Sherry Chandler » 2007 » December » 06
Watch it at YoutTube.
From the NYTimes:
Controversy has erupted from the sleepy third-floor hallway galleries at the New York Public Library, where a modest exhibition of contemporary prints called “Multiple Interpretations” is on view.
The work that has prompted protests from some library patrons, attracted coverage by The Daily News, Fox News and USA Today and has stirred the blogosphere is called “Line Up,” a series of politically inflammatory prints by the team of Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese. Each black-and-white digital print is a mug shot-style diptych in which a member of the Bush administration appears in profile and face forward, holding a police identification sign and the date on which he or she made a statement of questionable veracity relating to Iraq.
A video accompanying the prints allows you to hear an actual recording through headphones as you view each speaker’s fake mug shot reproduced on screen. President Bush announces the discovery of Saddam Hussein’s effort to purchase uranium in Africa. Dick Cheney says, “Nobody has produced a single shred of evidence that there’s anything wrong or inappropriate here,” presumably a reference to Halliburton. (The entire video is available on YouTube.)
It is at first mildly shocking to come upon such bluntly partisan artwork on a New York Public Library wall.Biting political satire is deeply a part of printmaking history — see Goya, James Gillray and Daumier — but handmade prints are no longer a significant form of political communication, and we don’t expect anything so brazenly tendentious in the public library context.
More thoughts on this installation at No Caption Needed.
Buy postcards of the mug shots here. Get the t-shirt here.
Update: Here’s a link to all the images in the exhibition.
This post was written by sherry
From Ronnie Ellis, posted by Mark Hebert on the WHAS11 Political Blog:
Kodak, Ky. – Go on. Drive up the mountain – if you’ve got the nerve. Up a narrow, winding road 15 miles southeast of Hazard, criss-crossing railroad tracks, past the little Kodak Church of the True and Living God, up Montgomery Creek, along a ledge precariously perched over a holler.
Watch out for the huge coal trucks, carrying 40, 50, even 60 tons of coal – what the locals call “a graveyard hump because they can’t stop and if you’re in the way, you’re in trouble” – coming down that same road, snaking between the cliff on one side and house trailers perched on the ledge over that holler on the other.
But when you get there – there’s no there. The mountaintop is flat gone. Just rock and rubble.
Look over the side, down into that valley where the little stream used to gurgle and now runs muddy along a man-made – well, ditch really. There’s your mountaintop, pushed over the side by the coal companies hauling out the coal – and the profits.
According to the folks who live on the road, the coal companies don’t much mind who or what gets in their way when they’re pushing the mountains down into the valleys and streams and hauling out their coal. And they think people in Frankfort don’t care. That may have changed Monday.
Several members of the House Appropriations and Revenue Committee, led by Chairman Harry Moberly, D-Richmond, made that drive Monday and they were struck by what they saw and heard.
I’m particularly struck by this little detail:
The taps in Ricky Handshoe’s house leak methane gas.
“The inspector said it was safe, but then he asked me if anybody smoked in the house. I said, no, and he said it wouldn’t be a good idea. So, how can it be safe?”
Let me also recommend Jeff Hess’s picture of his own carbon footprint up north in Cleveland, where it turns out his electric energy links back to Sam Martin’s stomping ground in West Virginia, down around Beckley looks like.
This post was written by sherry
