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Book Review – Art & Activism in the Age of Globalization
Posted on December 28th, 2011 • Filed under Look • No Comments
Art & Activism in the Age of Globalization: Reflect No. 8, edited by Lieven de Cauter, Ruben de Roo and Karel Vanhaesebrouck (available on amazon USA
NAI Publishers says: Should artists be activists? Is activist art one of an artist’s primary responsibilities or a pointless sideshow on the fringes of serious politics? The philosopher, writer and art historian Lieven de Cauter, Ruben de Roo and Karel Vanhaesebrouck explore this theme in collaboration with other thinkers and doers in his new book Art and Activism in the Age of Globalization.
In a time of globalization, populism, hypercapitalism, migration, War on Terror, and global warming, artistic engagement is vital. Art and Activism in the Age of Globalization takes the measure of contemporary activist art. What is the role of art and activism in the polarized, populist society of the spectacle? Art & Activism examines both the criticism of engagement as a mere pose and the need for cultural activism in today’s society. Urban activism and activism by anonymous networks are also investigated. Special attention is devoted to the effects of the War on Terror on activism in practice. The book concludes with a theoretical framework for contemporary activism and an impassioned plea for genuinely political art.
Errorist International, Operation BANG!, 2005
It is traditional in the blogosphere (is anyone still using this word?) to close the year with a ‘best of’ post listing the 10 most popular stories, the best exhibitions seen, the gadgets that have changed our life. I wish i could do it, it’s excellent for traffic. Alas! i have the memory of a mongoose and i’m too lazy to go through the archives of the blog. But i can safely declare that the best book i’ve read in 2011 was Art & Activism in the Age of Globalization.
A number of books about art and activism have landed on my doorstep over the past few years but this is the first one that takes as its premise the fact that activism, protest, subversion, disruption, criticism, community, resistance, etc. have become little more than buzzwords. Punk has lost its bite and essence and is now little more than a fashion trend. Che Guevara is more famous for the t-shirts his face sells than for the role he played in the Cuban Revolution. Subversion has been the cornerstone of Madonna’s rise to pop power for decades. The discursive fringe has reached the mainstream. Resistance is hip! Subversion is cool!
The popularity of these terms have depleted them from any meaning or strength. Well almost… Today you can land a commission or assignment from public institutions and private sponsors by writing application that claims that your ‘subversive’ artwork will raise ‘a healthy debate in the community’.
The editors of the book have therefore found it necessary to come up with a new word to define a powerful strategy that connects art and political engagement: subversivity. Subversivity is a disruptive attitude that tries to create openings, possibilities in the ‘closedness’ of a system.
The quality of the book extends way beyond its premise. Art & Activism in the Age of Globalization is composed of 30 essays by artists, art historians, philosophers, cultural critics, social scientists, curators, theatre directors, etc. I expected at least one or two of these texts to be bland, too scholarly, or cliché. But all i read was solid and relevant. There were a few repetitions but i never grew tired of the thoughts, experiments and ideas shared in the book.
The texts jumped from one discipline to another: visual art, theatre, architecture, hacktivism, urbanism, performances. They discussed artistic and activist practice in Europe and North America of course but also in Syria (exploring the form activism can take in a country where public activity is closely monitored by the State), South Africa, Argentina and other countries which ought to appear more often on the contemporary art map.
Unlike many books i review on the blog, this one contains very few images. Two to be precise and that includes the one on the cover. I didn’t really miss the images and discovered a few artistic/activist projects that would have deserved an individual post:
Renzo Martens, still from Episode 3, 2008
Renzo Martens, still from Episode 3, 2008
Ruben De Roo takes Renzo Martens’ film Enjoy Poverty as a platform to explore how artists can stimulate the political consciousness of the consumers of tragedies that we (‘Western’ audiences) are. A few years ago, Martens went to the Democratic Republic of Congo to launch a two-year project that examined the exploitation of one of Africa’s major exports: images of poverty and suffering. The artist traveled with a blue neon billboard that read ENJOY POVERTY and worked with Congolese photographers, teaching them how to sell images of suffering to Western media and aid agencies.
Christoph Schlingensief, Bitte liebt Österreich / Please Love Austria, 2000 (Image: Baltzer)
Christoph Schlingensief, Bitte liebt Österreich / Please Love Austria, 2000 (Photo © Paul Poet)
In their remarkably powerful and compelling essay, members of the collective BAVO call for socially committed artists to abandon “NGO art” (mostly art devoid of any political stand for fear of loosing subsidies) and urged them to be ‘really political’ by developing strategies and practices of resistances that stretch the limits of their discipline in the direction of radical politics. They gave Christoph Schlingensief’s Please Love Austria as a meaningful example of art engaging with politics:
In 2000, shortly after Jörg Haider’s far right party became part of the Austrian government, Christoph Schlingensief set up a camp for asylum seekers in a shipping container outside the Vienna Opera House. Twelve asylum seekers lived in the container for 6 days, their lives streamed over the web in a kind of Big Brother show, and the audience were invited to vote their least favourite players to exit the container and be deported to their native country. Decorated with a banner saying Ausländer Raus! (‘Foreigners out!’), the container became a flashpoint in Austria’s national and racial debate. One of the outcome of the work is that, at the end of the show, antifascist action groups stormed the container and freed the immigrants (who were actually actors.)
