The Tale of the Cables. Reading WikiLeaks as literature

I.
Much of the furor over last November's WikiLeaks release of US diplomatic cables concerned the alleged harm that the airing of sensitive American intelligence would do to the United States on the global stage. Vice President Joe Biden denounced WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as a "high-tech terrorist," with plenty of conservative commentators chiming in to call for Assange's prosecution under treason, espionage, or conspiracy charges—or for, what the hell, his contract assassination by the CIA.

True, the cables show that there was plenty of unsavory, if unsurprising, behind-the-scenes intrigue at most US embassy operations, involving everything from the proposed wiretapping of UN diplomats to the packaging of ambassadorial favors as inducements for lesser European powers to house terror detainees in extralegal "black sites." In the main, however, bombshell revelations didn't abound. Indeed, the leaked cables were more noteworthy for their rendering of the telling details and catty observations that make up the often-mundane business of embassy work abroad. The cables reveal far more about the simple human vanity that comically undermines the sober public images cultivated by autocratic ruling families than they do, for instance, about how this or that major player planned to radically alter the balance of power in the Middle East.

The WikiLeaks cables, in other words, read more compellingly as a kind of literature. True, they don't exactly evoke Tolstoy, Graham Greene, or even John le Carré. But diplomats are trained to chronicle the same tics and quirks of character that masters of fiction carefully record—and often with the same aim, of penetrating the surface equanimity of the characters they depict in order to win through to some more essential truths about their motivations. There's a reason, after all, that the fictional world, like the diplomatic one, is governed by plots—and that both fields share a comfort with moral ambiguity and casual deception that you don't find in most other endeavors. So it's probably a good idea to approach the cables not as the work of grand strategists like George Kennan, but rather as something akin to the chill, satiric portraits brought off by Patricia Highsmith, who famously said she was principally "interested in the effect of guilt" on her creations.

I've read a good number of the WikiLeaks cables and have found plenty of material that could have come straight from Highsmith's caustic pen. And when you see the written work of our diplomatic corps from that slantwise perspective, it can allay some of your worst fears about the course of American empire. As the catastrophic invasion of Iraq should have taught us, it's always better to have connoisseurs of human folly implementing your policies than true believers. Here, at any rate, is a fairly representative sample of the genre, filtered through my own obsession with the global energy business.

II.

In the initial entry of a series of cables on the most influential families in Azerbaijan—titled, with refreshing candor, "Azerbaijan: Who Owns What?"—an embassy hand notes that the country's First Lady has managed a sort of trifecta in phony civic achievement: "Mehriban Aliyeva, besides being the wife of the President, is a Member of Parliament and head of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation, a non-transparent organization that bills itself as a vehicle for charitable works."

Things get less decorous from there. "The Pashayev women are known to be fashion-conscious and daring, far more so than the average woman in majority-Muslim Azerbaijan," we learn. And then, with the word-mincing prelude out of the way: "Mehriban Aliyeva appears to have had substantial cosmetic surgery, presumably overseas, and wears dresses that would be considered provocative even in the Western world. . . . On television, in photos, and in person, she appears unable to show a full range of facial expression."

The First Lady's reconstructive work also created an issue of some delicacy when Second Lady Lynne Cheney arrived for a state dinner in September 2008. Flanked by her two daughters, Aliyeva didn't immediately present herself as the matron of the trio, so the crack embassy staff had to make some quick calculations in order to tell the Secret Service whom to introduce to whom. "Emboffs"—embassy officials, in cable jargon—"and White House staff studied the three for several moments, and then Emboff said, 'Well, logically the mother would probably stand in the middle.'"

Then there's Aliyeva's better half, Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev, whom a cable sums up as "Michael (Corleone) on the outside, Sonny on the inside." As the dispatch explains, "He typically devises [foreign policy] with pragmatism, restraint and a helpful bias toward integration with the West, yet at home his policies have become increasingly authoritarian and hostile to diversity of political views."

A waggish dispatch called "Lifestyles of the Kazakhstani Leadership" begins by drily recounting that political elites in the former Soviet republic "appear to enjoy typical hobbies—such as travel, horseback riding, and skiing." But then the cable goes on to observe that the country's oil-besotted leaders "are able to indulge in their hobbies on a grand scale, whether flying Elton John to Kazakhstan for a concert or trading domestic property for a palace in the United Arab Emirates."

As a representative study, the cable notes that in 2007 "President Nazarbayev's son-in-law, Timur Kulibayev, celebrated his 41st birthday in grand style. At a small venue in Almaty, he hosted a private concert with some of Russia's biggest pop-stars. The headliner, however, was Elton John, to whom he reportedly paid one million pounds for this one-time appearance. (Note: The British Ambassador relayed a slightly different story, with an unknown but obviously well-heeled friend arranging and paying for Sir Elton's gig. End Comment.)"

There are also several illuminating cables from Uzbekistan, another former Soviet republic now run by an autocratic clan. One cable from 2005 recounts a powerful First Daughter who is looking to burnish her public image. The Uzbek press, the cablist informs us, has lately run an "unusual series of articles promoting the virtue and selflessness of Gulnora Karimova," who is said to harbor ambitions of succeeding her father (perhaps best known internationally for gunning down and periodically boiling alive his political opponents).

But the strategy doesn't seem to be taking. "Most Uzbeks see Karimova as a greedy, power hungry individual who uses her father to crush business people or anyone else who stands in her way," said the cable writer. In one interview with an Uzbek paper, the dispatch continued, Karimova portrayed herself as "a highly principled person who listens to her conscience" and "went so far as to say that people treat you the way you treat them, and if you don't treat others well, you will 'find yourself in a blind alley.'" The correspondent then archly noted: "The many people crushed by Karimova would likely relish the chance to catch her blind in an alley." Even with the press campaign to improve her image, Karimova's "charm offensive will not likely make her more popular; she remains the single most hated person in the country. (Comment: We have no polling data to support that statement, but we stand by it. End comment.)"

Incidentally, some five years later, Karimova launched a new line of attack in her charm offensive by bringing Sting to Uzbekistan for a concert and to accompany her to a "cultural festival" she sponsored. When attacked by critics, Sting, who was reportedly paid as much as three million dollars for the trip, defended himself by saying that UNICEF had cosponsored the concert, which turned out to be false, and that while he was "well aware of the Uzbek president's appalling reputation in the field of human rights," he went to Uzbekistan anyway because he had "come to believe that cultural boycotts are not only pointless gestures, they are counter-productive, where proscribed states are further robbed of the open commerce of ideas and art." The statement didn't specify whether Sting reached that conclusion before or after he cashed his check.

Nor do the subtler protocols of a foreign political order escape the discerning eye of a properly trained US embassy official. In the staggeringly grim republic of Turkmenistan, one cable notes somewhat ruefully that given the rampant state of official bribery in the capital city of Ashgabat, "U.S. anti-corruption laws [add] a new layer of complexity and uncertainty for U.S. firms wishing to do business here." Another dispatch, meanwhile, handicaps the prospects for enhancing public trust under the rule of President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov as dim indeed. "Berdimuhamedov does not like people who are smarter than he is," this cable writer relates. "Since he's not a very bright guy, our source offered, he is suspicious of a lot of people."

The point about the president's suspicious nature certainly seems well founded, as another cable from Turkmenistan shows: "There have been reports about a recent incident in which a motorist crossed an intersection in front [of] President Berdimuhamedov's motorcade as it moved through Ashgabat. Several high-ranking police officials were fired after the incident, and the driver of the vehicle was reportedly beaten and charged with attempted assassination. In another incident, a military official was fired after a cat ran in front of the president's car as he was traveling to his dacha."

III.

Of course, WikiLeaks detractors wave away such vignettes as a sign of the petty, status-obsessed outlook of the genteel US diplomatic corps. But I prefer to think that, like many a literary innovator, the authors of these cables point a way forward to a fuller account of our common life in the not-too-distant future. It was, after all, Shelley who said that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

As any impartial observer will tell you, our own resource-rich republic shows plenty of civic wear and tear these days, with oligarchs of the political class freed under the dispensations of the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling to convert all manner of public institutions into private playthings. And if the rulers of the Caspian have bought Elton John and Sting, we have the example here of David Brooks—a defense contractor who grew rich selling body armor of dubious quality to the Pentagon and who was recently sentenced to prison for stock fraud and looting his own company—having hired 50 Cent, the Eagles, Tom Petty, and Aerosmith to perform at his daughter's bat mitzvah.

While we may still be some distance from career military leaders being cashiered over the sudden appearance of a wayward cat, it's not that big a leap. The only significant difference may be that in a Sarah Palin administration—speaking of vainglorious custodians of oil-republic wealth—civil servants will be advanced by a strict count of the number of cats they bag.

