Dave Hornor uses prose and imagery to create a captivating exposé on current United States Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross.
“A very, very rich man in New York City.”
Wilbur Ross, who gained the moniker “King of Bankruptcy,” is a business tycoon who acquired failed companies or ones on the cusp of bankruptcy. He then invested and built new companies from these assets by de-unionizing, cutting costs, and lowering wages to turn a profit before selling them again for an exponentially higher price. Ross received his education at Yale, where his father is an alma mater and then from Harvard. His education and social standing eventually landed him in politics, where he currently serves under President Donald Trump, who nominated him for the position.
“who collects Magritte paintings; he has 25.”
René François Ghislain Magritte was a Belgian Surrealist artist who was known for work that “challenged the real world.” He was a socialist who rejected the bourgeois economic and political system and instead used his career to fight it. Starting off as a graphic artist and quasi-abstract painter, Magritte eventually reinvented his artistic career as a figurative artist. He “made the familiar disturbing and strange, posing questions about the nature of representation and reality.” (moma.org)
“& 12 Dead West Virginia coal miners.”
Hornor, who is the son of a coal miner, tells the story of one company Ross owned; Sago Mine in West Virginia. On 2nd January 2006, despite receiving numerous safety and health code violations that were disregarded, the mine exploded, killing 12 workers. He narrates the evolution of the events and Ross’ position within in, emphasizing the ways his privilege and social monopoly pardoned him from responsibility and ownership over this needless of loss of life.
Hornor’s thought-provoking work begins with the story of Ross and the mine, which then leads into layers of quotes by Magritte atop his paintings in the latter part of the book. He juxtaposes Ross’ hold on capitalist power and wealth against the socialist philosophy and political outlook of Magritte.
“The only way poets and painters have of struggling against the bourgeois economic system is to give their works a content that rejects the bourgeois ideological values that underlie the bourgeois economic system” (15).
This book illustrates the structures of society in which the wealthy can take endlessly with no repercussions while the working class give with their lives for minimum wage. It reveals the faults of a Capitalist society in which art and agency can be commodified, in which the rich can ignore and negate the meaning of the artist’s expression, rendering artwork nothing more than paint on canvas for their homes. Hornor produces a book that encapsulates the difference between them and us, the rich and the working, the art collectors, and the artist. The book encourages us to evaluate where we lie within all this and how our actions help fight or help perpetuate an unjust society.
Works Cited
Hornor, Dave. a very, very rich man in New York City who collects Magritte paintings; he has 25 & 12 dead West Virginia coal miners. Seattle, 246 Press, 2015.
“René Magritte.” MoMA, 2017, https://www.moma.org/artists/3692
“Wilbur Ross Fast Facts.” CNN, 8 Nov. 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2013/05/30/us/wilbur-ross-fast-facts/index.html.
A Sign for the City is a public art project to acoustically commemorate significant cultural, social, and political events and figures in the history of Vancouver. It is done by reassigning the meaning of Vancouver’s Nine O’clock Gun, a 1812 built naval cannon in Stanley Park, and symbolically dedicating the firing of the cannon to one historical event or figure a day for a whole year, from May 1, 2011 to April 30, 2012.
Originally fired to “signal the close of the fishing day and as a navigational aid,” the cannon now is fired nightly to mark the time.
Photo Credit: @dannnyellow Source: Instagram
Through the whole book of history shaping events, I pick out 10 that resonate with me the most. Some of them are about the social issues that the city still struggles with to this day, such as indigenous (land) rights, housing, drugs. Some of them are somewhat surprising to me as a newcomer to Vancouver. Having just casted a ballot for the first time in my life not long ago, it makes me rethink what it means for an individual to (not) possess certain rights on a certain land, after reading that women were only given the vote in BC since 1917. However this may be the kind of reaction that the artists behind this project, Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber, aim for, which is to "[imagine] Vancouver as a socially and spatially just city."
But how about the history of the land before there is Vancouver?
Is it possible to imagine Vancouver as a socially and spatially just city without fully understanding how everything came to be the way as they are today?
Photo Credit: Herry T. Devine Source: City of Vancouver Archives
April 6, 1886: The city of Vancouver is incorporated. While approximately 1,000 people are living in the city at the time of incorporation, archaeological records suggest the presence of First Nations people living in the region dating back between 8,000 and 10,000 years.
October 15, 1898: The Nine O'clock Gun is fired for the first time - at noon. Placed at Brockton Point, the site of an important squat, the gun serves to displace squatters, while the same time providing a time signal for local populations and assisting in calibrating the chronometers of ships in port.
May 5, 1911: The province's first Women's Suffrage convention is held in Vancouver. From 1902 to 1913, the suffrage movement is defeated, but following the enfranchisement of women in the prairie provinces, women are given the vote in BC in 1917.
