“Mz 601,” a 1923 collage from the exhibition “Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage” at the Princeton University Art
By HOLLAND COTTER
NY Times Published: March 31, 2011
PRINCETON, N.J. — Timing is everything, and it can be ruinous. The German artist Kurt Schwitters built his magnum opus, the sculptural environment he called the Merzbau, in the early 1930s. He produced his most innovative collages in the decade before. In 1933 Hitler came to power. The collages were instant fodder for Nazi “Degenerate Art” shows. The Merzbau was bombed to dust in 1943.
By then Schwitters was living, self-exiled, in England, after having spent more than a year interned in detention camps there.
An application for a United States visa had been turned down. After suffering a stroke he was supporting himself marginally by painting landscapes and portraits. In 1947, on his 60th birthday, he received money from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to recreate Merzbau, but by then he was too ill to do heavy work. He died six months later, one day after being granted the British citizenship for which he had waited years.
The facts of his late years are painful to contemplate, yet much of the art in “Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage,” a gift of a show at the Princeton University Art Museum, feels just the opposite. Even when hermetic and melancholic, as many of them are, the collages are a delight, transcending the number-crunching, language-mangling modern world they reflect. And when they’re joyous, they have a true in-love-with-life lift, with hints of nature blooming through.
Inside the first gallery, before you can even examine the art, you hear a semi-natural sound, something between a thrush’s call and a cuckoo clock, then a kind of Papageno’s song of mews, blips and nonsense syllables, broken by a military rat-a-tat. It’s all Schwitters, performing his phonetic poem “Ursonate,” or “Sonata in Primeval Sounds.”
For decades he regaled European audiences with the piece, driving some listeners from the room, leaving others in stitches. He made at least two recordings of the piece and was still performing it in London as late as 1947.
Schwitters made no categorical distinctions between his art (painting, collage, sculpture, design, installation), his writing (poetry, essays, children’s stories) and his performances. To him they were all integral parts of a one-man cultural movement called Merz, which he invented, deriving the name from Kommerz, German for commerce.
The multidisciplinary nature of Schwitters’s output, which can make a career survey look like a group show, may be one of the reasons he remains an underknown figure. His sole American retrospective, at MoMA, was 25 years ago. Representative samplings of his art have since rarely been on view, there or elsewhere.
Yet he has had a huge effect on post-World War II artists and is revered by many. Two of the collages in the Princeton show are from Jasper Johns’s collection; two others are owned by Ellsworth Kelly. Robert Rauschenberg, who introduced Mr. Johns to Schwitters’s work, was a major fan. And a Schwitters effect, however indirect and unrecognized, can be spotted in much contemporary work.
Even in his own time he was hard to get to know. He made contradictory impressions on people who encountered him. To those who knew him through his performances he was an extrovert: a large, hammy guy with big ideas and a big voice, relishing the role of clown.
But he could quickly drop into loner mode, shy away from company, rebuff unsought friendship, assert the middle-class proprieties he grew up with. After bouts of what seemed like compulsive extroversion, he spent long stretches on his own. And the dozens of collages and assemblages at Princeton suggest how he used that time.
Meticulously puzzled together from paper, fabric, wire, scrap wood and other everyday materials, these pieces are the work of a sorter and measurer, a concentrator, a tabletop worker, someone who found satisfaction — more than that, comfort — in up-close, fine-grained aesthetic control. Even the Merzbau, with its interior network of nooks and shelves, projected deep focus, on a walk-in scale.
The exhibition, which originated at the Menil Collection in Houston, has some of all of this material, including a replicated section of the Merzbau. But with only 80 works, it’s clearly a theme show, not a survey, the theme being the persistence of painting throughout Schwitters’s career.
It’s an unadventurous approach, with problems. No doubt the curators — Isabel Schulz, executive director of the Kurt and Ernst Schwitters Foundation at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, Germany, and Josef Helfenstein, director of the Menil Collection — wanted to correct a mistaken view of Schwitters as an anarchic, antiart wild man.
But reducing him to “primarily a painter” is also a distortion, and one too in line with current, conservative market fashion. Still, it’s hard to complain about any show that brings together as many wonderful things as this one does.
And Schwitters did begin as a painter, and stayed one. Born in Hanover in 1887, he went to art school there and in Berlin, working in a by-then-mainstream romantic, Expressionist mode.
At the same time he was attracted to a new movement called Dada, which embraced art and literature equally and strove to confuse distinctions between art and life.
In 1918, under its influence, he made his first abstract collage from bits of torn trash, including bus tickets, cigarette packaging, chocolate wrappers and cloth, and then published a collage-style poem called “To Anna Blume.” To his surprise the poem was a popular hit, too popular in the view of certain Dada big shots who declared him ineligible for membership in their antiestablishment movement. He didn’t care. He was far more interested in creating than in rebelling. And besides he already had Merz.
The 1920s became a personal Merzathon.
Collages, sculptures, prints and poems flowed. Schwitters met all kinds of vanguard artists — friendly Dadaists like Tristan Tzara and Hannah Höch; Constructivists like El Lissitzky; Theo van Doesburg, a founder of the movement known as De Stijl — and collaborated with many of them. He traveled Europe nonstop, performed tirelessly, had shows and attracted collectors.
A good part of the Princeton exhibition is made up of works from this period, and they’re on fire, changing from piece to piece.
A very early collage called “Mz 11 Strong Picture” from 1919 is a jumble of words and numerals; a visual poem, tense and tight, like two cellphone conversations in proximity, with one word, “stark” — the German word for “strong” — repeated at different volumes.
In other abstract collages, color and texture become content. This is true of “Mz 371 bacco” from 1922, with its bursting yellow and red tobacco label, its scrap of handwriting like a whispered aside and its all-over surface pattern of crackling and wrinkling. Similar effects become combustive in “Mz. 410. Something or Other,” as cut-paper shards fly outward, fabrics unravel, and a bird feather, stabbing into the composition’s center, seems to be exploding and disintegrating.
These collages have an ambiguous dynamic: they’re festive, but they’re not benign. Thought of in terms of sound, they could be fireworks or gunfire. World War I was just a few years in the past. The atmosphere of cosmic uncertainty it generated was still very much in the air. For Schwitters, who was both an adventurer and an elegist, drawn equally to the new and the old, who kept dashing to the cultural front lines then pulling self-protectively back, art making was a crucial stabilizer.
You sense the steadying role it played for him in “Mz 601,” a 1923 collage radical in its pre-Minimalist play of grids and classical in its precisely judged asymmetries. And you sense it in the strikingly spacious, airy 1932 assemblage called “Körting Picture.” Done during or after one of Schwitters’s repeated getaways to a remote Norwegian island, it replaces urban detritus with a frond of seaweed and a patch of bark, and adds flickering strokes of paint like water-reflected light.
Overt references to nature, to cloud-filled skies and forests, recur in the 1940s, along with diminutive wood and plaster sculptures — surely Cy Twombly knows them well — as personable as pets. But organicism in the late work more often takes abject form. Collages grow denser and junkier, soiled with pigment and dirt, affixed with lumps of matter as dark and moist looking as chewed food or dissolving flesh.
