Paul Hebblethwaite

Is it Enough?

Paul Hebblethwaite — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 14:45:19 -0800

Even as a young child I was aware of various political conflicts. As a South African I was aware of apartheid and the struggle for justice. Being British, I was knowledgeable about the conflict in Northern Ireland. Growing up in a Jewish community in St. Louis, I was conscious of the Israeli occupation. Even today, I am reminded of my time in St. Louis as I scroll through my high school’s Facebook contacts, many who now live in Israel.

This knowledge has grown with both time and experience, and the details of the three experiences weave in and out of mind. In these three conflicts, walls divided people, religion fueled conflict over identity, land, and power, and division became a birth right.

The escalation of events in Gaza has led me to a difficult question: what makes Israel different from South Africa?

This is a difficult question because of the historical framework for an Israeli state. It is a difficult question because Israel is surrounded by hostile states. It is a difficult question because of the violence of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah. Is it enough?

In the end, I have sought solace in a deeper context. The politics of the conflict will run circles around logic or prudence, but in the midst of this violence, life continues. Just like when I was faced with the Thanksgiving blues, I find balance in contemporary art. Looking at a context or problem through the lenses of art helps me shake loose my desire for clean conclusions, and refills my spirit for yet another go at the issue.

Here are two links to reflect on both Israeli and Palestinian contemporary art as we wrestle with this difficult question.

http://www.herzliyamuseum.co.il/english/homepage

http://www.hagar-gallery.com

*Art by Iman Abu Hamid

MOCA and the (Debt) Collector

Paul Hebblethwaite — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 17:09:53 -0800

The art world in Los Angeles has spent the last two months watching the unfolding financial crisis at the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). In a nutshell, the museum outspent revenue for several years and borrowed from its endowment to cover expenses. With a recent drop in donations and the endowment depleted, the museum could have run out of money in the spring of 2009.

Like much of the country, MOCA was living on credit. The good intentions of significant exhibitions ran into the reality of fiscal irresponsibility. In theory, the museum’s blockbuster shows should have attracted new donors to cover the additional cost. In reality, the donations never materialized and the bills kept coming.

In response to the financial crisis, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation has offered $15 million in matching funds to replenish the museum’s endowment, and an additional $3 million annually for the next five years to cover operating costs. In exchange, the museum will restrict the annual budget to $13-$16 million per year (versus $20 million) and has established an advisory group to monitor the museum’s financial recovery.

I have watched the news with mild curiosity. As an artist turned administrator, the multilayered debate surrounding responsibility to mission, financial stewardship, and the value of contemporary art has been a fascinating journey. On the other hand, the entire episode is a sad indictment of how far our consumer culture and debt spending lifestyle has worked its way into every facet of society.

In Sickness and In Health, Times of Plenty or Officership...

Paul Hebblethwaite — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 10:46:19 -0800

A Christian Post article has been rising up the ranks of news stories on Conversant Life, “Salvation Army Leader to Lose Job for Violating Marriage Policy”. On the heels of the Proposition 8 battle in California, and a renewed exploration of marriage, any article on the rules of marriage will attract attention and interest.

I knew exactly what the article was about before I opened the link. I have had the fortunate experience of working for The Salvation Army for the last 3 years; including over a year working for Corps Officers (note the plural). When I interview new employees I always ask them what they know about The Salvation Army? The typical response revolves around thrift stores and Christmas bell ringing.

What the average person doesn’t know is that The Salvation Army is an Evangelical Church that combines faith and social service around the world and has evolved a particular culture born out of tradition and action. Many leadership positions are held by ordained clergy called Officers who are either single or married. The particular rule that married couples must both be officers is rooted in the strong distinct ministry of the churches founders, William and Catherine Booth. While William Booth was grounding his ministry in the slums of East London, Catherine Booth was a successful preacher whose ministry helped support the family financially. Their example was followed by an aggressive expansion of both churches and social services around the world.