Text by Ken Silverstein
Source:www.Bookforum.com, Feb/Mar 2011

Butterfly Effect

Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?' by Bik Van der Pol, image courtesy of MACRO

Public art is gaining a more and more significant position in today´s art scene, in the time of the domination of "liberal capitalism" that imposes privatisation of urban space and social system all around the world. Paradoxically, more and more "public art" projects are being funded and even organised by private sectors while the public authorities are increasingly retreating from the mission both due to financial and ideological crisis... How much public art can still make sense in such a context? How to imagine and implement relevant visions, forms and strategies to engage with this contradictory reality? At the end, is public art, like public sphere itself, a utopia in this age of privatisation? Is there anyway to make it realisable and meaningful for ordinary people in order to re-activate debates and projects of reclaiming the rule of democracy? And, facing the urgent issues of our society today such as economic, cultural, political and ecological crisis, how much the art world and the powerful ones - both public and private authorities - can resume their responsibilities to take initiatives to propose intellectual, ideological and spiritual ideas for improvements of the society?

Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?' by bik van der pol

Therefore, public art becomes crucial for the survival of our society. This is a true battle.

Bik van der Pol are among those who have been acting on the frontline of such a battlefield for the last two decades. Based in Rotterdam, the Netherland and consisting of Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol, the collective has been actively exploring the notion of public-ness and its impacts on various contexts across Europe and other parts of the world. Their projects, systematically conceived for specific venues as devices of memory, knowledge production and communication/collaboration with different communities. The outcomes are utopian and radical proposals for transformation of communal spaces in order to produce new forms of social life and public realm. Exploiting both physical and psychological dimensions, and dynamically engaging social dialogues, they often turn up to be provocative and enlightening.


Referring to common heritages of modern and contemporary utopias evoked in recent history , their work is frequently related to invention of new architectural forms, often resorting to temporary constructions that provide new spaces for public interactions - ranging from mobile cinema to diving platform, from public library to multimedia interfaces ... More than often, the interventional projects of Bik Van der Pol leave highly inspiring and enduring legacies in the communities where they take place. This long term effect successfully extends the significance of artistic activities as a major resource of collective and social imagination and critical reflection - an efficient form of reality check.

Bik van der Pol understand that ecological crisis and related issues are increasingly central to the debate of the common good of our society today. They tackle the question of environment as a main part of their artistic and sociological reflection and production. Environment, or Biosphere, is now understood as a key public sphere in which human beings are striving to rescue and improve the harmonious relationship with nature after much damage of natural conditions of our existence due to over-exploitation driven by our own activities. It´s at first social, cultural and hence political - an intense territory of change and exchange in terms of production of common projects for our survival. For the occasion of the Enel Award, referring both to the emblematic Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe as an ultimate example of human pursuit for the harmony with Nature and the scientific theory of Butterfly Effect they propose to create an environmental structure in the heart of the Eternal City - Rome, to incarnate the complexity, contradiction and fate of our world. Combining a human living device and a gathering niche for butterflies, or the "indicator species" that can not only play the role of pollinator for plants but also change completely the giant system of Nature by simply vibrating their thin wings, the structure functions as a condensed environmental machine that constantly reminds the fragility of our Environment, or the true public sphere. On the other hand, like the contemporary technology of virtual reality, this machine that embodies "virtually" the key negotiation between Man and Nature invites and relies on the interaction with its users, namely the public. Walking around and through the structure and contemplating the beautiful modernist architecture and the massive and energetic movement of the butterflies, the public are actively involving in the maintenance of the sensitive equilibrium between the two indicators of Existence... Like the movement of a butterfly´s wings, our every gesture can indeed trigger unexpected incidents in the system and provoke uncontrollable chain reactions... This is even inevitable.



Public art, in this respect, can also have its butterfly effect!
Text by Hou Hanru

Bik Van der Pol: are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?
MACRO museum of contemporary art, rome
december 4th, 2010 to january 16th, 2011

The metaphysical countrygirl

You, functional space
variants in voltage, the only light
Transitory effect of Love
several different lights
Sustain
Sustain them
you sustain them.

Omar Perez
"The Metaphysical Countrygirl" from Did You Hear About the Fighting Cat?, 2010.

Making is Thinking

Making is Thinking explores distinct artistic practices engaged with notions of conceptual craft and intuitive industry. It seeks to collapse the persistent dichotomy between the practical and the intellectual, and presents a range of works that refuse the binary of concept and form.

Among the artworks included in Making is Thinking, several recurring or overlapping areas of interest are discernible: There is a fascination with the role of the amateur, occupied with absurdly time-consuming activities that verge on meditation (Wilfrid Almendra, Dewar & Gicquel, Teppei Kaneuji, Hans Schabus). There is an analysis of the process of creation, and a transformation of this analysis into a new moment of creation (Hedwig Houben, Ane Hjort Guttu, Edgar Leciejewski). There is an exploration of sculpture and the applied arts, a struggle between functionalism and formalism that avoids any hint of nostalgia (Julia Dault, Rita McBride, Eva Rothschild). There is a flourishing of decoration and beauty in the reassessment of certain Modernist tropes (Eva Berendes, Alexandre Da Cunha). There is the avoidance of conscious thinking and the emphasis on intuitive knowledge (William J. O’Brien, Koki Tanaka). And in many of the works, there is a knowing humor or irony that deflates the pious earnestness that can accompany discussions of craft.

Artists: Wilfrid Almendra, Eva Berendes, Alexandre da Cunha, Julia Dault, Dewar & Gicquel, Ane Hjort Guttu, Hedwig Houben, Teppei Kaneuji, Edgar Leciejewski, Rita McBride, William J. O'Brien, Eva Rothschild, Hans Schabus, Koki Tanaka.

Curated by Zoe Gray, assisted by Amira Gad.


Ane Hjort Guttu, Static Dynamic Tension Force Form Counterform, 2009
C-print, 50 x 70 x 8 cm

Context:
European society has been marked by an increasing division between making and thinking that dates back to the industrial revolution. With the decline of urban guilds and rural cottage industries in the nineteenth century, and the subsequent mechanization of labor, workers were separated into blue- and white-collar jobs. Today, our education system privileges the creation of flexible “knowledge workers” over those with practical skills or manual know-how.

It is possible to trace a similar division in art since the beginning of the twentieth century. With Duchamp’s introduction of the readymade in 1913, the focus of avant-garde artistic practice shifted away from technique and the process of making to the transformative power of the artist’s vision. This saw the flourishing of conceptual art and the movement that Lucy Lippard famously labeled the dematerialization of the art object, culminating in Lawrence Weiner's 1968 Declaration of Intent in which he announced that an artwork “need not be built.” For Weiner, thinking is making. Nevertheless, today artists are still making physical artworks and engaging with tangible materials. In our increasingly dematerialized world, how are we to engage with materiality? How might thoughtful forms of this insistence on making relate to our supposedly post-industrial society?

In recent years, craft has been held up to epitomize an alternative set of social values in the face of industrial production, global capitalism and mass consumerism. Yet this idea of craft is broader than that defended by John Ruskin or William Morris at the start of the previous century. Incorporating many elements of Modernism and informed by postmodernism, it offers a radical way for rethinking questions of work, both within and beyond the artistic field. Many artists are turning to this expanded notion of craft as a paradigm for making that seems to fuse previously oppositional positions – such as the trace of the artist’s hand and conceptual reflection – and are exploring its potential for reconsidering broader questions of production.

January 23, 2011 - May 1, 2011
Witte de With, Rotterdam

Vers/L.C./Contre

16+9 ΘΕΣΕΙΣ ΓΙΑ ΤΗΝ ΕΠΙΚΑΙΡΟΤΗΤΑ ΤΟΥ LECORBUSIER


«Vers–L.C.–Contre», και σε ελληνική απόδοση «Προς-Ενάντια στον L.C.» Πρόκειται για ένα λογοπαίγνιο με τις λέξεις του Le Corbusier. Λέξεις που αφενός ο ίδιος εμβληματικά τοποθέτησε στον τίτλο του πιο γνωστού βιβλίου του (Vers une Architecture), αφετέρου χαρακτηρίζουν την πολεμική μορφή του έργου του συνολικότερα.

