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Photos from the Last Two Weeks

Vallejo Nocturno 2022 Copyright

Price Gauging at the Supermarket

From The Nation,

“If you’re a corporation that has eaten up most of the competition and cornered the market, is it easier for you to raise prices on your customers and maximize your profits because you don’t have to worry about losing your business?” asked Warren.

Powell replied, “In principle, if you don’t have competition and you’re a monopolist, yes, you can raise your prices.”

“Okay,” Warren continued. “Over the past year, we know that prices have risen because of supply chain problems, unexpected shifts in the demand for goods, and even higher labor costs. But if corporations were simply passing along these costs in highly competitive markets, would the companies’ profits margins have changed much?”

After mumbling something about varying factors that impact such calculations, Powell concluded, “But, in principle, you could be right.”

With that answer in hand, the point was made:

Senator Warren: Well, it’s very much not what we’re seeing right now. Today, nearly two out of three of the biggest publicly traded corporations in the country are reporting fatter profit margins than they reported before the pandemic which doesn’t sound like they’re just passing along costs. So let me ask you: Does that increase in profit margins, combined with greater market concentration in industry after industry, suggest to you that some corporations may be passing along increased costs and, at the same time, charging more on top of that to fatten their profit margins?

Chair Powell: That, that could be right. It could also just be, though, that demand is incredibly strong and that, you know, they’re, they’re raising prices because they can.

Senator Warren: Well, that’s the point. They’re raising prices because they can, and they’re not being competed down. You know, market concentration has allowed giant corporations to hide behind claims of increased costs to fatten their profit margins. So the consumer pays more both because the corporation faces higher costs and because, as you put it, because the corporation can increase prices. The reason I raise this is that higher prices have many causes, and we can’t overlook the role that concentrated corporate power has played in creating the conditions for price gouging.

Warren made the vital connection that all Democrats should be making as debates about the causes of inflation heat up. Instead of letting Wall Street apologists create the impression that inflation is simply the result of supply chain kinks and pent-up consumer demand after two years of pandemic lockdowns, and instead of letting Republicans suggest that federal and state investments in health care and housing are the problem, Democrats should be speaking like Warren. And like former Ohio state senator Nina Turner, a congressional candidate who declared Thursday:

It’s not “inflation,” it’s price-gouging.

Exxon and other Big Oil corporations are price-gouging us at the gas pump.

Grocery chains are making record profits price-gouging us at the register.

Corporations are bleeding working people dry. Enough.

Quote from Dan Graham

"When you define the audience, the performer becomes what the audience wants. Politicians do that all the time."

Dan Graham

Carmen Herrera ( 1915-2022)

Dan Graham Whom I did Not Know

I just ran into the news that Dan Graham passed away. I did not know about him until today when I read about his life and the the things he constructed and what he did. It's a testament to keep looking and learning about our world. Here is a good article that talks about his efforts and results in Art News:

The works for which Graham is best known, his glass pavilions, resemble clear architectural spaces that afford audiences unusual views of the spaces surrounding them. These are made with two-way mirrored glass, which “reflect[s] the sky,” Graham said in a 2014 interview with Artspace. “But then it becomes surveillance, as well—you can see out, but you can’t see in.” One intended as an “urban park” was built atop the roof of the Dia Art Foundation in 1991, and was sited there until the space’s closure in 2004; a curvaceous sculpture related to the pavilions appeared on top of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2014. Many more popped up in areas that are not quite considered art spaces—near the Arctic Circle in Norway, for example.

While within the art world Graham is known for artworks like the pavilions, he has also developed a cult following beyond it for one work in particular: Rock My Religion (1984), a 55-minute-long montage that links rock ‘n’ roll to a whole lineage of religious music that begins with the Shakers. Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore provided the soundtrack for the video, which is, in a way, Graham paying homage to the rock music that influenced him.

