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Book by Spring Ulmer
The Age of Virtual Reproduction
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Tourism of Death
By Spring Ulmer
I've thought of it, of course. At
fifteen I spent time in Germany, in concentration camps
as a visitor, a tourist. I think of the plantation
estates where one can go pay eighty dollars to stay in
slave quarters, of prisons in eastern Europe that are
now "sparse" hotels, offering the visitor the feeling of
what it might be like—haha—to
be in a gulag. I think of s/m, of the photos of Abu
Ghraib and what they mean, as public (and some of them
still secret) documents.
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For twenty-seven
years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of
war as anti-aesthetic . . . Accordingly we state: . . .
War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion
over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks,
terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks.
War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of
metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because
it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of
machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the
gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and
the stench of putrefaction into a symphony.
War is
beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that
of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the
smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others. .
. . Poets and artists of Futurism! . . . remember these
principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle
for a new literature and a new graphic art . . . may be
illumined by them!—Marinetti's
Manifesto |
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US plans shock
and awe" blitzkrieg in Iraq—By Henry Michaels—30 January
2003—The war being prepared by the White House and
Pentagon on the people of Iraq will be characterized by
barbarism on a scale not seen since the horrors of the
1930s and 1940s. The level of brutality will recall
scenes seared into the collective consciousness of
previous generations, such as the bombing of Guernica
and the Nazi blitzkrieg against Poland. . . .
CBS news
reported last weekend that the invasion will begin with
war planes and ships launching between 300 and 400
cruise missiles on day one. This is more than the number
of missiles launched during the whole of “Desert Storm”
in 1991.
Another 300 to 400 missiles will follow on the
second day.At an average rate of one weapon every four
minutes around the clock, missiles will relentlessly
rain down on Baghdad and knock out water supplies,
electricity services, communications, government
buildings, roads, bridges and other essential
infrastructure.—WSWS |
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Atomic bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki—By
executive order of President
Harry S. Truman, the U.S. dropped the
nuclear weapon "Little
Boy" on the city of
Hiroshima on Monday, August 6, 1945, followed by the
detonation of "Fat
Man" over
Nagasaki on August 9. These two events are the only
active deployments of nuclear weapons in war. The target
of Hiroshima was a city of considerable military
importance, containing Japan's Second Army Headquarters,
as well as being a communications center and storage
depot.
Within the first two
to four months of the bombings, the acute effects killed
90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 in
Nagasaki, with roughly half of the deaths in each city
occurring on the first day. The Hiroshima prefectural
health department estimates that, of the people who died
on the day of the explosion, 60% died from flash or
flame burns, 30% from falling debris and 10% from other
causes. During the following months, large numbers died
from the effect of burns,
radiation sickness, and other injuries, compounded
by illness. In a US estimate of the total immediate and
short term cause of death, 15–20% died from radiation
sickness, 20–30% from
flash burns, and 50–60% from other injuries,
compounded by illness.
In both cities, most of the dead were
civilians.—Wikipedia
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I think of Hiroshima's museum. what
we visit and why—as tourists, as searchers, as
pilgrims—is important to contemplate, and of course
there is always commerce and what it means to drop
dollars in place of misfortune. I lived for a year at
seventeen in India. came back torn. couldn't travel to
the two-thirds world again until I was 32 and
heartbroken, searching for Capoiera corners in Brazil. I
think of what it means to go in search of death, and
what it means to go on vacation when most of the world
is paying for you to do so. there is much guilt and
there is much remorse.
Perhaps the only thing that keeps
me going in life, when knowing, as I write that writing
is (Benjamin insists) barbarism if anyone else is unable
to choose to do so, too . . . that there have been
those before me who have traveled and done good. who
have made such films as Sankofa,
Daughters of
the Dust,
Hiroshima Mon Amour . . . and
written such books as Sontag's
Regarding the Pain of
Others, Berger's
Into Their Labors trilogy,
Oe's
Hiroshima Notes . . . .
It is the work and travel of these
men and women who have brought suffering to my
attention. They are not survivors, but they are
"witnesses," even as that term is problematic, that role
is problematic . . . they have taught me what it
means to be human, what it means not to give up and die
from depressed caused by guilt . . . these omnipresent
sufferings and how to stand those histories we are
haunted by; what to do about the spiritual need to
search out such spots in which atrocity occurred, what
to learn.
How to be respectful; how never to
travel without integrity, care for the environment and
people around you; how to be a decent person.
It is a large narrative, no?
I, too, was fed national geographic
images as a child. I am haunted still, even though those
magazines hurt entire cultures by representing them in
pejorative light, by the images of starving children;
asking my mother why those children's bellies were
sticking out (I was a child myself). I am tired, myself,
of the way Africa—if
you go to a literature shelf in any bookstore—is
represented. how the West represents anyone but western
white people . . .
Now I am at university of
Iowa, on
a fellowship to write non-fiction, in an African lit
class taught by a German . . . I want to run far away
and can't.
