Ed Felien : Batman and the Culture of Violence

Batman image from Batman: The Amimated Series / Wikimedia Commons.
Batman, The Joker, Nazis
and the culture of violence in America

Plato recognized the subversive value of art. He knew that art didn’t just hold a mirror up to society and reflect everything. It holds a lens that selects, frames, and distorts.

By Ed Felien / The Rag Blog / September 6, 2012

“Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” -- Oscar Wilde

Should we blame the Batman movies for the tragedy in Aurora? After murdering the people in the movie theater, James Holmes put his guns in his car and calmly told the police, “I’m the Joker.” He had booby-trapped his apartment so that anyone entering it would have set off massive explosions probably killing many more people. This begins to sound like The Dark Knight, where The Joker blew up a hospital because he was frustrated in getting revenge.

What explains the perverse pathology of The Joker? At one point in the movie he says he mutilated himself in sympathy with his wife who had been scarred by a knife, but later he says:

You wanna know how I got these scars? My father was a drinker and a fiend. And one night he goes off crazier than usual. Mommy gets the kitchen knife to defend herself. He doesn’t like that. Not. One. Bit. So, me watching, he takes the knife to her, laughing while he does it. He turns to me and says, "Why so serious?" Comes at me with the knife. "WHY SO SERIOUS?" He sticks the blade in my mouth. "Let’s put a smile on that face." And...

In the comic book original, The Joker is disfigured by falling into a toxic vat while robbing a chemical factory. The story of child abuse and watching his mother be victimized by his father is the invention of Christopher Nolan, the writer and director of the series.

Nolan was praised by critics for making The Joker psychologically believable. Whether the incident of child abuse actually happened to The Joker is irrelevant. The story is so compelling and horrifying that it seems to justify even more horrible acts of revenge on an indifferent world. Anyone who has been victimized and feels that the world has turned away could identify with The Joker’s demand that the world take note of his dimension of pain.

Nolan’s comment on the tragedy in Aurora was self-serving and willfully naïve:

I believe movies are one of the great American art forms, and the shared experience of watching a story unfold on screen is an important and joyful pastime. The movie theater is my home, and the idea that someone would violate that innocent and hopeful place in such an unbearably savage way is devastating to me.

The Joker is fascinating in his capacity for violence and destruction, but no one would call him “joyful” or “innocent and hopeful,” and The Joker is more than half the weight of The Dark Knight.

Children learn to speak by imitating their parents. They learn to act by imitating role models. Cultural values are taught by popular culture. What is acceptable is what is popular. Don’t artists have to accept responsibility for the lessons their art teaches?

This is not a new question. The last time it was debated seriously was when The Beatles’ White Album was blamed for inspiring Charlie Manson and his gang to murder Sharon Tate and four others in August of 1969. Certainly, today, we consider The Beatles joyful, innocent and hopeful, but there are songs on the White Album that are very dark.

Consider even the deliberately humorous “Bungalow Bill”:

Hey, Bungalow Bill
What did you kill
Bungalow Bill?

The children asked him if to kill was not a sin
“Not when he looked so fierce,” his mummy butted in
“If looks could kill it would have been us instead of him”
All the children sing


Or, “Happiness is a Warm Gun”:

Happiness is a warm gun
( bang bang shoot shoot )
Happiness is a warm gun, yes it is
(bang bang shoot shoot)
When I hold you in my arms (oh yes)
When I feel my finger on your trigger (oh yes)
I know nobody can do me no harm
Because
happiness is a warm gun, momma
Happiness is a warm gun
-Yes it is.
Happiness is a warm, yes it is ...
Gun!


Or, “Little Piggies”:

Have you seen the bigger piggies
In their starched white shirts
You will find the bigger piggies
Stirring up the dirt
Always have clean shirts to play around in.

In their sties with all their backing
They don’t care what goes on around
In their eyes there’s something lacking
What they need’s a damn good whacking.


Even the comic “Rocky Raccoon” has a dark edge:

Rocky had come equipped with a gun
To shoot off the legs of his rival
His rival it seems had broken his dreams
By stealing the girl of his fancy


Parts of “Yer Blues” are downright depressing:

Black cloud crossed my mind
Blue mist round my soul
Feel so suicidal
Even hate my rock and roll
Wanna die yeah wanna die
If I ain’t dead already
Ooh girl you know the reason why.


And Charlie Manson could believe that “Sexy Sadie” was talking directly about Sharon Tate:

Sexy Sadie how did you know
The world was waiting just for you
The world was waiting just for you
Sexy Sadie oooh how did you know

Sexy Sadie you’ll get yours yet
However big you think you are
However big you think you are
Sexy Sadie oooh you’ll get yours yet

We gave her everything we owned just to sit at her table
Just a smile would lighten everything
Sexy Sadie she’s the latest and the greatest of them all
She made a fool of everyone
Sexy Sadie
However big you think you are
Sexy Sadie


But the song that was the biggest hit from the double album, the song with the longest legs, was “Revolution.” When John and Paul sing:

You say you want a revolution
Well you know
we all want to change the world
You tell me that it’s evolution
Well you know
We all want to change the world
But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know you can count me out,

It’s probably John who ad-libs “in,” so a playful struggle goes on between the two as they go: “out” “in” “out” “in.” So, it’s left as an open question as to whether a revolution will mean destruction.

The Beatles didn’t pick those ideas out of thin air. They were the air that everyone was breathing that listened to popular music and wanted the war in Vietnam to end, and wanted racism to end, and wanted the oppression of women to end. The Black Panther Party was talking about armed self-defense and “Off the pig!”

Panther Bobby Hutton had been killed by the Oakland police after he had surrendered in 1968, and Fred Hampton was killed by federal authorities sleeping in his bed in 1969. The Weather Underground began its violent campaign against the war in Vietnam and draft boards in 1969.

Did The Beatles’ White Album cause the Tate murders? Of course not! Did they reflect the cultural values of the period? Yes! Did they have a responsibility to critically evaluate those ideas in their art? Do all artists have a responsibility to critically analyze the cultural values of their society, or is creating art enough of a responsibility? Was Sam Goldwyn right when he said, “If you’ve got a message, send a telegram”?

But this question goes back 2,500 years before The Beatles’ White Album. In Book III of The Republic, Plato seems to argue in favor of banning both The Beatles and Batman:

If a man, who through clever training can become anything and imitate anything, should arrive in our city, wanting to give a performance of his poems, we should bow down before him as someone holy, wonderful, and pleasing, but we should tell him that there is no one like him in our city and that it isn’t lawful for there to be. We should pour myrrh on his head, crown him with wreaths, and send him away to another city.

Plato recognized the subversive value of art. He knew that art didn’t just hold a mirror up to society and reflect everything. It holds a lens that selects, frames, and distorts. It judges society, and Plato knew it was possible that such judgment might find fault with his philosopher-kings. Plato believed it was best to eliminate the possibility of heresy while it was still outside the gates.

But, of course, Plato must have known that the instinct to create art that could reflect an idealized or distorted culture was an instinct in all of us. All of us have the capacity to create art, and whether the art reaffirms or criticizes society is a reflection of the individual artist’s point of view.

The Beatles’ White Album is a reflection of the popular resistance to the war in Vietnam, and, while it doesn’t articulate a coherent strategy, it seems in some songs to condone and romanticize armed struggle and guerrilla warfare.

The story of the Dark Knight is about Batman trying to save Gotham from a mad bomber. It sounds a lot like George W. Bush trying to save the world from Al Qaeda after the 9/11 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City.

At one point the movie asks the question that has troubled philosophers and governments since the beginning of civilization: Is torture ever justified? The question is posed in the way it always is, “What if by torturing someone you could get valuable information that would save lives, you could prevent a bombing that could kill innocent people?”

Batman beats up The Joker to get him to reveal where he is holding two hostages. Christopher Nolan seems to be saying torture is justified in trying to save lives, as we see the Dark Knight inflict pain on The Joker.

There is a direct link between Christopher Nolan’s script for Batman and George W. Bush’s script for his dark knight. Dick Cheney explained the Bush Doctrine on Torture to Tim Russert a few days after 9/11:

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

When they said we will use “any means at our disposal,” Bush and Cheney set themselves up above the law. Because the crime of 9/11 was so horrible, they felt using horrible means of retaliation simply balanced the scales of justice.

“An eye for an eye will leave everyone blind” is attributed to Gandhi.

Bush and Cheney did violence to the rule of law with their public justification of torture. If all crimes are allowed to balance the scales, then there is no law, and justice is simply the foot of the strongest on the neck of the weakest.

Someone who believes they have suffered a horrible injustice is then permitted to use whatever means they like to punish society and balance the scales.

Anders Breivik could justify killing 77 people associated with the Norwegian Labor Party because he believed their philosophy of multiculturalism was threatening the racial purity of Norway. Wade Michael Page could justify randomly killing six people in a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, because he believed they were a threat to racial purity in America.

These are examples of racial extermination carried out by Nazi fanatics, and, if there is no rule of law, then their justification of their acts as a defense of racial purity makes as much sense as anything else.

America has lost its moral compass. More innocent women and children have been killed by drone attacks than were killed in Aurora. The President has a Kill List of people to be assassinated without trial or due process. We are supporting atrocities in Syria and claiming it is a popular rebellion.

It is probably true that life does imitate art. The killer in Aurora thought he was imitating The Joker. But, to disagree with Oscar Wilde, it is probably true that art more often imitates life. Batman was imitating Dick Cheney in his use of torture. The collapse of moral values, the end of the rule of law, the random violence are justified by the state and then rationalized by the individual, and they find their expression in art.

