I mention all of these events not just as an excuse for my slow response, but also to give you all a sense of my current framework / mindset and to contextualize something that I have witnessed in the U.S. Over time, there have been more restrictions put into place, an erosion of freedoms, and citizens in this country take fewer risks particularly apt when thinking about new art practices such as “bioart”. Akos just mentioned issues of fear and doubt around exhibition of bioart and I think that this is real here, because it is also being conflated with things such as “bioterrorism” and “biowarfare” which of course Steve Kurtz and CAE speak to so well. I know many exhibiting venues that have had a difficult time raising funding for this area. So I think we are living in a particular moment of caution that makes this kind of practice even more difficult to show.

I am currently working with some colleagues, Rich Pell and Daniela Kostova, on a project we call the Bioart Initiative at my university. The name came about because of the collaboration between the Arts Dept and the Biotech Center so it was used as a simple identification of the collaborating parties. (I would love to see other terms used as I, too, am frustrated with this too broad nomenclature.) This is a multi-pronged project that has been funded for 15 months to bring in speakers, have exhibitions and sponsor residencies of artists working in the laboratory. The goals are to encourage more exchange between artists and the scientists who work in the building, the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS).

One of the recent projects was “Sentimental Objects In Attempt to befriend a Virus” by Caitlin Berrigan. Berrigan occupied the lobby area at CBIS with her geodesic domes resembling the hepatitis C virus, and held a series of “tea parties” offering dandelion tea and viral shaped chocolates to discuss the basis for the work. Berrigan has Hep C and uses this work to explore her relationship to the virus, build public awareness about transmission and more. One sculptural object almost closed the show down: along with the geodesic viral domes on exhibit were three potted dandelions. Berrigan claimed that she had fed her own blood to the dandelions and had a poster to this effect on the wall. This fact was picked up by the biosafety people on campus, and they freaked. Exposed blood, particularly infected blood was not allowed in the lobby of the building and was a grave bio-hazard. Besides the fact that this artist did not in fact feed the plants her blood, this potential risk was potentially enough to have the entire program shut down.

After we calmed them down, we did get to have some valuable discussions about the transmission potential - or not - for four day old blood, and the actual realities about Hep C transmission. http://www.metroland.net/back_issues/vol30_no45/art.html

And while I do not consider myself an expert in bioart exhibition, I am concerned with curation and exhibition and issues such as the caretaking needs of live things in the gallery or museum. When I exhibited “Embracing Animal“, a 10 month exhibition with live transgenic rats, I was amazed with the response of the museum staff. They not only gave public tours and lecture about the work, but the night-watchman also adopted the rats and would tend to them and play with them all night. They become the “keepers” and observers of these small lives, a role very different from their usual curatorial duties. They had to not only feed, water, change litter, but also watch and smell the rats to make sure they didn’t get ill; oversee the public and make sure they weren’t harassing the rats; and also make time to play with the rats. This was a complete reversal of their usual schedule. And while I am not advocating turning galleries / museums into zoos, this is a shift in the approach to exhibition that involves a different kind of different attention and care. I think we need some of these encounters in these spaces to broaden how we see ourselves to science / research subjects and what was once “nature”.

I will sign off now and add more later, thanks, Kathy High

Posted on Synapse Discussion List

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGzb6lNLY98

MC: Over the years, you’ve had experiences with various authorities that have tried in one way or another to censor your work. I’m interested if you could identify and comment on particular sites of censorship that exist in and around Art institutions and identify some the taboos that tend to generate negative responses from potential censors (curators, board members, sponsors, politicians, and other interested parties).

GH: The most blatant example was a piece called, Tactics for Survival in the New Culture. It was a text piece. I was going to put it in the windows of 112 Workshop (the first alternative space in New York City & the US) in 1974. Since 112 depended on grants from NYSCA and National Endowment for the Arts I was told I couldn’t do the piece because it would jeopardize their funding. I did do the piece later for another exhibition called the Manifesto Show for COLAB (an artists group I was a member of). When I first started working on the internet twenty years later in 1994 I put the piece up as a hypertext work. I have also updated it from a manifesto to an interactive textual maze. The piece is not cute. It deals with the dark side of the American psyche. It is a meditation on the psychological states that would bring one to be an anarchist. It is a New York Punk Art piece. Punk was a rebellion against the fake hippy utopian art that was being produced at the time. That type of art is still being produced. It gets a lot of funding because it uncontroversial.

There are of course several ways to censor artists for example the simplest is to not include the work in an exhibition or ask the artists to alter the work to make it more acceptable. This happens to me a lot in the US. Several of my artworks in particular my net.art works have sexual content. One of my first internet pieces Art Direct / Sex Violence and Politics was always raising hackles because of the sexual content. It was not included in several major internet shows because the museums were afraid that children would come upon the images and they would be liable. In this case both the government and the institution censored the work. In France the same work was featured in a centerfold of Art Press magazine in a special issue on techno art.

People who censor are often corporations flexing their muscle. One of the pieces in Art Direct … called BKPC, used Barbie, Ken and G.I. Joe dolls. At some point the isp host, *the thing* received a letter from Mattel toys demanding that the site be removed for violation of copyright. I had to get a lawyer and send them a letter saying it was fair use and for them to back off. Luckily the people at the thing were not intimidated by Mattel so the site stayed up. By the way BKPC is about interracial sex so it makes people uncomfortable or it’s titillating. When I showed the physical work in a Christmas showed called Toys / Art / Us , I was asked by the curators to make sure that children could not view the art work. I did this by mounting the works in glassine sleeves on a podium that could only be seen by standing adults. I was lucky the curator wanted to show the work and was willing to work through the problem with me. In other cases the curator would not be that imaginative and simply shy away from showing anything that was vaguely controversial.

Another case of censorship was the Whitney Art Port an online new media projects gallery. I did a piece called Cocktail Party that featured synthetic voices in conversations as if they were drunk and at a cocktail party. I was asked to remove three sequences because of their sexual content. I wanted so much to be included in this project and the curator was a friend that I altered the piece, removing the offensive parts. The curator was afraid that the corporation would stop funding the project if I offended them with my overt content.

This happens all the time to every artist and it’s quite a dilemma. If you do the work unaltered it often means that you are not ever selected again for exhibitions. But then again Michelangelo had to paint a fig leave on the Sistine Chapel.

MC: The funding issue is interesting to me and seems to come up in many of your experiences. Censorship stories, as rarely as they are covered in the news, seem to focus heavily on the ideological component of censorship and whether public money should be used to fund controversial art. I’m interested to hear more about how anxieties regarding funding (public or private) influence curatorial decisions inside art institutions. I’m interested to hear your thoughts on this sort of economically determined censorship and its effects on art and public discourse around art. I’m also interested to know if these funding anxieties have worsened or changed as art institutions have switched over to the Arts management model and have made themselves so dependent on corporate sponsorship for programming?

GH: I did a large billboard piece called Hey Bozo… Use Mass Transit. It was five large billboards scattered around New York City to convince people to use mass transit. It was part of a competition put on every year by the MTA and Creative Time. I received an Honorarium of $500 and they produced the billboards. The piece caused such a stir that it was in the papers for a week straight and I was on TV on all the networks. One of the upshots was that conservatives wanted to know why public money was used to produce an artwork that insulted motorists and the other thing that happened was that Bozo the Clown tried to sue me for trademark infringement because I used the word Bozo. These are symptoms or indications of a deeper issue albeit a populist one. One the one hand you have a media figure (bozo the clown) who tries to sue anyone who uses the word Bozo. He’s got a sort of cottage industry. This is the way that corporations deal with the avant garde they can’t control. On the other hand you have mass media that tries to produce outrage in order to keep the attention of the population. This is also called delivering eyeballs and is a way to sell advertising. As you can see the main tool to attack an artist is money. either cut off funding or sue them. This is a way to stop them from getting their message out whatever that message might be. But there’s a flip side to this coin. We live in an information environment. There really is no way to stop information from coming out. It will be presented in a different venue for example the internet or in the case of art, alternative festivals, galleries etc.. So the idea of censorship is media specific or venue specific. It becomes a power game that is about who controls the venue and therefore controls the message. In this case it’s a reflection of the capitalist marketing system and art is a part of that system. But I see art as something beyond that system.

There are essentially two economies for art. One is the market for objects this includes galleries, museums, magazines and all the ancillary services of art fairs etc.. The other is the academic economy, which trains artists, curators and all the people interested in art. These systems shape what art is seen and what the content and style of the work is about. Both systems have self perpetuating mechanisms. In the market it is about the object. If you don’t make art that has a physical object you can’t be in the market. There is a component that has to do with entertainment and ticket sales in museums. This allows for installation and performance art as well as digital art and screen based art. Indeed, the economies of temporary museum spaces are a reflection of corporate manager style art.

