raddest right now

Quote of the day, yay!

2012-01-22T17:09:00.001Z

'There is something paradoxical and beautiful in the sense of security that man needs to live and in the sense of insecurity that man needs to feel alive.'

-- Alessandro De Santis, architect, quoted in the OMA/Progress exhibition at Barbican Art Gallery (curated by Rotor).

Nuno da Luz at Vera Cortês

2012-01-20T15:54:00.005Z

For those in Lisboa this Saturday (21 January 2012), head to the opening of artist Nuno da Luz's first solo show at Vera Cortês Art Agency, which runs through 3 March 2012.

The show is titled O nosso silêncio é um aviso / O nosso silêncio é sólido after the group of works included, and comprises aural/spatial propositions that explore ideas around experience and its recording (remembering) via technological means. The artist endeavours to highlight the potential contained in the deterioration of records, as opposed to aspiring to the perfect rendering of experience lived, which ever-newer technologies ceaselessly claim to offer us.

As Sílvia Prudêncio writes in the press release, Nuno's aim is 'to allow us to embrace imponderability, to make use of improvisation as strategy. To suspend control, to reconcile uncertainties is to know the nature of things... [The work] is based on a eulogy to the poetic dimension of all disrupting factors, be they catastrophes or everyday coincidences.'

The opening will also include a concert from Manuel Mota and Margarida Garcia from 23h00.

Check it out!

I Hurt I Am In Fashion

2012-01-18T13:29:00.006Z

Check this genius fashion blog called I Hurt I Am In Fashion:

http://www.ihurtiaminfashion.com

Some of the most astute fashion commentary I've read in a long time. So glad someone has decided to put in writing what has been going on unvoiced in many of our heads for a long time!

IHIIF has been going strong for about 18 months now and has recently taken up residency in Jalouse magazine with a monthly contribution. It will be interesting to see how such a critical stance goes in the context of a fashion magazine. Could Jalouse's own pages potentially be victim to the IHIIF treatment? Or will IHIIF tone it down for the pristine gloss of printed fash?

About a year ago, IHIIF's anonymous author contacted me, when I responded positively and curiously, asking why it was started, etc., s/he provided a kind of manifesto in email-form. Here it is, from 15 January 2011:

i started IHIIF because i felt enough is enough
i use stereotypes to fight stereotypes
i fashionleak what everyone knows but no one talks about
i rub shoulders with the industry through mutual acquaintances
but instead of patting it on the back like everyone else i prefer to slap it
i'm a 5-month-old baby and growing quickly
and i will keep posting. indefinitely.
because i hurt, and i hurt because i am in fashion

Keep hurting!

(Maybe the next one will be called I Hurt I Am In The Art World? Starring HUO?)

Quote of the day, yay!

2012-01-11T19:25:00.002Z

"Whatever the future of alienated creativity and the city may be ... art and artists symbolically and structurally register the tensions between economic realities and corporate-governmental fictions of the post-Fordist city everywhere.

The artist has become both aider and objector to regeneration, but also the ultimate capitalist subject, what Agamben calls the 'whatever being'. Good for everything and nothing, s/he is without authentic identity - the figure of human 'species-being' freed from specialisation, social obligation and physical work, but in distorted form under alienated labour's continuation along flexibilised lines.

It is perhaps for this reason too that artists have become such paradigmatic figures within late capitalism, attracting fictitious fantasies of production whilst also finding it hard to know how to act within such a treacherous climate of cooptation.

Neither able to successfully collude due to art's lingering requirement for autonomy, nor to effectively opt out (street art becomes gallery art becomes street art etc.), the artist working in the maelstrom of regeneration registers, either critically or not, the social war it entails."

-- Josephine Berry Slater & Anthony Iles, No Room To Move: Radical Art and the Regenerate City, Mute Books 2010 (p.52)

Pier Paolo Pasolini's last interview

2012-01-04T22:22:00.002Z

Check out the last ever interview conducted with the late Pier Paolo Pasolini, on 1 November 1975:

http://www.leftcurve.org/LC30WebPages/Pasolini%27s%20Last%20Interview.html

The director of the infamous Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975) was interviewed by Furio Colombo only a few hours before the former's murder, which we could say imbues this conversation with more gravitas than is due. However, there is something presciently astute about some of Pasolini's comments here, no matter whether we choose to read them as fortuitous, coincidental or irrelevant.

Certainly, in any case, this last interview sheds some beautiful light on the man while leaving a lot of elusive statements to be interpreted - now, as then - as one sees fit. This seems like an apt textual conclusion to Pasolini's life, considering his reluctance in general to absolutes.

Some nice excerpts:

'We are particularly pleased with conspiracies because they relieve us of the weight of having to deal with the truth head on. Wouldn't it be wonderful if, while we are here talking, someone in the basement were making plans to kill us? It's easy, it's simple, and it's the resistance. [...] Let's not joke about the blood, the pain, the work that people then too paid with so as to "have a choice". When one keeps one's face flat against that hour, that minute in history, choice is always a tragedy. But let's admit it, it was easier then. With courage and conscience, a normal man can always reject a Fascist of Salò or a Nazi of the SS, even from his interior life (where the revolution always begins). But today it's different. Someone might come walking toward you dressed like a friend, very friendly and polite, but he is a "collaborator" (let's say for a TV station). The reasoning goes that first of all he needs to make a living somehow, and then because its not like he's hurting anyone.'

'Power is an educational system that divides us into subjects and subjected. Nevertheless, it is an educational system that forms us all, from the so-called ruling class all the way down to the poorest of us. That's why everyone wants the same things and everyone acts in the same way. If I have access to an administrative council or a Stock Market maneuver, that's what I use. Otherwise I use a crowbar. And when I use a crowbar, I'll use whatever means to get what I want. Why do I want it? Because I've been told that it is a virtue to have it. I am merely exercising my virtue-rights. I am a murderer but I am a good person.'

'It's like it rains in the city and the gutters are backed up. The water rises, but the water is innocent, it's rainwater. It has neither the fury of sea, nor the rage of river current. But, for some reason, it rises instead of falling. It's the same water of so many adolescent poems and of the cutesy songs like "singing in the rain". But it rises and it drowns you. If that's where we are, I say let's not waste time placing nametags here and there. Let's see then how we can unplug this tub before we all drown.'

[Thanks to Roi Cydulkin for sending me this interview!]

INTO 2012 WITH LOVE

2011-12-29T17:16:00.001Z

2011 requiem

for one who started with such uncertainty, 2011, such hesitation, and confusion, oh year of ones and firsts,
you have been a year of surprises, twists and turns, of joy and love and revelation – of shock tactics!
and – in the end – of something going towards a certainty

you have given me something more than any year – arbitrarily demarcated as they are – before
but it is hard to say what something is when it's framed so heavy-handedly by silly numbers

2011, you have shown me different cities, different languages, many different homes
you have shown me old and new, old in new, and new in old, and all the connections for self and other in between
geographically, emotionally
you have introduced wonderful people, reconnected me to long lost ones in ways I could have never imagined
you have shown me what love can be about in oh so many forms, friends, family, lovers, partners, romances, colleagues – I want all these words to mix into something far less narrow and insufficient
what word would we use to describe the love that is everywhere around us?
the love that appears in various forms but is largely the same love manifest through different beings and circumstances?
I guess this is why there is no word

2011, you have shown me that this love-thing can transform, and that transformation is beautiful somehow, always, both in self and other
you have shown that honesty and frankness are undoubtedly the way forward in all respects
that people deserve to know the world and that we all must endeavour to discover it, together

you have revealed to me, in quick succession and with necessary brutality, the forces behind our little society – the fragile façades that maintain our precarious existence – the quivering barrier between what-we-think-is-happening, what-They-tell-us-is-happening and The Real

the challenge is to get as many people as possible aware of these barriers, their careful construction -
and knock them down!!

2011, you have taught me that the answer is almost always 'yes' and that you really never know who or when someone will ask you a question

you have reinforced a hundred times that it's better to leave the house than stay inside alone (even when They make outside increasingly difficult to exist in, render the public obsolete)
outside is where the possible and potential collide with the self and all those other selfs who have bounced themselves outside their homes and into the realm of potential encounters
you never know when your random route is going to collide with the random route of a precious other, a fortuitous situation
so bounce around!

you have shown me that competition and individualism are poison to the soul and are to be avoided if we want to foster relations not based on conquering, profiting or capitalising upon the other (and selling the self)
you have proved the opposite is in fact true – that by sharing, giving, inviting, asking, linking, forwarding, introducing, opening relations, by really relating,
competition becomes something absurd – for why would you want to beat those who are yours and who you belong to and with?

2011, you have surprised me more than once, you have thrown curve balls and knocked me down, you have given me opportunities and changed my fate – many times – you have provided much music, dancing and so many laughs, you have given tears and made my decisions hard,
you have made my work confused and destabilised what I thought was direction
but you have also given me something in return, something that must needs only exist already-destabilised

you have presented people and events which, both 'bad' and 'good', I was not (of course) wholly prepared for,
the former I hope to have dealt with in a manner true to my progress and the latter I thank you deeply for sending
(and vice versa?)

for everyone there and here and around and with whom eyes and smiles have been shared, thank you
and go well

for 2011, you have shown me something the way

Prisoners

2011-12-16T18:29:00.007Z

Prisoners is a video made by Terry Flaxton in 1983-84 using footage from the making of Apple's famous advertisement launching the first Macintosh. This is the ad:

In Prisoners Flaxton juxtaposes images of the making of the ad with texts from George Orwell's famous Nineteen Eighty-Four and excerpts from conversations with extras on the set. It is a brilliant approach to investigating the curious correspondence between Apple's ideology (seen even more clearly with hindsight) and Orwell's 1984 dystopian prediction. This is nowhere more clearly highlighted than in the very fact that Apple are so at pains (presciently, over 25 years ago) to affirm that, because of them, 1984 "won't be like" 1984. But what about 2012?

Flaxton's last text-frame reads:

"It seems as though the sheer weight of the image has overcome my intention – strangely this has also happened in the ad – one simple voiceover cannot regain the ground lost. '1984' as an idea will always mean what Orwell intended. Oblivious to our fears, that year has passed and we have yet to deal with those ideas that hold us prisoner."

For more info on Terry Flaxton, see his page on LUX's website: http://www.lux.org.uk/collection/artists/terry-flaxton

All I Can See is the Management at Gasworks review

2011-12-14T01:48:00.001Z

Review written for BREESE LITTLE Prize for Art Criticism Volume IV (which I didn't win). Voilà, some (very) hurriedly thrown together words about this great Gasworks exhibition, which ran 7 October through 11 December 2011.

Immediately upon entering the Gasworks building one is confronted with the exhibition All I Can See is the Management, or at least some of the art works that have been curated into and thus contained by that exhibition title and the building that houses Gasworks contemporary art organisation. On first glance, it looks like a pretty exemplary example of a Contemporary Art exhibition in the early twenty-first century – a variety of media (moving image, still image, text work, silkscreen prints), no labels, works spanning the last thirty years or so, artists of various origins and ages, etc. – but as one delves further into the works presented it becomes apparent that this co-curated show is not your run-of-the-mill contemporary art exhibition. It seems to function in at least two at once complimentary and contradictory directions: All I Can See is the Management comprises a very clear critique of the hyper-managerialism that has been progressively integrated into our lives on all levels, whilst maintaining a certain consciousness (one senses) of the role that contemporary art itself plays in such managerial and neoliberal ideals.

Thus, perhaps it should come as no surprise that all we can see is the management when we enter Gasworks. That is the management of art works; more precisely the management of art works which themselves deal with ideas of managerialism and its effects on the human psyche, neoliberal indoctrination, so-called creative labour, the role of gender stereotypes and the family under capitalism, and the role of institutions and increasing institutionalisation of life. Hence the paradox: how to treat works who are consciously critiquing managerial principles from within a framework that is inherently so?

It seems that curators Antonia Blocker, Robert Leckie and Helena Vilalta are aware of this paradox without letting it detract from the individual works and their arrangement in the space as an exhibition. Instead, the exhibition allows the art works to serve as a powerful tools for examining – even interrogating – the constraints contemporary society (or post-Fordist society) puts on people in regard to work, bureaucracy and the legitimisation of practice (artistic or otherwise).

For example, in Filipa César's video Rapport (2007), the artist documents a Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) session. César employs primarily close-up shots of participants' faces and body gestures during group psychotherapy tasks aimed at improving management skills and training workers for 'excellence' in the office by aligning their needs with that of the business. The result is quite a strange experience (particularly if you haven't read the room-sheet explication) of wondering why these people are performing such odd movements, saying such bizarre things and interacting in a very rigid, contrived manner. One realises that this sort of behaviour, where humans are trained to behave primarily as business-minded individuals, when taken out of context, is entirely abstract and almost pointless. Through this abstraction one becomes subtly aware of the way human interaction has been instrumentalised for entrepreneurial motives, and the way personal interrelations based on the business model have been made to seem commonplace, even desirable.

In a similar vein, Amy Feneck's film [image above] Government Workers (2010) reveals, through the seemingly mundane aspects of a Hackney secondary school, a certain bureaucracy and administrative pressure that pushes subtly on all existing within that institution. She does this via long observational shots of the classes, offices, playgrounds and communal areas of the school, showing how those inhabiting these spaces are effected and controlled by such educational models – both physically and mentally. This prosaic account differs from Allan Sekula's School is a Factory (1978-80) series, for which the artist takes a somewhat more humorous track in his critique of educational institutions as spaces of continuous production. Sekula utilises documentary and staged black and white photography as well as diagrams to illustrate the socio-economic make-up of various South Californian community colleges in the late 1970s. His approach seems to flag many of the issues around, race, class and gender which continue to haunt (and produce) education systems today.

Whether we choose to see All I Can See is the Management as an overt attempt to expose the oppressive nature of managerial tendencies in neoliberal society, and as a successful exploration of how late capitalist society has so successfully blurred life and work (in that even the exhibition itself must be considered to function within this double-bind), or as a self-contradicting enterprise, we really can see the management here, which is fine by me.

[Please excuse the cheese!]

Quote of the day, yay!

2011-12-11T12:08:00.002Z

"Art is an occupation in that it keeps people busy—spectators and many others. In many rich countries art denotes a quite popular occupational scheme. The idea that it contains its own gratification and needs no remuneration is quite accepted in the cultural workplace. The paradigm of the culture industry provided an example of an economy that functioned by producing an increasing number of occupations (and distractions) for people who were in many cases working for free. Additionally, there are now occupational schemes in the guise of art education. More and more post- and post-post-graduate programs shield prospective artists from the pressure of (public or private) art markets. Art education now takes longer—it creates zones of occupation, which yield fewer “works” but more processes, forms of knowledge, fields of engagement, and planes of relationality. It also produces ever-more educators, mediators, guides, and even guards—all of whose conditions of occupation are again processual (and ill- or unpaid).

[...]

Another prime example in the complicated topology of occupation is the figure of the intern (in a museum, a gallery, or most likely an isolated project). The term intern is linked to internment, confinement, and detention, whether involuntary or voluntary. She is supposed to be on the inside of the system, yet is excluded from payment. She is inside labor but outside remuneration: stuck in a space that includes the outside and excludes the inside simultaneously. As a result, she works to sustain her own occupation.

[...]

In poorer parts of the world, the immediate grip of art might seem to lessen. But art-as-occupation in these places can more powerfully serve the larger ideological deflections within capitalism and even profit concretely from labor stripped of rights. Here migrant, liberal, and urban squalor can again be exploited by artists who use misery as raw material. Art “upgrades” poorer neighborhoods by aestheticizing their status as urban ruins and drives out long-term inhabitants after the area becomes fashionable. Thus art assists in the structuring, hierarchizing, seizing, up- or downgrading of space; in organizing, wasting, or simply consuming time through vague distraction or committed pursuit of largely unpaid para-productive activity; and it divvies up roles in the figures of artist, audience, freelance curator, or uploader of cell phone videos to a museum website.

[...]

The incorporation of art within life was once a political project (both for the left and right), but the incorporation of life within art is now an aesthetic project, and it coincides with an overall aestheticization of politics.

[...]

The artist-as-dilettante and biopolitical designer was overtaken by the clerk-as-innovator, the technician-as-entrepreneur, the laborer-as-engineer, the manager-as-genius, and (worst of all) the administrator-as-revolutionary. As a template for many forms of contemporary occupation, multitasking marks the reversal of the division of labor: the fusion of professions, or rather their confusion. The example of the artist as creative polymath now serves as a role model (or excuse) to legitimate the universalization of professional dilettantism and overexertion in order to save money on specialized labor.

[...]

Desire for self-determination was rearticulated as a self-entrepreneurial business model, the hope to overcome alienation was transformed into serial narcissism and overidentification with one’s occupation.

[...]

To paraphrase Allan Kaprow: life in a gallery is like fucking in a cemetery. We could add that things become even worse as the gallery spills back into life: as the gallery/cemetery invades life, one begins to feel unable to fuck anywhere else.

[...]

Your phone is driving you through this journey, driving you mad, extracting value, whining like a baby, purring like a lover, bombarding you with deadening, maddening, embarrassing, outrageous claims for time, space, attention, credit card numbers. It copy-pastes your life to countless unintelligible pictures that have no meaning, no audience, no purpose, but do have impact, punch, and speed. It accumulates love letters, insults, invoices, drafts, endless communication. It is being tracked and scanned, turning you into transparent digits, into motion as a blur. A digital eye as your heart in hand. It is witness and informer. If it gives away your position, it means you’ll retroactively have had one. If you film the sniper that shoots at you, the phone will have faced his aim. He will have been framed and fixed, a faceless pixel composition. Your phone is your brain in corporate design, your heart as a product, the Apple of your eye."