April 10, 1922: The Cranmer Potlatch prosecution becomes the first successful enforcement of the 1884 prohibition against First Nations' practice of the potlatch. Three local bands surrender their ceremonial regalia as a penalty, while Jim Hall of Karlukwees and six others from Fort Rupert opt to serve sentences at the Oakalla Prison Farm in Burnaby. The surrendered regalia are put on exhibit at the Alert Bay parish hall and viewed upon paying an admission price of twenty five cents.
Photo Credit: James Crookal Source: City of Vancouver Archives
March 10, 1958: Tim Cummings, the last of the legal residents of Stanley Park, dies. While other residents were evicted in the 1920s, Cummings lived in a small cabin near Brockton Point until his death at the age of 77. Despite efforts to save his "rickety shack" by Major Matthews, the City Archivist at the time, Cummings' cabin was torn down shortly after his death.
March 26, 1968: Under pressure from Vancouver citizens, City Council votes to reconsider and eventually repeal the "industrial" designation of the False Creek area. Considered a victory for participatory politics, the issue had been pressed by protesting UBC and SFU students who demanded that public opinion be taken into consideration by the city in its planning decisions. This repeal also marks the first time City Council makes a decision in response to public pressure.
Photo Credit: Gorden Sedawie Source: Ottawa Citizen
January 6, 1971: The Militant Mothers of Raymur, twenty-five women from the Raymur Social Housing Project, block the train tracks between Raymur Avenue and Glen Drive, demanding a safe crossing for Seymour students who cross the dangerously busy tracks every day to get school. Their intermittent blockades prompt the city to build an overpass at Keefer Street.
November 27, 1990: The Frances Street squat is brought to an end. Occupied between February and November, the six squatted houses, including one women-only squat, is curtailed when the Vancouver Police Department claims that the houses are full of weapons. Upon searching the houses and occupants, no weapons are found. Twelve members of the squat are arrested for mischief and obstructing a police officer. The buildings are labelled by City Council as a "public nuisance" and later torn down.
Photo Credit: Elaine Brière Source: BC Studies
July 11, 2000: "The Killing Fields" are erected: The Vancouver Network of Drug Users (VANDU) plants 2000 crosses in Oppenheimer Park to highlight overdose deaths and the fact that Downtown Eastside drug users have the highest HIV infection rate in the western world.
According to CBC News and BC Studies, "The Killing Fields" took place in the July of 1997.
January 31, 2008: Homeless citizen Darrell Mickasko accidentally burns himself to death in a Vancouver lane while trying to keep warm with a Coleman stove. Similar to the deaths of Dawn Amanda Bergman (also known as Tracey), Michael Ciro Nestoruk, Paul "Duncan" Giesbrecht, Thomas Sawyer, and Michael Hubbard, Mickasko's death is seen by many as a result of the lack of proper housing, inequality, and the criminalization of poverty in BC.
After reading the book and imagining 365 cannon blasts in my head, I notice that many events made to the list are the first or the last in their nature. It makes me think the innumerable undocumented incidents that contribute to the first success that makes history, and the impact of something long standing eventually becoming absent. What I anticipate to be an interesting read of fun facts of Vancouver turn out to be a complex past of the land and the people who live on it. Like how most of the space on each page is left blank, the few fact stating sentences in plain language leave me with more questions than I begin with, which is what I think makes A Sign for the City a powerful project.
Welcome to Polkamotion with Ma and Pa Chen by Teresa Chen (Call No. 0153)
Welcome to Polkamotion with Ma and Pa Chen by Teresa Chen is a documentary-style book that combines family photos, newspaper clippings, and adverts regarding her parents’ experience with the art of polka dancing. After their retirement, Teresa Chen’s parents took up polka dancing, a predominantly Polish and German art form. As their passion for the dance blossomed, so did their love for documenting their experience photographically. They would give the camera to fellow dancers who captured them in motion, and it is through these accumulated photographs that Chen created this book.
This book was a response to the concept of “Otherness,” a subject of focus within her practice. In her dissertation, Chen writes “that visual art can be effective for understanding the intersectional, hybrid, and relational processes involved in the construction of identities.”(pg 124). Being an (East) Asian diaspora in America, an identity was socially constructed for her by a society that did not understand her personal experience. Her book works to dismantle this hegemony of understanding and instead use her art to reveal the intricacies that lie within the idea of identity. Her parents, who are immigrants from China taking up a European dance form is an act of resistance against this hegemony in itself. This is not to say that moving to a multiracial country means that cultures are up for grabs or that you relinquish your own but instead shows that there is room for an exchange of experiences and ideas.
This book shows Ma and Pa Chen finding their love for dance in a culture different than theirs. It reinforces the idea that there is an opportunity for each individual to form their identity based on the relations between their own unique set of experiences and not in relation to who is different or “other” than them.
