Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: adbusters, advertising, art, censorship, consumerism, future gutter status, hijab, hijabism, hijabizing, korinna irwin, no logo, orientalism, post-consumerism?, princess hijab, rock star with words, street art, veil, visual terrorism, zines
Who is Princess Hijab? She’s my age, yet anonymous; an “unseen character” And
since 2006, the Princess, who has begun a movement (Hijabism) based on the subverting of advertisements (Hijabizing) veils faces on billboards using a black marker pen.The black hijab encompasses every existing form of distinction. PH also operates on the Internet by creating animated gifs. She initiated the hijab_ad collective.
There’s some debate over whether she is a hijabi or even a Muslim. Or even a woman (take that as loosely as you will). I kind of like that it’s ambiguous
and that you don’t necessarily need to subscribe to certain identities to dislike the oversexualisation of women’s bodies, and especially the creepily prepubescent
(hello, Tom Ford! though I do think those ads are kind of unintentionally brilliant in their hyper-plasticity, kind of like lucy and bart). Princess Hijab, anyway, sees her work as a kind of culturally specific Adbusters-ish response – except for the part where you consume to cut down comsumption. She tells Menasset that
“I created PH to be connected. I wanted to mix elements from different extractions and cultures, starting from my initial subject: the veiled woman. I believe it’s the reason why PH had such an impact. She never let herself be defined by religion nor gender. It was really crucial for me,: she said”.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: adalah, anarchism, anarchists against the wall, armed struggle, BDS, boycott, consumerism, direct action, divestment, future gutter status, insurrection, international solidarity movement, israel, jordan, lifestyle politics, palestine, sanctions, Sufism, uri gordon, wayne price
 Palestina by Melanie Cervantes |
Here’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, after coming across Wayne Price’s “the Palestinian Struggle and the Anarchist Dilemma, fleshing out my own thoughts on the death of armed struggle, and then following the recent successes of the US Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign. At least thus far it’s been something I’m a bit reluctant to take on especially as it looks like this is what I’ll inshallah be PhD applying to, so maybe part of a series? |
BDS – Pushing for institutional change
As much as I wholeheartedly believe in, and work with BDS campaigns at various levels, there’s something that makes me slightly uneasy about banking on consumerist/lifestylist, institutional, and interstatist avenues to produce social change. Not just the question of academic boycott, which I’m wholly torn on, but it that it feels like a ‘necessary evil’, a compromise for campaign efficiency, in a way. Necessary evils – awkward good/evil morality aside, it feels like an awkward liberal binary, or people who consider themselves anti-authoritarian but insist on centralised and hierarchical organisations and meeting structures for ‘efficiency’s sake’. You could perhaps look at it in the view that ‘every little bit helps’, think global act immediately local, and so on . Kind of the way I feel about veganism, buying local/from CSAs, fair trade etc – a good (if privilege imbued) along-the-way means to an end, but not the end in itself. But when BDS becomes, or rather, feels like the only avenue, what then?
MORE: WHAT DO YOU WANT THEN, A REVOLUTION?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: consumerism, dubai, film, surveillance society, the future, occupy everything, l'insurrection qui vient, brotest, BURP, braxis, tiqqun, comite invisible, university of minnesota, invisible committee, new school in collaboration, beer, sleep dealer, dystopia, electrodes, internet, image, censorship
Ignore the start picture – the video at the end is a Tiqqun one from 2001, and well worth watching. It’s dedicated to the lost children; here’s some other lost children in the hipstershapes of the Bro University Radicalization Project (BURP) which focuses
on redirecting the socially repressive forces of alcohol towards spontaneous anarchy, salutes the snap attack on sober conformity, a non-hierarchical attempt to liberate U spaces in favor of their natural free-form Bro-ness and Duder-tude, with chillaxing required for any kind of mutual aid, Miller or Bud.
This in turn begs the crucial question: BROTEST + BEER(Y) + BRAXIS = BURP??. Tiqqun’s invocation of electrodes is anyway fascinating in that the short was made in 2001, and is uneasily echoed in this year’s dystopian film Sleep Dealer, set in Mexico. I won’t rehash it here, but in brief, it depicts a near-futurist world of hypersurveillance and control, and a hypercapitalism that succeeds in total virtual alienation. Exploited workers thus ‘plug in’ to machines to remotely work across the border in America, through nodes in their bodies – put in by the technified coyoteks (!). The nodes themselves strongly resemble the 1/4 jack holes where you would plug a lead into a guitar or bass – it’s interesting to map this back to the connections that humans have with their own favourite shapes of wood (as opposed to perhaps a forest). In a final cessation of humanity, people can even leech and commodify their own emotions and memories (hello, NGO-industrial) and even plug into each other’s nodes – via a computer of course.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: advertising, art, brand recognition, chanel, consumerism, corporate imperialism, culture jamming, globalisation, graveyard, idol worship, intervention, just seeds, laura keeble, logos, macdeath, macdonalds, nike, public art, sculpture, street art, tombstones, traces, ZEVS
Another globalisation is possible? Probably not. This however is North Road Cemetary, in Southend, England, and it just might be where the phenomenon goes to die. Or rather three of its MNC markers – Macdonalds, Nike, and perhaps unusually, Chanel. The artist in question, Laura Keeble, based the project on “theory of magical thinking, looking at belief systems and idol worship”. She says that it plays with the viewers perception, hopefully creating a pause for thought. I can certainly think of people who indeed positively worship at the altar of the now iconic interlinked Cs, but Macdonalds? It’s nice that it can be read in so many ways though.
