Advent

In front of the craft shop,
a small nativity,
mother, baby, sheep
made of white
and blue balloons.

*

Sky
god
girl.

Pick out the one
that doesn’t belong.

*

Some thing

close to nothing
flat
from which,

fatherless,
everything has come.


Rae Armantrout
2009

Horizon Problem

Horizon Problem, 2011
38 x 19 x 13 cm
Wood, plywood, Acrylic.

Paper Model of a Functional House

Paper model of a functional house with a roof terrace made by a 14 year old girl form a pattern in "familiejournalen". The house has en antrance hal. kitchen, bathroom, living room and several bedrooms. Denmark, 1936.

"Metod" Talk

Kostis Velonis’ work draws from a variety of sources like political theory, history of art and architecture and is a lengthy study and reflection upon the concept of the archive as a key tool for art and knowledge. In recent works Velonis re-examines issues of the modernist architectural tradition in relation to the radical aesthetics and theory of the avant-garde. Velonis has a three month residency at Iaspis in Malmo (October-December 2011) and his exhibition The Promise of Happiness is shown at Signal 25 November 2011-19 Februari 2012. The talk will be held in English.

Metod is a series of lectures that focuses on working methods within the field of contemporary art- and culture.

Signal Center For Contemporary Art, Malmo
Thursday 1 December 2011, 7pm

The Promise of Happiness

There is something promising, something desirable about the Swedish model, especially in times of global economic crisis when the swedish economy seems to stand as unaffected and well rooted as a pine tree in the deep forests. This is of course not entirely true, but the cliché image is striking. The project of modernisation with technology, social engineering and the promise of a better life propelled the emergence of the swedish success story. However, a more nuanced analysis of the Swedish welfare state entails the complex understanding of its achievements and its drawbacks.

In The Promise of Happiness Kostis Velonis engages with the mutual relationship between social welfare and cultural modernity based on the belief that architecture and design will improve society, and that behind formal and aesthetic applications there is a plan for the production of happiness. With equal amount enthusiasm and critical investigation, he embraces the two contradictory interpretations of the welfare state – from one perspective it is understood as a democratic structure which is liberating on the individual level; from another the individual is understood as controlled and repressed by the state. Sometimes adapting the skillful language of the carpenter or the furniture designer and sometimes splurging into the amateur do it yourself-attitude Velonis' sculptural work both salute and satirize the principles of democratic design that combine politics with domesticity.

”Individual and mass... The personal or the general? Quality or quantity? - an insoluble question, because we cannot escape the fact of collectivity, just as little as we can disregard the individual's demand for autonomous life. The contemporary problem is: quantity and quality, mass and individual. It is necessary to solve this problem also in architecture and the crafts.” From the Swedish functionalist manifesto acceptera (1931).

25 November 2011 - 19 February 2012
Opening Friday 25 November at 7-9pm

Kostis Velonis holds a three month residency at Iaspis in Malmö with Signal as the host institution.

Source: www.signalsignal.org

Earth People

Earth People, 2011
Slide Projection

Folkets Hus in Malmo

The People's House (Folkets Hus) in Malmo, 40's-50's
(See also my post "Folkets Hus -Local Labour Centers", 11 Oct.)

Source: famgus.se

You Might be Able to Climb but Definitely you Will Fall

You Might be Able to Climb but Definitely you Will Fall , 2011
100x 85 x 85 cm
Wood, plywood.

Words Words Words

Leo Ferre

Et qu'ont-ils à rentrer chaque année les Artistes ?
J'avais sur le futur des mains de cordonnier
Chaussant les astres de mes peaux ensemellées
La conscience dans le spider je mets les voiles
Et quarante millions de mètres de tailleur
Prenaient la taille à la putain de Galilée
La terre a bu le coup et penche du Tropique
Elle reste agrippée à mon temps cellulaire
Je déchargeais des tombereaux de souvenirs
Nous étions une histoire et n'avions rien à dire
Moi je prendrai la quatrième dimension
Pour trisser dans l'azur mes jambes migratrices
Le mur instantané que je dresse à la Chine
Mao c'était le nom de ce Viking flamand
Le tissu d'esquimau vieillit beaucoup plus vite
Des plaies sur des grabats du Chili à Lisbonne
S'exténuaient en équations de cicatrices
Le malade concret et l'interne distrait
Sont allés boire un pot au Café de la Morgue
Des vieillards le chéquier à la main à la banque
Faisaient des virements de testicules abstraits
L'embryon vaginé derviche dans le manque
Un pavot est venu l'asperger cette nuit
Mon berceau féodal et mes couilles gothiques
Des faux-nez des trognons des tissus ajoutés
Fondaient sous les sunlights de l'Opéra Comique
La Standard Oil prend du bidon et du gin fizz
La fièvre est descendue ce soir à Mexico
O ce parfum diapré dans la nuit des cigales
Dans une discothèque on a mis des barreaux
Les fenêtres s'en vont de la gorge et du squale
Ça sent la perfection dans ces rues amputées
Saint-Denis c'est un saint au derrière doublé
La fièvre est descendue ce soir dans un bordel
Et fallait voir comment ça soufflait dans la cale
Il y a partout des cons bordés d'oiseaux
Comme des lettres cheminant en parchemin
Nightingale O chansons crevées à minuit trente
J'ai le concile dans la main qui se lamente
Devant le mur à faire un peu des oraisons
La Folie m'a tenu la main à sa culotte
On eût dit de la mer s'en allant pour de bon
Viens petit dévêts-toi prends du large et jouis
Je sais des paravents comme un zoom d'espérance

Que font-ils ? Qui sont-ils ?
Ces gens qu'on tient en laisse
Dans les ports au shopping
Au bordel à la messe ?
Et ces mômes qu'on pourrait
S'carrer entre deux trains
Histoire de leur montrer
Qu'on a du face-à-main...
Ils ont voté Ils ont voté
Comme on prend un barbiturique
Et ils ont mis la République
Au fond d'un vase à reposer
Les experts ont analysé
Ce qu'il y avait au fond du vase
Il n'y avait rien qu'un peu de vase

Et qu'ont-ils à rentrer chaque année les Artistes ?
J'avais sur le futur des mains de cordonnier
Chaussant les astres de mes peaux ensemellées
La conscience dans le spider je mets les voiles...

SHAKESPEARE AUSSI ETAIT UN TERRORISTE

" Words... words... words... " disait-il

Videla ?
En français : BUDELLE, tripes
En italien : BUDELLA, tripes

En argentin ?
Allez-y voir !

DE QUOI DEGUEULER...
VRAIMENT!

Where does such tenderness come from?

Where does such tenderness come from?
These curls that I stroke with my hand
Aren’t the first that I’ve stroked, and I
Knew lips that were darker than yours.

Stars rose in the sky and faded,
Where does such tenderness come from? –
And glowing eyes also rose and faded
Right next to my own two eyes.

