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.
In this RSA Animate, radical social theorist David Harvey asks if it is time to look beyond capitalism towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that really could be responsible, just, and humane? “Any sensible person right now would join an anti-Capitalist organization.” – The poignant words of Harvey on the unsustainable and inequitable nature of capitalism are brought to life by RSA’s very cool animation. Enjoy and have a great weekend.
Graffiti artist Blu strikes a chord in his home country with a new giant mural in Grottaglie, Italy, famous for its olive trees, ancient ceramic tradition and new, ever-expanding waste dumps. As the artist’s contribution to FAME Fest, a yearly event inviting top urban artists to create street and gallery works, Blu chose to highlight the town’s growing problem with his work É Pronta la Torta (The Cake is Ready).
“Southern Italy is in real deep shit with the trash business. Grottaglie did not need the dump at all and people in town were not given any warning before it was already being built. Guess how come? Now we have trash coming from very far away and the dump seems to get bigger and bigger, there already are three huge lots full of trash and trucks get here daily from Northern Europe to deliver more shit.
This piece comes at the very right moment, considering that there are workers digging another huge hole in the ground near the dump. There are reasons to believe that they are going to create a fourth lot and again, our formidable town councilors are not telling anything to their own people. How morbid is this?” – FAME Fest founder Angelo Milano
Visit this site for additional images and info about Blu’s mural, and check out the award winning film Gomorrah to get a glimpse of the severity and situation surrounding Southern Italy’s toxic dumping problem.
Jerm IX and Vegas just want to see more public street art in Vancouver. In the tradition of the world’s greatest graffiti artists, these two prolific tricksters have one big goal — to fill up sad, blank spaces in our city with thoughtful (and sometimes controversial) words and art. True to their word, Jerm and Vegas have spent a great deal of their free time pasting, hammering and spraying various eye-catching statements and graphics on every neglected space they can find.
Most recently, the artists have collaborated to bring their art-based dialogues to one of the most public spaces of all — the Skytrain — in a campaign aptly entitled V-TARP (Vancouver Transit Adspace Re-Appropriation Project). With over 35 installations already applied on Skytrain ads across the city, you may have noticed something a little different during your daily subconscious ad-scanning routines. Imagine this: next to one of those endless, ingratiating McDonald’s ads, a smaller ad-sized block of text that declares “I’M NOT LOVIN’ IT.” If this makes you pause and think, it has done its job.
The artistic style of Gord Hill is one of a man less obsessed with art than that of a man who desperately needs you to understand the weight of stories which must be told. A self proclaimed warrior and member of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation , Hill has spent a lifetime defending his people and his territory, telling stories through art, writing, carving, and activism.
His latest project,The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book is a documentation of the fighting spirit and ongoing resistance of the indigenous people of both North and South America.
The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book combines the American tradition of graphic novels with a depth of American indigenous history unlike any publication that has come before it. In his forward, Hill stresses that the strength of the comic book is that it is a “format useful in reaching children, youth, and adults who have a hard time reading books or lengthy articles.”
A new biography of the great 20th century journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski is causing a stir. His biographer Artur Domoslawski accuses Kapuscinski of making it up — of making some of it up, anyways. And his accusations have reignited the controversy over truth’s inviolability in the work of professional journalists.
Kapuscinski is like Canada’s Farley Mowat who some years ago was the target of a similar complaint — in fact, a rather savage attack that also accused him of making it up (Mowat’s face appeared on the cover of a widely circulated national magazine with an enlarged Pinocchio nose). And there is the recent reputational crucifixion of James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces and memoir-writer-cum-reluctant-novelist who made too much of it up for America’s apparently (and selectively, one might add) fact-hungry public, not to mention Oprah and her fans.
The idea of the ‘lie’ in journalism can still provoke a certain kind of righteous outrage. But what gets lost in the excitement is the conversation about truth itself. More specifically, outraged critics hardly ever suggest just what the unimpeachable approach to the truth might be.
Growing skepticism about journalism runs deeper than doubts about a few erroneous facts. An increasingly media savvy public has begun to suspect that the truth always arrives in the mouth of a speaker — that is, always from within language, culture, experience. The more serious problem isn’t the inviolable truth of this detail or that, but what will happen to a profession that hangs all of its hats on the peg of truth when the possibility of truth itself is up for grabs.
The artistic style of Gord Hill is one of a man less obsessed with art than that of a man who desperately needs you to understand the weight of stories which must be told. A self proclaimed warrior and member of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nation , Hill has spent a lifetime defending his people and his territory, telling stories through art, writing, carving, and activism.
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