US federal judge rules against Gagosian gallery and Prince for unfair use of ‘appropriated’ Cariou rastafarian images The celebrated American artist Richard Prince has been ordered to destroy works worth tens of millions of dollars after a court ruled that the paintings, which reworked a series of photographs by the French photographer Patrick Cariou, had breached copyright. A New York federal court has ruled that Prince and his gallery infringed Cariou’s copyright when he produced a series of works in a 2008 show using 35 pictures from the book Yes, Rasta, published by Cariou in 2000, “in their entirety, or nearly so”. Prince adapted the Cariou works by adding, in one instance, an electric guitar and some splodges for eyes. The ruling, which may lead to an appeal, stands to cost Prince and the Gagosian, one of the world’s leading contemporary galleries, with outlets in London and New York, potentially huge sums. Eight of the works from the exhibition, which was entitled Canal Zone, have together sold for more than $10m (£6m). Seven others have been exchanged for other works of art for between $6m and $8m. Prince has often made a virtue of his appropriation art. His images are sometimes taken from old advertisements in magazines. He told Art Forum magazine in 2003: “I had limited technical skills regarding the camera. Actually, I had no
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• Six die in assault on mosque in southern city of Deraa • Activists call for mass demonstration on ‘Dignity Friday’ Syrian police launched an assault on a neighbourhood sheltering anti-government protesters, fatally shooting at least nine in an operation that lasted nearly 24 hours, witnesses said. At least six were said to have been killed in an early morning attack on the al-Omari mosque in the southern agricultural city of Deraa, where protesters have taken to the streets to calls for reform and political freedoms. An activist in contact with people in the city said police shot three other protesters in the city centre after dusk. Inspired by the wave of pro-democracy protests around the region, the uprising in Deraa and at least four villages nearby has become the biggest domestic challenge since the 1970s to the Syrian government, one of the most repressive in the Middle East. Security forces have responded with water cannon, teargas, rubber bullets and live ammunition. The total death toll now stands at 16. Democracy activists used social-networking sites to call for massive demonstrations across the country on Friday, a day they dubbed Dignity Friday. An activist in Damascus in contact with people in Deraa said six had died in the raid on the mosque. A witness in the city said five people had been killed, including a woman who looked out of her window to see what was happening during the operation, which began after midnight and lasted for about three hours. Heavy shooting rattled the city until at least the early afternoon, when bursts of semi-automatic gunfire could be heard echoing in its old centre. State TV said an “armed gang” attacked an ambulance and security forces killed four attackers and wounded others and was chasing others who fled. It denied security forces had stormed the mosque, but also showed footage of guns, AK47s, hand grenades, ammunition and money it said had been seized from inside. Mobile phone connections to the city were cut and checkpoints throughout Deraa were manned by soldiers in camouflage uniforms and plainclothes security agents with rifles. Anti-terrorism police wearing dark blue uniforms were also on the streets. The witness said hundreds of anti-terrorism police had surrounded the mosque. The unrest started with the arrest last week of a group of students who sprayed anti-government graffiti on walls in Deraa. Syria Arab and Middle East unrest Middle East guardian.co.uk
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• Air strikes force government tanks to retreat from Misrata • Nato to assume day-to-day military command in Libya • Obama says Gaddafi may wait out military assault • Gaddafi tells supporters: ‘We will not surrender’ • Read a summary of events so far • Read out latest Libya news story 6.48pm: From the naval air base of Sigonella in Italy, a key stating post for the air strikes on Libya, Tom Kington has some more detail shedding light on the injuring of a number of villagers close to where a US fighter jet crased on Monday night: American fighter aircraft fired cannons to protect a downed US pilot in Libya on Tuesday, close to where local residents were reportedly injured by gunfire, a US military source revealed. The source’s statement on Wednesday could explain how at least eight Libyans near the scene were wounded by gunfire. The US military denied early reports that two helicopters arriving to collect the pilot in the early hours of Tuesday fired on locals. The source said Harrier jump jets that had arrived at the scene before the helicopters “strafed” the ground as they flew low over a group of vehicles indicated as a potential threat to the pilot. A second source told the Guardian the vehicles were targeted about three miles from the stranded pilot, about 30 minutes before the helicopters arrived. The pilot and a crew member had parachuted from their F-15E Strike Eagle aircraft after it suffered a mechanical failure during a raid near Benghazi, parachuting to separate locations. Two Osprey tiltrotor aircraft were dispatched from the USS Kearsarge off the Libyan coast to pick up the pilot, located thanks to a GPS signal, the source said. The second crew member could not be traced by rescuers because his GPS was not transmitting, he said. He was met by locals who took him and gave him shelter. He is now reportedly at Aviano air base in northern Italy. 6.44pm: Canadian forces have carried out their first attacks in the UN-sponsored campaign to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya, dropping four laser-guided bombs on an ammunition depot, according to the Associated Press news agency. Maj.-Gen. Tom Lawson, the deputy chief of air force staff, said that four CF-18 jet fighters, supported by two air-to-air refueling aircraft, conducted two separate bombing runs on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. The first attack took place overnight near Misrata, Libya’s third-largest city, located east of Tripoli. He had no information on where the second attack place or what kind of damage it may have inflicted. 6.40pm: British aircraft flew over Libya today but for the second day running took no part in attacks, according to defence officials, reports Richard Norton-Taylor, the Guardian’s security expert. British aircraft flew over Libya today but for the second day running took no part in attacks, according to defence officials, reports Richard Norton-Taylor, the Guardian’s security expert. The commander of British aircraft operating over Libya has said that Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s air force “no longer exists as a fighting force”. Air Vice-Marshal Greg Bagwell said the allies could now operate “with near impunity” over the skies of Libya. He was speaking during a visit to RAF aircrew based at Gioia del Colle in southern Italy. Ten Eurofighter/Typhoons and eight Tornado GR4s ground attack aircraft are now based there. “We are watching over the innocent people of Libya and ensuring that we protect them from attack” Bagwell said. “We have the Libyan ground forces under constant observation and we attack them whenever they threaten civilians or attack population centres.” US, British, and French aircraft have flown more than 300 sorties over Libya since Saturday and more than 162 Tomahawk cruise missiles have been fired. Four Tornado planes based at RAF Marham in Norfolk flew direct to Libya on the first two nights. The Trafalgar class submarines , HMS Triumph, has fired Tomahawk cruise missiles but less than its full complement of 16, it is understood. David Cameron told MPs that the Qataris on Tuesday deployed Mirage aircraft while Kuwait and Jordan would be providing “logistical contributions”, adding that “further support will be forthcoming” from Arab countries. He said 11 nations had contributed 150 aircraft to operations over Libya but a “lot more remained to be done”. 