Even the immaculate-white Hanover Merzbau, in a much-traveled full-scale reconstruction from the 1980s by the stage designer Peter Bissegger, feels claustrophobic and tomblike. To Schwitters this precursor of contemporary installation art was Merz in excelsis, a fit container for everything he cared about. But it isn’t an opening-out, heart-gladdening utopian space. It’s the equivalent of a Joseph Cornell box: a repository for relics, secrets and occult signs, a personal theater, and a retreat.
No wonder Schwitters was shattered by its destruction. (He started two other Merzbaus, in Norway and England, but never got far.) Not only had an artist lost the monument by which he hoped to be remembered; one of modernism’s signal outsiders, who often looked like anything but, had lost a place to hide, and never found the means or the time, precious time, to rebuild it.
Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage
WHEN AND WHERE Through June 26, Princeton University Art Museum, Elm Lane, off Nassau Street, Princeton, N.J.
April 1st, 2011
Through April 10, 2011
Created by kings and commoners alike, Kuba textile patterns underscore the phenomenal possibility of repetitive geometric compositions. The multiple permutations of a limited set of motifs and their combined juxtapositions inspired Western artists and influenced the evolution of European modernism. In the early twentieth century, African art profoundly affected artists such as Georges Braque, Paul Klee, Gustav Klimt, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso, who were searching for new modes of pictorial and perceptual imagery. Many of these artists collected African textiles and were inspired by the visually arresting Kuba textiles from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Men and women of the Kuba culture jointly produced raffia textiles embellished with a dazzling array of geometric patterns. Fibers from the Raphia vinifera palm were cultivated, processed, and woven into cloth by men. The fabric was handed over to women to finish the edges, pound to soften, and adorn with surface decoration. This collaboration of men and women in the production of these textiles was not only linked to concepts of cultural identity and community responsibility but to Kuba spiritual beliefs as well.
March 31st, 2011
Erik Jacobs for The New York Times
In a woodworking class at the Eliot School of Fine and Applied Arts in Boston, Max Smith-Stern, 5, adds wheels to an ambulance with the help of a vise.
By JULIE SCELFO
NY Times Published: March 30, 2011
IN honor of President’s Day last month, Deb Winsor, a carpenter with a workshop in Brooklyn, led a crew in the construction of an 8-foot-wide model of the White House, complete with north and south porticos and two dozen hand-painted windows.
After reviewing the plans with the workers, Ms. Winsor, 50, supervised them as they laid out two-by-fours for the front and back walls and then hammered the studs and plates together with three-inch nails. Next, she watched as some of them raised the walls and sheathed them in plywood while others used an electric jigsaw to cut bases for the portico columns. Finally, one of the carpenters used a screw gun to attach a flagpole to the roof and secure the pediment to the freshly painted facade.
At quitting time, the workers removed their protective headphones, put their tools back in their holsters and cleaned up their work stations. Then they gathered up the wooden toys they had made during break and ran to the door to greet their parents.
“Good job today,” Ms. Winsor hollered cheerfully at Oscar Markowitz, a 5-year-old boy with orange hair, flushed cheeks and a big grin, one of a dozen children (including the reporter’s son) participating in a weeklong camp she was holding at Construction Kids, her workshop on Flatbush Avenue.
“Tomorrow we’ll build a log cabin,” she added, as a 9-year-old boy walked by on handmade stilts.
Ms. Winsor started Construction Kids two years ago, after she conducted a one-day building project at her son’s preschool and was deluged with requests from parents and teachers for more. And while it might seem like something fairly unusual — teaching young children to use power tools — it is one of about a dozen such programs across the country that allow children to hammer and drill to their hearts’ content.
Just as legions of Americans in cities and suburbs have discovered the joys of working with their hands — building their own chicken coops or brewing artisanal vinegars — many are now encouraging their children to do the same, by giving them the opportunity to learn how to handle a hammer as well as they use an iPhone.
At the nonprofit Eliot School of Fine and Applied Arts in Boston, children from 4 to 17 are designing furniture and learning joinery techniques in woodworking classes and an off-site program taught at local elementary and middle schools.
The Randall Museum, in San Francisco, has had a children’s woodworking program for two decades, but in recent years it has doubled the number of its classes and added one for preschoolers.
The three-year-old Makeville Studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn, which bills itself as a “hands-on lab for craft, building, art and invention,” added a workshop building last year so children as young as 6 can take classes.
Kids’ Carpentry, an “after-school math enrichment program” that has quietly served Northern California for nearly 30 years, just opened a branch in Minnesota, has added a new program in Berkeley, Calif., and is preparing to bring its woodworking classes to six more cities in the Bay Area by the end of the year.
And so many parents have been trying to get their children into the Tinkering School, a sleepover summer camp in Montara, Calif., where children 8 to 17 build sailboats and treehouses, that the program recently opened in Austin, Tex., and plans to expand into an entire K-12 school in San Francisco in September; programs in Chicago and Buffalo, N.Y., are in the works for 2012.
“There is an awakening going on for sure,” said Doug Stowe, a longtime woodworker and educator in Arkansas, who was named a Living Treasure there in 2009 for his efforts at preserving and teaching the craft. Since he started a blog five years ago called Wisdom of the Hands, named after the program he founded in 2001 at Clear Spring School in Eureka Springs, Mr. Stowe said parents, educators and woodworkers from around the country have been contacting him for advice on starting projects and classes in their communities.
“Up until the early 1900s, there was a widespread understanding that the use of the hands was essential to the development of character and intellect,” said Mr. Stowe, 62. “More recently, we’ve had this idea that every child should go to college and that the preparation for careers in manual arts was no longer required.”
Somewhere along the way, he added, “we have forgotten all the other important things that manual training conveys.”
PREVIOUS generations may have learned to use tools at their fathers’ or grandfathers’ workbenches, but today’s parents often need woodworking classes themselves before they can pass along the knowledge.
Christopher Landy, 42, a television lighting designer in Brooklyn, dealt with what he jokingly calls an “early midlife crisis” by learning construction at Makeville Studio. “It’s very relaxing and it’s a great release from work,” said Mr. Landy, who is using his new skills to build a workshop at his weekend home in Columbia County, N.Y.
When he realized there were classes for children, Mr. Landy enrolled his son Max, 9, who has since built a lamp, a castle, a crossbow and a Harry Potter-inspired wand, among other things. Then Max’s sister, Samantha, 6, saw how much fun her brother was having, and now she takes a woodworking class, too.
“They truly love it,” Mr. Landy said. “It’s been a great creative outlet for the whole family.”
Other parents see woodworking as a way of counteracting the passiveness of logging on and tuning out. Brian Cohen, a former music industry executive in Brooklyn, co-founded Beam Camp, a “summer art and building” camp in Strafford, N.H., in 2005, after seeing how much time his children’s classmates were spending with their iPods and laptops. Children from 7 to 16 spend a month there, devoting part of their time to building a single sophisticated project — geodesic domes in the shape of virus protein shells, for instance, or parade floats with kinetic sculptures — with the help of professionals from various fields.
