Degenerate Art and The State

Part Ii: Notes of Discord

An 8-week study with Jeramy Turner and Jack Shneidman

It is not our fellow artist who is the enemy, but those who have made art the booty of exploitation, and who use it as a deodorant for war and fascism.
—Arnold Blanch, First American Artists Congress, 1936

Art can become an alternative form of revolt that both deepens our consciousness and inspires resistance. We will explore selected pieces of music, visual art, and including two exemplary, radical films: Soleil O (dir. Mel Hondo, France/Mauritania, 1967), a scathing attack on colonialism and capitalism; and Council of the Gods, (dir. Kurt Maetzig, East Germany, 1950) a fictional film linking Monsanto, Rockefeller, and Hitler. Music selections will include works by John Coltrane (1926-1967), American jazz saxophonist, composer, and civil rights activist; Charles Haden (1938-2014) of the Charlie Haden Liberation Music Orchestra, American jazz bassist and composer, also engaged in anti-war and anti-imperialist movements; and Frederic Rzewski (1938- ), American composer and pianist, engaged in anti-prison industrial complex activity, as well as being an anti-fascist agitator. Among visual art considered will be work by German muralist Werner Tuebke (1929-2004), including Peasant Wars panorama; Josep Renau (1907-1982) Spanish Civil War Communist, with photomontages of great power and beauty; and Edward Keinholz (1927-1994), American anti-imperialist, anti-U.S. sculptor from the 1960s.

JACK SHNEIDMAN earned a BFA from SUNY Purchase, and an MA from the City College of New York in music composition and jazz performance, respectively. He is the author of the instructional book, 1001 Jazz Licks published by the Cherry Lane Music Company (2000). He has led jazz ensembles in the New York area, and has also performed in Japan and London. He lectured at LaGuardia Community College for seven years.

JERAMY TURNER’s primary concern for many years has been the appropriation of visual art and film for the purpose of countering ruling class hegemony. From 1975-1992, she directed alternative movie theaters in Chicago and Minneapolis, and edited the cinema journal, Shattering Screen. In 1986 she taught herself oil painting so as to visually depict the vulnerability of capitalism, and has been painting in this mode ever since. She established the radical feminist art collective, Sister Serpents in 1989, which Jesse Helmes decried as a “hate group” against unborn children. She has taught and lectured on the conjuncture of political involvement in art and feminism at numerous universities and institutions in the US (Chicago, Boulder, Jersey City, Cornell University). Her work has been exhibited in London, Berlin, Vienna, Stockholm, Hamburg, Bergen (Norway), and at many alternative and university galleries throughout the US. She lives in Brooklyn and Aigen, Austria. Her paintings can be seen at www.jeramyturner.com.