Plogging: Europe’s bizarre eco-friendly fitness craze

Italy has hosted the championships since they began in 2021, first in Torino and now in Genoa

Written By: Adrian Brune

February 15, 2024

The first finisher crossed the line sweaty, tired and almost black with dirt, his white Decathlon shirt turned gray and his standard-issue blue gloves transformed into a deep midnight. He dragged behind him a refrigerator-sized plywood box, piled high with swollen rubbish bags and secured with a hooked rubber bungee cable — where he grabbed that, nobody knew. Yet José Luis Sañudo Lamela’s smile was wide, and he laughed heartily when onlookers and fans expressed amazement at his feat.

But despite Lamela’s assuredness that he would take home top billing in the annual World Plogging Championships, one man outdid him — if not in diversity of goods, in pure heft. Manuel Jesús Ortega García, a Spanish plumber, might not have been the fastest, but on his person he carried a dishwasher, a propane tank, a fire extinguisher and a host of other odds and ends — all in all more than 300 pounds of trash.

Not to be undone, other top finishers, such as Renato Zanelli and Elena Canuto, the 2022 champions, crossed the finish line with rusty irons hanging from their necks and chairs dangling from their arms, while pushing tires and dragging disused televisions and 1980s boom boxes. “The competition is intense this year,” said Zanelli, seventy-one, whose knack for locating refuse, in addition to his training, keeps him competitive against ploggers half his age.

Lamela, Ortega, Canuto, Zanelli and about sixty others from sixteen countries descended on Genoa, Italy, in late September to put their refuse-hauling regimes to the test in the World Plogging Championships, an annual race that combines running with trash collecting. For six hours contestants collected points by not only tallying miles and vertical distance, but also by hauling the heaviest and most valuable trash across the finish line — recyclable and fixable materials bringing in the top points. In one afternoon, athletes ran about 820 miles across Genoa, gathered about 6,600 pounds of trash and helped recycle more than 4,400 pounds (71 percent of the total amount) — equaling about 37,000 miles or fifty flights between Milan and Rome in carbon offsets.

“The quantity of collected waste has tripled since the last championships,” said Roberto Cavallo, the World Plogging Championship director. “The runners always manage to surprise us.” Cavallo, who is on the world organizing committee of plogging, knows his rubbish. The founder of Keep Clean and Run, an eco-marathon in which the plogging takes place in stages over a week, Cavallo and his partner Vitor Pereira have run nearly 215 miles crossing Trentino, Brescia and Bergamo, collecting abandoned waste found along the way, supported by citizens and students from thirty-eight municipalities across the region. “Sports, once again, has proven to be a useful vector of messages: a jog with a waste bag is enough to set an example of respecting our planet more,” he said.

Although it sounds like something done in the privacy of one’s home, plogging is actually a dictionary-recognized portmanteau coined by a Swedish environmentalist and runner named Erik Ahlström who in 2016 combined the Swedish phrase “plocka upp,” which means “to pick up,” and the English verb “jogging.” Ahlström had been shocked by the amount of debris he saw on the road during his daily cycling workout. So he started picking it up, and then he convinced his running club to take a day each week to pick up trash. “Rubbish and litter creates not only a dirty surrounding but also an anti-social one that distances us from one another,” Ahlström said. “We in Sweden with our clean water and fresh air should also be an example for a clean environment; zero tolerance to garbage should be a matter of course.” The Swedish plogging spread to other countries — even as far as the West Bank of Israel — and other clubs, including the Right to Movement Palestinian Runners, established their own plogging events. The growth of the movement spawned an idea: what if plogging turned into a competitive sport?

I traveled to Genoa — the site of the 2023 race, to find out. While Italy is known for its significant beauty, the country struggles with chronic littering, inefficient garbage collection and illegal dumping in the mountains, especially in the north. Rome has become symbolic of Italy’s inability to fix its trash problem; other ancient cities, such as Amman, Baghdad, Athens and Cairo are in even worse situations. But as the country with the most plogging activists and contestants, Italy has hosted the Plogging Championships since they began in 2021, first in Torino and now in Genoa.

“There is no typical plogger,” said Francesco Carcioffo, chief executive of Acea Pinerolese Industriale (API), an energy and recycling company that has helped sponsor and organize the race since 2021. “Everyone can be a plogger. For our event, some are professional athletes — trained runners interested in environmental causes — others are amateurs and just like to run in the hills or the mountains. We get a lot of students and first-time activists, and they can run — or just walk.

“We did have the CEO of a foundation last year. He was not very prepared, but he was very committed!”

By the time of the big race on Saturday, participants had already been both feted and indoctrinated into the mission of the International Association for the Environmental Communication which runs all the admin and PR for the WPC. There were luncheons, briefings, opening ceremonies (with country flag-bearing), equipment demos from sponsors, as well as route-planning and sightseeing. At 9 a.m. local time, Cavallo shouted “three, two, one, go” over a loudspeaker, and the athletes, equipped with four rubbish bags, gloves and donning their official plogging uniform of white t-shirt and black shorts, sprinted off in different directions. Some stopped just a quarter of a mile or so from the starting line at the Felice Ceravolo Sports Center in Lagaccio to collect their first trash. Others took off to be the first to find more point-worthy pickings along wooded hilltops — a prime dumping ground in the neighborhood just outside central Genoa.

Plogging had been going on for a number of years by the time API suggested a competition of some sort. The pandemic was in full swing and facemasks, as well as other rubbish, was littering the streets. The API decided to host an online race, according to Carcioffo. “We would have everyone run in their areas in their home countries and then send an email of the rubbish. More than 2,200 people participated,” he said. “We thought ‘let’s create a real event that could show people the impact they could have.’” The first edition in 2021 in the mountains outside Torino was a big success and was shown on national television. “In the mountains, littering is not so exposed, but when you focus on specific areas you can find a lot of stuff everywhere, and we put a big spotlight on this hidden pollution.”

The ploggers had plenty of opportunity to hone their “plocka upp.” From March 2023, qualifying events had taken place in four European countries (Italy, France, Greece, Spain), giving points for each plogger’s international plogging ranking. The top ploggers — some of them marathoners and ultramarathoners — from each of the qualifying events came to Italy to compete for the top prize: running gear courtesy of Italian equipment company Montura, beer from Danish brewery Carlsberg and an original medal created out of recovered electronic components by artist Andrea Sarzi Braga.

“They’re all running and thinking, ‘this waste is maybe not my waste — I didn’t leave it there — but the earth is my home and I don’t want it there,’” Carcioffo said during the race. He explained beforehand that even though some ploggers enter with big-ticket items on their agenda, volume could always win the day. “It’s not about cleaning big refrigerators all the time. People litter with small items — packages of cigarettes that every one of us can pick up.” As the hours ticked, GPS-tracked ploggers crisscrossed trails and roads bringing with them bulkier and bulkier bin bags. One contestant, Vanessa Perea Mediavilla, grabbed a large stick, tied the tops of her plastic sacks to it, and slung it over her shoulder milkmaid-yoke style, as others tagged their bulky items and left them at the roadside for after-race collection. Four refreshment points kept runners fueled with cookies, juice and envy, as each discussed their finds. With thirty minutes left in the race, athletes were gathering so much trash that organizers decided to make a last-minute change. Instead of limiting large finds to three, contestants could carry six dumped objects over the finish line — in addition to their four plastic bags. “I know it’s like changing the rules halfway through a game of Monopoly, but I know I can rely on your comprehension,” Cavallo announced. Some runners would almost double the weight of their trash.

Soon enough all the runners were in. Among the more than 6,600 pounds of bicycles, bike parts, motorcycle helmets, electric fans, traffic cones, baby seats, mattresses, pipes, air rifles and a toilet, race directors scrambled to tally the weight and value of each racer’s haul. In addition to his 310-pound harvest Ortega plogged for sixteen miles over 7,300 feet, making him the clear winner. Canuto lucked into an abandoned shopping cart to wheel in her 100-pound haul. She ran away with the women’s title once more, thanks to a payload heavy on electronic equipment. She also found a baby stroller, which the mother-to-be saw as auspicious. Zanelli came away from Genoa slightly disappointed but pledged to return for 2024. After all, the World Plogging Championships is the race that keeps on giving. In 2021, he brought home a nearly new, stainless-steel Napoletano Cuccumella he found in Turin. “I’ll always have the coffee maker,” he said.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2024 World edition.

What Really Happens in Vegas doesn’t tell you what really happens in Vegas

James Patterson and Mark Seal attempt to reveal the ‘magic’ of Vegas

Written By: Adrian Brune

February 9, 2024

Many magicians have passed through Las Vegas since its inception somewhere around the early 1940s: David Copperfield, Penn and Teller, Criss Angel. But possibly its most renowned, yet least acclaimed, trickster was a woman named Gloria Dea.  