“My partner and I saw that kids were spending too much time interacting with perfect interfaces,” said Mr. Cohen, 45. “We felt that we needed to provide an experience by which they could understand how perfection is achieved — and, more specifically, how that perfection is achieved by working through problems with your hands.”
Louis Hyde, 13, an eighth-grader in Brooklyn, has attended Beam Camp each of the last three summers and plans to go again this year. “I did not ever really imagine there was the potential to make things on the scale that we made them,” he said. “When you finish this gigantic thing at the end of camp, it just feels so good. And you know that you were an active contributor to it.”
FOR veteran tinkerers, part of the satisfaction of teaching children woodworking comes from sharing the joy of turning a pile of scraps into something functional or beautiful.
Gever Tulley, 49, a computer scientist and longtime woodworker, founded the Tinkering School in 2005 after he and his wife noticed, he said, “that more and more of our friends’ children were requesting to come over to our house for the weekend because they knew that I would give them a hammer and put them to work.”
“One day, I suddenly realized I had a responsibility to these children,” he continued. “If I didn’t give them an opportunity to start building things and making things that express their own imagination, they might not get one.”
During the first summer, he helped eight children build a wooden roller coaster with 120 feet of track. Last summer, the 12 children in each session built an entire village, where they slept for two nights, out of nothing but wood and string.
“Children are inherently exploratory,” Mr. Tulley said. Years ago, he added: “they were only limited by their imaginations. Now, they seem to be limited by parents.”
To be sure, many parents and educators are concerned about the inherent dangers in teaching very young children skills that require very sharp tools.
The Boy Scouts of America, for example, recommend that 6- and 7-year-old Tiger Cubs use ice-cream sticks and soap, rather than knives and wood, to learn carving.
Renée Fairrer, a spokeswoman for the group, explained: “We don’t think that most young people at that age have either the proficiency or the knowledge to use a knife. We want to get them comfortable with eye-hand coordination using an item that will not hurt them, i.e., a Popsicle stick, on a material that is soft and pliable, before going on to more advanced carving activities.”
Gary A. Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at the Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, agreed that there is reason to be concerned. He cited research that shows that the most serious woodworking injuries are from table saws, although they are relatively infrequent. “When we look at the numbers, and you compare those, for example, with something like bicycling or car crashes or things that are much more common, woodworking doesn’t reach the same level,” Dr. Smith said.
The message he would give parents: “Be really careful because of the power and potential seriousness associated with power saws and woodworking. Be mindful that your child needs to have the maturity, decision-making ability, the coordination to be able to do that safely. It should be done under trained supervision. And what’s even more important is that the type of saws they use should have automatic stopping technology.”
While the teachers and administrators interviewed for this article agreed that the dangers were real, they all said that no child had ever sustained serious injuries in their classes. As Mr. Cohen, of Beam Camp, put it: “Tetherball is more dangerous than the shop.”
Michael Glass, 55, the founder of Kids’ Carpentry, who has been teaching woodworking in schools and community centers for almost 30 years, said that most of the injuries he has seen were very minor.
“Of course, someone might hit their thumb with a hammer,” he said. “Or they might get a splinter. I can’t remember anyone ever cutting themselves with a saw. In 29 years, there’s been nothing that’s ever required anything more than a Band-Aid.”
He added: “We’re teaching them the safe use of hand tools. It’s a slow, deliberate process.”
Lenore Skenazy, a crusader against what she considers overprotective parenting, writes a popular blog called Free Range Kids. She believes that not teaching children basic skills because of the risk of injury defies common sense.
“We’ve sort of been brainwashed as a culture to believe that our children are the least competent generation to roam the earth,” Ms. Skenazy said. “In almost every other era, children were there to help the family survive, so as soon as they could, they would be helping out, planting seeds, using tools to fix a cart or build a crate. What we’re talking about, it’s not like, ‘Here, son, here’s a chainsaw.’ It’s not chainsaws for children. It’s skills that children have traditionally learned.”
Parents and teachers who support woodworking instruction for children say it also teaches them how to overcome setbacks.
Tony Deis, the founder of Trackers Earth, an outdoor education and recreation program in Portland, Ore., that offers instruction in woodworking and survival skills like fire-building, archery and wildlife tracking, said: “When you work with wood and any other natural material, you have to work with it. You can’t just make it be what you want it to be. You have to use all the tools available to create something. It causes kids to deal with real-world results and create real-world solutions for their problems.”
It may also offer them a rare opportunity to develop their creativity, said Abigail Norman, director of the Eliot School in Boston.
“Children are so driven to find the right answer, to put their name on the right place on the page, to fill in the right multiple-choice question, to blacken the right dot,” Ms. Norman said. “They’re crying out for opportunities to use their creative mind to take creative risks. Woodworking and art supply that.”
Moreover, because of shifting priorities, she added, many children are no longer exposed to woodworking at school. In the Boston area, “the era of shop class is pretty much over. Some of the independent private schools have woodworking still,” she said. But in “the public schools, we’ll go into a school for the after-school program and walk by an empty room that has ‘Woodshop’ on the door, but everything is gone from there.”
Two years ago, Mr. Tulley, the founder of the Tinkering School, self-published “50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do),” an instruction manual (with safety tips) that was his effort to help parents overcome their fears of things children naturally gravitate toward, like making a slingshot, licking a 9-volt battery or hammering a nail. It hit a nerve, and led to a slew of lecture invitations and, eventually, a bona fide printing: it is being published by a division of Penguin Group in May.
In his introduction for adults (there is a separate one for children), Mr. Tulley explains that the point of letting children do potentially dangerous things is to help them become competent people who “treat failures as feedback, which they incorporate in the ongoing, evolving solution to the problem.”
Like most of the parents interviewed for this article, Alessandra Bogner, whose 8-year-old son, Dean, is enrolled at the after-school program at Construction Kids, reports a positive experience.
“I like the fact that in this class we’re giving Dean this responsibility to say, ‘Hey, this is really dangerous stuff, and we know we’re giving you the opportunity to be careful, to do it right,’ ” Ms. Bogner said. “Your heart is in your throat for a minute. But they’re doing it right. And I love that.”
March 30th, 2011
By DAVID BROOKS
NY Times Published: March 28, 2011
A few months ago, Steven Pinker of Harvard asked a smart question: What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?
The good folks at Edge.org organized a symposium, and 164 thinkers contributed suggestions. John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University, wrote that people should be more aware of path dependence. This refers to the notion that often “something that seems normal or inevitable today began with a choice that made sense at a particular time in the past, but survived despite the eclipse of the justification for that choice.”
For instance, typewriters used to jam if people typed too fast, so the manufacturers designed a keyboard that would slow typists. We no longer have typewriters, but we are stuck with the letter arrangements of the qwerty keyboard.
Path dependence explains many linguistic patterns and mental categories, McWhorter continues. Many people worry about the way e-mail seems to degrade writing skills. But there is nothing about e-mail that forbids people from using the literary style of 19th-century letter writers. In the 1960s, language became less formal, and now anybody who uses the old manner is regarded as an eccentric.
