"Video and Resistance: Against Documentary"

The article “Video and Resistance: Against Documentary” calls out the fact that written representations are no longer efficient for people’s understanding. Visuals have become necessary to understand history, but documentaries fail at providing such accounts. They present bias and fictional stories and events in a project that is taken as factual. The article mentions a few works in particular that exhibit the awfulness behind documentaries by saying these works have no factual integrity.
This article relates to “The Image World” by Susan Sontag. In her writing, Sontag opens with the line “Reality has always been interpreted through the reports given by images.” Both show understanding of the importance of visuals but neither support the way in which they are carried out. “Video and Resistance: Against Documentary” states that documentaries misrepresent the truth and Sontag says that photographs do not give the whole story of a situation rather a picture is only an extension of a subject.

Caryn Rothbort
10/8/07
Environmental Justice in Onondaga County

Pollution and the contamination of bodies of water throughout the United States has been a prevalent and ongoing problem since early in American history. Hazardous to animals and plants that live in these lakes, the people who need and drink the water, and the surrounding neighborhoods, there has not been enough attention called to fixing these problems nor has there been enough effort made to fix them either. The Superfund is an ongoing project which is funded by the companies being held responsible for the site defamation and supplemented by the government to help clean these sites. But the Superfund is not being enforced strictly enough and there is little attempt being made to correct this problem. The Superfund, if working to its full capacity, is a great tool in helping clean these areas and has worked well for a number of areas but more often than not it has fallen short as being a realistic answer to a vast problem. Although attempts are being made, not enough is getting accomplished. The Superfund needs to more strictly impose its laws and make them more efficient for an improved functioning system. Its focus also needs to be narrowed to those with the largest problems as opposed to dabbling in the scene of all polluted areas.
According to the Christian Science Monitor article Superfund program: a smaller cleanup rag by Brad Knickerbocker, hazardous waste has been injected in to the soil, bodies of water, and air all across the United States since the Industrial Revolution. This led to the establishment of a national Superfund in 1980, which is a government funded program that had attempted to clean up these polluted sites. The fund is practically bankrupt after cleaning up only 886 sites since its beginning, leaving 1,203 in need of restoration (Knickerbocker 1-3). The number of sites itself causes a huge detriment to the capability of the Superfund program. The program was originally imagined to provide relief to twenty to thirty sites, but now this number has increased to an exuberant amount (Meyers). This is detrimental to the effort of the Superfund in that with so many sites to clean up and so many different problems to worry about, money is being stretched too thinly and resources are falling short. For a site to be restored and hazardous waste to be cleaned, each individual site needs more attention which is why the original goal of a few sights would have been more efficient.
Onondaga Lake is one of those sights which needs greater attention. Considered one of the, if not the worst polluted lakes in the nation, it has been contaminated since 1884 with the establishment of the Allied Chemical Corporation, which later became Honeywell International (Landers 64). Consistently, their multiple plants have discharged waste into the lake infecting it with a great deal of harmful substances. There are a number of various pollutants effecting the lake’s quality of health and a great deal of work needs to be done to restore it. The efforts being made seem to be more of a cover up so it appears that something is being done rather than having anything really accomplished. Broken down into nine sub-sites, or individual areas for its own plan of action for restoration, Honeywell is responsible for the clean up of six of these individual sites (Onondaga Nation). The Environmental Protection Agency and the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) outlined plans for the clean up that held Honeywell responsible (Landers 66). But the plan does not force the industry, which is liable for the vast majority of the pollution, to take enough action to efficiently clean the site. The plan will not effectively remove all the contaminants in Onondaga Lake (Onondaga Nation). The plan put forth by the EPA and DEC need to lay a stronger hand to remove the entirety of the waste in the lake. There is really no point in cleaning up Onondaga Lake only a slight bit because if there are still even a few contaminants in the lake, its still hazardous and harmful.
Attempts at progress are being made. From the 1970s until present day, there have
been a number of lawsuits, studies, and clean ups conducted. The Metropoliton Syracuse Wastewater Treatment Plant, or simply Metro, is located directly on the lake’s shore and has been a contributor to the contamination since the 1920s especially by filtering phosphorous and nitrogen into Onondaga Lake (Landers 70). The 1998 Onondaga Lake Amended Consent Judgment mandates that Metro reduce the concentration of phosphorous waste runoff into the lake (Landers 70). Since then, progress has been made, but it is no where near the authorized reduction. The Metro also introduced the biological aerated filter which has served as a significant factor in the reduction in the levels of ammonia (Landers 71).
Although progress is being made in the restoration of Onondaga Lake, it is not efficient or sudden enough. The negligence of large industries has had a detrimental effect on the lake, inevitably damaging the county of Onondaga. Being notorious for having such a polluted lake does not help the reputation of the county or make it enjoyable or safe for the members of the nearby community. Honeywell and Metro both need to own up to their mistakes and those of their predecessors to completely eliminate the mistakes that have been made. It is vital for these two major industries to not just create good public relations and have agreements on paper to look as though they are striving towards the crackdown of cleaning the lake, rather they need to follow what they agree to and do it in a speedy and efficient manner.
Onondaga Lake continues to be in need of repair. It has been contaminated since the 1880s and it has not let up very much since. Though there are efforts being made to alleviate the most polluted lake in the nation, they are in no way significant enough to
make promising immediate results. The major contributors to this contamination, Honeywell and The Metropolitan Syracuse Wastewater Treatment Plant, need to take a bigger role and make more of an effort to clean up the problems that they caused. The lake and Onondaga community does not deserve the treatment it has been receiving and deserves to be compensated by the correction of the horrid mistakes that were made.