Dea performed traditional magic — the sleight of hand stuff — but she had a specialty in billiard ball manipulation, tossing the balls so that they seem to multiply and then disappear. A prodigy, you could say — and one of the first magicians, let alone a female one, to set foot on the Strip. In 1941, Dea, who was born Gloria Metzner in Oakland, California, appeared at the Round-Up Room at the El Rancho Vegas. She was not yet twenty years old. Dea lasted a year before Hollywood recruited her into D-movies. She appeared in a few arcane flicks until Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space in 1957, regarded as the worst movie ever made. Dea remade herself as a car salesperson and moved back to Vegas. She died in relative but somewhat revived notoriety last March, having reached her centenary in a care home just outside the city. “Magic should be about taking audiences on journeys,” said Copperfield, who helped reveal Dea’s legend to the world, in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “This whole journey of discovering Gloria, this hidden treasure, has been wondrous, thrilling and very gratifying.” 

The mystery novelist James Patterson is something of a Gloria Dea. But after about forty years in the biz, 200 mystery novels and twenty-one non-fiction books, his sleeve tricks are beginning to show. The latest, What Really Happens in Vegas, is more of an Evel Knievel routine than a smooth landing.

Patterson’s new book was co-authored, or mostly authored, by veteran journalist Mark Seal, who previously wrote about Steve and Elaine Wynn of the city’s ruling family. Overall it’s acceptable enough, like a snack at the airport bookstore where the book will likely sell most of its copies before long flights. There is definitely more to Las Vegas than meets the eye — and even What Really Happens in Vegas has surprises — but don’t expect this book to satiate or even tide you over, for that was never its intent. Like the Strip’s high rollers, the authors aim to make some quick money and then get out, lest they lose themselves.  

We begin by examining the Bellagio Hotel fountains, which take hundreds of men, called “the oarsmen,” to maintain daily, though they seem to gyrate and dance organically. To Patterson and Seal, the Bellagio’s music system, which plays a rotating cast of songs including Frank Sinatra’s “Luck Be a Lady” and Andrea Bocelli’s “Con Te Partiro,” serves as the perfect metaphor for the city. The fountains operate thanks to Wynn, the whiz-kid son of a bingo hall owner come West. He and his ex-wife really run Las Vegas these days.

The book continues at the Harry Reid International Airport, the city’s portal. Not much is mentioned about Reid the former senator, the son of a miner and boxer-turned-lawyer who helped transform American social welfare in a working-class town that’s nearly 33 percent Hispanic, 12 percent black and 7 percent Asian, as well as the largest populations of undocumented immigrants in the country and the eighth-highest rate of homelessness. But the airport named for him gets fair play with its slots and its razzle-dazzle designed to prepare visitors.  

Next we join Bocelli’s daughter, Virginia, on a journey to the Big Apple (roller) Coaster at the New York-New York Hotel. Virginia loves the rollercoaster and will ride it ten or so times until she performs with her father later that evening for thousands at the MGM Grand’s Garden Arena. Andrea Bocelli, a native of Tuscany, has come to adore Vegas: “On impulse I would say that I have known it forever, because that is precisely my perception of Las Vegas: a place that is now so much a part of my life that I could not pinpoint its first approach.” He even feels the bright lights and high energy the moment he lands, Seal writes.   

We go on to meet more of the city’s characters: a mayor who sees a Great Depression-era courthouse as something bigger, in fact — a mob museum; a girl from northern California who comes to Vegas to attend nursing school but earns so much money as a drinks server (especially after breast augmentation surgery) that she decided to open her own health clinic one day; a European chef and restaurateur who is lured to Nevada by a shopping mall developer after millions of dollars and prime seats at boxing events are procured. The celebrity chef, Wolfgang Puck, tried his hand at boxing as a young man growing up in Austria. Even Bocelli’s daughter’s driver Raymond Torres is not exempt from this rapture. A troubled youth who grew up in the LA poverty, Torres, who grew a large business selling drugs in Las Vegas, was caught in 1995 fencing stolen goods: paintings by Salvador Dalí, Auguste Renoir and Henri Matisse owned by the entertainer Wayne Newton. Torres, who is part of a chauffeuring group called the Untouchables with access to dozens of luxury cars, has written his own book. “Everybody becomes their true selves in Las Vegas,” Torres says in the book. He sees it happening every day in his rear-view mirror.  

The lists and the stories of Vegas reincarnations go on and on — all twenty or so chapters of them. Most of the people described start out as regular folk and presto!, they have an inkling, go to Sin City and make their lives happen, at least according to Patterson and Seal. Except behind all the word-churning motion sickness is an industry supported by another industry that keeps the Wynns, the Adelsons, the Maloofs and now the Pattersons and the Seals living well: the business of selling the Vegas dream. Patterson, seventy-three, and now the foreman of the book empire rather than the boots on the ground, makes no attempt to defy the cliché. As the commercial copywriter he was before he entered the world of fiction, he wants to give the masses the Vegas they seek.  

“Las Vegas is a place about which people have ideas,” wrote Amanda Fortini in a 2020 article for Believer. In her piece, she attempted to convince the skeptical that culturally sophisticated, unhackneyed, pioneering people and places do exist in the Las Vegas area, such as “City,” a vast desert art sculpture Michael Heizer started in 1970 now open about three hours away, or the new Sphere, a colossal, 18,600-seat, 4D auditorium with a 16,000-pixel wraparound interior LED screen and speakers with directional signal and wave field synthesis technologies. Even the Las Vegas Neon Museum has more originality and authenticity. Neon, a French invention, became the city’s most iconic art form.  

Yet as Fortini wrote in Believer, “all these received narratives, these Vegas hand-me-downs, get recycled by the journalists who parachute in and out of here. These writers (who, it’s worth noting, are almost always male) swoop in for a day or two or four, steep themselves in authority and gin at a casino bar, and deliver their pronouncements on the very essence of this ‘wild and crazy’ place.” Fortini points out that the Strip, that 4.2-mile neon stretch of “an artificial, sealed-off capsule where (tourists) remain for the duration of their visit,” is actually next door to its functioning metropolis: Paradise, Nevada.  

So instead of the fun, truly entertaining gems of Vegas, Patterson and Seal’s readers are left with the tales of people like Jesse Garon Presley, the “king of all the king’s men… the first impersonator to ever receive the key to the city of Las Vegas” (Jesse Garron being the stillborn brother of Elvis, except his impersonator originally dropped an “r” off his middle name “not to jinx myself”). And Charolette Richards, who took the concept of the instant wedding and made an industry of it through her famous Little White Wedding Chapel.  

But things in Vegas are never as they seem, not even the people. They are recreations. Maybe this is Patterson’s point of writing What Really Happens in Vegas: someone can go to a settlement in the desert and build a new business and persona not remotely close to reality. Last fall, Garon Presley decided to revise his name to become a closer version of Elvis by adding that extra “r.” He is now Jesse Garron, and his website and all his social media reflect that change. Meanwhile, Charolette Richards, who when the book was written was approaching her mid-nineties and could hardly remember all the people she has married — including Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, and Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez — sold her wedding chapel in 2022 (Richards died last month). But visitors would never know: the pink-Cadillac Vegas wedding venue where the man now known as Jesse Garron officiates is everlasting. At least for the moment.  

Gloria Dea, the original Vegas magician, eventually married, settled down and gave up the ghost. She was rediscovered only because she sold every costume she had to every vintage store in Vegas. Sadly, What Really Happens in Vegas doesn’t tell the stories of the authentic people that built the city. As Fortini says, “Literature should portray, raise questions, and perhaps come to some conclusions about existence, which nobody ever seeks through Las Vegas. People come to Las Vegas looking for their idea of Las Vegas; they don’t come here looking for life.”  

The vagabond spirit of Mirleft, Morocco’s surf nook

A mile past the sleepy little town’s dusty high street lie cliffs of California proportions — with swells to match

Written By: Adrian Brune

January 23, 2024

At first, the sleepy little town of Mirleft looks like all the others on the 600-mile trek through the sands of the Sahara: half-gravel, half-concrete sidewalks, faded paint, brightly painted schools and the minaret of a new mosque jutting up toward the sky. But a mile past Mirleft’s dusty high street lie cliffs of California proportions — with swells to match. The cliffs arch down at a near forty-five-degree angle and into meaty waves rolling toward a point break. It’s here that a group of ten French and German surfers have joined up with Issam Surf School, heading down to Plage Sauvage, the beach below, in a 4×4.

