Arts and Ideas, Late Summer, 2013

hudson roverPerformance Piece for Print

Marianne Goldberg

All Things Being EqualReflections on Social Justice

Vineyard Contributors

The End of PowerHow Power Lost Its Edge

Moisés Naím

Justice, Photography by Mariana Cook

Photographs by Alison Shaw

Jamaica Kincaid’s New Novel – See Now Then

Paintings by Allen Whiting

Summer 2013, Issue 2 | FREE

aandimv.com twitter & facebook: artsandideas

Arts&IdeasThe Island’s Imagination

Martha’s Vineyard

Arts&Ideas

Publisher & editor

Patrick Phillips

Art director

Patrick Phillips

Poetry editor

Jennifer Tseng

Ad director

Martha’s Vineyard Times Ad Sales: [email protected]

contAct

Arts & Ideas PO Box 1411 West Tisbury, MA 02575

[email protected]

508.293.1693

About Arts & ideAs, inc.

Arts & Ideas magazine is published by Arts and Ideas, Inc., a print and digital publishing company. Communities are defined by resilience, ideas and arts. Arts & Ideas is a medium for commu-nity resilience— from person to planet.

A&I is available at newsstands free of charge. The price of one-year subscrip-tion is $11 (two issues) and $22 for two years (eight issues). Subscribers outside the U.S. must provide $15 per year for international postage.

Subscribe to Arts & Ideas at www.aandimv.com. You will receive one of the most beautiful magazines anywhere, while you support our highly imagina-tive island community.

MArthA’s VineyArd tiMes & A&i

January of this year Arts & Ideas and the Martha’s

Vineyard Times began a strategic content and

advertising partnership. In order to better serve

the Island arts community, this partnership allows

Arts & Ideas to offer Island arts and business

advertisers a greater value and extended reach. It

also will evolve into a strong content exchange as

the partnership matures. Arts & Ideas is honored

to be the Island’s arts magazine and knows this

partnership will expand and deepen the public’s

appreciation and connection with the arts and will

further connect Island artists with the world.

Arts&Ideas MagazineMartha’s Vineyard | Community | Imagination

P h oTo ( l E f T )

Jeanne Campbell

C o V E r P h oTo s

To P l E f T: Aung sun suu Kyi, Mariana Cook B oT To M l E f T: Atlantic ocean 2003, Alison shaw

Editor’s Letter

What is the place of the arts in our lives?

Having published Arts & Ideas, now for three

years, it has become clear to me that the arts

propose a common ground where people see

other people ‘re-present’ reality — a place of

shared imagination. On that common ground we can see our-

selves balanced, released; we can be made new. In this way, the

arts create an incredibly potent social event through which all

people might be equally renewed by other people’s imagined and

artfully practiced perspectives. You might say the arts propose a

great experiment; they test what we have come to understand as

our social bond, our community connection, the ways we see and

interact with each other. By proposing an imagined place, a here

we can all occupy, the arts suggest that in the less balanced

aspects of our lives we can do better — just imagine. In short, the

arts are a way to more fully meet each other. Through this meeting

place, the arts allow us to better understand how equal, con-

nected and how just and balanced our community is.

To take it a step further, the arts also say hello. They are a

communicative space in our lives. They are not some abstract

relationship to a sonata, a choreographic rondo, a poetic caesura

or painted diptych. The arts emotionally communicate, test and

affirm our shared humanness. In our busy, often structured lives

where we may have limited impact on the course of other people’s

lives, an artist of any kind chooses to connect with others by

clearing out an imagined space and saying hello, here, experience

this opening; watch, listen, see. Be part of creation.

With such vibrant creators and communicators as acquaintances,

friends and neighbors one true measure of the success of our

community is to fully reckon with, fully consider the here and hello

the arts propose. As we might take a sense of renewed together-

ness from a pot luck, a conversation with a friend, a gathering at

the Hebrew Center or the West Tisbury Congregational Church,

an encounter with the arts says we are all here in this together.

Fully reckoning with this simple encounter makes a big difference.

As with other issues of the magazine, in this issue of Arts & Ideas

we try to clear a space for togetherness on a local and global scale.

We provide a space to simply revel in the here and hello of the arts

and ideas presented. In this issue, through the writing of Islanders,

we also focus on an understanding of social justice. We’ve also

selected excerpts from national fiction and non fiction authors to

expand reflection, appreciation and understanding— to help

readers more fully reckon with equality, justice, togetherness. In

short, we try to re-present the imagination that connects us daily.

As always, and once again with this issue, I’m struck by how

welcoming the exchange of arts and ideas is in this community.

To all the people who have spent time thinking and writing and

painting and talking, thank you; your work in this community

makes my life better on a daily basis. I hope the way we’ve chosen

to present the art and ideas in this issue does you justice and

proposes an equally welcoming Here, hello.

Patrick Phillips— Publisher and Editor

Poet Laureate of Edgartown, by Jeanne staples, 36 x 36”, Oil on Linen

3Arts & Ideas Late Summer 201 3

1 9 hudson roverMarianne Goldberg’s hudson rover is an originally conceived invention: a performance piece for print. Initially performed as a dance/lecture/poem and published in ArtForum International in 1988, this reprint brings back to print this multi-spatial and multi-media performance.

28 justice – mariana cookThe faces of human rights are presented in full here. Mariana Cook’s Justice gives readers an essential opportu-nity to sit with national and international human rights activists, to read their words and to more fully embrace and understand lives dedicated to fighting injustice. This series of portraits is a compassionate and human story of struggle and freedom in black and white.

46 all things being equalWhere is the map of a just community? In plain words; it is found in the lives of all people. This extended essay on justice, written by several Island residents, looks at home, children, education, environment, equal access to knowl-edge, and reflects on compassion and social justice. It is an opportunity to pause, turn to and consider the local and global community we live in and create, together.

CONTENTS

FEatuRES

10

28

24

35

4 Arts & Ideas Late Summer 201 3

Artist profiles

10 Lillia Frantin

14 Susan Copen Oken

24 allen Whiting

35 alison Shaw

40 Carol Brown Goldberg

44 Jeanne Staples

Artist portrAits

7 Jeffery Serusa

18 Lily Morris

23 tim Laursen

poetry

13 Jill Jupen

34 Sandra Lim

43 Rebecca Wolff

essAys

8 Wendy taucher — Choreography & Form

NoN fictioN

17 Moisés Naím — the End of Power

54 Gar alperovitz — What then Must Be Done?

fictioN

19 Jamaica Kincaid — See Now then

experimeNtAl memoir

19 Kate Greenstreet — from Young tambling

59 Individual artisan and artist Guide

60 Gallery Guide

DEPArTMEnTs

46

40

44

10


500 North Road, Chilmark, MA(508)645-2544

www.hancockremv.comDeborah [email protected]

500 North Road, Chilmark, MA(508)645-2544

www.hancockremv.comDeborah [email protected]

Simply Magnificent is the only way to describe this pristine oceanfront parcel. Rolling dunes, Squibnocket Pond views, Atlantic Ocean views... when you see

this property you will feel as though you have stepped back in time... a blank slate for your dream home... in this unique & beautiful location... over 50 acres of

beachfront land abutting 60 acres of protected beachfront!

Exclusively Offered at $25,000,000

Lot Lines are Approximate

✶ Red Gate Farm Beachfront ✶✶ Simply Magnificent ✶

Lot Lines are Approximate

Simply Magnificent is the only way to describe this pristine oceanfront parcel.Rolling dunes, Squibnocket Pond views, Atlantic Ocean views... when you see

this property you will feel as though you have stepped back in time... a blank canvasfor your dream home... in this unique & beautiful location... over 50 acres

of beachfront land abutting 60 acres of protected beachfront!

Exclusively Offered Please Inquire

>> Artist/Gallery website: seaworthygallerymv.com

A rT I sT P o rT r A I T

very few islANders will fAil to recogNize this fAmiliAr imAge. Most associate the MV

Islander’s Doors with either a new adventure or returning home, whether it be a trip away or just a

long day re-provisioning off island. It is an image embedded in most of us from the countless trips

made on the Islander. It was the last remaining ferry in the fleet that had manually operated doors.

I had really wanted to capture this image for many many years, and only got the opportunity to do

so after she was de-comminsioned and tied up at the Fairhaven Maintenance Facility. On the

appointed day of the shoot, I was given the great opportunity to close the doors myself, thus also

bringing to a close one man’s love affair with an iconic vessel.

Jeffery serusa

Small Doors


Es sAy

there’s nothing I enjoy more than making up dances. Seeing a great piece of choreography performed by a great dancer is another pleasure. Lately, I’ve become curious about what my fellow choreographers see, how their own creative choices inform the way they view other

artist’s dances. I recently talked shop with Robert Battle, Artistic Director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the inventor of one of my favorite dances—Ella. A well-crafted idiosyncratic solo, Ella is filled with speed, mystery and sass, delivered via thrilling, ingenious virtuosity. It’s a joy to behold. I’m most interested in choreographic form and it’s this somewhat intangible element Mr. Battle and I discussed. There is an inherent conundrum in talking choreography. Choreography is as much about what one isn’t seeing as it is about what one sees. The core of a dance is a combination of movement, sound, space, expectation and the design in which they unfold. Great choreography creates a unique world, with a logic entirely it’s own. In order to provide tangible images to our discussion, I suggested Mr. Battle choose a number of favorite dances to use as points of discussion. He chose two: Alvin Ailey’s Revelations and Paul Taylor’s Arden Court. Enthusiastic, specific and perceptive, his thoughts ranged from the significance of a title and implications of geometry. Mr. Battle’s first and immediate response, when asked about a favorite dance, was to talk about Alvin Ailey’s masterwork Revela-tions. Not unlike Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Revelations is wildly popular, artistically profound and astonishing in it’s craft. Mr. Battle was unembarrassed about discussing this work as truly ground breaking—edgy in spite of its popularity. Our discussion of Revelations, form and seeing took a turn towards language: the

implications a title has upon a work. Mr. Battle feels the title of a dance offers the first entry point for the audience. While Mr. Battle does not think a title needs to be literal, he does feel if the frame-work of expectations formed from a title are not met, the moving images themselves are confusing. He thinks a well-chosen title creates a synergy between the intellectual side of the choreographer with the visceral element of the dancing. Paul Taylor’s Arden Court as the first choreographic work Mr. Battle added to the company repertory upon becoming Artistic Director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. The element in Arden Court which speaks most clearly to Mr. Battle is geometry. The structure of the work revolves in, around and up and down a diagonal. The geometric construct becomes a permanent presence, whether or not bodies are specifically moving in this defined space. In Mr. Battle’s analysis, the diagonal is as essential to Arden Court, as the dancers, music and moves. When watching dance, Mr. Battle has a running dialogue with himself: how does it all go together, curiosity about the intelligence of the cho-reographer, noticing moments he could never have thought of himself. Has he had a visceral reaction to the dance--does it take him in. When Mr. Battle sees a work with predictable form, he feels a distance is cre-ated between the stage and the viewer. Form in a well-constructed work creates a comfort zone for the cho-reography as well as a format through which boundaries are pushed. The choreographer maps the placement and pacing of movement and sound, building the structure of the dance. The performer actualizes the essence of the choreography by infusing interpretation onto this structure. Through the creator to performer, form is the vehicle that provides the audience with environment, logic and understanding. Form reveals the embodied connection for all— beyond structure and interpretation— to a fully realized whole.

Seeing the IntangibleChoreographers

Robert Battle &Wendy taucherTalk About Form by Wendy Taucher


COLLECTION

THE

feelgood footwear | beachwear | islandwear65 -2 M a i n S t r e e t , V i n e ya r d H a ve n , M A 0 2 5 6 8 | 5 0 8.6 8 7.9 8 14 | t h e co l l e c t i o n m v @ g m a i l . co m

V i s i t u s o n Fa ce b o o k & T w i t t e r.

