In a letter dated 18 March 2009, the [an agency of the City] of Venice announced the refusal of the project 100 Sexes d'Artistes by Jacques Charlier (which should have officially represented the French-Speaking Community of Belgium in the present Biennale) because "certain posters could offend the shared sense of public decency."
On 14 April1, we sent you a letter (in Italian) in which we posed the following questions:
could you tell us where the "shared sense of public decency" begins and ends by indicating which of the 100 posters might be considered offensive?
is the "shared sense of public decency" so fragile in Venice that it cannot tolerate the presence of a few posters dispersed around the city? And, in addition, are the same criteria applied to advertising, which is more invasive and sexist?
finally, who decides what constitutes the "shared sense of public decency"?
We have received no reply as yet.
You may be aware that the project censored by the Biennale and by the City of Venice has since been presented in public space in nine European cities (Antwerp, Belgrade, Bergen, Brussels, Linz, Luxembourg, Metz, Namur and Sofia) where it was welcomed with the good humour appropriate to this project . . . .
However, thanks to the unconditional support of the Ministry of Culture and Broadcasting of the French-Speaking Community of Belgium and Wallonie-Bruxelles International, we are going to publish a book relating the incredible story of this double censorship.
* * * * * . . . we would be very happy to be able to include your answers in this publication . . .
Your virtual "Grand Tour" starts here. Sincere apologies for the deficiencies in my photography (conditions were less than ideal) and for the lack of title and artist info in some instances (I didn't quite realize I was doing this 'til the trip was over).
Venice was sunny and suffocatingly hot; Kassel, rainy and cold, with exhibitions too darkly lit not to credit its curator with having intended the eyestrain. Appropriately, since many artists seem more or less urgently involved in dealing with what certainly seem to me to be our dark days (though I'm disappointed to realize I can't read too much into U.S. pavilion artist Félix González-Torres' selection of black candy, since he's dead).
Additional trends:
Tech-based art is getting the love, and much of the more interesting painting is clearly influenced by tech.
Charting, mapping, and architecturally-influenced drawing continue to offer possibilities, if not quite the import of Mark Lombardi's.
Conceptual art, which I like, was well-represented, but it can make for a dry exhibition experience, except when interactive.
Feminism is back, thank goddess. Perhaps because of that, or the aging of the Boomers, so are images of older women's bodies. I've seen enough of Tony Soprano to consider this overdue.
An awareness of multiply-layered referentiality remains supremely useful.
Minimalism lingers but drew little attention. And there's still some not-really-so-interesting video out there. Sorry; I'm just frustrated at what strikes me as more-or-less benighted under-utilization of a medium having the potential for maximal meaning and impact.
Of the work I saw (and I did miss some), a few pieces I especially loved (although there were many other wonderful works):
In Venice, Yves Netzhammer's video installation in the Swiss Pavilion – for me, a total knock-out (starting here); the three-channel video installation by the collective, AES+F, in the Russian Pavilion (starting here); Hyung Koo Lee's video and installation, The Homo Species, in a pavilion near the Russian pavilion (starting here); Joshua Mosley's video, Dread, in the Italian pavilion (starting here), in which the gray, digital claymation philosophers Pascal and Rousseau encounter an oversized dog; Philippe Parreno's video, I think in the Arsenale, The Writer (here); and a video in the Arsenale involving deliciously snarky, naked older women on a VW bus (sorry, thought I shot some video but I either hit the wrong button or somehow lost it).
Also, do not miss the Matthew Barney/Joseph Beuys exhibit at Peggy Guggenheim; it included lots of important videos and sculpture I'd never seen before and strikingly illuminates the relationship between the work of the two.
In Kassel, the replacement of the grass in the square in front of the Museum Fridericianum with weeds, here; a body of work called Virus that grips me more viscerally than intellectually, but I like it, starting here; a piece that looks like neon lettering but which is actually some kind of wrought element glowing merely with extreme heat, which says, "Wir suchen uberall das unbedingte und finden immer nur dinge," which I think means something like, "We seek above all the unconditional and ever find only what's for hire" (here; corrections welcome); Zofia Kulik's re-photographed photo collages in Kassel, starting here; Andrei Monastyrski's Goethe (I don't want to spoil the surprise, but do interact, and look for the other part).