It’s a welcome break from the desert — and a six- or seven-hour nonstop drive from Mhamid, where the paved road ends and there is nothing left but enormous sand mountains and large drifts that range in color from caramel to milk chocolate. There, about a seven-hour drive from Marrakech, tour groups abound, every other mile or so along the N9 lined with chipped or fading, eccentrically spelled signs, “Sahara Aventures,” “Excursion Tomboctou: 49 Jours” or “Zbar Travel: Camel, Trekking, Bivouac, Sand Boarding.” These pop-up desert guides, promising a romantic glimpse of the place where Lawrence of Arabia set his sights a century ago, are just one part of Morocco’s tourism revitalization.

Morocco gets surf year-round — its curvy coastline lands nearly perfect waves from the southwest and the northwest — but for perfectly lined-up, grinding kick outs, the Christmas holiday (and the period through March), bear witness to the Atlantic’s most powerful swells and least annoying tourists.

Since gaining independence from France in 1956, Morocco has been on a steady postcolonial trek toward self-sufficiency. With a king who is as fanatical about fighting terrorism in the Sahel as he is about creating luxury gambling resorts along Agadir’s corniche, tourists have flocked to Morocco in winter for everything from skiing the high peaks of the Atlas Mountains to surfing Saharan sand dunes to landing 360-degree turns on the Atlantic beaches — all just a day’s drive away. Because of this, Morocco, especially around Christmas, has become one of the world’s top tourist destinations, welcoming around 11 million visitors in 2022, according to the ministry of the interior — many of them headed for the souks, the riads and the culture of central Morocco and the Sahara.

The 6.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Morocco’s Marrakesh-Safi region on September 8, 2023 was expected to stem the tide of tourists. However, more than 960,000 people visited this past fall, up 7 percent from the previous year. Although the region still faces the difficult task of rebuilding, the government has pledged $11.7 billion to help more than 4 million people affected by the earthquake.

“It is crucial to communicate to the world that the situation is more than under control, that we are back to normal life,” says Fatim-Zahra Ammor, Morocco’s minister of tourism. “What was also great is that the tourists that were in place at that time in Morocco started sharing on social media their testimonials about the real situation and that really helped us a lot to convey what was really happening in Marrakech.” But what about the underdeveloped territory along Morocco’s 1,500 miles of coast? As part of the Azur plan launched in 2001, the Moroccans have created six seaside resorts across the country, as well as investing millions of euros in the Taghazout Bay surfer village. Taghazout, just north of Agadir, was once a small fishing village that has become a bustling mini-town full of cafés, family-friendly beach hotels and surf shops to accommodate the influx of European tourists — and the 15 percent of Moroccan surf guys looking to teach them how to hang ten.

With all this in mind, my girlfriend and I chose Morocco for a two-week break from England during the last two weeks of the year. The Atlas Mountains, the Sahara and the South Atlantic coasts were our top three points of interest — with an eye to enduring as few tourists as possible. After landing in Marrakech, we realized that although it’s home to gorgeous mosques, Jewish cemeteries and the Yves Saint Laurent Museum and Jardin Majorelle, the city’s snake charmers, deluge of winter holidaymakers and its constant thrum of traveling salesmen would send us to the Atlas ahead of time.

Three days after arriving we had landed in Mhamid, our car full of local ceramics and pottery purchased after exploring the kasbahs that mark off the territories of one marauding desert army from another. We had taken in the capital of Moroccan movie-making, Ouarzazate, and spent a night in a cushy riad before our planned desert excursion. After we parked our car, we pulled out the essentials and gave ourselves over to a turbaned man driving a twenty-year-old Toyota SUV, booming the desert blues of Tuareg band Tinariwen on repeat. Despite the promise of desert surfing, the closest we came was running up the dunes and sliding down as we lost our feet in the ocean of sand. After pulling our legs from its sucking undertow, we found our camels and our made-to-order campsite for a night of glamping under endless stars.

The next day, we bid adieu to the dozens of tourists headed to the Sahara for New Year’s and drove nearly non-stop toward the coast. As we stopped every so often to allow a camel crossing, each small village looked more or less the same — a gravel soccer pitch with a small group of lively girls and boys running to-and-fro in a pick-up game, and a couple of squat amenity stores for a Coca-Cola and pistachios. But as the coast grew closer and the sun set over the Atlas the sea air started to drift into our nasal passages.

Lesser known than Agadir and Taghazout are the towns on Morocco’s south coast, which not so long ago skirted a bit too close to Western Sahara for safe surfing. However, after Morocco largely squashed Western Sahara’s independence uprising and gained the West’s sovereignty rubber-stamp, those looking to avoid the crowded swells of Hawaii or Australia can catch any commercial flight to Agadir, rent a car and drift from beach to beach, from Sidi Ifni to Mirleft to Tifnit — its curvy coastline lands nearly perfect waves.

Just before midnight, we arrived in the sleepy village of Mirleft, the unassuming star of Morocco’s southern beach scene. Here most everything, including the town’s only bar, shuts well before midnight. In the morning, we strolled past arts and crafts stores brimming with Aragon oil products; cheap beach toys peer out from faded pink-and-blue arches. We ordered a coffee and set our sights on Mirleft Beach, where an array of orange tables, orange chairs and blue umbrellas awaited. Each café, of about a dozen or so, is linked to some sort of hostel and run by an enterprising young man who has usually escaped a dead-end village life for something more fun and lucrative. In Mirleft alone there are plenty of surf shops including Karim’s Surf School, Biscou Surf School and Spot-M, a British-owned outfit with a fully equipped gear shop.

We sought out Issam Surf School, run by a collection of young Moroccan men with a decent array of surfboards scraped together from the bigger surf school outfits. We circled the minarets of a new mosque, finding another hostel just a few blocks from the beach where Issam and two twenty-somethings waited in yet another SUV with just enough surfboards and wetsuits to accommodate the ten or so victims ready to venture into the soup.

With beginners and intermediates separated, we were handed over to Kareem, who firmly holds the surfboard to the top of our rental car when the lash straps don’t quite keep it steady. Judging both Mirleft and Atlas beaches too tame for the day, we followed another Landcruiser to the Plage Sauvage and into meaty waves rolling toward a point break. Two miles south of Mirleft, Plage Sauvage is a wide, rangy plain featuring caves, cliffs and crashing waves. Kareem was ready to get us on the boards, trying a number of techniques: we practiced standing on the beach, while the water lapped the boards; he brought us into a subtle wave, telling us in broken English to paddle out a little bit farther; he gave us endless opportunities to practice “pop-ups” and turn the board in toward the beach. At the end of our half-day, however, I had managed to stay up only for thirty seconds before mullering. But the beach was gorgeous and ocean still relatively mild, so Kareem took us to visit a friend of his who has lived in the cliffs for the past twenty years. He attempted an introduction, but my poor French and his broken English result in little more than “bonne journée.”

That night Kareem instructed us to drive even farther toward Legzira Beach, where a mammoth stone arch naturally formed after years of erosion juts out into the perpetually crashing waves. There were once two, but the smaller one collapsed in late 2016, thanks to… perpetually crashing waves. The sea continues to wear away at the fragile red sandstone of the remaining formation, marking time.

We drove down rollercoaster roads with hairpin turns until we reached Sidi Ifni, a former Spanish protectorate. After dinner at a small seafood restaurant in the center of town, we made our way back to Mirleft and our last nights with the sound of lapping waves.

The next morning, on our way to Agadir, we saw the hollow hulks of new-build homes outlined in concrete. These were closer to the shore, reminding us that Mirleft isn’t going to keep its secret much longer. Already, Plage Sauvage is littered with plastic bags and cans washed ashore from the Atlantic. Moreover, 80 percent of Moroccans now work in informal employment, making these villages Meccas for new beginnings. Airbnb, kicked out of New York and facing trouble in Europe, has been sponsoring coastal rentals, and new investment has brought in the first modern conveniences like streetlights and an ATM, to a town where the preferred modes of transportation are still donkeys and rusted-out mopeds. In addition to encouraging the building of new homes and the remodeling of former shacks, Morocco has pledged millions in road infrastructure projects, both to make the roads safer and to reduce travel time from the north. The earthquake has only strengthened the government’s resolve.

“The worst thing that can happen to those communities… is if tourism stops,” says Hala Benkhaldoun, the general manager of Intrepid Morocco, a tourism operator. “Small parts of the Marrakech have been affected but life is back to normal here. Tourists visiting… didn’t decide to leave the city — they didn’t run to the airport to get out; they continued their trips.”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s February 2024 World edition.

Killers of the Flower Moon renews debate over Oklahoma history

The Panorama of Petroleum mural at Tulsa International Airports Concourse B Baggage Claim. The recent film Killers of the Flower Moon, filmed in and around Tulsa, counters this narrative.