The academic system on the other hand allows for artists who don’t necessarily fit the market to have some financial patronage by teaching. The problem is that the artist’s work and creativity is all about getting students to attend the university and their own class. This is another form of marketing.

I believe in a different type of art, an experimental, anarchic art that shakes things up and operates outside the existing art economies. In many instances this has been confused with the idea of an alternative life style that is a sort of well of inspiration for entrepreneurs looking for new products, ideas and people to sell to. Anarchic art is about something different it’s about challenging and critiquing the existing systems. Why? because I believe that art is about seeing things clearly and is one of the few areas that has freedom. That form of art becomes dangerous because it is uncontrollable. It can’t be packaged and marketed. That is why there is always a move towards censorship of radical art works.

There is also fake censorship or more precisely using outrage as a way to manipulate the art market. This is used successfully by people like Maurice Saatchi who had a show of his Young British Artists at the Brooklyn Museum. This show was also shown in England and there was outrage in London as well. The outrage in the US was about Cris Ofili’s use of elephant dung in a virgin mary painting. A nice piece of art that was about his African roots. The outrage in London was about a photograph that portrayed a famous criminal child murderer in England. The public and the press demanded the works be “censored.” The works themselves went up in monetary value because of the outrage. The position is that of an artist that uses an epatez de bourgeois position in their art. This reinforces the patron’s sense of being better than the masses. It is an elitist position. I happen to like the art works but the content of the pieces are standard for the art world. The Ofili piece is multiculturalism and the other work is punk. Both styles were first presented in the late 1970’s and I view these latest pieces as stylistically conservative.

As you can see the notion of censorship is more of an unfulfilled demand by an outraged person in the street than any sort of actuality when it comes to the marketing of objects. Those works that are actually censored one never sees or hears about.

MC: I’m interested in what you call “fake censorship” or the use of public and media outrage as a marketing tactic. I’m reminded of an article - http://rtmark.com/rockwell.html - by Jackie Stevens concerning “Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution,” a 2000 Exit Art show concerning biotechnology. The article points out that, though the show included some very hard hitting criticisms of the biotech industry, it was nevertheless sponsored by biotech companies - companies that would have much to lose if consumers in the U.S. had the same sorts of concerns about biotechnology as some of the artists in the show. The obvious question of why would the biotech industry sponsor exhibitions that are openly critical of the industry’s practices is answered with the help of interviews with the chief biotech investor behind the show. Stevens writes, “The reason is simple: art about biotechnology, especially with a critical edge, serves to reassure viewers that serious concerns are being addressed. Even more importantly, biotech-themed art implicitly conveys the sense that gene manipulation is a “fact on the ground,” something that serious artists are considering because it is here to stay. Grotesque and perverse visuals only help to acclimate the public to this new reality.” I am also reminded of a transcript I used in a piece once in which a Sara Lee Corporation executive, speaking of the corporation’s “gifts” of impressionist art to the Art Institute of Chicago, stated, “Sara Lee’s art collection has made a statement - a quality statement - about our company. Art is all about excellence and vision and striving for perfection - the same standards that we uphold for our portfolio of leading brands. We are quite certain that the “brand names” of Monet, Renoir and Degas have been a great complement to Sara Lee and have become icons of excellence that reflect our approach to doing business.” It seems that the mythology of fine art or the aura produced around fine art itself (namely, mythologies concerning artists being prophetic or ahead of their time, that art is about transcendence, universals, timelessness and so on) is a very useful context for the deployment of marketing schemes. Cases like these I’ve mentioned could almost make one nostalgic for old school censorship - the kind in which an authority comes down on an artist for producing work that is perceived as being offensive. At least in these scenarios the content is working - the work is having an effect. All this raises a couple of questions that I’d like to know your thoughts on. Firstly, do you agree with Stevens’ assessment that the content of an artwork as intended by the artist can be eclipsed (effectively censored) by the curator, sponsors and institutional framework surrounding the show and fine art itself, and if so, should artists be trained (in academia and elsewhere) to be able to anticipate how their work is being used in a larger context and be prepared to engage in content production beyond the frame (so to speak)? What are the lessons you have learned over the years in these regards?

GH: This goes back to Wittgenstein’s Dictum, “the meaning of a word is its meaning,” and “The meaning of a word is its use.”

Look at it another way Steve Kurtz was creating some bio-art that was also political when he was arrested. The event caused the USGOV to come down hard claiming he’s a bio-terrorist. The art world has rallied around Steve and is doing what it can to stop his persecution. Steve’s artwork was in process and never exhibited so you can’t say that it was censored and yet the USGOV is trying to pin a terrorist label on him. The context here is fluid between a media occurrence, freedom of speech, and forces of unreasonable paranoia. Steve and the people around him now have an ongoing performance work that is a cause celebre about free speech. In the end it doesn’t matter if anyone ever sees the actual work, the censorship and repressive activity of the USGOV is the key factor. When realpolitik comes up against art, art always loses. On another level both sides of the Steve Kurtz dilemma are winning because they are using the event to create meaning for their separate actions.

Back to your initial question which is the context created by the venue and the funders. There is always a deal struck between the funders / patrons / venues and the artists that show in the venues or accept support from the patrons. The patrons are seen as progressive and open because of their support of the arts. The artists are seen as giving their support/approval of the patron and the gallery system by participating in it. That’s the simple deal. The complex deal has to do with the content of the artwork. When the church is your patron you do religious paintings. When the Dutch merchants are your patrons you do domestic scenes. When the government is your patron you do heroic art that glorifies the government and its programs. In America the market has become the patron or more correctly corporate marketing capitalism and its? technocratic bureaucrats/ managers are the patrons. The content of art reflects that reality.

However, there are many forms of art that operate outside these realities. The notion of experimental art is an art that doesn’t function in established arenas. Maybe we can call this theoretical art because it posits an art that can function outside of the normal venues set up for art.

In terms of censorship it may be more of a case of power and control. If one chooses to work in theoretical art one can expect no support from the existing patrons of the arts. This is a very fundamental struggle about who controls the meaning of art (content). Who controls the how, when and where of art? That is one of the reasons that I choose to work with the internet and digital art. The venues are much freer. There is little or no market action attached to this type of artwork. Indeed, this very interview is an artwork that uses the internet as its vehicle. I can state that it is an information/meditation that comes from the use of the networks. In this case it is an outgrowth of all the other communication artists that have come before me such as Fred Forest or, Joseph Bueys or Allan Kaprow.

MC: Earlier, you spoke of an anarchistic art practice that would function in opposition to the status quo. I’m assuming that this art practice would take on the political economic structure of an anarchist community. What might this look like? Are there examples of art subcultures that operate on anarchistic principles like anti-authoritarianism, free association, nonhierarchical organization, consensus decision making, egalitarianism, etc? I’m also interested in your estimation of online communities and new media art portals (like Rhizome.org for instance) who seem to reference some of these concepts in their mission statements yet seem to fall short in their editorial structure and policies. Perhaps, the concepts that sites like Rhizome imagine - decentralized and nonhierarchical - and indeed the internet itself seems to offer - would work in such stark contrast with what the dominant values of the fine art establishment (and our dominant political economic systems) that it becomes impossible to maintain funding, affiliations etc. Do you think the openness and opportunity for alternative systems and practices that electronic networks offer(ed) is now closing up, or do you see as much opportunity now as in the mid-to-late 90’s when it comes to networked art practice?

GH: There are many artists groups that are functioning at the moment. There is always a struggle and a dynamic where groups are involved. Rhizome has set up a sort of blog/news reporting website that has a brand name and a loose community around it. They have a mailist than functions somewhat as a place for critical discussion but the fundamental question is how does one move from discussion to action. The answer for rhizome is to be techno-centric and highlight emerging artists and technologies. They also spend a lot of time fundraising. The original project of rhizome by Mark Tribe was a simple anarchic mailist. This was also happening with nettime and thingist lists. There is one functioning now that is called [empyre] that comes out of Australia. Empyre was one of several list/communities that was featured during the documenta 6 in Kassel. I was actually involved in the discourse. My position was that I wanted to have my thoughts presented at the documenta.

There’s a back and forth flux on the internet that has some onerous aspects of fake digital democracy and fake creative freedom. This is web 2.0 where everyone can be creative and be content providers ala blogs and youTube etc.. This is the corporate bullshit of Facebook and Second Life. There?s an interesting piece in the Guardian about facebook that has be re-published here.

In any case, I am involved with three very vital digital art groups that have online/offline communities. One is called [PAM] - this is a video-artists community that has a physical kiosk presentation mode that is very much about non-hierarchical presentation. Another is locus sonus in France - that is an experimental sound art lab. I’ve also organized an artists group called Artists Meeting that is just beginning to pick up steam. Part of what these groups are about is using the technology to create a media space for group interactions to occur. The funding model is pooling resources. I maintain the server nujus.net that Artists Meeting and locus Sonus use. The sysadmin is an engineering student in Split Croatia who is donating his services. Locus Sonus is funded by the French Cultural Ministry as an experimental lab. [PAM] got its’ start by being included in the SCOPE art fair and artists Meeting is bootstrapping it at the moment.

