06-07-2025
Last night, Greg, who is staying with us during Spoleto, started a conversation around religion, with Gwylène. I refused to be drawn into it. I went to bed! This morning, I was still wondering where I had found a good reason to ignore our guest’s intellectual interests! He had been very clear about the reason why he had asked us to stay with us: his need for conversations meatier than his daily intellectual diet! I believe we provided some good open-ended dialogues around topics of art and politic … mostly art.
But last night, when the subject turned to religion, I played dead and chose to retire!
Now, I can make out why:
– the influence of Simone Weil. Her to-the-end rejection of the church as sole holder of the truth, imposed through an established set of dogmas and rites she would not bend to. They encumber the space for liberated thinking.
– and her rejection of the Old Testament, its advocacy for extreme violence, including against entire communities, calling for their extermination. All the more in view of the present Palestine genocide and some of the despicable, hateful rationals.
– my refusal to heed to the catholic church, any church, and their hypocrisy in so many circumstances, primarily relating to sexual abuse. This is yet an other case of unacceptable extreme violence.
– my sense that it is high time for the catholic church, all churches, to answer the calls of their members for LOYALTY to them, the worshipers, the believers. Or else, what is there for them to hold onto, and why shouldn’t everybody demand reciprocity, particularly from god … ” Lord, why have you forsaken me? “
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Within this mounting sense of global dismemberment, it is not despair that prevails yet, I believe. It is the urgency for humanity to defend and celebrate its common values. To call for equity and access. And – more political, more mature – to call for collective conscoiusness, in a time of moral failure of the elites.
This is how I have come to my latest iteration of the holly triad:
HUMANITY – EQUITY – ACCESS
06-11-2025
Below, a note I started to write to Bob Leonard who invites Gwylène and I to join a pre-ROOTS Camp 2025 reflection group, to advance its curriculum. Of course, I have very strong ideas and opinions on all this but I am not sure I want to repeat myself before a group which does not seam to be much more excited by the visual arts now than it was 10 years ago! Yet, the fact that we are asked to participate at this moment, may be a sign of change, an attempt to widen what I see as ‘ROOTS founders’ circle’, at a moment of unprecedented dangers for funding and the DEI agenda.
I am not a follower in that I know that to learn is to question and, in any oppressive culture, to question is to transgress. Danger!
I am not a leader in that I frown at whoever thinks they can talk at you and expect respect.
The idea is good of having Rooters do the hard work of building a core vision of what they want to accomplish, then invite outsiders, have them hear Rooters out and only then bring their own experience.
One of my contributions to the process would be that, as a foreigner, I experienced and was the beneficiary of the successful application of socialist laws in France. My individualism is in check and none of the principles and values I hold are indifferent to others and the planet we all live on together.
The other day, Gwylène and I had a conversation with Kathy de Nobriga and I told her about my disappointment with the immaturity of some core Rooters in their relationship with their own visual work. The experiment we developed with Angela and Muthi on the spirit of collaboration and the agency of 3D artwork’s in the fields of collective intelligence could have been a powerful seed but the effort was not pursued beyond the 4 of us. This was a lost opportunity to push for concepts like teamwork, autonomy, belonging and related notions.
Here, I am only jetting down my first reactions to your offer to be part of a workshop at ROOTS Camp. My hesitation to participate is in consideration of what I must accomplish in the next few months! I am not yet sure of going to Arden in August. But certainly I am willing to share thoughts before camp at your convenience and, if at camp, to be actively at the workshop(s).
I truly question the format of most gatherings where knowledge and experiences are exchanged, at ROOTS and anywhere else. This is, in big part, what keeps me estranged from the otherwise fantastically inspiring ROOTS meetings I have been part of for the last 20 years or so! Thank you for that.
So, please, feel free to call on me for phone or limited Zoom meetings. Be well and thank you for the opportunity. Jean-Marie
It is hard to somehow be an outsider in an organization where the pressure to ‘perform’ is so strong. I can actually say: to peerform! I like this word but I hate being subject to peerforming! Or peerformance. The visual arts are not performative. Sculpture, 3D arts, demand a high level of brain filtration, endless brainwork. ‘La pittura e cosa mentale’. So is ‘la scultura’. But from/by different parts of the brain. I see sculpture as a more Jungian endeavor, with its searches into the unconscious, the collective unconscious, archetypes, the roots of consciousness … altogether, how the immaterial reaches to flesh and blood. From the transcendent to the immanent!
06-13-2025
Yesterday we had two visitors. One was Rebekah, friend and coworker at the café, with whom we have kept in close contact. The other one was Victoria. The four of us had lunch and, of course, both the café and TINYisPOWERFUL were on/at the table with us. However, at the very end of the meal, Victoria got a call. She stepped outside to answer it. Then she came back in. In a totally different mood. A message had just expressed to her that she was fired from her job and that she did not have to show up for work the next day … What to say? … Her rant was as clear and articulate than her best ‘recaps’ at our meetings. She definitely has a top quality verbal skill which – now I know – holds up under fire. She will find herself a new job quickly, I am sure, but hopefully more lucrative and more challenging than a flower shop gig. Speaking of that flower shop however, she had been talking to a friend about her unexpected firing. He told her that he knew someone else who had been fired from ithe same shop, with the same brutality! To which Gwylène added that a former Fast&French employee also, had had the same experience.