Το λογοπαίγνιο εμπρόθετα αναγγέλλει την πρόκληση μίας εκφοράς θέσεων με όρους τόπου, χρόνου και τρόπου, έχοντας ως σημείο εκκίνησης έναν σημαντικό αρχιτέκτονα, αλλά και ένα πρόσωπο που αποτελεί ακόμα σημείο αναφοράς για το τι είναι καταγεγραμμένο στην συνείδησή μας ως μοντέρνο. Γιατί η εμβληματική φυσιογνωμία του Le Corbusier ανήκει και ως ένα βαθμό καθορίζει ιστορικά την εποχή της γέννησης και επικράτησης του διεθνούς μοντέρνου κινήματος. Αποτελεί επίσης αφορμή για συζήτηση πάνω στους σημερινούς όρους και τα πλαίσια της μοντερνικότητας, νοούμενης ευρύτερα ως νεωτερικότητας.

Στον παρόντα τόμο τίθενται θέματα που αφορούν τον τρόπο του να κατανοεί κανείς το σήμερα προσεγγίζοντας το χθες. Με στοχαστικό, κριτικό ή και ειρωνικό ύφος, με απρόσμενες αναλογίες ή συσχετισμούς, με ζεύγη αντιθετικά ή συμπληρωματικά, προβάλλονται θέσεις που ξεκινώντας από τον Le Corbusier, τον άνθρωπο, το έργο αλλά και την εποχή, συνεχίζουν, αποτελειώνουν, ή ξανασχηματοποιούν με ποικίλους επίκαιρους τρόπους έναν τρόπο, μία σκέψη, ένα τέχνημα, ή ακόμα τα θραύσματά τους. Οι συγκεκριμένες θέσεις, μπορούν να τοποθετηθούν η μια δίπλα στην άλλη με ποικίλους τρόπους και να ταιριάξουν καλά.

Κείμενα και έργα των:
AndersonStanford/ Καλαρά Νάντια/ Τουρνικιώτης Παναγιώτης/ Κουμεντάκης Γιώργος/ Βυζοβίτη Σοφία/ Γεωργιάδης Σωκράτης/ Βλάχος Βαγγέλης/ Κοτιώνης Ζήσης/ Γιαννίσης Δημήτρης/ Σταθόπουλος Θάνος, Ψυχούλης Αλέξανδρος/ Λυκουριώτη Ίρις, Λυκουριώτη Λήδα/ Γιαννίση Φοίβη/ Βελώνης Κωστής/ Μπαμπάλου-Νουκάκη Μπούκη/ Παπακωνσταντίνου Γιώργος/ Παπαδόπουλος Λόης/ Αντωνακάκη Σουζάνα/ Αλεξίου Νίκος/ Ρότσιος Δημήτρης/ Φατσέα Ρένα/ Αντωνακάκης Δημήτρης/ Λαζαρίδης Παντελής/ Παγώνης Θάνος/ Αγγελιδάκης Ανδρέας/ Παπαδημητρίου Μαρία/ Τζιρτζιλάκης Γιώργος

Έκδοση του Τμήματος Αρχιτεκτόνων του Πανεπιστημίου Θεσσαλίας σε συνεργασία με τις εκδόσεις FUTURA
Επιμέλεια:Φοίβη Γιαννίση, Ίρις Λυκουριώτη, Ρένα Φατσέα

Paesaggio Italiano

Luigi Ghirri, Bari,1982



Luigi Ghirri, Modena,1973

La Carte d'après Nature

The concept of the exhibition refers to Magritte's short-lived magazine, "La Carte d'après Nature". From 1952 on, and for only fourteen issues, he encompasses poetry, illustrations, short stories and other contributions, and sends them out as postcards. In a similar way, the artist Thomas Demand has selected artworks for the exhibition, which are interconnected in a poetic, associative and elegant manner from artists who all have their lines of thinking about Nature and her representations.


Rene Magritte, Jeune fille mangeant un oiseau (le plaisir),1927-Thomas Demand, Papier peint ,2010

Participants : Kudjoe Affutu, Saâdane Afif, Becky Beasley, Martin Boyce, Tacita Dean, Thomas Demand, Chris Garofalo, Luigi Ghirri, Leon Gimpel, Rodney Graham, Henrik Håkansson, Anne Holtrop, August Kotzsch, René Magritte, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Jan and Joël Martel and Ger Van Elk.

La carte d'apres Nature
18 September 2010 – 22 February 2011
Nouveau Musee National de Monaco
Villa Paloma, Monaco

Denise Scott Brown, Queen of the Desert

Here is Denise Scott Brown, hands on hips in the desert, looking us squarely in the eye with an intensity that seems like a provocation. ‘Here I am’, she seems to be saying, ‘And what do you think of that!?’

Her hair is up though a few wisps have come free. Her sleeves are pushed up to the top of her forearms, and she stands, square shouldered, legs apart with a concentrated glee. She stands to the right of the frame, as big as a building, occupying the image with supreme confidence. Her and Vegas, sky above and desert below. She, and everything around her seems charged with a glowing energy, bristling with urgency and significance.

In the distance, the strip. Blocked out against the sky is the erect and phallic Dunes sign. There is Caesars Palace, a Denny’s and a billboard for Cutty Sark. A hotel tower, a loop of Googie.

But we’re not on the strip, we are somewhere behind the strip. We’re off grid. Apparently with no road, no car. We’re backstage from the action, removed from Vegas’s effects. The photograph places us outside, looking into the city from the edge, from a point of view where the cities only urban logic is obscured. How did we get here? How will we ever get back? The photographs strange location disorientates us. But not, to judge from her expression, Denise, who seems to know exactly why she is there.

To her left, occupying the midground, is the ruin of some kind of shack. It’s chimney stack still standing as large as the buildings in the distance. Its roof in now on the ground, sheets of corrugated iron curled like crisps. A ruin? Here in Vegas in 1968? Its strange looming presence alongside the Vegan sign-scapes suggests something intangible – a fragment of mythic or folkloric something.

Maybe Denise and Bob stood here – as opposed to just over there where you wouldn’t see the chimney – for a reason. Maybe the ruined chimney stands for old forms of settlement, for hierarchies of hearth or home, for the kind of thing that free-flowing capitalist space – of which Vegas represented an extreme example – makes impossible. Maybe this collapsed structure represents an idea of history become unstable in the shifting semiological sands of the Nevada desert. Maybe, like a momento mori, it prefigures the mortality of even this landscape of newness.

She looks like the last woman alive. Certainly the only one who could stand right there like that and handle reality in such a clear-eyed way. Scott Brown smiles with a sheen of ecstasy, as though, Yes! This is it! This moment! This rubble around me! The sun beating down and the blue sky! This half formed landscape! This nothing … might somehow contain … everything! It seems to show us Denise experiencing Vegas’s urban condition like an electric charge shooting right through her, setting her taut.

The picture defines a complete architectural position. We see it in the contrast of Scott Browns excitement and singular confidence with the weak confusion of the environment. Somehow her stance suggests hope and possibility amongst an abandoned, unplanned, ill-fated landscape. If I were the mayor of Vegas I’d build a giant, glowing, neon bright version of her, standing there just like this image. A colossal Scott Brown, lights blinking and lasers scanning like a giant cult image of the city, an Athena Parthenos for a city that most had given up hope for.



Scott Browns image has a twin. A photo of Robert Venturi in a black suit with his back to us standing in almost the same spot. Our view has shifted a little to the right. This shift in framing makes the landscape seem clearer, less random, more intentional. His body is in a kind of ironic-stiff pose, gazing towards the strip so that his body forms a black shape, a void against the bright landscape. As a photograph, it’s more arch, more composed than that of Denise. It’s funny and absurd, a Magritte-in-the-desert. It presents an appropriate Venturian perversity, a non-portrait portrait.

Denise takes Bobs picture. Bob poses, Denise clicks. Bob takes Denise’s picture, Denise poses, and Bob clicks. This is a conversation via photography. An exchange, a to-and-fro of personality. These are not ordinary portraits of architects. We should remember that while we might now read them as polemic, they are also incredibly intimate images.

Their Vegas trip took place at around the start of their relationship. And the photographs they took of each other are the kind of photographs that we would now post to Facebook – photos taken on a roadtrip with a new-ish squeeze that we upload to publicly announce whatever intensities we may have just experienced. We’d do it to somehow receive external validation for all too fragile and mysterious sensations with the hope that posting them to a semi public space them might act as vital proof and to fix them against the existential fear that we know can rise up out of nowhere and swallow the possibility of love in one gulp.

O that we might all one day experience the intensity displayed in Bob and Dens photographic diptych, that moment where everything makes sense, even the fragmented landscape of an anti-urbanism of rubble and billboards and ruins, that moment when the world opens up into kaleidoscopic possibility.