And I used to listen to greater hymns
In complete darkness, at night,
Betrothed - Oh, tenderness! -
On the chest of the singer himself.

Where does such tenderness come from,
And what do I do with it, you, sly,
Adolescent, vagabond singer,
Whose eyelashes couldn’t be longer?

***
Откуда такая нежность?
Не первые — эти кудри
Разглаживаю, и губы
Знавала темней твоих.

Всходили и гасли звезды,
Откуда такая нежность?—
Всходили и гасли очи
У самых моих очей.

Еще не такие гимны
Я слушала ночью темной,
Венчаемая — о нежность!—
На самой груди певца.

Откуда такая нежность,
И что с нею делать, отрок
Лукавый, певец захожий,
С ресницами — нет длинней?

Marina Tsvetaeva, 1916
Translated by Andrey Kneller

Home under Construction (The Project of Happiness)

Home under Construction (The Project of Happiness), 2011
Slide projection, Lindh family collection.

Accent

Christian Berg belongs to a group of Swedish modern sculptors who remain influenced by functionalistic and constructive ideals but not with the usual radical frame of the Soviet and German colleagues of his time. His coolly controlled sensualism is rather conventional in the eyes of the polemical avant-garde. After a period of personal crisis, during the years preceding the war, Christian Berg he made a journey to Greece and this had a fertilizing effect upon him. He began to sculpt again, this time as a portraitist, discovering the possibilities of the classic expression beyond the fashions of the post cubist stylisations. In any case he is recognized as a pioneer of the north european sculpture and at the following pictures I choose one model and a drawing which I really like it. Both the two works have been realised for specific purposes.


'Accent", Proposal for a monument for the unknown political prisoner, bronze,1952.


Cover for the publication of Sigfrid Siwertz, "The Big Project", Stockholm, 1930.

Sabottage

Albert Jensen, Sabottage : Rδttegεngen i Karlskrona
Sveriges ungsocialistiska parti, Rδttsfall, 1909.

One Side gets even Lonelier

Untitled (After "the Melancholy of the distance") 2011
Wood, acrylic, mirror, wool.

Old Marx

I try to envision his last winter,
London, cold and damp, the snow’s curt kisses
on empty streets, the Thames’ black water.
Chilled prostitutes lit bonfires in the park.
Vast locomotives sobbed somewhere in the night.
The workers spoke so quickly in the pub
that he couldn’t catch a single word.
Perhaps Europe was richer and at peace,
but the Belgians still tormented the Congo.
And Russia? Its tyranny? Siberia?

He spent evenings staring at the shutters.
He couldn’t concentrate, rewrote old work,
reread young Marx for days on end,
and secretly admired that ambitious author.
He still had faith in his fantastic vision,
but in moments of doubt
he worried that he’d given the world only
a new version of despair;
then he’d close his eyes and see nothing
but the scarlet darkness of his lids.


Adam Zagajewski January 21, 2008
Translated, from the Polish, by Clare Cavanagh.

Charles Schulz’s self portrait

Charles Schulz’s self portrait :: scanned from The Peanuts Collection :: Little, Brown and Company :: 2010

Source: http://heyoscarwilde.tumblr.com

Setting the Scene

A rather similar way of protection (see Occupy Copenhagen protesters, "Trees don't Grow on money" post) of the "rebellion" equipment around Zuccotti Park, renamed Liberty Square by the occupation, at the end of October.The tents are still up, and the songs are still singing.Occupy Wall Street, NYC,2011.

Rettet die Würde der Demokratie

Man muss die aufsehenerregenden Interventionen des Herausgebers nicht immer goutieren, um dringend zu wünschen, dass die Wirkung seines jüngsten Artikels zugunsten einer „verramschten“ Demokratie nicht mit dem schnellen Szenenwechsel verpufft. Seine Interpretation der kopflosen Reaktionen unserer politischen Eliten auf die Absicht Papandreous, das griechische Volk über die trostlose Alternative zwischen Pest und Cholera selbst entscheiden zu lassen, trifft ins Schwarze. Was hätte die dramatische Lage einer von „den Märkten“ kujonierten politischen Klasse besser entlarven können als die pompöse Aufregung des Chefpersonals von EU und Internationalem Währungsfond über den unbotmäßigen Kollegen aus Athen?

Die Hauptdarsteller auf der Bühne der EU- und Euro-Krise, die seit 2008 an den Drähten der Finanzindustrie zappeln, plustern sich empört gegen einen Mitspieler auf, der es wagt, den Schleier über dem Marionettencharakter ihrer Muskelspiele zu lüften. Inzwischen ist der Gemaßregelte eingeknickt. Über dieser Wendung sollten wir nicht vergessen, was aus dem Schauspiel zu lernen ist. Ist es wirklich der glückliche Sieg des Sachverstandes über den befürchteten Unverstand des Volkes oder eines Spielers, der sich zum Anwalt des Volkes aufwirft?

Papandreou hat das Vorhaben eines Referendums aufgegeben, als sich sein Finanzminister vor dem Morgengrauen in einen Brutus verwandelte. Am Nachmittag desselben Tages konnte Reuters vermelden, dass der Euro „angesichts des bevorstehenden Kollapses der Regierung“ deutlich zugelegt hatte und die Aktien-Indices an den europäischen Börsen gestiegen waren. Erst die Peripetie, Papandreous Kehrtwende, enthüllt den zynischen Sinn dieses griechischen Dramas – weniger Demokratie ist besser für die Märkte. Mit Recht diagnostiziert Frank Schirrmacher in dieser Affäre die Abkehr von den europäischen Idealen.

Ob Papandreou die Vertrauensabstimmung übersteht oder nicht – zurück bleibt eine Gestalt im Zwielicht. Inzwischen wird seine Äußerung kolportiert, das Referendum sei „nie Selbstzweck“ gewesen. Zurück bleibt ein Vexierbild, das sowohl den tragischem Helden wie den Machtopportunisten zeigt. Es sollte nicht verwundern, wenn die Person selbst beides in einem wäre – sie verkörperte dann den Typus des Politikers, der am Spagat zwischen den Welten der Finanzexperten und der Bürger scheitert. Heute sind die politischen Eliten einer Zerreißprobe ausgesetzt. Beide driften auseinander – die Systemimperative des verwilderten Finanzkapitalismus, den die Politiker selbst erst von der Leine der Realökonomie entbunden haben, und die Klagen über das uneingelöste Versprechen sozialer Gerechtigkeit, die ihnen aus den zerberstenden Lebenswelten ihrer demokratischen Wählerschaft entgegenschallen.
Beruhigungspillen liegen griffbereit

Gewiss, in liberal verfassten Steuerstaaten hat immer ein Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Demokratie und Kapitalismus bestanden. Demokratisch gewählte Regierungen können sich Legitimation nur dadurch erwerben und erhalten, dass sie clever die Wege aufspüren, auf denen die Imperative beider Seiten irgendwie zum Ausgleich gebracht werden können – die Gewinnerwartungen der Investoren und die Erwartungen der Wähler, die wollen, dass es im Hinblick auf Lebensstandard, Einkommensverteilung und sozialer Sicherheit halbwegs gerecht zugeht. Aber Krisenzeiten zeichnen sich dadurch aus, dass solche Wege blockiert sind. Dann müssen die Politiker Farbe bekennen.

