PEOPLE OF INTENSITY PEOPLE OF POWER / LES READYMADES APPARTIENNENT À TOUT LE MONDE©

It was in the early 1970s that – for the first time ever, to my knowledge – executives (in the advertising industry, of course) hired artists for the specific task of interfering with business as usual. In the 1970s, Henning Brandis, a young man with a background in the Fluxus network, was hired at the advertising firm GGK Düsseldorf, where his job was to think up little assaults on the safety and continuity of everyday company operations. One morning, for instance, three creative directors found their desks nailed, legs up, to the ceiling. Everything that had been on the desks had been glued to them and covered, Daniel Spoerri–style, with a layer of white paint. Or there would be surprising noises, abused furniture, adolescent pranks, pointless assignments, and other critiques of conformist work, ranging in intellectual quality from class clown to Joseph Beuys. Around the same time, the owner of März publishers, Jörg Schröder, had founded the advertising agency Bismarc Media, whose employees were told to produce nothing, and, when they couldn’t bear producing nothing, observe each other laboring under the pointless compulsion to be productive. A general manager was appointed whose task was to undermine any possible output.

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[T]he phenomenon we are interested in here is this: a society in which intention and focus are on top and intensity and wastefulness are at the bottom – also existing, perhaps, on the romantic margins of leisure, of bohemianism and puberty – is being reshuffled into a society where all these relations are reversed. And if we accept that this is a social fact, we can describe this development in terms of a larger diagnosis of the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, from a society of discipline to one of control, as the victory of artistic critique as described by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, or in terms of the much-touted ideas of the artist as entrepreneur and of the creative cities in which the creative class allegedly leads a life that is as creatively intense as it is economically productive and successful.

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If we hold on to this distribution of pairs of opposites, however, something else emerges: on the one side, we find the description of work, at least in the conventional sense; on the other, that of leisure. Intensity and wastefulness, at least at first glance, obey extra-economic, if not counter-economic, principles. Someone who is wasteful neither saves nor invests; he or she does not speculate, does not even submit to the ritual calculation of the potlatch and its indirect benefits. Wastefulness is the opposite of husbandry. Intensity enjoys potential and irresponsibility: whatever happens, we do not put it in the biographical piggybank of subjectivity, heaping up experiences; nor does it even need to happen at all – it may well remain a dream. 

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Within this model, the subjectivation of the self seizes, time and again, precisely on those vestiges of the structure that shaped them as objective social relations just before they were fed into the illusion of omnipotence harbored by the outsourced subject of the post-Fordist economy. But this model also reveals a subject within the subject, a highly self-possessed and possessing subject that can triumph in the victories of the person who has to survive all of this in addition to his or her defeats. This subject is strong, harboring no illusions, and is a master that constantly dissociates from its own loserish qualities, either kicking them when they’re down or flirting with them, tender and bored. The sentences that start with “I’m the kind of person who…” allow for both.

Diedrich Diederichsen / http://www.e-flux.com/journal/people-of-intensity-people-of-power-the-nietzsche-economy/ 

Images : Hobby Pop Museum 

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  Au MAMCO de Genève est installé (et parfois montré) ce qui se caractérise comme un stockage : celui de l’agence Les readymades appartiennent à tout le monde©, ouverte à New York en 1987 et fermée en 1993 . « Je suis parti d’une fiction pour produire quelque chose qui s’inscrit véritablement dans la réalité », dit l’agence. Créée par Philippe Thomas, elle propose à des « personnages », terme volontairement ambigu, d’entrer dans l’histoire de l’art, via sa bibliothèque — ses catalogues, ses listes, ses registres. Bref, de proposer l’archivage de l’œuvre avant son existence, comme le réel enjeu de la transaction. Les « clients » de l’agence, alors, payent leur signature et avec elle, leur droit d’entrée, dans un petit théâtre où figurent collectionneurs, commissaires, critiques, historiens d’art ou journalistes. Ce petit théâtre n’apparaît pas comme tel, mais à l’image bureaucratique de l’entreprise gestionnaire et de ses images dont Philippe Thomas a imaginé toutes les retombées fictionnelles. 