FILM

Written By: Adrian Brune

October 18, 2023 | 4:33 pm

It happens to be a truth of modern travel: airports as destinations in themselves, designed to provide travel needs, shopping delights and above all, entertainment. Heathrow’s Terminal 2, the Queen’s Terminal, pays homage to the late Elizabeth II, who gave her blessing to the Harrods and Fortnam & Mason stores that line the waiting areas. New York’s LaGuardia has become a paean to the subway system, replete with murals and other memorabilia of that venerable institution. Las Vegas’s Harry Reid International Airport is a casino before the casino — try your luck before hitting the strip.  

Into this tradition, Tulsa International Airport in Oklahoma falls. A mish-mash of everything Oklahoma, including a Billy Parker Pusher Plane, an early plane modeled after the Wright brothers’; the Discover Tulsa store, which features Tulsa-themed gifts, such as barbecue sauce from Stan’s Smokehouse and Oklahoma-made Bedre chocolate; and lastly, but not leastly, an expansive, brightly colored mural — not unlike one crafted by Diego Riviera for the great industrialist Henry Ford — giving credit to the city’s founding fathers: the wildcatters, the bankers and the engineers who discovered oil in this former Native American territory.  

Panorama of Petroleum by artist Delbert Jackson is fifty-six feet long. It’s vastly detailed and even a bit cinematic. It purports to illustrate an American dream, as in the processes behind finding and producing oil. It features the faces of twenty-two Tulsa oilmen — the founding fathers of Oklahoma’s generational wealth and industry — imposed on the bodies of roughnecks, geologists, engineers and the men who made the industry tick. It’s also profoundly inaccurate, according to several journalists, art historians, scholars and Martin Scorsese, who recently adapted Killers of the Flower Moon for theaters. The 2017 bestselling book by journalist David Grann details the “Osage Reign of Terror” in which dozens of Osage Indians were murdered for their oil-rich land in the early 1920s — a nonfiction counter-narrative to Panorama of Petroleum.  

Yet in the metropolis once dubbed the “Magic City” by former president Harry Truman, inventive thinking remains.  

The Connecting the Pipeline portion of Delbert Jackson's Panorama of Petroleum mural in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The mural's depiction runs counter to the narrative given in Killers of the Flower Moon n cinemas this month

“Just because the Catholic Church is riddled with abuse doesn’t mean you take down every crucifix. What does the Osage Tribe and the murders on Osage land have to do with the discovery of oil outside of their nation?” says Michelle Place, the director of special projects at Tulsa Historical Society. “Many people who were in the oil business were Native Americans. Think no further than Thomas Gilcrease.  

“I disagree with your broad brush approach to Oklahoma’s history. There is so much more to the story. Be careful of hasty generalizations.” 

Point taken. Some prevailing Oklahoma history: long before the onset of the oil booms, the state’s Native Americans — Chickasaw, Comanche, Osage, Cherokee and other tribes — had tapped into many natural oil and gas seeps, using the viscous black liquid as medicine. Even before white settlers started coming in droves after the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889, they found they could also use the same stuff for such things as light and heat (igniting fires), insulation or waterproofing and lubrication. Enter the automobile engine and boom! The Native Americans discovered that the terrible farming soil that they believed would finally keep the white man away drew them by the thousands.  

Historians try to pin down the narrative of the oil business to one person, but it’s impossible. Almost simultaneously, countless men — railroad workers, calvary soldiers, immigrants and drifters from the Midwest — landed in Oklahoma to mine “black gold.” Some legitimately leased acreage from the Native Americans… and ultimately paid pennies on the dollar after mining it. Others intermarried into tribes and used custodial statutes to control the “head rights” of their families. Several, according to Grann, killed their wives and other family members by either poisoning or shooting or involving them in “accidents” — usually after imbibing them with alcohol or drugs. These murderous men then inherited the land, the oil and the profits that tribal people had previously shared equally.  

But when the Smithsonian Institute in Washington needed some money and a dazzling display for its Museum of History and Technology — the precursor to the now-standing National Museum of American History — DC looked to the oil titans of Oklahoma. In 1967, those millionaire goliaths gave it the Hall of Petroleum, a year-long revisionist exhibition designed “to give the public some conception of the involved nature of the processes of finding and producing oil and its preparation for consumption — whether by automobiles, airplanes, power stations, household furnaces or the petrochemical industry,” wrote Philip W. Bishop, author of the exhibit’s catalog, Petroleum. 

The Exploration portion of Delbert Jackson's Panorama of Petroleum mural in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

To give credit where credit was due, they had also turned to Delbert Jackson, a commercial artist from Tulsa who worked for Standard Oil-owned Amoco (American Oil Company). In 1964, Jackson set to work painting (with Amoco-made polymer tempera paint) his vision of the oil industry in three distinct phases: Production of Crude Oil, demonstrating the installation of a “christmas tree” valve; Connecting the Pipeline, depicting an oil-lease signing in front of a refinery; and Exploration, showing geologists studying rocks and samples.  

Before thousands of tourists entered to see rows of geysers and pumpers, oil and gas signs, and models of the machines that pulled crude out of the ground, including a horse-powered machine called the Corsicana rig, however, they passed Jackson’s mural: the paean to such men as Ted C. Bodley, former president of Mohawk Petroleum Co. (later sold to Koch Industries), pictured as a foreman; Walter Helmerich II, former chairman of the board of Helmerich & Payne (a company with a current net worth of $4.5 billion) portrayed as a pipe layer; and John Williams, founder of the Williams Companies, painted as a pipe joiner. They were all supposedly depicted “for the most part” working at the jobs they performed at the beginning of their industry careers, according to the artist. In real life, by the 1960s, few of these men set foot on an active drilling site — unless inspecting it or posing for press. One Jewish man and one black man grace the mural: Jacob Blaustein, the founder of Amoco, and Riddick Vann, an Smithsonian exhibit designer. No women, additional minorities or Native Americans otherwise feature.  

“One of the oddest things about the mural, to me, is that all these oilmen are depicted working while completely ignoring the majesty of their surroundings — you can’t help [but] wonder if the artist may have been subversive,” says Michael Mason, founder of This Land Press, an alternative newspaper in Tulsa credited with exposing many long-buried truths of Tulsa. On a serious note, Mason adds, “it’s difficult to understand why anyone would want to be featured in the mural, or why Tulsa would want to impress this message upon its guests.”  

Yet, he sided with late journalist and “historian of Tulsa’s darkest times” Lee Roy Chapman, who “believed that we should not remove unpleasant histories from the public view, but add explanatory placards so that the object becomes a badge of shame that encourages dialogue and reconciliation.”  

Other experts agree with Chapman, although they see the mural as less discursive. 

“Jackson’s mural is far less ambitious in scope than, say, Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry (1933) or Thomas Hart Benton’s America Today (1930),” says Emily Warner, an Art History professor at the University of Oklahoma and a former fellow of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “In those murals, the artists were trying to say something about the nature of modern life itself, at a moment when industrial technology had radically transformed it. Jackson isn’t going after as big or grand a subject, and by the time he’s painting (the 1960s), this kind of industrial technology doesn’t feel ‘new’ or disorienting to people in the same way. 

Walter Helmerich II, Carl Polk, Matt Roach, and A.J. Solliday painted as Oklahoma “roughnecks” or oil workers in Jackson's Panorama of Petroleum mural .

“Rather than commenting on the world-changing transformations of industrial technology, Jackson is simply offering a view of the oil industry, and making the case for Tulsa’s prominent place in that industry.” 

But the mural in DC was only meant to be short-lived. By the time the petroleum exhibit closed in 1968, oil production in the United States started to decline. The painting was tucked away in Washington, then at the Texas state fairgrounds  in Dallas — no one knows why. Texas state administrators thought Tulsa might be a better home for it. Thirty years later, the Helmerich Foundation and the Amoco Foundation — under the direction of the Thomas Gilcrease Museum and at a cost of $200,000 — brought Panorama of Petroleum to the Concourse B baggage claim at the airport, where it stands today. Then Mayor Susan Savage — a granddaughter of the industry — said the mural’s new home would welcome visitors with Tulsa’s main reason for existence as a city. “The airport also made sense because the mural features twenty-two oilmen who are significant Tulsans in our city’s economic and philanthropic history… and it enables Tulsa to share that history to travellers from around the world… many of whom would be significant businessmen and women themselves,” says Jim Langdon, a local journalist who runs Tulsa People magazine.  