6.34pm: To Syria briefly now, and Amnesty International has condemned last night’s attack on a mosque by Syrian security forces who are reported to have killed at least seven people. . The human rights organisation said that internet activists were among at least 93 people detained in a wave of arrests across the country. Amnesty said that videos sent by human rights activists appear to show armed forces shooting in the mosque area while civilians plead for them to stop. It quoted local sources who named those those killed as ‘Omar ‘Abd al-Wali, Muhammad Abu al-Eyoun, Hamid Abu Nabbout, Dr Ghassan ‘Ali al-Mahameed, Ashraf Masalma, Ibtisam Masalma and Tahir Masalma. The 93 who were arrested are believed to be aged between 14 and 45 and include five women. Some did not take part in the street protests but appear to have been arrested for their activities on the internet, according to Amnesty. 6.21pm: Our colleague, Mona Mahmood, has been scanning the Arabic and Libyan press for comments. After an earlier post , here are some more snippets. Al-Shams, a Libyan newspaper based in Tripoli This aggression will be foiled in the same way the US barbaric aggression against Libya in 1986 was foiled and our slogan is ” Victory or Martyrdom”, it is not a strange slogan to us, we the son of hero martyr ” Omer Al-Mukhtar” who held this slogan against the Italian invaders. Libya Al-Youm, a Libyan newspaper based in Switzerland Misratta is still standing and steadfast because of the bravery of its young men. The signals of collapse in Gaddafi ‘s regime became very clear and that means the balance of victory is going in the direction of the people revolution forces and the coming weeks will carry a lot of surprises. 6.00pm: Good evening and welcome to our continuing coverage of the Libya crisis. Our earlier live coverage can be found here . Let’s start with a summary. • Allied air strikes have virtually wiped out Muammar Gaddafi’s forces that were attacking the rebel-held town of Misrata. The aerial attacks have ended five days of bloody assault that cost nearly 100 lives. • The rebel council in Benghazi has created a governing body. Mahmoud Jibril, a US-educated planning expert who defected from the Gaddafi regime, has been named as its head. • Gaddafi promised victory to an enthusiastic crowd in his first public appearance in a week late on Tuesday. He said there would be “no surrender” to powers who belonged “on the dust heap of history”. Libya Arab and Middle East unrest Middle East Muammar Gaddafi Ben Quinn guardian.co.uk
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Interactive analysis: Video and text from key sections with commentary from our journalists Simon Jeffery Andy Gallagher Garry Blight Chris Fenn Toby Helm Heather Stewart Patrick Collinson
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They won't agree on much, but Fox News host Bill O'Reilly and Medea Benjamin, founder of the far-left anti-war group Code Pink, found some common ground on one fact Tuesday night: MSNBC talkers Rachel Maddow and Ed Shultz are hypocrites. Both Schultz and Maddow defended President Obama's decision to impose a no fly zone over Libya on their respective shows. Maddow trotted out the “reluctant warrior” line, while Schultz insisted that the president “deserves the benefit of the doubt and our support.” O'Reilly asserted – and Benjamin agreed – that neither MSNBC host would have been so generous had Obama's predecessor engaged in such a conflict. “The word 'hypocrisy' comes to mind,” Benjamin quipped (video and partial transcript below the break). O'REILLY: Our Unresolved Problem segment tonight, as we have been reporting there is a split among liberal Americans over Libya and other issues. Some on the far left believe President Obama is not doing a good job. But the mainstream liberal media in general remains supportive of the man they helped elect in 2008. Imagine, if you will, President Bush ordering the Libyan bombing, even with UN approval. Do you think the left would have supported that? But last night here's what went down. SHULTZ: I think the President of the United States, Barack Obama, deserves the benefit of the doubt and our support. MADDOW: He very clearly did not want there to be another military action in the world. He is very open about his reluctance. He wants everybody to know how reluctant he was. O'REILLY: Everybody knows how reluctant [imitates bomb dropping]. Joining us now from Washington, Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the anti-war group Code Pink. When you hear that kind of stuff, Medea – you're honest woman, which is why we have you on the program. We know you are anti-war, we know you're Code Pink. We know all of that. You are honest. Those people at MSNBC cheer-leaded Barack Obama into office. They are hard core left wingers over there. Yet, yet, you know if Bush had ordered the bombing what they would be doing, but they are not doing with President Obama. What say you? BENJAMIN: I think the word hypocrisy comes to mind. I'm sure if this were under President Bush they would be asking a barrage of questions about why didn't you go to Congress? Can we afford this? What's it going to cost? Don't we need jobs and not bombs? Is this really going to help the Libyans? Why not Bahrain, Saudi Arabia? All kinds of things. O'REILLY: Alright, so you don't think they are doing due diligence in analyzing the situation. Now the question becomes: why? Why are they in the tank? BENJAMIN: Well, you know, Bill, this is partisan politics. I think people that support President Obama wanted to see him as a reluctant warrior. But, yet, he was the one that gave us the surge in Afghanistan. We still have troops in Iraq. We are dropping drones in Pakistan that are killing innocent people. And now we see a – what I would say a rush to another war in Libya. So, at some point, have you got to admit that whether he is reluctant or not, he is giving us a lot of wars for a peace president. What portion of this double standard stems from an earnest belief in the goodness of Obama's motives and what portion is simple partisan hypocrisy is a wholly different question. Allahpundit recently explained it this way : So much of politics is driven by suspicions about motives; liberals cut The One slack that they wouldn’t cut a conservative because they assume he has good intentions, that he wants to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan ASAP, that he’s not serving any special interest overlords like Halliburton, etc. Rage is what gets people out in the streets, but it’s hard to feel enraged at a guy whom you believe is doing his earnest best to solve a difficult problem… But … yes, of course some of the anti-war movement eight years ago was fueled by partisanship aimed at delegitimizing a Republican president (one whom they never really felt was legitimate in the first place), just as conservative complaints about Afghanistan from the likes of Michael Steele and Ann Coulter became more vocal only after Obama’s surge. Which do you think better describes Schultz and Maddow? Let us know in the comments.
