Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | C | C: International Contemporary Art

Glad the CIA is immoral: Jacob Wren on Lene Berg, an artist whose work makes unexpected connections between the CIA and globalism.

Article Excerpt
Lene Berg's artist's book arrives in the mail in a zip-lock bag. On the front of the bag is a large green sticker with a text in white letters. The heading reads INSTRUCTION MANUAL, and it begins as follows:



Gentlemen & Arseholes consists of the first issue of the cultural journal Encounter from 1953, along with a series of supplementary materials that are inserted between the original pages. The inserts were collected over a long period, from books, newspapers, private albums, conversations, and so on, and thus vary in their character and form. What they all have in common is that they describe aspects of that which, for various reasons, was never mentioned in Encounter, nor in connection with any of the other undertakings of the sponsor and publisher, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (1950-1967).

The "aspects" in question, which were never mentioned in any issue of Encounter but are documented extensively in its reprinting as Gentlemen & Arseholes (2006), concern the CIA'S secret funding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which also organized publications in other languages, international conferences and artist residencies. In all of these initiatives, the objective of the CIA was to turn the European intelligentsia away from Socialism and to enhance the image of the United States. This information has been available for a long time, but now anybody can read about it on the CIA website.

The reprinted first issue of Encounter features beautiful literary texts and essays by Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, Christopher Isherwood, the Japanese writer Osamu...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!