The Detroit Diary is here at last!
There’s going to be a launch of all this year’s DAI publications on Saturday July 3rd, at The Ateliers in Amsterdam.
‘PERFORMING REALITY’ Saturday 3 July 16.00 – 19.00
Exhibition Werkplaats Typografie, De Ateliers, Stadhouderskade 86, 1073 AT Amsterdam
BOOK LAUNCH
12 Artist’s books, 16.00
PUBLIC LECTURES, 17.00 Seth Siegelaub will speak about copyright and economic issues concerning independent radical publishing, including art books, based on his publishing experience with the Chilean book ‘How to Read Donald Duck’, the so-called ‘Xeroxbook’ and the ‘Artist’s Contract’. He will specifically address free access to information and the practical problems of distribution in a world of dominated by capitalist property values.
Daniel McClean will discuss copying in art, copyright law, and his role as both a curator and a lawyer, focusing on the tension between practices of copying in art and the constraints imposed upon these practices by copyright law. The recent project ‘Free Sol LeWitt’, which McClean co-curated with Superflex at the Van Abbemuseum questions models of authorship in art. He will also discuss important trials involving artists, including Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons.
Q&A with Seth Siegelaub, Daniel McClean, Delphine Bedel, James Goggin, Aernoud Bourdrez [Use-IP] & Yannick Bouillis [Shashin], 18.30
Drinks, 19.00
More info about the Publications Project, see DAI website
An evening of ideas, discussions, presentations and more, on the topic of, The breakdown of control and surveillance situations – Detroit, The Netherlands and Karachi for example. From the viewpoints of technology, art and self-organising.
On Thursday June 3rd 2010, OT301, Overtoom 301, Amsterdam, at 20.00u Rob van Kranenburg will discuss ‘The breakdown of control and surveillance situations, Police 3.0, the Facebook Generation and Garbage 3.0… What does
it mean?’ Suzanne Hogendoorn with a small presentation compiled around the mirror that the global south mega-cities hold up for us to imagine the future of our own mega-cities in terms of self-organisation. And Jimini Hignett with a presentation, centering around the abandoned police station in Detroit, from the angle of my ongoing theme of ‘How to make art when everything is fucked up?’
‘Click here for more details.‘
In Barcelona visiting my good friend Maribel Perpiñá. She has just published a great book – ‘Se Busca Curator’, an overview of the curatorial practice in contemporary art. Wrapped around the cover is a poster mapping the topography of verbs used to describe the activities and responsibilities of curatorsby 99 respondents to questionnaires.
Big thank-you to The Stokroos Foundation – they have agreed to support my upcoming publication, which means that the photographs can be printed in colour – hurrah!
ReadyMade Magazine published a piece about art in Detroit which includes photos of my work and of Tyree Gruyton’s Heidelberg project – entitled Hands Up For Detroit – I feel honoured to be sandwiched between him and old friend Philip Petit.
There’s actually a second version of the Speramus Meliora work on a house already claimed with one of Tyree’s famous painted polkadots. So it’s interesting that even without knowing the geographical link, the author has brought the work together here.
Also an interesting comment by Christian Ernsten on the piece on the DUEA-blog, questioning issues raised by the article.
Reading through this pile of books by Loïc Wacquant for the upcoming publication – I couldn’t help be reminded of Céline… here’s a quote – this is written in 1932:
“…We have got into the habit of admiring colossal bandits, whose opulence is revered by the entire world, yet whose existence, once we stop to examine it, proves to be one long crime repeated ad infinitum, but those same bandits are heaped with glory, honors, and power, their crimes are hallowed by the law of the land, whereas, as far back in history as the eye can see—and history, as you know is my business—everything conspires to show that a venial theft, especially of inglorious foodstuffs, such as bread crusts, ham, or cheese, unfailingly subjects its perpetrator to irreparable opprobrium, the categoric condemnation of the community, major punishment, automatic dishonor, and inexpiable shame, and this for two reasons, first because the perpetrator of such an offense is usually poor, which in itself connotes basic unworthiness, and secondly because his act implies, as it were, a tacit reproach to the community. A poor man’s theft is seen as a malicious attempt at individual redress . . . Where would we be? Note accordingly that in all countries the penalties for petty theft are extremely severe, not only as a means of defending society, but also as a stern admonition to the unfortunate to know their place, stick to their caste, and behave themselves, joyfully resigned to go on dying of hunger and misery down through the centuries forever and ever …”
Louis-Ferdinand Céline – ‘Journey to the End of the Night‘
Wednesday, May 26th (2010), in the Waag, Amsterdam, Rob van Kranenburg’s arranging an evening to juxtapose some stuff – probably bits of my abandoned police station, Detroit project, ‘Special Attention’ – Rob’s rant ‘The end of the Netherlands in twelve steps’ – and something to do with somewhere beginning with a ‘K’ in India (he told me but I can’t remember, sorry). Watch this space for more details!
Meantime here’s another Detroit snap, (read the small print…)
Just when I thought I’d found the perfect writer for my ‘Special Attention’ publication, there was an email from Michael Uwemedimo saying that he regretted having to cancel but that he was locked in a car-boot somewhere in England as part of a Hostile Environments Training which his subsidy-givers have insisted he take before returning to his filming in the depths of the Niger Delta and therefore wasn’t able to write… (Still, perhaps he will find a way to collaborate on the wider ‘Special Attention’ project when he’s escaped his kidnappers…)
Anyway, in my ensuing panic (the deadline is hurtling towards me at breakneck speed) I mailed the first names relating to the relevant topics that I could think of and, amazingly, Loïc Wacquant has offered to collaborate by allowing me to use texts excerpted from his writings (on incarceration, the penal state, race as a principle of social vision and division etc).
Plus today, Rob van Kranenburg is going to write a piece centred around the photos of the abandoned police station – incorporating his work on biometrics and his rant ‘The end of the Netherlands in twelve steps’.
So politically the project is in really good hands!
Now just need someone to write something relating to the art side of the project, but now I don’t need them to deal with the other socio-political issues that ought to work out. Meanwhile, big grin on my face about the way this is going, and I have to get back to reading my way through Loïc’s books…
Here’s a short clip from an ongoing project – the story of Adam and Eve, as told by my homeless collaborator, Barbara.
(It takes a minute or so to load, particularly if your computer is as turgid as mine!)
You can see the complete, 6minute film on the The Way It Is page.
Thinking about ‘tools’ which I use to work with, for the (Un)Solicited Advice brief – manifestaplatform, and notice embedded in this clip a number of key elements, perhaps not tools as such that I might apply them consciously, but things such as a sense of inclusion/ exclusion, feminism, humour, story-telling/language, which feed my work through a kind of informed intuition.
For more of Barbara see GODSEND
- John Berger enunciates the possibility for art to run
“like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life's brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts and honour.”
As an artist, I feel the need to offer resistance to ‘life’s brutalities’, and although ‘activist art’ is not a new phenomenon, there is something about the times we are living through whereby I feel that a certain urgency has made the combination art and activism more necessary.