What these groups have in common is the notion of doing projects together rather than having an individual artists? voice. I like to engage in both positions, that is, I do individual pieces and I do group works. Two previous projects are accessible on the web right now. One is called rantapod and is a series of performance/meditations that is downloadable to ipod. The other is called Art Dirt Redux, which is a podcast/sound art piece. These all challenge the art market in some way because they exist and are seen by large numbers of net audiences without any artworld support whatsoever. So I can say that the internet does still function as a good venue for experimental anti-hierarchical art.

ADDENDUM

MC: In preparing this conversation for publication I noticed that in one of your initial emails to me - before we actually started the interview - you stated that you’d been censored for not using particular software or hardware in the production or display of your work. I think this ties in nicely with our discussion concerning corporate funding, but something that seems more of an issue in new media art then anything else (I can’t imagine a paint company sponsoring a show and requiring the artists to only use their brand of paint). Perhaps you have some thoughts on this.

GH: There’s a lot of net.art and digital curators who set up defining parameters for new media shows. These often focus on a piece of hardware or a type of coding as an organizing principal. This plays into or is a symptom of the computer/technology scene where there are *platform* wars such as internet explorer vs. netscape or mac vs pc. There are software wars such as Dreamweaver vs GoLive. These competitions are about dominating a market. This also happens in digital art where a group of artists insist that for example they are the only net.art artists that exist and try to corner the market with the willing help of a number of curators. Often artists working in new media believe that you must write your own code in order to be a digital artist or you must use JAVA or you must use open source software or …. You get the idea. I remember once speaking at a panel where there was a net artist who was using perl and php and Peter Sinclair and I were using Max MSP. The other artist talked only about the coding structure. Our piece used custom built software as well but we were interested in the content and the user interactions. This happens all the time where a person mistakes writing code for art or insist that digital art is only code. It’s a rather boring discussion about hardware and software.

About the artists

G.H. Hovagimyan is an experimental digital artist working in a variety of forms. He was one of the first artists in New York to start working with the Internet in the early nineties. His work ranges from hypertext works to digital performance art and installations. His streamed video talk shows, Art Dirt and Collider explore and document the artists of the digital art scene at the time circa 1995-2000.

In 1996 he began collaborating with Peter Sinclair a British artist who lives in Marseilles, France. Their collaborative works have been shown internationally in Europe and the US. In 1998 their work, A SoaPOPera for Laptops received a prize in the Computer Music category at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria.

Recent awards include: 2003 fellowship from Experimental Television Center, 2003 TAM Digital Media Commissions, 2002 Artists Fellowship from Franklin Furnace, 2002 pilot artist in residence program from Eyebeam, NYC.

He lives in New York City but is often in France, which has become a second home.

Mark Cooley is a new genre artist interested in visual rhetoric, forgotten histories and political economy. His work has been exhibited in many international venues - online and off. Mark is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Visual Technology at George Mason University.

States of Exchange: Artists from Cuba provides a dynamic and thought-provoking exploration of the complexities of economic and information exchange in contemporary Cuba. At a time when borderless communication is assumed to be the global norm, Cuba is a country caught in flux. With two legal currencies, minimal internet access, and divisions between those who can and can’t access external resources, the residents of Cuba have become experts at negotiating the complexities of exchange between each other and the world.

Curated by Cylena Simonds (Iniva) and prominent Cuban curator Gerardo Mosquera, the group show focuses on six artists living and working in Cuba today. Their work offers a witty and provocative response to scarcity and constraint, raising issues of global relevance. The artworks range from sculpture and performance to video installation, plus an extensive video screening programme featuring shorts and experimental documentaries by over 14 artists, including works never before seen in Europe.

Co-curator, Gerardo Mosquera says: ‘States of Exchange aims to show how artists in Cuba discuss contradictions, ambiguities and social negotiations in Cuban life, leading a critical culture that prevails in the country since the mid 80s. They use the semantic powers of art to create complex works whose impact goes far beyond the local context. So this is not a general show of Cuban art but a thematic exhibition on issues particular to Cuba. It includes both emerging artists that are beginning to be known internationally and more established ones.’

Works include:

Cuba’s complex system of economic exchange is summarised in Yoan Capote’s work Dinero Bilingüe (Bilingual Money, 2002), which splices together a peso with a US quarter – rendering both coins defunct. An elusive grasp of currency is also key to the video Pasatiempo (Dinero) (Pastime (Money), 2005) by Diana Fonseca in which two peso coins suddenly vanish leaving a dark stain on the artist’s hands.

Themes of censorship are explored in Jeannette Chávez’s video performance, Autocensura (Self-censorship, 2006), she painfully ties thread around her tongue and closes her lips, her self-inflicted silence becoming invisible. In Secreter (2000) Iván and Yoan Capote collaborate to create a means to share secrets via a giant rudimentary telephone reminiscent of a handmade children’s toy. In Wilfredo Prieto’s installation Speech (1999) we see rolls of toilet paper made entirely from Cuba’s official newspaper, Granma.

Using red beans to represent people, Lázaro Saavedra’s video animations La gloria borra la memoria (Glory erases memory, 2006) and El que no sabe es como el que no ve (Not knowing is like not seeing, 2006) succinctly dramatise the tension between the official representations of life in Cuba and the actual experiences of Cubans. A sense of dreaming and longing is evoked in Cambio de Estado (Change of State, 2006) in which Chávez covers a ceiling with starred military epaulettes to create constellations reflecting the night sky of the area in which the work is displayed.

Accompanying the exhibition there is a full-colour bilingual catalogue. There is also a lively education and events programme including music, talks by the curators’ and discussions with artists.

States of Exchange: Artists from Cuba is an Iniva exhibition at Rivington Place in Barclays Project Space and Project Space 2. The project has been realised with thanks to Arts Council England.

September: 6th - The Center for Land Use Interpretation :: 14th - Red 76 :: 20 - Eddo Stern* :: October: 3rd - Graffiti Research Laboratory :: 12th - Kevin and Jennifer McCoy :: 18th - Natalie Jeremijenko :: 23rd - Rosina Gomez-Baeze Tinture** :: 26th - Mongrel.

Unless otherwise noted: 7:00 p.m :: San José City Hall Council Chambers - 200 East Santa Clara Street, San José CA 95113 :: Free and open to the public :: please visit here for information on parking downtown. Lectures will be simulcast into Ars Virtua, a Second Life arts and media center. http://slurl.com/secondlife/Seventh%20Eye/6/77/48.

*At San Jose City Hall Room 118/119
**At San Jose State University, Art Building, Room 133, from 5-6 as part of the Tuesday Night Lecture Series.

Lectures are presented as part of FUSE, a CADRE-Montalvo artist research residency initiative in cooperation with ZERO1. One artist proposal will be selected for development in residency and featured at the 2nd Biennial 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge. Co-sponsored by the City of San José Public Art Program.

by Jane Crayton aka JanedaPain

“Art as crime; crime as art.” Hakim Bey

One of the most relevant statements made about art by a man who walked the line of expressionism. Hakim Bey, did he see the future, or did he contemplate the past, a combination of both I would guess.

The word guerrilla is a word of Spanish descent (guerra, meaning war) first used to describe the Spanish-Portuguese guerrilleros (insurgents). Guerrilleros have existed through out time often in defense of some wrongs imposed to a group of less represented and defended peoples. They often fight a foreign invader or a ruling government and crimes against humanity. In the modern world we have seen these same groups and individuals come out in a new form of guerrilla tactics that is often non-violent and thought provoking art. Unfortunately in the post 9/11 era we are now limited in our expressions, for fear that they may be considered terrorism and not art. Mind you some of these artist push the line, evacuating neighborhood and closing down cities, all in the name of their art projects and political views. But is it the over reaction of our post 9/11 era that has taught us to react with such eager and violent haste, and condemn the works of these political artist?

Is it the art or the tactics, that deliver the fear that resonates in the unaware and suddenly captured audience? That sudden and captured audience today can be an over alerted citizen or government workers. With the heightened threat of terrorism and the orange security levels at the airports, we are all being programmed that we are never to be safe again. And what a great subject for an art project, huh? Artist around the world are finding them selves in precarious positions, and having to explain themselves to courts around the world and defend their art. These artist are the guerrilla artist of the 21st century. But are they justified in their use of guerilla tactics for making their statement? Is this a struggle to control the people and their freedom of expression? Where do we need to draw the lines for artist and government?

