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Christy Rupp, Cut & Run, detail, cut paper collage, 2010 16 X 24". Photo courtesy of the artist. Wiener’s last comment brings us back to the fact that the tireless activists featured in this article are all artists, and the time and energy they expend to fight fracking has to have an impact on their creativity and careers. “In fact, my activism interferes with my getting much studio time,” Jill, who works with the all-volunteer organization Catskill Citizens for Safe Energy, said. “I do try to make sure that when I am in the studio I leave the fracking at the door, but really just outside the door. I try to not have the two intersect. My art is happy, fracking, not so much.” “For a few years I spent 5-6 hours per day on fracking-related activities, and slept almost not at all...I painted very little,” said Alice Zinnes. “The summer when the grandfathered test wells were drilled near my home, I was at the drill site a few times a day, photographing activities, etc. I'm now trying to become a painter again… My whole exhibition career has been put on hold -- except that I've shown a few times in fracking-related shows. But since my own work really isn't political, going the avenue of exhibiting in environmentallygeared shows isn't an option for me.” Ruth Hardinger’s creative experience is different. “My work is essentially in abstraction and process has always been sourced by a reference to something I found important,” she says. In recent years, she has created a series titled “Normal Faults and Pathways,” inspired by geological studies of the migration of the fluids used in hydraulic fracturing, triggered by the underground detonation of explosives. The works consist of parts that disconnect and reconnect. Despite this, her involvement still takes its toll, in her words: “The kind of time I put into this is holding me back from other aspects of my life that are precious to me: my family and my art, my business work and ability to relax, exercise, play. I have lost income because of the time this takes.” Has it been worth it? Alice weighed in on the upside, too: “Though my involvement with fracking has taken hours – sometimes whole days – away from my studio, in many ways, I feel it has brought a greater depth to my painting, and my life in general. I have met some truly wonderful people in this movement, and feel empowered by the passions we all share -- in the end I would not choose to have done my last few years differently.” REVOLT Magazine Number 4, 2013 In terms of consequences dealt out by those with opposing interests and views on fracking, Zinnes told us she has reason to believe that she, along with other activists including actor Mark Ruffalo, were placed on a watch list by Pennsylvania Homeland Security. “Just about everyone involved in the anti-fracking movement was on it,” she said. “I'm being followed by the gas industry on Twitter, which is creepy. Josh Fox's trailer was burned down while he was out of town… All the local government officials have signed leases, so no one would investigate this incident very far.” “I’ve had some intense conversations with ‘profrackers’ and we probably won’t be their close friends!” says Ruth Hardinger. “Nobody has threatened me. I’ve heard of that in other states… there are some totally horrific events, for example in Dimock, PA, where those whose water was contaminated could not receive water buffalos because other pro-frackers in the town opposed their receiving clean water.” There is some reason for the anti-fracking forces to be hopeful, such as delays in green-lighting the process, at least for the time being. In March, Pennsylvania Representative Matthew Cartwright (D) introduced legislation to remove oil and gas industry exemptions from the federal Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, which, if passed, will include closing the “Halliburton Loophole.” 4 Even filmmaker Josh Fox has stayed the course in the wake of Oscar notoriety, and “Gasland II” was released at this Spring’s Tribeca Film Festival. For Peggy Cyphers, her dual commitments to art and nature will collaborate this year. “I am heading out to the Prairie in Iowa, to Grin City Collective Residency, and will be working on a new piece about the preservation of our last 1% of magnificent Prairie,” she told us. This year’s projects also include a site-specific installation on the Calvert Cliffs of the Chesapeake Bay, using washed-up artifacts to create bird habitats to hang from the cliffs. Cyphers looks forward to working out of doors and, as she likes to say, “Responding to the call of our amazingly beautiful Planet!" Christy Rupp sees lessons to be learned. “As a nation, we don't need the cheap energy, we need a plan for the future. That best use plan is agriculture, and small business, not the evacuation of rural areas that are vulnerable to lax zoning laws,” she told us. “We need to cut the addiction to cheap fuel which only makes us crave more. We need a plan for renewable energy that works locally as well as globally.” “My hope is that the world will get off fossil fuels before all life is completely wiped out. My fears are that we will not make necessary changes in time,” Alice Zinnes told us. “I'm now spending my time equally against fracking and for sustainable solutions… Partly, fracking is so depressing that I need something else to bring me back up, and partly I realize I need answers to this horrendous problem... I am afraid we will have famine, storms, droughts, war and revolutions globally and nationally. Right now I'm wondering whether I'll live my natural life span, and I doubt it. I'm afraid today's kids will not.” Ruth Hardinger hopes that “My work will contribute to halting this insane technology for cities, states and at the federal levels, to changing perspectives, so as not use this energy which is destroying and will destroy so, so much.” Keeping the dialogue going while building bridges to the art community, in collaboration with Sideshow Gallery in Williamsburg, she is presenting and moderating the panel series “Culture Trashes Nature,” in which experts, activists and artists -- guests have included artists Aviva Rahmani and Lillian Ball, writer Jonathan Goodman and scientist Frank Gallagher--come together to discuss how the way we live impacts the environment, as well as what can and is being done to counteract the damage and prevent future harm to the world we all share. 1. “Fracking’s Future,” Michael B. McElroy and Xi Lu, Harvard Magazine, January-February 2013 http://harvardmagazine. com/2013/01/frackings-future 2. “Fracking Halliburton,” Kate Sheppard, Mother Jones/Blue Marble, November 10, 2010 http://www.motherjones.com/ blue-marble/2010/11/halliburton-fracking-epa 3. “Fracked to Pieces,” Melinda Tuhus, E – The Environmental Magazine, November 1, 2011 http://www.emagazine.com/ magazine/fracked-to-pieces 4. “Federal Legislation Aims to Close ‘Fracking Loopholes,’” Susan Phillips, State Impact Pennsylvania, March 14, 2014 http://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2013/03/14/ federal-legislation-aims-to-close-fracking-loopholes 28
