The Bowdoin Orient

On Wednesday, the artist and activist Atena Farghadani was released from prison in Iran. She was incarcerated about a year ago for creating a political cartoon advocating for reproductive rights and against members of the government. It was her second release. After her first one, the 29-year-old Farghadani made an online video that detailed her experience in prison—including solitary confinement and brutal violence—which landed her in jail once more. In addition to these two convictions, Farghadani has also been charged with threatening national security, insulting the Iranian government and even partaking in “indecent contact” upon shaking her lawyer’s hand after trial. Although international art unions and activist groups alike have stood behind Farghadani through the duration of her ordeal, she plans to remain in Iran. Despite past persecution, Iran is her home. Her attorney, in a statement, wrote that Farghadani’s lifelong dedication to art and activism comes at a “great price;” yet, a vital one in the face of humanity and peace.

Activism often comes from a place of love: one cannot hope for improvement without deep and shining optimism. Perhaps this care relates to Farghadani’s decision to remain in Iran. Concerning her practice, her art exists most poignantly within its initial state: in interaction with contemporary Iranian politics. Placing the work—and her physical self—outside of Iran’s political system impacts its significance, as well as her own identity. Art, as a mediation between the activist self and its author’s society, strikes several complex balances. This is not a new liminality to artist/activists, who straddle multiple boundaries simultaneously. Perhaps the most famous character of this specific duality is China’s Ai Weiwei, who has become somewhat of a posterboy of contemporary art as a reaction to the imposing Chinese government. 

The visual language of activism, understood as a reaction to injustice or violations to human rights, is powerful and constantly in flux. Its associated artworks thus shift dramatically regarding national context. In developing rigid, authoritarian governments, artists are first are foremost and heavily oppressed: art is an unknown fear that is emblematic of “free speech,” of anti-censorship. Art represents each power, voice and vehicle. This perhaps explains the shared persecution of Atena Farghadani and Ai Weiwei, who differ by their countries of origin and their respective attributes. There is a distinct and inadmissible difference regarding their international position in relation to the world, but also, in relation to us.

We read global art activism from a Western perspective, and specifically an American one: our enormous and diversely complicated nation often considers itself a form of mediation upon the entire world. This is not quite true, as mediation implies a certain equality and peace. America’s contemporary identity arises out of both idealized values and great oppression, and it is historically, socially and economically distinct. This being said, our country is in interaction—a past, present and future interaction—with every other nation in the world, and it maintains an immense amount of capital. An example of this took place last month when the United States Senate bi-partisanly and unanimously voted to ban the import of Syrian art objects and artifacts trafficked to likely finance terror groups. America’s global and economic power is enormous, and thus, we have an enormous responsibility to respect the national identities of both ourselves and others.

This can be done through the immeasurably powerful weapon of the arts, necessary now more than ever. Art is an imperative force in our changing world. In this column throughout the semester, I have sought to explore the intersections between art and society: particularly within the insular places of Bowdoin and America. I wanted to argue a fundamental importance of arts, but I found that arts courses are all important things by default. In some ways, I tried to prove something I already knew: human nature is contingent upon the arts, which remind us of the interconnectedness of all things.

A couple of weeks ago, I overheard a student in the Brunswick Junior High School class I tutor complain about her piano lessons. Although seventh-grade sentimentalism often confronts me in that classroom, nothing had struck me like this remark before. I turned to her. I couldn’t stop myself. Be grateful for those lessons. I had them too. Then I thought of my younger self, who was awkward amidst variations of heights and stages of puberty at a magnet school in Manhattan. I thought of what playing piano brought me then. My school was also predominantly white— although Upper-East-Side-white, not Maine-white— and all of the strange spaces I ended up coursing through at 13 (as a result of the piano) were white too.

At 13 years old, I found myself the keyboardist of an indie pop all-girl band. This band was a lot of things, but at its core it was a DIY art project that argued cuteness and youth in music could be revolutionary and feminist. In two years, I went from performing recitals to dark bars on the Lower East Side to comedy shows to concert venues on a European tour with my favorite singer. It was special. I became young and musical and privy to a world that seemed far away from that of my classmates. I thought indie music gave me a way out of the averageness and awkwardness of adolescence. In some ways, it allowed me to grow up quickly. In other ways, it did not let me grow at all.

