Some notes on Schindler's Arcadia

Any mention of Arcadia has always been overshadowed in Modern architecture by discussion of its more extroverted cousin, Utopia; but, this has helped the concept avoid negative connotations of the political and ideological utopias of the 20th century, and their spectacular failures. In fact, simultaneous with Utopia’s rise and fall, Arcadia was finding its appropriate place in the sunshine of Southern California.The Southern California dream has been based on the pleusurable reality of a house on a well-sized lot, providing space for a swimming pool surrounded by a large garden.

Houses constructed by R.M. Schindler have provided a framework in which to trace a change of focus from the collective experience of a pleasant, domesticated nature to the formation of a contemplated, elegiac one: the Kings Road House, built in 1921-22 in West Hollywood was the embodiment of an activist pastoral setting, under the influence of his wife, the activist, writer, and editor Sophie Pauline Gibling; the 1949 Janson House, designed and constructed in a small hillside lot in Hollywood for the poet Ellen Margaret Janson, was another.


 Schindler House , King's Road, West Hollywood, 1921-22

On Kings Road, S.P.G.'s socialist ideals led Schindler to create a communal dwelling, with several simultaneous design influences and a gentle balance between every resident's privacy and their commitment to the publicness of life at the house. It equally reflected the rhetorics of a plethoric and enjoyable “Arcadian domesticity” in the frame of a modernized vernacular architecture. Twenty-six years later, a second rural bliss was realized in Schindler's design for the “skyhooks house” in the Hollywood Hills. The Janson House, an inverted pyramid of wood floating on a steep hillside operated with the same airy self-consciousness as Ellen Janson's modern poetry.

Janson’s residence represented calmness and stability, and  offered evidence for reevaluation of that old concept of Arcadia, usually misrecognized through lush scenes of an idyllic locale with the god Pan surrounded by dancing nymphs.

Schindler argued that his buildings should be perceived as being “as Californian as the Parthenon is Greek.” However, his clients could not afford the best sites – land on steep slopes was cheap, as it was thought unsuitable for building and “suited better to mountain goats than human beings.” This particularity has made Schindler more interesting in the context of one of modern architecture’s main idealizations: the confrontation between nature and architecture. Historically emphasized with the symbolic remnants of a classical temple within the natural landscape, this collision was replaced on the West Coast by the pure geometry of the modern building on the steep hills of Southern California.

Beyond the extensive use of stucco and plaster over wood frames, it was also the incorporation of colored fiberglass that made Schindler’s later buildings, like the Janson House, appear as heterogenous assemblage habitats, as well as starting points for the extended questioning of faith in the canonical experience of modern architecture. The Kings Road House displayed, at the symbolic level the authority of the architect's working space, the home of Schindler's family and the congregation of the avant-garde community. Janson's House, conversely, displayed its connotations in the imaginary level, prioritizing Schindler’s wishes for his architecture, through the frame of his loved one.

 
Janson Residence, Skyline Drive, Hollywood Hills, 1948-49

Schindler designed and contructed a house for Ellen Janson under the “delicate workmanship” of her poetry but also in the shadow of his illness, as he was diagnosed with cancer soon after construction. The architect then became a specific vulnerable subject in which human expectactions of a desired environment were confronted with the limitations of human life. The architect died in his most imaginary construction - death in his own Arcadia.
His theory of “Space Architecture” was fully realized on the ridges and slopes of Hollywood, particularly with the self-assured design of the house’s deck, with a view of the San Fernando Valley.

Kostis Velonis
Many thanks to Anthony Carfello for his useful observations.

John Cage's genius an L.A. story

John Cage was born Sept. 5, 1912, at Good Samaritan Hospital in downtown Los Angeles. There is no plaque. Nor are there plaques anywhere in L.A., Long Beach, Santa Monica or Claremont, cities where Cage grew up, studied and gave his first concerts. And became John Cage.


Composer John Cage during his concert held at the opening of the National Arts Foundation, Washington DC, 1966.(Rowland Scherman / Getty Images)

He was, perhaps, the greatest music radical of the 20th century. He composed using chance procedures. His music honored silence along with sound. He made no distinction between traditional musical sounds and what some call noise. He embraced, rather than escaped from, messy urban life as well as anarchic nature. He was controversial, to say the least, but his influence has been, and continues to be, extraordinary. No one in the last century did more to change the way much of the world now thinks about, makes and consumes art.

Cage lived the last 50 years of his life in New York, personifying the city's avant-garde. He wrote the music for which he is known there and died in Manhattan in 1992.

But the voluminous Cage literature has underestimated or glossed over the degree to which his revolutionary ideas had their origins in the singular and sometimes outlandish L.A. cultural stew of the '20s and '30s -- a liberating, vibrantly open society where highbrow émigré artists mixed with mystics and movie stars, where artistic and sexual experimentation were not necessarily separate activities.

That may help to explain why cultural capitals on the East Coast and in Europe, Asia and South America are celebrating the Cage centennial far more robustly than is the city of his birth. Darmstadt, for instance, renamed its central station the John Cage Railway Station this summer during the term of the famous new music courses the German city holds every July. Our Union Station remains un-Caged.

But with his 100th birthday on Wednesday, this is a moment not only to take back Cage but also to maybe see a little of ourselves reflected in our still often misunderstood native son.

John Milton Cage, Jr., in Los Angeles circa 1918. (John Cage Trust)

L.A.'s optimism
A good place to begin is with his disarming laugh. Cage's magnificent sense of humor -- "I prefer laughter to tears," he often explained -- made him instantly likable. But that he prided himself on having been born with a sunny disposition is no wonder. The L.A. of a hundred years ago was a uniquely optimistic city.

An anything-goes boomtown, which included a madcap nascent film business, Los Angeles named its main streets downtown Temple, Charity, Faith and Hope. In 1913, we were characterized by a New York magazine as a city susceptible to "spiritualists, mediums, astrologists, phrenologists, palmists and all other breeds of esoteric wind-jammers," to say nothing of "mazdaznan clubs, yogi sects, homes of truth, cosmic fluidists, astral planers, Emmanuel movers, Rosicrucians and other boozy transcendentalists."

Spectacle was everywhere. Hollywood hillside pageants included a Theosophical Society adoration of the East and a 12-part Pilgrimage Play at the sites of the now Hollywood Bowl and John Anson Ford Theatre. As a student walking to Los Angeles High School in the '20s, Cage would pass by Aimee Semple McPherson's Angelus Temple in Echo Park, where the popular evangelist might don a USC football player's uniform to carry the ball for Christ or dress as a policeman and ride up to the pulpit on a motorcycle to put sin under arrest. When Cage turned to opera late in his life the result looked something like that. By using chance operations to make his "Europeras 1 & 2," Cage wound up with situations in which, say, a singer traditionally costumed for a 19th century opera might enter on a jeep.

Idiosyncratic spectacle was, in fact, part of Cage's DNA. The first one he witnessed was as an infant, but he spoke about it all his life. On a late spring afternoon in 1913, the tip of a submarine emerged from the bottom of the Long Beach harbor where it had been buried under five feet of mud for 36 hours. Thousands of spectators let out thunderous cheers. Nearby factories blasted their whistles. Three dozen boat launches honked their foghorns.

That glorious racket was what would now, no doubt, be called Cagean.


John Milton Cage, Jr., and John H. Gregg: below, William R. Roalfe, Miss Katherin Welborn and Superintendent of Schools Dorsey in a photo that appeared in the Los Angeles Times on December 22, 1927. (Los Angeles Times)

Stepping off one of those launches, the mayor of Long Beach walked onto the flat top of the sub and cut the seal with a knife. Out climbed the sub's inventor and his crew. They had just broken the world's underwater record by a dozen hours, and the inventor said he felt "dandy." The event was the top story on the front page of The Times the next morning under the headline: "Comes Up Famous." A picture shows the young inventor in a bowler hat kissing his stylish wife. These were John Cage's parents.

John Milton Cage Sr., was a visionary inventor. He worked on forerunners of color television, sonar and homeopathic medicine (Cage swore by his dad's "Mist-A-Cold" inhaler). When he died in 1964, Milton, as he was called, was toying with the idea of space travel based upon gravitation that he felt would show Einstein the error of his ways.