Batman is not responsible for the moral corruption of America. The government and the billionaires that own the government are responsible. And we’re responsible for letting them get away with it.

[Ed Felien is publisher and editor of Southside Pride, a South Minneapolis monthly. Read more articles by Ed Felien on The Rag Blog]

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ART / Jordan Flaherty : 'Every Portrait Tells a Story'

Sheila Phipps with some of her work from the exhibit, "Every Portrait Tells a Story." Photo from Loop21.
A mother's art:
Every portrait tells a story

Sheila Phipps does portraits of young men she believes were convicted of crimes they did not commit. Her son, New Orleans rapper 'Mac,' is serving 30 years for manslaughter and her art proclaims his innocence.

By Jordan Flaherty / The Rag Blog / August 14, 2011

NEW ORLEANS -- As the date approaches for the 10th anniversary of her son’s conviction, Sheila Phipps is hard at work completing a powerful and moving series of paintings that tell the stories of wrongly-convicted young men in the U.S. prison system.

Phipps, a self-taught artist in New Orleans, has been selling and displaying her work for more than 20 years. Her son is Mckinley “Mac” Phipps, the legendary New Orleans rapper who was convicted of manslaughter in 2001 and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

In collaboration with the Innocence Project, Phipps contacted prisoners across the nation and researched their cases. Once she read enough evidence to convince her of their innocence, she communicated with the prisoner and then painted an image of them.

Now, Phipps is unveiling a series of 10 works, for a show called the Injustice Exhibition. Her use of color and framing varies with the inspiration, ranging from muted portraits to bright explosions of color, often capturing small details like focusing on a subject’s feet or hands. In the portrait of her son she highlights the gentle features of his face.

Seeing her son locked away caused Phipps’ to use her art in another way, as both activism and as release.

“To be honest I didn’t know what else to do,” says Phipps. “I’ve had four lawyers. One of the lawyers said she don’t even think the judges read the appeals we’ve written.” The hope is that her art will wake up people to the lives being wasted in prison -- not only her sons’, but all lives.

“Art is a way to express yourself,” she says. “So why not express yourself by raising awareness?” Phipps started painting in the 1980s, using art as a way to relax from the strain of raising her six children. She quickly caught the attention of Sandra Berry who runs the Neighborhood Gallery, a New Orleans arts institution. “Her work is absolutely wonderful,” says Berry. “There is a sensitivity and a mother-like compassion in her work that she brings to every subject.”

The subject for whom Phipps’ compassion is most concentrated, her son “Mac,” started rapping at the age of seven. At 11, his talents won him a contest held at New Orleans’ Superdome, for which he won a record deal. He released his first album, featuring production work by former Cash Money Records artist Mannie Fresh -- who would later develop the sound that made Cash Money Records famous -- at age 12.

Painting by Sheila Phipps from "Every Portrait Tells a Story." Image from Loop21.
By the age of 22, Mac had released two more albums, and was one of New Orleans’ most popular rappers. His collaborations included tracks with Master P, Snoop Dogg, and Mystikal. According to Phipps, Mac stayed grounded, despite his success. “He’s a very humble person,” she says. “He doesn’t even smoke and drink, if you can believe that in this day and time.”

On February 22, 2000, after a concert in Louisiana, a fight broke out and a young man named Barron C. Victor Jr. was shot and killed. Phipps, who helped book her son’s shows, was there that night. According to her, Mac was nowhere near the altercation. “Mac was in the corner signing autographs,” she says. “When the shots we’re fired, he hit the floor like everyone else.”

According to Phipps, Mac ran out of the club, but then came back in with a gun drawn. The reason? Phipps says he was trying to rescue her. “He heard the gunshot and didn’t know what was going on,” she says. “All he knew is, I gotta get my momma out of there.”

Although ballistics tests showed that Mac’s gun (which he had a license to carry) had never been fired, he was charged with second degree murder. Another man came forward and said that he had killed Victor, but prosecutors said they found his story unreliable. Mac was sentenced to 30 years behind bars. It was his first offense.

“Before this happened to my son, I thought when people went to jail that they were supposed to be there,” says Phipps. “Going to trial, I see how these DA's twist stories just to get a conviction. Then they go home and sleep at night while innocent people are just sitting there behind bars.”

Mac’s story continues to inspire outrage. A documentary about his case, called “The Camouflaged Truth,” is currently in post-production, and last year Dee-1, an up-and-coming conscious New Orleans rapper with several videos in rotation on MTV networks, organized a benefit concert to raise awareness about Mac’s case. For Sheila, every day that Mac is locked up is a struggle, but she plans to continue fighting. “I want to travel with the exhibit,” she says. “Just to shine light on the prison system and how they railroad people. I hope that this will open up a lot of people’s eyes."

View photos of Sheila's work here: "Source Every Portrait Tells a Story." For more about Mac and his case, see Source http://www.free-mac.org. You can contact Sheila at sheilaphippsstudio@yahoo.com
.
[Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. His award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and Argentina's Clarin newspaper. His new book is FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworleans@leftturn.org, and more information about Floodlines can be found at floodlines.org. This article was also published at Loop21. Find more articles by Jordan Flaherty on The Rag Blog.]

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Marc Estrin : The Ethics of Infiltration

Cartoon from Brainstuck.com.
THE ETHICS OF INFILTRATION

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / January 17, 2011

We began two weeks ago with Hallelujah in the mall, and last week contrasted that with theatrical infiltrations less in service to consumer capitalism.

When I began publishing these in various theater journals, I was met with a storm of protesting letters concerning my unethical “manipulation” of the poor bystanders. I wrote a piece in response describing what I thought to be a continuum of manipulations, from those which decreased understanding and degrees of freedom to those which increased them.

It might be good to look at such a continuum in the light of what is going on today. Let's start with the bad news:

A recent article by George Monbiot reports a training session organized by the right wing libertarian group, American Majority on "How to Manipulate the Medium":

Here’s what I do. I get on Amazon; I type in “Liberal Books." I go through and I say "one star, one star, one star." The flipside is you go to a conservative/libertarian whatever, go to their products and give them five stars... This is where your kids get information: Rotten Tomatoes, Flixster. These are places where you can rate movies. So when you type in “Movies on Healthcare," I don’t want Michael Moore’s to come up, so I always give it bad ratings. I spend about 30 minutes a day, just click, click, click, click... If there’s a place to comment, a place to rate, a place to share information, you have to do it. That’s how you control the online dialogue and give our ideas a fighting chance.

On a wider scale, we have the current Israeli government support for a special undercover team of workers paid to surf the internet and spread positive news about Israel. The deputy director of the Foreign Ministry's hasbara ("public diplomacy," aka propaganda) department has admitted the team will be working undercover:

Our people will not say: "Hello, I am from the hasbara department of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and I want to tell you the following." Nor will they necessarily identify themselves as Israelis, he said. They will speak as net-surfers and as citizens, and will write responses that will look personal but will be based on a prepared list of messages that the foreign ministry developed.

The new team is expected to increase the ministry’s close coordination with a private advocacy group, giyus.org (Give Israel Your United Support). About 50,000 activists are reported to have downloaded a program called Megaphone that sends an alert to their computers when an article critical of Israel is published. They are then supposed to bombard the site with comments supporting Israel.

A justification for much of this -- a story we broke on The Rag Blog -- was shamefully enunciated by our own government's Cass Sunstein -- Obama's Harvard Law School bud, and recently appointed Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

Writing in a scholarly journal, (J. Political Philosophy, 7 (2009), 202-227), Sunstein proposes the following:

[W]e suggest a distinctive tactic for breaking up the hard core of extremists who supply conspiracy theories: cognitive infiltration of extremist groups, whereby government agents or their allies (acting either virtually or in real space, and either openly or anonymously) will undermine the crippled epistemology of believers by planting doubts about the theories and stylized facts that circulate within such groups, thereby introducing beneficial cognitive diversity.

From cognitive infiltration of websites, groups and meetings, it is a short enough step to the entrapments by agents provocateur we read about so commonly today. The missteps of suckered individuals have enormous life consequences -- for them, and for all of us -- in the age of Patriot Act paranoia and power.

If these kind of infiltrations populate one end of the continuum, what is the other end – the “good” end?

The most obvious current example lies in the operation of Wikileaks and the brave individuals that feed it sequestered material. A person working in a dishonest, destructive organization has every right to transform him or herself into an infiltrator, making available to Wikileaks or other publicity groups secret material the organization would otherwise have hidden.

As Julian Assange wrote on the Wikileaks homepage, “The goal is justice; the method is transparency.” It is paradoxical that it takes invisible infiltration to create public transparency, but there it is, and the effectiveness of this tactic can no longer be in question. Nor can the public good resulting.

While the theatrical infiltrations I described last week may be trivial compared to these larger examples, both good and bad, they do raise the question of whether all arts -- Art itself -- does not function as an infiltration.

One innocently goes to a bookstore to buy a book. But the contents of that book, if it be a good one, will infiltrate and infect one's heartmind. The infiltrating virus will lie within, creating biopsychical response, spiritual molecules unlabeled, unacknowledged, perhaps unknown, but potentially agents provocateur for new thinking and action.

It is with this infiltrating image in mind that my wife, Donna, and I have recently begun a new publication project called Fomite. A fomite is a medium capable of transmitting infectious organisms from one individual to another.

