• View
• Edit
• History
• Print

Main / Main

notebook

AND AND AND
AND AND AND is an artist run initiative, which will use the time between now and dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012 to consider with individuals and groups across the world the role art and culture can play today and the constituent publics or communities, which could be addressed. The series of interventions, situations, and occurrences entitled AND AND AND are part of dOCUMENTA (13) and will compose a map of emergent positions, concerns, and possible points of solidarity.

For the first event, AND AND AND has invited the New York-based 16 Beaver Group. For the AND AND AND series, 16 Beaver Group will be taking part in and organizing a discussion on June 24, 2010 at the US Social Forum (USSF) taking place in Detroit, Michigan. The event is intended to put into question the role of art in relation to the multitude of social movements and political struggles taking place today.
http://www.documenta.de/andandand.html?&L=1



Goodbye London - Radical Art and Politics in the Seventies
June 26 - August 15, 2010. Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst / The New Society for Visual Arts (NGBK), Berlin/GER
The exhibition focuses on the political culture of the 1970s in London and the UK. Against the backdrop of economic and political crisis (decline) a vital, politicized art scene developed, which found a temporary home in empty properties that had been given a new lease of life by over 30,000 squatters. It created art and film collectives, which actively intervened in property speculation, the escalation of the conflict in Northern Ireland and the scale of industrial disputes, and the emergence of Gay Liberation. The development lasted until the Falklands War and the failed Miners' Strike in the early 1980's consolidated the forces of Neo Liberalism, and the era of radical London ended. Over a decade, new workshops, performance spaces and studios came into being in the squatted factories and warehouses, in which major writers and artists such as Jon Savage and Derek Jarman began their careers. The radicalization of the mostly young activists was founded on the belief that there was no turning back. The multiplicity of political visions came from a desire to make fundamental changes, to try new alternatives and to think in new ways. The exhibition highlights the potential that can arise from a crisis, it illuminates the possibilities and limitations of radicalization and brings to light, through installations, films, photographs, posters and objects, a London that is, at least in Germany, until now largely unknown. Artists: Jo Spence, Stephen Willats, Jon Savage, Derek Jarman and others.
http://www.ngbk.de



A History of Irritated Material
25 February to 2 May 2010. Raven Row, London
The exhibition samples art’s relation to politics and the archive, using examples from each decade since the Second World War. ‘A History of Irritated Material’ includes Group Material, Inspection Medical Hermeneutics, Sture Johannesson, Ad Reinhardt, and Lygia Clark, from Object to Event, produced by Suely Rolnik. Activist films from Disobedience, an ongoing video archive will also be shown.
http://www.ravenrow.org/current/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y1x_4iWfak&feature=related (Die Klage der Kaiserin, entire film)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8wnBSclJjg (excerpt from Nelken 'The man I love')

"I'm not interested in how people move, I'm interested in what moves them."
R.I.P. Pina Bausch (1940 - 2009)

In Turin, the Permanent Ignition took the form of a collaboration with activists involved in the radical left-wing movement in Turin in the 1960s and 70s, In 2001 we organized a series of walks revisiting sites in the city associated with this period thus generating photo and text archives superimposing a plurality of narratives and perspectives on the movement and its history, archives that were later projected onto public buildings and sites around the city using overhead and video projectors. The multi-layered 'screens' produced by the superimposition of images and texts upon one another and upon physical sites and buildings associated with the historical processes and events addressed thus work as a map of the city, a map that rathen than offering a set of geographical coordinates seeks to link a set of historical events and struggles, conflicts and political processes, to sites in the city from which these narratives and memories are slowly being eradicated.

C.CRED (Collective CREative Dissent) 'Permanent Ignition: Turin' (2002) http://altspace.info/ccred/pi.html

This is the way I see most of the anti-war movements in the Vietnam era. The movements themselves weren’t political – not only in the sense that they unified people of many political views, but also in the sense that they weren’t asking directly for a particular political solution. Rather, since the war had put politics on hold, they were asking for an end to the war so that politics could resume. It seems to me that today, in a situation when we are facing a permanent state of war, that it makes no sense, in a way, to ask for the cessation of war in order to return to politics. One has to, in fact, develop a politics in order to put an end to war. This has inverted the problem face or objective of the anti-war movement.

Capital is fundamentally anti-democratic. Any project for democracy will have to confront the anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian element of capital production – keeping the rich rich and the poor poor. But not every democratic political project need immediately confront the capitalist order as such. Let me put it this way, I don’t think we are faced today with an alternative between reform and revolution. It seems to me that that is what the question brings up – is revolution required? And I don’t think we are in a historical situation where that alternative really makes sense. The pathways of revolution and reform today coincide in many ways... I think that today the two necessarily go hand in hand. One can’t, in fact, think about reform without having a revolutionary perspective and vice versa. I am of the view that one is forced, when thinking about global democracy, to take an anti-capitalist perspective and think about and imagine the possibilities of a post-capitalist society, but not that all political actions have to be taken with that immediate overthrow in mind.

Michael Hardt, Interview with M.H. in Theory, Culture & Society, 2006.

...for Lyotard in 1968 theoretically neither the reformists, nor the conservative faculty members, nor any one
of the militant fractions held the truth in May-June. They had stories that had to be told and weighed against the
other stories, so that a new story could emerge. Hence the need for endless meetings and a form of dialogue and
practice in which power relations were eliminated so that a 'new' narrative and praxis could emerge.(...)
"Our critique is not only verbal; it is critical practical (...) it involves physical combat against the so-called
order..." (Lyotard)

Marshall Lyotard and Foucault at Vincennes p183

Jean-Luc Godard Histoire(s) du Cinema (stills)

JEAN LUC
CINEMA
GODARD

title sequence to Bande a Part

'[a]cademic freedom is the privilege individual academics may claim as the freedom to question and test received wisdom, to put forward new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions without placing themselves in jeopardy of losing the jobs or privileges they may have at their institutions.' (Wolff, 2000, 198)

"Universities should be centres of critiques (...). No civilized culture would charge their members to educate themselves, just as it wouldn't sell band aids to the bleeding or food to the starving." Terry Eagleton at the Education Teach-in at Kings College London, 27/2/10 http://educationactivistnetwork.wordpress.com/

Unter weißen Tüchern, Cornelia Schleime, GDR 1983, 9'

"Portraying myself as sad was already radical, because women in the GDR were officially not nostalgic or sad." Schleime in panel discussion at Tate Modern 'Concrete Emotions: Personal Spaces and Urban Landscapes, 6 November 2009

The Corniche, Beirut's seaside walkway, is renowned these days as a pleasant place to walk, talk, and jog. It is also known as the favourite meeting place of political pundits, spies, double agents, fortune tellers and phrenologues.
To keep an eye on all this activity, Lebanese security agents set up cameras in 1992 along the strip. The cameras were manned and were placed inside the mini-van cafes that lined the strip at 18 meter intervals. Every afternoon,
the operator of camera #17 diverted his camera's focus away from its designated target and focused it on the sunset. The operator was dismissed in 1996 but he was permitted to keep his sunset video footage.
The Atlas Group was able to find and interview the operator who had sent the videotape to The Atlas Group. He stated that he focused his camera on the sun when he thought it was about to set and that he returned to his duties
once he thought the sun had set. Moreover, he stated that having grown up in East Beirut during the war years, he always yearned to watch the sunset from the Corniche located in West Beirut.

The Atlas Group. The operator 17 file

... it took Arkhipov decades to realize that his father's ingenious solutions were in fact invaluable artifacts of Soviet culture; the private side of life in a country where consumer shortages were an everyday occurance. ... As Russia tentatively enters the world of global consumerism, Arkhipov's 'thingamyjigs' tell the story of it's Soviet past - and of the wrenching years since the Soviet collapse, when the items of capitalist commerce started to become available in Russia, but were still largely unobtainable by the country's impoverished millions. The art critic Yekaterina Dyogot calls them, 'fragments of the sunken, non-market civilization of Soviet socialism.' They are also just plain clever, in the quirky personalized wy of inventions meant to serve their maker and not a marketing department.
'This is a completely unique phenomenon - things that were never meant to be goods for sale. People made them for themselves,' says Arkhipov. 'In the 21st century, it seems somehow unreal.' Arkhipov says he often knows at a glance whether objects were made before or after the Soviet fall. ... A brightly coloured carrying basket is a product of more recent times. It is woven, Arkhipov says, from the colour-coded bands used by European banks to separate denominations of cash. The basket weaver worked in a Moscow bank. 'He just collected them from the garbage bins.' Akrhipov is sure that sooner or later Russia will stop producing objects that reflect its communist past.