In Münster I think my favorite was a field of miniatures starting here – my photos don't do it justice; it contained miniatures of sculptures by over a dozen artists from Paik to Serra and beyond. Unfortunately, we missed several sculptures, including Mike Kelly's Petting Zoo featuring Lot's rock-salt wife.
Martha Rosler had important work in both Kassel and Münster (unfortunately also not done justice in my pics).
Practical tips:
Re- Venice: Bring a fan (seriously). And note, the Arsenale offers all five parts of Yang Fudong's Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest, but they run between a half-hour and an hour apiece; I discovered them too late to watch them all.
Re- Kassel: Bring a flashlight (semi-seriously). And check out the documenta evening film series; they're showing great stuff, and a lot of it's in English.
Re- Münster: Go first to an office for the Sculpture Project for their map; the one our hotel gave us wasn’t as good. You might also want to flip through the official short guide before setting out, because some of the sculptures are not so easy to identify; we found ourselves wondering if every odd object we encountered was supposed to be a sculpture (a great way to go through life, of course) — there are old sculptures from previous exhibitions as well as the new ones. And some benefit from a bit of explanation — e.g., we found Martha Rosler's piece before we read the description, and had no idea that some of the objects were not just large bird cages but mimicked medieval cages in which corpses were displayed.
Finally, if you call ahead, you can get a custom tour of the sculpture show, walking or on bikes. It was €90 or so, so we skipped it, but it might be great if you can split the cost with a group.
I also took the opportunity to visit the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. It proved to be very large and apparently very well-funded, better adapted for technology-based work than most institutions; and on a per-square-foot basis, it may have provided the most exciting art. Two major shows, one entitled Between Two Deaths, "on the political, social, and cultural trend toward melancholic retrospection" (read more here), and the other, Thermocline of Art, an exhibition of work by more than 100 artists from ca. twenty Asian countries. Unfortunately, I'd allotted just one day here, so to my serious chagrin, I barely scraped the surface of the Asian show. Works I especially loved here included Sue de Beers' video installation, Black Sun (starting here) and Elín Hansdóttir's sound and sculpture installation, Drift,here; I also liked Aida Ruilova's Lulu,here, and I'm a fan of Ryan Trecartin's A Family Finds Entertainment, which they also had.
Karlsruhe is close to the border of France – not esp. convenient to anything I know of, other than the Moselle River valley, which was beautiful. We also stopped by the well-preserved, 850-year-old Burg Eltz while in the neighborhood (the castle pics included in my photos are not of Burg Eltz, however, but of Burg Metternich in Beilstein).
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For posts explaining why It's the Derivatives, Stupid (before Planet Money was talking about them), see hereand here; and if you'd like still more, click on the label at the bottom of one of those posts, "follow the money."
Note: I revise my posts. Revisions are made to add info or improve accuracy or allure. If you're interested in my not-best, the Wayback Machine may have preserved earlier versions, or you can e-mail me and I'll see what I've got. If you'd like to quote me, please check back for the most recent version.
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"Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works." – John Stuart Mill, before the Manchester Statistical Society, December 11, 1867, as quoted in "Financial Crises and Periods of Industrial and Commercial Depression," T.E. Burton (1902). ["Unproductive works": wars, credit derivatives, etc.]
"The most popular tulip species were scarce and demanded huge prices, peaking with the 'Semper Augustus', which was worth 5,000 Dutch Florins, the same price as a canal-side house in Amsterdam."
Re- this blog:
I mostly do this when I should probably be doing something else, so it's hit-and-miss. Please don't think anything of it if I don't cover your exhibition or issue.