The images have been taken out of the VSBA archives as part of the ‘Las Vegas Studio’ show, currently on at the Graham Foundation. The show presents a series of photographs taken by Venturi and Scott Browns students on their research trip to Las Vegas – the raw material that later became Leaning From Las Vegas. I caught the show at Yale earlier this year. Somehow both the show and the accompanying catalogue trouble me. They are both so beautiful. Maybe too beautiful. Somehow too easy to like, especially given what the images were used for later.

Here is a fragment of a review I wrote for Frieze on the catalogue sometime last year that explains this sentiment a little more::

“What were shot as casual, off-hand, deadpan images by Robert Venturi and Denies Scoot Browns students suddenly assume a kind of high art status. They are no longer documentary images, but super-sexy images of mid century Americana. Their casual framing becomes artful. In doing this, it transforms the content of the images, delaminates them from their polemic, from the very reason they were taken. Presented here, they seem so seductive that it’s hard to think beyond their overwhelming beauty. While the book celebrates the LLV project, it has the strange effect of defusing its architectural argument. It’s not without irony that the Las Vegas Studio – itself an exercise in learning from the vulgar, popular landscape – should be revisited in such a refined, high art manner.

The value of learning from Learning From Las Vegas is not only in its own particular conclusion but also in its consequences for architecture and implications for research. This is briefly touched on in a meandering discussion between Rem Koolhass – who acknowledges the deep debt his publishing projects owe – Hans Ulrich Obrist and Peter Fischli. In other texts, editor and curator Martino Stierli sets out the context of the studios activities and Stanislaus Von Moos, a critic with a long and close relationship with the work of VSBA discusses the firms built projects. But perhaps most striking is the absence of the voice of Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi to illuminate what they were doing and how they were doing it. This absence of the mechanisms, tactics, intentions of the studio is frustrating, as is the context of the studios work within Scott Browns own sprawling personal image archive.

What we do get is a glimpse behind the curtain of a moment of significant architectural history. Here we can see a moment before the studios work became a fixed cultural point, still full of the thrill of discovery and pregnant with possibilities. It suggests we might be able to rewind architectural culture so that we might replay it to speculate on alternative presents, free from the partisan debates of previous generations.”





Whatever my misgivings, we must really thank Martino Stierli and Hilar Stadler for taking these two images out of the rickety wooden slide draws of VSBAs office and bringing them to our attention. They present us with an alternative to the canonical images of architects, planners and the city. Think of those images of Le Corbusiers hand hovering over the a model of the Ville Radieuse or Robert Moses astride an oxide-red I-Beam clutching rolls of drawings with Manhattan behind him – images of architecture as professionalised, detached and autocratic. Bob and Denise’s cute, funny and strange portraits suggest that architecture can have other kinds of relationship to the cities that surround us. That serious, important architecture might even include taking pictures of your sweetheart.

Denise Scott Brown’s desert portrait must stand as the most magnificent image of the contemporary architect. In it we see the foundation of an entirely different image of the architect as real, true humanist, an image of energy, engagement and willingness to take it all on so powerful that we should carry it around in our wallets as a reminder of everything architecture should be.

Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown is at the Graham Foundation till Feb 19, 2011. (Which you should go to if you can, because these scans really don’t do justice to these ultra-significant pictures).

Text by Sam Jacob
December 6th, 2010
Source:strangeharvest.com

Every website is a monument

Angelo Plessas, PlagueOfFantasy.com (offline monument), 2010


Angelo Plessas, TheAngeloFoundation.com (offline monument), 2010

Gloria Maria Gallery, Friday, 14 January-10 March 2011, Milan.
www.gloriamariagallery.com

Farming to Defeat Town Designed Plans

Farming to Defeat Town Designed Plans, 2010, acrylic, watercolor and pieces of wood on paper, 56 x 76 cm

Abandoned Houses

Photography by Kevin Bauman, Detroit.
www.100abandonedhouses.com

Contra a Obscuridade

Against Obscurity

The gaze lets go from ripeness.
I don’t know what to do with a gaze
overflowing from a tree,
what to do with that ardour

overflowing from the mouth,
and waiting on the ground to flow back to the source.
I don’t know the destiny of light,
but whatever it may be

it is the same as that of a gaze: the same
fraternal dust,
a delayed pain gathering, the shadow,
quivering still,

of a startled skylark.


O olhar desprende-se, cai de maduro.
Não sei que fazer de um olhar
que sobeja na árvore,
que fazer desse ardor

que sobra na boca,
no chão aguarda subir à nascente.
Não sei que destino é o da luz,
mas seja qual for

é o mesmo do olhar: há nele
uma poeira fraterna,
uma dor retardada, alguma sombra
fremente ainda

de calhandra assustada.

Eugénio de Andrade, 1988.
Publisher: Fundação Eugénio de Andrade, Oporto, 1993.

Cactus

Caroline May, Untitled (Cactus I), 2010, color photograph, 39 x 39”.


Caroline May, Untitled (Cactus II), 2010, color photograph, 39 x 39”

The Apartment Gallery, Athens
November 10 - January 8, 2011
www.theapartment.gr

Figland Housing

Figland Housing
Drawing by Sarcoptiform, 2010

Focus on Hunger: Interview with Vandana Shiva

Everything about world hunger is unfair. The fact that there are nearly 1 billion people starving in the world right now speaks to the vast amounts of injustice that our global system is built on. That 1 out of 6 human beings goes to bed hungry every night while there is more than enough food to feed everyone generously, seems to me the very definition of unfair. When I began my first exploration of world hunger last May, the endless stream of inequality and injustice was enough to make me want to scream. But out of all of the rage inducing facts and statistics, the one that haunts me the most, that makes me lose sleep at night, that I still find hard to believe, is that the people who grow the world’s food, our farmers, are some of the most likely to experience hunger.

In our world, farmer means woman. 80% of the developing world’s food supply, and 60% of the world’s food in total, is grown by women’s hands. Women plant, nurture, and harvest the food we all need to survive, yet they own less than 1% of all farmland, and are generally the last to eat. 70% of those suffering from chronic poverty and hunger are women and girls. They feed us, and while we eat they starve. The industrialization of our food system has led us to a place where we are now so removed from the food we eat that most of us barely know what’s in it, let alone where it came from or who grew it. What kind of life did she live? Was she well fed, able to enjoy the literal fruits of her labor? Or was she drowning in debt, a slave to the chemical and agricultural companies that have quickly devoured our world? Was she able to protect her land and grow her food in the way her mother and grandmothers did for centuries before her? Or has she been forced to pollute her land and her body with the genetically engineered seeds that promise so much, while yielding so very, very little? How much do we know about our food and the people who grow it? Why are they always the last to eat?

In India, 75% of people make their living by farming, and 60% of those farmers are women. These women plow the fields and raise our food, and yet their harvest is being stolen. In 1994, the completion of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) legitimized corporate growth based on harvests stolen from nature and people. The WTO’s agricultural agreements and ‘free’ trade policies allow transnational corporations that do not grow the food or work the land to make super profits off of the small farmers and their back breaking labor. The WTO’s Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement made seed-saving and seed-sharing a criminal act, disrupting millennia old traditions practiced in agricultural communities throughout the world. Corporations are now allowed to monopolize the right to a seed, the basic building block of our food security, by claiming it as their exclusive private property. The Agreement on Agriculture legalized the dumping of genetically engineered foods on countries, and criminalized actions taken to protect the biological and cultural diversity on which indigenous food systems are based.

Under World Bank and International Monetary Fund structural adjustment mandated reforms, India was forced to radically alter the way food had been grown in the country for centuries. Flashy advertising campaigns assaulted the country and images of gods, goddesses, and saints were used to sell new, hybrid seeds directly to small farmers, even as their land was being devalued, redrawn, and sold out from under them. Once the farmers began to purchase these new corporately ‘owned’ seeds they discovered they were highly vulnerable to pests, fungi, and weeds. Encouraged by their government and the corporations, the farmers bought the necessary corporate owned pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides on credit, comforted with the knowledge that these new seeds would produce yields so large they could repay their debts and have money to spare. Unfortunately, the new seeds were a dismal, drastic failure and crops failed throughout the country. Farmers were left with barren fields, polluted waterways, sky high debts, and empty bellies. Since 1997 200,000 Indian farmers have killed themselves, many by drinking the toxic pesticides that were supposed to save their crops. This cycle of debt and loss and more debt and more loss has been termed the ‘suicide economy’ and has created millions of chronically hungry and debt enslaved people throughout India.