Evgeny Morozov, the author of “The Net Delusion,” nominated the Einstellung Effect, the idea that we often try to solve problems by using solutions that worked in the past instead of looking at each situation on its own terms. This effect is especially powerful in foreign affairs, where each new conflict is viewed through the prism of Vietnam or Munich or the cold war or Iraq.
Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University writes about the Focusing Illusion, which holds that “nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.” He continues: “Education is an important determinant of income — one of the most important — but it is less important than most people think. If everyone had the same education, the inequality of income would be reduced by less than 10 percent. When you focus on education you neglect the myriad of other factors that determine income. The differences of income among people who have the same education are huge.”
Joshua Greene, a philosopher and neuroscientist at Harvard University, has a brilliant entry on Supervenience. Imagine a picture on a computer screen of a dog sitting in a rowboat. It can be described as a picture of a dog, but at a different level it can be described as an arrangement of pixels and colors. The relationship between the two levels is asymmetric. The same image can be displayed at different sizes with different pixels. The high-level properties (dogness) supervene the low-level properties (pixels).
Supervenience, Greene continues, helps explain things like the relationship between science and the humanities. Humanists fear that scientists are taking over their territory and trying to explain everything. But new discoveries about the brain don’t explain Macbeth. The products of the mind supervene the mechanisms of the brain. The humanities can be informed by the cognitive sciences even as they supervene them.
If I were presumptuous enough to nominate a few entries, I’d suggest the Fundamental Attribution Error: Don’t try to explain by character traits behavior that is better explained by context.
I’d also nominate the distinction between emotion and arousal. There’s a general assumption that emotional people are always flying off the handle. That’s not true. We would also say that Emily Dickinson was emotionally astute. As far as I know, she did not go around screaming all the time. It would be useful if we could distinguish between the emotionality of Dickinson and the arousal of the talk-show jock.
Public life would be vastly improved if people relied more on the concept of emergence. Many contributors to the Edge symposium hit on this point.
We often try to understand problems by taking apart and studying their constituent parts. But emergent problems can’t be understood this way. Emergent systems are ones in which many different elements interact. The pattern of interaction then produces a new element that is greater than the sum of the parts, which then exercises a top-down influence on the constituent elements.
Culture is an emergent system. A group of people establishes a pattern of interaction. And once that culture exists, it influences how the individuals in it behave. An economy is an emergent system. So is political polarization, rising health care costs and a bad marriage.
Emergent systems are bottom-up and top-down simultaneously. They have to be studied differently, as wholes and as nested networks of relationships. We still try to address problems like poverty and Islamic extremism by trying to tease out individual causes. We might make more headway if we thought emergently.
We’d certainly be better off if everyone sampled the fabulous Edge symposium, which, like the best in science, is modest and daring all at once.
March 29th, 2011
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: March 27, 2011
Recently William Cronon, a historian who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, decided to weigh in on his state’s political turmoil. He started a blog, “Scholar as Citizen,” devoting his first post to the role of the shadowy American Legislative Exchange Council in pushing hard-line conservative legislation at the state level. Then he published an opinion piece in The Times, suggesting that Wisconsin’s Republican governor has turned his back on the state’s long tradition of “neighborliness, decency and mutual respect.”
So what was the G.O.P.’s response? A demand for copies of all e-mails sent to or from Mr. Cronon’s university mail account containing any of a wide range of terms, including the word “Republican” and the names of a number of Republican politicians.
If this action strikes you as no big deal, you’re missing the point. The hard right — which these days is more or less synonymous with the Republican Party — has a modus operandi when it comes to scholars expressing views it dislikes: never mind the substance, go for the smear. And that demand for copies of e-mails is obviously motivated by no more than a hope that it will provide something, anything, that can be used to subject Mr. Cronon to the usual treatment.
The Cronon affair, then, is one more indicator of just how reflexively vindictive, how un-American, one of our two great political parties has become.
The demand for Mr. Cronon’s correspondence has obvious parallels with the ongoing smear campaign against climate science and climate scientists, which has lately relied heavily on supposedly damaging quotations found in e-mail records.
Back in 2009 climate skeptics got hold of more than a thousand e-mails between researchers at the Climate Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia. Nothing in the correspondence suggested any kind of scientific impropriety; at most, we learned — I know this will shock you — that scientists are human beings, who occasionally say snide things about people they dislike.
But that didn’t stop the usual suspects from proclaiming that they had uncovered “Climategate,” a scientific scandal that somehow invalidates the vast array of evidence for man-made climate change. And this fake scandal gives an indication of what the Wisconsin G.O.P. presumably hopes to do to Mr. Cronon.
After all, if you go through a large number of messages looking for lines that can be made to sound bad, you’re bound to find a few. In fact, it’s surprising how few such lines the critics managed to find in the “Climategate” trove: much of the smear has focused on just one e-mail, in which a researcher talks about using a “trick” to “hide the decline” in a particular series. In context, it’s clear that he’s talking about making an effective graphical presentation, not about suppressing evidence. But the right wants a scandal, and won’t take no for an answer.
Is there any doubt that Wisconsin Republicans are hoping for a similar “success” against Mr. Cronon?
Now, in this case they’ll probably come up dry. Mr. Cronon writes on his blog that he has been careful never to use his university e-mail for personal business, exhibiting a scrupulousness that’s neither common nor expected in the academic world. (Full disclosure: I have, at times, used my university e-mail to remind my wife to feed the cats, confirm dinner plans with friends, etc.)
Beyond that, Mr. Cronon — the president-elect of the American Historical Association — has a secure reputation as a towering figure in his field. His magnificent “Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West” is the best work of economic and business history I’ve ever read — and I read a lot of that kind of thing.
So we don’t need to worry about Mr. Cronon — but we should worry a lot about the wider effect of attacks like the one he’s facing.
Legally, Republicans may be within their rights: Wisconsin’s open records law provides public access to e-mails of government employees, although the law was clearly intended to apply to state officials, not university professors. But there’s a clear chilling effect when scholars know that they may face witch hunts whenever they say things the G.O.P. doesn’t like.
Someone like Mr. Cronon can stand up to the pressure. But less eminent and established researchers won’t just become reluctant to act as concerned citizens, weighing in on current debates; they’ll be deterred from even doing research on topics that might get them in trouble.
What’s at stake here, in other words, is whether we’re going to have an open national discourse in which scholars feel free to go wherever the evidence takes them, and to contribute to public understanding. Republicans, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, are trying to shut that kind of discourse down. It’s up to the rest of us to see that they don’t succeed.
March 28th, 2011Rare footage by Yvon Chouinard, initially created for National Geographic
March 27th, 2011
The design community continues to rally in support for victims of the 2011 Sendai earthquake and tsunami. Local resident and architect Shigeru Ban recently announced that he was accepting donations towards his partitioning system, a low-cost, highly effective system than can be deployed to provide basic insulation and privacy amongst families who have lost their homes.
With an estimated 400,000 displaced, the temporary housing solution is a simple yet significant change that can help families, who traditionally maintain thin neighborly relations and high levels of privacy, live their lives a bit more normally.
