The Flower Carrier

Diego Rivera's "The Flower Carrier" at SFMOMA:

The guide said, "You have to be able to think like a communist--or at least an economist--to understand this painting."

It's true. You have to note:

1. That in reality it's not the big basket of flowers that is bone-crushingly heavy--but the burden of being an unskilled worker under modern capitalism is very heavy.
2. That flowers are and are a symbol of pleasant luxury--but the flower carrier never sees them: for him they are not pleasant use values, but only exchange values.

It is, I think, my favorite painting at SFMOMA.

But I also found William Kentridge's "Tide Table" to be very, very good as well:

artblog: Upstairs... we wound our way... into the permanent collection where we found the Kentridge piece, 'Tide Table' (2003).... The piece, like other Kentridge works, intertwines the character Soho Eckstein, a white industrialist who is the stand-in for the artist, with the lives of black South Africans. Here, Soho vacations at the beach and quickly the beach scene dissolves into one of hospital-dormitories with people dying of AIDS. The tide comes in, the tide goes out like the lives ebbing and flowing...

Comments

[Egg]

And just outside the frame. . .the unseen hand.

[curious]

" the burden of being an unskilled worker under modern capitalism is very heavy"

how is the burden of being an unskilled worker under modern capitalism any worse than that of being an unskilled worker under any economic systen at any stage of development?

[chris]

We need John Berger to do this analysis.

[Brad DeLong]

It isn't. But Rivera thinks it is--that there is something particularly burdensome and particularly alienating about capitalism. And that's what he put into his painting.

[shah8]

hmmm, one note

capitalism is bad for unskilled workers, AND obsolete workers. One may argue that it is bad because it externalizes the burden of education onto those that cannot aquire it.

While some gain the luxury and the space to go to school, and eventually go to Berkeley, the people who's cheap labor which makes it possible to send higher classes to schools do not have the same opportunity.

Nice painting, though

[chris]

John Berger
Here is Where We Meet
Culture
Collaboration
Commitment

Let seven men write your poem

A Season of Celebration and Exploration
11 April - 18 May 2005

"I admire and love John Berger's books. H writes about what is important, not just interesting. In contemporary English letters he seems to me peerless; not since Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the visual world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscious. Less of a poet than Lawrence, he is more intelligent of citizenly, more noble. He is a wonderful artist and thinker." Susan Sontag

http://www.auburn.edu/~garriro/strigl.htm

Let's celebrate this community continues. In google there seems to be no site specificly for John Berger's works as there is for P. K. or Christopher Hitchens. The next site is John Berger Oy which has to be a toast essential for any talk of poetry but not understandable to me, and after that is Heterotopias which is in Chinese and a summary. the site "in the beginning" is scary with flying Confederate flags. Quick give me that toast.

[EliB]

I love Kentridge, and I didn't know SFMOMA had this piece. Thank you for alerting me!

[Dale]

Curious, Brad,
It's not so much that other social structures didn't oppress the poor, but that modernity seemed to promise so much more.

[trevelyan]

The flowers are choking him.

Out of curiosity, does anyone anywhere carry things that way? Whenever portaging I've always followed the French-Canadian fashion of a headstrap.

[sm]

I used a lot of pictures in my lectures on modern world history (intro level) this past year, and Diego Rivera was one of my favorites. Him and various Soviet and Chinese Communist posters. Even though the posters were the tools of lying murderous regimes, they, like Rivera's work, showed what people were upset about. My students have likely never been exposed to this stuff. At least not in such compelling form.

[Unskilled Worker]

Isn't the burden of being an unskilled worker heavier under capitalism than it is under communism?

[Julian Elson]

Aaaaaaaaaaarghhhhh! No! I read "Ways of Seeing" and I found it to be aggravating BS.

Well... okay. You can read Berger if you want to. I think it's a bad idea, though.

[anne]

The New York Times on-going series on class in America is excellent:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/29/national/class/CONSUMPTION-FINAL.html?pagewanted=all

When the Joneses Wear Jeans
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

BEACHWOOD, Ohio - It was 4:30 p.m., sweet hour of opportunity at the Beachwood Place Mall.

Shoppers were drifting into stores in the rush before dinner, and the sales help, as if on cue, began a retail ritual: trying to tell the buyers from the lookers, the platinum-card holders from those who could barely pay their monthly minimum balance.

It is not always easy. Ellyn Lebby, a sales clerk at Saks Fifth Avenue, said she had a customer who regularly bought $3,000 suits but 'who looks like he should be standing outside shaking a cup.'

At Oh How Cute, a children's boutique, the owner, Kira Alexander, checks out shoppers' fingernails. A good manicure usually signals money. 'But then again,' Ms. Alexander conceded, 'I don't have nice nails and I can buy whatever I want.'

Down the mall at the Godiva chocolate store, Mark Fiorilli, the manager, does not even bother trying to figure out who has money. Over the course of a few hours, his shoppers included a young woman with a giant diamond ring and a former airplane parts inspector living off her disability checks.

'You can't make assumptions,' Mr. Fiorilli said.

Social class, once so easily assessed by the car in the driveway or the purse on the arm, has become harder to see in the things Americans buy. Rising incomes, flattening prices and easily available credit have given so many Americans access to such a wide array of high-end goods that traditional markers of status have lost much of their meaning....

[anne]

Also important:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/29/opinion/29sun3.html

A Short History of Class Antagonism in the Black Community
By BRENT STAPLES

Bill Cosby spawned a cottage industry among opinion writers when he ascended a podium in Washington last year and harangued inner-city parents for doing too little to educate their children. He threw salt in the wound by saying those parents were spending too much on expensive sneakers and not enough on books.