A rT I sT P r o f I l E

My work is about loving self and the world around you in simple ways. Those simple ways are so crucial and important; they are the simple imbalances and balances that are in my paintings. When I paint there is this sense of balance— not static balance. That’s kind of how I’ve lived as well.

I’m a modernist, an early modernist. I see art as a connection to nature, people and humanity. My work is a lot about seeing beauty in the com-mon. I paint very mundane things.

I like to show the special-ness of the common and have people recognize in their own world. What is deep in side people is often misdirected by consumerism and materialism into small and narrow places — cloth-ing, jewelry, interior decorating, planning a garden. Maybe these are the things people stopped being aware of as children. My paintings provide a sense of delight that you may have felt as a child. I paint quickly. It takes a couple of weeks to finish, but the initial sketch

comes quickly. I am intense when I paint. I move color around the paint-ing and want to move people round the painting. I like people to feel as if they need to engaged with the painting. To be part of what they’re looking at. I appreciate those people who can get beyond the subject and become attached to what the painting is really about.

My real joy is playing things off each other. I don’t want to finish the paint-ing so that it becomes closed off. It’s important that people have access to it. I try to let what I’m doing show through and not insist on what is hap-pening — to let people enjoy that.

I’m aware when I’m painting of what I’ve chosen to put together as a still life. I’m always very close to what I’m selecting. It has to do with the shapes and the life of the color I’m looking at. I’m very close to the objects I paint. I repeat them. I have a very small world I love so dearly that I put into my painting — my objects and subjects, light and dark, hot and cold, jagged and smooth.

lillia frantin

Spring Studio, 36 x 48”, oil on Canvas


>> Artist’s gallery site: christina.com >> Artist site: lilliafrantinstudio.com

As a woman artist I never wanted to paint purely feminine things, but I wanted to paint feminine and masculine things. I want to have qualities of boldness and strength, to have an appreciation of subtle things. These things aren’t widely respected in the serious art world — I reject that.

To me, this is why art is such an amazing thing. There is enough in the world we can all respond to and can feel a kinship with.

Studio with Red Chair and Geranium, 40 x 40”, oil on Canvas

Garden and Sailboats, 36 x 48”, oil on Canvas


Kate Greenstreet — from young Tambling

E x P E r I M E n TA l M E M o I r

We didn’t have another world to go to, but we had books. We had the library downtown. I think my best friend and I must have read every book in the young adult section by the time we were ten (that word “adult” attracted us), at least all the

ones about girl detectives and romance and careers. We liked to sing on the swings, dance to records in the basement, talk about boys, act out dramatic scenes (birth, death). But I also needed to be alone. To think. My mother gave me the tiny room off the kitchen, where I could read and arrange things and listen to music on the radio. My father and my grandmother felt it was excessive for a child to have a room of her own (before this I was in the big room with my brothers), but my mother made it happen.

My room had a counter running the length of one wall—I loved this counter, the top was red linoleum. I used it mainly as a place to build small shrines. My father was constructing an archway into the living room (took about five years to finish) so there were often pieces of wood and plasterboard around. I might take a chunk of 2×4, cover it with a good white handkerchief, then set or stack things on it: to look at them. Rocks, dollhouse furniture, stuff I’d find on the sidewalk—or make, out of sticks and tin foil. This was almost an impulse toward sculpture, but I thought of my structures as altars, or shrines. I always had an urge to put things together that didn’t belong with each other until they were arranged, by me, in just the right way.

We moved away from the city when I turned 15. My mother was 36. All the women on our new street were mothers. They must have been mostly in their early thirties, their kids were still small. It was a pretty nice street. My mother was so happy to be in a place with trees. There were giant cracks in the life—we take that for granted now because that’s how the time is portrayed. But the women had their houses and their children, their marriages. Their husbands came into the dry cleaners where I worked after school.

When I think of them—Eleanor, Carolyn, Florence, Julie, Mary Ann— they seem trapped on that street. But on other streets, Barbara Guest was alive, Joan Mitchell was alive, Agnes Martin was alive. I got the job in the cleaners soon after we moved. That’s one of the places I learned about the kinds of things that happen to girls. Because you’d be there alone, most of the time. I learned a little bit about people. Mainly, I read. When it wasn’t busy, you’d just sit there until someone walked in. So

I read a lot, which was great since I always was trying to find more time to read.

The guys in back did the cleaning and pressing in the first part of the day. When I got there, I’d bag, staple the tickets to the plastic bags of clothes, and lift the clothes onto the conveyer. It could be heavy work for a person of my size, but I got stronger. The hardest thing about the job was how everybody came in all at once—Saturday morning, Friday night. That made me nervous, because people would be in a hurry and there’d be a long line. But I found I could do the job, and even like it. I did it for years, all through high school and, after that, full-time. I was supposed to go to college. I’d been accepted, but I didn’t want to go. Not that I intended to stay in town forever. But at the cleaners, although I interacted with people, I didn’t have to try to be one of them. It was different from school in that way.

In those years, I was especially attracted to books from the nineteenth century. I read a lot of stuff in translation. As a younger girl, I’d loved books in series—from there I went on to long books. I liked a large word-count. By this time, the friends I had weren’t reading what I read. But the books were also my friends. There was a kind of fidelity involved. I didn’t need to share them. I was faithful.

“She remains in the background, or, to say it better, elsewhere.” The time I was living in while reading wasn’t the time I occupied writing down NS for “no starch.” Shifting between the world of my book and dealing with whoever walked through the door was immediate and natural. Like any double life.

Later on, I would read to relax. But back then, I didn’t need relaxation. I needed to learn. And I needed to love. Not that I didn’t love anyone—but I needed to love more. I read to encounter characters I could love deeply. In Russian novels and plays, people jumped up from the table and said things. And they weren’t shocked if other people did—it was expected! I believed life took place in conversation. Or that it could. I wanted to somehow slip “through the barriers into the company of the Real Ones.” I was just starting to paint, and I hoped to be an artist someday.

from Young Tambling. Published by Ahsahta Press

Copyright © 2013 by Kate Greenstreet

>> Book website: ahsahtapress.org/product/young-tambling12 Arts & Ideas Late Summer 201 3

Jill Jupen — The Posie-Man

It was my childhood street

where Dick the Posie Man with his crooked leg

and slack-jaw

teeth missing

carried his crepe paper

posies tied up with twine, trying to protect his

brittle bouquet

from the rain

with his old, felt hat as he limped up the street

calling,

“Flowers!”

P o E T ry



Richard Avedon, the renowned photographer, invited me to create photo-

graphic work for a book he was planning that would explore the makings of ‘the family

portrait’. I was honored to be selected from over five hundred artists. I knew right away

that I would not produce the expected conventional image of generations of humans

gathered in stoic assemblage frozen for all time on a page. What I did not know, however,

was what I was going to create. On a consummate Vineyard morning I ventured onto a

field of screaming yellow Sunflowers. I was immediately transported back to childhood

remembrances of anthropomorphized flower personalities that played out in untold

hours of my youthful imagination.

susan Copen oken

Sunflower #2, 5’ 10”x 4’ 5”, mixed media and oil on canvas


Although most of the golden blooms appeared much the same in the field, there was one that

called to me with her human persona. I made the first image that night. I had found the family I

would photograph! Everyday was a hunt for another unique member of the family to celebrate and

they didn’t come easily. There were many barren days. Eventually 13 images were created to

complete the family portrait. It seemed serendipitous that for this short period I was able to track

down the most diverse examples in nature of this one family, ‘Helianthus’. The two pictured are

metaphors for male-female, yin-yang and contradictory forces. They are us. We are them.

— The sunflower transfer images would later become the studies for these large paintings.

>> Artist website: susancopenoken.com

Sunflower #5, 5’ 7” x 4’ 5”, mixed media and oil on canvas


The End of Power how power lost its edge: The More, Mobility and Mentality revolutions by Moisés naím

Javier solana, the spanish foreign minister who in the mid-1990s became secretary-general of NATO and then the European Union’s foreign policy chief, told me: “Over the last quarter-century—a period that included the Balkans and

Iraq and negotiations with Iran, the Israeli-Palestinian issues and numerous other crises—I saw how multiple new forces and factors constrained even the richest and most technologically advanced pow-ers. They—and by that I mean we—could rarely do any longer what we wanted.”

Solana is correct. Insurgents, fringe political parties, innovative startups, hackers, loosely organized activists, upstart citizen media, leaderless young people in city squares, and charismatic individuals who seem to have “come from nowhere” are shaking up the old order. Not all are savory; but each is contributing to the decay of power of the navies and police forces, television networks, traditional political parties, and large banks.

These are the micropowers: small, unknown, or once-negligible actors that have found ways to undermine, fence in, or thwart the megaplay-ers, the large bureaucratic organizations that previously controlled their fields. Going by past principles, micropowers should be aberra-tions. Because they lack scale, coordination, resources, or a preexist-ing reputation, they should not even be making it into the game—or at least, not making it for long before being squashed or absorbed by a dominant rival. But the reverse is true. Indeed, micropowers are denying established players many options that they used to take for granted. In some cases, the micropowers are even winning the contests against the megaplayers.

Do the newly arrived micropowers achieve this by overrunning the competition and driving the big incumbents out of business? Rarely. They are not equipped for vast takeovers. Their advantage is precisely that they are not burdened by the size, scale, asset and resource portfolio, centralization, and hierarchy that the megaplayers have deployed and spent so much time and effort nurturing and managing. The more the micropowers take on these traits, the more they turn

into the type of organization that other new micropowers will attack with just as much effectiveness. Instead, successful micropowers capitalize on a new set of advantages and techniques. They wear down, impede, undermine, sabotage, and outflank the megaplayers in ways that the latter, for all their vast resources, find themselves ill-equipped and ill-prepared to resist. And the effectiveness of these techniques to destabilize and displace entrenched behemoths means that power is becoming easier to disrupt and harder to consolidate

The implications are breathtaking. They signal the exhaustion of the Weberian bureaucracy, the system of organization that delivered the benefits and also the tragedies of the twentieth century. The decou-pling of power from size, and thus the decoupling of the capacity to use power effectively from the control of a large Weberian bureau-cracy, is changing the world. And this decoupling invites a disquieting thought: if the future of power lies in disruption and interference, not management and consolidation, can we expect ever to know stability again?

SO WHAT HAS CHANGED?

It’s hard to identify the moment when the dispersal and decay of power, and the decline of the Weberian bureaucratic ideal, began—much less to do so in the precise way with which, say, the poet Philip Larkin pinpointed the advent of the sexual revolution: “Between the end of the Chatterley ban” and the Beatles’ first album.2

Still, November 9, 1989—the date the Berlin Wall fell—is not a bad place to start. Loosening half a continent from tyranny’s grip, unlock-ing borders, and opening new markets, the end of the Cold War and its animating ideological and existential struggle undermined the rationale for a vast national security state and the commitment of economic, political, and cultural resources that supported it. Whole

n o n - f I CT I o n from The End of Power by Moisés naím. Copyright © 2013 by Moisés naím.

Excerpted with permission of Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group.