To be an artist has always been a daring act and a future of impoverished hell. It has always been looked down upon until or unless you achieve fame for your art. Artist usually tend to lean towards the side of interesting characters, someone daring, someone expressive of ideas and opinions, someone sending a message. Their approach when successful is usually one of great surprise and inventive nature. These artist are often ridiculed at first and later praised for their daring ability to take on a challenge when all are against them. Typically guerrilla artist have been viewed as punks spray painting on the sides of buildings, but this goes far beyond simple vandalism. There is a culture, a revolution and a style of guerrilla art that is comparable to a peaceful protest utilizing guerrilla tactics.

Banksy a graffiti and guerrilla artist from the UK has delivered some of the best examples of well engineered guerrilla art. His art is legendary, from dodging Israeli soldiers to paint beautiful scenes on the ’security’ wall in Palestine. To placing a parking boot on a sculpture in a central square in London. He has placed multiple pieces of modern remakes of art like Early Man goes to Market, and The British Pensioner in the Hat and Coat, in London Museums where they were not discovered for days even weeks. What a brilliant mind, how better to get into the museum, than to put your work there, yourself, video tape it and then wait for it to get discovered. But his guerrilla art is not just self promoting, he is making political statements by painting on the security wall in Palestine, and by placing the parking boot on the historical statue in a central location of London.

Mode 2 one of the most recognized graffiti artist in the UK. Known for his unmistakable style and technique of sketchy fill-in with detailed backgrounds and scenes. His work is more like paintings, yet his technique is definitely that of a graffiti artist. His work can be found around the streets of London and his commissioned work can be found on some large Billboards. He is considered a guerrilla artist because of his guerrilla like tactics of graffiti art. The simple fact that most of it is illegal painting on private property, makes it illegal. Although his work is relevant as a guerrilla artist, this trend of guerrilla tactics has grown and become a popular way for artist and activist to render their work in public spaces.

A group of artist who seemed to pickup wisely on the term guerrilla artist is the Guerrilla Girls. “We’re a bunch of anonymous females who take the names of dead women artists as pseudonyms and appear in public wearing gorilla masks.” is how the Guerrilla Girls describe themselves. This artist based feminist performance group started in New York. They have been surprising people all over the world with their outrageous guerrilla performances that often incorporate social and feminist issues. They focus more on the issues, than their personalities and individual identities, by wearing the gorilla masks. Their feminist conscious statements and demonstrations often transform the audience, and community, addressing a specific theme the girls have decided to share with the public. Would their audience take them as serious if their faces were shown? And do they fear public and social exclusion from their peer groups if their identities are discovered?

Yes Men are a group of artist and guerrilla activist utilizing artistic guerrilla tactics. Utilizing technology, New Media and theatrical tactics to achieve their desired identity alteration or ‘correction’. From redesigning dummy websites to recreating fake marketing packages, to spoof the media with live interviews of impersonated persons whose identity they wish to correct. In November of 2004 the Yes Men went on BBC with breaking news that the Dow Chemical Company, (whom they claimed to be representatives of ) were going to clean up the mess in Bhopal and compensate the victims for their companies lack of responsibility. From this “identity correction” of Dow Chemical Company, they helped show the true intension of the company which did not intend to help the victims at all. The Yes Men call out actions by industry, commercial or political persons by utilizing guerrilla tactics. They often imitate company executives, and ‘big time criminals’ to publicly humiliate them in order to ‘correct’ their public identities. Their targets have included McDonald’s, Dow Chemical, and Elected officials just to name a few.

The South Venice Billboard Correction Committee (SVBCC) A collective group of artist who administer radical social art changes to billboards in South Venice. This group works with guerrilla tactics to redesign and illustrate their social and political agenda. This group works to recreate a new politically corrected ad in place of the old ad. The group uses the existing design and redesigns the billboard to create a new public message. These actions are obviously illegal and a defacing of private property. The group is well aware that their activities are illegal, yet they continue to execute these guerrilla tactics to administer what they call “radical social art changes” to the billboards in order to deliver their social message. These guys literally scale the billboards at night and repaint them, and create a completely different message, in this public space. The idea that public spaces are the new canvas for political generated guerrilla art is a unique phenomena of the 21st Century New Media Artist.

Artist Jason Sprinkle (1969-2005), also known as Subculture Joe, was also an artist whom seemed to only catch negative attention from the city of Seattle. On Labor Day of 1993 Jason and his accomplices tied a ball and chain around the foot of Jonathan Borofsky’s “Hammering Man” stature, that graced the entrance to the Seattle Art Museum. Sprinkle’s guerrilla art performances and installations ranged from celebrated to terrorism related. In 1996 Sprinkle abandon a truck with a large red metal part of an installation in it, flattened all the tires and painted on the fender read a graffiti tag “the bomb”. As a result the Seattle bomb squad was called out, city blocks were evacuated and robots deployed to disarm any potential exploding devices.

“Christopher Boisvert, 25-year-old student from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, may have the next few years to think over the implications of art in public places. That’s because a class project he produced involved some art placed in a very public place that unfortunately went a bit awry. The public place was Union Station, one of New York City’s busiest transportation nexuses, and the public art was the placing of close to 40 black boxes at various locations with the word ‘FEAR’ emblazoned on them,” MAYORBOB writes. “To say that this project created a stir would be a gross understatement. In this post September 11th world, a display like that is going to engender just one reaction - fear. Union Station was shut down for about five hours while the NYPD bomb squad checked out the boxes. Boisvert turned himself in when he found out that the police were questioning people about the incident.” This is just another example where the artist although making a very powerful statement, should have been more aware of his actions and the potential fear that he created with his political and social statement. And if he did think of the potential dangers and the potential reactions to his art piece, should he have considered delivering it differently, or accepting the responsibility of it, or be prepared to cover yourself adequately like the Billboard Correction group or even Banksy.

But these incidents are not limited to guerrilla artist, because even artist whom simply speak of the controversial subject of terrorism are subject to suspicion. Within a few weeks of the September 11th terrorist attacks, the FBI contacted the Whitney Museum of American Art about Mark Lombardi’s drawings’ on exhibition there. Mark Lombardi had apparently committed suicide the year before but his controversial work illustrating the links between terrorism and the global economy were still on display in the museum. Lombardi’s work is considered not only art but also pieces of detailed and researched history. His art works are obvious interest to the government in the wake of the new era of terrorism we now live in. But is it really as bad as they want us to believe, or has the technology and the tactics of terrorism just fed the fear of radical self expression to be included within these terms.

Zanny Begg, produced a work of 10 life size checkpoint US solders for exhibition in the town of Sidney as a part of the [out of Gallery] project. Each life size replica was to have the slogan “Checkpoint for Weapons of Mass Distraction.” Her intension was to satirize the US search for weapons of mass destruction. Zanny was instructed to remove her life size solders shortly after erecting them by the City Counsel and Mayor Leo Kelly. She was threatened with arrest and her works were later impounded. “It’s a disgraceful interference with the freedom of speech of these artists,” said Council of Civil Liberties president Cameron Murphy. Another exhibition in November was canceled because the title “Guerilla Art” some how “discredited the council” according to Kelly. Artist are now being censored by city councils and mayors, and art work is being confiscated in the 21st Century. Artist are no only being targeted as terrorist, but they can not even display work on the subject of terrorism or occupation. Is our own censorship not just as bad as the ones we are trying to grant to those in which we seek to give freedom through war…yeah…um… thats an oxymoron.

Columbian born painter Fernando Botero exhibited works in California that depict the Abu Ghriab prison and suspected abuse to prison inmates. His works are bold and courageous, and depict the artist disgust in US policy regarding prison inmates. “I, like everyone else, was shocked by the barbarity, especially because the United States is supposed to be this model of compassion.” His goal is to make people remember the human tragedies sot hat no one will forget the unjust action of the US soldiers to Abu Ghraib’s prisoners. His pictures look to shake people to disturb them, to make them think, and hopefully make them act. We have artist that are working with portraying the victims and the perpetrators of terrorism on both sides of the fence.

Nasrin Mazoi, a graduate student selected to present works at the Museum of Israeli Art in Ramat-Gan displayed six portraits of Palestinian males all she averred, were prepared “to blow themselves up in order to change the present situation.” Her work has now traveled around the world, featuring these life size pictures of apparent suicide bombers or family members of one. This is not an isolated incidence of a Pro-Palestinian exhibition but it is a rather bold and very critical one. Some of these works have been lucky enough to squeak buy, but others have been subject to censorship and confiscation clearly because of the controversial subject.

