Your 28th Amendment?

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. The Queens Museum is in the midst of what it's calling a Year of Uncertainty, which seems a very apt description of where many of us are right with pandemic or national politics. They say even the Constitution and obviously the Constitution as the Supreme Court seems poised to overturn its own ruling in Roe v. Wade, and the other ways that they're changing the interpretation of the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, and you can keep going up to another 27 Amendments.

The museum has invited several artists and residents to participate with works that engage various communities, works that bring together social issues, constitutional questions, and art. We're joined now by two of those artists, Alex Strada and Tali Keren, whose multimedia and participatory artwork is focused on questions about the foundation of government, the US Constitution. It's called Proposal for a 28th Amendment? Is it Possible to Amend an Unequal System?

Note the questions there listeners, we're going to ask you to weigh in on both those two questions. Do you have a constitutional amendment to add, or is the Constitution salvageable based on inequality as it was, and they brought along one of the advisors when it comes to legal issues, Julia Hernandez, an associate professor of law at the CUNY School of Law? Welcome, Alex Strada, Tali Keren, and Julia Hernandez to WNYC. Hello.

Alex Strada: Hi, Brian. Thanks so much for having us.

Tali Keren: Yes. It's great to be with you,

Brian Lehrer: Alex and Tali, can you talk about this artwork first? You described it as multimedia, participatory, and incomplete. Why incomplete?

Alex Strada: Thank you for asking that. It's something as we were thinking about how to describe this project, one thing that really came to mind is the fact that it's incomplete. It's a participatory installation, as you mentioned, that critically examines the US Constitution and asks visitors to reflect on questions, record themselves, and actually become part of the growing oral archive. Unlike a traditional artwork that might ask for viewers to take in information, this work requires direct participation and engagement in order for it to function. It is incomplete without people's participation, and it is also incomplete as it continues to grow and change and evolve over time.

Brian Lehrer: The work is predicated on the idea that it's an open question whether the Constitution, written and ratified back in the 18th century, is worth amending or if we need to chuck it in, start over. CUNY law professor Julia Hernandez, maybe you could talk about that idea a little bit.

Julia Hernandez: Sure, and thanks for having me, Brian. There's certainly a lot of discussion about certainly in the last 10 years whether to amend the Constitution, whether it's possible to rewrite the entire thing from scratch. With respect to amending the Constitution, there's two ways to amend the Constitution, both are quite difficult. The first is with a two-thirds majority vote in the House and the Senate, followed by ratification of three-quarters of the seats, which today is 38. This is the process that all amendments have taken so far.

There's an alternative process, which actually hasn't ever been utilized, and that's if requested by two-thirds of the state legislatures, Congress can call a constitutional convention for proposing amendments. There's been more than 11,000 amendments proposed to the Constitution but only 27 have been ratified. It's very difficult, and they require a supermajority across the country in order to succeed.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, do you have a proposal for the next amendment to the Constitution, which would be the 28th? What's your idea for repairing the body politic by amending the Constitution, or do you think it's time to start over with a constitutional convention or something else? Tweet @BrianLehrer if you can do it in 280 characters, or call in 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Alex and Tali, can you describe this artwork as a visitor to the Queens Museum would experience it? There are sonic soapboxes, for example, so maybe start with that, but what is this experience for a visitor to the Queens Museum?

Alex Strada: Sure. The installation currently occupies the atrium of the Queens Museum. When you encounter the work, what you'd likely first notice are really large-scale colorful banners that say the project's questions in the languages that are most commonly spoken in Flushing, so in Spanish, Bengali, Korean, simplified Chinese, and in English. Beneath these colorful banners are the sonic soapbox sculptures that you mentioned. These sculptures build upon the history of the soapbox as a kind of organizing tool and objects that people would stand upon in order to protest, to gather, to share their political beliefs.

We've tried to approach this object as a site of listening. Anyone who encounters these soapboxes are invited to put on headphones, where they can listen to pre-recorded responses to the project's questions. We've made a range of different kinds of soapboxes, so there's a two-person soapbox that's built for people to listen collectively or be in dialogue together. There's a soapbox that's fully ADA wheelchair accessible, a day bed soapbox where you can lie down to listen and to dream, politically imagine, and there's a recording booth. Any visitor to the museum can also add to the oral archive and respond to the project's questions using the recording booth.

