NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Art in the age of globalization

via Bidoun, Fall Issue:

CURATORIAL COLUMN: Global Epidemic
Art in the age of globalization [excerpt]
Mai Abu Eldahab

Let's recap. Globalization—this obscure word remains consistently used and misused. Today, anything which includes non-western nationalities /cultures /ethnic or political groupings is defined as being the face of this globalization. On the art front this globalization is rampant; inIVA (London) produces the hit show 'The Veil'; the Fridericianum (Kassel) opts for 'In the Gorges of the Balkans' prepping the art market for the art of the new European states; in the aftermath of September 11, Witte de With (Rotterdam), the Bildmuseet (Umeå) and Fundació Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona) co-host 'Contemporary Arab Representations'; and PS 1 (New York) introduces us to poverty and violence in 'Mexico City: An Exhibition about the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values.' In this so-called new age of multi-culti/fusion/hybrid everything, globalization rhetoric is not only modish but economically viable as well—a catchphrase for a product line.

In the coming paragraphs, I don't want to redundantly propose yet another   definition of globalization (in 1998 alone, 2822 academic papers on globalization were written and 589 books on the subject were published), but rather I will try to put forward a suggestion of the three most commonly utilized understandings of this term and how they manifest themselves in the culture trade. [read on...]

Politically Incorrect Reflections on Violence in France & Related Matters (A Zizek primer)

New from lacan dot com (thanks B!)

Slavoj Zizek
Some Politically Incorrect Reflections on Violence in France & Related Matters

1. Violence, Irrational and Rational
http://www.lacan.com/zizfrance.htm

Two parallels are often evoked apropos the recent violent outbursts in France: the New Orleans looting after Katrina hurricane and May 68. In spite of significant differences, lessons can be drawn from both parallels. With regard to New Orleans, the Paris fires had a sobering effect on those European intellectuals who used New Orleans to emphasize the advantage of the European welfare state model over the US wild capitalism - now we know it can happen here also. Those who attributed the New Orleans violence to the lack of European-style solidarity are no less wrong than the US free-market liberals who now gleefully returned the blow and pointed out how the very rigidity of state interventions which limit market competition and its dynamics prevented the economic rise of the marginalized immigrants in France (in contrast to the US where many immigrant groups are among the most successful). On the other hand, what strikes the eye with regard to May 68 is the total absence of any positive utopian prospect among the protesters: if May 68 was a revolt with a utopian vision, the recent revolt was just an outburst with no pretense to any kind of positive vision - if the commonplace that "we live in a post-ideological era" has any sense, it is here. Is this sad fact that the opposition to the system cannot articulate itself in the guise of a realistic alternative, or at least a meaningful utopian project, but only as a meaningless outburst, not the strongest indictment of our predicament? Where is here the celebrated freedom of choice, when the only choice is the one between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence, a violence which is almost exclusively directed against one's own - the cars burned and the schools torched were not from rich neighborhoods, but were part of the hard-won acquisitions of the very strata from which protesters originate.
[read on...]

2. The Terrorist Resentment
http://www.lacan.com/zizfrance1.htm

3. Escape from New Orleans
http://www.lacan.com/zizfrance2.htm

4. The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape Revisited
http://www.lacan.com/zizfrance3.htm

5. C'est mon choix... to Burn Cars
http://www.lacan.com/zizfrance4.htm

6. Class Struggles in France, Again
http://www.lacan.com/zizfrance5.htm

Daniel Reich @ the Chelsea Hotel

via Hotel Chelsea Blog:
Daniel Reich -- We Have A Room For You

Daniel Reich is the man responsible for turning the Hotel Chelsea's Grand Ballroom into an artists salon.  Each week, Daniel and curator Dean Daderko, play host to some of the city's edgiest art events.  And, best of all, the events are free. [read interview]

upcoming events @ Daniel Reich Gallery Temporary Space at the Hotel Chelsea, rm. 600 grnd. floor:

Tuesday November 22, 8pm performance
Ulrike Mueller / Anna Blume: Looking for (S)He

Tuesday November 29, 8pm
Andrea Geyer: Thoughts on Spiral Land
work-in-progress.

Wednesday November 30, 9pm
Discoteca Flaming Star & special guest Mahalchick
Berlin-based DFS mix it up in a new performance. With additional events TBA featuring K8 Hardy, Jutta Koether, Greg Bordowitz, Grant Worth, and programs of film/video presented by Lauren Cornell, Larissa Harris, and Lanka Tattersoll.

Killer Images: Zahra Kazemi

via The Guardian:
Killer images
Saturday November 19, 2005 [excerpted]

Zahra Kazemi, a Canadian photojournalist, was arrested photographing a demo in Tehran and beaten to death in prison. Now, three years on, her son is still seeking justice - and Kazemi's photographs are creating a new political storm. Andréa Schmidt reports

[...] Zahra Kazemi was 54 years old when she was beaten into a coma by Iranian interrogators. An Iranian-Canadian photojournalist based in Montreal, she had travelled in the Middle East, Africa and central America, focusing on ordinary people, particularly women and children, chronicling day-to-day lives constrained by poverty and repressive regimes.