Works Cited

Knickerbocker, Brad. “Superfund Program: A Smaller Cleanup Rag.” The Christian
Science Monitor. (14 Nov 2003). 1 Oct 2007.


Landers, Jay. “New Life for Onondaga Lake.” Civil Engineering (American Society of
Civil Engineers) 76.5 (2006): 64-71,86. Applied Science & Technology. H.W.
Wilson. Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY. 1 Oct. 2007.
requestid=184552>

Meyers, Sheldon. “Real Replaces Ideal as Superfund Matures.” Journal of Applied
Research and Pubic Policy. 11 (1996): 113-117. Social Science. H.W. Wilson.
Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, NY. 1. Oct. 2007.

Onondaga Nation. 2005. Onondaga Nation. 1 Oct 2007.

http://www.onondaganation.org/news.cleanup1.html

Hazardous waste has been injected in to the soil, bodies of water, and air all across the United States since the Industrial Revolution. This led to the establishment of a national Superfund in 1980, which is a government funded program that had attempted to clean up these polluted sites. Now the fund which has spent nearly $1 billion a year on clean up is practically bankrupt after cleaning up only 886 sites since its beginning, leaving 1,203 in need of restoration. The fund was originally created with placing blame on the polluter often resulting in forcing that party to pay for the clean up. This still left “orphan sites”, or sites in which the owner abandoned it or went bankrupt and excise taxes on oil and chemical industries and some income tax were left to support their clean up. But the fees expired in 1995 and Congress has not renewed them causing the tax on individuals to be increased significantly. Many Senators are lobbying for the taxes on oil and chemical industries to be reinstated although this ignores the original meaning of the fund, to charge those responsible.

Phobias and fear have been integrated into the American culture for almost the entirety of its establishment. According to Sean Quimby, Syracuse University librarian and facilitator of the lecture “American Phobia: Collecting the History of Fear”, there are many manifestations of fear but two primary trends in the American way of life. The first is a dogged invasion of fantasy and the second is the gradual emergence of therapeutic culture.
The first trend that Quimby talks about is Americans’ obsession with the posed threat of invasion. One example that he gives of this is Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race in which he speaks about Henry Osbourne and his belief is the greatest danger is that people with the traits of religious grounding, or the Aryan race, dying out. The non-Aryan race threatened their existence. The next example that Quimby gives was the 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds. This radio show gave a fictional story of Aliens invading the world and it resulted in about six million people actually believing the story was a reality and instilling fear among all of them. Hadley Cantrill, a Princeton Professor, commented on this naiveté of the American public by saying that it was due to Americans’ inability to distinguish reality from fiction. The second trend that Quimby talks about, and spends a significantly less amount of time discussing, is the therapeutic culture of fear. The example that Quimby gives is God. He says that God is now being absorbed into this path of fear in a way that people’s belief in a higher being helps alleviate the uncertainty and horror of phobias.
The lecture as a whole did not present a clear thesis and nor was it very informative. Rather Quimby jumped around speaking of different figures and books that dealt with fear and the concepts of fear that Americans face, but had no unifying thought for all of these examples. The lecture was also not very in depth. It was a brief and only scratched the surface of the patterns and commonality of Americans’ fears and phobias. The lecture would have been better and more informative if Quimby gave historical examples and spoke more of the typical phobias that present themselves in American culture.

