Scar left after Richard Serra’s sculpture Tilted Arc was removed from Federal Plaza, New York, NY. Photograph by Scott Fajack,1989
Caller: Good morning.
John Laws: Okay, the Prime Minister is here.
Caller: Yes, good morning. Just a very broad question, Mr Keating, is: why does your government see the Aboriginal people as a much more equal people than the average white Australian?
Paul Keating: We don’t. We see them as equal.
Caller: Well, you might say that, but all the indications are that you don’t.
Paul Keating: But what’s implied in your question is that you don’t; you think that non-Aboriginal Australians, there ought to be discrimination in their favour against blacks.
Caller: Not… whatsoever. I… I don’t say that at all. But my… myself and every person I talk to - and I’m not racist - but every person I talk to…
Paul Keating: But that’s what they all say, don’t they? They put these questions - they always say, “I’m not racist, but, you know, I don’t believe that Aboriginal Australians ought to have a basis in equality with non-Aboriginal Australians. Well, of course, that’s part of the problem.
Caller: Aren’t they more equal than us at the moment, with the preferences they get?
Paul Keating: More equal? They were… I mean, it’s not for me to be giving you a history lesson - they were largely dispossessed of the land they held.
Caller: There’s a question over that. I think a lot of people will tell you that. You’re telling us one thing…
Paul Keating: Well, if you’re sitting on the title of any block of land in NSW, you can bet an Aboriginal person at some stage was dispossessed of it.
Caller: You know that for sure, do you?
Paul Keating: Of course we know it for sure! Caller: Yeah, [inaudible].
Paul Keating: You’re challenging the High Court decision, are you? You’re saying the High Court got this all wrong.
Caller: No, I’m not saying that at all! I wouldn’t know who was on the High Court.
Paul Keating: Well, why don’t you sign off, if you don’t know anything about it and you’re not interested. Good bye!
Caller: Yeah, well, that’s your …
Paul Keating: No, I mean, you can’t challenge these things and then say, “I don’t know about them”.
John Laws: Oh well, he’s gone.
Ciudades Paralelas - Lola Arias, Hotels, Split Screen
(Source: youtube.com)
Hotel rooms, shopping centres, factories… Functional places are not considered places of interest. They are to be found in every city, and they are what make cities inhabitable as such. These instantly recognizable places live parallel existences around the world, each modelled on similar rules but displaying a local face. For “Ciudades Paralelas”, Lola Arias and Stefan Kaegi invited artists to devise interventions in public spaces. As observation stations for situations, the projects make stages out of public spaces used every day, and seduce the viewers into staying inside that space long enough for their perception to change: Plays that make you subjectively experience places built for anonymous crowds. The projects are staged in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Warsaw and Zurich, in each city with local performers.
BURACO NEGRO (by cinthia marcelle)
Richard Sennett was 25 when his first book, The Uses of Disorder, was published in 1970. Reissued with a new preface, this prescient study of class, city life and identity celebrates the dynamism and diversity of metropolitan life and calls for an urban renaissance. He castigates the middle classes for retreating to the “secure cocoons” of the suburbs: “Suburbanites are people who are afraid to live in a world they cannot control.” In their flight to the more socially homogeneous suburbs, people are choosing a morally and psychologically impoverished environment. Only in “dense, disorderly, overwhelming cities”, with their rich mix of different classes, ethnicities and cultures, do we learn the true complexity of life and human relations: “The jungle of the city, its vastness and loneliness, has a positive human value.” Sennett speaks eloquently of the benefits to individuals and society of diverse, even “anarchic”, urban communities. His argument remains powerful and relevant, an inspiration to a new generation of urbanists.