Susan Glasser, Foreword to Home-made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artefacts by Vladimir Arkhipov

What does the process of recuperation consist in? In this: an idea or a project regarded as irredeemably revolutionary or subversive - that is to say, on the point of introducing a discontinuity - is normalized, reintegrated into the existing order, and even revives it. Shaken for a brief moment, the social relations of production and reproduction - that is to say of domination - are reinforced. Rather than analyzing the process - the diversion and circumvention of the initial project - the hypercritics, dogmatists and sectarians prefer to blame those who took the initiative and launched the idea. This is a theoretical and practical error. The fact that a project or concept has been 'recuperated' does not mean that it was not potentially active for a period of time. It means that 'people' (the opponents of the established order or disorder) did not know how, or were not able, to seize the opportunity, the favourable conjuncture, and carry out the project. Conjunctures pass; opportunities disappear for good. (...) The established order has a great capacity for adaptation and integration it assimilates what is opposed to it. It has demonstrated a surprising flexibility, and unsuspected capacity, which should taken into account, instead of attacking those who invent. (...) Hypercriticism has not made such analysis easier, or more profound, or more effective. It has become impossible to make any proposal without immediately being accused of recuperation, in the name of a bolder project and especially a more radical negativism. (...) there is nothing - no proposal, no project, no idea - which cannot be recuperated, that is to say, used by different social or political forces from those in whose name it was advanced.

Henri Lefebvre (1981). Critique of everyday life, vol 3. pp105

The Clash, late 1970s

"Everything that was directly lived has moved away into an image" (Guy Debord). No affect.

we have life changes now, and they've become not changes in our life, not like, to show you the distance we have traveled, Augustine's conversion to Christianity when he hears or thinks he hears the voice of God saying 'read' and he reads the scripture and becomes a converted Christian, he's born again, he becomes a new man. Now we change rapidly, we change professions 6 or 7 or 8 times in our lives, we change who and what we are the way we used to change our clothes and our fashion. There are kids who when they go to college by the end of their first year have been a variety of different people: 2 months as a medical student, 1 months and a half as a journalist 2 months as a poet, 2 months as a preppy, etc and all of the requisite uniforms for it. None of it felt, non of it part of affect. A fad. A personality formed as a fad, as a fashion, as an ornament. This really doesn't overstate the case for me. Ideology is here only a momentary fad (my week as a Trotskyist, my week as a Buddhist...) (> the simulation of politics. It's not politics, its the simulation of politics)

The self is lost, and if that's true, all of the strategies by which ordinary people try to live decent lives are lost along with it. The struggle/war zone of the future may be not any of the classical ones, workers against capitalists, slaves against masters, women against men, the black against white, but the struggle for the real against the unreal. the desire for experience is also a desire for a kind of experience. ie even in this hopeless picture painted about the young (they get more excited about a game boy game than talking to their relatives) there remains a curiosity about what experience could be like if i could have one. There is an absolute extremism everywhere about how far people will go to try to have a genuine experience (if we can still use this word genuine, which has been polluted, genuine boots/leather/...), to expand the 'I' a little bit, to have a tiny clear moment

notes from a lecture by Rick Roderick on postmodern culture

?

23 Mar 2009|

They Believed, Why Can't I?

It is gone now, but the image from a billboard in my New York City neighborhood haunts me. It was an advertisement for fashion designer Alexander McQueen and, like many ads these days, it showed no product. Instead, rising above the pavement was a supersized portrait of a street protest. It’s a particular moment: Paris in May of 1968, when students and workers took to the streets in a fit of imagination and fury. They seized the city and brought down the French government. But you don’t need to know the particulars to be moved by the image.
It’s a close-up of a handful of young protesters standing in the middle of the street. To the left is a row of attractive women in their early 20s, dressed with the careless elegance that Parisian women are known for. They hold red flags. Some of the poles point forward and some back. The flags fill and billow out beautifully, as they often do in socialist realist paintings. Two young men stand with their backs to the women. They too are stylish, wearing black leather jackets. They raise megaphones to their lips, speaking not to the group of spectators we see lining the sidewalk, but to a larger, invisible audience down the street and presumably around the world.

It’s a striking image – both aesthetically and historically – which is no doubt why the agency selected it. It bespeaks hip rebellion, today’s lingua franca of mass consumption. It is the old alchemy of advertising: buy this product and you will magically become someone else. McQueen’s last design collection and ad campaign drew upon the imagery of mods and rockers. To move from images of mid-’60s subcultural rebellion in Britain to late-’60s political rebellion in France is just a few short years and a hop across the Channel. Time and space and ideology are easily transcended by the advertisements’ appropriation; only the image of rebellion remains constant.
This is nothing new. The culture of rebellion has been embraced by the very culture being rebelled against for quite some time. Arguably the first cultural artifact of modern bohemia, Henri Murger’s La Vie Bohème (1849), along with its operatic reincarnation as Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème (1896), was, and still is, wildly popular with the very bourgeoisie it criticizes. By 1968 Columbia Records was selling music with an image of young protesters in a jail cell with the tagline “But the man can’t bust our music,” and today the image of Che Guevara sells everything from T-shirts to Swatch watches to Smirnoff vodka. Co-opting rebellion is an old story.
But there is something new about the McQueen advertisement. What’s being appropriated is not just the external image of rebellion, but the rebel’s inner passions. What makes the billboard so alluring is that these young protesters believe in something. I don’t know exactly what they believe – they might be chanting Maoist or situationist slogans – but the details of what they are saying and protesting are largely immaterial. They believe. It’s hard to say how I know this. There are signs: the paradisiacal smile that lights up the face of the woman to the far left; the simultaneously intense and vacant eyes of the young woman in the middle whose mouth is open mid-chant; the cool confidence of the young man in front holding the megaphone like a jazz soloist and clearly knowing that what he has to say is bigger than he is. But it’s something more than these visual markers. It’s a presence permeating the whole image. A presence that reaches out through history, past its present appropriation on this billboard, and confronts me where I stand. I can feel that they believe.

Advertising – consumer capitalism – desperately needs belief. Consumption in this overdeveloped world is carried out largely as custom rather than the result of any real belief in anything. This is the price a system pays for hegemony: once an ideology is routinized into everyday behavior, belief is no longer an issue. Kevin Roberts, the CEO of advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi, recently called for companies to move from trademarks to what he calls “lovemarks.” According to Roberts, it is only by creating brands with “emotional resonance” that foster “loyalty beyond reason” that companies can hope to stir the sedated psyche of the contemporary consumer. Advertisers fear, with reason, that we have become like the zombies in George Romero’s classic horror flick, Dawn of the Dead, who return to wander the shopping mall by sheer force of habit. By appropriating the political passion of the Parisian protesters, Alexander McQueen is attempting to animate dead desire.

The billboard’s expression – and appropriation – of political belief confronts me with my own faith. Not my convictions as a consumer (I’m more or less a zombie) but my belief as a political citizen. I’ve been an activist my entire adult life. I’ve built houses in Nicaragua, walked union picket lines, organized community activist groups and shut down cities with mass protests, but I can’t honestly say that I’ve ever really believed. My activism, like that of so many of my generational comrades, was more a reactive, or even existential, activism. We acted to hold on to what little things we had: community gardens, affordable rent and the right to unionize. Or we acted because to not act was simply inconceivable, it would mean accepting things as they were, and we knew something was wrong with the way things were. But believe, truly believe, in something? I’d be lying if I said I did.
I don’t think I’m alone on the left. Ask liberals in the United States today what they believe in. They might tell you they want an end to the war in Iraq, that they desire universal health care or are inspired by Barack Obama. But these aren’t beliefs, they’re actions, policies and politicians. A belief is something like universal peace or a caring society or a world with great leaders (or no leaders at all). It is only by believing in such grand impossibilities that small accomplishments are possible. This is why liberals, for nearly two decades now, have accomplished nothing. Many contemporary radicals are little better. They have grand beliefs but little desire to realize what they believe. Doing so would jeopardize their outsider status as rebels. As such, their belief is in bad faith.

Believing is what the other side does: the Christian fundamentalists who believe in the rapture and the righteousness of their cause, the Muslim radicals who dream of a Caliphate and a return to Islamic law or even the neoconservatives in Washington who fantasize about exporting free markets and Western culture by force. Belief is also part of the uncomfortable heritage of my own side. It was a sort of utopian faith that led to the forced collectivization and brutal public projects that marked Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China.
It was a belief in the inevitability of a new world that animated the students who protested in Paris and so many other places in 1968. Yet when this new world failed to appear, that faith passed into the illusion of victorious armed struggle in the West (the Weather Underground, Brigada Rosa or Baader-Meinhof gang) or a pacific retreat to the commune. In all these historical narratives, belief leads to heaven, the gulag, delusion or isolation. This is a history from which I am desperately trying to awake.