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Dubai’s art fair and biennial are using current protests to make the sparks fly between art and politics Last week saw the opening of Art Dubai , the Middle East’s biggest art fair, and the Sharjah Biennial in Dubai’s neighbouring emirate. On the same day, the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) sent troops to help crush the resurgent protests in Bahrain . Though the troops are probably from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates – a key member of the GCC – is now participating in the Arab spring, but on the wrong side. Suddenly, Art Week and the well-respected Sharjah Biennial assumed exponentially more meaning. The bubble of the art world didn’t burst – the art fair and the biennial are patronised by Dubai and Sharjah’s ruling families respectively – but the membrane between art and politics was infiltrated in ways alternately impressive, opportunistic, courageous and frustratingly inadequate. Dubai’s art scene is booming, even if the city is not. Its art fair is now in its fifth year and has 82 galleries – up from 72 last year – hailing from 43 countries, mostly from the “central world”, of which Dubai claims to be the capital. The fair took place in the halls of the Madinat Jumeirah hotel, next-door to the iconic sail-like building of the seven-star Burj al Arab . On the opening morning, I latched on to the entourage of Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, taking a tour of the fair. Sheikh Mo clearly appreciates the entrepreneurial spirit of the fair and the cultural cachet it gives his maligned city, the victim of seemingly insatiable schadenfreude since the crash two and a half years ago. (The latest screed, maybe the most hysterical and myopic in the new tradition of Dubai-bashing, comes from AA Gill in Vanity Fair .) Front-line art I deviated from the sheikh’s tour to take in the booth of Artspace, one of eight galleries from Dubai at the fair. It was the “revolution” booth, with several works referencing Egypt. Khaled Hafez’s mural-sized canvas features collages of soldiers and protesters in Tahrir Square on a background of blobby pixels and dribbles of paint. “From the front lines,” whispered a voice behind me as I leant in to the painting. The voice belonged to Hafez himself, who explained that the piece started off as an abstract colour field. But with the revolution unfolding as the paint dried, he transformed it into a tribute to his protesting comrades in Cairo’s art scene, creating an “open source” collage of their snapshots of the action. Hafez, 47, has long made politically charged paintings and video work. “My generation spent so much time blaming and criticising,” he said. “But it never crossed our minds to spend 18 days in Tahrir Square simply demanding what we want.” Artists of the younger generation were acting as citizens first, aesthetic ciphers second, which seems to be a good model for how to be a political artist in revolutionary times (American art critic Ben Davis wrote very eloquently on this recently ). Artspace showed another insta-response to revolution: a painting called Bye Bye Hosni, by the Moroccan artist Zakaria Ramhani, of a protester with a huge Facebook-like button on his back, tearing down a poster of Mubarak. It’s an uncomplicated statement of solidarity, but in the context of the art fair feels opportunistic and overly media-friendly – a too-perfect metonym of the revolution. Only a handful of the galleries at Art Dubai are recognisable to the many people here on the bandwagon of the western art fair circuit. Assar Art Gallery from Tehran is one of the unknown galleries that makes this fair more exciting than the big daddies. Assar’s standout work was a mock stain-glass window by Iranian artist Roxana Manouchehri, featuring an intricate mixture of Arabic and Gaelic text, Christian saints and Islamic iconography. The gallerist told me Manouchehri was inspired by a recent trip to Ireland. When I asked her about the situation in Iran, she told me that she teaches at the University of Art in Tehran; Sane Jaleh, the student killed in the recent protests and absurdly claimed by the government as a victim of the protestors, was one of her students. It was another moment where the bubble burst for a second, only to reform when the next sheikh or high-heeled gallerista swished by. Bahrain itself makes an appearance at the fair in a series of beautiful photos by Camille Zakharia at the Lucy Mackintosh gallery, from Lausanne. Zakharia documents the ramshackle fisherman’s huts and piers that jut out from Bahrain into the Gulf. The photos are part of the Reclaim project that appeared at the Venice architecture biennale last summer, investigating how rampant land reclamation around the island city state has cut off entire neighbourhoods – both Shia and Sunni – from their traditional relationship with the sea. These endangered shelters – hang-out spots for drinking tea, playing games and watching TV (one has a satellite dish precariously rigged to it) – are a touching picture of vernacular life in Bahrain, a mental background on which to project the current violence. The Reclaim project was initiated by Bahrain’s Ministry of Culture, run by Sheikha Mai bint Mohammed Al Khalifa. She was supposed to give a lecture on the project at the fair, but pulled out at the last minute. “It wouldn’t be appropriate for us to appear at an art fair at a moment like this,” Noura Al-Sayeh, head of architectural affairs at the ministry and curator of the Reclaim project, told me. But she was keen to point out that “art shouldn’t be undermined as frivolous or unnecessary. Its function is to fill in the gaps in a radicalised society.” Implied politics Escaping the strange bubble of the art fair, I took a bus to Sharjah, a conurbation of Dubai about 10 miles to the north, but much older and with something Dubai lacks: a large, well-established art museum. It has been almost completely taken over by the biennial – the 10th since 1993 and featuring 76 artists. The only hint of the “festivalism” familiar in most biennials here is a pretty innocuous-looking replica rocket, in surrender-flag white, pointing at the sky in front of the museum. The rocket is a Cedar 4, made by a group of scientists and mathematicians in the 1960s. They launched rockets not for military purposes but merely to study the science of trajectory and ballistics. The Cedar 4 was resurrected, and a film is being made about it by Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. The project is political only by implication; Hadjithomas, hovering nearby, would only say that “this was a project made by dreamers” and she wanted to “bring back” the importance of such people. Predictably, the politics at the biennial was slower and more considered than at the fair, which can respond faster to current events and with less intellectual burden. A mesmerising video by no fewer than four artists – Jane and Louise Wilson, Shumon Basar and Eyal Weizman – tells the story of the murder of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the Hamas officer assassinated by Mossad in Dubai last year. Similarly strategic is the selection of Harun Farocki’s 1993 film Videograms of a Revolution: a documentary of the Romanian revolution in 1989 stitched together from home videos and lost TV footage, which shows a heroic act of aggregation that the likes of Facebook and YouTube now do for us. Meanwhile, a very direct political action took place that morning as Sharjah’s Sheikh Sultan Bin Mohammed al-Qassimi was having his inaugural tour of the biennial. Outside the museum, a groups of artists including Ibrahim Quraishi