An hour north of the Tulsa International Airport, in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, however, is another panorama — a photograph of members of the Osage Nation standing side-by-side along with their white neighbors. Removed from that photograph, according to journalist David Grann, who passed Panorama of Petroleum with every trip there from 2013 to 2017, is a panel that shows one of the main perpetrators of the “Reign of Terror.” Grann couldn’t be reached for comment, but in an interview given to Rogerebert.com about the forthcoming Killers of the Flower Moon (released October 20), he described the “culture of complicity” that he discovered surrounding the murders of Osage Indians for head rights. “(The story) was about the guardians who were complicit. There were lawmen and a sheriff; there were prosecutors who were complicit, sometimes directly, in the murders or covering up the murders. Some morticians would cover up bullet wounds. Doctors had administered poisons; they were complicit in their silence.” 

“How much is this still living history? We are not talking about colonial times; we are talking about the 1920s; this was recent history.”  

Grann said also that he believed the murderers and the system had tried consciously to erase this history. “The Osage nation is deeply, intimately familiar with their own history, as are others, but people outside the nation have erased this from our concept. I think it’s important to reckon it… You can’t restore justice when there are these kinds of crimes you can’t bring back life. But hopefully, you can at least begin to restore a sense of the past. And in doing so, hopefully, learn something about the kind of people in the nation you want to be in the future.” 

None of the administrators of the Tulsa Airports Improvement Trust, nor prominent oil philanthropic trusts, including the Kaiser Family Foundation, nor art museums, such as Gilcrease, returned repeated requests for comment on either Killers of the Flower Moon or Panorama of Petroleum. It seems as if Tulsa, thanks to the many dust-ups surrounding the 1921 Race Massacre, is tired of apologies and explanations.  

Where does that leave Panorama of Petroleum? Still standing.  

“You are spot on looking for diversity to be reflected at the airport.  Blacks were not allowed to work in the oilfield, for example. Why not commission another mural of diversity or tell that story in a different way?” Place, of the Historical Society says. “Another suggestion. Write and mount text explaining the segregated nature of the mural…”

Langdon agrees. “David Grann’s book is excellent. I have not seen the soon-to-be-released movie.  The “Osage Reign Of Terror” was awful and a totally sad and significant human ‘event’ in Oklahoma history. I would love to see a mural at the airport reflecting Oklahoma’s Native American history and significance… a source of pride in our state…” 

But ultimately, as another inconvenient historical narrative about Tulsa hits international terrain,  at home it is kicked under the tarmac. “It’s the Airport Authority who manage this public place and made the decision about what is appropriate. I am happy to discuss Tulsa,  both its unpleasant but true history and good times as well,” Place says. “But, I am not going to debate whether the mural at the airport is right, wrong, should be altered to suit a false narrative or moved to a different location.” 

Welcome to Ouarzawood, Moroccan desert outpost and set of many major movies

Celebrities flock here to film at the biggest movie studio in Africa

Written By: Adrian Brune

May 21, 2023 | 4:20 pm

It’s been a nearly seven-hour drive up and down the Atlas Mountains from Marrakech before a roundabout appears at the entrance to Ouarzazate, the Amazigh (Berber) outpost where we might be able to stave off hunger, thirst and fatigue. But first, follow that roundabout — the one featuring a gigantic director’s clipboard. Then turn left and enter the parking lot of the Atlas Studios, known to the outside world as Ouarzawood, the must-see largest studio in the Sahel, just 230 miles from Merzouga: the gateway to the Sahara.

Park before a half-dozen faux Egyptian Ka statues — think gigantic copies of King Tut’s tomb — then a gate opens and just beyond lie the sets to a dozen or more popular movies. In the sand yard sits the General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon model used during an action scene from 1985’s The Jewel of the Nile; next to it, some bombed-out vehicles from the 2001 Ridley Scott film Black Hawk Down. Just beyond these, in addition to the Oscar Hotel — lined with artifacts from The Maltese Falcon and other desert-themed paraphernalia — is the entrance to this movie wonderland in the middle of the desert. Guests walk up to the cinema ticket booth, plunk down eighty dirhams each ($20), and before two minutes pass, Ibrahim steps out in his head-to-toe, purple-and-orange Sahrawi robes to give at least twenty eager people a tour of the biggest movie studio in Africa.

Ibrahim doesn’t know fluent English, but he knows enough to take people through the 322,000 square feet of various studios. There’s a giant Tibetan temple built for Martin Scorsese’s 1997 epic Kundun, an even larger Egyptian pyramid for the yet-to-be-released remake of Cleopatra starring Gal Gadot and, of course, a realistic Jerusalem for just about any Biblical movie created or still germinating in the mind of Mel Gibson (he filmed The Passion of the Christ at Atlas). “Just think of any historical epic you’ve ever seen, and you will always see Ouarzawood,” Ibrahim says, taking the group past the faux chariots used in the 2016 remake of Ben Hur. “When Gladiator came, the movies really took off,” he adds. “All of us in the town had new employment opportunities as extras, set workers, translators or stuntmen. The studio has made the town prosperous again.”

And what about Ibrahim? In which movie has he starred? “Game of Thrones, season three, episode five,” he says, cracking a smile, almost as if on cue. “Unsullied soldier.”

Indeed, compared to the other towns in the heart of Imazighen country, Ouarzazate has several new buildings, many craft and souvenir shops, actual sidewalks and a fresh coat of paint on nearly everything. The roundabouts also speak of the riches the Hollywood connection brings: there are more sculptures of directors’ boards and film reels. Then there’s the airport — unheard of for the region — for celebrities to land their private jets and avoid the day-long, roller-coaster drive from Marrakech.

The most recent celebrities on the runway: Will Smith and Naomi Scott for Disney’s 2019 live-action Aladdin. Landing next: Denzel Washington and Paul Mescal for the long-anticipated sequel to Gladiator.

Few films can match the massive financial heft and critical anticipation of Gladiator 2, currently filming on the Jerusalem set, which doubles for either ancient Rome or pagan North Africa. Ridley Scott is aiming for something like the $503 million and twelve Academy Award nominations the first one earned. While rumors had the ghost of Maximus (Russell Crowe), the Roman general-turned-gladiator, resurrected or fighting the wraiths of other deceased gladiators, the plot at Atlas currently puts Mescal as Lucius, the nephew of Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), coming to blows with a fictional version of the real-life Roman Emperor Geta, who ruled from 209 to 211.

It’s the latest in a series of desert coups for Atlas. In 2019, King Mohammed VI of Morocco — known as both “the king of the poor” and “the king of cash” — celebrated twenty years on the throne. The heir to one of the oldest dynasties in the world, “M6,” as he is known in the country, continued his father Hassan II’s reforms, aiming to open up society and transform the economy, including shifting the center of cash from minerals and shipping to other revenue streams such as moviemaking. So in 1983 entrepreneur Mohamed Belghmi capitalized on the changes by more or less taking over the site where British director David Lean had filmed the 1962 epic Lawrence of Arabia. Belghmi knew the site could provide an authentic set- ting for just about any ancient, desert-based story, thanks to 300 days of sunshine a year, a vast amount of space and a climate that can mimic the natural environments of many countries.

Atlas Studios officially opened in 1985 as a fictional African desert for the quick turnaround shoot of Jewel of the Nile, the sequel to 1984’s Romancing the Stone starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. While Robert Zemeckis filmed the first one everywhere from Veracruz to Snow Canyon, Utah, the NYU-educated Lewis Teague — known for little more than Cujo and The Dukes of Hazard: Reunion! — directed the $21 million budgeted follow-up mostly in Morocco.

From the lot with the cars and the chariots, Ibrahim takes his charges through the pyramids of Egypt. “Look familiar?” he asks, pointing to various sarcophagi. “Of course, this is where Brendan Fraser filmed all the action scenes of The Mummy.” Leaving everyone to snap photos, he saunters on to another great walled compound and slides open the doors to reveal Cleopatra’s carriage chair, where, of course, all the tourists have to sit and take photos.

After that, everyone follows Ibrahim to a gigantic ancient Buddhist temple. “When famous director Martin Scorsese couldn’t film Kundun about the current Dalai Lama in Tibet, he chose to come here,” Ibrahim says. “But instead of bringing across a 400-strong cast of ethnic Tibetans to Ouarzazate for extras, local fixers visited a Berber tribe whose ancestors fought for France in Vietnam and, as a result, married and brought home dozens of Indochinese women.” Scorsese placed their Asian-looking offspring to the rear of his set pieces, with only sixty Tibetans in front of the camera.