Those brief remarks have continued to reverberate through the court of public opinion. Conservatives are hailing Mr. Cosby as the tough love truth teller of the moment. Liberals have come close to describing him as a race traitor, as Prof. Michael Eric Dyson of the University of Pennsylvania recently pointed out in his incendiary book, 'Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?'

Professor Dyson, who is known for rhetorical pyrotechnics, is fiercely critical of Mr. Cosby for what he sees as unfairly attacking the poor. But Mr. Dyson doesn't stop there. He also reaches into the past, attacking earlier members of the black elite for doing the same thing.

Professor Dyson is at least aware that class conflict in the black community goes back to the very beginning. The most striking thing about the discussion that has followed the Cosby comments is the extent to which even well-educated Americans have been surprised to learn that class antagonism exists in the black community at all. This entrenched ignorance about black life was a long time in the making, and is only now being dislodged.

Americans no longer bat an eye when a black actor portrays a surgeon, a chief executive or even a president of the United States. It was not so long ago, however, that black actors who could find work at all were largely limited to playing criminals, servants and simpletons, roles that confirmed the doctrine of black inferiority. Sidney Poitier was the exception, in movies like the one that cast him as a learned psychiatrist treating white patients.

These movies were seen as groundbreaking, even in the North, because they offered black characters who were superior intellectually and in class terms to the whites they encountered on screen. But these glimpses of the black elite on film were not sufficient to counteract the race message that emanated from the American cultural apparatus through most of the 20th century....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/29/international/americas/29brazil.html

Effort to Reduce Poverty and Hunger in Brazil Falls Short of Its Goals
By LARRY ROHTER

ACAUÃ, Brazil - This is one of the poorest places in Brazil, which is why President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had it included in the pilot version of his Zero Hunger program. But more than two years after that effort began, with a visit by the president and his cabinet to these arid backlands, the program here has fallen far short of expectations.

Some of the promised projects to reduce hunger and poverty have simply not gotten off the ground, while others are mired in bureaucracy or have become entangled in partisan politics. Even the simple payment of $20 a month to poor families has generated problems, leaving out some who were supposed to get it and enrolling others who should not.

'The program leaves a lot to desire, not because nothing has improved, but because the steps have been so very slow and hesitant,' said the Rev. Gregório Leal Lustosa, the lone Roman Catholic priest in this and four neighboring municipalities. 'Often the money promised is not there, and when it is, there is difficulty in implementing the programs. So the mood is one of frustration.'

Zero Hunger was supposed to be the centerpiece of the ambitious social transformation promised by Mr. da Silva, a former labor leader who was born into a peasant family not far from here and went hungry himself as a child. At the United Nations and other international forums, he has repeatedly praised the program as an unqualified success and a model for other third world countries, and chided rich countries for not helping more.

But here, where the average daily wage is about $3 and full-time work is hard to find, there is a more nuanced view of Zero Hunger....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/29/international/asia/29letter.html?ex=1272427200&en=1a046af549bfcc2c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

Mystery of India's Poverty: Can the State Break Its Grip?
By AMY WALDMAN

BARADPUR, India - In torn clothes, the boys, mostly low-caste children of laborers, held out their plates to be served from a steaming vat of gruel. The image was Dickensian, but it represented not 19th-century England's abdication of responsibility toward the poor but 21st-century India's seeming embrace of it.

The children are beneficiaries of an acclaimed program mandated in 2001 by India's Supreme Court to provide cooked lunches to all primary schoolchildren. The program is the signature success of a movement in India that is working to create for the poor an entitlements-based social welfare system much like Europe's.

But this is India, home to the world's largest concentration of poor, where some 350 million people still live on less than a dollar a day. So the effort has inevitably raised questions as enormous as the challenge: not least, can poor nations have a social safety net, too?

Such questions have divided economists, policymakers and advocates here in recent months, reflecting the uncertain science of poverty reduction, the political and financial pressures tugging at this democracy of more than a billion people, and an India conflicted about the face it wants to present to the world....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/29/international/asia/29letter.html?ex=1272427200&en=1a046af549bfcc2c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&

Welfare and workfare programs are today taken for granted to assist the needy in otherwise prosperous Western industrialized societies. But they took centuries of effort and upheaval to take shape.

How much more staggering the task, then, for India. The country ranks 127th out of 177 countries on the United Nations Human Development Index, which measures life span, education and living standard. Nearly half its children are undernourished, a level worse than sub-Saharan Africa.

As the social welfare movement expands its goals, debate is expanding, too, over the obligations of the state toward the poor, what India's government can do, and whether betterment can or should be left to economic growth alone.

For example, the movement's latest effort - to get a law guaranteeing the rural poor jobs on public works projects - has proved deeply controversial.

As originally envisioned, the employment law would have guaranteed one member of any rural household 100 days' minimum-wage employment a year on a public works project near home.

Resisting the costs, the Congress-led coalition government has since substantially pared back the bill. Advocates for the poor say the later version would leave vulnerable most of the more than 90 percent of India's labor force that has no unemployment insurance or pension enrollment. The weaker version is close to enactment now.

The competing visions for the law reflect a similarly deep divide among economists. One school of thought argues that simply unleashing the economy - by allowing more foreign investment, selling off unprofitable state-owned companies and cutting red tape - will reduce poverty more than a new government program.

They point to government estimates that the proportion of people living in poverty dropped from 36 percent to 26 percent of the population in the first decade after economic reforms, which began in 1991.

"Where energy and policy should go is how to accelerate the growth, and not be distracted by these old slogans that really made sense 40 years ago," said Surjit S. Bhalla, an economist who opposes the employment law....

[Andrew Spark]

I would love to be the flower for a while. I need the break.

[Andrew Spark]

Thank you for the information here. I really enjoyed the articles about roses. It is good to find a gardening site for our area.