Yet without belief can there be any progress? For as much as I detest the religious right, I have to admit that they’ve gotten results: their agenda, be it family values or the War on Terror, is now America’s agenda. We might debate it, fight it or try to redefine it, but Ralph Read and Osama bin Laden are the ones who have defined the “it” we react to. And the left at its strongest was also the left with the strongest beliefs. It was the ’30s that realized the ideal of a modern society that cared for all its citizens and the ’60s that conjured up a culture of individual liberty. Belief motivates. It gets you up in the morning and headed toward the horizon; it makes you act to bring about what you know is impossible.
I know that belief is necessary to inspire and motivate, this is what makes it such a hot property for advertisers and activists alike, yet I still find it hard to believe. Too many of the most atrocious, and just plain stupid, events in history have been initiated by those who truly believe. Belief is blind. I prefer acting in the world with my eyes wide open.

Can belief and skepticism, rationality and faith, be reconciled? I don’t think so, for each cancels the other out. Belief is an edifice built upon ephemeralities like hopes and dreams. Rationality demands a firm foundation that is constantly tested through inspection and deconstruction. Philosopher René Descartes found this centuries ago when he fruitlessly tried to prove that God exists. It’s also why the “logic” of creationists today is so weak when presented in an academic debate or courtroom (though a majority of people in the US still believe in creationism or its variants). Combine the fiery flames of faith and the icy waters of calculation and you get a sodden pile of ashes.
Yet every day I carry this warring opposition within me. I know, for instance, that I am determined by my biology, history and ideology, yet I act as if I were fully responsible for my actions. When I watch reality TV or visit Las Vegas, for example, I know that what I am seeing is a staged representation of real people or landmarks, but my enjoyment is contingent on my feeling as if they are real. I think the trick is to possess both belief and skepticism, simultaneously, without trying to reconcile the two. That is, to exist somewhere in between, resonating with both yet never being wholly subsumed by either.
This isn’t as impossible as it sounds. Irony, for example, works this way: it makes a statement of belief that can only be understood by not believing it. And while irony leads most often to a smirking, knowing distance (e.g. Jon Stewart’s Daily Show), it does suggest that there may be ways to be suspended between the poles of belief and disbelief: a critical, provisional and ironic belief.

We need to believe, but we also need to remember that we are the ones who have constructed (and can thus deconstruct and reconstruct) the objects and rituals of our belief. This critical belief is the nightmare of politicians and advertisers, both of whom would rather have us feel loyalty beyond reason or express cynical skepticism, as neither of these subjectivities demand a self-conscious awareness that we are the architects of our own ideals.
I’ll probably never have the beatific look of conviction that lights up the faces of those young protesters on the streets of Paris. Nor will I ever share the certainties of the skeptic who points out that this billboard image is really just an ad campaign and that the photo was probably faked anyway. The belief I want to believe in is not easily reducible to a political slogan and doesn’t translate well into religious dogma. It’ll make a lousy billboard. Maybe for that reason alone it’s worth trying.

Stephen Duncombe is the author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. Adbusters #82 https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/82/paris_1968.html http://www.realitysandwich.com/i_want_believe

Bernadette Corporation "Get rid or yourself"

Get Rid of Yourself is a video-film-tract addressed to those who anonymously embody the return of political activism within Empire. While its initial sounds and images were filmed during the riots in Genoa, 2001, these materials are pulled apart and recomposed in order to locate the intensity of a shared experience, rather than producing one more documentary version of the programmed and hyper-mediatized confrontation of the G8 counter-summit. Elaborating a complex and rhythmic form of address via sound/image disjunctions, cheap video effects and performance, the film declares its own exile from a biopolitical space-time where nothing ever happens. The crisis it announces is the sudden return of history, but this time without characters or a story, and of a politics without subjects.
Provisionally aligning itself with the so-called ‘Black Bloc' movement – with the arrogance of its discourse as well as the force and style of their resistance – Get Rid of Yourself is an encounter with emerging, non-instituted or identity-less forms of protest that refuse the representational politics of the official Left. Edited in the aftermath of 9/11 - a period of doubt, reflection and heightened security measures worldwide – the film also attempts to measure the strange distance these events have crossed, and the increasing repression under which the feeling of ‘civil war' has been buried in the meantime. A filmed essay that works by betraying its own form, Get Rid of Yourself tries to approach what is most open in an event, rather than capturing and completing it as something recognizable.
Chloe Sevigny is filmed attempting to memorize the recollections of a female protester, to 'get into character' - she struggles with remembering the lines. This demonstrates the lack of affect - she has not lived through those experiences, for her it really just is a script, empty, with no relation to actual experiences or affects.

FOUCAULT: In the most recent upheaval the intellectual discovered that the masses no longer need him to gain knowledge: they know perfectly well, without illusion; they know far better than he and they are certainly capable of expressing themselves. But there exists a system of power which blocks, prohibits, and invalidates this discourse and this knowledge, a power not only found in the manifest authority of censorship, but one that profoundly and subtly penetrates an entire societal network. Intellectuals are themselves agents of this system of power - the idea of their responsibility for 'consciousness' and discourse forms part of the system. The intellectual's role is no longer to place himself 'somewhat ahead and to the side' in order to express the stifled truth of the collectivity; rather, it is to struggle against the forms of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of 'knowledge', 'truth,' 'consciousness' and 'discourse'. In this sense theory does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice. But it is local and regional, as you said, and not totalizing. This is a struggle against power, a struggle aimed at revealing and undermining power where it is most invisible and insidious. It is not to 'awaken consciousness' that we struggle (the masses have been aware for some time that consciousness is a form of knowledge; and consciousness as the basis of subjectivity is a prerogative of the bourgeoisie), but to sap power, to take power; it is an activity conducted alongside those who struggle for power, and not their illumination from a safe distance. A 'theory' is the regional system of this struggle.

Intellectuals & Power: A conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, 1972 http://libcom.org/library/intellectuals-power-a-conversation-between-michel-foucault-and-gilles-deleuze

...I do not think that there is anything that is functioanlly - by its very nature - absolutely liberating. Liberty is a practice. So there may, in fact, always be a certain number of projects whose aim is to modify some constraints, to loosen, or even to break them, but none of these projects can, simply by its nature, assure that people will have liberty automatically, that it will be established by the project itself. The liberty of men is never assured by the institutions and laws that are intended to guarantee them. This is why almost all of these laws and institutions are quite capable of being turned around. Not because they are ambiguous, but simply because 'liberty' is what must be exercised.

Michel Foucault

And control is not solely external, existing in the public sphere, it also pervades the body and the mind and unfolds through language, communication and social relations. As Castoriadis has described it: ”Individuals become what they are by absorbing and internalising institutions. This internalisation [...] is anything but superficial: modes of thought and action, norms and values, and, ultimately the very identity of the individual as a social being are dependent upon it.”(3) The institutional system is becoming like a gas we inhale.(...) In a situation where it is difficult to distance oneself from the domination of institutions, new means must be applied to construct alternatives. The society of control has, through the dispersal of society's institutions, ultimately reintegrated them into our minds. The resulting conditioning could be counteracted by a collective organising, a production of a context in connection with the material life lived through which are able to channel the diverse accumulation of branching desires whose voice is denied in the variable capitalist production of normality. Self-institutionalisation can be viewed as a kind of exorcism, a kind of externalisation of this internalised control. This is perhaps one way to describe the ambitions lying behind many of the new self-organised institutions which continue to emerge in various cultures around the world. At least it was the ambition that encouraged Henriette Heise and I to found the Copenhagen Free University. We did not want to base our institutional building on a direct opposition, but on a refusal of the dominant institutional mode of production, an evacuation of its basis through the construction of an alternative. The construction of this alternative was based on taking power – but also on a refusal to become government.

Notes on institutions, anti-institutions and self-institutions Jakob Jakobsen (Copenhagen Free University)
http://www.infopool.org.uk/control.htm

JUST IMAGINE CLOSING DOWN
THE CHISENHALE, THE TATES,
THE SHOWROOM, CAMDEN
ART CENTRE, SOUTH LONDON
GALLERY, THE SERPENTINE,
THE PHOTOGRAPHERS
GALLERY, SOUTH LONDON
GALLERY & THE HAYWARD,
AND TAKING ALL THAT
MONEY AWAY FROM ALL
THOSE CURATORS & STATUS-
MONGERS & BUREAUCRATS &
MONEYMEN & MANAGERS,
THEN GIVING IT TO ARTISTS,
WHO WOULD SET UP LOADS OF
TEMPORARY, MORE EXCITING
SPACES FOR LOTS OF ARTISTS
TO SHOW IN, AND THERE'D BE
MUCH MORE ART AROUND
BECAUSE THE MONEY WOULD
GO SO MUCH FURTHER THAN
IT DOES NOW AS IT WOULDN'T
BE SPENT FUELLING THE
CAREERS OF ALL THOSE WHO
PRETEND TO BE THE FRIENDS
OF ARTISTS BUT ARE REALLY
THEIR LAZY, POWERFUL,
ENEMIES...
JUST IMAGINE
ALL THAT ART!
IT WOULD MAKE
LONDON A PHOENIX
REBORN FROM THE
ASHES OF BUREAUCRACY!!
LET'S DO IT!!!

