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.

Ice House Detroit is a project bringing awareness to a variety of housing issues in Detroit.

Follow their blog or join their Facebook group.

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.]

A new documentary, Coal Country, directed by Phyllis Geller and shot by Jordan Freeman, tells the story of how coal mining has permanently deformed the Appalachian landscape and society. Here’s the trailer.

The film focuses on the modern mining practice of Mountain Top Removal (MTR), which involves coal companies blasting off the tops mountains to reach the coal underneath. MTR is a cheap and convenient way of getting at the resource, but causes pollutants to spew into the air and spill into the water, poisoning miners and the general population. The film shows the civil strife between miners wary of losing their jobs and anti-mining activists, some of them former miners themselves, who want to preserve the environment and protect human health. The battle continues.

In debates about the developed world mitigating the effects of climate change, sometimes it is forgotten that the necessary dismantling of our carbon-intensive economy can’t happen simply with confident utterances, but rather in the excruciating uprooting of thousands lives and livelihoods. Science says that curbing the most disastrous consequences of climate change means the immediate cessation of carbon emissions. After seeing what’s happening in West Virginia, however, I wouldn’t hold my breath.

By the end of 2010, Google’s operations in China (www.google.cn) may be over and done. A presence in China’s carefully state controlled fiefdom in cyberspace since 2006, Google has reacted to a mid-December breach of its security, which, according to Google,  the Chinese government orchestrated.  Google and 20 other companies (including Yahoo) suffered the indignation of similar hacking incursions.

The attack targeted the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, though Google assures the hacking attempt was unsuccessful. As a result of this ungracious behavior on the part of their host, Google will stop its self-imposed policy of censoring searches as per Chinese law. In a letter from Google’s legal office, the internet firm stated that it is “no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.” As of press time, Google has granted its employees in China an extended holiday furlough.

The internet has always been cumbersome set of golden chains for China, essential for its economic expansion but also a powerful forum for political dissent and expression. While has been disappointing to see Google entertain Beijing’s requirements for censorship since 2006, it will be pleasing to see Google follow through on its indignant exit. By demonstrating that China can’t bully forms of foreign direct investment that require a degree of privacy and intellectual freedom to operate, Google’s departure from Chinese cyberspace may make other American and European firms less reluctant to show the same boldness in negotiations with the government. Unfortunately, China will probably respond by creating its own tamed search engines like www.baidu.com, which beats Google’s share of the Chinese market by a wide margin. So there’s a long road ahead for any truly unrestricted internet in China, and the cat and mouse game between government and dissident will continue. To distort Deng Xiaoping’s quote concerning free market reforms and economic development (”it doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice”), no matter how determined the cat, it can’t catch all the world’s mice.

Matt Yglesias on the blog thinkprogress.org wrote a post recently concerning a troubling trend in America’s meritocracy: it doesn’t work, at least not as well as in other countries. Except for the United Kingdom, the United States has the lowest level of intergenerational income increase, meaning that, more often than not, people stay put in their parents social class. His data come from a Center for American Progress study. Here’s an illustrative graph:

The data contrast family incomes between late 60s/early 70s and the late 1990s/early 2000s.  While it seems hard to dispute such a comprehensive statistical study, the good news is that there may be other factors at work, at least in a few of the countries above. In the late 1960s, Norway had yet to exploit its substantial oil resources. At the same time, Germany, riven by the Berlin Wall, was emerging from the process of recovering from World War II, as was France. In the later half of the 20th century, however, things got better for Scandinavian and Continental countries. The United Kingdom it seems, however, has less of an excuse. There, stubborn distinctions of class seem to be at work, a barrier to a rising post-war tide that lifted everybody’s boat a bit.

What is to be done, though, in America remains unclear. The U.K. has a far more comprehensive social safety net, as do Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. But since Congress seems incapable of drafting legislation that will help keep the U.S. labor force alive, at least, there’s probably little hope in any effort that seeks to increase social mobility through redistributing wealth, at least as far as political reality is concerned. And, besides, it doesn’t seem to do much for breaking down class in the U.K. Perhaps the answer is more funding for education and school loans. But then that might mean having a less luxurious welfare state for America’s hard working corporate persons. Still, somebody’s got to lose in order for everybody to win.

The COP15 Conference, the  meeting in Copenhagen for countries party to the United Nations Framework Convention (UNFCC) on Climate Change, has begun in earnest. With it, a flood of foreigners has washed ashore in Denmark, among them NGOs, IGOs (Intergovernmental Organizations), the Press, and delegates from UNFCC signatories. Among them, unfortunately, is not your correspondent, Wilson Dizard, the one writing this blog post from Copenhagen. Others are in a similar position, and not just due to the fact that the they basically accredited twice the number of people the conference center can hold.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of interesting things going down around town that concern the arts of social change. Here are the first photos of the acts at the conference.

Alright, this is a picture of a ice flow in Iceland, where I had a rather long lay over. Iceland’s endangered glaciers are a topic of discussion at the Conference, as you might imagine.

The Bella Center. The world will have to wait to see what kind of substance, if any, might manage to emerge from this building a fortnight from now. Look at the cranes in the background, evidence of economic development chugging along. And then there’s a wind turbine, too. To be sure, Denmark is a land of contrasts.

(more…)

The Tortoise v. The Scare. A screen shot from a 2007 film depicting the protests, "Battle in Seattle."

An editorial in The Nation eloquently considers the recent history of direct action and resistance to the decisions the WTO makes at its meetings.

The funny thing about supranational organizations is that they talk about global governance but make no provisions for democratic input. Of course, this should be no surprise. Rights are rarely just donated out of good will. Unless they filter from sovereign hands by more pacific osmotic mechanisms of social change, rights have to be seized to be secured. And while protests might do more to raise awareness than shape policy, the conversation continues to evolve between the conductors and passengers on the run away train called Globalization.

SPACES

November 20, 2009 – January 15, 2010

Opening Reception: November 20, 6–9 p.m., free

2220 Superior Viaduct

Cleveland, OH 44113

216.621.231

“SPACES hosts Art Work: A National Conversation About Art, Labor, and Economics, produced by Temporary Services, an independent, Chicago-based collective comprised of Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin and Marc Fischer. Art Work is a newspaper and website that uses SPACES as its distribution hub. It consists of writings from artists, activists and academics on the topic of working amidst depressed economies and how that impacts artistic process, compensation and artistic property. The newspaper will be distributed throughout the United States and Puerto Rico.”

The independently published, 40-page paper (printed at The Plain Dealer press) features the writings of Julia Bryan-Wilson, author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam Era (2009) and Work Ethic (2003); Holland Cotter, New York Times Art Critic and 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism; Christina Ulke, Marc Herbst, and Robby Herbst, editors for The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest; Harrell Fletcher, visual artist; Futurefarmers, a collective design studio that supports art projects, artists in residencies and research interests; Robin Hewlett, artist/activist; Justseeds: Visual Resistance Artists’ Cooperative; Nicolas Lampert, interdisciplinary artist; Lize Mogel, interdisciplinary artist; and Dan S. Wang, artist and writer, as well as other influential essayists to be announced.”