer & Ellie Park ‘17, Contributing Writer
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rt is inevitably entangled with its social-political context. Like all members of society, artists are influenced by the larger structures of society and history. Despite common misconceptions of art as the realization of an artist’s singular, creative vision, many artists draw their subjects and inspiration from their environment. Therefore, art also functions as an expressive response to human conditions of the time. During wars, when the fundamentals of society are put in question, art also participates in the discourse of changing social dynamics. Nowhere is this more evident than in defeated Germany following World War II. Post-war German artists struggled with the collective guilt of the nation, which was held responsible for the heinous war crimes of Nazi party. During World War II, advanced reporting strategies and recording technologies, such as photography and film, showed the world images of damaged soldiers and civilians, horrific mutilations, and the decimation of buildings. The 20th century introduced an entirely different level of warfare destruction. Consequently, the societal cultures were seriously altered. When a culture is irreconcilably changed by a war, it is often most clearly expressed through the artwork produced. Moreover, Germany, as the leading Axis Power, faced a reconstruction starkly different than the rest of Europe. The Germans had to confront their changed status of the nation—once the glorious Aryan Empire—into a newly defeated and guilty nation. The Psychological Warfare Division (PWD) of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force started a propaganda campaign to develop a German sense of collective guilt starting in 1944. Ally controlled newspapers and radio stations began to release content with the purpose of making all Germans feel moral responsibility for Nazi crimes. Among US officials, collective German guilt was viewed as a prerequisite for the education of German citizens in the postwar era.
Propaganda posters which included Holocaust photographs often displayed statements such as “You are guilty of this!” Many movies were produced by the PWD in the late 1940s to tell the story of the Nazi atrocities, and the role of the German people in executing them. According to Sidney Bernstein, chief of PWD, the object of the campaign was to “shake and humiliate the Germans and prove to them beyond any possible challenge that these German crimes against humanity were committed and that the German people – and not just the Nazis and SS – bore responsibility.” As this sense of collective responsibility was imposed on German society and culture, intellectuals and artists alike struggled to reconcile what remained of their old culture with the new perceived German identity as an historical destroyer of humanity. Post-World War II German artists had to confront two major issues: resuming the suspended modern painterly exploration which was persecuted under Nazi rule and determining what direction German art should be in the aftermath of war.
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Photos Courtesy of Paul Schultz-Naumburg in his book Kunst und Rasse (Art and Race)
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Works from modern artists were forbidden to be on display and the pieces were often confiscated.
JHU POLITIK
SPRING 2014 SPECIAL ISSUE Art was one of the fruits of modernity which was persistently and thoroughly persecuted under the Nazi regime. The Nazi party saw the abstraction and non-mimetic representations of body in modern art as symptom of sick, degenerate human beings, which belied the Nazi ideal of physical perfection. Works from modern artists were forbidden to be on display and the pieces were often confiscated. Modern paintings that were collected, including those from famous artists like Pablo Picasso, were put on exhibition under the title “Degenerate Art,” to educate German citizens of the so-called ‘revolting art trend’. As a “cure” for this trend, the Nazi party presented idealized images of the body which asserted the superiority of the Aryan race. Massive sculptures flaunting masculinity and German pride were commissioned and put on display. Post-war German artists such as Georg Baselitz sought to de-mystify this construction of the idealized image of the German race by actively employing the “degeneracy” of modern art in his works. While Nazis glorified the Aryan race, they were simultaneously mutilating human flesh. The scenes of atrocious warfare propagated disturbing images of damaged human beings. Baselitz reenacted this annihilation of human flesh on these idealized bodily images. In Die Grosse Nacht im Eimer (Great Night down the Drain), 1962-63, Baselitz iconoclastically portrays a figure as dwarfish, bloodied, and grotesquely deformed. A receding hairline and the shorts reminiscent of a Nazi uniform alludes that the figure could be in fact Hitler, who is held responsible for the horrors committed against humanity during the war. The crudeness and ugliness in Baselitz’s work revived modern German art’s experiments with texture, technique, and representation, while at the same time revising the glorification of the human body which persisted under the Nazi party in the recent past Another group of German artists after the war turned their attention to art’s function as a record of history. These artists sought to come to terms with the past through remembering the atrocities of war by commemorating their existence. In the spring of 1958, an international competition was held for a monument at Auschwitz-- four hundred designs were submitted, showing the active interests of artists in the process of remembering the past. Joseph Beuys, in his collection of ready-made sculptures titled Auschwitz Demonstrations (1956-64), displayed photographs and floor plans of the notorious concentration camp and other miscellaneous objects that convey the horrors of slaughter. Another visual artist, Gerhard Richter, explored how the legacies of war and fascism interrelate with people’s lives in the post-war era at a more personal and microscopic level. Uncle Rudi (1965), Richter’s oil painting, gives an illusion of elusive black and white photo, portraying the artist’s uncle wearing a Nazi uniform. There is a tension between his innocent, awkward smile and his possible participation in war crimes. Photos of family members in military service prevalent in almost all German households were large part of visual culture of ordinary Germans. How does one deal with the fact that one’s uncles, aunts, and parents partook in Wehrmacht (Armed Forces of Germany), Hitler Youth, or the League of German Girls? Art is irreconcilably affected by history, but moreover, history is forever changed by art. Through art, intellectuals are able to immortalize the stories of people. It is clear that art is not only a powerful tool of preservation, but also of analysis. Through these works, people are able to gain a new and fascinating insight into the ways that these artists intended history to be remembered. Through these studies we can undoubtedly learn more about our history, more about our people, and more about ourselves.
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JHU POLITIK
SPRING 2014 SPECIAL ISSUE
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