Steven Kurtz is an associate professor of art at the University of Buffalo, in Buffalo, New York. He aroused suspicion in Spring 2004 when he called medical personal to his home because his wife unexpectedly died. When medical persons arrived at his home to help, they became suspicious of some medical, scientific, and technological equipment in his home. The authorities over reacted and shut down his neighborhood, evacuating people from their homes in surrounding neighborhoods, and closing streets. They took the body of his diseased wife into custody and arrested him, while dozens of agents searched his property. Mr Kurtz was now facing criminal charges as a member of the Critical Art Ensemble, “dedicated to exploring the intersections between art, technology, radical politics and critical theory”. In July of 2004 a grand jury rejected the ‘terrorism’ charges, but he still faces federal criminal charges today for mail and wire fraud. What is interesting about Steven Kurtz is that he was arrested not for his performance or his art per-say, but because of what they thought it could be. Gary Younge from The Guardian in Buffalo describes the situation. “What began as a personal tragedy for Mr Kurtz has turned into what many believe is, at best, an overreaction prompted by 9/11 paranoia and, at worst, a politically motivated attempt to silence a radical artist.” So where is the limit between crime and art, and art as crime? How do we define Kurtz, and other radical artist that work in new mediums that push boundaries with technology, should we limit their research? These are all important questions to be asking artist and their audience in the 21st century.

Are you scared to speak out, demonstrate, or produce radical art? I am, and I think even writing about this could get me on a list of people to be watched. I fear the police-state in which we live today, wants to censor our art and prosecute our artist as terrorist. I think that each of these artist has the responsibility only to themselves to weigh these actions, for they know their art has consequence, that is why it is so potent. It is apparent that the government wants to regulate what is said and demonstrated to the people. It is obvious that the current US administration is prepared to make permanent changes to laws in order to ease the legalities of entrapment for these guerrilla artist.

That said, when Banksy is striding through the Museum with a fresh addition ready to hang, does he not consider what will happen if he is caught and apprehended. Is it not the ultimate publicity for your work to be discovered and captured or even detained? Although horrible in the case of Steven Kurtz, who was not actively presenting work at the time of his arrest. Is he still not aware of his potential surroundings and the danger his work could have to his personal life and freedoms. But as artist and as activist, I think we are all willing to take these risks in our work and activism. I think some of us have been luckier than others. And I believe that some have carefully executed plans of great detail, with wisdom of potential hazards and legal obstacles.

When we examen the most recent incident in Boston on January 31st, where two artist Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens were charged with creating a panic because they placed electronic LED art that somehow caused a bomb scare. The installation was actually commissioned by the Turner Broadcasting Network and the art work depicting a popular animated character from Adult Swim’s, Aqua Teen Hunger Force “flipping the bird”. The artworks were actually installed for several weeks without, panic or notice throughout the entire country. What is crazy is it was a guerrilla marketing plan by the network, and they had several hundred LED boards placed in cities throughout the United States. Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis called the stunt “unconscionable,” while Boston Mayor Thomas Menino called it “outrageous” and the product of “corporate greed.” Democratic Rep. Ed Markey, a Boston-area congressman, added, “It would be hard to dream up a more appalling publicity stunt.” It seems that because the city over reacted, with the resulting “snarled traffic and mass transit closings as the bomb squad fumbled to find all the LED light boards. Do they now seek revenge for their over-reaction, or should they just consider themselves lucky to have gotten a good practice run. According to a student Todd Venderlin, “It’s so not threatening — it’s a Lite-Brite,” he told the press, referring to the children’s toy
that allows its users to create pictures by placing translucent pegs into an opaque board. “I don’t understand how they could be terrified. I would if it was a bunch of circuits blinking, but it wasn’t.”

When we look back into history we see that the great artist, scientist and inventors of our time have often had their actions and theories mistaken for evil conspiracy driven terrorism. Even Galileo was taken into custody and held by the church for speaking his views and publicly demonstrating his support of the new heliocentric view of the solar system. The modern inventors have to be risk takers in order to produce their inventions in theory, art and science. Yet they need to exercise extreme caution when demonstrating with guerrilla tactics because their politically charged art is still subject to the new laws of the Homeland Security Act, and may end up face to face with the terrorism task-force in the 21st Century. Hakim Bey said it best, “The best Poetic Terrorism is against the law, but don’t get caught. Art as crime; crime as art.”

Sources

Art of Mode 2. Retrieved Feb. 2, 2007
http://www.whitedust.demon.co.uk/mode2/mode2.html

Begg, Zanny. Retrieved Feb. 10, 2007
http://www.geocities.com/immateriallabour/beggpaper2006.html

Belluck, Pam. 2 Arrested in Boston Over Bomb Scare. Feb. 1, 2007 Retrieved Feb 2, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/01/us/01cnd-boston.html?ex=1327986000&en=aac354888264b8ff&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Bey, Hakim. Chaos: the broadsheets of ontological anarchism, Poetic Terrorism, 1995
http://www.charm.net/~profpan/chaos.html

California Department of Corrections. Retreived Feb. 2, 2007
http://www.geocities.com/billboardcorrections/index.htm

CNN Report. Two plead not guilty to Boston hoax charges. Feb. 2, 2007 Retrieved Feb 2, 2007
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/02/01/boston.bombscare/

Hackett, Regina. Jason Sprinkle, 1969-2005: Celebrated acts of guerrilla art caused notoriety, changed him. Seattle Post, May 25, 2005 Retrieved Feb. 11, 2007
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/visualart/225696_sprinkle25.html

Guerrillagirls.com; Retrieved Feb 9, 2007
http://www.guerillagirls.com/

MAYORBOB. edited by John Plastic, That’s not my Terrorist Attack, It’s My Art Project!; Dec. 18, 2006 Retrieved Feb. 2, 2007
http://www.plastic.com/article.html;sid=02/12/19/00442495

Munro, Catharine. Uproar over council ban on anti-war art display. The Sun-Herald; Feb. 6, 2005, Retrieved Feb. 10, 2007
http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Uproar-over-council-ban-on-antiwar-art-display/2005/02/05/1107476853983.html?from=moreStories

NPR. The ‘Conspiracy’ Art of Mark Lombardi, Nov. 1, 2003 Retrieved Feb. 10, 2007
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1487185

Roth, Frimet. Terrorism and Art, Jan. 19, 2005 Retrieved Feb. 10, 2007
http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/004703.php

Scigliano, Eric. Hammered man, beautiful mind. Seattlepi.com, June 1, 2005 Retrieved Feb 11, 2007
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/226511_sprinkle01.html

Vallen, Mark. Art for a Change. Fernando Botero Paints Abu Ghraib. Apr. 10, 2005 Retrieved Feb. 11, 2007 Yesmen.org, Retrieved Feb 10, 2007
http://www.theyesmen.org/

[posted on SPECTRE]

The Current Pulse of the World

Emergency Room at PS1/MOMA - ER NYC :: February 8 - March 19, 2007 :: Opening Reception: February 11, 2007 12-6pm :: Raphaele Shirley, Lee Wells, and Paul Middendorf exhibit new collaborative works and installations.

Everyday there are topics which seem ignored or under represented by the media, such as the war, genocide, global warming and more. It is important to keep finding clues and links which would reveal new evidences on the reality we are living in. It is important to seek and redefine what constitutes the news as it seems to the mainstream media is fairly myopic (using censorship through omission) about what is really going on around us. The emergency room group will be replicating the idea of a set format, as the news media have which will be the base structure, image, the pictorial context of expression. Working to generate an iconic image, logo and memorable framework, the images will be disfigured or added to on a daily basis, creating a log, a trail, of emergency events. Fragments of paper, written notes, video, and performance will unfold a picture for the public. The transient and fast paced environment coupled with the premise of the installation is a great opportunity to experience a new form of artistic expression, experimenting and focusing intensely on the moment and the current pulse of the world.

Raphaele, Lee, and Paul are artists who are specializing in political critique, public interventions and collaborations. The triangle created between these artists will generate a dialogue, a smoke signal path, and a critical exchange related to what constitutes the news and how this can be expressed within this context. Varying in mediums used, alternating freely between live video, internet, performance, painting, photography and installation according the needs of the moment we will document everyday, each day at PS1. Using the fabric of the city as our palette of expression and source of news, bringing back to Emergency Room fragments of urgency and emergency. Emergency Room is a constantly evolving collaborative exhibition conceived and led by artist Thierry Geoffroy, a.k.a. Colonel.

Emergency Room is motivated by a desire to learn what other artists think about current affairs from varied international perspectives under strict time constraints. By providing a physical space in which artists can display works made in reaction to current events, Emergency Room takes the pulse of the artistic community today. On each day of the exhibition, artists will install new work in response to the events of the last 24 hours, an arrangement that recalls daily news cycles. The artworks stay on view until the next morning when they are moved to an adjacent archive space and replaced by new work.