You can donate by going to his website where you will find all the necessary information to wire money to their bank account in Tokyo. Donate Here
Shigeru Ban is known for swiftly reacting in times of need, proposing architectural solutions to meet the demand for low-cost temporary housing. His plans have been deployed during the Great Hanshin earthquake of ’95, The Fukuoka earthquake of ’05 and the Haiti earthquake of ’10.
Thanks to Rodney Hill
March 26th, 2011
By BOB HERBERT
NY Times Published: March 25, 2011
So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.
Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living.
Arthur Miller, echoing the poet Archibald MacLeish, liked to say that the essence of America was its promises. That was a long time ago. Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.
The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.
Nearly 14 million Americans are jobless and the outlook for many of them is grim. Since there is just one job available for every five individuals looking for work, four of the five are out of luck. Instead of a land of opportunity, the U.S. is increasingly becoming a place of limited expectations. A college professor in Washington told me this week that graduates from his program were finding jobs, but they were not making very much money, certainly not enough to think about raising a family.
There is plenty of economic activity in the U.S., and plenty of wealth. But like greedy children, the folks at the top are seizing virtually all the marbles. Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush. As the Economic Policy Institute has reported, the richest 10 percent of Americans received an unconscionable 100 percent of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007, the most recent extended period of economic expansion.
Americans behave as if this is somehow normal or acceptable. It shouldn’t be, and didn’t used to be. Through much of the post-World War II era, income distribution was far more equitable, with the top 10 percent of families accounting for just a third of average income growth, and the bottom 90 percent receiving two-thirds. That seems like ancient history now.
The current maldistribution of wealth is also scandalous. In 2009, the richest 5 percent claimed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80 percent, collectively held just 12.8 percent.
This inequality, in which an enormous segment of the population struggles while the fortunate few ride the gravy train, is a world-class recipe for social unrest. Downward mobility is an ever-shortening fuse leading to profound consequences.
A stark example of the fundamental unfairness that is now so widespread was in The New York Times on Friday under the headline: “G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether.” Despite profits of $14.2 billion — $5.1 billion from its operations in the United States — General Electric did not have to pay any U.S. taxes last year.
As The Times’s David Kocieniewski reported, “Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore.”
G.E. is the nation’s largest corporation. Its chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, is the leader of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. You can understand how ordinary workers might look at this cozy corporate-government arrangement and conclude that it is not fully committed to the best interests of working people.
Overwhelming imbalances in wealth and income inevitably result in enormous imbalances of political power. So the corporations and the very wealthy continue to do well. The employment crisis never gets addressed. The wars never end. And nation-building never gets a foothold here at home.
New ideas and new leadership have seldom been more urgently needed.
•
This is my last column for The New York Times after an exhilarating, nearly 18-year run. I’m off to write a book and expand my efforts on behalf of working people, the poor and others who are struggling in our society. My thanks to all the readers who have been so kind to me over the years. I can be reached going forward at bobherbert88@gmail.com.
March 25th, 2011
Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat
General Electric with Waiter, 1984
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI
NY Times Published: March 24, 2011
General Electric, the nation’s largest corporation, had a very good year in 2010.
The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.
Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.
That may be hard to fathom for the millions of American business owners and households now preparing their own returns, but low taxes are nothing new for G.E. The company has been cutting the percentage of its American profits paid to the Internal Revenue Service for years, resulting in a far lower rate than at most multinational companies.
Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore. G.E.’s giant tax department, led by a bow-tied former Treasury official named John Samuels, is often referred to as the world’s best tax law firm. Indeed, the company’s slogan “Imagination at Work” fits this department well. The team includes former officials not just from the Treasury, but also from the I.R.S. and virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress.
While General Electric is one of the most skilled at reducing its tax burden, many other companies have become better at this as well. Although the top corporate tax rate in the United States is 35 percent, one of the highest in the world, companies have been increasingly using a maze of shelters, tax credits and subsidies to pay far less.
In a regulatory filing just a week before the Japanese disaster put a spotlight on the company’s nuclear reactor business, G.E. reported that its tax burden was 7.4 percent of its American profits, about a third of the average reported by other American multinationals. Even those figures are overstated, because they include taxes that will be paid only if the company brings its overseas profits back to the United States. With those profits still offshore, G.E. is effectively getting money back.
Such strategies, as well as changes in tax laws that encouraged some businesses and professionals to file as individuals, have pushed down the corporate share of the nation’s tax receipts — from 30 percent of all federal revenue in the mid-1950s to 6.6 percent in 2009.
Yet many companies say the current level is so high it hobbles them in competing with foreign rivals. Even as the government faces a mounting budget deficit, the talk in Washington is about lower rates. President Obama has said he is considering an overhaul of the corporate tax system, with an eye to lowering the top rate, ending some tax subsidies and loopholes and generating the same amount of revenue. He has designated G.E.’s chief executive, Jeffrey R. Immelt, as his liaison to the business community and as the chairman of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, and it is expected to discuss corporate taxes.
“He understands what it takes for America to compete in the global economy,” Mr. Obama said of Mr. Immelt, on his appointment in January, after touring a G.E. factory in upstate New York that makes turbines and generators for sale around the world.
A review of company filings and Congressional records shows that one of the most striking advantages of General Electric is its ability to lobby for, win and take advantage of tax breaks.
Over the last decade, G.E. has spent tens of millions of dollars to push for changes in tax law, from more generous depreciation schedules on jet engines to “green energy” credits for its wind turbines. But the most lucrative of these measures allows G.E. to operate a vast leasing and lending business abroad with profits that face little foreign taxes and no American taxes as long as the money remains overseas.
Company officials say that these measures are necessary for G.E. to compete against global rivals and that they are acting as responsible citizens. “G.E. is committed to acting with integrity in relation to our tax obligations,” said Anne Eisele, a spokeswoman. “We are committed to complying with tax rules and paying all legally obliged taxes. At the same time, we have a responsibility to our shareholders to legally minimize our costs.”
The assortment of tax breaks G.E. has won in Washington has provided a significant short-term gain for the company’s executives and shareholders. While the financial crisis led G.E. to post a loss in the United States in 2009, regulatory filings show that in the last five years, G.E. has accumulated $26 billion in American profits, and received a net tax benefit from the I.R.S. of $4.1 billion.
But critics say the use of so many shelters amounts to corporate welfare, allowing G.E. not just to avoid taxes on profitable overseas lending but also to amass tax credits and write-offs that can be used to reduce taxes on billions of dollars of profit from domestic manufacturing. They say that the assertive tax avoidance of multinationals like G.E. not only shortchanges the Treasury, but also harms the economy by discouraging investment and hiring in the United States.
“In a rational system, a corporation’s tax department would be there to make sure a company complied with the law,” said Len Burman, a former Treasury official who now is a scholar at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. “But in our system, there are corporations that view their tax departments as a profit center, and the effects on public policy can be negative.”
The shelters are so crucial to G.E.’s bottom line that when Congress threatened to let the most lucrative one expire in 2008, the company came out in full force. G.E. officials worked with dozens of financial companies to send letters to Congress and hired a bevy of outside lobbyists.
