This #100hardtruths was shared with me by my friend and mentor, Laura Wexler, the esteemed feminist scholar of photography and Principal Investigator of the NEH-supported Photogrammar Project:
“Fake news has it that we must sacrifice the NEA and the NEH for better stewardship of our national wealth and interests. It is claimed that these agencies are wasteful and unnecessary. But in fact, they are among the most important investments our society can make. By their means, we increase our chances to understand who we are, and thus to envision how we might better proceed. Their conceptual roots are in the alphabet agencies of the Great Depression when a staggering economic crisis called for a political shift in the way that the United States cared for its population, in some ways not unlike the present moment.
A few hours after his inauguration, Franklin Roosevelt swore in his entire cabinet en masse, so as to hit the ground running. In the next 105 days, in the depths of the emergency, in un-ending special session, Congress created and passed the Emergency Banking Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, the Truth-in-Securities Act, the Glass-Steagall Act and the National Industrial Recovery Act. The new president was able to persuade millions that they had “nothing to fear, but fear itself.” In all, there were 15 major bills. It was a vigorous and astonishing three and a half months.
The contrast with the current 100-day count-down could not be more stark. From the shocking disarray of presidential appointments to the ugly attempt of Congress to take healthcare away from millions of Americans, to the amplification of racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and xenophobia, to the spate of executive orders designed precisely to undo whatever could be undone of what remains of the New Deal’s legislation and spirit, Trump’s first 100 days are the Bizarro version of the earlier period.
Today, at day #91 of the Trump administration, we have plenty to fear, including fear itself which is shaking millions awake at 4:00 am. Among the weighty judgements our new president must make is how to apportion federal funding. Hanging in the balance is funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment of the Humanities and the National Endowment of the Arts, among others. These programs, many of which were proudly created in the 1960s in an echo of the Federal Arts and Writers’ projects of the 1930s, are on the chopping block of Trump’s proposed budget. Defenders have rushed to explain that redirecting their relatively meager funding will do very little to relieve the national debt, while they pay for themselves many times over through the amplification they provide for public history and public art. So, for instance, Graham Bowley wrote in The New York Times on March 16, 2017:
The two-endowment agencies each receive about $148 million a year now. The budget for public broadcasting, currently $445 million, has been more consistent over the years. Together they still account for only $741 million, or much less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the United States’ annual federal spending, an amount supporters say is too small to make a difference.
Mengqi Sun wrote in the Christian Science Monitor on March 17, 2017:
Though the budgets of the four agencies are negligible in the larger scheme of federal government spending – $148 million each for NEA and NEH, $445 million of CPB, and $230 million for IMLS – the federal dollars are often used to leverage state, local, and private funding.”
And Michael Cooper and Sopan Deb wrote in the New York Times on March 17, 2017:
Proponents of preserving endowment grants are increasingly speaking of them in terms that many Republicans can love – as investments that spur job creation; as public-private partnerships that award grants that are matched by private donations; and as programs that help returning veterans or people who live in rural communities.
But these defenses, though factual and earnest, and maybe even necessary, are themselves a species of “fake news.” To our adversaries, no matter how small we make ourselves, it will never be small enough. However little we claim to cost, we will still be too expensive, and however much we claim to multiply value, we will be worth too little. The premise is fake. We are aligning ourselves with the disrespect of our adversaries while attempting to gain their regard. We are fighting with one hand tied behind our backs while being shoved into a corner. It is hurtful to see.
The real news makes a much larger claim: that the Federal government benefits from the CPB, the IMLS and the NEA and the NEH not because they save money but because they support another economy: that of the nation itself. This larger expenditure is in the currency of self-recognition. For calculations about the NEA and the NEH, neither the “E” (money) nor the “A” and the “H” (arts and humanities) are as important as the “N” (national). The reason to fight for the NEH and the NEA is not because we need them in order to have arts and humanities, which we will have in any case, but because we need them to know how to imagine ourselves as a nation. As in Betsy deVos’s hands the voucher system systematically aims to destroy the public schools, in Trump’s hands the destruction of the NEH and the NEA aims to voucherize the public itself. But the public cannot be supported by special interests and wealthy individuals because those are specific and exceptional rather than representative actors.
During the Great Depression, under the direction of a brilliant young economist named Roy Stryker, Roosevelt’s Farm Security Administration sent more than a score of American’s most accomplished documentary photographers out into the field to take photographs that would show Americans to one another as “deserving” of government aid. This was done, if you will, under the sign of “fake news,” that is to say, the economic argument that New Deal programs of social support were saving far more than they cost. In point of fact, the enemies of the administration did not allow most of the programs to reach their full potential. No matter what the factual ratio of cost to benefit, state supported welfare was seen as creeping socialism and as something to be beaten back.