| When I see it I for example tend to immedately think of corporate imperialism and globalisation, as opposed to maybe aspirational-luxe goods. The markers are at the same time a jolting reminder of just how far brand recognition has permeated into our collective cultural consciousness. These symbols are obviously among the most recognisable, but you’d probably be surprised as to just how many others you recognise – take the corporate logo-d flag, for example. |  |
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 2008, art, brendan monroe, colours, consumerism, dubai, new year's eve, post-consumerism?
Sick and headachey, this will likely be the first New Year’s Eve for about as long as I can remember (all the way to the late 90s indignancy of being babysat to those glitzy bollywood stage marathons). In Dubai with an expired license and government offices shut for what seems like sneakily forever meanwhile amounts to something like being stranded, albeit somewhat productively so. It’s early evening yet and so putting on the glad rags vs a cup of tea is still debatable, but meanwhile Brendan Monroe’s paintings are rather soothing, with the titles balmingly perfect for an Anti-New Years? Above is ‘Breaking Blood’.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: black friday, consumerism, fashion, italy, ngo-industrial complex, paolo roversi, ritratti di allora, vogue italia 1998
Hmm an absence, and also an absent mind. I came across this 1998 editorial from Vogue Italia today and I’m reminded of the idea of Black Friday. Not the post Thanksgiving stupor consumerist apocalypse (but really doesn’t that walmart employee getting trampled say so much?) or the 1929 stock market collapse really either. But more like black-tongue of the plague, or genocide or concentration camps or something equally frailly horrific. The photographs -by Paolo Roversi are of course incredibly gorgeous but the models, frighteningly thin.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: consumerism, election day, electoral politics, incongruous with the setting, prop 8, the nation, voting, walmart, wfp, working families party
.. So it’s election day. Over the course of which we’ll see democracy and freedom and maybe hope and change and all those other four (five?) letter words spread over America like a large and perhaps particularly insidious purple bruise. My dorm appears to be a voting site to boot, currently swarming with feel-god liberalism. And, unfortunately the rather clumsily out of tune school marching band, who only seem to crawl out of the woodwork at the worst of times. They’ve thus far moved through the fight song, Sweet Child of Mine, Sweet Dreams, and -oh! currently the Final CountdownKind of like the frightening growth of Walmart above – I particularly like this dark-to-lights version. Interesting to see how it spreads along the coasts, and especially the Mexican border.
And voting, eh? I don’t believe in electoral politics and yet all the people who share this sentiment appear to be biting the Obama bullet. I can’t help but wonder if a McCain presidency wouldn’t help galvanise the quote unquote Left? Not that the last eight years did much though. Maybe it’s a question of investment – I don’t have a vote in this country, or the one with my residence visa, or the one with my passport either. If I did though, I reckon I would vote. Probably here too, if only for the local elections and third parties. And that said, if you are voting here in NY, please vote on the Working Families Party ballot line (E)?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anthropology, art, bataille, colgate, consumerism, crest, erik boker, product dissections, toothpaste
Aquafresh Extreme Clean
A minty-fresh comment on consumerism from New York based artist Erik Boker in this Product Dissections series. These dissected toothpaste tubes are incredible, each its own box held down with steely pins. I was interested to learn that Boker is somewhat informed by anthropolgy – there’s a lovely sense of Bataillan formlessness to these. At the same time, some of them are structured almost like rib cages, filled with fleshy blacklung, or maybe enthopied blood oranges. Although I like these the best, I unsurprisingly find the cooler-hued blue, green and white ones the most comforting. I think the naming of the product adds a lot too, if only as a reminder of the ridiculous brand diversifications.
Aquafresh Extra Fresh
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: art, capitalist casualties, cities, consumerism, d*face, macdeath, public art, street art, surveillance society, tattoos
Street improvements of the best kind? This is from D*Face in London, an artist who seems to tread the line between street art and commercial graphic design. I wonder if one always comes before the other? Some of his work is really sick though:
more
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: adbusters, consumerism, dash snow, decline of western civillisation, doom, hipster holocaust, m.i.a.
When did dot.coms become dot.cons? Who beat the beatniks into conservative consumerism? And who made adbusters – with their $50 *nobrand* black-dot-anticonsumerist sneakers – the token cultural messiah du jour anyway? Douglas Haddow is a smart, smart man (of course). And this article, Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization is kind of incredible, in a disdainfully self referential soul crushing kind of way.
The dance floor at a hipster party looks like it should be surrounded by quotation marks.