Bank

The Freie Klasse Project started in 1989 with Students of the Berlin University of the arts organizing their education autonomously, as an alternative to the regular class system. Organizing seminars, discussions and exhibitions the Freie Klasse became known for their ambition to reshape the institution and establish a collaborative and political approach towards art practise. After major demands, forming the political agenda of the Freie Klasse, were realized by the University almost ten years after the inception, the motivation of the participants started to weaken: In 1999 the platform of the class -the studio in the main building- was taken and the class fell apart. Since then, only some activities, carried out by different individuals, remained of the possibilities of independent study at the University.
When we discussed the current situtation of art education in Germany, during the student protests in 2003 the Freie Klasse as a self-institution once again came to mind as a tool to discuss very basic and general political ideas within the University and intervene in this specific social reality. We asked ourselves if we could reactivate the promise of an alternative, which was connected, to the term Freie Klasse and use it to continue the discussions of the student protests and connect them with ideas and thoughts in the field of art and culture. We took up what was left of the assets of the old Freie Klasse started working collaboratively, organizing a different form knowledge production. In the process we developed the idea to create a space that should not be governed by the institutionalized authorities. A self determined and independent space to exchange ideas did not exist at that time in the University and our aim was to research if such a space was still needed at all. On the contrary we thought it to be important to actually experience how such a space would look and feel like in reality.
Our proposition was to organize a temporary project, that would be very visible in the University for a limited time during the summer, rather than to reinstitutionalise us into yet another structure. We started to invite many students into a temporary working group that was open to anybody and would be structured around the aims of a temporary project. With this eruptive strategy, we sought to avoid some of the exclusiveness that characterized previous attempts to develop an independent project within this institution.

http://www.interflugs.de/

Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits. Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories. Some artists imagine they've got a hold on this apparatus, which in fact has got a hold of them. As a result, they end up supporting a cultural prison that is out of their control. Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is. Museums, like asylums and jails, have wards and cells- in other words, neutral rooms called "galleries." A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world. A vacant white room with lights is still a submission to the neutral. Works of art seen in such spaces seem to be going through a kind of esthetic convalescence. They are looked upon as so many inanimate invalids, waiting for critics to pronounce them curable or incurable. The function of the warden-curator is to separate art from the rest of society. Next comes integration. Once the work of art is totally neutralized, ineffective, abstracted, safe, and politically lobotomized it is ready to be consumed by society. All is reduced to visual fodder and transportable merchandise. Innovations are allowed only if they support this kind of confinement.

Smithson, Robert (1972). "Cultural Confinement" published in Artforum. Reprinted in Robert Smithson: The collected writings, edited by Jack Flam. University of California Press, LTD. London, England; 1996. available at http://www.robertsmithson.com/essays/cultural.htm

ICA’s Live Arts and Media Department was closed by Ekow Eshun, late last year with an accompanying email statement in which he described the area of practice as lacking the 'depth and cultural urgency' necessary to command the continued resources and focus of the institution. On the contrary we believe that Live Art and performance are highly significant and relevant forms with unique powers to speak to the contemporary situation and to engage the public in the most extraordinary, thought-provoking and challenging ways. In a city as big, culturally rich and varied in its makeup and history as London is, it is important that an arts centre like the ICA should give adequate space to this important area of art practice.
We (artists Tim Etchells and Ant Hampton) have re-opened London’s ICA Department of Live Art with an independent curatorial project True Riches including virtual contributions from an international group of artists, curators and thinkers working in and around Live Art.

www.ica-liveart.org.uk

On 15 April 1969, German television broadcast a 'television exhibition' entitled Land Art. The director, Gerry Schum, had asked several artists to conceptualize or direct a short sequence while he filmed it. (...) He refused to overly the works with the inane commentary that normally accompanied art programmes. On two other occasions he was able to insert an art piece into the daily flow of televisual trivia and entertainment: between 11 and 18 October 1969 a series of nine photographs were shown of Keith Arnatt slowly disappearing into a hole in the ground, one image each night repeated twie (at 8.15 and 9.15) for two seconds. (...) Trough seven days in December, at the end of the night's viewing, Jan Dibbets showed a fireplace: over the period, the fire was seen being lit, blazing and dying down. Both of these pieces dealt with duration and sequence in ways that were radically different from normal television; they were neither voiced-over nor explained.

Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art, p213

Rimini Protokoll. Breaking News - A ‘daily news show’

Breaking News fills the theatre, usually based on ‘acting-as-if’, with a prism of the mainstream from institutions that send us their version of ‘that’s-how-it-was’ every day – with news broadcasts from many countries, captured live via satellite. What remains of the day in the political news from ORF, Al Jazeera, the BBC or the Pentagon Channel? How much “foreign news” do Iraqis get compared with Icelanders? What images are broadcast in South Africa as well as in Ukraine? What is the day’s ‘lead story’? What is lost in the hunt for images? When are programmes switched off?

With the experts found for the project, Rimini Protokoll’s theatre opens a sensuous back door to the world-wide image pool of agencies and broadcasters. Does the event continue to exist at all, or does it disappear behind the network of the various reports on it?

In “Breaking News”, the experts involved in the project themselves become special links in the global news chain. They translate, filter, play videoed messages to each other, make comments and as correspondents contribute the perspectives of various broadcasters to this theatrical teleconference from the world’s political stages. Images of the past compete with the flood of current images. War, diplomacy and catastrophe flow into the great news stream from which every event and individual experience must swim free.

http://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/project_888.html

Art practice might involve the positioning of an object in such a way that it disrupts the situation that surrounds it.
It is in this sense that art can have such a disproportionately large effect on its context: (...) [thus] an art object
might be relatively simple but produce a large number of complex effects placed as it is within a complex situation
(and here attention would need to be given to the specific situation or milieu, into which the object is inserted. Art
can be like the pebble dropped in still water; large effects rippling out from an apparently minor event (...) we might
call this a reverse strategy to principle of connectivity (...), a strategy of anti-connectivity, of deviation, disjunction
and disruption.

Simon O'Sullivan Art Encounters: Deleuze/Guattari p26

Seen from the point of view of each artist’s individual projects such pieces are various, distinct, and personal, and each has a particular meaning. Seen from the point of view of the art-world as a system, they appear as the component parts of a uniform machine, which produces a large range of novel combinations that are tested against various publics for marketable meaning. (...) It should be said that, in comparison with modern and even many postmodern practices, these combinations have become simpler, their elements more manifestly found, their recombination more promiscuous and arbitrary, and the meanings that they generate more fleeting and cursory. (...) any mixing of styles or patching together of narratives is as good in principle as any other. (...) Perhaps there is a relation between the rapid play of images and the development of free trade, the erosion of barriers, historical memory, and identities in favour of the fungibility and mobility of objects, signs, and bodies.
... the most celebrated contemporary art is that which serves to further the interests of the neoliberal economy, in breaking down barriers to trade, local solidarities, and cultural attachments in a continual process of hybridization. This should hardly be a cause for surprise but there is a large mismatch between the contemporary art world’s own view of itself and its actual function.

Julian Stallabrass (2006). Art: incorporated. Oxford : Oxford University Press.

When he had to cancel a visit to the Nova Scotia College of Art + Design in 1971,
John Baldessari sent instructions for a combined exhibition and teaching assignment:
the students were completely to cover the walls of the college gallery with the lines
'I will not make any more boring art.'
(Lucy Soutter, Frieze Sept 06)

When Jens Haaning broadcasts funny stories in Turkish through a loudspeaker in a Copenhagen square (Turkish Jokes, 1994), he produces in that split second a micro-community, one made up of immigrants brought together by collective laughter which upsets their exile situation, formed in relation to the work and in it.

Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, p17

This was a ten-minute performance piece between a masonry-block wall and a collapsed concrete pier between Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges.The photograph was taken at the point at which Oppenheim's bodywas in the position of greatest stress. The artist tested the capability of his body to suspend itself between two masonry walls. Oppenheim's body formed a human bridge, echoing the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges on either side of him. Oppenheim held the position until his body collapsed, just as that section of the dock itself had already collapsed.