This is the terrain of demographics, standards of living, levels of health and education, patterns of migration, families, communities, and, ultimately, our attitudes: the reference points for our aspira-tions, beliefs, desires, and, indeed, the ways in which we think about ourselves and others. To describe such changes at this deep level and to understand what they are doing to power, we need to break them down into three categories: the More revolution, the Mobility revolu-tion, and the Mentality revolution. The first is swamping the barriers to power; the second is circumventing them; the third is undercutting them.

populations forced to march more or less in lockstep were freed to find their own drummers, an upending of the existing order that found visceral expression in events such as the Christmas 1989 execu-tion of the Ceausescus in Romania and the January 1990 storming of East Germany’s Stasi headquarters—the secret-service organization that represented one of the darker pinnacles of postwar bureaucratic achievement. Economies trapped in a mostly closed system were opened to foreign investment and trade championed by a burgeoning herd of multinational corporations. As General William Odom, Ron-ald Reagan’s National Security Agency director, observed: “By creat-ing a security umbrella over Europe and Asia, Americans lowered the business transaction costs in all these regions: North America, Western Europe and Northeast Asia all got richer as a result.”3 Now those lower transaction costs could be extended, and with them also the promise of greater economic freedom.

Slightly more than a year after thousands of Germans took sledge-hammers to the Berlin Wall, in December 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research on the Franco-Swiss border, sent the first successful com-munication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol and a server via the Internet, thereby creating the World Wide Web. That invention, in turn, sparked a global communications revolution that has left no part of our lives untouched.

The end of the Cold War and the birth of the Internet were certainly factors enabling the rise of today’s micropowers, but they were by no means the only important ones. We often find it hard to resist the urge to attribute a period of great flux to a single cause. Take, for instance, the role of text messaging and social media such as Facebook and Twitter in upheavals around the world. A fierce but ultimately sterile debate has occurred between those who argue that social media have sparked new political movements and those who argue that their effect has been overstated. As elements in the struggle for power, social media have helped coordinate demonstra-tions and inform the outside world about human rights abuses. But savvy repressive regimes like those of Iran and China have also used these tools for surveillance and repression. And when in doubt, a government can simply turn off national Internet access (at least in large measure, as Egypt and Syria did when their dictators were challenged) or establish an elaborate system of filters and controls that reduces the flow of nonapproved online communication (as China has done with its “Great Firewall”). There are plenty of cases and counter-cases that illustrate the arguments of Internet optimists and techno-futurists like Clay Shirky as well as the counter-arguments of skeptics like Evgeny Morozov and Malcolm Gladwell. Thus, to under-stand why the barriers to power have become porous, we need to look at deeper transformations—to changes that began accumulating and accelerating even before the end of the Cold War or the spinning of the Web. The biggest challenges to power in our time have come from changes in the basics of life—in how we live, where we live, for how long and how well. What has changed is the landscape in which power operates.

>> Book website: resiliencethebook.com

Dr. Moisés Naim served as the Minister of Finance in Venezuela, the Executive Director of the World Bank, and Editor of Foreign Policy magazine. He is now Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. As such, Dr. Naim writes as a scholar, practitioner, and witness to global change over the last three decades.


my goal as a painter is to map consciousness through portraiture by focusing on

the internal side of the human experience. The environment that the subjects inhabit is

animated by their emotional state.

Stalling Out is about being disconnected, and lost. Asleep on a storm of self-created

toxicity, the man runs out of conscious strength to run from his own personal turbulence.

lily Morris


Stalling Out, 42 x 48”, oil on Canvas

>> Artist website: lilymorris.carbonmade.com18 Arts & Ideas Late Summer 201 3

Marianne Goldberg — hudson roverA Performance Piece for Print

P E r fo r M A n C E P I EC E fo r P r I n T hUDson roVEr, Choreographed, Directed, and Written by Marianne Goldberg, in her invented genre of

the “Performance Piece for Print.” re~printed here from its original publication in Artforum International

Magazine in new york City, December 1988. Photographs taken for the piece by robert Tobey.

hudson roverA Performance Piece for Printby Marianne Goldberg

>> Artist website: www.valeriesonnenthal.com

hudson roverA Performance Piece for Print

by Marianne Goldberg

Meanings continually form and re-form over the surfaces of

the body. The body is a stage which reinvents itself: wings, cur-

tains, action, space, bones muscles and flights of fantasy. The

body surpasses itself through the very discourse in which it is

embedded: Bedding, Budding, Butting. In a wide yearning that

travels along the cool surfaces of arms and legs, carrying one’s

own weight, excited to move, dancing and reading within the

page— inhabiting a place of great luxuriousness and pleasure.

— Marianne Goldberg

For publication in Artforum International in December 1988,

Marianne Goldberg choreographed HuDSON ROVER in her

invented genre, the “performance piece for print.” Com-

posed of juxtaposed or overlaid text and photographed

gestures, in this genre Goldberg re-conceives the printed

page as a stage the dancer can vividly inhabit differently,

with “reading” becoming a theatrical act.

Each of Goldberg’s Performance Pieces for Print were also

presented as lecture performance in radically altered form,

text spoken at a podium accompanied by gestures. Gold-

berg and performers also danced each work as a full

concentrated performance, highly theoretical and intel-

lectual lecture material inserted as surprise, undercut,

and ecstasy.

HuDSON ROVER is the second of several works Goldberg

created in this genre, the first published in Women & Perfor-

mance, titled Ballerinas & Ball Passing; the next in Writings

on Dance in Australia, Coming into Parts and performed

with Eva Karzcag; another a sequel to Ballerinas, featuring

performer Christianne Brown and christened after its ret-

rograde language structure as Be To Want I.

Homogenized Ballerinas, printed in Meaning and Motion, an

anthology edited by Jane Desmond, is a scholarly transfor-

mation of the performative material. the essay references

live installations of the pieces, performed and printed

across the united States to Canada and Yugoslavia from

1987 through the year 2000.

In Ballerinas, photographs of Goldberg as a university lec-

turer and as a dancer-choreographer intersperse with

images of classic works by other dance artists, historical

and contemporary. throughout the works, Goldberg

choreographs gestures in counterpoint with language

and composes both theatrically, as opacities across two-

dimensional surfaces of the printed page. Resultant work

is held in the hands of spectator-readers, who turn the

page potentially in discussion with others.

Experimental performative writing rarely fits into what we

already know how to read. Evoking questions about articu-

lation of movement in relation to printed word, mechanics

and conventions of reproduction in intellectual discourse

often render alternate forms invisible or unprintable.

although traditional formats for reproducing theoreti-

cal insight erode changes on pieces like HuDSON ROVER,

publication in an arts journal celebrates creativity, point-

ing to intentional ironic play with conventional text, image,

punctuation, kinetics, caption, foot-note.

Visual formats of many standard publications present a

seamless, homogenized flow of predictable text, while

occasional kinetic images are available only as illus-

trations. Publication in Artforum as an artists project

provided space where a performer can live in her own re-

imagined world. Subjectivities of the moving body are rec-

reated for a rarefied realm of heightened existence within

the theater of the page. this reprint in Arts & Ideas brings

HuDSON ROVER to life once more, to roam across the

page, alive within a thriving contemporary space.

Dr. Marianne Goldberg is a writer, choreographer, and visual artist. She is founder and artistic director of Pathways Projects Institutes in Chilmark, where she designs installations and collaborative arts community events.

Her scholarly writings and Performance Pieces for Print have been published in The Drama Review; Artforum International; Women & Performance and numerous other journals and books. Her chore-ography has been performed internationally and across the United States.

hudson roverA Performance Piece for Printby Marianne Goldberg


>> Artist website: cargocollective.com/laursen

i’ve decided to dedicatethe next ten years to combining live musical performances

with home-made robotics. I want to create a traveling vaudeville inspired stunt/music/food

show and tour the world. I’m three years into it. I have finished prototyping all the designs

and completed the circuit I will use to control my machines.

I am living in my shop near the Navy Yard in Brooklyn and wishing I was in a barn on MV.

Tim laursen


Ganesha, Aluminum, wood, pig skulls, pneumatic cylinders, blue fur, lED’s, wire, and steel, 3 x 2 x 8’.

My fingers emit sparks of fire with expectation of my future labors. — William Blake



Red Tulips, 18 x 14”, painted in 2005, oil on canvas


Allen Whiting

>> Artist website: allenwhiting.com

Sailboat – Menemsha Pond, 24 x 30”, painted in 2003, oil on canvas


Continuum. I’m in the continuum; I’m a consciousness that’s only here for a little while, existing in this space that is so full of a lot of stuff. I mean, the continuum for me; what is our history, when our history makes us realize probably more about the continuum than if you were just, you know, trying to kill something to

eat all day every day. You know what I mean? We read about and know who our ancestors were, and we worry about where our offspring might end up . . . The artistic continuum, I just think that I’m studying something that’s much bigger than I am— I wouldn’t expect to finish it, in a certain way.

My particular bent is towards what’s right there (points at his barn). Now, I suppose what’s right there has an incredible meaning to me which has its own continuum— because it’s a barn, built by the family, either survived by the family or not. You know that incredible patch of green, that’s just some weeds that are on my shoulder to destroy one of these days, (laughs) but I want to paint it first. So, that’s kind of the continuum for me. That it’s just because I happen to love landscape, and it’s the landscape that’s closest to me. It’s forever presenting itself.

So, it’s simple. Very . . . (laughter.)

Two people, talking on the porch. Hot July day. Fan and iced tea:


Big Sandy, 40 x 60”, painted in 2000, oil on canvas


Aung san suu Kyi “ . . . I have often wondered why people treat each other in

such an autocratic way. Now we know, of course, what it is

like to be deprived of one’s basic rights, and we would not

subject anybody to that kind of experience. Putting it in a

very general way, it’s a mixture of greed and fear that pushes

people to ill-treat others. They want to preserve their own

security and enjoy the privileges to which their position

entitles them. And also ignorance, because there are some

people who really believe that it’s all right to treat those

who are ‘different’ from them in any way they like.”

Aung San Suu Kyi is a Burmese opposition politician and former Secretary General of the National League for Democracy.


JUSTICE

A few years ago, I became fascinated by people for whom the “rule of law” is no

mere abstraction, for whom human rights is a fiercely urgent concern. I hoped to give a face

to social justice by making portraits of human rights pioneers. The subjects I chose live in a

multitude of countries, in both open and closed societies; they range widely in their ancestry

and social origins. Some have been advocates from an early age. Others came to their cru-

sades unexpectedly, even unwillingly. Several were simply doing their jobs, and then realized

that doing so can, under certain circumstances, be a radical act.

To photograph and conduct interviews with these people, I traveled to countries

around the world. I learned that many of these advocates are devoted to a cause with which

they have a personal connection—a cause that is, in some sense, a birthright. But equally

impressive are those who fight to protect people with whom they have nothing in common,

save a shared humanity.

My intention was to pay tribute, not only to the courage of independent thought

and action that these people possess, but also to their dogged insistence that reason and

fairness prevail. There are few people in the world who possess such passion and caring for

others, and who also have the imagination and the practical expertise to accomplish their

goals. It has been my privilege to meet some of them and to try to understand and reveal

their strength of character.

Mariana Cook

fAces of the humAN rights revolutioN

P h oTo G rA P h s By

MArIAnA CooK

Photographs and text excerpt are reprinted from

“Justice: faces of the human rights revolution”,

Copyright © 2013 by Mariana Cook, Courtesy of Damiani.


“ . . . I had the incomparable professional opportunity

that has defined the balance of my career: to serve

as one of the volunteer lawyers who assisted Thur-

good Marshall and his association with the NAACP

Legal Defence Fund in developing the strategies

leading to the decisions in the school segregation

cases—Brown v. Board of Education and Bolling v.

Sharpe—in 1954 and 1955. The Supreme Court had

at last brought the nation into compliance with its

founding principle, promulgated by the Declaration

of Independence and reaffirmed by Abraham Lin-

coln at Gettysburg, that “all men are created equal.”

