AESTHETICS AND RADICAL POLITICS

Sat 3rd Feb 2007, Manchester University

There has always been a strong connection historically between
aesthetics and radical politics, and this is no less true for the
global justice movement’s current preoccupation with cultural
approaches to political action. This conference seeks to bring
radical artists, activists, theorists and academics together to
discuss past and present convergences between the theories and
practices of artists and writers and the theories and practices of
movements for radical social change.

There is already a massive amount of literature on Marxist
approaches to aesthetics, art and literature, and whilst
recognising the usefulness of such approaches, this conference will
attempt to engage with these issues from other radical critical
positions - whether they be anarchist, autonomist, ecological or
otherwise. Such perspectives have often been overlooked
historically, but it is arguable that they now more centrally
influence the activities of radical artists and activists.

Tillie Olsen, Feminist Writer, Dies at 94

Kuie Bosman, NY Times

Tillie Olsen, whose short stories, books and essays lent a heartfelt voice to the struggles of women and working-class people, died on Monday in Oakland, Calif. She was 94.

Ms. Olsen died after being in declining health for years, her daughter Laurie Olsen said.

A daughter of immigrants and a working mother starved for time to write, Ms. Olsen drew from her personal experiences to create a small but influential body of work. Her first published book, "Tell Me a Riddle" (1961), contained a short story, "I Stand Here Ironing," in which the narrator painfully recounts her difficult relationship with her daughter and the frustrations of motherhood and poverty.

At the time of the book's publication Ms. Olsen was heralded by critics as a short story writer of immense talent. The title story was made into a film in 1980 starring Melvyn Douglas and Lila Kedrova.

Ms. Olsen returned to issues of feminism and social struggle throughout her work, publishing a nonfiction book, "Silences," in 1978, an examination of the impediments that writers face because of sex, race or social class. Reviewing the book in The New York Times Book Review, Margaret Atwood attributed Ms. Olsen's relatively small output to her full life as a wife and mother, a "grueling obstacle course" experienced by many writers.

borninflames writes:

Cinema/Utopia:
An Interview with Richard Porton

Andrew Hedden, Lucid Screening

Reading Richard Porton’s Film and the Anarchist Imagination [Verso 1999] brought me back to my love for film years after I more or less abandoned it for political activism. Politics really come first in my life — as a lot of the content on Lucid Screening probably shows — but I’m always holding out for those places, so few and far between, where film and politics can coincide to the benefit of both. I found such a place in Porton's book: in its exploration of an anarchist aesthetic, and for all its academic lingo, I hold it to be — along with Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed — one of the most intriguing pieces of anarchist theory written in the past fifty years.

The book left me wanting more. It’s in this spirit that I contacted Porton for an interview on the occasion of Andy Horbal’s Film-Criticism-Blog-a-thon.

Many thanks are due Porton, and not just for granting this interview: he is woefully rare in the world of both film and political criticism for his strong willingness to wrestle with, in his words, the “probably… irresolvable tension between great art and good politics.” In this interview, Porton discusses a broad range of subjects, among them the reception of his 1999 book; the aims of film criticism; his work as co-editor of Cineaste magazine; whatever anarchism might offer cinema; and that ever-pesky push and pull between aesthetics and politics.

"These Sinister Christmas Holidays"

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Granma

Nobody remembers God at Christmas. There is such a roar of horns and
fireworks, so many garlands of colorful lights; so many innocent,
slaughtered turkeys; and so much stress from spending beyond our
means in order to look good that one wonders if anyone has any time
to ponder that such madness is to celebrate the birthday of a boy
born 2,000 years ago in a destitute horse stable, a short distance
from where a few thousand years before King David was born.

Nine hundred and fifty-four million Christians believe that this boy
was God reincarnated, but many celebrate his birth as if they don't
really believe it. In addition, there are several millions who have
never believed it but like to party and many others who would be
willing to turn the world upside down so that nobody would believe
it. It would be interesting to find out how many of them also
wholeheartedly believe that the Christmas of today is a revolting
holiday but don't dare say it for a prejudice that is no longer
religious, but social.

The Rapture Project

January 4 - 21, 2007

HERE Arts Center 145 6th Ave.

The Rapture Project is Great Small Works’ newest production, a serio-comic epic spectacle about fundamentalism and American culture and politics. Inspired by rough-and-tumble Sicilian marionettes, current events, popular End Times literature, and day-to-day anxiety, with visual motifs from the Cockettes and 1920’s Christian iconography.