handed out pieces of paper bearing the names of Bahrainis killed in the protests. “We in the artworld are not living in a vacuum,” Quraishi told me by phone after being released from the interrogation that swiftly followed. “We didn’t do it for show, but to have people carrying around these names with them all day,” he said. Quraishi was only released after five hours of questioning by the Sharjah internal security forces and after giving assurance that he was not trying to bring down its ruling regime. Solidarity feels good, but the effect of Quraishi’s action may be counterproductive. Haig Aivazian, a co-curator of the biennial who was also taken for questioning, told me: “I would support a gesture of solidarity, but this one was not effective. The very small margin of freedom that the Sharjah Foundation has created for the biennial has been compromised.” A more constructive act of solidarity emerged the next morning over another pertinent issue in the region: migrant workers’ rights, in this case for the new Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi, designed by Frank Gehry. Walid Raad, a Lebanese artist participating in the biennial, announced a boycott by a group of 130 artists, curators and writers unless the Guggenheim Foundation ensures construction workers are given fair conditions. “Artists should not be asked to exhibit their work in buildings built on the backs of exploited workers,” Raad said. “Those working with bricks and mortar deserve the same respect as those working with cameras and brushes.” The Sharjah Biennial is implicated as its chief curator, Suzanne Cotter, is also chief curator of the new Guggenheim. Human Rights Watch reports have documented rampant abuses on Saadiyat island, where the Guggenheim will stand alongside a Louvre outpost designed by Jean Nouvel, a national museum by Norman Foster and a Zaha Hadid-designed opera hall. Workers are forced to repay extortionate recruitment fees, have their passports revoked upon arrival, and are subject to fines if they quit. Maybe the local Gulf News knew the artists’ declaration was coming: the day before, they ran a puff piece with the headline ” Cosy home for Saadiyat workers “, reassuring readers that everything is rosy on Saadiyat, which literally means “island of happiness”. Art and politics are an awkward pairing at the best of times. But Art Dubai and the Sharjah Biennial, however awkwardly and with whatever compromised means, are bringing the invigorating oxygen of cultural and political debate to the region. Let’s hope it continues, inshallah. Art Festivals Dubai Dubai Bahrain Middle East United Arab Emirates James Westcott guardian.co.uk
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Dubai’s art fair and biennial are using current protests to make the sparks fly between art and politics Last week saw the opening of Art Dubai , the Middle East’s biggest art fair, and the Sharjah Biennial in Dubai’s neighbouring emirate. On the same day, the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) sent troops to help crush the resurgent protests in Bahrain . Though the troops are probably from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates – a key member of the GCC – is now participating in the Arab spring, but on the wrong side. Suddenly, Art Week and the well-respected Sharjah Biennial assumed exponentially more meaning. The bubble of the art world didn’t burst – the art fair and the biennial are patronised by Dubai and Sharjah’s ruling families respectively – but the membrane between art and politics was infiltrated in ways alternately impressive, opportunistic, courageous and frustratingly inadequate. Dubai’s art scene is booming, even if the city is not. Its art fair is now in its fifth year and has 82 galleries – up from 72 last year – hailing from 43 countries, mostly from the “central world”, of which Dubai claims to be the capital. The fair took place in the halls of the Madinat Jumeirah hotel, next-door to the iconic sail-like building of the seven-star Burj al Arab . On the opening morning, I latched on to the entourage of Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, taking a tour of the fair. Sheikh Mo clearly appreciates the entrepreneurial spirit of the fair and the cultural cachet it gives his maligned city, the victim of seemingly insatiable schadenfreude since the crash two and a half years ago. (The latest screed, maybe the most hysterical and myopic in the new tradition of Dubai-bashing, comes from AA Gill in Vanity Fair .) Front-line art I deviated from the sheikh’s tour to take in the booth of Artspace, one of eight galleries from Dubai at the fair. It was the “revolution” booth, with several works referencing Egypt. Khaled Hafez’s mural-sized canvas features collages of soldiers and protesters in Tahrir Square on a background of blobby pixels and dribbles of paint. “From the front lines,” whispered a voice behind me as I leant in to the painting. The voice belonged to Hafez himself, who explained that the piece started off as an abstract colour field. But with the revolution unfolding as the paint dried, he transformed it into a tribute to his protesting comrades in Cairo’s art scene, creating an “open source” collage of their snapshots of the action. Hafez, 47, has long made politically charged paintings and video work. “My generation spent so much time blaming and criticising,” he said. “But it never crossed our minds to spend 18 days in Tahrir Square simply demanding what we want.” Artists of the younger generation were acting as citizens first, aesthetic ciphers second, which seems to be a good model for how to be a political artist in revolutionary times (American art critic Ben Davis wrote very eloquently on this recently ). Artspace showed another insta-response to revolution: a painting called Bye Bye Hosni, by the Moroccan artist Zakaria Ramhani, of a protester with a huge Facebook-like button on his back, tearing down a poster of Mubarak. It’s an uncomplicated statement of solidarity, but in the context of the art fair feels opportunistic and overly media-friendly – a too-perfect metonym of the revolution. Only a handful of the galleries at Art Dubai are recognisable to the many people here on the bandwagon of the western art fair circuit. Assar Art Gallery from Tehran is one of the unknown galleries that makes this fair more exciting than the big daddies. Assar’s standout work was a mock stain-glass window by Iranian artist Roxana Manouchehri, featuring an intricate mixture of Arabic and Gaelic text, Christian saints and Islamic iconography. The gallerist told me Manouchehri was inspired by a recent trip to Ireland. When I asked her about the situation in Iran, she told me that she teaches at the University of Art in Tehran; Sane Jaleh, the student killed in the recent protests and absurdly claimed by the government as a victim of the protestors, was one of her students. It was another moment where the bubble burst for a second, only to reform when the next sheikh or high-heeled gallerista swished by. Bahrain itself makes an appearance at the fair in a series of beautiful photos by Camille Zakharia at the Lucy Mackintosh gallery, from Lausanne. Zakharia documents the ramshackle fisherman’s huts and piers that jut out from Bahrain into the Gulf. The photos are part of the Reclaim project that appeared at the Venice architecture biennale last summer, investigating how rampant land reclamation around the island city state has cut off entire neighbourhoods – both Shia and Sunni – from their traditional relationship with the sea. These endangered shelters – hang-out spots for drinking tea, playing games and watching TV (one has a satellite