How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Project Willow » Sun Nov 06, 2011 3:01 am

The entirety of the documentary Arc presented on page 1, I believe, of this thread. Well worth watching as my anti-hero, Mr. Hughes, slowly and painstakingly outlines SOME of the negative consequences of the hegemony of money in art.

Yeah, it's all an eye roller! :bigsmile

http://c-monster.net/blog1/2011/11/04/biggest-unregulated-market/











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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby barracuda » Sun Nov 06, 2011 1:41 pm

Mugrabi has absolutely no idea why he has a Richard Prince painting on his wall that he paid millions of dollars for. None. He can't, in any significant way, even articulate what he likes about the artist's work.

And Hughes has no ability to see his own role in the very phenomenon he so despises, the thirty years of lending the imprimateur of the cover of Time magazine to the artists whose work he admires. He and Mugrabi are staring at each other through opposite ends of the same paper tube.
The most dangerous traps are the ones you set for yourself. - Phillip Marlowe
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Allegro » Thu Nov 17, 2011 10:37 pm

.
Earlier this month, there were union protests outside Sotheby's. See the two final paragraphs.

Sotheby's stuns with $316 million contemporary art sale
— By Chris Michaud | Reuters
— NEW YORK | Thu Nov 10, 2011 12:55am EST

    The art auctions ended with a flourish on Wednesday as Sotheby's sold $316 million of contemporary and postwar art, the best result of two weeks of sales and led by a $61.7 million Clyfford Still abstract.

    The sale, held amid a backdrop of world financial market turmoil, gave Sotheby's its highest contemporary total since May 2008 -- when the art market was at its peak and just months before the financial crisis took hold.

    "The sale blew every expectation away," said Tobias Meyer, Sotheby's worldwide head of contemporary art who also served as auctioneer.

    The $315,837,000 total including commissions easily beat the presale estimate of $192 million to $270 million.

    "It was one of the best auctions I've ever seen in my life," said Nicolai Frahm, a leading London-based contemporary art adviser. "And in the middle of a recession," he added.

    Sotheby's scored a coup by landing a group of four Stills, whose works virtually never come to market and which were being sold by the city of Denver to benefit a new Still museum opening there this month.

    Led by "1949-A-No. 1," which soared to $61,682,500 against an estimate of $30 million and smashed the record for the artist, the group of abstracts took in $114 million, nearly twice the pre-sale estimate.

    Similarly, a group of eight works by Gerhard Richter totaled $74 million, nearly three times the low estimate. The artist's abstract numbered (849-3) fetched $20.8 million, nearly twice the estimate and setting an artist's record.

    Francis Bacon's "Three Studies for a Self Portrait" also fared well, selling for $19.7 million.

    Several works produced protracted bidding wars, yielding records for artists including Joan Mitchell and Cady Noland.

    "It is incredible to see prices like this in a deep recession," said Frahm. "But people still have a lot of money, and it seems art is one of the very few asset classes where it's safe to put your money -- if you buy the right works."

    Marc Porter, chairman of Christie's Americas, concurred.

    "We have seen two weeks of record-breaking prices for artists across price bands whenever the object has the requisites of quality and freshness to the market," he said.

    Not everyone was thrilled with the auction, however. Protesters supporting union art handlers locked out by Sotheby's in a protracted labor dispute staged a noisy protest as well-heeled clients navigated their way inside.

    An undetermined number were detained after locking themselves together and blocking the sidewalk but police had no information on arrests.


    [REFER.]
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Allegro » Fri Nov 25, 2011 1:48 am

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The New Usual and the Demise of the Art City
— by Edward Kubow | Huff Post Culture, July 21, 2011

    The city: sanitized, polished, monied. The urban streetscape has succumbed to a monotony of banks, global retailers, and coffee house chains. The "financialization" of a worldwide, interconnected economy, the product of a vast neo-liberal economic agenda, has fundamentally altered the social and cultural state of the metropolis as great art center.

    Today, despite the pain still being felt throughout middle America and smaller communities, a too-big-to fail financial system is firmly rooted and by all accounts booming. In this masterfully constructed world of free-trade and free-flowing capital, where free-market idealism is just that, America has woken up to the reality that it no longer manufactures much of anything -- except money. Astronomical sums of it. Armed with fantastical financial models that fomented the development of abstract, debt-based products, bankers became the stewards of the new finance-driven economy peddling their 'Made in the USA' euphoria globally. Unfortunately, the implosion of the previous economic cycle, the ensuing recession, and the terror threat of a Greater Depression only served to recalibrate the American corporatist system: the final phase of the entrenchment of institutional power has been certified and the redistribution of wealth to the economic elite has been secured. So, while we continue on a chronically unstable boom-to-bust track, for now, at least in the metropolis, it is back to business as usual. The new usual.

    The economy of finance and warp speed gentrification that is its by-product has wholly transformed the metropolis. Neighborhoods that have lost their identities and cities are at risk of losing their souls to mass homogeneity. In the newly-fashioned metropolis where only the monied class and the upwardly mobile can afford to live, the chance of a nascent creative moment is unlikely; a whole artistic movement, the possibility of a by-gone era. Let's face it: the SoHo House is no Artist's Club or Cedar Tavern. What can we possibly expect from a place where elitist masquerades as cool, the dance club has been destroyed by bottle service, and credit wealth has bred flagrant inauthenticity exacerbated by a pseudo-celebrity culture? This environment is empty, devoid of depth of character and like the city itself, increasingly soul-less. While there was some hope that a seminal creative moment would be borne of the economic crash, that nothing structurally nor politically has changed has dashed that hope.

    Amidst rapidly shifting geo-economic plates, we are stuck in a political morass. It is an ideological battle being fought by money, for money, and being won by the Right. The counter-argument for good government, a fundamental tenant of any democracy that believes in equality and social justice, is just not there. Good government is a value now superseded by a romantic belief in the good of market leaders and of the free market. The word free itself resonating powerfully in the populist mindset and tugging at the patriotic heart string. Nothing is free of course, and the blind pursuit of the visions of Friedman and Norquist has come at a high price: a continuing loss of economic sovereignty and a self-mutilation of our social ideals. The latter largely a result of a pre-occupation with the cult of wealth and self-interest. Until that delicate but necessary balance between government role and private sector place is acknowledged and then re-asserted, China rises outstripping America's future competitiveness via massive investments in education and infrastructure.

    Not surprisingly, it is the technocratic revolution and the rise of the managerial class - a class that is less creative, risk-averse, and tends to relinquish leadership in the face of external economic forces -- that is at the root of this spectacular failure of aptitude and disconnect from rationality. Economic theory as religion too emerged from this era and thanks to the proliferation of management programs at universities, management degrees have since become the best perceived educational path that money can buy. Unfortunately, our society has become an embodiment of this textbook-management mentality: along with an abject lack of vision for the future, we have accepted powerlessness in the face of free-trade agreements and speculative bankers trading money as a real, tangible good. While global money markets effectively shackle governments by linking their activity to financial-market logic, nation-states' full creative potential is undermined.

    In the metropolis where finance overwhelms the presence of every other industry and is the dominant driver of prosperity, a creative void has undeniably emerged. As we adjust to living in a post-industrial America, the decline of manufacturing and the demise of the factory, the once-backbone of city's economy, compounds this condition. True, the technological revolution has repositioned moribund industrial neighborhoods into hubs of high-tech ingenuity and creativity, and low wage-paying jobs have been replaced by high-salaried ones, but there is an inherent dearth of socio-economic breadth in this new reality. In the past, manufacturing has played an especially crucial role beyond being a provider of mass employment: the sector has been a traditional draw of immigrant workers with factories serving as incubators of the new American society, a place where people of varied ethnicities and cultures mixed and worked side-by-side for the very first time. Multiculturalism in concentrated form, this private sector-run integration program of-sorts was not only providing inter-cultural exposure but also the shared experience of life in a new country. In a dense urban setting, this is especially potent.

    Among the conditions that ripen any artistic movement is a high-brow, low-brow social and economic tension that the metropolis once generated in abundance. It is the intensity of that specific experience that is the expression of the totality of urban form and life. Simply put, a density of social and economic disparities has been a hallmark of the artistic city. Mid-century and 1980's Manhattan are regarded as two of the most fertile creative periods in American history. Representative of times when the artist could live in the metropolis and be inspired by its textures and countless contrasts and contradictions: the uncomfortable dissonance between rich and poor, gritty downtown and shiny uptown, old world and new world, mainstream and sub-cultures. These are the dynamics at play in the city as incubator of art; they can be an infinite set of extremes and differences that overlap, collide, and fuse that incite revelations of the human condition. Art being a product of that intellectualization.

