March 13 – April 17, 2010

apexart

Sinudom Silk Screen Factory
35/21 Moo 1, Sakaegnam Road
Samaedam, Bang Khun Thian
Thailand

Franchise Two: “free size” **
Curated by Logan Bay

Participating artists: Alvaro Ilizarbe, Jen Stark, Juan Angel Chavez, and P7

“In a mass produced world of global goods, the act of creation is often lost or forgotten. Hidden machinery cranks and sweats out elements of our everyday life, yet we rarely glimpse the environment where ideas are physically forged. To produce the exhibition free size artists Alvaro Ilizarbe, Jen Stark, Juan Angel Chavez, and P7 will work directly in the Sinudom Silk Screen factory along side employees creating works of art. By bringing these contemporary artists into a global manufacturing hub the realms of production and creation will exist in a simultaneous space, transforming this modest factory into an active generator of creative capital. The Sinudom Silk Screen factory is located on the edge of Samut Sakhon a province that houses many factories. Over the past few decades Thailand has worked to become a producer of exportable goods and inexpensive items for domestic use. While the manufacturing machinery is abundant, many of the products are designed elsewhere. free size will encourage viewers to see that industrial spaces can also be incubators for creative thought and social evolution.

** For Franchise Two we excluded submissions for exhibitions to take place in large cities like New York, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo, to focus on locations with less than 500,000 people — places such as Moshupa or Priboj, Baton Rouge or Lübeck, Cadiz or Az-Zawiyah, Heidelberg or Zinder. In response we received 243 exhibition proposals from 63 countries, and jurors submitted over 5,000 votes to identify a winner.”

Opening reception: March 13, 2-6 pm

[Text and graphic from apexart. Cross-posted to The Data Stream.]

Washington D.C. is both living illusion and allusion. Being the center of U.S. bureaucracy, power, and wealth, D.C is also the epicenter of American poverty. The very most powerful and wealthy live next door (well not exactly) to some of those most greatly exploited, oppressed, and neglected.

A fitting representation of the functions of the system therein, D.C. is the home to the nation’s highest infant mortality, teenage pregnancy, and AIDS infection rates. Sixteen percent of local children live far below the poverty line, while our governmental leaders tangle with one another for greater power and money, while millions of tourists per year grace the marble steps and golden pillars on which our nation was built with the blood, sweat, and tears of those most deprived of the bounties of American “capital.”

Kike Arnal has provided a powerful photo essay expressing the contradictions of our nation as represented by Washington, D.C.

“In the Shadow of Power” exposes the “sobering statistics” that “suggest mental images not normally associated with the seat of American democracy…most people, even most residents of Washington, hardly notice the harsh reality that underlies these statistics. Tourists enjoy the stately architecture, many museums and stunning monuments and the professional class circulates largely between upscale or newly gentrified neighborhoods and their workplaces. Elements indicative of failure or hardship and those of apparent success seldom intersect in Washington. The images in this booklet reflect…ongoing explorations of the city, and…all of Washington in purposeful swings across its social and cultural landscape.”

To see these images visit Kike Arnal’s website, click on Features, then scroll to find “In the Shadow of Power: Life in the World’s Most Powerful Capital.”

Charta has published the photos in book form with a forward by Fred Ritchin and an introduction by Ralph Nader. You can purchase the book at Artbook.

Better yet, if you live in the D.C. area, come to Busboys and Poets at 2021 14 St. N.W.  tonight at 6 p.m. and see Kike Arnal and Ralph Nader speak about the project, sign books, etc. The event is free and open to the public.

One of my favorite artistic movements is Czech New Wave cinema.  The movement was deeply embedded in Czechoslovak politics of the period, particularly De-Stalinization which permitted political and cultural reforms such as state support for the film industry and increased artistic freedom generally.  The filmmakers objective was “to make the Czech people collectively aware that they were participants in a system of oppression and incompetence which had brutalized them all.”