dish precariously rigged to it) – are a touching picture of vernacular life in Bahrain, a mental background on which to project the current violence. The Reclaim project was initiated by Bahrain’s Ministry of Culture, run by Sheikha Mai bint Mohammed Al Khalifa. She was supposed to give a lecture on the project at the fair, but pulled out at the last minute. “It wouldn’t be appropriate for us to appear at an art fair at a moment like this,” Noura Al-Sayeh, head of architectural affairs at the ministry and curator of the Reclaim project, told me. But she was keen to point out that “art shouldn’t be undermined as frivolous or unnecessary. Its function is to fill in the gaps in a radicalised society.” Implied politics Escaping the strange bubble of the art fair, I took a bus to Sharjah, a conurbation of Dubai about 10 miles to the north, but much older and with something Dubai lacks: a large, well-established art museum. It has been almost completely taken over by the biennial – the 10th since 1993 and featuring 76 artists. The only hint of the “festivalism” familiar in most biennials here is a pretty innocuous-looking replica rocket, in surrender-flag white, pointing at the sky in front of the museum. The rocket is a Cedar 4, made by a group of scientists and mathematicians in the 1960s. They launched rockets not for military purposes but merely to study the science of trajectory and ballistics. The Cedar 4 was resurrected, and a film is being made about it by Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. The project is political only by implication; Hadjithomas, hovering nearby, would only say that “this was a project made by dreamers” and she wanted to “bring back” the importance of such people. Predictably, the politics at the biennial was slower and more considered than at the fair, which can respond faster to current events and with less intellectual burden. A mesmerising video by no fewer than four artists – Jane and Louise Wilson, Shumon Basar and Eyal Weizman – tells the story of the murder of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the Hamas officer assassinated by Mossad in Dubai last year. Similarly strategic is the selection of Harun Farocki’s 1993 film Videograms of a Revolution: a documentary of the Romanian revolution in 1989 stitched together from home videos and lost TV footage, which shows a heroic act of aggregation that the likes of Facebook and YouTube now do for us. Meanwhile, a very direct political action took place that morning as Sharjah’s Sheikh Sultan Bin Mohammed al-Qassimi was having his inaugural tour of the biennial. Outside the museum, a groups of artists including Ibrahim Quraishi handed out pieces of paper bearing the names of Bahrainis killed in the protests. “We in the artworld are not living in a vacuum,” Quraishi told me by phone after being released from the interrogation that swiftly followed. “We didn’t do it for show, but to have people carrying around these names with them all day,” he said. Quraishi was only released after five hours of questioning by the Sharjah internal security forces and after giving assurance that he was not trying to bring down its ruling regime. Solidarity feels good, but the effect of Quraishi’s action may be counterproductive. Haig Aivazian, a co-curator of the biennial who was also taken for questioning, told me: “I would support a gesture of solidarity, but this one was not effective. The very small margin of freedom that the Sharjah Foundation has created for the biennial has been compromised.” A more constructive act of solidarity emerged the next morning over another pertinent issue in the region: migrant workers’ rights, in this case for the new Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi, designed by Frank Gehry. Walid Raad, a Lebanese artist participating in the biennial, announced a boycott by a group of 130 artists, curators and writers unless the Guggenheim Foundation ensures construction workers are given fair conditions. “Artists should not be asked to exhibit their work in buildings built on the backs of exploited workers,” Raad said. “Those working with bricks and mortar deserve the same respect as those working with cameras and brushes.” The Sharjah Biennial is implicated as its chief curator, Suzanne Cotter, is also chief curator of the new Guggenheim. Human Rights Watch reports have documented rampant abuses on Saadiyat island, where the Guggenheim will stand alongside a Louvre outpost designed by Jean Nouvel, a national museum by Norman Foster and a Zaha Hadid-designed opera hall. Workers are forced to repay extortionate recruitment fees, have their passports revoked upon arrival, and are subject to fines if they quit. Maybe the local Gulf News knew the artists’ declaration was coming: the day before, they ran a puff piece with the headline ” Cosy home for Saadiyat workers “, reassuring readers that everything is rosy on Saadiyat, which literally means “island of happiness”. Art and politics are an awkward pairing at the best of times. But Art Dubai and the Sharjah Biennial, however awkwardly and with whatever compromised means, are bringing the invigorating oxygen of cultural and political debate to the region. Let’s hope it continues, inshallah. Art Festivals Dubai Dubai Bahrain Middle East United Arab Emirates James Westcott guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Dubai’s art fair and biennial are using current protests to make the sparks fly between art and politics Last week saw the opening of Art Dubai , the Middle East’s biggest art fair, and the Sharjah Biennial in Dubai’s neighbouring emirate. On the same day, the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) sent troops to help crush the resurgent protests in Bahrain . Though the troops are probably from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates – a key member of the GCC – is now participating in the Arab spring, but on the wrong side. Suddenly, Art Week and the well-respected Sharjah Biennial assumed exponentially more meaning. The bubble of the art world didn’t burst – the art fair and the biennial are patronised by Dubai and Sharjah’s ruling families respectively – but the membrane between art and politics was infiltrated in ways alternately impressive, opportunistic, courageous and frustratingly inadequate. Dubai’s art scene is booming, even if the city is not. Its art fair is now in its fifth year and has 82 galleries – up from 72 last year – hailing from 43 countries, mostly from the “central world”, of which Dubai claims to be the capital. The fair took place in the halls of the Madinat Jumeirah hotel, next-door to the iconic sail-like building of the seven-star Burj al Arab . On the opening morning, I latched on to the entourage of Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, taking a tour of the fair. Sheikh Mo clearly appreciates the entrepreneurial spirit of the fair and the cultural cachet it gives his maligned city, the victim of seemingly insatiable schadenfreude since the crash two and a half years ago. (The latest screed, maybe the most hysterical and myopic in the new tradition of Dubai-bashing, comes from AA Gill in Vanity Fair .) Front-line art I deviated from the sheikh’s tour to take in the booth of Artspace, one of eight galleries from Dubai at the fair. It was the “revolution” booth, with several works referencing Egypt. Khaled Hafez’s mural-sized canvas features collages of soldiers and protesters in Tahrir Square on a background of blobby pixels and dribbles of paint. “From the front lines,” whispered a voice behind me as I leant in to the painting. The voice belonged to Hafez himself, who explained that the piece started off as an