The head of its tax team, Mr. Samuels, met with Representative Charles B. Rangel, then chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, which would decide the fate of the tax break. As he sat with the committee’s staff members outside Mr. Rangel’s office, Mr. Samuels dropped to his knee and pretended to beg for the provision to be extended — a flourish made in jest, he said through a spokeswoman.
That day, Mr. Rangel reversed his opposition to the tax break, according to other Democrats on the committee.
The following month, Mr. Rangel and Mr. Immelt stood together at St. Nicholas Park in Harlem as G.E. announced that its foundation had awarded $30 million to New York City schools, including $11 million to benefit various schools in Mr. Rangel’s district. Joel I. Klein, then the schools chancellor, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who presided, said it was the largest gift ever to the city’s schools.
G.E. officials say the donation was granted solely on the merit of the project. “The foundation goes to great lengths to ensure grant decisions are not influenced by company government relations or lobbying priorities,” Ms. Eisele said.
Mr. Rangel, who was censured by Congress last year for soliciting donations from corporations and executives with business before his committee, said this month that the donation was unrelated to his official actions.
Defying Reagan’s Legacy
General Electric has been a household name for generations, with light bulbs, electric fans, refrigerators and other appliances in millions of American homes. But today the consumer appliance division accounts for less than 6 percent of revenue, while lending accounts for more than 30 percent. Industrial, commercial and medical equipment like power plant turbines and jet engines account for about 50 percent. Its industrial work includes everything from wind farms to nuclear energy projects like the troubled plant in Japan, built in the 1970s.
Because its lending division, GE Capital, has provided more than half of the company’s profit in some recent years, many Wall Street analysts view G.E. not as a manufacturer but as an unregulated lender that also makes dishwashers and M.R.I. machines.
As it has evolved, the company has used, and in some cases pioneered, aggressive strategies to lower its tax bill. In the mid-1980s, President Ronald Reagan overhauled the tax system after learning that G.E. — a company for which he had once worked as a commercial pitchman — was among dozens of corporations that had used accounting gamesmanship to avoid paying any taxes.
“I didn’t realize things had gotten that far out of line,” Mr. Reagan told the Treasury secretary, Donald T. Regan, according to Mr. Regan’s 1988 memoir. The president supported a change that closed loopholes and required G.E. to pay a far higher effective rate, up to 32.5 percent.
That pendulum began to swing back in the late 1990s. G.E. and other financial services firms won a change in tax law that would allow multinationals to avoid taxes on some kinds of banking and insurance income. The change meant that if G.E. financed the sale of a jet engine or generator in Ireland, for example, the company would no longer have to pay American tax on the interest income as long as the profits remained offshore.
Known as active financing, the tax break proved to be beneficial for investment banks, brokerage firms, auto and farm equipment companies, and lenders like GE Capital. This tax break allowed G.E. to avoid taxes on lending income from abroad, and permitted the company to amass tax credits, write-offs and depreciation. Those benefits are then used to offset taxes on its American manufacturing profits.
G.E. subsequently ramped up its lending business.
As the company expanded abroad, the portion of its profits booked in low-tax countries such as Ireland and Singapore grew far faster. From 1996 through 1998, its profits and revenue in the United States were in sync — 73 percent of the company’s total. Over the last three years, though, 46 percent of the company’s revenue was in the United States, but just 18 percent of its profits.
Martin A. Sullivan, a tax economist for the trade publication Tax Analysts, said that booking such a large percentage of its profits in low-tax countries has “allowed G.E. to bring its U.S. effective tax rate to rock-bottom levels.”
G.E. officials say the disparity between American revenue and American profit is the result of ordinary business factors, such as investment in overseas markets and heavy lending losses in the United States recently. The company also says the nation’s workers benefit when G.E. profits overseas.
“We believe that winning in markets outside the United States increases U.S. exports and jobs,” Mr. Samuels said through a spokeswoman. “If U.S. companies aren’t competitive outside of their home market, it will mean fewer, not more, jobs in the United States, as the business will go to a non-U.S. competitor.”
The company does not specify how much of its global tax savings derive from active financing, but called it “significant” in its annual report. Stock analysts estimate the tax benefit to G.E. to be hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
“Cracking down on offshore profit-shifting by financial companies like G.E. was one of the important achievements of President Reagan’s 1986 Tax Reform Act,” said Robert S. McIntyre, director of the liberal group Citizens for Tax Justice, who played a key role in those changes. “The fact that Congress was snookered into undermining that reform at the behest of companies like G.E. is an insult not just to Reagan, but to all the ordinary American taxpayers who have to foot the bill for G.E.’s rampant tax sheltering.”
A Full-Court Press
Minimizing taxes is so important at G.E. that Mr. Samuels has placed tax strategists in decision-making positions in many major manufacturing facilities and businesses around the globe. Mr. Samuels, a graduate of Vanderbilt University and the University of Chicago Law School, declined to be interviewed for this article. Company officials acknowledged that the tax department had expanded since he joined the company in 1988, and said it now had 975 employees.
At a tax symposium in 2007, a G.E. tax official said the department’s “mission statement” consisted of 19 rules and urged employees to divide their time evenly between ensuring compliance with the law and “looking to exploit opportunities to reduce tax.”
Transforming the most creative strategies of the tax team into law is another extensive operation. G.E. spends heavily on lobbying: more than $200 million over the last decade, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Records filed with election officials show a significant portion of that money was devoted to tax legislation. G.E. has even turned setbacks into successes with Congressional help. After the World Trade Organization forced the United States to halt $5 billion a year in export subsidies to G.E. and other manufacturers, the company’s lawyers and lobbyists became deeply involved in rewriting a portion of the corporate tax code, according to news reports after the 2002 decision and a Congressional staff member.
By the time the measure — the American Jobs Creation Act — was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2004, it contained more than $13 billion a year in tax breaks for corporations, many very beneficial to G.E. One provision allowed companies to defer taxes on overseas profits from leasing planes to airlines. It was so generous — and so tailored to G.E. and a handful of other companies — that staff members on the House Ways and Means Committee publicly complained that G.E. would reap “an overwhelming percentage” of the estimated $100 million in annual tax savings.
According to its 2007 regulatory filing, the company saved more than $1 billion in American taxes because of that law in the three years after it was enacted.
By 2008, however, concern over the growing cost of overseas tax loopholes put G.E. and other corporations on the defensive. With Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, momentum was building to let the active financing exception expire. Mr. Rangel of the Ways and Means Committee indicated that he favored letting it end and directing the new revenue — an estimated $4 billion a year — to other priorities.
G.E. pushed back. In addition to the $18 million allocated to its in-house lobbying department, the company spent more than $3 million in 2008 on lobbying firms assigned to the task.
Mr. Rangel dropped his opposition to the tax break. Representative Joseph Crowley, Democrat of New York, said he had helped sway Mr. Rangel by arguing that the tax break would help Citigroup, a major employer in Mr. Crowley’s district.
