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David Sylvian of Japan
The origins of this piece came out of a discussion about neoliberalism and music in the context of the legacy of the 1960s counter culture. The debate revolved around two lines – whether punk was an ending or continuation of the 60s, and whether neoliberalism has subsumed and commodified counter-cultural themes, making them null and void.
Read moreGustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers, 1849
While there have been strides to widen discussions in art history to include issues like gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity, the corporate marketing of pricey art-history textbooks to American college students produces materials that glaringly omit and/or deemphasize Marxism as an analytical catalyst. In addition, examples of historical experiments with self-described "real-existing socialism" tend to be so grotesquely abbreviated as to distort context and content and preclude understanding.
Read moreThe right to the city is a cultural right as much as it is a political and social one. Over the past fifty years, capitalism has dramatically changed the character and rhythm of the city. As rents have gone up and schools have been neglected and privatized, our alienation from urban environments has been underlined. This is illustrated and concentrated in the relationship of both governments working and poor people to art.
Read moreMy decade-long engagement as a communist propagandist had convinced me of the importance of revisiting the old question of “political art,” and the linkages and gaps it opens up between the received notions of “aesthetics” and “politics.”
Read more“Outsider Art” positions art and artists in or outside the art world. “Art Brut” and “Outsider Art” were terms coined during the reign of the modernist avant-garde, in the 1940s and 1970s respectively. In this, whatever problems these concepts had, they initially positioned artists in and outside a conscious stream on ongoing aesthetic innovation, a stream in which a significant minority of artists had political sympathetic with anarchist, socialist, and Marxist politics. But, as Boris Groys observes, the modern avant-garde became, in the late 20th century, a weak avant-garde, avoiding the strong politics of modern art, as well as the strong images of classical and popular culture. There are number of reasons for this transition.
Read moreThis special online issue includes essays by Shannon Bell, Jordy Cummings, Laura Fair-Schulz, Joe Sabatini, Adam Turl, and Cam Scott; interviews with Anupam Roy, Tyler Bee from the Beehive Design Collective, and Kate Doyle Griffiths; reviews from Jason Netek, Agatha Slupek, annd Neil Rogall; poetry and short stories from Urvi Kumbhat, Benjamin Balthaser, Margaret Corvid, Tish Markley and Trish Kahle; visual art from David Mabb, Richard Reilly, Jon Cornell, Laura Fair-Schulz, Octavio Quintanilla, Nathan Nun, Anupam Roy and Adam Turl; audio/video from Alexander Billet, Magally Miranda-Alcazar and Adam Turl.
Read moreThere are concepts whose time has passed, and each usage now betrays or strays from the initial power of the term. “Transgression,” when deployed by such thinkers as Michel Foucault and Georges Bataille in the1930’s-to-late 20th century was a radical concept articulated with change and resistance. That is not to say that transgression wasn’t often a means for the homogeneous order to absorb elements marked outside of it and/or or at its limits.
Read moreMy work pivots from the following ideas and concerns:
Art was shamanistic in origin (under primitive communism).
The present day avant-garde is a “weak avant-garde” (see Boris Groys) detached from both the modernizing and utopian impulses of the modern avant-garde.
The solution to this weakness is a popular avant-garde that deals with the lives and concerns of the majority of the world (the working-class, the exploited and oppressed).
A viable strategy to combat the weak avant-garde is “narrative conceptualism;” putting the stories of working-class people up front in experimental artwork.
The following artworks and artist statements are from Red Wedge #4; previously not posted to our site.
Read moreAccording to Franco Moretti, the fear of bourgeois society can be summed up in two names: Frankenstein and Dracula. He notes how both were born in 1816 on a rainy evening near Geneva, at a time when industrial development was just beginning to get underway (1997, 83). His argument is that Frankenstein and Dracula are dramatic, totalizing monsters. Unlike the feudal or aristocratic ghosts who were confined to a castle, these figures go international, expressing the motions of capital and labour. While originally published in 1983, his argument resonates most strongly in the late neoliberal period.
