The Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven has a beautiful and huge Dan Perjovschi wall, on which I noticed the drawing above. It reminded me of a George Carlin show where he talks about all the stuff you keep in your house:
That’s all your house is: it’s a place to keep your stuff, while you go out to get more stuff.
The whole scene is brilliant:
Some other ‘stuff’ of Perjovschi:
The Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven organised the exhibition Forms of resistance, which comprises works from different periods that deal with activism. The exhibition contains many posters, all of them fantastic old-school silk-screen art works. I’ve photographed couple of them.
Furthermore, the upcoming year the Van Abbemuseum will enter the second half of the project Be(com)ing Dutch, which deals with issues around multiculturalism and national and cultural identities, currently some of the most urgent issues in the Netherlands. Reports on these activities will follow; please check the first debates on streaming video here.
Perhaps a bit sad for Christmas, but beautiful landscapes: Father and Daughter by Michael Dudok de Wit.
It’s hard to find good books about the city and urbanism. The market is saturated with popular glossy-looking books, dealing with interesting subjects such as globalization, terrorism, new media and so and so forth. However, they generally fail to put these developments in a historical and theoretical perspective.
So I was quite thrilled to find Urban theory, a critical assessment, by John Rennie Short. The book doesn’t dig deep into any issues, its strong point is the discursive overview of urban theories. Rennie describes the most important discussions regarding the city, starting with theorists such as Benjamin, Simmel and Howard in Modernism, and Soja, Lefebvre and Dear in Postmodernism and further discusses issues such as globalization, immigration, control and politics in the city.
It’s a pleasant and easy read; a must-have hand book on the city, comprehensive and gripping. So please, don’t judge this book by its cover, because that requires some critical assessment as well…
By Antonio Scarponi, taken from the Conceptual Devices weblog:
Here is the new, free RE-USE Do it Yourself Agenda for 2008. For more informations about RE-USE, here.
RE-USE is an ADA device (Analogical Data Accumulator) that re-uses the back of discarded photocopies or of any computer-printed document, promoting an individual behavior with an eye to the sustainability of everyday life. Follow the Re-use instructions, download Re-use files and print out your diary, the notebook and address book on the blank side of any standard-sized printed paper. You can then bind your Re-use simply with the help of a hole-punch and metal rings. RE-USE is a flexible system offering a wide range of independent inserts, all of which are available in different standard sizes: diary, notebook, pockets, address book, colorful address cards, CD holder. Makes any combination you need, and you can bind it within the original designed covers made of recycled leather. RE-USE is made of ecological materials: recycled leather for the cover and a special post-consumer processed paper called ‘cartapaglia’ for the inserts.
The public debate about the Dutch multicultural society – and in particular the integration of Muslim culture – has been infested by populism, false sentiments, anger and xenophobia. Last week, all usual suspects spoke out again in the media when the director of the City Art Museum in The Hague banned a controversial work.
The possibility for open-minded people with balanced ideas – by and far the majority – to have a proper and rational discussion has been trampled on. Extremists on both sides have hijacked the debate with dogmatic, hyper-emotional and uncompromising arguments. An interesting point is that art plays a conspicuous role in conveying, or communicating, some of these ideas. One famous example is the film Submission, made in 2004 by Theo van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, dealing with the suppression of Muslim women, which led directly to the murder of Van Gogh, and indirectly to Hirsi Ali fleeing from the Netherlands to the USA.
Last week the Iranian artist Sooreh Hera broke the news when her photographs were banned from the City Art Museum in The Hague by its director Wim van Krimpen. The pictures showed homosexual lovers wearing masks of the prophets Muhammed and Ali. Van Krimpen had no problem with issuing the difficulties of homosexuality in Islam culture, he disapproved of the provocative and insulting nature of the photographs.
Again, issues of freedom of speech, of religion and sexual orientation were discussed, and again, the debate was hijacked by the usual, populist suspects. Political parties in The Hague argued that art institutes cannot shut out the public debate and political issues, others claimed that the museum had violated the freedom of speech, and provocative works could not be banned simply because they are provocative.
I think the decision was perfectly sound. The argument that the museum avoids political discussion is false. Its decision to avoid a provocative work, which would further polarize a public discussion that’s already been spoiled and infested, is purely political. The viewpoint of Van Krimpen is to have a discussion which is balanced and avoids further polarizing. Moreover, this decision shows that, as a museum, an artist, a theorist, a politician, any stakeholder in this discussion, you have a choice. Not regarding participation in the discussion, or avoiding it, but a choice in the way you want to discuss it.
