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The image at the top was on the front page of the New York Times online edition. I hate to further exploit this woman's grief, but it bugs me that the "pool" in the photo is just a temporary prop assembled for a photo-op, because five years after 9/11/2001 no memorial exists. The photographer who took this picture, and/or the editor(s) who cropped it, are, in effect, liars. The bottom photo is from a series of wide angle shots on the DailyKos website showing the pool without the cropping.
The Huffington Post notes the similarity between the poster for Disney/ABC's pro-Bush propaganda movie, The Path to 9/11, about America's inability to root out the terrorists among us (lurking behind the flag) and the poster for the 1996 TV series Dark Skies, which depicts those terrorists as they really are: lemur-eyed extraterrestrials. Slightly off topic, I was almost late for w*rk today because my train, which enters Manhattan through the gaping hole formerly known as the World Trade Center, was cancelled from 3:30 to 5:00 for a Bush-and-wife wreath-laying photo-op at the former base of the former tower(s). He never misses an opportunity to milk tragedy for political gain. No ill respect meant to the dead--here's hoping that the truth will come out eventually about the events of that horrible day--as opposed to the Administration whitewash and exploitation we've had so far.
Momenta Art, celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, recently moved to a new location at 359 Bedford Ave., between S. 4th and S. 5th in Williamsburg. The gallery consistently serves up engaged, political (or politically-tinged) art and introduces many artists who go on to be exploited by the system, I mean, become stars. One of the great things about New York is there are pockets of cultural life here that resist the prevailing "happy talk" that started with '70s news media and gradually spread to every facet of our society. Momenta is such a pocket. Consider this press release for "The Unhumane Society," opening Friday, September 15, from 6-8 pm:
The work of each of the artists in this exhibition slides easily between the human and the animal world. In a video by Daniel Herskowitz, the artist eavesdrops upon conversations among primatologists. As they discuss group behaviors of lower primates, the group dynamics of the scientists seem not so distant. In Stefaan Dheedene’s video an African hunter methodically describes his process of trapping and killing animals. Our attention is displaced by his clinical description of his work punctuated by the diminishing screams of a baby antelope as he clubs it to death. Similarly, in a video by David Burns, a farm family considers the interpersonal relations of their chickens and discuss which chicken must die – as the video presents the loser chicken, beheaded and plucked in reverse. In a video by Liselot van der Heijden, the viewer is left alone to commune with the endlessly looping final breath of a dying zebra. Tom Moore also offers a kind of quiet communion. His photographs of primate cages from the Berlin Zoo, also empty of humans (and of animals) document a frighteningly perfect animal habitat that fulfills every need. And Mark Dion's natural history photographs offer the disquietude of our animal curiosity.One is tempted to say, lighten up, guys. For sure no Chelsea gallery would ever send out a press release that disturbingly bleak. (A member of the patron class might get "bummed out" and stop coming in.) But I happen to believe that humanity will have much to answer for vis a vis the rest of nature when we stand before the Immortal Aliens for cosmic judgment, so kudos to Momenta--this sounds great.
The other works in the show slip more precipitously between the human and the animal. Rachel Lowther offers us a sculpture representing the glistening inflated-to-bursting obscene reality that is a rat urinary and genital system after said rat has 'received' excess amounts of testosterone in the form of Perandren. Breyer/P-Orridge’s absurd, fetishistic sculptural object of a wheeled gumball machine filled with used tampons and topped with a wolf’s head suggests the machinistic fetishization of a feminine primal order. Human/animal hybrids are more directly represented in the works of Rita Ackerman and Jason Fox – with his painting of a pathetic creature separated from the viewer by a chain-link barrier and her charming, brutal, doe-like vampires. All pretense falls away with the work of Grace Roselli. In her classically rendered painting, a pregnant woman hunches over skeletal human remains in a post apocalyptic sewage-scape; unable to cope with the human world she becomes subsumed in an idealized nightmare of our animal side taking over. As pathological as it is clinical, it is a nightmare that we all share.