Graham’s storied career has been widely recognized by various institutions across the world. He appeared in four editions of Documenta, three editions of the Venice Biennale (not counting an inclusion in the Venice Architecture Biennale, a rarity for visual artists), three editions of the Whitney Biennial, and two editions of Skulptur Projekte Münster in Germany. His 2009 U.S. retrospective, “Beyond,” appeared at the Whitney Museum in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Graham, who was long based in New York, claimed in a 2009 Art in America interview that he had trouble gaining recognition for his work in the city. That had not stopped a legion of contemporary artists from making the journey to his $450-a-month apartment on the Lower East Side to hear from him. He was known to enchant visitors with pithy meditations on the self-seriousness of the art scene of the ’70s and the latest comedies playing in multiplexes near him. He often seemed to take just as much pleasure in reading the writings of Guy Debord as he did in watching a gross-out comedy starring Seth Rogen.

“All art should be for fun,” he said at a screening of his work in 2015.

 

A Very Good Documentary

 

It is enlightening to see a documentary that addresses the issue of protest and violence from a different perspective than American News television. We have dumbed down to a primitive level where thinking is not allowed. Here in this productive documentary you begin to understand the complexity of the issues but also who holds most of the cards in this game. Here is a review from J. Hoberman at Artforum:

This metadocumentary, an annotated assemblage of mainly first-person smartphone videos made during the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) demonstrations of 2018 and 2019 by the mixed-media journalist-artist-provocateur David Dufresne sans help from French ministry of culture, is as significant in its way as the founding film of cinema verité, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s 1961 Chronicle of Summer, in which Parisians of all types were asked about their personal lives and then in some cases, having seen themselves on-screen, were interviewed again provide the film’s coda.

Monopoly creates a similar feedback loop. Simply described, the film features images of urban mayhem—Robocopoid police battling scraggly yellow vests. Produced largely by the demonstrators, these videos are presented on the screen as subjects for analysis by actual participants, among other commentators (truck drivers, plumbers, lawyers, police-union officials, academics, social workers, journalists, stay-at-home moms): talking heads whose identities are withheld until the end of the movie, the better to sharpen the viewer’s appreciation of body language and vocal tone.

Dufresne employs a radical method of directing. Subjects respond to stimuli, in some cases reliving an experience. The movie’s first words are “C’est moi,” uttered by a demonstrator who has lost an eye as he watches himself wounded and crawling on the ground. This is immediately followed by a stern rebuke from Emmanuel Macron, who, shown alone amid an obedient audience, scolds an unseen gilet jaune sympathizer: “Your words repression and state violence are unacceptable in a constitutional state.” Dufresne inserts an opinion by the wounded man’s mother, followed by some truly atrocious examples of “unacceptable” state violence, including footage in which, in their apparent eagerness to confiscate a camera, cops smash their way into a car.

Visceral as it is, Monopoly is a montage film in the Soviet tradition. Dialectics abound. Brutality is juxtaposed with theory. The same streets are shown during and before chaotic manifs. Violence perpetrated by the police is set beside violence perpetrated against the police—the latter most elaborately in some multiscreen security-cam footage watched, in real time, by an outraged group of cops. The idea that the state is defined by its monopoly on violence is derived from Max Weber’s 1919 lecture “Politics as a Vocation”: hence the movie’s American title. More sarcastic, the original French title refers to a cop’s gloating comment on footage showing perhaps forty young Arabs being taught to “behave” by spending hours on their knees, hands clasped behind their heads. Dufresne, born a month before May ’68, attributes his interest in police brutality to his teenage enthusiasm for punk rock. Monopoly has universal relevance even while it is specifically French, dealing as it does with the indigenous gilets jaunes movement—a leaderless, mostly working-class revolt sparked by rising fuel prices and unified largely by a populist loathing of Macron—while advancing a variety of analyses that deploy semiotics and critical theory with infectious gusto. There is thought amid the clobbering. Academics parse symbols; sociologists dissect crowd behavior and “ritualized” or symbolic acts of aggression. Philosophers suggest that demonstrations serve to make establishment power manifest, while smashing the windows of the high-end Champs-Elysées brasserie Fouquet’s enables demonstrators to physically possess the shards of that power.