Read moreGlenn Branca made it to my hometown relatively late in his career; as I recall, he stormed the stage rasping approval after a performance of the first movement of his fourteenth, then most recent, symphony — an overture of ambient menace, moving through the harmonic series in cascading waves. Wild-haired and foul-mouthed, long since an institution, Branca took his time in praise of the neo-romantic program in which he appeared, spitting anachronistic condemnation of musical systematizers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Pierre Boulez. I recall thinking this attempted relitigation of musical modernism extremely telling; no one is a context unto their own, and more often than not an adaptive grudge outlives its object as a useless negativity, festering resentfully.
Read moreThe vanishing point where your bodies appear, / A desert horizon where nothing but light comes / Into being. I sit with two letters, one from a / Journalist and another from a soldier, overcome
Read moreWhen I was a kid I made a pocket in my head / and held the family dog inside for a whole week / before dad realized he hadn’t run away. / Dad made me bring Hero back but he was older / and he said I was his favorite, now.
Read morePlease step aside for a moment, ma’am. / A strike at my bare feet. / someone else exits the coffin, and / they go on and I am here. I have / no bomb but I wish I had / something to mop the blood with.
Read moreWives pick through the avocados, press the rinds, sinking their thumbs into the meat to ensure that this one will produce quality guacamole. In the carts, small children wind their fingers around their metal cages, burn their palms on the nylon safety belts better suited for suicide. Where are the husbands? The only man in sight stands behind the chilled meat counter. He leans now, over the grinder, making sausages. His hand rests on the control, missing an index finger, perhaps an accident that someone has served on a plate of hors d’ouerves two plates down from the guacamole. Almost unseen, a teenager with unnaturally blonde hair sweeps the floors, down each aisle in an easy, angled movement that dances under the wheels of the carts, the only sound the leather pants she wears in defiance of the dress code. The one she tells her manager she would follow if only the job provided health insurance and now she slips a pack of Virginia Slims from behind the counter and steps outside. Nearly invisible, and she promises herself she only took the pack because wages are so low they really stole them from her anyway.
Read moreThe struggle for Palestinian rights is central to radical politics today. The fight for BDS (Boycott, Disinvestment, Sanctions)’ is the sharp end of this. The fury seen in the media and by most politicians as well as the huge sums spent by the Israeli state in countering BDS suggests a movement gaining in momentum
Read moreAs sexism – pure, naked sexism and misogyny – rears its ugly ahead in the liberal democratic public sphere, it appears ever more appropriate to look back for insight to the feminist 1970s: a time oft-mythologized1 and (at times) faithfully portrayed as the era of very angry women. The 1970s are a complex moment in North American feminism’s past. The way we re-visit this so-called ‘foundational’ era of the Women’s Liberation Movement, it seems, will play a role in how we can imagine the horizons of feminism’s futures.
Read moreWhen Anselm Jappe wrote Guy Debord in 1993, it was widely hailed as the first serious intellectual biography of the principal figure of the Situationist International (SI). Six years later, when the University of California Press published an English translation, Stewart Home1 declared it “both the most boring and by far and away the most stupid book to be written about a situationist to date.” On the other hand, Ken Knabb2 praises Jappe’s effort as “the only book on Debord in either French or English that can be unreservedly recommended.”
Read moreTwo works sit before me. One, a non-descript jet-black Verso book, containing a controversial and often misunderstood thought experiment from the dialectical philosopher Frederic Jameson. The other is a record album by the great humanist songwriter David Byrne. Both are titled American Utopia. Both attempt to find countertendencies in the social whole in the 21st century, “late-late capitalism”, if you will, countertendencies that perhaps we can cognitively map, if not concretely perceive as utopian, as going beyond the semblance of time and place, a place where nothing ever happens, as “happening” implies going back to the dualism of fact and value that dialectical art and philosophy attempt to transcend. Byrne’s music, both literally and figuratively, provides a soundtrack to what Jameson called postmodernity – a concept about which one can hold agnosticism with regards to hard periodization, but still use to demarcate an aesthetic sensibility.
Read moreThese pastiche posters portray the victories and transformations of cat-kind following a revolution that has overthrown all relations in which cat is a depraved, enslaved, abandoned or despised being. These repurposed propaganda posters attempt to capture the aesthetic energy and radical, transformative hope of the 20th century revolutions while criticizing the social order that they both replaced and created. The works attempt not to rewrite or document history but rather to create hopeful images of a world in which creatures have escaped the logic of history and point toward a real-possible future.
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