After advertising stock for his submarine company in The Times at a dollar a share, Milton raised $1 million. But the craft was of no value to the U.S. Navy because his sub released air bubbles revealing its location. Milton went bankrupt and fled town.

John Jr., an only child, spent his preschool years in Detroit, where Milton taught engineering. Another fiasco, though, sent the family high-tailing it back to L.A. after Milton invented what was then the world's most powerful airplane engine, so strong that it blew apart its housing and thus also proved useless.



Milton built a Craftsman-style house for his family in Eagle Rock and turned to experimenting with early radio, which caught his son's fancy. In 1924, 12-year-old John Jr. began a weekly show about the Boy Scouts at KNX, which had been started four years earlier in the bedroom of L.A.'s first disc jockey, Fred Christian. Cage delivered the local Boy Scout news, played the piano (mostly Grieg) and invited clergy of various denominations to give inspirational talks. This proved so popular that the Boy Scouts took over the time slot. Without Cage, though, listenership plummeted and KNX pulled the show off the air.

Cage's first piano teacher was his Aunt Phoebe, his mother's sister. Phoebe James was a remarkable pedagogue who developed unconventional (that is to say conventionally Cagean) methods of teaching music to children that included jiggling balloons filled with rice and hitting radiators with sticks. At Los Angeles High School, Cage had another enlightened music teacher, Fannie Charles Dillon, a concert pianist and pioneering female composer who adapted bird calls into her scores.



The 1928 class valedictorian, Cage graduated with the highest scholastic average at the time in L.A. High's history, and he represented his school in an oratorical contest that spring at the Hollywood Bowl. His winning speech proposed a day of quiet for all Americans. By being hushed and silent, he said, "we should have the opportunity to hear what other people think." Nearly a quarter-century later, Cage would shock the musical world with his composition "4'33." For four minutes and 33 seconds, the performer remains silent, inviting the audience to appreciate sound as an inescapable -- and enjoyable -- aspect of our environment.

Cage entered Pomona College that fall as a theology major, but his interests quickly turned elsewhere. His enthusiasm for the French artist Marcel Duchamp, who became one of Cage's most significant influences, can be traced to José Pijoan, a Portuguese art professor at Pomona. Henry Cowell, the innovative California composer who would later become Cage's first important mentor and champion, gave a recital at Pomona, hitting the keyboard with his fists and elbows and directly plucking the piano's strings.


Cage discovered the writing of the Indian art theorist Ananda Coomaraswamy -- on which he based his notions about the role of nature and the emotions in his music of the '40s and early '50s -- at Pomona when Coomaraswamy's musician wife, Ratan Devi, visited the campus. But it was Don Sample, a pretentious Harvard grad and drifter who was hanging around Claremont, who changed Cage's life.

Sample induced Cage to help him curate an art exhibit, and he introduced Cage to the work of James Joyce, a writer who served as a source of inspiration throughout Cage's life. Cage's decision to drop out of Pomona after his sophomore year and go to Europe was at least in part to meet up with Sample. Whether they first became lovers in Claremont or in Europe is unclear.

Transformation
Cage went to Europe thinking himself a writer, but, after a few piano lessons at the Paris Conservatory and a year wandering around Europe and North Africa with Sample, Cage returned to L.A. in 1932 a composer of mathematically constructed scores and also a painter who took his inspiration from squinting at the sun (juvenilia that was either destroyed or lost). At first Cage and Sample stayed with Cage's parents, disguising their affair. Thanks to his invention of the electric radio, Milton had been able to afford a large house in Pacific Palisades, but the Depression had by now wiped him out, and the family had been forced to sell all the furniture. Even this became a Cage trope. During his early years in New York, he lived in an artfully decorated but unfurnished downtown loft that was famously photographed by New York fashion magazines.


Portrait of Richard Buhlig circa 1930. (Johan Hagemeyer / Online Archives of California / The Bancroft Library).

The early '30s was a time when L.A. had begun its transformation from provincial city into a cosmopolitan arts center, much bolstered by the great Russian and German émigré artists who had begun to arrive. And so, almost laughably, began the 20-year-old Cage's own transformation. Late in 1932, Cage, Sample and a high school friend of Cage's, Harry Hay (who would become a prominent gay activist), put on Cage's first concert at the Santa Monica Bay Woman's Club, where Cage's mother was a member.

Hay sang. Cage played the piano. For a song that Cage had written to a text by Aeschylus about the death of Xerxes, Hay donned white blankets upon which colored patterns were projected by a fluorescent light source that Milton rigged up. Once again, Milton didn't quite anticipate the consequences of his invention, and the projector got so hot that the velum upon which the designs were painted began to run. The ladies in the audience were bewildered.

As the family fortunes continued to fall, the Palisades house was sold, and the Cages moved downtown. John's mother, Lucretia, took a job as women's club editor at The Times. Under the byline Crete Cage, she wrote more than 1,600 columns that chronicled her times and her town by reporting on the daily speakers at the city's many clubs. These were often national figures and their topics were social, political and artistic issues. Not only did Crete instill a concern for society in her son that became the essence of his thought, but he was greatly influenced by her elegantly clear writing style.


“Rolywholyover a Circus,” John Cage’s 1993 exhibition at MOCA in Los Angeles, featured three rooms of organized chaos. (MOCA, MOCA / August 24, 2012)

Cage and Sample moved into an auto court in Santa Monica, and also lived briefly in one of the rooms the architect Rudolph Schindler lent out to artists in his famed house on Kings Road in West Hollywood. There Cage met German art dealer Galka Scheyer, a patron of the Expressionist painters she had dubbed the Blue Four (which included Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky).

Through Scheyer, Cage heard about pianist Richard Buhlig, the first important musician to take an interest in the young composer. Though now forgotten, the Chicago-born pianist was also the first to play a complete cycle of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas in L.A. and the first to record Bach's "Art of the Fugue."

Buhlig, who was a student of Hinduism and Buddhism, is the one who planted the seed in Cage that he needed to do something about his obviously large ego and get beyond his likes and dislikes so he could be open to new discoveries. He told Cage that listening with preconceived notions was listening with opinion.

And he sent Cage to Henry Cowell, who then prepared Cage to study with Arnold Schoenberg. The Austrian composer had recently emigrated to L.A. from Berlin to escape Nazi persecution, and Cage took his courses at USC, UCLA and Schoenberg's Brentwood home.

Most of the time Cage spent with Schoenberg was devoted to traditional harmony and counterpoint exercises, rather than learning the 12-tone technique that Schoenberg had invented to do away with conventional harmony. On his own, Cage drafted a collective of bookbinders (with whom he shared a house in Santa Monica) into a percussion ensemble and wrote pieces for them that applied Schoenberg's structural principals to rhythmic cells. Schoenberg, however, thought this of little interest.



Fed up with repeatedly having to study the composer's harmony textbook, "Harmonielehre," Cage dropped out of Schoenberg's UCLA class in 1936 after having devoted himself to the master for nearly two years. Still the young composer continued to, as he put it, worship Schoenberg like a god. He took away from Schoenberg the idea that a composer always needed some kind of system. And Cage always came up with one.

Complicated love life
In order to become musically focused during his studies with Schoenberg, Cage realized that he needed to greatly simplify his personal life, which had become promiscuous. He continued his relationship with Sample, and both had other male partners as well. But Cage had also been involved in a passionate love affair with Schindler's wife, Pauline, who was 19 years his senior. She had separated from her husband and was living in Ojai.

Then one day Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff walked into an arts and craft shop downtown that Crete ran during the years she wrote her Times columns. The daughter of a Russian Orthodox priest in Alaska, Kashevaroff was a beauty who had been photographed nude by Edward Weston and had been part of John Steinbeck's circle in Salinas. When John saw her, it was, he said, love at first sight.


Marriage license between John Cage and Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff June 7, 1935 in Yuma, Arizona. (John Cage Trust)

For a while Cage juggled all three lovers, turning to a not-particularly receptive Pauline for advice about how to woo Kashevaroff. In the end, Cage and Kashevaroff drove to Yuma, Ariz., and got married on June 7, 1935. His mother put the announcement in The Times.

