NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Kiki Smith's Op-Art

via NYTimes :
Artist Kiki Smith celebrates the vernal equinox.

Rhizome Benefit Concert @ the Hiro Ballroom

  

via: http://rhizome.org/events/benefit/

Rhizome

Affiliated with the  
NEW MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART   
presents a  
Benefit Concert  
featuring:  

GANG GANG DANCE
PROFESSOR MURDER
YACHT
M.C. CORY ARCANGEL  
&  
A SILENT AUCTION  

On April 16, 2007
at the Hiro Ballroom
in the Maritime Hotel
371 West 16th Street
Doors at 8pm

Tickets:  
VIP - $75  /  General Audience - $35;
Member & Group - $25

PURCHASE TICKETS

                   

Cultural Politics: March issue

"We Don't Like It As It Is But We Don't Know What We Want It To Be"
The Speculative Archive / Julia Meltzer + David Thorne. Images courtesy of the artists

The latest issue of Cultural Politics, (Volume 3, Issue 1, March 2007) with a special section on Velocities of Power has just been published. (See Table of Contents below). As the journal's Arts Editor I am proud to draw your attention to the Field Report for this issue: "We Don’t Like It As It Is But We Don’t Know What We Want It To Be," a project about time, the war on terror, and architecture in contemporary Damascus by The Speculative Archive artists Julia Meltzer and David Thorne. Other artists contributing to past and upcoming "Field Reports" in Cultural Politics include Stephen Andrews, Zoe Leonard, Nancy Spero, Carrie Moyer, David Humphrey, Trevor Paglen, Paul Chan and Dinh Q. Le... Stay tuned!

Joy Garnett
Arts Editor
Cultural Politics
http://culturalpolitics.org

Cultural Politics
Volume 3, no.1
March 2007

TABLE of CONTENTS

ARTICLE

Shrinking the Borders: Globalization, Culture and Belonging
Graeme Turner


SPECIAL SECTION ON VELOCITIES OF POWER

Velocities of Power: An Introduction
John Beck and Paul Crosthwaite

Resistance Becomes Ballistic: Vanishing Point and the End of the Road
John Beck

Speed, War and Traumatic Affect: Reading Ian McEwan's Atonement
Paul Crosthwaite

Media Poll-itics in Canadian Elections: A Report on Accelerated Public Opinion
Bob Hanke

Running to Stand Still: Late Modernity?s Acceleration Fixation
Donncha Kavanagh, Geoff Lightfoot, and Simon Lilley


FIELD REPORT /  ART WORK

We Don't Like It As It Is But We Don't Know What We Want It To Be
The Speculative Archive/Artists Julia Meltzer and David Thorne on time, the war on terror, and architecture in contemporary Damascus 


BOOK REVIEWS

Ghosts of Place
Mike Gane on John Schofield's Combat Archeology: Material Culture and Modern Conflict

Bringing the Economy Back in to Cultural Politics?
Joanne Roberts on Don Rowbotham's Culture, Society and Economy: Bringing Production Back In 

Last Chance Chelsea

via NYTimes Art Listings, 3/16/07 :

Galleries: Chelsea

MICHAEL WAUGH: 'LEAD ME ASTRAY' Mr. Waugh's work is about close reading. Several large drawings of 19th-century landscapes are composed of handwritten phrases, cut and pasted in nonsensical order, from American presidential inaugural speeches. A drawing of the Spanish colonial explorer Cabeza de Vaca, who landed in Florida, is installed in a room plastered with promotional materials from a different colonialist enterprise, the last Art Basel/Miami fair. Schroeder Romero, 637 West 27th Street, (212) 630-0722; through March 24. (Cotter)

Last Chance:

  ★ CATHY BEGIEN The reason to see this first solo show by the San Francisco filmmaker Cathy Begien is an ingenious, surprisingly intense short video called "Black Out." In it the blindfolded artist delivers an episodic account of a bad-trip, club-hopping night on the town, as friends pop into the frame from the side to hand her drinks and cigarettes and act out parts of the story. When Ms. Begien breaks down toward the end of the film, it's hard to tell whether she’s laughing or crying. Both responses make sense. Winkleman Gallery, 637 West 27th Street, Chelsea, (212) 643-3152; closes tomorrow. (Cotter)

EVA AND FRACO MATTES: '13 MOST BEAUTIFUL AVATARS' This artistic duo, best known for media hacking and culture jamming, has turned to digital canvas portraits of avatars — digital surrogates — from the online virtual world Second Life. With their flat colors, slightly blocky features and assertive hair, these images have a jaded artifice worthy of "Blade Runner," but are also eerily effective as paintings. Postmasters, 459 West 19th Street, Chelsea, (212) 727-3323; closes tomorrow. (Smith)

★ BAKER OVERSTREET: NEW PAINTINGS Like Keegan McHargue and Devendra Banhart, this young artist has a penchant for tribal motifs, which he flattens into symmetrical compositions and renders with an outsider roughness. The works in his debut show evoke the imagery of the space-ship-obsessed, self-taught artist Ionel Talpazan, as well as Alfred Jensen and Forrest Bess. Their notion of the visionary is both self-conscious and familiar, but they are painted with energetic dispatch and a sure sense of scale, color and wit that encourage you to stay tuned. Fredericks & Freiser, 536 West 24th Street, Chelsea, (212) 633-6555; closes tomorrow. (Smith)