“. . . All of my later experiences have reinforced

the lesson I learned in Atlanta and South Africa:

that the true forces for justice come from inside

each society and that real change is never achieved

by one individual—even though individual acts of

courage and determination are essential. Profound

and sustainable social change always requires a

critical mass of people willing to work together to

reach the tipping point that will alter history and

achieve justice. Most important, I learned that it

is possible to win.”

Gay McDougal louis h. Pollak

Gay McDougal, a global civil rights lawyer, began her life in the segragated South, attended Yale Law School and helped orga-nize the international Anti-Apartheid Movement. She was a member of the South African Independent Electoral Commis-sion and stood beside Nelson Mandela as he cast his first vote.

Louis H. Pollak (1922–2012) was universally beloved. As a lawyer, law teacher, and judge, he was involved in some of the most controversial areas of the law . . . He served as Dean of Yale and the University of Pennsylvania Law Schools.


“My personal experience as a disabled person taught

me how important it is to fight injustice and protect

human dignity . . .

“My motivation to teach, research, and practice human

rights law stems from my belief that the international

catalogue of human rights offers a wonderful set of

values and principles that includes all, transcends

the boundaries of religion and culture, and is the only

basis for freedom, peace and equality. Human rights

treaties need to be used as tools; otherwise they

remain just words on paper. They can change the

world, or they can merely be given lip service.”

“Throughout my life, I have worked to eradicate racial

discrimination in the United States; this effort con-

tinues to affect how I think, what I do, and who I am.

. . . I’m proudest of my role as chief legal strategist in

Brown v. Board of Education. What I hoped to achieve

was equal educational opportunity for all African-

American children. While that has not yet been real-

ized, this ruling remains the key to achiveing racial

equality and justice in the United States. In guaran-

teeing equality to all persons in our society as a fun-

damental tenet of basic Law, Brown stands at the

highest pinnacle of American judicial expression,

because it espouses the loftiest values.”

robert l. Carter Theresia Degener

Robert L. Carter (1917–2012) won 21 of the 22 cases he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, securing First Amendment protection for civil rights organizations, expanding federal protection of voting rights, and strengthening equal access to housing and employment.

Theresia Degener is a German law professor and a leading expert and advisor on international human rights, disability, discrimination, bioethics, and gender laws.

JUSTICE

Mariana CookfAces of the humAN rights revolutioN


“One thing that is so spectacular about the human

rights movement is that it appeals to the best of

the human spirit. It’s about the ability to live with

dignity. To love the way you wish. To think what you

wish. To speak what you wish. To associate with

whom you wish. It’s the idea that we are sovereign

over our bodies, our minds, and our spirits. To artic-

ulate that in a way that gives freedom to people

across the globe is one of the greatest aspirations.”

Anthony Romero is the Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Anthony romero


“ . . . And isn’t it extraordinary, in a world where might

does sometimes seem to be right, that in the end

it is goodness that prevails? We were involved in a

struggle against the injustice of apartheid. Many

times we seemed overpowered. The apartheid

government had all the paraphernalia imaginable.

Even so, goodness ultmately prevailed . . . “

Archbishop Desmond Tutu is Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town, South Africa, a veteran anti-apartheid activist and peace campaigner often described as “South Africa’s moral conscience.”

Desmond Tutu

JUSTICE

Mariana CookfAces of the humAN rights revolutioN

>> Author Website: cookstudio.com >> Book Website: artbook.com/justice.html 33Arts & Ideas Late Summer 201 3

sandra lim — Above Us Are the last lights

planting something within us

that also represents death for the

taking at every turn;

greeting the season

all coated in soft silver

with a strong handshake;

loving and hating,

those buttons done up all the way

to the top of your sweater.

P o E T ry

>> More by Sandra Lim: www.readab.com/slim.html34 Arts & Ideas Late Summer 201 3


Alison shaw

Skaket Beach II 2013


moving water— and it has that early morning light. The quality of

light and the fact that the water is going to be moving and that the

pilings are shown as much as possible; I’m showing as many as I

possibly can and the negative space in between. I’d move an inch

left or right to go from all bunched together to slightly separated.

So, it’s really paying attention. And, I can’t do this in the evening,

because the light’s coming from the wrong direction. Early morning,

like this morning— it was raining as I pulled up there— they are still

back-lit. Therefore it makes the pilings darker against the lighter sky.

Rather than if the light were from another direction an hour after

The tone, if I were doing the same thing at dusk, rather than

at dawn with the light coming from behind me, the exposure, the

darkness, or the value of the pilings versus the background is going

to be much closer, a lower contrast.

— That would make it less interesting.

I need to watch the pattern. I’m always really paying

attention. I spend a lot of my time watching things, being a fly

on the wall. I’m never documenting in the traditional sense of the

word. It’s always my own take on it.

One key project I did years ago in the mid-nineties, was

photographing his 24 foot day sailor. I was hired to photograph it

being constructed at Gannon and Benjamin in my own way, in a

way that no one else would have photographed it, that brought

my own art to it. I was hired to see the boat in a way that people

wouldn’t necessarily see it. I was broadening their vision of what

the boat is and what the craft is.

The dock this morning that I was photographing, if I were

going to truly document it from a neutral perspective, it would be

in neutral light and freezing the water as it moved. But, I had this

whole vision in my mind of showing all of the pilings, but with the

Menemsha II 2008 Nantucket Sound 2008

Alison shaw


>> Artist website: alisonshaw.com

Fishing Pier II, Oak Bluffs 2013

Alison shaw


see now then, the dear Mrs. Sweet who lived with her husband Mr. Sweet and their two children, the beautiful Persephone and the young Heracles in the Shirley Jackson house, which was in a small village in New England. The house, the Shirley Jackson

house, sat on a knoll, and from a window Mrs. Sweet could look down on the roaring waters of the Paran River as it fell furiously and swiftly out of the lake, a man-made lake, also named Paran; and looking up, she could see surrounding her, the mountains name Bald and Hale and Anthony, all part of the Green Mountain Range; and she could see the firehouse where some-times she could attend a civic gathering an hear her government represen-tative say something that might seriously affect her and the well-being of her family or see the firemen take out the fire trucks and dismantle various parts of them and put the parts back together and then polish all the trucks and then drive them around the village with a lot of commotion before putting them away again in the firehouse and they reminded Mrs. Sweet of the young Heracles, for he often did such things with his toy fire trucks; but just now when Mrs. Sweet was looking out from a window in the Shirley Jackson house, her son no longer did that. From that window again, she could see the house where the man who invented time-lapse photography lived but he was dead now; and she could see the house, the Yellow House, that Homer had restored so carefully and lovingly, polishing the floors, painting the walls, replacing the pipes, all this in the summer before that awful fall, when he went hunting and after shooting with his bow and arrow the largest deer he had ever shot, he dropped down dead while trying to load it into the back of his truck. And Mrs. Sweet did see him lying in his coffin in the Mahar funeral home, and she thought then, why does a funeral home always seem so welcoming, so inviting from the outside, so comfort-able are the chairs inside, the beautiful golden glow of the lamplight softly embracing every object in the room, the main object being the dead, why is this so, Mrs. Sweet said to herself as she saw Homer, lying all alone and snug in his coffin, and he was all dressed up in brand-new hunting clothes, a red and black plaid jacket made of boiled wool and a red knitted hat, all clothing made by Woolrich or Johnson Bros. or some outdoor clothing outfitters like that; and Mrs. Sweet wanted to speak to him, for he looked so much like himself, to ask him if he would come to paint her house, the

Shirley Jackson house, or could he come and do something, anything, fix the pipes, clean the gutters of the roof, check to see if water had leaked into the basement, because he appeared to be so like himself, but his wife said to her, Homer shot the biggest dear of his life and he died while trying to put it in the back of his truck; and Mrs. Sweet was sympathetic to the worldly-ness of the dead, for she could make herself see the army of worms, parasites, who had, without malice aforethought, begun to feed on Homer and would soon reduce him to the realm of wonder and disillusion so sad, so sad all of this that Mrs. Sweet could see then, while standing at the window of the house in which Shirley Jackson had lived and across the way was the house in which old Mrs. McGovern had died and she had lived in it for many years before she became old, she had lived in her house, build in a neoclassical-some-thing style that harkened back from another era, long ago, long before Mrs. McGovern had been born and then became a grown-up woman who mar-ried and lived with her husband in the Yellow House and made a garden of only peonies, big white one that were streaked with a wine-dark red on the petals nearest the stamens, like an imagined night crossing an imagined day, so had been those peonies in Mrs. McGovern’s garden and she had grown other things but no one could remember what they were, only her peonies were committed to memory when Mrs. McGovern had died and so therefore vanished from the face of the earth, Mrs. Sweet had dug up those peonies from that garden, “Festiva Maxima” was their name, and planted them in her own garden, a place Mr. Sweet and the beautiful Persephone and even the young Heracles hated. The Pembrokes, father and son, mowed the lawn, though sometimes the father went off to Montpelier, the capital, to cast votes for or against, as he felt to be in the best interest of the people who lived in that village in New England, which even now is situated on the banks of the river Paran; and the other people in that village, the Woolmingtons lived always in their house, and the Atlases too, and so also were the Elwells, the Elkinses, the Powerses; the library was full of books but no one went into it, only parents with their children, parents who wanted their children to read books, as if reading books were a mysterious form of love, a mystery that must remain so. The small village in New England held all that and much more and all that and much more was then and now, time and space inter-mingling, becoming one thing, all in the mind of Mrs. Sweet.

f I CT I o n Excerpted from See Now Then, A novel by Jamaica Kincaid, published by

farrar, straus and Giroux. Excerpt provided by permission of the author.

Copyright (c) 2013 by Jamaica Kincaid,

see now thenby Jamaica Kincaid


All that was visible to Mrs. Sweet as she stood in the window, at the window, but so much was not visible to her then, it lay before her, all clear and still, as if trapped on a canvas, enclosed in a rectangle made up of dead branches of Betula nigra, and

she could not see it and could not understand it even if she could see it: her husband, the dear Mr. Sweet, hated her very much. He so often wished her dead: once then, a night when he had returned home after performing a piano concerto by Shostakovich to an audience of people who lived in the nearby villages and so felt they wanted to get out of their homes from time to time, but as soon as they left their homes they wanted to return immediately, for nothing was nearby and nothing was as nice as their own homes and hearing Mr. Sweet play the piano made them sleepy, their heads sometimes suddenly falling forward, and they struggled to keep their chins from landing on their chests and that happened anyway and there would be lurching and balancing and gulping and coughing and though Mr. Sweet’s back was turned away from his rural audience he could sense all this and he could feel every twitch, every shudder, as it registered in each individual. He loved Shostakovich and as he played the music written by this man—