The roots of the organization’s policy on marriage include the practicality of service combined with a respect for participation in ministry by women. Of course, this radical co-ministry is trumped in individual Divisional leadership appointments were the theology of headship restricts a woman from leading her husband as Divisional Commander. There is a healthy debate within The Salvation Army concerning even this issue. On the other hand, there are no limits for single women officers, including commissioning as General of the organization (I believe there have been three women Generals).

Despite a 100 year global tradition of co-pastoring, an officer in Wisconsin wants The Salvation Army to radically change a theologically rooted approach to marriage. Despite obvious problems (no marriage is perfect), the organization’s policy empowers married couples to proactive and responsive ministry. It is the organization’s co-ministry that allows The Salvation Army to respond rapidly to disasters and to mobilize resources in response to need and demand. As the significant other of a future Episcopal Priest, I endorse their policy (for what it maters).

* The editiorial image is from the Los Angeles Herald in 1908 when the local Salvation Army was arrested for marching in the streets of Los Angeles. Note the married officers.

The Space Between Us

Paul Hebblethwaite — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 11:25:03 -0800

The poems of Rainer Maria Rilke helped me understand how difficult it is to enter the experience of another human being. We spend so much of our day alone in our own thoughts, that when confronted with another person, we are so feeble in our ability to affectively communicate. Twelve years into my marriage I am still surprised at how easy it is to miss communicate, for my words to be so ineffective at expressing my inner reality.

In our work at The Salvation Army Alegria we are aware of this challenge. Our ability to “know” the person we seek to help is critical in our ability to sensitively guide them towards “wholeness”. At times it is a frightening scenario, one human influencing another; because our actions are based on the premise that we know what the person we are helping needs. Sometimes we are right, sometimes we are not.

There are very few visual artists that create this particular tension for me as a viewer. I often feel a certain distance between myself the viewer, the work of art, and the artist themselves. It reminds me of the time when one of our youth felt detached from a group of portraits on display at our facility because she didn’t think the people were real. When I introduced her to a subject of one of the paintings at the art opening her face light up with revelation; the paintings had became an intimate substitute for the real person.

The work of Louise Bourgeois is different. When I view her work in a museum or gallery, I often feel a very close connection between her work and the woman herself. Due to the deeply psychological and organic nature of her work, I often leave deeply affected by the visceral experience. Last week I took a Sunday Sabbath to view her exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Two particular pieces absorbed a large amount of my interest. In the second room, two of her spiral cell pieces dominated the viewer’s attention. The work demands that the viewer circle the object looking for cracks or windows into the inner space of the cell. The voyeuristic experience creates an intentional viewing posture that pushes distractions to the edge and allows the viewer to focus their attention on the contents of each cell. This focus creates an intimacy that reduces the distance between the audience and the artist, with the work operating as a powerful intermediary.

Intermediary objects and experiences are important vehicles for human interaction. Whether it is a conversation about the weather or the ball drop on New Years Eve, both objects and experiences help create bonds between people that help us overcome the limits of language. If we rely to heavily on the “word”, we run the risk of limiting our ability to relate to a broader diversity of people.

Redefining Thanksgiving

Paul Hebblethwaite — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 13:52:33 -0800

Can a diverse America meaningfully embrace Thanksgiving in its traditional form?

Working in homeless services through countless years of Thanksgiving dinners has left me empty of any celebratory sympathy for the false traditions that surround Thanksgiving. I don’t believe for one minute that the “First Thanksgiving” was a sunlit banquet of settlers and Native Americans enjoying turkey, mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie at the table of friendship. I understand the reason why the mythology of Thanksgiving has developed: supporting manifest destiny and creating an ethical framework for European American expansion. I just don’t like this quasi meaningful excuse of a holiday which has become a vehicle for creating consumer demand and white washing the reality of history

Can we add meaning to the holiday, or discover its universal roots as a harvest celebration? Can it be a celebration of the sacrifices that others make for our own benefit, and a ritual of confession for the things we take for our own selfish gain?