But the real news is what happened anyway. Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Gordon Parks, Margaret Bourke-White, John Vachon, John Delano, Arthur Rothstein, Esther Bubbly, Marion Post Walcott, and many others took the opportunity to work extravagantly beyond bounds to make a collective portrait of the spirit of the American people that is unsurpassed, one of our greatest national treasures.
I am Principal Investigator of the NEH-supported Photogrammar Project, codirected by Lauren Tilton and Taylor B. Arnold. Photogrammar has made an interactive, geospatial map of the more than 170,000 photographs produced between 1935-1945 by the Farm Security Administration and its successor, the Office of War Information. Because Photogrammar makes this enormous archive of images so easily searchable, it is possible to see at scale the extraordinary extra expenditure these artists laid out in the work that they did, work that had no need to be as fine as they made it. Most of the images were circulated in newsprint-quality reproductions or in government reports. Much less effort would have sufficed. And yet, the government got more.
Ella Watson, by Gordon Parks. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-DIG-fsa-8b14845]
See More:
- “Museums Chart a Response to Political Upheaval,” Graham Bowley
- “What America without the NEA and NEH would look like, and why that matters,” Mengqi Sun
- Republicans Start Lining Up to Fight for the N.E.A. and N.E.H., Michael Cooper and Sopan Deb
- Photogrammar Project
Fake news directs our attention to something else we know to be true that remains often harder to see: the internet’s hidden corporate architecture and governmental backbone. The foundational lies of today’s internet—that it is a public good rather than a monetized commodity; that it promotes or is even interested in freedom of expression and civil discourse; that our actions here are activism rather than consumerism—are papered over by facetious platitudes.
A screenshot from the Russian Foreign Ministry’s website, from the New York Times, 2-23-17.
The fake news is not new, and it should not come as a surprise. In reality, the internet is primarily a place of censorship, capitalism, surveillance, distraction, and entertainment: the perfect incubator for fake news and all that might result from it.
See More 100hardtruths-#fakenews:
- “With a Big Red Stamp, Russia is Singling Out What It Calls ‘Fake’ News,” Neil MacFarquhar
- The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, Evgeny Morozov, 2012
#40, challenge the narrative of (African) American progress
March 11, 2017
“In the Library of Black Lies, Edgar Arceneaux challenges the narrative of American progress, and in particular, African American progress through the selection, placement, and modification of books in a library of his own invention. Via this timely work, made last year, when fake news became ‘real’ news and the content of real news was interrogated, the artist presses for a closer look not only at what is patently true or false, but at the more complicated stories about our past that lead us to where we are now.” In conversation with Mark Marino, “he will also discuss the installation in relation to racial formation (the matter of black lives) and to the libraries of print (lies inked in black).”
See More:
- Black Lives Matter | Freedom & Justice for all Black Lives
- Center for American Progress
- 40 Years: The State of Black America
Twenty years ago, on March 13, 1997, Frank Rich penned an op-ed, “Lesbian Lookout,” in support of the NEA, which was under threat. The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996), which I produced and acted in, and Yvonne Rainer’s MURDER and murder, were that year’s perennial NEA whipping boys.
When it comes to a fixation on lesbian sex, even Howard Stern is a poor second to Pete Hoekstra, a Representative from Michigan. Mr. Hoekstra seems to have a curious obsession with sampling alleged lesbian porn financed by the National Endowment for the Arts. In a January letter to the N.E.A.’s chairman, Jane Alexander, he describes how he executed his solemn duty to watch a movie called The Watermelon Woman after ‘reading a review . . . which stated that [it] had “the hottest dyke sex scene ever recorded on celluloid.”‘ (What paper is the Congressman reading?)
Martha Page (me) and Fae Richards (Lisa Marie Bronson) in a photo from the Fae Richards Archive, Zoe Leonard
The Watermelon Woman has recently enjoyed a twentieth year remaster of our deteriorating print, and a twentieth anniversary re-release, commencing at last year’s Berlinale, moving on to MoMA, enjoying a week’s theatrical run at NY’s Metrograph, and now available for purchase. Supported by $31,500 in 1995 by the NEA, the last year the Endowment supported individual filmmakers, it has gone on to be a valued enough piece of American filmmaking that our remaster was supported by film culture stalwarts like the UCLA Film & TV Archive, Outfest, and the Toronto International Film Festival. It has remained valued for many things, including its art-world famous “Fae Richards Archive” of 82 images by Zoe Leonard re-enacting the life and contemporaries of our fake star, otherwise known as “the Watermelon Woman”; for its contributions to the sub-genre fake documentaries, of which I am also a scholar; for its place in history as the first African American lesbian feature film; and for its intelligent, disarming, honest depictions of the relations between owning and controlling imaging technologies and history, memory, and truth (also the focus of all of the #100hardtruths I pen).