Alfredo Jaar, Lights in the City, in 1999
Gie Goris mentions Alfredo Jaar‘s Lights in the City as an example of art work that fuels a debate in society and unsettles without resorting to easy provocation.
The artist installed red light on the Copula of the Marche Bonsecours, a landmark monument in the centre of Montreal. The lights were connected to homeless shelters located 500 yards from the building. When a homeless person entered one of the shelters, they could press the button that would make the top of the building glow red.
Eventually all the shelters for homeless people in Montreal could be wired and connected to the Cupola. This way, a major landmark and historical monument in the city would be acting as a non-stop lighthouse, producing endless, painful distress signals to society. With enough media coverage and public outrage and support triggered by these ongoing distress signals, homelessness could be completely eradicated from Montreal, Jaar explained.
The strategy worked so well that the commissioning authority ended the intervention.
The book ends with the most honest plea: to burn the book (or burn your brain) because subversion (or subversivity) can be undermined by essays, books, intellectual jargon and ‘radical’ theories.
Image on the homepage: Errorist International, Operation Bang!, 2005. Action in Mar de Plata, Argentina. Courtesy of the Etcétera Archive.
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Excerpt from “Take This Book: The People’s Library at Occupy Wall Street”
Posted on December 20th, 2011 • Filed under Look • No Comments
An excerpt from Take This Book: The People’s Library at Occupy Wall Street, an extended essay by Melissa Gira Grant, forthcoming in print, epub, and as a Kindle single. Available to support on Kickstarter.
Instagram Photo by Melissa Gira Grant
“Philosophically,” Jaime, one of the librarians, said, “the books stay with the occupation.”
There had been a dry run, too, the night the Occupiers prepared for the city to evict them. On October 13, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that Brookfield Properties, which legally owned the park, wanted to clean Zuccotti, and the Occupiers anticipated that the mayor would also send in the New York Police Department to remove them. So the Occupiers took this order both graciously and defiantly: They would clean the park themselves, and early in the morning, when the cops and the cleaners were to arrive, the Occupiers would refuse to leave. Someone posted an invitation to Facebook on the day of the cleanup, calling people to gather before Wall Street’s opening bell, and to bring brooms and mops and pails. All day, wearing ponchos and latex gloves, Occupiers scrubbed the stone steps of Zuccotti, swept the grounds, and straightened their camp’s stations. As night fell, some of the camp’s infrastructure was evacuated: most of the Kitchen, the Media Center, and almost all of the sleeping bags, foam mats, and blankets that people weren’t using at that moment, and at that moment, the moment I entered the park, just after two in the morning on the day we’d been told we’d be evicted, a dozen or two people were still curled up on mats, plastic tarps drawn over their faces, in the swells of rain that joined us as we arrived in the park, that took us down the clean stone steps leading to Broadway, and that ran two-inches deep and quick, into my boots and into the blankets of the few people still trying to sleep.
But near those stone steps, just off to the north side of the park, along Liberty Street, was the library. It was still there, raised up on clear plastic bins, taped over with tarps covered in slogans. That afternoon and into the night, a librarian named Stephen Boyer prepared it: lining up the boxes and taping down the tarps. If someone had slashed into the plastic, she would have seen yards and yards of books, lined up in their clear plastic bins, and there would be no doubt that what she had discovered had been ordered, taken care of, and if doubt still remained, then there was the poetry written on the tarps, too.
The covered-up mass of the library stretched at least 20 feet in length, five or so feet high, a dull-blue mound gleaming with rain that sheltered those of us sitting beside it. There was the woman with the ash-blond curls and the good boots and trench coat, a media badge around her neck, who, each time I looked up at her over the course of hours, could be found rolling a cigarette on the top of her suitcase. There were the three of us—my protest pals for the night, Darryl and Joanne —talking and pacing and inadvertently sleeping on the stone bench set into the wall along Liberty, which was where I always told people who were coming to the park for the first time to meet me. We didn’t talk about where we were going—I just led us there, and we sat. Darryl had two onions in his canvas tote bag because when he had been in Tahrir Square that summer, he had learned that if they use tear gas against you, you should bite into an onion to counteract the gas. Every 10 minutes, I thought I might throw up because nobody knew if or when the cops were coming, how many there would be, how they would move or remove us. So that was how I ended up spending hours in the library, with the library, and woke from a soft sleep around half past four as someone called out Mic Check! and asked for help carrying the library to a van parked down Broadway. I don’t know how many hands came forward to do it, but the transfer was done in just a few minutes and then nothing but a corkboard was left on the stone bench where the library began.
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Can Search Data Be Used to Choose Book Ideas?