Not only does this suicide economy lead to debt and impoverishment created hunger, it also destroys a region’s ancient biodiversity by creating huge swathes of lifeless monocrops in its place. The promises of ‘life science’ corporations like Monsanto are that they will feed the world through their genetically engineered seeds and the resulting higher crop yields. However, the opposite has been true. They have, in fact, created hunger on an unimaginable scale. Whatever higher yields they have been able to display are offset by the fact that they require massively higher inputs. Traditional farming practices have always been highly productive as they utilize a close looped cycle of animal integrated perennial and annual polycultures. When resource use is taken into account, the ‘advancements’ of the Green Revolution is obviously counterproductive and grossly inefficient. More and more land is needed to create adequate harvests under the new methods, along with more water, more money, more time, more effort, all of it for slightly more food, and far more hunger.

“However, this phenomenon of the stolen harvest is not unique to India. It is being experienced in every society, as small farms and small farmers are pushed to extinction, as monocultures replace biodiverse crops, as farming is transformed from the production of nourishing and diverse foods into the creation of markets for genetically engineered seeds, herbicides, and pesticides. As farmers are transformed from producers into consumers of corporate-patented agricultural products, as markets are destroyed locally and nationally but expanded globally, the myth of ‘free-trade’ and the global economy becomes a means for the rich to rob the poor of their right to food and even their right to life.” Vandana Shiva, Stolen Harvest

It was in this environment, to fight these wrongs, that world renowned global south activist, physicist, and eco-feminist Vandana Shiva created Navdanya. Founded in 1984, Navdanya is providing an alternative to the modern global food system by promoting biodiversity conservation, farmer’s rights, and organic farming methods, with an emphasis on seed saving. Navdanya means nine crops, in reference to the nine crops that represent India’s collective source of food security, and it is this self-sufficient food security that it hopes to preserve. Over the past 26 years, Navdanya has created an ever expanding alternative to the culture of death and debt pushed by the transnational corporations. Dedicated to the preservation of nature and the people’s right to knowledge, water, and food, Navdanya promotes global peace and justice through the conservation, renewal, and rejuvenation of the gifts of biodiversity. Navdanya has helped to create 54 community seed banks throughout India with the intent to rescue and conserve crops that are being pushed to extinction by monoculture farming practices. 3,000 varieties of native rice, 12 genera of cereals and millets, 16 genera of legumes, and 50 genera of vegetables have so far been saved due to their efforts. More than 500,000 farmers have been trained in organic and sustainable farming methods and more than 50 international courses have been offered on biodiversity, food, biopiracy, water, globalization, business ethics and more. Navdanya focuses on empowering local farmers to resist patents on seeds, and struggles to keep India free from GMO crops by recognizing humanity’s inherent right to food, water, and seed sovereignty.

One of Navdanya’s specific goals is to empower women and to keep food security in their hands through a network of women’s producer groups (Mahila Anna Swaraj). Navdanya views women as the caretakers of biodiversity, the providers of food security, and the conservationists of the cultural diversity of food traditions. By keeping women’s food knowledge and expertise alive they hope to guarantee food security for generations to come. Navdanya’s gender program, Diverse Women for Diversity, works on a local, national, and international level as a global campaign for women to resist monoculture monopolies and celebrate food security and biodiversity. Leaders in the food justice movement around the world recognize that it is women who hold the key to fighting the global hunger crisis, and it is this topic that I wanted to focus on in my interview with Dr. Vandana Shiva.

Burge: In 1998, India was forced to open up its seed and farming sector to global corporations like Cargill, Monsanto, and Syngenta by the World Bank’s structural adjustment policies. Can you explain how it is not natural disasters like drought and famine that cause the majority of hunger, but man-made economic policies like these? Why must a resistance to globalization form such a necessary part of food security and bio-diversity?

Shiva: The main causes for hunger are industrial agriculture and globalised trade in food. Industrial agriculture creates hunger both by destroying the natural capital for producing food and locking farmers into debt because of its high cost of production. Globalised trade creates hunger by diverting fertile land for exports, promoting dumping and unleashing speculative forces. In industrial agriculture and globalisation also contribute 40% to green house gas emissions that are leading to climate change which in turn is destroying agriculture and food security. The rules of globalisation both in the structural adjustment programmes of the world bank and the free trade rules of WTO promote industrialisation and trade liberalisation. Resisting such corporate globalisation is necessary for food security and biodiversity.

Burge: Since 1997, 200,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide after being forced into inescapable debt by pesticide and seed companies, in what has been termed a ‘suicide economy’. Do you think this kind of unending debt is a political tool consciously designed to keep the people powerless and desperate, or is it simply an unintended tragic consequence of misguided economic policies?

Shiva: The corporations and governments that are designing high costs agriculture systems to maximise corporate profits are simultaneously designing the debt trap for small farmers. This debt trap is what is leading to farmers suicides. Pushing small farmers to extinction is very much part of the corporate design of industrial farmer. It is not merely an unintended consequence. As a US agriculture policy person said: “farmers must be squeezed of the land like the last bit of toothpaste is squeezed out of the toothpaste tube”.

Burge: What do you say to critics who claim that with the global population nearing 7 billion people we need industrial agriculture and genetically modified foods to feed everyone?

Shiva: Industrial agriculture actually reduces nutrition per acre since it destroys the biodiversity which maximises nutrition per acre. Industrial agriculture is artificially projected as being productive through the monoculture of the mind and a focus on the monoculture yield of handful of globally traded commodities. That is why hunger and malnutrition has grown in direct proportion to the spread of industrial agriculture. As far as genetic engineering is concerned, it is a not a yield increasing technology. It has only put Bt. toxin genes into plant or genes for resisting toxic herbicide. This has increased the yield of toxins not of food. The Union of Concerned Scientist report “Failure to Yield” and Navdanya’s reports “Seeds of Suicide” and “Biodiversity Based Productivity : A New Paradigm for Food Security” have the data that shows that genetic engineering has not contributed to increase in production.

Burge: Women grow the majority of the world’s food and 60% of India’s farmers are women. Women also make up 70% of the world’s chronically hungry people. Why is it that women, the people who grow the majority of the world’s food, are the last to eat?

Shiva: Just as farmers who grow the food are the largest number of hungry people in the world, women who produce and process food constitute the majority of malnourished people. The denial of food to the producers of food is a result of the injustice built into industrial food systems and social discrimination.

Burge: Navdanya calls itself a ‘women centered movement’, holds female heritage learning and preservation classes known as Grandmothers’ University, and has a gender program, Diverse Women for Diversity, that is a global campaign of women advocating for bio-diversity and food security. Could you tell us why it was so important for Navdanya to focus on the empowerment of women? Why do you consider the partnership of ecology and feminism to be a partnership of liberation?

Shiva: The dominant model of agriculture has come out of capitalist patriarchy and is based on war. These wars begin as wars in the mind, become wars against the earth, and result in wars against our body. Women need to lead the movement for a non-violent food system because they have not been part of the war economy. Grandmothers hold the heritage of non-violent knowledge which protects the earth and our health.

Burge: In your book Stolen Harvest you describe a ‘hijacking of the global food supply’, as corporations that do not grow the food or work the land reap the obscene profits of the farmers’ labor. When people are kept so poor they can barely feed themselves, and the multinational corporations are unimaginably powerful and wealthy, how can the common people find the resources to stand up to this injustice?

Shiva: Since each of us eats everyday food can become the site of a revolution for justice. If we say no to GM foods, if we commit ourselves to eating organic, we build another food system which is controlled by people and not by giant corporations.

Burge: In describing the implementation of ‘free-trade’ policies upon an unwilling population, you have said that the moment the will of the people is ignored it becomes a dictatorship. In light of the unfathomable levels of violence being perpetrated against an almost powerless population (and at a time when an agricultural company like Monsanto hires the services of the private army Blackwater), why do you and Navdanya remain committed to a non-violent resistance strategy?

Shiva: We in Navdanya stay committed to non-violent resistance strategy because it has more power and more resilience.

Burge: The women you work with through Navdanya’s various programs and Diverse Women for Diversity often have their lives profoundly changed when they are given the tools and resources for self-empowerment. Can you tell us of an instance when you saw a woman, a family, or a community transformed?

Shiva: Twenty years ago, a women called Bija came to me to find work as domestic help. Bija means the seed and I asked her if she would help me in Seed Saving and she immediately agreed. For two decades Bija has worked as Navdanya seed keeper. She holds classes for scientists on the conservation of biodiversity, she received the Slow Food Biodiversity Award on behalf of Navdanya in Porto Portugal in 2001. The potential Bija achieved is the potential in every peasant woman and it is this potential Navdanya seeks to unleash.

Burge: What kind of future is envisioned by the women of Diverse Women for Diversity? How will a world premised on food security, bio-diversity, and sustainability look?

Shiva: The future envisioned by Diverse Women for Diversity is a future in which every species and every person has space to evolve to their highest potential, live in mutuality with each other and create a world of peace, justice, and sustainability.