G.E. officials say that neither Mr. Samuels nor any lobbyists working on behalf of the company discussed the possibility of a charitable donation with Mr. Rangel. The only contact was made in late 2007, a company spokesman said, when Mr. Immelt called to inform Mr. Rangel that the foundation was giving money to schools in his district.
But in 2008, when Mr. Rangel was criticized for using Congressional stationery to solicit donations for a City College of New York school being built in his honor, Mr. Rangel said he had appealed to G.E. executives to make the $30 million donation to New York City schools.
G.E. had nothing to do with the City College project, he said at a July 2008 news conference in Washington. “And I didn’t send them any letter,” Mr. Rangel said, adding that he “leaned on them to help us out in the city of New York as they have throughout the country. But my point there was that I do know that the C.E.O. there is connected with the foundation.”
In an interview this month, Mr. Rangel offered a different version of events — saying he didn’t remember ever discussing it with Mr. Immelt and was unaware of the foundation’s donation until the mayor’s office called him in June, before the announcement and after Mr. Rangel had dropped his opposition to the tax break.
Asked to explain the discrepancies between his accounts, Mr. Rangel replied, “I have no idea.”
Value to Americans?
While G.E.’s declining tax rates have bolstered profits and helped the company continue paying dividends to shareholders during the economic downturn, some tax experts question what taxpayers are getting in return. Since 2002, the company has eliminated a fifth of its work force in the United States while increasing overseas employment. In that time, G.E.’s accumulated offshore profits have risen to $92 billion from $15 billion.
“That G.E. can almost set its own tax rate shows how very much we need reform,” said Representative Lloyd Doggett, Democrat of Texas, who has proposed closing many corporate tax shelters. “Our tax system should encourage job creation and investment in America and end these tax incentives for exporting jobs and dodging responsibility for the cost of securing our country.”
As the Obama administration and leaders in Congress consider proposals to revamp the corporate tax code, G.E. is well prepared to defend its interests. The company spent $4.1 million on outside lobbyists last year, including four boutique firms that specialize in tax policy.
“We are a diverse company, so there are a lot of issues that the government considers, that Congress considers, that affect our shareholders,” said Gary Sheffer, a G.E. spokesman. “So we want to be sure our voice is heard.”
March 25th, 2011By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: March 24, 2011
Portugal’s government has just fallen in a dispute over austerity proposals. Irish bond yields have topped 10 percent for the first time. And the British government has just marked its economic forecast down and its deficit forecast up.
What do these events have in common? They’re all evidence that slashing spending in the face of high unemployment is a mistake. Austerity advocates predicted that spending cuts would bring quick dividends in the form of rising confidence, and that there would be few, if any, adverse effects on growth and jobs; but they were wrong.
It’s too bad, then, that these days you’re not considered serious in Washington unless you profess allegiance to the same doctrine that’s failing so dismally in Europe.
It was not always thus. Two years ago, faced with soaring unemployment and large budget deficits — both the consequences of a severe financial crisis — most advanced-country leaders seemingly understood that the problems had to be tackled in sequence, with an immediate focus on creating jobs combined with a long-run strategy of deficit reduction.
Why not slash deficits immediately? Because tax increases and cuts in government spending would depress economies further, worsening unemployment. And cutting spending in a deeply depressed economy is largely self-defeating even in purely fiscal terms: any savings achieved at the front end are partly offset by lower revenue, as the economy shrinks.
So jobs now, deficits later was and is the right strategy. Unfortunately, it’s a strategy that has been abandoned in the face of phantom risks and delusional hopes. On one side, we’re constantly told that if we don’t slash spending immediately we’ll end up just like Greece, unable to borrow except at exorbitant interest rates. On the other, we’re told not to worry about the impact of spending cuts on jobs because fiscal austerity will actually create jobs by raising confidence.
How’s that story working out so far?
Self-styled deficit hawks have been crying wolf over U.S. interest rates more or less continuously since the financial crisis began to ease, taking every uptick in rates as a sign that markets were turning on America. But the truth is that rates have fluctuated, not with debt fears, but with rising and falling hope for economic recovery. And with full recovery still seeming very distant, rates are lower now than they were two years ago.
But couldn’t America still end up like Greece? Yes, of course. If investors decide that we’re a banana republic whose politicians can’t or won’t come to grips with long-term problems, they will indeed stop buying our debt. But that’s not a prospect that hinges, one way or another, on whether we punish ourselves with short-run spending cuts.
Just ask the Irish, whose government — having taken on an unsustainable debt burden by trying to bail out runaway banks — tried to reassure markets by imposing savage austerity measures on ordinary citizens. The same people urging spending cuts on America cheered. “Ireland offers an admirable lesson in fiscal responsibility,” declared Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute, who said that the spending cuts had removed fears over Irish solvency and predicted rapid economic recovery.
That was in June 2009. Since then, the interest rate on Irish debt has doubled; Ireland’s unemployment rate now stands at 13.5 percent.
And then there’s the British experience. Like America, Britain is still perceived as solvent by financial markets, giving it room to pursue a strategy of jobs first, deficits later. But the government of Prime Minister David Cameron chose instead to move to immediate, unforced austerity, in the belief that private spending would more than make up for the government’s pullback. As I like to put it, the Cameron plan was based on belief that the confidence fairy would make everything all right.
But she hasn’t: British growth has stalled, and the government has marked up its deficit projections as a result.
Which brings me back to what passes for budget debate in Washington these days.
A serious fiscal plan for America would address the long-run drivers of spending, above all health care costs, and it would almost certainly include some kind of tax increase. But we’re not serious: any talk of using Medicare funds effectively is met with shrieks of “death panels,” and the official G.O.P. position — barely challenged by Democrats — appears to be that nobody should ever pay higher taxes. Instead, all the talk is about short-run spending cuts.
In short, we have a political climate in which self-styled deficit hawks want to punish the unemployed even as they oppose any action that would address our long-run budget problems. And here’s what we know from experience abroad: The confidence fairy won’t save us from the consequences of our folly.
March 25th, 2011
50 Years
March 24 – August 7, 2011
Opening reception: Thursday, March 24, 6-8PM
Thanks to Rodney Hill
March 23rd, 2011
By WILLIAM GRIMES
NY Times Published: March 19, 2011
Toshiko Takaezu, a Japanese-American ceramist whose closed pots and torpedolike cylinders, derived from natural forms, helped to elevate ceramics from the production of functional vessels to a fine art, died on March 9 in Honolulu. She was 88.
Her death was confirmed by Scott Ashley, the associate director of the Perimeter Gallery in Chicago.
In her stoneware and porcelain works, some small enough to fit in the palm of one hand, others monoliths more than six feet tall, Ms. Takaezu blended the expressive bravura of painters like Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline with the calm, meditative quality of traditional Japanese pottery in forms suggestive of acorns, melons or tree trunks.
Her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Early in her career she made traditional vessels but in the late 1950s, strongly influenced by the Finnish ceramist Maija Grotell, she embraced the notion of ceramic pieces as artworks meant to be seen rather than used. She closed off the top of her vessels, leaving a vestigial nipple-like opening and creating, in effect, a clay canvas for glazing of all kinds: brushing, dripping, pouring and dipping.
