I know class is over but there is a boutique in philidelphia called Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility and they sell a Water Benjamin tote bag.
Had to share.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Thursday, December 10, 2009
War
I wanted to address the comments brought up in class after we viewed the documentary on Abu Ghraib. A couple students mentioned that “war changes everything” was not a valid response to the accusations against the soldiers in the documentary. I do not believe that their actions are excusable nor will I argue that their charges should be dropped in this post. I would, however, like to point out how different war is from ordinary life. Having a number of people in my family serving in the armed forces, I have come to understand how difficult the lives of soldiers are. My cousin, in particular, served at a FOB (Forward Operating Base) in the heart of Baghdad. The base was about the size of two football fields side by side. If anyone left the FOB, they ran the risk of getting shot at or blown up. He was stationed in a hostile country for twelve months. When he was on patrol duty in the streets, he worked shifts that lasted anywhere between twelve and fifteen hours. Most of the time he was only left with sticks of beef jerky to satisfy his hunger. After my cousin spent his first tour on the base, he had to serve a second tour in a location out of the city. His situation didn’t improve much. He was given the responsibility of guarding convoys in and out of Baghdad. One of the toughest challenges he faced was avoiding the IEDs (Improvised Explosive Device) used to limit the military’s mobility. Unfortunately, he rode in a vehicle at the front of the pack. A disadvantage of being in this position was running over these explosives, which was a frequent occurrence. In six months he escorted over ninety convoys and came back with visions of other soldiers getting their legs blown off by these devices or having their bodies completely shredded. These images, along with the possibility that you could get blown up at any minute, eventually takes its toll on the mind. It creates pressure and a tremendous amount of stress. The soldiers in the video were in similar conditions. One of the soldiers mentioned a mortar coming through the roof and landing at his feet. Technically, this soldier should now be either in a wheel chair or in the ground. I imagine that he didn’t take the situation very lightly. Not only did the soldiers have people shooting at them from outside, they also had to deal with attacks from within the base. Although they seemed to have the situation under control, there was an instance when one of the prisoners came into possession of a firearm and shot one of the patrolling soldiers. The soldiers stationed at Abu Ghraib were forced to work and live in an extremely unsafe environment. Like my cousin, they were surrounded with life threatening situations and horrific images of their fellow soldiers getting maimed and killed. It is likely that these living conditions would have a severe effect on their minds. In addition, a number of the people who were criticized for their behavior were serving as MP (Military Police). Generally, soldiers classified as MP were trained to direct traffic and handle domestic disputes. These soldiers were young, inexperienced, and not trained to carry out the job they were assigned at the prison. The military originally argued that they were “rogue” soldiers and that they were acting on their own, but further investigation showed that the soldiers charged were given orders from their superiors. There was intentional policy concerning how the prisoners should be treated and the orders came from commanding officers. In the army, if you do not follow the orders of your superiors, you run the risk of getting you and your fellow soldiers killed. Soldiers who do not follow commands are often thrown out of the military or even thrown in prison. There was a failure of command at Abu Ghraib. The superior officers gave the soldiers commands, but they were not appropriate for the prison’s management. Yes, by their actions the soldiers participated in cruel and unusual activities, but we can only place so much of the blame on them. The real investigation should have been conducted against their superior officers and the government agencies involved in the incident. The pressure and stress associated with their job also played a significant role in the treatment of the prisoners. Once again, this does not give the soldiers any excuse for what they did, but it is important to understand the significance of the situation and the relationship dynamics between them and their superiors.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
WWII veteran had Hitler's art book on bookshelf
By JAMIE STENGLE, Associated Press Writer Jamie Stengle, Associated Press Writer – 12-9-09
DALLAS – After fighting his way across Europe during World War II, John Pistone was among the U.S. soldiers who entered Adolf Hitler's home nestled in the Bavarian Alps as the war came to a close.
Making his way through the Berghof, Hitler's home near Berchtesgaden, Germany, Pistone noticed a table with shelves underneath. Exhilarated by the certainty of victory over the Nazis, Pistone took an album filled with photographs of paintings as a souvenir.
"It was really a great feeling to be there and we knew, by that time, he was on his last leg," Pistone told The Associated Press.
Sixty-four years after Pistone brought the album home to Ohio, the 87-year-old has learned its full significance: It's part of a series compiled for Hitler featuring art he wanted for his "Fuhrermuseum," a planned museum in Linz, Austria, Hitler's hometown.
Pistone's album is expected to be formally returned to Germany in a ceremony at the U.S. State Department in January. Germany has 19 other albums discovered at the Berchtesgaden complex that are part of a 31-album collection of works either destined for or being considered for the Linz museum.