Favaretto has developed a series of temporary public installations titled “Momentary Monuments”. They are all based on the idea of destruction and disappearance. One project was a wall consisting of 36000 sandbags piled up around the statue of Dante Alighieri in Trento which after some time collapsed onto itself. Her contribution for the 2009 Venice Biennale was a temporary swamp in the garden outside of the Arsenale. The swamp was inspired by people who had withdrawn themselves from the public eye in order to protect their inventions, dreams, or their madness. Of her archive of biographical texts and images, Favaretto chose 20 stories of disappeared to whom she dedicated the entire project. Out came a metaphorical monument to this extreme form of transgression. It is about memorizing and honouring those who prefer an existence in a state of suspension to a life in a dogma of presence. (via Lara Favaretto at Klosterfelde (Contemporary Art Daily))
The walls and the floor of the church, covered by a white surface, are a background for images and can be totally marked by the visitors. Many Berlin-based artists, architects, and other professionals who use drawings in their work accepted our invitation to participate in the congress. Non-professional draftsmen are also invited. In this project, authorship, hierarchies of expertise, and qualifications are blurred into an enterprise of illustrating excess, which is free and open to all. A series of workshops furthermore will bring together different social groups with clashing interests, beliefs, or opposing views who will be encouraged to communicate in a non-verbal way. The use of visual language is democratized in a mass conversation that only looks like an exhibition.
Łukasz Surowiec’s project Berlin-Birkenau transplants baby birches from around the former death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau into private gardens in Berlin. The KW top floor is thus filled with vast swaths of the sprouts, and an ancillary video that is vaguely reminiscent of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985). Now, a ritual is a set of stylized actions, performed mainly for their symbolic value. Ritual is defined by a mode of symbolic structuring that removes the human from the clashes of antagonist history (political history) and places him on an altogether different type of temporality (the temporality of life, death, and natural cycles). That is, ritual re-inscribes human history back onto mythical history. The community structured by ritual is thus not a political community but an ethical community. Since ritual voids the political edge constituting one’s identity, one is no longer a Jew, German, nor Palestinian, just a man appearing as Man. The political difference that exists at the core and as the cause of any traumatic political event is evacuated by an all-encompassing piety, which can only maintain itself for as long as that same political difference remains suspended. All ritual is an appeasement, and is thus fully inadequate to express the sense of urgency present in political demands. The act of planting a tree to commemorate war victims speaks the language of Protocol. Planting trees is what first ladies do. To revert art back to ritual is thus to lose sight of the modern tradition of critique. The political is not synonymous with politics. Critique is the acknowledgment of this split, or, as Bertolt Brecht put it, an awakening of a sense of strangeness that forces one to reshuffle the “order of things.”
“This is an attempt to create a new kind of monument - a living monument”
Organized under the matter-of-fact stewardship of Okwui Enwezor with the assistance of curators Mélanie Bouteloup, Abdellah Karroum, Emilie Renard, and Claire Staebler, “Intense Proximity” is essentially predicated upon the following global and post-colonial predicament: what happens when the distance between the colonizer and the colonial subject, or, in broader strokes, near and far, visible and invisible, collapses? This leads to what Enwezor identifies as “intense proximity,” defining it “as the degree of nearness in which cultural, social, and historical identities and experiences share and co-exist within the same space, while exposing the fault lines of cultural antagonism.” This is engendered by a state of contact, which right-wing conservatives, protectionist policies, and psychotic xenophobes like Anders Breivik (in case you doubted the utterly terrifying topicality of these issues) would seek to prevent as much as inhumanly possible, and for which Enwezor, on the contrary, aesthetically lobbies in the form of intense proximity.
Dozens of schoolkids are careening about on Jeremy Deller’s full-scale inflatable Stonehenge on Glasgow Green, bouncing into and around the stones. Deller’s work is a cheery take on heritage and the Cultural Olympiad. Celebratory, interactive and possibly even educational, it ticks all the public art boxes. On the other hand, Deller might be pointing out that our greatest and most solemn monuments have all become sites of entertainment nowadays. Hooray for our increasingly infantilised culture. (via Glasgow Festival of Visual Art: The new Scottish colourists | Art and design | The Guardian)
