Clinton Fein (born 1964) is a South African born artist, writer and activist, closely identified with his controversial web site,Annoy.com and his notable Supreme Court victory against Janet Reno, Attorney General of the United States, challenging the constitutionality of the Communications Decency Act in 1997, where Fein's right to disseminate his art was upheld in a landmark victory for First Amendment rights.
We want to apologize for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives. -- Susan B. Komen Foundation
Political kowtowing and lack of moral courage do nothing to advance women's health.
Nancy G. Brinker, the founder and chief executive of the Susan B. Komen Foundation, acknowledged the decision had been “deeply unsettling for our supporters, partners and friends.”
After a storm of criticism followed the organization's obviously political move to defund Planned Parenthood, they backtracked.
But the damage was done, exposing the leadership for who they really are. With Nacy Brinker at the helm and Karen Handel anywhere close, the stink remains.
And the result of this irreperably damaging move on their brand?
Loss of trust on the left and disppointment on the right.
Hello Apartheid My Old Friend.You've come to talk with me again.
Today South Africa passed the 'Protection of Information Act' that mocks press freedom despite vociferous opposition by protesters donning black in the cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria. This dark day, commonly referred to as 'Black Tuesday,' is a sad, blatant kick ion the face to all those who fought to end Apartheid, spilling blood in the pursuit of freedom.
The Sound of Silence is the secrecy this act protects and the freedom it desecrates.
The ANC today demonstrated once and for all that it is no longer fit to associate itself with Nelson Mandela or anything that he fought for and stands for.
Four pieces from my Tortureseries are included in “Please Lie to Me,“ Montreal art gallery, Art Mûr’s, exhibition opening next week to celebrate the gallery’s 15th anniversary.
“Please Lie to Me,” (PDF invitation) features an exciting mix of globally diverse artists, including the Gao brothers, a duo of extraordinarily talented, highly controversial Chinese artists, with whom I had the pleasure of spending an evening trading censorship stories in Beijing in 2007 while I was exhibiting Torture with New York's Michael Petronko Gallery.
Torture is a series of staged and digitally manipulated photographic images that recreate the infamous torture scenes from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, transforming the diffuse, muted and low-resolution images into large-scale, vivid, powerful and frightening reproductions. I focused on the choreography and sexualization of torture, which included images of prisoners stripped naked, wearing hoods or sandbags as they're forced to stand in excruciatingly uncomfortable positions, simulate sexually degrading acts, are plastered with feces and subject to egregious humiliation.
In spite of the horror, the images, stylized with fashion-photography lighting, radiate a profound beauty and eroticism that is all at once seductive, disturbing and unsettling.
The series, unfortunately, is as relevant today as it was during the Bush administration that inspired, enabled, condoned and justified the torture perpetrated in America’s name. President Barack Obama has refused to deal with this issue seriously and hold those responsible accountable. That the orders came from the top are no longer theories, but chapters from the books of Dick Cheney and other players who not only admit to their illegal. globally condemned, human-rights-violating, trickle-down torture policies, but vow they would do it again. This blight on America’s moral standing remains, and will continue to. Dirty, ugly and embarrassing.
Euphemisms like “enhanced interrogation techniques” for torture and “looking forward” as an excuse for a failure to prosecute war crimes doom us to repeat the same mistakes down the road. And render any attempts to promote democracy around the world nothing more than a waste of time, effort and money. Until Dick Cheney and his cohorts are at down in handcuffs before a court, whether in Nuremberg, Johannesburg or Baghdad, America’s ten year adventure in Iraq will prove the costliest and deadliest public relations disaster in American history.
The coverage of the Torture series was quite expansive, and included interviews and explanations as to what inspired the show and what was learned as a result. I have included a few for those who haven’t seen it or been exposed to it.
Art Mûr is located at 5826 rue St-Hubert , Montréal, Québec, and the show runs from November 5 – December 12, 2011.