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Some Photos from The Last Two Weeks

All Images are from Vallejo Nocturno 2022 Copyright

Learning About Luigi Ghirri

 

From a discussion at Aperture with the curator of a Luigi Ghirri photo exhibition:

Michael Famighetti: The installation for The Idea of Building was quite beautiful and worked so well in the Matthew Marks Gallery space, which has the feel of a modest chapel. How did this project come to be?

Matt Connors: I have been a Ghirri fan for a long time, and a conversation developed with the gallery about me curating a show. The first time they showed Ghirri was in a Thomas Demand–curated show, so I think they were interested in me to see what would happen, because I wasn’t a photographer, but was someone invested in his work. 

Famighetti: Did you work closely with the Ghirri estate on the selection?

Connors: I went to Italy to the archive to meet with Adele, his daughter. Before that, I was buying every Ghirri book. I was freaked out because of how admired and loved he is in the photography world, and I felt acutely aware that I was not a photographer. But I kept digging in on my personal research and wrote a minithesis to send to Adele. And then I went in January 2020, one of my last trips before the COVID-19 pandemic. The archive is in what was once Ghirri’s house; it was an absolute fantasy.

Famighetti: What vision of Ghirri did you present to the estate?

Connors: The process of choosing a Ghirri photograph is kind of like a psychological intake, because there is so much, many different bodies of work; it involves confessing what you like.

After looking at many images, I started to dig out a vision of him as a painter. It sounds self-serving, but because I’m making paintings all day, putting color together materially, I started to see that parallel so clearly in his work.

In the book Project Prints (2012), which is about how he would make contact prints and cut them out and make little maquettes to play with, you can see that the materiality of his approach was key. He was obsessed with building, actually building things—like making tables, folders, and containers—and that just seemed so present in the work. That became the paradigm. I think his entry into art-making via the drawing that was part of his cartography and surveying work set the stage for him to use photography in a more tactile, painterly, material way.

Famighetti: Ghirri was also a prolific author of concise reflections on photography, and he wrote about how he didn’t take pictures, or compose pictures, but rather saw himself as creating things from images—your building angle seems to naturally emerge from his thinking.

Connors: Yes, and there was a nervousness that the title—The Idea of Building—would read as if the show was about architecture. (I had just seen a show that was all about his photographs connected to architecture.) But I did use a few photos he took of Aldo Rossi’s studio, and there are a few others included that are focused on architectural frameworks. He would go back and then make photographs based on his surveying work. Architecture is embedded in how he sees.

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Capitalism and Democracy

Ian Welsh has written eloquently about the incompatibility between democracy and capilaism-here is what he says:

The history of capitalism and democracy shows that we need to choose on or the other. The problem is that capitalism concentrates power in the hands of a few people who aren’t chosen thru democratic means. Capitalism requires those people to pursue unlimited profit, because those who don’t lose their power to those who do.

When they have that power, they then buy government, because government is both the main threat to them, and the force which, by use of law and means like central banks bailing them out, can keep them obscenely rich even when markets would otherwise cause them to lose their money and thus their power.

The history from the Great Depression on is instructive. Capitalism caused a huge, nearly worldwide depression. Government did not bail them out, and so they lost their power. FDR came to power, and more or less following Keynes’s prescriptions, he bailed them out. He and the people working with him put in place multiple protections to make sure that capitalism couldn’t cause such a crisis again.

Capitalists hated him for it. He had rescued them, but at the cost of 90% top marginal tax rates, huge estate taxes, regulation and aggressive anti-trust laws. Upon his death (little could be done while he was alive, as he was so popular) they immediately started attacking all the protections he had put in place. It took them decades, but they stuck to it, and after all, even in their reduced state, they were still powerful and could afford to pay people to spend their lives working against the New Deal.

