Remembering Al Boime, my teacher and friend

I first met him like thousands of others, in the auditorium where he taught at UCLA. I will never forget the first class when he jokingly started to read the names of the class roll from what had to be a list of over four hundred students and go up to each student personally to shake a hand and welcome them to class. He didn't even get far into the A's when he stopped and everyone appreciated this as a great icebreaker, but I knew it was much more.
Al Boime, my art history professor and friend, always had a very deep meaning behind everything he did. The joke with shaking hands was merely a joke for many, but for Al it was his way of saying that this is what pedagogy should look like. He couldn't teach without opening the door for friendship and interpersonal discourse, whether he was teaching a seminar or a freshman level intro class, he had to make it human. I entered that door and never left, which is why the news of his death is so painful.
Here's something Al said about his teaching which really illustrates the humility behind this great figure. "By examining the political forces that motivated the art makers and finders, and revealing the hidden mainsprings in visual production, I truly believed that I was contributing to the emancipation of thought, at least in one small corner of the minds of my students and readers. Thus art history became my raison d'être, a vehicle for enhancing the lives of my fellow citizens, while at the same time bringing about a nanno-change toward social justice in society."
A nanno-change? Al, you rocked my world.
I was a student at UCLA while Jesse Helms and his ilk were attacking the National Endowment for the Arts for funding a retrospective of images by Robert Mapplethorpe, and, inspired by Al, I couldn't sit still. I had been studying video art and became very interested in activist filmmaking. Al was off to do research in Washington, D.C. and I followed him there to do some research of my own. From LA, I set up interviews with various congress people and the infamous Senator Helms, but when I got to the Helms office, I was greeted with a handshake and sent off to a noisy cafeteria with two aids who pulled out facsimiles of the Mapplethorpe photographs from a brown paper bag and asked me if I considered this art. “It was kind of like being called a fag on the school yard,” I told Al after the experience. I had traveled all the way from LA on my student budget and didn't get the main interview I had come for. Al had a great idea. He told me about the political pseudo-events that the French artist Delacroix used to do and said he had confidence in me that I could manufacture something much better than a Helms interview. To his credit, I went outside of Congress, put my video camera on a tripod and stood in the frame narrating the story of what happened to me as I took off my clothes. I explained how the image I am creating maybe homoerotic to some viewers, and that I really didn't care as long as it remained erotic to my girlfriend back home. Then I quickly got dressed and ran back to Al's office where I shared with my teacher the story of my conquest. Later that school year, when there was a serious dispute over racism in the university school body elections, around the time of my hero, Abbie Hoffman's suicide, I ran a pig for president of UCLA with huge 8 foot by 4 foot posters of a pig that said, “Eat a fig, do a jig, wear a wig, vote for a pig! Pigasus for President.” Al was elated.
After graduation, in the months leading up to the first Gulf War, I started having mini-salons in my apartment to give exposure to bands and artists I liked and to discuss the big issues of the day. I remember Al coming for a Chanukah salon where we discussed our internal conflict between opposing a military solution and being concerned with the welfare of Israel. Al and I connected over the fact that I was brought up in a socialist Zionist youth movement, and we often talked about the virtues of the kibbutz movement. After the Gulf War, I moved back to Israel with my new girlfriend, now wife, Irit, and lived in Tel-Aviv. I had some government granted rights as a new immigrant which included free tuition at the major universities, so I started a masters degree in art history, but after the first year I couldn't handle it any longer. All the passion for art that I experienced with Al was missing. I learned dates and titles of images, but the social context and great political significance were never mentioned. I wrote to Al to share my discomfort and his response was so inspiring, I wish I could find the letter to quote him. What I understood was that if I am being taught art by methods that canonize the art and the artist in a way that commodifies the artwork and legitimizes the capitalist co-option of the work, then I am not engaging in art history for art's sake. This was what I needed to hear as I decided to leave the program. It also freed me to appreciate art in the way that I most enjoyed it, the way that Al did.
Two years after moving to Israel, Irit and I decided to get married. We had to do it outside of Israel because the Jewish state would only allow us to marry Orthodox, and we were not about to be bullied when it came to making our sacred vows. Instead, we planned three weddings, one in LA where we met, one in Chicago where I grew up, and one in Tel-Aviv where we had an “illegitimate” Reform wedding that became part of the campaign for religious freedom in Israel. Al was at the LA wedding, but told me how proud he was about the Tel-Aviv one. He was also the first to toast us at the conclusion of the ceremony. His wish for us was lots of love and a large family of little Steiner's who could agitate like their father. Al, three kids and fifteen years of marriage later, you got your wish, and much of our children's activism and appreciation of art will always be traced back to you.
Thank you my friend. I will miss you.