abstract colour field. But with the revolution unfolding as the paint dried, he transformed it into a tribute to his protesting comrades in Cairo’s art scene, creating an “open source” collage of their snapshots of the action. Hafez, 47, has long made politically charged paintings and video work. “My generation spent so much time blaming and criticising,” he said. “But it never crossed our minds to spend 18 days in Tahrir Square simply demanding what we want.” Artists of the younger generation were acting as citizens first, aesthetic ciphers second, which seems to be a good model for how to be a political artist in revolutionary times (American art critic Ben Davis wrote very eloquently on this recently ). Artspace showed another insta-response to revolution: a painting called Bye Bye Hosni, by the Moroccan artist Zakaria Ramhani, of a protester with a huge Facebook-like button on his back, tearing down a poster of Mubarak. It’s an uncomplicated statement of solidarity, but in the context of the art fair feels opportunistic and overly media-friendly – a too-perfect metonym of the revolution. Only a handful of the galleries at Art Dubai are recognisable to the many people here on the bandwagon of the western art fair circuit. Assar Art Gallery from Tehran is one of the unknown galleries that makes this fair more exciting than the big daddies. Assar’s standout work was a mock stain-glass window by Iranian artist Roxana Manouchehri, featuring an intricate mixture of Arabic and Gaelic text, Christian saints and Islamic iconography. The gallerist told me Manouchehri was inspired by a recent trip to Ireland. When I asked her about the situation in Iran, she told me that she teaches at the University of Art in Tehran; Sane Jaleh, the student killed in the recent protests and absurdly claimed by the government as a victim of the protestors, was one of her students. It was another moment where the bubble burst for a second, only to reform when the next sheikh or high-heeled gallerista swished by. Bahrain itself makes an appearance at the fair in a series of beautiful photos by Camille Zakharia at the Lucy Mackintosh gallery, from Lausanne. Zakharia documents the ramshackle fisherman’s huts and piers that jut out from Bahrain into the Gulf. The photos are part of the Reclaim project that appeared at the Venice architecture biennale last summer, investigating how rampant land reclamation around the island city state has cut off entire neighbourhoods – both Shia and Sunni – from their traditional relationship with the sea. These endangered shelters – hang-out spots for drinking tea, playing games and watching TV (one has a satellite dish precariously rigged to it) – are a touching picture of vernacular life in Bahrain, a mental background on which to project the current violence. The Reclaim project was initiated by Bahrain’s Ministry of Culture, run by Sheikha Mai bint Mohammed Al Khalifa. She was supposed to give a lecture on the project at the fair, but pulled out at the last minute. “It wouldn’t be appropriate for us to appear at an art fair at a moment like this,” Noura Al-Sayeh, head of architectural affairs at the ministry and curator of the Reclaim project, told me. But she was keen to point out that “art shouldn’t be undermined as frivolous or unnecessary. Its function is to fill in the gaps in a radicalised society.” Implied politics Escaping the strange bubble of the art fair, I took a bus to Sharjah, a conurbation of Dubai about 10 miles to the north, but much older and with something Dubai lacks: a large, well-established art museum. It has been almost completely taken over by the biennial – the 10th since 1993 and featuring 76 artists. The only hint of the “festivalism” familiar in most biennials here is a pretty innocuous-looking replica rocket, in surrender-flag white, pointing at the sky in front of the museum. The rocket is a Cedar 4, made by a group of scientists and mathematicians in the 1960s. They launched rockets not for military purposes but merely to study the science of trajectory and ballistics. The Cedar 4 was resurrected, and a film is being made about it by Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. The project is political only by implication; Hadjithomas, hovering nearby, would only say that “this was a project made by dreamers” and she wanted to “bring back” the importance of such people. Predictably, the politics at the biennial was slower and more considered than at the fair, which can respond faster to current events and with less intellectual burden. A mesmerising video by no fewer than four artists – Jane and Louise Wilson, Shumon Basar and Eyal Weizman – tells the story of the murder of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the Hamas officer assassinated by Mossad in Dubai last year. Similarly strategic is the selection of Harun Farocki’s 1993 film Videograms of a Revolution: a documentary of the Romanian revolution in 1989 stitched together from home videos and lost TV footage, which shows a heroic act of aggregation that the likes of Facebook and YouTube now do for us. Meanwhile, a very direct political action took place that morning as Sharjah’s Sheikh Sultan Bin Mohammed al-Qassimi was having his inaugural tour of the biennial. Outside the museum, a groups of artists including Ibrahim Quraishi handed out pieces of paper bearing the names of Bahrainis killed in the protests. “We in the artworld are not living in a vacuum,” Quraishi told me by phone after being released from the interrogation that swiftly followed. “We didn’t do it for show, but to have people carrying around these names with them all day,” he said. Quraishi was only released after five hours of questioning by the Sharjah internal security forces and after giving assurance that he was not trying to bring down its ruling regime. Solidarity feels good, but the effect of Quraishi’s action may be counterproductive. Haig Aivazian, a co-curator of the biennial who was also taken for questioning, told me: “I would support a gesture of solidarity, but this one was not effective. The very small margin of freedom that the Sharjah Foundation has created for the biennial has been compromised.” A more constructive act of solidarity emerged the next morning over another pertinent issue in the region: migrant workers’ rights, in this case for the new Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi, designed by Frank Gehry. Walid Raad, a Lebanese artist participating in the biennial, announced a boycott by a group of 130 artists, curators and writers unless the Guggenheim Foundation ensures construction workers are given fair conditions. “Artists should not be asked to exhibit their work in buildings built on the backs of exploited workers,” Raad said. “Those working with bricks and mortar deserve the same respect as those working with cameras and brushes.” The Sharjah Biennial is implicated as its chief curator, Suzanne Cotter, is also chief curator of the new Guggenheim. Human Rights Watch reports have documented rampant abuses on Saadiyat island, where the Guggenheim will stand alongside a Louvre outpost designed by Jean Nouvel, a national museum by Norman Foster and a Zaha Hadid-designed opera hall. Workers are forced to repay extortionate recruitment fees, have their passports revoked upon arrival, and are subject to fines if they quit. Maybe the local Gulf News knew the artists’ declaration was coming: the day before, they ran a puff piece with the headline ” Cosy home for Saadiyat workers “, reassuring readers that everything is rosy on Saadiyat, which literally means “island of happiness”. Art and politics are an awkward pairing at the best of times. But Art Dubai