Pistone's 3-inch thick, 12-pound album's journey from obscurity began this fall when a friend became curious about the book sitting on Pistone's bookshelf.
The friend discovered after some Internet searching that the Dallas-based Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art was involved in 2007 in the restitution of two other albums that were part of a series documenting art stolen by the Nazis from Jewish families.
Its founder, Robert Edsel, who while living in Italy for a time after selling his oil and gas business became interested in what was done to protect art in World War II, traveled to Ohio this fall to examine Pistone's album. Seeing it convinced him that Pistone had one of the missing albums of the series on the planned museum.
Stamped on the album's spine is "Gemaldegalerie Linz" — Gemaldegalerie means picture gallery in German — and the Roman numerals for 13. It still has a sticker from the book's binder in Dresden.
Birgit Schwarz, a German art historian from Vienna who has written books about Hitler and art, including a book called "Hitler's Museum" describing the albums in the series, is convinced the album is authentic. She said she recognized paintings in the album along with the volume number and title.
"It's absolutely clear!" she wrote in an enthusiastic e-mail to the AP after reviewing scanned photographs of the album. "Hans Makart's 'Pest in Florenz' (Plague in Florence), for example, the first picture of album XIII, Hitler got as a gift from Mussolini!"
Souvenir hunting was routine by soldiers during the war, and problems arise when people try to sell rather than return culturally important items, said Thomas R. Kline, a Washington-based lawyer who specializes in art restitution and works for the foundation.
"It's really important that as people go through their attics and they find the things that grandpa brought home, people are aware that something as simple as a book of pictures could have a cultural significance," Kline said.
Ambassador J. Christian Kennedy, special envoy for Holocaust issues at the State Department, said the agency is happy to help return objects taken during the war. "This is all about doing the right thing," Kennedy said.
Edsel started his foundation in 2007 to honor and continue the work of the original Monuments Men, the roughly 345 men and women from 13 nations who helped Allied forces protect cultural treasures during World War II. After the war, they began trying to find the rightful owners of pieces of art looted by the Nazis, hundreds of thousands of which are still missing.
"It's my desire to see the works of the Monuments Men completed," said Edsel, who wrote two books detailing the group's work.
The discovery of albums could help. In Pistone's case, experts had the names of artwork featured in his album but the photographs could help match them to the correct piece of art, Edsel said.
"They are key documents from the crime scene," he said of the albums.
He said the art Hitler wanted for his museum was bought, stolen or confiscated. The 13th album contains works by some of Hitler's favorite German painters, including a photo of Adolf von Menzel's painting of Frederick the Great that hung in Hitler's office in Munich.
Edsel said his office gets about a call a day from someone curious about an item brought home after the war.
"We're looking for people with goodwill who don't know what they have," Edsel said.
Pistone, album in hand, returned home after surviving the battlefields in Europe. He finished college, got into the restaurant business and had five children. The album mostly stayed up on a shelf at his home in Beachwood, Ohio, but he'd occasionally take it down and let family members look through it.
Once he met Edsel and learned about the Monuments Men, he knew it should be returned to Germany. "I just wanted to get it in the right hands," he said.
Before the book makes the trip overseas, it and one of two other albums the foundation helped discover will go on display for about three months at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans following the State Department ceremony, Edsel said.
Edsel said that of the two albums from 2007, one has already been donated to the U.S. National Archives to join the other albums in that series used as evidence of Nazi looting in the Nuremberg trials. He said that the second will go to the National Archives in the next three years.
"When soldiers and their families realize what they have and come forward to return it, there's never an issue. It's a happy moment and there's celebrations of one kind of another," Kline said. "We owe a huge debt to this generation that saved the world from Naziism."
___
Stengle, Jamie. "WWII veteran had Hitler's art book on bookshelf - Yahoo! News." Yahoo! News. Web. 09 Dec. 2009..
DALLAS – After fighting his way across Europe during World War II, John Pistone was among the U.S. soldiers who entered Adolf Hitler's home nestled in the Bavarian Alps as the war came to a close.
Making his way through the Berghof, Hitler's home near Berchtesgaden, Germany, Pistone noticed a table with shelves underneath. Exhilarated by the certainty of victory over the Nazis, Pistone took an album filled with photographs of paintings as a souvenir.
"It was really a great feeling to be there and we knew, by that time, he was on his last leg," Pistone told The Associated Press.
