Monthly Archives: June 2008

San Francisco to vote on naming sewer after George Bush

Is this art? Is it activistm? Certainly, the power elite are not shaking in their boots over such stunts, but this just viscerally seems right. via: the Independet By Guy Adams in Los Angeles Friday, 27 June 2008 San Francisco Public Utilities Commission The plant that could be renamed the George W Bush Sewage Plant Some presidents get carved into Mt [...]
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Game Culture

Play is one of the earliest and most important activities of mammals; helping adolescents learn the skills they need to survive. Games take the free play of the animal kingdom and apply rules and constraints, which have the ability to teach and develop the values and beliefs of a culture. The chess queen developed as [...]
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Quote from Georg Baselitz

This mythology of the lone genius, isolated from society, and relieved of social responsibility, is summed up for me in these comments by the painter Georg Baselitz: “The artist is not responsible to anyone. His social role is asocial; his only responsibility consists in an attitude to the work he does. There is no [...]
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Gran Fury talks to Douglas Crimp

Gran Fury talks to Douglas Crimp – Interview ArtForum, April, 2003 DOUGLAS CRIMP: One of your members, Mark Simpson, is no longer with us. Perhaps we can officially dedicate our remarks here to his memory. When did Mark die? TOM KALIN: Mark died of AIDS on November 10, 1996. DC: Okay, let’s begin with a work that [...]
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Home Invasion as Art

For the past four years, Critical Art Ensemble’s Steve Kurtz has been a martyr in the world of activist art, the victim of overzealous FBI investigatory impropriety. The case against him was utterly absurd, Kafka-esque even. Thankfully,though, the judge saw reason this month and his case was finally dismissed. Now, he has an exhibit entitled [...]
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Welcome! An Introduction…

The Steves: As a political artist, how can you know when you’ve been successful? Hans Haacke: I’ve been asked that question many times, and that question requires one to go around it before one really avoids it. “How to Win” is a work in progress by Stephen Duncombe, an academic, and Steve Lambert, an artist. We are [...]
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En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism(1920)

Richard Huelsenbeck (1920) En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism From En Avant Dada: Eine Geschichte des Dadaismus, 1920 (reprinted in Art and Social Change, Will Bradley and Charles Esche, eds., London: Tate, 2007, pp. 61-68) From the First German Dadaist Manifesto, written by Huelsenbeck: “Art in its execution and direction is dependent on the time in which it lives, [...]
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The Socialist Ideal: Art (1891)

William Morris (1891) “The Socialist Ideal: Art” New Review, January 1891 (reprinted in Art and Social Change, Will Bradley and Charles Esche, eds., London: Tate, 2007, pp. 47-52) “…I assert that socialism is an all-embracing theory of life, and that as it has an ethic and a religion of its own, so also it has an aesthetic: so that [...]
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Architect Lebbeus Woods

In all honesty I don’t know Woods’ work well. Just finished this interview and he has a reputation for making radical work that changes perceptions. Some excerpts: “It wasn’t about cleaning up the mess [in the Sarajevo project] or fixing the damage; it was more about a transformation in the society and the politics and [...]
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How George Carlin Changed Comedy

via: Time When the culture began to change in the late 1960s — when the old one-liner comics on the Ed Sullivan Show were looking pretty tired and irrelevant to a younger generation experimenting with drugs and protesting the War in Vietnam — George Carlin was the most important stand-up comedian in America. By the time [...]
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