    Furthering the demise of the art city has been the exponential rise in the value of real estate over the last two decades -- inextricably linked to financialization of the economy. While rental rates understandably have to increase to correspond with underlying asset values, a dwindling inventory of rental stock - both market rate and affordable - is not so desirable. As sophisticated developers and investors alike look for the quick returns offered by condo construction and especially condo conversions, the diversity of housing options, once a fixture of the metropolis, will continue to evaporate. Underlying this is that bankers and hedge-fund managers long ago co-opted the residential real estate market bloating apartment values and establishing a new standard of pricing tailored to their incomes tied to their bonuses.

    With the affordability of city housing gone, the demise of the co-habitation of social and economic classes has been further impacted. The city and its central neighborhoods have become off-limits to newcomers while the working-class have all but disappeared from the picture except to enter the city as visiting service industry workers. The middle-class long decamped to the suburbs and now visit the city as the new Disneyland. A glossy place, aspirational for sure, but veiled in elitism, the many main streets brought to you by various corporate sponsors: Chase, Citi, and Bank of America, H&M, Nike, and Zara. Luxury is accessibly dangled with Vuitton, Dior, and Armani selling ubiquitous diffusion lines to the masses. This illusion of mass wealth is a dangerous delusion feeding the political class' relentless adherence to failed policies.

    Along with the demise of the factory, the lack of affordability in the city has also altered the settling patterns of immigrants. If the first generation of urban sprawl was defined by so-called white flight, that is, white, middle-class residents fleeing urban decay, immigrants have come to characterize the following generation, this time circumventing high costs of living. That vibrant Chinese, Korean, Polish, and Russian enclaves have emerged in previously homogenous subdivisions should come as no surprise. These ethno-cultural nods are flourishing, though scattered, in the outer boroughs, the suburbs, and even the ex-urbs. These days the most authentic Chinese food is most likely found in a suburban strip mall far from the city center. Immigrants may still settle within the expansive metropolitan region but the critical mass of diversity of newcomers living in the heart of the city is lacking. An endless flow of immigrant communities used to settle in the dense urban core presenting a rich mosaic of struggle, adaptation, and integration; it is a dynamic condition for the creation of art that has been significantly diffused. It is a deficiency of enlightenment.

    Culture defines us as a people and a civilization. Art outlasts even the most awesome of technological inventions: a sculpture, canvas, or motion picture never become obsolete because they tell stories and immortalize our history. They are artifacts that are a reflection of a moment, an experience, a condition, an emotion, and they are worthy of our collective support. Government support of the arts and arts programs is therefore vital to the existence of the creative city. The Works Projects Administration (WPA) for example, employed countless artists to work on public art commissions during the Great Depression and in fact can be credited with nurturing those who would go on to be known as Abstract Expressionists -- most of whom worked under the program in the 1930's; the WPA brought together formerly isolated artists with untamed ideas about form and medium and new ways of painting that some two decades later would coalesce resulting in arguably the most celebrated movement in American art history.

    Given the conservative movement's success at steering the national discourse for three decades now, their espoused anti-government rhetoric has become consensus-thinking threatening support for arts funding even in good times. In times of economic distress the rhetoric is especially bristling. Continuing unabated and buttressed by Tea Party cohorts is the unwavering belief in tax cuts, massive deregulation, and the whittling-down of government as the panacea to growth. Tragically, this is proving to be the formula for the dismantling of America, the decimation of the middle class, the eradication of the social justice structure, and ultimately, a weakening of democracy.

    In a world where legislators have come to see civilization only through an economic prism, that abstract constituency known as "the markets" or "investors" is the only one that really matters these days. This is especially true in the American context where all the talk of "the American People" is merely lip-service. For the metropolis redefined by the money manufacturers, the future in the medium-term therefore, looks as robust and glossy as ever. For the art city, the fertile period may yet be coming.

    Taking stock, the recession did not so much as set the stage for a seminal creative moment as it provided for the pre-text to follow-through with the more radical elements of the neo-liberal ideology. Now, under the guise of a debt crisis, the next phase of this agenda has taken on blatantly anti-democratic forms: smashing the labor movement, dissolving local governments and selling entire towns to private interests, and destroying what's left of the public school system, the once-great equalizer, to say nothing of the desire to finally feed medicare and social security to the market. Short of stripping certain constituencies of the right to vote, this is a vision for a country of extremes: haves and have nots separated by the widest chasm imaginable. It is a country that resembles any number of Third World jurisdictions that come to mind. Ultimately, it is from the ruins of a wider-spread economic devastation followed by vast social disarray and decay that an artistic moment will finally emerge. Combined with the next, much worse financial meltdown as its catalyst. One even the bankers won't survive. Right now though, Detroit is looking pretty good.

    [REFER.]
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Project Willow » Fri Dec 30, 2011 5:06 am

Somewhat antithetical to the OP, but posted in the spirit of preventing thread proliferation.

Designers and design historians told me over the years that they had heard about the existence of a Nazi graphics standards manual. No one could say they actually saw it, but they knew of someone who had. So it grew into something of a Big Foot or Loch Ness Monster tale, until one day I actually saw it too – and it had been right under my nose the whole time.

I had envisioned a manual of the kind that Lester Beall did for International Paper or Paul Rand did for IBM, showing acceptable logo weights and sizes, corporate typefaces and colors. I was so familiar with these standards manuals, that it never even occurred to me they were postwar formats — and decidedly modern. Maybe the Nazis did theirs in a different way.

The Nazis brand may indeed be uniformly distinctive, but for all the significance they placed on graphic design, there was more variety and greater leeway than one might think. Nonetheless, once I determined who was responsible for maintaining the NSDAP brand, it was a bit easier to identify the identity manual.

More at the link.


http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=24358[/quote]

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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Allegro » Sun Jan 29, 2012 2:26 pm

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The first four paragraphs of this gracefully worded essay emphasize the reasons for posting the piece in this thread, Willow. Mr. Sorel notes the caricatures that are not displayed in the museum, which causes that familiar moment of curiosity: ‘Why not? Too much information?’ Beyond the fourth paragraph is I think a delightful read about comic art and its makers.

_________________
The Wicked Art of Caricature
— by Edward Sorel, The Nation | January 18, 2012

    The greatest collection of Thomas Rowlandson prints in private hands, once owned by art dealer Francis Harvey, was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City when they went up for auction in London in 1959. Now, more than half a century later, they can at last be seen, together with the museum’s other masterpieces of caricature, in an exhibition at the Met called “Infinite Jest” (closing March 4). That title, borrowed from the graveyard scene in Hamlet, where the prince contemplates the skull of the court jester, seems just right for a five-century survey of man’s folly.

    But the subtitle, “Caricature and Satire From Leonardo to Levine,” is, I’m afraid, a case of misleading advertising. It implies that the display of caricatures from the twentieth century—David Levine’s century—will be treated with the same respect and thoroughness as earlier centuries. They are not. The entire twentieth century is represented by a pitifully small group: Al Hirschfeld, Joseph Simpson, the tenor Enrico Caruso, Levine and a couple of Mexican woodcut artists. Nowhere on the walls of the Met will you see William Auerbach-Levy, Isabel Bishop, Ralph Barton, Ronald Searle, Feliks Topolski, Peter Arno, David Low, Will Cotton, Pat Oliphant, Philip Burke or the unique midcentury caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias.

    And it doesn’t get much better at the Leonardo end of the exhibition. We have every right to expect that in an exhibition of comic art from the turbulent sixteenth century we would see the caricatures that Protestant artists were drawing of the Pope and that Catholic artists were drawing of Martin Luther. It was, in fact, the Reformation that made an industry out of political cartooning and inspired some of Europe’s greatest artists—Dürer and Holbein, to name but two—to join in this propaganda war. Their woodcuts and engravings were distributed across Europe.

    But you would barely know that the Reformation existed from viewing the walls at the Met. There is exactly one print, an engraving by Pieter van der Heyden, ripping off some images of Hieronymus Bosch, that may, perhaps, be an indictment of the excessive trappings of the Catholic Church, but it’s a far cry from the powerful, pointed political commentary that was being produced in Germany and the Netherlands at that time. A great opportunity to display the first instances of anti-clerical cartooning has been missed, and with it some of the most famous woodcuts of that period.

