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Gorbachev, Reagan, and the Much-Deserved End of the Soviet Union
The world is much freer today than when I was born, largely because the “Evil Empire” collapsed.
The Soviet Union was awful. It killed at least 20 million of its own people (some say as many as 60 million). It enslaved and impoverished
its own citizens, as well as those who languished behind the “Iron Curtain.”
Ronald Reagan deserves the lion’s share of the credit for the collapse of communism – in part because he restored America’s economic vitality and built up the nation’s military, but also because he directly condemned the immorality of Marxism(often using humor).
But since the last dictator of the Soviet Union just died, let’s examine Mikhail Gorbachev’s role.
An editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal is worth reading because it explains that his biggest achievement was not using bloodshed to preserve communist rule.
Mikhail Gorbachev…rose through the Communist ranks but presided over the end of the regime. His greatest achievement was allowing the Cold War to end without a war or a worse conflagration that the world feared for decades. …He understood that the country he inherited in 1985 when he became general secretary of the Communist Party was losing the Cold War to a revitalized West.
Its economy wasn’t the juggernaut of central-planning genius that the CIA had assessed at the time. …Ronald Reagan had reversed the U.S. malaise of the 1970s with a defense buildup and reforms that unleashed America’s private economy. …Gorbachev’s reforms were intended to revive the Soviet regime to be able to compete with Reagan’s America. …The countries of Eastern Europe, long enslaved as members of the Warsaw Pact, saw their moment to break free. Gorbachev refused to send in the tanks as his Soviet predecessors had done in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. …mutual trust between Gorbachev and Reagan…helped to bring the Cold War to an end with freedom as the victor.
George Will is also grateful that Gorbachev allowed Soviet communism to whither away without violence. Here’s some of what he wrote in his Washington Post column.
Failing upward into the world’s gratitude, Mikhail Gorbachev became a hero by precipitating the liquidation of the political system he had tried to preserve… Like Christopher Columbus, who accidentally discovered the New World, Gorbachev stumbled into greatness by misunderstanding where he was going.
…Gorbachev’s most noble facet, his “extraordinary reluctance” to use violence to hold the Soviet system together. …President Ronald Reagan…described the Soviet Union as “the focus of evil in the modern world.” …he launched a high-tech challenge to a Soviet Union in which 30 percent of hospitals lacked indoor plumbing. …The Soviet Union’s brittle husk crumbled as Gorbachev struggled to preserve it. His reputation rests on the world’s amnesia about this.
Professor William Taubman of Amherst also opinedin today’s Wall Street Journal.
He seems more sympathetic to Gorbachev than George Will, but also lauds him for opting against a bloody crackdown.
Mikhail Gorbachev…deserves to be celebrated… When he entered office in 1985, Gorbachev had almost unlimited power. He could have presided indefinitely over the status quo. Instead, he…acquiesced in the dismemberment of the Soviet empire without the violence that accompanied the collapse of most other empires.
…he persuaded communist hard-liners to vote themselves out of office. …Gorbachev was happy to give up domination of Eastern Europe… Gorbachev tried to save the Soviet Union but ended up hastening its destruction. When it became clear in late 1991 that his great project was doomed, he could have lashed out, mobilizing the military to save him and what was left of the U.S.S.R., at the risk of civil war. Instead, he bowed out with dignity.
Matt Welch of Reason also weighs in, emphasizing that Gorbachev was not great, but that he allowed a great thing to happen.
f the late Mikhail Gorbachev had gotten his way, the world would look a lot different than it does now. Socialism would still be the dominant economic system from Leipzig to Yakutsk. The Warsaw Pact would still exist; a unified Germany would not, nor would the independent Baltic states.
Above all, the planet would still be blighted by the wheezing and malevolent existence of what Ronald Reagan rightly described as “the evil empire”—the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. …Yet we should not judge the eighth and final Soviet leader, who died Tuesday at the age of 91, by his base geopolitical desires but rather by the glorious human flourishing that his actions—and especially his inactions—allowed to take place. …November 9, 1989 became the most liberating day of the most liberating month of the most liberating year in human history.
Last but not least, David Satter shared some insightsin a column late last year for the Wall Street Journal.
During its 70-year life, the Soviet regime killed at least 20 million of its citizens for political reasons. …however, the Soviet Union wasn’t indomitable. In 1988 the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev allowed a space for free information in Soviet society, creating a contradiction between free speech and a system based on lies.
When glasnost wasn’t repressed, it led to the collapse of the system. …President Reagan rejected the idea that the West had no alternative to accommodation. In the words of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, he took the offensive “ideologically and geostrategically.” …As for his strategy, Reagan said it was simple: “We win. They lose.” …the U.S. rearmament drive began to bear fruit. …Stunned by these developments, the Soviets eventually decided to take the risk of major reforms.
As you might expect, I like the emphasis on Reagan’s role. Yet another reason why he is the only great president of my lifetime.
The takeaway from today’s column is that Gorbachev mostly deserves praise for what he didn’t do. By opting against a crackdown, he allowed the Soviet Union to wind up on the “ash heap of history.”
And that’s a great result.
P.S. Here’s my collection of columns about the grim 100th anniversary of communism.
P.P.S. And here’s my collection of anti-collectivism humor, including many columns mocking communism.
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Mikhail Gorbachev, seen in 1984, when he was a Russian Politburo member and second in line at the Kremlin.‘A man one can do business with’
Hoping to shift resources to the civilian sector of the Soviet economy, Gorbachev began to argue in favor of an end to the arms race with the West.
However, throughout his six years in office, Gorbachev always seemed to be moving too fast for the party establishment — which saw its privileges threatened — and too slow for more radical reformers, who hoped to do away with the one-party state and the command economy.
Desperately trying to stay in control of the reform process, he seemed to have underestimated the depth of the economic crisis. He also seemed to have had a blind spot for the power of the nationality issue: Glasnost created ever-louder calls for independence from the Baltics and other Soviet republics in the late 1980s.
He was successful in foreign policy, but primarily from an international perspective, with other world leaders taking note. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called him “a man one can do business with.”
In 1986, face to face with American President Ronald Reagan at a summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, Gorbachev made a stunning proposal: eliminate all long-range missiles held by the United States and the Soviet Union. It was the beginning of the end of the Cold War.
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 “for his leading role in the peace process which today characterizes important parts of the international community.”
The pact that resulted, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, endured as a pillar of arms control for three decades until, in 2019, the United States formally withdrew and the Russian government said it had been consigned to the trash can.