★  'WHAT F WORD?' The "F word" in question for this group is feminism, though others come under its purview. The work spans decades, from an apt updating of a Flemish Madonna and child by the estimable and too long overlooked Anita Steckel, to very recent art by Dana Frankfort, Jane Hammond and Shay Nowick. In a brand-new piece, Elaine Reichek brings Ezra Pound into the picture. Ulrike Muller pays tribute to Mina Loy. Patricia Cronin contributes an image of a tomb sculpture she designed, depicting herself and her lover, the artist Deborah Kass (also in the show), embracing on a bed. Cynthia Broan Gallery, 546 West 29th Street, Chelsea, (212) 760-0809; closes tomorrow. (Cotter)

Baudrillard's Matrix: Breathe His Air

via the Times Higher Education Supplement (TES) (London) 
March 16^th 2007, p.14:

Gone, but still breathing new life into his field
The work of Jean Baudrillard will continue to disturb the tranquil waters of modern sociology, says John Armitage.

"He who knows how to breathe the air of my writings knows that it is an air of the heights, a robust air". So wrote German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

Similarly, one has to be suited to the atmosphere of the writings of Jean Baudrillard, the radical French sociologist and intellectual successor to Nietzsche, who died last week. If one can "breathe his air", one can gain remarkable insights in Baudrillard's work on postmodernity and hyperreality, social and media theories and, indeed, on Nietzsche himself.

Or else, as many modern sociologists have discovered when faced with his major works such as Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), Simulacra and Simulations (1981) and, most recently, The Intelligence of Evil Or The Lucidity Pact (2005), there is serious danger of an apoplectic reaction.

Baudrillard is notorious for his trenchant political critiques of the writings of Michel Foucault on power and the feminist activities of the late Susan Sontag. Likewise, his development of the concepts of simulation and hyperreality and his remarks on the mass media world of The Matrix, on technology and postmodern science have been subjected to rigorous analysis and debate. Most infamous of all, perhaps, was his observation that the Persian Gulf War did not take place.

Yet I would argue that it was his assault on modern sociology that really hits the mark and where, in fact, he had a singular and sometimes terrifying capacity to disturb its supposedly tranquil waters. For Baudrillard, the outsider, managed to expose everything from Marxist sociology and the near-pointlessness of political engagement to the foundations of contemporary social thought. How liberally one breathes the air when encouraged by him to confront the disappointments of the postmodern social system, depends upon how one responds to his sometimes-difficult works. Postmodern sociology, as Baudrillard appreciated and lived it, was a constant deliberation undertaken through the writing of highly provocative and stylised texts that are frequently rejected tout-court by the high priests of modern social theory.

Baudrillard was a seeker after all things extraordinary who questioned the utilitarian foundation of both Adam Smith's classical and Karl Marx's radical social and economic thought by concentrating on the life and nature of commodities — the object — in contemporary consumer society. Any consideration of consumption had previously been expelled by contemporary Smithian and Marxist sociology obsessed with production and accumulation. From the understanding provided by his long, itinerant meanderings in the more or less prohibited social theory of Georges Bataille, Baudrillard learnt to observe the starting point of the economic and the object from a perspective very different from that of modern sociology.

In fact, what Baudrillard revived and expanded on was the covert history of Bataille's "notion of expenditure", a radical theory that saw as deficient the writings of Smith and Marx, those sociological grandees associated with the introduction of concepts such as use value and exchange value. However, the reality of his insights were too much for modern sociology to swallow, particularly when he argued that in the postmodern society people are increasingly exchanging visual signs with one another. Value is no longer tied to an object’s use value or exchange value, but instead to its sign value.

Baudrillard demonstrated his true strength through his argument that the machinery of conspicuous consumption continues to be affected by symbolic values. These became for him increasingly the real gauge of social values because symbolic values are fundamentally linked to pre-capitalist forms of organisation that contemporary society likes to pretend that it has transcended.

For Baudrillard, the failure of modern sociology was not necessarily its faith in its ideal type, the perfect society or even its blindness concerning symbolic exchange. Rather, its breakdown was and is its powerlessness in the face of the demise of both semiotics and the material world. In other words, each significant move in Baudrillard's writings, indeed, every stride he made away from semiotics and materialism and towards an understanding of the symbolic order was a kind of resistance to our sign-dominated contemporary society. Yet he did not automatically contest postmodern social principles. Instead, he was prepared to challenge their symbolic presence and characteristics, to set his analytical sights on the forbidden features of enchantment and seduction, brutality and abrupt reversibility that lie at the core of contemporary consumption and expenditure. In this sense, Baudrillard's postmodern sociology continues to provide a much-needed critique of semiotic society. For what had been outlawed more or less in principle up until his arrival on the modern sociological scene was the fact that the age of restricted production and accumulation was over and that the era of limitless consumption and expenditure had begun.

John Armitage teaches media and communication at Northumbria University. He is the founder and co-editor, with Ryan Bishop and Douglas Kellner, of the journal Cultural Politics.