    But when we finally arrive at the English printmakers of the Georgian period—George and Isaac Cruikshank, Thomas Rowlandson, James Gillray and James Sayers—we are almost ready to forgive the Met curators everything. For we are in the presence of the most brilliant cartoons ever drawn with an etching needle. The seeming effortlessness of their draftsmanship makes us smile even before we try to get the joke. And the pigments that were used to hand-color these prints is another miracle. How have they managed to stay so vibrant and strong over two centuries? If you have only seen a Rowlandson or Gillray in reproduction, you’ll be surprised by the vividness of the color in the originals.

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    It’s not surprising that the British caricaturists overshadowed their contemporaries on the Continent during the eighteenth century. They had more freedom to express themselves. In fact, Hannah Humphrey’s print shop, where she sold Gillray prints that she had published, was just around the corner from the palace where the king and his family resided. It was impossible for him to take a stroll with his family and not see the scurrilous images of himself that hung in her shop window. He was not amused. And every now and then he attempted to crack down on these seditious cartoonists. At one point Gillray landed in the slammer, and Rowlandson had to hide out with some distant relatives. (Gillray effected his release by promising the Crown that in the future he would take the Tory side in all political matters, and was even put on a retainer by the king to make sure he did just that.)

    Once Napoleon became a threat to England, King George suddenly realized he needed these able-fingered men for the propaganda war to come. In the Napoleonic Wars the French were heavily outclassed, without notable weapons to compete with Britain’s big guns, Rowlandson, Gillray and Cruikshank. These three caricatured the ambitious Corsican with images so unforgettable that to this day many think of Napoleon as a short, power-mad general, wearing an absurdly ornate military uniform. In fact, his uniform after 1800 was relatively modest, and his height, five feet seven inches, was quite average.

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    Perhaps the most familiar print to come out of Britain’s wars against Napoleon is Gillray’s “The Plumb-pudding in Danger;—or—State Epicures Taking un Petit Souper.” In it William Pitt, Britain’s prime minister, and Napoleon dine at a table where they carve up an enormous plum pudding in the shape of the globe. Napoleon slices away all of Western Europe, including Hanover, a state belonging to George III. Pitt, for his part, has his fork in the Atlantic, and his knife is halfway to controlling half the world. I find this cynical view of the conflict remarkable. Here was Gillray, his country in the midst of an all-out war, pointing out that the voracious imperial appetite of Britain was not terribly different from that of the alleged madman it was trying to eliminate. Conceptually it is one of the most mordant commentaries on the Napoleonic Wars, and one of the funniest.

    As we move away from these British etchings toward the lithographic cartoons of the Frenchman Honoré Daumier and his acolytes, we are reminded once again how advances in the technology of reproduction always change the character of the art. Lithography, which may be drawn with a crayon or a brush, allowed the caricaturist a new freedom for stylistic individuality that previous generations of woodcut and engraving artists, and etchers, never had. It was also faster. Political cartoonists, now working with a crayon on stone, could comment on events in a matter of hours, and this meant they could appear in the daily newspapers. This was power! Now their cruel caricatures of legislators and monarchs reached millions and swayed public opinion. It wasn’t long before King Louis-Philippe threw a few of them behind bars.

    For the caricaturist, in particular, lithography was a boon. It allowed subtle facial shading, difficult to do in line. It also gave the ambitious artist a larger press to work with, and thus a larger sheet of paper on which to attempt spectacular panoramas or complex tableaus. The best example of the latter is “Panthéon Nadar.” Today we know Nadar (Gaspard-Felix Tournachon) chiefly for his photographs, but in 1854 he was a celebrated caricaturist. His project was to produce four giant sheets representing thousands of notable playwrights, actors, musicians, artists and authors, who would be numbered and then identified on the sides of the image.

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    He succeeded in completing only one lithographic drawing in his wildly ambitious series, but it is difficult to imagine him doing another without losing his mind. Hundreds of French writers, each one lovingly caricatured, in what is certainly the most spectacular print in the whole exhibition. Talk about labor intensive! Bear in mind that except for the few daguerreotypes taken of some of these writers, Nadar had no photographs to use for reference. Many of the authors he caricatured had to come to his atelier for a sitting. No wonder Nadar decided to take up photography as soon as the camera became a more mobile instrument.

    In an exhibition full of delightful surprises, one of the biggest was to discover that Gustave Doré, the illustrator and painter of monumental biblical scenes, started his career as a caricaturist. His full-color lithograph An Englishman at Mabille, done in 1861, is a Frenchman’s unflattering view of a typical well-to-do British gentleman visiting that popular dance pavilion in the summer. He has large protruding teeth and a receding chin, a physiognomy that meant English to the French. But when the print was reprinted for an American audience, this ridiculous-looking bon vivant was titled The Southerner as He Was. The print is also an example of the incredible strides that had been made in commercial lithography. Full-color-process printing was just around the corner, and now cartoonists and caricaturists could work in any style, and in any medium, without giving a thought to how it would be reproduced.

    Toward the end of the exhibit there’s a line drawing by David Levine—a portrait of Claes Oldenburg as a toilet bowl, a comment on Oldenburg’s sculpture Soft Toilet. Levine’s caricature from 1969 isn’t bad, but it certainly isn’t one of his memorable ones. Levine’s work meant so much to so many New Yorkers that to see him represented by a single caricature of such unexceptional quality is maddening. And coming, as it does, near the end of the exhibit, it almost succeeded in making at least one visitor forget the joy that this exhibition had given him.
Art will be the last bastion when all else fades away.
~ Timothy White (b 1952), American rock music journalist
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Project Willow » Wed Feb 01, 2012 12:23 am

^ Thanks Allegro. I wish I could be in NY to see the exhibit, flawed as it may be.
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Norman Rockwell's Granddaughter

Postby Project Willow » Tue Mar 06, 2012 3:15 am

http://outfront.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/05/norman-rockwells-granddaughter-paints-terrorists/

Norman Rockwell’s granddaughter paints terrorists
By Christopher Moloney, OutFront producer

Daisy Rockwell’s grandfather, Norman Rockwell, created some of the most iconic illustrations of American life.
Her uncle is a celebrated sculptor.

Her father built a giant pyramid – inspired by Hindu temples – lined with thousands of plastic action figures.
And she paints terrorists.

For the better part of the past decade, under the pseudonym “Lapata,” Daisy Rockwell has been creating images of terror suspects in unexpected poses.

In one piece, Mohamed Mahmood Alessa, a New Jersey man arrested for allegedly trying to join a terrorist group in Somalia, is cuddling his cat.

In another, Aafia Siddiqui, currently serving 86 years for attempting to kill U.S. nationals, is seen on her graduation day.

Rockwell told CNN the innocent-looking portraits – based on actual photographs of her subjects – were intentional and her way of “dismantling the aura of fear” that surrounds these people, to better understand their actions.

“We are supposed to think that those who wish America ill are motivated by evil and to not think any further than that,” says Rockwell. “(But America) has spent quite a bit of time meddling in the affairs of other countries. Whether we like it or not, there are plenty of reasons out there for people to wish us ill as a country.”

Rockwell has traveled extensively and holds a doctorate in South Asian literature, which she says, in retrospect, may have been her way of escaping the legacy of her family name.

“I started studying Hindi in college because I love learning languages,” she says. “I wanted to learn a language that was very unfamiliar to me, and I grew very interested in South Asian literature. It taught me a great deal about perspectives I was unfamiliar with.”

These new perspectives feature prominently in her latest book, “The Little Book of Terror,” a collection of her essays and paintings about terrorism.

Divided into five sections, the book includes paintings of people whose names you know (Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein), and some you might not (Jalaluddin Haqqani and Ilyas Kashmiri).

Rockwell considers her process an “interaction” with the people she paints and occasionally changes her opinion about them.

“When you look that closely at someone, you almost always develop sympathy for them,” Rockwell says. “It's like sitting next to someone for a long bus ride. … I want to think about who these people are and why they made the choices they did. I want to share the results of my thoughts, which are my paintings, with other people.”

She was particularly inspired to paint bin Laden.

“We take for granted who he was and what he did and why, and stop thinking of him as a human being with profoundly human motivations. The war on terror is quite bizarre, when you think about it, because it's a war on an emotion - fear. At least, that is what we are told. Instead of just being at war, we are trying to stamp out fear itself.”

Still, for the all the time she’s spent thinking about (and painting) terrorism, she considers global warming the “most overwhelming problem we face.”