Ibrahim leaves us all outside near the screening room, where clips of the 200 movies made at Atlas Studios play on a loop, and collects his tips. After watching for a few minutes, many of the guests head out to the Jerusalem set, about two kilometers from the rest of the studios. In the early aughts Amine Tazi, another native Moroccan, scooped up not only Atlas Studios, but also nearby CLA Studios, which includes the UNESCO World Heritage site Ksar Aït Benhaddou in the Atlas Mountains between the Sahara and Marrakesh — the site of the 2006 film Babel and Werner Herzog’s Queen of the Desert.

“Fortunately, the wealth our blockbusters bring is transferable to the town,” Tazi says via email from “Ouallywood,” he notes, a marked difference from just “Ouarzawood,” to include “Hollywood, Bollywood… they all come to us to film.” In the Jewel days, an LA production would move to Morocco, he notes, but now when a production is shot wholly within Morocco, around 30 percent of the budget is spent locally on everything from hotels and meals to helicopters. The slots formerly filled by Americans — the camera crew, assistants, grips, animal handlers and even caterers — are usually filled by graduates of film-technician courses at the École de Cinéma de Ouarzazate and production and scriptwriting classes at the Faculté Polydisciplinaire. “All that’s needed now to make a foreign movie is to fly in a director and a bag of cash. According to studio bosses, about 80 percent of movie staff are now Moroccan,” Tazi says.

The Moroccan movie boss adds that he acquired a government license allowing him to draft in the Moroccan army as extras: for Kingdom of Heaven, Tazi outfitted 3,000 real soldiers with spears and sandals for a running battle scene across an imaginary Palestine. When Ibrahim doubles as an extra, he earns $25 a day plus lunch, while anyone who moonlights in hair, makeup or costuming can take home $50 per day.

And lastly, in a town of 100,000 that had never had a movie showing, Abderrazak Zitouny, the director of the Ouarzazate Film Commission, now puts on the Ouarzazate International Film Festival every September. “Essentially, we are a cinema city without any cinemas,” Tazi says. By screening 100 video shorts on pop-up screens around town — ten of them filmed in or around Morocco — the festival drew crowds of up to 1,000 to see their neck of the woods on the silver screen, many for the first time.

In all, the festival logged 5,000 viewers, nearly half under age twenty-five. “Of course, many people who could not travel to the Moroccan desert were watching some of the short films on YouTube and thinking about Ouarzazate,” Tazi says.

When Zitouny isn’t in LA, he courts initial filming inquiries in his downtown office near the École du Cinéma. “Combined with low costs for hotels, drivers and extras, we can make a movie for 50 percent less than in the United States or Europe,” Zitouny says from Ouarzazate. In addition, he says, a single permission grants filming rights anywhere in the country.

Driving out of Ouarzazate, past the set that looks like an American gas station from the horror flick The Hills Have Eyes, it’s plain to see that the movie gamble has paid off for the Berbers. “The Atlas Studios exceed anything on offer in Morocco’s more traditional rivals, as well as anything in Jordan or Tunisia,” Tazi says. “Only the production powerhouses of Turkey and Egypt produce more Middle East-related films. “Political stability means that Morocco’s relative safety is a huge asset for foreign pictures,” Tazi says. “But even beyond this lies what has always been top currency in movies: beauty. It is Ouarzazate’s film-set looks that keep producers coming back for more.”

This article is taken from The Spectator’s June 2023 World edition. 

Is the New York subway the city’s best gallery?

Beneath the Big Apple’s streets, the MTA has amassed the largest collection of public art in the world

Written By: Adrian Brune

April 20, 2023 | 9:25 pm

Milton Glaser was among the most celebrated graphic designers in the world, honored with one-man shows at such glittering institutions as the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. Glaser was the first graphic designer to receive the National Medal of the Arts award. His “I ♥ New York” logo has been emulated everywhere, and his Push Pin Studios set the standard for graphic design outfits around the world, likely creating more theater posters and magazine covers than any other in New York.

But when Glaser pitched one of his “dotty landscape paintings” to the But when Glaser joined the 2017 Metropolitan Transit Authority’s (MTA) call for artists pitching one of his “dotty landscape paintings” its Art & Design judges turned him down. Glaser took the rejection in stride. After all, he had already created artwork for the Astor Place station, Untitled, in 1986 — a set of geometric porcelain-enamel panels which riffed on the 1904 Grueby Faiences that paid homage to the Astor family through its main source of income: the beaver. “By extracting fragments of the motifs on the tile panels, enlarging their scale, and placing these pieces in a random pattern, they take on the appearance of a puzzle,” Glaser said of the work after it was installed.

And from time to time, according to Dan Bates, the longtime manager of Glaser’s studio, before New York’s most famous graphic designer died at the age of ninety-one in 2020, either Glaser or one of his staff would personally stop by the station and check on “Untitled.” “I recall it being in very shabby condition,” Bates says. “As with most things in the city, it has an element of grit to it. I’m not sure it would have necessarily stood out as problematic, but [it was] emblematic of the history of the station — and the city.”

These days, the subway’s artistic legacy runs as deep as its subterranean stations — from the terra-cotta signs designed by the system’s original architects, George Lewis Heins and Christopher Grant LaFarge, to the mosaics of Jack Beal in Times Square to the faceted glass of Barbara Ellmann way out on Van Siclen Avenue in Brooklyn. all of which stand open and unguarded for the public’s viewing pleasure. MTA Arts & Design, a public-private partnership between the transit authority, state government and public art foundations, now manages the most diverse collections of public art in the world, with more than 350 works by world famous, mid-career and emerging artists.

(‘Stationary Figures” (2018) by William Wegman at 23rd St)

Lately, MTA Arts & Design has gone on a bit of a spending spree for subway artwork, particularly for the long-touted extension between Penn Station at 34th Street and Grand Central at 42nd Street. In May 2022, the agency revealed Nick Cave’s “Each One, Every One, Equal All,” a mosaic of the artist’s brightly colored wearable works across nearly 4,600 square feet — the largest such project completed to date in the subway system; Yayo Kusama’s “A Message of Love, Directly from My Heart unto the Universe,” part of Kusama’s “My Eternal Soul” series; Kiki Smith’s “River Light,” “The Water’s Way,” “The Presence,” “The Spring,” and “The Sound,” her ode to the East River; Jordan Bruner’s “The Grand Wander” and Paul Pfeiffer’s work, “Still Life,” which pays homage to the iconic New York City street performer “Da Gold Man” with large-scale photographs installed in double-sided light boxes. Arts & Design will not disclose how much it paid these artists for each commission (80 to 90 percent of the cost goes to fabrication), but a typical Cave Soundsuit goes for $189,000 and a Kusama can go for millions.

In addition to collecting, the MTA’s $55 billion remit also ensures that the century-old transportation network’s existing decorative elements are restored and renewed. Yet several of the uptown Heins & LaFarge terra cotta signs at the original twenty-eight stations are chipped and defaced, while the mosaics of the subway’s second architect, Squire Vickers, across the boroughs need a good cleaning. Glaser’s “Untitled” at Astor Square has been extensively scratched with names and random words and some faceted glass works in the outer boroughs have been broken and boarded up. With this new work going up, how is the MTA preserving the old — including the spinal column of the program made up of the works of such famous artists as Roy Lichtenstein, William Wegman, Sol LeWitt and Nancy Spiro, which have been in the subways for twenty years or more?

“When some of the early works were installed in the 1980s and 90s, the material that was chosen was not very durable and it became obvious that it was not going to hold up,” says Sandra Bloodworth, the longtime director of the MTA Art & Design Program, on a Zoom call from her office in New York. “Milton’s [“Untitled”] was one of the first to ever go up — there had been really no arts program in the subway before — and it was done on porcelain enamel, which can be touched up from time to time, but any permanent solution would require a re-creation,” she explained. “Early on in the program, I made the case for mosaics because everywhere we looked, the mosaics were in mint condition, while we were rescuing a lot of the other work.”

During the 1970s and 80s — the pre-Giuliani years — when New York was the “gritty and nonconforming” place for which some Lower East Siders still long, few people rode the subway and the infrastructure began to crumble, leaving anyone who dared climb below street level faced with dingy stations and trains awash in spray paint.

In the early Eighties Ronay Menschel, a board member of the MTA and a deputy mayor under Ed Koch, founded a new office within the MTA, Arts for Transit, to commission art under the recently passed Percent for Art legislation. Going forward, one percent of capital funds for each station was allocated for art, and in the beginning, Arts for Transit led efforts to save the existing historic terra cotta and mosaics designed by Heins & LaFarge and Squire Vickers. But since the New York City subway falls under the state’s remit, station restoration falls under the jurisdiction of Capital Program and the State Historic Preservation Office. “The NYC Transit cleaning department is responsible during the operational life of a station,” says Sandra Bloodworth. “If it cannot do it, the restoration goes to a capital program — Percent for Art is the only time we can touch it.”

