Sakharov Prize: Europe's answer to the Nobel honours artists and dissidents from Tehran to Moscow

You may not have noticed, but the EU has it’s own equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize. The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought is given to those who strive, through dissent, to give expression to the battle against oppression. The first recipient was Nelson Mandela, the latest, honoured this year, are two Iranians, Jafar Panahi and Nasrin Sotoudeh.

Panahi, a film director, has portrayed the lives of the marginalized and oppressed in contemporary Iran – women, children, the poor – with commitment and lack of sentimentality.  Iranian authorities have construed this social criticism as a threat and have detained Panahi since March 2010.
Principled

He is now serving a six-year prison sentence, banned from film-making or giving interviews for the next twenty years. Sotoudeh is a lawyer who has represented abused women and children as well as intellectuals and activists who have fallen foul of the Iranian regime. She too is now in prison, serving an eleven-year sentence and banned from leaving the country for twenty years. This artist and this lawyer are paying the price for their principled opposition to authority.

The alliance of law and the arts in resisting state violence is familiar to observers of Central and Eastern Europe, and will be discussed in London on Thursday in a debate hosted by the EU Parliament and the University College, London.  It’s one year on since the death of Václav Havel, above, and its his spirit of dissent that the Sakharov Prize honours more than most. Back in 1977 in Czechoslovakia, a small group of intellectuals and ordinary citizens, of artists, philosophers, lawyers, economists, priests and workers, of enviromentalists, liberals and Marxists, united to express their opposition to the actions of their government.

This government had held its people in a repressive stranglehold since the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. Charter 77, as the group called itself, was formed specifically in response to two events.  First, in 1975 the Czechoslovak government had signed the Helsinki Declaration on Human Rights. Charter 77 sought to hold the government to the standards that it had subscribed to and yet was flouting with its continued imprisonment of its citizens on political grounds.

This was, then, a statement about legal norms. Second, Charter 77 responded to the arrest, trial, and banning from performance of the underground rock group, The Plastic People of the Universe. Charter 77 was equally about the right to challenge norms and to experiment socially and aesthetically.

Dissent in Czechoslovakia was born from these twin impulses: law and the arts, norm and experiment.  From these impulses came a movement that, in the Velvet Revolution of 1989, played a central role in the overthrow of the European political order.

In the writings of Charter 77’s spokesman, Václav Havel, who later became the leader of that revolution and then his country’s president, dissent was defined as the ‘art of the impossible’: the art of not accepting the status quo as the only state of affairs possible, despite all apparent evidence to the contrary. Through his own years of imprisonment, Havel practiced this art and kept his faith in radical political change, a faith that, arguably, demanded the creative vision of a playwright more than the realism of a lawyer.

Dissent in Central and Eastern Europe was not just about overthrowing a debased form of Communism. It was fundamentally about emancipatory modes of thought and action. This legacy has lost none of its relevance at a time when, as Slavoj Žižek has claimed, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Alternatives

Today we see dissent throughout the world: in Iran, but also in Putin’s Russia and in Charter 08, the Chinese movement that explicitly models itself on its Czechoslovak forerunner, in the upheavals of the Arab Spring, in pro-democracy movements in Belarus, Burma and Bahrain.

Here the arts often play a vital role, perhaps in Pussy Riot’s punk prayer, but certainly in Ai Wei Wei’s ludic yet politically trenchant artistic practice. We see dissent closer to home in Europe and the West too: in the Occupy movement, in anti-austerity movements in Greece and Spain, and in the growing conviction that — given the collapse of our economic system and the bankruptcy of our political system — there must be other ways of doing things.

The European Union does not only give out prizes to honour the courage of dissidents like Panahi and Sotoudeh.  It now also receives prizes.  We can all take some pride in, and even some credit for, the award of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to the EU. Yet the EU seems more comfortable with dissent when it happens beyond its own borders.  Our task as ordinary Europeans is to resist this by drawing on the legacy of Havel: to demand justice as well as experiment, to dare to think and do the impossible.

Tim Beasley-Murray is a  Senior Lecturer in European Thought and Culture and Peter Zusi is a  Lecturer in Czech and Slovak Literature at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, both at the University College London

Sebastian Mikael: An Artist On The Verge

Sebastian Mikael didn't write his first song until he was 18, but the now-24-year-old singer/songwriter is emerging as a versatile artist of siginificant talent and promise.

"I still feel like I'm always learning, always developing," says Mikael, whose debut album is slated for release on Slip-N-Slide/Vested in Culture/Epic Records in the coming year. Early impressions in the way of such songs as "Speechless" and "Beautiful Life" suggest the album will offer a diverse range of styles and influences from old-school and neo-soul to contemporary jazz to pop.

Mikael emigrated from his native Sweden to the United States in 2008, enrolling at California's Musicians Institute and, two years later, transferring to Berklee College of Music in Boston where he remains an undergraduate. Having learned to play guitar and piano by his own hand, Mikael says, "It was vocally that I went, for more classical training; also with writing music-like the harmony and theory of music."