Dennis Oppenheim, May 1970, Performance, Pier between Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges and abandoned sump in Long Island, New York

Trisha Brown Roof Piece 1973

Bas Jan Ader Fall Amsterdam

Kierkegaardian reading of the city of Hiroshima in Alain Resnais' film Hiroshima Mon Amour (notes from Hubert Dreyfus's seminar 'Existentialism in Film and Literature')

The city is what Kierkegaard characterizes as 'Knight of Faith'[in Fear and Trembling]. It has neither forgotten its incomprehensible fate, it has not trivialized it, or ended the grieving, rather, paradoxically, it has internalized it and on the grounds of it erects a new city (personified by the male protagonist, an architect involved in building the new modernist architecture of Hiroshima), a new possibility for life. The past is at the same time the defining feature, moment, and at the same time the grounds for

The city as a character: the hotel "New Hiroshima" (a beginning), the museum (an archive), the peace parade (an act of remembrance), neon lights, street life, bars (life, should have been shot in colour to exaggerate the vibrance of the new city - in contrast to the French town, which is shown as dead and broken), modern architecture (Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum by Kenzo Tange, rebuilding the city).

Thinking Hiroshima's landscape of forgetting: incorporating into a way they can go on living, but not forgetting. They do something else with it, which we haven't really fully understood yet. 'we don't joke about...' (they take it very seriously). grief, do it right (not get stuck in it, like French woman does), but really suffer the loss of your world/meaning, now you can feel that somehow everything is going to be alright, can survive and move on (contradictory: be in grief and suffer and not hang on to it, let it however become a part of you and change it from being an object you love to being part of you on the basis of which you can go on. This is not a rational move, it can't be understood, you can't tell yourself that it'll be alright, you just do it). That's what Hiroshima does, it becomes a new city, keeps the old, ruins (Museum of Peace), a deep kind of forgetting AND remembers it by taking it over. It keeps its identity and defining commitment, takes on the disaster and goes on somehow, become just as joyful, finite etc as before. It can be joyful. (p65 Fear and Trembling)

The female protagonist doesn't understand the city. She mistakes it for 'lower nature' (forgetting, naturally)

What if the city was imagined as a designed object of tremendous scale? If the museum was integral to the city - the context for which its exhibits were designed - the recurrent museological problem about how to recreate a sense of context around an artifact is removed from the start. The museum would be its own context. We are concerned with the city itself and how the physical form of the city is the manifestation of an ongoing and unending process of design. The permanent collection consists of all the designed objects within the perimeter of the museum, therefore the museum is in a constant state of acquisition and de-aquisition. The border between interior and exterior is inscribed by movement. The border patrol continuously circles the perimeter streets, welcoming visitors on the outside, thanking for participation on the inside.

Michael Rock/Susan Sellers Museum of the Ordinary (proposal)

Afghanistan is unlike Sarajevo or Kigali or any other war-ravaged landscape I have ever photographed. In Kabul in particular,
the devastation has a bizarre layering with the different destructive eras lying on top of each other. I was reminded of the story
of Schliemann's discovery of the remains of the classical city of Troy in the 1870s; digging down, he found nine cities layered
upon each other, each one in its turn rebuilt and destroyed. Walking a Kabul street can be like walking through a Museum of
the Archaeology of War ' different moments of destruction lie like sediment on top of each other. There are places near Bagram
Air Base or on The Shomali Plain where the front line has passed back and forth eight or nine times ' each leaving a deadly
flotsam of destroyed homes and fields seeded with landmines.

Simon Norfolk. _Afghanistan http://www.simonnorfolk.com/

Carlo Giuliani was an Italian demonstrator who was shot dead by police during the demonstrations against the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001.

------Marking the flood-level in the texture of the city (Paris)---------

Robinson hoped that if he looked at it hard enough he could cause the surface of the city to reveal to him the molecular basis of historical events. And in this way, he hoped to see into the future.

Patrick Keiller London

W.Eugene Smith Rhythm of a Corner, ca 1957

scene from Smoke, directed by Wayne Wang, written by Paul Auster

"The early films appear attractive because most of them are single shots of 50 to 100 feet (about 1 to 2 minutes). They
explore their landscapes in a way that later, more conventionally edited films do only rarely. (...) 1907 is already
difficult - because although there are some very compelling subjects, by then most of the films are edited sequences of
much shorter shots, so that one is continually glimpsing a few seconds of another world, then being hurried on somewhere
else."

Patrick Keiller The City of the Future, Frieze Article

D'Est (From the East, 1993), Chantal Akerman

Second Ring Road


Third Ring Road


Chang'an Boulevard

Ai Weiwei: It's not exactly documenting. It has that function, but it has no documentary purpose. It's not being used as evidence or testimony for anything, but rather to materialize our physical life, its condition in the moment. If you are in place A or on line A or line B, then that present there or that movement is simply as it is. We're living in a constantly changing world and everybody sees it and knows it, but as an artist who is also involved in issues of design and urban planning, I always try to find a way to most efficiently capture what I call fragments, or very small pieces which carry the flavor or carry the essential meaning of the city. So it's a very small effort that I have made, even if it looks quite massive in terms of the length of the videos, its just one section of a fact - the concrete world.
(...)
I made two pieces, one about the second ring and the other about the third ring. The video of the second ring is structured through the 33 bridges, taking one minute shots on each side of the bridge. So standing there you see the car traffic moving from overhead. Then I did the third ring, 50 some bridges and the same thing, the only difference is that second ring is taken on cloudy days (in Beijing most days are like that), while the third ring is taken on sunny days. If you look at it immediately you know that one's second ring and one is third ring. One is just grey color, and sometimes snowing. It's very boring and not an exciting thing to do, but nevertheless it records the condition at the time, its very much like a witness passing through: what he would see, his eye, anybody's eye. There is no artistic or aesthetic value, not much judgment there. Its very, very simple situation; it's very much like a monitor actually.

(...) the Chang'an boulevard project moves in a straight line from outside through the city. It's a section. You were interested in the movement from rural space through urban space and back to the rural. How do you see that piece describing the contemporary city?

AW: I think that surprisingly enough when I started to make it, I did not know what it would be. It's not based on very sophisticated thinking, more on an attitude than on careful planning. It started when one of our friends said they had a son who wanted to come to Beijing, but had nothing to do. After he arrived I asked him if he could do this for a while. Then after days of planning what he should do, I found that Chang'an from the 6th ring road to the 6th ring is 45 km. So I made a very simple decision: just take one video shot for one minute every 50m. No technical requirements: push down, count 1 minute, turn it off, move another 50m, push down... Whatever happens in front of the lens is fine. It took months, the whole winter, because in the winter there is no better or worse view. I think in Beijing the winter really reflects northern landscape very well. You know there is a kind of sadness there. So after months he had taken 1000's of shots: from a very rural, primitive village, to the business district, to the political center, to an old town and later on ended up in the Capital Iron Company, which has just been destroyed and moved to another city township. This video was the last possible time to take these shots of the Capital Iron Company, a symbol of socialist industry. They made all the iron for the nation.

http://archinect.com/features/article.php?id=47035_0_23_0_M

Die Leere Mitte (The Empty Centre, 1998), Hito Steyerl

After German reunification, Potsdam Square is rebuilt by transnational companies. In the same process, people are shoved out to the outskirts of the city. They are marginalized by the recentering of Germany 's political and economic power. Die leere Mitte ("The Empty Centre") closely follows the processes of urban restructuring and transition that have taken place in the center of Berlin for the last eight years. In 1990, squatters proclaim a socialist republic on the death strip. Eight years later, the new headquarters of Mercedes Benz arise in the same location.

The film makes use of slow superimpositions to uncover the architectonic and political changes of the last eight years. History is condensed in metaphorical transitions from one frame to the other, from GDR socialism to FRG capitalism, from past to present, but also revealing hidden connections between continents, an unknown genealogy of earlier globalisations. The film focusses on Potsdam square to discover traces of global power shifts, and the simultaneous dismantling and reconstruction of borders.

At the same time, it traces back the history of ostracism and exclusion, especially against immigrants and minorities, which always have served to define the notion of a powerful national center. After the recent German elections, a new chancellor boasts to represent the 'New Center' of public opinion. The film nevertheless strives to highlight the perspective of those who are still excluded from public representation and to give them a voice and a history.

"It is not so much crossing boundaries as frontiers as it is the partial disappearance, dissolution or repositioning of the boundaries themselves. It is the shifting of the boundaries as you try to cross them... Now you begin to see that we are also talking about the fragmentation of boundaries; the partial breakdown, renegotiation, repositioning of boundaries, about the appearance of new boundaries which cut across the old ones." (Stuart Hall)

"...the orientation of squares and avenues is contained by my vitality, the city is present in the vividness of my memory of places. (...)
I carry this 'mental map' everywhere I go. In the desert as in China, my city is already there, my domicile has become my domiciliation.
Paris is more than accompanied baggage. Paris is portable. (...) Even destruction - TABULA RASA - would not be enough to throw me (...).
When it comes down to it, only reconstruction could really disorient me by demolishing the constructions of my memory."