Additional artists include Lois Andison, Simon Bilodeau, Dominique Blain, Susan Bozic, Renato Garza Cervera, Cooke-Sassville, Clinton Fein, Sarah Garzoni, Karine Giboulo, Dina Goldstein, Nicolas Grenier, Jonathan Hobin, Guillaume Lachapelle, Cal Lane, Nadia Myre, Jennifer Small, The Gao Brothers, Diana Thorneycroft, Barbara Todd, and Colleen Wolstenholme.
Fein's counterfeits are not intended to reprise tired debates about originality and authorship. Unlike Sherrie Levine, who rephotographed Walker Evans's Depression-era images, or Thomas Ruff, whose enlargements of Internet images preserve and accentuate the flaws of screen grabs, Fein seized upon despicable amateur images, which unexpectedly had acquired public notoriety and probative value, and re-presented them in enhanced, painterly terms. His invocation of old-master painting, far from summoning up Christian martyrdom as do the Abu Ghraib canvases of Fernando Botero, delivers us to the dark threshold of inhumanity conjured by Goya.
The recent show, titled "Torture," consisted of staged and manipulated photographic images. Fein felt that the low resolution of the pictures taken by the GIs participating in the Abu Ghraib abuses - the images that later appeared in the press - had the effect of muting and veiling the actual horror of the scenes depicted. Only sharp, high-resolution images, he concluded, could convey the full impact of the humiliating atrocities and show what the corrupt leaders of a supposedly civilized nation routinely endorsed.
Like Loan's execution and America's lynchings, the acts recorded in the original Abu Ghraib images look like performances for the camera's eye, as though the greatest shame of all was to have the moment documented for an audience, for posterity. And by including himself within the exhibition, Fein engages head-on this question of the photographer's presence at scenes of violence. Perhaps the artist is as sinister a figure as the original prison guard. Perhaps Fein enjoyed making violence as beautiful as this, and now asks us to enjoy it-asks us to take as much pleasure in these scenes as the original prison guards, with their grins and gestures. Perhaps Fein's camera, which demanded of his models full nudity and physical exhaustion, is as aggressive as the prison guard's club.
Several contemporary artists have tried to evoke the grotesqueries of war...But no one else has reached the peculiar extremes to which Fein goes. Using hired models, he re-enacted and photographed scenes of cruelty that were recorded in the notorious unofficial photographs of "detainee abuse" at Abu Ghraib.
Fein presents these images as giant panel-mounted chromogenic prints. To viewers who remember the Abu Ghraib images, Fein's pieces will look both grimly familiar and oddly aestheticized. Two are his inventions.
Encountering them in an art gallery provokes tangled responses: outrage that someone would advance his own ambitions through the degradations the Abu Ghraib photos record; perverse temptation by the opportunity to study the mise-en-scene of the original pictures, safe in the knowledge of seeing simulations; despair that history has again diverted the resources of art away from pleasure and contemplation to bleak and urgent critical functions; and, finally, the recognition that, after all the barriers between art and life come down, nothing insulates our enjoyment of the arts against toxic pollution from our knowledge of real events.
The constant comparison of Occupy Wall Street protesters and the Tea Party crowd (before they were coopted by Dick Armey, Sarah Palin, Batty Bachman and the Republican establishment) has been marvelously simplified by one James Sinclair.
His diagram makes one thing very clear. The biggest obstacles in the pursuit of consensus are labels.
From its inception, as part of a First Amendment lawsuit challenging the Communications Decency Act, our role was to ensure that both language and imagery, crude in style and execution in its early days, was intentionally as indecent and annoying as possible.
The targets of Annoy.com’s wrath – politicians and the media – were excoriated with unreserved venom and vitriol, with the foulest language imaginable and frequently graphics to support it. And top of that list, from day one, was Rupert Murdoch and his media properties.
The biggest irony of all, was that our small company had waged a First Amendment battle, the resolution of which would protect the likes of News Corporation. No one could argue that online transmission of content of the New York Post, The Sun, News of the World and later Fox News, would meet the vague definitions of both indecent and annoying.
Almost every month, our disgust for Murdoch and the extent to which he was singlehandedly and irreparably degrading journalism was published on Annoy.com.