-- Hito Steyerl, 'Art as Occupation: Claims for an Autonomy of Life', e-flux Journal #30, 12/2011

Weekend listening

2011-12-10T12:00:00.003Z

For a nice listen this weekend, check out the new mix called 'Patterned Ground' from New York-based group, Beige (see website for more infos and to hear some of their own tracks).

You can stream the track via SoundCloud above or download it to your computer via the following link: http://www.mediafire.com/?z9w8g2tf37scxyq

I'm with you at Occupy London/Bank of Ideas

2011-12-06T22:25:00.002Z

This Thursday 8 December 2011 for 20:00 head down to the occupied ex-UBS building at 17-29 Sun Street EC2 for I'm with you's latest event, I'm with Occupy!

I'm with you is an ongoing collective performance project conceived and produced by Johanna Linsley, R Justin Hunt and Christa Holka, which has so far popped up in gardens, houses, clubs, books and clifftops around London and England.

I'm with Occupy will be the eighth incarnation of the I'm with you performance event project which, according to their website, "has something to do with weirdness, if weird could mean collapsing contingency, necessity, function and awareness. Not quite, but not unrelated to, ‘queer’ ..."

In the context of Occupy London and the Bank of Ideas, I'm with you comes to show the power of communal organisation and energy as a driving force for finding new ways to invest time and spend it (largely without spending £)!

As such, the event will be a "coordinated set of un-harmonious performance outbursts, as friends of I'm with you contribute song-length flash performances to the growing alternative investment structure." It will be a "collaborative, simply produced presentation of complicated (or not so complicated) ideas, emotions and experiences related to occupation, solidarity, righteous anger and desire (with a healthy dose of ridiculosity, glamour and hysteria)."

Come down!

For more information, visit the Facebook event page.

The Great Klepto Debate

2011-11-29T16:14:00.001Z

For those in Sydney this Saturday 3 December 2011, go and check out the sixth incarnation of Serial Space's 'Great Debate' series: That Property Is Theft.

The evening starts at 19:00 and speakers include:

AFFIRMATIVE
Catriona Menzies Pike
Bec Conroy
Mark Gawne

NEGATIVE
Ann Deslandes
Adam Jasper
Pip Smith

"Real Estate agents in Sydney are like celebrities, driving in fancy cars and driving up the cost of living. Increasingly the artistic community is feeling priced-out of the city. But, on the flip side, we work hard for a living, we need to be able to manage and organise our society and the concept of property is one way to do that. ..." For more info click here.

Quote of the day, yay!

2011-11-27T19:12:00.002Z

"Events like biennials, art festivals and buildings like a theatre, a Kunsthalle or a museum are ideal semi-public venues for the art scene around which creative ideas can circulate. You could say they form the concrete infrastructure. Or rather, they make the scene more visible - the non-seen scene becomes a seen scene. That primarily applies to artists whose work is displayed by the organizations in question or is on display in the buildings. The concrete infrastructure literally scenarizes the art scene thus making of it a more or less lasting artistic scene. And, incidentally, the displaying of the scene takes place in complete accordance with the rules of post-Fordist art.

The consequence is that someone works with a temporary contract or, in the art world itself, often without a contract - in what is always a vitalistic, project-based setting and of course with flexible, invariably night work, and irrepressible creative enthusiasm. In short, it involves a work ethic in which work is always enjoyable - or should be; in which dynamism is boosted unconditionally by young talent; and in which commitment outstrips money. That is what determines the spirit of the artistic scene. If you try to rationalize this great, spontaneous desire and freedom to work (for instance, by means of rigid contracts or labour agreements), bureaucratize or reutilize it, you are in danger of letting the metaphorical creative genie out of the bottle, or rather suffocate it.

However, we should not forget that creative work like this is always a form of cheap instable [sic] work - something that makes the art scene of great interest to outsiders like company managers and politicians. Not only does it boost the local economy and introduce the city into the world market. It also, and especially, reveals a biopolitical ethic that nowadays benefits the economy. The protagonists of the creative scene and economy appear not to believe 'Arbeit macht frei', as in the Nazi concentration camp, but 'Freiheit macht Arbeit' (freedom makes work).

The willing acceptance of flexible work in an artistic operation would make gratifying advertising for a temp agency. It is better to offer no opinion as to whether, with that rhetorical reversal, the concentration camp has become the central social matrix of all society as Giorgio Agamben claims. If the crossover between professional, public and domestic activities - but especially, on the one hand, the interplay between formality and informality, and, on the other, seeing and being seen - is exploited on the basis of economic rationalism, the cultivated freedom of the art scene gets uncomfortably close to the inhuman confinement of the camp. To make this link between scene and camp is no doubt carrying things too far. However, the point is that the freedom of the art scene within the capitalist mis-en-scène can merely provide a false autonomy, because it always stems from a well-defined (un-free) finality, primarily the pursuit of profit."

-- Pascal Gielen, 'Art Scene - Control Machine', Art and Activism in the Age of Globalization, NAi Publishers 2011

Message from the Vice-Chancellor: 2012 budget and staffing

2011-11-22T14:31:00.023Z

An email to all University of Sydney students from Vice-Chancellor, Michael Spence:

Dear student,

As you may have heard, the University of Sydney is planning some major changes in the coming year.

Many of you will be aware that some of our facilities are run down and in need of repair, and our IT systems are overdue for upgrading.
Repairs, maintenance and upgrades of this scale do not come cheaply – in 2012 alone we need to spend $53 million on repairs and maintenance and replacement of basic IT infrastructure, some of which is 20 years old.

This work can’t be postponed any longer.

To meet these costs and to begin saving for further improvements, we will have to take some prudent measures in 2012. Every area of the University is being asked to make savings, and we will have to accelerate some of the organisational changes we have been planning. We need to reduce the cost of our administration and staffing, and a small number of academic staff who are no longer contributing significantly to our research or teaching will be offered redundancies or early retirement. [My emphasis.]

In taking these steps, we aim to provide you with a reinvigorated, more innovative learning environment, and to give you buildings and facilities of which we can all be proud. You deserve the best.

Yours sincerely,

Michael Spence
Vice-Chancellor and Principal

Translated, this basically means USyd want to build some pretty facilities (like a cafe in Fisher Library - the Southern Hemisphere's largest bibliothèque - for which 500,000 books must be removed), upgrade on technology (which will always need to be upgraded anyway!), and get rid of any staff whose student evaluation responses and research 'contributions' are not up to the university's standards (i.e. are not making monetary profits for them or whose classes are not functioning in a suitably 'outcome'-based manner - God forbid a challenging lecture, God forbid a specialised subject that necessarily has small enrollment numbers!).

Furthermore, Spence uses the lame excuse of old infrastructure to justify the trimming off of any staff (and departments if he had his way, read: the near-dissolution of Sydney's brilliant Political Economy department) who do not fulfill his (and the University's funders') ideas of what research and teaching are about. (For more information on USyd's 'Investment and Capital Management', click here.)

I would vehemently argue that research and teaching have nothing to do with profit-margins, evaluation forms and bureaucratic examination processes (and also not much to do with IT systems, if I'm honest), but I guess I am naive to think that a university might be a place where one learns how to think not how to tick pre-determined boxes.

It is actually embarassing that Spence would make the assumption that I would be 'proud' of these changes and the so-called 'reinvigorated, more innovative learning environment' that he will be providing me with. Somehow, I highly doubt it. These catchy words actually say nothing to me except 'neoliberal dogma'.

Outrageously, we now clearly see from Spence's friendly little email that The University of Sydney is well and truly - as if we didn't already know, thanks ANZ bank for sponsoring our student cards - going down the dark and pathetic path of putting profit over education, infrastructure over experience, pre-determined outcomes over the possibility of challenging knowledge structures and learning from teachers who themselves love learning without knowing where it might lead.

We need education that acknowledges the unknown and allows for students and teachers to approach new ideas together and without the pressures of profit-margins, endless funding applications and bursary justifications, the need to publish-for-the-sake-of-publishing, ubiquitous evaluation questionnaires that assess the performance of teachers in terms of 'learning outcomes', and the idea of students as full fee-paying 'customers' who cannot be criticised or failed because we need their money.

Well done, Michael Spence, bravo to you for this stroke of economic genius! Thank you for confirming my suspicions that The University of Sydney is no longer an institution that promotes learning in an unfettered manner but rather the contrary - fettering in an unlearned manner. The fetters are in the finance.

That said, Spence is right about one thing: students really do 'deserve the best'. But unfortunately for all of us, including Spence, this is not it! Universities are not meant to be businesses! Financial viability is not a relevant factor in evaluating their success or the success of their staff.

EDIT: Matthew Thompson, an editor at The Conversation, has posted an interesting article in response to these measures and the email that was sent to all staff (slightly more detailed than the student one). Read it here: http://theconversation.edu.au/sydney-uni-to-cut-academic-and-general-staff-but-boost-it-4404

Interestingly, Thompson reveals: "The announcement comes less than a fortnight after the University of Sydney recorded 2010’s third highest operating surplus of any university in the country. Third only to the University of NSW and the Australian National University, the University of Sydney last year notched up an operating surplus of $113.7 million, with over half a billion dollars in revenue coming from student fees and charges, student contributions, and Commonwealth contributions in lieu of students paying upfront fees."

Well, well, well, "difficult times", eh, Mike?

EDIT 2: I received this response from David Pacey - Executive Director and Portfolio Manager, Office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Education and Registrar - after sending the Vice Chancellor a link to this blog post:

Dear Eleanor

Thank you for your email and detailed BLOG expressing concern in relation to the necessary adjustments to the University’s 2012 Budget.

The University takes your concerns and feedback seriously and your views will inform ongoing budget discussions.

Really? It's like they've never seen the word 'BLOG' before ... !

EDIT 3: A group of University of Sydney staff have co-authored an article titled 'Sydney University Academics Speak Out' for the independent news website NewMatilda.com (published 5 December 2011). A very good explanation of what's really going on here.

The Haircut Before THE PARTY !

2011-11-18T09:31:00.007Z

Come join to celebrate the end of THCBTP's time on Toynbee Street this Saturday 19 November from 18:00 !

More info here.

parataxis iii

2011-11-14T11:32:00.016Z

parataxis iii is happening Wednesday 16 November at The Hair Cut Before The Party at 26-28 Toynbee Street, London E1 7NE.

This will be the third edition of an ongoing project I have been organising that has so far taken place at Serial Space, Sydney (2009) and MKII, London (2010). parataxis tries to explore the possibilities of an event where the need to pre-claim thematics and connections between works is suspended in favour of acknowledging the connections that may emerge through the common 'dis-measure' of creation.

This time we are being hosted by The Hair Cut Before The Party, whose project I have been interested in since receiving a free haircut from them back in March and subsequently becoming more involved. Considering THCBTP's aims, parataxis iii will be functioning in a more discursive/conversive mode, with a series of presentations, spoken interventions, soundscapes, images and printed texts from trance-national thinkers/artists/writers/performers, etc.

These include:

Alex Gawronski
Anastasia Freygang
Ashley Wong
Doublethink Project
Eleanor Weaver
Marian Tubbs
Noah Brehmer
Owen Parry
Richard Houguez
Wrong Solo & Lucas Liccini

We hope you also will have something to say/read.

Come!

[P.S. For info on past versions, click: parataxis i & parataxis ii.]

FIVE YEARS

2011-11-12T10:38:00.003Z

TODAY RADDEST RIGHT NOW IS FIVE YEARS OLD !!!!!

HOW DID THAT HAPPEN !??!?!?

HOW MANY HOURS, DAYS, MONTHS, HAVE I 'WASTED'/'SPENT' WRITING, EDITING, READING THIS BLOG ?!?!?

PERHAPS TOO MANY.

MAYBE YEAR SIX WILL ALLOW FOR NEW DIRECTIONS.

AS ALWAYS, ANYONE WHO IS READING THIS, THANK YOU FOR CLICKING TO HERE PAST/PRESENT/FUTURE !!!!!

WEIRD.

X

(pic by Manon Marguerite)

Interview for SuperKaleidoscope

2011-11-11T10:28:00.003Z

I recently interviewed artist Marian Tubbs for SuperKaleidoscope's Featured Artist programme.

I asked Marian about Heidegger, Damien Hirst, photography, Pagan urges and what she's 'looking for', all in relation to a recent exhibition, Pagan Pop, curated by Yolande Norris at Canberra Contemporary Art Space.

You can read the short interview here:

http://www.superkaleidoscope.com/featured-artist.php

Thanks to Sarah Mosca and Kim Fasher of SuperKaleidoscope.

Ex-Trendy at PACT for Sydney Fringe

2011-11-06T16:13:00.014Z

About a month ago (25 September 2011, to be exact), I was lucky enough to attend one of Ex-Trendy's performances at PACT centre for emerging artists as part of the Sydney Fringe Festival.

I have been an Ex-Trendy fan since hearing them play at Stucco in Newtown, Sydney back in early 2009. Earlier this year I wrote about Ex-Trendy's debut EP, Losing Business, on this blog. Since then, bassist Michaela Davies and drummer Reuben James Alexander have joined the original members, guitarist/vocalist Robbie Ho and lead vocalist/keys-synth player Matte Rochford, to create a sound which is enhanced in its depth and has a slightly more bluesy rock/psychedelic feel to it than the more acoustic tones of the Losing Business EP.

For Sydney Fringe Ex-Trendy did more than play a gig. Their performance entailed a 'participatory and sensory journey' of thirty minutes non-stop musical and vocal splendour. We heard not only the Losing Business tracks but also some new tunes and superb improvised poetry from Matte as well as awesome solos from Robbie, Michaela and Reuben.

One particularly great moment was the song 'No Connection', for which Ex-Trendy had a mobile number (Robbie's, I later learned) blown up large on a TV screen behind the band for all the audience to see. The idea, as Matte explained to us during the introductory bars, was that the audience text him anything they have lost and he will alter the lyrics to the song (which lists many things that have been lost by Matte) to include the audience's lost items. This was a great moment of texting frenzy as members of the audience informed Ex-Trendy via SMS of their lost stuff only to hear it relayed back to them moments later in song as Matte frenetically read texts, made rhyme and held tune. My lost Le Coq Sportif sneakers even made an appearance, which I was very happy about!

This and other hyper-live elements (like the unintended failure of one of the mics and the band's smooth integration of this hiccup into the show) really showed the attempt to get the audience involved in the performance more than simply as spectators, as well as the band's awareness of the utter indeterminacy of the live and the possibilities this fact enables for performance. The jaunty beats, slightly glamour-rock vibe of Robbie and Matte's performances, and the critical-comical lyrics that really made you want to laugh/dance/cry all combined to prove Ex-Trendy as a really exciting prospect for critical and entertaining music/performance/art.

Matte's lyrics/poetics range from seemingly banal discussions of beer labels to implicit political critiques, and the music moves similarly: from the cheekily romantic metaphor of 'Battery Low', to the deceptively simple message of 'Textbook Store' (which I see as quite a convincing critique of our bureaucratic/technologic/schizophrenic world), to the intimate ambiguity of 'Losing Things'. As PACT themselves describe it: 'Flight of the Conchords meets Syd Barrett, PJ Harvey, Laurie Anderson and Suede in an inter-stellar spaceship turbolift.' There may seem to be a lot going on here, but it also feels like Ex-Trendy embrace the chaos in a really concise way: reception comes through the Ex-Trendy television very clear.

Technology is a recurring theme for Ex-Trendy, but the somewhat distanced, even impersonal lyrics, which embody that technological aspect in content and form, are rendered the opposite by an extremely passionate delivery from all involved. And by the very fact that we were all there, hearing the music, feeling the beat, clapping along; by the fact that, at the end, we all wanted more live.

Check out part of one of Ex-Trendy's performances at PACT:

And the official video of 'Textbook Store', by Maia Sinclair-Ferguson:

For more information you can find Ex-Trendy on Facebook and on MySpace.

Gombrich comes to me via Jura!

2011-10-29T04:33:00.015+01:00

By chance I came across Ernst Gombrich's The Story of Art 12th edition (1972) for $2 at Jura Books, a great bookstore and social space with anarchist tendencies in Petersham, Sydney. [Pic below is part of the 'Gnome Rebellion', inspired by Noam Chomsky! See the Facebook page for more.]

Gombrich was included in an Art History course I did recently, and we discussed his methodology from an art historiographical perspective in our seminars, though to be honest I didn't actually get around to reading any of his writing!

It's funny how the world works. I'm of the persuasion that letting books, ideas, people and theories come into your life somewhat au hasard, by these chance encounters, is much more conducive to an 'academia' than being forced to read or pursue or consult Theory by external imperatives (such as the aforementioned course, for example, though I admit the book wouldn't have meant much to me were it not for this very same course making it significant!). Not only does the latter mode imbue all findings with a kind of obligation, it inhibits the kind of personal investment or story that can produce and encourage intellectual stimulation and exchange.

In any case, upon reading the first few pages of Gombrich's most famous book, I realise it is indeed a very useful reference and his approach is really interesting in terms of thinking art history as it was posited in the mid-twentieth century (the book was first published in 1950). I can't say for sure, but I'd suggest his work has relevance for thinking contemporary art as well.

A particularly charming paragraph that grabbed my attention follows:

'We are all inclined to accept conventional forms or colours as the only correct ones. Children sometimes think that stars must be star-shaped, though naturally they are not. The people who insist that in a picture the sky must be blue, and the grass green, are not very different from these children. They get indignant if they see other colours in a picture, but if we try to forget all we have heard about green grass and blue skies, and look at the world as if we had just arrived from another planet on a voyage of discovery and were seeing it for the first time, we may find that things are apt to have the most surprising colours.'