Cage spent two more years in L.A. after leaving Schoenberg's class. This is when he began to find his voice, and it would be hard to imagine that happening in quite the same way anyplace else. One inspiration was the animator Oskar Fischinger . A German émigré whose application of classical music to abstract imagery was one of the models for the Disney film "Fantasia," Fischinger practiced Buddhism and further paved the way for Cage's later fascination with Zen. He also provided Cage with a model for eloquent graphic notation, which would become another Cagean hallmark.

Next, Cage accompanied dance at UCLA either on the piano or with percussion, and he assisted his Aunt Phoebe in her music education classes at UCLA's progressive elementary school on Sunset Boulevard. For an aquatic ballet, Cage came up with the idea of a dipping a gong into the pool so the swimmers could hear it underwater. The water gong was the first among a great many original sound-producing contraptions the son of an inventor would devise throughout his career.

His teaching was equally revolutionary. He put together a list of 10 "Rules and Hints for Student and Teachers, or Anybody Else." Rule 4 is "Consider everything an experiment." Rule 6 begins "Nothing is a mistake." Rule 9 advises "Be happy whenever you can manage it." Rule 10 advocates breaking all the rules, "even our own rules." It was at the UCLA elementary school where Cage first experimented with placing household objects on or in between the strings of the piano to create a new percussion effect.


The composer and musician John Cage, November 21 1988. (Paul Bergen / Redferns / Getty / August 30, 2012)

Around the time of his 26th birthday, Cage took a job as a dance accompanist at the Cornish School in Seattle, where he claimed to have invented the prepared piano, in which he inserted nut and bolts, screws and rubber erasers inside the piano. This radically changed the nature of the piano, turning it into a gently startling one-man percussion band, and it was one of the things for which he became known. But the prepared piano's origins were decidedly on Sunset Boulevard.

His final companion
After two years in Seattle, a year in the San Francisco Bay Area and a year in Chicago, Cage moved to New York. He and Kashevaroff divorced after 10 years of marriage, and Cage spent the rest of his life with dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, whom he had met at Cornish.

Cage's parents also came East and Cage's trips back to L.A. were infrequent and always to give performances. But he also often acknowledged his debt to his hometown, and one way he did so was by accepting an honorary degree from the California Institute of the Arts in 1986. He had been offered many others but turned all the others down.

I lived in New York during the last four years of Cage's life and spent as much time around him as I could. He had felt I might make a good biographer for a biography he didn't really want written. But he did seem almost obsessed with youth. He particularly liked to speak about his father, whom he adored but hardly knew. When Milton was busy on an invention, he might not emerge from his laboratory for days on end. And Cage acknowledged that this led him to seek out father figures, such as Schoenberg and Duchamp.


John Cage and Merce Cunningham, 1985, Photographer: Jay Anderson, Courtesy of the John Cage Trust.

Nor did he ever stop trying to prove himself to Schoenberg. A system he called anarchic harmony, upon which he based his late music, was his answer to his old teacher. During Cage's final summer, he even began rereading the Austrian master's "Harmonielehre."

Shortly before Cage suffered his fatal stroke, I happened to call his assistant, the Cage authority Laura Kuhn, who now heads the John Cage Trust at Bard College in New York. An enormous thunderstorm was brewing. "John," Kuhn relayed, "says it's going to rain like hell."

She then handed him the phone to say hello. I joked that it would be a good, spooky night to read "Harmonielehre." "Oh, I've finished that," he said. "Isn't that marvelous?"

About a half-hour later, Cage collapsed on his kitchen floor and never regained consciousness. He was alone. Kuhn had left and Cage was making lemonade for Cunningham, who was on his way home. Whatever his last thoughts were, Los Angeles hadn't been far away.

By Mark Swed
Los Angeles Times Music Critic, August 31, 2012

For more information about Schindlers-Westons-Kashevaroff-Cage and their Avant-Garde Relationships visit John Crosse's blog http://socalarchhistory.blogspot.com/2012/02/schindlers-westons-kasheravoff-cage.html

King of the Hills

King of the Hills, 2012
42 x 32 x 6 cm
Wood, clay, acrylic, oil, plastic leather

Lhasa de Sela - What Kind Of Heart

Canção "What Kind of Heart" de Lhasa de Sela, incluída no disco de 2009 "Lhasa".
Dedicated to Mechthild Weber for her Birthday (6 Sept).

Newtopia

Newtopia: The State of Human Rights, will explore the numerous, complex and multi-faceted issues pertaining to human rights and its evolving discourse.
The exhibition will be divided into several distinct thematic chapters that trace the development of human rights and their rise since the post-war era. It will negotiate the different and complex facets of human rights: from civil and political rights, social, economic and cultural rights, to the right to sustainable development, to peace and to a healthy environment, while emphasizing the indivisible, interrelated and interdependent nature of these rights. Newtopia will also track the evolving nature of human rights discourse, as well as its problematics, such as the conflict between universalism and cultural relativism, one of the key debates surrounding human rights. It will contain work by over 65 artists of different generations working in diverse media and will examine a rich variety of artistic responses in relation to the basic tenets of human rights. Many of these artists come from countries and geographies where human rights has been or is a particularly pressing issue such as the Arab World, China, India, Latin America, South Africa, Russia and certain former Soviet countries such as Belarus or the Ukraine. However, the exhibition will also explore the situation in the Western world in the post-1989, post-9/11 era, a time during which human rights seem to be increasingly disregarded, and hard earned civil liberties and social rights are currently under serious threat.





Kostis Velonis, Model for a Life Without Democracy, 2012
220,5cm x 20cm x 120 cm
Wood, Acrylic

The exhibition will trace the artistic responses to the development of human rights in the last 100 years or so, and especially since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, paying particular attention to the significant rise of human rights since the 1970s and their current state. It will be divided into four chapters. The first chapter will explore so-called 'first-generation' human rights, which revolve around issues of freedom and participation in political life. Civil and political at root, these aim to protect the individual from excesses of the state and to ensure participation in democratic processes. The work in this chapter will address issues such as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the right to a fair trial, and the right to vote. The second chapter will focus on so-called 'second-generation' human rights, which are social, economic, and cultural in nature and tied to the establishment of the welfare state, now increasingly under threat. They call for equal conditions and treatment of citizens. This chapter will include contributions by artists whose practice has focused on issues of work, housing and health care, as well as social security and employment. The third chapter will focus on the current state of human rights, and on rights which are a response to post-war economic and geo-political developments such as de-colonisation, globalization, multi-culturalism and the consolidation of global capitalism. These rights go beyond the civil and social, covering a wide spectrum related to contemporary socio-political issues: minority rights, the rights of immigrants, asylum seekers and sans papiers; gay, lesbian and trans-gender rights, and the right to self-determination; the right to economic development; the right to a healthy environment and rights to land, air, water, natural resources and sustainability; the right to 'difference' and cultural rights.

Artists: An-My Le , Ravi Agarwal , Amsab , Kader Attia , Sami Baloji, Yael Bartana , Taysir Batniji , Elisabetta Benassi , Edward Burtynsky , Fernando Sanchez Castillo , Cengiz Cekil, Alejandro Cescarco, Olga Chernysheva , Johan Creten , Ninar Esber, Stelios Faitakis , Ali Ferzat, Ziyah Gafic, Ganzeer , Eduardo Gil / El Siluetazo, Kendell Geers with Special Guests: Marina Abramovic, Belinda Blignaut, Ganzeer Ilse Ghekiere, Ilya & Emilia Kabakov , Barbara Kruger , Nedko Solakov , Betty Tompkins , Kara Walker; Sandra Vasquez de la Horra, Zapiro (Jonathan Zapiro), Esther Shalev Gerz, Leon Golub , David Goldblatt , Hans Haacke , Mona Hatoum , Nicoline van Harskamp , Barbara Hammer , Jan Hammer, Diango Hernandez , Lynn Hershman , Wafa Hourani , Satch Hoyt , Alfredo Jaar , Khaled Jarrar, Sven´t Jolle, International Institute of Social History , Nikita Kadan , Hayv Kahraman , Amar Kanwar , Lina Khatib, Thomas Kilpper , Jarek Kozakiewicz, Nevan Lahart, Thomas Locher , Basim Magdy , Tom Molloy , Gianni Motti , Boniface Mwangi , MadeIn , Marina Naprushkina , Jennifer Nelson /Dimitris Kotsaras, Seamus Nolan , Pablo Picasso , Pia Rönicke , Bruno Serralongue , Taryn Simon , Travis Somerville, Simon Starling , Sun Xun , Jan Svankmajer , Kostas Tsolis, Lieve van Stappen, Simon Velez, Kostis Velonis , Andy Warhol , Wilhelm Werner, Krzysztof Wodiczko , Wilchar , Wooloo


It will take place in some of Mechelen's prominent cultural institutions, which include, among others: Mechelen Cultural Centre; Lamot Conference and Heritage Centre; the Academy of Fine Arts; Museum Hof Van Busleyden; and the public space.
Curated by Katerina Gregos.

