Creative Time will realize its most ambitious project yet this fall, with its third annual summit and the opening of Living As Form, a show by 25 curators surveying more than 350 socially engaged projects. The size of Living As Form alone will make it a landmark show, and judging solely by the list of participants, it will present a representative cross-section of socially engaged cultural production – as Creative Time is proud to mention, the roster includes both “art world luminaries” and the “purposefully obscure.”
Artists, writers, critics, and curators will gather at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, NYU, on September 23rd, 2011 for a day-long series of presentations on the political implications of socially engaged art. Expected presenters include: Alternate ROOTS, Appalshop, Common Room, Cybermohalla Ensemble, Decolonizing Architecture, Jeremy Deller, Darren O’Donnell, Laura Flanders, Theaster Gates, Hou Hanru, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Shannon Jackson, Long March Project, Alan W. Moore, My Barbarian, Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), Ted Purves, Gerald Raunig, Navin Rawanchaikul, Katerina Šedá, Chemi Rosado Seijo, Andreas Siekmann, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Ultra-red, United Indian Health Services, Urban Bush Women, Voina, Dan S. Wang, WochenKlausur, and Women on Waves. Tickets to the Creative Time Summit are still available, and attendees will get a preview of Living As Form, which opens to the public the following day.
The chosen site for Living As Form is the 15,000 square-foot Essex Street Market building in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and the building will serve as a base for the three-week long show. The archival exhibition will be housed here, as well as the artists in residence. Creative Time is commissioning nine new works by Bik Van der Pol, Carolina Caycedo, MadeIn Company presented by the Long March Project, Megawords, OurGoods, Surasi Kusolwong, Superflex, Temporary Services, and Time/Bank (Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle). These commissions range from performances to public interventions and installations, not all of which will be on site at the Essex Street Market building. The projects will explore topics including public shrines and ceremonies, mind/body consciousness, the dynamics of power, vertical development and air rights, and alternative economies. Some participating artists also served as curatorial advisors.
Living As Form culminates with a book, published by Creative Time Books and distributed by MIT Press, due out in January of 2012. Contributors include Brian Holmes, Claire Bishop, and several other theorists offering context to the key examples of works, methodologies, conditions, and variations within the attempt to bring cultural skills to the arena of social change.
Join Groundswell at the Creative Time Summit this September!
Jerusalem’s Museum of Tolerance, photo courtesy of Simon Wiesenthal Center
The Israeli interior ministry recently authorized construction to begin on Jerusalem’s Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance despite protestations that its siting will violate the historic Ma’man Allah, or the Mamilla Cemetery. Palestinian families whose ancestors are buried there have joined with archaeologists, academics, and artists, including Jewish allies, to voice opposition to the plan. These more recent objections illuminate an ongoing struggle to protect the cemetery, as well as the museum’s troubled past.
Ma’man Allah (Mamilla Cemetery) is a centuries-old site that, until its expropriation in 1948, was in regular use, interring the remains of some of the region’s longest Muslim family lineages. Islamic saints and scholars are buried there, including Edward Said‘s relatives, and so when the plans for the museum were first announced in 2002, the opposition’s rejoinder came swiftly. Those who mobilized against breaking ground turned up the public pressure, staging press conferences to gain international attention, and ultimately bringing the issue to the United Nations. A concurrent legal strategy was brought in Israeli courts, which succeeded in getting the excavation suspended in 2006, but two years later the Supreme Court sided with the government and resumed the project, after which remains from the graveyard were moved to the perimeter of the site.
Following this political turmoil, in early 2010 the first architect commissioned to design the building, Frank Gehry, left the project. The official reason given was that he was committed to too many projects at the time and needed to scale back. However, at the time of his withdrawal, it came to light that the Wiesenthal Center was far from its $200 million fundraising goal, and a more plausible explanation is that the star architect worried the project wouldn’t come to fruition. More, his proposal was met with mixed reviews, and its ambivalent reception no doubt factored with the negative press against his continued involvement.
Without Gehry, the project pressed on, commissioning a new design by Chyutin Architects for $150 million less than the original plan. In June of 2011, the new building was approved, and after an accelerated permitting process, construction was approved the following month. The Chyutin building will be a drastic departure from Gehry’s proposal, and, as the Jerusalem Post reports, will include an amphitheater, exhibit halls, classrooms, a stone plaza and a parking lot. Artinfo reports the far more conservative design prompted the interior ministry to comment that:
the project presents architecture that is modest and thoughtful, and contributes to the creation of a public space that is fitting for the area on a local and urban level.
Of course, it’s what is beneath the building that is at issue, and the ministry’s fanfare only adds insult to injury to those whose ancestors are being relocated. Democracy NOW! interviewed one such descendant, Columbia University professor and author Rashid Khalidi, who recounts the Wiesenthal Center’s official line – that no graves were being disturbed – in the video below.
Ma’man Allah has already once been built over in the past, to accommodate a municipal parking lot during the 1960s, and this figured into the interior ministry’s decision to rubber stamp the museum’s second proposal. Khalidi’s account of that time period conflicts with that of the Wiesenthal Center’s founder, who has claimed that the parking lot construction met with no resistance. Then, as now, Khalidi claims, the difference in protections offered to Arab and Jewish heritage sites could not be more pronounced, a view that is substantiated by his co-interviewee Michael Ratner, the current president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Ratner notes that of Israel’s 136 protected cultural sites, not one was Muslim or Christian until at least 2008.
Khalidi and Ratner speak of the erasure of Arab and Palestinian histories from West Jerusalem in their interview, and they express regret that the Wiesenthal Center is implicated in achieving such a goal. The U.S.-based organization has established other sites in Los Angeles and New York. That an institution with as laudable a mission as the Wiesenthal Center has met with such conflict is a deep irony matched only by the notion that a museum of tolerance could be built on top of the graves of the displaced and dispossessed.
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