"The activity of art is based on the capacity of people to be infected by the feelings of others.” -- Tolstoy, What is Art?

Art, writing, music are the kinds of infiltrations which -- if ethically and mindfully done -- have the capacity to increase, not decrease, degrees of freedom.

[Marc Estrin is a writer, activist, and cellist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

Also see:

• Marc Estrin : Mob 'n Maul / The Rag Blog / December 30, 2010
• Marc Estrin : Infiltrations / The Rag Blog / January 11, 2011

And see:

• Got Fascism? : Obama Advisor Promotes 'Cognitive Infiltration' by Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / January 11, 2010

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R.I.P. Bill Narum : Legendary Artist of the Texas Counterculture

Below, cover of Space City!, June 1, 1971. Illustration and design by Bill Narum.

Bill Narum was a dear friend of The Rag Blog and my personal friend and colleague for more than four decades. He was art director at Space City!, the pioneering underground paper we published in Houston in the late Sixties and early Seventies. He was a major force in the Houston underground radio scene -- at KLOL and KPFT -- and became one of the most important graphic designers and poster artists in the Texas counterculture. And he was still going strong.

He was also an activist, deeply committed to social justice, to basic political and cultural change, but -- as with most things in his life -- he did it without bombast or bluster.

Bill Narum was an exceptional talent; he was also a calm and gentle human being. His death leaves a void that cannot ever be filled.

Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / November 19, 2009

R.I.P. Bill Narum:
Legendary Texas counterculture artist,
underground radio pioneer

By Chris Gray / November 19, 2009

See gallery of Bill Narum art, Below.

Bill Narum, a key figure in Houston's counterculture in the late 1960s and early '70s, passed away Wednesday night, November 18, 2009, at his home in Austin. The cause of death was an "apparent heart attack or something that took him quickly while sitting in his studio at the art table in his chair," said Narum's close friend Margaret Moser, who profiled him for the Austin Chronicle in 2005.

Austin native Narum, who was in his early 60s, grew up in Houston and discovered his talent for graphic design early on. "In the fifth grade, I'd been drawing girlie cartoons from Playboy in a notebook, and I left it in my desk after class," he told the Chronicle. "The next day I was reprimanded for disrupting class because they were passing around my notebook."

In the late '60s, Narum co-founded Houston free-form FM rock station KLOL and worked as an illustrator for underground newspaper Space City News. He struck up a long-lasting friendship with a band then just starting out, which had recently rechristened itself ZZ Top. Narum would go on to become ZZ's house graphic artist, moving from posters and album covers such as 1976's Tejas to epic murals for the band's fleet of semis and the famous cactus-and-cattle-skull stage design for the trio's legendary 1975-76 "Worldwide Texas" tour.

Bill Narum, from left, with Houston underground radio pioneers Dan Earhart and Larry Yurdin. Photo by Gloria Hill, Austin, 2008.
After moving back to his hometown in the '70s, Narum continued designing posters for venues such as Antone's and Armadillo World Headquarters, and explored a budding interest in both video and computer-game design. In 2005, he was elected president of the board of directors of Austin folk-art storehouse the South Austin Museum of Popular Culture around the same time his 40-year retrospective, "You Call That Art," opened at the museum.

Speaking of Narum's many achievements, SAMOPC director Leea Mechling told the Austin Chronicle: "He's a major contributor to the cultural dynamics of not only Austin, but Texas, the United States, and the world."

Source / Houston Press

Senator John (Corn Dog) Cornyn, R-Texas, aka Lapdog to President Bush. Graphic by Bill Narum / The Rag Blog / May 23, 2008.




Also see:

• Bill Narum: We Call That Art by Margaret Moser / Austin Chronicle / Nov. 20, 2009
• R.I.P. Bill Narum / by Bill Hood / This Week I Learned / Nov. 19, 2009

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Through the Windshield

Seen at the corner of E. 12th St. and Pleasant Valley Rd., in Austin, Texas,
an unlikely art sale. Perhaps it's the heat...
Mariann Wizard

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Stephanie Chernikowski : 'Looking at Music: Side 2' at the MOMA

Sonic Youth. 1983. Black-and-white photograph, 11 x 17" (27.9 x 43.2 cm). Photo by Stephanie Chernikowski / Looking at Music: Side 2 / Museum of Modern Art, New York.

That is a very early shot of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth playing at CBGB. They are both multi-talented, as are many of the artists in the show. Looking at Music: Side 2 examines a movement of downtown artists, musicians, photographers, and film makers who enjoyed breaking rules and usually did their art on the cheap. New York was broke and so were we. It sounds like a brilliant show and includes artists I really like -- Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Jean-Michel Basquiat. I look forward to seeing it.
sc nyc 6.2009

Stephanie Chernikowski / The Rag Blog / June 9, 2009

Stephanie Chernikowski, a former denizen of the Sixties Austin artistic and literary bohemia who now resides in New York City, is featured in an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MOMA).

The show, titled Looking at Music: Side 2, opens June 10, and runs through Nov. 30.

Stephanie Chernikowski moved to New York City from her native Texas on Columbus Day of 1975. She began working as a photojournalist shortly before her move and has continued to view life through a lens. Her concentration has been on 35mm black & white portraiture and documentation of the downtown music and arts scene, with occasional digressions.

Looking at Music: Side 2
June 10, 2009–November 30, 2009
The Yoshiko and Akio Morita Media Gallery, second floor

The Museum of Modern Art presents Looking at Music: Side 2, a survey of over 120 photographs, music videos, drawings, audio recordings, publications, Super 8 films, and ephemera that look at New York City from the early 1970s to the early 1980s when the city became a haven for young renegade artists who often doubled as musicians and poets. Art and music cross-fertilized with a vengeance following a stripped-down, hard-edged, anti-establishment ethos, with some artists plastering city walls with self-designed posters or spray painted monikers, while others commandeered abandoned buildings, turning vacant garages into makeshift theaters for Super 8 film screenings and raucous performances.

Many artists found the experimental music scene more vital and conducive to their contrarian ideas than the handful of contemporary art galleries in the city. Artists in turn formed bands, performed in clubs and non-profit art galleries, and self-published their own records and zines while using public access cable channels as a venue for media experiments and cultural debates.

See the online interactive presentation of the works included in Looking at Music: Side 2, with a slideshow of selected highlights, interpretive texts, and original acoustiguide conversations recorded for the exhibition. The site will launch by June 17, 2009.

Go to MOMA's public flickr page for Looking at Music: Side 2.

Visit Stephanie Chernikowski's website.

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Chris Jordan : The Photographer as Agent of Environmental Change

Chris Jordan took this photo at a Florida cellphone-processing plant, which he says sorts about 50,000 phones a month. Working ones are resold; the rest are shredded and burned to recover a tiny amount of gold in each one. "Pound for pound, there is more gold in cellphones than there is in gold mines," he says. "All of the remaining material from the phones (something like 99.995 percent of the phone) goes to a landfill." Photo: Chris Jordan.
Chris Jordan photographs our culture of excess in hopes of changing it
By Carey Quan Gelernter / April 19, 2009

Seattle-based, internationally acclaimed photographer Chris Jordan has become the "it" artist of the international green movement. At a time the public is waking up to the planet's peril, Jordan's large-scale images of the vast detritus of American consumer excess seem made-to-order to dramatize the environmental story.

PHOTOGRAPHER CHRIS Jordan is living out an eco-fairytale. In a few short years, he catapulted from corporate lawyer chancing a career change to "it" artist of the international green movement.

Talk about timing. The fateful tale of how his muse intersected with the zeitgeist unfolds something like this: New law-school grad moves from Texas to Seattle in 1991 for its rep as a top-10 cool place and its nearby mountains to climb. Resigns the bar a decade later to save his soul and take a leap of faith he can survive as an art photographer. Follows his muse into industrial yards, trash heaps and recycling centers, fascinated by the colors and patterns. A friend comments he's captured a macabre portrait of America; he's seized by an "aha" moment.

He sits by a New York Times reporter at a dinner; a prominent feature story on Jordan follows, anticipating by several months his first solo New York show, "Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption." This is September 2005; four months later "An Inconvenient Truth" premieres at Sundance, galvanizing awareness of the planet in peril.

Suddenly it's as if Jordan's large-scale images of the vast detritus of our excess, from the seas of plastic bottles to the plains of discarded cellphones, were made-to-order to dramatize the environmental story.

Everyone wants him: Rachael Ray, a World Economic Forum in Dubai, the exclusive, $6,000-per-person TED conference where celebs and brainiacs commune about big ideas. He's in Harper's, Men's Journal and Vogue Italy; giving talks from Qatar to China. He goes to New Orleans to document the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which he links to global warming; these photos are shortlisted for the major enviro-photography prize, the Pictet.

But because this is an eco fairytale, you cannot assume "happily ever after." How does one person, one artist, cope with the urgency, the weight of responsibility of his role as messenger? Answers keep shifting; angst accompanies fame.

We caught up with Jordan, 45, for a chat in his cramped studio behind his small, wood-frame home in a still-modest part of Ballard. It's an unusual time for him, as he just spent a rare whole month without leaving Seattle. Mostly curled up, in fact, with wife, son and dog in "a big nest" of comforters and pillows on the living-room floor. Recovering from the whirlwind. Thinking.

What follows is an edited portion of our conversation.

Q: You have become "the" artist of the green movement. What are the best aspects of wearing this crown, and the worst?