        Cette entreprise ne s’est pas cependant limitée à produire des œuvres dont la particularité tient au fait que leur première cession s’accompagne de l’attribution de leur signature à l’acquéreur — une procédure s’inspirant de celle, très usitée dans la fiction littéraire et qui consiste, pour le romancier, à prêter des propos, des pensées ou même des œuvres entières à ses personnages. Inéluctable développement de la logique interne du travail de l’agence, elle passe, en 1991, de l’attribution d’une œuvre singulière à celle de toute une exposition. Citant un titre de Nabokov, Feux pâles au CAPC de Bordeaux, permet de ré-envisager l’intégralité de l’histoire du musée occidental, allant jusqu’à lui associer diverses œuvres d’artistes inconnus – clients de l’agence – accrochées, avec la bénédiction de l’institution signataire. Comme le signale Patricia Falguières, il s’agit non d’un retrait physique mais d’un véritable ré-investissement de l’exposition. Une exposition où ne s’opposerait plus le verbal et le visuel, le livre et le lieu. C’est ainsi, finalement, que le stock, le stockage, l’archivage, les « planning boards » les cartes postales deviennent le Cabinet d’Amateur de l’esthétique de la production. 

Elisabeth Lebovici + Caroline Bourgeois / L'argent au plateau / http://www.artsetsocietes.org/f/f-lebovicibourgeois.html

Images: Philippe Thomas, Les ready-made appartiennent à tout le monde® ; Autoportrait de Groupe / copyright succession Philippe Thomas / MAMCO Genève.

CYNTHIA_ITS_ME_IN_THE_BATHROOM_ ALWAYS_LOOKING_FOR_MAGIC

Shana Moulton, Every Angle is an Angel 

@ Palais de Tokyo until 11.09.2016

"My entire practise is a form of consumption. I hit my stride as soon as I realized that shopping, home decorating, and all of the television and video games I'd consumed as a child could be a source of inspiration rather than something to disown."

"always looking out for magic, it's a way to escape from banality."

"Cynthia, it's me in the bathroom; it's me worried about ageing; it's me looking at a beauty magazine. Getting into this character is just getting into me."

loving contorsions

HTRK - Love is Distraction

Shigeko Kubota, Vagina Painting, 1965, performed at the Perpetual Fluxus Festival in New York

Temperance in Séjour de deuil pour le trepas de Messire Philippes de Commines (hs. 76 E 13, fol. 8r), 1512, tempera and gold leaf on parchment.  The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek

Yasumasa Morimura, Daughter of Art History- Theatre B, 1990.

to render, say, out of sight out of mind as invisible lunatic

excerpt from Employment for the Castes in Abeyance

I was a translator at the Institute:
fair pay, clean work, and a bowerbird's delight
of theory and fact to keep the forebrain supple.

I was Western Europe. Beiträge, reviste,
dissertaties, rapports turned English under my
one-fingered touch. Teacup-and-Remington days.

//

The trade was uneasy about computers, back then:
if they could be taught not to render, say, out of sight
out of mind as invisible lunatic

they might supersede us - not
because they'd be better. More on principle.
Not that our researchers were unkindly folk:

one man on exchange from Akademgorod
told me about Earth's crustal plates, their ponderous
inevitable motion, collisions that raised mountain chains,

the continents rode on these Marxian turtles, it seemed;
another had brought slow death to a billion rabbits,
a third team had bottled the essence of rain on dry ground.

They were translators, too, our scientists:
they were translating the universe into science,
believing that otherwise it had no meaning.

//

Les Murray's Employment for the Castes in Abeyance and Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia, featuring a Piero della Francesca in the chapel where the Italian cult of the Virgin is ritualised; miraculous birds fly out of the Madonna as a woman prays for a child. The Madonna is a protector of women and symbol of childbirth, and although she doesn't feature heavily in the bible, over time, especially over the late middle ages and early Renaissance, she has become an equal figure to Christ himself, and most prominently in Italy. The film is about a writer who is as unsure about the modern age as the poet in Employment; he befriends a mad man convinced that 1 + 1 does not equal 2 but a more comprehensive 1, and that he must wade through a steam pool with a lit candle in order to save the world. Gorchakov begins to dissolve into a transferred madness, exacerbating his alienation from the modern world; fusing his wife, the Madonna, and his interpretor; and attempting to fulfil the madman's vital task.

treasures from the palais de tokyo book fair

Asiatische Adlernase; Thomas Jeppe / Edition Taube

BALDISCHWYLER – But you know this quote from Plato, where he is comparing the artist to someone who is building a table? 