At first, says Bloodworth, who joined the program in 1988 from a background in arts education and became director in 1996, no New Yorker believed that any art could withstand the political, cultural and physical pressure of the millions people who ride the subway every day. But Arts for Transit proved them wrong, starting with Houston Conwill’s “The Open Secret” (1986), a series of bronze reliefs about the sacred spaces of African Americans, mounted on the mezzanine level of the 125th Street Station in Harlem.

Within ten years, the Arts & Design program — a gentle shift in name from Arts for Transit or Percent for Art — had installed forty-eight artworks; by 2013, 250. “Since our last art book, New York’s Underground Art Museum, came out in 2014, the subway has added at least 100 more works,” Bloodworth adds.

But for every 1,000 admirers, there is at least one miscreant. From practically the time she started, Bloodworth says, artists who paint and draw for the project have been given a list of approved materials and fabricators for their work, as well as directions for a set of processes that would ensure their work’s durability, rehabilitation potential and longevity. Sculptors and other creators work in bronze, steel or faceted glass, often where the subway goes above ground. Painters are encouraged to use mosaic.

“Sandra always said ‘as long as the wall is there, your piece is there,’ and that’s true. I had a project manager who was involved in my work every step of the way,” says Lisa Dinhofer, who conceived “Losing My Marbles” for the 42nd Street-Port Authority Station in 2003. “I grew up on the subway; I was born and raised in Brooklyn and was twelve years old when I took the subway to the ‘city’ as we called it, to see the museums. It was my way of giving back.” Following a short blind-jury process, in which Dinhofer submitted a “maquette,” or a mockup of her gold-colored trompe l’oeil frame surrounding a series of marbles which seem to roll across the plane, she vetted two companies, New York-based Miotto Mosaic Studios and Franz Mayer of Munich, and within a few months saw her vision realized in the tunnels.

When she was considering submitting, Dinhofer says, her partner told her that with 500,000 people traveling through the Port Authority every day, “more people are going to see your piece on New Year’s Eve than all of your shows put together, even after twenty years.” Because of that visibility, Dinhofer willingly takes the risk. “It’s the subway — anything can happen. I am just really happy it’s there, and I’m more inclined to think like Milton Glaser” — that changes to the subway art are not necessarily problematic, but emblematic of the relationship between art and the city.

However, if she had the floor at an Arts & Design meeting, Dinhofer would suggest a conservation department. “Every major museum has a department of conservation, and right now, the MTA has essentially created a contemporary art museum underground. There is that Lichtenstein, which is an enamel piece, at 42nd Street and the Ralph Fasanella [oil] at 53rd Street, which I am not sure they ever got around to lighting again.”

Dinhofer and many other artists may get their wish.

On March 20, the MTA announced its Re-NEW-vation Program with the goal of renovating the older, historic stations, from undertaking concrete repairs and water mitigation efforts to replacing tiles along the station walls, and deep cleaning everything. So far this year, the MTA has completed eleven of twelve scheduled facelifts and is on track to complete fifty by the end of the year, including Morgan Avenue, whose Squire Vickers’ tiles are obscured by graffiti, and Delancey/Essex, which needs scouring. But so far, the Arts & Design program has not mentioned replacing faceted glass panels missing from “Jammin’ Under the El” by Verna Hart (1999) at Myrtle Avenue or “Looking Up” by Michael Krondl (2004) at Neptune Avenue, scrubbing the paint and marker off “Migration” by Robin Holder (2006) at Flushing Avenue or retouching the water-damaged “Coney Island Reliefs” by sculptor Deborah Masters (2010) at Stillwell Avenue.

To be fair, the MTA suffered considerably during Covid. The New York transit system will be running on a projected deficit of $1.6 billion in 2024. Its proposal to reduce budg- et gaps through 2028 by an average of $915 million annually leaves many wondering how the subway and commuter trains will keep running when federal aid runs out, let alone how the MTA can showcase new art.

Still, Bloodworth promises that “we will continue to provide durable works of art that are beloved by New Yorkers.” Some extra revenue could come from sales of another book to be released in 2024. Other artists would love to see the Subway Museum mount an exhibition featuring the maquettes, the clay studies called bozzetti and the other influences that go into each work of art.

In the end, however, the pioneering creators of the MTA Museum have accepted a bit of “Zen detachment,” according to Bates, when it comes to the pieces installed — possibly the most racially, ethnically, intellectually and gender-diverse collection of art among any of the institutions of New York. “I would never want the conservation to supersede the new work, because the new work keeps the subway exciting,” Dinhofer says. “New York is constantly reinventing itself for better or worse and people are experiencing it in different ways. Some people are going to come out of the Port Authority every day and forget about it, while others are going to think they saw something very special, whether mine is there in 1,000 years or something else.”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s May 2023 World edition. 

The shock and awe-inspiring art of Iraq

After decades of disorder, the country has a budding art scene

Written by: Adrian Brune

January 25, 2023 | 1:50 pm

FROM THE MAGAZINE

Tara Abdulla in her studio in Sulaymaniyah (Carlotta Cardona)

The road from Erbil consists of one large, tarmacked lane, no separation marks, no shoulder, despite seemingly never-ending ascents and descents and a barrage of trucks carrying huge oil tanks. As soon as the mountains of the Iranian border appear, the cars form a bottleneck into Sulaymaniyah, the “cultural capital of Kurdistan.” It leads to a maze of circular streets, where finding anything — let alone an old tobacco factory turned arts center — becomes a challenge, even for two journalists armed with Google Maps and a local fixer.

Yet after some circling, a phone call, a bit of translating and the opening of two twelve-foot, light-beige metal gates, the artist Tara Abdulla appears, smoking a cigarette. Short and slight, with long, wavy black hair and a sly smile, in this conservative yet chaotic region Abdulla could be haram personified.

Abdulla leads the way to her studio on the fourth floor of the refurbished tobacco factory formerly known as XLine. She has been there for nearly three years. A former student of the Institute of Fine Arts in Sulaymaniyah, Abdulla was offered a studio in 2020 by Shero Bahradar, one of the founders of the “utopian artistic collective” XLine and incubator of modern art in Iraq. Two years later, Abdulla is one of the only artists who remains in the building. She creates in a gallery-sized room in which she hangs her photorealistic canvases — modern line paintings that reflect her feelings surrounding gender roles and the sculptures she uses in her installations.

Is it daring art? For an Iraqi woman, definitely. Is it Abdulla’s most controversial work? Not even close.

In 2020, Abdulla gathered nearly 5,000 pieces of clothing from women who had been abused, sewed them together and hung them across nearly four miles of her home city. The installation, “Mêyîne,” lasted only briefly — “I sent my message,” Abdulla says. “I put it up after midnight, so I wouldn’t be stopped, and people were shocked to see the dresses that women wouldn’t wear normally outside hanging in a very public place.” Within a day, a group of men set “Mêyîne” (which means “wait” in Kurdish) on fire. Abdulla had to take it down to prevent further attacks. But she wasn’t dismayed. Rather, she felt buoyed by the reaction.

“It was my dream to see someone make a fire and destroy [the work]. I said ‘look at my message, I am right about this society. I made my point.’”

Abdulla and her work perfectly illustrate the state of art in Iraq, a country currently finding its voice ten years after Americans left and about five years following the demise of the Islamic State. During those long, dreary years, in a country that once had its own “Baghdad School” of art, anything aside from decorative arts or portraits of Kurdish leaders was shoved underground or hidden in the back rooms of furniture and antique stores. Two decades after the first bombs dropped in Baghdad, the arts in Iraq are emerging, if not exactly flourishing, again.

When Muslim Arabs invaded Mesopotamia in 634, Baghdad became a center of Islamic civilization caught in the middle of two great powers: the Shi’a Safavids and the Sunni Ottomans who fought a series of wars over Baghdad and the region’s holy sites until the region came fully under Ottoman control in the seventeenth century. The most important principle governing the arts was aniconism: the religious prohibition of the representation of living creatures based on the belief that God is the sole author of life, and that any person who produces a likeness of a living being seeks to rival God. The drawing of inanimate objects such as trees and rocks or anything that does not possess a soul was permitted.

In the early twentieth century, when Picasso and Braque were sharpening their Cubism in Paris, Iraq did not exist as a nation. But at the end of World War One, the British drew Iraq’s modern borders and installed the Hashemite dynasty of King Faisal I to put an Arab face on their rule. Also, during this period, a group of Polish officers who had been part of the Foreign Legion, landed in Baghdad and introduced local craftsmen to European painting, which fostered greater public appreciation of art.

