Culture

Micropolitics Autumn 08 The Sensible At Work Micropolitics Mondays Beginning 13 October 6:30 PM Housman's Bookshop, 2nd floor 5 Caledonian Road Kings Cross London N1 9DX http://micropolitics.wordpress.com Building on lessons learned from past visitors, Suely Rolnik, Brian Holmes and Franco Berardi, this year, the Micropolitics group will take it slowly. Departing from our drifts, narratives and fables of our experience of Post-Fordist life and labour, we will elaborate concepts from what Suely Rolnik calls the ‘sensible mutations’ found within our current regimes of value production. How do provoke frictions and counter-conducts, structures of support, and other forms of value, for ourselves and with others? How might we intervene into the formats and processes that manage expectations, relationships, the production of knowledge and social care? Part seminar, part analytic support group, micropolitics will meet on the second Monday of each month.
Call for participation TURN*ON Artivistic 2009 (Fall) Montreal, Canada http://artivistic.org The world to come is so sexy. We are unstoppable for we are fueled with an incredible urge to embrace the pleasure provided by difference, exchange and freedom. Our actions today are charged with an energy that is animated by the rise of change and a movement that is simply irresistible. New movements are arising at the intersections of sex, politics and technology. These movements are inspired by, as well as critical of, the long traditions of struggle they stem from, remixing gender bending, sex work (and play), and media activism. From body hacking to the implosion of the service economy, where are we today and what new possibilities can we envision and nurture? For its upcoming fourth edition, Artivistic is going sexy. Discussing, questioning, and imagining the past, present, future, and infinite possibilities of sex. While keeping issues of power and control in question, we want to turn to the potency of pleasure, curiosity, humor, and desire in order to TURN*ON that which has yet to be thought and experienced differently.
Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now September 20 – November 22, 2008 Opening: September 20, 2008, 7-10pm Exit Art, 475 Tenth Ave., New York City Signs of Change is a major exhibition opening at Exit Art on September 20, 2008, chronicling 50 years of the cultural productions of social movements. Dara Greenwald and Josh MacPhee have curated over 600 posters, prints, photographs, moving images, audio clips, and other ephemera from over 30 countries. Signs of Change provides a dialogue with the past and an engagement with the present about the important cultural work of social movements. From the American Indian Movement to Women's Liberation, the South African Anti-Apartheid struggle to Portugal's Revolution of the Carnations, German Autonomen and squatters to South Korea's Kwang Ju uprising, this exhibition carries us through the whirlwind of people taking action to change the world.
50 Ways To Leave Your Love, Or, let's find a completely new art criticism Brian Holmes For most of the twentieth century, art was judged with respect to the previously existing state of the medium. What mattered was the kind of rupture it made, the unexpected formal or semiotic elements that it brought into play, the way it displaced the conventions of the genre or the tradition. The prize at the end of the evaluative process was a different sense of what art could be, a new realm of possibility for the aesthetic. Let's take it as axiomatic that all that has changed, definitively. The backdrop against which art stands out now is a particular state of society. What an installation, a performance, a concept or a mediated representation can do with its formal, affective and semiotic means is to mark out a possible or effective shift with respect to the laws, the customs, the measures, the mores, the technical and organizational devices that define how we must behave and how we can relate to each other at a given time and in a given place. What you look for in art is a different way to live, a fresh chance at coexistence. Anything less is just the seduction of novelty - the hedonism of insignificance. If that's the case (if the axiom really holds), then a number of fascinating questions arise - for the artist, of course, but also for the critic. Where the critic is concerned, one good question is this: How do you address yourself to artists or publics or potential peers across the dividing lines that separate entire societies? How do you evaluate what counts as a positive or at least a promising change in the existing balance of a foreign culture? I'm sure you immediately see how difficult this is. Already in the past, it was hard enough to say that a particular aesthetic tradition and a particular state of the medium defined the leading edge, the point at which a rupture became interesting. Yet still there were times when all the painters seemed to flock to Rome, then later to Paris, then later to New York City; and so through the sheer aggregation of techniques and styles, the fiction of a leading edge could be maintained, at least by some. But in the face of a simultaneous splintering and decline of what used to be called "the West," and a correlative rise of some of "the Rest," who could seriously say that certain local, national or regional laws, customs, measures, mores and technical or organizational devices are really the most interesting ones to transgress or even break into pieces, in hopes of a better way of being? Or to be even cruder about it, and closer to the actual state of things: Who can seriously claim that the Euro-American forms of society are the benchmark against which change must be measured - even if those societies are still the most opulent and most developed and most heavily armed with all the nastiest of technological weapons?