BARON – Maybe in Plato's time, it was easier to do something like this. Art now is different. I had the impression, especially in conceptual art, that so many charlatans are on the road with no ideas about what they are doing, but they try to give their work a very complicated and super intellectual look. And then you have along with it the word Adorno or something, and you think "Okay, maybe I don't understand it but it must be something serious." For me it got so confused in the end that it was not easy to say whether something was good or bad art.

BALDISCHWYLER – The effect is that there is no good or bad art.

BARON – No, it's not always possible to say. I believe in art still of course, but for me tea was a kind of relaxing idea of understanding things. To see this leaf here, and to have it in your hand, you can really feel it. A good high mountain tea, it's not falling apart so fast. If it's very bad, the structure is very thin, and normally it breaks very easily. In art, it's not so simple. 

Several Clouds Colliding; Brian Catling / Iain Sinclair, Swedenborg Archive / Book Works.

Eyes No Eyes
Iain Sinclair

Werner Herzog, at a loose end in San Francisco, breathless from the absent hospitality of his patron, Francis Ford Coppola, and suffering from malarial tremors, fever dreams of encroaching jungle, took himself to the rock bastion of San Quentin. He was soothed, as he noted in his journal, by the 'linden-green' walls of the gas chamber, where so many famous scenes of True Crime newsreels played out their final scenes, eroticised and dissolved by the grudging inevitability of an antiquated chemistry. Gross intimacies are witnessed by implicated voyeurs who cloud a studded porthole with the breath of fear. We have the censored gaze. And colour going out of the eyes like airmail letters sent from secure wards to dead presidents. We have a complex and shocking exchange in real time. The serpentine hiss of pellets falling towards, but never achieving, a red fire bucket. Last words mimed for a disconnected microphone.

//

Tea. Hills and mounds of drying leaves. Terraces and paddies of south London suburbia. An empire of crescents and fishbone tributaries branching and rebranching in dying winter sunlight. Denmark Hill and Forest Hill. Dulwich and Peckham Rye. Ceylon and Assam. Verandahs. Conservatories. Post-colonial villas. Frederick John Horniman. His illegitimate bounty sold in tins and packets. 'Pure and delicious.' His neighbour traded in whale oil, boiling blubber in reeking vats on Bugsby's Marshes, and used the profit to commission whaling-voyage art by JMW Turner. There was a thirst for bones, for carvings, feathers, Day of the Dead vodun wax and tin. Fortunes measured in salvage, in sacks of tribal fetishes, mummy cases, torture chairs of the Spanish Inquisition reassembled in Whitechapel smithies. A slogan for the times, for the trade: 'A Right Royal Drink!' Coded for initiates. A secret embossed for the verminous multitudes, the bankers' clerks and remittance men of Carshalton and Upper Norwood. Royal rite. Inebriated princelings. Rituals of the the Royal Arch. Tea and sympathy. Annie Horniman appoints Mathers to curate her father's cabinet of curiosities, the madness that overwhelms the family home, Surrey House, forcing them to relocate. Closed down, shuttered, demolished. The museum on the hill: its mural like the screen of a cod-Egyptian cinema, its succulent curves and pillars. A blunt tower carved out of buttermilk.

Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie; Stewart Home, Semina No. 7, Book Works

One of the funniest, sharpest satires I have read this year; dripping with all sorts of great stuff. Home homes in on, as it were, email spam for bigger, better, more satisfying Nigerian money scams and female artists, with the usual dose of soft core and razoring wit.

After Death: The Artist

I. Make Kara Walker Tremble with Desire for your Huge New Penis! 

You know very little about the philosophical sources from which aesthetic theory was constructed. Instead you approach most topics from the perspective of Freud and diagnosis. You decide that Abstract Literature is a product of the subconscious and therefore can't be precisely defined... You don't know that you are already falling behind positions articulated nearly a hundred years ago by the Surrealists.

You imagine the Abstract Literature Manifesto you are attempting to write being played in the key of G major, and you attempt to visualise it as deep space; black with flashes of darker blackness. Your text is pornographic, its obscenity lies in the fact that it can't be imagined, it can only be experienced in its totality as a concrete form. Blackness. The void. too many light-years between stars.

You try to think yourself into a state of suspended animation. You worship waste and claim to be drawing on Bataille's theory of solar economics. If nature abhors a vacuum then nature itself must be a social construction, there is nothing at all in deep space. You want to add some colour to your text... Space is deep.

