Reflections on art-centered protest.
By Rocky Rūb
Columbia and its students are no strangers to protest. But amid the chants and locked gates that have become part of our everyday reality, recent art-centered protests and installations stand out for the way they make us both spectators and interpreters. However, interpretation may not be in the spectators’ hands at all. In her essay “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag describes interpretation as “plucking a set of elements from the whole work. The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation.” Many of us became translators after leaving campus last spring to a flood of questions from both loved ones and strangers, who wanted our testimonials to the narratives which played out on their screens. Sontag says, “To understand is to interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon, in effect to find an equivalent for it.” As winter break approaches and we again return home to “restate” the images of our campus to our families, recollections of this semester’s art protests will decorate our collective memory as new scenes to be translated.
On Oct. 7, the Zionist student group Students Supporting Israel organized an outdoor art installation in memory of the victims of the Hamas attack one year earlier. Titled Memory Lane, the installation was held on the west Butler Lawn, where the Gaza Solidarity Encampment had been six months prior. The exhibit was composed of many pieces of art created by a variety of artists, including a multi-campus traveling collection of enlarged milk cartons with the faces of Israeli and American citizens taken hostage or killed by Hamas. One of the most startling pieces in the exhibit was by Ezra Saragossi, GS ’24, who constructed scenes based on accounts of the attack with written descriptions, and placed them next to each other on a bright red carpet.
Illustration by Em Bennett
Art, in this instance, left little to the imagination. Saragossi actually defied instructions from the Columbia-affiliated Jewish organizing groups and administrative leaders, by including fake blood and depictions of mutilation in his piece. Red paint is splattered across all the meticulously placed items, including women’s underwear, gagged and bound teddy bears, a battered child’s stroller, and burned cardboard homes. Saragossi wanted these images to be confrontational to both Zionist and anti-Zionist viewers. “From the Jewish perspective, [Jewish students] needed to feel stronger and needed something that could—we can pinpoint what hurts, and then we can get over it. And from the other side, I wanted to show people [the innocence of the lives affected], a lot of [whom] are dehumanizing Jews.”
But the Jewish perspective is not married to Zionism, and some Jewish students on what Saragossi calls “the other side” have a different relationship with their faith. On the Math lawn, for a week starting on Oct. 16, a group of Jewish students constructed what they called a Liberation Sukkah. The goal was to create a space without Zionist affiliation to celebrate the Jewish holiday Sukkot, something they couldn’t find at Columbia-affiliated observances. According to the Torah, the Sukkah is a moveable shelter with at least two and a half walls and a see-through roof. This Sukkah was painted with symbols of Palestinian life and messages of resistance, like an excerpt from poet June Jordan’s “Intifada Incantation”: “I said I loved you and I wanted genocide to stop.”
A leading artist of the Sukkah who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that the painted images were inspired by “scriptural connections between Jews and Palestinians that are brought forth by this holiday … about land and harvest.” For them, the holiday meant thinking about the “connection between Palestinians and their homeland and to the plants and vegetation that sustain them.” Art is an indispensable means of communicating the students’ message. “There’s been so many people who want to come and take pictures of the protests and say things like, ‘They’re anti-semitic, they’re pro-Hamas.’ So being able to have those [pictures] with the messages is important … to refocus on Palestine.”
Protest art offers itself as an already-interpreted object that amplifies a specific voice or ideology. Both artists that I spoke to described wanting as many eyes on their work as possible. Memory Lane, which faced the center of the lawn for the engaged SSI art enthusiasts to browse, was almost turned around to face the outer hedge-lined perimeter for those walking by, and the Liberation Sukkah was constructed so that its largest painted wall would be seen by students flocking to the northern campus. Both demonstrations were staged for the passerby and seeped into quotidian campus commutes, bestowing their messages on familiar ground and suddenly becoming the centerfold to our visual landscapes. By using the visual arts, the demonstrator commits to preserving their message in its most accessible, visceral form, but cannot allow that shape to be freely manipulated by the unaligned. For protest, its art is already the interpretation, and the viewer must simply look.
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