Alternately ridiculous and terrifying, The Rapture Project brings together tabloid newspaper stories, popular literature about Armageddon, and fundamentalist iconography to create an epic spectacle following an unlikely cast of characters from the USA to The Middle East and beyond.

See the Creationist tour of the Grand Canyon and learn the history of the world through Bible-based science.

Enter the world of Muslim squatter punks in Buffalo where young believers try to redefine Islam for the 21st century.

Marvel as the spirit of Susan Sontag debates the Devil.

Be awed as regular American citizens confront the growing power of fundamentalism over their lives and institutions.

Wonder if The Rapture is upon us!

Anonymous Comrade writes:

Crossing the Border?
Hybridity as Late-Capitalistic Logic
Of Cultural Translation and National Modernisation
Kien Nghi Ha

One of the most celebrated features of hybridity is its supposed characteristic to cross cultural and national boundaries and its ability to translate oppositional cultural spheres into innovative expressions of the so-called postmodern era of late capitalism.

This era is apparently based on free circulation and intermingling of ideas and significations in a world increasingly shaped and reshaped by different forces and different meanings of globalisation and migration. This view, which stresses hybridity as the central term for the ongoing process of intercultural transgression, became lately prominent in the mainstream academic discourse. Even in the more sophisticated parts of the multicultural integration industry sponsored by the state are obvious trends to refashion national representation through inclusion and appropriation of cultural resources, which belong to marginalized groups in the immigration society.

At the same time there is also a significant and popular desire within the mainstream society to explore new forms of cultural consumptions, which are not purely based on the construction of antagonistic differences and fixed stereotypes, but rather on the culturalistic production "out of such hybridization that newness can emerge" – to use a paraphrase coined by Salman Rushdie.

Terraces & peripheries. Left snobbery & the radical right

Emilio Quadrelli

If anyone still had any doubts much has happened to dispel them. Many of the terraces of the Italian football stadiums are controlled to an increasing degree by the radical right. This is a fact. And it is necessary to start from here to attack, politically and not morally, a phenomenon which has been spreading for some time in metropolitan peripheries and which only becomes worthy of attention when it gains heavy media visibility. Only in the presence of swastikas, celtic crosses or explicit holocaust references dominating stadiums are many people stupefied, as if they were in a remake of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, and they forget at least a thing or two.

First, they [i.e. the fans associated with the radical right] don’t come from the moon, they also have a social life outside the stadiums, lived quite coherently with the ‘values’ expressed on the terraces. In other words, adherence to the nazi ‘lifestyle’ is not something purely symbolic and extemporaneous, adopted in a framework where carnival prevails, but a total and in many cases totalizing ‘lifestyle,’ with effects on everyday life. The second thing is the consent and legitimation which – without any kind of forcing, it should be noted – they can claim across areas which cannot necessarily be reductively described as belonging to the world of the radical right. To speak only of the Roman situation, it is worth recalling the ‘dead boy’ derby match.

This spurious story was circulated by some hardcore fringe fans, regarded by the ‘experts’ as marginal, isolated from the rest of the crowd, but it immediately became the unquestionable truth for the whole stadium. Essentially the story accused the security forces of killing a young boy during the baton charge that preceded the match. The denial by senior officers and by the highest municipal authorities met with a long deafening, chorus of ‘shame, shame’ (from Lazio and Roma fans alike), which left little room for interpretation and showed that, when it came to choosing between the institutional truth and the illegitimate truth of ‘small groups’ of ‘unruly fans’ the whole stadium showed little doubt about which side it was on. And this is only one of many episodes which could be cited. Posing a few questions, then, seems legitimate to say the least. As they are not aliens, the ‘stadium extremists’ do not come from outer space, they inhabit urban areas which are not particularly hard to identify: the peripheries.

michel chevalier writes:

target: autonopop

Michel Chevalier

Has something fundamental changed in the art world in the last few years?
Or, let's say: since the '70s, since the outset of western capitalism's ongoing crisis? Have mechanisms set in that narrow the range of what artists/critics/curators can do?

«target: autonopop» answers yes to all these questions and takes aim at the commercial art gallery circuit, its products, and the somewhat less (overtly) market-oriented art-institutional context. Safe generalizations that spare people's feelings and preserve confortable arrangements are not on the agenda; instead: a regularly updated process in which art is "consumed" in a different way.