Participating Artists: Jaishri Abichandani, Kamrooz Aram, Victor Ash, John Avelluto, Toby Barnes, Bill Beirne, Niels Bonde, Steven Day, Mike Estabrook, Frank Franzen, Charley Friedman, Nancy Friedmann, Deborah Grant, Jean de Piepape, Jens Haaning, Sophie Hjerl, Vandana Jain, Amy Kao, Lasse Lau, Shaun Leonardo, Peter Lind, Caroline Lund & Thorbjørn Reuter Christiansen, Al Masson, Marc Mer, Paul Middendorf, Mac Premo, Lisi Raskin, Susanne Schuricht, Raphaele Shirley, Lisa Strömbeck, Henrick Vibskov, Lee Wells.

Biographies

Paul Middendorf is living and working in Portland, Oregon as an artist and curator. In 2000 Paul received his BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and began launching his career as a painter. Currently Paul works as Director and Founder of Gallery Homeland. He has shown nationally and internationally, and most recently produced and performed in Scratching the Surface in Portland Or, Lifeboat-Miami for Art Basel’s International Art Fair, Lifeboat-Hamptons for The Scope Art Fair, and was co-curator for Waterways, an Istanbul Biennale project. Paul is still an active artists and curator working across the globe. www.manifestartistry.com

Raphaele Shirley lives and works in NYC. She specializes in collaborative projects and Public Art installations and events. She has exhibited nationally and internationally in interventionist projects such as ³Waterways² and ³Two Continents and Beyond² in the Venice (2005) and Istanbul Biennales (2005) and has shown recently in the Art Basel Video Lounge curated by Michael Rush. She has co-created several experimental projects including PAM Perpetual Art Machine and The New York International Fringe Festival. She works in diverse mediums ranging from sculpture to photography, video and sound.

Lee Wells is an artist, exhibition organizer and consultant currently living and working New York. He has been exhibited internationally for over 10 years, including the 51st La Biennale Di Venezia, Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinatti, Museo d’arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto and most recently included in the Art Basel Miami Beach Video Lounge curated by Michael Rush. He is a co-founder and director of IFAC-arts, in addition to co-founding, [PAM] the Perpetual Art Machine. www.perpetualartmachine.com, Cinema-Scope director for Scope Art Fairs and site editor for www.rhizome.org at the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

WE WILL NOT BE SILENT

Is It True, JetBlue? by Naeem Mohaiemen

“The artist says, “It’s not my business.” Then whose business is it? Does that mean you are going to leave the business of the most important issues in the world to the people who run the country? How stupid can we be?” [Howard Zinn, Talk @ Massachusetts College of Art, October 10, 2001]

Is It True Jet Blue? JFK? TSA? A rhetorical question that leads to a tautology. Yes, of course people racially profile the darker masses while whipping up a pervasive fear in the name of “national security.” Paranoia is so essential to running the modern state, other navigation tools seem permanently broken.

After learning that Raed Jarrar was told to remove his Arabic WE WILL NOT BE SILENT t-shirt before he could board a JetBlue flight, four members of The Critical Voice (TCV) boarded a Jet Blue flight last Thursday. The four members, all white women and US citizens, were wearing the same Arabic t-shirts. They were allowed to board the flight. This is more evidence that the Raed Jarrar case is one of racial profiling and censorship.

Many of us have been helping as supporters of TCV, an affinity group of Artists Against the War (AAW). Today, after consultation with other members, Laurie of TCV went on Democracy Now and broke the story. I first met Laurie when she and other TCV members were ejected from NY Public Library’s “Who’s Afraid of Iran” event (w/ Shirin Neshat, et al) — they were wearing the same t-shirts, but were ostensibly ejected for carrying political posters.

The t-shirts have now spread globally, and become an icon of popular, non violent resistance. Because of the open-ended nature of the two phrases “We” (who?) and “Will Not Be Silent” (about what?), people have appropriated these t-shirts and used their bodies to register opposition to many flanks of the “War On Terror”, including invasions, fear-mongering, censorship, detention of immigrants, racial profiling of Muslims, use of African-Americans, Latinos and working-class Whites as cannon fodder, the abandonment of poor Blacks in New Orleans, and the linkages and overlaps between all these and other common struggles. To give one example, two weeks ago, many of us as members of Action Wednesday, collaborated with TCV to distribute the t-shirts at Outernational concert in Central Park, to protest the invasion of Lebanon.

Caroline Parker, Laurie Arbeiter, Susan Kingsland, Ann Shirazi and other members of TCV and AAW put into practice a new model of artists as public actors, activists and intellectuals who refuse to confine their cultural production inside gallery or museum walls.

Contra Adorno, it becomes even more essential to write “poetry” (using an expansive definition) after Auschwitz. To use the many routes of contemporary culture to dissent and to shape a new mental and actual reality.

Sandy Kaltenborn of Kanak Attac in Berlin writes, “Design Is Not Enough.” Neither are t-shirts, but they are a good start. To take the carrier of such witless 1970s slogans as “Have A Nice Day”, “I’m With Stupid”, “Pobody’s Nerfect”, “Kiss Me, I’m Drunk” “My Parents Went To London And All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt”, and invert it into an act of body-based defiance is a good beginning.

At the risk of descending to repetition, I echo Adorno’s sentiment:

“The only relation to art that can be sanctioned in a reality that stands under the constant threat of catastrophe is one that treats works of art with the same deadly seriousness that characterizes the world today.” [“Valéry Proust Museum” in Prisms, Samuel and Shierry Weber, trans. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983)]

Stay tuned.

Related Links

We Will Not Be Silent On JetBlue (Press Release)
http://tinyurl.com/jjo9k
http://www.parkerstudio.com/AAW/JetBlueNotSilentweb1.pdf

Snakes On, Arabs Off The Plane
http://alternet.org/story/41140/

Artists Against War
http://aawnyc.org/

The Critical Voice
http://thecriticalvoice.org/

Naee Mohaiemen
Visible Collective/Disappeared In America
http://www.disappearedinamerica.org

[posted on sarai]

Call for Participation

This summer and fall you are invited to contribute to the creation of an open-access publishing house, a Free Press, to be launched at Roda Sten contemporary art center in Goteborg, Sweden. A project of artist Sal Randolph, Free Press will accept all kinds of writing from the public; contributions in any language can be as short as a single word or as long as an encyclopedia and can include manifestos, statements, documentations, studies, stories, recipes, poems and whatever you can imagine.

“Even in the age of the internet, book publishing is a walled garden where editors and commercial interests filter out most of what is written,” says Randolph. “To publish is to ‘make public,’ and the published materials of the world create their own kind of public space, a city of books where readers and writers are citizens. Free Press aims to open up access to that public space. Like any city, Free Press is bound to include both ugliness and beauty, though the definitions of each will certainly differ.”

All participating manuscripts will be published as printed books in the Free Press series, available in the project’s library and reading room at Roda Sten, where events and discussions will also take place. Additional copies will be placed on shelves in local bookstores and libraries. Readers will be able to download copies from the website and order them at cost from an internet book printer.

Free Press builds on several earlier projects by the artist — in particular, Free Words, where 3000 copies of a free book were infiltrated onto the shelves of bookstores and libraries by a worldwide network of volunteers, Opsound, a gift economy of music, and Free Biennial / Free Manifesta, in which the form of an art biennale was appropriated and re-imagined to create large open-participation exhibitions of free art in the public spaces of New York and Frankfurt am Main, Germany. In her work, Randolph explores the effects of gifts and gift-economies in the creation of social architectures.

The Free Press exhibition will take place from September 17 - October 20, 2006 at Roda Sten.

Free Press: Call for Participation :: Free Press is looking for writing of all kinds - any language, any style, genre or subject matter, experimental or traditional, unpublished or previously published.

Manifestos, artists statements and conceptual/experimental texts are especially welcomed, as well as writing about gifts and gift economies, open systems, freedom of expression, censorship, surveillance, intellectual property, the commons & the public domain, anarchy, cooperation, political philosophy, alternative economies, public space, urbanism, situationism & psychogeography, conceptual, performance, and participatory art, graffiti and street art, distributed creativity, social software, virtual worlds, open source, happenings, the 1960s, the future, utopian and postutopian visions.

All material included in the Free Press project will be released under Creative Commons licenses which will allow the texts to be printed and freely shared.

Deadlines: Texts will be accepted through the Free Press website starting August 1, 2006 continuing through the end of the exhibition on October 20. However, if you wish your text to appear in the gallery, please allow for publication time (2-4 weeks) and send it as soon as possible, certainly before the end of September. If you want your book to be there at the opening (September 17), send your text now!

For guidelines and more information please visit: http://freewords.org/freepress/you/info/help

About Roda Sten

Roda Sten is a cultural center in Goteborg, Sweden. Roda Sten is also a cultural landmark which lies on the sea entrance to the city and is a popular port of call for many who take a stroll on the banks of the harbour. Once housing the huge industrial boiler, Roda Sten today is an exceptional centre of the arts. It entices and fascinates with i’s enormous dynamic space and opportunity to work large scale. The outside of the building is a zone for the graffiti artists of the city while within the building remnants of past graffiti is preserved. This unconventional exhibition space sets the scene for daring, ground breaking explorations.