Natürlich liegen ideologische Beruhigungspillen, die die Vorstellung hervorrufen, das kurzfristige Wohl der Banken und der Shareholders sei eins mit den langfristigen Interessen der Bürger und der Stakeholders, immer griffbereit. Aber heute dürfte sich kein verantwortlicher Politiker mehr etwas vormachen. Die Politiker, die die Bankenkrise den überschuldeten Staaten in die Schuhe schieben und dem ganzen Europa ohne Rücksicht auf Verluste Sparprogramme aufnötigen, sehen nur auf einem Auge. Sie erkennen, dass der Mechanismus der öffentlichen Kreditaufnahme an seine Grenzen gestoßen ist, aber sie fragen nicht nach den Gründen für den Legitimationsbedarf, den der Gesetzgeber auf diese Weise befriedigt hat.

Der legitime Anspruch, dass es in den europäischen Wohlstandsgesellschaften neben dem privaten Reichtum keine öffentliche Armut und keine marginalisierte Armutsbevölkerung geben darf, wird ja nicht schon dadurch entwertet, dass der Überhang des liquiden Kapitals nach Anlagemöglichkeiten sucht und irgendwann auf Kosten der Bürger „abgeschöpft“ werden muss. Man möchte den Politikern, die sich in die heile ordoliberale Welt einer richtig eingestellten, aber unpolitisch sich selbst regulierenden Wirtschaftsgesellschaft zurückträumen, die Lektüre eines Aufsatzes von Wolfgang Streeck in der letzten Nummer der „New Left Review“ empfehlen. Dort untersucht der Direktor des sozialwissenschaftlichen Max-Planck-Instituts in Köln, warum der Schuldenmechanismus, der heute unerträgliche Kosten verursacht, seit den achtziger Jahren den damals in ähnlicher Weise untragbar gewordenen Inflationsmechanismus abgelöst hat.
Der drastische Schamfleck

Papandreou hat das Verdienst, den zentralen Konflikt, der sich heute in die ungreifbaren Arkanverhandlungen zwischen Euro-Staaten und Banklobbyisten verschoben hat, für eine Schrecksekunde ins Licht jener Arena zurückgeholt zu haben, wo aus Betroffenen Beteiligte werden können. Gerade wenn nur die Wahl zwischen Pest und Cholera besteht, darf die Entscheidung nicht über die Köpfe einer demokratischen Bevölkerung hinweg getroffen werden. Das ist nicht nur eine Frage der Demokratie, hier steht die Würde auf dem Spiel. Ein Kommentator der „Financial Times“, die sonst mit den Idolen der Hochfinanz nicht zimperlich umgeht, vertrat nach Bekanntwerden des Referendumsvorhabens die pikante Meinung, eine Entscheidung politischer Natur sei eher Sache des Parlaments, während ein Referendum nur im Falle einer Verfassungsänderung angebracht sei. Hätte nicht die griechische Bevölkerung wenigstens nachträglich über den verfassungsändernden Souveränitätsverlust abstimmen sollen, der, wie auch in Irland und Portugal, mit den Auflagen der Troika aus EU, Weltwährungsfonds und Europäischer Zentralbank längst eingetreten war?

Lehrreich ist Papandreou aber nicht nur in der Rolle des tragischen Helden. Als der Machttaktiker, der den politisch-kriminellen Machenschaften einer gewissenlosen Opposition das Wasser abgraben wollte, hat er, kaum eine Woche nach der vermeintlich großen Lösung, die Unberechenbarkeit einer zerrissenen Europäischen Union bloßgestellt. Man muss nicht sogleich von Unregierbarkeit reden; aber drastischer hätte der Schamfleck einer Währungsgemeinschaft ohne Politische Union, die fehlende supranationale Handlungsfähigkeit nicht ausgeleuchtet werden können.

Die bailouts, die sich überschlagen, haben bestenfalls aufschiebende Wirkung. Eine überzeugende Lösung der Finanzkrise ist mit Mitteln der Fiskalpolitik allein gar nicht zu haben; überzeugen könnte die europäische Politik nur mit dem glaubhaften institutionellen Entwurf zu einer abgestuften Integration. Langfristig scheint die gegenwärtige Krise ohnehin keinen anderen Ausweg zu lassen als die überfällige Regulierung der Banken und der Finanzmärkte. Den reuevollen Absichtserklärungen der G-20 auf ihrem ersten Treffen im Jahre 2008 in London sind keine Taten gefolgt.
Für eine europäische Verfassungsgebung

Es fehlt am politischen Willen zur globalen Einigung, weil die Institutionen fehlen, die eine supranationale Willensbildung und die globale Durchsetzung von Beschlüssen erst ermöglichen würden. Auch aus diesem Grunde müssten die Staaten der Europäischen Währungsgemeinschaft die Krise als Chance begreifen und mit der Absicht, ihre politische Handlungsfähigkeit auf supranationaler Ebene zu verstärken, Ernst machen. Das griechische Desaster ist jedoch eine deutliche Warnung vor dem postdemokratischen Weg, den Merkel und Sarkozy eingeschlagen haben. Eine Konzentration der Macht bei einem intergouvernementalen Ausschuss der Regierungschefs, die ihre Vereinbarungen den nationalen Parlamenten aufs Auge drücken, ist der falsche Weg. Ein demokratisches Europa, das keineswegs die Gestalt eines europäischen Bundesstaates annehmen muss, muss anders aussehen.

Dieses Projekt verlangt nicht nur institutionelle Phantasie. Die überfällige Kontroverse über Notwendigkeit und Nutzen eines solchen Projekts muss in der breiten Öffentlichkeit ausgetragen werden. Das verlangt allerdings von den politischen Eliten nicht nur den üblichen Spagat zwischen Bürgerinteressen und dem Rat der Experten. Die erneute Anbahnung eines verfassungsgebenden Prozesses würde vielmehr ein Engagement verlangen, das von den Routinen des Machtopportunismus abweicht und Risiken eingeht. Dieses Mal müssten die Politiker in der ersten Person sprechen, um die Bürger zu überzeugen.

