NEWSgrist - where spin is art
An e-zine covering the arts since 2000
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Vol.5, no.234
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read it on the blog:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com
Archives:
http://newsgrist.net
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Tuesday, November 02, 2004
The Military Vote: Meanwhile, Near Falluja…
read about how Marines are voting and how they feel:
via Kevin Sites:
Dispatch: Military Vote:
Military Vote: Where Do Frontline Marines Stand On the Eve of Election,
Battle?
Dateline: Near Falluja
Though many Marines here profess a deep interest in the outcome of the
U.S. presidential racemost don't have much time to pay close attention.
Nearby a squad from Weapons Company assembles and sites their 81mm mortar
tubes while the heavy "whoomp" retorts of a 50-caliber sniper rifle
pulsate across the firing range a thousand meters away. On the eve of the
U.S. election they are busy preparing for battle, perhaps the fiercest
they may experience in Iraqthe fight for Falluja.
The idea of quelling the symbolic heart of the insurgency prior to Iraq's
January elections has become somewhat of an obsession, both for the
interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and the Bush
Administration.
But the question that has echoed nearly as loudly as weapons fire
here"when will the offensive begin." The smart money answer, though still
not specific, has always been"after the U.S. Presidential elections," the
race too tight, the risk too great for President Bush to begin an attack,
which, with heavy collateral damage, could be bad p.r. regardless of the
outcome. […]
The military usually takes an active role in helping soldiers and marines
exercise their civic responsibilities when it comes to votingproviding
non-partisan political education classes on the candidates and assistance
in requesting absentee ballots for those deployed overseas.
But because of problems in getting mail to frontline units combined with
slow response from service member's home state there are still some
serious snafus.
Corporal Elton King, 25, of Battle Creek, Michigan requested an absentee
ballot two months ago. It arrived three days agotwo weeks past the final
deadline for mail in ballots.
"I'm very upset about it. This would've been by first year voting," says
King. "I would've voted for Kerry. I'm a die-hard Democrat and I don't
like Bush. In the four years he's been innothing he's promised has come
happened."
[…]
Tuesday, November 02, 2004 at 01:33 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/11/military_vote_a.html
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Bush's Cheating Heart
via Salon, thanks to we-make-money-not-art and Lessig blog:
NASA photo analyst: Bush wore a device during debate
Physicist says imaging techniques prove the president's bulge was not
caused by wrinkled clothing.
By Kevin Berger
Oct. 29, 2004 | George W. Bush tried to laugh off the bulge. "I don't know
what that is," he said on "Good Morning America" on Wednesday, referring
to the infamous protrusion beneath his jacket during the presidential
debates. "I'm embarrassed to say it's a poorly tailored shirt."
Dr. Robert M. Nelson, however, was not laughing. He knew the president was
not telling the truth. And Nelson is neither conspiracy theorist nor
midnight blogger. He's a senior research scientist for NASA and for
Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and an international authority on
image analysis. Currently he's engrossed in analyzing digital photos of
Saturn's moon Titan, determining its shape, whether it contains craters or
canyons. […]
Larry Lessig says:
When this story broke, my reaction was the same as Begalas on Crossfire:
There was no way that Bush cheated like this in the debates. And just
because Doonesbury believes it that doesnt make it true.
But now Salon says a NASA photo analyst has concluded that he did. I know
on the scale of things unnecessary war, torture, trillion dollar
deficits, the environment this sin is tiny. But is there anything more
pathetic than cheating in a debate? WBSH George radio man Bush. Powerful
and effective, so long as he keeps the channel in tune.
and furthermore:
"iDebate"
[image source: Bush's iBulge, via BoingBoing]
Tuesday, November 02, 2004 at 01:21 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/11/bushs_cheating_.html
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Jimmy Breslin Has the Last Word
[image source]
Jimmy Breslin (via Newsday):
I'm right - again. So I quit. Beautiful
One day last May, I assigned the election to John Kerry. I said it early,
and often. As I looked more, I saw that it shouldn't even be close. I said
that in this space more than once. Now I am so sure that I am not even
going to bother to watch the results tonight. I am going to bed early, for
I must rise in the darkness and pursue immediately an exciting, overdue
project.
