Strange Fruit

Strange Fruit,15' x 5',sand,felt,wool,acrylic and oil paint,discarded drawings.

My intent in creating this anthropology and  art research project is to place focus on emotional mark making and color informed by the poem/song "Strange Fruit" sung first by Billie Holliday and later by Nina Simone about the black lynchings in the south and the Frank Leo lynching.

STRANGE FRUIT-THE BEGINNINGS OF MY RESEARCH PROJECT-C32325-An Anthropology and Art Project

I was in NYC last week and saw a powerful exhibit at The Holocaust Museum and decided... especially since I am Jewish, to create an art work informed by this song,Strange fruit which was first a poem by Abel Meerpol,1937.

It was sung first by Billie Holiday and then by Nina Simone(see links below to hear the song).I took photos of lines and cracks and debris in the train stations in NYC.(see images below)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8Lq_yasEgo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs

"TO WATCH A MAN HANG FROM A TREE AND CALL HIM "STRANGE FRUIT"....THIS IS THE UGLIEST SONG"Nina Simone

With the Black and White issues today and in lines with BLACK LIVES MATTER, I decided to create an artwork informed by all of this....this is the beginnings.......stay tuned for more as I begin to make the art...as a side note..whenever I decide to make an art work, I choose something which gives me "that lump in my throat"feeling as Robert Frost once said.Here I go again.....C32325 may be the title I use as that is his number on the tree....or simply the title "strange fruit",which is the title of the poem and song and how they compared hanging bodies to strange fruit from a poplar tree.

100 years ago, an act of anti-Semitic violence that changed America: The lynching of Leo Frank

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A stain on American history

BY MENACHEM Z. ROSENSAFT DAVID MELUSKEY

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Monday, August 17, 2015, 4:33 PM

In the early hours of Aug. 17, 1915, a 31-year-old man took his last breath as the table beneath him was kicked out and the short rope hung from an oak branch snapped his neck.

The man hanging from that tree was an American Jew by the name of Leo Frank. Although Frank was the only Jew in the history of America lynched by a mob, his death had a profound and lasting impact on American Jewry.

Frank, a superintendent at a pencil factory in Atlanta, had been sentenced to death on questionable evidence for murdering 13-year-old Mary Phagan in 1913. She had worked at the factory. His trial was a foregone conclusion; Frank had already been convicted in the court of public opinion.

The Northern Jew was the obvious target of the people’s rage. A hate-infused trial ensued, and Frank was portrayed as the insidious Jewish infiltrator, taking what he pleased.

A conviction quickly came, and Frank was sentenced to death.

As he went from appeal to appeal, the case against him began to fall apart. Even some of his accusers conceded that Frank had not murdered Mary Phagan. After his appeals had been rejected by the Supreme Courts of both Georgia and the United States, Georgia Gov. John M. Slaton investigated the body of evidence and, taking a bold stand, commuted Leo Frank’s sentence to life in prison. Slaton did not believe the accused had been guilty of the crime.

But this did not sit well with a community longing for justice but blinded by bigoted rage. After he arrived at the Milledgeville State Penitentiary, Frank’s throat was slit by a fellow prisoner. He survived this attempt on his life, yet the wound had barely healed when on Aug. 16, 1915m a well-oiled mob of 25 rolled up to the prison gates, removed Frank in less than a half hour without firing a shot, and brought him to Marietta, Mary Phagan’s hometown.

After being badly beaten, he was hanged from a tree at 7 a.m.

With so many tragedies that have befallen the Jewish people, why should we take time to remember this singular incident? Because Leo Frank’s death was the functional equivalent of state-sponsored murder.

Although the governor had commuted the sentence, prominent Georgians, including judges and other state officials, plotted and carried out a seamless abduction and lynching. A huge crowd watched the lynching, which was supervised by a well-known superior court judge. That very same day the perpetrators of the crime were absolved of any wrongdoing by a grand jury, although they were all well known locally.

Several photographs were taken of the hanging, which were published and sold as postcards in local stores, along with pieces of the rope used to hang Frank, his nightshirt, and branches from the tree.