Quite surprisingly appropriate to find this phrase in an old art history book in a counter-cultural space, just down the road from The University of Sydney - who demanded I read it in the first place!

Freud for females ... ?

2011-10-23T07:49:00.004+01:00

This quote from Freud reveals all! Read the following to be enlightened:

"...When a male child first turns his curiosity to the riddles of sexual life, he is dominated by his interest in his own genital. He finds that part of his body too valuable and too important for him to be able to believe that it could be missing in other people whom he feels he resembles so much [my emphasis]. As he cannot guess that there exists another type of genital structure of equal worth [my emphasis], he is forced to make the assumption that all human beings, women as well men, possess a penis like his own.

This preconception is so firmly planted in the youthful investigator that it is not destroyed even when he first observes the genitals of little girls. His perception tells him, it is true, that there is something different from what there is in him, but he is incapable of admitting to himself that the content of this perception is that he cannot find a penis in girls. That the penis could be missing strikes him as an uncanny and intolerable idea, and so in an attempt at a compromise he comes to the conclusion that little girls have a penis as well, only it is still very small; it will grow later.

If it seems from later observations that this expectation is not realized, he has another remedy at his disposal: little girls too had a penis, but it was cut off and in its place was left a wound. This theoretical advance already makes use of personal experiences of a distressing kind: the boy in the meantime has heard the threat that the organ which is so dear to him will be taken away from him if he shows his interest in it too plainly.

Under the influence of this threat of castration he now sees the notion he has gained of the female genitals in a new light; henceforth he will tremble for his masculinity, but at the same time he will despise the unhappy creatures on whom the cruel punishment has, as he supposes, already fallen."

-- Sigmund Freud, 'Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood', Philosophers on Art: from Kant to the Postmodernists, Columbia University Press 2010 (ed. Christopher Kul-Want); originally published as 'Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci', 1910.

Now, my big question is: Does this psychoanalytic explanation of phallocentricity explain patriarchy? Or rather, is Freud's analysis merely a product of patriarchy?

Is the idea that women are 'missing' something, that they possess 'wounds', that they are 'unhappy creatures' a psychoanalytic discovery - i.e. in relation to the non-lack of having a penis - or a product of a patriarchal, phallocentric psychoanalysis? Are these assertions even possible without the assumption that a penis is the 'ground zero' of sexual being (and thus human being)? Is it not absurd to speak in such terms, as if the female's perspective on the male genitals (as foreign, as 'different', as lacking, even - to use the loaded term in reverse) is somehow inferior or secondary to the male's impressions of hers?

Perhaps, Freud is aware of this - I've not read widely enough to say - but certainly upon reading the above text, one has not only the impression that Freud is staking out something crucial to his general theory, but also that the quote itself explicitly delineates these obvious short-comings, this obvious oblivion (for which he cannot totally be blamed, given his epoch) to the inherent phallocentricity of his claims.

Moreover, this can be seen further in the fact that - here, at least - we have no 'female child' perspective to parallel the 'male child' one. Perhaps it's because Freud is male, I don't know. But my first reaction to this text was: Okay, but what do the female children think !?! Surely they, too, must be 'dominated by [their] interest in [their] own genital'? Surely they, too, must find it 'uncanny and intolerable' that others who they see as resembling themselves so closely have this odd protrusion where there shouldn't be one? Surely, if Freud's argument has any traction, the female child, too, is 'incapable of admitting to [her]self' that such a perception (i.e. the male child's odd protrusion) of difference can be correct? Does she, too, imagine that the boy's strange 'growth' will alter itself eventually to look like hers?

Maybe she does. But Freud doesn't seem to give her (and hence us) the chance to see her genitals as in fact not less-than a penis, but rather at least 'equal to' a penis (as he himself intones in relation to children's physical resemblance in all other respects).

For it seems that Freud assumes that there is a lack inherent in the simple biological fact that a female doesn't have something ostentatiously sticking out, like a penis or testicles, for example. But could this simple - banal - biological reality possibly equal 'lack'? I guess we are trapped by language, I am realising; I can't even speak about female genitals without there being a certain presupposition (in my own words and thoughts) that obviously females are lacking, because the penis protrudes. Lack is something 'missing'. The penis is missing from the female because, apparently, there is nothing to see. But, what if our idea of missing, of lack, was totally fucked up? And in fact constructed on this very idea of male supremacy?

I guess that's what many women have been saying for a while now. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex is case in point. More recently, Luce Irigaray's Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un, speaks about the female sex as being not one but 'already two' (though not divisible into ones); which fundamentally alters the dominant conception of sexuality. (I quoted Irigaray on this blog a couple of months ago: http://raddestrightnow.blogspot.com/2011/08/quote-of-day-yay-citation-du-jour.html.)

Maybe all this is bleedingly obvious and redundant, and maybe I've completely misinterpreted Freud. In any case, these are some questions that came to mind. Any thoughts very much appreciated.

WORDS ON OCCUPY WALL STREET

2011-10-14T02:11:00.010+01:00

Check out this new work from brilliant New York-based photographer, Ruvan Wijesooriya:

wordsonoccupywallstreet.tumblr.com

Ruvan has spoken to various individuals present at the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in New York City. These short clips offer a really interesting insight - from very varied perspectives - on what this occupation means for people there at Liberty Square, and indeed for the United States and the world at large. (Click pics for links.)

If you're curious to read something more theoretical about what's going on with OCCUPY, two very good online journals, transversal and e-flux, have come out with issues dedicated to OCCUPY. transversal's '#occupy and assemble∞' issue can be found here, and e-flux Journal #28 is here.

Plus, it is also worth checking up on blogs like Jodi Dean's I cite, Laurie Penny's Penny Red, Brian Holmes' Continental Drift, or Richard Seymour's Lenin's Tomb, for various musings on this and related struggles.

There is a great opinion piece on Al Jazeera English called 'The class warfare the rich don't understand' by Heather Digby Parton. And you can read/hear Slavoj Žižek's take on OCCUPY by clicking this link. There are many, many insightful YouTube clips documenting this occupation circulating about the interwebs. For example, via Democracy Now!:

Lastly, for those in Sydney and environs, there is a solidarity demonstration starting tomorrow, 15 October 2011, at Martin Place in the CBD from 14:30. For more information, visit the Occupy Sydney website or the Facebook event.

The OccupySydney.org.au 'Unifying Statement' follows thus:

*We act in solidarity with protests and occupations that have occurred and are occurring in New York and other US cities, Spain, Greece, Egypt and other cities around the world.
*We are the 99%.
*The system is broken.
*A better world is possible.
*Human need, not corporate greed!

They stress that this will be a 'peaceful' and 'mass democratic' occupation, which 'will be a place for discussion about what is wrong with this system, how we can change it, and the organisation of the occupation itself.'

Let's see where this thing can go, let's see if the 99% have still got it in them after all these years of being told they should desire to be the 1.

In solidarity,

Quote of the day, yay! (Note to self ...)

2011-10-11T00:20:00.001+01:00

"Freud makes clear that those who ask for analysis do so because they want a witness to share their feelings with. At the same time, to surrender those feelings is the last thing they are prepared to do. This is because they find comfort in the pattern of repetition they have established for themselves. As long as they repeat it, they recognize themselves in the repetition. So the cycles of reenactment are mistaken for the core of one's personality. To give them up, it seems, would mean to surrender oneself entirely (to the witness).

This is why, in the moment of transference, the witness is simultaneously drawn into the close cycle of repetition, and warded off as a threat to the comfort of a familiar pain which shall not be surrendered. In Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the Pleasure Principle) Freud in fact describes the force of repetition/transference as a 'demonic' principle of 'conservative resistance' against the pleasure principle itself: Under the spell of repetition people protect a world they (believe to) know and control against new experiences of pleasure that would disrupt the immutable laws of their cyclical universe.

Provocatively then, Freud portrays the surrender of the comfort found in the repetition of safe patterns as a leap forward towards an avowal of memory that implies an openness to yet unknown pleasures."

-- Jan Verwoert, 'You Make Me Feel Mighty Real: On the Risk of Bearing Witness and the Art of Affective Labour', Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want, Piet Zwart Institute & Sternberg Press 2010 (pp. 290-1)

STREETERS has a new website!

2011-10-09T06:47:00.011+01:00

Check out the great new website for Creative Management & Representation agency, Streeters:

www.streeters.com

Streeters is based in London and New York and represents some of fashion's most important artists, including Alastair McKimm, Andrew Richardson, Cathy Edwards, Eugene Souleiman, Jacob K, Jane How, Karl Templer, Kate Phelan, Luigi Murenu, Mario Godlewski, Mark Segal, Pat McGrath, Raphael Salley, Richard Nicoll, Russell Marsh, Tabitha Simmons, Tom Allen, Val Garland, Vanessa Reid, and many more.

Streeters was established in 1988 by Beverley Streeter and Liz McKiver, who today direct the London and New York offices respectively. The agency's ethos has always been about discovering and developing new creative talent who push fashion imagery in new directions and blur the categories of confinement, whilst simultaneously maintaining a stable and reliable work-ethic, which has enabled - and continues to enable - the cultivation of a strong and loyal client base.

The new website has been conceived and produced by Streeters' Art Department manager, Siobhan Cait Farrar, in consultation with the whole Streeters team as well as Streeters artists. The result is a concise, regularly updated and easily navigated portal into what each artist is up to.

The new site is easy and efficient, with drop-down menus that actually work, allowing paths to be (re)traced simply and logically (e.g. London>Hair Stylists>Eugene Souleiman>Editorial>Full Screen), with simple 'Back' buttons, various portfolio-viewing options and PDF download feature.

In addition, Streeters now has a blog, which has regular posts about new editorials, advertising campaigns and related news. Everything is tagged and linked, so it's really easy to connect artists who work together or stories which contain multiple Streeters artists.

The site has been in development for an extended period and has been worked and reworked to get it to the current point of efficiency, ease and visual pleasure. The amount of work at the back-end of a site like this is expansive and never-ending. There is an immense history of work by many of the artists (particularly established ones), which has needed to be digitally archived and sorted from the existing physical magazine archives - Streeters has a wonderful magazine collection.

This sort of work is that from times before fashion's digitisation at every level; when images existed primarily as hard copies - literally, 'tear-sheets' or 'tears' - and magazines were the only way of seeing the work of fashion artists. Indeed, there was a time, really not so long ago, when physical portfolios were laid out and re-laid out almost every day as new editorials came. This was done for every working artist by the art department and the agent, and the portfolios were sent out to prospective clients by couriers - real people, not 0s and 1s - every day. Now this process tends more and more to occur via PDFs, links, downloads, etc.

This development is by no means a bad one, it's just worth remembering that a lot of the fashion we see on the screen - which, I would say, is where most of us access it, most of the time - has a very physical, tangible and human backstory.

So this new site - despite its apparent simplicity - has required much research and planning, myriad conversations, a lot of schlepping magazines and scanning tears, and hours of tagging; combined with the fact that artists are continually producing new work which requires archiving, editing and arrangement. This is an ongoing task that is often unnoticed when we see such a comprehensive catalogue or archive of production laid out so neatly, and at the click of a finger.

So congratulations to Siobhan and everyone at Streeters for this great effort and thanks for the amazing resource! I encourage everyone to check out the site and provide any feedback you may have by contacting art[AT]streeterslondon.com.

[Tweeters, you can follow Streeters at: @StreetersLDN and @StreetersUSA.]

Quote of the day, yay!

2011-10-05T04:58:00.008+01:00

'... I come from the generation for whom, in the early nineteen-seventies, shoplifting became a positive virtue within the disaffected counterculture. Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book" contained handy shoplifting hints and was chained down in bookstores. Jerry Rubin, channelling Proudhon's dictum "Property is theft," declared in his book "Do It", "All money represents theft.... Shoplifting gets you high. Don't buy. Steal. If you act like it's yours no one will ask you to pay for it." I found this to be true. Running an alternative school with almost no money in the early seventies, I made trips to a large bookstore in London and piled up reference books and textbooks until the tower nestled under my raised chin. Then I confidently walked out of the shop. No one ever stopped me. I had no qualms. It was a corporate-owned shop, and the books I stole were for the educationally and socially deprived kids I was working with. Even better than acting like it's yours is righteously believing that it's yours ...'

-- Jenny Diski, 'The Secret Shopper: The history of shoplifting', The New Yorker, September 26, 2011

[To hear Diski speaking about shoplifting with Blake Eskin for The New Yorker's audio series, click here.]

"Press" archives: Rise Art & Z!NK

2011-10-03T04:54:00.002+01:00

I hesitated from posting the links to a couple of 'press' interviews I've done in the last year or so. It seems a bit funny to blog about yourself talking about yourself and your blog; it feels funny to talk about this blog, in general. It becomes, like, triply self-referential, which I guess is fine, but I haven't quite yet worked out exactly what I think of it all.

That said, despite slight reservations, after all, I did agree to answer questions about this blog, and myself, so I guess that means I must be okay with it.

So, in the spirit of being 'okay' with talking about oneself talking about oneself:

Early this year I answered some questions for London-based writer and curator, Lorena Muñoz-Alonso, who is editorial associate at Rise Art and writer of the art blog, SelfSelector.

You can read that here: http://www.riseart.com/article/detail/id/1438

In 2010, similarly, I answered questions for Ashley Caputo, a writer at New York/Montreal's Z!NK magazine.

That one can be read here: http://www.zinkmagazine.com/main/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=376:what-is-rad-right-now-ask-eleanor-weber&catid=40&Itemid=88

[Just for the record, some of the words used for my responses in the Rise Art interview are not mine, maybe that is clear. And, yes, my naïve enthusiasm and excessive exclamation mark use in the Z!NK one is slightly painful to witness for me, too.]

Er, haha. This is awkward! Let's look at a picture!

Quote of the day, yay!

2011-09-29T01:43:00.002+01:00

"I’m a cheap intellectual whore"

-- Simon Critchley, Professor of Philosophy, The New School, New York. (Excerpt from 'The Infinite Demand of Art', Art & Research, Volume 3 No. 2, Summer 2010)

Alicia Frankovich interview for KALEIDOSCOPE blog!

2011-09-27T05:49:00.006+01:00

Back in June I interviewed artist Alicia Frankovich in Berlin for KALEIDOSCOPE blog!

Finally the results of that conversation and the ensuing correspondences are online, so please click the link below to read it.

http://kaleidoscopeoffice.wordpress.com/2011/09/26/alicia-frankovich-in-conversation-with-eleanor-weber/

Many thanks to Alicia Frankovich, Chris Sharp and Margarida Mendes.

Cannibal delicacy

2011-09-20T05:35:00.004+01:00

Some coincidences on cannibalism.

First, I read Georges Bataille's text Eye (tr. Allan Stoekl), written 1929, where he says:

"Cannibal delicacy. It is known that civilized man is characterized by an often inexplicable acuity for horror. The fear of insects is no doubt one of the most singular and most developed of these horrors as is, one is surprised to note, the fear of the eye. It seems impossible, in fact, to judge the eye using any word other than seductive, since nothing is more attractive in the bodies of animals and men. But extreme seductiveness is probably the boundary of horror.

In this respect, the eye could be related to the cutting edge, whose appearance provokes both bitter and contradictory reactions; this is what the makers of the Andalusian Dog must have hideously and obscurely experienced when, among the first images of the film, they determined the bloody loves of these two beings. That a razor would cut open the dazzling eye of a young and charming woman - this is precisely what a young man would have admired to the point of madness, a young man watched by a small cat, a young man who by chance holding in his hand a coffee spoon, suddenly wanted to take an eye in that spoon.

Obviously a singular desire on the part of a white, from whom the eyes of the cows, sheep, and pigs that he eats have always been hidden. For the eye - as Stevenson exquisitely puts it, a cannibal delicacy - is, on our part, the object of such anxiety that we will never bite into it. The eye is even ranked high in horror, since it is, among other things, the eye of conscience. [...]"

Second, I stumble across Planningtorock's I Wanna Bite Ya (released 2006) on YouTube. Horribly à propos ...

Third, I wonder: If extreme seduction exists at the boundary of horror, and if cannibalism is understood as extreme horror, are the cannibal and the seductive analogous?

If then the eye is the most attractive part of the body, does it ('the window to the soul') point to a certain cannibalistic drive through its inherent seduction? Is it horror or beauty that we see when we look into someone's eyes?

We obsess about, protect, and revere the eye - that most elusive of organs - while simultaneously we fear and feel disgust for its invisible roundness, its sliminess, its revelation ('scary eyes'); it is uncomfortable to think of dead eyes, and we eat animals most easily without having to see or think that they once saw (and thought). Does the eye (the delicacy at which we retch) thus exemplify the seductive horror that is humanity in all its glorification and abjection?

Finally, does this cannibal instinct reveal itself equally in our desire for the seductive (to consume/be consumed, to penetrate/be penetrated - vitality) and in our dread of the horrific (to destruct/be destructed - mortality)? To the point where both that desire and that dread become part of exactly the same movement?

I think you know the answer to this. And in the words of Planningtorock: "What happens if we get close to each other?"

"I want to bite you."

My Soul At Work for New Planes

2011-09-19T05:12:00.008+01:00

Please excuse self-promotion (though this is a blog, after all) but below is an article I wrote for New Planes Public Press Issue #2, The Page as a Performance Site. You may remember I wrote about the New Planes 2 launch here earlier, which consisted of performative interventions and installations inspired by the issue.

