From the Center For Artistic Activism, a great argument for political art and how to approach it…
“An open letter to critics writing about political art…”
Tag Archives: Politics
[INTERVIEW] Lucia Cuba on Gender, Strength and Politics | PAS UN AUTRE
http://www.pasunautre.com/2012/06/22/interview-lucia-cuba-on-gender-strength-and-politics/ Political Fashion Statement This made for great breakfast reading. Mr. Cuba is articulate and engaged/engaging. The photographs of this work of his are exciting. Here he gives a sample of his history as designer and social scientist, the evil perpetrated by former Peruvian president Fujimori, some insight into present-day Peruvian activist doings, shows a way out of the shallows for fashion as a concept, and a lot more. And damn, but the photos are striking…
Speaking of Racist Advertising…
Over at Artspace.com there’s a great interview with the artist Hank Willis Thomas on racism, advertising, politics, slavery, artistic production, the role of the artist in the 21st century and a great many other things. Thomas works with video, photography, interviews, iPad apps, and other formats. He collaborates and does solo work. The interview finds him in the process of moving into the sphere of ‘Post-Black’ art.
Post-Black is an interesting term. I’d encountered it years ago, but hadn’t put any thought into it until about 2007 (pretty late; I know). That year I was at a Seattle museum for a public conversation between a couple of New York’s ad-hoc curators on post-diaspora black art.
They had a lot of imagery from many black artists and things were going along smoothly in their talk until the Q&A. At that point, a white guy in the audience announced that Kara Walker was the most important artist of the evening because her work was about the most relevant issue: slavery. That didn’t go down so well and I’m proud to say that my evening’s companion ripped the guy a new one.
She caustically explained black artists didn’t need anyone, black, white, or other, pigeon-holing them into particular dialogues. Black people can discuss what they want and he, as a white male and former Boston-based gallery owner, needed to get the fuck back as he was part of the problem. The problem of holding black people down.
I couldn’t have been more delighted that day.
Hank Willis Thomas discusses the role of the artist at the end of the interview and I’m going to throw a quote from him here, ” part of the role of the artist in the 20th and 21st century is to actually do the things that don’t make sense. So it’s okay for somebody to say, “I just mess around with chairs,” or “I just look at the color blue because it’s really interesting to me.” It opens doors to our minds that are less tapped, less used, because we’re not robots. And societies where art is repressed wind up in (sic) fascist societies, and they don’t last as we saw with communism. If you suppress those voices, people freak out and it collapses.”
Beautiful. Just beautiful. And wait ’til you read what he has to say about Obama.
His website. His Wikipedia entry.
Africans, Asians Unite!
Asia in My Life
By Ngugi wa Thiong’o
“The links between Asia and Africa and South America have always been present but in our times they have been made invisible by the fact that Europe is still the central mediator of Afro-Asian-Latino discourse. We live under what Satya Mohanty in his interview in Frontline (April 2012), aptly calls the long intellectual shadow of the Age of European Empire.
In my case, I had always assumed that my intellectual and social formation was tied to England and Europe, with no meaningful connection to Asia and South America. There was a reason. I wrote in English. My literary heroes were English. Kenya being a British colony, I had learnt the geography and history of England as the central reference in my widening view of the world. Even our anti-colonial resistance assumed Europe as the point of contest; it was we, Africa, against them, Europe. I graduated from Makerere College in Uganda in 1964, with a degree in English; then went to the University of Leeds, England, for further studies, in English. Leeds was a meeting point of students from the Commonwealth: India, Pakistan, Australia, and the Caribbean. We saw each other through our experience of England. Our relationship to England, in admiration, resentment or both, was what established a shared space.
After I wrote my memoir of childhood, Dreams in a Time of War, published in 2006, I looked back and saw how much India had been an equally important thread in my life. I had not planned to bring out the Indian theme in my life: but there it was, staring at me right from the pages of my narrative. The thread starts from home, through school, college and after.”
via Chimurenga
Book Review: ‘With/Without’
With/Without by Markus Miessen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
With/Without deals primarily with the sectarian codification of space in the Middle East. And like any set of treatises on the Middle East’s urbanity, its architectural growth, it is obsessed with Dubai, that startling jewel in late Capitalism’s crown (and its voyeuristic facets).
The book is composed of a series of essays, most illustrated with photographs and/or computer generated imaginings of future projects. Some are much better than others, but I’ll leave it to other readers to decide the strength of each as my designs may not be theirs.
The interview with architecture’s great ambassador, Rem Koolhaus, is exciting and stultifying. Interviewer Markus Miessen is every bit as lucid as Koolhaus and reading their dance is exhilarating. Unfortunately they do seem to talk at cross purposes at times such as when, in discussing the mediation of space in Dubai, Miessen questions if any space has been left for ‘conflict’. Koolhaus seems to not understand the question and moves on to say that they are no longer building cities, but resorts. Or perhaps that is the answer.
Rarely does the question of the condition of migrant workers in their closed-off island world come in to play. That’s sad as it’s one of the more important questions that needs to be addressed in the issue of Dubai’s phenomenal growth.
Later, in the section ‘Symbolic Boundaries’, Miessen talks with Philipp Misselwitz about the fastest growing cities in the word, refugee camps. This chat is loaded with ideas on the resistance to normalization by camp dwellers. It would make a fascinating TED Talk or an entire book of their conversations.
Fawwaz Traboulsi provides a fascinating piece on the struggle to create a new flag for Iraq in the appendix. Kurds flying the pre-Saddam flag. The commission of a flag that bears a startling resemblance to Israel’s that gets thrown out. Short, but exciting.
Perhaps my favorite piece was the interview with Iraq’s director-general of the Iraqi National Library and Archive, Dr. Saad Bashir Eskander. Here we learn how they manage to keep the project going in spite of document theft and intentional destruction, only 5 hours of electricity per day in Baghdad, and the murder of several employees.
There are many great essays in this book and my only lament is that they are all teasers. Many of them could have been expanded to book length or would make excellent documentaries. The image reproduction leaves much to be desired as the paper they’re printed on appears to be reclaimed and the inks are perhaps soy-based. It leaves them appearing washed out and muddy.
I borrowed this via inter-library loan, but I believe I’m going to have to purchase it. This is the type of small tome that needs to be loaned out to anyone who thinks of the Middle East as a drab collection of religious fanatics who beat their heavily cloaked women and only aspire to the role of suicide bomber. The intellectual and artistic achievement of this region would put any of those ridiculous notions to the grave.