The last element of the installation that you'll encounter are videos that line the walls of the installation which consists of different interviews that Tali and I have conducted with scholars from the CUNY Law School, Brooklyn Law School, and Columbia, as they critically mark up and question the Constitution, quite literally block it out or write notes in the margin, and unpack the document in regards to its structural racism, in regards to climate justice, labor, abolition, and also the difficulties of amending the Constitution, as Julia mentioned.

Brian Lehrer: Tali, if you want to weigh into this, and maybe Julia, I'll ask you too as a law professor, why do you raise the question of just throwing out the Constitution and starting over rather than amending it? In the context of politics as they exist in the United States, what do you think about the chances of ending up with something more inclusive if we started over, as opposed to, as Julia says, it would take a majority of state legislatures to vote to have a constitutional convention? We see where the majority of state legislatures are going these days.

Tali Keren: Julia, should I start? I would say, for us as artists, this is exactly where we can ask these questions. We, artists, in many ways, a place where you invite people to radically imagine the world we live in. For us to stay within what the question of what is possible or what is not possible might not be the same thing as it would be for a policymaker, or for a lawyer. For us, it's really a question of bringing people together and trying, at this moment of crisis, really opening up different possibilities because many of the structures and worlds we inhabit are a result of people coming together and imagining first, and then often these things are manifesting themselves in legal structures and in policy.

Brian Lehrer: Professor Hernandez, is there a country out there with a better Constitution on paper, if we define better, is more progressive, more inclusive, more protective of democracy on the ground? At least on paper, we did at least amend our Constitution all these times, 13th amendment banned slavery, 14th amendment due process equal protection, 15th amendment voting rights, we can cite others. There's a history of amending it toward the more progressive in many cases, toward the more equal. Does any country have a better constitution?

Julia Hernandez: Brian, many scholars and commentators look to South Africa's Constitution. It was developed in the context of years of social-political struggle. It guarantees specific socio-economic rights that the United States Constitution does not guarantee such as the right to housing, the right to healthcare, to reproductive decisions. It specifically bans torture, cruel and inhumane treatment, detention without trial. It specifies that the Constitutional Court has an expanded number, in comparison to the United States Supreme Court, an expanded number of justices, limited terms.

To answer your previous question also, I think the possibilities of either starting from scratch with the United States Constitution, rewriting the Constitution, or proposing further amendments really begins with being honest and clear-eyed about the origins of our particular document and being honest about the fact that the Constitution was drafted and adopted in the context of the TransAtlantic slavery, trade, conquest and colonization of people's native to what is now the United States.

The DNA of this document holds many problems. Just to name a few, and there's many, the legitimization of slavery in the text of the document and the interpretation of the document, the failure to guarantee universal voting rights, the failure to define citizenship, and of course, like you initially mentioned and is certainly playing out today, the issue of the Supreme Court's power in interpreting constitutional rights has been a pervasive theme throughout our constitutional history.

Brian Lehrer: Let's open up the soapbox and see what people would say if they were on one of these Queens Museum soapboxes. Let's start with Julie in Hastings. Julie, you're on WNYC. Hi, there. Get up on that soapbox but just for a few seconds. How would you amend or would you throw out the Constitution?

Julie: Oh, thank you, Brian. I wouldn't. Politics is the art of the possible. I'm not an artist, I'm an academician. Politics is the art of the possible, so I don't think it's going to happen. I hope many callers have called in about an amendment to overturn Citizens United. As you know, there's already a movement to get that amendment to make us no longer the outlier among advanced democracies, the only one that is so corrupted by big money affecting everything practically.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to keep this short for now and move on to others but overturn Citizens United for its corrupting influence with money in politics. Jay in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. You have a constitutional amendment of your mind, right?

Jay: Eliminate the Electoral College, plain and simple. Get rid of minority rule in this country.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Robert, in Atlantic Highlands, you're on WNYC. You have a constitutional amendment. Hi, Robert.

Robert: Hi. My amendment is that I would like to see a quality of life index or happiness index, which other countries have, set with given parameters and separate from economics.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Jean in Stanford, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jean.

Jean: Hi. I would like to have women as citizens of equal stature in the Constitution. We have ratified the 28th Amendment, the Equal Rights Amendment. In fact, it has been ratified. We have added it under Article 5 to the Constitution, and the only thing right now that's happening is that the executive branch is refusing to publish a new constitution that includes the 28th Amendment, but we have, in fact, amended the United States Constitution with the 28th amendment to make women citizens of equal stature under the Constitution of the United States.