I left my project of two years because touring did not agree with public school. But I left indie because I could not fit its world. Even if I was a good musician, I would never be lithe and pale enough, which I felt deeply as a personal fault. Despite the girl-power and riot-grrrl aphorisms I touted, indie provided no guidance to navigating my identity, which was lonesomely darker and different from those of my bandmates and everyone around me. My Asian-ness pushed boundaries and thus I could feel the edges of the indie’s racial structures. Racism is strange this way. It pervades subcultures that are committed to artistic integrity and nurturing the independent spirit outside of commercial media. In all of that good, insidious individualism and prejudice still distort the world like light through a prism.

I did love music, although I did not love what surrounded it. Something that my friends at Bowdoin remind me of—over three-hour dinners at the vertical tables in Thorne—is that artistic remarkability is not unique here. Many of us have dabbled in different worlds—art, acting, modeling, dance—and still end up here. This is not to say that performing arts careers are sacrificed for education. Rather, the worlds of art can be compared to a world like Bowdoin, where issues of racism and shifting demographics often take the center slot on the front page of the newspaper and the implicitness of being white is challenged by students of color. These are the skills an artist of any sort needs to navigate a world as systematically white as indie, not as an anomaly but as an extraordinary.

An exemplar artist of color in indie is Hari Kondabolu ’04, who spoke candidly about his experiences at Bowdoin last weekend. Kondabolu’s rise to comedy stardom can be attributed to a couple things. Firstly, that he is a good comedian. Secondly, he confronts issues of race humorously and head-on, which he learned to do at Bowdoin, and has spoken about in the Orient. This was of interest to me, seeing as Kondabolu and I performed at the same types of comedy clubs in 2010, but nowadays, he is on the stage of Pickard Theater and I am in the balconies first tier. Perhaps that is a measurable value for spending time in a world like Bowdoin.

This means that there is also an argument to be made for the liberation of indie music. Last week, I watched the Japanese-born Asian American musician Mitski’s first video, and was deeply overcome by her clear engagement and discussion of race. It has been a long time coming, but Asian American indie artists are gaining recognition by the nature of identities which is something I wouldn’t have believed could happen years ago. This is particularly moving to me as I think back to my seventh grade self, who toiled at the piano and believed for a while that she would never forsake music for college, let alone a tiny one in Maine. Then again, it is easy to sign a life away before you know what it will hold. I am glad to feel the world shifting and changing beneath my feet.

There is a particular sheen of gold that falls upon the desert at sunset. It is unlike the pale northeastern light that rises and sinks upon the Maine snow over 2,000 miles away. It is unlike anything I have ever experienced prior to visiting Arizona on an Alternative Spring Break (ASB) trip. Despite this, the desert was still somewhat familiar to me. It is the same landscape of Manifest Destiny paintings and made­-for-­TV ­movies about the Old West. It is the same desert of the postcard sky that breaks into an untouchable prism of purples, so sun­spun that representations appear flat and gaudy. Perhaps this is because the implications of the desert far surpass its visuals.

When participating in and then writing about such a trip, one inherits a set of internal politics. Traveling, gaining, then creating something out of the experience is both reflection and representation. I am not from the borderlands, so I am a tourist and a liberal arts student engaging with a place and its host of issues. Our ASB studied the migrant crisis at the Arizona/Sonora border and the economic, social and legislative systems that influence it. It was often emotional, terrifying and deeply moving at the same time. Although it would take a half­ semester of seminars and a week in the desert to even begin to describe this, some key thoughts arise as relevant to the liberal arts education, particularly regarding understanding the systematic borderlands through visual thinking.

