Succeeding as a pickpocket to continue the egalitarian arm

    For many years groups of individuals (moneyed interests) whom profit from the work of the singular individual (anyone whom is not a part of moneyed interests) have built up an almost infallible system.   I say almost because such a system has not yet reached the lengths to control and take over every facet of our lives, but instead control our worth as an individual. This worth the groups of individuals have placed on the singular individual as the marginal existence of personhood. The singular individual has no idea of personhood and worth as a corporal being, their nature of individualism has eroded. This eroded nature posits that no state of being is a true state of being. Instead these singular individuals exist as something less than human in the regard that their being becomes a conditional. A conditional for the groups of individuals to profit off of everything and erode their worth as a singular individual. That would be why being a pickpocket is a way to express the corporal condition. When the groups of individuals whom profit exist in their individual state, what defines them is their access to capital.
    This is exhibited by the wallet, where the representation of worth is made at that moment. If it is stripped and taken, the singular person from the group of individuals loses their value. They become removed from their perceived advantage and instead retreat. Their retrieval is from the profited existence and instead to the same place as the singular individual. They are alone in their excess and gone is their advantage. The group that they depend on is not there, it has disappeared with sleight of hand. In some sense the nature of profit has failed, inspiring the individual without personhood to commit these acts. They have to in order to survive. If the groups of individuals who profit off their exploitation have the means to be exploited themselves, than the singular individual has to take control. Taking the wallet is the refuge of the exploited.
    The refuge that the exploited manufacture is as an equality of means. The singular individual uses this to build personhood, to express their desire for place in society. They are stripped of their ability to exist as a singular individual. Therefore taking the wallet allows them to perform their role as personhood. It is not crude revenge, but an expression of corporal personhood. The act is an expression, like performing a play or developing a art routine. It expresses to the group of individuals their role as actors and the singular individual’s role as an actor also. Equality is achieved in the nature or roles. The singular individual lacks their role as personhood until the wallet is taken, than they switch this role with the groups of individuals. Eventually the roles will be completely reversed.

                                                                 -Mark Brinton

La Tinta Grita

"A work of art can be called revolutionary if, by virtue of the aesthetic transformation, it represents, in the exemplary fate of individuals, the prevailing unfreedom and the rebelling forces, thus breaking through the mystified (and petrified) social reality, and opening the horizon of change (liberation)." 
-Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension

