Homeless, home-making, and archaeology: "To be at home wherever I find myself"

Zimmerman, Larry J.2016 Homeless, home-making, and archaeology: 

"To be at home wherever I find myself"

 pp. 256-272

https://www.academia.edu/36082943/Homeless_home-making_and_archaeology_To_be_at_home_wherever_I_find_myself_

Identities and Sub-Modernity Tropes and Psychic Apparatus in Contemporary Greek Culture

Text by Yorgos Tzirtzilakis

https://www.academia.edu/35068551/Identities_and_Sub-Modernity_Tropes_and_Psychic_Apparatus_in_Contemporary_Greek_Culture
 

Kwaito's Promise

In mid-1990s South Africa, apartheid ended, Nelson Mandela was elected president, and the country’s urban black youth developed kwaito—a form of electronic music (redolent of North American house) that came to represent the post-struggle generation. In this book, Gavin Steingo examines kwaito as it has developed alongside the democratization of South Africa over the past two decades. Tracking the fall of South African hope into the disenchantment that often characterizes the outlook of its youth today—who face high unemployment, extreme inequality, and widespread crime—Steingo looks to kwaito as a powerful tool that paradoxically engages South Africa’s crucial social and political problems by, in fact, seeming to ignore them.
           
Politicians and cultural critics have long criticized kwaito for failing to provide any meaningful contribution to a society that desperately needs direction. As Steingo shows, however, these criticisms are built on problematic assumptions about the political function of music. Interacting with kwaito artists and fans, he shows that youth aren’t escaping their social condition through kwaito but rather using it to expand their sensory realities and generate new possibilities. Resisting the truism that “music is always political,” Steingo elucidates a music that thrives on its radically ambiguous relationship with politics, power, and the state.

Gavin Steingo, Kwaito's Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa, University of Chicago Press, 2016 http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/K/bo23290913.html  

The Barricade and the Dance Floor: Aesthetic Radicalism and the Counterculture

Whole Earth Catalogue, July 1970

In Hjorvardur Harvard Arnason’s sweeping survey History of Modern Art, first published in 1968, a brief entry on psychedelic art completes his six-hundred-page tome. It seems a fitting way to conclude the book’s march through modernism, focusing as it does on the au courant style of the moment. As Arnason explains, “The recent appearance of psychedelic art may be accounted for in several ways: the easy availability and enormously increased use of psychedelic drugs; the mixture and confusion of appeals to several senses simultaneously in the so-called mixed media performances; the ethos of the hippies and flower-children; and the prevalent atmosphere of rebellion against ‘the establishment,’ whether in society in general or in art specifically.” 1 Arnason does not elaborate on these causalities, which, nevertheless, are instructive in their range of positions. The use of mind-altering and consciousness-expanding drugs such as LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin on the part of artists would seem to be an expected foundational definition of a psychedelic art. This “art under the influence” approach applied not only to some artists whose work was produced during drug-induced sessions but also for the many more who drew upon such episodes and experiences more symbolically or referentially, giving psychedelic art currency as both a form of process and representational art. Interestingly, Arnason does not parse the difference between the artist and the audience undergoing an altered state of consciousness, rendering psychedelic art also possible in the mind’s-eye of the beholder.

Text by Andrew Blauvelt

Read more : http://www.walkerart.org/feature/2015/aesthetic-radicalism-counterculture


"The Barricade and the Dance Floor: Aesthetic Radicalism and the Counterculture" is republished from Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia (Walker Art Center, 2015; Andrew Blauvelt, ed.). The exhibition is on view October 24, 2015 through February 28, 2015, before traveling to the Cranbrook Art Museum and University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.