Currently, the public debate is completely dominated and corrupted by two extremist opinions: the first is the populist viewpoint, which means showing the work without any questioning, because criticizing the political content of art – based on rational arguments – is immediately disregarded as violating the freedom of speech. Second is the Islamic extremist viewpoint, which allows only the complete rejection of Hera’s work, which has been expressed by death threads towards Sooreh Hera, who is now in hiding. Consequence: end of discussion.
Certainly, the utopian ideas of a multicultural society, dating from the eighties and the nineties, must be challenged, but extremist opinions must be as well. Currently, anyone on the left favoring a proper, balanced discussion regarding multicultural issues in the Netherlands is being disregarded as left extremist, against freedom of speech and terrorist-in-action. And on the other side of the spectrum, any right-wing party favoring a proper discussion, is disregarded as secular extremist, anti-religious, racist and xenophobic.
To use the famous words of Spike Lee: “Ye’ all need a chill!”. And to make my point, please check the following feverish, raging fragment of Lee’s Do the right thing, because this is where we are now: at boiling point.
Here is the blog of the course I am teaching at KTH, Stockholm. The blog is about the design process that students are following in the project. The course is (of course) about the ageing of the population, a topic in which I am writing my PhD thesis on… However this is a media design course. I wish my academic work will be as fun and stimulating as this course is. Students started to dig in to the ageing issue from the “X-ray” of an “object” that could represent an ageing human condition. Each team work than followed different ways… the course ends the 12th. We’ll make an exhibition. Pictures of it to come.
I finally got the chance to post in the blog and for this first time I would like to talk about my subject of research and what I’ll be posting here. My interest is mainly social dynamics and how is is possible to generate transformation with them. The example this time is an original idea from the Brazilian theatrical director Augusto Boal, he implemented the participatory theater in Brazil. This kind of theater is asking the active participation of the audience to recreate the story giving them the chance and moreover the responsibility of being active in the conflict situations and have a better common insight of what would be the ideal situation. In this example you’ll see a group trying this technique with participatory statues questioning the situation in Palestine.
This week two students walked out of my class at the art academy in Rotterdam; they disagreed with my connecting situationism and skateboarding. After the coffee break they unsubscribed at the administration office, stating provocatively that they ‘couldn’t learn anything in my class’.
What happened? Were they right? I recognized an old conflict that runs through the academy, and that runs through the art world. I had invaded their territory, attempted to conquer it by theorising their world and challenging their autonomy. Skating has nothing to do with theory and therefore theorising it must be rejected. And why would they be wrong? All subcultures are by definition threatened by dissolving into commercialism and mainstream, by institutionalising through theory. They thrive on their exclusiveness, their homogeneous and alternative identity, their codes and rules. Therefore, if not well protected, they are threatened by extinction.
That’s one reading of this dispute, a proper one and I don’t disagree with my two former students in this regard – though a good discussion might have solved it in another way. Nevertheless, I want to look at this issue from another point of view.
Regarding the discussion we had, I merely wanted to point out that skating is an innovative movement, a group of people challenging the city as it was conceived by its architects. When the philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote his key work The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, he was embraced by surfers who recognized his ‘living in the fold’ as their ‘surfing in the wave’, the fold of nature. Similar to my connection between skating and situationism it’s a clear example of the crossover. For the surfers the ideas of Deleuze enhanced their experience in ‘the tube’, rather than taking it down.
The crossover between theory and practice should be similar to the crossover in music styles, or the crossover between hip hop music, graffiti and break-dance, or the crossover between philosophy and surfing mentioned above. It leads to differentiation and by opening up one expression for the other, crossover becomes a tool for innovation and empowerment. Instead of an antagonistic relation in which theory colonizes territories, I’d rather see it as a collaboration aiming at opening up new territories.
Jeanne van Heeswijk – De strip
This can be witnessed strongly in the way urban counter cultures, such as skating, created an anarchistic model of living in the city and inspired all kinds of alternative expressions. It can traced back to the trend of galleries squatting abandoned buildings, artists acting out interventions in public space, rather than making commissioned works, temporary appropriation of abandoned patches of land for leisure activities, community practice in art and architecture, which develops alternative strategies for the redevelopment of neighbourhoods, political stencil art, recycling of buildings, places and materials, etc.
It’s just one line of thought with regards to a benevolent exchange between theory and practice, but I think work needs to be done to close the gap!
Suzanne Lacy – The roof is on fire
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