My commentary, last night, was that we were witnessing the application of a classic business model: the owner of a small shop who relies on a faithful manager, reasonably payed, to take care of the most routine and usually unpleasant tasks of opening and closing shop or firing the poorly paid second tear workers, considered totally dispensable, although they are indispensable, just as slaves were and maybe again if we do not control our own greed. “Keep them in check” says the boss! In South-Carolina, a ‘right-to-work state’, there is no law against abusive firing no-contract workers. I see this issue of the Uberized worker(s) as a good one to raise, were TINYisPOWERFUL to rekindle its relationship with TINY Businesses. Why? Because TINYisPOWERFUL’s values place humanity before business. We believe that doing business is a way to make community, to sustain the people, not fleece them. As Simone Weil analysed with so much accuity, the labour processes which do not consider individual/human realities and work conditions, risk being oppressive. They force workers into mental distress, with cascading consequences inside and outside the workplace. I believe all businesses, from big to TINY, have a social and political responsibility to support the physical and mental health of their workforce as well as their income. That means: PEOPLE OVER PROFIT.
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The next thinker I intend to concentrate on is ANDRE GORZ. I know him from “le Monde Diplomatique”, one of my best sources of information and knowledge for a long time. What makes him more than a political philosopher is that he not only produce many guiding concepts for his times but he also reported on them and followed their application. Gorz was a recognized and principled journalist too, who enlightened and often questioned the productivist principles of the ‘Glorious Thirties’ and ended up in the ecology constellation. He spent lots of his time working with major intellectuals from the left side of the mid-20th century French spectrum. One of them was Jean-Paul Sartre, at the magazine ‘les Temps Modernes’ – very influential in the 1968 students and workers uprising – among others. He had a very strong sense of the critical place of labour in structuring human life. From the time of his early research in philosophy, he asserted that there are ethical reasons for opposing social hardships and injustices, and that having clarity about this opens the way to human authenticity and, therefore, liberation. It is the centrality of the person as subject and social agent which brings him to that of work, labor, this universal way for individuals to step into their social realities and responsibilities. Work is an expression of self and must remain that. Work is always at risk of becoming either a refuge, or a condition, or a source of alienation. Gorz tells us that it is existential to approach this central issue in our ideologically-driven societies. And, remember, not only does he study, think and philosophize, he also reports to the poeple in various newspapers and magazines, in France and abroad. He is accountable for his intellectual work.He is remarkable.
From Gorz and his writings, I have come to understand that today’s America, in trying to hide and rewrite its past history of slavery, chain gangs and anti-union sentiments, presently dreams of submitting its work forces into mental numbness and generalized indenture. Why not eliminate all frontline im/migrants and chain to field and mine work all the unemployed, all the sick, all the poor, all the racialized?
Who knows what this will do to the sacrosanct idol of exploitative capitalism, the Golden Calf of modernity: PRODUCTIVITY?
NO, let me rewrite this sentence:
If only Trump knew what this will do to the sacrosanct idol of exploitative capitalism!
But what does he care. He will be the Gilded Calf of modernity.
At this juncture, I really think that no ideology resembles exploitative capitalism more than soviet-style socialism!
Mental sleep!
Good as dream
Fake as news
George, where are you
Not Saint
Not Bush
Simply Orwell
Oh well
Can’t do – Can’t do – Can’t do – Can’t do
06-14-2025
This morning, there was a protest in Charleston: No Kings. Well attended I would say, but confined – by police permit, I suppose – to Hampton Park. A few years back, in France, there would have been a march demanding the right to march! But younger generations are looking for deeper proofs of commitment from their elders than marching. Like trust, respect, access, care, climate care … Otherwise, what future will they have been dealt that is worth marching for today? To change tomorrow’s history requires more than a march or a protest. It requires humanity, equity and access NOW. Trump gives them a military parade! This parody is highly absurd because, if they protest they may be mowed down, but they may also change the world.
We the people protest, march, parade also. To change the world – in self-defense.
I suspect that what I just wrote makes little sense, although … This happens often when I push back against being limited by meaning, sense, common sense that is. It smells of Self-censorship. I ask though: is there such a thing as common sense? This quintessential American notion is quintessentially acontextual and therefore thoroughly meaningless, in urgent need of immanence!
Yet, common sense seems to have become a mantra for this presidency, its ultimate reason for doing its ‘things’. Justifications are unnecessary when your high priests clamor exceptionalism, privilege, christianity. And when you dare to attempt the conversion of the National Guard into a Guardia Civil.
I may well be dreaming – right now – about the regime. I see it failing for lack of purpose beyond self-perpetuation.
Tick-Tock – Tick-Tock – The mouse runs up the clock – and Humpty-Dumpty is so far gone. He won’t be put together again.