I know that you are screaming for relief at this point, hoping I will redeem my sad and harsh criticism of Thanksgiving with enthusiasm for its positive meaning. For whatever reason I can’t. Instead I leave you with a link to the work of Contemporary Native American Artist, Fritz Scholder. My prayer is that you will take the opportunity this Thanksgiving to remember our Native American brothers and sisters, and allow your life to be enriched by their culture and spirit during this harvest celebration. Another suggestion is the movie Smoke Signals, because it is deeply meaningful and laugh out loud funny.Dare I say, Happy Thanksgivin.

Image: Fritz Scholder "Indian Contemplating Columbus" 1992, Currently on Display at the National Museum of the American Indian.

Born in a Cotton Field

Paul Hebblethwaite — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 09:45:31 -0800

In Faith Ringgold’s Born in a Cotton Field, a painted quilt, the nativity narrative fuses to the experience of African Americans in the south. The work of art creates a secondary context to over lay the biblical story. The voyage to Bethlehem is replaced with the fraught voyage of slaves travelling the Underground Railroad; Jesus born in the open cotton fields.

When I moved to the United States from Belgium and South Africa, I was introduced to the particular history of America. The experience of slavery and the civil war created contact points between the struggle of racism in my birth place and the colonial roots of institutional slavery around the world. The school I attended in America included a reminder of slavery’s legacy through a bussing program that brought African American’s from St. Louis’s city center to the suburbs were I lived. I grew up confronted by the reality of segregation; whether it was socially enforced or politically enforced, the impact was often the same.

The paintings and painted quilts of Faith Ringgold provide an exhaustive point of immersion into the experience of African Americans in the United States and Europe. Experiencing her art provides an immersive experience that creates opportunities for learning and personal reflection.

Kehinde Wiley

Paul Hebblethwaite — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:18:49 -0800

Kehinde Wiley is a vastly popular painter working in New York and Los Angeles. A new exhibition of paintings, The World Stage: Africa Logos-Dakar, recently closed at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Wiley is known for his realist paintings that reflect historical portraits combining contemporary figures and stylized backdrops. In the recent exhibition, the paintings incorporated African cloth printing with youth in poses borrowed from historical public sculpture in the African countries he visited.

The combination of ordinary people, the grandeur of public portraiture and sculpture, and the bright floating backgrounds of his paintings has translated into rapid success for the artist. With his most recent exhibitions he is demonstrating an evolving maturity backed by the global relevance of synthesizing historical pomp and ordinary importance. Wiley's celebration of the ordinary with eye popping visuals subverts the historical precedence of celebrity, without a simple critique that would doom his art to slick propaganda or a bright remix of a useless genre.

Representation

Resources

Conversant Votes!

Paul Hebblethwaite — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 18:00:31 -0700

The staff of Slate Magazine recently posted an article detailing each staff person's vote in the upcoming Presidential Election. Maybe the Conversant community should follow their lead. Over the last month there have been numerous articles about the candidates and robust conversation about their positive and negative attributes. There has been concern that Conversant is both too liberal and too conservative. This is our opportunity to reflect the political diversity of this community.

This is our opportunity to share with each other who we are voting for and why, in six sentences or less by adding a comment to this blog. Please do not reply to any comment (any reply to comments will be removed). One vote, one comment.

Some may choose to not comment, and I respect their desire to vote without comment.

Art: Irrelevant, Like Church?

Paul Hebblethwaite — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:19:28 -0700

Once in a while the odd economics of the art world hit mainstream media and cause the average citizen to shake their head in bewilderment and think about the last time they were in a museum or gallery. I would imagine the average American visits a museum only a handful of times in their life. They wonder from room to room and enjoy the content, colors, and composition of different paintings. The time spent in the contemporary art section might leave them bewildered. Overall, it is a solid two to three hours of quiet contemplation and they walk away a little more relaxed and looking for something a little more exciting to do.