The foremost intellectual servant of these men was Milton Friedman, but many, many labored in this cause. They built a political, economic and intellectual infrastructure and waited for their opportunity. With the oil crises, inflation and unemployment of the 70s, they had their chance. They made sure that an egalitarian model for dealing with the crisis wouldn’t work, and they got Thatcher and Reagan elected, then they dismantled the New Deal and all the protections against another economic catastrophe like the Great Depression.

This allowed them to vastly consolidate wealth, pushing power into the hands of fewer and fewer people. Antitrust law was gutted, unions cut to ribbons, and regulations which protected against them were destroyed, while new ones were put in place to ensure the concentration of wealth and power.

A small example was given to me by an accountant, who in the 70s used to do the taxes for Indian bands. When Reagan took over the regulations were changed so that only large companies were allowed in the business and he was frozen out. This sort of thing happened everywhere, and, indeed, continues to this day.

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Best Music of 2021-Igor Levit

Shostakovich and Levit seems like a perfect marriage. Levit has both the intelligence to interpret Shostakovich's compositions and the manual dexterity to translate it into the piano sounds with coherence and a master storyteller's pacing. A three disc extravaganza. Good lord!

From Alex Ross of the New Yorker:

Levit introduced himself to the international public in an ostensibly conventional manner, with a recording of Beethoven. The Sony Classical label signed him in 2012, after he had attracted notice as a member of the BBC’s young-artist program. His first Sony project was nonetheless bold in concept, even brazen: where other début pianists might have stuck to the “Moonlight,” the “Appassionata,” or the “Waldstein,” Levit offered a two-disk set of Beethoven’s final five piano sonatas, including the titanic “Hammerklavier.”

To some, the gesture smacked of arrogance. He told me, “I know there is this attitude that you are supposed to wait until you are sixty-five and have seen life and the world and suffering before you approach late Beethoven. But I know thirteen-year-olds who know a level of suffering that these full-of-themselves, elegant mid-sixties artists have absolutely no fucking idea about. Give me a break! Anyway, that’s where I started, with late Beethoven. Matti really helped give me that attitude. He would say, ‘Just go do it. Just be a pianist. I will help you not to be an idiot.’ ”

When that début recording arrived in the mail, I rolled my eyes, but skepticism soon gave way to wonder. The opening gestures of Opus 111, in C Minor, were almost frightening in their intensity; the inward-searching lyricism of the second movement suggested a sage elder who could remember the world before the wars. When Levit traversed the entire cycle for Sony, in sessions extending from 2017 to 2019, he considered rerecording the late sonatas, but decided that his earlier attempts held up. A sleight of hand happens as you make your way through the set: Beethoven gets older while Levit gets younger.

From Gramophone :

Levit is unquestionably the finest artist of current times to have added it to his repertoire and I heard him give a thrillingly visceral, epic reading at Wigmore Hall a couple of years back. This studio account is every bit as compelling, making you realise afresh what a masterpiece this is. The many moments where Stevenson seems to transcend the possibilities of the keyboard, becoming positively symphonic in his writing, leave him unfazed and each section follows with complete inevitability, yet there’s plenty of contrast, too, for instance in the sequence of dances that form the Suite in the Pars prima, while the ‘Pibroch (Lament for the Children)’ has a desolation to it that is as heartfelt as the composer’s own.

Moving on to the Pars altera, the ‘Fanfare – Forebodings’ section is terrifying, while the ‘Glimpse of a War Vision’ has a surreal beauty (Stevenson was a conscientious objector and spent a year in Wormwood Scrubs after refusing to sign up for National Service); from the depths then grow ‘Variations on “Peace, Bread and the Land” (1917)’, in which Levit reveals a Messiaen-like colour palette. This is one of those jaw-dropping moments where most pianists (James Willshire and Murray McLachlan among them) show some strain, but not Levit – the ‘Central Episode: Études’ is dispatched with a hyper-virtuosity but also a rare grandeur. The DSCH motif is ever present, of course, but never becomes overbearing or merely repetitive. To the Triple Fugue, which is overly softly contoured in Willshire’s reading and too coolly efficient in McLachlan’s hands, Levit brings a plasticity and an inexorability ameliorated by a humanity that is very potent.