Der Politik und Parteipolitik wäre eine solche Initiative gar nicht mehr zuzumuten, wenn sie sich tatsächlich zu einem selbstbezüglichen System geschlossen und gegenüber der Umwelt einer nur noch administrativ als Stimmenreservoir wahrgenommenen politischen Öffentlichkeit abgekapselt hätten. Dann könnten sich die Parameter für das, was in der Öffentlichkeit als selbstverständlich gilt, nur noch im Zuge einer sozialen Bewegung verschieben. Wer die überregionale Presse in Amerika verfolgt hat, wird über die Reaktionen erstaunt sein, die „Occupy Wall Street“ ausgelöst hat.

Von Jürgen Habermas

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 04,11.2011
Source: http://www.faz.net

Trees Don't Grow on Money

The Occupy Wall street movement has not been a popular option for demonstrations in Denmark as it's been in United States and other European Nations. In the central square of the Copenhagen, a small group of people have however realized the conditions for a kind of public presentation using creative and crafty ways about the protection of their equipment. Here are some shots from a recent travel to the capital city of Danes. November 2011.

The Grand Domestic Revolution – User's Manual

Revolution' is no longer just a notion from a bygone era that is periodically resuscitated as a fashion buzzword or in celebration of some technological innovation. The current crisis makes it abundantly clear that the triumph of neoliberalism has not guaranteed a better life for the majority of citizens and non-citizens. Living means struggling with perpetually rising housing rents and mortgage pressure, with the consequences of having work or no work, and anxieties arising from exploitation and self-exploitation. Living is flailing under the constant demand for individualised performance. Living means being locked up in our homes and workplaces, connected mainly through the Internet. Our lives have been distanced from families, friends, colleagues, neighbours and strangers. We want to change this—and that change has to be more than cosmetic.

'The Grand Domestic Revolution—User's Manual' (GDR) is our proposal for taking action and amending our precarious living conditions right here and now, starting from our homes, neighbourhoods and work places, to our towns, cities and beyond. After two years of 'living research' residencies, home productions, town meetings and affinity actions, GDR culminates in an exhibition that aims to share proposals for a grand domestic revolution today. We ask you to join us in our investigation of the conditions and status of the contemporary domestic sphere and in exploring ways of transforming it—building new forms of living and working in common.

Long Live The Grand Domestic Revolution!

The exhibition includes works by:

Agency, Ask! (Actie Schone Kunsten) with Andreas Siekmann, Sepake Angiama & Sam Causer, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Doris Denekamp & Arend Groosman, Domestic Workers Netherlands (part of FNV Bondgenoten) with Matthijs de Bruijne, Paul Elliman with Na Kim, Hans van Lunteren and Rob van de Steen, Casco-HKU Creative Lab 'Extended Family', Andrea Francke, 'Our Autonomous Life' with Nazima Kadir, Maria Pask and evolving cooperative cast, Shiu Jin, Mary Kelly with Margaret Harrison and Kay Hunt, kleines postfordistisches Drama, Germaine Koh, Graziela Kunsch, Wietske Maas, Gordon Matta-Clark, Travis Meinolf, Emilio Moreno, Read-in, Martha Rosler, Helke Sander, Kateřina Šedá, Patricia Sousa, Xu Tan, Valerie Tevere & Angel Nevarez, Mirjam Thomann, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Jort van der Laan, Agnès Varda, Werker Magazine, Vincent Wittenberg, and Haegue Yang.

Spatial design is by Ruth Buchanan and Andreas Müller. Exhibition map and signage is developed by Åbäke.

Themes:

Through the two-year research process, four main themes emerged that have become key lines of thought for engaging the large scope of GDR research and actions.

- Domestic space: housing the commons and living together
- Domestic work: invisible labour and working at home
- Domestic property: struggles between ownership and usership
- Domestic relations: extended families, neighbours versus networks

Locations:

The works themselves perform their positions in dialogue with the exhibition themes across Casco and other venues shared by our neighbours.

1. Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory, Nieuwekade 213–215, Utrecht www.cascoprojects.org
Casco is transformed into a living and working space, functioning as 'home base' of the exhibition and further actions. It is also where GDR's cooperative sitcom 'Our Autonomous Life?' is produced and screened, and includes space for children and the GDR library.

2. Volksbuurt Museum, Waterstraat 27–29, Utrecht www.volksbuurtmuseum.nl
The Volksbuurt Museum finds its seed in Committee Wijk C, founded in 1974 to preserve and recover the neighbourhood, where Casco is also situated, in response to rapid urban renewal and demolition projects. GDR works are cohabiting with the various documents and objects in this local folks' museum. Annexed as a temporary structure to Volksbuurt Museum is 18b Pavilion consisting of the structural devices installed in the former GDR apartment.

3. De Rooie Rat, Oudegracht 65, Utrecht www.rooierat.nl
De Rooie Rat is the oldest leftist political bookstore in the Netherlands, established in 1974 just up the canal from Casco. Works that call for action mingle with the inspiring books at De Rooie Rat!

Occasions:
Watch out for the activities throughout the exhibition, including pilot premiere of the cooperative sitcom 'Our Autonomous Life?', 'Teach-in' by Read-in, 'Kitchen 139' organised by W139, Amsterdam with Casco in conjunction with GDR, 'Assembly (The Grand Domestic Revolution)' by Agency, 'Keywords Cooking School' book launch by Xu Tan, collective futurist fiction writing conference and home schools on GDR Future' (finnissage?). More information is available on our website or GDR wiki.

6 November 2011–26 February 2012
Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory
Utrecht,The Netherlands
Source :www.cascoprojects.org

Schwinn

I hate the phrase “inner life.” My attic hurts,
and I’d like to quit the committee
for naming tornadoes. Do you remember
how easy and sad it was to be young
and defined by our bicycles? My first
was yellow, and though it was no Black
Phantom or Sting-Ray but merely a Varsity
I loved the afternoon it was suddenly gone,
chasing its apian flash through the neighborhoods
with my father in vain. Like being a nuclear
family in a television show totally unaffected
by a distant war. Then we returned
to the green living room to watch the No Names
hold our Over the Hill Gang under
the monotinted chromatic defeated Super
Bowl waters. 1973, year of the Black Fly
caught in my Jell-O. Year of the Suffrage Building
on K Street NW where a few minor law firms
mingle proudly with the Union of Butchers
and Meat Cutters. A black hand
already visits my father in sleep, moving
up his spine to touch his amygdala. I will
never know a single thing anyone feels,
just how they say it, which is why I am standing
here exactly, covered in shame and lightning,
doing what I’m supposed to do.

Matthew Zapruder
“Schwinn” from Come on All You Ghosts, 2010.

Sports Cottage built with masonite

Sports Cottage biult with masonite, 1946, Sweden.

Outdoor Furniture

In the heart of the expanding "docklands" of Malmo's harbour i had to deal with a remarkable number of public design. Winter 2011.