“(Global warming) will ultimately destroy our human habitat,” she says. “At that point, throwing bombs at each other and arguing about birth control will be moot points.”

What do you think of Daisy Rockwell’s work? Do you agree that the war on terror is a “war on an emotion”? Is global warming the “most overwhelming problem we face”?


http://www.foxheadbooks.com/?page_id=2

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Tuna Princess by Lapata.

Daisy writes, “His mother has said that he wanted to take his cat, Tuna Princess, with him, but she did not allow it and they argued. Eventually he left instead with a large bag full of candy from his parents’ deli. The candy was seized by the FBI.” The NYPD does not Zagat their deli.



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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Project Willow » Tue Mar 13, 2012 5:59 pm

Sounds just like what my friend Su said when she set up her grant program.

http://www.bewareofimages.com/

Beware of Images

In 1929, the Belgian artist Rene Magritte created The Treachery of Images. The painting showed a pipe, and under it the paradoxical inscription This is not a pipe. When it was pointed out to him that what he had created was in fact a pipe, Magritte replied "OK, you should try filling it with tobacco then". Stated 10 years before the infamous WWII propaganda campaigns, Magritte's warning was clear: Beware of the seductive and deceptive power of images.

Religious institutions, governments and corporations have mastered this power and exploit it to advance their interests. Unfortunately, these practices are at the root of today's social, ecological and financial problems; and as representation technologies become more sophisticated, their sources more centralized and their reach broader, the problems are bound to become more challenging.

Beware of Images is a feature-length, animated documentary about the history of visual representation. The movie explores the intricate relationship between the technology, regulation and social effects of mass media. Its aim is to serve as an educational and entertaining media literacy tool that can be enjoyed by everyone.



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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby American Dream » Wed Jun 20, 2012 10:54 pm

http://cbmilstein.wordpress.com/2012/06 ... ination-2/

Reappropriate the Imagination

June 20, 2012

(Note: This essay originally appeared in Realizing the Impossible: Art against Authority, edited by Josh MacPhee and Erik Reuland [AK Press, 2007]).


***

An art exhibit, albeit a small one, is always housed in the bathroom of a coffeehouse in my town. A recent display featured cardboard and paper haphazardly glued together, and adorned with the stenciled or hand-lettered words of classical anarchists such as Mikhail Bakunin and Errico Malatesta. The artist’s statement proclaimed, “I am not an artist”; the show offered only “cheap art,” with pieces priced at a few dollars. Undoubtedly the materials came from recycling bins or trash cans, and perhaps this artist-who-is-not-an-artist choose to look the quotes up in “low-tech” zines.

There is something heartwarming about finding anarchist slogans in the most unexpected of places. So much of the time, the principles that we anarchists hold dear are contradicted at every turn, never discussed, or just plain invisible. And thus seeing some antiquated anarchist writings scribbled on makeshift palettes in a public place, even a restroom, raised a smile of recognition.

But only for a moment; then despair set in. Why is anarchist art so often a parody of itself, predictable and uninteresting? Sure, everyone is capable of doing art, but that doesn’t mean that everyone is an artist. And yet it is generally perceived as wrong in anarchist circles that some people are or want to be artists, and others of us aren’t or don’t want to be. Beyond the issue of who makes works of art, why can’t art made by antiauthoritarians be provocative, thoughtful, innovative–and even composed of materials that can’t be found in a dumpster? More to the point, why do or should anarchists make art at all today, and what would we want art to be in the more egalitarian, nonhierarchical societies we dream of?

This I know: an anarchist aesthetic should never be boxed in by a cardboard imagination.

Pointing beyond the Present

The name of one radical puppetry collective, “Art and Revolution,” aptly captures the dilemma faced by contemporary anarchist artists. It simultaneously affirms that art can be political and that revolution should include beauty. Yet it also underscores the fine line between art as social critique and art as propaganda tool. Moreover, it obscures the question of an anarchist aesthetic outside various acts of rebellion. It is perhaps no coincidence at all, then, that Art and Revolution’s logo design echoes the oft-quoted Bertolt Brecht contention that “art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it”–with “ART,” in this collective’s case, literally depicted as the hammerhead.

Certainly, an art that self-reflectively engages with and thus illuminates today’s many crushing injustices is more necessary than ever. An art that also manages to engender beauty against the ugliness of the current social order is one of the few ways to point beyond the present, toward something that approximates a joyful existence for all.

But as capitalism intensifies its hold on social organization, not to mention our imaginations, efforts to turn art into an instrument of social change leave it all that much more open to simply mirroring reality rather than contesting or offering alternatives to it. And short of achieving even the imperfect horizontal experiments of places like Buenos Aires and Chiapas, much less replacing statecraft with confederated self-governments, attempts to make art into a community-supported public good remain trapped in the private sphere, however collectively we structure our efforts. Artistic expression is fettered by the present, from commodification to insidious new forms of hierarchy, and hence creativity is as estranged from itself as we are from each other.

Such alienation isn’t limited to the aesthetic arena, of course. But precisely because creative “freedom” appears to defy any logic of control–in “doing it yourself” (DIY), one is supposedly crafting a culture that seems to be utterly of, for, and by us–it is especially seductive as a space of resistance. Our aesthetic tools should be able to help us build new societies just as much as demolish the old, but our renovations will likely be forever askew when set on an already-damaged foundation. And no matter how shoddily constructed, they will always be sold out from under us to the highest bidder. Still, we have to be able to nail down something of the possibilities ahead.

Art at its best, then, should maintain the dual character of social critic and social visionary. For the role of the critic is to judge, to discern, not simply beauty but also truth, and the role of the utopian is to strive to implement such possible impossibilities. As Sadakichi Hartmann put it in a 1916 Blast article, radical artists should “carry the torn flag of beauty and liberty through the firing lines to summits far beyond the fighting crowds.”[1]

This is perhaps art’s greatest power, even when distorted by the present-day social order: the ability to envision the “not yet existent.”

The Temporary and the Trashed

Since the 1970s, a series of interconnected phenomena loosely drawn together by the term globalization have transformed the world. One of these changes is the rise of “global cities” as nodes of control, and over time, this has become embodied in the designed/built aesthetic environment.[2] In City of Quartz, Mike Davis wrote of the “fortress effect” behind a free-market maneuver in the aftermath of the 1960s to reoccupy abandoned (read: poor because abandoned by capital, whites, and so on) downtowns. New megastructure complexes of reflective glass rose up in city centers, hiding elite decision-makers and their “upscale, pseudo-public spaces” inside.[3] Several decades later, with global capitalism seemingly triumphant, brazenly transparent architecture is replacing secretive one-way windows. Just take a peek at the revitalized Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, Germany. Corporate office-apartment buildings of see-through glass reveal lavish interior designs, and are ringed by airy public plazas featuring cheerful sculptures, artsy ecological waterways, and multimedia installations.[4]

Since anarchists today are by and large neither city planners nor architects, nor those commissioned to produce public art, we’ve had to make do with temporary festivals of resistance decrying the environment that’s been built to constrain the majority of humanity. Such carnivals against capitalism have succeeded in fleetingly reclaiming everything from facades to landscapes to outdoor art. And in those moments, libertarian leftists have become impromptu designers of place. The preferred artistic medium here is flexibility, with a dab of anonymity. A large stick of chalk, a homemade stencil, or strips of cloth are easily concealed, and just as easily used to transform a sidewalk, wall, or fence into a canvas. In these and many other ways, anarchist artists set up the circus tent of a playful urban renewal, bringing glimpses of the pleasure in reworking social spaces together, of integrating form and content into the everyday-made-extraordinary by creative cultural expressions.

On the other hand, when we’ve actually expropriated or “freed” spaces, we seem to re-create an aesthetic of deterioration in those places already destroyed by state and capital, racism and fear, almost reveling in the rubble. The degradation foisted on the poor, the marginal, and the forgotten is gleefully picked up as some sort of pirate sensibility. All too often, capitalism’s trash is the blueprint for own trashed creations, as if artistic expressions modeled on a better, more visually pleasing world might just make us too comfortable to swashbuckle our way to revolution. Garbage, along with the shoplifted and the plagiarized, are all romanticized as somehow existing outside domination by anarchist artists who thoroughly inhabit a social structure (as does everyone) where the best of peoples’ cultures are tossed aside, stolen, or plagiarized for profit and power.[5]

Whether conceived as circus or chaos (or both), however, these types of civic artworks are as evanescent as the latest iPod updates; they merely frolic on built environments instead of collectively shaping them. Such artistic strategies are ultimately hollow, replicating the feeling of life under capitalism, whether one has material plenty or not. Instead of offering a challenge or a vision, both our joyful and joyless DIY art ends up parroting the bipolar “choices” that most people struggle against daily: the lure of the ephemeral, unattainable spectacle, or utter rejection in the debris of its excess. And yet this reopening of social space via creativity brings with it a sense of inclusiveness, of democratic places remade and consented to by all–or at least the potentiality thereof.