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Coalition military deaths in Iraq since March, 2003: 4,766(as of April 22, 2011; click here to update). At least 467 contractors have also died, based on only partial information. Total U.S. military wounded as of as of January 14, 2010: 31,882.
Coalition military deaths in Afghanistan since October, 2001: 2,416 (as of April 22, 2011; click here to update.
Thoughts for the year or whatever, in no particular order:
What a huge debt this nation owes to its “troublemakers.” From Thomas Paine to Martin Luther King, Jr., they have forced us to focus on problems we would prefer to downplay or ignore. Yet it is often only with hindsight that we can distinguish those troublemakers who brought us to our senses from those who were simply troublemakers. Prudence, and respect for the constitutional rights to free speech and free association, therefore dictate that the legal system cut all non-violent protesters a fair amount of slack. – Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Papineau v. Parmley, 465 F.3d 46 (2d Cir. 2006).
I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half. – Jason "Jay" Gould, per Philip Sheldon Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States Vol. 2: From the Founding of the A. F. of L. to the Emergence of American Imperialism, P. 51 (1998, 2d ed.).
On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. – Stewart Brand to Steve Wozniak, at the first Hacker's Conference in 1984, per Roger Clarke.
A modern economic system demands mass production of students who are not educated and have been rendered incapable of thinking. – U.N.E.F. Strasbourg, On the Poverty of Student Life (1966).
A balance of power requires a balance of knowledge. – moi (pre- 2000).
. . . Napoleon . . . said that it wasn't necessary to completely suppress the news; it was sufficient to delay the news until it no longer mattered. – attributed by PRWatch to Martin A. Lee & Norman Solomon, Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1991), p. xvii.
The infowar is the new class war; and information is the new wealth. – moi (2010).
Nothing is inevitable, except defeat for those who give up without a fight. – "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" (1961), script by Irwin Allen & Charles Bennett.
Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? . . . But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. . . . All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. – Hermann Goering, per Nuremberg Diary (Farrar, Straus & Co 1947), by Gustave Gilbert
The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous. – George Orwell, 1984.
Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders . . . . and millions have been killed because of this obedience . . . . – Howard Zinn, Failure to Quit (South End Press, 2002; originally published 1993).
Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love. – Julian Assange, IQ.ORG, "Witnessing," Wed 03 Jan 2007.
I used to be concerned about this mass audience thing . . . not anymore. There are overlapping circles of activity and . . . . It doesn't matter what the volume is . . . These circles are not sealed off from each other, they affect each other. – Yvonne Rainer, in an interview by Lyn Blumenthal for "Women with a Past," Program Six from the series, What Does She Want (VHS 1987, Video Data Bank).
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.' – John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (1919).
In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. – James Madison, Independent Journal, Wednesday, February 6, 1788, The Federalist.
[W]e forgot that the question is NOT, how do we get good people into power. The question is, how do we limit the damage the powerful can do to us? – Chris Hedges, "The Failure of the Liberal Class in the United States," address to the Poverty Scholars Program, April 10, 2010.
They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. – Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1977).
In all history, there is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. – Sun Tzu, The Art of War, ca. 500 B.C.
The opposite of good is not evil; it's apathy. – Cindy Sheehan in her speech to the Veterans for Peace on August 5, 2005, just before she began her first vigil outside of Pres. G.W. Bush's ranch in Crawford, TX; see vimeo; see also HuffPo.
One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail. One beats and beats for that which one believes. That's what one wants to get near. Could it after all Be merely oneself, as superior as the ear To a crow's voice? – Wallace Stevens, The Man on the Dump(1923). It's class warfare, [and] my class is winning, but they shouldn't be. – Warren Buffet, CNN Interview, May 25 2005, suggesting we need to raise taxes on the rich. The past is never dead. It's not even past. – William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, Act I, scene iii (1951). Cui bono (To whose benefit)? – attributed by Marcus Tullius Ciceroto Lucius Cassius Longina Ravilla, ca. 125 B.C.
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it .– Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms, 2nd series (1848), Ch. 1 "Physiology of Plunder."