It was a really great night, with good people, good work and good whisky. Plus everyone got a copy of the broadsheet, which includes contributions in text/photo/graphic/(etc.)-form from a whole heap of good souls and costs only $3. You yourself can procure a copy via the stockists listed here.

To read my article (and contributions from Hellen Rose and Eleanor Bennett), click the images below.

P.S. This article has also been published (in slightly revised format) for THCBTP's chapbook series, but more on that later.

Fashion Month Automatic Image Association

2011-09-18T09:25:00.010+01:00

1) Model Ehren Dorsey by Attilio D’Agostino

2) Hair stylists Martin Cullen and Eugene Souleiman by Giorgio

3) Designer Sonia Rykiel by Alec Soth

4) Model Kelly Mittendorf by Billy Kidd

5) Model Julia Nobis by Tommy Ton for Style.com

6) Model Lisanne de Jong by Viviane Sassen for Dazed & Confused

7) Editor Grace Coddington by Tommy Ton

8) Model Alek Wek by Philippe Vogelenzang for Glamour (Netherlands)

9) Editor Anna Wintour by Scott Schuman

10) Model tests by Philippe Vogelenzang

Quote of the day, yay!

2011-09-17T06:46:00.001+01:00

"... Spinoza has immense resources for analyzing the affective regime of late capitalism, the video-drome-control apparatus described by Burroughs, Philip K. Dick and David Cronenberg in which agency is dissolved in a phantasmagoric haze of psychic and physical intoxicants. Like Burroughs, Spinoza shows that, far from being an aberrant condition, addiction is the standard state for human beings, who are habitually enslaved into reactive and repetitive behaviors by frozen images (of themselves and the world). Freedom, Spinoza shows, is something that can be achieved only when we can apprehend the real causes of our actions, when we can set aside the 'sad passions' that intoxicate and entrance us.

There's no doubt that late capitalism certainly articulates many of its injunctions via an appeal to (a certain version of) health. The banning of smoking in public places, the relentless monstering of working class diet on programs like You Are What You Eat, do appear to indicate that we are really in the presence of a paternalism without the Father. It is not that smoking is 'wrong', it is that it will lead to our failing to lead long and enjoyable lives. But there are limits to this emphasis on good health: mental health and intellectual development barely feature at all, for instance. What we see instead is a reductive, hedonic model of health which is all about 'feeling and looking good'.

To tell people how to lose weight, or how to decorate their house, is acceptable; but to call for any kind of cultural improvement is to be oppressive and elitist. The alleged elitism and oppression cannot consist in the notion that a third party might know someone's interest better than they know it themselves, since, presumably smokers are deemed either to be unaware of their interests or incapable of acting in accordance with them. No: the problem is that only certain types of interest are deemed relevant, since they reflect values that are held to be consensual. Losing weight, decorating your house and improving your appearance belong to the 'consentimental' regime."

-- Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zer0 Books 2009)

Vogue Italia Settembre 2011: The Discipline of Fashion

2011-09-09T10:08:00.016+01:00

It is no secret, every now and then Steven Meisel produces something for Vogue Italia that is simply quite brilliant.

In the September 2011 issue of the magazine, the American photographer has worked with model Stella Tennant and stylist Karl Templer to create an editorial titled The Discipline of Fashion. It takes inspiration from Ethel Granger, who is famed for having achieved the world's smallest (adult) waist, 13 inches.

There is something very subtle afloat in these almost eery images; something lurking in their subconscious. That is, something apart from the standard Vogue Italia/Meisel/Templer stock of Meisel's typically superb use of light, uncannily astute composition and ability to extract wonderful expression from his models, combined with Templer's faultless skill in throwing together a striking - but never incoherent - look no matter what the style (not to mention Tennant's air of stealthy composure when she can probably hardly breathe).

The Discipline of Fashion can be read on the surface as a fashion story about corsetry, set in a beautiful country house and designed to sell the high luxury garments and accessories photographed. If we delve slightly further, we can say it's about depicting (perhaps even criticising) the often extreme and certainly unnatural contortions Fashion demands of the body. We could also read it as celebrating those extremes and the way that fashion allows us to create identities for ourselves through adornment and alteration. Finally, we can see it as a historical documentation of a woman who embodied Fashion's doctrine of 'creative self-expression' (or self-oppression, depending on your perspective) through dress, Ethel Granger.

All that is valid and interesting. Yet if we take it even further, and read a little deeper, could we say that The Discipline of Fashion is providing a comment not only on all of the above, but also on something more nuanced about the manipulation - physical and psychological - that Fashion imparts on and produces in people? Take a close look at these images.

Look at the way not only Tennant's body but also her facial expressions are strained and slightly awkward, look at the close cropping in many of Meisel's frames. This is not only a physical confinement of body and space but visibly also a mental one, which is produced through the physical restriction such adornment enforces. We can see this further in the framing and high-contrast lighting Meisel has used. Despite the seemingly tranquil country-house setting, there is something interrogative and demanding about these pictures.

The idea of physical limitation is not uncommonly associated with our ideas of what fashion garments constitute and do - the body is contained, or housed, in a fabricated skin which shapes and moulds our muscles and organs and thus dictates our movements. Considering that mental states are largely produced by physical ones (see Reich), can we extend this understanding of fashion's role in fabricating physicality to include the idea that clothing equally produces our psychologies and subjectivity?

Moreover, can we visualise this idea here, within Meisel's images? Perhaps I'm looking too much into it - or maybe I'm just exaggeratedly riffing on recent encounters with the writings of Reich, Deleuze and Guattari - but it really seems there is something subtly provoking at work in these photographs. This is much more than your run-of-the-mill fashion spread; what's more, I'd guess that we all instinctively know and see the difference here, which probably in itself suggests a lot about what might be happening in this series of images.

Look at the way there is a certain subversion of traditional fashion poses. Where the model is literally turned on her head or where, instead of using the table in its conventional way, she lies atop it, mirrors its shape, contorts her body, and becomes furnishings herself (or, 'planks'). What does this suggest about the body and mind produced by clothing and, more specifically, by extreme clothing? What does it imply about the production of bodies and minds via fashion high and low, slow and fast?

What's more, the explicit use of corsetry on body parts other than the waist - i.e. neck and arms - exemplifies the slight absurdity in such a garment. We visualise the corset - thanks to history - as something more or less normal, but what happens when we apply the same effect to a neck or an arm? Are we trying to make them look thinner or more graceful? Are we trying to exemplify their shape or hide it? Do we read corsetry as defining, refining, optimising or malforming the body? Is it any less strange to corset a neck than a waist? Here, one can see a quite literal questioning of the supposedly traditional uses of garments, and thus their constructed 'purpose', while simultaneously that questioning functions within a very normalising paradigm of fashion aesthetics.

It's impossible to say what Meisel's intentions were here, except - to be sure - that they were a mixture of conscious and unconscious ones. Some may think my interpretation is a little far-fetched, but if we consider that fashion is essentially about disciplining the body, about producing 'disciplined bodies' (see Foucault), who can thus be read within society as properly or improperly serving their pre-assigned role, perhaps it's not very far-fetched at all to suggest that there is a certain psychology which is concurrently produced? Perhaps it is quite understandable that Meisel and co. would be aware of this and attempt - via the very same means that create the bind - to pose some questions about this discipline.

The psychologies produced manifest in as many ways as there are dresses, but they are always implicit in the way we clothe, corset and adorn our bodies. And despite the fact we may understand this enclothment as being a self-devised, even 'free' decision, it is one which is, rather, more or less decided for us by myriad forces constituting society and its production of subjects.

Discipline yourself or perish!

Quote of the day, yay!

2011-09-02T09:26:00.003+01:00

'Schizophrenia only shows, in a grotesque degree, a condition which characterizes man of today quite generally; the average human being of today has lost contact with his real nature, with his biological core, and experiences it as hostile and alien. He must of necessity hate anybody who tries to bring him into contact with it.'

-- Wilhelm Reich, 'Chapter Two: Peer Gynt', The Function of the Orgasm, first published 1942 (translated from the German by Theodore P. Wolfe)

New Planes Public Press #2 launch

2011-08-30T10:05:00.005+01:00

Hey curious Sydney people, there is an event on Thursday night (1 September, which means start of spring - take that, North Hemi!) that you might be interested in.

It is the launch of Issue Two of New Planes Public Press, The Page as a Performance Site, and it will take place at Serial Space in Chippendale (33 Wellington Street) from 19:00.

Seeing 'the issue is about collective energy and celebrates the page as a performance site', as writes editor Lisa Lerkenfeldt, the opening reception will include a programme of live interventions - 'inspired in some way by the issue' - from some New Planes contributors.

This live programme includes:

Animated Collages by Angela Bermuda
Video poetry conference by Marcus Rechsteiner
Birthing the Spirit by David Capra
Your Lips Of Tragedy by Eleanor Weber
Ultra-terrestrial by Stephanie Overs & Lisa Lerkenfeldt
Wilfred Brandt Sings Greatest Cracked Songwriters by Wilfred Brandt
R i t e o f S p r i n g by Jules Ferrari

In addition, you will get to obtain (for a measly $5 donation at entry) the New Planes Public Press and thus experience wonderful contributions from:

Amanda Maxwell, Andrew Long, Angela Bermuda,
Bababa International, Billy Maynard,
Charles Dennington, Chris Sammut,
David Capra,
Eleanor Bennett, Eleanor Ivory Weber,
Garry Trinh,
Hellen Rose,
Jack Jeweller, Jesse Hogan,
Kate Moss, Kenzee Patterson, Kevina-Jo Smith,
Leah Fraser, Lewis Gentle, Lisa Lerkenfeldt,
Marcus Rechsteiner, Mary MacDougall, Max Olijnyk, Megan Garrett-Jones, Miss Jules Ferrari,
Nick Briggs, Nic Warnock,
Siberia Records, Stephanie Overs,
Tim Alves, Trinie Dalton, Tristan Ceddia, Tully Arnot,
Wilfred Brandt, and
Zephyr A. Pavey.

Plus, if you want more incentive, there will be free refreshments provided by Santa Vittoria (so, I would propose, please feel free to BYO additives ...)!

You can find the event on Facebook by the following link: https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=104997482938896

Come!

Park La Crib

2011-08-29T00:50:00.002+01:00

Hej København !

Park La Crib is a group exhibition of art students from both London and Copenhagen, organised by the students themselves.

The site of the exposition is in an amazing old parking lot, to which the artists have been given access for the period. You will find it at the following address:

Palæ Garragen, top floor
Dronningens Tværgade 4
1302 Copenhagen, Denmark

The private view is this Thursday 1 September from 17:00 to 22:00 after which the exhibition will be open everyday from 10:00 to 17:00 through Monday 5 September 2011.

You can see some images from artists involved by visiting copenhagen11.tumblr.com.

The artists involved include Morten Akhøj, Moa Alskog, Magnus Andersen, Ann-Sophie von Bülow, Isabel Denny, Joel Furness, Veronica Julie Geiger, Magarita Krag, Rebecca Krasnik, Asta Meldal Lynge, Jakob Ohrt Nielsen, Christine Overvad, Jack Park, Anna Klara Paterson, Silje Pettersen, Julie Riis, Viktoria Wendel Skousen, Cecilie Skov, Amalie Smith, Claus Spangberg, Stoffer, Maja Theodoraki, Esme Toler, Tinne Zenner & Anna Ørberg.

Check it out!

l honneur de timur presents rezeption (27 August)

2011-08-25T00:10:00.013+01:00

For those who are curious to experience, this Saturday 27 August 2011 l honneur de timur presents a multidisciplinary occasion on the topic of 'reception'. Likeminded transnational players have been invited by l honneur de timur to contribute sound, movement, voice, visuals, text, cuisine, installation (etc.), which will circulate in the context of topic and location.

rezeption treats l honneur de timur's desire to initiate an environment which encourages all present to embrace the situation and further it, with emphasis on the enhancement of communal possibilities through time and physical effort. The credo is 'any absorption demands something given'.

rezeption occurs from 1pm to 1am in an old mill in Berlin's Kreuzberg. You will find the daylong event via the courtyard at Falckensteinstraße 48 (U-bahn Schlesisches Tor).

You can obtain further information by visiting Facebook, where you will find the l honneur de timur page and the rezeption event. To read more about the concept and individuals involved, please click on the images below.

[P.S. Perennial self-excusing for self-propaganda. For my part in rezeption I will be presenting a text dealing in repetition and emphasising a tense of presence, performed (always) in past. This vocal engagement is combined with synthesizer by collaborator Matte Rochford, who I want to thank. All elements improvisatory in nature, resulting hasardously, within their respective - textual, sonic, verbal - frames.]

Quote of the day, yay! (Citation du jour...)

2011-08-24T08:39:00.003+01:00

'... l'auto-érotisme de la femme est-il très différent de celui de l'homme. Celui-ci a besoin d'un instrument pour se toucher : sa main, le sexe de la femme, le langage ... Et cette auto-affection exige un minimum d'activité. La femme, elle, se touche d'elle-même et en elle-même sans la nécessité d'une médiation, et avant tout départage possible entre activité et passivité. La femme "se touche" tout le temps, sans que l'on puisse d'ailleurs le lui interdire, car son sexe est fait de deux lèvres qui s'embrassent continûment. Ainsi, en elle, elle est déjà deux - mais non divisibles en un(e)s - qui s'affectent.'

-- Luce Irigaray, Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un, Les Éditions de Minuit 1977

Francis Ponge through Jean Fautrier or vice versa

2011-08-21T13:02:00.007+01:00

It would be an understatement to say that I am unsure of the pages that follow: these are strange texts, violent and awkward. These are not confident words.

There is a moment in creation when one feels as if shaken by the shower of blows your subject deals you. One can react, then, with a torrent of uncoordinated blows (many missing their mark or thrown into the void), almost like a tree reacts to the wind. Do the leaves record the gusts of wind or respond to them? One should decide (if one wants).

This, which may be true concerning an ordinary subject, is a fortiori true for those which, by nature, so violently affect one's sensibility that it is knocked into a daze from the first round: for subjects too beautiful or too atrocious.

But suppose that atrocity itself is the subject ... Then, it is only a matter of remaining standing, of finishing the fight at all costs, and of collapsing only afterwards, after the sound of the bell.

...

That I should say it at present is in response to a rather coarse temptation, offered with malice and in order to get noticed by painters and their dealers; to speak or write about painting is to throw oneself blindly into the trap they hold out so that you serve as a foil for the painted work itself.

One is almost (what do I mean by almost, it is certain) assured of instantly falling into the absurd, the incoherent, the muddled.

...

What do painters who ask you to write about their painting want? They want their expression (exhibition, collection) to ring in the ears of the world, at the same time as in their eyes.

They want words about their painting to bring about a sort of prescription for thought. That one furnish words (in bulk) to those who will visit the exhibition or flip through the album.

...

In any case, good painting will be that about which, trying always to speak, one could never say anything satisfactory. Does it matter then that we were speaking a lot and in an unsatisfactory fashion?

...

But still ... But, we literati friends of painters, don't we fall into a clumsy trap? Aren't we condemned to confused expressions, to the absurd? Aren't we only going to serve as slaves, as foils?

Well, then! Let's take it as a challenge. Or rather, let's accept it like asceticism (through masochism?). In any case, it will be an exercise. And since it should bring us a little bit of money (very useful, money, if only to allow us to write other things, writings of another sort). Some money, and one or two of these paintings. In order to get an eyeful ad vitam aeternam. Let's go! It is quite worth it: I like Fautrier's paintings.

...

If I said only one thing, it would be: I like Fautrier's paintings. But let's enter further into the game. Let's look for words. Let's take the match seriously.

-- Excerpts from Francis Ponge, Notes on the Otages, Paintings by Fautrier, written January 1945, Paris (translated from the French by Vivian Rehberg).

Friday at THCBTP (chaps and chops)

2011-08-17T06:20:00.008+01:00

Hey, London! This Friday (19 August) from 18:00 head to The Haircut Before the Party at 26 Toynbee St. E1, where you are invited to celebrate the opening of THCBTP Salon Reading Room and PDF fileshare station, as well as to launch the first in a series of chapbook publications, edited by THCBTP.

The chapbooks presented at this event (including one by yours truly) are short text-based publications that aim to further explore ideas raised within the salon. They are:

'An Introduction to Becoming' by anon (read here)
'Communicative Action: A Dialogue' by Evan Harris
'My Soul At Work: Following Bifo with the help of Depeche Mode' by Eleanor Ivory Weber
'The Trial of Lewis Blisset, a ballad', by Ali Bucron

In addition, during the event, Irish writer Michael Harding will present a script in ten parts to be performed on the evening, drawing on extracts of selected texts from the THCBTP collection. And local writer, Gerry King, will be reading from his book Lubin Tales, a collection of short fictions that incorporate photo-collage and linguistic invention into their tales of provincial misdeeds.

At the same time, you can browse through thousands of PDF's using the THCBTP fileshare (print-by-donation or BYO USB). Plus the salon will be open for free haircuts on Friday as per normal, from 12:00 until readings commence at 18:00. Allez-hop, chop-chop!

Art meets Fashion for Art Monthly

2011-08-15T08:32:00.004+01:00

I wrote an article for Art Monthly Australia's annual Emerging Arts Writer's Award competition and, lo' and behold, I actually won. I was very surprised. (Kinda like those chooks ...)

The article has been published in the August 2011 issue of Art Monthly, 'Art Meets Fashion' (also the theme of the competition), which is out now. You can read it by clicking on the images below or by finding the magazine at one of the many stockists in Australia and abroad (more info on that here).