Art as social critic/visionary, when doggedly and imaginatively placed in the commodified (non)commons of today, just might play its part in moving us toward a noncommodified commons: what we share and enjoy together, in the open, always subject to use by all, subject only to directly democratic structures, and always the vigilant sentry of a better and better society.

It’s not that everyone needs to make art, nor should artists offer an aesthetic of revolt or a revolting aesthetic–that is, mere negation or else nihilism. That’s not what makes art revolutionary. It’s that everyone needs to routinely experience critical-utopian art as commons, commons as a critical-utopian art.

The Art of Value

To some degree, whether self-consciously or not, anarchists’ artistic impulses get to the heart of what makes capitalism so deplorable. “Value” is determined by how much one has and can continually exchange as well as accumulate, whether in the form of money, property, or especially control over others. We anarchists, and billions of non-anarchists, know that value can never be measured by piling quantity on top of more quantity; that how we live our lives, and especially how we treat each other and the nonhuman world, is what matters.

As a political philosophy, anarchism thus aspires to the ongoing project of balancing individual subjectivity and social freedom–the qualitative dimensions of life–knowing that both are essential to the potentiality of the other. As a practice, anarchism engages in prefigurative politics, from forms of cooperation to institutions of direct democracy. This is what makes and keeps us human, in the most generous sense. And such a project will be forever necessary, whether within, against, or beyond capitalism.[6]

One way that anarchists attempt to reclaim value is by carving out a cultural realm that allows everyone to participate, to be valued for what they can envision and/or create, and by redistributing the possibility of producing works of art through the use of affordable, accessible, indigenous materials. We use what’s at hand, often lend a hand to whoever wants to make art, and attempt to do this in ways that are multicultural and inclusive. In isolation from the other realms of life–economics and politics, the social and the personal—and embedded within structures of domination and forms of oppression, however, the cultural effort to revalue value frequently reproduces the social system we oppose.

Examples abound here, sad to say. Puppets are among the easiest of targets, primarily because they became the poster kids for anticapitalist mobilizations. Devising a cheap and collective manner to produce artistic expressions of resistance isn’t problematic per se; such creations have allowed us to prefigure a better life even as we protest present-day horrors. But when puppets all start looking alike, whether filling the streets of Seattle or Hong Kong; when they are mass produced from the same materials, in the same manner; when they are something eco-entrepreneurs can fund to both create the appearance of grassroots protest and turn radical notions into the most liberal of demands[7]–then we are developing our own factory forms of creativity. Those we mean to empower–the everyone-as-artist–become near-assembly-line workers. So even when the production is fun or done in an edgy warehouse space, the profound recognition (of self and society) that comes from the creative act is lost. Art and the artists become unthinking, cranking out copycat rip-offs of the latest political art trend.

The distribution and consumption of such works can become equally debased. At a convergence in Windsor, Canada, to challenge free trade agreements several years ago, a prominent puppetista angrily insisted that thousands of anticapitalists should pause their direct actions to watch her collective’s street theater. “We’re here to entertain you, and you need to stop and be entertained!”

It certainly isn’t enough to make sure that more and more people are cultural producers (or consumers of free art)–the anarchist version of DIY quantity piled on top of more DIY quantity, somehow adding up to a new society. Indeed, “the people” making art might mean that there is no art at all, for quantity can actually destroy quality. And without the qualitative dimension, there can be no appreciation of beauty or craft, or the self who crafted that beauty.

This Wal-Martization of resistance art–cheap, accessible, homogeneous, and everywhere–isn’t the only conundrum we face. It is as hard for us, “even” as anarchists, as it is for “ordinary” people to resist the hegemonic forces at work: those dominant types of organization and ways of thinking that become naturalized, and hence almost unquestioned in a given time period. Perhaps the only bulwark against internalizing and thereby reproducing the current hegemonies we rebel against is our ability to simultaneously think critically and act imaginatively. Indeed, this is where anarchism as a political philosophy excels: in its ongoing suspicion of all phenomena as possible forms of domination, and its concurrent belief in nonhierarchical social relations and organization. This ethical impulse–to live every day as a social critic and social visionary–certainly infuses anarchist rhetoric. It also underscores all those values that anarchists generally share: mutual aid, solidarity, voluntary association, and so on. But for even the most diligent among us, acting on these ethics is much trickier than holding them in our hearts or jotting them down in a mission statement.

A British anarchist historian recently asked me for a tour of Hope Cemetery in Barre, Vermont. In Barre’s heyday, at the turn of the twentieth century, socialists and anarchists worked in the granite industry, living and dying (often and too young) as those who made tombstones. These Italian immigrants built an anarchist library and later a labor hall, established a food co-op and art school, published newspapers such as Cronaca Sovversiva and hosted speakers like Big Bill Haywood, and rabble-roused. Yet more than anything, they sculpted their communal aesthetics into the hard gray stones dotting the cemetery, a lasting commons to the good works of these radicals. “Look at the artisanal quality of each and every gravestone,” to paraphrase my visitor. “This exemplifies the difference between the appeal of marxism and anarchism then. Factory workers could never see themselves in their work, but these stone carvers could recognize themselves in their designs; they could see their own potentiality.”

Such recognition is the first step toward valuing our world, toward knowing we can self-manage the whole of our lives. But it can only come when our artisanal efforts are part of crafting a social beauty. This, in turn, can only be defined in the process of doing-it-ourselves (DIO), where we don’t necessarily all produce art but we do all substantially participate in engaging with, debating, judging, and determining the place(s) of creative expression.[8] The qualitative would be that realm of social criticism and pleasure that comes in the full recognition of free selves within a free society.

Working at Cross-Purposes

The creative act–the arduous task of seeing something other than the space of capitalism, statism, the gender binary, racism, and other rooms without a view–is the hope we can offer to the world. Such aesthetic expressions must also aim to denaturalize the present, though. And this dual “gesturing at and beyond” will only be possible if we continually interrogate this historical moment, and whether our artworks are working against the grain within that context.

For the pull of the cultural industry is strong. No matter how subversive and cutting edge we might remain in our creative works, global capitalism is always ready to recuperate our every innovation. Our rebellious ad busting has become indistinguishable from advertisements employing rebellion-as-sales-pitch. For instance, just after Seattle 1999, an ad featured protesters running in their Nike sneakers from tear gas and police, with the familiar “just do it” tagline; yet it was unclear whether this image was the brainchild of Nike or activists–and either way, it didn’t matter. It sold a lifestyle; it mocked a movement.

Creative work and/or processes of collective art-making without an explicit politics that integrally and forever vigilantly incorporates critical thinking into its practice will almost necessarily, especially under the current conditions, become part of the problem. Some of this will be clear, as when our freely traded handmade patches become the inspiration for prefabricated “made-in-China” clothing in pricey boutiques. The less-obvious manifestations are more troubling: when the DIY sensibility itself, so key to anarchist artistic creations, slowly but surely ingratiates itself into multiple mainstream commodities, from Home Depot’s “You Can Do It” to the new Oreo kits that allow the consumer to “make” their own, with cookie tops and cream separated.

The flow, of course, doesn’t simply go in one direction. As “products” of the dominant culture, we also are influenced before we ever cut a stencil or edit a video. Without constant awareness, we almost unwittingly take up the project of this society of control, with its fragmentation, insecurity, and shallow infotainment. Social isolation is mirrored by an anarchist art that asserts its anonymity, where we willingly erase our own subjectivity, and its temporariness and flexibility, where we willingly give up accountability and connectedness. The contemporary state’s evisceration of human and civil rights, with its move from “the rule of law” toward “the rule of lawlessness,” is reflected in an aesthetic that exalts in its own outlaw status. The art of cartography allows radicals to map out the constant fear of being watched by, in turn, surveilling others. And much of what antiauthoritarian artists produce replicates the culture of distraction that keeps people from acting and thinking for themselves–such as documentaries without a narrative, or screen prints that reduce social conflict to “us” versus “them.”

