By Hakan Topal, August 20th, 2012 
In my last post, I explored the idea of artistic research as I reflected on my visit to this year’s documenta exhibition. Today I will follow up by reviewing a case in point, “The Afghan Seminars” of dOCUMENTA (13), and then add some concluding reflections.
dOCUMENTA (13) actively stimulated the development of new artistic encounters by commissioning new projects, organizing various proceedings and publications. The organizers invited various artists and scholars for a series of events before and after the opening, for example, in Kabul, Cairo and Banff. “The Afghan Seminars: A Position of Documenta (13)” is particularly interesting because it included artists such as Michael Rakowitz, Giuseppe Penone, Mario Garcia Torres, Francis Alys, and Adrian Villar Rojas, most of whom were commissioned to produce a new work related to their experience in the war-torn country. In addition, the exhibition in Goethe Institute, Kabul presented 27 artists from 13 countries as part of the dOCUMENTA (13).
Although artists had no prior personal knowledge about the context of Afghanistan, they came up with interesting plans. For instance, in his film, “Reel/Unreel” (click link to watch), Francis Alys follows children who are playing a game with a steel circle, as well as an actual film reel given to them by the artist himself. Children continuously navigate by rolling the reels, following different paths in Kabul streets. The camera constantly shows the rotating reels in a close shot, depicting an intimate engagement with the urban context, providing a unique perspective, and a ground-up view of the city. The film operates in many layers. As we follow the kids and the reels, the film reel unfolds and refolds back, both literally and metaphorically, depicting life in Kabul. The project relates to the Kabul’s recent troubled past where films were burned down by the Taliban. However, the children’s playfulness offers the possibility for a joyful future.
Michael Rakowitz’s “What Dust Will Rise?” (2012) (click link for image), a conceptually complex project deals with the books that were destroyed during the aerial bombing in Kassel in 1941. Rakowitz’s . . .
Read more: Notes on dOCUMENTA (13): Afghanistan and Conclusions
By Hakan Topal, August 17th, 2012 
This years’ documenta—dOCUMENTA (13) titled with a small d as a subtle typographic gesture to create a distinctive branding —is sited around the city of Kassel with over 180 art projects, mostly new commissions. With a budget of thirty five million euros, it is the most expensive contemporary art exhibition in the world.
I visited dOCUMENTA (13) during the opening dates of the exhibition. Everyone spoke of the curator’s peculiar approach, choices, and her eccentric personality. The idea of the star curator is relentlessly promoted in the growing numbers of biennials and triennials all over the world, without bearing on the quality or content of the exhibitions. But nevertheless, the organizers use the lure of the curator-figure as a cheap marketing strategy. In fact three months before the opening, a press kit landed on blogs, featuring curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in various glamor shots with different outfits. With almost no mention of the participating artists, the emphasis was on the curator as the sole mastermind.
These days, biennial openings are eerily like business events. Museum directors, gallery owners, collectors and schmoozing artists form a toxic bubble, diluting art’s effectiveness for a salient alternative future, transforming it into any other commercial activity. But one has to ignore all this to see the content and the hard work put into the exhibition by thousands of cultural producers. A biennial is best navigated by creatively selecting the sources to read, the people to speak with, the restaurants to eat at, and the events to participate in. Even so, it is exhausting to spend three days to see all the work. I have to admit that I could not watch all the films or visit all the sites.
Nevertheless, compared to many other contemporary art biennials, with its scope and careful execution, documenta is still a very exceptional experience. Since the organizers have an extensive time period to put the exhibition together, from its research to its commissioned projects, it provides a vigorous snapshot of the current state of contemporary art. Because of its scholarly yet experimental approach . . .
Read more: Notes on dOCUMENTA (13): Artistic Research
By Hakan Topal, August 16th, 2012 
This is the first of three posts on this year’s Documenta art exhibition. -Jeff
Documenta opened its doors to the public on June 6th. Documenta —one of the largest contemporary art exhibitions in the world—takes place in Kassel, Germany every five years. This high point of the international art world calendar was initiated in 1955 to heal the scars of the Second World War, largely as a response to the “Degenerate Art” exhibition by NAZI regime. But it also intended to show the open mindedness of western societies and freedom of expression to the rest of the world, specifically the Eastern Bloc. Obviously the world’s political conjuncture has dramatically changed, since then, as has the exhibition.
One of the most interesting aspects of this year’s exhibition was its multifaceted relationship with the idea of nature and the paranormal. Some of the projects sited in Kassel’s Orangerie, Karlsaue Park and the Ottoneum (the natural history museum) offered a distinct approach to engage with matter and living things as an artistic category.