Who knows what I'm actually on about, but it must have made sense to someone.

Verge Festival 2011: UnContainable (?)

2011-08-11T14:07:00.010+01:00

The University of Sydney's Verge Festival recently made a call-out for current students, alumni and 'community' to make proposals for a project called UnContainable, which will place ten shipping containers on the main campus' Eastern Avenue, which is one of the primary and most frequented thoroughfares on the expansive Camperdown campus.

The stated aim of UnContainable is 'promoting art practice and culture to the widest audience possible the best way we know how: going completely insane.' It would seem to me that they are closer to their mark than they could perhaps imagine. (If, that is, you concur with Deleuze and Guattari's ideas about the inherent insanity - schizophrenia - of the capitalist project.)

The request was that 'artists, artist collectives, and ARIs' (Artist-Run Initiatives) turn the shipping containers and Eastern Avenue into the 'biggest art installation the University of Sydney has ever seen': 'We want cool, inviting, transformative installations on the inside and eye-catching decoration on the outside. The only restrictions are on work that would structurally compromise the rented shipping containers'. Participants are invited 'to decorate the outside and display their work on the inside, with possible interiors ranging from a mini-gallery to an installation.' The artists involved are offered a budget of up to $500, but this is only 'payable upon presentation of receipts to Verge staff'.

It seems that their key premise is that 'unlike a gallery, there are no boundaries between the individual and the artwork' in the UnContainable project. But I'm not so sure.

Following my recent areas of interest - the spaces where artistic and capitalistic aims collide - and a very suspicious (cynical?) inkling about UnContainable's compromised position within the University-Corporation (not to mention the Verge Festival project at large), I made the following proposal to the organisers, Part I outlining the idea, and Part II the material aspects:

Part I

As Austrian artist, Oliver Ressler (b. 1970), writes: 'Containers are the most important means of transportation for goods around the globe and therefore essential for the continuation of capitalist world-market.' My feeling is that festivals like Verge are perhaps exactly the sorts of events which help maintain (whether directly or indirectly) a certain power relation of ill-distributed capital under the guise of diversity, culture and artistic talent.

I have been thinking that the promotion of this sort of festival, and particularly the positioning of it at the heart of the campus exemplifies the University's need to project an image of dynamism, openness, artistic cache and so-called diversity, when those things are often far from what it is about in actuality.

It seems this need is satisfied in a way which either capitalises on students' desire for some form of expression which is not manifested through commodities or abstract exam marks; or on their belief that this sort of event is actually a space for free expression (can such a space exist anywhere in this society?); or simply on the basis of it being something that will assumedly look good on a CV. We are implicated from all sides.

One could imagine the UnContainable project as one which utilises this desire for creativity and turns the genuine work of participants into publicity for The University of Sydney. Even more cynically, one could imagine it as a marketing strategy to promote Sydney as a university that partakes in a neoliberal notion of 'creative' subjects ready to enter into the capitalist job-market armed with the artistic flexibility necessary to react to the precarious situation such a market now necessarily entails. These strategic movements obstruct by-default the possibility of genuine creativity, i.e. creativity not predicated on predetermined parameters.

The irony of the use of shipping containers for such a pursuit is not lost. Moreover, one could see the containers as metaphorical for the state within which most students actually exist in terms of education and the consequent narrowness of existence ahead of them. We have created a farce of knowledge acquisition that leads to a goal of obtaining a piece of paper (a degree) which, in theory at least, will lead us to that much-lusted-after job.

We have pursued this aim progressively without any regard for what university actually means: academic freedom. Not contained knowledge. Which, alarmingly, is effectively what universities have become in all but name. There is no space to follow the thought, to extend the tutorial, to converse deeply with the teacher, to read broadly and generate connections haphazardly in this institution. Students must obtain marks. Teachers must produce 'research'. Knowledge, reflection and thinking are contained and locked up so as to produce neatly packaged subjects prepared for the market of jobs.

There is no escape from this model within the uni-corp, and what's more they don't even need to remind us of this fact – it doesn't seem to occur to us that what contained knowledge means is the inability to reflect on our human condition, and what that means is a life of enslavement. The inevitable note made for every lecture, hence, reads: 'Who needs to reflect when there is money to be earned?'

Rather than 'Uncontainable', my project would be titled, 'Already Contained: See For Yourself'.

Part II

My budget is $500. I will need to pay the artists involved for their labour as well as set up an installation inside the container, which will be a kind of capitalist paradise and thus cost money. This installation will decay over the period of its exhibition on Eastern Avenue.

To clarify, this is what I wrote to a friend regarding this proposal and explains my idea for the project: 'I have this image of the container as some kind of prison, or cage, of decadence. The sort of luxurious, disgusting, OTT, façade-like, artificial, hollow, decadence that capitalism is all about. With just too much of everything and a completely unnecessary everything. People eating too much, drinking too much; a party in the container; too many colours; perfume; loud music; plush animals; too much makeup; technology, glitter and Swarovski crystals; images everywhere – changing, changing, exciting and wonderful, crazy and beautiful but stinking and rotting by the end of it all. Everyone exhausted and resentful and sick. All the façade having lost its shine.'

Ideally, I would like access to an amp and stereo system and/or computer to play music from the container; internet access would also be great. I would like to purchase a lot of McDonald's food to aid the olfactory impressions coming from the space. This food will be left inside the container throughout the duration of the piece (i.e. it will not be eaten). I would like to line the inside of the container in pink faux-fur and would like to paint the outside with some slogans such as: 'capital punishment is everywhere'.

Yesterday I received the following email from UnContainable project liaison: 'We were overwhelmed by a large number of high-quality applications, meaning that unfortunately on this occasion we have been unable to include your proposal in UnContainable.

Again thank you for taking the time to put together your proposal and for your enthusiasm for the project. We hope Verge Festival has the opportunity to collaborate with you in the future.'

You may hope so, but, me? Well, frankly I'm really not so sure ... My disappointment is not felt regarding the rejection per se (in fact, if I'm honest, it's a relief), but rather for the utter absence of any engagement with why, perchance, this proposal was not included. I know I'm not alone (this is a generic email that all rejectees would have received), but nonetheless I feel this unquestioned negation of any space of real critical consideration (the excuse is 'overwhelming high-quality') exemplifies exactly the impotence and dead-end 'creativity' of projects like Verge.

Deleuze and Foucault on Power

2011-08-03T07:40:00.002+01:00

Michel Foucault: ... I was surprised to see how many people who were not in prison interested in the problem, to see so many people respond who were in no way predisposed to hearing this discourse, and surprised to see how they took it. How do you explain it? Is it not simply that, generally speaking, the penal system is that form where power shows itself as power in the most transparent way? To put someone in prison, to keep him there, deprive him of food and heat, keep him from going out, from making love, etc., is that not the most delirious form of power imaginable?

The other day I was talking with a woman who had been in prison, and she said: "To think that one day in prison they punished me, a forty year old woman, by forcing me to eat stale bread." What is striking in this story is not only the puerility of the exercise of power, but the cynicism with which it is exercised as power, in a form that is archaic and infantile. They teach us how to be reduced to bread and water when we're kids. Prison is the only place where power can be exercised in all its nakedness and in its most excessive dimensions, and still justify itself as moral. "I have every right to punish because you know very well how evil it is to steal, to kill..." This is what is so fascinating about prisons: for once power does not hide itself, does not mask itself, but reveals itself as tyranny down to the most insignificant detail, cynically applied; and yet it's pure, it's entirely "justified", because it can be entirely formulated in a morality that frames its exercise: its brute tyranny thus appears as the serene domination of Good over Evil, of order over disorder.

Gilles Deleuze: Now that I think about it, the inverse is equally true. It's not only prisoners who are treated like children, but children who are treated like prisoners. Children are subjected to an ifantilization which is not their own. In this sense, schools are a little like prisons, and factories are very much like them. All you have to do is look at Renault's entrance. Or anywhere: you need three vouchers to go make pee-pee during the day.

You uncovered a text by Jeremy Bentham in the eighteenth-century, a proposal for prison reform: it is in the name of this noble reform that Bentham establishes a circular system, where at one and the same time the renovated prison serves as a model, and where without noticing it, one moves from the school to the factory, from the factory to the prison and vice versa. There you have the essence of reformism, of representation which has been reformed. However, when people begin to speak and act in their own name, they don't oppose one representation, even one which has been reformed, to another representation; they don't oppose another mode of representation to power's false mode of representation. For example, I recall when you said that there was no popular justice against justice, it happens at another level altogether.

Michel Foucault: In my view, what comes to light beneath the hatred which the people have for the judicial system, judges, tribunals, prisons, etc., is not only the idea of some other, better justice, but first and foremost the perception of a singular point where power is exercised to the detriment of the people.

The anti-judicial struggle is a struggle against power, and in my opinion it's not a struggle against injustice, against the injustice of the judicial system, nor is it for a judicial system that would work more efficiently. Still, isn't it striking that every time there are riots, revolts and seditions, the judicial apparatus has come under fire, in the same way and at the same time as the fiscal apparatus, the army, and the other forms of power?

My hypothesis, but it's just a hypothesis, is that popular tribunals, for example, those during the Revolution, have been a way for the lower middle class, in alliance with the masses, to recuperate and harness the movement unleashed by the struggle against the judicial system. To harness it, they proposed this system of tribunals, which defers to a justice that could be just, to a judge that could pronounce a just sentence. The very form of the tribunal belongs to an ideology of justice which is a bourgeois ideology.

Gilles Deleuze: If we look at today's situation, power necessarily has a global or total vision. What I mean is that every form of repression today, and there are multiple, is easily totalized, systematized from the point of view of power: the racist repression against immigrants, the repression in factories, the repression in schools and teaching, and the repression of youth in general. We mustn't look for the unity of these forms of repression only in reaction to May '68, but more so in a concerted preparation and organization concerning our immediate future.

Capitalism in France is dropping its liberal, paternalistic mask of full employment; it desperately needs a "reserve" of unemployed workers. It's from this vantage point that unity can be found in the forms of repression I already mentioned: the limitation of immigration, once it's understood that we're leaving the hardest and lowest paying jobs to them; the repression in factories, because now it's all about once again giving the French a taste for hard work; the struggle against youth and the repression in schools and teaching, because police repression must be all the more active now that there is less need for young people on the job market. Every category of professional is going to be urged to exercise police functions which are more and more precise: professors, psychiatrists, educators of all stripes, etc.

Here we see something that you predicted a long time ago, and which we didn't think possible: the global reinforcement of the structures of imprisonment. So, faced with such a global politics of power, our response is local: counter-attacks, defensive fire, an active and sometimes preventative defense. We mustn't totalize what is totalizable only by power, and which we could totalize only by restoring the representative forms of centralism and hierarchy. On the other hand, what we must do is find a way to create lateral connections, a system of networks, a grass roots base. And that is what is so difficult. ...

-- Excerpt from Gilles Deleuze's 'Intellectuals and Power' in Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974, ed. David Lapoujade, translated from the French by Michael Taormina [Semiotext(e) 2004]. Interview with Michel Foucault originally published 4 March 1972 in L'Arc, no. 49: "Gilles Deleuze".

Quote of the day, yay!

2011-08-02T14:10:00.001+01:00

'In the practice of institutional psychotherapy, it is well known that the most zoned-out schizophrenic can suddenly dredge up the most incredible stories about your private life, things you would never have believed anyone knew, and then will proceed to articulate, in the crudest manner possible, truths you thought were secret. It's no mystery. The schizophrenic has instant access to such insight, because he is directly flayed, so to speak, on the hooks that constitute the group in its subjective unity. He finds himself in a "clairvoyant" situation with respect to those individuals who, crystallized in their logic, in their syntax, in their own interests, are absolutely blind.'

- Félix Guattari, in an interview with Vittorio Marchetti for Tempi Moderni, no. 12 (1972)

The Way It Wasn't for Un

2011-07-28T06:09:00.001+01:00

As I mentioned earlier, I recently wrote an article for Melbourne art magazine, Un.

You can read the article by clicking on the images below.

Any thoughts much appreciated, if anyone actually reads it.

James Taylor Gallery

2011-07-25T23:43:00.003+01:00

This week is the last of the current exhibition at James Taylor Gallery in East London.

Effectively four solo shows, the current programme comprises Benedict Drew's The Persuaders, Joshua Bilton's The Arch of Enantiodromia, Martelli/Gibson (igloo)'s VISITOR and Dean Kenning's A Voice in your Throathole.

These shows are really worth checking out. The unexpectedly enormous James Taylor space is conducive to a really engaging experience of artworks and allows for an at once complimentary and singular experience of the installations - these are no exception. (Don't forget to take the dingy for a spin!)

Closes Sunday 31 July. For more info visit jtg.org.uk.

THCBTP on Debt, Austerity, Resistance

2011-07-20T16:40:00.007+01:00

For those in London, head to 26 Toynbee Street E1 7NE, where The Haircut Before the Party have their wonderful (free) hair salon and reading room set up.

This month's discussions are centred around debt (which makes the world go round - or not) and events have been organised around this subject to encourage a communal understanding of our relations with debt both as individuals and societally. A couple of weeks ago I went to a great talk by anthropologist David Graeber, from Goldsmiths, about the history of debt - a really informative discussion.

This week the following led-discussions will be intertwined with the haircutting, chatting and communal readings that normally occur at THCBTP:

Thursday 21 July, 2pm. "Hannah from Corporate Watch on banks, credit and explaining the financial crisis B2B [back-to-back] with someone from The Commune on the movement from real wages to credit (a class history of financialisation)".

Friday 22 July, 2pm. "Nick Dearden from Jubilee Debt Campaign on the IMF and the meaning of their restructuring".

Saturday 23 July, 2pm. "Richard from The Third Estate on resistance movements building against austerity in Europe and the UK".

"All events are aimed at participation."

The salon is open from Thursday to Saturday, 12pm to 6pm, so pop over any time to get involved. If you want a free haircut, it's best to reserve a time in advance at thehaircutbeforetheparty.net.

And even for those who don't want their locks touched - THCBTP is a wonderful place to visit, chat, listen, meet people, read, hang out, discuss, interact and be involved in a different kind of currency.

Actualities of today: € EU crisis, $ US crisis

2011-07-15T01:42:00.021+01:00

Today two news pieces came to my attention.

The first was a link posted on Facebook by my friend Maria. It is an article published in the Guardian by British writer John Lanchester titled 'Can the eurozone survive the Greek debt crisis?' This astute piece of journalism outlines the reasons for the current Greek economic collapse (structurally implicit within the historic/material functionings of the Euro itself, it seems to me), and predicts the possible outcomes of this situation for the Eurozone at large (the domino effect which will ensue from the Greek crisis), whilst problematising these realities in the broader context of the European Union (if you think Britain is exempt from Euro-related troubles, think again).

Lanchester evokes the disturbing days to come for the Eurozone (and all those involved in any way with Euros!). Basically, whether Germany (the Eurozone's richest) further 'bails out' Greece (euphemism for creates more crazybig loans), or whether Greece goes down Argentina's path and defaults entirely on all loans - renders it's debt void and cuts itself off from the IMF - the Euro is in a supersticky situation.

In the former case, the already-precarious situation is intensified by merely buying Greece a bit more time before the imminent demise of the current financial set-up (for all involved) - because the debt will effectively just get larger and thus more destructive. In the latter case, Greece puts itself into an exceptional situation, where preparation is minimal and risk enormous. One must also ask whether such a self-exile is possible in this festering economic swamp in which we all reside. They say it is working for Argentina, but I must question whether being South America's 'fastest-growing economy' is really anything to be proud of? Whose standard of 'fast-growing' are they measuring by? Yes, I thought so.

Lastly, whichever way it goes, the risk of further EU-nation implosions being spurred by that of Greece is very high. Will Germany pay for those, too? Or refuse? Lanchester says they have no choice but to 'bail out' any of the weaker Euro economies if they want to 'save' the Euro itself. Ireland, Portugal, Spain? Once Spain goes down, the Euro goes with it. Spain is the twelfth biggest economy in the world; Germany, France, even Britain, must go with it.

You can read the article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/13/eurozone-greek-debt-crisis-euro

The second news was a surprising newsletter from Adbusters. They are announcing a so-called 'shift in revolutionary tactics', with their plan to 'flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months.' This intervention is scheduled to commence on the 17 September.

Their one demand (inspired by the recent events in Egypt): 'that Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington. It's time for DEMOCRACY NOT CORPORATOCRACY.'

My major query about this demand is that it seems to be missing one crucial point: Obama (or any president or 'representative') is part of the problem, not the cure. In his current incarnation, the president figure is merely the puppet of corporatocracy, he represents it and exists because of it. I am thus not sure if he is the one to call to for the end of money's rule. But who knows, it's worth a try.

In any case, if this occupation actually does occur (with such a long lead-up and such self-conscious planning one wonders if it won't be suppressed before the tents are even pitched) we could be in for a very interesting rattling of Wall Street dominance over American politics and psyche (and for that matter the world's). Either that, or an unprecedented suppression of rights of expression and protest in the capital of global capitalism.

Let's see the dice roll. And hope, at least, the players are paying attention to their opponents' every move. The Wall Streets of the world don't give a toss about people's lives.

Where Art Belongs

2011-07-13T19:45:00.008+01:00

Chris Kraus' Where Art Belongs [Semiotext(e) Intervention Series, 2011] is one of the most interesting art-related texts I've read in a long time. It somehow restores my faith that writing about art can be a viable and stimulating possibility for a writer. I found it so much more moving than what one normally reads written 'about' art, which is too often (especially in officially legitimised spheres) the sterile regurgitation of tired concepts, passionless analogies, poor justifications, conceptual quagmires and - most strikingly - the blatant denial of the real powers at work behind any critique of art (capital, exploitation, hypocrisy, competition, redundancy, etc.).

