Le Retour A La Raison by Man Ray (1923)

Hans Richter - Rhytmus 21 (1921)

Marcel Duchamp - Anemic Cinema (1926)

Philip drinking coffee at Akademie der Künste

The silver foil sleeping cat

The Moldavian massacre - Dynasty

"Perhaps the most famous Dynasty cliffhanger is the so-called "Moldavian massacre", when Blake's youngest daughter Amanda Carrington married Prince Michael of Moldavia on the eve of a military revolution in his country. Although the massacre itself (arrived at by writer Camille Marchetta, who had devised the wildly-successful 'Who Shot J.R.?' scenario on Dallas five years earlier) had superb production qualities and became the most talked-about episode of any TV series during the calendar year of 1985 (with a viewership of sixty million), it is nonetheless largely remembered for its disappointing resolution four months later.
Nearly every character was in attendance at the royal wedding in the season's final episode which aired in May 1985. At the conclusion of the wedding, revolutionaries stormed in, apparently gunning down everyone in the chapel. The final scene of the episode, with nearly every character on the ground appearing lifeless, gave the impression that anyone could have died, and in the summer that followed many magazines published stories speculating about which characters would survive the massacre.
When the series resumed in the fall viewers quickly learned the outcome of the fifth season finale, where it was revealed that everyone had survived with the exception of two minor characters: Steven's boyfriend, Luke Fuller, and Jeff's girlfriend, Lady Ashley Mitchell (played by Ali McGraw). In the 2006 CBS special Dynasty Reunion: Catfights & Caviar, Gordon Thomson reiterated that it was the follow-up that was the letdown, not the cliffhanger itself. Joan Collins had been conspicuously absent from the season six opener; she was in a tense contract renegotiation with the show, seeking an increased salary. As a result, the first episode had to be rewritten to explain her absence and many scenes were given to Krystle. Collins's demands were met (she reportedly signed a $60,000 per episode contract) and she returned to the series in the season's second episode." wiki

Open House at IASPIS today and tomorrow

OPEN HOUSE AT IASPIS 2009

DATE: 2009-09-18
TIME: 15.00
PLACE: Iaspis/Konstnärsnämnden

Paticipants: Anna Ekman, Paul Elliman, Europa, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Cecilia Järdemar, Annette Krauss, David Maljkovic, Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere, Yuka Oyama, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Anri Sala, David Shrigley, Jemima Stehli, Mladen Stilinovic, Tercerunquinto, Judi Werthein, Susanne Winterling, Joanna Zawieja.

Friday September 18, 3pm – 9pm.
Saturday September 19, 12pm – 4pm.

Iaspis is a Swedish exchange program whose main purpose is to facilitate creative dialogues between visual artists in Sweden and the international contemporary art scene. Iaspis encompasses an international studio program in Sweden, a support structure for exhibitions and residencies abroad for Swedish based artists, as well as program of seminars, exhibitions and publications. Iaspis is the international program of the Visual Arts Fund, a branch of the Arts Grants Committee.

IASPIS

Gloria Swanson tells about the lion scene in "Male and Female"

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Aldous Huxley (1956 / 1972)

Between 1800 and 1900 the doctrine of Pie in the Sky gave place, in a majority of Western minds, to the doctrine of Pie on the Earth. The motivating and compensatory Future came to be regarded, not as a state of disembodied happiness, to be enjoyed by me and my friends after death, but as a condition of terrestrial well-being for my children or (if that seemed a bit too optomistic) my grandchildren, or maybe my great-grandchildren. The believers of Pie in the Sky consoled themselves for all their present miseries by the thought of posthumous bliss, and whenever they felt inclined to make other people more miserable than themselves (which was most of the time), they justified their crusades and persecutions by proclaiming , in St. Augustine’s delicious phrase, that they were practicing a “benignant asperity,” which would ensure the eternal welfare of souls through the destruction or torture of mere bodies in the inferior dimensions of space and time. In our days, the revolutionary believers in Pie on the Earth console themselves for their miseries by thinking of the wonderful time people will be having a hundred years from now, and then go on to justify wholesale liquidations and enslavements by pointing to the nobler, humaner world which these atrocities will somehow or other call into existence.

Not all the believers in Pie on the Earth are revolutionaries, just as not all believers in Pie in the Sky were persecutors. Those who think mainly of other people’s future life tend to become proselytisers, crusaders and heresy hunters. Those who think mainly of their own future life become resigned. The preaching of Wesley and his followers had the effect of reconciling the first generations of industrial workers to their intolerable lot and helped to preserve England from the horrors of a full-blown political revolution.

Today the thought of their great-grandchildren’s happiness in the twenty-first century consoles the disillusioned beneficiaries of progress and immunizes them against Communist propaganda. The writers of advertising copy are doing for this generation what the Methodists did for the victims of the first Industrial Revolution.

The literature of the Future and of that equivalent of the Future, the Remote, is enormous. By now the bibliography of Utopia must run into thousands of items. Moralists and political reformers, satirists and science fictioners—all have contributed their quota to the stock of imaginary worlds. Less picturesque, but more enlightening, than these products of phantasy and idealistic zeal are the forecasts made by sober and well-informed men of science. Three very important prophetic works of this kind have appeared within the last two or three years—The Challenge of Man’s Future by Harrison Brown, The Foreseeable Future by Sir George Thomson, and The Next Million Years by Sir Charles Darwin. Sir George and Sir Charles are physicists and Mr. Brown is a distinguished chemist. Still more important, each of the three is something more and better than a specialist.
Let us begin with the longest look into the future—The Next Million Years. Paradoxically enough, it is easier, in some ways, to guess what is going to happen in the course of ten thousand centuries than to guess what is going to happen in the course of one century. Why is it that no fortune tellers are millionaires and that no insurance companies go bankrupt? Their business is the same—foreseeing the future. But whereas the members of one group succeed all the time, the members of the other group succeed, if at all, only occasionally. The reason is simple. Insurance companies deal with statistical averages. Fortune tellers are concerned with particular cases. One can predict with a high degree of precision what is going to happen in regard to very large numbers of things or people. To predict what is going to happen to any particular thing or persons is for most of us quite impossible and even for the specially gifted minority, exceedingly difficult. The history of the next century involves very large numbers; consequently it is possible to make certain predictions about it with a fairly high degree of certainty. But though we can pretty confidently say that there will be revolutions, battles, massacres, hurricanes, droughts, floods, bumper crops and harvest, we cannot specify the dates of these short-range consequences. But when we take the longer view and consider the much greater numbers involved in the history of the next ten thousand centuries, we find that these ups and downs of human and natural happenings tend to cancel out, so that it becomes possible to plot a curve representing the average of future history, the mean between ages of creativity and ages of decadence, between propitious and unpropitious circumstances, between fluctuating triumph and disaster. This is the actuarial approach to prophecy—sound on the large scale and reliable on the average. It is the kind of approach which permits the prophet to say that there will be dark handsome men in the lives of x per cent of women, but not which particular woman will succumb.