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Critical Art Ensemble's Steve Kurtz Cleared of All Charges Department of Justice Fails to Appeal Dismissal Kurtz Speaks about Four-Year Ordeal Buffalo, NY—Dr. Steven Kurtz, a Professor of Visual Studies at SUNY at Buffalo and cofounder of the award-winning art and theater group Critical Art Ensemble, has been cleared of all charges of mail and wire fraud. On April 21, Federal Judge Richard J. Arcara dismissed the government’s entire indictment against Dr. Kurtz as “insufficient on its face.” This means that even if the actions alleged in the indictment (which the judge must accept as “fact”) were true, they would not constitute a crime. The US Department of Justice had thirty days from the date of the ruling to appeal. No action has been taken in this time period, thus stopping any appeal of the dismissal. According to Margaret McFarland, a spokeswoman for US Attorney Terrance P. Flynn, the DoJ will not appeal Arcara’s ruling and will not seek any new charges against Kurtz.
SEIZED Critical Art Ensemble Institute for Applied Autonomy June 7 to July 19, 2008 Opening Reception: Saturday, June 7, 8–11pm Admission is FREE Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center 341 Delaware Avenue, Buffalo, NY 14202 Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center is pleased to announce the exhibition SEIZED by Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) and the Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA). The exhibition premieres Saturday, June 7, 2008 from 8–11pm and the opening reception is free and open to the public. The exhibition will remain on view through July 18, 2008. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday, 11am to 6pm and Saturday, 1–4pm. Following the four year long ordeal of CAE founding member and University at Buffalo Art Professor Steve Kurtz—accused by the Justice Department of “bio-terrorism” and later indicted on charges of mail fraud for procuring harmless bacterial cultures for use in an educational art project—SEIZED presents the artworks behind this case which has attracted worldwide attention and propelled an international arts community to rally to Kurtz’s support and on behalf of freedom of expression.
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Utah Phillips: May 15, 1935 – May 24, 2008 John Pietaro Utah spoke directly to each of us in that filled auditorium on April 24 of this year. It didn’t matter that it was his disembodied voice, speaking over a cell phone held up to a microphone, held aloft by Pete Seeger, one of the event's headliners. The strength of Phillips' message message was as clear as the vitality in his tone. I was happy to be there to hear Utah's response to our benefit concert on his behalf, happier still to witness the warm exchange between he and Seeger, another elder of fighting the good fight. But this room on that sunny spring day in Rosendale New York was dedicated Utah Phillips; we'd all come with the intention of helping this man who’d been there for the greater “us” for decades. Utah told us of his life and plans for the future. Sure, he sounded tired, but none could accept that Utah would not get through this challenge. He told us so. None would believe that he would pass away just about a month later. Damn, at least we can say that it took a lot to silence Utah. But the echo of his work rings loudly, as sonorous as the music onstage that day from Pete, Dar Williams, Redwood Moose, Sarah Underhill, Norm Wennet, Bill Vanaver, my own Flames of Discontent and others.
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Linguist Noam Chomsky Gives Students Lesson in Free Thinking Emily Krone, Daily Herald Staff http://tinyurl.com/4qcvs3 In a second-floor classroom at a Carpentersville [Illinois] high school, one of America's most renowned free-thinkers warned about 40 assembled students that the American public school system conspires to blunt their creativity and engender their obedience. Via speakerphone from his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, linguistics professor Noam Chomsky told Dundee-Crown High School students that a two-tiered educational system exists: While the elite attend schools that promote critical, independent thought, the masses attend schools that train students to pass tests and follow orders. The system evolved after the Industrial Revolution, Chomsky said, when the ruling elite recognized the need to transform independent artisans and farmers into pliant factory workers. Today as then, Chomsky said, the imperative is the production of a docile work force that will perpetuate the status quo.
New Radical Subjectivities: Re-thinking Agency for the 21st Century The University of Nottingham, UK Friday, September 19th, 2008 Keynote Speaker – Professor Peter Hallward (Middlesex University) This one day conference for postgraduate students and early career researchers explores recent articulations of subjectivity and political agency in critical theory and cultural studies. The continued ascent of neo-liberalism and economic globalisation, along with postmodern and poststructuralist theorising around subjectivity, potentially sets a dangerously de-politicised subject against the expanding forces and inequalities of contemporary capitalism.
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Dear Friends: Hanon Reznikov, Judith Malina's husband and the co-director of The Living Theatre since Julian Beck's death in 1985, passed away last night. He suffered a stroke a little more than two weeks ago, followed this week by pneumonia. To send cards or notes of condolence to Judith here is the address: Judith Malina The Living Theatre 19-21 Clinton Street apt 203 phone: 212-397-9301 Email: contact@livingtheatre.org As is Jewish custom, no flowers. However, baskets of fruit or other edibles are accepted.
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