When working on SonicAnta in the Sonoran Desert, Glenn Weyant is closely watched by armed US border patrol officers, The Department of Homeland Security and the Police Department of the City of Nogales, AZ. Despite all the authoritative attention, Weyant keeps his cool and continues drumming modified chop sticks against the steel wall of the US-Mexcican boarder. Slowly moving along, he takes a cello bow and begins to play the barbed wire fences and other landmarks and objects separating Mexico and the United States.

Weyant is a visionary- a sonic visionary to be exact. Carefully recording the ambient noises produced, he converts these experimental performances into mixed sound collages that set new standards for the realm of experimental sound recording and align themselves artistically with other groundbreaking sound design experiments, such as All Ice Records from Norway.
The Anta Project blurs the lines between sociopolitical art and experimental music. By reinventing the barrier fence into an electro-acoustic instrument, Weyant breaches on the controversial issue of US boarder control. His comment: “It’s an easy way of galvanizing the tension. We don’t have solutions, but at least we can have a focal point for our fear: ‘We built a wall, we’re safe.’ But if the border has become a symbol of national insecurity, why can’t we take the symbol and turn it on its head? Let’s transform the wall, reconceptualize it as a bridge between two worlds.”
I also urge you to check out on the website what the US and the Mexican government both had to say about his artwork.
A solid piece of work- thank you.

Most Americans have a pretty good idea of the number of US casualties in the Iraq war, but a recent study showed that many are oblivious or completely underestimate the number of Iraqi civilian killed over the past five years after US-Iraq invasion.

“Margot Norris explains the discrepancy between public perception and body count data as the result of de facto practices by the Pentagon. By restricting press access to the suffering, the government systematically obscures public knowledge, which in turn blocks affect, empathy, and protest. The moral and political defeat in Vietnam helped usher in the illusion that human loss is irrelevant to military success.”

Currently a graduate student at MIT’s Media Lab, Alyssa Wright’s mobile protest art piece aims at depicting the death toll of Iraqi civilians. The project consists of a backpack, two confetti cannons, and a GPS unit. Every night the location of the most recent bombings in Baghdad are downloaded onto the unit and superimposed onto a map of the city of Boston. When the next day a person wearing the backpack enters a site in Boston which corresponds to that of a bombed location in Baghdad, the cannons immediately fire thousands of paper scraps into the air, each inscribed with the name of a civilian who died in the war.

To read more about the Cherry Blossom Project click this link.

Opening in limited cinemas around the country tomorrow is Errol Morris’s new documentary called “Standard Operating Procedure”, winner of the Silver Bear Award at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival.

In the film Morris investigates the power and limitations of documentary photography by means of the horrific images taken by young soldiers at Abu Ghraib in 2003. Not only did the pictures’ impact change the war in Iraq but also America’s collective self image. Morris believes that the images function both as exposé and cover-up. “An exposé, because the photographs offer us a glimpse of the horror of Abu Gharib; and a cover-up because they convince journalists and readers they had seen everything that there was, no need to look further.”

By interviewing five of the seven soldiers directly involved, Morris seeks to further understand who these people are, what they were thinking, and why these pictures were taken? “My last film, ‘The Fog of War,’ was about a person that was at the apex of power, Robert McNamara. With this new one, I wanted to make a film about the people at the bottom of the pyramid, ‘the little guys.’ A story that I think the world needs to see and hear.”

As many crucial questions are asked throughout the film, many remain unanswered. The explicit and horrendous images of torture and sadism shown in cinema-screen size also call for viewer discretion. To see some of the film’s interviews and read a Q&A with the director, check out the SOP’s website.

Art Threat did a great post this morning about the Czech art group Ztohoven. On June 17, 2007 they were able to broadcast a nuclear explosion on Czech National Television. A mountain resort in the Krkonose region appeared to go up in a mushroom cloud of smoke. The video was a hoax pulled of by Ztohoven who released a statement on their MySpace page claiming responsibility: “We are neither a terrorist organization nor a political group, our aim is not to intimidate the society or manipulate it, which is something we witness on daily basis both in the real world and in the world created by the media…We hope our action will become an appeal for the future and remind the media of their duty to bring out the truth.”

The performance, entitled Media Reality sparked controversy throughout the country. The Czech National Gallery awarded the group with the newly created NG 333 prize for their work. ”This piece—alongside all of the art the group Ztohoven is making - is crossing the border from art into something more social. The artists are trying to escape from the cage of art, and into real life. They would like to influence their own lives, and other people’s lives.” The cash prize totaled approximately 333,000 KOR, or US$18,350.