A domesticated animal is an animal which has a master who is in a position to teach it tricks, to sterilize it or compel it to breed as he sees fit. Human beings have no masters. Even in his most highly civilized state, Man is a wild species, breeding at random and always propagating his kind to the limit of available food supplies. The amount of available food may be increased by the opening up of new land, by the sudden disappearance, owing to famine, disease or war, of a considerable fraction of the population, or by improvements in agriculture. At any given period of history there is a practical limit to the food supply currently available. Moreover, natural processes and the size of the planet being what they are, there is an absolute limit, which can never be passed. Being a wild species, Man will always tend to breed up to the limits of the moment. Consequently very many members of the species must always live on the verge of starvation. This has happened in the past, is happening at the present time, when about sixteen hundred millions of men, women, and children are more or less seriously undernourished, and will go on happening for the next million years—by which time we may expect that the species Homo sapiens will have turned into some other species, unpredictably unlike ourselves but still, of course, subject to the laws governing the lives of wild animals.

We may not appreciate the fact; but a fact nevertheless it remains: we are living in a Golden Age, the most gilded Golden Age of human history—not only of past history, but of future history. For, as Sir Charles Darwin and many others before him have pointed out, we are living like drunken sailors, like the irresponsible heirs of a millionaire uncle. At an ever accelerating rate we are now squandering the capital of metallic ores and fossil fuels accumulated in the earth’s crust during hundreds of millions of years. How long can this spending spree go on? Estimates vary. But all are agreed that within a few centuries or at most a few millennia, Man will have run through his capital and will be compelled to live, for the remaining nine thousand nine hundred and seventy or eighty centuries of his career as Homo sapiens, strictly on income. Sir Charles is of the opinion that Man will successfully make the transition from rich ores to poor ores and even sea water, from coal, oil, uranium and thorium to solar energy and alcohol derived from plants. About as much energy as is now available can be derived from the new sources—but with a far greater expense in man hours, a much larger capital investment in machinery. And the same holds true of the raw materials on which industrial civilization depends. By doing a great deal more work than they are doing now, men will contrive to extract the diluted dregs of the planet’s metallic wealth or will fabricate non-metallic substitutes for the elements they have completely used up. In such an event, some human beings will still live fairly well, but not in the style to which we, the squanderers of planetary capital, are accustomed.

Mr. Harrison Brown has his doubts about the ability of the human race to make the transition to new and less concentrated sources of energy and raw materials. As he sees it, there are three possibilities. “The first and by far the most likely pattern is a return to agrarian existence.” This return, says Mr. Brown, will almost certainly take place unless Man is able not only to make the technological transition to new energy sources and new raw materials, but also to abolish war and at the same time stabilize his population. Sir Charles, incidentally, is convinced that Man will never succeed in stabilizing his population. Birth control may be practiced here and there for brief periods. But any nation which limits its population will ultimately be crowded out by nations which have not limited theirs. Moreover, by reducing cut-throat competition within the society which practices it, birth control restricts the action of natural selection. But wherever natural selection is not allowed free play, biological degeneration rapidly sets in. And then there are the short-range, practical difficulties. The rulers of sovereign states have never been able to agree on a common policy in relation to economics, to disarmament, to civil liberties. Is it likely, is it even conceivable, that they will agree on a common policy in relation to the much more ticklish matter of birth control? The answer would seem to be in the negative. And if, by a miracle, they should agree, or if a world government should someday come into existence, how could a policy of birth control be enforced? Answer: only by totalitarian methods and, even so, pretty ineffectively.

Let us return to Mr. Brown and the second of his alternative futures. “There is a possibility,” he writes, “that stabilization of population can be achieved, that war can be avoided, and that the resource transition can be successfully negotiated. In that event mankind will be confronted with a pattern which looms on the horizon of events as the second most likely possibility—the completely controlled, collectivized industrial society.” (Such a future society was described in my own fictional essay in Utopianism, Brave New World).

“The third possibility confronting mankind is that of a world-wide free industrial society, in which human beings can live in reasonable harmony with their environment.” This is a cheering prospect; but Mr. Brown quickly chills our optimism by adding that “it is unlikely that such a pattern can exist for long. It certainly will be difficult to achieve, and it clearly will be difficult to maintain once it is established.”