Eighteenth century parks in the English tradition are spread around Europe as idealized slices of nature in urban settings, with Arcadian forests, bridges, small houses and creeks. The bourgeoisie depicted the countryside in a sentimental way, as a response to rapid urbanization. Nature became something to be looked at and leisurely experienced. Parks are highly crafted artificial sites and reflect this modernist ideology. A small army of maintenance workers maintains the ecosystem and botanists carefully manage the flowers and plants. Even wildness is manufactured.
Pierre Huyghe’s “Untitled (2011-12),” one of the most intriguing projects of the exhibition, negotiates with the park itself. When one arrives to the composting area of the park to see Huyghe’s work, they encounter scattered aggregate, asphalt, sand, soil and construction materials. The location registers as peculiar and haphazard. One inevitably wonders if they arrived to the right site, or just a staging areas for park services. But there is no randomness like this in German parks, known for their preciseness. So this oddity resolves itself as you navigate by jumping over the . . .
Read more: Notes on dOCUMENTA (13): Parks, Nature and Artifact
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, August 8th, 2012 
I am still jet-lagged, or is it a cold? I can’t tell. Whatever it is, I have not been up to par for the past few weeks. The trip to Europe, including visits with my daughter and her family in Paris and the seminar in Wroclaw, was more challenging than expected. Naomi, my wife and Deliberately Considered’s Art and Design Editor, and I slowed down in our posting. But now, we are back. I expect to regain my strength, and you, dear Deliberately Considered readers, can expect in the coming weeks more posts on Wroclaw and on American and global politics and culture. Here, today and tomorrow, my thoughts on OWS responding to the discussions at the Wroclaw seminar. -Jeff
The starting point of the Wroclaw Seminar was Occupy Wall Street. It then served as our primary case for comparative investigation throughout and informed our final conclusions. Seminar participants Pamela Brown and Sidney Rose suggested additional readings for the seminar when we focused on OWS — Rose on the link between Anonymous and OWS. She was particularly interested in the online pre-history of OWS. Brown, an Occupy activist, was focused on the present challenges and recent accomplishments of the movement.
Rose suggested a piece describing an embrace between Cornell West, the philosopher, social critic and activist, and Gregg Housh, a leading figure in the shadowy group, Anonymous, at an occupy demonstration in Boston. This informed our discussion about the virtual infrastructure that supported the embodied occupations. As we tried to understand what is special about the new “new social movements,” the interaction between virtual and the embodied was a topic we knew we needed to explore.
We discussed how events in the Middle East and North Africa, combined with virtual actions, led to Occupy Wall Street, and sparked a global social movement wildfire. Following the Arab Spring, OWS developed with an Adbusters initial proposal to occupy wall street on September 17, 2011 , supported by politicized hackers such as those associated with . . .
Read more: Politics as an End in Itself: New Media and the Persistence of OWS
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, August 2nd, 2012 
Social movements create publics. They make it possible for people to express and act on their common concerns together. This creativity of movements has not fully appreciated. It has a long history, and it is also a key characteristic of the new “new social movements.” We discussed this in the Wroclaw seminar, moving from history to the study of the movements of our times.
Our discussion reminded me of the work of one of my former students, Angela Jones. Her dissertation, now a book, is on the Niagara Movement, which preceded the NAACP. The movement established the first national forum for the discussion of African American concerns by African Americans. Until very recently, it has been viewed as little more than a footnote in the career of W.E.B. Dubois. Jones’s work fills in a gap in history, the first fully developed study of this early episode in the long civil rights struggle. The gap existed because of the insufficient understanding of the importance of creating free public interaction in social movements.
In the democratic opposition to Communist regimes, specifically in Poland, the goal of establishing independent publics was not overlooked. In fact, for quite a while, it was the major end of the social struggle. The constitution of a free public space for discussion and action became the primary end of underground Solidarność in the 1980s. Because the regime couldn’t be successfully challenged, the end became to constitute a zone beyond its control. The end was for individual and collective dignity, to create an area where one could express oneself, appear outside of official definition, consolidate agreement among diverse participants in an autonomous public, which could be applied at an appropriate moment. The goal was to engage in a long cultural march, as Adam Michnik put it in a 1976 classic essay, “The New Evolutionism.”
In the new “new social movements,” this movement feature has been cultivated in a new political, generational and media environment. New media forms have . . .