06-21-2025
On 10-22-2023, Bertrand Badie, retired professor from Science Po Paris, was asked to answer questions about the newly started war between Israel and Palestine. Today, almost two years later as I am editing this Journal**, I look for the link to that Badie interview. I was so impressed by it then. I find it, l watch it again, and I am impressed by it again. Mostly by how Badie explains that the word ‘war’ does not apply for the Israelo-Palestinian confrontation. For two prime reasons: (1) for Clausewitz, war is a conflict between established States, with rules of engagement and procedures for a resolution. Today, most conflicts are between States and resistance/rebellious groups which are often supported by populations with a voice or in search of a voice. This is the case for wars of liberation from colonialism, or wars against an invading State. They may also be between factions from opposed populations, spilling over borders .
There are also modes of contemporary conflicts. Many of them are identified as ‘asymmetrical’, where one party is overwhelmingly more powerful than the other, mostly in armament and popular support. They all share an essential characteristic: their victims are principally civilian populations. That is where the notions of terrorism on the one hand and genocide on the other appear and find context. State terrorism or not, genocide or not quite, no party in such wars can escape the stigma of either or both. (2) such wars are now rather defined as ‘conflicts’ which do not necessarily have the Articles of the UN Charter to lean on. That is why, every time, they last a cruelly long time, till exhaustion, or until allies and/or third parties negotiate terms of peace or disengagements for them, often very arcane and hard to abide to. Such confits may also be so called ‘proxi wars’.
More and more though, Peace Resolutions seem to invoke – beyond the observance of the rules concerning Human Rights laid out in the UN Charter – the respect for the HUMANITY in each and every human being fallen prey to a conflict. I understand this to mean: see yourself in the other, friend or foe alike, your commonality. This appeal to the humanity in each of us captures the birth of a new universal language for an ever more universal consciousness. A language opposed to exceptionalisms of all sorts. A change of scale from State or Empire to individual citizens or collectives of citizens, to
self-organized groups, of resistance or not, movements, political or not, cooperatives, unions, faith groups, interfaith or not … which are a powerful response to social atomization caused by the pressure of system-imposed ‘egotistic consumerism’ and centralized hetero-regulations (as opposed to auto-regulations)
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Today is also the day Abriel makes public the final product of her residency at TINYisPOWERFUL: A sculpture, that took about a year to accomplish. Let me call it a NARRATIVE SCULPTURE. A piece of in/with community art which conveys the state of public housing in Charleston, gentrification, the extent of housing injustice and their effects on her personal history. Yes, she tackled it very well, as far as the closeness of content and form. A quality one of the audience members lauded. Bravo Abriel. For the last two months or so, although she started preparing for her long trip abroad, and therefore was not at the studio as much, she saw her piece to the end very meticulously. Of course, when she came Friday and Saturday, there was a bit of a rush. Crunch time! And definitely, for me, the satisfaction to see that she was very much in charge. I particularly appreciated the quality of the collages applied to the interactive panel. I had not seen them before. She is a serious artist.
The presentation did not take place at the studio or at the house. Abriel needed to transport the piece to the place of presentation. None of the four cars which came by the house that morning was big enough to carry it! And my Volvo is history now! She had to call Uber and request a van to take it to Bintü Atelier, a TINY African inspired restaurant. We also discovered that the panels slaked down when pulled out fully! This was on me! But no one seemed to mind too much and Jack-the-master-carpenter even said that it added a soft touch to it! Nice guy!
Anyway, it’s over and we all wish Abriel a great trip – far, far away and for a long, long time, if I understand. She does not want to stay in Charleston. Good for her. Sharp as she is, she will take in the whole experience and surely make a better future for herself, I am sure.
Thank you, Abriel.
06-30-2025
With the mind on Palestine and Israel:
(1) Masha Gessen wrote, in the New York Tiimes:
“It’s hard to keep defending yourself against a false accusation. It’s logically impossible to prove an absence. And as anyone who has ever been falsely accused knows, it hurts.”
Here, she is talking about anti-semitism, an accusation made against whoever criticizes Israel for its treatment of Palestinians.
I have struggled with this for ever, without finding reasonable answers to the quandary. I am at it again. But – today – there is a new argument to add to my list: the addition of the word HUMANITY to TINYisPOWERFUL’s and my own values and mission. Humanity defined as
– the entire human population of the planet
– the quality of being human
(2) Monique Chemillier-Gendreau just published a book which enlightens the legal side of the conflict between Israel and Palestine, from her International law perspective.
Crime against humanity? Genocide? The step by step Israeli plans to take over more territory, from the start, at no occasion, (the Balfour Declaration, the first Nakba, Oslo, October 7), has Israel had any intention to offer viability to a Palestinian state.
Title of the book:
Rendre impossible un État palestinien. L’objectif d’Israël depuis sa création (Éditions Textuel, 2025)
To make a Palestinian State impossible. Israel’s goal from its inception
I have been trying to present rational arguments to counter the logical impossibility of proving an absence. Then, why not look elsewhere for arguments?
Our humanity is our common …
Isn’t refusing it to others denying it to ourself?
But is this an argument or an other evidence?
The Arts?
If not a window onto others,
Are they a mirror on my self-destruction?
Wounded, I stand
Pulverized, I stand
Undeterred, I resist