Check out BrushFire the blog for Provisions’ latest project.  The blog covers arts and cultural programs around the country in the run-up to elections in November, with a special emphasis on events in the DC area, where over twenty cultural organizations are planning special upcoming programs that engage social issues.  The blog documents happenings in other cities around the country as well.

If you’d happen to be in Chicago on July 21-22, be sure to go to the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum. That’s were Futurefarmers are staging their innovative public art project Energy Plans. Through a series of carefully designed but playful events, they will get people talking about energy-related issues.

The public will be invited to participate in discussions with scientists in the Energy Tent. The outcome of these discussions will be a series of questions relative to the issue of “Energy” and the upcoming 2008 elections. The questions produced in these small discussion groups will be posed to larger groups in the form of a Continuum, which will look like this:

In short, a continuum is a visualization of a group discussion in which people are asked to position themselves physically in relation to certain questions. According to Futurefarmers:

Participants will be asked to place their stool on a position on the continuum that relates to where they stand on that issue. Participants will then stand on the stool to declare why they chose to stand in that position. Most likely, after hearing why each person is standing where they are, discussion and criteria shifts will influence people to change their position.

Each morning, Futurefarmers will conduct special workshops with Chicago area teenagers from the Chicago Park District TRACE (Teens Re-Imagining Art/Community/Environment) program and the Nature Museum CPS summer interns.

If you’re not able to be there but would like to participate, you can submit to the Continuum online: here. Your contribution will be used later on site during the staging of the event. The continuum will be video taped and later presented in Provisions’ BrushFire exhibition: Close Encounters: Facing The Future at the American University Museum in DC.

Here for an article.
Here for Energy Plans.
Here to submit to the Continuum.
Here for Futurefarmers.

Volume Magazine has just released its latest issue on the subject of ‘Social Engineering’. An independent magazine about design and architecture, Volume goes beyond architecture’s definition of ‘making buildings’. It reaches out for global views on designing environments, advocates for broader attitudes to social structures, and reclaims the cultural and political significance of architecture. Articles in the new issue range from an interview with James C. Scott in which he states a fundamental critique on State driven large-scale social engineering to OMA’s new architectural quest in being an incubator of cultural resistance. Highly recommended!

Our society seems to be locked into a position in which the choice of the user and the voter determine our future ways of living. A disturbing forecast of a collective urban life in a giant Big Brother House looms; a material and social world in which the sensational media and its commercial translation is prevalent. Our sense of what is real and what is quality is on the verge of collapse. The practice and education of the engineers of this society is determined by short term effect instead of social responsibility. Culture is market, politics its façade and the city its stage. Instead of reviving old school high modernist social engineering or claiming here the need for an intellectual Junta, we solicit for new forms of social engineering. Where does this lead you?

Here for Volume Magazine.

For this film, activist and artists Paul Chan invited several other video artists to generate four short films that intimately portray political activist who have been sentenced to jail by the US government post September 11, 2001.
The film in itself stands at the intersection of art and politics. It is a brilliant survey of our current laws and constitutional rights, the Patriot Act and its implications, and the abuse of power within the US legal system.
The subjects include activist lawyer Lynne Stewart, founder of the Critical Art Ensemble Steve Kurtz, naturalized American citizen, husband, father and academic Mohammed Yousry, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Kathy Kelly, and Frida Berrigan, the first activist to protest against Guantanamo Bay at Guantanamo Bay.

Paul Chan’s video portrait of Lynne Stewart called “Untitled” , focuses on the relationship between the language of law and the language of poetry.

The film [simply] shows Ms. Stewart talking; in a sense it is a self-portrait. She talks about her trial, about her career as an activist lawyer and about a personal politics that sounds instinctual rather than ideological. She also reads poetry.

One of the poems she reads is William Blake’s “On Another’s Sorrow” from “Songs of Innocence”. It isn’t “political” in any overt way. It is filled with both questions and answers. While she reads, Mr. Chan turns the screen into a field of changing colors, so that we concentrate on the music of the words, the activism of the soul that poetry is, the power outlet that art can be. It’s a simple device, and like any effective political action, right or wrong, brilliant because it works.