From these rather dismal speculations about the remoter future it is a relief to turn to Sir George Thomson’s prophetic view of what remains of the present Golden Age. So far as easily available power and raw materials are concerned, Western man never had it so good as he has it now and, unless he should choose in the interval to wipe himself out, as he will go on having it for the next three, or five, or perhaps even ten generations. Between the present and the year 2050, when the population of the planet will be at least five billions and perhaps as much as eight billions, atomic power will be added to the power derived from coal, oil and falling water, and Man will dispose of more mechanical slaves than ever before. He will fly at three times the speed of sound, he will travel at seventy knots in submarine liners, he will solve hitherto insoluble problems by means of electronic thinking machines. High-grade metallic ores will still be plentiful, and research in physics and chemistry will teach men how to use them more effectively and will provide at the same time a host of new synthetic materials. Meanwhile the biologists will not be idle. Various algae, bacteria and fungi will be domesticated, selectively bred and set to work to produce various kinds of food and to perform feats of chemical synthesis, which would otherwise be prohibitively expensive. More picturesquely (for Sir George is a man of imagination), new breeds of monkeys will be developed, capable of performing the more troublesome kinds of agricultural work, such as picking fruit, cotton and coffee. Electron beams will be directed onto particular areas of plant and animal chromosomes and, in this way, it may become possible to produce controlled mutations. In the field of medicine, cancer may finally be prevented, while senility (“The whole business of old age is odd and little understood”) may be postponed, perhaps almost indefinitely. “Success,” adds Sir George, “will come, when it does, from some quite unexpected directions; some discovery in physiology will alter present ideas as to how and why cells grow and divide in the healthy body, and with the right fundamental knowledge, enlightenment will come. It is only the rather easy superficial problems that can be solved by working on them directly; others depend on still undiscovered fundamental knowledge and are hopeless till this has been acquired.”

All in all, the prospects for the industrialized minority of mankind are, in the short run, remarkably bright. Provided we refrain from the suicide of war, we can look forward to very good times indeed. That we shall be discontented with our good time goes without saying. Every gain made by individuals or societies is almost instantly taken for granted. The luminous ceiling towards which we raise our longing eyes becomes, when we have climbed to the next floor, a stretch of disregarded linoleum beneath our feet. But the right to disillusionment is as fundamental as any other in the catalogue. (Actually the right to the pursuit of happiness is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.)
Turning now from the industrialized minority to that vast majority inhabiting the underdeveloped countries, the immediate prospects are much less reassuring. Population in these countries is increasing by more than twenty millions a year and in Asia at least, according to the best recent estimates, the production of food per head is now ten per cent less than it used to be in 1938. In India the average diet provides about two thousand calories a day—far below the optimum figure. If the country’s food production could be raised by forty per cent—and the experts believe that, given much effort and a very large capital investment, it could be increased to this extent within fifteen or twenty years—the available food would provide the present population with twenty-eight hundred calories a day, a figure still below the optimum level. But twenty years from now the population of India will have increased by something like one hundred millions, and the additional food, produced with so much effort and at such great expense, will add little more than a hundred calories to the present woefully inadequate diet. And meanwhile it is not at all probable that a forty per cent increase in food production will in fact be achieved within the next twenty years.

The task of industrializing the underdeveloped countries, and of making them capable of producing enough food for their peoples, is difficult in the extreme. The industrialization of the West was made possible by a series of historical accidents. The inventions which launched the Industrial Revolution were made at precisely the right moment. Huge areas of empty land in America and Australasia were being opened up by European colonists or their descendants. A great surplus of cheap food became available, and it was upon this surplus that the peasants and farm laborers, who migrated to the towns and became factory hands, were enabled to live and multiply their kind. Today there are no empty lands—at any rate none that lend themselves to easy cultivation—and the over-all surplus of food is small in relation to present populations. If a million Asiatic peasants are taken off the land and set to work in factories, who will produce the food which their labor once provided? The obvious answer is: machines. But how can the million new factory workers make the necessary machines if, in the meanwhile, they are not fed? Until they make the machines, they cannot be fed from the land they once cultivated; and there are no surpluses of cheap food from other, emptier countries to support them in the interval.

And then there is the question of capital. “Science,” you often hear it said, “will solve all our problems.” Perhaps it will, perhaps it won’t. But before science can start solving any practical problems, it must be applied in the form of usable technology. But to apply science on any large scale is extremely expensive. An underdeveloped country cannot be industrialized, or given an efficient agriculture, except by the investment of a very large amount of capital. But what is capital? It is what is left over when the primary needs of a society have been satisfied. In most of Asia the primary needs of most of the population are never satisfied; consequently almost nothing is left over. Indians can save about one hundredth of their per capita income. Americans can save between one tenth and one sixth of what they make. Since the income of Americans is much higher than that of Indians, the amount of available capital in the United States is about seventy times as great as the amount of available capital in India. To those who have shall be given and from those who have not shall be taken away even that which they have. If the underdeveloped countries are to be industrialized, even partially, and made self-supporting in the matter of food, it will be necessary to establish a vast international Marshall Plan providing subsidies in grain, money, machinery, and trained manpower. But all these will be of no avail, if the population in the various underdeveloped areas is permitted to increase at anything like the present rate. Unless the population of Asia can be stabilized, all attempts at industrialization will be doomed to failure and the last state of all concerned will be far worse than the first—for there will be many more people for famine and pestilence to destroy, together with much more political discontent, bloodier revolutions and more abominable tyrannies.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, from “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and other essays,” abridged edition, 1972. Originally published in 1956.

Source

The Duetto buffo di due gatti performed by the Petits chanteurs a la croix de bois in Seoul, Korea, 1996

wiki

Jean Baudrillard - A Conjuration of Imbeciles - Liberation May 7, 1997

(Translated by Francois Debrix)

Two situations, both critical and insoluble. One is the total
worthlessness of contemporary art. The other is the impotence of the
political class in front of Le Pen. The two situations are
exchangeable, and their solutions are transferable. Indeed, the
inability to offer any political alternative to Le Pen is displaced to
the cultural terrain, to the domain where a Holy Cultural Alliance
prevails. Conversely, the problematization of contemporary art can
only come from a reactionary, irrational, or even fascist mode of
thinking.

What can we oppose to such a dignified conjuration of imbeciles?
Nothing. There is unfortunately nothing which can remedy such a
mechanism of intellectual perversion. This mechanism is based upon the
bad conscience and the total impotence of the so-called "democratic"
elites who are unable to find a solution to both impasses, that of
contemporary art and that of the political struggle against the Front
National. The elites have simply chosen to fuse the two problems
together in a single moralizing and vituperative discourse. The real
question, then, becomes whether one can still open one's mouth, utter
anything which may sound strange, irreverent, heterodoxical or
paradoxical without being automatically called a fascist (which is,
let's admit it, a way of paying tribute to fascism). Why has every
moral, conventional, or conformist discourse - traditional rightist
discourses - moved to the left?