Besides, if I was up, so many people, upon seeing every word I said of
this election coming true on television in front of them, would be kissing
my hands and embarrassing me with outlandish praise. So I go to bed with
total confidence. I will get up and stroll to other meadows. I invented
this column form. I now leave, but will return here for cameo appearances.
And I leave today as the only one in America who from the start was sure
John Kerry would win by a wide margin. Let me tell you why. […]
Tuesday, November 02, 2004 at 01:01 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/11/jimmy_breslin_h.html
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Artist Pension Trust: Masterplan Revisited
[David A. Ross, president, APT, 2004. Photo: Ashley Thayer]
Back in July we blogged about the new Artist Pension Trust. Here are a few
excerpts from the latest from ArtForum:
Art Appreciation: Alex Mar on the Artist Pension Trust:
THE ARTIST PENSION TRUST breezed onto the New York scene in May with a
master plan to rescue emerging artists from their time-honored plight of
lifelong destitution. A barter-based mutual fundthe first of its kindAPT
invests artworks rather than money: Artists sign on to contribute twenty
pieces over twenty years; works are sold as they appreciate; and profits
go toward building up a tax-deferred retirement trust. Under the
stewardship of David A. Ross, former director of the Whitney Museum of
American Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and with advice
and support from heavy hitters like Jeffrey Deitch and John Baldessari,
news of the fund sparked a buzz of excitement and quite a few questions:
Who are the unknowns bankrolling this venture? Where do the gallerists fit
in? And is it too good to be true?
With an international agenda and a separate fund of 250 artists for each
city included, APT aims to make a wide impact. New York and Los Angeles
are already in play, London and Berlin are set for early 2005, and plans
for Asia are in the works. "I think APT is going to be an activist
project, encouraging artists and arts professionals to consider how to
make this business more survivable," says curator Simon Watson, a member
of the committee to select artists in New York, which also includes
private dealer Clarissa Dalrymple.
[…]
Whether or not APT succeeds as a community or a business plan, what's the
argument for accepting the starving-artist stereotype? The heated debate
makes it clear that if Ross and company succeed, they may be opening the
door to a wave of similar self-sustaining initiatives aimed at eventually
improving artists' quality of life. "I had zero help when I started out,
and young artists need all the help they can get," says Baldessari, who
joined the APT advisory board after his financial consultants gave the
project the green light. "When you're young, you don't expect to sell
anything. In my first show I didn't have the money for the truck to move
the works to the gallery, so I gave a work to the gallerist for $50. Later
on she sold it for, I think, $275,000. You have to think down the line and
not just be grateful for anything you get."
Tuesday, November 02, 2004 at 12:39 PM in Benefits | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/11/_david_a_ross_p.html
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Tribute to Golub: "Painting condenses and fixes this human time of rushing
decades…"
[image: Leon Golub, 2002. Photo: Donald Lokuta; source]
via Artforum:
Gerold Marzorati on Leon Golub: Night Watchman
IT COULD BE SAID that the world caught up to Leon Golub last spring, just
months before he died from complications of surgery on August 8 at the age
of eighty-two. The images that emerged in April of what transpired when
darkness fell at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad horrified the world,
Golub included, no doubt, but they couldn't have taken him by surprise.
He'd already conjured them with paint, slowly teasing pictures of abuse,
torture, and degradation from his careful reading of progressive journals
and from photos that he clipped from S/M magazines and, ultimately, from
the deeper recesses of his psyche, where it always seemed to be 3 AM […]
"In a sense I began to see myself as a reporter," he told me. What he
meant was that from that point on, his paintings not only existed in
relation to other paintings, but "they also existed with news stories,
reports about human-rights abuses, things of this kind." With the modest
portraits of political leaders and the monumental paintings of political
thugs that followed, Golub now saw himself as a painter bearing witness,
someone making paintings, as he put it, that say, "That's how it was."