The artist-as-social-visionary has to peer hard to separate potentiality from peril right now. As autonomist Marxist Harry Cleaver commented in 1992 in relation to anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin’s method, “He had to seek out and identify, at every level, from the local workshop and industry to the global organization of the economy, signs of the forces of cooperation and mutual aid working at cross-purposes to the capitalist tendencies to divide all against all.” Then and now, such cross-purposes are what gesture at “the future in the present,” to again cite Cleaver, but discerning them isn’t easy.[9]

Providing the Keys to Closed Doors

The artist-as-social-critic doesn’t have to search far for subject matter these days, and yet many people seem to be “pushing against an open door,” to borrow from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s formulation in Empire. That is, the social ills we’re contesting have long since been superseded by even more horrific phenomena. As Hardt and Negri argue, we’ve been “outflanked by strategies of power.”[10] Our countermove, then, must be based on imminent critique, working through the internal logic of what we’re scrutinizing toward its own undoing and alternative potentialities. It must be a critique of the “real by the possible,” as philosopher Henri Lefebvre asserted in 1958.[11]

One theme picked up and challenged by radical artists over a century ago was fragmentation, an emergent concern in their day. Now, social atomization is a fact of everyday life, and more frighteningly, is accepted and even celebrated. Contemporary artwork that portrays fragmentation only serves to mimic rather than decry our societal “breaking apart,” precisely because the damage has already been done. So here comes one task for art: to depict resistance not to fragmentation per se, for mere description has lost all power of critique, but to illustrate how social acquiescence to it has become a valued commodity.

This ties into a related issue: alienation. Building on Karl Marx’s work, avant-garde artists and intellectuals long ago moved the critique of alienation from (only) the realm of production to that of consumption, culminating most famously in the Situationist International’s critique of everyday life and assertion of “all power to the imagination.” Life had become a spectacle, with us as its passive spectators.[12] Today, this estrangement has gone one step further in a globalizing cyber-society, where people eagerly join the spectacle as active actors in the vain hope of feeling life again–through such things as reality television, hot dog-eating contests, and pieing prominent individuals–only to participate more thoroughly in their own removal from the world. And thus here’s another aim for art: to capture the new forms of alienation that appear as active engagement, but that ultimately sap the very life out of us all.

A third area worthy of artistic scrutiny is what geographer David Harvey has called “time-space compression,” pointing to “processes that so revolutionize the objective qualities of space and time that we are forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we represent the world to ourselves.”[13] Under globalization, temporality has become an ever-accelerating, just-in-time, simultaneous phenomenon, and spatial barriers have shrunk or even been overcome altogether. Yet anarchist art often still harkens back to a nostalgic time-space of “before,” clinging to archaic forms and/or content–the pastoral black-and-white woodcut, say. Here’s an additional artistic aspiration, then: to interrogate the dizzying “no-time” and displacing “no-place” of our present virtual reality and real virtuality.

This dovetails with the dilemmas raised by high technologies and excessive consumption/waste. During the industrial era, artists such as filmmaker Charlie Chaplin showed the “little guy” being dragged through the gears of Modern Times, yet in our informational age, the computer now bypasses the cog as emblematic, and the “programmer guy” is pulled into The Matrix. Moreover, the new forms of production made possible by digital technologies have filled houses with kitsch, dumpsters with food, and big-box stores with clerks. One anarchist answer to technological/production shifts has frequently been to use garbage as art material–a decades-old artistic choice that has lost any bite (especially since most commodities are now junk to begin with), but more crucially is unfeeling in light of the millions who are forced to use garbage as architectural (and often eatable) material. Or else to supposedly avoid high tech–conveniently forgetting that nearly all commodities involve communications technologies in their design, production, distribution, and/or disposal. The task for artists here is to separate the wheat from the chaff: to critique the ways in which new types of technologies/production help facilitate, versus potentially diminishing, pointless excess or new methods of exploitation as well as time-space compression, alienation, fragmentation, and of course top-down power.[14]

Which brings us to the question of maintaining power, or sovereignty: the possession of supreme authority. Wars, revolutions, and “peacetime” are all essentially waged in the name of seizing this ultimate power (with anarchists hoping to redistribute it horizontally), but the ongoing consolidation of sovereignty is where much of the terror is often done. An increasingly uneven balance of power is held in place today by nation-states inculcating a particular blend of fear, despair, paranoia, and hate, and if all else fails, returning once again to “improved” forms of torture as a last resort. Anarchist art frequently just pokes fun at anxieties, depicts its own hatreds and paranoia, or worse, lapses into portraying the ways that states retained control in the past—say, via a monopoly on violence (something that suicide bombings, 9-11, and other nonstatist acts of violence have shown to be false). Contemporary art should instead scrutinize and expose present-day mechanisms of power: how the mundane as well as the lovely–the bus to work, the toothpaste tube, or the nice new neighbor–are made into objects of anxiety-as-control; how explainable events become paranoiac fantasies of hate-as-control (the Muslim, the Jew, or the Mexican “is responsible”); and how one’s private spirituality, sexuality, or diet (indeed, one’s very personhood) become fair game as physical and psychological abuse in the faceless, nameless, hopeless Gitmoization of torture-as-control.

This list of aesthetic concerns could stretch out further, but let me wrap up with an area that art, from the start, has always tried to capture: remembrance. From bison hunts to biblical stories, from victories in battles or revolutions, from socialist realist to fascist art, artists have attempted to memorialize the past as a means to sustain or shape the present. At its best, such creative recollections have attempted to make sense of the past and the present in order to contemplate a better future—especially in the face of hegemonic representations. Strikingly, however, the current moment is marked by a reversal of aeons of art history: forgetting. Call it the postmodern condition, or blame it on the speed of daily life or efforts to escape harsh realities, but history seems to get lost almost before it’s been made, and we’re left with a hodgepodge art of immediatism. Such ahistoricism erases the developmental logic of domination and hence our ability to contest it, but also that of the revolutionary tradition and hence our capacity to nurture it, thereby helping to “disappear” hope. The artistic imperative here is simple: struggle against memory loss, including our own.

The above themes may seem amorphous; worse, they may appear to be completely removed from the many pressing, often life-and-death issues people face–the numerous “isms” that most of us battle, from racism to heterosexism to anti-Semitism, and sadly on and on. But it is through such concerns that, for instance, racism operates in specific ways right now, and can therefore be illustrated and potentially fought. Today’s form of fragmentation, for example, has turned many toward fundamentalisms–Islam, Judaism, or Christianity–as a means to regain community, often at the expense of women, queers, and indeed anyone dubbed as the transgressive other. Fear has an object, and in the contemporary United States that is frequently the young black male and the bearded Middle Eastern man. Spatial displacement brutally creates refugees, who then become targets of hate. You get the picture. Rather, you can paint, print, or perform the picture.

Lest I seem to be blaming artists for an inegalitarian world, or minimally for not doing enough to challenge it through their work, let me reiterate: I desire to encourage shifts in cultural production and cultural producers in order that both can contribute to the project of ever-freer societies. There are valid reasons for artistic choices–say, whether to sign a work or not–but all too often such choices seem already circumscribed or shaped by today’s social ills. Art should instead aim to turn the tables: this miserable historical moment could be the raw material for artists to give shape to choices of our own construction–ones that might circumscribe domination.

As an anarchist whose creativity comes through the act of writing, I know all too well that penning words or printing a poster both become damaged in the context of a damaged world. And the world seems increasingly damaged at present. A lithographer friend recently told me, “I’m not making art right now, because I don’t want to produce work that’s nihilistic, and that’s all I can feel these days.” Despite these counterrevolutionary times, though, we must all try to work through our own fears and despair, in ways that allow our imaginations to run utopian. My hope is to instill hope in others by claiming that it is through our continual ability, together and alone, to understand and resist the emergent global order with clear eyes, and envision and prefigure humane alternatives with even clearer eyes, that we might just win.

Collectively Gesturing toward Utopia

So how might we begin to clamber out of our boxed-in existence, precisely in order to “win,” knowing that there will never be a final victory but simply better approximations of fundamentally transformed social relations?