Gorbachev speaks during a visit to Ottawa, Canada in 1990.Bettina Aptheker pictured below:
Moral Support: “One Dimensional Man” author Herbert Marcuse accompanies Bettina Aptheker, center, and Angela Davis’ mother, Sallye Davis, to Angela Davis’ 1972 trial in San Jose. Associated Press
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Francis Schaeffer has written extensively on art and culture spanning the last 2000years and here are some posts I have done on this subject before : Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 10 “Final Choices” , episode 9 “The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence”, episode 8 “The Age of Fragmentation”, episode 7 “The Age of Non-Reason” , episode 6 “The Scientific Age” , episode 5 “The Revolutionary Age” , episode 4 “The Reformation”, episode 3 “The Renaissance”, episode 2 “The Middle Ages,”, and episode 1 “The Roman Age,” . My favorite episodes are number 7 and 8 since they deal with modern art and culture primarily.(Joe Carter rightly noted, “Schaeffer—who always claimed to be an evangelist and not aphilosopher—was often criticized for the way his work oversimplifiedintellectual history and philosophy.” To those critics I say take a chill pillbecause Schaeffer was introducing millions into the fields of art andculture!!!! !!! More people need to read his works and blog about thembecause they show how people’s worldviews affect their lives!
J.I.PACKER WROTE OF SCHAEFFER, “His communicative style was not that of acautious academic who labors for exhaustive coverage and dispassionate objectivity. It was rather that of an impassioned thinker who paints his vision of eternal truth in bold strokes and stark contrasts.Yet it is a fact that MANY YOUNG THINKERS AND ARTISTS…HAVE FOUND SCHAEFFER’S ANALYSES A LIFELINE TO SANITY WITHOUT WHICH THEY COULD NOT HAVE GONE ON LIVING.”
Francis Schaeffer’s works are the basis for a large portion of my blog posts andthey have stood the test of time. In fact, many people would say that many of the things he wrote in the 1960’s were right on in the sense he saw where ourwestern society was heading and he knew that abortion, infanticide and youthenthansia were moral boundaries we would be crossing in the coming decadesbecause of humanism and these are the discussions we are having now!)
There is evidence that points to the fact that the Bible is historically true asSchaeffer pointed out in episode 5 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? There is a basis then for faith in Christ alone for our eternal hope. This linkshows how to do that.
Francis Schaeffer in Art and the Bible noted, “Many modern artists, it seems to me, have forgotten the value that art has in itself. Much modern art is far too intellectual to be great art. Many modern artists seem not to see the distinction between man and non-man, and it is a part of the lostness of modern man that they no longer see value in the work of art as a work of art.”
Many modern artists are left in this point of desperation that Schaeffer points out and it reminds me of the despair that Solomon speaks of in Ecclesiastes. Christian scholar Ravi Zacharias has noted, “The key to understanding the Book of Ecclesiastes is the term ‘under the sun.’ What that literally means is you lock God out of a closed system, and you are left with only this world of time plus chanceplus matter.” THIS IS EXACT POINT SCHAEFFER SAYS SECULAR ARTISTSARE PAINTING FROM TODAY BECAUSE THEY BELIEVED ARE A RESULTOF MINDLESS CHANCE.
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Francis Schaeffer pictured below:
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Bettina Aptheker pictured below:
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Bettina’s father was Herbert Aptheker (July 31, 1915 – March 17, 2003) was an American Marxist historian and political activist. From the 1940s, Aptheker was a prominent figure in U.S. scholarly discourse. David Horowitz described Aptheker as “the Communist Party’s most prominent Cold War intellectual”.[1]
Herbert Aptheker was a famous pictured below:
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Schaeffer compares communism with French Revolution and Napoleon.
1. Lenin took charge in Russia much as Napoleon took charge in France – when people get desperate enough, they’ll take a dictator.
Other examples: Hitler, Julius Caesar. It could happen again.
2. Communism is very repressive, stifling political and artistic freedom. Even allies have to be coerced. (Poland).
Communists say repression is temporary until utopia can be reached – yet there is no evidence of progress in that direction. Dictatorship appears to be permanent.
3. No ultimate basis for morality (right and wrong) – materialist base of communism is just as humanistic as French. Only have “arbitrary absolutes” no final basis for right and wrong.
How is Christianity different from both French Revolution and Communism?
Contrast N.T. Christianity – very positive government reform and great strides against injustice. (especially under Wesleyan revival).
Bible gives absolutes – standards of right and wrong. It shows the problems and why they exist (man’s fall and rebellion against God).
WHY DOES THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM CATCH THE ATTENTION OF SO MANY IDEALISTIC YOUNG PEOPLE? The reason is very simple.
In HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture, the late Francis A. Schaeffer wrote:
Materialism, the philosophic base for Marxist-Leninism, gives no basis for the dignity or rights of man. Where Marxist-Leninism is not in power it attracts and converts by talking much of dignity and rights, but its materialistic base gives no basis for the dignity or rights of man. Yet is attracts by its constant talk of idealism.
To understand this phenomenon we must understand that Marx reached over to that for which Christianity does give a base–the dignity of man–and took the words as words of his own. The only understanding of idealistic sounding Marxist-Leninism is that it is (in this sense) a Christian heresy. Not having the Christian base, until it comes to power it uses the words for which Christianity does give a base. But wherever Marxist-Leninism has had power, it has at no place in history shown where it has not brought forth oppression. As soon as they have had the power, the desire of the majority has become a concept without meaning.
Is Christianity at all like Communism?
Sometimes Communism sounds very “Christian” – desirable goals of equality, justice, etc but these terms are just borrowed from the New Testament. Schaeffer elsewhere explains by saying Marxism is a Christian heresy.
Below is a great article. Free-lance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Bettina Aptheker pictured below on left:
Bettina Aptheker (left) and Karen Yamashita
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A Christian Manifesto Francis Schaeffer
A video important to today. The man was very wise in the ways of God. And of government. Hope you enjoy a good solis teaching from the past. The truth never gets old.
The Roots of the Emergent Church by Francis Schaeffer
How Should We then Live Episode 7 small (Age of Nonreason)
#02 How Should We Then Live? (Promo Clip) Dr. Francis Schaeffer
Francis Schaeffer “BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY” Whatever…HTTHR
Professor Bettina F. Aptheker
Published on Nov 7, 2012
Visiting Professor from University of California at Santa Cruz.
Bettina Aptheker
| Bettina Aptheker | |
|---|---|
| Born | 13 September 1944 North Carolina, USA |
| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley San Jose State University University of California, Santa Cruz |
| Occupation | Activist, educator, author, |
| Spouse(s) | Jack Kurzweil (1965-1978), Kate Miller |
| Children | Two from first marriage |
| Parents | Herbert and Fay Aptheker |
Bettina Fay Aptheker (born September 13, 1944) is an American political activist, feminist, professor and author. A former member of the Communist Party USA like her parents, she was active in civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and has worked in developing feminist studies since the late 1970s.
