Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anarchism, ☭☭☭, collective amnesia, doris salcedo, el otro lado, eyal weizman, gentrification, green scare, istanbul biennial, postco, postracial scars, property not people, racism, RAF, rupture reveals structure, sds, seattle, shibboleth, violence, weather underground, western freedoms
A lot of things can happen between the gaps, and down little alleyways and other narrow spaces between one building and the next. Like this installation by Doris Salcedo at the 2003 Istanbul Biennial, which fills a gap between buildings by lowering in 1600 chairs. Or this ridiculous house in Seattle, found by Kyle Gabouer. He says that it was owned and inhabited by an elderly woman, who “was so insistent on living her last days in the home that no matter the price, she refused to sell it in order to make way for construction. The contractors decided they’d build around her. I heard that she recently passed, and the building isn’t even finished yet…” Something to think about with “Manhttanville”, perhaps?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anarchism, art, ☭☭☭, calorie free propaganda, electoral politics, emiliano zapata, emma goldman, obama, peter kropotkin, posters, sds, shephard fairey
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Street artist Shephard Fairey’s – perhaps better known for OBEY and ANDRE THE GIANT – iconic Obama posters are pretty well known by now. I’m seeing a lot of takes on them; here’s some I particularly like.
MORE…
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: aesthetics, anarchism, art, ☭☭☭, beautiful losers, buenaventura durruti, every heart is a revolutionary cell, just seeds, meredith stern, olympics, pete yahnke, sds, swoon
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THINGS THAT WILL HAPPEN ON 08/08/08
- The Olympics start. I think the Olympic Ring Bike is kind of amazing. Usually I associate the Olympics with Bombay, mad humidity and my grandmother’s house with rattan paneling on the walls. Don’t know that I’ll see any of this episode though. - This film premieres in NYC. It describes itself as being “rooted in the DIY subcultures of skateboarding, hiphop, punk and graffiti” and celebrates “the spirit behind today’s most influential cultural movement“. I’d daresay reality TV trumps these today, but either way, - I will be on a transatlantic flight to a wedding in Surrey, then Dubai and maybe South India for a few weeks. - After having presumably bombed the Arabic oral which is in 9 hours (but unwritten) and the final exam the next day. Oh dear? |
THE ARTWORK FOR THE FILM GOT ME THINKING ABOUT REVOLUTIONARY AESTHETICS, THOUGH
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: alice in wonderland, charles manson, clocks, denise grunstein, jan svankmajer, lewis carroll, pigs, rags, sds, time, weather underground, white rabbit
So while I normally never get excited about things like this, these Denise Grunstein pictures found at the artist and his model have actually gotten me thinking about this Friday. Alice in Wonderland is definitely among the trippiest of Disney movies, and is supposed to be fairly revolutionary in original author Lewis Carroll’s hiding of complex and forbidden mathematics equations in it (doesn’t that sound dramatic, now). At that, I’m rather eager to see (Czech surrealist) Jan Svankmajer’s take on it. Of it, he has infamously said that “Carroll is an illustration of the fact that children are better understood by pedophiliacs than by pedagogues.” Perhaps for fascinatingly, he has equally said that “childhood is my alter-ego.” The Disney version was decidedly saccharine, but it has been otherwise immortalised in Charles Manson’s famous quote,
We’re not in Wonderland anymore, Alice.
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At that, I’m reminded of the Weather Underground’s infamous co-option and support of Manson’s rhetoric (later to be much regretted) at the 1969 ‘War Council’ in Flint, Michigan (in which they also repped Captain Ahab). In which Bernadine Dohrn (re: the 1968 Tate – La Bianca murders) was said to have exclaimed,
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Pigs – of the farm or capitalist variety – seem to show up a lot here ouf. Perhaps it was the growing up in a Muslim country lack of pig love? Baby pigs are kind of cute. But then again, all small/fluffy animals or things probably are. Anyway, the quote’s from a really interesting chapter, ‘Excesses and Limits’, in Jeremy Varon’s Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies, especially re: the place of violence in the movement. Even if you’re not an SDS kid, promise!
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Although there’s the mad fun of cards and tea (a little teapot, short and stout perhaps?) I’m rather drawn to being the twitchy pattery white rabbit (does it have any other names?) that Alice follows down the rabbithole. Mainly because this allows me to wear a tophat (or perhaps a bowler, for want of one) a BOWTIE (or perhaps even several, à la flying saucer, but most importantly for the most excellent Flava Flav-ish shiny purple jacket printed with stopwatches that I found in a Long Island thrift store. It’s rather warm though.
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Though it could also be wonderful to wear one of those mirrors that distort shape, making you bulge or shrink concavely, going as those ‘drink me’ bottles of course. Seems like it would be kind of heavy though. And with the weather being what it is and the location secret until the day-of, perhaps it wouldn’t go amiss to rethink this too, ouf. In other rabbitish inspiration, I love these pictures from a masked opera and ballet rendition of the story respectively:
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And while trawling for more white rabbit pics, I also came across these lovely ones from a 2003 editorial replete with more pigs and bowties (via foto_decadent)
Filed under: film, politic + insurrection: other | Tags: art, ☭☭☭, die fetten jahre sind vorbei, every heart is a revolutionary cell, louis vuitton, pigs, sds, student activism, tattoos, the edukators, the fat years are over, wim deloye
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Since writing about The Edukators a while back, I’ve come back to it a fair number of times. Not to give away any of the plot (see it, it’s brilliant), but the end sentiment shuffles somewhat over to “some people never change” as quoted on the note at the end. A literalised writing on the wall if you will, with the person in question being a german ex-SDSer – turned corporate millionaire- ostensibly still with the radicredientials of his student days.
But just how sustainable is student activism anymore? Since then, at least from what I can gather in the US, the nature of the university system itself seems to have changed. In ‘68,
you could graduate $2000 or $3000 in debt and go on to be a committed activist for the rest of your life; many of the 68 vets have done just this. Today you’re going to be graduating from the same schools with something like $100k in debt. and activism is almost something you have to give up as you hit your senior year, if this makes sense. Similarly, whereas most stuff went down at big elite institutions like Columbia or UC – Berkley, today it’s happening at state, community and even high school campuses, which is especially incredible. What then will the future look like – are many of SDS, for example, destined to become the same kind of benevolent i-bankers, corrupting the system from within (if at all)?
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I don’t know when said fat years will be over. But in the year of the pig, corporate branding reaches new levels, with pigs getting Louis Vuitton tattoes. There’s an interview over at if it’s hip it’s here with Belgian artist Wim Deloye, a vegetarian who tattoos live pigs (albeit sedated) for art’s sake. To quote from the interview:
Wim: I started tattooing pig hides, which I’d get from the slaughterhouses, in 1994. It was only in 1997 that I started to work on live sedated pigs. I tattoo pigs because they grow fast and they are so much better to tattoo than fish. I tattoo them when they are young and I like the way the artwork stretches and distorts over time. Essentially, we invest in small tattoos and we harvest large paintings.
I don’t know how I feel about the cruelty aspect of this, but some of the stretched pigskins look too much like human skin for comfort. There’s some more examples at the same site.
Filed under: diy, film, rags | Tags: die fetten jahre sind vorbei, diy, every heart is a revolutionary cell, film, sds, the edukators, the fat years are over
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aka The Edukators, a film I’ve been itching to see after coming across a quote “every heart is a revolutionary cell. Cue a painted hoodie (how did I never realise I had gold paint before?)/ drawing (to be redone).
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