Do we need paintings to do this work? Can't the human-rights reportsand,
now, the digital photos snapped at Abu Ghraibdo the job? Czeslaw Milosz,
the epical poet and witness bearer, whose death at ninety-three came a
week after Golub's, weighed this question some years ago as he walked
through the galleries of the Muse d'Orsay. Later he would write in his
diary an observation that makes the clearest, simplest case for the
painter's work and, I tend to think, for the work that Golub turned to in
midlife and made his own: "Painting condenses and fixes this human time of
rushing decades that is otherwise evasive, untouchable." Daringly,
carefully, and rather beautifully, as odd as that may seem, Golub fixed on
coarse canvas the worst we are capable of. His focusso much his ownwill be
very much missed. And, it would seem, we won't soon have the comfort of
calling his paintings dated. […]
Gerald Marzorati is the editor of the New York Times Magazine. His book
about Leon Golub, A Painter of Darkness, was published in 1990 (Penquin
USA).
Tuesday, November 02, 2004 at 12:18 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/11/tribute_to_golu.html
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Journalist Arrested, Punched, For Photographing Voters
"When did taking photographs outside in a public place become a crime?"
Just now it did, in Palm Springs FLA for the election.
via BoingBoing:
Police punches, harasses photographer documenting FL elections
In the Palm Beach Post:
A widely published investigative journalist was tackled, punched and
arrested Sunday afternoon by a Palm Beach County sheriff's deputy who
tried to confiscate his camera outside the elections supervisor's
headquarters. About 600 people were standing in line waiting to vote early
when James S. Henry was charged with disorderly conduct for taking photos
of waiting voters about 3:30 p.m. outside the main elections office on
Military Trail near West Palm Beach. […]
Tuesday, November 02, 2004 at 11:14 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/11/journalist_arre.html
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Desert Screen: Filming Baghdad
from Al-Ahram (Cairo), via >> mind the_Gap*:
Beyond the bottom line
Sonali Pahwa speaks to Kouross Esmaeli, an Iranian-born, New York-based
filmmaker who recently went to Iraq, about the politics of US
representation of Iraqis
[…]
Going to Iraq was like stepping out of the screen and into the street.
Baghdad is devastated. It is a large city with beautiful public spaces,
artworks and buildings that are covered in dust, bombed out or just
abandoned. I arrived there on the day the Red Cross and several other
international agencies were bombed. And the mood never really changed
after that: fear mingled with a strong desire for normalcy.
Baghdad is a far cry from Cairo or Amman, where American franchises litter
every corner. It has yet to be globalised, but the process has begun.
Satellite dishes of every size poke out of windows, balconies and rooftops
like metal sunflowers twisting to find their satellite beams. Iraqi
television sets are now flooded with the same programming that people
watch in the rest of the Arab world. It is a whole new world for Iraqis,
since satellite dishes were banned under the previous regime, and its
effects remain to be seen.
I stayed at a hotel that was also the Baghdad bureau for a major American
network belonging to the MTV conglomerate, and so I got to see how the
news bureau operated up close. The newest development in the US corporate
media operation in Iraq is the use of private security. Imagine, for every
American journalist there has to be one guard. How close can you get to
ordinary people if you have an armed guard following you around and
directing your movements according to his estimate of risk? I simply
refused one, and the bureau agreed to make an exception in my case since
being Iranian and speaking Arabic made me local enough. […]
Tuesday, November 02, 2004 at 08:14 AM in Film | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/11/_from_alahram_c.html
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Monday, November 01, 2004
Bringing the War Home
"Citikorp"
Copper Greene (the artist behind the iPod/iRaq posters that went up back
in May) unleashed a new campaign in China, jamming Citicorp.
via Wooster Collective (thanks to bloggy)
Monday, November 01, 2004 at 10:58 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/11/bringing_the_wa.html
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Visualize Winning
Here's what to do: visualize winning.
"Visualize Winning" is actually an excellent
short flick by Needlenose,
a cooperative progressive blog,
and brought to you by Band of Citizens:
http://www.bandofcitizens.org/citizenflicks/visualizewinning.html
Monday, November 01, 2004 at 10:42 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/11/visualize_winni.html
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Friday, October 29, 2004
Off to Miami Beach: The Art of Politics
In a few hours I'll be on a plane to Miami Beach for a show (blogged
earlier), and loaded with these stickers:
which are available for download here.
I don't know what to expect in South Beach, but there's a rumor that
pro-Bush counterdemonstrators will set up shop outside the gallery… I
guess they won't be getting any free drinks.