Burge: How can we in developed Western nations stand in solidarity with the women in India and throughout the world who are facing chronic hunger and poverty, and assist them in their struggle?

Shiva: There are three ways in which you can support our work. You can support our programs by making donations to Navdanya. You can attend our courses at Bija Vidyapeeth – The School of the Seed and visit our programs on seed saving and organic farming as solutions to hunger. You can spread the principles on which our work is based.

“Women were, really, in my view, the ones who domesticated plants, created agriculture. And as long as women were controlling agriculture, agriculture produced real food. Agriculture was based on [women's learned and passed on] knowledge. A Women’s centered agriculture never created scarcity. As long as women controlled the food system you did not have a billion people going without food and you didn’t have 2 billion going obese and w/diabetes. This is the magic of patriarchy having taken over the food system. Earlier, patriarchy left food to women, modern patriarchy wants to control food . . . women’s knowledge has been removed from agriculture . . .we can only have a secure food culture if women come back into agriculture.” Vandana Shiva

Text by Natasha Burge
Written on October 12, 2010
Source: cchronicle.com, foodfreedom.wordpress.com

Dekinnoka 5, Robot Professional Wrestling, the 3rd fight, single match S...

Dekinnoka 5, Robot Professional Wrestling, the 3rd fight, single match Saga vs Garoo

Pionen – White mountain, Architecture of WikiLeaks

The project takes place in a former 1200 square meter anti-atomic shelter.
An amazing location 30 meters down under the granite rocks of the Vita Berg Park
in Stockholm. The client is Wikileaks and the rock shelter hosts server halls and offices.







Architects: Albert France-Lanord Architects
Location:Stockholm, Sweden
Construction: Albert France-Lanord Architects
Construction Area: 1,200 sqm
Project year: 2008
Photographs: Ake E:son Lindman

Source:www.archdaily.com

Capitalism and the Aesthetics of Knowledge in the 21st century

Capitalism and the Aesthetics of Knowledge in the 21st century:
Uses of the Social Document in Contemporary Visual Art


Renzo Martens, Episode III - Enjoy Poverty, 2008, film still

A series of four screenings and seminars led by Angela Dimitrakaki, art historian and writer (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Wednesday 8 December
Ursula Biemann, Black Sea Files, 2005, 43'
Courtesy of the artist

Thursday 9 December
Johan Grimonprez, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997, 68'
Courtesy of The Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens

Friday 10 December
Renzo Martens, Episode III: Enjoy Poverty, 2008, 88'
Courtesy of Wilkinson Gallery, London

Saturday 11 December
Allan Sekula, The Lottery of the Sea, 2006, 179' (3 hours)
Courtesy of Galerie Michel Rein, Paris


Allan Sekula, The Lottery of the Sea, 2006, film still

De Chirico Lecture Room, Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA)
http://www.kunsthalleathena.org

I imagine it Otherwise

Savvas Christodoulides, I imagine it Otherwise
Table base, bath towels, glass, plastic pot
200 x 130 x 126 cm

Omikron Gallery, 27 November - 31 December 2010
Nicosia, Cyprus

Revolution by Design

It’s a funny place, Cuba. It’s very, very Soviet. You can’t ask the wrong questions, you can’t talk to people about politics. That’s a big faux pas in Cuba. If you say to anyone, “What do you think of the revolution,” they’ll all say, “Oh, it’s great, it’s been fantastic, it’s been really interesting, who wouldn’t want a revolution,” that sort of thing. And then you hear from other people there’s this thing called the CDR, the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. It’s basically a spy on every block, a woman or a man who lives in a small apartment who has been awarded the title of CDR representative for that block. And it’s his or her job to snitch if you’re up to no good. So I was at Alfredo Rostgaard’s house and I said, “Are you a supporter of the revolution?” and he smiled and said, “Yeah, I love the revolution,” and that was that.



I met him a few years before he died, and I have to say he was a bit of a crazy old man. I’d asked the taxi driver — I had a taxi driver who seemed to know things, he was like my fixer — “Can you take me somewhere where I can buy Cuban posters?” Because there are no shops in Cuba; you just have to ask around. “Yeah, yeah,” he said, “I can take you somewhere.” So we bang on this door and it opens and there’s Alfredo Rostgaard. I was like, “Oh my God, I recognize this guy from photos, it’s Alfredo Rostgaard.” And he’s one of these sort of smiley, mischievous, cheeky old men who you just knew had been a bit of trouble in the past, good-looking, sort of a bit of a flirt. He told me a joke. He said in Spanish, “You know, I don’t speak English. But I do know a joke in English.” And he told me a joke — I don’t remember it, unfortunately, something about a small boy at school asking his teacher something about sex. He was a very amusing old geezer.



After I bought some posters and we chatted for a while in our broken Spanish and English, I said, “Shall we go for a drink?” So we went to the local bar and got really drunk. And the next day the guy who had taken me over there phoned me and said, “You didn’t take Alfredo out for a drink, did you? Oh God, he’s not supposed to be drinking.” So he was someone who I would describe as antiestablishment. Very antiestablishment. And antiestablishment in a funny way. I would say that if he was the art director of Tricontinental for all those years, he would be constantly trying to get away with stuff that he thought was a little bit wacky and slightly not quite what his bosses wanted from him. You know what I mean?

— Charles Moseley, proprietor,

cubanposterart.blogspot.com

One of the oddest chapters in the annals of the Cold War was its proxy war by magazine, and the oddest Cold War magazine was undoubtedly Tricontinental. Based in Havana and art-directed by legendary poster designer Alfredo Rostgaard, Tricontinental was the official publication of OSPAAAL, one of the many revolutionary acronyms liberated by Fidel’s triumph in 1959. OSPAAAL stood for Organization in Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and its magazine was available in each of the New World’s great colonial languages: English, French, and Spanish. Some issues were even available in Arabic and Italian.



The magazine did its share of party-line thumping: inspiring tales of 100 percent literacy rates and vaulting social and technological progress, with occasional missives from communist luminaries like North Korea’s Kim Il-sung. But the bulk of Tricontinental’s editorial content was aimed at Third World militants, practicing or potential, for whom it served as bulletin board, guidebook, and lifestyle magazine.

self-criticisms of counterrevolutionary coup plotters in Guinea, describing the exact make and model of the Mercedes they accepted from the imperialists in exchange for betraying the intractable destiny of the people. There were unreadably long lists of tiny victories by innumerable guerrilla organizations: trucks full of ammunition or wheat or concentrated fruit juice liberated from the imperialists; city squares and government buildings gloriously defaced by revolutionary slogans; hopelessly obscure silos, checkpoints, bridges, pipelines, roads, radio towers, and police stations, exploding forgettably in the subtropical night. There were first-person accounts of police corruption and genuinely tender evocations of fallen comrades. In March 1970, a special issue presented the full text of Brazilian Marxist Carlos Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, a pragmatic and hair-raisingly detailed program for revolution in the cities of the industrialized world. (The chapter on “The Bank Assault as Popular Mission” detailed “important innovations in the tactics of assaulting banks,” including “the shooting of tires of cars to prevent pursuit, locking people in the bank bathroom, forcing someone to open the safe or the strong box, and using disguises.”)



What made all of this truly strange, however, was Tricontinental’s design. Compared to dismally drab Soviet attempts at cultural propaganda — or the comically guileless efforts of the Chinese — the Cubans had something uncontrivable going for them: it looked like they were having fun. Tricontinental resembled an underground zine from San Francisco more than an information vehicle for Third World liberation, and that juxtaposition had an effect comparable to that moment in Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil when a gang of black nationalists in a municipal junkyard read from a stilted manifesto while necking with white women in abandoned cars. Tricontinental’s covers were deliriously poppy, with bright, eyecatching graphics, making it just the sort of thing Marighella’s urban guerrillas should never be seen carrying in public.

At the height of its fame, the magazine boasted more than 30,000 subscribers in some eighty-seven countries. Most issues featured a poster insert demonstrating Cuban solidarity with one or another righteous global political struggle. Those posters found their way to college dorm rooms and kiosks across the globe, with young people from Berkeley to Beirut lining up to join OSPAAAL’s solidarity-of-themonth club.



The spare, colorful style of the OSPAAAL poster — like those of the ICAIC (Cuban Film Institute) and a number of other revolutionary cultural ministries — became the unofficial design language of graphic agitation the world over. That language was largely dictated by necessity; the posters, like the earliest covers of the magazine, were printed by hand on a silkscreen press. The inside of the magazine displayed a similar economy. In a technique Rostgaard called “Origami,” a single photo could be used to accompany any number of pages of text. Over the course of a six-page article, an image of Haitian dictator Papa Doc Duvalier appeared, only to be torn into four neat pieces and tossed into a garbage can.