A: The best aspect is, there's a kind of awakening process happening right now that is incredibly exciting to see and contribute to. Although I don't like that term green movement because it seems to be only about plants, save the trees; it's far bigger and deeper and broader.

Seattleite Chris Jordan has made an international reputation documenting America's culture of consumer excess. He took this photo, "E-Bank, Tacoma, 2004," at a scrap-metal-recovery facility that sorts, shreds and ships out the scrap. Photo: Chris Jordan.

Q: How would you define it?

A: It's about environmental stewardship, and that includes noticing we're devastating the population of our oceans, for example, and it's about reducing cruelty to animals, raging against factory farming and addressing global climate change. It's also about social justice.

Q: In your "Running the Numbers: An American Self Portrait" series that's now a national traveling exhibit, you've included photos about women's breast augmentation, U.S. spending in Iraq, prisoners in Abu Ghraib, and the high percentage of Americans in prison. Is there a link to environmentalism?

A: These are all issues we're in denial about, including the environment. I think there's shame associated with looking at any of these.

Q: Shame?

A: American culture is not about experiencing our shame, it's about denying it. It's been that way our whole history.

One culture I find fascinating to juxtapose against American culture is the culture of Germany. They've gone through a long process through their art, poetry, public discourse, their politics, of owning the fact of their complicity in what happened in World War II. It's still a topic of everyday conversation in Germany.

Q: Is that where we want to go?

A: I think we have to. Not necessarily the same way Germany did. But American culture, there's a swashbuckling ego, personified by George Bush and (Dick) Cheney, of, "If I'm doing it, it must be right, because I'm American." In my view, this is part of a bigger American picture, which is a denial of any kind of bad feelings.

We remove ourselves from our connection with each other and the world. After doing that for a very long time, we end up where we are now.

Q: What is the grief and shame about?

A: Grief — here's an example. We've never grieved Katrina the way we could have. We barely grieved 9/11. The most spectacular tragedy to happen in our country in a long time, and the very first thing our leader said was, "Everybody go shopping."

We had candlelight vigils, then we moved right on to hatred — of the Mideast. It's like, the grief went underground and got subversive and turned into a war.

I think there's a tremendous amount of unacknowledged hostility in American culture.

Also, with the advent of the Internet — this whole new cult of just infinite information that's like an avalanche that hits all of us — I think our culture of not feeling has gone up by a whole magnitude. We're all kind of emotionally overwhelmed.

"Barbie Dolls" depicts 32,000 Barbies, equal to the number of elective breast-augmentation surgeries performed monthly in the U.S. in 2006. Photo: Chris Jordan.

"Barbie Dolls" depicts 32,000 Barbies, equal to the number of elective breast-augmentation surgeries performed monthly in the U.S. in 2006. A partial zoom shows how the Barbies are arranged. Photo: Chris Jordan.

Q: So is your work to counter that?

A: For a while, I thought the "Running the Numbers" series was about holding onto individual empowerment; one of its central themes is the relationship of the individual and the collective. When you stand back a distance from these pieces, you see the collective, and it adds up to a picture of some kind. When you walk up close you see that the picture is created by lots and lots of individuals who each play an equal role.

Last spring, I was doing all these keynote talks, talking about the power of the individual. How every vote counts. Every individual matters. I began to realize that you also could look at my pieces in exactly the opposite way, which if you look at the 2 million plastic bottles, you could take one of those plastic bottles away, and never know the difference.

I'm starting to realize a primary theme is not a belief that every individual matters, it's a much deeper experience of rage.

Q: Your rage?

A: Yeah, my own personal rage, at the experience of feeling disempowered. And anonymous.

We all want to feel we matter. And yet, with something like Google Earth, you look at your house, zooming all the way back, and see it's not even one pixel in a city like Seattle. And then you can zoom out and see that Seattle's not even a pixel ... And seeing all these statistics, about our mass culture, our mass consumption.

I understand on a new level why it is that babies cry when they're just born. It's like, it used to be warm and quiet and safe and all about me. And then they come on out and there's this experience of, oh my God, I'm in this giant, cold, harsh, overwhelming, incomprehensibly complex world, and all I know to do is scream.

And in a way, that's what these pieces of mine are. They're like very carefully filtered screams of rage.

Q: So you're saying, we were always less than pixel, but now we know it, and we see the complexity of problems in the world, and it's like, aaaaah.

A: Yeah, yeah. I don't think people yet have the ability to experience their individuality at the same time as having this new global world view. Because if you think about our history, it was only a really short time ago we were living in tribes. If your tribe is 50 people or 30 people or 100 people, then it's not so hard to have a very palpable sense of who you are, and how you matter.

"Prison Uniforms" depicts 2.3 million folded prison uniforms, equal to the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005. The U.S. has the largest prison population of any country in the world. Jordan's parents, Rocky and Susan Jordan, view the work on exhibit at the Von Lintel Gallery in New York, June 2007. Photo: Chris Jordan.

Q: So how do you deal with that?

A: Our kind of national response, until now, is to live in denial of it. Because at the same time as we're developing this new world view and we're learning that computers we buy have an unacceptable effect on the environment, on the world, and the shoes we buy have an unacceptable effect on poor people in another country, and the food we buy is having an unacceptable effect on the oceans, at the same time we're learning all that stuff, we have become accustomed to this highly material lifestyle. And we don't want to give it up.

Q: And so...

A: And so we just live in denial. I had a very dear friend over yesterday that I was talking to about vegetarianism. And I said, let's just watch this little clip together, called Meet your Meat. It's a devastatingly powerful 12-minute film on the cruelty in the factory-farming business. She didn't want to watch it. She said, "I'm afraid I'll have to give up meat. I don't want to know." This, to me, is the crux.

And the crux is the change of consciousness that I see many, many people experiencing, and that is to realize that there is a benefit to making a lifestyle change. You could even use the word that I hesitate to use, but there's almost something sacred about rediscovering our connection with the Earth and with each other. It's a path to happiness.

Q: What about the worst aspects of wearing your crown?

A: There's a tremendous amount of hypocrisy in the green movement that I'm only beginning to see I carry myself. I own a 44-inch-wide printer that uses petroleum-based inks and prints on petroleum-based paper. I flew entirely around the world in three weeks one time last year, made a complete circumnavigation of the world to give three talks about C02 and saving the environment.

It's hard because I don't want to give up my comfortable material lifestyle. I don't want to give up my iPod, and when the new iPod comes out, I want to buy that one. And when the new computer comes out, I want to buy that one. I'm in absolutely no position to wag my finger at anybody. And yet — I don't want to just sit mute.

Q: More irony...You were in Paris, where you were shortlisted for this really big prize for environmental photography, the Prix Pictet. You were in Dubai...

A: It was ridiculous: 900 wealthy people from all over the world flew to Dubai and stayed in a five-star hotel, ate top-quality food imported from all over the world, and talked about what we could do to save the world. It was truly an exercise in irony and denial and hypocrisy.

Q: And appearing on Rachael Ray, at TED ... This is a very glamorous life.

A: It is. I thought that was all good, too. I realized lately, a few things happened to me as a result of the last year. First of all, I did almost no new work. And my personal relationships also all suffered. I have a 12-year-old son. Lots of times I was away, I missed his soccer and school events. And my friendships, my relationship with my wife. It got a little out of balance for me. It also, I think, went to my head.

Q: You've said you'd really rather be a musician like Herbie Hancock, who brings joy, than what you do.

A: It's like I'm at a great big party, and everybody's enjoying themselves, and I'm the one guy who just can't help but point out the bloody rhinoceros head in the corner.

Q: It's a downer, huh?

A: In a way it's a real downer. It's an emotionally hard role to sustain. And yet I embrace it. And it's beyond what I ever thought would happen to me in my lifetime. I never thought my work would be viewed by 100,000 people a month on the Internet. It's astonishing to me.

Q: What differences have you seen around the world in how your art and message are viewed?

A: The people who connect with my work are remarkably like-minded; (there's a) thread that just truly connects people of every race, culture and background. There was a while there that I felt extremely hopeful.

Q: There's a "but" coming...

A: The "but" is . . . Imagine the scenario. I'm in Taipei, in a room of 250 people; I feel hopeful — there seems to be this spreading, new consciousness, and it's the same consciousness I felt in Lisbon, Caracas, Tokyo. And then I walk out into a city of (millions) of people and get on a plane and fly out, and it's night, and I see gigawatts of electricity being burned, and I realize what a tiny, tiny minority of people it is that even care about these issues. And a minority of people who even have the luxury of thinking about them.

And so I waver between hopefulness and an overwhelming feeling of despair and hopelessness. I've heard so many visionary, brilliant people from all walks of life, scientists who say the next 10 years are the most important 10 years in the next 10,000 years. We either turn it around in the next 10 years or it isn't going to be turn-aroundable.

See, hear more of Chris Jordan

The first comprehensive presentation of Jordan's work opened at the Museum of Art at Washington State University in January and now moves to museums throughout the country, including the Pacific Science Center in Seattle from Oct. 3 to Jan. 3, 2010.

The exhibit focuses primarily on Jordan's "Running the Numbers: An American Self Portrait" series. More info: chrisjordan.com.

Hear Chris Jordan at the exclusive TED gathering.

[Carey Quan Gelernter is a Seattle Times staff editor and writer. She can be reached at cgelernter@seattletimes.com. Alan Berner is a staff photographer.]

