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The Art of Revolution: Spoken Word, Video, and Performance Art to Change the World

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Some of today’s most interesting, socially engaged, controversial, and occasionally even blasphemous artists are working in the mediums of spoken word, video and performance art. I’m excited to be joining Tikkun Daily as a blogger on the multi-media arts beat. All of the artists I plan to present here are working out of the belief that through their work they have the capacity — even the obligation — to ask the questions that light the spark of change. Whether they are examining issues of social justice, feminism/gender politics, the environment versus consumerism, Israel/Palestine or any other of today’s most complex problems, these artists are trailblazing their way to the cutting edge of both politics and artistic representation. The first artist featured here is Lisa Vinebaum of Montréal, Québec.

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Where Art Meets Religion: A Mystical Space

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by Peter Gimpel

Are there “sacred values” capable of dissolving the borders between art and religion? That question pulsed at the heart of the recent Art and Religion Symposium organized by the Foundation for Centripetal Art and co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Religion and the Center for Jewish Studies at UCLA. Rafael Chodos, the foundation’s director, opened the symposium with a riddle:
A group of people gather in a certain place, where they all focus on the same thing. Some of them are moved. All of them feel that their experience is important.

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The Medium Is the Matzo

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by Melissa Shiff
Excitement is rising in Montreal over matzo as an art construction team prepares for Passover like never before: stocking up on three thousand pieces of matzo, they are set to build a multimedia installation that lets visitors journey out of Egypt and crush oppression. “The Medium is the Matzo” project functions like a three-dimensional Haggadah and brings some of the religious holiday’s central themes into the context of contemporary social action. After viewing the installation at the Bronfman Center at New York University, media scholar Douglas Rushkoff wrote, “It’s a provocative and playful exploration of the real values underlying Pesach, transmitted to its audience through a series of experiential installations that hit all the senses.” Visitors to the installation depart from Egypt by following a path through a Ten Plagues space and a Matzo Mitzrayim Tunnel to the Passover Projections part of the installation. Through the wonders of video technology, visitors become actors as they are inserted in real time into Cecil B. DeMille’s iconic film The Ten Commandments at the very point where the runaway slaves are crossing the Red Sea.

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Elizabeth Taylor, an Icon

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Elizabeth Taylor’s life was not flawless. No human life is. She lived large, for all the world to see. She faced all that life brought her way, including sickness and her own misjudgments, with a grace that represents the divine impulse that lives inside every human soul.

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Can We Tell All Of Our Stories, One At A Time? Miral, The Movie

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It will be most interesting to see how Americans respond to the new movie, Miral, by well-known painter and movie director Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly). The movie opens tomorrow in New York and Los Angeles, and on April 1st in some other cities. Miral tells the story of several generations of Palestinian women from 1948. It is based on an autobiographical novel by the Palestinian-born, Italian TV journalist Rula Jebreal, who grew up in the Dar El-Tifl orphanage in East Jerusalem. The idea of a well-known Jewish artist telling a story from the Palestinian point of view has of course raised a ruckus.

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The Right of Return for New Orleanians and Palestinians: An Interview with Jordan Flaherty

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When I first picked up Floodlines on assignment to write a review for Bitch magazine, I thought I knew something about what went down in New Orleans after Katrina, but after reading this firsthand account of surviving the storm, I realized I didn’t know much at all. It reminded me of the first time I read a leftist account of the history of Zionism. Only then did I realize how much the US mainstream media had framed my perception of Palestine by focusing on individual acts of violence by Palestinians taken out of context from the larger frame of Israeli state violence. Similarly, while reading Floodlines, I was forced to confront how my understanding of New Orleans has been shaped by mainstream media reports that focused obsessively on individual acts of violence while ignoring the large-scale state violence imposed on mostly poor communities of color. I was moved by how Flaherty, a white journalist and organizer based in New Orleans, manages to tell a story that encompasses both the staggering injustice of structural racism and the inspiring grassroots activism of New Orleanians.

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C.K. Williams To Be Honored March 14 at Our 25th Anniversary Celebration

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The last time the Tikkun Award went to a poet, it was Allen Ginsberg who received it in person at a ceremony at Columbia University in New York City. He joined a list of significant figures who had previously received the award including Grace Paley, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone, and Abba Eban. Tikkun’s poetry editor Joshua Weiner provides some context on why it is going this year to C.K. Williams.
What is the role of the poet in Tikkun’s core vision, of commitment to peace, social justice, ecological sanity? What is the role of the poet in a movement that aims to foster solidarity, generosity, kindness, and radical amazement? What is the role of the poet when it comes to social change and individual inner change?

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Music at Our 25th Anniversary Celebration #1: Kelly Takunda Orphan

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I will be profiling the honorees at our March 14 celebration over the next couple of weeks (see my last post), not just to promote our event, since most readers of this blog live far away and can’t attend it, but to promote these people and their tremendous contributions, to explain why they are receiving the Tikkun Award. In addition to speeches from the honorees and editors, we will enjoy some terrific music and poetry at the event. Again, for people far away, as well as to bring more of you nearby folks to the event, I am hoping to profile the musicians. (We are also in the last days of creating our new magazine website which will debut in early March so it’s another of those insanely intense two weeks at Tikkun — so who knows what I will actually manage to post about here). Today I want to start by writing about Kelly Takunda Orphan Martinez, because she has a fundraiser concert of her own this week that I encourage Bay Area people to come to.

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Peoplescapes and Travelscapes: Paintings of People, Places, and Politics

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Nancy Calef produces rich, detailed paintings of people and places — illustrations she refers to as “narratives containing many threads of humanity.” Whether she’s portraying casino culture, Wall Street, or the mainstream media’s misplaced priorities, Calef says she tries “to capture the common denominator and the unique quality in all of us.” “Peoplescape” is the term Calef has coined for her people-focused visual narratives, in part to emphasize their coherence with her early work – mostly plein air landscapes. “I used to paint these beautiful landscapes, and it became too sugary for me because I realized the world isn’t only beautiful landscapes,” says Calef, who spent her twenties traveling and painting. Although Calef continues to create “travelscapes,” she has shifted her focus to depicting people.