Anyone who has read this blog knows that I am fascinated by what the NY Times calls "the culture of naming" in Latin America. The German, French or faux composite Spanish/French/German names spelled in a hybrid Spanish manner of some of my Puerto Rican relatives, those I read on name tags at the Asssociated Super Market, or see on the screen while watching Miss Universe...they all obsess me. Reyna, Yesenia, Jeanmarie, Delorean, Elvis, Harold, you name it! And now in Spain, too, my compatriots name their children Yonatan, or Yenifer. Fabulous.
Thanks to Simon Romero in Caracas, we learned that the dictator Chavez wants to curtail such practices and limit approved Revolutionary Bolivarian names to a set list. (see below under Real News/Miss Universe). His disgruntled Congressman Iroshima Perez is offended. And now we learn that the leader of the student group opposing the regime is named STALIN Gonzalez. Obviouly, this is pronounced EHS-TAH-LEEN. You cannot make this stuff up. Realismo Magico at its best. And I have been told by my beloved Venezuelan friends that there are cases of telenovela writers who are also avant-garde theatre authors with names like IBSEN (that would be their first name of course). I remember meeting a man from Peru who went by the first name LENIN. So the heroic student leader Stalin isn't an exception.
The Wall Street Journal
To Oppose Chávez, Youth In Caracas Rally Behind Stalin
That's Ivan Stalin González, Student-Movement Leader; A Broad Dissent on Campus
By JOHN LYONS and JOSÉ DE CÓRDOBA
November 24, 2007; Page A1
CARACAS, Venezuela -- As Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez attempts to push through what he calls 21st-Century Socialism, his biggest obstacle is an army of students led by a leftist named Stalin. Ivan Stalin González, who prefers to be called just plain Stalin, is president of the student body at the Central University of Venezuela, or UCV, Venezuela's biggest public university. During the past few weeks, Mr. González and other student leaders here have organized protest marches by tens of thousands of students opposed to a constitutional referendum set for Dec. 2. The proposed changes would dramatically expand Mr. Chávez's power and allow him to seek perpetual re-election.
The student movement has taken the government by surprise, highlighting an embarrassing irony for the fiery Mr. Chávez: University students, long a bastion of the left here as in the rest of Latin America, are overwhelmingly opposed to him. They have also emerged, along with the Catholic Church, as among the last major opposition to Mr. Chávez in a country where he already controls the congress, courts, army and most media outlets.
Students like Mr. González have traditionally played an outsized role in Latin America's turbulent politics. In the 1950s, University of Havana students led a struggle against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Fidel Castro, who forced Mr. Batista from power -- and who is Mr. Chávez's revered mentor -- got his start as a student leader at the university. In Mexico, a massacre of students and other protestors in 1968 helped inspire the creation of half a dozen small guerilla groups in the 1970s. And in Venezuela, UCV holds an important place in political history. In 1957, a student strike that began here eventually led to the downfall of dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez. Half a century later, many Venezuelans hope Mr. Chávez will meet his political Stalingrad at UCV. "Student struggles have always preceded great historical changes," says Fernando Ochoa, a former defense minister who was jailed when he participated in the 1957 strike as a high school student.
Anti-Chávez sentiment on Venezuelan campuses burst into the open in May, when the government pulled the plug on RCTV, a television network critical of Mr. Chávez. Tens of thousands of students viewed the move as a blow to freedom of speech. They were also alarmed by Mr. Chávez's promises that the "revolution within the university" would be next -- likely expanding government control over areas like the curriculum. They took to the streets, creating a protest movement in campuses across the country. The Dec. 2 referendum has sparked a round of new protests. Caught off guard, Mr. Chávez has called the students "terrorists" and written them off as "pampered, rich mama's boys." UCV, which charges no tuition, has a range of students, from the scions of businessmen to the sons of taxi drivers.