In the aftermath of the murder, fear spread among Southern Jews. Until then, they had found themselves quite comfortable and safe in their genteel communities. They owned businesses, were respected by their neighbors, and even held government office.

While Frank’s death may have been the only anti-Semitic lynching in America, there were of course thousands of African Americans who were cruelly murdered in this fashion. We cannot forget these poor souls either. We must acknowledge and learn from this dark chapter of our history.

Artist,Ken Gonzalez did a series called Hang Trees(see link below)about the California lynchings.

http://kengonzalesday.com/projects/hangtrees/index.htm

The collage/sketches made to inform the large wall piece I created are below:
Keep in  mind I was thinking of rope,hanging,head down,hands and feet positioned and the cracks and detritus of those ancient NYC city subways.

when i self harm

the girl in  pieces

as the world gets darker

White Blindness

Author of the book ,Through Our Own Eyes, Bertold Brecht 1956

"And I always thought: the very simplest words must be enough.When I say what things are like,everyone's heart must be torn to shreds.That you'll go down if you don't stand up for yourself.Surely you see that."

I can easily relate to these words in my own life and choose to express this ideology through the work I create.

I hope the art I am making will embrace these ideas and express emotive rich surfaces ,viseral and intimate yet strong and powerful.

A Lesson in the fields of China from the book,Through Our Own Eyes by Guy Brett

These last few chapters discuss the art in China and Africa as means of personal expression about war and poverty in the late 1950s when many peasants and villagers took up painting in their free time to record their feelings about poverty and the paintings are made in a very complex manner and this painting,,A Lesson in the fields... is the first of this kind  and leads up to the paintings about the revolution and shows crop spraying  and patterned paintings on fabric reflect the landscape,some pictures show poverty  showing a lack of  medical facilities with baskets in abundance of herbs and glass vials showing the nature of primitive making of chemicals and healing powders.We actually see peasants discussing their paintings now.

Next discussion is actually about African paintings even though the music was and is  the main art form used to express."The Indigenous cultures defined and redefined themselves against the onslaught of colonialism..."page 99...This was a time of repressed and persecution and humiliation n of the villagers.This is shown in the villagers' art.Naive painting styles with enlarged arms and hands  and sad expressions prevail.Even simple large  mud sculptures are being made in the villages at this time.They presented artworks which were using found materials to express their constant poverty and humiliation. I will end this course with this quote from the author,Bertold Brecht 1956

"And I always thought: the very simplest words must be enough.When I say what things are like,everyone's heart must be torn to shreds.That you'll go down if you don't stand up for yourself.Surely you see that:I can easily relate to this in m y own life today.

From the book,Through Our Own Eyes by Guy Brett(continued)

I am going to discuss some of the Outsider Art from several different countries presented here.
Pages 32-54.
These are quilt type of artworks done in a very primitive manner,no perspective,child like images all stitched and very colorful....the disappeared people ,this trauma of Santiago when working people,normal day to day workers disappeared after a coup censorship of every kind was prevalent and of course in the arts.traditional decorating of bags and baskets using brightly colored wool(as I have incorporated into my collages) as these political artworks emerged they were seized,of course by the police.of course these women and grandmothers disappeared and were never heard of again.
These were These quilts show the people taken prisoners and hugging their families and sadness if felt in these naive quilts.These working day women who made many of these  lived in squatters areas trying to improve their lives...a beautiful blue quilt with doves flying towards the sun says"Never Give in or stray away from the road"page 35.In Chile in 1973-1984-A patchwork of a series of smaller quilts were made and recounts the day one of The Coup..it documents the endless search for relatives gone missing.. a black square in many of thee is symbolic for  an unknown place as the anguish of not knowing... "We lack solidarity"is printed on one quilt...,one shows a woman on a telephone saying day after day on the telephone with no news..,one patchwork exposes a very brutal crime by the secret police which happened in to a young woman who was said to have dies while planting a bomb but the truth as with many other women is she was beaten to death by the secret police with an iron..there is on the quilt a large hand sewn offering flowers.The last one I will describe is the one about showing women chained  to the railings of National congress in Santiago to demand full punishment for all of these killings and their are pictures of the missing relatives embroidered above the womens' heads.

