Hiroshima Transfigured

This blog began as a record of my experiences living in Paris in October and November of 2008, particularly the activites and events leading up to the foundation, in January 2009, of the Nouveau Parti Anti-Capitaliste (NPA), with other bits about life in Montparnasse, in Paris. I am now writing from Boston about a range of political issues that help define for me the present state of crisis.


In his opening statement in the Tenenbaum copyright infringement case (see "Justice, Equity, ...", 7/20), defense attorney Charles Nesson invited the jury to consider the Necker cube (pictured at left) as a "metaphor for the truth." His remarks followed the plaintiffs' opening, in which Tenenbaum was predictably described as dishonest and evasive, taking bread from the mouths of artists and technicians and their hungry children while shirking all responsibility for his misdeeds. Since the facts underpinning these assertions are fairly clearly on the record, Nesson's hope is not so much to refute them as to reframe them. Tenenbaum was and is a "nice kid," indistinguishable from the millions in his generation who "love music and technology," share files, and take for granted the free circulation of culture via the internet. Just as the eye sees the Necker cube in two equally 'true' orientations, the jury are enjoined to see Tenenbaum in these two contradictory but coexisting perspectives, rather than trying to decide which of them is 'the truth.'I spent several hours on Saturday inside the world of Sol LeWitt. We were visiting the gigantic installation of LeWitt's wall paintings that will fill an entire factory building at MassMOCA, three floors' worth, for the next 25
years. You enter a world of pure concept--spare lines void of color that fill whole walls with simple geometric forms massively elaborated through repetition--at the ground floor. Then you rise into rectilinear patterns of primary colors, then into swirls and splashes of all sorts of colors, always articulated in terms of formally governed patterns. Those patterns, LeWitt's part of the job, enabled this installation, his chef-d'oeuvre, to be executed by a small army of art students according to LeWitt's instructions after his death. He has in this fashion bequeathed to us, by way of MassMOCA, a vast utopian space.