«target: autonopop» examines the articulation between the market/gallery and institutional spheres, their cooptational and coercive instances, their aversion to any critique which has real consequences.

Visual, social, and historical investigations supplement a project which is not merely theoretical: to retrace and critique the art-circuit's tacit dogma of ambivalence and non-oppositionality. On the curatorial and production level, «target: autonopop» has been fostering and generating activity which avails itself to exactly these "unartistic", unambiguous and frontal means when necessary, be it in an art or a non-art context.

«target: autonopop»
is featured at the XV Biennale de Paris

December 2006 Launch for Thomas Pynchon's Latest Novel

Guardian

The long wait could be over for Thomas Pynchon fans. His first novel in nearly a decade is coming out in the US on December 5.

But the release, as with so much else about the elusive author of contemporary classics such as The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow, is shrouded in mystery. Since the 1997 release of Mason & Dixon, a characteristically broad novel which followed the travails of two 18th-century astronomers charting the disputed borderline between Pennsylvania and Maryland, new writings by Pynchon have been limited to the occasional review or essay, such as his introduction for a reissue of George Orwell's 1984. He has, of course, continued to shun the media and avoid photographers, though he has turned up twice on "The Simpsons," appearing in one episode with a bag over his head.

Totems without Taboos: The Exquisite Corpse

By Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid

Database aesthetics, collaborative filtering,
musical riddles, and beat sequence philosophy
aren't exactly things that come to mind when you
think of the concept of the "exquiste corpse."
But if there's one thing at I want to you to
think about when you read this anthology, its
that collage based art - whether its sound, film,
multimedia, or computer code, has become the
basic frame of reference for most of the info
generation. We live in a world of relentlessly
expanding networks - cellular, wireless, fiber
optic routed, you name it - but the basic fact is
that the world is becoming more interconnected
than ever before, and it's going to get deeper,
weirder, and a lot more interesting than it
currently is as I write this essay in NYC at the
beginning of the 21st century. Think of the
situation as being like this:

in an increasingly fractured and borderless
world, we have fewer and fewer fixed systems to
actually measure our experiences. This begs the
question: how did we compare experiences before
the internet? How did people simply say "this is
the way I see it?" The basic response, for me, is
that they didn't - there was no one way of seeing
anything, and if there's something the 20th
century taught us, is that we have to give up the
idea of mono-focused media, and enjoy the
mesmerizing flow of fragments we call the
multi-media realm. For the info obsessed, games
are the best shock absorber for the "new" - they
render it in terms that everyone can get. Play a
video game, stroll through a corridor blasting
your opponents. Move to the next level. Repeat.
It could easily be a Western version of a game
that another culture used to teach about morals
and the fact that respect for life begins with an
ability to grasp the flow of information between
people and places. I wonder how many Westerners
would know the term "daspada" - but wait - the
idea that we learn from experience and evolve
different behavioral models to respond to
changing environments is a place where complexity
meets empathy, a place where we learn that giving
information and receiving it, is just part of
what it means to live on this, or probably any
planet in the universe. What makes "Exquisite
Corpse" cool is simple: it was an artists parlour
game to expose people to a dynamic process - one
that made the creative act a symbolic exchange
between players.

Some economists call this style of engagement
"the gift economy" - I like to think of the idea
of creating out of fragments as the basic way we
can think and create in an era of platitudes,
banality, and info overload. Even musicians and
artists - traditionally, the ciphers that
translate experience into something visible for
the rest of us to experience - have for the most
part been happy for their work to be appropriated
by the same contemporary models for material
power that have created problems for their
audiences - power and art happily legitimizing
each other in a merry dance of death, a jig where
some people know the rules of the dance, but most
don't. But this "death," this "dematerialization"
- echoes what Marx and Engles wrote about way
back in the 19th century with their infamous
phrase "all that is solid melts into air." Think
of the exquisite corpse concept as a kind of
transference process on a global scale. When you
look at the sheer volume of information moving
through most of the info networks of the
industrialized world, you're presented with a
tactile relationship with something that can only
be sensed as an exponential effect - an order of
effect that the human frame of reference is
simply not able to process on its own. At the end
of the day, the "exquisite corpse" is just as
much about renewal as it is about memory. It
depends on how you play the game.