“From the (below) list it will be evident that the kind of practices that we are talking about range from comics to high theory, with software, web-based work, radio, documentary filmmaking, and self-published broadsheets in between. Crucially, each of these might involve either a level of sociality in the production of cultural processes or a willingness to engage with a discursive register (and sometimes both). This unties art and cultural work from decorative or propagandist demands and enables it to claim a space for forms that are generative of questions, thought, reflection and communitas.” — Monica Narula, Raqs Media Collective

A Place Like This, A Time Like Now: Sometimes it feels like things are beginning to get really interesting. We imagine that Calcutta in the 1940s and ‘60s (or in the 1880s) and Bombay in the 1920s and ‘50s or Delhi in the 1850s and (briefly) in the 1970s, might have been really rewarding times and places to live in. We have a sense that Delhi, today, in the first decade of our young century, is again showings signs of quickening to the possibilities of a new life.
A Place Like This, A Time Like Now

Sometimes it feels like things are beginning to get really interesting. We imagine that Calcutta in the 1940s and ‘60s (or in the 1880s) and Bombay in the 1920s and ‘50s or Delhi in the 1850s and (briefly) in the 1970s, might have been really rewarding times and places to live in. We have a sense that Delhi, today, in the first decade of our young century, is again showings signs of quickening to the possibilities of a new life.

This new life does not come upon us without its share of pain, because it exists simultaneously with the cruel transformation of the city that evicts hundreds of thousands of people, and destroys their carefully built frameworks of existence. It is not without its share of paranoia, as the shadow of the deep state, through a variety of surveillance networks, leaches into every street corner. It is not without its vulgarity as new money explodes and talks tough and dirty. Perhaps it is at times precisely such as this one – when large structural conflicts play themselves out on the urban landscape – that the forging of critical and reflective cultural practices seems all the more urgent and compelling. Perhaps that is why we sense them so keenly when they begin to intimate themselves to us.

And so, even as our city re-invents itself through escalating conflicts over extant and looming habitation and property, new migrants re-define the face and voice of the street, women take an increasingly visible place on the precincts and old urbane certainties crumble; a new sensibility takes hold. Delhi has outgrown the destiny of being a small town with a violent past and burdened with Imperial grandeur. It is now just a city, just another very big city. A city that has set out on a journey to find the world.

Circuits and Cities

Interesting connections are being formed, between Delhi and Bangalore, between Delhi and Lahore, Delhi and Kathmandu, Delhi and Berlin, New York, Beirut, Bandung. There is also a relationship with mofussil towns, and regional centres in north India which is not only extractive. Traffic between Delhi and Benaras, Allahabad, Gorakhpur, Ballia, Patna, Jabalpur and Jaipur has a different cultural significance now. People bring new thoughts and voices from these places, and return to them with the connections that they make in a place like Delhi. Within our city, entire worlds, like those of the resettlement colonies of Dakshinpuri or of the threatened riverside settlements like Nangla Machi or of inner city squatter zones, are finding a voice. The sense of Delhi being a place that contains entire worlds is more vivid today than it has ever been.

Writers, artists, practitioners, performers and audiences travel between spaces more than before, and the magnet of Mumbai, which necessarily took away the best of Delhi, seems to have weakened, replaced, in parts, by a genuine conversation. We can no longer think of our milieu only in terms of the physical boundary of the National Capital Territory of Delhi, of the Republic of India, or even of the South Asian region, but crucially, in terms of how different sub cultures and scenes in Delhi function as nodes in an expanding network that intersects at key points with other networks which may have originated in other cities. Here, the distance (or proximity) between Delhi and Bangalore or Mumbai, or for that matter Beirut or Bandung, becomes a function not of geography but of the affinities and interests that transcend frontiers of one kind or another.

What’s going on? Where?

In the domain of the imagination, images, sounds and thought, there is a quiet ferment that marks our city. Its signs are muted, nascent, fragile. There is nothing overt or spectacular about these symptoms and we must not rush headlong to any conclusions or prognoses. Everything is uncertain. But the symptoms of a specific sensibility are insistent on revealing themselves. They demand from us a renewal of the terms of engagement which have hitherto ruled the domain of cultural praxis and artistic work. New publics beckon us to join them at play. So many things wait to be done.

This is as good a time as any to initiate a conversation that indexes some of these developments around us, points to things further away that might be of interest, and pauses to take stock of what might lie head.

First, to take a look at what is around us:

Spaces like Khoj in Delhi which provide an excellent context of hospitality for new and emerging work, cross-border initiatives in modest and unconventional public spaces by artists and practitioners in India and Pakistan like Aar-Paar, and the recent initiatives taken by documentary filmmakers to challenge censorship in exhibition are signs that there exists a strong desire to re-write the terms within which cultural practice occurs in our milieu.

Younger practitioners are trying out new forms – lawyers (such as in the Alternative Law Forum) are making comic books and html works against intellectual property and censorship, and the comic book or graphic novel is emerging as an interesting complex new form (see the work of Sarnath Bannerji, Vishwajoyti Ghosh and Parismita Singh, among others), as its practitioners explore difficult zones in personal experience and history. Architects and urban theorists, such as Solomon Benjamin, are experimenting with performance based presentation formats. A new generation of photographers is making edgy and personal work, without obligatory colourful turbans and the tyranny of the ‘well made photograph’. There is a new energy in the documentary, and the short and experimental film making scenes, made possible in part by more accessible technologies of production. Zines appear and disappear with an interesting frequency and broadsheets inaugurate the advent of a serial image-text essay form, and a new kind of critical fiction as well as non-fiction writing is making its presence felt in English, Hindi, Bangla, Tamil and Malayalam on Blogs. It appears that things are stirring.

Meanwhile, elsewhere…

At times like this, it also becomes useful to try and see what may be going on in other places and in other milieux. In our travels over the last six years, we have had the good fortune of observing many initiatives and practices all over the world that we think might serve as interesting provocations, so as to begin a conversation about what might be possible. We are placing this list on record also to register our kinship and solidarity with the people who have actualized these practices.

We are mentioning here only those spaces and initiatives that we consider to be modest. We need to focus on situations and processes that can be initiated and sustained with limited resources. What we have noticed in each of these instances is that a tight budget, or a lack of expansive resources, has not by any means implied a handcuffed imagination. Exciting things can also be done in small spaces, with little money, with no captive audiences, and by people who have full time jobs and next to nothing in terms of social security.

We have also restricted this list to instances where we have actually encountered the concerned practitioners personally. The list of practices and initiatives that we have found interesting, exciting and challenging which we have read about in addition to these, or seen in a show or on the internet, (although we may not have met the people involved with them) is far longer, and would require separate writing! This list is not exhaustive, and we intend to update and expand it from time to time so as to maintain a public database of the conceptual, intellectual and practice based context that we are nourished by.

There is no specific design or hierarchy implicit in the order in which they appear in the list below:

Queen’s Nail Annexe, San Francisco

A very small not-for-profit exhibition space (two rooms) which also doubles as a recording label in the Mission district in San Francisco, sustained by the innovative work of two dynamic persons. They work as community pedagogues, artists, facilitators and curators. The Queen’s Nail Annex offers space to young and old practitioners and curators who are able to offer a rigorous argument in their work. When we visited the Annex (which borrows its name from its neighbour - a Nail Beauty Parlour) we saw the opening of an exhibition devoted to videos and music produced by and in collaboration with the veteran experimental architecture and urbanism practice Archigram.

AndCompany, Frankfurt

A group of performers, theatre artists, musicians and theorists, based mainly in Frankfurt. We collaborated with them on a ‘reading performance’ in connection with ‘The Wherehouse’, a process and work that reflects on the relationship between cities and people termed as illegal migrants. What attracted us to Andcompany&Co’s work was its practical adventurousness, which took in a strong interest in the legacy of Brecht’s work, along with theatre, music, acrobatics and theory with a sense of enjoyment in working together as an ensemble. Their commitment to music, fun and philosophy, within the constraints of a modest working style and a commitment to working with all available materials was interesting to engage with.

Mongrel, London

A collective of software programmers, artists, technicians, writers located in and around London. Mongrel considers its practice to be a kind of art hacking, and is founded on meticulous, almost obsessive research often initiated by Mongrel Graham Harwood in collaboration with itinerant theorist Matt Fuller. What continues to attract us to Mongrel’s diverse productivity is its eclecticism and serious irreverence. They are just as happy doing cut and paste xerox comic books and newsprint broadsheets as they are writing complex bits of code for a piece of software or hacking games and applications.