Mr. Chávez's description also hardly fits Mr. González. The 27-year-old, sixth-year law student grew up in a poor household that dreamed of a Communist Venezuela. His father, a print-machine operator, was a high-ranking member of the Bandera Roja, or Red Flag, a hard-line Marxist-Leninist party that maintained a guerrilla force until as recently as the mid-1990s. Its members revered Josef Stalin as well as Albania's xenophobic Enver Hoxha. As a boy, Mr. González remembers packing off to marches with his sisters, Dolores Engels and Ilyich, named in honor of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. As a young man, Mr. González burnished his leftist credentials, joining Marxist youth groups and following his father into the Bandera Roja. He traveled to Socialist youth conferences in Latin America. Mr. González was still in his teens when Mr. Chávez was voted into office in late 1998. Even then, he says, he was skeptical about Mr. Chávez's socialist rhetoric, as are many Venezuelan leftists. Mr. Chávez, a lieutenant colonel who had staged an unsuccessful coup attempt in 1992, would be more authoritarian than egalitarian, Mr. González reasoned.
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119586925917802724.html
Friday, November 30, 2007
Breaking News! The Pollocks Are Fake!
The totally Nerdolicious and charismatic forensic scientist James Martin wittily proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that there is something the Matter with the Pollocks!!!
If you want the straight story, the cache of alleged Jackson Pollock works found by the son of artists who were friends with the late Abstract Expressionist has been disputed for years, generating controversies among art historians, gallerists, curators, conservators, scientists and lawyers. Many of the disputed works are on view at the Boston College Museum in a show called Pollock Matters. But at a Standing Room Only panel organized by the International Foundation for Art Research, which I was extremely fortunate to attend, a leading expert on Pollock and two scientists raised serious questions against the attribution.
Here is the link to the NYTimes article:
Scientist Presents Case Against Possible Pollocks
By RANDY KENNEDY
Published: November 29, 2007
A large group of paintings discovered several years ago and thought by some to be by Jackson Pollock included many containing paints and materials that were not available until after the artist’s death in 1956.
For full story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/arts/29pollock.html?ex=1354078800&en=e6e960a6e1929ed1&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
The brilliant art historian and Pollock expert Pepe Karmel began the evening's lectures by demonstrating that the focus on materials since the works were first unveiled means that the issue of connoisseurship has been overlooked. He showed how, looking carefully at the color, composition, application of paint, and condition of the works, one can compare those with Matter provenance to known Pollocks and find notable differences between the two. Giving very specific examples, he demonstrated why there is something the matter with the Matter pictures which look like the work of someone who has taken Greenberg's paradigm of "all overness" literally, there are problems with scale, with the grounds used, and many other issues.
The works look more like Herbert Matter's known pictures than Pollock's, so, he suggested, could they be works by Matter experimenting "in the manner of Pollock"?
Then Richard Newman, a scientist from the MFA Boston spoke, he was very impartial in tone and summarized various studies conducted by scientists on these works.
Finally, James Martin presented for the first time the results of his research. He had allegedly been threatened with lawsuits if he spoke publicly about his research. This of course made listening to its unveiling all the more exciting. Martin, who works with the FBI among other institutions, combined police-type research, interviews, and the like, with hundreds of scientific tests. He enraptured the entire room, you could hear a pin drop, and there were gasps as he developed his arguments. It was like a live artworld version of CSI!!! Who knew that science could be so exciting? It is when a life-or-death issue is at stake: do we or do we not have a new body of work by one of the canonized Masters of American art? If so, how many millions are they worth?
Martin went over many inconsistencies in Alex Matter's stories regarding the date(s) the works were found and the location(s) where they were found. He also mentioned that he examined the warehouse records of the storage where they were found and that Matter and his mother had access to the space (this led me to ask if they knew the works were there all along or perhaps placed them there after Herbert Matter died?) He conclusively showed that the boards used in some of these works were not produced until the mid 1970s, he also discussed at length the pigments. Most of those were from the mid-1970s or later. Then and thankfully using layman's terms as much as he could, he explained why he learned that many of the works include these pigments from the 1970s-80s at the lowest layer, and then are covered over with pigments available starting in the 1960s. Some of these pigments available only as of the 1970s are used for the initials "JP" in some works. He added that for some, this type of situation may raise questions of intentional misattribution and fraud.
Of course, to my recollection, all three were careful not to literally say that the works are fake, but they presented scholarly arguments that convinced me for one, that they are.
I felt like I had been a witness to a historic event that will be part of art history.
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