Of course having all the talent and ambition in the world doesn't ensure success, and the diligence it can take to achieve that success can be daunting. To that end Mikael acknowledges how R&B artist/producer Ryan Leslie, who was a featured speaker at the 4th Annual Business of Hip-Hop/Urban Music Symposium at Berklee in 2010, ultimately gave him the nudge he needed to shoot for the big time. "He was talking about showcasing your talent online and not hesitating on putting it out there," Mikael recalls of Leslie's message. "Even if you feel like you're not completely developed, don't be afraid to put yourself out there. Let yourself develop while you're already out there. Really, just be bold with your talent and be creative."

The insight continues to serve Mikael well as he nears completion on his as-yet-untitled debut, which for him is clearly a labor of love. "Right now it's like I don't want to stop," he insists. "I want to keep going because I want to make this as good as I can."

Eugène Atget (1857–1927)

Although he studied drama in Paris in the mid-1870s and was an itinerant actor for some years thereafter, Eugène Atget's theatrical sensibility found its best outlet in a more deliberate, contemplative, and purely visual art form. In the late 1880s, he began photographing whatever artists needed as models for their work, and by 1898 he had established a practice in Paris. He became obsessed with making what he modestly called "documents" of the city and its environs, and compiling a visual compendium of the architecture, landscape, and artifacts that distinguish French culture and its history. Except for a brief attempt to capture life in the streets early in his career, Atget rarely photographed people, preferring the streets themselves as well as the gardens, courtyards, and other areas that constituted the cultural stage.

By the end of his life, Atget had amassed an archive of over 8,000 negatives, which he organized into such categories as Parisian Interiors, Vehicles in Paris, and Petits Métiers (trades and professions). While his principle clientele would change, Atget continued to frequent artists' ateliers and cafés until the end of his life, selling his pictures to those most able to see their intrinsic worth.

In the 1920s, Atget was heralded by Man Ray and the Surrealists for his photographs of window displays that melded reflections of the street with artifacts for sale, and for his pictures of places that seemed like so many theatrical stages pregnant with imminent action. His keen observations of the moments when today's traffic intersects society's immemorial concerns demonstrated far beyond Surrealist circles how photography could succinctly and evocatively describe cultural values as pervasive and almost as invisible as air.

Carleton Watkins (1829–1916) and the West: 1860s–1870s

If the Civil War was the greatest test of the young American republic's commitment to its founding precepts, it was also the watershed in its history. The feudal agrarian life gave way to the dominance of the industrialized North, which now turned its well-oiled centralized organization and genius for engineering toward the West, launching across the continent wave upon wave of migration and exploration, consolidation and appropriation. The camera went along for the ride, often in the hands of one of Mathew B. Brady's and Alexander Gardner's well-trained field photographers such as Timothy O'Sullivan (1840–1882) (1986.1054.19).

By the close of the Civil War, twenty-five-year-old O'Sullivan had had seven years' experience in wet plate photography, five of them working from a van on or near the battlefield. His technical proficiency under adverse conditions and his strong constitution recommended him as a photographer for the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, the first of several exploratory surveys of the American West. Clarence King, an enterprising geologist from Yale, had convinced the government to implement a study of the geological structure and natural resources of the region west of the Great Plains and east of California, the so-called Great American Desert. From 1867 to 1872, King and his corps of young scientists and photographers mapped and described a band 100 miles wide by 300 miles long lying roughly along the route of the railroad that would link the east and west coasts in 1869.

The consummate photographer of the American West, Carleton Watkins (1829–1916), however, had absolutely no field training during the Civil War. In 1851, when he was twenty-one, Watkins left Oneonta, New York, for California, following the example of Collis P. Huntington, another Oneonta native who had moved to California to make his fortune. After a stint in Huntington's store in Sacramento, Watkins moved to San Francisco, where he chanced into an apprenticeship with the daguerreotypist Robert Vance. By 1858, Watkins had established an independent practice, photographing mining operations and land claims for financiers who were building their careers in the lap of the new state.

a In 1861, Watkins traveled with one of his patrons, Trenor Park, entrepreneur of the Mariposa gold mine, on a family excursion to Yosemite (1989.1084.1-.3), an extraordinarily beautiful valley surrounded by cliffs 3,000 feet in height. Unknown to white settlers until 1849, the valley was twenty hours by stage and mule from San Francisco. But word spread fast at the Mariposa mine, and by 1858 there were land claims, a better road, and tourists enough to support a hotel. In 1859, C. L. Weed photographed the valley, and by 1861 Easterners had come to know of the awe-inspiring site from articles in the Boston Evening Transcript, written by the Unitarian minister Thomas Starr King.

The 30 mammoth-plate (22 x 18 inches) and 100 stereo views that Watkins took in Yosemite in 1861 were among the first photographs of the valley sent back east. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Ralph Waldo Emerson received copies through Starr King, and in 1862 the photographs excited further interest when they were exhibited at Goupil's New York gallery. It was partly on their evidence that President Lincoln signed a bill in 1864 declaring the valley inviolate and leading the way to the National Parks system.