Friday, October 29, 2004 at 07:50 AM in Art Exhibitions | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/10/off_to_miami_be.html
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Wednesday, October 27, 2004
Eminem's Anti-Bush Mosh
[thanks for the still, Choire]
Here's the video: this is heavy. Aside from that it's totally cool
animation/remix.
and here are the lyrics (thanks Liza):
Enimem - Mosh
too long to post here– to read them go here:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/10/eminems_antibus.html
=============
George W. Bush, September, 2001: "If Osama bin Laden is responsible for
these attacks, he will be brought to justice, whatever the obstacles."
George W. Bush, March 13th, 2002, when asked about Osama bin Laden's
location: "I just don't spend that much time on him. I don't really think
about him very much. I truly am not that concerned about him."
If you're age 18 or over, please consider these two statements when you go
to the polls on November 2nd. America thanks you.
=============
Wednesday, October 27, 2004 at 08:23 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/10/eminems_antibus.html
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Border Patrol: Art of the Crossing
via NYTimes:
How to Cross Borders, Social or Otherwise By ELIZABETH BARD
[…]
Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon, two British artists, are compiling a
database exploring elements of legal status in Britain, with the ultimate
goal of allowing people to create a new identity from information
collected on the Internet. The first stage of their project is the focus
of "Rules of Crime,'' a small show that runs through Nov. 13 at the New
Museum.
The art-history books have plenty to say about false or alternative
identity; from Rembrandt's biblical set pieces to Cindy Sherman's film
stills, artists have long experimented with disguise and metamorphosis.
Unfortunately for Mr. Bunting and Ms. Brandon, the law books have a lot to
say, too. In its final form, their project may be viewed as the Homeland
Security
Mr. Bunting and Ms. Brandon are among a growing number of artists who are
harnessing technologies associated with governments and corporations to
challenge the status quo. Increasingly, such artists find that they need a
good lawyer as they walk a fine line between artistic expression and
criminal activity.
[…]
Wednesday, October 27, 2004 at 12:47 PM in Art Exhibitions | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/10/border_patrol_t.html
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Art, Law & Contemporary Culture: Lecture by Jeffrey Cunard
reBlogged via Mediatrips:
The second in a series of Art & Technology Lectures held at Columbia
University's Digital Media Center will be by Jeffrey Cunard at 6:00 PM,
tommorrow, Thursday, October 28, in 702 Hamilton Hall, Columbia
University.
See map.
Mr. Cunard will speak about art, law, and contemporary culture.
bio:
Jeffrey Cunard is a partner at the law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton and a
recognized practitioner in the field of the Internet and cyberlaw. He is a
co-director of the clinical program at the Berkman Center for Internet &
Society at Harvard Law School, and sits on the boards of several arts
organizations, including the College Art Association.
The Art & Technology Lectures will continue through the fall with Siva
Vaidhyanathan on November 18, Jon Ippolito on December 2, and Cory
Arcangel on December 16.
Info about upcoming speakers and streaming video of previous lectures
here.
The Art & Technology Lectures are organized by the Digital Media Center
and sponsored by the Computer Music Center. Streaming video of the
lectures is produced in partnership with the Columbia Center for New Media
Teaching and Learning.
Wednesday, October 27, 2004 at 12:26 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/10/art_law_contemp.html
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Tuesday, October 26, 2004
Scared Stiff
[image: condom wrapper by Eliza Barrios]
PaperVeins Museum of Art
is pleased to present:
Saturday October 30
SCARED STIFF
A Condom Wrapper Design Exhibition
Benefiting Education On Teen Pregnancy and AIDS
@
The Alice Band Salon and Day Spa
233 Fifth Avenue, #5B (@ 27th St.)
Curated by:
Koan Jeff Baysa, MD and Virgil Wong of PaperVeins Museum of Art;
Calum Stephen of Alice Band Salon and Day Spa;
Ryan Harris of KJ+REEproductions.
Silent Auction 6 pm-8 pm
Party 8 pm-10 pm
Music by Counterintelligence
Each print is 13 x 13"; bids start at $30; click here to see the 50+
prints donated by artists from around the world.
more about PaperVeins
Tuesday, October 26, 2004 at 02:34 PM in Benefits | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/10/scared_stiff.html
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