   On March 15th, UNCC held the opening for “La Tinta Grita: The Ink Shouts” in the first floor gallery of Storrs.  The collection was put together by Kevin McCloskey, a professor of communication design from Kutztown University, Pennsylvania.  McCloskey was kind enough to attend the opening and give some background information on the works, share stories, and answer questions from the viewers.  A couple of the artists were invited to attend the exhibit, but unfortunately the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City denied them visas without explanation. The gallery showcases 25 woodblock prints made by the Oaxacan political artist group known as ASARO. A brief history of the events from which the works originated is necessary to fully appreciate their merit.
   Oaxaca is the second poorest state in Mexico, with 8 out of 10 people living in extreme poverty, and lacking basic needs such as running water, sanitation, and paved roads.  For 20 years the Oaxacan teacher’s union had staged an annual strike by occupying the city’s central plaza, usually lasting a week or two and concluding with small wage increases.  But in May 2006, governor Ulises Ruiz Oritz sent in 3,500 police to evict the strikers using rubber bullets and tear gas, causing the hospitalization of over 100 peaceful protestors.  Nonetheless, the teachers managed to fend off the police forces, and barricaded the roads to ensure that they would not return. 
   In response to this situation, the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) was formed, and asserted itself as the city’s new governing body.  The APPO is “a confederation of teachers, concerned citizens, and representatives of indigenous communities,”1 a loose coalition of all those protesting poverty and injustice in Oaxaca.  Their first, and continuing, non-negotiable demand was the resignation of governor Ruiz, who has long been accused of political corruption.  In addition to the excessive force used on the strikers, he has been accused of repression and violence towards indigenous groups and political opponents, damaging historical sites with poorly managed public works projects, and is suspected of rigging his election. 
    As Ruiz refused to step down, the conflict continued to escalate, and erupted in October 2006.  After the death of American journalist Bradley Will in a shootout, the federal government sent 4,500 Federal Preventive Police to restore order, with the help of armored vehicles and helicopters to drop tear gas on the crowds.  The clashes that occurred in the next few months led to countless injuries, arrests, tortures, ‘disappearances’, and at least 18 deaths.  It was around this time that the APPO supporters started to organize according to the sets of skills they had to contribute to the struggle, and this is how the Assembly of Revolutionary Artists of Oaxaca (ASARO) was born.  Their mission was to “take our artistic expression to the streets, to popular spaces, to raise consciousness about the social reality of the modern form of oppression that our people face.”2  They created woodblock prints, stencils, paintings, posters, and various other kinds of works that communicated their political views in a simple, direct, and emotional style.
   The woodblock prints on display in La Tinta Grita cover a wide range of subjects, from portraits of heros like Emiliano Zapata and Benito Juárez, to violence at the frontlines of the protests, to copyright laws regarding corn.  The artists are between the ages of 15-30, with the older ones being master printmakers who teach the trade to the younger members.  The inexperienced artists can be spotted on a couple of prints that have backwards wordings, because the maker didn’t realize the text would be reversed in the printing process.  But these novice prints are no less composed or impassioned than the others.  Each work has a bold, unrefined character that reveals the amount of force involved in the carving process, along with the undeniable skill of the laborer.  The topics addressed are very diverse, but all share a general concern with celebrating indigenous rights and denouncing the actions of governor Ruiz.  A few depict the Virgin of Guadalupe, and a couple contain a hammer and sickle, which McCloskey suggests may serve the same purpose, as a symbol of faith or devotion.  Several feature calavers, skeleton figures reminiscent of the works of Mexican printmaker Jose Guadalupe Posada.  The works draw on a rich history of visual culture that lends them to be compared as easily to ancient folk art as to Posado and Siqueiros, as to modern graffiti artist Banksy. 
