Josh McPhee, one of the fine folks behind the Just Seeds Visual Resistance Artists’ Coop, has published a powerful collection of contemporary political printmaking.
Paper Politics: Socially Engaged Printmaking Today is a major collection of contemporary politically and socially engaged printmaking. The book’s 156 full-color pages include hundreds of reproductions, as well as three essays and several shorter writings to provide context and food for thought.
From the publisher’s website: “This full color book showcases print art that uses themes of social justice and global equity to engage community members in political conversation. Based on an art exhibition which has traveled to a dozen cities in North America, Paper Politics features artwork by over 200 international artists; an eclectic collection of work by both activist and non-activist printmakers who have felt the need to respond to the monumental trends and events of our times.”
“Paper Politics presents a breathtaking tour of the many modalities of printing by hand: relief, intaglio, lithography, serigraph, collagraph, monotype, and photography. In addition to these techniques, included are more traditional media used to convey political thought, finely crafted stencils and silk-screens intended for wheat pasting in the street.”
Paper Politics: Socially Engaged Printmaking Today
Edited by Josh McPhee
PM Press, October 2009, 156 pages
Amazon: CDN$17.61 | US$17.96
Montreal author David Bernans made international headlines in 2006 when he was prevented from holding a reading of his novel North of 9/11 on the campus of Concordia University. While university administrators had cited security concerns as cause for the rejection, they were quick to reassign blame to a clerical error once journalists came calling. Documents recently obtained through access to information legislation show that the writer was in fact under observation by security personnel. In this first-person narrative, Bernans chronicles his experience dealing with Concordia’s security apparatus, and questions the motivations of a university that spies on and censors its students.
Dangerous Reading
There is a powerful moment in the film The Lives of Others where ordinary citizens in a recently re-unified Germany are poring over de-classified documents of the former East German regime’s Stasi to see how details of their lives had been recorded and carefully filed away by the spies of a hyper-paranoid police state. What would it be like to sit under the cold glare of the florescent lights of those drab storage rooms among the massive filing cabinets and read about your own life as seen through the eyes of the Stasi?
Well, I have never lived in a communist dictatorship, but you might say I got a glimpse of my own Stasi file thanks to a favourable ruling from Québec’s Access to Information Commission. “It seems,” writes Investigator Jacques Lachance in the report to his superiors, “that Dr. Bernans is interested in bilingualism at Concordia.” Why, I wondered as I read my file, does the investigator feel it relevant to inform his superiors that the subject he is observing — a writer doing graduate work in translation — is “interested in bilingualism”? Is that really news to anybody? Do they have investigators following mathematicians around, informing their superiors that this one is interested in pi, that one in logarithms? Or perhaps, I thought, “bilingualism” was some kind of code word for a particular political tendency, or sexual preference. Was he telling his superiors that he suspected me of being bisexual?
Click to continue »
The charges of insulting religious values and inciting religious hatred were dropped against celebrated Turkish writer Nedim Gursel last week. A private complainant had asserted that in his novel The Daughters of Islam, Gursel wrote about “Allah’s lovers” whereas in fact he had written about Allah’s servants – proving once again that it is always worth while reading the books you want to burn before you try to burn them. A police report also concluded that publication of the book had not disturbed the peace.
Gursel, who was born in Turkey, teaches contemporary Turkish literature at Sorbonne in Paris. He is the author of over 30 books. His first novel, The First Woman, also raised controversy. He was accused of offending public morality and the book was banned in Turkey.
Turkey has received international condemnation for how writers are embroiled in legal accusations that many argue have no place in a secular democracy. According to PEN International, there are more than 100 writers, journalists and editors facing prosecution in Turkish courts.
Page illustration from the graphic novel DMZ
I haven’t got my hands on a copy of this new graphic novel yet, so I thought I’d let the words of the predictably fired up independent investigative journalist Greg Palast suffice:
DMZ is New York in the future, and it looks uncomfortably too much like America today. There’s a phony war on terror, a hunt for illusory insurgents and troublemakers which becomes the trigger-point excuse for crushing the heaving, rising underclass.
Except here, in the comic, America’s culture war and class war has moved to its inevitable bloody conclusion: a corporate junta pretending to provide safety to war-torn New York while using high-tech military intelligence and scum-bag death squads to hold on to power.
In the center of the story is a half-assed but earnest journalist Matty Roth on the Lower East Side whose need to voice the story of the voiceless is at war with his reasonable cowardice. Tell me about it.
Reporter Roth is sent in to find and cover a charismatic street leader, Parco Delgado, who declares his candidacy with explosives. Is Delgado a greasy, piece-of-crap thug or a savior in a dirty T-shirt? What makes creators Wood and Burchielli such smart storytellers is that they don’t make the answer simple, but they don’t fail to give the answer. If the story sounds weird it’s because any story that’s real is weird….
DMZ is a brilliant news report from inside America’s skull dreaming into the future – when the “stimulus” has worn off and reality eats our young.
Palast wrote the introduction to the book. You can buy it through him (signed by Wood and Palast), or get it here.
Cover Image Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-dissidents
Who among us would blog if at every other keystroke we expected the military to kick in the door? This, of course, is the unacceptable reality for bloggers and cultural producers worldwide who write and make art in oppressive and violent regimes. For example, Nay Phone Latt , a 28 year old Burmese blogger, was sentenced last November to 20 years in prison for defamation of the state and being in possession of a “subversive” film. Or the recent murder of journalist Anastasia Baburova (along with human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov) in Moscow. These writers take huge and sometimes tragic risks to speak truth to power.
In its ongoing efforts to help these citizen heroes, Reporters Without Borders reissued their Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-dissidents, a practical and accessible how-to guide for publishing online in dangerous circumstances. The update was release last Spring, but because these issues remain so vitally relevant, we thought we’d sing its praises once again. Whether you need to keep your emails private, cover your cyber tracks, or get around internet filtering systems, this handbook provides clear and detailed instructions. Click to continue »
Get your technology boots on – Redwire Magazine is looking for articles, poetry, letters, artwork, photos stories about Indigenous peoples and the negative and positive sides of technology – as a tool for communication, as economic driver, as means of artistic expression, as extension of colonial power, as fabric for building cultural strength …
Redwire Magazine was crated in 1997 as an uncensored forum for Native youth. Today Redwire distributes 11,000 copies across Canada, four times a year.
Redwire is the first-ever Native youth run magazine in Canada and is committed to operating with Native youth staff, writers, artists and publishers. Redwire appreciates all submissions but gives priority of publication for work created by Native youth (29 and under).
Deadline for work is Feb 9/2009. Send submissions and inquiries to editor@redwiremag.com.
Skim book cover
The Governor General’s award shortlist this year includes Skim, a graphic novel by writer Mariko Tamaki and graphic artist Jillian Tamaki. Inexplicably, only Mariko Tamaki has been nominated.
Chester Brown and Seth – two of Canada’s most prominent graphic novelists – are leading an international coalition of artists to demand that Jillian Tamaki be included in the nomination. Supporters of the cause include Art Spiegelman and Lynda Barry, among others.
In an open letter to the Canada Council (sponsors of the GG award), they wrote “Try to imagine evaluating Skim if you couldn’t see the drawings…We want both of the enormously talented creators of this book to be honoured together for their achievement. ”
Send an email to the Canada Council and tell them what you think. The award winners are scheduled to be named on November 18.
Check out artist Jillian Tamaki’s blog for information about Skim.
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