What I think I know is that I think
you can respectfully honor people. you can be caring.
There are ways of looking that don't rape. There are
ways of communicating that don't condemn or that open us
to other knowings.
These are my hopes; the other
things, they are constant sorrows. And so it is good to
care for them, good to sing to them.
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The Aftermath
of Rwandan Genocide
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Spring with Neighbors |
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| On the Road |
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Spring Eating Cane with
Workers |
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| Women on Swings |
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Not Without Pride |
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| Objects Left Behind |
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Objects Left Behind (2) |
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| Cowboy |
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Girls at Work |
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| Cane Cutter |
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Walking Up Hill |
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| The Gaze |
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Friends |
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| Cyprian |
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Judith and Marie |
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Editor' Note:
This exposition does not do Ms. Ulmer's work full justice.
Some of these photos I have cropped additionally so they
would have a fuller effect in a small space such as this
page. If I had the technical know how I probably would
have made the full photo available. But of course you
can always contact Spring Ulmer: she may make the photos
available to you in full or maybe even prints if so
desired
—
spring_u@yahoo.com
Spring Ulmer's introduction was
culled from a note she sent me in response to an
editorial written by Jean Y.T. Lukaz.
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Spring Ulmer grew up without
electricity in the woods with parents who were active in
the Civil Rights Movement. She received her B.F.A. in
Photography from the Cooper Union School of Art and her
M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Arizona. She
worked as a journalist for the Mountain Eagle newspaper
in Eastern Kentucky; taught photography and English to
Sudanese refugees, migrant children in Illinois, and
juvenile detainees in Arizona, and most recently at the
University of Arizona. She has received fellowships from
the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Kentucky Arts
Council, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the
Andrea Frank Foundation. Presently she is the recipient
of an Iowa Arts Fellowship at the University of Iowa.
She went to Rwanda this summer. |
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posted 25 August 2006 * * *
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The Age of Virtual Reproduction
By Spring Ulmer
Spring Ulmer's
The Age of Virtual Reproduction disrupts and
redefines established patterns of seeing as she looks
both at and beyond suffering and slaughter for an
ethical way to live. Relentlessly in relation and in
isolation, Ulmer meditates on moral and emotional
anaesthesia our age of numbing. On the road in Rwanda,
investigating executions, meditating on photographs of
the past, Ulmer interrogates her own and others often
"romantic obsession with what is disappearing and asks
how to be in touch with the real and reality—either
through the self or its loss. Looking at work by
August Sander,
Walter Benjamin, Congolese painter
Tshibumba Kanda Matulu,
John
Berger,
William Gedney,
Kenzaburo Oe,
Wim
Wenders, and others, she finds, with Benjamin, that
"there is no cultural document that is not at the same
time a document of barbarism." |
The Age of Virtual Reproduction offers a catalogue (of people,
stories, nature, and art) that maintains that more than just surviving, life
can be overwhelmingly and beautifully patterned, and thus, critically,
recognizable.—Essay Press
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Ways of Seeing
By John Berger
John Berger’s
Ways of Seeing is an in depth look on art, the
way people view it and the influences that traditional
oil painting has had on society and modern day
publicity. The beginning of the book goes into the issue
of how people now look at art versus how people in the
past look at art and how reproduction has effected this.
The relationship between social status and the subjects
of oil painting, particularly the female nude is
discussed as well. Berger turns to modern day and
explains the role that publicity takes in our daily
lives and how it is modeled after the traditional oil
painting of the past. . . .
Since art is so widely accessible
famous works are being quoted or appropriated for other
works of art, advertisements, and merchandise. |
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The way art is viewed has changed dramatically
over the course of a hundred years due to technology and social
change. . . . Envy is key in advertising it makes people want what
the person in the advertisement has; therefore being unsatisfied
with their present state. Women and sex are used profusely in
advertisement since it appeals to both women and men. Men want the
women and the sex and the women want to be the women. This idea of
women and sex ties into the beginning of the book; where the women
in the advertisements are used for the exact purpose that the female
nude was used in traditional oil paintings.
Berger paints a grim picture of the effects of
traditional oil painting and publicity on the lives of people. It is
too often used to promote materialism and individual prosperity and
envy. The subjects in oil painting and advertisements are just tools
for the constant need to possess certain objects.—EmilyMay
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The Dramatic History of the Congo
as Painted by Tshibumba Kanda Matulu
By Paul Faber
Tshibumba Kanda Matulu (1947-1982?) portrays the
turbulent history of his country, the Congo, in this
impressive series of 102 paintings. Important characters
and events feature in this passing parade, such as the
political leaders Lumumba and Mobutu, and the Belgian
monarchs Leopold II and Baudouin. Tshibumba’s paintings,
produced between 1973 and 1974, portray historic events
and figures, but always contain lessons for the present.
Tshibumba also wrote explanatory texts on his paintings.