Paul Virilio City of Panic pp5

"Every once in a while, he would suddenly feel what it had been like to hold the three-year-old boy in his arms - but that was not exactly thinking, nor was it even remembering. It was a physical sensation, an imprint of the past that had been left in his body, and he had no control over it."

Paul Auster City of Glass

BBC NEWS Brown 'to change' protests laws

The laws which restrict the right to demonstrate in Parliament Square need to be changed, Gordon Brown has said. The PM said change was needed to balance
"the need for public order with the right to public dissent". He said he would consult with police, Parliament, civil liberty groups and Westminster council. A 2005
law created an "exclusion zone" inside which all protests required police permission. Critics say it curbs the right to spontaneous protest. The requirement for police
permission was introduced in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005.
It was partly a response to anti-war protester Brian Haw, whose round-the-clock vigil in Parliament Square, using placards and loudspeakers had annoyed MPs and peers.
The Home Office has also said the law was necessary for security reasons - it had been argued that a bomb could be left beneath Mr Haw's signs. But while Mr Haw remains
in the square, having been granted police permission for a reduced protest, many other unauthorised, peaceful, protests have been broken up. The restrictions have been
heavily criticised and the subject of several unauthorised protests themselves.
In January Lib Dem Baroness Miller said the 2005 Act had had a "chilling" effect on demonstrations, as many people believed they were totally banned.

Story from BBC NEWS:http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/uk_politics/6266420.stm
Published: 2007/07/03 16:29:42 GMT

Politik hat in der griechischen Polis, also mitten auf dem Marktplatz, begonnen. In diese Mitte der Menschen gehört sie auch. In Heiligendamm hingegen hatten die politischen Akteure versucht, sich abzuschotten von den Leuten, von denen sie gewählt werden und in deren Sinne sie zu handeln verpflichtet sind. Es war, als hätten sich die Gipfelteilnehmer auf einem anderen Planeten versammelt. Der friedliche Durchbruch der Demonstranten, bei dem sie mittels Masse durch die Polizeiketten förmlich diffundierten, war ein Triumph über diesen extremsten Abschottungsversuch der Politik, den es bisher gab. "Wir sind das Weltvolk!", schrieben die Demonstranten den Staats- und Regierungschefs mit ihren Aktionen hinter die Ohren. "Ihr könnt euch zurückziehen, wie ihr wollt, wir werden euch so nah wie möglich auf die Pelle rücken." Und das gelang.

Christoph Schwennicke, Die Auswärts-Kanzlerin, SZ 09. Juni 2007 , Seite 4

Quelle: SZ, 16.4.07

design: Ogilvy NY + Andrew Bannecker

Environmentalist Vandana Shiva on the Coca-Cola sponsored campaign 'Hopenhagen' in an interview with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, 14/12/09:

Amy Goodman: There is a big campaign here called “Hopenhagen.”
Vandana Shiva: Yeah.
AG: Among the corporate sponsors are Coca-Cola (...). Can you talk about the global effects of Coca-Cola?
VS: Yeah, my heart just sank, because when I got off the flight, the first thing I saw was a Coca-Cola bottle, “Hopenhagen.” Well, if you’ve been to Plachimada, India, where 1.4 million liters, 1.5 million liters were extracted by Coca-Cola every day, and—
AG: Liters of water?
VS: Liters of water to make these soft drinks and to do the bottling of water. The women had to rise up against Coca-Cola. The women had to say, “Shut this plant down, because we are having to walk ten miles to get clean and safe water.” That would not be Hopenhagen. The women of Plachimada would not see hope in a Coca-Cola bottle.
AG: Where is Plachimada?
VS: Plachimada is a little village in Kerala where the women organized and shut down a Coca-Cola plant, and this triggered a movement across India. Three plants have been shut down. Coca-Cola does not bring hope, and Coca-Cola should not be the symbol of finding solutions for the climate crisis.
(http://www.democracynow.org/2009/12/14/indian_environmentalist_vandana_shiva_it_is)

Panel: Coca-Cola Owes $47M for Environmental Damage in Indian Village

In India, a government panel has recommended a $47 million fine against the Indian subsidiary of the soft-drink giant Coca-Cola for environmental damage. The panel found a Coca-Cola bottling plant polluted the water and soil around the village of Plachimada by discharging toxins including cadmium and lead. The plant was shut down in 2004 after local residents successfully won a campaign for its closure. Coca-Cola has denied responsibility for the environmental damage and says it rejects the panel’s recommendation.
(Democracy Now!, 24 March 2010)

"How much harm does a company have to do before we question its right to exist?"

Paul Hawken, The Economy of Commerce, in Kalle Lasn Culture Jam p154

Dear Mrs. Bush:

As American designers, we strongly believe our government should support the design profession and applaud the White House sponsorship of the Cooper Hewitt National
Design Museum. And as finalists and recipients of the National Design Award in Communication Design we are deeply honored to be selected for this recognition. However,
we find ourselves compelled to respectfully decline your invitation to visit the White House on July 10th.

Graphic designers are intimately engaged in the construction of language, both visual and verbal. And while our work often dissects, rearranges, rethinks, questions
and plays with language, it is our fundamental belief, and a central tenet of “good” design, that words and images must be used responsibly, especially when the matters
articulated are of vital importance to the life of our nation.

We understand that politics often involves high rhetoric and the shading of language for political ends. However it is our belief that the current administration of
George W. Bush has used the mass communication of words and images in ways that have seriously harmed the political discourse in America. We therefore feel it would be
inconsistent with those values previously stated to accept an award celebrating language and communication, from a representative of an administration that has engaged
in a prolonged assault on meaning.

While we have diverse political beliefs, we are united in our rejection of these policies. Through the wide-scale distortion of words (from “Healthy Forests” to “Mission
Accomplished”) and both the manipulation of media (the photo op) and its suppression (the hidden war casualties), the Bush administration has demonstrated disdain for the
responsible use of mass media, language and the intelligence of the American people.

While it may be an insignificant gesture, we stand against these distortions and for the restoration of a civil political dialogue.

The letter was signed by Michael Rock, Susan Sellers, Georgie Stout, Paula Scher and Stefan Sagmeister

design: Milton Glaser

"Branding New York - How a city of crisis was sold to the world" by Miriam Greenberg traces the rise of New York City as a brand and the resultant transformation of urban politics and public life. Greenberg addresses the role of 'image' in urban history, showing who produces brands and how, and demonstrates the enormous consequences of branding. She shows that the branding of New York was not simply a marketing tool; rather it was a political strategy meant to legitimatize market-based solutions over social objectives.

"The “Big Apple” became not only a place to visit and “love,” but also a global model of the neoliberal city, which so diminished the meaning of citizenship, even as local groups struggled to preserve rights to the city.” Thomas Bender, University Professor of the Humanities, New York University

"A new and hegemonic vision of New York was being produced — one that seemed, finally, to eclipse the apocalyptic image of the city sinking into the sea that had emerged over the previous decade. It was a vision so convincing and enticing that it could be embraced by tourists, celebrated by the media, upheld as a symbol for the nation, and used to distract attention from the city’s still very real and unabating problems.
I don’t want to give too much credit to image-making in and of itself. It was a necessary but not sufficient aspect of this change. But on the other hand, I think it can conceal or distract attention from the deeper political and economic restructuring that was and is going on. And it helped turn New York’s free market ‘recovery’ from fiscal crisis into a global model.
I’m not saying that image makeovers are bad per se. I think it’s fine for cities to try to market themselves. But I would say the branding of New York City, insofar as it combined market-centered policies with that image-making, has had negative effects on the diversity and the affordability of the city; the dynamic mix of the economic base of the city; and the resilience of the city in response to crisis, because it’s so dependent now on finance, real estate and tourism."
Dr Miriam Greenberg

http://www.amazon.com/Branding-New-York-Crisis-World/dp/0415954428

Responses by Advertising and business groups regarding the legislation against advertising in public space in Sao Paulo: "They say that free expression will be inhibited, jobs will be lost and consumers will have less information on which to base purchasing decisions. They also argue that streets will be less safe at night with the loss of lighting from outdoor advertising. (...) "This is a radical law that damages the rules of a market economy and respect for the rule of law," said Marcel Solimeo, chief economist of the Commercial Association of São Paulo, which has 32,000 members. "We live in a consumer society and the essence of capitalism is the availability of information about products." (...) "I think this city is going to become a sadder, duller place," said Dalton Silvano, who cast the sole dissenting vote and is in the advertising business. "Advertising is both an art form and, when you're in your car or alone on foot, a form of entertainment that helps relieve solitude and boredom."

