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Peace, freedom, and self-determination were among the themes at the 19th European Media Arts Festival (EMAF), held May 10-14, 2006, in Osnabruck, Germany. This predominantly white-collar town of about 150,000, located in the country’s northwest region at the intersection of the Hamburg-Cologne and Berlin-Amsterdam train lines, could hardly be a more appropriate host to media art committed to such issues. Already an important trading hub during the Middle Ages (the large cathedral and historic old town remain impressive traces), Osnabruck was one of the two original signing places of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648–a historic treaty that, because it ended the Thirty Year War, was responsible for the religious and geopolitical restructuring of post-medieval Europe and would, until the French Revolution, serve as the unofficial blueprint for the definition of European nation states. Leggi il seguito »

To be frank, much of the challenging terrain before us is explicitly political terrain. We live in a time of war. We live in a time of political divisiveness. We live in a time when the struggles for power at home–over issues of race, of corporate power, of the environment, of faith matters, of gender, and of so much more mirror similar struggles that span the globe.
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New York-based Mexican artist Pablo Helguera recently initiated an artist-led expeditionary project, “The School of Panamerican Unrest” (2006), in the hope of generating connections between the different regions of the Americas through a variety of events–discussions, performances, screenings, and collaborations–by means of a nomadic forum that will cross the hemisphere by land, from Alaska to Argentina. As Helguera describes:

This hybrid project will include a collapsible and movable
architectural structure in the form of a schoolhouse, as well as a
video collection component inside a van that will make the journey.
The project, which seeks to involve a wide range of audiences and
engage them at different levels, offers alternative ways to understand
the history, ideology, and lines of thought that have significantly
impacted political, social and cultural events in the Americas. (1) Leggi il seguito »

One of the most notable projects that RTMark has engaged in is the Yes Men’s World Trade Organization (WTO) parody site, www.gatt.org. The site, launched in early 2000, looks almost identical to the WTO’s official site but has been modified to generate critical discourse about the policies and proposals of the WTO. The site spawned invitations to attend conferences by visitors who thought that they were conferring with the actual WTO, which the Yes Men accepted. The resulting outcome can be seen in the documentary The Yes Men (2003) by Dan Ollman, Sarah Price, and Chris Smith, who follow the activists’ antics as they act as spokesmen for the WTO.
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Lanfranco Aceti: I would start by saying that the real issues have been censored. I was shocked by some of the images of 9/11. [Images of] people holding hands and jumping off the Twin Towers were probably some of the most desperate representations of this tragedy–the impossibility of escape. This brought memories of family history from World War II and the comment of my father who said: “Cowards, they didn’t leave them a route to escape … At least during the bombings we could run to the mountains.” I believe that there is no escape and that the “clash” between secularism and fascist applications of multiculturalism has generated an “emergence,” as Paul Virilio would say, of a “rediscovery of civic and civilized engagements.” For this reason, I created a series of works and one of them was titled Bloody Falling Rain (2002), made with digital media, blood, and glass. The idea was to cover the surface of the image with real blood to represent the impossibility of escape from the visual and psychological imprisonment of the tragedy itself. The images remained private until now and were only presented at the Harvard Divinity School as part of a paper on aesthetics I delivered at the annual meeting of the International Society for Phenomenology for Aesthetics and Fine Arts at Harvard University, May 16-18, 2003. Certainly the rules of engagement have changed. There are no other alternatives, no escape route is left but to face the present political times.
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July 19, 2006: Today was a particularly strange day for me because I was granted an opportunity to leave tomorrow morning. I hold a Canadian passport as I was born in Toronto when my parents were students there. I left at age two. I have never gone back, for lack of opportunity and occasion, no other reason. I have the choice to sign up for the evacuation, but the European and North American governments have been so despicable, so racist that I don’t want to subject myself to a discrimination of that sort … For days I have been itching to leave because I want to pursue my professional commitments, meet deadlines and continue with my life … And yet when the phone call came informing me that I had to be ready at 7:00 am the next morning, I asked for a pause to think. I was torn. The landscape of the human and physical ravages of Israel’s genial strategy at implementing United Nations Resolution 1559, the depth of destruction, the toll of nearly 250 deaths, more than 800 injured, and 400,000 displaced, had bound me to a sense of duty. It was not even patriotism, it was actually the will to defy Israel. They cannot do this and drive me away. They will not drive me away.
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In her Foreword, Squiers points out that the subjects of these works are not depicted as victims and while these activist photographers were not chiefly concerned with aesthetics, the resulting images are “vital, compelling, subtle, and persuasive.” From Lewis W. Hine’s expose of child labor practices to Donna Ferrato’s shockingly intimate portraits of domestic abuse to Lori Grinker’s narratives of veterans of wars and civil conflicts to David T. Hanson’s Waste Land (where the unseen human bodies echo the often invisible toxins to which they are subjected), the book is replete with examples of groundbreaking documentary and social photography. Each selection of photographs is accompanied by Squiers’s astute commentary on specific aesthetic aspects and the circumstances of production of the work, as well as in-depth social, political, and economic context.

Antonitsis has meaningfully selected to appropriate, as the epitome of the artistic advertising of luxury goods cum lifestyle, the masterpieces of high-end television advertising by renowned fashion photographer Jeffrey Apoian, who is a full collaborator in the work. (3) Yet he reworks the frames in which each advertised product (beauty products, jewelry, champagne, etc.) emerges with its sharp (branded) recognizability and appeal by blurring them to the point of abstract unrecognizability and digital painterly beauty. Furthermore, he denudes the advertisements of their commercial voice-over, while leaving intact only the original soundtracks to dramatize the idyllic scenarios of love and beauty that are enacted by fashion models in make-believe everyday settings, which vary from exuberant baroque exteriors to elegant modernist interiors and exotic beaches. Using his, by now, signature “digital blurring,” Antonitsis and Apoian make the advertised products vanish, dissolving them into their spectral doubles: a series of beautiful polychrome abstract frames. Leggi il seguito »

The installation was comprised of uniforms from around the world, documentary and fashion photos of soldiers in camouflage, music videos set among battles and explosions (the singers camouflage-clad), and consumer items appropriating the pattern of camouflage such as snowboards, T-shirts, and halter dresses. There were also scrap wood “trees” with mannequin bodies, maps, and globes of the world “growing” camouflage tape mounds. There were toys of war placed both in battlefields and in a large doll house, books on war scattered in a living room covered in camouflage tape, and forty-foot, ambiguous, cardboard forms that could be bullets, missiles, or submarines. The installation filled three galleries–a lot of real estate to take up, and to Hirschhorn’s credit, one does not begrudge him his excess. The tragic flaw of “Utopia, Utopia” was that Hirschhorn allowed the viewer to see how entirely seduced he is by critical theory; he threw aside a chance to serve as a witness, choosing instead this infatuation, which is unfortunate since he succeeded at making a map that shows the cognitive discord of war.
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However comfortably Eggleston may be placed within the documentary tradition of postwar photography, both the matter of his influence and his own voluminous, ongoing production are far more complicated than referencing such a tidy and direct lineage might imply. His work raises various questions: Is Eggleston more an inheritor of Walker Evans or the grandfather of Andreas Gursky? Is his cool, nonjudgmental approach part of a longstanding modernist commitment to recording the everyday or an exactingly rendered postmodernism before the fact? Is Eggleston’s evasion of discourse surrounding the work old-fashioned and genteel or rather timely and fashionable?
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