    In addition to the woodcuts, the exhibit also features a few photographs taken by Hank Tusinski while he was visiting Oaxaca in November 2006.  Most of these show groups of strikers quietly reading the newspaper, conversing, and sitting underneath a wall of ASARO murals.  The one that immediately catches the eye is of a small group of artists working on a street tapete, right under the gaze of an intimidating line of fully geared federal police leaning on their riot shields.  Tapetes are memorial ‘carpets’ made of colored sand and flower petals, traditionally made to memorialize lost loved ones on the day of their funeral or the Day of the Dead, or in ASARO’s case to mourn another victim of the protests.  The one being worked on in the photograph condemns Ruiz for his role in the deaths, with the word ASESINO (murderer) painted over his portrait and skulls stenciled in the corners. 
    ASARO is about reclaiming the streets.  At night, artists go out and spray paint stencils and slogans, wheat paste posters, and put up tissue paper prints on public buildings.  If a fellow activist is arrested or killed, they commemorate the event and make it known through a new artwork.  “We believe that public art (in all its diverse artistic disciplines) is a form of communication that allows a dialogue with all sectors of society and which makes possible the visualization of the real conditions of existence—the norms and contradictions of the society which we all inhabit.”3  The government responds by silencing this communication with cleaning crews that tear down the posters and cover the walls with paint.
    ASARO is about reclaiming the calendar.  For nearly every state-sponsored holiday or festival there is a counter-festival held by the community.  For instance, Guelaguetza has become a large tourist attraction in Oaxaca in recent years.  After Ruiz took the opportunity to cash in on the event by charging high ticket prices, and make the money curiously disappear, APPO held its own free “Popular Guelaguetza.”  Another tourist-aimed festival called Night of the Radishes has the alternate “People’s Radish Festival,” where artists use radishes to carve and construct sculptures of barricades, helicopters, police, and other familiar themes.
   The artists refuse to sign their names to any of the artworks they make.  The anonymity is in part due to the priority of the political message over any kind of fetishization of the artist that may serve financial ends, and partly to emphasize the collective nature of the organization, but it also serves the more practical reason of avoiding incarceration.  Many, if not arrested, have suffered beatings at the hands of police or supporters of Ruiz while being caught putting up a new work.  However, during the daytime they are able to sell their prints in the city’s central square, which is how Professor McCloskey first stumbled onto their work during a visit in 2007.  He recalls, “I asked in my intermediate Spanish: How much? 100 pesos. Just under ten U.S. dollars a print. Then I asked how much longer they would be there. Hasta cosas cambian, Until things change.”4
    By December 2006 the barricades were gone and most of the violence had subsided.  But today the struggle has still not completely ended; Ruiz is still in power (his term will come to an end this December), a number of police and federal troops remained in the city to maintain order, protests continue to resurge, and ASARO continues to make art, although in a somewhat tamer manner.  The main change to the group is their new gallery, Espacio Zapata, made possible by the funding of their growing body of collectors.  The gallery is sort of a double-edged sword: it provides the community with a center for gathering and viewing subversive artworks where they won’t be destroyed or erased, but it also effectively confines the art into an easily digestible space hidden from the view of the public.  The presence of street art has been made difficult because of the constant surveillance of “traffic cameras” throughout the city, as well as new strict laws against “visual contamination,” but it has not come to a halt just yet.  Sporadic blog updates (http://asar-oaxaca.blogspot.com/) with collections of photos taken from around the city reassure us that ASARO is still hard at work reclaiming the municipal landscape.
    La Tinta Grita is one of the most exciting exhibits to graze the presence of UNC Charlotte in recent memory.  The name of the exhibit is a reference to the “Grito de Dolores” given by Miguel Hidalgo in 1810, the rallying call that initiated Mexico’s fight for independence.  In the collection of ASARO’s woodblock prints we can hear the ink shouting the same call to action, the same cry of injustice, and the same longing for change.  2010 is a momentous year, marking the bicentennial of Mexico’s independence from Spain, as well as the centennial of the Mexican Revolution of 1910.  One can’t help but hope that this year will bring the next triumphant anniversary to celebrate.
                                -Ryan Shullaw