Within this system, to be a citizen studying casualties of citizenship is a strange, paradoxical role. It is nearly as strange as the action of learning from those with less in order to better oneself or self ­knowledge. Often humanitarian groups we met that worked directly within the crisis would relay a vague, hopeful sentiment of us students eventually affecting policy or creating awareness of the issue. This was a general bid, but as a student primarily studying art and literature, I found myself challenging my engagement with the border rather distinctly: for being an arts student does not put me in a place of direct influence—I will likely never create policy—but rather in a peripheral location. Although artists have been creating work about and on the border for decades, I am a visitor and my influence exists in a liminal space. This personal conflict preserves, but not without the understanding that the border and the borderlands are too a liminal space, and thus to engage with them as a visual system is possible.Besides the sun, the chicory air and the variable tones of russet and stucco, a distinctive trait of the desert is its effervescent, unyielding heat. It creeps higher throughout the day until it matches the temperature of the human body. To spend an hour in the sun is difficult; to spend a day trekking the border is deadly. For migrants that cross the desert, it is more than just landscape, it is death. Thousands of people have died crossing within the past two decades.

Despite border relations being a popular political issue, the fact is that the borderlands are far more. They are a home, an economy and a weapon. It is difficult to ruminate upon the beauty of a landscape when it puts human lives at stake. These are some of the paradoxes of the border, factors that make the space liminal, as if in between two worlds. Application of the arts cannot project a simple course of action and change, but then again, this is not a simple situation.Visual thinking invokes something even more complex. People are dying at the border as a result of a system of deterrence involving a several tactics, but most famously, a wall. When our group took our enterprise van into the desert sand to visit this wall in person, we found it to be better described as a gate, or a fence. The first thing I noticed about the wall was that its rust ­colored stature soared like a piece of public large-­scale artwork, and contained nearly as much symbolic value. There is immense weight in thinking of the border line as a representation. If the 16­ million dollar per mile manifestation of the gate is purely symbolic—as it is insecure in places—then what does this mean for the fundamentals of our country and the values that are fiercely and tenaciously guarded in the borderlands?

The relationship between art and the borderlands continues to merge and morph. Liminal spaces are not unfamiliar to the arts nor is most sublime paradox of the beautiful and the terrible coexisting as one. The liberal arts, over 2,000 miles away from Maine, continue to suggest ways of thinking about the 2,000 mile stretch of border.

A body can disintegrate within three days of extreme desert conditions. The landscape, with its variations of cacti and oscillating droughts, carries a particular history that cannot be ignored. The poet Elizabeth Brewster wrote, “people are made of places / They carry with them / hints of jungles or mountains, a tropic grace / or the cool eyes of sea-gazers”. The converse of this idea is that places are made of their people. All of those bones in the desert are what make America. America, vast and golden and destined, stretches a liminal space between coasts. As tan and tantalizing as  the Arizona landscape was, nothing about it was truly foreign to me, not even the sun. We are never visitors of our own country; we are its participants, and its bounty. 

My first act of early-teenage rebellion was buying a sewing machine. I found it on Craigslist in early July, and so found myself, 14 years old, exchanging $35 for a stranger’s spring cleaning leftovers—a compact, simple-stitch, late 1960s Singer. I told my Chinese parents—who thought I was going through a phase—that it was on loan from a friend for the summer. The temperamental machine didn’t even last that long, perhaps because it was old, or perhaps because I stayed up until 2 a.m. every day that summer splitting threads and breaking needles.At first, it was fun to make colorful, textural things; then the things made me. I studied clothing the way a shy, book-savvy young girl does: through literature. I hoarded back-issues of Vogue to analyze fashion trends in America. While these were phases, sewing—building clothing for my individual, Asian-American, adolescent body—was not. When I wore what I made, I found that it lent me the most compelling case for uniqueness. The way I dressed validated my personality and my body concurrently. It asserted the reality of my existence.

To align the outer self with an expression of the inner self is a cultural/political act, especially for those who face discrimination and stereotyping. In my experience, being Asian in America has always come with a set of connotations from assumed identities. Making clothes let me in on a secret: I could slip into different perceptions based on the way I dressed. I was not another nameless Asian if I dressed like a Warhol Superstar or a Riot Grrrl. By rooting myself in American sartorial history, I could assert aspects of my identity that I wanted to emphasize, rather than those prescribed to me. This was a revelation: the power of playing dress up. The care I devoted to the way I dressed was an effort to affect the split-second assessment others made of me based on my ethnicity. Dressing with deliberacy and style awarded me just a second more of contemplation.