You've ended up mirroring the slow drift of an ice floe, the imperceptible passage of distant galaxies through hyper-space. At this point your words in their opaque nothingness literally become 'the ill-will of the people', the spongy referent that animates all post-democratic societies. The cold of interstellar space thousands of degrees below freezing. Abstract Literature: A New Movement in the Visual Arts!

Non-Euclidean geometries. Voices green, purple and red. Strange folds in the fabric of time and space. The universe buckled, bent and sent into reverse. Apocalypse postponed, time running backwards and in slow-mo. Your words have developed an intolerance to alcohol. They are overwhelmed by feelings of existential dread and can't bear to be separated from each other. They've arranged themselves into a single extended sentence from some eldritch dimension unknown to man, a slow stuttering echo of Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end of Ulysses.

Kahu, Mount Aspiring, New Zealand, 2009; Daniel Gustav Cramer, Berlin, 2010

Tales 01, Zeinigen, Switzerland, June 2008; Daniel Gustav Cramer, 2011.

These are small, adcinematic (neologistically ad 'toward, motion to, reduce to, change into' + cinema) photographic series composed of around 7 or 8 shots in sequence. I fell into them immediately, for their simplicity and their striking arousal of definite feelings; 'Ah,' I thought, 'yes, I've got it,' though you're not sure precisely what you have. Maybe a narrative, an echo of your own experiences, or the familiar desire to source mystery in other people, in looking at nuns and wondering, 'where are they going? Is the world sinister or sane?' They give away nothing, ask nothing, and so are replete with potential.

Georges Hugnet & the Love Life of the Spumifers

Georges Hugnet was a lesser-known Surrealist, publisher, and illustrator, who was heavily involved in underground resistance publishing in German-occupied France. He published one of the first histories of Dada in 1924, which was noticed by André Breton - Hugnet joined the Surrealists in 1932. La Vie Amoureuses des Spumifères, a series of overpainted postcards, was published as a book in 2010.

more, hither, hither, and hither>>

Japanese collective, Dumb Type

 Dumb Type on Pleasure Life - "technology has in many ways created a network covering the globe, making the world smaller, and sending information tens of thousands of miles, from point A to point B, in just a few seconds. In reality, however, when we try to communicate, for example, the few words 'I love you,' just these words, we are forced to realise the vast distances that lie between us."

Pleasure Life was an ordered enterprise, and hi-tech. A performer throws away a banana and a robotic tractor whirrs out and cleans it up. There is no surprise, spontaneity, or ambiguity, and the natural landscape comes wrapped in the glass and plastic of television sets.

pH looks at the rise of Japanese information and consumer culture. Furuhashi - "pH is a science term and pH7 is the centre, where things are balanced. It's like heaven, limbo and hell. Japanese society now, especially Tokyo, is like limbo. People think it's heaven but it's not. It's really destructive."

Yekaterina Samutsevich's closing statement... Pussy Riot & Putin

In the closing statement, the defendant is expected to repent, express regret for their deeds or enumerate attenuating circumstances. In my case, as in the case of my colleagues in the group, this is completely unnecessary. Instead, I want to voice my thoughts about the reasons behind what has happened to us.

That Christ the Savior Cathedral had become a significant symbol in the political strategy of the authorities was clear to many thinking people when Vladimir Putin’s former [KGB] colleague Kirill Gundyayev took over as leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. After this happened, Christ the Savior Cathedral began to be openly used as a flashy backdrop for the politics of the security forces, which are the main source of power [in Russia].

Why did Putin feel the need to exploit the Orthodox religion and its aesthetic? After all, he could have employed his own, far more secular tools of power—for example, the state-controlled corporations, or his menacing police system, or his obedient judiciary system. It may be that the harsh, failed policies of Putin’s government, the incident with the submarine Kursk, bombings of civilians in broad daylight, and other unpleasant moments in his political career forced him to ponder the fact that it was high time to resign; that otherwise, the citizens of Russia would help him do this. Apparently, it was then that he felt the need for more persuasive, transcendental guarantees of his long tenure at the pinnacle of power. It was then that it became necessary to make use of the aesthetic of the Orthodox religion, which is historically associated with the heyday of Imperial Russia, where power came not from earthly manifestations such as democratic elections and civil society, but from God Himself.