Fieldwork as Artistic Practice

I really related to this section of the book which is about art in public places.This section is written by Tatsuo Inagaki He says that it disturbed him  that much of the public art did not tackle into consideration the region,the people from the area.He criticized that the art seemed to be more like museum pieces instead of art made specifically for the people living there.He decide to make art ,public art that was specifically targeted towards the people who lived there.He found that researching like anthropologists did was very helpful.His process involved  interviews with local residents. For example... in these interviews he asked about  their lives and their relationship with the place. and residents told stories of important memories here.As anthropologists begin with fieldwork and then place their findings into the form of ethnography or writings I the author  used photographs of the people in their places and presented them in museums in that specific place.

My RESEARCH????...Hearing Faces,Seeing Voices:Sound Art,Experimentalism and the Ethnographic Graze by John Wynne

"The word itself,'research',is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world's vocabulary."page 49
This section discusses the difficulties for artist who choose to do field work as preparation and research for their art..he quotes Lippard as saying page 49.."..experience comes first and theory later once we realize what we should be thinking."she says the danger is that we,artists may become"tourists". However,that being said, "Thankfully, some artists,recordists and composers do take the time to think rather than blithely engage in that kind of sonic tor ism..":But developing self reflective research and production practices both in the field and in the studio(or at a desk)is as important for artists as it is for ethnographers and anthropologists."page 49 A discussion about sensory turn in anthropology activating the senses is important to an anthropologist and artist alike.Hearing Voices.. by Thomas Sobe 's work uses speech and sound so the viewer can experience and interact.

Between Art and Anthropology..continued..PRACTICE WHAT YOU PREACH..LOOKING FOR TH E MEANINGFUL IN YOUR WORK

"Practice what you preach" that is what I take away from these pages.and the search for meaningful context for your work...
This section begins with a discussion about a year on a farm in a project called Overlay. Lippard's essay discusses about how she always wanted to be an archaeologist and she decided to leave out politics in this project and to create a difficult problem for herself,making her go outside her "comfort zone".She says that as she now looks back about this experience she approached it from an artist point of view,but she does say that this project OVERLAY..marked the beginning and the end of her artistic career as after this experience she  came farther away from art criticism and began becoming a cultural critic.Now she is doing fieldwork all around New Mexico listening to archaeologists and she says the only art discussed in her new book is rock art.In this essay she discusses the common ground between artist and anthropologists is their ethics.This topic is rarely discussed in the art world,she says but is constantly discussed in the world of anthropologists. Her interest is finding out how each artist functions in society and how they choose their audience and social effects.She concludes that it is the "quest for meaningful context,and for meaning itself,has led these artists towards anthropology,which,even when it's trapped in it's own self-fulfilling prophecies,does offer significant contextual models."Page 25

Echoes and Parallels "makes connections between both artists'personal ill health and their interest in shamanism;..."page 37. Coates' interest in shamanism is attributed basically to his ill health,severe eczema which he had asa child Beuys apparently had experience  any "psychic"and near death experiences with three traumas in his life making  an impact on him as an artist and Beuys life once he was rescued by Tatars in Crimea during WWII and he was wrapped in felt and fat to keep him warm.37.Now Coates also had an interest in shamanism as he says growing up in suburbia one dreamed of an exotic wildlife ..Marcus coates..Dawn Chorus 2007 is a video installation and there is a clear engagement with anthropology in both these artists' work as Coates even mentions his preparatory work for this installation as".There is a photo of Beuy's I like America likes Me...where all you se is a blanket wrapped around a person and a cane sticking out...in Coates Journey to the Lower World,2004...you see him as a shaman dressed in" Field Work".However the author does say that there is similar interest in the "therapeutic aspect"of the shaman's role which is  reflected in both Coates and Beuys work. The author raises the question about ethical issues in their work.Both these artists engage the audience in a dialogue "with a figure that has been conceived of as having been a victim of destruction".page 45.It is concluded that both their work reflect self identity issues with the shaman's role within western art.

Artist Ken Gonzalez also did a series informed by the lynchings in California (see link below)

http://kengonzalesday.com/projects/hangtrees/index.htm