Contents
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Biography[edit]
Early years and education[edit]
Aptheker was born in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to Fay Philippa Aptheker and Herbert Aptheker, first cousins who had married in Brooklyn. Both parents were political activists; her mother, who had been married before and was 10 years older than her husband, was a union organizer. Her father was a Marxist historian whose first book about slave revolts overturned previous conceptions of enslaved African Americans. He was a major figure in changing the writing of African-American history.[1] She was raised in Brooklyn, New York, where her Jewish parents, children of immigrants, had grown up. Her first job as a teenager was in the home of W.E.B. Du Bois, who was a good friend of her father.
Aptheker obtained her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley. As an activist in the W.E.B. Du Bois Club of the Communist Party USA, she was a leader in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement during the fall of 1964.
Ten years later, she partially retired from political activism and returned to academia for graduate work. In 1976 she completed her master’s degree in communications at San José State University, and started teaching there.
Cover of Aptheker’s May 1968 pamphlet,Columbia Inc.
Political career[edit]
Aptheker was a delegate to the June 1964 founding convention of the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs, a Communist Party-sponsored youth organization, held in San Francisco.[2]
She rose in influence to become a member of the governing National Committee of the CPUSA. She was remembered by the California party leader Dorothy Healey in her 1990 memoir as “one of the liveliest of the young people who rose to prominence in the party in the 1960s and also one of the warmest human beings I’ve ever met.”[3]
In 1968, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia divided the 120-member leadership of the CPUSA. All but three of the National Committee, headed by party leader Gus Hall, backed the intervention of Soviet tanks.[4] A meeting of the National Committee held over the Labor Day weekend backed Hall by a margin of five-to-one.[3] Bettina Aptheker denounced the invasion into Czechoslovakian internal affairs, however, and voted with the minority; she opposed her father Herbert Aptheker over this issue.[3] One of the CPUSA’s leading intellectuals, he and a majority of its leaders had defended the Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956.[4]
During the 1970s, Aptheker worked for the defense in the high-profile trial of Angela Davis, a long-time friend and fellow Communist Party member involved in George Jackson‘s attempt to escape from jail. She also wrote a book about the trial, which was published in 1974.[4]
Academic career[edit]
After completing her master’s degree, Aptheker taught African-American and Women’s Studies at San José State University. In the early 1980s, she completed a doctorate in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Since 1980, she has taught in the Feminist Studies department there.
Marriage and family[edit]
In 1965 Aptheker married her fellow student Jack Kurzweil, who was also a Communist activist. They divorced in 1978 after having two children together.
Since October 1979, Aptheker has been with Kate Miller, her life partner. They have three children between them (each woman had children in her first marriage). Aptheker is a grandmother.
About her father[edit]
In her memoir, Intimate Politics, (2006), she wrote about growing up in a leftist household, as what was called a “Red Diaper Baby.” She was strongly influenced in her activism by that of her parents. She also commented on her father’s scholarship. In addition to his commitment to the cause of justice for African Americans, she believed her father celebrated black resistance under slavery as an attempt “to compensate for his deep shame about the way, he believed, the Jews had acted during the Holocaust.”[5]
Her memoir reported that her father had sexually molested her from when she was 3 to age 13. In an opinion column written after her book was reviewed, Aptheker said she had earlier kept silent to shield her family.[6] Memories began to arise in 1999, after her mother’s death and when she began writing the memoir. When her father asked, “Did I ever hurt you as a child?,” she responded “yes” and explained the emotional effects of his treatment. He expressed anguish and sorrow, and they eventually reconciled. With counseling, she found she had suffered dissociation when young, as at the time her family was under great stress during the McCarthy years. Bettina Aptheker stressed her compassion for her father.[6]
Her assertion generated considerable controversy in the academic community because of her father’s stature as a scholar and Communist. Numerous letters were published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which had reviewed her book, and on the History News Network of George Mason University.[7] Some historians wondered how this news affected people’s perceptions of Herbert Aptheker’s work. Others questioned Bettina Aptheker’s credibility, classing her account in stories of “recovered memory.”[5] The historian Mark Rosenzweig wrote, “the truth about Herbert and Bettina is inaccessible to us.”[8] The historian Jesse Lemisch wrote in his second essay about the controversy, “Shhh! Don’t Talk about Herbert Aptheker”:
“…a general public silence by Old Leftists in response to the report of Herbert Aptheker’s sexual molestation of his daughter Bettina may be writing another chapter in the strange history of American Communism. Fellow Red Diaper Babies and many former Communists seem to want to sweep this under the rug – or, may I say, airbrush it – as if there had never been a Women’s Liberation Movement, and it had never occurred to anybody that there might be a connection between the personal and the political…”[9]
The controversy continued for months. In November 2007, the historian Christopher Phelps published an overview. He included the results of an interview with Kate Miller, who had been present during Aptheker’s 1999 conversation with her father about the abuse, and confirmed her account.[10]
Footnotes[edit]
- Jump up^ Aptheker, Bettina F. (2006). “Beginnings”. Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel. Emeryville, California: Seal Press. pp. 9–10. ISBN 978-1-58005-160-6.
- Jump up^ Francis X. Gannon, Biographical Dictionary of the Left: Volume II. Boston: Western Islands, 1971; pp. 182-183.
- ^ Jump up to:a b c Dorothy Healey and Maurice Isserman, Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990; p. 233.
- ^ Jump up to:a b c Horowitz, David (November 10, 2006). “The Political Is Personal”. Front Page Magazine. Retrieved February 11, 2011.
- ^ Jump up to:a b “Doubts expressed about his daughter’s story”. History News Network. 2006-10-30. Retrieved 2008-01-17.
- ^ Jump up to:a b Bettina Aptheker, “‘Did I ever hurt you when you were a child?'”, Los Angeles Times, 15 October 2006, accessed 19 January 2012
- Jump up^ “Search: Bettina and Herbert Aptheker”, History News Network, 61 responses
- Jump up^ Mark Rosenzweig (2006-10-30). “RE: Herbert and Bettina Aptheker”. Retrieved 2008-01-17.
- Jump up^ Jesse Lemisch, “Shhh! Don’t Talk about Herbert Aptheker”, History News Network
- Jump up^ Christopher Phelps, “Herbert Aptheker: His daughter’s partner confirms molestation charge”, The Nation, 5 November 2007, reprinted at History News Network, accessed 18 January 2012
Works[edit]
- Big Business and the American University. New York: New Outlook Publishers, 1966.
- Columbia Inc. New York: W.E.B. DuBois Clubs of America, May 1968.
- Racism and Reaction in the United States: Two Marxian Studies. With Herbert Aptheker. New York: New Outlook Publishers, 1971.
- The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976.
- The Unfolding Drama: Studies in U.S. History. With Herbert Aptheker. New York: International Publishers, 1979.
- Woman’s Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex and Class in American History. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982.
- Tapestries of Life: Women’s Work, Women’s Consciousness and the Meaning of Daily Life. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989.
- Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2006.