She became known for the squat balls she called moon pots; the vertical “closed forms,” which grew sharply in height in the 1990s; and thin ceramic trunks inspired by the scorched trees she had seen along the Devastation Trail in Hawaii’s Volcanoes National Park. At times Ms. Takaezu exhibited the moon pots in hammocks, an allusion to her method of drying the pots in nets. She also cast bronze bells and wove rugs.
Strongly influenced by her study of Zen Buddhism, she regarded her ceramic work as an outgrowth of nature and seamlessly interconnected with the rest of her life. “I see no difference between making pots, cooking and growing vegetables,” she was fond of saying. Indeed, she often used her kilns to bake chicken in clay, and dry mushrooms, apples and zucchinis.
Toshiko Takaezu (pronounced Toe-SHEE-ko Taka-YAY-zoo) was born on June 17, 1922, in Pepeekeo, Hawaii, the middle child of 11. Her parents were Japanese immigrants from Okinawa. She studied art at the University of Hawaii at Manoa but in 1951 enrolled in the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., to study with Ms. Grotell, a strong believer in experimentation and in allowing students to find their own way.
During a visit to Japan with one of her sisters in 1955, Ms. Takaezu spent time in a Zen monastery and with some of Japan’s most eminent traditional potters.
“You are not an artist simply because you paint or sculpt or make pots that cannot be used,” she told Ceramics Monthly in 1975. “An artist is a poet in his or her own medium. And when an artist produces a good piece, that work has mystery, an unsaid quality; it is alive.”
Ms. Takaezu was an influential teacher, both in the classroom — where she insisted on the high calling of the ceramist by repeating the mantra “no ashtrays, no souvenirs” — and in the studio, where she took on apprentices throughout her career. She taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art for nearly a decade after returning from Japan and for 25 years at Princeton, where she helped to develop the visual art program. She retired from Princeton in 1992.
She is survived by two brothers and four sisters.
Her work was the subject of a traveling retrospective that originated at the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto in 1995 and the exhibition “The Poetry of Clay: The Art of Toshiko Takaezu” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2004. “The Art of Toshiko Takaezu: In the Language of Silence,” edited by Peter Held, is scheduled to be published by the University of North Carolina Press in April.
March 22nd, 2011
Time Magazine Cover, 1965, oil on canvas, 22×16 in.
Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster 1964–1966 explores an essential and often overlooked period of the artist’s work. Celmins is best known as a painter of refined representational images—including night skies, ocean waves and spider webs. However, the images that first grounded her interest as a young artist in Los Angeles in the 1960s are characterized by violent themes such as crashing warplanes, smoking handguns, and other images of death and disaster influenced by the violence of the era and the mass media that represented it.
This is the first exhibition to concentrate on the Celmins’s early paintings and sculptures, made during a three-year period that laid the technical and thematic groundwork for her future as an artist.
Vija Celmins was born in 1938 in Riga, Latvia, and fled with her family to Germany in advance of the Soviet army’s invasion in 1944. Migrating to the United States in 1948, the family settled in Indianapolis, where Celmins grew up and studied art. In 1962, she moved to the West Coast to attend graduate school at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has lived and worked primarily in New York since 1981.
Through June 5, 2011
March 21st, 2011By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times Published: March 19, 2011
When America is under stress, as is happening right now with debates about where to pare the budget, we sometimes trample the least powerful and most vulnerable among us.
So maybe we can learn something from Japan, where the earthquake, tsunami and radiation leaks haven’t caused society to come apart at the seams but to be knit together more tightly than ever. The selflessness, stoicism and discipline in Japan these days are epitomized by those workers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, uncomplainingly and anonymously risking dangerous doses of radiation as they struggle to prevent a complete meltdown that would endanger their fellow citizens.
The most famous statue in Japan is arguably one of a dog, Hachiko, who exemplified loyalty, perseverance and duty. Hachiko met his owner at the train station when he returned from work each day, but the owner died at work one day in 1925 and never returned. Until he died about 10 years later, Hachiko faithfully went to the station each afternoon just in case his master returned.
I hope that some day Japan will erect another symbol of loyalty and dedication to duty: a statue of those nuclear plant workers.
I lived in Japan for five years as the Tokyo bureau chief for The New York Times, and I was sometimes perceived as hostile to the country because I was often critical of the Japanese government’s incompetence and duplicity. But the truth is that I came to cherish Japan’s civility and selflessness. There’s a kind of national honor code, exemplified by the way even cheap restaurants will lend you an umbrella if you’re caught in a downpour; you’re simply expected to return it in a day or two. If you lose your wallet in the subway, you expect to get it back.
The earthquake has put that dichotomy on display. The Japanese government has been hapless. And the Japanese people have been magnificent, enduring impossible hardships with dignity and grace.
As I recalled recently on my blog, I covered the 1995 Kobe earthquake that killed more than 6,000 people, and I looked everywhere for an example of people looting merchandise from one of the many shops with shattered windows. I did find a homeowner who was missing two bicycles, but as I did more reporting, it seemed as if they might have been taken for rescue efforts.
Finally, I came across a minimart owner who had seen three young men grab food from his shop and run away. I asked the shop owner if he was surprised that his fellow Japanese would stoop so low.
“No, you misunderstand,” the shop owner told me. “These looters weren’t Japanese. They were foreigners.”
Granted, Japan’s ethic of uncomplaining perseverance — gaman, in Japanese — may also explain why the country settles for third-rate leaders. Moreover, Japan’s tight-knit social fabric can lead to discrimination against those who don’t fit in. Bullying is a problem from elementary school to the corporate suite. Ethnic Koreans and an underclass known as burakumin are stigmatized. Indeed, after the terrible 1923 earthquake, Japanese rampaged against ethnic Koreans (who were accused of setting fires or even somehow causing the quake) and slaughtered an estimated 6,000 of them.
So Japan’s communitarianism has its downside, but we Americans could usefully move a step or two in that direction. Gaps between rich and poor are more modest in Japan, and Japan’s corporate tycoons would be embarrassed by the flamboyant pay packages that are common in America. Even in poor areas — including ethnic Korean or burakumin neighborhoods — schools are excellent.
My wife and I saw the collective ethos drummed into children when we sent our kids to Japanese schools. When the teacher was sick, there was no substitute teacher. The children were in charge. When our son Gregory came home from a school athletic meet, we were impressed that he had won first place in all his events, until we realized that every child had won first place.
For Gregory’s birthday, we invited his classmates over and taught them to play musical chairs. Disaster! The children, especially the girls, were traumatized by having to push aside others to gain a seat for themselves. What unfolded may have been the most polite, most apologetic, and least competitive game of musical chairs in the history of the world.
Look, we’re pushy Americans. We sometimes treat life, and budget negotiations, as a contest in which the weakest (such as children) are to be gleefully pushed aside when the music stops. But I wish we might learn a bit from the Japanese who right now are selflessly subsuming their own interests for the common good. We should sympathize with Japanese, yes, but we can also learn from them.
March 20th, 2011