For many Iraqis, the modernizing influence of Europeans was welcome, particularly after hundreds of years of stagnation under the Ottomans. The government soon sponsored scholarships for Iraqi artists, allowing them to study at academies in Paris, Rome, London and Berlin. One of them, Faeq Hassan (1914-87) completed his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and on his return to Baghdad founded the painting department at the Baghdad College of Fine Arts. In conjunction with his friend, the artist and sculptor Jawad Saleem, he formed al-Ruwad (the Pioneers Group) — the equivalent of European café society — which took the ancient and Islamic genres, as well as Western influence, and created art “for the people.”

But for the generation of Iraqi artists who came of age under Saddam Hussein, the unifying subject was the dictator, often depicted holding a sword or riding an Arabian horse. If Saddam was venerated appropriately and pleased with his likeness, artists could paint virtually whatever they wanted — from nudes to the Prophet Mohammed himself — and enjoyed what Natiq Al Alousi, an Iraqi sculptor who lives in Abu Dhabi, calls a “golden period.” While he crushed all political dissent, the dictator cultivated the image of a patron of the arts; the second Gulf War ended a flourishing arts scene.

After the US invasion in 2003, verdant landscapes, stylized portraits of peasant women, cubist pieces by renowned artists like Jawad Saleem and the realist still-lifes of Faeq Hassan were spirited away from the Saddam Center for the Arts, one of Baghdad’s most prestigious cultural venues. Other museums and galleries were looted. “We were a rich country and now we are very poor,” says Yousif Muhamid, an artist from Baghdad who now lives in Erbil. “To the West, I now have to say that you ruined this place. The problem is that we have thieves — the Americans brought all of these thieves to power — and they are stealing the money we need to build institutions.” Muhamid had been a colleague and close friend of Layla al-Attar, who led Baghdad’s Academy of Fine Arts during the first Gulf War and who created a floor mosaic of former president George H.W. Bush in the lobby of Iraq’s Al-Rasheed hotel in 1993 so that guests could walk over his face. The same year, al-Attar and her husband were killed by a US missile attack ordered by President Bill Clinton that missed its intended target and hit her house. Many of the city’s artists still don’t believe it was an accident.

Tara Abdulla wearing a mask and gown in her studio in Sulaymaniyah (Carlotta Cardona)

For someone used to the gallery scenes of New York or London, finding original art and its creator in Iraq is akin to Indiana Jones stumbling across the staff of Ra while looking for the Holy Grail. Mass-produced photographs and velvet paintings of the Eiffel Tower and Audrey Hepburn line the streets and souks of Erbil. While visitors seek authentic Iraq, anyone of means in Iraq wants anything that screams “Western.” A gallery mentioned online one day might be gone the next. After Saddam’s fall, Muhamid stayed in Baghdad and eked out a living by teaching undercover, putting on secret shows or stowing away his work in the backrooms of shops in the Green Zone which otherwise sold “Lawrence of Arabia” tchotchkes and bric-à-brac to Alliance soldiers. Alliance bombs and shooting squads were everywhere and any professional activity that overstepped basic survival ground to a halt. Anything seen as subversive, critical of the Americans or damning of whatever militia attempting to fill the power vacuum (al-Qaeda, Mahdi Army or Badr Organization) could put an artist in the crosshairs of a loaded weapon.

The work of serious artists during the US occupation offered the scant Iraqi perspective of “Shock and Awe” — a meditation on the brutality of the period. Distorted renderings of the famous toppling of Hussein’s statue in Firdos Square are a common theme, as are ghoulish figures amid primitivist outlines of fire. Many also juxtaposed slashes of black, sandy red, brown, glowing yellow and orange, Kurdish and Arabic script and Babylonian sketches with collaged elements, such as election ballots, pieces of the Iraqi flag and newspaper clippings.

Interested in this outpouring of art, an ex-Navy lieutenant named Christopher Brownfield helped get these works shown in the West. In 2008, Brownfield put on a New York show called Oil on Landscape: Art from Wartime Contemporaries of Baghdad. Many of Muhamid’s friends and contemporaries were featured in the show, but by that time, he and his wife had chosen Kurdistan over the capital and landed in Mosul, where he taught for a year. When ISIS captured that city, they escaped to Erbil. “I felt cut off from those who have fled the country and pride at having made the decision to stay and carry on,” he said.

“Before we had one Saddam, and now we have five Saddams,” says painter Naja Hazali, echoing a common sentiment about Iraq’s violence and political disorder.

But the Second Gulf War did have one significant outcome: aid money. Billions and billions of it — through USAID, the United Nations and its agencies, and various NGOs that contracted to restore some sense of normalcy to the country. The earmarked and politically pipelined cash went not only to rebuilding infrastructure, but also to find and replace looted art taken during the “Shock and Awe” campaign, to fund “culture zones” like XLine in Sulaymaniyah and to rebuild ancient monuments from millennia ago.

One of those monuments is Erbil’s Citadel, or Qelat Hawler, a 7,000-year-old fortified settlement on top of an imposing ovoid tell. In 2007, the High Commission for Erbil Citadel Revitalization was established to oversee the citadel’s restoration and all the inhabitants, except one family, were evicted. In 2014, UNESCO pumped in $15 million to conserve and rehabilitate the Citadel.

A painting by Iraqi artist Yamama Jaff (Carlotta Cardona)

On my first trip to Iraq in 2015, I saw local construction crews rebuilding a good portion of the outside walls and erecting the Kurdish Textile Museum, devoted to the rugs and clothing of northern Iraq. By 2021, the local government had installed the Erbil Stones and Gemstones Museum and rehabilitated the Mulla Afandi mosque, the oldest mosque in the city, as well as a public hammam or steam bath. By November 2022, crews had added an amphitheater, rebuilt a burned antique shop and carved out a space for the Kurdistan Music Archive. Most importantly, Cihan University, a private, English-speaking school founded in 2007, opened a space for artists’ studios in the center of the structure.

Wandering into the Citadel on a Sunday morning, visitors will likely encounter Naja Hazali and her colleague Yamama Jaff working on a canvas or monitoring their various shops. Hazali, a former architect who spent her formative years in Iran, paints large oil compositions often involving a bull — an ancient symbol of power, fertility, divinity and wisdom — entwined with a woman. “Men are very different here in the Middle East. They have to say, ‘we are better; we are stronger than the woman,’” Hazali tells me, pointing to a painting of a bull charging at a woman. “I want to say that ‘no, we are the same; we need each other,’” she adds, moving over to a painting of a woman playing music on a bull’s horn. Both women, who wear jeans, sweaters and heavy makeup to highlight their deep brown eyes, instead of hijabs or abayas, agree that the arts scene in Iraq is improving, but that Sulaymaniyah and Baghdad are the only hubs. “Before we didn’t have women photographing or women painting or women making or creating things and now, we have this place,” Hazali says. “But in Baghdad or Sulaymaniyah, they care about it more.”

A painting and jewelry by Iraqi artist Yamama Jaff (Carlotta Cardona)

In the small shop where Jaff sells necklaces, bracelets and rings made from semiprecious stones, as well as her paintings, the young artist seconds her colleague’s point, adding “the people don’t care about the painting because of the notion of haram or that it is too expensive. We still have multiple caliphs: one says [about aniconism] ‘no problem’; one says ‘OK, but not this’; one says, ‘haram.’ I don’t care. I will create my art and people with open minds can come and find me here.”

Back in Sulaymaniyah, young children are still encouraged to become doctors, lawyers, or civil servants instead of artists, according to Abdulla. Unless parents are progressive (hers were not), girls are either married off or confined to the home — education ends after a certain age. While men and women of a certain class can sometimes study and live abroad, most western NGOs are not going to interfere in the local culture. “There are some NGOs teaching women a craft, but never art,” Abdulla says. “They are looking to use these women to elicit more donations.” Furthermore, she adds, many women are taking any creative skills they have and going into the business of beauty. Indeed, nail salons, laser hair-removal shops and Botox outfits have begun to pop up in local malls where the wealthy spend their free time. “We have lost many women this way. They do a lot to color and change themselves and aren’t focusing on making things of beauty or expressing themselves through art.”

Abdulla, who has another public installation going up this year, doesn’t have much hope for Iraq’s arts scene. The demise of XLine, once also known as the city’s “Culture Factory,” only emphasizes the uphill struggle for cultural endeavors in the country. Despite fifteen-year contracts with the local government and funding of around $3 million, plans to develop a national theater, cinema, four galleries and a museum of fine art and archaeology remain just that: plans.

“How can people be interested in something they have never seen before — that they don’t have in their own environment?” Abdulla says. “People are tired of being oppressed, but they don’t know how to express it yet.”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s February 2023 World edition.