Billboard ban in São Paulo angers advertisers, By Larry Rohter, International Herald Tribune, December 12, 2006

Le Collectif des Deboulonneurs are one of several French groups on a crusade against consumerims. The group demands that advertisements in public spaces be restricted to
dimension of 50 x 70 cm, which is the maximum size for political posters.

http://www.deboulonneurs.org/

Aldo van Eyck, Playgrounds, Amsterdam

Tacita Dean The Russian Ending

Superimposed on each image (a found postcard, depicting accidents and disasters) are white handwritten notes in the style of film directions with instructions for lighting, sound and camera movements, suggesting that the each picture is the working note for a film. The title of the series is taken from a convention in the early years of the Danish film industry when each film was produced in two versions, one with a happy ending for the American market, the other with a tragic ending for Russian audiences. Dean’s interventions encourage viewers to formulate narratives leading up to the tragic denouements in the prints, engaging and implicating the audience in the creative process.

"I'm anxious to use some new technology, to see if we can eliminate the surface noise and reveal what might be an
off-the-cuff conversation between Edison and Dickson. (...) It would be the first recording ever of a natural con-
versation between people unaware that they were being recorded. There's a formality to all recordings of the human
voice we have from this period (1890's), very much like the photographs of people sitting in their Sunday best...
It was the same with sound...You spoke in your sunday-best voice, very clearly into the horn. But on parts of this
particular cylinder - the violin test from 1894 - people were simply talking, naturally. I hope we can decipher it: not
only for what they say, but how they are saying it.

Walter Murch The Conversations p95

"Well, first of all, it's a fairly easy perception: all you have to do is stand up and then relax - you know - and at a certain point you realise that you've relaxed everything
that you can relax but you're still standing and in that standing is quite a lot of minute movement [...] the skeleton holding you upright even though you're mentally relaxing [...]
Call it the "small dance" [...] It was a name chosen largely because it's quite descriptive of the situation and because while you're doing the stand and feeling the "small dance"
you're aware that you're not "doing" it, so in a way, you're watching yourself perform; watching your body perform its function. And your mind is not figuring anything out and not
searching for any answers or being used as an active instrument but is being used as a lens to focus on certain perceptions."

...Paxton's revolution derives from his claiming of stillness as dance - ultimately, as he writes in the quote, there is no stillness, but only layers of
minuscule motions. At the still point of the body, we are to find neither ascent nor descent, but also not fixity. Stillness is full of microscopic moves.
Paxton's embrace of sstillness as a form of dancing necessitates, implicates, produces a radical rearrangement of the subject's perceptual field. At the
perceptual threshold a sensorial rearrangement takes place on the level of the microscopic, [...] and stillness reveals its many layers of vibratile inten-
sities.(...) As the subject stands still, listening, sensing, smelling its own bodily vibrations, adjustments, tremors streaming through, across, within the
space between core subjectivity and the surface of the body, there is nothing more than the revelation of an infinite, unlocatable space for microexploration
of the multiple potential for otherwise unsensed subjectivites and corporealities one harbours. The "small dance" happens in that nowhere; the dancer must
explore the unlocatable there between subjectivity and body-image.

Andre Lepecki Still: On the Vibratile Microscopy of Dance in Brandstetter, G. (ed) 2000. Remembering the Body. Hatje Cantz Publishers

Rineke Dijkstra Kora, Tiergarten (1998/2003)

J.C. Yes, and the audience can become the performer.

D.C. What does the composer become?

J.C. He becomes a member of the audience. He starts to listen.

John Cage For the Birds p127

'... nichts als natürlich darstellen was nicht auch natürlich ist. Nicht so tun, als ob das was durch Geschichte, Technologie, Institutionen
und Gesellschaft geprägt wurde natürlich sei.'

Derrida

Nach vierzig Jahren sieht man die großen Konturen: In allen westlichen Staaten haben sich in jenem Jahrzehnt die Studentenzahlen vervielfacht. In den Wohlfahrtsstaaten studierten zum ersten Mal in nennenswerter Zahl die Kinder der Besitzloseren. Überall ging es zunächst um Studienbedingungen, mit lokalen Ausprägungen: in München um die Buspreise, in Paris um die Geschlechtertrennung in den Studentenheimen, in Berkeley um das Recht auf politische Betätigung. In Mexiko, Spanien, Polen, Ungarn war es ernster, dort waren die Universitäten die einzigen Orte, an denen so etwas wie eine freie Meinung nicht gänzlich zu unterbinden war. Man muss es nicht, wie Immanuel Wallerstein, die Weltrevolution von 68 nennen, aber in jenen Jahren begann die Auflösung der politischen Nachkriegsordnung. Die Kolonien erkämpften ihre Selbstständigkeit, die Sowjetunion verlor ihre Kontrolle über die Satelliten, in den westeuropäischen Staaten trat die alte Führungsschicht ab. Deutschlands Parlamentarier, die dem Volk nicht trauten (die NPD wurde vorübergehend stark), bekamen Panik ob einer kleineren Konjunkturdelle, konnten die drei Milliarden Vietnamtribut nicht zahlen, dachten an Inflation und Weimar, flüchteten sich in eine Große Koalition und planten eine Wahlrechtsänderung. Und die westliche Führungsmacht USA war dabei, sich weltweit zu diskreditieren. Denkräume öffneten sich, Suchbewegungen begannen.

Mathias Greffrath, Der Sommer, in dem unser 68 begann, DIE ZEIT, 17.05.2007 Nr. 21

George Brecht - Concerto for Orchestra, Fluxversion 1 (1962)

Orchestra members exchange their insturments.

Fluxus Workbook, http://www.fluxus.org/12345678910.html

Ben Vautier - Strike (1962)

After the audience is admitted to the theater and seated, a member of the actors' union gives a 5-minute talk on low
wages and announces a 3-hour strike.

Fluxus Workbook, http://www.fluxus.org/12345678910.html

Why the hell not re-use the stones of Stonehenge?

Cedric Price

The informal is opportunistic, an approach to design that seizes a local moment and makes something of it. Ignoring preconception or formal layering and repetitive rhythm, the informal keeps one guessing.
Ideas are not based on principles of rigid hierarchy but on an intense exploration of the immediate. It is not ad hocism, which is collage, but a methodology of evolving start points that, by emergence, creates
its own series of orders. When we attempt to trap chaos and convert it to our preconceptions, Order! becomes an enormous effort. We try to eliminate fault or error. We try hard but the effort turns to dullness
and the heavy Formal. The more subtle approach is to seek the notion that chaos is a mix of several states of order. What is an improvisation is in fact a kernel of stability, which in turn sets sequences that
reach equilibrium. Several equilibriums coexist. Simultaneity matters; not hierarchy. The informal has tree principal characteristics: local, hybrid and juxtaposition. They are active ingredients of an animate
geomety that embraces the linear and non-linear. Both Cartesian and post Einsteinian geometry are encompassed by it. The informal gives rise to ambiguity. This means interpretation and experiment as a
natural course of events.

Cecil Balmond, The Informal - Manifesto

Thomas Markus' paper at the 1971 Design Participation conference is the most accurate analysis of the differences between reformist and revolutionary designers that I have seen. The former, typically from a middle-class leftish background, try to make the design process transparent to the public gaze, and to provide ranges of alternative solutions so that compromises may be effected. But the revolutionary rejects both this and the conservative/patronage-oriented way, in favour of working for a real transfer of power. His clients are the end users and his work is often voluntary. He is not afraid of value judgements and he often rejects 'participation', not least for its potential for political manipulation.

Today's 'radical design' tells us to participate. 'User participation', said Nigel Cross in his preface to the Design Participation proceedings, 'by involving in the design process those who will be affected by its outcome, may provide a means for eliminating potential problems at their source.' Too right. One of the chief potential problems being that of protest and action after the event. With the magic ingredient of 'participation', all the people with the power have to do is to turn around and say 'How can you moan about this building (or whatever) - you participated in its design.' Most 'participation' is on the level of one's jailers asking if one prefers the rope or the firing squad. Many people instinctively know this, which allows the authorities to throw up their hands and say 'You see - even when we offer you a say, you don't want it.'

I cannot emphasise strongly enough how harmful I believe the notion of 'participation' to be. It is a spectacle to distract us, a sop to the masses, a manoeuvre carried out largely by hypocrites with bad intentions. No government dares carry participation to its logical conclusions... and in practice they do not need to worry, because it is self-regulating: by definition diminishing its own energy as peoples' needs appear to get answered. When people talk about 'participation', I believe they mean 'limited participation', 'reasonable participation'. (...)

...if reform is retrograde and participation placatory, what should designers do? Simple. Apart from a few special cases, they should stop designing - at least under the present terms of reference. To the people designing doorknobs, cars, hairdriers, radios, packages, chairs, beds, and tractors and bandages, we should say 'STOP - THE ONES WE'VE GOT WILL DO'. You've been so clever, such good designers, that nearly everything we make and use is just about good enough now, considering all these other problems we've got.'