“The Oath to the People’s Commissar,” “Song of the Forests,” “Eight Preludes for Piano” —the grave sorrows and injustices visited on him flowed over Mr. Sweet and he was very moved by the man and the music that the man made and he wept as he played, pouring all of his feelings of despair into that music, imagining that his life, his precious life was being spent with that dreadful woman, his wife, the dear Mrs. Sweet, who love making three courses of French food for her small children and loved their company and she loved gardens and loved him and he was least worthy of her love, for he was such a small man sometime people mistook him for a rodent, he scurried around so. And he was not a rodent at all, he was a man capable of understanding Wittgenstein and Einstein and any other name that ended in stein, Gertrude included, the intricacies of the universe itself, the being Then and how Then becomes Now; how well he knew everything but he could not express himself, he could not show the world, at least as the world turned up in the form of the population of some small villages in New England, what a remarkable person he was then and had been and in time to come, these people who wore the same socks days in a row and didn’t dye their hair after it lost the natural color and the lust it had when they were young and they liked to eat foods that were imperfect, food made limp by natural pathogens or insects for instance, people who worried about the pilot light going out of the boiler and the pipes freezing because the house was cold and then the plumber would have to be called and that plumber would complain about the work of the plumber who came before him because plumbers always found each other’s work imperfect; and his audi-ence worried about all sorts of things Mr. Sweet had never heard of because he grew up in a city and lived in a large building that had many apartments in it and when things went wrong, someone named the Super was called to make it right: the Super could change a lightbulb, get the elevator to work again after it had ceased to do so, make the garbage disappear, scrub the

floor of the lobby, call the utility company if the utility company had to be called, the super could do many things and in Mr. Sweet’s life, when he was a child, the super did them and Mr. Sweet had never heard of them until he came to live with that dreadful woman whom he had married and was now the mother of his children, the mother of his beautiful daughter in particu-lar. The piano concerto came to an end and Mr. Sweet shook himself out of the deep sympathy he felt for the composer of the music and the audience shook themselves into their duck-feather-filled coats, which had trapped the smell of wood smoke from the fires build in the fireplaces and wood-burning stoves, that was a winter smell, that was a smell Mr. Sweet hated, the super would have taken care of that smell, this was not a smell of Mr. Sweet’s childhood; a dining room in the Plaza Hotel, his mother wearing French perfume, those were the smells of Mr. Sweet’s childhood and that then: the mother’s perfume, the Plaza Hotel. And he said a good night to those people who smelled as if they lived in rooms where wood was always burning in the woodstove, and immediately no longer thought of them as they drove home in their Subarus and second hand Saabs, and he put on his coat, a coat made from the hair of camels, a very nice coat double-breasted, that the beastly wife of his, Mrs. Sweet, had bought for him from Paul Stu-art, a fine haberdasher in the city where Mr. Sweet was born and he hated the coat because his benighted wife had given it to him and how could she know what a fine garment it was, she who had just not long ago gotten off the banana boat, or some other benighted form of transport, everything about her being so benighted, even the vessel on which she arrived, and he love the coat for it suited him, he was a prince, a prince should wear such a coat, an elegant coat; and so glad he was rid of his audience, he slipped behind the wheel of his own used Saab, a better one than most of the others, and he turned into a lane and then turned left onto another lane and after one quarter of a mile he could see his home, the Shirley Jackson house, the structure that held his doom, that prison and the guard inside, in bed already, most likely, surrounded by catalogs of flowers and their seeds, or just lying there reading The Iliad or The Library of Greek Mythology by Apollodorus, his wife that horrible bitch who’d arrived on a banana boat, it was Mrs. Sweet. But what if a surprise awaited him just inside the door, for even a poor unfortunate man as he, for so Mr. Sweet thought of himself, unfortunate to be married to that bitch of a woman born of beast; the surprise being the head of his wife just lying on the counter, her body never to be found, but her head severed from it, evidence that she could no longer block his progress in the world, for it was her presence in his life that kept him from being who he really was, who he really was, who he really was, and who might that really be, for he was a man small in stature and he really felt his small stature so keenly, especially when standing beside the young Heracles, whose deeds were known and they were great and he was famous for them, even before he was born.

*



>> Artist website : carolbrowngoldberg.com

NT1, 84 x 72 x 2”, Acrylic on Canvas with Pulverized Glass


>> Artist website : carolbrowngoldberg.com

Carol Brown Goldberg

Class Photo 2011, Bronze, Dimensions Variable

Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. — T.S Eliot

Color School artist, Gene Davis, was my teacher/mentor. Known for his large striped canvases, he would pace the Corco-ran Art School studio, hands in pocket, while meting out pearls of personal philosophy and reflection. Something he said and later wrote;

“Look at the painting in terms of individual colors. In other words, instead of simply glancing at the work, select a specific color such as yellow or a lime green, and take the time to see how it operates across the paint-ing. Approached this way, something happens, I can’t explain it.”

In 2004 my work was focused on color and how the eye sees nuanced values. The size of the painting, averaging 7 feet by 8 feet is an important factor. Broad parameters allow greater lati-tude for peripheral vision, and the peripheral vision is what cre-ates the illusion of light, or the center aura.

A meditative process of painting is essential.

Small circles or markings sit atop writings, drawings, lined geometric shapes, pulverized glass, or gestures of ‘thrown’ paint. I like the synthesis of freedom and order, daring and doubt… not the willing suspension of doubt, but its embrace. I am comfortable with opposites, with contradictions, with ambi-guity. Through a practice of rhythmic repetition of brushstrokes, my mind is free to think and feel about the unobservable, the infinite, life, death, and everything in between.

Sculpture: I had a sculpture commission in Spain, at the same time as the Clinton-Obama debates. I moved a work table in front of the television and began to glue disparate elements together with no pre-conceived idea of what the final image would be, a bit of a Dada happening. It seemed as if the debates were generating these works. The process is similar to paint-ing, where the meditation of setting my hands free from my con-scious mind allows me a kind of wild freedom of form. After 5 weeks, I had over 150 anthropomorphic maquettes made of spigots, electrical items, pipe fittings, gadgets.


Vanity and delusion propel much of the creativity within and around us. Empathy and

substance are my elusive counterpoints.

Vanity motivates me to think my efforts can engage a viewers perceptions of the world.

Empathy forces me strive to reach beyond my cloistered art life into a world of dynamic and

ominous change. I create in a fast, spontaneous (semi-delusional), manner, when something

pushes me— no repetitive methodology. As a result I throw away most of my efforts.

Substance comes from imagery that both presents traditional composition elements and

documents a specific moment. The picture” bullet marks”, derives from a New York Times

photo of a well dressed girl lost in thought in front of a large bullet pocked wall (in Tripoli, Libya,

in 2011). The face is where I focused my attention— with the use of strong complementary

color to contrast the colorless marks behind her.

The aim of the composition is to present a strong, simple “hook”, the girl, who draws the

viewer into a more mysterious menacing space. She is innocent, could live around the block,

but is in a war zone— a “timeless beauty” effected by our tax dollars.

richard limber


Bullet Marks, pastel on paper, 16 x 20"

>> Artist website: richardlimber.com42 Arts & Ideas Late Summer 201 3

rebecca Wolff

let’s put our heads together

and open our mouths

what caverns inside

will be what

joins us

P o E T ry

>> Artist website: rebeccawolff.com 43Arts & Ideas Early Summer 201 3

When I was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, I painted a

lot of portraits. Portrait painting, portrait drawing, life drawing, cast drawing. My

primary concern at that time was simply to get a good likeness. It’s always been the

philosophy of the school to immerse the students in the fundamentals of art

training, even during the ‘60s and ‘70s when other art schools abandoned this

practice. In the last ten years I’ve reconnected with the portrait, but I’m pretty

clear that I’m not a “portrait painter.” I never do commissions. Most times, people

have a very specific idea of how they would like to look when captured in oil on

canvas, and I don’t think I would be very good at figuring that out.

Jeanne staples


Solitaire, 50 x 72”, Oil on linen

Blenheim Spot, 20 x 34”, oil on linen


I discovered that I have become more interested in the idea of populating my

canvases with figures which are in service to a story. A few years ago, when I

started my painting series Present Pending, I began to think of the portraits as

a collection of paintings that, separately and collectively, would suggest the

exposition of a story. Each piece is designed to give the viewer a sense of one

of the actors in the narrative and a setting. Collectively the players interact and

the narratives connect, but without telling the whole tale, letting the viewers

complete the story themselves.

Nearly all my portraits now seem to be inspired in this way, whether

it’s a one-off portrait, part of a series, or one of my 3-D paired painting

installations. The figures are meant to live in an ambiguous narrative where the

viewer is invited to draft the next chapters. I am endlessly fascinated with the

idea of creating art that aspires to engage the viewer — draw them in, invite

their participation, tease their imagination. That’s what a good exposition does

for me, and the pursuit of it in my work keeps me engaged.

>> Gallery Website: granarygallery.com >> Artist website: jeannestaples.com

Waiting, 50 x 36”, oil on linen

all things being equalVINEYARD PERSPECTIVES ON LOCAL AND GLOBAL jUSTICE

Brendan o’neil

Environment

Continued on page 48

Martha’s Vineyard may not be the first place you think of when you hear the term “Environmental Justice”. What does the concept mean in the context of our Island? Most people think of Environmental Justice as the fight for fairness when it comes to the distribution of positive and negative environ-

mental impacts – and that’s true. It is a global movement that emerged largely in response to the disturbing trend where polluting industries were building in areas with the least powerful political voices.

Elsewhere, Environmental Justice is characterized as a struggle where one party suffers the harms of environmental damage while the other reaps the financial rewards of the exploitation. On the Vineyard however, this particular dichotomy does not quite fit. For the most part, we are all in it together. All of us stand to benefit more from environmental protection than exploitation.

Importantly for our Vineyard experience, Environmental Justice is also a social move-ment that is very much locally-based. On Martha’s Vineyard, it involves a confluence of public and private groups and individuals applying pressure from many different direc-tions, all aimed at building a workable definition of the elusive term “sustainability”.

The Vineyard Conservation Society (VCS) has fought to forge that workable definition for nearly 50 years. Stated broadly, the goal is to bring consumption patterns across a range of sectors within levels that can be sustained into the future— indefinitely.


Moshup Trail West View, 16 x 20”, oil on canvas, by rez Williams



How to do that? We must start by reaching consensus that this Island community will safeguard the integrity of our natu-ral resource support system. That means keeping farmland and wildlife habitat from being consumed. For VCS, it translates into advocating for open space acquisition, facilitating gifts of perma-nent conservation restriction on privately-owned lands, and urging tighter land-use regulation.

The famous quote about land attributed to Mark Twain – that they’re not making any more of it –has particular poignancy in the context of our small Island. Unsustainable land development is fragmenting our assemblage of native plants and animals, contami-nating our ponds with nitrogen from septic systems, and clogging our rural roads with traffic. Thousands more houses can be built in the years ahead under existing zoning. And climate change is bringing sea level rise and more severe storm impacts that will force a major rethinking of existing land use.

High on the Environmental Justice agenda must therefore be creative thinking about limits-to-growth. For decades it has been a taboo subject, for a variety of reasons. Fortunately, on the heels of the Martha’s Vineyard Commission’s regional Island Plan, a consensus is emerging: No one wants to see the future face of the Vineyard that is predicted by our current unsustainable growth trajectory.

But land use is also tied to a myriad of other sustainability threads. We must advance sustainability in the area of energy through improved efficiency of our machines, use of appropriate renewable technologies, and energy conservation in our homes and businesses. In the area of food production, we must put prime agriculture soils to work by preserving existing farms and buying local. Making our water resource sustainable means protecting our ponds and drinking water supplies, perfecting technology to remove nitrogen from wastewater, conserving undeveloped land, and expanding our shellfish economy.

So perhaps Martha’s Vineyard is just the place to demonstrate leadership in the area of Environmental Justice. After all, we welcome visitors and “opinion leaders” from around the globe. If we can serve as an idea incubator for principles of sus-tainability, and demonstrate that they work, the seeds will spread! As one ardent VCS supporter put it, “if there’s any place where this can happen, it will be on Martha’s Vineyard.”

Brendan O’Neil is the Director Vineyard Conservation Society.Site: vineyardconservation.org

The library is now more than just a place where you grab a book and sit quietly. It is increasingly a place that fosters social interactions and where knowledge and ideas are created and shared.

The very nature of a public library as a public, free space creates opportunities for creative people and their audiences. In our old space, the art wall hosted artists from the island who might not have a chance to share their art in other venues and provided an opportunity for them to speak about their creative process. In our new space, we will have a room where art will shine and where our community can gather together to meet the artist (and each other).