External links[edit]
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Featured artist Krzysztof Wodiczko
Art from Krzysztof Wodiczko
Krzysztof Wodiczko: Peace | Art21 “Exclusive”
Uploaded on Sep 24, 2010
Episode #121: “You cannot work towards peace being peaceful” says artist Krzystof Wodiczko, who explains this paradoxical position in terms of his personal experiences growing up in Poland under communist rule. Filmed at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Wodiczko’s interview is punctuated by the sound of sirens from outside, the city in a state of “full alert.”
By appropriating public buildings and monuments as backdrops for projections, Krzysztof Wodiczko focuses attention on ways in which architecture and monuments reflect collective memory and history. Projecting images of community members’ hands, faces, or entire bodies onto architectural façades, and combining those images with voiced testimonies, Wodiczko disrupts our traditional understanding of the functions of public space and architecture. He challenges the silent, stark monumentality of buildings, activating them in an examination of notions of human rights, democracy, and truths about the violence, alienation, and inhumanity that underlie countless aspects of social interaction in present-day society.
Learn more about Krzysztof Wodiczko: http://www.art21.org/artists/krzyszto…
VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Gary Henoch. Sound: Steve Bores. Editor: Joaquin Perez . Special Thanks : Catherine Tatge, the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
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Krzysztof Wodiczko | Art21 | Preview from Season 3 of “Art in the Twenty-First Century” (2005)
Uploaded on Apr 8, 2008
Krzysztof Wodiczko creates large-scale slide and video projections of politically-charged images on architectural façades and monuments worldwide. By appropriating public buildings and monuments as backdrops for projections, Wodiczko focuses attention on ways in which architecture and monuments reflect collective memory and history.
Krzysztof Wodiczko is featured in the Season 3 episode “Power” of the Art21 series “Art in the Twenty-First Century”.
Learn more about Krzysztof Wodiczko: http://www.art21.org/artists/krzyszto…
© 2005-2007 Art21, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Krzysztof Wodiczko: Designer Adam Whiton | Art21 “Exclusive”
Uploaded on Jan 7, 2011
Episode #133: Filmed at the Interrogative Design Group offices at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, designer Adam Whiton discusses his work with artist Krzysztof Wodiczko. By developing innovative technology for projects such as “The Tijuana Projection” (2001), “Dis-Armor” (1999-2000), and “AEgis” (2000), Wodiczko and Whiton explore the potential for design to be used in a way that will “get people to think more…trigger questions and make people uncomfortable.”
By appropriating public buildings and monuments as backdrops for projections, Krzysztof Wodiczko focuses attention on ways in which architecture and monuments reflect collective memory and history. Projecting images of community members’ hands, faces, or entire bodies onto architectural façades, and combining those images with voiced testimonies, Wodiczko disrupts our traditional understanding of the functions of public space and architecture. He challenges the silent, stark monumentality of buildings, activating them in an examination of notions of human rights, democracy, and truths about the violence, alienation, and inhumanity that underlie countless aspects of social interaction in present-day society.
Learn more about Krzysztof Wodiczko: http://www.art21.org/artists/krzyszto…
VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Gary Henoch. Sound: Steve Bores. Editor: Joaquin Perez??. Artwork Courtesy: Interrogative Design Group & Krzysztof Wodiczko. Special Thanks?: Catherine Tatge, the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). @ 2011, Art21, Inc.
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About Krzysztof Wodiczko
Krzysztof Wodiczko was born in 1943 in Warsaw, Poland, and lives and works in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since 1980, he has created more than seventy large-scale slide and video projections of politically charged images on architectural façades and monuments worldwide. By appropriating public buildings and monuments as backdrops for projections, Wodiczko focuses attention on ways in which architecture and monuments reflect collective memory and history. In 1996, he added sound and motion to the projections, and began to collaborate with communities around chosen projection sites—giving voice to the concerns of heretofore marginalized and silent citizens who live in the monuments’ shadows. Projecting images of community members’ hands, faces, or entire bodies onto architectural façades, and combining those images with voiced testimonies, Wodiczko disrupts our traditional understanding of the functions of public space and architecture. He challenges the silent, stark monumentality of buildings, activating them in an examination of notions of human rights, democracy, and truths about the violence, alienation, and inhumanity that underlie countless aspects of social interaction in present-day society. Wodiczko has also developed “instruments” to facilitate survival, communication, and healing for homeless people and immigrants; these therapeutic devices—which Wodiczko envisions as technological prosthetics or tools for empowering and extending human abilities—address physical disability as well as economic hardship, emotional trauma, and psychological distress. Wodiczko heads the Interrogative Design Group, and is Director of the Center for Art, Culture, and Technology, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work has appeared in many international exhibitions, including the Bienal de São Paulo (1965, 1967, 1985); Documenta (1977, 1987); the Venice Biennale (1986, 2000); and the Whitney Biennial (2000). Wodiczko received the 1999 Hiroshima Art Prize for his contribution as an artist to world peace, and the 2004 College Art Association Award for Distinguished Body of Work.
Links
Galerie Lelong, New York
Krzysztof Wodiczko on the Art21 Blog
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Krzysztof Wodiczko
| Krzysztof Wodiczko | |
|---|---|
Personal Instrument, Warsaw, Poland, 1969
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| Born | 1943 (age 69–70) Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland |
| Occupation | industrial designer, tactical media artist |
| Years active | 1968—Present |
Krzysztof Wodiczko, born April 16, 1943, is an artist renowned for his large-scale slide and video projections on architectural facades and monuments. He has realized more than 80 such public projections in Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States.
War, conflict, trauma, memory, and communication in the public sphere are some of the major themes of an oeuvre that spans four decades. His practice, known as Interrogative Design, combines art and technology as a critical design practice in order to highlight marginal social communities and add legitimacy to cultural issues that are often given little design attention.[1]
He lives and works in New York City and teaches in Cambridge, Massachusetts where he is currently professor in residence of art and the public Domain for the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). Wodiczko was formerly director of the Interrogative Design Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he was a professor in the Visual Arts Program since 1991. He also teaches as Visiting Professor in the Psychology Department at the Warsaw School of Social Psychology.
Contents
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Early life[edit]
Krzysztof Wodiczko, son of Polish orchestra conductor Bohdan Wodiczko,[2] was born in 1943 during the Warsaw ghetto uprising and grew up in post-war, Soviet-occupied, Poland. In 1967 while still a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, he began collaborating with director Jozef Patkowski and the Experimental Studio on sound performances. He graduated in 1968 with an M.F.A. degree in industrial design and worked for the next two years at UNITRA, Warsaw, designing popular electronic products. From 1970 until his emigration to Canada in 1977, he designed professional optical, mechanical, and electronic instruments at the Polish Optical Works.[3]
In 1969, Wodiczko collaborated with Andrzej Dluzniewski and Wojchiech Wybieralski on a design proposal for a memorial to victims of Majdanek concentration camp in Poland. He also performed with Personal Instrument in the streets of Warsaw and participated in the Biennale de Paris as a leader of a group architectural project. He was a teaching assistant for two years, 1969–70, in the Basic Design Program at the Academy of Fine Arts before moving to the Warsaw Polytechnic Institute where he taught until 1976. Throughout the 1970s he continued his collaborations on sound and music performances with various musicians and artists.