Read more: Politics as an End in Itself: The Arab Spring and The Creation of Independent Publics
By Andrea Hajek, July 30th, 2012 
New media are increasingly changing the way history is being written and memories are being forged. Perhaps it’s not an appropriate comparison, with the Olympics ongoing, but think of the London bombings in 2005. Mobile camera phones enabled a new and more instant form of witnessing and communication, as Anna Reading explains in her article on “Mobile witnessing, mortal bodies and globital time” (Memory Studies 4.3, 2011). Another revolutionary moment in the history of media was the advent and diffusion of television, in the 1950s and 1960s, which enhanced the globalization of information and knowledge. It thus contributed to the creation of collectively shared, public memories as it allowed for news to reach – for the first time – large masses of people in various geographical areas.
The impact of television on the collective memory of the 1960s is illustrated by the blockbuster Forrest Gump (1994): here the protagonist is given a place – occasionally through recourse to original footage – in a range of major historical events which most Americans will have “experienced” through television. It thus feeds upon a national and visual memory of those years in the USA. In Italy too visual media have had an essential role in the creation and circulation of memories of the country’s national history of the past five decades or so. This is also because Italy has never had a real newspaper ‘culture’, and for most Italians TV news reports have been the main means of information. Italian cinema, in addition, has something of the status of a national heritage product, as Alan O’Leary suggests in his analysis of Italian movies on terrorism (Tragedia all’italiana. Italian Cinema and Italian Terrorisms 1970-2010, 2011), which has created a number of memorable ‘screen memories’. A news report about, say, a heat wave in Rome, for example, may start with the famous fountain scene from Federico Fellini’s Dolce Vita.
But visual memories of Italy’s past can also be viewed daily on the 15-minute long program Blob, which goes on air just after the evening news at 8pm. Created by a former TV director and . . .
Read more: Media Remember: Berlusconi’s Comeback and The Genius of Blob
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, July 27th, 2012 
The seminar on “New New Social Movements” has just ended and our tentative findings are in: there is indeed a new kind of social movement that has emerged in the past couple of years. Our task has been to identify and understand the promise and perils of this new movement type, to specify its common set of characteristics, its causes and likely consequences. We began our investigations in Wroclaw and will continue in the coming months. This is the first of a series of progress reports summarizing our deliberations of the past couple of weeks. -Jeff
The new movements are broad and diverse. Our informed discussions ranged from the uprisings of the Arab Spring, to Occupy Wall Street, including also the protests in major Romanian cities and the mining region, protests against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in Poland, protests in Israel concerning issues of housing, food, healthcare and other social demands, and the protests in Russia over the absence of democracy in the conduct of the affairs of state and elections. Participants with special knowledge of these social movements presented overviews in light of the social science theory and research of our common readings. We then all compared and contrasted the movements. We worked to identify commonalities and differences in social movement experiences.
We started with readings and a framework for discussion as I reported here. I had a hunch, a working hypothesis: the media is the message, to use the motto of Marshall McCluhan. But I thought about this beyond the social media, as in “this is the Facebook revolution.” Rather my intuition, which the seminar participants supported, told me that the social form (in this sense the media) rather than the content is what these movements share.
There is a resemblance with the new social movements of the recent past studied by Alain Touraine and Alberto Melucci, but there is something else that distinguishes the new social movements of the moment: a generational focus on the creation of new publics to address major . . .
Read more: Politics as an End in Itself: From the Arab Spring to OWS, and Beyond – Part 1
By Malgorzata Bakalarz, July 23rd, 2012 
In my last post, concerning the inadequacies of the debate around the Jedwabne atrocities, I highlighted the distance between the informed debate and the broad understanding of the population at large, especially people far from the major cities, uninvolved in and not comprehending elite cultural debates. I pointed out that the popular distrust of official rhetoric which made a great deal of sense during the Communist period was now being applied to the important discussion about the painful past, making the debate for much of the population counterproductive. The consequences of this are becoming tragically evident now in a cultural war, spreading like wild fire across Poland, a cultural war about educational reform.
**
Educational reform in Poland has been ongoing since 1999 – each of its stages stirring controversies of a different sort. The most recent protests could be labeled as the “Occupy” stage. The protests have been coalescing around some supposedly minor changes in school curriculum that aim to integrate middle school and high school programs and also allow students to choose, for the first time, a subject track in high school.
The core reason for these protests is a new way of offering and teaching history, in particular the introduction of the new “History and Society” course for students in the science track. This course will encompass overarching topics that the teacher will be able to develop together with students. Among the list of recommended topics provided by the Ministry of Education are the following: “Europe And The World,” “War and Military Systems,” “Woman, Man, Family,” and “Motherland’s Pantheon And Motherland’s Disputes.”