One starting point might come from Emma Goldman, who in 1914 observed that modern art should be “the dynamite which undermines superstition, shakes the social pillars, and prepares men and women [sic] for the reconstruction.”[15] Another might be found with anarchist artist Clifford Harper, who noted of his 1974 “utopian images” posters: “they depict an existence that is immediately approachable.”[16] And yet another is hinted at by libertarian left social theorist Murray Bookchin, who in 2004, reflecting on his imminent death, wrote, “To live without a social romance is to see without color. Imagine what life would be like in black and white, without being able to hear–to be deaf to music. Step by step our potentialities like hearing became organized sound, and the Marseillaise was born.”[17]

Other points of departure come from on-the-ground experimentation by contemporary artists, some anarchists and others not, that grapple with some of the concerns mentioned above. Such as provocateur street artist Banksy, who despite his growing fame and fortune, still manages to question how present-day sovereigns maintain their control. Whether painting giant windows to a better world on the separation wall being erected by the Israel government, or placing a life-size figure dressed in Guantanamo Bay orange within the scenery of a Disneyland ride, Banksy serves to startle, to act as a vigilant public eye. Moreover, he asks people to “imagine a city where graffiti wasn’t illegal. . . . A city that felt like a living breathing thing which belonged to everybody, not just the real estate agents and the barons of big business. Imagine a city like that and stop leaning against the wall–it’s wet.”[18]

Another example comes from installation artists Esther Shalev-Gerz and Jochen Gerz’s attempt to deal with “‘forgetting’ in a place of ‘remembering,’ and thus establish, through the act of public participation, each person’s memory.” In 1986, they erected a twelve-meter-high lead column in a town square in Hamburg, Germany, and “invited passers-by to write their name on its surface.” It became a “community board without restriction,” and “mimicked the process of an ideal democracy–a public space open to unrestricted thought . . . and all-encompassing dialogue.” Over seven years, which included the fall of the Berlin wall, the column was slowly lowered into the ground as sections filled up. A debate ensued during that time over public space/art, and especially the Nazi past and neo-Nazi present. But as this disappearing “countermonument” was also meant to illustrate, “in the long run,” according to Shalev-Gerz, “it is only we ourselves who can stand up against injustice.”[19]

To my mind, the best efforts are the ones that focus as much on horizontal social organization as on aesthetic questions, thereby highlighting the DIO art-as-commons dimension of anarchism that, again to my mind, really does distinguish an antiauthoritarian art. Novelist Ursula Le Guin, for one, imagined a utopia where museums might function like libraries. The Internet now facilitates open-source, interactive electronic museums. Other inklings of this can be found in those creative projects that play with, and work at, the notion of communal control of our now-privatized spaces and prefigure directly democratic, confederated social structures.

One compelling case study is the United Victorian Workers, Local 518, organized in late November 2005 by an artist/activist collective as a counterpoint to the Victorian Stroll in Troy, New York. The “official” stroll is a privately funded annual event designed to lure holiday shoppers to the “historic streets of downtown” by creating a “magical stage” peopled by the Victorian upper crust; the “unofficial” version “gave a presence to those whose labor built the city by dressing in Victorian-era working-class apparel and performing a period-inspired strike during the event.”[20] Many of the bystanders as well as the participants, though, couldn’t tell the difference, and the full history of nineteenth-century Troy was reinserted into the public imagination. As one of the artists involved with this project remarked, “It was a collective intervention into public memory and Christmas shopping.”[21] Certainly, “by making visible the class and labor struggles of the era,” this interventionist art piece “obliquely points out the city’s motives to present a selective history conducive to consumption,” as Shopdropping observed.[22] But it also cleverly and clearly transforms the “Whose Streets? Our Streets!” of protest moments into a tangible lesson played out in the actual historical space–potentially sparking civic dialogue and action around contemporary injustice.

In a much more expansive effort in April 2001, the three-day Department of Space and Land Reclamation campaign involved sixty mostly illegal reclaimings of public space in Chicago, thereby explicitly linking artistic expression to vibrant conversations and decentralized self-management in the city’s many distinct neighborhoods. As the weekend’s catalog noted, “Artists/activists/radical citizens have once again found common ground” in multiple practices that “all resist the encroachment of top-down centralized control and private capital. Projects of reclamation situate the producer at a critical intersection of power.” A central headquarters, open around-the-clock during the campaign, was designed “to connect various practitioners of reclamation as well as initiate a critical dialogue about the building of a radical aesthetic/arts movement in Chicago and beyond.”[23]

And in one final example, in summer 2006, CampBaltimore, in a surprising collaboration with the Contemporary Museum of Baltimore, encouraged people to debate urban design through the lens of social justice while building a network to transform art and society.[24] According to anarchist Mike McGuire, who participated in the project, CampBaltimore built “a trailer that could serve as a mobile convergence center,” which included “a small infoshop, a place from which to serve meals, a mobile sewing workshop, and a place to do film screenings” within neighborhoods. Another part involved “Headquarters: Investigating the Creation of the Ghetto and the Prison-Industrial Complex,” housed in the museum. Here, “blurring the lines between the practices of artists and activists,” the museum also became “an infoshop and center of operations: a platform for activities that investigate Baltimore’s program of uneven urbanism and a site to mobilize for local and global struggles.”[25] “It’s not like a traditional model of political activism or artistic models of political activism. It’s both–and [it’s] trying to offer an alternative way, seeing other ways, . . . grappling with the evaporation of public spaces in the city and the privatization of everything,” explained museum artist-in-residence Gabri.[26] Rather than art on the walls, then, “Headquarters” featured short videos documenting grassroots struggles in Baltimore, a dry-erase map of the city that people could write on, a flowchart outlining socioeconomic interconnections, a mini library, and a meeting space, among other things. The trailer and museum became platforms for people to think and converse about their city–and hopefully change it.

In these instances and others, there is a sense of attempting to engage with the complexities of the present, and via a process of art-as-dialogue, working together to both critique and reconstruct our lived public places. Such imaginative projects indicate that centrally planned forms–whether capitalist, fascist, or socialist–cannot build a dailyscape that speaks to who we are and want to be. And that there also needs to be an integration–or reintegration in many cases–of what is now seen as art into those things now viewed as either material necessities, functional, or infrastructure. Mostly, though, they gesture, hopefully and often joyfully, at a time-space of “after.”

What would such a time-space beyond hierarchy, domination, and exploitation look like, and what of an anarchist art then? That is something we need to dream up together, through our various acts of imagining, debating, fighting for, and deciding on that ever-dynamic time-space.

In the meantime, in this present awful time-space, I dream of art that agitates even as it unmasks injustices; that educates even as it inspires; that organizes even as it models self-governance. That surprises and provokes, sometimes upsetting a few carts in the process, and that isn’t identifiable as anarchist art by its look but instead by its sensibility. I long for a nonhierarchical aesthetic that isn’t afraid of instituting imagination as a public good, which can also stand up to public involvement and interrogation as well as directly democratic decision-making. That has an unending commitment to the notion that through creative expression, humans achieve a qualitative self- and social recognition that can, by breaking through the alienation we experience today, point toward self-determined social relations–not wealth or fame, but knowing that we are fully seen by and see others, “warts and all,” as we shape a world of beauty together, all the while defining “beauty” by what upholds values such as cooperation, dignity, love, freedom, and other anarchistic ethics.

To hell with cardboard! Let’s utilize whatever artistic mediums are necessary, toward endless, plastic possibilities in societies of our own, ongoing collective creation. That would be beautiful, indeed.

Notes

[1] Sadakichi Hartmann, “Art and Revolt,” Blast 1, no. 22 (December 1, 1916), 3; repr., The Blast, ed. Alexander Berkman, intro. Barry Pateman (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 181.

[2] The term “global city” was first coined in Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).

[3] Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990), 226, 229.

[4] Of course, this may all change again, given the global economic crises of 2008 and likely beyond.

[5] Obviously, many artists use free or discarded materials because they don’t have the financial resources to buy art supplies, and hence their aesthetic can simply be chalked up to a lack of means. But also prevalent among anarchist artists is the notion that trash is valueless from the standpoint of capitalism, and so by utilizing such material, one is creating something of noncapitalist value. Or at least throwing capitalism’s excess in its face as some sort of incriminating evidence. This reduces capitalism to economics, though, and ignores Karl Marx’s great insight: that capital is first and foremost a social relation. Whether one uses expensive or free art supplies, the social organization behind them both remains the same. But of course, even on the level of economics, waste management is a multitrillion dollar industry, utterly dependent on recycling and garbage. So whether you take a materialist or social theory perspective, a “cheap art” aesthetic is perfectly compatible with present-day forms of domination. Today’s junk can easily become (and has) tomorrow’s boutique item; society’s rejects (from punks to urban black youth) can become (and have) tomorrow’s formula for hipster culture.