and the Sharjah Biennial, however awkwardly and with whatever compromised means, are bringing the invigorating oxygen of cultural and political debate to the region. Let’s hope it continues, inshallah. Art Festivals Dubai Dubai Bahrain Middle East United Arab Emirates James Westcott guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Dubai’s art fair and biennial are using current protests to make the sparks fly between art and politics Last week saw the opening of Art Dubai , the Middle East’s biggest art fair, and the Sharjah Biennial in Dubai’s neighbouring emirate. On the same day, the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) sent troops to help crush the resurgent protests in Bahrain . Though the troops are probably from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates – a key member of the GCC – is now participating in the Arab spring, but on the wrong side. Suddenly, Art Week and the well-respected Sharjah Biennial assumed exponentially more meaning. The bubble of the art world didn’t burst – the art fair and the biennial are patronised by Dubai and Sharjah’s ruling families respectively – but the membrane between art and politics was infiltrated in ways alternately impressive, opportunistic, courageous and frustratingly inadequate. Dubai’s art scene is booming, even if the city is not. Its art fair is now in its fifth year and has 82 galleries – up from 72 last year – hailing from 43 countries, mostly from the “central world”, of which Dubai claims to be the capital. The fair took place in the halls of the Madinat Jumeirah hotel, next-door to the iconic sail-like building of the seven-star Burj al Arab . On the opening morning, I latched on to the entourage of Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, taking a tour of the fair. Sheikh Mo clearly appreciates the entrepreneurial spirit of the fair and the cultural cachet it gives his maligned city, the victim of seemingly insatiable schadenfreude since the crash two and a half years ago. (The latest screed, maybe the most hysterical and myopic in the new tradition of Dubai-bashing, comes from AA Gill in Vanity Fair .) Front-line art I deviated from the sheikh’s tour to take in the booth of Artspace, one of eight galleries from Dubai at the fair. It was the “revolution” booth, with several works referencing Egypt. Khaled Hafez’s mural-sized canvas features collages of soldiers and protesters in Tahrir Square on a background of blobby pixels and dribbles of paint. “From the front lines,” whispered a voice behind me as I leant in to the painting. The voice belonged to Hafez himself, who explained that the piece started off as an abstract colour field. But with the revolution unfolding as the paint dried, he transformed it into a tribute to his protesting comrades in Cairo’s art scene, creating an “open source” collage of their snapshots of the action. Hafez, 47, has long made politically charged paintings and video work. “My generation spent so much time blaming and criticising,” he said. “But it never crossed our minds to spend 18 days in Tahrir Square simply demanding what we want.” Artists of the younger generation were acting as citizens first, aesthetic ciphers second, which seems to be a good model for how to be a political artist in revolutionary times (American art critic Ben Davis wrote very eloquently on this recently ). Artspace showed another insta-response to revolution: a painting called Bye Bye Hosni, by the Moroccan artist Zakaria Ramhani, of a protester with a huge Facebook-like button on his back, tearing down a poster of Mubarak. It’s an uncomplicated statement of solidarity, but in the context of the art fair feels opportunistic and overly media-friendly – a too-perfect metonym of the revolution. Only a handful of the galleries at Art Dubai are recognisable to the many people here on the bandwagon of the western art fair circuit. Assar Art Gallery from Tehran is one of the unknown galleries that makes this fair more exciting than the big daddies. Assar’s standout work was a mock stain-glass window by Iranian artist Roxana Manouchehri, featuring an intricate mixture of Arabic and Gaelic text, Christian saints and Islamic iconography. The gallerist told me Manouchehri was inspired by a recent trip to Ireland. When I asked her about the situation in Iran, she told me that she teaches at the University of Art in Tehran; Sane Jaleh, the student killed in the recent protests and absurdly claimed by the government as a victim of the protestors, was one of her students. It was another moment where the bubble burst for a second, only to reform when the next sheikh or high-heeled gallerista swished by. Bahrain itself makes an appearance at the fair in a series of beautiful photos by Camille Zakharia at the Lucy Mackintosh gallery, from Lausanne. Zakharia documents the ramshackle fisherman’s huts and piers that jut out from Bahrain into the Gulf. The photos are part of the Reclaim project that appeared at the Venice architecture biennale last summer, investigating how rampant land reclamation around the island city state has cut off entire neighbourhoods – both Shia and Sunni – from their traditional relationship with the sea. These endangered shelters – hang-out spots for drinking tea, playing games and watching TV (one has a satellite dish precariously rigged to it) – are a touching picture of vernacular life in Bahrain, a mental background on which to project the current violence. The Reclaim project was initiated by Bahrain’s Ministry of Culture, run by Sheikha Mai bint Mohammed Al Khalifa. She was supposed to give a lecture on the project at the fair, but pulled out at the last minute. “It wouldn’t be appropriate for us to appear at an art fair at a moment like this,” Noura Al-Sayeh, head of architectural affairs at the ministry and curator of the Reclaim project, told me. But she was keen to point out that “art shouldn’t be undermined as frivolous or unnecessary. Its function is to fill in the gaps in a radicalised society.” Implied politics Escaping the strange bubble of the art fair, I took a bus to Sharjah, a conurbation of Dubai about 10 miles to the north, but much older and with something Dubai lacks: a large, well-established art museum. It has been almost completely taken over by the biennial – the 10th since 1993 and featuring 76 artists. The only hint of the “festivalism” familiar in most biennials here is a pretty innocuous-looking replica rocket, in surrender-flag white, pointing at the sky in front of the museum. The rocket is a Cedar 4, made by a group of scientists and mathematicians in the 1960s. They launched rockets not for military purposes but merely to study the science of trajectory and ballistics. The Cedar 4 was resurrected, and a film is being made about it by Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. The project is political only by implication; Hadjithomas, hovering nearby, would only say that “this was a project made by dreamers” and she wanted to “bring back” the importance of such people. Predictably, the politics at the biennial was slower and more considered than at the fair, which can respond faster to current events and with less intellectual burden. A mesmerising video by no fewer than four artists – Jane and Louise Wilson, Shumon Basar and Eyal Weizman – tells the story of the murder of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the Hamas officer assassinated by Mossad in Dubai last year. Similarly strategic is the selection of Harun Farocki’s 1993 film Videograms of a Revolution: a documentary of the Romanian revolution in 1989 stitched together from home videos and lost TV footage, which shows a heroic act of aggregation