Swedish exhibition of Modern Homes

..at Malmo 7-28 September, 1939 and illustrated by Anders Beckman, a very active artist of his time. I found this poster from the Annual "Svensk Reklam" publication, P.A Norstedt &Soner, Stockholm, 1939.

Le Corbu et la Suedoise (Marguerite Tjader Harris)

Le Corbu et la Suedoise (Marguerite Tjader Harris), 2011.
Wood, plywood, clay, felt, acrylic
133 x 92 x 86 cm

One World Government? Not So Fast!

Since the Enlightenment, human civilization has increasingly lived with the presumption that, via reason and knowledge, we would have the power to manage.

It is the so-called "General Motors" view of scientific management that took hold from the 1950s onwards. We argue that it is a profoundly inadequate model for how businesses, societies and civilizations evolve.
If one looks at the United Nations and other post-World War II, Bretton-Woods institutions such as World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), there seems to have been, since their inception, the same mid-20th Century faith that such management might even lead to some form of a centralized world governance structure that would "know" and "allocate" and "manage."This view of global governance and this arrangement of international organizations is misguided, even dangerous. It can't adequately cope with many issues, including global climate change, food insecurity, loss of biodiversity and other similar global policy problems.

The slender loris: looking for solutions to deforestation and other biodiversity challenges.

Policy makers — both global and local — need to question one of the central assumptions found in top-down scientific management models. This assumption states that a global or "regional" social welfare function could be used as a proxy to design institutions and their organizational functions. We argue that no one can pre-state what new "salients" of economic or cultural activities will arise, from what little or large triggers. Critically, not only do we not know what will happen, we do not even know what can happen.Optimization and control relying solely on the variables known right now is often a dangerous illusion. We cannot optimize over a state space of a pre-defined social welfare function. We do not know the new relevant variables that will arise.

Instead, an evolving and adaptive complex-systems approach to global governance, with one's focus on wise enablement, not control, might provide an alternative way to design the functions and capacities of international organizations.Under this view, we are called upon to be open to the partially unknowable adjacent possible, not to control, but to enable and adapt, and partially shape what will emerge. This is the profound opposite of the General Motors model, from dictatorship and from a controlling global governance managed by the elites who "know."Under this complex-systems perspective, we begin to see democracy in a new light, a framework of freedoms and procedures that allows and enables adaptability, shaping the possibilities of where we will go.If we assess the three global crises currently known as global climate change, global food insecurity and global biodiversity loss, we find that centralized decision makers at international organizations such as the World Bank, IMF and World Trade Organization (WTO) have valued maximization of economic growth as a primary decision element.

That emphasis has led to unintended environmental and social effects, including global climate change, global biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation and increasing food insecurity.Emphasis on maximizing economic efficiency for global production of goods and services has led to strongly centralized "free trade policies" that are enforced by international organizations such as WTO. The environmental impacts of such free trade policies have not been internalized through imposition of Pigovian taxes in the conduct of international trade.

The powerful industrial north and allied transnational corporations have been able to negotiate terms of trade that maximize their profits and retain current socio-political power patterns, while greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions resulting from the global industrial complex, mining, deforestation, wasteful consumption and energy burning continue to accumulate in coupled atmospheric and oceanic systems. Global climate change science is unable to predict an accurate timing of critical phase transition; however all global circulation models agree that our business-as-usual path of GHG emission trajectory will sooner or later cause a phase transition in the coupled atmospheric system; after which socio-political policy actions and behavioral changes by themselves will not be adequate to stop run-away climate change because natural bio-geo-chemical cycle would have degenerated to the point that reduction in anthropogenic GHG emissions would be inadequate to stop global warming effect from playing havoc in the global socio-ecological systems.

Protection of free trade through centralized global institutions and maximization of economic growth will only exacerbate GHG emissions. On the other hand, international climate policy experts are well aware of the fact that any strong action by a handful of nation-states would shift global industrial production to the nation-states that do not take any meaningful action on regulating GHG emissions.The governance of global climate, food and biodiversity crises pose a fundamental normative or value ambiguity challenge, i.e., experts in centralized international organizations do not and can not know the space of variables and strategies over which the optimization-decision problem is to be stated. Both the mitigation of and adaptation to global climate change requires deep, long-term foresight, and unwavering collective/normative human action at the global scale.

Yet, the complexity of managing global-climatic change, and its impacts on irreversibly changing the evolutionary pathways of biological, technological and economic systems, remains a deep puzzle, beyond the reach of positive sciences.From a normative standpoint, which is an essential component of any governance effort to deal with the complexity of complex systems, international organizations need to move beyond the positivistic goals of managing and controlling global socio-ecological systems. Management and international organization sciences need to move beyond "optimization-envy."There is a need to accommodate both facts (understanding) and values (normative prescriptions) for managing global environmental and social crises. Furthermore, management and international organization sciences will need to let go of reductionism and replace it with the acknowledgment of normative (or value-laden) complexity of managing complexity.

Perhaps most importantly, we need to explore, not control, "enablement" and adaptability to manage huge systems which engender ever new relevant features that alter the wisdom of earlier management plans. Again, we not only do not know what will happen, we do not know what can happen, hence we must change our organizations to reflect this reality of the real world as it evolves. Enablement and adaptability may well require a mixture of interacting local and regional structures that explore, cooperate and compete for wise policy decision.

This is the opposite of global, top-down control pretending that it knows. Further, given the complexity of dealing with global climate change, global food insecurity and global biodiversity loss, the rationalist and normative arguments based upon the logic of Pareto optimality and Nash equilibria lead to poorly defined international institutions that create perverse incentives for local and indigenous communities, displace biodiversity through the removal of old growth forests, engender inequities due to century old property right and tenure conflicts, assume technological methodologies that cannot objectively assign baselines and, above all, place a monetary value on natural and biological systems that trivializes the worth of biodiversity and social-ecological systems through assumption-laden, institutional-design frameworks and game theory.Due to the many invalid assumptions, and a lack of reality-checks, the Pareto optimal fitness landscapes could not be pre-defined by rational and/or centralized planners. This in turn implies that global social welfare functions could not be pre-defined by rational planners.

We emphasize this un-prestatibility by arguing that the expected utility functions and strategy spaces of different stakeholder groups are not fixed; rather they are context dependent and change in unknowable ways. The expected utility functions and strategy spaces of different stakeholders change with changes in technology, boundary conditions, biological evolution and other endogenous and exogenous drivers of change in the social-ecological systems that are typically ignored when modeled by Pareto-optimizing rational planners.Global governance mechanisms and policy designs need to incorporate a complex-systems perspective in designing and supporting international policy and institutional mechanisms.

Under a complex-systems perspective, social-ecologoical systems could transition in and out of multiple stable states, or even exist far from equilibrium. Instead of arguing over the design of inter-temporal global welfare functions, or assuming that economic growth is the dominant criteria in setting up utility functions for macroeconomic policy making, a complex-systems perspective opens up the possibility of an adaptive, decentralized and democratically anchored global governance.