There has been a shattering reformulation. The right used to embody
moral values and the left, by contrast, used to represent an
antagonistic mode of historical and political exigency. But today the
left is deprived of its political energy. It has become a purely
moralistic law-making structure, a representative of universal values,
a sacred holder of the reign of Virtue, and an incarnation of
antiquated values such as Good or Truth. It now acts as a jurisdiction
which asks everyone to act responsibly while still granting itself the
right to remain irresponsible. The political illusion of the left
(which had remained frozen during twenty years of opposition) turned
into a platform of historical morality (and not of historical
direction) once it came to power. It then became the holder of a
morality of truthfulness, basic rights, and good conscience, having
thus reached a zero degree on the political scale and, undoubtedly,
the lowest point of the genealogy of morals. Its moralization of all
values marked its historical failure (and the failure of thinking in
general). Since then, even reality, the principle of reality, has
become an act of faith. Try to question the reality of war, for
example, and you immediately become a betrayer of moral law.

With the left and the traditional right both deprived of political
substance, where has the political gone to? Well, simply, it has moved
to the far right. As Bruno Latour so accurately noted the other day in
Le Monde, the only political discourse today in France is that of Le
Pen's Front National. All the rest is moral and pedagogic discourse,
teachers' lessons and lecturers' tirades, managers' rhetoric and
programmers' jargon. By contrast, having given himself to evil and
immorality, Le Pen has been able to take over all of the political,
the remnant of what has been abandoned or voluntarily rejected by a
political ideology of Good deeds and Enlightenment values. The more he
is antagonized by a moral coalition (a sign of political impotence),
the more he enjoys the benefits of political immorality, the benefits
which come with being the only one on the side of evil. In the past,
whenever the traditional right decided to implement an ideology of
morality and order, you could always count on the left, always
attempting to antagonize those so-called moral values in the name of
political claims. But today, the left is experiencing the same
condition that once characterized the traditional right. Suddenly
responsible for the defense of moral order, the left has no choice but
to witness the slippage of abandoned political energies toward
political forces which do not hesitate to antagonize its newly created
order. Conversely, the left keeps on reactivating the source of evil
by continuing to embody the rule of virtue, which of course is nothing
more than the rule of supreme hypocrisy.

If Le Pen did not exist, we would have to invent him! Indeed, it is
thanks to him that we can get rid of our evil share, of what is the
worst part of us. It is as such that we can curse Le Pen. If he were
to disappear, however, we would be left begging for pity! We would be
left struggling with our own racist, sexist, and nationalist
(everyone's fate) viruses. Simply, we would be abandoned to the
murderous negativity of society. As such, Le Pen is the perfect mirror
of the political class which uses him to conjure up its own evils,
just as every individual uses the political class to cast away any
form of corruption inherent to society (both are similar types of
corrupt and cathartic functions). Trying to put an end to this, trying
to purify society and moralize public life, trying to eradicate what
claims to embody evil is a complete misunderstanding of the way evil
operates, of the way politics itself operates.

Opting for a mode of unilateral denunciation, and ignoring the very
principle of reversibility of evil, anti-Le Pen supporters have left
him with a monopolistic control over the evil share. Having thus been
cast away, Le Pen can no longer be dislodged. By demonizing him in the
name of virtue, the political class simply offers him a most
comfortable situation. Le Pen simply has to pick up and recycle the
discourse of ambivalence, of denial of evil, and of hypocrisy that his
opponents constantly throw at him in the course of their battle for
the defense of law or the defense of a good cause. Le Pen's enemies
provide him with the energy he needs. Too eager to discredit him, they
simply transform his mistakes into (his own) victories. They do not
see that good never comes from a purification of evil (evil always
retaliates in a forceful way), but rather from a subtle treatment
which turns evil against itself.

All this shows us that Le Pen may be the embodiment of worthlessness
and idiocy. No doubt! But he is above all the symptom of his
opponents' stupidity. The imbeciles are those who, by denouncing him,
blatantly reveal their own impotence and idiocy and glaringly
demonstrate how absurd it is to antagonize him face to face. They
simply have not understood the rules of evil that his game of musical
chairs follow. By continuing to antagonize him, the imbeciles give
life to their own ghosts, their negative doubles. This shows, indeed,
a terrifying lack of lucidity on their part. But what drives such a
perverse effect, the fact that the left remains trapped in a discourse
of denunciation whereas Le Pen maintains a privilege of enunciation?
What pushes one to gain all the profits from the crime while the other
suffers the negative effects of recrimination? What causes one to "get
off" [s'eclatant] with evil when the other gets lost with the victim?

Well, it's quite simple. By incarcerating Le Pen in a ghetto, it is in
fact the democratic left which becomes incarcerated and which affirms
itself as a discriminatory power. It becomes exiled within its own
obsession and automatically grants a privilege of justice to what it
demonizes. And, of course, Le Pen never misses an opportunity to claim
republican legality and fairness on his behalf. But it is above all on
the imaginary but very pregnant figure of the rebel and persecuted
soul that he establishes his prestige. Thus, he can enjoy the
consequences of both legality and illegality. A victim of ostracism,
Le Pen has an incredible freedom of language and can deploy an
unmatched arrogance of judgement, something that the left has deprived
itself of.