Park Fiction, Hamburg

An ensemble of people and practices located in close proximity to the depressed Saint Pauli district in Hamburg. A very successful instance of how cultural action within a community/neighbourhood context can stall the designs of urban redevelopment that might have resulted in eviction and demolition.

Atelier BowWow, Tokyo

An innovative architecture practice located in Tokyo, initiated by Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Mayomi Kaijima, with whom we collaborated on the making of Temporary Autonomous Sarai (TAS) in Minneapolis in 2002. Atelier BowWow’s investigations in what they call ‘da-me’ or ‘not good’ and ‘pet’ architecture, with their accent on researching informal and improvised architectural interventions in dense urban spaces is something we have a great deal of sympathy for. BowWow’s take on built form in urban space privileges that which may seem marginal at first, but is actually vital to the life of a neighbourhood or a street. It gestures to a density of contact, a plurality of usage and function, to the animatedness of interstitial spaces, and to a democracy of the sidewalk, the verge and the back alley that we find resonant with the urban forms of our city. It would be interesting to see what could occur if architectural practices in South Asia began taking an active interest in the informal city as an expressive of an architectural language.

TOROLAB, Tijuana

Another architectural practice, like Atelier BowWow with a strong presence in contemporary art venues. Torolab is based in Tijuana at Mexico’s northern frontier with the USA, and much of its work is by way of an imaginative and focused reflection and research on the special conditions of the border zone, the peculiar relationship between the twin cities of Tijuana in Mexico and San Diego in the USA and the forms of improvised and ‘emergency’ architecture, using discarded automobile bodies, car tyres, crates and cardboard boxes that are a hallmark of subaltern urbanism in Tijuana.

Arab Image Foundation, Beirut

An archival initiative undertaken by a group of photographers, critics and theorists spread across the Arabic speaking world, and in the Arab diaspora, to archive and document popular photographic and image making practices, especially with a view towards the destabilization of the ‘Arab Image. They have spoken in Delhi, at an invitation from Khoj.

The Atlas Group Archive, Beirut/New York

A somewhat disembodied entity centred around the personage of Walid Raad that invokes an archival register to explore the contemporary history of Lebanon through mixed media installations, single channel screenings, visuals and literary essays and lectures/performances. What we find interesting in the work of the Atlas Group is the close attention to history, a sense of archival irony and a highly sophisticated visual language. What the Atlas Group Archive does is to use a historical imagination to weld a set of philosophical statements about the politics of seeing. The invocation of an image by the archive becomes an occasion for thinking about truth claims and uncertainty. Images, even the memories of images, become things to think with, not just objects to look at or recall. It may be interesting to see what happens were we to transpose aspects of this register of thinking with images and memories to the fractured history of our city.

Common Room & The Bandung Center for New Media Arts, Bandung

A dynamic cluster of self-organized spaces in Bandung, Indonesia, with a special interest in expressing the enormous vitality of urban youth culture in Bandung, with its distinct political and critical edge and commitment to having a very good time, with music, murals, experimental video, street fashion, new media, publishing and comics. The Common Room and the Bandung Center are object lessons in the ability to organize a dynamic public space and presence that is non-commercial, that has little or no funding, and that survives because of a close relationship to a young public that nurtures it with time and with improvised resources.

Long March Foundation, Beijing

A highly intense ensemble of artistic, cultural and archival practices, developed over many years and within the matrix of a densely collaborative framework, particularly interested in areas such as migration within China, that emerges from the space of the Cultural Transmission Center in Beijing. We found this practice, which we encountered for the first time at the Taipei Biennale 2005, to occupy a different, more nuanced but far more quietly subversive register of expression compared to the by now formulaic visual sensation of contemporary art from China.

kein.org: collaborative media production, Internet/Munich

kein.org is a peer to peer network of cultural practices that encompasses software, theory, performance, events and conferences - kein.org has in its history been the site for very precise and focused online and offline interventions (’Kein Mensch ist Illegal’ and ‘Deportation Class’) against the detention and deportation of illegal immigrants in Germany and Europe.

Metareciclagem, Rio de Janeiro/Sao Paulo

Metareciglagem is a loose ensemble of people and practices that embody a critical free and open source practice with software, machines, people and spaces in Brazil. Equally distant from the NGO scene and the imperatives of self-consciously political language, metareciclagem is basically interested in initiating a set of creative processes that reclaim autonomies for human presence and subjectivity in all processes involving technological mediation, especially, but not only in those that use computers (accessible, assembled hardware) and software.

Chaos Computer Club, Berlin

A pioneering group of hackers and who were and continue to be active in the Berlin scene, intervening critically and through cultural and artistic work in areas to do with intellectual property, electronic surveillance and technological creativity.

Radioqualia, London, Bacelona, Auckland

An online art collaboration by New Zealanders Adam Hyde and Honor Harger, it was founded in 1998 in Australia and is currently based in Europe. Using various streaming media softwares, r a d i o q u a l i a experiments with the concept of artistic broadcasting, using the internet and traditional media forms, such as radio and television, as primary tools, and aims to explore broadcasting technology within the context of philosophical speculation.

Bureau d’etudes, Paris/Strasbourg

A practice consisting of researchers and cartographers who map flows of power and control in politics, economy, society and culture and render their work through elaborate diagrams, often exhibited within contemporary art venues and events.

Visible Collective, New York

A collective of artists, documentarists, legal practitioners, designers, programmers, cartographers and activists - creators of the ‘Disappeared in America’ project that documents the detention and disappearance of people in the United States of America following September 11, 2001

Temporary Services

Temporary Services is a group of three persons: Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin and Marc Fischer. Their work draws on their varied backgrounds and interests to produce creative exhibitions, events, projects and publications. Within their work they create socially dynamic situations and spaces for dialogue. They are distinguished by their fondness of self published pamphlets, and public projects that are temporary, ephemeral, or that operate outside of conventional or officially sanctioned categories of public expression.

We were especially struck by Temporary Services collaboration with a prisoner serving a sentence of life imprisonment that resulted in a project called ‘Prisoners Inventions’ consisting of a collection of ingenuous inventions made by a prisoner, a book and the replica of a prison cell.

Red 76, mainly Portalnd, Oregon

Red76 is the title used by a group of people working on collaborative projects in Portland, Oregon. The guiding constructs holding Red76 projects together are the facilitation of thought in public space and the examination of how to define what and where that space can be. The wish to charge space, to create an atmosphere where the public may become hyper aware of their surroundings and their day-to-day activities – such as making a lecture series in Laundromat shops – is an important construct for them.

Critical Art Ensemble, dispersed locations online

A collective of artists, theorists and scientists known for their critical research and creative work located at the intersections of technology, biology, cybernetics, feminism and a trenchant critique of the military-industrial-information technology complex. CAE produces events, performances based on laboratory experiments, books and web-based renditions of research themes and ideas.

Middle Corea

Middle Corea describes itself as a virtual networked territory actually located in the Internet, and ideally located within the ecosystem of the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. It realises itself through a variety of artistic and documentation activities undertaken by a group of artists, practitioners, photographers, theorists and curators loosely located in and around Seoul.

Mute and Metamute, London

A print journal and website devoted to a wide ranging critical discussion of the politics and culture of new technologies of communication

Improbable Voices

Improbable Voices is an archive of reflections in the form of interviews from inside a womenÂ’s prison, and a proposal for a monument to the prison-industrial system. The Improbable Voices project emerges out of a collaboration between a California based artist, Sharon Daniels, a group of ten women inmates who are incarcerated at the Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF) in Chowchilla, CA - the largest female correctional facility in the United States and Justice Now, a human rights organization that works with women in prison to build a safe, compassionate world without prisons.

From the above list it will be evident that the kind of practices that we are talking about range from comics to high theory, with software, web-based work, radio, documentary filmmaking, and self-published broadsheets in between. Crucially, each of these might involve either a level of sociality in the production of cultural processes or a willingness to engage with a discursive register (and sometimes both). This unties art and cultural work from decorative or propagandist demands and enables it to claim a space for forms that are generative of questions, thought, reflection and communitas.

Many of these formal approaches might seem somewhat alien to the current milieu of art exhibition practices in places such as Delhi, but we are certain that there is a change in the offing. New spaces will emerge and are emerging where new forms and new people will be at play. This is nascent now, but we think that this will take on a momentum of its own in a matter of years.

What is also evident is that as in other areas of human creativity (science, music, filmmaking) the rise of collectives, ensembles and networks will accelerate a vibrant cultural milieu. We hope that this listing provides everyone in our milieu with reasons for reflection, and we look forward to carrying forward a conversation.

We look forward to more interesting times in our city!

August 1, 2006

Monica Narula
Raqs Media Collective
Sarai-CSDS
29 Rajpur Road
Delhi 110054
www.raqsmediacollective.net
www.sarai.net

Raqs Media Collective: For the Record [posted to Saria by Monica Narula] [Related entry]