In 1971, Wodiczko began work on Vehicle, which he tested the following year on the streets of Warsaw. In 1972 he created his first solo installation: Corridor at Galeria Wspolczesna, Warsaw. The following year he began exhibiting with Galeria Foksal, Warsaw. In 1975, Wodiczko traveled for the first time to the United States where he was artist-in-residence at the University of Illinois, Urbana and exhibited at N.A.M.E. Gallery, Chicago. He participated again in the Biennale de Paris, this time as a solo artist.
In 1976, Wodiczko began a two-year artist-in-residence program at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada. He emigrated from Poland in 1977, establishing residency in Canada teaching at the University of Guelph in Ontario, and began working with New York art dealer Hal Bromm. In 1979 he taught at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and continued teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design until 1981. From 1981-1982 he was artist in residence at the South Australian School of Art (currently part of the University of South Australia inAdelaide). In 1983, Wodiczko established residency in New York City teaching at the New York Institute of Technology, Old Westbury. The following year, he received Canadian citizenship and in 1986 resident-alien status in the United States. He began teaching at MIT in 1991, maintaining his residence in New York City while working in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Projections[edit]
Krzysztof Wodiczko began developing his public projections in 1980 interfacing the facades of urban architecture – whether public monuments, public buildings, or corporate architecture – with images of the body to juxtapose the physical space of architecture with the psycho-social space of the public realm. “In the process of our socialization,” the artist writes, “the very first contact with a public building is no less important than the moment of social confrontation with the father, through which our sexual role and place in society [are] constructed. Early socialization through patriarchal sexual discipline is extended by the later socialization through the institutional architecturalization of our bodies. Thus the spirit of the father never dies, continuously living as it does in the building which was, is, and will be embodying, structuring, mastering, representing, and reproducing his ‘eternal’ and ‘universal’ presence as a patriarchal wisdom-body of power.”[4]
In an often cited example, Wodiczko projected an image of the hand of Ronald Reagan, in formal dress shirt with cufflinks, posed in the pledge of allegiance, onto the north face of the AT&T Long Lines Building in the financial district of New York City four days before the presidential election of 1984. “By creating a spectacle in which a fragment of the governing body, the presidential hand, was asked to stand for corporate business,” writes Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, “Wodiczko offered a suggestion about the class identity of those forces that – hidden under the guise of God, State, and Nation – are the actual receivers of the pledge of allegiance.”[5] In subsequent projections, the artist layered iconic representations of global capitalism, militarism, and consumerism with images of fragments of the body to suggest a consideration of our relation to public space that is contingent both to history and social and political ideologies of the present.
Art historian Patricia C. Phillips writes of the artist’s work: “In his public projects of the past decade, Krzysztof Wodiczko has conducted a series of active mediations that combine significant public sites, tough subjects, and aggressive statements that are only possible because of their temporality. He applies the immediate force of performance to social and political problems. The rhythms of extenuating events and the brevity of each installation give his projected episodes the intensity of public, political demonstrations. His thoroughly staged, illuminated images often require months of preparation, yet they seem like surprise attacks – fiercely focused parasitic invasions of renowned institutional hosts.”[6]
Perhaps the best-known and most popular intervention of this nature was performed when the artist created a projection for Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square, London in 1985. The South African government was at that time petitioning the British government for financial support. Wodiczko turned one of his projectors away from Nelson’s column projecting a swastika onto the tympanum of the temple-like façade of South Africa House, the South African diplomatic mission to the United Kingdom. Though the image remained only two hours before the police suspended the intervention as a “public nuisance” it lingered in public awareness much longer.[7] It is frequently cited at conferences, in classroom discussions, and other forum as an example of successful urban guerrilla cultural tactics – that is, art and/or performance that is waged by unexpected means for the purpose of engaging an active response.
Tijuana Projection, 2001. Public video projection at the Centro Cultural Tijuana, Mexico. Organized as part of the event InSite 2000.
In explaining the potential of cultural projects in the public sphere, the artist writes: “I try to understand what is happening in the city, how the city can operate as a communicative environment… It is important to understand the circumstances under which communication is reduced or destroyed, and under what possible new conditions it can be provoked to reappear. How can aesthetic practice in the built environment contribute to critical discourse between the inhabitants themselves and the environment? How can aesthetic practice make existing symbolic structures respond to contemporary events?”[8] For Wodiczko, disrupting the complacency of perception is imperative for passersby to stop, reflect, and perhaps even change their thinking; so he built his visual repertoire to evoke both the historical past and the political present.
In this way, Wodiczko’s visual repertoire for his projections expanded beyond the body (ears, eyes, and hands as indicators of human sensibility) to include chains, missiles, tanks, coins, cameras, boots, swastikas, guns, candles, food baskets, and corporate logos. “In these projections,” writes Kathleen MacQueen, “the artist alternates between symbolic, iconic, and indexical images – the principal relations an image can have to its subject, according to the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce – that is, predicated on a cultural reference, a physical resemblance, or a physical relation respectively. In many instances they scramble all relations: the hand, an index of the body – someone’s body – is also an iconic representation of communication that might symbolically represent an open or closed ideological position.” The reductive, visual signs monumentally-sized to fit the facades on which they are projected, are not meant to read as logos for a political agenda, instead they suggest a perceptual contradiction to disrupt the kind of assumptions that beset the casual passerby.[9]
Wodiczko’s visual interventions into public space are intended to alter what Jacques Rancière would later term the realm of the sensible.[10] When the public views its urban monuments with sidelong glances out of the corners of its eyes, it accepts the monuments as natural and uncoded. By intercepting vision with projections, Wodiczko replaces an unconsidered reception with a critical one.[11] This is the lesson of the Russian Formalists, of Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt and of Friedrich Nietzche’s understanding of Goethe’s belief that knowledge must quicken activity rather than lead to complacence.[12]
The artist began to integrate direct activism into his projects in the late 1980s with his vehicles and his instruments, articles of design that would act as band-aids – not only healing social wounds but perhaps more importantly calling attention to them.