Let's give an example of such a magical thought that today stands in
for political thought. Le Pen is blamed for the sentiment of rejection
and exclusion of immigrants in France. But this is just a drop in an
ocean of social exclusion that has overwhelmed all of society
(recently, exclusion itself, as well as the "social breakdown" that
politicians like to mention, were all excluded by the decree signed by
the President of the Republic to dissolve the National Assembly). We
are all both responsible and victim at the same time of this
inextricable and complex process of exclusion. There is something
typically magical in the need to conjure up this virus, which is
everywhere to be found (it is a direct function of our social and
technical "progress"), and in the desire to exorcise the curse of
exclusion (and our impotence by the same token) through the figure of
a hated man, institution, or organization, no matter who or what they
are. It is as if we were faced with a tumor in need of extraction
whereas, in fact, the metastases have already expanded everywhere. The
Front National simply follows the course of the social metastases, and
is all the more virulent since people think that they have eradicated
the disease when, in fact, it has already infected the entire body.
Not to mention that this process of magical projection of the Front
National takes place along the same lines as this party's own process
of demonization of immigrants. One must always be suspicious of the
ruse of contamination, a ruse which, by means of the transparency of
evil, mutates positivity into negativity, and a demand for liberty
into "democratic despotism." As usual, it is a question of
reversibility, of a subtle encirclement of evil whose rational
intelligence is never suspected. While modern pathology tells us a lot
about the physical body, we do not pay attention to this mode of
analysis when it comes to the social body.

To remain within the political, we must step away from ideology and
look at things through the lens of social physics. Our democratic
society is a stasis. Le Pen is a metastasis. Global society is dying
of inertia and immune deficiency. Le Pen is simply the visible
transcription of such a viral condition; he is the spectacular
projection of the virus. This happens in dreams too. Le Pen is a
burlesque, hallucinatory figuration of a latent state, of a silent
inertia caused by forced integration and systematic exclusion. Since
the hope of finally curing social inequalities has truly disappeared
(by and large), it is no surprise if resentment has moved to the level
of racial inequality. The failure of the social explains the success
of the racial (and of all the other fatal strategies). As such, Le Pen
is the only savage analyst in today's society. The fact that he is
placed on the far right is merely the sad result of the fact that
analysts are no longer to be found on the left or the far left.
Judges, intellectuals no longer analyze. Only the immigrants perhaps,
as polar opposites, could become analysts too. But they already have
been recycled by a good and responsible humanitarian thought. Le Pen
is the only one who operates a radical erasure of the so-called
distinction between right and left. This is, no doubt, an erasure by
default. But the harsh criticism of this conventional distinction
which was unleashed in the 1960s (and culminated in 1968) has
unfortunately disappeared from the political scene today. Le Pen
simply recuperates a de facto situation that the political class
refuses to confront (it even uses elections to deny it), but whose
extreme consequences will be felt some day. If, one day, political
imagination, political will, and political demand hope to rebound,
they will have to take into account the radical abolition of the
antiquated and artificial distinction between right and left, which,
in fact, has been largely damaged and compromised over the past
decades, and which only holds today through some sort of complicit
corruption on both sides. This distinction is dead in practice but, by
means of an incurable revisionism, is constantly reaffirmed. Thus, Le
Pen is the only one who makes up the new political scene, as if
everyone else had already agreed to destroy what's left of democracy,
perhaps to produce the retrospective illusion that it actually used to
mean something.

What consequences of this extreme (but original) situation can we
envisage if we do not focus on the hallucinatory medium that Le Pen
embodies, if we do not take into account the point of magical
conjuration where all energies converge and vanish? How can we avoid
falling for the viral growth of our own ghosts if we fail to take into
account, beyond moral order and democratic revisionism, the type of
savage analysis that Le Pen and the Front National have, to some
extent, taken from us?

Baudrillard, Jean. "A Conjuration of Imbeciles." Liberation May 7,

"From the Gathering" at the Helen Pitt Gallery, Vancouver

Artists: Haegue Yang, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Lara Favaretto, Aurélien Froment and Mandla Reuter
Currated by Andrew Bonacina and Anne Low

The Helen Pitt Gallery is pleased to present 'From the Gathering', a group exhibition of five international artists – Lara Favaretto, Aurélien Froment, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Mandla Reuter and Haegue Yang – all exhibiting for the first time in Vancouver. Curated by London-based curators Andrew Bonacina and Anne Low the exhibition proposes a series of questions and scenarios around the potentiality of individual agency within the multiple publics and constructed communities that we participate in on a daily basis. Without prescribed outcomes, the artists invite us to consider our position as an engaged or 'emancipated' spectator, confronting us not with stories, but with possible stories written according to individual interpretation. The recurring motif of an absent protagonist in each of the works opens up potential for spontaneous intimacy, fleeting social encounters and the opportunity to reflect on our role in the production of knowledge.

Haegue Yang often uses abstract and transient forms to create fleeting portraits of both individuals and places; displayed in 'From the Gathering' her series of nine photographs depicting 'sitting tables' – vernacular seating structures found throughout Korea – are a visual testament to the idiosyncratic nature of provisional social space, negotiating a transitional realm between the public thoroughfare of the street and the intimacy of private space. Continuing Christodoulos Panayiotou's interest in social constructions and performative gestures, his slide work 'If Tomorrow Never Comes' (2007) gathers together newspaper images of fireworks displays in the city of Naples from the early 20th century till the present. Used as both a form of celebration and as a communication method by the Camorra, the fireworks embody both the fleeting gathering of a dispersed public and an illicit form of communication.

Lara Favaretto's series of questions scrawled on the gallery walls are at once curious and confrontational. Addressing each visitor individually, they instigate a notional census that articulates the way knowledge is accumulated through the sifting and growing constituency of any given public. Aurélien Froment's series of toy-like objects, based on the gifts produced by the German 19th century educationalist Friedrich Frœbel, are not apparent within the exhibition until the viewer arrives and is given a 'show and tell' of the objects, kept in a discreet box by the gallery staff; the objects' dual character as both 'gifts' and pedagogical tools marry social exchange with the production of knowledge. Mandla Reuter's site-specific work similarly allows for the viewer to test the boundaries of their own agency within the ritualised space of the gallery. His intervention, which sees every internal and external door of the gallery space removed for the duration of the opening (and leaned casually around the walls of the gallery) serve as an index of the negotiation required for their removal, opening up the possibility for stories narrated in the space of contact between the unwitting protagonists of the work.


The Helen Pitt Gallery is a non-profit artist-run centre dedicated to the promotion of experimental contemporary art that addresses social, political, cultural, and critical issues. We promote and facilitate public dialogue concerning critical awareness, social consciousness, contemporary art practices and community.