Sixty-four years after Pistone brought the album home to Ohio, the 87-year-old has learned its full significance: It's part of a series compiled for Hitler featuring art he wanted for his "Fuhrermuseum," a planned museum in Linz, Austria, Hitler's hometown.
Pistone's album is expected to be formally returned to Germany in a ceremony at the U.S. State Department in January. Germany has 19 other albums discovered at the Berchtesgaden complex that are part of a 31-album collection of works either destined for or being considered for the Linz museum.
Pistone's 3-inch thick, 12-pound album's journey from obscurity began this fall when a friend became curious about the book sitting on Pistone's bookshelf.
The friend discovered after some Internet searching that the Dallas-based Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art was involved in 2007 in the restitution of two other albums that were part of a series documenting art stolen by the Nazis from Jewish families.
Its founder, Robert Edsel, who while living in Italy for a time after selling his oil and gas business became interested in what was done to protect art in World War II, traveled to Ohio this fall to examine Pistone's album. Seeing it convinced him that Pistone had one of the missing albums of the series on the planned museum.
Stamped on the album's spine is "Gemaldegalerie Linz" — Gemaldegalerie means picture gallery in German — and the Roman numerals for 13. It still has a sticker from the book's binder in Dresden.
Birgit Schwarz, a German art historian from Vienna who has written books about Hitler and art, including a book called "Hitler's Museum" describing the albums in the series, is convinced the album is authentic. She said she recognized paintings in the album along with the volume number and title.
"It's absolutely clear!" she wrote in an enthusiastic e-mail to the AP after reviewing scanned photographs of the album. "Hans Makart's 'Pest in Florenz' (Plague in Florence), for example, the first picture of album XIII, Hitler got as a gift from Mussolini!"
Souvenir hunting was routine by soldiers during the war, and problems arise when people try to sell rather than return culturally important items, said Thomas R. Kline, a Washington-based lawyer who specializes in art restitution and works for the foundation.
"It's really important that as people go through their attics and they find the things that grandpa brought home, people are aware that something as simple as a book of pictures could have a cultural significance," Kline said.
Ambassador J. Christian Kennedy, special envoy for Holocaust issues at the State Department, said the agency is happy to help return objects taken during the war. "This is all about doing the right thing," Kennedy said.
Edsel started his foundation in 2007 to honor and continue the work of the original Monuments Men, the roughly 345 men and women from 13 nations who helped Allied forces protect cultural treasures during World War II. After the war, they began trying to find the rightful owners of pieces of art looted by the Nazis, hundreds of thousands of which are still missing.
"It's my desire to see the works of the Monuments Men completed," said Edsel, who wrote two books detailing the group's work.
The discovery of albums could help. In Pistone's case, experts had the names of artwork featured in his album but the photographs could help match them to the correct piece of art, Edsel said.
"They are key documents from the crime scene," he said of the albums.
He said the art Hitler wanted for his museum was bought, stolen or confiscated. The 13th album contains works by some of Hitler's favorite German painters, including a photo of Adolf von Menzel's painting of Frederick the Great that hung in Hitler's office in Munich.
Edsel said his office gets about a call a day from someone curious about an item brought home after the war.
"We're looking for people with goodwill who don't know what they have," Edsel said.
Pistone, album in hand, returned home after surviving the battlefields in Europe. He finished college, got into the restaurant business and had five children. The album mostly stayed up on a shelf at his home in Beachwood, Ohio, but he'd occasionally take it down and let family members look through it.
Once he met Edsel and learned about the Monuments Men, he knew it should be returned to Germany. "I just wanted to get it in the right hands," he said.
Before the book makes the trip overseas, it and one of two other albums the foundation helped discover will go on display for about three months at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans following the State Department ceremony, Edsel said.
Edsel said that of the two albums from 2007, one has already been donated to the U.S. National Archives to join the other albums in that series used as evidence of Nazi looting in the Nuremberg trials. He said that the second will go to the National Archives in the next three years.
"When soldiers and their families realize what they have and come forward to return it, there's never an issue. It's a happy moment and there's celebrations of one kind of another," Kline said. "We owe a huge debt to this generation that saved the world from Naziism."
___
Stengle, Jamie. "WWII veteran had Hitler's art book on bookshelf - Yahoo! News." Yahoo! News. Web. 09 Dec. 2009.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Objective Art
So Jon Rafman, an artist, is taking images of people captured on Google street view and blowing them up, presenting them as artworks. Here's a Rafman quote from this Gizmodo post about the artworks:
Jeez, what would Benjamin think? This goes way beyond mechanical reproducibility. Of course, we have to realize that not every image taken by the Google cams reach the same aesthetic levels. It seems, then, that the "art" aspect really comes from the artist's selection of the images more than the images being taken themselves.