Not to say that Kraus' book is the perfect model for approaching art via text, almost the opposite, in fact. And that's it's beauty. There is no perfect model, and Kraus seems only too aware of this. There is no model, full stop. Why then, I wonder, so much monotony everywhere in artworld literature?

Kraus' book doesn't always make sense, or it makes different sense. It has sense, sensibility. She speaks of personal experiences and anecdotes, she transcribes from notebooks, she changes topics abruptly, and doesn't quote theorists. Her friends appear. There is sex in her words (naturally). Fiction is imminent. She plays favourites and takes sides. She is clever and naïve, abstract and obvious. It is such a pleasure to read her work, but there is no obligation.

This is not sampled criticality undertaken to generate sound-bites for the next hot obnoxious artlet, espoused by one of his or her curator-crony championers keen to obtain artworld kudos (although I imagine they will quote Kraus, and even she will be co-opted by the 'creative' forces of curator-cum-gallerist-cum-critics). It is rather, I feel, a writer using art as the lens through which to share experience and understanding - of the self, of art, of the world.

Kraus writes in part four, "Drift": 'Last night I felt the spirit that gripped me for months leave my body. I was no longer "in love". I was left with a vivid and heightened sense of the tangible. What was in front of my face - the rooms in this house, the carved rails on the bed, the night wind blowing against the net curtains - became suddenly real, newly interesting. Released, I was happy. Because psychoanalysis (like narrative plot) relies mostly on conflict, its structural method cannot account for these hauntings.'

Yes, I think this is where art belongs.

Bright Light Bright Light

2011-07-12T11:23:00.002+01:00

Check out the super new track 'Disco Moment' from Bright Light Bright Light AKA Rod Thomas.

Directed by Jody Wilson and filmed in East London's MKII studios, with Art Direction by Alun Davies and styling by Justine Josephs.

The Doublethink Project

2011-07-07T12:39:00.004+01:00

I recommend checking out the great new project from the Doublethink duo, Jakob Ohrt and Christian N. Halsted, titled 'Transnationalism'.

Ohrt and Halsted explore their new theme through public interventions, surveys, droll feats of appropriation and performative gestures. The outcomes include projects like Borders, which constitutes 'placing a tetherball on the tri-border of Slovakia, Austria and Hungary' and 'placing a badminton net at the Wales/England border'; A Global Anthem, a SoundCloud track comprising 'every national anthem in the world, put together in to one global anthem'; and Flag, where Doublethink asked four people of different backgrounds sets of questions (eg. what is your favourite animal?) and designed them personalised flags based on their responses.

At once playful and pointed, Doublethink's practice of examining one theme via varying modes of 'conceptual research' - from public interventions to written essays - is effective in allowing an impression of the theme to emerge whose stance is neither predetermined nor unequivocal. In addition this approach correlates to their ideas about, in this case, transnationalism itself: 'we have tried to depict transnationalism through an approach embracing a kind of playful understanding of borders and not of fear. It’s about national history and the modern challenges thereof. It is, as the word implies, about cultures beyond place and vice versa.'

Doublethink make a clear distinction between their version of transnationalism and the 'multicultural' transnationality proffered by dominant politics, the latter necessarily containing a grain of pejorative 'cultural' determinism. As the duo write, quoting anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod, 'culture is operating within a discourse where it has come to “enforce separations that inevitably carry a sense of hierarchy”'. Doublethink attempt to interrogate this 'xenophopic' hierarchy which separates, at least in the so-called West, ‘us’ and ‘them’.

As Doublethink (whose name, for those who don't know, is a concept in George Orwell's masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four) conclude, we must doublethink all these thoughts: 'What is your role in a transnational environment? What possibilities does such a setting enable? Try to think of the real differences that separate people apart and try to think what actually connects us. Try to think. Doublethink.'

Some aphorisms from Kafka

2011-07-04T18:58:00.005+01:00

All from Franz Kafka's (1883-1924) The Zürau Aphorisms (Schocken Books, New York 2006):

13. A first indication of glimmering understanding is the desire to die. This life seems unendurable, another unreachable. One no longer feels ashamed of wanting to die; one petitions to be moved from one's old cell, which one hates, into a new one, which one will come to hate. A last vestige of belief is involved here, too, for during the move might not the prison governor by chance walk down the passage, see the prisoner, and say: "Don't lock this man up again. He's coming with me."

16. A cage went in search of a bird.

20. Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual.

26. There is a destination but no way there; what we refer to as way is hesitation.

39a. The road is endless, there are no shortcuts and no detours, and yet everyone brings to it his own childish haste. "You must walk this ell of ground, too, you won't be spared it."

53. It is wrong to cheat, even if it is the world of its victory.

58. The way to tell fewest lies is to tell fewest lies, not to give oneself the fewest opportunities of telling lies.

62. The fact that the only world is a constructed world takes away hope and gives us certainty.

66. He is a free and secure citizen of the world because he is on a chain that is long enough to allow him access to all parts of the earth, and yet not so long that he could be swept over the edge of it. At the same time he is also a free and secure citizen of heaven because he is also attached to a similar heavenly chain. If he wants to go to earth, the heavenly manacles will throttle him, if he wants to go to heaven, the earthly manacles will. But after all that, all possibilities are open to him, as he is well aware, yes, he even refuses to believe the whole thing is predicated on a mistake going back to the time of the first enchainment.

69. Theoretically, there is one consummate possibility of felicity: to believe in the indestructible in oneself, and then not to go looking for it.

74. If what was supposed to be destroyed in Paradise was destructible, then it can't have been decisive; however, if it was indestructible, then we are living in false belief.

76. The feeling: "I'm not dropping anchor here," and straightaway the feeling of the sustaining sea-swell around one.
-
A reversal. Lurking, fretful, hoping, the answer creeps around the question, peers despairingly in its averted face, follows it on its most abstruse journeys - that is, those that have least to do with the answer.

79. Sexual love deceives us as to heavenly love; were it alone, it would not be able to do so, but containing within itself, unknowingly, a germ of heavenly love, it can.

80.The truth is indivisible and is therefore incapable of recognising itself; whatever claims to recognise it must therefore be a lie.

87. A faith like an ax. As heavy, as light.

91. To avoid the solecism: Whatever is to be entirely destroyed must first be held very firmly; if something crumbles, it crumbles, but resists destruction.

96. The joys of this life are not its joys, but our fear of climbing into a higher life; the torments of this life are not its torments, but our self-torment on account of this fear.

103. You can withdraw from the sufferings of the world - that possibility is open to you and accords with your nature - but perhaps that withdrawal is the only suffering you might be able to avoid.

Story Magazine

2011-06-30T12:41:00.003+01:00

The first issue of Story Magazine is now available in selected bookstores and cafes around London as well as digitally online.

The magazine was initiated by photographers Sophie Allen and Richard Doran and features articles, projects, interviews and photo-series by and about so-called 'creatives' - artists, musicians, writers, photographers, curators, etc. You can find more information on the website (storymagazine.co.uk) or on Facebook.

I wrote an article for this first issue reviewing Amos Gitai's Traces exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. You can read it by clicking on the image below.

Quote of the day, yay!

2011-06-17T01:15:00.001+01:00

'The non-hierarchical character of network communication becomes dominant in the entire cycle of social labour. This contributes to the representation of info-labor as an independent form of work. But this independence ... is in fact an ideological fiction, covering a new and growing form of dependency ... This new dependency is increasingly apparent in the automatic fluidity of the network: we have strict interdependence of subjective fragments, all distinct but objectively dependent from a fluid process, from a chain of automatisms both external and internal to the labour process which regulate every gesture, every productive parcel.

Both simple executing workers and entrepreneurial managers share the vivid perception that they depend on a constant flow that cannot be interrupted and from which they cannot step back save at the price of being marginalised... Cellular phones are probably the technological devices that best illustrate this kind of network dependency. The cellular phone is left on by the great majority of info-workers even when they are not working. It has a major function in the organisation of labor as self-enterprise that is formally autonomous but substantially dependent.'

- Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Soul At Work: From Alienation to Autonomy, Semiotext(e) 2009 (pp. 88-9)

un Magazine 5.1 launch

2011-06-05T17:02:00.002+01:00

I wrote an article for the latest issue of un Magazine, which is launching on Wednesday evening (8 June 2011) from 19:00 at BUS Projects in Melbourne.

Those in town should defintely head down to the basement of Donkey Wheel House at 673 Bourke Street, grab a copy of the mag (it's free!), have a drink, meet some of the great people involved with un and experience performances from Ana Nicole and East Link.

Allez-hop, Melbourne!

This Is Happening

2011-06-02T14:20:00.006+01:00

Heidi is someone I've known for a long time - since we were children, in fact - but never really known well, that is to say closely. Nevertheless, Heidi is someone who has always somehow been present in my consciousness, someone from my small home town who always seemed interesting and, more importantly, interested. I can't say for sure if this is the case but, from reading what she has to say about things, I suspect so.

Heidi has been present with RRN since the very beginning. Some of my first test shots (back when I still wanted to be a fashion photographer) were with Heidi, many taken with my old lomo camera not far from our school, her wearing our school skirt uniform and a leather jacket I'd found in an op-shop.

Excuse the nostalgia, but a lot has changed since then. Necessarily. In practically every way. However I still don't really know Heidi that well, though I did recently come across her blog, This Is Happening, which is kind of about what is happening culturally around Sydney, as well as interesting events, recipes, thoughts on stuff, photographs, observations, etc., that Heidi is assembling online. You know, a blog.

On Heidi's blog I read this post, where she speaks about this incredible series of serendipitous events and how these things are all interconnected (read it!) and now I am posting it on here to continue the movement, and now let's just wait and see where we end up next.

Here's to coincidences that aren't, after all, so coincidental ...

Klaus Nomi's Delilah

2011-05-31T19:01:00.003+01:00

Feeling the Klaus Nomi vibes this moody summer evening in Germany.

Counter-tenor Klaus Nomi sings the famous aria "Mon coeur s'ouvre à ta voix" from Camille Saint-Saëns' opera Samson & Dalila. Written for mezzo-soprano, the aria is sung by Dalila as she attempts to seduce Samson into revealing the source of his strength.

Also check out Maria Callas' wonderful rendition: youtube.com/watch?v=U_WALGjOnn8

Jean via Max and Franco

2011-05-30T23:47:00.003+01:00

Max sent me the following quote from Jean Baudrillard after reading my musings "around the question between a possibility of alternative economies or the possibility of an alternative to 'economy'" (Max's words).

'Everything began with objects, yet there is no longer a system of objects. The critique of objects was based on signs saturated with meaning, along with their phantasies and unconscious logic as well as their prestigious differential logic. Behind this dual logic lies the anthropological dream: the dream of the object as existing beyond and above exchange and use, above and beyond equivalence; the dream of a sacrificial logic, of gift, expenditure, potlatch, "devil's share" consumption, symbolic exchange.

All this still exists, and simultaneously it is disappearing. The description of this projective imaginary and symbolic universe was still the one of the object as the mirror of the subject. The opposition of the subject and the object was still significant, as was the profound imaginary of the mirror and the scene. The scene of history as well as the scene of the everyday emerge in the shadow of history as it is progressively divested of politics. Today the scene and the mirror have given way to a screen and a network. There is no longer any transcendence or depth, but only the immanent surface of operations unfolding, the smooth and functional surface of communication.'

The text, The Ecstasy of Communication, was first published in 1987, just before effectively the entire globe (and not just the US and UK, who had by this stage already well and truly gotten their heavy deregulated balls rolling thanks to the Reagan and Thatcher regimes) entered into its current deal with what Franco "Bifo" Berardi calls 'aggressive neoliberalism', 'the central dogma of global politics, the very same force that is plunging us ever deeper into mass depression.'

Berardi in fact makes interesting use of Baudrillard's theories in his brilliant book The Soul At Work (2009), which I am currently reading (more to come!), so Max's comments were somehow very fortuitous. Berardi writes in relation to the simulacra and 'derealisation' produced by commodities that 'Baudrillard foresees the tendency that would become dominant in the next decades: in his analysis, simulation modifies the relation between subject and object, forcing the subject to accept the subaltern position of the seduced. The active party is not the subject, but the object.'

The question, then, is no longer about the objectification of the subject through alienating labour, nor the resultant exploitation, but rather the subjectivisation of the object enabled via the technological developments of the last thirty years and the unprecedented effect this has had and continues to have not only on humanity's (dis)relation with reality (read: Baudrillard's 'desert of the real'), but also on our communicative, affective and sensual capabilities as a species.

Semiocapitalist ideology is not just under our skin but it's eating out our souls.

How To Sleep Faster launch

2011-05-24T12:29:00.003+01:00

Arcadia Missa is a new studio space and gallery in South East London, whose project aims 'to experiment with, and present questions to, the socio-political role of visual culture', whilst creating 'a space that reflects and gives definition to our experience of contemporary culture'.

I like the fact that Arcadia Missa are overt about the socio-political nature of their project - I think any interesting (art) work needs to be functioning with these questions in mind. Why are we creating a space? What does it mean to be an artworker in this society? How is what we are doing pertinent?

It seems that Arcadia Missa are aware of these essential considerations. Their self-published periodical, How To Sleep Faster, addresses and moves beyond the first two Arcadia Missa exhibitions, Sleep Faster and How To Carve Totem Poles, by involving new contributors who 'discuss and expand on ideas we set out with when opening the gallery'. The momentum of the publication is outward-reaching, pushing the exhibition-projects further rather than finalising them with retrospection. This is a space where questions and ideas can take on 'a new course'.

How To Sleep Faster is launching on Thursday night (26 May) at the gallery's Bellenden Road space. Thursday is also the opening of the performance and exhibition project from art collective Your Body is a Temple, who will present a set of 'semi-interactive software sculptures' and give a performance on Friday 27 May from 18:00 to 22:30.

The first Arcadia Missa periodical features contributions from Katrina Sluis, John Hill, Wojciech Kosma, Raphael Julliard, Alex Sprogis, Supralimen, Russell Hill, Asta Meldal Lynge, Jon Crook, Luke Hart, ARR Materials, Matty Mastrandrea and Rózsa Farkas. For the duration of the launch and the Your Body is a Temple V exhibition (26 – 29 May), How To Sleep Faster will be available at a discounted price.

Check it out!

Quote of the day, yay!

2011-05-19T14:23:00.001+01:00

"I have a nationality but my bones have no nationality. I am an international skeleton."

- Alejandro Jodorowsky, KW Berlin, 11 May 2011

castillo/corrales nouvelle adresse

2011-05-17T20:02:00.005+01:00

castillo/corrales have moved to a new location :

80 rue Julien Lacroix
Paris 75020

The new address is a former pharmacy that's been turned into a gallery, bookstore, studio and office space for the now-expanding castillo/corrales project. The group have grown out of (but not above and beyond) the well-loved space around the corner on rue Rébeval, which they inhabited for four years.

The inaugral exhibition in the new space will be called The Best Society and will include works from artists who helped castillo/corrales renovate and move into the new space and who have thus become an important part of the project. In the collective's own words, this will be 'an exhibition gathering the artworks of the artists friends who have given us so much of their time and energy recently in helping us renovate, conceive, and move in, the new castillo/corrales.'

Artists include: Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Lander Burton, David Douard, Armand Jalut, Renaud Jerez, Julien Kernanet, Lucie Lanzini, Markus Lichti, Nicolas Linel, Cyrille Maillot, Clément Rodzielski.

The vernissage will happen this Friday night (20 May) from 20h. Those in Paris, allez-hop!

Ampersand Magazine: The Fade

2011-05-14T16:08:00.010+01:00

You may or may not remember, but back in November a photo of mine was exhibited at The Paper Mill in Sydney as part of Ampersand Magazine's 'Capture The Fade' competition, which was judged by photographer Bill Henson. The competition received nearly a thousand entries from photographers all over the world, 24 of whom were selected for exhibition and publication in Ampersand.

Finally Ampersand is out! Their latest issue, The Fade, contains all the winning images (including my photograph Joe, below left, which was taken on new year's eve 2009 in London), plus a whole lot more 'curiosities' to keep you entertained. For more info visit the Ampersand website.

This issue of Ampersand is published in collaboration with Art & Australia magazine, and as far as I can see from the images looks beautifully printed. If you're interested in getting hold of a copy, they are AU$10 and available online or at these stockists.

[Installation shot courtesy of Garry Trinh.]

Quote of the day, yay!

2011-05-06T11:55:00.006+01:00

"The bowler hat was a motif in the musical composition that was Sabina's life. It returned again and again, each time with a different meaning, and all the meanings flowed through the bowler hat like water through a riverbed. I might call it Heraclitus' ("You can't step twice into the same river") riverbed: the bowler hat was a bed through which each time Sabina saw another river flow, another semantic river: each time the same object would give rise to a new meaning, though all former meanings would resonate (like an echo, like a parade of echos) together with the new one. Each new experience would resound, each time enriching the harmony. The reason why Tomas and Sabina were touched by the sight of the bowler hat in a Zurich hotel and made love almost in tears was that its black presence was not merely a reminder of their love games but also a memento of Sabina's father and of her grandfather, who lived in a century without airplanes and cars."

- Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, translated from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim (Faber and Faber, p. 88)

AGÊNCIA

2011-04-28T15:13:00.004+01:00

ART WORKERS WON'T KISS ASS. (Click the pic!)