that the likes of Facebook and YouTube now do for us. Meanwhile, a very direct political action took place that morning as Sharjah’s Sheikh Sultan Bin Mohammed al-Qassimi was having his inaugural tour of the biennial. Outside the museum, a groups of artists including Ibrahim Quraishi handed out pieces of paper bearing the names of Bahrainis killed in the protests. “We in the artworld are not living in a vacuum,” Quraishi told me by phone after being released from the interrogation that swiftly followed. “We didn’t do it for show, but to have people carrying around these names with them all day,” he said. Quraishi was only released after five hours of questioning by the Sharjah internal security forces and after giving assurance that he was not trying to bring down its ruling regime. Solidarity feels good, but the effect of Quraishi’s action may be counterproductive. Haig Aivazian, a co-curator of the biennial who was also taken for questioning, told me: “I would support a gesture of solidarity, but this one was not effective. The very small margin of freedom that the Sharjah Foundation has created for the biennial has been compromised.” A more constructive act of solidarity emerged the next morning over another pertinent issue in the region: migrant workers’ rights, in this case for the new Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi, designed by Frank Gehry. Walid Raad, a Lebanese artist participating in the biennial, announced a boycott by a group of 130 artists, curators and writers unless the Guggenheim Foundation ensures construction workers are given fair conditions. “Artists should not be asked to exhibit their work in buildings built on the backs of exploited workers,” Raad said. “Those working with bricks and mortar deserve the same respect as those working with cameras and brushes.” The Sharjah Biennial is implicated as its chief curator, Suzanne Cotter, is also chief curator of the new Guggenheim. Human Rights Watch reports have documented rampant abuses on Saadiyat island, where the Guggenheim will stand alongside a Louvre outpost designed by Jean Nouvel, a national museum by Norman Foster and a Zaha Hadid-designed opera hall. Workers are forced to repay extortionate recruitment fees, have their passports revoked upon arrival, and are subject to fines if they quit. Maybe the local Gulf News knew the artists’ declaration was coming: the day before, they ran a puff piece with the headline ” Cosy home for Saadiyat workers “, reassuring readers that everything is rosy on Saadiyat, which literally means “island of happiness”. Art and politics are an awkward pairing at the best of times. But Art Dubai and the Sharjah Biennial, however awkwardly and with whatever compromised means, are bringing the invigorating oxygen of cultural and political debate to the region. Let’s hope it continues, inshallah. Art Festivals Dubai Dubai Bahrain Middle East United Arab Emirates James Westcott guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Conservative WI Justice Prosser attacks Chief Justice as a ‘bitch,’ threatens to ‘destroy’ her
March 23, 2011 No Comment
enlarge Credit: Prosser Website Megyn Kelly and FOX News have been trying to paint WI protesters as being violent thugs and Tea Party-like (my analogy) ever since the grassroots resistance to Gov. Scott Walker’s punitive measures began. Maybe Megyn can take a look at how Conservative Judge Prosser has been behaving: As the deeply divided state Supreme Court wrestled over whether to force one member off criminal cases last year, Justice David Prosser exploded at Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson behind closed doors, calling her a “bitch” and threatening to “destroy” her. The incident, revealed in interviews as well as e-mails between justices, shows fractures on the court run even deeper than what has been revealed in public sniping in recent years. Problems got so bad that justices on both sides described the court as dysfunctional, and Prosser and others suggested bringing in a third party for help, e-mails show. Prosser acknowledged the incident recently and said he thought it was becoming public now in an attempt to hurt him politically. Prosser faces Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg in the April 5 election. He said the outburst came after Abrahamson took steps to undermine him politically and to embarrass him and other court conservatives. “In the context of this, I said, ‘You are a total bitch,’ ” Prosser said. “I probably overreacted, but I think it was entirely warranted. . . . They (Abrahamson and Justice Ann Walsh Bradley) are masters at deliberately goading people into perhaps incautious statements. This is bullying and abuse of very, very long standing.” The Feb. 10, 2010, incident occurred as the court privately discussed a request to remove Justice Michael Gableman from a criminal case. “In a fit of temper, you were screaming at the chief; calling her a ‘bitch,’ threatening her with ‘. . . I will destroy you’; and describing the means of destruction as a war against her ‘and it won’t be a ground war,’ ” Bradley wrote in a Feb. 18, 2010, e-mail to Prosser and others. “In my view, a necessary step to address the dysfunction is to end these abusive temper tantrums. No one brought in from the outside is going to cure this aspect of the dysfunction.” Three days later, Justice Patience Roggensack wrote to Bradley, criticizing her for copying judicial assistants on her e-mail. Don’t you just love how the victims of his foulmouthed bullying are themselves painted as “bullies”? It’s the ‘Bloody Shirt’ principle in action, converting perpetrators into victims and vice versa. On FOX’ America’s Election HQ website, an article appears about Judge Prosser from 03/22 called : Collective Bargaining Appeal Takes Center Stage in Wisconsin Supreme Court Election which omits Prosser’s abusive actions altogether. What a shock. Our pal David Edwards adds some context to Prosser’s resume at Raw Story: The admission that he one called the chief justice a “bitch” follows a spotted history on women’s isssues. In 1990, while serving as a Wisconsin state Representative, Prosser argued that teen women would lie about being raped to get an abortion. As a Supreme Court justice in 2010, he voted to uphold a circuit court decision that said the City of Milwaukee’s Paid Sick Leave Ordinance did not adequately disclose that leave could be used related to domestic and sexual violence. While District Attorney of Outagamie County in 1979, Prosser had also refused to prosecute a priest that had allegedly sexually abused two children. “I was ready to take the stand,” Troy Merryfield, one of the abused children, told the Journal Sentinel years later . “He (Prosser) said it would be too embarrassing for a kid my age and said what jury would believe a kid testifying against a priest?” The conservative Prosser is facing Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg in a re-election battle which could change the makeup of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The Kloppenburg campaign attacked Prosser after his spokesman admitted the justice would serve as a “complement” to Republican Gov. Scott Walker if re-elected. “This race is about returning independence and impartiality to the court,” Kloppenburg wrote in an op-ed for Madison.com. “It’s about electing justices who haven’t prejudged cases and who see the judiciary as a co-equal branch of government and a check and balance against overreaching by the executive and legislative branches, not as a ‘complement’ to their political agenda.” This Justice is up for reelection on April 5th, so let’s hope he goes down.
Continue reading …