Art is as relevant to a lot of Americans as Church is. Not much.

I recently read the book, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Art by Don Thompson. The title refers to the sale of a Damien Hirst installation that includes a stuffed tiger shark floating in a tank of formaldehyde. The book does an excellent job of balancing the particular economics of art collecting with anecdotal stories that add life to the book. It is a great read for anyone curious about the business of contemporary art.

The book also reminded me why I spend time promoting Art and Shelter. In the book he outlines the likelihood of making a living as an artist in New York City. There are roughly 45 artists earning a high six figure salary, 600 artists who earn six figures, 3000 artists represented by galleries, and another 41,355 artists who are not represented by galleries or dealers. The odds of financial success as an artist are similar to pro sports.

The harsh reality of the art market challenges the current system that validates a small number of artists and relegates the rest to the hallway closet. Were does the art not sold end up? Is the work of the 3646th artist not worthy of praise or exhibition on an empty wall somewhere? My only conclusion is that this system of manufactured value results in a tragic absence of art in contemporary life, with art divided between walls of the art establishment and the darkness of an artist’s closet (or worse, a landfill). There has to be another way to create work that pushes the boundries of human creativity and prophetic vision.

After Babel

Paul Hebblethwaite — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 22:30:49 -0700

I will always remember the sharp rebuke from my grandmother to be quiet when I asked her and my other relatives to speak English at the dinner table so I could take part in their conversation. It was a pivotal year when my next brother and I began to wear the trappings of our acquired American culture. It was the year we showed up in South Africa with banned Midnight Oil cassette tapes, long hair, and new attitudes. As a monolingual child of pop culture I stood out in sharp contrast to the Afrikaans identity of my Mother’s family. Every summer we would relief drop into a white washed world of mountain views, vineyards, and institutionalized segregation. I grew up a South African whose cultural identity was only an illegitimate government’s passport deep. Passports are pretty thin documents that can open doors or get you kicked off trains (I can tell that story another day) but don’t tell you much about a person’s soul.

I was born into a family that spoke two languages, Afrikaans and English. We straddled the white divide in South Africa, a calm détente of cultures that had erupted in the past into civil wars and concentration camps. My great grandmother had been held in a British concentration camp during the Boer War. My British grandfather had lost his home and business during the independence struggle in what became Zimbabwe. My genes are a testament to the riptides of history in the beautiful sun struck country of South Africa. Through the twists and turns of my family’s multi-generational immigration experience, I ended up in the United States of America.

The barriers of language are a significant fault line in the development of a cohesive cultural identity. The language barrier between me and my grandmother amplified our distant relationship. A source of belonging wilted in her cold morning frost.

The video installation of Zineb Sedira is an intimate portrayal of the linguistic disconnections of the immigration experience. The French born Zineb is an artist living in London. In the piece, “Mother Tongue” three parallel videos show a conversation between herself and her mother, herself and her daughter, and finally between her daughter and mother. In the first conversation, the grandmother speaks Arabic to Zineb. Zineb speaks French to her daughter who responds in English. In the third conversation, the grandmother and granddaughter speak to each other in a language neither one knows.

In Zineb’s video, the challenges of communication, whether language or cultural, are sharply focused and compress generational time into a moment that speaks truth into our contemporary experience. Working in Los Angeles, I am daily confronted by the barriers of culture and language. I am witness to language shifts between parents and their children in our after school program or my own fumbling attempts to some how connect with the Spanish speaking residents in our HIV/AIDS housing facility. What I needed as a child, and what Zineb represents, is that critical bridge between people. At Alegria staff bridge the gap between my privilege and the experience of the families we work with so that I am more effective as a leader and between the parents and their children who are rapidly adapting to their new home culture.

I watch my staff, I watch Zineb, and I see present forms of a Jesus that bridged Jewish and Gentile culture, the divide between men and women, a bridge that crosses the silence of language and cultural differences. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Galatians 3:28