One example of something we are currently providing for kids during our transition is computer time for a shared computer game called Minecraft. It is exciting to watch these children share adventures with their friends and work together to create wonderful, imaginative worlds.

The library has long been offering programs on written and visual art, music, culinary ideas and crafts, but our new space will afford an opportunity to do more hands-on learning. As the library moves into its new space, we will create an area that facilitates informal learning opportunities. We will open our doors to inventors and creators in our community to share their knowledge in a real hands-on way. We plan to have a MakerSpace with the tools, access and training to give our community a chance to play and learn. We will invite “Makers in Residence” to share their creative energy with the public.

This change in what the library is— from a place where one absorbs information to a place where creative expression is fostered— is the next step in the future of public libraries. Beth Kramer is the Executive Director of the West Tisbury Free Public Library. Site: westtisburylibrary.org

Brendan o’neil : land Continued from page 46

Beth Kramer

libraries



When we think of social justice in relation to education, we often think of questions of access: Who has access to what schools? But access, though undoubtedly important, is not the only area where questions of social justice and education intersect. What happens once any student is actually enrolled in a school should concern us just as much, for unless that student is taught in a way appropriate to how she/he best learns, access may simply lead to frustration and failure.

The great educator Paolo Freire knew this well and characterized the pedagogy that prevails in most of our schools as “fundamentally narrative.” The teacher talks and the student listens. Eventually, words lose their transformative power and simply become sounds

– washing over the student’s consciousness. Alienated from formal education – even if she/he continues to attend school – the student loses interest and psychologically drops out.

Teachers, as one might expect, tend to deny that this is the case in their classroom. Several years ago I travelled around the country interviewing first-year college students. Among the many discoveries I made two stand out. First, the vast majority of students described themselves as “hands-on” learners. Second, no teacher ever admitted to “lecturing” too much – even when that was precisely what her/his students had just told me. These discov-eries should not surprise us. One study suggests that approximately 20% of all students are kinesthetic learners – they need to move to learn well. Another study notes that while 75% of the general

Edward Zlotkowski

Education

Splash the Day Away, 12 x 24”, egg tempera on Ampersand Clayboard, by harry seymour

population prefers learning that goes from the concrete to the abstract, 75% of America’s higher education teachers prefer the opposite.

Several decades ago, the contemporary service-learning move-ment was launched in part to address this mismatch. By struc-turing class assignments around concrete community needs and challenges, teachers could not only help students bond more deeply with their community, they could also help them find new avenues to excellence. Indeed, in Making the Most of College, Richard Light stresses that even for Harvard students learning through experiences outside the classroom is vital. Over the last decade, a wide range of resources has become available to assist teachers – on every level – in designing and implementing community-based assignments.

Because my wife and I moved to the Vineyard only after our only child had started college, I have not had much direct experi-ence with the island school system. Still, it seems to me that we have here both the diversity of learner needs and the commitment to community required to make service-learning an effective educa-tional resource. Doing so could create another valuable strand in the weave of island life. It could bring together otherwise uncon-nected social groups, address a multitude of concrete needs, and help insure our children have a wide variety of paths to achieving success. When the greatest number of students possible has such a path, we link social justice and education in a way that benefits all of us.

Edward Zlotowski is a West Tisbury resident, a retired professor of English and national and international consultant on ‘service learning.’


Philosophers have been talking about justice at least since Plato; they are still talking. Social movements try to achieve social justice for those they fight for—African Americans, women, the poor, gays, soldiers. I have always been with those who fight for justice. As a member of the Congress on Racial Equality, I worked for equal treatment of blacks in housing. As a peace activist, I demonstrated against the wars in Vietnam War and Iraq. I have supported Occupy Wall Street.

Doing so makes me feel good, whole — right with the world. Where do these feelings come from? I have always been aware of injustice and my responsibility to do something about it. My parents were both immigrants, my mother from a village near Kiev and my father from Odessa. I was a child during World War II and not shielded, as some American Jewish kids were, from the concentration camps and the murder of millions of Jews. I knew all about Hitler and had fantasies about parachuting into his head-quarters and killing him.

There but for the grace of God go I. I understood that those children in the camps could have been me. And the adults could have been my parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents. Some of the relatives who stayed behind disappeared, not to be found again. We used to take in refugees from the war and many of them had numbers on their arms. There but for the grace of God go I.

So you might say I am a grateful survivor in America, an America whose ideals my father would recite by heart:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men arecreated equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life,liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

When I was growing up in Philadelphia, I cried when we would drive through poor black neighborhoods, or when a family of gypsies were living in a storefront, or when I saw veterans with no legs, begging. How could this be, I would ask my parents? This was America.

They couldn’t tell me. Those scenes have stayed with me. As I grew up, I tried to make America live up to itself. I tried to repair the world, or tikkun

olam, as Jews are taught. Which requires that you are not just for yourself. Social justice does not mean charity but fighting the forces that cause the

need for charity. So I came to the island and what did I see? More opportunities to repair

the world. I saw inequality in wealth and income, the smugness of those who have everything, the resulting housing crunch for the middle class, the need for a food bank and clothing drives. All are evidence of social injus-tices. We need to put them right.

Zelda Gamson is an Island resident, and a sociologist and writer who taught at the University of Michigan and the University of Massachusetts Boston.

for most of my adult life I lived in cities, Philadelphia and New York. I was profoundly affected by the poverty I encountered in both places – the abandoned and gutted out row houses, the soaring towers of housing projects, the violence and ill

health, the struggles of immigrants and refugees. And all this existed alongside tremendous wealth. The injustices were glaring and I was compelled to respond. In that response, I discovered a diverse commu-nity of people committed to social justice. When I moved to Martha’s Vineyard to start my new ministry, I didn’t yet have an imagination for how I would engage the issues of the day in this place, nor did I know how my perspective on suffering would evolve.

Through my role as pastor to a broad spectrum of Islanders, I have borne witness to the pain and hardships of our neighbors. Down the long sandy roads, beside the lapping waves, in gingerbread cottages, in generationally owned family homes and in winter and summer rentals, all forms of suffering reside. Economic collapse, physical and mental illness, hunger and homelessness, family violence and loneliness are all present here. Because suffering is more hidden on the Island, I believe we must cultivate a compassionate heart, attuned especially to what we cannot see. For suffering is everywhere, no one is immune, including us.

By staying awake to our own suffering, we can use it as a source of connection to neighbors and strangers alike. Can the suffering we know from an illness give us a new heart for the poor? Can our loneli-ness teach us about the immigrant experience? I believe our fragility, our common human condition, can be a source of strength and unity, and can inspire action for justice. But first we must sit with the pain.

The Rev. Cathlin BakerFirst Congregational ChurchWest Tisbury, MA


Cathlin Baker

Compassion

Zelda Gamson

social Justice

50 Martha’s Vineyard Arts & Ideas Early Summer 201 2


I think of how we treat all children when I measure justice in the world. My heroes are normal people who show compassion by taking action.

*

I was in DC to tape an interview at the Supreme Court and looked out the window of my luxury suite, within view of the Capitol Rotunda. I noticed several mothers with babies in tow. Around the corner I discovered the largest and oldest adult home-less shelter in D.C.. Children live there without anything resem-bling childhood.

My friend Jamila couldn’t stand this and started a Playtime Project. Playtime Project takes the kids out of the shelters, plays with them and helps their families get social services. The Home-less Children’s Playtime Project is thriving— unfortunately not in danger of obsolescence.

There are two million homeless children in America.

*

Standing on a playground at an elementary school in Kenya, the headmaster told me that many of the students put stones in their lunch pails to escape the shame of detection. Today, only 25% of Kenyan elementary schools have a school lunch program.

At one school in Masaailand, where cattle are sometimes prized more than young girls’ education, the headmaster of the local school started a fish farm and managed to sell every fish to the pastoralist parents of his students. The monies helped offset the costs of school lunch.

In another village in Western Kenya, farmers were given fertil-izer in exchange for a pledge to tithe 10% of their crop to estab-lishing a school lunch program. Farm-yields increased five fold

len Morris

Children

and at last count 8 schools had started to feed the children. That program lasted two years and lost its funding.

One billion children are malnourished world-wide. The World

Food Program feeds 23 million every day in 62 countries and

could do more— if they had the money.

*

On a dumpsite in central Brazil I met three generations of women (grandma, mother and daughter) all scavenging for food or anything salable. Eventually, the daughter would attend school through a cash transfer program called the Bolsa Escola. Her mom imagined she’d become the principal of the school. Over 40 mil-lion children are in school today, in 20 countries, using this anti-poverty program. It could be expanded, if there were more money.

Worldwide, nearly 70 million children have never set foot in

school.

*

Each of these snapshots, is a measure of justice. The statistics can be numbing but the children themselves are very real and their childhoods are fragile and pass quickly. Robert, Sister Mary, Jamila, the Headmaster, are the heroes— they show their compassion daily in what they do.

Desmond Tutu told us something I will never forget...

“These children are not figures on a page, they are flesh

and blood. Picture the face of a child you love, picture

your own child.”

And, he said one other important thing.....

“If you want to enjoy all you have.... share it.”

Len Morris is the Editorial Director of Media Voices for Children, a documentary filmmaker, lecturer and advocate for children’s human rights. Site: mediavoicesforchildren.org


Into the Light, Photograph by Bob Avakian


My wife longed for a stable home in which to raise children. My two daughters allow that our house is nice but plan something closer to the ocean for their selves. I’m mostly content if the counters are clean

of homework, unpaid bills, dirty dishes or any of the other happy detritus of a full life.

Home - different meanings for different people - but, if we start at shelter and add dependability we move towards the sense of security that underpins the idea of home for many of us. After that it is the aggregate of personal choices, fancies and concessions as well as the efforts made, shared, given or received that helps define our community’s appearance, its sensibility and its day to day reality.

For some years now our national discussion has foundered on dissimilar notions of an individual’s rights and their primacy over shared responsibility to each other. Cherry picked references to the intentions of our country’s founders skip over the significance in their thinking of a “social contract” between individuals, each other and their government. The trading of individual rights for the “protection” of the larger group was a central tenet in their discussions. Questions of degree and type of trade-off abounded but the “common good of society” as an influence on that balance was prevalent throughout both the high-minded pursuit of a representative form of government and the practical mechanics that made that ideal extant on the ground.

Love or hate them, the recent Supreme Court’s rulings affecting voting and marriage indicate continued important attention paid to legal, political and social rights of individuals and groups. And yet, across groups, our nation currently has wealth inequity rivaling our colonial period, anecdotal social mobility versus actual and an intersect between declining incomes and rising housing costs that sees more than 6.5 million U.S. households spending at least half their income on housing.

Our representative government’s response is to mimic the blind philosophers and define this elephant as expenditures, entitlements and budget excesses only with revenues, tax policy and record corporate profits not part of their purview. There seems a direct line from the foreshortened definition of our governmental system as based largely on the individual to our inability to address reasonably the practical difficulties assailing the majority of our citizens. Where are the voices that remind us of our systemic duty to diligently attempt the balance of the two?

Here on the island we have great natural beauty, varied opportunity, significant wealth and myriad acts of generosity cheek to jowl with high costs of living, seasonal employment swings, an aging population and limited possibilities for younger families. We all have friends, neighbors and work associates who rollercoaster through seasonal leases and potential year-round situations that materialize and disappear with regularity. Still, many of us were surprised to hear that this past January’s point-in-time homeless count on the Vineyard turned up 140 individuals, 80 in one abandoned building alone. Our surprise at such numbers should only broaden our efforts to increase housing opportunities and supports along the greater spectrum of need. That effort, inclusive of slow progress, significant celebrations, occasional set-backs and lengthening process, continues to help define our community.