Vehicles[edit]
Homeless Vehicle, 1988-89, New York, NY
While the artist had produced his first vehicle in Poland with additional conceptual versions designed when he lived in Canada, it was with his Homeless Vehicle Project of 1987-89, that he redirected “attention from the work of art as dissent to the work of art as social action: in this case, the discussions and design collaboration with members of the homeless community to develop both a physical object and a conceptual design that would make their participation in the urban economy visible and self-directed.”[13] The Homeless Vehicle Project was both symbolic and useful: the artist’s first work to use a collective process to legitimize the problems of a marginal community “without legitimating the crisis of homelessness.”[14] While the public was cautious, the operators of the vehicles took the project seriously. According to Wodiczko, “You see this in certain gestures, certain ways of behaving, speaking, dialoguing, of building up stories, narratives: the homeless become actors, orators, workers, all things which they usually are not. The idea is to let them speak and tell their own stories, to let them be legitimate actors on the urban stage.”[15] The attention to testimony as a transformative process while still tentative in theHomeless Vehicle Project became a significant performative process in the artist’s Instruments and eventually part of the his projections as well.[16]
Wodiczko created Poliscar in 1991 as a kind of “command center” for communication and community activism – a vehicle equipped with first-aid supplies, video and radio transmission equipment, and tools for everyday survival, it could support legal, medical, and social crisis aid, the mobile units ranging from three to ten miles from a base station. Poliscar was a technological design for the disenfranchised public of the polis or public sphere. Later Wodiczko would merge his vehicles with his projections when working with war veterans (see “Recent Work”).
Instruments[edit]
Krzysztof Wodiczko created the Personal Instrument in 1969, his first conceptual design work taken into the public sphere. Though he had a degree in industrial design and created popular electronics for a Polish manufacturer, his design philosophy was influenced by Russian constructivism epitomized by the poet/artist Vladimir Mayakovsky’s statement, “the streets our brushes, the squares our palettes.” ‘‘The Personal Instrument’’ consisted of a microphone, worn on the forehead, which retrieved sound while photo-receivers in gloves isolated and filtered the sound through the movement of the hand, which was then perceived discriminately by the artist, perceptually confined by the sound-proof headphones. By emphasizing selective listening, vital (under authoritarian restrictions) to a Polish citizen’s survival, Wodiczko intimated the prevalence of censored speech, registering “dissent of a system that fostered only one-directional critical thinking – listening over speech.”[17]
After his work with the homeless community in New York City and Philadelphia, Wodiczko returned to the possibilities of smaller, personal instruments as conceptual and functional objects to offset the problems of communication for urban migrants. Initially based on the iconic staff of the wandering prophet, the Alien Staff (1992 and its variant, 1992/93) was designed to mediate conversation between aliens (the juridical term designating all immigrants whether of legal or illegal status) and the franchised population of an urban environment. The staff not only presented an object of curiosity to passersby, causing them to interrupt their pace long enough to ask questions, it also became a repository of narrative recording and objects both sacred or necessary (e.g., green cards or family mementoes) to the lives of the immigrants. Influenced by Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves (1991), Wodiczko developed new equipment in 1993 that focused even more directly on democratic speech rights for the performative stranger. Mouthpiece (Porte-parole) was intended to act as a protective zone so that the immigrant could expand her narrative outward into a collective experience thereby pulling her out of isolation. The video technology, to be worn over the mouth, makes strange the familiar thereby creating a point of entry for passersby to enter into conversation with the immigrant. Between 1993 and 1997, thirteen culturally displaced persons used variants of the Mouthpiece in Paris, Malmö, Helsinki, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Trélazé, and Angers.
Recent work[edit]
…OUT OF HERE: The Veterans Project, 2009–2011. Seven-channel color video with sound. Installation view, Galerie Lelong, New York, 2011.
While working on Porte-parole in Europe, Wodiczko received an invitation from the filmmaker Andrzej Wajda to participate in an urban festival in Krakow using for the first time powerful Barco NV video projectors. Working with the Women’s Center, he merged for the first time the testimonial work that had evolved from his work with instruments with the visual impact of his well-known large-scale public projections. Testimony of domestic abuse spoken from the City Hall Tower created shockwaves in an overwhelmingly Catholic culture of denial.
In this way, Wodiczko continued in his testimonial video projections to respond to the needs of urban society’s marginal citizens who frequently survive outside the usual boundaries of juridical and social resources. In 2001, he merged the means of his instruments with the purpose of the projections in his Tijuana Projection executed for InSite 2000. In this public intervention, women working in the “maquiladora” industry of Tijuana, Mexico wore media technology designed to project their faces onto El Centro Cultural as they spoke emotionally of incest, police abuse, and work place discrimination in real time. As participants, their parrhesiatic speech was courageously offered at great risk to themselves for the purpose of moral and political change. Through the video projections, Wodiczko continues to develop the potential for aesthetic practice to effect social change as part of a wider discourse on agonistic pluralism prompted by such influences as Chantal Mouffe and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
The role of art in understanding and confronting conflict becomes an increasingly significant aspect of both Wodiczko’s aesthetic and pedagogical practices. This is true in his continued work with immigrants and his recent work with war veterans in the Veteran Vehicle Project as well as his public lectures and teaching seminars worldwide including his seminar on “Trauma, Conflict, and Art” for the Warsaw School of Social Psychology. Recently, Wodiczko has also created projections for the interiors of cultural spaces as a metaphor for our psychological isolation from broader social and political experience. His 2005 exhibition at Galerie Lelong in New York City, If you see something…, his 2009 installation in the Polish Pavilion for the 53rd Venice Biennale, Guests, position the viewer in relation to the consequences of global capitalism and the conflict produced as a result of the inequitable distribution of resources and opportunities. Krzysztof Wodiczko believes in the necessity for intellectuals to participate actively in society forging, as critic Jan Avgikos points out, “a commitment to resistance and truth-telling that, while often derided as outmoded or impossible, remains a basic human impulse.”[18]
“…Out of Here: The Veterans Project”[edit]
In 2009, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston exhibited …Out of Here: The Veterans Project. The multimedia installation, which ran from November 4, 2009, to March 28, 2010, filled a dark and empty museum gallery with recorded voices and explosions, along with flashes of light, simulating the experience of a mortar attack in Iraq. On three walls of the gallery, projectors cast two horizontal rows of windows, creating the illusion that viewers were inside a darkened warehouse. The eight-minute audio track started with the bustle of traffic and citizens in an Iraqi city, brought in children’s laughter, and subtly overlapped an excerpt from an Al Jazeera broadcast of President Obama speaking about the need to endure in Iraq. Listeners also noted an Islamic call to prayer, forebodingly drowned out by the approach of a helicopter. Without much warning, soldiers began yelling and shooting. When the gunfire ceased, a mother was heard wailing, and the episode ended in ominous silence (voices recorded for Out of Here belonged to a mixture of Iraqi-Americans, United States soldiers, and actors).[19]
In the process of creating Out of Here, Wodiczko opted to expand the dictionary definition of veteran. Traditionally, the term is described as “a person who has served in a military force.”[20] Wodiczko has redefined veteran to include anyone who has lived in an area where war was fought at the time they lived there, for example, residents of Iraq from 2003-2011, or residents of Germany, England, France, etc. during World War II. The Iraqi-born civilians (veterans, by the artist’s definition) who contributed to Out of Here, including the woman who lent her voice to the audio track, offered a perspective altogether different from those of the American military who had been in Iraq. This careful manipulation of the term foreshadows the artist’s choice to insert his own thoughts in Out of Here, in addition to culling the testimonies of soldiers and Iraqis. Having lived through World War II in Poland and served in the Polish military during the cold war, Wodiczko is not merely working with veterans; he is one. The artist fulfills both old and new definitions of the word veteran.
