political art & cultural policy
A magnitude 8.0 earthquake shook through Wenchuan County in Sichuan province of the People’s Republic of China on May 12, 2008. Official figures listed 69,197 dead, including 5,335 children, mostly killed as a result of shoddy school construction — a horrible tragedy, particularly due to China’s one-child policy, that caught the attention of a couple of artists, including the now infamous Ai Weiwei.
When Tillett Wright began her photographic project, Self Evident Truths, back in 2010 she didn’t expect the groundswell of requests for photographs that she ended up receiving. She originally wanted to shoot 4-5,000 people, but the response has led her to increase her goal to 10,000 people.
“I basically decided to photograph anyone in this country that isn’t 100% straight, which, if you don’t know, is a limitless number of people,” jokes Wright in her TEDx talk posted above.
To date she has photographed around 2,000 people. “This is the civil rights fight of our generation,” says Wright.
Artists exploring the medium of video games: Works by Wafaa Bilal, Mohammed Mohsen and Harun Farocki
Let’s face it: shooting stuff is fun – in video, that is; but it can also be ethically complicated. Gallery 101’s current exhibition Blown Up: Gaming and War, brings to the conventions of video gaming the complexities of art, activism and critical commentary. I am not exactly a typical gamer (don’t own a console), but virtually re-connecting with my inner warrior and social critic at the same time, as I did last week at Gallery 101, was something of a treat.
Video games have come a long way from the simple pleasures of the arcade, and especially in the world of art. The structures of commitment and involvement created by games offer fertile ground for artists exploring kinds of human experience well beyond the zero-sum shoot-em-ups of most commercial game play. The installations in this show are fun. They’re weird. They’re confounding. And they leave burrs in the imagination as readily as the gratifications of conventional games wash mindlessly away.
Rumours are circulating that British activist and street artist Banksy has been arrested. Fortunately, they seem to be false.
From a suspiciously unattributed press release (update — the web link seems to be down again. Here is a PDF of the release.):
London Police Chief Wayne Leppard held a press conference to answer questions about how Banksy was finally apprehended. “We had a 24-hour Anti-Graffiti Task Force monitoring different groups known to have associated with Banksy. We received word that around 2am a group of individuals left a flat speculated to be one of Banky’s art studios. This group was followed by agents and once vandalism had occurred, we then arrested the group, 5 men total. These individuals all had ID on them except for one, and that is the one we believed to be Banksy,” Leppard said.
“We then raided the studio where this group was last seen leaving from. Inside we found thousands of dollars of counterfeit money along with future projects of vandalism. We also found a passport and ID of a Paul William Horner who matched the description of the man that we are currently holding.” Leppard continued, “Horner is currently being held without bail on charges of vandalism, conspiracy, racketeering and counterfeiting. We are also holding the other four individuals whose names we are not releasing at this time.”
There is no indication, however, that anyone by the name of Wayne Leppard exists at London’s Metropolitan Police Service. We’ll let you know if we hear any evidence that this rumour is in fact true.
In recent “real” Banksy news, an original work of his entitled Wrong War has been recovered by police who were investigating a suspected fraud.
Image: Wrong War was found by London’s Metropolitan Police during a search of a property as part of a fraud investigation.
A new digital media challenge is looking for creative work that addresses the need to improve democracy in the United States.
And as it is with American democracy in practice, large sums of money are at stake — $100,000 in cash prizes will go to “the most fresh and creative submissions.”
Pablo Picasso, L’aubade, 1942 (© Succession Picasso 2012)
“ History isn’t the lies of the victors … I know that now. It’s more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.” – The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
On the last Sunday in the year, the Parisian bourgeoisie were out in force. The queue for the Impressionism and Fashion exhibition at the Musee d’Orsay moved in sudden leaps but still took over an hour to get to the security checks. For the Dali exhibition at the Pompidou Centre, those with pre-booked tickets queued for an hour, those without considerably longer
Meanwhile, across the Alma Bridge from the Eiffel Tower, all was quiet outside the Palais de Tokyo and the Musee de l’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Inside, the galleries hummed with an apprehensive curiosity as the patrons moved in physical comfort around exhibits that were anything but comfortable, couched as they were in the context of the annees noires of the Nazi occupation. L’Art en Guerre, France 1938 to 1947 was an opportunity for Parisians to confront a difficult past that lay within the memory of many of them.
If Josh Keyes’ paintings don’t take a bit of your breath away, I suggest you visit an optometrist. Each painting sits as a stand-alone diorama, a moment caught in a fictional time, with beautiful realistic paintings of animals in a world so strange that it is most likely caused by human error.
While his work is often shown along with other surrealist artists gaining notoriety in the west coast pop-surrealism art scene, they carry a completely different message. His peers often site old fashioned cartoons as their inspiration, where Josh has been moved by ecological plights. Ever since first seeing his work in an issue of (the really and truly fabulous, but not at all political) Hi-Fructose Magazine I’ve been itching for an excuse to interview him. Luckily for us, this year he has some new shows coming up, and a book signing in February. I managed to catch him by email for an interview that just makes me love his work even more.
Gazdov Ivan: Silhouette
An international exhibition of political poster design, Graphic Advocacy: International Posters for the Digital Age: 2001-2012 is currently on display at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Curated by MassArt professor and Chair of Graphic Design Elizabeth Resnick, the featured work spans nearly three dozen countries and touches on just as many pressing issues.
From their website:
The third exhibition in a trilogy focusing on socially conscious posters, Graphic Advocacy features 120 works from 32 countries including Bolivia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Israel, Kuwait, Russia, and Singapore. As a medium for social change, posters record our struggles for peace, social justice, environmental defense, and liberation from oppression.
From the confrontational and political, to the promotional, persuasive and educational, the poster in all its forms has persisted as a vehicle for the public dissemination of ideas, information, and opinion. Ready access to broadband and mobile communications and to digital production technologies has expanded the poster’s role beyond the printed surface, creating a contemporary tool for support and protest that is still a cornerstone of 21st century advocacy.
Here’s a small sample of the works on display. More can be seen at Graphic Art News, while an official website of the exhibition, as well as a printed book, are currently in production.
It’s 2012 and close to four years after the Lilly ledbetter Fair Pay Act was signed into law in the United States. Surely, the gender wage gap has been closed, right? Wrong.
Even with moves toward equalizing pay between men and women, men still make almost 20% more than women in nearly all industries. This is despite the fact that women receive the same education, with the same tuition price tags and levels of debt upon graduation. The only major differences are that there are more ladies in college and they have better average GPAs to boot. The benefits of paying women their fair share include increasing the GDP while reducing the poverty rates for families.
Check out the infographic below to see what else the gender wage gap affects.
An angry but ultimately hollow account of anti-capitalist resistance in the 21st century
The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book is the second graphic novel from activist Gord Hill. It is a chronicle of several anti-capitalist and anti-globalization movements over the last two decades, from the WTO protests in Seattle to the recent Occupy movements. Hill also places a great deal of emphasis on the violence that has accompanied these movements, regardless of whether that violence was perpetrated by police or protestors.
As a documentary account of these events, The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book does a passable job. Hill was clearly involved in many of the movements chronicled in the book and is able to expose events that were under-covered or completely overlooked by mainstream media outlets at the time. This is the greatest strength of the book, which is at its best whenever it is able to provide first person accounts from inside the political actions it depicts.
As decent and occasionally eye-opening a documentary account as Hill’s book can be, it utterly fails for me as work of commentary. A brief history of capitalism and its myriad problems (and I’ll be the first to agree that there are many) is provided but very little in the way of solutions beyond blind rage is offered.
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