Unfortunately, six of the artists involved with Ztohoven have been charged with scaremongering and spreading false information. If convicted, they could face up to three years in prison.

Here for the article.

Here for Ztohoven’s website.

(Thank you, Zulma!)

Philadelphia artist Daniel Heyman has been exhibiting remarkable watercolors and dry point etchings in a number of exhibitions around the country. They were made during interviews with Abu Ghraib prisoners recounting their experiences of abuse. The following is Daniel’s description of the project:

“In March 2006 I traveled to Amman, Jordan, and in August I traveled to Istanbul to participate in interviews of former detainees from Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq. Philadelphia attorney Susan Burke (Burke Pyle, LLC.) and Detroit attorney Shereef Akeel (Akeel & Valentine, PLC), joined by lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights and Human Rights Watch are mounting a class action lawsuit on behalf of the tortured former detainees, and travel frequently to the Middle East to meet with them. Burke invited me in my capacity as an artist, to accompany them to Amman to join in the interviews of the former prisoners, driven to Amman from Baghdad. Each of the Iraqis was tortured in Abu Ghraib. None of the Iraqis were ever formally accused of any crime, and each was released without charges.

I went to Jordan to bear witness to the victims’ stories in a visual medium, in this case drypoint prints and watercolors, in an effort to attach individual faces to the Abu Ghraib story, that has interested me since first hearing of it 2004. Working with journalist Tara McKelvey, (also invited by Burke), who conducted the interviews, I drew the client’s portrait directly onto a copper plate using a stylus. I scratched the testimony I heard as it was being spoken backwards onto the plates so that once printed, the words would read forward. After three days I finished the last of my 8 copper plates and changed to painting the portraits and text in watercolor paints, completing 10. My goal was to give a voice to these victims in a way that is more direct and more human than what is available through newspaper or TV articles. This past August I returned again with Burke and Akeel, this time to Istanbul, again to witness interviews of more former detainees. I completed 10 drypoints and 9 watercolors. The major difference on this excursion was that the lawyers brought with them some two hundred non-public photos taken in the torture ward of Abu Ghraib, and, after each interview, asked the prisoners to identify anything they could in each of the pictures. “

Heyman’s website: Link
Print Center exhibition review: Link
Current exhibition: New York Public Library
Upcoming exhibition: DePaul University Museum

Ben Wilson, aka ‘Chewing Gum Man’, creates unique works of art on discarded gum you find on urban streets:

Each picture tells a story as recounted by a passer-by: this was the place where someone was knocked down or had their first kiss. The pictures are small signs of personal connection, a humanizing of an anonymous urban environment; he doesn’t want payment, it’s a gift of recognition in the city’s commercialized and often violent public space.

The artist has been arrested several times and was most recently asked to submit a DNA sample. The case merges compelling issues concerning artistic subversion of public space and government invasion of civilian privacy.

Here for an excellent article.

This historic anthology presents many of the radical and visionary movements, groups, cells of protest and propaganda of the late 1960’s. It includes such now-well-known groups as the Dutch Provos, the Black Panthers, the Yippies, and the Situationists. Check it out!

The spirit of Michel Foucault is haunting many contemporary art exhibitions nowadays; you might remember my Bio-Power post from a while ago during my visit to Bratislava. It says –as always– probably more about these unsettling times than about the trendy mindset of hip curators and cultural activists. Foucault’s thinking is a great vehicle for reflections on justice, societal constructions, surveillance, power relations, body politics, and activism; which makes his legacy enduring.

Just consider a new show at LACE, just space(s), which is reminiscent of Foucault’s famous unfinished text Of Other Spaces. The exhibition reclaims so-called dysfunctional spaces –including streets, parks, prisons, borders, and pipelines– as spaces that matter. Through a compelling display of artistic, activist, and scholarly works, it offers insights into how spatial consciousness can advance the pursuit of social justice.

just space(s) expands its activities to symposia, a library/infoshop, and a mobile community resource, while going into themes such as (Im)mobility - Prisons and the Prison Industrial Complex; Borders, Labor, and Migration; Economic Justice and the Right to the City; Environmental Justice and Public Health; Racialization of Space and Spatialization of Race; and Land - Indigenous Epistemologies, Land Claims and Treaty Rights.

If you can’t make it to LA, the website is a must: here.

Image: Million Dollar Blocks, Spatial Information Design Lab

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