Text by Asim Zia and Stuart Kauffman
Source:www.npr.org, Sept.6, 2011

En svensk utopist

Nils Herman Quiding wrote a "rational" vision of a Swedish utopia based on the principle of equality and solidarity which in turn would constitute the basis of a society of prosperity. Here is a presentation of his oeuvre by Gustaf Henriksson. En svensk "utopist" : Nils Herman Quiding ("Nils Nilsson, arbetskarl") i belysning af hans egna skrifter bearbetade och i sammandrag populärt framstälda Holmberg, Gustaf Henriksson (författare) Björck & Börjesson och Tiden (Två utgåvor samma år med olika omslag men samma inlaga), 235 s.

Little wooden seats and the woman of his dreams

Little wooden seats and the woman of his dreams, 2006
Wood mdf, plywood, metal, lamp, cd, cd player, 2 speakers, amplifier.
Variable dimensions.

In the framework of the series Every Month selections from the museum’s permanent collections are presented from October 12th until November 30th on the mezzanine.
Little wooden seats and the woman of his dreams, 2006 by Kostis Velonis has been chosen as Work of the Month for October – November.

The theme of several of Kostis Velonis’ works deals with emotions such as desire, love, failure, loneliness, loss and melancholy. In the work Little wooden seats and the woman of his dreams, 2006 the artist deals with a love story between two historical figures and creates an intensely poetic work, giving a timeless dimension to the emotions of the love story that he “narrates”. Herodes Atticus after the wrongful death of his wife Aspasia Rigillis mourned so much that he decided to honor the memory of his wife by building the “Rigillis Conservatory” later renamed “Odeon of Herodes Atticus”. Velonis creates a sound installation consisting of a model of the Conservatory, on which he places a large wooden heart that lights up the space. The red light refers to the color of passion and attributes a dramatic element to the installation. On the last stand of the theater, the artist has placed two small stools of different size that refer to the two figures of his story, but also encourage daydreaming around imaginary relationships. In the surrounding space a cover of the song The first time ever I saw your face by Ewan MacColl is heard, sung by Johnny Cash. The special, deep and bass voice of the famous American singer and composer heightens the intensity of the drama and melancholy, while simultaneously bringing to mind the lament of MacColl for the loss of his wife, to whom he had dedicated this particular song in 1957. In Velonis’ sound installation the two stories of love and grief meet each other.

The red light refers to the color of passion and attributes a dramatic element to the installation. On the last stand of the theater, the artist has placed two small stools of different size that refer to the two figures of his story, but also encourage daydreaming around imaginary relationships. In the surrounding space a cover of the song The first time ever I saw your face by Ewan MacColl is heard, sung by Johnny Cash. The special, deep and bass voice of the famous American singer and composer heightens the intensity of the drama and melancholy, while simultaneously
bringing to mind the lament of MacColl for the loss of his wife, to whom he had dedicated this particular song in 1957. In Velonis’ sound installation the two stories of love and grief meet each other.

EMST National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens
12/10/2011 - 30/11/2011

Bragg’s Law

Josephine Schuppang of Technical University in Berlin writes,

I was pointed to your blog when I talked to a friend about my newest tattoo. He told me that you are collecting scientific tattoos. I didn’t even know there were other people who did that sort of thing. You bet my tattoo artist looked strangely at me for my request.

So attached find a picture of my tattoo of Bragg’s Law. It is along the side of my left foot and shows nicely in my favorite pair of heels.

I studied Physics, and although I wanted to go in to Astronomy I got lost a bit and landed in Crystallography, which has a long history here in Berlin. Last year I wrote my thesis on the transmission electron microscopy of nitride semiconductors. After my defense I wanted to get a tattoo to remember this occasion. But all the formulas I did use were too long and complex to use, and all the images I took wouldn’t have worked.

So I decided on a fundamental formula, Bragg’s Law. It is important for electron diffraction, so that fits. And I have always liked the Bragg story, the father-son tag team of physics and the fact that William Lawrence Bragg was only 25 when they got their Nobel Prize.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy. Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue (Image: PLoS One)

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."
Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PloS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.


The Occupy Wall Street movement spreads to London (Image: Dave Stock)

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."

"It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.

Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Bar-Yam says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.

One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara.

Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, "is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups". Or as Braha puts it: "The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy."

So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.
The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies

1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company

* Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used
Graphic: The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy

Text by Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie
Source: www.newscientist.com
19 October 2011.

The world is a forgetful place

Is all memory technology an invitation to forgetting?

At the new, wonderfully overwhelming LA Review of Books, Casey Walker uses Joshua Foer’s “Moonwalking with Einstein” to raise the difficult question that seems to be at the heart of the recent study surveyed here on transactive memory, at the crux of this Radiolab segment, and at the nexus of much apprehension about the future of the internet.

As Casey writes:
“The world is a forgetful place. We cannot remember even what we wish to, what we’ve tried so hard to hold onto, our holy books and most famous writers and the terrain of the planet on which we live. Call it the Sebald problem: the mind is always lapsing into oblivion.”

And we worry that technology — once it was writing, now it’s computers — is aiding and abetting this dispersal of memory into oblivion. Rather than inviting us to forget, however, Casey points out that ever more complex technologies actually bolster the sort of “effortless” memory we rely on in our “more prosaic lives.” We don’t need to be “memory champions,” like the ones Foer aspires to imitate in his book (prodigies who can instantly recall umpteen digits of Pi) because we have technology that stores such information, leaving our minds free to learn and think and remember other things. Or, as Casey puts it, “We might remember less, but we still know more, which makes it hard to mourn the memory palace’s loss.”

The concern that technology is destroying our memory seems even more bizarre, bordering on the realm of paradoxical, since we simultaneously worry that data storage technology will never allow us to forget. As Jeffery Rosen wrote just last summer in a New York Times Magazine front page piece called, “The End of Forgetting,” forgetting has immense social value, but the advance of memory technology “increasingly means there are no second chances — no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past.”

How are we supposed to make sense of the interaction between the web and memory if we believe that the Internet is pushing our memories into oblivion at the same time that we insist on our “constitutional right to oblivion” and “reinventing forgetting on the Internet”?

Wikipedia is the perfect embodiment of these conflicting anxieties. On the one hand, Wikipedia (plus a solid 3G or WiFi connection) offers a convenient source of transactive memory — we don’t need to carry random trivia around in our brains because Wikipedia will “remember” it for us. On the other hand, Wikipedia has the potential to present a biased documentation of biographical information that could prevent the sort of social forgetting Rosen was writing about. Thus, Wikipedia represents what we love and hate about computing technology all at the same time — instant access to unbridled information — suggesting that our continued efforts to make conclusive statements about the future of memory and technology are futile because it ignores the magnificent complexity of both.