Brian Lehrer: Right, depending on how you count the timeline and all of that. The ERA. All right. John in Staten Island wants to go all the way. Hi, John, you're on WNYC.

John: I sure do. Julie from the Queens Museum largely covered what I was going to say, and I thank her for that. The Constitution that we are now under is a defective document. It was designed to create a more perfect union. Well, I think now, 125 years later, we need to scrap it and do a completely new constitution, one that would include the 28th Amendment certainly, one that would include an LGBT rights issue amendment, one that would scrap the Electoral College, which was racist in its design. I think that we can do a constitutional convention, not under the present climate in this country, but I think it's what we need to do. I would be happy to work with the Queens Museum in that direction if they were--

Brian Lehrer: John, thank you very much. We're going to leave it there with callers on this as we just have about five minutes left in the show and in the segment. There's a smattering of what people think about how to change the constitution or whether to start over as we continue with Alex Strada and Tali Keren whose multimedia and participatory artwork at the Queens Museum is called Proposal for a 28th Amendment? Is it Possible to Amend an Unequal System? They are joined by Julia Hernandez, law professor at the CUNY Law School who's been the constitutional adviser to this art project. Alex and Tali, for listeners wondering, how is this art exactly? Maybe talk a little bit about that for folks who might be more used to visiting the Met to see paintings and sculptures and stuff like that?

Tali Keren: That's a really good question. We're both also art teachers, so this is also a question that students ask all the time. What is art and why, for example, why is the work like this art when many people might think of art as sculpture or a painting? As I tried to also touch on before, our ideas that art is very conceptual in the fact that it's a place for community to come together and imagine. Really think about the borderless ability of the imagination. That is a place that in some ways museums can occupy or artists can facilitate, we believe. It's always a question of how to translate these ideas into form and shape, but at the core, it's bringing people together from different disciplines and really thinking through radical political possibilities and change. For us, that's the way we think of art.

Brian Lehrer: Tali or Alex, whoever wants to take it, we heard what we heard from the callers. I wonder if any of those reflect a most common or most common few that you're getting by participants at the Queens Museum on the soapboxes that you've set up there or if there are others.

Alex Strada: Thank you everyone for calling in. We've had a lot of people propose abolishing the Electoral College. I think that might be one of the more common proposals. We also have had a lot of people propose throwing it out and starting over. In addition to having an installation, we're also holding a number of different workshops with law professors to activate the installation. We had one with the Queens Teens, a group of teen activist artists affiliated with the Queens Museum, where we collaborated with CUNY law professor, Charisa Kiyô Smith. One of the teens in the workshop has this really wonderful recording where she talks about how the Constitution is like spilt milk, it's spoiled. We found that, in general, younger people really want to reimagine something entirely different, but a commonplace 28th amendment is to abolish the Electoral College.

Brian Lehrer: Professor Hernandez, I guess, the one that I thought about, I've mentioned on the air before, which is not something I'm proposing, it's just something that's popped in my head when we talk about education and equality on the show, which we do a lot. I thought of a constitutional amendment to ban education funding based on property taxes, which is a national pattern, of course, that funding base, and it almost guarantees unequal education funding by the income of the children's parents. Maybe a constitutional amendment to ban funding of education based on property taxes. That's my contribution to this project for what it's worth. It sounds really that's small potatoes compared to what you think about and what the participants are thinking about. You want to give us the last thought in 30 seconds?

Julia Hernandez: Sure, Brian. I think that's an amendment that I've thought about also. I think the proposal for an amendment to abolish the Electoral College is really a great one. I think the history there is also really important in terms of the Electoral College formula having been derived from the three-fifths clause or compromise when the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were drafting the convention and trying to think about whether enslaved people would be represented. We can see the carryover from that really unequal and racist system to the Electoral College we have today.

Brian Lehrer: Or redesign the Senate, which maybe goes to the next step from the Electoral College, talk about unequal representation. We thank Alex Strada and Tali Keren, artists, and CUNY law professor Julie Hernandez. Proposal for a 28th Amendment? Is it Possible to Amend an Unequal System? is on view through February 13th at the Queens Museum. Thank you all.

Alex Strada: Thank you so much, Brian.

 

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