The higher the buildings, the lower the morals. – Noel Coward (1899-1973) (numerous sites attribute this to Coward, but I've found none that provides a more precise citation).
He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future. – George Orwell, 1984 (1949).
[Y]ou always have to ask yourself: Why do I get this specific information, in this specific form, at this specific moment? Ultimately, these are always questions about power. – Dr. Konrad Hummler, Swiss banking and media executive, interview 2011-07-11 retrieved 2021-08-15 from NZZ.
Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity. – attributed to Marshall McLuhan, http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/poster.html. "Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can't stop them from doing."
– Joseph Heller, Catch 22, Ch. 39, P. 407 (Simon & Schuster, 50th Anniversary Ed., 2011).
They'd rather some people die for your mistake, than that they lived, but that they lacked a leader.
It was too late to prevent the great Fall, but it was still possible, at least, to cut short the intermediate period of chaos. – Isaac Asimov, Second Foundation, P. 87 (ed. Bantam June, 2004; first published 1953). You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. – Abraham Lincoln (1805-1865). My heart rouses thinking to bring you news of something that concerns you and concerns many men. Look at what passes for the new. You will not find it there but in despised poems. It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. – William Carlos Williams, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" (1883-1963) (I don't own this and find no online source that mentions where it was published; pls help if you can). All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. – Edmund Burke (1729-1797; see link re- variants and possible misattribution).
I consider it completely unimportant who . . . will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this: who will count the votes, and how. – Joseph Stalin (1878-1953), per the Memoirs of Stalin's Secretary.
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.
HECATE: And you all know, security Is mortals' chiefest enemy. – W. Shakespeare, Macbeth(ca. 1606), Act II, scene v, MIT's Moby Ed.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. – Frederick Douglass, “West India Emancipation" speech, Aug. 3, 1857.
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. – Margaret Mead
The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall. – Che Guevara, Intercontinental Press (Vol. 3 January - April 1965); also in Che Guevara speaks: Selected Speeches and Writings (1967). The United States is the only nation in history to go from barbarism to decadence without any civilization in between. – Norman O. Brown, Closing Time (described as a graffito in Paris, May 1968; p. 29, ed. Vintage Books, 1974).
Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything; That's how the light gets in. – Leonard Cohen, "Anthem" (1997?)
Let’s do something, while we have the chance! It’s not every day that we are needed. . . . Let us make the most of it before it is too late! – Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1949).
If, one day, a people desires to live, then fate will answer their call. And their night will then begin to fade, and their chains break and fall. For he who is not embraced by a passion for life will dissipate into thin air,
* * * * * Then it was earth I questioned: “Mother, do you hate mankind?” And Earth responded: “I bless ambitious and aspiring souls, Who do not flinch at danger. I condemn those out of step with time, People content to live like stone." – “If the People Wanted Life One Day,” Abou-Al-kacem El-chebbi (also spelled other ways, such as Abu Al-Qasim Ash-Shabi), known as the "poet of the Tunisian Revolution." Hatred never ceases by hatred; But by love alone is healed. This is an ancient and eternal law. -- "Dhammapada," Ch. 1. theTwin Verses5, as quoted by Maha Ghosananda.
There is no responsibility, without freedom; No freedom, without power; No power, without knowledge; No knowledge, without love.
– moi (1976).
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias. – Oscar Wilde (1997). Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis, p. 1051, Wordsworth Editions.
. . . and in the morn I'll bring you to your ship and so to Naples, Where I have hope to see the nuptial Of these our dear-beloved solemnized; And thence retire me to my Milan, where Every third thought shall be my grave. – W. Shakespeare, The Tempest (ca. 1611), Act V, scene i, MIT's Moby Ed.
In a letter dated 18 March 2009, the [an agency of the City] of Venice announced the refusal of the project 100 Sexes d'Artistes by Jacques Charlier (which should have officially represented the French-Speaking Community of Belgium in the present Biennale) because "certain posters could offend the shared sense of public decency."
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