An escargatoire (yup, that’s what it’s called) of giant pink snails is wrapping up their visit to Miami Beach this month, preparing to migrate towards other parts of the United States.
These colourful invertebrates — the largest of which measure 8 feet tall — are made entirely of recycled plastic and are intended to pique curiosity and encourage conversations on recycling and other issues of environmental sustainability. The forty-five snails are part of a larger initiative known as the REgeneration Art Project, which places big, bright animal installations in unexpected locations across the globe, including Rome, Venice, Prague and Paris.
Marcel Walldorf’s life-size sculpture of a policewoman in full riot gear pissing on the floor has some Germans “pissed”. The sculpture, entitle “Petra”, which has already captured the prestigious Leinemann Foundation Award for fine arts, was put on display in Dresden last week. Local security officials were not amused. The artist has received letters of condemnation from state security services and local officials.
The gallery located in the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, however, told AFP news service that despite official outrage, response from the public has been “overwhelmingly positive”.
The star of ‘engaged art’ is on the rise. The number of artists creating, performing, and exploring in the world of social and political reality is mushrooming. Or maybe that’s the way it has always been, and new technologies are allowing us to do end-runs around gate-keeping curators and mainstream media. Either way, we are discovering whole worlds of politically engaged and celebrated artists that not so long ago would just as likely have been escorted from the hallowed houses of high art for disturbing the peace.
Call it what you will — engaged art, social practice, avant-garde, dialogical aesthetics, community art, public art, activist art, radical art — audiences for the confounding, beautiful, horrible and hilarious kinds of symbolic dissidence these practices describe are growing. When Art Threat started three years ago there was only a few websites like us. Now there are dozens. This is a very good thing.
A top 10 (or 9) list is a necessarily troubled compromise made up as it is by hierarchy and exclusion. On the up side it’s like a map — something to help navigate an increasingly complicated and at times overwhelming volume of cultural choices. So here’s my map of people and organizations to watch for, some better known than others, but all involved in making art that gets under the skin and changes — at least I hope it does — in some undeniable way those who encounter it.
Overlooking Amman’s hills via a balcony installation at Darat al Funun gallery is artist Hamdi Attia’s work Archipelago, A World Map. In reinterpreting the globe, Attia presents a world composed of island territories coded by the names of Palestinian regions and cities.
Archipelago, explains Attia, highlights that “military occupation became a constructed geography,” in Palestine, “politics of occupation have become systematized and completely reshape the physical environment for Palestinians.”
In just a few days (on Nov 25) begins one of the most remarkable festivals in Canada, Etat d’Urgence, a cultural gathering for the homeless in the heart of one of North America’s finest urban playgrounds – Montreal, Quebec. The event – as this year’s promotion suggests – is an all inclusive vacation for Montreal’s homeless. And, for the other 14,000 regular Montrealers expected to attend, Etat d’Urgence is a cultural festival that is entirely unique.
For four days, the homeless of Montreal will have access to three large tents offering 24-hour food service and medical aid, psychological counseling, more than $50,000 in donated clothing (including some nice all-weather gear from Mountain Equipment Coop), haircuts, sleeping facilities, information tables for services offered year round by community organizations, three hot meals daily and a surprisingly world class roster of cultural and musical performances by artists and musicians.
Turning trash into artistry is an alchemy long overdue for a species who according to the U.N. throws out over a billion tonnes of solid waste every year. The artists in Convergence which opened October 16 at Lumenhouse in Brooklyn, New York, want to draw our attention not only to our excesses, but to the confounding and enchanting ways waste can be diverted from oceans and landfills and resurrected as cultural beauty.
Curator Mariko Tanaka says the idea for Convergence came from her work with Project Vortex, a group committed to repurposing plastics on their way to and already accumulating in the world’s oceans. Their modus operandi of reuse and recycle is through art and design. All of the artists in Convergence belong to Project Vortext (PV) which boasts artist-members from around the world.
Paul-Felix Montez is an artist who has designed sets for major films and exhibits for museum projects. He lived for ten years just five blocks north of the World Trade Centre’s twin towers. Inspired by a simple statement by a friend, he is now planning a large-scale exhibition called The Prayer Room for the ten year mark of the 9/11 attacks. The exhibition, even in its proposal phase, speaks to a multitude of conversations coming out of the fall of these iconic buildings – the most significant of which is that of ‘place’ for American immigrants.
Last weekend I got to speak with Paul on the phone about his inspiration, his ambitions, and his process in planning for The Prayer Room. Though the physical exhibition does not yet exist, just the proposal for the exhibition has provided a great starting point for many conversations. The images are renderings of the proposed exhibition.
In the wake of the recent racist attack on a Muslim cab driver in NYC, I’m particularly interested in the public reaction to the latest project by Tehran-born, Big Apple-based artist Amir Baradaran. For one week beginning September 9, Baradaran will debut Transient, a series of 40-second video installations infiltrating New York’s taxicabs.
South African visual artist Nicholas Hlobo creates large sculptural works that are expansive masses which at once feel oozey, voluptuous and highly structured. The contrast of femininity and masculinity is created by his use of dissimilar materials such as rubber inner tubes, ribbon, organza, lace and found objects.
Hlobo has accumulated an impressive portfolio since graduating from Wits Technikon in 2002. Born in Cape Town in 1975, he is now based in Johannesburg and is represented by Michael Stevenson Gallery.
“Through my works I attempt to create conversations that explore certain issues within my culture as a South African,” says Hlobo of his work in his Artist Statement. “The conversations become a way of questioning people’s perceptions around issues of masculinity, gender, race and ethnicity.”
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.
Contributors
Stefan Christoff, Colin Horgan, Julia Pyper
Michelle Siobhan Reid, Valerie Cardinal, Race Capet
Laurence Miall, Terry Fairman, Tyler Morgenstern