The series of paintings was acquired in 2000 by the KIT
Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, from Johannes Fabian, an
anthropologist, who befriended the artist in the Congo
from 1971 to 1974.The series presents a lively and
accessible view of colonial and postcolonial African
history by someone on the inside and from the working
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It translates the
African tradition of storytelling into a contemporary style.
Furthermore, it tells a story of African-European cultural
exchange, as the series was made by an African who knew that he
would have a European audience. The insider explains what
happened in his country to an outsider. As Tshibumba’s
perspective is an integral part of this story, the book reflects
on questions of presentation and self-presentation. Johannes
Fabian made extensive notes of his conversations with Tshibumba,
on which he draws in his Preface to this book.
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Related Books
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The Work of Art in the Age of Its
Technological Reproducibility
and Other Writings on Media by Walter Benjamin
Edited by Michael
W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin
Benjamin’s famous
“Work of Art” essay sets out his boldest thoughts—on
media and on culture in general—in their most realized
form, while retaining an edge that gets under the skin
of everyone who reads it. In this essay the visual arts
of the machine age morph into literature and theory and
then back again to images, gestures, and thought.
This essay,
however, is only the beginning of a vast collection of
writings that the editors have assembled to demonstrate
what was revolutionary about Benjamin’s explorations on
media. Long before Marshall McLuhan, Benjamin saw that
the way a bullet rips into its victim is exactly the way
a movie or pop song lodges in the soul. |
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This book contains the second, and most daring, of the four versions of the
“Work of Art” essay—the one that addresses the utopian developments of the
modern media. The collection tracks Benjamin’s observations on the media as
they are revealed in essays on the production and reception of art; on film,
radio, and photography; and on the modern transformations of literature and
painting. The volume contains some of Benjamin’s best-known work alongside
fascinating, little-known essays—some appearing for the first time in
English. In the context of his passionate engagement with questions of
aesthetics, the scope of Benjamin’s media theory can be fully appreciated.
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If the natural
utilization of productive forces is impeded by the
property system, the increase in technical devices, in
speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an
unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. The
destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has
not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its
organ, that technology has not been sufficiently
developed to cope with the elemental forces of society.
The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are
attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous
means of production and their inadequate utilization in
the process of production—in other words, to
unemployment and the lack of markets.
Imperialistic war
is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form
of “human material,” the claims to which society has
denied its natural material. |
Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of
trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary
bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new
way.—“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction” (1936)—By Walter Benjamin
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Age of Silver: Encounters with Great Photographers
By John Loengard
Age of Silver is iconic American photographer
John Loengard’s ode to the art form to which he
dedicated his life. Loengard, a longtime staff
photographer and editor for LIFE magazine and other
publications, spent years documenting modern life for
the benefit of the American public. Over the years he
trained his camera on dignitaries, artists, athletes,
intellectuals, blue and whitecollar workers, urban and
natural landscapes, manmade objects, and people of all
types engaged in the act of living. In
Age of Silver, Loengard gathers his portraits
of some of the most important photographers of the last
half-century, including
Annie Leibovitz,
Ansel Adams,
Man Ray,
Richard Avedon,
Alfred Eisenstaedt,
Henri Cartier-Bresson, and many, many others.
Loengard caught them at home and in the studio; posed
portraits and candid shots of the artists at work and at
rest. Complimenting these revealing, expertly composed
portraits are elegant photographs of the artists holding
their favorite or most revered negatives. This extra
dimension to the project offers an inside peek at the
artistic process and is a stark reminder of the
physicality of the photographic practice at a time
before the current wave of digital dominance. There is
no more honest or faithful reproduction of life existent
in the world of image making than original, untouched
silver negatives. Far from an attempt to put forth a
singular definition of modern photographic practice,
this beautifully printed, duotone monograph instead
presents evidence of the unique vision and extremely
personal style of every artist pictured. Annie Leibovitz
is quoted in her caption as once saying, “I am always
perplexed when people say that a photograph has captured
someone. A photograph is just a piece of them in a
moment. It seems presumptuous to think you can get more
than that.” —PowerhouseBooks |
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The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
By Annette
Gordon-Reed
This is a scholar's
book: serious, thick, complex. It's also fascinating, wise
and of the utmost importance. Gordon-Reed, a professor of
both history and law who in her previous book helped solve
some of the mysteries of the intimate relationship between
Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, now brings to
life the entire Hemings family and its tangled blood links
with slave-holding Virginia whites over an entire century.
Gordon-Reed never slips into cynicism about the author of
the Declaration of Independence. Instead, she shows how his
life was deeply affected by his slave kinspeople: his lover
(who was the half-sister of his deceased wife) and their
children. Everyone comes vividly to life, as do the places,
like Paris and Philadelphia, in which Jefferson, his
daughters and some of his black family lived. So, too, do
the complexities and varieties of slaves' lives and the
nature of the choices they had to make—when they had the
luxury of making a choice. Gordon-Reed's genius for reading
nearly silent records makes this an extraordinary work.—Publishers
Weekly |
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