Installation at Black/Feminist/Lesbian/Queer/Trans* Cultural Production, curated by Melonie Green, Melorra Green and Dorothy Santos
It is true that some recent re-reviews have noted the political artfulness of the depiction of lesbian sex in the film, but everyone knows that salacious sex is not really the film’s primary preoccupation (Dunye’s more heady interests in identity, self-reflexivity, film history, experimental form, and the political power of archives have contributed to its ongoing attention by scholars, as was demonstrated in the recent academic conference that was part of its anniversary). We understood the #hardtruth that bigots used its lesbian sex scene as a smoke screen for their much more prurient commitments to censorship, racism, sexism, and homophobia.
There are many haunting truths to be told about our experiences twenty years ago associated to past efforts to defund the NEA. As is true for many real statements about fake things, I hope our place within a previous generation’s successful defense may be useful for those working today to hold off this administration’s sorry attempts. Some of what actually happened now plays as phony as the claims trotted out against us, but as many of the facts of our place within the history of the annals of the NEA reflect tactics, and players, that stay true to this day: speak truth to power; fight for the right for the least-seen to speak truth to power.
- For the most part, white men were our strongest champions as the Congress used our little picture for bigger aims. Frank Rich wrote on our behalf, and Alex Baldwin spoke for us on the steps of Capitol Hill. Having made a film about black women and lesbians’ lack of access to capital, media, and power, it still came as a shock that Cheryl never got to speak on her own behalf.
”We’re in the ‘no bullwhips, please’ phase of Federal funding for the arts,” Mr. Baldwin said after his two-day excursion here. ”I would love all art to be funded, for the Federal Government to spend $1 billion on the arts, and for the N.E.A. to be restored to what it was. ‘But the political facts of life are that funding anything that this Congress considers obscene will enable Dick Armey and the Republican leadership to dynamite the entire N.E.A.” (“Lobbyists Fight Cuts on Arts Day in Capital,” 1997)
- But in the end, a congressional bill to defund the NEA by $31,500—staged as political theater to shame our film, and other attempts of American self-expression—was voted down on the floor of congress due to the simple and true words of one of our strongest champions, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, from Texas. “Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat from Texas, took up Dunye’s cause in the Congressional debate, informing House members that ‘I’ve seen the film, and I think Cheryl Dunye is doing a wonderful job. Can we just say we have a difference of opinion?'” (“Can ‘Community Standards’ Apply to ‘Watermelon Woman,‘” 1997).
See More:
- The National Endowment for the Arts
- #148milliondollars, Paul Weston
- “Five Best Art World Protests Against Trump,” Ilana Novick
- www.neafunded.us, Tega Brain
- F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner
- #100hardtruths-#fakenews: a primer on digital media literacy
#35, science is real
March 8, 2017
See More:
- junkscience.com
- InsideClimate News
- 350.org
- March for Science, Earth Day, April 22, 2017
- #100hardtruths-#fakenews: a primer on digital media literacy
#34: place matters; re/flecting the border
March 7, 2017
ERRE and Margarita Garcia Asperas, Re/flecting the Border, 2017
“Last Sunday, just a few meters from Ana Teresa Fernández’s intervention [Erasing the Border (Borrando la Frontera)], Marcos Ramírez, better known as ERRE, staged a performative work titled Re/flecting the Border. A collaboration with fellow artist Margarita Garcia Asperas, the piece involved placing a tall mirror against the border, with a 16-by-4-foot table jutting out from it along the Mexican side. A communal dinner was held there, its reflection in the mirror creating the appearance of a cross-border meal. ‘With the reflection, you have a 32-by-4-foot-long table with people on both sides, but it’s just an illusion,’ ERRE says. ‘It’s like a mirage.'” (“For Artists, the U.S.-Mexico Border is Fertile Territory,” Matt Stromberg)
The #100hartruths about fake news aren’t easy. They are complex, complicated, contradictory. Like this one. For many of the past 34 posts, I’ve been celebrating the material as a check to #fakenews. I make strong claims like “Place Matters.” Yet in this post, in the same breath, I honor artistic illusions, photo-mirages. Today, it is the press of the imagination alongside the image, the aesthetic amidst the indexical, the affective within the factual that render the even harder truths that are allowing me to see.