One of my four sisters came to believe that home was anywhere she was free from the interference of her family and anyone else she felt had too much to say about how she lived. That definition aged her prematurely and, when cumulative health issues mounted a year ago, kept help that would have saved her life a room’s length away. Shelter, yes; home, maybe; community, no.

David Vigneault is the Executive Director of the Dukes County Regional Housing Authority. email: [email protected]


David Vigneault

home


history has a way of surprising us, especially in times when serious change seems impossible. The modern civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the gay rights move-ment, even the modern conservative movement (which was

modest in the early postwar era), all rose to major power without ben-efit of pundit prediction. Indeed, the success of all these movements was quite contrary to the conventional wisdom at the time, which held that nothing serious could change.

Nor did anyone predict the Arab Spring revolutions in the Middle East, or the radical shifts in power that have overthrown conservative and authoritarian governments throughout Latin America in the last two decades. Farther back, how many people in 1989 predicted that the Berlin Wall would fall, or that within two years the Soviet Union would dissolve, or that within five years apartheid would finally end in South Africa?

The American Revolution itself stands as a reminder that a small and totally outgunned group of determined people could defeat the then most powerful empire in the world.

I am no utopian; I am a historian and political economist. I am cautious about predictions of inevitability—including the assumed inevitability, dictated from on high, that nothing fundamental can ever change.

It is possible—indeed, perhaps likely—that at some point the pain, tensions, loss of belief, and anger building up in America will lead to something far more explosive and transformative than business-as-usual politics. And it is our responsibility—yours and mine and other Americans’—in advance of such a time to openly consider what might make sense, how to proceed, and what our role in the matter might be.

The place to begin is with the profound challenge now confronting us in connection with the truly fundamental American values—equal-ity, liberty, and democracy; and with the ongoing loss of belief in the corporate system’s capacity to achieve and nurture these values, not to

mention those involving global sustainability. I am not talking, simply, about the need to address social and economic and climate change pain, as important as they are. I am talking about addressing something much deeper.

A nation that proclaims a creed based on centrally important values but continues to violate them in practice is setting itself up for chal-lenges much more serious than the problems of “normal” politics. If the trends continue to decay—and there is every reason to believe that most, in fact, are likely to—we will clearly be entering what social scientists term a “legitimation crisis”: a time when the values that give legitimacy to the system no longer can, in fact, be achieved by the system.

The late Seymour Martin Lipset and William Schneider, cautious researchers studying the loss of belief in American institutions during the 1980s at a time even before the economic and social pain had begun to deepen, concluded:

The situation is much more brittle than it was at the end of the 1920s, just before the Great Depression, or in 1965, immediately preceding the unrest occasioned by the Vietnam War and the outbreak of racial tension . . . The outcome could very well be substantial support for movements seeking to change the system in a fundamental way.

Their conclusion, though premature, stands as a warning—and a challenge— to our own time. At minimum it is another reminder of the importance of considering strategies beyond the usual political routes to change—an “Option Six,” if you like.

Put another way, the deepening difficulties also suggest the possibil-ity that we may now be well into the prehistory of the next American revolution, that Option Six may ultimately involve longer-term changes much greater than many have contemplated. It is never possible to know in advance what may or may not occur. Nonetheless, such a time is a time when it is also our responsibility to begin to consider the funda-mental question of how a “next system” might and should be organized, a time to begin to explore new ways to achieve the great American values that can no longer be achieved by the dying system.

Understood in this larger perspective, the various efforts under way that offer the possibility of democratizing the ownership of wealth may not only help bolster traditional progressive political strategy, but also help lay down critical building blocks for something far

n o n f I CT I o n This excerpt from What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution,

Copyright (C) 2013 by Gar Alperovitz, is reprinted here with the permission of Chelsea Green Publishing.

What Then Must We Do?toward a community-sustaining system

by Gar Alperovitz


>> Local Bookstore websites: bunchofgrapes.com edgartownbooks.net >> Publisher’s Site: chelseagreen.com

more fundamental.Which also means it is time to begin to get serious about the ques-

tion: If you don’t like corporate capitalism and you don’t like state socialism, what do you want? It is time to throw off the blinders that suggest we must always and forever be constrained by systemic alterna-tives whose main lines of development can be traced back more than a hundred years—indeed, far longer back in historical time. That the question may be of more than passing interest is also suggested by the fact that the words capitalism and socialism were the most-looked-up words in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary in 2012.

A good way to start answering the question is to confront the profound challenge of community, and its practical requirements and systemic implications. The institutional requirements of community pose fundamental issues that neither corporate capitalism nor state socialism ever took seriously. The critical point of departure is the question: Can you ever have Democracy with a big D in any system if you don’t have democracy with a small d in the actual experience and everyday community life of ordinary everyday citizens?

Especially at a time like ours when corporate power and money dominate?

I’m talking about genuine democracy, not just voting. Real par-ticipation, the kind political theorist Benjamin Barber calls “strong democracy.” The kind where people not only react to choices handed down from on high, yea or nay, but actively engage, innovate, create options—and also decide among them. There are increasing numbers of experiments with what this means— some that we’ve visited in earlier chapters, and many others in the United States and around the world that point to a new direction, building from the bottom up. In such efforts the outlines of a very different, more vital, more engaged democracy for the next system are beginning to be forged, developed, expanded—starting in specific communities.

There are also new, related theoretical outlines being generated by our leading scholars. The president of the American Political Science Association, Harvard professor Jane Mansbridge, writes: “Without an extensive program of decentralization and workplace democracy, few people are likely to have the political experiences necessary for under-standing their interests.” As she also observes, “They are most likely to come to understand their real interests in a small democracy, like a town or workplace, where members make a conscious effort to choose democratic procedures appropriate to the various issues that arise.”

Other scholars—including Barber, Stephen Elkin, and Robert Putnam—have elaborated on similar themes. The spirit of such a vision, however, can be traced back to Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill, who best understood the importance of getting things right at the community level. Here is Tocqueville: “Local assemblies of citizens con-stitute the strength of free nations. Municipal Institutions are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people’s reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it.”

And here is Mill: “We do not learn to read or write, to ride or swim, by being merely told how to do it, but by doing it, so it is only by prac-ticing popular government on a limited scale, that the people will ever learn how to exercise it on a larger.”*

I need to stop the flow here to sharpen a critical point: It is not enough to urge such change, even to experiment with it, though both are important. A systemic challenge goes deeper, much deeper, and it brings us back full circle to who controls wealth—and for more than one reason.

First, anyone who has considered the matter for more than five minutes knows that money influences elections big-time, that the distribution of power is intimately related to the distribution of income and wealth, and that democracy remains superficial and essentially compromised so long as this is so. But the hard place in the argument about how to achieve real change, the place that under-scores the need for systemic change rather than mere policy and political change, is that the old system, the one dominated by corporations with the hope that traditional politics can significantly alter the distribution of income and wealth (hence democracy!), no longer can achieve such change.

Which means that either the next system will be built upon differ-ent ways to organize the ownership of wealth, or the ongoing trends will continue (with or without minor adjustments around the edges).

Another way to say this is that there is a difference between an abstract vision of democratic practice and the value of democracy, on the one hand, and what is best termed a systemic design capable of achieving and sustaining that vision and that value, on the other.

Which means, again: If you don’t like state socialism and you don’t like corporate capitalism, what do you want?

And if you aren’t willing to answer that question, or even engage it, why should we listen to your concerns about the failings of the cur-rent system?

Just to dig a bit deeper into the difference between defining our values and vision and creating a serious systemic design capable of achieving and sustaining them, here’s a second challenge:

You can’t have a genuine experience of meaningful local democracy if communities are continually disrupted, the people moved hither and yon, and municipal government so dependent on corporate help that there is no room for any serious form of democratic choice.6

Accordingly, if the next system takes community and democracy from the ground up seriously, it will have to deal with stabilizing the local economies of our communities.

* The challenge such a vision presents to weak democracy understand-ings—and also to abstract slogans of “participatory democracy”—was captured by a wall poster during the 1968 uprisings in Paris: “Question: How do you conjugate the word ‘participate’? Answer: I participate, you participate, we participate. They decide!”


Ocean Park Realty, Inc.69 Circuit Ave., Oak Bluffs, MA • 508-693-4210 • www.oceanparkmv.com

ONE OF KINDIN-TOWN VICTORIAN!

16 BedroomsDouble Lot!

A BLOCK FROM BEACH!$1,200,000

CELEBRATING 40 YEARS!

Custom Vineyard Design! Shows Like A New Home Pristine! Built in 2004, 3Br/2.5Bth Open Spacious Living/Dining Area, Gourmet Kitchen and Wood Floors Throughout!

Easy To Show! $559,000

Year-Round East Chop Location! Steps To Beach, OB Harbor & Ferries! 4Br/3Bth, Open Floor

Plan, 1st Flr Mastersuite & 2nd Flr Mastersuite! Wood

Burning Fireplace! Existing Rental History! $775,000

STEPS TO BEACH, STRONG RENTAL HISTORIESCALL MARILYN MOSES 617-462-0381

OR EMAIL [email protected]

CALL MARILYN MOSES at 617-462-0381!!!O

CEAN PARK REALTYO

CEAN PARK REALTY

Oak Bluffs Specialists

L.A. BROWN KATHLEEN TACKABURY

58 Main Street Vineyard Haven

Open Daily 9:30am - 6pm

Fridays until 8pm in July & August

508-696-9500nightherongallery.com

Open for the Summer Season985 State Road ~ West Tisbury, Mass.

Gallery Hours 1-6pm: June ~ Saturday and Sundays July & August ~ Thursdays through Sundays Or, by appointment

508 693 4691www.allenwhiting.com

Davis House GalleryOrchid, 8” x 6”, 0il, 2012


SOUTHMOUNTA IN .COM

the art of design build/

SMC Arts+Ideas DesignBuild FullPageBleed_High Summer_2013.indd 1 7/14/13 12:00 PM

JOSEPH WILLIAM DICK ARCHITECTURE, INC.