The world captured by Google appears to be more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality, the perception of a neutral, unbiased recording, and even the vastness of the project.Now, I obviously have some misgivings about the potential objectivity of anything, much less something as subjective as art, but this is about the closest thing to it that I can think of; the pictures on Google street view are taken by a nine-lensed camera mounted to the roof of a car. As far as I can tell, it's an automated system; there's no real agency aside from the driver's choice of where and when to drive (and, if you look through the gallery, you'll see that there's no way a driver could have predicted some of this stuff).
Jeez, what would Benjamin think? This goes way beyond mechanical reproducibility. Of course, we have to realize that not every image taken by the Google cams reach the same aesthetic levels. It seems, then, that the "art" aspect really comes from the artist's selection of the images more than the images being taken themselves.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Friday, December 4, 2009
"Why not everyone is a torturer": Complicating the"easier" readings of Millgram and Zimbardo
Here's an interesting BBC article written by two psychologists detailing how their research speaks to recent events in Abu Ghirab and also complicates most earlier interpretations of the Zimbardo & Millgram experiments. These earlier interpretations essentially contend something like "if we all shared the same circumstances as the soldiers working the prison, we all would have ended up doing basically the same thing."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3700209.stm
Certainly these newer studies don't invalidate the results of the Zimardo or Millgram experiments. What they do is caution us against reaching very broad and simplistic conclusions from the experiments. Unfortunately, answers to difficult problems are rarely simple and often times a nuanced picture or solution ends up being a closer approximation to the truth than one that is painted in grand, but broad strokes. I think Dr. J's reading of those experiment's significance is generally correct: "Basically what those experiments showed was that under certain conditions--primarily conditions that exploited people's trust and confidence in authority figures--some people might forgo their independent moral standards. The studies did not show that we all would do it, nor did they show that any of us could do it in a situation in which we had to make the independent decision to do so."
I need to give Dr. Johnson practically all the credit for the information contained in this blog post. If you want to read Dr. J's original blog post on torture, where this info came from,you can do so here: http://readmorewritemorethinkmorebemore.blogspot.com/2009/05/torture-101.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3700209.stm
Certainly these newer studies don't invalidate the results of the Zimardo or Millgram experiments. What they do is caution us against reaching very broad and simplistic conclusions from the experiments. Unfortunately, answers to difficult problems are rarely simple and often times a nuanced picture or solution ends up being a closer approximation to the truth than one that is painted in grand, but broad strokes. I think Dr. J's reading of those experiment's significance is generally correct: "Basically what those experiments showed was that under certain conditions--primarily conditions that exploited people's trust and confidence in authority figures--some people might forgo their independent moral standards. The studies did not show that we all would do it, nor did they show that any of us could do it in a situation in which we had to make the independent decision to do so."
I need to give Dr. Johnson practically all the credit for the information contained in this blog post. If you want to read Dr. J's original blog post on torture, where this info came from,you can do so here: http://readmorewritemorethinkmorebemore.blogspot.com/2009/05/torture-101.html
Zimbardo + Abu Ghraib
A book I read a few years back seems relevant to our discussion of the Abu Ghraib cases. Philip Zimbardo (best known for his Stanford Prison Experiment) put out a book, "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil" after testifying at the trial of Staff Sgt Ivan “Chip” Frederick II, one of the Abu Ghraib defendants. Zimbardo argued the lessons learned from SPE: A bad system produces bad situations in which people act badly without even necessarily knowing why. The court martial rejected his testimony, claiming Abu Ghraib was an aberration. Frederick – an army reservist – was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment and stripped of nine medals and 22 years’ retirement pay. The standard line on Abu Ghraib held true, "a few rotten apples can taint the whole barrel," bracketing out the possibility of changing the prison structure, the prison situation that Zimbardo tried to argue caused the behavior.
----
EDIT: Zimbardo's Hero Project centers around the study of the banality of heroism, aiming to be an "international organization to promote heroism as an antidote to evil and as a celebration of what is best in human nature," and "to internalize the perspective, 'That when I become aware of the need to act on behalf of others needing help or being the victim of evil forces, I will be ready and able to take the necessary action.'” If you want to be a Zimbardo "hero-in-waiting," it looks like you can sign up here (looks like Anderson Cooper did!).
notable post on the Hero Construction Company Blog: "Cameras and Heroes" -- "the camera really did change the way we behaved... and they weren't even real cameras!"
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