Let’s face it – “sustainability” is a ruined word. How many times do we suppose BP used it (and will, O Lord, in the future) explaining its green integrity to the world? The Sea Shepherd Society has a different approach: law enforcement as provided for in the United Nations World Charter for Nature.
The Sea Shepherd Society’s tactics are controversial – tree spiking, sinking whaling vessels (without loss of life; unlike the sinking of GreenPeace’s Rainbow Warrior by the French government that killed photographer Fernando Pereira), sinking drift nets, bombing whalers with custard, directly charging whalers and tuna fishers, putting its boats and crews between whales and industrial harpoons. But its modis operandi is consistent: monkey wrench the illegal destruction of nature.
In most instances of high seas piracy – piracy, that is, in the sense of unrestricted and unaccountable harvesting on the open oceans to the point of extinction – the Sea Shepherd Society is the only agency acting directly against the perpetrators of the wholesale slaughter of marine life. It is considered in some quarters to be a mature response to an economic system that refuses to police itself and to discipline its urges for short term reward and pleasure.
This Saturday July 31, the Riverside Municipal Auditorium in Riverside, California is hosting the See No Evil Art Auction in support of the Sea Shepherd Society’s busy agenda. There is a long list of donating artists, and music by ‘the crystal method’ and DJ Diabetic.
6 pm at the Corner of Mission Inn and Lemon in Riverside,3485 Mission Inn Ave, Riverside, CA 92501-3304.
For those who cannot make it to California for the thrill of rubbing shoulders with the glitterati of radical sustainability, check out the Sea Shepherd’s online store. You can even order the a Sea Shepherd VISA Platinum Rewards Card!! shop till you drop and help enforce the UN World Charter for Nature.
Artist Wu Yuren has been arrested, beaten and is being held in a Beijing jail according to his wife, Canadian Karen Patterson. Patterson decided to make her appeal through the Western media to draw attention to her husband’s plight.
According to the New York Times, despite his being detained, the Chinese government has yet to admit they even have Yuren in their custody.
Last winter Yuren joined other artists in their opposition to urban development in the neighbourhood of Beijing that housed their studios, District 8. The development plan subsequently allowed the seizure of their studios by authorities. Their highly visible protest went past Tiananmen Square, a particularly sensitive region of the city in connection with public demonstrations of dissent.
The Daily Telegraph (one of the UKs largest daily newspapers, owned by real estate billionaires David and Frederick Barclay) reported that the current arrest came about after Yuren – whose studio had been relocated – attended at a local police station to complain about problems with his landlord. After a fractious interaction with the police, he was beaten and detained.
The brutal police response may be linked to the activist histories of Yuren and some of the other artists involved in the original protest against the development plan, many of whom have signed Charter 08, a manifesto demanding a variety of political changes in China including an independent legal system, freedom of association and the elimination of one-party rule. Charter 8 is not so popular with the current administration.
Yuren’s work has been widely appreciated as an element of the most innovative art being produced in China today. In the Imperial Criminal (2001) series, for example, Yuren displays twelve passport-like blue tinted photographs with fluorescent brands stamped on their foreheads to indicate ancient/modern crimes – the brand is exposed when placed under ultra-violet light. In The Sparks Program (10,000 Years Art Exhibition, Oct 2005), seven labourers strike a pile of flint in a dark space for three hours with metal batons, producing a heavy knocking sound with flying sparks – a commentary on the situation of peasant construction workers in Beijing’s real estate boom. And in connection with his resistance to land development, he transformed White Box Museum of Art into a large demolition site. According to ML Art Source (a Beijing-based promotional website for contemporary Chinese art with the self-stated goal of serving as “a platform that will bridge the art to the people and the people to the art”) the controversial nature of Yuren’s installation at the White Box has ensured that there is little information available about it.
It may be that this story is being reported in such high profile mainstream media sites because of his wife Karen Patterson’s Canadian citizenship. For more information and to keep up to date you can follow Karen Patterson’s twitter feed @KPinChina.
Originally posted as “Demise of the Film Council” at Putney Debater
There is something very seriously rotten in the State when the Government can decide to abolish the Film Council to save £15m a year at the same time that the head of BP is said to be about to take a severance package of approaching the same amount. The disparity is all the more striking when you register that while BP is writing off more than £20 billion to pay for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the Film Council has been responsible for allocating a mere £160m of Lottery funding to more than 900 films which have entertained over 200 million people and helped to generate over £700 million at the box office worldwide, or almost £5 for every £1 of Lottery money thus invested.