See More:
- Erasing the Border (Borrando la Frontera)
- Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border, eds., Fiamma Montezemolo and Josh Kun
- #100hardtruths-#fakenews: a primer on digital media literacy
#33: speed matters; there is safety in the slow
March 6, 2017
Today’s internet seeks, supports, and succeeds via virality. The pursuit of virality for media content on the web is understood as a truism and a good, as self-evidently powerful, as the natural pursuit of the habitat.
“Viral marketing depends on a high pass-along rate from person to person. If a large percentage of recipients forward something to a large number of friends, the overall growth snowballs very quickly. If the pass-along numbers get too low, the overall growth quickly fizzles.” marketingterms.com
Of course, virality is also a pre-condition for fake news. When ideas move fast—in their production, reception, or pass-along—we give up the time necessary for research, verification, contemplation, and action.
Given the internet’s fundamentally unhealthy imbrication of views, brand, market and celebrity, we must demand and produce sustaining environments that counter acceleration.
See more:
- The Slow Writing Manifesto, Mark Sample
- Slow Food International
- The Art(s) of Slow Cinema, Nadine Mai
- Learning from YouTube, Alexandra Juhasz. In my many years of thinking about and spending time in YouTube, I found myself immersed in the same contradiction of the fast/slow rendered here: i.e. I demand the slow in a fast form of and format for writing (in the video-book I call this “a plea for long-form in short-form”). In the example from the book that I link to here, “Hildebrand on Joanie 4 Jackie (March 31, 2009),” I discuss the early VHS video-sharing project (by mail) of Miranda July, Joanie 4 Jackie (itself just recently moved to the internet, but with great depth and context, thanks to the work of Astria Suparak and others, allowing it to be one of those rare internet places that I’ve been referring to in this project that uses the space to construct depth through material). I wrote in 2009, when things were much less fast then they are today: “While at first look these VHS chain letters seem to be a dead or dying form ‘given the ease, access, and cost of sharing video on the Internet,’ I realized that what they will always have over YouTube is the actual, small community that can only be created by the painstaking and careful act of choosing to attach your work to an object that already has a community built onto and within it. The VHS chain letter permits the safety of the slow through the space of the movable box.”
- Joanie 4 Jackie, Miranda July
- #100hardtruths-#fakenews: a primer on digital media literacy
#32, take responsibility for our own acts of looking
March 5, 2017
Last summer, in “How Do I (Not) Look, Live Feed Video and Viral Black Death,” I wrote:
We come to this cultural, political and media onslaught as individuals but, it is my contention that each of us must take responsibility for our own acts of looking. When we look (or write) we engage in the regimes of visibility—complex networks of power, ownership, and access that frame our viewing and knowing—that surround and inform violence. Accounting for our place, our needs, our actions in the face of viral videos of murder is one within a constellation of necessary ethical and political acts … when we have the choice to look, we are bound ethically and politically to what we witness and what we do with all we have seen.
What would be an ethical look at Fatima Avelica‘s cell phone video record of her father’s tragic arrest by ICE? Given the ubiquity of such images, their sheer unavoidability, is there more to be done then seeing, feeling, and then sharing? I choose two possibilities from my earlier response as a place to start and conclude with a third written today:
1) look askance: “also look carefully elsewhere—away from documents of the act of violence itself—to do the harder work of seeing the ‘causality, responsibility, and impact’ that often (or must) go unseen, even as (or so that) violence is made increasingly visible.”
2) look at death’s platforms: “Ethical viewing considers not just our own looking at viral videos but at the broader political-economic and technological structures that produce, hold, and frame the videos that we see and share.”
3) look, feel and then do: Avelica’s video uses sound to effectively produce melodrama. Her anguished sobs render an emotional truth and impact on what would otherwise be a too-common, easily-expendable largely-unshared image of the definitive, daily, and increasing violence enacted against primarily brown and black people by the police, ICE, and other agents of our state. But the honest emotional charge written into the DIY composition of Avelica’s video has guaranteed its momentary virality, its massive seeability, and seen it will be: albeit quickly, interchangably, and surrounded by other things. How could its fleeting (over)visibility be used to motivate more?
Before we look, I would ask you to consider: what would honoring my three ethical looks look like? I might suggest that my previous 31 #100hardtruths, rendered here on the internet as a complex and building series of montages of images, analyses and links to resources—posts that take me real time and effort to write and share—represent one manifestation of this harder work.