Holland Cotter, New York Times January 17, 2006

The film is now available at Video Data Bank (www.vdb.org)

Equipped only with a camera and a couple of microphones that can be turned into a mobile recording studio, Alexander Hacke, the bassist from the industrial avantgarde band Einstürzende Neubauten and German-Turkish filmmaker Fatih Akin, roam the streets of Istanbul, capturing the diverse, sonic landscape of this vast and vibrant city.

The 90 minute documentary, Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul, functions as an insightful and infectiously enjoyable survey of contemporary Turkish musical identity. The almost mystical seeming voyage introduces the viewer to a broad spectrum of familiar and foreign sounds ranging from rock, hip-hop and electronic to classical “Arabesque”.
As Hacke and Akin wandering through this seductive musical world, they interview and record musicians from all different walks of life in various spots in the city. We listen to the sound of the neo-psychedelic band Baba Zula, fusion DJ-duo Orient Expressions, two Turkish rock bands Duman and Replikas, fast-rapping Ceza , , the infamous digital dervish Mercan Dede, clarinetist Selim Sesler, the street performers Siyasiyabend, the beautiful Kurdish dirges singer Aynur Dogan, the infamous Orhan Gencebay on the sar, and the two legendary female singers Muzeyyen Senar and Sezen Aksu.

Located on the Bosporus, Istanbul is defined by its unique geographical position at which both continents and cultures of Europe and Asia come together. The city is a hodge-podge of colors, styles, languages, life and cultures. Crossing the Bridge and the artists in it underscore the idea that through the process of making music and its mere appreciation, music is not only a source for entertainment, but its can also function as a political act, a way to maintain one’s heritage, forge new paths and therefore shape one’s own identity.

The artists featured in the documentary have not only influenced Turkeys current cultural landscape, but by stylistically or lyrically taking on and addressing some of the relevant issues at hand, they, with the help of this beautifully shot and edited documentary, have given insight into the current social and cultural context of modern day Turkey.

Land of Human Rights is a project dealing with the status quo of human rights in Europe seen from an artistic perspective. Over a period of three years, arts organizations in Central Europe and the Balkans are collaborating to develop a program of human rights issues through the means of art. The planned activities – exhibitions inside and outside the gallery space, poster campaigns, media projects, film programs, theoretical discourse etc – are supposed to reach a broad audience. They are designed to make people aware of the following fact: “In many respects the observance of human rights is not guaranteed ‘in front of our doors’ too!”

Trafó Gallery in Budapest is currently working together with Polish artist Joanna Rajkowska. The project Airways is an attempt to create a symbolic public space that manifests the divergence between the idea of the Hungarian nation state and the actual Hungarian society at present. For her Budapest project Rajkowska invited two groups on the same flightseeing tour. One includes the representatives of right wing groups that aim to constrict the social space in a radical, nationalist way, while the other comprises foreign residents and ethnic minorities, who are, albeit members of actual Hungarian society, regularly ousted from it. Rajkowska’s works deal with spaces of social contact and the conflicts and communities forming these: they suggest simple yet far from obvious encounters.

Here for Land of Human Rights; and its partners:

rotor association for contemporary art, Graz
University of J.E. Purkyně, Ústí nad Labem
riesa efau | Motorenhalle, Dresden
Trafó Gallery, Budapest
Galerija Škuc, Ljubljana
g - mk | galerija miroslav kraljević, Zagreb

“An artist operates on the same territory as ideology. The affirmative and critical potential of art demonstrates itself, therefore, much more powerfully and productively in the context of politics than in the context of the market.”

(Boris Groys, Art Power)

Being one of the major intellectual figures from Eastern Europe operating in Western art circles, Boris Groys persistently believes there is no more potent force in today’s world than art, its influence extending far beyond the art world. Producing more paradoxes per page than any other critic, he provokingly attacks – and consistently demonstrates the many flaws in – the critical discourse surrounding contemporary art.