THE CINEMA VIEW LOST IN WHEAT: Terrence Malick's To The Wonder BY DAN CALLAHAN Video still, Terrence Malick's To The Wonder. For both audiences and critics, Terrence Malick has increasingly become a point of controversy and contention. “Badlands” (1973), his feature debut, was acclaimed by most as an instant classic about criminal love and sociopathy, but his follow-up, “Days of Heaven” (1978), was met with a more mixed response. Some thought that that movie leaned far too heavily on the merely pictorial beauty of Néstor Almendros’s cinematography. Malick withdrew from filmmaking for twenty years, a leave of absence that has yet to be fully explained. His comeback, “The Thin Red Line” (1998), was met with both respect and bewilderment due to its consistent staring at grass waving in the wind, a visual pre-occupation that came at the expense of the people on screen. We only had to wait seven years for Malick’s next film, “The New World” (2005), and that movie was the site of an epic online battle between two critical heavyweights: Matt Zoller Seitz, who defended the movie as if it were a girl he was passionately in love with, and Dave Kehr, who dismissed it with clinical and well-earned authority. Six years passed before Malick’s “The Tree of Life” (2011). This has been one of the most divisive of modern movies, championed by a small group of supporters as a masterpiece on childhood and grief but rejected in furious terms by Kehr, J. Hoberman, Jonathan Rosenbaum and many other of our finest film critics. “The Tree of Life” has been taken apart limb from limb by Kehr and Hoberman, both of whom expressed outright loathing for the film’s flowing editing style, which Kehr judged the result of a director who had shot miles of footage and who could not be bothered to make firmer decisions about structure and visual composition. Many of these critics (not to mention generally confused audience members), looked askance at the film’s religious and spiritual yearning, which was often categorized as lightweight New Age malarkey. “The Tree of Life” is the greatest American film I have seen since David Lynch’s “Mulholland Dr.” in 2001. And so it is with a heavy heart that I must now turn to Malick’s new film, “To The Wonder,” a movie released practically right after “The Tree of Life” if we are to compare his work rate to what it has usually been in the past. Most alarmingly, IMDb lists a further three films Malick has shot, all in post-production! What is going on here? Why is Malick suddenly so inspired to work and shoot at such a rate? Since he does no interviews or publicity, only rumor and hearsay can supply any motive for this surge of creative energy. It might be up to a later biographer to figure out just what goes on with Malick, and this is sure to be a difficult job, even if “The Tree of Life” seems like one of the most autobiographical of films. “To The Wonder,” alas, seems to me guilty of every one of the faults Malick’s critics decried in “The Tree of Life” and his past work, and a lot more besides. It plays, in fact, like a parody of a Malick film, all quivering wheat and whispery voice-over and vague reaching for enlightenment. The film centers on Marina (Olga Kurylenko), a Ukrainian woman who moves to Oklahoma to continue her love affair with Neil (Ben Affleck), a man involved in some kind of environmental chicanery. Nestled within the movie is another storyline about how Neil takes up with a childhood friend, Jane (Rachel McAdams), and has an affair with her. Marina and Jane might as well be the same woman as far as Malick’s camera is concerned. Kurylenko looks and behaves like a fashion model, and there are interminable shots of her ecstatically throwing her arms around various exteriors and interiors, until we get the sense that Kurylenko hasn’t the foggiest notion what she is supposed to be portraying. She’s just trying to move in an interesting way for her director, who seems entranced with her, but that entrancement is a dead end. Malick views All-American blond McAdams in exactly the same way, asking her to roll around in the dirt, roll around in the grass and be at one, presumably, with nature. Affleck is much like Richard Gere in "Days of Heaven", a smarmy model who also seems to have no idea what he’s supposed to be doing. On the edges of the story are people who do not look like movie stars, many of whom are afflicted with impairments or diseases of some kind, and Malick’s brief fetishization of their difference in contrast to his tediously pretty lead actors is borderline offensive. The case for and against Terrence Malick is far from finished. Maybe one of his next three films will be another “Badlands” or “Tree of Life.” But this new work, which might be dubbed “To The Blunder,” seems to underline the value for him of taking his time.
Page 2 and 3: m a g a z i n e TM volume 1 no. 4
Page 4: THE R LIST Social Activism in fancy
Page 7 and 8: JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, Untitled (Two
Page 9 and 10: artist, “Father of MTV,” concep
Page 12 and 13: TOP 10 NYC !#$%12456!@# ARTISTS NOW
Page 14 and 15: FASHION Today The Cult of the First
Page 16 and 17: absurd and misogynistic claims leve
Page 18 and 19: the Black Power Movement on the att
Page 20 and 21: Westbeth Artists' Housing, New York
Page 22 and 23: Westbeth PHOTOS BY SCOTTO MYCKLEBUS
Page 26 and 27: Art & Politics:Fracking Drawingthel
Page 30 and 31: THE LITERARY VIEW Skyscraper Blues:
Page 32 and 33: THEATREVIEW Theatre for the Person:
Page 34 and 35: to you, telling you, ‘This is how
Page 36 and 37: ARCHITECTURE VIEW On Being Post-Seq
Page 38 and 39: of “performative queerness.” Do
Page 40 and 41: 2 Tha Beat Y’all When Hip Hop Ped
Page 42 and 43: hip hop, I’m equally seduced by t
Page 44 and 45: SWAGILISH Salomon and THEillUZiON B
Page 46 and 47: narrative, like party at the end of
Page 48: Dominique Claire models Revolt Wear

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