Proponents of the reform believe that it succeeds in finding solutions to two major problems: first, the new curriculum provides much better continuity between middle and high school, allowing students to cover a greater swath of history. Middle school students and first year high school students will follow a unified World and Polish history curriculum, after which they get to choose their track. Second, science track students will be able to build upon the history knowledge they acquired in earlier grades, but now they will learn to . . .
Read more: A Polish Cultural War: The Battle over the History and Education
By Andrea Hajek, July 13th, 2012 
 In 2011, protests across the globe placed contentious politics at the heart of media attention. From the Arab Spring to the global Occupy movements, the world was caught in a rapid of rebellion. The role of new media in sparking, diffusing and connecting these protests did not go unnoticed.
But it’s not only the younger generations of protesters who increasingly have recourse to digital and mobile media in their activism. Old-timers are discovering new media technologies as well. This was exemplified in the recent publication of a series of photo albums on Facebook, containing hundreds of snapshots of Italian activists from a 1970s student movement, the so-called “Movement of ’77.” This was not the first attempt to reunite the 1977 generation, and yet, it has never been so successful. What makes Facebook different? Are we dealing with plain nostalgia here? I would rather argue that these digital photo albums, which open up a whole new perspective on the 1970s, as they turn attention away from dominant memories of terrorism and violence, have potentials in that they contribute to a more inclusive, alternative “history from below.”
In 2011, Time Magazine elected global activists “person of the year”. That same year, Italian student protests which had occurred 35 years ago revived on the web as photographer Enrico Scuro – class of ’77 – uploaded his photographic collection to Facebook. In doing so, he unchained enthusiastic reactions from former protesters, who tagged themselves into the photographs and left comments of all sorts. People also sent Scuro their own photographs, thus contributing to what has become something of an online family album, currently containing over 3,000 photographs. As they narrated personal anecdotes, complemented by other people’s recollections, the former protesters collectively reconstructed the (hi)story of a generation, a history not tainted by traumatic memories of terrorism and political violence – typical of the official and public version of the Italian 1970s. Furthermore, the Facebook rage led to a series of reunions outside the virtual world and, a few months ago, to the publication . . .
Read more: Facebook and the Digital (R)evolution of a Protest Generation
By Malgorzata Bakalarz, July 9th, 2012 
In this post Malgorzata Bakalarz deliberately responds to my posts on Polish Jewish relations from the point of view of a young Polish scholar studying in New York. I deeply appreciate her update. Jeff
At the end of his text “Why Poland?” Jeff recalls the exchange between Adam Michnik and Leon Wieseltier about Polish-Jewish relations and the public discussion about Jedwabne pogrom. He makes a statement that could become a title of a new book on Polish-Jewish relations (or, perhaps, on Polish-Polish relations). He summarizes the exchange, acknowledging the importance of the Jedwabne discussion and concludes: “but something is missing.”
Something, indeed, was missing, and that was patience and sympathy.
The debate around Jedwabne, although groundbreaking and influential, was still in most cases elitist and center-oriented. Observing it, I was under the impression that default ways of framing the Jedwabne discussion were established very early on, and it was somehow impossible to contribute outside of them. And the situation was extremely sensitive: content-wise, it was urging Poles to embrace their difficult past, to admit it’s not exclusively heroic character, when there was still a largely unsatisfied need for the public acknowledgment of the Polish suffering: from the Soviet system, from the WWII, from the 19-century partitions.
“Formally,” the official narratives about Jedwabne ignored familiar Roman Catholic rhetoric, known and trusted as the “language of truth.” Dry, factual descriptions of the event, and the discussions about it, left no room for dramatic, stilted (but familiar), ceremonial, timeless narrative, which had been framing anti-communist discourse for so many years.
The legacy of Communist “parallel realities,” with corrupted and not trusted public discourse confronted with the private, (mainly) Roman-Catholic, reliable one, made this “linguistic estrangement” of Jedwabne debate an important issue. It contributed to the fact that many dismissed the debate altogether: unacceptable content confirmed by unacceptable “official” (read: not ours) language.
Not enough time was spent to translate and make available the discourse about complex Polish-Jewish past, and, in particular, about complex Polish war history. Not enough time was spent to listen to the voice of people from the outside . . .
Read more: Why Poland? 3.5, Confronting a Difficult Past
|
A sample text widget
Etiam pulvinar consectetur dolor sed malesuada. Ut convallis
euismod dolor nec pretium. Nunc ut tristique massa.
Nam sodales mi vitae dolor ullamcorper et vulputate enim accumsan.
Morbi orci magna, tincidunt vitae molestie nec, molestie at mi. Nulla nulla lorem,
suscipit in posuere in, interdum non magna.
|
Blogroll
On the Left
On the Right
|