Sarah Kanouse writes:

"Urban, Rural, Wild" Exhibition
Chicago, September 8–October 22, 2005

Based at I space (230 W. Superior, Chicago);
Related events at other locations
http://www.walkinginplace.org/ispace

“Urban, Rural, Wild” presents new work by eight artists addressing the historical and contemporary relationships among metropolitan Chicago, rural downstate Illinois, and the places where the conceptual, associative, and physical urban-rural divide breaks down. Part exhibition and part investigative platform, “Urban, Rural, Wild” presents gallery installations, associated off-site events, a resource center, and a film series to interrogate, rethink, and re-imagine city and country in the midwest.

NOT BORED! writes:

"Is the Reichstag Burning?"

True Authors Identified

Not Bored!

It is commonly thought than Gianfranco Sanguinetti — the author of "On Terrorism and the State" (1978) — also wrote "Il Reichstag Brucia?" ("Is the Reichstag Burning?" 1969), which is a classic situationist denunciation of terrorism executed by the State (in this case, the secret services of Italy). But recently translated materials (see below) indicate that the tract's real author were other situationists: Eduardo Rothe and Paul Cesoni.

The Circus Amok season has begun. If you haven’t seen Amok, well.. now’s your opportunity!

http://www.circusamok.org

Thurs, Sept 1 Riverside Park (Manhattan), 6pm

Fri, Sept 2 Fort Greene Park (Brooklyn), 6pm

Sat, Sept 3 Coney Island (Brooklyn) 2pm & pm

Sun, Sept 4 Marcus Garvey Park (Manhattan) 4pm

Monday, Sept 5 McCarren Park (Brooklyn) 1pm & 4pm

Thursday, Sept 8 Styvesant Cove (Manhattan) 6pm

Friday, Sept 9 Herbert Von King (Brooklyn) 6pm

Saturday, Sept 10 St. Mary's (Bronx) 4pm

Sunday, Sept 11 Prospect Park (Brooklyn) 1pm & 4pm

Thursday, Sept 15 Union Square Park (Manhattan) 1pm &
4pm

Friday, Sept 16 Sunset Park (Brooklyn), 5pm

Sunday, Sept 18 Highland Park (Queens), 4pm

Thursday, Sept 22 Bedford Playground (Brooklyn), 5pm

Friday, Sept 23 Washington Square Park (Manhattan),
5pm

Saturday, Sept 24 Rufus King Park (Queens), 2pm & 5pm

Sunday, Sept 25 Tompkins Square Park (Manhattan), 1pm<
& 4pm

The Connection Between the War Against Terrorism, Economics and Media-Art

Researchers, activists and media-artists meet on the Trans-Siberian train from Moscow to Beijing September 11th –20th 2005.

The conference “Capturing the Moving Minds” gathers a pack of people … artists, economists, researchers, philosophers, activists … who are interested in the new logic of the economy, the new form of war against terrorism and in the new cooperative modes of creation and resistance, together in a space moving in time. Spatially moving bodies and bodies moving in time (through the different time zones) creates an event, a meeting that not really 'is' but 'is going on'.

Is this project about economics, is it political activity or a work of art? This “boundlessness” or “indeterminacy”, which always characterizes the creation of new, is where the energy of the project is coming: The enterprise expresses and exposes itself the “knowledge economy” in which it exists. It is something the orthodox conceptions about work, action, economy and art are unable to grasp. In this organizational experiment everybody is “alone together” like a pack of wolves around a fire having neighbours to the left and to the right but nobody behind their backs exposed to the desert.

AnttiR writes:

Night of the Street Arts in Helsinki
AnttiR

Night between 25th and 26th of August was "night of the arts" in Helsinki, that is different galleries, theatres and opera are open until late night, and there are many events in the streets as well. Because street arts such as graffiti and stickers have been seriously repressed thanks to so called "zero tolerance" policy, a number of artists and political activists (from squatter spectrum, not anarchist) wanted to organise "night of the street arts". This was a festival against violence and repression unleashed by city of Helsinki and private army of FPS (Finnish Protection Service) on their payroll. Organisers preferred not to announce their affiliations, and action was claimed by no any particular group.

People may have noticed thjat we are under a spam attack, this article was posted by a registered user, sylvia, but I inadverntentl;y deledeted it, apologies]

I am sylvia from greece and currently sponsored by the programme YOUTH to independently work on researching cultural houses in Europe. I have been reading a lot through the internet and am mainly interested in free spaces, like the Rote Fabrik in Zuerich, Switzerland, which poped up after radical youth movements. I have been reading a lot about Italy and Holland, the Squatters and so on and it is all so fascinating, but it is difficult to find out whether there were cultural places that survived and are still functioning, like in Switzerland, since I am in the other end of the world and all this took place when I wasn't even born! But I have the chance now to know more about it and share the information with so many other people.. Can anyone help me? Information about such free independet cultural houses, or links to people that could give me more specific information? the page http://av-produktionen.ch/80/home.html is very helpful, but unfortunately only referring to Switzerland. And anything else I have managed to find has more to do with the history and less with the results. I would so much appreciate any help. Just point out a couple of places you like and hang out in. Thanx a bunch!!! sylvia"