Artist’s Website :
Works Cited
Chen, Teresa, and Martin Jäggi. Welcome to Polkamotion with Ma and Pa Chen. Edition Patrick Frey, 2002.
Chen, Teresa. Between Selves and Others: Exploring Strategic Approaches within Visual Art. 2014. Plymouth University, PhD dissertation.
Teresa Chen by
SPEECH/ACTS is an artist’s book published on the occasion of a group exhibition at Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania in 2017. The exhibition explores experimental black poetry and how the social and cultural constructs of language have shaped black American experiences. The book features poetry and text-based art works by a generation of artists born in the 80s: Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Steffani Jemison, Tony Lewis, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Martine Syms, alongside essays and newly commissioned poetry by their poetic forerunners such as Harryette Mullen, Simone White, Fred Moten, and Morgan Parker.
Artists in SPEECH/ACTS employ Black Experimental Poetry as a tool to disrupt the homogeneity of African American culture depicted in the Black Arts Movement in the 60s. There is shared frustration among artists coming from different background and generations: to have the complexities and nuances of each individual’s blackness striped away and to be reduced to a monolithic identity, which continues to this day. Words like crack, gap, fragment, and split repeatedly show up when these artists try to describe their experiences relating themselves to the boarder singular “blackness.” In a way, SPEECH/ACTS could be seen as a project of experiment itself. If the role language plays in appropriating culture and exerting power is being questioned in the first place, how do the black communities expect to use it to define themselves where they have never been properly recognized.
Nonetheless, Black Experimental Poetry approaches the intricacy of the political, racial, and cultural connotations of blackness from a place of personal immediacy, where the quotidian, queerness, class, proximity to whiteness, religion and various sociopolitical aspects all come to play. Refusing to be judged by the arbitrariness of circumstances, Black Experimental Poetry allows instability and expansion in the definition of blackness on its own terms. Like Harryette Mullen points out in her essay, blackness is a social construction, it may encompass more than race, but shared experience, cultural fluency, and political solidarity.
There is multiplicity of blackness here. Blackness that is jet, ashy, grey, kinda, and white. Blackness that is I don’t know, a stout truth, a romance of, Oprah, and going
going
going
Works Cited
Onli, Meg, et al. SPEECH/ACTS. Futurepoem, 2017.
“Chirashi: Stories from the Garden” by Baco Ohama (Call Number 0091)
Baco Ohama is a Japanese-Canadian artist who works primarily with text. She has various artist publications, some in tandem with exhibitions, and others as works on their own.
“CHIRASHI: stories from the garden” is an artist’s book interlaced with poetry, personal narratives, and documentation of family history in both text and photographs. Through poetic descriptions of gardens, recountings of familial relationships, and a transcription of a letter, Ohama builds a portrait of her grandmother, Asayo Murakami, with implications to the pains of loss, quiet joys, and excitement of discovery of cultural heritage.
The book begins with a poem depicting her grandmother in the garden, and through this fragmented depiction, Ohama indicates the struggle of language barrier and loss of fluid communication. She ends the poem introducing a letter written to her grandma, the writing of it being “a slow process” for her as she must check and double-check translations.
Ohama’s letter to her grandmother exists in this book fragmented, with each successive piece of it marking a different section of the book. The letter is written in Japanese hiragana, in Japanese romanized phonetics, and in English, highlighting the process of translation, Ohama’s efforts to communicate with her grandmother, and her efforts to connect with her history.
Much of the book’s content are fragmented memories and stories, often retold by different family members. Many pages are accompanied by family photographs, printed on translucent vellum sheets, making the text on either side partially visible through them. The visual effect is a delicate fogginess, emulating the feeling of recollecting memories.
As the reader pieces together the snippets of stories around Ohama’s grandmother, they are made increasingly aware of the transference of a culture from one geographical location to another, and its effects on the passing of culture through ongoing generations. Ohama’s process of cultural recovery through the making of this book underlies each page, revealing the pains and the joys of being a part of a diaspora and having to search for your histories. Ohama wisely states:
“The bridges are there between generations. Between sansei and yonsei and our issei and nissei parents and grandparents. There is much to be shared when we open ourselves to the lives and experiences, the stories and the love, the pain and the treasures of one another.
At times when we get so busy and caught up with the multitude of things we must do each day we may forget to walk over that bridge.
When we do it’s quite possible that we will discover … /
… a garden in full bloom”
The book is finished off with a glossary of Japanese words used in the text.
Linda Ohama, has filmed a documentary of their grandmother titled “Obachan’s Garden”, which will be showing next Monday at the Cinematheque, Vancouver.
Additional Resources:
http://japanesecanadianartists.com/artist/baco-ohama/
https://wsworkshop.org/collection/until-my-body-says-sleep-kokyo/
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