Giving us a break in variation from the excessive, sometimes nausiating, dome of advertisment in New York’s Times Square, Creative Time has provided us with a thoughtful exhibit.

AT 44 1/2 Creative time presents video art on the HD screen in Times Square: “From June 15–July 15, Creative Time will present one video each by emerging artists Rob Carter, Graeme Patterson, and Allison Schulnik. The artists freshly mine the possibilities of stop-motion animation, which has been used in filmmaking for over a century. By constructing detailed microcosms of paper and clay, the artists in this series transport us into the kinetic worlds of a city experiencing exponential growth, a discrete memory of youthful contention, and a strange, alien planet. Simultaneously, the analog—and extremely time- and labor-intensive—process by which these worlds are rendered comes into stark contrast with the overwhelmingly digital landscape of Times Square.”

Click here for more on these pieces

Rob Carter, Metropolis:

Graeme Patterson, Grudge Match:

Above, Allison Schulnik, Forest

Last night U.S. television sports channel ESPN premiered a short film on South Africa’s Robben Island as part of its Outside The Lines series.* Through interviews and footage of the country’s most infamous prison, ‘home’ to revolutionary opponents of apartheid, the documentary charts the relationship of the formation of a prison soccer association to the crafting of the 1996 South African constitution – one based on both the rule of law and the practice of justice.

Robben Island: A Greater Goal
RT: 18:37

WATCH

[* "The series examines topical issues off the playing field. It includes interviews and opinions from leading authorities on the issue at hand. Hosted by veteran journalist Bob Ley, Outside the Lines has investigated trends and topics ranging from sports teams' hazing to the overseas labor practices of U.S. sneaker companies." Cross-posted to The Data Stream.]

The loss of public space to obtrusive advertisement is something to lament. Billboards and the like stain our landscapes and architecture. That being said, the following is a beautifully told story of a dying art form: that of hand painted billboards. The following artists use a similar technique to that which Michelangelo used to paint the Sistine Chapel, but must constantly contend with faster and cheaper means of advertisement: a remaining luddite’s sentiment highlighted by the complexity of the ever mobile forces of production, advertisement, and invasion in the current age.

“Up There” from The Ritual Project:

Anonymous artist/photographer, JR, has been exhibiting his art in the public realm for several years now – always in unsuspected places, mostly illegally. His up-close full frame portraits detail human expression and its worth and show up in sometimes controversial settings with the purpose of non-violent confrontation.

“Portrait of a Generation” portrayed suburban “thugs” which was “posted, in huge formats, in the bourgeois districts of Paris.”

“Face 2 Face” was allegedly the largest illegal photo exhibition to date. Portraits of Israelis and Palestinians were posted face to face in eight Palestinian and Israeli cities, and on the both sides of the Security fence / Separation wall.

“In 2008, he embarked for a long international trip for “Women,” a project in which he “underlines the dignity of women who are often the targets of conflicts.”

The following is the trailer for JR’s new film, “Women are Heroes,” the story behind this recent project.

The film showed at this years Cannes Film Festival.

“Columbia is the trade union murder capital of the world. Since 2002, more than 470 workers’ leaders have been brutally killed, usually by paramilitaries hired by private companies intent on crushing the unions. Among these unscrupulous corporate brands is the poster boy for American business: Coca-Cola.”

If you are in the NYC area this Monday April 26 you can view the premier with Law Students for Economic Justice at NYU.

Read a review of the film at Alternet and check out the film’s website.

Avatar has become a pop culture nexus for Palestinian rights activists.  The film portrays the struggle between a heartless interstellar corporation and the Na’vi, lithe and luminescent aliens indigenous to a planet rich in the lucrative mineral “unobtanium.” The Na’vi live atop a rich deposit of this shimmering ore, so the corporation and its thugs want to remove them, by any means necessary. For activists, the film is an apt analogy to Israel’s annexation of Palestinian territory. So what do these idealistic youth do? Dress up like the aliens.

The protestors appeared in Bil’in, a Palestinian town cut in half by the Wall (whatever adjective, security or Apartheid, no one on either side disagrees that the structure is a wall) and Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem which Israeli settlers have laid claim to and from which Israeli authorities have evicted Palestinians.

When I was in Bil’in in April 2009, the buzzword on the banners was “Occupation Flu,” play to the now-almost-forgotten H1N1 craze. Demonstrators gathered every Friday after prayer to confront Israeli soldiers who meet Palestinians’ stones with tear gas and flash-bang bombs. I was there to write a story, here, which explains more about this weekly protest.

A protestor shields his nose and eyes from the effects of tear gas.

The most striking aspect of this re-appropriation of a distinctly American, Avatar meme, is the irony. And right across the barbed-wire fence opposite from Bil’in are Israeli soldiers whose weapons supplied by American taxpayers. So, as Joseph Nye would explain, that’s an example of U.S. “hard power.”. Then, on the other side, the Palestinians to score by appropriating imagery siphoned with sophistication from the mighty currents of American “soft power.”

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.

It’s great to hear new work from this poet/survivor, and generator of the radical meme: “The revolution will not be televised.”

The video is of Scott-Heron’s cover of Robert Johnson‘s Me and the Devil and is included on his new album which can be heard on his website.

Here’s an animation by Ineke Goes of Johnson’s original song.

Scott-Heron’s Message to the Messengers.

BBC interview.

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.]

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.