Aesthetic and Political Avant-Gardes

George Katsiaficas, Journal of Aesthetics & Protest

The term “avant-garde” as used in popular discourse as well as in the more specialized worlds of art and politics has a variety of meanings. Sometimes it is overlooked—treated as having no special importance. There is no entry for it in the 32 volume Macmillan Dictionary of Art (1996), the New Encyclopedia Britannica (1995), or even in Raymond Williams’s highly regarded Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Yet for most of the 20th century—and the 19th as well—the term avant-garde was widely used to define attempts to forge new dimensions to our aesthetic and political definitions of reality. At the intersection of art and politics is where the term originated, and it is there that its most explosive interpretations can be found. In its 1973 edition the now-defunct Great Soviet Encyclopedia stridently attacked “avant-gardism” as “saturated with capitalist and petty bourgeois individualism.” More recently, feminists and post-modernists have attacked the avant-garde as a concept that fosters elitism.

If we were to attempt to give a brief definition to “avant-garde” as it has evolved over the last two centuries, it would refer to people seeking to transform aesthetic and political developments in society. Sometimes entwined together in complementary relationships, and at other moments separate and even antagonistic strands, aesthetic innovation and political engagement are both embedded in the core of the meaning of avant-garde. In what follows, I will trace the development of avant-garde movements from their origin in 19th century France to the contemporary period. In my view, the tension between the political and the aesthetic in avant gardes is significant and valuable; political activists can learn a great deal from the impact of aesthetic movements.

"Looking Back at 'The Battle of Algiers'"
Louis Proyect, Monthly Review

Challenged by terrorist tactics and guerrilla warfare in Iraq, the Pentagon recently held a screening of "The Battle of Algiers," the film that in the late 1960's was required viewing and something of a teaching tool for radicalized Americans and revolutionary wannabes opposing the Vietnam War.

Back in those days the young audiences that often sat through several showings of Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 re-enactment of the urban struggle between French troops and Algerian nationalists, shared the director's sympathies for the guerrillas of the F.L.N., Algeria's National Liberation Front. Those viewers identified with and even cheered for Ali La Pointe, the streetwise operator who drew on his underworld connections to organize a network of terrorist cells and entrenched it within the Casbah, the city's old Muslim section. In the same way they would hiss Colonel Mathieu, the character based on Jacques Massu, the actual commander of the French forces.

The Pentagon's showing drew a more professionally detached audience of about 40 officers and civilian experts who were urged to consider and discuss the implicit issues at the core of the film — the problematic but alluring efficacy of brutal and repressive means in fighting clandestine terrorists in places like Algeria and Iraq. Or more specifically, the advantages and costs of resorting to torture and intimidation in seeking vital human intelligence about enemy plans.

— Michael T. Kaufman, "What Does the Pentagon See in 'Battle of Algiers'?" (New York Times, September 7, 2003)

At a press conference dramatized in The Battle of Algiers, the captive FLN leader Larbi Ben M'Hidi is asked what chance he has of defeating the French. He answers that it has a better chance than the French have of defeating history. M’Hidi’s reply was probably lost on the Pentagon audience since every imperial power in history seems utterly convinced of its own invulnerability. The film has an entirely different significance for the left. We watch it to become inspired, all the more so at a time when Americans are facing our own version of the battle of Algiers.

Dalton Trumbo's JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN

Adapted for the Stage by Bradley Rand Smith

Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun tells of a young soldier wounded in WWI. Through an intimate one-man performance, we explore the mind of a boy rendered blind, deaf, and quadriplegic who still dares to ask the question "why?"

The New York International Fringe Festival - FringeNYC

A Production of The Present Company

& Sleepless Theatre Company:

the New York division of LOOKOUT! Players

Performance dates and times:

Sunday, August 14 at 12pm

Thursday, August 18 at 8pm

Sunday, August 21 at 4:30pm

Thursday, August 25 at 5:45pm

Saturday, August 27 at 7:15pm

Playing at:

Ace of Clubs

9 Great Jones Street

(3rd Street between Broadway and Lafayette)

Subway: B,D,F to Broadway/Lafayette stop

W,R to 8th street stop

6 to Bleecker Street stop

212.677.6963

Enrollment info for Continental Drift Seminar with Brian Holmes

Part I -- Sept, (12) and (15-18)

Part II -- Oct (20-24).

at 16 Beaver

Continental Drift is a modular and experimental seminar that will attempt to embark upon the "impossible" task of articulating the immense
geopolitical and economic shifts which took place between 1989-2001, the effects of those changes on the emerging bodies of governance (i.e., the formation of economic blocs like EU or NAFTA) and in turn the effects on subjectivity. Having witnessed the incredible vibrancy of social
movements which took hold in that same period, the seminar acknowledges that new modes of control and channeling of various flows have merited a shift in tactics and strategies. The question of "what now?" is precisely at the core of our study. "The goal, then, is to map out the majority models of self and group within each of the emerging continental systems, to see how they function within the megamachines of production and conquest – and at the same time, to cross the normative borders they put into effect, in order to trace microcartographies of difference, dissent, deviance and refusal.