How did he succeed in doing this? After all, we still have a secular state, and any intersection of the religious and political spheres should be dealt with severely by our vigilant and critically minded society, shouldn’t it? Here, apparently, the authorities took advantage of a certain deficit of the Orthodox aesthetic in Soviet times, when the Orthodox religion had an aura of lost history, of something that had been crushed and damaged by the Soviet totalitarian regime, and was thus an opposition culture. The authorities decided to appropriate this historical effect of loss and present a new political project to restore Russia’s lost spiritual values, a project that has little to do with a genuine concern for the preservation of Russian Orthodoxy’s history and culture.

It was also fairly logical that the Russian Orthodox Church, given its long mystical ties to power, emerged as the project’s principal exponent in the media. It was decided that, unlike in the Soviet era, when the church opposed, above all, the brutality of the authorities towards history itself, the Russian Orthodox Church should now confront all pernicious manifestations of contemporary mass culture with its concept of diversity and tolerance.

Implementing this thoroughly interesting political project has required considerable quantities of professional lighting and video equipment, air time on national TV channels for hours-long live broadcasts, and numerous background shoots for morally and ethically edifying news stories, where the Patriarch’s well-constructed speeches would in fact be presented, thus helping the faithful make the correct political choice during the difficult time for Putin preceding the election. Moreover, the filming must be continuous; the necessary images must be burned into the memory and constantly updated; they must create the impression of something natural, constant and compulsory.

Our sudden musical appearance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior with the song “Mother of God, Drive Putin Out” violated the integrity of the media image that the authorities had spent such a long time generating and maintaining, and revealed its falsity. In our performance we dared, without the Patriarch’s blessing, to unite the visual imagery of Orthodox culture and that of protest culture, thus suggesting to smart people that Orthodox culture belongs not only to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Patriarch and Putin, that it could also ally itself with civic rebellion and the spirit of protest in Russia.

Perhaps the unpleasant, far-reaching effect from our media intrusion into the cathedral was a surprise to the authorities themselves. At first, they tried to present our performance as a prank pulled by heartless, militant atheists. This was a serious blunder on their part, because by then we were already known as an anti-Putin feminist punk band that carried out their media assaults on the country’s major political symbols.

In the end, considering all the irreversible political and symbolic losses caused by our innocent creativity, the authorities decided to protect the public from us and our nonconformist thinking. Thus ended our complicated punk adventure in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.

I now have mixed feelings about this trial. On the one hand, we expect a guilty verdict. Compared to the judicial machine, we are nobodies, and we have lost. On the other hand, we have won. The whole world now sees that the criminal case against us has been fabricated. The system cannot conceal the repressive nature of this trial. Once again, the world sees Russia differently from the way Putin tries to present it at his daily international meetings. Clearly, none of the steps Putin promised to take toward instituting the rule of law have been taken. And his statement that this court will be objective and hand down a fair verdict is yet another deception of the entire country and the international community. That is all. Thank you.

Camp Fire Grlz Rule!

++ the graphics are ++++

Bubbles, foam... Peter Sloterdijk and atmospheres

Sloterdijk's magnum opus, a three part work of which the first is Bubbles; Spheres I, is as humble in its task as it is groundbreaking; "even to speak of gaining access is misleading, for the discovery of the spheric is less a matter of access than of a slowed-down circumspection amid the most obvious." Perhaps the all-encompassing extendo-addendum to Heidegger's Being and Time, Sloterdijk uses a theory of spheres as a morphological tool for grasping the exodus of the human being from its primitive isolated bubble to our contemporary existence as unroundable foams. The book speaks volumes in spheres, bubbles, orbs, foams, heaps, sponges, clouds, and vortices. This is so ®å∂îçå¬. I haven't read something this good since Serres.

Enjoy an extract from Spheres I explaining its III:

"The third book will address the modern catastrophe of the round world. Using morphological terms, it will describe the rise of an age in which the form of the whole can no longer be imagined in terms of imperial panoramas and circular panopticons. From a morphological perspective, modernity appears primarily as a form-revolutionary process.

… our spherological approach supplies the means to characterise the catastrophes of world form in modernity - that is, terrestrial and virtual globalisation - in terms of non-round sphere formations. This contradictio in adiecto mirrors the formal dilemma of current contemporary state of the world, in which global markets and media have ignited an acute world war of ways of life and informational commodities. When everything has become the centre, there is no longer any valid centre… The guiding morphological principles of the polyspheric world we inhabit is no longer the orb, but rather foam.