Copyright © 2009 The Seattle Times Company

Source / Seattle Times / Pacific Northwest Magazine

Thanks to Diane Stirling-Stevens / The Rag Blog

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ART / 'Man at Work' Exhibition Has Lessons for Today

At the Grohmann Museum in Milwaukee: Frederick Arthur Bridgman, The Seaweed Gatherers, 1912 / MSOE.
Workers Built the Modern World

[The Eckhart G. Grohmann Collection 'Man at Work,' continuing installation of 700 paintings and sculptures spanning 400 years of history. Also, touring exhibition, 'Cradle of Industry: Works from the Rhineland Industrial Museum,' January 16 - April 5, 2009. Grohmann Museum, Milwaukee School of Engineering, Milwaukee.]

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / April 4, 2009

The Grohmann Museum, a modern building with a cylindrical entrance way reaching up to the fourth floor, is nestled among a variety of interesting and renovated older buildings in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The museum is a block from an old Blatz Brewery building that looks like it has been converted into high income condominiums.

Inside the Museum is an extraordinary collection of paintings, over 700, covering 400 years of artistry, all about work and workers. An additional visiting exhibit, “Cradle of Industry,” added paintings of German industrialization from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s and some recent documentary photos.

The paintings together illustrated the evolution of work, from agriculture, to crafts people (cobblers, blacksmiths, cork makers, glass blowers, and taxidermists), to miners and forgers, bridge builders, and steel makers. Additional paintings presented women picking hops for beer making, a seventeenth century accountant pouring over his books, and a surgeon opening up a patient’s head. Some of the paintings portrayed twentieth century factory work and a few documentary photos showed workers amassing in strikes against their bosses.

The paintings were collected by Dr. Eckhart Grohmann, a local entrepreneur who acquired and expanded a local aluminum casting and engineering company in Milwaukee. Grohmann reported that as a child he visited his grandfather’s marble processing company in Poland where he watched stonecutters and sculptors engaging in their craft. It was there, he reported, that he grew to appreciate hard work not as “an idealized concept but a principle of life.” Grohmann’s goal was to present in these paintings “a clear image of the honor of work.”

Viewing these many images of work, the viewer develops a profound appreciation of the centrality of human labor to the evolution of civilization. The paintings suggested how classical economists like Karl Marx could develop theories based on the idea that the value of all commodities came from the amount of work time that went into their production. In short, labor was the basis of all value.

Unfortunately, while the paintings powerfully underscore the basic Marxian idea about the value of work, contemporary politicians see work and workers as disposable. If they are organized in their work places they are impediments to human progress.

So goes the recent hint by the Obama administration that it will force General Motors and Chrysler into bankruptcy court. The New York Times wrote on April 1 what the consequences of this might be for workers: “In bankruptcy, companies can seek to persuade a judge to set aside labor contracts and terminate pension plans, by making a case that they are too expensive, forcing workers to rely on smaller government-provided retirement checks.”

In addition, Republicans, so-called moderate Democrats, Bank of America, Starbucks, Costco, the Chamber of Commerce and other representatives of big capital are marshaling resources to forestall the Employee Free Choice Act from becoming law. EFCA would make it easier, in the face of company pressures, for workers to form unions. If workers have a realistic chance of voting in unions they will do so. If they do have unions, wages and benefits will rise and workers’ basic quality of life and sense of security will rise. Finally, increasing numbers of workers with jobs at livable wages could stimulate economic growth.

Visiting the Grohmann Museum suggests the profound gap between the history of human civilization, built on the skills and energies of workers, and the way in which the contemporary political economy denigrates, marginalizes, and humiliates workers. Empowering and rewarding the working class must be central to progressive change in the days, weeks, and years ahead.

Harry Targ, who posts to Progressives for Obama, teaches political science. This article also appears on his website, Diary of a Heartland Radical.

The Rag Blog

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Frank Shepard Fairey: Grafitti Legend Claims Arrest Before Big Show is Political

Frank Shepard Fairey / Exopolis
Street artist Frank Shepard Fairey at Institute of Contemporary Art earlier this month. Photo by David L. Ryan / Boston Globe.
Police arrest Obama artist and 'Andre the Giant' tagger just before opening at the Institute of Contemporary Art

Frank Shepard Fairey: 'They are suppressing an artist's freedom of transformative expression.'

by John R. Ellement and Andrew Ryan / February 9, 2009

Artist Frank Shepard Fairey criticized Boston police today after he pleaded not guilty to graffiti-related charges, questioning the "motivation and the timing" of his arrest on Friday hours before his opening at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

Police arrested Fairey at about 9:15 p.m. on Friday as he was heading to the "Experiment Night" event at the ICA, where more than 750 people were waiting for him to appear. The arrest was timed, Fairey said, "in a way that was designed to create as much inconvenience for me and the museum as possible."

Police have said that warrants for Fairey's arrest were issued on Jan. 24 for damage to property due to graffiti. A police spokesman did not immediately respond to a phone message when asked about Fairey's comments about the timing of his arrest.

An arrest affidavit filed today described Fairey as an "idol to members of the graffiti subculture" who has been defacing property in Boston since 1989. Fairey's signature tag is a stencil of the professional wrestler Andre the Giant and the words "Obey the Giant" or "Obey."

When Fairey returned recently to Boston for his show at the ICA, he allegedly "victimized new properties while defiantly stating in media outlets that he will not stop his unauthorized posting of his tag," according to the affidavit requesting a warrant for his arrest. "Suspect Fairey continues to engage in a constant and systemic assault on Boston Neighborhoods."

In media interviews leading up to his ICA show, Fairey admitted, according to the affidavit, "illegally tagging property ... recently in Boston."

Fairey, 38, has gained prominence for his "Hope" image of President Barack Obama, which has been hung in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. The Los Angeles-based artist is locked in a dispute with The Associated Press over whether he illegally used a copyrighted AP photo to create the poster. Fairey told reporters today that he filed a counter suit against the AP today in federal court in New York.

"They are suppressing an artist's freedom of transformative expression," Fairey said.

As Fairey appeared in courts in Brighton and Roxbury today, his defense attorney said that additional graffiti-related charges are being filed against the artist.

The defense attorney, Jeffrey P. Wiesner, referenced the new charges today as he criticized Boston police in comments made after Fairey appeared in Brighton District Court. Wiesner said that police exercised "bad judgment" when they arrested his client for allegedly pasting art without permission.

"And I think it is bad judgment that they are now seeking further charges," Wiesner said.

Boston police would not discuss any additional charges. "They have some other incidents in which the suspect has been implicated," said Officer Eddie Crispin, who declined to provide specifics. "The investigation is still ongoing."

According to the arrest affidavit filed today, Fairey has committed at least six acts of vandalism within the City of Boston. A hearing has been scheduled in Brighton on March 10 when a clerk magistrate will decide whether there is evidence to support additional charges, Wiesner said.

Fairey was released on personal recognizance after his brief hearings in Brighton and Roxbury. Dressed in a suit coat and dark collared shirt with no tie, Fairey appeared with four representatives from the ICA.

The Brighton charge dates to Sept. 16, 2000, when a police officer allegedly saw Fairey post a tag in Allston. At the time, Fairey was carrying "an 'excessive' amount of graffiti propaganda and stickers, according to the arrest affidavit filed today. Fairey never appeared in Brighton District Court to face the charge, which carries a possible fine of $100.

The case is Roxbury Municipal Court is much more recent. According to court documents, Fairey allegedly defaced a Massachusetts Turnpike Authority building at Massachusetts Avenue and Newbury Street. Fairey is accused of stenciling five images of a black-and-white face above the word "Obey." The charge carries a maximum sentence of two years in the Suffolk House of Correction and could force Fairey to pay restitution and lose his driver's license for year, according to his lawyer. Fairey has told the Globe he has been arrested 14 times.

© 2009 Boston Globe

Source / Boston Globe / Common Dreams

The Rag Blog

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Bush Scandals : The List. (Not a Pretty Picture)

British Artist Jonathan Yeo created this portrait of President Bush using a collage of images cut out from 100 porn magazines. This piece was unveiled in August 2007 at the Lazarides Gallery in London. Interestingly enough, Yeo was commissioned by the George W. Bush Presidential Library to paint an official portrait of the 43rd President, but before he could begin working on the portrait he was fired. Instead of scrapping the project all together he decided to change directions and finish the piece anyway…with porno mags. Image by Jonathan Yeo / WebUrbanist.

Hugh's List of Bush scandals: 'Most are breaches of the public trust, many violations of Bush's Oath of Office. The rest are crimes and War Crimes.'

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / February 4, 2009

Any American who has a simmering anger after eight years of George W. Bush as president will want to bookmark the links below to a web site simply titled:

“Hugh Makes a List … because there are just too many scandals to remember”

A progressive named Hugh started making a list of Bush scandals in late 2006. A blog, firedoglake, provided its initial exposure. Firedoglake loves challenges, so Hugh didn't even have to ask for help. The first entries were very brief. One site remembers,

Hugh edited each entry by adding enough information so that even a mainstream media reporter would understand what event or action the entry implied or recognized. All of these entries - there are finally 400 - are worse than a president getting a hummer from another adult under the Oval Office desk. Most are breaches of the public trust, many violations of Bush's Oath of Office. The rest are crimes and War Crimes.

Hugh’s List is a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 site. We are offering our readership free access to this scholarly and unique undertaking.

The Table of Contents itself is breathtaking:

The detailed list is here.

Here is a brief excerpt from the first paragraph of the last entry.

