Hate Removed: White Supremacist Books Transformed into Art Exhibit with Positive Messages

[Nachtengel]

By JOE NICKELL of the Missoulian

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When life gives you 4,000 books full of racist aspersion, make art.

That’s the simple logic behind “Speaking Volumes: Transforming Hate,” one of the most ambitious, diverse – and unlikely – art projects in the modern history of Montana. A joint project of the Holter Museum of Art in Helena and the Montana Human Rights Network, the widely traveled exhibit arrives in Missoula this week – the closest it has yet come to where it all began, in a storage locker near Superior.

That’s where, back in 2003, Montana Human Rights Network director Ken Toole was taken by a disaffected member of the white supremacist group, World Church of the Creator. The locker contained thousands of copies of 13 books written by Ben Klassen, the infamous author of the “White Man’s Bible” and founder of the so-called Creativity Movement. All that the impoverished defect or asked in exchange for the books was a bus ticket out of town.

So Toole approached the Holter Museum with an idea: Why not enlist artists to transform all that hate into something good?

That’s when Katie Knight got involved. A longtime social activist, teacher and artist from the Helena area, Knight has devoted her career to addressing human rights issues through the arts. When the Holter Museum approached her about curating the project, she jumped at the opportunity.

“It was such a great concept and so much in line with what I’d been focused on all of those years, so I was really excited,” said Knight. “Of course, it was daunting, too – what to do with these thousands of books.”

Knight began by putting out calls to artists around the country and across Montana. She also initiated a juried selection process, whereby anyone with an interest could create an artwork out of the books, and submit it for possible inclusion in the exhibit.

The response, she said, was overwhelming.

“It was astonishing the range of responses from all over,” said Knight. “We got works that responded to the books in a very broad range of ways.”

Some artists pulped the pages of the books, completely remaking them into something altogether different. Others altered the texts more subtley. New York artist Charles Gute took pages of the books and marked them up, substituting words to create a whole reversal of the message. Faith Ringgold – a well-known African-American artist and writer whose work was featured at the Missoula Art Museum in 2007 – left out the books entirely, and instead wrote and illustrated a story about the first time she was ever called the “N” word.

Continued: http://www.missoulian.com/entertainm...cc4c002e0.html

[Bittereinder]

Continued: http://www.missoulian.com/entertainm...cc4c002e0.html

Unmade and added some random pc stuff, does that sound like transformed?

[velvet]

Unmade and added some random pc stuff, does that sound like transformed?

This doesnt even sound like 'art'

Obviously a case for the Entartete Kunst thread

[Sigurd]

This doesnt even sound like 'art'

I'll have to get this to you in German (word by word translation therafter) to get the double entendre across:

Natürlich ist es keine "Kunst" in ihrer reinen Form, sondern viel eher "eine Kunst". Diese Art von "Kunst" ist eine schattige, unterschwellige Tat welche man im gelehrten Jargon schlicht und einfach "billiges Plagiat" nennt. So hirnverbrannt zu sein, auf solch unkreativen Unsinn zu kommen, ist tatsächlich wahrlich eine Kunst.

[[Well, it is certainly not "art" in the strict sense, but rather "an art". This type of "art" is a shady act of subterfuge which the scholar simply calls "cheap plagarism". To be so messed up in one's head to come up with that nonsense is indeed an art.]]

[Erlkönig]

This is just camouflaged book burning isnt it ? I doubt it has anything to do with art at all.