Brian Smith, Conceptual Design - A Polemic, in Design for Need

Some say the word Odradek is of Slavonic origin, and try to account for it on that basis. Others again believe it to be of German origin, only influenced by Slavonic. The uncertainty of both interpretations allows one to assume with justice that neither is accurate, especially as neither of them provides an intelligent meaning of the word.

No one, of course, would occupy himself with such studies if there were not a creature called Odradek. At first glance it looks like a flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does seem to have thread wound upon it; to be sure, they are only old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colors. But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to that at a right angle. By means of this latter rod on one side and one of the points of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if on two legs.

One is tempted to believe that the creature once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a broken-down remnant. Yet this does not seem to be the case; at least there is no sign of it; nowhere is there an unfinished or unbroken surface to suggest anything of the kind; the whole thing looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished. In any case, closer scrutiny is impossible, since Odradek is extraordinarily nimble and can never be laid hold of.

He lurks by turns in the garret, the stairway, the lobbies, the entrance hall. Often for months on end he is not to be seen; then he has presumably moved into other houses; but he always comes faithfully back to our house again. Many a time when you go out of the door and he happens just to be leaning directly beneath you against the banisters you feel inclined to speak to him. Of course, you put no difficult questions to him, you treat him--he is so diminutive that you cannot help it--rather like a child. "Well, what's your name?" you ask him. "Odradek," he says. "And where do you live?" "No fixed abode," he says and laughs; but it is only the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it. It sounds rather like the rustling of fallen leaves. And that is usually the end of the conversation. Even these anwers are not always forthcoming; often he stays mute for a long time, as wooden as his appearance.

I ask myself, to no purpose, what is likely to happen to him? Can he possibly die? Anything that dies has had some kind of aim in life, some kind of activity, which has worn out; but that does not apply to Odradek. Am I to suppose, then, that he will always be rolling down the stairs, with ends of thread trailing after him, right before the feet of my children, and my children's children? He does no harm to anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful.

Franz Kafka "The Cares of a Family Man", ca1915

Stammesdichtung hat eine lange Tradition in Südarabien: Schon Mohammed, der Prophet, setzte auf die Wirkung schöner Worte und ließ seinen Gefährten Hassan ibn Thabit, einen der besten Poeten seiner Zeit, mit Versen für die Hingabe an Allah werben. "Als Stammesideal gilt bis heute, dass jeder Mann und jede Frau ein Poet ist", sagt der Anthropologe Steven Caton von der Harvard-Universität. Monatelang lebte der Amerikaner in einem abgelegenen Bergdorf, um seine dichtenden Nachbarn zu beobachten. "Für die meisten von ihnen ist das Dichten etwas Selbstverständliches. Sie waren ziemlich überrascht, als ich ihnen sagte, dass das so im Westen nicht existiert." Aus Jahrhunderten blühender Poesie ist jedoch nur wenig überliefert. Arabische Stammesdichter reimen nicht, um Sammelbände zu füllen, sondern meist mündlich, für den Augenblick: um den Bräutigam bei der Hochzeitsfeier zu preisen, mit der eigenen Meinung zu überzeugen, von Ereignissen zu erzählen - und _{Konflikte zu lösen}.

Wo der Staat nichts zu sagen hat

Für den Ort, an dem sich al-Maschriqi jeden Dienstagnachmittag mit Bekannten zum Rezitieren und Reden trifft, kommen alle schönen Worte zu spät. Bürgerkriege und heftige Regenzeiten haben die alten Lehmhäuser des Dorfes am Rande der Hauptstadt Sanaa in Ruinen verwandelt, überragt von einem neuen, weiß verzierten Minarett aus rotbraunem Backstein. Das Nachmittagsgebet, das dritte der fünf am Tag, ist gerade vorbei, als al-Maschriqi den Diwan, den Versammlungsraum des Neubaus betritt, den bestickten Gürtel mit dem Krummdolch daran an den Haken neben der Tür hängt und barfuß im weiß glänzenden bodenlangen Männerkleid auf den Polstern auf dem Fußboden Platz nimmt. Bevor einer der vier Poeten im Raum den ersten Vers vorträgt, rascheln Plastiktüten. Alle haben sich eine Portion kleine dunkle Blätter mitgebracht, leicht berauschendes Qat. Al-Maschriqi stopft sich das Grün in die rechte Backe, kaut darauf herum, und liest mit vollem Mund sein neuestes Gedicht vor, notiert binnen Minuten. Es geht um Alltägliches, die allgegenwärtige Lebensgefahr auf jemenitischen Straßen zwischen Autos ohne Licht und Bremsen, in überladenen Minibussen. In den Versen wird al-Maschriqi zum Fahrer eines Sammeltaxis, der laut hupend mit offener Schiebetür über die kurvigen Gebirgsstraßen braust. "Setz dein Leben nicht so schnell aufs Spiel" - den Refrain murmeln alle mit. Vielleicht machen die Verse die Straßen sicherer als die jüngste Kampagne der jemenitischen Regierung. In den Weilern der bis zu 3000 Meter hohen Berge, in denen der Staat ohnehin kaum etwas zu sagen hat, bewirkt ein kunstvolles Gedicht, das von Haus zu Haus wandert, mehr als Plakate und Spruchbänder. Jeder zweite Jemenit kann nicht lesen und schreiben - die im ländlichen Dialekt verfasste Volksdichtung aber versteht jeder. ... Herausforderungen dieser Art lauern für den Dichter im Stammeskrieger überall. Im Bus, wenn der alte Mann auf einen Sitzplatz pocht - mit einem eindringlichen Zweizeiler, der dem unachtsamen Jungen nur die Wahl lässt, wortlos seinen Platz zu räumen oder schnell eine angemessene Entschuldigung zu reimen, mindestens so geschickt wie die Worte des Alten. Oder beim Scheich, wenn zwei Familien nach einem Verkehrsunfall über das Blutgeld verhandeln, und der Schuldige mit einem bewegenden Gedicht an die Nachsicht der rachsüchtigen Opfer appelliert. Jüngere Stammesleute erreicht ein herausfordernder Vers auch als SMS. Mehr als eine Viertelstunde sollte bis zur getippten Erwiderung nicht verstreichen. Für die Antwort gelten strenge Regeln. Sie muss das gleiche Versmaß haben, den gleichen Reim verwenden, zumindest das gleiche sprachliche Niveau erreichen. Der riesige Schatz an Synonymen im Arabischen hilft, diese Anforderungen zu erfüllen. Das Publikum ist unerbittlich. Wer eine Zeile spricht, die nicht ins Reimschema passt, wird mit einem lauten Zwischenruf zum Schweigen gebracht. Der Dichter verliert sein Gesicht. Es ist ein bisschen, wie wenn amerikanische Rapper in Hip-Hop-Gefechten gegen die Kontrahenten einer anderen Gang vom Leder ziehen. Mit einem wichtigen Unterschied: Persönliche Beleidigungen sind tabu. "Man nennt nie jemanden einen Idioten", erklärt Professor Caton. "Man zeigt, dass er einer ist."

Das verbindet Dichtung und Kriegsführung: Es gibt Regeln, und sie zu achten, ist eine Frage der Ehre. "Durch dieses sehr komplizierte System der Versformen können die Leidenschaften, die zu Gewalt führen, eingedämmt und in kreative Bahnen gelenkt werden", sagt Caton. "Eine Form der Katharsis, der Kanalisierung roher Gefühle in formale Kompositionen." So fügt sich Dichtung in die raue Stammeswelt. Und deshalb interessiert sich auch die Politik für Poesie.

Es war nach den Anschlägen vom 11. September 2001, die Regierung war bereits auf den amerikanischen Anti-Terror-Kurs eingeschwenkt, als einem Präsidentenberater in einer Qat-Runde auffiel, wie häufig einflussreiche Dichter im Heimatland der Familie bin Laden von "Märtyrern", "Widerstand" und "Heiligem Krieg" sprachen. Also ließ er einen Wettbewerb ausschreiben: um das beste Gedicht gegen Gewalt, gegen Terrorismus, gegen Entführungen. Mehr als 600 Poeten reichten ihre Verse ein, al-Maschriqi war einer der prämierten. "Verfalle nicht dem Wahnsinn auf dem Weg zu den Extremen / Dein grundfalscher Standpunkt ist kein Grund zum Stolz / wer nur zerstört und Terror sät, wird selbst daran zerbrechen", heißt es in seinem Anti-Terror-Gedicht, mit dem er nun über die Dörfer zieht. Warum aber sollten sich Fundamentalisten von ein paar Reimen beeindrucken lassen? "Gedichte können Menschen überzeugen, die sich weder durch Gesetze noch durch Gewalt einschüchtern lassen", sagt al-Maschriqi. "Denn Gedichte berühren das Herz ihrer Kultur."

KLAUS HEYMACH + SUSANNE SPORRER, Land der Dichter und Kämpfer, SZ 09. Juni 2007, Seite 14