01.09 > 10.12.2012 , Mechelen, Belgium
www.newtopia.be

Eurozine - Freedom is a chilly virtue - Michael Ignatieff, Ieva Lesinska Michael Ignatieff talks about Isaiah Berlin

Eurozine - Freedom is a chilly virtue - Michael Ignatieff, Ieva Lesinska Michael Ignatieff talks about Isaiah Berlin

Gerry Mulligan Sextet-Night Lights

Gerry Mulligan Sextet - Night Lights (1963)

Personnel: Art Farmer (flugel horn), Bob Brookmeyer (trombone), Gerry Mulligan (piano), Jim Hall (guitar), Bill Crow (bass), Dave Baily (drums)

The Gold House

The Gold house was built by R.M.Schindler in the middle of 40's in Studio City of Los Angeles .
It is constructed by stucco, wood and glass, the preferred materials of the architect . Some of the parts of the house are restored following the spirit of Schindler's taste. I need to thank the homeowner Eric Preven for his permission to use some pictures on my blog.

Pollock as a Puppet Hero

A filmed performance of a shadow-puppet play .

Using techniques of the traditional Greek shadow-puppet theatre ("Karaghiozis"), East Asian storytelling theatre and the modern American musical, Apostolos puts together a highly idiosyncratic imaginative biography of Jackson Pollock. Performed in February 1999, in Athens, Greece, "The Tragical History of Jackson Pollock, Abstract Expressionist" is the alleged work of two fictional characters: the American artist, poet and puppeteer Alfred Hoos and the Greek avant-garde theatre director Yannis Philaretos. The play, and its performance in Athens, plays a central part in a novel called the "Republic". But here we have the paradox: though this was meant to be a fictional play in a real novel, now the play exists and the novel doesn't.

Alfred Hoos' shadow play staged by Yannis Philaretos, storyteller Alexandros Mylonas, assistant director Tassos Langis, painting katerina Karoussou, music Dimitri Papadimitriou, produced by Maria Nicolacopoulou, curated by Katerina Koskina and written disigned and directed by Apostolos C.Doxiadis. Zoumboulakis Galleries, Athens, 1999

Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles

Japanese Graphic Design

1955, designed by Tadashi Ohashi
From the book 1950: Japanese Graphic Design in the '50s: The Designer Is Born.
www.50watts.com

Does the Past Have a Future? by Kenneth Dewar - The Literary Review of Canada

Does the Past Have a Future? by Kenneth Dewar - The Literary Review of Canada

Pacific Dunes

Memory belongs to time; i shall not need to remember
Dunes. I climbed in the sea's thunder, up, up
with aching thighs, and stood on the highest
sand-crest;
Behind, the dusk circle of the mountains;
Before, the burning blue where the earth curves the sea.

But when i turned and slid into the hollow, the sea's voice failed, and time's
Outflung on a floor of sand the color of sun,
in a cup of sand and light, submerged in
light and soundlessness, i forgot you,
Beauty; and all the roads taken and not taken

Ask gulls, if the wastes of the sea, far from
sight or land, where the unheard swell
falls and rises,
Keep this secrecy…
Ask the near-dead, newly returned from the
outposts of silence…
Ask children at their play…

Ellen Margaret Janson, 1949

The interior of Kessler’s house in Weimar

The interior of Count Harry Kessler house in Weimar, designed by Belgian architect Henry van de Velde. Pierre Bonnard’s "The Mirror in the Green Room" hangs on the back wall. 1905

Atlantic

Ellsworth Kelly, Atlantic, 1956. Oil on canvas on two panels, 205.1 × 292.1 × 4.4 cm

Frank Lloyd Wright- What's My Line

Frank Lloyd Wright was a mystery guest on the 03 June 1956 episode of WML.

Ἡ ποδιὰ τῆς Μαριῶς

Πλένει ἡ Μαριὼ στὸν ποταμό, πλένει τὲς φορεσιές της,
κι οἱ ὀμορφιές της λάμπουνε, κι ἀστράφτουν στὸ κορμί της
ἀράδες τ᾿ ἀσημόκουμπα κι ἀράδες τὰ γιουρντάνια,
καὶ στὰ καθάρια τὰ νερὰ τὰ πόδια της ἀσπρίζουν
σὰν νἆταν μὲ τριαντάφυλλα καὶ γάλα ζυμωμένα.
Περνοῦν ἐκεῖθε πιστικοὶ καὶ κυνηγοὶ διαβαίνουν,
κι ἄλλοι τὴν λὲν Λιογέννητη, ἄλλοι τὴν λὲν Νεράιδα.
Πέρασε κ᾿ ἕνας σταυραετός, πέρασε ἀπάνω ἀπάνω,
καὶ σὰν νὰ νοιάστηκε κι αὐτὸς τὴν ὀμορφιὰ τῆς κόρης,
χαμήλωσε ὡς στὸν ποταμὸ κι ἁρπάζει τὴν ποδιά της,
τὴ λαχουριά της τὴν ποδιά, τὴ χρυσοκεντημένη,
ποὖχε ξομπλιάσει ἀπάνω της τὸν οὐρανὸ μὲ τ᾿ ἄστρα,
καὶ σκούζει ἡ ἄμοιρη Μαριὼ καὶ κλαίει τὴν ποδιά της.
Ὁ σταυραετὸς μεσουρανὶς χάθηκε μὲσ᾿ στὰ ἀστέρια.
Σὲ λίγες μέρες ὕστερα ταράχθηκεν ἡ χώρα,
παγάνα πῆραν τὰ χωριὰ τοῦ βασιλιᾶ οἱ ἀνθρῶποι
καὶ δείχνουνε στὲς λυγερὲς ποδιὰ γεμάτη ἀστέρια,
καὶ σ᾿ ὅποιας πιάσει τὸ κορμί, καὶ ὅποια τὴν πεῖ δική της,
ἐκείνη θὰ τὴν πάρουνε μαζί τους στὸ παλάτι.
Πέρασαν, πέρασαν χωριὰ τοῦ βασιλιᾶ οἱ ἀνθρῶποι,
δείχνοντας τὴ χρυσὴ ποδιά, κι οὔτε κι εὑρέθη κόρη
νὰ τῆς ταιριάζει στὸ κορμὶ καὶ τὴν πεῖ δική της.
Καὶ στῆς Μαριῶς πᾶν τὸ χωριὸ καὶ δείχνουνε στὲς κόρες
ἀράδα ἀράδα τὴν ποδιά, καὶ τὴν γνωρίζουν ὅλες.
Μέσα στὲς ἄλλες ἔρχεται καὶ τῆς Μαριῶς ἡ ἀράδα,
καὶ κοκκινίζει ἀπὸ χαρὰ καὶ παίρνει καὶ τὴν ζώνει,
τήνε γνωρίζουνε μὲ μιᾶς τοῦ βασιλιᾶ οἱ ἀνθρῶποι,
καὶ τήνε παίρνουνε μαζί, τὴν φέρνουν στὸ παλάτι.
Παίρνουν αὐτοὶ τὸ τάμα τους, κι ὁ βασιλιὰς τὴν κόρη.

Κώστας Κρυστάλλης, 1891.