This valuable extra second has never been a case of life or death for me. Asians are stereotyped, above all, as being docile. For other people of color, stereotypes are different, dangerous. In 2012, a 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot in the gated community in which he lived while wearing a hoodie. Martin’s death sparked national protest, with the hoodie becoming a symbol against unjust racial profiling. In this case, the haunting image of the hoodie, which may or may not have affected how Martin’s shooter perceived him, is a garment weighted with cultural implication. In America, clothing is far more than just clothing. Perhaps if Martin had been afforded that extra second, he wouldn’t have been unjustly, lethally judged. Then again, perhaps not: a reality of America is that it is not fair. 

These two very different situations emphasize the systematic implications of appearance. Style provides a flexibility in perception that is radical for people of color in America, who often control very little about how they are seen. Fashion is not just for the vacuous: clothing is a tool for validating the marginalized body, for asserting presence and existence and identity, and thus a tool of power and privilege. With this in mind, there is something inherently vicious in using this power to disrespect or reduce others. To perpetuate stereotype by mocking or appropriating is invalidating and thus, inhumane. It engages the same system that creates otherness, that argues that wearing a hoodie as a black American is a good enough reason for death.

“Style,” Maya Angelou wrote, “allows [a] person to appear neither inferior in one location nor superior in the other.” Style elasticizes boundaries as it moves beyond socio-economic classification and fleeting judgements. I learned this by the lamplight of my sewing machine. At Bowdoin, we learn this by way of engaging in our community, which includes many brave and articulate voices of color. In America, style can be a weapon for those who need it. However, it is not ultimately strong enough to save them from the line of gunfire. This is the work that must be done by American institutions. It is difficult to change a system to protect those it has historically excluded. All the same, it is far more difficult to exist in it. Since this is what Bowdoin demands of students of color, it is merited that students of color demand institutional change of Bowdoin. It is just about time for spring cleaning. 

This Valentine’s Day weekend, I had the pleasure of participating in Eve Ensler’s canonically feminist and controversial show, “The Vagina Monologues.” Bowdoin’s annual performance of Ensler’s 1996 work seeks to provide a forum for conversation as well as a community to women on campus. Last week, Surya Milner highlighted several of the show’s concerns and criticisms in the Bowdoin Orient.

More often than not, American culture sees the word “feminist” followed by “controversial.” In the case of “The Vagina Monologues,” these concerns are merited; Ensler’s theater essentially defines the female by biological parts, inaccurately equating womanhood with ownership of a vagina. Although I was aware of this imprecision when I auditioned, I still struggled with it throughout the duration my participation. Womanhood, like feminism, is deeply complex and more than just parts. However, “The Vagina Monologues” open discourse regardless of their scope of representation, and have done so for the past decade. My participation allowed me to think extensively about my favorite part of feminism, which is that it offers the opportunity to reconsider and deconstruct.

If anything, Ensler’s focus upon the vagina can be seen as an homage to the vagina’s role in arts, both ideologically and visually. The vagina has historically been rallying point for women: thus, the goal of the monologues is to unite women under a common experience. As a visual symbol in art, the vagina has done similar and notable things for America feminism. In a lineage of feminist art, these rallying points have made woman artists quite successful.

However, one must still keep in mind the parameters against women for artistic success. Use of the vagina in art saw two of the 20th century’s most iconic artists find great achievement. In the mid to late 70’s, a woman and an artist named Judy Chicago created an installation piece that concurrently functioned as feminist encyclopedia. Currently at the Brooklyn Museum, “The Dinner Party” comprises of a large triangular table with the place settings of prominent women of Western history. Each setting is individually customized to represent its sitter, with each plate depicting the large, abstract vagina meant to represent commonality between women.

Another woman artist, Georgia O’Keefe, became known for creating dream-like abstractions of nature. Despite O’Keefe’s own reluctance to align with these interpretation, her paintings are now popularly seen as floral and feminist representations of vaginas. As exemplified by the success of these two artists, the symbolism of the vagina is an essential component of historical feminism in America. Through the tireless work of many woman and artists, the vagina has become a part of the art historical canon and a nexus for feminist art.