# 400: An Absent President

Of the 2922 days Bush was President he spent all or part of 1,020 of them on vacation (35% of his time in office). This includes 487 days at Camp David, 490 at his ranch in Crawford, and 43 days at his family’s compound in Kennebunkport. If there is one word which typifies this and Bush, it is AWOL. The man has been AWOL his whole life. You have only to look at his academic career or his lack of it. […]

Unfortunately for us, the Presidency is a real full-time job. In it, Bush stayed true to form. He was not just physically absent from it much of the time. He was intellectually and morally absent from it all the time.

But the blame does not belong to him. It never does with an AWOL man. No, it belongs with us who, as a nation, for 8 years took a vacation from ourselves and our responsibilities. We had not just an AWOL President with Bush but an AWOL age. Now Bush is gone, as AWOL as ever, and we are left to deal with his legacies.

The Rag Blog

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Frank Cieciorka's Self-Inscribed Eulogy

Frank Cieciorka
In Memoriam: Frank Cieciorka
By Bruce Anderson / December 3, 2008

Frank Cieciorka died [at the end of November 2008] at his home in Alderpoint, Southern Humboldt County. A modest, soft-spoken man whose passing will sadden everyone who knew him, Frank was born in 1939 in Binghamton, New York but grew up in nearby Johnson City, a town then dominated by a shoe factory where the artist first experienced the world of work. Frank was an early hero of the Civil Rights Movement, and had been a radical of the best independent type America can produce all of his adult life, a skeptic for justice, a resistor of all the oppressive little orthodoxies, some of the smallest ones oppressing us right here in Ecotopia.

I'm happy he lived long enough to see Obama elected president, not that Frank would, or could, switch off his critical faculties. Frank became a well-known artist, best known for his lesser work, his art for the emblematic, pivotal events of the 1960s. None of the obituaries I've seen mention his wonderful paintings of the people and land in and around Alderpoint, the very best I know of in inland Northern California.

I knew Frank wasn't well. The last time I saw him in Garberville he could barely get up the stairs to Andy Caffrey's place. The emphysema that finally carried him off had cost him most of his lung capacity. He said he hadn't stopped smoking soon enough for his lungs to regenerate.

I hope what follows, most of it in Frank's own words, will serve as the obituary this remarkable man deserves.

* * *

"My parents were first-generation Americans. My grandfather immigrated from Poland, an area near the Russian border, to escape being drafted into the Russian army, a 25-year hitch under the Czar. 'Cieciorka' is Russianized Polish that was something like Cicherski in the old country. To pronounce 'Cieciorka' substitute the letter h for both the i's."

"My first hero and role model was Doc Ricketts in Steinbeck's novel, Cannery Row. That book made me realize I was a bohemian at heart."

Accepted as an art student at the Pratt Institute in the big city but unable to attend because tuition was beyond his 18-year-old ability to pay, Frank headed west to San Jose.

"My father was working for IBM in their warehouse at Binghamton, and when IBM opened up their plant in San Jose they wanted experienced workers to staff it so they offered to help with moving expenses for anybody willing to transfer to California. This was early IBM, 1957. My parents jumped at the chance and moved to California. But the move was so expensive they had to pilfer my college savings account. I'd worked all through high school, mostly at the shoe factory where I started when I was 14. I made a dollar an hour, but I paid my parents $5 a week room and board from the time I was 15 until I graduated from high school. It was the way they were raised. My father always told me about how he turned over his whole paycheck to his mother when he was a kid and she'd give him 50¢ back from his paycheck. On his wedding day he turned over his last paycheck to his mother and got his last 50¢ back. My father said his parents had a clothesline in the attic, one for each kid, and every time they spent any amount on the kid, including the cost of his birth at the hospital, they would take a clothespin and hang the receipt up on the clothesline. The last receipt on the clothesline was the one for the lunch bucket they bought for the kids when they went to work. My father said after he was married he had to buy back all the receipts on his clothesline!"

In sunny California, the times were a-changin'...

"They sure were, and me with them. My parents were pretty much apolitical. They were nominal Democrats but voted for Ike. They wholeheartedly disapproved of my political activities. It got to the point where we were semi-estranged for a while. I was drafted in 1961. I took the physical at the Oakland Induction Center and passed that. The last thing we were supposed to do in the process was sign the loyalty oath after looking over a questionnaire prepared by the Attorney General. I looked it over and raised my hand and said, 'You're asking me about my political beliefs and associations here, which I have a constitutional right to, and which are none of your business. I'm not going to sign this. The sergeant or whatever he was said, 'All right, you go to that group on that bench over there. And then the Army kidnapped me. They took me to a motel and held me there overnight before they let me go. Army counterintelligence investigated me for a year and a half and finally cleared me of whatever it was they were investigating me for. The FBI, on two occasions, went to my father's workplace and asked the manager if they could talk to him. They would interview him while he was on the job and make him look bad in front of his fellow workers. My father was very unhappy with me. It wasn't until I went to Mississippi and my name got into the paper in a positive story about Freedom Summer that my parents finally decided that I wasn't such a bad guy after all. The president of IBM himself walked into the warehouse where my father worked to shake my father's hand for having such a great son."

He was hanging out with all the wrong people by '61 or so.

"People forget that there weren't that many radicals at that time, and that the individual police departments of the Bay Area had what they called 'red squads.' They kept files on the people who showed up for demonstrations, small as those numbers were, and if you showed up in the wrong places often enough you got yourself a red squad file and an FBI file.

"The Communist Party in San Jose called themselves a club. They had meetings on Sunday mornings so it would look like they were going to church. I worked with a lot of them. I was pretty close to them. I also worked for CORE and Friends of SNCC. So I'm sure when the FBI was investigating me when they came across these associations. I considered myself a radical revolutionary communist with a small c. I'd read a lot of Marx and Lenin and all the things you were supposed to read to keep up with the people involved in these groups. In fact, I organized the first W.E.B. Dubois Club in San Jose. Terrence Hallinan — K.O. Hallinan — got me to do that. He was the main organizer of young people in the Bay Area for the old CP. He called me one day and said they wanted to get a W.E.B. Dubois club going in San Jose, but they didn't want a party member to do it; they wanted a fellow traveler, who couldn't get smeared as a... And basically that was my role, to be a fellow traveler, and to do things that an actual party member couldn't do without being smeared. So I did it. I formed the W.E.B. Dubois Club. I applied for membership in the party, and even got an interview with a party member, a printer, a guy I'd worked with a lot. He did the official interview, but towards the end of it he said, 'You know, intellectually you may be a Marxist, but in your heart you're an anarchist. You wouldn't be happy in the party.' I got a dozen or so people on campus to join, but it collapsed when there was some kind of convention or congress where a resolution was proposed to throw all the Trotskyites out of the club. There was an acrimonious discussion, arguments, fistfights — and 9 of the 12 members from San Jose walked out in disgust, leaving only the three Trotskyites. And that pretty much ended the Dubois Club in San Jose.

"It was a great time, though, and I loved college. I liked it so much I spent 7 years getting a four year degree. I took all kinds of courses: literature, film, music, biology, history, philosophy, logic, political science, economics and, of course, the art courses I needed for my art major. My favorite class was Professor Richard Tansey's art history course. He gave me a lasting appreciation of the art and culture of Western Civ that's withstood the current political rectitude. I lived in apartments right off campus close to downtown. My roommate during my last year was Luis Valdez, who went on to become a well-known movie director. We shared an apartment above the Jose Theater — three movies for a dollar.

"I'd been very active in Friends of SNCC for about a year before Freedom Summer, mostly in fundraising and general support. I knew a lot of the people who were active in SNCC. When they announced Freedom Summer I applied and was accepted, but that was also the summer that the Progressive Labor Party was organizing a trip to Cuba, and I applied for that too, and was accepted for the Cuba trip. Luis had applied for the Cuba trip and he decided to go to Cuba and I decided to go to Mississippi.

"To go with SNCC to register voters in Mississippi, we had to first go to Oxford, Ohio, for a week of orientation. I was assigned to Holly Springs in the northern part of Mississippi, about 50 miles south of Memphis. It was the largest voter registration project in Mississippi. We covered about five different counties from our headquarters in Holly Springs. In fact, Goodman and Schwerner had gone down to Holly Springs a couple of days before the rest of us, then to Philadelphia, Mississippi, to check out a church burning there. And just as we were getting loaded on the chartered buses to go to Mississippi from Ohio, we got the word that Goodman, and Schwerner and Cheney were missing.

"I immediately ran to the bathroom with diarrhea. What have I gotten myself into here? But we drove down overnight, arriving at Holly Springs at 3 in the morning.

"Holly Springs was a good sized town of 20,000 or so. It had a nice downtown, a courthouse square with old trees, civil war statues ringed by stores. The further away from the center of town you got the more seedy it got. And rundown. And of course we were living in the black part of town, which was pretty decrepit.

"Whenever we walked downtown to go shopping, we'd get all kinds of dirty looks. We wore chinos and white shirts, the standard uniform for white SNCC people. The blacks all wore bib overalls. The whites looked like college students pretty much. But they knew who we were. You had to register your car within 30 days of arriving in the state and you had to get Mississippi license plates. They had reserved a particular sequence of numbers for civil rights workers. Our cars would be recognized anywhere in the state by our license plate numbers. There was no way we could be anonymous. Younger black people were all for us; they'd cross the street to shake our hand. But the older ones were very wary of us. We'd try to organize a mass meeting by going door to door and people would just nod and agree with us — 'Yeah, I'll be there. You can count on us.' But only a few older people would show up.