Pars tertia takes us back to Bach and the ‘Subject II: BACH’ is alluringly coloured, while the following ‘Subject III: Dies irae’ seems to be hewn from solid rock, Levit alive to its terrifying vision. The final section, based on a French ouverture-type dotted rhythm around the DSCH motif, is again given due weight and as we reach the Passacaglia’s final moments there is a fitting sense of having experienced an epic journey with the most imaginative of guides.

The Bachian element in Stevenson’s homage to Shostakovich is also at the root of the Russian’s great cycle of Preludes and Fugues, premiered by Tatiana Nikolayeva in 1952. And, much as I admire her reading of this set, Levit is more than a match for her. Space precludes a detailed analysis but let me offer a few observations. His sense of characterisation in each piece (often determined by key) is unerring: there’s a freshness to the opening C major Prelude, while to the Fugue he brings a quiet absorption, the textures always perfectly balanced. But he’s equally alive to Shostakovich in more acerbic mood, whether in the nervous march of the Eighth Prelude in F sharp minor (where Nikolayeva is also persuasive) and its anxiety-laden Fugue, rendered monumental in Levit’s spacious reading, or the sardonic D flat major Prelude (No 15) and its Fugue, a tour de force of complexity; Donohoe doesn’t manage the same impact, even though he’s not exactly sluggish, tempo-wise. Shostakovich the symphonist is there too, in the B minor Prelude of No 6, its dotted rhythms conveying a sense of immutable strength and leading without resolution into a growly, obsessive fugue. Here he treads a middle ground between Nikolayeva, whom I find a touch too deliberate, and Donohoe, who makes less of its power. To the Bach-inspired numbers Levit brings a characterful immediacy, whether in the bustling E major two-voice Fugue of No 9, for instance, or the Prelude of No 10, which quotes directly from the ‘48’. And the 14th Prelude in E flat minor has never sounded quite as starkly anguished as it does here, with a folk-like melody against a tremolo backdrop.

From The Classic Review:

Having to fill the shoes of Tatiana Nikolayeva, to whom Shostakovich dedicated the Preludes and Fugues (and who recorded them three times over in 1962, 1987, 1990), is a tall order. Levit surely does not disappoint: for those in search of a contemplative and highly-nuanced version, this is it. There are a myriad of influences present – Bach, of course, but also Russian folk melodies, Orthodox liturgy, and nods to the composer’s other pieces. While showcasing the variety, what Levit manages to do simultaneously is treat the set as a unified entity. He imbues it with what I might best describe as ‘overarching dignity.’ Gradients, ranging from restrained elegance to stately austerity, are captured in a thoughtful and thought-provoking manner.

The unassuming C major Prelude (Volume 1, track 1) derives a hypnotic feel through the sway of its dotted rhythms. Yet, the work is not mired in predictability: Levit shows us the rich colors of the innovative harmonic language through well-blended voicing. The long lines of the fugue complement the prelude, which is based more upon chordal textures: here, his remarkably even tone is a fine counterpart to a mellow canvas absent of sharps and flats. The perpetuum mobile A minor Prelude (Volume 1, track 3) sets up an interesting comparison to a rendition by the composer himself. While Levit’s might not have the same electrifying ferocity, his clarity and detail certainly make up for it.

The G# minor (Volume 1, tracks 23 & 24) cannot go without mention. The Prelude has a powerful orchestral opening that melts away into a lovely middle, and eventually, a meditative conclusion. What drives these changes is not only the melodies, however – the left hand ostinato is what fuels the passacaglia, and Levit’s has an array of temperaments from declamatory to shadowy. The impressive Fugue is a vibrant contrast with its assertive persona, heard in the marcato textures and crystalline dissonances. That said, the sound quality never comes off as harsh on the ears, and the final moments (including the major ending), lend a quiet profundity and balance to the work.