Zanny: In the statement which accompanies the announcement of the theme for the 16 th biennale of Sydney you make a play on the space between “revolution” and “forms that turn” suggesting that perhaps the second part of the title could be reversed to “turns that form”. If we conceive of revolution as a turn then we could say these turns have generated new aesthetic forms. How do you conceptualize the relationship between art and revolution? Carolyn: I am not sure that these turns have generated forms in art, I would say that the forms have generated the turns. Historically artists relate to the context within which they live and they are particularly sensitive to the problems of the times they live in, so they will generate, through the language of art, possible turns in personal ways of constructing knowledge but also broader social ways of conducting ones life and engaging with others. I don’t see art as a reflection of society I see art as impacting on how society shapes itself and questioning the dominant paradigms of that space. |
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Making Art Politically: an interview with Hito Steyerl : Real Time (+on screen) The curators of Documenta 12 claimed to have solved the problem of exhibiting film within an art context by “sending it to the cinema”. How do you see films fitting within an art context? |
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On the Possibility of the Avant-garde composition in contemporary art (with Dmitry Vilensky): for Documenta 12 Magazine Project and Chto Delat? Over the last few years, a number of artists have succeeded in both realizing and finding the theoretical grounding for a variety of works which allows us to speak of a new situation in art. These projects have found points of connection between art, new technologies, and the global movement against neo-liberal capitalism. The lineages of this interest in political art can be traced back to Documenta 10 (1997) and coincides with the emergence of the “movement of movements” which erupted onto the political horizon in Seattle in 1999 – an event which, it can be argued, has crystallised a new political subject (named the Multitude by Hardt and Negri’s Empire published in 2000). This situation has subsequently been manifested through a variety of cultural projects whose critical stance towards the process of capitalist globalisation and emphasis on the principles of self-organisation, self-publishing and collectivity has evoked the idea of a return to “the political” in art. |
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If You See Something, Say Something newspaper: January 2007. Co-editor with Keg de Souza of the If You See Something, Say Something newspaper. To access a PDF file go here. Contributors include: Dmitry Vilensky, Contra File, Brian Holmes, Etcetera, Daniel Boyd, Astra Howard, Gregory Sholette, Kate Carr, Taring Padi, Marni Cordell, Ava Bromberg, Hito Steyerl, Lucas Ihlein, Richard DeDomenici and Alissar Chidiac. |
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Artist interviews: interviews with artists from the exhibition If You See Something, Say Something including Federico Zukerfeld, Contra File and Arlene TextaQueen for the web-site: www.ifyouseesomethingsaysomething.net. |
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Approaches to Future Alternative Societies: Interview with Oliver Ressler, Sydney 2007, for the web-site: www.ressler.at. |
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“The spectre of the many (and the ordinary),” Katy Siegel wrote in the January 2005 edition of Artforum, “hovered over blockbuster exhibitions like Documenta 11, the Venice Biennial (Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the viewer) The International Centre for Photography Triennial (“Strangers”) and the 2004 Whitney Biennial.” [1] Added to these “blockbuster” exhibitions are a series of other exhibition projects which have sought to bring the energy and combativeness of the “crowd” into the framework of the museum – the Ex Argentina project in Cologne, Barcelona and Buenos Aires, the Collective Creativity exhibition in Kassel, The Interventionists at Mass MoCA, the upcoming Zones of Contact for the Sydney Biennial, the Disobedience exhibition at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery Sydney and many others which have drawn inspiration from communities in motion or conflict. In curatorial decisions and artistic production there has been a noticeable emphasis on the nexus between social and artistic practice registered in a return of interest in “the political” in art. |
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The field of education that contains the most interest and potential is that which grounds knowledge, and self-knowledge, in the practices and lived experiences of the oppressed outside the framework of the professions and the academy. In this sense self-education is not the individual completion of a university degree, the gaining of a place in the academy, nor even the mastering of a particular self-directed body of knowledge (useful though all these processes may at times be) but rather the process by which the individual is able to participate in a collective process which challenges the violence of the relationship between the commodity form and the comodification of consciousness... |
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Multitude and the poetry of class composition article printed in Chto Delat? "How Does Politics Begin", February 2006. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri warn the reader, in the preface to Multitude: War and Democracy in the age of Empire, "this is a philosophical book...do not expect [it] to answer the question, What is to be done?" Despite this warning, however, that aching and persistent question hangs over their argument for the rest of the book. If Hardt and Negri's central premise is correct, and the living alternative to Empire is now the multitude, this raises - as quickly as a reader of philosophical books can remind them of thesis eleven - a familiar question: does the concept of the multitude help illuminate how to bring to life this alternative? Or, to put it more directly, in the face of the war, brutality and injustice of Empire, what is to be done? ... |
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Ex Argentina: mapping the visual and political in Argentina article from Moscow Art Magazine, 2006. La Normalidad (normalisation) was the theme for the third exhibition component of the Ex Argentina project which opened in Buenos Aries at the Palais de Glace on February 14th 2006. Ex Argentina was initiated by Andreas Siekmann and Alice Creischer after the dramatic economic collapse in Argentina in December 2001. They travelled to Buenos Aries in November 2002 to begin an investigation, through artistic methods, of the global and local power relations which precipitated this collapse and its aftermath. Through the exhibition program, and its associated discussions and publications, they hoped to create a geneology of the crisis in Argentina which would help foster a minoritarian and local critique capable of challenging the production of global knowledge on the collapse in Argentina, situating this within a global context. |
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Recasting Subjectivity: Globalisation and the Photography of Andreas Gursky and Allan Sekula article printed in Third Text ,V19, Issue 6, 2005. This essay will explore two aspects of globalization —"smooth space" and "the multitude"—through looking at the work of two photographers: Andreas Gursky and Allan Sekula. Both of these photographers are currently demanding attention on the world stage: Gursky held a major retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2001 while Sekula was included in Documenta 11 in 2002 and held a major retrospective at the Generali Foundation in Vienna in 2003. I will argue that a close examination of these photographers work provides a unique vantage point for a more nuanced understanding of these concepts, and, through this, the process of globalization itself. |
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Charles Baudelaire, in Painter of Modern Life, urged the artist to “set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of motion, in the midst of the figurative and the infinite.” He urged the artist to “become one with the flesh of the crowd” and enter it as if it were an immense “reservoir of electrical energy”. In the fin de siecle malaise of post 1968 the electrical energy of the crowd, which in the 1860s so appealed to Baudelaire, appeared to have dimmed to the point where it was barely able to light the way into any serious discussion of mass participation in social life. The multitude ebbed away from sight; fractured, on the one hand, into the antagonistic single units of identity politics and overly homogenized, on the other, into the universal, and unifying, subject position of the working class. Between these two poles enthusiasm for the multitude languished in darkness... |
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By Zanny Begg Redfern/Waterloo has long been regarded as a “problem” area for Sydney which successive social planners, architects, academics and town planners have sought various ways to remedy, police or contain. The heart of Redfern is The Block which is home to one of Australia’s strongest and most established urban Indigenous communities. But the suburb is also home to several public housing projects and various strong working class and migrant communities. The relatively low costs of rent, and the previously undeveloped nature of the suburb, means that it has traditionally been a place for students and other poorer residents to rent and, maybe for lucky low income families, to take out a mortgage. Its close proximity to the city, however, has meant that it has also been in the sights of urban planners and developers whose “bright idea” is to transform this area into a high density cosmopolitan haven for “city living”.
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