All this time we’ve been railing against Murdoch, it felt like we were swimming upstream alone. Long before Keith Olbermann began his vendetta against Fox News and later Murdoch. But the Internet has a memory, and despite the vulgarity of some of the expression, here is a compilation of what Annoy.com published. Vindication has taken a long time, but it looks like finally it may just have arrived.
Is Israel really the only genuine democracy in the Middle East, as it is so often portrayed? Not if the Knesset has anything to do with it.
In a stunning move, Israel’s Knesset voted 47-38 to pass a bill that will make it illegal to support an anti-Israel boycott.
According to Britain’s Telegraph, “Under the terms of the bill it will be a civil offence to back an anti-Israel boycott, be it consumer, academic or cultural; and initiators of a boycott will be subject to litigation. The law also prevents the government doing business with any company that initiates or complies with boycotts.”
What exactly does “back” a boycott mean? Can you criticize it? If there’s a boycott on a performer, do you have to actually go see the performer to prove you aren’t boycotting?
I’ve been harshly critical of Israel’s policies, not Israel, nor her people, nor her right to exist. Ever. And I’ve felt that Israel was strong enough, and vital enough and committed enough, and democratic enough to handle it, so my expectations have been high.
Under this policy, given my art and writing, visiting Israel would constitute a risk for me, although I have yet to determine what the actual punishment would be, or who could sue me for what dmages once the litigation began.
A spokesperson for EU’s foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton stated: “The EU recognizes Israel's sovereignty in the legislative process. Furthermore, the EU does not advocate boycotts. However, as part of such fundamental values as free expression and speech that the EU cherishes and shares with Israel, we are concerned about the effect that this legislation may have on the freedom of Israeli citizens and organizations to express non-violent political opinions."
I can only hope the Israel’s courts have better sense than their politicians, and this ridiculous, anti-democratic law is struck down by Israel's High Court of Justice immediately.
I'm incredibly honored. In this Authors@Google Presents talk, Bill spends a considerable amount of time discussing landmark First Amendment cases that set the stage for any Internet law to follow. Renv.ACLU, in which I filed an Amicus brief, and ApolloMedia v. Reno in which I was the plaintiff. He also dicusses Wikileaks and Julian Assange.
In addition, he discusses other important cases and their implications, including Yetta Stromberg (the first time in American history that the court struck down a law on First Amendment grounds) to Ku Klux Klan leader, Clarence Brandenburg, Earl Caldwell (the journalist who covered the Black Panthers and refused to hand over his notebooks and recordings to the FBI at the behest of J. Edgar Hoover), Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Larry Flint (editor of Hustler magazine).
Bill’s book provides an incredible history of the First Amendment – how “fighting words” or “shouting fire in a crowded theater” and other familiar First Amendment principles came to be. I will definitely be discussing more of Bill’s book, chapter by chapter, in posts to follow.
Introduction" 1 Yetta Stromberg 2 Jehovahs Witnesses 3 Dannie Martin 4 Raymond Procunier and Robert H Schnacke 5 Earl Caldwell 6 Richard Hongisto 7 Clarence Brandenburg 8 Larry Flynt 9 Clinton Fein and the ACLU Afterword
Because I'm known as a First Amendment purist and activist, I've received a number of messages and questions regarding Tracy Morgan and the First Amendment. I think it's worth expressing the following.
First and foremost, only a government can censor speech. Organizations such as NBC also enjoy a First Amendment right to express themselves, and as a private corporation can legally choose to deny someone a voice on their media properties if they so choose. And while we refer to it as corporate censorship, it is not really censorship at all in the context of the First Amendment.
Tracy Morgan is protected by the First Amendment. And while some may argue that his diatribe crossed the line into inciting violence, such a shouting fire in a crowded theater, it would not meet the strict standards that are applied that guarantee us our First Amendment protections.
That said, the First Amendment right to freely express oneself does not mean that speech is without consequence. Eminem can sing homophobic and misogynist lyrics, and the targets of his expression can just as loudly and freely berate him, mock him, pity him and boycott him.
Anti-gay organizations can spew their vile hatred under the guise of morality or religion, but it doesn't mean they won't be ripped a new one for it.