[6] Contrast this to the project of anarchy qua primitivism, which is to somehow “forget” that we are imaginative, qualitative beings marked by our capacity for dialogue and hence reasoned actions, and instead “return” to passive receptacles foraging for our most basic needs, which seems to me exactly what capitalism and statecraft as forms of social organization strive to reduce us to. This is no digression: when we deny our very ability to think symbolically, the notion of art disappears too, not to mention us as humans along with it.

[7] As one example, some Vermont puppeteers, who certainly needed the money for their many unpaid political projects, were commissioned to produce a puppet show for the 2005 Montreal Climate Control Conference. Yet there were strings attached. The eco-capitalist who financed these puppets had his own agenda in mind: make the art look like a self-initiated activist protest, but keep the theme in line with his own reformist political point. (This isn’t to say that these particular artists, and others like them, aren’t also able to subvert the eco-capitalist’s goal to some degree.)

[8] As Erik Reuland noted in editing this essay, “Many people would also argue that the whole definition of art should be exploded, and many things traditionally considered crafts or trades could be viewed–and invested with the same value–as artistic practices. They’re not necessarily asserting that everyone can and should draw, write songs, and so on.” Such a debate is complex, but at the risk of overgeneralizing for my present purposes, the notion that art’s definition should encompass much more, and many more people could thus be considered artists, seems often to water down what we mean by art and artists as to make both unrecognizable. Why does this matter? Precisely because of the concern articulated here about the recognition of ourselves and each other as profoundly individuated humans, with wonderfully differing artistic and nonartistic things we might choose to excel in, embedded in a profoundly articulated community of our own ongoing self-determination.

[9] Harry Cleaver, “Post-Marxist Anarchism: Kropotkin, Self-Valorization, and the Crisis of Marxism,” 1997 extended essay (available from AK Press), 5, 8 (emphasis added).

[10] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 138.

[11] Henri Lefebvre, foreword to Critique de la vie quotidienne, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1958), 16; cited in Richard Gombin, The Origins of Modern Leftism (1975; repr., Baltimore, MD: Insubordinate Editions), 47.

[12] See, for example, Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (1967; repr., Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006); Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967; repr., London: Rebel Press, 2001). For more on the Situationist International along with some downloadable texts, see http://www.bopsecrets.org/index.shtml.

[13] David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 240.

[14] Josh MacPhee offered the following comment while editing this essay: “The trouble is that Modern Times is a better movie than The Matrix!” I agree. And given that it’s perhaps harder than ever to make artwork that isn’t degraded from the start, Josh asks, “What is an artist to do, simply accept that degradation? Is not the woodcut a harkening to a time when craft mattered, and therefore a rejection of the made-in-China [or made-in-the-USA] aesthetics?” Sure. But what Josh and I are both getting at is this, to quote him again: It is “no longer about what we do (with capitalist globalization, everyone has access to everything, so skateboarding, noise music, tall bikes, and silk screening become fodder for Coke ads) but how we do it. This is a deceptively simple idea, but it can be easily misunderstood. It does not mean that there is a ‘correct’ way to do things (that is, a way to move into a neighborhood and not gentrify); we are still beholden to the larger systems we exist in. But it does mean that the ethics of how we do things matters, for the very reason that they are at the core of the new world we are trying to build.” I appreciate the dialogue Josh and Erik added to this essay in the editing process–a good example of “how we do it.”

[15] Emma Goldman, foreword to The Social Significance of the Modern Drama
(Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1914), available at http://sunsite3.berkeley.edu/Goldman/Wr ... eword.html.

[16] See http://www.infoshop.org/wiki/index.php/Clifford_Harper.

[17] Murray Bookchin, “The Twilight Comes Early,” November 2004, available at http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Ar ... light.html.

[18] See http://www.banksy.co.uk/outdoors/tramp.html.

[19] See http://www.shalev-gerz.net/ENG/index_eng.html; http://www.thephotographyinstitute.org/ ... _gerz.html.

[20] For more on the official Troy Victorian Stroll, see http://www.troyvictorianstroll.com/about/index.cfm. For the unofficial version, see the “Action” section under the “Projects” header at http://www.daragreenwald.com/.

[21] E-mail to the author, October 19, 2006.

[22] See http://www.rpi.edu/~scarfa/portfolio/pr ... stroll.htm.

[23] See http://www.counterproductiveindustries. ... Ideas.html.

[24] See http://www.campbaltimore.org.

[25] See http://www.contemporary.org/past_2006_04.html.

[26] Quoted in Bret McCabe, “Unite and Conquer,” City Paper, July 12, 2006, available at http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=12015.
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Canadian_watcher » Sat Jun 23, 2012 9:23 pm

I don't have a deeply researched (by someone else) response here, but I do have some anecdotal thoughts to share in direct answer to the OP:

How?

HOW?

By shoving it up the asses of those people who dine at the finest restaurants, whose non-GMO food comes from special farms thick and green with bushels of produce which was grown with seeds procured from deeply disguised seed banks. By stuffing it down the throats of those who kiss the lipo'd arses of the aforementioned spoiled brats, who kow-tow to them by only showing muted landscapes and tired abstracts or purile erotica from the same four 'artistes-du-jour' in gallery after gallery on the strips of anybigcity, anywhere.

We survive by our underground pride, by appealing so hard that the establishment will vomit right before it falls all over itself to have a piece of the action. And then, once they buy everything we've got, we change it up, throwing them for a loop they haven't been around since they lost their virginities.

We don't pay other people to make our ideas a reality. We don't feed them full of bullshit. We don't give them what they want. We take what we want from them.

How does art survive? By surviving.

That's how.
Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.-- Jonathan Swift

When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him. -- Jonathan Swift
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby barracuda » Mon Jun 25, 2012 8:48 pm

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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Project Willow » Mon Jun 25, 2012 10:14 pm

AD, I'm still working on that one.

C_W, you have more faith in humanity, and the art market, than I, apparently, but thanks!

B. :cry: Do they have a song where some greedy corp takes her flower idea and makes a huge profit off of it, after they rape and kill her?




These actions seem like interesting springboards for ideas . . .

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archiv ... jill-magid
Today in State Surveillance: Artist Jill Magid
Posted by Brendan Kiley on Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 10:08 AM

Jill Magid is an American-born artist who uses state surveillance (particularly in Europe) as her palette.

A couple of slices from her Wikipedia page:

"System Azure is an ongoing work initiated in 2003. In her explorations into surveillance while an artist in residence in Amsterdam, Magid proposed to the Amsterdam police an art project of decorating surveillance cameras. The police rejected this suggestion. Magid returned as a "Security Ornamentation Professional" attached to a fictitious company, complete with portfolio and business card, and pitched the same proposal — but this time as public relations rather than art. This was accepted and Magid was hired to install her work."

Her work was later seized from the Tate Modern by the same Dutch Secret Service agency that commissioned the work. The show was titled "Authority to Remove." I like the way Magid thinks.

And:

"Evidence Locker is a 2004 work. During the Liverpool Biennial, Magid engaged Citywatch, Liverpool's closed–circuit video surveillance system (one of the largest in the world). Magrid's strategy for gaining access made use of an exception to the law that all footage is erased after 31 days: if a person sends a request form describing who they are, where they were, and what they were doing (along with a photo and ten pounds), the police must store the footage in the evidence locker for seven years. Magid made such a request for 31 days straight, in the manner of love letters and diary entries.

"She ultimately developed a rapport with the agents of Citywatch, and they began to follow her, facilitated by recognizing her patterns of movement and the red coat she wore for that purpose. As Magid and Citywatch became more aware of each other, issues of trust and pitfalls in the logic of the system came out. In one instance, she stood in a square alone and closed her eyes for an extended amount of time. The video operators were afraid for her safety, but felt helpless because they couldn't tell her if something was going to happen. To take this further, she asked if she could borrow a radio receiver with an earplug so she could close her eyes in a busy street, and be guided by the agents watching.

I love the idea that Magid woos/forces the panopticon of state surveillance (which is, by definition, remote and impersonal) into an intimate relationship. That is really the most subversive thing you can do to a state-surveillance system—make it care about you, not as a citizen and potential threat, but as a friend.

Magid has a show up now at the Honor Fraser gallery in Los Angeles.
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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby Project Willow » Mon Jun 25, 2012 11:49 pm

Just watched this moving and fascinating doc.

Que bella, Francesca.

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Re: How does Art Live in Corporo-Fascist America?

Postby barracuda » Wed Jul 18, 2012 11:08 am

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