The name Agência is derived from the title of painter Ângelo de Sousa's drawings, which were 'made up of simple gestures, grammars for languages between bodies, capable of enactment by anyone'.

The Barber Shop in Lisbon presents a great programme of talks over the next two weekends. The talks will be in Portugese and English and address ideas around business and art, precariousness, going 'beyond authorial work', the neoliberal project to co-opt artistic flexibility 'as a model for entrepeneurship', 'the biopolitical turn defining late capitalism', and art and the law.

Agência will consist of four sessions, ranging 'from sociological reflection on the Portuguese artistic field (Vera Borges); the theoretical and philosophical analysis of precarious labor under late capitalism (José Neves & Miguel Castro Caldas); examples of association and labor activism (Scottish Artists Union); as well as when art and copyright interfere with Law (Daniel McClean).'

There will also be an online Q&A with Temporary Services, whose Art Work newspaper will be available, plus contributions from artist Kobe Matthys' Agency project, as well as the results of a recent inquiry into workers in the field of contemporary art in Portugal.

Check it out!

The Barber Shop is a project by Margarida Mendes. In 2011 artists Mariana Silva and Pedro Neves Marques are curatorial fellows.

Erik Madigan Heck + Mary Katrantzou

2011-04-26T13:13:00.007+01:00

Pretty pictures by New York-based photographer Erik Madigan Heck of model Janice wearing London-based designer Mary Katrantzou's autumn/winter 2011 collection for A Magazine and Nomenus Quarterly.

Mr. Heck says of the painterly images: “It signifies a different direction in my own work, where I am trying to flatten the space between photography and illustration, by eliminating photographic elements and painting on different surfaces and colors in post-production, attempting to move closer towards painting itself, in process and form.”

Looking pretty good to me! A beautiful mix of oil, watercolours and argent; of pre-raphaelite, surealist and art-deco. I like it how fashion seems to blend into the wallpaper and vice versa. And this chic blue chignon is quite perfect.

Credits:
Photographs by Erik Madigan Heck
Styling by Heidi Bivens
Hair by Weasley O'Meara
Makeup by Deanna Melluso
Model Janice at Ford
Set design by Shaun Kato Samuel
Post-production by Michael dos Santos and Andrew Bennett for Versatile Studios
Clothing by Mary Katrantzou
Additional jewelry by Candace Ang

PINA 3D

2011-04-25T14:18:00.007+01:00

My first 3D movie experience occurred on Friday night, when I saw Wim Wenders' latest film Pina at the Barbican in London. The film is a tribute to German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch (1940-2009) and makes for a stunning portrait both of Bausch's oeuvre and the woman herself.

The film depicts numerous of Pina's works, solo and group, which are shown performed on stage, in public spaces and in natural settings by her company. There are also portrait-like segments of each of the dancers, who speak about their feelings about Pina, about dance, about her work, about life in general. In addition there is archival footage of Bausch working in the studio and of her performing in one of the most renowned works, Café Müller.

In true Wenders style, the music is brilliant, the colours are divine and the composition generous and emotive. The settings are breathtaking, almost other-worldly, and the 3D effects contribute to this feeling of really entering into some other, ethereal, atemporal, beautiful, fragile, powerful, universe. The passion is so present, and the love.

Gift economy musings

2011-04-21T14:13:00.014+01:00

Last Saturday I attended AMASS: Towards an Economy of the Commons at Chisenhale Gallery, London. The event was organised by DOXA, the Amateurist Network and ...ment journal and included speakers like co-operative director Sion Whellens, writer and editor Anthony Iles, activist/critique group The University of Strategic Optimism, Eva Weinmayr from AND publishing, and academic Stevphen Shukaitis. Members from the organising groups as well as attendees contributed to what was a very interesting discussion around the possibility of an economy of the commons.

The talks included ideas of autonomy and autonomous spaces, self-organisation and issues around the re-enclosure of commons. Speakers addressed how to deal with the conservative attempt to co-opt communal tendencies (sharing, working collectively for mutual benefit, working for no monetary profit, natural generosity, solidarity, etc.) for the profit of the few (read: Big Society). What to do when those 'in power' take away not only the people's right to exist as a political body (through the privatisation of all 'public' space) but also concurrently recuperate all radical or counter-government practices into the very system those movements despise.

Sociologist/anthropologist Marcel Mauss was mentioned a couple of times in relation to his notion of a gift economy. Firstly by Shukaitis, and then by Iles as well as by some audience members. People were positing the possibility of an economy not based on the transfer of abstract 'money' as a vehicle for obtaining goods and services but rather an economy based on people's commonality - the fact we all need certain things - and thus premised on the fact that gifts encourage reciprocal exchange rather than oppression and division which necessarily comes with the abstract value assigned to having 'more' or 'less' money.

I think this is an extremely useful way of thinking away from economies based on abstract value and consequently abstract human relations and towards economies centred on the simple fact that there are human requirements for existence (not economical ones) and, when shared and managed by humans amongst themselves (rather than from above), both value and relations become at once decentralised and somehow concretised.

I do have some queries about the gift economy, however. Is this sort of exchange-based system simply emulating the money-based one, just without the money? Would we still feel the same oppressive need to 'pay back' - the despair of debt, or the burden of 'owing' someone - within this gift economy? Perhaps. Would the gift economy merely be another life-controlling system that presupposes lack, and the hierarchy of the gift-giver (having) and the gift-receiver (not having)? How could we create a gift economy in societies whose foundations presuppose competition, rivalry and the fear of not having what someone else has? All these questions deserve serious consideration.

Subconsciously continuing on this train of thought, I was visiting the website of Danish duo Doublethink, where I found their brilliant short essay called Generosity or stupidity? In it, Doublethink write about their 'public service' projects, which exist somewhere between generous interventions into social mundanity and indulgently cynical comments on the ridiculousness of our public relations as individuals, as a society and spacially.

The duo make some very useful comments around the co-option of what should be basic services: 'it is interesting how what started as a water and gas service in many countries, have developed into a political project structuring people’s lives', concluding that 'at the end of the day, the service is only relying on human beings.' I think this second statement is vitally important to bear in mind when thinking about all the structures that surround and create us. Coincidentally, though somehow unsurprisingly, their essay also cites Mauss, shedding light on Doublethink's primary stance: 'a gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is simply a contradiction in itself.'

Lastly, and I'm nearly done, Gregory Sholette's great new book (Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture) makes a nice link about the Situationist's espousal of an alternative to capitalist economics based on the concept of a potlatch ceremony, which according to Mauss (via Sholette!) 'redistributed ... property downwards, in the form of gifts that traveled from those better off to those less so, thus raising the status of the gift-givers within the entire community.' Obviously, as suggests Sholette, the Situationists expected at least some kind of pay-off for their efforts (like the potlatch 'gift-givers' expecting a rise in status), even if political in nature rather than material; 'their generosity therefore might be thought of as a gift of resistance.'

Of course, this gift of resistance is a great one - let's all get more of that, please! - but I think a key question we should also consider is what it means for society on all levels (and for the proposed gift economy) if the concept of gifts and generosity are based on the assumption of some reward, even if subconsciously? Could a society function away from the give-receive binary? Can we even imagine what that would feel like? A place where the concept of 'giving' was not predicated - however honourably - on some recompense. Where goods and services flowed happily in all directions without even the thought being possible that 'you owe me' or IOU.

Quote of the day, yay!

2011-04-19T16:33:00.004+01:00

'A fall toward objects without reservation, embracing a world of forces and matter, which lacks any original stability and sparks the sudden shock of the open: a freedom that is terrifying, utterly deterritorializing, and always already unknown. Falling means ruin and demise as well as love and abandon, passion and surrender, decline and catastrophe. Falling is corruption as well as liberation, a condition that turns people into things and vice versa. It takes place in an opening we could endure or enjoy, embrace or suffer, or simply accept as reality.'

- Hito Steyerl, 'In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective', e-flux Journal #24 (to read the whole article, visit e-flux.com/journal/view/222)

Crackademic for New Planes

2011-04-10T21:08:00.011+01:00

I wrote a piece called Crackademic > Crack-pandemic for the first issue of New Planes Public Press, 'an open model for writers and artists to experiment with text and images in print format', which launched in February. I was trying to discuss a broad idea of the academy as I see it playing out in contemporary society. I was also just trying to play around with some ideas I've been having and some different text formats.

You can read my text by clicking on the images below (apologies for dodgy scans, but I'd love to hear what you think!). New Planes is edited by Lisa Lerkenfeldt and Hayley Morgan and is available at stockists in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne (as well as online) for a lowly $3.

For more information and to submit to issue 2, visit newplanes.tumblr.com or contact newplanescult@gmail.com.

Photo of the week, so to speak!

2011-04-08T23:44:00.003+01:00

Sourced via the Really Free School.

Ex-Trendy - Losing Business

2011-04-05T13:36:00.002+01:00

One of my very favourite bands, Ex-Trendy, independently released their first EP in March. I recently received a wonderful little parcel all the way from Sydney from my amazing friends, it contained two copies of their little gem titled Losing Business! Super!

The release is a wonderful seven-track romp through the melodic mental landscape of band members Matte Rochford and Robbie Ho (below, from Sydney and Hong Kong respectively), whose beautiful voices, Latin-infused acoustic guitars and subtle keys (with the sometimes assistance of Reuben James Alexander on drums or harmonica) make for a listening experience that is at once psychotic and relaxing (Poetry Song), melancholic and furious (Battery Low).

Ex-Trendy's songs include lyrics like 'I have a habit of destroying the things I love and losing them, I cut them up with scissors or put them in a treehouse and then it rains' (Losing Things), and 'I was standing in line at the textbook store trying to get some information, I was mixing my mind in computer signs trying to get a new location, I was battering the screen in saliva stream trying to get a breath of air, I was scoping out the scene with a fax machine and a dial tone in my ear' (Textbook Store). Needless to say, the band are as much a lyrical treat as they are a sonic one. I've been a fan since I first saw them play at Stucco in Newtown, Sydney back in 2009 so am very excited for this record.

Ex-Trendy launched Losing Business at the Red Rattler in Marrickville, Sydney on 11 March (see pic above) and at the Wesley Anne in Northcote, Melbourne on 29 March. For more info you can also find Ex-Trendy on Facebook!

Damir Doma, I die

2011-04-03T11:23:00.008+01:00

This is how I'd like to look
Clothes-wise
Clothes, wise

Practic-chic
Indulgent and weighted

Easy, breezy
Ersatz dark
Swoosh

Clear eyes
Nice pound, pony

Hands in pockets
Head tilted, tilting me
Looking up and in

Seeing nothing but beautiful, shiny lights
Protected by my blindness
Watching the world through my eyebrows

Fashion encourages illogical dreaming

Damir Doma, you work the system!

For this is tomorrow

2011-03-29T13:45:00.006+01:00

I wrote a piece for this is tomorrow about Canadian collective General Idea's retrospective at La Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. You can read it by clicking this link:

http://www.thisistomorrow.info/viewArticle.aspx?artId=683&Title=HAUTE%20CULTURE:%20General%20Idea%20%20Une%20r%C3%A9trospective,%201969-1994

Finally Relational Aesthetics explained!

2011-03-27T13:33:00.002+01:00

Thank you, Hennessy Youngman!

Thank you, Gregory Sholette!

Sholette writes in Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (Pluto 2011): '... imaginative expressions of autonomous production have always extended well beyond the realm of the formal art world. Nevertheless, when mainstream cultural institutions try to incorporate transient forms of art, or devise terms to package them, such as "relational aesthetics," the result typically comes off as so many frozen assets, so much art world real estate plopped down on the multi-billion dollar monopoly board.'

Quote of the day, yay!

2011-03-24T12:04:00.003Z

"The face of reality is still evident beneath the thin skin of Glamour. The false eyelashes like false commas punctuate the superficiality of its content."

- General Idea, 1975

LURVE Nº4

2011-03-21T20:08:00.006Z

I did an interview with London-based designers Benjamin Kirchhoff and Edward Meadham of MeadhamKirchhoff way back in July 2010. It was for the fourth issue (Fall/Winter 2010-11) of LURVE magazine, titled 'truisms', which has finally come out and which I've finally managed to scan (albeit badly).

I asked MeadhamKirchhoff about their own designs and motives, as well as their perspective on the workings of the fashion industry and their role within it. The article is paired with a beautiful photo editorial by Ronald Dick.

Click the images to see more and read some!

Claire Fontaine at Air de Paris

2011-03-18T19:48:00.006Z

The best contemporary art exhibition I have seen in a long time was Claire Fontaine's 'No Family Life', which ran from 11 February through 19 March 2011 at Air de Paris.

The work pictured beneath this text is called France (burnt/unburnt). Claire Fontaine describe it thus: 'Cette sculpture a deux aspects : avant et après leur combustion. L’œuvre évoque l’équilibre politique fragile du pays et elle constitue un danger dans son aspect non brûlé car n’importe qui pourrait y mettre le feu.’ [Basically: 'This sculpture has two aspects: before and after combustion. The work evokes the fragile political balance in the country and constitutes a danger in its unburnt state because anyone could light the fire.']

One of the things I appreciated most about this exhibition was that each work had a short explanation like this one above, which appeared after the title on the room-sheet. This is a really helpful way of accessing what could appear otherwise as one of those pretentious contemporary art exhibitions of 'found objects' installed in a white cube from which one is supposed to feel emanating great and profound meaning, but from which one actually usually just feels empty and depressed. (That is, behind the veneer of serious consideration, personal investment and interest, all of which are long-term side-effects of our complete loss of perception in late-capitalist society and certainly within the legitimised Art World). Or probably that's just me.

Anyway, there actually is some great ideas in this art show and I think it's really ace that Fontaine has allowed those to be made clear by way of simple explanations rather than vague allusions or indulgent inanity. Yes, their installations and sculptures are super-clever and necessarily abstract (this is art), but they also manage at the same time to undermine their own super-clever selves and function - through the very fact of their presence in the gallery in combination with these candid texts - as concrete and essential art pieces, as works that actually allow us to think or feel something, rather than being predicated on critical indifference (general numbness).

These works take a side, they have a clear stance and, moreover, one which is made explicit. This is the way we can start waking up from our collective 'dream' (also known as nightmare) and regaining some kind of perspective. Take a position! Be clear! There is no room left for pussy-footing or floaty indifference masked by the supposed desire of untethered, endlessly interpretable signification.

Whether it is via a canvas of Mao's face overlaid with Ikea catalogue text or a white neon window piece flashing "NO", "NO FAMILY", "NO LIFE", "NO FAMILY LIFE", Claire Fontaine hit the proverbial nail - or batter the proverbial ram (i.e. in Untitled (Suspended Battering Ram)), as it were - on the head. In describing the show's title work, Fontaine explains: 'Le néon aborde la question de la famille et des conditions de reproduction de la vie de façon ironique.' ['The neon raises questions of the family and of the conditions of the reproduction of life in an ironic way.'] Indeed.

For more info on Claire Fontaine, see Anthony Huberman's great interview with them for Bomb magazine: http://www.bombsite.com/issues/105/articles/3177.

Quote of the day, yay!

2011-03-12T19:47:00.005Z

"Once it attains the stage of the integrated spectacle, self-proclaimed democratic society seems to be generally accepted as the realisation of a fragile perfection. So that it must no longer be exposed to attacks, being fragile; and indeed is no longer open to attack, being perfect as no other society before it. It is a fragile society because it has great difficulty managing its dangerous technological expansion. But it is a perfect society for governing; and the proof is that all those who aspire to govern want to govern this one, in the same way, changing hardly a thing.

For the first time in contemporary Europe no party or fraction of a party even tries to pretend that they wish to change anything significant. The commodity is beyond criticism: as a general system and even as the particular forms of junk which heads of industry choose to put on the market at any given time.

... We have dispensed with that disturbing conception, which was dominant for over two hundred years, in which a society was open to criticism or transformation, reform or revolution. Not thanks to any new arguments, but quite simply because all argument has become useless.

... Never before has censorship been so perfect. Never before have those who are still led to believe, in a few countries, that they remain free citizens, been less entitled to make their opinions heard, wherever it is a matter of choices affecting their real lives. Never before has it been possible to lie to them so brazenly. The spectator is simply supposed to know nothing, and deserve nothing.

Those who are always watching to see what happens next will never act: such must be the spectator's condition."

- Excerpts from chapter VIII of Comments on the Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, first published in French 1988 (translated to the English by Malcolm Imrie 1990)

Strawberry Skies at Watt Space

2011-03-09T11:20:00.010Z

For those in Newcastle (Australia) and environs I highly recommend you check out Manon Marguerite of Strawberry Skies' first exhibition, which opened today at Watt Space.

Strawberry Skies is the label of Newcastle-based designer Manon Marguerite. Manon's work is inspired by Japanese street fashions and uses both found and self-designed fabrics and materials to create styles that can be assembled into Lolita looks or worn as singular pieces.

All Strawberry Skies garments made individually by the designer, who currently works on a 'pre-order basis, where designs are released then ordered prior to being made.' Far from being typical Lolita-fashion, Manon's prints are inspired by Andy Warhol's soup cans or aliens in space and have names like Fish Bowl, Crayon Box and Odile (more commonly known as the black swan). All Strawberry Skies garments are made in Australia but shipped internationally, you can find more info at m-strawberryskies.com.

The solo exhibition will include both released and unreleased designs as well as Strawberry Skies photo-shoots such as these above (photos by Manon Marguerite & Luke Marshall). To see some of the stuff inspiring Strawberry Skies, visit Manon's Tumblr at strawberryskies.tumblr.com.