Perhaps the international success of such films was due to Cold War curiosity about Central and Eastern Europe and these films offered the outer world a rare look at art from a communist country with relatively little censorship.  Two New Wave films received Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film, The Shop on Main Street in 1965 and Closely Watched Trains in 1967.

New Wave films are characterized by dark humor, unscripted dialogue and often center around misguided youth.  My favorite is Vera Chytilová’s Sedmikrásky (Daisies, 1966), perhaps the movement’s most radical and surreal film.  The two main characters, both named Marie, realize that the world they live in is corrupt and decide to go corrupt themselves.  The narrative follows Marie I and Marie II as they justify their ‘bad’ behavior because ‘the world has gone bad.’  While Marie I and Marie II destroy social norms, Chytilová’s approach to cinematic form destroys conventions, reinforcing the audience’s shock.

Some argued Daisies is apolitical and void of substance (Jean-Luc Godard did), but I believe that any film from this era defying socialist realist aesthetics is inherently political.  Chytilová is clearly working in response to the political reality of Czechoslovakia; exploring morality, anarchy, gender roles and automatism.  I could go on and on, but I hope you’ll judge for yourself.

One of my favorite songs (aptly titled “Haiti”) by one of my favorite bands (Arcade Fire) has been on my mind as of late.  The song is from the band’s 2004 debut album, Funeral, and pays tribute to band front woman Regine Chassagne’s Haitian roots.  Although Regine is a dual Canadian-American citizen, her parents emigrated to Canada from Haiti in the 1960s.  Set to an eerily whimsical tune, she sings a blend of English and Haitian Creole, mourning the country and people she will never know because of the Duvalier regime.

Arcade Fire has been dedicated to promoting understanding of Haiti’s history since the band’s inception and is one of the biggest supporters of Partners in Health’s program in Haiti through donating proceeds from ticket sales, raising awareness among fans, even playing “Let it Be” in a St. Marc hospital ward at the request of a dying patient.  Music can have an amazing ability to lift one’s spirits, as evidenced by PIH’s Naomi Rosenberg, who was with Regine and her husband/band-mate Win Butler during their 2008 trip to Haiti.  She writes, “During a visit to the hospital in Cange, Win and Regine played for kids in the pediatric inpatient ward.  Anthony, a small boy sick with both a serious case of malnutrition and HIV, had been completely inconsolable, lethargic and unresponsive, according to his nurses.  But upon hearing Win and Regine’s music, Anthony propped himself up to sit and started clapping along.”

Regine and Win in Haiti in 2008.

I never get tired of seeing Arcade Fire live; the concert experience is like going to the circus, theatre, and orchestra all at once.  For their performance on Saturday Night Live in 2007, Win duct taped a message on his guitar, “sak vide pa kanpe,” a Haitian proverb meaning “an empty sack cannot stand up” as a reminder of the devastating poverty afflicting Haiti.  In true rock-star form, he smashed the guitar at the end of the performance of their anti-war anthem “Intervention.”

Regine wrote a heartfelt editorial for The Observer about her very personal reaction to the earthquake and pleads for continued aid of Haiti which you can read here.  She muses, “What we are seeing on the news right now is more than a natural disaster. This earthquake has torn away the veil and revealed the crushing poverty that has been allowed by the West’s centuries of disregard.”

Here’s a performance of “Haiti” which gives you a taste of the band’s stage antics and Regine’s emotion while singing her elegy.

Are you sick of being bombarded by countless advertisements in your daily life?

Do you want to check your email or look up the definition of epistemology without being lured into a dating site or convinced of some obscure disease that you don’t actually have (and obviously don’t need insufficiently tested prescription drugs for)?

Well fret no more.

Add-Art has saved the day.

Add-Art is a FireFox add-on which not only blocks internet ads, but replaces those ads with thoughtfully curated art exhibitions, commonly with social change themes.

Add-Art is an open source project and is run on a day-to-day basis by Hana Newman and Steve Lambert.