Bin Dahn, is an extremely talented artist whose exhibit “Life: One Week’s Dead” pays homage to the soldiers and more specifically the victims of the Vietnam War. His art work gives a definitive testimony to the Vietnam War and it’s soldiers. Dahn, to create his work, takes leaves and covers them with negatives so that the leaves loose their chlorophyll and then duplicates images onto them. The images he creates incorporate portraits of soldiers from the war in which he obtained from the Life Magazine issue, One Week’s Dead, which was the inspiration for his projects. In Dahn’s lecture he explained that after visiting Vietnam, he realized that remnants of the war linger in the landscape and thus the reasoning for using leaves to portray his ideas. His art works depict what it would be like if the leaves and landscape of Vietnam could talk, the leaves are what contain the war. By placing the portraits of these soldiers on leaves, Dahn is in a sense giving testimony to the Vietnam War and allowing the stories hidden in the landscape surface. Dahn also said in his lecture that photos are the DNA of our memory. So by surfacing these photographs, Dahn is giving validation to the war and allowing his audience to take in pictures of the soldiers and at the same time the feeling of the scenery.
Bin Dahn’s art can be a reflection of current times as well. Many compare the Vietnam War to the current Iraqi War for ambiguous reasons of entry and unnecessary deaths. The vagueness of the faces of the soldiers in the grass art works can represent any and all of the soldiers of the Vietnam War and can even represent the soldiers of the Iraqi War. The faces represent the men who fight in all the wars of the United States to defend our nation.
In Susan Sontag’s “The Image-World”, she examines the concept of photography and its importance in society. Sontag states “a photograph is not only an image…an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a foot print or a death mask.”(p.350). This applies completely to Bin Dahn’s exhibit. His art work portrays the real but it also is “a trace…stenciled off something real”. His pictures are of the real men who died in Vietnam and their stories are coming from the remains left at the site. The grass that begs to tell its story and the fallen men who are trying to break through. Whatever it was that the pictures were not able to capture, the landscape made up for. Sontag also states that “Photograph collections can be used to make a substitute world, keyed to exalting or consoling or tantalizing images.” I thought this concept applied to Dahn’s pictures because they do create a new world. When examining the grass art work, standing close gave a distorted view of what was actually imprinted on to the grass, it looked as if it were simply shards of grass placed next to one another. Upon a second examination from a farther distance, the portraits became more apparent. Despite the clear distinction of a figure, the faces were undistinguishable making the pictures capable of being anyone and everyone, a representation of all soldiers of the war indication of all their presences. Allowing the pictures to be any and all soldiers creates a new world of more general war scene than the specifics of the soldier actually portrayed in the picture.

1. Art is a concept that is left up to the interpretation of an individual based on their preference to aesthetically pleasing pieces of work.
Over the summer, I went to Manhattan to see the “Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. There were a lot of interesting paintings and sculptures throughout the exhibit but the one painting that really struck me was a painting called “Grain of Sand”. The painting is a circle and is extremely colorful and bold. Its comprised of many different faces and miscellaneous shapes and designs. The colors of the picture and the intricate designs captivate you into examining the piece of work and spending a great deal of time with it. I got lost into the sea of colors and shapes and refused to move as my friends wanted to move on. The reason I was so taken aback by this art work was because it was so different than conventional pieces I was used to. It was not a landscape or portrait and didn’t have a specific color scheme, rather it incorporated anything and everything the artist wanted to have. The artist, I believe, wanted to try and grab hold of the audience of his painting and try to scream out to them and I believe he was very successful in this manner.

2. In Thierry de Duve’s essay “Art was a proper name”, Duve explores the definition of art as a word and as an entity. He takes you through a journey as a person unfamiliar to the Earthly concept would discover it. His thoughts and theories are extremely similar to the definition I always attributed to the concept that is art. Art is a vast … that encompasses an infinite number of meanings and a great deal of different interpretations. As Duve states in his essay “Either the ontological status of the work of art is an empty set, or it is an infinite one; either nothing is art, or everything can be.” (p.11). I completely agree with this statement. Since the definition of art is left up to the individual, it can encompass as much or as little as a person believes it to be. Art can be defined as anything from a painting, to a song, to a piece of literature, to, as we saw in class, a ready-made urinal. There is no limitations put on what someone can consider art because every person walks away from the same object with a different feeling evoked, experience undertaken, and idea developed. Whose to say that what you enjoy and believe is art, is not truly the definition of what art is. Duve also says “that humans give art an autonomous place, with magic and religion on one side, and science on the other.” (p.5). This shows that humans give great value to art by placing it by itself in a different theory from the other established notions. I, as well as Duve, believe that everyone can decide for themselves what exactly art is, if it’s anything at all.