Souzy Tros (“Suzy Eats”) Art Canteen

The new Souzy Tros canteen will serve fresh, cheap food—such as Greek trahanas and Middle Eastern hummus—to reflect the ethnic mix of the city’s population today as a seed for cultural exchange and re-constructive creativity. It is a project by Greek artist Maria Papadimitriou, in collaboration with American writer Cathryn Drake. Inspired by a famous scene in the 1969 film La Parisienne, in which a Greek tailor’s chubby client claims to be dieting to fit into a new dress but is only getting bigger: “Souzy eats—and lies” can be seen as a metaphor for the Greek state’s denial in the face of the economic crisis, as well as a general global refusal to reform our unsustainable modern lifestyle.
Activating the void of an abandoned industrial space, Souzy Tros is a re-creation of the communal space in the old Greek courtyard houses, where neighbors shared their everyday lives. A community forum sorely lacking in contemporary society, it promoted collective survival and action, as well as simple information exchange, especially crucial in times of hardship. Crises and other disasters tend to fracture populations into defensive groups defined by tribal common denominators, be it religious or ethnic, and Greece has proven this by becoming increasingly polarized as things have worsened.
The latest platform in Papadimitriou’s T.A.M.A. (Temporary Autonomous Museum for All), Souzy Tros will be a long-term project providing vocational training and creative inspiration for both Greek and non-Greek residents through a time-bank system and forums for the expression of ideas by invited guests from various fields. By hosting creative workshops, film screenings, performances, and music that encourage participation from the community, the canteen will serve as a catalyst for bringing creative people together to share their resources.


Organizational team: Elisavet Antapassi, Eftihis Eftimiou, Catherine Economou, Maria Halkias, Nadia Kalara, Dinos Bakounakis, and filmmaker Constantine Giannaris.

Souzy Tros (“Suzy Eats”) Art Canteen
Markoni 8, Elaionas 10447, Athens (50 meters to the left of Eleonas Metro exit)

Corporation

Corporation, 2012
15 x 5 x 7 cm
Plastic, duct tape, electric circuit and cables

Unanswered Prayers

“Answered prayers cause more tears
than those that remain unanswered.”
Saint Teresa of Avila

Inspired by the last, unfinished novel of Truman Capote entitled Answered Prayers, the exhibition Unanswered Prayers deals with the idea of failure as a creative process.

Success as a concept is a human fabrication. Nonetheless, everything is structured around it, people are expected to achieve certain goals, earn social and professional recognition, etc. The show Unanswered Prayers stands at the opposite end of this notion of producing overachievers and explores how one can actually gain from not achieving given goals, from not fulfilling their desires and how can one possibly grow and learn through failure or through the internal conflicts that are caused by unattainable desires.


You just fail, 2010
Felt, acrylic, wood
197 x 57 x 7 cm

Participating Artists: Em Kei & Nicolaich, Dimitris Foutris, Nikos Kanarelis, Stelios Karamanolis, Maria Lianou, Eva Marathaki, Tula Plumi, Dimitris Tataris, Kostis Velonis, Versaweiss

CAN Christina Androulidaki Gallery, Athens
12.07.12 - 15.09.12
www.can-gallery.com

Sweden’s New Gender-Neutral Pronoun: Hen

A country tries to banish gender.

By most people’s standards, Sweden is a paradise for liberated women. It has the highest proportion of working women in the world, and women earn about two-thirds of all degrees. Standard parental leave runs at 480 days, and 60 of those days are reserved exclusively for dads, causing some to credit the country with forging the way for a new kind of nurturing masculinity. In 2010, the World Economic Forum designated Sweden as the most gender-equal country in the world.
But for many Swedes, gender equality is not enough. Many are pushing for the Nordic nation to be not simply gender-equal but gender-neutral. The idea is that the government and society should tolerate no distinctions at all between the sexes. This means on the narrow level that society should show sensitivity to people who don't identify themselves as either male or female, including allowing any type of couple to marry. But that’s the least radical part of the project. What many gender-neutral activists are after is a society that entirely erases traditional gender roles and stereotypes at even the most mundane levels.
Activists are lobbying for parents to be able to choose any name for their children (there are currently just 170 legally recognized unisex names in Sweden). The idea is that names should not be at all tied to gender, so it would be acceptable for parents to, say, name a girl Jack or a boy Lisa. A Swedish children's clothes company has removed the "boys" and "girls" sections in its stores, and the idea of dressing children in a gender-neutral manner has been widely discussed on parenting blogs. This Swedish toy catalog recently decided to switch things around, showing a boy in a Spider-Man costume pushing a pink pram, while a girl in denim rides a yellow tractor.



The Swedish Bowling Association has announced plans to merge male and female bowling tournaments in order to make the sport gender-neutral. Social Democrat politicians have proposed installing gender-neutral restrooms so that members of the public will not be compelled to categorize themselves as either ladies or gents. Several preschools have banished references to pupils' genders, instead referring to children by their first names or as "buddies." So, a teacher would say "good morning, buddies" or "good morning, Lisa, Tom, and Jack" rather than, "good morning, boys and girls." They believe this fulfills the national curriculum's guideline that preschools should "counteract traditional gender patterns and gender roles" and give girls and boys "the same opportunities to test and develop abilities and interests without being limited by stereotypical gender roles."
Earlier this month, the movement for gender neutrality reached a milestone: Just days after International Women's Day a new pronoun, hen (pronounced like the bird in English), was added to the online version of the country’s National Encyclopedia. The entry defines hen as a "proposed gender-neutral personal pronoun instead of he [han in Swedish] and she [hon]."The National Encyclopedia announcement came amid a heated debate about gender neutrality that has been raging in Swedish newspaper columns and TV studios and on parenting blogs and feminist websites. It was sparked by the publication of Sweden's first ever gender-neutral children's book, Kivi och Monsterhund (Kivi and Monsterdog). It tells the story of Kivi, who wants a dog for "hen's" birthday. The male author, Jesper Lundqvist, introduces several gender-neutral words in the book. For instance the words mammor and pappor (moms and dads) are replaced with mappor and pammor.
The free lifestyle magazine, Nöjesguiden, which is distributed in major Swedish cities and is similar to the Village Voice, recently released an issue using hen throughout. In his column, writer Kawa Zolfagari says, "It can be hard to handle the male ego sometimes. I myself tend to get a stinging feeling when a female friend has had it with sexism or has got hurt because of some guy and desperately blurts out some generalisation about men. Sometimes I think 'Hen knows me, hen knows I am not an idiot, why does hen speak that way of all men?' Nöjesguiden's editor, Margret Atladottir, said hen ought to be included in the dictionary of the Swedish Academy, the body that awards the Nobel Prize in literature.
Hen was first mentioned by Swedish linguists in the mid-1960s, and then in 1994 the late linguist Hans Karlgren suggested adding hen as a new personal pronoun, mostly for practical reasons. Karlgren was trying to avoid the awkward he/she that gums up writing, and invent a single word "that enables us to speak of a person without specifying their gender. He argued that it could improve the Swedish language and make it more nuanced.
Today's hen champions, however, have a distinctly political agenda. For instance, Lundqvist's book is published by a house named Olika, which means “different or diverse.” Olika only publishes books that "challenge stereotypes and obsolete norms and traditions in the world of literature." Its titles include 100 möjligheter Istället för 2! (“100 possibilities instead of 2!”), a book for adults who "want to give children more opportunities in gender-stereotyped everyday life"; and Det var en gång … en ritbok! (“Once upon a time there was … a drawing book!”), the first "gender-scrutinizing" drawing book for children that "challenges traditional and diminishing conceptions of girls and boys, men and women."
But not everyone is keen on this political meddling with the Swedish language. In a recent interview for Vice magazine, Jan Guillou, one of Sweden's most well-known authors, referred to proponents of hen as "feminist activists who want to destroy our language." Other critics believe it can be psychologically and socially damaging, especially for children. Elise Claeson, a columnist and a former equality expert at the Swedish Confederation of Professions, has said that young children can become confused by the suggestion that there is a third, "in-between" gender at a time when their brains and bodies are developing. Adults should not interrupt children's discovery of their gender and sexuality, argues Claeson. She told the Swedish daily, Dagens Nyheter, that "gender ideologues" have managed to change the curriculum to establish that schools should actively counter gender roles.
Claeson might have a point. The Swedish school system has wholeheartedly, and probably too quickly and eagerly, embraced this new agenda. Last fall, 200 teachers attended a major government-sponsored conference discussing how to avoid "traditional gender patterns" in schools. At Egalia, one model Stockholm preschool, everything from the decoration to the books and toys are carefully selected to promote a gender-equal perspective and to avoid traditional presentations of gender and parenting roles. The teachers try to expose the pupils to as few "gendered expressions" as possible. At Christmastime, the Egalia staff rewrote a traditional song as "hen bakes cakes all day long." When pupils play house, they are encouraged to include "mommy, daddy, child" in their imaginary families, as well as "daddy, daddy, child"; "mommy, mommy, child"; "daddy, daddy, sister, aunty, child"; or any other modern combination.