His basic thesis, namely that the political and propagandistic function of art did not end with the cold war, will leave many believers in the “autonomy” of art irritated and somewhat baffled. Groys states that the existing art institutions, system or market can’t be seen as autonomous in any significant sense of the word. Instead, he makes a case for the political function of art by revealing how art and politics are initially connected. This, however, does not mean that art holds no power in its own: according to Groys it has an outspoken autonomous power of resistance.

Presenting it as a strong force in public space, Groys demonstrates art’s power as propaganda following not commercial but political logic. However, he discusses not per se propaganda but the propaganda function of art in general. He demonstrates this by considering the art produced under socialist systems, which had no market at all, but also by considering today’s Western system. In his view, the abundance of exhibitions, biennials, triennials and art fairs are performing an increasingly political function: making propaganda for the pluralism of the West and the Western life style.

Groys points out that in our so-called postideological age the prestigious international exhibition provides an idealized, curated, image of the perfect balance of power. “The desire to get rid of an image can be realized only through a new image – the image of a critique of the image.” Advocating for a slow and complex return to authorial authority, Art Power is a must for anyone interested in thought-provoking cultural and political philosophy.

Art Power, Boris Groys, MIT Press, 2008

New considerations are entering the public discourse about ethics, raising intriguing and sometimes perplexing questions about right living. A recent essay posted at the Human Flower Project gives a great introduction to the new field of plant ethics– beginning with a breeding history of the world’s most popular fruit: the banana. The essay, submitted by the EarthScholars Research Group, is in part inspired by the Venezuelan Palm Society’s Universal Declaration of Plant Rights, which begins to compile principles that might guide more responsible interactions with plants. Food for thought as we turn the earth’s biomass into humans.
Link

Although freedom of speech is guaranteed in the United States, access to all information and knowlege is not. What we read in the news, and what we see on TV, what we find on the internet and what our government tells us is not always the full story. Artists are beginning to question the knowlege at their disposal, challenge the information they are fed, and confront the facts they have been given through their art.

For Reasons of State, an exhibition showing from May 16 to June 7, 2008, at The Kitchen in NYC, features artists who explore issues of public access to information in American society, focusing on the availability of knowledge to the general public and the censorship or misrepresentation that results from governmental and/or corporate influence.

Exploring the fine line between a citizen’s need-to-know versus his or her right-to-know, the exhibition interrogates the different power system within our society and transforms our political understanding, our way of reasoning and our moralities into vivid and visual experiences.

Curator and art historian Dunja Blazevic, currently director of the SCCA in Sarajevo, started in 1981 a legendary monthly TV show called TV Gallery, which was broadcast monthly on the Yugoslav TV network until 1991. TV Gallery was a highly influential platform for interdisciplinary, socially engaged artistic and curatorial practice in the Western Balkans, being an unrivaled example of a public TV concept and art’s place within it.

TV Gallery is now turned into an exhibition, highlighting the TV show’s innovative ideas about democratization, participation and cultural production. Today, the preserved tapes of this show demonstrate how such radical experiments would be unacceptable on public television, where they would be considered as elitist, noncommercial and uninteresting both in form and content:

A paradox ensues that the TV shows aiming at mass media public today can return only in a ‘closed’, ‘elitist’ space of a white cube gallery. In the world of Big Brother and programmed social oblivion, ‘obsolete’ media space of a gallery reaffirms itself as one of the rare spaces for freedom and experiment, a place of reminiscence that social and media reality are not unambiguously marked with politics or economy. Although socio-political context enabled these shows, nothing would have happened without initiative, creativity, and courage of editors, redactors, directors and artists that produced the shows and had clear ideas about theory and ideology of media, art and personal action.

TV Gallery is part of the project Political practices of (post)Yugoslav Art, a long term project in which four independent cultural organizations collaborate in multidisciplinary research, mapping and analyzing of the historical, social and economic conditions that have shaped artistic practices in the Western Balkans.

Here for the 4 partners: WHW (Zagreb), kuda.org (Novi Sad), SCCA/pro.ba (Sarajevo) and Prelom Kolektiv (Belgrade).

Here for Political practices of (post)Yugoslav Art.