It is sad to see Brit Schulte – a founding editor – part ways with Red Wedge. If there is one constant, however, it is change. Over the past year there have been an increasing number of challenges in maintaining Red Wedge as we had been previously organized – especially as a few editors, including Brit, have been finishing up graduate degrees. More importantly, our ideas evolved in different directions. While we are sad to see Brit go, an open discussion is preferable to papering over differences. There will, we hope, be further opportunities to collaborate – and they will be more productive if we all know exactly where we stand.
Read moreI was frustrated. Like I oft am, I admit. None of the contributions from the conference floor seemed to carry with them a nuanced understanding of aesthetic criticism, of art, of culture (let alone how Marxists or more broadly how the Left could participate in these things). I wasn't alone: there existed a small, equally frustrated community, with an even larger periphery of curiosity and cultural interest.
We endeavored to establish a dialogue, debate, body of writing and eventually a performance circuit that saw itself in the many traditions of: surrealism, constructivism, Marxist cultural criticism, DAdA, the propaganda of Bolshevism, the W.P.A. art campaigns,
Read moreThe Paris Commune was in essence the first large scale experiment in socialist governance. On March 18th of 1871, radical workers and artisans organized in the National Guard decisively took control of the city as the regular French army fled. Days later, the Commune was elected, immediately declaring that workers could take over and run workshops and businesses, as well as abolishing the death penalty and military conscription, mandating the separation of church and state, and the beginnings of a social safety net and pensions. Both revolutionary and democratic, every day saw new ways of running the city advanced by ordinary laborers.
Read moreStar Wars stands out as perhaps the most popular franchise in the history of science fiction and fantasy. George Lucas' original trilogy did what even Stanley Kubrick's 2001 failed to accomplish: it made Hollywood executives look to speculative fiction as a genre worthy of investment and promotion.
One can easily date the origin of Hollywood's current reliance on the genre for the profitability of the industry itself to the original film. With the rebirth of the franchise at the hands of director J.J. Abrams the cycle has come full circle. Abrams’ The Force Awakens is a direct homage to the original film, boasting an almost identical narrative structure keeping with the saga's “rhyming” tendency.
Read morePaul Kantner was not the leader of Jefferson Airplane, the sixties band that came to epitomize the counterculture. Leadership rotated, original leader Marty Balin once joked, to whichever member was currently involved with Grace Slick. Neither was Kantner Jefferson Airplane or 70s Jefferson Starship’s lead vocalist, being only one of four singers, his warm, understated vocals often eclipsed by Slick and Balin’s more attention-grabbing turns. Nor was Kantner his bands’ primary songwriter – one of the Airplane’s four primary songwriters, he was just one hand on the Jefferson Starship overcrowded deck. All this is not however to bury Kantner – that occurred, literally, in January 2016, at age 74 – it is absolutely to praise him. Indeed to praise him in the most comradely fashion: as a key component in a countercultural collective, the very antithesis of the individualist diva.
Read moreThe robots have arrived – sort of. It’s only a matter of where one looks. If one were paying attention to the Oscars this year, it would have been hard to miss the most famous robot trio of all time as they arrived on the opulent stage of the Dolby Theater. Ahead strutted in the pleasingly neurotic, bronze figure of the linguist, C-3PO, with his short, stout, and sassy mechanic mate R2-D2 close behind, and bringing up the rear the white-orange ball of a droid named BB-8, who made its debut in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, released this past December. When R2-D2 beeps that C-3PO forgot the tickets to the ceremony, the latter retorts: “The ticket was your job, nitwit.” When told that he looked somewhat like the Oscar statue behind them, C-3PO declared that it looked like him. “How do you think we made it this far?”
Read moreWe have reached the Hegelian endgame; the fusion of art and philosophy. Not quite, as Arthur Danto notes, a negation of art by philosophy but the fusion of both. The art object has become, it is claimed, a philosophical argument in itself. But it is a pyrrhic victory – a Twilight Zone ending for art history, modernism and the avant-garde.
Anything can be made into art. But there is a small army of theorists dedicated to parsing out what is and isn’t art. Anyone can be an artist – if they aren’t too attached to the idea of eating dinner. Art and philosophy have fused but in the absence of the social revolution that was meant to accompany that fusion. The result is a philosophical-art object that is profoundly weak. If the present model of serious contemporary art is a weak avant-garde, the solution is a popular avant-garde: a rapprochement between artistic experimentation (as art) and mass emancipatory politics.
Read moreThis is the newly-designed cover for Red Wedge No. 2, “Art Against Global Apartheid.” We are incredibly excited to send it and the rest of the issue to the printers – which we’ll be doing in a matter of weeks now.
A roundtable with Robin D.G. Kelley, Walidah Imarisha and Jonathan Horstmann from BLXPLTN; essays on the meaning of art and interracial solidarity; poetry from Prerna Bakshi, Anthony Squiers and Demetrius Noble that runs the gamut from the humorous to the heartbroken and outraged to the ethereal and mysterious; a look at what a recently founded collective of anti-capitalist artists is up to. This is material worth getting excited over.
Read moreThe Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) is leading a one-day strike on April 1st. In Illinois, leaders of both political parties have orchestrated an artificial budget crisis. Under the pretext of this false scarcity of resources people like Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner are firing teachers, closing schools, and wreaking havoc on public education.