Go to http://add-art.org/ to add it to your FireFox or just to check out the very fitting current exhibit:

Merchandise (you are not what you own):

“The artists in this show appropriate and subvert the language of marketing, using its tools of photography, costuming and set dressing, digital manipulation, and data tagging. By copying these strategies, they create transparency where obfuscation is usually found. By bringing the sublimated messages of consumer culture into question, these artists offer the possibility of a more critical engagement with the image.”

Curated by Anuradha Vikram

Enjoy detournement, not marketing, and make better use of your space, time, and eyes.

Jess Baines has an excellent new article in Afterall on the history of radical graphics beginning in England in the 1960’s.  It’s a great introduction/reminder of how a previous revolution in technology, namely broad access to low-cost printing equipment, fueled global resistance to war and helped spread alternative social justice movements.

A wiki has been started to collect information on the topic.

Image: Poster from the Poster-Film Collective’s History Series.

SPACES
2220 Superior Viaduct
Cleveland OH 44113
216.621.2314

January 29–March 26
” … in a most dangerous manner”

Curated by Steven Lam and Sarah Ross

“‘… in a most dangerous manner’ serves as a working research archive that demonstrates how ‘economic crises’ have often been used to restructure and restore class divisions. The exhibition seeks to recast current economic conditions as not quite a crisis, a temporal anomaly, nor a failure in governmental regulations, but as a cycle common to the last 150 years of American (and increasingly global) financial markets. Employing abstraction, metaphor, and narrative, the artists inject their work into current discussions surrounding economic recovery and stability, while imagining potential exits from this system.

Featuring projects from a mix of emerging and established national artists, “…in a most dangerous manner” showcases art, a publication, found objects, documents, screenings, performances, and town-hall discussions. The exhibition presents work that names and locates the various physical and material sites that have been invested, degraded, and subsequently contaminated by a culture of market-driven speculation.

Artists presenting in the exhibition include Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber, Julia Christensen, Elaine Gan, Benj Gerdes and Jennifer Hayashida, Lize Mogel, Claire Pentecost, Ohio University School of Art Critical Regionalism Initiative (Kainaz Amaria, Matthew Friday, Ray Klimek, Jeff Lovett, Yates McKee, Jason Nein, Spurse), Katya Sander, and Allan Sekula.”

[Text and graphic from Spaces website. Caption: "Image courtesy of Claire Pentecost." Cross-posted to The Data Stream.]

The Banff Centre
Walter Phillips Gallery
Glyde Hall, St. Julien Way
Banff, Alberta, Canada

January 30 – April 18
Ragnar Kjartansson: The End

“A self-described radical post-romantic, the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson traveled westbound towards the Rocky Mountains in search of the epic. Working primarily as a performance artist, Kjartansson is known for his spectacular and humorous stagings of extreme character types, from the knight and rock outcast to the lonely crooner. In Banff the artist sought to create a cacophonic folk-country music video in the guise of a Davy Crockett-clad outlaw. Drawing on the nostalgic representations of nature found in sources as varied as paintings by Caspar David Friedrich and the cover of the Supertramp album Even in the Quietest Moments, his work is a dramatized engagement with Canada’s frontier.

The End — Rocky Mountains is a five-channel video installation synched together as a single disfigured country music arrangement in the chord of G. Produced with the support of The Banff Centre for the Icelandic Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale, the piece was developed by Kjartansson in collaboration with Icelandic musician Davíd Thór Jónsson at the Centre in February 2009.”

Artist’s Talk: January 28, 4 p.m.
Opening Reception: January 29, 7 p.m.
Country & Western Hour: Friday, January 29, 9:30 p.m.

[text and graphic from gallery website. Caption: "Ragnar Kjartansson production shot The End (2009) Photo: Laura Vanags. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York; and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik." Cross-posted to The Data Stream.]