The vagina has also become an impetus for ideological debate for feminists, as contemporary feminism includes transgender and LGTBQA+ rights. As previously stated: womanhood does not equate to having or wanting to have a vagina. The feminist rally point is exclusionary, and works like Chicago’s and Ensler’s do not reflect this. Yet, this is not to say that these works have no place in today’s society: “The Dinner Party” stands monument to a time when feminists truly believed in the phrase, “divisions are diversions.” Diversity in feminism proves this quite the contrary: divisions are exactly what makes being a woman rich, complex and fascinating. Despite its pitfalls, Ensler’s play continues to find function in its controversy.

As a participant of “The Vagina Monologues,” the show’s reception was overwhelmingly positive. As a feminist, this was slightly disappointing. The presence of such a show on a college campus should provoke conversation about womanhood. If we do not talk about “The Vagina Monologues,” and why it is both feminist and controversial, then it loses its dynamism. A lack of conversation of the show’s shortcomings suggests that Ensler’s play might still have a function on our campus. Perhaps there is something to be said for keeping up with the times.

If you participated in the Winter Break book club of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me,” then perhaps you were, as I was, moved by Coates’ uncanny articulation of “the Dream.” To portray the white, suburban, American Dream as the crème of the machine of systematic oppression, Coates invokes sensory descriptions: the Dream “is perfect houses with nice lawns,” he writes; it “smells like peppermint.” These abstractions imply the idea of the Dream rather than explain it. Despite its ambiguity, the bittersweetness is communicated. I found myself carrying the unanswerable question of the Dream with me all throughout break: how can I fix the flaws of a fraying system?

Like good questions, good art lingers in the mind for just as long as it needs to. This is a fact that arises out of studying the arts in any capacity. At Bowdoin, a promise of the liberal arts is the ability to “count... Art an intimate friend”. What exactly does this entail? William De Witt Hyde, a man who was just as philosophical as Coates, provides us with another example of indirect language in addressing the benefits of the liberal arts in his Offer of the College. Hyde and Coates perhaps resort to verbiage as a way of circumventing a difficult meaning.

Both writers grapple with complex questions. “Difficult” barely gropes at the throes of the broken society which the Dream articulates. “Between the World and Me” does not end on a note of hope or change. Coates offers empathy to the Dreamers, who will “have to learn to struggle themselves,” but he does not offer answers. He is not supposed to.

This does not mean that the answers are not desired. The young readers of Coates grew up in post-9/11 America, where polished political campaigns promised uplift from a despairing country. Our generation has come of age only to find in our hands a broken society and a dying earth, with ourselves, our humankind, as personally responsible. A ferocity for justice, beyond else, courses through classrooms, discussions, homes and specifically, college campuses like this one.

This generation’s inclination for change demands answers. I imagine shaking my copy of “Between the World and Me,” hoping for secret messages from Coates to fall out. Despite the yearnings, our leaders can only reflect the conclusions we ourselves reach. Coates relays, as did President Rose in his “Why do issues of race matter if I’m white?” symposium, as do other Orient columnists, as do the best writers and thinkers of this generation, that answers do not come quickly. We cannot simply trade the broken machine; we must fix its problematic parts. We can, however, lean on what still works.

Art, in any of its effervescent, ever-expanding forms, provides those viable, moving parts. This, I believe, is where we will find the answers. In this column, I will be exploring the interactions between art and society—how they affect and inform each other at Bowdoin and beyond. I believe that the arts are healing in the face of social discord; they help us provoke our histories, explore ourselves and search for the answers. The value of the arts is omnipresent; it is not limited to James Bowdoin III’s (recently catalogued) collection. It is not limited to museums, to 340 Miles North, to the Beam classroom. Spaces dedicated to art are necessary and important, but evoking the arts where they are not designated is perhaps where they are most impactful. That is the value of this type of education. Hyde thought it important that we all know that, and I agree.

Coates writes the point that “The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing.” Conversely, art antagonizes the Dream by challenging it, providing tools for its dismantling. Ideally, we will find the answers that will help us break the Dream and explain the liberal arts and make our weird warm world into a safer and cleaner place. For now, we choose the questions that will make the answers matter. The world is in our hands for a little while longer.