To those who feel gender equality or gender neutrality ought to be intrinsic to a modern society, it probably makes sense to argue for instilling such values at an early age. The Green Party has even suggested placing "gender pedagogues" in every preschool in Stockholm, the Swedish capital, who can act as watchdogs. But of course toddlers cannot weigh arguments for and against linguistic interventions and they do not conceive of or analyze gender roles in the way that adults do.
Ironically, in the effort to free Swedish children from so-called normative behavior, gender-neutral proponents are also subjecting them to a whole set of new rules and new norms as certain forms of play become taboo, language becomes regulated, and children's interactions and attitudes are closely observed by teachers. One Swedish school got rid of its toy cars because boys "gender-coded" them and ascribed the cars higher status than other toys. Another preschool removed "free playtime" from its schedule because, as a pedagogue at the school put it, when children play freely "stereotypical gender patterns are born and cemented. In free play there is hierarchy, exclusion, and the seed to bullying." And so every detail of children's interactions gets micromanaged by concerned adults, who end up problematizing minute aspects of children's lives, from how they form friendships to what games they play and what songs they sing.

Text by Nathalie Rothschild
Posted April 11, 2012
Source www.slate.com

A Little House of your Own

Ellen Janson at her house during construction, designed by RM Schindler. 1948, Courtesy of R.M. Schindler Archive, University of California Santa Barbara.

An english actor and director Maurice Browne, founder of the "Chicago Little Theatre" was the husband of Ellen Margaret Janson, an american poet whose work has appeared in such magazines as the London Mercury, Carmelite, Harper’s, Vogue, Poetry, Diane Forum and for the most part of her life she was living in the west coast. Maurice Browne also known for his bittersweet autobiography "Too Late to Lament", describes his first impressions with Ellen Janson - Margaret Ellen as he called her.

"Margaret- Ellen..had an excellent thing in women, a soft and low voice . Stillness accompanied her, outer and inner stillness; and when she stood or walked she seemed to rest so lightly on the earth that, though she was tall like her Norwegian forbears, one expected her to float skyward" .

Very soon Ellen gave birth to their son Praxy but Maurice had decided to stay in England. In 1948 -1949 R.M.Schindler has built Ellen Janson's house in Hollywood hills. Between his last period of hospitalization (he was diagnosed with cancer) Schindler was staying at his girlfriend's house . In 1953 R.M.Schindler died "in the Sky ", in a place "made of cobwebs" and 'skyhooks" at Janson's residence site.



A Little House of your Own, 2012
Slide projection with Diascop.

Ellen Janson on the Deck

Ellen Janson on the Deck, 2012
48 x 14 x 18 cm
Wood, plywood, color papers, books

Ιαμβικό μέτρο

Ἔχουσα θαλλὸν μυρσίνης ἐτέρπετο
ῥοδῆς τε καλὸν ἄνθος, ἡ δὲ οἱ κόμη
ὤμους κατεσκίαζε καὶ μετάφρενα.

Κρατοῦσε ἕνα τρυφερὸ κλαδὶ μυρτιᾶς
κι ἕνα ὡραῖο τριαντάφυλλο.
Τῆς ἄρεσε: χαμογελοῦσε. Τὰ μαλλιά της
ἔσταζαν νύχτα πίσω της.

Αρχίλοχος (π. 680 π.Χ. - 630 π.Χ. 30)
[Ed.29]

Ellen Janson (Smiling Head)

Jacob Epstein, 
Ellen Janson (Smiling Head)

Bronze with a green patina , 33 cm. high

Portrait commissioned by Ellen Janson in 1931, but there is a misspelling (Ellen Jansen) that has come into popular use in the historiography of modern sculpture, possibly based on the sound of the word.

Even Christie's experts they misspelled her name.

www.christies.com/lotfinder/LotDetailsPrintable.aspx?intObjectID=4186422

Sirius

Out of vain dreaming in the dead of night
i wake and see your beauty in the sky
challenging me, calling a name of light
Forgotten...
But the masked years go by.
There are many lovely rooms and fires
So many shadows;siren-beautiful
Are words, leading from silence;and
desires
Are beautiful to death.
And so your cool
Far -lit beloved hush of radiance
Grows dim to me. I have forgotten you,
Sirius. Where the lesser planets dance
I dance with them in darkness...who am true
Only in those rare moments when i wake
And half-remember light, for a star's sake

Ellen Janson

Το Αθηναϊκό Underground 1964-1983

Η έκθεση φιλοδοξεί να καταγράψει το εύρος αυτού του ιστορικού φαινομένου, τόσο χρονολογικά όσο και περιπτωσιολογικά. Από τις πρώτες νύξεις για το ύφος στις σελίδες του περιοδικού Πάλι έως στον μηδενισμό του punk και τη σταδιακή πολιτικοποίηση και ριζοσπαστικοποίηση του φαινομένου. Από τα δεκάδες έντυπα των 70s και 80s που διανέμονταν στην πλατεία Εξαρχείων έως ψυχεδελικές και underground τάσεις στις γκαλερί της εποχής. Από το παραισθητικό και παραβατικό σινεμά έως τη σχέση των εικαστικών με τη μουσική της εποχής. Η έκθεση θα επιχειρήσει να αναλύσει το κλίμα εκείνης της εποχής, πολιτισμικό και πολιτικό, το οποίο (ίσως) εμφανίζει παράδοξες ομοιότητες με τη σημερινή. Ακριβώς γι’ αυτό το λόγο η ιστορική ανασκόπηση αυτή θέλει ν’ ανοίξει διάλογο με μια ανήσυχη καλλιτεχνική σκηνή των ημερών μας που θα μπορούσε, υπό κάποιο πρίσμα, να θεωρηθεί το “νέο underground”.



Συντονισμός-επιμέλεια: Θανάσης Μουτσόπουλος, 

Επιμελητής έντυπου αρχείου: Νεκτάριος Παπαδημητρίου, 

Επιμελητής εικαστικού αρχείου: Παντελής Αραπίνης, 

Επιιμελητής κινηματογραφικού αρχείου: Γιάννης Χαριτίδης

, Επιμελητής εικονογραφικού αρχείου: Θανάσης Μουτσόπουλος



Καλλιτέχνες της έκθεσης Underground: 1964-1983

Αλέξης Ακριθάκης, Μίνως Αργυράκης, Στήβ Γιαννάκος, Στέργιος Δελιαλής, Νίκος Ζερβός, Λάζαρος Ζήκος, Πάνος Κουτρουμπούσης, Nicholas Liber [Νίκος Λυμπερόπουλος], Ηλίας Πολίτης, Θανάσης Ρεντζής, Αλέξης Ταμπουράς, Κωστής Τριανταφύλλου, Λεωνίδας Χρηστάκης, Γιάννης Αρκούδης Χριστοδούλου, Χρήστος Ζυγομαλάς, Νάνος Βαλαωρίτης.



CAMP : 29.6- 30.8.2012, Αθηνα
Πηγη: www.campoint.gr

Model for the Greek Pavilion

Model for the Greek Pavilion (International exposition, Paris, 1937), 2011
115 x 26 x 50 cm
Wood, acrylic,veneer, mdf.

The German pavilion at the 1937 "Paris Exposition international",
designed by Albert Speer

Reduction to the Versatility of an Angle

Wrack tangles with and even wads

lower links in an airfield fence -

simple to think of a tide that swells like that

were we always as grainless

as placer deposits read from the Mull:

were this reduction not its own story.

Filiation frets itself differently

on islands, Whitsun sublet flinging

black over itself and white

on islands one of the commonest

elements is a cormorant years drafted;

now, fog intensity of repose.

We don’t recall you on Staple Island,

but a Brocken spectre and an address

on macronutrition. Silent planes

lift from or taxi at Prestwick,
kens of drift mining scatter:

not even rails, but a gradient record.

Joe Kennedy, 2012

View of LA from Skolnik House

House for Samuel Skolnik, designed by R.M.Schindler, Los Angeles, Los Feliz, 1950-52.