Posted on October 28th, 2011 • Filed under Learn • No Comments
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.
Name: Hyperink
Quick Pitch: An ebook publisher that develops titles based on existing demand.
Genius Idea: Bloggers, content farms and news publishers alike have long leveraged search trends to uncover the information people are looking for and profited accordingly. But can the same model be applied to book publishing?
McKinsey alum Kevin Gao, whose startup Hyperink announced its first significant ($1.2 million) round of funding this week, believes so. (And so do his investors, apparently.)
Book publishers, he says, too often choose what to publish based on what they like rather than what they know will sell. Hyperink will instead find out what people want to read, largely by sifting through short and long-range search data. The company will then find authors to write short, highly targeted books on the topics people are searching for information about.
Think How to Get Into Yale rather than How to Get Into College, or a short history on Apple founder and former CEO Steve Jobs around the time of his death.
Hyperink is also welcoming pitches from aspiring authors, promising design, editing and marketing services in exchange for 50% of the royalties. Gao says the company is also interested in partnering experts who are less inclined to write their own books with journalists to co-author books.
Books are generally priced in the $15 to $25 range — a bit on expensive side for ebooks, but on the low end for business books.
Gao added that all of Hyperink’s books to date have been profitable within the first year of publication.
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.
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Before the New York Art Book Fair
Posted on September 27th, 2011 • Filed under Look • No Comments
The sixth edition of the New York Art Book Fair is approaching, taking
place at MoMA PS1 between September 30 and October 2. At a time when the idea
of publishing and the production of print media are constantly discussed, the
New York Art Book Fair allows us a yearly survey of efforts in the field of art
publishing, as well as the ability to reevaluate and reconsider publishing
houses and projects that interest us on a regular basis, and a variety of
events, from book signings to lectures and screenings.
The Fair features more than two hundred exhibitors: publishers,
magazines, independent artists, art institutions, and distributors. In order to
facilitate wandering through this expansive event, we rounded up a selection of
publishing initiatives, highlighting those that survey new media art, have a
strong online presence, or use technology in interesting ways.
Piracy Project / AND Publishing. Based in London, the Piracy Project is
a publishing and exhibition project that organizes workshops, lectures, and
open calls for pirated book projects, all directed at creating a platform from
which to think about ideas of copying, re-editing, paraphrasing, and so forth.
Badlands Unlimited. Founded by artist Paul Chan, Badlands
Unlimited publishes both e-books and physical artists’ books. The e-books are
interactive and unlike many other art e-books, take full advantage of what the
technology offers by including text, images, and films. See Sarah Hromack’s interview with Paul Chan here.
Half Letter Press. Initiated by Chicago-based collective
Temporary Services, Half Letter Press has an online reading room with some of
the best links on the internet, and they publish and distribute books on art
and theory.
Eikon is a bilingual German-English journal published in Vienna
that focuses on photography and new media art.
Fillip, published in Vancouver, cover critical writing and
thinking about contemporary art. They have a strong online presence with
podcasts, news, and articles, but also publish a print biannual magazine as
well as a series of books.
Paraguay Press (castillo/corrales). This Paris-based
space and publishing house is managed by a group of artists, writers, and
curators that produce castillo/corrales and Section 7 Books. They publish
artists’ writing, theory, catalogues, and the journal MAY.
Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory is an Utrecht-based space whose
publications initiative include the magazine Casco Issues, as well as books.
mono.kultur. Each issue of mono.kultur is simply one
interview with one artist, writer, filmmaker, etc. Past issues include artists
like Taryn Simon, Ai Weiwei, Cyprien Gaillard, and Ryan Mcginley.
SKOR, the Amsterdam foundation publishes Open, a journal on art
and public domain.
Bureau for Open Culture reconsider the exhibition and the
diffusion of knowledge in the art world. The books, manuals, and other
publications are all available as PDFs on their website as well. See the
interview with its director and curator James Voorhies in Rhizome here.
The Serving Library is a new project by Dexter Sinister, an
online archive of downloadable texts and a small library space in New York.
A selection
of programs and events during the fair:
Friday, September 30
5:45 PM
Artists’ zones
pecha kucha: ten five-minute artist presentations.
Sunday, October 2
12:00 PM
Screening:
Typographic Matchmaking in the City.
1:00 PM
The Internet
of Things: Volume Magazine contributors discuss the topic of Volume #28.
6:00 PM
Confessions of
a Book Thief, a presentation by artists Paul Branca and David Horvitz.
Ongoing:
Zine Swap: artist Ryan Foerster hosts a zine
trade-up at PS1′s courtyard throughout the fair.
Book Coop: e-flux’s book coop, a mobile home featuring publications by over 200
international art centers, artist-run spaces, and independent publishers,
will be present at the courtyard.
40 ARTISTS
/ 40 WORKS / 40 YEARS: in celebration of the fortieth anniversary of
Electronic Arts Intermix, a series of screening will take place in the Basement
Vault throughout the fair, showing forty works by forty artists from the last
forty years.
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