Something particularly notable out this strike is that it is not just the CTU out there today. The strike is being billed as a call to action for entire city. This makes it unique.
Read moreThe world must know. The world simply must know, must be shaken by the shoulders until it collectively acknowledges that something like the Monks can exist. That there can be such a thing as “avant-garde garage rock,” and that it can be played by active American G.I.’s increasingly alienated with the army. It needs to know, fifty years to the calendar month after the release of their only album.
Ten years back there was in fact something of a surge in interest around the Monks. A documentary was made, a tribute album was put out featuring the (International) Noise Conspiracy, the Fall, and a few other recognized inheritors of the garage rock sound.
Read moreThe Communal Order of the Ouroboros is written by St. Guillotine and illustrated by Craig E. Ross. You can read this comic from the beginning by clicking here. The Communal Order of the Ouroboros is a highly esoteric yet self-proclaimed open coven for all Communist witches, warlocks, and other magical and/or mystical Marxists. This comic is the magical diary or "Communist Grimoire" told through the first person perspectives of 5 communist witches who start a coven dedicated to using any magical means necessary to overthrow the dictatorship of capital.
Read moreNo, Red Wedge will not be fucking moving to Canada, no matter how close to reality the phrase "President Trump" may be getting... With all due respect to our canuck comrades.
What we will be doing, however, is presenting not one but two panels at this year's North American iteration of Historical Materialism, which will be held at York University in Toronto on the 13th, 14th and 15th of May. The abstracts for the panels are below.
As the first abstract says, we are planning to premiere Red Wedge No. 2, "Art Against Global Apartheid" at the conference...
Read moreSixteen men were executed in the aftermath of the Easter Rising – the seizure of the General Post Office in Dublin by Irish volunteers that took place one hundred years ago this week. Among those executed was James Connolly: leader of the Irish Citizen Army, trade unionist, revolutionary Marxist, de facto commander-in-chief of the Easter Rising.
Connolly has been canonized in the century since his death. That death – at the hands of an occupying British Army – is by itself enough to command respect of anyone concerned with self-determination, but there is also a certain tragedy in how overlooked his eloquent words and ideas can be, even today.
Read moreRed Wedge will be publishing a series of articles surrounding the April 1st strike. These will deal with the impact of austerity on artists, educators and social life, both materially and ideologically; the ongoing neoliberal assault on all that is not of practical and immediate use to capital. We are putting out a call for artists, in the coming two weeks, to make drawings, collages, graphic images, or anything else that might be of use to the struggle. Submit your images to us by March 27 for consideration.
Read moreIt just so happened
I was stumbling, bumbling, fumbling around
a bit tipsy and lit from the whisky that day.
I walked, talked, and came across some chalk,
Which in big, bright, bulbous letters yelled,
“Lecture this way!”
Read moreThere is nothing about that six second video that is not wonderful and beautiful. A diverse crowd of anti-racists – Black Lives Matter of course, but also supporters of Bernie Sanders, immigrant rights and anti-Islamophobia activists – jumping up and down and shouting Kendrick Lamar lyrics in celebration: they just shut down Donald Trump.
Trump supporters and other conservatives – as well as Trump himself – are now whining about “thugs,” and threatening to show up at Sanders’ rallies. Centrists and a great many liberals are wringing their hands about whether Trump’s “free speech” has been violated – as if Trump or his supporters have ever shown such regard for our right to express ourselves.
Read moreYes, there were Dada women!
One hundred years of Dada this year. Cabaret Voltaire lasted less than six months from its opening, February 1916 in Zurich, Switzerland. Who would have guessed that its obscure beginning would herald a world-rocking negativity that was at the same time an ardent demand for renewal?
The group, idea, movement that it created, Dada, itself didn’t last very long but quickly mutated into surrealism and somehow made its radical presence known worldwide.
Read moreThe Chicago Women's Graphics Collective, much like the Chicago Women's Liberation Union and its Rock Band, is one of those neglected facets of the feminist movement in the 1970's. That is beginning to change with the release of films like She's Beautiful When She's Angry, as well as a broader interest being shown by a younger generation of feminists in their roots and history. The Graphics Collective created stunning work, some of which has found itself into the most well known iconographic annals of "the Long Sixties," even if its creators are far too infrequently acknowledged.
The text below is from Estelle Carol, a founding member of the CWGC. Still a feminist and socialist, she is now one half of the political cartoon duo Carol-Simpson, as well as a web designer in suburban Chicago. She also helps maintain the CWLU Herstory Project.
Read moreHow can we crack the vote? We can't - it's made
of blood. It's built of creaking spines and skulls,
surrounded by a hundred filthy gulls
grown fat and sleek from scraps piled in the shade.
No, we can't crack it, only grab its tail
and climb the gory bones straight to the neck
and cling on for dear life, we scrabbling specks,
Read moreThere is no getting around the popularity or cultural clout that both Afropunk and Afrofuturism have in contemporary culture. It’s been over ten years since James Spooner’s film on Afropunk came out, the website that bears its name is visited by hundreds of thousands each month, and the yearly festival recently expanded from Brooklyn to Atlanta and will soon be making its way to Paris. Afrofuturism, for its part, has become quite trendy in certain circles, with advertising companies attempting to cash in on its aesthetic. It is not difficult to see its influence in a growing array of artists.
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