VINEYARD HAVEN | (508) 693-1717 YARMOUTHPORT | (508) 362-1309

JOSEPHWDICK.COM

RESIDENTIAL ARCHITECTURE & INTERIOR DESIGN


Painting

LLoyd KELLy Artist website: www.lloydkelly.com Gallery website: www.christina.com

AntoInnEttE noBLE Artist website: www.antoinettenoble.comGallery website: www.shawcramergallery.com

MARSton CLouGh Artist website: www.marstonclough.com

KEnnEth VInCEnt Gallery website: www.granarygallery.com

JESSICA PISAno Artist website: www.jessicapisano.com Gallery website: www.mvdragonfly.com

KEtz Artist website: www.ketzweiler.comGallery website: www.piknikmv.com

don MCKILLoP Gallery website: www.mvdragonfly.com

LESLIE BAKERArtist website: www.lbaker.comGallery website: www.shawcramergallery.com

tRAEGER dI PIEtRoArtist website: www.traegerdipietro.com

douG KEntArtist website: www.dougkentpaintings.com

MARIE-LouISE RouFFArtist website: www.mlrouff.comGallery website: www.shawcramergallery.com

LIz tAFtArtist website: www.liztaft.com

dAn VAnLAndInGhAMArtist website: www.danvanlandingham.comGallery website: www.mvdragonfly.com www.piknikmv.com

RoSE ABRAhAMSonArtist website: www.roseabrahamson.comGallery website: www.shawcramer.com

MAx dECKERArtist website: www.maxdecker.comGallery website: www.piknikmv.com

AnnE d. GRAndInArtist Website: www.grandinart.com

CIndy KAnEArtist website: www.cindykane.com

KARA tAyLoRArtist website: www.karataylorart.com

WEndy WELdonArtist website: www.wendyweldon.com

ALLEn WhItInGArtist website: www.allenwhiting.com

REz WILLIAMSArtist website: www.rezwilliams.com

JACK GREEnEArtist website: www.jackgreenart.org

PhotographySAM LoW

Artist website: www.samlow.com

SuSAn dAVy Gallery website: www.mvdragonfly.com

SuSAn SAVoRy Artist website: susansavory.wordpress.com/moleskine-exchange

Lynn ChRIStoFFERSfacebook: find Lynn-Christoffers

StEPhEn dIRAdoArtist website: www.stephendirado.com

RAy EWInGArtist website: www.rayewing.com

VIVIAn EWInGArtist website: www.vivianewingportfolio.carbonmade.com

GABRIELA hERMAnArtist website: www.gabrielaherman.com

AARon SISKIndArtist website: www.aaronsiskind.org

ERIC PECKARfacebook: find Erik-Peckar

JEAnnE CAMPBELLArtist website: www.jeannefineart.comGallery website: www.louisagould.com

ELIzABEth CECILArtist website: www.elizabethcecil.com

SALLy CohnArtist website: www.sallycohnphotography.com

GARy MIRAndoArtist website www.garymirandophotol.com

SAM hISERArtist website: www.hiserfotograf.com

toVA KAtzMAnfacebook: find tova-Katzman

nEAL RAntouLArtist website www.nealrantoul.com

IllustrationhEAthER GoFF

Artist website: www.heathergoff.me

PoetryJoRIE GRAhAM

Author website: www.joriegraham.com

SARAh GAMBIto Author website: www.sarahgambito.com/about

FAnny hoWEAuthor website: poetryfoundation.org/bio/fanny-howe

JuStEn AhREnfacebook: find Justen-ahren

donALd nItChIEfacebook: find Donald Nitchie

Fabric artsPAM FLAM

Artist website: www.pamflam.com

PAuLEttE hAyESArtist website: vineyardvoice.org/paulette-hayes

JewelryJoAn LELAChEuR

facebook: find Joan-LeLacheur

KAtE tAyLoRArtist website: www.katetaylor.com

LuCIndA ShELdonArtist website: www.lucindasheldon.com

SculptureBARnEy zEItz

Artist website: www.bzeitz.com

ELISSA tuRnBuLLArtist website: www.elissaturnbull.com

Collage, Fine art PrintsPEGGy tuRnER zABLotny

Email: [email protected] Gallery website: www.fieldgallery.com

Non FictionLAuRA WAInWRIGht

Publisher website: http://vineyardstories.com/book.php/21/Home-Bird

FictionAMELIA SMIth

Author website: www.ameliasmith.net

EMILy CAVAnAGh Unofficial website: www.mvpcs.org/Home/teachers/junior_high-school/emily-cavanagh

Individual Artist GuideConnect with the artists who have been in Arts & Ideas:

Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Society

S u M M e r C o n C e r t f e S t i V a l Delores Stevens • artistic director + festival pianist

2013

D o n ’ t m i s s o u r 4 3 r D c o n s e c u t i v e s e a s o n !July 15, 16, 22, 23 . august 5, 6, 12, 13, 19, 20

orDer noW! 508 696 8055 . mvcms.org . ticketsmv.com

mozart ravel

GershWin

Bernstein

ellinGton

corea

Britten

schuBert

Piazzolla

vauGhan-Williams

MV2013 ad ArtsIdeas.indd 1 4/30/13 12:49:33 PM

Sumner Z. Silverman, PhD.Licensed Psychologist

Issues of Creativity, Productivity& Quality of Life

508.693.7481

40 Years Experience


ALISon ShAW GALLERy

88 Dukes County Ave. oak Bluffs, MA, 02557 508 696 7429www.alisonshaw.com

AndREW MooRE

11 Martha’s Park road Po Box 1533 oak Bluffs, MA, 02557508 693 8548www.agmoore.com

ChRIStInA GALLERy

32 north Water streetPo Box 40Edgartown, MA, 02539508 627 8794www.christina.com

CLAudIA JEWELERS

51 Main streetEdgartown, MA, 02539508 693 5456www.claudiamv.com

CouSEn RoSE GALLERy

71 Circuit Aveoak Bluffs, MA, 02557508 693 6656www.cousenrose.com

dAVIS houSE / ALLEn WhItInG

985 state roadWest Tisbury, MA, 02575508 693 4691www.allenwhiting.com

douG KEnt PAIntInGS

490 Indian hill roadWest Tisbury, MA, 02575508 696 9606www.dougkentpaintings.com

dRAGonFLy GALLERy

91 Dukes County Aveoak Bluffs, MA, 02557508 693 8877www.mvdragonfly.com

EdGARtoWn ARt GALLERy

19 summer streetEdgartown, MA, 02539508 627 6227

EISEnhAuER GALLERy

38 n. Water stPo Box 1930Edgartown, MA, 02539508 627 7003www.eisenhauergallery.comfacebook find: Eisenhauer-Gallery

FEAthERStonE CEntER FoR thE ARtS

30 featherstone laneoak Bluffs, MA, 02557508 693 1850www.featherstoneart.org

FIELd GALLERy

1050 state roadPo Box 790West Tisbury, MA, 02575508 693 5595www.fieldgallery.comfacebook find: the-Field-Gallery

hERMInE MEREL SMIth FInE ARt

548 Edgartown roadWest Tisbury, MA, 02575508 693 7719

ISLAnd ARt GALLERy

Kennedy studios Custom framing66 Main street – Po Box 4657Vineyard haven, MA, 02568508 693 3948www.kennedystudiosmv.comEmail: [email protected]

KARA tAyLoR FInE ARt

24 south roadChilmark, Ma. 02535508 693 7799www.karataylorart.com

LouISA GouLd GALLERy

54 Main streetVineyard haven, MA, 02568508 693 7373www.louisagould.comfacebook find: Louisa-GouldTwitter: @GouldGallery

nIGht hERon GALLERy

58 Main streetVineyard haven, MA, 02568508 696 9500www.northwatergallery.com

noRth WAtER GALLERy

27 north Water streetEdgartown, MA, 02539508 627 6002www.northwatergallery.comfacebook find: North-Water-Gallery

oLd SCuLPIn GALLERy

58 Dock streetEdgartown, MA, 02539608 627 4881www.oldsculpingallery.org

PIK nIK ARt & APPAREL

11 Winter street / nevin squareEdgartown, MA, 02539508 627 1066www.piknikmv.com

SALtWAtER GALLERy

367 lamberts Cover roadVineyard haven, MA, 02568508 696 8822

SEAWoRthy GALLERy

34 Beach roadVineyard haven, MA, 02568508 693 0153www.seaworthygallerymv.com

ShAW CRAMER GALLERy

56 Main streetVineyard haven, MA, 02568 508 696 7323www.shawcramergallery.com

thE BRIGISh CoLLECtIon

34 south Pond roadVineyard haven, MA, 02568508 696 3109www.brigish.com

thE GRAnARy GALLERy

636 old County roadWest Tisbury, MA, 02575508 693 0455www.granarygallery.comfacebook find: the-Granary-Gallery

VInEyARd ARtISAnS FEStIVALS

1059 state rdPo Box 774oak Bluffs, MA, 02557508 693 8989www.vineyardartisans.com

Island Gallery GuideVisit and support our local galleries. They sustain artists and art markets.


talks by authors,panel discussions & book signings

Harborview Hotel

Chilmark community Ctr

EDGARTOWN 11- 5AUG 3AUG 4

mvbookfestival.com

CHILMARK 11- 5

mvy.com.mvol.com.mvtimes.com.artsmarthasvineyard.orgendowmv.org featherstoneart.org

Weekday and weekend events on Martha’s Vineyard throughout the month of October.

Contact the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber of Commerce at 508 693 0085. Or visit: artsmarthasvineyard.org

Engage in arts and culture here this summer, and return to celebrate more in October!


17 WINTER STREET | EDGARTOWN | 508.939.4528

MADE IN AMERICA WITH LOVE ® | WWW.ALEXANDANI.COM

PAUL NORWOOD—BAY BREAKERS, 36 x 36" $3,900

MICHAEL HUNTER ProPrietor /CuratorPIKNIKmv.com

11 Winter Street / nevin Square · EDGARTOWN · 508.627.1066


We specialize in discreet, personal service to help our clients achieve the purchase or sale of property on Martha’s Vineyard.

With today’s technology and the Island’s unique multiple listing service, every office and agent has instant access to every listing in our LINK system. Therefore, what each of us offers is a personal and professional relationship built over the long term.

A real estate transaction is the beginning of a long and pleasant friendship, and we look forward to meeting with you in the very near future.

508-627-7320 · PSMONMV.COM 238 UPPER MAIN STREET, EDG

ART SMADBECK

DOUG HERR

STUART LOLLIS

SUSAN THOMPSON

PAUL PERTILE

BOB MONE

FRAN AGNOLI

PRIESTLEY SMADBECK & MONE

REAL ESTATE

Anne D. Grandin

[email protected] www.grandinart.com

Selected paintings on display at

PIKNIK Gallery, Art & Apparel

11 Winter Street/Nevin SquareEdgartown 508-627-1066

508 693.4850 • southmountainenergy.com

E N E R G Y


Featherstone Flea &

Fine Arts Market Na

ncy

King

sley

c enter f or the ar ts Info & Directions: www.featherstoneart.org In google maps, search “Featherstone Art”

Phone: 508-693-1850

Featherstone

Musical MondaysOutdoor Music

June 24 - August 12 • 6:30 - 8:00 pm$10 for adults • $5 w/Our Island Club Card

Children under 14 free • Outdoor Stage

Check our website for Gallery Shows, Classes, Summer Camp and All Events

Art Shows in the Pebble GalleryJuly 25 - 28

beneath the surface: works by Franny Werthwein & Bob Rosenbaum

Opening Reception Thursday, July 25 from 4 to 6 pm

The Pebble Gallery

A two person show featuring paintings and paper art by Franny Werthwein and underwater photography by Bob Rosenbaum.

Every Tuesday at Featherstone From June 18 to August 27, 2013

9:30 am to 2:00 pm

Tuesday, July 23 at 7pm: John Koethe

Friday, August 9 at 7pm: Billy Collins

Tuesday, August 27 at 7pm: Nathalie Handal

Summer Festival of Poetry

Beautiful garden stock combinedwith award winning landscape and design. All under one roof.

Contact us today for your complimentary consultation.

508-696-8869

Susan-Swartz-MVAI-OPTIONS-3.indd 4 7/31/13 3:34 PM


24 South Road, Chilmark. Ma.

Gallery Hours: wed-Sunday 12-6

www.karataylorart.com

the barn diaries - august 18th reception

n e w l o c a t i o n

Susan-Swartz-MVAI-OPTIONS-3.indd 4 7/31/13 3:34 PM

A bookstore andso much more.

35Main StreetVineyard Haven508.693.2291

bunchofgrapes.com

BOOK STORE

bunchgrapesof

follow us on:

BOG-MV ARTS & Ideas 1:Layout 1 5/21/13 11:02 AM Page 1

A bookstore andso much more.

35Main StreetVineyard Haven508.693.2291

bunchofgrapes.com

BOOK STORE

bunchgrapesof

follow us on:

BOG-MV ARTS & Ideas 1:Layout 1 5/21/13 11:02 AM Page 1

S

um

mer 20

13 Issu

e 2 —

Nu

mb

er 5

Arts &

Ideas —

Marth

a’s Vin

eyard

aand

imv.com

Documents

Arts and Ideas, Late Summer, 2013