Despite some help from friends with photography, Manon is very much a one-woman show. She designs, makes, markets and manages all Strawberry Skies business herself, even down to the website design and brand identity. Support her by heading down to Watt Space, corner of Auckland and King Streets in Newcastle, for the opening event tomorrow, Thursday 10 March, from 18:30.

And give her a kiss from me!

For K A L E I D O S C O P E blog!

2011-03-06T23:03:00.004Z

I wrote a piece for K A L E I D O S C O P E blog! about Copenhagen-based artist Al Masson's latest exhibition at Le Commissariat in Paris. You can read it here:

http://kaleidoscopeoffice.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/al-masson’s-cbo-concept-at-le-commissariat-paris-by-eleanor-weber/

The tragic tale of John Galliano and other fables

2011-03-01T17:31:00.012Z

Actor Natalie Portman is 'shocked and disgusted', Scott Schuman (The Sartorialist blogger) thinks he sees 'a sad man willing to say anything to hurt others as a desperate cry for help', Dior CEO Sidney Toledano declares that what Galliano said 'totally contradicts the values which have always been defended by Christian Dior', Vogue Italia Editor-in-Chief, Franca Sozzani says Galliano 'was clearly provoked, and filmed, while obviously inebriated', Giorgio Armani apparently 'feels sorry' for the British designer, while Lisa Armstrong of The Times wrote 'to see the man entrusted with one of France’s most venerated labels spouting the views of the most ignorant white supremacist is shocking'.

Whatever you might conclude from this fifty year old fashion designer's recent remarks in Paris, there is more than meets the eye in this sorry, wretched tale.

Beside the obviously problematic 'I love Hitler', the smug surgically-enhanced visage, and the slurring alcohol-infused voice (all of which, in another context or circumstance could be somehow excused) this guy and this whole fiasco represent so much of what is wrong with the world.

Unfortunately, this little pimple in Dior's smooth veneer has not been heralded as an example of the fashion industry's utter introspection nor, by extension, that of any other exploitative, consumptive and indoctrinating industry whose profit-margins are higher than your average education budget. Equally, it has not been noted that hierarchy-based systems such as these - where the likes of Galliano attain bizarre demi-god status to the extent that they lose all sense of self-, community- or world-perspective (i.e. maybe some perspective which is not predicated on fashion cycles, ludicrous pay-checks, Augusts spent in St. Tropez, etc.) - are one of the primary problems in society today and should be disencouraged not reinforced by this kind of propaganda-cum-media circus (I join the swarm) which now surrounds Christian Dior, Mr. Galliano, and indeed the potential successors to the helm of Ship Dior.

What's more, no-one has seemed to flinch about the fact that everyone has suddenly decided to get on their high-horse about anti-semitism coming from a drunk fashion designer, when many of the world's so-called leaders are prepared to support wars where thousands of innocent civilians are killed in the name of supposed democracy in a war 'on terror' and contra Islam (read: Iraq war).

I suppose it's more interesting for us to be talking about some rich white guy who has said he loves Hitler than the racist policies such as Australia's Northern Territory 'Intervention' into Aboriginal communities, France's anti-burkha regulations, the genocide occurring in Africa every day due to diseases effectively funded by US pharmaceutical companies, the United Kingdom's (and most other so-called First World states') draconian measures to limit immigration to their shores (unless you're super-rich of course), the negligent response by those in power to environmental disasters (often the product of what is called Western 'progress') that occur in countries and cities too poor or exploited to help themselves, the capital punishment of homosexuality in countries such as Sudan and Iran (it is at points like these we see the hypocrisy of 'liberal' Western corporations like Givenchy so proudly using the face of a transgender model to sell clothes), or the utter poverty of people from former-Soviet countries like Armenia whose governments exploit their people (nothing new there) and report prosperity to the flaccid ears of rich Western 'democracies'.

I could go on but, sorry, did someone mention fascism?

Quote of the day, yay!

2011-02-20T00:52:00.000Z

"... as soon as the contradiction ceases, life too comes to an end and death steps in."

- Susan Hiller, Monument, 1980-1

Hard and soft, colour and not

2011-02-19T23:43:00.000Z

Three beautiful collections
Three ideas for Autumn - all pointing one way
Instead of a 'trend' let's call it a balancing act
Everything and nothing
Fashion turns and surely something has to remain?
Something relevant, a message
Something important for our times

I'm still thinking
But, in the meantime, these are beautiful clothes

Quote of the day, yay!

2011-02-08T10:42:00.001Z

"The idea that we can or should plan every single possibility of our lives in advance is a very contemporary but perhaps also reactionary idea. It’s just impossible. No one can know how one would react to the next insurrection, whether one will be the protagonist or the enemy of those who are rebelling. Those who pretend to be able to do so are prisoners of an ideology. We have no regrets right now, but of course the situation can and should be transformed. In fact, revolutionary moments are times when priorities automatically change. Then you never have to ask yourself, Do I go there or not? What will happen to me if I do this? You just can’t help being where you have to be; nothing can stop people from taking the side that has to be theirs. There is no hesitation in decisive moments, and if there is, this is already a political position."

-Artist Claire Fontaine in conversation with Anthony Huberman for BOMB magazine, Fall 2008

Dearest Of Dearest

2011-02-06T11:48:00.001Z

Exhibition of the work of New York-based photographer and RRN favourite Ruvan Wijesooriya opening on Wednesday 9 February from 19:00 at ION Studio on Wooster Street. Go!

And check out the invitation:

PARATAXIS twelve

2011-02-05T14:13:00.000Z

Sydney-based artist Rosita Holmes contributed four painting-collages to parataxis. Rosita works a lot with found magazine images which she reappropriates into new combinations and pairs with other materials such as paint (here), thread or clear vinyl. The other side of her practice includes long-durational performance installations in which the artist herself is the object and the residue is large-scale photographs or films of the installation. These images themselves are at once records of an event and art-objects in their own right.

Thank you, Rosi!

New Planes Public Press #1

2011-02-02T01:44:00.004Z

New Planes Public Press launch their first issue, Obvious Viewing, this Thursday night (3 February) from 21h at GOODGOD Small Club in Sydney. The event includes sounds from Djanimals and Kirin J. Callinan plus a free copy of New Planes with entry!

Editors Lisa Lerkenfeldt and Hayley Morgan write on their website that 'New Planes Public Press is an open model for writers and artists to experiment with text and images in print format. As an outlet for liberal thinking, critical news and alternative transmissions, the broadsheet blurs boundaries, overlaps interests and explores the relationship between a generation and it’s press.' This issue seems jam-packed with some great stuff, features include:

The Internet by Mary MacDougall, My Dream Place by Olle Holmberg, Bottle by Max Creasy, Duppy Housing by Dylan Martorell & Christopher L G Hill, Becuming Soon by Jack Jeweller, Tom Polo by Serena Bentley, Poems by Phoebe Loomes, The Third Wheel by Jackson Eaton, Hany Armanious by Lisa Lerkenfeldt, Meeting Milos Mali by Hayley Morgan, Accidental Still Life by Matthew Hopkins, and Hanging out on Lake Flacid by Tim Moore, plus much more!

If you can't make it on Thursday night, New Planes is available at these nice places in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne for $3. Bargain!

ANGST Issue Two

2011-01-30T12:49:00.008Z

Back in March 2010 I made a post about the launch of ANGST magazine's first issue, which included Cyprien Gaillard, Anastasia Freygang, Marko Righo, River Phoenix, and Alexandra Catiere, among others. Well now, January 2011, the second issue of ANGST has been launched and again presents us with a beautiful and intriguing array of artists, photographers and writers, all of whose work deals in some way with the publication's current theme of movement.

ANGST editor, Fiona Bryson, writes that 'Angst is a publication focusing on art, photography and counterculture', and it seems that the idea is for each issue to open up further questions about aesthetics and their relation to countercultures of different temporalities and geographies. In this issue, for example, Bryson has put the famous Teenage and Almost Grown works of Joseph Szabo (above) beside Leigh Ledare's Pretend You're Actually Alive series (below), which was exhibited at Pilar Corrias Gallery in 2010.

Also included in ANGST Issue Two are photographs by Hanayo of her daughter (below), Hugh Holland's images of 1970's Californian skate-culture, works by Austrian artist Marina Faust, and Miles Standish's photographs of the 1980's Melbourne underground scene. In addition, there are texts by Hannes Schmidt & Sophie-Therese Trenka-Dalton, Mike Brodie and Bryson herself.

ANGST magazine is stocked in selected book stores in Berlin, London, Los Angeles, New York, Palm Springs, Paris, Vancouver, Tokyo and Zurich - so plenty of chances to get your hands on a copy!

ra in Paris

2011-01-27T10:42:00.010Z

ra is a one year old fashion concept store/kitchen/gallery/venue, a space where design, photography, installation, music and performance meet, and where fashion becomes more than the promotion of ‘trends’ and begins to question the way we dress and offer alternative ways of perceiving image. The store is based in Antwerp and deals with young and emerging designers and artists from all over the world.

ra’s contribution to Paris’ Fall-Winter 2011-12 menswear Fashion Week was a showroom of sixteen contributors, each creatively installed or presented to bear a meaning and not just passively display. The event opened on the 21st and ran through the 24th of this month. A massive crowd attended the opening event at the rue de la Corderie location to see wonderful designs, experience performance by Nicola Testa, Tony Hornecker & Romain Brau, and drink a whole lot of absinthe!

Some of my favourites include Kevin Kramp’s androgynous and oversized wool pieces (above), Telfar’s simple yet innovative cotton and jersey basics (below), the hand-woven leather pieces of Daniel Andresen and the large-scale tableau-like images of Frederik Heyman (bottom).

ra continues to work with some of the most exciting emerging designers in the world, has regularly changing installations in their Antwerp space, experimental showrooms during Paris fashion weeks, and performative events around Europe. Keep your eye on ra, this is fashion starting to move again.

PARATAXIS eleven

2011-01-14T13:20:00.004Z

Sydney-based Pure Evil played their first gig at parataxis on 22 October 2009.

Pure Evil are Jack Dunbar and Caroline De Dear.

After almost a year hiatus Pure Evil have started playing and making music again and I'm excited to see what they come up with. Jack wrote recently: "I would like to build a summer collection of songs to play through till winter but I want to make them purely from field recordings, very indexical. I'd love to get totally anal about labelling all the samples with the date and time (to the second) they were made and their location (possibly by latitudinal/longitudinal values)."

Can't wait to hear! But in the meantime check out Redtree:

flash MP3 player

Quote(s) of the day, yay!

2011-01-11T15:03:00.007Z

'Dressed up in a benign rhetoric of egalitarian progressiveness (now everyone can be educated – and in debt!), the blithe snobbery of the government’s position can be sampled by glancing at an article by Michael Gove, now Education Secretary, from 2003: “Anyone put off from attending a good university by fear of that debt doesn’t deserve to be at any university in the first place.” The arrogance and privilege of this statement beggars belief. It is utterly obscene that a post-war generation who enjoyed free education as a democratic right can now, while in government (as a result of that free higher education), condemn future generations to a lifetime of liability.'

- Claire Bishop, Con-Demmed to the Bleakest of Futures: Report from the UK in e-flux journal #22

&

'What we have witnessed in our own time is the death of universities as centres of critique. Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has been to service the status quo, not challenge it in the name of justice, tradition, imagination, human welfare, the free play of the mind or alternative visions of the future. … there is no university without humane inquiry, which means that universities and advanced capitalism are fundamentally incompatible. And the political implications of that run far deeper than the question of student fees.'

- Terry Eagleton, The death of universities in The Guardian, 17 December 2010

Pruitt-Igoe

2011-01-07T14:52:00.006Z

Picture of the future? Picture of the past?

Pruitt-Igoe was a post-WW2 urban housing project located in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. It was designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki (of World Trade Center fame) and completed in 1955.

There are varying arguments as to why it occurred - from architectural failure to social and political tensions in St. Louis - but within a year the buildings were largely vacant and living conditions had rapidly decayed. Pruitt-Igoe became somewhat of a ghetto of poverty, crime and segregation.

In 1972 the federal government decided to begin demolishing the development, a process which would last four years.

One could compare Yamasaki's Pruitt-Igoe project to Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation in Marseille, France, which was completed a few years earlier in 1952.

Wikipedia says: "according to the planning principles of Le Corbusier and the International Congress of Modern Architects, [Pruitt-Igoe] residents were raised up to 11 floors above ground in an attempt to save the grounds and ground floor space for communal activity".

Unfortunately, and we still see this today, it seems the very opposite occurred. These high-rise unit-based buildings promoted isolation and tension much more than the supposed unification and community their architects aspired to.

I wonder what real community looks like in 2011?

Season's greeting (2o1o-zoll)

2010-12-31T00:10:00.001Z

Quote of the day, yay! (Becoming-Political Bodies)

2010-12-28T14:07:00.008Z

"The only thing left is pleasure.
Next time they kettle us the only thing to do is reclaim it. Make the kettle ours. In the face of a wall of Police in armour and on horses the only thing left to do is love.
Get that animal off that horse!
Take to the streets.
When they kettle us, we'll enjoy it. When they trap us we'll get off on it. When they intimidate us we'll rub it in their faces by letting them turn us on.
Next time in the kettle the only thing to do is to start kissing. When they stand ready to fight, we need to be ready to love.
I mean it."

- Owen Parry (AKA Banshee Boy)

(Click pic for link.)

PARATAXIS ten

2010-12-26T22:01:00.006Z

Sydney-based artist Matte Rochford's contribution to parataxis was an 'installation for VHS tape, VCR, monitor and stool'.

The footage played on the monitor was found VHS material re-edited via multiple VCR plays/playbacks and then re-recorded onto one master parataxis tape. Very much the product of a given time and running approximately four hours, the resulting images incorporate traditional VHS motifs like the rainbow screen, time countdown, and pre-film shorts as well as random snippets of news or sports events.

The accompanying sound - projected solely from the old TV monitor - is equally derived haphazardly from whatever footage Matte happened to be using and thus depends on things like number of re-recordings. At times one could hear but a low murmur, whilst at others loud, seemingly random noises interpolated the space.

Matte works largely with performance and out-of-date technology and consequently does really interesting things with alarm clocks, TVs, VCRs and mobile phones. One performance includes setting dozens of alarm clocks at varying times to create a sonorous landscape of interruptions whilst Matte performs his poetry.

To keep up-to-date visit Matte's blog: txtme.blogspot.com

(W)Inter-watching: Jodi Dean, Chto delat?

2010-12-17T22:07:00.009Z

Two things to see before 2010 is over, a great combination (together they only take one hour and twenty minutes of your time, and really worth it!):

1) Jodi Dean's talk at the Former West congress in Istanbul this November, titled The Communist Horizon.

2) Chto Delat's most recent film, Tower: A Songspiel (2010)

Jodi Dean is a Political Theorist based in Geneva, New York, USA. Chto delat? is a political theory/art/activist collective based in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Quote of the day, yay!

2010-12-14T19:42:00.002Z

"The religious and the aesthetic sensibilities have been identified by the dominant culture as two attitudes potentially antithetical to power. Accordingly, culture has absorbed them into two major frameworks of power: the religious and the artistic institutions."

- Carla Lonzi, 'Let's Spit on Hegel', first published in Revolta Femminile 1970, sourced from May #4)

Valeska Gert

2010-12-10T12:24:00.013Z

I came across Berlin-born artist Valeska Gert (1892–1978) only very recently and was surprised I'd never heard of her before (not because I'm usually so knowledgeable but because she's really amazing and perhaps deserves to be better known!).

She currently has an exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, which is how I discovered her. The show is titled Pause. Valeska Gert: Moving Fragments and runs until 6 February 2011.

The gallery says that her work is about 'perception' - whether she is working in dance, theatre, art, music or film - and the exhibition explores this idea via Gert's work and that of others who 'also tackle the phenomenon of perception', like Marcel Duchamp, Valie Export and Jenny Holzer (below).

For my part, I just found Gert's way of speaking, dealing with an interview/talking about her work, as well as the images she created to be incredibly intriguing and powerful. I can't even remember exactly what she was saying or doing but it was good! And I guess that's exactly how 'the structures and effects of perception' work - moving away from 'understanding' and towards purely perceiving. Valeska Gert is wild!

[For those who understand German, this video might be interesting!]

PARATAXIS nine

2010-12-08T22:16:00.004Z

Sydney-based artist Mary MacDougall contributed two works to parataxis, a glass painting exhibited with tiles on a shelf and series of photographs (taken through glass) that were projected on a loop (through glass).

Mary describes herself as a painter but, in addition to canvas and oils, she works with less usual materials such as glass, tile and chalk. Her practice also incorporates photography, sculpture, certain kinds of installation, writing, music, publication and the Internet. Mary has an impeccable book collection and runs an awesome blog called Picture Mound, for which she selects photographs from the Guardian website and reassembles them to create unexpected connections between images, cultures and events.

Mary recently had a solo show at db, an artist-run space in Sydney, and will next be exhibited in a group show in Melbourne titled The Zero Dollar Show, which opens in January and will also include works from Bababa International, Charlie Sofo and Zanny Begg, among others.

I was super happy that Mary agreed to be involved with parataxis. I find that her subtle gestures abstract materials and images in a way that is not gratuitous but rather curious and generous. The results are works that give to a space and the people occupying it, more than imposing themselves or demanding reactions.

For this is tomorrow

2010-12-01T16:57:00.008Z

I wrote a piece for this is tomorrow about London-based artist Lydia Gifford's latest exhibition at Marcelle Alix gallery. You can read it here:

http://www.thisistomorrow.info/viewArticle.aspx?artId=558&Title=Lydia%20Gifford:%20Brackets