Amitis Motevalli

Crude historical depictions of African Americans as ape-like may have disappeared from mainstream U.S. culture, but research presented in a new paper by psychologists at Stanford, Pennsylvania State University and the University of California-Berkeley reveals that many Americans subconsciously associate blacks with apes.

In addition, the findings show that society is more likely to condone violence against black criminal suspects as a result of its broader inability to accept African Americans as fully human, according to the researchers.

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This is a partial list of insurgents and militia members killed in the Iraq War according to a few published news sources. Insurgent deaths, like civilian deaths, are hard to count or estimate. See the examples of undercounting shown in Casualties of the conflict in Iraq since 2003. Also, some claims are difficult to verify. For example; the claim by an Al Qaeda leader that 4000 foreign insurgents have been killed in the war.

Besides serving as an indicator of some of the numbers of insurgent deaths during specific time periods, this article allows readers to investigate the circumstances of those deaths by reading the citation articles. It also allows readers and researchers to investigate patterns in the type of insurgent tactics used, and the patterns in coalition responses.

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Amitis Motevalli

Sherman Austin first gained national attention in 2002 when the FBI ransacked his home and eventually held him in 24 hour lockdown in connection with internet activity. After a maze of interrogations and court proceedings from LA to New York, Sherman served one year in Federal Detention, mostly in Arizona. He completed a three year probation this year, and recently released a new record titled "Silence is Defeat: The Album the FBI Doesn't Want You to Hear." I spoke with Sherman Austin about his music, his resistance, and the initial FBI raid on his home...

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The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency
Mahmood Mamdani

The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The victims too are by and large identified as members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called genocide. Why the difference? Who does the naming? Who is being named? What difference does it make?

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Arabic-language teaching arrives in New York

"MARCH on," wrote the Lebanese-American philosopher and poet Khalil Gibran, "and fear not the thorns, or the sharp stones on life's path." Thus did the pupils, staff and administrators of the institution named after him march through a storm of controversy and into the doors of the Khalil Gibran International Academy this week.

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Amitis Motevalli

Clayton Campbell

To see more of the Abu Ghraib photo reworkings we uploaded earlier, click here.

Clayton Campbell

Clayton Campbell

I have been working with photographs I have taken of the Pergamon Altar for the past four years. The Pergamon Altar is a fabulous invention, a frieze of marble depicting a battle between the gods and the giants. The giants, vanquished by the gods, are shown in ecstatic poses of high suffering, violence, submission and humiliation. The figures are erotic, showing a kind of pathos, which validates their condition as a valid and desirable consequence of good over evil. In fact, the altar really commemorated the victors of a local war, who had killed and enslaved, tortured and desecrated, their opponents and victims.

(rollover images to see re-working)

The link between the Pergamon Altar (basically seen as a treasure of antiquity because of its unworldly carving and ability to depict the human figure) and the photos from Abu Ghraib prison stretch over 2000 years. In war, torture is common. Yet in the United States, there is a suspension of belief in the basic facts of brutality and inhumane behavior associated with warfare. Most Americans, upon seeing the Abu Ghraib photos, registered shock, but not really surprise. After a few months the subject disappeared from the news, and was not mentioned in the 2004 Presidential election.

In thinking about how it is so easy to suppress knowledge of torture and inhumane behavior, making it commonplace or at least digestible during a time of war, I made a number of art works to research this dynamic. With the Pergamon Altar, I re-worked photographs, painted over them with pastel and gouche, and added different elements of collage. They became small ‘jewels’, seen for the received notions of beauty that antiquity projects, and I have sold quite a number of them for these reasons alone. With the Abu Ghraib photos, I intentionally corrupted the digital files so they broke into bands, and then re-worked them further with Photo shop and printed them on a large scale, 4-0 inches by 60 inches. When they were coming off the press, the people in the shop asked me why I was printing pornography, and of course the actual photos can be seen as pornographic. For a culture suffused in images of sexual and physical violence towards men, women and children, pornography is widely accepted and tolerated. So it just a small leap to acceptance of images of violence which degrade us even further. My concern is that images are alive, they live within us whether we like it or not, and the more of these toxic images we receive, what becomes of us? How much will we accept,  and privilege, or at what point do we resist and reject what is the worst of humankind?

(rollover image to see originals)

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A core conceptual proposition that the ‘work’ begins and ends with the ‘idea’ (art and art criticism as a thought process) is fairly well ensconced in the cultural canon. It exists with an air of academic certainty. I expect that every serious artist’s tool- box contain some applications of conceptual practice; interventions, evidences, documentations, actions, appropriations, art and text strategies, an infinity of choice. Whether or not an artist successfully learns how to use these tools depends in part on how they train and educate themselves and who their mentors may be. Conceptual production in 2006 is a decentralized vocation in an international landscape of extraordinary cultural and critical diversity. That is a perfectly fine place to have arrived at, and it means that creative persons are thinking ever more deeply about the world they inhabit, and their relationship to it.

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