Tracy Morgan has the right to say whatever he wants about how he feels about gay people. That does not mean he has the right to be employed by NBC or Tina Fey if he crosses a line that either displeases them or reflects badly on them.
Rush Limbaugh can make as many racist, vile and ugly statements as he likes. It doesn't mean he is protected from it being attributed to a pathalogical, racist, vile, bloated Oycontin addict.
Ann Coulter can say that if she had a gay child she would tell the child he or she was adopted. And we can say that if Ann Coulter told a child she was a mother, the child could, and most likely would, say he or she was adopted.
As public figures shoot their mouths (and themselves in the foot), and laws that tackle hate speech are being crafted in congress, we need to be careful to make sure that context, mood and occasion are incorporated into how expression is assessed and managed as opposed to blanket condemnations of words.
Nigger, faggot and other epithets have an important historical relevance, and the outright ban of those words would be chilling and dangerous. We can't teach why these words hurt and sting without being able to use and reference them.
While it may be really tempting to silence people like Tracy Morgan, Mel Gibson, or Michael Richards, the best way to counter the lies and the hatred they spread is through countering misinformation. That means more, intelligent, constructive expression that neutralizes -- or better nullifies -- the original speech , not less expression.
Tracy Morgan may yet learn the hard way just why the kind of garbage he spews in unacceptable (not to mention unamusing and ignorant). In terms of fans, job opportunities, and goodwill, to name a few. But he still has a First Amendment right to express himself, as do all Americans.
Just because we have free speech does not mean it is without cost.
Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards West Coast Premiere Friday April 8, 8pm Performance Art Institute, 550 Sutter Street, San Francisco
Seating is limited, please contact reservations@theworkcenter.org to reserve. $20 suggested donation.
In collaboration with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Stanford University, the Performance Art Institute presents I Am America by the Open Program of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards. I Am America brings the poetry of Allen Ginsberg to life in a visceral performance with language culled from his entire body of work, intermixed with calls, shouts and traditional songs from the American South. Original music developed in intensive collaboration over a period of 3 years complements and builds upon these sources.
As part of a year-long celebration of its 25th year anniversary, The Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards presents the West Coast premieres of two original and groundbreaking performances in San Francisco, Palo Alto and Big Sur. I Am America and Electric Party Songs by the Workcenter's Open Program, will premiere in April, 2011 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Stanford University, the Performance Art Institute, and the Henry Miller Library. These performances are supplemented with a series of workshops, symposia, film screenings, and work demonstrations throughout April.
The Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards was founded in 1986 in Pontedera, Italy by Jerzy Grotowski, well known as one of the most influential theatre practitioners of the 20th century, firstly for The Constant Prince, which changed Western theater forever, and then later in his life for his paradigm-shifting working method dubbed Art as vehicle. Today, the Workcenter continues its research into the very essence of theatre: the moment of meaningful contact between human beings.
The Open Program is an area of research within the Workcenter's larger mission and was commenced in 2007 by 11 actors from Italy, Spain, Poland, France, Argentina, the United States and Canada, led by the Workcenter's Associate Director, Mario Biagini.
Idealism is cute. Really. Eager entrepreneurs pitch their start-ups, caught up in the intoxicating thrill of possibly being the next multi-billion dollar visionary. A “don’t be evil”-like philosophy framing a social application (before marketing strategists condescendingly suggest a brand refresh) that will revolutionize the planet. Like seriously. A Western, Silicon Valley inspired narrative bathes these idealists in the warm glow of technocratic achievement, shimmering self satisfyingly in the reflection of a Zhi Tea-infused sweet tea vodka.
The now indelible associations – Mumbai/Twitter, Egypt/Facebook -- perpetuated by cunning PR flaks and extremely important, Klout-affirmed bloggers on iPad 2s – are overshadowed by the cataclysmic technological failures of Fukushima Daiichi and escalating violence in Libya, Bahrain and Yemen. The press release professed power of Twitter and Facebook and social graphs and mobile apps snuffed out by a dictatorial flick of an electrical switch, our twenty-first century, WikiLeaked, 2.0 reality irremediably shattered with 9.0 tsunamic force by the reliable stench of death, despair, depleted uranium and oblivion.