One year later, Out of Here was shown at Galerie Lelong in New York City. This second iteration contained an excerpt from a different speech by the President, and mentioned the end of the war and the gradual withdrawal of troops. Speaking on the changes, the artist commented, “It made the work more up to date…but the irony is that this project didn’t have to change much.”[21] Wodiczko cited the locations, Boston and New York, as sufficient to garner different readings of the work. “The works in Boston and New York have different publics. New York’s character and the [art] shows gave Out of Here a big international audience as opposed to the more local audience in Boston.”[22] Collectively, these narratives paint a picture of the individual veterans who told them, the larger picture of the Iraq War, and the more subtle clues to the war’s repercussions.[23]
Prizes and awards[edit]
Hiroshima Projection, 1999. Public video projection at the A-Bomb Dome, Hiroshima, Japan.
- 2009 Golden Medal “Gloria Artist” from the Polish Ministry of Culture for his exceptional contribution to Polish culture.
- 2009 Medal for the Contribution to the Promotion of Polish Culture Abroad from the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
- 2008 Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture.
- 2007 Katarzyna Kobro Award of the Polish Cultural Institute.
- 2005 College Art Association artist award for a distinguished body of work.
- 2004 Kepesz Award from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- 1998 4th International Hiroshima Prize for his contribution as an artist to world peace.
References[edit]
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Constructs such as ibid., loc. cit. and idem are discouraged by Wikipedia’s style guide for footnotes, as they are easily broken. Please improve this article by replacing them with named references(quick guide), or an abbreviated title. (February 2013) |
- Jump up^ Interrogative Design Group, http://interrogative.mit.edu/about/.
- Jump up^ Douglas Crimp, Rosalyn Deutsche, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Krzysztof Wodiczko, “A Conversation with Krzyzstof Wodiczko” inOctober 38 (Autumn 1986): 36.
- Jump up^ “Biography” in Krzysztof Wodiczko, Wodiczko (De Appel Amsterdam, 1996), 76. (Most biographical information for “Early life” comes from the biographical data in this catalog.)
- Jump up^ Krzysztof Wodiczko, “Public Projections,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 7 (Winter-Spring, 1983) quoted in Krzysztof Wodiczko, Public Address (Minneapolis: The Walker Art Center, 1992), 89.
- Jump up^ Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, “Understanding Wodiczko,” Counter-Monuments: Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Public Projections(Cambridge, MA: Hayden Gallery, List Visual Arts Center, MIT, 1987).
- Jump up^ Patricia C. Phillips, “Images of Repossession,” Public Address, 44.
- Jump up^ Krzysztof Wodiczko, “Projections,” Perspecta 26, Theatre, Theatricality, and Architecture (1990): 273.
- Jump up^ Wodiczko, Perspecta 26 (1990): 273.
- Jump up^ Kathleen MacQueen, Tactical Response: Art in an Age of Terror (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Publishers, 2010), 89-90.
- Jump up^ Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (2000), trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, 2004).
- Jump up^ MacQueen, Tactical Response, 91 and Krzysztof Wodiczko, “Designing for a City of Strangers” (1997) in Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects and Interviews (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999), 4-15.
- Jump up^ Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980).
- Jump up^ MacQueen, Tactical Response, 88.
- Jump up^ Krzysztof Wodiczko, “An Interview by Jean-Christophe Royoux” in Critical Vehicles, 177.
- Jump up^ Wodiczko, Critical Vehicles, 177.
- Jump up^ MacQueen, Tactical Response, 88.
- Jump up^ MacQueen, Tactical Response, 88.
- Jump up^ Jan Avgikos, “Kryzysztof Wodiczko: Galerie Lelong.” In Artforum International (December 1, 2005), 278.
- Jump up^ Blake J. Ruehrwein, “Wodiczko’s Veterans: Artist, Institution, and Audience in …Out of Here: The Veterans Project,” M.A. Thesis, City College of New York, Dec 2012.
- Jump up^ The American Heritage Dictionary, 4th ed., s.v. “Veteran.”
- Jump up^ Krzysztof Wodiczko, interview by Blake Ruehrwein, April 29, 2011.
- Jump up^ Ibid.
- Jump up^ Blake J. Ruehrwein, “Wodiczko’s Veterans: Artist, Institution, and Audience in …Out of Here: The Veterans Project,” M.A. Thesis, City College of New York, Dec 2012.
Bibliography[edit]
Selected publications, essays, and interviews by the artist[edit]
- 2009, City of Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial. Edited by Mark Jarzombek and Mechtild Widrich. London: Black Dog Publishing.
- 2009, “Designing for a City of Strangers” in The Design Culture Reader, edited by Ben Highmore, Routledge.
- 2008, “Questionnaire: Krzysztof Wodiczko.” October 123, “In what ways have artists, academics, and cultural institutions responded to the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq?” (Winter 2008): 172-179.
- 2003, “Creating Democracy: A Dialogue with Krzysztof Wodiczko” by Patricia C. Phillips in Art Journal 64, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 33-47.
- 2003, ”The Tijuana Projection, 2001” in Rethinking Marxism 15, no. 3 (July 2003): 422-423.
- 2002, “Instruments Projections Monuments” in AA Files 43: 31-41.
- 1999, Critical Vehicles: Writings, Projects and Interviews. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999.
- 1997, “Alien Staff, Krzysztof Wodiczko in Conversation with Bruce Robbins.” In Veiled Histories: The Body, Place, and Public Art. Edited by Anna Novakov. New York: San Francisco Art Institute and Critical Press, 1997.
- 1990, “Projections.” Perspecta 26, Theater, Theatricality, and Architecture (1990): 273-287.
- 1988, “Conversations about a project for a homeless vehicle.” October 47 (Winter 1988): 68-76.
- 1986, “Conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko.” With Douglas Crimp, Rosalyn Deutsche and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth. October 38 (Winter 1986): 22-51.
- 1986, “Krzysztof Wodiczko: Public Projections.” October 38 (1986): 3-22.
Selected catalogs[edit]
- 2009, Guests/Goscie. With John Rajchman, Bozena Czubak, and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth. Milan and New York: Charta.
- 2005, Krzysztof Wodiczko: Projekcje Publiczne, Public Projections 1996-2004. With contributions by Anna Smolak, Malgorzata Gadomska, Dariusz Dolinski, et al., The Bunker Sztuki Contemporary Art Gallery, Kraków.
- 1998, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art, July–September.
- 1995, Krzysztof Wodiczko: Projects and Public Projections 1969-1995, De Appel Foundation.