Part of a raft of cost-cutting measures at the DCMS involving the merger, abolition or streamlining of 55 cultural organizations ranging from advisory bodies on libraries and museums to historic wrecks and ships, the move has angered a lot of people: a petition set up as soon as the news came out garnered 1000 signatures within two hours, as well as a couple of Twitter streams. [Latest: 3739 signatures.]
Pamela Anderson is in Montreal to host a gala event for Just for Laughs and had planned on unveiling her new PETA advert/poster as well. It turns out the city of Montreal thinks the poster is sexist and is prohibiting its going up. You can judge for yourself (above), but it all begs the question on who decides what is appropriate and how they decide what is and isn’t in our public sphere. It seems that when it’s a poster for selling phones, lingerie, shoes, or beer, apparently scantily clad women get the green light. When it’s a poster promoting People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, it’s just dirty and wrong. Thoughts?
Dennis, Massachusetts (40 minutes from Woods Hole) resident David MacGuire organizes screenings of Al-Qaeda training videos that help to rally the community against non-Muslims in a vicious orgy of pro-terrorism, hatred and violence.
The above statement is pure fabrication. I don’t know MacGuire personally, and don’t know (or care) what he does in his free time. But I do know that he is prone to constructing a fictitious reality about a documentary group I am connected with in Woods Hole called Cinema Politica. MacGuire’s recent opinion piece in the Cape Cod Times is a propagandistic piece of fear-mongering that has unfortunately entered the public sphere with the unfortunate headline “Cinema Politica promotes anti-Semitism and hatred.” His opinion piece was published days after an editorial by the newspaper entitled, “Resume the film series,” in response to the recent decision by the Woods Hole Community Association to revoke Cinema Politica Woods Hole’s privileges to show films, based on complaints from community members after a screening of the documentary Occupation 101.
As an editor at Art Threat, a blog about the politics of art, I thought this space was an apt one in which to respond as the founder and programmer of Cinema Politica.
The Art of Oppression (and surveillance, as seen in the video above)
That the hundreds (at last count 900+) of G20 protesters (and random civilians) held in pens at a detention centre in Toronto also happen to be extras in a former movie studio should come as no surprise to those who took part in this summer’s biggest blockbuster hit. This production note is but one piece of a larger spectacle of fascism recently carried out in the streets of Toronto.
While tens of thousands of us peacefully marched and did so as representatives of every strata of diverse Canadian society, we witnessed the most cynical, unprovoked and violent police and state actions rarely—if ever—seen at such scale in this country. Walking down one of the main Toronto arteries yesterday as the march got under way, I was horrified to see an elderly man beaten by six riot police. Several friends—mostly organizers of civil society groups and independent mediamakers—have been arrested and many have been beaten and have had their personal belongings searched, including cell phones (still others had all their pictures and video deleted or destroyed). In the detention centre, reports are emerging of sexual harassment and the segregation of queer activists and countless abuses of the Geneva Convention.
Standing on College street watching a procession of dozens of dark-tinted vans go by full with riot police, we watched as a man walked toward us calmly and was violently seized and dragged away by ten riot police, a scene reminiscent of so many Hollywood horror films.
The protests rocking Greece have reached the cultural industries. Workers from Greece’s Ministry of Culture took over the Acropolis twice last month in protest over severe cuts to cultural funding. As part of the “austerity measures” being imposed on Greece as a result of recent economic turmoil, there have been deep cuts to the national cultural budget. More than 40 museums and ancient sites have been closed. The workers were demanding over a year’s worth of back pay and the creation of permanent jobs rather than contract work.
In other news from Athens, two of the largest labour unions in Greece ADEDY and GSEE, marched on Saturday to protest against planned pension system reform. About 2000 protesters braved heavy rains in front of the parliament building, holding banners and chanting slogans against the reform and other austerity measures the government has introduced to overcome the country’s debt crisis.
And yesterday, a crowd of 3,000 marched through Athens to demonstrate gay pride and protest against discrimination. “We’re everywhere” read one banner at the parade. The country approved civil unions in 2008, but the gay community has been seeking the approval of full gay marriages.
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