But it was the introduction of four-color printing for the front and inside covers that occasioned Tricontinental’s signature graphic development, the “Cartel Maqueta,” or model poster. Cartel Maqueta is an allegorical and highly composed style of photography in which objects and people are graphically arranged to tell a story or illustrate an idea. (A similar style was popular in record album art of the late 1960s and is currently enjoying something of a revival.) What made Tricontinental’s photography unique was that it operated under the same constraints that had led to Origami. The third dimension was attacked with characteristic gusto, using an idiom Rostgaard called “the anti-ad” — similar to the Situationist strategy of détournement, in which the modes and methods of the spectacle are used against it. In Tricontinental’s case, this meant ironically adopting the language of capitalist publicity to further revolutionary ideals. But photography carried its own problems, particularly in regard to costs.

The solution developed by the Cubans that proved so elusive to the propagandists of the rest of the Red world was a sense of humor. The photographic medium occasioned a sort of self-conscious humor to lighten the hand of ideological imperative and steer the ridiculous toward the satirical. Hence an image meant to evoke solidarity with Palestine features a Palestinian youth (an unshaved and fatigued Cuban with a sheet wrapped around his head) with his foot planted on the head of an Israeli soldier (a mannequin head wearing an army helmet bearing a freshly painted Star of David), buried up to his neck in the sand of the desert he had stolen (a white sand beach — the whole scene was shot from a ladder to keep the sparkling blue Caribbean out of the frame).



In another singularly hilarious image, this one meant to expose the contradictions of American domestic priorities, an astronaut (a man in a white cotton one-piece, with a futuristic-looking pilot’s helmet) reaches for the moon (a cardboard crescent wrapped in tinfoil) while standing on the backs of three rather confused-looking black children (three confused-looking black children).

Although their quality varies considerably, all the images in Tricontinental succeed in giving concrete expression to a means of production that was itself political, analogous to guerrilla warfare — making the most of limited technology and/or arms by dint of manpower, charisma, and ingenuity. This ethos of finding opportunity in necessity also defined the American counterculture and the peace movement, which also shared the Cuban affection for the silkscreen, and for radical politics (up to a point).



While the young Cuban artists at OSPAAAL were ambivalent about the aesthetic influence of their enormous neighbor to the north — Rostgaard was purportedly bemused to learn from an American magazine that he was practicing “pop art.” But the remarkable thing is that their publication never looked as if it were co-opting trippy Yanqui graphics and far-out motifs to repurpose them for the party line. On the contrary, in the pages of Tricontinental, communist revolution through armed struggle emerged as the farthest-out trip of all.

It’s worth remembering that the magazine took its name from the Tricontinental Congress of January 1966, a convocation of revolutionary states and organizations at the Chaplin Theatre in Havana, chaired by Castro. If you spend enough time reading neoconservative Web sites, you will eventually find the contention that the congress was the primal scene of late-twentieth-century terrorism, as Soviet agents and their Cuban henchlings began cultivating a network of operatives who would go on to sow decades of terror across the globe, culminating in 9/11. That’s quite a stretch, even if the attendees at the conference did, in fact, include a seventeen-year-old named Illich Ramirez Sanchez, later known for his “work” with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine as Carlos the Jackal.



In 1975 Alfredo Rostgaard left the magazine to work for UNIAC, the Union of Cuban Artists. But the magazine continued to be published, even as the prospects for the inevitable triumph of the revolution came to seem more and more remote. Tricontinental only stopped printing around the turn of the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Cuba literally ran out of ink. Whatever one thinks of the Cuban revolution and its contradictions and failures, Tricontinental’s demise seems like the noblest conclusion that any magazine could aspire to. This one included.

Text by Babak Radboy
Source:Bidoun Magazine 22, 2010

I Love the White Middle Class

Anton Kannemeyer, I Love the White Middle Class . . . , 2008, acrylic on canvas, 47 x 47”.

It’s time to stand up for courage and conviction

There has been considerable discussion in recent years about the lack of public engagement in civic and political life. But this discussion suffers from the fact that it’s conducted from the perspective of a political elite that is itself socially isolated. This elite therefore has a perception of the public as an object with which one engages. That itself tells me straightaway that when we use the word ‘public’, we’re almost invariably not talking about the public in the way that it’s been historically understood.

In many respects, the public has become a project, a project of inclusion. New Labour loved having these projects. So every museum would start saying ‘we’re showing fine art, but we’re also spending millions of pounds on including the public’. The moment the public becomes a project that you seek to include artificially, it acquires a fantasy-like character. Hence, virtually everything we say about public engagement – counting the numbers, checking whether the voter turnout has gone up by two per cent since last time and so on – all represent this kind of fantasy of trying to create a link that really isn’t there. Just because you vote at a particular time, just because you come to a meeting, this does not involve or imply the reality of a public.

Historically, a public referred to a group of people with an idea of themselves as distinct and independent, as having something in common, and a sense that it had some power and influence. So therefore the idea of empowering the public is a contradiction in terms: power is gained, not granted. When you ‘empower’ people, you’re not empowering them, you’re enfeebling them.

Today, it seems that almost every form of public engagement – of public relations – is a kind of impression management. People make a lot of money out of it, but it really doesn’t bear upon everyday life. I think the problem is a cultural one and that’s the domain we should be addressing.

The cultural problem that we have today is something that Machiavelli identified over 500 years ago. He grasped that the strength of a body politic is determined by the extent to which it was infused by public spirit. As far as Machiavelli was concerned, a real public spirit accounted for the strength of the Roman Empire – the Roman republic specifically – and also the incredible things that were going on in Florence, Sienna and so on during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. And Machiavelli made the point that public spirit presupposes a set of virtues, forms of behaviour that you expect people to have as part and parcel of everyday life. These virtues would include devotion, courage, patriotic conviction, risk-taking and so on. (That all this seems so terribly old-fashioned now is part of the problem.)

I would argue that almost every single virtue that makes for public spirit is stigmatised by our society. Having recently been listening to people’s recollections at the inquiry into the 7/7 bombings about what happened that terrible day in London in 2005, what really struck me was that you had stories of people wanting to do things for the hurt and injured but who were being told by fire officers that for health and safety reasons they could not go anywhere near these people.

Just imagine: here are all these people, they’re trying to help others, they’re trying to do the right thing, but to do so they have to adhere to a very clear process. All these processes, all these procedures, serve to displace public interaction. They make public virtue dependent on adhering to different codes of conduct.

This displacement of public virtue happens in all sorts of ways. Just this morning, for instance, I heard yet another plea for volunteering – I almost felt like throwing up, I’ve heard it so many times. Now call me old-fashioned, but when I was young you volunteered because you believed in something. You wanted to help people; you wanted, for instance, to give blood. You didn’t do volunteering because it looked good on your CV. So, while volunteering certainly has a virtuous potential, it has been turned into a process that you adhere to much in the way that you clock on to a job.

An example of this stigmatisation of virtue relates to something I feel strongly about, namely, devotion and care. During the course of writing a book a few years ago called Therapy Culture, I noticed that aspects of devotion and care had become increasingly stigmatised, often being expressed and defined as a marker of a disease. In fact, any manifestation of love, friendship, loyalty or altruism was potentially labelled as a form of addictive behaviour. Altruistic behaviour – which hardly seems a bad thing – is actually diagnosed as compulsive helping. According to this definition, compulsive helpers disregard their own needs and feelings and focus on helping another person. That kind of sums up our current situation with regards to public virtue: in a different era, in a different society, this so-called disease would be seen as a positive thing.

Rhetorically, responsibility and loyalty are still upheld as public virtues, of course. But in practice these are undermined, time and time again. Something happened to me recently that made me think about this in a way that I hadn’t before. Last year, my mother died. While she was in hospital, I used to go to visit her all the time. And the very first time I went to visit her, I introduced myself to the nurse: ‘I’m Frank Furedi, I’m Clara’s son.’ The woman looked up at me and said, ‘You mean you’re her “carer”’. ‘No, her son’, I responded. But she was insistent: ‘No, you are her carer.’

It was very interesting that she used the word carer. This kind of terminology displaces the idea that there’s some kind of spontaneous and informal relationship with a bureaucratic typology. It reminds me of the way in which very elementary forms of compassion, of human interaction, have been pretty much blocked out altogether.