1 Dr. John Pohl, gallery placard.

2 ASARO, gallery placard.

3 http://houston.indymedia.org/news/2008/06/64061.php

4http://commonsense2.com/2008/07/art-culture/hasta-cosas-cambian-until-things-change/

A Letter 
My response to the "Does God Exist?" debate on March 24 2010.
 
Dear Dr. William Craig,
    Your admission during the “Does God Exist?” debate at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, that acquaintances of yours in Haiti vehemently prayed for a large natural disaster shows the disgusting moral character of the Christian religion.  If you have forgotten the letter to which I refer, it was from Christian missionaries currently in Haiti, who wrote about their horrific hopes for a earthquake or tsunami or other great catastrophe, in order for the disaster to serve as a catalyst for great change.  In the letter, they so celebrated the recent earthquake in Haiti, they praised God for the service it provided for Haiti, and the missionaries.  Your opponent, Dr. Tooley, passed over this remark, I hope, with the hope that people would apply his argument against the existence of God defined as an omnipotent, omnipresent, and perfectly good being, using an argument showing the evil which the Christian God has perpetrated and allows to go on is inconsistent with the definition of God, therefore God, as defined, does not exist.  But I will here make explicit the unacceptable immorality of praying for disaster, and, if your god is the cause of the great suffering of Haiti, I will show how God is not worthy of worship (which leaves aside the point that humanity should not worship anything anyhow.)
    First, your point that anything God wills is moral, can be granted, but does not affect human morality.  You say yourself, using the example of a human taking a gun out and killing you on stage, that human will and actions can be immoral.  (You leave out, assuming God can act through a person, that God could act through a human, rendering whatever that human did moral, leaving the question, how can we punish a human on earth without knowing if God had in fact acted through that person?  This obviously has large implications for human morality, for if we acted against a human, whom had been the tool of God’s will, we would be acting against God, rendering us immoral.)  So, given human will and actions can be immoral, then humanity needs to construct a moral system separate from that of God’s morality (because humans cannot do whatever they please, and the morality set forth in the various religious texts are not sufficient for all human conditions, nor do the texts provide justification for each moral statement beyond using God’s will, which we have seen is insufficient.  God has a different moral code from that of humans, therefore we can not base human morality on God’s morality.  Otherwise, this may leave humans acting immorally.)  All of this is to say that even if God caused or willed the earthquake in Haiti, human will and action shan’t be judged by if it corresponds with God’s will.  If it was, our legal systems would have no justification, for someone can easily claim they are in accordance with God’s will, and no one would be able to prove otherwise.  This shows that your friends’ comments and prayers about the Haiti earthquake can have no justification rest on God’s will.  This leaves humanity to judge these people with our own constructed moral system.  This is how I can safely say that I was sickened by the comments you made.  To will the suffering and death of thousands of people is immoral.  That’s not to say anyone is responsible for the earthquake, but it leaves questions about the motives of the Christian missionaries.
    The last question I want to ask is: does a god who wills suffering and large-scale unnecessary massacre deserve to be worshipped?  I find this question of utmost importance and consequence, yet I have never heard it asked, at least in modern theological discourse.  Looking at religious texts and the supposed evidence of God’s actions, it is a difficult case to make to say God is a perfectly moral being.  Thus to make this argument, one must say anything God wills or does is moral (convoluted reasoning is used in regards to whether it is good because God says so, or does Good exist as some form to which God prescribes.)  As shown in my previous argument, even if we grant God morality, we still may not say human morality is of the same nature.  The question becomes; is human morality potentially better than God’s morality?  In other words, can humans be more moral than God?  Given both the history of God and the history of humanity, one could say both have been equally immoral, albeit God has infinite resources of power making it possible for it to stop humans from acting immorally, but that can be ignored here.  The history of humanity has also shown great actions of goodness, great moral actions.  The same cannot be said of God.  God often corrects human behavior using genocide and massacres.  This is no ideal, in fact it is often taught as the complete most evil way to solve problems. At this point, the only good thing God has done is create life, but that in-itself is not a moral action, nor does it entice humanity to worship, for I don’t see many people worshiping their parents, whom are the direct cause of each individual.  Yet Christians still say humans should worship such a being.  I think humanity can certainly ascribe to a higher morality than this, then death and suffering.  I have my own ideas on how morality can be constructed socially, a morality which accounts for individual freedom and collective needs, and doesn’t use fear and Hell as the ultimate reason to ascribe to such a morality.  But, here, let’s leave it at the fact that humans can have a morality higher than “all is permitted.”
    Finally I just want to reiterate the argument Ivan makes in The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky.  He simply makes the point that even if God exists, and all it does is moral, that even if Hell exists, it is not worth worshipping God.  For to worship God is to accept all the evil (“moral”) acts God has willed throughout human history.  It is to accept all the injustice and unnecessary suffering of innocent people, i.e. children.  Ivan thinks the price of admission is too high, he would give back his ticket to heaven, in order not to accept what God has willed or allows to occur.  Ivan makes the ultimate rejection of the Christian God, and the ultimate affirmation of humanity’s potential and makes a point to say humanity can do better than this.  So, if God exists, it is not necessary to worship such a god, and may be more moral to reject the worship of such a god.
    I’d like to go on to say how Christian Morality denies humanity its potential (albeit it is certainly not the only system that doesn’t empower humanity with morality.)  But I will leave it as is.  I will simply say that what the Christian missionaries in Haiti were happy for was mass suffering and death.  They were praising God for killing innocent children.  It was not God who mobilized and organized mass efforts to save the people of Haiti.  Nor was it God who dedicated time and resources to the on-going effort of restoring and rebuilding Haiti.  Humanity came to the rescue, not God.

                        Sincerely,

                            Eric Virzi