The Pitt provides an important opportunity to engage with the exhibition context in the production or presentation of challenging works from local, national and international artists of a variety of experience and practice. The Gallery is an active and proud member of the Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres.

From the Gathering
Helen Pitt Gallery
102-148 Alexander Street
Vancouver, B.C.
V6A 1B5
Canada
Phone: 001 604 681 6740
Contact:
info@helenpittgallery.org

www.helenpittgallery.org

12 September - 31 October 2009
Open Tuesday – Saturday, 2-5pm

Olafur explains how he ended up naked in the cage of the elephants in the Amsterdam Zoo - Wysing - Guest house garden

The secret garden of Stuart in London

Gret Palucca dancing "Serenata"

Generosity is the new political curated by Lotte Juul Petersen at Wysing Arts Center

With artists: Bik Van Der Pol; Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson; Céline Condorelli; FREEE; Luca Frei; Tellervo & Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen; Christodoulos Panayiotou; Kateřina Šedá.

Launch: 5 September 4-6pm (all welcome)
Exhibition open daily: 12-5pm until 1 November

Generosity is the New Political explores the complex and ambiguous concept of generosity. Rooted within a system that merits symbolic value over market worth, acts of generosity contradict the accepted notion of production and exchange. This exhibition features new works by five international artists commissioned by Wysing to interpret the complex notion of generosity, including FREEE Art Collective’s performance work to re-name some of Cambridge’s favourite streets after 18th century radical thinkers. In addition, the exhibition presents three existing works that explore generosity, including the darkly humorous film work I love my job 2008 by Tellervo and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, where workers in Göteborg, Sweden are offered the chance to act out everything they ever wanted to do or say during the darkest moments of their work life.

Wysing Arts Centre
Fox Road, Bourn
Cambridge CB23 2TX
Tel: +44 (0) 1954 718881
info@wysingartscentre.org
www.wysingartscentre.org

Totale Erinnerung, curated by vvork at the 3rd Foto-Festival

with:
Mathieu Bernard-Reymond, Broc Blegen, Catrin Bolt , Luchezar Boyadjiev, Candice Breitz, Olaf Breuning, Mauren Brodbeck, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Paolo Chiasera, Citizens Association “Rocky Balboa” Žitište, Lenka Clayton, Gerad Coles, Dainis Derics, Marjolijn Dijkman, Harm van den Dorpel , Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Amel Emric, Leo Fabrizio, Lise Gagne, Cyprien Gaillard, Hayley Grimes, Simon Hardy, Pablo Hare, Joel Holmberg, William Hundley, Iman Issa, Mandy Lee Jandrell, Pete Johns, Jan Kempenaers, Kernbeißer, Lanica Klein, Shaan Kokin, Timur Kulgarin, Tomaz Levstek, Miguel Luciano, Ives Maes, Kelly Mark, Brett Matthews, Juan Monino, Mark Ollerenshaw, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Lauris Paulus, Kevin Phelan, Sarah Pickering, Wang Qingsong, Bernadette Rafferty, Karla Vanessa Redor, Amanda Richards, Thomas Ruellan, Pascual Sisto, Simon Smyth, Mohammed Tawfeeq, Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkacova, Guy Tillim, Rijel Violet, Drazen Vukelic, Chris Wiley

curated by:
VVORK

Aleksandra Domanović:
*1981 in Novi Sad (Serbia), lives and works in Berlin.
Oliver Laric:
*1981 in Sofia (Bulgaria), lives and works in Berlin.
Christoph Priglinger:
*1979 in Linz (Austria), lives and works in London.
Georg Schnitzer:
*1977 in Graz (Austria), lives and works in Vienna and Hartberg.

Exhibition places:
Alter Meßplatz, Mannheim

The labyrinth functions as an analogy to the world of images in the age of Flickr, YouTube, and cell-phone cameras, where there exist endless variations of an image one beside the other. The frequency of duplicates, copies, conversions, and reinterpretations demands a new way of dealing with the notion that we can orient ourselves toward images.
The labyrinth is a site of confusion and at the same time memory. Similar repetitive impressions lead to a loss of orientation.
The installation Totale Erinnerung (Total Recall) makes reference to the environment of the labyrinth. The Alte Meßplatz in Mannheim is characterized by a wide variety of architectural styles from the last two centuries, yet is does without any kind of memorials or monuments. Our selection of works that examine monumentality uses this site of emptiness. The comparison of similar monuments allows the viewer to recognize heterogeneity in an ostensibly homogenous series.
Alongside works by contemporary artists, indiscriminate stock photography, vacation pictures from Flickr, photos from auction houses, as well as works by photographers for the photo agencies Reuters and the Associated Press will be shown.
There is no clear path through the labyrinth. The visitor defines his or her own path and thus constructs a dramaturgy of the images.

Foto-Festival
vvork

Extracts from Paradise Now - The Living Theater

Ryszard Cieslak of Grotowski's Laboratory briefly speaking and then presenting some exercises with two Danish students

To Have Done with the Judgement of God (a radio play by Antonin Artaud)

Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu: the audio recording 1 and 2

kré puc te
kré Everything must puk te
pek be arranged li le
kre to a hair pek ti le
e in a fulminating kruk
pte order.