We can embrace or denounce futuristic narratives about downloadable brains or the death of privacy at the (algorithmic) hands of online personalization, but it’s hard to imagine a future in which we don’t protect both our biological memory, no matter its shortcomings, and our privacy, no matter how much we seek transparent information.

In the great human story, it’s not the end of memory or the end of forgetting. The tale is still unfolding as our memories are adapting to technology and we are adapting technology to complement our memories.

Source: mneumozine.tumblr.com/
9 sept. 2011

"Folkets Hus" - Local Labour Centers

..Known as "Folkets Hus" in Sweden, they have been built by the labour organisations to provide meeting halls. In this publication that i found today, there is the presentation of the local labour center of Kristianstad, 1964.
They vary in size, but the emphasis is at the modernization of the building with the help of co-operative building societies and the welfare state.

The Same Sad Rhetoric

The Same Sad Rhetoric, 2011
166 x 150 x 88 cm
Wood,acrylic.

Monodrome

The 3rd Athens Biennale 2011 MONODROME is considered the final part of a trilogy which started with DESTROY ATHENS 2007 and continued with HEAVEN 2009. Drawing upon the life and work of Walter Benjamin and inspired by his book by the same title (One way Street, 1928), MONODROME is curated by Nicolas Bourriaud and X&Y (Xenia Kalpaktsoglou and Poka-Yio, co-founders of the Athens Biennale). It is a narrative broadcasting from historical venues in the centre of Athens and articulating an imaginary dialogue between The Little Prince and Walter Benjamin. As the intellectual retreats defeated in the face of the escalated distress, the Little Prince keeps questioning this condition with the disarming innocence and the plainspoken boldness of a child.


MONODROME is being realized despite the Crisis that affects Greece heavily. Produced in a state of emergency, and through the synergy of all participants and a large group of volunteers, MONODROME assembles the diverse pieces of an exploratory puzzle, addressing the "here and now". At the same time the exhibition attempts to question historical narratives that have functioned as dictums of the Greek sociopolitical and aesthetic identity and resulted in the country's perennial suspension between a ‘before' (tradition) and an ‘after' (modernization). Being usually perceived and promoted as an emblematic city, Athens today is the epicentre of the Greek upheaval, a place of massive demonstrations and public discussions.

MONODROME aims to provoke debate around something that has broken down, but also offer the possibility at a glimpse of something new to come.

Participants: Bas Jan Ader, David Adler, The Angelo Foundation, Archisearch, Aristide Antonas,Badlands Unlimited, Vassili Balatsos, Kostas Bassanos, Hans op de Beeck, Filanthi Bogea, Pierre Bonnard, Yannis Bournias, Andrea Bowers, Vlassis Caniaris, Freddie Carabott, Paul Chan, Pantelis Chandris, Nikos Charalambidis, Marcus Coates, Ida-Marie Corell, Cultural Center of Olympic Airways Employees' (POLKEOA), Josef Dabernig, Daily Lazy, Mark Dion & Robert Williams, Jimmy Durham, Shannon Ebner, Sean Edwards, Elmgreen & Dragset, Matias Faldbakken, Floater, Robert Florey & Slavko Vorkapić, Sam Forsythe & New Forms of Life, Dimitrios Galanis, Liam Gillick, Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville , Katerina Gogou, Vangelis Gokas, Jens Haaning, Vasileios Hatzis, Imagine the City, Yota Ioannidou & Teresa Maria Diaz Nerio, Georgina Kakoudaki & 4Frontal, Stelios Karamanolis & Toula Ploumi, Agni Katzouraki, Michalis Katzourakis, Kavecs Projects, Janice Kerbel, Kernel, Jakob Kolding, Nikos Koundouros, Panayiotis Lambrou, Julien Langendorff, "Leaking" Intervention, Esther Lemi, Lucas Lenglet, Norman Leto, Andreas Lolis, Tonis Lykouressis, Lucky PDF, Makis Malafekas, Caroline May, Vassilis Mazomenos, Metahaven, Tracey Moffat, "Neos Aristophanes", Periodical circa 1889-1894, Yannis Oikonomides, Henrik Olesen, Orizontas Gegonoton, Jean Painlevé, Rallou Panagiotou, Maria Papadimitriou, Rena Papaspyrou, Christos Papoulias, Vicky Pericleous, Paris Petridis, Phrixos, Julien Prévieux, The Public School, Józef Robakowski, Tom Sachs, San Francisco Actor's Workshop / Herbert Blau, Kostas Sfikas, Dionysis Sotovikis, Spyros Staveris, Studio Karamanolis, Fiona Tan, TANK TV, Yannis Theodoropoulos, Theophilos Hatzimichael, Harald Thys & Jos de Gruyter, Jalal Toufic, Under Construction, Yorgos Vakirtzis, Ino Varvariti, Vangelis Vlahos, We Never Closed, Uygur Yilmaz

3rd Athens Biennale 2011 MONODROME
23 October - 11 December 2011

Markets Can Be Very, Very Wrong

Muller, Mendelsohn, and Nordhaus have a new paper in the American Economic Review that should be a major factor in how we discuss economic ideology. It won’t, of course, but let me lay out the case anyway.

What MMN do is estimate the cost imposed on society by air pollution, and allocate it across industries. The costs being calculated, by the way, don’t include the long-run threat of climate change; they’re focused on measurable impacts of pollution on health and productivity, with the most important effects involving how pollutants — especially small particulates — affect human health, and use standard valuations on mortality and morbidity to turn these into dollars.

Even with this restricted vision of costs, they find that the costs of air pollution are big, and heavily concentrated in a few industries. In fact, there are a number of industries that inflict more damage in the form of air pollution than the value-added by these industries at market prices.

It’s important to be clear about what this means. It does not necessarily say that we should end the use of coal-generated electricity. What it says, instead, is that consumers are paying much too low a price for coal-generated electricity, because the price they pay does not take account of the very large external costs associated with generation. If consumers did have to pay the full cost, they would use much less electricity from coal — maybe none, but that would depend on the alternatives.

At one level, this is all textbook economics. Externalities like pollution are one of the classic forms of market failure, and Econ 101 says that this failure should be remedied through pollution taxes or tradable emissions permits that get the price right. What Muller et al are doing is putting numbers to this basic proposition — and the numbers turn out to be big. So if you really believed in the logic of free markets, you’d be all in favor of pollution taxes, right?

Hahahahaha. Today’s American right doesn’t believe in externalities, or correcting market failures; it believes that there are no market failures, that capitalism unregulated is always right. Faced with evidence that market prices are in fact wrong, they simply attack the science.

What this tells us is that we are not actually having a debate about economics. Our free-market advocates aren’t actually operating from a model of how the economy works; they’re operating from some combination of knee-jerk defense of the haves against the rest and mystical faith that self-interest always leads to the common good.