The Open Society and Its Enemies

Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies : Hegel and Marx (Routledge Classics- Vol. 2) London, 1945.

The End of an Autumn Day

The End of an Autumn Day (It's Grim Down South series), 2008
wood, acrylic, felt, cotton
123x33x23cm

South

Yannis Karlopoulos, News from the Past Series
Athens: View from Lycabettus Hill, 2011, collage, vintage postcards


SOUTH will be an arts and culture magazine published in Athens and distributed internationally. Possessed by a spirit of absurd authority, we will try to contaminate the prevailing culture with ideas that derive from southern mythologies such as the "perfect climate", "easy living", "chaos", "corruption", and the "dramatic temperament”, among others. Through our twisted - and "southern" – attitude, expressed through critical essays, artist projects, interviews and features, we would like to give form to the concept of the South as a "state of mind" rather than a set of fixed places on the map. People from different - literal or metaphorical – 'Souths' will renegotiate the southern attitude, partly to define it and partly to invent it, within the post-crisis world. Opening up an unexpected dialogue among neighbourhoods, cities, regions and approaches, SOUTH will be both a magazine and a meeting point for shared intensities.

Published by: Dyo Deka Ekdotiki SA, A collaboration of LIFO free press & Kunsthalle Athena

SOUTH contributors:
Carla Acevedo- Yates, Andreas Angelidakis, Julieta Aranda, George – Icaros Babassakis, Sotirios Bahtsetzis, Fotini Barka, Panayotis Barlas, Dimitris Bouras, Lorenzo Bruni, Carlos Capelán, Christos Chrissopoulos, Cibelle, Caroline Corbetta, Florence Derieux, Angela Dimitrakaki, Juan Andrés Gaitán, Penelope Georgiou, Massimiliano Gioni, Syd Krochmalny, Runo Lagomarsino, Julia Lesage, Miltos Manetas, Chus Martínez, Rodriguo Mallea - Lira, Stilpon Nestor, Ricardo Nicolau, Ylva Ogland, Louisa Papaloizou, Nikos Papastergiadis, Kostis Papayorgis, Javier S. Peres, Marios Perrakis
Angelo Plessas, Dimitris Politakis, María Inés Rodríguez, Georgia Sagri, Sokratis Sokratous, Mladen Stilinović, Pier Luigi Tazzi, Yorgos Tzirtzilakis, Kostis Velonis, Venia Vergou, Marita Virgioti,
Vangelis Vlahos, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Octavio Zaya, João Mourão & Luís Silva, Xenia Kalpaktsoglou & Poka-Yio

Mystical Anarchism

We are living through a long anti-1960s. The various anticapitalist experiments in communal living and collective existence that defined that period seem to us either quaintly passé, laughably unrealistic, or dangerously misguided. Having grown up and thrown off such seemingly childish ways, we now think we know better than to try to bring heaven crashing down to earth and construct concrete utopias.

Despite our occasional and transient enthusiasms and Obamaisms, we are all political realists; indeed, most of us are passive nihilists and cynics. This is why we still require a belief in something like original sin, namely, that there is something ontologically defective about what it means to be human. The Judeo-Christian conception of original sin finds its modern analogues in Freud’s variation on the Schopenhauerian disjunction between desire and civilization, Heidegger’s ideas of facticity and fallenness, and the Hobbesian anthropology that drives Schmitt’s defense of authoritarianism and dictatorship (which has seduced significant sectors of the left hungry for what they see as Realpolitik).Without the conviction that the human condition is essentially flawed and dangerously rapacious, we would have no way of justifying our disappointment, and nothing gives us a greater thrill than satiating our sense of exhaustion and ennui by polishing the bars of our prison cell. Nothing can be done about it, we say. Humanity is a plague.

It is indeed true that those utopian political movements of the 1960s, in which an echo of utopian millenarian movements like the Free Spirit could be heard – such as the Situationist International – led to various forms of disillusionment, disintegration, and, in extreme cases, disaster. Experiments in the collective ownership of property, or in communal living based on sexual freedom without the repressive institution of the family – or indeed R. D. Laing’s experimental communal asylums with no distinction between the so-called mad and the sane – seem like distant whimsical cultural memories captured in dog-eared, yellowed paperbacks and grainy, poor-quality film. As a child of punk, economic collapse, and the widespread social violence in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s, it is a world that I have always struggled to understand. Perhaps such communal experiments tried to be too pure and were overfull of righteous conviction. Perhaps they were, in a word, too moralistic to ever endure. Perhaps such experiments were doomed because of what we might call a politics of abstraction, in the sense of being overly attached to an idea at the expense of a frontal denial of reality. Perhaps, indeed.

At their most extreme – say in the activities of the Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and the Red Brigades in the 1970s – the moral certitude of the closed and pure community becomes fatally linked to redemptive, cleansing violence. Terror becomes the means to bring about the end of virtue. Such is the logic of Jacobinism. The death of individuals is but a speck on the vast heroic canvas of the class struggle. Such thinking culminated in a heroic politics of violence, where acts of abduction, kidnapping, hijacking, and assassination were justified through an attachment to a set of ideas. As a character in Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre Musique remarks, “To kill a human being in order to defend an idea is not to defend an idea, it is to kill a human being.”

Perhaps such groups were too attached to the idea of immediacy, the propaganda of the violent deed as the impatient attempt to storm the heavens. Perhaps such experiments lacked an understanding of politics as a constant and concrete process of mediation. That is, the mediation between a subjective ethical commitment based on a general principle – for example the equality of all, friendship, or, as I would say, an infinite ethical demand – and the experience of local organization that builds fronts and alliances between disparate groups with often conflicting sets of interests, what Gramsci called the activity of “hegemony.” By definition, such a process of mediation is never pure and never complete.

Are these utopian experiments in community dead, or do they live on in some form? I’d like to make two suggestions for areas in which this utopian impulse might live on, two experiments, if you will: One from contemporary art, one from contemporary radical politics. These two areas can be interestingly linked. Indeed, if a tendency marks our time, then it is the increasing difficulty in separating forms of collaborative art from experimental politics.

Perhaps such utopian experiments in community live on in the institutionally sanctioned spaces of the contemporary art world. One thinks of projects like L’Association des temps libérés (1995) or Utopia Station (2003), as well as many other examples gathered together in a show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in Fall 2008, Theanyspacewhatever. In the work of artists like Philippe Parreno and Liam Gillick, or curators like Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Maria Lind, there is a deeply felt Situationist nostalgia for ideas of collectivity, action, self-management, collaboration, and indeed the idea of the group as such. In such art practice, which Nicolas Bourriaud has successfully branded as “relational,” art is the acting out of a situation in order to see if, in Obrist’s words, “something like a collective intelligence might exist.” As Gillick notes, “Maybe it would be better if we worked in groups of three.” So much contemporary art and politics is obsessed with the figure of the group and of work as collaboration, perhaps all the way to the refusal of work and the cultivation of anonymity.

Of course, the problem with such contemporary utopian art experiments is twofold. On the one hand, they are only enabled and legitimated through the cultural institutions of the art world and thus utterly enmeshed in the circuits of commodification and spectacle that they seek to subvert; and, on the other hand, the dominant mode for approaching an experience of the communal is through the strategy of reenactment. One doesn’t engage in a bank heist, one reenacts Patty Hearst’s adventures with the Symbionese Liberation Army in a warehouse in Brooklyn, or whatever. Situationist détournement is replayed as obsessively planned reenactment. The category of reenactment has become hegemonic in contemporary art, specifically as a way of thinking the relation between art and politics – perhaps radical politics has also become reenactment. Fascinating as I find such experiments and the work of the artists involved, I suspect here what we might call a “mannerist Situationism,” where the old problem of recuperation does not even apply because such art is completely co-opted by the socio-economic system which provides its lifeblood.

