Berlinale Dispatch. Strange Culture.

Far more disturbing than Paul Schrader's The Walker is Strange Culture [site], which tracks the ongoing prosecution of Steve Kurtz, an art professor at the University of Buffalo, who faces charges of mail fraud for his internet purchase of bacteria for an art project that was supposed to be part of a museum exhibition.

Now this is a story that you really can't make up. Kurtz was working with a group called the Critical Art Ensemble. His wife Hope was collaborating with the group. When she died suddenly in May 2004 in the middle of the night of a heart attack, Kurtz called the police. When an ambulance arrived, the attendants noticed chemicals around, and called in Homeland Security, whose agents arrested Kurtz and confiscated his chemicals, computer files, and even his wife's body.

It gets better. Homeland Security agents and the US attorney in Buffalo suspected Kurtz of being a terrorist because an invitation to an art exhibition that they found at his house contained writing in Arabic. The Feds were not able to say what the writing actually said, but that hasn't stopped them.

In a re-enactment, the actor Thomas Jay Ryan, portraying Kurtz (Tilda Swinton plays Hope) attempts to eat some of the bacteria in order to show Homeland Security agents and FBI that the microbes were completely safe. It just hastened his arrest.

Unbelievable? Kurtz and a colleague from the University of Pittsburgh have been defending themselves against fraud charges since the summer of 2004, despite the fact that no party has complained of being wronged by the alleged fraud.

The film is a case in point not of what can happen but what is happening right now - unfounded charges lead to indictments despite clear evidence to the contrary, phones and emails seem to have been tapped and political considerations seem to be driving the whole thing.

Lynn Hershman Leeson made her film quickly (in time for this year's Sundance, where it premiered), perhaps too quickly, although she seems to have had time to commission black and white drawings that look like woodcuts that document the case. The drawings, which depict scenes that evoke the stations of the cross, drive home the point that the kind of witch-hunt against Kurtz tends to happen when this country is at war. Here we see US politicians citing the treachery of the enemy to justify a war on the rights of its own citizens. For more on this, see The Power of Nightmares by Adam Curtis.

The defendants are being represented by the Buffalo lawyer, Paul Cambria, whose role in the defense of unpopular civil liberties deserves more attention. Cambria has defended Larry Flynt and other purveyors of pornography, and won. It's hard to know which cause is less popular, pornography or art. Of course, for many on the Right, given the demonology of contemporary art over the last 20 years, there is no difference anyway.

Earlier: "Sundance. Strange Culture."

Posted by dwhudson at February 15, 2007 11:05 AM