A natural adept, Watkins soon established his own business photographing for mining interests and land-dispute cases and, by 1862, had become famous on both coasts for his dazzling views of Yosemite. Embracing both human enterprise and the natural wonders of California, Watkins created crystalline views of the West that balanced the works of man and nature in an ideal harmony we can only envy today.

Watkins combined a virtuoso mastery of the difficult wet-plate negative process with a rigorous sense of pictorial structure. For large-format landscape work such as he produced along the Columbia River in Oregon (1979.622; 2005.100.108), the physical demands of this process were great. Since there was as yet no practical means of enlarging, Watkins' glass negatives had to be as large as he wished the prints to be, and his camera large enough to accommodate them. Furthermore, the glass negatives had to be coated, exposed, and developed while the collodion remained tacky, requiring the photographer to transport a traveling darkroom as he explored the rugged, virgin terrain of the American West. The remarkable clarity of Watkins' "mammoth" prints was unmatched by any of his contemporaries, and by few artists today.

Nine Polaroid Portraits of a Mirror, 1967

Anastasi's conceptual exercise—the gradual covering and replacement of a mirror by pictures of itself—allegorizes the transformation in the status of the photographic image in the 1960s. Only possible with the invention of the instant print camera, the artist's process involves photographing the mirror, attaching the print to the surface, and photographing the mirror again until the surface is covered. Anastasi's gesture problematizes what was once a direct, unmediated perception of the real with an endless labyrinth of recycled images. Like Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes and Jasper Johns' flags and targets, the perceptual gap in these works between the thing itself and what is literally depicted has been all but erased. The exponentially multiplying self-referentiality of Nine Polaroid Portraits of a Mirror constitutes one of the ways in which artists of the 1960s parodied the interiority and introspection of their immediate predecessors, the Abstract Expressionists.

Childe Hassam (1859–1935)

Childe Hassam (1859–1935), a pioneer of American Impressionism and perhaps its most devoted, prolific, and successful practitioner, was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts (now part of Boston), into a family descended from settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Equally adept at capturing the excitement of modern cities and the charms of country retreats, Hassam (properly pronounced HASS-am) became the foremost chronicler of New York City at the turn of the century. In our day, he is perhaps best known for his depictions of flag-draped Fifth Avenue during World War I (67.187.127). His finest works manifest his brilliant handling of color and light and reflect his credo (stated in 1892) that "the man who will go down to posterity is the man who paints his own time and the scenes of every-day life around him."

After establishing his reputation in Boston between 1882 and 1886, Hassam studied from 1886 to 1889 in Paris. There he was unusual among his American contemporaries in his attraction to French Impressionism, which was just beginning to find favor with American collectors. Hassam returned to the United States late in 1889 and took up lifelong residence in New York. His signature images include views of Boston, Paris, and New York, three urban centers whose places and pleasures he captured with affection and originality. Examples include Winter in Union Square (43.116.2) and Spring Morning in the Heart of the City (43.116.1), both of which record lively sections of New York during the first decade of Hassam's activity there.

While Hassam was unusual among the American Impressionists for his frequent depictions of burgeoning cities, he spent long periods in the countryside. There he found respite from urban pressures and inspiration for numerous important works of art. Hassam's many portrayals of the old-fashioned gardens, rocky coast, and radiant sunlight of the Isles of Shoals, Maine, are among his most cherished works. Among them is the 1901 view Coast Scene, Isles of Shoals (09.72.6), the first canvas by the artist to enter the collection of the Metropolitan Museum. Hassam's images of Newport, Portsmouth, Old Lyme, Gloucester, and other New England locales also exemplify the late nineteenth-century appreciation of the picturesque region redolent of early American settlement and colonial growth. In 1919, Hassam and his wife purchased a colonial-period house in East Hampton, on the south fork of Long Island, New York, and made it their summer headquarters.

Hassam created more than 2,000 oils, watercolors, pastels, and illustrations, and—after 1912—more than 400 etchings and other prints. With these works he achieved critical acclaim and commercial success, riding the great wave of enthusiasm for American Impressionism to fame and fortune.

See Boone County's most creative at Artist Showcase

Looking for a one-of-a-kind gift for that special someone this holiday season?

Head to the 10th annual Artist Showcase where your creative neighbors from the Boone County Visual Arts Association (BCVAA), and other talented local artists, will display and sell their art.

From oil painting and watercolor to photography and porcelain art, 30 artists will be showcasing their original works for you to peruse. As always, all purchases will help support a local artist, the BCVAA, and Boone County Public Library.

The weekend kicks off with an opening reception at 6 p.m. Friday, Dec. 7, at the Main Library, 1786 Burlington Pike, in Burlington.

Get the first look at the artwork while enjoying refreshments provided by the BCVAA and listening to the smooth sounds of the WGP Jazz Trio. Artists from the BCVAA will be set up all weekend, near the second floor rotunda, to demonstrate in-person how they create their unique pieces. You can watch them work and ask questions.