I learned yesterday
(I must be behind the times, or perhaps it's only a false rumor,
one of those pieces of spiteful gossip that are circulated between
sink and latrine at the hour when meals that have been ingurgitated
one more time are thrown in the slop buckets),
I learned yesterday
one of the most sensational of those official practices of American
public schools
which no doubt account for the fact that this country believes itself
to be in the vanguard of progress,
It seems that, among the examinations or tests required of a child
entering public school for the first time, there is the so-called
seminal fluid or sperm test,
which consists of asking this newly entering child for a small
amount of his sperm so it can be placed in a jar
and kept ready for any attempts at artificial insemination that
might later take place.
For Americans are finding more and more that they lack muscle
and children,
that is, not workers
but soldiers,
and they want at all costs and by every possible means to make
and manufacture soldiers
with a view to all the planetary wars which might later take place,
and which would be intended to demonstrate by the overwhelming
virtues of force
the superiority of American products,
and the fruits of American sweat in all fields of activity and of the
superiority of the possible dynamism of force.
Because one must produce,
one must by all possible means of activity replace nature
wherever it can be replaced,
one must find a major field of action for human inertia,
the worker must have something to keep him busy,
new fields of activity must be created,
in which we shall see at last the reign of all the fake manufactured
products,
of all the vile synthetic substitutes
in which beatiful real nature has no part,
and must give way finally and shamefully before all the victorious
substitute products
in which the sperm of all artificial insemination factories
will make a miracle
in order to produce armies and battleships.
No more fruit, no more trees, no more vegetables, no more plants
pharmaceutical or otherwise and consequently no more food,
but synthetic products to satiety,
amid the fumes,
amid the special humors of the atmosphere, on the particular axes
of atmospheres wrenched violently and synthetically from the
resistances of a nature which has known nothing of war except
fear.
And war is wonderful, isn't it?
For it's war, isn't it, that the Americans have been preparing for
and are preparing for this way step by step.
In order to defend this senseless manufacture from all competition
that could not fail to arise on all sides,
one must have soldiers, armies, airplanes, battleships,
hence this sperm
which it seems the governments of America have had the effrontery
to think of.
For we have more than one enemy
lying in wait for us, my son,
we, the born capitalists,
and among these enemies
Stalin's Russia
which also doesn't lack armed men.
All this is very well,
but I didn't know the Americans were such a warlike people.
In order to fight one must get shot at
and although I have seen many Americans at war
they always had huge armies of tanks, airplanes, battleships
that served as their shield.
I have seen machines fighting a lot
but only infinitely far
behind
them have I seen the men who directed them.
Rather than people who feed their horses, cattle, and mules the
last tons of real morphine they have left and replace it with
substitutes made of smoke,
I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from
which they were born
I mean the Tarahumara
eating Peyote off the ground
while they are born,
and who kill the sun to establish the kingdom of black night,
and who smash the cross so that the spaces of spaces can never
again meet and cross.

And so you are going to hear the dance of TUTUGURI.

TUTUGURI

The Rite of the Black Sun

And below, as if at the foot of the bitter slope,
cruelly despairing at the heart,
gapes the circle of the six crosses,
very low
as if embedded in the mother earth,
wrenched from the foul embrace of the mother
who drools.
The earth of black coal
is the only damp place
in this cleft rock.
The Rite is that the new sun passes through seven points before
blazing on the orifice of the earth.
And there are six men,
one for each sun,
and a seventh man
who is the sun
in the raw
dressed in black and in red flesh.
But, this seventh man
is a horse,
a horse with a man leading him.
But it is the horse
who is the sun
and not the man.
At the anguish of a drum and a long trumpet,
strange,
the six men
who were lying down,
rolling level with the ground,
leap up one by one like sunflowers,
not like suns
but turning earths,
water lilies,
and each leap
corresponds to the increasingly somber
and restrained
gong of the drum
until suddenly he comes galloping, at vertiginous speed,
the last sun,
the first man,
the black horse with a

naked man,
absolutely naked
and virgin
riding it.
After they leap up, they advance in winding circles
and the horse of bleeding meat rears
and prances without a stop
on the crest of his rock
until the six men
have surrounded
completely
the six crosses.
Now, the essence of the Rite is precisely
THE ABOLITION OF THE CROSS.

When they have stopped turning
they uproot
the crosses of earth
and the naked man
on the horse
holds up
an enormous horseshoe
which he has dipped in a gash of his blood.

The Pursuit of Fecality

There where it smells of shit
it smells of being.
Man could just as well not have shat,
not have opened the anal pouch,
but he chose to shit
as he would have chosen to live
instead of consenting to live dead.
Because in order not to make caca,
he would have had to consent
not to be,
but he could not make up his mind to lose
being,
that is, to die alive.
There is in being
something particularly tempting for man
and this something is none other than
CACA.
(Roaring here.)

To exist one need only let oneself be,
but to live,
one must be someone,
to be someone,
one must have a BONE,
not be afraid to show the bone,
and to lose the meat in the process.
Man has always preferred meat
to the earth of bones.
Because there was only earth and wood of bone,
and he had to earn his meat,
there was only iron and fire
and no shit,
and man was afraid of losing shit
or rather he desired shit
and, for this, sacrificed blood.
In order to have shit,
that is, meat,
where there was only blood
and a junkyard of bones
and where there was no being to win
but where there was only life to lose.
o reche modo
to edire
di za
tau dari
do padera coco
At this point, man withdrew and fled.
Then the animals ate him.
It was not a rape,
he lent himself to the obscene meal.
He relished it,
he learned himself
to act like an animal
and to eat rat
daintily.
And where does this foul debasement come from?

The fact that the world is not yet formed,
or that man has only a small idea of the world
and wants to hold on to it forever?
This comes from the fact that man,
one fine day,
stopped
the idea of the world.
Two paths were open to him:
that of the infinite without,
that of the infinitesimal within.
And he chose the infinitesimal within.
Where one need only squeeze
the spleen,
the tongue,
the anus
or the glans.
And god, god himself squeezed the movement.
Is God a being?
If he is one, he is shit.
If he is not one
he does not exist.
But he does not exist,
except as the void that approaches with all its forms
whose most perfect image
is the advance of an incalculable group of crab lice.
"You are mad Mr. Artaud, what about the mass?"
I deny baptism and the mass.
There is no human act,
on the internal erotic level,
more pernicious than the descent
of the so-called jesus-christ
onto the altars.
No one will believe me
and I can see the public shrugging its shoulders
but the so-called christ is none other than he
who in the presence of the crab louse god
consented to live without a body,
while an army of men
descended from a cross,
to which god thought he had long since nailed them,
has revolted,
and, armed with steel,
with blood,
with fire, and with bones,
advances, reviling the Invisible
to have done with GOD'S JUDGMENT.