In one picture, a young Palestinian girl, weighed down by her school bag, walks home at the end of the day. Debris on the road burns, and Israeli military trucks loom in the background. In another taken in 2002, an Afghan girl stares accusingly at the camera. One taken in Iran captures a woman covered in an abbaya, reading a book alongside an expanse of sea. Kazemi was, as Montrealers like to say, "une artiste engagée" - an artist whose political and social commitments suffused her work and gave it life. Her images give a value to the sort of resistance to oppression that often goes overlooked. [read on...]

via CBC News Online:
INDEPTH: ZAHRA KAZEMI
Iran's changing story
November 16, 2005

Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi died in Iranian custody on July 11, 2003, almost three weeks after she was arrested for taking pictures outside a prison during a student protest in Tehran.

Two days later, Iran's official news agency reported that Kazemi had died in hospital, after suffering a stroke while she was being interrogated. On July 16, 2003, the story changed. Mohammad Ali Abtahi, Iran's vice-president, conceded that Kazemi died as a result of being beaten.

Later, the Iranian government would charge an Iranian security agent in Kazemi's death. He was acquitted of a charge of "quasi-intentional murder. In July 2004, Iran's judiciary said the head injuries that killed Kazemi were the result of an "accident."

The case stayed under the radar screens of most Canadians until March 31, 2005, and the stunning revelations of Shahram Azam, a former staff physician in Iran's Defence Ministry. He said he examined Kazemi in hospital, four days after her arrest.

Azam said Kazemi showed obvious signs of torture, including:

    * Evidence of a very brutal rape.
    * A skull fracture, two broken fingers, missing fingernails, a crushed big toe and a broken nose.
    * Severe abdominal bruising, swelling behind the head and a bruised shoulder.
    * Deep scratches on the neck and evidence of flogging on the legs.

Azam left Iran in August 2004, saying he was seeking medical treatment in Finland. He later went to Sweden and got in touch with Kazemi's son, Stephan Hachemi. With the help of Canadian lawyers, Hachemi helped Azam and his family get to Canada. He was granted landed immigrant status as a refugee sponsored by the government of Canada.

After Kazemi's death, Hachemi demanded that Iran return her body to Canada for burial – but Iran refused. He has also been critical of the federal government, saying Ottawa did not do enough to help his mother. He has demanded that Canada take the case to the International Court of Justice. [read on...]

Fore more information on Zahra Kazemi:
Zahra Kazemi Foundation
Wikipedia page
Yahoo News
Technorati links
Google search results

Calling All Readers: Johanna Drucker's Sweet Dreams

Back in September I posted something about Johanna Drucker's new book:

Sweet Dreams : Contemporary Art and Complicity
by Johanna Drucker
264 pages
University Of Chicago Press (July 15, 2005)
ISBN: 0226165043

via Amazon:

[...] Drucker shows that artists today are aware of working within the ideologies of mainstream culture and have replaced avant-garde defiance with eager complicity. Finding their materials at flea markets or exploring celebrity culture, contemporary artists have created a vibrantly participatory movement that exudes enthusiasm and affirmation--all while critics continue to cling to an outmoded vocabulary of opposition and radical negativity that defined modernism's avant-garde.
[...]

I heard about this book from Walter Robinson's (Artnet) rather skeptical if not lukewarm review ("Alas, her argument is ultimately unremarkable..."), but that was enough to make me run out and buy the book, which I am now reading. Raptly.

So far I'm hard-pressed to find any reviews other than Artnet's -- certainly not in Art Forum or Book Forum. Not yet. The book has been out since July -- why aren't they reviewing, or at least refuting? Are they hoping it will just go away?

NEWSgrist is breaking with its usual autonomy and inviting readers to take a look at Johanna Drucker's remarkable, inflammatory book and send in commentary. Or even a review. You can post it to the comments section here, or you can email me; if they're interesting at all I'll include excerpts of your comments in a future post. If no one sends in anything worth posting (I won't post anything, or everything...), I'll keep excerpting the book until someone does. Here's this week's excerpt:

As suggested, in recent decades artists have produced a very different dialogue with culture broadly considered. Hard and fast distinctions of "mass," "ordinary," or "high art" don't always hold. Nor do they have stable material conditions in which to operate, however much institutional boundaries or discursive zones demarcate art from popular aesthetics.

That stubbornly persistent belief in radical aesthetics is the baby to be thrown out here. The tenacious core of outmoded discourse is that art exists to serve some utopian agenda of social transformation through intervention in the symbolic orders of cultural life. Its dreadful, reified rhetoric of elitist posturing passes itself off as the spirit of political heroism. Far from the fray of real politics, from grass roots community organizing or lobbying agencies, this has become the managed, bureaucratic discourse of new academicism, as repressively formulaic as any of the nineteenth-century salon and atelier styles it disdains. The unthinking position continually replicates itself in elite institutions and esoteric, policed languages of high criticism. Entrenched and unchallenged, this academic discourse largely serves careerist or professional interests, while claiming a revolutionary, even proletarien (can we really even still use that word?!?) agenda. Getting free of the grip of habits of thought engrained in this critical legacy is essential if we are to reimagine our relation to the world of aesthetic experience--and of actual politics as well.
(pp.49-50).