And they’re wrong, with every breath we take.

Text by Paul Krugman
Source: New York Times,30 Sept.2011

Clothed with the Sun.·.

Panos Tsagaris, Clothed with the Sun.·.
76x56cm, 2011.

October Tune

A stuffed quail
on the mantelpiece minds its tail.
The regular chirr of the old clock's healing
in the twilight the rumpled helix.
Through the window,birch candles fail.

For the fourth day the sea hits the dike with the hard horizon.
Put aside the book, take your sewing kit;
patch my clothes without turning the light on:
golden hair
keeps the corner lit.

Joseph Brodsky
(1968/translated by the author)

Au hasard Balthazar

Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)
Dir: Robert Bresson
Here is the final scene, very painful especially for all those viewers that have seen the film in the past.

As delicate as an ass’s bray

As delicate as an ass’s bray are the little lights which descend from the distant city inside you can’t pedal fast enough to get there and when you finally do catbirds have called it a day ears grow dim you are barely a sound so you head out again for the ring of trees.

Julia Story, 2011.

Reconstructed Window with Frame

Det rekonstruerade fonstret med karm, foto I.Roth
Malmo, Sweden.

What Happens when a Leftist Philosopher Discovers God?

Society is the social science journal superbly edited by Jonathan Imber. In its fall issue it carries an article by Philippe Portier (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris), entitled “Religion and Democracy in the Thought of Juergen Habermas”. Coincidentally, in a recent issue of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, Habermas is on a list of German celebrity intellectuals who pop up continuously in the media. (The list includes Margot Kaessmann, the Protestant bishop who resigned after being caught driving under the influence. Curiously, she only became a celebrity after this unfortunate incident.) Habermas has been a public intellectual (a more polite term for celebrity) for a very long time. I have never been terribly interested in Habermas, but the coincidence made me think about him. Portier’s article does tell an intriguing story. It might be called a man-bites-dog story.

Habermas is exactly my age. Our paths crossed briefly in the 1960s, when he was a visiting professor in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, where I was then teaching. We did not particularly take to each other. I was put off by both his leftist politics and his ponderous philosophical language. (German philosophers, no matter where located on the ideological spectrum, vie with each other in producing texts which are comprehensible only to a small group of initiates.) I also sensed a certain professorial arrogance. I remember reading a response by Habermas to a critic, limited to the statement that he refused to discuss with an individual who quoted Hegel from a secondary source.

Habermas first received a doctorate in philosophy, but moved toward sociology under the influence of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School, then acquired a second doctorate in the latter field under the fiercely Marxist Wolfgang Abendroth. In 1964 he became a professor in Frankfurt, as successor to Max Horkheimer, who by then was a neo-Marxist icon. Habermas was a hero of the so-called student revolution which erupted in the late 1960s. His students fanned out across West German academia, creating a network which for a while administered an effective ideological hegemony in the human sciences. At the time I found Habermas’ role in this rather objectionable. But I gave him credit for distancing himself sharply from the more radical wing of the student movement, as he later distanced himself from the anti-Enlightenment views of the postmodernists. In 1981 Habermas published his magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action, a strong endorsement of reason as the foundation of public life in a democracy. He retired from his professorship in 1993, but not from his role as an active advocate of Enlightenment rationality. It is debatable how far his more recent work still continues under a neo-Marxist theoretical umbrella. His views on religion have shifted considerably.

Portier distinguishes three phases in Habermas’ treatment of religion. In phase one, lasting up to the early 1980s, he still viewed religion as an “alienating reality”, a tool of domination for the powerful. In good Marxist tradition, he thought that religion would eventually disappear, as modern society comes to be based on “communicative rationality” and no longer needs the old irrational illusions. In phase two, roughly 1985-2000, this anti-religious animus is muted. Religion now is seen as unlikely to disappear, because many people (though presumably not Habermas) continue to need its consolations. The public sphere, however, must be exclusively dominated by rationality. Religion must be relegated to private life. One could say that in this phase, at least in the matter of religion, Habermas graduated from Marxism to the French ideal of laicite—the public life of the republic kept antiseptically clean of religious contamination.

Phase three is more interesting. As of the late 1990s Habermas’ view of religion is more benign. Religion is now seen as having a useful public function, quite apart from its private consolations. The “colonization” of society by “turbo-capitalism” (nice term—I don’t know if Habermas coined it) has created a cultural crisis and has undermined the solidarity without which democratic rationality cannot function. We are now moving into a “post-secular society”, which can make good use of the “moral intuition” that religion still supplies. Following in the footsteps of Ernst Bloch and other neo-Marxist philo-Godders, Habermas also credits Biblical religion, Judaism and Christianity, for having driven out magical thinking (here there is an echo of Max Weber’s idea of “ the disenchantment of the world”), and for having laid the foundations of individual autonomy and rights.

Habermas developed these ideas in a number of publications and media interviews. The most interesting source (not discussed by Portier in the article) is a 2007 publication by a Catholic press, The Dialectics of Secularization. It is a conversation between Habermas and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (at the time of this exchange head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, subsequently Pope Benedict XVI). Habermas here gives credit to Christianity for being the purveyor of a universal egalitarianism and for an openness to reason, thus continuing to provide moral substance for democracy. Not surprisingly, Ratzinger agreed.

I am not sure what Habermas’ personal beliefs are. But I don’t think that his change of mind about religion has anything to do with some sort of personal conversion. Rather, as has been the case with most sociologists of religion, Habermas has looked at the world and concluded that secularization theory—that is, the thesis that modernization necessarily leads to a decline of religion—does not fit the facts of the matter. Beyond this acknowledgement of the empirical reality of the contemporary world, Habermas admits the historical roots in Biblical religion of modern individualism, and he thinks that this connection is still operative today. Yet, when all is said and done, Habermas now has a positive view of religion (at least in its Judaeo-Christian version) for utilitarian reasons: Religion, whether true or not, is socially useful.

Let us stipulate that smoking is unhealthy. Let us then assume that a tribe in some remote jungle believes that tobacco smoke attracts malevolent spirits. A public health official sent into the region does not, of course, share this superstition. But he makes use of it in dissuading people from acquiring a taste for newly available cigarettes—because he knows that some people do the right thing for a wrong reason. Eventually, he thinks, people will do the right thing for a better reason. And that will be the end of the demonological theory of tobacco smoke.

Any sociologist will agree that religion, true or not, is useful for the solidarity and moral consensus of society. The problem is that this utility depends on at least some people actually believing that there is the supernatural reality that religion affirms. The utility ceases when nobody believes this anymore.

Edward Gibbon, in chapter 2 of his famous history of the decline of the Roman Empire, has this to say: “The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful”. When you cross the philosopher with the magistrate, you get Habermas.

Text by Peter Berger
Source:blogs.the-american-interest.com/berger