The Question Arises ...

What makes it serious
is that we know
that after the order
of this world
there is another.
What is it like?
We do not know.
The number and order of possible suppositions in
this realm
is precisely
infinity!
And what is infinity?
That is precisely what we do not know!
It is a word
that we use
to indicate
the opening
of our consciousness
toward possibility
beyond measure,
tireless and beyond measure.
And precisely what is consciousness?
That is precisely what we do not know.
It is nothingness.
A nothingness
that we use
to indicate
when we do not know something
from what side
we do not know it
and so
we say
consciousness,
from the side of consciousness,
but there are a hundred thousand other sides.
Well?
It seems that consciousness
in us is
linked
to sexual desire
and to hunger;
but it could
just as well
not be linked
to them.
One says,
one can say,
there are those who say
that consciousness
is an appetite,
the appetite for living;
and immediately
alongside the appetite for living,
it is the appetite for food
that comes immediately to mind;
as if there were not people who eat
without any sort of appetite;
and who are hungry.
For this too
exists
to be hungry
without appetite;
well?
Well
the space of possibility
was given to me one day
like a loud fart
that I will make;
but neither of space,
nor possibility,
did I know precisely what it was,
and I did not feel the need to think about it,
they were words
invented to define things
that existed
or did not exist
in the face of
the pressing urgency
of a need:
the need to abolish the idea,
the idea and its myth,
and to enthrone in its place
the thundering manifestation
of this explosive necessity:
to dilate the body of my internal night,
the internal nothingness
of my self
which is night,
nothingness,
thoughtlessness,
but which is explosive affirmation
that there is
something
to make room for:
my body.
And truly
must it be reduced to this stinking gas,
my body?
To say that I have a body
because I have a stinking gas
that forms
inside me?
I do not know
but
I do know that
space,
time,
dimension,
becoming,
future,
destiny,
being,
non-being,
self,
non-self,
are nothing to me;
but there is a thing
which is something,
only one thing
which is something,
and which I feel
because it wants
TO GET OUT:
the presence
of my bodily
suffering,
the menacing,
never tiring
presence
of my
body;
however hard people press me with questions
and however vigorously I deny all questions,
there is a point
at which I find myself compelled
to say no,
NO
then
to negation;
and this point
comes when they press me,
when they pressure me
and when they handle me
until the exit
from me
of nourishment,
of my nourishment
and its milk,
and what remains?
That I am suffocated;
and I do not know if it is an action
but in pressing me with questions this way
until the absence
and nothingness
of the question
they pressed me
until the idea of body
and the idea of being a body
was suffocated
in me,
and it was then that I felt the obscene
and that I farted
from folly
and from excess
and from revolt
at my suffocation.
Because they were pressing me
to my body
and to the very body
and it was then
that I exploded everything
because my body
can never be touched.

Conclusion

- And what was the purpose of this broadcast, Mr. Artaud?
- Primarily to denounce certain social obscenities officially sanctioned and acknowledged:

this emission of infantile sperm donated by children for the artificial insemination of fetuses yet to be born and which will be born in a century or more.
To denounce, in this same American people who occupy the whole surface of the former Indian continent, a rebirth of that warlike imperialism of early America that caused the pre-Columbian Indian tribes to be degraded by the aforesaid people.
- You are saying some very bizarre things, Mr. Artaud.
- Yes, I am saying something bizarre, that contrary to everything we have been led to believe, the pre-Columbian Indians were a strangely civilized people and that in fact they knew a form of civilization based exclusively on the principle of cruelty.
- And do you know precisely what is meant by cruelty?
- Offhand, no, I don't.
- Cruelty means eradicating by means of blood and until blood flows, god, the bestial accident of unconscious human animality, wherever one can find it.
- Man, when he is not restrained, is an erotic animal,
he has in him an inspired shudder,
a kind of pulsation
that produces animals without number which are the form that the ancient tribes of the earth universally attributed to god.
This created what is called a spirit.
Well, this spirit originating with the American Indians is reappearing all over the world today under scientific poses which merely accentuate its morbid infectuous power, the marked condition of vice, but a vice that pullulates with diseases,
because, laugh if you like,
what has been called microbes
is god,
and do you know what the Americans and the Russians use to make their atoms?
They make them with the microbes of god.
- You are raving, Mr. Artaud.
You are mad.
- I am not raving.
I am not mad.
I tell you that they have reinvented microbes in order to impose a new idea of god.
They have found a new way to bring out god and to capture him in his microbic noxiousness.
This is to nail him though the heart,
in the place where men love him best,
under the guise of unhealthy sexuality,
in that sinister appearance of morbid cruelty that he adopts
whenever he is pleased to tetanize and madden humanity as he
is doing now.
He utilizes the spirit of purity and of a consciousness that has
remained candid like mine to asphyxiate it with all the false
appearances that he spreads universally through space and this
is why Artaud le Mômo can be taken for a person suffering
from hallucinations.
- What do you mean, Mr. Artaud?
- I mean that I have found the way to put an end to this ape once and for all
and that although nobody believes in god any more everybody believes more and more in man.

So it is man whom we must now make up our minds to emasculate.

- How's that?
How's that?

No matter how one takes you you are mad, ready for the straitjacket.
- By placing him again, for the last time, on the autopsy table to remake his anatomy.
I say, to remake his anatomy.
Man is sick because he is badly constructed.
We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape off that animalcule that itches him mortally,
god,
and with god
his organs.
For you can tie me up if you wish,
but there is nothing more useless than an organ.
When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions
and restored him to his true freedom.
They you will teach him again to dance wrong side out
as in the frenzy of dance halls
and this wrong side out will be his real place.

To Have Done with the Judgement of God
(Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu),
a radio play by Antonin Artaud (1947).
Excerpted from the collection:
Antonin Artaud
Selected Writings
Edited, and with an Introduction by
Susan Sontag
Translated from the French, Oeuvres complètes, by
Helen Weaver
Published by
University of California Press
Berkeley Los Angeles
ISBN 0-520-06443-7 (paperback)