For that reason, the public can never have the virtues we want the public to have because we’ve done such a brilliant job at undermining those virtues. It is worth recalling that Machiavelli and other humanists feared the professionalisation of public duty. If you look at their writings, time and again they point to the danger of their city states relying on mercenaries instead of the services provided by citizens. From their perspective, the employment of mercenaries absolved the people from taking responsibility for the future of their community and served as instruments of the corrosion of public duty. That’s more or less what the bureaucratisation of public life has achieved today. It leads to a world where even family responsibility can become outsourced to ‘carers’. In such circumstances the public can’t do anything until a bureaucrat ticks the right box.

So we need a change in cultural attitudes towards the public.

When I was in Australia this summer during the election, the prime minister, Julia Gillard – who I don’t particularly like, but who has her strengths – decided that she would set up a citizens’ assembly to discuss climate change. ‘Why not?’, I thought, ‘this is a good thing’. After all, it affects the citizens, so why shouldn’t they get to discuss it?

But climate change experts opposed to the idea were saying ‘these are citizens, they are not experts on climate change’. The environmentalists were even worse. They were saying, ‘we don’t want citizens because ordinary folk are selfish, they only care about guzzling gas, they want to have big carbon footprints. So we want a proper committee of experts.’ And in the end, when the assembly was set up, Gillard had basically got rid of the idea of an assembly of normal people and had stuffed it with the experts instead.

In a press release she explained that instead of a committee of people, we have a group of experts who have a greater understanding of the challenge of climate change. ‘While the commission will set up a website’, she continued, ‘there are no plans for a major advertising campaign’. The committee concluded that the proposal for a citizens’ assembly should not be implemented and that there would be other ways of harnessing public dialogue and engagement in the science of climate change and engagement in questioning the price of carbon.

This illustrates how the language of public engagement, public dialogue, public inclusion are self-consciously used as a means to push people away. And I don’t blame Gillard or any other politician. I think politicians are in a very difficult situation. It’s not their fault.

What I do have a problem with is the fact we don’t recognise that ordinary people have been silenced, that we’ve forced people to censor themselves in terms of what they actually believe and what they think. And most importantly, instead of culturally validating people’s active, positive side – all the good things about human beings – what we’ve done is subjugate them to the most boring, flattened out form of bureaucratic rule. As long as that’s the case, any form of public engagement will simply be a caricature of itself.

Text by Frank Furedi

Part of a series of articles based on talks given at the Battle of Ideas festival, which took place on 30 and 31 October at the Royal College of Art in London. Here, Frank Furedi argues that whilst there is an obsession with ‘public engagement’ today, the very virtues necessary for a public spirit - risk-taking, devotion, courage - are stigmatised

First published by spiked, 10 November 2010

Ανθρώπινη μανία κατακόρυφης γλυπτικής

Hibernia

Η πλατφόρμα είναι δεμένη κάπου στον ανοιχτό ωκεανό όπου και απαγορεύονται οι δημόσιες προβολές DVD στις ομάδες εργατών. Η συνολική δομή της πλατφόρμας ζυγίζει χιλιάδες τόνους. Η πρόσδεσή της στο βυθό της θάλασσας γίνεται με πύργους από ατσάλι και αλυσιδωτές γέφυρες ύψους δύο χιλιάδες μέτρων. Η θέση της είναι σταθερή και βρίσκεται σε κατακόρυφη αντιστοιχία με πλούσιο υποθαλάσσιο κοίτασμα πετρελαίου. Το αντίβαρο της πλατφόρμας που την δένει στην τελική της θέση γίνεται με τόνους τσιμέντου και χαλικιού. Στο έρμα, κοινώς «σαβούρα», συνήθως εσωκλείονται και οι δεξαμενές αποθήκευσης του ανεπεξέργαστου πετρελαίου που αντλείται. Απόληξη της υποθαλάσσιας κατασκευής στην επιφάνεια του νερού είναι μια τεχνητή νησίδα τσιμέντου, η ίδια η πλατφόρμα. Το σχήμα της νησίδας διαγράφει ένα δεκαεξάκτινο αστέρι με μορφοποιημένα άκρα κυματοθραύστη. Πάνω στη νησίδα υψώνονται κυκλικά πυλώνες που στηρίζουν τα καταστρώματα εργασίας. Οι ομάδες εργατών δουλεύουν από το ύψος των καταστρωμάτων με απόκριση στο κατακόρυφο βάθος του εντοπισμένου κοιτάσματος. Αιωρούμενοι βραχίονες με προσαρμοσμένα μέλη γεωτρυπάνων εφαρμόζονται στα στόμια αγωγών. Οι αγωγοί διασχίζουν όλο το βάθος μέχρι το κοίτασμα, και η στήριξή τους έχει γίνει με τη βοήθεια αλυσιδωτών υποστυλωμάτων μέχρι το βυθό. Η διάνοιξη του ορύγματος γίνεται με περιστροφική γεώτρηση. Χρησιμοποιείται γεωτρύπανο που φέρει κεφαλή οδοντωτών τροχών με αδαμάντινες προσμείξεις. Αφού το τρυπάνι κουμπώσει στο στόμιο, πρέπει να βυθιστεί σταδιακά μέσα στον αγωγό μέχρι το τελικό βάθος. Οι χειριστές εφαρμόζουν κυλινδρικά πρόσθετα στελέχη στην ουρά της κεφαλής για να την επιμηκύνουν. Στόχος είναι η διάνοιξη φρεατίου που καταλήγει στο κοίτασμα. Στη διάτρηση αρχικά αφαιρούνται κομμάτια υποθαλάσσιου εδάφους με σχήμα αντίστοιχο του τρυπανιού. Τα «καρότα» από λάσπη διαλύονται μέσα στο νερό και το τρυπάνι εκτρέπεται σταδιακά παρασύροντας μαζί του στο κοίτασμα τον αγωγό άντλησης. Η κεφαλή τότε ανασύρεται κι επιστρέφει στην επιφάνεια διαμέσω του αγωγού. Διαβιβάζονται στη συνέχεια, από παράπλευρες οπές των αγωγών, αέρια υπό πίεση που θα περιορίσουν τον αυθόρμητο πίδακα του πετρελαίου σε μετριασμένη ανάβλυση και τελικώς στην άντληση του ακατέργαστου πετρελαίου.

Επιβεβαιώνω. Το θαλασσινό αλάτι καίει τα πάντα στο πέρασμά του. Διεισδύει καταστρέφοντας ολοσχερώς ιστούς και όργανα και κυρίως τον εγκέφαλο. Επιβεβαιώνω επίσης ότι αυτό είναι κάτι συνηθισμένο.1

Η τσιμεντένια νησίδα φωσφορίζει κίτρινη σαν σανίδα σωτηρίας που εκπέμπει κάλεσμα για να την αρπάξει ο χαμένος χρυσοθήρας. Αυτό το ακραίο μοντέλο απομονωμένης εντατικής ανθρώπινης δραστηριότητας μπορεί να σου στρέψει το πρόσωπο στο σκληρά και βαθιά κρυμμένο πετρέλαιο κάτω από τον πάτο του ωκεανού. Στη χαρά σου μέσα θα ανέβεις με σάλτο επάνω της σαν έποικος μόλις σε ρυμουλκήσουν. Το χτισμένο πηγάδι άντλησης που επιπλέει πάνω στο νερό και σηκώνει τους γερανούς του, για να τραβήξει ανθρώπους και βαρέλια, θα προεκτείνει αμέσως τα πόδια σου συμπαγή τούβλα μέχρι το βυθό. Εσύ θα κοιτάξεις ψηλά τον πύργο που σηκώνεται στον ουρανό και με τα μάτια θα ακολουθήσεις, μέσα στο βάθος του ορίζοντα, το ελικόπτερο που μεταφέρει βάρδιες εργατών από τη στεριά στην πλατφόρμα, να επιστρέφει πίσω στην ξηρά. Έμπορος, θαλασσοπόρος και γεωγράφος. Ο Πυθέας ο Μασσαλιώτης τον 4ο αιώνα π.Χ. ξεκίνησε μέσω στεριάς και έπλευσε βόρεια προς τη Βρετανία, και στη συνέχεια βορειότερα προς την Ισλανδία, ψηλά στον ήλιο του μεσονυχτίου. Διαγώνια απέναντι από τη Νέα Γη του Καναδά, σε νοητή γραμμή από το μέσο της Ιρλανδίας, βρίσκεται το κοίτασμα πετρελαίου της Hibernia. Εκεί επάνω εδράζεται η σύγχρονη επαρχία του υποθαλάσσιου βόμβου που σταδιακά μεταμφιέζει τα τσιμέντα της σε φυσικό ύφαλο και θαλάσσιο βιότοπο για ψάρια και μικροοργανισμούς.

1. Enki Bilal ANIMAL’Z, Casterman 2009. [↩]

κειμ. Αναστασία Δούκα, Kaput.09
Πηγη:Kaput.gr