Nevada Museum of Art
160 West Liberty Street
Reno

Center for Art + Environment

Lucy Raven: China Town

“Begun while working as an artist-in-residence at the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Lucy Raven’s video “China Town” traces copper mining and production from an open pit mine in East Ely, Nevada to the Yangtze River in China, where the semi-processed ore is sent to be smelted, refined, and spun into wire and used to electrify the nation. The video consists of an animated sequence created from more than 7,000 photographs, along with ambient sound that Raven recorded along her journey across the globe. China Town offers a stunning view of the relationship between the industrial landscapes of two countries, whose economies are intimately linked due to China’s increased demand for resources and electricity.”

Through May 9

Matt Coolidge, Center for Land Use Interpretation Director, will be part of CCAI’s March 2010 Nevada Neighbors project, and will give a public talk on Wednesday, March 31 at 7 pm at the Carson City Library.

[Text from Museum website. Graphic from Mass MoCA web site. Click on image to enlarge.]

Robben Island Museum
Off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa

“From the 17th to the 20th centuries, Robben Island served as a place of banishment, isolation and imprisonment. Today it is a World Heritage Site and museum, a poignant reminder to the newly democratic South Africa of the price paid for freedom.”

Jillian Edelstein
Truth & Lies Exhibition

Based on her documentation of hearings that revealed gross human rights violations during proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) from 1996 to 2000.

The photographs are a reminder of an apartheid ‘hell-hole’ that was prevalent in South Africa prior to 1994; a South Africa that the young of today might only have heard about. The Edelstein photographs also represent seemingly innocent scenes of murder, torture, secrets, lies and the uncovering of truths.

A visit to the exhibition goes hand in hand with a deeper understanding of Nelson Mandela’s words of wisdom at the dawn of our democracy: “Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another.”

On view through March.

[Text from Museum website. Graphic from Good & Evil: Stories and photographs from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Accompanying text below by Jill Edelstein. ]

DIRK COETZEE
Pretoria, 26 February 1997

“I follow Dirk Coetzee’s detailed instructions down Jacaranda-lined Isipingo Street. For a few short weeks every year, this dull brown town is turned purple by a mass of exquisite blossom. My first impression is of how heavily Coetzee has incarcerated himself. His rottweilers are snarling, and the barbed wire around the metal gates glistens in the sunshine. Tea is served in china cups on a floral tray. So civilized, I think, holding my cup and saucer. I notice that wherever Coetzee goes, the leather purse which hangs off his wrist like a little handbag goes with him. ‘It contains my gun,’ he informs me. ‘I take it everywhere, even when I go to the toilet.’”

– From Jillian Edelstein’s diary.

Dirk Coetzee was the first commander of the special ‘counter-insurgency’ unit at Vlakplaas. He had ordered the deaths of many ANC activists, including Griffiths Mxenge, a human rights lawyer, who was stabbed 40 times at Umlazi Stadium in Durban, and Sizwe Kondile, a young law graduate from the Eastern Cape, who was interrogated and beaten then handed over to Coetzee who had him shot and his body burned. Coetzee’s career at Vlakplaas was short-lived. He was demoted first to the narcotics division and then to the flying squad and in 1986 was discharged from the police force. In 1989, prompted by the last-minute confession about the unit at Vlakplaas by one of Coetzee’s colleagues, Almond Nofomela,who was attempting to avoid execution on death row for a non-political murder, Coetzee exposed the undercover operations of the SAP in an interview with the journalist Jacques Pauw. For the next three years, Coetzee lived in exile. He returned to South Africa in 1993, and in May 1997 was tried and found guilty for his role in the murder of Griffiths Mxenge. But he had applied to the Truth Commission for amnesty and in August 1997 he was granted amnesty for Mxenge’s murder. At the TRC hearing in Durban, Coetzee was asked what he felt about what he had done to the Mxenge family. He said he felt:

“… humiliation, embarrassment and the hopelessness of a pathetic, ‘I am sorry for what I have done’ … What else can I offer them? A pathetic nothing, so in all honesty I don’t expect the Mxenge family to forgive me, because I don’t know how I
ever in my life would be able to forgive a man like like Dirk Coetzee if he’d done to me what I’ve done to them.”

[Cross-posted to The Data Stream.]