"The one time I got beat up it was by a couple of beefy young guys. But usually you could walk down the street and feel fairly safe. You'd get insults tossed at you, but you never thought somebody was going to just come out and sucker punch you. At our meetings, that's when it would get hairy sometimes. There was one meeting at a black church at night out in the woods that I won't forget. As the meeting was breaking up and people were leaving, the Klan showed up. They were in street clothes but somebody recognized them, or at least some of them, as being members of the Klan. As we drove out of the parking area, they drove in. So we drove like hell and got out of there, and were back on the highway before we realized we'd left a guy behind, a black guy named Elwood Berry. I think he was from Cornell. Some of us had to go back. We snuck back through the woods; we could hear the Klan stomping all over the place, looking for anybody left behind. There were at least a dozen of them.

"We assumed they were armed. That was always the assumption. We found Berry hiding in the woods, and we got him out of there. The time I got beat up I had just been put on staff as a field secretary. It was the end of summer and volunteers were going home and going back to school. I said I wanted to stay on so they made me field secretary. $10 a week was the pay.

"An election was coming up, and just across the river in Arkansas a black candidate was running for the Agricultural Board. It was very powerful position because the commissioners assigned cotton allotments; they told farmers how much cotton they could grow. It was important to black sharecroppers to be represented on this board. A black candidate was running and a big a turnout of black voters was needed to elect him. A lot of sharecroppers lived way out in the boonies and didn't have transportation to the polls. So a whole bunch of SNCC field secretaries from Mississippi were brought in to help out with the logistics of the election. My job was to drive out to certain plantations, fill the car with sharecroppers and anybody else who was eligible to vote, drive them to town, wait until they voted, and drive them home again. And then take another load into town and back — all day. One group I brought in, I dropped off at the polling place to vote, then I parked in the parking lot across the street from the polling place to wait for them to drive them home again when they were finished voting. There were a bunch of people milling around outside. The chief of police was there. I was sitting there in my car, a SNCC car. Two guys came up and opened the doors, both doors, and jumped and squeezed me in the middle and started beatin' on me inside the car. They couldn't haul off and slug me because there wasn't enough room to do that in the front seat, so they dragged me out of the car, took my glasses off and proceeded to beat me. I assumed the fetal position on the ground, and they proceeded to kick me and stomp me and were bending over to punch me. But they were frustrated because they couldn't really get at me, so a couple times they picked me up in the air and lifted me up over their heads and just threw me down, which would break open my fetal position so they could get in a couple good punches before I could curl back up again. For me, it was one of those rare out of body experiences. I felt like I was somehow hovering about six or eight feet above my body watching these two guys beat me up, feeling no emotion. I remember thinking to myself, 'Well, the chief of police is across the street watching this, so they're not going to kill me.' And I was clearly thinking ahead. 'Let's see, I'm supposed to be in Gulfport tomorrow morning for a staff meeting. I'm obviously going to be too damaged to drive so I'm going to have to drive with somebody else.' While these guys are just pummeling me! Finally the chief of police walked over and said, 'OK boys, we've had enough fun now' and arrested me for failure to yield the right of way." (Laughs)

"He took me to jail. A SNCC officer called the SNCC office in Atlanta. Atlanta called Friends of SNCC in San Jose, San Jose SNCC called my congressman, Don Edwards, who is a really good guy. And Edwards called the Sheriff's Department in Grove, Arkansas. I was in jail for 20 minutes. The chief of police comes in and says to me, 'You must be hot shit. I just got a call from your congressman who said if we don't take you down to the hospital and get you checked out for injuries he's going to have a Congressional committee down here tomorrow morning investigating us.' They took me to the hospital and cleaned up my cuts and bruises and checked me for broken bones, and I got bailed out. I was amazed at how quickly they reacted.

"I'm glad I had the Congressman I had at the time. I forfeited bail. Five bucks for failure to yield right of way. But the worst jail I was in was the one in Holly Springs. It had been condemned; the toilet was plugged up and the place stunk something fierce. Steel bunk, no mattress. I was the only guy in it. They didn't put me in the main jail. The walls were just covered with graffiti. There was a rag in the sink and I wet it and washed off a spot on the wall and wrote some freedom slogans on it. When I finally got bailed out, I was walking down the steps, and the sheriff comes running down and grabs me by the collar and says, 'You son of a bitch! You can't write that stuff on the walls of my jail! You're under arrest!' I was charged with defacing the Marshall County jail.

"The best jail I was in down there was in Oxford, Mississippi, home of Ol' Miss and William Faulkner. I was in that jail for five days. It was very clean and the jailer's wife was a great cook. That was some of the best food I had the year I was in Mississippi.

"I didn't tell the other inmates that I was a civil rights worker. I guess the sheriff in the jail in Oxford didn't either, although by the end of it one guy figured it out. He let me know he knew why I was there. But he was more curious than hostile. He couldn't understand why someone would risk going to jail for registering black people to vote. He was a young guy, about my age. And there was one old guy of about 60 who was in jail because he had a 13 year old girlfriend. She'd stand out in the parking lot and wave to him, and he'd stand on this bench and look out the window and wave back.

Frank Cieciorka

"I was in the Oxford jail for the crime of carrying a placard. It was an 8x11 sheet of paper pinned to my shirt that said I was a voter registration worker. This is a funny story itself. We were going to have a big freedom day. Everybody would gather at this church and then the people who were going to attempt to register to vote would march up to the courthouse and try to register to vote. They wanted a SNCC worker to lead the parade, as it were. 'It's an absolute certain arrest,' they said. 'We need a volunteer to be arrested.' I had just received another draft notice and was supposed to show up in Memphis the next day to be inducted into the Army. So when they said it was a sure arrest, and they wanted a volunteer, I raised my hand — anything to avoid the Army. So they taped this paper to my chest and I led a group of about 20 or so people down to the courthouse; as soon as I walked into the registrar's office they arrested me. I did five days on that one. Paul Krassner bailed me out.

"When Friends of SNCC read that I was in jail and my bail was $500, they called Krassner and asked him to make a donation. He had re-produced a poster of my cartoon, "One Nation Under God," and had been selling them for $1 each in The Realist since March of '64, and I was arrested this time in July of '64, only a few months later. Anyway, he sent $500 down, which he said were proceeds from the sale of the poster. I'll be damned, I said. It had made at least $500 in only two months. Krassner stipulated that when the bail was returned it should be considered a donation to SNCC.



"Even when you tried to get away from it the violence kind of followed you around. One time we had a staff meeting down in Gulfport; then we decided to go to New Orleans for a party. An interracial group of us went on into New Orleans. Just walking down the street we got chased by a bunch of young thugs until we finally got to a crowded street where we could split up and mingle with the crowd. We thought that New Orleans was more sophisticated than that!

"And another occasion, Halloween, somebody drove by in the middle of the night and fired a couple of shotgun rounds into our house. A black guy who was going to run for some office in the Holly Springs area was found dead in a field. He'd been run over repeatedly by pickup trucks. There was always something. A lot of people on our side had guns, too. You could hardly blame them.

Occasionally there'd be a federal marshal present if we had announced an event likely to result in an incident. If we announced a Freedom Day or a mass registration, something like that, a federal marshal or FBI agent would show up to observe. That's all they would do — observe. At one attempted registration people were getting beat up on the courthouse steps by the cops using clubs as a couple FBI agents stood there watching. We ran up and said, 'Hey! Look! Our civil rights are being violated! We're being beaten up by the cops for trying to register to vote. Do something! They said, 'We can't do anything. We're the Federal Bureau of Investigation, all we can do is investigate. We have no power to make arrests.

"Stokely Carmichael's famous Black Power declaration was in the summer of '65, a couple of months after I left Mississippi, but I was still considered to be on staff. A lot of the freedom school teachers were saying that what they needed was some material on black history that was accessible to people with limited reading skills..... My wife at the time and I wrote it and illustrated it. We finished that and felt we'd pretty much done what we could in Holly Springs. We went back to San Francisco and started work on The Movement newspaper, which had begun as a Friends of SNCC newsletter. It was mostly concerned with the Civil Rights Movement.

"I was Stokely's driver on a couple occasions. I was considered one of the better drivers in tight situations because I had gotten people out of scrapes by my recklessness behind the wheel. I was his bodyguard on two occasions when he came to speak in San Francisco. Once was in Oakland at a Black Panther meeting. I had a Colt .45 'Commander.' The short one. I tucked it in my pants in the small of my back. San Francisco SNCC needed two or three guys to be bodyguards so I volunteered. We got to the auditorium where Stokely was going to speak and the Panthers are searching everybody as they go in, patting them down. I got to the door and the guy pats me down and never touches the small of my back. And after it was over and we were leaving I went over to the guy who frisked me and turned around and flipped up my shirt and showed him the gun and said, 'Next time, pat the small of the back, too.'

"Another time Stokely was speaking at the Fillmore auditorium. There was going to be a dance, a fundraiser. Hugh Masekela was going to entertain. Stokely was going to speak and I was one of the bodyguards. They had rent-a-cops also for security. We approached the rent-a-cops beforehand and said, 'Look, we three guys are armed. We're Stokely's bodyguards. If anything goes down, know that we're on your side. The rent-a-cops said, OK, but if anything happens, we're trained professionals. Anyway, later on in the evening I'm out on the dance floor twisting and turning and jumping all over when all of a sudden this 45 comes out of the small of my back and clatters across the floor. The crowd just rolled their eyes. I liked Stokely a lot. At the time I supported his position. I thought that the black nationalist movement at the time was healthy. I still do to some extent. The last time I saw him was around '67 or so. I did a photo shoot with him for the newspaper and that was the last I saw of him.