The structural implication of the current earth-encompassing network - with all its eversions into the virtual realm - is thus not so much a globalisation as a foaming. In foam worlds, the individual bubbles are not absorbed into a single integrative hyper-orb, as in the metaphysical conniption of the world, but rather drawn together to form irregular hills.

Referring to a pathology of spheres displays a threefold focus: a politicological one, in so far as foams tend to be ungovernable structures with an inclination towards morphological anarchy; a cognitive one, in so far as the individuals and associations of subjects can no longer produce any complete world, as the idea of the whole world itself, in its characteristic holistic emphasis, unmistakably belongs to the expired age of metaphysical total-inclusion-circles, or monospheres; and a psychological one, in so far as single individuals in foams tend to lose the power to form mental-emotional spaces, and shrink to isolated depressive points transplanted into random surrounds (correctly referred to systematically as their environment). They suffer from the immunodeficiency caused by the deterioration of solidarities - to say nothing, for the moment, of the new immunisations acquired through participation in regenerated sphere creations. For sphere-deficient private persons, their lifespan becomes a sentence of solitary confinement; egos that are extensionless, scarcely active and lacking in participation stare out through the media window into moving landscapes of images. It is typical of the acute mass cultures that the moving images have become far livelier than most of their observers: a reproduction of animism in step with modernity.

With this neither gay nor sad science of foams, the third book of Spheres presents a theory of the current age whose main tenor is that reanimation has an insurmountable lead over reanimation. It is the inanimable outside that gives food for thought in intrinsically modern times. This conclusion will inevitably drive the nostalgic yearning for a conception of the world, which still aims for a liveable whole in the education-holistic sense, into resignation. For whatever asserts itself as the inner realm, it is increasingly exposed as the inner side of an outside. No happiness is safe from endoscopy; every blissful, intimate, vibrating cell is surrounded by swarms of professional disillusions, and we drift among them - thought paparazzi, deconstructionists, interior deniers and cognitive scientists, accomplices in an unlimited plundering of Lethe.
… The world, it seems, has grown much too large for people of an older type, who strove for true community with things both near and far. "

Turbo Sculpture & Aleksandra Domanović at [space] studios, London

"The Political and economic turmoil of the early 1990s Yugoslavia rendered the society compliant enough for the concept of ‘turbo culture’ to gain momentum. With all its exaggerations, inordinateness and random amalgamations of both local and global ornamentation, turbo eventually became a prefix for social and media phenomena of the war and post-war period. As a result terms such as turbo politics, turbo television, turbo architecture and turbo urbanism developed…"

- Excerpt from Turbo Sculpture, 18:29 minutes @ [space] studios, London.

‘Turbo sculpture’ is an epiphenomenon of turbo culture. It refers to the depiction of popular non-national media celebrities in public sculpture projects across the former Yugoslavian nations. In recent years turbo sculpture monuments of Bruce Lee (Mostar, 2005), Rocky Balboa (Žitište, 2007), Johnny Weissmuller / Tarzan (Međa, 2007), Bob Marley (Banatski Sokolac, 2007) and Tupac Shakur (Belgrade, forthcoming) have been unveiled.

Aleksandra Domanović's recent work deals with a spate of monuments, built within former Yugoslavia, which betray a fascination with Western pop-culture both lurid and banal. It is exactly this blonde n' beige on hot pink aesthetic that frames Domanović's video work, which wittingly pairs cheap computer graphics with smooth, astute commentary on the dilemmas of choosing new role models, the historicisation of political tensions, and earnest kitsch. 

Check it out at [space], 129-131 Mare street, Hackney. They are also showing a great retrospective of photographer Jo Spence, as well as a video of the Wim T. Schipper's fluxus style play, Going to the Dogs. 

Turbo Sculpture 2012 from A.D. on Vimeo.

when the woman came into the room... Judith, Brecht, Caravaggio

Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes, 1598-99

They won't say: when the walnut tree shook in the wind

But: when the house painter crushed the workers.

They won't say: when the child skimmed a flat stone across the rapids

But: when the great wars were being prepared for.

They won't say: when the woman came into the room

But: when the great powers joined forces against the workers.

However, they won't say: the times were dark

Rather: why were their poets silent?




What kinds of times are they, when
A talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?

Bertolt Brecht