Or, I could build a ramp to the viral video, that moves from causality:
to responsibility:
to impact: Paying the Price: The Impact of Immigration Raids on American Children (The National Council of La Raza, 2007).
Alternatively, attending to my second suggestions for possible ethical looks, I could build a ramp to the viral video that moves from the broader political-economic and technological structures that produce
“Today, millions of consumers love and live by their iPhones, but what are the implications of its special technology on society, media, and culture?”
Why advertisers are all talking about Facebook Video, Fortune
and frame the videos we see and share.
Or I could ramp to the video with possible actions
or agents that can help
to address and build upon the powerful but usually fleeting emotional appeal of what we see and share.
My Brooklyn College colleague, Lindley Hanlon, after attending another anti-Trump immigration policy demo.
I hope it’s clear what I’ve tried to rather awkwardly demonstrate, limited as I am by the vertical design features of this (and any) blog. Giving time to build structures that hold viral images, and taking time to frame our viewing of them, are possible ethical projects of looking in a time where the speed and volume of image production and consumption equates rather tragically to the speed of image forgetting and a linked sense that there might be nothing to do in the face of the very real violent tragedies that such images record.
I am convinced that we can do more:
- National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
- Mixteca
- Moving Data: The iPhone and the Future of the Media, Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau, eds.
- #100hardtruths-#fakenews: a primer on digital media literacy
#31: look deeper into the migrant experience
March 4, 2017
According to a press release from The New School/Parsons, their show State of Exception/Estado de Excepción “presents traces of the human experience—objects left behind in the desert by undocumented migrants on their journey into the U.S. and other forms of data, all collected as part of the research of University of Michigan anthropologist Jason De León’s Undocumented Migration project. De León’ sees the materials as fragments of a history, revealing death, trauma, and suffering on both sides of the border while bringing to light complexities of the migrant experience.”
“Debris Field Left by Migrants on the U.S. Side of the Border” (2012), by Richard Barnes.
“Now, more than ever, in the aftermath of a presidential campaign that fed off anti-immigrant and xenophobic rhetoric, it is absolutely critical to look deeper into the migrant experience and raise questions as to what the future may hold for the thousands of people fleeing dire poverty, drug cartel violence, and political instability to the south.”
“John Doe, Artifact #6” (2016), by Richard Barnes. These are personal effects found on the bodies of migrants who had died in the Sonoran desert on the United States side of the border.
Photographs and other forms of evidence that flow effortlessly and in abundance across the internet as the truths that build fake news and its very real violent manifestations, demand material depth for greater substantiation, authentication, and complexity. Material depth that contributes to seeing through, past or with greater depth at fake news can take many forms:
- access to material objects that ground the fleeting
- encounters with rudderless objects that occur within what I have called “good image holding environments” that produce context by building history, analysis, and frames and are also themselves contexts as places with unique and situated histories, communities, and values (I want to be clear, this can include spaces on the internet, albeit those made and inhabited with great care and commitment)
- access to humans who have lived, witnessed, or embody the experience being evidenced
- and finally and perhaps counter-intuitively, a poetic approach that offers truths only available through the imagination, the aesthetic, the intellectual or the affective.
See More:
The winner of HackPrinceton 2016 is FiB: “Let’s stop living a lie.”
FiB says: “In the current media landscape, control over distribution has become almost as important as the actual creation of content, and that has given Facebook a huge amount of power. The impact that Facebook newsfeed has in the formation of opinions in the real world is so huge that it potentially affected the 2016 election decisions, however these newsfeed were not completely accurate. Our solution? FiB because With 1.5 Billion Users, Every Single Tweak in an Algorithm Can Make a Change, and we don’t stop at just one.”
These resources were collected by Lisa Hirschfield who writes: “A number of fake news-flagging browser extensions have been developed to work with Facebook (in addition to the measures Zuckerberg vowed to take). It’s a great idea but of course the elephant in the room is even deeper browser integration with your Facebook feed and reading habits, especially with Chrome/Google … Beyond what they might glean from our browsing habits and Facebook feeds, do these browser extensions also open the door for an organization/institution/someone else’s judgement to insinuate itself into our personal critical apparatus?”
See More Detection Devices:
- This is Fake, brought to you by Slate
- Media Bias Fact Check Icon, Jeffrey Carl Faden
- Official Media Bias/Fact Check Extension
- Media Bias/Fact Check
MEDIA PRAXIS 