To turn to politics, perhaps we witnessed another communal experiment with the events in France surrounding the arrest and detention of the so-called “Tarnac Nine” on November 11, 2008, and the work of groups that go under different names: Tiqqun, the Invisible Committee, the Imaginary Party. As part of Nicolas Sarkozy’s reactionary politics of fear – itself based on an overwhelming fear of disorder and a desire to erase definitively the memory of 1968 – a number of activists who had been formerly associated with Tiqqun were arrested in rural, central France by a force of 150 anti-terrorist police, helicopters, and attendant media. They were living communally in the small village of Tarnac in the Corrèze district of the Massif Central. Apparently a number of the group’s members had bought a small farmhouse and ran a cooperative grocery store, besides which they were engaged in such dangerous activities as running a local film club, planting carrots, and delivering food to the elderly. With surprising juridical imagination, they were charged with “pre-terrorism,” an accusation linked to acts of sabotage on France’s TGV rail system.

The basis for this thought-crime was a passage from a book published in 2007 called L’insurrection qui vient, or The Coming Insurrection. It is a wonderfully dystopian diagnosis of contemporary society – seven circles of hell in seven chapters – and a compelling strategy to resist it. The final pages of L’insurrection advocate acts of sabotage against the transport networks of “the social machine” and ask the question, “How could a TGV line or an electrical network be rendered useless?” Two of the alleged pre-terrorists, Julien Coupat and Yldune Lévy, were detained in jail and charged with “a terrorist undertaking” that carried a prison sentence of twenty years. The last of the group to be held in custody, Coupat, was released without having faced prosecution on May 28, 2009, on bail of 16,000, and was forbidden to travel outside the greater Parisian area. Late that year, fresh arrests were made in connection with the Tarnac affair. Such is the repressive and reactionary force of the state – just in case anyone had forgotten. As the authors of L’insurrection remind us, “Governing has never been anything but pushing back by a thousand subterfuges the moment when the crowd will hang you.”

L’insurrection qui vient has powerful echoes of the Situationist International. Yet – revealingly – the Hegelian-Marxism of Debord’s analysis of the spectacle and commodification is replaced with very strong echoes of Agamben, in particular the question of community in Agamben as that which would survive the separation of law and life. The question is the relation between law and life, and the possibility of a nonrelation between those two terms. If law is essentially violence, which in the age of bio-politics taps deeper and deeper into the reservoir of life, then the separation of law and life is the space of what Agamben calls politics. It is what leads to his anomic misreading of Paul.

The authorship of L’insurrection is attributed to La Comité Invisible and the insurrectional strategy of the group turns around the question of invisibility. It is a question of “learning how to become imperceptible,” of regaining “the taste for anonymity,” and of not exposing and losing oneself in the order of visibility, which is always controlled by the police and the state. The authors of L’insurrection argue for the proliferation of zones of opacity, anonymous spaces in which communes might be formed. The book ends with the slogan, “All power to the communes” (Tout le pouvoir aux communes). In a nod to French philosopher Maurice Blanchot, these communes are described as “inoperative” or “désœuvrée,” as refusing the capitalist tyranny of work. In a related text simply entitled Call, they seek to establish a “series of foci of desertion, of secession poles, of rallying points. For the runaways. For those who leave. A set of places to take shelter from the control of a civilization that is headed for the abyss.”

A strategy of sabotage, blockade, and what is called “the human strike” is proposed in order to weaken still further our doomed civilization. As the Tiqqun group write in a 1999 text called “Oh Good, the War!”: “Abandon ship. Not because it’s sinking, but to make it sink.” Or again: “When a civilization is ruined, one declares it bankrupt. One does not tidy up in a home falling off a cliff.” An opposition between the city and the country is constantly reiterated, and it is clear that the construction of zones of opacity is better suited to rural life than the policed space of surveillance of the modern metropolis. The city is much better suited to what we might call “designer resistance,” where people wear Ramones T-shirts and sit in coffee shops saying “capitalism sucks,” before going back to their jobs as graphic designers.

L’insurrection is a compelling, exhilarating, funny, and deeply lyrical text that sets off all sorts of historical echoes with movements like the Free Spirit and the Franciscan Spirituals in the Middle Ages, through to the proto-anarchist Diggers in the English Revolution and different strands of nineteenth-century utopian communism. We should note the emphasis on secrecy, invisibility, and itinerancy, on small-scale communal experiments in living, on the politicization of poverty that recalls medieval practices of mendicancy and the refusal of work. What is at stake is the affirmation of a life no longer exhausted by work, cowed by law and the police. These are the core political elements of mystical anarchism.

This double program of sabotage, on the one hand, and secession from civilization on the other, risks, I think, remaining trapped within the politics of abstraction. In this fascinatingly creative reenactment of the Situationist gesture – which is why I stressed the connection with contemporary art practice – what is missing is a thinking of political mediation, where groups like the Invisible Committee would be able to link up and become concretized in relation to multiple and conflicting sites of struggle, workers, the unemployed, even the designer resisters and – perhaps most importantly – more or less disenfranchised ethnic groups. We need a richer political cartography than the opposition between the city and the country. Tempting as it is, sabotage combined with secession from civilization smells of the moralism we detected above: An ultimately anti-political purism.

That said, I understand the desire for secession: It is the desire to escape a seemingly doomed civilization that is headed for the abyss. I would argue that the proper theological name for such secessionism is Marcionism (an early Christian belief system) which turns on the separation of law from life, the order of creation from that of redemption, the Old and New Testaments. In the face of a globalizing, atomizing, bio-political legal regime of violence and domination that threatens to drain dry the reservoir of life, secession is withdrawal, the establishment of a space where another form of life and collective intelligence are possible. Secession offers the possibility of an antinomian separation of law from life, a retreat from the old order through experiments with free human sociability: In other words, communism, understood as the “Sharing of a sensibility and elaboration of sharing. The uncovering of what is common and the building of a force.”

It is also the case that something has changed and is changing in the nature of tactics of political resistance. With the fading away of the so-called anti-globalization movement, groups like the Invisible Committee offer a consistency of thought and action that possesses great diagnostic power and tactical awareness. They provide a new and compelling vocabulary of insurrectionary politics that has both described and unleashed a series of political actions in numerous locations, some closer to home, some further away. The latter is performed by what the Invisible Committee calls – in an interesting choice of word – “resonance.” A resonating body in one location – like glasses on a table – begins to make another body shake, and suddenly the whole floor is covered with glass.

Politics is perhaps no longer, as it was in the so-called anti-globalization movement, a struggle for and with visibility. Resistance is about the cultivation of invisibility, opacity, anonymity, and resonance.

Text by Simon Critchley , 01 Jun. 2012

Source : www.adbusters.org

MADE IN L.A.

Artists

Scoli Acosta, 
Kathryn Andrews, 
Animal Charm
, Math Bass, 
Scott Benzel, 
Sarah Cain
, Sarah Conaway, 
Fiona Connor, 
Kate Costello
,Meg Cranston, 
Nzuji de Magalhães, 
Michelle Dizon, 
Roy Dowell, 
Zackary Drucker
, Patricia Fernández
, Cayetano Ferrer, 
Dan Finsel
,Morgan Fisher,  
Simone Fort, i
Liz Glynn,  
Mark Hagen
, Zach Harris, 
Kenyatta A. C. Hinkle
, Channa Horwitz, 
Pearl C. Hsiung
, Ashley Hunt, 
Vishal Jugdeo,  
Mimi Lauter
, Thomas Lawson, 
Nery Gabriel Lemus, 
Dashiell Manley
, Allison Miller
, Nicole Miller, 
Meleko Mokgosi
, Zac Monday
, Ruby Neri
, D’Ette Nogle, 
Alex Olson, 
Michele O’Marah, 
Camilo Ontiveros,  
Joel Otterson, 
Karthik Pandian,  
The Propeller Group, 
Vincent Ramos, 
Laura Riboli, 
Ry Rocklen
, Miljohn Ruperto, 
Analia Saban
, Brian Sharp, 
Slanguage
, Ryan Sluggett, 
David Snyder, 
Jill Spector
, Koki Tanaka,  
Henry Taylor
, Caroline Thomas, 
Cody Trepte, 
Erika Vogt,  
Lisa Williamson, 
Brenna Youngblood.

The biennial is curated by Anne Ellegood, Ali Subotnick, Lauri Firstenberg , Cesar Garcia, Malik Gaines, and is organized by the Hammer Museum in collaboration with LAXART.


“Made in L.A. 2012: New Art Now,”
June 2-Sept. 2, 2012, featuring works by 60 artists spread between three institutions, the Hammer Museum in Westwood, LAX Art in Culver City and the Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park in Hollywood.