- 1995, Sztuka Publiczna, Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw.
- 1994, Art public, art critique, Paris.
- 1992, Public Address: Krzysztof Wodiczko, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
- 1991, The Homeless Vehicle Project. With David Lurie, edited by Kyoichi Tsuzuki, Kyoto Shoin.
- 1990, Krzysztof Wodiczko: New York City Tableau, Tompkins Square, The Homeless Vehicle Project, Exit Art, New York City.
- 1987, Counter-Monuments: Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Public Projections with Katy Kline and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, List Visual Arts Center.
Selected critical and scholarly studies[edit]
- 2012, Blake J. Ruehrwein, “Wodiczko’s Veterans: Artist, Institution, and Audience in …Out of Here: The Veterans Project,” M.A. Thesis, City College of New York, Dec 2012.
- 2009, Eva Marxen, “Therapeutic Thinking in Contemporary Art or Psychotherapy in the Arts” in The Arts in Psychotherapy 36: 131-139.
- 2008-09, Ewa Lajer-Burchardt, “Interiors at Risk: Precarious Spaces in Contemporary Art” in Harvard Design Magazine 29 (Fall-Winter 2008-09)
- 2008, Dora Apel, “Technologies of War, Media, and Dissent in the Post 9/11 Work of Krzysztof Wodiczko” in Oxford Art Journal 31, no. 2 (June 2008): 261-280.
- 2008, Rosalyn Deutsche, “The Art of Witness in the Wartime Public Sphere” in Forum Permanente, transcript of the Tate Modern lecture, March 4, 2005.
- 2007, Tom Williams, “Architecture and Artifice in the Recent Work of Krzysztof Wodiczko” in Shifting Borders, edited by Reid W.F. Cooper, Luke Nicholson, and Jean-François Bélisle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
- 2006-7, Lisa Saltzman, “When Memory Speaks: A Monument Bears Witness” in Trauma and Visuality in Modernity, edited by Lisa Saltzman and Eric Rosenberg, University Press of New England and in Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art, The University of Chicago Press.
- 2006, Mark Jarzombek, “The Post-traumatic Turn and the Art of Walid Ra’ad and Krzystof Wodiczko: from Theory to Trope and Beyond” in Trauma and Visuality in Modernity, ed. Saltzman and Rosenberg.
- 2005, James Leger, “Xenology and identity in critical public art: Krzysztof Wodiczko’s immigrant instruments.” Parachute, July 28, 2005.
- 2002, Andrzej Turowski, “Krzysztof Wodiczko and Polish Art of the 1970s” in Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art Since the 1950s, The Museum of Modern Art.
- 2002, Rosalyn Deutsche, “Sharing Strangeness: Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Aegis and the Question of Hospitality” in Grey Room 6 (Winter 2002): 26-43.
- 1998, Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, The MIT Press.
- 1993, Denis Hollier. “While the City Sleeps: Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin’” in October 64 (Spring 1993).
- 1989, Patricia C. Philips, “Temporality and Public Art.” Art Journal 48, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 331-335.
- 1987, Ewa Lajer-Burchardt, “Urban Disturbances.” Art in America (November 1987): 146-153, 197.
- 1986, Rosalyn Deutsche, “Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Homeless Projection and the Site of ‘Urban Revitalization.” October 38 (Fall 1986): 63-99.
Films and video[edit]
- 2005, Susan Sollins and Susan Dowling, series producers. Art 21, Art in the Twenty-first Century. Season Three. Alexandria, VA: PBS Home Video.
- 2000, Yasushi Kishimoto, Krzyszto Wodiczko: Projection in Hiroshima, 70m/color, Ufer! Art Documentary.
- 1991, Derek May. Krzyszstof Wodiczko: Projections. Ottawa, Canada: National Film Board of Canada.
External links[edit]
- Krzysztof Wodickzo is represented by Galerie Gabrielle Maubrie since 1989 http://www.gabriellemaubrie.com
- Krzysztof Wodickzo is represented by Galerie Lelong, http://www.galerielelong.com.
- Harvard GSD Faculty profile, http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/#/people/krzysztof-wodiczko.html.
- Maria Hinojosa: One-on-One: Krzysztof Wodiczko, WGBH Boston, February 2, 2010, http://www.wgbh.org/programs/programDetail.cfm?programid=12.
- The Callie Crossley Show, WGBH Radio, February 10, 2010, http://www.wgbh.org/programs/programDetail.cfm?programID=855.
- BUniverse – “Art, Trauma, and Democracy: Immigrants and Veterans” – Krzysztof Wodickzo shares several short videos depicting immigrants and their feelings about living in a land that is not their own, Institute for Human Sciences, Boston University, December 3, 2009,http://www.bu.edu/buniverse/view/?v=1lV8st9M.
- City as Stage, City as Process – Krzysztof Wodiczko, Porous City – November 20, 2009, MIT Tech TV, http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/4516-krzysztof-wodiczko—porous-city.
- ICA Boston, Krzysztof Wodiczko, …Out of Here: The Veterans Project, November 4, 2009 – March 28, 2010, http://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/exhibit/wodiczko/.
- The Odysseus Project – “Krzysztof Wodiczko’s The Veterans Project,” – Marijke, October 28, 2009, http://odysseus.nervegarden.com/2009/10/28/krzysztof-wodiczko-the-veterans-project/.
- Fact TV – “The War Veteran Vehicle” – Liverpool, Ireland, September 2009, http://www.fact.tv/search?content_search_simple=true&content_wordss=wodiczko&submit.x=0&submit.y=0.
- Interrogative Design, http://interrogative.mit.edu/about/.
- The 53rd International Art Exhibition in Venice, Polish Pavilion, “Guests/Goscie”, http://www.labiennale.art.pl/.
- BOMBLive! – “Krzysztof Wodiczko.” – Interview with Giuliana Bruno, Sculpture Center, Long Island City, October 29, 2007, http://www.bombsite.com/issues/0/articles/3209.
- Culture.pl – “Krzysztof Wodiczko” – profile, http://www.culture.pl/web/english/resources-visual-arts-full-page/-/eo_event_asset_publisher/eAN5/content/krzysztof-wodiczko.
- Polish Cultural Institute – “Krzysztof Wodiczko” – 2005 profile, http://www.polishculture-nyc.org/index.cfm?itemcategory=30817&personDetailId=74.
- Art 21, Season 3 (2005), Episode: POWER; interviews and videos, http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/wodiczko/
- agglutinations.com – “Interview with Krzysztof Wodiczko: Making Critical Public Space” – Elise S. Youn and Maria J. Prieto, April 11, 2004, http://www.agglutinations.com/archives/000035.html.
- “Interview with Krzysztof Wodiczko.” – with Dan Cameron, excerpts edited by Jacques Strapp with permission of the authors, 2001–2002, http://www.art-omma.org/issue7/text/KWodiczko_interview.htm.
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