"And the Haight. I thought it was great. Just the sheer energy that they had. I thought, 'God! This is where we should be proselytizing, propagandizing, try to harness this energy and develop some political consciousness. But the left for the most part just held the hippies in disdain. I also thought it was sort of schizophrenic — camping, smokin' pot, droppin' acid, working on the newspaper, going to demonstrations. In fact, it resulted in a major psychotic break for me in 1969. People's Park was it. When that was over I cracked completely. I was really nutso for several months. People were taking care of me. In and out of the hospital. Bouncing me around. I'd get so outrageous and so out of control that my friends finally decided they couldn't handle me and they busted me into Mt. Zion. I spent two weeks there and realized that I had to get my act together or I'd spend a lot longer time there. I got out and more or less kept it together. I decided I'd get back in the movement and back into political activity rather than leave town as a basket case. And I did for another two years. I helped form an organization called People's Press, a collective of about a dozen people who produced and printed and distributed our own material. We started with a pamphlet on the history of Vietnam. Terry Cannon wrote it. I illustrated it. We printed it. We had our own printing press, our own darkroom. Our group was more than half women, too. Each member apprenticed him or herself to a printer to learn the trade. I apprenticed myself to a guy named Earl Hendra who had a big dark room in the Mission District. I learned all the camera work necessary for printing. Then I bought a camera, a huge camera 16 feet long. I built a darkroom around it and taught everybody else how to use it. Several women apprenticed themselves to printers and learned how to run first the multilith and then the bigger presses and came back and taught everybody else how to run them. That's how we learned the trade, by teaching each other. It worked very well.

"By 1972, I was pretty much back together. But I realized that I just didn't have the enthusiasm for the political work that I had before. The war was still going on. Nixon was re-elected. I had become a backpacking fanatic shortly before that. Part of my therapy in getting back together was some friends took me backpacking, and I realized that when I was out in the wilderness, like the Sierras, or the Trinity Alps, I felt totally, absolutely sane. Then we'd be driving back to the city after spending four or five days out in the wild and just that sea of red tail lights heading into the city would make me just feel the panic rising in me. So I went backpacking every chance I could get. Then it occurred to me that I should just move to the country and go backpacking every day if I wanted to. I'd met some people from Alderpoint and they invited me up for a visit. I liked the town and thought, 'Gee, this is as good a place as any if I'm going to move to the country.' I asked if there was any place available I might rent, and they pointed me in the direction of a little three-room cabin for $25 a month. I had about $50 to my name at the time, but I went up and rented it, drove back to the city, and within a month I closed up all my urban business and got in my Volkswagen bus and started a new life in Alderpoint. I purchased this property Karen and I live on now shortly after I got here in '72. I asked the owner in Santa Rosa if he wanted to sell it and he said, 'Yeah. Sure. $1500.' Half an acre with a three-room cabin on it. I borrowed $1500 from my parents and bought it.

"I borrowed some more money to get the initial building materials to get started on my studio. I learned enough carpentry working with an architect who was remodeling a ranch house out here to pick up enough work to buy another batch of materials to work on my own place. When the materials and money ran out I'd go hustle some more carpentry work. And I picked up a little freelance commercial art work from the city now and then to supplement that. All the hippies moved west of 101. Redway and west of there to Whale Gulch and that area. Hardly anybody of the back-to-the-land type came this far east of 101.

"In 1978 a CHP officer busted me for cultivation. I had finished building my house, but I couldn't afford to live in it so I rented it out to a woman on welfare with three kids. Her rent was just enough for me to make my loan payments that I couldn't quite afford to make at my income level at the time. I was still living in the old three room cabin down below the house I'd built on my half-acre. I decided that the only way I could pay off this place and live in it was to grow some pot. I planted a bunch of plants in with my tomatoes, and planted a row of sunflowers along the garden edge to act as a screen so it couldn't be seen from the road. This woman who rented my house had a ten year old boy who was riding a motorcycle around Alderpoint one day. The kid was stopped by a CHP cop who brought him home. It was July 3rd, 1978. My sunflower screen had only grown about shoulder high. As the officer was escorting the kid down the path from the parking area to the house he looked over at the tomato patch and saw the pot plants. He went back to his car and radioed the sheriff's department to come and bust me. They did, and they took me off to jail in Eureka.

"The two deputies got here in a hurry. They roared up and said, 'All Right! What's happening?' The CHP officer says, 'We've got these people here and they have some pot plants. The woman and her kid are in the house.' One of the deputies said, 'Why did you call in, Officer needs assistance? We thought you were in trouble! I ran somebody off the road trying to get here!' The CHP guy, an old sergeant who everybody around here hated, says, 'Well, you know how tough these feminists can be these days.' I told the deputy, 'Look. I own this property. She's my tenant. I'm totally responsible for anything that happens here.' She wasn't arrested. I was. I spent the weekend in jail because it was the July 4th weekend. My bail was $2100. I couldn't afford it. The guy in the next cell asked me, 'What's your bail? I said, $2100. He said, 'What are you in for?' I said I was in for cultivation. He said, 'Jesus! I'm in here for assault with a deadly weapon and my bail is only $700!' Finally the judge got back to town after the weekend and let me out on my own recognizance.

"It took me eight court appearances and the better part of a year before it was finally dismissed as an illegal search and seizure. The CHP officer had no business bringing the kid home. Their own rules in cases involving minors say they are supposed to choose the option that least restricts the freedom of the minor. He'd thrown the kid in his patrol car and driven him home. So, the judge decided that was illegal search and seizure.

"I met Karen in '79. Mutual friends had been suggesting we meet each other because we're both artists. I had seen some of her stained glass work and really liked it. Then somebody needed to get a newspaper article to me and she lived way out in the boonies and she said I'll just leave it with Karen Horn who lives in Redway and the next time you're in town you can stop by and pick it up. So I went to her house and she asked me to have a cup of tea. We sat around and talked and I liked her. We went out to dinner and we started seeing each other regularly. We had a long distance relationship for four years. She was in Redway I was in Alderpoint. Every Thursday, my town day, I would go to town, take care of business and she would cook dinner and I'd spend the night. And then on Saturday she and her daughter Zena would come to Alderpoint and I would cook dinner for her and Zena and they'd spend the night and go back to Redway on Sunday. After four years of that we decided we should try living together. In '84 Karen moved in with me. By then I was in the big new house with the big new studio and we thought we'd be able to share the studio because it was 16 x 32 feet. But we soon found we both needed more space than that. So we built the new studio.

"I've learned a lot from Karen. My strong suit is drawing. I'm only OK in color and not good at composition. My favorite compositional device was a vignette with things just sort of fading out at the edges. I wasn't worried about squares and rectangles and so forth. Karen is very rigorous in her compositions.

"At San Jose I kind of coasted on my drawing ability. I probably could have gotten a lot more out of the art department if I'd applied myself more. But I was too much into political activity. That took up most of my time. And I was just overwhelmed by all the possibilities for learning... everything! Here you are at a university that teaches classes in science and literature and history and I wanted it all. So between politics and the liberal education, I'd say I slighted the art more than I should have."



Lincoln Cushing asked Frank about Frank's famous clenched fist woodcut.

"Moving leftward from my infatuation with Ayn Rand as a freshman, I became active in the peace movement around 1959. When the House Committee on Un-American Activities held their hearings in San Francisco in May 1960 I joined the 5,000 strong demonstration in front of City Hall motivated mostly by civil liberties and free speech. There was a sizable group of Communists, Trotskyists, Anarchists, and other assorted reds off to one side thrusting fists into the air and chanting radical slogans. I remember feeling somewhat uncomfortable being associated with this group who seemed to be much more radical than I and I moved to another part of the crowd. I didn't attend the next day, May 13, because I had an important art history mid-term that I didn't want to miss. That night watching the news on TV I was outraged at seeing my friends washed down the City Hall steps with fire hoses. The next day I joined the demonstration and this time positioned myself in the midst of the reds and had my fist in the air with the rest of them. Thus I can pinpoint my radicalization to Friday, May 13, 1960. Shortly after that I joined the Socialist Party and, having turned 21 that year, voted for Norman Thomas in the November election. It wasn't all that long before I was voting for Archie Brown and Gus Hall. From that time the fist was one of my fave icons and I used it in cartoons and posters whenever I could. When I got back from Mississippi in '65 the fist was a natural for the first woodcut in a series of cheap prints. It wasn't until we made it into a button and tossed thousands of them into crowds at rallies and demonstrations that it really became popular. When I visited the lefty button maker in Berkeley who made them he showed me his wall of all the buttons he'd ever made. Literally dozens of organization had either incorporated the woodcut into their logos or used it in some fashion to promote some cause or issue."

Frank is survived by his wife, Karen Horn of Alderpoint; his step-daughter, Zena Goldman Hunt of Italy; and his brother, James Cieciorka of San Jose.

Source / Anderson Valley Advertiser

Please also see James Retherford : Steven Heller, The New York Times, and our Little 'Blog of Record' / The Rag Blog / Nov. 28, 2008.

And also see Legendary Artist of the New Left : Frank Cieciorka Dead at 69 / The Rag Blog / Nov. 26, 2008.

Many thanks to Marilyn Buck for sharing this article with us / The Rag Blog

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